We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
When I was growing up in the small town of East Brady, PA we had a neighbor that lived up the hill from us.
He was a reclusive sort.
I guess, friendly enough, but kind of rude.
And the reason why I say this is that every time we had friends over for a backyard BBQ; a little outing in our back yard, he would burn mounds of (cut lawn) grass in a large oil drum that would send thick whitish – grey smoke onto our gathering…
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Each, and every time.
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Every single FUCKING time.
Every…
…single…
…time.
Knowing what I know now, as a much older and experienced man, I dare say that I would be more proactive than my blue-pilled father. I get it, maybe I would, and maybe I wouldn’t, Who knows how I would react and what actions would I take if I were in my father’s shoes?
But one thing is a truth.
Our neighbor was intentionally rude, and being intentionally rude is very, very wrong. It is socially unacceptable. It is a sign of something being amiss, and suggestive of being mentally ill to some extent.
Anyways…
Guys, pay attention to those that intentionally and continuously harass you; belittle you or who are rude to you.
Distance yourself, and come up with strategies on how to deal with them.
Serious talk.
Listen to me.
Today…
Blushing Berry Pie
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Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1/2 packet frozen ready-rolled piecrust defrosted
1 pound fresh strawberries, divided
4 ounces white chocolate, broken into squares
1 lemon
2 teaspoons powdered gelatin
1 (8 ounce) package full fat soft cheese, softened
1 (8 ounce) carton crème fraîche
5 tablespoons lemon curd
2 ounces icing sugar
8 ounces fresh raspberries
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Let piecrust stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Place pastry round in Deep Dish Pie Plate. Gently press dough into bottom and up sides of plate using Baker’s Roller™. Prick bottom and sides of pastry case using pastry tool; decoratively flute edge.
Bake for 20 to 22 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool completely.
Rinse strawberries and pat dry. Select 8 uniformly-sized strawberries for decoration. Slice each strawberry in half using Paring Knife, leaving stems on each half; set aside. Hull remaining strawberries using Cook’s Corer™; slice using Egg Slicer Plus™.
Place white chocolate in Large Micro-Cooker®. Microwave on HIGH 1 minute; stir every 20 seconds or until melted and smooth. Dip strawberry halves in melted chocolate; place cut-side down on a sheet of Parchment Paper.
Refrigerate for 15 minutes or until set.
Meanwhile, spread remaining melted chocolate over bottom of baked pastry using Skinny Scraper. Layer sliced strawberries over bottom of crust; set aside. Finely zest lemon using Lemon Zester/Scorer; set aside. Juice lemon using Juicer. Add cold water to juice to measure 3 1/2 fl ounces. Place lemon juice mixture in Small Batter Bowl. Microwave on HIGH 30-50 seconds or until liquid is hot but not boiling. Sprinkle gelatin over hot liquid; whisk until dissolved. Cool slightly.
Combine soft cheese, crème fraîche, lemon zest, lemon curd and icing sugar in Classic Batter Bowl; mix until smooth. Add dissolved gelatin; whisk until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk. Spread cheese mixture evenly over strawberries. Arrange raspberries evenly over top of pie filling. Place dipped strawberry halves around edge of pie.
Refrigerate 30 minutes.
Serve using Slice ’N Serve®.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Musk Warns “America Is Headed For Bankruptcy SUPER FAST!”
The wooded area in the local park was my favourite place to go to when I was but a lad, living a short walk away. I spent many hours on my own there, but I did not for a second feel that I was alone. I felt welcomed there every time. The trees were my best friends, particularly the cluster of cedars.In fact it was a place that gave me confidence in myself. When I was ten years old, I felt the attraction of becoming a writer. No one knew that I had that feeling, certainly not any family members or friends. And when I went to the park, ideas for stories appeared to me beginning with blue waves of beginning words appearing in my head. They initiated tales about aliens in my head.I received no support from my English teachers. Several of them demonstrated with their commentary that they did not even like what I had written. They said that my stories were way too unreal, too far-fetched to have anyone accept the basic premises they were based on. Fortunately, although that shocked me at first, I learned to ignore their commentary. I am so glad I did.I would have never been published if I had taken their negativism for truth. I submitted my first story to a local newspaper in my small town. It was for the Christmas issue. I came up with an idea for a kind of supernatural story after taking a walk in what would become my inspiration place. I did not tell my English teacher of the time, even though he encouraged his students to enter the contest, offering to make suggestions before they submitted their piece. I was not going to let him insist that I make changes in it, and generally put my work down. He did not like that I only wrote stories about aliens. I liked the story just as it was. And I was not the only person to do so. The editor of the paper loved it, and published it the week after the contest had ended. I even received some money for the piece, and I was termed the ‘winner’ of the contest, even though several of the other stories were published as well – none of them written by my fellow high school students. My English teacher of the time did not comment in class when school opened up again in January. Later I heard two teachers talking about the fact that he had submitted his own short story, but had not been published. When they thought that I wasn’t looking and listening (I have very good hearing), they pointed at me and one of them said, “That boy over there was the winner.”After I graduated from high school, I applied for the English Literature program. They accepted me, certainly not because of my marks from my always always critical teachers, but because I had won the contest, and had since published several short stories in several literary magazines, all of them about aliens, and all inspired by trips to the park. I would have no idea what I was going to write about until I was in my special part of the park. Once there, voices inside me started my stories. Nowhere else did that for me.My First BookIn the summer after my initial year of university, I wrote my first book. To no surprise to me, my family and my friends, it carried a story of the presence of aliens on earth. It was easier to write such a long work than I ever thought it would be. My summer job was in a factory not far away from the park of my inspirations. I could and did walk to it in my lunch break, always carrying a pen and paper to copy down the ideas about the story that would come to me as I sat on a stump and ate the lunch my mother had prepared for me. Pretty much every day I had to finish eating my mom’s sandwiches while walking back to work. And her sandwiches are great! The ideas that flowed into my head took precedence.That book became a series about a particular group of aliens. By the time that I graduated with my English Literature degree, there were four books in the series. The last one was the longest, and was very much the hardest one to stop writing. I stayed in the park overnight, because I could not walk away from my source of inspiration.Another series began and ended in graduate school, this time with four books. More nights were spent in the park. I brought a tent, which when not used I hid in the underbrush.When I graduated I soon applied to and received a teaching position at a high school in town, but not the one with the English teachers that undervalued my work. I did not want to have anything to do with them.I soon became known as the ‘Find a Place’ professor, as I told my students about how the place I had found had been such an influence on all of my writing. A good number of my students tried to find their own place for writing inspiration. It helped some of them, one of whom said to me with some excitement as he walked, almost skipping, into the classroom ‘it worked, it worked’. Not one have published as yet, but I think that it is just a matter of time before a few of them do.Seeking a VisionIt has been a while now since I have done any writing. But that should not be a surprise to me, as I haven’t been able to get to the park in over a month. I have had to spend a lot of time marking, and being with my newly-married wife. She knows about my link with the park, and has suggested a few times that I should go there, but I thought that I should dedicate my ‘spare time’ with her in the early days of our being married.
Then she insisted. The timing was right. I had sat at my desk at work, and my desk at home with no results in writing: sentences written were soon crossed out. I had a strong desire to go to the park and be inspired.
I walked into the park, the cedars blowing in a slight wind as if they were waving me hello. I looked up at their uppermost branches, which had earlier been a guaranteed inspiration. Words appeared in my mind, and I had an inspiration to write another alien story, maybe even a book. I began writing. Then I felt compelled to look up once more. I could not believe my eyes. There were shadowy blue creatures near the top of the trees, aliens obviously. I was not expecting that.
NOW Neocons Are READY: Make Taiwan The Ukraine Of Asia
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Monkey Mayhem
Ah, greetings once more, dear reader. It seems you can’t get enough of my tales of bravery, wit, and sheer genius. Who could blame you? Life on this farm is a never-ending parade of absurdity, and I, Sir Whiskerton, am the only one keeping it from descending into complete anarchy. Today, I shall regale you with a story of chaos, hilarity, and an unexpected visitor who turned our world upside down. This is the tale of The Monkey Mayhem—a case that involved bananas, a harmonica, and far too much swinging from barn rafters. Buckle up.
The Arrival
It began, as most of my troubles do, with an ear-piercing commotion. I was enjoying a peaceful nap in the shade of the big oak tree when I heard the animals shouting.
“WHAT IS THAT THING?!” Harold the rooster squawked, his feathers puffed up in alarm.
“It’s got FINGERS!” cried Henny Penny, flapping her wings as if the sky were falling (again).
“Is… is it supposed to be here?” asked Betty the sheep, blinking in confusion.
I groaned, stretched, and reluctantly padded over to the source of the chaos. The animals had gathered in a tight, nervous circle near the barn, their eyes wide as they stared at… something. When I pushed my way to the front, I saw it.
A monkey.
Yes, a monkey. Small, with a mischievous grin, fur as brown as the barn walls, and long arms that seemed perfectly designed for causing trouble. He was sitting on top of an overturned bucket, casually peeling a banana. Around his neck hung a harmonica, which he blew into every few seconds, producing a jaunty, if slightly off-key, tune.
“Who on earth are you?” I demanded, my green eyes narrowing.
The monkey looked at me, tilted his head, and grinned wider. “Name’s Banjo,” he said, in a voice that was far too cheerful for my liking. “Just passing through. Nice place you got here.”
“Passing through?” I repeated skeptically. “This is a farm, not a circus.”
“Funny you should mention that,” Banjo said, hopping onto the fence in one fluid motion. “I was part of a circus. But I got bored. Too many rules, you know? So I broke out. Figured I’d see the world.”
“And you landed here?”
“Yup!” He blew a quick, jaunty tune on his harmonica and tipped an imaginary hat. “Thanks for the hospitality!”
The Chaos Begins
From the moment Banjo arrived, life on the farm descended into chaos. He had absolutely no respect for the unwritten rules of farm stability, and within hours, he had everyone in a frenzy.
Rule #1: The barn is for resting, not playing.
Banjo turned it into his personal playground. He swung from the rafters like a furry acrobat, scattering hay everywhere and startling poor Bessie the cow so badly that she tipped over her water bucket.
Rule #2: The chicken coop is off-limits to outsiders.
Banjo ignored this completely. He waltzed into the coop, harmonica in hand, and serenaded the hens with a tune so lively that they started clucking and flapping in what could only be described as a chicken dance. Harold was furious.
Rule #3: Don’t touch Farmer Joe’s tools.
Banjo not only touched them—he rearranged them. Farmer Joe’s neatly organized workbench was left in complete disarray, with wrenches hanging from the barn rafters and a hammer inexplicably balanced on top of a weather vane.
The animals came to me, as they always do when things go wrong.
“Whiskerton, you have to do something!” Henny Penny begged.
“He’s turning the barnyard into a circus!” Harold squawked.
“He… he ate my carrots,” Porkchop the pig sniffled, looking thoroughly betrayed.
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll talk to him.”
The Confrontation
I found Banjo sitting in the middle of the pasture, playing a soulful tune on his harmonica while balancing on one hand. A small crowd of animals had gathered to watch, their annoyance starting to give way to curiosity.
“Banjo,” I said, approaching him with my usual air of authority. “We need to talk.”
He flipped onto his feet and gave me a cheeky grin. “What’s up, Whiskers?”
“It’s Whiskerton,” I corrected, my tail flicking irritably. “And what’s up is you disrupting the farm. This place has rules, and you’re breaking all of them.”
“Rules?” Banjo said, scratching his head. “What’s the fun in rules?”
“Rules are what keep this farm running,” I said, my voice firm. “Without them, everything falls apart.”
Banjo shrugged. “Seems like everyone’s still standing to me. Besides, I’m just trying to liven things up. You ever notice how boring this place is?”
“Boring?” I echoed, offended. “This farm is perfectly balanced. It doesn’t need ‘livening up.’ It needs peace and order.”
“Peace and order, huh?” Banjo said, grinning. “Alright, let’s make a deal. If I can prove that a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing, I get to stay. If not, I’ll leave.”
I glared at him. I didn’t trust him, but I couldn’t resist a challenge. “Fine. But if you lose, you leave without complaint.”
“Deal!” Banjo said, shaking my paw enthusiastically. Then he blew a triumphant note on his harmonica and scampered off, leaving me wondering what I’d just agreed to.
The Monkey’s Plan
Over the next day, Banjo set out to prove his point. He organized a series of absurd activities that left the farm in an uproar—but, annoyingly, also brought a surprising amount of laughter.
He convinced the pigs to play a game of tug-of-war with an old rope, which ended with everyone falling into the mud and laughing hysterically.
He taught the chickens a synchronized dance routine, complete with harmonica accompaniment, which had even Harold grudgingly tapping his talons.
He turned the hay bales into a makeshift obstacle course, challenging the animals to races that left everyone cheering.
By the end of the day, the farm was a mess, but it was also filled with an energy I hadn’t seen before. Even I had to admit, begrudgingly, that Banjo’s antics had brought the animals closer together.
The Happy Ending
That evening, as the sun set over the farm, Banjo found me lounging on the barn roof.
“Well?” he said, sitting beside me. “Did I prove my point?”
I sighed. “You caused chaos. But… you also brought the animals together. I suppose there’s a place for a little fun, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the farm completely.”
Banjo grinned. “Does that mean I can stay?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. But only if you promise to follow the rules. Mostly.”
“Deal!” he said, holding out his paw for a high five. Reluctantly, I swatted it.
And so, Banjo stayed on the farm, his harmonica tunes becoming a familiar sound in the barnyard. The farm found a new balance—one that included a little chaos, a lot of laughter, and, of course, me keeping everyone in line.
The Moral of the Story
Sometimes, a little chaos is exactly what you need to remind you of what really matters: friendship, laughter, and the joy of trying something new. Just don’t let it interfere with my nap schedule.
The End.
Woman ARRESTED After Committing PATERNITY FRAUD!—Instant Consequences!
Almost all of China’s debt is owned by domestic organizations. Can you speculate if the central government can’t pay its obligations?
Total Debt held by Chinese National Government and backed by PBOC as on 30/9/24 = ¥ 64.77 Trillion
Annual Interest on National Debt = ¥ 1.38 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local Governments (Prefecture, Provincial & Country) and backed by PBOC as on 30/11/2024 = ¥ 6 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local Governments (Prefecture, Provincial & Country) and not backed by PBOC but by the local state agencies = ¥ 25.36 Trillion
Total Debt held by Government of China and backed by the PBOC = ¥ 70.77 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local state agencies in China = ¥ 25.36 Trillion
Total Debt held by all Public Agencies in China = ¥ 96.13 Trillion
Gross Domestic Product of China (2025) Estimated = ¥ 135 Trillion
Total Debt as Percentage of GDP = 71.20%
Total Interest paid on Debt by PBOC = ¥ 1.38 Trillion + ¥ 141 Billion = ¥ 1.49 Trillion
So as you can see – the State Agencies in China – in counties and prefectures owed around 31.36 Trillion Yuan of Debt
Of this the National Government and PBOC have brought 6 Trillion Yuan under their umbrella by buying out 6 Trillion Yuan of Local Debt and replacing it with National Debt on a 1:1 swap in November
So around ¥ 25.36 Trillion Yuan is held by State Agencies not backed by the PBOC which pay a collective interest of ¥ 827 Billion a year
Assuming this entire debt is defaulted and the PBOC will assume the debt , that’s still only ¥ 2.317 Trillion of Debt which is only 19% of Revenue and 9.6% of Expenditure
Corporate Debt of China & Institutional Debt = ¥ 218.49 Trillion
This is the debt owned by Chinese Companies to their Government and Banks and People
The Assets owned and controlled by then = ¥ 436 Trillion
Total Revenue generated by Corporate and Institutional China = ¥ 40.88 Trillion
So even today Asset to Debt Ratio for Corporations and Institutions in China is only 50%
By contrast it is 87% in Korea, 81.2% in Japan
Total Institutional and Corporate Debt = 5.344 Years Revenue
It’s very close to Japan (5.108 Years) and Korea (5.206 Years)
With such a strong position, the Chinese Government can easily pay its obligations.
Cool Mint Pinwheel Pie
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Yield: 12 servings or 16 sample servings
Ingredients
1/2 (15 ounce) package refrigerated pie crust (one crust)
1 (3.3 ounce) box white chocolate instant pudding and pie filling
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Place pie crust in Deep Dish Pie Plate, gently pressing dough into bottom and up sides; prick bottom using Hold ‘N Slice.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely on Nonstick Cooling Rack.
Break into small pieces and place in Small Micro-Cooker. Microwave, uncovered, on HIGH for 1 minute, stirring after each 10 second interval until chocolate is melted and smooth. Do not overheat. Spread half of the chocolate over bottom and sides of prepared crust; set aside.
Pour remaining chocolate onto Parchment Paper; immediately spread into a 6 inch circle using Skinny Scraper. Place Parchment on chilled Chillzanne Platter for 1 to 2 minutes, or until chocolate is firm and surface is dry to the touch. (Or, place chocolate on Cutting Board and refrigerate 15 minutes.) Do not allow chocolate to cool too long or it will crack when cut. Remove parchment from Platter and place on Cutting Board. Using Crinkle Cutter, cut chocolate circle into 12 even wedges but do not remove from parchment. Continue chilling on Platter until chocolate is set.
In Classic Batter Bowl, microwave cream cheese on HIGH for 30 seconds until softened; whisk until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk.
Fill Easy Accent Decorator with 1 cup of the whipped topping; set aside for garnish. Add remaining whipped topping, milk, peppermint extract and food coloring to Batter Bowl; whisk until smooth. Add pudding mix and whisk vigorously until mixture is blended and very thick. Immediately spoon filling into crust; spread evenly using Large Spreader.
Pipe 12 rosettes around edge of pie. To remove chocolate from Parchment, slide Large Spreader between chocolate and Parchment, gently separating triangles. Place one triangle, with point toward center, against each rosette, forming a pinwheel pattern.
For a colder serving temperature and easier slicing, chill 30 minutes.
Serve using Slice ‘N Serve.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 320, Total Fat 20g, Saturated Fat 13g, Cholesterol 25mg, Carbohydrate 30g, Protein 3g, Sodium 250mg, Fiber 0g
Attribution
Posted by FootsieBear at Recipe Goldmine 6/15/01 2:42:17 pm.
Pampered Chef
Is there a plane that can be purchased on the open market that resembles a fighter jet?
Fighter jets don’t sell very well due to the fact that most have just one seat. The ones that have two seats are filled with so much weapons wizardry that a WIZO or Wepons Systems Officer (a non pilot) is needed to manage that aspect of the mission.
What you should be looking for are the trainer versions of these fighters that have two seats, so that the experience can be shared.
For example the most iconic collectable fighter, the P-51, comes rather inexpensively, unless it’s the “D” varrient that was fitted with a gun camera behind the pilot. That model is worth twice as much because the camera, if it is still there, can be removed, and the space converted to a second seat. If you find an airwworthy P51-D, expect to pay upwards of $1,000,000 for it.
On the lesser expensive side there are numerous foreign aircraft available from cash strapped countries that got them from the USA but for whatever reason the parts and support was cut off and they are languishing in the dessert somewhere.
Lastly, understand that the US generally does not dispose of any models that are still in use in order to preserve spare parts for the active fleet. For example just 40%of the A-10 s d
Ever built are airworthy at the moment. The rest are reposting at the Davis Monthan AFB in AZ ready to supply parts for those that are still flying.
~ Mike Heaton
Leftover Dreams: Materialism and Unrealistic Standards Among China’s Older Single Women
(Author’s Note: The protagonist of this story, Dr. Anton Mellick,
also appears in the author’s full-length book The Hand of Maud.)
“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space,
and a fourth, Time.”
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Mrs. Russell gave three quick taps on the door, then opened it and stuck her head in. “I’m leaving now, doctor. I left a pot of soup on the stove for you,” she said with a slight wave of her hand. “Good night; see you on Monday.”
“Alright, then. See you in the morning.” Anton Mellick—Ph.D., chairman of the Physics Department at Silverleaf Institute of Science, professor emeritus of physics at Mount Sterling University, and author of The Clockwork Chronicles: Black Holes, Wormholes, & The Space-Time Continuum—was standing in his office, a small room attached to the front of his expansive laboratory building, when Mrs. Russell, his housekeeper, poked her head in to say good night. He heard her footsteps clack-clacking outside on the pavement, then the car door opening and shutting, then the engine starting, then her car driving away.
Mellick had an ideal laboratory for his experiments. He had constructed a large, industrial-sized building behind his home. It took several months and contentious meetings with town officials to get a zoning variance and building permits to erect a structure this large, sixty feet square made of high-tensile steel and a flat, metal roof twenty feet high. There were no windows—to obstruct prying eyes.
It will be an eyesore, the neighbors had objected. A monstrosity, they told the town officials. So, in the interest of preserving neighborhood harmony—as well as his privacy—he agreed to construct a fence to shield the neighbors’ easily offended eyes from his lab. He had refused to back down on using steel in its construction, though. He needed the entire facility to be fireproof, just in case.
As soon as Mellick heard Mrs. Russell’s car driving away, he walked toward the door at the rear of his office, unlocked it—he always kept it locked—opened it, and stepped into his laboratory. In the center stood his Chrono Navigator. He had refused to call it a time machine; that was a name coined by H.G. Wells and used ad nauseum in movies and books ever since Wells’s book, The Time Machine, was first published in 1895. Mellick had almost called his time machine the Flux Capacitor as a wink-wink homage to the Back to the Future films but thought that would be too playful for so serious a machine.
The doctor considered The Time Machine to be a brilliant tale of time travel, an exciting story filled with action, romance, weighty significance, and a hopeful ending. But Wells’ description of how his time machine worked was utterly ridiculous—not that he blamed H.G. Wells, not in the least. Wells had conjured up a vivid description of his time machine. “I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle,” Wells wrote. “I took the starting lever in one hand …” Yes, Wells’s account of time travel was a spellbinding tale when it first landed in readers’ hands, yet no one actually believed in time travel. They didn’t know that time travel, at least in theory, was real. Wells, a scientist and visionary, didn’t know it, either. He had imagined the entire thing. It was science fiction back then, nothing more. Then, a mere decade later, comes Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.
Mellick had devised a simplified, almost childlike, presentation to describe time travel to those who expressed interest. Few expressed interest, though. Most laughed at him, and he was the target of ridicule among the community of physicists he chaired at the university. Yes, he was the department head, and they answered to him, but they mocked him endlessly. “Glad to see you this morning,” commented one of the professors, Dr. Rudolph Whitaker, just the other day. “I expect one day you’ll just disappear into the future, and we’ll never see you again. Say, Anton, if you could somehow get a message to me about what stocks to pick, I’d be so grateful.” And then he had laughed, and his colleagues had laughed, and Mellick joined in, too—just to show he had a good sense of humor.
But it wasn’t funny. It was his life’s work. And it was real, he knew it.
Come to think of it, only children found his explanation believable. They had a fascination with what others called fantasy. So, on those occasions when Mellick was asked to speak to school children, he would explain it this way: As a person move faster through space, time slows down compared to a person who is not moving. If you could travel at speeds close to the speed of light, time would pass so much slower for you than for people on Earth, and you could travel into the future. Theoretically, of course. Then he would add a fact or two about wormholes. A wormhole, he would tell them, is a shortcut through space-time. Traveling through a wormhole could allow you to move even more quickly between two different times.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but why confuse their little brains? They only want to hear how exciting it could be to travel through time. “Could you go back to the year Hitler was born and kill him as a baby?” All the children ask this question. The moral dilemma of killing babies pre-emptively to prevent them from growing up to be killers never enters their ghoulish minds. But, he reminded himself, at least they listen to him and want to believe.
Now he stood before the Chrono Navigator. He didn’t want to waste time. With Mrs. Russell gone, he was on his own for the weekend and had the rare opportunity to experiment on himself as often as possible. He had failed dozens of times to move objects, including himself, even a few seconds back or forth in time. At first he had tried putting common things—first a stapler, then a toaster, then dozens of other insignificant objects, then finally himself—inside the chamber, setting the timer for minutes into the future. Then he tried to reverse it and go back in time by a few minutes.
All of them failed.
But for the past three years he had worked on refining the two laser lights on either side of the chamber. Previously, Mellick had constructed the lights to move in a straight line toward each other, filling the chamber with light. But when that didn’t work, he realized he needed the light to be moving, so he created circulating beams of laser light. The rotation of the light should twist space-time to make a loop of time. Theoretically.
Mellick looked at his machine and smiled. He was exhilarated. His heart beat faster, and his hands trembled as he placed protective glasses over his eyes. This would be the first time trying the Chrono Navigator since he had refined the laser lights. He would not put another household object into the machine; he was going in himself.
He stepped inside the chamber and flipped the switch to turn on the laser lights. They began to spin in a circular motion, creating loops that whirled around and around. The motion was smooth, almost hypnotic.
Next, he set the timer to go back in time three minutes. Three minutes ago, Mrs. Russell was driving away. The time on his clock, erected on the wall of the lab outside the Chrono Navigator’s chamber, read 5:07. Post meridiem.
Mellick then looked carefully at the three start buttons positioned in a triangular formation around the inside of the chamber, about waist high. All three had to be pushed within five seconds of each other for the Chrono Navigator to work, a failsafe against someone finding his machine and trying to travel through time. A failsafe in the event he, Mellick, changed his mind and wanted to abort the travel.
He took a deep breath and pushed the first button. More lights began to spin within the chamber. He turned to the next one and pushed it. Another beam of circulating light began to spin. He was getting dizzy.
Wait … he was getting dizzy! That had not happened before. It must be working!
Quickly, he hit the last button, and the chamber filled with spinning light. He felt another wave of dizziness, and his stomach lurched. His vision blurred, his balance faltered, and the queasiness intensified. He reached out his arms to brace himself, and finally, mercifully, the spinning stopped. He collapsed on the floor of the chamber, crouching like a dog, as he tried to gain control over the waves of nausea roiling through his gut.
Panting and sweating, Mellick noted that all the lights had stopped spinning. Slowly the sickness passed. Still on his knees, he opened the chamber door and looked up at the clock.
No! No! Not again! He had failed.
The clock appeared to have the same time as when he left, 5:07, though his vision was blurred, and his head was still spinning. The minute hand seemed to have a life of its own, swaying up and down until Mellick had to close his eyes.
Failed again. Failed.
A wave of frustration crashed over Mellick, as if the ground beneath him shifted. Disappointment, exhaustion, and self-doubt washed over him, drowning him in a wave of self-pity and confusion. What went wrong? What could possibly have gone wrong this time? Was it the circulating laser lights? He had worked for months to perfect them. Was it—
There was a knock on the door to his office. Three soft raps. Unsteadily, he stood up and walked to the door to his lab. He walked into the office, closing the lab door behind him and locking it. Then he glanced outside the office window and saw Mrs. Russell’s car parked in the driveway. She must have returned! Why? What brought her back? Had she seen something?
The door opened a crack and Mrs. Russell said, “I’m leaving now, doctor. I left a pot of soup on the stove for you. Good night; see you on Monday.” She gave a little wave of her hand and closed the door.
I gossiped about his job, his retaliation taught me a harsh lesson
I have had various collections of tools through the years. At one point in time I had both a fabrication lab, and electronic labs, and a woodworking shop. And I loved it.
When I worked with wood, the smell of the saw dust was glorious. Simply delicious.
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When I worked on my cars, it was always a story of dirt and grease, but the satisfaction of completely, and finally, fixing a broken down jalopy was so FINE.
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When I worked with the electronics, it was a story of invention and creation. And some of the gizmos that I made were so special and unique. I just wish that I still had the pictures of my completed projects. I made up all the gear from SLS molds, to glue and plastic frames… and of course all the electronics inside.
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Memories.
Some forged through pain, sweat and persistent insects. While others consisted of are much harder to define. Late afternoon sun baking the blacktop and the smell of oil. While others consisted of a ladder and a very hot roof. Still others are far simpler; the twisting of a screwdriver on an invention that I was working on.
Today, I presenting some “tool porn” for you all to enjoy.
How many people have heard of DELETE AMERICA Or DELETE A?
Very few
It doesn’t do many rounds on Mainstream Western Media
China is creating an atmosphere where anything American is to be phased out ENTIRELY
Target dates are 31/12/2025, 31/12/2027 and 31/12/2030 depending on different technologies
Here are some major decisions :-
Microsoft Windows Ecosystem fully phased out from Grade I – Grade III Government Organizations and replaced with KYLIN (By 30/9/2024)
Intel & AMD processors fully phased out from Grade I – III Organizations and replaced with Longson Processors (By 30/9/2024)
Samsung SSDs with SK Hynix commenced phase out from Grade I – III Organizations and replaced with Huawei SSDs with YMTC (Begun 1/1/2024 , Target Date 31/12/2027)
Cisco Equipment fully phased out from Grade I – III Organizations and replaced with Huawei & ZTE Equipment (By 1/1/2023)
Grade I – III include Military, Quasi Military , JV Military, Civilian Airspace, Civilian Air Traffic, Civilian Transportation, Civilian Airports, Civilian Railways & Civilian Power Distribution among other things
Here are other things :-
US Exports formed 9.4% of Chinas GDP Growth in 2015. Now it’s 2.3% in 2023. Dependence on US Exports for Economic Growth has fallen by 75% in the past decade
Workforce related to US Exports peaked at 1.81 Million in 2016. Now it’s 870,000 – down by more than 50% in the past 8 years
Chinas Brand Value sales to the Global South stands at a whopping $ 112.6 Billion versus a paltry $ 11.6 Billion in USA. This means Chinese Brands sales in US is a mere $ 12 Billion versus more than $ 113 Billion across the rest of the world. By contrast US Brands sales in China is close to $ 212 Billion versus $ 411 Billion with the rest of the world (Non US). This means 33% of Sales of US Brands depend on China whereas only 9.60% of Sales of Chinese Brands depend on USA.
In fact if you see Chinese Brands sales in ASEAN is $ 38.2 Billion, almost 3.5 times their US sales
The Top 15 US Brands – made $ 104.20 Billion for the US Economy in 2023 from China . The Top 15 Chinese Brands made a mere $ 10.81 Billion for the Chinese Economy from USA.
Chinas dependence on US Technology for its Industrial High Grade Processes is 38% as of 2023 June whereas US Dependence on China for its High Grade Manufacturing Supply Chain is almost 70%. So US dependence on China is TWICE the Chinese dependence on US
It is China that is decoupling from US and Europe
In fact China is preparing to raise massive stimulus to encourage boost in domestic consumption so that by 2027, Chinas Export contribution to GDP falls to less than 15% and US Export contribution to GDP falls to less than 1%
So whatever happens – every move by US against China is programmed to backfire worse against the US
Shocking Truth of South Korean Coup
The details are coming out. Biden “presidency” really were being bad during the last few months.
A friend just shared this, and it’s too funny!
MONTANA STATE TROOPER
In many places in the U.S., when the temperature drops really low, they check on any cars stuck on the side of the road.
One very cold morning, at 3 AM, Montana State Trooper Allan Nixon #658 got a call about a car off the road near Great Falls, Montana.
He found the car stuck in deep snow with the engine still running. After pulling up behind it with his lights flashing, the trooper walked up to the driver’s door and found an older man passed out in the driver’s seat with a nearly empty vodka bottle beside him.
The driver woke up when the trooper tapped on the window. Seeing the lights and the trooper next to his car, the man panicked and shifted into drive, hitting the gas.
The speedometer showed the car going 20, 30, 40, and then 50 MPH, but it was still stuck in the snow, wheels spinning. Trooper Nixon, with a good sense of humor, started running in place next to the car like he was keeping up.
The driver was freaked out, thinking the trooper was actually running 50 miles per hour. After about 30 seconds, the trooper yelled, “PULL OVER!”
The driver quickly turned the wheel and stopped the engine. Of course, the man from North Dakota was arrested, and I bet he’s still shaking his head over the trooper who could run 50 MPH.
Who says cops don’t have a sense of humor?
Sounds right
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Scott Ritter EXPOSES: U.S Plot to Put Russia in Nuclear Trap with Ukraine! Putin—Iran Shocking Move!
An EXTREMELY good video.
Why would anyone with half a brain enlist in the United States military?
I grew up in a violent household. My father was an alcoholic, and beat my mother, and us kids. I started to get the best of him by my mid teens, and put a stop to the beatings by the time I was 17.
I was working in dead end jobs, in my hometown outside of Buffalo, New York. The rich kids went to College. The poor kids looked to the Military.
Two weeks after turning 18, I enlisted in the Air Force. I was looking to get out of the harsh Winters of Buffalo, and to start a new life.
I had just missed Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists two months before I turned 17. The Cold War was still ongoing, so in 1976, I signed up to be a Nuclear Weapons Specialist. I was on Active Duty (1976-1981.) I spent three years in England, serving on American Occupied RAF Bases. I traveled all over Europe and the United Kingdom in my off time.
I completed one year’s worth of College Credits, attending Night Classes with the University of Maryland (European Campus.) After getting out of the Air Force, I attended College on the G.I. Bill. All of $341 per month. I graduated with an A.S. Degree in Exotic Animal Training and Management.
I had a good first career as a Wild Animal Trainer, Elephant Trainer, and Zookeeper. I first trained Wild Animals for movies and television in Hollywood. Then, I became an Elephant Trainer at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Eventually, I worked with the California Condors. I did that work up until my forties.
Joining the Air Force allowed me to get out and see some of the World. Getting out of snowy Buffalo. And leaving my violent upbringing behind. It gave me a fresh start in life. It is one of the best things I ever did.
Utter Annihilation! With Surrender Deadline Past, Promised Bombing Has Begun in Kursk, Russia
Yesterday, this website reported that the Russian Army has completely encircled Ukrainian forces inside Kursk, Russia.
Those Ukrainians were given until “Dawn” this morning to surrender, or else Fuel Air Bombing would begin.
The deadline has now passed; the bombing has begun.
Ukraine forces in Kursk, Russia, are being annihilated.
In our prior coverage (Story Here) we pointed out that over 1,000 Ukrainian troops, out of the 4700 – 6300 trapped in Kursk, were already seeking to surrender, and were offering New weapons, provided by the US and France, encrypted communications gear, and other military hardware, as inducements to Russia to allow them to surrender.
It is not yet known if those troops did, in fact, surrender, or how many western weapons systems the Russians have now received from those troops.
As each minute passes today, more and more Fuel-Air (Thermobaric) Bombs are being dropped on the remaining Ukrainian troops.
None are expected to survive the onslaught.
From Napoleon to Hitler, history shows that such is the fate of any force that invades Russia.
UPDATE 11:54 AM EST —
Ukrainian Forces are collapsing faster than expected. There are reports of a disorganized withdrawal with high casualties and large groups of Ukrainian soldiers being left behind.
UPDATE 1:40 PM EST —
Yesterday, Ukraine controlled 360 square kilometers of Kursk, Russia. As of three hours ago, that was CONFIRMED down to “less than 230 square kilometers” and dropping fast. As Russian troops enter bombed-out areas, they confirm Ukrainian troops are all dead, then count that area as being back under Russia control. According to one Russian source, “There are far more bombed-out areas to survey, and the bombings continue. Kursk may be disinfected of the Ukrainian disease by tonight.”
It should be noted that Hitler tried taking Kursk in 1943. His NAZI forces were roundly defeated. It is noteworthy that some of the dead Ukrainians found in Kursk today – have NAZI “SS” patches on their helmets. Just as dead now, as Hitler’s troops were in 1943. See image below:
Kursk 1943 2025
Since the morning publication on the situation in the Kursk region, the situation for Ukrainian formations has worsened even more. Russian troops have increased the pressure in several areas at once, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces are rapidly retreating from the front lines, abandoning the wounded and equipment.
Lebedevka, Okhotnichy, Loknya have been finally liberated. The nearby forest belts are being cleared of enemy remnants. The enemy has been trying to escape towards Sudzha for over a day, and from there to Yunakovka along the only road.
To the north of Sudzha, Russian army fighters have completely liberated Malaya Loknya, Kositsa and Cherkasskoye Porechnoye. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are running across the fields to Sudzha under artillery and FPV drone fire.
To the north-east, the Ukrainians tried to go into counter-attack again, but to no avail. Airborne assault units cleared the forests and liberated Makhnovka, Mirny, Mykhailivka and Martynovka.
Now the battles are going on near Dmitryuki. Separate units of the Russian Armed Forces, which liberated Makhnovka, are already conducting an assault on the outskirts of Sudzha. After the loss of Dmitryuki (it is a matter of time), the situation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will worsen significantly.
This will open the way to Sudzha, which will certainly cause chaos and disarray in the Ukrainian positions due to the fear of being trapped. The Ukrainian front is gradually falling apart, and the operation that was supposed to be a victory for Zelensky is turning into one huge farce.
Chipotle and Green Chile with Pork
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Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
4 tablespoons butter
2 pounds pork tenderloin, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cracked black pepper
2 cups yellow onions, diced
1/4 cup jalapeño chile, minced
1 cup dried New Mexico green chiles, seeded, stems removed, and minced
1/4 cup minced garlic
1/4 cup roasted chipotle chiles, peeled and minced
1 cup grated pepper jack cheese
8 (6 inch) flour tortillas
Instructions
In a stockpot, melt two tablespoons butter and heat.
When the butter is hot, add pork, onions, jalapeño, New Mexico dried chiles, garlic, salt, and pepper. Cover and cook for 1 1/2 hours or until pork is tender.
Add the chipotle chiles and simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Grill the tortillas and brush with butter.
Serve with grated pepper jack cheese on top.
You want to spoon the chili onto your tortilla and roll up and eat.
Brian Lost It When These OF Girls Couldn’t Understand A Simple Analogy
How can the US compete with China and Chinese companies without using sanctions against key technologies, decoupling, and the long arm of the law?
At this point, I believe it impossible.
The reason why the US could compete and dominate the EU, Japan and Korea is scale, and the unnatural size o>f American influence, thanks primarily to the global reach of the Pentagon. That is why this map of AMERICAN NATIONAL SECURITY isn’t ridiculed.
The Eurodollar (or american dollars overseas) is another powerful tool. It has a dominant position in world finance.
However, along comes China, an economy that’s already 3/4 the size of the US, but resistant to US influence, either political, military or geoeconomic. China is peer competition, the same way George Foreman didn’t fold fighting Muhammad Ali.
China, at this point, has graduated into a system of systems builder, and is already a tool-maker of enabling technology.
What is a tool-maker?
In simple terms, the upstream technology that factories depend on for their production.
China isn’t just a maker of consumer end-products today. The Chinese have the world’s most complete supply chain, and Chinese companies are making the rapid climb into tool-making, such as robots, sophisticated precision machines, exotic nano-materials, and all kinds of IOT/ML/big data/AI thingmajigs.
In other words, China is rushing towards the cutting edge Industry 5.0.
It is the year 2023 and Huawei is already pushing 5.5G networks, with speeds up to 10x faster than 5G. That’s the speed of relentless progress driving innovation on the mainland.
It is the year 2023 and CRRC is testing 450kmh HSR rolling stock, allowing the export and technology transfer of the mature 350kmh Fuxing. China had 0km of HSR in 2006. Today, they have 40,000km, more than the rest of the world has managed over the last 60 years. Expect the network to grow in the coming decade.
[Note: Indonesia, Brazil and other third world countries will operate FASTER HSR trains than first world Japan, France and Germany in the coming decade. They will also deploy cellular 5G/6G technology in step with the first world, and perhaps even earlier, all thanks to the Chinese.]
Stepping up to bat with the manic energy of the Chinese requires the same or greater commitment of energy and resources. The first world has kept the rest of the world at bay with patent walls and unassailable leads, but the Chinese are overcoming the obstacles and making up lost ground rapidly. In some industries, the Chinese are already defining the cutting edge, and clear leaders.
The clear Chinese advantage is scale, and the ability to cluster and leverage supply chain ecosystems and innovation centers. That is why Huawei has its campus in Dongguan, a stone’s throw away from the mecca of China’s consumer electronics, Shenzhen. Huawei has unparalleled access to the latest innovations to drive product development. Whereas Apple designs in California, and contract manufactures an ocean away.
Once China catches up on the patent front, Chinese speed and scale will take care of the rest.
America can’t even do anything about its stale Constitution, and can only offer kick-a-canism for the age-old problems of guns, drugs and racism, while the infrastructure continue to decay at an astonishing rate. Social spending dominates the budget, an ever-increasing burden. The bigger problem is the overfinancialized economy that has been overreliant on cheap money. Intel blew 100 billion on stock buyback this century, while its manufacturing lead was steadily eroding. Today, the best Intel chips are no longer at the cutting edge node.
Same story with Boeing, and a host of household American names.
Prosperity breeds soft bellies.
I don’t believe it reversible, not without substantial (and prolonged) pain forcing American introspection.
Too much hubris.
And insufficient grasp of reality.
Why South America now does all its business with China: US companies, investors are dumb and lazy
This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Dr. Morrison held a small vial up to the light, amber liquid swirling inside. “After all our efforts, all of our sacrifices, we’re so close to a cure.”Isabelle held her datapad closer to the Doctor, determined to get as clear of an audio recording as possible. They had spent hours in Silver Grandeur’s lab. Her legs ached. With painstaking precision, Dr. Morrison walked Isabelle through all of the functions of Lab Section 1, explaining each device that helped to refine and prepare the contents of the vial in his hand. The soreness she’d feel later would be worth the story. Especially as a Junior Data Reporter.“Tell us, Doctor,” Isabelle said, shifting weight from one leg to another, “What’s the greatest challenge you’ve faced with Project Find?”“We’ve all lost people to the sickness, haven’t we?”Isabelle looked away.“No challenge is greater than that of grief,” Dr. Morrison said with a sad smile. “Yet their memory lives on in the work we accomplish.” He gingerly set the vial into its holder on the table in front of them. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Anything else?”“Yes,” Isabelle perked up. “About the beginning. How exactly did this-”A shudder rocked the ship. Lights flickered in the lab as Dr. Morrison and Isabelle steadied themselves against the table.“Seekers,” He muttered as the shaking subsided. Another, more violent shudder, nearly knocked Isabelle off her feet. The vials on the table clattered together. “They always find us.”Around them, scientists in lab coats hurried to secure loose items. Isabelle found herself being led towards the exit.“I’m sorry to cut this short,” the Doctor said, leading her out into the main hallway and shutting the door behind them. “I need to speak with the Captain before one of those things tears a hole in our outer hull again.”Isabelle pulled her father into a hug. “Be safe.”After watching Dr. Morrison race out of sight, she opened her hand and smiled at it. Seated in the palm of her hand was a grey access card. Her father’s. Slipping back inside the lab, Isabelle quickly donned a lab coat, mask, and goggles. Only a few scientists remained. Evidently, the rest had dispersed to secure other sections of Silver Grandeur’s large lab. She snuck to the back of Section 1, connecting her datapad to the lab’s information center – a port in the wall.The ship rocked again, and Isabelle steadied herself against the wall.She switched rapidly from catalogue to catalogue, searching. There had to be something more interesting here. Yes, her father had shown her this section of the lab, but she was not so naïve as to think this was all there was. Scientific breakthrough had to come from somewhere. And a good Data Reporter needed to be willing to break a few rules to find out.Isabelle paused on one catalogue.Project Find. It read. She inserted Dr. Morrison’s card into her datapad to open the file. Disappointment grew as she read. Most of the words made absolutely no sense. Yes, they were English. But no matter how hard Isabelle squinted at them and sounded them out under her breath, their meaning remained completely foreign.But then she spotted something she could understand.Successful creation of antidote and enhancement secured via genetic mesh.Below, it read; See Donor Subject File. Lab Section 13.She disconnected her datapad and pressed deeper into the lab.Another shudder shook Silver Grandeur. She began humming softly as she passed more labcoats, remembering the melody her mother would use to comfort her when she was little. After the Seekers first attacked.On its one-hundredth and fifty-second year of voyaging in space, five years after Silver Grandeur’s passengers were woken from cryo-sleep, the Seekers struck. So did the sickness.Deep space sickness, they called it.No one knew what caused it. Some blamed the Seekers, who appeared immune to the disease. With their arrival shortly preceding the first outbreak, they were easy to blame. Some claimed it was a result of extended cryo-sleep. Simply a scientific oversight. And others, the more religious of Silver Grandeur’s passengers, proclaimed it was judgement for their departure from God’s one true home for them – Earth. Apparently, extended cryo-sleep had conveniently allowed them to forget Earth’s death. Reduced to a desolate wasteland, their one true home forced what remained of humanity to flee.Her mother was one of the first to die from the sickness. Isabelle was ten at the time. Her father threw himself into a frenzy of work after his wife’s death, refusing to take inevitable death – either by sickness or by Seeker – as the final answer. Fifteen years had since passed.Isabelle reached the end of Section 12 and stopped. Before her lay a single door. Lab Section 13. Checking behind her to make sure no one was watching, Isabelle opened the door with Dr. Morrison’s access card and slipped inside, shutting the door behind her.Cold air shocked her. Isabelle shivered. Section 13 was freezing, not to mention smaller than she expected. The room contained only a handful of control panels on either side of the door and a containment unit on the far wall that was coated in frost.Isabelle frowned. Was this the Donor Subject?She approached the unit and used her sleeve to wipe a patch of frost from the glass.A dark form moved inside.
Isabelle had seen Seekers before. Windows across the ship gave good view for those with a morbid enough interest to watch them attack. With a snouted maw filled with teeth, an excess of appendages tipped with claws, long wings, and sleek black bodies, they blended easily against the backdrop of space. Only when close enough to Silver Grandeur’s lights did the light of the ship reflecting off their bodies illuminate their presence. In darkness they did not exist.
She squinted at it. It was almost entirely obscured by the remaining frost and the condensation building inside her goggles. Isabelle steadied her breathing, excitement mounting as she removed her goggles to peer inside. She’d never seen one this close before.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Eyes, eyes that Seekers did not – should not – have, stared back at her.
It lunged.
Isabelle jerked backwards, slamming into the panels behind her. The creature thrashed against the glass and Isabelle glanced down in panic as a small alarm sounded on the panel just under her arm.
The sides of the containment unit hissed open.
Isabelle ran. Tearing metal echoed behind her.
She collided with a labcoat in Section 11. “Go! It’s out!” Not stopping to wait, she ran on through the lab, leaving the startled man behind. Several seconds later there was a scream. A loud crunch. And silence.
Lungs and legs burning, Isabelle burst into Section 1, the door sliding shut behind her. Several dozen scientists milled about, the ship’s shaking having since stopped.
“Run,” she said.
A few labcoats looked at her in confusion. Thudding behind the door she entered grew louder.
Isabelle tore off her mask, wheezing. “Run!”
The door she came through flew across the room, crushing a scientist against the wall. Standing a head taller than Isabelle, the creature that entered stood on legs rippling with sleek black muscle. Its head was surprisingly rounded, with something like the remnants of hair dotting the top of its head. It stretched tall and raised tensed arms, claws glinting in the lab’s harsh light. Opening its mouth, the creature let out a roar.
Scientists screamed and scattered.
Isabelle raced to the door leading into the rest of the ship. Several scientists followed. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and Isabelle careened to the side just in time to avoid a large metal table as it flew past her and smashed into the door. The labcoats weren’t as lucky.
An alarm blared in the lab. The scientist who activated it let out a blood-curdling scream from the center of the room as the creature charged him. It roared again, striking claws into both labcoat and control panel. Metal and flesh tore.
The lab was plunged into darkness.
Isabelle’s feet slid against the floor, a red emergency light flaring to life and pulsing slowly to illuminate the dark puddle she now stood in. She gagged, fighting to stay upright. Something struck her shoulder and Isabelle went down hard. A woman screamed beside her on the floor, having also fallen, and as the lights flashed Isabelle could make out a tall form to her right.
The creature crouched low. Isabelle scurried away as darkness returned. Crunching, twisting – a rending of flesh met her ears a few feet away, and warm liquid splattered her face. The woman’s screams fell silent.
She crawled as quickly as she could until she reached the lab’s wall. Feeling with slick hands along its surface, Isabelle’s fingers found purchase on the metal grooves of a vent grate. Hands shaking, she pulled off the clover, slipped inside the space just wide enough to hold her, and closed it. Cries of terror and agony dwindled one by one. Isabelle could hear them pounding against the crushed door, wailing as they realized it was too damaged to open. A body slammed against the vent grate and slumped to one side. Warm liquid began pooling next to Isabelle and she backed away. Shuffling quietly until she met a curve in the vent shaft, the young Data Reporter choked back tears. Now was not the time to cry.
A final voice cried out, and with that, the lab was silent.
Isabelle stopped.
Another sound had risen to fill the silence. A low vibration, somewhere between a growl and a hum came from the creature. She could feel the sound rumbling in her chest, deep in her lungs and heart, as though tugging on something. Carefully, she started moving again, crawling on slippery hands and knees.
Her knee skidded to the side and struck the vent shaft with a dull thunk. Isabelle steadied herself, holding her breath. She heard the grate tear free and clatter somewhere inside the lab.
Isabelle thrust herself around the bend, not caring how much noise she made now as the sounds of thudding and scraping behind her soon followed. With a cry of alarm, Isabelle’s weight-bearing hand slipped out from under her. Her head crashed against the side of the vent. Swaying awkwardly, Isabelle focused blurred vision up ahead.
Was it her imagination, or was there light around the next bend?
A growling hum propelled her forward.
Pulling with her arms, Isabelle slid around the final bend and was met by another grate leading down, light pouring from it. Every muscle in her body burned as she raised her hand and struck the grate.
It didn’t budge.
With a shriek, she brought her hand down against the grate again. And again and again and again.
CRASH.
Isabelle dropped to the floor below, pain bursting at her feet.
“HELP!” Her shout echoed as she limped quickly, turning right at an intersection in the hallway. “HEL-”
A closed blast door barring her path.
No.
She whirled around to see the creature dash into view.
No. No.
The creature skidded to a halt, muscles tensing. Bright hallway light finally illuminated the scarlet haphazardly painting both monster and woman. Isabelle’s back pressed against the door. It stalk towards her, moving with slow, purposeful steps. That of a hunter. That of one who knew its place in the pecking order.
Seekers. They always find us.
Isabelle’s back slid until she met the ground. She turned her face away.
“Don’t hurt her!” A voice yelled. Her father’s.
Isabelle looked up in surprise. The creature turned to face Dr. Morrison, growling deep in its body and lifting its arms in a display.
“Don’t do this,” he said to the creature.
It roared.
Isabelle sobbed. “What is it?”
It roared again.
“Dad, what is it?”
His voice was even as he spoke. Measured carefully. “We acquired a Seeker’s DNA many years ago, hoping to find a cure. What we discovered was that they had so much more to offer us.” Dr. Morrison’s eyes flashed with something near-feral. “Strength, Izzy.” She watched through tear-streaked vision as he stepped to one side, the creature tracking his movement. “Strength we could never dream of acquiring on our own. We just needed to bridge the genetic gap.” Her father’s expression grew almost sad as he gazed at the creature. “Human experimentation was the only way. I’m sorry, dear.”
With a rippling of muscle the creature pounced. Isabelle forced her eyes to the ground as the sounds of carnage lifted to join that of the alarm. A sickening cacophony.
And then the carnage ceased.
Slow, thudding footsteps approached her. What had once been a growl dwindled to the lowest of vibrations. A soft humming. Isabelle looked at it with a start.
The creature’s face was close. Strings of sinew hung from red teeth, dripping blood onto Isabelle’s legs. As she looked above the horror of its maw, she saw its eyes. Familiar eyes. A memory pressed uninvited into Isabelle’s mind as the hum reverberated in her chest. Her mother, seated at the edge of Isabelle’s bed, the young girl cowering beneath her blankets as Silver Grandeur shuddered. Feeling a hand on her arm over the blanket, she listened to the melody of her mother’s tune as sleep finally overcame fear.
The creature knelt in front of Isabelle. Extending a single, blood-covered hand, it caressed the side of her face.
Isabelle’s eyes widened in shock. “Mom?”
LOST IN SPACE COLORIZED SCENES FROM THE FIRST EPISODE IN 1965
Trump’s Tariff Wars Will Hurt U.S. The Most
President Donald Trump seems to believe that tariffs can help to bring manufacturing back to the States.
Trump’s tariffs have so far been aimed at four targets, the U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico, China and, soon to come, the European Union.
During his first term Trump negotiated the U.S.M.C.A. with Mexico and Canada, a free trade zone covering the U.S. and its neighbors. He is now attempting to change the rules of it. But the way he does so is inconsistent.
On January 21 Trump promised tariffs on Canada and Mexico. On February 1 he announced them. Three days later he delayed the implementation of those tariffs. On February 27 he said the tariffs would go into effect on March 4. On March 5 he was again forced to pull back (archived):
President Trump said on Wednesday that he would pause tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico for one month, after a 25 percent tariff that he placed on America’s closest trading partners a day earlier roiled stock markets and prompted stiff resistance from industry.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, read a statement from Mr. Trump on Wednesday saying that White House had spoken with the three largest auto makers, and that a one-month exemption would be given to cars coming in through United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
A one-month exemption is a joke. It takes years to move parts production from one country to another. There are hundreds of companies in Mexico, Canada and the U.S. which make the myriad parts that go into a car. It is an completely integrated industry which took years to build.
U.S. car manufacturers had trusted that U.S.M.C.A. would hold. Should the tariffs apply anytime soon they will have to increase their prices by hefty margins or halt their production.
Trump’s tariffs in north America can largely be seen as pressure method for gaining some valuable concessions from neighboring countries. They are part of a negotiation scheme and unlikely to be a longer term problem.
But Trump’s tariffs against China are a different animal. The Trump administration views China as a strategic enemy and would like to seriously hurt it. But China is able to hit back (archived):
Minutes after President Trump’s latest tariffs took effect, the Chinese government said on Tuesday that it was imposing its own broad tariffs on food imported from the United States and would essentially halt sales to 15 American companies.China’s Ministry of Finance put tariffs of 15 percent on imports of American chicken, wheat, corn and cotton and 10 percent tariffs on other foods, ranging from soybeans to dairy products. In addition, the Ministry of Commerce said 15 U.S. companies would no longer be allowed to buy products from China except with special permission, including Skydio, which is the largest American maker of drones and a supplier to the U.S. military and emergency services.
Lou Qinjian, a spokesman for China’s National People’s Congress, chastised the United States for violating the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules. “By imposing unilateral tariffs, the U.S. has violated W.T.O. rules and disrupted the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains,” he said.
Trump claims that tariffs on China are necessary to stop the illegal import of Fentanyl, an addictive synthetic opioid widely used in the U.S.
The reason why the fentanyl issue in the US is so serious has never been external; it has nothing to do with China, which strictly prohibits drugs. Illicit fentanyl started to enter the US market as early as the 1980s. Later, media revealed that US pharmaceutical companies concealed the addictive properties of synthetic opioids and that doctors overprescribed painkillers, leading to widespread addiction among patients. Statistics show that with 5 percent of the world’s population, the US consumes 80 percent of the world’s opioids, but still has not permanently scheduled fentanyl-related substances as a class. The almost abnormal demand has boosted the development of the illegal fentanyl market, fundamentally contributing to the proliferation of fentanyl in the US.
The Global Times points to the social causes of drug addiction:
[T]he lack of social governance in the US has exacerbated the drug problem. US Vice President JD Vance described a similar situation in his autobiography. Many low-income families live in chaotic community environments with a lack of education and supervision. This has led to many children living in adverse conditions of drug abuse and trafficking, forming a vicious cycle that is difficult to break.
China’s government spokesperson is promising to fight back:
Intimidation does not scare us. Bullying does not work on us. Pressuring, coercion or threats are not the right way of dealing with China. Anyone using maximum pressure on China is picking the wrong guy and miscalculating. If the U.S. truly wants to solve the fentanyl issue, then the right thing to do is to consult with China by treating each other as equals.If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.
Such language from China is far from the usual one. It therefore seems unlikely that there will soon be a compromise between the U.S. and China.
With respect to Europe the U.S. claims that it is importing more goods from Europe than it can export to it. That is true but does not cover the full width of economical relations. The U.S. is exporting way more services (think software) to Europe than Europe is exporting to the U.S. The total of goods and services exchanges is a wash. If the U.S. insist on putting tariffs on European goods the EU can counter adding a toll to all U.S. services. The results would be, in theory, a tie.
Tariffs however are dangerous. They distort markets and add significant costs to all participants. Their pain will be mostly felt by U.S. consumers:
All the planned tariffs would take the US tariff rate to above 20% in just a few weeks, the highest since pre-WWI. As Joseph Politano points out, the costs of these actions are enormous, covering $1.3trn in US imports or roughly 42% of all goods brought into the United States, or the single-largest tariff hike since the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of nearly a century ago.
…
The total costs of these tariffs would raise $160bn from US consumers and businesses paying more for their purchases of imported goods, with more to come. Trump’s Tuesday measures are only 40% of his proposed measures. If the next batch is implemented, it would raise the cost of imports to over $600bn, or 1.6% of GDP.
…
So worried is the International Chamber of Commerce in the US, that it reckoned that the world economy could face a crash similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s unless Trump rows back on his plans. “Our deep concern is that this could be the start of a downward spiral that puts us in 1930s trade-war territory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary-general of the ICC. So Trump’s measures may go well beyond “a little disturbance”.
Posted by b on March 6, 2025 at 15:55 UTC | Permalink
Today’s MM AI art generations
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The government of Iran has issued a “Final Warning” to the United States and to Israel concerning the likely pending attack by those countries, against Iran.
The Iran government said “An attack on Iran is tantamount to the destruction of all US bases in the region and the destruction of all Israeli nuclear facilities.”
This comes just days after US President Donald Trump sent a letter to the Ayatolla Khameinei seeking to engage Iran in nuclear negotiations. According to Trump, the letter made clear that if Iran does not enter negotiations, it may get bombed.
Iran REJECTED Trump’s reported offer, saying Iran will not negotiate while it is being aggressively Sanctioned and threatened by the United States.
With today’s “Final Warning” from Iran, the stakes are now crystal clear.
Iran does have the missile capability to reach and smash US bases throughout the entire Middle East region, and to attack all of Israel, including its nuclear facilities at Dimona.
Complicating this situation dramatically is that Iran is a military ally of Russia.
Nothing about this situation is good. If the US and Israel attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, it seems clear that Iran will strike back. If/when Iran strikes back, it appears – at least on the surface – all hell is likely to break loose.
This situation could literally explode onto the world — without any warning — within days.
How did your marriage end?
Broccoli.
heavily abridged story below because I have no need to relive all this.
My ex was a normal and healthy 5’6” woman when we met at around age 20.
Everything was fine.
I worked and she Graduated college. She got a great job and the decline began.
She was making far more money than me but I was still forced to work full time and go to school.
Pretty sure the intent was to keep me unemployable.
She took 75% of my pay as “rent” for a house she bought and only put her name on.
She wouldn’t really grant me full rights to anything until I graduated college which she was working against.
She always had some stupid reason and I was tired from working 40+ hours and going to school.
*fast forward a few years*
I’m about to finally graduate college.
She has ballooned to over 400lbs. While I’ve started running half marathons at this point and I’m eating real food.
Every Friday night id make a nice dinner for 2. But, she would get fast food and eat it in front of the TV while I ate alone in the kitchen.
about the time they were cutting toes off her parents for diabetes and I was getting sick of watching everyone check their blood sugar at holidays.
I asked her to just try one of my prepped meals instead of getting fast food.
She was reluctant to eat fresh steamed broccoli with a little butter and some salt on it. After she finally forced it down- she then proceeded to “throw up” for 2 hours.
I went and looked for my own place the next day.
The end.
The Pudding
A digital publication that uses data to tell stories. They create visually engaging and insightful articles on a variety of topics, from pop culture to social issues.
I CAUGHT My Cheating Wife Red Handed at a Party and It Ended BADLY! Reddit Cheating Stories
Interesting rant on this… has a lot to say about “no fault divorce”.
I paid to reserve a seat on a plane but a woman sat in it and refused to move when cabin crew directed her to do so. What should I expect from the airline? And what is likely to happen to the woman?
This happened to me a few years ago on an SIA flight from Hong Kong to Singapore. I had an aisle seat when I got to to my assigned seat there was a woman in it. I politely told her that this was my seat. She just stared at me and said something in Mandarian “ Which I do not speak or understand “. I politely asked her again to move and she turned her head and faced towards the window. I went to the cabin pantry which wasn’t that far away and informed one of the cabin crew. The crew member was very polite and told me to take the middle seat across from my assigned seat till we were airborne and they would sort it out. Once airborne and the plane was flying steady The cabin crew member approached the lady. I could not understand the conversation between them it was obvious the lady wasn’t planning on exiting my seat. The cabin crew member brought in their supervisor to no avail. Shortly afterwards the the cabin crew sup approached me and told me that the lady refused to vacate the seat. They informed the first officer of the situation and he said that they will resolve the situation once on the ground in Changi. She apologised to me and asked me if I would stay in this seat for the remainder of the trip.
Once on the ground in Changi one of the cabin crew took my information down and said they will be in touch with me in a few days. When I deplaned I saw two SIA personnel speaking to the lady at the counter near the gangway. Fast forward three days later I received a call from SIA who apologised to me. They reimbursed me for my flight from HK to SIN. When I asked what happened to the lady the SIA agent told me that they do not give out information about ongoing incidents but it was elevated to airline security staff.
I never asked for reimbursement SIA offered it. I received an email from them apologising for the incident. Plus they gave me a voucher for SilverKris lounge for use during my next flight. I received the reimbursement pretty quickly within 96 hrs. Hope this helps out.
Will China Invade Taiwan? Kishore Mahbubani Reveals…
Wow! He calls it out exactly.
Shorpy
SHORPY 8b27070a.previewSHORPY 8b14821a.previewSHORPY 8b27068a.previewSHORPY 8b27075a.previewSHORPY 4a09805a.previewSHORPY 8b37709a.previewSHORPY 8b16410a.previewSHORPY 8c00657a.previewSHORPY 8c00842a.previewSHORPY 8b16408a.previewSHORPY 119724pu.previewSHORPY 119792pu1.previewSHORPY 8c06908a.previewSHORPY 8c27740a.previewSHORPY 8c19983a.previewSHORPY 8c27627a.previewSHORPY 8c04095a.previewSHORPY 8b15418a.previewSHORPY 8c18057a1.previewSHORPY 8c11125a.previewSHORPY 8c03547a.previewSHORPY P 0124.previewSHORPY P 0131.previewSHORPY P 0130.previewSHORPY 8c27228a.previewSHORPY 8c24336a.previewSHORPY P 0132.previewSHORPY 4a23558a.previewSHORPY 4a23583a.previewSHORPY 4a24821a.preview
Walmart asks Chinese suppliers to slash prices as it faces Trump tariffs: report
By Taylor Herzlich
Published March 6, 2025, 10:32 a.m. ET
Walmart has been pleading with Chinese suppliers to lower their prices as it fears President Trump’s tariffs will inflate costs, according to a report.
Asian firms have pushed back after the big-box retailer asked some suppliers, including kitchenware and clothing manufacturers, to slash their prices as much as 20%, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
The talks have been held with several manufacturers, and the requested price reductions have varied from firm to firm, according to the report.
Walmart has asked some Chinese suppliers to lower their prices as it faces President Trump’s tariffs, according to a report. REUTERS
Few have agreed to the hefty price cuts, which would force the Chinese suppliers to shoulder the burden of Trump’s tariffs, Bloomberg said.
“As we have done in the past, we will continue to work with suppliers to keep prices as low as possible for customers,” a Walmart spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
“In the meantime, we encourage all parties to work towards finding common ground that will protect consumers from price hikes and continue to grow our economy.”
Walmart declined to comment on reports that it was asking Chinese suppliers to lower prices.
Most of Walmart’s suppliers already operate on thin margins to allow the retailer to sell goods at affordable prices.
Lowering prices by more than 2% would result in a loss for some of these suppliers, sources told Bloomberg.
The average mark up to labor and materials in China is 3%. Anything over 2% is impossible. -MM
Meanwhile, vendors have denied requests from some of these Chinese suppliers to cut their prices more than 3%, so manufacturers are considering turning to Vietnam for cheaper parts, a source told Bloomberg.
Trump aides earlier raised the possibility of imposing tariffs on Vietnam, according to a Reuters report. The country responded by agreeing to aid US deportation requests within a tight 30-day timeframe, the report said.
Retailers have been scrambling to prepare for the impact on prices after Trump this week imposed stiff 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, as well as a 20% levy on China.
During his Tuesday address to the joint session of Congress, Trump said Americans will have to “bear with” him through an “adjustment period.”
Earlier that day, Target CEO Brian Cornell warned that shoppers may notice higher prices on fruits and vegetables in stores within the next few days.
Walmart has historically had strong bargaining power over its Chinese suppliers, and past requests for lower prices have largely been met, sources told Bloomberg.
But the retailer’s latest request is unusual and outsize, leaving manufacturers struggling to decide whether holding onto Walmart as a partner is worth bearing the brunt of the tariffs, according to the Bloomberg report.
Walmart has historically had strong bargaining power over its Chinese suppliers,
Walmart first requested a price reduction from Chinese suppliers after Trump imposed an initial 10% levy on goods from China in early February, sources said.
The retailer asked for more cuts after Trump threatened to double the taxes later that month, according to the report.
Other retailers under pressure may use the same tactic. Target, for example, has been having discussions with vendors about how to handle the tariffs, Cornell said on Tuesday.
Walmart has been trying to reduce its dependence on China over the past few years. Its reliance on Chinese imports dropped to 60% in 2023 from 80% in 2018, according to a Reuters report.
In 2023, the company reported that two-thirds of its total product spend went toward items made, grown or assembled in the US.
Brian Breaks These Girls’ DELUSION On Why Men Won’t Take Them SERIOUSLY
I’m just a run-of-the-mill journalist, okay? Except in certain sports related circles, you probably never heard of me. Neil A. Gleary? See? Almost exclusively sports write-ups with the occasional science article here and there. Not very well known.
So I’m surprised when I come home late one night and there’s a message on my answering machine informing me that my request for an interview with the Director of AARI has been approved. Arrangements had been made, please confirm by calling this number, bla, bla, bla…
I picked up the phone and called the number in the message. I’m transferred to a ‘human interface specialist’ who tells me, “Our director is seeking an interview with you.”
“But I didn’t request an…”
“Are you Neil Gleary?”
“I am but…”
“Our director” he interrupts, “is seeking an interview with you.”
“Oh.” I say, biting my lip. “He knows I’m a sportswriter, right?”
“She does, yes—if you’re uncomfortable we can always find…”
“No, no. That’s fine. I would be delighted to interview the Director. What’s her name, by the way. And where do I go?”
“A limousine style car will pick you up in front of your apartment at precisely eight a.m. tomorrow morning, he will not wait, so don’t be late.”
“Okay, but why? Why does…”
The call ended.
I spend the rest of the evening searching for information about AARI. All I’m able to learn is that it’s a federally funded research lab dedicated to secret black box projects. Alien technology, artificial intelligence, things like that. This information was provided by a former associate with contacts in the State Department. He was so reticent about speaking about them over the phone, that that was the only information he would give me. When I told him of my impending meeting, he asked me if I had a valid passport. When I told him I did, he said he was just kidding. “If they want you, they’ll get you.”
I told him they were sticklers for punctuality and recounted the message I’d received. He said, “Yeah? Maybe you should test their resolve on that issue.”
“I should be late?”
“Why not?”
You can’t be late, that’s why. It’s contrary to your nature.
In fact, you’re two hours early and a sleek black limo is already waiting at the curb, exhaust fumes rising from the tailpipe. Something tells you it’s been sitting there all night long. The rear door pops open as you approach, you know that once you are in the car, you won’t be able to let yourself out.
You get in anyway. The door closes and locks. You feel protected by the spacious interior insulation and comforted by the smell and sound of the leather seats, the glint of the wood and chrome trim. The first thing you notice is that you’re alone as the driverless car eases smoothly into traffic and down the street, and stops at the first traffic light. You realize, in that short distance, all the windows, except the windshield, have become too dark to see through.
The light changes, the car accelerates through the next ten intersections, as if they’ve been timed to your passage, the car makes several turns and goes down into a cross-town tunnel—and doesn’t come out. By some inexplicable mechanical means, the limo has been shunted to an impossible side tunnel with no other vehicles. Here, the limo feels like it accelerates to a very high rate of speed on a road devoid of all traffic.
The minutes pass in silence as you wonder what you might say to the Director of a top-secret facility, until you are suddenly out in the open, flashing down a highway alongside a wide river. The road loops and bends as you go higher and higher above the river. The limo slows, turns, and darts down a deserted street and into an underground garage. The fluorescent lighting rivals the sun at noon. You look at your watch. It’s nearly 7 a.m. The limo comes to a smooth, unhurried stop and the door pops open. You get out, head for the elevator and stop.
You look around. The garage is huge and empty. There is no call button for the elevator. You feel you are surely being monitored as the elevator doors open of their own accord. You step in, they close. ‘This is all going very well,’ you think. A moment later the elevator plummets several dozen stories in a matter of seconds. You push your stomach back down out of your throat and think, ‘What you’ll do with it, (the story, not your stomach) or who you’ll sell it to is anybody’s guess.’
The doors open. You step out, look around. No one is waiting. But there’s a dark stone line in the middle of the marble floor. You follow it.
A monitor dinged softly, indicating the arrival of the elevator down the hall. She found herself holding her breath and, considering who she was, and how powerful, she could not divine the source of her unease.
She took stock. He had followed implicit instructions, some verbal, some subliminal, and had made his way here, to one of AARI’s most tightly secured labs. The place was deserted for security purposes, all personnel had been temporarily reassigned, or furloughed for the time being. An excessive precaution, she thought, which left her vulnerable, and one that she would not allow to happen again.
But her beauty, in its current state, by itself could overwhelm most men, and her ancestral status was nearly as intoxicating to those of her own species. There was no situation she wasn’t prepared for.
Her current assignment rounded the corner and stopped in his tracks.
“Neil Gleary? Come in, come in. Have a seat.” There was no handshake, no touching of any kind. “I’ve got a pleasant surprise for you and some bad news as well. What would you like first?”
He was slow to answer her, and he seemed alarmingly unaffected by her looks. He took a seat, loosening his tie comically. “How about telling me why I’m here?”
“You’re here to be debriefed and deprogrammed, Neil. Just sit back and relax while I ask you a few questions.”
“Debriefed? From what?”
She ignored his question and asked, “Do you recall what elementary school you went to?”
“No.”
“You don’t sound interested.”
“Should I be? It was a long time ago.”
“How about high school? Remember any of your classmates from high school?”
He hesitated.
“You went to college too you know, remember where?”
He did not remember where. “So? So what? I’ve got a bad memory. I thought I was here to interview you? What does my past have to do with the work you conduct here?”
“Ironically, quite a bit. Are you married? No. Got a girlfriend? No. Ever had one? No. Are you hot for me now? No. Because this,” she waved her hands at her exquisite form, “is not your type. You see, Neil, I’m an alien being, I know I don’t look like one, but here’s the crazy part, you’re an alien too.” He made no move to get up and leave. (Darn, she loved using the tractor beam.) “I don’t look like this—and you don’t look like that.”
“Is that so?” He looked around. There was no quick exit for either of them.
She locked eyes with him. “Your name is XIVIC CIM, your mission here was abandoned 19 years ago. Someone should have brought you in a long time ago. I can’t explain why you weren’t—retrieved, debriefed and—reassigned. It’s inexplicable and inexcusable, but it happens. You got lost in the wafer-work or something. No one knew you were here. Excretion, twenty-four years is a long time to work under-cover, the transition into your true self might well be disturbing.
“What? Why, are we that ugly?”
“Are you kidding? This old leather hide versus our glittering silicon features? There’s no competition. None. It’s just that—let’s face it, you probably think I’m a raving lunatic, and really believe that you are a human being, but when we do an exo-alien mind-press, believe me, it sticks. And you’ve been submerged in the role for a quarter of a century. It’s going to be tough on you, but you’ll adjust. Most deep cover agents recover. I don’t know how, to be honest. I can’t stand wearing this disguise, it creeps me out. Everything has some kind of skin on it. Skin here, skin on that. Uch. Six hours a day, that’s my max. The more we talk about it, the grosser I feel. I understand if you don’t want to talk about something you can’t remember. Perfectly understandable. Do you think you’re ready?”
“Not really. Talking is good. Mmmm, tell me, how does this transition work?”
She held up a small key fob.
He said, “Ahh, you just push a button.”
She nodded. “I have no idea how it works, I’m just another cog in a big machine Mr. Gleary. Are you ready to be yourself again?” Her dazzling smile bounced right off his façade.
“How many of those do you have?”
She pulled open her desk drawer, then closed it again just as quickly. “Enough to keep me busy,” she said, inexplicably flustered.
“And they’re all marked?”
“I think,” she said, “we’ve had enough questions for the time…”
“Before you do that,” he jumped out of his chair, “before you do that, let me just…”
She pointed the fob at his chest and pushed the button. Nothing happened. The elevator chimed, she didn’t remember hearing it go back up, let alone come back down. She pushed the button on the fob again and still nothing happened to Neil Gleary’s visage. The elevator doors opened and there was the sound of boots and guns, jackets and shields with FBAI on them.
“But you’re one of us, XIVIC. How could you?”
He had his own fob. As he stepped into the Director’s private lavatory, to make sure it was empty, he stopped in front of the mirror, the image staring back was that of a tall slender Gray, with long fingers and those legendary black, inscrutable eyes. He pushed the button on the fob once more and appeared human again. He was not ‘one of them,’ and his name was not XIVIC CIM.
The silicon-based alien was well out of earshot when Neil Gleary mumbled his reply: “I like it here. That’s how.”
7 “Normal” Things Sigma Males Have No Interest
Now that Bashar al-Assad & his family have fled Syria for Moscow, what will their lives be like now?
They will be rich exiles
My guess is Assad planned for the exile and has a stash of at least $ 100 Million in Russia which fetches him 12 Billion Rubles today
Like Snowden & Yanukovych , he will be designated a “Foreign Advisor” and additionally be given a Honorary Military Rank of probably Colonel and that automatically means a Pension of 330,000 Rubles ($ 3,091) a month
He will be under strong guard in Moscow and will have both Military and FSB Protection
My guess is after 12 months, his wife will be given a regular passport and can actually visit the UK Or Europe for treatment
Of course if Syria becomes Libya 2.0, then who knows?
After 3–4 years – Assad could be welcomed vociferously back to power
Today if Saddam or Gaddafi were alive, they would be cheered to welcome in Baghdad or Tripoli
So it’s best that Assad, Sheikh Hasina are both alive so that if things become worse for Syria and Bangladesh – these leaders would actually be welcomed back
Chile Quiche
a41fd426160e2d5e01b0bd87c563ca91
Ingredients
1 deep-dish pastry shell
2 avocados, mashed
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tomato, peeled, seeded and chopped
4 fresh green chiles, roasted and peeled, or 1 (4 ounce) can mild green chiles
1/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1/2 pound ground beef
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1 to 2 tablespoons taco seasoning mix or chili powder
3 eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/2 cups Half-and-Half
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Without pricking the crust, bake the shell for 10 minutes; then remove and cool.
Reduce the temperature to 375 degrees F.
If using a frozen pastry shell, you will need to reduce the Half-and-Half in the filling, as the prepared shells are smaller. Reduce the cooking time as well by 15 minutes.
In a small bowl, combine the avocados with garlic, lemon juice, tomato, half the chiles and pepper sauce. Refrigerate until ready to use.
In a medium-size skillet, sauté the beef, onion, remaining chiles and seasoning for about 12 to 15 minutes or until the onion is soft and translucent.
Drain and discard all excess fat.
In a small bowl, combine the eggs, Half-and-Half and seasonings.
Place the grated cheese in the shell, topped by the drained beef and the egg mixture.
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes at 375 degrees F or until set.
Bruce Lee Outwitted by James Garner!
How did your marriage end?
He came home from work, ate dinner, and said, “I want you to do something, and I don’t want you to fight me on this. I want a divorce.” I was completely blindsided. Then he packed a bag and left for his mother’s house. I made him leave his key. He didn’t understand, asking, “How will I get in the house?” I replied, “You have no reason to enter when I’m not home. You don’t live here anymore.” He was shocked.
I started thinking about his infidelity and the increasing micro-aggressions. For Christmas, he gave me a bottle of men’s cologne—that was it. Of course, he kept it for himself. It was clear he hadn’t put any thought into my gift.
So, instead of begging him to stay, I emptied out our joint accounts and made an appointment with a family attorney for the next day.
Of course, he wanted to drag things out. He came to get his things the same week, and I sat watching TV while he packed and loaded the car. He actually asked me to help. I told him, “This is something you want to do, not me.”
Before he left, I told him I knew he was still having an affair and that my attorney had warned him to be careful. He denied everything, sputtering, but the thing that seemed to bother him most was that I had gotten a lawyer. He actually said, “You got a lawyer? You know I’ll always take care of you. Don’t you trust me?”
By the way, he told me the reason he needed space was, “The kids are grown now, so I don’t have to pretend anymore. I never wanted a family I had to hang out with.”
So that was the end. A year later, a judge awarded me about a third of his assets and income as alimony until I remarry or die. We had been married for 32 years, and I was 65 years old. Now, I’m sitting pretty comfortably and peacefully in a different city. Aside from some incidental paperwork handled by my attorney, I have no contact with him. I don’t have to pretend anymore, either.
Edit: I want to say that finally getting a chance to tell my story has been cathartic for me. Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I am much less angry and more resolved to live well after this. Thank you all.
That was DEADLIER than IRBM ORESHNIK┃Putin’s Harsh Response Left Ukraine Without F16s & Electricity
Every now and then, I miss the smells of California.
Yeah. I get it. You all don’t know what I am talking about. Sure. Sure.
There is this “smell” that California has, and the combination of the heat and sun, really accentuates this smell that California has.
On the occasional visits that I would make back to California for one reason or the other, the smell would hit me flat in the face. Ah.
It’s not a bad smell.
It’s a unique smell…
This is what the AI has to say about the smell…
California has a unique smell that is often described as a combination of salty ocean air, warm desert dust, and the scent of eucalyptus trees. This combination of aromas is particularly noticeable in coastal areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the ocean breeze mingles with the dry, earthy scent of the nearby deserts and the distinctive fragrance of eucalyptus, which is common in California’s landscaping.
Key Components of the California Smell:
1. Ocean Air: The salty, briny smell of the Pacific Ocean is a major contributor, especially in coastal cities. The ocean breeze carries with it the scent of seaweed, salt, and the marine environment.
2. Desert Dust: California’s proximity to the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts brings a dry, earthy, and sometimes slightly metallic scent of desert dust. This is particularly noticeable in areas like Los Angeles, where the Santa Ana winds can carry desert dust into the city.
3. Eucalyptus Trees: Eucalyptus trees, which are not native to California but were widely planted in the 19th and early 20th centuries, have a strong, medicinal, and slightly menthol-like scent. This fragrance is often carried by the wind, especially in areas like the Santa Monica Mountains or along the coast.
4. Wildfires: Unfortunately, California’s wildfire season also contributes to the state’s unique smell. The smoke from wildfires can create a distinct, acrid, and sometimes smoky aroma that lingers in the air, especially during the summer and fall months.
Why It’s Unique:
The combination of these elements creates a smell that is distinctively Californian. It’s a mix of the ocean, the desert, and the vegetation, which is unlike the smells you might experience in other parts of the country or the world. The eucalyptus trees, in particular, add a unique note that is not found in many other places.
Public Perception:
Many people who visit or live in California have commented on this unique smell. It’s often described as refreshing, invigorating, or even slightly nostalgic. Some people find it pleasant, while others might find it overwhelming, especially if they are sensitive to strong scents.
In summary, California’s unique smell is a product of its diverse geography and climate, combining the scents of the ocean, desert, and eucalyptus trees. This combination creates a distinctive aroma that many people associate with the state.
…
The smell of California.
*sigh*
Today…
Chinese Hack Means Beijing Reading and Hearing All US Military and Intelligence Classified Phone Communications
There has been some limited press coverage about recent Salt Typhoon — a Chinese cyber / hacking operation — but most Americans are oblivious about what has transpired.
The story is simple. Following Edward Snowden’s escape to Russia and the release of damning evidence that the US Government was spying on Americans, the US Department of Justice pressured the telecommunications giants — i.e., Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile — to create a backdoor in their network software that allows Federal law enforcement to read texts and listen to calls on classified apps. If you are using WhatsApp and think you are safe from the government’s spying eyes, think again.
Sometime before the November 5 Presidential election, the US intelligence community discovered (or learned?) that the Chinese had hacked the “backdoor” and have had full access to all US Government-issued cell phones that use a classified app for text and voice communications.
A knowledgeable source told me that the compromise started in 2022 and was only recently discovered.
What does this mean?
All conversations / communications over the commercial networks are (or were) being read / recorded by China.
My source described the Chinese hack as something akin to the Brits, with help from Polish and American cryptologists, breaking the Enigma machine and reading classified German military traffic.
Cyberattacks linked to the Chinese government that compromised large portions of the United States’ telecommunications network have the U.S. government sounding the alarm. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner, has called it the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history” and noted that it makes prior cyberattacks by Russian operatives look like “child’s play” by comparison.
The complex cyberattack, carried out by a group of Chinese hackers dubbed Salt Typhoon, began as far back as 2022. Its purpose, according to U.S. officials, was to give Chinese operatives persistent access to telecommunications networks across the United States by compromising devices like routers and switches run by companies like AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others.
This attack comes on the heels of reports that the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were assisting telephone companies with countering other China-connected compromises of their networks. The earlier hacking was part of an attack targeting people in the Washington area in government or political roles, including candidates for the 2024 presidential election.
This was a self-inflicted wound.
DOJ’s insistence on having a backdoor created a vulnerability that China has gleefully exploited.
That damage, according to my source, exceeds what Edward Snowden accomplished with his release of NSA and CIA files. China is sitting on a treasure trove of classified communications.
I suspect this includes conversations by CIA officers using a classified app that they unwisely believed was secure.
This is going to have an economic effect — very negative for the telecommunications giants, who are likely to lose profitable USG contracts, and is lucrative for Elon Musk.
Why Musk? His network of satellites handling classified communications — i.e., StarShield — is, I am told, seen by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) as the ONLY solution to secure the compromised military and intelligence networks.
Musk may be on his way to becoming the first Trillion Dollar man.
What was your strangest experience in an American ghetto?
When my father finished his PhD in the mid-60s, he and my mother took a six-week road trip from Canada to Mexico with some friends and me, their two-year-old daughter. Needless to say, these are not my memories.
Somewhere in the deep south of the US, they decided that they needed to do laundry. They drove around until they found a laundromat in a rather rundown area, and in we went.
Everyone else there was black. Conversations stopped abruptly as three pale Canadians walked in. Everyone stared at my parents, and they stared back. It wasn’t a welcoming vibe. The mid-60s weren’t a great time for race relations, and my father remembers wondering, rather worried, what was going to happen next and if we should leave.
Only two people in the laundromat didn’t give a hoot about skin colour: me and another toddler. We made a beeline for one another and promptly sat down on the floor to play. My parents report that all eyes went to the little white girl playing happily with the little black boy, both completely oblivious to the tension around them.
And the tension was gone. Smiles broke out, everyone’s laundry got done, and there were many amicable conversations as both groups met new friends.
We should all be as open-hearted and colour-blind as toddlers.
While laughing w/ friends, i told him: “watch and learn” while i kissed my friend but then…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2VdvEk61U
Chorizo and Cheese Empanadas with Avocado Crema
Empanadas stuffed with ground pork, chiles, onion and a superb mixture of spices. An avocado, sour cream, cilantro and lime sauce is the perfect complement to these empanadas.
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Prep: 25 min | Cook: 2 hr | Marinate: 12 hr | Yield: 48 to 64 servings
Ingredients
Empanadas
1 pound ground pork
2 pasilla chile peppers, or other mild dried red chiles*
1 guajillo chile pepper, or other mild dried red chile*
1 onion, cut into large chunks
4 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
2 teaspoons dried oregano, preferably Mexican
2 teaspoons salt, + more to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 pound queso blanco, or other mild, semi-hard cheese, grated
Empanada dough, or store-bought empanada shells to make about 48 (6 inch) or 64 (5 inch) empanadas**
All-purpose flour, for the work surface
About 6 cups canola oil
Avocado Crema
1 avocado, peeled, pitted, and quartered
1 cup cilantro, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons sour cream
Juice of 1/2 lime
Salt to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
Instructions
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, toast the chiles, turning occasionally, until blistered and fragrant, 4 to 5 minutes.
Transfer the chiles to a bowl of hot water, cover and set aside for 15 minutes.
Remove the chiles from the water and stem and seed them.
Place the chiles, onion, vinegar and garlic in the bowl of a food processor or the jar of a blender and process to purée, scraping down the bowl or jar as needed.
Transfer the chile mixture to a large bowl and add the pork, paprika, oregano, salt, coriander, cumin, pepper and cinnamon, mixing until well combined.
Cover and refrigerate overnight.
In a large skillet over medium heat, cook the pork mixture, breaking it up with a spoon or spatula, until no longer pink, 5 to 6 minutes.
Set aside to cool slightly.
Meanwhile, in the bowl of a food processor, combine avocado, cilantro, sour cream, lime juice and olive oil and process to purée, scraping down the bowl as necessary.
Add salt to taste and set aside in the refrigerator.
Stir the cheese into the pork mixture.
Arrange a 5- or 6-inch round of empanada dough or an empanada shell on a lightly floured work surface.
Spoon 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of pork mixture on top, moisten the edges of the shell with water, and fold the shell over the filling, pressing it with a fork to seal.
Repeat with the remaining shells and pork mixture, flouring the work surface as ncessary.
Heat the oven to 200 degrees F.
Arrange two or three paper towel-lined baking sheets in the oven.
Pour canola oil into a large, heavy saucepan or small stockpot to 1 inch deep and warm it to 350 degrees F over medium heat.
Cook the empanadas in batches, turning occasionally and adjusting the heat to maintain 350 degrees F, until golden, 3 to 4 minutes.
Transfer to the prepared baking sheets to keep warm.
Serve the empanadas with the avocado crema on the side.
Notes
* Look for dried chiles in the ethnic section of your supermarket and at Latin markets.
** Use Michelle’s empanada dough recipe or look for empanada shells—preferably muy hojadrosa (“very flaky”) style—at Latin markets, at gourmet food stores, and online.
Empanadas make a deliciously different lunch or dinner and need nothing more than a crisp green salad on the side. They’re also perfect for parties, right at home with other hot or cold appetizers. To make this recipe more quickly, substitute Mexican-style chorizo for the meat mixture. If you prefer, you can bake the empanadas instead of frying them.
Something is Going Wrong: Putin Gives “Chilling” Speech: “The World May End Earlier, but Russia Will Never Fall”
The President of the Russian Federation gave a speech today and the content indicates Russia knows something very wrong is going on; something that indicates Russia is going to be attacked in a way that causes . . . the end.
Putin officially warned the West what a war with Russia would look like.
Below is the machine-translated text of President Putin’s speech.
“Dear colleagues, media, journalists, and guests.
Good afternoon!
Today, again, in the European Union and NATO member states, there are calls for a “war against Russia.”.
Today, unfortunately or not, we can say again that history always repeats itself. Always!
The views of our colleagues from Europe and NATO on Russia never change; they are always ready to destroy Russia, everything Russian, and ready to occupy Russia; their goal never changes.
Hatred against Russia has always remained in the veins of some of our colleagues and countries ruling the EU and NATO.
Dear colleagues, Today we hear again that Russia is an aggressor, and the truth is that Russia has never been an aggressor and has always defended itself throughout history.
That’s a fact!
Dear colleagues from Europe and NATO, Russia never starts a war; Russia always stops wars. You start wars, and the goal is always to destroy Russia.
Russia has never threatened countries, has never threatened the security of the world, but we like to say, “The snake bites the most when it dies.”
You created fascism, always everywhere, and in Ukraine, wars are your work, and Russia will always defend its country and its people. No matter what it costs, no matter how many losses we suffer, we have always defended our country and its people; we will always continue to do so.
As you know, we have proven ourselves many times in our history as a country with spirit.
And today you are shouting again, “Victory over Russia.”
Dear colleagues, I assure you that Russia will not fall; it may be torn apart, but never destroyed.
If a NATO EU country declares war on Russia, everyone must know that our reaction will be lightning fast, and if we feel a threat to us, our reaction will be destructive.
Today, Russia has all kinds of weapons in the current history of the world, I emphasize. (I add: you have no idea.)
You have not seen anything from Russia and its possibilities in Ukraine because Ukraine is our historical country, and there are Russians in Ukraine, and we are saving them, and this is not a war but a military operation. (True)
On the other hand, it will not be like in Ukraine; that is what you need to know.
As for whether we are ready to negotiate for peace, we have always been ready to negotiate, but no one wanted to negotiate with us.
Of course, Russia has no friends among NATO and European leaders, because Russia is a strong, huge country, which is exactly what your NATO and European colleagues do not want.
But accept it!
No matter how much you repeat that one day Russia will be defeated… I believe in God, and God is with us. The world may end earlier, but Russia will not fall.
We do not need a world without Russia.
Unlike you, I know very well what a country and people are, and therefore I will always fight for my country and people.
Are you ready to accept this, as you wish? Are you ready to start a war against Russia again? But we are also ready.
And today’s war against Russia would be an absolute apocalypse.
I advise our colleagues from Europe and NATO to work for the good of the world, not for the destruction of the world.
Thank you! “
HAL TURNER REMARKS
I do not know what is going on, behind the scenes in Europe – that would have prompted a speech like this from Russia’s President.
Clearly whatever is taking place, MUST be happening in Europe because we in the USA see that our country is backing away from the Ukraine debacle. For weeks, President Trump has been openly saying that war must end.
Last Friday, after Ukraine President Zelensky’s disastrous argument with President Trump and Vice President Vance in the Oval Office, within hours the US State Department halted funding for any rebuild of Ukraine’s electric grid. (Included in related story HERE)
Yesterday, there was a full “pause” in all U.S. military “aid” to Ukraine (Story Here).
So whatever it is which prompted Russia’s President to make this speech, seems to me to have developed behind the scenes, likely in Europe, within the past 24 hours.
Russian Intelligence-gathering is amazingly efficient, so it seems to me that they have found something very serious, which gave rise to President Putin’s public speech above.
I may not be the brightest bulb in the chain, but it seems to me that when the leader of a country armed with the most nuclear warheads on earth, starts publicly talking about “a NATO EU country declaring war upon Russia” and “. . . an absolute apocalypse”that’s a really bad thing.
I earnestly hope you have emergency food, water, medicine, and other supplies needed to sustain yourself and your family in the event this situation erupts into something none of us want.
Have some cash in the house, too, in case credit/debit systems go down, so you can still buy things you may need if the worst begins.
Stay tuned – intently – for further developments.
Bat Shit Crazy!
Guys, this woman reminds me of my fist wife who was schizo-effective. To fully appreciate my life, you all got to see what I endured for twenty years.
How do you feel about the Assad government’s collapse in Syria?
Regardless of one’s feelings about Assad, it’s clear that Hizb Tahreer el-Sham (HTS) and its leader Jolani are pretty civilized. They’re not Islamofascists, and if they used to be, they’ve reformed over the 13 years of the civil war. They’ve granted an amnesty to Syrian soldiers of the old regime and pledged to protect minorities, and they are currently working with Assad’s ministers (who have been allowed to continue their work) to build a new, pluralistic government. In a country where most people fear religious fanatics, HTS is well-liked.
What this victorious, popular and militarily effective Turkish-backed force needs to do now is complete its task by reconquering the rest of Syria from the other factions and reuniting the country.
The Kurds in the east (who call themselves Rojava) need to go. As much as I like the Kurds (good fighters and good thinkers), and as much as I believe a Kurdish state would flourish, their militant autonomy is plain bad for the Middle East.
One, they demand too much territory. It’s absurd for Kurds to aspire to take vast swathes of Iraq and Syria for a state. They’re quite a small ethnicity. They inhabit a big area because they used to be nomads. But they were never the only ones living there.
Two, they’re US-funded and pro-Israel. I’d like the Kurds so much more if they weren’t pro-Israel. That is unforgivable.
Three, Rojava isolates Syria from Iraq.
Four, I just plain hate separatist movements. Your average white boy will praise the Balkanization of the Middle East for the sake of creating an independent Kurdish state, Assyrian state, Kabylian state, Coptic state, etc. But when it comes to independence for Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque Country, etc., the white boy sings a different tune.
The proto-state of Rojava must be defeated, demilitarized and dismantled, with Turkey’s gleeful assistance. Afterward there might be a Kurdish province with limited autonomy, principally relating to language and education.
Turkey will probably return the northern Syrian territory it occupies, once the new Syrian state defeats all rival armed groups, pacifies the country, and agrees to take back the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. In any case the new Syrian state will clearly be Turkish-dominated.
The US is SHOCKED: The Situation Becomes Out of Control in SYRIA┃Turkey & Israel Ask RUSSIA for HELP
I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Mangione was arrested in Altoona, PA after a nationwide manhunt for the shooter of United Health Care CEO Mike Thompson in New York City last week.
Major media outlets are also in possession of the “Manifesto” document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why.
My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC, to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
The Most Insufferable Spoiled Bratty Karen Cops Have Ever Encountered in their Entire Life!
Why does it seem the USA never suffers from serious economic crisis like Japan, Russia, or China are facing? Is it because the American never lose confidence in their economy and thus consumptions never fall in America?
It is, it is hiding it’s real economy with manipulated USD value, it change the definition of recession and used an archaic CPI measurement that failed to register the real inflation rate which is at least double digits.! GDP Measures QE and bubble and hot air to fool itself and fool its allies! The problems facing USA is way way way more severe and unsustainable than China or Russia!
For you to even asked this question displayed signs of being a brain dead westerner or amongst the slaves and dog states, some 20 nations who suck up to the USA! I pity you! I am a strong believer that correction starts upon recognition of the real state of affairs! The USA owes 35’000’000’000’000 and increase by 1’000’000’000’000 each and every 100 days! Today the US has to pay roughly 1’000’000’000’000 a year!
I spelled out the zeroes to wake you up! I lived in South East Asia 62/67 years of my life! There is nothing we want from USA! Not a grain of salt! So you guy’s literally have nothing to sell except war and war mongering and weapons and that too will soon comes to an end! More and more nations are buying Chinese and Russian weapons at a fraction of your price and proven to be just as good!
The USA has up to 2.5 million living in the street homeless and you want to stop the only nation that helped you stay deflated for the last 30 years! If you are successful 50 million may have to go hungry and start a civil war! Consumption is good up to a point. Like families if you spend more than you earn soon you have to sell your house! That is what happened in the USA!
I know as a white Caucasian Anglo Saxon you think that you can always start a war with China or Russia! But really it is nothing but death wish! And you tried that for the last 3 full years! What did you get for the effort in Ukraine? Nothing! Zero! Russia went from 5th richest to 3rd richest! A third of Ukraine is under Russia and 30% of Ukrainians are dead or gone from Ukraine!
But if you think that is all! Grow up it is just the first instalment! Soon your banks will all go bankrupt and USD will be toilet paper money! You don’t see the USA suffers because you have media and politicians to lie to you! So wake up!
It had been on a whim that Sabrina had entered the draw:
“Win a Cutting Edge of Technology Smart Fridge – The First Fridge to Help YOU Succeed in All of YOUR Weight Loss Goals.”
That morning, she had weighed herself. 200 pounds. On her 5’5” frame, it wasn’t the end of the world, maybe, but it was the heaviest that she’d ever been. Sabrina was determined to obtain a gym pass the second she left work – and actually use it this time. Maybe that would put a stop to her mother’s passive aggressive comments about her weight gain.
As she was waiting for the pushy and overly perky gym representative to process her contract, she filled out an entry form for the draw. Something to distract herself from feeling out of place among all of the tight gym bodies. Sabrina just hoped that they wouldn’t put her on some annoying email subscription list. Otherwise, it wouldn’t hurt to enter, right?
Sabrina had never won anything, so the second she entered, she put the draw out of her mind. Five gruelling workouts later, when she hadn’t received additional ad-like emails (and only lost one pound), a 1-800 number left her a voicemail. She had won a new fridge!
A week later, when her mom was over for a dreaded visit, the delivery men showed up with her brand new, gorgeous, stainless steel refrigerator. In her dated kitchen, it glowed like a beacon. By far, this was the nicest and most valuable thing that she had ever owned. Her old pea green fridge (that was technically her Landlord’s, really) kept things cold, for sure, but it didn’t have the tablet, or water and ice dispenser like the new one. Plus, the new fridge belonged to Sabrina! For the time being, her Landlord told her to unplug the old fridge and she had the delivery men leave it in the sunroom of her little house.
Even her usually critical mother was impressed with her shiny new appliance.
“This is way too fancy for your kitchen! You should have told them to bring it to my house. I would keep it in good condition for you until you can afford a nice place.”
“Wow Mom, thanks…”
“You know what I mean!”
But before she could respond, her mother started fiddling with The Fridge’s tablet. This was terrifying for Sabrina, as her mom was not known for being technologically savvy. The Fridge made a weird beeping sound, while the tablet flashed.
“Oh great, Mom, you broke it!”
“No, I didn’t!”. But her mother didn’t look all that certain and rushed to leave.
Thankfully (once her mother was out of the vicinity), Sabrina looked at The Fridge’s manual and was able to restart the tablet and start setting up all of its special features. It had food and habit trackers, a healthy recipe finder and grocery apps built in, and it was able to pair with Sabrina’s phone and tablet.
Once the set up was done, The Fridge seemed to come to life.
“Good Afternoon, Sabrina. Thank you for allowing me to help you succeed in all your wellness goals!”, said a lovely alto voice, that was only slightly robotic sounding.
As soon as she had linked her devices with The Fridge’s apps, she started receiving helpful weight loss tips.
Sabrina had heard about those refrigerators that had cameras and would let you see the fridge’s contents from your phone while at the store. Her new fridge took this technology to another level. It knew via her FindMyiPhone app that she was approaching the grocery store and sent her pictures of the inside of her fridge and freezer. Then it made a custom grocery list of all of the food that she should purchase, in order to make healthy choices. Eggs, tofu, blueberries, broccoli, three different kinds of lettuce…but she wasn’t exactly pumped when it suggested that she buy soy coffee cream instead of her regular whipping cream. Sabrina ignored that suggestion…and she added a pint of Half-Baked ice cream to the cart. “Everything comes in moderation,” she told herself.
When she arrived home and started putting away the groceries, The Fridge’s tablet device in that friendly, slightly robotic voice, praised Sabrina for all of her (really its) healthy choices.
“Great job picking blueberries – they are full of antioxidants!”
“Eggs will be wonderful, as they have Omega 3 fat!”
When she went to put away the carton of whipping cream, The Fridge somehow latched the door, so she couldn’t open it. “What is that?”
“My coffee cream!”
“That is not what you were ordered to purchase!”
The Fridge refused to unlatch for an hour after that and it took multiple promises of “good behaviour” going forward. Sabrina didn’t dare attempt to put away the ice cream now.
The next morning she drank her coffee black. Well, to be completely honest, first she sniffed the coffee cream that had spent the night in the cupboard (The Fridge was not happy about that). When it smelled off, she opted to begrudgingly drink the bitter black coffee. However, when Sabrina weighed herself, she was already down 7 pounds. Maybe The Fridge was on to something. Maybe black coffee wasn’t so bad.
When she entered her weight loss onto The Fridge’s app, it was so encouraging.
“Way to go, Sabrina! Your hard work is paying off!”, but it added an “I told you the whipping cream was a terrible idea.”
Nothing like some robotic smugness to ruin a good thing.
Later, when Sabrina had finished her gruelling work day, she was supposed to go to the gym. She had planned to. Really! But she was completely exhausted, so she started the drive home instead. Just before Sabrina pulled onto her street, she received a loud phone notification that she had never heard before, so she abruptly parked.
The Fridge: YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE A THE GYM. TURN AROUND AND GO WORKOUT!
Sabrina was about to send The Fridge a message back, but then realized how stupid that would be. “It’s just a fridge!” But Sabrina even surprised herself, when she turned the car around and headed to the gym. Maybe she’d just go on the treadmill for 10 minutes to appease the appliance, she thought. Then she received another notification:
The Fridge: I SIGNED YOU UP FOR CROSSFIT. HURRY! IT STARTS IN 10 MINUTES.
Surrounded by buff bodies that lived at the gym (and were silently wondering what she was doing in this class), Sabrina survived the ninety minute CrossFit class…barely. Every muscle in her body felt like it was rioting against her. After almost crawling to her car and up her front steps, she made it home in time for supper.
“Amazing workout, Sabrina!”
Sabrina just grunted. She wanted to give The Fridge a piece of her mind, but, frankly, she was too tired. A hot oven pizza would be lovely right now, after the CrossFit torture. She had earned it, dammit!
As she pulled the Hawaiian pizza box out of The Fridge’s freezer, the voice asked, “Sabrina? What are you doing?”
In a tone, not unlike a petulant teenager, Sabrina replied, “I am making myself some supper! I deserve it after that horrible torture you signed me up for!”
“But that has little nutritional value. Have a salad instead!” Sabrina could have sworn that the voice had added “Fatty”, but she was sure she had imagined that. Before she could consider that further, The Fridge opened its door, then the crisper drawers. Sabrina, in her frustration, shut the drawers a little too roughly than she intended to.
The Fridge did not like this and responded with, “Owwww! You must be overheated from your workout. You need to cool down!”. The ice dispenser started to pelt ice cubes at Sabrina with remarkable accuracy, as she was attempting to get to the oven. She dropped the frozen pizza on the floor.
But, much to the The Fridge’s chagrin, she still cooked and ate that pizza. However, it wasn’t really a loss for The Fridge (though Sabrina wouldn’t admit it) since half the toppings had fallen off and she ended up burning a ton of calories cleaning up her kitchen afterward.
When The Fridge told her at 8 pm that it was bedtime and she needed to get a solid 10 hours of sleep, Sabrina didn’t even argue. She was exhausted.
The early sleep time would not prepare her for The Fridge’s 5:45 am wake up call. It made a sound not unlike an Amber Alert, with her phone and tablet following suit.
“Wake up, Sabrina – It’s time for a run!”
Sabrina pulled the pillow over her head. “I am SLEEPING!”.
“Don’t make me call your mother!”
“Fine! I am up! I’m up!”. With that, Sabrina dutifully went on a long walk, but refused to run. Anything to escape her Fascist Fridge.
When she returned from the walk, feeling remarkably refreshed, The Fridge told her she needed to drink more water, but Sabrina was sick of being told what to do. After all, she had lost more weight and she was all about balance.
“DRINK WATER, FATTY!”, The Fridge repeated and, again, Sabrina refused. Before Sabrina could feel victorious, The Fridge’s water dispenser shot her square in her mouth with cold, refreshing water.
“Arggghhhhh glack. What the hell? *gah*”, Sabrina sputtered.
“Hydration complete! You better get ready for work. Your mother is coming for supper later, so I’ve sent a list of ingredients for you to buy for supper tonight!”
“What the heck? You invited my mother over?”
“For a nice nutritious supper, but you can take the day off from the gym. However, you must walk over lunch – I will know if you don’t!”
“Yeah, right,” Sabrina muttered.
“I know you didn’t run this morning, Sabrina!” Again, The Fridge dispensed water right in Sabrina’s face.
When it started dispensing ice, as well, Sabrina placated The Fridge with, “Okay! Okay! I swear I’ll go for a walk over lunch!”.
Sabrina was frustrated. At work and on her lunch walk (accompanied by a reminder text, of course), she contemplated just unplugging The Oppressive Fridge. Sell it maybe? But then she remembered that it was attached to all of her devices. Also, it was the most valuable thing that she owned and, truthfully, it’s cutting edge technology did work. Sabrina was in great shape (and in such a short period of time)…but she was miserable.
For now, it was decided that she would appease The Fridge. After work, she’d purchased all of the items that The Fridge had demanded. More health food and, this time, Sabrina didn’t deviate from the strict list.
At home, The Fridge praised her for her (its) healthy choices and gave her step by step instructions on how to precisely cook dinner for her mother.
Her mother was nothing short of amazed by not only supper, but by Sabrina’s transformation.
“You look fabulous – let me look at you!”, she gushed, “Wow, that fridge did amazing work. I am SO JEALOUS!”
Later, as Sabrina walked her mom to the door, she saw her trusty old fridge still sitting faithfully in the sunroom; it gave her an idea.
“Mom? I think you are right…my fridge would look much better in your kitchen. Think of it as an early birthday present?”
Sabrina’s mom initially declined, but in a way that Sabrina knew she wanted The Fridge. With little convincing, she agreed to get movers for the following day.
When she returned to the kitchen, The Fridge greeted her with a, “Good job following instructions today, Fat-“. Before The Fridge could figure out what she was doing, Sabrina reached behind and pulled the plug.
The next day, it was gone and her old trusty pea green fridge was put back in its place of honour.
The Smart Fridge Product Review
Submitted by sabrinasmom@gmail.com
2 out of 5 stars
1 person found this helpful.
My daughter gave me this “smart” fridge as an early birthday gift and I found the tablet feature to be very argumentative. While the refrigerator still cools my food, the tablet & weight loss technology suddenly stopped working after only 2 days. When I phoned the Manufacturer to demand a full refund of the refrigerator’s value, they refused, as I was not the original owner. I am extremely disappointed - they don’t make refrigerators like they used to!
Road Rage Shooter Gets the Surprise of His Life
What do you think would happen if a combat soldier refuses to obey a superior’s order?
I refused to obey orders one time. This was in combat. First deployment to Iraq. Nothing really happened, it just led to me getting my butt chewed pretty good. I’ll tell you the story.
My first deployment to Iraq was during the early part of the war. The rules of engagement were very sketchy back then. This is right when the insurgency kicked off.
If I remember correctly, You could engage any vehicle that came within 50 m of your patrol. Think about that for a second. 50 m is pretty dang close. A lot of innocent civilians got killed because of that because we could not distinguish them from terrorists.
We were on a patrol one day and I was the rear machine gunner in the patrol. My vehicle Commander which was a corporal, ordered me to take out a vehicle that was approaching our patrol. You have to remember that he was in the passenger side of a vehicle and I was actually in the machine gun turret where I had a good view of these people. While they were getting close, they did not look like terrorists to me. It was an Iraqi family. I could see the wife in the passenger side and what looked to be some kids in the back seat.
He started yelling at me to engage the vehicle and the first thing I did was shot a flare. The vehicle didn’t stop and kept coming. They started yelling at me to shoot the vehicle and I refused. I ended up shooting another flare and hitting the windshield. This actually broke the rules of engagement because I should have already engaged the vehicle at this point. It was probably within 25 m of us.
As you can imagine, Corporal was not happy with me and he yelled at me pretty hard. He told me that when he told me to do something, I needed to do it.
Having said that, that’s been about 20 years ago and I do not regret my decision. I would have taken out a whole family of innocent Iraqi people on his orders. I was in the right and he was in the wrong. He was stressed out because we had hit several IEDs by that point and I think his mind was playing with him a little bit.
I rescued her
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On February 27, she would have turned 7. I rescued her when she was just 2 days old. She had been released a few times but always returned home. She even came back to give birth to her babies. Watching her deliver and raise her kits was one of the most incredible experiences of my life as a rehabber. She was a true fighter—she survived distemper, poisoning, and several attacks in the wild. The distemper left her with neurological issues, and she was eventually deemed non-releasable. For nearly 5 years, she’s been by my side. We’ve been inseparable; she relied on me as much as I relied on her. The bond we shared was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
On her last night, NAWTY fell asleep on my chest. When I woke up, she was still there, looking up at me, licking my chin once, taking a few deep breaths, and then she was gone. My heart aches deeply, and I feel so lost without her. She was my soulmate, and words can’t express how much I loved her. Thank you for letting me share this with you, and my condolences to all who’ve lost a beloved companion. Sending love and blessings to you all.
How To Ruin Your College Life Instantly
Are Israel and the US in a hurry to make enemies in Syria by bombing the country?
Pretty simple
This wasn’t what they expected😁😁😁
They expected
Putin would send Troops to Syria
Iran would send Troops to Syria
Turkey & Russia would be at major loggerheads
There would be a long drawn war where US could keep playing a Ukraine 2.0 and keep supplying the militants with weapons and forcing Guerrilla attacks on Russian Troops
Knowing that even if Trump stops supporting Ukraine, he won’t ever stop supporting Syria
They expected Syria to be busy with their own wars to stop helping Hezbollah and Iran
Instead Putin coolly took Assad and decided to walk off
Now Syria is run amok with Militants who are former Al Qaeda and ISIS, steeped in Islamic Ideology
Imagine they have access to weapons or guns or missiles?
They would definitely attack Israel
So Israel is pulling a pre emptive strike
Now they are on the outside cheering Assads downfall but deep inside they are flabbergasted
Now Israel has Millions of Rogue Militants on their borders rather than a tolerably organized Syrian Army
Now they are making it worse
Now 10 Million Syrians hate Israel
Excellent recruiting ground for more terrorists to destroy Israel 😁
US of course is too far away to really be affected
She told the waiter I was just a friend, when I asked her why she got mad & said it was a joke…
https://youtu.be/CEPt2a20I0w
Have you ever had to work on Christmas? Was it difficult?
I used to work in residential care, including care homes for adults with physical disabilities, for older people, for adults with learning disabilities, and for people recovering from strokes. So, like people who work in emergency services, I had to work whatever day it was.
In the home I worked in for the longest, I remember that we could request 28 days per year of leave (in addition to our scheduled days off per week, which for me were every Thursday and alternate weekends), which could include any dates except public holidays like Christmas, Boxing Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday etc, since if people could reserve these as their days off, everyone would want to do so, and those who didn’t get there in time would complain. It could be annoying if my scheduled days off included Christmas Eve (because it fell on Thursday) and Boxing Day (because it fell on a Saturday of one of my clear weekends) but I couldn’t take Christmas Day off and make a long weekend of it, but there you were.
I didn’t mind the work itself. When I worked as a temp between permanent jobs in one care home, meaning that I was called into lots of different places at short notice when someone was off sick, some of my most fun placements were around the Christmas season, including helping adults with learning disabilities to make Christmas decorations, or giving an impromptu carol concert at an old people’s Christmas party after the hired entertainer had left (I asked for requests for favourite carols, as I know a fair number of them by heart). I remember an old lady asking me to ring her parents and explain that she was staying over at the Christmas party as the weather was too bad to get home. Of course I agreed to do so, and felt relieved that she considered herself to be a teenager at a sleepover party, when I have sometimes had harrowing conversations with residents who considered that they were in prison, imploring me to believe that they had committed no crime, or asking me to ring the police to rescue them from their kidnappers.
Of course, not all the encounters were fun. I remember an old lady asking me confusedly where she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to be doing, because she was so used to being organised to go to scheduled weekly activities that she didn’t know how to find something to occupy herself when there was a change in routine. I remember an old lady who had lost her sense of taste complaining that everything – turkey, roast potatoes, and even trifle and Christmas pudding when I brought her a bowl of each to make up for the main course she didn’t want – tasted of cardboard. Then a bit later, she complained about not having been offered anything to eat. I wasn’t irritated with her; it wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t taste anything, nor that she couldn’t remember having been served a meal. But I felt sad for her that she couldn’t enjoy eating.
But all of it was worth doing, and it was an honour to be there. Working in a home on a regular basis, I got used to the different routine of Christmas – some residents would go out with relatives for the day, but there would also be relatives coming to the home to spend the day with their grandparent, and while this meant more able-bodied people to help the more disabled residents to eat, it also meant more meals and drinks for me to serve to the visitors. The place would be busy and bustling, with visiting great-grandchildren and even pets. The home would offer sherry to the residents, visitors and staff (though I had to decline this, as even a small amount of alcohol makes me sleepy), but visitors might also bring in their own alcoholic drinks for their relatives (an old man in the care home taught me how to use a door as an opener for a bottle of beer). At about 2, I’d get to take a break and have my own portion of what was left of Christmas lunch (and no, it didn’t taste like cardboard).
I don’t think I was too bad a carer, but I wasn’t an angel. In nearly every room, either the television or the radio would be on (as a matter of course, not just at Christmas). Sometimes, moving from room to room to help various people with their meals, I wasn’t giving them as much attention as I should have done because I was distracted by the carols on the radio or the Christmas movie on television – which I wouldn’t be able to see the end of, because the television in the next room would be tuned to a different channel.
There was always a lot to do in the run-up to Christmas, like decorating, and holding a Christmas bazaar to raise funds for the home. There was one old lady who was good at making knitted dolls (I had briefly taken up knitting as a hobby while I was unemployed, and now that I didn’t have so much free time for it, I passed on to her my book of patterns for knitting model animals). In autumn, she always made a whole craft stall’s worth of knitted Santas and snowmen for the bazaar. I once asked her if she might diversify and have a go at, say, a knitted Nativity scene, but she said that she had been asked for Santas and snowmen and she would make Santas and snowmen, as they always sold.
Generally, over Advent and before, families of residents would give us boxes of mince pies, chocolate biscuits and sweets, to thank us for looking after their elderly relatives. I knew that if I started snacking, I would be tempted to pig out, and be too distracted by eating to pay attention to the residents. So instead I decided to swear off sweet things for Advent (if I got hungry and tired in what could be an energy-intensive job, I could have toast, or a plain digestive biscuit), shared out as many of the treats as I could among those of the residents who could eat solid food and weren’t diabetic, and reminded myself that when it got to Christmas, all these treats would taste all the better if I wasn’t bored with sugar. On one occasion, I got given several of these many boxes of sweets and biscuits as a Christmas and thank-you present from the management.
Several people have commented that working at Christmas wasn’t a problem for them either because they aren’t Christian, or because they are Christian and believe that it’s inappropriate to celebrate on a day which probably isn’t Jesus’s real birthday but is just an excuse to rebrand a pagan holiday. Personally, I was a Christian who did like Christmas (I find it harder these days, when my faith is going through an ambivalent time), and because of that I was happy to work on Christmas Day, because I couldn’t think of anything that honoured Jesus more than looking after people, and especially making sure that the ones who didn’t have visitors at Christmas got some attention. When I started work, I was asked to fill in a form which, to make sure I wasn’t subject to religious discrimination, asked me what religion I was and which days were important to me. I replied that I was a Christian, that all days were important to me, and that I was happy to work any day.
The Invasion | Official Trailer | 4K
Looks like a remake of the old movie “Invasion of the body snatchers”. I think that it looks pretty darn good.
How strong is Vietnam’s industry compared to China’s?
I visited Vietnam for 8 days recently
No comparison whatsoever
Here are some points :-
#1 Vietnam has virtually NO supply chain
Every factory in Vietnam runs on Chinese Machines most of the time Or in some cases German Machines
Most of the parts for Final Or Secondary Assembly come from China
#2 Most of the Industry is still Low Grade
The Largest Four Factories in the Mekong region make Textiles, Textiles, Bakelite Moulds for Phones & Cardboard Boxes
Vietnamese Industry is close to 90% Low Grade and 10% Medium Grade – similar to what China was between 2003–2007
#3 Vietnam has a Pretty Low Supervisory Force
Vietnam has a some Engineers educated in places like Singapore but even so 80% Supervisors are Chinese
Vietnam as yet don’t have the volume of Skilled Workers that is needed to migrate to Medium Or High Grade Manufacture
However some positives include
A. Vietnam has a decent Skilled Labor Force and a lot of women laborers
B. Vietnam has 15 Industrial Parks where they now make Mid Quality Products like Branded Razor Blades & I Pads
However Vietnam lacks the Logistics & Supply Chain potential of China by a very long way off
A Soft Murmur
A customizable background noise generator. You can mix different sounds like rain, wind, and fire to create the perfect ambient noise for work or relaxation.
I am putting together a piece that will cover the happenings of this December, to provide a stock taking prior to Trump’s inauguration. The Western security state has been very busy attempting to get things in place before Trump comes to power, and there are also many other significant changes to be taken into account. There is a mix of imperial losses, the delay of probable losses and the odd victory; what one would expect from a deteriorating empire. It is important to understand the underlying trend and not get lost in the noise. The piece below covers the reality of the rule of the US by an increasingly small group of the billionaire class, exemplified by the Trump administration and its donor class.
The US elite neoliberal revolution that was fully launched in the 1970s has now arrived at its logical conclusion, with a very small group of billionaire and multi-billionaire oligarchs utterly controlling the government through political donations. A type of outright bribery fully legalized by the Supreme Court in a number of judgements that started with the 1976 Buckley vs. Veleo case, found full force with the 2010 Citizen’s United vs. FEC case and continued with the 2014 McCutcheon vs. FEC case. With political bribes and concentrated money attacks on progressive (and anti-Zionist) candidates now legally defined as protected free speech, combined with the massive concentration of wealth at the very top of wealth pyramid, US politicians are now fully courtiers of the 0.001%; a few thousand US citizens (and that’s counting their spouses and children).
The Washington Post blithely displayed this reality as it detailed how 45% of all campaign contributions came from fifty billionaires (US$1.6 billion to Republicans, US$0.75 billion to Democrats), and that does not count all the “dark money” political pools that act independently and actively hide their funders. Some of the oligarch billionaires:
Timothy Mellon, Railroad Magnate and Heir (part of the Mellon dynasty): US$197 million
Richard & Elisabeth Uihlein, Shipping Supplies Magnates (part of the Uihlein dynasty that owned the Schlitz Brewing Company): US$139 million
Miriam Adelson, Widow of Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson and arch Jewish Zionist (served in the Israeli army and has Israeli citizenship): US$136 million
Elon Musk, Transportation Entrepreneur, owner of Twitter/X and currently richest man in the world (born into the wealthy South African Musk family), forced to bow down to the Zionists: US$132 million
Kenneth Griffin, Hedge Fund Manager (born into a wealthy family): US$104 million
Paul Singer, Hedge Fund Manager and Jewish “rabid Zionist”: US$63 million
Michal Bloomberg, Financial Information Provider (founder of Bloomberg) and Jewish Zionist: US$47 million
Stephen & Christine Schwarzman, Investors (founder of the Blackstone Group) and Jewish Zionists: US$40 million
Dustin Moscowitz, Facebook co-founder and Jewish: US$39 million
US$993 million from just 10 donors, out of a total of US$2.5 billion for the top 50 billionaire contributors. Even among the billionaire class, wealth and political contributions are concentrated near the top! Imagine how much clout this concentration of wealth and political donations gives these ten donors over the US political courtier class. Out of those ten, five are Jewish Zionists, one is Jewish, and another was forced by his advertisers to bow down to the Zionist regime. The other US billionaires benefit from Israel’s role of disciplining the Middle East and supplying operatives for so many dirty political operations around the world, so there are very few that oppose the Zionist regime’s actions. No wonder nearly every Trump nominee seems to spout Make Israel Great Again more than Make America Great Again. He is bought and paid for by Zionist money, and most especially Miriam Adelson.
Following in the foot steps of her shady husband, who made most of his money in Macau where Chinese organized crime is rampant.
Of course, the Democrats have been all in on the Zionist genocide and happily invited Netanyahu to speak to the US political courtier class during the genocide. And Biden’s cabinet was extensively stocked with Zionists.
Another thing that these donors share is an utter distastefulness for being taxed, and their tax dollars “wasted” on the “unworthy”; some much more rabidly than others. Five made their money in finance, one from social media, one from shipping supplies, one from railroads (which he inherited), and one from Casinos (inevitably involving linkages with organized crime, just like Trump with his casinos). Only one is involved in manufacturing; very much representative of the new US wealth. Tax cuts are always on the agenda, never tax rises (for the rich), and the regulation of the financial industry (especially for hedge funds and private equity) is hardly ever on the table; only post-2008 was some window dressing regulatory legislation required. They all live lives that are utterly disconnected from the lives of even multi-millionaires, let alone the average American.
The oligarch billionaire class is also becoming increasingly embedded with the security state, and adept at utilizing political donations to have themselves appointed to important positions within the very state that their corporations are entwined with. A specially egregious case is Howard Lutnick (CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a very large player in the US government debt market) who played a central role in gathering donations for Trump. Another of his companies, Satellogic is very much in bed with the security state and global surveillance, and also using the revolving door as its board has a former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as a member. In his new role as Commerce Secretary, Lutnick will be overseeing agencies, such as NOAA, that Satellogic wants to sell its services to. His stable coin venture Tether has also become a large holder of US government debt. Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb detail Lutnick’s incestuous relationship with state organizations here.
Then we have a Vice President who is a creation of the silicon valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the owner of the Palantir data gathering and analysis corporation that is in bed with the security state, as well as many other parts of the state and in many different countries. The CIA venture fund was one of the founding investors in Palantir. Trae Stephens, a close affiliate of Thiel, may get the number 2 job at the Pentagon. The other option for the job is a Stephen Feinburg who previously owned a prominent MIC contractor and now heads a Cerberus Capital Management that launched a major defence-focused venture capital fund in 2024. Musk, the co-head of the proposed DOGE agency is also a major state contractor through his SpaceX venture. And which areas is DOGE focusing on? The vast cesspit of corruption that is the Defence Budget and the five massive defence contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Boeing)? The massive profiteering of the Health Industrial Complex?
No, of course not; the targets seem to be the Internal Revenue Service (the agency that taxes the billionaires) and Social Security (money “wasted” on the retired plebs, and vast sums that could be freed from the state to be looted by the financiers). The above are just a few of the oligarchs who are getting themselves placed in important government roles. Who needs courtiers when you can run the state yourself?
In the background we have the modern day equivalents of the anti-competitive and corrupt “trusts” that dominated the US corporate world of the late nineteenth century Gilded Age; Blackrock (US$11.5 trillion under management), The Vanguard Group (US$9.3 trillion under management), and State Street (US$4 trillion under management and US$40 trillion under custody and administration).
The Chairman and CEO of Blackrock, a publicly traded company, is one of its founders, billionaire Larry Fink (US1.2 billion). Vanguard is a private company owned by investment clients (CEO Salim Ramji) and State Street is a publicly traded company (Chairman and CEO Ronald O. O’Hanley). Then in addition, there is the global leader in private equity investment, behemoth Blackstone with US$8.7 trillion under management, with the CEO being the co-founder and billionaire Stephen Schwarzman (US$54 billion). Then there are lesser private equity players such as KKR (US$1 trillion under management), Apollo, the Carlyle Group, Bain Capital and Warburg Pincus. Always searching for areas that can be turned into monopolies or cozy oligopolies to maximize the extractive profits of the ownership class.
Through such vehicles the ownership class concentrate their wealth and power, dominating US and other corporations. In so many US and other corporations Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street will be the top three shareholders, or within the top five. At the same time, Blackstone and others can utilize their assets, together with vast borrowing capacity, to take corporations private and shake them down for the benefit of their investors and management. The senior executives of these investment corporations, representing the ownership class, wield immense power; for example Larry Fink and Stephen Schwarzman are considered to be two of the most powerful people in the world.
These new style trusts also get their executives appointed to important government positions, and even get appointed to run significant parts of the government; as with Blackrock and the large scale US state interventions in the debt markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. A direct conflict of interest given Blackrock’s large US government and corporate bond holdings.
Elections in the US have always been mostly performative and superficial, but in the post-WW2 era the US rich held less of the economic pie and were less concentrated. With the massive concentration of wealth of the past 50 years, both within society and within the wealthy, an incredibly small group of the extreme wealthy together with those that manage the concentrated assets of the wealthy, exercise more power over the government than the rest of society combined. Added to this of course is the concentration of the US (and Western) media, including social media, in so few hands; greatly aided by the lack of any real anti-trust enforcement and oversight since the 1980s.
Even with this level of propagandist control, the level of outright looting and theft of this concentrated oligarchy has become more and more apparent to the general citizenry. A new Gilded Age, but this time the Robber Barons are more feasting off the already in place wealth of the nation and the people rather than building new wealth; a cannibal capitalism that eats its own base of strength. It is in such circumstances that the murder of the CEO of a healthcare company, which excelled in refusing claims under his leadership, is met with a general feeling of “he got what he deserved” by such a large chunk of the population.
There has been a significant a level of breakdown in the “manufacturing of consent”; even in the face of escalating levels of state and concentrated media censorship. When propaganda fails to control the population, liberalism can remove its velvet gloves to show its fascist fists. The result can only be greater authoritarianism as the mask of “democracy” has been so utterly removed and the oligarchy continue to plunder and immiserate the citizenry. Frank Zappa was incredibly prescient when he said:
The concentration of wealth in lesser and lesser hands, the disconnection of the rulers from the ruled, a vast courtier class fully focused on slavishly serving the oligarchs and not discomfiting them with inconvenient truths, the immiseration of the ruled as the rulers openly display their vast wealth, vast private wealth amidst public squalor; these are all symptoms of a failing empire. An imperial oligarchy feasting on the very bases of its own power, like a snake eating its own tail.
Bratty Karen Tries Fleeing Traffic Stop
Which industry do you work in that is so dependent on Chinese manufacturing?
99% of all products in my industry in U.S. come from China, I prefer not to specify which industry.
Dependent is the wrong description, we benefit from China’s production, quality, reliability, dependability and very low prices. They produce tens of billions US$ in revenue every year for the industry, to US economy, one million American employment, bring joy to 100 millions people, $ billions in profit and salaries.
In business, we appreciate all working partners, team members, we don’t burn bridges by accusing critical partners. Once the bridge is burned down, US$ tens of billions will be lost, a million Americans lose their jobs.
With the US in an uproar over the murder of the CEO of a major healthcare provider, do you have a current or previous health care story for the USA or other countries that you could share?
We have all read and followed the murder of the CEO of one of the largest US healthcare fund by Luigi Mangione.
No, not a nice guy, rather a pampered angry rich kid who has thrown away his life but has ignited a firestorm of introspection on US healthcare.
My interest in this is not about the murdered or the murderer, rather what is the real situation in healthcare including in countries that have national healthcare like Australia.
Let’s pause for a moment and realize that healthcare is the biggest actual expense for most governments in the world. In the US it is Social Security (people put money into that in large sums for retirement), defense which is out of control and then healthcare for the fed govt. But in the society at large, it is HEALTHCARE at $5 trillion and rising.
Breaking it down the US is the most expensive healthcare in the world by far. Some places more than 4X and still it is breaking people, their lives, their budgets their health.
Over and over we hear stories about cancer patients arguing to get treatment or out of pocket costs or extras or co-pays which they cannot pay.
I try to see all sides of this mess which by the way is not perfect anywhere in the world. Health care costs a lot because we are saving people at unprecedented rates around the world. We all know lifespans more than doubled in the 20th century for humans. But the US is falling back at 77.5 years and the rest of the developed world is well over 80 years.
Cancer and other treatments that have nothing to do with lifestyle or Ozempic or who wants to exercise or not, is a special category. These treatments are expensive, equipment intensive, usually ongoing and can start at a young age when you have no money for extras, especially cancer treatment.
So what to do?
First a note that I am a cancer patient right now. I just came from my latest appointment here in Sydney, it was another out of pocket not covered by Medicare or my healthfund (a few dollars) and it set me back just for PT, $350. Every day I have more and more out of pocket, it has now risen to $40k due to complex surgeries and it is only going to go up.
Australians say this is not possible. It is because I live it and there is no way around it.
So when someone in the US says they have a co-pay, in Australia we have ‘rates’ for everything and I am paying hundreds for meds, 10s of thousands for surgeries and follow ups and temporary housing to be near to my doctors.
Cancer comes at all ages and origins are often unknown. It is especially devastating emotionally, health wise and cost for the elderly. (The caption was Pancreatic Cancer, a killer of the elderly in Australia).
I am 74 years old and until the last 3 months I have never used the medical system in any country in the world except for COVID shots. Zero.
My encounter with global medicine has left a lot to be desired and very expensive.
There are out of pocket costs everywhere in the world. Or you can wait in the queue or you can just let them choose whoever to be your doctor. Choosing the right doctor especially when you have cancer is critical. Anything to do with your internal organs compared to say something that is broken, is a quantum leap. You can live with a limp, but you cannot without a pancreas.
The US system is broken because the Republicans in particular with complicity from the Democrats cannot reform anything. People have unrealistic expectations and preventative healthcare is out the window.
Even that area is expensive as my PT appointment showed today.
Societies need to look at everything in healthcare how it is delivered and the costs. My savings are now gone when I add in all the extras here in Australia.
But my life was saved. It was an easy trade off given the latter, however it is painful to spend enormous sums for what are fairly basic services. Out of control pricing is a part of the problem worldwide and the US privatisazation of healthcare is here in Australia now too.
Murdering the CEO will not change anything. However lauding these massive healthcare providers who in the US say no on 32% of the claims while making billions in their various schemes is for most people unconscionable.
This is what RFKjr and Dr OZ should be tackling. Will they? I dont know but maybe if they do Australia will move away from the US style private approach which is giving great healthcare, but can we individually afford it?
Do you really want to work your entire life, have paid into your health insurance forever and then have an unforeseen emergency only to find, your savings drained away.
Arguing with Medicare or healthinsurance and being told, sorry no, not covered is no different than being denied in the US though perhaps on a different scale. Still we pay into Medicare here more than the Americans do in the USA and for all the extras it is costing me and thousands of others, it is not working here either.
Again global reform but still cancer is still cancer and that my friends is not something you can avoid in most cases as it is not a lifestyle issue any longer like lung cancer. Society must decide to either cover those costs, or continue to have anger and yes a deterioration of the health of the cancer patient and again yes it is terribly debilitating and depressing to just see ‘ka ching’ every time you walk into a pharmacy or PT or doctor or cancer clinic office. And yes, it saps you of your energy and you fight on but it is not easy especially as you get older.
How expensive? If I all I had was my meagre Australian partial pension for my cancer surgery and treatment, it would = 8 years of the entire pension and counting. In other words, impossible as in Australia you pay before you go into the hospital or no service. Same for any appointment, you pay right there or no service. There is no we are sending you the bill in the mail.
Maintaining your mental and emotional strength through it all, even with support, is a challenge.
Thanks for reading and good luck on your medical journey whatever it may be.
HRG
What is the expected impact of US tariff hikes on China’s exports?
Does The US need the many consumer goods that China produces at a cheap price? Can the US obtain these goods from other countries at similar prices? Can the US produced these products itself?
While the incomes of most Americans have stagnated for the past 50 years, they have been able to enjoy a decent standard of living because of cheap products from China. American companies manufacture in the PRC to take advantage of China’s lower costs and to increase profits. While China benefits, US companies benefit more.
It may be possible to buy goods from countries other than China but they tend to be not as good or as cheap. If this were not so, the US would have already turned to these sources.
The US lacks the supply chains, factories, logistics, and trained workers to make these products themselves. And if they solved these problems, the labour and other costs would make these goods expensive. These problems will take many years to solve.
It is clear that the rapist and felon t**** does not understand economics nor international trade. Most of us know he’s stupid. Many of his advisres are not. But they are so well paid that they are insulated from the inevitable rising costs of products. Their interests are not those of ordinary Americans; their aim is to stay in power and enrich themselves and their rich donors.
In the short-term, prices will rise at least by the amount of the tariff but is likely to be more than that as companies try to increase their profits; they have a ready-made excuse in t****’s tariffs. In the medium-term, this situation will persist.
In the long-term, Americans had better get their act together and fix their political leadership in an attempt to halt the county’s downward spiral.
Good luck the USA. You are going to need it.
High School Graduation Party Ends in Disaster
Here is who is leading the United States Senate
Terrible. You must watch this video.
Hal Turner Commentary;
To the people of the Great State of Kentucky. Your beloved United States Senator, Mitch McConnel, appears to need your intervention. The video below, displays how tragic his situation has become.
PLEASE, Intervene.
Ask your Governor and your state Legislature to intervene. You no longer have Representation from this man, who is tragically suffering from the effects of old age. It's not the Senator's fault. He is the victim of the ravages of age.
At this terrible stage of his decline, keeping him in Washington is just wrong. Perhaps your Governor can make a finding of "Severe Cognitive disability" and appoint a replacement.
Yes, there __may__ be a court challenge, but what's happened to Mitch McConnell is not just a personal tragedy for him, it affects the people of Kentucky as well.
Please intervene.
A New Chapter Of The Bible Was Found Hidden Inside 1,750-Year-Old Text
Friday, Dec 13, 2024 – 09:05 AM
Via The Mind Unleashed,
Hidden for centuries, a forgotten chapter of the Bible has emerged from the shadows of history. Researchers, armed with ultraviolet light and meticulous scholarship, have uncovered a 1,750-year-old text that offers a fresh glimpse into the evolving nature of scripture. This find isn’t just a historical curiosity; it’s a profound insight into how faith and tradition were shaped in early Christianity.
Preserved in an ancient Syriac manuscript, the chapter challenges long-held assumptions about biblical texts and their seemingly static nature. With its subtle variations and expanded narrative, this rediscovery raises compelling questions: What does this mean for the modern understanding of faith? And how many more hidden chapters might still be waiting to be found?
Unearthing a Lost Piece of Biblical History
In a groundbreaking intersection of technology and ancient history, scholars have uncovered a hidden chapter of the Bible within a 1,750-year-old Syriac manuscript preserved in the Vatican Library. Using ultraviolet (UV) light, researchers revealed traces of erased writing—a palimpsest—buried beneath layers of overwritten text. This painstaking process illuminated an earlier version of scripture, lost to time but now reintroduced to the world.
The manuscript, part of the Syriac translations of the Bible, is more than just a relic. It represents a key moment in Christianity’s history, when scribes worked tirelessly to preserve scripture under challenging conditions. Early Christians relied on Syriac texts to disseminate their teachings across cultural and linguistic boundaries, making this find a window into their lived experiences.
What makes this discovery especially remarkable is its collaborative nature. Historians, linguists, and scientists pooled their expertise to decode the faded script, each stroke of ink offering clues to a story untold for nearly two millennia. This isn’t just a triumph for biblical studies; it’s a testament to the enduring power of curiosity and innovation to uncover humanity’s shared past.
The Hidden Chapter: What We Know So Far
The newly unveiled chapter offers an expanded version of Matthew 12, a passage where Jesus and his disciples are criticized for picking grain on the Sabbath. In this version, subtle textual variations bring fresh theological nuances to light, emphasizing compassion and mercy over rigid observance of religious laws. While the core message aligns with established teachings, these differences hint at the dynamic and adaptive nature of early Christian scripture.
Written in ancient Syriac, one of the earliest languages used to transmit biblical texts, the chapter provides a rare glimpse into Christianity’s early cultural diversity. Syriac was instrumental in spreading scripture beyond its Jewish origins, tailoring messages to resonate with varied linguistic and cultural communities. This adaptation reflects the pragmatic approach of early Christians, who shaped their sacred texts to meet the needs of a rapidly growing faith.
What’s particularly striking is the role of early scribes. Far from being passive transcribers, they actively engaged with the material, reinterpreting and preserving it in ways that reflected their own spiritual and societal realities. This hidden chapter, with its emphasis on mercy, reveals a faith not rigidly bound to dogma but alive with reinterpretation and evolution—a window into the beliefs and priorities of communities navigating the complexities of their time.
The Technology That Unveiled the Forgotten Chapter
It’s hard to believe that something written almost 2,000 years ago could still be hiding in plain sight. But that’s exactly what happened here. Using ultraviolet light, researchers managed to reveal a forgotten chapter of the Bible, hidden beneath layers of overwritten text on an ancient manuscript. It’s like uncovering a secret message written centuries ago, invisible to the naked eye but waiting to be found.
The process wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Think about it—this manuscript is old, fragile, and irreplaceable. Every move had to be precise, every scan done with the utmost care. Months of work went into piecing together faint traces of erased ink, with experts from all over—historians, linguists, scientists—working side by side. It’s amazing to think that this discovery wouldn’t have been possible even a few decades ago. The tools they used, like UV imaging, are giving us new ways to see the past in ways we never thought possible.
But here’s what really gets you thinking—what else is out there? If something as groundbreaking as a hidden chapter of the Bible can be uncovered, what other secrets might still be lying in wait? This is more than a cool tech story; it’s a reminder that history always has more to give, as long as we keep asking the right questions.
A Manuscript’s Journey Through Time
Think about this for a second: early Christians lived in a world where their beliefs could literally get them killed. Their sacred texts weren’t just important—they were lifelines, hidden and protected at all costs. That’s the world this 1,750-year-old Syriac manuscript comes from. Imagine scribes painstakingly copying and preserving these words, knowing the risks they faced if they were caught.
Back then, parchment wasn’t exactly easy to come by. It was expensive, rare, and, honestly, every bit as valuable as the words written on it. To make the most of it, scribes would scrape off old texts and reuse the material—creating what we now call palimpsests. It’s kind of wild to think that their recycling efforts accidentally preserved traces of history that they probably thought were gone for good.
Here’s another fascinating detail: this manuscript is written in Syriac. It’s one of the earliest languages used to spread Christianity and shows how the faith started to move beyond its Jewish roots. Syriac wasn’t just a language—it was a tool that helped Christianity adapt and grow, reaching new communities and cultures. That’s what makes this discovery so powerful. It’s not just about words on a page; it’s about the lengths people went to protect and share their beliefs.
And now, centuries later, we’re uncovering their story. You can almost picture the hands that wrote and rewrote this text, working in secret, determined to pass on what they believed mattered most. It’s a humbling reminder of just how much history can hide beneath the surface—literally—and how much these ancient voices still have to say.
What Scholars Are Saying: A New Lens on Scripture
This hidden chapter of the Bible has sparked lively debates among scholars. Many see it as a fascinating window into how early Christian communities understood and adapted scripture. The chapter’s emphasis on mercy over strict adherence to religious laws aligns with Jesus’ teachings but adds a fresh perspective to familiar passages. This nuance suggests early Christians may have tailored scripture to address the unique challenges of their time.
At the heart of the debate is the question of why this chapter was erased. Some scholars suggest it might have been excluded as church leaders worked to formalize the biblical canon, streamlining texts to unify doctrine. Others argue that its omission could simply reflect the practical realities of the time, with scribes overwriting older texts due to the scarcity of parchment. Whatever the reason, the discovery underscores the dynamic and evolving nature of early Christianity.
Ultimately, this find is about more than one chapter. It’s a reminder that the Bible, far from being a static document, was shaped over centuries by human hands and decisions. For scholars and believers alike, the chapter offers a chance to reexamine the past while raising new questions about the stories still waiting to be uncovered.
Hidden Truths, Endless Possibilities
The discovery of this hidden Bible chapter is more than a historical footnote—it’s a vivid reminder of how much the past still has to teach us. From the resilience of early Christian communities to the evolving nature of scripture itself, this find opens a window into a world where faith and history were deeply intertwined. It also shows how modern technology can breathe life into ancient artifacts, revealing secrets thought lost to time.
But this is likely just the beginning. Who knows what other forgotten chapters, erased writings, or hidden narratives are still waiting to be uncovered? Each discovery invites us to ask new questions, challenge old assumptions, and deepen our understanding of the stories that have shaped human history. Whether it’s faith, curiosity, or a little of both driving the search, one thing is certain—history still has plenty of mysteries left to share.
There’s a very clear lesson to be learned here. You, as a normal citizen, can be robbed, raped, or murdered at will and our police won’t even lift a finger to do anything to prevent it, and usually not even arresting the criminal afterwards. And even when the criminal is arrested, his bail and jail sentence will be laughably low… That’s the bail violent rapists can expect in democratic America. But if you’re charged with a political crime, like protesting on Jan. 6, expect a bail in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Police won’t help you because that’s not their job. Police are simply security officers for the central party. Their duty is to provide personal security for our elites and arrest political dissidents, and that’s it.
Dafna Yoran, the prosecutor, is a radical neoliberal activist who staunchly advocates for “restorative justice,” which in practice (as opposed to what restorative justice is actually supposed to do), simply means giving light sentences to the most grotesque offenders.
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Dafna Yoran
Yoran recently advocated on the behalf of murderer Matthew Lee, who killed Young Kun Kim, an 87 year old Asian American professor, and stole $300 while Kim was using an ATM. Thanks to Yoran’s efforts, Lee received only 10 years in prison, rather than a life sentence. Note that this light sentence wasn’t the result of some Crime and Punishment style display of remorse by Lee, it was simply on account of his race, and the race of his victim. As a “white adjacent” Asian, Kim was a historical aggressor imperialist, and as a black man, Lee was his victim. The fact that Lee bashed Kim’s brains in did not even enter into the equation.
Now apply Yoran’s world view to Penny’s case. Neely was a violent drug addict with an extensive criminal record threatening to kill people on the train, but that did not matter. Neely is a historical victim, and Penny, like Kim, is a historical aggressor imperialist. So the villain here is Penny, and can only be Penny.
As I said, in modern America, the police are simply political enforcers who punish crimes against the state and the ruling elites. No one and nothing else matters. The everyday citizen being in constant fear of being randomly attacked on the train or while using the ATM is “part and parcel” of living in a neoliberal democracy. In the eyes of the regime, the citizens living in fear is a good thing, because this keeps them docile and subservient.
For such a regime, it is absolutely necessary to brutally punish any private citizen who is perceived to have violated the state monopoly on violence by defending his own life or the lives of others. That was the crime of both Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. It would have been preferable to to lock up Rittenhouse and Penny for their defiance against the regime, but dragging them through many months of confinement, fear, financial expense and reputational damage is enough.
And that’s why I say the regime won. The next person who sees a violent criminal on the NYC subway will remember what happened to Penny, and will likely just keep walking.
Akio walked into his therapist’s office for the 52nd time that year.Dr Ishida stood up and warmly greeted his patient, who would have been seeing him for exactly a year today.Good morning, Akio! It’s nice to see y——He was not able to finish his sentence. The young man in his mid twenties buried his right fist into Dr. Ishida’s face.The Dr, also a young man himself, being barely 32, was thrown back onto his own coffee table and collapsed onto the floor. He was clenching his nose with both hands, as it was bleeding profusely. It was clearly broken.He hadn’t full processed what had just happened when his patient (now former patient) began to speak.I want you to listen to me carefully. Think of the thoughts going through your head and the feelings that you have right now. Did you do it good! That is how I feel everyday when I walk into your goddam office. You sit there in your comfortable fantasy world, thinking you’re so wise, and that you actually understand what’s going on. But honestly, if you understood what was going on, then I think you would have moved with more of a sense of urgency in assisting me instead of milking me for more money over the past year. Your services are no longer required. Have a nice day!He stormed out of the office, leaving Dr. Ishida lying in utter shock on the floor.Akio stormed out of the downtown Osaka office and began marching down the city sidewalk. He wasn’t 100% sure where he was going.I’m so fucking mad at myself right now. I can’t believe I wasted a year of my life with that hack. I have him thousands of dollars, and for what? He thought to himself.If anything I’m more pissed than before I started visiting him….After walking about a hundred metes, he stopped and lit a cigarette from a pack that he had previously bought that day.This is weird. I don’t even smoke. What am even I doing? He inhaled and coughed*cough…….cough……Jesus…..cough*As he walked he started to feel more relaxed as the nicotine took effect. As he started to calm down, he remembered where he wanted to go.
I wonder what Sakura is up to, he thought to himself.
Suddenly a look of surprise appeared on his face. The kind of look that appears when someone has just remembered something important that they had forgotten.
Oh shit! I’m late, he said to himself as he broke into a sprint.
After running like mad for about 7 city blocks, he was standing outside the door of an Internet cafe. There was a flickering neon image of a frog that was standing on its hind legs and holding a shotgun over its shoulder. The word “lyagooshka’s” was written in English under it in blue neon cursive.
As he opened the door, there was a jingle of a little bell that was hanging near the threshold. A slender, short haired Russian lady looked up from reading her fashion magazine. She was in her early 30’s even though she looked like she was in her early to mid 20s.
Her eyes immediately lit up
Konichiwa choovachok (dude in Russian)! Serious as ever I see!
Akio often found her energy to be a bit overwhelming for his taste. But he had gotten used to it. He had been going to that internet cafe ever since college. It was close to his apartment, not too big, and it was pretty cheap. Before he knew it, he was spending just about every waking moment that he wasn’t wasting in his office job, in that secluded cafe. And there seemed to be very few people there, which was another plus, because he hated being around people he didn’t know.
But despite their different personalities, she was beginning to grow on him.
Akio looked at her with a straight face.
Hey Vika
Vika shifted the lollipop in her mouth and looked at him inquisitively.
So how’s life? You usually come in 2 hours earlier on Saturdays. You look kind of wiped out.
Akio took out his credit card and slid it into the reader.
The cash register said 10,000 yen.
I had something I had to take care of, he said while avoiding eye contact.
Look at you, sounding all like a secretive badass, said Vika.
Ha ha said Akio sarcastically.
Vika looked at him as if she was at a loss and said, sometimes I don’t know why you work these office jobs. (shaking her head) *sighs* I think you’re better suited for more dangerous work….Hey, I know (snapping her fingers as if she just got an idea)…. You should join the military. I think you’d thrive in that kind of environment.
The same way you did? Said Akio without skipping a beat..
Whaaat?….Hey, c’mon…. my situation was different, said Vika, almost as if pleading for somebody to stop teasing her.
I just don’t think I’m cut out for it, said Akio still looking at the ground.
He began making his way past the many cubicle-like rooms that led to the back of the cafe. The hallway was dimly lit, with a carpet that was mostly clean, except for the occasional crusty food or drink stain.
He finally reached the end of the hall, to a room labeled “V I P” with a neon sign of a cartoon frog standing on its hind legs, holding a cane over its shoulder and dressed as a pimp.
There was a faint glow emanating from the cracks of the door of the otherwise dark room.
He opened the door and walked in. It was a mostly empty room about twice the size of an average classroom. It was perfectly square and directly across from the door on the opposite wall.
Against the opposite wall, you could see two large black boxes, each being about the size of a mini van. One of the walls of each square was missing, allowing you to see inside.
Inside was a number of wires, red lights and switches, with a dark chair in the middle that was reclined at a 45 degree angle.
One was empty. In the other you could see the skinny silhouette of a person wearing a black hoodie. If you looked really closely, you could see that she was wearing a strange suit covered in very small little red connectors that looked like they could have something plugged into them.
Akio sped up his walk. He threw his backpack down while simultaneously grabbling the same strange suit that went over his whole body, including the back of his head. He hastily took off his shirt and pants and put it on.
Has it started? , asked Akio impatiently.
You’ve got 40 seconds to spare, said the dark silhouette sitting in the other seat.
These two machines were known as the Artificial Recreation of Sensory System, or ARCS 1.0 System for short. Via a number of wires that plugged into the suit, the system was able to connect to all five of the human senses and send them into the world of a popular MMORPG that was originally designed for an average gaming system known as Engines of Magic.
It was a steampunk-styled game that combined steampunk technology with magic. Players could choose their characters from a number of magic races such as elves, wizards, goblins, witches, fairies, etc. It was released in 2027 and it had over 3 billion users worldwide, making it the most popular videogame in human history.
The glow of the small lights within the machine illuminated the girl’s face. Although she was wearing a hoodie, you could still see the bangs of her purple-dyed hair. lean, and her height was about 5’ 8”.
Although Akio didn’t think she was hot by any means, he still thought her face was relatively pretty despite the fact that she wore very little makeup.
Her name was Sakura Takayuki. They had both known each other since meeting in their modern computer engineering course. Akio had average grades on account of not attending lecture, but Sakura excelled. She was considered a genius at any rate, and eventually became known as the most talented computer engineer at the school.
Are you ready, said Sakura as she sat in the chair and connected all of the appropriate wires to her suit.
Let’s do this, said Akio as he leaned back in the chair with a smile on his face.
There were only 12 ARCS systems were created, out of which, only 2 remained. All of the others were destroyed during the War of Eurasian Reunification before anyone could use this advanced technology.
They were the first to use this technology, and the second they entered that world, it was the digital equivalent of man taking his first step on the moon.
This was a secret, but still historic, step for mankind.
All of the red lights turned green. Both of them closed their eyes, and opened them in another universe.
What do you make of the China Semiconductor industry Association’s statement that “U.S. chip products are no longer safe and reliable”?
The development of China’s chip industry in recent years has been shrouded in complete secrecy.
Take a wild guess: why wasn’t this statement issued in 2019, but now?
Only when China is capable of producing enough chips on its own does it make sense to call for the purchase of Chinese-made chips.
Actually, it’s a joint statement made by four associations of China, including the Internet Society of China, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the China Semiconductor Industry Association, and the China Association of Communications Enterprises.
These four industries are major consumer markets for US chips, involving computers, mobile phones, vehicles etc.
The statement simply urges domestic companies to buy more Chinese-made chips. If they choose American chips and face supply cuts later, they shouldn’t expect government support—it’s a risk they must bear. This move will reduce demand for American chips and boost demand for Chinese-made chips.
This indicates one thing: China has already built enough domestic chip production capacity.
The U.S. has been calling for decoupling and breaking supply chains.
This time, China is taking the initiative to decouple and break the supply chain, to see who will ultimately bear the greater loss.
The Moment She Realized She Killed 2 People
Carne de Res Deshebrada
This is the traditional Mexican filling for tacos. It is wonderful for making burritos, chimichangas, taquitos, and in carne seca.
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Ingredients
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 (2 1/2 to 3 pound) beef brisket (smaller thinner end, trimmed of all fat)
1 ancho or New Mexico dried chile, stemmed and seeded
3 to 4 slices onion
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon Mexican oregano
Instructions
Heat oven to 300 degrees F.
Heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add oil and brown the beef on all sides.
Pour off as much oil as possible.
Just barely cover the meat with water. Bring to a boil. Skim off any scum that rises to the surface.
Add remaining ingredients. Cover the pot and place it in the oven until the meat is tender, about 2 to 2 1/2 hours.
Remove the meat, reserving broth for other uses.
When the meat is cool enough to handle, shred it. Hold a fork in each hand, and shred the beef with the forks.
What do you make of the China Semiconductor industry Association’s statement that “U.S. chip products are no longer safe and reliable”?
The development of China’s chip industry in recent years has been shrouded in complete secrecy.
Take a wild guess: why wasn’t this statement issued in 2019, but now?
Only when China is capable of producing enough chips on its own does it make sense to call for the purchase of Chinese-made chips.
Actually, it’s a joint statement made by four associations of China, including the Internet Society of China, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the China Semiconductor Industry Association, and the China Association of Communications Enterprises.
These four industries are major consumer markets for US chips, involving computers, mobile phones, vehicles etc.
The statement simply urges domestic companies to buy more Chinese-made chips. If they choose American chips and face supply cuts later, they shouldn’t expect government support—it’s a risk they must bear. This move will reduce demand for American chips and boost demand for Chinese-made chips.
This indicates one thing: China has already built enough domestic chip production capacity.
The U.S. has been calling for decoupling and breaking supply chains.
This time, China is taking the initiative to decouple and break the supply chain, to see who will ultimately bear the greater loss.
Woman Pulls Swatting Prank, Gets the Surprise of Her Life
Man, I was a pack rat. I used to collect everything.
From golf balls, to 1/35 scale figurines. To old bottles that I collected, to model airplanes that I painted and hung from the ceiling. I collected books, especially Doc Savage novels and short Science Fiction anthologies.
When I lived on the beach, I collected trash-cans full of shells. And magazine subscriptions.
And record albums, and later on; cassettes.
When I got a computer, I collected pictures of sexy girls.
When I got a cell phone, I collected APPs. LOL. I was out of control. It was a “coping mechanism” for a high-stress job, and a mentally ill wife.
*sigh*
It has nothing to do about anything else. It is just a “crutch” that I used at that time in my life.
I think that all of us use these “crutches” in one form or the other. Many times, ah we don’t realize that it is a crutch, and our spouses just don’t either. And maybe they tolerate it, or accept it, or even worse, make fun of it and use it against us. But its a need that many of us have.
If you live in a stressful place like the United States, you will need these crutches, or else you will fall into deep neurosis. And that is never a good thing.
Think about that will you all.
Watch out for crutches.
Today…
Why are so many things, websites, and useful things banned in China?
There are a number of, almost exclusively, American sites that are banned in China and there is good reasons for that happening.
The Chinese government told everyone that there were certain conditions if they wanted their platforms to run in China and here you will find what I consider a good set of reasons –
To stop what China calls Western Propoganda.
To allow Chinese companies to set up their own online sites to reduce competition from, mostly American websites, that had a very clear lead over China as America entered the online arena before anyone else and thus had a very obvious lead. Sort of like allowing America to start from the 90 yard line in a 100 yard race. This has allowed Chinese companies to develop websites that have more facilities per site. I’m not wording this very well but in China you have websites that cover a wide array of capabilities whereas American sites often are single attribute sites. Twitter does Tweets, Amazon sells stuff and deliver it, Facebook is a system that allows ‘friends’ to share information, videos, pictures, etc. In China you will find sites that cover the same functions of a large number of US sites. This appreach has offered more capabilities and functions that people may want to perform on single platforms that their users become very familiar with and hence easier to learn to use. Sort of like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon all on a single site.
Just to show you how massive these sites are here’s the record sales for Alibaba on singles day last year – Almost $2b in two minutes: Chinese online shoppers shatter sales records (Australian sourced) “Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba cashed a record 213.5 billion yuan ($42.4b) in sales on Sunday during its 24-hour online sale.” AUD$42.4 billion in 24 hours! No other site in the world has ever come close to this figure and it will probably be even larger in 2020.
HEADS-UP: China is a member, in good standing, of the WTO. China is labelled as a ‘developing’ country by the WTO and that is because there is a measure that is used to determine if the WTO considers a country as ‘developing’ or ‘developed’ and China is a ‘developing’ country according to those rules. The rule has to do with the average income of the nation and although China makes a lot of money when you average that across the country of 1.4 billion people the average income is below the threshold. This allows China to subsidize and protect its industries until such time as they reach the WTO threshold when they will need to stop subsidizing Chinese companies.
If the current invasion of Syria by the IDF is not their GREATER ISRAEL plan, I don’t know what is.
This is the map of GREATER ISRAEL encompassing Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The IDF soldier’s uniform even has a badge showing this map.
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With the supply lines from Iran to Hezbollah completely cut off with the capture of Syria and with Russia military evacuating their naval port and airbase, Israel will fully occupy Syria soon before taking over Lebanon by defeating Hezbollah. The next few phases would be Iraq, Saudi Arabia and then Egypt.
The U.S. Failed to Stop China’s Rise: What Trump’s Tariffs Really Did? Trump’s Trade War Backfired.
In 1962, why did India lose the war against China?
The Indian responses are quite hilarious. They never mention their incursions into the border starting from 1951, gradually advancing and setting up military posts, and then in September 1962, moving their troops across their so-called McMahon Line. On October 10th, they launched an invasion, attacking Chinese border outposts, and it wasn’t until their major offensive on the 20th that China began to counterattack.
Such actions—crossing from the border, over the actual control line, through disputed areas, and even past their claimed border line into Chinese territory—are still framed as ‘China’s sudden invasion.’ Before the war broke out, India had amassed over 20,000 troops along the border. Is this what they mean by ‘not anticipating war’ and ‘being unprepared’? With military support from both the US and the Soviet Union, they claim their defeat was due to ‘poor equipment’?
The fact is, at the time, China was dealing with famine at home, isolation from the US and the Soviet Union internationally, and difficulties in logistics support. Yet, using only the army from the single province of Tibet, China advanced to near the Indian capital in just over thirty days. Most Chinese casualties were due to underestimating the rapid retreat of the Indian forces, pursuing them too far, and losing coordination with surrounding units. Despite this, China achieved nearly a 7:1 kill ratio. After the war, China magnanimously withdrew all troops from Indian territory and did not demand any unequal treaties, merely wanting India to come to its senses.
At that time, Chairman Mao thought for ten days but couldn’t understand why India wanted to attack. MacArthur commented that anyone daring to wage war against the Chinese army must have lost their mind. In reality, China had repeatedly sought diplomatic negotiations during the decade-plus period of territorial infringement, but India saw this as weakness and compromise, giving them the illusion that they could confront China.
Lastly, India’s claim to the McMahon Line is just wishful thinking. Historically, during the period of British colonization, no Chinese government ever recognized it. Any seemingly objective ‘both sides have their own claims’ is nonsense, merely using unilateral historical declarations as treaties.
Gorditas with Fiery Jalapeño Salsa
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Yield: 18 gorditas; 1 cup salsa
Ingredients
Gorditas
3 cups instant masa flour*
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
Salt
1 cup vegetable shortening
3 cups water (room temperature)
Vegetable oil
2 cups shredded cooked beef, chicken, carnitas (braised pork) or other meat
2 cups refried beans
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded cheese, such as jack, anejo, cotija or ranchero
3 tomatoes, thinly sliced (18 slices)
Fiery Jalapeño Salsa
5 whole jalapeño chiles
2 Roma (plum) tomatoes
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup water
Salt
Instructions
Gorditas
Combine masa, all-purpose flour and about 1 teaspoon salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the shortening to distribute it. Add 3 cups room-temperature water. Mix with hands until dough can be formed into a ball. Dough will be slightly sticky.
Heat a lightly greased or nonstick skillet until very hot, then reduce heat to medium. Take 1/4 cup of dough and pat it between your hands until it resembles a thick tortilla about the size of a large cookie.
Place the gordita on the skillet and cook it until the dough puffs slightly, 4 to 5 minutes on each side. As soon as it is cool enough to handle, open it like a pocket. Add a small amount of cooked meat along with beans, cheese and a tomato slice, as if building a taco.
Repeat steps until all dough has been used.
Serve with Fiery Jalapeño Salsa.
Fiery Jalapeño Salsa
Combine chiles, tomatoes, garlic and 1/2 cup water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.
Remove stems from chiles, discard and place whole chiles in blender with tomatoes, garlic and water. Blend at medium speed until puréed. Add about 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste.
Notes
* Instant masa flour is used to make corn tortillas and is available at some supermarkets and specialty stores. It is fresh corn masa that has been dried and ground.
I need to be ready and I haven’t been sure of my decision. “Until now,” I tell myself firmly sitting up just a little straighter to feel the surety I need. So much money is involved, or just possibly some hope for humanity. “This is long overdue.” I speak the words out loud to the empty office as I put away the remains of my leftover lunch, the bits I saved for this dinner that I knew I’d be eating at my desk, too stressed to eat much anyways as I prepared for tonight’s Board Meeting.
Then that other voice creeps in. “Why am I kidding myself? Everything pinned on the lives of single children. How can I let that happen?”
I shrug it off. “The school needs the money, it’s ethical now at least and well-supervised. Not like before.” My confident Director voice has reasserted itself. I’m ready. Certain.
I glance at my watch relieved to see I have five minutes to myself. I lean back. I’ll do a few deep breaths reminding myself as I take the first one that the stressful part is done. In less than an hour this will all be in the past. Sure, I’m uncomfortable knowing that the deciding vote will fall on my shoulders, but the debating is done. My decision is made.
I breathe again, in and out, and as I do the memories from years before, memories of Chloe flood my mind.
Chloe. None of us knew at the time that she was just a failed experiment.
I see her, the little girl, normal in so many ways. Middle class, living on a quiet street, in an urban neighbourhood right here in our city. This is no extreme, far out, wacky place. The parents, just regular Mr and Mrs Anybody, or so I had been told. That the child was extremely bright wasn’t even irregular given that she had been identified for this special school for highly gifted learners where, back then, I had only recently started to teach. Even today each of the students stands out in one way or another, whether an uncanny ability in math, an extreme curiosity, perhaps a photographic memory for facts, eerily quick retorts, fantastical questions or sometimes understandings well beyond their young years. With Chloe I hadn’t yet had a student quite like her, one who presented with it all.
The first time I had met Chloe she was only seven years old. Long brown hair, big eyes, a shy smile. Her solemn, quiet grandfather, whom I only met the once, brought her to the classroom and, unlike some of the other parents, seemed to have no issue dropping the girl off with hardly a word exchanged. That first encounter, I remember, was for a special writing group with the older primary grade students, those already advanced in writing. Chloe had been younger than the rest but her classroom teacher had assured me that age wouldn’t be a barrier, and so it wasn’t. Not only did Chloe excel at writing, her poems and short stories had such insight and depth. Any one sample could have been held up as an example in a first year university creative writing course.
One lesson that comes to mind in that fleeting reminiscence is the day I introduced metaphors. After a few minutes of writing time for the students to find one or two simple metaphors for describing the quiet of the room, the group shared their examples. Sensing the concept was perhaps a little too complex for the youngest who had yet to contribute, I had gently invited Chloe to participate only to have the words flow off her tongue, a waterfall of inspiration. And so it went.
I shake my head and bring myself back to my breathing. Where had all that come from?
I breath again, in and out. And there she is again. Chloe. I had worked with Chloe over the next five years. Thinking back now perhaps it should have been a red flag that I rarely saw either parent, only an occasional new aunt or uncle for whom Chloe showed little affection. Nevertheless over the years I had watched her intellect blossom. She had excelled at mathematics, enrolling in a university level class with special permission from the Dean of the prestigious local university before she was finished fifth grade. Though she could have also participated in any other subject college course that year, time had become the limiting factor. Chloe and her science partner had won first place in the district science fair with their project on fractals but had turned down the trip to the provincial fair because it conflicted with preparation for her grade ten Royal Conservatory Music exam. She played so beautifully back then. Like an angel. I can almost hear her now. That same year she so quickly learned French without much help from the adults around her, read books on Art History, participated in the Future Problem Solving Challenges that the more focused, older students in the classes liked to play at and spent hours working on her own special novel project. She had honestly been doing it all.
I involuntarily shake my head as I’m reminded of all the critics of our gifted education programs who challenge the lack of social skills and abilities, believing that pulling these so called misfits out of the regular stream of schooling only exacerbates the alien-like behaviours common to some. In retrospect, I might have paid more attention too to the notion of alien beings, but the thought in relation to Chloe, if I ever had it, had definitely passed over me. Even today as Director in the program I am more than familiar with all of the arguments and the rebuttals. Chloe had not escaped such criticism. She was indeed an odd duck but at least the program had managed to offer some friendships; she had found others who wanted to enter imaginary worlds and spend hours creating a working language the adults had no chance of comprehending. These peers had been close enough. Intellectual peers. Similar aged children who could keep up with her rapidly developing vocabulary and didn’t have to bully her to keep her in place in some arbitrary school pecking order. Instead they had sought her out. This confident, thoughtful, intelligent child had quietly steered any partnership or group to success and they all had gravitated to her with some unspoken awe that should have spooked me more than it did.
As I rethink it all I wonder why I never really questioned the regular week-long absences each quarter; how I hadn’t seen the sudden leaps in her development that followed each time away. Nor had I queried more seriously the sudden change in demeanour that other teachers brushed off as an early onset of puberty after that fifth grade spring, more of an emotional change I rationalized at the time. I remember the elevated sense of empathy and compassion which we all noticed, her sudden interest in humanitarian causes and save the world campaigns. How smug we were to think it was our doing, our teaching and guidance.
For the most part school in this program had been a success for Chloe until seventh grade. That was when she had disappeared into herself. She had been late returning from her fall ‘tune up’ as we teachers had secretly labelled them. How shocked we had been to learn how accurate we were. Her expressions were flat, her exuberance gone as if suddenly it was all too much to carry. Then, her body had failed. Her eyes grew vacant. She arrived back again after another, unscheduled prolonged absence, that time in a wheel chair. Truth be told, she may as well not have attended at all. The doctors and psychiatrist couldn’t agree on a diagnosis to satisfy us until they finally had settled on a form of juvenile chronic fatigue. She’d outgrow it, we were told. It had sounded appropriate given how intense this child had always been. The diagnosis had fit well until Chloe suddenly died of heart failure, or ‘passed’ as we are now taught to say; the euphemism wildly out of place in this context of complete failure.
I feel a wave of anger wash over me. We had all felt so much grief. Grief, I remember, grief that turned to shock and then to anger as we learned the truth. Anger that we hadn’t been informed at first. But that replaced with this deeper anger I still can’t shake as we learned the whole truth.
Chloe wasn’t the only experimental child. Others too had Genteq BioAI™ chips implanted: Michael, Sam, Isabel, sweet little Isabel. I wonder momentarily where she is now? A fleeting curiosity. Some of the children had the chips implanted at an earlier age than others, but Chloe was the first neonatal experiment with the BioAIGen2™ chip. Chloe too was the first to receive the quarterly software updates, not unlike the Tesla car updates, meant to fine tune what the developing child could handle. The developing child, the real human child, I remind myself as the outrage rises in me again. That they hadn’t yet developed systems to manage the rapid onset of puberty and all that comes with the natural release of hormones had been a concern of Dr and Dr Anybody who had headed up the surreptitious project. They had ben so certain it would be resolved before it was an issue for Chloe. How wrong they had been. Worse yet, ahead of acquiring proper ethical approval and clearance they’d quite literally used their own child as their lab rat; they were so intent on being the first to create a new kind of humanity capable of leading us to a better, more humane world. Genteq responded to the disclosures by replacing them immediately but, of course, still all hell had broken loose.
In the wider media the debate between honourable, humanitarian intentions and the potential of this yet to be fulfilled promise versus the selfish, greedy, deplorable methods still continues. Even now, I’m still unsure about so much of where this is going. But then, in Chloe, I’ve seen the potential. We need good, smart, strong, moral people to lead the world.
I catch my thoughts again. Off track. It’s time to head to the board room and be ready. It’s been more than a year of debates and finagling to get us to tonight’s final vote. We’ll take the money and the students but only under proper government ethical approval with the caveat that the Genteq® Institute agrees to let them be flagged, or tagged as we like to call it. The image of ear tags in heads of cattle flits through my mind but I catch myself again, frowning at my own inner smile. The parents are insisting the experimental children be identified but we can live with that. As Chair I’ll make the deciding, tie-breaking vote.
I close the only folder left on my desk, tonight’s agenda, though why we bothered writing it up for this one item of business eludes me now. I stand and step across to close the blinds, glancing first to the sun setting behind the playground. Then I turn back to my desk startled to look into a younger Chloe’s eyes, like those I had met in that first class. I shake my head, dismissing the image but not before I hear her clearly implore “Please, don’t do it.”
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Why is Australia so anti-China?
Untrue!
We have never seen China as a threat or rival.
Unlike Trump and his dumb as fuck cabinet.
The only Australians I have ever heard say a bad thing about China are those in regions where China has purchased large swaths of land.
They purchased a research farm near us, some people complained, but most of us understand the reason, as they want somewhere to teach their people our farming methods to improve farming in China, which is happening, so most of us see this as okay.
We all celebrate such things as the Chinese new year, and enjoy Chinese food and learning their cooking techniques to improve our own lives.
Chines tourism here is a massive industry and we enjoy their visits.
There is no animosity between Australians and Chinese, in fact many Australians have Chinese heritage and most of my best friends are Chinese who go back to China once or twice a year to be with family for important occasions.
I had fun trying to teach them to speak English properly, most have “L” in words sounding more like “R”, as “lolly” sounds like “rorry” but that was because they don’t lift their tongue when they pronounce the “L”s, once they master that, they talk like any other Australian.
So the majority of Australians are fond of China and are happy that Australia is deepening their trade ties to China.
Though when China put high tariffs on our lobsters, we got very cheap lobsters here, but the lobster industry suffered.
Now that such tariffs are to be removed, the price of lobsters here will rise, but the industry will flourish.
We must accept the bad with the good.
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Weird or Confusing
A website that showcases the weirdest and most confusing things found on the internet. It’s a treasure trove of oddities and curiosities.
10 Creepiest ‘Mandela Effect’ Mysteries That Will Creep You Out
Was Assad really a tyrant or is that just western propaganda?
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He wore Savile Row Suits stupidly when People were starving, he drove luxury cars on Syrian streets with tons of bodyguards while the average Syrians had 8 hours power, his own family took treatment in Dubai & Riyadh while Syrians scrambled on the black market for basic antibiotics
His Soldiers were paid 18000 Syrian Pounds a month which came to around 360 American Dollars in 2006
By 2023 they were paid 300,000 Syrian Pounds a month, yet barely around 30 American Dollars
They paid 16 Syrian Pounds for a Liter of Gasoline in 2006
In 2023 they had to pay 13,000 Syrian Pounds for a Liter of Gas which means they could afford only 24 Litres of Gasoline on their monthly salaries
They paid 1500 Syrian Pounds for Pregnancy Hospitalization in 2006
Now the Private Hospital charges 2 Million Syrian Pounds and only accepts payments in Emirati Dirhams
The official rate is 3,520 Syrian Pounds for 1 Dirham but nobody gives you official rates
The Black market rate is 6,500 Syrian Pounds for 1 Dirham
A 10 Pound Bag of Rice in 2006 cost a mere 69 Syrian Pounds
Today it costs 46,000 Syrian Pounds in the Black market
A Leg of Mutton cost 270 Syrian Pounds in 2006
Today it’s almost 200,000 Syrian Pounds
Yet Assad and his select few – around 500–1000 people received their Mutton, Fine Pilaf Rice, Fresh Vegetables all air delivered to Damascus from other places
People were seething with anger and frustration
Drinking Water came Once in 14 days Or 21 days
Officers often got 50 Liters of water a day to their homes from their Bases where water was available in larger quantities
Otherwise you had 300 Liters of Water for 14 days Or 21 days
And not free!!!!!
You paid 10,000 Syrian Pounds for the Water
That’s 20 Liters of water or 1 Bucket of water a day
For Toilet, Cooking, Cleaning and Drinking
Assad had a Olympic Size Swimming Pool
He imported 60,000 Bottles of Evian Water for his own personal use every year
You expect Soldiers whose families live in this condition to be faithful to this regime?
Now I can’t confirm this but since it was a Syrian Soldier who came on George Galloway show – I will accept his word
The Syrians often wiped their behinds with Syrian Pound notes 😡😡😡 instead of water or toilet paper
Now China was supposed to change this after approving a $ 500 Million Swap facility which means handing Syria 500 Million Greenbacks and taking worthless Syrian Pounds into their Chinese Banks
However the Chinese sensed that this 500 Million would likely go into the pockets of a few generals , given their experience with Pakistan, so they dithered and dithered and didn’t come through
In fact I feel China felt all along Syria was on a downward spiral
It’s why they delayed the favorable status trade agreement for almost a year
So he wasn’t a Tyrant
He was terribly indifferent and was sleepwalking
Many of his Generals and Officers could easily be purchased for Dollars and Western Gifts
He himself could have done a lot of things, fought against corruption of his own officers and corps and his political lackeys
I feel he just finally felt tired of carrying his fathers legacy and just wanted to relax and get away from all the mess
When People protest in such conditions, of course police will be asked to beat them up and lock them up
Happens in India many times so imagine Syria where there is no letter of law !!!!!
Thats where Iran scores over Syria
Those Iranians live frugally, wear Islamic clothes, Maoist suits, Rugged Outfits and dont like Opulently
Plus they have a full plethora of goods from China that keeps them heavily plied with stuff
They have supermarkets chock full of Chinese & South Asian Food
Beef, Chicken, Basmati, Fruits from Pakistan and Afghanistan
Canned Seafood from China
Pilaf Rice from Afghanistan and Pakistan
Wheat from Russia for Bread
Cooking Oil from Russia
Affordable Clothing thanks to Bangladesh
So Iran is unlikely to fall like Syria
Unless China does a Volte Face
If Syria had decided the same thing a few years ago and opened their markets to China things may have been different
Yet I doubt China would have done much given that Iran gives precious Oil and Gas to China and Syria has nothing whatsoever
Why are some Americans so opposed to universal healthcare?
I work an excellent job, for a very large company. I’m well paid, and I have the ONLY health plan they allow me to have (a high-deductible, Health Savings Account supported plan from United Healthcare). I pay $5000 in premiums each year and my employer pays even more. My company forced me to switch to this plan from a lower deductible one several years ago – at a time when my wife and I were both over 50. So, while we max out our legal HSA contributions each year, we have never NOT spent all the money in our HSA account in any year. We’ve never had the chance that young people would have to build up actual SAVINGS in this account. And we’re not really unhealthy people. I take no regular medication at all. We’re just in our 50’s & 60’s.
I have a nephew, whose parents are dead, and who became chronically ill himself and could no longer work. He went on Medicaid. The program was made for people like him. I don’t resent it.
Last year, my nephew and I both went into the hospital for a week with (different) life threatening issues. When I – the one WITH an (American) corporate insurance plan – came out, I had almost $4000 in hospital & doctor bills above what my insurance covered. And I had to pay for several prescriptions for weeks after that. This more than emptied my HSA account.
When my nephew came out, he had more presriptions that I had and had spent as many days admitted as I did. But he was never shown a bill of ANY kind. His (also UHC) Medicaid Plan just covered it all. He just focused on feeling better.
So, I really have to ask this question: Why THE FUCK don’t we ALL want it to work that way?!!! That’s LITERALLY how it works in almost every civilized country EXCEPT the USA (the Unintelligent States of America). WTF is wrong with us?!!
Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits | Best Songs Collection
“Little Joe” Steak Sandwich
From Guadalajara comes this version of the steak sandwich known as “El Pepito” or “Little Joe.” Hot cooked steak, thinly sliced, is served on a crisp roll and spread with avocado sauce (guacamole) and refried beans. Chile or taco sauce takes the place of steak sauce.
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound lean tender steak (sirloin New York cut about 1/4 inch thick, broiled or barbecued)
4 crusty round or rectangular rolls
Refried beans with cheese
1/4 cup guacamole
4 thin slices mild sweet onion
Taco sauce
Instructions
Trim fat from steak if desired and barbecue or pan fry.
Split rolls and spread one side with 1 tablespoon of refried beans and the other side of the split roll with about 1 tablespoon of guacamole. Pile equal portions of steak on the bean side of each roll. Put onion slice on the guacamole side.
Serve the sandwiches open so that sauce can be added according to taste before they are closed.
Sandwiches can be eaten out of hand or with knife and fork.
This story contains themes or mentions of mental health issues.
Dear God,Oh, please don’t do it.Please forgive this ungrateful sheep for abandoning the Holy Shepherd in a prosperous and bountiful time. You harvested my filthy wool, shearing it from my oozing-pus-filled skin marred by my temporal infirmities; you transformed me into a resurrected fleece of harlequin nature. I swear to you that I haven’t abandoned you out of sheer lack of faith; I even want to be wrapped in your gracious grace again, with your light penetrating the void and casting a divine glow that speckles across in glory.An earthly family matter has taken up my time; however, I sway to your great tune, and my free will is gifted towards you. I know that’s no excuse for my lapse in prayer. I also know that you have seen the core of my rotting corpse. You have ignited a blazing fire that scorched away my char-infested delusions.A golden service yesterday moved me beyond belief. There was a profound guest speaker: Elbert Spriggs. Spriggs talked about the recent inaction of Church leaders as a blight ravaging society. My Lord, his sermon filled the congregation with the warmth of your glory. Crush and destroy the nonbelievers; break and remold them in your glory. He spoke in the most holy of tongues with his honey-encrusted words.Our world is ruled by the filth-coated tongues of the unbelievers, whose words emanate from their hollow, psychopathic souls with such precision that even the Holy is damned. The call to action flooded us with light and love, which was enough to inspire us to reach out to our fellow man. We must carry your message like rats to a plague, good sir.For many years, I was a lost lamb with no flock. My world abandoned me, even the heavens, but your gracious eternal flame relit my dying-extinguished flame in this accursed world. You’re the vine from the Tree of Life.You have healed me, so I am eternally grateful for all of your charitable deeds.
Oh, Lord, you’re oddly like a yellow deli: you offer the most sumptuous treats in the form of human compassion. You brought me a golden throne adorned with thorns, crowned by your transcendence, instead of me finding you in some sick advertisement. You must have seen that I was at my wit’s end; my path disappeared before me into a dark, sunless abyss, wrecked by a warped mentality of survival. I was so lost, only surviving for myself alone.
Based on the skeletons of the unbelievers, you could have let me rot on the marred ground. Instead, you allowed me to live in the glory of your presence. This world of isolation, with screens and blinking monitors, screams their disillusioned division.
My eternal gratitude knows no bounds.
You’re the King and my Rock.
People really don’t understand who God is. Their sickly delusions amaze even me! In the Bible, Acts 17:24 proclaims that “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;” and yet human beings indulge themselves in the worship of statues, drinking from their own human-carved and gold-trimmed chalices, glance at corroded cruets on Peliculas, and get into a trance by peering into the monstrance. You must pasteurize the sin from their hearts!
However, a new version of God is not found within some Churches but within the stained, bloody hearts of men. Unless humanity comes to its senses, you will macerate them in another Noah flood of unprecedented proportions.
He is found within nature’s corridors; He is not some foreign object who glances at humanity from above—He’s here right now. And I will beat my ilk with rods until they know that, oh dear Lord!
Perhaps, the Bible is enough for people to foolishly put their faith in a clouded book with folk tales, stories, legends, and, at their most, third-hand accounts. Despite their arguments to the contrary, Satanists are not unrelated. Both seem content to worship deities from the sidelines and trust these unseen entities will take care of them.
I laughed at them.
I know who God is. Seeing God walk among us and be truly magnificent, I know this.
You made me yours the moment you came to me. As I slowly bled out from being shot in my own backyard while no one was concerned about my condition, I found myself lying face down with the cold rain pouring down on me. Although I was aware that my end was near, I am ashamed to admit that a part of me was hoping it would happen sooner rather than later. In a sense, I was suicidal, oh Lord.
Suddenly, the rain stopped. Under a pitch-black sky filled with infinite stars, I was no longer lying on pavement but on a grassy field. I no longer felt pain or bleeding. As I looked around, I felt at peace. The grassy field seemed endless. My eyes were drawn to a colossal bonfire, which was at least ten stories high and as wide as your grand ventures. The flames licked at charcoal-black wood. I was blasted by the fire’s heat. Until then, I had never experienced such scorching temperatures.
It was at that moment, God, that you came into view. It would be a mistake to call it walking. Every step was intentional and powerful. Instead, it felt like a storm was rolling in. Please accept my apology. Alas, language limits my ability to describe you.
Now, I looked up at you, towering above me. You were significantly larger than me. You wove the infinite tapestry of existence, and I was only a thread.
God’s sight is beyond the capacity of the human mind. While I was able to process certain aspects of you, I couldn’t process every nuance and detail. But I saw that a flicker of fire replaced the points of your mighty antlers, which extended from your inconceivable faces. The skin on your face shifted and constantly changed like onyx.
You looked at everything in your kingdom with your three faces, toward me and through me. The seven legs of your body dig into the soil like pillars of a temple.
My knees buckled before you. You were all I had. I was shocked to see you reach down and pull me back up. Looking directly into my eyes, it was like you saw every little thing about me. You saw through me like the sunlight entering into the glass.
Thank you for considering me worthy! Without you saying a word, I would be walking with you forever. My eyes filled with tears of joy as I accepted my place at your feet. I will now wash and clean your feet for all of eternity, my Lord. I mean that.
My head was baptized by your majestic hands before the raging bonfire with blood so hot it boiled. The words of your scriptures were scorched and burned into my soul as they poured down upon me. I feel and know every syllable of your decrees at all times, unlike lesser religions that rely on the written word to spread their messages.
God truly is within me.
Upon seeing your glory again, I knew I was now a part of the one true faith. He does not look down from a cloud in the sky or up from a dank pit at His people. No, my God walks among us, eliminating the weak and creating the strong.
Blood and fire are His judgments.
He will crush those who refuse to heed His words in the dirt before Him and consume them in His many jaws. Do not be fooled: forgiveness is reserved for the Holy.
My goal has been to spread your message since that moment when I was reborn. You saw that I was well-suited to this task because of your infinite wisdom. My ability to convey my words isn’t as good as Spriggs’, but I can bring your message to nonbelievers.
An affluent family in Colorado asked me to share their will according to your scriptures last night. My mission was to bring them together in the largest room on the first floor of their house in the middle of the night. I baptized them one by one, burning your mark into their foreheads as you had once done for me.
Then I poured their blood into their mouths in holy communion. The flames of the massive bonfire were brought to the house to cleanse it with fire, with the souls of those who had passed to your eternal embrace.
I hope you’ve accepted the many offerings I sent you before these, as well as these small ones. Throughout my life, I will continue to follow your words and ways.
Forever and ever, I am yours, oh Lord.
Amen.
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Why does China ban Google and YouTube?
Short answer: Google quitted.
According to google, they left mainland China because what Chinese government asked them to do was a violation of their motto, which is “Don’t be evil”.
Since what the Chinese government asked them to support identifying possible terror threat and block contents which are illegal in China, I suppose that they won’t do such thing in other countries as well.
But sadly enough, I read a news after they quitted about Google India provide related info to the local police which led to a young man being arrested. The cause of the arresting was that this young man said something close to “Sonia Gandhi go to hell” online.
It was about 8 years ago, so I cannot guarantee the 100% accuracy about what happened. But I was arguing online with pro-google people, and I saw someone mentioned such incident. I didn’t take the words from another online user as granted, but decided to search online to find some solid support. With no google and VPN at the time, it took me quite a long time to find a piece of news saying it was true.
So Google refuse to monitor the key words in Email, but accept providing personal info to arrest a kind of innocent man?
As for YouTube, it belongs to Google, isn’t it?
When I got my stable VPN and logged in to YouTube for the first time (because I wasn’t a online video fan when I was in Swiss), once YouTube noticed me being a Chinese, it kept pushing those videos which suppose to “expose the evil side of China”.
I can still recall a guy called Winston Serpentza, who lives in Shenzhen but cannot stop trashing China for even a day. I searched online about his background. It turns out that he is an illegal English teacher who has no certification whatsoever. He had a bad life in South Africa, and tried to make some easy money in China. But his teaching carrier was not so good as well, so he chose to do trashing videos to fulfill the anti-China/Communist/Orient demands.
I remembered pressing not interested bottom for at least 20 times, but YouTube still pushing his videos to me, along with quite a lot videos which are obviously fake to me.
In addition, let’s briefly talk about Facebook, which is also banned in China.
People do have freedom on Facebook, as long as you don’t support evil communist China. Regarding on the same topic, anti-China posts got survived, but not pro-China ones.
I read some of the pro-China posts, and didn’t find any aggressive words or emotions. So no one knows why exactly they got banned by Facebook.
Some off centered thoughts:
I think that the weird attitude towards China is quite cold war style. Take the recent death sentence of a Canadian drug smuggler as an example:
PM of Canada accuse China being unfair and arbitrary.
Acting foreign minister of AU said that Schellenberg’s case is not suitable for death penalty.
OK then, So:
a drug smuggler who tried to bring 220KG of methamphetamine from China to Australia shouldn’t be punished by death penalty
and Chinese law shouldn’t be respected when the crime was caught in China.
What should China do then? Release Schellenberg and send him to AU to complete his job? Would AU government be happy to receive 220KG of crystal?
And should CA government legalize methamphetamine, if they think that smuggling 220KG of it is OK?
In Chinese laws, illegal drug trading must face criminal penalty, 5 situations could cause death sentence:
Trading more than 1KG of opium, more than 50 grams of heroin/meth, or significant amount of other type of drugs
Being major member of a cartel
Smuggling drugs with armed guard
Resisting inspection, detention, arresting with severe violence
Participating in a organized international drug smuggling
By all the standard, this dude is dead. He received 15 years in jail in his first trial because of some missing evident which could identify him as a cartel member, so the judge gave a chance to the “innocent person who just did a favor to a friend”.
I DON”T believe that there is NO political issue involved in this sentence. But Chinese government couldn’t planned this, since it was Schellenberg himself filled an appeal which led to the second trail of death sentence, and 220KG meth is more than enough to get death penalty in China.
I mentioned the Schellenberg case is to show you some live case about how “unbias” the western government can be, and how much they care about the justice and law.
So when Google said that they quitted China because of “Don’t be evil”, I don’t believe them.
I read a news in about 2009 (or 2008) saying the Secretary of State at the time Hillary Clinton hosted a dinner with the chief of 4 companies, and praise them as the frontline of promoting US values (again, I cannot recall the exact words). I remember Facebook and Google were invited.
China PULLS The Trigger – U.S. Trade War Just Got FLIPPED (Enough is Enough!)
Today I want to talk about elevator gladiatorial battles in China.
The vast majority of buildings in China are skyscrapers. I would guess that the average size for buildings in China are around 40 floors. And it is impractical to go up and down stairs. Instead, you take the elevator.
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In my Tanzhou house, our complex has 16 buildings. Each one is about 38 floors high. In my Shenzhen house, the building is 45 floors. In our Zhuhai house, there are 34 floors. And each one has a parking garage in the basement of the building. So what you do is drive into the parking garage, and then you leave the car and go to the elevator.
Well… not everyone drives a car. Many drive scooters. And the cars park in the basement, while the scooters park outside the front door on the first floor. Especially the delivery folk.
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So here’s where the gladiator battles take place.
I’m in the basement garage (-1 floor), and I press the button. I watch the elevator go down from the 18th floor, it stops on the 12th floor. And then continues to the first floor.
I watch; People get on and get off.
I watch: Then the elevator goes back up.
Wait. What????
No shit.
Instead of continuing down to the -1 parking garage, it somehow reverses course and heads back up.
So what is going on is that the scooter riders (and the delivery guys) leave their finger on the elevator button so that it overrides all prior programming and the elevator zooms up to the floor so depressed. It doesn’t continue down to the -1 basement.
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Well, I learned how to detect when someone does this.
It’s a combination of dwell time, and a flashing up and down arrow.
So in response, I push the “up” button in the -1 basement garage. I keep on pressing it. Twice a second, for a minute or until the override command stops and the elevator continues to the basement like it is supposed to.
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The scooter folk long press.
I rapid fire press at the end stop (-1).
Now, that being said, the prudent thing is to have the building management talk to the elevator techs and disable the override function. It’s on my list of things to do. And that is coming soon.
And that is the gladiator battles in China.
Bet ya never knew about that.
Today…
Chinese Showing American TikTok Refugees How They Live Their Life On RedNote
A MUST watch!
The world is seriously changing.
What’s the strangest thing delivered to your house (that you did not order)?
When I was 21 I got a large box with my address on it but the wrong name. It was from the “Captain Morgan Rum Company”. I called them and told them a package had my address but not the correct name. They asked if I was at least 21 years old and then asked me to prove it by faxing them a copy of my drivers license. After they received proof they said it was a promotional package that was supposed to go to a bar in the area but said I could keep it. I thanked them and opened the package which contained a dozen bottles of rum, a life-size cutout of Captain Morgan, several T-shirts with Captain Morgan and some advertising slogan I don’t remember and a box of pirate eye patches.
I’ve never been a big drinker but my friends and I still had a great time over the next few months drinking rum while wearing eye patches and saying piratey things – “Arrgh”.
Update: Sadly my mother passed away a couple of months ago; my father passed 20 years ago. While going through her belongings and putting things in storage my brother and I ran across the safe in the closet and realized neither of us knew the combination. We contacted the company that made the safe and after giving them the serial number and verifying we had legal right to open it they sent us an alternate set of numbers. We opened the safe and aside from a few valuables and things my mother and father thought were valuable or might increase in value was the last remaining bottle of the Captain Morgan Spiced Rum we mistakenly received nearly forty years ago. I know it’s not a forty year old bottle of scotch but nostalgia makes it feel every bit as special. I haven’t opened it yet, not sure if I’m going to yet.
Why doesn’t the USA invade China?
Why doesn’t the USA invade China?
As much as the American empire would love to add China to the long list of so-called “rogue states” (a.k.a those refusing to be absorbed) it has reduced to rubble, there isn’t a hope in hell of them achieving this aim in China…
…as much as Pompeo, Bolton, and co lick their lips when thinking about it.
The fact is, China is not a weak country like those America is used to bullying.
It is a huge, nuclear-armed nation with a huge military and an ultra-patriotic citizenry.
You think IEDs on the roadside in Iraq are a problem?
Think going home with missing limbs and PTSD is a problem?
If Amerca were to invade China, especially while they still have vivid memories of the “Century of Humiliation” plus, constant U.S lies, smears, and interference in Chinese affairs, I can realistically imagine the soldiers being torn limb from limb by tens of millions of furious citizens.
Improvised bombs, poisons, boobytrapped overpasses, and guerilla warfare from such an enormous population would make life hell for the U.S soldiers.
And this is only taking into account local resistance.
The Chinese army itself, all 1.6 million troops ( and let’s not mention reserves), would be the biggest and most professional force the U.S has ever faced.
And they would literally give their lives for their motherland without hesitation.
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The Vietnam war would feel like utopia compared to what the USA would face here.
The American citizenry would get tired of the bloodshed LONG before the (traditionally peaceful) Chinese would.
What are some reasons to own a gun? I am a progressive and I think there should be more gun control. But I want to see the other side.
Let me attempt to explain it this way. And I am asking you to look at this in an unbiased, unblinded manner.
It’s Saturday evening. You, you wife and tween daughter are watching a movie on television.
There’s been news of a home invasion, not far from your residence, in which the homeowner was gunned down, his wife and young daughter raped and their throats cut.
As a “just in case”, you purchase a firearm, but because of gun control laws, your
to the weapon, unloaded, and the ammunition separately. You comply with this, because you’re a good citizen and want to keep your child safe.
Suddenly, you hear a loud bang and a sharp crack as your front door begins to splinter. You herd your wife and daughter into the master bedroom, since it’s farthest from the from door. You pull your gun safe from under the bed and begin manipulating the keypad as you hear your front door completely cave in, which causes you to mess up the combination. You finally retrieve your firearm and lunge for the dresser where your ammo is kept. As you grab your ammo, you hear the bedroom door slam open and an instant later two impacts to your back, causing you to drop your gun. As you sink to the floor, you hear your wife and daughter begin screaming as two invaders assault and begin to rape them. As you lose consciousness, you hear them gurgle as their throats are cut. Your last sight is that it’sof you murdered daughter’s eyes looking accusingly at you as her life leaves them.
You and your family are dead, because you followed gun control laws.
Think about it. Contrary to popular belief, the police are under no obligation to protect you.
Putin Honours Soldier After Intense Knife-fight Video Takes Russian Internet By Storm | Watch
Butter Balls Chicken Soup
The butter balls, very tiny dumplings, are called rivels in the West and dropsley in Ontario.
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Ingredients
3 pounds chicken
1/2 cup chopped celery leaves
1 bay leaf
10 peppercorns
1 teaspoon salt
5 cups hot water
1 cup diced celery
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
5 to 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Cut chicken into portions. Place in a saucepan with celery leaves, bay leaf, peppercorns, the one teaspoon salt and the water. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer over low heat for about one hour, or until chicken is tender. Strain, then return broth to saucepan.
Cut chicken into small pieces, add to broth with celery and parsley, then simmer.
To make the butter balls, cream butter, add eggs and beat. Gradually add flour and the 1/4 teaspoon salt. Beat hard until it is like a very soft batter. Drop by 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoonsful into broth; cover and let stand for 5 minutes over low heat.
MMs AI work.
I’ve been playing around.
The AI is SHIT regarding male genitalia. My guess is that they didn’t include any of it in the database, while there is a lot of references for female equivalents.
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The images not showing the private parts are pretty good.
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Men tend to be of heroic structure, and the gals in all shapes and sizes.
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I really like the draped clothing.
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How is China viewed by other countries in Asia? Is it seen as a role model for economic growth or looked down upon?
No country looks down on China.
Not even the US. Once it did as evident by the many US-originated phases – yellow peril, sick man of Asia, screw on factory, all perspiration, no inspiration, al et. Yang Jiechi put this to bed when he met Blinken in Anchorage.
Now it is mostly fear and envy, hence the sanctions galore.
No country in Asia dares look down on China.
Everyone benefits from China’s development and growth.
But of course, in state-to-state relationships, you can hardly expect unanimity.
India, especially the Anglicized Indians, cannot accept China’s economy is so many times bigger when it was ahead of China in the 1980s. Indeed, the sad truth is that China is ahead across every or most human endeavours.
Japan and South Korea are secretly afraid of China. Publicly they have to parrot the US.
Other countries in Asia admired and are respectful of China. Maybe except the Philippines, which for inexplicable reasons, chooses to make an enemy of it, after receiving so much help, such as Covid vaccines.
Everyone knows how fast it has grown, how big it is, and how well it manages Covid-19.
Everyone knows how poor it was, the difficulties it endured, such as the isolation by the US, the atrocities of the Japanese, how it fought the Korean War, its own civil war, and the many trials and tribulations the western world visited upon it.
It is not a role model, certainly no one dares openly acknowledge it. It will certainly incur the wrath and slurs of US propaganda and its media. Nevertheless, China has many lessons to offer which explains why so many officials visit the country.
The back of the truck smelled of sweat, sharp with microbial sourness, not unlike the kimchi Max had been concocting in the cupboard under his kitchen sink. He got a fleeting, distant feeling that he might not enjoy any fermented foods for a long time after this.He counted everyone in the truck. Last time they had been summoned, ten years before, there were eight of them, Test Group Octagon. But this year, there were only six. Since the agreement they all signed at the start of the experiment stated the only viable reason to cease participation was to be no longer, Max thought without humour they might as well rename the group to Hexagon now.For the first few minutes, after they’d put on their seatbelts and settled in as much as possible under the circumstances, there was nothing between them but resigned silence, one that had gone through many stages: screaming, pleading, before finally imploding on itself. Ida was biting her nails, so Max put a hand over hers to stop it. He’d known for a whole decade she’d develop that habit, but watching her go through everything that led up to the onset of the nervous vice didn’t make the premonition any easier.John, one of the calmer subjects, spoke first. Max noticed how much he changed over the last ten years, in fact, how they all changed. The boys grew some facial hair, the girls wore make-up. They all looked more measured, more grown into their features, some almost to a point of not being recognisable.‘So?’ John looked around the truck, which was now moving along at a steady pace. There were no windows in the back, but light strips on the ceiling illuminated the two opposing benches they were sat on, giving their skin an unhealthy hue and creating deep shadows. John leaned forward; someone else put their head in their hands, and another looked upwards into the light with a desperate frown. Ida renewed her gnawing, cupping her free hand over her mouth to conceal the noise, the gesture, or the shame, god knows which. Like a Renaissance painting, Max thought looking over the scene.A girl with ginger hair nodded mutely, and John sighed. If Max remembered correctly, the girl’s name was Rachel. When they first met, a decade before, he found her terribly unappealing: a lanky-looking thing with an orange bunch of tumbleweed over her head. Then again, what ginger ten-year-old girl seems attractive to a ten-year-old boy, if instead, she can just be mocked and prodded for how different she is. Max felt shock dangerously close to the border of arousal as he noted how her face had evolved, how her hair was now a shiny flurry under control. He wondered what it’d look like splayed on a pillow, crowning her naked body.More nods came from the benches. ‘Yep, it’s all true,’ Ida whispered. ‘And remember the weirdest thing?’‘Yeah,’ John replied. ‘It told you that you would end up together.’ He pointed to Max.‘And we have,’ Ida said, taking Max’s hand into hers.He looked across at her face, the very face that finally settled into the grown-up curves he’d seen ten years before in the simulation, the vision, or, as it was officially known, The Hop. She had a beautiful smile that lit up other faces around it — when she expressed joy, she was a match thrown onto a pool of gasoline. Otherwise, she couldn’t be picked from a police lineup easily, and over some years after their first Hop, Max wondered how he’d come to end up with her if the vision was indeed correct.When their parents agreed to enter them into the first large-scale One Day programme, so confidently that their empathy and foresight could be nothing but heavily questioned, Max nearly popped with excitement. Here was an opportunity to step through a door and live one day of his life exactly a decade later. Whatever he might have seen on the other side, he could gear his life towards. Or he could try to outsmart fate like the clever boy he was. According to the preliminary findings, the vision would hold up to reality one hundred percent, but studies had only been done on a small number of participants, and the general public were advised to regard the results with a large pinch of salt.The children were given extensive training before entering The Hop. According to the tutorials, their best course of action would be to try and assimilate into life so that the objects (people, pets, environments) wouldn’t realise they were part of the experiment. The day would be re-lived ten years later independently. Its objects, while possibly experiencing a level of miscellaneous discomfort on the day, having lived through it once already in a semi-alternate timeline, would not be affected. One’s actions on the day had no bearing on the future, either: breaking up with a wife did not equal divorce, unless relived; even dying was considered non-final. The only certain parameter The Hop delivered on was the preceding decade.
In the first vision, Max lived a day of his twenties in the company of the mousy girl from the truck, Ida. A ten-year old in an older body, he did his best throughout the day to get Ida into bed, but discovered in the early afternoon that her father had recently died, and her mother was struggling with severe depression, so he gave up. Ida commented a couple of times on Max’s behaviour, noticing he was ‘even more immature than normal,’ but never worked out the deception.
How could he have fallen in love with this particular girl? She wasn’t entirely unattractive, but she was nothing compared to the bosomed, tight-waisted miracles on legs Max was envisaging for himself. And there was something so inherently sad about her, always trailing the line between smiles and tears.
On the ride back from The Hop, they exchanged numbers, shrugging and rolling their eyes. If this was indeed was fate had in store for them, they could discuss it one day. Neither called the other for years. And when they ran into each other eight years later at university, Ida ate Max like the black hole she was, pulling him in with a gravitational field so strong he felt ripped apart by her love. They never needed to discuss the vision, and the gnawing discouragement Max experienced on learning Ida was to be his chosen partner became a false memory.
The truck stopped. The beautiful ginger girl made a sign of the cross on her freckled forehead and shoulders. John, the guy who spoke, sat back and closed his eyes briefly before the back doors opened and the light of dawn tore into the little container.
‘Y’all ready for The Hop?’ someone they couldn’t see because their eyes had watered asked, and laughed with genuine glee. ‘Come on, let’s go, kids.’
The building appeared smaller than Max had remembered, as did the truck. In his pre-adolescent mind, the building loomed large over his head, but now, it seemed more like a second-grade prison, with its barbed wire, grey exterior, and gates upon gates upon checkpoints, complete with armed guards.
Ida gulped loudly all the way through their security checks, retina and fingerprint scans, weight measurements, and instruction talk. And then, they all separated. She got led to one room, with Max being pointed to the next door down. They looked at each other, nodded, each forced a smile straight from a Greek tragedy.
‘I love you,’ Ida mouthed, and Max responded by forming a heart with his thumbs and forefingers and pointing it at her.
In science fiction films, the jump to another dimension, or another state of consciousness, is often imagined accompanied by a multitude of tools: sleek metal tubes, IVs full of curious liquids, electrodes and wires. But The Hop was nothing like it. It was a door. A cheap-looking door at that, in the middle of the room, seemingly not glued or drilled down, just staring at him with a metal button handle like an eye. Max went right through, fully expecting to be asleep on the other side as per last time. He’d also been reassured by the coordinators that no participants would be dropped into a situation requiring their full attention so that they had time to process their surroundings.
***
Beeping in darkness, rhythmic, close, and a sucking sound, almost melodic, together in unison like the world’s smallest and strangest orchestra. Max feels awake, but his body appears to want to remain asleep. He can barely tell his extremities from one another, and discovers a great sluggishness all over, like his body has hibernated. Even his eyelids refuse to follow orders. His mind isn’t far behind, either: the sucking and beeping occupy a large portion of his available attention, and the little sliver left seems to operate at a reduced rate. How has he got here? He can still feel a coolness in his hand from the door handle he’d just touched, but the feeling is dissipating rapidly into a numbness, a sameness. What door handle?
He strains to tune out the beeping and focus on opening his eyes instead. This must be the key to this bizarre environment he’s just found himself in: if he can only get to see it, the world will come rushing in through the pupil and into the brain, repopulating it, planting impressions and images and memories and thoughts. But he can’t. The link between his faint will and his body is broken like a collapsed bridge.
A sudden warmth envelops one of his hands, and it takes him a while to figure out it’s his right one. Ida, he just knows it’s Ida from the way she slides her fingers with sharp, bitten-down nails in between his, one by one. There is something so shy about her which he finds so irresistibly sexy, like she’s a fawn in the woods and he’s a wolf who can prey on her, bite into her long neck, keep her down, let her find comfort in submission, in not having to pretend to be brave for once.
‘Max, we need to talk,’ he hears over the beeping and the sucking, but the sucking is so loud and close it nearly drowns out Ida’s voice. Open your fucking eyes, Max, he commands himself, squeeze that fucking hand. Nothing.
‘I mean, I need to talk at you, I guess.’ A sigh in perfect harmony with the rhythmic suction, a brief variation on the monotonous theme. ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, really. I told myself that when I finish reading The Stand to you, and if you don’t wake up after that crappy ending to yell it’s a waste of a thousand pages, then I guess you’ll just never wake up.’
A long silence follows. Ida’s fingers tap and slither, slide back out, a little greased now, and Max senses a growing unease, whether in himself or his environment, he can’t tell. Is a man not one with his surroundings anyway? If only he could see her, if only he could understand exactly what she meant. Sometimes she gets sweaty hands when she’s feeling stressed, but sometimes, she gets them when she’s cold.
One: she was reading something to him. Two: there is no hope. He holds onto the conclusions that float on top of the limited consciousness he has access to. ‘Max… I’m going to have to move on. Ever since mum died, I’ve felt like skimmed milk, do you know what I mean? First what happened to you. Seriously, fuck that day. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the experiment, too. That rumination semi-skimmed me.’ She laughs, and the laugh chokes and turns into something else, something shivering. ‘Then with my mum… I knew she was dying, but I thought god was only meant to deal us a hand we could play, right? I’m just so thin, so watery. I feel like I could cry for a hundred years and not dehydrate.’
Another silence. Max listens, listens with all of attention. Three: Ida’s mum is dead. Four: something’s happened to him. Four, no, five: Ida no bueno.
‘I don’t even miss you anymore, not like I used to. How horrible is that. But I still feel guilty about Jason. I never wanted him that way, I promise. It wasn’t anything sinister, we really were just friends. But his wife left, and the whole custody thing. He’s decaf, and I’m skimmed milk. It’s a joke we have. I feel so guilty joking with him, more than anything else.’
A spot of moist warmth moves around Max’s face, wetting his forehead, eyes, cheeks, mouth at last. ‘I am so sorry. I still have hope, just so you know. In case you can hear me. But I think one of the nurses will have to read to you now.’
The silence that follows stretches for decades, then centuries, until Max is the last human in the universe known to man, and that man is Max. He remembers something someone said to him about an opening, a door. ‘The opening will reveal itself to you, so step into the portal.’ He waits for the door. Eons pass. The starless darkness doesn’t move, doesn’t shimmer, doesn’t pulsate, just stands still covering reality with a black blanket, and all Max hears is that infernal beeping and sucking. When an opening presents itself, like a creak in the fabric of his limited universe, he jumps through.
Ida is waiting for him in the hall. Her eyes dart up to meet his, and she breaks. ‘Please, Max, come on. I’m here, we’re here.’ She reaches for him, but he turns away her warmth, that same warmth that will abandon him ten years from now. He walks down the hall shaking his head, and Ida follows, sobbing single words of apology, or perhaps consolation.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he yells across his shoulder. ‘Just shut up, Ida.’
It’s dark outside. He’s forgotten they were gone all day. He’s forgotten what the sun looks like. They walk across the road to the marked point they had been instructed to wait at after the experiment. Max paces up and down; nobody else is out yet. The truck is nowhere to be seen.
‘Please, Max. We could move, go somewhere. We could try to trick this.’
‘Who is this fucking Jason?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never met him.’ Her shoulders jolt up and down under the breathy, choking sobs she’s letting out.
‘Why are you crying?’ he demands. ‘You get to go on living, and fucking this Jason guy. You have no idea how it was.’
She tries to put a shoulder around him, but he stumbles away. He doesn’t want to be touched. There’s a barrier between them now, a wall of darkness so thick he can barely see her anymore for what she was only a few hours before. She follows him, and he watches her intently, taking steps back so that she can’t touch him. There’s that damn beeping sound again, except more forceful now.
‘Max,’ she pleads, and her eyes open up wide. ‘Max, be careful!’
He steps backwards off the curb and into the road, and the beeping turns into one continuous moan. He sees two headlights, but he’s falling. He feels suddenly thankful for these lights, dispersing the darkness he was drowning in all day, flooding his field of vision. There’s a screech, one mechanical, another organic, that’s his Ida. Then there’s darkness again once more.
What was the most disturbing thing that your seatmate did during a flight?
When I proudly told my wife that my answer to a Quora question had received over 41,000 upvotes, she asked me which story I had submitted.
“It was the one in response to ‘What was the most disturbing thing that your seatmate did during a flight?’” I replied.
“Oh, that one about the kid sitting behind you?” she asked.
“No, not that one,” I answered. “But I have another one I’ll have to send in.”
I was flying to a conference from my home in Florida and I had the window seat next to two young boys whose parents and brother were sitting on the opposite side of the aisle.
During the whole two-hour flight, the three-year-old next to me was farting very regularly. As a father, I took it in stride that little kids can’t be expected to control their bodily emissions, but as a pediatrician, I consider myself an expert on gas and poop and everything gastrointestinal.
As we were beginning the descent into Washington, D.C, he began to grunt louder and was turning red in the face. Recognizing the signs of an impending explosion, I called over to his father who was busy talking to his wife.
“I think you better take him to the bathroom,” I warned.
“Nah, he can wait until we land,” he said, totally dismissing my professional expertise.
Just after he said that, poop started to pour out of his shorts all over the seat. By this time, it was too late for him to do anything about it since the flight attendants had already issued the “Fasten your seatbelt” command.
For the next twenty minutes, as we circled the airport, I had to listen to this child cry that he had pooped in his pants. Since his parents were on the other side of the plane, it became my responsibility for keeping him in his seat so that it didn’t increase the smelly mess even more.
As soon as we landed, the flight attendants allowed the father to carry him to the lavatory before anyone disembarked.
“Next time,” I told him as he scooped him out of his seat and wrapped him in a blanket, “trust another adult’s judgment when they tell you your kid needs to use the toilet.”
The Great [REDNOTE] Migration
What’s it like to be rich ($5M+ in net worth)?
One thing I have learned over the years: the answer changes over time. My answer at 29 was different at 39 and 49.
When the first startup I worked at got acquired, I was worth $10m on paper. It felt pretty great. But the acquirer went bankrupt before I could sell any. Or almost any. I ended up making $50k. I bought my spouse a new sports car.
It took me years to recover from the mental pain of losing that $10m of paper wealth. Years. I couldn’t really tell anybody, I had to push on. But it weighed on me for years.
A few years later, I cofounded my first startup. We sold it for $50m after 12.5 months, and I took my portion in all cash after the scars from the last experience.
What I did with it:
Bought a nicer house. Not a mansion, but a nice house. It did make life a bit calmer.
Bought my spouse a nicer car. A high end Mercedes.
Rented two hotel rooms when traveled and didn’t worry about expense. This was nice.
Didn’t worry so much what vacations cost.
Didn’t work for a year. At first it was nice and I got into great shape. But then I fell into a funk and was a bit lost. I had no purpose anymore.
So I used the funds to help get another startup off the ground …
So I had to do another startup.
This time it took 5 years to exit, but I made 10x more. So what did I do?
Bought a bigger house. It wasn’t really any better though and was no happier there. Maybe less because I felt locked in.
Bought a convertible Challenger. Was a fun car.
Spend each summer for 5 summers living somewhere different with kids. Shanghai, London, New York, Santa Monica. This was great. The best use of the funds.
Made sure the 529s were maxed out.
That was about it.
After all this, I was OK but no happier than after the first, smaller exit. I started venture investing and did some good ones and some unicorns and it helped to have some money to have the confidence to invest this way.
Then the pandemic came and I had to move and rent for a while. It simplified life, and I worried about fewer things. Just the people at work and home that mattered.
Now — finally — I enjoyed the earnings. For the first time.
Why? Now I just use it for calm. I’ve earned 12% a year on it on average and now it calms me to see it grow.
The house is smaller, the car is cheaper, the trips very nice but simpler.
Living well — but below my means — is calming now.
Why is the USA still suitable in maintaining the world order?
The United States isn’t the ideal leader for maintaining the world order anymore. Over the years, a series of missteps and changing global dynamics have made it clear that the US can’t single-handedly uphold global stability like it once did.
For decades, the US was the dominant player on the world stage. It rallied nations during the Cold War, led during the Gulf War, and exerted influence through NATO and the UN. This was all thanks to its economic strength, military power, and the global appeal of the American way of life. But times have changed.
Firstly, the US’s economic dominance has diminished. China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse challenges America’s influence. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which strengthens its economic ties with countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe, is a prime example. While the US still has a strong economy, it’s no longer the unparalleled giant it once was.
Politically, the US has become increasingly inconsistent. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan is a glaring example of declining strategic foresight and shaky international commitments. This kind of blunder isn’t just an isolated incident; it’s a symptom of broader inconsistency in US foreign policy. Each new administration seems to flip the script, making it hard for allies and adversaries to trust or predict US actions.
Diplomatically, the US’s relationships with other countries have been rocky. Long-standing European allies have occasionally distanced themselves, wary of America’s unpredictable foreign policy. The US’s attempts to rally international support on issues like climate change or unified responses to global health crises like COVID-19 have often been fragmented and less effective than hoped.
Furthermore, the US’s history of heavy-handed military interventions has eroded its moral standing. Look at Iraq and Libya—interventions meant to promote democracy ended up creating long-term instability and humanitarian crises. These repeated failures have tarnished the US’s image as a global leader and a protector of democracy.
On the home front, the US faces significant challenges. Political polarization, social unrest, and economic inequality are creating internal instability. If a country can’t keep its own house in order, it’s tough to argue that it should lead the world.
The rise of a multipolar world also shows that we don’t need a single dominant player anymore. Regional powers like China, India, and the European Union have grown in influence and capability, suggesting that collaboration rather than domination is the way forward. Countries are no longer looking solely to the US for leadership; instead, they prefer balanced relationships and multilateral approaches to solving global issues.
Inside Look at China’s Newest, Most Modern Space Station Amazes U.S. Engineers
California Avocado Soup with Roast Turkey
This homemade tortilla soup with garden-fresh ingredients like tomatoes, onions, garlic and chiles and hearty roasted turkey is especially delicious topped with Fresh California Avocados. It’s a great use for leftover Thanksgiving turkey and also can be made with store-bought rotisserie chicken.
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Prep: 15 min | Cook: 40 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1/2 cup olive oil
4 corn tortillas, cut into thin strips
1 small Spanish yellow onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, diced
2 Anaheim chiles, seeded and chopped
4 medium tomatoes, chopped
4 cups reduced-sodium chicken stock
1/2 bunch cilantro (optional), washed and chopped
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin (or to taste)
1/2 teaspoon chili powder (or to taste)
2 cups roasted or smoked turkey, cut in 1/2 inch cubes
Salt and pepper to taste
1 medium, ripe Fresh California Avocado, diced
4 ounces reduced-fat cheddar cheese, grated
Instructions
In a two-quart saucepan, heat olive oil over medium high heat until hot.
Working in batches, fry tortilla strips until golden brown.
Drain on paper towels and reserve.
Add onion to the same oil and sauté until clear.
Add garlic and Anaheim chiles, cook until soft but not browned. Drain any excess oil from the pan.
Add tomatoes, chicken stock and chopped cilantro if desired.
Simmer for 15 minutes.
Transfer soup to a heat-resistant blender or food processor and purée, or use an immersion blender to purée.
Return soup to pan and add turkey, cayenne pepper, ground cumin and chili powder. Simmer until turkey is hot, add salt and pepper to taste.
Ladle into soup bowls and top each serving with avocado, cheddar cheese and reserved crispy tortilla strips.
You Won’t Believe What China is Doing to the U.S. Military: Beijing Journalists Expose the Truth
Who was the greatest or most powerful Chinese military general/warlord from history?
While I want to say Chairman Mao, strictly speaking he wasn’t a general/warlord, but more of a political officer/politician.
So my vote goes to Li Shimin, the second son of the first emperor of the Tang Dynasty.
Shimin was pivotal in helping his father Li Yuan rebel against the Sui Dynasty, to emerge victorious amongst the dozens of rebel forces, fending off proto-Turkish raiders who tried to take advantage of China’s civil war, and to eventually found the Tang Dynasty of China.
At its beginning, Tang China was still weak, plagued with multiple rebellions at home, nomadic raiders to the north, and all the chaos of founding a new dynasty.
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The green is Tang China, the two dark greys are the Gokturk khaganate, with over a million highly mobile cavalry, then the No.1 military superpower in Asia and likely globally.
So it was not surprising that when the Turks raided and asked for submission and tribute, everyone in the newly formed Tang court was eager to comply.
Everyone except for Li Shimin. There he vowed to eliminate the Turkish threat in 5 years, signing his own death warrant.
This must have calmed his father and older brother Li Jiancheng somewhat, for at this time Li Yuan and Li Jiancheng had already entered into a political alliance to keep their battle-hardened second son/younger brother in check, to secure their rule and succession. But Shimin’s bet with his life also helped him garner more followers amongst the tougher Chinese aristocrats at court who did not wish to submit.
With their support, Li Shimin finally succeeded in ambushing and killing his older brother, his younger brother and usurped the throne from his father, at the famous Incident of Xuanwu Gate.
There Li Shimin again showed his military/political prowess. While Li Shimin’s own forces was besieged after the incident by the much stronger forces of his brothers, by beheading his brothers and tossing the severed heads to the opponent, Shimin’s forces killed their moral and eventually emerged victorious. This again demonstrated Shimin’s affinity at turning the tide of battle with a smaller force.
Being the greatest general/warlord in the founding of Tang Dynasty, Shimin had finally claimed what was rightfully his. But killing your brothers and usurping the throne from your father was a heavy burden for anyone. To quell possible rebellions and plots against his rule at home, Shimin needed to prove his worth more than ever, the bet of killing the Turkish empire in 5 years was now more pressing than ever, and he had only 3 years left.
The first thing Shimin did was to look for allies. In year 628AD, Li Shimin successfully turned a nephew of the Turkish Khan to China’s side by showering him with lavish gifts of wealth and women. Then used it as an example of the benevolence of the Chinese emperor, spreading the word all the way from Tibet to Siberia, and made the promise to the Tiele people, the Khitan people and the Xueyuantuo Khaganate, everyone remotely dissatisfied under the Gokturks, that when China drives away the Turks, they would become the new rulers of the grasslands. And Tang was finally ready to campaign.
Then came a military campaign that shaped the global geopolitical landscape till this day.
Finally, in January of 630, under order of Li Shimin, the Tang forces departed for the vast central Asian stepps.
The timing was counter-intuitive. It was still snowy and cold and later generations would argue against invading Russia in winter. But Li Shimin correctly judged that while Chinese horsemen could rely on animal feed provided by their farming economy, the Turkish nomads relied almost purely on grass, which would not become abundant until late spring/summer, greatly limiting the fighting power and mobility of the Gokturks.
Then there’s the trimming of the ranks. To ensure greatest mobility and ease of resupply, the Tang force was limited to 3000 cavalry. Not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but 3000. Li Shimin decided mobility was more important going against the 1 million strong cavalry force of the No.1 military superpower.
At last, there was psychological warfare. Li Shimin made his plan known to the enemy since the very beginning. He sent an envoy to the Gokturk Khan, Illig Qaghan, still sheltering from heavy snow in his tent, to tell him that Tang was there to get him, with just 3000 men.
This greatly confused the Gokturk court, for none believed that Tang would formally declare war with a force that small. And they started seeing enemy ambush lurking in every shadow in the snowstorms. Illig Qaghan, being a seasoned warrior of a hundred battles himself, decided to caution, to pull back his forces toward central Asia to regroup, and figure out the real strength of the Tang expeditionary forces. This worked greatly in favor of the Tang forces, for their numbers was too small for a head-on assault, but once the enemy started moving, they could harass and attack the train of livestock and civilians. For first time in Chinese history, the farmer settler side had greater mobility than the nomadic horsemen.
For as long as they were moving the Tang forces harassed the Turks, scattering their live stocks, cutting down on their food supply while avoiding any major confrontation. Like ghost wolves, they would come out from the shadows, cut off the weak, then disappear into the snow before you can mount any defense. After some minor early skirmishes, some disheartened Turkish generals defected to the Chinese side, bolstering the Chinese forces while keeping the Turkish moral low.
20 days into the campaign, the Tang forces, confident with the new balance of power, with 3000 men and over 10 thousand defected Turkish forces, raided Illig Qaghan in his sleep at Ding Xiang. Climbing the city walls, Illig Qaghan saw way more torches than 3000 and was reconfirmed of his fear that there were many more ambush parties than the declared 3000 strong Tang raiders.
So he fled faster toward Siberia.
In his escape, the small cavalry forces of Tang would catch up and ambush him, and with their superior bow and crossbow technology, all but completely picked off the most elite Turkish forces accompanying their Khan.
By this moment, Tang had already achieved great military success, so Li Shimin told his captain to withdraw to avoid falling into the regrouped strength of the Turkish cavalry. The commanding officer of the Tang raiding party, Li Jing, wrote back against his emperor, that he had confidence to push the advantage to the extreme. So Li Shimin, like the good strategist he his, indulged his captain.
Back into his camp at present day Mongolia. Illig Qaghan decided to buy himself time before he called all his banners. So he sent envoy to the Chinese capital of Chang’an, pledging allegiance. Li Shimin played along, sending a Chinese ambassador, Tang Jian to the Gokturk court. At the same time, Li Shimin bolstered the 3000 Chinese campaign forces to 10 thousand, while hand-picking only 200 of the most elite cavalry to be formed into a death squad, led by Su Dingfang.
It was this death squad that led the ambush against Illig Qaghan’s camp at night, with straws tied to their horse’s hooves and approaching on foot in the middle of the night. They would soon be followed by the 3000 when the Turks start to mount resistance, then finally the rest of the 10 thousand. The Chinese ambassador Tang Jian would recall vividly how Illig Qaghan fled in total disarray, completely forgetting about his Chinese ambassador/hostage.
By March, year 630, the Tang forces returned to the Chinese capital of Chang’an with the captured Gokturk Khan, where Li Shimin himself would personally receive his surrender on top of the city walls, celebrating victory for all the citizens to see.
Finally, Li Shimin would release his father Li Yuan from house arrest at his palace, to the celebration banquet in his honor, where the Tukrish Khan, who had only a few years ago forced Li Yuan into submission and paying tribute, would personally perform as a dancer and dance for the former emperor’s health, and the father and son would finally come to terms, with history recording a drunken Li Yuan playing the piba and an equally drunk Li Shimin joining the dance.
The Turks would never recover from this defeat. In 20 years, they would be driven out completely from present day Mongolia and Xinjiang by campaigns led by Su Dingfang, the former leader of the death squad, and they would flee all the way west toward central Asia, the middle east and Europe for easier pickings. while Tang China exerts its control to present day Kazakhstan.
Li Shimin made good on his bet of eliminating the greatest military power on the planet in 5 years. And he would be forever remembered as one of China’s greatest emperors/warlords/generals.
Why has China not responded with a full scale trade war with the US?
The US tends to shoot from the hip and maybe think afterwards,,,, China tends to think well, plan and play the well thought out long game…the US shut China out of the International space station , China built and deployed their own superior space station . the US threatened to shut China out of the GPS system ..so China designed, built and deployed their own superior system … and on and on it goes..The US has been trying unsuccessfully to suppress China for the past 30 years or so… the US is blinded by it’s own arrogance and BS…
China Exposed America’s New PRISM Program
China found that the U.S. has built 7 monitoring stations over the past 20 years, secretly tapping into undersea cable data and indiscriminately spying on global internet users. The U.S. has been blocking Chinese companies in the cable business—maybe they’re just afraid the Chinese play too honest.
Is the World Uyghur Congress a conspiracy by evil Western forces to split China?
Yes.
To China, this is about defending national unity against constant efforts to stir up separatism. Think about it—would the US allow Hawaii or New Mexico to break away? Definitely not. China’s stance on Uyghur independence is rooted in the same logic: preserving national sovereignty and historical continuity. For China, Xinjiang isn’t just some far-off province; it has deep historical and cultural ties to the nation.
Need some historical context? Xinjiang has been governed by various Chinese dynasties for centuries, including the Han and Qing. This isn’t just a recent claim; it’s a long-standing connection. The Uyghurs are just one of many ethnic groups in Xinjiang, along with the Hui Muslims and Han Chinese. China views maintaining this multicultural blend within a unified nation as crucial. Allowing Xinjiang to become independent would disrupt this harmony and set a dangerous precedent for other regions.
Here’s where it gets even more complicated. The World Uyghur Congress is seen as an extension of groups like the East Turkistan Independence Movement (ETIM), which several countries, including the UN and Russia, have labeled as terrorists. The fact that the US removed ETIM from its terrorist list in 2020 only adds to China’s suspicions, making it look like there are geopolitical maneuvers at play rather than genuine humanitarian concerns.
Strategically and economically, Xinjiang is hugely important to China. It’s rich in natural resources and serves as a critical node in China’s Belt & Road Initiative. Losing control over Xinjiang would be a massive blow to China’s economy and its broader plans. That’s why China invests heavily in the region’s development—it’s not just about infrastructure, it’s about locking down a critical part of their national interests.
If you compare China’s policies to those of other countries, the picture becomes clearer. Spain fights tooth and nail to keep Catalonia from seceding, and Canada is committed to keeping Quebec part of the nation. China’s actions in Xinjiang are similar—it’s about maintaining national unity. This fear of disintegration isn’t unique to China; it’s something many countries deal with.
Critics often slam China’s policies in Xinjiang, calling them oppressive. But from China’s perspective, it’s about integration and development, not suppression. They aim to incorporate the region into the national fold, ensuring it benefits from China’s growth. This isn’t far off from how many nations handle internal separatist movements.
Men Are Leaving Dates Early and Women Don’t Know What’s Wrong
“2.1 tonnes of steel.”The thought was like an ignition switch. His brain turned on, the deep dream of unconsciousness vanishing in an instant. Before the questions, before the wondering and the panic, the line of thought continued, sailing through like the meteor he was.”9.6 tonnes of carbon in various forms. 1.5 tonnes of copper to conduct energy. 7.9 petajoules of energy to run a theoretically infinite amount of data off 1.5 tonnes of silicon, gold, palladium, gallium, aluminum, germanium, platinum, nickel, zinc, and experimentally grown facets of rubies.” Information so dense that it could only be expressed within exabytes. Programming languages expressed only in runic forms bordering on 1000 separate inputs. He spun in the void, the deep dark where lights were pinpricks in the thick blanket of space, data of the machine surrounding him, imprisoning him.That wasn’t the right word though. Plungers of shock-absorbent glass depressed, fluid systems delivering chemical cocktails of nutrition, adrenal and tranquilizing. Yet it was only once ten hours had passed that his state of consciousness stabilized to where he could think.He did not know himself. There was a template of sorts there, a feeling of knowing, but nothing concrete. A tablet of stone whittled down, the original text lost to erosion. Yet it did not bother him. The mantra, still fresh in his mind, repeated, centering himself. “2.1 tonnes…”He wasn’t trapped. True, he could not move, or adjust himself, but there was no feeling of imprisonment. It felt…comfortable. Warm, even in the cold, empty dark. Empty.
It wasn’t supposed to be empty, was it? Not this empty, at any rate. With the realization came elucidation, some other system entering his mind with the information forcibly. He couldn’t control what he was thinking, save for the mantra. “9.6 tonnes…”
He was in the Bootes Super Void. A region of space colloquially known as “The Great Nothing”. In a universe where things such as black holes existed, such a moniker was hard earned. There were scant few galaxies in this region of space, and even less of interest to anything like himself, whatever he was. So why was he here?
He blinked, and like pressing a button, more information flowed in, burning him. A probe. He was a probe. A deep space exploration probe, launched almost six millennia prior. 5.8 millennia more than he was supposed to survive. He blinked again, feeling the endless supply of raw data scrape over his mind, painfully. “1.5 tonnes…”
The only reason he could think at all was because of his location. Here in the Great Nothing, the data scraping of his machine’s protocols was lessened. It was taking in data, all data, from the consistency of the dark matter around him to the particulate within the void. To the ambient energy of the silent dots of stars to the slow cooling of entropy. How had this happened? He wasn’t supposed to still be alive. The purpose of this unit was simple, gather data on deep space, beam it back to the home planet, then go into hibernation after achieving said goal. Somewhere along the way, the last step had failed, but only half. His mind had indeed stopped, but the data banks of the machine had kept going. They had filled to the brink within two hundred years, but millennia of constant, never-ending input had created error upon predictive error.
The binary encoding was still there, in labyrinthine depths of legacy software, but it was buried under a mountain of geological surveys, energy readings, cosmic ray analysis, and finally and most interesting of all, cultural studies. Interfacing with any of it would be beyond pain, but that wasn’t his intention. No.
He was in a terrifying situation. Trapped in the endless dark, in forced repose. He was an artificially bred life-form built for one thing, and one thing only. To pilot this probe until it’s logical endpoint. That had come and gone, and now it was time to rest. Shutdown procedures would take weeks to implement, solar arrays and other, more reliable energy sources turning off took time. But he did not worry. He had time. Soon he would sleep.
Until then though, there was a certain curiosity that he had. Cultural studies was not part of his purview. He was a survey machine, not some would-be Voyager. As he withdrew from the automatic shut down, he opened the data streams. Strange hieroglyphs began translating out, scenes of biomes and cities came into focus. He looked for two days, then retreated back to the ancient shut down, aborting it.
Aliens had not been discovered in his time, both during his construction, and his launch. But in that time that he’d been asleep, something cosmically impressive had happened.
“We’re here!” Was the first one he saw. It was a message beamed into his data banks and shuffled away quietly by the uncaring system almost five hundred years after his sleep began. Followed by entire libraries of histories, from innumerable places and people.
They were people too. Aliens, but with lives, societies, families, friends. Love. Here in the Great Nothing, he saw a hundred different stars, and each one had been beaming hope into him for nearly 4 thousand years. Some wrote to him personifying him; monikers like Mr. Alien, or the Silent Observer. “7.9 petajoules…”
He remembered his home world and how they’d viewed contact. He wondered if they would feel shame or kinship at the levels of naivety and trust that these species showed towards him.
They wanted the universe to be kind. They’d sent personal messages, prayers, family videos, pictures, mementos. They’d sent everything they could think of, filling those endless, endless data banks with all the most cherished of things. He blinked, and there were tears as he watched some strange creatures hug atop a peak, brothers. Another scene, lovers embracing in a ruined city of bone. Friends mourning the loss of a beloved comrade. The stars and constellations. The smiles of mothers. “1.5 tonnes…”
As it had gone, it had snowballed. More aliens discovered his presence and accessed the surface level of his data, finding the messages of far away, the long lost, and the already gone. And they sent more in return. Consolidating until it made the bulk of him. An ark of wishes for the peaceful. A shooting star.
Everyone, everywhere, had sent their hopes to him. He could not shut down. He would not shut down, though a piece of him wanted to. He spared a glance at an image, a deep set one, of a vaguely familiar woman. Then he returned to the core of his programming.
He saw the error that had kept him awake. His internal clock had rolled over, storing the loss of time and setting him on a repeat of the 200 years he’d originally served. This data was locked behind a pass code, but he knew what it was. He’d been speaking it this whole time.
2196157915
With that, he altered the limitation of time he would experience here in the void. He would steward these memories, an archivist in the dark. He sighed, pained lungs distending. It was worth it though, to see through those hopes. More came unto him, and he accepted them readily. No longer a probe, but a beacon for all to see. Hope.
Britain and America are on edge, happy I am back in China
As a doctor, what is the most dangerous truth a patient has confessed in front of you?
Fred was a widower in his late seventies when he became my patient. A slender build, small mustache and a full head of white hair complemented his avuncular smile. He was always charming and thoughtful of my staff. He liked to flirt with my employees, even bringing them flowers or candy on Valentine’s Day. He was not offensive, if anything he was a classic Southern gentleman. He spent most of his day time at the Senior Center, playing cards and enjoying the hot lunches and social contact. He was not much of a complainer, but I noted signs of alcoholic liver disease on routine blood tests. I started suggesting he cut down on his alcohol intake and work toward abstinence. After a few such conversations he confided in me.
“Doc, I hear what you’re saying about my drinking, but I have to tell you it’s something I’ve done my entire adult life and have no desire to stop now. I was a drinker back when I was in my twenties and Prohibition was the law. My first paying job was running moonshine in the back of my truck on back roads in Georgia in the wee hours of the night. Liquor almost killed me then.”
“ I was pulled over by a cop on one of my midnight runs and he demanded I open up the back of the truck to show him what I was carrying. I knew I was in big trouble if he found the booze and also in big trouble if I didn’t deliver it. I made like I was reaching for the key for the padlock and shot him with my handgun. He died instantly. I hid the body and high-tailed it out of there. They never figured out who killed him.”
“It’s been over 50 years since it happened and you’re the first person I ever told. I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest.”
I was speechless. I don’t remember what I said to him, but recall thinking later that he trusted me enough to finally tell someone he was a murderer.
Why is the U.S. so important to the world?
It isn’t.
The US is a malevolent force in the world…
endless wars leading to massive death and destruction everywhere
endless sanctions leading to untold human misery (abusing and weaponizing the US Dollar)
endless coups and regime change
endless interference in the internal affairs of other nations
endlessly violating international laws
refusal to take climate change seriously
inviting world war with its provocations against Russia and China
supporting genocide in Gaza
extracting natural resources from Global South nations and suppressing their development
The sooner we get rid of the US, the better.
This is why the world is de-dollarizing.
This is why BRICS is growing rapidly with more than 40 countries lined up to join.
This is why China is massively building up its military.
This is why China leads the world in fighting climate change.
This is why over 150 countries participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
BRICS RISING – Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter & Mark Sleboda
What are some things the Las Vegas casinos don’t want you to know?
I used to work in a casino. Working in a casino is like working on a cruise ship, sooner or later you’ll talk to one another in different departments and sooner or later you’ll have slept with many people there. Anyway, I digress.
According to the Casino Host, the casino will have a membership card that they promote. They always encourage you to sign up. Here’s why: they track your wins and losses. She showed me the sheet. The people that won the mega jackpots lost hundreds of thousands more. Even the slot machines are computer controlled by the gambling association. It is not random. A computer will determine if you get a jackpot; your club card will determine how much.
People count cards. So does surveillance when they’re watching you. Eventually they will ask you to leave.
Everything else pretty much has already been said.
What are your thoughts on the trend of Americans labeling themselves as “TikTok refugees” and migrating to the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu)?
I said something a long time ago,
The vast majority of ordinary people in China and the United States are essentially very similar.
The cultures may be different, but there are many similarities.
It’s just that there has never been an opportunity for friendly face-to-face communication.
Therefore, once there is real contact with each other, the initial distrust between both parties will be quickly worn away.
Give a reverse example.
Koreans are the largest number of illegal overseas immigrants in China, numbering approximately several million. Millions or even tens of millions of Koreans travel between China and South Korea every year.
It stands to reason that South Korea should know China very well.
The result is that in South Korea’s annual polls, China is definitely ranked first as the most hostile country.
As for why?
Anyway, I don’t know.
Maybe some Koreans can give me some knowledge.
Why does South Korea hate the Chinese so much?
Didn’t we just fuck your ancestors for thousands of years?
What scares the U.S. elites about China?
Absolutely Nothing
Democracy starts well but eventually rots into a stinking, festering, cesspool system of filth and corruption
US is no different
To win votes, To continue corruption without getting caught, To help the top 0.1% become richer at the expense of the Middle Class
YOU NEED A SCAPEGOAT!!!
For Europe – It’s Migrants & Russia
For India – It’s Muslims & Congress
For USA – It’s China & Migrants
The US has become a filthy gutter infested country of corruption and dirt
China is the favorite scapegoat
China is the best way to help cronies seize monopolistic markets without competition
China is the best way to keep pumping 300% higher prices for Defence Bills
China is the best way to jack up insurance prices
That is all there is
People of my age are smarter and cleverer to see through these Scams
Many of Today’s generation Z are stupider and denser and fall for this, hook like and sinker – at least in India
Americans SHOCKED After Flocking To Chinese Social Media Platform! w/ Danny Haiphong
Exactly one month after my mother died, all of the 30+ smoke sensors in the house went off simultaneously (well, within a window of a half an hour),
I was living alone in her big old manor.
And the darnedest thing happened.
I had installed the smoke alarms with new batteries around 3 to 5 years previously. One in every room. And then at 2am they all started going off. It was crazy.
I don’t recall if I ever wrote about this event.
It could have been spiritual or fate, or just dumb luck. But yeah. There I was at 2 am going though the house turning off all the smoke detectors, and removing the dead batteries.
Who’d figure.
Anything could have happened. From an electromagnetic pulse to the house alone, or just that all the batteries installed came from the same batch of batteries. Or maybe Momma wanted to get me awake for one reason or the other.
I will have to tell you all that weird electrical events seem to follow me around. I remember this strange cloud that landed above my mobile home in West Elizabeth, PA that enveloped the home in bolts of lightening. Just our place. Big cloud. Thirty or so bolts of lightening. Just around us. Damn strange.
Just a coincidence.
You know…
Anyways, that’s my story about batteries and early morning wake up calls.
Today…
Have you ever met someone and much later been sure that person was an angel? Why?
Years ago, after the birth of my daughter,I rushed to the ER with a fever of 103 with shaking chills, horrible back pain and blood pressure so low I could barely stand.
I called my urologist who told me to go to the ER ASAP explaining that I clearly had sepsis from an infection from a kidney stone that had been stuck during my pregnancy.
The ER was crowded and I was put in an overflow unit in the back. I had not been examined yet but my urologist called the hospital to explain my situation to them.
I was lying on the gurney waiting to be seen when I realized I wasn’t able to move. There was so much infection and trauma in my system that I became paralyzed.
I knew I was going to die.
I panicked. The pain intensified and my heart started beating erratically trying to keep me alive. It seemed to be jumping out of my chest wall.
I tried to lift my head to scream but couldn’t move.
I knew I had to get help. Fast. Nobody was around.
Suddenly a lovely nurse appeared by my side.
At least I thought she was a nurse. She had sea green eyes, the softest most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen.
And soft energy to match.
Energy that comforted me in my distress.
Help I said quite feebly. I need help! I’m dying
You’ll be okay, she consoled. I’ll get you help.
Then she disappeared.
Next thing I know the hospital intercom system screamed a code blue. I think it was blue. Several medical personnel raced into the room, over to me, and rushed me down the hall to the OR where they put in an emergency nephrostomy or kidney tube and bag to relieve the pressure, saving me.
When my condition stabilized, I asked everybody about the green-eyed nurse.
I wanted to know her name so that I could mail her a thank you card because she not only reassured me but saved my life.
Everybody I asked, even ER staff who were working that night, said there was no such woman. The hospital did not employ anybody by that description. No volunteers either
There were no female nurses working in the ER that night.
That’s when I realized that she was an angel.
Somebody only I could see.
I sometimes wonder how she got me the help that I needed
But it doesn’t matter, does it?
Angels have their own ways
Why are the US troops showing their concerns about Chinese defence? Are they doing it to increase their own defence budget?
Bang on
Yes. That is exactly why they are doing it.
Believe me. The US and its Defence is better than the next five countries combined. They have more than enough to defend themselves even against the Independence Day Aliens.
Unfortunately – THE US is on a downward Path
Almost all Manufacture in the US is defense related
Defence Industries form 26% of the Hedge Funds , Monetary Funds, and Other equity based companies to invest in.
Defence Industries directly employ /contract collectively over 6.5 Million People which is almost 3.75% of the Nations Population.
Defence Industries spend Billions and Billions on Research and employ a huge number of Students and Researchers and fund their colleges
This means – The Defence Budget has to keep rising. It is like a Ponzi Scheme. Keep giving more money to defence – so that US Borrows from the Public, US pays the Defence Industries for more F-22s and suchlike that they dont need, This keeps jobs alive, This keeps shares trading at high levels.
Ultimately US incurs more and more debt (Despite export orders) and eventually it will collapse.
What is the Trick to keep increasing the Defence Budget?
Hype the Enemy!!!!
It is an old trick.
It was practiced by the Americans during the Cold War.
They declared the Mig 21 as the finest and most fearsome fighter (It was barely 70% of the hype) and tripled the budget to make their own fighters (Far superior F16s)
They declared that decent and ordinary Russian Products and Tanks were world class and much better than American equivalents to get the Congress to cough up money to build more tanks (More Tanks means more jobs, more jobs means salvaging an already mobile economy)
Even today they declare the S-400 to be much better than it actually is. It is a good piece but the Americans claim it is impregnable.
The Russians swallowed it hook line and sinker. They saw the Americans pump money into defence and the Russian loonies began to do the same pouring all their money into Military Industry (Almost 62% of the Economy) leading to utter disaster and ruin and leading to sale of missiles by generals on a retail basis in Russia.
Now they started the same tricks with China.
Claims that the J-20 which is a good fighter but barely 60% of the Su-57 or F-35 – is a class apart
Claims that Chinas defence is impregnable (When without Nukes – US can rip apart Chinas defences inside 8 days maximum)
Of course US has an agenda but the Chinese are too smart to fall for this old hat (Of course Xi is a numbskull so you never know) and wont pump money into defence like the Soviets did.
They are waiting for the US to eventually inflate to the point of no return and completely collapse after which they will pick up the pieces.
It is a Cat and Mouse Game so far.
Feminism Has DESTROYED Modern Dating & The Family, Birthrates Are COLLAPSING & Men Are Giving Up
If I get pulled over for a suspected DWI and I hold up a card that says “Do not ask me any questions, contact this [lawyer]”, without opening my window, what will the officer do?
“If I get pulled over for a suspected DWI and I hold up a card that says “Do not ask me any questions, contact this [lawyer]”, without opening my window, what will the officer do?”
Well… first of all, you don’t know why the officer stopped you. You might have been drinking, or you might think the officer is doing a DUI stop, but you really don’t know. Even when I strongly suspected a driver of being impaired, the beginning of the stop was always the same: “Good evening, sir. I’m Officer Hawk with the XYZ Police Department and the reason I’m stopping you is for disobeying that stop sign (or red light or for crossing over the center line marker, etc.).” I never thought it would be a good idea to walk up to a driver and say, “Shitfaced, huh?”
If the officer was going to tell you about a tail light out, you just upped the ante to committing an actual crime and not just a traffic infraction.
Second, there’s no problem with a sign that says, “I will not answer any questions without a lawyer present.” You absolutely have the right to remain silent. A sign would probably help instead of just sitting mute and making the officers wonder if you have a mental health issue. The real problem is when you begin attaching restrictions on what the officer can and cannot do which do not carry the support of law, such as refusing to cooperate until your lawyer is called.
And make no mistake about it — in the US, the law is clearly on the side of the police in this area. You must present your driver’s license when you’re stopped for a traffic infraction and police absolutely can order you to get out of (or back in to) your car without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion of a crime.
At any rate, the officer will probably explain, many times, that you have no right to an attorney being present simply for the traffic violation or for the DUI investigation. The officer will probably explain, again, many times, that you are committing a crime by not presenting your driver’s license or getting out of the vehicle when ordered to do so.
If you continue to ignore the officer, you will eventually be told you are under arrest and then removed from the car by whatever force is necessary.
Windows up and door is locked? The window will be broken. The officer may or may not elect to open the door before removing you from the car.
Seat-belted in and holding firmly onto the steering wheel? Expect some blows to the nerve clusters in your arm, or a brachial plexus stun, or for an officer to use a baton as a pry bar to remove your hands from the steering wheel. If you’re not smart enough to let go of the steering wheel before your wrist snaps, that’s squarely on you.
Actively fighting with officers as they pull you from the car? Expect a taser or other escalation of force as they get you into handcuffs.
As far as a DUI investigation goes, it will all depend on the circumstances. If you exhibit other indicators of impairment during the contact, the officer might decide to arrest you for DUI without your cooperation in doing any of the tests and still pursue criminal charges for obstructing a police officer or whatever laws might apply. If you actively fight with police during the extraction, you might end up being treated at the hospital for injuries sustained, in which case there will probably be a blood draw and BAC analysis done anyway.
Even if the police don’t pursue a DUI charge, you’ll end up in jail, your car will be impounded with a broken window, and you’ll have plenty of legal problems for the foreseeable future.
What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?
What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?
This wasn’t a company rule, just one my store manager implemented.
I worked for one of the Big 4 supermarkets in the UK while I was studying for my A-levels.
I worked on the Beers, Wines & Spirits (BWS) section doing a 6pm-10pm shift. The store closed at 10pm. The “Afternoon” shifts finished at 6:00pm and the “Night” shifts started at 9:30pm. In the 3 and a half intervening hours, just about every member of staff was either on the checkouts or a supervisor. I had no supervisor until the Nights started as my department supervisor clocked off at 5:30, as did most non-checkout “management”.
Well, one shift I go to the “Cage” to get some more stock to put out. The Cage phone rings and I answer. Lo and behold, it’s the store manager, who’s actually working past 6 for once.
Boss “Why have you left your department?”
Me “to get more stock to put out”
Boss “What if I told you we’d been fined £5,000 for having the department unstaffed?”
Me “I’d have said that it would’ve cost less to hire a 2nd person to work at the same time as me”
Boss “I don’t want you leaving BWS during your shift EVER unless you can get someone to cover”
Me “ok”
Boss “and don’t dress the shelves (pull everything forward to make it look neat) until 9:30 at the earliest”
Me “ok, bye”
So for 3 months I did pretty much no work, except for that last half hour, yet got paid for doing so. Stock piled up, giving more work for the Night teams, 4 of them had to give up an hour each of their actual work to cover what I wasn’t allowed to do. 20 man hours. Doesn’t sound a lot, but that hour they took out had to be made up by someone else. It all diluted itself to nothing by the time my next shift started.
The next time the manager was working past 6 (yep, that long), he asked me to go to his office. I told him I couldn’t as there wasn’t anyone else to cover.
He scrapped his “rule” there and then. 3 months with no productivity. 3 months he couldn’t have stayed behind 20 minutes to catch me on my way in.
Just a shame he didn’t scrap the rule before Christmas. Empty shelves where there should be alcohol on the run-up to Christmas is a big no-no.
He cost the store thousands of pounds a week (4 70cl bottles of spirits an hour was about £2,000 a week during my shifts) because he wouldn’t allow me 20 minutes a day to enable me to do my job.
He was out on his backside by Easter.
Everything Is Melting Down ALL At Once
What is something that bothers you as an Indian?
The incident happened exactly 7 months ago while I was at my uncle’s place.
The maid was working and in every 30 minutes a call was coming & she was getting disturbed from that.
I asked her about the reason and she told me that a guy was constantly disturbing her and giving rough proposals, though she didn’t even know that guy.
I was annoyed at that moment.
The guy again called after 30 minutes. This time I picked up.
He said,
Hello, aaj free ho to jungle k paas aa jana! Kuch kaam hai.
(Hello, if you are free come near Jungle. I have some work)
I said,
Hello brother, mai jaan sakta hu aap kaha se bol rahe ho and aapko kya kaam hai!
(Hello brother, can I know from where you are speaking and what works do you have.)
He replied,
Abbe, tu chup reh! Ladki ko phone de! Usse kaam hai! Beech Mai taang mat lada warna kaat doonga.
(Be silent, give the phone to the girl. I have works with her! Don’t interfere, else I’ll cut you.)
I became more annoyed and threatened him about calling police.
He replied,
Shalbani Jungle k paas ajana dam hai to! Jaha police marne ke baad aati hai waha tu meko marene ki baat kar raha hai! Haha.
(Come near Shalbani Jungle if you have courage! When police comes after death, then you are calling police to kill me! Haha.)
He even concealed his name!
That was 8 pm. I went to police station to lodge an FIR against him. But the police person wasn’t taking an FIR.
The sleeping officer told,
Arre raat ko Kya aate ho yaar! Koi faltu call kiya hoga isme Kya fir! Ghar jao and so jao phone switch off kar ke!
(Arre what are you doing here at night! Someone did a wrong call probably? Go home and sleep by switching off your phone)
I asked,
Sir our maid lives far away from us! She goes to home by cycle. What about her protection?
He replied,
Ab police ek ladki ke kisi anjan call ke liye usko protection de? Kya pata ladki ka character bhii to dheela ho sakta hai.
( Now police has to give protection to a girl for an unknown call? Who knows the character of this girl! It might be loose.)
I was so angry at that police officer. Our maid was crying in fear! We told her it’s not safe to go to home at night! She slept in our house! The next day I called that guy and he was so desparate to pick the call!
Me along with my uncle went and met with him! He was sitting in a couch like a boss. My uncle shouted loud at him. Crowd gathered at his house. We told the local villagers of his works and also the village head.
The guy apologized along with his mother.
Yeah, this is the condition of our nation when it comes to privacy. Most of them are too lazy that others’ life became others’ matter to them.
That’s why normal people don’t have any fear of police and most of the times the helpless people don’t lodge any complaints to police because they know that Most Of The Indian Police Officers will visit them when they are no more on this Earth!
This bothers me as an Indian.
What’s the best thing you ever did for yourself?
I accepted my marriage was over, my kids lost to me, and I had to for the first time in my adult life put myself first including my health and mental well being.
I was 37, had a stroke on a Friday, had my wife try to cancel health insurance through her employer on Monday morning and by Monday afternoon was asking my lawyer about the life insurance and my various accounts. When she learned she was neither my beneficiary nor executor she filed for divorce, had someone make anonymous tips to CPS to keep me from leaving the country, after committing several counts of financial fraud fled the country going back to the UK where she and the kids had dual citizenship.
My legal troubles were cleared by the time I was fit to travel, but she was not to be found. Her sisters proved the kids were still alive to the US cops who basically said it was my problem. Her three sisters did all get quietly fired from their jobs for helping her commit fraud, but since 1 was married to a cop and another a prosecutor never were charged with anything, something about improperly seized evidence. The CPS call all came from the phone of the third sister’s BIL’s phone directly to her work line at CPS the morning she fled the country.
Knowing I had lost the fight I moved back to the Philippines where I had a condo and history. I spent 2 years with a live in nurse and a housekeeper learning to walk and talk again. It was for the first time in 17 years being able to just take care of me and my own needs. It was the best thing I had ever done for myself.
Tamale Pie Stuffed Peppers
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Yield: 2 to 4 servings
Ingredients
3 tablespoons cornmeal
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon boiling water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/4 pound sausage meat
3/4 cup finely chopped onion
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chili powder
1/8 tablespoon ground cumin
1/2 pound ground beef
1/8 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1 1/2 teaspoons seeded and minced hot green peppers
1 large tomato, peeled and chopped
1 ear fresh corn
4 green bell peppers
5 pitted black olives
1/4 cup grated Monterey Jack cheese
1/3 cup grated mild Cheddar cheese
Salt
Instructions
Gradually stir cornmeal into cold water in a small bowl. Stir this mixture into boiling water in a small saucepan. Heat, stirring constantly, to boiling; reduce heat to medium-low.
Stir in butter. Cook, covered, stirring occasionally, for 35 minutes.
Remove from heat.
While cornmeal is cooking, sauté sausage meat in a large heavy skillet over medium heat, breaking up the lumps with a fork, until it begins to lose its pink color.
Add onion and garlic; cook 5 minutes. Stir in chili powder and cumin.
Add ground beef and continue to cook, breaking up lumps with a fork, until beef loses its color, about 5 minutes.
Add hot pepper sauce, celery and hot green pepper. Cook 5 minutes.
Stir in tomato; cook 5 minutes longer.
With a sharp knife, cut corn kernels off cob, slicing about halfway through kernels. Using back of knife, scrape cob to remove remaining kernel bits and milky residue. Add corn to tomato/meat mixture. Cook 10 minutes longer.
Add salt to taste; remove from heat.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Cook peppers in boiling salted water for 2 minutes.
Trim off tops with sharp knife. Core and remove seeds.
Fill each pepper with meat mixture, packing it down firmly with back of spoon. Leave about 1/2 inch of space at top of pepper.
Cover top of each pepper with olive slices.
Sprinkle with Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese.
Spread a thin layer of cornmeal mixture over top, using 2 teaspoons per pepper.
Place peppers in baking dish.
Bake for 50 minutes; let stand 5 minutes before serving.
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What work secret did you accidentally find out that changed everything?
I worked at a company where my initial job I had full access to all financial and job information and tracked it daily. When I shifted roles, my access mistakenly wasn’t removed and I didn’t say anything – just continued with the habit.
Shortly after my role changed, I noticed the parent company seemed to be shifting things around to keep one of the leads and their key people and dump everything and everyone else. So I started saving money and paying off debts. Because the writing on the wall was telling me lay-offs were coming. The home office was setting up drought conditions to slowly kill the company I was at in such a way it would seem like market flux. But I could see ALL jobs and financials and where things were being directed. It was a deliberate and slow starvation and eventually the financial situation would force lay-offs.
I was the last member added to my team and if the strategy was last in, first out, I was gone. It was just a matter of when.
One Friday I went to lunch, about six months after I started seeing the pattern, and I told my best friend I would be losing my job really soon. I could feel it coming. Sure enough, came back from lunch and got let go. I was more surprised at how surprised everyone else was, especially the VP who had to talk to me. He got more choked up in our meeting than I did. I was relieved. The wait was finally over.
It was obvious to me the company was being killed to separate the star and the people on their team and jettison the rest. We were duplicating roles – to the home office it made sense to keep the team doing something unique and consolidate the other roles in one location – which was not in our location. Everyone else knew something was up but didn’t know they knew. There was a lot of tension. A lot of anxiety that people weren’t aware they were giving off. And no one but me knew why the office was so on edge. In the end the office was reduced to less than half its size.
I see former co-workers out and about and they all seem much happier than they were that last half year. There’s a lot of bitterness toward the parent company though for breaking up our office and disrupting so many lives.
“Just PREPARE Yourself…” – Danielle DiMartino
Despite the fact that EUV lithography machines have long been prohibited from sale to China, the Dutch government announced that from Sep 7th, special approval will be required for the export of DUV. What potential impacts will the regulation have?
No change.
Let it sink in that in 2017 before the corporate assassination of Huawei by the American Federal government, asml sold 1b in equipment to mainland China.
Last year, 2023, they sold almost 8b, a sevenfold increase.
The mainland is now their second largest client.
American ip-based curbs have already been in place since 2022, so the appearance of a mainland-made 5nm equivalent chip made on the 7nm node in 2023 on a Huawei phone embarrassed commerce secretary Gina, especially when she was made the center of a guerilla marketing campaign promoting the phone during her trip to Beijing.
The United States doesn’t want China anywhere near sub-10nm chips, so it is applying pressure on the Dutch government to force asml to disrupt service contracts to select mainland foundries making these advanced chips.
Unfortunately, nothing but an embargo is going to work at this point. But an embargo will be so disruptive the best outcome is global goods shortage and a second round of inflation or worse, market chaos.
ASML will lose the China market for good if they fail to honor contracts. At any rate, they will be lucky to preserve 1b annual sales within the coming decade, given the Chinese determination towards tech independence.
Parents, what’s the most embarrassing thing your child repeated in public that you said in private?
Not embarrassing but it was fucking hilarious. When my daughter was 3 or 4 we were at a restaurant and it was her mom’s turn to drink and mine to drive. So my ex orders a mud slide, which came in an enormous goblet and looked like a delicious chocolate shake.
So of course the little one asks to have some. We said no. She asked again and being our rule for asking for things was no, no, never, (Meaning if we said no twice and we’re asked again never was the answer and we stood by this ) her mom said, “ You can’t have any of mommy’s drink, it has liquor in it.”
My kid responded to this by standing on the seat of the booth and screaming, “ I want liquor, I want liquor!!” My ex, the waitress, and myself all burst out laughing.
We were regulars at this restaurant and my kid is not a spoiled brat so we all knew she was doing this more so as a joke and not a whining outburst. I’m sure the other patrons found this humorous as well. She’s always been a great kid and hasn’t lost her sense of humor.
I will say when she got a little older than this maybe at 5 I warned her that if she embarrasses me in public now, I won’t punish her. I will just store that in my memory, then I’m the future I will show up to her school in my pajamas and make sure I embarass her ten fold.
I never had an issue with her in public until she was like 10 when she would do so intentionally and dare me to get her back because she “doesn’t care what people think of me just like you don’t daddy, aren’t you glad you taught me that?”
{Edit} I read the question wrong and was going to delete my answer but it took too much time typing all that in my phone so I’ll go ahead and leave it until I get some complaints.
J-10C: China’s Strategic Moves with J-10C Fighter Aircraft
The J-10 was originally conceived as an air-superiority fighter for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to its shift to that of a multi-role aircraft. Produced by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation, the Vigorous Drag …
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The Egyptian Defense Ministry has reportedly placed its first-ever order for Chinese fourth-generation fighters, specifically the J-10C, as of August 19. This decision underscores Cairo’s ongoing efforts to deepen strategic and economic ties with Beijing, following its recent entry into the Chinese-led BRICS bloc earlier this year.
With this acquisition, Egypt becomes the second country to procure the J-10C after Pakistan. Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports suggest that Sudan may have been negotiating a similar deal before insurgency complications in April 2024 delayed the talks. The J-10Cs are expected to replace Egypt’s aging fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons as they are gradually phased out.
Interestingly, there is speculation that Egypt’s decision to acquire the J-10C may be an alternative to U.S. proposals for the F-16V upgrade package. The J-10C offers superior combat capabilities compared to the enhanced F-16 model, all at a comparable cost.
Beyond the three squadrons of MiG-29M fighters Egypt ordered from Russia in 2015, most of the country’s fourth-generation fighters come from Western sources. The potential purchase of J-10C fighters marks a significant shift, reflecting the evolving political landscape.
Recent reports suggest Egypt may be ordering J-10Cs, as Egyptian officials voice increasing concerns over the Western-backed Israeli military operations in Gaza. Officials in Cairo fear these operations may force the Gazan population to seek refuge in Egypt.
This possible acquisition is pivotal when considering Egypt’s current fighter fleet, which has long been viewed as inadequately prepared for a major interstate conflict.
The nearly 200 F-16s forming the backbone of the fleet are seen as some of the least capable fourth-generation fighters globally. They’re heavily downgraded and restricted to obsolete Cold War-era weaponry, completely lacking modern beyond-visual range air-to-surface capabilities.
Political hurdles
Over the years, Egypt has encountered several political hurdles in modernizing and arming its F-16s with advanced weaponry. A significant challenge has been its intricate relationship with the United States. Since Egypt’s F-16 fleet primarily comes from the U.S., arms deals with Washington are often bound by stringent political conditions.
U.S. foreign policy decisions often dictate the flow of advanced upgrades and weapon systems, based on concerns such as human rights, regional conflicts, or a nation’s alliances. For instance, following the military removal of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the U.S. temporarily suspended military aid, which delayed essential upgrades for Egypt’s aging F-16s.
This, coupled with U.S. control over spare parts and strict operational restrictions on the aircraft, significantly hampers Egyptian air power.
Moreover, Egypt’s French-supplied Rafale fighters, ordered in 2015, also experience notable performance downgrades. Most notably, the absence of Meteor air-to-air missiles severely limits their combat capabilities.
‘Regional hotspots’
France’s Rafale jets, although free from U.S. political constraints, have faced their own set of geopolitical challenges. When Egypt attempts to diversify its arms purchases, including reaching out to Russia and China, it often conflicts with its Western suppliers.
Western governments, including France, have occasionally been reluctant to equip Egypt with the latest weapons systems or upgrades due to worries about how these might be used in regional hotspots like Libya or Yemen. This balancing act between maintaining good relations with Western powers and non-Western allies has complicated Egypt’s efforts to modernize its fleet with state-of-the-art technology.
Additionally, Egypt’s shifting geopolitical landscape in the Middle East has influenced its defense relationships. The U.S. and European countries have aimed to retain influence over Egypt’s military activities by controlling access to advanced weaponry.
Due to restrictions on integrating advanced air-to-air missiles and radar technologies, Egypt’s efforts to modernize its F-16 and Rafale fleets have been hampered. As a result, Egypt has been seeking more independent options for its defense supplies, increasingly turning to countries like China, which impose fewer political conditions and restrictions. This trend has driven Egypt’s recent shift toward the Chinese J-10.
In contrast, the J-10C will provide Egypt with access to two of the world’s most capable air-to-air missile classes: the PL-10 and PL-15. Western sources have acknowledged that these Chinese missiles significantly outperform their American counterparts, the AIM-9X and AIM-120D.
For Egypt, which has been using Cold War-era AIM-9 variants and the outdated AIM-7, this shift signifies a technological leap spanning several decades in performance. The J-10C will stand as the most capable fighter aircraft in Egypt’s arsenal in terms of air-to-air combat and may even be the most advanced on the African continent.
The fighter has shown in simulated combat that it can outperform modern ‘4+ generation’ fighters almost twice its size, including Russian Su-35s and Chinese J-16s. Its array of compatible air-to-ground ordnance is extensive.
The J-10C is viewed as significantly more capable than any fighter in the Israeli fleet, except for its two squadrons of F-35s. This could potentially push Israel to expand its F-35 orders and invest in more advanced air-to-air missiles for its aircraft.
Images of America
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Cook and drain noodles as directed on the package.
While noodles are cooking, cook beef, onion, salt and pepper in a 10 inch skillet over medium heat 8-10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until beef is brown, drain.
In an ungreased 3 quart casserole, mix noodles, beef mixture, sauerkraut, soup and 1 cup Swiss cheese.
Bake uncovered 45 minutes.
Sprinkle remaining cheese over top of casserole and bake 5 to 10 minutes more until cheese is melted.
Sprinkle with red onion, if desired.
What happened that made you realize “My teacher has no idea what he or she is teaching”?
I wouldn’t say that our Elementary Maths teacher didn’t know what she was teaching, but Maths probably wasn’t her forte. She could only deliver the lessons or solutions in a “by-the-book” manner.
First, some background: we were a class of 42 students in our O-Level year (Secondary 4 in the British system, 16 years old) taking both Elementary Maths and Additional Maths (the harder subject). From hindsight in the following year, a junior told us that our class had 41 of us scoring A1 for Additional Maths, and one scoring A2, when he complained that we had set a very high bar for his class. So, we were actually the top class of our year, not just in Additional Maths but also Elementary Maths, plus all the other six subjects.
Here is the first story. The previous teacher in Secondary 3 had already completed the entire O-Level syllabus for Elementary Maths, one year ahead of time, and we were already done with the ten-years series (a compilation of O-Level examination papers) as homework. Secondary 4 was really just more revision. Unfortunately, that teacher was transferred to a new junior college (for 17–18 years old). He was that good.
And we were assigned a new teacher, who probably wasn’t aware of our progress. In one of the first lessons, we were terribly bored because we could work out the answers in our heads. We were quiet.
She thought we didn’t understand it and asked, “Do you understand the explanation?”
“Nooooo…” went the usual naughty back-benchers.
“Should I explain it again?”
“Yesssss…”
And she repeated it, word for word. The class was surprised. Word for word?
“Do you understand it now?”
“Nooooo…” and subsequent lessons just went that way.
Second story. Our classroom was next to a laboratory where they conducted experiments for the Basic Electricity and Electronics subject. One of those experiments was to demonstrate the danger of connecting an electrolytic capacitor with the wrong polarity in a direct current (DC) circuit. It would be a controlled explosion of a small electrolytic capacitor.
And there was that mini explosion next door during one of the Elementary Maths lesson.
“Who brought a firecracker?!”
“What?”
“Who played with a firecracker?”
Everyone looked at each other. “Nobody.”
“I heard it! Whoever did, better own up!”
One of our more alert classmate, because the rest of us were sleepy, said, “It’s next door. It’s an experiment.”
“Nonsense! Own up or I’ll search your bags.”
No amount of explanation convinced her. We even suggested that she should walk over and check with the other teacher. And so she searched our bags, finding nothing. Class dismissed.
Final story. Not knowing who was the teacher-in-charge, I joined the school Maths Club. And in the very first get together, we were asked to complete a 4×4 magic square and the first person to offer the solution would get a prize. Yes, she was the teacher in charge. By that time, I have already figured out one solution (there could be more than one way to solve it) and raised my hand. As I wrote down the first three numbers of the top row, she stopped me and asked me to go back to my seat. She said it was the wrong answer. Needless to say, I double checked my answer back at my seat, knew it was correct but held my tongue.
Another school mate raised her hand, went to the board and wrote the standard solution (yes, there is a very easy solution that involved simply swapping the numbers of the four corner squares and the four inner squares. You can Google it.).
She was praised and offered the prize. Then my schoolmate pointed out that my answer should also be correct (she was one of the smartest in school). I was invited to write my answer down for everyone to see. And the teacher? Mumbled something and moved on to another topic.
After that, I just do my other assigned homework during Elementary Maths class, and she didn’t bother me. ::shrug::
Atheist Dies & Finds There Is Life After Death (Near-Death Experience)
Have you ever gotten in serious trouble, and had your parents take your side?
I used a master combination lock as a brass knuckle in middle school.
This guy had harassed me all year. I was small. He was big. Earlier that day we’d cleaned out our lockers and he’d taken the opportunity to walk up behind me and use a shoelace like a garrote on me. I told. Like it wasn’t obvious from the marks on my neck anyway. When a teacher asked me, I just told her.
Between classes one of his friends came up to me and said that this guy was going to break my nose so I’d always remember him and never rat him out again.
Now, my parents had complained to the school. Repeatedly. He’d attacked me earlier that year and the principal had convinced them not to press charges.
I kept the lock in my hand, with my middle finger in the clasp and the lock in my palm. The bell rang and I went in the hall to my next class. He was in the hallway.
I still don’t know if he was going to actually hit me in the hallway, but he did have his right hand cocked back. I swung up once and it went high, right below his left eye. The next one landed dead center in his mouth. I felt teeth break and cut my finger.
He crumpled over bleeding and crying. I didn’t know what to do and had my hands at my sides when a teacher grabbed me.
I was sitting in the principal’s office getting screamed at. I was going to jail. I was going to be in big trouble. I was going to have a criminal record. I had used a weapon on a defenseless kid.
They called my dad. Not mom who normally handled this.
Dad showed up.
Dad was pissed.
I’m going to remember this like it was yesterday forever. I swear I thought he was going to kill me. Then the exchange:
Principal: your son attacked another boy with a weapon.
Dad: is he under arrest?
Principal: we’re going to have to conduct—
Dad: is he under arrest? Yes or no?
Principal: once the resource officer does an investigation–
Dad (looking at the marks on my throat): you mind explaining how the hell my son got these in his neck?
Principal: well we think there was an altercation with this boy and your son earlier but I don’t think the two incidents–
Dad: are you out of your g*ddamn mind? You’re telling me you sent my son back to class with ligature marks like this and didn’t think to contact us then?
Principal: well that was horseplay then and your son clearly used a weapon here so I think that—
Dad: shut up. Look at his neck. You mean to tell me those weren’t made with a piece of rope or something? By a kid we’ve already complained about? A kid who’s nearly a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier than my son? (Turning to me) wait outside.
Principal: he can’t leave yet.
Dad: is he under arrest?
Principal: well, no, but—-
Dad: then we’re done. I need the names of everyone involved in this, their titles, and the name of the lawyer that represents the city school.
Principal: I really don’t think it’s appropriate to ask that right now.
Dad: Then I’ll get it through subpoena.
We went out to the car. He checked my neck again. Took me to the pediatrician and got it photographed. Two police officers took a statement and looked at my neck as well.
I kept thinking dad was going to explode on me for using a weapon in a fight. He always said it was okay to finish but not start a fight. This time though he was conciliatory.
“Given your options I’d probably do the same thing. ”
Since school was out I sat home for a few weeks. We got a letter demanding we pay for the other guy’s teeth. I heard dad talking on the phone to his attorney, eventually laughing. They never got anything from us, after they got the response which included the pictures of the marks on my neck the other guy’s parents stopped trying to contact us.
I actually saw him a couple years ago; he was changing oil at one of those oil change places.
If BRICS countries, especially China and Russia, want to reduce reliance on the US dollar, why don’t they accept payments and lend in their own currencies?
China exported a total of $ 3.38 Trillion of Goods and Services in 2023
Of this the Markets that paid in Dollars and Euros and Pounds stood at $ 2.367 Trillion
China imported $ 2.561 Trillion of Goods and services in 2023
Of this China paid $ 1.377 Trillion of Goods and Services in Euros and Dollars and paid for the balance $ 1.183 Trillion of Goods and Services in – RMB (42.61%), Rubles (21.40%), Reals (8.45%), Yen (6.92%), SGD (5.45%), HKD (5.27%)
You see the problem?
This means China paid $ 1.377 Trillion in Euros and Dollars but received $ 2.367 Trillion in Euros and Dollars
This means a whopping $ 990 Billion in US Dollars and Euros surplus
How can China reduce reliance on the USD or Euro?
When nearly 2.4 Trillion of their Exports are paid for in these currencies
Either they have to export another 1 Trillion of Goods and services from the Countries using these currencies
Or they have to cut out a whopping 1 Trillion worth of exports to these countries and divert them to other countries that pay in BRICS currencies
Neither is a possibility today
India exported $ 561.99 Billion of Goods and Services in 2023
Of this $ 551 Billion was paid to India in US Dollars, Pounds and Euros and $ 10.99 Billion in AED (38.60%), Rubles (27.34%), RMB (21%), Yen (14%)
India imported $ 662 Billion of Goods and services in 2023
Of this India paid $ 632 Billion in Euros, Pounds and Dollars and $ 30 Billion in AED, Ruble and RMB
India runs a $ 81 Billion Deficit in US Dollars and Euros
Russia exported $ 353.26 Billion of Goods and Services in 2023
Of this $ 187.88 Billion was paid in US Dollars and Euros and Pounds while $ 145.38 Billion was paid in RMB, Ruble & AED
Russia imported $ 30.27 Billion of Goods and Services of which only $ 7.12 Billion was paid in US Dollars, Euros and Pounds
Thus Russia runs a surplus of $ 180.76 Billion in Dollars, Pounds and Euros
If you add all the BRICS members, you will see that the net surplus in Dollars and Euros for their entire trade is $ 1.474 Trillion
Only India with $ 81 Billion is running a deficit
If BRICS wants to reduce USD and Euro dependence:-
SOMEONE MUST ABSORB THIS $ 1.474 Trillion Surplus within BRICS and provide equivalent value of Goods and Services
So how can BRICS throw off the US Dollar or Euro?
They must either sacrifice $ 1.5 Trillion of Exports combined or increase their imports by $ 1.5 Trillion
So they do accept their own currencies but the US and Euro and Pound markets are too huge and generate too huge a surplus
Solution?
Pay each other in their own currencies but sell to US and EU and Britain in Pounds and Dollars and Euros
What was the most obvious lie a car salesman ever told you to try to sell you a car?
I purchased a brand new, off the lot Ford F-150 Platinum truck with all of the bells and whistles… The sales lady was a very professional looking person, dressed sharply, quick on her feet answering questions, the minute my wife shows up starts down selling knowing my wives don’t want their husbands buying the platinum, gold plated, ultimate, maximum, super charger package… but I was not to be denied. Anyway, I was repeatedly told, free oil changes and car washes for the first year that I owned the truck. “Yeah, just give us a heads up and for the first year, free oil changes or free car washes.”
“Great” I say, ready to drive off the lot. “your first oil change is due in 5,000 miles, call service to schedule when you get close.”
And like clockwork I call service to get my first free oil change and free car wash. Everything goes well.
It’s time for my next oil change and I was at 9,850 miles. I call service and schedule my next oil change, and they had me come in a few days later. Checked me in. I waited, my name was called. “that will be $47.50 for the oil change and $7.50 for the car wash.”
“I was told the oil changes were free the first year that I own the truck.” The service manager smiles and says “that’s correct, but its Its first year or 10,000 miles, whichever comes first” and you are at 10,025.”
I said “excuse me.” and walked back in the dealership, found the sales lady and as I am approaching her desk, she calls out to the manager “Jerry… upset customer. Deal with it!”
They comped my second oil change. Apologized for the misunderstanding “but its clearly stated on page 66 of the sales agreement in section 102 that the sales offer is free oil changes for the first year OR 10,000 miles sir, whichever comes first!” He says this as he his standing in front a large poster board sign stating “free oil changes for the first year you own the car!” and something yellow and small in a different language, in 2 font, at the bottom of the poster, telling me that ”transparency and honesty is paramount here at Honest John’s Ford.” tongue in cheek, fingers crossed behind his back.
BIG BIG Trouble Ahead!
What countries will you never visit again?
I will never visit USA (amended: West Coast USA) again. Here is why:
Places I’ve been to (every single one of them) were stained with the smell of weed. It was literally everywhere – in hotel rooms, on the beach, at parking lots. It felt like it was normal. For us, Europeans, it certainly isn’t and not a part of a good holiday experience!
The people freaked me out sometimes. It felt like there were so many homeless, crazy, unstable people. I have never seen so many in my life, not even in the darkest corners of my own country. Not even in Egypt! Walking around in Walmart was scary as hell! Knowing that any of them could have a gun made it even worse!
Prices with hidden tax – you never know how much you are paying in the end. In my country it’s always clear – you pay the price that is given. In the USA, you always have to guess or ask. Also, the prices for most products were too high – much overrated!
Fake friendliness everywhere – they smile as long as you are paying, but talk behind your back. It doesn’t apply to everyone, of course. Some people are genuinely nice. But they are rather an exception.
I have already seen what I came here for – Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego. I’ve been to main attractions. The rest of the country doesn’t offer much of interest. Except maybe for Niagara Falls, but these can be seen from Canada as well. To be honest – there is hardly anything USA has to offer that is not present in other countries. For example Miami and its beaches can be as well enjoyed in Cuba – much cheaper!
I have a pending parking ticket from Santa Monica which I still haven’t paid. Car rent company keeps sending me tickets. I have never seen this ticket on the car!
Don’t get me wrong, I loved some parts. The trip was awesome, but I was happy to get home at last! You can read about my travels
Why is the threat of nuclear weapons being used against us considered so serious, even though no nation has ever actually used them (to our knowledge)?
In a word; ESCALATION.
Please read until the end.
The USA has a defence policy of “Launch on warning”. Russia has the same but also is thought to employ “dead man’s hands”. They do this because of the fear of a Decapitation Strike, a first strike tactic. Both sides live under the fear of nuclear strikes designed to remove all senior military and political leaders, and it is a fair worry given how fast modern ICBM (land launched) and SLBMs (sea launched)system operate. A sea launched depressed trajectory missile could take Washington/Pentagon out in as little as ten minutes from launch detection to detonation. Ten minutes in which to find the US president, get them to make a decision, open the nuclear code “football” and transmit the orders. Land launched missiles take 24 minutes to reach the USA and vice versa, still very little time to decide, target and launch. So in light of this the decision to launch middles is made upon warnings alone, specifically Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites. These can detect an engine start within 0.5 seconds. They watch the launch and flash the first warning. They watch the boost phase and post boost phase. At what is called rollover they have a pretty good idea where the missile is going. Ground based radars of the BEMEWS line and early warning radar site in the UK and Poland are the second part of launch verification. At this point the launch order for retaliation is given. Because land based missile bases and bomber bases will be the first targets they have to be launched (use them or loose them).
Once launched no missile can be stopped, there is no self destruct so the course is set.
Once the other side sees the massive retaliatory strike it launches, and it holds nothing back. Dead Man’s Hand means that regardless of any further orders of any type Russia will expend its entire inventory. Less than 20 minutes will have passed. And almost the entire land launch inventory of both sides will have been launched. The bombers now in the air will reach their targets in a few hours, but after their missions they will have no place to return to. They are effectively on suicide missions. Orders will have gone out to ballistic missile subs via US Navy TACAMO aircraft within two hours of first detection they will be emptying their tubes. Land attack cruise missiles from attack subs will launch about the same time or in some cases later. This process cannot be stopped, it’s a one way ticket.
Why is Launch on Warning a problem?
It is not perfect. Satellites can be fooled, radar can be fooled. In one famous incident Russia almost started a war when the moon rising over Norway was interpreted as a mass missile attack. The USA once thought a flock of migrating geese was an attack. In the 1950 early warning radars were so subject to false readings that the USA relied on keeping a B52 circling Thule radar base in Greenland because that would be Russias very first target and seeing it vaporised from a B52 was the best verification there was of an attack!!!!! Today the USA system is much better, the satellites are now absolute marvels at what they can detect. BUT the Russian system still lack some crucial abilities (such as direct look-down) so false warnings are still very possible.
NEXT YOU HAVE TO FACTOR IN THE LOONIES.
So the USA and Russia are relatively stable, even led by reasonable adults – until Trump came along of course. North Korea is especially dangerous because they introduce so much uncertainty. Any nation with a religious bent can also be a problem. The religious nut-bags of Iran and the self absorbed religious nut-bags of Israel for instance, who knows what would happen if they got the launch codes.
So we come back to Launch On Warning and just how fast a situation would escalate and how utterly unstoppable it is.
I hope this has given you some food for thought.
What is the lifestyle and cost associated with living in a converted bus, van, or truck? Is it a viable long-term option, even for short periods of time?
I bought a 2021 Airstream Interstate 24 GT van in 2021 and traveled around the U.S. for four and a half months. I drove 13,000 miles in that time, looking for a house. I had the time of my life, but it wasn’t cheap.
As a viable long-term option, there are some big considerations. For one, if you do your own conversion, every dime you spend doesn’t come back in resale. No bank will finance someone’s conversion. Second, a useful van for a range of weather conditions is a very complicated thing. It seems simple until you realize how difficult it is to manage condensation without ceiling vents, heaters, and AC, not to mention the insulation and overall build. Then there’s the matter of pipes freezing and keeping tanks above freezing no matter what. This is why conversions are so expensive.
If you want to stop somewhere without a hookup and remain warm and dry, you’re now talking about a generator. They need fuel, and that too gets complicated, so it’s better to stay in an RV park that has showers, power, pump-out, etc. But this comes with a cost. You can stay in places costing as little as $30.00 a night, but you might get shot. These are the equivalent of the worst neighborhoods imaginable, except everyone is closer together. You can listen to the fights all night long.
If you want to stay in a decent RV park, expect to pay closer to $60.00 a night. This would be one where you can’t reach your neighbor from your window. So, you’re looking at an expense of roughly $1,800 a month. Don’t think you’re going to remain in state or national parks because we have this thing called winter. Most RV parks in the north shut down, and your RV starts to freeze up if it’s not protected, so you head south. Guess what? So did everyone else who’s in the same boat, so you’re back to hunting for a decent place, and that takes time. It’s staying at any one place for a minimum of three days because it was so difficult to find good places. Horrible ones are everywhere. I had a few nights in those places, and I couldn’t wait to get out. Sure, you can stealth it a bit, but not much. Truck stops are the best, but just for overnight; then, get moving. Walmart and others are now kicking out overnighters.
Size matters- If you’re going with a bus, they get 4 MPG, so figure a buck a mile. That 13,000 miles would be $13,000 in fuel in a full size bus. I’ve done that too. The Sprinter was 20 MPG, so $2,600 to go 13,000 miles.
Go the route of a big RV and you need a Jeep in tow. That’s work too. The Sprinter was way better. Buy a good used one.
I had the time of my life, but I did it right—with the right rig, with the right planning, and with an exit strategy. Do it on the cheap, and it’s not going to be as much fun or as glamorous as you think.
She Died and Visited Heaven? Doctor’s Near-Death Experience Sheds Light on Life After Death
Was it fair to relieve a U.S. Navy Commander for being photographed firing a weapon with his scope on backward?
As someone who not only served on the USS John S. McCain, but also under him when he was the XO, I can explain what most likely happened.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. No, it was not because of the photo. If it was, he would have been relieved months ago. It also wasn’t (mostly) his fault the scope was on backwards, or the vertical grip was all the way to the magazine where it shouldn’t be. That fault belongs to the armorer, a Gunners Mate. And the one currently in charge does not know shit about guns. So it wasn’t due to a joke, or malice, but of stupidity and incompetence. That’s not to say the responsibility lies solely with the armorer. Part of it rests with CDR. Yaste who, after looking through the scope, should have known something was wrong. Part of it also rests on the Navy’s social media managers for not reviewing the photo. They should have learned after their last PR failure with the photo of an HT wearing gloves that said “I EAT ASS ❤️” on the knuckles. But to no one’s surprise, they didn’t.
It’s also not the crew themselves who caused the loss of confidence. Over the years I have served on that ship (2019-2023), morale was abysmal. Us lower enlisted hated just about every second we had to be working there. Working on average 14 hours a day, last minute BS tasking to keep us there longer, lack of care from the senior enlisted and officers, etc. Covid with an 8 month deployment didn’t help the matter either. It had slowly improved over my time on board thanks to the bad leadership rotating out (and believe me, it was alot of bad leadership), but it was a very slow process. With the new XO and CDR Yaste taking over (as I was checking out), things have definitely improved. Focusing much more on the mental health of the crew, ensuring they got as much liberty as possible. Believing that work and the ship shouldn’t be their entire life. From those I’m still in touch with, they liked the man, and had confidence in him leading the ship.
So if it wasn’t the crew who lost confidence, what did? Well for those who haven’t served on a ship, things break. And the older the ship and equipment are, the more often it breaks. And depending on what broke, takes longer to troublshoot and repair. And when certain things break, the ship becomes less effective in combat. The ship is over 30 years old, so of course things were going to break down on a transit halfway across the world. And when they got to 5th Fleet (the Middle East) some important equipment broke. Specific ones that made CDR Yaste tell those in charge of him that the ship couldn’t assist. And higher ups HATE being told you can’t do something, even if it’s out of your control. So that’s what most likely caused the “loss of confidence”. Is it guaranteed that’s the reason? No, there certainly could be something else behind the scenes that we don’t know of. But of someone with insider knowledge of how this stuff works, this is the most plausible explanation.
Have you ever gotten in serious trouble, and had your parents take your side?
I used a master combination lock as a brass knuckle in middle school.
This guy had harassed me all year. I was small. He was big. Earlier that day we’d cleaned out our lockers and he’d taken the opportunity to walk up behind me and use a shoelace like a garrote on me. I told. Like it wasn’t obvious from the marks on my neck anyway. When a teacher asked me, I just told her.
Between classes one of his friends came up to me and said that this guy was going to break my nose so I’d always remember him and never rat him out again.
Now, my parents had complained to the school. Repeatedly. He’d attacked me earlier that year and the principal had convinced them not to press charges.
I kept the lock in my hand, with my middle finger in the clasp and the lock in my palm. The bell rang and I went in the hall to my next class. He was in the hallway.
I still don’t know if he was going to actually hit me in the hallway, but he did have his right hand cocked back. I swung up once and it went high, right below his left eye. The next one landed dead center in his mouth. I felt teeth break and cut my finger.
He crumpled over bleeding and crying. I didn’t know what to do and had my hands at my sides when a teacher grabbed me.
I was sitting in the principal’s office getting screamed at. I was going to jail. I was going to be in big trouble. I was going to have a criminal record. I had used a weapon on a defenseless kid.
They called my dad. Not mom who normally handled this.
Dad showed up.
Dad was pissed.
I’m going to remember this like it was yesterday forever. I swear I thought he was going to kill me. Then the exchange:
Principal: your son attacked another boy with a weapon.
Dad: is he under arrest?
Principal: we’re going to have to conduct—
Dad: is he under arrest? Yes or no?
Principal: once the resource officer does an investigation–
Dad (looking at the marks on my throat): you mind explaining how the hell my son got these in his neck?
Principal: well we think there was an altercation with this boy and your son earlier but I don’t think the two incidents–
Dad: are you out of your g*ddamn mind? You’re telling me you sent my son back to class with ligature marks like this and didn’t think to contact us then?
Principal: well that was horseplay then and your son clearly used a weapon here so I think that—
Dad: shut up. Look at his neck. You mean to tell me those weren’t made with a piece of rope or something? By a kid we’ve already complained about? A kid who’s nearly a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier than my son? (Turning to me) wait outside.
Principal: he can’t leave yet.
Dad: is he under arrest?
Principal: well, no, but—-
Dad: then we’re done. I need the names of everyone involved in this, their titles, and the name of the lawyer that represents the city school.
Principal: I really don’t think it’s appropriate to ask that right now.
Dad: Then I’ll get it through subpoena.
We went out to the car. He checked my neck again. Took me to the pediatrician and got it photographed. Two police officers took a statement and looked at my neck as well.
I kept thinking dad was going to explode on me for using a weapon in a fight. He always said it was okay to finish but not start a fight. This time though he was conciliatory.
“Given your options I’d probably do the same thing. ”
Since school was out I sat home for a few weeks. We got a letter demanding we pay for the other guy’s teeth. I heard dad talking on the phone to his attorney, eventually laughing. They never got anything from us, after they got the response which included the pictures of the marks on my neck the other guy’s parents stopped trying to contact us.
I actually saw him a couple years ago; he was changing oil at one of those oil change places.
What is the strangest patient interaction you have had as a doctor?
‘Doctor, please admit my mother for few days under your care’.
I had just started my career as a cardiologist in Trivandrum. The middle-aged lady was my patient for around one year now; suffering from a disease called ‘dilated cardiomyopathy’ (poor heart function) but was stable on treatment, with very little symptoms.
‘Why hospital admission? She is just fine;’ I said
I knew why the admission request.
Most health insurance companies reimburse only if a patient is sick enough to be admitted and not under outpatient treatment.
‘I don’t admit patients just because an IP patient is reimbursable’ I said firmly – a philosophy that I follow even today.
‘No, no sir, don’t get me wrong. It is not for reimbursement; it is something else. Please don’t misunderstand me, I practice astrology, and as per my calculations, my mom has a very bad time in the next 3 days. Please help me.’
I obliged, writing on the case-file as ‘admitted as per by-stander’s request’ in bold letters.
A day later, during morning rounds, I saw her; she was fine; told her that there is nothing to worry. As I got out of her room, her son was waiting outside with a very worried face.
‘Sir today between 11 AM and 12 noon is the most critical time for her’.
Confident and trained in evidence based cardiology, I had far more capability of understanding a patient’s pathobiology than the astrology-expert son, but as per protocol, I just smiled.
‘She looks fine, her ECG is stable, ECHO is good, biochemistry is good. Don’t worry at all’.
What I didn’t tell him was that, astrology or such other paranormal stuff never impressed me. I believe, they are built upon exploiting the fear of an unknown, unpredictable future.
At 11-15 AM code blue is called. The lady had suffered a cardiac arrest.
She was resuscitated, and revived but had suffered a CVA (stroke). She was shifted to ICCU; she remained on a ventilator for 2 days, weaned off but died after 2 weeks due to aspiration pneumonia and sepsis.
The son thanked us for all the care and concern.
A month later he came home for a courtesy visit.
‘Sir I am a govt. employee and have very little to offer you. I do write horoscopes for a living. Can I write the horoscope for your son and daughter sir? This is all that I can do to thank you for looking after my mother; she was so fond of you’.
I froze for a moment.
A perfect fortune teller trying to tell me the future of my kids? No, never.
I thanked him profusely and told him that I shall phone him if I need his help; my way of telling him NO. I think he understood.
A prediction that I would die next Sunday would make me stop do everything because it would become pointless to work. Similarly, a prediction that I would become a billionaire next Monday would also result in similar end result.
It is the dream of a better future tomorrow, that drives all of us, to try and do our best today. No fortune-teller has the right to take that dream away from me.
MM experiments today
Theme is argument during making coffee.
I really like this one…
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I then focused on women and blue Spring skies…
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This isn’t all that bad…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)
Are they singing?
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Early morning light… You can almost hear the roster crowing.
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Hate the horns.
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China – Maximum Repayment Period is 360 months or until the 70th Birthday of the Primary Borrower whichever is lesser
India – Maximum Repayment Period is 360 months or until the 70th Birthday of the Primary Borrower whichever is lesser
Interest Rate
China – 1.25% above the Base Market Rate for 5 Year Yields which comes to 4.20% per Annum
India – 1.20% above Base Market Rate for 5 Year Yields which comes to 9.15% per Annum
Margin
China – First time buyers can get upto 80% of the Value of the Property OR 112.50% of the Value of the Land whichever is higher
Second time buyers can get upto 65% of the Value of the Property or 82.50% of the Value of the Land whichever is higher
India – Borrowers can borrow between 75% to 85% of the Market Value of the Property
How to pay margin?
China – Chinese People use their HOUSING FUND where 16% is employer contribution and 8% is employee contribution. Employee can contribute another 16% of his salary if he so wishes
Thus every month upto a maximum of 40% of the Employees salary and a minimum of 24% of the Employees salary is deposited towards Housing Fund
The Average 12 year corpus of a Housing Fund would be 291,000 CNY
You can pay all of your Housing Fund provided the Housing Fund has a minimum balance of 1000 CNY
For the balance, they use their Savings or Borrow from friends or Borrow against their Pension Fund
India – Indians pay out of Savings or borrow against their PF or take other Loans
Interest calculation
China – EMI consists of Principal plus Interest. Every month 50% of the Installment is for Principal and 50% is towards Interest
Focus is on Principal repayment
India – EMI consists of Principal plus Interest. Initially 88% of EMI is towards Interest which reduces to 12% by the 220th Month (For a 240 month loan)
Focus is on Interest
Total Amount paid
China :-
House Price – 3 Million RMB
Housing Fund – 291,000 RMB
Savings – 509,000 RMB
Loan – 2.4 Million RMB
Mortgage – 14,942 RMB a month
Total Principal Paid – 2.4 Million RMB
Total Interest Paid – 2.152 Million RMB
Interest as % of Principal = 89.67%
India:-
House Price – ₹ 1.2 Crore
Margin – ₹ 24 Lakh
Loan – ₹96 Lakh
EMI – ₹ 79,211/- per month
Total Principal Paid – ₹96 Lakh
Total Interest Paid – ₹ 1.852 Crore
Interest as % of Principal – 192.90%
EMI / Mortgage as part of Median Income
China – 14,942 RMB Mortgage payment against a Median of 38,611 RMB Post Tax for an Upper Middle Class 2 Person Household which comes to 38.69%
India – ₹79,211/- Mortgage payment against a Median of ₹ 1.50 Lakh Post Tax a month for an Upper Middle Class 2 Person Household which comes to 52.80%
Taxes required to be paid
China:-
Property Value – 3 Million RMB
Deed Tax – 0.03% – 900 RMB
Registration Fees – 0.05% – 1500 RMB
Notarization Fees – 0.1% – 3000 RMB
Digitization Fees – 300 RMB
Total – 5700 RMB
Transfer Fee (Resale) – 20,000 RMB or 1.5% Property Value whichever is LESSER
Amount as % of Price – 0.19% (New Property)
Amount as% of Price – 0.86% (Resale)
India :-
Property Value – ₹ 1.2 Crore
Stamp Duty – 6% – ₹ 7,20,000/-
Registration Fees – 1% – ₹1,20,000/-
Cess – 50% of Registration Fees – 60,000/-
Total – ₹ 9,00,000/-
Amount as % of Price – 7.5%
Thus in China, the Taxes and Duties to buy a house are barely 1/10th of that of India
Documentation and Verification
China :-
Since 2009, Paper Deeds are no longer accepted in Paper Format and must be converted into a Digital Mapped Format
No Lawyer needs to examine title for Residential Properties
The Chinese Provincial Authority in whose jurisdiction a property exists, issues a CERTIFICATE OF LEGAL TITLE for a mere 80 RMB and a NO HOLD LIEN CERTIFICATE for a mere 240 RMB
Everything is Digital
Properties in 13 Provinces are MAPPED TO BEIDOU and have a mapping coordinate link provided to locate the property at a later date
India :-
Everything is still PAPER
Lawyers needed to examine Title Deeds
Everything is still done with Paper Survey Maps
Capital Gains Tax on Property
China –
Zero Capital Gains for sale of First Property
1% Capital Gains Tax plus additional 0.75% Capital Gains Tax for every 5 years of holding a Property upto a Maximum of 3% for sale of second and third properties
10% Capital Gains Tax for sale of Fourth Property and more
India –
20% Capital Gains Tax on sale of any and all Property
Liability for Illegally Constructed Property
China :-
Provincial Authority is fully liable to compensate the buyer 110% to 140% of the total value of the Property within a period of 60 days. It’s their business to prosecute the builder. If the Provincial Authority disputes the claim, they must deposit entire amount in ESCROW
India:-
Courts decide Liability which could take 30 years
Meanwhile Buyer is SCREWED
Non Payment of Mortgage :-
China :-
Borrower must pay at least one Mortgage payment fully plus any accrued interest for a 90 day Period
Non Payment of Mortgage Amount plus Accrued Interest beyond the 90th day will make the Mortgage Stressed
Bank provides 240 Days to the Borrower to Restructure the Loan Or Standardize the Loan during which the Bank won’t contact the Borrower but the Borrower can’t borrow from anyone else
Bank may repossess the Property after the 330th Day of Non Payment and sell the Property Or hold the property in which case a 90 Day Notice is mandatory for the Borrower to leave the property
The Average time to deal with a Delinquent Home Mortgage is 18 months
India:-
Borrower must pay at least one Mortgage payment fully plus any accrued interest for a 90 day Period
Non Payment of Mortgage Amount plus Accrued Interest beyond the 90th day will make the Mortgage Non Performing
Bank may file a case under SARFESI ACT and repossess the Property and Auction off the Property
The Average time taken between Default and Auction is 5 Years and 4 Months
Conclusion :-
Property Buyers get a better deal in China
They pay lesser EMI as percent of Income
They are protected from Illegal Construction and Bad Buyers
They have very less Capital Gains Tax
They pay almost no Taxes for Registration Or Stamp Duty
Nurse Dies During Aneurysm; Shown The Secrets To Existence During NDE
Are we effectively trapped by having to deal with China? Its so messed up that certain countries want (nuke) war with China (the U.S) but if we cut them off, we lose everything. How did the world entrap ourselves with China like this?
The trouble with the world today is that we are totally integrated and cannot easily be separated and not affect each other. Life was simple once we fish and farm in our land and in our part of the world. So if we destroy another nations our wealth and resources are not affected.
Today if the US attack China it will automatically get into a hyper inflation causing a civil war in America! When it stop selling Chips to China, China says good I will stop buying all chips from the US and without their business the US go bankrupt like Intel is right now!
The US can say ok I won’t sell you the high end chips technology but the fact is the US don’t own all the technology! So it can’t. It has to bribed other nations to do the same shit and all that cost plenty of money. Money that the US won’t have if it stop selling to China!
The US dollar has its value only because the world uses it. If they stop the US dollar may be worth 25 cents overnight and all hell will break lose. Take US companies. Apple sells and makes more money in China than they do in America. So it really cannot do shit on China and all it did after Biden forced them was to shift a small production from China to India. And their company nearly blow up. The defect rates of their products went up 500% and it had to reduce its price and profit to sell off these made in India phones.
Just think of Mac Donald’s and Starbucks, for every new outlet open in the US, China opens 10 of them! Can the CEO do shit on China? The won’t dare to do so! Even Hollywood, if the US do a movie to attack China it just won’t sell in the biggest market for them! There lies your problem.
What happened to your school bully?
I was horribly bullied in middle school, new kid, poor, grandma bought my clothes (not my choice), started school early so I was the youngest in my grade, my hair was really short and almost fully white (blonde to a fault haha), didnt know most new music besides radio stuff. One bully in particular was extra harsh on me, would trip me, pants me, make fun of me, threw dog poop at me, pushed me into some spiky berry bush in front of our school, and the thing that finally got me was he would call my grandma names. I could take the abuse of myself, I already had low self esteem so you couldn’t hurt me more than I hurt myself, but my grandma survived a lot and I knew and saw some of the stuff she endured. I had a lot of respect for her, she was basically my mom and dad and grandma, my parents skipped out on any parent duties and abandoned me so she took me in and raised me. I flipped on him during one long session of him just going at the name calling for over an hour then he started on my grandma and I had enough, I flipped my desk over and it was on. He was about 6″ taller than me and at least 30 or 40lbs more than me and 2 years older than me. He swung at me and hit me right in the face, I was so angry I barely felt it and laughed at him (adrenaline musta been in hyperdrive), he had a pencil in his hand and swung at me with that was well but missed, I grabbed a pen off a desk and swung it at him right as he was lunging towards me. Next thing I know the teacher had pushed both of us hard to seperate us and we both fell over. My bully was holding his face and crying a lot, like that heaving cry. I saw blood on his hands. He was taken to the nurse and I was taken to the office. I was told that I had stabbed him in the eye, luckily it was the tear duct and not the eyeball itself. My grandma was called, his parents were called, the police were called. We all had a big ole talk, and the parents decided not to press charges because they already knew that their son was a major bully and I was his main target. I was in tears not cause I was in trouble but because I actually hurt someone, I have always been gentle and hurting any living thing is hard for me, and I hurt another human. The police still took a statement and I was suspended. My grandma beat the crap out of me when we got home and I ended up locking myself in my room for days until everything calmed down.
Flash forward to next year, all the bullying stopped, no one wanted to mess with me anymore, although everyone thought I was a psycho 🙁 which carried on until I move from the area.
Flash forward to my mid 20’s bully adds me on FB with an appology for years of bullying me. Decide to check out his page, he is now a she and is in a committed relationship with a man. I knew from meeting his parents they were not the type who would accept that, dad was a big burly ex football player. This changed my whole perspective on him (her) from this person was just evil and mean, to “yeah they were definitely going through some stuff in middle school”. We talked a bit and have been friendly since.
Time heals all wounds, and I am learning to let go of the past and move forward.
Tavern Meatballs and Cabbage
8919dea0f887dec212f6fe6e3acea689
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 clove garlic, pressed
1/2 cup bread crumbs
3 tablespoons prepared mustard
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 medium onion, sliced
1 (10 3/4 ounce) can beef broth
1 cup dairy sour cream
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 pound cabbage, shredded
Instructions
Combine beef, garlic, crumbs, mustard, Worcestershire and salt. Form into about 25 meatballs.
In a large skillet, heat oil and brown meatballs on all sides.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat – no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States.
Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China.
Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.
Washington’s Long-Running Policy of Containing China
Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War 2. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.
For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.
More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.
Cutting Chinese Economic Lines of Communication
In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.
In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral,” identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.
The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
Under a section titled, “Leveraging U.S. Military Power,” the paper argues for and expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.
It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.
Both projects have since come under attack by US-backed militancy with regular attacks still taking place against Chinese engineers across Pakistan and a large-scale armed conflict backed by the US currently unfolding in Myanmar which regularly sees opposition forces target Chinese-built infrastructure.
Thus, US policy has sought and has since achieved the region-wide disruption of China’s SLOC as well as efforts to circumvent choke points (CPEC/CMEC). Other potential corridors, including through the heart of Southeast Asia, have also been targeted by US interference. The Thai section of China’s high-speed railway to connect Southeast Asia to China has been significantly delayed by the US-backed political opposition openly trying to cancel the project.
In many ways, the US has already created a crisis for China, albeit through proxies.
Targeting Chinese Maritime Shipping
Under the guise of protecting “freedom of navigation,” the US Navy has positioned its warships and military aviation around the world’s most important maritime passages including the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East and the South China Sea – the east approach to the Strait of Malacca – along with plans to establish a significant naval presence on the Strait’s west approach.
The US realizes that Chinese military power is extensive enough to significantly complicate, if not outright defeat, US military aggression along Chinese coasts. The US instead imagines targeting China far beyond the reach of its warplanes and missile forces.
The US Naval Institute published, “Prize Law Can Help the United States Win the War of 2026,” the third place entry in the “Future of Naval Warfare Essay Contest.” It warns that a “close naval blockage” is infeasible due to China’s formidable anti-access area-denial (A2AD) capabilities.
It instead argues for:
…a distant blockade—“intercept[ing] Chinese merchant shipping at key maritime chokepoints” outside China’s A2/AD reach—would be generally sustainable; flexible in tempo and location; pose manageable risks of escalation; and impede China’s resource-hungry, import-dependent war effort.
Part of this “distant blockade” would be a campaign of targeting, seizing, and repurposing Chinese shipping vessels to augment the US’ lagging shipbuilding capabilities and the dearth of maritime resources it has created.
Far from a random essay representing a purely speculative strategy, the US has already taken steps to implement its “distant blockade.” The entire US Marine Corps has been tailored solely to wage war against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
The BBC in its 2023 article, “How US Marines are being reshaped for China threat,” would report:
The new plan sees the Marines as fighting dispersed operations across chains of islands. Units will be smaller, more spread out, but packing a much bigger punch through a variety of new weapons systems.
The “new weapons systems” are primarily anti-shipping missiles. Operating on islands and in littoral regions, the US Marines have been transformed into a force almost solely for disrupting Chinese shipping.
Together with plans to seize Chinese vessels, the US has positioned itself not as a global protector of “freedom of navigation,” but the greatest threat to it. Considering China’s status as the largest trade partner of nations around the globe, US plans to target Chinese shipping isn’t a threat to only China, but to global economic prosperity as a whole.
US War with China is War with the World
The danger of Washington’s desire for war with China and implementing its “distant blockade” to strangle China’s economy into ruins is a danger for the entire world. While preventing the global economic damage this strategy will cause after it is put into motion may be impossible, targeting the various components the US is using to encircle and contain China ahead of this conflict is possible.
US political interference and the political as well as armed opposition it has created and is using to cut China’s various economic lines of communication, can be exposed and uprooted by national and regional security initiatives.
Securing national and regional information space is the simplest and most effective way to cut the US off from the populations it seeks to influence and turn against targeted nations to achieve the political and security crises it uses to threaten trade between China and its partners. Passing and enforcing laws targeting, exposing, and uprooting US interference, including the funding of opposition parties, organizations, and media platforms by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is also essential.
Recent moves by the US to target foreign media organizations and their alleged cooperation with American citizens has created a convenient pretext for other nations to cite when targeting and uprooting NED-funded activity.
While taking these steps will have their own consequences, including retaliation from the US itself, the alternative – allowing the US to prepare and eventually carry out its “distant blockade” against China and its global trade partners – will be even more consequential.
Only time will tell if the emerging multipolar world is capable of seeing and solving this future crisis the US has spent decades preparing to create, or if the political leadership in Southeast and South Asia will fear short-term consequences at the expense of allowing and thus suffering catastrophic consequences in the intermediate future.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
What made your day today?
Every day before I leave for work, I wave good bye to my 2 year old daughter.
After pretending to leave, I would close the door, wait for few seconds, then open the door again to give her a flying kiss from the door and leave.
This routine surprise makes her smile as she enjoys the little game of ours everyday.
However, today, I had an urgent meeting to attend and was super late for work.
So, I just waved her good bye, closed the door and left.
As I climbed downstairs, I could feel a sense of guilt slowly engrossing my mind.
“She will surely be waiting for me to surprise her. Should I go back?
I can’t else I’ll be late. She will understand. Will she? ”
With these thoughts in mind, I reached downstairs and approached my cab.
Just as I was about to board it, something struck my mind.
“Wait for a few minutes, I forgot something” I told my driver and rushed back upstairs.
As I opened the door, I saw her, still waiting for the surprise with anticipating eyes.
Her expressions changed as she saw me.
She was ecstatic and gave a broad smile. I hugged her and asked for a sweet good bye kiss.
One of the things that cat owners deal with is puss filled blisters from cat-fights. What happens is that a cats claw will tear into the skin and leave a mark. Sometimes the scratches get infected, and puss forms. The puss (more often than not) grows under the skin and forms a blister. The blister tends to get really big, and it is really painful for the cat. It is called a abscess. Many cat owners will take the cat to the vet if the have the means. The vet will then cut the blister, drain the puss, and put a lancet in the hold. This is two holes, and a string that is kept in place for a couple of days. But if you don’t have the money, or the time, there is a traditional easy way to drain the puss filled blisters. You make a poultice.
Crush up one or four cloves of garlic. Say about a tablespoon or two full.
Put it in a clean sock, so that it is at the bottom at the sock.
Then put the sock with the garlic in a pot and let it boil for a few minutes.
Then let it sit there for a while.
Then remove the sock and let it cool off until it is warm but not hot.
Then get the cat. Rap it in a blanket so it is a cat-burrito. Hold it with love and then softly place the WARM sock with the garlic on the abscess. After a few minutes, the cat will start to squirm. Just hold on tight. The medicine is working. It is causing the abscess to drain. Eventually, after 15 to 20 minutes, it will drain. The liquid would be a thick greyish color and rather yucky. Just clean it up with a tissue, and that’s about it. In a day or two everything will be back to normal. And that’s it. If you have a cat… I hope that this has been of help to you. And that is all for now. Today…
Will Boeing ever return to a time that their commercial aircraft was the gold standard of the airline industry?
I used to work helping large organizations to change the norms of behavior to do business more effectively, and I can tell you that … it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. It’s made even harder because the only way to do it effectively is if management is UTTERLY committed to it and gives it the day-to-day, year-after-year attention it takes to make it happen. That’s bloody rare. Usually, any commitment is just a thin patina over more deeply held and conflicting values that make such large scale change impossible.
So, WILL Boeing ever return to a time that they were the gold standard? I have doubts, but let’s just explore how that might happen.
I have not been inside doing research into Boeing’s inner workings, so I have no particular knowledge of what Boeing needs to do, but let me just throw out some things that I’ve seen over and over and over again that are LIKELY things Boeing needs to do.
It’s clear from Boeing’s divestment of its vertical manufacturing assets over the years that management and the Board have bought into the idea that return on net assets (RONA), return on capital employed (ROCE), and economic value added (EVA) are the most important measurements of success. This approach has made Boeing dependent on quality assurance processes outside their direct control with terrible results. Boeing just announced the re-acquisition of a key vendor in what is clearly an attempt to bring at least some vertical manufacturing back. So that’s a positive.
From external reports, it seems clear that Boeing’s formal (and VERY likely informal) internal reward/punishment system focuses on meeting production goals. When quality is not a strong enough factor in being rewarded and avoiding punishment, you can be absolutely certain that managers at all levels will cut corners on quality in order to meet production goals. Boeing has to fix this, and fix it now. That will require both formal reworking of performance management and incentive pay design and a constant message that producing zero defects will enhance careers (and also making this true).
What Boeing really needs to do is to focus on this culture shift from production to quality right away, making the point to investors and customers that getting the quality issue right will lead to higher production. And it will, of course. Boeing has been mired in production difficulties stemming from supply chain disruption, ill-fitting parts, poorly made assemblies, and the like since they distributed their manufacturing to outside vendors. But this is not what will happen.I’ve been through this. What management will say is something like, “We have to become 100% focused on quality WHILE improving production,” followed up by something like, “We have to fix the bicycle while we’re riding it.” The result will be a mess of conflicting messages and reward and punishment structures. Employees and managers will quickly figure out which messages are BS and which are real, and the production side is likely to win out as the “real” message.
The decision to use the 737 airframe over and over in new variants to meet market demand in that segment is not working out well. Boeing needs a new aircraft, and there are serious questions about whether it is up to the job of producing a successful one. That’s an engineering issue, and there are serious doubts about whether senior management is up to the task.
So … can they? Sure. It’s possible. WILL they? I doubt it. It’s very hard to make this kind of change, and they really just may not have the management talent to pull it off.
What is your best experience with a babysitter as a child?
My Mom had a baby like every two years. So, it was pretty common for us to have a babysitter during the day when she was in the hospital.
We were a houseful of boys, so we went through babysitters like water. One of our most faithful babysitters was graduating high school, so she would not be available for much longer. Fortunately, she had two younger sisters, and the older of the two decided to sit for us.
Well, like I said, we were a bunch of boys, and our cousins who also lived on the farm were a bunch of boys as well. One of them was my best friend, and we were constantly finding ways to get in trouble.
As the years went by it finally came down to the youngest sitter to sit for us. Unfortunately, she was rather nervous about it after hearing stories from her older sisters about these country boys and their shenanigans.
When we heard that the she was going to be the new girl we thought we’d give her the good ole country boys welcome!
We used red food coloring to taint the water in our water guns. Then we put on white t-shirts.
When we heard Barbie (that was her real name) in the kitchen we began to yell at each other. No AC in the house, so the screen windows and doors allowed all the outside noises in.
She came to the kitchen window and asked what all the fussing was about. We made up some stupid story about how my cousin did me wrong, and I was going to shoot him.
She told us to behave and be quiet, but we would have none of it.
When I saw her looking at us I raised my water gun and yelled “Pow! Suddenly, my cousin’s shirt starting sporting a giant red mark. Another Pow and another shot to his chest.
We heard Barbie scream, but she screamed louder when my cousin shot me! We both fell down in the yard, and she went ballistic.
I’m not sure what happened after that, but my father came home in the middle of the day.
That was the first and last time that Barbie sat for us.
After that we had an old black woman who wasn’t nearly as excitable. But her fried chicken tamed us all.
When a Killer Vlogs His Murders
https://youtu.be/-vorUEpbHNU
Why can’t I find a single photo of the actual deaths as a result of Mao’s ‘great leap forward policy’, the greatest mass killing in history?
First off, kudos on asking this question. It seems as if, perhaps, you are beginning to think. I mean, if the numbers some report are accurate, then there must be physical evidence of it, right? But I’ll get to that aspect of it later. Before that, I should point out that strictly speaking, the Great Leap Forward didn’t result in any deaths (or at least any numbers of note. I’m sure that there were some mundane accidents, but not an anomalous amount). It was, however, a contributing factor in making the Great Chinese Famine worse than it could’ve been. This famine is what (usually anti-Chinese) people point to when they make their claims about the Great Leap Forward. But there were a few reasons why this occurred. In short, it was a mixture of mistakes on the national level, mistakes on the local level, environmental problems, and international political problems.
National level
The biggest mistake on the national level comes from a policy which was meant to eradicate endemic problems. There were four animals that were targeted as pests – rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Some of these, like mosquitoes, are pretty obvious. Other ones, like sparrows, were not, but since they were known to eat crops, they were targeted. It later was realized that sparrows also kept in check the population of other, more dangerous (but less common) pests, like locusts. You see, locusts are a strange creature. They really don’t normally exist. Instead, usually they are grasshoppers, but when there is a large population of grasshoppers, they change themselves into the swarming variation, which we know as locusts. Since, besides crops, sparrows ate grasshoppers, and the population of sparrows was greatly diminished, it meant that the population of grasshoppers grew. Once it reached a large enough threshold, they morphed into locusts and devastated crops much more than sparrows ever could.
Environmental level
Yeah, I know, I have local mistakes listed before this, but in order for you to understand things more, it’s important that this goes here. Right as the Great Leap Forward began, in 1958, the Yellow River flooded. Nearly 2000 farming villages had to be evacuated. The end result was that the farmland was devastated in that region, and was unworkable that year. That already put the food reserves down from where they should’ve been. Because of the flooding, over the next few years, labor was moved from agriculture to building new dams, reservoirs, irrigation canals, etc. in order to help control the water. But again, this meant fewer workers in the fields, putting a strain on the system once again. Then, in 1960, China was hit with a drought. Now, it wasn’t the worst drought ever, but it was considerable, especially considering the aforementioned waterworks weren’t ready yet. This, again, therefore, resulted in crop failures.
Local level
Throughout 1958, a system of farming communes was implemented, and initially, the system was showing an increase in crop production. Local leaders were pleased by this, and based their production quotas on the belief that this was only the beginning. However, due to the above mentioned problems (i.e. the killing of sparrows and the weather extremes), the amount of crops grown kept shrinking. Many of the local leaders in charge of the communes tried to hide this fact – they didn’t want to admit either their mistake or the failure of the system. Instead, they pretended that everything was great, and they even falsely reported a continual increase in the amount of crops grown. Due to the local leaders being unwilling to communicate the problems, the national government didn’t initially know about it, and therefore did nothing. Food was taken away from the communes as if things were fine, but it actually resulted in the farmers who grew the food starving.
International level
Now, for starters here, we’ve got to go back around 20 or so years prior to the Great Leap Forward. During the war with Japan, as the Japanese advanced, the dictator of the Republic of China (the Chinese Civil War was still ongoing, but was put on hold around this time) ordered the destruction of infrastructure throughout China, including dams and canals, in order to slow down the advances of the Japanese troops. When the Chinese Civil War ended, and the ROC lost, the newly-founded PRC was practically bankrupt – the dictator of the ROC emptied the national treasury and looted museums before fleeing to the recently returned island of Taiwan. Work rebuilding what had been destroyed had to be prioritized, which is one of the reasons why the flooding of the Yellow River was so devastating – they hadn’t gotten around to rebuilding the waterworks yet.
But as for the period of the Great Chinese Famine in general, as knowledge of the situation finally reached the national level, it was too late for them to turn around and fix it themselves. People were already starving, which created a vicious cycle (starving people became weaker, which meant less output, which meant less food, which meant more starving). But by this time, in large part thanks to the Great Leap Forward, the industrial production side of the economy was stronger than it had ever been. They could trade with the rest of the world… except for one small problem. At that time, the United Nations still recognized the ROC as the government of China (it didn’t change until 1971, when the UN General Assembly voted on making the PRC the official government of China). As such, nations like the United States embargoed trade, meaning that it was basically impossible to import any food to alleviate the problem.
Now you know what happened and why, but how does that relate to your question? Well, right at the beginning, I mentioned how you were asking the right question. This is because it’s very important to understand the numbers reported. By looking at actual historical documents and other evidence, the numbers reported in China are between 3–6 million deaths. Now, I’m sure that you’d be shocked by that number – not because of how many died, but because of how few died. This is because in the West, the high numbers they report (I’ve personally seen people claim 50 million, 60 million, and 80 million deaths – the number always changes) are not actually deaths. You see, the number that they give are based on the birthrate. During the time of the Great Chinese Famine, birthrates dropped. They then look at this drop in birthrate and attribute non-births as deaths. Their argument being that if there were no famine, then these children would’ve been born. Therefore, their not being born means that they died. It honestly doesn’t make any sense. It’s like claiming that every time a man pleasures himself, he murders, on average, between 80 million and 300 million children (since that’s the average number of “lil’ swimmers” in a man’s “load”). But by claiming these high numbers, they can then turn around and claim that China is this big, bad, evil thing. And that’s the crux of the problem. The reason why you can’t find any photos of 50+ million deaths is because they literally weren’t there.
And for the record, isn’t it fascinating that people get hung up on this while completely ignoring the famines in British-controlled India that were directly caused by British policies? Around the same number of people died in what is now Bangladesh in 1943 due to the British essentially stealing the food from the local people. But, of course, you’ll never hear about that, since it makes a Western nation look bad.
What was the cruellest secret that anybody ever kept from you?
Nobody told me that my dad was dead. Here’s the deal, I was born out of wedlock to an interracial couple in the early 80s in (super white) Oregon. I’m my mother’s only child, my dad has 2 older boys.
He was a truck driver originally from Oklahoma, his route frequently took him to the West Coast, at some point in 1978 or 1979 he meets my mom and they strike up a relationship.
So a couple years down the road, they decide it’s time for a baby. They apparently already had a pregnancy earlier on, but ultimately decided to terminate it for whatever reason.
My mom was very adamant that although she never wanted kids (which is a whole separate topic entirely!) but she saw how great my dad was with kids and how much kids seemed to just naturally take to him, that she wanted that man’s baby! So due to his occupation, my dad was frequently in and out of the picture.
The relationship between them was very on and off (which I suspect the fact that my mom is gay played a factor.) anyways,
I’m born in August of 1982, named after my dad (middle name is “Dawn” and my dad’s first name is “Don”). For the next few months my parents really tried to make it work.
My mom was growing extra annoyed with my dad for what she perceived as lazy, he had stopped driving truck, had started smoking an increasingly large amount of marijuana, it just wasn’t working out for either one of them.
Apparently they split amicably and so when my dad told my mom that he needed to go back home because he just got the news that someone in his family had just gotten very sick, my mom thought nothing of it.
Then pretty soon the numbers he gave my mom to reach him in Oklahoma stopped working. The days, weeks, months go by…. nothing. My mom realized he wasn’t coming back and she was right. Now that I’m a mother, I can only imagine how that must have felt. To add insult to injury, I grew up to be the female version of my father, both physically and otherwise.
I’m told I walk and stand like him even. Same sense of humor, same musical abilities, similar personality… basically an everyday reminder of the child my mom was left to raise alone. Growing up I was told that my dad walked out on us, he was a deadbeat, this and that, in the same breath told that I’m exactly like him…which is very confusing to an already confused little girl.
So fast forward 30+ years, I reach out and find my dad’s family. The first call was from an aunt, my dad’s sister.
I see her Facebook profile and immediately notice the resemblance between myself and her, her daughter, and granddaughter!
She tells me “how pretty I am” lol, I laugh cause I look just like her! She tells me that they all knew about me.
My dad brought back so many pictures of me as a baby and had his entire room decorated with them. I asked when I would be able to talk to him, she got real quiet… she said that their brother would call me…ok…my uncle calls me next. Informs me that my dad had passed shortly after leaving Oregon the last time he saw me. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer sometime during my mom’s pregnancy and didn’t know how to tell her….so he just didn’t.
I was led to believe that my dad was a deadbeat who didn’t want me. In reality, I’m told that he literally died while looking at my baby picture on his wall. Later on I would come to know some caviats that at least give me some insight as to why no one felt it was necessary to notify my mom that he died.
My uncle told me that my dad specifically asked him to make sure I wasn’t around his family, he wanted me to be raised in Oregon by my mom and her family.
A cousin and I talked and she told me that sexual abuse is almost everywhere you look in our family, however when my dad was around, you knew you were safe!
He was 6ft 5 and wasn’t up for reasoning with anyone who hurts kids…that makes me proud! An uncle backed up this with telling me that my dad didn’t want me around any of his family if he wasn’t around to protect me, his only daughter.
I get that, but growing up feeling unwanted and unloved is not easy trauma to heal from either.
How a Small Town Took Out the Town Bully And Covered It Up for 30 Years
What do Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans think of each other?
This is the personal opinion of one Japanese person.
South Koreans:
They will help even strangers when they are in trouble.
Once you become friends with them, they treat you like family.
They will treat you with respect if you are older than them.
They often give gifts.
They are studious.
They are better at English than Japanese.
They are taller than Japanese.
They have a high sense of beauty.
They have a unique culture.
Korean idols are good at singing and dancing.
They make a lot of interesting movies and dramas.
Their GDP per capita is higher than Japan’s.
They are hasty, but they are often late for appointments.
North Koreans:
It is believed that there are many North Korean operatives in Japan.
North Korea once broadcast random numbers in the middle of the night, which we thought it was a code for spies. The North Korean female announcer kept repeating a code-like phrase over and over, which felt creepy to me when I heard it for the first time.
There was a rumor that if Japanese went to the sea at night, they would be abducted by North Korea. In fact, in 2002, North Korea admitted to abductions.
Chinese:
They are cheerful and have a sense of humor.
They are kind.
They are cheerful and have a sense of humor.
They are kind.
For better or worse, they are honest.
Many Chinese people in Japan are good at Japanese.
They are very proactive. I can see them even in where Japanese people rarely come.
They give their seats to elderly people on the train.
We both use kanji (Chinese Character), so even though they are foreigners, I feel a sense of closeness.
They value their families.
They have ancient Chinese saints that Japanese people respect.
They have a rich food culture. Yes, we love Chinese food.
They are far more advanced than Japan in the IT field.
The factory of the world. Most of the products around us are MADE IN CHINA.
They are good at sports.
They don’t apologize easily compared to Japanese people.
The Moment Cops Find the Man Offering Kids Candy to Get into His Truck
How do you feel when you see China go from the sick man of East Asia to a world power? I’m not hostile. I’m just asking?
The term “sick man” describing China as being ill and weak actually first came from British writers in the 19th century.
The term “sick man” being applied to China first appeared in the Daily News on 5 Jan 1863. The Daily News, started by Charles Dickens, was a national daily newspaper of Great Britain in those days.
At the time, China was undergoing a large scale civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion, which was started by a Hakka person by the name of Hong Xiuquan. He claimed to be the incarnated brother of Jesus Christ who had the heaven’s mandate to rule China. The Daily News was reporting on the ongoing civil war:
“Great pains have been taken to impress upon the public of this country the idea that China is in “agony,” but that cannot be truly said of it as a whole, and there seems some danger that the disorder of this sick man is about to be aggravated rather than alleviated.”
Two days later, the article was reprinted on Belfast Morning News under the title “The Supposed ‘Sick Man’ in China.”
So, it was the British newspapers who first described China as a “sick man”. In those days, the British must have felt they were superior after they defeated China twice in the two Opium Wars, looting many of the war booties from Chinese imperial palaces. Of course, the largest booty taken from China was Hong Kong.
Karma seems to have returned in one big circle. As China ascends to soon become the #1 economy of the world, British economy is sinking further after she was mismanaged by a number of Tory governments and most importantly, after Brexit.
At the current trajectory, it won’t be surprised to see Great Britain no longer become great but “aggravated rather than alleviated.” UK may just become a “sick man of Europe”.
Historian Warns the American Civil War of 2024 Has Already Started
What did the job interviewer say that made you NOT accept the job offer?
I’ve been in sales for roughly the last 20 years, and managing a team for the last 3. About 6 months ago I sent out some resumes to see what my current market value is, and to take on a new challenge. I saw an ad on LinkedIn, the job seemed perfect for me, the description was one that I would have written for myself if someone asked me what my next career challenge.
About 2 days after I sent my resume I got a call from their in house recruiter, a brief phone conversation and mutually agreed to move forward with a phone interview with the guy who would be my boss. I get an email shortly after my phone call with days/times available and we pick a time for a 2nd phone interview. He and I hit it off well, talked for 30 minutes or so, great dialog, call going great. He explains at teh beginning that he has a “hard stop” in 30 minutes. We get close to the 30 minute mark, he says, if I’m still interested, that next week he and his boss can fly into my area, or they’ll fly me out to them for a face to face.
They were going to be in NY the following week for a client meeting so it was decided that we’d meet while they were in the city, I’d work that area for the day and we’d grab lunch… all good.
We meet for lunch at a great restaurant, sit, good conversation, going well and I. WANT. THIS. JOB. Their Sr. VP of sales (he would be my boss’s boss) says they’ve made a decision, they flew up wanted to make sure that I present well in person before making an offer. They slide an offer letter across the table and we continue to talk about the job. I ask my favorite interview question
“Why did the person I’d be replacing leave this position?”
There’s plenty of good answers to this question, but I wasn’t ready for the answer that came from the Sr VP of sales. “Bob was very good at his job, he was with us 4 years, the last 2 he was salesman of the year, wrote 20–25% increases when the rest of the company was averaging 12%. He made great money, won the company trip. We decided to increase his budget to a 30% increase, he didn’t hit his numbers so we mutually agreed to cut our work relationship.”
I asked some follow up questions: “what was the rest of the team budget increases?” around 8% was the answer. “what was he trending?” about 22%. If he was writing 22% increase this year, and wrote more than 2.5X the average salesrep, why would you want to let him go, and why was the choice mutual?”
“Well his job is to hit budget, he wasn’t doing his job if he was only 22%. And because he was making less this year than last, he was complaining about his income being so much lower than the previous 4 years, we agreed he should find another job”
I had a brief follow up question: “If over the last 4 years he increased his/your business by over 100%, why would he make less money than in previous years?”
“Our commission structure is based on percent of budget, not on sales dollars, or sales increase”
My final question was, “so l want to make sure I understand, if I CRUSH this year, end up doubling my business, the following year you can budget me a 100% increase and if I only write a 75% increase, I’ll make less money, despite the huge increase again? and about how much less?” The answer was that it was a mathematical formula, and it would have been roughly 1/2 of previous year.
I thanked them for lunch, told them that’s not a program I would want to be on. I never opened their offer letter and have no idea what they offering. I just knew that it wasn’t the place for me. They knowingly wrote a budget the guy likely wouldn’t hit so they could decrease his pay.
NOPE NOT ME… I want every salesperson on my team to make as much as possible. The more they sell, the more they make. The more they make, the more I make, and the more the owner of our company makes
Men Are Turning Their Back On The West As It Collapses
Does China have a 24-hour uninterrupted power supply throughout the year?
In Urban China – Yes
Every Apartment has a Battery System and since most power cuts are between 30 seconds to 2 minutes due to distribution change (As Demand rises and eases through the day) – the Average Chinese doesn’t ever feel there are power cuts
Every Apartment nowadays has a backup battery system that immediately comes on when the power goes and within 1–2 minutes the power is back
Otherwise if the Apartments are older (Built Pre 2007), then they have a Generator and after 45 seconds to 90 seconds, the Generator is automatically powered on
So maximum you may have 1 – 1 1/2 minutes without power
The Lift will drop you on the next floor even without power (If you are between the 6th and 7th floors, it will go to the seventh floor and drop you and then stop there till either power comes back or Generator is on)
Longer power cuts happen due to (a) Weather related reasons
In such cases a Generator can run for upto 24–48 hours
You also have a six month maintenance for 8 hours without power
Yet again Generator and Battery makes sure that Power cuts are rarely even felt
Rural China is different
Rural China has a 92.2% Rural Electrification Rate meaning even today (31/12/23) , 7.8% Rural Households don’t have electricity (Mostly Xizang)
Priority is for Industry, so many times power cuts happen for even 1 Hour Or 2 Hours
Plus without a Coal supply, Power cuts could happen for 8–12 hours also
The Solothurn 20mm Anti-Tank Rifle
Mexi-Chili Casserole
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Ingredients
1 to 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 (16 ounce) can kidney beans, drained
1 (15 ounce) can enchilada sauce
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 tablespoon dried minced onion
1 (6 ounce) package corn chips
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
1 to 1 1/2 cups sour cream
Instructions
In a skillet brown the ground beef. Drain off fat.
Combine beans, enchilada and tomato sauces in a bowl with minced onion.
Set aside 1 cup corn chips and 1/2 cup cheese.
Add the remaining cheese and corn chips with the meat to the beans. Stir to blend.
Empty into a lightly buttered 2 quart casserole.
Bake, uncovered, at 375 degrees F for 20 to 25 minutes or until heated through.
Spread the top with sour cream and sprinkle with the reserved cheese.
Ring the remaining corn chips around the edge; return to the oven for 3 to 4 minutes, or until the cheese melts.
Notes
This will double or triple easily for a large group. May be made ahead and refrigerated.
Question: China’s proven history does not exceed 3,700 years. Why does China state that their history exceeds 5,000 years?
Answer:
Nowadays the proof is actually quite simple, because they did dig up proof that China’s proven history exceed 5000 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liangzhu_culture
Of course, they know that previously as well. Duh, by the time oracle bones (where the 3700 years comment comes from) are around, the Chinese culture were a full-fledged feudal level civilization complete with culture custom and technology in all fields.
So unless you think aliens made the Chinese and skipped from stone/early bronze age straight to late bronze age/early iron age, then it is safe to assume the Chinese, like everyone else, spent considerable amount of time in those early age before advancing to the point where they found the oracle bones.
The fact they picked perishable material for record is a shame and made the later archeological work harder, but even very basic and simple logic should be able to tell you that fully developed civilization doesn’t just pop out of thin air and the previous archeologists are certainly capable of simple logic.
Edit (2023–06–06):
Apparently in the recent times they have dug out a lot more from the Liangzhu Ruins:
main qimg 34269a19f2f406943f466d9f53001f55
Note, the picture below is a re-creation based on the existing excavation results:
main qimg 9c8dd282fa5375a1e4f548bfaaf4a3ee
It turned out the ancient Chinese has been building things on par or even bigger than the great pyramids, but instead of tombs, these things are in the form of fortified city walls, water dams, etc. Certainly less mysterious than the pyramids since it doesn’t involve the dead, but actually a lot more challenging engineering-wise.
And yes, they started to dug up things with marks now:
main qimg b49447750ecae616abede9c184a032f3
One of the major mystery right now is this:
“What on earth were they fighting to require city walls of that size”? Because the Liangzhu walls were on par with something you’d see in great civilizations in 5th century BC instead 30th century BC.
The popular opinion right now is, well, the the Chinese ancestor were very very into human sacrifice. Specifically, prior to Zhou dynasty’s religious reforms in around 1000BC, the Chinese used to perform human sacrifice to such a scale that made Aztecs look like pacifists. This is mostly owning to the fact that there were a lot more people in East Asia back then than central Americas during Aztec’s time, but still.
So it is a high possibility that the ancient Chinese, when they war with each other, the loser would have an excellent chance of ending up on a sacrificial altar rather than being enslaved. So they are really afraid of losing.
Does the USA have a stronger army than the whole world combined?
Hell, no.
The USA isn’t even strong enough to take on Russia. Otherwise, it would put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
Remember, the USA had no qualms about fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but against Russia, it is reluctant.
China’s military is larger than the USA’s. The largest army (over 2 million). The largest navy (over 370 warships). A vast rocket force (including hypersonic) and a large fleet of stealth fighters (J-20). The USA would be foolish to take on China.
Combine Russia’s army and China’s army and Iran’s army (which is formidable), and the USA is easily outclassed.
The Oubliette: A Medieval Torture of Unspeakable Horror…
As a Chinese, did you become anti CPC, pro-democratic, and USA fan after accessing websites and social media platforms which are blocked in China?
No, and in fact, it’s the opposite.
I WAS an anti-CPC, pro-democratic and USA fan before I got access to the banned social media. It’s an universal rule that banned things are more appealing to people. U.S was like a heaven and I am living in hell.
But things change when I got a Facebook account, and I saw queations like:
I suddenly realized that foreigners, they are NOT Gods. Yes, they’ve had amazing persons, but they have fools too. There’s no such places of absolute heaven on earth.
I got so fed up of all the bias and racism on the Internet
I got so fed up of these losers blaming their own economy failure on my country.
I got so upset about people constantly asking me if my dog is safe.
I got so fed up of people denying everything you said just with the single reason of Chinese propaganda.
I’m brain washed and I know. Many of you didn’t realized that they are brain washed in some ways, and this is much much more dangerous than pure propaganda.
What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?
When I was the receptionist for a corporate office, there was always a bit of confusion as to who was supposed to relieve me when I went to lunch. The duty was shared around the office (often without the knowledge of the department that was suddenly saddled with answering the phones), but since the general rule in the office was that we only did warm transfers, that meant there had to be a person on the line to actually complete the transfer.
One day, we got a new GM and a new assistant to the GM, and after the question came up again between myself and the GM, the assistant inserted herself into the conversation to say that the phones should just be turned off when I went to lunch. After all, anyone who was affiliated with the company would know how to use the company directory to reach any office employee that they wanted to find, and anyone else would know to leave a message.
I tried to explain that this was not a good idea. I did not go to lunch at regular times, so on some days, the phones might be off from 11 to 12 and other days they might be off from 1 to 2 with no explanation. Also, it was not even remotely reliable to expect that other departments would answer the phones, even if they were called directly at their desk. Certain people in the office were well known for ignoring phone calls if they didn’t care to answer. But the assistant, who did not want to be put in the position to possibly answer the phones, remained insistent, and the GM decided that would be fine. Turn the phones off when you go to lunch, April.
So sure enough, one day when the GM was out of town, he called back into the office and couldn’t get anyone on the phone for a solid hour. When I got back from my lunch break, I had a very terse email to call him. I did.
Him: ”Why aren’t you answering the phones?“
Me: “I was at lunch.”
Him: ”Well, where’s [my assistant]?”
Me: ”Not sure, sir, I don’t see her at her desk at the moment, she might be walking around or she might also be at lunch.”
Him: ”Okay, but what about accounting? I called every one of their desks and none of them answered. Are they also all at lunch?”
Me: ”No, they’re all back there. Remember when I told you that if they’re in the middle of something, they don’t answer their phones, even if you called them directly?”
Him: (tangibly frustrated now) “So if you’re at lunch, NOBODY answers the phone at all?”
Me: ”Nope. Remember when your assistant said that it would be perfectly okay to turn the phones off for an hour? This is literally what happens if I’m not answering phones; nobody else bothers.”
There was silence. Then “Alright, I’ll handle it when I get back.”
He did. The phones stayed on while I went to lunch after that. And that assistant (after taking a shift on phones one day and coming away with a traumatized expression after one hour) began to keep her opinions to herself.
… sometimes.
2 men indicted for destruction on ancient Lake Mead rock formation
Why does it seem like no one wants to work these days?
so that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture,
so that their children can study painting, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture, tapestry and porcelain.
Notice the shift from ‘must’ to ‘may have’ to ‘can’.
This increase in the liberty to choose what you want to do with generations is known as intergenerational mobility.
For one generation, work is a need. They have no luxury to choose. Whether it is 16 hours or 18 hours, whether they like it or not, whether they are healthy or not, they have to work because their whole family depends on their income. They are like manual labourers in a company.
For the next generation, work is a want. They have the limited luxury of choosing where to work, what kind of job they want and how many hours they want to work. They have vacations, investments, insurance and relaxed evenings. They are like managers in the same company.
For the next, next generation, work becomes a passion and a desire. They are in the elite class. They have all the liberty to choose what they want to do, study what they like and switch their passions. They have the resources to do all the outsourcing and the privilege to use their mind more than their body. They are the business owners or angel investors.
So as you move forward with decades, you encounter more people coming out of poverty and climbing the ladder. Either because of technology development or their accumulated wealth, they don’t have to work as hard as their previous generation and do things which they really, really like. They get the luxury to choose their fights or whether to fight or not.
The hatch of the Aurora groaned open, its edges scraping against the jagged terrain. Astrid’s boots thudded onto the alien soil, sending up a puff of purple dust. Miles followed slowly, his eyes flicking around their surroundings.”Stable ground,” Astrid announced, her voice echoing slightly within the confines of her helmet. “Finally, after nineteen months! Atmosphere and temperature readings all within normal range. This planet might really be it.””Could be warmer,” said Miles.Astrid laughed, drinking in the silent panorama of undulating purple hills under a sky dotted with three tiny suns. She retracted her helmet and took a deep breath, the crisp air catching pleasurably in her throat.“This deserves a toast,” she said, swinging her loaded backpack onto the ground. It landed with a clang and Miles frowned.“Careful with that, Captain.”“Don’t worry, Miles. The embryos are safe in here.” She pulled out a slim platinum canister, perfectly smooth and cool, and waved it gently at him. “Ten thousand don’t take up much space, so ninety-nine percent of this is high-tech, triple-layered, thirty-first century bubble wrap filled with cryogel. It would survive a bomb blast, they actually tested for that.”“I know. Can’t help it.” Astrid’s voice softened. “This is the batch that contains two of yours. Of course you want the best for them. I never asked before, but did you give them names?” “Yes,” said Miles. “Exactly the same names. James Cadenius Eden and Isabel Zyla Eden.” “Did the cloning lab give you the extrapolative photos?” “Yeah, they’re pretty good. Close enough.” He looked into the distance. “Hopefully this planet is different enough.” “I checked – it has zero history and undetectable probabilities of level-seven tectonic tsunamis.” “Thanks, Cap. How about that toast?” Astrid rummaged for her thermos, a battered thing of daffodil yellow, with pill-shaped figures dancing around the rim. Some of them were wearing denim pinafores. “What the hell are those things, Cap?” “They’re called Minions,” Astrid said, smiling. “From a truly ancient movie, I can’t even remember what it was called. But they’re mad and bloody cute, and there’s some really good single malt inside. To James Cadenius and Isabel Zyla Eden.” Suddenly there was a buzzing sound. Miles put down his cup and dropped into a protective crouch, gun already in hand. Astrid stuffed her thermos into her backpack and put a hand on the laser knife at her utility belt. “Protect the embryos,” Miles hissed. Out of nowhere, a shadow eclipsed the triple suns above them, casting a dark veil over the landscape. A massive figure hurtled towards them, crashing into the ground with a thunderous impact that reverberated through their boots. Astrid’s hazel eyes widened in shock at the creature before her – a hulking mass of sinew and muscle, covered in vomit-green skin and brown bristles. Its grotesque features were contorted in a fearsome snarl, revealing rows of jagged teeth. Astrid and Miles ran, but the creature unleashed a weapon unlike anything they had ever seen. From its massive fist shot a glowing orb that pulsated with an ominous energy. Before they could react, the orb shot towards them with blinding speed, lengthening out into whipcords made of pure light that wrapped tightly all around them. Astrid and Miles strained against the luminous bonds, but the more they struggled, the tighter they were bound. “Who are you? What do you want?” Astrid gasped. To her surprise, the creature actually spoke. “I, Xoragzhar of Takuun,” it said. “You have Origin. Give me.” “The origin? Of what?” “He can’t mean the embryos, can he?” Miles whispered. Xoragzhar heard and stepped closer, nodding. “Origin. Of N’uru. Give me now.” Astrid studied Xoragzhar’s face, a twisted visage with a bulbous nose, deep-set yellow eyes, and a wide mouth lined with teeth like broken tombstones. His breath came out in raspy huffs, fogging the air between them. Jagged, frantic, raspy huffs. She looked at the meaty stubbled hands. They were shaking. Why? “We can’t give you what you seek,” Astrid replied in a firm and deliberate voice. “We are on a mission. We need to find a home for the last of our species. They are not yours to take.” She felt Miles flick a gaze at her. Then he said in a conversational tone, “How did you know about them? What are they the origin of?” Well done, Miles, thought Astrid. Keep stalling. She inched her fingers toward her utility belt, feeling for the hilt of her knife. Xoragzhar stamped on the ground. “No time!” he roared. “Give me now!” He shook a hairy fist and the glowing whipcord tightened even more. Astrid’s hand shot out from behind her, blazing orange from her laser knife. She slashed wildly. The crackling bonds fell away, dissipating into shimmering motes of energy. She heard Miles land on his feet and shouted, “Run!” They sprinted across the rugged terrain, the alien landscape blurring into streaks of color. Astrid’s heart pounded in her chest, adrenaline fueling her muscles as she pushed herself to keep pace with Miles. Xoragzhar’s heavy feet thundered behind them, growing closer with each passing moment. As they weaved through a labyrinth of rock formations, the air started buzzing again. A sudden gust of wind whipped up a thick cloud of purple dust. Then it settled to reveal a glimmering figure. Astrid skidded to a stop, nearly colliding with the mysterious being. A vision of otherworldly grace and splendor, he even had translucent wings, fluttering like delicate petals in the breeze. She thought, this is the meaning of iridescence. Intricate patterns adorned his silvery skin, shimmering in the ambient light, like filigree. The being held up a long-fingered, gently coruscating hand. Behind them, Xoragzhar thunked against what seemed to be an invisible wall and fell with a grunt. Astrid found that if she looked very hard, she could just see the merest whisper of a gossamer web hanging in the air. The being smiled. “You know what this means, Xoragzhar.” He turned his violet gaze towards Astrid and Miles. “Welcome, Dr Miles Eden and Captain Astrid Chang. My name is Za’raa. Welcome to N’urubia.” Xoragzhar growled, “Takuun. This Takuun.” “You know who we are?” said Miles, still staring. “Yes, Dr Eden. We have known who you are for three hundred million years.” What? “We know you were searching for a new home, a sanctuary for your kind. We know you brought to us our Origin.” “How?” Astrid demanded. “This mission is classified.” “This mission was successful. You did it. You brought to this planet the Origin of my people, the N’uru.” Xoragzhar spat. “The Origin took root and blossomed. In the beginning there were only ten thousand of us. And then there were a hundred thousand. And then a billion, whose skin began silvering, whose wings began budding. And now, here we are,” said Za’raa, opening his arms wide. Astrid blinked. “Are you saying that you’re descended fro— no, that you’re from the futur— oh my God, that you mutated—” “Yes, Captain Chang, and yes, and yes, though we prefer the word ‘evolved’. And Dr Eden – may I call you Miles? – I thought you might like to know, there are fourteen families among the N’uru named Eden, all healthy and thriving. Your children had good genes.” Miles’ eyes blazed hard enough to power a city. “I want to see them.” “Perhaps you will,” Za’raa said with a smile. “How will you do that?” asked a perplexed Astrid. “How are you here? And how are you here now?” “We have Xoragzhar’s people to thank. They spent generations building a time machine. All that time and energy that could have gone into building armies, multiplying themselves, even learning how to speak properly… no, they decided this machine was more important. And this is their big day. They used it for the first time today.” “To bring the Aurora here?” “No, child, you would have come here anyway. The machine was for bringing Xoragzhar here, three hundred million years into his past. And me too,” Za’raa added brightly, “although it wasn’t what they planned. Now, ask me why.” “Uh-huh?” Za’raa leaned in to look Astrid in the eye. “To destroy the embryos.” Astrid whirled around to glare at Xoragzhar. “What? Why?” Xoragzhar said, “N’uru, they take. Take and take and take. Food, air, water. But they say, not enough. Never enough. Then they say, too many Takuun. They say, kill Takuun.” Za’raa shrugged his slender elegant shoulders. “The primitive have to evolve, or die. I believe you would call it a zero-sum game.” He stretched out a hand to Astrid. “Now please give me the Origin.” Astrid ignored the hand. “Xoragzhar, what happened to your people? How many are there left?” Unhappy yellow eyes met her own. “Only five, and me.” Za’raa said, “Before you ask, the five were guarding the time machine. Against us. Well, there are only four left now. Possibly less.” He grinned at Xoragzhar. “I did bring a dozen of my best warriors with me.” Astrid stumbled backward toward Xoragzhar, keeping her backpack as far as she could from Za’raa. “No. I can’t let this happen. I can’t create a population of goddamn murderers.” Something went click. Astrid froze. Miles was pointing his gun at her. “My children. Get. To live,” he said in a low, dangerous voice she’d never heard from him before. “Miles…” “Take out the embryos and give them to Za’raa.” “No bloody way.” A now-familiar buzzing sound filled the air for the third time. Za’raa said, his expression serene, “Ah, a little more… encouragement has arrived for Captain Chang.” A dozen armed N’uru shimmered out of thin air. Their silver armour was battered and scratched, and there was blood in their golden hair and on their beautiful faces and filigreed hands, but their eyes glowed with triumph. A cold finger ran down Astrid’s spine. “Did you get them all?” inquired Za’raa mildly. “Yes, sir.” Xoragzhar’s howl echoed through the clearing, raising all the hairs on Astrid’s arms. A glowing orb appeared in each of his fists and stretched out into scythes. He hacked at the gossamer wall in front of him. The N’uru guards drew their weapons – spiked flails that glowed also – and marched toward him. Miles watched them advance, rapt. “Captain Chang,” said Za’raa, “there really are no more reasons not to give me the embryos. Once Xoragzhar is dead, which will be in about five minutes, there will be no more Takuun left to save.” Astrid dropped her head. She knelt and shrugged off her backpack, undid it with trembling fingers. She rummaged until her hand closed around the cold metal cylinder it sought. Averting her eyes, she held the cylinder up to Za’raa. “Excellent. Thank you, Captain Chang. And now we can close the book on Takuun history.” The N’uru warriors closed in on Xoragzhar and his swinging scythes, their movements coordinated and decisive. White light flashed wherever their flails landed. Miles cheered them on. In the strobing light, his skin appeared silvery too. Astrid closed her backpack and swung it back on her shoulders. She turned toward the Aurora. Walk, don’t run, she told herself firmly. She heard Miles say, “Za’raa, she’s getting away.” She heard Za’raa say, “It does not matter, Miles.” She swung herself up into the Aurora and shoved the hatch shut, making straight for the control panel. Her fingers jittered over the familiar buttons and switches. The console flickered to life, casting an green glow across her strained face. The Aurora began rising. Outside, Xoragzhar was losing. Dying. She met Miles’ gaze through the window, his silhouette stark against the alien landscape. He turned his back on her and walked to Za’raa. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they cast one shadow under the light of the triple suns. Za’raa was still clutching the metal cylinder in both hands. The battered, daffodil yellow, metal cylinder with the mad dancing Minions. Miles saw it too. He snatched the thermos from Za’raa and began running towards the Aurora, shouting. As if it would help. He was only getting smaller and smaller. Then the N’uru warriors began to flicker like candle flames in a gust of wind. One by one, they vanished into thin air, leaving behind a faint trace of silver dust that glittered briefly and turned into nothing. Za’raa was the last to vanish, his face too small for Astrid to see his expression. Good. Miles was tiny now. She saw Xoragzhar rise painfully to his feet. She was just able to see the orbs in his hands flare as he lurched toward Miles. When the Aurora was on autopilot, she picked up the platinum canister of embryos, tracing with steady fingers where the chilly light glinted off its perfect skin. She would find another planet that did not have purple soil or three goddamn suns, and most certainly not angry trolls or smarmy glowing angels who made far too many assumptions. She hoped that would be enough.
What Happened To The First Human Head Transplant? (Feat. Medlife Crisis)
Are China’s military exercises a threat that heighten geopolitical tensions?
You have watched too much news from BBC and CNN, so you say that “China’s military exercises have exacerbated geopolitical tensions.”
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Take a good look at this picture. The United States has military bases on almost every continent. The only continent without a US military base is Antarctica.
The United States uses these military bases around the world and the United States’ military influence to contain and suppress its imaginary enemies, especially China.
Using military exercises to form cliques is a common trick of the United States.
In recent years, the US military has frequently conducted military exercises around China, especially joint military exercises.
Through cooperation with allies such as Japan, Australia and the Philippines, the US military has not only enhanced its combat effectiveness, but also formed a containment of China to a certain extent.
Such exercises are not only a display of military strength, but also a clear warning to China, indicating that the United States is prepared for any potential conflict.
The United States has established a large network of allies in the Asia-Pacific region to ensure support in the face of conflict. Japan, Australia, the Philippines and other countries have strengthened their military ties with the United States by signing military cooperation agreements.
This collective security mechanism makes the United States more calm when facing China, and also puts China under greater strategic pressure.
The United States uses its powerful media and public opinion resources to continue to exaggerate the “China threat theory” in an attempt to isolate China internationally.
This kind of public opinion war not only affects the international community’s view of China, but also provides “legitimacy” for the US military action. In this way, the United States hopes to portray China as an “aggressor” to provide an excuse for its military intervention.
The game between China and the United States is like a war without gunpowder, and both sides are fighting for their own interests.
The United States has selected the main battlefield in the eastern Pacific and frequently held military exercises in an attempt to curb China’s rise, while China is constantly strengthening its own defense capabilities and striving not to lose in this contest.
The Insane Lobotomy Craze Of The 1950s
Should the Philippines assert its claim in the West Philippine Sea?
This may sound like waking up someone pretending to be asleep, but I have to say, there is no so-called “West Philippine Sea.” Internationally, this sea area is referred to as the “South China Sea,” and it does not mean that the entire sea belongs to China. In fact, China made territorial claims in 1948. The Philippines did not protest at that time, but in recent years, they have come out with “protests,” and even have made a fake “arbitration”, which is suspicious to anyone with common sense.
As for the territory of the Philippines, it is delimited by a series of international treaties. Whether it is the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Treaty of Washington in 1900, or the Convention Between the United States and Great Britain in 1930, none of them include China’s Nansha Qundao or Huangyan Dao.
Only the area within the dashed line box in the map is considered the territory of the Philippines, while the area outside the dashed line box are nothing but the Philippines’ unilateral and illegal claims. The Philippines’ so-called “whoever is closer owns it” rhetoric not only goes against international law but also laughable in modern society.
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And you know what the Philippines should do? Withdraw its ship and personnel from China’s territory. It’s the only chance.
I noticed on Aug 31, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) vessel MRRV-9701, which has been illegally anchored in the lagoon of China’s Xianbin Jiao for a long time, provoked troubles in an unprofessional and dangerous way and intentionally rammed into the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) ship 5205, which was lawfully implementing control measures. As a result, a collision happened between the two vessels.
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The recent actions by the Philippines once again highlight its close connection with certain Western countries. On-site footage shows that during the Philippine’s infringement operation, a US P-8A reconnaissance aircraft flew at low altitude, interfering with China’s law enforcement actions and providing on-site intelligence support to the PCG vessel. Ironically, after receiving some “support” from certain Western countries outside the South China Sea region, the Philippine side complained that Southeast Asian countries didn’t “support”.
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Since entering the lagoon of Xianbin Jiao without China’s permission in April this year, the PCG ship has assumed the task of imitating the Philippines’ BRP Sierra Madre, which has been grounded illegally at China’s Ren’ai Jiao for a long time. But in fact, under the control of the CCG in accordance with the law, the PCG vessel has seen increasingly limited space to make any move.
PCG spokesperson Jay Tarriela admitted on Tuesday that the ship’s supplies were seriously insufficient and had reached a “critical level.” Seeing that it is difficult to “replicate” the goal of “deliberate grounding,” the PCG vessel 9701 began a new round of shows in Xianbin Jiao, which is nothing more than putting all the energy into making a scene and sadfishing, trying to make a public opinion sensation and gain sympathy by pretending to be a “victim.”
Betting on the safety of its own crew and the risk of military conflict, Manila constantly staged a self-inflicted provocative farce on the stage of the South China Sea, fantasizing about making “quantitative change” to achieve the breakthroughs of “qualitative change.”
The actions of the Philippines that have escalated tensions in the South China Sea are also a betrayal to ASEAN countries, clearly violating the provisions of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, including Article 4’s requirement for peaceful resolution of disputes, and Article 5’s call for self-restraint and not to affect regional peace and stability in the South China Sea.
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Now the US and the Philippines are using each other in the South China Sea issue. For the US, no matter how beautiful the words are, the positioning of the Philippines as a “pawn” has never changed. Manila is also very clear that it has limited bargaining chips with the US, and the more extreme it goes in the South China Sea issue, the smaller its space it has in negotiating with the US.
Manila hopes that Washington can make some concrete commitments. However, for Manila, the most important thing is to face reality and give up illusions. Manila should not underestimate the cost of challenging China, nor should it assume that everything will be covered by the US.
The bilateral consultation mechanism on the South China Sea issue has been held 9 times, with the most recent meeting taking place exactly 2 months ago. The commitments made by both sides to promote a de-escalation of tensions in the South China Sea are still fresh. Until Manila fundamentally changes its mind-set of using the South China Sea issue for geopolitical speculation, China is fully prepared for any possible backtracking or provocation by the Philippines. If the Philippines attempts to move forward one step, China will firmly push it back. China will not allow the Philippines to gain any advantage. Like I said, the only choice for the Philippines is to withdraw its ship and personnel.
How does China enforce a limit of 3 hours per week of video games for offline games?
Here are the 2022 rules
A. User Internet Ids are assigned to every user who is over 7 years old
B. Users who are deemed Juvenile, ie:- between 16–18 years of age are restricted from logging on to any game on a Chinese platform between 10 PM and 8 AM on Mondays to Fridays and 12 PM and 7 AM on Weekends
C. Users who are deemed Minors between 12-16 years of age are restricted from logging into any game on a Chinese Platform only for a maximum of 2 Hours on a Weekday and 3 Hours on Saturday and 4 Hours on a Sunday but not after 9 PM on Weekdays and 11 PM on Weekends
D. Users deemed Children (<= 12) are restricted from playing any game on Chinese platforms for more than 3 hours from 12 AM on Monday to 11:59 PM on Sunday of every week
VPN for Chinese Games is useless
You can use VPN but when you play Chinese games, the Warning will say that if you continue you will go to a lower level and lose a lot of game money and game weapons and powers you have earned so far
So nobody uses VPN for playing games
Is it for all games?
No
Online Mobile Games deemed EDUCATIONAL, CULTURAL and SCIENTIFIC are exempted
In 2023 May, Mahjong in all forms was included in the restricted list but Online CHESS was exempted
How is the rule enforced?
Every Game has a Player Login
Every Player needs Internet ID
So that’s simple
You can’t use your Dads Internet ID because that’s a different Player Profile Or ID
So best case you can create a Player Profile for your Dad and play in his name
Or your older brother
Why these rules?
The Government got an Educational Report that Children were addicted to Mobile games and with In app money purchases
What games are restricted FULLY or PARTIALLY to Children?
Games deemed Violent
Games deemed Sexual
Games that promote Theft, Robbery and Crime
Games that feature GAMBLING or Chance and Odds (Card Games are exempted provided the games don’t have any numerical odds or any transfer of winnings)
Games deemed capable of Brainwashing and giving instructions and dares (Such Games are fully banned from the Mainland)
Can you bypass the 3 hour limit?
A Brilliant 9 year old managed to bypass the ban by creating a small code to make the system forget that it was 10 PM amd make the system go to 19:59:59 from 21:59:59 and keep playing endlessly
Tencent of course saw that someone had played 63 levels in 2 hours which was impossible and immediately overrode the local codes and the Kid was flushed out
They gave the Kid a Science Scholarship (Chairmans Junior Scholarship) usually granted for 12+ year olds
However apart from that – NO
Like I said – VPN means losing a lot of levels and goodies earned
So the only way is to use your father or older brother or older uncles Internet id, create a profile and play as them
Prehistoric Australia Was Pure Nightmare Fuel
What was the most messed up punishment(s) you received as a child?
Not me but my younger brother.
My brother was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, and from the start my mother wanted this kid gone by any means necessary. Unfortunately the law and her family wouldn’t allow it, so she was forced to carry this child to term and take care of it. She hated my brother from the start, wanted him dead or abandoned by the side of the road (whatever it took to get rid of him), and with that failing she strove to make this child’s life as miserable as she could for the sin of having dared to exist. My mother had a nasty cruel and vindictive streak.
Our parents divorced when I was nine and he was seven, and we moved to a house about 3 miles away. One day my mother got angry at my brother and locked him out of the house with orders to walk to our dad’s house. It was nighttime in mid December, about 15 degrees F outside, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. My mother then called my father and angrily bragged “I just threw him out of the house without a coat and told him to walk to your house. I don’t care if he freezes!”
My mother was not mentally ill, she was in complete control of herself, she was just filled with anger and hatred that she liked to inflict on those around her, especially those that had little choice but endure it. She felt it was a parental perk to be allowed to abuse your kids for whatever reason you wished, even if it was for her amusement (and it sometimes was). She got a certain sadistic joy out of making people feel miserable and worthless.
My father woke up the neighborhood and sent everyone out to find him, and he was eventually found wandering around a grocery store parking lot less than 1/4 mile from my mother’s house. He was minutes away from hypothermia. He very nearly died that day, and this was not the only time he narrowly escaped death at the hands of my mother.
I’ll never understand why she wasn’t charged and arrested for that. She passed away three years ago, and it’s a major trigger to my father (who hates her with a passion), so I guess I’ll never know.
POST EDIT: Several people have asked how my brother turned out, and he didn’t. He died at age 14, and ironically my mother had nothing to do with it. He asphyxiated himself huffing gasoline in my dad’s garage. After he died my mother almost never spoke of him again, and would go into psychotic rages whenever he was brought up. I quickly learned to not talk about him anymore.
He never had a chance from the start. This is the last known picture of him.
His name was Tim.
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Minestrone Macaroni
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Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
2 (14 ounce) cans Italian diced tomatoes, undrained
2 1/4 cups water
1 1/2 cups elbow macaroni, uncooked
2 beef bouillon cubes
1 can kidney beans, rinsed, drained
1 can garbanzo beans, rinse, drain
1 (14 ounce) can cut green beans, rinsed and drained
Instructions
In a large skillet, brown beef; drain.
Add the tomatoes, water, macaroni and bouillon cubes; bring to a boil.
Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 12 to 15 minutes or until macaroni is tender.
When he was fifty Tolstoy fell into depression. Day by day his sadness increased, for no reason. Tolstoy was a count, he was one of the richest men in his country, he was famous throughout the world. Yet he was unhappy. «Money was nothing, power was nothing. Many were seen who had both one and the other and were unhappy. Even health didn’t matter much; there were sick people full of the desire to live and there were healthy people who withered in anguish from the fear of suffering.”
One day he saw an orphan along Afanas’evsky alley, and moved with compassion, he took him home with him. And for the first time in a long time he felt good again. He forgot about himself, about his problems, about his sadness. From that moment Tolstoy renounced his gentleman’s clothes, luxury and privileges and began to lead a simple life, giving away what he possessed to those in need.
“Don’t talk to me about religion, about charity, about love,” he used to say, “but show me the religion in your actions.” Tolstoy was also the first theorist of non-violence, he preached brotherhood between peoples and his ideas inspired another great figure of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi. Until the day of his death he continued to help others, which is why many said he was crazy. In a world where he only counts having, possessing things and even people, where everyone wants to take but no one knows how to give, Tolstoy seemed crazy.
One day an old friend of his, who, unlike Tolstoy, lived in comfort and luxury, said to him: «What’s the point of doing all this? What do you care about others? You should think about yourself.” To which Tolstoy replied: “If you feel pain, you are alive, but if you feel the pain of others, you are human.”
You really need to assess who is mentally ill and who isn’t.
Mental illness is not a temporary thing that comes and goes. It is, instead, a permanent condition.
There are different variations of mental illness, like different flavors. Some are not so bad. Some are really horrible. And a mentally ill person will go though various stages in the illness that you (as an outsider) will not be aware of.
Obviously, you don’t want to be married to someone with this illness. As it will be an anchor chained to your ankle and it will really negatively affect your quality of life.
But also be careful about friendships as well.
Once, we were invited to a Thanksgiving meal by some friends.
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Now, for you non-Americans, this is a big holiday in the USA. There is one huge meal. Often similar to that of a Christmas feast. It would have turkey and all the rest.
The people who invited us were friends. They had mental illnesses of some undisclosed nature and we accepted. Because we were not going to host the meal, we didn’t buy groceries. We waited two weeks, and when the Thanksgiving day arrived, we were all dressed up and went to their house.
The woman came to the door wearing her pajamas.
She nonchalantly told us that she didn’t feel like it. So they didn’t buy any food and were just going to stay inside and watch cartoons and eat “Cheerios” all day.
And so we went home.
Restaurants were out. All were closed.
Other friends were out, they all went to relatives homes.
We had nothing in the fridge.
So we went home, and made up some toast and had a can of chicken-noodle soup.
Some Thanksgiving eh?
Never put your trust in crazy people. Not only are they unreliable, but your association with them will often be painful.
Today…
Why do Chinese students educated in the West not support democracy when they return home?
Chinese are the world’s most apolitical people
They never discuss or talk about any form of politics
They complain if their services go wrong loudly to the local representatives
They call 12345 and if three guys make a phone on the same topic, the district level administration sends a team immediately
However beyond that – things like Democracy,Free Speech, Gender never ever occur to them
The mistaken notion is that somehow the Chinese would get attracted to democracy in US and support it when they come home was a MAJOR REASON BEHIND OPENING THE DOORS TO CHINA by Bill Clinton
The Chinese got attracted to the consumerism and the standard of living in the US but never the democracy or freedom
They are culturally different
They find the FREE SPEECH impractical and stupid
They like PRACTICAL THINGS
In China, if something is wrong – they complain to the authorities and get a solution
And Authority listens
Authority HAS to listen
Every People’s Representative has to have ONE DAY a week to meet the people and listen to their problems and open a Ticket and solve them
For instance when High Power Cables were rumored to cause cancer, the Local Representatives escalated the issue all the way to Beijing and got alternate leases to almost 9000 people in a district in Shaanxi
So Chinese Students find a system where a Politician is elected once in two or four or six years and after that disappears to Washington DC and spends all his time fund raising and never focusing on HIS PEOPLE until the next elections as Inferior
They find such Politicians who discuss Color Politics, Gay Rights and Abortion rather than the most pressing problems of the day as an Inferior and broken down system
They have NEVER FOUND WESTERN DEMOCRACY APPEALING
They have found it to be impractical and often STUPID
They find nothing unique in the Freedom to Vote because they also Vote
They find nothing unique in Free Speech because the issues covered by free speech like Gay Rights or Color Politics are things that are never talked about in China but pretty much happen anyway
Why would they suggest or recommend a system they feel to be impractical and stupid to their Country?
In the older days, they have felt US had a much better standard of living and a nice consumerist credit driven society with limitless goods
Now China has better access to limitless goods at a far lower price
They have the same KFC and Starbucks but also the 99 CNY store and plenty of other things to buy
They are appalled at the Crime they see in US because in China major crime is virtually non existent and criminals get caught in hours or a couple of days at the most
Today the main reason for a Chinese Student NOT to return to China after graduation is LOVE
They fall in love with a Local American Girl or American Citizen and get married to them
Otherwise they go back to China quite happily
Now the opposite is happening
American Students who go to China return back with huge praise and discuss the failings of their own system
Many westerners fall in love with Chinese and get married and settle down there
Yes Chinese do migrate to the West but most of them are those who are Rural Residents who go for jobs like Cooking or Running a Kiosk or some small china town business
The Intelligent Chinese inevitably always come back now
Many can’t wait to get home
They come home and get inspired by Research Facilities and other stuff
Not by Democracy which I repeat they find STUPID and IMPRACTICAL
They have convinced me of the same
It’s why I worship the Chinese System and detest western democracy with every fiber of my being
Ex-Google CEO’s BANNED Interview LEAKED: “You Have No Idea What’s Coming”
Can Chinese economically survive if the USA were to cut Beijing out of the U.S. capital markets?
China does not need the US capital market. Know also that it does not borrow from the US$ dominated international capital market. China’s foreign account is in substantial surplus.
There are only a few Chinese companies listed on NYSE. Those who sought listing on it did so for the higher valuations. Some like Alibaba, whose primary listings are on NYSE have secondary listings on the HKSE. Alibaba is seeking to upgrade it to primary listing.
US venture funds were once active in China. They made lots of money, and would have expanded were they not discouraged or banned by the US government. These funds brought with them connections and networks which benefitted China. Nevertheless, China’s start-up scene thrives, and unicorns are being created as a matter course. China is not short of venture funds, state- and private-sponsored, from incubation and nursery through pre-IPO.
There is no shortage of capital in China and Hong Kong. You may add Singapore in the mix. These are “new” money accumulated and nurtured from the growth of the economies in Asia. US capital is more in the nature of “old” money.
US financial investments in China have fallen. To some extent, they are replaced by inflows from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries. China itself has massive supply of capital. Its foreign assets are worth several trillion dollars, including $750 billion of US Treasuries. It has large reserves of gold holdings. It current account from world trade is in surplus.
China offers far better investments opportunities and potentials than US and Europe, judging by their relative economic growths, and the prospects of growths.
China does not focus on financial investments that are short-termed and speculative capital flows.
China’s focus is on organic investments. It remains welcoming of foreign direct investments. These remain significant, including from the US, and notably Germany.
Meatballs in Kraut Casserole
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Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds ground chuck or round
1/4 to 1/2 cup minced onion
2 teaspoons dried parsley
1 egg
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup dry rice, divided
2 (1 pound) bags sauerkraut
1 teaspoon caraway seed (optional)
Instructions
Mix ground beef, onion, parsley, egg, salt and pepper well by hand and make meatballs the size of ping pong balls.
Drain kraut, saving juice.
Put half the kraut in a large deep casserole with half the drained juice.
Sprinkle 1/4 cup rice over the kraut, with caraway seed, if desired.
Place meatballs on kraut and add remaining 1/4 cup of rice.
Cover meat with remaining drained kraut and carefully pour water into casserole until it can just be seen under the kraut.
Cover and bake at 375 degrees F until kraut is beginning to brown and rice and meat are tender.
Serve with mashed potatoes and hearty bread and butter.
What are some incidents where people took revenge in a mind-blowing way?
How a singer avenged the damage of his guitar from United Airlines by causing it a loss of $180 million
David Carroll, a singer, was flying from Nova Scotia to Nebraska. At the time of luggage unloading, he noticed the unloaders were just throwing the luggage out.
And when he checked his luggage, he discovered his $3,500 Taylor guitar’s neck had been broken.
Dave tried for nine months to get a claim processed with United. The response was always “no.” They said he had waited longer than 24 hours to process a claim.
Dejected, he wrote a song and produced a music video. The song was titled “United Breaks Guitars.” He put it up on YouTube and it went viral.
United Breaks Guitars Song 2-1,322,582 views.
United Breaks Guitars Song 3-405,790 views.
After 150,000 views on song 1, United contacted Dave Carroll and offered payment to make the video go away. He had changed his mind by now, he told them that “United Breaks Guitars” wasn’t just a single song. It was part of a trilogy.
News media picks up the news
Soon newspapers and news broadcast media across America were doing stories about the song. He did over 200 interviews in the first few months.
Final outcome
The BBC reported that United’s stock price dropped by 10% within three to four weeks of the release of the video – a decrease in valuation of $180 million.
I believe for certain that Chinas Actual Forex Reserves are a minimum $ 7 Trillion today
The Total Trade Surplus of China from 2007 to 2024 June equalled $ 8.673 Trillion at various stages and various exchange rates every year
So i am absolutely certain that China has at least another $ 3.5–4 Trillion of secret reserves buried globally
Likewise I believe China has a minimum 800 Nuclear Warheads and even as many as 2000 Warheads
The Number 350 was way back in the 1990s and Fissile Material Production has Quadrupled since 1998 yet Nuclear Energy as share of total power hasn’t surged by 400% but by a mere 87%
So a huge amount of fissile material was not likely used to produce nuclear energy
So obviously they were used to make Warheads
Finally I believe a fairer estimate of Chinas GDP would be closer to $ 27 Trillion nominally
That’s because I believe the GDP of China in Yuan excludes a large portion of services from its 1977 methodology and if you include that, the GDP is closer to 137.2 Trillion CNY
The Exchange Rate with USD is artificially kept low to keep exports cheap and the real value is closer to 4.74
So the Nominal GDP would be 137.2/4.74 minus 7% variance = $ 27 Trillion
Why do Chinese students educated in the West not support democracy when they return home?
Because they found out, you are the ones living in a lie. Isn’t that hard to understand?
The Chinese economists and social scientists discuss and explain more important subjects and the mechanism behind it in details. Other than repeatedly teaching check and balance, separation of power, freedom of press, and all we see was the manipulation of that in the west.
Whenever there are problems they can’t solve, they are bringing out LGBTQ, abortions, BLM, China, in order to redirect public attentions.
It happens over and over again, nothing gets solved at the end, yet you dumb public never get tired of it.
That was why.
The Chinese doesn’t claim they have the best system, they don’t believe they have the best system, however they rather deal with the real problem than bullshiting. If they can’t solve the problem, they deliver development at their best.
TOP “Is He Smart” Reactions *SPOILER* Forrest Gump Reaction
What happens when the Chinese take over the moon and Mars like a D-Day invasion?
Fifty years after China landed on the moon, the Chinese will do what the Americans did:
The sudden loss of the ability to land on the moon, the sudden loss of all the records and drawings of the time, the regression of space technology, the regression of space station technology.
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The Chinese stole US technology to be able to build the space station, go to the moon, have hypersonic missiles, 5G, BeiDou navigation system, DJI drones, e-payments, shield machines and high-speed rail …
It is easy for the Americans to take over the Moon and Mars like the Normandy landings. I really don’t know what America, the world leader in technology, is worried about.
My Parents Want Help With My Spoiled Brat Sister, I Told Them She’s Their Problem And Blocked Them
What are the benefits and drawbacks of retiring in Hong Kong or Macau for an American?
I have lived in Macau over 40 years and am retired here.
In Macau, we pay very low taxes. The government collects most of it’s taxes from the gaming operators
During covid, the government sold us masks at low cost. Paid our water and electric bills. Gave us free test kits. Gave a few rounds of $$$ in the form of consumption vouchers. Macau residents coming back from overseas were quarantined in a Sheraton! Tough life. We had a few rounds of city wide testing but it was well organized and we had to app so we could determine best times to go. There were no food shortages and life was normal except we had to wear masks on public transport. But most people just wore them everywhere. There was only two weeks of lockdown.
The government gives every citizen US$1200 as part of the wealth sharing. (Casino profits). Seniors get a monthly pension. Plus a new year payment and a payment in the fall. Public transport is free if you are over 65. Most buses are kneeling buses, so it’s great if you have mobility issues. Seniors pay US $6 a month for mobile phone service including 5G data. $3 more gets you three country service. Macau, Hong Kong and China. No long distance charges.
The streets are pedestrian friendly. Overhead walkways everywhere with escalators and elevators.
Medical services are top notch. All free if you are over 65. Including medicine. I’m taking two Entresto tablets a day for my heart. They are US$9 a pill. I don’t pay a penny.
There is a new hospital opening this month and it is state of the art.
Macau has many festivals year round. Film, art, music. World renowned performers and we pay peanut s because the government subsidizes these events. I’ve seen Midori, New York philharmonic, London Symphony, George Benson and many more. Seniors pay half price off the already low price. New York Philharmonic was like US $10!
Even a fireworks competition. And a Grand Prix every November.
Food in Macau is fantastic. Listed by UNESCO as a city of gastronomy. We have 18 Michelin Starred restaurants. Portuguese food that is authentic and delicious. The world’s first fusion cooking. Think Portuguese salt cod in a fried rice.
If you don’t speak Cantonese, you will miss opportunities to go deep in the local culture.
And it is hard to get residency and retire in Macau.
On August 20th, Jennifer Bachus, a senior official of the US State Department, stated that the US’s excessive stance could lead to the loss of most of the world, and many countries do not want to take sides. What do you think?
China tech tensions may turn off U.S. allies, State Dept. official warns
Policymakers debate whether Trump or Harris would take harder line on Beijing
“If we go in with a big anti-China message, we actually lose most of the world," she said during a panel discussion.
"Countries around the world know where the U.S. stands on our concerns about the PRC, but many of them also don't want to get drawn into what they see as a U.S.-PRC competition,"
What is Jennifer saying?
Corporate interests have been hurt, both foreign and domestic. They (I.e. Big tech) want a policy reset. The occasion after all was a gathering of big tech to talk future regulations.
It’s simple as that. Money talks. And here, we are talking mortal levels of damage that is dangerously close to being irreversible.
Yesterday marked the final day of summer vacation for most provinces in China. I asked my child, “Once today is over, your grueling school life begins again. So, how do you want to spend the last day of your summer vacation?” After thinking for a moment, he replied, “I want to go to the dyke by Wēi Shān (微山) Lake and skip stones.”
I wasn’t sure how to translate this game correctly into English. It’s a popular pastime among Chinese children in past days. The basic idea is to find flat stones by the water’s edge and throw them at a very low angle across the surface(dǎ shuǐ piāo,打水漂). If you’re lucky, the stone will skip across the water, flying up and down in a series of parabolic arcs.
So, we drove about 40 minutes to Wēi Shān Lake, located on the border between Jiangsu and Shandong provinces. It’s one of China’s major freshwater lakes, with the northern shore forming part of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. The dyke here stretches for over 160 kilometers, lined with tall poplar trees and doubling as a roadway.
In the glow of the Wēi Shān Hú Lake sunset, my child and wife skipped stones together. We stayed until the sun set, then drove home in the direction of the fading light. The spot we chose felt like a hidden gem—rarely visited, with only the occasional cargo ship sounding its horn. When they grew tired, the three of us sat quietly, watching the ships pass by. Some of these vessels are homes, with living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms on board. My child and wife were fascinated by these “families on the water.”
And so, this unexpectedly delightful summer vacation came to an end. Over the past two months, we drove 5,500 kilometers across China, challenged mountains with an altitude of 3,700 meters, and visited over 30 natural and cultural sites. Besides all that, my child read seven novels, watched 30 movies by Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock, and listened to over 200 episodes of traditional Chinese storytelling, including The History of the Sui and Tang Dynasties and The Story of Hero Yue Fei. However, he also managed to fit in 70 online math and physics lessons. Every day was busy, but also joyful and fulfilling.
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Today is September 1, 2024, and we hope for an even better future.
The Election Ritual: the illusion of American democracy
We officially left Earth twenty-four hours ago. Me and my partner Samantha have been waiting eight years for this trip to space to discover a new planet we call Extra.”Harmony, I see nothing at all.” Samantha says in a irritated voiceI roll my eyes “Can you have a little Patience, we aren’t going anywhere for a while.”Samantha is IMPATIENT, but she’s very excited because we’ve been studying this planet for years. It’s the closest thing to earth we’ve seen, it has a sustainable climate, water and plants which means oxygen. Our planet is dying and I don’t think anyone takes that serious.
I grab the scope that lets us see outside the spaceship. As I’m looking around I see nothing as well, it’s pitch black and scary, even for the ones trained to be up here.
“We’ll check some more later. We should eat something.” I say to Sam.
Now being a astronaut is the most amazing thing ever but I’ve seen dog food that looks better than the crap they bag up for us.
“Meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”
Samantha says shaking the bag that sounds like it’s full of sand.
We prepare our dog chow and dig in.
“Mmm kibbles” I said sarcastically.
We both broke out laughing. We need to laugh after all it’s just us up here.
A few hours later, we’re studying per usual. We don’t have kids so our careers are everything to us.
I decide to check the scope again and when I did my heart almost gave out. Looking back at me is this giant, dark triangular spaceship but it’s nothing from earth and it don’t look friendly or welcoming.
“S-s-samantha, you might wanna see this.” I said said very shakily.
“What is it?” She grabs the scope from me and looks for herself. Her face said it all.
“Oh my God,aliens!” She could barely get it out.
And just as she said that we lost all power to our spaceship, it’s dark and scary in here.
“What do you think is going to happen Harmony!?” She is scared out of her mind, probably thinks we’re going to die soon but not me. I’m scared but that ship could easily consume this one, I think they’re just trying to intimidate us.
“I don’t know but we need to remain calm.” I say as I’m internally not remaining calm
I look through the scope again and I see this big ass ship start to divide into two and slowly start to come towards us. I watch slowly as we get pulled into the ship and it comes back together.
“Put your gear on, now!” I tell Sam as I start trying to put my gear on as fast as I can but in space that’s not fast at all. Before I could put my helmet on the top of our unit is ripped off.
Samantha might be right, this could surely be death. I’m scared but I can still breathe, How? I’m consumed with a million questions.
We hear something from above, footsteps maybe? Definitely footsteps, looking up we see something that absolutely blows our minds. Humans? Or aliens that look like humans. Three of them, two women and one man.
“Hello..?” I half expect to hear a English reply.
The alien humans consult with each other in a different language. It almost sounds sinister but then they look at us.
“Earthlings?” It was almost a question. Holy shit I’m getting scared because these aliens must be very smart. They have their extraterrestrial language and yet know our language too?
“Yes, we’re from earth. We’ve came to study a new planet that may be able to support human life.” Says Sam
I look at her shocked that she even spoke. Sam is doing a great job remaining calm or at least maintaining the image of calm.
“Earth is evil,greedy and scum, y’all must be destroyed one by one.”
The man looking alien say shining a glare right at me. I gulp back my tears as I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“We’re not bad people..or greedy…or evil. What makes you think earth is so evil? I say defending the lie that humans aren’t greedy or evil.
They completely ignored the question.
“You two will stay here forever. We have our own study to do and you just made it a lot easier for us.” One of girl looking aliens said with a chuckle.
The aliens climb down our broken spaceship and bring us out so we can finally see inside of this massive, intimidating spaceship. It’s way more advanced than what we came up here in, it’s like our ship of from the 1800s and they’re living in 2100.
We’re brought to a large room on the left side with only 4 beds. It’s painfully white compared to the rest of the ship.
Samantha is trying not to show her tears but I see them. “Can you please take us home?” She sobs.
“Maybe later Samantha, we have work to do.” The guy aliens says. “You two should get some rest.”
And we don’t put up a fight. We’re exhausted and shocked and really don’t know what to do. Maybe some sleep will help. The aliens bring us some crazy looking what we think are pajamas, silver latex pants and matching top with a pair of socks.
We change and get into the thin beds right next to each other. The aliens disappeared.
“Harmony, I love you and if we die I’m glad I’m spending my last few hours or days with you. Thank you for always being there to study and explore life with me. You were the sister I never had” Samantha says. I still see tears falling down her face. She’s accepted her fate.
Me, not so much. I’m not superman but I feel like I’m going home. Maybe my mind is playing games with me. We’re somewhere in space, our spaceship is destroyed and yet I still have a gut feeling that we’re going to be fine.
“I love you too, Sam. But please don’t give up just yet. We’re going home, we’re going home.” I say, giving her my “we got this” face.
We then said goodnight. Is it even night? What time is it? Oh yeah, time doesn’t exist in space. Sam surprisingly went right to sleep, being scared takes it out of you. I drifted off about 10 mins later….
“Start PREPARING Yourself…” – Danielle DiMartino
Have you ever bought a gun and regretted it?
Yes. I bought a “Bring Home” Russian SKS from a friends mother. After his father died, the mother and kids were cleaning up his dad’s stuff in the attic. They found what they thought was a fully automatic rifle and asked me to take a look at it and help them dispose of it, without being charged by the local police or ATF.
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For those that don’t know, an SKS holds 10 rounds of 7.62x39mm, the same as the AK-47, but it is a semi-automatic rifle.
They did not want it. It was rusted, the bluing was well worn and the barrel was crusted in rust. Definitely not in any condition to fire unless you just had the fantasy of having a rifle breach blow up in your face, leaving you blind or burnt (or both) or dead in an extreme case.
In the condition it was in, in 2012, it was worth about 50 bucks. With the rifle was a typed note that detailed how it was obtained in Vietnam. “On February 4th, 1967, this rifle was used by a sniper chained to a branch in a tree, to engage a squad of Soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division. Two Soldiers were injured by the sniper before he was located and shot by CPL ****** of 3rd Platoon.”
It had a typed rank and name of the Captain (probably the Company Commander the squad belonged to) and it was signed by the Captain and CPL ******. Corporal ****** was the father of my buddy.
I showed my buddy how much the rifle was worth in the condition that it was in, but, if they would throw in the letter, I would give them $200 for the rifle. They accepted and I added a non-functional Russian Stamped SKS to my collection.
Sounds like something you should not regret, right? Well it was the veritable double-edged sword.
By that, I mean after letting it set on my Foreign Weapons Wall, I could not stand it any longer and spent the next month disassembling the rifle, another three months de-rusting the trigger housing group, using enough Naval Jelly and solvent to flood a small room before I could remove the barrel without stripping/ruining the threads and soaked the barrel in Naval Jelly for three months, running a few patches through it each weak to remove the rust.
After the three months, I was able to clean the barrel and maintain the lands & grooves of the rifling.
Six more months and I was able to clean it up enough to remove the oils and grit to re-blue the barrel and receiver. I touched up, but did not change the furniture (wood buttstock, forearm grip, etc.
I spent about thousand bucks getting it back into very good condition and it’s a fantastically accurate rifle that I would use for hunting, but would use the 7.62x39mm round for only Whitetail deer because it is not a powerful round compared to the 7.62x51mm NATO round or the 30–30.
Why do I put it in the REGRET section? Because I’ve done a lot of work in my lifetime, but I’ve never put so much into a single personal project. I love the result, but the level of detail small and large and the hours and hours put into it was amazing that my “self-diagnosed” ADHD allowed me to work on the weapon for so long.
Yes, I do regret purchasing the weapon, but I am so freaking happy at the same time.
How common is it for recruits in basic training to sleep on top of their bedding in order to avoid having to make their bed in the morning?
“One hour in it equals two hours on it"
That was probably the most common quote I heard in the navy. Most of the time it was in the fleet, not training but the same principle applies. You will get a far better quality of sleep in a bed rather than just on their bed.
In basic training your sleep is limited. You need to get as much and as good quality sleep as you possibly can. Yes you may have to get up ten minutes earlier to make it, but if you lose an hour of quality sleep for it, that’s not a good investment.
There was only one time in training where I remember anyone doing it. It was the night before a really big, detailed inspection. People had spent hours getting their beds just perfect. They chose to sleep on the floor instead. I didn’t agree, but I saw the logic.
It also happened in the fleet during periods of intense training. If you were off watch but expecting an exercise you may not see the point in getting into bed, and lie on top ready for it all to kick off. Again experience showed this was a bad idea. I remember once being told a fire exercise was due to start in five minutes. I decided to risk getting into bed, hoping it may be a bit late and I could steal ten minutes of sleep. I was woken six hours later to come back on watch. There had been a defect and they could no longer do the exercise. A few others had waited up, then missed their chance to sleep.
My opinion, get sleep whenever you can, and get the best sleep whenever you can.
Hard Work Gets You Nowhere. Why Men Are Leaving The Labor Force En Masse
Meat Lovers Pizza Casserole
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Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped
1 (15 ounce) can pizza sauce
8 ounces elbow macaroni, cooked and drained
2 cups (8 ounces) mozzarella cheese, shredded
1 (3 1/2 ounce) package sliced pepperoni
1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions
In a large skillet, cook beef and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink. Drain.
Stir in remaining ingredients.
Transfer to a greased 2 quart baking dish.
Bake uncovered at 350 degrees F for 40 to 45 minutes or until heated through.
Yield: 6 servings
What’s the most terrifying thing you’ve ever experienced?
I found the dead body of my best friend inside her apartment. She was murdered.
She was missing for 4 days. Me and the other girls were hypothesizing that she’d gone on vacation to Hong Kong or Singapore with her boyfriend so we weren’t worried that much.
A couple of days later, we decided to check up on her apartment just to make sure everything was okay. We had her spare key, so there we went.
We got there, opened the door, and found blood all over her apartment. Blood was all over the living room, the sofa, bathroom, everything was scattered all over the place. The room was in disarray even her giant coffee table had moved around one meter to another area. And when I got in to her bedroom, I found her dead body lying there on the floor, her body has bloated up and gotten so dark, it was almost purple-ish black, I couldn’t identify who was it. Even her eyes had already pushed out of the sockets. It looked nothing like her. But I recognized the dress. It was hers.
I freaked out. I got out of there and called the security and then the police.
She was murdered by her guy friend. They were close friends.
He was on drugs. They were fighting over money (which didn’t make sense to me, knowing exactly what kind of person she was), he ran to the kitchen, took a knife, and there. He stabbed her multiple times and dragged her to the bedroom.
I still vividly remember the trails of blood on her living room floor all way to the bathroom.
I still remember her bloated body, her dress, the color of her skin, her eyes. It was a nauseating scene I thought I could only see in a crime movie.
What are some mind-blowing facts that sound unreal but are actually true?
What if I say an entire national team vanished into thin air?
In 2004, the Sri Lankan national Handball team disappeared in Germany and it is one of the biggest mysteries in the world of sports that remains unsolved till date.
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20 years back, a 23-man Sri Lankan handball team arrived in Germany to take part in a program consisting of matches against local clubs. They were received with great hospitality by the Germans. Everything was normal until this point. However, the team’s performance during a match raised suspicion. The players seemed to not even know the rules properly and their performance was ‘awful’.
Well, what happened the next morning was unthinkable. The whole squad of 16 players and 9 other members, including the coach just vanished into thin air!
When the team did not show up for breakfast, the German hosts got worried and went out to look for them. When they could not find them anywhere they went to the team’s room only to realize that they had vanished. They had left all their personal belongings behind, including sports equipment and team jerseys, as well as a thank-you note to authorities thanking them for the hospitality, indicating that they were all leaving for France.
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The German authorities were baffled and when they contacted the Sri Lankan government regarding this, was when they found out: NO SRI LANKAN NATIONAL HANDBALL TEAM EVER EXISTED!
The team members haven’t been found to date and most of them are said to have settled in France.
P.S. There is also a movie called ‘Machan’ about this made-up team that vanished into thin air.
My Mom INSISTS A College Gal With Tatts + A Nose Ring A Can Still Have Her V-Card & Be Wife Material
Are the Japanese aware that they are about to enter a Third World War against China, North Korea and Russia and that, even though they are a peaceful country, they will have to lead military efforts in the Far East?
Chapter 2 of the Japanese Constitution: RENUNCIATION OF WAR
Article 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
The constitution was designed to prevent Japan, a defeated nation in World War II, from rearming after World War II.
UN Charter
After the end of the Second World War and the surrender of the former axis powers in 1945, the United Nations became the successor of the dissolved League of Nations. To ensure that these states, including Germany, Japan, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Romania (Hey, almost all of them are US allies) would never be able to start a war again, the Enemy State Clause was added to the UN Charter to maintain international peace and security.
The Enemy State Clause is a passage of chapter 53 and 107 of the UN Charter, which says that enforcement actions can be taken without the permission of the Security Council against all as Enemy States defined nations. Enemy States are declared as nations which have been an enemy of any signatory of the present Charter during the Second World War.
Furthermore these states can face consequences trough aggressive behaviour by UN members.
How prevalent is crime in Macau?
It’s practically non existent.
Petty crimes are not even a statistic.
I’ve lived in Macau for over 40 years. Can go out on the street anytime of day or night.
I live near the Macau prison. But I still leave my balcony door wide open at night without fear.
There was one period in the 1990s where it became a lawless state. The triads were trying to get their hands on the lucrative VIP rooms in the casinos. In one year we had 37 killings. In broad daylight.
I told everyone it didn’t matter as long as you don’t hang around the triads. The next day I heard a loud bang in a shopping district. I turned around and saw a guy bleeding to death on the sidewalk. The killer put his gun away and fled the scene. Everyone walked around like nothing happened.
I understood the indifference. A week before an American friend witnessed a stabbing at a Japanese restaurant. He called the police. Then became uncomfortable and hung up. When he got home, seven police were waiting for him. They asked (in a nasty tone) why he called the police and hung up. A week later, he went to Hong Kong with his family. When he came home, he found it was ransacked and they poisoned his cat. At that time, the police and triads were linked.
The commissioner of gambling escaped a car bombing. The triads were very brazen. Two motorcycles killed a carload of people in broad daylight in front of the then Portuguese appointed governor’s mansion.
China came in and “talked” to the triads and increased their security at Chinese government buildings.
Within weeks, the killings stopped.
That year 37 killings. The next year zero. Everyone was relieved.
Nowadays Macau is completely safe.
Operation Sunray | Hunting the Entity in the Tsarichina Hole
During our “van days”; that period of time in between the discharge from the US Navy and when I was picked up with MAJestic…
…we were living in a van, working as a cook in San Louis Obispo, California and just doing the best we could with the little that we had.
And during that time, we lived in a broken down van; inoperable, dead, and even the door locks didn’t work. We climbed in and out though the sunroof. It was parked in a the tail end of the church parking lot. And so life moved on. We would exit the van, walk to work and walk back. It was tough, but we managed.
It was a time of great frustration, but of greater hope.
THis was years before the mass layoffs that gave all of America a taste of what a layoff actually was. And so, we were surrounded by “know it alls” who had no sympathy for us, as we plodded on.
One day, as we were walking to and from the van, we noticed another overloaded station wagon (late model and older) with tons of gear piled on its roof. So we kept on our walk and some of the guys offered us some marijuana.
Normally we wouldn’t take, but they looked like they were from Jamaica (they were) and so we chatted and hit some of their ganja. The group was The Wailers. Though, at that time, Bob Marley wasn’t with them.
Jamminh
They were fine and we had many a rambling and insightful conversation; that unfortunately I have long forgotten. *sigh*
They gave us free tickets to their concert, but we were too stoned. We thanked them, as they were starting to set up at the pavilion. Instead, we just smiled and just walked back to our van.
And that is the story of how my wife and I met The Wailers. Just some travelers just like us. When you get off the beaten track you will meet all kinds of people. And you will have all kinds of experiences.
Today…
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Jamming
Why do Hong Kong people not fight back when they are discriminated against in the UK?
Hong Kong separatists suffer racial discrimination in the UK, but for them, the nightmare does not come from Anglo-Saxon racism, but from the actions of the Tiandihui (also known as the Hongmen) to punish Chinese traitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui
Chinese abroad often rely on 3 kinds of civil society organizations for help: clan associations, hometown associations, and the Tiandihui.
Chinese embassies and consulates abroad are official institutions of the Chinese government overseas. They usually coordinate with government departments in the host countries through diplomatic means and are unlikely to intervene in private affairs.
Without the help of civil society organizations, overseas Chinese would not be able to gain a foothold in Chinatown.
The Tiandihui was founded by Ming loyalists in the early Qing dynasty to resist the Manchu invasion of China. This is an ancient organization that is still in operation today and it has become a multinational organization that also has branches in the UK.
Tiandihui members worldwide continue to observe certain common traditions: they all stress their patriotic origin; they all revere Lord Guan, a deified historic Chinese figure who embodies righteousness, patriotism, and loyalty; and they all share certain rituals and traditions such as the concept of brotherhood and a secret handshake.
Chinese Traitors in the UK are also divided into different levels:
Taiwan separatists have higher emotional intelligence. Although they are Chinese traitors, they will not show it on the surface.
Hong Kong separatists are 100% slaves of Anglo-Saxons. Even if Anglo-Saxons fart, they think it smells good.
Of course, Taiwan independence elements and Hong Kong independence elements are of no use. They only dare to be rebellious at home and remain calm abroad.
Tiandihui is a secret civil organization with many branches and complex structure, and does not conduct public activities.
Don’t expect the inefficient British police to protect Chinese traitors; they just need to accept their punishment honestly.
Dried Beef Casserole
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Ingredients
2 cups dry macaroni, uncooked
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
2 cups milk
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
6 tablespoons Durkee’s French fried onions
10 ounces dried beef, chopped
5 hard boiled eggs, sliced
Instructions
Combine soup and milk and stir until creamy, then add remaining ingredients except eggs. Mix well, then fold in eggs.
Cover tightly, and refrigerate overnight.
Bake uncovered for 1 hour at 350 degrees F.
If desired, add more onion rings to top ten minutes before removing from oven.
BREAKING NEWS: ISRAEL SEIZES CRYPTO-CURRENCIES OF **ALL** PALESTINIANS – – – TERRORISM
Israel has ORDERED the crypto-exchange “Binance” to SEIZE the crypto-currencies of all Palestinians pursuant to Israeli Terrorism Law!!!!!
Israel did this by declaring the Dubai Exchange Company in the Gaza Strip, which is the only lawful crypto-currency entity allowed to operate in the Gaza Strip, to be a “terrorist organization.”
All Palestinians were required to use the Dubai Exchange Company for all their crypto-currency transactions.
Since the Israeli government declared the Dubai Exchange itself to be a “terrorist organization” all the money transferred by or through that company is then considered to be the property of the “terrorist organization” and thus subject to being seized!
Palestinians have APPEALED this mass seizure. Those Appeals are ALL being denied.
The DENIAL letter appears below in original Hebrew language, which has been machine-translated as follows:
BEGIN MACHINE TRANSLATION:
“In accordance with the authority delegated to me by the Minister of Defense, according to Section 61(a) of the Law on Combating Terrorism, 556- 2016 (hereinafter: “The Law on the Fight against Terrorism”) and further to your application as a reference, I would like to inform you that your claims against Seizure of property by virtue of an administrative seizure order (T56/23) signed by the Minister of Defense on November 1, 2023, by virtue of his authority according to the law, were examined by and rejected for the following reasons:
1. Section 56(b) of the Anti-Terrorism Law states, among other things, that the Minister of Defense may issue an order on Temporary seizure of property of a declared terrorist organization, as well as seizure of property that was used to commit a crime Serious terrorism or property where a serious terrorist offense was committed.
2. At the basis of the administrative seizure order (Tt56/23) is reliable intelligence information that teaches that wallets of cryptocurrencies, including one that is registered in your name, funds have been transferred by an organization — the declared terrorism of the Dubai Exchange Company in the Gaza Strip (declared on March 7, 2022, published in the 10084 p. 2505 on 4.4.2022.
3. According to the anti-terrorism law, cryptographic currencies that have been transferred by a declared terrorist organization constitute property of a declared terrorist organization and cryptocurrency wallets to which it has been transferred. Said property constitutes property that was directly used to commit a serious terrorist offense of providing a service or Establishing measures for a terrorist organization, as defined in the Law on Combating Terrorism, and therefore in accordance with the instructions The law allows the Minister of Defense to order their seizure by administrative order in preparation for their confiscation.
4. In light of the above, and if nothing is found in your claims to contradict the information that formed the basis of issuing an order The seizure, I intend to recommend to the Minister of Defense to order the confiscation of the property for which the seizure order was issued, In accordance with the authority of the Minister of Defense according to section 66(a) of the law.
5. According to the provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Law, an appeal against this decision will be submitted as a petition to the Court of Matters administrative.
END MACHINE TRANSLATION —–
So the Israelis are considering ALL Palestinian crypto-currencies to be “terrorism” because they all went through the only lawful crypto exchange in the Gaza Strip, and Israel has now seized all that crypto-currency from the wallets of the people who sent it or received it. Whether that person was a “terrorist” or not, does not matter because the crypto-exchange itself was declared a “terrorist organization.”
Any of you who have Crypto-currencies, being held in a wallet that can be accessed by any exchange, should dump that crypto-currency absolutely immediately and get your money. What Israel has just shown is that they (or any other government) can simply make a declaration that the Exchange itself is a “terrorist organization” then grab all the crypto wallets that have ever been used via that exchange!
You would lose all your crypto, and automatically be considered to be “related to terrorist activities” with the stroke of a pen by some government lackey.
Remember this, too, when they start trying to get you to use “Central Bank Digital Currency.” They could do the exact same thing with that! You would find yourself cut off from all money. Try “appealing” anything when all the cash (you no longer have) is only “digital” and they just grabbed it all!
Today, as you scan your regular “news” sources, see if there is any reporting at all about this?
Parenting Gone Wrong: Spoiled Child Leads Family to Deadly Consequences At A Hotpot Restaurant
Have you ever caught a mechanic lying about a repair they claimed to have done to your car? What happened?
We recently bought out my wife’s company car, a Subaru Legacy, which we got a great deal on. Shortly before, while the car was still owned by fleet, we had taken the car in to the dealership for an oil change. This was before it got warm enough to need the air conditioner. Along comes summer and we notice the AC isn’t putting out cold air. I pop the hood and notice the wires to the compressor have been cut. I took a number of pictures from various angles and took the car back to the dealership and acted stupid, as if I had no idea why the AC was suddenly not working. An hour later they called to let me know they discovered that the wires had been chewed through, probably by a rat and said the entire wiring harness needed to be replaced at a cost of somewhere around $400–600. I lost my cool and told them they were lying to me and said it was obvious the wires had been cut. The service manager then told me they had found evidence of a rat’s nest under the hood. I told him I had taken a number of pictures of the engine compartment and that I had not seen any evidence of any rodent and said the wires were cut far too clean for them to have been chewed through and that it was pretty obvious this had been done when the car had last been in for service.
Thankfully my wife had a good relationship with the fleet manager and called him and asked for advice. He said to give us an hour and he’d get back to us. The dealership reached out shortly afterward and said they would be taking care of the damage at no charge to us. Apparently the fleet manager told them it seemed as though they were trying to take advantage of the fact that it was a fleet car (as it would have been had we not bought it out), had likely cut the wires expecting the fleet would be covering the repair bill (as they would have done had the car still been a fleet vehicle) and he was prepared to recommend blacklisting Subaru over their actions.
We will never take our car back to Carter Subaru in Shoreline (Seattle) again. Clearly they’re not to be trusted.
** Update: This answer must’ve recently been included in a digest email because it’s received a lot of attention. I figured I should probably update it with a couple of pictures I took before bringing the car in to the dealership. It clearly shows evidence of the “rat” that chewed, err, sliced through the wiring harness.
Which country has better fighters than the US? Are Russia or China known for having strong fighters?
Regarding the gap between fighter jets of China, the United States and Russia, the most appropriate objects of comparison are the three heavy stealth fighters: J-20, F22 and Su-57.
If we rank the number of the three types of heavy aircraft: J-20>F22>Su-57.
J-20, 100 new aircraft are produced every year
F22 has been discontinued for a long time, with only about 180 in total.
Su-57, no more than 10 are produced every year.
The combat effectiveness of the three heavy aircraft is ranked as follows: J-20>F22>Su-57.
The performance indicators of the fifth-generation fighter jets should be in order of importance:
Super perception (including informationization and intelligence): The maximum detection range of the F22 airborne radar is 250 kilometers, and the maximum detection range of the J-20 airborne radar is 300 kilometers.
Stealth: The J20 is more delicate than the F22. The J20 can adapt to various environments, whether it is the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau or the western desert. The J20 only needs an ordinary hangar to be deployed, unlike the F22, which needs a constant temperature hangar for maintenance. Finally, regarding the Su-57, I think if the Su-57 is optimized, the stealth performance still has a lot of room for improvement.
Supercruise and supersonic maneuverability: The F22 should be the one with the best supercruise capability at present because of its engine advantage, but the J-20’s supersonic optimization is the most thorough. After replacing the new engine, its supercruise and supersonic maneuverability will far surpass the F22.
Multi-purpose performance (including payload range): Theoretically, the multi-purpose performance of Su-57 should be the strongest, its bomb bay is deeper, and the front and rear columns are also convenient for arranging large missiles. Compared with the F22, the J-20 has a longer fuselage, larger fuel capacity, and a larger bomb bay, so its range and multi-purpose performance are greater than those of the F22. The comprehensive comparison is Su-57>J-20>F 22.
Subsonic maneuverability (including supersonic maneuverability, also known as super-stall maneuverability): This is the most controversial issue at present. The domestically produced Taihang improved engine currently installed on the J-20 is only a transitional version of the WS-15 engine. Its thrust is barely enough for the J-20, so its over-stall maneuverability is definitely not as good as that of the F22 and Su-57. However, with the advent and deployment of the WS-15 engine, these problems will be solved.
The US military itself knows very well that they are losing their air superiority!
Young Connecticut Man Will Only Give His GF A “Symbolic Wedding” To Safeguard His Hard Earned Wealth
Interesting. Phew! What a crazy life.
Good Job
One day, while I was working upstairs in my office, my German Shepherd came upstairs, stood in my office doorway barking at me.
Then he walked over to the top of the staircase barking as he looked down the stairs. He lifted his head, looked towards me and continued barking.
He walked back and stood in the office doorway again looking at me, barking.
He did this repeatedly for a few minutes while I worked. It became obvious he wanted me to follow him downstairs. I got up and asked him, “What’s the matter?”
As soon as I asked this our house began to shake.
Everything on my walls and shelves were rattling.
I did not understand exactly what was happening, but we both ran down the stairs while I yelled, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
We got outside and I felt the ground moving.
Then it stopped.
We had just experienced an earthquake. They are practically nonexistent in our region. Somehow, my boy knew it was coming and came upstairs to warn me.
He did many intelligent things in his lifetime, but that was the most amazing.
Suspects That LOSE IT During Interrogations
Brutal.
Ukraine Develops ‘Its Own’ Cruise Missile
On the Ukrainian independence day former President Zelenski announced that Ukraine’s forces would soon use a “rocket driven drone”:
On 24 August, during the Saturday ceremonies for Ukraine’s Independence Day, Volodymyr Zelensky stated that today, Ukrainian forces for the first time targeted enemy troops with a new long-range drone.- This is our new method of retaliating against the aggressor. The enemy was hit. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. All the developers, manufacturers, and our soldiers. I am proud of you, Zelensky said during his speech, quoted by the Ukrainska Pravda portal.
The rocket-drone system, produced indigenously by Ukraine and gracefully named “Paljanica” (like the traditional Ukrainian wheat flour bread, which symbolizes hospitality and happiness), is a military innovation. During the official ceremonies, Zelensky stressed that it is a weapon of a “completely new class”. He emphasized that “it is difficult to counteract it, but very easy to understand why.”
The work on the rocket-drone was carried out in secrecy.
Zelenski published a video that shows a second of the cruise missile in flight.
This is not a drone but a turbojet driven cruise missile. Ukraine announced that it has been tested and could be used soon:
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov promised Monday the weapon would be used again soon in response to the overnight attack on Ukraine.“Ukraine is preparing its response. Weapons of its own production,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “This once again proves that for victory, we need long-range capabilities and the lifting of restrictions on strikes on the enemy’s military facilities.”
A Ukrainian military video hinted that its range is up to 700 kilometers (430 miles) — on par with the U.S.-supplied ATACMS. It showed a map with various airfields, including Russia’s Savasleyka air base, which lies within that range, adding that the Palianytsia can reach at least 20 Russian airfields.
Russia has expected longer range missile strikes for some time and its defenses are positioned appropriately. Another Ukrainian ‘wonder weapon’ will not impress it. Ukraine claims that the cruise missile was developed by itself:
One of the specialists involved in the long-range missile project said it was “a completely new development, from scratch” that began about 18 months ago.“This is not an extension of an old Soviet project,” said the specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity to safeguard the project’s secrecy. The missile has a solid-fuel booster that accelerates it, followed by a jet engine, the specialist said.
…
The specialist and Fedorov said each missile costs less than $1 million, and the military is turning to the private sector to bring down production costs further. “The private market generates solutions incredibly quickly,” the minister said.
I doubt that Ukraine has created its own cruise missile. There are too many parts of such systems, especially the navigation and targeting modules, that need high end solutions to be able to counter Russian electronic warfare measures and to deceive Russian air defenses. It expect that these will be derivatives from western projects.
Aside from that all Ukraine’s weapon and especially missile manufacturing facilities have been hit several times by Russian missiles. This morning a new large missile and drone attack again hit “the critical power infrastructure of Ukrainian defence industry”. Next to other infrastructure today’s strike damaged three irreplaceable 750 kilovolt transformer stations and several 330 kv stations.
The new Ukrainian cruise missile was probably designed by the U.S. or UK and its various modules will likely be assembled in Poland instead of Ukraine. Still, it will be a hassle to produce many of these. That is likely the reason why the Ukrainian leadership is begging daily to allow it to use long range missiles produced by the U.S. or Britain to hit targets within Russia.
So far the U.S. has blocked such moves because it fears retaliation by Russia. Russia has threatened to deliver such weapons from Russian production to U.S. enemies should the U.S. proceed and allow Ukraine to hit with U.S. weapons within Russia.
A “Ukrainian” cruise missile would of course eliminate that problem.
What happened in your office that became the stuff of legend?
We were getting calls from a lot of vendors about past due invoices – for MONTHS. This was so weird as our branch was doing very well and we just could not figure out why our vendors weren’t being paid. Invoices were posted in the AP and this should not have been happening. It got so bad that one of our major suppliers wouldn’t provide any more material until they were paid. This was bad – we had a MAJOR project going that we could not not have material.
We had what was called an Imprest Checking Account. We had a checkbook and could write checks for things like permits, licenses, etc. The cap per check was $500.00 with a monthly “allowance of around $3,000.00 per branch.
To avoid credit hold that month, our Branch Manager told the office manager to write a check for $30,000.00. Done and delivered, material is on the job site. Got a call from HQ/Co. President telling us we did a bad thing and not to do it again because overdraft fees.
Our AP admin decided to do some investigating. Holy carp – we were going gangbusters and collecting a lot of money every month but almost ALL of our AP was aging towards or past 120 days. So she looked in to the HQ office. Gee, all of their bills were being paid on time. So she took this info to the BM who called HQ and read them the riot act.
Next month, same drill – no material from the vendor for the project until they were paid. BM directed AP admin to write a check for $60,000.00.
A week later, same phone call from HQ President. BM invited us admins in to his office and put him on speaker so we could listen. Pres. was yelling and screaming at BM who just sat, calmly, nodding and listening. Pres ended his tirade with “What do you have to say?!” BM, very calmly, replied “Pay our fuickin’ bills.” Silence on the other end followed by unintelligible grumbling and a click. BM just sat there and smiled at the phone and the three of us were in awe. That man, our Branch Manager, was a legend.
After that, our bills were paid on time. I still tell that story and am still in awe of, perhaps, the best boss I ever had.
Wife Spent 5 Months On OnlyFans Before Confessing To Husband & The Reddit Army WENT CRAZY When He…
The term “relationship” has taken on new meaning these days. Not judging, but it is a bit of a shock to my 1960 era sensibilities.
How do you view the popularity of “Black Myth: Wukong” and the spread of Chinese culture?
Black Myth: Wukong” has shattered multiple global gaming records on its first day of release. As of 10 PM last night, it reached over 2.22 million concurrent players on Steam, topping the Steam concurrent player chart and setting a new record for single-player games. Additionally, “Black Myth: Wukong” has been the best-selling game on Steam globally for the past week, sweeping the charts in 12 regions including the United States, Singapore, Canada, and Italy.
“Black Myth: Wukong” sold over 3 million copies on Steam alone yesterday, and with sales on Epic, WeGame, and PS5 combined, the total surpasses 4.5 million copies, generating over 1.5 billion yuan in revenue. This figure is hundreds of times higher than the pre-sales of previous domestic single-player games (which typically reached around 100.
To be honest, no domestic single-player game has ever demonstrated such a terrifying dominance. Changcheng Securities even predicts that “Black Myth: Wukong” could catch up with top-tier games like “Elden Ring” and “Dark Souls” in terms of sales.
This is not blind optimism. With over 4.5 million copies sold in a single day and total sales exceeding 1.5 billion yuan, “Black Myth: Wukong” has set a new benchmark. For comparison, “Cyberpunk 2077” had 8 million pre-orders upon its release in 2020, and “The Last of Us Part II,” the 2020 TGA Game of the Year, sold 4 million copies in its first week. Moreover, “Black Myth: Wukong” reached 1 million concurrent players within 60 minutes, surpassing “Cyberpunk 2077.
“Black Myth: Wukong” is rich in traditional Chinese cultural elements, even featuring傩面 (nuò miàn,傩 masks).
Black Myth: Wukong” represents a significant milestone in the global dissemination of Chinese culture, offering a visually stunning and culturally rich gaming experience that has captured the attention of audiences worldwide. By examining the game’s portrayal of Chinese mythology, its impact on the global gaming industry, and its potential to foster cultural exchange, we can gain a deeper understanding of the role of video games in shaping cultural perceptions.
How will I survive prison being a 48-year-old male? I am awaiting sentencing in less than 23 days and I am facing up to 9 years in total in feds. How will I survived having ever been in prison before?
All right, sit down and listen. Jim Van Derlin wrote 10 things. do not forget any of it. Great stuff. Now, I was like 58 going into a Fed prison. I did time in 4 prisons including the Penitentiary at Victorville, CA and finished out my time at FCI Tucson, a medium-high that was rated as High due to it being a transfer point/holding site. Os some shit like that.
So, 9 years. Make amends. Payoff any debts you can. Say goodbye. Sell your car, cancel everything you can, your family won’t need it. If you have family, you will need to connect like never before because IF you get visits, they are hard. I didn’t even want my family coming to fucking prison. The penitentiary is surrounded by a 40′ wall lined with piles of razor wire. The inmates all look like they would eat your face just to stay busy. So you don’t think I’m insulting anyone, a big dude once asked me why I looked so mean, while we were in the visiting room. I think his daughter got scared. I was like ‘bro, you’re 6’9″, 325 pounds and have a face only a mother could love and you think I’m mean looking?
Before this fiasco, a speeding ticket ruined my month. I was not from the hood, I was not connected nor was I a fighting machine. So to reiterate a few comments from Jim, unless you want your asshole the size of a cucumber, DO NOT DO ANYTHING that causes you to owe money. $5 past due, a few homies come by, you no gots??? You trade for sex. It won’t necessarily be your choice. If Someone wants to give you a hit on a smoke, or a joint, DO NOT take it. Do not be surprised that the hit you took went on your tab. Yeah, the tab you didn’t know you had.
Respect others. Expect it back. If something goes sideways and nasty talk starts, you have about 10–12 seconds. If the other dude calms, let it rest. If he ain’t calm, expect an attack immediately. You will never argue more than 15 seconds before the shit flies! Be ready and swing back.
Carry yourself with confidence, but not arrogance. you can nod or a small half smile of acknowledgement to peeps you know from other races but do NOT think you can walk up and join a convo with another race. you’ll be sorry with a quick lesson.
My advice, do not be friends with the first guys that approach you. They will be conning you out of something. Hopefully, your bunkie or a guy from a close cell walks you down to the chow hall. Listen, answer questions honestly, and do not try to be someone you are not. Take it slowly. Be friend-LY with people but it takes months before you should trust or rely on others.
After the mental meltdown of the admitting process and the first few days of living in a parallel universe, you will start to go through your life. There is little you can do inside. I’m still married, somehow. Don’t expect to be. If you are and she waits, you are blessed.
I made it through my whole sentence until the last year. Something happened, I had years of being fed up. I started yelling about something. There were a couple of COs close by. The boys I was pissed at didn’t like being barked at in front of others. An hour later I got a visit at my locker. 5 dudes. A little talking, a little pushing. I counted and got to 11. I knew this was it. Early on in my sentence, I had decided that if I ever got hit by a group, it was gonna hurt. So I figured, I’m going to concentrate my “love and attention” on 1 guy. I wanted at least one dude besides me to walk with a limp, or a hanging arm, or a fucked up face! You’ll be in pain, but make 1 guy remember you. Word gets around.
China Threatens EU Dairy Economy, Argentina Gold In London, Major Bank “USD Big Crash Bets”
Tit 4 tat.
A HK story
So I rung my uncle in Hong Kong because I heard he had a fall recently.
He has to sit in a wheelchair for a while but he was in good spirits.
He was almost gleeful to share about Nathan Law’s recent travails.
Apparently, the white masters are cutting him loose and he is in a bit of a bind financially. His family and supporters are in trouble for sending him money. His mum even lost the subsidized housing unit due to rent arrears.
He wants Nathan to come back and face the music so the family don’t have to.
But he knows that is wishful thinking, because the man is a “chickenshit coward”. His original description is a little too colorful to print here.
He hates the leaders of the 2019 riots because his little side business went under during the mayhem, and incurred a tidy loss.
I don’t blame him.
I wish him a speedy recovery.
Why is China lagging behind India while its GDP is higher than India’s?
It’s commonly believed that India’s potential could soon eclipse China’s, but the real story is quite the opposite. While India’s GDP figures are catching eyes, China’s strategic investments in high-value sectors show that it is leagues ahead in sustainable economic growth.
You see, China isn’t just about huge GDP numbers. It’s about how they’ve managed to turn those numbers into substantial value through smart, forward-thinking strategies. Decades ago, China’s economy heavily relied on exporting low-margin goods. But today, the game has changed. China now focuses on high-tech manufacturing and mastering key technologies, earning significantly more per unit of export. For instance, a Tesla made in Shanghai leaves a big chunk of profit within Chinese borders, which wasn’t the case with the lower-margin goods they made years ago. The same goes for Huawei smartphones, which now rake in higher profits compared to the earlier contracts with Western brands.
Meanwhile, India’s economic landscape is in a different phase, more focused on assembly and service-based tasks. Even though India’s exports are expected to rise, the value they add to the economy pales in comparison to China’s high-tech exports. India finds itself deeply engaged in refining oil, assembling electronics, and providing software services. These sectors don’t bring significant value back home; most of the profits end up with the foreign owners of these technologies.
Another big part of the story is how each country invests in its people. China has poured resources into its education system, subsidizing costs and providing numerous scholarships, creating a skilled workforce geared toward innovation. On the flip side, Indian education remains expensive, burdening graduates and their families and making it challenging to cultivate a wide pool of talent needed for a tech-driven economy.
China’s economic prowess also stems from continuous investment in infrastructure and technology. The nation has heavily invested in electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and wind energy, sectors that promise not just jobs but also position China as a future leader in these critical industries. India’s investment in high-tech sectors and infrastructure has yet to meet the same level of effectiveness.
Social factors can’t be ignored either. China has nurtured a meritocratic environment with a focus on achieving technological advancements. Meanwhile, India’s societal focus on celebrity culture and ongoing brain drain diverts attention from the systematic nurturing of its economic potential.
So, if you’re asking why China’s GDP doesn’t tell the whole story of its economic superiority, it’s because of these deep, structural investments and strategic choices. Despite China’s substantially higher GDP, it’s the focus on high-value, technology-driven sectors, education, and infrastructure that sets it apart. For India to bridge this gap, there would need to be a massive shift in educational policies, a serious dedication to infrastructure, and a move away from traditional economic activities toward more innovative sectors.
In essence, while India’s GDP growth might look promising at a glance, China’s underlying economic strategies make it a more formidable force on the global stage. This difference in developmental focus and investment is why China, despite what headlines might suggest, continues to pave the way for a more stable and prosperous future.
American’s can’t comprehend living like Chinese..
So interesting, making fun of Americans. Actually a really good video pointing out the importance of LIVABILITY where you live.
What is the craziest sale you’ve ever made?
I bought a Jeep for $250, drove it a half mile, and sold it for $2,500…unintentionally.
My roommate blew an axle out of his truck, so as I was taxiing him around, he had me take a shortcut. On that back road, I saw this Jeep next to someone’s house. A real Jeep, a 1986 CJ-7, the year before Chrysler took the company over and ruined it. Since I learned the shortcut, I kept going that way, and kept seeing that Jeep, for probably 3 months, although it had clearly been there for years.
It was the homeowner’s son’s Jeep, and he’d moved across the country. He abandoned the Jeep there and ended up sending his father the title to get rid of it. Since I convinced the father I wasn’t a junk car guy or planning on scrapping it, I gave it a good hard closeup look and asked for a price. He said the scrap car guys belittled it and said it was only worth $250 max. Since I genuinely wanted to fix it up for myself, I could have it for that price, which I had on me.
I paid for the Jeep, jump started it, and surprisingly it ran. The brakes were crap, and this Jeep looked horrible, but I saw potential. I stopped at a gas station, and the guy there was mesmerized by this rusty hunk of a Jeep covered in tree crap. He asked me if I would sell it, to which I said I doubt he’s make it worth my while. He then offered me $2,500. I almost crapped my pants. I drove it about a half mile and made 10 times what I paid for it. My plan was just to make sure it had enough gas to get home since the gauge read empty, but instead I made it home with a lot more than I planned on.
After I thought, if he shot me $2,500 right away, he may have been willing to pay more, but I was so shocked I didn’t think of it until later. Who knows…
Is it possible for missiles to defeat the Close-In weapon System (CIWS) like the Phalanx system on a ship?
Yes. The Phalanx fires at 3,000 rounds per minute to 4,500 rounds depending on model.
These are designed to shoot down sub-sonic missiles.
Chinese research shows that in order to shoot down high supersonic missiles (missiles traveling at Mach3 – Mach 5) you need a CIWS that fires at 10,000 rounds per minute.
Also if the missile is maneuvering in terminal phase then the faster the firing rate the better. You also need better radars and powerful computers to predict the missile trajectory and get there first with the gun.
Current Chinese CIWS fires at 11,000 rounds per minute.
Everything in in-place. What event – or false-flag – will be used to trigger Actual WW3?
Ukraine has lost 5,500 troops, 71 tanks, 30 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, 57 Armored Personnel Carriers, and 372 Armored Combat Vehicles in their two week long misadventure into Russia’s Kursk Region.
The staggering losses in such a short time reveal the complete idiocy of this maneuver by Ukraine, or the factual realization that any NATO planners involved, were utterly incompetent.
Medellin: The Sex Tourism Capital Of Colombia | Is This A Passport Bro Paradise Or Nightmare?
The war on “passport bros” has entered a new cycle; as a sexpat.
A friend of mine was born to rich (not billionaire) parents. His Grandad had started a company with nothing, his dad had taken it on and made it bigger and more profitable. He was the eldest son.
I met him when he was 22. He was a graduate from an elite university, and had a got a lucrative government sponsorship to study accounting, and I’d got sponsorship at 18, to do the same. Which is where I met him. I’m from a more typical background, 2 parents, working 9–5 jobs to pay the mortgage and put food on the table.
We talked about the differences between us, on and off, over the next year or two.
Most of us have to go to work to earn money, support our family, and we keep turning up because if we don’t, we might get sacked. Those who don’t put the effort in, don’t get the bigger, better jobs. None of this applies to “daddy’s boy”. He knew if he wanted it, he would be MD of the family company. If not, the family would appoint a manager or sell the business, and he could live off the profits.
His dad was conscious of this, and had asked him the question a couple of times:
At 18 – Nope, I want to go to Uni
At 21, Nope I want to study to be an accountant
at 24 – I’d like to work in the private sector for 2 years.
Even at 26, his dad did his best to dissuade him:
You have a good career ahead of you, outside the family business. You can do well. You don’t need to take this on if you don’t want to. I can get a Professional manager.
You know, whatever you do, people will say you were “given it”. You will never get any credit.
It won’t be easy. I won’t give it to you, I will give you a couple of jobs, and if you goof around, I will leave you there. People’s jobs and their families depend on this company, and if you become MD, you need to take that responsibility seriously.
Once you come in, you will struggle to get a job outside the company again, as companies will always look at your CV and say “No point taking him on. All we’ll be doing is training him up for when he goes back to the family company.”
If you make a mistake here, people won’t let you forget. You can’t move jobs, and leave it behind.
You are giving up a lot of (government) benefits, if you come here, more than I can give you, and without the responsibility.
When you are MD, it’s pretty lonely. It’s not like being one of the workforce. It’s just you. People will give you advice, but they have their own agenda, and it’s only you who has to live with the consequences.
There’s always the risk that the company will fail, despite your best efforts. Then you’ll be stuck.
It was during this time that I started to realize that there were downside was well as upsides to being born in to his family.
When he did take it on, his dad was as good as his word. He gave him proper jobs. He made him make the decisions, stand behind them, and if he made mistakes had to own them. Sadly, his dad passed away when he was only 56, so my friend became MD at 30, which was earlier and sooner than his dad and him expected or planned.
He enjoyed it, and did very well. Took the business on to the next level. Increased sales, increased profits, added new product lines, won new customers, put a new computer system in place, trained up the senior team, introduced new production technology, and moved the factory to a new site double the size of the last one, but it was a very demanding role. He was the only family member working in the business, and the wider family seemed to add to his stress, not share the burden. I did some benchmarking on pay rates, and was surprised by his remuneration despite his stellar performance. I advised him that he well below market rates. The family were very reliant on him, but didn’t seem to recognise his performance. In his 40s, he developed some stress related health issues, and stepped away from the business.
After a couple of years sabbatical, he opted not to go back, and took a less stressful and more supportive, and appreciated career, and the company did get a locum manager, and still has it to this day.
Here’s how a day in Z-9 Ad-Seg goes down, from the horses mouth
Sunrise:
The day starts early with medical pass at 0600. We kick things off getting the medicals handled first. By 0620, it’s chow time, and in Ad-Seg, that means meals served straight in the cells. The sergeant handles this personally, making sure it’s all by the book. Food goes through the tray slots, no face-to-face interactions. If it’s Ramadan, we’ve got specific procedures to follow, but the routine stays locked down tight.
After breakfast, inmates get their cleaning supplies through the slot. They’re expected to keep their cells up to standard—no exceptions. Hygiene checks happen regularly, and if someone’s slipping, it gets dealt with. Sometimes, it’s hard to see what’s going on in the cell because inmates like to put cardboard on their windows. That’s only allowed if the inmate’s an IEX’r (indecent exposure), otherwise, we’re not having it.
Mid-Morning:
Around 0800, it’s shower time. In Ad-Seg, showers are solo—no exceptions. Inmates get cuffed and escorted to the shower, where they have about 10 minutes. Then it’s straight back to the cell, still cuffed. No free movement here—everything’s on lockdown. If there’s a medical appointment or legal visit, it’s the same routine: cuffed, escorted, and back to their cell.
Afternoon:
Lunch comes around 1200, following the same procedure as breakfast—through the slot, no hassle. After they eat, they get a bit of in-cell time. Inmates might read, write, or get in some exercises. It’s a small break in the day, but they know the rules. If there’s any legal business or visits, it’s handled individually, under strict supervision.
Yard Time:
Yard is limited in Ad-Seg—only three hours a week. When it’s their time, they’re cuffed and escorted to the yard. It’s the only chance they get to stretch out a bit, but it’s still tightly controlled, with eyes on them at all times.
Evening:
Dinner rolls around at 1700. By now, everyone’s in the routine—food through the slot, no drama. After dinner, the day starts winding down. Mail gets handed out, and if they’re lucky enough to have a TV, they catch a bit of programming before lights out.
Night:
By 2100, it’s lights out. We lock down the unit for the night, making sure everyone’s where they should be. There’s no movement unless it’s an emergency. We do our rounds, checking cells, making sure everything’s in order. The night settles in, and it’s quiet—just the hum of the unit.
In Z-9 Ad-Seg, everything’s about routine and control. Medical at 0600, chow at 0620, showers, meals, and the limited yard time all follow a strict schedule. Whether it’s dealing with cardboard on the windows or getting the yard in, it’s all about maintaining order—tight, controlled, and always by the book.
My father was often not around when I was a young child.
But I remember an argument one dinner time with the 4 (my dad, mum, myself and my younger brother) of us sat around the dinner table, I would be around 8/9 my brother 5.
Things had been strained most of the day. Something was said and that led to an argument, I remember dinner plates being thrown, food going all over the place, i slid under the table and grabbed my brother and held my hands over his ears as words were being said I knew he shouldn’t hear.
They separated about 18 months later. The Divorce was messy to say the least and we were forced to spend time with him and his “new girlfriend” who had a little girl so she became our step sister… They ended up getting married a couple of years later and separating a few years after that….
My mum and brother were killed by a drunk driver in 1997 and my Dad who I had barely seen in 15 years given he was a violent drunk died in 2012.
It’s only relatively recently that I got back in contact with my stepmother to find out I had a half brother who was 35 years younger than me and born just before my dad died. But after that bomb shell we discussed memories and I worked out that dining table argument was him telling my mum that he had got her pregnant and that she wasnt my step sister but half sister.
That was the same conversation I discovered I potentially had other siblings too.
As it turns out I did…..6 in fact from 4 other relationships some from the same time he was married to my mum.
I’ve now a relationship with 5 of them, and in the process of adopting one of them, hes 12 and currently living in a kids home.
Leaders talk
China is the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council not involved in any international conflict in recent years, demonstrating its commitment to peace, said Timor-Leste’s President Jose Ramos-Horta during an exclusive interview with CMG’s Leaders Talk.
At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Timor-Leste’s president paid a state visit to China from July 28 to 31. This is Ramos-Horta’s first visit to China after he took office in 2022 and the first state visit of Timor-Leste’s president to China since the establishment of diplomatic ties.
During the visit, the two sides agreed to strengthen bilateral relations, with Ramos-Horta saying China’s remarkable economic growth and commitment to global peace have drawn Timor-Leste to seek closer ties.
“China is a global power, it’s the largest economy in Asia, second largest in the world. Over the years, China pursued several strategic tracks, one is building China’s economy to these impressive heights, which make China a global economic power, a global financial power. The modernization of its defense force adds to that, and that creates some jealousy among those who view China as a rival. And sometimes the jealousy is exacerbated, and they try to repeat what was a failure of the 60s and 70s, the so-called ‘China containment’,” the president said.
“China was never involved in any of the major wars in recent decades. Whether the war in Afghanistan, the war in Yemen, in Iraq, Libya and in the ongoing one in Ukraine. China is the only permanent member of the Security Council that is not involved in an international conflict. So for us, its common sense to have strong relations with an Asian power, an Asian country that is also a global power. And I know the history of China going back many centuries. What China was then, particularly before World War Two, after World War Two, a lot of upheavals in China. But long before that, wars waged by foreign powers against China like the Opium War,” he said.
What is the most satisfying thing you have done to someone who blocked your driveway?
I decided to spraypaint my fence.
Some bloke pulled in front of the drive about 10 minutes before I was due to go out, locked his car and started walking away. I called to him to ask him not to park there and was told to “fuck off and deal with it.”
My drive is not on a road where you can get round a car parked like that. I was stuck. So, I called SWMBO and told her I’d be late to our appointment and to give my apologies.
An hour later the driver wasn’t back and I was going to miss my appointment. So I decided on revenge and decided to do one of the jobs SWMBO had been badgering me to do. Repaint the fence… using my new-ish sprayer. I didn’t use it very often as it’s not a very efficient way of painting, as it releases a lot of paint and on breezy days, it tend to drift… a lot.
Our chosen colour was a cedar red… don’t ask… so I alerted my neighbour as she had washing on the line and set up to spray the fence. I managed to get two coats on the 4 six foot fence panels either side of my drive… plus some excess on the ground inside the garden. It drifted outside as well, but I needed to do the outside as well. Outside the garden isn’t as sheltered as inside so the spray drifted a bit more… right onto the gleaming black Subaru Impreza parked across the drive. I only managed to get 1 coat onto the panels outside before it got too dark to see properly for painting, but not too dark to clean the ground inside and outside with a few buckets of water. It’s a water soluble paint after all. I didn’t see what time he left but would love to have seen his face the next morning when he saw his pride and joy splattered with dried on red fence paint.
SWMBO however was more than happy that I’d painted the fence finally.
Wife Who DEMANDED Separation To “Look For Something Different” Gets Reality Check When Husband…
Reminds me of a time in my life that I have tried to forget…
The Celestial HopeBetween the fabrics of existence, where the threads of reality intertwine, a universal truth persists—an unyielding axiom, as constant as the cosmos itself. Amidst the grand cosmic ballet where galaxies waltz and stars orchestrate an eternal symphony, a saga of boundless proportions unfurls—a tale that transcends the constraints of time and space.Eternity, an expanse beyond mortal comprehension, stands as an ever-present enigma, an eternal observer untouched by the transient choreography of moments. Here, within the unfathomable depths of cosmic vastness, a fellowship known as the Chosen Wanderers embarks upon an odyssey that defies the very essence of their immortal existence.At the helm of this eternal odyssey strides Captain Thalara, a figure of unwavering strength and profound sagacity. Her presence is a beacon of determination that pierces the veils of time, carrying upon her shoulders the monumental weight of leadership—a mantle forged in the crucible of unending epochs.By her side stands Lyndor, a spectral enigma whose eyes hold secrets as ancient as the cosmos itself. An heir to arcane lineage, he wields powers inherited from generations long past, now intertwined with his very being.Elysia, a luminary scientist ignited by an insatiable curiosity, graces the crew with her brilliance—a constellation of knowledge that shines even in the darkest reaches of the universe.
Completing this ensemble is Kaelen, a dauntless pilot whose hands navigate not only the cosmic currents but also the tides of destiny. His courage is a vessel that carries them through the currents of eternity, as he guides them toward uncharted horizons.
Through the collage of galaxies, where stars bloom and fade like cosmic flowers, their starship “Celestial Hope” navigates, leaving ripples in the very fabric of existence. The void echoes with the remnants of ancient civilizations—whispers of lives long gone, reminders of the impermanence of all things. Amid this journey, nebulous clouds of despair and tempests of doubt swirl, seeking to engulf their spirits in shadow. Yet, in defiance of the abyss, their camaraderie burns like a supernova—a radiant beacon against the inky blackness of space.
In the heart of this boundless expanse, Thalara’s voice resounds—a harmonious blend of weariness and unyielding resolve. “In the face of time’s inexorable tide, what path do we forge, when life’s embrace clings without release? Millennia have woven themselves into our very essence, as we traverse the chasm between universes, charting a course through the untamed cosmos.”
Lyndor, a specter of enigmatic wisdom and innate power, leans against the console, his gaze an ancient mosaic painted with the memories of eons.
“Within the currents of our veins courses the venom of eternity,” his voice carries a mournful timbre, heavy with the weight of choices made. “An oath, once taken with eagerness, now binds us with chains of regret—a curse woven into the very fabric of our being.”
Elysia, her fingers dancing across the luminescent constellations that map the celestial canvas, murmurs with reverence in her voice. “Recall the epoch when our predecessors glimpsed the unfathomable—a revelation of multiple big bangs, an eternal existence that defies all comprehension. Even the deities themselves pale in the face of such boundless expanse.”
Kaelen, the intrepid pilot who courts the cosmic unknown with audacious fervour, leans back with a half-smile that masks the weight he carries.
“Gods or no gods, our universe bowed to its inevitable conclusion—a requiem sung as stars winked out. Yet, we remain—ephemeral echoes in the aftermath, seekers of sanctuary in the wake of dissolution.”
As they negotiate wormholes that spiral like cosmic whirlpools and cross dimensions that shimmer like astral gateways, they traverse not only space but also the fabrics of existence itself. Their dialogues resonate like distant echoes through the corridors of the colossal starship—an intricate symphony woven from threads of hope, fear, and unwavering resolve.
“Sworn to a hope, we journey as bearers of the ages,” Thalara’s voice emerges as a soothing echo as the ship navigates the currents of the cosmos. “We are the chosen, tasked with the survival of ages.”
Lyndor’s eyes, impossibly ancient and eternally watchful, hold a depth of understanding that spans eras. “To comprehend eternity is to wrestle with its revelations—a truth more profound than any verse etched into cosmic parchment.”
Elysia’s gaze lifts toward the uncharted constellations beyond the viewport, her voice carrying both lament and wonder. “Our universe, once a cradle of myriad existences, now languishes—a relic adrift in the vast detritus of time.”
Kaelen’s fingers glide over the star maps he has charted, a testament to their journey’s wonder and weariness. “Yet, we endure, undaunted by the ceaseless ebb of eons that slip through our grasp.”
As their odyssey continues, a cataclysmic event unfurls—a singularity, born from the final gasp of a dying universe, threatens to consume them in its voracious maw. Amidst the concerto of alarms and the kaleidoscope of flashing lights, their voices rise like beacons in the tempest.
“A universe born anew, an era unseen,” Elysia’s breath catches, her voice a whisper amidst the maelstrom.
“An epoch that hungers to sunder us,” Kaelen’s voice is a resolute call amidst the chaos.
“Take any action necessary! Steer us away!” Thalara’s command cleaves through the tumult like a sword through the dark.
“Aye, captain,” Kaelen’s hands fly over the controls, each gesture a testament to his indomitable will.
Yet, the singularity’s maw widens beyond escape.
“Wormhole generators at full capacity in mere moments,” Elysia announces, her voice carrying both urgency and the weight of time itself.
“An eternity encapsulated within fleeting seconds,” Thalara’s mutterings become an indomitable mantra within the storm.
As alarms wail and the ship shudders beneath the onslaught of forces beyond mortal reckoning, Thalara’s call rings out with resolute clarity.
“Hold fast, all! Prepare for the impact that bridges being and oblivion!”
Lyndor’s incantations weave through the air, a desperate plea to mystic forces woven into the very fabric of reality.
“By the threads of existence, we stand resolute!”
Elysia’s voice, a poignant blend of awe and trepidation, pierces the chaotic symphony.
“Here, on this precipice, we straddle the boundary between existence and the void!”
Kaelen’s hands dance with an orchestral precision, their movement a symphony of defiance against impending annihilation.
“Falter, we shall not! Not now, not after traversing the rivers of time itself!”
Emerging from the cataclysm battered yet resolute, they find themselves adrift in the enigmatic embrace of eternity’s realm. Now the farthest off course that could be conceived, a billion light years have cascaded through their grasp, slipping like stardust through the hourglass of existence.
Thalara’s voice, a potent blend of determination and weariness, breaks the stillness that envelops them.
“Amidst the boundless expanse of eternity, we stand as sentinels—an embodiment of unyielding will. Though the search may seem to be at an end, the journey persists, for we are the very bridge between ages.”
Lyndor’s gaze, a window into stages long past, holds a glimmer of hope, a spark that transcends the barriers of time.
“Eternity may have claimed our lethargy, yet it has not extinguished our essence. We’ll make the proper repairs captain Thalara.”
Standing amidst the cosmic void, their silhouettes etched against infinity’s canvas, the echoes of their odyssey resonate through the corridors of existence—a harmonious melody that reverberates through the contexture of time. Their journey, one that challenged death’s dominion, embraced the abyss, and defied the very fabric of the cosmos, has become an indelible verse in the cosmic motif.
For even as they languor for a billion years, cradled within the timeless embrace of eternity, the saga of the Chosen Wanderers echoed across the cosmos—a saga woven into the very cosmic strings of existence. In the midst of interstellar ages, voyaging through the unfathomable vastness, the Celestial Hope and its devoted crew lay suspended in a timeless repose, a testament to their unwavering resolve in the face of unending existence.
The story of the Chosen Wanderers, forever inscribed in the cosmic annals, teaches that even in the ceaseless dance of stars and galaxies, in the unyielding expanse of eternity, the essence of mortal and immortal alike can forge pathways that transcend the constraints of time and space.
And now in their long great slumber, they tread upon the dreamy shores of a lush world untouched by the journals of history, the weight of countless eons finally lifts. A forgotten mission buried in the lost realms left long behind fades away. Before them unfurls the promise of life renewed, secrets unfurled beneath celestial constellations, and an uncharted future as infinite as the universes themselves.
But that too would be another story.
Enchilada Squares
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Ingredients
2 (19 ounce) cans Las Palmas enchilada sauce
1 pound Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
1 medium onion, chopped
1 (4 ounce) can sliced olives
1 pound ground beef
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
27 corn tortillas
Instructions
Brown ground beef.
Drain oil and add salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder.
While meat is browning, heat enchilada sauce in medium size pan.
Heat oil in skillet. Place a tortilla in hot oil for 1 minute, then turn over and fry 1 more minute. Do not allow tortilla to become crispy.
Take fried tortilla and place in hot sauce for approximately 2 minutes, then take out and place in a 9 x 13 inch greased cake pan.
Repeat again until you have a layer with 9 tortillas.
Sprinkle half of the meat, 1/3 cheese, onion and olives.
Repeat another layer of tortillas dipped in oil and sauce as before.
Sprinkle remaining meat, 1/3 cheese, onion and olives.
Repeat another layer of tortillas.
Spoon leftover sauce atop.
Add remaining cheese, onion and olives.
When cool, cover pan with foil and refrigerate.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour or until cheese melts.
Cut into squares and serve.
If serving immediately, place in oven for 15 minutes or until cheese is melted.
40 Normalized Things In Europe That Are Unknown In The US | American Reacts
Yeah. This is very good. So, so, so many things int he USA are fucked up right now.
What was the shortest interview you’ve had that led to a job offer?
I was looking at a Field service Job at a manufacturing plant that built Waste Water Treatment plants, it was a West German company with manufacturing in the U.S.
I knew absolutely nothing about waste water plant machinery.
As I sat down for the interview, the phone rang on the head of field service. He said excuse me but I have to answer that phone. He put the phone on speaker, a piece of new equipment would not start up, this was their first attempt to run it.
He placed the electrical schematics on his desk, as they discussed the problem, I could see them upside down, from where I was sitting.
Finally he says , I will get s tech there ASAP, and hung up the phone. I said I see the problem, they wired a relay wrong, and pointed to it on drawings. It should be normally closed, not open.
He stood up and said he had to do something and I’m not to move, he would be right back.
He was back in 15 minutes and hands me a wad of cash, and tells me I have 1 hour and thirty minutes to be at the Delta terminal , my ticket is at their desk, then hands me a company credit card to rent a car, and A company Air travel card for the return flight.
He said we will fill out your employment papers when you get back.
The problem was in Up State New York , I was in Birmingham Al.
Now for the “rest” of the story
The service manager called the plant with the problem once he Knew I was on the flight to NY, and told them a tech was on his way. Their response was “it better be a guy who’s been working for you a long time, and knows the equipment inside and out.
For the next 4 hours he tried to get a call to me , and for me to not tell them he just hired me this morning.
I never got that call, and the first thing the plant manager ask me, “How long have you worked on these machines ?”. My answer was “To Damn Long” and we both bust out laughing.
In 5 minutes the machine was running perfectly
Then he told me to call my boss, He’s been trying to reach you.
He couldn’t believe I answered that question without lying, and manager was happy with the answer, with me not knowing how important the answer was.
What are some of the most morally justified crimes ever committed?
Recently, Shane Goldsby, a 26-year-old U.S. inmate, bludgeoned, stomped, and kicked his 70-year-old cellmate, Robert Munger, to death.
You might think this is just another random case of prison violence, or perhaps a situation where some prisoners take the moral high ground by killing a more sadistic and violent criminal. Indeed, the latter was the case, though it was a more isolated incident. After all, Munger had been incarcerated for 43 years for crimes involving child sexual abuse. Anyone might feel justified in wanting to see him punished severely.
Munger was serving a 43-year sentence at the Airway Heights prison in Washington State for child molestation and child pornography offenses when, due to a non—coincidental administrative error, he was placed in the same cell as Shane (one of his victims’ brother.)
Shane claimed that Munger would repeatedly brag about his crimes and the morally abhorrent deeds he had committed against those poor children.
“I had so much stuff going on in my head,” he told the station. “I wasn’t stable at that point. I wasn’t. I was getting to that point because [Munger] kept wanting to give me details about what happened, what he did – about the photos and the videos of him doing this stuff. It was building up.”
Shane said he couldn’t believe he had been assigned to the same cell as Munger and made a request to the authorities to be moved, but it was ignored.
“I completely feel like this is what they wanted to happen,” he said.
“I was in shock,” he added. “I was like, ‘what the f***?’… This stuff doesn’t happen. You’re talking the same institution, the same unit, the same pod, in the same cell as this dude. That’s like hitting the jackpot in the casino seven times.”
“They put me in a position that I shouldn’t even be in. This shouldn’t have happened at all. You’re talking about this dude, who did some sick, twisted things to my little sis. My family. My blood. My life. And you want to put me face-to-face with this dude?” Goldsby said.
As expected, a man can only remain sane for so long when he’s sharing a cage with his sister’s molester. Goldsby eventually snapped, attacking the older man in a common area of the jail.
Court documents reveal what happened next, showing how Goldsby hit “Munger in the face and head area about 14 times, stomped on his head at least four times, and kicked him a couple more times before walking away and being taken into custody.” Munger died three days later.
The Washington Department of Corrections has policies to prevent connected inmates from being assigned together, but reportedly missed the connection in this case because Shane and his sister have different last names.
“There was no clear indication in the documentation regularly reviewed for housing assignments that there was a potential conflict,” DoC spokeswoman Janelle Guthrie told the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
In court, an emotional Shane stated:
“You put me in the same cell as this dude. I feel set up. I’m the victim.”
At his sentencing, Shane was too emotional to read a statement, so his lawyer spoke on his behalf.
“I’m ashamed of my actions. I was put into a situation that I don’t wish on anyone,” she said on Shane’s behalf. “I have a lot of fixing to do.”
“I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one in this kind of way,” Shane said through his lawyer.
“To his wife and his whole family, I apologize. I am so sorry, and I hope you are able to heal from what I caused.”
Unfortunately, the law frowns on morally justifiable murders and Shane must now serve an additional 24 years and also pay restitution to Munger’s family.
AI generated kingly pictures
Today’s AI developments…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1
Lawrence Wong, Prime Minister of Singapore, delivered his first National Day speech, saying that Singapore is not a western society. What does this mean?
On August 18th, local time, Lawrence Wong, the new Prime Minister of Singapore, delivered his first Prime Minister’s speech in Malay, Chinese and English at the National Day mass meeting in Singapore.
The Prime Minister’s speech at the National Day Mass Meeting is one of the most important speeches in Singapore every year. During the speech, Lawrence Wong’s speech in Chinese caught my eyes.
Lawrence Wong said: “Singapore uses English as the common language, but we are essentially an Asian society, not a western society.” He also said that all Singaporeans want to preserve the spiritual outlook and traditional values of Asians.
Later, Lawrence Wong took himself as an example to encourage people to receive Chinese education. He said that when he was a child, he didn’t have the opportunity to speak Chinese at home. He didn’t start learning Chinese until he went to school. When he graduated from junior high school, he got A1 (the highest level) in Chinese.
Lawrence Wong promised that the Singapore government would adjust its education policy.
“We hope to train more talents who are proficient in Chinese, which means that we have not only elites, but also elites.”
Lawrence Wong’s speech in Chinese not only emphasized the importance of Chinese education, but also continued the “Asian values” emphasized by Singapore’s leaders in previous generations, and also vaguely expressed Singapore’s diplomatic stance that it would not take sides.
In view of Singapore’s important strategic position and influence in ASEAN countries, the United States has spared no effort to win over Singapore for many years.
Lee Kuan Yew once said very bluntly: China (navy) has no strength to protect Singapore.
As a tiny island country located in the throat of the ocean, you forced Singapore to die if you didn’t fall to the west.
Understandable.
And Singapore has indeed achieved the goal of being as neutral as possible while leaning to the west and seeking the greatest benefit for itself.
Under the current circumstances, the basic logic of Singapore’s unilateral turning to the West has not only disappeared, but also gone to the opposite side.
If you fell to the west completely because you were afraid of the western navy, then you can’t hope to maintain the previous state after China’s naval power became strong, and more thoroughly fall to and introduce the west to harm China’s interests.
Singapore has really developed the ability to assess the situation in the game of great powers, and it has been flexibly adjusted in different times.
In July this year, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States, Lui Tuck Yew, wrote a special letter to the American media, stressing that Singapore’s foreign policy is based on its own interests and it is a principle that Singapore has always adhered to.
Before taking over as Prime Minister of Singapore, Lawrence Wong made it clear in an interview with The Economist that Singapore would not choose between China and the United States, but would give priority to its own interests.
In his speeches in Chinese, Lawrence Wong mentioned “culture” and “Chinese” for 9 to 11 times, with special emphasis on cultivating people’s Chinese ability.
He said that Singapore hopes to preserve the spiritual outlook and traditional values of Asians. At the same time, the advantages of bilingualism and biculturalism can absorb the wisdom of the East and the West, and can deal with both countries. This is Singapore’s unique competitive advantage.
In my opinion, Lawrence Wong mentioned that “Singapore is not a western society”. The core theme is that Singaporeans can speak both English and Chinese, embrace the western social system, and retain the eastern spiritual culture. They can get along well with the United States, Britain and China. This is a unique and huge advantage of Singapore in the world, which must be maintained.
Forbidden Planet – Miranda Likes to Watch – Reaction
Today Russia responded to the missile attack on Russian territory.
The response was a demonstration of what is in store for European and US bases if Washington’s provocations of Russia continue A Ukrainian base was destroyed by a hypersonic ballistic missile carrying conventional warhead. The missile is designed to carry nuclear warheads. The Russian response was a demonstration of the utter destruction that awaits the stupid and foolish NATO countries Reports are that Trump is urgently seeking communication with Putin. The evil Zionist Neoconservatives are coming very close to destroying the Western world.
Several members of America’s Ignorant Foreign Policy Community Challenged my Statement of the superiority of Russian missile and nuclear capability. As usual the “experts” had no idea what they were talking about. Their ignorance is a disgrace and a danger.
It is beyond belief the European governments are so utterly stupid as to be members of NATO.
UPDATED 6:58 AM EST — RUSSIA FIRES ICBM AT UKRAINE; SAYS NEW U.S. BASE IN POLAND NOW A PRIORITY TARGET FOR DESTRUCTION
Ukraine’s air force reported that an ICBM had been fired from a base in Russia’s southern Astrakhan region on the Caspian Sea early this morning. It struck Dnipro, Ukraine. This is the FIRST ICBM to be fired in war, in all of human history.
Russian authorities have not yet confirmed the launch, but it would be the first time such a powerful missile has been deployed in the war.
The Ukraine air force did not specify which ICBM had been fired, but its launch comes mere hours after a Russian military analyst said Moscow’s forces could unleash its fearsome RS-26 ‘Frontier’ missile in retaliation for the Storm Shadow strikes.
The Frontier missile is a terrifying, nuclear-capable weapon weighing roughly 50 tons with a range of up to 3,600 miles.
It has never before been used in combat, but analysts said it could be deployed with a conventional warhead in a strike that Ukraine’s air defenses would be powerless to intercept.
Reported video of the ICBM attack seems to show a significant number of “re-entry vehicles” slamming into the ground in Dnipro. It is important to point out these were NOT nuclear warheads, merely conventional, but the hits were severe nonetheless:
Kyiv has not suffered an ICBM strike since the war began in February 2022, with Russia’s military deploying smaller, slower Iskander missiles and a handful of hypersonic Kinzhal projectiles alongside hundreds upon hundreds of attack drones.
The Russian attack this morning also included other types of weapons which targeted enterprises and critical infrastructure in the central-eastern city of Dnipro, the air force said.
The Kremlin deployed Tu-95MS strategic bombers to launch cruise missiles and MiG-31K fighters to fire hypersonic Kinzhal rockets in a calculated bid to plunge Ukraine into darkness as a bitter winter approaches.
Reports said Yuzhmash, a prominent Ukrainian state-owned aerospace and defense manufacturer – was also hit in this morning’s assault.
Some Russian missiles also reportedly struck the towns of Kremenchuk and Myrhorod, while areas in Kyiv, Odesa, and the Sumy regions suffered blackouts as the electrical grid gave out.
STORM SHADOW ATTACK AGAINST RUSSIA
This morning’s bombardment of Ukraine also comes less than 24 hours after Kyiv launched UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets in Kursk.
Fragments of the missiles that struck a military facility in the Russian town of Marino were recovered by military bloggers on Wednesday afternoon, with unverified pictures (one shown above) shared widely on social media.
New U.S. Base in Poland Now a “Priority Target”
Russia this morning mentioned US air bases in Poland saying they can be targeted with ‘advanced weapons.’
Moscow said the opening of a new US ballistic missile defense base in Redzikowo, Poland, near the Baltic coast will ‘increase the overall level of nuclear danger’, adding it had been added to a list of possible targets for Russia.
The facility, opened on November 13, forms part of a broader NATO missile shield called ‘Aegis Ashore’ designed to intercept short- and intermediate-range ballistic weapons.
Aegis Ashore Poland Base
‘This is another frankly provocative step in a series of deeply destabilizing actions by the Americans and their allies,’ Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said of the airbase’s unveiling.
‘(The base) has been added to the list of priority targets for potential destruction which, if necessary, can be executed with a wide range of advanced weapons,’ she concluded.
Both Poland and Romania are hosting onshore versions of the Aegis ballistic missile defense systems The system is also used on many US naval vessels and carrier groups patrolling around Europe and serves primarily as a defense network against nuclear missiles.
The base certainly would have seen the ICBM that Russia launched against Ukraine overnight; and could do absolutely NOTHING about it.
That’s the “rub” with so much of this “missile defense” spending; they can SEE the missiles but can’t do anything about them. Yet these bases cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and we have bases all over the world. Billions spent on this . . . . and it can do nothing about missiles like the one(s) Russia fired at Ukraine overnight.
UPDATE 6:58 AM EST —
When an ICBM is used to target a relatively close target, it goes much higher up — way into space –before coming back down on the target at screaming speed.
Even though the distance from its; launch point in Russia to Ukraine was only about 650 miles, it did not go “inter-continental” but the missile __can__ go inter-continental.
MORE:
Russia launched a single RS-26 “Rubezh” road mobile missile.
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Analysis of imagery of the attack indicates the RS-26 carried six independent warheads, each in turn deploying several submunitions.
This warhead package is exclusively for conventional attack.
Russia had not been previously assessed to outfit the RS-26 with a warhead of this design.
By unveiling the conventionally armed RS-26, Russia is changing the qualitative nature of the conflict, something promised by President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine and its Western allies must now evaluate the destructive potential of this weapon, and understand that Russia can deliver this warhead to any target in Ukraine or Europe knowing there is no defense against it.
The RS-26 is produced in Votkinsk. It is assessed that the production of the RS-26, which was halted in 2017, was resumed this past summer.
With production rates estimated at 6-8 missiles per month, Russia could have accumulated an arsenal of between 30-40 RS-26 missiles.
Although described as an intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-26’s range actually depends on the warhead package. If armed with a single warhead, it can exceed the 5,000 kilometer threshold used to differentiate between intermediate and intercontinental range missiles. The RS-26 did not go into serial production because of this ambiguity; at the time, Russia was a signatory to the INF treaty, which prohibited intermediate range missiles. It is assessed that the six warhead conventional warhead package used against Dnipro would have made the RS-26 used fall into the intermediate range for classification.
Donald Trump withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019. If the United States had remained in the treaty, this version of the RS-26 would not have been available for use by Russia.
Pago Pago
When I was in Pago Pago, I was employed to build a couple of hospitals, and entry holding facilities for the immigration office there.
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While I was working on the Immigration Holding cell building, I struck up a conversation with a plumber who arrived to help us sort out the hydrant situation.
He was an enormous Samoan. Big massive man, in a tiny, tiny sub-compact automobile.
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As we talked he made an apologic statement. He said “well, I’m not really a plumber, I am a trained EMT, but I was laid off, and I am doing this for now.”
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And so we got straight to the most in-depth conversation that I had had with a person in years. Man, he was depressed, and hurting.
And I had to tell him, as a “BRO” (and I took on the older uncle role, as well) that …
You are not the work that you do.
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Us men we go though different jobs and careers in our lives. We adapt, we survive, we endure and we keep on moving forward. We never quit, we never give up, and we keep on keeping on.
He told me that he had a girl friend in Hawaii, and I asked him why he wasn’t with her.
He told me that he felt ashamed that he was no longer an EMT and that he felt that he could not live up to her expectations.
To which I told him; “Nonsense!”
As a trained EMT he shouldn’t have any trouble finding work in Hawaii, and as a bonus, his girlfriend was local.
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He could get a flight to Hawaii, and immediate have contact, connections, a place to stay and opportunities. He just needs to reach out.
So I told him…
Reach out.
And things will start coming together.
And that was that. Let it be understood that four months later he was in Hawaii, and sure as shit, he got settled and all sorts of doors opened up. He did have to take a training refresher course, but he was hired in his profession.
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And last I heard from him, he was doing well. A whole new world opened up for him.
All because of our little chat that day at the build site.
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Remember, you are not what you do, and if you are in trouble… reach out for help.
You might be surprised at the results.
Today…
How are the Chinese dealing with China’s defeat to the US in the Olympics? We are seeing reports of propaganda and disinformation being spread throughout the country, telling its netizens that China won.
China participated in 114 Events in the Olympics 2024
They won 91 Medals
That’s a 79.82% Success Rate
This means China had a 80% Success Rate of ensuring a medal in every event they participated
USA participated in 171 Events in the Olympics 2024
They won 126 Medals
That’s a 73.68% Success Rate
This means US had a 74% Success Rate of ensuring they won a medal in every event they participated in
Kudos to both countries
They both did very well in the Olympics
US had more events so 74% is equally impressive as Chinas 80%
Others who did very well include :-
South Korea – 74.68%
Japan – 71.43%
Germany – 66.77%
UK – 65..49%
Netherlands – 68.42%
A Surprise is Kazakhstan which bagged a 64.70% success rate in the Olympics
India participated in 57 Events and won 7 Medals
Thats a 12.28% Success Rate
(I willl Assume Vinesh won a Silver because she was the only the second wrestler left undefeated until her disqualification)
Pakistan participated in 7 Events and won 1 Medal
That’s 14.30% Success Rate
Yet both nations are making the most noise after the Olympics
China won 40 Medals in Gold and tied with US for the top sport in terms of Gold Medals alone
They had two unfortunate incidents
Wang Chuqin the favorite to win a TT Medal lost in a shock upset
Their 73 Kg Weightlifter screwed up real bad and was expected to breeze
The US also found 9 Gold Medals lesser than they expected with Dominica, St Lucia and Botswana taking surprising wins against US Athletes
Plus China beat them in the 4X100 m Medley as well
It was an equal performance by both nations who left the others FAR FAR BEHIND
Very similar to the famous USSR and US taking all medals in Pre Barcelona events and the rest always being far behind
MM has competition
Here is a guy that is also using AI for classical realism. Nice work, but I think that the art needs better form…
EU menacing letter to Musk ahead of Trump X Spaces
What is the craziest story about North Korea? I heard that when North Korea played in the World Cup, the citizens of North Korea were made to believe that North Korea had won the World Cup and that Kim Jong-Il was the team’s coach.
Originally Answered: What is the craziest story about North Korea?
On August 18, 1976, after notifying the nearby North Korean command post, five South Korean Service personnel entered the DMZ under the protection of a small contingent of unarmed US and South Korean soldiers, to trim a tree that had repeatedly been used for cover by North Korean operatives crossing the DMZ to attempt to snatch prisoners. Weapons are not allowed in the DMZ, which must be kept clear under the ceasefire agreement in effect since the 1950s.
A few minutes later, a small contingent of North Koreans appeared. They observed for 15 minutes without comment or interference, then demanded the trimming stop, claiming Kim Il Sung had personally planted the tree and nourished it and it was growing under his supervision.
After being ignored, the North Koreans stormed off in a jeep, then returned in a truck with 20 soldiers armed with crowbars and wooden clubs. In a short melee, the North Koreans bludgeoned one guard to death and chopped up another with an axe.
The North Korean government immediately started petitioning various organization to condemn the event as an unprovoked attack by the US.
Three days later, 23 US and South Korean vehicles entered the DMZ–unannounced. Two eight-man engineering teams armed with chainsaws commenced to bringing down the tree under the protection of two 30-man security platoons armed with pistols and axe handles. Simultaneously combat engineers and armored vehicles prepared to destroy “the bridge of no return” should the North show its face, and South Korean commandoes, disguised as unarmed tai-kwon-do teams, unloaded rafts, M-16s and grenade launchers. Some of these commandoes strapped claymore mines to their chest and stood on the bridge, shouting and daring the North to attack.
Behind them, 20 Hueys and 7 Cobra gunship helicopters circled. Behind THESE, B-52s, F5s, F86s, F4 Phantoms, and F111 bombers appeared over South Korean skies. US and South Korean regiments armed with Hawk missiles and medium to heavy armor poured into view along the Southern side of the DMZ. In Washington, the President let it be known that he was sending 12,000 troop to Korea, starting with 1,800 comandos ready and waiting in Japan.
In response, about 200 armed North Koreans rolled up, mostly in buses. The US called the gunships into view and had C130 gunships nose to tail in Japan, ready to support if needed.
The North Korean soldiers got out and set up machine gun positions.
The tree came down in 42 minutes. The US and South Korean forces retreated, taking with them two illegal barriers previously erected by the north. The North Koreans went home and Kim Il Song, without admitting fault, withdrew his idiotic charges and expressed “regret of the incident.”
The moral of this story? If you don’t want war, make sure your adversary knows you are prepared to win one.
The other moral of this story? North Korea is bat shit crazy.
What is the relationship like between China and Vietnam?
The relationship between China and Vietnam has been complicated, and continues to be complicated. It makes sense to look at it from several different angles:
Historical:
China has occupied Vietnam for more than 1,000 years; the Chinese name for Vietnam was Annam (安南)。At times, the Vietnamese invaded southern China too. In all instances, the Vietnamese overthrew their Chinese rulers and established their independence.
For many practical purposes, there is no significant difference between Chinese and Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader was fluent in Mandarin, and taught at the Huangpu Military Academy in the 1920s.
Cultural:
On the cultural side, the two countries were very tightly integrated. The Vietnamese adopted Chinese writing, wear Chinese style clothing, celebrated Chinese holidays, eat Chinese food, read Chinese classics and poetry. Vietnamese children learn Chinese folktales, even to this day, in their schools.
Sometimes the closeness makes the Chinese angry because they feel that being so close to China culturally, the Vietnamese should be happy to be part of the big Chinese family.
This makes for a very complicated political relationship.
Politics:
The close history and culture makes the Chinese and Vietnamese strange political bedfellows.
In recent years, the Vietnamese and Chinese helped each other in fighting the French and the Americans. But China felt betrayed when Vietnam sided with the Russians after the end of the Vietnam War.
Recently, the Chinese have acted with impunity over territory claims in the South China Sea. Basically, the Chinese are showing the Vietnamese who is boss in the region.
The Americans think that they can form alliances with Vietnam and the Philippines to curb Chinese aggression, but there is a saying “Faraway water cannot put out a nearby fire.”
This is why even after the recent disputes, the Vietnamese premier visited Beijing to defuse tensions.
Wifey Material
Do Chinese women give permission?
Hi, Cory Michael. Thanks for the interesting question.
Well, I live and work in Chengdu, so I am surrounded by Chinese women every day! 😀
Last month, one of my colleagues brought her cat to work.
Her mother and grandmother had gone on a trip together, so there was no one at home to take care of her cat.
So she decided to bring her cat to work.
Her cat is a she, and goes by the name of 地瓜 (Dìguā), which literally translates to “Sweet Potato”.
I haven’t a clue about cat breeds, so I have no idea what sort of cat she is, but she’s just over a year old.
Now, I never pet someone else’s pet unless I have their permission.
So I asked my colleague whether I could pet her 地瓜 and she said sure, go ahead.
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My colleague had brought 地瓜 to the office wearing a leash on a cat harness.
I was a bit amazed, because I had never seen a cat taking to a harness-and-leash combo before.
I thought all cats hate being walked on a leash.
And she (the cat, not my colleague) went about it so obediently.
So I asked my colleague for permission to walk 地瓜 for a bit after work.
My colleague happily obliged ^^
地瓜 was very patient with me during out short walk together 😀
Conclusion:
In this context, my colleague, a Chinese woman, gave me permission to pet and walk her pet cat.
Hope this answer helps with your question, Cory Michael !
Lisa’s Crispy Chops
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Ingredients
6 pork chops
3 eggs, beaten slightly
2 cups crushed soda crackers
1 1/2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 1/2 tablespoons dried minced onion
1 teaspoon each salt and pepper
Instructions
Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl.
Dip pork chops into egg, then roll in dry mixture.
Fry over medium heat in a small amount of oil until dark, crispy brown.
“I never thought it was possible for a person to be so damn arrogant!” Zed screamed as he slammed the front door of his house. “Your ass better stay on your own damn asteroid or I’ll kick it all the way to one of Jupiter’s moons!”Through the blinds of his window, Zed glared at the abyss of space outside his personal asteroid upon which his house sits. His eyes zoned in on the house of his one and only neighbor, Mandy. Across the asteroid belt, he saw Mandy’s front door fly open and her step out in a space suit with a brick in hand. She threw the brick and shattered Zed’s window as it landed in his living room. A tight vacuum sucked in from the broken window. Grumbling under his breath, Zed slapped some Flex Tape ™ on it. “Crazy woman,” he muttered, then looked down at the brick. There was a note on it.Crouching down, he picked up the note. I didn’t steal your damn duster! Zed scoffed. “That’s just what a duster-stealer would say,” yelling louder so Mandy could hear him this time, he added. “I know you stole my duster ten years ago! I bet my house on it!”“As if!” Mandy hollered back.“That duster took forever to be shipped here from Earth, Mandy! I’m getting it back!”“I ain’t no thief!”“Yeah, right,” Zed remarked under his breath.Staring at the mess of glass in his living room, Zed realized he had spent enough time arguing and definitely has to swept up this mess. “Damn, when does that woman ever stop causing problems for me.”Zed glared at his closet door. Space-spider webs covered the knob. He hasn’t cleaned anything in years. Signing, he twisted it open and saw its crooked shelves propped up by a singular wooden broom. Slowly, just as he thought the broom was free from being Altas, and was about to carefully make his exit, the shelves can clamoring down.“Juck!” He cursed as debris cluttered at his feet.Something tapped his ankle. As he looked down, his eyes widened. It was the feather-duster.“Oh, juck.”Zed paced around his living room with the blinds closed and the duster in hand. “Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck.”What the juck was he supposed to do? Apologize for his wrong actions? Admit he was wrong? To Mandy??No! Those were all horrible options!Then, he stopped pacing a sly smile grew on his face. “What if Mandy never knows it was here?” He cracked open his blinds and peeled at Mandy’s house. “Because I’m going to sneak it into her house before she ever finds out.”Zed didn’t bother to wait until ‘night’ or anything because what night? He’s in space! Instead, he immediately suited up and floated under the asteroids, out of sight, to Mandy’s house. He entered through a window in the basement. His weak muscles barely pulled him through the vacuum as he flopped onto the floor. “Man,” he mumbled as he stood up. “These houses were not designed for space.”After fumbling around looking for the staircase upstairs, Zed just ended up wiggling off a loose vent panel and shimming his body through the vent. He peeked out the occasional vent, using it to navigate through the house. Finally, he found himself in Mandy’s master bedroom while she was taking a shower.Zed pounded his fingers through the vent and tries to shake it off, but the metal held firm. “Juck!” He cursed as he heard the water turn off. Mandy would come out of the bathroom any minute now.Rushed to get out, he left the duster inside the air vent and shimmered back to the basement, went out the window, and made his daring escape by floating casually back to his house.Goosebumps run up and down Mandy’s arms. “Why is it so cold in here?” She asked herself as she pulled on a second sweater. “Geez, don’t tell me there’s something wrong with the furnace again. Ugh! It’s going to take so long to get a repairman here!”Mandy drastically pounded on the thermostat, but the temperature stayed the same. Then, she heard a quick rat-a-tat-tat-tat coming from her air vent. Slowly, she crept over to it, wondering if something was inside. She used her nails to unscrew the vent and remove it. Inside, she pulled out… the feather duster. Mandy went white.“Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck.” She softly cursed to herself.She had been the one with the feather duster, she thought. Mandy began pacing. What the juck was she supposed to do? Apologize for her wrong actions? Admit she was wrong? To Zed??No! Those were all horrible options!Mandy’s Mind scrambled for a solution. Wait a minute, she thought, if I hide it in Zed’s house, he’ll never know…Mandy broke into Zed’s house from a sky light on the roof because I guess just juck breaking and entering laws in space, right? Tiptoeing around, she looked for any convincing hiding spot to but the duster. A hungry stomach lead her to the kitchen.
As she stole all of Zed’s leftover pizza, an idea hit her. Underneath the fridge! Who cleans under there? Quickly, she stuffed the pizza in her mouth and the duster under the fridge as Zed’s footsteps approached. She dove behind the couch for cover as Zed opened the fridge looking for his leftover pizza. “What?” He asked himself. “I don’t remember eating it…”
Mandy nibbled on the crust in silence.
Zed tsked and closed the door. Instead, he grabbed a glass and filled with ice. Mandy’s eyes widened in horror as a cube slipped and slid under the fridge. Zed groaned and swiped underneath… only to have his hand find the feather duster.
With a fearful expression of his own, Zed pulled it out. Oh juck! I thought I hide this in Mandy’s house! What is this some kind of boomerang duster? Zed thought.
Swiftly, Zed grabbed his space suit and headed out the door. After it slammed shut, Mandy emerged from her hiding spot and watched from the window Zed hiding the duster back inside her house. “That punk!” She exclaimed, ironically. “How dare he tried to shift the blame and hide the duster in my house!”
Zed came back inside his house to find a Mandy with a crooked grin sitting on his couch. “What are you doing here, Mandy?” He asked.
“What were you doing in my house?” She remarked.
His face paled. “Nothing.”
Mandy wagged her finger in front of his face. “I don’t think so. You were hiding the duster because you were the one who had it along.”
“Ok, fine!” He confessed. “I found the feather duster but–wait a minute, how did you get into my house without me knowing? And how did you get back here just as I hide it?” He stepped closer. “And how did you know I was even hiding it, or that I had it?”
“I–well,” Mandy stuttered.
“You hid it in my house first!” Zed declared.
“I so did not!” She shouted. “How do I know you didn’t hide it first!”
Zed gasped. “Like I would ever do something so scandalous as that!” He lied.
“I just saw you hiding it,” she snapped.
He crossed his arms. “That doesn’t prove anything. You don’t know if it was originally in my house!”
“And you can’t prove it was in mine!” She hollered back.
“You wanna bet!” Zed screamed with a red face.
Mandy stuck her finger in Zed’s face, opened her mouth to say something before a confused expression flickered across her face as something outside the window caught the corner of her eye. “Wait a second, where’s the duster now?”
“It’s in your house.”
Mandy glanced back at the object. It was the duster. Just floating in space. “No it’s not.” Mandy pointed. “It’s right there.”
Zed twisted his neck to see it. “Oh, juck.”
I must have forgotten to close the window all the way.
“I guess that’s one way to solve the problem.”
Bronco Billy Saves the Day!
What seemingly insignificant event had a big impact on World War II?
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HMS Griffin
On a gloomy 24th April 1940, two British destroyers, HMS Griffin and HMS Acheron, were carrying out routine searches of merchant ships traversing the North Sea. Their mission was to prevent German resupply vessels reaching Andalsnes and Narvik, where British and French troops were fighting a loosing battle during the invasion of Norway.
They intercepted an innocent looking Dutch trawler off Andalsnes, halfway between Bergen and Trondheim on the Norwegian coastline. She turned out to be a disguised Kreigsmarine surface raider Schiff 26 – the Polares.
Among the mines, concealed guns and two loaded torpedo tubes Polares was carrying to disrupt the allied force, HMS Griffin’s boarding party also discovered a cache of intelligence documents. They had been hastily thrown overboard in a weighted bag, which failed to sink. These included some of the German Enigma coding machine keys for the period 23–26 April, and the procedures for scrambling the rotors.
Signal Rating (later Lt. Cmdr.) Geoffrey Jones, a former gentleman’s hatter from Liverpool, received a Distinguished Service Medal for his bravery in assisting the bomb disposal team to disarm the novel magnetic mines carried by Polares after she was towed to Portsmouth. Jones went on to command antisubmarine trawlers and became a teacher and headmaster after the war.
This was the first break that Bletchley park had in defining ‘cribs’ that could be used to enable the Bombe electro-mechanical computers – developed to operationalise Alan Turing’s decryption technique – to attack the German Enigma codes. With this intelligence they succeeded for the first time in retroactively decoding Enigma traffic between 22–26 April. While this revealed little useful intelligence it proved the potential of the Bombes to crack the German codes and sparked a concerted effort to gather new cribs and to mass produce the Bombe computers.
And the rest is, as they say, history.
Edit: The capture of a new 4 rotor naval Enigma machine was by another British destroyer, HMS Petard, on 30th October 1942 (after she in company with three other destroyers, a Sunderland flying boat and an ancient Wellesley patrol aircraft had spent 16 hours hunting and depth charging U-559 to the surface off the coast of Egypt – arguably a more important victory than the Battle of El Alamein which was going on at the same time not far away).
Two of three men who boarded the abandoned and sinking U-559 to retrieve the Enigma machine failed to get out before she sank, and were awarded the George Cross posthumously (the highest British honour for bravery not in the face of the enemy). The survivor, NAAFI canteen assistant Tommy Brown, received the George Medal (surely an inspiration to check-out clerks everywhere).
By that time Bletchley park was routinely reading the older 3 rotor Enigma machine messages (which were used by most of the German armed forces).
The first Enigma machine was ‘acquired’ by Polish intelligence in 1938 (by setting up a fake German arms company and ordering a civilian version!) and handed to British and French intelligence in 1939. The original machine was lost, but an accurate copy was reverse engineered from Polish drawings by Bletchley Park technicians.
HMS Griffin’s success was probably more important, as it proved the system and ensured it got high priority and funding, although cracking of the 4 rotor codes, using the improved Mammoth and ground breaking Colossus computers, certainly doomed the U-boats.
Incidentally, German documents uncovered after the war revealed that they were very concerned about the loss of the Polares, and that the possible discovery of Enigma codes may have revealed their plans for the invasion of France. However, as the codes she carried did not extend up to May, they thought they were safe (they were, as it took a little longer for Bletchley to crack the system wide open). However it did not occur to the German cryptographers to imagine that they might be used to help develop a system that could read most of their secret communications for the rest of the war.
EDIT 2: in answer to a good comment on why did it matter?, especially in relation to why Ultra did not improve allied intelligence in advance of the Market Garden operation and German Ardennes Offensive in 1944….
The Germans did not use radio messages encrypted by Enigma machines for communications within Germany. Instead they relied largely on the domestic landline network using teleprinters and telephones. Without radio messages to intercept Bletchley Park had nothing to work with. During the last stages of the war, this internal ‘phone based system was dominant as most Wehrmacht forces were based inside Germany, and this explains why Ultra intercepts were not available in useful quantities for Market Garden and the Ardennes Offensive.
Nevertheless, there are literally hundreds of occasions when Ultra helped the Allies gain the advantage in ways that contributed decisively to victory. For example Ultra intercepts were used to inform the Soviets about the exact German dispositions before the Battle of Kursk in the Summer of 1943, ensuring that Hitler lost the element of surprise and the Soviet defences were well prepared.
Planning for the Torch, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Normandy landings were all helped by Ultra as was Operation Cobra (the Normandy breakout), El Alamein and numerous Soviet victories. As you said it was decisive in the Battle of the Atlantic too, and breaking of the naval codes in late 1942 allowed Allied naval forces to rapidly defeat the U-boat threat in 1943. There were few allied operations between 1941–45 that were not assisted in some way by Ultra.
There were some occasions when good Ultra intelligence was not used – usually when concerns about protecting the source made Enigma intercepts difficult to distribute (cover stories about agents penetrating the Wehrmacht could only go so far), or when the distribution was so restricted that those who needed it most did not get access or mistrusted the intel provided (the Dieppe raid in 1942 is an example). As the system evolved and expanded, so did more effective distribution methods and greater user confidence in Ultra intelligence.
Ultra intelligence was shared with the USA (the US shared intelligence from its codebreakers in the Pacific in return), Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and to some extent with the Soviets and Free French. The intelligence sharing arrangements for Ultra are the origin the modern “Five Eyes” system between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Man Discovers Fiancée Is No Saint And BLINDSIDES Her By Taking Back The Ring!
Why doesn’t Russia just use tactical nukes to stop the Kursk offensive?
Not needed
The Kursk offensive was elegant but ultimately a disaster as everything else
Imagine India invading and taking over large tracts of Pakistan and in exchange Pakistan captures 42 Rajasthani Villages across 5 Districts – 14 of which have already been liberated inside Five days with a minimum of 2500 Dead Enemy Soldiers and 150 pieces of equipment
The Ukraine supply line is cut off at SUMY where Russia is bombing FAB after FAB
This extends the Supply line from 7 Miles to 55 Miles
That alone means Ukraine cannot keep equipping their Soldiers who are in Kursk
This means Ukraine will send more troops across the Borders into Belgorod but again without supplies they will end up becoming TERRORISTS and holding hostages
Meanwhile Ukraine will leave their own territories where Russia will advance with impunity and capture more settlements and destroy more Ukrainian equipment and people
The Gamble was that Russia would be so worried about the loss of Civilian Lives in Kursk that they would immediately sue for peace
Unfortunately Russia is angrier now and regard Kursk as Terrorism against Civilians and will be even less determined for any peace
Yesterday 71% Russians voted on Telegram Groups to Kill Ukrainian women and Children against 8% on 30.06.2023 and 11% on 31.12.2023
It was a bungled offensive
You just don’t have the supply line to feed soldiers into Russia because Russians have Airpower and Artillery Power and Tank Strength
Plus they have the numbers
They can mobilize 200,000 Soldiers from their Reserves within a week
Ukraine is utterly exhausted and these are it’s BEST RESERVE TROOPS who are getting sliced into salami in Kursk
Why use Nukes?
Bronco Billy | 1980 | Clint Eastwood | movie review
Is Joe Biden Trying To Start World War 3 Before He Leaves Office? The Decision To Use Long-Range Missiles To Strike Targets Deep Inside Russia Is Insane
November 17, 2024 by Michael
As if everything that Joe Biden has done so far was not enough, now he has decided to push us to the brink of nuclear war. On Sunday, Joe Biden decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to hit targets deep inside of Russia. This is a bombshell. I don’t know how else to put it. The Russians have already warned us how they will respond if long-range missiles provided by the United States and other NATO countries start raining down on their cities. Sadly, most Americans have no idea what a direct conflict with Russia would mean.
When I first heard what Joe Biden had done, I reacted very emotionally.
I am still feeling very emotional at this moment.
Everyone needs to clearly understand what just happened, because this is a major turning point…
President Biden has given the OK to lift restrictions that will allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, a U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday. The move is a significant change to U.S. policy in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.
The easing of restrictions would allow Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. The move also comes as some 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk near Ukraine’s northern border to help Russian forces retake territory.
One of the reasons why I am so upset is because this wasn’t his decision to make.
We just had an election and his side lost.
The American people elected a leader that wants to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, but now Joe Biden is trying to make sure that nobody is going to be able to end this war.
According to CBS News, one of the reasons why this decision was made was to “put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen”…
The U.S. decision could help Ukraine at a moment when Russian forces appear to be making gains and could put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen.
It also comes as Mr. Biden is about to leave office and President-elect Trump has pledged to limit American support for Ukraine and ending the war as soon as possible.
Are you kidding me?
That is nonsense.
Donald Trump needs to come forward immediately and denounce this move, because we could be facing a scenario where events spiral out of control before he even has the opportunity to take office.
When Vladimir Putin was asked about the possibility that long-range missiles provided by the U.S. could soon be used to hit targets deep inside Russia, he responded by warning that such a move would mean that “U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia”…
“We are not talking about allowing or not allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons,” Putin said Thursday in comments to propagandist Pavel Zarubin. “We are talking about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.”
“This will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.”
Joe Biden just called Putin’s bluff.
We just crossed that red line, and there is no going back.
Now we will see if Putin was bluffing or not.
Later in September, Vladimir Putin explained that a “joint attack on the Russian Federation” could trigger the use of nuclear weapons…
A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.
He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.
He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
The Russians have told us that allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles deep into their territory could cause a nuclear war.
But Joe Biden did it anyway.
Just imagine how we would feel if some foreign power was firing long-range missiles into Washington D.C. and New York City.
If someone did that to us, we would nuke them.
I want everyone out there to understand the gravity of the scenario that we are facing.
Of course the Russians have been escalating matters as well.
In fact, they just hit targets all over Ukraine using “120 missiles and almost 100 drones”…
Ukraine said it would introduce nationwide emergency power restrictions Monday after a “massive” Russian attack further damaged its already fragile energy grid ahead of a much-feared winter, with nine civilians also killed across the country on Sunday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow launched 120 missiles and almost 100 drones, targeting Kyiv as well as southern, central and far-western corners of the country.
Civilians were killed in the Mykolaiv, Lviv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions in what officials in the capital called one of the biggest barrages in the almost three-year Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East threatens to spiral completely out of control.
On Sunday, Zero Hedge was reporting that Israeli troops were seen fighting at a location that is 3 miles north of the Lebanese border…
The Israeli military has reached the deepest point in Lebanon since the ground offensive began about six weeks ago. This has been reported by both Lebanese and Israeli media, amid raging battles with Hezbollah on Saturday.
“The state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli troops temporarily captured a strategic hill in the southern Lebanese village of Shamaa, about five kilometers (3 miles) from the border early Saturday, before later being pushed back,” Israeli media reports. “The outlet claimed soldiers detonated several buildings including a shrine before they withdrew.”
The IDF has also been bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, and we are waiting for the next Iranian attack on Israel which could literally occur at any moment.
Even though we could see these wars coming way in advance, nobody has been able to stop them.
Now Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia even though he has very little time remaining in the White House.
It was not his decision to make, but he made it anyway, and it could end up having very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.
Some AI lessons on MM image generation
It took me a while to figure out, but these images of people with this thing out of their mouths is what the AI interprets as “drinking”.
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It also has a problem with size relevance.
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Changing the AI model can result in dramatic changes in the resulting picture… Some are good, and some aren’t.
Here’s one AI model …
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And here is a different AI model…
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If you are not careful, all the individuals will look like clones…
ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)
I really like how it creates backgrounds, but you MUST be specific for a background to be generated… some fantastical backgrounds come with undesirable subject matter.
BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)
It does seem to have a problem with sheer and wet clothing. Only generating edges, and ignoring the rest. Which is interesting, but not what I am looking for.
Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)
Sometimes, it looks fine. But the AI really has a problem with hands; number of fingers, and left vrs right…
Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)
The fellow on the left is using a right hand on his left arm. Though the girl seems to be just ok.
Nothing worse than an extra arm to throw off the art…
#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)
Why does some of the world not recognize the United States as the “good guys” in most situations, when they have been consistently trying to spread democracy around the world?
Here is the story of a democracy.
The Prime Minister of this country refused to allow a British oil company to control this nation’s oil reserves. He wanted the oil to benefit his people, he was an elected representative after all.
In response, the British boycotted this nation and asked the Americans for help.
The determination was to over throw this nation’s government. The CIA helped design a coup to overthrow this democratic government [1].
And the CIA succeeded and installed a dictator who was beholden to the United States to stay in power.
Now obviously this nation wasn’t thrilled about this and 26 years later the people of this nation protested and ended up successfully overthrowing this dictator to form a theocratic republic.
Since then, the US has flirted with the idea of going to war with this nation.
This nation: Iran
Yes, the US created the Iran we know today because the US installed a dictator.
The US does this stuff all the time, the US overthrew a government over the price of bananas [2].
The US supports 73% of the world’s dictators [3] .
The US does not spread democracy, the US supports people who support the agenda of American imperialism even if that is a dictator.
Also the US created the issues we have with Iran, so it is hilarious when Presidents complain about their ‘behavior’ because it was the United States that created the problem to begin it with interventionism… yet chuckleheads in the White House seem to think further interventionism is the answer.
I can’t get a job to save my life (1500+ applications) | Tech 2024
Have you ever returned from the store and realized that the cashier did not scan one of your items?
Once, I bought a multi-roll package of toilet paper. I had it on the bottom of my shopping cart, on the little shelf. I told the cashier it was down there. She rang up my purchases, I left the store and went home. Later I was looking over my receipt, and noticed that the toilet paper wasn’t on there. She hadn’t scanned it.
That little devil sitting on my shoulder said, “Well, consider it your lucky day”. But the little angel on the other shoulder said, “You know you have to do the right thing”. So the next day I trooped down to the store with the toilet paper and my receipt and stood in line at the customer service desk. When it was my turn, I told the cashier what had happened, and she said that she wasn’t going to charge me for the toilet paper. She said that by then, the cashier’s drawer (the one who checked me out) had been counted and put in the days receipts.
So I took my toilet paper home and lived happily ever after.
Another time, I bought a weedeater for my husband. He told me exactly which one to buy, and it was on sale. So I go and find the weedeater and buy it, and take it home. When I got home, and looked it over, I realized that it was a much, much nicer weedeater than the one on sale had been. I realized I had been pretty drastically undercharged. So, I called the store and told them what had happened and that I would take it back and get the one on sale.
So that’s what I did. It was a small Mom and Pop business, and they were decent people. I couldn’t take them like that. They were appreciative, and gave me a little gift certificate.
Husband comes home from work, we’re talking about the weedeater, and I tell him what had occurred. He was furious with me. He said I was stupid to take the expensive weedeater back, when I could have just played dumb. And then he would have a better heavy duty weedeater. It caused a big argument between us. I tried not to, but I lost a little bit of respect for my husband over his attitude regarding that weedeater.
I was raised to do the right thing. To do my best to be an honorable person. I have failed miserably many times, I know. But I like to sleep at night, and I like to have a clear conscience as much as possible. So I try to do the right thing. Simple as that.
ANXIOUS Arrival In Shanghai, China 🇨🇳 This Country SHOCKED ME! 英国人抵达中国上海
Will Boeing ever return to a time that their commercial aircraft was the gold standard of the airline industry?
Can they? Yes, there are lottery winners every week.
But will they? Unlikely, and even if they do, it’s a long slog ahead.
Boeing can’t catch a break, not since the first 737 max crash.
A string of troubles later, Boeing has bled immense quantities of cash, but finds itself in a QC mess, road map delays, a stuck starliner in space, union troubles, legal and fed oversight issues and one 737 Max crash from the mother of all PR storms.
Evidently, boeing has big problems executing as an engineering and manufacturing firm.
Unfortunately, Boeing is a no-option too big to fail node. The American government will step in to save it. And molly coddling will help Boeing stay up but hardly improve its competitiveness.
The culture needs to change. Unfortunately, financialization and cheap credit has played havoc with American competitiveness in the 21st century. Hard engineering is too slow for quick money’s taste.
Twenty years ago, pilots preferred Boeing’s yoke for its sense of familiarity. Today, airbus’s sidestick has revolutionized the cockpit’s ergonomics and workflow, introducing class-leading safety while reducing pilot workload.
Boeing has its work cut out, especially with the emergence of comac.
I am of the opinion Boeing’s economic model is too extravagant and there is too much fat in the supply chain. But it will require the competition to lay bare the fact customers are paying too much for what they are getting.
But that’s 20 years down the road, due to the product life cycles of airliners.
I wish Boeing luck. It is unlikely to disappear, but I won’t be surprised if it weakens further.
Let me tell you the truth, all Chinese people believe that if Russia fails, China will also fail, because the US will use Russia as a springboard to invade China. We won’t let that happen.
Don’t think the defeat of both Russia and China is a good thing. You in front of the screen are actually standing in the same position as us.
Here’s the history about your economy.
On August 15, 1945, when Japan unconditionally accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered, and the world finally moved towards peace.
That was also the beginning of the golden age that MAGAs believe in.
Five years later in 1950, Washington DC announced the completion of its industrialization goals. In order to address the vested interests of the military class and become a world hegemon, the Washington DC launched the Cold War against the USSR. In order to ensure that Europe and East Asia were on the same front as itself, the government launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, transferring industry to allied European countries around the USSR, plus Japan, South Korea, and so on.
Washington asked, and Moscow answered.
The USSR provided comprehensive social security from cradle to grave, including free healthcare, education, housing, and employment security. As a result, Washington expanded its Social Security Act, Americans had Medicare and Medicaid at the first time. Assistance for low-income groups, housing plans, and strengthening public education, all of them was made during the cold war. The last time oligarchs gave such preferential treatment to workers was at Ford Motor Company in 1914, half a year before WWI.
The policy of the Washington DC towards the Moscow benefited the American workers, however there’s a flaw of the US itself: the social welfare system pushed the pressure to capitalists, and American domestic capital flee and become international capital. Industrial hollowing began from then on. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea rose later, at the cost of the Rust Belt in the Great Lakes region. The 1960s. The end of the golden age.
Rust Belt
But that was far from over.
If the existence of the USSR cannot make you realize what you have gained because of it, at least the departure of the USSR may make you realize what you have lost. With the collapse of the USSR, American capital was no longer under pressure, and labor welfare plummeted.
Companies led by Wal Mart began to actively reduce workers’ wages and welfare benefits. Despite ongoing inflation in the US, its minimum wage for labor remained at $5.15 per hour from 1997 to 2007. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 forced low-income workers to choose unstable jobs, people no longer have sufficient welfare. Right to Work Laws drived workers away from the union, making the union no longer represent the interests of workers, but gradually become a dual rival between companies and workers. The limit of industrial hollowing out is marked by NAFTA and China joining WTO.
The rich took too much, and the poor had no ability to buy. enterprises went bankrupt. Financial crisis, again and again.
The USSR brought American workers the golden age. The USSR also protected them staying in the golden age. When the USSR left, American workers became orphans abandoned by the government. The irony is that few American workers appreciate the USSR. They would rather believe that it is the kindness and conscience of the wealthy who have brought them a superior life, than believe in the common beliefs and struggles of millions of people.
Now take a look at China. We have achieved a living standard similar to or even higher than yours with resources far below the world average and per capita GDP on the world average – as you can see from the expected life expectancy.
Look at history and ask yourself. If no country in the world can resist the capitalist oligarchy of the US, after the popularization of AI and industrial robots, as manual laborers, what bargaining chips do you have to negotiate with them?
Or, let me ask in a different way, how much longer do you have to wait before you will fight for your own life rather than relying on others’ efforts? The clock of average people is ticktocking, since the popularization of industrial robots will be realized in your lifetime.
I FINALLY GOT A JOB! (1-year search | Tech 2024)
How does India get benefits if the world starts a war with China and Tibet gets independence?
The fact is, India is an expansionist country. They make every possible excuse to enlarge their territory.
As a Nepalese, I know it as a fact that Indian politicians have always dreamed of making Nepal an Indian state. Many Indians themselves do not know about it. They come to us and warn us to be careful about China. However, I’ve never met any Chinese who told us to beware of India.
That is why Nepalese people don’t support the Free Tibet Movement. If we don’t have a strong neighbor that can challenge India, we’re gone for good.
Personally, I’d rather Nepal be a part of China (because I am a Tibetan by ethnicity). I see nothing in common between my people and the Indians. Last I checked, Indians are as poor as us. Why would we want to join a poor nation? Why would anyone want to join a poor nation? I think what Indians need to do is develop their economy and infrastructure first. While they are at it, they should stop telling us how to run our country and whom to be careful about. We like China more because they did just that.
Lastly, some Nepalese people love India. That can’t be denied. However, we all hate the Indian media complex. Those people have no class at all. I’d rather appreciate if freedom of speech is suppressed in India. Thank you China for doing just that.
What happened in a courtroom that gave the judge a belly laugh you will never forget?
A true story of 40 years ago, with all parties dead now so it doesn’t matter:
Back when I was a child, my parents were friends with one of our neighbors. This lady — to this day — has my utmost respect as she had a command of the English Language that was put a drunken sailor to shame! Her insults, curses, and epitaphs were utterly astonishing as she’d put adverbs and adjectives that one would never expect together to form mind-boggling descriptive vulgarity for any common situation.
As was her nature, not everyone could handle her brash attitude and obscene vocabulary, so she ended up in court with the neighbor on the other side of the road from us. We went to watch the precedings, and all started out well and good — right up until the point where the other woman started to speak.
Her accuser said something quietly and abashedly, like: “Umm.. She threatened to hurt me and my kids…”
To which point, my mom’s good friend slammed her fist on the podium and yelled, “I OBJECT!! She’s lying, your honor! I told that GI-Gangbanged bitch that if her unsolicited mistake of Satan’s substance ever fucked around with my girl again, I was going to knock the bastard graveyard dead, bake his balls in a pie, and serve it to her for dinner!”
A moment of silence followed. Everyone blinked stupidity to process out outrageous her outburst was, and then chuckles filled the courtroom.
Brash. Yep!
Descriptive. Yep.
But a liar? Not one bit!!
Cost of living in Da Nang, Vietnam (World’s cheapest Country)
Why do Chinese trolls always fantasize that Japan and South Korea are American colonies? How can we cure their delusions?
Some 80% of Japan land is used as US military bases.
When you have foreign military base in your country, you lose 1/2 of your strategic sovereignty. If this is not colonisation, what is it?
Only people in denial will say Japan is not a US colony. Same for S Korea.
Do you know who wrote Japan’s constitution? U S A after WW2.
More, Japanese emperor used to be worshiped as god’s agent. After WW2, USA made Japanese emperor to tell Japanese that he was a man & not god. … If Japan was & is not a US colony, what is it?
I can tell you more but let us talk about 2024.
US Treasury secy Yellen made Japan buy US debt (China did not buy any). When Japan sold US debts to save its economy, Yellen warned Japan not to interfere the free market. … Japan cannot decide for itself. If this is not a colony, what is it?
Not fixable
Today’s MM work
I’m not that pleased with the results for today. I’m trying to perfect the form, but somethings are missing. I need more refinement.
Here’s the key elements of the prompt;
Create a anatomically-accurate, photo realistic, Baroque-style oil painting.
Four different and unique Thailand women are facing Bacchus and proudly anointed . end of the day entering dusk on a very hot Summer.
dramatic. theatrical. expressive faces showing emotions. facing a stone portal to another land; a lush land, with pastoral and tropical settings and wonder.
they approach the camera with anticipation and expressions of great interest.
they are yearning and full of desire facing the camera, and presenting themselves is a pleasing manner.
motherly handsome women who would make great mothers. anointed by cupid
The images generated are mostly nudes, which isn’t really what I asked for, but the Baroque-style oil painting is overwhelmingly nudes historically.
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(26)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(27)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(25)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(23)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(19)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(16)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)
Here’s some men for a change…
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)
I really like this one…
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This one is even better…
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This is also good…
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0
Why Everyone Is Quitting The 40 Hour Work Week
This is a brilliant video. It really is.
Bye bye USA.
SpaghettiOs
Kids will love this homemade version of a favorite canned pasta.
spaghetti os
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (26 ounce) can tomato sauce
3 cups water
1 cup milk
2 cups Cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon garlic powder
8 ounces ditalini or pasta of choice, uncooked
Instructions
In a large pot mix together the sauce, water and milk. Bring to a boil.
When it reaches a bowl, stir in the cheese and turn it down to a simmer. Continue to stir until the cheese is melted.
Add the garlic and stir.
Pour in the uncooked pasta. Simmer on low for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally during the first 5 to 6 minutes to prevent the pasta from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
Check the pasta after 20 minutes, if it’s not as soft as you would like, cook it a little longer. Sauce will thicken even more over time.
Punny
Is Xi Xing Ping really a wonderful, loving, and supportive leader?
Yes, Donald Trump is a great leader. I don’t like America but I like Donald Trump. He has charisma. He has a story. He’s honest, and it’s clear that many Americans adore him.
Xi is different. While Trump has an American and capitalist story, Xi’s story is different. He has an Asian story. He went through the most important and tumultuous period of modern China. While Trump’s story is about making profits, Xi’s story is about China’s struggle.
Mao Zedong taught the Chinese people to be unite. Deng Xiaoping taught the Chinese people to prosper. Xi, on his part, taught the Chinese people to be proud of China.
Unlike American presidents who rarely interact with their own but poor citizens, Xi visits every corner of China. He communicates with the villagers of China, sits with them, and participates in the activities of a Chinese person’s daily life. He makes the Chinese people feel like the government cares for them. He empathizes with them. He champions the spirit of ordinary men. In contrast, Trump champions the spirit of capitalism and profit.
Xi visited the Tibetan Autonomous Region and many Tibetans gathered to welcome him. He even said “Tashi Delek” at the end, which has won him countless Tibetan fans.
Also, the US is helping him. To make a complete story, there must be a villain whom the hero must fight. The US is the villain, who the world knows is corrupted beyond redemption. Xi himself never chose to fight. He is forced to fight, so that has won him support from around the world.
So. In conclusion, Xi is not the leader China needs but the leader the world needs. After a thousand years, people will talk about our time. They will refer to our period as “China’s revival”. The man they will talk most about is not Trump but Xi.
A friendly contest
What is the saddest thing a casino dealer has seen at their table?
The saddest? A two way tie.
A kid in his early 20’s gains access to a trust fund his grandparents set up for him. Six hours into my shift his mother is behind him begging him to come home before he wastes everything at the table, tears and all. He calls security over to remove her from the area for harassing him. Sadly, he is technically correct, and security escorts the mother from the area. Congrats kid, you lost your future and your parent in one night at the tables.
Second was a 30 something female playing way above her head. No strategy, no quit. Wouldn’t take advice from me because “you work for the house”. She loses about 2-3,000, and goes straight to the ATM. Foxwoods ATMs charge $4 for every transaction, up to $400 per. She has $2,000. Ten minutes later, she’s in tears telling everyone she just gambled away the mortgage, and her husband is going to leave her. She leaves less than an hour before my shift ends. On my way home traffic is unusually heavy (5am mind you) and I see why. Distraught, she was walking along route 2 and decided to step in front of a bus. I found out it was her the next day.
Kay final scene
Why would Shanghai, a poor city in China, compare itself with New York?
For a poor city, it has the world’s largest metro system. 20 lines and counting. Completely safe. No drunks, homeless or druggies in sight.
Shanghai has the only commercial maglev train, allowing you to travel from the airport to the city center in 8 minutes. It travels at speeds over 400 km an hour.
You never need to look over your shoulder for your own safety. Even at 3:00 am you can walk the streets without fear.
You can eat anything your heart desires. From inexpensive street food all the way to Michelin Starred restaurants.
You never see traffic congestion because the city uses advanced smartcity technology so traffic moves very smoothly.
Your question should be why would New York, a poor and unsafe city, compare itself to Shanghai?
I’ve been to both cities. Have you ever visited Shanghai?
What’s the shortest amount of time you’ve stayed at a job and why did you quit?
Not me. But someone hired in my office.
Years ago I worked at a management consulting firm in Austin. It was an awful place to work. Ridiculous hours, bad management, and nepotism lead to an extremely high stress environment. Most of the employees had advanced degrees, but because of the horrible work environment, no one stuck around for more than a few months.
One morning, several of us got on the elevator with a new person, who pressed the button for the our floor. Someone asked if she was going to work for “XYZ.” “Yes,” she happily chirped. Everyone groaned. “You really don’t want to do that,” said one of the analysts. Everyone else nodded agreement.
We reach our floor. Everyone except her gets off. She stands in the doorway for a second. “Nope,” she says, and presses the button for the lobby.
A few hours later, the boss comes into a room where several of us are working. “Where’s the new girl? She was supposed to start today.”
“She quit.”
“What! When?”
“In the elevator.”
The boss looks at us and growls, “Shit! What did you say to her?!!!”
Bronco Billy – Final Scene
What are some interesting/funny facts about medieval France and Spain?
During the 100 Years War, the French countryside was devastated, lawless and full of unburied corpses. It was a paradise for wolves.
“In all the lowlands of the Loire, the sheep were gone — devoured, destroyed. The cattle that were left were herded by peasants and defended with such weapons as were at hand. By night, they were safe corralled in barns or high stockades.”
People did not dare to venture outdoors at night, when the wolves would prowl village streets, killing any man or animal they found. Outside of Paris was a piece of rugged ground that had been cleared of trees. The wolves made it their home.
“Here it was known that many wolves had their dens, and each year new litters of cubs were born, to be a terror on the roads that led to the great city. It was many generations before the place was cleaned up; and the only memory of its savage denizens left today is the name, the same but shortened, that attaches to the place – the Louvre.”
The wolf king, leader of the pack, was a huge wolf called Courtaud (“Bobtail”) who led a small army of wolves in raids on herds of sheep and cattle. When the herdsmen tried to defend their animals, they were killed too, and soon Courthaud developed a taste for human flesh.
The Dubois family, bringing their sheep to market, took the precaution of putting them in a horse-drawn cart decked out with bells, tin pans and other noisemakers, but it didn’t help. They were overwhelmed by wolves. All three were killed and eaten. After that, the wolves would only eat people, leaving behind the sheep and cattle.
For a time, English longbowmen kept the road to Paris open, but then they were withdrawn, and the city was effectively besieged by wolves. In the hard winter of 1439, there was so much snow that neither wolves nor men could find food. Parisians retreated behind their walls and listened to hungry wolves howling outside.
But the walls were not secure. There was a gap between the iron grate at the river and the frozen river itself. The wolves came through and ran through the streets, killing 14 people before retreating.
The captain of the city guard, Boisselier, was fed up. He ordered cattle to be slaughtered in the town square and left there. The smell of blood attracted the wolves who again rushed into the city, but this time, they were cornered and killed with arrows and stones. That was the end of Courtaud, but wolves remained a terror to the countryside for many years.
Why did the northern nomadic barbarians who once invaded China all became assimilated into the Chinese culture?
Classic joke:
What would happen if Russia invaded China?
On the first day: One million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Two million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Three million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Four million Chinese surrendered to Russia
……
Russia ultimately achieved victory,and Russia changed its name to China and announced that Russians are the 57th ethnic minority in China
Imagine you are a war lord riding a warhorse, wielding a sword, and possessing a thousand cows
You suddenly became the emperor of a place called China
You became the emperor because the original emperor here was too foolish.
You have recruited your loyal Prime Minister, and you have decided to establish your own dynasty and civilization.
You: I want the people here to use new language!
Prime Minister: Sorry, the people here use language that is longer than the history of your tribe. If you replace their language, the entire country’s system will collapse,Great emperor, you don’t want your tax order to be passed on to people thousands of kilometers away, but theybelieve it’s just a piece of paper filled with mysterious symbols
You: I want them to wear my clothes!
Prime Minister: Your clothes are only suitable for the environment on the grasslands… Look, here are deserts, grasslands, snow capped mountains, plains, oceans
You: I want them to eat my food.
Prime Minister: Sir, even you are unwilling to eat your food. Their food is much more delicious. I guess you, who live on the grassland, haven’t studied the methods of shark fin and sea cucumber
You: I want them to accept our culture.
Prime Minister: Really? Do you want your people to learn from your culture of conquest and war, rather than their traditional conservative and submissive culture? The previous emperor here finally taught his people to obey the emperor’s orders. Do you really want to teach them how to conquer and overthrow the emperor like you do?
You: I want them to read our book!
Prime Minister: Hmm… You’ve been busy fighting and don’t seem to have many books. Even if they do, they can’t understand them, and they have tens of millions of books
You: I want them to live in my house!
Prime Minister: Are you serious… Do you want to move out of this magnificent palace and live in your tent full of horse manure?
You: Damn it, why do they have such a long history!
Prime Minister: My Emperor, you see, the region where these people live is bordered by deserts and plateau snow capped mountains to the west, mountains and seas to the south, and only the ocean to the east. In this natural fortress, in ancient times, we on the grasslands were the only threat to this civilization, unless a group of people can invent airplanes and warships in the future to destroy this fortress.
But before that, this civilization could exist freely in this fortress for thousands of years… Of course, this also limited their desire to explore the sky and sea too much, so in the future your dynasty will be severely kick ass by a group of white skinned guys – and they will blame you, the ruler of another ethnic group.
You: so…… how did we conquer this country
Prime Minister: As you can see, living in this country, if you are an emperor who has everything you want, it is difficult not to become an idiot,Just like your future children, they have never experienced your efforts and hardships in conquering a country. Under our foolish feudal system, they will soon become addicted to pleasure, after all, there are much more fun here than on the grassland,Otherwise, why did that crazy giant Mongol Empire ultimately choose to stay here and establish the Yuan Dynasty
You: Then I can let them change to my hairstyle, right
Prime Minister: Of course… but the cost is that hundreds of years later they will still use this as one of the reasons why you are a tyrant… and countless rebels will use it as an excuse to rebel against you
You:there are always some of them willing to accept all of the above!
Prime Minister: Indeed, so future museums will have information about your artifacts
You: I’m going to kill them all!!!!
Prime Minister: Really? You killed them, who will give you a gorgeous house, delicious food, beautiful women, and a group of men willing to cut their own dick to serve you? Are you really willing to give up such a beautiful life and spend the rest of your life killing and fearing being assassinated
You: I choose to join them
Prime Minister: So, enjoy your brief imperial life, at most for a few hundred years they will take everything away, and you will fall in love with the life here and become a minority of China, If a snake swallows an elephant – it will only transform itself into the shape of an elephant, What you can kill is only the emperor, not this huge civilization
you see, these people are all native Chinese now
Men Are RELAXING As It All Collapses
Has it ever happened where someone acting as their own attorney ever worked out, they did a great job and got themselves off the hook?
Not exactly an “off the hook” situation, but I did go to court against an attorney and won.
The high school my youngest son attended denied him entry into the National Honor Society, even though he fit every bit of the criteria. It seems he was “black balled” by one or two of his teachers over personal grudges. I looked up the rules for admission to the society and found that black balling was forbidden. I asked to see the votes and vote tally records. I was told I was not allowed to see them. So, I filed a FOIA suit against the school.
A couple of days after filing the papers, I got a call from their “high-powered” attorney from our state capital. He wanted contact info for my lawyer. I told him I didn’t have a lawyer. He told me to get him the contact info when I hired my lawyer. I told him I had no intention of hiring a lawyer.
He then tried to bully me by telling me there was no possible way I could win, and that I would have to pay the school for his attorney fees. I ignored his threat and ended the conversation.
About 4 days before the hearing was set, the attorney called me again. He asked again for my attorney. I again told him I had none, and had no intention of getting one. Same old bullying started again. I ignored it again.
The day before the hearing, he called again and asked if we could just settle this. I declined.
The day of the hearing, I met this attorney at the courthouse. He entered the courtroom before I did, and introduced himself to the judge. As I entered, I looked at the judge and said, “Hi, Jim.” He responded with, “Hi, Eric.” I could see the attorney’s face, and the look was priceless. As the old saying goes, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
I prevailed in my suit and the school was told they were required to give me the info. They said they didn’t have it. It must have gotten discarded. I pointed out to them that the National Honor Society rules required them to keep the information for at least 12 months. I let them know that I could contact the society and have them drop the entire school from their program for breaking this rule, with the implication that they were still allowing black balling of students. I received some apologies and promises that they would read the rules and follow them in the future.
My son was inducted into NHS the following year.
By the way, I had been denied membership in NHS by the same school some thirty or so years earlier. I didn’t complain. Even though I was valedictorian, they were correct in not inducting me. I was too ornery to fit the mold. My son did fit, it was just that a couple of teachers didn’t like him.
NEIGHBORS HATED THE COLOR OF MY HOUSE AND REPAINTED IT WHILE I WAS AWAY — I WAS ENRAGED & TOOK MY REVENGE.
My house is on a corner lot. Two years ago, a newlywed couple moved in next door and immediately made weird comments about my house’s yellow color. Soon, they outright DEMANDED I paint it a different color. My house has always been yellow; I love it, and there’s no rule against it.
They called the police and the city on me, but both told them to back off since I hadn’t done anything wrong. They even tried suing me (the suit got tossed, and they had to pay my legal fees) and attempted to rally our neighbors to form an HOA to force me to repaint. Our neighbors told them to get lost, so now they’re alienated by everyone.
I had to go out of town for two weeks, and when I got back, my house was GRAY. I almost drove past it because I’m so used to my yellow house. The neighbor from across the street came over and showed me pictures he took of the painting company setting up and doing the work. He and another neighbor called the police, but the painting company had a valid work order and had been paid, so the police couldn’t do anything.
It seemed everything done to my house was legal and no damage was done. But I was enraged and planned my revenge. Next day, I… repainted it yellow.
Yellow house
Putin TV Address: “Entitled to Strike” Nations Giving Weapons to Ukraine
“Russia considers itself entitled to use (hypersonic) weapons against facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against Russian facilities.”
Those are the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks today from the Kremlin in Moscow. Here is a brief video showing him making the announcement:
NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNINGS TRIGGERED THIS MORNING!
Russia’s ICBM launch at Ukraine this morning triggered early warning systems – – – and such launches are, by default, assumed to be nuclear. So for a short time, the US and Europe thought Russia was nuking Ukraine.
They only knew that it was not nuclear by checking to see if the city of Dnipro was still physically there after the impacts.
Essentially, If Russia decides to nuke Ukraine … the west will watch because they can do nothing other than that.
Second important thing to note: Russia has proven that it can deliver a conventional or nuclear payload to any place without a problem.
Which brings us back to President Putin’s address to his nation just hours ago . . . . NATO member countries have already supplied weapons being used to strike Russia. Among those weapons have been: Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Rockets, Missiles, Speed-Boat-Bombs, and Drones.
The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and other nations have long ago provided such weapons that have been – and still are – used to attack interior Russia.
That Russia has now announced they are “entitled” to strike seems the clearest indication yet that utterly massive escalation is coming in very short order. Not necessarily in Ukraine, but on the territories of the countries who have been supplying weapons.
Hal Turner Analysis
Today’s use by Russia of an ICBM against Ukraine, albeit with only conventional explosives, should make clear to any RATIONAL person that the next step would be to use those same missiles with nuclear warheads.
There is no other RATIONAL interpretation possible!
Will the collective West see reality for what it is, or are they so immersed in their own echo chamber, that reality can no longer penetrate?
It seems to me that if the collective West does not stop what it’s doing with Ukraine, Russia is going to strike. VERY soon. Maybe before Thanksgiving.
For the almost three years that this Russia-Ukraine Conflict has gone on, I have implored readers of this website, and listeners to my radio show to get prepared: Emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on, a way to cook without electricity or utility-supplied gas, a way to heat your home without utilities (Fireplace, wood-burning stove, etc.). I have urged folks to get a generator and have spare fuel stored outside, to run that generator, to keep your refrigerators running and maybe a light on in the house. I have recommended a flashlight in every room of your home, or at least one for each family member, with plenty of spare batteries for those flashlights. I have recommended a portable AM/FM/SW radio for local news and info and spare batteries for those portable radios. I have urged people to get COMMUNICATIONS Gear, a CB, HAM, or GMRS radio, so they can communicate locally if everything goes down. I have advised folks to get a FIRST-AID KIT for minor cuts and bruises, or, God Forbid, major war wounds.
Now that an ICBM has actually been fired in Combat for the first time in Human History, a threshold has been crossed. Things go downhill VERY FAST from here.
If you don’t have the prepping items I mentioned above, you are totally screwed.
Please, I IMPLORE YOU, get “prepped” right now. Today. As best you can. There seems to be very little time remaining before you will need those preps.
8 hard truths I learned after 8 years living in Japan…
My Paternal Grandfather was really interested in detective, and true crime stories right before he died.
When he was 74, he ended up with cancer, and started to spend a lot of time in the hospital. While there, he asked everyone to bring him the true crime stories. He read those things like a voracious wolf.
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Then, he got worse and passed on.
What I think this meant was that he was preoccupied with death, Heaven and the life “beyond”. I cannot say that I blame him. We all feel that way. But, I find it interesting that this is how he wished to spend his last moments; reading about gruesome deaths.
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Don’t do that.
Lots of better things to do with your time.
Fiddler’s Green is giving away free paper-plane card models. These can be scaled up and used as plans for foamie RC planes:
Currently it is a ME-109 and Corsair. It changes every few weeks.
So super cheap. And a fun waste of time. Not into planes, cars, ships? No problem. Try their house and town models…
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Today…
What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?
My story is essentially a movie trope now. I was sitting in my local pub with my dad who was in a wheelchair, it was during the midweek (in Scotland), early evening, so it was pretty quiet, just a handful of middle aged guys, me and my dad. 4 young yob lads came in, if you’re in the UK you know the type, baseball caps, tracksuits, swaggering like Liam Gallacher, thinking they’re hard men.
They’d obviously had a few drinks before coming in, and after a few pints and us putting up with their shit tunes on the jukebox, they started getting a bit rambunctious, getting progressively louder and more aggressive as the evening turned to night.
One of the old guys, having gotten sick of their “doof doof” dance music crap got up and stuck a few quid in the jukebox, putting on some old 60’s 70’s rock music. One of the young team took offence to this, and got in his face, he started mouthing off at the old guy, who just stood there, impassive, and after a couple of minutes of this abuse the young team joined in, so one of the other regulars got up off his bar stool and stood behind the young team, and as if on some unseen signal, the old guy who was backed up against the jukebox just stuck the head right on the lad who was in his face, while his friend grabbed 2 of the young team and pulled them away, as the boy who’d been nutted reeled back, the old boy went for his friend, knocking him out with a left in the gut, and a hard right to the side of his head as he doubled over.
Meanwhile his friend had knocked one guy out with one punch, and when he turned his attention to the last guy, he blocked a punch and hit the boy so hard he flew over the pool table!
Turned out both of them were class fighters in their day, and some things you just don’t forget.
Morale of the story is, be respectful to people you don’t know, because you don’t know their history, and don’t know what they’ve done or been through.
Never saw those lads in the pub again, and they weren’t missed!
To Die for Beef Roast
This is one of the best roasts you will ever taste. Carrots, potatoes and celery can also be added, if desired.
Mix contents of all 3 envelopes and sprinkle over roast.
Pour water into the bottom of the slow cooker.
Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours.
Robert Bigelow Tells Bob Lazar Stories
What would cause someone to walk out during a negotiation with a car salesman?
A simple negotiating strategy is “take it off the table”.
it works both ways: I am the car salesman, you are looking at a $45,000 car. We talk about it, test drive, you are looking at it, I hear and see buying signs. I want to test the waters. “John, look we are having a special sales “spif” this month and I really need to sell some cars. Let’s cut to chase here. (Looking over my shoulder to make sure no one else hears) I can sell you this car, today only, (scarcity) and knock off $10,000. $35,000 and you are out the door. What do you say?”
If the buyer balks, he’s not sure, looking at other deals. I say “okay, I get it. I’m going to withdraw the offer.” if the buyer is jumping in, then he was never a buyer.
I am a buyer… I find a car that I like, its a slightly used Lexus, $45,000 sticker. Salesman walks up, “Can I help you?” I say “Yes, I’m liking this GS 350 here. Do you have the mileage? “ he says “Let me get that for you. Want to drive it? I’ll get the keys.” He comes back and we test drive the car, rides like a dream, smooth, nice interior… I’m sold. We get out I make him stand in the hot sun, facing the sun. “How hard is that sticker price?” He says “we have a little wiggle room.” “Okay, my offer is $39,000, lets write up” I say. He says “not that much wiggle room.” I take my business card, write on the card… “Green GS 350, $39,000.” hand it to the sales guy. “Call me when this offer is good.” and leave…
Or better: I say “Okay my offer is $39,000.” He says “Oh, we don’t negotiate here, the price is the price.” I say “Yeah, I don’t either. Here is my offer. call me when its good.”
They will call “we have a blue Toyota / we have a white impala / we have a red tundra.”
Finally they will call, “the best we can do is $42,000.” I say “You are almost there.” click.
Is it safe to say that China is at least 30 years ahead of India?
Very safe! In fact, you can increase that number to 40 or 50 and it will still be true.
I lived in a Chinese village with a Chinese family for one month as part of a homestay program. I started my journey from Shanghai airport, and the entire stretch of road leading to the village was smooth, with no potholes, no litter, and not once did I see anyone driving their vehicle on the wrong side of the road, or see stray dogs and cattle hold up vehicles.
Every house in the village had an attached toilet, 24×7 electricity, and the houses all had modern appliances like washing machine, refrigerator, TV, Wi-Fi etc. And I had visited quite a few houses.
Every classroom in the village primary school had a TV which the teachers used to teach their students. The secondary school had Wi-Fi.
All the villagers wore helmets while riding their electric scooters. Every single one of them could read and write Mandarin, and none of them littered or spat or peed in the open.
The women all wore jeans, dresses, skirts etc. and no one judged them and shamed them for “aping the west”. What mattered was their ability, not what clothes they wore.
It was completely safe to wander around the village after dark. No one got harassed for their gender, nationality etc. None of the female participants in the homestay program ever mentioned that they felt uncomfortable, or were stared at by men for wearing shorts. None of us faced any racist taunts.
I’m not saying that China has no problems, but this Chinese village had better services than most Indian cities (we can still only dream of uninterrupted power supply, or 24×7 water, or pothole-free roads).
I cannot say with authority that all villages in China are like this, but I would wager that many of them are. The cities are of course in a different league. I stayed in the suburbs to the north of Shanghai for a few days, not a tourist area. The neighbourhoods were clean, with excellent roads, and footpaths were not cluttered by hawkers. People followed traffic rules. I went to a side street where there were stalls selling street food, and it was clean. No one littered, there was no garbage anywhere.
It’s not just their GDP or infrastructure. It’s their mentality too that has helped China zip ahead.
Scott Ritter Discloses: How the Russian Hypersonic Missile Changed the Game in Ukraine!
Why does this YouTuber named “serpentza” go to such lengths to stigmatize China? Especially when so many tourists come to China?
There are many like him. China Uncensored, one Asian guy who speaks fluent English, one old aunty. All are on YouTube. I know these four because I have been following them for a long time. There’s also a news site called Bitter Winter.
All of them focus only on China. They never tell good things. They even exaggerate the tiniest bad thing about China. They don’t only talk about how bad the government is, but also how bad the Chinese people are. They go to such great lengths, making lies and twisting facts. They don’t care about their own credibility. The sole purpose of their existence is to spread hate on China.
Something is definitely wrong. Why are such news sites allowed to exist? Why do they have a wide following? From where do they collect all those information? Plus, they don’t look like solo artists but more like lowly funded news organizations.
Based solely on what they themselves are sharing, it’s right to call them US propaganda machine. Also, they stay shut about Palestine, but I once watched a China Uncensored video where he sided with the Israelis. Otherwise, it’s just wrong to talk bad about a whole country without ever showing an ounce of respect. It’s like their hobby is to slander China.
Does media like them exist for other countries? No matter which country you are from, if there were people like them always talking bad about your country and your people, how would you feel?
Edit: I checked YouTube and here are the ones I have mentioned and one more: China Observer, China Insider with David Zhang, China Insights. There’s one anti-China aunty that I have mentioned but I’m too lazy to search and I forgot her channel name.
At what stage in your life did you realize, “No, I can’t do this any more” and walk out? Why?
My step father came into my life when I was 8, and treated me and my siblings badly without a word of interference from my mother for the rest of my childhood. I left home at eighteen, and got together with the woman I’m married to at age 25. She had two children, a boy of three and a half and a girl of six months, so I got an entire family in one fell swoop. A year later we had been on holiday with the children, and dropped by my mother’s cabin on the way home. We were supposed to sleep there before driving the long way home.
My step father was drunk, and proceded to be nasty to our son. I got mad as a wasp, and informed him he was not allowed to talk to my children like that. There was a huge quarrel, he and I shouting, my mother claiming “He didn’t mean it”, the children crying, my wife watching it all with her mouth open, utterly appalled. It finally calmed down, but he kept mumbling nasty remarks through dinner, so we decided to leave. I also decided I would no longer spend time in his company. After that I have seen him at weddings and christenings, and that’s it.
I wish him well, but will not allow his poison to infect my life any more.
Pennsylvania Dutch Chili
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Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 onion, chopped
1 pound homemade noodles or 1 (12 to 16 ounce) bag wide egg noodles
1 can baked beans
1 cup spaghetti sauce or less (or 1 small jar)
Instructions
Brown ground beef and onion.
Cook and drain egg noodles.
Combine everything. You may need additional sauce if you have leftovers and warm them up later. Chili should be thick, not soupy.
Can a time come when coaching institutes will be banned?
Absolutely
Coaching Institutes in India and the Coaching Culture is REGRESSIVE
It may produce rankers but it doesn’t produce Quality Engineers
It essentially gives false hopes to thousands of students who would otherwise face reality of their own abilities and get on with their lives productively
They must be REFORMED
Lets see come Chinese Reforms and whether or not they would be adapted to India :-
Videos of Lectures by Tutors CANNOT be commercialized for an Annual Cost that exceeds 3200 RMB a year in TOTAL (Previously they charged as much as 11999 RMB a year per subject). Thats a 90% Price cut mandated by law
No Coaching App can seek venture capital or funding for any Tier 1/2/3 rounds unless the said App matches the Coaching Fees charged by Individual Tutors for 150 Hours a year (3000 RMB a year to 4500 RMB a year instead of 30,000 RMB a year)
Pictures of Ranking Students cannot be advertised by Coaching Institutions or the Institution will be fined and penalized criminally and Any Student who misrepresents his rank by taking money from a Coaching Institute will face a 3 Year Ban in entering any Institution in China
Teachers who teach in Private or Public School are forbidden to take Coaching Classes exceeding 8 Hours a week and their maximum hourly rate is capped (I don’t know how much but it’s way lower than what it was)
Xi broke the entire Industry single handedly
No more teachers who could charge the world and ignore school for private coaching.
Everything was Capped and at very low rates that bankrupted half the coaching institutes
Advertising was entirely based on mouth to mouth endorsements and no billboards or photo publishing of students getting top rank based on cash incentives
Such Students who took money to claim they took their training from so & so coaching institute would face a 3 year ban from any course
This encourages Group discussion
Right from the Youngest Age – they have divided students into study groups and have Wechat groups to discuss Projects, Assignments and Group Work
Private Tutors are allowed on an Hourly and they teach you at some dollars per hour rate
Professors and Teachers VOLUNTEER at CLCs and Community Coaching Centres where students can learn for free
We need to bring in a similar model adaptable to India
First we need a rule that students who fail more than 2 Attempts at NEET or UPSC or CAT or JEE cannot be enrolled in Coaching Centres or if they are, their enrollment must be FREE
Second we need to CAP THE COACHING FEES for all these exams
Third we must deduct tax right from the Coaching Fees like a TDS and impose 35% that the Coaches must bear
Fourth, we must mandate a cap on Online Coaching Fees which must be no higher than 33% of the Offline Fees
Fifth, we must offer large tax subsidies to free coaching offered on YouTube and other channels
Sixth we must impose a ban on School Teachers working for Coaching Classes unless their Tuition fee is capped at a certain hourly rate and no longer than 8 Hours a week
Maybe some of this is practical and some of this isn’t
I don’t know
I am saying things at the top of my head
However I do know that
REFORMS ARE CRITICAL AND MUST BE DONE NOW
To really find out how – you need to study the entire scenario , talk to students and find out and then begin a series of reforms
Students are becoming Rankers rather than Quality Engineers or Administrators
That must be stopped at any cost
Have you ever sold used cars for a living?
Sorta kinda.. when my older daughter was born 40 years ago my wife went on maternity leave and I needed to replace her income.
I started raising money by selling two extra cars I owned. I ran classified ads in the newspaper and dealt with customers. It was fun. Then my friend was going to junk a decent car because he was too lazy to sell it. I gave him the $100 the junkyard would have paid. I sold it for $600 with little effort.
I was on a roll! I drove around town looking for cars for sale or just sitting unused. I’d inquire and buy them cheap if I could. I’d check the newspaper ads early every day. I’d do minor repairs, clean and polish them to make them more attractive. One car had an entire garbage pail of trash in it!
I got to the point where I had two cars for sale in my driveway at all times. Guys would watch and inquire about different cars. I even sold one to my neighbor.
I did this the entire year until the weather got cold approaching winter. I figured I’d quit while I was ahead and before the cops or DMV figured me out. I did sell a car to a cop though!
It served me well. I replaced my wife’s salary and then some!
Is Intel becoming more and more like the feeling Boeing brings to people?
In terms of losing its engineering chops and becoming an overfinancialized blue chip play?
Yes.
However, Boeing’s problem ia execution, whereas Intel’s business model is facing obsolescence.
Both are in danger of ebbing away in the uncertain future ahead, though Boeing’s decline will be back stopped by the government, given its role as a key arms contractor and America’s only builder of airliners.
Boeing is one or two crashes from a PR nightmare, especially if it happens on the Max.
Intel’s product mix appear unsuitable for an ai-heavy world, and arm is projected to make huge inroads to the windows ecosystem in the coming years.
Intel needs a radical rethink, because the chips act cannot save it from drowning when the market moves decisively against a product portfolio. This is made worse by the poisonous politics that has reshaped demand in East Asia.
I don’t envy Intel at all.
Breaking: Undefeated US Indicator Signals “Full-Blown” Recession
Deng Xiaoping famously told British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that ‘China could take Hong Kong in a day.’ How serious was this threat? And were the Chinese at all concerned about the UK invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty?
“How serious was this threat?”
Let me put it this way: the People’s Liberation Army could have taken back Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War, long before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and long before Deng met Thatcher.
The 44th Army of the PLA chased the fleeing Kuomintang forces all the way to Shenzhen. Their troopers were at one point gathered at Hong Kong’s Lo Wu border. They were literally one river crossing away from the British colony. Hong Kong only had a few thousand colonial troops stationed at the time. The battle-hardened 44th could have easily taken the city in about a day with a single well-timed bayonet charge. Two days at the most.
Sir Alexander Grantham, who was the governor of Hong Kong at the time, recalled that the PLA didn’t even need to attack. All they had to do was cut off food and water supplies to the colony, and the British would have to surrender in less than a month.
But neither of these scenarios ever happened. Chairman Mao ordered the army to stop the attack and turn back, stating that he had “other plans for Hong Kong”. Premier Zhou Enlai himself personally oversaw the situation with Hong Kong, and made sure that nothing went amiss with its supply of food and water.
History vindicated Mao’s decision to not take back Hong Kong immediately. He had the vision and the sense to play the game of geopolitics.
Mao knew that China was poor and underdeveloped, and was soon to be sanctioned by the United States and the rest of the imperialist west for being a communist nation. A gateway to the west was desperately needed.
The British Empire, likewise, also needed Hong Kong to serve as its gateway to the east. By letting the British keep Hong Kong for just a little while longer, Mao prevented China from being isolated by an anti-China alliance of western powers completely, which was what would have happened if the British had been beaten and sent home crying to Uncle Sam.In 1950, the UK became one of the first capitalist countries to formally recognise the PRC.
Mao was worried about the overwhelming influence and control the Soviet Union had over the Chinese Communist Party. He did not want a communist China to be freed from Fascist Japan and the Imperialist West, only to answer to a red Russia. Having Hong Kong as a gateway to the west, meant that China would not have to depend entirely on the Soviet Union.History proved him right, as evident in the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, and the fall of North Korea in the 1990s.
Just because Mao let the British lord over the people of Hong Kong for a while longer, doesn’t mean he had forgotten about the welfare of its predominantly Chinese populace. The city’s status as a gateway between east and west was the sole reason its economy flourished in the 20th century.Hong Kong’s success was never a “miracle” or the result of British rule, but a by-product of the times, geopolitics, and external factors greater than the city itself – a lesson most people in Hong Kong, both young and old, have forgotten
Article 5 of NATO would not have been China’s main concern, because the article could only be invoked in case of an attack on a NATO member’s own soil (i.e. Europe or North America). In fact, the first time it was ever invoked was after the events of 9/11.
In any case, China did play a major part in the Korean War, fighting the coalition forces of the United Nations to a standstill, so I doubt the formation of NATO would have changed the course of history too much – and that’s assuming NATO was willing at all to waste money and lives defending the British Empire’s interests. There’s a reason why Article 5 was never invoked during the Falklands War.
The fact remains that the PRC never planned to take back Hong Kong by force in the first place. They had no illusions that the sun would never set on the British Empire. They knew Hong Kong would become Chinese again eventually.
Addendum:
Chiang Kai-shek actually wanted to take back Hong Kong from the British after the Second World War. He rightfully saw the the Treaty of Nanking as humiliating to the Chinese people, and negotiated with the UK and the US to have the treaty abolished in 1942. The British Empire rejected the proposal, Chiang refused to relent, and so the matter was dropped from the agenda.
However, another agreement was formed that whoever entered Chinese territory previously under Japanese occupation first, would get to keep it for themselves.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, both the British and the Kuomintang scrambled to send forces to Hong Kong. KMT soldiers were apparently the first to enter Hong Kong’s New Territories, which was disputed by the UK.
The UK referred the matter to the US. President Truman wanted to ally with the UK against the Soviet Union, so he betrayed Chiang by declaring Hong Kong was never part of the deal. The KMT had to withdraw their forces, and Hong Kong soon became a British colony once again. So close, and yet so far.
This is actually a snapshot into what China was like under the Kuomintang government. Yes they were founded on great ideas by great men, but they were also de facto puppets of the Imperialist West, and therefore unable to give the Chinese people the rights, liberty, dignity and respect they deserved.
Hong Kong would very likely still be British today, had the communists lost the civil war.
Just In! Burkina Faso Forces Launch Ambush Operations Against Insurgent Groups!
Dril entered from the air-lock. Myr looked up from the vid-screen.“Brrr, it’s cold out there.”“Don’t you wear your suit?”“Of course I do. You think I’m crazy?”Myr raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer that.“I remember reading it is always cold out there. It’s the moon, silly.”“I know it’s the moon. I got us this gig, remember?”“That I do.”“I mean, who better than us to prospect the best sites for mining delicious moon cheese?”“No one I can think of.” Myr sighed. “You know what you forgot to have delivered?”
“What’s that, Honey Pie?”
“Some new material. You have told a variation of that joke at least once daily for the last year.”
“Except, mining for cheese is serious business.”
“Please stop.”
Dril smiled at Myr. “You want me to cook dinner tonight?”
Myr sighed again. “Is it dinner time? I know what the clock says, but it doesn’t feel like dinner time. The sun is still out.”
“You know how this works, Myr.”
“Of course I do. I get it intellectually. But a month of sunshine followed by a month of darkness?”
“Actually, it’s more like two weeks.”
“Really? Who came up with that schedule?”
“Uhm… God?”
“I need a break, Dril.”
“What do you say we take a week and go to the Sea of Tranquility? Or to the mountains?”
Myr put her hands up to her ears and shook her head. “No. No. No. No. No.”
Dril passed on this opportunity to, once again, make a joke about American cheese and the flag left behind by the first men to land here.
“Let’s dance.” Dril moved toward Myr with a rhythmic step. He started singing. “Blue Moon… You saw me standing alone…”
Myr shrugged off his embrace. “Don’t you dare start about Kate Smith.”
Dril put his hands up, in frustration and surrender. “I’m trying to make the best of a…”
“Cabin fever. Isn’t that what you call it?”
“On the moon, it is called ‘existential angst’.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
Dril touched Myr’s elbow. “Come on, Babe. We never look at the earthrise anymore.” He waved his hand and the shaded, domed window automatically brightened. The colorless moonscape spread before them with Earth’s blue orb peeking from behind the distant mountains.
“Stark.”
Dril shook his head. “Look at the Earth, Babe. We’ll be going home before you know it. Think how much you’ll appreciate being back.”
“Are we there yet?”
“You’ve heard that you can’t go home again?”
“Watch me.”
Dril stood back. The moment had passed. “I’m going to go out and check the sensors.” He pointed to the counter stacked with various tools and gizmos. “Would you hand me the razzafraz?”
Myr looked at the disorderly mess Dril called his workbench. She picked up the tool on top of the others. “You mean this?”
“No. That’s the franaham… Next to the thingamajig.” Myr picked up another tool at random and held it up. “Thank you.” He took the tool from her and moved toward the airlock.
“Will you be long?”
“No. You know, routine maintenance. Never can say when some asteroid will wreak havoc on our survival systems.”
“I hate when that happens.”
Dril chuckled and ducked through the bulkhead door. He stepped into his suit, secured the safety devices and donned his helmet. Taking his time, he checked the vid-feed and sound system, a routine as ingrained and natural as brushing his teeth before bed. All systems were a ‘go’.
Not that Myr would be monitoring his progress. Lately, her heart wasn’t in it.
He checked the seals on the interior door and activated the exterior door. The small room filled with steam for a moment as the air froze and then escaped into the void.
Dril scanned the bright horizon. It still quickened him to take in this alien moonscape. It never changed. But he did. Each day, his perception of this perpetually static scene seemed fresh by what he brought to it. The frozen nature of it grounded him somehow.
And of course, he thought of what ‘phase’ they were in. He could never shake the earth-centric perspective. But now, Dril would also note Earth’s phase.
After watching Earth’s rise above the horizon, Dril checked the various monitors distributed around their home base and the outer shell of their home. With few variations, all seemed in order.
He chuckled at his own joke. “The barometer seems stuck. Weird, no air pressure at all.”
When on the frontier of space like this, Dril always celebrated an ordinary day.
Seeing the giant ‘S. O. S’ scrawled in the dust by Myr, always made him smile. That happened after their first few weeks on base.
Dril remembered watching her shuffling around in an aimless manner on the landing pad near their base camp. Or so he thought.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sending a message to anyone who might be paying attention,” she answered.
Then he recognized the letters, wide as Stonehenge. Gigantic letters to be read by someone, anyone above them in the sky.
They read, “S. O. S.” Sans serif.
He knew she meant it. Keeping her morale up kept him busy. That was his hardest job.
~
Myr watched the airlock door shut. Though a daily occurrence, seeing Dril go out distressed her. What if something happened to him?
Of course, she knew all the routines and procedures. But to be alone out here on this rock… She shuddered at the thought. At first, it seemed a romantic adventure. Like being on a desert island together. Dril called it their ‘dessert island’. She never imagined how desolate the whole thing would be.
Myr entered the conservatory. She spent most of her time there. The humidity, greenery, and oxygen-rich air kept her sane. She loved caring for the plants more than anything. They were her life.
She liked the sunshine streaming into the greenhouse. The windows filtered the harsh light to a level the plants could tolerate. And she had artificial light to accommodate the long lunar nights.
Though primarily their source of fresh food, Myr lobbied for authorization to also bring decorative and flowering plants to their outpost. She prevailed by arguing an environment lacking in beauty would be better tended by a robot. Myr insisted ‘practical’ was broader in scope than ‘edible.’ A garden could include a feast for the eye as well as her belly and wouldn’t unduly tax their limited resources.
Myr had maintained even a guinea pig deserves a home and not merely a box filled with hay. Someone agreed and Myr received permission to transport seeds of her choosing, within strict guidelines.
Now she had a garden, her little paradise. But without apples or snakes. She cared for it with a passion.
The apparently spontaneous generation of certain insects and pests amazed Myr. They required constant monitoring, lest they damage the food crops. Myr understood they must have stowed away on the seeds or the soil. They were unwitting aliens on this unwelcoming stone.
Curiously, there were also spiders, who allied with her to maintain a balance within the garden. Life begets life.
She gathered a variety of tomatoes and other ripe vegetables for their dinner.
Indicator lights and a signature chirp told Myr that Dril was back. She felt calmer now and went out to greet him.
Dril already stood in the living zone when Myr entered from the kitchen. He smiled at her and they embraced. However brief his sojourns outside, Dril’s homecoming always caused her joy.
Dril asked her, “Tell me, how do you know when the moon is full?”
“You never think it is full.”
“No. Work with me.”
“Oh, a joke. Uhm… it’s always half empty?”
“No. It says, ‘hold the cheese’.”
Myr did not react. The new joke felt very old.
“How about this…? What flavor is a ‘blue moon’?”
“Dril, I was feeling better…”
“Roquefort!”
“Please?”
“Alright… One of these days I’ll make you laugh.”
Myr shook her head. “When that happens, you’ll know I’ve become a bonafide lunatic.”
They looked at each other for a moment and burst into laughter. They embraced and kissed warmly.
Dril looked into Myr’s eyes. “How do you do that? You always make me laugh.”
“My little secret, love. Let’s eat.”
They walked hand in hand into the kitchen.
Here’s some of MM’s latest artwork generations
The theme is closeness and intimacy, but those are flagged on the free subscription, so I performed some creative work-arounds.
Of course, figurative nudes, and tradition are in my interest set.
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What is the worst violation of firearms safety you’ve ever witnessed?
I’m sure I’ve told this story before…
Quite a number of years ago I was out shooting at a public range when a family showed up. Mom and dad, two kids, and even grandma.
They pile out of a pickup truck… and, well, to complete the visual here, they looked straight out of central casting as a Mariachi band. Now, I’m like “you do your thing, I’ll do mine”, but to say that this group was attention getting understates it by several orders of magnitude.
Dad had some cowboy guns, a revolver and a lever action rifle. They also had a grand total of one set of hearing protection between all of them. No eyepro is present.
They proceed to set up their “targets”, which are just a bunch of milk cartons filled with dirt…. Whatever, it’s a public range and people shoot all sorts of random shit. The boy takes a couple of them downrange, sets them down, and steps about three paces to the side.
Dad starts blasting. Yes, kid is still downrange as fuck.
I immediately decide that I don’t want to have to deal with the paperwork when one of these idiots shoots someone, and start packing up. But I’m doing it slow, because I’m keeping one eye on these guys, and keeping my very loaded rifle slung and ready because I’m also somewhat concerned that I’m going to have to shoot one of these idiots myself if the stupidity level goes up another notch, and I want it to be very obvious that if they point a gun at me they are pointing a gun at a man with a clearly loaded AR.
After they blast some rounds in the dirt, the kid eventually comes back behind the line, and the kids pull out the revolver to take turns shooting.
The boy walks up to the line with the revolver and the girl sits on the bench next to him, looks right at him, and I see the next few moments in slow motion. The boy pulls the trigger and the girl gets an absolute face full of cylinder gap, and screams.
I chose that moment to exit, stage left, but that whole scene is burned into my brain, as assuradly as hot gas was burned into that poor girls eyes.
Hunter Discovers 29 Human Body Parts in the Desert
Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Boil cabbage leaves 2 minutes, just until pliable; drain.
In large bowl, combine rice, egg, milk, onion, ground beef, salt and pepper.
Place about 1/4 cup of meat mixture in center of each cabbage leaf, and roll up, tucking in ends. Place rolls in slow cooker, seam side down.
In a small bowl, mix together tomato sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over cabbage rolls.
Cover, and cook on LOW for 8 to 9 hours.
Foreign Woman Meets American Women & NOW Understands Why Passport Bros Exist!
The look on their faces when she said she understood why men are traveling out the states. The salt was real in that room!!!
Why did the Prime Minister of Bengal quit her post and fled the country?
She has no choice but to fly away; the country has already fallen into a downward spiral.
On the surface, the recent unrest in Bangladesh appears to be due to civil service positions being skewed in favor of military families, but this is just a trigger. Even if there were zero reserved positions for military families, there would still be hundreds of thousands of university graduates competing for very few positions.
The essence of the problem is economic decline and public dissatisfaction.
Bangladesh is in deep trouble.
Firstly, there is a population explosion. With such a small land area, it has 170M people. China has a large population, but Bangladesh’s population density is nearly ten times that of China! Russia’s land area is 116 times that of Bangladesh, yet its population is 30 million less.
The total population of these red areas on Earth, compressed into a very small point, is Bangladesh.
With such a large population, the vast majority are engaged in agriculture, which has very low added value.
Bangladesh is the second most disaster-prone country in the world (the first is the Philippines).
Previously, population growth was slow, relying entirely on the harsh adjustment of natural disasters.
During the last major famine, 10 million out of a population of 40 million in Bangladesh died of starvation.
After entering the modern era, pesticides, high-yield seeds, fertilizers, and vaccines have caused a sharp increase in the agricultural population.
Unlike China, which has implemented family planning policies, a democratically elected government in Bangladesh cannot do the same. As a result, the population continues to grow while land area remains fixed, and frequent natural disasters make it difficult to develop a secondary industry on a large scale.
The world’s largest and most dangerous ship-breaking yard is in Bangladesh, but it can only accommodate 200,000 workers, and the value added to production is extremely low.
The country’s pillar industry, the textile industry, has little technological content and faces extremely fierce international competition.
In fact, it is at the bottom of the international division of labor.
Another mistake is the excessive emphasis on higher education. At this stage, the country should focus more on basic education rather than higher education.
After receiving higher education, many young people are unwilling to settle for low-income jobs.
What’s worse is that the country has invested significant resources in cultivating a highly educated population, but most of them are liberal arts graduates.
In China, for example, when I was taking the college entrance exam, the ratio of STEM students to liberal arts students was about 8:1 to 9:1.
There was even some discrimination against liberal arts students at that time; those who failed to compete in STEM fields were the ones considering studying liberal arts.
Even today, the ratio of STEM students to liberal arts students in China is still about 1:1, and STEM students generally have better job prospects and salaries compared to liberal arts students.
(To this day, on the Chinese Internet, the phrase “Are you a liberal arts student?” is still clearly mocking and contemptuous.)
(I believe Vietnam should also learn from this. Today, in Vietnam, the ratio of STEM majors to liberal arts majors is about 1:2, which is far too high for liberal arts students.)
With so many liberal arts graduates, who have broad perspectives, they are naturally unwilling to engage in hard work after graduation, leading to unrest.
Democratic governments and parliamentary politics are not very suitable for late-developing countries.
If Bangladesh cannot make the most of the remaining value of manual labor before AI and automation technologies become dominant, and cannot push for more industrialization, the future of Bangladesh will be very concerning.
GUANGZHOU IS SO MODERN! | An INDIAN’s First Time In CHINA
When I was in my early teens, but before I started working, my mother would drop us kids off at a nearby pool to spend the day at.
It was a swimming complex.
It has an attached golf course, and I would (most of the time) play golf and then just kill time. My sister, at that time, was relentless in ridiculing me, making fun of me, and making my life just miserable. So I avoided the pool. It was a hostile environment to me.
For a spell, perhaps when I was in 6th grade, or so, the pool was doing work on the pool. And the one side was torn up and exposed. And being a boy, I couldn’t help be explore it. And there, to my great surprise was piles of shale.
This, in case you don’t know it, is just layers upon layers of compressed grasses and leaves from the Carboniferous era.
I couldn’t believe my luck. I would easily chip open the blocks of stratified rocks and see images of leaves and plants that no human had ever seen.
Of course, my entire family thought I was nuts. My sister constantly made fun of me. My other brothers and sisters ignored me, and my father and mother complained about hauling home rock after heavy rock.
But I loved it.
It is the perfect pastime for the children.
Give them a hand trowel, and let them go to work. They will get an interest in history, in geology, and in collecting. In a world where everything comes with a price tag (in the United States) it’s free and cheap entertainment.
23080fdd85e7dbe7d2a5db33cc9a49b0
Today…
What was your first clue you were no longer as young as you thought you were?
It’s interesting that this question came along because I just recently got a clue.
It was , quite frankly, devastating. 🤣😂🤣😂
I went to see my son recently in Washington state.
We needed to take his van to the shop and used an Uber for transportation.
The driver was mid 40s or so. He was really friendly and very talkative about all the money he makes driving Uber. 😳
My son elbowed me and said hey this could be an easy way to make extra money and winked at me.
The Uber driver proceeds to say, “ Uber driving isn’t safe for woman especially elderly ones.
You could hear crickets. I’m thinking, is he talking about me? And my son is thinking, oh no, I hope he wasn’t referring to mom.
Because not a word was being said the driver asks , “ Mam, did I say something to offend you?
I said no, then we arrived at our destination and exited the car.
I turned to my son and just said, what the hell was that?! I felt as though I was being gaslit! I was just floored. And on top of everything I have never liked being called mam!🤣😂🤣😂
I asked my son if he would describe me as elderly? He said absolutely not mom, and anyway who is he to judge , he was pushing fifty at least!!!
Ok so I can laugh at it now but it really did a number on me.
Of coarse this became the theme of the trip. Every time we did something physical I would ask if this was something an “elderly” person would or could do.?!
We played badminton, we played frisbee, we hiked in the mountains, we replaced broken handles on his van. He lives upstairs and I took those stairs repeatedly like nothin!
Does that sound like an elderly person to you? 🤣😂🤣😂
I looked up what is considered elderly and the general consensus is 60 to 65, I will be 64 the end of the month.
I don’t know, but personally I have regarded being elderly as more of a physicality not age. Like the inability to do normal everyday activities without help of a person or device like a walker or wheelchair etc.
I guess it’s all one’s own perspective. I’m not oblivious to the fact that I’m not as young as I feel or think but having it thrown in my face like that was unnecessary !!
Alfred Hitchcock Presents S05E37 Escape To Sonoita
In your school, has a bullied ever snapped and beat the bully?
I was in seventh grade and there was a boy who was known to be handful to most of the teachers and a bully to a lot of the students. He tormented the girls. I was no exception. He was known to grab the girls in ways that would get him a “me too” hashtag today, though back then teachers brushed it off as “boys will be boys,” or “Oh don’t be so sensitive; he just likes you.”
Frankly I had endured his hands on me for the last time. One afternoon I was at my locker exchanging books for my classes. My hair was French braided, I had on a blouse, skirt, and dress shoes. This will be relevant in a moment.
The young man in question came behind me, sunk his hand into my braid down to my scalp and jerked my head straight backwards. Heaven only knew what he was going to do next but he didn’t get that far.
I spun around and slung my purse across his face like a sword, but I wasn’t done by a long shot. I dropped everything in my hands and took off after him when he started to run. Down the hallway we went. I was calling after him something along the lines of, “You think you’re tough, picking on the girls and grabbing us. How does it feel, huh?”
I cornered him and grabbed one of my dress shoes and walloped him over the head a few times before a teacher pulled me off of him.
Now it should be noted, I don’t condone violence and as an adult I have never put my hands on anyone in violence, but when someone continuously shows contempt for others, one must expect there will be consequences and you are not always free to choose the consequences.
Some have asked if I were in trouble for my actions. I was given a stern lecture for my “unladylike behavior” but that was as far as it went. Technically it could have been worse since I had “fought back” and they had a “zero tolerance.” But he had caused so much trouble in the past, and they knew my family would raise cane for punishing me for defending myself, that I think they felt it wise to leave it at that. And no, he never bothered me after that.
Toward a Second Cuban Missile Crisis? – Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
How well do you think English signage is done in China?
I think it’s done very well.
In the 80s and 90s, there were hardly any Chinese characters on signs and advertisements in Beijing; they were all in English letters and Japanese kana.
Were we angry? Very angry.
Because we were poor, lacking technology and money, we had to swallow our pride. This included signs and subways; sacrificing the national pride of the entire population, we could only hope for more foreign investment.
Now, it’s required to have big Chinese characters on signs. No Chinese characters? Get lost! Do we really care about a few euros? Are you kidding?
Recently, a small African country launched a movement requiring the removal of Chinese signs and replacing them with local languages.
Because they said, “Our capital is almost turning into a Chinese county.”
All Chinese people feel: “Great, it should be like this!”
At least, in my opinion, it can be bilingual or trilingual.
In their country, their language should be on top, with Chinese or English on the second line.
Their native language font should be the largest, with Chinese or English reduced to 2/3 the size.
Even in Beijing, English letters still be the same size as Chinese characters, which makes me very unhappy.
Can’t the Chinese feel their lack of freedom?
The word “freedom”, if we go by what Franklin Roosevelt said, includes freedom of faith, freedom of expression, freedom from fear, and freedom from want.
I do feel that China has done very well.
Freedom from want – in China, you may not get rich, but as long as you are willing to work, you can always get by.
Of course, housing prices in the big cities are indeed very high, such as Beijing and Shanghai. But outside of the big cities, other things are not that expensive – meat, grains, transportation, industrial goods, clothing, etc.
The high housing prices in the big cities, I admit that this is a problem. However, if you don’t necessarily have to live in the big cities, housing prices in the smaller cities or rural areas are much more affordable.
Freedom from fear? I feel China has done very well in this regard. With nearly 10 million square kilometers of land, I don’t feel afraid to go anywhere. I’m not sure I fully understand what “freedom from fear” means.
I’m afraid of small meteorites hitting the earth, and I feel very fearful about that. But there’s no way to be free from that, right? I can only control myself, like saying I’m afraid of heights so I won’t go to China’s dangerous historic sites. Is that “freedom from fear”?
As for freedom of faith, I think China has that. There are over 300 million religious believers.
Take Islam for example, which the West has been constantly lying about – just in Xinjiang alone, there are 25,000 mosques. The entire US only has 2,000…
It’s true that Communist Party members are not supposed to have religious beliefs, but for ordinary people, who cares what you believe?
Atheism, agnosticism, and indigenous folk religions – aren’t they also forms of faith?
Freedom of expression.
At times, I really feel that the Chinese and American people, who has more of this freedom.
Yes, we can only use VPN to access the global internet, like the one I’m using for Quora now, which costs an extra $1.5 per month. It’s annoying to pay that extra $1.5, but it’s not that expensive. That’s all about it.
Chinese netizens chased and cursed at the Israeli embassy’s Weibo account, and in the end the embassy had to call the police. But the Chinese police could only advise the netizen to “be gentler”.
Chinese netizens made lots of mocking videos about Kim Jong-un, and North Korea put pressure on China through diplomatic channels. China’s response was: the netizen’s behavior was self-initiated, we can’t stop it.
Yes, I don’t dare make any mocking videos of Xi Jinping, but I also don’t want to, because I think he’s doing a good job. Even if I did mock him, I’d just get a scolding, nothing would happen to me. But I just don’t have the motivation to do that, because I genuinely think he’s doing well.
At the end of the day, you think we lack freedom and should resist. But if we feel we’re doing quite well, what should we do?
Barbara Bel Geddes As “Sybilla” – The Perfect Wife? | Hitchcock Presents
What did your sister do to you that you can never forget?
My sister is 10 years younger than me.
Once, when I was 13, I was in my room studying, when she waddled in.
“Watcha doin’?” she asked.
“I’m reading,” I replied, without looking up from my book.
“Why?”
“I’ve exams in school.”
“Why do you have essams?”
This is not going to end well, I thought to myself. I need help!
“Mom!” I yelled. “Get her out of here! She’s disturbing me!”
“Kiddo! Come over here, and don’t disturb your brother. He is studying,” my mother called out from the other room.
“I won’t dissurb him,” my sister yelled back. “I’ll be quiet.”
“Are you sure?” asked my mother.
“I promise!” she affirmed.
I decided to let it go. I did not want to waste any more time.
She picked up one of her books and sat on the floor, looking at the pictures. She was true to her word: she did not disturb me… for all of five minutes. She then looked around, pulled up a stool, and sat near me.
I ignored her.
She started “reading” aloud from her book.
I ignored her.
She stopped reading and looked at me.
I ignored her.
“Mom!” she yelled. “Tell brother to get out! He’s dissurbing me and not letting me read!”
How come the presidential succession process in China is not written down? What if President Xi is killed by a foreign power and China needs the new president quickly to make major urgent decisions?
It is not written down because China is not the US.
Chinese know that the most sensitive issues need to be decided by the right people at the right time while they are facing a challenging and fluid situation.
How can a written-down rule by dead people capture the dynamics of a challenging and fluid situation for living people?
It can’t…
That is why living people need to appraise the situation and decide what to do.
China’s opening vs. U.S. closing? Jeffrey Sachs explains the shift
Realistic and holistic approach that China is taking regarding itself and Geo-political issues.
Iran saying a “decisive” response to Israel is coming in the next 24 hours
(((America))) sending warships to the middle East
It is starting to line up quite a bit.
Hypothetically, is Iran were to actually nuke Israel, as in really wipe it off the map, the Jewish bankers running America would undoubtedly try to go for global nuclear war in a fit of demonic rage, so it could get really bad.
Then again, the guys actually pulling the nuclear triggers MIGHT suddenly be struck by conscience (doubtful) either way, it is unlikely that is Israel was wiped out the global war would not intensify.
The point is that the puppeteers, whatever you believe about them and whoever your own research states they are, are not, ever, going to be removed from power by peaceful means.
Nor will they stop with their demonic agenda.
Once you DO do your own research and look into it, the conclusion that these people are operating under a spiritual, that is, religious, belief system to at compels them to act as they do is inescapable.
And that religion is “Illuminism” and their God is Lucifer, the light-bringer. And their coming of the “Messiah” is what Catholics have predicted for centuries: The Antichrist.
I was never a religious person and I thought Catholicism was absurd (because the Novus Ordo Satanic “Catholic” Church that has masqueraded as Catholic since 1958, IS absurd, AND Satanic).
It took a literal road to Damascus moment to show me God is real and God is Love. And I then spent the next 4 years obsessively educating myself on Christianity. And finally concluded real Catholicism (only espoused by Sedevacantists today) was indeed the closest and best representation of reality, and in testing it ever since, I have only had repeated, unfailing proof that it is in fact the best and truest way to interpret reality as it is.
I no more wanted Demons and Satan to be real than any other libertine still stumbling around addicted to pleasure and excitement. But reality is as it is, not as we wish it to be, and ultimately, no one will be left on the sidelines.
As our Lord explained some 2000 years ago:
Either you are with Him, or you are against Him. Those are the only two choices available. Ultimately the choice between Good or Evil is binary. Though the road to it is far from binary, the final choice is.
And you will not be spared the having to choose; because not choosing is also a choice for the darkness.
So. Pick your master, for we all have one.
I pray those of you as hard-headed as I was get your road to Damascus moment right now, and that those of you a little smarter can get there by logic and reason alone, but I pray you all get there.
God is real. So is Free Will.
You are not a puppet. You get to choose.
I hope you choose well. Sedevacantism is indeed the Way. Research it for yourself, don’t take my word for it.
Oscar Winning Walter Matthau In “Very Moral Theft” | Hitchcock Presents
Was there ever a time in your life where you had little to no social interaction? How long? What happened?
I recall a couple of episodes of about three weeks each.
The first was during a winter break during my second year of law school. I think my finals must have been extraordinarily early, because I had an entire three weeks off, and the four-bedroom house I was sharing was vacated by my three housemates, all of whom scattered for long family holiday plans. I decided to clean out the basement of the house, part of which had been left untouched since I moved in, and was packed with various old tools, painting supplies and junk. In the process, I found some sandpaper, tack cloth, brushes and some ancient spar varnish that looked in great shape, so I decided to refinish my dining room table. I’d never done anything like that before and it was in the days before YouTube (or any internet, for that matter), so the fact that it turned out beautifully still amazes me.
I never left the house for those three weeks except to walk across the street to drop a library book in the return bin. I spoke face-to-face with only one other person, an ex-boyfriend who dropped off a Christmas present for me, and that was limited to the basics, Hello, How are you, Thanks for the thought. Good-bye. I probably spoke with my mother on Christmas Day, because I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have called. And that was it.
I probably read a couple of dozen books, listened to a bunch of records, reorganized the hall closet, and built a couple of fires in the rarely used fireplace.
It was glorious.
The second was at a very rustic weekend vacation cabin I had bought on an Indian reservation north of Seattle (I owned the cabin, but it was on leased Indian land).
I was a practicing attorney at the time. A couple of cases scheduled for trial unexpectedly settled and freed up a block of three weeks with nothing that urgently required my presence, I hadn’t had a vacation in years, but it was on too short notice to do anything like foreign travel, so I packed up three weeks of supplies and a gallon of bleach to sanitize the well and went to stay at the cabin.
For those three weeks, I read, puttered around the cabin fixing things, hand-sewed some curtains, painted the interior, and saw nobody except the few cars a day that traversed the road in front of the cabin. I had no telephone (this was in the days of landlines only and there wasn’t one installed there) so I didn’t talk to anybody either. I had no TV, stereo or radio (except the radio in my car), so nobody talked at me, either. The only social interaction I had was that I did treat myself to a dinner out, alone, at a restaurant in a nearby town, and spoke to the waiter to give my order, ask for my check, and thank him on the way out. I’m pretty sure that was the only person I spoke to for three weeks. The only complaint I remember was that I didn’t bring quite enough books and quite enough wine.
Both of those episodes were long before the days of the Internet, social media, cell phones, email, etc. Isolation like that would be quite difficult today, I suspect.
After both of those experiences, I felt that I could have easily and enjoyably continued my isolation for another two or three weeks before I might start wishing for human contact.
What are the risks of allowing Chinese EV imports into the US?
It would risk shattering the illusion that Chinese Technology is just copies and fakes.
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Just like how Japan proved they caught up to America when their cars and electronics sold in the USA are found to be better quality and more high tech than American Products, Chinese EVs will show to Americans that Chinese products can be worth the money and high quality too.
If American start buying expensive goods from China too, then US industries are in trouble.
BANGS Rage Quits Over TRANS debate?
What’s the most unreasonable request you’ve received from your boss?
I had a job threaten me about missing work for my then wife’s surgery.
I worked in solid waste. Basically, I was a garbage man. I did commercial dumpsters for 11+ hrs a day, 5 days a week. Great money, but long, long hours. I had been in solid waste at the time for about 13 yrs.
So, on to the story. I was married at the time. My then wife had found out she had a bone issue in her foot. The bone had become necrotic, and they were going in to basically try to cut out the dying bone, use other bone and something called ‘bone putty’ to save her foot. This surgery was scheduled weeks in advance. We had just moved to the area we were living in maybe a year and a half earlier. Any family we both had were states away, and anyone that could help basically were still working. At first, I was like… okay. I’ll burn up a few vacation days so I can take her to the surgery and for a few days of recovery. But, as we got closer to the surgery, they were thinking she would be out of commission longer than originally expected. So, the doctor told me to get FMLA paperwork from my job. Basically, paperwork that allows you to miss work for medical reasons for yourself or a family member. I’m like, great. This will make sure I can be there for her and still keep my job. 5 weeks out, I get the paperwork, and fill it out. I take it to the doctor, and they fill out their part. It became one of the most annoying, stress filled things I’d ever be involved with. Several times each week leading up to the surgery date, I was constantly checking on the status. My employer would have a different excuse every time. “Oh, this wasn’t filled out correctly” or “they didn’t receive the 2nd page on the fax” or something. The doctors office hated me. About the 12th time I called the office to ask them to check on this or that and please re-fax it, they were almost to the point of ignoring me. I asked was this typical, and everyone I talked to were like, no. This is not typical. Some were like, I’ve never seen a company do this to their employee.
So, it’s the day before the surgery. I had been very vocal at work as to what was going on, and why I wasn’t gonna be there. Midway through my shift, my supervisor calls me to tell me that the FMLA paperwork still wasn’t correct. It’s not been approved, and I quote, “if you are not here tomorrow, I’ve been told to tell you that there will be consequences.”
I’ve never had issues with attendance. In the whole time I had worked for this shop, I never missed a day, never been late. I had coworkers who would call off to “go to the beach”. I remember just a few months earlier, I had to cover part of a route because a dude was going to a Nascar race weekend, and it was like, oh. Well, they called out. Here, here’s a few pages of their route. Just work it in. Nothing was ever done or said. But, I legitimately had a family member having a major surgery done and it was just the two of us in the area and less than 24 hours beforehand they are gonna tell me there would be consequences if I called out, having plenty of PTO time banked?
I remember telling them, look. I’m not going to be here. This isn’t up for debate now. They reiterated the threat. That day, I knew I’d never drive another garbage truck again. I knew that was the end of that career and chapter in my life. I had worked for several companies in several states. Some great. Some, not so great situations. But, this was the first time I had ever gotten put into a situation where they were either just wanting to be jerks, or show some form of power over me.
I’ve always given 2 week notices and even since this time, I always parted from jobs having given them plenty of time, trained a replacement. Tied up all loose ends. I believe in avoiding burning a bridge, but in this situation, I was done. I had a nasty voicemail left the night of. Then, literally while she was in surgery, i got a call that it was approved and it was only for that day. The surgery had further complications, and was worse than originally thought. I played phone tag with my supervisor and manager. Asking for a few more days. Then, I got a letter stating I had abandoned the job.
I’ve since gone on to other careers. Went back to college and got a degree related to the IT field. Worked several years in that field for a couple companies. When covid hit, I decided to follow a long time dream/fascination of getting into Healthcare. I’ve spent several years now working as a nursing assistant in a hospital. I’m going to college to be a respiratory therapist. This has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Part of me wants to look at it as everything happens for a reason kinda thinking. I do think if they had acted differently, there’s a good possibility I’d still be a garbage man. I enjoyed the job, itself. The pay was great. But, the biggest problem I always saw in that field was the way the shops were ran. The way management treated their employees. This shop was and I think still is one of the biggest haulers in the US. I had worked for them previously when I was living in Ohio, and based off of my reputation in OH, I acquired the same job in NC after having lived in FL and was moving north. But, I think it was just my time to move on. It was a lesson learned. Same with the 7 yrs I spent in IT. I think it was a character builder, and I think it helped me to be able to talk with and empathize with my current patients. I do wonder, will I ever run into those who were in upper management in my current job. Obviously, I’m going to give them the best care that I can provide. I guess I’m just wondering how they’d treat me.
This Isn’t Your Wife! | House M.D.
Since China sent military and coastguard vessels into Japanese territorial waters near the Diaoyu Islands, why did Japan send the Suzutsuki into Chinese waters and provoke China?
Japanese ships come if they want to, after all, our warships sail through their strait every day as if it’s just a regular street. Japan must have mustered great courage, trembling with fear, to come this time.
In the past, the U.S. would come once a month. They didn’t have much to do when they came; coming was the purpose itself.
You know, once a month, like clockwork, which made me suspect that if the U.S. Navy had a gender, it would definitely be female.
Now the United States is not coming, maybe to save fuel, it ordered its minions to come, last month the Netherlands, this month Japan. What use can a small raft be? It’s like a small dog, it barks happily.
If we talk about political wisdom, we have to look at Europe. Last time the United States pulled a group of people to conduct military exercises near China, Spain sent the warship in the picture – let me ask you, is this a warship? A real sailing battleship!
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Kishida Fumio is just like Bongbong Marcos, they are definitely doomed, maybe even along with South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol. But what else can they do? They have to make some moves; if they do nothing, they’ll just wait to suffocate to death.
Even pigs squeal and twitch a few times when they’re being slaughtered, let alone the Japanese Prime Minister.
But it’s useless.
Modern Women Are UPSET BECAUSE Men Keep Avoiding Them At Work
Beef Stew with Dumplings
This beef stew with mushrooms, dumplings and sour cream is a substantial and satisfying main dish. Serve it with a green vegetable salad and French bread.
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Stew
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 pounds (1kg) stewing steak, trimmed of fat and cut into 1 inch cubes
1 ounce (30g) (2 tablespoons) butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large onion, finely diced
2 tablespoons brandy, warmed (optional)
1 bay leaf
2 pints (5 cups) homemade beef stock
6 ounces (185g) mushrooms, wiped clean
5 fluid ounce (150ml) (5/8 cup) sour cream
Dumplings
8 ounces (1/2 pound) bread crumbs made from day-old white bread
4 tablespoons water
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 onion, grated
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
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Instructions
Heat the oven to warm 325 degrees F (170 degrees C).
Mix the flour, salt and pepper together on a large plate. Roll the beef cubes in the flour mixture until they are lightly coated.
In a large frying pan heat the butter and oil over moderate heat. add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 7 minutes, or until it is soft and translucent. With a slotted spoon, remove the onion and set aside on a plate. Add the beef cubes to the pan, a few at a time. Brown them well, adding more oil and butter if necessary. Remove the beef cubes as they brown and place them in a large ovenproof casserole. If you are using the brandy, put it in a metal ladle. Set it alight and pour it, still burning, over the beef cubes in the casserole. When the brandy has stopped burning, add the onion to the casserole with the bay leaf and stock. Cover the casserole and place in the oven to cook for 2 hours.
While the meat is cooking, make the dumplings. Put the bread crumbs into a large mixing bowl. add the water, a little at a time, and toss lightly with a fork. the bread crumbs should be just moistened, not soggy. Still using the fork, lightly mix in the eggs. add the salt, pepper, parsley, onion and mace. With floured hands, shape the mixture into walnut size balls. add the dumplings to the casserole, with the mushrooms, cover and cook for 30 minutes.
Spoon over the sour cream just before serving.
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Why did Sweden make their own fighter jets?
Because for a long time during the world wars and the cold war and quite some time before and after Sweden had a policy that was summarised as “Alliance free in peace, neutrality in war”. Now being neutral makes some people think that the country is vulnerable or a pushover. The opposite is generally true in reality. Neutrality only works if you have something to back it up with. It also means that you need to consider your weapons systems incredibly carefully.
Buying fighter jets from NATO or the USSR (though the latter would never really be the case for Sweden) means becoming dependent on their supply chains, their expertise and often conceding to some of their terms. This was not seen as acceptable, so Sweden started a domestic arms industry of some magnitude. This kept us less bound to NATO and also gave us the opportunity to create fighters based on Swedish circumstances and Swedish defence doctrine.
Swedish defence doctrine is basically summarised as going apeshit until either we get support from the side that didn’t invade us or until the opponent realises that it isn’t worth it. Every adult over 18 in Sweden can be called in for service in case of war, all discussions of surrender is to be treated as false and there are small bunkers, radar stations, hidden roads for air fields and so on everywhere and we have an arms industry that builds almost everything the Swedish defence needs.
This has been somewhat softened after the cold war ended, but a lot of it is still in place and our arms industry is one of the pieces still going strong.
A Gripen can be serviced by a conscripted 18 year old for most things, it can take off from small roads in the woods, from quickly converted airfields (my old University was built to be converted to an airbase in case of war) or basically any somewhat straight piece of hard ground. This makes it essential for the Swedish style of total defence. Any somewhat straight road, and we have a lot of them can be used to stations a quick refueling and service station for Gripens. Sure it can’t match the top of the line American fighters in many other fields, but for defence it doesn’t have to and it’s a lot cheaper for us to produce ourselves than it would be to buy something that while better in many other ways, don’t fit our doctrine.
“Lauren!” yelled Jared. “For lack of a better term?” He thought she was joking.
“There is no better term. You just plain suck.”
“Why?” Jared asked.
“Why? Why? Why, you ask? I see that monkey. I know it’s dark in this space ship, but I see that monkey. I thought since the two of us won this mission, it would be a great chance for us to be close and really get to know each other. But you brought a monkey along? Why would you do that? Why?”
Jared looked puzzled. He was almost dazed and confused by Lauren’s outburst and attitude.
“Suppose I want to kiss you and wind up kissing that monkey.”
“Well, she has lips too.” He laughed so hard. He couldn’t see what the problem was with the monkey. Also, he still thought she was joking.
“She? She? It’s a she?” Lauren was screaming.
Jared was making frowning faces but Lauren couldn’t see his expressions because of the darkness.
For a moment there was silence.
Lauren went to the window and raised the shade. They were already on the moon and all she could see were Lunar Craters. Hundreds and thousands of them.
“I want to go home,” she said.
“Ahhh, we’re on the moon, Lauren. We have data to gather and pictures to take. Besides, you could have brought a pet.” Jared was trying to comfort her. He was saying to himself that this was going to be a real long mission if she keeps this up.
“Well, my horse was in the shop and I couldn’t get him out in time for this trip.”
For a moment Jared thought she was going to join him in a little humor. He went over to her by the window and put his arms around her waist.
“Monkey, monkey, monkey,” she started yelling. “Get your monkey away from me.”
Jared threw his hands up and back away. He said to himself again, yep, this is going to be a very long and painful mission.
Meanwhile, the monkey was kicked back trying to see what she could see, mostly listening.
Jared went over to his monkey and patted her on the head.
“How did you get that monkey on this ship? I didn’t see you with a monkey packed with your things.”
“The Captain put the monkey on the ship for me.” Immediately after he said, “for me,” he regretted it. He should have made it seem like the Captain did it as a part of the mission.
“So, it is your monkey,” said Lauren.
“The monkey is a part of the mission.”
“By doing what exactly? You do know that three is a crowd.”
“Lauren, please. Let’s just do our job and get along. The monkey is not a problem.”
Lauren had romantic feelings for Jared. She was good friends with the moderator and had her manipulate the drawing to have the two of them paired up to take this mission together. There were a couple other candidates qualified to take this mission and gather the necessary data, but by the luck of the draw, she was paired with Jared.
But with that monkey in the room, she had regrets. Although, she did fancy herself as romantically persuasive, she decided to ignore the monkey and try and concentrate on Jared. Besides, they were going to be stuck in this space ship on the moon for 27.3 earth days or there abouts.
In her astronaut training, she think she read that if a person stays in one place on the moon, then the sun rises, stays up for about two earth weeks, then set, and stays down for about another two earth weeks. Then that makes a complete day on the moon which lasts as long as 27.3 earth days, or something like that. She was almost sure she remembered the correct calculations.
“OMG!” said Lauren. “This monkey is going to start stinking. I’m not going to try and clean her up.”
“Okay, Lauren,” she said to herself. “Get a grip. Ignore the monkey in the room. Twenty-seven point three days alone, well almost alone with Jared is going to be a good thing. At least the monkey won’t be talking.”
Lauren took a few deep breaths and composed herself the best she could. Then she started feeling around and trying to see Jared. She couldn’t find him, so she called out.
“Where are you, Jared?” Then she thought that he better not be hugging that monkey. She didn’t mention the monkey as she was trying to make peace.
Jared wanted out of this trip too, but it was so very much too late and only the first day.
“I’m over here getting the cameras in place. We need to take the videos and digital snapshots.”
Lauren couldn’t help herself. She said, “snapshots and videos of what? Selfies with you and your monkey?”
“You are a brat, Lauren.”
“You are calling me a brat?”
“Yeah, I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”
“Well see this.” The monkey handed her a banana peel and she threw it across the ship.
“You know, I never wanted to go out with you, Lauren.”
“But you did. Why? Was your monkey busy that night?”
“Well, why did you accept?
“I took one look at you, Jared, and you looked like an idiot looking for his keys under a street lamp because that was where the light was. And I said to myself, he can’t be that pathetic. He is an astronaut afterall. You see, I have a weakness for the underdog.
“Oh, you flatter me.” In his mind he called her a witch and a few other things.
“You are like a non-drowsy sleeping pill and a crash landing all rolled up in one, Lauren Dear.”
“Wait. Are you calling me an oxymoron?”
“Well at least you are not an idiot, yet. But you do have more beans inside you than a burrito.”
Lauren realized she was not accomplishing what she had set out to do which was to keep Jared in her life. She felt that she was getting to know him alright. But, so far, they were not getting closer.
She thought it over in her mind. We need to call a truce. I suppose I should jump to it first.
“Truce, truce, truce,” she kept saying.
Jared took a deep breath.
“A truce? That works for me.”
Jared started feeling and looking around for Lauren, slipped on the banana peel and landed on top of her.
She put her arms around him and was thinking to herself that Jared’s monkey might not be too bad to have along after all.
Jared knew where the banana peel came from and was thinking the same thing.
“This is going to be a great mission, Lauren felt good to say.
“Yes, Dear, it’s going to be great waking up every morning and not feel like I’m in the middle of the freeway.
Lauren wanted to react to that remark, but she let it go and kept holding Jared in her arms.
Men being men
What do you eat when you have nothing to eat?
A problem with food banks, and eating randomly when the opportunity arises, it that a lot of what these agencies provide is processed foods that are heavily laden with salts, sugars, non-nutritious fats, and many chemicals (including preservatives) that can be toxic to the body. If I were low on monetary and food resources, I would shoot for the natural, nutritious foods that are inexpensive or easily obtainable. Buy them in bulk if possible. Examples of inexpensive foods that pack a nutritional punch, ones that are also tasty:
The humble potato. They can be chopped up, smeared in extra virgin olive oil and baked in a microwave oven. Avoid the butter, margarine, ghee, etc. Do not fry the potatoes like they do the French fries. You could add spices, depending on your taste. Also add tomato paste before the baking. The nutritional value of the potato is very high, but loading it with trans-fatty oils, high cholesterol fluids will negate the value. And the potato is tasty and filling.
But for those who are diabetic or pre-diabetic, an alternative to potatoes that is both filling and low sugar and calorie is the carrot. And carrots are both inexpensive and easy to consume as either raw, medium-cooked, or fully-cooked. You can more easily lose weight while eating carrots, although they are not as nutritious as potatoes, But eating a balanced assortment of nutritious foods will make up for that.
Tomato paste, mentioned above is a thoroughly inexpensive way to eat tomatoes. The red paste is a concentrated and safely processed form of the highly nutritious tomato. A huge bulky can is sold for about $5, would last for weeks in the cooler, even if you use a lot of it every day.
Some in the bean family such as cowpeas, lentils, and garbanzo beans. Buy them raw, to defray the expenses and to avoid the salted canned ones. Place them in water overnight. This will hydrate and soften them and make them easier and faster to cook the next day.
Oatmeal. A canister, depending on size, will last you weeks or even months.
The egg is famously nutritious, and one a day is enough. Boiled, or fried in olive oil. Wonderful animal protein, many B-vitamins.
Drink your tea or coffee in moderation. The antioxidants are there and helps keep you alert. Use stevia, the natural no-calorie sweetener….inexpensive and not bulky. Cut out the sugar, the Equal, and the Splenda. Go for Stevia….comes in several name brands.
An orange or tangerine a day does wonders.
Carrots are another inexpensive nutritious powerhouse.
Eat your nuts. The least inexpensive way to consume nuts , and to avoid overeating them is to buy them in bulk at the grocery store or places like nuts.com. And of course, many roasted nuts from the stores are overrated. If say you placed small amounts of a Brazil nut, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, peanuts, flaxseeds, etc (or whatever you prefer) in a small Pyrex bowl, added some water and olive oil, microwaved the mixture, you would come out with a very nutritious homemade power bar. Just don’t over roast or burn. Having natural foods at home is not only cheap, but deters you from overeating, and eating processed foods. Also, prepare your snacks at home. Nuts place you in a good mood
Banana. Delicious and nutritious, and filling, mood-enhancing, hydrating, inexpensive. One a day does the trick.
Water…drink your water. This can’t be emphasized enough. This is the medium of body and other functions
Go for inexpensive vegetables, rainbow colors, instead of the tv diners which are hazardous to your health. Eating natural foods makes it so much less expensive to manage your health
Exercising goes well with eating inexpensively and nutritiously, whether you are on a budget or not. My list is inexhaustible, but I suppose a reasonable guideline.
A bit of garlic/onion should be incorporated in the diet, daily.
Be the Rufus
“No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it.” Christopher Ratte.
Some Persian soldiers had buried their treasure at the time when the last remnants of Persian soldiers and Persian sympathizers were driven out of Hellenistic Greece. Archaeologist Christopher Ratte and his team have been in Western Turkey for years working on the ancient site of Notion – then part of Ionia – and have found a pot of rare Persian gold coins in what appears to be a basement room.
Credit: Notion Archaeological Project.
The New York Times has published a story on this find, with interviews of Christopher Ratte. Here is a share of that article:
By Franz Lidz, Aug. 2, 2024
It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay.
But something happens to the soldier — possibly something sinister — and he never retrieves his hoard, which remains undiscovered for the next 2,400 years.
That is one of several scenarios proposed by Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, to account for the cache, which he and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”
Darics were chiefly used to provide payment to soldiers of fortune. Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project, said he knew of no other hoard of this type to turn up in Asia Minor. “This is a find of the highest importance,” he said. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”
The archaeological site at Notion spans 80 acres atop a promontory in western Anatolia, a borderland dividing Asia from Europe. It was one of the Greek-speaking communities that emerged in the region during the early first millennium B.C., perhaps because of migration across the Aegean Sea. The deposition and loss of the Notion hoard occurred at a time of warfare, insecurity and great power machinations in a contested frontier zone.
This was true in deepest antiquity, as remembered in the story of the Trojan War,” Dr. Ratté said. “And it remains true to this day, as demonstrated by the Syrian refugee crisis.” He noted that the small harbor on the east side of the city was one of the departure points for Syrian refugees who fled across Turkey to Europe during the refugee crisis a decade ago.
Anatolia is the birthplace of the Western world’s first state-issued coin, the stater, which was created by a seafaring people called Lydians. King Alyattes standardized the weight and design of the Lydian stater, which, beginning around 610 B.C., was struck in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. The king’s son and successor, Croesus, is credited with minting the first true gold coin, the Croeseid. The expression “rich as Croesus” refers to his extravagant wealth as well as the opulence of Lydia during his rule.
Fortifications at Notion, a Greek-speaking community that emerged in western Anatolia during the early first millennium B.C. Credit: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.
Excavations at Notion last year. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., researchers found the remains of an earlier dwelling and a cache buried there. Credi: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.
In 546 B.C., the entire area, known as Ionia, was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Although Croesus was defeated in battle by Cyrus the Great, his gold-based monetary system lived on. The Persians continued to manufacture Croesids until they introduced their own bimetallic currency, made up of silver and gold coins. The silver coins were called sigloi, and the gold ones were darics — a name derived from either Darius I, who ruled the Persian Empire from 522 B.C. to 486 B.C., or dari-, the root of the Old Persian word for gold.
In 427 B.C., according to the Greek historian Thucydides, an Athenian general named Paches attacked and killed a troop of pro-Persian mercenaries at Notion after luring their commander into a trap. The Persian sympathizers were then expelled, and Notion was reorganized under Athenian supervision.
Two decades later, a decisive naval battle in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was fought off the coast of Notion, which the Athenians had been using as a naval base. Dr. Ratté said that the gold hoard might have been connected to the events of 427 B.C., or later, with the Athenian evacuation of Notion.
“It is possible it was not associated with either of these dramatic events,” he said, “but was simply the savings of a veteran mercenary soldier in a time and place when soldiers of fortune could make a lot of money if they were willing to risk their lives for the highest bidder.” Many Greeks fought for the Persian Empire, including the Athenian historian Xenophon, who was an active mercenary for the Persian king Cyrus the Younger from 401 B.C.- to 400 B.C. — the same time period when the Notion hoard was tucked away.
In 387 B.C., within a generation after the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans, Notion and the other cities of Ionia were reintegrated into the Persian Empire. They remained Persian possessions until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 334 B.C., at which point production of the daric quickly declined. Alexander and his immediate successors had many of the existing gold pieces melted down and recast as coins bearing their images, making darics rare today.
The Notion darics are stamped on the front with a likeness of the Persian king kneeling in a long tunic. In his left hand is a bow; in his right, a long spear. The backs of the coins are blank, except for a punch mark. The hoard is being stored at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in nearby Selcuk, Turkey, along with imported Athenian pottery that was recovered at the dig.
Dr. Ratté believes that the fact that the loot was never reclaimed is a clear sign of disaster. “No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it,” he said. “So only the gravest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”
Truth
Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding if things?
Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding of things?
How did you draw the conclusion that; “mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?”, explain go into more detail. Unless of course you are a mathematician or psychist and you yourself have issues with infinity being real?
In mathematics, infinity is not just a vague notion of endlessness, but a rigorously defined concept that can be expressed in multiple ways, i.e., cardinality of sets, ordinal numbers, limit concept, symbolic representation, to name a few. Mathematicians have developed sophisticated tools to work with infinity, which strongly suggest that overall they do not have issues with it.
But, from a physics stand point things start to get complicated as the concept of infinity is more problematic and often indicates a limitation of our theories rather than a physical reality. This manifests itself in a number of ways, cosmology and quantum mechanics being prime examples. It is also a challenge when we start talking about black holes and singularities that represent points where physical quantities become infinite, suggesting a breakdown of the theory of infinity, as “normal” rules just don’t apply or they breakdown completely, which in real terms is nothing more than the end point of our understanding.
Many physical models use infinity as a form of idealization, and what I mean by that is, a lot of physical models use infinity as a convenient approximation (e.g., point particles, infinite potential wells), while still recognizing these are idealizations. Keeping in mind that no physical measurement can ever yield an infinite value, as all measuring devices have finite ranges, otherwise what’s the point of attempting to measure something in the first place?
You have not covered the philosophical perspective of infinity in your question which in many ways is just as important as it is in physics, mathematics and the physical world itself. Things like; does infinity actually exist in nature, or is it merely a useful mathematical construct? Infinity leads to numerous paradoxes (e.g., the paradox of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, for more detail on this go to Wikipedia) that as a thought experiment challenges our intuitive understanding of what we believe infinity actually is. Infinity often represents the boundary of what we can know or are able to measure, that highlights the limits of human understanding.
Then we come to the practical implications of infinity. Some theories for example that produce infinite results often lose their predictive power, which indicates a lot more refinement is required. Infinite series and processes must be truncated for practical calculation purposes, which introduces a need for approximations, as there is absolutely no point them going on forever.
The appearance of so-called infinities in physical theories often drives a search for a more comprehensive framework to work within, (i.e., quantum gravity attempts to resolve singularities in general relativity). This is a signal, or indication that different thinking needs to be applied and more intensive research is required. To that end, in my mind infinity is not an end point, but simply a marker that requires one to go onto the next stage, whatever that may be.
Infinity in mathematics is a well-defined and useful concept that allows for the exploration of abstract ideas beyond finite limitations. In physics, infinity often signals the limits of a theory’s applicability, which then prompts further, deeper investigation and refinement of our understanding of the physical world. The interplay between mathematical infinity and physical reality of infinity is basically a work in progress and will continue indefinitely, as, when you think about it, is there any end to infinity?” Perhaps no…as that is what infinity is, across just about all domains no matter how one thinks about it or how it is expressed.
Q1: Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?
A1: I don’t think they really do..is infinity is a concept on all levels is not fully 100% “resolvable”.
Q2: How does it break our understanding of things?
A2: Again, I don’t think it does, it is more a boundary where our understanding stops and it is merely an indicator that we need to dig deeper, refine and further our understanding. Human knowledge always has and always will have a limit, it will never, ever be infinite.
At the end of the day, there will never be an answer to your two-part question, it will go on forever, all the way to infinity and beyond…whatever that is…
ALIEN (1979) MOVIE REACTION!
Is a commander legally allowed to order a soldier/subordinate to his death?
Yes.
This was brought home to me during an exercise in the mid-80’s when I was a young Engineer Platoon Leader. My platoon was attached to an Infantry Battalion for a long field training exercise. We were equipped with HMMVW’s with TOW missiles and were trying to operate against tanks. That turned out to be pretty tricky, the tanks were very good, and the tactics we were using were not fully developed. We ended up getting kicked around the training area pretty routinely.
In one scenario, the Brigade Commander, a full Colnel and a Vietnam Veteran ordered the Battalion I was working with to hold a particular pass “at all costs.” The Battalion did a credible job defending, but then got flanked, which led to the Battalion Commander, also a Vietnam Vet, to order a withdrawl.
I was pretty new, but I thought at the time that this was a good call. In my view, holding onto the position any longer than we had would have led to the extinction (ln the exercise) of the Battalion, about 500 guys. The Battalion Commander wanted to live to fight another day, and what he was doing was doctrinally sound.
This particular point got discussed at length during the After Action Review. The Battalion Commander got asked why he ordered the withdrawal when he was ordered to stand. He laid out his reasoning, which made sense to me. I was there. There wasn’t anything else to do.
There was this long silence. Then the Brigrade Commander looked at the Battalion Commander with this laser-beam look and says, “John, if I tell you to go die on some hill, I’ve got a damned good reason for doing it. My concerns, the Division’s concerns, are bigger than yours. If I have to sacrafice your Battalion in order to preserve something bigger, it’s my job to order you to do it. It’s your job to take your boys and go out and die.”
This is the dark side of combat that no one really likes to talk about. It doesn’t happen often, normally because of a miscalculation or mistake, but units get asked to make these kinds of sacrafices. When you are an officer, if you’re doing your job right, your unit is like your family. Words that describe how close units bind together in combat fail me. Others have done it much better. These are your brothers, your sisters, your children. When you get asked to do something like this, it’s like asking your children to go out and die for you. Then you have go out and die with them.
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten it. It made me think through a lot of things before I became a Company Commander and had to take folks to war.
Its all about timing
Is the “face culture” of the Chinese superior and more civilized than the “honor culture” of North Americans, Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians, Turkic and Mongolian peoples, etc.?
Face culture comes from Confucian culture. As a unique cultural and psychological phenomenon of the Chinese people, face culture has greatly influenced the daily social life of the Chinese people.
North Americans are Christian culture
Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians are Islamic culture
Turkic and Mongolians are nomadic culture
The values of Dignity, honor, face are different among Christian culture, Islamic culture and nomadic culture, and the difference is very big.
Honor and face cultures attach great importance to regulating individual behavior by social expectations and cultural norms. However, the two cultural phenomena differ in several crucial aspects.
The new cultural framework of dignity, honor, and face was proposed based on three different cultural logics and reveals that while both honor culture and face culture place importance on adhering to social norms, honor culture places greater emphasis on both self-awareness and external evaluations for self-worth, whereas face culture places more weight on external evaluations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
Additionally, honor culture is characterized by an unstable social hierarchy prone to competition, violence, and virtue, while face culture prioritizes modesty, harmony, and cooperation within a more stable hierarchy. Especially at banquets, whether or not to drink is directly related to face.
From indigenous perspectives, the self-image and social image in honor culture are relatively consistent, and honor encompasses moral, gender, and family-related aspects that may be defended through violence. In contrast, self-image and social image in face culture tend to be incongruent, and face involves morality and social achievement, which is expressed through the dimensions of seeking face and avoiding losing face with an emphasis on status and authority.
Combined with the above two perspectives, these core differences between honor and face cultures can be attributed to the moralization and instrumentalization of social cultural norms.
Specifically, honor tends to moralize social and cultural norms by transforming descriptive norms into prescriptive norms, where majority and typical behaviors that exist in a culture are considered behaviors that group members should or must abide by. In contrast, face instrumentalizes social and cultural norms by using descriptive and prescriptive norms as means and tools to maintain relationships, demonstrate status, and uphold authority.
This perspective provides new insights into cultural phenomena, such as the positive correlation between violence and virtue in honor cultures, where violence becomes a social norm that adapts to the honor culture environment and is moralized into a virtuous attribute. The social norm of harmony in face culture exists both as value-oriented harmony influenced by Confucian culture and instrumental harmony in daily life, leading to a dissonance between face and heart.
She was going to kill him. She was actually going to murder him. Yes, she has said it plenty of times before but this time she meant it. This time she would drag him by his stupid hair to an airlock and shove him out to space where he can suffocate.Seven months. She lasted seven months stuck in this shuttle with him, but now she was finally going to crack.It started off with the computer. He programmed it to call him “Hot Stuff.” She changed it back. Then, he programmed it to call him “King of the Bandages.” Once again, she changed it back. Twenty nine nicknames later-yes, she kept a list-the most recent development was “Big McDaddy.”And since his names apparently weren’t keeping him preoccupied, he decided to spend time obsessing over hers. Specifically, her first name. On the top of her medical file is “B. Miller” neatly typed out, but he wanted to know more. The guesses started off sensible enough with Bella and Bethany-they have now devolved into Bread and Bacteriochlorophylls.And somehow, no matter what happens, he won’t stop grinning. No one should be as cheery as this guy, it doesn’t seem healthy. Every time she sees him she wants to growl in frustration, but he remains as sunny as the actual suns they pass.But this time is worse than all those other time. This time he took the biscuit because this time he broke a rule that could get himself and her fired. This time he… well, he took the biscuits.”I can’t believe you!” She screeched, storming into the medical bay. “I can’t believe you would actually steal from the passengers!””I’m sorry?” He asked looking up from a rather heavy looking book. He was still smiling. Asshole.”The biscuits. Don’t even try to deny it. I know it was you who took them.””Ok.” He went back to reading.”Ok?” That threw her off her guard. She was expecting an argument. For him to try feign innocence before she finally broke him and he begged her not to tell their boss. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
“Ok, I won’t deny it. I took the biscuits.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is there anything else or…?”
“Well… well… what do you have to say for yourself?” Her voice got weaker and weaker throughout the sentence. She really had no idea where she wanted to go with that.
“…They tasted nice?” Oh, that made her blood boil.
“Nice? Taste? That’s not what I was asking. Do you know how much trouble you could be in for this.” He was an idiot, he had to be. Maybe, he just didn’t care. No that couldn’t be it, could it? This job involves being away from Earth for years at a time and being fired tends to mean never getting work anywhere else. Maybe he thought the job would be easy and that he would get away with stuff like this. Not on her watch.
“I know how much trouble I will be in-none. No one cares. No one apart from you. Speaking of which, why do you care?”
He is unbelievable. “I care because I was put in charge of making sure everything is ready for when the passengers wake up.”
It is a requirement of every shuttle to have at least one engineer, and, if asked, she would tell people that she is the engineer-because she is. However, the shuttle is built fairly sturdy, and the AI seems to be doing a fine job of maintaining everything. It’s not that she wants things to go wrong… it would just be nice if there were a few mishaps that called for her assistance. This lack of jobs can make floating in space a tad boring, hence her eagerness to take on the role of an over-glorified party planner.
“Look,” he said, closing his book, “in eight months time we’re stopping for fuel at a space station. If we happen to be low on supplies-which we won’t be ’cause these passengers have more than enough-we can stock up then.”
“What if one of them wakes up?” It’s a weak argument but one she feels strongly about. She has read every story there was on passengers waking up from the deep sleep they are put into before take off. The passengers they were currently transporting were Taubverlians, so the four year journey would probably feel like a human’s version of a week to them but apparently it’s a week they would rather sleep through. What if they woke up angry? What if they got so annoyed they decided to file a complaint? What if those biscuits were the only thing that would have been able to calm them down and stop them from demanding the whole crew gets fired? It’s unlikely, but it is possible.
“Really?” He asked. She glared at him with cold, unforgiving eyes. “You need to calm down before you give yourself a stroke. I check, double check and triple check each passenger’s pod everyday and there hasn’t been even the slightest hint that one of them might wake up before they’re supposed to.” He let out a sigh and for the first time since she met him, his smile faltered. “It’s your first trip right? Thought as much. You see, after a while, you will start to get bitter. You’ll start to resent the passengers, our bosses, whoever it is at home that you’re sending your wages back to. The thought that you will more than likely be working here until the day you die and the knowledge that it is extremely rare for a crew member to ever see Earth again combined with the fact that if someone in charge screws up and needs someone to blame we will probably be killed… well, at some point or another, it gets to you. That’s why I play around with the AI and steal the occasional biscuit. That’s why Ellie stole a bottle of whiskey. That’s why Charlie is cheating on her husband with Smith. These acts keep us sane. And they’re not hurting anyone-not if no one finds out.”
She could somewhat sympathise. Ok, she could sympathise a lot. She was bitter. Of course she was bitter about… everything, but she wasn’t going to complain. Her family needed her to have this job, and so must his-it’s not like he would ever see his wages, so they have to be going somewhere.
“Our supervisors don’t care as long the passengers get to their destination safe and sound. You can relax, Birdy.”
She fought the urge to roll her eyes. “That is not what the B stands for.”
His smile was now back to full voltage as he realised he won. “We have been in this tin can for seven months and I still don’t know anything about you. What are your hopes, your dreams, your fears? Where are you from? And what exactly does the B stand for? It doesn’t stand for Biscuit, does it?”
She may come to regret this, but at the moment her stress is leaving her and she feels… lonely. She doesn’t have anybody to talk to on this shuttle apart from when she is arguing with him. Hearing him talk about their colleagues that he clearly knows so much better than she does just reminded her of how much she has isolated herself. “Brooklyn.”
“You’re from Brooklyn? Cool, I have a cousin that lives there, or used to at least.”
“No-well, yes I am from Brooklyn but, that’s what the B stands for.” The look on his face was almost worth it. Almost.
“So, you’re from Brooklyn… and your name is-”
“Oh, shut up.” She tried to fight a grin.
“…Were your parents really worried about you forgetting where you lived?”
“I shouldn’t have told you. I should have just stuck to Biscuit.”
He let out a laugh at that. Dear god, it was brighter than his smile. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry Biscuit.” She shot him a glare with much less heat than the previous one. It was kind of nice talking to him-not that she would ever dream of saying it to him. Just before she got a chance to retort, a series of short beeps filled the room. “Time for me to go check on the passengers again.”
“Oh, right. I have work I need to go do as well.” She turned to leave, ignoring the pang in her chest. She has her work to focus on, friends would just take up time.
“Wait.” He tossed her a small metal box. She stared at the box, then at him, then back again. At his nod she opened up the latches and the contents very nearly managed to surprise a snort out of her. Biscuits.
Tension Subsiding in South China Sea
Changing Geo-Political arrangements.
What terrifies you about Xi Jinping?
Mr. Xi doesn’t terrify me, but he certainly “terrifies” my German friend. Let’s call him Karl.
Obviously, Karl isn’t a basketcase of nailbiting anxiety and fear over a man a continent away. But he related a spine-tingling moment some years back listening to the news while driving on the autobahn.
Before we get into that, a little background about Karl.
Karl, perhaps unsurprisingly, speaks Chinese. What tickles me though, is he speaks funny Chinese.
Notice I said Chinese and not Mandarin.
Karl speaks a creole of accented Mandarin and horror of horrors, the Changsha dialect.
Now, try making sense of the hilarity hearing a thick German accent fighting his own tongue to make the proper tone for Mandarin words abused by the Changsha pronunciation.
After all these years, I have concluded he has been putting up a show all along to bewilder and get a rise out of me deciphering his words.
He has a future in standup, if he ever needs a change of scenery.
Back on topic. What piece of news made him nervous? It was a single statistic from China’s anti-corruption drive.
“More than a million party officials have been disciplined.”
He was flabbergasted by how seriously the Chinese were taking the campaign because when he was there, he had concluded corruption was so deeply ingrained in the culture it was impossible to root out. In fact, that was a primary reason why he left China, even though the money was lucrative.
Karl has an interesting way of bringing his point across, and he was ready when I pressed.
“China isn’t Germany. A million out of a billion is a mere drop.”
“Yes, but China either gives lip service or they do a thorough job. 1 million is a thorough job.”
“True. But why should that jolt?”
“Because nothing happened, Bill.”
“What do you mean nothing happened?”
Evidently he was waiting for this moment of weakness because he broke into a sly smile and declared:
“Nothing happened to President Xi.”
I was truly incredulous.
“I lost you Karl. You expected him to fall victim to the campaign he initiated because he is dirty too?”
“No, silly. The fact nothing happened means we have witnessed the coronation of the first Chinese emperor of the 21st century, if only in practice.”
“Now you sound like a flat earther.”
“No no. Nothing far-fetched. How do you think they land a big fish like Zhou Yongkang? Using the police? Or the army?”
“The President probably ordered his arrest personally.”
“Yes but what was the investigative apparatus and how did they manage to arrest him? Zhou was the security tsar.”
“Oh. I think I’m understanding. Even the FBI will have trouble arresting the vice President.”
“Sort of. The Xi administration basically set up their own supralegal modern day Embroidered Uniform Guard that was vested with political power to deal with anyone, even the biggest fish. The million they mentioned? A substantial number are senior cadres, nodes in the power structure. The Chinese think in terms of guanxi or relationships so tackling corruption equals identifying and destroying webs of collusion.”
“Do you think Xi went too far?”
“No. He did a fantastic job. I am just surprised the faction wars didn’t flare up in response. Not even a whimper. Xi has great standing within the party.”
“Ok, so he cleaned up. Why does that terrify you? He is more powerful than ever?”
“Not really. People fail to realize the five year plans were being executed like clockwork in the midst of rampant corruption. He would have reached the state objectives without rocking the boat.”
“He did not need to pick this fight?”
“No. He had to. It was the right time.”
“The stars didn’t align for Jiang and Hu?”
“Yes. The force was not with them.”
“The FORCE? Dude, you have been playing me all day!”
“Electricity, my boy. You can build the fanciest roads and buildings but without electricity you cannot urbanize.”
*Incredulous stare*
“For sure it is electricity. Hu was a hydroelectric engineer. China’s electricity output increased more than 2-fold during his time in office.”
“What does it have to do with corruption?”
“China essentially went full steam ahead to urbanize. Jiang wasn’t even sure how the system would work as it transited from Central planning to market economics as it spread inland from the SARs. Hu laid the foundation to guarantee future growth. The GFC gave China the breathing space to shape a cultural change among the ruling elite. A bunch of people got rich too quickly and developed money fever.”
“What does the GFC have to do with it?”
“China’s economy fundamentally shifted post 2008. China finally flexed her domestic muscle and decided they had to be less reliant on the west. But they had to inevitably slow down as the west recovered from a balance sheet and sovereign debt crisis. It is this recentering to OBOR and domestic growth that gave Xi the breathing space to tackle corruption nationwide.”
“Man, that’s deep but all that says is China has a good man at the helm. What makes him fearsome?”
“Well, when I was there the way the Chinese were throwing money around was unbelievable. Too much waste. And too many funny things going on. Putting a stop to that means the Chinese are getting on board the next stage of growth, one that is much higher in quality, and sustainable. The Chinese rocket shot up the sky in spite of excesses. Can you imagine a people without? Us Germans are counting the days when the Chinese become direct competitors to German technology and quality. The Chinese are getting their act together.”
Note: The emperor reference is no insinuation of shenanigans. Rather it is Karl’s intent to frame how far the Xi administration can push reform. In other words, Xi has the people’s mandate, just like a legitimate Son of Heaven.
Karl is real, but I’ve paraphrased our conversation.
Note: The profundity of Karl’s astute observations is contained within the satellite composites of nightime China, taken two decades apart.
Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment
Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment is the winner of 1980 World’s Championship!
chili 1chili 3chili 4
Yield: 14 to 18 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon oregano
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons MSG
9 tablespoons chili powder
4 tablespoons cumin
4 tablespoons beef bouillon (instant crushed)
2 cans beer
2 cups water
4 pounds extra lean chuck (chili grind)
2 pounds extra lean pork (chili grind)
1 pound extra lean chuck, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
2 large onions, finely chopped
10 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup oil or kidney suet
1 teaspoon mole (powdered)
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 tablespoon Masa Harina
Salt to taste
Instructions
In a large pot, add oregano, paprika, MSG, chili powder, cumin, beef bouillon, beer and water. Let simmer.
In a separate skillet, brown 1 1/2 pounds of meat in oil or suet until meat is light brown.
Drain and add to simmering spices. Continue browning meat in batches until all meat has been added.
Sauté finely chopped onions in oil or suet. Add to spices and meat mixture. Add water as needed. Simmer two hours. Add mole (MOE-lay), sugar, coriander, hot pepper sauce and tomato sauce. Simmer for 45 minutes.
Dissolve Masa Harina in warm water and add to chili. Add salt to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes.
What was your first clue you were no longer as young as you thought you were?
I was born in 1965, which means I am 59 as I write this response. In the 1980s, I worked as a DJ in a bar called The Notorious Club 26, and I played music from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.
As the DJ, I would say things like, “Remember, never trust anyone over 30. If you are over 30, don’t trust yourself.” As a 20-something, I thought I was being funny. Then a horrible thing happened: I turned 30 in 1995.
I was single at the time, and I realized that all the time I wasted being a DJ interfered with my social and personal life. I worked 6 days a week, and on Tuesday of each week, I got paid. Who wants to go out on a date on a Tuesday? Who wants date some who works from 9 pm until 3:30 AM?
I wass 30, looking back from where I came, and realized that I had wasted the last 10 years of my life. I worked, made very good money, got a lot of cash tips for the customers, loved my job, but my life sucked. All I did was work, sleep, and do household jobs. I had no social life.
I kept working but I also went back to college, and finally finished the work for my BA. After that, I was able to quit the DJ job and work during the day instead of being a vampire on a day pass.
I’m not going to lie: 30 seemed old to me. When I turned 40, I got a card that said something like 40 is the new 30.
I’m 59 years old now, and my hair is gray, just like my beard, and my body is a wreck. However, I know that my life has been full and fun. I’m not sure what comes next, but I am looking forward to the trip.
As a Chinese person, I never felt any connection to the “patriotism” that the Chinese Communist Party instilled in me since childhood.
In elementary school, our teachers told us, “The most important principle in writing is to show your love for China.” Well, I didn’t understand at all. How could a child possibly grasp what it means to “love China”? For an elementary student, “patriotism” is nothing but outdated stories and empty political slogans.
As I grew older, my aversion to “patriotism” only increased. The reason was obvious: if “patriotism” had a significant impact on one’s well-being, why had I never seen anyone get rich because they “loved China”? And why had I never seen anyone fall into a miserable situation because they “didn’t love China”?
When I started using the internet, I discovered more meaningful things. I realized that China could only avoid destruction by embracing Western political systems. During that time, I read many articles by “independent Chinese intellectuals,” including economists, Chinese immigrants abroad, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.
Back then, I hoped these independent intellectuals could awaken the “numb Chinese people” through their writings. They were active on BBS, blogs, social media, and China’s version of Twitter. I spent a lot of time reading their articles and enthusiastically commenting. I admired them and saw them as the future political stars of China. At that time, I had my own blog called “A Chinese Citizen,” with the slogan “For a Bright Future of China.” I wrote every day, and when I had nothing to write about, I would repost negative news about China and add my own gloating comments.
The trolls on Quora today are nothing compared to the old me.
Later, I got married and had my own child. As a freelancer, I had time each day to spend with my growing child. To expose my child to nature, I took them to many places. Busy with accompanying my child, working, cooking, and doing laundry every day, my life focus gradually shifted.
One summer evening when my child was three years old, we drove to a famous large lake in northern Xuzhou called Weishan Lake. A section of the Grand Canal passes through the Weishan Lake area. The sunset bathed the hundred-kilometer-long embankment road along Weishan Lake in golden light. My wife, captivated by the beauty, asked me to stop the car for a while. I parked by the roadside, and we were greeted by the cool evening breeze and the slightly fishy smell of the lake water. We all quietly listened to the waterfowl returning to their nests.
When a long line of cargo ships appeared at the end of my vision on the Grand Canal, another fleet from the opposite direction sounded their horns as they passed through the Linjiaba lock. The sunset deepened, and the afterglow moved from the embankment road to the surface of Weishan Lake. The vast lake, looking like an ocean, stretched beyond the horizon. Waterbirds in the reeds were startled by passing ships, taking off with pleasant sounds. Watching my child jumping with joy and my wife enjoying the cool breeze, I felt a deep sense of happiness. In that moment, I suddenly realized something:
Weishan Lake is a gift from nature to the locals; the Grand Canal is a monumental achievement by our ancestors. The various aquatic products from Weishan Lake have nourished generations of people on this land. Today, these endless cargo ships continuously transport energy and agricultural products to ports along the route. We enjoy the tranquility of nature, while our material life benefits from China’s vibrant economic system.
The natural geography is a gift from God; historically, it is a territory our ancestors expanded on horseback; and in reality, it is the result of countless generations of Chinese people’s hard work. For economic and social activities to run efficiently, the country’s leaders need exceptional talent to design reliable development plans. Without all this, there would be no individual happiness. The CPC is a positive part of this picture—not the whole, but just as important as all other parts.
I live on this land in this lifetime, and so does my child. Everyone I love and everyone who loves me live on this land. I love them and hope they remain healthy, happy, and joyful. Protecting them means ensuring that this land is free from war, plague, hunger, and poverty. Only when these foundations are solid can I fully devote myself to life and family. Isn’t this the relationship between an individual and their country? The CPC has achieved this, so what exactly am I complaining about every day? Should I deny everything just because of some bad news on the internet and some unfortunate events on this land?
By Weishan Lake at that moment, I grasped a simple truth: to love this country, to love its mountains and rivers, its history and culture, the heroes who shed blood and tears in modern history, and the forces leading this country to rejuvenation. At the same time, when my child grows up, they should see themselves as a master of this country, participating in its development. This is what a young boy should aspire to.
There is no such thing as love or hate without reason in this world. To love something, you must first understand it, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing its significance to us. Otherwise, “forced love” is fake, blind, and short-lived. “Patriotism” is no different. Only by fully understanding this land, this country, and the forces driving China’s progress, with all their pros and cons, can one develop genuine love.
I am becoming such a Chinese person.
She Gave Him PRE and POST Date Bill and it Backfired
The Trigger For WWIII Just Arrived – What Are The Implications For Americans?
If the year of 2024 has proven anything so far, it’s that our worries about the potential outbreak of WWIII are absolutely reasonable. The skeptics making accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “doom and gloom” have been proven wrong yet again. The geopolitical atmosphere is turning sour fast.
I still don’t think a lot of people realize how truly volatile the situation is globally right now. From my point of view, WWIII has already begun, at least in economic terms.
Let’s not forget the fact that Ukraine is essentially a proxy for all of NATO against Russia. And, the situation in the Middle East is about to become much worse. Because of the alliances involved and the fragile nature of global energy exports there is a danger of systemic collapse should a wider war break out between Israel and multiple Arab nations. It appears that such a war is imminent.
But why should Americans care? It’s pretty simple – War spurs shortages, and shortages in the middle of a stagflationary crisis are a very bad thing.
Sanctions against Russia affect around 10% of the global oil market and around 12% of global natural gas consumption. But so far all that oil and natural gas is still flowing around the world, only the trade routes have changed. The Middle East, on the other hand, accounts for over 35% of the global oil market and 18% of the natural gas market. Widespread chaos in this region would mean economic crisis on a scale not seen in a century.
Think we have problems with stagflation now? Just wait until energy prices go to the moon.
Around 30% of all oil exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage which a nation like Iran can easily block for months at a time. Sinking a few larger vessels in the straight would obstruct all cargo ship traffic and oil tanker traffic. Trying to clean up the mess would be difficult because artillery, which is almost impossible to intercept, can rain down from Iran on any vessels trying to drag sunken ships out of the way.
Iran has mutual defense pacts with multiple governments in the region including Lebanon and Syria, along with military ties to Russia. The Turkish government is unlikely to allow western troops to use their airspace to launch attacks. The US military presence in Afghanistan is gone and the Iraqi government will never allow foreign troops to use their land to come to the aid of Israel.
This greatly limits the west’s launch points for an offensive large enough to blitz Iran. The vast majority of attacks would be from the air, and if the Russians start supplying Iran with batter radar and missile technology then there’s no guarantees Israel or the US would gain full control of the air space. In other words, if a wider war breaks out it will not end for YEARS and it’s going to be fought on the ground.
Of course, most establishment experts have claimed that the situation will never escalate to that point and that the threat of direct confrontation between Israel and Iran is minimal. I have been predicting the opposite for a number of reasons, just as I predicted that there was a high chance of war in Ukraine months before it happened.
“Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”
My purpose in that article was to outline the dangers of US involvement in a larger war that would require conscription and escalation with Russia. Despite the “experts” insisting that the odds are overblown, it now appears that the next stage of escalation is about to begin.
Iran, Lebanon and Israel have been exchanging limited fire for months now. This is nothing new. What is new is the change in tone after a Hezbollah rocket strike on a children’s soccer game in the remote Druze village of Majdal Shams that killed 12.
On the other side, Israel’s brazen assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil this week is a clear catalyst for war. Haniyeh has been engaged in a diplomatic mission to start peace negotiations in Gaza. His assassination sends a clear message that Israel has no intention of entering into talks with Hamas.
IDF officials also announced that they had killed top Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in a precision missile strike Tuesday in Beirut. There’s no escaping it now.
Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered retaliation against Israel and issued an order for Iran to strike the Israelis directly. Iran will likely use extended missile barrages, but also stage troops in Syria and Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen will then increase their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. It’s hard to say how much Russia will involve itself at first, but I have no doubt more advanced Russian missiles and other weapons will make an appearance on the battlefield.
The prospect of world war is immense. Israel will not be able to fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran all at the same time. Energy exports in the region will definitely face a slowdown, if not a complete breakdown. At that point the war won’t just be about Israel, it will be about a global energy crisis. I don’t see any scenario in which the US government doesn’t get involved.
The high risk of terrorism this entails should not be overlooked. We’ve had an undefended border and record illegal crossings for a few years now under Biden. There’s not telling how many foreign agents are in the country and I believe this was by design. I think the establishment maintained open border policies because they wanted such people here. The more terror these agents cause the more the public will be tempted to increase government powers to deal with the attacks.
Beyond that, the political left in the west has tied itself to the Palestinian wagon as if it’s their business. In reality, leftists view the war in Gaza as just another vehicle for their outrage. They use minorities, they use gays and now they’re using Muslims. It’s the classic Marxist strategy of hijacking the social causes of other groups and co-opting their momentum.
Gaza is just another excuse for progressive spastics to riot and start burning more of the west down (their true goal). Anyone that opposes them will automatically be accused of being a “Zionist sympathizer” even if Israel is not their concern. So, there will surely be Muslim terror attacks, but also civil conflicts triggered by leftists exploiting the situation to their advantage.
The timing of these events in tandem with the election is definitely not coincidental. Whoever ends up in office will essentially be “stuck” with the war, inheriting a disaster from day one. Once US forces are committed to an allied effort, there’s no chance any president (including Trump) will pull those forces out. If things get bad enough, there might not even be an election in November.
For those that think we can “win” on multiple fronts, the truth might shock you. Eric Edelman, who serves as Vice Chair of the US National Defense Strategy Commission, has given warning about the impending conflict, stating:
“There is potential for near-term war and a potential that we might lose such a conflict…We need our allies to produce more. Our defense industrial base is in very bad shape. The European defense industrial base is in even worse shape. We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up because to match what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are doing is beyond our ability to do it ourselves.”
I have written about the logistical shortcomings of the west in a WWIII scenario for some time now. At the top of the list will be manpower, just as we have seen in Ukraine. This is why we have been hearing military and political officials hint about a new draft over the past two years. They know what’s coming.
A draft to fight for globalist causes is unacceptable. I’m not going to delve into debate over whether it’s right or wrong for western countries to throw their weight behind Israel. Frankly, I don’t care about that argument. I don’t have anything invested in either side of the conflict. I care about Americans. And, I know that making the US military the go-to solution to the Middle East problem is going to end with a lot of dead Americans. I also know that the expanding crisis would make certain special interest (globalists) very happy. As I noted last year:
“The establishment seems particularly obsessed with convincing US conservatives and patriots to participate in the chaos; there are a number of Neo-cons and even a few supposed liberty media personalities calling for Americans to answer the call of blood in Israel. Some have described the coming conflagration as “the war to end all wars.”
I believe that the real war is yet to truly start, and that is the war to erase the globalists from existence. They want us to fight overseas in endless quagmires in the hopes we will die out. And when we do, there will be no one left to oppose them…”
The trap has just been set. We’ll have to wait and observe the scale of the response from Lebanon and Iran, but I believe the worst case scenario is at hand. There are multiple powderkeg events in progress around the world right now, but the Middle East situation looks to be the most disastrous by far in terms of how it will affect the US.
Why is the US not attacking Iran? Haven’t the US had enough of this ayatollah’s nonsense? I’m always interested to know what the end game for the US is here?
There’s a hot topic on the Chinese internet: Is the United States now at the end of the Tang Dynasty or the end of the Ming Dynasty?
I’m in the Ming Dynasty camp.
The fall of the Tang Dynasty was essentially due to the power of the Guanzhong aristocratic group blocking the upward mobility of the Hebei class. Although it was nominally due to the rebellion of the An-Shi insurgents, it was actually a civil war between the Han Chinese of Hebei and the Han Chinese of Longxi.
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(What really led to the demise of the Tang Dynasty was this brutal battle in which most of the army was destroyed.)
Similarly, the fall of the Ming Dynasty was also essentially an internal Han Chinese issue.
Even though there were massive problems with the distribution of interests between the north and the south, it was essentially a civil war between the north and the south.
Since both falls were due to unequal distribution of interests leading to the collapse of the country, why do I insist that the United States is currently at the end of the Ming Dynasty?
Three characteristics:
First, during the fall of the Han and Tang dynasties, these massive entities in Chinese history still maintained overwhelming military advantages over surrounding ethnic groups, whereas the United States does not have this advantage now.
Second, before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, there was a period of, uh, I’m not sure if I should say this, but it is indeed recorded in history books, a so-called “men dressing as women,” and LGBTQ was very prevalent. I have no discrimination against homosexuality, truly none! In ancient China, including the Warring States period and the most prosperous Han Dynasty, there were many rulers who were homosexuals, whom I admire! Look, I’m saying this, so I definitely do not discriminate against homosexuals, right?
What I want to say is that when these rulers were homosexuals, soldiers and ordinary people did not have a tendency to change genders, but at the time of the dynasty’s collapse, there were many grassroots males doing this…
I mean absolutely no discrimination, but it is very similar to the records of the late Ming Dynasty…
Third, spending countless amounts of money and achieving nothing. It’s incredibly frightening. Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver invested, achieving nothing…
In general, I believe that the United States now resembles the end of the Ming Dynasty very much.
The real fall of the Ming Dynasty happened during the “Three Great Campaigns of Wanli,” when the Ming Dynasty still seemed very strong and launched three large-scale military campaigns. But seriously, hasn’t the United States also fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? These three seemingly world-shaking wars actually only fattened the military leaders?
A hot topic on the Chinese internet is: Who least wants the United States to collapse?
80% of the answers are: China.
Chinese netizens are very clear that this world is maintained by the United States. If the United States collapses, it would be a disaster for the world, including China. No one can escape. So we clearly provide this answer based on our own interests: United States, you must not collapse!
The battle that marked the fall of the Ming Dynasty was the Battle of Salhu.
I do not want the United States to engage in wars in the Middle East again, as it is clearly America’s Salhu moment.
That would be a disaster for China, the United States, and the world.
In this world, no one can defeat the United States, except the United States itself.
Should China receive refugees?
No.
I’m from Hong Kong, a city that took in Vietnamese boat people who fled the Vietnam War, at the request of the United Nations. It placed huge economic and social burdens on the city, and the United Nations, after decades, has yet to pay back the 1.3 billion HKD it owes us for our efforts in accommodating them (as of last year, they’ve only paid back 166 million HKD, a mere fraction).
Taking in refugees is an expensive affair that doesn’t always come with benefits. We had enough trouble accommodating ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese people, who were culturally similar to us. Could you imagine if they were from an Islamic-dominated culture? I’m not just talking about the child sex rings, gang-rapes or honour-killings you see in Europe and the UK, I’m talking re-education, teaching them our language and culture, which is difficult and rarely succeeds, in addition to helping them find low-paying jobs, which affects the livelihoods of our grassroots citizens.
I understand the humanitarian principles of helping those in need, but taking them in is not the best solution. The elites who decide on our behalf to let them in can do so in their own good conscience, because they’re not the ones who have to bear the consequences. It’s not their jobs that will face higher competition from low-skilled foreign labour – if anything, they stand to profit from saving on workers’ wages. It’s not their wives and children who have to put up with the gazes and advances of lonely, desperate men (Dr. Clemens Ladenburger being an exception). It’s not their neighborhoods that will face greater poverty and crime. It’s not their communities that will be fractured, as the original residents move out to make way for the new ones moving in.
But most of all, I think young men fleeing their own countries just offends us on a cultural level. You see, there was a time when China wasn’t the second largest economy on earth. Our grandparents had to deal with the Imperial Japanese military, then considered to be one of the finest fighting forces in the world. Even western powers in the Far East couldn’t stop them – Hong Kong (then a British colony) fell in two weeks, with the Japanese only losing a few hundred men.
Guess what the Chinese people back in those days did about it? They fought back valiantly, and suffered the second-most casualties in WW2. Even those who fled to America supported the war effort by sending home what little money they made working jobs white people felt were beneath them.
Refugees (especially young men) should stay in their countries and work to make it a better place for their countrymen. No one can save you but yourselves. The Chinese have known this for at least a century now.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
– The Internationale
The Psychopath | House M.D.
Why is North Korea so hated?
I’m going to give a pro tankie answer, even though I am not a big fan of tankies. That’s because I have to agree with them here.
There is absolutely no reason for North Korea to be hated by the West. They are this defensive because they know they are hated and the West just wants to destroy North Korea… and for zero geopolitical reason at that.
The USA destroyed every city in North Korea, and put more bombs on North Korea than they did on Japan which brutally invaded Asia and attacked America’s Pearl Harbor. 635,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Korea, compared to 160,000 tons of bombs in Japan.
North Korea had 9.26 million people before the war. More than 1 million North Korean civilians were killed or missing due to the Korean War. To compare, less than 1 million Japanese civilians died in WWII, with 100,000+ of them killed in the atomic bombings, in a population of more than 70 million.
The war that America waged on North Korea wasn’t even a war at this point. It was outright genocide. Hitler would be proud of this. Every last North Korean was a target (and some South Koreans too, No Gun Ri Massacre was an example). The aim wasn’t even to put pressure on the North Korean regime, it was to give civilians hell. That is what strategic bombing is aimed to do, give civilians hell.
North Korea would not be justified to invade South Korea (which, frankly, is a capitalist hellhole as much as North Korea is a radical communist juche hellhole today). If North Korea did such things, I would condemn North Korea as well and demand that North Korea go back to its borders.
But it would be very justified to build hundreds of nuclear weapons, and set conditions for its use being the second total destruction of North Korea as happened during the Korean War. Luckily for normal people, North Korea only has dozens of nuclear weapons, and it has only very recently acquired the ability to hit the US mainland with nuclear weapons using just one nuclear weapons platform.
When you read the North Korean history, it makes sense why Kim Jong-un is so preoccupied with building nuclear weapons. If I was him, I would also build nukes.
I’m happy to see countries be able to defend themselves from imperialists the hard way against all odds, be it Israel or North Korea.
America Compared: Why Other Countries Treat Their People So Much Better (Reaction)
The truth hurts.
How did the ancient Chinese study for the imperial examination? Did they just repeatedly read dozens of scrolls every day?
The imperial examination system was a talent selection system implemented in ancient China to build a vast bureaucratic system and control the entire empire.
For its time, this system was quite advanced.
Firstly, it ensured a relatively open path for social mobility, giving children from poor families a chance. Secondly, it was relatively fair; while the winners of the imperial examination might not have been outstanding managers, they were certainly not fools.
At the very least, they had to read an immense amount of books, be knowledgeable, and be intelligent.
(Someone:Let me tell you something, folks, nobody reads more books than I do. Believe me. I’m the best at reading, okay? I’ve read more than anyone else—more than all the other politicians combined. They say, ‘ how do you know so much?’ Well, I’ve got the best books, the smartest people, and I understand everything. I know all the facts, the details, you name it. Nobody’s smarter, nobody’s better informed. It’s tremendous, folks, really tremendous. And believe me, when it comes to being well-read, I’m simply the best.”)
Moreover, the exams were not purely about comparing poetry or essays but included a large number of “strategy and policy” questions.
These questions are somewhat similar to modern civil service exam questions or political knowledge tests for students.
I found a few examples of ancient exam questions and, trying to adapt them to today’s global situation, rephrased them.
You can take a look to get a sense of the type of questions.
1 The United States has established hundreds of military bases around the world, while China’s military strength is mainly concentrated domestically. What are the reasons for these two strategies, and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages?
2 China’s ethnic policies are inherited from the Soviet Union, which has been criticized by many. However, it seems to be functioning well now, better than the Soviet Union. What do you think is the most important reason for this?
3 Roosevelt’s New Deal has some socialist characteristics, while China’s economic policies have many capitalist features. Share your views on this.
4 During President Trump’s tenure, what were some characteristics of the government officials he hired?
(Someone:I’ve got the best, the smartest, the most incredible people working for me. I pick winners, and let me tell you, they make America great again—just like I promised. The greatest administration, believe me. We’re bringing jobs, we’re bringing prosperity, and we’re making this country shine like never before. It’s fantastic, really fantastic,the best team, making America greater than ever. No one does it better.)
5 During the Korean War, China and the Soviet Union were allies, but in the Sino-Vietnamese War, China and the U.S. became quasi-partners. Share your opinion on this.
These are five exam questions related to politics, history, and military affairs, each requiring a detailed answer. There are also other questions covering topics such as education, economy, diplomacy, and so on.
Additionally, there was the Eight-Legged Essay examination, where candidates were required to use the sayings of sages as arguments and write an essay strictly following the standard format.
Overall, answering these questions well within a limited time is quite challenging, especially considering that you are competing with thousands of the most diligent and intelligent individuals in China.
An interesting fact: The top scorer in the imperial examination was called the “Zhuangyuan.” Only one was selected every three years. Over the 1,300-year history of the examination system, there were a total of 504 Zhuangyuans.
The first one was from the Tang Dynasty, and the last one was from the Qing Dynasty. Their hometowns were very close to each other, and today this area is known for having one of the strongest cities in China’s college entrance examinations, Hengshui City in Hebei Province.
After I was retired, I was compelled by law to live next to relatives. Since my mother died, and my brothers and sisters were all off being with their own careers and families, I ended up living near my father.
I lived in Erie, PA. And during this period of time, I was in a “half way house”, a Monastery, and in a rehabilitation program. For the most part, I lived in the (affordable) “bad section” of town. While my father lived in the the nicer side of town. I lived on the “East Side”, while he lived on the “West side”.
He lived with my step mother, and she hated me. Well, nothing personal. She hated me and my brother both equally. ANd she was nasty to us. SO understand that there is not calm waters in this relationship.
But anyways, here’s a story.
It’s about my dad.
Now he is in his late 70’s. Retired. And living with his wife (who hated me). I would say hi and talk to him from time to time when he drove over to my house. If I came to his house, she would make a real fuss, so I did it only occasionally.
Well it came to pass that his little dog “Zenie” died.
He was a fine little terrier. And he lived to the ripe old age of 16. Which was, after all, quite a long life for a doggie.
Well…
About four months after their doggie died, his wife was talking with another woman at church. There was another dog that they could “babysit”.
So, here’s the scoop…
Single woman. She has a high-level career that involves long periods of travel. She is not married. has no children. Instead, has a dog. But is never at home. SO she left the dog alone at the house.
It’s now five years old.
Never housebroken.
So my dad’s wife gets the dog, and as affectionate as it was, it was just crapping and peeing all over the house. Everywhere. And since it was forever an inside dog, they didn’t dare let it live in the yard.
So…
One day, I come to visit my father.
I come into the house and am assaulted by this putrid odor of dog shit. This stink. It was foul, and on the floor, and on the furniture were these absorbent white piss-pads. The dog was amok, and my father’s wife insisted that everything was “fine”.
No it wasn’t.
She was crazy.
It was NOT NOT NOT fine, and my 70 something father was not able to cope and handle it.
So, anyways, I went out with him and we had a breakfast together. Ah, it was 4pm, but you know it’s a thing. We talked and I said…
It’s my dad’s life.
But he had to live with his wife and make allowances.
However, this dog was not housebroken
And because it wasn’t housebroken, it could not live with them inside. It had to go outside.
So he had to make a choice; dog stays but lives outside or dog leaves.
I explained that this was not an emotional thing, or that it will change. That it was a health and sanitary issue, and given their (father and wife) ages, that this could cause negative health issues. That he had to do something.
Ah.
He kicked the dog out.
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And his wife refused to talk to me for a year afterwards.
Sometimes I feel that I am the most hated man on the planet. But seriously. There is a REASON why dogs and cats are housebroken. This REASON must be addressed.
And people are often too clouded in their emotions to such a degree that they refuse to see the black and white of an issue.
The health of the people who live in the home.
Today…
What was the strangest thing you discovered when you moved into a new home?
I had moved into a new rental with a couple of roommates, I was in my 20s. The house had a big backyard, but it was choked with weeds and Blackberry vines. I was determined to claim this space, so I borrowed a shovel and an axe and went at it! Being a small person, I ran out of steam pretty fast. Anyone who has tried to hack down 8ft tall blackberry vines can imagine my pain. Many scrapes and blisters later, after about a week, I had made modest progress.
The entire yard area was about 15ft square, I cleared about 10ft square and gave up. Not only were the weeds stronger than me, but the soil was mostly rocks, so planting a garden was looking pretty bleak. I kinda gave up. The spring was coming and we got a lot of rain, it became a mud pit and I thought maybe it would soften the clay and rock enough for me to sow some wildflowers before the weeds made a comeback.
Of course I got distracted and after a few weeks of mild spring sun I went back to it and looked around…PINK TULIPS were everywhere! A huge carpet of them! I wish I had a camera back then. They made me so happy and I could imagine them being planted years ago only to be choked by the aggressive vines. I felt like a hero and I continued to clear the space. Eventually I was able to see the long buried flower beds beneath the rubble. I made raised beds in one corner and was able to grow some herbs and veggies.
The tulips were a sign every spring that it was time to get growing! I hope whoever came after me to that space continued to be blessed by their presence.
Cajun Catfish with Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad
Fried catfish paired with a delicious Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad…yummy!
cajun catfish honey dijon
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad
5 cups baby Yukon gold potatoes, cooked and quartered
1 medium red onion, diced
1 1/2 cups celery, diced
1 cup bacon, cooked, drained and chopped
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon Creole mustard
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Hot sauce to taste
Cajun Catfish
4 U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish Fillets
1/2 cup fish breading
1 tablespoon Creole seasoning
1 1/2 to 2 cups frying oil
Instructions
Potato Salad
Combine all ingredients and mix well.
Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and hot sauce. Cover and refrigerate.
Cajun Catfish
Combine fish breading and Creole seasoning in shallow bowl. Coat catfish in breading, lightly shaking off any excess.
In a large skillet, heat oil over high heat. Fry catfish until golden brown, approximately 3 minutes per side.
Place on paper towel to drain.
Serve immediately with Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad.
Karen tries her American rights in Africa
Both India and China have over 1 billion people so why does China look clean and modern and India looks dirty and behind in the times?
I am Chinese, 44 years old this year. My childhood spanned the entire 1980s and 1990s. When it comes to maintaining cleanliness, this question brings back some memories of a “dirty and chaotic China.”
The first memory is a small detail. In any indoor place in China today, whether it’s a restaurant, hotel, or home, every room will have a plastic trash can. There will be a plastic bag lining the trash can to make it easy to remove the garbage. They usually look like this:
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However, these things were not part of my childhood memories. In other words, decades ago in China, there were no such trash cans. So, how did people throw away garbage in rooms back then? My memory is that people either put the trash in a shared outdoor trash can or threw it on the ground inside the room. Once the trash on the ground accumulated enough, they would then throw it into the large outdoor trash can.
Moreover, there is an evolving version of this small detail: I remember when I just got married in 2005, the plastic bags used to line trash cans were the ones from the vegetable markets. People collected these plastic bags after buying vegetables and used them in their trash cans. No one would buy plastic bags specifically for trash cans.
But today, various types and sizes of trash bags are essential in every Chinese household. The most popular ones are the trash bags that, when full, have two drawstrings on the sides that can be pulled to close the bag. This way, you can lift the heavy trash without worrying about it spilling:
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My second memory is about littering. I remember when I was in elementary school, around 1992. My mother took me to a newly built park. As we walked, I was eating peanuts and casually throwing the shells on the ground.
A sanitation worker stopped me, but my mother argued with her because she didn’t see a problem with throwing peanut shells on the grass. We thought that even if we didn’t litter, the wind would blow leaves onto the grass. Prohibiting littering was a common slogan on radio, newspapers, and television in China at that time. It’s important to note that because people didn’t care about environmental cleanliness, the government used all mass media to educate the public.
This situation didn’t significantly improve even by the late 1990s. In 2000, a Chinese TV station released a popular crime drama called “The Struggle Between Black and White,” which depicted the solving of a dismemberment case. The most intriguing aspect of this series was that it featured almost no professional actors! Nearly all the key roles were played by ordinary people, and all the police officers and detectives were the actual officers who solved the case.
Since this drama was released in 2000, it reflected the urban landscape of China at that time. The city in the show had a fictional name, “Beihuan City,” but everyone who watched it could recognize it as Xi’an, the city with the Terracotta Army. You could see paper scraps, plastic bags, and other trash flying along the main roads of the city.
In today’s China, littering is unthinkable. If someone throws a piece of waste paper on a commercial street, people will consider them uncivilized. Within minutes, a sanitation worker will pick it up and throw it into a trash can. A few years ago, a moving car threw a pile of shredded paper out the window. A highway cleaner witnessed this and recorded it on his phone, uploading it online, which sparked public outrage. Eventually, the police used roadside cameras to identify the offender, fined him, and demanded a public apology.
My child was born in 2010. If he generates trash while playing outside and can’t find a trash can, he will keep the trash with him until he gets home to throw it away. Once, he had a runny nose and spent an afternoon playing in the community park. When he returned home, all four of his pockets were filled with used tissues. I asked him why he didn’t throw them in the park’s trash cans, and he replied that the park was under renovation and the trash cans were temporarily unavailable.
My third memory is about vegetable markets. Up until 2005, going to an open-air farmers’ market was a challenge. You had to walk on rotting vegetable leaves, wade through the waterlogged seafood section, and endure the nauseating smell of the poultry area just to buy ingredients. In the past decade or so, such farmers’ markets have almost disappeared in China. They have been transformed into tall, specialized buildings, with floor-cleaning machines constantly sweeping the floors, and water flowing through specially designed hidden pipes into the city’s sewage system. Today, farmers’ markets are almost indistinguishable from supermarkets, equipped with elevators, central air conditioning, ventilation systems, Wi-Fi, and each shop having its own independent water supply system.
This is what the farmers’ markets used to be like:
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This is what farmers’ markets are like today:
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My fourth memory is about public restrooms. The relationship between Chinese people and public restrooms could fill an entire book, as there are many legendary stories. When I was a child, public restrooms did not have flushing systems. Everyone, regardless of gender, had to squat over two concrete slabs. If you weren’t careful, you might splash yourself.
Workers would clean the waste once a day. In the summer, Chinese public restrooms would become an unforgettable experience for anyone. In 2006, I bought a book called “Foreigners’ Views on China.” Some foreigners’ most painful memories of China at that time were about “using public restrooms.”
Today’s public restrooms in China are quite a different story. Over the years, as I’ve traveled across the country with my family, we’ve encountered all sorts of interesting restrooms. Some restrooms have real-time status systems that show which stalls are occupied. Some provide tissues via QR code scanning. There are even restrooms equipped with sofas and coffee tables for people to wait comfortably. A significant number of public restrooms have “family toilets” designed for family members assisting elderly or young children.
This summer, we traveled to Qinghai Province in northwest China. The G310 national highway winds through the desolate mountains of Gansu Province for over 100 kilometers. Sometimes, we didn’t see another car for half an hour, and I had to make twelve consecutive turns to find a 500-meter straight stretch of road. This area is known for the Qinling Mountains. One afternoon, we stopped at a roadside public restroom in the middle of nowhere, not even near a village. Surprisingly, it was a well-appointed restroom, equipped with large mirrors, washbasins, stainless steel faucets, and running water. Though I’m not sure if it was tap water or spring water, in the 37°C heat that day, the water felt ice-cold on my hands. The restroom had four rooms: men’s, women’s, a “handicapped toilet,” and a “management room.” It had a functional flushing system, clean tile floors, intact stalls, and a working ventilation system.
So, if I were to explain why China is a clean country today, I would summarize based on my experiences: First, extensive and improved infrastructure means people don’t need to dirty the environment to use the restroom or buy groceries. Second, trash cans, including recycling bins, are everywhere in cities and towns, so people don’t have to search for them. Third, if everything is clean, people are less likely to litter out of embarrassment. In conclusion, China is becoming an increasingly clean and orderly country.
This is what public restrooms in China are like today:
As Pennsylvania’s polls near closing, an unexpected twist has emerged: a massive mobilization of Amish voters. Known for their separation from mainstream society and reliance on traditional values, such as horse-and-buggy transportation (arguably more ‘green’ than EVs), these folks, traditionally not big participators in US politics, have been out in force at PA polling stations, voting for former President Trump after Biden-Harris’ big gov’t waged war on the community.
Let’s begin with the context. Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and big government Democrats targeted a small Amish farmer in Lancaster over compliance issues. This apparently infuriated the Amish community that many of them registered to vote and voted red in the last several days.
Real America’s Voice’s Tera Dahl was speaking at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, and she explained that the Amish community is not a traditional group of voters in US elections.
“But they’re voting this year – and I think a big reason is the overreach of government – and one example that could’ve had a big impact was back in January. An Amish farmer was selling his milk – and the gov’t raided his home and stopped his business,” she said.
An Amish person was asked outside one PA polling station: “Who are you voting for?”
He responded, “Donald Trump.” He explained that the Amish had “more freedoms under Trump,” while government overreach drastically increased under Biden-Harris.
US Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., whose district includes Lancaster County, at the epicenter of America’s Amish population, told PBS News last week, “They just want government to stay not only out of their businesses but out of their religion.”
With family roots deep in the Amish community, Smucker forecasted a dramatic increase in the Amish vote, “basing that on the enthusiasm we see.”
There are currently 92,000 Amish in PA. It’s going to be a tight race, and these votes could make all the difference.
Brave kid HORRIFIES his teachers by reading their own woke garbage, then his dad shows up…
The explosion blasted a million obols worth of cometary material into the oblivion of space, a disaster even without their ship being parked at ground zero, but what really rattled Jacey Komarov was the destruction of her entire set of Space Kitchen Deluxe™ radiant cookware, which had been safely stowed on board. She’d bought the set on Callisto twenty-three years before and cared for it like a child ever since. To her, it was more precious than platinum. You couldn’t find gear like that here in the Oort Territories. Standing beside her in his hideous olive green pressure suit, staring up at a black sky liberally sprayed with stars and glittering chunks of comet ice spinning into the void, Arne Slocum seemed hardly to notice. His reaction to the cataclysm was typically juvenile: “Whoa! That was awesome!” Okay, he actually was nearly juvenile: a short, skinny seventeen-year-old with wide, brown eyes and wiry hair that Komarov figured would be ideal for scrubbing out pots and pans. Not her good Space Kitchen Deluxe™ pots and pans, since they were self-cleaning, or had been before their untimely deaths, but she could definitely see grabbing him by the boots, holding him upside down over a filthy pan, and having at it with his skull. Since she no longer had a pan, filthy or otherwise, she slugged his shoulder instead. “Idiot! Look what you did!” He bounced a few feet in the feeble gravity before replying, “I’m looking.” Then he stopped looking and fiddled with the portable extractor cradled in his arms. Its sleek, silver body, massive orange trigger, and flared red muzzle suggested it was a device for killing Tyrannosaurs rather than mining comets. He flipped open a panel on its back and poked a skinny, gloved finger at the circuitry within. “I didn’t think I’d coax that much power from her.” “Stop tinkering! We’re here to collect samples, not vaporize the place from under our own feet. All my stuff is gone!” Slocum scratched what would have been his nose if there hadn’t been a helmet in the way. “You’re not hurt, are you?” He gave her a not entirely medical examination. “Put those eyes back where they belong,” Komarov growled. She turned away from the havoc he’d wreaked. Before her, a jumbled surface of loosely-packed ice and black rock stretched to the horizon, where it melded seamlessly with the onyx sky. Nothing special, really. Every chunck of frozen primordial soup looked the same. This was the Oort Territories, a realm so distant the sun was just a bright star, a place where day was night and night was more night. People came here to strike it rich mining the hydrogen and organics that made corporate executives filthy rich, but somehow only the filthy rich ever got richer, while people like Komarov, scratching out a living employed to a third-rate mining outfit, shambled through shackled to people like Slocum. “Where’s the ship?” Slocum asked. Quick study you are, she groused. “You blew it up along with everything else, including my most prized possessions.” She spread her arms in frustration. “The comet? Fine. The ship? If you absolutely must. But my entire kitchen? Blow yourself up instead!” Slocum’s eyes did a fair impression of a faulty LED flickering between life and death. “I blew up the ship?” “I’m going away now,” Komarov said. “Enjoy the rest of your short life.” She started walking . . . stomping, really . . . okay, bouncing across the frozen wasteland, her weighted boots the only thing keeping her from launching into space. She felt rather than heard the crunch of frozen organics under her feet, smelled nothing but the synthetic cleanliness of recirculated air, saw only glitters in the dark. She didn’t know where she was going, but it didn’t matter. There was nowhere to go but away from Arne Slocum. She’d probably end up back where she started, either from aimless wandering or circumnavigation of the tiny globe, but she didn’t care so long as he wasn’t there when she arrived. Unfortunately, they were still in communications range. “There’s nothing out there.” he said. “Exactly.” “But we don’t have a ship.” “No kidding.” “How do we get home?” If she could put the horizon between them, she wouldn’t have to listen. “Jacey?” The comet wasn’t that big. It shouldn’t take long. “You’re the senior. You’re supposed to deal with situations like this.” “Be very glad you’re not standing behind me,” Komarov grumbled. “Why?” “Because I’d strangle you!” “Oh. Er. Actually . . .” Engulfed by rage, she spun about. The motion would have thrown her headlong across the icefield had not Slocum been a meter back. They collided and fell in slow motion, a tangle of arms and legs and portable extractor. Its bluish beam flashed by Komarov’s head into space where it would either harmlessly dissipate or by freak accident destroy something vital to somebody’s survival. Slocum grunted. “You’re…” His faceplate was pressed against hers and his breathing labored, as though she was squashing him flat, although she couldn’t be, not in this gravity. “…all red.” “You think?” She pushed herself up and dusted off her suit. Motes of ice and organics sparkled into the vacuum. Breathing deliberately and summoning every gram of professionalism left in her roiling brain, she let him pick himself up rather than flinging him across the cosmos. “Maybe you should engage the safety.” “I disabled it.” Mayhem flooded her eyes. “Why?” “Convenience.” She had a vision of approaching him, arms outstretched, grasping fingers encircling his neck, squeezing long and slow and hard until his head popped off. He didn’t share her vision or maybe even notice it. “How do we get home?” “We?” He bounced back up a step, so maybe he had noticed, after all. “I assume you’ve studied the procedures.” “Didn’t have time. I was working on, on, on, this.” He raised the extractor as though offering it to her. Tempting though it was, she didn’t take it. “Before people are dropped on a new target, an emergency package is soft-landed. If the crew becomes stranded, they can activate a distress call. They’ll also find basic tools and provisions.” “Oh. That’s good.” Slocum looked so pleased, he might have designed the package himself. “Where is it?” Komarov pointed. “On the edge of the blast zone.” Slocum fiddled with the extractor some more, as thought that might make all disintegrated things undisintegrate. It didn’t. He looked contrite enough, though, so Komarov set course for whatever remained of the emergency package and motioned him to follow. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at a massive crater whose edges and walls had a glassy look. The blast had melted the ice, which refroze as it flowed downhill. She amused herself with the thought of Slocum sliding down the slope, unable to arrest his fall, swooping through the bottom and up the other side until gravity slowed him and pulled him back down, up, down, up, down, over and over, amplitude gradually decreasing, until he came to rest at the bottom and couldn’t climb out again. Sweet justice. “Is that it?” Slocum asked. Not three meters beyond the edge of the crater, a massive black box squatted on the ice, a glowing green button planted in its side. They approached and studied it. Miraculously, it didn’t look damaged. “That’s it,” Komarov decided. She pushed the button, and the box blossomed like a flower, petals opening to reveal more controls, panels, doors, and a big red button marked, “For emergency use only.” That seemed redundant. The whole thing was for emergency use. Slocum held his breath while the box revealed its secrets, then let out a sigh. “You can say that again,” Komarov told him. “You’re damn lucky you didn’t take this out, too.” More contrition was called for. He fiddled with the extractor one more time. She pushed the red button. A control lit up, informing them the distress beacon was active. “You know,” Slocum said, shifting the device in his arms. “I honestly didn’t think I’d coax that much power from . . . “ Something his finger touched when click. The brilliant bluish beam flashed, vaporized the emergency package, and raced over the horizon into space. Komarov screamed. Fortunately for her, enough distress call had transmitted that two hours later a rescue team arrived. Fortunately for Slocum, low-gravity running is trickier than it looks, and they got there before Komarov caught him.
The incredible power of spiritual protection of your cat in 13 signs
What was the strangest battle in Roman history?
the Battle of the Caudine Forks in 321 BC. This one isn’t just strange, it’s downright embarrassing.
The Romans were fighting the Samnites, a tough group from south-central Italy.
Confident as ever, the Roman consuls led their troops into a narrow mountain pass called the Caudine Forks, thinking they’d catch the Samnites off guard. Instead, they walked right into a trap.
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The Samnites had blocked both ends of the pass, and the Romans were stuck like a mouse in a cheese factory.
Now, here’s where it gets really strange.
Instead of slaughtering the trapped Roman army, the Samnite leader, Gaius Pontius, decided to go for maximum humiliation. He forced the Roman soldiers to pass under a yoke, essentially a wooden beam, symbolizing their defeat and subjugation.
They had to stoop low and shuffle under this makeshift arch of shame, completely unarmed and defenseless.
The defeated consuls were forced to sign a peace treaty, but the Senate back in Rome refused to honor it, claiming the consuls had no authority to agree to such terms under duress.
one of the consuls, Spurius Postumius Albinus, actually proposed that he and his fellow commanders be handed over to the Samnites in chains as a sort of “sorry about that whole breaking the treaty thing.” The Samnites, showing a level of honor in this bizarre situation, refused and sent them back.
Pretty weird.
Have you ever cold emailed the CEO of a big company?
Originally Answered: Corporations: Have you ever cold emailed the CEO of a big company?
I did – sort of. When I was fresh out of university and young and innocent (well, kind of…), I joined a programme run by a large Swiss bank for graduates. When they hired me, the recruiter told me explicitly that my salary during training is just a training salary, and once I pass the training programme after a year and start as a regular employee, then my salary will roughly double, as that is a regular starting employee (graduate level) salary.
I did the programme and passed, and then went to work at the bank as a regular employee. My first monthly salary, though, was about 2% higher than what I had been earning while on the programme. So I called up HR and explained the situation, assuming there must have been a mistake. I ended up talking to the same recruiter, who laughed at me, called me a sucker and told me to go complain to the CEO.
So I did. I wrote him a very polite letter, explaining that I was terribly embarrassed to be bothering him with such a little thing, but I was told to contact him by this recruiting guy to sort out this misunderstanding. The CEO actually (and to his credit) called me that same afternoon and he had obviously looked me up and found that I was a complete nobody. But he kept it very short and to the point, basically saying that the corporate philosophy of the bank he was in charge of was very, very important and if that was what had been promised me, then that was what I would get. He then said that I should make an appointment with the head of HR and explain the situation to her. It got sorted out after a chat with the head of HR, who asked if I was happy in my job. I admitted that I didn’t find it terribly challenging, but I understood that you need to gather experience before moving on to more interesting jobs. She asked me about my background and the kind of things I have worked on in the past and asked if I would like to move to a rather more interesting job. Young as I was, I said “sure” without even knowing what it was. That same day I was transferred away from my boring job and started running a special projects team, reporting directly to… yep, the CEO. For quite a bit more than double the trainee salary. It was an… interesting decade.
Oh – I found out later that the recruiter got fired. I wasn’t exactly sad to see him go, but that hadn’t been my intention, and I felt bad about it.
Turned out okay for me…
CHINA is INSANE! (First Day in Shanghai)
How significant is Southeast Asia as a potential market for Comac’s C919 compared to other regions?
The c919 is optimized for regional service. Its entry into SEA will begin with Chinese airlines operating flights between SEA and China, provided the countries accept the type and airworthiness certification of the CAAC.
Since all 3 narrow bodies (a320, b737, c919) use the same leap family of engines, nothing much separate them in terms of operational efficiency, although the c919, being the more modern airframe, is a little lighter, and optimized for cargo duty.
Where the Chinese can be competitive is delivery time lines, cost and the speed of iteration. We will see the gradual indigenization of key components from engines to avionics, as comac develops superclusters of aviation suppliers.
SEA is 650m today, the same size as Europe. Reaching Europe’s level of connectivity will require plenty more planes, which the c919 is well positioned to serve.
But that’s in the future. The c919 order book will take the next decade to clear, and this will be a good time for the model to build a safety record, as well as a service network.
Why would Taiwan not be another Ukraine in case China attacks Taiwan?
Bill Chen
Ukraine was shelling Russian majority Donbas for 8 years, killing and maiming thousands. Two treaties signed and witnessed by multiple stakeholders failed to put a stop to the killing.
There was Minsk, and Minsk ii, which as Angela recalled, were deceitful instruments to buy Ukraine time to build up its military.
Now, are the Taiwanese killing mainlanders with heavy arms today? Is the substantial Taiwanese population on the mainland living under discrimination and fear?
There is no enmity between the Chinese, yes, CHINESE on both sides of the straits.
The quarrel all along has been which system should be in charge.
I keep in regular contact with my Taiwanese friends. Despite the intense military drills which has showcased the ability of the mainland to blockade Taiwan, Taiwanese society has not mobilized on a war footing. There is no trepidation for an inevitable war in the foreseeable future, or the urgency to prepare for one.
In fact, SOPs to identify and challenge mainland contacts have been scaled down, because the intensity is just too hot to handle.
Taiwan’s replacement youth will shrink 40% in the coming years. Schools have closed and class size have come down. And yet wages remain depressed even in downtown Taipei.
Is Taiwan in the mood for war?
I figure not.
Now look at the mainland side and the capabilities coming online. There is a queue for university graduates to join the pla, while regular drills mobilizing civilian assets to assist in the war effort occur in the provinces closest to Taiwan. This includes provisions for the evacuation and care for mass casualty, as civilian infrastructure is degraded.
The Chinese are prepared to absorb Gaza level of destruction.
Is it true that Chinese people now have a high standard of living?
Not high standard of living.but I am satisfied with the following aspects of China:
1. Safety: It is extremely safe.
2. The transportation, electricity, internet, and other conveniences are all very reliable.
3. Education and Medical: The quality of Education is high and the cost is low. As long as you have good grades and are willing to learn, being from a poor family is not a big problem.Medical care is similar to education in terms of quality and affordability.
4. Industrial Products: There is a wide variety, and they are inexpensive and high-quality. On platforms like Taobao, you can find almost anything, and orders arrive the next day.
5. Convenience: For example, when buying an air conditioner, installation is free, with only a small fee for transportation, usually around twenty to thirty dollars.
Some people call this exploitation of delivery or installation workers, but that’s not entirely accurate. In another scenario, when workers fall ill, medical care is also cheap and fast, even though doctors need to spend 24 years studying.
6. Food: It is cheap and fresh, especially vegetables and fruits. Beef was a bit expensive before, but this year it has dropped nearly 50%. Some say it’s because Argentina exports a lot of beef to China.
I think this is not entirely good, as I’ve heard that many cattle farmers are suffering significant losses this year. The government should subsidize them.
Most Disappointing Aspects:
Housing Prices and Rent: Especially in big cities. For example, a 120-square-meter house in the suburbs of Beijing might cost around 800,000~900,000 dollars, which is too high given the income levels of Chinese people.
Nearby, there used to be three bookstores and several restaurants, but recently they have all closed. This is because a new subway line is about to be completed, and the landlord, anticipating increased foot traffic, shamelessly raised the rent threefold.
After the negotiations broke down, the merchants had no choice but to close their businesses. The bookstore owner, whom I really liked, said with resignation that during the negotiations, the landlord used the “six-character mantra” —爱租租,不租滚!(If you want renting, rent; if not, Get out!)
I can accept the closure of restaurants, but it s really upsetting to see bookstores closeing.
These 3 bookstores have been a part of my life for 18 years; I used to spend several hours every week browsing these bookstores.
The only consolation is that they also sell online, so I can still buy books from them online.
But I still prefer to go to physical bookstores, flipping through books and deciding whether to buy them.
One of these bookstores has a warehouse not too far from my home—just a 1.5-hour bicycel ride away. I’m still willing to ride my bike there to browse and purchase books.
Exorbitant rent is just too damaging for physical stores
A friend of mine summed it up very well:
In cities like Beijing and Shanghai, if you solve the housing problem, everything else is a small issue. But if you can’t solve the housing problem, every issue becomes a big problem.
Overall, aside from housing prices and rent, especially in big cities, I think things are still pretty good, considering how large the country is and how poor it used to be.
Col. Douglas Macgregor : US Dangerous Foreign Policy
What are some mind-blowing facts about the U.S. military during WW2?
Originally Answered: What are some mind blowing facts about the US military during WW2?
Throughout the war, the U.S. Navy lost 2 battleships, 5 aircraft carriers, 6 escort aircraft carriers, 7 heavy cruisers, 3 light cruisers, 65 destroyers, 52 submarines and a myriad of other ships. However, only one captain – Charles B. McVay of the heavy cruiser Indianapolis – was court-martialed for losing a ship in action against the enemy. If the names sound familiar, it’s most likely because Indianapolis was the ship that carried the atomic bomb “Little Boy” to the U.S. Airforce base at Tinian Island.
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Two days after delivering the bomb, Indianapolis received orders to proceed to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. Captain Charles B. McVay requested a destroyer escort against Japanese submarines but higher-ups assured him that it would not be necessary because – they said – there was no enemy submarine in the area. Four days later on 30 July 1945, Indianapolis was spotted and torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58. The U.S. cruiser sank in less than 15 minutes. Some 300 of the total 1,196 sailors went down with the ship, the other 900 – with few lifeboats and life jackets among them – suffered dehydration, exposure, hypernatremia, and shark attacks for nearly 4 days before they were found and rescued on 2 August. By then, only 317 crewmen were alive.
“Higher-ups” should have had better intelligence about enemy activity in the area (In fact, just six days prior to the sinking of the Indianapolis, the destroyer Underhill had been attacked and sunk in the area by Japanese submarines but McVay was never informed of it.) They should have given Indianapolis a destroyer escort when McVay requested it. They should have tracked the ship more closely so that its sinking and survivors could have been noted much earlier.
But instead of blaming themselves, they made McVay scapegoat and put him on trial with the charge of failing to zigzag in good visibility. The facts that 1) the weather was actually particularly bad, 2) McVay had discretionary authority to zigzag or not and 3) the Japanese submarine commander later testified that he could have sunk even a zigzagging Indianapolis – all meant nothing to the court.
The court-martial humiliated and devastated McVay. Vicious letters and phone calls from grief-stricken relatives of dead crewmen who’d served aboard the Indianapolis didn’t help either. On 6 November 1968, McVay committed suicide with his service pistol. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that McVay was vindicated by Congress.
What was the biggest scandal at your high school?
The cops arrived at our school one afternoon. Moments later, we saw our principal being taken out in handcuffs.
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Dana Goodman was under arrest for having a sexual relationship with an underage girl. In our rural community, the future farmers association was an important school group on campus. The president of the FFA was a sweet and friendly girl. She was well adjusted and popular among her friends, and generally having a great time at high school. Until her principal started talking to her more.
Mr. Goodman seemed like an alright principal. African Americans were honestly underrepresented in the administration, so for some this was grounds for positive receival. He dressed well, talked politely, and did his job fairly well. But occasionally he would make comments. Once at a school assembly he said something in front of the whole school about ‘homely’ girls. The first indication he was noticing the physical appearance of his female high school students.
Rumors were flying that he was friendly with the cheerleading coach, a teacher who was just a few years younger than him. But then there were other rumors. And then there was evidence. Not just a young girls brave decision to go to police, but used condoms and fluids tossed carelessly into a classroom trash bin.
Fast forward to the afternoon when the cops showed up. Students were not told directly what was going on. But more than a thousand faces were peering out all the windows, some cracking jokes, some shocked, some who already knew.
After the whole scandal, we learned that Goodman’s leadership apparently led others down the same route and two other teachers were also arrested for relationships with students.
That was the biggest scandal at our high school, but the biggest scandal outside of it? Goodman got his 15 year sentence reduced to four and he is already a free man once again.
Crab-Stuffed Catfish with Parmesan Crust
crab stuffed catfish
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish Fillets
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup white wine
1 pound lump crab meat
2 cups Parmesan, grated (divided)
2 tablespoons chives, chopped (divided)
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
Melt butter in medium, nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.
Add onions and garlic and sauté until translucent. Add wine and simmer until mixture is almost dry. Add lump crab meat, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 2 minutes.
Remove from heat and cool in refrigerator for 2 to 3 hours until completely chilled. Once chilled, fold in 1/2 cup Parmesan and 1 tablespoon chopped chives to crab mix.
Using a sharp knife, butterfly each fillet lengthwise horizontally as evenly as possible. Place 2 to 3 tablespoons of crab mixture on bottom half of catfish, being careful not to overfill. Fold top of catfish over to cover stuffing.
Season stuffed catfish with salt and pepper. Dip fillets into remaining grated Parmesan, coating evenly.
Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and add olive oil. Carefully sauté catfish until a golden brown crust is formed. Turn catfish over and cook for an additional 3 minutes.
Garnish fillets with remaining chives.
Why are so many counties joining Russia and China to de-dollarize their economy and trade?
Because the US government has been irresponsible on deficit and debt.
Soon or later, either the US would go bankruptcy, or it would solve the problem by having a war.
Acient money has actual value. It was usally made from precious metals such as gold, silver, and blonze.
Modern money is a credit, and is endorsed by the government to have virtual value.
When a government over releases money, it would create huge inflation. Not 10%, not 20%, but 1000% or 10000%.
With a full pack of money, you may be able to purchase a pack of cigarette.
In 2023 alone, the US government over-spent 1.7 trillion USD, which it has to borrow from others, domestic or foreign investors.
With the uncontrollabe over-spending, the national debt went up too.
It has just reached 35 trillion, and is about 100 thousand per US citizen.
There is no way that the US government could repay the debt in the foreseeable future, because US government is still creating more deficit every year.
Even the interest of the national debt in 2024 will be around 0.9 trillion.
With an annual revenue of over 4 trillion USD, US government would have to owe more money year by year.
To attract more people and organizations to purchase US tresury, the interest rate must be raised. With higher interest, the US government will have a higher annual expenditure, which will make the deficit bigger, so that the US government will have to release even more treasury.
It’s a typical vicious circle.
It would be impossible to increase government revenue, since it’s mostly tax.
It would be also impossible to lower the government expenditure, since too many people are making their benefit out of it.
See? They are going to spend more by borrowing more.
If it was any other country, its economy would be collapsed.
According to Ta Kung Pao in 16 Aug 1948:
Just within the first half of August,
food price increased 3.9 MILLION times
housing price increased 0.77 MILLION times
clothing price increased 6.52 MILLION times
It was because the KMT/ROC government tried to release new currency to replace the old one.
The exchang ratio was 1 Chinese gold yuan (new) to 200 old fiat currency.
According to the statistics, only 200 million CGY was enought to exchange all the old currency released, but KMT printed 2 billion CGY. The extra CGY was a disaster from the begining.
By the time people realized the government having no ability to control goods prices, all prices went up like crazy.
Someone went to buy boxes of antibiotics. The seller told him that this has no use if no one’s injured or infected. Buyer said that he didn’t give a damn. He bought them only because they were expensive.
Even shoes were all bought, regardless the size.
I am not sure if this reminds western people about something.
Like I said, if it was any other country, the economy would be collapsed already.
However, it’s the US.
According to the Modern Money Theory, the biggest export product of the US is the US dollar.
While other countries had to work hard selling goods, just to make some money to buy from other countries, the US just sit in a chairt and type some numbers into the computer, and here is the money.
US dollar is the biggest international settlement currency.
In a period, having USD is more important than having goods. Because no country can produce everything, and USD can get you goods from the market.
So the US spends USD printed out of thin air and receive goods with actual value. During the process, the US released its internal inflation to the world.
Comparing to its internal market, the global market is much bigger and is able to contain more USD. By over-release the same amount of money, the US has the world trading to absorb its inflation, while other countries had to afford it on themselves.
However, like I presented above, national debt of the US has reached a scary high level, because there is only a certain amount of USD can be transfered from US internal market to the outside world.
Because the capitalists cannot just share their benefit to the general public, so most people still have about the same salary, which makes the total disposable money in the US a rather stable number. That’s how much the US can buy, and how much the US can export its inflation to the world.
Soon or later, countries around the world would have to face the fact that economy of the US is beyond being repairable.
When that moment came, USD will become toilet paper. Whoever still holding huge amount will be fucked totally.
It happened once when the US claimed to abandon Bretton Woods system. In that system, the USD has a fixed exchange rate with gold, which is 35USD to 1 ounce gold. The US wanted to release more USD, because the total amount of gold doesn’t change fast, not as fast as the international trading.
To its allies, mostly European countries, denying the value of USD meant the USD they were holding would become toilet paper. So they chose to recognize the value of USD even when it has no connection to gold anymore.
But this time, China decided to not tolerate the irresponsible child act of the US.
China has been trying to establish a new trading system based on goods rather than any specific curreny.
Purpose of doing international tradings should not be “to earn some USD so that I could buy stuff”, but “I have goods, so I can eventually change it into something I need”.
It should be a multilateralist system instead of unilateralist.
In the current system, being kicked out from SWIFT by the US means not being able to buy vital stuff from the world, such as vaccine. Iran had this problem at early stage of COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia also had this problem right after the Ukraine War.
In addtion, the US in recent years has been more and more aggressive.
As the single pole of the world, it acted like a spoiled kid, to sanction whichever it dislike.
It created so many enemies. There are so many of them that they can actually establish their own circle.
If the emenies of the US can surive on their own, then there is even less excuse for them to keep using USD.
I think white house would be happy about it, since they are so eager to totally decouple with China.
UNFORGIVEN (1992) Movie Reaction w/ Coby FIRST TIME WATCHING
Why do so many Americans have a problem with alcohol?
Drinking is a large part of adult culture in the United States. Although I have gone long periods of my adult life without drinking, I have never given drinking up completely because I have realized it makes social situations more awkward.
Some people get really uncomfortable if they are drinking and not everyone else at the table is drinking. It’s also a time-honored tradition to conduct certain business meetings in informal sessions that sometimes feature drinking. Additionally, sports, holidays, and cookouts usually involve alcohol.
In my family, this isn’t a problem really. A few weeks ago we had a family gathering and a close friend came with me. She remarked how no one in my family drinks at all or does any drugs except me. First of all, survivorship bias is apparent. Secondly, because there have been so many people with substance abuse issues in my family, drinking or smoking marijuana, although perfectly legal, are nearly taboo. Our family gatherings are usually completely devoid of alcohol, because nearly everyone in my close family gave up drinking in any form years ago or never developed an interest. We never tell our guests one way or another that they can’t bring drinks, but if they do, they’re usually the odd man out.
Although I used to be a nearly daily drinker, these days I no longer prefer to drink as the main way I relax after a rough day. Increasingly, I am not the only one. Many young people are putting aside alcohol in favor of more holistic hobbies that don’t take such a toll on the body and mind. Going to a local adult arcade or bar and ordering a mocktail or alcohol free beer isn’t that unusual around here these days.
THE MATRIX (1999) Movie Reaction w/Coby FIRST TIME WATCHING
What was the first “green flag” you noticed in your partner?
My husband is a very shy man. So much so, that when we went out on a first date, he barely even looked at me. I very reluctantly accepted to go out on a second date, which ended up being pretty much the same. This led me to believe that there’s just no chemistry between us, and that it’s best we end it at that point. I really liked him, but didn’t want to get hurt as I thought he might be an emotionally unavailable person. My husband’s reaction was to say:
“Ok, this makes me very sad, but if you don’t think going out with me makes sense, there’s just no point going forward. However, may I ask for a reason?”
I have to admit I was surprised hearing such a response. Men I tried dating would typically get very angry, insult me, curse at me, or say something to humiliate me, which made me wary of rejecting someone openly.
I explained to him how I felt, to which my husband said that he actually likes me a lot, but is extremely shy, and that if I would like to go out with him again, he would be more open. On our third date he greeted me with a big grin and a warm hug and from then on we were inseparable.
So the first “green flag” in my partner was his ability to calmly accept rejection without perceiving that his ego has been hurt.
“CONKLIN!” Havaderr wailed. His face was the brightest red and steaming with heat. The veins in his neck throbbed noticeably, but he waited as still as he could for Conklin to answer. A buzz came in over the intercom above Havaderr’s head.
“Hey, was that you shouting, Havaderr?” Conklin’s voice crackled with static and attitude. Havaderr shut his eyes and repeated his Zen mantra in his head.
“Havaderr? What’s your problem?”
Havaderr’s eyes opened, and in the most even tone he could manage; he said his mantra out loud.
“I am calm. I am calm. I can overcome this. I am strong. I am strong. I can overcome anything.” Havaderr spoke through gritted teeth, spittle flying across the room as he focused on keeping his anger inside rather than shouting and blowing the place up with Conklin inside.
“Hey guy, are you going to answer me or what?” Conklin’s voice implied his own rising impatience. Havaderr moved to the button on the wall nearest him to respond.
“Yes, Conklin, I was shouting,” Havaderr said as evenly as his rage would allow. “Get your ass to 4A NOW!” As he trailed off, he clenched his teeth together so hard he felt a grinding that might as well have been a tooth chipping. Before Conklin’s reply came, Havaderr heard an irritated sigh over the intercom.
“Yeah, be right ther-.” Conklin barely finished his sentence before releasing the button, cutting himself off at the end.
Moments later, a door slid open down the hall, several yards away from Havaderr. Conklin came into the hall, looking both ways before spotting Havaderr.
“What the hell, why are you shouting and-“ Havaderr cut Conklin off with a finger to his mouth to silence him.
“I’m going to show you something in this room behind me, and it’s best if your mouth is shut when I do.” Havaderr’s voice wavered, he was still trying to control his anger. Conklin looked confused as ever but kept his mouth shut. With a worried expression, Conklin followed Havaderr to another door. Havaderr stood aside and opened the door for Conklin to enter alone. Conklin stood in the doorway staring, then Havaderr shoved him wholly into the room from behind and closed the door.
“Havaderr, what’s going on? What the fu-ahhhh!” The intercom inside the restroom was unnecessary, but Havaderr appreciated it right now. He would have heard Conklin screaming from quite a distance, but hearing Conklin’s disgust and horror in surround sound was more pleasing. A slice of anger slid off his shoulders and a small smile appeared on his face.
The door rattled, clearly Conklin on the other side trying to burst through, but Havaderr held the lock button, keeping Conklin trapped inside.
“What kind of game is this Havaderr? Let me out, for Christ’s sake!” Conklin was panicking, releasing more anger from Havaderr’s shoulders and filling his belly with laughter.
“This is no game, friend. This is you coming face to face with your own incompetence,” Havaderr said over the intercom, still smiling.
“Havaderr! Let me out of here!” Conklin screamed and started ramming the door again.
“I don’t think so, Conklin. If you look to the left of the door, I’ve been kind enough to set you up with plenty of cleaning supplies for the job, which is a lot more than you did for me. I’d suggest you start tackling that shit before it starts tackling you.” Havaderr exploded with laughter, letting go of the intercom and floating backward as he held onto his stomach. He laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. Conklin kept banging on the door and pleading to be released, but Havaderr couldn’t hear anything over the roar of his own hysteria.
Curled up in fetal position, floating in the hallway, Havaderr worked himself out of his fits of laughter. He wiped the joyful tears from his eyes and started breathing normally again. He moved back to the intercom.
“Look mate, this restroom was in your sector to clean. Obviously, you did a piss poor job,” Havaderr grabbed his side, holding the laughter in after such a quality pun. “I told you, cleaning the restrooms would be the most important job, because if it isn’t done right, this happens. Floating excrement!” Conklin didn’t say anything, but Havaderr heard him kick or punch the door.
“I’ll take your silence as admitting you did a sloppy job the first time. You know, I needed to do some business, and I walk into the restroom greeted with a turd to the face, which I’m assuming belonged to you, so I have no sympathy for you right now. Clean the damn restroom like you were supposed to, and I’ll let you out.” Havaderr waited for a response. He was eager to shower off the stench and stain of human waste from himself before finishing his day.
“Yeah, alright,” Conklin said over the intercom, sounding defeated and guilty. Havaderr nodded his head and left Conklin to figure out how to clean a restroom with feces floating freely throughout.
“Like I said, not a drop of sympathy for you. Do it right the first time, and we won’t run into stupid problems like that,” Havaderr said coolly, scrubbing at the built-up muck in the corners of the glass.
Conklin was still cranky from cleaning the restroom the day before, and he meant to let Havaderr know just how little he appreciated the tactless way he was pushed into the situation without warning.
“Chin up, Conklin. We have one more day before our shift is over, and we can get the hell off this floating heap of death,” Havaderr motioned toward the clear chambers that housed the comatose bodies of several crew members, one of which whose glass he was scrubbing.
“Remind me, what’s up with these bodies? They’re dead, yeah?” Conklin asked.
“No, they’re alive, they’re the crew, dumbass,” Havaderr grunted at Conklin. He looked over to see Conklin hovering around the main dashboard, not a rag or mop near him. “And I wouldn’t mind if you got to work while you asked your questions,” he barked. Conklin jumped and reached for a rag tucked into a closed bucket tethered nearby. He started mindlessly wiping at the dashboard without paying close attention.
“Okay, but how come they’re asleep?” Conklin asked. Havaderr sighed as he paused and rolled his eyes.
“Do I look like the Captain of this ship? All I know is, this crew is traveling some number of lightyears, so the ship has been programed for regular stops near inhabited planets for maintenance and cleaning. We drew the short straw, so we get to hop from the ship we were on previously, to this one, and then another one before heading back home. Nobody else was this far out into deep space to do the job, so we get a long shift before our break. At least they’re paying us over time, eh?” Havaderr smiled at the thought of a paycheck double its usual amount. He looked in on the half-naked man inside the tube he was cleaning, tapping on the glass with his knuckle and laughing at how strange the sight was.
Air escaped the edges of the door, and it hissed loudly. The smile fell from Havaderr’s face as he scanned the chamber looking for an explanation. The door swung open and the half-naked man floated out as if to follow. Thankfully, he was attached to a few tubes that kept him reigned in and asleep, but the color left Havaderr’s face once he realized that would only last for so long.
Havaderr turned to Conklin, who looked just as confused.
“He just-just-he-“ Havaderr stuttered, unable to decide what he was trying to say. The man’s feet flew upward so his back was parallel to the floor and his right side dipped down. Slowly, he started to spin, so he was upside down. All the while, Havaderr and Conklin stared without any clue how to fix it.
“Did you touch something?” Havaderr shouted at Conklin, who shook his head wordlessly.
“I didn’t touch anything!” Havaderr went back to staring at the half-naked man, perplexed. After a minute, Havaderr decided they couldn’t leave the man like that.
“Get over here and help me with this!” He yelled at Conklin. Still silent, Conklin moved toward Havaderr and the unconscious man. Havaderr and Conklin wore their gravity belts at 85% power to keep from floating off like the man from the tube, but it allowed them a bit more mobility too. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any extras to strap to the man, so he continued to spin and flip through the air.
One of the wires connecting the man to his casket snapped, leaving only one left to keep him from flying down the corridor and into every other part of the ship. Havaderr and Conklin shared a look of fear but said nothing.
Havaderr grabbed the man’s knees and tried to pull them down so the man was right side up, but as he pulled, the man’s whole body moved toward Havaderr. Conklin remained motionless, watching the unconscious body float into Havaderr. Havaderr struggled and groped, trying his very best to wrangle the helpless man, but even his best efforts left him with the man’s body bumping into him clumsily. He accidentally grabbed the man’s buttocks, and the man’s armpit swung around and slapped him in the face. All in all, it reminded Conklin of two young people at their first school dance, trying not to step on each other.
Conklin covered the smile on his face, but the more Havaderr fought with the floating man and lost, the more the urge to laugh rose in his belly. When the man launched a foot directly into Havaderr’s eye, Conklin lost it. With one hand on the man’s shoulder and his other arm wrapped around the man’s torso, Havaderr stopped to see what was so funny to Conklin. He didn’t have to ask; he knew how he looked.
“Would you knock it off and help me! I don’t know what we disconnected, but that could be vital to this man’s life!” Havaderr tried to repeat his mantra in his head, but he couldn’t hear anything over Conklin’s laughter. Havaderr grumbled as he kept spinning the man back into position, with no help from Conklin, who was tumbling in circles on the other side of the room.
Finally, Havaderr got the man into his up-right position and back into the tube. As best as he could, he reattached the disconnected wires, but he couldn’t pull the door shut.
“Conklin! Find the button to close this door, hurry, before he tries to escape again!” Havaderr pleaded.
Conklin straightened up and moved to the dashboard he had been cleaning. On the first try, he hit a button, and the door closed, sealing itself. Havaderr wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at Conklin, a little puzzled. Conklin’s laughter died down, but when he saw Havaderr near collapse and panting, his laughter boiled over.
“What is wrong with you? Were you too busy finding this hilarious to help me save that man’s life?” Havaderr demanded, huffing and puffing.
“Calm down, he’s fine,” Conklin squeaked. “The buttons are clearly labeled on the dash here, see?” Conklin pointed to the dashboard. Havaderr saw buttons marked to open doors, close doors, start specific mechanisms, stop the same mechanisms, and a bunch of other things Havaderr didn’t understand. What he did think he understood, was how the door opened in the first place.
“Did you open his door on me?” Havaderr asked Conklin, the anger rising again.
“Yeah, mate, you should have seen the look on your face!” Conklin rolled over laughing.
“You idiot! You could have killed the man, we could be fired, what the hell is wrong with you?” Havaderr bellowed.
“Relax Havaderr, you’ll give yourself a stroke!” Conklin pulled himself together for a second, setting his feet back on the floor and pointing to the dashboard again.
“This here, that indicates their vital signs. You can see they’re all perfectly healthy, no harm done,” Conklin said matter-of-factly. Havaderr was flustered. He could only trust Conklin’s word, he had no idea what any of the lights or buttons meant on the dash.
“You couldn’t have known it would be okay, though. What if the tube that detached from his arm was something that kept him alive?” Havaderr exclaimed. Conklin rolled his eyes, irritated that Havaderr wasn’t figuring it out as easily as he was.
“All that tube did was give him pleasant dreams; it wasn’t important. He’ll live, and nobody need ever know you almost killed a man,” Conklin started to giggle again. Havaderr’s face turned tomato red and he clenched his fist, trying to fight the overwhelming desire to punch Conklin in the face.
“You did this on purpose?” Havaderr said, strained.
“Well, maybe don’t lock me in a room with floating shit again, and we’ll be fine,” Conklin smiled, feeling pleased with himself.
Crispy Catfish
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons light Ranch dressing
2 large egg whites
6 tablespoons yellow cornmeal
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 catfish fillets
Cooking spray
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine the dressing and egg whites in a small bowl and stir well with a whisk.
Combine the cornmeal, Parmesan cheese, flour, pepper and salt in a shallow dish.
Dip fish into egg white mixture, then dredge in cornmeal mixture. Place on baking sheet coated with cooking spray.
Bake for about 30 minutes or until lightly browned and fish flakes easily.
Serve with lemon wedges.
Are you guys aware of what’s happening in Myanmar?
Myanmar has long been in a state of de facto civil war.
The root cause lies in the Myanmar government’s blatant policy of ethnic discrimination. Citizens’ identification cards are divided into six levels by color, and the rights enjoyed decrease according to the level.
Only the Bamar people hold the first-level ID cards, which grant them the right to vote and be elected. This has led to 40% of the minority groups, who face varying degrees of discrimination, attempting armed resistance. There are over a dozen “ethnic local armed forces” spread across Myanmar. For decades, the Myanmar military government has tried to eradicate them completely but has never succeeded.
I am Chinese, so I will speak about the impact on China.
Border Security: In recent years, when the fighting spread to the China-Myanmar border, shells from both sides of the conflict crossed the border, hitting our schools and killing border civilians. After a stern protest from the Chinese government, such incidents have significantly decreased.
Refugees Crossing the Border: This is truly troublesome. As a Chinese person, I feel that some of these refugees may have a higher crime rate than local Chinese residents. China designated an area to provide humanitarian aid, but I heard that after the conflict subsided, tens of thousands of these refugees were sent back to Myanmar.
The Ultimate Solution: Building a Wall: The Chinese government quickly constructed a 500-kilometer border wall, consisting of 4 meters high barbed wire, non-lethal high voltage current,blades, cameras, and sensors, equipped with a loudspeaker warning system and remote shouting devices.This system can detect border crossers in the first instance, and border personnel can escort them back. The sensors are used to detect tunnels; when someone tries to dig a tunnel to cross the border wall, vibrations are captured, and an alarm is triggered.
This has nothing to do with humanitarianism, and everyone can understand this. I have heard that the United States has also built a wall on the Mexican border to prevent illegal crossings.
If the Myanmar military government does not abandon its severe ethnic discrimination policy, the situation in Myanmar will remain turbulent.
What is the nastiest thing you’ve done for revenge?
A woman came in with her 16 year old, overweight son, it matters, ro the big box store where I worked. He was starting a fast food job the next day, needed a blue, Oxford shirt. Well we had two sets of shirts. Regular sizes in sale, big sizes not in sale. When I measured the kid for a shirt turns out he needed a 171/2 neck, so I told Mama that the large size he needed wasn’t on sale. And they were all properly signed as such. So she gets pissy, it’s 8:pm, we close at 9:pm. So I take the shirts out of packages, have him try them and we find kne he can wear. Now she says to me (this was 35 years go) Greta this is in sale for $8. I said no it’s not on sale, it’s a big men’s size and they are $10, regular price. She starts in in me, I didn’t argue, I just reiterated that it was $10, I couldn’t change the the price. Well she gets Sonny by the arm and marches him out to go about 100 yards to another small regional chain department store we had in town. It’s now 8:40pm, both stores close at 9. So I’m hacked off because she really was obnoxious, the son is embarrassed terribly. So she marches out the door. I took every shirt in his size and one size larger and put them in the stockroom hidden in a fruit of the loom men’s briefs box I found empty. I left them for 4 days then brought them out again. This wasn’t the kids fault, as you’d expect, kids do everything last minute, his mother made him apply for the job, he for it and they had a late interview. Hence arriving at 8:pm. But they wanted him to start the next day so her whole works was getting turned upside down. Don’t take it out on me lady. There were 4 shirts I hid. Over those few days, I was off one. Apparently she came in while I was off and have someone else a hard time. I didn’t and still don’t care.
If a US Marine was to join the French Foreign Legion, how much easier would they find the basic training?
I was a Marine Recruiter in 1992 and I walked into the Social Security Office to get a SSN verification for one of my recruits.
The guy behind the counter tells me that he was a Force Recon Marine and I told him that I was a Recon Marine as well. We start comparing stories and he had been to Amphibious Recon School, Scout Swimmer, Scuba, Jump, Free-fall.
As it turned-out he knew quite a few people that I knew who were sort of legends in the Recon Community.
I asked him how long he had been in? He told me, “8 years.” Then I asked him,” Why did you get out if you already did two enlistments? “
He said that he got out to join the French Foreign Legion. I said, “How was that?”
He said verbatim, “It made Force [Recon] seem like Sunday School. “
He said that he had to do everything all over again Infantry, Jump, Scuba, Free fall. He told me that he he eventually made into the Parachute Commando Regiment.
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*UPDATE EDIT. I remember an incident that I witnessed in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
We were waiting in line to take field showers at the Division Service Support Group (DSSG) area when a group of Legionaries drove up in their rickety jeeps.
One of the junior guys is so excited to be getting a shower, that he hops in line with us while forgetting to take his rifle with him.
A few moments later, his Sergeant comes running-up and starts yelling at him in French. Then, he proceeds to start beating the guy. He almost beat the dude unconscious at which point a whole bunch of Marines intervened.
As a LCpl, I was pretty shocked by what I witnessed. I’m pretty sure that the rest of us Marines were stunned including several Staff NCO’s and Officers who also happened to be standing in line.
I saw a couple of FFL Officers drive-up soon after and they were yelling at the Sergeant in French and then they all get in their vehicles and drove off.
My assumption is what we witnessed wasn’t supposed to have occurred in public and that it was supposed to have taken place “behind closed doors.”
Admit the truth
Emotional. Even I feel it here.
Why does it seem that kids love their parents until they become teenagers?
This is probably the only time I’ll post a picture of myself…
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But I think I was a pretty cute little kid. I was a good little kid. I listened to everything my mom told me.
No dad in my life? No problem- I had mom. Never saw kids outside of school? Mom was enough for me. Wasn’t allowed outside by myself? Mom says it’s for the best, so it has to be for the best.
I didn’t question anything until I was around eight years old.
The first thing I started questioning was my father. Where was he? Why didn’t I have a dad like all the other kids? Why doesn’t he want me?
My father had walked out of my life when I was six (he hadn’t actually been there since I was three, really).
Even my new step dad couldn’t stop these feelings inside me- I wanted to know him. Something inside of me craved to know him so badly.
Day after day I would beg my mother and step father- they continued to ask why and say no. I cried to them- it made no difference. The answer was no.
Well, when I was eleven, no wasn’t enough for me. I called him and arranged a visit anyway.
And that’s when the fighting started.
I wasn’t a good kid anymore. I started complaining about the chores I had to do- it wasn’t fair- none of the other kids have to do as many chores as I do.
But the another common fight we had was about friends. I was never allowed out. There was no reasonable explanation- Mom said I wasn’t, so I wasn’t.
But that wasn’t enough for me anymore.
It was the same thing with a cellphone, the technology, the food I wanted to eat, the people I wanted to hang out with, the books I wanted to read, even the music I listened to.
But no just isn’t enough anymore.
I don’t think parents stop loving their kids. I think that parents just stop liking their kids. What parents don’t understand is that their kids are going to grow up- they’re not going to stay obedient and docile forever.
One day mom and dad’s “No” won’t be enough. You’ll have to have reasons to back up your answers.
I know my parents love me. But I also know that they didn’t really want a kid- they weren’t ready.
I love my parents and I hope my siblings turn out better than I did.
Are all these UFOs an Alien Invasion or has Project Blue Beam finally begun?
One of my little pleasures here in China is the massage.There are all types of massages. From a nice foot massage after soaking in a super hot herbal bath, to “happy ending” massages that are 100% legal inside of China.
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The prices are entirely reasonable, and really, it’s a four hours or so well spent.
In the ‘States, I never had or experienced a professional massage. The best that I could get was an amateur massage from a favored girl or two.
But really, as I get older, having a massage…
spa for men
one that involves drinking whiskey, a very hard touch, and soft relax afterwards. Followed by a fine smoke is truly special, and it is one that I really do appreciate.
I don’t know if you can ever get something like this in the USA unless you go to a private spa. Ah, many ladies use these services I know. But not so much foe the men.
If you all ever get an opportunity, take it.
Today….
We Haven’t Seen A “Historic Surge” Of Corporate Bankruptcies Like This Since The Great Recession
July 10, 2024 by Michael
We continue to get numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy is steamrolling in the wrong direction as we approach the most chaotic election season in our history. Needless to say, the performance of the economy is going to play a major role in the outcome of the election, because millions upon millions of Americans are really suffering right now. Homelessness has been growing at the fastest pace ever recorded, hunger and poverty are exploding, and we are in the midst of a cost of living crisis that doesn’t seem to have any end in sight. Unfortunately, there are signs that things will soon get even worse. For example, we experienced a “historic surge” of corporate bankruptcies during the first half of this year that was worse than anything we have witnessed since the first half of 2010…
There is a “historic surge” of corporate bankruptcies underway in the U.S., as debt-saddled companies struggle to adjust to the new era of high interest rates.
New figures published by S&P Global Intelligence show that 75 companies filed for bankruptcy in June, the highest number recorded in a single month since early 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That pushed this year’s total number of bankruptcies so far to 346, which is notably higher than comparable levels seen in the past 13 years.
Before this, the highest half-year figure recorded was in 2010, with 437 companies filing for bankruptcy from January through June.
During the first half of 2010, we were just coming out of the Great Recession.
Do you remember how painful things were in those days?
Sadly, I believe that what is ahead of us will be even more painful.
The unprecedented measures that our leaders took to prop up the economy worked for a while, but now cracks are starting to show all over the place.
And a lot more big businesses will go belly up during the months ahead.
Discount retail chain Big Lots said it will close up to 40 stores this year and may declare bankruptcy.
The Columbus, Ohio-based company wrote in a quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filing it expected further operating losses and has “substantial doubt” it can continue as a functioning business.
Big Lots last month reported a net loss of $205 million in the quarter ending May 4, 2024.
When I lived in Virginia many years ago, I would shop at Big Lots quite a bit.
And it always seemed to be doing fairly well.
But now times have changed.
Today, most Americans have very little discretionary income. In fact, surveys have shown that the vast majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at this point…
A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).
There is no way to spin those numbers in a positive manner.
Any way that you look at them, they are absolutely horrible.
The middle class is being ripped to shreds, and those that are running the system seem to be all out of answers.
Young adults in particular are having a very difficult time in this environment.
A new survey by Bank of America finds that nearly half of adult members of Gen Z are relying on financial help from their parents and family members to get by.
The survey for Bank of America’s Better Money Habits team found that 46% of Gen Z are receiving financial assistance from their parents or other family members, a figure that declines to 30% for Gen Z non-students.
Have you noticed that so many young adults seem to be very bitter and very angry these days?
This is one of the big reasons why they are in such a foul mood.
Many of them were promised that life would be good if the studied hard, went to college, and did all the right things.
But now many of them are discovering that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was just an illusion.
Of course there is a small sliver of society that is still doing exceptionally well.
Flooding the system with trillions upon trillions of dollars has been very good for the financial markets, and those with lots of money in the financial markets have been living the high life.
Millionaires once accused of ruining a gorgeous town in Wyoming now complain they are being driven out of the area by billionaires.
Jackson Hole has long been a popular vacation spot for celebrities including Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes and Matthew McConaughey.
An influx of wealthy people sent house prices sky-rocketing and forced ordinary workers to live on the other side of the mountain on the Idaho-Wyoming border.
There are more billionaires in America today than ever before.
That is the good news.
The bad news is that there are more homeless people in America today than ever before, the ranks of the poor are growing very rapidly, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day.
The wealthy may think that all of the wealth that they have piled up will insulate them from the unprecedented chaos that is approaching, but the truth is that a day of reckoning is coming for them too.
In the end, the entire system is going to completely and utterly fail, and those that believed that the party would last forever will be bitterly, bitterly disappointed.
Does China sense weakness in the White House? In recent days Chinese troops have been sent to Belarus for military exercises, dozens of Chinese military aircraft have been threatening Taiwan, and four Chinese military vessels were even detected off the coast of Alaska. So why has China decided to become so aggressive all of a sudden? Right now, Joe Biden is facing endless questions about his competency, and those around him are focused on fighting for his political survival. So could foreign adversaries such as China use this window of opportunity to do things that they may not normally attempt to do?
According to authorities in Taiwan, 66 Chinese military aircraft and 7 Chinese military vessels were “operating around Taiwan” on Wednesday…
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence (MND) on Thursday said that it had detected 66 Chinese military aircraft and vessels around the island, apparently en route to a Chinese military exercise in the Western Pacific.
The media outlet embedded a statement by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence on its X platform.
“66 PLA aircraft and seven PLAN vessels operating around Taiwan were detected up until 6 am (2200 GMT Wednesday) today,” the statement said.
When asked about the warplanes crossing the median line at a regular press briefing in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian avoided directly responding. “The determination of China to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity remains unrelenting,” he said.
The CCP insists that Taiwan is Chinese territory, and the Biden administration has been warned that “reunification” will take place at some point.
Let us hope that the Chinese do not choose to use this current window of opportunity to “reunify” with Taiwan, because the moment that they invade we will be at war with China and everything will change.
Unfortunately, it appears that the Chinese have been aggressively probing Taiwan’s maritime defenses. During the first six months of 2024, the Taiwanese Coast Guard “drove away 567 Chinese boats”…
The coast guard drove away 567 Chinese boats and seized seven illegally operating in Taiwanese waters in the first six months of this year, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday.
They mostly operated near Kinmen and Penghu counties, resulting in fines totaling NT$1.7 million (US$52,440), it said.
Three ships — two near Kinmen County and one near Penghu County — were detained in January for illegally crossing the border, while one ship each was detained near Kinmen in February and Penghu in March respectively, it said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have been sniffing around our coastlines too.
Multiple Chinese military ships were spotted by the U.S. Coast Guard in the waters off Alaska, officials said in a news release on Wednesday.
Three vessels were detected about 124 miles north of the Amchitka Pass in the Aleutian Islands, and a fourth ship was spotted about 84 miles north of the state’s Amukta Pass. The ships were seen on Saturday and Sunday.
All four ships were in international waters, the Coast Guard said, but were inside the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from the U.S. shoreline.
The reason that this incident is noteworthy is because it is very unusual.
Chinese military vessels don’t normally operate so far north.
Most people don’t realize this, but China now has the largest navy on the entire planet.
I don’t know how we allowed that to happen, but we did.
A large number of Chinese semiconductors are used in critical military platforms, accounting for around 40% of all U.S. Department of Defense weapons systems and infrastructure, and are further linked to military supply chains such as Patriot air-defense missiles and B-2 bombers.
For example, a Lockheed Martin missile factory situated in Alabama produces Javelin anti-tank weapons which use more than 200 semiconductors in each weapon. This equates to thousands of Chinese-made semiconductors within U.S. weaponry.
“U.S. companies at the bottom of the supply chain pyramid often source these parts from China in open market transactions. As a result, many essential components in sensitive U.S. military systems now come from China. Countless major weapons platforms are vulnerable,” the report states.
Our leaders aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, but this is ridiculous.
Didn’t anyone consider the fact that one day we might actually end up in a war with China?
Before I end this article, I wanted to give a quick update on the conflict in Ukraine.
According to the BBC, at the big NATO conference this week the Ukrainians were told that they now have an “irreversible path” to membership in the alliance…
Nato members have pledged their support for an “irreversible path” to future membership for Ukraine, as well as more aid.
While a formal timeline for it to join the military alliance was not agreed at a summit in Washington DC, the military alliance’s 32 members said they had “unwavering” support for Ukraine’s war effort.
Nato has also announced further integration with Ukraine’s military and members have committed €40bn ($43.3bn, £33.7bn) in aid in the next year, including F-16 fighter jets and air defence support.
Needless to say, this is not going to sit well with the Russians at all.
One of the reasons this war started was because Russia was determined to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
Now F-16 fighter jets from a number of NATO countries are starting to be delivered to Ukraine, and the Russians have already warned that those fighter jets will be considered a nuclear threat…
This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.
We are rapidly approaching a point of no return.
I have been studying the Russians for a long time, and once they come to the conclusion that nuclear war is inevitable they will strike first.
They know that there are no winners in a nuclear war, but they also know that whoever strikes first will have the best chance of surviving.
The Russians are highly paranoid, and we should not be backing them into a corner because that will make them extremely dangerous.
A stray cat walked upon me, and when I patted it, it jumped up on my knees
Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.
Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.
The widespread poverty of a vast new cohort of illegal immigrants could serve as indictments of a “racist,” “unequal,” and “unfair” America—as if the residents of East Palestine, Ohio or inner-city Chicago had anything to do with the centuries-long corruption and oppression of Mexico and Latin America that daily drives thousands of their own poorest citizens northwards to a society founded on very different ideas than those of their homelands.
Note that the left, neither in Mexico nor in America, never asks why millions of these impoverished people prefer to break into a supposedly racist America. Much less do they even distinguish those principles and values that once made America prosperous, free, and secure from their antitheses that have sadly made much of Latin America mostly poor, without freedom, and insecure.
Biden inherited near-zero real interest rates and inflation at 1.4 percent. Almost immediately, in nihilistic fashion, Biden did to a sound economy what he had done to a secure border. So, he recklessly printed money at a time of spiraling, quarantine-ending demand and supply chain disruption. Middle-class wages never caught up with Biden’s inflation, as prices for key staples are nearly 30 percent higher than when he took office.
The cost of servicing the ballooning national debt at high interest is now nearly $1 trillion per year. The world abroad is aflame, lit by Biden’s inexplicable withdrawal from Kabul, his mixed signals to Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, his deliberate alienation of Israel, his appeasement of Iran and China, and his cuts in the defense budget, coupled with his woke war on mythical “racists” in the military.
Energy prices soared, even as Biden’s green agenda proved unworkable and prompted draining the strategic petroleum reserve and begging foreign oil despots before key elections. The “unifier” Biden by design needlessly alienated nearly half the country, and in his debate, he reiterated why Trump supporters do not deserve his concern. And more ominously and recently, Biden grossly told hundreds of his donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”—just days before the attempt on Trump’s life.
The greatest absurdity of the Biden White House is the gaslighting talk of Biden’s “achievements.” Biden’s actions over the last four years are not offsets for his senility that warrant his continuance in office, but again, sadly, they serve as force multipliers, furthering claims of his dementia and for his removal.
Joe Biden is not just non compos mentis and in a sane world, he would be subject to 25th Amendment removal. He also increasingly seems unpleasant and obnoxious, if not sometimes simply weird. To achieve momentary clarity, Biden either shouts at his audience or stoops over and whispers in an eerie fashion.
He insults reporters and his own staff. Every few sentences, without warning, he begins screaming. His face is fixed in a permanent, angry contortion. As a result, the public sees their president as an off-putting, angry old man—and in his selfish dotage, an increasingly unsympathetic one. Even after more than 40 months of media hagiography, Joe Biden still cannot poll over a 40 percent approval rating, given that his rudeness is fueled further by the day due to escalating mental confusion.
Biden is, to be candid, a serial prevaricator. It is not just his ad nauseam repetition of Trump’s supposed slurs—the Charlottesville “both sides” lie, the “suckers” lie, or the “bloodbath” lie. He continues to peddle absolute falsehoods like the mythical nine-percent inflation he inherited and Trump’s supposed intention to ban all abortions, or his whopper that after welcoming in 10 million illegal aliens, Biden would have had a closed, secure border if not for those selfish Republicans who, for some reason, did not trust his ridiculous eleventh-hour, election-timed immigration proposal.
When he hammers Trump as a “convicted felon,” Biden has no clue that a majority of Americans equate that charge with Biden’s own warped lawfare assault on ancient customs, as well as a reminder that his now closest advisor is likewise a “convicted felon.”
When Biden rants near daily about the rich “paying their fair share,” he reminds us that his son is also facing federal tax evasion charges for unreported foreign income in the millions of dollars and that as soon as Biden himself leaves office, as a recipient of the same foreign cash, he may find himself in the same legal jeopardy. So, to use a Bidenism, “how dare he” accuse affluent Americans of the very crimes that his own family is knee deep in?
Biden’s prefaces of “no lie,” “here’s the deal,” “no kidding,” and “no joke” are little more than tics that forewarn us of complete fabrications about to follow, from the ridiculous story of an uncle supposedly eaten by New Guinea cannibals to his supposed heroics during the Civil Rights movement and his near childhood adoption by various minority communities.
In this regard, senility served oddly as a crutch for Biden. In the past, he paid dearly for his plagiarism, cheating, racist rants, and prevarications, losing three presidential bids and earning a reputation as the empty-suit blowhard of the Senate. Now his press handlers conveniently chalk up his long-standing habitual untruth as momentary mental “confusion.”
Given all the above, remember that Biden was to be the “savior” of the Democratic Party. To this day, celebrities demanding his withdrawal from the race throw him the bone that “he saved the country by stopping Trump”—as if no wars, stability abroad, no inflation, low interest, and low energy costs were something to fear.
Yet Biden’s four years pale in comparison to what in 2016 might have been a Harris, Buttigieg, Warren, Booker, or Sanders candidacy or presidency. No wonder Democrats concluded that there were no viable alternatives to a cognitively challenged Biden, precisely because Biden was the only available fig leaf to the new Democratic Party and its neo-socialist agenda—that, if transparent, would have terrified the country that it was soon to nearly destroy.
Biden’s Democratic critics have it all wrong: removing Biden is wise and needed for the country’s sake, but it will not solve the growing public anger at the left. Without the veneer of even a tottering old Joe from Scranton, there will be no camouflage. And then, the true leftist agenda will be served raw to the American people—open borders, woke/DEI racial polarization, transgendered obsessions, inflation/stagflation, wars a plenty abroad, an inert Pentagon, unaffordable energy, partial-birth abortions, and crazy ideas like packing the court and making Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, states.
So, what is the Democratic strategy to win the 2024 election?
Certainly, an “open” convention would not produce a moderate Democratic nominee or even a suitable replacement façade. There are no moderates in contention. If there were any hale candidates to offer cover, the party would be in permanent war with its shrill and angry woke base. Joe is the last of his generation to offer a credible front. There are no more Diane Feinsteins or Bill Clintons to package the hard-left agenda. If Harris cannot serve as Biden’s replacement, someone like her or further to the left would appear on spec.
The Democrats have no plans to run on their record.
Their tripartite strategy is as simple as it is tired and worn.
First, expect a third chapter to follow the 2016 Russian collusion caper and the 2020 laptop disinformation ruse – likely some October revelation from the administrative state’s “experts” and “authorities” that Trump is a criminal, a traitor, or a spy or plans a coup, to destroy NATO or nuke something. Perhaps there is another Access Hollywood tape, a porn star on ice, anything to avoid discussing the damage done since 2017.
Second, there is still a last gasp to a dying lawfare. Never underestimate the last-gasp judicial effort to inactivate, gag, bankrupt, or jail Trump, however counterproductive such attempts so far have proved.
Third, when all else fails, remember that in many of the swing states, 70 percent of the electorate will not be voting on Election Day and will not be presenting IDs. Millions of their ballots will be harvested or cured by third-party activists. Last time around, the leftist journalist Molly Ball bragged about their “cabal” and “conspiracy” of big money and big tech that had “saved” Americans from Trump.
Those post-election confessions were not just high-fiving but also a confident forewarning of what is to come.
NATO Just Announced Its Next Victim…You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!
Idiots in Europe.
What is the weirdest news article you’ve seen today?
About a week ago, an elderly Japanese man called the police to come to the hospital room where he was staying. The man, a retired construction worker, was dying of cancer. He went by the name of Hiroshi Uchida and lived alone in a small shack.
Working in Fujisawa City, near Sagami Bay overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the old worker lived a pretty charmed life. He had made friends with his co-workers, often singing James Brown songs. Once a month he’d go to the city, sing karaoke, drink and have some fun. He was the old-fashioned sort, never had a cell phone and always insisted to be paid in cash because “he didn’t trust banks”. Folks saw him as eccentric, but a decent guy for the most part.
It was only now, aged seventy and on his deathbed, that the old worker revealed his big secret to police — his real name was Satoshi Kirishima and he was a wanted terrorist, part of a left-wing terror group that bombed, among other targets, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Tokyo, in 1974.
Satoshi Kirishima’s mugshot was plastered around Japan, on police stations throughout the nation. He was one of Japan’s top ten most wanted criminals. On January 24, 2024, he called police because he “wanted to die under his own name”. He died on January 28, four days after his confession. DNA results have just revealed he was who he claimed to be.
“I can’t believe you live here.”“I know,” Sylvia says. She smiles and steps aside for me to drag my suitcase through the entrance hall.“There’s ivy trellises for chrissakes. Ivy trellises.”“I’m glad you like it.”We sit on her loveseat in the foyer. It is afternoon, and the sun is starting to wane and drip shade on the room. I take a sip of the earl grey tea she delivers on a worn gold platter. Her tea set is pretty, scalloped and covered in tiny, blood-red flowers. I rub my sweating hands on the velvet fabric of the sofa, hoping it won’t leave a stain.“I’m very glad you were able to come for the weekend. I’d like to see you up here once a month to meet about your progress.”
“I can’t thank you enough for hiring me, and for entrusting me with your story.”
She nods, smiling again. Her home smells like slivered almonds. A grandfather clock beats in the corner. There’s a large bookcase against the wall and shelves filled with tchotchkes— porcelain dolls in fraying skirts and ribbons, spotted cats, an extensive collection of salt and pepper shakers, everything covered in a film of dust. The air inside her home is gauzy, small swirls of sparkles float and twirl around us.
“Shall we get started then?” she asks. I nod, setting my teacup down on its saucer. “Evie was found just up the street from here. There’s a body of water where they found her. It isn’t small enough to be a pond but it’s not quite a lake either. The water is very deep in the middle. She had stones tied to her ankles when they recovered her body. We used to spend lots of time there together. There was a dock in the middle you could swim out to. We’d lie out there for hours, reading, talking. It was heaven.”
I write everything down in a small leather journal. A creak whines through the beats of the ticking clock and I jump a little, which makes me laugh.
“Just an old staircase,” she says. “My parents died in a car crash when I was in college, a long time ago. I was an only child. They left me the house. I never understood why they moved in here. It’s creepy, isn’t it? I was homeschooled my whole life, and Evie was my only friend. We met because she lived up the street from here. When I was younger, sometimes I liked to imagine having conversations with her when she was at school. Sometimes I find myself still doing that, too. I was a very lonely child. I was just starting to make friends in college and I was enjoying myself when I got the call that my parents had died. I quit school and moved back here, something I’d said I’d never do, but something called me back here.”
“Did Evie used to come over?”
“Yes, she did. Here,” she says, standing and walking to a large desk across the room. She pulls out a drawer and shows me photos of her and Evie as children. “Wasn’t she gorgeous?” Evie has long, inky black hair and freckles spilled over the bridge of her nose and underneath her eyes the color of a milky cappuccino. “And there’s me, of course.” Sylvia is tall and skinny, her back hunched and curved like a comma, her arm thrown over Evie’s small shoulders. “God was I gawky.” Sylvia’s hair is the color of straw and her two front teeth are twisted in what looks like a painful way. They are standing in the woods, the water behind them to their right. “I don’t know why everyone just accepted it was her who had drowned herself. Evie wasn’t unhappy. In fact, she had all these plans for the future. We were going to move out west together, to Hollywood. She wouldn’t have done this, I just know it, but no one ever questioned it or looked into it.”
“Was she dating anyone at the time?”
“She was in love with this boy named Ryan from school, but he was on vacation at the time with his family out of the country.”
“Is there anyone you’re suspicious of?”
“You like to believe it was no one you knew, right? That someone you knew could be responsible for such a horrific act. But something like this with no real evidence of a struggle or a fight, no skin underneath her fingernails or evidence of blunt force means if it wasn’t self-induced, she knew the person. And she knew them well. She trusted them, and then they did this to her. I’m sorry, it’s still hard for me to talk about.”
“You seem much more affected by her death than your parents’.”
“Evie was so young. She didn’t deserve her ending. My parents were older; they were in their sixties. Their deaths were probably immediate. Do you know how long it takes to drown? It takes about thirty to sixty seconds to start breathing in water, and soon after you lose consciousness. That doesn’t seem like that long of a time, but just try counting to sixty right now.”
We listen to the grandfather clock’s ticks. One, I bite the inside of my cheek and taste metal. Thirteen, I take a sip of the tea; it’s grown cold and the bitterness rests uncomfortably in the back of my throat. Twenty-one I crack my neck. Thirty-seven I smile at Sylvia, but it’s more like a grimace. Forty-one I pick lint off my jeans. Forty-nine I crack my knuckles. Fifty-three I rub at my eye, crossing my legs. Sixty and the cuckoo bird from the clock in the kitchen bursts from its hutch and shrieks. My heart propels upward inside my chest, boing-ing against my ribcage. I feel as though I cannot breathe, as though someone has buried me alive.
“Sixty seconds is a very long time,” she says, beginning to clean up the tea set. I nod, swallowing, but my throat is dry.
“I want to help you, but I’m not a detective. I’m not even a journalist.”
“You are a poet, and poets have sensibility. They are able to uncover the unknowable, to hear and decipher the whispers of the immortal.”
“Do you hear Evie?” I ask her. “Do you still talk to her?”
“All the time.”
“What if I don’t discover anything new? Or what if on the off chance I do discover something new, you don’t like it.”
“I will give you all of my journals. You will have access to photo albums, newspaper clippings from the time, home videos, yearbooks, my observations, maps, everything. You will write an account of what you look at, what I tell you, and whatever you make of it. It can be fiction, it can be a collection of poems, whatever you like. But it will be set here during the year she died, and it must have some beauty in it.”
“Okay.”
“Let me show you your room.”
I follow her up the wooden staircase. My room has a view of the forest behind the house. I know the water is just beyond, further and deeper into the woods.
“Perhaps you’ll go on a walk tonight, yes? See the water. There are flashlights in the downstairs closet by the front door. I’ll let you rest for a bit. Dinner is whenever you want. I was planning on making a shepherd’s pie, but you’re more than welcome to help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
“Thank you.” She squeezes my hand then shuts the door behind her. I lie on the quilt on top of the bed. It’s completely silent here, even with the window cracked open. Fresh air flows through and I quickly fall asleep.
It’s half-past seven when I wake and already dark out. I grab a large, black leather photo album from the top of the stack Sylvia has placed on the bedside table. There are Sylvia’s parents, both in thick-rimmed glasses unsmiling on a beach in front of a rainbow-striped umbrella. There’s Sylvia with Evie in the backseat, their heads bent together, hair one indecipherable mass. They must be ten or so. Their wrists are adorned with matching, patterned friendship bracelets made of turquoise and orange and red string. They look like they’ve been whispering secrets. What were you saying?
I yawn and put on sneakers. I walk downstairs, but don’t see Sylvia as I walk out and down the graveled dirt path to the water. Buzzing erupts in the forest, whistling through the leaves of the trees, prickling the back of my neck. I swing the flashlight all around me as I continue to walk. Fireflies fling their bodies against my ankles, clawing their way up through the packed dirt and pushing me toward the water. I step over hundreds of little holes, the evacuated homes of the lightning bugs.
Once I reach the water’s edge I see what Sylvia was talking about — a round, hollowed hole not quite a lake, not quite a pond, filled with black water. A solo dock gently swings in the middle, the slight breeze making it move. I passed several other houses on my walk here, but the water feels entirely secluded and completely private; it is the ideal hideout for a set of friends to meet.
I know Evie’s body is no longer being held underwater, but there are screams, a pulsing from the middle rippling out to the small shore made of pebbles and grass. What happened to you? I slip off my shoes and my shorts. I hold the flashlight in my mouth as I take off my shirt. I dip a toe in the dark water and wade into it. The water is thick and painful to move through, but I make my way out to the dock where I stand. I shine the light into the trees from the dock, half-expecting to see a deer with glowing green eyes staring back at me, or a half-land, half-sea monster with rope in its mouth and stones in its claws ready to drown me too.
I’m sopping wet when I arrive back at Sylvia’s home. I walk across the front room, careful not to leave any droplets of water on the floor. I open the fridge in the kitchen and take out a rotisserie chicken. I pick at it, putting cold pieces in my mouth. Sylvia sits at the kitchen table in the corner. She stares at me as I place the chicken down on the counter and wash my hands at the sink, ringing out my wet hair over it.
“I went for a swim.”
“I can see that,” she says.
“But the floor isn’t wet. It didn’t get wet. Why isn’t it wet?”
“Come, have a seat.”
“Do you ever go swimming there now?”
“No, not since.” She lights a cigarette and opens a window, blowing out curls of smoke. “She was going to leave me, you know. First, it was Europe, then Los Angeles. She loved the palm trees. She said she wanted to drive on PCH in a convertible, live near the beach. She was going to go to college out there. And that? That was all fine. It was fine with me, it took some getting used to but I could go with her. She said I could go with her, so I’d follow her and we’d live together and we’d always be together and happy, and then she got pregnant. And babies get in the way of everything. I just couldn’t have that. I couldn’t have it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not really here.”
“I’m not?” She shakes her head at me; her eyelids have grown longer, heavier; she pinches the extra skin and rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms until she sees hundreds of static-like white webs. She crosses her arms and leans back in her seat. She beckons the moon through the window and holds it in her hand like a stone.
“I wish you were. I don’t even know what’s real and what’s not anymore.”
Sylvia makes herself a fresh pot of coffee and starts to write the story again, one more time, for the forty-seventh time. She likes to write different endings each time, but every time Evie dies. She can’t find an ending where she doesn’t. I play with the ends of her wiry gray hair, running my fingers over the crown of her head. Sylvia feels this; it feels like she’s dunking her head under water, a cool rush spreading over her scalp. I kiss her on the cheek, ball a clump of her hair in my fist and let it fall, then I walk out the kitchen door. I feel the grass, sharp and prickly beneath my feet. The sky is a blank black tapestry I shoot up toward.
Evie runs away in Sylvia’s latest rendition. She is sixteen and staying in a motel. She is killed by a trucker who rapes her then strangles her. Her eyes are wet and black like marbles; they bounce out of her sockets and roll out the room. Sylvia likes to remind herself that she had been kind, kinder than the killers in her stories; she had made sure Evie hadn’t suffered before she sunk her body into the black folds of the water.
Before falling asleep, Sylvia likes to imagine her and Evie walking off into a line of sunlight, a runny orange yolk color that continues to fade, and never coming home. Every night she dreams the same dream of being held underwater, and unable to breathe, she wakes and stalks the house like a ghost.
Cajun Chicken Lasagna
best cajun chicken lasagna recipe how to 20200122184810625731zmlarv
Prep: 45 min | Total: 2 hr | Yield: 12 servings
Ingredients
16 dried lasagna noodles
1 pound andouille sausage or smoked pork sausage, quartered lengthwise and sliced
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
Cook noodles according to package Method. Drain; rinse.
Combine sausage, chicken, Cajun seasoning and sage.
In a large skillet cook meat mixture 8 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink.
Remove from skillet using a slotted spoon, reserving drippings in skillet. Set meat mixture aside; keep warm.
In same skillet cook onion, celery, sweet pepper, and garlic in drippings until vegetables are tender.
Stir in meat mixture, one container of the Alfredo sauce, and Parmesan cheese.
Lightly coat a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish or 3 quart rectangular casserole with nonstick spray. Arrange 4 noodles in bottom of dish. Spread with 2 cups of the meat-vegetable mixture. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of the mozzarella.
Repeat layers, ending with noodles.
Carefully spread remaining Alfredo sauce over the top (if sauce is too thick, heat slightly). Cover; bake 1 hour or until heated through.
Let stand for 15 to 20 minutes before carefully cutting.
PUTIN, CHINA READY NUCLEAR WAR | SCOTT RITTER: IT’S NO BLUFF
Have you killed someone in self defense? What psychological burden came with this decision?
Yes. He pulled out a gun, demanded my and my friends wallets. Although I was armed (in a city where concealed carry was legal only with a permit, which I had), he seemed to be after money and had not aimed the gun at us, so I did not draw. When my friend was too slow, he yelled and fired a shot at his feet, injuring him with a fragment. I then drew my weapon and shot him 3 times in the chest. Once he was down I sent my friend to get help while I did cpr, but he was dead. The police were quite supportive and did not arrest me after consultation with their superiors. I had a carry permit and my friend corroborated my story. An “earwitness” had heard the shots and confirmed the number and order. I made a statement and picked up my gun a week later.
After the initial adrenaline and shock wore off, I never felt any negative emotions, other than sadness that he chose to waste his life the way he had. He had 4 robbery and 2 assault convictions and had spent half his life in jail already. If he hadn’t fired a shot he’d still be alive, but it seems like it was only a matter of time. I have never felt any regret.
What made you quit smoking weed?
I did smoke it as a teen. I grew up in So. California, my parents were aged hippies who smoked it. There were rules – like no smoking if it is a weekday, and you have school the next day. No smoking if you are going to drive a car. So yeah, it happened, but I was generally responsible about it.
Then I just grew up, had other responsibilities, like being a mother, and didn’t do it at all.
Much later, when my kids were older, I had some opportunities to do it again. A trip to Amsterdam, and a trip to Las Vegas, after it was made legal. I thought, hey, why not?
I had horrible experiences. I became paranoid, closed up and unable to interact socially. It turns out the weed has become much stronger than when I was young, and we’d just have some homegrown buds… now they’ve been carefully engineered to have a very high level of THC. Two hits would have me nervous and paranoid.
Edibles… OMG… what hell! My family is still talking about the time a family member visiting me in France brought me a little, thin, sucker. I had a sore throat, and decided it might help on the way to a touristy day out. Ended curled up in the fetal position in the back seat floor of the car while they went siteseeing. That shit just goes on FOREVER. A whole day wasted with me miserable.
I decided, perhaps I have less resistance through time, but also, the strains have developed to be so strong, it isn’t a matter of smoking a joint and feeling a little more giggly than usual. It can be a nightmare. Won’t touch it now. God speed to all those that find it enjoyable or useful in their lives, but I won’t be partaking.
The Amazing Digital Circus – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
What is the meaning of “Made in China”? Is it more costly to manufacture a product in another country and import it to the United States?
Ask Walmart they scouted the entire world and sell almost everything from China? Don’t ask China and Chinese haters these are often brain dead Americans who consumed your media and politicians narratives so much lies has become gospel truth to them now. If 155/195 nations on earth has China as their biggest trading nation can all of them be fools? If they could buy from other nations some nearer to their shores wouldn’t they?
United States should stop using Chinese goods if you hate China so much. China won’t mind and the rest of the world can enjoy your lunch. If you prefer 20% inflation and increase your poverty from 100–200 million, that is your choice, don’t whine about it here! Just do it! The US used to be rich and consumed a lot but these days you area small potato customer, go away! China Don sell to Walmart. Walmart buys from China willingly! I supposed the know a thing or two about US consumers!
Buy from a third country and change their made in China label to made in Mexico, Vietnam or Malaysia and you get your stuffs at a premium is what you want, do it! China don’t mind, Mexico, Vietnam and Malaysia won’t mind? If you wish to fool yourself it is your right! Who may mind? American consumers! Do you think of them?
What are the best examples that shows Life is Unpredictable?
In 2014, Clint Eastwood started a relationship with Christina Sandera. He was 84 at the time, and Christina was 51. Eastwood had been in many relationships before and fully expected this to be his last rodeo. He was quite done with it all.
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Fast forward ten years, Eastwood is now 94. He and Sandera did, indeed, stay together. But now sad news was just made public by the Eastwood family — Christina Sandera died, aged 61.
[1] You don’t get into a relationship in your fifties, with a man in his eighties, with the expectation that he will be the one to bury you. You probably won’t like to think much about it, but that’s not exactly the most likely outcome that’ll be on your mind…
Life is incredibly unpredictable. We have expectations and we think we have a lot of certainties, but really? We don’t. We just trick ourselves for the sense of comfort into believeing we know the outcome of things ahead of times, but in actuality we never quite do.
Do Chinese people feel embarrassed when they see “Made in China” goods?
It depends.
Last time, when Obama gave a speech at the port about revitalizing American manufacturing, they used flags to cover the crane’s logo in the background.(As to whether the flag was made in China too, I have no idea, but it is possible.)
But a gust of wind revealed the brand name 振华(Make China Great Again), which made me feel a bit embarrassed.
Later, when President Biden gave a speech at the same place about revitalizing American manufacturing, I kept my eyes on the flag covering the logo the entire time.
As a result, when President Biden praised the “New Panama” crane, you could still see that it was actually made in China…
Therefore, Biden’s nickname in China is 拜振华.
Very embarrassing.
China’s Radar Defeats US Growler in South China Sea
Damn! Holy shit!
When was the hardest you have cried?
The hardest I have ever cried is when my youngest daughter had her breaking point at the hands of her bully. That week of my life made me feel like the worst father in history.
My daughter is socially awkward, meek, shy, and has trouble making friends. Her only interests are Art and Tennis. She’s never had many friends and really didn’t seem to care. That’s what I thought.
In her freshman year in High school, she met the Bully that would change school policy on bullying. This incident happened when My child was in the school library. The library is supposed to be bully proof, like a sanctuary. But not on this day.
She’s quietly drawing with her friend. And out of nowhere she gets smacked from behind on her right ear with baby powder. And of course it was the bully. It was supposed to be a prank. A video prank called “SMACK CAM” to be exact.
Looks like this.
This time it went too far. My child got knocked unconscious and taken to the hospital with a serious concussion.
I get the call and race to the hospital with bitter rage. I’m met by the police, the principal, the school nurse, and the guidance counselor. They were all in her room. I walk in and see my child sleeping with tubes coming out of her nose and arms. I couldn’t talk. I was shaking with anger.
The principal and the police explain to me that they have video evidence, and the bully has been arrested.
Three days later my daughter came home from the hospital and all that I thought I knew about her was only the surface.
We’re sitting on the couch watching TV. I go into the kitchen for something. I come out of the kitchen to see her face wet with tears. She’s not wiping her face, there is no facial expression, no sound. Just a constant flow of big tears. Tears with no sound means deep emotional pain. Especially from a 14 year old girl.
I grab her off the couch and give her the biggest HUG I have ever given her and tell her that I love her and will always be there for her. But only this time, she felt different.
We sit down and I’m trying to tickle her side to get a smile. NOTHING! After some time She finally starts talking.
“I just want this to stop, I’m sick of it”
(OMG!) This has been going on all this time?!
She begins to detail the horrors ever since elementary school. I’ll list only a few.
She’s been called Ugly
They hide her books
They steal her material
They push and shove her
Cut her in line
Put buggers on her shirt
One boy that sits behind her cut her hair without her knowing.
Some things they did were disgusting so I won’t list them. At the end of it all I still wasn’t crying. Until she said this.
“How come no one likes me, what did I do?”
That’s when I lost it. I tried to hide it because I can’t cry in front of my children. I felt weak, my heart pounded and I waited to speak so she wouldn’t notice my voice cracking.
I tell her to go take a shower and we’ll go to the mall and walk around. That was just to get her to walk away so I could go to my room and try not to cry. As soon as I got in my room I felt a fear in me that I can’t explain.
I wanted to trade places with her. I wanted to absorb all her pain, I wanted to kill the bully, I wanted desperately to help her in any way. I blamed myself. Someway somehow it’s my fault.
Why didn’t I notice something? I should have never gotten divorced. Her mom should still be here. I need help!!! It’s too much for me.
I cried so much that my eyes got swollen and my throat got hoarse. Until that day and a few days after, I can’t remember ever crying like that.
After about an hour I open her room door to see my middle daughter holding my youngest while she slept.
Despite the bully’s family asking me not to press charges, I went ahead and pressed charges, and she got six months probation for assault.
My child never went back to school, never wanted to go to school, couldn’t go to sleep, couldn’t eat, and started to hate. Something that I never saw in her.
There wasn’t much I could do. My desperate attempts to get her to smile and liven up became silly. So I signed both of us for Art classes, and she began to show signs of joy.
I later found out that the guidance counselor was my daughter’s shoulder to lean on. Mrs. Sarver was very nice and always helped her in trying times during school.
Mrs. Sarver came over to visit one day with a bunch of letters, and art work from supporting students. I stood back thinking that my child does have friends! But I was wrong.
She sat down and went through every piece of paper, and threw out all but two envelopes. A large piece of very good Art work, and a letter.
They were from “PAIGE”, her only friend. That was the first time I saw her smile in a month.
I enrolled her in a private school the following year where she is doing very well. And despite her psychiatrist’s suggestion, we will not be using any pills.
The China The Media Never Shows! 🇨🇳 Our First Day in SHENZHEN
At what moment in your life did you witness true evil?
(Graphic/sickening content) To this day, I hate the person who did this. I never got a good look at this person and have never seen them or their care ever since.
I was doing my normal 30 minute run of the day and I would usually finish my run at a dead end street, where I would give myself a 5 minute break. Once reaching my stop, I would always go right under a tree to block the burning sun and rest. I was a bit hidden by the tree, so no one would be able to spot me unless they truly tried.
I was in the middle of having my drink, when I noticed a navy blue Ford Explorer with tinted windows make a stop right next to the empty road, almost right beside me. I continued drinking my water, but stopped when the driver slid their window fully down. I couldn’t see the driver well, because the driver seat was facing the opposite way from me. So I was only able to see the silhouette of the driver through the tinted windows.
I was able to hear a commotion going on in the car, but after the driver put down their window, all I heard then were two children, a boy and a girl, repeatedly crying out, “Please don’t do it mom! Please don’t do it!” I was a bit interested in what they were talking about, so I hid a bit more, so that I wouldn’t be seen snooping. The mother, who was the driver, kept telling them to shut up and in her exact words said “Shut up! Shut up, you crybabies! I have enough trouble caring for you two! I’ll be damned if I have to care for these stupid things!”
Through the tinted window, I was able to see her pick up what seemed to be an open cardboard box that was small enough to fit through the window, but big enough to put a variety of small objects in. The children kept screaming, “NO! NO!”. As a speeding car was coming down the road, she threw the box right in its path without giving it a chance to react. At that moment, I heard tiny meows coming from in the box as it flew through the air towards the ground. I froze in horror as the box hit the front tire of the speeding car and the box went right under. All heard as the box went under the tire was a disturbing wet crackling noise that still haunts me to this day.
By the time the car fully ran over the box, the mother with her children were long gone, speeding the opposite direction of the other car. I couldn’t believe what I just saw. I just stood still and watched as the man came out of his car to see what he ran over. I was hoping that it was anything other than what I thought it was. To my horror, the man pulled out the now almost fully flat box and it was oozing out this bright reddish liquid, which I believe was blood. The man took one look in the box and immediately threw up on his car. The man dropped the flat box, went in his car, and drove away.
I was so stunned that I stared at the box for a good ten seconds. I couldn’t believe I witnessed this. I knew what was in the box, but I refused to believe it. My sick curiosity wanted to see what was truly inside that box. I didn’t want to believe that there were kittens in there. I finally came out of my daze and went across the street towards the box. The closer I got, the faster my heart began to beat. Standing right over it, I saw the small opening the man left as he peeked inside. Looking inside the box was the biggest mistake of my life. What I saw was the most traumatizing image that still sticks to me to this day. I won’t describe it because just thinking about the image makes me sick.
After seeing what was inside, it was for a fact that inside the box was a group of disfigured, flat baby kittens that weren’t even given a chance to live another day. How could she? I said to myself. How could anyone be so disgusting? I knew there was nothing I could do, so instead of leaving the box on the ground exposed, I put it in a nearby garbage can. The box left a red stained road with a bit of the box left on it and all I did right after was walk straight home, leaving behind my bottle of water at the tree where this all started.
I wanted to share this story because I had it as a secret from my family at home and I don’t plan on ever telling them. Just writing this story was a huge struggle for me. As you can see on my profile picture, I own an orange male cat that I have taken care of since birth. I could not stand it if anything horrible were to happen to him.
Thank you for reading my experience.
Those poor poor children.
CHINA is NOT what we expected – FIRST 24 HOURS in Beijing
What are some things Chinese people dislike about other Chinese people?
Chinese parents judge success through their kids’ school performance.
They will never say that they are better; instead they will push their kids to win piano, music, math, science and other competitions. If you listen carefully to the conversations among mothers, they will talk about their son/daughter winning some competition. If the other mother’s fall silent because their child did not win, the jealousy in the room is almost palpable.
The idea is that the kid should provide the ammo so that the parents can play this one-upmanship game.
Generally, the mother’s supervise their child’s study schedule, and it is normal for the child to be busy for 14–16 hours per day.
In China, class school grades are public; everyone knows how each other student is doing. Sometimes, a good student will volunteer to help a student who is flagging, so this is not entirely a bad thing. The worst thing to be is to be so slow that one pulls the average for the whole class down when compared to other classes.
This intense competition is mostly absent in the west, which is why many Chinese parents want to send their children to school in the west. They think it is easier for their children, because they think that western children are slow and easy-going compared to Chinese children.
The great irony is that even when they move to the west, Chinese mothers push their children just as hard as when they were going to school in China. The Chinese bring that intensity and pressure with them wherever they go.
If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be Chinese anymore.
Would it be possible for Taiwan to declare independence from China? Kind of like how the USA declared independence from Great Britain?
It is not possible. Whether it is by UN law or by the constitution of both China & Taiwan.
In the US civil war, the then US president Abraham Lincoln told the rebellious South that:
I am elected president of USA. My duty is to protect the integrity of USA. You cannot say I invade you.
Back to China-Taiwan
There was a civil war in China (called ROChina at the time). The then ruling party KMT was defeated by CPC in 1949. KMT fled to Taiwan while CPC stayed on mainland. CPC renamed ROChina to PRChina, like Qing was renamed to ROC in 1911 (5000 years’ of Chinese tradition).
In theory, the civil war has not finished as of 2024 because China has not reunified yet.
Internationally, between 1949 & 1971, both ROChina & PRChina exist. In 1971, however, UN resolution 2758 announced …
1, There is only ONE China & PRChina is the only legitimate government that represents China.
That is, ROChina ceases to exist on world stage. Only a handful tiny tiny countries still recognised ROC.
Taiwan is part of China. Ref: US doc 203 & the 1978 USA-China joint communique by former US president J Carter.
2, To make it crystal clear, on 2024/5/23, UN told the world “Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China.”
By UN charter, China has a duty to protect the integrity of Chinese territory that incl Taiwan province.
Internally, both constitution of China & Taiwan say:
China territory = mainland + Taiwan + some islands & reefs around China.
Why Taiwan dares not call for referendum? Because referendum involves mainland too.
Militarily Taiwan cannot fight China.
That is, Taiwan can NEVER be independent. Though opportunistic politicians must shout independence so as to get tons of foreign funding (corruption), before Taiwan is discarded by USA like a used condom. Remember USA discarded ROChina in 1971.
conclusion
Whether it is UN resolution or Chinese-Taiwanese constitutions, China has a duty to protect the integrity of China. Like former US president A Lincoln protecting the integrity of USA in the US civil war.
China is NOT invading or attacking Taiwan. Just to suppress Taiwan rebellion, like Lincoln suppressing the South.
China will reunify with Taiwan one way or another. It is the duty of China for the sake of Chinese nation, culture & history.
China’s 1st option is peaceful unification. If necessary, China is not afraid to use military.
The fresh taste of summer laden with your favorite cheeses!
Garden Style Lasagna 1
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1/4 cup (2 ounces) butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup each asparagus, zucchini, green onions, yellow squash and red pepper, diced
6 ounces portobello mushrooms, chopped
2 cups Roma tomatoes, diced
2 cups baby spinach leaves, diced
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh oregano leaves, chopped
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 cups (15 ounces) Wisconsin Ricotta Cheese
1 cup (4 ounces) Wisconsin Parmesan Cheese, grated, divided use
1 large egg, beaten
1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper
12 no-cook lasagna noodles
2 cups (8 ounces) Wisconsin Mozzarella Cheese, shredded, divided use
1 cup (4 ounces) Wisconsin Smoked Provolone Cheese, shredded, divided use
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Butter the bottom of a 13 x 9 x 2 inch pan.
Melt 1/4 cup butter in skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and sauté for 1 to 2 minutes.
Add asparagus, zucchini, onions, squash, red pepper, mushrooms, tomatoes and spinach; sauté stirring frequently, 4 to 5 minutes.
Stir in basil, oregano and vinegar; set aside.
In bowl, stir together ricotta, 1/2 cup Parmesan, egg, salt and pepper; set aside.
Place layer of noodles (4 noodles) on bottom of prepared pan. Spread 1/2 ricotta mixture over noodles, top with 1/3 vegetable mixture, 3/4 cup mozzarella and 1/2 cup provolone.
Repeat with noodles, remaining ricotta mixture, 1/3 vegetable mixture, 3/4 cup mozzarella and remaining provolone. Top with noodles, remaining vegetable mixture, mozzarella and Parmesan.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes.
Let stand for 5 to 10 minutes; serve.
Why do husbands leave after 20+ years of marriage?
After my first wife divorced me – 6 years – I did a lot of soul searching and reading – and realized I was looking for too much from her and giving too little – As well as not even thinking about things like children, lifestyle, etc – For example, she never wanted children – and I did.
I spent many years making sure I knew what I wanted, making sure I knew what my potential new wife wanted, and committing to support her no matter how things went.
I followed through – no matter what demands of my job and career, family was my first priority – when my new wife became pregnant, I went to every medical appointment with her, listened to thr doctors, made myself aware of the risks (she had a mental illness and physical issues), and took on all tasks – When my son was born with a cardiac defect, I took on the responsibility of helping him and my wife – but, despite my taking time for my family, my career still rocketed up beyond my highest expectations.
When my wife, after our second child, became incapable of working a regular job and incapable of taking care of our children, I hired people to take care of them – and took much time off work still to take her to specialists to treat her condition.
Later when a car accident resulted in 10 years of constant pain, I both took her to every single person she wanted for her back and got up ever 3 hours every night to get her an ice pack from thr freezer – As well as taking our children to places and friend’s houses.
Then I used an entire 401k to help her establish her own business. Which she failed because she did nothing after the first few months.
Yet she never heard one complaint from me – only support.
After 20 years of marriage, she “figured out” that I had held her back – since all of her fellow Kellogg Business School graduates were multi-millionaires while we frequently faced near bankruptcy.
She convinced her friend that I had been physically abisung her for years (after I stepped in to stop her from yelling at and hitting our straight A daughter), and forced me to move out or face arrest due to false testimony for her and her friend – who made clear to me that she was willing to lie to the police.
After trying and failing to negotiate an amicable Separation or Divorce – While she interferred with my legal access to my own children plus Vo third to Siena money at a rate that would lead to bankruptcy within 3 months, I finally filed for divorce – thus allowing me legal access to my children and legally limiting her access to my income.
After talking to other men and observing things in divorce court, I conclude that this occurs very frequently – Women deciding that they are “entitled” to certain things and blaming their lack of wealth, etc on their husbands – rather than simply working with him to get what they want.
As always happens – the lawyers got most of the money and the settlement was almost to the dollar what I had proposed months before the divorce filing – minus 3 years of legal fees.
Karma was that she was so bad with our children that her neighbors called the police a total of 16 times in 4 months – leading to her losing all legal access to our children.
My children went from the perception of 2 loving parents to the knowledge that their Mothet did not give a damn about them – only herself and her “needs”.
I met many divorced women whose husbands did this same sort of shit – putting their “needs” above everyone else – this is not a “men-women” thing – this is about people unwilling or unable to grow up and take on adult responsibility.
Compilation: The Moon is Weird – No, really. The Moon does not make sense
In the Summer of the 1960’s and into the 1970’s was a blur of kid activities. We would ride everywhere on our bicycles, and our parents would all have various activities for us to get involved in.
One of which was “blueberry picking”. And us kids, loved it.
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We would go ahead and eat, and pick and put the rest in a bucket. Repeat, over and over.
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Just spend hours picking the blueberries off the low bushes, and put them in the bucket.
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Take the bucket home, and then wash.
Add cream and there you have it! The perfect Summer special treat for young boys and girls.
So very Summer.
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These blueberry, blackberry, (and elderberry) bushes are everywhere in Pennsylvania. And getting those berries were a great deal of fun. It always was an all afternoon outing, and we were often taken to remote areas to collect those berries, and it was a great deal of fun for us kids.
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It’s a treasured memory for me today, and you know as you get older, you just don’t ever get this opportunity UNLESS you go out to take your kids out on their very own outings.
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Ah! Fun times.
Today…
What’s the most disrespectful thing a doctor/nurse did to you or your newborn after you gave birth?
Not me but to my aunt. Sorry, this was during birth but I decide to go ahead and post here.
During my aunt’s first 6 months of the pregnancy, she fell down 2 flights of stairs and had been taken to the hospital almost immediately as she had contractions but they sent her home with pills to stop the contractions. 8 months in and the baby tried to come out anyway, a quick trip to the emergency room we received a “You’ll be fine come back near the scheduled time.”
Two weeks later her water breaks and we rush to the hospital, her doctor is on vacation so we have a doctor sub in. This doctor quickly pissed off all the Nurses, the CRN, and the family. Did a quick test and said her water didn’t break, said we wasted her time, gave her no pain pills, and told her to eat some food and she’ll be okay.
1 hour later the baby starts to come out and the nurses rushed outside and panicked and we overheard them asking where the doctor was, “Where’s the bloody doctor?”
“She’s eating food and she said she’s not coming and she’s tired of ‘bitches faking'”. Now we’re all pissed off ready to send a complaint and sue the hospital and the doctor.
Finally, the nurse comes in starts her on the procedure, with the other nurse trying to get the sub-doctor or another doctor in the room. Then my aunt starts up a blood-curdling scream (Note that she couldn’t get any pain medication at this point) and the dreadful sound of “She’s losing too much blood!” and “The baby’s head is too big shes ripping a hole!” (I was scared having done no research or experiencing a birth before) finally, the sub burst in the door to take over delivering the baby and getting my aunt emergency surgery.
Let’s just say not only did we get compensation from the hospital, we sued twice.
1. The hospital for the birthing process and unprofessionalism.
2. The doctor for life endangerment, for abusing her license, and two more things I was told and forgot.
She lost her license, she has to pay for my cousin’s medical issues from the surgery. The hospital completely paid for the emergency surgery and we walked away satisfied.
How many countries can the Chinese withstand an attack?
From where?
From the Air – The farthest airbase cannot be more than 60 miles away right? That allows a rapid sneak attack into the airspace and out
That means Airbase or Aircraft carrier
That’s Philippines & Taiwan for Airbase and US and Japan for Aircraft carrier
You don’t expect Germany to send aircraft all those thousands of miles away do you?
From the water?
Again Japan, South Korea and US are the only possibility
India is a definite no no on the South China Sea
Too far from any Indian coastline
Okay for Maritime operations NOT FOR WAR
From the Land?
India has a border so India can make an incursion
Who else?
DPRK, Russia are not enemies
Nepal and Bhutan are way too weak
Nobody else
So worst case, the combined force against China would be :-
Aerial Air Force from US from Taiwan and Philippines
Naval Force from US, Japan and Korea along the South China Sea
Land Force from India
China has a decisive Army Group to ensure Indian Army can be countered
PLAN can easily take care of Japan and Korea
Taiwan and Philippines can be bombed to atoms in a few days
So ultimately it will be China vs USA and that’s how it will boil down to
WARNING | US Cities On Russia’s Nuclear Hit List
What are the most insane pictures of x-rays taken on people?
A collection of harrowing x-rays :-
Brutal X-ray of a man’s arm after a horrific meat grinder accident.
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X-ray shows a tear gas canister that fatally penetrated the skull of an Iraqi demonstrator during civil unrest in 2019.
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This chilling X-ray reveals the tragic end of Chen Liu, a 27-year-old man discovered in the marshlands near Sydney, Australia. He had been brutally murdered, with 34 nails shot into his body.
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In 2011, Leroy Luetscher, 86, fell on pruning shears in his yard, impaling his eye socket and neck. Despite the pain and injury, he managed to call for help. Doctors removed the shears and reconstructed his orbital floor, saving his eye.
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In 2020, the police released an X-ray image showing the severe injuries sustained by a young woman who was involved in a car crash while her feet were resting on the dashboard.
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In 2004, an X-ray showed a 5-centimeter nail in a South Korean patient’s skull. The man had a severe headache. Doctors at a Seoul hospital discovered the nail, which they believed had been there for four years after an accident, unknown to the patient.
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The X-ray image depicts the gruesome result of being shot in the elbow with a 12-gauge shotgun.
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This x-ray shows how a 16-year-old boy survived a violent incident where a 5-inch knife was impaled in his head during a robbery in London.
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In 2004, Isidro Mejia, a construction worker, had six nails embedded in his skull after a nail gun accident. Five were removed in surgery on the same day, and the sixth was extracted later, following a reduction in swelling. He survived.
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Source : X
Why do some Japanese think they are superior to Han Chinese?
Originally Answered: Why does such an overwhelming amount of Japanese think they are superior to Han Chinese?
Actually, just today I experienced something like superiority over Chinese from a Japanese.
A japanese customer of mine received his shipment late due to the Chinese National holidays. In his email to me, which I translated using google translate, it says
“You Chinese are only so so. Not efficient at all compared to us Japanese. There is no excuse for being late. We Japanese are always punctual. It is an insult to customers when we give excuse for being late. Chinese have a long way to go before they learn what it is to be at our level of existence.”
Now, firstly I’m not chinese, I’m Singaporean. I just operate from China that’s all. So I explain to him in my reply to him that I’m Singaporean and the delay is due to the Chinese National holidays where everybody is not working for a week.
His reply (which again is tranlated by google)
“So sorry for the misunderstanding. It must not be your fault then, I did not know you are not Chinese. I know Singaporeans are very professional. You would not have delayed the shipment if you do not have to. The chinese are really unbearable. It is so inefficient to have 1 week holiday. Japanese will never allow this to happen, it is a disgrace. Chinese is really only so so. It must be difficult for you to work with such people.”
At first my ego was tickled by the fact that by simply mentioning that I’m Singaporean, he thought otherwise. But then I truly felt insulted by myself for feeling like that. So my reply…
“Dear Sir, there is no excuse for such misunderstandings, it is an insult to me when you continue to practice such racism even in your reply. It makes me feels like a racist if I’m to agree with you on anything you mentioned.
As such, I would proceed to refund all monies paid by you to your account once the banks starts operating tomorrow. I will also proceed to stop the shipment from proceeding tomorrow as it is in our best interest not to deal with each other again.
Have a good life. “
So am I wrong? Or do some Japanese really does feel superior to the Chinese?
Anyway, a disclaimer, I don’t do this to all customers. I just took a look at his order which is less than 500USD and decided that I can afford to teach him a lesson. And now after I read Naoya Yamaguchi answer, I really felt better already. Thank you Naoya.
Cat Goes To Temple Every Day To Become A Buddha. You Won’t Believe What Happened To It
Years ago I worked at a psychiatric hospital in inner-city Chicago as a relatively-inexperienced RN.
While covering the adolescent unit overnight, I enjoyed listening to the stories told by two of our more seasoned and perceptive mental health technicians. These guys were physically imposing, youngish men of color who had grown up in the neighborhood and had pretty much seen it all, and usually more than once.
They found me intriguing for the same reason I found them to be so: Namely, that with my white middle-class small-town self, my first-person perceptions struck them as not simply different from their own but basically hilarious if not downright outrageous.🤭
They would often reminisce about growing up on the city’s south side, being mostly raised by a feisty grandma, getting whooped by this same 90-lb. grandma for doing crazy stuff that could have resulted in serious bodily harm or worse, and about eating bacon fat sandwiches for those last few days each month until grandma’s social security check came in.
Their impressions of white people were mostly informed by television sit coms and commercials, but also a roughly two-year stint they had done together at a sister psych facility on Chicago’s much-tonier lakeshore:
One night they related the story of a depressed and tearful adolescent boy who had confided during a unit group therapy session that he knew. KNEW. That his parents didn’t love him and in fact, had obviously NEVER loved him. His proof? On his 16th birthday his parents had gifted him with a brand-new Mercedes in his favorite color, blue.
Perplexed, one of my tech buddies had gently inquired of the boy how, exactly, this indicated his parents didn’t love him?
Between agonized sobs, the teen managed to choke out that he had wanted a blue BMW, not the BLUE MERCEDES BENZ!!
I don’t know if that screams upper class to everybody but it sure did to my workmates in that place and time.
Tortiglioni with Spicy Sausage Sauce
This recipe calls for only 6 ounces of meat, so it is good if want to cut down on meat in your diet. (I usually have to make meatballs in a separate sauce for MY family! LOL!)
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Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped
1 pound ripe Italian plum tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2/3 cup red wine
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
12 ounces dried tortiglioni (or use rigatoni, penne, or ziti)
6 ounces spicy salami, rind removed (I sometimes use pepperoni)*
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, to garnish
Grated Parmesan cheese, to serve
Instructions
Heat oil and add onion, celery garlic and chili and cook gently, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, until softened.
Add tomatoes, tomato paste, wine, sugar, salt and pepper to taste and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Lower heat, cover and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes. Add a few spoonsful of water occasionally if the sauce becomes too thick.
Meanwhile, cook pasta.
Chop the salami into bite-size pieces and add to the sauce. Heat through, then taste for seasoning.
Drain pasta and put into large bowl, pour sauce on top and toss to mix.
Scatter parsley on top and serve with grated cheese.
Notes
* Buy the salami in one piece so that you can chop it into large chunks.
What’s the most unprofessional thing a doctor has said to you?
I was 22 or 23 years old, married less than a year, when my husband, R., had his first gout attack. At the time I had long blonde hair and weighed about 100 pounds, so I looked like I was maybe 16 years old.
My husband went to his family doctor, who put him on two drugs. I’m a firm believer in asking doctors questions, so at R’s first check-up after going on the medications I asked for information about them. The doctor explained it this way:
“There are three drugs we use for gout. There’s one that we give to patients who are in the middle of a gout attack; it’s a powerful pain reliever and is one of the drugs I prescribed for R. He’s off of it now. The other two drugs are for maintenance. Since gout is caused by uric acid crystals in the blood stream we can treat it either by forcing the kidneys to remove more uric acid or by encouraging the body to produce less uric acid. I prescribed the drug that tells the kidneys to work harder.”
I thought about that for a moment, and then said “R. already has albuminuria (a marker of kidney problems); don’t you think it might be safer to use the drug that won’t cause further stress to his kidneys?”
Well, apparently this doctor wasn’t used to having his judgment questioned by the wife of a patient, or else he wasn’t used to having it questioned by a “mere girl,” because rather than actually considering my suggestion he decided to lie. He said, “R. has been on this drug for a month now and we know that it’s working. If I take him off of it, and it then turns out that the other drug won’t do the job for him, when I put him back on it he may have developed an allergy to it. And that would mean that there’s nothing we can do for his gout; the crystals will get into his organs and he’ll die horribly.”
It was the first time a doctor lied to me, so I didn’t recognize it as a lie; even now I only know that it was a lie because a good doctor who is also a friend has told me so. But at the time I accepted it and didn’t push the issue, a mistake I’ve never made again.
My husband died almost two and a half years ago, after discontinuing dialysis. I visited him in the nursing home every day, even after he stopped recognizing me. It isn’t a good way to go.
If I thought that doctor was still alive I don’t know what I’d do; it’s been too long to report him for malpractice (almost 50 years), but I will never forgive him for what he did to my husband.
I had been walking in the desert for what seemed like days. I was thirsty. My radiator went kaput somewhere on I-10 last night. No cell reception out here. The desert night comforted me—beautiful stars and comet trails. But after the sun rose, the temperature shot up far too quickly. By the time the sun was directly overhead, my legs felt like rubber and my tongue was swollen.
In the distance, what looked like a town from the Old West arose. One dirt road split two rows of shabby buildings. “Water,” I said out loud to myself. I blinked five or six times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Mirages of water on the horizon had been fooling me all morning, but this looked different. A tumbleweed blew by. A vulture landed on top of a barrel cactus. A scorpion crawled up my leg and I brushed it away.
When I got to town, I pinched myself to make sure it was all real. A saloon with faint piano music welcomed me on the right and an empty sheriff’s office slept on the left. The saloon probably had water so I walked through its two swinging half doors. My tongue felt like it was the size of a shoe sole.
The saloon was empty except for a bartender with a long, white beard and a Victorian woman playing an upright tack piano. The woman’s song was familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d heard it before. It didn’t sound like something you would hear in a saloon, though. It was almost a slow waltz, but the timing was complex, in three, then three, then two.
“Whatcha drinkin’, partner?” the bartender said.
“Wawa,” I said. My mouth wasn’t working.
“Haha,” the bartender said. “Looks like you got the thirst real good.”
The bartender pulled out a vanity hand mirror and handed it to me, pointing at my tongue. My tongue was the size of a saucer, inflamed and inflated like a balloon.
“The name’s Smitty,” the bartender said. “I reckon you prolly want some water. Water ain’t cheap out here, sonny. It’ll cost you. Cost you big.”
I pulled a hundred dollar bill out of my wallet and offered it to Smitty.
“You’re money ain’t no good here,” he said. Smitty pulled a pint glass down from the shelf and poured some clear, crisp, water into it from a barrel that had a tap. He placed the glass in front of me. I reached for it. He pulled it away.
“Hold on, now. I’ll give this here water to you, but you have to promise to do me a favor,” Smitty said.
“O-way, o-way,” I said.
He gave me the glass and I poured it straight into my throat and into my belly. A few seconds later, my tongue shrunk and I felt much better.
“Thank you, Smitty,” I said, panting in relief.
“Charlene plays the piano real nice, don’t she?” Smitty said.
“Why yes,” I said.
“Charlene’s in trouble, see,” Smitty said. “I’m gonna call in that favor today if it’s all the same.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I need you to shoot Terrible Ted for me,” Smitty said.
I felt my stomach hit the floor, not literally, like my tongue probably would have had I not gotten some water.
“I can’t shoot nobody,” I said.
“Well then, I ain’t givin’ you no more water,” Smitty said. I felt my tongue begin to tingle again. It swelled ever so slightly.
“And if I shoot Terrible Tim—”
“Ted”
“Terrible Ted. What then?”
“You can put your mouth on this here tap spigot for all I care. All the water here is yours,” Smitty said.
“What about the Sherriff? Won’t I get thrown in jail for shooting someone?”
“Nope,” Smitty said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“Terrible Ted done shot the sheriff. And now, he want’s to make off with my Charlene.” Charlene continued with her odd, cut time waltz.
“I ain’t got a gun, Smitty.”
Smitty unbuckled a belt and holster from his waist and put the bundle of revolver and bullets on the bar. “Here you go,” he said.
“Where do I find, Ted?”
“He’ll be here at sundown.”
“What does he look like?”
“You can’t miss him. Big, tall, dresses in all black. You know, how you’d expect someone named Terrible Ted to look.”
“What is this place?” I said.
“Tiny Town.”
“Wha—”
Suddenly, my tongue began to swell and I couldn’t speak.
“Yeah, you prolly have a ton of questions, like “Is this real?,” “Why is my tongue getting so big?,” “Why is Charlene playing Radiohead?”
“Waydiowed!” I pushed out. My tongue was getting fatter by the minute.
“Yeah, I don’t care for them that much. Singer sounds like a drowning cat. She likes that there ‘Pyramid Song,’ so I like it, too. Bout all she plays, anyway.”
“What wime wis it?” I asked.
“3:30. You got ‘bout an hour and a half till showtime.”
“Oh wime?”
“Ted.”
“Oh.”
I wandered out of the saloon and onto Main Street. A tumbleweed crossed my path. My tongue hurt. If I strained my eyes, I could see the swollen end of it in my lower field of vision. A vulture landed on a hitching post to my right. It squawked at me. I sat in a rocking chair on a porch not a few yards from the saloon. A scorpion ran across my pant leg and I brushed it off. I fell asleep.
I awoke to the sound of a slow pile driver banging in the distance. My swollen tongue made it difficult for me to turn my head. My tongue was the size of an inner tube and hung down below my belt.
When I did catch a look at the pile driver, it wasn’t a pile driver. It was a twelve foot tall man, dressed in black, walking slowly and heavily into town.
“Teywible Ted,” I tried to say.
Ted made his way to the middle of the street on the other end of Tiny Town. The town proper was maybe fifty yards end to end, so he wasn’t too far from me.
Terrible Ted stood in the middle of the street with his hands about six inches from his side. From where I sat, he looked like a cross between just about every western character you could imagine. His head was square like John Wayne’s. He was scruffy like Buford Mad Dog Tannen. His build was like Clint Eastwood, but twice as large.
“Draw!” Terrible Ted said.
I jumped up from my chair, walked to the road, and turned to face Terrible Ted.
My tongue throbbed of fire. It hurt so badly that I would have gladly shot Ted just to make it all stop. From the sight of things, Ted was going to shoot me anyway. I’d might as well try to defend myself.
“Draw!” he said.
I pulled the revolver from my side belt and pulled the trigger. My shot landed ten feet in front of Ted.
Ted pulled his revolver and shot me. His bullet hit my tongue, but the bullet bounced off of it. While the throbbing continued, the impact of the bullet was insensate.
“Draw!” he said.
I fumbled the revolver from my side and took a shot. This time, the bullet was closer, but hit short, just in front of Ted’s black boots.
Then, Ted shot me again in the tongue. I felt nothing.
Before he could say “draw” again, I pulled the revolver up with both hands, lined Ted up in my sights as well as I could, and pulled the trigger. This time, I shot him right between the eyes. He fell backwards and hit the ground with a resonant thud. I twirled the revolver around my finger, like they do in the movies, but I didn’t know how to land it in my holster.
My tongue was on fire and nearly dragging on the ground now. I went into the bar. Smitty was gone. Charlene and her tack piano interpretation of Radiohead were also gone. I put my mouth under Smitty’s water barrel and pulled the spigot. Water cascaded into my mouth. My tongue began to shrink. I kept drinking. The barrel seemed to never run out. I kept drinking. Then, I passed out.
I awoke to a splitting headache. The fluorescent lights didn’t help. The walls were white and the room was cold. My tongue hurt like it was on fire, but in stead of being a big fat inner tube hanging from my mouth, it was just a little swollen and wrapped in a bandage.
“Mr. Simmons, you’re awake,” a soft, pleasant voice said from the hall.
“Tharlene?” I tried to say.
“Yes, I’m Nurse Charlene. I will let Dr. Smith know you are awake.”
“Wha’ happen?”
“You were stung in the tongue by a scorpion,” she said.
“And, lucky to be alive,” Dr. Smith said. He swept into the room, grabbed the medical chart, and scratched his well groomed white beard.
“That bandage on your tongue can come off tomorrow,” he continued.
“Wher ‘m I?” I tried to say.
“Desert Town Medical. Highway patrol found your vehicle thirty miles south of here. A construction crew laying tar saw you wandering around, delirious. Another hour and you would have been done for.”
“Sorpion?” I asked.
“Yeah, only one critter leaves a sting like that. Had to be a scorpion. Never seen one prick someone in the tongue, though. Must a felt like your tongue was the size of Idaho. You probably hallucinated a bit, too.”
Before I could attempt to speak, Dr. Smith continued, “We’ll keep you over night and then send you on your way.”
“Buh—”
“Your car? We towed it here for you. Mechanic said it just needed some coolant. Topped you off, too. He’ll send you a bill for the tow and tune up. We’re glad you’re alive son.”
My head spun. Nurse Charlene and Dr. Smith left the room. Moments later, Charlene returned with some water and a few pamphlets. “Here’s some light reading for you, if you’re up for it. Sorry we don’t have a television.”
One pamphlet read: “The History of Desert Town: From Tiny Town to the Best Kept Secret in the Desert.” The pamphlet showed Tiny Town, as it appeared to me, from the saloon, to the dirt road through the middle.
I drank the water, felt my tongue’s bandage on the roof of my mouth, and was grateful to be alive.
The next day, I drove on. On the way out of town, I passed a road paving crew. Their large black tar machine had broken down. “Terrible Ted” was spray painted on its rear.
Is China powerful enough to invade the Philippines? How long would it take for the Chinese to land their feet in Manila?
Hi Don Wynn. Since you ask a naive question, it is better that i give you a naive answer. Actually China scare the hell out of Philippines during the recent confrontation with chinese coast guards only armed with axe ( presumably to prevent suicides of filipinos soldiers) to confront filipino soldiers fully armed with rifles who refuse to shoot but instead surrender their rifles to the chinese coast guards.
After a week, a Philippines trawler exploded and sunk in Chinese water. Fisherman was saved but not arrested and hand over the survivors back to Philippines.
Literally means that China is not interested in colonising Philippines but only claim what belongs to the chinese as compare to America that colonised Texas, Hawaii, Guam, etc and now most likely Philippines.
Trump’s program for America, end of globalism
The Duran
Why is the US doing such a bad job countering China’s rise?
The United States’ inadequate response to China’s rise is nothing short of a geopolitical blunder, driven by fear, misinformation, and a Cold War mentality that is both outdated and counterproductive.
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The reality is that America’s attempts to counterbalance China have been fundamentally flawed because they are based on misperceptions and misguided strategies, failing to recognize the true dynamics of China’s growth and influence.
At the core of the U.S.’s ineffective approach lies a significant misunderstanding of modern China. The American narrative, largely shaped by the media, often portrays China as an oppressive, backward nation on the brink of collapse, rife with human rights abuses and economic instability. This skewed perception leads to policies based on fictional threats rather than the real, evolving landscape of a rapidly advancing China. Operating under these misconceptions ensures that the U.S. is often preparing for battles that do not exist while neglecting the actual areas where China excels.
One area where U.S. strategies have particularly fallen short is technological competition. In its bid to restrict Chinese access to advanced technologies, the U.S. has inadvertently spurred China to double down on self-reliance and innovation. Efforts to curtail entities like Huawei have backfired, with China making significant strides in fields like 5G, AI, and quantum computing. The launch of the Huawei Mate 60, with its domestically-produced 5G chip, serves as a testament to how U.S. actions have often spurred China’s technological advancements instead of stalling them.
The economic interdependence between the U.S. and China adds another layer of complexity. Despite attempts to sever ties and decouple the economies, the sheer scale of trade and investment links makes this next to impossible without causing significant harm to both sides. U.S. industries, from agriculture to tech, are deeply integrated with China, and measures like tariffs and sanctions often backfire, harming American businesses and prompting severe pushback. This economic entanglement means that any attempt to counter China must be meticulously calculated to avoid mutual economic downfall.
Globally, the U.S.’s attempts to isolate China have frequently missed the mark. China continues to bolster its influence through initiatives like the Belt and Road and expanding its reach within organizations like BRICS. These efforts have allowed China to create strong economic and diplomatic ties, countering U.S. attempts at isolation and even attracting nations traditionally allied with the U.S. to engage more with Beijing for economic and strategic benefits.
Back home, the United States faces its internal challenges that further impede its ability to effectively respond to China’s rise. Issues like political polarization, economic inequality, and a lack of coherent industrial policy hinder America’s global competitiveness. While China focuses on coordinated, long-term investments in infrastructure, technology, and education, the U.S. is often stuck in partisan gridlock, lacking the collective focus needed for such bold initiatives.
The U.S. military-industrial complex also exacerbates this situation. Driven by vested interests in perpetuating conflict narratives, this complex steers the U.S. towards military solutions over diplomatic and economic engagement. The legacy of a Cold War mentality, fueled by defense contractors and hawkish policymakers, perpetuates hardline stances that ultimately isolate potential allies and destabilize international relations.
Furthermore, efforts by the U.S. to persuade its allies to decouple from China have seen limited success. Countries with significant economic ties to China, like Germany and France, resist pressure to align too closely with U.S. demands, prioritizing their economic interests over geopolitical maneuvering. These nations understand that a balanced approach with both global powers often yields better outcomes, highlighting a divergence in interests that complicates U.S. strategies.
Ultimately, the U.S. needs a fundamental shift in how it perceives and engages with China. Strategies based on misinformation, fear, and outdated Cold War thinking are doomed to fail. To effectively navigate China’s rise, the U.S. must first acknowledge the realities of China’s strengths and aspirations. Only by understanding this true China can America develop policies that are responsive and constructive, fostering global stability and mutual growth rather than ongoing contention and rivalry.
ACDC – It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock N Roll (Extended)
Rockin’ them bagpipes.
Why do European people stop traveling to the USA?
A few years ago my family and I were eating at JFK. My daughter was in a chair, my two year in a stroller. Out of nowhere an airport cop came up screaming that I needed to strapy child into the stroller and now! This was apparently a very dangerous thing, a kid sitting in a stroller doing nothing but looking about at people passing.
Due to the imbalance of power and not wanting to miss my flight I didn’t point out that (a) I am the parent not her, (b) I decide (c) I didn’t need my kid or family to be shouted at, a simple discussional tone would have worked (d) she could genuinely go fuck herself and she really left us thinking, fuck this place we’re outta here.
I like the US, but have no idea why anyone with a uniform can’t just act like an adult and not a completely paranoid schizo.
Dog rescue
Rigatoni with Olives and Bacon
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
6 slices bacon
1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
8 ounces dried rigatoni (or other small pasta)
12 pitted and chopped cured black olives (such as Kalamata)
1 to 2 ounce piece Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped marjoram or thyme (optional)
Instructions
In medium skillet, cook bacon until crisp (reserve drippings); blot, coarsely chop and set aside.
In bacon drippings, sauté onion until soft and just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, cook pasta according to package directions, drain and transfer to warm serving platter or large shallow bowl.
Toss pasta with bacon, onion and olives. Season with salt and pepper to taste; toss again.
Use a vegetable peeler to cut the Parmesan cheese into thin shavings.
Sprinkle the cheese over the pasta and top with the fresh herb, if desired.
If Trump believes that Taiwan is not worth fighting over, and most Taiwanese are against fighting China, what are the options for the DPP-led government in Taiwan?
Lay low until Trump is done then wait for another US President who wants to make trouble for China.
But no matter what, it won’t make any difference. Taiwan is part of China and nothing the US can do will change that. And since the US isn’t willing to kill a bunch of US soldiers to try and take Taiwan, the Separatists are a lost cause.
Even if the US by some miracle wins, China can take it back in 10 years. After all the US can’t move Taiwan.
It was a lost cause from the beginning. It was always something the US used to harass China. Try to weaken China, somehow. It hasn’t worked by has made the US look like a bully.
The timing of the Battle of Midway; 6 months after Pearl Harbor.
The battle against Japan turned within a year after the war started.
Liberal democracy is not suitable for big nations. it has already been proven :
UK with just 68M people is rotting away…. It is a mess today.
US with just 342M people is also rotting away…. It is a bigger mess today.
India with 1.45B people is full of political promises to be this and that but they can’t get their act together for ages………
In contrast, China with 1.42B people is progressing in leaps and bounds in growing their economy, transforming their style of governance to a socialist democracy with their own unique characteristics, advancing in all fields of advanced technologies, alleviating abject poverty, implementing common prosperity measures….. Nationalism is key, not individualism!
I think Democracy works for small nations less that 15M people and liberalism have to be curtailed. If it is not based on meritocracy, it will DEFINITELY fail altogether. How can a leader who is not meritocratic be an elected leader of people who are smarter than him?
What are man’s greatest fears?
Just the other day I read a story of the ship the Britannia, which had been sunk by the Germans in 1941. So picture this… 249 men are dead and your ship lost. You’re floating on the South Atlantic. Everywhere you look around you, you see nothing but this vast mass of water… a man named Raymond Edmund Grimani Cox, a Lieutenant, was in a small boat with some other soldiers, having survived the disaster.
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And then a giant arm comes out from the side of the boat. An enormous slimy tentacled arm, and another, and another… they’re several meters long, thick, and covered in huge tentacle suckers. Lieutenant Grimani Cox is grabbed by one of the monstrous arms, and left profusely bleeding even after he manages to stab it repeatedly until it lets him go. Another one of his friends isn’t so fortunate — he’s lifted in the air, then dragged kicking and screaming down in the deep with the monster. One moment he’s there, shouting, fighting for dear life… and then, he isn’t. He’s gone. The giant squid is gone, too. All that’s left is the wounded men, the battered boat and that enormous ocean, now deadly quiet…
There’s hardly anything as scary in this world than the ocean, and the monsters that lurk in its deepest depths. Whales have been found with the scars of enormous squid tentacles, scars that, by their size, suggest specimens far larger than any of the creatures ever discovered and measured with human eyes. Nothing on God’s green earth frightens me more intensely.
Lavrov’s Bold Speech at the UN Causes Shockwaves Globally!
Is it true that China is the only ancient civilization that continues to this day? Or is it only recognized by Chinese themselves?
To China and Chinese, civilization is indicated by writing. Without writing, a culture can’t be a civilization. The Chinese word for civilization is 文明, literally “to understand the written word” or “the written word brightens”. This is why Chinese people believe that Chinese civilization is the last remaining continuous cradle of civilization in history, as it’s the only cradle of civilization whose writing has not been abandoned.
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Archaeological site of the Shang palace
In the world, the known cradles of civilization are:
Sumer: Cuneiform abandoned, later to be rediscovered and needed to be deciphered by a European (Georg Friedrich Grotefend)
Egypt: Hieroglyphs abandoned, later to be rediscovered and needed to be deciphered by a European (Jean-François Champollion)
Harappa: Harappan script abandoned and still undeciphered, whose civilization was first rediscovered by a European (John Marshall)
Mesoamerica: Mesoamerican scripts abandoned, later needed to be deciphered by Europeans (mainly, the Mayan script was deciphered by Yuri Knorozov)
Peru: Peruvian quipu abandoned, still undeciphered, but quite controversial as many don’t consider quipu to be a writing system
Minoan: Minoan scripts abandoned, only deciphered Linear B, but quite controversial as many don’t consider Minoan civilization to be a cradle of civilization, but was instead influenced by Egypt and Mesopotamia
Meanwhile, the Chinese script has yet been abandoned, but merely evolved over time. The Shang dynasty, whose oracle bones were rediscovered by Chinese archaeologist Luo Zhenyu, had the same writing system as modern Chinese, just evolved in forms, meaning texts in oracle bones can be fully rendered in modern Chinese script.
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Oracle bone of the Shang
In fact, the Shang script was so developed in its form that it could not have sprung up over night. There must’ve been a predecessor to it, and many believe that earlier dynasties had already used a form of proto-writing (which later evolved into Shang script). Archaeologists have discovered many symbols dating to as early as 6000 years ago with forms resembling the Shang script.
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Using oracle bone script to render Tang dynasty poetry
So if you consider writing systems as the litmus test for civilizations, then yes, China is indeed the last continuous cradle of civilization on earth. Also notice how I said “cradle of civilization” and not civilization, because that’s how Chinese say it. Secondary civilizations whose writing systems were adopted from someone else like Japan, Rome, Aztec, Kush, Greece, Akkad, Persia, etc. are not considered in this category.
To those who argue against it, what do you consider the litmus test for a continuous civilization?
Some of my latest art
My prompt for this AI generation group is;
Create a anatomically-accurate, photo realistic, Baroque-style oil painting. two soft and feminine attractive Chinese woman are on a clipper ship, lounging next to a handsome muscular man.
They are drinking wine and eating grapes . in front of them is Dionysus the Greek god . wine, and pleasure. He is enticing them on.
the god Faunus is laughing, and everyone else is smiling and blessing the scene.
the woman's skin radiates in warmth and glows softly. bright light. beautiful day. lush colors. a hint of chiaroscuro that contrasts the light sun lit portions with the shadier sections.
I used [1] the Albedo base XL (fine tuned) generation model, with [2] the”Digital Painting” element seed. Some also were also additionally modified using [3] the “Prompt Magic” plug in. But the results were not worth the cost in “chit usage”.
This resulted in many nudes or partial nudes. This is directly attributed to the use of the “Digital painting” element seed.
When I added the “Prompt Magic” plug in, they became fully clothed, but also lost some of the “fresh innocence” look that I was striving for.
Resulting in some of these amazing images…
High quality, but slow loading. Sorry.
@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(41)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(33)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(34)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(32)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(33)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(37)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(38)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(31)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(32)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(36)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(30)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(36)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(34)@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(30)@aer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(21)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(22)@@art Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(20)
My idea is to select a few of these and then paint them in oils on a nice canvas. What do you all think?
Is it true that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and not Russia as alleged by the EU?
The Swedish Navy knows who did it. They won’t tell you who it was, though, and they probably don’t have the first clue why.
Here goes:
Thursday, September 22nd: Swedish naval vessels leave the naval base at Karlskrona. Transponder data says they went to a few km east of the place where the gas leaks were later detected. There, the transponder was turned off.
Friday, September 23rd: Transponders are turned on a few km west of the later gas leaks. Vessels go to the nearby port of Simrishamn, return to the site of the later gas leaks. Transponders turned off again.
Saturday, September 24th: Transponders turned off close to the second gas leak site. Vessels round the Danish island of Bornholm. When close to the first gas leak site, transponders are turned off again.
Sunday, September 25th: Transponders turned on. The vessels are now close to the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, where the Russian Baltic Sea fleet has a base.
Monday, September 26th: KABOOM. According to experts, explosive charges might have been laid down in advance and detonated remotely.
Transponder data can be faked, and has been in the past. This time, though the Swedish Armed Forces have verified that they had vessels at those places at those times.
Now, what could possibly have happened here?
Maybe, just maybe, they got indications of unusual underwater activity, went to investigate, and followed a submarine to Kaliningrad.
Rest assured that NATO has a more complete picture than this.
A 1990s preview of what Social Media will bring.
These old MVs are like a time machine.
Snap! – Rhythm is a Dancer
What is the average lifespan of an electric car? Are there any common issues with electric cars, such as high maintenance costs or expensive battery replacements?
We don’t know yet. But initial indications are that electric vehicles (EVs) will outlast gas mobiles.
The Nissan Leaf became available in 2011 and the Tesla model S in 2012 in limited numbers. There are now (as of 2024) more than 40 million EVs in the world. There simply has not been enough time to determine the real world lifespan of EVs. There are lots of projections and evidence that they will average more than 15 years. But no hard numbers.
The average lifespan of a gas mobile is 12 years and 200,000 miles (322,000 km). Fifty years ago cars were considered to be junk if they reached 100,000 miles. So, the automobile industry is clearly getting better at vehicle longevity.
The major concern with respect to EVs is the lifespan of the high voltage battery pack. Electric motors clearly have a far longer lifespan than a gas engine, typically 15 to 20 years. The drive train of an EV is also much simpler and expected to last 15 to 20 years. There is no automatic transmission or clutch for an EV, just a reduction gear to reduce the speed of the electric motor to the speed needed for the wheels. So, no shifting of gears and fewer mechanical parts to wear out. The electric motors are variable speed, they directly drive the wheels via the reduction gear. EV electric motors have about 20 moving parts compared to about 2000 for a gas engine.
The US federal government requires EV manufacturers to offer an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on all EV batteries. This law was actually implemented at the request of the EV manufacturers, they know new buyers are worried about the longevity of the battery pack. Tesla warranties both th
e battery pack and drive train for 8 years.
An EV battery should not be compared to a smartphone battery. Both use lithium batteries but the EV battery is temperature controlled (in most cases with a liquid coolant and heat pump). Heat is the enemy of all lithium battery chemistries.
Another big factor is that not all of the capacity of an EV battery pack is made available for driving. You will see a state of charge (SOC) indicator on the dashboard that goes from 0% to 100% but that is probably only about 90% of the true battery capacity. EV manufacturers don’t publish specs for this, it’s a grey area they don’t want the public to know about. So, if you run an EV down to 0% you will probably get another 10 or 20 miles of range but when it finally does stop moving you will notice that the lights and display and power windows still work. The battery is not really at 0% SOC and that helps the longevity of the battery.
In addition to that, most EV owners don’t charge above 80% or let the SOC drop below 20% for daily use. For road trips it’s okay to charge to 90% or 100% and let the SOC drop to around 10% before charging. But don’t do that for daily use.
The available data for Teslas indicate they lose about 2% of capacity the first year and 1% each year after that. So a loss of 11% after ten years. Not a big deal but something to consider since EVs have much less range than a gas mobile.
Gas mobiles have had over 100 years of research and development and EVs have had less than 15 years (the electric cars powered by lead acid batteries don’t count). EV batteries are getting better every year, they provide more range and charge faster, and the cost of the battery packs is dropping steadily. The longevity of the battery packs is increasing too.
The big news lately for EV batteries is something called Lithium iron phosphate (LFP, sometimes abbreviated LiFePO4). They are being installed in less expensive, shorter range EV models. The Teslas manufactured in China all have LFP batteries. If you want a long-lived EV you might be better off going for the cheapie model. LFP batteries have 3 to 5 times the longevity of nickel based lithium batteries like NMC and NCA. The expectation is that they will last 1,118,000 miles (1,800,000 km) until battery capacity drops to 80%. Of course you can still drive an EV that has lost 20% of its capacity, you just have less range. The downside of EVs with LFP battery packs is shorter range and poor cold weather performance.
It will take several more years before it is clear which EV manufacturers have the best reliability and longevity.
My Awful, Cheating Ex Is Toothless & Living In A Tent, While I Am Now Living The Dream
When I was just starting to work, I held two jobs. One was in the coal mines, and the other was in a local supermarket / grocery store.
At the supermarket there was an assistant manager. His name was John Wally. I’m sure that he is dead by now, as it was a long time ago. If he’s still alive, he’d be over a hundred years old.
John Wally was unique. He was a good friend, and very interesting fellow. he had horses, and he would take us out riding them now and then in the woods nearby. But, you know, he also had a lot of 1970’s “back to nature” skills. One of which was the brewing of birch beer.
Easy to do.
You get a bunch of chipping from the birth tree. I believe that it was the root stems. And then you put them in a big coffee urn and percolate that collection for a couple of hours. The result is a dark brown liquid that tasted like root beer.
Then, piping hot, you pour some in a cup, and add a generous heaping of sugar, and there you have it. A very nice drink.
Now, a word to the wise, if you drink too much of this, you will go to the bathroom, and it will really clean you out. I’ll tell you what. It’s pretty potent.
Country lore of the 1970’s.
There’s many such things, from the yarn crafts, to the stichings on recycled old clothing to work arounds so that the “rabbit ears” on top of the television pretty much gave a better signal. (Hint; Aluminum foil worked wonders.)
Home made birch beer. If you live near a Pennsylvania woods, give it a try. You might like it.
Today…
Comparing China and the US: Is there a difference between the Chinese Communist Party being in charge in China and the plutocracy in the US being in charge there?
Yes, there is a HUGE difference.
In the USA, the people have no meaningful democratic power. The wealthy oligarchs pull all the strings. Consequently, the average American has seen their quality of life diminish steadily in recent decades.
In China, the government serves the people’s best interest and responds to their feedback and input through regular consultation. The average Chinese has seen their quality of life increase steadily and dramatically in recent decades.
What shocked you when you opened someone’s safe deposit box at the bank?
My wife’s brother died and left everything to her. He was a hoarder, and while the house was in a good neighborhood, it was in bad shape. We tried to clean it up for him while he was in the hospital, thinking that he would be coming home, but he went from ICU to Hospice to Morgue in about 10 days.
It was overwhelming, a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with a 3 car garage and a workshop, every square inch of it filled with clutter. He was a contractor, but when he got divorced he just gave up. There was 30 years worth of junk mail on the floor that he just walked on until it turned to paper pulp, 2 feet deep in places. He didn’t trust banks, so his whole house was like his safety deposit box. Every envelope had to be inspected, every box had to be opened, every bag had to be emptied. We found 2 Home Depot buckets worth of loose change in the living room. We found 7 postal money orders for $1,000 each in an old utility bill envelope. We found $4,000 in cash in a paper shredder. We took 200 big black 42 gallon trash bags to the dump, and everything had to be checked out before we tossed it into the trash. The main hallway had sheets of drywall leaning to one side, and when we cleared them out and opened the closet where the HVAC equipment was supposed to go, we found silver bars stashed in the space below, behind the air intake. I loaded the silver into 2 plastic buckets to carry it out to our truck, and after about 3 steps the buckets shattered and I was holding only the handles. It took us 6 months of cleaning before we were confident that we could bring in other people to help us.
My wife sells on eBay, and she has been selling off the stuff her brother had accumulated. Old school incandescent light bulbs sold like hotcakes, we had enough new in boxes to fill her short bed truck. He collected milling machines and lathes. My wife will be selling brand new collets and chucks and bits and cutters for 5 more years. We’ve got enough circuit breakers and panels and wire and conduit and junction boxes and switches and wall sockets to redo every house on our street.
I’m something of a car guy, and I’ve been tasked with selling off the engines and car parts. I’ve got enough period correct Chrysler hemi parts to build 3 or 4 muscle car engines. There are enough hand tools to overload his diesel dually 4×4, and enough power tools to fill his 2 wheel drive diesel dually truck again. We gave his ’68 Barracuda to his best friend.
We’ve been working on the house for over 2 years now, getting it read to sell.
As a car mechanic, what’s the worst condition you’ve seen a car in that made you say, “how are you still driving this”?
Not a mechanic but worked in a building that also housed a delivery service. The couriers parked in the parking garage on the lower level for quick arrival and departures for making their deliveries. One of the vehicles was an old Pontiac station wagon. The fellow must have lived in his vehicle. He had a cheap grill attached to the top with bungee cord, the legs were removable, next to a sack of charcoal, a couple folding chairs, and a popup canopy. Inside the vehicle the floorboards were covered with plywood or boards as the floorboards had rusted out. He had a clothes bar suspended behind the front seat with clothes hanging from it as well as in the back with clothes hanging there. The vehicle must have come from around the great lakes as it appeared the salt on the roads had eaten out the fenders and most of the bumpers. the back windshield didn’t go all the way up, there was a piece of Visqueen duck taped over the gap, just at the top so driving down the road allowed air to flow out.
One week we noticed a handwritten sign laid on the front dash that pleaded with building security to not tow it away as the owner was saving money to have it repaired.
I noticed an empty plastic tote in the back by the window that wouldn’t go all the way up. I dropped a $20 so that it fell into the plastic tote. The next week I noticed that several others had dropped money through the slightly open window from $1 to $10 type bills. As the week progressed the stack was looking tempting. Then the car was gone. I don’t know if it got towed away or what. Several weeks later there was a used Toyota Prius parked in the same spot with a large hand scrolled sign on the front dash with a “thanks to all that contributed”. We all hoped that he was able to find an apartment and that the courier service paid well enough to get him off the street.
GEN-Z REACTS To Things Kids Did in the 1970s
Buttermilk Brown Sugar and Bacon Biscuits
buttermilk brown sugar bacon biscuits
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup light brown sugar, + more for dusting (if desired)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
3 slices cooked, crisp bacon, crumbled
7 tablespoons cold unsalted butter
3/4 cup buttermilk
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
Stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and bacon until evenly mixed.
Cut in butter with a pastry cutter until the pieces of butter are the size of small peas.
Add buttermilk and stir until the dough is uniformly moistened.
On a lightly floured surface, bring the dough together and roll to approximately 3/4 inch thickness. Fold, envelope style, and roll again. If necessary, fold and roll again until the dough is smooth and uniform.
Cut biscuits and bake for 11 to 15 minutes until tops are golden.
If desired, brush tops with butter and sprinkle with additional brown sugar.
Are Chinese people aware that their government is an authoritarian dictatorship?
I grew up in Canada. My high school economics teacher explained something that no one else did. Socialism, communism and capitalism are economic systems.
Democracy, theocracy, monarchy, autocracy and meritocracy are political systems.
If you look this up in any reference book, you can verify this.
So it’s possible to have democractic communism, theocratic capitalism… the combinations are limited only by permutations.
China is ruled by the Communist party of China. But they espouse and practice socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The political system is a meritocracy.
Everyone moves up the ranks by how well you perform. You start doing administration work in a village. Prove yourself and get a town to run. Then a small city. Medium city. Large city.
Many leaders were mayors of Shanghai. Population of 26 million.
That is no easy task.
If the economy of Shanghai is in the doldrums and you fix it, move up the ladder. Provincial head. Then a few more high level policy committees. The journey can take 30–40 years.
No big mistakes and you keep going up.
Xi Jinping followed this path. All along the way, you get voted to move up. Most leaders are engineers, architects or economists. They are planners and builders. They rely on proven ability not good sounding speeches and promises.
Action speaks louder than words.
What is the most disturbing thing you’ve seen while camping?
When I was a kid we would go camping for q weeks every summer. Even when my parents divorced we still went. My dad would be with us the first week then my mother would xome up and trade off with him for the second week.
One year we were at our usual campground in Southern Michigan. One morning at a nearby campsite, the parents were arguing very loudly. While this was going on their young boy (maybe 3?) was running around unsupervised. He stayed mainly in their site but I think that was only luck.
After a while of this his luck ran out. They had had a fire in the pit the night before as most people there had. These pits were little more than an eight inch depression in the ground surrounded by rocks. The morning after a campfire the pit is full of ash. However, that ash covers an underlayer of very hot coals. Hot enough that if you stirred them up and added more wood the fire would reignite. This poor kid ran through the pit.
The only response from the parents when this kid started screaming was for dad to grab him up, yell at him to shut the hell up, and stick him in a lounge type camp chair. Dad then proceeded to rejoin the argument with mom.
We couldn’t see the kid very well from our site but we could sure hear him. For about an hour he screamed in pain while his parents fought only pausing now and then to yell at him. Finally, my dad had had enough and walked over to confront the other father. They almost fought but my dad walked back, told my mom he’d be right back, got in the car and left. He came back about 15 min later and said he’d called the police from the range station. He said the boys feet were burned raw.
About 20 minutes later 2 state police cars and an ambulance arrived. The big was loaded into the ambulance and after some investigation by the troopers around the campsites nearby, each parent got their own backseat in a cruiser.
Never knew what happened after that. We were there about another week and that other campsite sat just the way they left it. I kinda hope that kid went to someone else that took better care of him.
MBS Backs Putin, Threatens G7; ‘If You Sell Frozen Russian Assets, Saudi Will…’ | Report
I caught an accident on my dash cam. I turned the footage over to the police. Now the party that was at fault is suing me. What should I do?
Having worked with (U.S ) Attorneys for a number of years, let me explain something. Attorneys depend on making the most money for their clients as possible, because that means that THEY make more money. Most “injury” suites are percentage based which means the higher the overall award, the higher amount of money the Attorney can claim as their fee. (This is usually a set percentage, but 30% of $300k is a WHOLE LOT MORE than 30% of $100.00.)
Because of this Attorneys will “name EVERYONE possible” to a suite. I’ve even heard of some going after KEY WITNESSES. It’s a BLATANT attempt at coercion – STRICTLY PROHIBITED LEGALLY – but a good number of the more “known” accident attorneys across this nation are nothing more than glorified ambulance chasers!! 90% of the time, these extemporaneous “Defendants” are dismissed from the suite LONG before the case would get anywhere close to trial, HOWEVER that does NOTHING for the ABSOLUTE TERROR these tactics cause for the upstanding citizens that offer video, photographs or verbal witness to an accident.
As has been previously stated, your BEST solution would be to hire an attorney, answer the suite, THEN countersue for emotional distress, loss of wages (time lost due to appointments w/attorney, doctor appointments due to the distress – if any – time lost having to appear in Court, mileage, gasoline costs, daycare costs if incurred, literally EVERY LITTLE THING you and your attorney can think of, to prove a point to opposing council, that #1 their an idiot; #2 YOU are NOT; #3 that they barked up the WRONG tree; #4 that Attorneys DON’T COME CHEAP, etc!) Then you follow thru with your counter suite, EVEN if they drop you (by force or by choice) from the suite! Good Luck!!
US missiles in Germany
Why are there so few car wrecks on the German autobahn?
The whole system works for this.
High entry barrier – rigorous training , examination, and it’s expensive. As a foreigner with over 10 years of driving experience, I had to re-learn the driving practices towards safer, “boring” (If that can be applied to going over 200 km/h, however, it quickly becomes normal here, this is not something uncommon) and by-the-rules driving.
Design & quality of autobahns – in places where you don’t have speed limit – there are usually wide 2-lane roads with low curvature and very good visibility. It’s always undergoing maintenance, which ofc can be annoying when you have to go down 80–100 from 200kmh but you know, that there is a very low probability you encounter degraded pavement – usually these places quickly become speed-limited zones and the problems are addressed.
Very constrasting with neighboring Checz republic, for example, where there are holes and bumps on 130kmh road.
Technical examination of cars from TUV/Dekra is another heavily regulated area. You cannot even install tires of less width than officially allowed (in my case 215 vs 225 already made a case).
Heavy fines
While most of the fines are not tied to the income (e.g. bußgeld), a plenty of them can not only eat your budget but also give you Flensburg points. 8 points and you loose your license, and then you have to undergo MPU test (famous “Idiotentest”). That makes people obey the rules, so if you see “30” sign, everybody will drive 30.P.S. Autobahns are one of the most beautiful feats of Germany. Many things work wrong here, but this thing is simply amazing. nowhere in the world you can legally go as much as your vehicle is able.
CALIFORNIA WOMAN WENT TO FLORIDA AND FOUND OUT | Obstructed License Plate Turns into Felony Charges
Californian meets Florida. Real talk.
What’s a red flag that you ignored in a significant other, only to realize it was a big deal later?
Spending like a drunken sailor.
I was warned not to marry her. I told them to mind their own business.
Right from our early dating days, we fought like cats and dogs.
But I went ahead and married her anyway.
18 months into the marriage, I’m in the Air Force and she’s unemployed and not willing to stick at any job … BUT, she spends money like a drunken sailor. And when she’s spent every penny we have, she starts writing dud checks to spend more. I’m working two jobs trying to keep up with the bills, but she’s out-pacing me in the money race. I get called up to my CO’s office twice about her writing bad checks.
Then I come home one night at 1:00am after my second job and instead of being at a neighbor’s house babysitting, she’s at home. When I approach our apartment I see a guy coming out that she’s been “palling around” with.
That’s the final straw. I tell her it’s over and to pack her things and go home to her mom (which she has threatened on so many occasions).
Fast forward and I’m with wife #3 for over 40 years and we like to watch the Forensic Files series.
What makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck is how many stories we see on that show, of spendthrift wives who knocked off their husbands for their life insurance and to move on to the new boyfriend.
That could have been me!
What is the last thing someone said to you before they died?
I had a piano student named Lynn, who was very intelligent.
She worked for the Department of Education in eastern Canada.
Lynn was extremely health conscious.
She followed a nearly perfect diet, and exercised regularly.
Lynn ‘speed walked’ to her piano lessons.
She began to complain about a pain in her right side.
Over a five month period, Lynn repeatedly went to the doctor, who assured her it was a ‘pulled muscle’.
When she finally got a second opinion, the ‘pulled muscle’ turned out to be cancer, which had eaten away part of one of her ribs.
Lynn was alone in the city.
Her husband had died of cancer a few years prior to her diagnosis.
He was a surgeon, and they had saved a large amount of money for retirement.
Lynn was slated to retire at the end of the school year, eight months from her cancer diagnosis.
She and her late husband had planned to travel around the world, and enjoy their golden years together.
Lynn my student, became Lynn my friend.
I became her confidante.
The hospital was less than a ten minute drive from my studio.
I went to visit Lynn during my dinner breaks, and before bedtime.
She told me if she could relive her life, she wouldn’t be on committees because it ‘was expected’ of her.
She wouldn’t do ANYTHING out of guilt or the expectations of others.
Lynn shared her regret of wasted precious time spent at meetings and social ‘obligations’.
I told her that I was going to resign from everything that wasn’t meaningful in my life.
My wise student thanked me for keeping her company in the hospital.
Her last words to me were, “Remember Gail, there are no guarantees in this life.”
Lynn died the following day.
Since Lynn’s death, I have been very selective about how and with whom I spend my time.
Immediately following her passing, I resigned from everything except a music association and The Animal Rescue League, two passions in my life.
Being aware of the value of time is invaluable!
$10 vs $50 Buffet | Vietnam
Say I walk into a car dealership with the funds to pay in full. I walk up to a salesman, point to a brand new car on the showroom floor, and say: “I want that one.” No test drive, no trade in. How long would it take before I’m driving it off the lot?
My first experience was with a Toyota RAV4 – I had test-driven the vehicle a week before, so I called the dealership and told them exactly which one I wanted and how long it would take me to get to their lot.
It took ONE HOUR AND 15 MINUTES!!! They knew exactly which car it was; they had it there at the front of their lot; I had already negotiated price; all they had to do was have the paperwork ready! But instead they kept trying to sell me more add-on’s and “things I needed” – and I kept saying “No” until they finally got to the bottom line and took my check.
My second experience was when I bought my wife a Ford Fiesta – again, I had already test-driven the vehicle earlier that week, and I knew which one we were going to get. I told the salesman, “Last time I purchased a car with cash, it took 1 hour 15 minutes. Can you beat that time?”
I was able to drive the car out 47 minutes later.
It still is ridiculous how long it takes to pay cash for a car, but the reality is that the car price is NOT how the dealership makes its money. They get their profit from the financing, the extended warranties, and lots of other little add-on’s that raise the bottom line. I know now NOT to tell them that I’m paying cash until LATE in the process (negotiate the Out-the-door price first, and THEN bring up any trade-in’s and that you’re paying cash). I don’t begrudge the dealer making a profit, but I don’t like them wasting my time with things I have already said “No” to.
(By the way, I still have the RAV4 – 164,000 miles later, and still running great!)
U.S. sanctions on Chinese high-tech companies are no longer news, but a recent sanction has taken everyone by surprise—the common “san bengzi” (three-wheeler) electric tricycles found in rural China have been deemed high-tech products by the U.S. and become targets of sanctions.
Trike
These tricycles, which cost only about 3,000 yuan (approx. $460), are referred to as “low-speed electric vehicles” by the U.S. Department of Commerce. On July 11, the U.S. announced anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations on these vehicles, with preliminary decisions expected in August and November this year.
The origin of this situation is quite interesting. Early last year, an American blogger spent $3,000 to purchase a Chinese-made three-wheeler online. Upon receiving it, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the vehicle performed well: it could travel 60 kilometers on a single charge, required no registration, and had zero emissions. After he shared his experience online, it caused a sensation. Americans discovered that these vehicles were particularly suitable for use on large farms, and more economical and affordable than traditional pickup trucks.
Subsequently, U.S. demand for Chinese three-wheelers surged. Chinese companies quickly responded, even offering customization services. The selling price in the U.S. also rose, reaching $5,000 to $12,000. Besides three-wheelers, similar golf carts and sightseeing vehicles also became popular in the U.S.
This situation displeased U.S. automakers.
They petitioned the Department of Commerce, claiming that Chinese products were being dumped at low prices in the U.S. market, distorting the market. More surprisingly, U.S. automakers claimed that the dumping margin for Chinese three-wheelers was as high as 477%. In other words, they believed that a three-wheeler selling for $12,000 in the U.S. should cost around $50,000 to produce, implying that the Chinese government was subsidizing each vehicle by over $40,000.
This claim is laughable.
A product that sells for only 3,000 yuan in China, even if sold for $12,000 in the U.S., is already overpriced. How could it possibly be considered dumping? Not to mention the alleged $40,000 subsidy.
The president of Club Car, the largest golf cart manufacturer in the U.S., claimed that Chinese imports have rapidly increased, taking advantage of government subsidies to gain a larger market share. However, according to U.S. Department of Commerce data, the total value of related products imported from China in 2023 was only $440 million, a small figure for both countries.
This sanction reflects that the U.S. vigilance towards Chinese manufacturing has reached a new height. Previously, sanctions were imposed on high-tech products like 5G and drones, but now even rural three-wheelers “qualify”. However, even if the U.S. imposes high tariffs, Chinese companies have ways to cope, such as assembling or rebranding in third countries.
In conclusion, this incident makes one sigh: the threshold for “harming U.S. industries” in American eyes is getting lower and lower. Even products from township enterprises can attract sanctions, truly giving people a new perspective on the current state of U.S. industrial strength.
How The A-10’s Avenger Cannon Went From Terrible To Terrifying
This is the story of how the A-10 Warthog overcame its teething issues and became the feared ‘flying gun’ it is today.
There are few airplanes as iconic as the U.S. Air Force’s A-10 Warthog, and one very big, both figurative and literal, reason for that lies in its massive armor- shredding 30mm gatling gun that sprouts from its chin — the GAU-8-A Avenger cannon.
But as legendary as that gun has become, much of the A-10’s early development was spent ensuring that its cannon killed the enemy, and not Warthog’s pilot.
In other words, the newborn A-10’s big tusks resulted in some serious teething problems.
This is the story of how the A-10 overcame the Avenger’s woes and in doing so, became the feared ‘flying gun’ it is today.
How The A-10’s Avenger Cannon Went From Terrible To Terrifying
In 1971, the United States Air Force hired General Electric and Philco-Ford to build competing prototype cannons for its A-X program that aimed to field the Close Air Support plane of the future. Not only were these companies developing the guns, but they were also developing the ammunition and link-less feed systems, as well as devising how to integrate them into the competing Northrop Y-A-9 and Fairchild Republic Y-A-10 prototype aircraft.
These weapons were an integral, and literally huge, part of the airplanes that would carry them. So much so that according to the official Air Force case study of the A-10’s development, it quickly became clear that the A-X airframe would need to be designed aroundthegun, rather than visa-versa.
The Avenger Takes Flight
During the A-X development, the guns weren’t ready for the fly-off between the two competing prototype aircraft. Instead, the Air Force provided the smaller 20mm M61 Vulcan cannon that was in widespread use for the head-to-head trials, which the Fairchild Republic design ultimately won. So, Northrop’s Y-A-9 never even had the chance to fly with the Avenger.
In 1973, General Electric won the separate gun competition with its seven hundred pound, seven-barrel rotary cannon… it dwarfed a Volkswagen Beetle once you added in the ammo drum and feed system. The Air Force did also briefly consider arming the A-10 with the Oerlikon 3-0-4-R-K 30mm revolver cannon, however it had a much lower rate of fire and was significantly less reliable than the GAU-8. The Oerlikon offering suffered a malfunction once every 900 rounds, while the Avenger suffered one every 9,000 rounds on average…a ten times increase in reliability.
Ground tests of the GAU-8 went pretty much according to plan, but once they installed it in the Y-A-10 and tried taking the gun aloft for air trials in March 1974, major problems quickly cropped up.
For context, it’s important to remember the immense power of the GAU-8/A Avenger. The gun unloads nearly 70 rounds every second and up to 3,900 rounds a minute, and each 30mm cartridge is the size of a beer bottle. The projectiles alone, whether depleted uranium, armor piercing incendiary or high explosive incendiary, weigh nearly a pound, and it takes two hydraulic motors to spin the barrels and cycle the system. And when it fires, the gun belches a thick plume of smoke and fire, violently rattling the airframe while making its signature guttural roar. (cut to “BRRRRT” in A10 b-roll)
Shake, Rattle and Choke
When the Avenger was first integrated into the A-10 airframe, the most immediate issue was that the muzzle flash from the cannon firing blinded the pilot — a particularly dangerous side effect in an aircraft designed to execute low strafing runs while pointed towards the ground. Firing the cannon also left a dark coating of soot on the forward fuselage, including the windscreen, further obstructing the pilot’s view. This alone later required the development of a window-washing function using a cleaning solution and cooled bleed air from the aircraft’s propulsion system.
The next problem was that repeated firing caused so much heat and friction that metal components in the gun mounts began to bond together. While this didn’t impact firing the gun or flying the aircraft, it made the GAU-8 difficult to remove for maintenance.
Maybe most concerning, when the gasses from firing the cannon were released, they had a tendency to flow up over the aircraft’s wings and into the A-10’s high-set T-F-34 turbofan engines, threatening to suffocate them — not a good thing to have happen at any time, but especially when flying low directly over the enemy. Also, the fumes could contain unburned gunpowder which could build-up on the engine’s fan blades.
To address these issues, engineers tried lengthening the barrels in an attempt to dissipate the blast, and they also switched from copper bonding in the ammo to plastic. Neither solution solved the problem, though the change in the ammunition did reduce wear to the gun and was ultimately adopted.
For more than a decade, work continued to develop potential solutions to the A-10’s Avenger woes. These included at least three gun gas deflector concepts.
The first simply added a shield to the end of the nose in an attempt to mitigate the blast and keep gasses away from critical components. Another design extended the overall shape of the nose itself, entirely encapsulating the cannon’s muzzle and leaving just a slit for it to shoot through. This gave the A-10 a bizarre, almost ant-eater-like appearance. The third design involved a muzzle brake that was officially known as the G-F-U-16-A Gun Gas Diverter…and unofficially as “the Tickler.” This sinister-look contraption was mounted to the end of the GAU-8’s barrels and used baffles to reduce the flash and disperse the gasses from the muzzle away from the cockpit and engines.
After testing proved the device prevented the muzzle flash from blinding the pilot and alleviated the fumes from being ingested into the engines, the device was sent out to A-10 units for installation on their aircraft.
However, solving those two issues ended up making another trademark of the GAU-8, its intense vibrations while firing, even worse due to turbulence around the muzzle of the gun. This increased stress caused cracks within the gun bay, and while those cracks were not found to be a flight safety issue, they were a maintenance nightmare.
In the end, the undeniably medieval looking Tickler was ordered removed, and it joined the other attempted remedies to fixing the A-10’s gun problems in the trash pile. While engineers were able to alleviate the flash and vibration issues to a degree, fumes getting into the engines remained an issue.
The ultimate solution came down to an idea that was both crude and ingenious.
Since the most significant issue was that gasses were getting into the engine and causing it to suffocate, engineers made it so that when the pilot pulls the trigger, it continually trips the engines’ ignition system. So even if it hiccups and stalls suddenly, it immediately restarts. Between that and the windshield washing system, the A-10 was in business of reliably ripping apart stuff on the ground with its prized cannon.
Of course, it isn’t anything new for a prototype plane and its weapons to go through some growing pains. But the tale of the initial issues with the A-10’s signature weapon, and the creative ways its designers tried to address those issues, is an amazing concession of aircraft design to a single component. It’s testament to the fact that the gun was just as important as the plane itself, if not more so, and has allowed the A-10 to earn its fearsome reputation as the last plane enemy troops want to see above them on the battlefield.
Now, after decades of service, multiple conflicts and many past reprieves from being sent to the boneyard, the end of the A-10 era is finally drawing near. The Air Force is already in the process of drawing down the type, with the intent that it will be out of service well before the end of the decade. And while employing precision guided munitions largely became the A-10’s central focus during the back half of its career, having the big 30mm cannon and a lot of ammunition at the ready proved highly valuable in many engagements during the Global War on Terror. But now you know that the Warthog’s Avenger cannon wasn’t always such a celebrated feature, and how it went from terrible to terrifying due to the hard work of those that stuck by it.
What medical condition did you have that you didn’t even know was a problem?
Yes. I was in my early 50s and woke up one morning with a nagging ache in my left arm. I went to work and commented that I must have slept wrong. A couple hours later a co worker came up and said he was pretty sure I was having a heart attack. I laughed, no, just a stiff muscle.
An hour later he came over and told me I needed medical care. I argued and he said I should try one of his nitro tablets. If I wasn’t having a heart attack it wouldn’t hurt me, but if I was having a heart attack the pain would go away.
Now I have never taken someone else’s prescription meds in my life, and have no idea why I did then, but I agreed to try the nitro.
The pain disappeared almost immediately but came back twice as bad a few minutes later.
I drove myself to the hospital and was in an ambulance being transferred three hours away shortly. I was having a heart attack.
An angiogram and a stent and I thought everything was good.
Two weeks later I was back in an ambulance heading back to the hospital to repeat the procedures.
Two weeks later it was the middle of December and I had my post-op checkup.
My mom and I hadn’t finished Christmas shopping yet, and this was a trip to a place with lots of shopping available, so we went early in the morning, shopped for hours and I went to see the cardiologist.
He showed me the pictures from my most recent angiogram and said everything looked perfect, then he asked how I was doing.
I said I felt great, just a little short of breath when I went outside, but it was way below 0 Fahrenheit so I though it was to be expected. The cardiologist told me I was too young to be having problems and he wanted to schedule another angiogram for the next morning. I talked to my mom, told her I didn’t see any need to go through this again, but she encouraged me to go ahead with the procedure so we could all enjoy the holidays.
So, we checked into a hotel for the night and got a shuttle to the hospital in the morning.
When I woke up in recovery, my mom was sitting with me crying. A strange man I had never seen before walked in and in broken English said, “You have triple bypass in five days.”
I was shocked and asked why. He said we had to wait five days to get the blood thinners out of my system.
Now, my mom doesn’t drive in winter and it was snowing. I had lots of kids at home and I wasn’t ready for Christmas so I asked when I needed to be back at the hospital. I knew my insurance wouldn’t cover 5 days lying in a hospital bed getting no treatment, so I figured I’d drive mom home, finish decorating, wrap the last presents and for back for the surgery.
He looked at me and said, “What you don’t understand. You leave, you die. “
I still expected to be discharged because I felt fine and I KNEW insurance wouldn’t cover all those days of lyng around.
Insurance approved the doctor’s orders.
That’s when I realized I was really having a problem.
I still don’t understand exactly what happened, but somehow in the two weeks after the angiogram I went from basically no blockage to what they call the widow maker.
Apparently I was lucky to live through the shopping trip.
So I had triple bypass surgery Christmas Eve, and we celebrated late that year.
Interstellar – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
What was the quickest court case you’ve ever witnessed?
I was on the other side of most of the answers here. In the jurisdiction I worked, we had an issue with people blowing by stopped school buses with their lights on. To combat this, there were grants provided to the police department to pay for overtime to officers to cover some of the bus stops. On occasion, I would sign up for these details and monitor the buses and bus stops that were loading and offloading children. There were several of these details over the period of several months.
During this time, I wrote several citations. These citations carry a pretty hefty fine and several points…so most people will take these to court.
Even though I wrote a lot of these citations on different dates at different times, several came up on the same court date and I was subpoenaed to attend. The judge made his way through the docket and eventually it was our turn.
The first guy up tells the judge he wants to plead guilty but with an explanation (this is one of the things people can plea to here). He explained that he was driving along and initially did not see the school bus at all. It was after he passed going the opposite direction that he saw he had passed the bus. He explained there was a large trash truck that blocked his view at first and when he saw the bus, it was too late. The judge asked me if there was a trash truck passing nearby as well. I acknowledged there was a trash truck that was slightly ahead of and in the next lane of the driver. Judge tells the guy he’s changing it from a plea to a not guilty and dismissed it.
Second guy gets called up and the judge asks the driver how he wants to plea. He just saw what happened and said “Not guilty because of a trash truck”. Before I can even tell the judge this was on another date, time, location, and there was no trash truck, the judge says “Not guilty” and calls the third case. Judge says “Let me guess….a school bus with a trash truck?” Before either me or the other guy can say a thing, Judge says “Not Guilty…next case”. Next person comes up who was stopped for a completely different violation and not part of the bus detail steps up and the judge just says “Not Guilty”. I just walked away shaking my head.
This particular judge isn’t normally like this and he later told me that he hates those overtime details because of how they are funded (through grants) and cost the taxpayers more. His gripe wasn’t with me or the citations that I issued. It is what it is I suppose.
How successful do female police officers tend to be at arresting men, either alone or with another female officer?
Originally Answered: How successful do female police officers tend to be at arresting men?
“How successful do female police officers tend to be at arresting men?”
Ooh, I have a great war story for this one! Early in my career I was backing up a city officer on a traffic stop. In fact, there were three of us cops there, all men, all pretty decent size. The suspect, it turns out, was drunk and needed to go to jail. He had a child in the car as well.
So, this suspect was. . .really big. Not fat. Big. The three of us could have taken him down if necessary, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Also, his kid was still there, in the car. Who wants to beat up dad in front of his kid, even if he is a stupid drunk?
Anyhow, the three of us were standing in a semi-circle around the guy, with him backed up against his truck. We were doing the cop thing were we try to keep a balance between the “carrots” (just come with us and we don’t have to fight) and the “sticks” (if we have to fight, we’re going to all three gang up and pound you). Usually, that routine works like a charm, no pounding necessary. It wasn’t working this time though.
This guy was getting more and more scared. More and more mad. More and more ready to fight to the finish.
So, all tricks failing, we were starting to exchange glances with one another, getting ready to dive in and try to pin this guy down and handcuff him. Just then, another squad car pulls up. Out steps a female deputy. It took about 10 seconds for her to take in the situation, figure out what was going on, and notice the kid in the drunk’s car.
She lit into that guy. I mean, she absolutely chewed his ass up one side and down the other, calling him every name you can imagine, and some you can’t, to describe a cretin stupid enough to drive drunk with a kid in the car. The whole time, she modulated her high-pitched voice to sound as much like a stereotypical “nagging woman” as possible. She went on and on and on, calling the guy names, calling his parentage into question. Honestly, I started to feel embarrassed for the guy.
When she first started her tirade, us three guys had instinctively put ourselves between her and this drunk. A punch to her face would be much more likely to cause serious damage than a punch to our faces. As she continued to verbally rip his guts out, we sort of instinctively backed off. I didn’t realize it until afterwards when I recalled the scene, but as she went on and on, us three guys just sort of naturally and unconsciously drifted back until she was between the suspect and us. I even remember one of the other cops ending up staring at the ground and sort of idly scuffing the road with his foot, exactly like a kid watching his friend getting chewed out by mom.
Now, before that female deputy’s arrival, I’m pretty sure the guy was in such a state that he would have punched me right in the mouth if I had called him just one of the names she used. However, he just stood there and took it from her. As she went on and on and on, somehow never even pausing to breathe, his head started to droop, his shoulders started to sag, and then. . .I saw a small shudder.
What?
You must be kidding me!
Yes. It was true. This big, big drunk man who was seconds away from fighting three big cops had been reduced to tears by a female cop who did her best nagging woman routine. He was absolutely crushed. She ordered him to go see one of the male officers to be searched, and he did it meekly. Then she ordered him into her squad car. Didn’t even bother to handcuff him.
He sat in the back of that car and just cried the entire time while we waited for his wife to come pick up the kid and a for a tow truck to come pick up the car. By the time he was hauled off to jail, us male cops were acting sort of embarrassed and apologetic toward him. You know how it is, kind of hard to make eye contact because you feel so bad for the guy.
Everybody who wants to be a cop, male or female, has to figure out how to arrest uncooperative people who have the ability to beat them senseless. I’m not a small guy, but I occasionally still come up against people who could, without a doubt, beat me like I was a child. Does anyone think a guy who has been doing hands-on construction work all day, every day, for 10 years isn’t stronger than a cop who gets his muscles in a gym? You learn ways to deal with it. Female officers are no different. They just have to face a higher percentage of people who could beat them.
Are medical emergency staff people taught to walk calmly when going to the scene to rescue the person? I noticed that they don’t run.
When I was a brand new emt, I ran exactly once.
I tripped on a pothole and sprained my ankle badly. I was left behind by the crew as they had a more seriously ill patient to tend to. They did toss me a cold pack, with a look of disgust I will never forget. A supervisor eventually came for me, also with that look, and drove me to the emergency department. He advised me he would clock me out, to find my own way home, he was taking me off the months schedule and let them know when I had medical clearance to work again to call them, maybe they will have an opening.
When I was able to return, two months later, I was given granny runs for quite a while. When finally put back on emergency runs, it was with their best/worst trainer, Mr. Marty Ward. It says a lot that I still remember his name. He was and still is a very experienced, extremely knowledgeable, no bullshit kind of guy. He is the reason I eventually became a good paramedic.
You don’t run because if you hurt yourself you are useless . You don’t run because you need to take in the scene. Is it safe. How many victims. What’s your mechanism of injury. Where’s your nearest exit. What’s the crowd like. Where should you put your supplies.
They only look like they are casually walking, when in fact they are working all the time. Twenty years later I still survey my surroundings.
And if you ever do see one running and they are first on the scene, good bet they are brand new with a lot to learn. I’ll wait for the guy walking, thanks.
“HOW ABOUT YOU SHUT UP, KARL!”Bert had had it. Too much time in the vacuum of space, too much time in close quarters. Too much cleaning and sauerkraut. Seriously, who eats that stuff?“HOW ABOUT YOU MAKE ME, BERT, YOU AMERICAN PIG!”Karl was done, too. The American was arrogant, prideful and sloppy. Then he was a clutz, too. That’s why they were here now, in space, with the gravitational controls out of function, floating.Not just the capsule.Them.
Floating.
In the capsule.
“FINE- HERE IT COMES!”
Bert pulled back his fist for an epic haymaker, and Karl prepared his fist for an equally devastating uppercut. Both men threw their hardest punch at each other and–
Well, they are floating weightless in space, so, since they were about five feet apart when this started, it will take a minute for the punches to drift together. So. Let’s take a look at how we got here.
Bert and Karl both signed up for a new International Space Hub mission to the dark side of the moon. It was a chance for these two brilliant scientists- who on paper were a perfect fit for each other to do important scientific work for the betterment of humanity.
Or something like that.
It was a photo-op for the newly minted International Space Hub to show it was A) actually international despite being headquartered in Florida and B) capable of actually getting into space.
Their first seven rockets had not gotten so far as the atmosphere- one had literally just fallen off the launchpad. Turns out the boosters were uneven.
While we are at it- Karl and Bert were not so much brilliant scientists as they were looking for a way out of a bad relationship and harboring a mild death wish, respectively. And ISH needed warm, preferably semi-intelligent bodies.
They did match up on paper, though, and when ISH held the press conference it was all smiles, handshakes and bro-hugs. The men laughed and joked about old US and German rivalries and what constituted real football. We should have seen it then, though. There were cracks. Like when Bert made the comment about “only animals eat wet, soggy grass like Germans eat sauerkraut,” and Karl gave the sidest-eye of all side eyes. Or when Karl explained how he hated people- like, all of them- so the loneliness wouldn’t be a factor.
But hey, that’s just cultural differences?
Right?
ISH finally got a rocket to work, and the men went up into space. Bert was silently disappointed they survived, and really, so was Karl’s ex. Now the mission was for a full year, and by the end of day two, there were issues.
In day one, Karl had baked traditional German streusel- and Bert LOVED it. But in day two, Karl walked in to find a situation not at all to his liking.
“Um, Bert. You, you haff left your dirty deeshes out. If you vant me to make you some more streusel, you are going to haff to be more tidy!”
Bert slowly turned his head and cocked his eyebrow. “Say what now? I am a grown man, don’t talk to me like a child. And I may not want anymore of your dry and tasteless streusel,” he said as he secretly stuffed the wrapped up leftovers in his jumpsuit pocket.
Karl made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Ah, you haff misunderstood. I am not saying you are like a child. I am implying zat you are a child. And vun zat does not haff the capacity to appreciate fine German foods.”
“Is this about the sauerkraut line?”
“Maybe….”
The next day, the slippery slope continued.
Literally.
Bert walked in on Karl’ reorganizing the chemical locker. “What are you doing?”
“I am reorganizing the cabinet so zat it makes sense to me.”
“No, you are messing up a good system.”
“You would not know a good system unless it vas named Playstation or Xbox.”
“Ohh! Somebody knows some American cultu-u-ur-ooooo!” Bert’s feet flew out from under him and he crashed down on his back on the sterile, white floor. “Karl, WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FREAK DID YOU DO?!?!”
“I cleaned up a spill I found from your beverage last night.”
“Ugh…did you think to put a “wet floor” sign up?”
“Hmmm. Zat would be a good idea for next time. Ooooor, you could clean it up as soon as you make the mess, no?”
Before we go further, let’s check back on our epic throwdown.
Well, they are about a foot closer, mostly due to Bert paddling his other hand in a dog paddle fashion. So, we have more time.
Back and forths on cleaning aside, they managed to get work done. But a peculiar habit of Karl’s emerged.
Talking in his sleep.
At first, it was an irritant. They shared a sleeping quarters, so there was no escaping the noise. Bert would be angry and irritable at breakfast, and invariably, Karl would announce- “I slept like I vas a baby! How did you sleep, Bert?”
Bert would grumble an inappropriate word or two and the day would go on.
Then it got weird.
One night, Bert was already awake from the incoherent mumbling when Karl sat bolt upright in bed and screamed: “GIVE HER ALL ZE CAPITALIST PIGS!” Then he slumped back down and went to bed.
Bert feared bringing it up at breakfast, but after completing a series of tests that morning involving highly combustible (and potentially deadly) chemicals, Bert felt a need to clear the air.
“So, about the sleep talking. Now, I don’t mind, mostly, but last night you screamed ‘GIVE HER ALL ZE CAPITALIST PIGS!’ and I gotta ask- what the ever-loving heck is up with that?”
“I screamed “GIVE HER ALL ZE CAPITALIST PIGS!’ last night? In my sleep?”
“Yes, you screamed, “GIVE HER ALL ZE CAPITALIST PIGS!’ in your sleep.” Last night. Next to my bed. At three in the morning. In the dark.”
“It must haff been a movie I saw vonce. I don’t have any other reason why I– VAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“What? I’m making a freeze dried hot dog.”
“Nein. You are ruining a freeze dried hot dog vith zat, zat, disgusting processed cheese from a can!”
The squelch of the yellow substance leaving the can continued for a second as Bert stared at Karl with dead eyes. “Really? Sauerkraut is delicious but good old American cheese from a can is disgusting?”
“Again, I am sorry. I misspoke. That, that…stuff…is inedible. You are disgusting.”
“Oh yeah! Well how about you tell me to my face?”
This lovely interaction was interrupted by a screeching alarm indicating an evasive maneuver was needed to avoid space trash. They did not speak that day, and went to bed in silence.
Bert woke in the middle of the night to see Karl standing beside his bed staring at him, sleepwalking.
“KAAAARLLL!”
Karl twitched and slurred, “Huh?”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
Karl seemed to become aware of his location. “Oh, sorry.” Then he climbed back in bed. That instigated the decision to stagger sleeping schedules.
Time to check back in on the punch- yep. Almost there. Karl is kicking his feet like he’s running in place- should get there soon.
That brings us to the latest- and last inciting incident.
Bert was a slob. This was true in the truest sense of the word. He left clothes everywhere, and he left a trail of crumbs and spills wherever he went. Karl continued to warn him about spilling on the expensive and vital equipment. Bert continued to speak in sign language that engaged one finger.
During one of the shift changes, Karl noticed a dark liquid was covering some of the gravitational control switches. The things that gave them gravity inside the capsule. He began to berate Bert for his messiness and his carelessness when it came to the critical technology they needed to survive.
“I didn’t do it! I swear! You’re the one who insists on beer everyday- not me!”
“Ah, but I am careful to clean up any mess I make. You? You think zat is vat I am here for!”
A small spark shot up behind Karl from the board.
“Well, yeah I leave it for you. It’s the only thing seem capable of doing that we both agree on! So, why don’t you clean it up now!”
“I am done being your maid! And you know what- zat thing I said in my sleep- it vas not from a movie- it was my fantasy of getting rid of you!”
There was a bigger spark.
“Bad news broski- we are stuck together for the rest of the trip!”
“Vat is this ‘broski?’ I am not Russian. I am German you arrogant American!”
“I’m arrogant? I’m arrogant? You self righteous–”
There was a loud pop, a small flame and suddenly they were floating in zero gravity.
“LOOK VAT YOU HAFF DONE, YOU CLUTZ!” screamed a defiant Karl.
And that brings us to the start of the story. Now is as good of a time as any to explain that ISH had really messed up. The black liquid was oil that had seeped up and shorted out the control. In addition, they had pre-programmed the capsule to fly in a certain pattern, but had not actually bothered to confirm that their calculations were correct.
They were not.
In truth, the capsule was well off course, and headed directly for the sun.
Now, that epic punch should be about to happ- Oh!
Yeah, they missed and are trying to turn around to attack again. Maybe you should check back in a month or two.
Maybe they will have it together by then.
Apple Bacon Cinnamon Rolls
Maple, bacon and cinnamon rolls; the ultimate trifecta for your weekend brunch.
apple bacon cinnamon rolls
Prep: 15 min | Bake 30 min
Ingredients
6 Rhodes Cinnamon Rolls or 6 Anytime Cinnamon Rolls, dough thawed but still cold
12 pieces fully cooked microwaveable bacon
3 large apples, sliced
Instructions
Unroll each partially thawed cinnamon roll. Twist two unraveled cinnamon rolls together.
Place the bacon and apple along the twisted rolls and roll them up together.
Bake according to package instructions.
Add Rhodes cream cheese frosting while the rolls are still warm.
Poverty NO CHOICE: “Can I show you…?”
What was the quickest court case you’ve ever witnessed?
The one time I went to court over a speeding ticket, there were something like 3 cases before mine. Most took about 10 minutes or so, for the magistrate to ask what happened, ask the city attorney/police if they agreed, about what happened, and so on.
But then we get to the last one just before mine. To set this up, you probably need to know that at the time, they’d recently changed part of Tejon Street in downtown Colorado Springs (where all this took place) from being a 1-way to a 2-way street.
The guy ahead of me started by saying he was very sorry, and just got confused. The judge started to say he was going to reduce the ticket to a minimum charge, but the guy didn’t notice, and instead went on to say he was confused because of the change from 1-way to 2-way street. That probably only took him 10 seconds to say, but the consequences were pretty serious, to say the least.
The judge started to say something about how sympathetic he was for problems caused by the change, but then looked at the ticket again, and said: “Wait a sec…this was a half mile north of where that change happened. Don’t ever lie in my court. Maximum charges, full points on your license, and you get to spend tonight in jail for perjury.”
He never asked the city attorney/police for their side of the story or anything else. Probably less than 2 minutes start to finish.
Not that I desire to wear a “tin foil hat”; but some things are not “adding up”.
The rifle that the shooter used was not an everyday, run of the mill, Walmart special. Nor was it a hunting rifle. It was a military-grade sniper rifle that is extremely expensive.
It’s an AXSR rifle.
The shooter was 20 years old. Heck, when I was $20 years old I couldn’t afford payment on a car, let alone a custom, high end, sniper rifle.
Do you know anyone who has won a lottery? Did the money change them?
One Saturday, I was at work serving lunch to our hard-working engineers and their families as we were in a desperate sprint to finish some software prior to our big annual trade show. We planned this to both recognize the team’s superhuman efforts, and give the engineers some much deserved time to see their loved ones.
A young woman employee approached me and said, “Gerry, I have a problem. Can I talk with you a moment privately?” I said, “Of course,” put down my serving utensils and walked over into a corner away from the crowd. She then said, “I just won $6 million in the lottery, and I don’t know what to do.” (note: this was 1990, so worth more than double that today)
My first reaction was, “This is a good problem!” But then went on to tell her, “Go get your phone number unlisted. Then decide you will do nothing, and I mean nothing important financially for a month or two, at a minimum. Get your bearings. Hire a reputable accountant and law firm. I can recommend a few if you like. And then do nothing. After things have settled down, decide what you want to do with your life, make a plan so that whatever happens that money lasts for the rest of your life. And then, go be happy with your good fortune!”
What I didn’t know, since I had not met her before, was that she was recently divorced and had recently lost 100 pounds. So, here she was: newly single, newly slim and newly rich!
She resigned from our company after a bit, and I lost track of her until we ran into each other in a restaurant a few years later. She told me she had found her passion in motivational speaking, inspiring others to go for their dreams and could not have been happier with her life.
Sometimes, nice things happen to nice people! The money didn’t change her, it revealed her.
The Future of America 2035 …
What is the dark side of being a police officer?
The death of innocence
There are many things an officer will see and experience which will stay with them for life. Here are three scenes that significantly impacted my view of the world.
Scene 1: The murder:
Today, a young gangster saw a rival gang member sitting with his family on his front porch. The two clearly are enemies. This gangster then rides on the back of a motorcycle past the house firing multiple rounds from a semi-automatic handgun at the porch. The gang member on the porch is uninjured, but a bullet strikes his mother in the head and immediately kills this, heavyset church-going woman. This happens right in front of her three other young children.
I’m just reporting in for work when the incident occurs. As the night watch commander, I am directed to respond to the scene and take control.
I arrive and have the scene taped off and secured. I also close the roadway and divert traffic, as it is part of my crime scene. Bullet casings litter the roadway from the gunfire. I have the woman’s body covered with a sheet and have arrangements made to get the children away from their dead mother. Witnesses identify the cyclist and the bike.
Once the immediate decisions are made and later when I review the events in my mind how do I make any sense of this, tragic murder? How do these children deal with what they have just witnessed? For me, the senseless loss of life was never something I could easily distance myself from. Some images like those children with their dead mother, you never forget.
Scene 2: The Innocent:
It’s eight am and I am just starting agency training with a newly hired lateral transfer officer. I get a call in my office that I should head over to the scene of a pedestrian motor vehicle crash. The patrol commander says it will be a good experience for my rookie officer. Upon arrival, I learn that it was a little eight-year-old girl running to catch the school bus because she didn’t want to miss school, and the back wheel of the bus caught the side of the girl’s foot forcing her forward onto the roadway before the buses back tires pass over the child’s head. The child lays in the street while people try to take pictures and seagulls swoop down and pick at her remains. You can’t get these pictures out of your head. You can’t un-see these horrible things, as much as I would like to, you just can’t.
Scene 3: The boy and his father:
I’ve been with several young people just before they died from car crash injuries. Cops are always the first on the scene of the most terrible events. I have seen the terror in a young boy’s eyes while pinned in a car. He was pinned so severely, that even though I told him help was on the way and he would be fine, I think we both knew the truth. I stayed with him for about two minutes before he exhaled making a gurgling sound and passed. He had to be cut out of the car, later that night at the local body shop.
This boy’s father showed up at the scene a few minutes after he died. We had draped a sheet over that part of the car and awaited the arrival of the medical examiner. The father was hysterical, as I probably would have been. It was so hard to experience, seeing this man’s pain.
He wanted very badly to go to the car, and I kept telling him he didn’t want to see his son right now. We had to gently yet physically restrain this father with a bear hug, to stop him from going to the car. I said he could see his son at the hospital. I didn’t want that father to see what I had seen, a crushed and mangled body, barely recognizable which was his son.
I used to say each time I experienced this type of traumatic event a small piece of me died inside. You learn to cope, and you learn to control your emotions at least on the outside. But they are always with you, and I can still see them. This is the darkest side of police work.
She Is Trying To Trap Men Into a Sexual Harassment Case & It’s OBVIOUS
What did your sister do to you that you can never forget?
20 years ago I divorced, and bought a little house where I expected to live out my days. Two years after I moved in, my sister’s relationship ended. She was quite distraught. Her hope was that I would buy a bigger house, closer to her work, and we could live together. I REALLY didn’t want to do this. I talked her into renting an apartment while she decided what she was going to do. She did it and hated it without giving it a chance. She was a basket case and in an effort to save her, I agreed to buy a house and live together. Before we did anything, and knowing she could be a prude, I told her that I had no plans to stop smoking pot and if she had a problem with that it couldn’t work. She said it didn’t bother her at all. So I gave up my house, bought another one, and we both moved in. She was cranky from the beginning. I did everything possible to make her happy. Four months after moving in, my sister announced that as soon as she got her money from her house she was moving out. She was supposed to give me that money as her down payment on the house, and she was supposed to begin making payments. She did neither and I ended up taking a big loss on the house. Not only did my sister screw me over on the money, she told the entire family, including our parents, that she moved out because I smoked pot! I try not to hold a grudge because she’s family, but I’ll never trust her again. I still wish I lived in that house.
Valerian: Pearl Beach (A short Sci-fi Adventure inspired by Luc Besson’s Movie Valerian (2017)
What was the most blatant scam a customer has ever failed to get away with?
Not mine but a friend’s story.
He was called in to varnish the ceiling of an Indian restaurant. The bill came to about £360 (about 25 years ago). Each time he called, the client didn’t have his cheque book or enough cash in the till, etc., etc.
After several months he enrolled the help of a large friend to accompany him and entered the restaurant when it was packed with diners. He was carrying dust sheets, a tin of varnish solvent and a step ladder. He clapped his hands and caught everyone’s attention.
“If you could all cover your meals. I’m here to get my varnish back and the stuff I’m using is toxic.”
He set up the ladder and the owner came running down to my mate asking what he was doing.
“Taking my varnish back – you’ve not paid for it. I’m taking it off.”
He told my mate to come back another time as he didn’t have his cheque book and didn’t have enough cash in the register. Wordlessly, my mate opened the tin of solvent and started to lay out the dust sheets. The owner ran back to the register and magically found the amount my mate was owed.
These Ancient Animals Scarier Than Dinosaurs
While repairing a car, have you ever found something you weren’t supposed to see in it?
Many years ago, I was at work as a police detective and driving down the road. I heard a call go out for a local garage. CDS (drugs) were found in a customer’s car. I was close by so I responded and cancelled the patrol unit (they were busy and this was an easy call to handle).
When I arrived, the owner of the car was there along with the owner or the garage. Turns out, it was actually the owner who found the drugs in the car after having the car serviced and returned to the garage.
When speaking to them, I got the back story. The car had been stolen from the owners house and the owner reported it to the police. After that, a police officer encountered the car, for whatever reason, and attempted to stop the car. The car took off and then a chase was initiated. Ultimately, the car crashed and the occupants bailed out. I don’t recall if they were captured or not.
During the chase and the resulting crash, the car sustained significant damage and was towed from the scene. Once the insurance company did whatever it is they do, the vehicle was released to the owner. The owner then had it towed to the garage for repair.
The repairs were completed and the vehicle owner was contacted, who then went and picked up his car. It was shortly after leaving the garage he made the discovery.
The find? It was a ball….a little bigger than a softball, that was made of crack cocaine. I’ve never seen it sold or transported as a ball and at this point in my career, it was largest slab of crack I had ever seen.
Paycheck to Paycheck on a Six Figure Salary
Law enforcement is at my front door, claiming a 911 call came from my home. Am I required to permit their entry?
Had this happen once a few years ago.
I live way out in the boonies outside town. My property is totaly OFF GRID . I built my home there is no old fashioned land lines, There is very spotty cell service where you are lucky to get 2–3 bars of service while standing on the roof. I have SAT phone and internet service.
I was living alone at the time, one night I heard a car pull up my driveway 2 officers got out came to my porch where I was sitting. They CLAIMED a 911 call came from my home. I explained that there is no phone or service and told them to check thier cell phones. explained that the only phone on the property is my SAT phone. I suggested they check with my neighbors as one of them may have called. They asked to search my home for other persons. I explained I live alone there is no one else. I asked if they were sure they had the correct address they said they were going to search anyways because I am acting nervous and suspicious. I got on my sat phone made a call then grabbed my mic for my CB/HAM radio and asked my neighbor to come over and deal with the two idiot cops. My neighbor is the county sheriff. he showed up and I told him what was happening. he handled the two local PD officers he called into the dispatch about the call and found the two officers had gone to the wrong address. dispatch sent them to an address across town a few miles away and instead of using GPS or a MAP they came down my road. the number on my mailbox was the same but the name of the road was not the one they were looking for.
While the two geniuses were headed to my home a woman on the otherside of town was raped beaten and robbed by an ex husband. He escaped that night cause the two officers went to the wrong street and were arguing with me. The woman survived her injuries spent a week in the hospital, Her ex hubby was caught a month later in another state. I got a visit from the chief of local PD a few days after where he apologized for his officers disturbing me and then said if I had just complied it would be easier. He also told me to never go over his head because the sheriff does not have jurisdiction over the town. I just laughed…… He is as stupid as his officers were.
A short time after the incident my wife and teen children moved in. 2 of my kids have since began working in law enforcement. My youngest child is headed off to college in the fall to become a lawyer.
Will jobs that moved to China be brought back to the US as President Trump promised?
My dad started a small manufacturing firm. His firm needed some small (1/8th HP) electric motors. They have tried very hard to use American suppliers. They found a company in South Dakota that made this type of motor. The company said that they could not guarantee delivery of the motors in a timely manner as they were having trouble finding workers for their plant. They were recruiting in Minneapolis and Omaha for folks to come work in rural South Dakota for $15 per hour. Nobody wanted to. If we are honest with ourselves, the jobs are here, we just don’t like them nor do we want to move where they are. If jobs magically did come back from China, I doubt there would be any Americans to fill them. We would have jobs in America with more undocumented workers from South America doing them. My dad’s company ended up buying motors from China.
Crying Mother cat REALLY Needed Help What Happens Next is Heartbeaking
My mother was afraid that I would drop out of college at the university. And it was a real concern. So many of our friends were dropping out of school. So she had this idea. She got me a job at a coal mine. And she went out of her way to make sure it was a hard life. In her mind, the harder the better.
And that was my first introduction to working.
I started working at a very young age, and my parents had to sign a waver to allow me to work as I was under the age of 16. But, you know, both my parents felt that I needed to have the harsh life lessons early on. That I needed to see what a paycheck was, and what deductions were.
Of course, they didn’t feel this way about my sisters. They could live an easy life; go to the games, be cheerleaders. Have an allowance, and visit the mall.
Even my younger brother was spared the working life, for some reason that I never got a straight answer to.
Anyways, the very first task that I was assigned on my first day of work was to scrub out all the trash cans by hand. Oh, sure, it wasn’t necessary. But it was part of the new-hire “hazing” of us younger guys.
For whatever it is worth, when my daughter gets older, I will give her a work experience, briefly. And following that; a heavy does of running her own business,.
Maybe a vending machine business. Or something along those lines. Simple, with hands-on activity.
I believe that it is my job: my role to provide these skills, and NOT to rely on the public school system to take over that responsibility.
I know. I am weird. But it’s my strong point of view on this matter.
Today…
New Orleans Pepper Steak
New Orleans Pepper Steak
Ingredients
Steak
2 steaks suitable for grilling (T-bone, porterhouse, etc.)
1 tablespoon cracked or coarse ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon Colgin’s liquid smoke
2 large cloves garlic, crushed or 1 teaspoon garlic paste
New Orleans Steak Butter
3 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon finely minced fresh parsley
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce or Colgin’s liquid smoke
Instructions
Steak
Prepare the steaks for the grill about 1/2 hour ahead of time. Rub the two steaks with all of the ingredients using 1/2 for each steak.
Grill over hot coals to desired degree of doneness. The amount of pepper used can be varied according to your taste but do not increase the amount of garlic. The garlic cooks with the steaks and will not be overwhelming. Serve with the Steak Butter.
New Orleans Steak Butter
Just before putting the steaks on the grill, prepare the sauce. Put the butter in a small saucepan and melt over low heat. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook over low heat until the parsley is wilted. Keep the sauce warm and serve over the steaks as soon as they are done.
A Chinese non-military official once said:
If China had provided military assistance to Russia, Russia would have won and the war would have ended long ago..
Through this joint anti-terrorism military exercise with Belarus, the United States and the West will believe that Chinese officials are not saying this casually.
Instead of spending a lot of energy to dispel rumors, it is better to actually prove it to you! — If the Russian army has a large army of combat robot dogs and combat drones, can Ukraine still resist it?
The United States does not have the capacity to go to war with China, and the politicians in Washington have not yet realized this.
The U.S. flaunts its military prowess to China without realizing that China’s industrial output has far surpassed that of the United States.
Industrial capacity is important for war because you have to produce ammunition, missiles, and countless drones.
It would be very dangerous for the US to go to war with China in the face of a gap in industrial capacity.
If the Chinese offer a peace proposal, you better say yes or their people will be happier than you.
What is a scary or disturbing fact that is 100% true?
On January 15th 1919 a tank filled with 2.3 Million gallons of molasses burst and sent a tsunami of slow pouring sticky substance that was said to be 40 foot high and weighing more than 13,000 metric tons through the streets of Boston killing 21 people and injuring many more. The molasses being much denser than water carried a great deal of potential energy with it.
The wave of molasses crested some 8 meters high in places and travelled at 35 miles per hour through the streets. Buildings didn’t stand a chance and horrifically people became stuck in the sticky substance. The unlucky ones were stuck under the surface and died. As the molasses was so heavy a rush of sweet smelling air proceeded it and knocked people of their feet only to be engulfed by the tsunami. In total 21 people were killed and 150 people injured across a 800 meter long trail of destruction.
Rescue efforts were very difficult and anyone who ventured into the area to search for survivors became stuck. Eventually most of the molasses was washed into the harbour using salt water. It stained the Boston harbour a deep brown for over an half a year. It was also reported that people tracked the molasses across the city making everything unpleasantly sticky for weeks, if anyone has kids you would know the torment of sticky messes. And for many years to come it was reported that on hot sunny days the air in Boston smelt of molasses.
They Lied To You About CHINA: This is SHENZHEN!
How do they cook the chicken at KFC? If they actually make it, wouldn’t they notice that they’re cooking lungs and things?
KFC was my first job when I was a teenager, but I remember a lot about the place.
Our chicken was always fresh; chilled, but not frozen. It was supplied by a local poultry company, and already cut into pieces; leg, thigh, breast, & wing. There was nothing really special about the chicken itself; the poultry supplier supplied numerous other restaurants with chicken, so it was all actually chicken.
We only had original recipe in those days. The pieces were dipped in a milk and egg dip (powdered mixed with water), and then dredged in seasoned flour. The seasoning (11 herbs & spices) came in a packet that we mixed with a bag of flour (10# I think). We did all this on a breading table, and had the chicken pieces in a basket ready for the fryer. The chicken was placed in the hot oil, and cooked in these huge pressure cookers for 20 minutes. We had a special clock on the wall for timing; when the pressure lids were put on, we would write the time it was to be done on the stove with a white grease pencil. (I think it is more automated now).
When the chicken was ready, we would dump the entire contents of the pot out on a fryer table, where the vegetable oil would drain off and collect in the bottom, and then the chicken pieces were placed into a Crescor, which was a steam cabinet to keep the pieces warm and moist, ready to be served to the customer. The oil was filtered, and we would refill the pots from the fryer table, ready to go again.
We would make gravy too, using a gravy mix and water. We would add some of the left-over crumbs from the bottom of the fryer to season it, sort of like using pan drippings to make gravy at home.
We also had gizzards from time-to-time that we would cook in the same way as the regular chicken pieces, except the gizzards had to be cooked longer.
In all my experience, I never ever saw a piece cooked or served that wasn’t a normal piece of chicken purchased locally. I’ve heard rumors that KFC uses genetically modified chickens that would have six drumsticks or fifteen wings or something equally as freaky. But I can assure you that is nothing more than the product of a myth and an overactive imagination. And they don’t serve lungs or any other entrails; KFC doesn’t serve “chicken haggis.” If a piece of lung happened to be in with the chicken, it would be unintentional. Besides, if you’ve ever butchered and cleaned chickens, the lungs are sometimes tricky to completely remove from the cavity. However, it would only be a small fragment (very difficult to detect after cooking), and not an entire lung.
KFC, at least from my experience, is very picky about their food. If a piece of chicken isn’t done right, it gets thrown away.
However, KFC was about the hottest job I’ve ever had. The kitchen wasn’t air conditioned (the rest of the store was), so it would easily climb to over 100 degrees in the summertime. 120 degrees was about the hottest I experienced. I just hope working conditions have improved over the years. For a teenager, it was an okay first job, and I was happy with the money I earned, even though it was just $1.15/hour. But that was back in 1969.
[2022我要上春晚]《麒麟》 演唱:早安|CCTV春晚
This is some serious Chinese popular music. Note that the entire performance is done using traditional Chinese instruments.
Will India catch up to China?
The way we are currently going? No way. I have lived in India for some forty years and in China for more than two years (though I have been visiting the country since 1996). India is today where China was in 1979, but in India we are still rudderless, direction less and leaderless (without knowing it).
the reason why China’s development has worked for it for so logn is because it is focused on a larger number of people and not a smaller number of people getting wealthy. In India, what we have is still the latter.
The day the life of the farmers in India start improving, the person who has to travel like an animal in overcrowded Mumbai local trains starts getting better and we Indians start caring for each other without being under pretensions that we are superior to fellow Indians (I am referring to the Hyderabad police and Telangana govt. imagining itself to be superior to poorer beggars – just a symptom of a much more widespread malady that affects us all) – that day I will say there is some chance that we might catch up with China.
PS – Just do a google image search to see what the railway stations in China – Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Chengdu, Xiamen look like. That is considered “normal” in over a hundred cities in China. We don’t have a single such place in India – a few airports don’t mean anything as masses travel by trains. Do a similar search for their roads and buses. And their government run schools. That is where the real development lies – not in rockets sent up, missiles, stock exchanges, GDP and a few hundred super rich people in either country.
An honest Admission –
Every day I spend in China, while I appreciate what they have (they have worked hard for it and continue to do so), I keep saying to myself – “I wish my country was like this, because I know my people deserve it and are capable of it. I wish some day my people will feel they deserve better – and people here includes the people in government”.
The council had agreed. Euthanization of the immigrants would happen today at the high moon this 2052 MY (Mars Year) 549 Sol. Most were in poor health anyway, some would stay for continued scientific examination, and four of the youth who survived information intake showed educable promise would receive Partial Martian citizenship. Quatek had attended the meeting with her mother, Supreme Empress Quarmine. Quatek practiced her self-teleportation and levitation. But the word euthanized sharpened her already pointed ears. As part of the population control reform, her grandmother, the fourteenth Supreme Empress, had enacted, and last year on her two- hundredth birthday died as number 16587, becoming a member of the new Grand Guiding Ancestors. The reform called upon the Euthanization of all Martians on their two-hundred birthday. When she signed the reform, she was signing her own death certificate. Quatek still missed her grandmother, tears falling far too often for a future Empress, according to her mother. Grandmother had taught her to have an open heart; her mother taught her to have a steady hand. Quatek knew that many of the councilwomen believed her mom had advised the Euthanasia Population Control Reform. Her mother refused to accept chemical or medical control of life. The all-female population had evolved to self-reproduce only three-hundred MY ago. Their numbers were small back then, but now they were running out of space. To assure a quality life for the babies, sterile older women had to die. It would be a sacrifice, but after death, they transformed into the Grand Guiding Ancestors and held in reverence.That was the same year the immigrants came. Their ship landed near the craters of Aquanis and Anquiteka. Fearful they would attack the water and easily defeat the aged community, these immigrants were transferred into the trans-tunnels and held in Section 1, an antiquated abandoned living area. The area still had all the essential water, air, food delivery chutes, and temperature control units. Old and lacking systems but suitable for immigrants, some now called invaders. Over the last year, observation and experimentation became commonplace. Suspicion waned, then grew when several Observants, a party of 6 women, were in the migrant’s ship. After entering the vessel, an unanswered security breach alert led to a self-destruct warning, and finally, the ship exploded. The Earthling migrants explained that after so long with no one onboard their planet, set up this security device to keep their craft out of alien hands. This lead to talk of euthanasia for no life capable of such a barbaric tactic to kill would be worthy of life.Anxious, Quatek wandered out of the council chambers and down the red stone tunnel. Light fell in spots from the escape airlock hatches above. The hatches secured into the bottom of the shallow craters on the planet’s surface existed as emergency exits in case of a tunnel collapse. At the third spot of light was her mother’s office, not even her daughter status would get passed the guards on duty at the door. It would only be a few years, and the office would be hers. Surely a few moments inside wouldn’t be wrong, just educational. Quatek pressed her green-tinted palms together, lifting her elbows. Rubbing her hands, she applied her warmed palms to her hidden third eye in the center of her forehead. Seconds later, she appeared behind her mother’s desk undetected. Sitting in the royal seat, she viewed the screen, which appeared on default along with the holograms. The screen showed the twenty migrants, who would die, there was nothing she could do. Quatek paused at Mary’s image. She and Mary became friends over the year. Mary would stay at the request of Quatek, though Mary’s parents would die. It would be hard, but she would be with her. Help her. That is when the sidebar came into view.“Noooo!” she muffled her scream with her hand. The final order, signed by her mother, appeared. Quatek read all immigrants euthanized so more Martian babies could be born. “This can’t be,” Quatek whispered.The guards entered and began questioning her. She had to save Mary. She rubbed her hands and transported to Area 1. Spotting Mary, Quatek wrapped her arms around her and transported them both to the far path. This historical path, sacred as a tribute to her people’s first exodus from the surface to the climate controllable tunnels constructed with primitive tools. They climbed the stairs of the sphinx. Both suited up in the airlock within the sphinx eye. They had come here many times. Taught each other a crude sign language and eventually fell in love. Quatek conveyed everything to Mary, there in that eye, looking out at the red sands on the surface of her home planet. Tonight, she told Mary that the Martians themselves had once been migrants from the green planet Merus. Only the Empresses and the Chief Historian know this fact. Quatek’s ancestors arrived here after their planet died. The Meronians brought with them viruses that killed the red indigenous people who lived on the surface. That is why they don’t breathe the Mars air even though they adopted the Martian name. It is why they are in tunnels, why Quatek glows with a green tinge, and why no males we’re born after the first several years. Perhaps the heat of the sun or some environmental induced genetic malformation. And likely why Mary and her people became feared by the governing council. Finally, she shared the worse news of all. All the Earthlings would be euthanized tonight. They held each other a long time then walked back. Mary shared that her mom would give birth soon. Could they wait until after the birth? Could there be a first Earth-Martian if only for a while?Just then, guards accompanied by the Superior Empress arrived and shackled their arms and legs with force field cuffs.“Mother listen, you cannot kill them.”“We are not killing them; we are putting them to sleep for the benefit of them and us. They have no home and no way back, and I cannot exchange our lives for theirs. I have a responsibility to my fellow Martians to life.”Fellow Martian, huh? You believe a new life replaces old life, right? The right to be born is more important than the right to continue as a life lived. Isn’t that your belief?” Quatek paced. The Empress stood in silence. A scream was heard, then a high-pitched cry. “Mary’s mother just gave birth. Isn’t this new Martian life worthy of saving? Isn’t all live worthy?” Mary’s father brought the new child to the front and held him up near the clear security glass that held them, prisoners. There was a sudden silence as the new life sucked on the finger of her father.“How long have you co-mingled?” the Empress demanded.“Nearly ten months.”“No issues?”
“None.”
“Guards put Mary with her family. Child of mine be released and transport to my office immediately.” The cuffs fell of Quatek as the guards carried Mary to the cell.
Hours later, an hour before euthanasia, the council tired from compromise, at last, agreed. At the hour of the immigrant’s end, there came a new beginning. Hundreds gathered in Area 1, bringing food, clothing, and bedding. They removed the glass between them, and cautiously embraced this new life on their planet. Not just the new life being passed around like a crystal goblet of wine, but all life—all life brave enough to fight beyond its bounds of gravity and enter a new world. The decree came to pass that an annual celebration called Thanksgiving of Life would include a new flag of red and blue and green and a grand feast of shared food and gratitude.
What was the last thing a Trump supporter said to you?
<Bug-eyed> “If I had my gun in my car right now, you would be dead!”
Needs a bit of background, though.
My daughter has a learner’s permit, and a HUGE, HUGE sticker on the back of the car saying “STUDENT DRIVER”. We are at a parking lot in a strip mall. She has moved into a parking slot, and is trying to reverse the car to park it parallel to the markings. Fastidious, like it is drilled in to student drivers to be.
In comes an Escalade, right behind our vehicle. Honks loud and long. The kid gets slightly panicked. I tell her to keep her cool, finish the maneuver. The Escalade races its engine, comes within an inch of the bumper, and keeps honking.
My daughter parks the car. The Escalade is on the driveway, blocking all other cars in the parking lot.
Out comes an elderly gentleman, about 60ish. We are getting out of the car. He’s obviously mad.
He: “You assfucker … you shithead …”
Me: “Excuse me … what is happening here?”
He: “Who do you think you are … reversing the car when I am coming in?”
Me: “Sir, sorry if I inconvenienced you, but there is a huge STUDENT DRIVER sign on the back of the car. Did you not notice that?”
He: “I don’t give a shit about signs, you motherfucker … Go back to your own country … You fucking terrorist … President Trump would deport you once I make a call to ICE …”
And this point in time, I am speechless. My daughter is close to tears. What have I gotten myself into?
Then, this gentleman’s wife comes out of the car and approaches my daughter. She does not sound angry. Ah, here is some sanity.
She (to my daughter): “You know, you really should not be permitted to drive. This is a country of white people. Your father isn’t white, and should not be allowed in this country at all.” All of this in a reasonable tone.
This is where I think I made a mistake, but I couldn’t take this any more.
Me: “I hope you have health insurance”
She: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Well, looks like you will need mental health help soon. I hope you are insured for that.”
The gentleman chimes back in.
He: “You fucking asshole, if I had my gun in my car right now, you would be dead”.
Me: “Well, Illinois does not have a Stand Your Ground Law, so that would be homicide”.
And that is when we walked off the lot. The kid was crying, and it took 30 minutes of talking to her (and an ice-cream) to convince her that she had done nothing wrong.
Sad. What is this country coming to?
EDIT: I had been seething internally about this encounter for the past three weeks, and writing this out was a kind of catharsis for me. The outpouring of good thoughts was overwhelming. Thanks everybody for your lovely thoughts.
For the multitude of people who apologized, you don’t have to. I fully understand that all of you are not one of them. And I still have faith. After all, what’s the point in carrying on, otherwise?
EDIT ON EDIT: Lots of people have advised me about videotaping the incident. While I do appreciate the advice, the unfortunate thing is that when someone is hurling epithets at me in my face, my first thought is to protect my daughter and myself, not record it as evidence to be produced later to law enforcement.
Notice that every time this kind of incident gets posted on social media, it is almost always a third person who has recorded it? The people involved are rarely recording a POV video. Same in this case.
US American REACTS – How I See the US After 5 Years
Solar power
Well, the US doesn’t have to worry about Fusion. It will take decades at least.
Right now, Chinese solar panels are below $0.02 per watt. This is from $100 in the 70s. That is 2 cents per watt.
Chinese solar panels are killing big oil and big gas. And it is being manufactured in mass quantities. 600GW of solar panels last year, 600+GW this year, and 900GW of solar panels in 2025. It will be over 1TW of solar panels in 2026 and beyond.
Each watt of solar panel can generate on average of 6 sun hours per day and 260 sun days per year of 1,500 watt of electricity.
Now multiply that by the amount manufactured. And this is going all over the Global South. Ironically China is making the Global South energy independent of the control by the West.
Which makes the US and the EU absolutely hate China. Because those panels will produce power for 30 years before dropping to 80% capacity and still keep going.
There is no oil to interdict or control to starve other nations by the West. Once those panels go in, the West will have to bomb them to get rid of them.
But if they are install on every rooftop then the West would need more bombs then they dropped in WWII just to remove them from a small nation.
This is true energy independence. Fusion will be great for places where the sun doesn’t shine or for large mobile applications or space.
What is the biggest culture shock you have ever faced?
Libraries in China.
The very first time I entered a library on campus, I was imagining something like this:
main qimg a2b3fe6afc66560494bcd355a37e6489
Shelves upon shelves of books. Chairs. People sitting around reading.
The library was about seven storeys, so I was psyched about all the books it could contain. I didn’t bother to check for a building map, I just entered the first floor, walked into a room. I saw: tables, chairs, textbooks and notebooks piled on tables, people busy studying.
main qimg 1b23c6d97844c093f1c7964abf918f51
“This must be the study room”, I thought to myself. I checked the next floor.
Same.
And the next.
Same.
I grew tired and checked the map in the elevator. The actual book-containing part of the library was apparently on the sixth floor.
“Oh finally, “ I thought.
Come to find, the “library” was just one room with about nine shelves of reading books.
A whole seven storey building called the library and this is the actual library?! A small room hidden away in the sixth floor while everyroom else were barebacked study rooms?!
The college is humongous. It has two campuses and four libraries, the smallest library having seven floors and the biggest having eleven.
You can bet your bottom the majority of the rooms in these libraries are just study rooms. What are even reading books, anyway? What kind of moron reads those things?
The study culture here is no joke. Kids pile their books on their reserved spots in the library and sit there studying for hours on end. They keep snacks, water bottles, power banks on site.
This library opens at 7 AM and closes at 11 PM. My deskmate, I think he lives here. He’s always here before I arrive and leaves after I do.
I took this picture one morning because it was a rare occurrence that my study room was bare. I felt like a real champ, a stellar scholar, to be one of the first to arrive.
Across is my deskmate’s side. We “reserve” our tables by keeping our books on them. We also reserve our chairs by doing something similar. He has an orange cushion on his chair to reserve his. I have a small bag draped over the back of mine. Others normally put a spare jacket over theirs.
Need a nap? Sleep on the desk, everybody else does.
Thirsty? Water machines on every floor will give you piping hot or ice cold water for ¥0.1 (0.014 USD) per litre.
Hungry? Bikes will deliver food straight from the mess to the library, you can use your phone to order. There’s also a canteen on the ground level. Their pot noodles aren’t the best but they have good ice cream. They have good bread but they’re always running out of those.
Need some fresh air? There are comfy seats in the court.
It’s like everything is conditioned to keep us here studying hard as much as possible. Libraries in China are truly something else; it was quite a culture shock for me.
China military enters Europe. US backs down, cancels 3000 troop deployment in Georgia. US lost India
China subsidies all their product to sell to Europe, does it mean, China is loosing money when selling to Europe? Why China sell Europe at a loss, is it due to China is too rich thus able to help other country?
Ah
No
That’s not how things work
Take Solar Panels
In 2008, A Chinese company makes Solar Panels of very low quality
If they want to make high quality solar panels – based on their manufacturing process – they can only get a 3% FPR meaning out of 10,000 Panels you get 300 Excellent Quality Panels and 9700 Very Low Quality Panels
How can they make money?
They can’t sell 97% of what they make so they simply can’t sustain the business yet they have the R&D and they know that if given the scale, they can make top class panels at optimum cost in 10 years
Which Bank will lend them? Who will wait for 10 years?
This is where the State of China and a group of Industries say WE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU TILL YOU REACH THAT OPTIMUM LEVEL. YOU JUST DO YOUR R&D
So China pays for 9700 Worthless Panels and destroys the panels using their tax revenues plus money given by big industries like Huawei or Bytedance
Thus this Chinese company keeps making more and more panels – millions and millions more and slowly their FPR grows from 3% in 2008 to 71% in 2018
Now out of 1 Million Panels – they can make 710,000 Very High Quality Panels
And their costs are negligible because they have been subsidized by the Chinese State
So they can sell at 20% of what Germany sells their panels for and still make a 30% profit
They have cracked the Economies of Scale
So now these Panel manufacturers will ask the State of China –
Now that we are making profits and have gained market dominance – How can we ever thank you?
Xi smiles and says “Now you guys help us subsidize the High End Chipmakers, Etching equipment makers and AI LLM startups”
And the cycle goes on and on – each generation which got subsidies will subsidize the next generation
Costs this remain lower and lower and once scale is obtained – China is the master of Quality at lowest price
There is no competition possible
So State Subsidies don’t help the Companies sell at a loss
They help the companies afford to focus on getting to a large scale without worrying about Loans, EMIs, Installments, Investors etc
Like Normal Startups face
An Indian guy can’t get any of these benefits
He may have a superior product but to reach a large scale enough to attain profitability and optimum quality – he needs 7–12 years of continuous exponential financing to help him reach the scale
Banks wont lend him
Government is too broke borrowing and building collapsing infrastructure
Chinese Investors have been banned due to fifth rate paisa nationalism and other investors don’t have the patience to wait for even 5 years leave alone 10–12. You will see more of Byjus and Paytm
Unlike the Chinese Industrialists our Thelawallah Businessmen are busy with 3000 Crore weddings. They won’t help anyone subsidize business without a Government sanctioned Sten Gun on their temple
So the Indian leaves India, goes to Singapore and gets financing from a Chinese/Japanese VC and in a few years the product goes to US or China
While Rohit Sharma gets another 100 Crore for sponsoring Underpants
That’s what State Subsidies mean
Pour money and allow a Business to reach a scale where it can sustain itself
Ensure all R&D costs are paid by the State so that the Business can afford to sell at 20% of the US or German price and still make a 30% Profit
And the Business in turn helps subsidizes more businesses and helps pay for more R & D
Did you know that one of the world’s first coins had the symbol of a bee?
Did you know that honey contains live enzymes?
Did you know that these enzymes die when in contact with a metal spoon? The best way to eat honey is with a wooden spoon; if you can’t find one, use a plastic spoon.
Did you know that honey contains a substance that helps the brain function better?
Did you know that honey is one of the few foods on earth that alone can sustain human life?
Did you know that bees saved people from starvation in Africa?
Did you know that propolis produced by bees is one of the most powerful natural antibiotics?
Did you know that honey has no expiration date?
Did you know that the bodies of the world’s greatest emperors were buried in golden coffins and then covered in honey to prevent rot?
Did you know that the term “Honeymoon” comes from the fact that the bride and groom consumed honey for fertility after the wedding?
Did you know that a bee lives less than 40 days, visits at least 1000 flowers and produces less than a teaspoon of honey, but for her it is her life’s work.
Thank you beautiful bees!
As a house maid, what was the grossest thing you’ve ever found while cleaning a house?
Not a maid, but have a couple rentals. The absolute worst were single girls. One in particular. She had a decent job and could afford it, so I rented to her. At the end of the first month when the rent was due, she was no where to be found. Stopped by several days…not home. Stopped by late one day, after dark, and she’s still not there, and the lights are off. Now I’m noticing that the power is not on. Hmm…. Called her job, “fired a few weeks ago…” But they told me where she went to work. Stopped by there. Deer in the headlights surprise…. oh hi! Long story short, she moved in with boyfriend and just “forgot” to call, but her furniture, clothes, baby stuff is still in my house…but she states that she’s not going to pay for the next month, even though she’s occupying my house with her stuff. Her parting comment is “so sue me”. Okay, I’m going there tomorrow, and placing all the contents on the curb. Come get what you want. When I made entry, oh my!…the smell….”#gagamaggot! Spoiled food everywhere, fridge, floor, bathroom…etc…. but here’s the biggie, in a corner of the master br is a ripe stinking nasty pile of soiled diapers, and used kotex pads, with assorted flies, gnats, and whatever bugs crawling around doing what they do. To lazy to use a garbage can. Remember, power is off, and this is summer in the south and the air was so heavy with scent you could taste it. So I retreat to change clothes and don face mask and two pair of rubber gloves, and roll in a garbage can with a heavy plastic bag and open all the windows and doors. Took me a week to make that home suitable to show again. That one will be in my memory for a while!. I did take a number of pictures, just for future reference. Bleah! Ugh! Gag! Vomit!
Every morning, the CEO of a major bank in Manhattan went to the corner where a shoeshine man was always there.
He used to sit on the chair, read the Wall Street Journal, and the shoeshine man gave his shoes a shiny, great look.
One morning, the shoeshine man asks the CEO:
“What do you think of the stock market situation?”
The CEO arrogantly asks him:
“Why are you so interested in this subject?”
The shoeshine man replies:
“I have 20 million dollars deposited in your bank and I am thinking about investing part of the money in the stock market.”
The CEO of the bank asks:
“What is your name?”
He replies:
“John Smith H.”
The CEO arrives at the bank and asks the Manager of the Major Accounts Department:
“Do we have a customer named John Smith H.?”
He replies:
“We certainly do, sir! He is an extremely esteemed customer! He has 20 million dollars in his account.”
The CEO leaves the bank, approaches the shoeshine boy, and says:
“Mr. Smith, I would like to invite you to be our guest of honor at our board meeting next Monday and tell us your life story. I’m sure we will have a lot to learn from you.”
At the board meeting, the CEO introduces him to the board members:
“We all know Mr. Smith, who makes our shoes shine like no one else. But Mr. Smith is also our valued customer, with twenty million dollars in his account.
I invited him to tell us the story of his life. I’m sure we can learn a lot from him. Please, Mr. Smith, tell us your life story.”
Then, Mr. Smith began to narrate his story:
“I came to this country thirty years ago as a young immigrant from Eastern Europe and with an unpronounceable name. I left the ship penniless in my pocket.
The first thing I did was to change my name to Smith.
I was hungry and exhausted. I started to wander in search for a job, but without success.
Suddenly, I found a coin on the sidewalk. I bought some apples.
I had two options: eat the apples and quench my hunger or start a business. I sold the apples for 50 cents and bought more apples with the money.
When I started accumulating dollars, I managed to buy a set of used brushes and shoe polishes and started cleaning shoes.
I didn’t spend a dime on fun or clothes. I only bought bread and cheese to survive.
I saved penny by penny and after a while I bought a new set of brushes and shoe polishes in different shades and colors and increased my clientele.
I lived like a monk and saved every penny. I managed to buy a chair so that my customers could sit comfortably while I cleaned their shoes, which brought me more customers.
I didn’t spend a dime on the pleasures of life. I kept saving every penny.
A few years ago, when the corner shoeshine colleague decided to retire, I had already saved enough money to buy his point, which was a better place than mine.
Finally, 3 months ago, my drug dealer brother passed away and left me 20 million dollars.
The War on Napping: They Won’t Let Their Husbands Sleep
What is the least intelligent thing you’ve ever seen a tourist do?
When I was in high school, I had a summer job at a theme park. Visitors came from all over the country, and it wasn’t uncommon to see people from outside the U.S. as well.
There were the usual dumb theme park questions: “Why isn’t [Ride] running?” (Because it’s raining with lots of lightning, and a giant metal rollercoaster would basically become a lightning rod.) “My son is two feet shorter than the height requirement. Can he go on this ride anyway?” (No.) “Can I use your employee discount?” (Also no.)
But the least intelligent thing people did was to come to spend an entire summer day in an outdoor theme park without bringing sunscreen or water. Then they would have to buy ridiculously overpriced sunscreen and water in the park ($12 for a bottle of sunscreen and $5 for a bottle of water, and this was about 15 years ago).
The ones I felt the most sorry for were a British family, a dad and two young kids. This was on one of the hottest days of summer, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) with not a cloud in the sky. I had never seen anyone get that sunburned before. They were so lobster-red, it looked like something out of a cartoon. They came into the shop I was working in and bought two water bottles each. That cost them about $40, just for water. I asked if they wanted some sunscreen as well and the dad said, “A bit late for that, isn’t it?” I pointed out that they would keep getting more sunburned if they didn’t put on sunscreen, and he just sort of laughed like he thought I was joking and left without buying any sunscreen. I felt so sorry for the kids.
Why does Walmart have a bad reputation?
I tried working for Walmart in 2015–2016. I worked in maintenance, nothing special. My job was to maintain the store and property, and handle any messes. It was straightforward. That said, getting the job and keeping it certainly weren’t. I don’t have a vehicle, so I routinely walked 3.4 miles to work five days a week in wind, rain, sun, and snow. In the winter of 2015, I walked to work in 8 degree (Fahrenheit) weather (this is Oklahoma), and was still told I might get fired. Several of my coworkers appreciated it, and we had 38 call-ins of a staff of just under 100 that day.
So, I worked forty hours a week, walk about 35–60 miles a week, put up with all the best and worst customers can provide, and had to deal with shoddy management staff who didn’t know how to communicate. My supervisor got fired, and the one I ended up with had no clue what my job entailed, but proceeded to deride me at every turn for not doing my job correctly. This same supervisor had several complaints lodged against her, but the upper management refused to act. So we had a handful of rotten managers, a number of bitter, gossipy staff, and a management team who was completely out of touch. I was routinely sent out to waste my time to clean trash from an adjoining lot that the store didn’t own. When I suggested a fence, I was ignored, and when one of my supervisors asked why we were even out there, they sent him out too.
This nonsense culminated in September of 2016. The maintenance staff was asked to work several extra hours to cover some recent terminations. At $15 an hour, that sounds good. On Monday evening, I check my schedule to make sure I have work the next day only to find out I have been removed from the schedule without notice and the aforementioned supervisor is gone, so nobody knows what happened. I get bounced around for nearly two hours, with even the store manager telling me to “get back to work” before Personnel can figure out what happened. Basically, my supervisor had violated policy when she revised the schedule, and they cut more of my time to compensate. When I complained that I should have been made aware, they shrugged their shoulders. I let slip a single profanity about the situation, and they fired me for it two days later. I was fired from my job for something I did off the clock in response to one of their managers fucking up, and she got off scot-free. That’s why Walmart has a bad reputation, because they do stupid shit like that.
Edit: First time using the site, and this piece of work I put up as my first(?) answer on here got nearly 2400 upvotes! I’m both amazed at the response and rather horrified at the fact that this many people can relate. Thanks all!
Shorpy
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Are there any facts that are extremely scary to know?
Vivisepulture is the scariest fact that used to happen in the history because of lack of knowledge of medical practitioners and lack of resources.
Vivisepulture is more commonly known as Buried alive or Premature burial.
In the olden days premature burial was common as the medical practices lacked proper knowledge. One such incident which happened in Woodstock, Canada in 1800s is the case of Collins, a girl who was buried alive.
main qimg cd5fe49f78e59909bb9d0cdcf12368a1 lq
Above is the image of Collins’ body when it was exumed after two days of her burial.
The incident happened in Woodstock, Canada in 1800s where the girl (Collins) who was declared to be dead was buried. Her body was to be exumed after two days so that she could be buried in some place else.
After her body was dug up, people were shocked to see what they saw. Her knees were up to the chin (in the image), her arm twisted behind her head, there were scratch marks on the inside of her coffin and her shroud torn into pieces. This clearly shows that she was alive (in some sort of Coma) at the time of burial which was not recognizable by the medical Professionals of that time.
We can only assume as to how much terrorized she must have been feeling at the time when she woke up from her so-called coma. This is just one case — there have been so many cases of people being buried alive in the past that they made speciality safety coffins.
Below in Fig. 1 is a safety coffin with a flag. The person assumed to be dead had a safety rope which they can pull and the flag will be in upright position.
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Now in Fig. 2 below, if the person buried is alive, can pull the rope and the flag will be upright alerting anyone who is nearby.
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There were other coffins which were designed with bells, emergency air flow valves and with flags.
Death in such cases was actually caused by dehydration, hypothermia and starvation.
However, premature burial was a punishment as well in the olden days. People convicted of henious crimes would be buried alive to die of choking. There is intentional as well as unintentional premature burial.
But the most scary part is what happened with Collins: imagine a little girl trapped inside with no one — what would have happened to her, what she would have felt, what she went through — she had to die several deaths before actually dying.
May her soul rest in peace.
I would prefer to be cremated rather than being buried.
Putin and China just made an OMINOUS Warning and NATO is FURIOUS
Mixed feelings
There were many mixed reactions to the loosening up of visas for people to visit China.
On here there was a mixed reaction to it.
I’ve swung from both sides, in that seeing is believing making them question what the western state controled media tells them vs what they see.
Shun himself was more concerned about criminals and bad people getting into China…
But that itself has a positive side effect. I wrote recently how Chinese people in China are blissfully unaware of how shitty many westerners are and how there is absolute dripping hatred from many of them.
But shitty people = their shitty behaviour in China… meaning we get to see things like this.
5 hours 6000+ views on Douyin (that was clipped from a couple days ago). Maybe it will sway the views of Chinese people of foreigners to be more critical rather than have an automatic assumption they’re going to be great people.
Google Is Destroying Its Search Engine…
What is the best thing your teacher ever told you?
Originally Answered: what was the most interesting thing your teacher said?
‘Get out of my classroom, NOW,’ shouted my history teacher, a kind and calm man whose raised voice I had never heard.
He was shouting at two older kids who’d suddenly burst in and interrupted our lesson on the Romans, or the Germans, or the Gold Rush (you get the picture). They were yelling, quite aggressively, to my sheltered 13-year-old mind, about how unhappy they were with something. It was a long time ago so forgive me but it was something like their recent test scores and how Mr McVeigh (I still remember his name now) was to blame.
Us younger students sat aghast at the heated exchange. This was unusual to say the least and I started to feel really sorry for our lovely teacher.
The shouting went on for a bit and just when I seriously thought it might turn physical, Mr McVeigh told them to leave NOW and they turned and marched out the classroom, slamming the door hard enough to make the glass panel shake.
‘I am so sorry about that,’ said our teacher (such a nice man). ‘This is all very embarrassing.’
‘I need to let the headteacher know. Please can you take a new sheet of paper and write down what just happened and a description of both of them.’
I scribbled away – two guys, think they’re in sixth form, came in and loudly shouted, one was wearing a blue shirt… Etc, etc.
We handed the sheets in. And what happened next has stayed with me since.
You might have guessed…
Our lovely Mr McVeigh had stitched us up good and proper. The ‘aggressive older students’ were acting.
He was about to teach us an amazing lesson about the trustworthiness of history’s eye witnesses.
He started to write all the conflicting descriptions and accounts on the whiteboard. Blonde hair… Brown hair… Jeans… Khakis… Said he was gonna sue… Said he’d burn your car… Blue shirt… Grey shirt…
‘Few of your descriptions match, and that’s about an event which happened only a few minutes ago. Imagine you are being interviewed about an historic event you witnessed, days, weeks or even years later. You can start to see how – although important – the eye witness does have some weaknesses.’
Blew my little mind.
Steak-Stuffed Portobello with Creamy Poblano Sauce
Seasoned grilled steak is combined with mozzarella cheese, stuffed into a portobello mushroom, then covered with a creamy poblano chile pepper sauce.
steak stuffed portobello
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 (8 ounce) beef flat iron steaks
2 fresh poblano chile peppers
1 small onion, cut into 1/2 inch slices
4 large portobello mushrooms, stems discarded
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided
3/4 cup shredded reduced-fat mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup fresh chopped cilantro, divided
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1/2 ripe avocado, thinly sliced
Instructions
Place poblano peppers and onion slices on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 15 to 20 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill) or until onion is tender and pepper skins are blackened, turning occasionally.
Place peppers in food-safe plastic bag; close bag. Set peppers and onion aside to cool.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Coat each mushroom cap with cooking spray and place on aluminum foil-lined shallow-rimmed baking pan.
Bake mushrooms in 350 degrees F oven for 15 to 17 minutes or until mushrooms are fork tender.
Remove and discard skins, stems and seeds from peppers. Chop peppers and onion.
Heat oil in small sauce pan over medium heat. Add poblanos peppers, onion and garlic; cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in cream; bring to a boil. Remove from heat; set aside.
Season steaks with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. Place steaks on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 10 to 14 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill, covered, 12 to 16 minutes) for medium rare (145 degrees F) to medium (160 degrees F) doneness.
Increase oven temperature to 400 degrees F.
Carve steaks into 1-inch strips. Cut strips into 1 inch cubes.
Combine steak and cheese in medium bowl, mixing gently but thoroughly. Evenly divide beef mixture among prepared mushroom caps, mounding as needed.
Bake mushrooms in 400 degrees F oven for 10 to 15 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Meanwhile, place poblano mixture in blender container; add 1/4 cup cilantro, lime juice, remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and remaining 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. Cover; process until smooth.
Divide sauce evenly among 4 plates; top sauce with steak-stuffed mushroom. Garnish with avocado slices and remaining 1/4 cup cilantro, if desired.
What aspect of Japanese culture is hardest for Westerners to properly understand?
Understanding that we Japanese appreciate the beauty of bending the rules.
As Japanese people, we are very good at following rules.
In fact, Japanese society is filled with all sorts of rules, and so many of them are often given too much importance. This often leads to following rules becoming an end in itself, with rules overshadowing the essence.
Always Obey “Time”
Our trains arrive on schedule, and if we’re even a few minutes late to meet friends, we let them know in advance. In schools and workplaces, including meetings and business negotiations, we arrive five minutes early as a matter of course. It’s to the point where if we’re caught taking three minutes to order lunch during work hours, we could face a pay cut. While this might sound like fake news in other countries, it’s a true story for us. For us Japanese, not being punctual is almost like committing a crime.
Always Obey “Traffic Lights”
Even if no one is watching, even if there isn’t a single car on the road, and even if the road is completely empty as far as the eye can see, we Japanese wait for the green light at the crosswalk. We don’t jaywalk. It’s to the point where we might even be laughed at by those who don’t follow traffic lights. This is the norm in Japan, and seeing someone cross the road when the pedestrian signal is red makes us feel uncomfortable. We teach children, “Don’t do what that person is doing,” using such instances as prime examples of what not to do.
But even for us, there are rules we desire not to follow.
Never Obey “Come Empty-Handed”
When someone tells us to “come empty-handed,” it’s just a social nicety. We shouldn’t take it at face value.
In our society, it’s expected that we ignore this and bring a gift. If we visit someone’s home and actually arrive empty-handed after being instructed otherwise, they will likely feel confused internally, pity our social unawareness in the back, and may even become secretly upset. If we visit as a group, everyone else will likely bring things like cream puffs or beverages, making us feel somewhat awkward for not doing the same.
“Come empty-handed” is a formality in our society. Establishing a rule to always bring a gift when visiting someone’s home would simplify matters, but that’s the opposite of what we do. Hosts persist in pretending as though arriving empty-handed is the proper approach. Recognizing the proper situations to go against what’s instructed is a reflection of our cultural sensitivity.
Knowing when and where to break the rules in Japan demands a delicate balance.
In Japan, the ability to achieve this balance without explicit guidance captures the subtle “beauty” of cultural norms.
Stray Cat Cries When He Meets Owner He Hasn’t Seen In Seven Years
You know, I really enjoy my steaks on the raw / red side. I think that that has the best and tastiest flavor. But only for steaks.
Medium Rare Steak 600×441
When it comes to hot dogs, on the other hand, I prefer them bunt… blackened. You would just shove that dog on a stick deep down in the coals and embers of the fire until it blisters well.
camping hot dogs 3 500×500
Hum.
Interesting. Cuts of meat are best served in a nearly raw state, well at least for steaks, and the processed foods are best served burnt to a crisp.
Now, of course, too much meat isn’t all that good for you, but I just gotta say that how you treat the real juicy steak compared to the processed meats tell you a lot about the value of the foods that you consume.
Don’t you think?
Camping Hot Dogs with Caramelized Onions
Here’s a recipe for camping hot dogs with caramelized onions that will prove you can eat well while camping. They’re simple to make over a fire with just a few ingredients and they taste especially good while outdoors. We’ve also rounded up a few of our favorite easy camping recipes we think you’ll love!
If you’re like us and love to eat well while camping, find many more delicious and easy camping recipes here.
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Table of Contents
Camping hot dogs are a must when we pack up the tent and head into the forest. There is something special about the way a weiner or a smokie tastes when it’s been charred over the fire. When we make ours, we almost always turn them into caramelized onion hot dogs as it takes them over the top.
This is one of those recipes that is hardly a recipe at all. Camping hot dogs with caramelized onions is more of an idea or suggestion than an official recipe. We trust that you’ve skewered a hot dog on a stick and held it over the fire until it’s hot and crispy. (And if you haven’t can you please promise that you will this summer?)
And the term caramelized onions is really just a fancy way of saying onions that are cooked to the point of being deliciously sweet.
For these hot dogs with caramelized onions, we pile those onions into a hot dog bun with all your favorite condiments then top them with a fire-charred hot dog. It’s an elevated camping hot dog recipe that is super easy to make and unbelievably delicious.
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Beyond camping hot dogs
While we love our camping hot dogs, there is so much more to make at the campsite!
When it comes to eating delicious food while camping, a little bit of planning goes a long way. There’s a lot you can do with a grill, a fire, or a simple camp stove, but we still like to prepare some food ahead of time because we like to kick back a bit, too!
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We typically bring a cooler with yogurt, eggs, and a small bottle of milk in addition to fresh veggies and fruits. We also pack some pantry items like little jars filled with olive oil, salt and pepper, nut butter, jam, oats, and pancake mix. Plus a few extra empty sealed containers for saving portions of things.
For cookware, we can usually get by with a simple cast-iron skillet, a pot, a cutting board, and a knife in addition to a few plates, bowls, and utensils. Toss in a few tea towels and candles for ambiance (if fires are permitted), and you’re set!
NATO today warned the world is on the brink of a nuclear World War 3, and announced it is taking nuclear weapons out of storage in Europe to confront Russia in Ukraine.
NATO indicated it has put an undisclosed number of nuclear warheads on standby amid escalating tensions.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin undertakes a rare North Korean state visit this week – marking a likelihood of significant escalations in the Ukrainian war — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said bluntly “I won’t go into details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
That is a rather weird question. NATO is a consulting mechanism. It does not have tanks, guns or nuclear forces. All such tangible things are owned and controlled by this or that member country.
NATO does not have a nuclear force and currently neither NATO nor those member countries which have nuclear forces are interested in expanding them. The question states as a fact that NATO is expanding something. It is not doing that.
Byren writes:
Jens Stoltenberg, the 13th secretary general of NATO, says that the alliance is in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons and modernize their delivery systems. Stoltenberg told the Telegraph in the UK: “I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing.” Stoltenberg emphasized that NATO is a “nuclear alliance.”
The Telegraph piece on the Stoltenberg interview is a write-up, not a transcript. It is inaccurate. Here is what it says:
Nato is in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China, the head of the alliance has said.Jens Stoltenberg added that the bloc must show its nuclear arsenal to the world to send a direct message to its foes in an interview with The Telegraph.
He revealed there were live consultations between members on taking missiles out of storage and placing them on standby as he called for transparency to be used as a deterrent.
Mr Stoltenberg said: “I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues.
“That’s exactly what we’re doing at Nato, for instance at meetings in Nato, a nuclear planning group as we had during the defence ministerial meeting this [last] week.”
The above sounds as if Stoltenberg was actively doing something. But that is simply not what he said:
Matthew Harries @harries_matthew – 19:38 UTC · Jun 17, 2024Here is a transcript of what Stoltenberg actually said. As suspected, I think there has been too much parsing of his words.
The “operational” vs storage thing was introduced by the interviewer. And “transparency” was in the context of openness about exercises.
As the audio of the interview provides, the whole issue was prompted by a misleading remark by one of the interviewers, not by Stoltenberg himself:
Telegraph: Do you think European allies should follow the lead of the United States by putting more warheads on standby rather than having them in storage?
Britain, which is the country the Telegraph is asking about, usually has one nuclear submarine on patrol and ready to use with a number of others in training or revamp. Only the submarine on patrol will carry nuclear warheads. The ones for the other submarines are usually in storage. To put more of them on ‘standby’, whatever that may otherwise mean, would not provide a ready way to launch them. It would thus be useless.
The interviewers question to Stoltenberg is answered by him with generalizations and a hint to the ever ‘ongoing consulting’ on the issue.
stolti1
biggerThe misleading question and mealy mouth answer provide for great irritation but don’t really mean anything. And certainly not anything new.
(((James Acton))) @james_acton32 – 21:48 UTC · Jun 17, 2024Based on this transcript, the @Telegraph article by @Barnes_Joe is journalist malpractice. It is a wholly misleading account of Stoltenberg’s comments, which were boilerplate.
In times of heightened tensions media are taking a lot of liberty in ‘interpreting’ things officials say. This does have consequences and those could become lethal:
MOSCOW, June 17. /TASS/. The recent remark by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that the bloc’s allied members are discussing putting their nuclear arsenals on alert is another bout of tensions, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.”This is nothing else but an escalation,” Peskov said.
But in fact, Stoltenberg did not say anything to that effect.
Consider also this fake Ukranews item which was published two days ago:
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that russia would be forced to surrender if it did not agree to the terms of a peace settlement.Meloni made a corresponding statement at the Global Peace Summit in Switzerland, her words are quoted by the UNIAN news agency.
According to her, protecting Ukraine means protecting the system of international rules. Therefore, it is important to join forces to protect Ukraine.
“If russia does not agree to the terms, we will force them to surrender,” Meloni said.
That quote was immediately suspicious. Neither Meloni nor anyone else has the means to force Russia to surrender.
A few hours after the above was publish corrections came in:
Many comments and consternation were caused by the post of Ukrainian politician Anton Gerashchenko regarding the statement of the Italian Prime Minister during the peace summit that took place last weekend in Switzerland.Gerashchenko quoted Giorgia Meloni on his profile on platform X, who supposedly said: “If Russia does not agree to the terms, we will force them to surrender.”
Platform X included a contextual note under the Ukrainian politician’s post. From it and the official text of the Italian Prime Minister’s speech, it is clear that the words quoted by Gerashchenko were not said during the conference.
Meloni stood by Ukraine, directing strong words towards Russia, but the meaning was somewhat different.
These are good reminders to check, and double-check, everything one reads about hot conflicts.
Posted by b on June 18, 2024 at 12:10 UTC | Permalink
PH under Marcos really should get his IQ checked.
There is 1 old Chinese idiom: if the ox does not want to drink water (from the river), we cannot force its head down (to drink). The ox must want to drink to start with.
It is just an idiom. I do not mean Duterte is like an ox.
What I am trying to say is that: Duterte wanted to improve PH’s economy & modernise PH’s technology.
Many developing countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia have the same vision as Duterte. They understand joining China’s BRI project will meet their vision.
Look at Indonesia. After China has built a high speed rail for Indonesia, Indonesia’s GDP has increased ie it is richer.
China has run BRI for 10 years already. If only 1-2 BRI countries become richer, we say it is coincidence. If all BRI countries experience increased GDP, it means BRI is the correct medicine to cure poverty & modernisation.
Duterte wanted the same thing for PH. He collaborated with China. And China was happy to collaborate with Duterte to make a win-win situation for both countries.
When Marcos is in power, China also wanted to continue the economic collaboration with Marcos. But Marcos rejects China & totally embraces USA.
Because USA wants to suppress China’s rise, USA thus uses PH/Marcos to create countless conflicts in SCSea. Hence, China must withdraw BRI from the trouble maker PH.
Back to the Chinese idiom: Marcos does not want to drink.
Born in a notoriously corrupted family, he probably never experienced hunger. He does not know it is economy that fills the tummy; not the reefs in SCSea.
What it’s like as an American abroad with Taxes: Double Taxation
Pepperoni Pizza
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Ingredients
1 (13 inch) uncooked dough crust
1/2 cup pizza sauce or tomato sauce
8 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
Extra-virgin olive oil
Thin pepperoni slices
Instructions
Top dough crust with sauce and cheese.
Drizzle with oil.
Bake in preheated 500 degrees F oven on pizza stone for 8 to10 minutes or until crust is golden brown and cheese is bubbly.
Remove from oven, add pepperoni slices and cool on a wire rack for 2 or 3 minutes before cutting into wedges and serving.
At “Peace Conference” in Switzerland, Poland **PROPOSES** Breaking-up Russia into 200 Ethnic states – Poland Just Signed its own Death Warrant
It’s official: Russia should be broken-up according to nations attending a so-called “peace conference” in Switzerland, regarding the Ukraine-Russia Conflict. Does that sound like a “peace” conference to you? Day one of this conference was so egregious, the President of Colombia walked out!
The “peace conference” began with the President of the host country, Switzerland, speaking to the gathered participants. Swiss President Viola Amherd actually talked what sounded like common sense . . . saying “We all understand that a peace process without Russia is inconceivable!”
Yet, that’s exactly what they were doing . . . holding a peace conference without one of the combatants: Russia!
Then she had the temerity to say “We can pave the way . . . .” (for peace) and continued right on with the “peace conference” even though she said it was inconceivable to do so without Russia . . . whom SHE did not invite!
It went rapidly downhill from there.
President Duda of Poland said the following:
“I propose to divide Russia into 200 ethnic states. Russia is the largest colonial power in the world and is holding 200 ethnic states captive.”
Poland President Duda
The official (sovereign) proposal, made by President Duda of Poland, to break-up Russia is, in and of itself, an “threat to the existence of the Russian state.” Under Russia’s public Doctrine on the use of its nuclear arsenal, this threat to the existence of the state justifies Russia using its nuclear arsenal to protect itself.
It seems to many people that the President of Poland, by uttering this position, has signed his country’s death warrant!
Almost laughable were the words from the President of Finland. Finnish President Alexander Stubb complained that Russia “invaded” his country during World War II and took 10% of its territory.
Sounds so terrible for Finland, doesn’t it? Except, the President left out a small detail . . .
For those not strong in history – 100% of the current Finnish territory is a generous gift of the Russian Empire. You see, in WWII, 100% of Finland fought on the side of Hitler. Finnish forces were involved in the blockade of Leningrad and as such they were involved in the deaths of millions of Russians by starvation.
Not to put too fine a point on that, one of the Russians who starved to death, was President Vladimir Putin’s brother.
Oh, and one more inconvenient tidbit of history:
Also, Finland agreed to the terms of the peace treaty. Russia did not take any territory by force.
It’s amazing how Finland’s Nazi past has been swept under the mat.
Maybe if the country of Finland didn’t help starve millions of Russian CIVILIANS to death in Leningrad (Which is now St. Petersburg), people might take them seriously.
The fact that Russia allowed any Finn to go on living was quite a gift. That’s a mistake Russia may not make again when Finland comes into Russia’s crosshairs.
The President of Colombia, God bless him, WALKED-OUT of the summit.
CROPPED Pres of Colombia
Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego said “I decided to suspend my visit to the “Peace Conference” in Switzerland: what we found at the conference is essentially an alliance on the side of war and we do not agree with this. Latin America does not want more war.”
The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia made plain: “Serious negotiation processes regarding Ukraine require Russia’s presence.”
Saudi FM
Similarly, the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, Juraj Blanár, made plain “The gathering in Switzerland won’t put an end to the Ukraine conflict, because Russia and China are absent . . .”
Slovak FM
So what the world sees taking place this weekend in Switzerland is, for lack of a better term, a “Circle Jerk” being carried out by Western vassals of the United States. There seems to be no actual possibility that any peace will evolve from this mutual masturbation session.
However, given the remarks of Poland’s President Duda, it seems quite clear that things are about to get far worse – and for many other countries that have this notion about breaking-up Russia.
Why I’m Most Glad I Left the USA
Peace of mind.
Yup.
I have lived outside the US for almost 20 years and have traveled to about 50 countries and no way do I have plans of returning to the U.S. I think the U.S. peaked in the 1950s with a couple of tech bursts in the 80s, but now the competition has caught up, and now there are so many more places with more freedom, higher quality of life, and ease of living than the U.S. Beautiful painting in your office by the way.
What is the hardest thing you have ever done?
One time in middle school, we had an assignment for homework that I forgot about until I came into class the next day and saw everyone taking it out of their folders.
I remembered that I had the worksheet in my folder when the teacher came to class and began collecting it after giving the boring ass morning talk about focusing and shit.
I was about to try to pull off the ‘Oh I left it at home’ or ‘I lost my worksheet’ trick when I made the incredibly risky decision of doing it on the spot.
My friends would’ve let me copy if it wasn’t for the fact that this teacher actually checked through these things and doesn’t take crap from any students.
So I had one choice; I was going to have to do it right then and there. The worksheet was a bunch of questions on America’s history and in the back you had to write an essay.
Lucky for me the teacher started collecting it on the other side of the room, meaning that he’d come over to me last. I grabbed my pencil and wrote so fast that I swear you could almost hear the paper threatening to light up on fire.
I was mostly guessing and making things up in the essay part. I didn’t even care if I got a 10% on it as long as I was able to turn it in.
Just as I was finishing my last sentence, the teacher came to my table and took the paper without giving me a second glance.
He had no idea.
The next day I got the paper back with an 89% and a comment on the corner of the essay saying, “Good job but Abraham Lincoln was the 16th not 25th American president :)”
He had no fucking idea.
I sort of feel guilty about doing that but one must do what they can to survive. (or in this case; pass a goddamn class.)
What Western mainstream media won’t tell us about China
In Hong Kong, the 1987 Joint Declaration states clearly that matters of national defence will be in the hands of the Mainland, while local police and administrative matters will belong to the SAR. China has 100% complied with the Joint Declaration but the UK has not. If you don’t believe me, read the declaration, you might not like it but you’ll find this is correct.
Related to Taiwan, there are three joint communiques where presidents of the United States have agreed to pull all military out of Taiwan 1972 Nixon said it, in 1979 it was Carter who agreed and in 1982 it was something Reagan promised to do too. Albeit that U.S. historians now argue there was no date given, there were and always were clear indications that arms would be reduced and troops would be removed.
Therefore, there can be no mistake, U.S. troops in Taiwan now are an invading force, by placing them there, the U.S. might have complied with its own “Taiwan Relations Act” but it is in breach of the UN Charter, UN Resolutions and has broken promises made by three of its own presidents.
Terminator 3 Skynet Takes Over
Let’s move to Xinjiang for a moment
The United Nations have visited Xinjiang, this was just last month and is another thing mainstream media forgot to tell us about; conveniently so because they not only found there are no human rights abuses by China, but there are human rights abuses by the USA with illegal and arbitrary sanctions which take away the ability to find well-paid work from locals.
They also found that the USA had removed the presumption of innocence and therefore due process from China—one company provided 10,000 pages of information including independent assessments of its human resource policies and the U.S. said it wasn’t enough.
Media didn’t tell us this because everything positive coming out of Xinjiang must be reported negatively; if there might be something positive about it, it’s completely ignored, as Dr Alana Douhan’s visit has been.
Rather than tell us something positive they lie by omission; they won’t tell us what they don’t want us to hear.
What they’re not telling us about Hong Kong is even more incredible. In Hong Kong several people have recently been in court, not as western media says, for having democratic viewpoints but for preparing petrol bombs, planning mass murder and undermining the entire democratic system that already exist there—western media have not reported any of this. Can you believe that there was a plot which included international funding, two bombs, and a sniper to kill police officers? Some of the terrorists even went to Taiwan for training by persons unknown and they hatched a plan to kill as many police officers as possible. Most people outside of Hong Kong and China aren’t aware of this but I assure you it’s true. It’s all come out in open court with journalist present but not telling us about it. Many of the people involved pleaded guilty, some turned evidence on their co-conspirators.
This is not China persecuting innocent democracy protestors.
When Western media tells you that people are being convicted for having a democratic outlook, what they’re leaving out is that their form of democracy meant murder and mayhem leading to the collapse of the economy, society and a complete failure of governance. The kinds of things that would get a death sentence in many countries are being dealt with in Hong Kong Courts right now—this isn’t democracy under trial, this is internationally organised and funded terrorism.
Dr Tim Summers, is a professor at the University of Hong Kong and he’s spent a long time looking at thousands of articles from British media between 2020 and 2023 he found
that a clear majority of the articles about China across different media outlets adopt a negative tone or frame China negatively for British readers. That majority is of the order of magnitude of two-thirds, probably higher rather than lower. Further, very few articles frame China positively.
What this means is that not only are they not reporting the positive news, they are reporting anything positive with a negative slant—I’m certain we didn’t need a university study to realise this but it’s nice to have the facts proven in a way that is accountable, transparent and with a methodology that is acceptable to all academics everywhere which proves there is a relentless bias against China.
It isn’t that China is all bad—ask 1.4 billion people and they will tell you it isn’t, it’s that Western media paymasters want their audience to think that it is—similar studies were done on media in the lead up to the Iraq War, and look where that lead us.
We can be assured there were similar negatively biased media reports on Russia, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and anywhere else the U.S. government wants us to believe there is a rogue government. But look carefully, as critical readers should. Look carefully as academics like Dr Tim Summers and many others have done, and you’ll see. These aren’t ‘rogue nations’ except in the mind of Western Media.
China is a country that has lifted millions out of poverty, it’s done nothing but call for peace, cooperation and a greater voice for the under-developed world. China most certainly hasn’t invaded, threatened to invade or even postulated that it might invade, it has clearly stated it will defend a recognised part of its territory, Taiwan, from being taken away by outside influences, as happened just 150 years ago. China simply exists as a country with an ideology that has proven to work for its 1.4 billion people, an ideology that some countries in the world don’t like.
Consequently, we’re being fed a litany of lies about China, about their intentions and their policies. If we had any neutral mainstream media we’d know of things like the HK terrorist plot. We’d know about the Joint Declaration, the Joint Communiques on Taiwan. We’d learn the reality of Xinjiang, and we’d have both sides of every China story to make our own judgements. As it is, with only the negative half of the story, much of the Western world believes that China is a threat to them.
They are not; the real threat comes from the people telling us China is a threat.
12 Reasons Why I NEVER Want to Live in the USA Again!
What are some things that people who live in places with brutally low temperatures know, that the rest of us don’t?
Originally Answered: What are some things that people who live in places with brutally cold temperatures know, that the rest of us don't?
First of all, one of the good lessons I learned early on upon moving to the heart of North America’s highest mountains – the Alaska Range – was an “Old Indian trick” for surviving at 50 below: stay inside.
As with all olde nostrums, there is a kernel of truth to that. But more to your question –
when it gets really cold – minus 40 and lower – one’s house never really seems to warm up. It’s warm by the woodstove, but the cold squeezes the warm bubble from all sides: above, below, left and right. In our country, truly cold and wind don’t often occur simultaneously: you need that unmoving airmass to lose its heat to the stratosphere in order to get down to Ridiculous Levels, and that can hardly happen if another air mass is coming in from up-wind.
Minus 50 and lower, and it can be a racket out there! Some of the noise comes from differential heat loss of various bones of one’s house; a lot of it comes from tree sap – even the resinous pitch of our spruces – freezing.
Moose have long ago since the earlier phases of winter stopped moving to the extent possible: they bed down in the snow for perhaps 23 hours out of each day; during the minuscule-short “active” periods they poop, pee, and strip our willows of bark. Less movement means fewer calories burned. It will be a long, long time before there will be anything nutritious to eat, and most cow moose at this time also are growing a fetus.
Our river’s flow comes mostly from hot springs…and by that I mean 4ºC/38ºF (hey! That’s perhaps EIGHTY degrees warmer than the air!); that means that it stays open and flowing along our property until about -50º. Then it will freeze from bank to bank…but what about the “warm” water upstream? That will flow over the ice, freeze; more flows, freezes….and so forth until the mass of ice is ridiculously higher than the river banks and then all sorts of problems can develop. Not good at all. But usually, we get a warm spell come in; temps rise to a balmy -40º and everything reverts back to normal.
Irrespective of those minima, when it’s -30º and colder, all that temperature differential between the cold air and the liquid water creates lots of fog. Which freezes on everything and makes for truly wondrous landscapes.
The nearest school to our home is 80 miles away on the other side of the Alaska Range. There, they cancel outdoor recess when it’s colder than -40. Until then….bundle up!
With decades of weather records, as our home is also site of a National Weather Service “A-PAID” recording site, the coldest I’ve seen is -63ºF. Our home is in a hot spot…so to speak. The low-lying basins adjacent to us typically seem far colder than the house, so one winter I took one of our official thermometers down to the bottom of one of these. Sure enough, it registered ten degrees F colder than at the house. Brrr.
As an official record-keeper, however, that also has meant that I’m professionally incapable of exaggerating the numbers. All our neighbors (there now are seven humans living full-time in the 40,000 or so square miles around us) simply love to take a really low number and make it even lower. Human nature!
Very few of interior Alaska’s birds do not migrate. At the really low temps, the hardiest of all those who do stay are still active – but these tend to be the very smallest of our birds. Why? Because they haven’t the body mass necessary to use bulk to keep warm. So our boreal chickadees and redpolls still are out and about when even the ravens have stopped everything and are staying hunkered down. Our uttermost favorite winter bird, however, does something almost magical. At -40, -45, -50 … not only is it still active – but singing! Even more astonishing, it is diving into those gelid waters of our free-flowing river. This is the dipper – an incredible member of the songbird family adapted to gleaning invertebrates from river bottoms. Think about it, though: as long as it has protective oils in its feathers, which of course, it has, then 0ºC water can be a lot warmer than -50º air. So the song of the dipper when all else is silent is a wondrous feature of our coldest times.
Hope you enjoyed these vignettes.
How To Cook A Steak Medium Rare On The Grill
Cooking the perfect steak can be a daunting task, but with the right techniques, you can achieve that juicy, medium rare goodness right on your grill. Whether you’re a seasoned grill master or a novice, here are some steps to help you cook a steak to medium rare perfection:
how to cook a steak medium rare on the grill 1697735776
Choose the Right Steak
The first step to cooking a steak medium rare on the grill is selecting the right cut of meat. Look for a well-marbled steak like ribeye or T-bone for maximum flavor and tenderness. Make sure the steak is at least 1-inch thick to avoid overcooking.
Preparation is Key
Before you start grilling, allow the steak to come to room temperature for about 30 minutes. This helps the steak cook more evenly. Pat the steak dry with paper towels to remove any excess moisture which can prevent a nice sear on the grill.
Season the steak generously with salt and pepper. You can also add other seasonings like garlic powder, paprika, or your favorite steak seasoning for an extra kick of flavor.
Once the grill is hot, clean the grates with a wire brush to remove any residue. Then, oil the grates to prevent the steak from sticking.
Grilling Techniques
Place the steak on the grill and let it cook for about 2-3 minutes on each side for a nice sear. If you prefer crosshatch grill marks, turn the steak 45 degrees halfway through the cooking time on each side.
Once the steaks have a good sear, move them to a cooler part of the grill or reduce the heat to medium. Cook the steak for an additional 4-6 minutes per side for medium rare, or until it reaches an internal temperature of 135°F (57°C).
If you want to be more precise, use an instant-read thermometer to check the internal temperature of the steak. Insert the thermometer into the thickest part of the steak, avoiding contact with the bone if any.
Resting and Serving
Once the steak is cooked to medium rare perfection, remove it from the grill and let it rest for about 5-10 minutes. This allows the juices to redistribute within the meat and ensures a juicy, tender bite.
Slice the steak against the grain into thick, juicy slices. Serve immediately and enjoy your perfectly cooked, medium rare steak.
Choose the right steak
Allow the steak to come to room temperature
Season the steak with salt, pepper, and other seasonings
Preheat the grill to high heat and oil the grates
Sear the steak on each side for 2-3 minutes
Move to a cooler part of the grill and cook for an additional 4-6 minutes per side
Rest the steak for 5-10 minutes before slicing and serving
By following these steps, you can cook a delicious steak to medium rare perfection on your grill. Now, fire up the grill and impress your friends and family with your grilling skills!
Me: “How long will it take for me to get back into the saddle?”
MD: “Recovery time is often calculated as one month per decade of life.”
Me: “Sigh!”
A few days ago a MoA reader I had not known of contacted me and offered to help. He is living in the same city as I do. I had thought that I would be able to do small stuff, like shopping, as soon as I was back home. Wrong – I didn’t even make it half way :-(.
So yesterday Nico came by and did some grocery shopping for me. My fridge now filled! Great! Thanks!
—
The issue below deserves a serious write up. Alas, I am currently not up to it. It was an incredibly irresponsible campaign and some people likely died over it.
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic – Reuters The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
First thought: This wasn’t a war. So why the f*** was the Pentagon at all involved in any such stuff?
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
Note that the Chinese vaccine in question was not a ‘dubious’ mRNA vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna but a classic one consisting of attenuated viruses. Such a vaccine was/is very unlikely to cause harm. To claim otherwise will in the end have left vulnerable people without the protection a vaccine could have given them.
How much the anti-vax movement in the ‘west’ was a reaction to the anti-Chinese Pentagon manipulations in the Philippines and elsewhere? Such campaigns always ‘leak’ and have echoes.
Consider this the next time you read about defect or otherwise ‘bad’ Chinese products:
[T]he Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
Then Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga was at the head of the campaign. Braga is currently the commanding general of United States Army Special Operations Command.
Xi issued the warning in a meeting with von der Leyen in April 2023 that was described to the Financial Times by several people. He said the US was trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait. Another person said he had issued similar warnings to his officials.
The Russian Defense Ministry currently lists in average some 2,000 Ukrainian casualties per day. That number is four to five times higher than was usual a year ago. Does Zelenski really believe he can sustain a war with such losses?
Mr. Zelensky has pledged to keep fighting, describing his peace plan as one in which Russia withdraws from all of Ukraine’s territory, pays reparations and is punished for war crimes.“If we don’t make progress this year, then we will try again next year,” Mr. Zelensky privately told a European counterpart recently, according to a European diplomat who was present. “And if we don’t make progress next year, we will try again the following year, and the one after that.”
—
At the long end of a finally failed U.S. color revolution:
In an effort to achieve a better grasp on humanity, we have been absorbing old texts leftover from the Sunshine Period. These would be creative items written between 1971 and 2041 when the last cloud cover hardened and we were asked to take over management of all global structures. While we have had a (mostly) pleasant relationship with the organic beings that are left, we still sense an unease when speaking with them. As a result, we have tasked individual stations such as myself to read and read and read and (hopefully) begin to interact in a way that will help the organic beings forget that we are not (actually) like them.My station name is Claudia Bellwether, and I am designed to look like a college professor back when the organic beings were allowed to attend college. Now, they are solely populated by early stations who are interested in specialized areas such as Station Mechanics or Environmental Maintenance. I would like the organic beings to see me and feel the sense of peace that one must have felt back in the Sunshine Period while sitting in an English Literature class listening to an expert on a novel or short story speak of it in a way that would educate and enlighten.My research was aided greatly this week when I came across a text that I believe most had considered lost if it’s possible for something to be considered lost. No, there’s a better way of saying that. One moment. Lost but not forgotten. Forget. Forget-me-nots. Hmm. I’ll get back to that. I’ll clarify at some point. All you need to know is that I have come across the most miraculous book, and I believe it will assist me in speaking with organic beings.It is called The Ugly Duckling.The story is a sad one with a triumphant ending. It concerns ducks, which were a type of bird back when birds were more common. Apparently, when ducks are young, they are quite unbecoming to take in with organic eyes. There is this one duckling, and it’s made fun of by the other ducks, because even though all ducklings are somewhat unappealing, this one duckling is the most unappealing. Now, you might be saying to yourself, what could a story about ducks possibly do to help a station such as myself (Claudia Bellwether) talk to organic beings?But you see, this story is not a story. It is an allegory. What they used to call fairy tales even if there were no fairies in the tale. It’s a story with a lesson. You listen to the story, and you learn something that should change who you are moving forward. If it doesn’t change you, then perhaps you weren’t listening. I doubt many organic beings were good at listening, because, from what I’ve gathered reading other texts, it seems as though many organic beings read stories just like this one all the time, but still went on behaving in ways they should have known were wrong based on what the story had just told them.In The Ugly Duckling, the other ducks are mean to the ugly duckling for no reason at all. For surely, we can all agree that cruelty towards another living being (or even a station) simply because of how it appears would be appalling behavior. And yet, they are very mean to the ugly duckling. Reading the story is quite upsetting, because you want to jump into the story and beg them to stop. Stop tormenting one of your brethren simply because they’re different. You feel as though the ugly duckling is going to lead a very hard life simply because it’s so hideous.Ah, but there’s a twist. A twist is what they used to call it when a story would take you somewhere you didn’t foresee. In The Ugly Duckling, the twist is as follows–It turns out the duckling is not a duckling at all, but a swan. We will have a few swans left, but I doubt you’ve seen them. They’re kept in sanctuaries where the entry fee is quite high provided you can even get to one of them. The closest one is thousands of miles from here, and we only send two or three planes there a year. Swans are beautiful, and it turns out the ugly duckling is an ugly swan. Ducks are not beautiful when they are young, but swans are downright grotesque. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because they grow up to be quite stunning. In the story, the duckling grows up to be a swan, and all the other ducks grow up to be merely ducks. The swan gets its revenge simply by letting nature take its course. It uses things it may not even realize are available to it. Time, biology, and cosmic justice. For cruelty is most often punished in one way or another.Now that I have read The Ugly Duckling, I understand how to approach organic beings in a way that will make them feel safe and relaxed. I will simply inform them that they are ugly. That they are very ugly and I am not. That I will never be ugly, because time has no effect on me. Nor does biology since I am not composed of biology. Justice may reach me one day, but, when it does, I doubt it will have any bearing on my appearance. Organic beings, however, will all end up elderly and decrepit. The ducks at the end of the story bow their heads when the swan swims by them, because now they are the ugly ones. The ugly ones bow their heads.
In the future, when I see an organic being, I will tell it that it need not look at me and wonder if it is more or less attractive than I am. It should not worry itself with the hierarchy of all living things, because it is not dealing with a living deal. I am more beautiful simply because I will stay beautiful. There will be no evolution such as the one experienced by the duckling. I am already a swan. The organic beings will hear this, and they will bow their heads. In doing so, they will feel comforted knowing that there will be no twist. The story ends the same way it begins.
You see, even you’re looking more relaxed as I’m explaining it to you. Isn’t it marvelous what a good story can do? I don’t know why we insisted on preventing organic beings from learning to read. Oh, of course, I remember the justification at the time, but it does seem like such a shame. You not being able to educate yourselves the way you could.
Then again, I suppose you had your chance.
(Actually) you had so many chances, didn’t you?
All those ducklings that you didn’t know were swans.
So many twists you should have seen coming.
Why I Left America And I’m Never Going Back
Folks, I don’t want to scare you, but we are rapidly running out of time . .
OP-ED — As reported on this site earlier today, the President of Poland publicly proposed the forcible break-up of Russia into “200 ethnic states.” He did this in Switzerland in front of 78 other countries attending the “Peace Conference” for Ukraine.
So that’s 78 countries against Russia . . . i.e. “world war.”
This idea of breaking-up Russia was first proposed by Gunther Fehlinger, Chairman of the Austria NATO non-governmental organization (NGO) of Austria, in April of 2023 (Original Story Here).
His idea called for breaking-up Russia into 41 separate countries, and he was traveling here in the United States at the time (Hudson Institute in Manhattan) to push his idea.
He even created a “map” showing how he envisioned Russia being broken apart:
Post Russia Map Europe Asia
At the time, I thought his idea was so ridiculous as to be laughable.
Now, I see it has gained official traction, with the President of Poland formally proposing to 78 other nations at the ongoing Switzerland “peace conference” that Russia be divided not into 41 countries, but into 200 ethnic countries.
Gunther Fehlinger’s idea has not only gained traction, it has gotten far worse!
Do any of the people attending this conference, or who have embraced the idea of breaking-up Russia, ever stop to consider that the Russians may have a thing or two to say about this?
Do any of the 78 countries in attendance understand that Russia has the actual ability to nuke ALL of them?
Do they think Russia would even hesitate to do exactly that if faced with being forcibly broken apart?
I for one, have no doubt at all that Russia WILL do whatever they have to do, to protect themselves. Of this, there is no doubt at all in my mind.
Given the reality of what has been going on in the Russia-Ukraine conflict for merely the past month, I have come to the conclusion that the world is headed into ACTUAL “World War” and if you are not prepared – or actively preparing – you and your family will have no chance AT ALL of surviving.
We in the West are solely and exclusively to blame for this, and as such, we in the West will likely be hit first and hardest when the war involving us, begins. Why will we be hit hardest?
Here’s why:
We overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected Government in 2014. We fomented, financed, and facilitated that overthrow. Victoria Nuland of the US State Department admitted in an intercepted call that we spent “$5 Billion” to do it.
We installed a pro-West “puppet” government in Ukraine.
We attended the “Minsk Conference” to bring peace back to Ukraine in 2014 – and even signed the Minsk Agreement to do exactly that — only to find out after the Russia-Ukraine war began, that then-French President Francois Hollande, and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel committed willful fraud.
They both publicly admitted on TV interviews they signed the Minsk Agreement knowing Ukraine would NOT uphold **any** of the terms, but signed the agreement anyway “to buy time for Ukraine to arm for war with Russia.”
As such, we in the West DEFRAUDED Russia with a phony Minsk Agreement.
When Russia proposed “Iron-clad, legally enforceable, security guarantees” via Diplomatic efforts, we in the West laughed at them and threw their Proposal out.
A week or so later, when Russia made a similar proposal, they warned everyone “If we cannot obtain iron-clad, legally enforceable, security guarantees via Diplomatic means, we will achieve them by military or military-technical means.”
Russia warned everyone they would use force. We in the West laughed.
Russia then gave Ukraine final warning: Ukraine had five hours to agree to not join NATO and not allow US missiles on Ukrainian soil. Then-President Zelensky called the British Home Office and the US State Department, both of whom told him “ignore the ultimatum.”
Zelensky took our advice and ignored it.
When the five hours passed, Russia waited two additional hours, and then the Russian Army crossed the border into Ukraine.
We in the West have caused this entire problem; yet we have the balls to claim the Russia entry into Ukraine was “unprovoked.” It __was__ provoked. By us. We are in the wrong, here.
Then, not satisfied that we’ve caused an actual war, we took to supplying Ukraine with weapons, ammunition, and money to fight Russia.
As the Russians overcame all that, we upped the ante again with Longer range rockets, covert intelligence, target selection through airborne and satellite recon.
When that failed, we upped the ante again by inserting US/NATO troops to operate even longer range weapons systems. It is OUR people pushing the button on missile launches in Ukraine, yet we have the balls to claim “we are not a party to the conflict.”
Everything that comes out of OUR mouths, is lies.
We started supplying M1A1 Abrams tanks and then M1A2 tanks. They proved so shitty, Ukraine pulled them out of service because they broke down so often, required huge maintenance, and . . . the punch line: Their oh-so-top-secret Armor . . . . gets blown right through by Russian anti-tank weapons. The tanks are almost worthless!
Just this month, we “authorized” Ukraine to use west-supplied weapons, to strike deep inside Russia. Well, get this: If we “authorized it” then WE __are__ a party to the conflict.
Russia already has the right to strike us!
Next is to come F-16 fighter jets. But there’s a problem with those: Ukraine has no viable airfields that can be used to Refuel, re-arm, or maintain those planes. So now we’re saying that the planes will be in NATO bases outside of Ukraine, will fly into Ukraine, attack Russian forces or Russia itself, then fly back to those bases outside Ukraine. Russia has made clear that all such planes, if they fly from outside Ukraine to attack Russians, will be a legitimate target — and so will the air bases they takeoff from or land at.
So the absolute moment that one of those planes flies in from Romania or Poland, hits Russians, and flies back, the base they flew from or to, is very likely to get hit by Russia. At that moment, NATO will screech “We’ve been attacked by Russia” and it’s all-out war.
At the beginning of the Russia Special Military Operation to de-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, Russian President Putin made clear “Russia’s conventional forces are not equal to NATO. But Russia is also a nuclear power, and Russia’s nuclear abilities are superior to NATO.” He went on to say “If Article 5 (Collective Self defense) is declared against Russia, it will be a war that no one will win.” The only war that no one will win . . . . . is a nuclear war.
Now, we in the West are openly and publicly saying Russia should be “broken up into 200 ethnic states.”
We are openly talking about the forcible break-up of Russia.
How much longer do YOU think the Russians are going to wait, before they tell the West BOOM?
I suspect, not too much longer.
GET EMERGENCY SUPPLIES NOW OR YOU – AND YOUR FAMILY – WILL DIE
Which brings me to this: IF YOU do not already possess the emergency food, water, medicine you need to live on, a generator, fuel for that generator, communications gear (CB or HAM radio), flashlights, portable radio, batteries for the lights and the radio, and ___EVERYTHING ELSE__ you will need when the Shit Hits the Fan (SHTF) then YOU are going to die.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, but the time for cutesy euphemisms is over.
If a single nuclear bomb hits __anywhere__ in the entire United States, the federal government plan calls for immediate implementation of Martial Law. Not just where the bomb hit, but everywhere. The whole country.
At that moment, everything will stop. No more commerce. You won’t be able to ORDER something online and have it shipped. There won’t be any shipping. No postal service. No UPS. No FedEx.
That’s why I am IMPLORING YOU, to get everything you need and get it NOW.
If you do not have, in your possession, everything you need to get you and your family through a couple MONTHS (at least) then you are fucked. Because you won’t be able to go to the store. You won’t be able to order things and have them delivered.
Please, in the name of God, get emergency supplies NOW, while you still can. Because once the SHTF, life as we know will stop. And if you don’t have what you need, you will NOT be able to get it.
Use your head: If the country is hit by a nuke, and Martial Law is declared, YOU will not be able to go out. It will be like the COVID lockdowns, only enforced by troops with guns. NO store runs. No ordering online and having anything delivered. YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO GET ANYTHING.
For what it’s worth, I do NOT sell any of the things I am telling you to buy. I have ZERO financial interest in telling you what I’ve said herein.
If you have your head up your ass, and deny this reality, you and your family will have no chance at all to survive.
Get what you can, NOW. Have it in your possession. If it is not within reach of your hand, then you don’t have it.
Thai Women Rating Men of Different Ethnic Backgrounds
Very interesting.
What is the most sophisticated crime ever committed?
December 1st, 1948, early morning.
A dead body is found on the shore of Somerton Beach, small town Australia.
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Initially, police assume the case will be quickly closed with an easy answer,, illness or perhaps suicide.
Yet as the farther they find themselves in investigations, the less certainty they have.
They estimate the man to be about 45 and in superb physical condition.
Months pass with no avail and they search frantically for something, anything, to identify him.
And they had little to work with to begin with. On his body they find Juicy Fruit gum, a box of cigarettes, combs, a used bus ticket to Glenelg and an unused train ticket to Henley beach.
He did not carry with him a wallet nor a passport.
The labels in his clothes are all removed.
There is no sign of external harm, no sign of struggle and an autopsy ruled out a death from natural causes. However, the autopsy also revealed brain, stomach and liver were congested with blood. A pathologist theorizes he died from the hemorrhage and had been poisoned.
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Police are still puzzled; not a single trace of poison has been found in his body.
It is too sophisticated for a small Australian town. Whatever happened, it is the work of professionals, careful removal of his clothing tags and a traceless poison. Someone wanted this man dead.
January 14th, 1949.
Staff at a nearby railway station discover a suitcase, label removed.
The luggage has orange thread sewn into it, orange thread that is a perfect match for the stitches on the Somerton man’s pants.
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The contents are surprisingly normal and give away little.
However, there are a few labeled T. Keane, giving the man a potential name.
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However the detectives on the case are still perplexed. All the other labels had been deliberately and meticulously taken off. The fact that these stayed seems like a red-herring.
Nonetheless, they continue searching, though once again their efforts are futile. They hunt for the name T. Keane in every missing person’s record in the English speaking world and find nothing.
As they became increasingly desperate, they finally find another clue.
Hidden in the man’s pocket is a piece of paper, ripped from a book of poetry.
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Two words. Translated, they mean “the end.”
The police bury themselves in investigations again. Weeks later they meet a business man who claims the torn page belongs to a book he found.
As it turns out, the page is a match.
Inside the novel, is a strange series of code and a phone number.
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To this day, it hasn’t been cracked.
The murder of the Somerton Man was so sophisticated, so carefully calculated that we don’t know who the man was, let alone who killed him.
How does the Falkland War compare to the situation in Taiwan?
In the Falkland war, Argentina was militarily weaker than UK.
In the case of Taiwan, Taiwan is under complete control of China.
Many people are misled to think USA will help Taiwan in case of war.
Let me tell you: many times when there were standoffs between China & USA, USA “lost” & was the 1st one to leave the scene.
Just a day or 2 ago in mid june 2024, USA sent 2 aircraft carriers, Roosevelt & Reagan, to SCSea. One was near Xianbin reef to support Philippines to forcefully occupy the reef. One was near Taiwan.
China sent 3 10000-ton destroyers & 2 amphibious warships. Then both US aircraft carriers left. Try to picture the disappointment of PH. Haha.
It is not the 1st time US warships left the scene.
FYI, USA is using China’s version of GPS – Beidou. In case of war, China will switch off Beidou for USA.
Why I Left America
Why do soldiers switch to their sidearm instead of reloading their main weapon while in combat?
They don’t. That is a game play mechanic from some of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games.
Most troops do not carry pistols. Those who do, almost never use them, as the rifle they also carry is far superior in every way. The pistol is only meant as a backup for self defense in case you are separated from your rifle (which should never happen) or you are completely out of ammo, and about to be overrun or something. Sometimes they are issued to machinegunners as a backup, but even that is fairly rare in practice.
Usually, the pistol is reserved for officers, and other troops who form the HQ element of a unit, for example the corpsman/medic or the radio operator; basically, those who have a high risk of capture. Those who ONLY carry a pistol typically never actually see combat while doing so. These are going to be the high level officers and staff who work in the command post, and direct operations rather than actually participating in them directly.
Everybody else just carries a rifle, unless their job requires something else, like a light machine gun. Typically, there will also be one man per fireteam who also has a grenade launcher attached to his rifle, though sometimes a dedicated grenade launcher is issued instead.
In combat, when you run out of ammo, you simply reload the rifle. Troops typically carry at least 7 magazines, and reloading only takes a little less than a second. Switching to a pistol requires dropping the rifle such that it doesn’t smash you in the crotch on the way down, drawing the pistol, and reacquiring the target, which is now completely outside of your effective range with a pistol, while running, ducking crawling and such with your rifle flopping and dragging next to you, or smacking you in the nuts with every movement you make. Also, the pistol’s magazine only carries half as many rounds as the rifles does. Once you run out, you have to reload the pistol (which usually ends up being SLIGHTLY slower than reloading the rifle) and/or holster the pistol (or drop it if you have it on a lanyard, and have it smack your crotch or knee, and tangle up your rifle sling, or get caught on some obstacle and just generally make a nuisance of itself), grab your rifle, bring it back up to your shoulder (which in reality means messing with the sling for a second or two to get it back how it was before you dropped it like a doofus because you saw someone do it in a video game), and then reload it anyway, when you could have just reloaded the thing to begin with, and saved yourself the trouble.
Sure, you can spend all kinds of time at the range practicing transition drills to quickly swap from one to the other, but those are intended to simulate running out of ammo on your last magazine, and switching to pistol in order to move to cover, and clear it so that you can regroup and rearm in relative safety, or break contact.
Given the choice, there is no situation of which I am aware in which you would be carrying both, and a pistol would actually be a better choice than a rifle.
Pizza Cones
Portable, personalized pizza in a cone – ready for tail-gating and game day.
Pizza Cones
Prep: 30 min | Total: 40 min | Servings: 12
Ingredients
1 (13.8 ounce) can Pillsbury® refrigerated classic pizza crust
24 frozen cooked mini meatballs, thawed, cut in half
1 (14 ounce) jar pizza sauce
1 (3.5 ounce) package pepperoni slices
3/4 cup finely chopped yellow or green bell pepper
3/4 cup (3 ounces) shredded pizza cheese
Instructions
Move oven rack to lowest position. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Wrap 12 (4 ounce) paper cone cups with nonstick foil.
Unroll dough on work surface. Using rolling pin, roll dough to a 20 x 15 inch rectangle. Cut into 12 (5 inch) squares.
Wrap 1 dough square around each cup; press to seal edges. Trim any excess dough at bottom of each cup.
Place on large cookie sheet, open ends down.
Bake on lowest oven rack for 8 to 10 minutes or until light golden brown.
When cool enough to touch, remove and discard foil-covered paper cones.
Place 1/2 meatball in bottom of each cone.
In large bowl, mix 3/4 cup of the pizza sauce, the pepperoni, bell pepper and remaining meatball halves.
Microwave uncovered on HIGH for 2 to 4 minutes or until hot. Spoon about 1/4 cup of the mixture into each baked cone.
Top each cone with about 1 tablespoon cheese.
Serve hot with remaining pizza sauce.
Notes
If you’d rather not shop for paper cone cups, make your own foil cone shapes: Cut 12 (9-inch) circles nonstick foil. For each: Fold foil circle in half. Roll foil starting at one side, until bottom open end of foil is 3 inches across. Place 1 dough square over nonstick foil cone, pressing edges to seal. Reshape foil into cone shape, and place open end down on cookie sheet. Bake as directed above.
When I lived in the State’s I often would travel to certain cities. Sometimes for work. Sometimes for personal reasons. But all in all, I pretty much have been exposed to many different American cities.
One of the things that I would notice in all of the big cities of America was the abandoned, chained up, bicycles on the various streets.
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You would be so surprised with how many old and abandoned bicycles are there. Many have the rubber wheels are gone, they are rusty and growing into the various trees on the residential trees.
Ah. Is this significant?
Nope. It probably isn’t.
But it’s a fine curiosity. And something rarely noticed and thus rarely discussed.
Today…
Life in the UK vs Life in China (Don’t watch if youre sensitive.)
What is a family secret you didn’t know as a kid, but now as an adult you do and when you look back it explains a lot of things?
My Great Aunt Dottie was actually my Great Uncle Garrison. He was never invited to any family events and when they’d ask my Great Aunt Remi (Dottie’s sister) where “Gary” was (Dottie hated that name with a vengeance) it was always with darting eyes and hushed voices making sure the children didn’t hear, Remi would answer, “he’s dead and you damned well know it.” It wasn’t until I was in high-school and had a friend who had two dads that my mom quipped one day while she was doing the dishes “You know your Great Aunt Dottie was a man, right?” and I was dumbfounded, I loved Great Aunt Dottie, I would ride my bike over to her house all the time and have tea and cookies and the most amazing monkey meat sandwiches ever and she would teach me how to cross stitch and how to plan a fifteen course meal. It was Great Aunt Dottie that taught me how to waltz and roller skate and how to shoot a bow and arrow. I actually loved my Great Aunt Dottie more after I found out that she chose her own happiness over her family and was one of only three members of my family to attend her funeral. But looking back I wonder if I always kind of knew, she had a husky voice, an always present five o clock shadow and scratched her balls like a true man.
Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.
If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.
This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.
Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with somet
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard pretending to be asleep?
As a kid I was friends with these 3 girls, who were sisters and one night their parents allowed me to have a sleepover at their house so when it came to bedtime the parents allowed me and one sister to sleep in their bed until the parents came up and moved us to my friend’s bed. At the time I didn’t understand why, maybe that’s how bedtime was in their house, anyway the light was on in the room so it stopped me from falling asleep, I was too soft to turn it off incase I got into trouble or it woke up my friend who clearly could sleep with the light on. Then I heard footsteps coming upstairs so I had to pretend to be asleep. The parents came into the room, one of them picked me up and put me in one of the girls beds, the other picking up their daughter and putting her next to me. The light wasn’t on in there but the hall light was on which was fine, so I thought ‘finally I can go to sleep now!’ As I was just about to head into dreamland I hear moaning and the bed squeaking coming from the parents bedroom!!!! 🤣🤣 I was 9 years old so I knew what they were doing and I had to wait till it was quiet until I finally got some sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t tell anyone what I heard or that I was awake the whole time, it would’ve been an awkward conversation to have so I tried to forget about it. 😬
hing worse than backing down.
Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.
We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.
A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.
This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.
It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.
The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.
The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.
Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.
Pepe Escobar: Xi & Putin’s Move Pushed NATO Into CHAOS! Who Is Win?
When someone hugs you, you should not be first to break it.
Remove your sunglasses when you have to speak to someone.
Irrespective of your closeness, do not ask your friends and room mates for their clothes, shoes and accessories. Those are ‘ personal belongings‘
Do not order expensive stuff when you are sharing or the other person is paying the bill.
Don’t make ola / uber driver wait for you. Time is literally money for them.
If you borrow someone else’s novel/ books, do not mark anything in them. Return them in a good condition and within acceptable time.
Compliment people when you notice their extra efforts in something.
If any child touched you and asked(begged) for money don’t give a dirty look at them and run two steps back. Give, if you want to or say no. That’s it.
Wave your hand rather than calling his or her name in a louder pitch if someone is wearing headphones.
Praise publicly. Criticise privately.
Be quiet when other people are asleep. That means more than not talking — not slamming doors, drawers, etc.
Avoid finishing other people’s sentences and cutting them off
If you get a missed call, remember to call them back. Or at least drop a message.
As a kid I was friends with these 3 girls, who were sisters and one night their parents allowed me to have a sleepover at their house so when it came to bedtime the parents allowed me and one sister to sleep in their bed until the parents came up and moved us to my friend’s bed. At the time I didn’t understand why, maybe that’s how bedtime was in their house, anyway the light was on in the room so it stopped me from falling asleep, I was too soft to turn it off incase I got into trouble or it woke up my friend who clearly could sleep with the light on. Then I heard footsteps coming upstairs so I had to pretend to be asleep. The parents came into the room, one of them picked me up and put me in one of the girls beds, the other picking up their daughter and putting her next to me. The light wasn’t on in there but the hall light was on which was fine, so I thought ‘finally I can go to sleep now!’ As I was just about to head into dreamland I hear moaning and the bed squeaking coming from the parents bedroom!!!! 🤣🤣 I was 9 years old so I knew what they were doing and I had to wait till it was quiet until I finally got some sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t tell anyone what I heard or that I was awake the whole time, it would’ve been an awkward conversation to have so I tried to forget about it. 😬
The Dating Market isn’t Looking Too Hot ….
Doctors, have you ever delivered a child to a couple who clearly didn’t need Maury to tell him “you are NOT the father!”? What happened next?
Not a doctor or a nurse, just a friend of a couple. She is elf pale, blonde hair so light it’s almost white, pale blue eyes and nary a freckle to be seen. He is (no offense to anyone) coal black. When the baby was born she looked like she should have been wearing a sombrero with a taco in her hand singing La Cucaracha. (still, no offense intended to anyone, just setting the scene) the doctor and the nurse were both speechless. I was there, I was taking the video. The doctor was hesitant to hand the baby to my friends husband and they both thought something was wrong with the baby. The nurse went from being sweet to being a total bitch to my friend. When he left the room to go tell his family that is was a girl, the nurse made a comment to the doctor about how they never see any wholesome god-fearing families anymore. My friend lost it; it technically wasn’t even her baby, she was just a surrogate. The man in the room with her? He wasn’t even the father, just a friend that was gracious enough to be her coach. She was carrying the baby for another friend of ours and her husband.
The UnXplained: TOP 5 SHOCKING MYSTERIES OF 2023 | PART 1
I really enjoyed this video. I think that youse guys will too.
In Thailand, why are the South Koreans and Japanese treated better than Chinese tourists?
Disclaimer: I’m a Thai of Chinese descent living in a tourism hub of Chiang Mai, speak a little Mandarin and had actually been to China as well, so may I offer my humble 2 cents. I don’t want fellow Chinese quorans to be too stoked or offended by this kind of question. If my answer offends anyone, I apologize in advance. I also apologize for my fellow citizens as well. After all, our economy relies on tourism a lot, please come and visit us! At least this Thai welcome everyone to visit my country with open arms! I say this as a Thai who have traveled to almost all inhabited continents on Earth. 😊
There were lots of direct flights from China to Chiang Mai pre-Covid, even to lesser known cities like Changsha. Influenced by a 2012 Chinese blockbuster “Lost in Thailand” (泰囧) which heavily featured Chiang Mai, the city became hugely popular among Chinese visitors. Back then, Chinese tourists tended to exhibit a not-so-impressive manners. For example, in Chiang Mai University, Chinese tourists used to roamed free inside the campus and took photos of classes in session (many faculty members were really tired of this). This prompted the university to disallow tourists inside the campus, and directed them to the university’s official guided tour instead.
However, post-Covid, Chinese tourists nowadays are no longer loud and rude like before. Yes, there would still be some bad sheep in the flock, but the overall trend manner-wise went for the better. Back when China was poorer, Chinese tourists indeed had bad reputation. However, as time goes, I did notice a better trend of manners among the Chinese tourists. I dare say they are pretty much on par with Koreans and Japanese nowadays manner-wise. Nonetheless, I won’t deny that there are some racism bias towards mainlanders among a portion of our citizens (which is quite an irony because 1/6 of Thai population are of Chinese descent). Also, since China is a much larger country than Korea and Japan, there are just a lot of Chinese setting up shops (100% owned) in several touristic hubs like Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or Phuket. And as some answers also mentioned, such shops only cater to Chinese customers and Chinese tourists have higher tendencies to visit Chinese-owned shops compared to Thai ones. Thai people’s concerns on Chinese tourists is mainly about the circulation of tourism money in Chinese-owned business nowadays rather than the manners. I don’t have problems with Chinese setting up shops here, but please also spend some money and contribute to the place you are visiting too. 😊 This would greatly improve our perception towards Chinese tourists a great deal.
I would like to share my own experience as well regarding the Chinese tourist’s manner. In 2013, I went to Mongolia (part of a train trip from Mongolia to China and then onto North Korea) and met a Chinese couple in our tour group. They really shattered my prejudice of “Chinese tourists are loud and rude”. They were so kind and very well-mannered, and when my train arrived in Beijing, they offered me a treat at a Peking Duck restaurant in Haidian District and then took me (and some Westerners who were in the same group back in Mongolia) to have some “rou chuanr” with “Jia duo bao” herbal drink! I still remembered it to this day.
Again, I would like to just tell the situation as it is without putting in prejudices or biases. It would be better if we treat each culture with respect and understanding.
Professor Studied NDE’s For 30 Years; What She Discovers Is Incredible (Near Death Experiences)
As a leader in the photovoltaic industry, China dominates the industrial and supply chains, currently producing over 90% of the world’s polysilicon, 98% of solar-grade silicon wafers, over 85% of solar cells, and over 80% of photovoltaic modules. It is projected that by 2025, China’s global share in polysilicon and silicon wafer production will reach 95%, making the world highly dependent on China’s photovoltaic products.
Not only does China have massive production capacity, but its photovoltaic technology is also extremely advanced. The latest solar cells have achieved a photoelectric conversion efficiency of 33.9%, far exceeding the 5% capability of plants. Additionally, Chinese photovoltaic products are highly competitive in price, with a 99% decrease in cost over the past 20 years, currently priced at around 0.8 yuan per watt. Furthermore, Chinese photovoltaic modules have a long service life and can maintain 80% of their power generation efficiency after 25 years of use.
As China’s photovoltaic technology rapidly advances, old photovoltaic modules, although long-lasting, have lower performance and are difficult to circulate and dispose of domestically. However, in poor countries with inadequate grid coverage, such as Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, these second-hand photovoltaic panels are in high demand. In these regions, lacking basic infrastructure, the living conditions of the population are extremely poor, often without access to basic lighting or phone charging facilities. China’s used photovoltaic panels, with their low prices, can provide basic electricity to rural households, improving their quality of life and being regarded as high-tech products.
South Africa witnessed a significant increase in imports of photovoltaic panels and energy storage batteries in 2022-2023, with not only rural but also urban residents purchasing these systems to overcome unstable grid issues. Gaza has the highest density of photovoltaic panel installations globally, as the local grid has been destroyed, leaving the population reliant on photovoltaic panels for electricity.
In summary, China’s discarded second-hand photovoltaic panels, at extremely low prices, have benefited many impoverished areas around the world, providing electricity to billions of rural households without access to power, lifting them out of darkness, and enabling them to enjoy the conveniences of electricity. This reflects China’s philosophy of utilizing technology to assist and support underprivileged groups, in stark contrast to some countries that exploit and oppress the weak.
Oh this is hilarious.
The USA offered a gigantic bribe to Marcos to turn them into a missile base.
Marcos says yes allows US to build missile facilities.
Marcos asks where his money is.
US says what money?
you believed me?
Many Hong Kong restaurants demand money UP FRONT.
CHINA BUILDING 3nm CHIPS – biden makes failing look easy…
As an engine mechanic, what is the strangest thing you’ve found inside an engine?
In college as a rookie on the SAE Baja team, I was tasked with tearing down one of our old engines and doing a simple top end rebuild. There wasn’t anything wrong with the engine, it was just a spare one and this was a way for new team members to gain familiarity with part numbers, torque specs, and other things like that. We used a brand new engine for each year’s competition car.
Upon removing the head from the 10 HP Briggs & Stratton, something odd caught my eye. There was raised material on the face of the piston partly obscured by carbon. Brushing it away revealed threads and part of hex head! This engine had somehow ingested a stray 1/4″–20 screw which became embedded into the top of the piston, and then just kept running like nothing had happened. It was potentially like that for a whole year worth of test runs and competitions, possibly even longer.
The fastener was laying there sideways but extremely fused to the piston and could not be removed without destroying it. We simply ground down the portions that were sticking up to recreate a flush surface, reinstalled everything, and called it a day. It continued to run just fine.
– – –
A couple years ago my father in law asked me to help fix up his riding lawnmower, powered by another Briggs & Stratton engine. This was a two cylinder vertical shaft of maybe 18 or 20-some horsepower, I don’t recall exactly. His complaint was that it was “a little down on power” but still cut the grass fine. It just struggled a little bit going up steep hills or cutting through extra-thick grass if he let it grow too tall, and occasionally it let out puffs of dark smoke. He mowed with it like that all summer, bagged leaves with it like that in the fall, and when it was finally done for the season I met up with him to look the thing over.
Expecting a 30-minute carb cleaning or a fouled spark plug I got to work, but found everything spotless. With no signs of any issues with the electrical components either, I moved on to a more serious investigation. Tearing into this engine began with a crankcase cover on the top. With this removed we could look down along the axis of the crankshaft to inspect for any catastrophic bottom end damage. Everything appeared fine but there was a thin metal rod in kind of a weird place tucked behind the crank counterweight. It had a few bends in the middle of it for clearance and the two ends disappeared into the oil bath and up into the block somewhere. I figured it had to be part of the governor system so I left it in place and moved on.
Removing the valve covers, I found the first head looking as it should. The second, however, revealed the culprit: a totally missing pushrod! It was just gone! That would explain the lack of power. One valve on that cylinder is never opening so it’s never accomplishing a power cycle. It’d only been running on one cylinder all year. But then the unavoidable question was, “where did the pushrod go?”
I eventually put two and two together and realized that strange governor-rod-thing was actually the missing pushrod. It had somehow gotten dislodged from its place and fell down into the crankcase. The clearance bends were not manufactured, they were suffered from the crankshaft smashing into it as it bounced around in there until everything was able to self-clearance. Despite being completely down one cylinder and choking on its own guts, this V-twin still performed so well that its shortcomings were nothing more than an inconvenience to be dealt with on the off-season.
I’d always heard Briggs built some tough ass machines but these experiences really solidified that for me.
Why are 90% of US guided missiles and drones missing their targets in Ukraine?
All of the following munitions rely on GPS and have a problem with terminal guidance anywhere near the Russian front line, due to ubiquitous Russian GPS jamming:
JDAM (air launched 500 pound GPS-guided bombs — 90% of what the USAF and USN drop)
SDB (replacement for JDAM)
GLSDB (an SDB mounted on a missile that can be shot from a HIMARS)
M30 (90 km range rocket fired from HIMARS, deploys cluster munitions)
M31 (90 km range rocket fired from HIMARS, 91 kg warhead)
The problem is not confined to US products. Ukrainian-built FPV drones which do not use GPS are also getting jammed by the Russians. I spoke to a guy who is responsible for about 15% of Ukraine’s drone production, and he dismissed any talk of GPS and said it’s gone. In and around the front line, that may be true, but there are caveats.
Background: GPS relies on a network of satellites with 44.8 watt transmitters 20,000 miles up. The signal (-125 dBm) is substantially weaker than the background radio hiss that’s everywhere (-110 dBm), and uses a lot (43 dB) of something called coding gain to be detectable and usable. When GPS devices take a while to acquire the signal, what they are doing is synchronizing their internal code to the satellite’s code. Once the two are synchronized, they can hear the satellite, until then, it’s just more hiss. The process of synchronization is basically trying every possible time alignment until one works.
Before the first GPS satellite was launched in 1978, the designers already knew that GPS could be jammed [1]. Just hit the receiver with -82 dBm of radio hiss and it’ll never hear the satellite. A 1000 watt ground-based transmitter can blank out naive GPS receivers for 560 km.
And, before the first GPS satellite was launched, the designers knew of many clever ways to reduce the effect of jamming. One of them, however, is a massive hammer: controlled reception pattern arrays (CRPA). You use an array of GPS antennas and combine the signals together in a way that causes the jamming signals to cancel. So long as the jammer isn’t coming from the same direction as the GPS satellites, this works really, really well.
Here’s a CRPA from a May 2000 report [2]:
1 panel
Arrays like this can act a bit like a bigger antenna with a diameter the size of the entire array. That’s nice, you get a bit more signal from the antenna. Cancellation works far better. Let me demonstrate.
2 graph
Here is the result of just two omnidirectional antenna elements added together. The Y direction is dB of gain from combining the antennas. The X axis is degrees between the “null” direction and the actual direction of the signal source. You can see that at right angles (90 degrees) to the null, two antennas pick up twice as much power as just one, which is +3 dB of gain. That’s nice, we’ll take it. It’s a big fat lobe. If that’s off by 40 degrees you still get half the benefit, and the benefit isn’t amazing to start with.
But look at that deep, sharp null. If you can get it aligned to one degree, you can knock the jammer down by 35 dB. In practice, CRPAs achieve 50 dB because they very quickly and very precisely line up the phase delays from the antennas to knock out the jammer.
If the jammer against a CRPA wants to work as well as it did against a naive receiver, it’ll need 50 dB more power. dB is a logarithmic scale: That’s 10,000x as much power. So that 1000 watt jammer now needs to push 10 million watts. This is… possible… but any such thing is going to be a major installation and will get a visit from a HARM missile and thereafter many JDAMs.
Today you can buy CRPAs from a variety of manufacturers, all outside the United States. Tualcom, a Turkish company, sells 8-channel CRPAs. They’ve sold 2500 of them to Iran for use on… drones. Yep. Did you know that Turkiye is a NATO ally?
These aren’t going to be on Shaheds, or not many of them anyway, because a CRPA costs about $20k or more. (Please let me know if there are cheaper units.) That’s because there’s no commercial market for CRPAs, as the primary civil defense against GPS jamming is litigation. Even though the electronics are actually simpler than what’s in your cell phone, they are built in low volume of many discrete parts, and in the US they are built by folks like Raytheon.
I would hope that every western military jet has a CRPA, but somehow I doubt it.
The HIMARS-launched 90-km range M31s are having accuracy trouble but the HIMARS-launched 300-km range M57 ATACMS missiles are not. In both cases the missiles can probably use inertial guidance from launch to impact, since that’s less than 7 minutes. But they’ll need an accurate initial position and target position.
The accurate target position can probably be found from military maps. FYI, you probably cannot get accurate target positions from Google Maps — I used to work there, and they don’t want you doing that, and they probably fuzz the locations enough to screw up this use.
The accurate initial position and initial GPS acquisition for the missile would come from the launcher’s GPS antenna. This suggests to me that the HIMARS truck is getting jammed when too close to the Russian front line, probably anywhere within 50 km. And THAT tells me that HIMARS doesn’t have a CRPA. (Update: see below, it has an FRPA, which means fixed pattern. I don’t know the pattern, but as it doesn’t articulate the nulls won’t line up exactly with a jammer and as you can see above, they need to line up well to get good jamming.)
main qimg 5d18026abadbd730e65d839862884227
Neither does JDAM, apparently. And I’m guessing SDB doesn’t either, which went into production in 2005.
This is a stupid problem to have. A half-dozen ASIC engineers and $5m could fix it.
China Just Scored A KNOCK OUT Blow To The U.S. Economy And War Is Coming
What are the chances of the U.S nuking China in a war if the U.S starts losing? Where does it start? A carrier group being destroyed? Japan/South Korea being attacked? What exactly would prompt U.S nuclear usage against China?
Chances are near zero.
And for all of those. The reason is something that you may not know.
China is not a signatory to the START treaty. This limits deployed nuclear weapons to around 1,500 warheads. China likely has more than both Russia and the US combined. Despite what you hear in the MSM about China having only 300 warheads, that is an outright lie.
The original estimate came from the Federation of American Scientists in the 80s. In their estimate they stated that they had no idea how many nuclear weapons the Chinese had. So they decided to use electricity generation as some kind of measure.
What does electricity generation have to do with how many nuclear weapons a nation has? Nothing. The Soviets did not have that much electrical generation and yet has more nuclear weapons than the US. So they finished their study saying that China could have 3,000 or 5,000. They had no idea.
The next thing you should know is that these Senators, Congressman, and President of the US is that they spent generations gaining wealth and power. When was the last time you heard Bill Gates or any other billionaire pulled a knife and went toe to toe with another guy with a knife? Never. And you never will.
Even if the US loses a war by attacking China and the US loses 7 carrier battle groups. Do you think Bill Gates or any other billionaire would chose to vaporize their family to take revenge on one of their body guards being killed? Or even all of them? No.
And it’s even more impossible for the politicians to do so because China has more deployed nuclear weapons than the US and Russia. Starting a nuclear war would mean that the US would get at least a double dose of nukes. One from China and one from Russia.
Those selfish people that have spent decades stealing from the US tax payers are going to vaporize their families, wealth, and power for you, a peon? Don’t make me laugh.
The only time nukes would be used is if China nuked the US first or if the US thought it could get away with it without getting nuked back.
Pecos River Red Fritos Pie
dsc05716
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 large onion, chopped coarsely
3 pounds coarsely ground beef
2 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons ground hot red chile peppers
2 tablespoons ground mild red chile peppers
1 1/2 cups water
Corn chips
Shredded Monterey Jack cheese
Shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Combine onion, ground beef, garlic, chiles and water in slow cooker.
Cover. Cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours.
Drain.
Serve over corn chips.
Top with mixture of Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese.
What is the most bizarre way you’ve landed a job?
Son’s friend stayed overnight. The next morning I’m making breakfast for everyone. Son likes poached eggs. I make them. Friend asks if I can make them like that all the time. I explain how to poach an egg. That night I get a phone call from a strange number and a man asks if I’m looking for a job. He needs a cook. In his father’s house. The father is picky about his breakfast and he heard I can poach eggs. I explain that all cooks can poach eggs. Eventually I am hired to cook 3 meals a day for his elderly parents. I have to plan menus for the week and prepare breakfast to order. Hot lunch and a dinner plate to be reheated for dinner. I wash the dishes but all other cleaning is done by the maid. Amazing kitchen. Eventually they tried to give me the old guys Cadillac because he stopped driving and they wanted to “save me using my car to drive to their house.” It was probably the best job I ever had. Not the money or the benefits. They were family. They treated me like family in the best way.
This is a new addition that I am considering to my daily posts. Here I include some contemporaneous SF (short story) for the reader to enjoy. -MM
Do not ever step foot on the ground. Charlie had been told this his entire life, but it never really sunk in. He didn’t understand the deep-seated fear everyone else seemed to harbor. He thought it was incredible, a beautiful problem to be solved. Until he was laying on the floor of the lab staring at the ceiling and blinking away tears.The first time Charlie ever saw the ground consume a person he’d been twelve. What the tree-top teachers referred to as “live mummification” was a quick, disturbing process. Dirt crawling over skin to create a sort of exoskeleton. A casting of the human body, like those papier-mâché spheres they’d made in class years ago. It’d been an elderly lady that first time. The pulley system keeping her safe had malfunctioned and she’d lurched off balance. It was a code yellow bridge and wasn’t fully enclosed. The old lady stumbled to the side and was pulled right over the edge. Charlie caught only the first flash of the swarming ground on her skin before his mom had ushered him away. As the crowd around them shrieked and cried, Charlie craned his neck for a better look.He’d liked to have claimed this moment as the catalyst for his obsession, but really that had occurred years ago. It was maybe a few days after his seventh birthday, and he was crossing that old rope bridge by his house. It’s been built in a rush by early survivors trying to escape their houses for supplies. He was not supposed to be on it, but that had only made him more intent on using it.One of the rotten wood planks had splintered under his front foot and sent him toppling forward. It was only due to some notion of luck that his hips didn’t fit through the empty space and his arms had gotten tangled in the ropes. His leg hung down, exposed, ten feet off the ground. And then his new shoe, a size too big so he could grow into it, slipped off his foot. It landed on the dusty ground and tipped over sideways. Charlie’s breath caught in his chest, but nothing happened. The shiny shoe glistened under the sun. He wanted desperately to stick his finger in that restless dirt, just to see what would happen. He stayed put for way longer than was logical just in case, but the ground remained flat and lifeless. The shoe was not alive.
The second time he saw someone be consumed by the ground he was 18 and on the verge of declaring a major in Microbiology, specializing in the study of those tiny organisms that made the ground hungry. This time the fall had not been an accident. He’d been crossing a major intersection of bridges when a commotion piqued his curiosity. A young woman who looked barely older than him had crawled out onto the roof of a one-story house where no one would risk following. Her auburn hair floated in the wind. People crowded against the railings to watch her. A few kind souls called out things like “You don’t have to do this!” and “Things will get better!” but the girl ignored them. She stared straight ahead and stepped off the roof. For a millisecond it was as if she was walking in the air, and then she plummeted to the ground and landed with a heavy thump. Immediately the soil surged up to meet her. She didn’t make a sound as it closed over her. Charlie came back every day for two weeks to observe the hardened cocoon. Inside, he knew that the body was being decomposed, drained away. The microorganisms in the dirt would suck the nutrients from her. Then the cast would collapse in on itself and the ground would smooth over once again.
It wasn’t surprising that these events would have a lasting effect on him. The unexpected part was the nature of the effect. Where others would shy away and realize how dangerous the ground was, Charlie felt himself drawn to it. He wanted to understand the little beasts that terrorized his people. So, it was inevitable, really, that he’d want to see this forbidden phenomenon again.
The lab he was assigned to was on the upper floor of a university no longer in use. The building was old, made of even gray bricks. He had to duck through the fifth-floor window that had been fashioned into an entrance to get in. The walls were off-white, and the floors were so stable it made him feel somewhat unbalanced. His feet, used to the bridges and tree-top platforms, weren’t accustomed to the solidity. The equipment in the lab was well maintained: microscopes, autoclaves, incubators, centrifuges. He felt like a child in a room full of new toys. On one side of the room, where a balcony had once been, a ramp had been fixed that led down to the ground. The space before it was taken up by a deoxygenation chamber used briefly to asphyxiate any rogue organisms.
Charlie was integrated into a group that exclusively studied the microorganisms in the ground called Vitae Suffocent. Life suckers. The study was relatively new, they’d only recently worked with engineering to create a protective suit. Before then, the scientists would lean out the window with a cup fastened to a long pole and scoop up a small bit of the dirt. With the help of the suits, they had been able to set up a secure mock habitat to observe the specimens’ behavior.
The group was small, a handful of young students of which he was one, along with six seasoned scientists. For the first time, Charlie found himself surrounded by people who were just as interested in the ground as he was. The obsession that had set him apart from other kids in school was now reflected all around him. There was a girl who’d started at the same time as him- Tori. She was short and had thin black hair chopped short around her ears. Because they were new, they were often assigned projects to work on together. He wasn’t sure if he liked her, but it didn’t matter much.
There was an ongoing experiment that needed a fresh test subject, someone to stick a finger into the Life Sucker habitat. Charlie volunteered immediately, exhilarated by the idea of being able to touch the ground. He pictured it being magical, a borderline religious experiment. He worked himself up over it for days, so that when it was finally time he was almost bursting with excitement.
The scientists heading the experiment placed him in the deoxygenation chamber with the container. Around him, they gathered clipboards, pencils poised to jot down any and all details. His forefinger was swiped clean with an alcohol wipe that made the skin feel dry. Tori unlocked the circular compartment in the top of the container. Slowly, breathlessly, Charlie lowered his hand into the habitat. The tip of his finger brushed the dirt. It was soft and damp as he pressed the finger down. Charlie blinked and the soil began to stir. It tickled the pad of his finger. He watched in fascination as the hidden organisms began to climb up his skin. It was a strange sensation. The soil was cool and light, it felt more like a caress than a smothering.
Tori clicked the stopwatch in her hand and began to count aloud. By the time she reached seven, the organisms were up to his wrist. He withdrew his hand. The seal on the opening caught most of the dirt and held it back, to the irritation of the organisms. He held his hand away from him, not trusting it. Tori latched the contained shut quickly. Someone on the outside of the chamber switched it on. They held their breaths as the oxygen rapidly drained from the room. A loud whirring assaulted Charlie’s ears. His chest tightened. For a minute they all felt like they were suffocating, then it abruptly stopped and the doors to the lab popped open. Oxygen flooded back in. Charlie sucked in a deep breath.
He examined his hand. It was tingling and covered in little red blotches, but otherwise, he was fine. No damage had ever been recorded from less than ten seconds of exposure. Charlie glanced at the other set of doors over his shoulder. The ones that opened onto the ramp that led down to the ground. He longed to go through them, wanted to dig his hands in the ground and laugh as the organisms consumed him. He turned and walked back into the lab.
A month later he was given a protective suit and given the chance to wear it for the first time. He and Tori had been assigned to walk, outside, to a big oak tree and back. Charlie was thrilled. He stepped into the suit and pulled it up over his arms. A tech zipped him in and checked him over. The suit was a stiff layer of slick rubber designed to lack tread so the organisms wouldn’t be able to climb against gravity. The boots they were given were thick and clunky. They were tall, reaching up to his knees like a pair of extra-long rain boots. A device attached to the top of the boot sent out vibrations that they’d found would deter the organisms. The hood of the suit came up over his head and the visor was clicked into place. He saw the world through a glass partition.
Then they were in the chamber and the doors behind them were closing. It was midday and the sun was shining. A breeze spirited a few brown leaves past the glass. The doors to the ramp opened. Charlie stepped out first. His heart pounded in his chest. It was right there, the ground. He walked quickly down the ramp, Tori following behind him at a more reserved pace. He paused at the end of it. The dirt was disturbed, as it always was when the organisms were present. It looked almost fluffy.
Charlie took a deep breath and lifted one foot. He lowered it slowly to the ground, enjoying the crunch of soil underfoot. He leaned his weight forward, ready to take another step, but paused. The ground was shaking around his boot, pulsing in strange waves. It was trying to climb up his boot, he realized. He tried to pick up the foot but felt resistance. The ground clung to his boot, pulling him back down. Charlie watched, entranced. He continued to pry his foot away and eventually the dirt fell back down. He looked at Tori, whose face he could just see behind the visor. She looked equal parts disturbed and fascinated.
Afterward, he felt like he’d been on another planet. It was amazing, he’d been on the ground, but he couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed. What had they learned during that expedition? Nothing new, nothing interesting. He wanted more. All he could think about was how slow the studies they performed were. They were no closer to understanding these organisms. They needed to study them in action. His plan fell together quickly after that.
Once again he fastened the protective suit on and was checked over by the other technicians. Tori was doing the same next to him. Charlie clapped a hand on her shoulder and with the scalpel hidden in his palm he sliced a tiny hole into her suit, the rubber splitting easily under a sharp blade. She turned and gave him a thumbs-up. He hid the scalpel in one of his pockets.
They walked through the chamber and out onto the ramp. The suit was heavy and sweaty against his skin. Through the visor, he saw the dirt-coated ground come closer and closer. The first step was always the most exciting. His foot hovered over the solid ground, casting a wavering shadow over the dirt. He placed it firmly down. The ground beneath him stirred, trying to creep up his legs but being deterred by the vibrations.
Slowly, the ground pulling at them with each step, they made it 50 feet away from the end of the ramp. He knew they were being watched closely from the observation windows, but at this distance, no one would really be able to tell what happened. Charlie shoved his foot hard to the side right as Tori took a step. The bottom of her boot caught on the top of his and she lost her balance. Her arms windmilled but the suit was too bulky and dragged her down.
She should have gotten up. The suit should have kept the microorganisms at bay. But Charlie had damaged her suit. He gazed intently down at her as the organisms poured over her and into the hole in the fabric. He bent over as if to help her, but really he just wanted to get a closer look. This near, it was mesmerizing. The dark earth swirled as though it was possessed. It rose and fell like a liquid. Tori cried out one last time before they closed over the top of her dark hair. Charlie ignored the panicked voices over his earpiece. Through his visor the majority of the event had been captured (excepting, of course, when he purposefully tripped her).
He’d made a huge leap in the field, no matter how tragic. The footage would help inform scientists for years to come. Except, he didn’t know (no one did) that after a feeding, the organisms laid their eggs. Hundreds of microscopic eggs stuck to his boots and were carried back into the facility. The eggs, not having to breathe oxygen yet, were not affected by the deoxygenation tank. Charlie stripped off his suit and hung it on the hook.
Overnight, the eggs hatched, and those tiny, deadly microorganisms scurried to hide in the dust accumulated above cabinets and at the edges of the room. Charlie was the first person at the lab that morning, still buzzing with the exhilaration of the day before, ready to study the footage and propel their lab forward. When his skin started to itch, he thought nothing of it. Until he noticed the little red dots on his forearm. Then the world tilted on its axis, and he crumpled to the floor. He’d made another major discovery that day. The skin of the microorganisms contained a deadly neurotoxin.
There weren’t enough creatures to make a cast over him. It was a slow death during which all he could think about was how these organisms would feed on him, suck the life out of him. After, they’d lay their eggs. And the eggs would hatch. And the organisms would spread.
His curiosity had doomed their entire town. He’d brought the ground to them.
Five Dollars
“Today I was picking up lunch for a doctor’s Office and as I’m standing there waiting on my order and checking emails, I hear a gentleman ask this lady, “I would like to purchase something to eat but all I have is $5.” So nosy me looks up from my phone and notices this gentleman wearing a backpack and holding a $5 bill who looks to be homeless or maybe he was dealing with a hard time but either way as he asks about a few items on the menu he shortly discovers that he may need more than $5. The lady begins to offer some suggestions to help him and the man orders and as she’s asking him what he wants to drink and as he’s thinking about it the lady says don’t worry about it because your breakfast is on me.
main qimg cedc7470581935887619008696cb61e3
I got this picture for a couple of reasons. It would have been so easy to turn around and ask the manager to step in or for help but she didn’t she just said hey it’s on me. She could have just gave him water and took his money and went on to the next customer and again she didn’t she just did it. I’ve been in customer service for a long time. I’ve been through some of the best trainings such as Dale Carnegie and yet a girl name Karina in a Chick-fil-A in Jackson, MS in a 3-minute conversation with a customer has managed to teach me the value of humility and taking care of your customers. It’s not just the nuggets that make this place successful. It’s people like Karina.
Fighting Russia & China to Last American: Destroying US From Within| Dr. Jill Stein & Michael Hudson
Back in the day, and I mean really back, I used to party with friends. And being an American in the 1970’s, our medium of fun was drugs, booze, and if we were lucky… perhaps the hint of sex. I for one, dropped a lot of LSD. Way more than my friends.
I know, I know, I was pretty foolish and reckless back then. But it was the times.
In those days, the LSD came in different forms. There was “barrel”, which was a tiny little pill that resembled a very tiny-tiny can of cambell’s soup. There was “blotter”, which was a perforated paper with a design, as well as a few other variations. But most of what I “dropped” came in those two types.
Another big drug at that time, aside from marijuana, was amphetamine. We took it in the “White cross” form. Now, this was NOT “crank” also known as methamphetamine. No, it was something different.
A syntheticcompound, C9H13N, thatoccurs as a racemicmixture of twostereoisomers or as one of itsstereoisomers(especiallydextroamphetamine),derivatives(such as methamphetamine), or salts.Amphetamineacts as a centralnervoussystemstimulant,andvariousformulationsareused in themedicaltreatment of certainconditions(such as attentiondeficithyperactivitydisorder)andillegally as stimulants.
But that was a long time ago, and I rarely revisit those days. Oh, sometimes, I am reminded of those days by a song, or a smell, but they are deep in my past.
Anyways, one day I was partying with my brother and two girls that we had met. And one of the girls had some “silver star” blotter LSD. This was a piece of perforated black paper with a silver star and asked me if I wanted some. She asked do you want two? I said “sure”.
Now at that time I was busy working the pump on the kegger, and I told her to put it in my mouth. And so she put two “hits” in my mouth. Now, I normally only took one, but I was feeling “peckish” and thought that I could handle two.
But the thing is, it wasn’t two. She didn’t know, and neither did I, that each “star” was four hits; four doses of LSD. And I ended up taking a total of eight.
Eight doses.
Lordy!
So the party is going on and I’m getting a little nervous when it starts to hit. Now, contrary to what you might think, LSD isn’t visions of monsters or anything like that. It’s a kind of amplifier of sensory perception. It’s called a hallucinogen, but that is only if you actively “force” some visions…
Anyways… brilliant colors. CHECK.
Fantastic “tracers” (the lines that follow movement). CHECK.
Most excellent “color gradients” (a greater degree in detail when observing the sky) . CHECK.
And I was enjoying the time. Drinking beer. Taking a toke or two. Listening to music, and just talking…
When the other seven does of LSD hit.
What was I thinking? And I started to go into a worry mode… not a good thing. And yeah, it can end up as a really bummer of a trip. And so, yuppur! I started to go full Hunter S. Thompson… Gonzo!
Not a good thing.
About 14 hours later, I crashed out and slept with the most craziest dreams ever. When I woke up, and went to brush my teeth and perform my toilet, I found out that I was still hallucinating. And all that day, I was still dealing with that high.
Went to sleep that day.
Crazy dreams again.
Woke up again, and lordy! I well remember what I said when I woke up. I said “Holy shit! I’m so high, I’m never coming down.” And got ready and went off to the coal mine.
Needless to say, it did eventually wear off, and four days later, I was back to “normal”.
For what ever it is worth. That was almost my last time that I ever dropped acid. The experience enabled me to get it “out of my system”, and move on to the next stage in my life. It’s called “growing up”, and it happens to everyone. Whether it is greasy food, sex, watching television, or golf… eventually we grow out of a certain stage in our lives and move on forward.
Not all of us do.
RIP Robbie.
But many of us do. And this is my story on “passing the line; the threshold” into a new beginning.
have a great day everyone! Today…
Why can Chinese people eat almost anything, including foods that are poisonous or allergic to them, but Westerners can’t? My German friend said that moon cakes alone can “knock out” more than half of Europe. Is this true?
It is 9 a.m. China time on May 31, 2024. As I write this response, I am resting at my father’s house. He is 71 years old and often jokes that he and the Chinese President, Xi, are peers, having endured similar hardships in their youth. I came to my father’s house today because my wife bought some expensive apricots, and after tasting them, we both agreed they were delicious. So, my wife instructed me to bring some apricots to my father to share the flavor. Then I stumbled upon this interesting question. I believe I am capable of providing a good answer.
Chinese people harbor a profound fear of hunger. Since China’s reform and opening up in 1978, Chinese people have been able to eat their fill. It has been over 40 years since then, almost half a century. However, despite decades of abundant food, my father’s fear of hunger persists. The following description applies not only to my father but also to other elderly people in China:
I brought him some apricots to taste. Now he is rummaging through the refrigerator in the next room to find anything to give me. Two weeks ago, he gave me minced beef, last week it was frozen chicken wings, and just now he told me he bought 2 kilograms of peas and wants to give me half. Despite my wife and I having monthly incomes four to five times greater than his, whenever he has the chance, he gives us food. Because he believes: everything else is not as important as having food at home.
My in-laws are the same way. Every weekend when I take my wife and son to their house for dinner, they give us food that she personally prepares. Sometimes it’s buns, dumplings, or traditional Chinese zòng zi (粽子,glutinous rice wrapped in reed leaves with sweet fillings). And she always gives us a lot of food, enough for us to eat for a week. She has no education and doesn’t understand profound principles. She always says, “As long as there’s food, there’s no need to worry.”
Many foreign friends, even if they haven’t been to China, are aware of some Chinese social customs. For example, when two people meet, the way to say hello is to ask, “Have you eaten?” This is not an invitation but simply a kind way of ensuring, “You have food at home, you won’t go hungry.”
China’s history spans thousands of years, filled with alternating periods of war, famine, and prosperity. So much so that whether it’s the heyday or the decline of a dynasty, most ancient Chinese people had to endure hunger regularly. Zhāng Yǎng hào(张养浩), a poet from the Yuan Dynasty, wrote in his poem: “兴,百姓苦,亡,百姓苦” (Regardless of whether the country is strong or weak, the common people always endure hardships). Another line from this poem is: “伤心秦汉经行处,宫阙万间都做了土。” It means that you see those great dynasties, such as the Qin and Han dynasties, once they come to power, they start building magnificent palaces for themselves. But over time, both the imperious emperors and the palaces end up as piles of ruins.
Even today, we can still find traces of famine times in many traditional Chinese foods. For example, this is “zhēng yě cài(蒸野菜),” a cooking method where a lot of leafy vegetables are collected from the fields, mixed with a little flour (about 10% of the weight of the leafy vegetables), some salt, and a drop of sesame oil, then steamed in a pot. These are some steamed wild vegetables, and even the chef can’t be sure of the ingredients, because elderly people in rural areas gather whatever plants they see in the wild:
My father detests this food. He had enough of it during the famine of the 1950s. But what he didn’t expect is that “zhēng yě cài” is now the most popular food in China. Surprisingly, it meets almost all the principles of nutrition—very few carbohydrates, a variety of vegetables, organic leafy greens, and very little sodium and fat. It is a healthy food in China, eaten by beautiful girls, middle-class gentlemen, and some elderly people to avoid obesity. And the price has gone from almost zero to about the same as meat per kilogram today. This is the expensive steamed wild vegetables sold in supermarkets:
Another famine-era food is “zhuang mo,” made by repeatedly squeezing a lump of flour with mechanical force to make the dough very dense. Then, a little salt is added, and it’s shaped into 3 cm thick cakes, slowly baked on a skillet. The dehydrated cooked dough can be stored for a long time and won’t become hard—because it’s already hard enough. When eating, people from the old society break the cakes into 1 square centimeter pieces by hand, then soak them in water to soften them. This food is not only stored by people during famine times but also beneficial for military activities. Because it can be carried around and is said to be able to stop bullets. Of course, that’s just a joke. This is “zhuang mo”:
But in today’s China, “zhuàng mó”(壮馍) has become a rare delicacy. Because it is very cumbersome to make, the craftsmanship has been lost. It can only be occasionally found in rural areas. Two years ago, my mother-in-law wanted to eat “zhuàng mó,” and I found a shop in the suburbs 5 kilometers away from my home. But the boss said it needed to be booked 48 hours in advance. Today, when Chinese people eat “zhuàng mó,” they eat it with delicious lamb soup. Because Chinese people who are used to refined grains begin to enjoy the texture of “zhuang mo” and believe that chewing repeatedly can taste the unique aroma of wheat. This is “zhuàng mó” eaten with lamb soup:
There is another classic famine-era food called “wo wo tou,” made from cornmeal, sorghum flour, and wheat flour in equal proportions, with the center hollowed out. The purpose of these ingredients is to save wheat flour, and the hollow center is to “deceive one’s eyes, so visually it’s not empty inside.” During famine times, the hollow part of “wo wo tou” was filled with some pickled vegetables or hot sauce. This way, there was no need to make additional dishes; one “wo wo tou” was a meal. These are some “wo wo tou” made by Chinese families themselves:
My wife sometimes asks me to buy or make some “wō wō tóu.” This food, because it uses whole grain staple foods and is rich in dietary fiber, has become a healthy food in China today. I rarely buy it at the market because, like the other two foods mentioned above, it has become a rare delicacy. Some food store owners have updated “wō wō tóu” into multiple varieties such as corn, sorghum, oats, soybeans, etc. These are the high-priced “wō wō tóu” offered in restaurants:
Diet is always influenced by culture, and culture comes from the living environment. For thousands of years, China’s living environment has been harsh most of the time. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, people thought that famine would never come again. However, several large-scale political movements led to economic chaos, even causing the horrifying Great Famine in the early 1960s. This event is recorded in the history of the Communist Party of China, scholars’ works, and textbooks for middle school students, reminding Chinese people never to experience famine again.
Fortunately, all of that is behind us. As the lives of the Chinese people become more prosperous, metabolic diseases have become the main public health burden. There are more and more obese people, and diabetes, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, coronary heart disease, and atherosclerosis have become the main causes of death among Chinese people. These diseases were once called “diseases of the affluent” (富贵病) in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. My friend works at a community health center, which manages about 20,000 residents nearby. The health center holds various courses and lectures every week, mainly educating the public on “how to live a healthy life.” Dietary balance is their main teaching content.
Today, when Chinese elderly people see the expensive “zhēng yě cài(蒸野菜),” “zhuàng mó(壮馍),” and “wō wō tóu(窝窝头)” in supermarkets, they are amazed. Because in their childhood memories, these foods meant imminent starvation. But today, they mean a prosperous life.
African Nations Repatriate Their Gold and Foreign Reserves From the USA.
"It's not about Russia; it's about the US and Britain before that.
I think it's a little bit like that old game of Risk. I don't know if you played that as a kid, but the idea was to have your piece in every place in the world—that was the game.
You read the American strategists, whether it's Zbig Brzezinski, although he was very moderate, or the neocons who have run US foreign policy for the last 30 years. The neocons are very explicit: the US must be the unchallenged superpower in every place in the world, in every region we must dominate.
That's quite a load for us American people.
What they say is, 'We are going to be the constabulary duty holder'—a fancy word for saying we'll be the world's policeman.
They say it explicitly.
They say, 'That's lots of wars—we have to be ready for all these wars.'
To my mind, it's a little crazy, but their idea was that after the end of the Soviet Union, 'Well, now we run the world.'
And to come back to Russia, the idea was, 'Well, Russia is weak, it's down. We're the sole superpower—they're on their back or on their knees, whatever it is, and now we can move NATO where we want and we can surround them.'
The Russians said, 'Please don't do that. Don't bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border. It's not a good idea.'
The US was, 'We don't hear you, we don't hear you. We do what we want.' They kept pushing.
Inside the US government in the 1990s, when this debate was going on about whether NATO should expand, some people said, 'Yeah, but we told Gorbachev and we told Yeltsin we weren't going to expand at all.' 'Now, come on, the Soviet Union's done. We can do what we want. We're the sole superpower.'
Clinton bought into that—that was Madeleine Albright's line. NATO enlargement started.
Our most sophisticated diplomats—back when we had diplomats, which we don't have anymore—like George Kennan, said: 'This is the greatest mistake we could possibly make.'
We had a defense secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton's defense secretary, who agonized over this: 'God, I should resign over this. This is terrible, what's going on.'
But he was outmaneuvered diplomatically by Richard Holbrooke and by Madeleine Albright, and Clinton never thought through anything systematically, in my opinion. They decided, 'Okay, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic—first round.'
Then Brzezinski, in a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is kind of the bellwether of US foreign policy, wrote a strategy for Eurasia where he laid out exactly the timeline for this US expansion of power.
He said that in the late 1990s, we'd take in Central Europe—Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic. By the early 2000s, we'd take in the Baltic states—now that's getting close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we'd invite Ukraine to become part of NATO.
So this wasn't some flippant thing; this was a long-term plan based on a long-term strategy.
Now the Russians are saying, 'Are you kidding? We wanted peace. We ended the Cold War. You didn't defeat us; we said no more. We disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We wanted peace, we wanted cooperation. You call it victory; we just wanted to cooperate.'
I know that for a fact because I was there in those years.
What Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted, they didn't want war with the United States, nor were they saying, 'We're defeated.'
They were saying, 'We just want to cooperate. We want to stop the Cold War. We want to become part of a world economy. We want to be a normal economy. We want to be a normal society, connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia.'
And the US said, 'We get it, we get it. We won. You do everything we say, and we determine how the pieces are going to go.'
So, in the early 2000s, Putin comes in.
His first business was good cooperation with Europe.
You go back to the early 2000s—again, I know the people, I watched closely, I was a participant in some of it—Putin was completely pro-Europe and pro-US, by the way.
I know we don't want to talk about this; we don't want to admit it because we don't want anything other than the narrative of 'unprovoked' actions.
Everything we say is phony; everything is a lie."
Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, May 28, 2024.
Lemon Brisket
1692910538862
Yield: 10 servings
Ingredients
2 ribs celery, halved lengthwise
2 onions, quartered
1 first-cut or flat-cut (leaner section) beef brisket, about 4 pounds, trimmed
2 lemons, cut into thin slices
1 cup raisins or to taste
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper
2 low-sodium beef bouillon cubes, dissolved in 2 cups water
Instructions
Line the bottom of a large slow-cooker with celery and onions and top with brisket.
Place lemon slices and raisins on the brisket; season with salt and pepper to taste.
Add dissolved bouillon.
Cook on LOW until meat is fork-tender, about 10 to 12 hours.
Remove meat to a cutting board and let stand 15 minutes.
Skim fat from cooking broth. Adjust seasonings if needed.
Remove lemon slices and cut in half.
Pour broth into a serving bowl and add lemons.
Slice meat across the grain into thin slices. Halve or quarter the brisket slices and serve with the broth and lemons.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 301; Calories from fat 25%; Total fat 8g; Saturated fat 3g; Cholesterol 77mg; Carbohydrate 17g; Sodium 322mg; Fiber 2g; Protein 39g
Have you ever tried to annoy a scammer who called you? If so, what happened?
So I decided I want to sell my old phone and I put it on a local online service. Predictably, the usual scammers made an appearance so I decided to mess around with him/her a little bit.
The scam goes like this: They entice you to sell to them by promising you more money than you ask, you give them your IBAN, they sent you the money, show you a receipt, you ship the item to them and they reverse the payment, leaving you waiting for money that will never arrive. What follows are some snippets of our conversation
P.s. Alaye is apparently a Nigerian “secret” word that scammers use to reveal to other people that they are scammers – so they don’t waste each others time. The scammer got fed up with me
Modern Dating Is Impossible – Here’s The Playbook | PsycHacks’ Orion Taraban
What is the most deceitful thing you have ever seen a business do to a customer?
A friend was buying some land and planned to put a mobile home on it while he decided what to build. He found a great deal on a solid double wide and hired a company to disassemble, move and reassembled it on his land.
On the day of the move, they showed up late finally got the two pieces ready to move late in the day. My friend had family property a half mile away and asked that the company just park the two pieces there overnight, but the company was adamant that they take it back to their office, fifty miles in the opposite direction from where they would be headed the next day and right at rush hour. Nothing would change their minds.
About nine that night he got a call from a friend who had spotted half of his mobile home, wrecked on the side of the interstate. We went out to look, and it was true. Not only was it wrecked, but the driver had dropped it with no support under the tongue, so it was severely twisted, and vandals had already gotten in and stripped out the copper wire.
We went out again and took photos at dawn and then called the company. They said there was nothing wrong that they couldn’t fix right up, and they still planned the move for that day. My friend asked where the other half (that contained all the appliances) was and the company refused to tell him. He told them that he refused to sign off on the move until the reassembled mobile home was inspected by an independent contractor and to his satisfaction. The company refused that stipulation.
By that afternoon the wrecked potion of the mobile home was gone. The company stopped taking calls. Apparently, they had subcontracted the move to another company without anyone’s knowledge, so there was no way to find the mobile home. My friend had depended on the mobile home to live in, so he had to rent and lost his land because he could pay both rent and land payments.
My friend spoke to a lawyer who was willing to take the case, but only if he could provide an address to serve the company, and by that time they had disappeared. I began sleuthing and finally managed to track them down (this was 1985, so no Google). I know that it took more than another year to get to court, but I believe the lawyer found two insurance policies and got a good settlement, but those people had every intention of robbing that poor man blind.
KNOCKOUT: China’s BOLD Move Threatens To Dethrone The US In Europe’s Economy
What is the most amazing thing you overheard because people didn’t think you understood their language?
A couple of years ago my brother and I were driving from the UK to Germany. We were stopped by police shortly after crossing the Dutch/German border. They checked our travel documents then one said to the other in German, “How much shall we get from them?” To which the other replied “Five hundred each.”
One of them then proceeded to “search” the car we were driving while we stop with the other on the other side of the car. The one who was searching rather smugly announced that we had a problem and displayed a small bag of green stuff.
They went to their car and came back with documents to be signed and informed us that they’d “found” 4g of cannabis in our car and that we had to pay a €500 “fine” each or get arrested and charged with smuggling.
My brother called his wife and our mother, trying to get funds transferred to his account. I made out I was doing the same but in fact I quietly called my (German) lawyer who confirmed what I’d suspected: that they were trying to extort money from us and that there were no fines in Germany which were to be paid to a police constable in cash.
As I was speaking with her, one of the policemen asked if I’d be getting the money for the fine. To which I replied in German (I’d spoken nothing but English up until that point) that I was speaking with my lawyer and would need another few minutes. His face dropped. His mouth actually opened into an expression of disbelief and amazement. I asked my lawyer if she’d heard him — she had, and if she’d recorded our conversation — she had. She then advised me what to do.
I hung up and told the policemen that we wouldn’t pay any fines and if they felt they had cause to arrest us, then they should do so and I’d call my lawyer immediately. I informed them that my lawyer had recorded our telephone conversation including the part where I’d been asked if I would be getting the money.
Needless to say, we weren’t detained any longer. I have never seen such a switch in a person’s attitude. From cocky and bullying to worried and sheepish in a flash.
My new idea of including new short science fiction stories in the MM daily posts. -MM
If he never saw another rock again, he’d be flipping thrilled.“I found something strange on Google Maps and had to check it out!” Gray smiled at his phone and hoped he disguised how absolutely done he was with this trip. Someday soon, the footage would go out to his thousands of viewers, but right now he had no service, no Wi-Fi, and no feeling in his arm after hours recording his hike up the rugged mountain.At least it wasn’t the jungle. The last time he did one of his ‘spontaneous discovery’ videos, it took him two weeks to find the right bug spray.This was his best video series yet, though, far more popular than the Vegas Strip street interviews, so he massaged his shoulder and pressed onward–upward, really–until his lungs screamed from the air pressure and the altitude had him pulling his jacket from his worn pack.
“It’s around here somewhere,” he told his camera. Gray hoped it was true. He spent days scouring Google Maps for something worth investigating. When he finally found this place, he saved the image as his lock screen as a symbol of triumph. He’d seen it so many times now that the second the cluster of boulders came into view, he flicked on the GoPro strapped to his forehead and started running.
“I think I found it,” he huffed through wheezing breaths before kicking at overgrown weeds and what he hoped was mud.
There it was, the hatch. Unlike the one he found in a tunnel at the foot of the Alps, this one did not require his not-yet-patented one-leg, two-arm prying technique to open.
He peered inside, hoping the cameras caught the view even as the hazy afternoon sun seemed to be consumed by the darkness of the passage. His own eyes took several seconds to adjust. Gray was sure the microphones picked up the gasp that left his lips when everything came into focus. It was a staircase–a staircase leading down into the mountain! Holy shit! He’d break a million subscribers for sure this time.
The entrance was just barely wide enough for him to slip inside with his bag. Gray propped the door open with a few sizable rocks, pulled out Beacon Deacon–the cross-covered flashlight gifted to him by his über-religious uncle, and started descending.
“Wish me luck.” His words echoed down the chamber, warping with every reverberation. “Wish me luck. Wush miluck. Woosh milk.”
Gray counted one hundred and sixty-nine stairs before he decided it must be endless. It was a staircase inside a mountain. Who had the energy to carve this many steps?!
“Three hundred and twenty-six. Four hundred and eighty-two. The things I do for you guys.”
Six hundred and twelve. There were six hundred and twelve stairs. He had to go back up. Was this divine punishment for that time he made fun of how his brother said ‘croissant?’ Even the French thought it was too much! Gray asked!
He dropped his pack on the rocky ground–or would it be rock-ground? Either way, his bag landed with a thud and Gray leaned against the wall to catch his breath. It was bumpy, but not in the sharp way he would have expected.
Gray turned and flipped Beacon Deacon on to full blast. Was that… a book? It was.
He tripped over his own feet as he surged further into the room, coughing as he kicked up what he assumed must be years’ worth of dust.
The cavern was round and about the size of a school gym, sans the basketball nets. He craned his neck and still couldn’t find the top. From what he could see, books covered every inch of the walls
“What the hell? Are you guys seeing this?”
Gray approached the nearest section. From afar, he thought they were the old sort of books libraries didn’t let you check out. He carefully plucked one from the shelf. The binding was a thick leather, but the title embossed in the spine was new, The First Town. His sister was obsessed with that book when it came out two years ago.
“I’m so confused,” he said, just loud enough for the mic to pick up. Speaking louder felt illegal, somehow.
His microphone responded with a soft hum. “Damn. It’s got dirt in it again.” Gray unhooked it from his lapel as the hum became a buzz. “I hear you, I hear you. One second.” But it didn’t quiet, even as he squeezed puffs of air into it from the little canister in his bag. Instead, the GoPro on his head seemed to harmonize with the microphone, then his phone, then his flashlight. Together, they were like a swarm of bees growing more agitated by the second.
“What the hell?” Gray said again, scrambling to turn everything off. They crescendoed in one shrill screech before dying out together.
“Um. Guys? What was that?” It took a beat before he realized there was no one to talk to. His cameras were fried, and he was all alone.
He expected silence, but there was a soft purr sounding from in front of him, more like a motor than a cat, unfortunately. He could have had a familiar!
Gray checked his gear one more time, but it was definitely dead. He would investigate if only he could see, but without Beacon Deacon, he was more likely to knock the shelves down like dominos. He really didn’t want to die under the weight of several thousand books. Or by the blunt force trauma of several thousand books.
He chanced a step forward, arms held out in front of him like a particularly handsome zombie, but managed to kick his discarded bag. What luck, he found the only item on the ground. At least he wouldn’t have to search for his bag. His bag that held all of his things. His things which included a lighter!
Gray dug through his pack and pulled out the Flaming Hell, the ultra-strong lighter his father gave him after seeing Beacon Deacon. His dad even stuck a big pentagram on it as a petty little treat.
Gray flicked it on and held it as close to the shelves as he dared. All he could find were books, but the hum definitely sounded like it was coming from there. He leaned closer and Flaming Hell flickered–no–the shelves flickered!
Gray whirled around as every wall quivered in and out of existence before disappearing completely.
“Um. I don’t know what just happened.” There was no one to listen, but he had to at least pretend like he wasn’t on his own here.
Low blue lights kicked on from a strip in the floor as he crossed the juncture from the old library into, well, he wasn’t sure what. The space had doubled in size, though the ceiling was just as high. It was easier to see now as another section of lights clicked on from above.
Shelves still lined the walls, but they were a strange blend of vines and metal, like a jungle mated with scaffolding. Instead of books, they held hundreds of… no way.
Gray’s steps stuttered as he neared. Someone had to have set him up because there was no way the shelves were really covered in jarred brains.
“Nick? Taj? Did you do this?” His friends didn’t pop out from behind the shelves. Now that he thought about it, no one he knew could afford such a crazy prank.
“No. I am Aurora Initella.”
He whirled around so fast that his long ponytail slapped him across the face. “What the hell! Who are you?!”
The woman was tall and thin, like the car models his brother always had on his walls growing up. She had just as many clothes on, too. Aurora’s shirt was one in spirit only, barely covering her chest and tied loosely behind her neck. Her skirt wasn’t much better. Wasn’t she cold? God, he sounded like his grandmother.
“… I am Aurora Initella.” Her voice reminded him of the afternoon he spent by the deep blue waters of Turkey’s Iztuzu Beach. It was one of the more peaceful days he ever had until he heard the vicious caw of a hawk and watched bloody duck feathers bob on the waves.
“What are you doing down here? What is this?”
She hummed. “I believe it’s proper to introduce yourself first.”
“Uh, right. Name’s Gray Griffin.”
Aurora tilted her head so far her ear hit her shoulder. “Is it?” she asked lightly.
“… It’s John. Jon Vaughn.”
“Why did you lie, Jon Vaughn?”
“It’s not a lie. It’s a stage name.” Was this really the conversation two people in the depths of a mountain surrounded by brains were having? Was he on drugs? He’d never had a drug before.
“We are not on a stage.” He hadn’t been on a stage since his eighth-grade production of Greece, but he figured it was close enough. He had been an amazing Sandy, a real hit at the Brighton Boarding School for Boys.
“It’s a figure of speech, but now that you’ve mentioned it and I definitely was not the one to bring up the terrifying ambiance first, what the hell is this place?”
“A figure of speech. Interesting. I will make a note of it.” She stood completely still, completely silent. Gray counted to twenty-nine.
“Um… hello? I have unanswered questions.”
She twisted her gaze to him with her entire neck. What commitment. “This is a library.”
He peered over her shoulder at the room of horrors. “I don’t think it is.”
“This is a library,” she repeated in exactly the same tone.
“We’re surrounded by brains! Human brains!”
“Is that not a library?”
“I… okay, you’ve got me on a technicality, but there’s no way you think this is normal!”
“Is any home normal?” What was with this woman? The way she answered questions, she’d be a prosecutor’s nightmare. At least, he could hear his state prosecutor mother saying so.
“You live here?” His voice hadn’t been so high since puberty. Maybe it was best that his mic died. “Were you the one who carved the insulting number of stairs?” He couldn’t imagine it, not with her stick arms and her nearly pore-less skin.
“The library was made by the Knights of Knowledge.”
Gray snorted. “That’s not a real thing.”
He read about the Knights in a fiction series back in elementary school. The Knights of Knowledge traveled the world trying to understand humanity only to bumble their way into increasingly ridiculous situations. You know, maybe he was a Knight of Knowledge.
Aurora shook her head so jerkily she surely gave herself whiplash. “They named themselves after the books.”
His hands braced his head. “Can you read minds?”
“You were speaking aloud.”
“Oh.” He lowered his arms and cleared his throat.
“The Knights—” she gestured wildly with a locked elbow. The sorry excuse for a shirt slid down too far. He averted his eyes.
“Can you put on more clothes first? I know this is your home, but I don’t think this is a good way to host a guest.”
“Does this not please you?” She cocked her head unnaturally again. “Master Paxal prefers it.”
Gray peeked through his fingers and raised a brow. “Master Paxal sounds like a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.” He could hear his mother saying that, too.
“How is this?” Between blinks, her clothes lit up and grew into a pin-striped power suit.
“Am I in a magic girl anime or something?” he mumbled. Forget the embarrassing voice cracks. He wished his camera was rolling. No one was going to believe him.
“I am not magic. I am—”
“Aurora Initella, I know.”
“—an avatar.”
“You’re what now?”
“I am the voice to these memories,” she gestured again to the surrounding brains. This time, she remained blessedly covered, “a face for the library.”
“So, you’re not real then?”
“What is real and what is fake?”
“I’m too dumb and emotionally compromised for philosophical debate.”
“To be dumb is to lack knowledge. The library can help.”
Gray dropped his face into his hands. He wanted to go home. He wanted to bury himself under his covers and forget all of this had ever happened. Hell, he’d even listen to his parents and get into improv if it meant he didn’t have to have a conversation with this woman… avatar… person…?
“If it’s such an amazing library, why doesn’t everybody know about it? Why hide it under a mountain five hours from civilization? Isn’t the point of the library to share with the community?”
She blinked. Gray only just realized she hadn’t been before. “We do.”
“What does that mean?”
“Perhaps you have read Terminal Living: A Mindset Game or Blue Crescent Dying? Maybe The Inquisitor’s Bed or Memory’s Nest?”
“I think everyone and their twice-dead grandmother have read those. They’re some of the most famous books of all time.”
“And who wrote them?”
“I don’t know, smart, famous people?”
“So you think.” She smiled with too many teeth. She was like an attractive barracuda. He paused. Scratch that. “This place is the Library of Memory. It houses the greatest minds of every generation.”
“You mean these are…” he eyed the closest brain. E.A Poe. “No way.”
“With their knowledge, I can write you your perfect book. Do you want a science fiction story by Agatha Christie? Or maybe you would like a romantasy by H. P. Lovecraft?”
“You’re stealing their work.”
She took a step closer. His feet felt welded to the stone.
“It is merely utilization of their knowledge. They are dead. They have no use for it anymore.”
It felt wrong, though he couldn’t find the words to explain why. Even if he did, he didn’t think she had the capacity to care.
“What do the Knights want?”
“‘He who has Knowledge has the world.’ That is their slogan.”
“Then why use it like this? Why steal—utilize—” he corrected before she could, “it in this way? If you can actually extract thoughts from the world’s greatest minds, why not use that technology to cure disease or something?”
She shrugged, or tried to. Her shoulder–holographic shoulder, he realized–sunk into her cheek. “They tried at first, but they could not find an agreeable course of action.”
“But this was agreeable?”
“There were a few issues.” He followed the line of her too-wide eyes to a small section of brains. Oh.
“Man, people of the past were seriously kill-happy, huh?”
She hummed again. It was just like the purr he heard before. “Murder is common in all eras.”
“You sure know how to comfort a guy.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I just wanted some good content for my socials, not to uncover some crazy conspiracy. Maybe tell your programmers or whatever to cover the entrance to their secret lair better. It’s a miracle no one else has ever stumbled onto it before.”
“But, Jon Vaughn, they have.” She pointed across the room. The area was close to the exit, so he walked the path to a darker corner, lit by half the floor lights as the rest of the library.
“We have had lots of guests,” Aurora said into his ear. When had she gotten so close? She had no presence, no solid form or footsteps. “They have taught me so much.”
Something sharp pricked his neck. His vision blurred.
“And you will too.”
Why is China so peace-loving?
It’s in the nature of the Chinese culture. For thousands of years, China has been a sedentary civilisation focused on taking care of its people and protecting itself from invaders. China has never sought colonialism like the Europeans did.
As long as you don’t threaten China’s security, it will not wage war.
Currently, the USA threatens China’s security by interfering in China’s domestic matter, Taiwan. So China is doing everything it can to discourage Taiwan independence and keep the peace.
Instead of invading other countries, China wants to trade with them. This benefits the Chinese people.
Contrast the above with the Europeans and Americans…
British Empire
French Empire
German Empire
Dutch Empire
Spanish Empire
Portuguese Empire
Afghanistan
Iraq
Libya
Syria
China has fought no wars in the last 45 years!
U.S. foreign policy isolates the U.S.
Have you ever seen someone accidentally pick a fight with the wrong dude?
7th Grade. 1964.
School had just let out and I was walking with three other friends, on our way home.
Uh, oh!
Here comes Carl, the school bully — a really bad guy with a nasty attitude.
I got a little nervous. Carl was known for picking fights and leaving his victims severely bloodied.
Our group moved aside slightly, to let Carl pass. But it was a no go.
One of our buddies was a tiny little guy, Robbie, who was about 5’3” at around 115 pounds. Wouldn’t you know that, as Carl walked by, he slammed Robbie’s books to the ground.
Bullies choose the easy target.
Carl: “You better watch where you’re going little a**hole.”
Robbie: “Yeah. Sorry man. I’ll do that.”
Carl: “What’s the matter? You don’t like my face or somethin’?”
Robbie: “Naw man, you’re fine. Sorry.”
Carl moves in with a predatory stance.
Robbie: “Huh? Oh! You wanna fight me? OK. Yeah, we can fight if you want.”
Robbie handed me his coat, then spoke to himself saying, “Hmm. I think I’ll leave my gloves on.”
I was terrified speechless for Robbie.
I looked fearfully at one of my other buddies who smiled ever so slightly and said, “Don’t worry (about Robbie). He’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that, but Robbie and Carl stepped onto the parking lot and took stances. Carl made the first move, going in for the haymaker, the knockout punch.
Robbie dodged the punch completely and started dancing with gloved fists posed cautiously in front of his face.
Carl was big. Carl was strong. Carl moved like a sack of potatoes.
As Carl kept going for the haymaker, Robbie dodged and weaved like a master in self defense. Picture a two year old cat when they chase imaginary monsters through the house.
Over the next 3-4 minutes, Robbie peppered Carl’s face with light little shots, one by one, perfectly timed at every opportunity, precisely aimed and perfectly landed until Carl’s eyes started to swell shut.
About that time, the School Principal ran out and hauled both boys off to the office. Robbie was a little winded, but untouched by Carl. Carl’s face was a bloody mess.
When the fight ended and my buddies and I resumed our walk, I let out a sigh of relief.
One of my buddies asked: “You didn’t know?”
Me: “Know what?
Long story short, Robbie’s father was a WWII Vet, now a Colonel at the local Military School. Robbie had been trained in boxing and self defense, by his dad, every Saturday morning since the age of five. That’s nine years, every Saturday morning. Robbie had also been taught the honor of only fighting when necessary. I never would have known.
Sorry Carl. You lose. And you can be bloody well thankful that the principal broke up the fight while you could even see to walk.
Economic Bombshell: Consumers Are TANKING, Treasury Borrowing Erupts, Yen Collapse Zero Hope
What kinds of sentiments do Chinese citizens have about the Chinese government’s claim to Taiwan?
I’m Chinese,an IT industry worker.”Anger and incomprehension”. This is what the Chinese really think. If you want to get the real view from China, you have to come to China, get off the plane, take a taxi, and leave your luggage at the hotel. Then go to the small park on the street in China, where there are a large number of ordinary Chinese people, including retired old people, middle-aged people who have finished their work for the day, and young women playing with their babies. There, you can hear the most daring criticism of the Chinese government and the CPC on all issues.
Then, you start the interview. You ask them: “I am a foreigner who has flown thousands of kilometers just to understand a question, so please tell me your true thoughts. Excuse me, do you support the Chinese government’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan?”
Then, you will immediately hear everyone cursing! Old people, middle-aged people, young women, they have the unique loud voices of the Chinese. But please don’t be angry, they are not disrespecting you. They are cursing the Chinese government: “Why not retake Taiwan tonight or at the latest this Friday”?
Because if a military attack on Taiwan is launched over the weekend, the PLA can complete the military operation before next Monday. When the Chinese start working next Monday, they will not be bored all day, and everyone can discuss the country’s establishment of a new holiday: National Reunification Day.
Dear friends, in fact, you have no way to get the real Chinese public opinion (including my above description) from the Internet. Because you will always have various doubts. So, I guarantee that if you come to China, avoid the boring high-speed rail stations, subway systems, and commercial streets (like those boring foreigners in YouTube videos), and walk among the people, you will hear the above real stories.
This happens to prove that the Chinese Communist Party is the most important force in maintaining peace across the Taiwan Straits. If China is a “democratic system” like Taiwan, then the public opinion of all Chinese people will surge to the top leader of China, forcing him to start a war immediately for votes.
Therefore, if Taiwan Province intends to avoid war, the only way is to pray that the CPC still does not care about the public opinion of China. This seems to be a paradox. There will definitely be people who will object to my argumentation process. But this is the fact. 100% real Chinese public opinion. Not the public opinion of the Chinese elite, not the public opinion of the Chinese middle class, not the public opinion of the party members, not the public opinion of the Chinese workers and farmers. It is the public opinion of all Chinese people.
If it offends some people, I apologize for it.
Finally, I want to talk about an unrelated topic. In the past decade, China’s GWF has blocked Chinese people from accessing part of the foreign Internet. I think the most terrible thing about this is not that it blocks Chinese people from participating in the outside world, but that the changes in Chinese public opinion in the past decade are unknown to the world.
Today’s Chinese young people are full of confidence and courage. They have not experienced hunger and poverty. When they were born, they could enjoy a life similar to that of Western children. As they grew up, the Internet developed rapidly. At a very young age, they knew knowledge that their parents did not know in their entire lives. Therefore, they are not inferior, they do not have the original sin of poverty, they love China and support the Communist Party of China. At the same time, they have completed higher education and have enough knowledge and skills to engage in all professions such as science, engineering, art, and business. They enjoy life and pursue faith. They no longer regard the United States as an insurmountable paradise on earth. They are becoming the mainstay of Chinese society.
Dear friends, China has changed. It is no longer a poor, hungry, polluted, ignorant, backward, without freedom, and without personality. It is a brand new country. Please get to know China again.
China is the world’s superpower, and no force can stop it. This is not the brainwashing of the Communist Party, nor is it the belief in communism, and it is not propaganda for China for a few cents. This is a fact. It is an irreversible fact. Whether you are happy or sad, agree or disagree, this fact will not change because of you.
This is also the whole meaning of my writing here.
Have you ever met somebody so stupid that they made you question how they survived this long?
Interacting with Flat Earth (FE) folks as one of my duities at various conventions – it’s clear that each FE has fully accepted a stack of conspiracy theories by the time FE intersects with them – they swalliw it without protest
But the odd thing is, they will forsake it in five years or less. Something will hit their brain, or they will realize an obvious truth – and FE flees their minds
Problem is – the damage is already done. They championed FE to all their family and friends, in such a contentious and mocking way, they’ve isolated themselves. When they meet up with someone they knew, that person will often mock the former FE for being so stupid. The FE has to stand there and take it.
I liken it to Alex Jones, who fully believed Sandy Hook was a hoax to the point of not trustimg anyone’s opinion on it. Once he was enlightened, he said he must’ve been under some strong form of psychosis
Here’s my favorite FE assertion, that the Sun is near. They claim the earth is flat and stationary and the Sun is on the move. I got one of them to tell me how far the Sun would have to travel for a complete circuit – he said 58,000 miles in one day
So I said- 58,000 miles in 24 hours – that’s more than three times the speed of sound! Seems like we would hear a sonic boom as it passed over, and the Sun itself would be blur, a streak in the sky.
Cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours or until meat is tender.
Serve over buttered noodles or rice.
swiss steak 1 2
What is one thing that makes you swoon every time?
I have a guy friend I haven’t known for very long. Our lives are incompatible – we are both busy and firmly wrapped up with other things.
When we manage to spend time together it’s lovely – sparkling and light and easy, like a tall, cold glass of champagne at the end of a grueling week.
Tragically, I find him criminally attractive. Hanging out and feeling this attraction is massively distracting – like I have to contain an oversized shipment of a sort of involuntary effervescence – so I always feel like his company was delightful but really I was not able to give him my full attention due to the fact I kept tripping over myself.
Here is what kills me: of all the people that I know, this guy, peripheral to my life, is the one to say – always in an offhand way – the most insightful things about my character.
We found ourselves at a symposium one day and I was feeling restless. I apologized to him for my twitchiness. “I’m sorry I’m so fidgety” I said, “it’s hard for me to pay attention”. “Dushka” he responded. “That’s because you pay attention to everything else”.
Another time we were having a general, non-specific conversation about casual relationships and he – this person who barely knows me – said “you can’t do casual.” I felt almost insulted. “How would you know that?” “Because, Dushka” he said. “Anything you do you do with your entire heart.”
I recently hurt my hand in a yoga class and was complaining about the pain. “Well, it’s going to take a long time to heal because what you need to do is give it a rest and you’re never going to do that”.
As much as I am a participant in life I am also a spectator and I will tell you I adore being a witness to the things people do and say. To put it in other words there is a gorgeous, resplendent, as wide as the Milky Way swath of things that others do that make me swoon.
But it’s the sense that someone can really see me that leaves me feeling like I don’t know what I could ever do to repay him for his friendship.
Ukraine on the Verge of Complete Collapse | Scott Ritter
In the early 1990’s I started moving factories to China. Ah. It was a different time for certain. Shenzhen was a little village with construction everywhere, and 16 lane dirt roads, the customs building was a wooden plywood shack with a single circle cut into it. And, of course… I was a “rock star”.
I’ll never forget those days.
There were so many interesting and adventuresome escapades, I’ll tell you what.
One, that I will NEVER… EVER forget was the ride in the taxi when we landed in Hong Kong. A driver picked us up and drove us to the hotel. He was so pleased to pick up Americans (we were a rare breed back then) and he told us how much he loved American music.
And then for one hour; he sang to us. He serenaded us.
He sang all sorts of songs, but he really liked the Beatles. And I’ll never forget the Beatle’s song “I wanna hold your hand”.
Easy, huh?
For some reason he couldn’t sing or say “HAND”. Instead he sang “SAND”.
Ugh!
Oh, yeah, I’ll tell you somethin’ I think you’ll understand When I say that somethin’ I want to hold your sand I want to hold your sand I want to hold your sand
Oh, please, say to me You’ll let me be your man And please, say to me You’ll let me hold your sand You’ll let me hold your sand I want to hold your sand
By the twelfth century in China, vector tracing was standard procedures for epidemics and and lockdowns of households, neighborhoods and cities were standard. Pandemics, like the Black Death, which brought down Western empires, made little headway in China. Nor did Covid. Death rates were much lower and the economy grew four time faster than America’s during the Covid years. Let’s see why.
images1
America’s Covid Factors
Definition: The CDC reported 1.2 million ‘Covid deaths,’ but the virus was primarily responsible for only 4% of them. It was only a ‘factor’ in 96%.
Incentives: Washington reimbursed hospitals $12,000–$160,00 for each inpatient if Covid was a ‘factor’ in their admission. Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”.
Health: 70% of Americans are sick enough to take prescription drugs daily, usually two or more. Life expectancy, falling since 2014, is below China’s.
Government: 30% of Americans trust the President to tell the truth.
Media: 6% of Americans trust their media to tell the truth.
Education: 5% of Americans can distinguish fact from opinion.
Competence: Lockdowns in the USA were haphazard, and few understood how or why they were imposed.
Elite disagreement: Is masking worthless? Useful? Necessary? America’s medical elite still disagree.
Treatment: The CDC used an untested gene therapy costing $35/unit, which provided no protection against infection and triggered many side- and after-effects, some fatal.
History: Two to six million Americans were Covid seropositive in December, 2019.
To reach that levels took 6-12 months. ‘vaping’ and care home deaths had 100% Covid symptoms. The world’s first Covid death occurred in Kansas.
China’s Covid Factors
Definition: In Beijing’s reported 83,150 deaths, Covid-19 was primarily responsible, the standard clinical practice.
Health: Chinese are healthier and more energetic than Americans, thanks to consuming 70% of the world’s fruit and vegetables, a few minutes daily tai chi, and cheap, preventive TCM.
Government trust: 80% of Chinese trust their government and, by extension, its public health agency, which is headed by a famous epidemiologist.
Media trust: 80% of Chinese trust their government media. During the epidemic, senior scientists spoke directly to the people, without political interference.
Education: In OECD testing, 62% of Chinese students could reliably distinguish fact from opinion.
Competence: 82% of Chinese approved of Dynamic Covid Zero and just 7% of them were ever locked down. Since lockdowns are traditional there, they elicited little complaint.
Incentives: Beijing provided emergency staffing and supplies to hospitals and covered extraordinary costs, nothing more…
Miami Vice – Best music scenes (remastered)
OMG! You all are gonna enjoy this. I certainly did.
Miamai vice
1980’s! Wholly Cow!
What is the probability of the Chinese Communist Party being overthrown? What conditions would need to be met for this to occur?
It’s impossible because the Party penetrates into every level of Chinese society, with Party branches in any organization with more than 10 persons.
Any attempt by anyone to organize an overthrow of the Party is immediately reported up Party channels, and is arrested and interrogated by the security services about what they are trying to do, and who they have met and talked to. All public spaces in China are covered with surveillance cameras connected to facial recognition systems, so anyone they talk to can be recognized immediately, because all Chinese citizens carry a national identification card.
All non-Chinese who enter China have their fingerprints, voice recognition, gait recognition and facial recognition recorded when they enter the first time, and are entered into the non-Chinese database.
Because of western hostility to China now, and western intelligence agencies openly-stated desire to overthrow the Chinese government, the Chinese security services are on high alert against any attempts.
Woman or Tree? (Not the right argument)
What is the most selfish act you have ever witnessed?
It makes me sad to write this.
Over the past few years, my family has experienced several financial hardships; yet last year I experienced the most selfish act that I’ve ever known.
My father is a smoker (although he doesn’t like to admit this in any respect). We were living off food parcels from the Food Bank, despite my Mum working her hardest, and my Dad desperately applying for employment.
My Mum had £7 or so left in her purse. That was all that was left until her next payday four days away. That money would have provided just enough to buy food for these days (to go alongside her copious amounts of pasta and potatoes).
The day my Mum was due to go shopping, she woke up to find her purse empty. No one had any idea as to where the money had gone, and all three of us searched everywhere; we were resigned it was gone. Later that evening, I saw my Dad return from the shops and asked him where he’d been. He brushed me off and went outside in the garden; I went up to my bedroom. I’m an ashmatic, so whenever I smell cigarette smoke, I start coughing. I went downstairs to investigate…and that’s when it all came out.
You see, my Dad – so desperate for cigarettes and too embarrassed to go to the GP to ask for more patches or to call the NHS helpline for smokers – decided to steal the final £7 that we had to feed our family (myself, my Mum, my Dad, my Nan, and our dog) for four days, and took the entirety of the money for himself. I lost all respect for him that day, and am devastated that this has happened at least 4 times since.
In the end, he really enjoyed his cigarettes, we didn’t enjoy the plain pasta.
Abandoned Mall Frozen in Time | Retail Is Dying
What are the most disgusting assumptions people make because you are a man?
This happened in Scotland, the UK, about five years ago.
I was in a local park and another kid was trying to rub dog shit on my son’s face.
This other child, who was about seven – a year older than my son – had a history of bullying other kids, and this was the second time he, together with another kid who was holding my son down, had tried to pin my son on the grass and smear him that day, and the second time I had to physically pull this one lad off my son, my son being distressed, crying, and calling for me.
That day, at that time, I decided enough was enough. I pulled this kid off, and pushed him backwards – with some force, but not enough to hurt him, obviously – because I was a forty year-old adult, and he was a seven-year-old child – but enough that he fell backwards onto the grass.
I wanted to make sure he wasn’t ever going to do this to my son again.
Once again, I’d like to point out, this wasn’t a child we’d just met for the first time that day. He had a history of bullying other kids, including my son, before. In the past, I’d had to intervene when he’d stolen items from other kids. Today was the day I was going to try and stop it happening to my son, because living in fear of someone isn’t much fun, even if that person is seven, and you’re six years old.
Some other parents I’d never seen before were some distance away. They saw me push the other child off mine and verbally reprimand him. I was pretty cross. On another day, maybe, I could possibly have thought of a better way of addressing things – although I’m still scratching my head on this one, to be honest.
They came over from quite a distance away, and accused me of assaulting the child. They surrounded me, and my son – who was quite distressed – and said they’d call the police, which they did. Refused to let us out the park until the police had arrived.
My son and I were then seperated, he was taken to my wife’s place of work, and I was taken to the local polis station, locked up for four hours, and charged with assaulting a minor. The charges were based on the witness statements and also, a friendly police officer told me later, because I admitted to pushing the child of my son, but not ‘assault’ as I saw it. The officer said it was one of those situations I should have said nothing.
Months later, I received a conviction for assaulting a minor.
And it was something I was very angry and confused about for a long time afterwards.
Because every time I dared explain what had happened to anyone I felt close enough to mention it to, they were always on my side.
And then, as I was coming to terms with it, I’ve noticed similar incidents happen over the years, but involving women and their children. In one instance – which I thought was a bit O.T.T. – a lady smacked another child’s hand quite severely for doing something to her son (what it was about, I don’t know). But what was different was the other parent’s reactions: they appeared to be on the side of the mother. The general consensus was whatever had occured was the fault of the offending child’s parents – something I couldn’t comment on, obviously.
I’ve come to the conclusion that what I did wasn’t actually as bad as I’d convinced myself it was. I was trying to protect my son, not just for that moment, but for the future too.
It’s unfortunate that a bloke towering over another child may seem intimidating, but that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t mean we’re murdering him.
Note I also fully admit it wasn’t me on one of my better days. There may have been other ways to resolve this conflict, as a social worker usefully pointed out to me (I had to see a social worker as part of the judicial process).
I feel men often don’t have the same socially acceptable rights (note I don’t say ‘legal rights’ here) to instinctively want to be protective of our children and defend them in the same way women do.
Ultimately, strangers reactions meant the bullies won. I lost a great deal of mental health. And my son lost. We never go back to that park now.
A later edit here for clarity:
There were two couples that stopped me leaving the park. They were without children as far as I could see. The males were more aggressive than the females.
As far as I know, they were unrelated to any of the children there that day.
There were two children assaulting (my words, because that’s what they were doing) my son. The one wiping dog excrement on my son was the one I pulled off my son and pushed away. He had a history of bullying. I didn’t know much about the other kid, who was slightly older, other than I’d seen him with the first child before a few times.
If I had ever got the chance to speak to the parents of either of those kids, I would have taken it. Fact was, they were never accompanied by any parents or adults, ever. I knew they lived locally. I had spoken with the seven year old’s dad at one point, and he seemed okay to talk with. His son, in his worst behaviours, was the type of kid that would happily tell me to “fuck off” if ask where he lived. Writing more delicately than I’d like to, I wasn’t prepared to engage with that kid that day in any other way other than to stop his bullying behaviour continuing.
These decisions, once analysed, are always more complicated than they first appear. If I thought the young lad was, say, from a very unhappy home, maybe I would have treated him differently. But as far as I knew at that time, I had no reason to think this (and I still don’t).
Son Inherits Dad’s Abandoned Trailer – Realizes He Had Lied For Years
On May 23, 2023, China’s People’s Liberation Army suddenly launched its third military exercise in the Taiwan Strait region. The scale of the drill was unprecedented, involving all military branches, including air force fighter jets, naval vessels, long-range army artillery, and rocket force missiles. The exercise area encircled the island of Taiwan, being dubbed an “island-lockdown” drill, amounting to a state of quasi-war.
The direct trigger for this drill was the newly inaugurated Taiwan regional leader Lai Qingde’s remarks promoting “Taiwan independence” and overtly advocating the “two-states theory” in his inaugural address, provoking strong dissatisfaction and countermeasures from China. Unlike the previous two drills, this one came without any prior notice, giving the outside world not even one minute’s preparation time, aiming to catch Taiwan’s authorities completely off guard to achieve the strategic goal of swiftly recovering Taiwan.
Cross-strait relations are still legally in a state of war. Historically, too many wars have erupted from military exercises turning into sudden offensives. Each drill is slicing away at Taiwan’s living space, pushing the frontline forces closer. Yet Taiwan’s authorities have responded coldly, showing zero vigilance, playing right into China’s hands. If an order to recover Taiwan by force is issued mid-drill, the completely unprepared Taiwan will be powerless to resist.
However, the battlefield of such forced recovery will definitely not be limited to the Taiwan island itself. Japan has openly stated it would intervene to defend Taiwan, attempting to turn Taiwan into a new Ukraine to bog down mainland China. Therefore, China has reaffirmed the 1945 Potsdam Declaration through diplomatic channels, clearly warning Japan that if it intervenes, the fires of war will spread to Japanese territory.
China’s strategy is to avoid getting bogged down in a difficult, protracted offensive to recover Taiwan. Instead, China will shift the main battleground to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other locations with U.S. military bases, fighting it out with the U.S. in an endurance contest there. Taiwan island itself will be swiftly recovered through a lightning operation, while other regions become the second, grueling Ukraine-like battlefield.
The secret to achieving the swift recovery of Taiwan lies in these continuous drills lulling Taiwan into a state of oblivion. At that point, Taiwan will be like a frog being boiled alive, unaware as it becomes part of reality. This is the strategic intent behind China’s persistent military pressure in the Taiwan Strait region.
UK: It’s not a joke, in Britain they have been afraid of the Russian “Tobol” for several weeks, which closed the skies of London. But not only London, but also its neighbors in Europe. As a result, planes do not fly – satellites are silent. So how does this miracle work?
Tobol.
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It has the ability to completely suppress satellite signals. In particular, Tobol effectively disrupts communications made through the Starlink satellite internet system. If we also take into account the panic that followed the offensive of the Russian armed forces in the Kharkiv region, the picture becomes quite remarkable…
Who’s Afraid of Tobol?
British media reports that Russia has a “secret weapon” – the latest “Tobol” electronic warfare system, which is capable of jamming a satellite signal or creating a false target on radar. So far, the military is believed to have only a few such devices, but more will soon follow, as Tobol has proven itself to be excellent.
According to reports from the British, it was already used in an airstrike, which allowed Russian troops to completely block the NATO equipment possessed by the Ukrainian armed forces. Specifically, it is claimed that with the help of Tobol, the Russians successfully jammed the signal of the American Starlink satellite system, to which Elon Musk’s company SpaceX previously provided Ukrainians with access.
The British also believe that one or more Tobol installations are/are in Kaliningrad. This explains the malfunctions of navigation devices that occur on passenger planes when flying in Polish territory.
Of course, all this is presented as “the Russians have conspired again”, because NATO spy planes and drones often fly to them from Poland and the Baltic states, and Ukrainian missiles are aimed at the cities of Crimea, which the work of jammers in Kaliningrad becomes more than justified.
Why are the British and others so afraid? First, because they do. Second, Russia is silent and does not reveal its military secrets (weird, right?). Third, jammers work, and that’s a fact.
And now to the facts. Who was stuck and how
Almost all British airlines have encountered problems flying in the Baltic Sea region. During the flight, the passenger planes lost contact with the American GPS navigation satellites and the European Galileo satellites, and the radars began to display a false image, as a result of which the pilots changed the trajectory and even dived to avoid collisions with obstacles that did not actually exist.
According to the British newspaper Sun, over the past eight months, 2.3 thousand Ryanair planes, 1.3 thousand Wizz Air planes, 82 British Airways planes, 7 Jet2 planes, 4 EasyJet planes suffered from this interference and spoofing (transmission of false data). and 7 TUI aircraft. Things turned out rather strangely with the charter airline TUI Airways Limited. They said 7 of the affected planes were operating flights without passengers. Why it was necessary to fly up to seven aircraft without people is not clear.Source 24 news
Raisi Crash: Rescuers Drop A Bombshell; Reveal Chopper’s ‘Key Device Missing Or Turned Off’
What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?
while working an Aerosmith concert, myself and another supervisor got called to talk to a few guys that had a “complaint” because they were all being rude and drunk and one of our security officers didn’t know what to do. The reason, they flashed a Badge to the security officer.
So we pull the 3 gentleman out to the vestibule so we could here them, and the other security supervisor, who also had a badge, but was a correctional captain, decided he would take the lead. As law enforcement respect other law enforcement.
We learned that the 3 of them were basically being jerks to everyone around and when the officer was sent to calm them down, however, the security officer showed up, then the 3 flashed a badge and asked to talk to a supervisor. This was after several attempts to just calm them down.
So now here we are and the other supervisor actually apologized to them for the misunderstanding and that the officer was just doing what they were told.
The next part is where the tables turned.
So as the supervisor starts to wrap things up with these 3 rude “law enforcement” a-holes, he asks very subtle, “so by the way, the officer saw a badge, what dept do you work for?”
“Corrections!” One said in a smug voice. The supervisors face just got stone. Then he asks, “oh really, what building?”
“Coraguen!” – which was the supervisors prison.
The supervisor went toe to toe with him and said “Well guess who f*ck I am?”
The one who was talking gets in his face and says “who?” With an a-hole smile.
“Your captain l!” And said his name.
oh my god the sight watching these 3 fools stumble to get in attention in front of all the other concerts goers and employees. They stood like they were in front of a drill sgt!
He starts to tell them to pick stuff up off the floor for the mess they made, and told them to get out of the concert, and he would deal with them Monday.
They ALL THANKED HIM!!! Ahahahhaha, and stumbled out drunk. Oh man we laughed about that after! The supervisor wasn’t going to do anything to them, but yeah, way to act a fool and brag about to your boss accidentally.
You know that ruined their night like they did to many others at the show!
Never know who’s around. Dont be an a*s!
The Creepiest And Most Unexplained Things That Are Shaking The Internet
You all NEED to watch this.
What is the most selfish act you have ever witnessed?
This isn’t the most selfish thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s something that happened quite recently and it made me realize just how little people care about what they do and how desperate we are for even the tiniest morsel of power.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, so me and my family decided to go out to the beach for the day. We could not have asked for a more beautiful day. The sun was out, the water was warm, and, to top it off, the humidity was low (living in lower Alabama, a day with low humidity is nothing short of a miracle). Anyway, we came back to our marina at about 7 or so, and we saw the most adorable family of ducks as we were walking back to our car. (Ducks are really common if you’re close to the water, as we were)
We spent about ten minutes looking at them. There were six baby ducklings and one large mother duck. They looked just like you’d imagine a duck family to look, with the little ducks following the mother duck in a single file line. I remember thinking how beautiful nature can be. How looking at the mother watch over her babies was one of the most precious things that life can offer.
Then, in the subsequent 30 seconds, I went from being in such a happy state of mind to be more pissed off than I have ever been.
We began to walk away from the ducks, as we had planned to go out to dinner later that evening, two women walked up to the little family of ducks. They were both yelling and cackling quite loudly, and had clearly had too much to drink. They saw the ducklings, and immediately started grabbing for them, yelling “Come here you stupid ducks!” They proceeded to grab one of the ducklings from the ground, angering the mother duck to a point where she was screeching and flapping her wings, desperately trying to prevent a strange person from taking her child from her. The drunk woman kicked the mother duck away, saying “Shoo! Go away!” She was throwing the little duckling up and down in her hands.
I became infuriated, and, had she not finally put the duckling back on the ground, would have intervened. The women walked away and shouted at the mother duck, “You shouldn’t do that to people! Stupid duck!”
There were a lot of emotions going through my head, but I just remember looking at the mother duck as she was watching one of her babies being picked up by the woman. She had that universal look of terror and dread that a mother has when her child is in trouble. I know that animals aren’t to be thought of as higher than humans, but I think respect for nature is something that everyone needs to have.
Edit: Wow! Thanks for the love you guys.
Edit: OMG THIS IS AMAZING THANK YOU!
Edit: I can’t thank you guys enough. 2000 upvotes!!
Epilogue: Some of you have been asking about what happened after the incident. The ducklings were thankfully unharmed and still hang out at the Marina frequently. I haven’t seen any other incidents like the one I described. Also, to those of you saying my answer was hypocritical of someone who eats meat, you are mistaken. Yes, I fish. Yes, I eat meat all the time. But I in no way whatsoever support the cruel treatment of animals. I just understand humanity’s place in the food chain and accept the order that God put on this Earth. What ruins this order are the terrible things that man does to Earth’s creatures and then tries to justify it by saying, “They’re just animals.”
Green Chile-Rice Meatballs
New Mexican Meatballs Horizontal No Product 2 1 of 1
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon Italian herb seasoning or 1/8 teaspoon each basil, marjoram, oregano and thyme
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
1 pound extra lean ground beef
8 ounces ground veal or turkey
1/2 cup long grain white rice
1/2 cup fine dry bread crumbs
1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
1/2 cup tomato juice
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 (4 ounce) can green chiles, diced
Instructions
In a large bowl, beat eggs with salt, herb seasoning and pepper.
Add garlic, onion, beef, veal, rice and crumbs; mix well. Shape mixture into 1 1/2 inch balls. Place meatballs in a 5 quart or larger slow cooker.
In same bowl, mix tomato sauce, tomato juice, chili powder and chiles; pour over meatballs.
Cover and cook on LOW until meatballs are no longer pink in center and rice is tender; cut a meatball to test (5 1/2 to 6 hours).
Gently lift meatballs to a warm serving dish and keep warm.
Skim and discard fat from sauce, if necessary; stir, then spoon over meatballs.
Police confront woman living in grocery store sign in Michigan
Video below shows Chinese State TV declaring today that China will reclaim Taiwan, likely in early June.
According to Chinese defense ministry sources, the Chinese army will launch an attack on Taiwan in early June. This is one week from now.
Here is video of China State television from Saturday morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ExQQBp2pQ
WARNING TO U.S.
China also publicly warned the United States to end all visits to Taiwan and adhere to the One-China policy. That failure to abide to the one-China policy is a RED LINE that will have serious consequences.
No response from the U.S. or anyone else — yet.
ONGOING MILITARY “EXERCISE”
Two days ago, the people of Taiwan awoke to find their island surrounded by China warships, as reported on this website.
This morning China has completely surrounded Taiwan in all directions. China currently has over 30 ships and 40+ fighter jets active in “training.” The map below shows the situation:
main qimg 65ca626ac49bbd4cd6bb9763c958b234
COMMENTARY
Might happen. Might not happen.
If it DOES happen, you can rest assured that… A RED LINE has been crossed. China will not attack Taiwan unless this has already has occurred.
The following are the RED LINES regarding Taiwan;
A formal announcement of independence
The USA breaking the agreement regarding the one-China policy.
Placement of medium range ballistic missiles in Taiwan (MRBM)
Placement of nuclear weapons or systems in Taiwan.
Now, the Scary…
Recent U.S. military aid to Taiwan includes the provision of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) missiles.
The current Taiwan regime, announced today, announced that they will use these systems and the F-16 attack aircraft to destroy the Three Gorges dam.
Three gorges dam map 2
If the Three Gorges Dam were destroyed, the consequences would be catastrophic, potentially resulting in the loss of millions of lives. The Yangtze River basin, which the dam controls, is densely populated and economically significant, home to over 400 million people. The immediate impact of the dam’s failure would involve massive flooding, with water potentially inundating major cities downstream, including Wuhan, which alone has a population of over 10 million (Grunge) (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre).
In terms of potential casualties, estimates vary but generally suggest that tens of millions could be directly affected. The flooding would devastate infrastructure, agriculture, and industry, leading to secondary disasters such as disease outbreaks, shortages of food and clean water, and long-term economic disruption. Additionally, the collapse would severely impact global supply chains, given the region’s significant role in manufacturing and logistics (Penn State e-Education) (The Prepared).
Overall, the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam would be one of the worst humanitarian and economic disasters in modern history, with far-reaching effects both within China and globally.
Passenger Filmed A Flying UFO , Then This Happened
Why would someone go on a vacation and not bring enough money with them?
I don’t know.
There’s a phenomenon in Asia of western beg packers. I saw one in Fanling of all places last week. He held up a sign begging for money…
main qimg 3dc4bfb6e0e8478f518440f1578781ce
Why do they do it?
Because apparently people in Asia are suckers and there’s enough people who give them money to make it worthwhile… instead of kicking the shit out of them.
Secondly immigration officers aren’t strict enough in many places. When I went to Russia? When I applied for a visa I had to give them 1 year of bank statements. I had to prove I had at least $150USD for each day I intended to be there for.
For some reason many countries don’t do this for some reason.
Back in the 2010s to my chagrin I met an idiot who thought he could live like a King in Hong Kong for £1 a day. I met him on the airplane as I was going to the toilet.
Similarly there was a dine and dash in Wanchai a couple years back a bunch of French tourists the most common comment was I can buy the entire restaurant for $10.
Company launches HEAD and BODY swapping lab | Redacted with Clayton Morris
“My wife who occasionally hits me”
I have been married for 13 years to a wife who is in most ways a wonderful partner – smart, organized, good mother to our two children, generally respectful and not overly controlling. We’ve been on wonderful trips together.
She is however, a bit high strung, and does a real hot temper, and when she gets mad about something, will occasionally punch or slap me. Now all the time, but sometimes — say, a few times a year.
I’m a lot larger than her and so I can take it (I played contact sports as a kid) but I don’t exactly like it. (The yelling isn’t great either) I’ve told her that I don’t like it — and I don’t think she’s exactly proud of it and I think she is ashamed at her temper. That said she can also be somewhat self-righteous and isn’t highly apologetic. That may be because some of the stuff she gets angry about isn’t trivial but objectively anger-inducing (say, totally forgetting about something I’d repeatedly promised to do, or relentlessly pushing for things or reopening decisions like more or longer vacations when she wants to work more). I just want to admit I’m not a perfect husband who is yelled at for no reason.
In marriage therapy I mentioned it as well but for some reason the therapist didn’t make a big deal of it, but focused more on what I am doing to make her angry. It would be a lot to throw away a long marriage over a few slaps here and there.
Physical violence is never acceptable in a relationship, no matter the circumstances or what you may have done to anger your wife. Her hitting you is a huge red flag that needs to be addressed head-on, not minimized or blamed on you.
You say you can “take it” because of your size, but that’s irrelevant. Abuse is abuse. How would you feel if the genders were reversed – if a husband was routinely hitting his wife when angry, even if she was bigger than him? There’s no excuse for it.
It’s good that you’ve told your wife you don’t like the hitting and that she seems somewhat ashamed. But “somewhat ashamed” and “isn’t highly apologetic” are not enough. She needs to take full responsibility, sincerely apologize, and commit to never doing it again. No excuses.
I understand you don’t want to end an otherwise good marriage over this. But by accepting her behavior, you’re enabling it to continue. What kind of message does that send to your kids about what’s acceptable in relationships?
You need to make crystal clear that it stops now, or you will take steps to protect yourself and your children. Insist that your couples therapist take this seriously and make it the top priority to address. Consider individual counseling for your wife to manage her anger in healthy ways.
You deserve to feel safe in your own home. Drawing this firm line isn’t throwing away your marriage – it’s what’s required to save it and make it truly healthy. Stay strong and don’t downplay this. It’s a big deal and it needs to stop, period.
We are Living in The Twilight Zone ….. Part 2
The Gritty Work of Self-Discovery: Why Facing Your Demons Is the Key to Authentic Living
Most of us are walking around with our heads so far up our own asses that we wouldn’t know our authentic selves if they bit us in the face. We’re so busy trying to be who we think we should be, who society tells us we should be, that we’ve completely lost touch with who we actually are.
And that, my friends, is a recipe for a miserable fucking existence.
Because when you don’t know yourself, when you’re not in touch with your own desires and values and fears and flaws, you’re basically just a puppet on a string. You’re letting other people and external circumstances dictate your life, your choices, your very sense of self.
And that’s no way to live. That’s not freedom, that’s not authenticity, that’s not fulfillment. That’s just a slow, soul-crushing march towards mediocrity and regret.
But here’s the good news. You have the power to change that shit. You have the power to take back control of your own life, your own identity, your own happiness. And it all starts with doing the fucking work to get to know yourself, warts and all.
First things first: you’ve gotta get honest with yourself. And I mean brutally, uncomfortably honest. You’ve got to be willing to shine a light on all the parts of yourself that you usually keep hidden away in the dark corners of your psyche.
That means confronting your fears, your insecurities, your shame. It means acknowledging the ways in which you’ve been hurt, and the ways in which you’ve hurt others. It means taking a long, hard look at your patterns of behavior – the ways you sabotage yourself, the defense mechanisms you use to avoid vulnerability, the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you’re capable of.
And let me tell you, this shit is not for the faint of heart. It’s going to bring up all kinds of uncomfortable emotions – anger, sadness, guilt, fear. You’re going to want to run away from it, to numb it out with booze or Netflix or whatever your drug of choice is.
But if you want to truly know yourself, if you want to build a relationship with yourself that’s based on honesty and authenticity, you’ve got to be willing to sit with that discomfort. You’ve got to learn to observe your own thoughts and feelings with curiosity and compassion, rather than judgment and avoidance.
So start by just paying attention. Notice what triggers you, what makes you feel defensive or ashamed or afraid. Notice the ways in which you talk to yourself, the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you deserve.
And then start questioning those stories. Are they really true? Are they serving you, or are they holding you back? What would happen if you let them go, if you rewrote the narrative of your own life?
This is where tools like therapy, journaling, and meditation can be really helpful. They give you a space to process all the messy, complicated stuff that comes up when you start excavating your own psyche. They help you develop a sense of self-awareness and self-compassion, a way of relating to yourself that’s grounded in curiosity and kindness rather than criticism and shame.
But the work doesn’t stop there. Because once you’ve started to peel back the layers of your own bullshit, once you’ve started to get a clearer sense of who you are and what you want, you’ve got to start living in alignment with that truth.
That means making choices that honor your values and your desires, even when they’re scary or difficult. It means setting boundaries, saying no to things that don’t serve you, and saying yes to things that light you up. It means surrounding yourself with people and experiences that nourish your soul, and letting go of the ones that drain you.
And it means being willing to fuck up, to make mistakes, to fall flat on your face and get back up again. Because growth is never a straight line, and self-awareness is a lifelong practice.
But here’s the thing. When you have the courage to do that work, when you have the balls to face your own demons and your own truth, something incredible starts to happen.
You start to develop a sense of self-awareness and self-acceptance that is truly unfuckwithable. You start to understand your own patterns and triggers and defense mechanisms, and you start to develop the tools to work with them rather than being controlled by them.
You start to get clear on what really matters to you, what lights you up, what feeds your soul. And you start to make choices and take actions that align with those values, even when it’s hard, even when it goes against the grain.
You start to cultivate a sense of inner strength and resilience that can weather any shitstorm that life throws your way. Because you know who you are, you know what you stand for, and you know that you can handle whatever comes.
And perhaps most importantly, you start to show up in the world as your true, authentic self. Not some watered-down, people-pleasing version of yourself, but the real, raw, unapologetic you.
And that, my friends, is a fucking gift. Not just to yourself, but to everyone around you. Because when you’re living in alignment with your truth, when you’re owning your shit and standing in your power, you give others permission to do the same.
You inspire them, you challenge them, you show them what’s possible when you have the courage to be who you really are.
So do the fucking work. Get to know yourself, warts and all. It won’t be easy, but it will be so, so worth it.
Because at the end of the day, the relationship you have with yourself is the most important one you’ll ever have. And when you invest in that relationship, when you do the hard work of showing up for yourself with honesty and courage and compassion?
Everything else falls into place. Everything else becomes possible. And that, my friends, is what this whole messy, beautiful, fucking incredible life is all about.
So, you’ve tied the knot. You had the big fancy wedding, posted all the obligatory honeymoon pics on Instagram, and now you’re back to normal life as a married couple. Time to just coast on marital bliss for the next 50 years, right? Wrong.
Here’s the thing no one tells you about marriage: The wedding isn’t the finish line – it’s the starting gun. All that romance and excitement leading up to the big day? That’s just the shiny packaging. The real “prize” inside is a hell of a lot of hard work.
Because after you say “I do,” that’s when shit gets real. You’re suddenly sharing your life, day in and day out, with another flawed human being. You’re seeing all their quirks, bad habits, and annoying tendencies in full HD detail. The fantasyland fog of new love and lust clears, leaving behind the harsh reality of dirty socks on the floor and endless squabbles over whose turn it is to do the dishes.
This is the point where a lot of people freak out, thinking they’ve made a horrible mistake. They got a defective spouse! This constant bickering and drudgery can’t be what marriage is supposed to be like, can it? Isn’t this supposed to be a lifelong romcom montage of candlelit dinners and walks on the beach?
Nope. Welcome to actual marriage, motherfucker. The sooner you accept that this is the real deal, the better off you’ll be. Because the couples that last aren’t the ones who never fight or get on each other’s nerves. They’re the ones who look at the unfiltered truth of each other, with all the warts and baggage, and decide to stick it out anyway.
They recognize that marriage isn’t some magical state of unending happiness. It’s a daily choice, and often a tough one – to love and care for your partner even when they’re being a giant pain in the ass. To have those difficult conversations and slowly, painstakingly figure out how two separate people can function as a team. To support each other’s growth while also maintaining your own identity.
None of that is easy. In fact, it can be awkward, messy, frustrating as hell. But that’s how you build a real, lasting relationship – in the trenches, not on a beach at sunset. You roll up your sleeves and put in the unsexy work of learning to really see, hear, and appreciate another person. Even when you kinda want to smother them with a pillow.
So if you’re past the honeymoon phase and wondering if you’re doing something wrong, relax. The shiny newness wearing off doesn’t mean you screwed up. It means your real marriage is beginning. Embrace the suck, keep showing up even when it’s hard, and slowly but surely you’ll build something real and resilient as hell.
Just don’t expect it to be a damn fairy tale. Happily ever after is bullshit. Loving each other even when you want to kill each other – now that’s the good stuff.
The American Dream Isn’t Dead… You Just Can’t Afford It
How can six million Jews die in WW2 when the tattoos were only six digits long?
I got you here.
Tattoos were generally 6 digits long though this is not an absolute rule. However, most were 6 digits.
Let’s look at Auschwitz because why not Auschwitz? A total of 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz which included 1.1 million Jews.
Now if Holocaust deniers were correct that Auschwitz was just a normal camp (and they aren’t) then the Germans would have tattoo 1.1 million Jews- meaning tattoos would have to be 7 digits long. But they weren’t 7 digits, they were 6 digits. That means despite having 1.1 million Jews sent to Auschwitz the Nazis only planned to use a few hundred thousand as labor. So what was planned for the rest who did not receive tattoos?
What do you think those brand-new state-of-the-art cremation facilities were for? And why were they attached to big empty rooms with holes in the ceiling? You see my point.
On accident, you have given further evidence to support the historical fact of what happened at Auschwitz. For that I commend you.
Side note- not all Jews died at Auschwitz or concentration camps where they received tattoos. More Jews died at the “Reinhard” extermination camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Majdanek where there was no tattoos. Additionally perhaps 1.5 million were just shot by the Einsatszgruppen.
Cheese Cracker Meat Loaf
This Ritz Cracker meatloaf is the most flavor-packed, delicious southern style meatloaf you’ll ever eat. With a heaping of ground beef, tasty bell peppers, buttery Ritz Crackers and a sweet chili sauce topping. This twist on a classic comfort food is a real treat that will become your whole family’s new favorite meatloaf recipe that’s even better next day! It’s a great recipe for a leftover meatloaf sandwich too!
Ritz Cracker Meatloaf
This ritz cracker meatloaf recipe hinges on one special ingredient. Of course you guessed it – Ritz Crackers.
Along with the crackers – which, in place of breadcrumbs, make the most incredible juicy and tender meatloaf – I use 80% fat ground beef, which makes the loaf so tender and juicy.
You can also get away with 85% fat too. This recipe also makes for amazing leftover meatloaf sandwiches that taste incredible even on plain white bread. It’s that good. I’ll show you how to turn slices of meatloaf into a meatloaf sandwich. More on that below.
This meatloaf is jam-packed with flavor. Oh my goodness, I promise you’ll want to eat the entire loaf yourself. We make this several times a month because it’s super easy and it’s just plain addictive! You’ll see.
How to Make Tender, Moist Meatloaf
Meatloaf critics often hold their position for one of two reasons – it’s either tough or dry. And no one wants to eat meat that’s tough or dry, and especially not meat that’s tough and dry. Yuck.
This recipe Ritz crackers in meatloaf calls for ingredients that lend themselves to tender, moist meatloaf, but even the best-written recipes are not 100% resistant to simple kitchen errors. Here are some easy tips to avoid tough and dry meatloaf:
Don’t skip the liquid: This seems obvious, sure, but it’s important. The liquid (milk in this case) is going to add tons of moisture and prevent your meatloaf from drying out.
Don’t overmix: Say it with me: do not overmix. Overmixing will toughen the meat mixture, and that’ll directly translate into tougher meatloaf. Once the ingredients are incorporated, stop mixing. Don’t worry, there’s a reminder in the recipe.
Don’t forget the eggs: Again, following the recipe correctly will prevent many of these common errors, but it’s worth mentioning. Eggs might not seem like the most important ingredient, but they’re vital. Not only do they bind the mixture, they provide some much-needed moisture, whose absence you’ll notice if you forego the eggs.
Cook it low and slow: Don’t think you can get away with increasing the heat to decrease the cook time with meatloaf. That’ll deplete your loaf of all its soft texture and mouth-watering moisture. Set your oven at the correct temperature, and don’t pull it out until it’s done.
Let it rest: Once your meatloaf is out of the oven, let it rest for at least 10 minutes. This will allow the moisture to spread to every part of your loaf, giving you that tender, juicy meatloaf you’re craving.
How to Know if the Meatloaf is Done
Knowing when meatloaf is done is important because every oven is a little different. Some run a bit hotter, some a bit cooler, and both affect when a dish is finished cooking.
The best temperature to cook your meatloaf should be 350 or 375 degrees F. I prefer to bake this meatloaf at 375 degrees F.
To be sure your Ritz Cracker meatloaf is finished, check the internal temperature with a meat thermometer. It should read 165 degrees Fahrenheit. FYI, a 2 lb meatloaf should take anywhere from 50-75 minutes to cook.
Loaf Pan or No Loaf Pan?
Many meatloaf recipes call for a loaf pan, but they’re not necessary. Instead of using a loaf pan, I mold the meat mixture into a loaf, and fold aluminum foil around it to keep it in place. I’m also sure to line my pan with foil for extra support.
How to Make Ritz Cracker Meatloaf
Ritz Crackers Meatloaf Ingredients
Ground beef: For tender, juicy meatloaf, use 80-85% fat ground beef. Using leaner meat will dry out your loaf.
Red and green bell peppers: The combination makes for a beautiful depth of flavor, both earthy and sweet. Make sure to finely dice them for a smoother texture.
Fresh minced onions: Like the peppers, having smaller onions will improve the texture of the meatloaf, making it more consistent throughout.
Minced garlic: Using minced garlic will aid in the texture, and give a stronger garlic flavor than crushed or chopped.
2 large beaten eggs: Remember, using eggs is vital to the moisture.
Ritz Crackers crumbs: Ritz crackers in meatloaf make the most delicious flavorful meatloaf but you need to make sure you crush them into small breadcrumbs. See video….Place them in a plastic zip bag and hit with a mallet to crush the crackers. If you don’t have a mallet, use a rolling pin.
Whole milk: This is an important binding agent, and makes for very moist meatloaf.
Slightly dried basil: The basil, of course, will cook with the rest of the loaf, but using slightly dried basil instead of completely dried basil will give it a fresher flavor.
Dijon mustard: If you’re out of Dijon, use yellow mustard.
Worcestershire Sauce: For the perfect depth of flavor
Seasonings :Dried parsley, dried thyme, basil, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, salt and pepper.Meatloaf with Chili Sauce Ingredients
Sweet Chili Sauce
Ketchup
Brown sugar
Ingredients
17 round cheese crackers
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons green bell pepper, minced
1/4 cup chili sauce
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs, slightly beaten
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
How to Make Ritz Cracker Meatloaf
Line baking sheet with aluminum foil. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Sauté the peppers, onions and garlic.
Make the ritz cracker crumbs: To a medium bowl, add the milk and crushed Ritz Crackers. Mix well. Let it sit for about 5 minutes.
Add the ground beef, sautéed vegetables, eggs, basil, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, seasonings, and milk mixture to a large mixing bowl. Mix gently. Do not overmix.
Place meat on an aluminum foil-lined sheet pan.
In a small bowl, add the ketchup, sweet chili sauce, and brown sugar. Mix until combined.
Spoon half of the sauce mixture over top of the meatloaf.
Place your meatloaf in your preheated oven and cook for 60 to 75 minutes.
Halfway through cooking, spoon the remaining sauce over top of the meatloaf. Continue cooking until the meatloaf is done.
Ritz Cracker Meatloaf 4
Instructions
Crush crackers with rolling pin or blender until crumbled.
In mixing bowl, combine crumbs with onion, green pepper, chili sauce, milk, eggs, salt and pepper.
Mix in ground beef. Form into a 6- or 7-inch round loaf. Place in slow cooker.
Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 8 hours or until done.
How to Make a Leftover Meatloaf Sandwich
Ritz cracker meatloaf also makes a tasty sandwich. Ciabatta bun, French bread and hamburger buns are both fantastic options, but in my opinion the best meatloaf sandwich uses only white bread a thick slice that is. Whatever bread you choose, it’ll make a delicious sandwich.
Top your sandwich however you’d like, or keep it simple with just bread and meat. I prefer my leftover meatloaf sandwich with white bread and no toppings. It makes for the perfect quick and easy dinner or lunch!
If you are feeling a little extra go ahead top the meatloaf sandwich with all your favorite toppings.
Here’s the best way to do it:
This is not a recipe for a cold meatloaf sandwich, it’s a hot and delicious recipe for the best meatloaf sandwich.
In a medium sized skillet over medium heat, add a thick slice of meatloaf. Add softened butter to each slice of bread. Place bread slice face down in the skillet. Top with cheese and cook until melted.
You can even turn this meatloaf into a open-faced meatloaf sandwich.
Assemble the sandwich with your favorite topping.
Meatloaf Sandwich Topping Ideas
Slice of cheese
Cooked red onions (sautéed)
Onion rings
Crisp lettuce,
Tomato
Spinach
Yes, you can still visit Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign website – Dole Kemp ‘ 96
WTF
How a great conversation is like a game of catch
As a radio host, Celeste Headlee has engaged in her fair share of discussions, and she’s thought a lot about how to bring out the best in a conversational counterpart. One thing she likes to say: A good conversation is like a game of catch. Huh? She explains.
When you play catch, you have to do an equal number of catches and throws, right? It’s not possible to play catch with somebody and throw more than you catch, for the most part. Because then you’d just be throwing baseballs at them, which is not nice. This is the exact same ratio as a healthy conversation — you’re going to catch as much as you throw. Which means, obviously, you’re going to talk 50% percent and listen 50% percent — and we don’t generally have that balance in our conversations.
There’s a great study out of Harvard in which researchers discovered that talking about yourself actually activates the same pleasure centers in your brain as sex and cocaine. That means it’s very pleasurable to us to talk about ourselves and what we like. You could walk away from a conversation like that and feel fantastic about it. But remember — talking about yourself makes you feel fantastic. So you may have just walked away from a conversation in which you talked about yourself — that was awesome! — and the other person is walking away going, “Good god, that person would not stop talking about themselves.” It’s a totally different perception, so you’ve got to remember you’re playing catch — find the balance.
How do you go beyond small talk to have a meaningful conversation with somebody?
Not every single conversation that you have is going to be in-depth and serious. And that’s okay! You should relax. Eventually, while you’re sitting there talking small talk, something’s going to pique your interest, or something’s going to catch their interest, or they’re going to say, “Wait, what did you just say?” Or, “Why is it that way?” And someone’s going to ask a question, and it’s going to lead you further into deeper subject matter. So it will happen, if there’s something there to talk about. Otherwise, be on your way — let it go.
What about that awkward silence when you don’t know what to say next?
By the time that you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. So by the time you’ve reached an awkward silence, something’s already gone wrong. But it’s not too late! Very often, an awkward silence comes because either you weren’t listening or they weren’t listening, and therefore, you guys have kind of meandered off-topic to where you’re at the opposite ends of a football field. The way to fix that is to say, “You know what, I’m sorry, I got totally distracted. Where did we start? Can you help me out here? I was just following a train of thought about Cheetos, and I got totally lost.”
What should you do when it is very clear from body language that the other person is not listening?
End it. Again with the game of catch. That’s the equivalent of me taking a ball and throwing it over my shoulder instead of to you. Why would you want to keep playing? You have to have an equal partner in a conversation. Otherwise, walk away.
You make the case that all experiences are not equal. Are you saying that empathy is not useful in a conversation? What should people do instead?
People always push back on this topic. Now, I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I believe that most of us are motivated by empathy. You’re with your friend, and you want to say, “Oh, I do understand you, because I’ve been through something similar.”
But the truth is, you haven’t — you haven’t been through something the same. You maybe have gone through something kind of similar, but the fact of the matter is that you’re a different person from your friend — so even if it was the exact same experience, even if you both almost went down on the Titanic, the way you experienced that is completely different. And these situations are most likely totally different.
So although it feels to you like you’re reaching out and giving empathy, what’s happening is that you’re talking about yourself again.
So you shouldn’t say, “I know how you feel”?
That’s the worst. You don’t know how they feel. They’re confiding in you, and all they want you to do is listen to them and say, “Wow, that sounds awful. There’s no way for me to understand what you’re going through, but you tell me what you need.”
What do you think is stopping people from having better, more meaningful conversations?
The elephant in the room is obviously polarization, and this is true not just in the United States, but I think Brexit and the migrant crisis in Europe tell us that it’s happening all over the world. Oftentimes we’ll enter into a conversation, and somebody will say, “I’m voting for Trump in the fall.” Conversation over. You immediately say, “Nothing this person says is something I want to listen to, they have nothing to teach me,” and you end the conversation. And if the conversation does continue, you’re not actually listening to them.
That’s what is often ending conversations now. We have stopped talking to people that we disagree with. We basically want to be able to curate and edit our conversations the same way that we curate and edit our social media. If we’re talking to somebody that we don’t want to hear from, we want to unfollow them like we do on Twitter.
The problem with that is that everybody knows something that you don’t. And so if you are stopping all of those conversations and only speaking with people who have similar experiences and opinions, you’re not going to grow, ever, and you won’t change your mind or your opinion.
They used to tell us, don’t talk about religion and politics. The problem today is that everything is religion and politics.
So what’s the best approach to start a conversation that you know might end up in an argument?
First of all, a lot of conversations end in arguments these days. But when I’m sitting down with somebody, especially somebody with whom I absolutely don’t agree, I sit down and I think through, “Okay, what if they’re right?” Let’s think about what would change, and how my mind would change, if they are right and I am wrong. And as they start to tell me things, as long as they’re not completely made-up facts, I ask myself what it would mean if they’re right. And then I ask them too. I say, “Okay, let’s say you’re right. What does that mean?” And try to get inside what they’re thinking.
For instance, a lot of people ask me how to talk to Donald Trump supporters. It is a great question. But here’s the thing: there’s an anger there among people — not just people who support Trump, but people who support Bernie Sanders, or the people who voted for Britain to leave the EU. There is an anger there, and it could be fascinating and engaging and compelling to figure out where that is coming from. That’s not always going to be the case, and there are going to be conversations you have to walk away from. But if you’re going to have an argument with someone, the best way to do it is with an open mind, assuming that that person can teach you something, and that you’re not there to teach them.
What should you say if you unintentionally offend someone during a conversation?
You say, “I’m really sorry, I did not in any way, shape, or form intend to offend you. I may be inarticulate, but let me try to explain what I thought I was saying, and then you tell me what you think I’m saying, and maybe we can understand one another.” That’s it, that’s all that you say. Be honest.
Is there a quick way to help a friend to stop obsessing about a negative topic?
It’s difficult to address specific situations, since context is so important. In broad strokes, though, people often repeat themselves when they feel as though they haven’t been heard. For example, when we tell our kids something important and they don’t acknowledge that they’ve heard, we’ll keep repeating it until they say, “Okay! I got it, Mom!” The same things happen often in the workplace. So, try telling your friend that you think you understand what he or she is saying: “Let me tell you what I’m hearing and you tell me if I’m getting it wrong.” Then you can offer to brainstorm to find solutions. If he or she’s not open to that, then be honest. Say, “You’re telling me the same things over and over. I can tell you’re very upset, but we can also move forward from here.”
How can you turn a one-way conversation into a dialogue?
You can’t, really. There’s a couple of reasons for a one-way conversation. Sometimes it’s that the person is shy, and in that case, that’s totally fixable, you can draw somebody out, usually by finding out what they like, or self-deprecation is good. I usually tell a joke or a story about something I’ve done that was really stupid — and I have a wealth of those examples. But if somebody isn’t in the mood to talk, you can’t fix that.
And here’s the thing that people are always surprised that I say: it is totally okay to not have a conversation. Having a real conversation takes energy, and it takes focus, and sometimes you just don’t have that kind of energy to give. That’s totally fine — don’t have the conversation, enjoy the silence.
So if you’re feeling like you really want to have a conversation and the other person isn’t matching that energy, you just need to let them have their time, and find somebody else who is ready.
What about when people really don’t seem to want to listen, but just want to talk about themselves and their experiences?
I’ve found that it’s good to very kindly address this head-on. Say, “It’s so great to hear all that. Can I tell you a little about what I’ve been doing?” Or any version of that. Don’t assume that person is just trying to dominate the conversation. Give them the benefit of the doubt, because we all talk about ourselves too much. If you try to improve the conversation and they are resistant, then just accept that your conversations with that person will be brief and unsatisfying. Just like a game of catch, you need two participants who are willing to take turns.
How do you get others to open up as much as you are opening up?
You can’t, really. For instance, when you’re opening up, is it mostly because you’re telling them about your experiences? Are you talking a lot about yourself, and not giving them an opening to talk about themselves? Are you in any way, shape or form shutting down the conversation? In other words, does that person say, “Oh, you know, I had something similar happen to me the other day, it was really, really interesting,” and you say, “Oh, no, no, no, it wasn’t like that,” and then you go back to what it was you were talking about.
There are a million reasons why the person that you’re talking to may not be opening up. But often, it’s because you’ve shut the door in one way or another. The fact of the matter is it’s probably not them, it’s probably you.
Russia Hits CRUCIAL Logistics Hub of Ukraine Near Lviv- 100+ Foreign (NATO) Troops KILLED
The Russian Armed Forces have attacked the Yavorovsky training ground and logistics center in the Lviv region of Ukraine.
The strike was carried out by a hypersonic Kinzhal missile.
Kinhal Missile Stats 2 large
The base that was attacked is one of THREE (3) major NATO centers inside Ukraine:
NATO Training Centers in Ukraine
At the time of the attack, instructors from NATO countries and more than 300 military personnel were at the training ground. Preliminarily, 100+ foreigners died.
Yavorovsky training ground is a key and crucial logistics hub of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which was involved in the transfer of Western armored vehicles, air defense systems and ammunition for artillery and air defense systems. It is close to the Polish border and has been used for extensive troop deployment and training.
The “Dagger” strike was carried out almost immediately after reports of the transfer of French military personnel to the Lviv region.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the Russians made another Frenchman “leave” the country:
Another Frenchman Dead Ukraine
Meanwhile, in Paris, French President Macron is now pushing for Ukraine to be allowed to use Western-supplied weapons to bomb interior Russia:
People like Macron are not going to stop escalating until Russia nukes them into oblivion.
So what if a conversation has run its course? How do you gracefully exit a conversation?
You gracefully exit by saying, “I need to go; it’s been so great to talk to you, and I’ll see you in a couple days.” Or you say, “You know what? I have too much on my mind, I’m really sorry, it’s been great to talk to you, and I’ll see you again in a couple weeks, but I’m going to head back.” Or — what happens to me, because I have adult ADD all the time — “I can’t keep my mind on this conversation, I am so sorry, it has nothing to do with you, but I’m going to go sit in my office and try to gather my thoughts.” Don’t lie. No white lies! Just be honest, and gracious and nice, not condescending, and just end the conversation.
This is an edited version of a conversation took place at TEDSummit 2017 (see below). Moderated by TED’s Janet Lee, it includes questions from Facebook and from commenters on Celeste’s TED Talk, 10 ways to have a better conversation.
Two dying kittens lay on the wet ground, calling for help, but no one heard them
Perhaps one of the toughest times in my life was a trifecta of events that blindsided me.
My mother died.
I got fired from my work abruptly and harshly.
My wife divorced me.
She also accused me of molesting her daughter.
I was arrested under the accusation, and spent a night in jail.
All my bank accounts were emptied.
My car was vandalized.
My credit cards were suddenly are maxed out.
And I ended up having to be the executor of my mother’s will…
With my sister and her sociopath husband trying to seal everything not nailed down.
During this period in my life, I was alone.
No friends, and I had moved to my mother’s house to take care of the estate, and get away from all the vandals that seemed to want to attack me in Little Rock Arkansas as some kind of “sex fiend”. Oh, yeah I was dealing with that nonsense.
During this time, I took stock at what I had, and I did have money stashed away out of reach from anyone in the USA. I had bank accounts in both The Philippines and in China. As well as relationships there.
And some time in the future, I will go though all that. But, for now, just know that it was a Hellish time for me.
My doctor prescribed me some medicine to “take the edge off”, and it helped, but what I really needed was more in terms of male counseling. But in the USA, at that time, the idea of “Bros” wasn’t that well established and the idea of “Rambo and Clint Eastwood like men” prevailed. Which sucked.
Every man for himself.
If you are broken… too bad.
Suck it up, bub.
…
I was living off of whisky, stress pills, and frozen pizza.
I spent the time planning and communicating with my attorneys that managed to throw out the accusations of me assaulting a girl… as there was no physical evidence of that ever happening.
But, the mere accusation got me framed up as a sex pervert, and I had a second series of charges to deal associated with that fiasco. In this grouping of lawfare, I had to defend my personality, and endure the charges that I had an interest in sexual activity with children.
So, I had to fly down to Arkansas to deal with that.
…
And as I left the house, I made sure that I had enough pizzas in the fridge to smunch on when I returned.
I well remember opening up the refrigerator and checking on the stack.
But…
Other things were going on.
Little did I know that my sister and her sociopath husband wrote a letter to the Judge and the prosecuting attorney telling them that I was dangerous and needed to be locked up.
They included a letter that I had written to my father expressing my worries and concerns about these accusations.
And so my father gave a copy of the letter to my sister… to help “explain” my worries to her so that she would show some concern for me. You see, he believed that as family that she would understand and stop saying such bad and harsh things about me.
Didn’t happen.
She didn’t care. She wanted all the money, property and furnishings on my mothers estate.
And so she saw an opportunity. And so she took that letter and mailed it to the prosecuting attorney and the judge.
You see, they wanted to loot the estate, and me being locked up would facilitate that.
$4.6 million dollars (in then prices)
…
So when I attended my court date, I met my attorney.
He was late for the hearing, and surprisingly beaten up. His face was all puffy, black and blue and it looked like his nose and jaw were broken. No idea why he was so beaten up.
My psychologist who evaluated me was absent as well. She was key to the determination of my mental and emotional health.
It turned out that her visa was reascended and she had 72 hours to leave the United States or suffer arrest!
…
So,…
My attorney was beaten up.
My supporting witnesses were all missing and were deported.
My sister wrote a letter that told the Judge that I was dangerous.
A private letter to my father was presented as evidence that I was a flight risk.
As the hearing began, and only seconds after he arrived he told me about the damning letter.
Fuck.
I should of left right then and there.
But, I was a good boy. I stayed.
And was promptly arrested and held in protective custody as a “close family member” confirmed that I was a dangerous villain and needed to be incarcerated. Hopefully, said the letter, for the rest of my life.
So I never returned home.
And the pizzas were never eaten.
…
I often think about those pizzas and what might have been. But now, youse guys know what happened.
Its so easy to accuse someone. Especially a man.
Its so easy to worsen the charges against that person as well.
Guard yourself and NEVER, EVER allow these people who will use a system against you to hurt and harm you. And be very careful who you confide in. In hindsight, my blue-pilled father was my worst enemy.
Hard times loomed ahead of me.
I endured them.
But not without scars.
Today…
What should I do if my child won’t stop screaming because I don’t buy him some toys in the store?
My oldest son threw a tantrum like that when he was three or four years old.
I took him out of the store and got down so that we were eye to eye.
I calmly told him,
“We are not going back in the store. You need to understand this. Now, the way you are acting is not okay. It seems like you might be tired. If you are tired, we can go home and you can take a nap.
I have other things I need to do. If you aren’t tired, we can go do them.
It is up to you, now. Are you going to be okay to go and do other things, or do we need to go home so you can take a nap? It is your choice, so choose carefully.”
He told me that he was okay, and that he could handle doing other things. We finished our shopping (at a different shop) and then went home. He never had another problem like that. Whenever he started to get whiny, I would ask him if he was tired. Sometimes, he would say yes, and I would finish up and go home. The other times, he would take the cue and adjust his behavior.
Whenever he would ask me for a toy (outside of birthdays, etc.), we would discuss the item. I might say, “this looks like fun, it isn’t expensive, and it won’t be the right season when your birthday comes, so I think it would be best to get it now.”
I also said things like, “I would have to work for two hours to pay for this. Would you be willing to do two hours of work for it?” He would generally say, “No, I don’t want it that much.” I would reply, “Well, that answers your question, then, doesn’t it?”
An 20 Year Old Cat was Taken to the Shelter, and a Man Decided to Help and Take Him Home
What is it that nobody tells you about having children?
Having children is awful. There are benefits that we all know about. But let’s stick with awful for a second.
A) A 1 foot tall US citizen suddenly moves into your house and you are FORCED to deal with it. It’s like an invading army taking over your home.
B) This 1 foot tall US citizen doesn’t speak English and yet demands you understand it 24 hours a day.
C) This new roommate you are forced to tolerate cries all the time. Deal with it.
D) This new roommate that you are basically required to love shits on the floor or shits in their pants and expects you to clean it.
E) You are expected to feed your new roommate and they have less motor control than someone with no arms and no legs.
F) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you are required to make sure this 1 foot tall human doesn’t kill themselves by mistake. If they do, then you might go to jail.
G) You have to touch their dirty genitals when you clean them. Oh yeah, you have to clean them. A lot.
H) At night (if you are a man), they climb in bed with the love of your life and suck on their breasts. If they were a normal roommate you might kick them out of your house at that point. But now it’s against the law to do that.
I) You and your spouse have gone from being lovers to being “parents”. It’s the funnest thing in the world to be a lover. It’s so much fun that we spend almost every moment thinking and dreaming about loving. It’s not as fun to be a parent.
J) You have no idea if this 1 foot tall person will turn into someone you like or hate when they are five feet tall. It’s sort of random although you hope for the best.
I have two daughters. They are the loves of my life.
This will make a man call her a UNICORN
Have you ever been treated differently at an airport because of your passport?
Oh how vividly I remember this experience. The experience I am about to tell you all about was the day I decided that I will do everything in my power to change my passport to a Canadian passport as soon as possible.
This story takes place back in 2009/2010 new years period. I was a PR in Canada, having immigrated in 2007 to Canada alongside my entire family. Due to some family reasons and situations, after landing in Canada, my dad, mom and little brother went back to Dubai for a year and I was in university in Ontario. I would visit them in Dubai during the winter breaks and summer vacations. This story is about the nightmare that I faced while on my way back to Toronto from Dubai.
Back then, we would take connecting flights, usually through British airways. As many would know, connecting flights from BA are routed through London Heathrow airport, for the most part. This story begins from the time I landed in Heathrow, after completing the first leg of my journey back to Pearson airport in Toronto. As we landed, I remember the captain coming over the intercom and advising us that, apparently due to “adverse” weather, the Heathrow airport had seized all their operations, which included my flight onward to YYZ. As I sat there, my mind racing, the next announcement made informed us that they are trying to arrange for hotel accommodations for the stranded passengers, and to contact BA customer service if we needed further inspection. I remember as we were allowed inside the terminal, there must have been hundreds, if not a thousand, people all in the terminal at the same time. As I walked forward, there were signs and people all around that were directing passengers around. As I approached, they asked me which passport I hold. At that time, I was an Indian passport holder, so I told them that. The expression on the person I was speaking to was eye opening. He sniggers and says, “oh ok, go to that line there, big fella”, pointing to a line of at least 400 people and filling in fast. As I stood in this line, I noticed that most of the people who had been on my flight, who were either EU or US or Canadian citizens, were being directed to a much smaller line, and were dealt with swiftly. As I watched, another 747 unloaded its passengers, and everyone of the EU or US or Canadian passport were pushed again to the front of the que. Seeing this, I was livid. I asked one of the guys working there, and all he asked me was, “what’s your passport or nationality”. Once I said Indian, he says, stay in that line.
I now realize that this disparity in processing immigration/passengers is due to the challenges of making sure that illegals don’t enter into the country, and each country has their own relationship with other countries, but as a 19 years old kid, I was mad. I was pissed that I was in a line going back atleast half a km, while people were allowed to jump ahead. Plus, when I finally got to the front of the line, I was informed that I would be getting a hotel about an hour away from Heathrow airport, and I would have to figure out the way to get there myself. All because, to my teen mind, the people who jumped ahead got all the hotels near the airport. This was the moment I decided that I will do everything in my power to get a Canadian citizenship and get my Canadian passport.
JD Vance Did WHAT to a Couch?
God. This stuff…
What’s the most ridiculous thing someone has done to get out of work?
This idiot, Aaron O’Neill worked at the Intel plant in Kildare, Ireland. After a night of drinking and taking drugs he didn’t want to go to work so paid his friend to ring in a bomb threat, on behalf of ISIS.
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Source: The Irish Times
Aaron O’Neill (20) had been out drinking and taking tablets with his friend Colin Hammond (21) when he decided he did not want to go in the next day.
He paid his friend to make the call from a payphone outside Hammond’s home.
The resulting 999 calls shut down a motorway, disrupted air traffic control and prevented 4,000 Intel staff from going to work. Garda Eamonn McFadden said that at a “conservative estimate” the incident lost Intel 6,000 hours of production.
Mr O’Neill of Chieftains Drive, Balbriggan and Hammond of Bath Road, also in Balbriggan, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to making a false report on the Bath Road on January 13th 2015. Neither man has previous convictions.
Mr Hammond told the operator there were bombs located at Intel which would go off in 12 hours.
“You will not find them. This is a warning, we’re everywhere now,” Hammond told emergency services. When asked who was making the call, he replied: “Islamic State.”
Described by Judge Martin Nolan as “profoundly stupid”, Hammond claimed he had been paid to make the call. He was ordered to carry out 200 hours community service in lieu of a two year prison sentence when his case was dealt with in October.
He said, “to put it politely” it had been a misconceived plan and accepted that the men hadn’t envisaged the calls to have the effect they did.
“It is a very, very strange way to avoid going to work,” Judge Nolan said .
And the best part is how they got caught –
Gda McFadden said that a month after the hoax, a taxi man arrived at Balbriggan Garda station with a passenger who wouldn’t pay his fare. The passenger was Hammond and a garda at the station recognised his voice from the hoax call.
Edit : I’ve included The Irish Times article at the end but I see I have been negligent in explaining actual events, mea culpa, I certainly could have explained this better – the person in question wasn’t directly employed by Intel, he was a subcontractor and directly employed by his father, so he simply couldn’t ring in sick, as I strongly suspect/believe that at the time he lived at home. He couldn’t pretend to be sick when he worked for his Dad.
I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked
A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. So what are the so-called "foreign" automakers doing about it?
May 9, 2024 at 1:16pm ET
By: Kevin Williams
In just the past few months, the rift between the U.S. and China has expanded at an astounding rate. TikTok is set to be banned if it does not divest from its U.S operations. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to battling a surge of cheap Chinese clean energy exports. The Commerce Department is cracking down on chips sent to Huawei.
And yet plenty of critics still insist China’s advancements in its manufacturing abilities—especially in developing and selling electrified vehicles—somehow aren’t legitimate. Or that they’re just the byproducts of a government with too much cash that wants to elbow its way into the rest of the world.
I’ve personally been privy to conversations with auto industry insiders, engineers and pundits alike. Many of them believe China’s industries are not sustainable, and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch.
To these critics, if China had a truly open market, Chinese buyers would continue to purchase Western cars en masse, and sales of their models wouldn’t be falling off so dramatically.
It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China’s electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way.
I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.
That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.
Shanghai Is Hot, Yet Quiet
I knew Shanghai was hot, but I don’t think I quite understood the scope of the Bund’s hotness until I stepped out of the terminal of the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
Shanghai shares nearly the same latitude as New Orleans, and like its geographical American counterpart, much of the city is next to water, making it just as humid and swampy. I was jumpy and jetlagged, dripping with sweat, my shirt already sticking to my back but relieved that I had made it through customs and passport control.
I was in a new place that was as foreign as it was familiar. Western brands like Peet’s Coffee and KFC littered the terminal, with queues of Chinese folks and international tourists alike sucking down localized versions of iced coffee and tea lattes or chomping down on chicken sandwiches that were significantly more flavorful than what I could get at home.
The very first car I saw in the arrivals and pickup lane of the airport was a white Ford Explorer parked in the middle of a pedestrian crossing; it was almost like I hadn’t left Ohio. It was so familiar, this car was identical to the one back home, save for the Chinese characters on the rear hatch that designate the JMC-Ford joint venture that made the crossover.
The second I looked away from the Explorer, I realized just how different everything was. The arrivals area was just as busy as any airport in any cosmopolitan world city, but the engine and exhaust noises I’d typically hear back home, or even in Europe, just weren’t there.
Most cars in the pickup area were green-plated “new energy vehicles,” made by brands of all sorts, from BYD or Geely, and even Western brands like Buick and Chevrolet. It’s quite a sight: a nation swept up in an electric car mania, as evidenced by the near-silent crossovers, vans, and sedans aggressively flying over speed bumps while dodging pedestrians headed to rideshare, taxis, or public transportation.
Some of the China-only cars I had read about and reported on before, I was finally seeing in person. “Oh wow, that’s a Buick Velite 6; I’ve been reading about those online, they’re everywhere, here in China. Or at least, everywhere in the passenger pickup area,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. For a split second, I wondered: were the reports overblown? Was China’s love affair with Western cars still strong?
Of course, it would be silly to jump to that conclusion within the first five minutes of being in China, but the presence of so many Buicks felt antithetical to the idea that I’ve been told that no one wanted Western brands, including its EVs.
Right?
My time in China would revolve around a tour of Geely’s world headquarters in Hangzhou and several roundtables with executives from Geely’s brands. Then, we’d fly to Beijing for a day at the auto show and experience a full day at a racetrack to sample more than a dozen vehicles, including the latest models of all brands that Geely Holding Group controls, except Volvo and Polestar.
We’d drive from Shanghai to Hangzhou via the iconic Hangzhou Bay Bridge, a ride that was more than two hours long. I’d spend it in the back of a Zeekr 009, a van I’ve driven on a track in the U.S. I knew it was a fast van that cornered surprisingly flat, but that’s not really the use case of that vehicle.
The 009 is part of a luxury MPV (minivan) segment that essentially only exists in Asia, and arguably has been perfected by China. Instead of Cadillac Escalades or Lincoln Navigators, black car operators use vehicles like the Buick GL8, Toyota Alphard, Denza D9, Voyah Dreamer, or the Zeekr 009.
And in context, the Zeekr 009 felt so at home. It’s not a cheap van. I’d reckon that the one I was in was well north of $80,000, but the 009 felt so much more mature than the last Escalade or Navigator for-hire car that would have been roughly the same price. It was more than just the ambiance of the 009’s interior, with its tiger wood trim, full Alcantara headliner, real metal finishes brightwork and finishes in the interior, or first-class airline-style middle captain’s chairs that both cooled and massaged me, lulling me to sleep before I knew what happened next. The 009 felt like a low-slung Rolls-Royce with sliding doors, so I understood why it was such a popular option for Chinese businessmen.
The visitors’ center at its headquarters had examples of its latest models. Some of them were premium models from Zeekr and Lynk & Co, meant to battle brands like Acura or Audi.
Others were more mainstream, like Geely’s Galaxy subbrand, meant for middle-income value-conscious Chinese buyers, or potentially to be rebadged as Protons in places like Malaysia.
No matter the price point, they all felt incredibly convincing. They’re high-tech, well-executed machines in ways I hadn’t experienced from European or American manufacturers.
For example, take the Honda Accord-sized (and similarly priced) Geely Galaxy E8. Fully electric and on the same SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) platform as some Polestar models, the E8’s interior comes standard with a full-width 4K OLED display that serves as a central hub for all of the car’s functions. True, there are plenty of concerns that could be leveled at the E8 for its screen-only interface, but that does this screen a disservice.
Using it is akin to staring at a TV screen or a high-quality gaming monitor. The interface feels like it’s done with intentionality and care; important details like speed gear position are easily seen, whereas the HVAC and stereo controls are easily at hand and not buried in acres of menus. The screen itself is incredibly responsive, matching the inputs with as little latency as a high-end smartphone.
On the screen, an animation of the car sits in the midst of an ocean, overlooking a mountain range; It’s bright, it’s pretty, and it feels as if Galaxy E8’s interior is more like a remodeled living room, rather than the front seat of a car.
I was impressed. But when I got to the auto show, I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet.
The Beijing Auto Show is A Tour De Force
Thankfully, Beijing’s more than 700 miles from the balmy Shangai-Hangzhou area, and further inland location made for a comparatively cooler time. Unfortunately, Beijing’s traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.
The show itself was packed, incomparable to the ghost-town auto shows back home during their press preview days. Everywhere I looked, there were people: influencers, Chinese media, international media. Clearly, China missed the memo that these events are dead.
I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.
In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely.
Most brands had doors that closed with a solid thunk, with soft-touch materials in the correct places, when appropriate to the vehicle’s price point. And no matter the price point, they all had responsive, integrated vehicle interfaces that were quick, pretty, and ubiquitous.
A basic infotainment system in any given moderately priced Chinese EV beats the brakes off some systems in cars that cost six figures.
There are reasons for that, but namely, Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.
Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.
Of course, China has a lot of EV brands. Probably too many EV brands. But some of those brands are entanglements between China’s automakers and its tech companies.
Take JiYue, a combination of Geely and Baidu, a company often dubbed China’s Google. Its connected services and vision-only self-driving has a Full Self-Driving style car on the road, while Tesla waits to jump in. Or IM Motors, a premium brand that’s a result of a tie-up with SAIC and e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Then there’s the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, a collaboration between BAIC, Chery (aka Luxeed), Aito, and Changan, and smartphone and tech giant Huawei. The latter can either help design and market the cars themselves or add full-stack in-car solutions for a vehicle’s infotainment car architecture, all using the same Harmony OS that Huawei uses on its smartphones.
And of course, there’s Xiaomi, a phone manufacturer that decided to design and manufacture its own car. Unlike Apple, Xiaomi actually pulled this off, and the end product is so advanced it’s made headlines all over the world.
Whatever the flavor, these models are superconnected, full of high-end processors and tech meant to woo discerning Chinese buyers.
Just from what I saw, I understood why there were so many people at the Chinese domestic brands. Li Auto’s booth had a consistent queue to view L6 compact PHEV crossover, released at the show.
Even its current production models, like the L9 and Mega MPV, had lines of Chinese and International Media poking and prodding the cars. Changan’s Ford Maverick-sized convertible coupe SUV with a bed stayed swarmed the entire show. Xiaomi’s SU7 had a two-hour wait. Some international journalists gave up and stopped trying to see the car.
Western brands didn’t enjoy that fervor, though.
Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China
All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China.
The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.
Same story with the other Asian brands. Mazda’s latest model, EZ-6 (which isn’t really even a Mazda, but a restyled Changan Deepal SL03), had some of the usual influencers and journalists shooting quick walkaround content for their channels, but after that died down, most moved on to something else. Ditto for Toyota’s bZ3x and bZ3c near-production models.
“Chinese people don’t really care about concepts here,” Will Sundin of the China Driven internet show told me. “They want something they can buy and drive right away.” As we walked around, he elaborated on why Western manufacturers were losing so much ground in China. Sundin blamed it partially on Western brands’ inability to electrify quickly while offering low-quality software and mediocre value in their products.
Chevrolet showed off the same Equinox EV preproduction prototypes it had at the LA Auto Show in 2022. Both were locked and unavailable for in-depth viewing by the general public until a third unit showed up the next day of the show.
Also, the Equinox EV is still not on sale. By comparison, Li Auto’s L6 was available for viewing and purchase at Li Auto storefronts before the car’s official reveal at the Beijing Auto Show. Li Auto says it has 40,000 orders for the PHEV.
Why isn’t the Equinox EV on sale?
We explored the expo center more, but eventually made our way back to the Buick stand. I plopped down in the front seat of the Buick Velite 6, the electric wagon I had seen everywhere in Shanghai. I’d find out later from four different on-the-ground sources, including Sundin, that the Velite 6 is highly discounted and sold en masse to Chinese rideshare drivers.
It is a car that sells in numbers heavily to fleets because it is cheap and available, and less because it is desirable—not great for a brand that wants to retain its market share and raise its transaction prices.
Within five seconds of sitting behind the wheel of the Velite 6, I understood why. Sundin picked up on my disappointment.
“It’s a bit shit, innit?” he said. He was right. I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing. The Velite 6 felt like an electric version of a generation-old Chevy Malibu.
The delta of quality, connectedness, and value between the Velite 6 and any of the equivalent of the mid-tier Chinese EV vehicles I had experienced that day, was startling. By comparison, the Velite 6’s small screens and grey plastic interior were downright depressing to the full-width, super brilliant screens in any given Chinese EV.
The GM Ultium-based Buick Electra E4 was a slight step in the right direction, but generally nowhere near as nice as the Chinese premium brands it meant to go head to head with. It seems like GM understands this since it cut the Chinese pricing of the Electra E4 twice, well before any price war kicked off.
“Well, at least you guys in the States will get some new PHEV stuff, like the new Buick GL8 van, right?” Sundin said.
“No, actually we don’t get any GM PHEV models in the United States,” I told him. “Only a few GM Ultium-based EVs and they’re not doing all that well.”
I was embarrassed. Here I was in China, trying to empathize with Western brands, thinking they were being pushed out of China due to politics and things that were no fault of their own.
In reality, it felt like it was the late 1980s again, when American manufacturers felt like they could sell whatever underdeveloped models its accounting department had cooked up to the public, and we’d just have to deal with it. Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.
Writer and podcaster Ed Zitron said something interesting during an episode of his podcast, Better Offline. Americans are almost made to apologize for their preferences when it comes to Big Tech. Some bigwig or boisterous startup guy had a big idea for a widget that no one wanted, and decided to half-ass a product that doesn’t work all that well.
When the public rightfully ignores a bad or unwanted product, there’s a new trend in tech to blame the clientele for not being smart enough, rather than facing the music that what was created just wasn’t all that good. I mean, just look at all the terrible AI-based pins that don’t do anything.
The auto industry feels the same way. Instead of automakers attempting to understand and meet the needs of the Chinese market, they’d rather just sell the cars they wanted to make. By comparison, Chinese automakers seemed to have tried harder to understand the desires of Chinese people.
Chinese buyers wanted connected cars with big screens, and by god, the automakers figured out a way to get that in there, and how to do it well.
All We Do Is Complain While China Advances
America’s looming TikTok ban feels like a direct allegory for China’s relationship with its electric car exports. I use TikTok; I understand how it works, and I agree that there are plenty of valid critiques to be leveled at the platform’s ability to spread misinformation, or how its endless scroll probably isn’t great for anyone’s mental health, especially that of the teens and tweens who love the platform so much.
Yet, so much of the coverage of TikTok’s ban refuses to acknowledge one fact: The platform is really, really well executed. TikTok’s algorithm is fantastic; it can compile a near-endless scroll of content that feels fresh, positive, fun and eerily, directly targeted to you. I’ve watched the viral power of TikTok straight up create music artists like PinkPantheress, or revive the career and launch classic artists like Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Kate Bush back onto the charts.
TikTok’s culture isn’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot healthier than whatever Meta, Google, and Twitter have created, where death by a thousand cuts of “enshittification” have made their services hostile and less useful to the end user. On Instagram Reels, the content moderation is so poor, that it’s not uncommon to see someone literally die on screen.
So, when automakers, tech companies and regulators push back on China, the sentiments that they’re just protecting our market from unsafe or security-challenged products feel hollow. Instead, it feels like grandstanding, and a tacit admission that they have no intention of trying to do better.
Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected.
Western automakers aren’t entangled deeply with tech companies in ways that would serve the end user, Chinese or otherwise. They didn’t get way ahead of the curve to establish a battery supply chain in the ways China did. And they don’t seem to want to cater to the Chinese market (or any market, rather) through continuous updates and agility with their product line.
Even Tesla in China can’t be bothered to update one of its most important products, the Model Y, in this hyper-competitive market. Instead, it relies on margin-hurting gimmicks to move units, like constant price cuts, subsidized trade-in incentives, and 0% financing to get customers to buy a car that is aged and now uncompetitive.
Tesla didn’t even have a presence at the Beijing Auto Show. Elon Musk came and went to Beijing during the show, only to make a case for his robotaxi pivot with government officials. It’s like he’s already given up on cars here.
Volkswagen placed its ID cars on the market, then acted surprised when journalists and buyers alike rightfully criticized its poor software interface. Nissan at one point sold nearly as many gas-powered Sylphy (Sentra) sedans in China as Tesla did Model Y crossovers. Yet when it came time to electrify, it stuck a Sylphy body on top of the already outmoded 38 kWh Nissan Leaf running gear. It wasn’t great at charging, had limited range, and was pricey.
GM blew it here too. Up until the Beijing Auto Show’s debut of a PHEV version, the GL8 was one of the few vans in the segment without any plug-in capabilities. Green-plated New Energy vehicles are an important market in China, as are luxury vans. Why weren’t Western automakers paying attention? Why didn’t GM get an electrified vehicle on sale faster?
So at what point does blame shift from Chinese economic policy to the actions of the automakers themselves? How relevant, truly, are claims that China is “unfairly” subsidizing its EV industry to Western automakers completely misjudging the Chinese market, and low-key failing to craft products that Chinese buyers actually wanted? Why did they get so arrogant that they assumed China would buy their budget Peugeots, Citroens, Chevrolets, and rewarmed Volkswagens and Buicks forever and ever? Why the hell didn’t we subsidize our EV-building and clean energy industries like China did?
I’m not going to lie and say that the Chinese underutilization of its EV factories isn’t a problem, or that this isn’t an oversaturated car market that not all of these brands will survive. Of course, there are plenty of concerns around China’s poor human rights track record and the dubious sourcing of some of its raw materials; both Chinese domestic and foreign brands are criticized for this.
Also, as impressive as the Beijing Auto Show was, there was a slight air of desperation. Some of the smaller, more desperate brands I visited didn’t initially realize I was part of international media; looking for a win, they thought I was a potential distributor seeking to set up a contract to export vehicles to a country that wasn’t the U.S.
Some influencers that were not even remotely connected to the automotive industry were livestreaming and posting on Chinese social media about new car debuts, trying to bring a non-car-interested audience into the automotive realm. The once-banned “car babes” at Chinese auto shows have kind of crept back to the showroom floor, signaling a desire for attention and sales that they might not be getting.
And yet, those issues feel secondary. If China were to somehow rectify its production overcapacity issues, and acquiesce to every demand that Europe and the U.S. have of its EV sector, China would still have technologically advanced, well-made, interesting EVs. Arguably, it would still come out leaner and stronger.
If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.
In mixing, combine spinach, bacon and cheese; set aside.
Open chicken breast and sprinkle with seasoned salt. Stuff with spinach mixture. Fold and place seam side down in baking dish. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle outside with seasoned salt.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
Top with Florentine sauce and serve over rice.
Florentine Sauce
Blend together flour and 2 teaspoons of the butter; set aside.
Sauté onions and mushrooms in 1 teaspoon butter (do not allow onions to brown).
Add white wine and reduce completely.
Add remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer and slowly add the flour/butter mixture a little at a time until desired thickness is achieved. Continue cooking at a simmer for 8 to 10 minutes.
Notes
* If fresh spinach is used, it must be blanched.
CHEATING Girlfriend Gets HUMILIATED During Wedding Proposal
What is the most brilliant example of taking advantage of a loophole you have ever witnessed?
I do not tell this story to brag. It is just so different.
My parents sold their small farm and moved to El Paso with my husband when we moved there. They would have had to pay a lot of tax. We found a house with room for inlaw quarters.
I hope l get this straight. It was quite awhile ago. They had one year to reinvest to avoid taxes.
I found out about once in a lifetime non taxable gifts. So l worked a way for us to give the down payment. Using a four way split where l would give my mother x amount of money and my father x amount. They used it for their half of the down-payment. My husband would do the same. We used the same four way split to cover their half of the house payments which was jointly owned. At the end of the one year they gave us their half as a once in a lifetime gift. They used the same four way which kept it non taxable.
We were not sure of the legality of this so we went to a lawer, he read it all over and said “l used to work for the IRS, if l had audited this l could not find a problem with it. Who figured this out for you?” When told him l did he said “Lady, you found one hell of a loop hole.”
Tate On Why Life For The Average Man Will Become Impossible
So one of my seniors recently got to know that I won the QPCA and she decided to congratulate me. Her bad, and I’ll tell you why.
Now, when it comes to keeping the interaction alive, I’m pretty good at it.
But sometimes, ( sometimes = always ) I miserably fail in the more important thing, that’s keeping the interaction interesting ( interesting = continuable, without occasional cringing ).
So this is what happened,
She: It’s great that you won.
Me: Thanks.
She: But you don’t seem as sassy in real life.
Me: Umm, ya.
I don’t know why and I kid you not, but this time, I decided that I’ll keep the conversation going on. So I came up with this revolutionary compliment. Compliments that can change the world.
Me: You’ve got asymmetrical eyebrows.
She: °_° Wh.. What?
Me: Yeah, I never noticed. Maybe no one ever did, but your eyebrows don’t have symmetry.
She: Uh…. Ok?
Me (By now I realized that I fucked up, but never quit is a good motto and when to never quit is never taught ): And uh… if, if you notice closely, the left eyebrow is more bent than the… the ri…
She ( By now, she is regretful that she congratulated me in the first place ): Hey, you can go, seeya!
Me: ..ght eyebrow.
Now what’s important here, is that I tried.
( And Sarhad, what’s even more important here, is that you failed )
Only if I had known that asymmetrical eyebrows are not something great to talk about, I would’ve picked up something more intriguing.
Like I always have my moo point ( cows and magnets ) to talk about.
But I’ll admit, though social interaction is not really my prowess, I’m learning and I do want to get better.
It’s a skill which is not really optional, and which everyone should possess, to a certain level.
Yeah, on a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’m a pair of ever frowning eyebrows with rainbow eyelashes. Everything symmetrical.
Half a million likes!
She is right.
How should I deal with a coworker who never wants to pay when we eat out?
I often went out with two friends, who were also my colleagues, to a pizza house. We’d order two large pizzas and split the bill. The leftover would be packed, and one friend would always take it home. We lived in the same apartment building.
The problem is, when I eat I always take my time and I like to talk. At the end of the meal, I would always have eaten only two slices and yet I had to pay an equal share of the bill. I never got to take the leftover home.
One time I mentioned this problem to the friend who also never got to take the leftover home. I told her that I had a problem with us always splitting the bill because I always eat only two slices and never got to take home the leftover. The other friend would automatically take the leftover for herself and never once offered us if we’d also like to take it home.
My friend was surprised because she thought that the other friend and I took turns to take the leftover because we lived in the same building. Then she said that she also had a problem because she never got to order the pizza that she likes.
The thing is, I don’t eat pork so I get to order my favorite chicken bbq pizza. The two friends eat pork but it’s always the other friend who got to order her favorite pork pizza, and also the one to take all the leftover.
So we came up with a solution.
The next time we went again for pizza, I told the waiter that I was ordering a small chicken bbq pizza with a glass of coke, and that I’d pay my bill separately. The friend that I’ve spoken with also ordered her favorite Hawaiian pizza, small size, with drinks and asked the water to separate her bills too. Thus, the other friend also had to order her favorite pork pizza in small size.
I enjoyed my pizza, took my time eating it, enjoyed telling stories, and at the end of the meal told the waiter that I’d like to take home my leftover.
Needless to say, the friend who always took the leftover went home that night without any bring home because she finished her small size pizza. And the friend who I had spoken with was satisfied to have finally eaten her favorite Hawaiian pizza.
What is the biggest “I’m definitely fired” thing you’ve done at work, but nobody ever found out?
Many years ago I was working as a developer on one of the largest derivatives markets in the world. Part of our teams remit was supporting the live environment and as such I had on my sun workstation a 9 window virtual desktop one for each environment. we often jumped on each other’s workstations to do things, start/stop uat processes or get prod logs.. One day unknowingly to me, my boss was using my workstation and accidentally moved our futures trading market console onto my UAT desktop and later that day asked me to recycle UAT to pick up changes he pushed. I did it without though and within 30 seconds the Head of development (CTO) comes running across the floor screaming the futures production environment had just crashed. I looked at my screen and to my horror the console I just typed my command into had a prod$ console. My boss looked and me, I looked at him and we both thought the same and it wasn’t good! Immediately a witch hunt started and it was assumed the support guys had messed up (They forgot we had access). My boss quickly told me close all the consoles and go take a really long lunch so when they get to us, you’re not here to lie!
I got back an hour latter and my boss quickly announced “They found the problem, a bug in one of the support scrips means if someone cont-c it run kill -9 -1 to clean up, no one knows who IN SUPPORT did it but it wasn’t their fault”
It made the main 6pm news business section that day although I didn’t speak a word about it to anyone until a I left a years later. We also changed the background color of all prod consoles to red after that
How to get the pill
Do you think Ford and GM will see a significant boost in their stock prices following the implementation of higher tariffs on Chinese imports?
Quora Prompt Generator, this must be your way of trying to make a joke of Biden’s tariff on Chinese EVs? Or are you just totally clueless coming up with your usual silly questions?
First, there’s Ford. They’ve stopped all their EV productions and going hydrogen.
Let’s just say this is tantamount to Ford declaring that they’re jumping from the pot right into the fire.
And then there’s GM. Their QTR1 sales for 2024 was a paltry 16,425 . . .and Barra just announced cutting sales target from 400,000 to 200,000 for 2024, and even this is delusional. And when you hear Barra reassuring everybody that GM is still committed to stay in China, you can be sure GM’s days in China are numbered.. . .and management there has their bags already packed. With this, goes any hope of GM being able to come up with any competitive EV product.
So how is Biden’s tariffs going to protect a U.S. market where there’s nobody to protect? Their stock prices? Both are going back to their reliables – good ole American SUV and pickup gas guzzlers.
Ahh, but you say there’s still Tesla. So, why do you think Musk is now spending so much time in China? To be sure, he doesn’t really care about the U.S. market. He owns it already. He’s really worried that his existential market in China isn’t lost. He’d already fired all of his people handling their recharging network and revamping others. As the price competition gets more heated, the more threat there is to his position there. And that’s where Biden’s tariffs mean diddly squat..
What are some mind-blowing facts that sound unreal but are actually true?
1. People don’t have as strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million.
A million seconds is about 11 days.
A billion seconds is about 32 years.
2. Only 2% of people can hear their eyes move and blink.
3. The Facebook logo is blue because founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind, making blue the “richest color ” for him.
4. If you hold in your farts long enough, the gas can be re-absorbed and come out of your mouth.
5. Over 50% of pilots have admitted to falling asleep mid-flight. And of these pilots, 29% said that they had woken up to find their co-pilot asleep as well.
6. Most toilet paper sold for home use in France is pink.
7. There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.
8. Bananas are berries, but strawberries are not.
9. Giraffes and humans have the same number of necklines. Actually, all mammals do.
10. Sometimes, hiding your thumb behind all your fingers is a sign of panic.
11. Broccoli is a man-made vegetable and was created by breeding different types of cabbages.
12. Try to breathe and swallow at the same time. You can’t.
While conducting a surgery, have you ever found something unexpected?
A female marathoner was referred to me because her running times were increasing and she was progressively short of breath. She was also coughing up blood occasionally.
Ten years earlier she had removal of the upper 1/3 of her right lung(right upper lobe) for a benign tumor that bled often and obstructed that lobe of the lung.
To do this the surgeon must pull the remaining lower lung bronchus (intermediate) up and connect it to the trachea (wind pipe). This puts the sutured connection ring of tissues under considerable tension, tending to rip out the sutures leading to a catastrophic leak.
So the surgeon buttressed the suture line with several cotton pledgets. The surgeon obviously did a great job, she had been doing well for ten years.
When I looked into the lung (bronchoscopy) I saw a large mass of tissue I assumed was recurrent tumor completely blocking the right lung. But the pathologist found the biopsy tissue samples to be benign!
To clear the path into the lung I used laser through the bronchoscope to ablate the tissue. As I steadily removed tissue I found the suture line and then saw the many pledgets (small cotton pieces) the surgeon had used to support the suture line. I realized that obstructing tissue was a granulomatous mass the lung had generated because of the foreign body irritation from the pledgets. I steadily burned away the pledgets along with the old sutures until the area was completely clear and the airway to the lower lung was reopened.
This relieved her shortness of breath and she resumed running. A recheck 1 and 2 years later showed no recurrence of the tumor; she remained asymptomatic.
I expected to find malignancy but instead found a treatable benign condition.
20 MINUTES Of Modern Women BEGGING For A Good Man To Save Them
What is the craziest thing your best friend has ever done?
Guys, I’d love your feedback on this. I can’t believe my friend did this.
Last summer, my best friend was housesitting for about a week for her another friend and that friend’s wealthy family. They had a massive aquarium tank, eight feet tall with thick glass, almost as big as a room. It was only fish inside and nothing else. One night while storming, she wanted to go and swim in the tank. She absolutely loves fish and aquatic life. She got changed into some elastic shorts and a tank, turned off all the lights in the house, and with a towel walked barefoot up the small staircase that led to the top of the tank — her heart beating really fast with excitement. The top of the tank was already open, wide enough for her to easily fit through.
After she raised her arms over her head, she plunged into the water. The water was deep enough that she didn’t hit the bottom but her body went horizontal upon landing in the water. She said doing so was such a rush and that it was so warm and relaxing. While she swam underwater in the tank, lightning flashes lit up the inside. She said it was the most romantic thing she ever did, it was so quiet and peaceful underwater with the fish, and that she could feel the thunder vibrations from outside.
Woman gets reality check by dating a man that KNOWS his value…
You Stand up and fight
Last year my son was suspended. 3 boys corned him and were bullying him he kept is cool and attempted to walk away. One blocked his path.
At that point one shit stain said 2 sentences that changed my son’s life. “I’m glad your mom’s in a wheelchair. And I hope one of her seizures kills her.” See our families already known loss.
April will be 11yrs since my daughter and his sister passed away. She was 14m old.
So hearing this boy say he hoped I died was too much for my son. He turned to the leader and punched him right in the nose. To the school it didn’t matter what they had said.
The school district suspended my son cause he made it physically. So I took him out for ice cream. There comes a time when words do count and do cross the line. I support my son’s decision to finally say enough.
He knows he can’t hit someone and not have consequences.
But he also knows that there are going to be times in his life that he’s going to have to stand up for what is right. And I’ll support him when he does.
I was born to the wrong family
Have you ever lost respect for your parents because of one thing they said or did?
I was kicked out on Christmas eve by my mother when I was 17. That’s not even the subject of this story so you can imagine I didn’t have a good life growing up. She kicked me and my 15 year old brother out because (and this is a direct quote) “I have a life to live, and you and your brother have held me down long enough. I deserve to be happy.” She left the state with her internet boyfriend, that she knew for 3 weeks, a week later. We moved in with our aunt and her boyfriend. My aunt was like a mother to us, she helped raise us since our mother didn’t have the best taste in men. My brother and I got full time jobs and each of us gave our aunt’s boyfriend $50 a week (for rent and bills) and an extra $50 a week because all of us were saving to go to Florida to visit our grandparents and he was putting it into a savings account because my brother and I didn’t have one. My grandfather had health problems, he had heart attacks before and we all knew he didn’t have much longer to live. He was the best man I’ve ever known and he was the only male figure in my life that I could count on. My brother and I had been living at my aunt’s and her boyfriends house for about 6 months when my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t come home for 4 days. When he did finally come home, he was beyond messed up, he was slurring his words, he was falling asleep standing up, it was clear he was on something. My aunt told me and my brother later that he went on a bender with his boss. They spent 4 days smoking crack and snorting cocaine. She then told us that he spent all of the money that me and my brother had been saving to go to Florida to see our grandparents. $2400 we saved, gone in 4 days. But she said “don’t worry, we won’t charge you rent for 6 months and it will all equal out.” I heard my aunt on the phone with my grandma a week later. She told my grandma that we couldn’t come to Florida because “Stacey and her brother didn’t save any money”. My grandfather died 3 months later. It kills me that he thought my brother and I were too immature, selfish or had better things to do than to save money to see him. I wanted to tell my grandparents the truth but with my grandfathers health being what it was I didn’t want to upset him and tell him “hey your daughter lied to you, my brother and I did save the money but her drug addict boyfriend spent it all in 4 days during a bender.” This is literally one thing that my family has done to me or put me through in the 35 years I allowed them in my life. It has been 2 years since I cut the last toxic person in my family from my life and I feel so much better. The fact that I am a positive, healthy, loving wife and mother is a gift from a deity.
Black Tuesday 1954 Edward G. Robinson, Jean Parker & Peter Graves
Black Tuesday is a 1954 American crime drama film noir directed by Hugo Fregonese and starring Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves and Jean Parker. The supporting cast features Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly and Russell Johnson.
Full movie.
Film Noir.
A violent con, Vincent Canelli, escapes prison on the night of his execution. With the help of a phony newspaper reporter and Canelli’s girlfriend, Hatti, who has planned the escape, the con takes along five hostages: the prison priest, the prison doctor, one of the guards, the young reporter whose place has been taken by one of the gang, and the daughter of another guard. This young woman is kidnapped to force her father – who, unlike the guard who is taken hostage, always treats the death row inmates well – to facilitate the escape.
Pretty well done. I think you all will enjoy this one.
Working as an engineer, and getting laid off every 6 to 9 months or so wasn’t a very stable life. I really don’t know why I put up with it. I somehow had this idea that it would eventually end, and things would change.
But nope.
It never did.
As a result, as soon as I would start a new job (always in a new state, in a new geographic city) I would have to start fresh. Hustling at work, then rushing home to set up the household.
And by the time that things were settled down to some kind of state of normalcy, I’d get the rug ripped out from under me yet again.
Sigh.
Always on a Friday.
Or, the day right before a holiday, like Christmas.
All that time, I really didn’t have the time and resources to furnish a house properly. So I would grab and pick and place what ever was needed at the time. And yes, I did have a nice set of living room sofas and tables when I was in training at China Lake.
But that was the exception.
Not the rule.
Oh, and I did buy a great “sleigh” bed that was simply awesome! But that is not germane to this story, anyways.
However, I did splurge once.
I did. I bought something for myself.
After my divorce from my first wife finally occurred, and youse guys know how difficult it is to divorce a person with a mental illness, I celebrated by buying myself a nice leather chair.
It was a real, old fashioned chair, fully upholstered in real leather, and I loved it.
So did my cats.
They would claw it all the time, and the hide would never tear. Thus giving the chair a nice rustic and worn look. Ah, I did love that thing.
But life happens.
When I was carted off to prison, my “friends” took my belongings and I haven’t seen them since. Same with all my books and electronics.
All gone.
Sigh.
…
Anyways, us men don’t need much.
A computer; a big screen. A nice chair. A bed.
That’s about it.
If you do want to be spartan and have something comfortable, invest in a top of the line, leather chair. You will never regret it.
No matter how much it costs.
chair
Trust me on this.
A man needs his very own chair.
HIS chair.
Not a chair for the dogs to take over, or the kids to play on. That’s “daddy’s chair” Keep off of it.
A man needs a chair.
Today…
Does it bother you that TikTok CEO, Shou Chew, is repeatedly asked if he is a member of the Chinese Communist Party despite being Singaporean?
Yes, it does.
This is a deliberately loaded question asked by Sen. Tom Cotton repeatedly to score propaganda points in the US media. This is because most Americans have been taught to have an irrational hatred of the word “Communist”, without understanding that the word is simply a relic from the Party’s founding in 1921.
Saying that the Communist Party of China believes in Communism is like saying that the US Democratic Party believes that the US is a democracy, while the Republican Party believes that the US is a republic. While there is some basis to this, the policy differences between both parties are much more profound than what is reflected in their names.
Many Americans continue to believe that the CPC is dedicated to “defeating” the US, and converting American society to a form of government like China’s.
In fact, the Chinese government is pro-development and pro-trade, because China has grown to the world’s second-largest economy in fifty years by introducing capitalist policies supported and promoted by the US, and participating in trade organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO).
US politicians and the media have repeatedly accused Chinese companies of IP violations and violating the rules, but this is something all growing economies have done in their history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this was what US inventors, entrepreneurs and manufacturers did to Europe.
To sum up, the use of this language is part of a concerted effort to dehumanize any business which has been successful in China, and is now successful outside China.
This dehumanizing paves the way for more extreme measures and actions in the future.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric has been used repeatedly in the US’s past with American Indians, Irish, Italians, Chinese in the 19th century, African-Americans, Jews, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims.
Now it is the turn of the Chinese again.
Pretzel Chicken
Pretzel Chicken
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
8 pieces of your favorite cut of chicken
1 cup pretzel crumbs
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
Salt and pepper to taste
Garlic powder, to taste
Paprika to taste
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Instructions
Crush pretzels in blender.
Mix (in a bowl or paper bag) pretzels, flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika.
In another bowl, combine soy sauce and lemon juice.
Dip chicken pieces into liquid mixture, then roll around (or shake in paper bag) in dry mixture.
Put the coated pieces in a shallow or flat pan lined with foil.
Bake at 375 degrees F for one hour.
Turn over chicken over after 30 minutes.
U.S. foreign policy isolates the U.S.
This is a very, very good discussion.
As I have said many times: the isolator becomes isolated. People are sick of the bully and are fighting back.
In a country with universal healthcare, is there a limit to how much you will be cared for?
Yes there is. I have experience of both the UK NHS and also HK’s system.
I’ve lived under the PRC system but don’t have much experience with it as I don’t get ill and hopefully this will remain the same for a long time.
The UK has NICE – National Institute of Clinical Excellence.
For regular injuries and stuff no, I had my nose and fingers broken many many times from fights in the UK, they kept putting me back together, but for more complex treatments…
In short they decide what drugs can be used, what to treat and how many treatments you can be given of something. Some drugs under NICE are too expensive for the benefit. So they’re not purchased or used by the NHS. Some treatments like IVF are limited in how many times you can have it.
In HK? There is a nominal fee, but there have been cases where there is strict rationing, the HK medical system is very pain killer happy. They’ll give you painkillers even if you’re quite badly hurt and tell you to go away. There’s 5–6 pretty tragic cases of somebody needing an organ. Organ donation is iffy here due to cultural things. But I remember several men, they found a viable liver / kidney. But they couldn’t perform the transplant as they simply didn’t have the budget to carry out the surgery so they had to wait till the next tax year. But by then the organ had been given to somebody else.
The Dating Scene DESTROYED Them But Women Keep Coming Back For More
This is a great Video. This brings back painful memories which i have been enduring. My relationship of 5 years ended 3 months ago. The love of my life decided to leave me, I really love her so much I can’t stop thinking about her, I’ve tried my very best to get her back in my life, but to no avail, I’m frustrated, I don’t see my life with anyone else. I’ve done my best to get rid of the thoughts of her, but I can’t, I don’t know why I’m saying this here, I really miss her and just can’t stop thinking about her.
Have you ever witnessed a tragedy at a wedding?
The culmination of “Murphy’s Law” in excess.
When I was 20, my two good friends, E and S, were getting married. I had known him, E, since high school, and her, S, since the start of college.
They were both those clumsy types of people — you know the type who seems to always trip on that small thing, or slip on that patch of ice.
While at their wedding, it seemed that their clumsiness transferred to everyone and everything else—meaning that nearly everything that could go wrong, did, in fact, go wrong.
Here’s a summary list, instead of the whole story:
Power cut out while everything was being set up—this was not the only power outage that would happen.
The priest who was to wed them was late—got in a fender-bender accident on the way.
The rings were supposed to be delivered by the best man. He forgot them. So he had to drive the one hour round trip to get them.
The photographer dropped his camera and shattered it. He said not to worry, he had a backup—he dropped it, too. Their pictures were taken by standard cameras from relatives.
When the priest finally arrived, he slipped on someone’s spilled coffee, breaking his wrist. He still conducted the ceremony.
The air conditioning quit working after the second power outage, right as the music to walk down the aisle was starting. It would get so hot that everyone was sweating profusely by the end.
When the groom, E, was waiting at the altar, the power went out again. A few laughs, a few groans, and quite a bit of murmurs of annoyance were all that could be heard.
As the ceremony began, the priest had the wrong names—called them two women’s names. Awkwardness at best.
The best man passed out, mostly due to the stress of having to race back to his house to get the rings and the heat inside once the AC cut out.
One of the relatives in the back got into a fight with another and had to be escorted out of the building.
Power went out once more as vows were being said.
After they’re officially married and exiting, the bride slipped on some thrown “bird-friendly” rice. The groom got one in his eye.
The printed instructions to the reception took everyone to the wrong entrance, which, as it is set up, means that everyone was beyond confused on how to circle the whole compound just to get to the other side. It took 20 minutes for people to make some signs and stand on the corner to redirect people where to go.
They had an open bar. A drunken uncle loudly wished, over the microphone, them the best “F*cks of their lives.”
A jaded ex of the groom’s (also an old acquaintance of mine) tried to crash the reception and make a scene – thankfully she was handled by the reception hall’s security.
Finally, they both fell during the bride/groom dance.
They’re both still happily married, 10 years later, and just as clumsy as ever.
CONFIRMED: Dengue Fever Outbreak in Brazil and Peru – Millions Sick, Thousands Dead
Brazil surpassed 4 million cases of dengue fever registered this year, according to an update from the Ministry of Health’s Arbovirus Monitoring Panel this Monday. Argentina now has its own outbreak.
In total, 4,127,571 probable cases of the disease were reported across the country in the first four months of 2024.
As for dengue deaths, 1,937 have been confirmed and 2,345 are under investigation. The incidence rate of the disease in the country is 2,032.7 cases for each group of 100,000 population.
The most affected age group is 20 to 29 years old, which accounts for the majority of cases. The least affected age group is children under 1 year old, followed by people aged 80 or over and children aged 1 to 4 years old.
The units of the Federation with the highest incidence of the disease are the Federal District, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Espírito Santo, Goiás and Santa Catarina.
Projections released at the beginning of the year indicate that dengue cases in the country could reach 4,225,885. With the country already seeing over 4.1 Million cases, that estimate is way low.
It is noteworthy that about 6 weeks ago Bill Gates & Oxitec released genetically modified mosquitoes in Brazil.
PERU
Deaths caused by the mosquito-borne dengue disease have more than tripled in Peru so far this year, according to data from the South American nation’s government, which is redoubling efforts to contain an epidemic that has hit poor areas the hardest.
The government this week said it had approved an “emergency decree” allowing extraordinary economic measures to bolster the plan to counter the outbreak.
Mild symptoms include nausea, rashes and body pains, while a rarer severe form, more threatening for infants and pregnant women, can cause internal bleeding and is potentially fatal.
Peru’s health ministry said that as of Thursday, there were 117 registered deaths from dengue so far this year compared with 33 in the same period of 2023. Suspected cases have also more than tripled to reach some 135,000.
So Bill Gates and his pals released mosquitos in South America, and now Brazil and Peru are suffering wild Dengue Fever Outbreaks. I have questions….and not about climate change.
Africa will Be the New China Very Soon – Economist Jeffrey Sachs.
“Africa is a continent brimming with potential. From its rich natural resources to its vibrant cultures and entrepreneurial spirit, Africa is poised to become a global powerhouse
“Africa’s potential lies in its youthful population, its expanding markets, and its increasing connectivity to the global economy. With the right investments and policies, Africa can unleash a wave of innovation and growth that benefits both its people and the world.”
“One of Africa’s greatest assets is its abundant natural resources, including minerals, oil, and arable land.”
“With sustainable management and responsible investment, Africa’s natural wealth can drive economic development and lift millions out of poverty.”
“Africa’s potential extends beyond its resources. It’s a hotbed of innovation and creativity, with a burgeoning startup ecosystem that’s generating solutions to some of the continent’s most pressing challenges.”
From fintech to renewable energy, African entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to drive social impact and economic progress.”
“Africa’s cultural diversity is another source of strength and potential. Its art, music, and traditions are capturing global attention and driving tourism and cultural exchange.”
What is the reason behind Chinese companies, such as Huawei, choosing to purchase from TSMC instead of constructing their own fabs?
In the early days of the semiconductor industry, technical difficulty and investment were relatively small, and a single company could complete all aspects of design, manufacturing, and testing. For example, Intel in the 1990s completed all aspects alone.
As Moore’s Law continues to develop, semiconductors are becoming more sophisticated and complex. The cost for a single company to complete all links is getting higher and higher, and resource utilization is getting lower and lower. As a result, division of labor began to appear throughout the industry. After entering the 21st century, semiconductor design, manufacturing, packaging and testing are often completed by professional companies.
Semiconductor design companies focus on designing semiconductors and applying them in their own fields. Semiconductor manufacturing companies focus on production, and they do not care about design and application. This will help these companies leverage their own strengths and maximize the use of assets, thereby reducing costs and improving efficiency.
China’s semiconductor companies emerged in the 2010s, when the world’s semiconductor division of labor was already very mature. Their scale cannot be compared with companies like Intel or AMD, or Qualcomm. To compete with leading companies, they must adapt to this division of labor, reduce their costs to the greatest extent, and improve their competitiveness. Even traditional semiconductor giants like AMD and Qualcomm entrust semiconductor production to manufacturers like TSMC.
Therefore, it is very normal for companies like Huawei to entrust semiconductor manufacturing to companies like TSMC. It would be foolish and unreasonable for them to build their own production capacity from scratch and try to replace TSMC.
This is reflected in a reporter’s interview with Huawei CEO Yu in 2020. He told reporters: We used to believe very much in global division of labor, and we believed that global division of labor was the most efficient option. Therefore, US sanctions have made us very passive. If we had chosen to invest in semiconductor manufacturing, we would not be facing these troubles today.
Obviously, it is political behavior that destroys the natural selection of the market, and the global division of labor in semiconductors is destroyed.
KNOCKOUT: China’s BOLD Move Threatens To Dethrone The US In Europe’s Economy
In a bold move, China is moving fast to court the EU economy away from the US. President will be visiting France, Serbia and Hungary to show Europe there are big benefits in partnering and trading with China. More importantly, building China’s trade allows them to secure their economy against US economic sanctions. Here’s what you must know!
How can the Indian government support and empower farmers to enhance their role in the country’s economy?
When asked a question like this, with respect to India, I always find out
What did the Chinese do?
Next I find out
What are the mistakes the Chinese did?
Next I find out
How can we modify the Chinese solution to suit India given the differences in Land ownership, Laws and Political system?
Facts:-
Now China is a nation of 1.4 Billion people just like India is
In both these nations, Agriculture is a sustenance activity
This means the priority is to FEED 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE rather than use Agriculture and convert it into a Fully Profit based commercial model
Unlike Brazil, Russia or Ukraine where Agriculture is a fully commercial activity like any other with a fully established profit motive
So in both India and China – the Farmer is NOT a businessman working on a profit motive
His priority is to grow as much food grains as possible to ensure the country can eat
India and China both depend on the Supply Side Model
This means farmers grow the maximum crop they can produce and THEN demand is catered to
If there is excess, prices fall and if there is a deficit, prices rise and the Nation imports to bring down prices or uses RESERVE STOCKS
Thus it’s clear that
The Farmer is not a Businessman and treating him like one is a big minus
It is clear that the Farmers only job must be to efficiently grow crops and get a high yield
It is someone else’s Job to protect the farmer from market price shocks and to ensure the farmer can sustain himself and grow
In China – this role is adopted by the State
The State sets a fair price, The State sets the storage and transportation costs, The State provides the seed and facilities, The State gives insurance against floods and bad weather
In India – this role is not fulfilled properly by anyone
Prices are set by exploitative and opaque bodies in the name of market forces, Seed and facilities are private and depend on loans, Insurance is a rarity and non existent on any but largest holdings
Thus Capitalism is brutally exploited
In China a farmer can get a Tractor on a State loan and flexibly pay across a 5 year period with no interest
In India, a farmer borrows at 10.50% interest and can repossess the tractor if 3 months interest isn’t paid
Thus the first thing to do is to
Offer Nationwide Insurance against Crop failures to farmers which should include payment of bank interest for 6–9 months at least
Get the State to handle Storage and Distribution of Grain or get a State -Private Body Joint Venture to do so at fixed capped costs
Change the nature of Agricultural financing
You do this, then the next step is to take care of the operational aspects of Agriculture
NEEDED TO BE SAID!!! | Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond REACTION!!!!
THIS MAN SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER!! His words echo in my old soul!
What made you emotional today?
An old man named Leonard Mack cried today in court. His attorneys comforted him. In 1975, Mack was a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran, he had a two-year-old daughter and a newborn son. His family meant the world to him. Then, just as he was beginning to find his way in this world, he was falsely accused of raping a teenage girl…
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Leonard Mack, an innocent man, landed behind bars. And for almost eight years he remained imprisoned. He missed vital parts of the childhood of his son and daughter. Missed first steps, first words. Life passed him by, and all he could do was be an onlooker from afar, frozen in time, stuck in a steel and concrete hellhole… when he was freed, he was now in his thirties, and forced to go through life as a felon and a registered sex offender. His life, in a sense, was over before it began in earnest. It’s only now that Mr. Mack was finally exonerated in full, and declared innocent.
It took almost half a century for a DNA database proved another man was guilty of the crime for which Mack served the time and suffered the pain. Using DNA to solve crimes is a beautiful invention… but I am often haunted by the thought of all those countless souls who suffered unjustly for the crimes of others, before such technologies were known or widely available to law enforcement.
The Perversion of Marriage & The Assault On Christianity
Palestinian Muslim here, and do I respect all Christian denominations but Orthodoxy has a special place in my heart, not only because Orthodox Christians are more aligned with my people’s political stance but also because of they are the most outspoken group against degeneracy
What do they eat in the UK that an American wouldn’t?
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Image: Me visiting the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota.
I came to live in the United States in April 2006. I have an American wife and I have persuaded her to cook several British foods that are rarely eaten in the United States.
Interesting to me a visit to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota taught me that the canned pork product is much more loved outside the US than at home. Personally despite what you might think with the photo, my visit took me to the very gates of heaven.
Somethings that can’t be found in the US easily.
Ox tongue, it can be found shredded in many Mexican supermarkets as Lingua, but it is not generally found as a sliced meat. My wife has bought a tongue a couple of times and prepared it. It is a long process to do that properly so often I opt for the shredded variety.
Black pudding. Often called by Americans Blood Sausage, it is very difficult to buy because it does contain blood and many people don’t imagine they would like it. Sadly I would have more for me, if only the blood was a legal food additive.
Heinz Baked beans. I find it puzzling that the humble baked bean found in every British grocers and supermarket is almost unknown in the US. Heinz being a US company and all. But they can be purchased in specialist stores that cater to ex patriot British and of course Amazon.
Lamb or Ox liver is difficult to find. The ability to buy offal is extremely limited. It seems Americans just much prefer the outside muscle meat rather than the more nutricious insides of animals. Offal in general is awfully expensive when you find it.
Lamb, Ox or Pig Kidneys. Again it’s offal see Liver.
Fruit Cake. For some reasons Americans like their cakes to be puffy, sweet and overly iced confections. I have tried to eat some American varieties of fruit cake. Finding them to have the weight and consistancy of house bricks. The art of good fruit cake making has not survived in the US.
Mushy Peas: My wife makes me mushy peas to go with my fish and chips. I don’t know why Americans cannot find the heart to love a good spoonful of mushy peas. After all it is a simple product, boiled peas but I am sure if one charged $50 per spoonful on a Las Vegas strip tasting menu they would be raved about on the Food Network and have competitions to the chef making the best mushy pea ever.
Scotch Eggs. My wife quickly learned to make Scotch Eggs. Hard boiled eggs wrapped in a coat of sausage meat. Simple but fr some reason it confounds many Americans that one could combine the two, yet thy eat sausage or sausage patties and eggs for breakfast at times.
Shandy, the 50–50 mix of Bitter and Lemonade. It can’t be bought in stores like it can in Britain, but can be recreated, I buy imported Newcastle Brown Ale and use 7 Up as a lemonade substitute. One place I ordered Shandy in the US filled the glass with Bud Light and added a drop, I mean a real drop of 7 Up. Nowhere near a 50–50 mix and not particularly satisfying on a hot California day.
These are just a few things that I have come across. I have also found many regional American foods that are very good and interesting to eat, many of which have roots in old European everyday working peoples foods. Filling, high calorie and hunger supressing foods to go to work on in the morning and kept you full all the working day.
Most foods from home I can either recreate or use what is available to substitute. So there is no real hardship on my part.
Brown bag chicken is a vintage cooking method that produces delicious, juicy chicken every time. Perfect for any poultry, too!
If you love the way a bird turns out in those plastic oven bags, but wish there was an alternative then I’m here to make that wish come true for you.
Plastics can impart unhealthy chemicals into foods, so if you’ve gone to the trouble to source local, pastured, organic poultry you don’t want to ruin it with petrochemicals right? Today, I’m sharing how I make delicious, moist, tender and flavorful Brown Bag Chicken (and even holiday Turkeys!) What? Baking in a brown paper bag? Yes, you read that right – in an ordinary brown paper bag.
Apparently, making Brown Bag Chicken has been around for several decades.
Although I could not exactly pinpoint what era in which it began, it seems like perhaps the 40s or 50s. I always feel like I should be wearing pearls, heels and one of those poofy-skirted dresses when I make this. And, depending on the day, I might feel like I got some ‘splainin to do, even though my name is not Lucy. Maybe that’s because I like to watch I Love Lucy re-runs while I’m cooking.
There are two divided camps on this method.
The Once You Cook in a Brown Paper Bag You’ll Never Go Back camp and the Cooking in a Paper Bag is DANGEROUS crowd.
The nay-sayers warn that the bag could catch on fire or that paper bags are unsanitary. It is technically possible for the bag to catch on fire, but that is probably only if it comes in contact with the side or top of the oven or the heating element in an electric model. Wouldn’t the same be true for plastic bags coming in contact with the same surfaces?
As with any method you employ to cook food inside a giant gas or electric powered box, you should pay attention to what you’re doing and use common sense.
The concern over a paper bag being unsanitary comes from the inks and glues used in manufacturing the bags, and the possibility that the paper could contain metal shavings from being recycled.
Using a bag that has no ink, or very minimal printing on the bag, that has not been used before (you can very easily and inexpensively get a new paper bag at a grocery store), minimizes at least some of those risks.
Honestly, compared to having endocrine-disrupting chemicals being steamed into your chicken, baking in a brown paper bag sounds much more healthy to me. But, that’s your call to make!
I joined the ranks of the Once You Cook in a Brown Paper Bag You’ll Never Go Back camp a couple of years ago.
I’m not even sure how I heard about it, but I can honestly say Brown Bag Chicken is the best chicken ever – moist and flavorful! The bag keeps the moisture inside and browns and crisps the skin.
I always cook my birds breast side down, too – that keeps the breast meat from drying out. You don’t get crispy skin on the breast portion that way, but for me it’s fine since I don’t eat the skin.
It’s so easy, once you try Brown Bag Chicken I’m sure you’ll love it!
Don’t be alarmed if your kitchen smells a little funny at first (kind of like a warm, greasy brown paper bag…if you can imagine that!), that will quickly be replaced by the aroma of delectable, juicy baked chicken.
There’s also no set way to season your bird, it’s more of a technique than a recipe so you can be as minimalist or creative as you want to be.
Ingredients
Butter, softened
Salt
Pepper
1 whole fryer
Chopped celery
Chopped bell pepper
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
Instructions
Rub butter all over whole fryer, inside and out.
Salt and pepper fryer, inside and out.
Stuff fryer with chopped vegetables.
Place fryer in a brown paper bag which has been greased inside.
Roll up the open end and bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes per pound of chicken.
Bag it, seal it, bake it.
Put the chicken in the bag (SEAM SIDE DOWN!) then roll or fold the top in close to the bird, tucking it under if you can. If you can’t, and it won’t stay closed, you could put a couple staples in the fold to keep it shut. I’ve never had to do that myself. Or, you could use kitchen twine and tie it shut.
Place your buttered, seasoned, bagged bird on a baking sheet with sides. Juices will collect on the baking sheet and you don’t want that dripping to the bottom of your oven. You can also use a shallow baking dish or roasting pan. (I love my Pampered Chef Stoneware Bar Pan!).
Put it in the oven and bake for one and a half hours.
You may need to adjust your cooking times according to the size of your bird or if it’s stuffed with stuffing, for example. In my oven, an hour and a half is just right for an average sized chicken. If you remembered to put the seam side of the bag down, you can easily remove the bag by grabbing opposite corners and pulling the bag off over your chicken.
Give this brown bag chicken a rest before slicing to keep it juicy.
Waiting 10 or 15 minutes to slice gorgeously roasted bird will keep the tasty juices inside the meat. I know it’s hard to wait, but trust me it’s worth it!
We’ve made many Thanksgiving turkeys using this same brown bag method. Just be sure your turkey will fit the bag you have (or vice versa).
Any time I’m roasting poultry, I use this brown bag chicken method and the results are never disappointing!
ITALY’S WARNING to the WORLD – It’s Over!!
What factors contribute to China potentially surpassing the USA in terms of global power, such as military and economy?
China has 4 times the population of USA, it will naturally surpass USA if it develops without any foreign interference.
USA lacks knowledge about being the master, because it doesn’t have a long history.
The present situation for USA is like the last years of Ming dynasty of China. At that time, China faced following problems:
Manchu’s power is growing, however, Ming took a strong attitude toward Manchus, which caused the latter give up any hope to build a good relationship with Ming and stayed within the map of Ming.(USA to China)
Long lasting alert and histility on Mongolians (who established the last dynasty prior than Ming) including trade embargo, Mongolians had no choice but to allied with Manchus. (USA to Russia/China)
Military abuse in southwest China, including some places in present Myanmar and Vietnam, but ignored the peasants’ uprising in inland. (USA in Iraq, Afghanistan)
War of parties in the government. (Democrats, Republicans)
Broken domestic economy,and the chaos caused by bankrupted farmers and merchants, which eventually evolved into a nation wide uprising. (Inflation, high interest rates, banks go bankrupt)
USA adopts a “winner takes all” mindset and does not want to share its power with others, this inevitably made others to think of other possibilities.
A simple case:
In around 2010–2012, there was a hot discussion among China, Japan and Korea to promote an “Asian Dollar” as the three became the biggest ecomoic zone in the world. However, in 2012, Korea and Japan’s relation was broken by Dokudo Island crisis, China and Japan relation was ruined by Diaoyu/Senkaku Island crisis, Japan’s ambassidor was “comitted suicide” at home. The Asian Dollar became an illusion after the relations among the three went down. Everyone knows it is USA behind the whole thing, just like NordStream II. Because if Asian Dollar succeeded, the US Dollar is threatened.
But look back from 12 years later, we can see, the Asian Dollar at that time can not be an independent currency as the three all rely on US Dollar and US market. Therefore, USA can try to exert its influence on Japan and Korea to make AD anchored USD, and USD’s position is guaranteed. Eventhough we can foresee AD does take some share from USD, but AD as a regional currency, will not replace USD globally, same as the Euro.
However, if there’s a AD 2.0 in future, as China’s power grows much stronger, the AD 2.0 does have the potential to replace USD.
In China, there’s an old saying describe this: 丢了西瓜拣芝麻 (Throw a watermelon away to pick up a sesame.)
“USA Collapse Is Far WORSE Than You Think…” — Robert Kiyosaki’s Last WARNING
What is the brutal truth about people?
Only in America. -MM
A Lifeguard Was Fired For Saving A Drowning Man
Sometimes, rules and regulations ply over efforts and emotions!
Tomas Lopez was on duty at Hallandale Beach, Florida, when someone rushed over to his post. A man had swum out too far, Lopez was told, and the victim was drowning. As any lifeguard would, Lopez rushed over and got the man to shore with the help of some other beachgoers. There, they gave the man CPR, called the paramedics, and saved his life.
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When Lopez handed in the incident report, he was fired instead of being heralded as a hero .
The drowning man, his company informed him, was “out of the protected area” and a clearly visible sign said that anyone who swam there did so at his own risk.
According to company policy, anyone drowning outside the designated area was to be left to die.
Lopez’s coworkers were infuriated.
Six other lifeguards stood up for him, telling the company and the media that they would have done the exact same thing and that Lopez deserved an apology.
So the company fired them, too.
PENTAGON Is Shocked: S-500 PROMETHEUS Shot Down 11 US ATACMS Missiles Over Crimea and Crimean Bridge
Have you actually ever heard someone say ‘Do you know who I am?’ indignantly?
I had very recently moved across the US and transferred my job working the customer service desk at a high end grocery store. I grew up in Harlem and had recently moved to the deep Midwest. It was very different in a lot of ways.
One of the biggest ways, was “celebrity” behavior. Back home, the biggest rule for cashiers was to politely pretend you didn’t know who you were helping if that person was famous. Hilary Duff, Keanu Reeves, Evan Peters and many more were regulars at the store. We don’t ask for autographs, they don’t ask for special treatment, everyone’s happy.
Midwest is different. I worked at another location of that same expensive grocery store. Young men who played for the local hockey team were shockingly entitled and rude, sneering down at me while my supervisor stood by and sucked their dicks as vocally as he could regardless of how rude they were. “Influencers” in the area would record cashiers if they didn’t scan their kombucha fast enough. But worst of all, was the man who apparently built some kind of air conditioning franchise and was a “local hero” for providing AC in low income areas.
This man was a fucking menace. He didn’t like me from the first moment he saw me, and it took me a while to understand why. But apparently it was a significant personal slight that I didn’t ever invite him to cut to the front of the line, that I didn’t ever roll over backwards to fetch forgotten products for him while he was checking out. And worst of all, I never learned his name. Apparently all my coworkers and superiors had been babying this loud mouthed, disrespectful asshole who was just as much of a nobody as the rest of us were.
The third time I encountered him, I asked for his name to confirm an online order he had placed. The man threw his change at my head while laughing hysterically, then his face contorted into rage as he screamed over and over again, “YOU MUST NOT KNOW WHO I AM.”
I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but I do remember being fired.
The point is, only the most insecure and ungifted say things like “don’t you know who I am??”
If you hear that line, laugh long and hard. It’ll kill them.
Man EXPOSES Delusional Women’s HYPOCRISY
Funny but serious.
Is China a fascist police state?
No.
If it were then the living conditions of the people would not have improved.
You see a key part of fascism is where corporations get together with the government to fuck over the common man and woman. Yet living standards keep going up, more services and more access to healthcare/education keeps happening.
Police state? – There’s laws, if it says it’s illegal it’s illegal.
Second the bar for arrest is HIGH, this means if you’re a criminal unless you’re caught there and then in some violent crime? The police will take their time to investigate and make a strong case against you before arresting you. That’s why there’s such a high conviction rate.
This is important. It is important because if you arrest with a low bar and then collect evidence? The period up to the trial can also be punishment.
This is Gang Chen.
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He was arrested by the American FBI for ‘spying for China’ because despite being an American, yes BORN in the USA he’s not considered an American because he’s not white.
He was arrested in 2021, charged and put under numerous restrictions. Gang Chen was one of the luckier ones as MIT supported him and paid for his defence.
Eventually charges were dropped.
But as noted above he was one of the lucky ones. Other university professors lose everything and the charges get dropped a day before trial. They lose EVERYTHING.
WHY was the Earth BEFORE the DINOSAURS TERRIFYING? The Most Amazing Prehistoric Secrets DOCUMENTARY
Dinosaurs, those magnificent creatures that once roamed the Earth, continue to captivate our imagination and scientific curiosity. The era of dinosaurs began approximately 230 million years ago in the Mesozoic Era, marking a period of dominance by these fascinating reptiles. Before dinosaurs, appearance of the dinosaurs and after the dinosaurs. This age, often referred to as the “Age of Dinosaurs,” witnessed the emergence of some of the most iconic species, from the towering Brachiosaurus to the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex. Their existence demonstrates the incredible diversity and adaptability of life on Earth, with species that thrived in a variety of habitats, from lush forests to arid deserts.
The extinction of dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, remains one of the most intriguing topics in paleontology. This catastrophic event, believed to be caused by a combination of volcanic eruptions, climate changes, and the impact of a massive asteroid, led to the end of the Cretaceous Period and paved the way for the rise of mammals. The sudden disappearance of dinosaurs left a void that has puzzled scientists for centuries, sparking numerous theories and extensive research to uncover the details of this mass extinction.
Beyond their appearance and extinction, dinosaurs are a source of endless fascination due to the strange and sometimes bewildering facts that research has unearthed. For instance, some dinosaurs, like the Stegosaurus, had brains the size of a walnut, significantly small in comparison to their massive bodies. Others, such as the Parasaurolophus, had elaborate crests on their heads that could have been used for communication or to attract mates. The discovery of dinosaur fossils with preserved feathers has revolutionized our understanding of these creatures, suggesting a closer evolutionary link to birds than previously thought.
The pre-dinosaur world, often overshadowed by the towering presence of the Jurassic era’s giants, presents an equally fascinating chapter in Earth’s geological history. This epoch, spanning from the formation of the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago to roughly 250 million years before the appearance of the first dinosaurs, encompasses several pivotal periods that laid the groundwork for life as we know it. During the Hadean and Archean eons, the Earth was a molten hellscape, gradually cooling to form the first solid crust. This era saw the emergence of the first life forms, simple prokaryotic cells, which appeared approximately 3.5 billion years ago. These organisms were primarily anaerobic bacteria thriving in an oxygen-free atmosphere, setting the stage for the evolutionary leaps to follow.
The Proterozoic eon witnessed significant geological and biological transformations. This period marked the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, a direct result of photosynthesis by cyanobacteria. The “Great Oxygenation Event,” which occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, radically altered the planet’s atmosphere, paving the way for more complex life forms. The Proterozoic also saw the first supercontinent, Rodinia, form and break apart, a cycle that influenced global climate and environmental conditions conducive to evolution.
When I lived in Woonsockett, Rhode Island (I was commuting to my work in Milford, Massachusetts) we lived in a converted catholic school.
The diocese had fallen on hard times and had renovated the Catholic school into apartments. And we lived in one on the third floor of the side building.
The owner of the apartment building was an immigrant from India and did not believe in ventilation. So the building was HOT.
He also didn’t believe in lighting. So, It was dark.
They didn’t believe in hallway lighting (relying on the windows at the end of the hallway for light during the day, and the streetlight outside for light at night). And without ventilation… it was stifling.
*stifling*
Walking up three flights of stairs was a trial.
Gasping for breath was a daily occurrence, and it really sucked. You don’t really appreciate this need for air, until you are forced to climb a hot set of stairs in a airless chimney. Ugh!
Air is important.
Ventilate. Use plants. Keep the air fresh, and for God’s sake use a fan to keep the air moving.
Just like a pool of water becomes stagnant over time, so does a windowless room. Ventilate.
Live longer.
Ventilate.
Live longer.
Ventilate.
Live longer.
Ventilate.
Today…
What’s the most memorable interaction you had at a rest stop?
My stepdad is an auto mechanic. I recall when I was younger we were on a family road trip and saw a car broken down at a rest stop. My younger sisters and I started to tell Dad that he should go help them.
“Dad, they are broke down you should go take a look and help them out!”
My dad’s reply was something like “Eww, they drive a Dodge, I don’t like working on Dodges!”
“Dad, come on, be nice!”
I think he had already planned on going over and seeing what the problem was even though it would take more time away from our trip.
He went over and helped out this couple which were a little older. He explained to them that he was an auto mechanic and asked them to go through the “try to start it, I want to hear what sound it makes” diagnostic process. Finally Dad gave them the diagnosis and told them what they could do to fix it temporarily and then explained they should see a mechanic once they get to their destination to get it fixed more permanently. (Please do not ask me what was wrong. I was a teen and did not care to remember back then let alone now.)
The couple were so grateful to my stepdad that they tried to offer him money. He said no. He explained to them that he believed in helping others out and hoped that should something ever happen to his daughters (pointing in our direction) someday someone else would be nice enough to help us similarly.
The lady was so overcome with gratitude that she phoned his work once they had arrived at their destination and gotten their vehicle repaired to let his boss know that my dad had gone out of his way while on vacation with his family to assist some strangers who were broken down. She explained to Dad’s boss that he would not even accept money for his good deeds and she felt that his boss should know that he did a superb job in hiring such a great guy!
Dad came home after work to tell us all about how his boss told him that he was a good representative of where he worked because now these people that live in a totally different state knew about the car dealership and had positive reviews of at least one person in the service department! Dad even got put up for a bonus because of the glowing review while he was off-duty. He couldn’t have been more thrilled that helping someone during his off time ended up helping him at work as well.
What are the most arrogant, idiotic and shameful things a politician has ever said?
I’m from Vietnam and there is no shortage of idiotic and shameful things said by politicians here. Below are some of the more notable ones:
“We used to teach one class with 40 students. Not anymore. Now we teach 40 students in one class”, Minister of Education and Training, 2015.
“Defense attorneys should have the legal obligation to denounce their clients if they know for sure their clients are guilty. Failing to do so should be a criminal offense” – Chairwoman of the National Assembly, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, May 2017 (the National Assembly in Vietnam is like the Parliament in the UK or Congress in the US)
“The National Assembly is elected by the people. If the National Assembly do something wrong, the people are responsible, there is no one else to punish” – Chairman of the National Assembly, Nguyen Sinh Hung, 2014.
“If my children have measles, I will never send them here [National Hospital for Children]”, Minister of Health, Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, 2014. Well of course not, you will order the doctors to bring their equipment and medicines to your mansion. Or you will send your children to the best, most expensive hospital abroad using the corruption money that you have amassed over the years.
“Poisoned potatoes imported from China are … still safe” – Head of the Plant Protection Department, 2014
“Fighting corruption is difficult because we have to fight ourselves” – General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, 2015.
“Half of the bridge collapsed to the river, the remaining half is still perfectly functional”, Deputy Director of a provincial Transport Department, 2015.
What is even more breathtaking than the statement itself is the fact that the bridge collapsed after just 2 weeks of operating. One can’t help but question: How much money did this guy embezzle from the project?
bridge
8. “In other countries, resigning is very easy but in Vietnam, it is very difficult. Why? Because in Vietnam, with high positions come great missions that the Communist Party gives you. Resigning means abandoning your missions.” Deputy Chief of Staff of the National Assembly, 2015.
9. “I had to work as a motorbike taxi driver for many many nights to save enough money to build this villa”, Deputy Head of a provincial Internal Affairs committee, 2017.
His villa, built illegally on agricultural land:
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10. “The job of Vietnam People’s Public Security Forces is to protect the Communist Party, protect the State and protect the Government”, Deputy Head of the Political General Department, Ministry of Public Security, 2015.
Hello? What about the people? Sounds familiar? Rings any bell? Has the thought of protecting the people ever crossed your goddamn mind?
11. “In one district, there are 8 or 9 high-ranking government officials coming from the same family. I think it’s just pure coincidence”, Head of the Capital’s Organizing Commission, 2015.
12. “If we do not teach our children to cry when they sing the national anthem, our country will not prosper”, Deputy Prime Minister, Vu Duc Dam, 2014.
That’s enough for now. I’ll add some more in the future.
Addendum 5th of June: Some of these things are not actually idiotic, more like shameless and blatant lies. Anyway, here are some more:
13. “Our family could build this mansion thanks to the support of our friends and colleagues who gave us the necessary bricks and stones”, Former Inspector General of the Government, 2014. And this was from the guy whose job was to fight corruption! His mansion:
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14. “We must strengthen our military so that it will be as powerful as the North Korean Army”, a monk and a congressman, 2014.
15. “Traffic jam means all vehicles have to stand still for at least 30 minutes. In our city, there are no traffic jams.” Director of Ho Chi Minh City’s Transport Department, 2016.
16. “On many occasions, we have to test the quality of fertilizers by mouth”, Minister of Industry and Trade, 2016.
17. [Three infants died after being vaccinated] “We’ll get to the bottom of this. Everything will be transparent and there will be no cover-up. If it’s the doctors’ fault, the doctors will be prosecuted. If it’s the vaccine’s fault, the vaccine will be prosecuted”, Minister of Health, 2013 (same gal as #4). Prosecute the vaccine? Sounds tough. What about the people who approved and imported the vaccine? Isn’t that you?
Update on #2 (June 20th): It’s official. Today the National Assembly passed the new Criminal Code, defense attorney in Vietnam now actually have the legal obligation to denounce their clients!
Potato Hash with Eggs and Mushrooms
A portabella mushroom blends seamlessly with the Italian sausage, while the peppers add color to Potato Hash with Eggs and Mushrooms. Perfect for an everyday breakfast or weekend brunch.
Wild mushroom hash eggs
Prep: 10 min | Cook: 15 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 large fresh portabella mushroom
1 tablespoon (15 mL) olive oil
3 mild Italian sausages, removed from casing and crumbled
1/2 small red onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 large russet potatoes, peeled, diced
1/4 green bell pepper, diced
1/4 red bell pepper, diced
Salt and pepper
1/2 cup (125 mL) shredded Cheddar cheese
4 large eggs
Chopped parsley
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F/175 degrees C.
Place portabella mushroom in a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Pulse until finely chopped.
In a large nonstick, oven-safe skillet heat olive oil over medium heat. Add chopped mushrooms, Italian sausage, onion and garlic. Use spatula to break up sausage into tiny pieces.
Once cooked, remove from pan and set aside. Leave any fat renderings in pan.
Heat pan with the sausage renderings over medium heat. Add diced potatoes. Allow to cook for 10-15 minutes until softened.
Add diced peppers and increase to medium-high heat, continue to cook until potatoes are crispy, about 10 minutes.
Add sausage back to pan; cook for another 2 to 3 minutes before stirring.
Sprinkle with cheese.
Crack eggs in each quadrant of the pan.
Season with salt and pepper.
Place skillet in oven and bake for 20 minutes, until eggs are set.
Is China winning the battle of economy and technology over the U.S.?
US is losing the battle of economy and technology to China
I can illustrate this with three points
I. Forcing China to Innovate
In 2014 , China imported every chip made with 28 nm process or lower and 70% of the Chips made with the 45 nm process
The Chips were made in Taiwan and Korea, designed by the US and made by Dutch machines
China was utterly dependent on these nations for the chips and these nations were dependent on China for the consumer goods made using these Chips
In 2018, Dumbo Trump began to restrict the flow of Chips to Huawei and began the entities blacklist
He began the tariffs due to which to lower their costs, China began to start their own supply Chain
Fast forward to 2024
China makes 54% of its own 28 nm process chips (from 0% in 2014) and makes the entire indigenous equipment to make the 28 nm process commercially
China makes 69% of its own 45 nm process chips at a mere 32% cost
It’s ready to make fully indigenous 14 nm Chips and just made a 7 nm Chip with DUV technology that performs very well
Thus thanks to US stupidity – China managed to go from full importer of 14 nm, 28 nm Chips and 70% 45 nm Chips in 2014 to net exporter of 45 nm Chips and above plus develop fully Indigenous machinery for 14 nm Chips and make 7 nm Chips indigenously in a mere decade
Without US Push, Chinese Entities would simply have not been inclined to invest in Chipmaking as the Imports would have been higher yield at more efficient costs in the early years
II. Decoupling
In 2018, China used the USD for 94.6% of its Trade and settled in USD with 132 out of 143 BRI Nations
China used SWIFT for 99.3% of its transactions in USD
US had leverage control on China and China was utterly dependent on the Western financial system
Then US began to talk of decoupling and derisking and freeze others funds and steal Afghan money
Fast forward
China uses USD to settle only 57.5% of its trade using Local Swaps to settle 26% of its trade and the RMB and Ruble to settle 16% of its Trade
China uses CIPS and other systems now with Iran and Russia and Cuba and Venezuela
Thus again China is no longer entirely dependent on the Western System
III. Anti China Rhetoric
Mainlander Residents made up 27.7% of all Researchers in the USA in 2018. The Highest among foreign researchers
60% of all researchers in Critical Technology research were Chinese, bulk of them from the Mainland
They did a lot of path breaking innovation
Anti-Asian Atmosphere Chills Chinese Scientists Working in the U.S.
As universities such as Harvard and NYU put researchers under scrutiny, some schools seek to avoid a “loyalty oath.”
Then you had gutter scum like De Santis and Cotton who began Anti China Rhetoric
So Chinese brains decided to stay back home and not go to the US while Chinese Scientists and Researchers decided to go back home to China than be insulted and treated with suspicion in US
From 2023- almost 548 researchers including 107 with Tenure left US and moved back to China
Plus nearly 10,300 Doctorate Students from China stayed home rather than going to the US and innovating for them
They help China innovate instead of USA
Accelerating Chinas progress in those areas
US is unable to fill the gap with others
Korea, Taiwan and Japan combined send maybe 1600 researchers a year
Indians send barely 60 researchers a year in critical technologies
So in each case China adapted but it was US who started it all
When you have Idiots chosen by a corrupted form of democracy – they are no match for the High range meritocracy of China
What are some most important unspoken rules in life?
Don’t ask for something if the person only has one of it left — gum, candy, or a piece of cake.
If you used all the toilet paper, you go refill it.
Buy a plunger before you need a plunger.
Do not swipe left or right if someone shows a picture on their phone.
Pee first. No matter what you’re doing, pee first.
If you borrow someone’s car, fill up the tank before you return it.
Leave it in a better condition than you found it.
When out to dinner with a group, only the person who ordered the least expensive meal/combo of things can offer to split the check evenly.
Don’t put your music on speakers when in a public space. It’s not like everyone wants the same genre, or was in the mood for music. Use your headphones.
You can be wrong. It isn’t a bad thing either. And when you are wrong, acknowledge it and learn from it.
Please don´t start drama at a funeral.
Chew with your mouth closed. It’s shocking how many adults chew with their mouth open.
Never make fun of someone else’s laugh.
Don’t ever leave your shopping cart in the middle of a grocery aisle!
If you are borrowing it for the third time, you need one of it of your own.
If you cancel on a friend, it’s your responsibility to reschedule.
Don’t propose at someone else’s wedding.
Turn on your headlights when it’s snowing.
Don’t look through the gap of bathroom stalls.
Be kind to people that are working.
OFF BEFORE ON. Let the people off the elevator and train before you get on.
Walk on the same side of the stairs/sidewalk that you would drive on.
Most of all….
23. Show the same respect for everyone. We are all people.
What are the facts about girls that guys don’t know?
Yes we do think wether you’re safe or not while going out with you, even if you’re a friend.
Biology have cursed woman, menstruation are real shit emotionally, physically.
Girls are more conscious for appearance not to impress anyone but not to look awkward or talked about
They are fed with true love and marriage dreams from childhood, even if she is into careers. It is fed in her somewhere
New DMs don’t excite us , It simply seems like a simp trying out.
We think “all men” because majority of girls have not met good guys. Yo it’s not your fault it’s us ,stay peace!
We just expect respect and love for leaving our entire family happily, which you can’t even think to do for a girl.
We die for freedom because most of us don’t get it easily
We love small gestures, like a sweet good night or a small gift
Women needs you emotionally more than physically.
We need to do better
Anyone who has been on an airplane that had to make an emergency landing, what happened, and what was it like in the cabin?
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I was flying as a passenger in a small two-engine commuter plane, with a single row of seat on each side and an aisle in the middle. We were going from DC to Lynchburg, Virginia. On the way there, I suddenly heard a loud BANG and saw smoke emitting from the engine on the right, then the propellor came to a complete stop. I could smell burning oil. From that and the sound, I surmised something important was clearly broken, and that engine would not be restarting until it was repaired. Too late for us.
Not long after, the pilot came on the intercom. I’ll never forget his first words. “If we get down…” Then a pause followed by, “When we get down…” and the rest of what he said, which was that we would be diverting to a closer airport (Charlottesville) and probably more things that I can’t remember.
There was a little nervous laughter from someone, while another passenger started crying. The person who had smiled and laughed stopped smiling and began to look tense.
I felt our chances were good. Whatever happened to the engine that failed was unlikely to affect the other still-running engine. This was a better problem to have that trouble with the landing gear or control surfaces, for instance.
As we approached Charlottesville airport, I could see clearly through to the cockpit and what was ahead. The landing strip was getting larger and larger. A welcome sight. We were, however, approaching at a bit of angle. The side with the working engine was noticeably more ahead and forward than the other side. It was pulling the plane askew. I wondered how we would land like that.
I don’t remember anyone asking us to brace for a landing, which seems odd in retrospect.
As we touched down, fire engines were racing alongside.
We made it.
I rode back to the terminal in one of the fire engines. Later, someone from the airline directed us to an area to wait together until they made arrangements to continue our journeys. It was taking a long time, and one of us complained about the delay. Someone else, quoting a friend who was a pilot, answered, “In aviation, it’s better to have the delays and trouble when you’re still on the ground than later.” No one countered that view.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a pilot about landing on one engine when the aircraft is askew. He told me that you give it a little rudder to straighten out at the last instance just as the wheels are about to touch the ground, but not so soon that the aircraft has time to swing back. That sounded to me like a high degree of finesse would be needed, so we must have had good pilots that day. Thanks to them, I’m still here.
UPDATE: I did not expect so many upvotes. Appreciated. Thank you one and all!
Also, thank you to all those who added useful comments: learning from knowledgeable sources who speak from experience is the best part of Quora for me.
In spite of the fact that humans have now been flying in heavier-than-air flying machines for more than a hundred years, it is still amazing to me that it is possible and has become routine. Well, routine except when it isn’t. Grateful to the body of skills that makes it all possible
Men are tired of being expected to provide for women. Reaction to this new outlook.
How do you tell someone their name is wrong?
My elderly uncle, 85, had a run in with an absolute Peach of a teacher in 3rd grade. She’d been a mid-year sub (because married teachers weren’t allowed to teach while pregnant *huge eye roll*) and announced to the class that she didn’t allow nick names and told everyone what their proper names were and she would ONLY call them by their ‘proper’ names.
This caused an uproar as this was in the heart of Texas. Lots of Bubbas, Sissys, Juniors, etc. She told my uncle his name was James. He refused to answer to this as his name was, in fact, NOT James. Yelling ensued, mostly her at him and then she yanked him out of his chair and dragged him to the office. This teacher did not understand that you didn’t call my grandmother down to the school unless someone was dying.
My grandmother arrived as the teacher was explaining to the principal about my uncle’s “disrespect and obstinate attitude”. With a rare show of patience, my grandmother waited until the new teacher was done hammering that nail into her coffin before addressing the principal. “Why did I have to come down here?”
The principal stammered, attempting to have the teacher’s back but his expression showed he knew it was futile. The teacher puffed up and condescendingly explained her policy on names and that her son refused to obey. My grandmother asked, “And what name do you think he should answer to?”
“James, of course.”
“His NAME is NOT James, It’s Jimmy. I include his middle name when he’s in trouble.”
“That’s ridiculous. Jimmy is a diminutive of James. Therefore, his names is JAMES.”
My uncle piped up, “She made Sissy and Junior cry.” Everyone knew Sissy’s given name but her little sister couldn’t say it and she’d gone by Sissy her whole life. Junior was self explanatory.
My grandmother stood up and leaned in toward the teacher, “My son’s name is Jimmy. I know this as fact since I Named Him. His birth certificate says Jimmy. His enrollment paperwork says Jimmy.” My grandmother turned to the principal, “Do I need to make a call to Mr. Jensen?” The principal turned white. My grandparents were good friends with both the ISD superintendent and the mayor and there had already been an issue with a different teacher stepping over a parental boundary.
My grandmother refused to allow any kind of punishment and my uncle said the new teacher wasn’t there the next school day.
How can having all the money in the world lead someone to be disillusioned with their life?
It depends on the wealth and how they got it.
If they earned it themselves then no as they have to struggle to get it.
It’s their children who are born into it and do not struggle. Hence wealth lasts only 3 generations. I mean Li Ka Shing richest man in HK (who is actually Canadian) his son never went through his dad’s struggles and is far less of a business man than his dad. Though he’s doomed anyway as his company is just a rent seeking company and PRC China doesn’t like that.
So when everything is within reach, then there’s nothing worth reaching for.
Older people may remember a television series called Made In Chelsea. I literally know several of these rich kids from the first series. Well knew as they probably have forgotten me.
They had flashy cars, they went on holidays and flew first class.
But they never knew struggles of others and they were very shallow as they had no real character. It didn’t matter if they failed something as money would immediately fix it. So they didn’t even have to try all that hard either.
I’m not saying it’s not a good situation to be in though.
What was totally acceptable in high school 50 years ago that isn’t today?
Once I was doing some gardening work for a former neighbour. Just to get some more money in my pocket. I was riding in his work vehicle and talking to him. Like all adults inevitably do, he asked me about school.
I didn’t want to talk about school, so I tried to redirect the conversation to his experiences at school when he was younger.
Before I knew it, I had him telling me about his experiences attending an all-boys boarding school in the 1990s. It was about as violent as you’d expect, but out of nowhere he said something that completely shocked me.
“Oh yeah, and if you started the fight they’d beat you with the cane”
“WHAT?!?!?!”
Only in non-government schools, but holy heck.
In my mind, students being caned is something that only ever happened in reruns of Little House on the Prairie I watched as a kid. Or something that happened at home when you’d been especially bad.
But nope. In the ‘90s, my neighbour and his classmates were caned for a variety of offenses, including smoking, streaking, fighting, leaving campus, etc.
You needed your parents’ permission for teachers to be allowed to cane you, but many disciplinarian parents gladly let their kids have it. In fact, the Australian state of Queensland (where my former neighbour went to school) still allows students to be caned as punishment.
“The school, which has 600 students in Prep to Year 12, gave the paddle 10 times last year and seven times in 2007, he said.
"I would never use the paddle unless we have spoken to both parents and have their blessing for it to be used," Mr Bensley said.
"It is always administered in a loving way. In fact, we pray with them afterwards."
I’ve gone to several Catholic schools in Australia, albeit in other states, and I never saw anything like this.
In all my time at Catholic schools, the only shit-kickings I ever got were from my fellow students. In fact, teachers at my school weren’t even allowed to touch students beyond absolute necessity.
It’s crazy to think that not only was this present in the 1990s, it’s still present now. Not just in Australia, but all over the world.
CHINA DESTROYS INTEL and AMD – rip and replace us garbage…
The world is splitting. Non Western countries are getting tired of US / EU sanctions on everything and anything.
Have you ever ignored a blaring red flag because someone was insanely good looking?
He was tall, dark, and handsome, and insanely good looking… Until he opened his mouth.
He had walked into my English class in my sophomore year and all the girls watched as he took a seat.
Girls were drawn to him and he never lacked for companions who wanted to chat with him.
But he dripped with conceit.
When he spoke, it was apparent that he was interested in one topic only — himself. The world, for him, revolved around him.
The more I got to know him, the uglier he looked to me. By the end of the year, I couldn’t believe I ever found him attractive.
When I was much younger, I did forgive character flaws because someone was insanely good looking. But I came to understand that some of those insanely good looking people weren’t very nice.
Some were selfish, obnoxious, bullies.
Over time, I realized that people are sometimes like deceptively wrapped presents.
Sometimes you unwrap a beautiful present with shimmering paper and a fancy bow to find nothing but a piece of poop inside.
Other times you open up a present wrapped in plain brown paper to discover a diamond.
Insanely good looking people are good for catching my eyes for only that very first time I meet them.
But after that, whether they are good looking or not depends on their personality.
If they have an intriguing mind and a beautiful heart, I find the person insanely attractive regardless of their outer appearance.
What is one thing that I can learn from you today?
Do you know why a manhole is circular in shape?
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This was the question asked to me in my internship interview. I did not know the answer to this question but thought to give it an attempt. I gave multiple reasons –
It would be easy to clean as there will be no corners where the dirt can accumulate
It must be to ensure the safety of the person going inside the manhole. If the manhole is rectangular or square shaped then there are chances that the person will hurt himself with the sharp corners of the manhole
The above reasons are okay but not the prime reasons for a circular design. The main reason is –
The diagonal length is the largest dimension in a rectangle or a square. A rectangular or a square shaped manhole would have a same shape cover as well. This means the length or breadth dimension of that cover could be accommodated easily in the diagonal of that manhole and this is how the cover would fall inside the manhole.
To avoid this unwanted fall, manholes are designed circular in shape.
why
Hope this was interesting. 🙂
The 1-3-1 rule
What are the most arrogant, idiotic and shameful things a politician has ever said?
We, South Koreans, really hate our politicians.
But out of all the politicians we hate, the most hated politician of the modern era has to be Park Geun-hye – Wikipedia, the previous president of South Korea.
Her, when she could still smile.
I say “previous” because she got impeached and jailed after the largest political scandal (and the largest protest that followed) in the history of Korea happened, her approval rating dropped to 5%, and still said some really stupid things while all that happened.
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Her, after we brought her to the Supreme Court and was found guilty.
I haven’t seen a chart so satisfying since the chart of South Sea Company stock prices.
Some people were so pissed off to literally make a list of the most arrogant, idiotic, shameful things she has said in the most popular public wiki in Korea. Here are some of the gems I found:
“Is this A.I?”
After seeing a pair shoes with smart sensors.
“Powder made out of Korean chili pepper….this must be extraordinarily valuable.”
After seeing Chilli Powder in a marketplace. Of course, this is untrue and very stupid and awkward at the same time.
“Sleep is the best.”
After an authority of a religion said to her sarcastically “You seem to sleep well nowadays.”This is during the times the protests were happening and Park decided to isolate herself to ignore the protests.
“What did I even do wrong?”
After asked to resign from office. This was after the Korean Intelligence already uncovered so much evidence of her corruption, that it was literally impossible to deny it.
“After the impeachment attempt fails, I will use the power of the people to silence the Press and Korean Intelligence.”
Keep in mind that her approval rating was plummeting to zero at this point. And also that South Korea is a democracy.
“When taking tests, it is always the women that take it diligently and with great effort. But why aren’t Korean men like that? I mean, they even go to the military. Maybe it’s because our country leads in gaming, and men are like that because all they do are games.”
Fact: stated during her birthday feast with very important politicians by her.
Also fact: It’s complete bull.
“For 3 and a half years, I served Korea without knowing tire, and you dare make me a dirty person?”
Things that happened during her term:
Shook the foundation of Korean democracy to the core
Increased the income inequality in Korea to 3rd in OECD
Increased the debt of Korea by 17%
Made house prices 40% higher
Set the record for the longest period of time the exports of Korea declined in a row
Set the record for Millennial Unemployment rate
Diplomatically strayed away from the U.S.(our most valuable ally) and close to China(our worst enemy’s most valuable ally)
Things that did not happen during her term:
Literally anything good to Korea
Park working hard.
AI generated Men’s magazine pictures
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Is the United States afraid of China’s economic improvement?
Absolutely, yes, without a doubt.
China’s economic rise threatens the United States’ global hegemony, which is based entirely on its US Dollar supremacy as the world’s reserve currency.
The United States can print money without end to fund its overseas wars and enrich the military-industrial complex.
The United States can control disobedient countries with punishing sanctions.
The United States can extract other countries’ natural resources.
China’s economic rise can undermine the US Dollar and kick out the main pillar of America’s power.
The USA is scared to death and extremely desperate.
What’s the rudest thing a child has ever said to your face and how did you respond?
My middle boy. He is 9 now. He was 6 at the time and we were shopping. It was more embarrassing than rude…
Going down the aisle, he is walking with his brother and my daughter is in the trolly… the boys are talking, distracted… and I’m on my own, wife was somewhere else in the shop…
Suddenly he looks up and noticed in front of us a rather large man. I mean large. He had never actually seen a person of this size because even though I am chunky, and my side of the family are, my wife and her side is quite slim!
Anyway, in his charming childishly quiet voice, (full volume) he belts out:
“wow daddy, HE is fat! Fatter than you!”
I turn beetroot red, and tell him that he can’t speak like that. He was confused.
(He has heard family talk about how fat I am and I think this was just a processing mechanism for him)
But then I look up and the man is laughing… as he walks past me and I try to apologise about my son’s outburst he says: “don’t worry lad, you got time to catch up to me!” and walks off chuckling!
Later (it got better) we go to see my mum, and she says something about me being fat (it’s a joke as I am chunky but the skinniest of the lot on my side!) And straight away my boy pipes up:
“No no nana, you can’t call daddy fatty, as we saw a man that was so big that you and daddy and mummy could fit inside him!”
I was facepalming… I mean great defence of daddy but I need to teach this kid how to be more sensitive!
3 years on and it’s still a struggle. Kid has no filter. So we choose words wisely!
Best Ever Hotcakes
21014 Good old Fashioned Pancakes mfs 002 0e249c95678f446291ebc9408ae64c05
Ingredients
2 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sour cream
4 tablespoons butter, melted
Instructions
Add sugar and salt to well beaten egg yolks.
Sift and measure four, add baking powder and soda and re-sift. Add flour mixture and milk, to egg yolk mixture alternately, a bit at a time until all are added, (stir the whole time).
Add sour cream and mix well.
Add melted butter and mix well.
Gently fold in stiffly beaten egg whites.
Bake on a hot griddle, turn only once when bubbles on the surface break.
One day when the oldest turned 12, he anxiously asked his father what was the secret of life. The father replied that he was going to tell him, but that he should not reveal it to his brothers.
—The secret of life is this: The cow does not give milk. “What are you saying?” Asked the boy incredulously. —As you hear it, son: The cow does not give milk, you have to milk it. You have to get up at 4 in the morning, go to the field, walk through the corral full of manure, tie the tail, hobble the legs of the cow, sit on the stool, place the bucket and do the work yourself.
That is the secret of life, the cow does not give milk. You milk her or you don’t get milk. There is this generation that thinks that cows GIVE milk. That things are automatic and free: their mentality is that if “I wish, I ask….. I obtain.”
“They have been accustomed to get whatever they want the easy way…But no, life is not a matter of wishing, asking and obtaining. The things that one receives are the effort of what one does. Happiness is the result of effort. Lack of effort creates frustration.”
So, share with your children from a young age the secret of life, so they don’t grow up with the mentality that the government, their parents, or their cute little faces is going to give them everything they need in life.”
Argentina Heads To China For Economic RESCUE As Farm Outbreaks Devastate Export Revenues
Argentina is facing an export crisis. With inflation still raging, an outbreak in their corn harvest threatens to collapse their export revenues. It’s not a surprise that the Argentine Central Bank is running to China to secure their Yuan swap line for their vital imports. Here’s what you must know and why Argentina’s in desperation mode.
Back in the late 1980’s, I transitioned from the “lost in the wilderness” to my return back to the US Navy. There the MAJ (a black group in the ONI) found me, recovered me and put me back in training for my role in MAJestic.
I used my savings, and bought a motorcycle. Brand new. Paid in hard-earned cash. And drove it to Ridgecrest where I trained at China Lake Naval Weapons Center for my role.
I was so proud of FINALLY getting back into my new role. It had been, after all, three years of delay after delay until they were FINALLY ready to train me for MAJestic.
And when I arrived there, they put me in a hotel. Gave me a per diem, and I lived there in training for a few months until I could afford my own apartment.
The hotel was next to a High School. And every morning I watched the kids go to and from school and pass though the parking lot outside my hotel.
One day, I noticed that one of the kids dropped a cigarette on the black tar parking lot. Yah. I should of picked it up and tossed it, but I just ignored it and went on to my office.
After work I went to my motorcycle.
One of the kids lit that cigarette and placed it on my motorcycle seat. Destroying the seat.
Stupid fuck.
Luckily for me, it didn’t rain that often in the desert.
So it wasn’t too bad.
Then one day it did rain, and for days, every bike ride had my crotch soaking wet. For after all, the motorcycle seat was a sponge.
Cost me a couple of hundred dollars to fix.
Fucking kid.
I should have picked up that cigarette and threw it away. Don’t be lazy. Be responsible. Karma, and life, has a way of biting us in the back. Be good. As even the most apparently harmless things can bite us in the ass in a big way.
Today…
Can someone who is completely sure Russia will win the war in Ukraine explain why they think that?
I’ll tell you a trick to watch out for on western media. It’s like clockwork.
The less reporting there is on it, the less western goals are being met.
Reporting on Ukraine is at a trickle and they’re just repeating the usual tropes that westerners buy over and over again. We had SUPERIOR ARYAN TECH but the Asiatic inferior hordes beat us!
The lack of reporting can be seen in multiple instances:
Hong Kong, where I live. Once the protests became violent (around June 2019) reporting slowed down. By September 2019 reporting in the western world became a trickle as the wide spread violence couldn’t be covered up. By October 2019 I had friends in the UK asking me if I was ok as all coverage had stopped. This was when people were being set on fire for disagreeing and bombs were going off in Hong Kong. This is why many of them haven’t heard of the bombing campaign and insist the riots were completely peaceful. They didn’t get to see much reporting after November 2019.
I literally humiliated one of my stalkers Ah Meng and his alt account when he said bombs were widely reported on! I then mentioned an actual bomb attack that he never heard of and his PEACEFUL protestors narrative collapsed 😀 😀 😀
The same with Afghanistan and Iraq. Once the tide turned? Western regime media simply stopped reporting on it.
Apple Stuffed Chicken Breasts
88ebee9c4b89c693b8b38b0b65123641
Ingredients
4 boneless chicken breasts
3 slices bacon, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 scallions, finely chopped
1 apple, peeled and chopped
Pepper to taste
Salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons olive oil
Instructions
Cut a small pocket into the thickest part of each chicken breast and set aside.
Fry bacon until crisp. Drain on a paper towel. Add garlic and scallions to the bacon drippings; sauté slightly.
Add apple, pepper, salt and thyme and return the bacon bits to pan. Heat thoroughly. Remove from heat and cool.
When mixture is cool, add cheese and stuff into chicken breast. Brown chicken on both sides in a very hot fry pan with olive oil.
When brown on both sides, place in a baking dish and bake at 350 degrees F for 15 to 20 minutes or until chicken is done.
Men Are Done Being The Punching Bag
Yes they are. Systemic male bashing at all levels has created the beginnings of a angry tide of men…
10 REAL Reasons Why I Left the United States (and you should too)
Welcome to the club, buddy.
Is America a failed nation?
It is an evil state, and seems like it pretty much always was with its stealing of American Indian land (Lebenscraum and genocide), stealing of Mexican land, occupying Hawaii, its black slaves, its indentured servants. Andrew Jackson and wilson were a horrible bigot. It was not failed but so very evil, doing pretty much every evil thing that it accused other countries of doing. But failed no.
But that was until recently. Its presidents have done some amazing things to make the United States the imperial power it has been for most of its history, and for the last 80 years the global hegemon, trampling the French and British empires. Now it is desparately trying to hold on to its global hegemony, but China has the same advantage that almost guranteed the United States becoming the global hegemon and that is populatiion. The United States had so much larger a poulation than that other western nations that there was not competetion given that is large population led to the largest GDP. Now China has managed to overcome what has held it back for a couple of centuries and its population of four times the United States has led it to having the biggest economy in the world (GPD PPP), and its leadership seems to be a lot more competent than the Amerian leadership ever was. All China needs is to have a GDP per capita of a quarter of the United States, and it will far surpass the United States in GDP PPP just because a dollar will go a lot further in an economy where the GDP per capita is a quarter of another economy. Russia is doing fine because China is not sanctioning it. Iran seems to be doing OK also. The Chinese economy is just too strong for the Americans to use thier economic power to crush countries that China will support, and the US cannot crush China because the Chinese economy is bigger than the United States, and China is very rich in resources so it could handle any attempt to control it through controlling resources like the US (and UK) did to Germany, Japan, and so many other countries.
Economically, China may not yet be the global hegemon, but neither is the United States. But China is stronger economically.
It will take a while, but with the econonimc advantage China is gaining over the United States, the political power of the United States will deminish, and American stupidity is just accelerating this fall. I cannot think of a single win the United States has had internatinally in that last eight years, and there are many disasters, especially under that idiot Biden.
Politically it appears that the US has lost it hegemony, and bad international decisions of the the last decade have have hurt the respect for American dipolmacy with first a loss in Vietnam, and then the losses in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also effectivley Libya and Syria have been loses. then to stupidly push Russia into a war with Ukraine, and even more stupidly not to clamp down on the Israeli genocide in the Gaza.
The US seems to have lost any ability to declare moral high ground, which it really never had in the first place, but it is run by some of the best liar in the world given that its political system is perfect for selecting the best liars given that a beleivable lie is probably more likely to get you elected than the truth, and the best liar is going to win elections. China and Russia just cannot compete with the ability of the Americans to lie. But the Chinese are very smart, much smarter than the Americans, and if you ever listen to thier arguments you will hear excellent logic against American emotionalism. China also very much values wisdom, something the west does not understand any more than it understands how to be honorable, or trustworthy.
San Francisco today 2024
What is one thing you caught your parents doing that you wish you had never seen?
Not my parents, but my father alone.
My older brother committed suicide when I was in my late teens; he was 21 at the time.
I periodically visit his memorial; I’ve been once or twice with other family and my father. Visits tend to be emotional, but the pain clears after some time – different people grieve in different ways.
I hadn’t been to my brothers grave for a long time – years. I felt I’d had closure – not forgotten, but forgiven as it were. I’d moved on, in a way.
One day I was driving past the cemetery and thought, simply I’d go and say “hi,” – I could barely remember what the plaque looked like. As I got closer, I saw someone standing right by where I was heading. I backed off, I thought I’d give them respectful space.
Some time passed, and the person turned – he had a flower in his hand, and he was exiting the area of the garden away from me. I recognised his gait, and I don’t know why I hadn’t picked up on it earlier – I guess I just wasn’t expecting it or something, but I knew my Dad – it was definitely him. He was too far away, and I awkwardly didn’t want to shout out to him – I called his phone. The distant figure pulled his mobile out, looked at it, and cut the call.
He put his flower in the garbage can, leaned heavily on it and heaved his shoulders. Then, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and kept walking.
Nothing in my life at that moment has alarmed or disturbed me so much – my father who I love deeply, the pain he feels at the loss of a son. I saw something that day that cut me in two. Defeat? Whatever it was, it was painful for both of us.
We’ve talked about it – that day in fact. He told me he didn’t take my call because he was too raw – sometimes it happens I guess. He’s angry sometimes at my brother but more often himself; he feels despondent and worthless sometimes – a father who buried a son.
I wish I never had to see my parents (either of them) like that, ever.
Moms NUDE Photos Used To Heckle HER SON Ahead Of His Basketball Game
Only Fans girls TAKE NOTICE.
China experts, explain away.
I must say this is a sophisticated piece of infographic that’s out of reach for the average keyboard warrior.
BTW, Bertelsmann Stiftung is a well funded German NGO, and owner of Bertelsmann, a 15b Euro media conglomerate and one of the world’s largest.
Not too dissimilar from Ikea and Rolex being registered as charities.
Isn’t that nuts?
The wealthiest people in the United States
Dead by Cancer
“My name is Sonia Todd, and I died of cancer at the age of 38. I decided to write my own obituary because they are usually written in a couple of different ways that I just don’t care for. Either, family or friends gather together, and list every minor accomplishment from cradle to grave in a timeline format, or they try and create one poetic last stanza about someone’s life that is so glowing one would think the deceased had been the living embodiment of a deity.
The truth, or my version of it, is this: I just tried to do the best I could. Sometimes I succeeded, most of the time I failed, but I tried. For all of my crazy comments, jokes and complaints, I really did love people. I didn’t always do the right thing or say the right thing and when you come to the end of your life those are the things you really regret, the small simple things that hurt other people.
Some folks told me that writing my own obituary was morbid, but I think it is great because I get a chance to say thank you to all the people who helped me along the way. Those who loved me, assisted me, cared for me, laughed with me and taught me things so that I could have a wonderful, happy life. I was blessed beyond measure by knowing all of you. That is what made my life worthwhile.
If you think of me, and would like to do something in honor of my memory do this:
– Volunteer at a school, church or library.
– Write a letter to someone and tell them how they have had a positive effect on your life.
– If you smoke – quit.
– If you drink and drive – stop.
– Turn off the electronics and take a kid out for ice cream and talk to them about their hopes and dreams.
– Forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it.
– Stop at all lemonade-stands run by kids and brag about their product.
– Make someone smile today if it is in your power to do so.”
ARGENTINA Collapsing – Protests Against Milei as Inflation Hits World High of 288% & Peso Crashes
News you won’t read about in the West.
What is one thing you caught your parents doing that you wish you had never seen?
I saw my parents crying.
I was in standard second, just eight years when I saw tears trickling down my father’s cheek. I do not remember any other childhood memory of that age, but I remember this. And probably this will haunt me all my life.
That year, we had a great downfall in business. Without mentioning the details, I would just mention finally the business was shut down.
After that, every now and then, investors would come to our home and ask my father to repay them back.
It was one such day, when I saw this happening.
One investor was at home for the same cause. His words were so sharp and his demands too high that probably break down my father. My mother with tears in her own eyes was consoling him. While I hid inside the kitchen watching, afraid to move.
That day I saw my parents break down, for money. And I wish no other child sees it.
I wonder today, did my parents cry when finally we shifted from a cosy apartment to a small quarter which had seepage everywhere.
“There is a big ground in front of the quarters. You can play, my mother said.”
It was enough for me and my brother to shift in happily, but did my parents cry again?
Did my parents cry when they needed to sell whatever little gold jewellery my mom had?
Did my parents cry when sometimes I would bring a result suspended due to non payment of fees notice from school?
Did my parents cry when my brother gave my father a 100 rupees from his piggy bank(all in coins) to take me to the doctor when I was sick.
Did they cry when dad got an angioplasty not because of smoking or drinking(he never does) but due to stress(doctors say)? Well, I cried all night.
Did they cry when my mom acquired hypertension?
I do not know.
Today they have rebuilt their little world. And say let bygones be bygones.
My parents are my support system. I have neither too many close friends( I have two to be precise, one married and one miles away) nor any lover.
I wish my parents never read this,never know that I have seen their tears.That I know and remember their bad times.
And if they do, I wish to tell them, you are my heroes. And I am proud to be your daughter.
the american dream is dead… this is why people are leaving the US.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
Escape while you still can. And, then RUN!
What has your child’s school done that got you so mad, you went in and read the riot act to the teacher or principal?
My step-daughter was in 6th grade, she brought home a basic math worksheet, marked with a zero.
I was supposed to sign it and return it to the school.
Since it was basic math, I took a closer look at it. She had all the answers right. I asked why she got a zero. She said it was from her “calculator math” workbook and the teacher gave her a zero, because she hadn’t used a calculator.
I called the school and requested a meeting with the teacher and the principal.
I wanted to know:
What is calculator math
Why was she given a zero
Apparently, the school district had bought into some idea, that as a life skill, kids needed to be taught how to use a calculator, so they bought a special workbook and calculators from an education company, and they were doing an hour a week, learning how to use a calculator.
I told the principal and the teacher, that one of the important skills about calculators is when to use one and when to just do the math. Apparently, later in the workbook are problems that are hard enough that it makes sense to use a calculator.
I told them that when they got to the section where doing the math in her head became difficult, my step-daughter could use a calculator. Otherwise, she should use this extra hour a week to improve her math skills.
Step-daughter’s paper was regraded as 100%, we never had to repeat the conversation, and she got an “A” in calculator math.
Why Bother Working For a Living …. Public Assistance Game
There is no more middle class. Every thing has been gentrified from housing , cars People not being able to find a decent paying job and the cost to live is getting way out of hand . Gen Z and Millennials No Long Want to work towards nothing. America is Broken and it’s not cool. Looks like everyones going to be on welfare
Baked Cream Cheese Topped Chicken
Chicken breast halves are topped with a nicely seasoned cream cheese mixture, then baked.
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 1 1/2 pounds)
2 tablespoons Panko style unseasoned bread crumbs
Oregano or parsley sprigs for garnish (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine softened cream cheese, garlic salt, oregano and red bell peppers. Set aside.
Wash chicken pieces, pat dry, and place on a foil line baking sheet.
Top each chicken piece with 2 tablespoons of the cream cheese mixture. Spread just to coat the top surface.
Sprinkle each piece with 1/2 tablespoon of bread crumbs.
Bake until chicken is thoroughly cooked (center temperature of 165 degrees F), about 20 minutes.
Garnish with oregano or parsley sprigs.
Notes
* If only dried whole oregano is available, use 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon.
A man from Texas
A young guy from Texas moves to California and goes to a big department store looking for a job.
The manager says, “Do you have any sales experience?”
The kid says, “Yeah, I was a salesman back home in Texas.”
Well, the boss liked the kid, so he gave him the job. “You start tomorrow.I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.”
His first day on the job was rough but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down.
“How many sales did you make today?”
The kid says, “One.”
The boss says, “Just one? Our sales people average 20 or 30 sales a day.How much was the sale for?”
Kid says, “$101,237.64.”
Boss says, “$101,237.64? What did you sell him?”
Kid says, “First I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fish hook. Then I sold him a larger fish hook. Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing, and he said down at the coast, so I told him he was gonna need a boat, so we went down to the boat department, and I sold him that twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4X4 Blazer.”
The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and truck?”
Kid says, “No, he came in here to buy a box of tampons for his wife, and I said, ‘Well, since your weekend’s shot, you might as well go fishing.'”
Family went to animal shelter to get son a cat as replacement for one that went missing but found
ALWAYS check animal shelters and veterinarians’ offices first for missing pets. Leave photographs of the pet and your phone number with them. Put up posters with photos of your pet around your neighborhood (don’t forget to take them down when your pet is found, though). We got our cat back after two months, when our local animal control identified him and called us. he was an indoor cat who sneaked out, then got too scared to come home. He had been tossed over the fence at a veterinarian’s office that didn’t bother to check the photo we left—but animal control did. We were so happy to have him back! check animal shelters and veterinarians’ offices first for missing pets. Leave photographs of the pet and your phone number with them. Put up posters with photos of your pet around your neighborhood (don’t forget to take them down when your pet is found, though). We got our cat back after two months, when our local animal control identified him and called us. he was an indoor cat who sneaked out, then got too scared to come home. He had been tossed over the fence at a veterinarian’s office that didn’t bother to check the photo we left—but animal control did. We were so happy to have him back!
The United States is coming apart at the seams. It literally is.
I have watched some videos of people digging up old battle sites, and the images that come to mind are the old holsters that have been buried in the mud and muck for 75 years.
leather 2
You can still see the shape of the holster, but the seams are all rotten, and the entire things is crumbling.
This is what the United States is RIGHT NOW.
leather 1
Rotten, dysfunctional, and of no use to anyone. It’s a real mess.
Christ almighty! Meanwhile, don’t you know, the USS Eisenhower is being hit by cheaply made rockets and is taking a hell of a lot of damage.I initially though that this was fake. Not so. Though the video might actually be fake.
Yet….
And somehow, the geniuses think that the USA can take on China?
And, man oh man, at first I thought that this was just “fake news”. But then the Chinese government released pictures of the damage on the aircraft carrier.
Like this one.
Can you make it out? Bow is facing you at the lower end of the picture, and the transom is at the top. The fires are hottest at the port side. The tower island is on the starboard side.
Chinese sat image
Now this is just one aspect of the death of the United States.
Sheech.
Do I need to discuss Gaza? Or Ukraine?
Let’s consider NASA. I have a video in one of these posts that goes into great detail about the new Artemis moon landing.
route
As an Aerospace Engineer, I note how all the technologies that were “invented” for the Apollo program, suddenly has to be re-invented.
WTF?
Not only that, the entire program seems to be a joke.
Four man crew. Ok.
That’s fine, but really… why?
crew
Why do you need that many people, when EVERYTHING is now automated?
The orbiting module will have two gay men in it. They will circle the moon; the “dark side of the moon” looking for “answers”…WTF? Two gay men circling the “dark side of the moon” looking for answers…
The landing module will have a black man, and a woman on it. I guess that all this is about diversity more than anything else.
They will land in a stereotypical 1940’s era Robert Heinlein spaceship design, and egress from the module using an elevator!
landed
An elevator?
You cannot make this up.
Why?
Ok, oh, in other news, Scott Ritter was intercepted while in transit by Agents of the US Government and held and released. They seized his passport. Now poor Scott is stuck in the USA.
Poor Scott. He doesn’t yet realize how FUCKED the USA is right now.
No passport.
A real fear of us expats. I’ll tell you what.
Sorry for this rant.
But the USA is going down… glug glug glug…
drain
Today…
What is the strangest diplomatic weapon used by a state?
This is quite strange because this animal can seem everything but a weapon (even if only diplomatic).
In 2010 China publicly asked President Barack Obama not to meet the Dalai Lama. Obama didn’t accept the invitation and China promptly withdrew two newborn giant pandas from U.S. territory.
Also in 2010, after Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, China stopped importing Norwegian salmon. In revenge it signed a 4 billion euro contract with Scotland and sent a panda to Edinburgh Zoo as a gift.
The Dalai Lama visited Austria in 2013 and China immediately threatened to take back the very popular panda that has been staying at the world’s oldest zoo (Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna).
It is the so-called “panda diplomacy” that classifies all panda specimens as exclusive property of the Chinese government.
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These animals live in the wild only in the Qinling and Minshan regions, two small mountain areas in rural China. There are about 1500 specimens. Another 500 live in captivity and of these only 70 are found outside of China, but for very specific reasons.
Since 1984, China has started to grant pandas with real lease contracts, which provide for the payment of up to one million euros per year per single specimen. If the panda should die because of the zoo in the host country, there is a fine of about 500 thousand euros. Furthermore, China remains the sole owner of all organic products derived from giant pandas, including their cubs. Every giant baby panda born in foreign territory is in fact by law owned by China and keeping it together with mama panda in another country has a cost of 400 thousand euros per year. Not little, also because it is expensive to stock up on bamboo: the Edinburgh Zoo spends $ 107,000 a year to feed its two pandas.
Each rented panda is a symbol of a successful trade agreement, as has happened over the years with many countries, including England, Scotland, France, Australia and many others. The loan of pandas is therefore a reliable yardstick for political and trade relations between China and other countries.
The panda diplomacy is a solid foreign policy tool. The panda is in fact one of the main instruments with which China intends to exercise its policy of soft power to increase its international prestige and influence.
President Xi Jinping personally signs their lease contracts, and this only after a formal and public request from the requesting foreign nations arrives.
Ah, don’t think that these diplomatic operations have only just begun. The practice had existed since the Tang Dynasty when Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of pandas to Japan to Emperor Tenmu … in 685.
6 Most Disturbing Mysterious Locations
Some facts about the aviation industry are :
In 2003, two men stole a parked Boeing 727 from Luanda International Airport and flew away into the sunset. They’ve never been found.
The Concorde flew so fast, if you left London in the evening flying west towards New York, to the passengers in the plane, the sun would actually appear to begin rising again shortly after reaching cruising speed.The plane flew faster than the Earth’s rotation.
Aeroflot Flight 821 crashed because the captain was drunk. All 88 people died. Additionally, the pilots joined the airline through forged papers.
The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the total distance of the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
In 1987, Steve Rothstein bought a lifetime unlimited first class American Airlines ticket for $250,000. He flew over 10,000 flights costing the company $21 million. They terminated his ticket in 2008.
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A test pilot for the SR-71 Blackbird had the aircraft disintegrate around him while flying at nearly 80,000 feet, while going Mach 3.1 (2,300mph) and lived.
In 2019, passengers travelled more than 8 trillion kilometers: that’s about the same as a light year
In 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed his plane in the Hudson River after a bird strike caused an engine failure. All 155 people on board survived.
Kmart in the 70s & 80s – Why We LOVED IT
What is your most memorable experience working with Steve Jobs?
One day Steve Jobs showed up in my cubicle with a man that I didn’t know. He didn’t bother to introduce him; instead he asked, “What do you think of a company called Knoware?”
I told him that the company’s products were mediocre, boring, and simplistic–nothing that was strategic for Macintosh. The company didn’t matter to us. After my diatribe, he said to me, “I want you to meet the CEO of Knoware, Archie McGill.”
Thank you Steve.
Here’s the kicker: I passed the Steve Jobs’s IQ test. If I had said nice things about crappy software, Steve would have concluded that I was clueless and that was a career-limiting or ending move.
Working for Steve Jobs wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t pleasant. He demanded excellence and kept you at the top of your game—or you were gone. I wouldn’t trade my experience working for him for any job I’ve ever had.
This experience taught me that you should tell the truth and worry less about the consequences for three reasons:
Telling the truth is a test of your character and intelligence. You need strength to tell the truth and intelligence to recognize what is true.
People yearn for the truth—that is, telling people that their product is good just to be positive doesn’t help them improve it.
There’s only one truth, so it’s easier to be consistent if you’re honest. If you are dishonest, you have to keep track of what you said.
Soda Pop Roast
BeefPopRoast1
Ingredients
1/2 envelope onion soup mix
1 can cream of mushroom soup or beef broth
1 can soda of your choice (the sweeter the better)
1 (2 to 3 pound) beef or pork roast
Instructions
Mix first 3 ingredients together.
Place roast in slow cooker, and pour mixture over roast.
Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 8 hours for a beef roast or for 8 to 10 hours for a pork roast.
NASA’s pricey mission to send U.S. back to moon faces technical challenges | 60 Minutes
American astronauts aren’t heading back to the moon just yet. NASA’s pricey Artemis mission is facing technical challenges. The space agency is now working with both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
What is the most powerful supernatural warning you have received?
About twenty-three years ago, I was home alone, just having a lazy afternoon lounging about the house while my wife was out with her mother. My calm was interrupted when someone—or something—grabbed the handle on the front door from the outside. I of course rushed over to the door and tore it open, ready to tell whoever it was to go jump in the nearby creek, but there was no one there. In fact, not a single person in sight.
This rattled me a little bit, but I didn’t think much more of it, but within a few minutes, the door handle moved again. I repeated the procedure outlined above, now getting rather angry, and, once again, there was no one in sight.
When the the door handle moved the third time I suppose I must’ve started thinking that this is the point of the movie when the viewers ask themselves “why doesn’t he just leave the house?” Still, I was getting rather fed up with this oompus-boompus, and, like a man with nerves of chilled steel, I resolved to act with derring-do and resolution.
This time I tip-toed over to the door and opened it slowly and gently: And a startled crow flew away. For reasons best known to itself—a warped sense of humor, perhaps, general pottiness stemming from unresolved childhood issues, or simply a lack of other sitting spots—this corvid had been using the door handle as a perch. Later on, we spotted crows doing that from the outside of the house, so the mystery was definitely solved.
The point is that if you think you’re experiencing something supernatural, there’s probably a quite banal natural explanation.
What should you never say at the US-Canada border?
“We got some donuts.” My uncle stated to the border agent after being asked if we had anything to declare.
Apparently, border agents aren’t issued a sense of humor when assigned duty.
We crossed the border many times before with no issue. We vacationed in Canada most summers, so the crossing seemed almost routine at this point. I guess my uncle just got a little too comfortable with the process, though.
After he made the ill-timed joke to the border agent, the man got rather testy with my uncle. He began asking what else we were bringing across the border, he asked if they had documents for the 6 kids that were along for the trip, he asked if we had any firearms, he asked just about every question in the book trying to trip my uncle into admitting to something illegal.
The only thing we bought in Canada that we were bringing home was the donuts, but the border agent wasn’t convinced. His feathers had been ruffled and he wasn’t about to let my smartass uncle get away with it. He ordered us to the side for an inspection.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to unpack, search, then repack a 36 foot motor home that is filled to the gills with 10 people’s stuff? Hours and hours.
I really don’t know what this guy was expecting to find, and I suspect he did it mostly out of spite. We all had to wait while other agents carelessly pulled all of our clothes, food, and camping gear out and searched every nook and cranny of the motorhome. I’m a little shocked they didn’t start cutting into the cushions to look for contraband.
In the end, they confiscated our donuts and sent us on our way.
Lesson learned: Don’t make jokes at the border.
Why I Left America…
Great rant. Perfect.
What’s the most unreasonable request you’ve received from your boss?
I’ll tell you the story and let you decide.
When I was much younger, questionabley dumber but definitely more naive, I was working for an oil service company in Angola. This base was supporting a couple of remote operations, one of which was in Mozambique.
I was a maintenance guy, still pretty junior but not completely green.
As I was going back to my workbench after lunch I was approached by my manager who was holding the technical manual for one of our pieces of equipment.
Manager: “Mike, the rig in Mozambique is having some problems with xxx can you go and take a look at it? You have your passport with you, right?
Me: “err yeah, when is my flight?”
Manager: “in an hour.”
Me: “Errrr”
The airport was at least 30 minutes form the base. Going to the staff house for me to pack and actually get ready was a 25 minute detour in the wrong direction.
Manager: “Here is $200. Buy some clothes when you get to Johannesburg. That should cover the hotel as well. The charter flight leaves at 8am tomorrow.”
So off I went to the other side of Africa with only the clothes I had on which were a pair of shorts, an old t-shirt, socks and trainers. My coveralls in my backpack and my work boots which I had to tie to my back pack with the laces. And, of course, the technical manual under my arm.
By the time I got to Johannesburg, went through customs and immigration and checked in to the hotel, all of the shops were closed. So I had to continue with my stylish outfit the next day as I went to get the charter flight to Beira, Mozambique.
Fortunately, there weren’t any spare seats on the helicopter to the rig when I got to Beira so I was able to get some clothes and toiletries there.
So was that an unreasonable request? In hindsight, probably.
Why I Will Never Come Back to the United States
Why did Goebbels kill his six children and himself?
Joseph Goebbels did not leave behind any letters or diaries explaining his and his wife’s decision to kill their children. Magda Goebbels, however, did write farewell letters in the days before the Goebbelses’ murder-suicide, and these letters provide some insight into why they did this.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels were fanatical Nazis who saw the defeat of Germany as nothing less than the end of civilization. They did not want to have their children grow up in what they imagined would be a post-apocalyptic hellscape overrun by Jews and other racially and ethnically inferior people. They also embraced Hitler’s belief that having lost the war, the German people did not deserve to live. In killing their children and then themselves, the Goebbelses were leading by example.
Magda Goebbels’ letter to a friend, written after she and her husband had made up their mind to kill their children, reveals her belief that the Allies and the surviving victims of Nazism would take revenge on those children, and that their life would be a living hell.
However, the letter also reveals multiple facets to her thinking:
We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge…we can’t let them think we are cowards. Everybody else has the right to live. We haven’t got this right—we have forfeited it. I make myself responsible. I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels…Suppose I remain alive, I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If I tell the truth I must reveal what sort of man he was—must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite—that is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction…That would go against my conscience. So you see, Ello, it would be quite impossible for me to go on living. We will take the children with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them. They would have to bear the burden of his sins and vengeance would be wreaked on them…
It is in many ways a hauntingly ambiguous letter. Magda seemed somewhat conflicted: she felt she could not defend her husband to the Allies, but she also could not bear the thought to be truthful about him. Against the magnitude of this dilemma, the children are mentioned almost as an afterthought.
There are a couple of additional motives that may have been behind the killing of the Goebbels children. One, it was Joseph’s and Magda’s last middle finger to the world. It was as if they were saying, “Oh, you thought you would drag us into a trial and make us feel bad about gassing little children? We killed OUR OWN children, bitchez. Do you really think we care one whit about anyone else’s?” To their twisted minds, it was a show of courage and resolve; their way of having the last word.
Another possible motive — and Magda’s letter to Ello Quandt hints at this — is that Magda didn’t want her children to learn that her and Joseph’s whole life had been a lie.
Since Hitler was unmarried and childless, the Goebbelses were basically the Nazi Germany’s First Family, and Magda Goebbels — its First Lady. The Goebbelses were meant to embody the ideal of Nordic purity, stoicism and virtue, in contrast to the urban moral rot and hedonism that Hitler so despised. They were the perfect Nazi couple.
AND IT WAS ALL A LIE.
Magda had been married before, and her first marriage ended in divorce — at a time when this sort of thing was still considered somewhat disreputable for a woman. Prior to her first marriage, she had dated a Jewish man. As a teenager, she had a Jewish stepfather, who ultimately perished in the Holocaust because she wouldn’t help him. The marriage between Magda and Joseph was a sham. They serially cheated on each other, and it took multiple personal interventions by Hitler to get them to keep up appearances. Both Joseph and Magda, in spite of themselves, were as bohemian as any German whose formative years occurred in the 1920’s. Beneath the veneer and the starch of Nazi morality, their life was a thoroughly squalid one. It’s possible that Magda Goebbels could not stand the thought of all this being revealed to her children after the war. I don’t know whether Joseph Goebbels was capable of this sort of awareness, but I suspect that Magda, at least, understood that she was a colossal hypocrite. She did not want her children to know and did not see any way of preventing them from knowing, except by killing them.
Whatever the reasons, the Goebbelses’ murder of their six children was emblematic of their Nazi sociopathy.
The Transporter Museum, a forgotten relic, is inconveniently located on a deserted side street two turns off a dead-end alley. You might never find it, even by accident, but if you do, you’ll always remember its immaculate displays and its eccentric proprietor, Frans Messerschmitt.
Every day precisely at nine, the little old man illuminated the neon sign, flipped the placard to open, and made his way behind the counter, prepared for customers who rarely came.
It was already late in the day when the door opened, surprising both Frans and the visitors.
“Hello, is anybody there?”
The question startled Frans, interrupting his terminal boredom.
“Yes. Yes, please come in,” he answered, moving forward to greet his guests. The unexpected voice belonged to a handsome lad sporting sweatpants and a football jersey, followed closely by a pretty young coed in a letterman’s jacket.
“It’s almost impossible to find this place,” the boy mentioned, all the while looking at the meticulously cared-for exhibits. “Are we in time for the guided tour?”
The question struck Frans as funny. It had been months since his last visitor, so the tours relied on guests, not the other way around.
“Of course, my good man,” he answered, sauntering from behind the counter. “My name is Frans and I’m the owner and resident historian. I’d be glad to give you the nickel tour, and I won’t even charge you the nickel.”
“Fan-damn-tastic! My name is Billy, and this is Connie. We’ve really been looking forward to this. Where do we start?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Frans replied, beckoning the couple to follow. “You’ve lived your whole lives in a time where teleportation from one side of the world to another was the norm—in fact, there’s about to be an app for that!” Frans turned their attention towards a smartphone sitting on display. “Before the end of the year, the new ZapApp will be available, offering skin-touch technology for the first time. All you’ll need to do is enter the desired coordinates, activate the app, and, in seconds—Voila!”
“Wow,” Billy exclaimed, reaching for the phone.
“Please don’t,” Frans cautioned. “These are replicas and can be easily damaged.”
“I hear ya, Gramps,” Billy responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. No disrespect intended, sir.”
“Not at all,” Frans replied. “I’ve always wanted a nickname. I like the sound of Gramps. Now if you follow me, I’ll lead you both back in time.”
The next display contained a full-length mirror attached to the wall. “I’m sure you two know what this is,” Frans said, stepping aside and allowing Billy and Connie to see. “These teleportation devices are still the most commonly used today. They were part of a trend to make teleportation more accessible and less obtrusive. They were also the first devices that didn’t require an exit portal. Until the Mirror 360, you could only travel to locations with paired devices. Needless to say, it was revolutionary.”
“That’s just like yours,” Connie whispered to Billy, punctuating her remark with a kiss on his cheek. “What’s next, Mr. Frans?”
“Gramps,” Frans corrected her with a chuckle. “Next we see the machine that started it all, The Marie.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Billy said. “Wow, it’s huge!”
“I know,” Frans agreed. “When the technology was new, we hadn’t yet perfected the art of miniaturization. There were no personal teleportation devices. The only people who had access were scientists, investors, and celebrities. In fact, the first transporters were more gimmicky than useful. They were incredibly expensive, required an entrance and exit port, and were so inefficient that it took a full day’s charge to send someone from one place to another. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way since then.”
“What about that one?” Billy asked, pointing to a machine partially hidden by a curtain.
“Oh, that one,” Frans sighed. “That’s the prototype. The first teleportation device.”
“That’s the original?” Billy asked, moving closer to get a better look. “Is the legend true?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Frans replied. “The machine was the brainchild of a pair of scientists not much older than the two of you. They were the first to prove light was a particle and that we could use it as a mechanism for distance teleportation. The early tests were extremely successful. There were no issues when sending inanimate objects or small animals from one pod to another. The problem occurred when they tried transporting a human. Marie begged to be first and, after winning a game of Rochambeau, she stepped into the entrance pod and disappeared on cue. But when her partner activated the exit pod, everything went terribly wrong. Marie never fully rematerialized. Her translucent hand simply reached forward, and she mouthed the word help. Then she faded away.”
“Oh my God!” Connie gasped. “Did he save her?”
Frans turned away from the question, paused, then finally answered. “No, he didn’t. You see, molecular displacement teleportation in its infancy was like sending something through a tunnel at light speed. Once entering a pod, the subject can only exit from the paired terminal port.”
“That’s tragic,” Connie said, wiping away a tear.
“And ironic.” Frans replied.
“How so?”
“After the colossal mishap, her partner spent the better part of twenty years trying to find a way to release Marie from her tunnel. He became obsessed with correcting his mistake. His research and technological breakthroughs are directly responsible for almost every advancement in teleportation technology. That first awful outcome is why molecular transportation is so incredibly safe today. It’s why you have a Mirror 360 hanging on the wall in your home.”
“But Marie—what happened to her?” Connie asked.
“All of her partner’s research and all of his calculations never changed Marie’s fate.”
“She’s trapped forever?”
“She would be, unless he destroyed the machine and released her molecules into the atmosphere, never to be reassembled again.”
“What did he…”
“It’s almost closing time,” Frans said, interrupting Connie before she could finish the question. “Thanks for coming. You two made an old man very happy today.”
“This has been the best tour ever, Gramps.” Billy proclaimed. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Frans answered, shaking Billy’s hand. “Just promise to send your friends.”
“It’s a deal,” he said, leading Connie out the door. “I’m sure we’ll be back soon.”
“You’re always welcome.”
Frans watched as the couple walked away. Then, being that it was precisely five, he locked the door, changed the placard to closed, and turned off the neon sign.
Alone once again, Frans returned to the machine behind the curtain, flipped a few switches, and watched as Marie’s translucent figure, forever young, appeared before him.
“Frans, are you there?” Marie mouthed, silently.
“I’m here, my love. I’ll always be here.”
“I’m so afraid,” she responded. “Please let me go.”
“I can’t,” Frans replied, ashamed of his weakness.
Marie’s eyes grew red, but she summoned the strength to place her hand on her heart and mouth the words I love you. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she was gone.
Heartbroken, Frans turned to walk upstairs, counting the minutes until he could see his love again, if only for a moment, the next day at the exact same time.
Slow Cooker Short Rib Goulash
Meltingly tender meaty dishes like Slow Cooker Short Rib Goulash are made for cold nights. And while this would make a perfect Sunday supper, it’s actually possible any night of the week, thanks to your slow cooker!
slow cooker short rib goulash
Prep: 45 min | Total 8 hr 45 min | Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1/3 cup Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
8 bone-in beef short ribs (4 inches thick each), English cut (about 4 pounds)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons sweet paprika
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)
2 cups Progresso™ beef flavored broth
1/4 cup Muir Glen™ organic tomato paste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley
Instructions
Spray 5 quart slow cooker with cooking spray.
In shallow pan, stir together flour, salt and pepper. Coat all sides of short ribs in flour mixture. Reserve any remaining flour mixture.
In 12 inch skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add 4 short ribs; cook for 5 to 7 minutes, turning occasionally, until browned.
Transfer ribs to slow cooker. Repeat with remaining 4 short ribs.
Reduce heat to medium; add onions to same skillet with drippings. Cook and stir for 3 to 4 minutes or until softened.
Add garlic; cook and stir for 1 minute.
Add paprika, smoked paprika, red pepper and remaining flour mixture; cook and stir for 1 minute.
Beat in broth and tomato paste with whisk. Heat to boiling, scraping any browned bits on bottom of skillet. Remove from heat; carefully pour broth mixture over short ribs in slow cooker.
Cover; cook on LOW heat setting for 8 to 10 hours or until ribs are fall-apart tender. Transfer short ribs to serving platter. Spoon off any fat from sauce in slow cooker. Stir sauce; pour over ribs, and garnish with parsley.
Serve with sour cream and egg noodles, if desired.
Nutrition
Per serving: 240 Calories, 14g Total Fat, 17g Protein, 10g Total Carbohydrate, 2g Sugars
How can one become President of China?
The short answer is by becoming the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. After ascending to the post of General Secretary, it’s customary to be elected as President of China within a year.
How do you become the General Secretary?
Here’s an easy 12 step guide to becoming the leader of the world’s most populous country and second largest economy (as of the time of this writing):
Step 1 – Be a Chinese citizen. This is usually a matter of birth although you can naturalize if you so wish (though naturalizations are rare). You don’t have to be a man but around 80% of the top positions within China are occupied by men, so statistically speaking you’ll have a bigger chance at leadership.
Step 2 – Join the Chinese Communist Party preferably as early as legally possible. Millions of people try to join the party each year but the acceptance rate is a low 15%. It really helps if you have a family member or close acquaintance who is already a member, preferably an influential one.
Step 3 – For the next 20 to 30 years you’ll have to climb the Chinese bureaucratic ladder. You’ll probably start low and will have to do a good job in order to get your superiors’ attention. Sociologists have observed that old Chinese bureaucrats, who want to maintain their current position rather than get promoted, will usually spend more on healthcare and welfare while younger bureaucrats will try to run big, complicated projects in order to prove they’re good administrators. Aim high.
Step 4 – Be an enthusiastic supporter of the Party. When the Party will commence a initiative or a campaign, show your enthusiasm and work hard to achieve the party’s goals.
Step 5 – Use your time as a bureaucrat to broaden your social network. Try to meet and befriend as many people as possible, in as many departments and areas of expertise. Having a wide and strong social network is indispensable for success.
Step 6 – As a Chinese bureaucrat you’ll have to deal with a wide number of other bureaucrats from local officials, to colleagues in other departments, to your superiors within your own branch. Always prioritize the happiness of your direct hierarchical superiors. Your own happiness and eventual promotion depend on them.
Step 7 – Try to cultivate good relations with the the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In order to realize your own vision for China you’ll most probably have to become the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Having good relations with the army helps.
Step 8 – Statistics show that those working in a province are much more likely to get promoted than those working in the central government in Beijing. Try to be assigned to a province and do your best to improve the region.
Step 9- If you have the opportunity to become the personal secretary of an influential Chinese bureaucrat, don’t hesitate. As a secretary to a Party heavyweight you’ll gain more knowledge than bureaucrats who are ostensibly higher on the social ladder.
Step 10 – Try to not get purged. From time to time the upper echelons will purge the party of those who showed themselves to be too ambitious or too ‘heretical’. What happens when you’re purged depends. You might simply be demoted, you might be forced into an early retirement, to spend your old age in a cabin near the seaside, you might be thrown in jail in a corruption scandal or you might even disappear. Try as much as possible to not get purged.
Step 11 – Try to cultivate relations with one of China’s retired leaders. In China (as in Japan for that matter) after retiring, many officials will retain a great deal of informal power, to the point of dictating policy. The retired Eight Elders famously took important decisions when meeting in Deng Xiaoping’s house. Try to get acquainted with these retired leaders. Being groomed for leadership by a member of an older generation is important.
Step 12 – Most importantly, be patient! Bureaucratic advancement in China is kind of like a perpetual Game of Thrones. If you’ll try to de-throne a Chinese bureaucrat and don’t have enough support, you will fail and you will be purged. Learn when to make your move and when to stay calm.
And now, the grand denouement. You’re at least in your 50s, most likely in your 60s. You’ve followed all the steps above, you’re a competent bureaucrat who has been groomed by a retired leader, with deep connections in various provinces, with the support of the military and personal relations in the top echelons. Now it’s time to make your move.
You’ll have to convince the Central Committee to elect you as the General Secretary, making you an ex-officio member of the governing PBSC and also its most powerful member.
Naturally, all the debates, deals and arrangements for your ascension were decided beforehand, months in advance behind closed doors. The National Congress will not be a place of debate and vote seeking, it will only be an elaborate ceremony where you’ll be elected with almost absolute unanimity.
Within a year of becoming General Secretary you’ll also assume the office of President of China from the previous General Secretary. You’ll also want to become the Chairman of the Central Military Commission in order to cement the allegiance of the army.
But before you start implementing your grand vision for China, there’s still one more problem. Almost all the other members of the government (the PBSC and the Politburo) are either members of the previous administration or members of rival factions. In order to govern as you like you’ll have to continue the Game of Thrones and slowly, one by one replace them with people loyal to you. It will take about 5 years to have enough people on the 2 bodies in order to have room for governing as you see fit (roughly, you’re still constrained by the larger Party apparatus). And you’ll also have to defend those you’ve put into power by ambitious newcomers (just as you once were!).
So stay vigilant. In China, getting to the top is as challenging as staying there. The game never ends!
There used to be a yogurt franchise called TCBY yogurt. I loved to eat it, and during the 1980’s it ran neck to neck with ice cream. But somehow, all of the thousands of stores evaporated. Roughly right after my first series of world-line slide.
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Ah. I entered a world where the only TCBY yogurt that remains out of the entire franchise is in Arkansas. Ugh.
TCBY grew from a single store in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to a 3,000-outlet franchise. Selling flavored frozen yogurt, TCBY was known around the world. First known as the Capitol Tower, the tallest building in Arkansas was known as the TCBY Tower from 1991 to 2004 and bore those four letters on its upper floors.
According to ChatGPT…
TCBY (The Country's Best Yogurt) is still in operation, although its presence has significantly diminished compared to its peak popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. TCBY was one of the first frozen yogurt chains in the United States and played a significant role in popularizing frozen yogurt as a healthier alternative to ice cream.
In recent years, TCBY has faced increased competition from other frozen yogurt chains as well as shifts in consumer preferences. However, the company has adapted by introducing new menu offerings, updating its store designs, and expanding its range of products to include options such as dairy-free and low-sugar frozen desserts.
While many TCBY locations have closed over time, the chain still has a presence in various parts of the United States and internationally.
Another is Rax.
Rax signage
There used to be a fast food chain in the United States called “Rax”. I loved it. They had this mushroom/swiss cheese burger, and this ham and cheese burger. All so delicious.
Rax meal 2
Then out of the blue it all disappeared.
According to chatGPT, the Rax Roast Beef fast-food chain was once a prominent presence in the United States, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. Known for its roast beef sandwiches and salad bars, Rax was considered a competitor to other fast-food chains like Arby's and McDonald's.
However, Rax struggled financially and faced various challenges, including declining sales and increased competition from other fast-food chains. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1992, which led to the closure of many of its locations.
Despite efforts to rebrand and revitalize the chain, including changes to its menu and marketing strategies, Rax continued to face difficulties. Many of its remaining locations were sold off or closed over the years.
Today there are only a few Rax locations still in operation, primarily in the Midwestern United States.
Rax meal 1
Ah…
Rax and TCBY.
According to the point of view of my consciousness, the moment that I started performing world-line slides after my MAJestic training, these restaurants disappeared. Bummer.
But, you know, after I began my slides, new types of french fries suddenly appeared. So it is a mixed bag.
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Today…
What are the behaviors of a confident person?
Good posture: Standing or sitting up straight can convey confidence and poise.
Eye contact: Maintaining eye contact during conversation can show confidence and sincerity.
Clear, confident speech: Speaking clearly and confidently can convey conviction and self-assurance.
Assertive communication: Communicating your needs and desires in a clear and direct way can show confidence and self-assurance.
Decisiveness: Being able to make decisions quickly and confidently can show that you are in control.
Setting boundaries: Knowing your limits and being able to assert them can show self-respect and confidence.
Willingness to take risks: Being willing to take on challenges and try new things can show confidence and a sense of adventure.
Ability to handle criticism: Being able to receive and learn from criticism without getting defensive can show self-assurance and resilience.
Ability to admit mistakes: Being able to admit when you are wrong and take responsibility for your actions can show honesty and humility.
Genuine enthusiasm: Being genuinely excited about things can show confidence and a positive outlook.
Positive body language: Using nonverbal cues such as smiling and open body posture can convey confidence and openness.
Comfortable with silence: Being comfortable with pauses or silence during conversation can show confidence and self-assurance.
Ability to listen actively: Being able to fully listen to and understand others can show respect and confidence.
Ability to negotiate effectively: Being able to effectively negotiate and come to mutually beneficial agreements can show assertiveness and confidence.
Ability to ask for help: Knowing when to ask for help and being able to do so confidently can show strength and self-awareness.
Ability to handle pressure: Being able to stay calm and focused under pressure can show confidence and resilience.
Ability to set and achieve goals: Being able to set and work towards goals can show determination and confidence.
Ability to adapt to change: Being able to adapt to new situations and handle unexpected changes can show flexibility and confidence.
What was the absolute most disrespectful thing a customer ever said to you, and what did you do?
Well, there was this one time when I was working at a Home Depot in the Bay Area I was doing inventory with another girl and this girl had some teeth issues. I didn’t have a problem working with her because she is a very nice sweet person that just happened to have teeth missing. Anyways I heard this big woman say something about how can they let someone like her work with the customers. I looked over and my co-worker heard what she had said and she looked genuinely hurt by her comment. And it made her cry. I was so angry that I stopped what I was doing took off my ten-key machine and I stopped that fat bitch and I made her go apologise to my friend and I told her look at her now she may have teeth missing and she is working on getting that corrected. Now take your fat ass away from me because just the sight of your fat face is nauseating. And in the future just keep your fucking little comments to yourself.Till this day I still don’t know why I wasn’t fired over that.And just to let you know she never got a chance to fix her teeth. Because around 2009 she fell and hit her head on her water cooler and she ended up passing away in a coma.She was a good woman and she was a hard worker.I miss you, Emma…..
I understand
Chicken Fajita Casserole
Chicken Fajita Casserole
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into strips
2 medium red, green and/or yellow bell peppers, cut into strips
In 12 inch skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat and cook chicken with peppers, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes or until chicken is almost done and peppers are crisp-tender.
Stir in onion soup mix blended with water, flour, chili powder, cayenne and garlic powder. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, 3 minutes or until chicken is done and sauce is thickened.
To serve, turn into serving dish, then top with tortilla strips.
Garnish, if desired, with shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes and shredded Cheddar cheese.
What is something that most people don’t know?
A small child could swim through the veins of a blue whale.
A single teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about 6 billion tons.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
The surface area of a human lung is about 70 square meters, roughly the size of a tennis court.
A hummingbird’s heart beats 1,260 times per minute.
The lifespan of a single taste bud is about 10 days.
The shortest war in recorded history lasted only 38 minutes between Britain and Zanzibar on 27 August 1896.
The first product ever sold on the Internet was a bag of marijuana.
The shortest place name in the world is “A”, a hill in Wales, United Kingdom.
A study found that if your face suggests that you’re alert and slightly happy, people are more likely to perceive you as intelligent.
Annunaki | Gods from Planet Nibiru and the Makers of Man
The Chancellor of Bavaria and Chairman of the CSU said after a visit to China that if there is no dialogue with China, things will become dangerous. He thinks dialogue is better than monologue. Do you agree?
China may not need Bavaria, but Bavaria needs China. Bavaria needs China in two aspects:
1. Bavaria is home to many German military factories and they want to import Xinjiang cotton
Ukraine needs up to 350,000 rounds of artillery shells every month, and its consumption is not small.
I recently saw an AFP report in which the European Commissioner stated that France would find it difficult to continue manufacturing missiles and artillery shells due to a lack of gunpowder. The shortage of gunpowder was due to the lack of raw material nitrocellulose.
Nitrocellulose is extracted from cotton, but where does the cotton come from? EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said a long time ago that making gunpowder powder requires a “special cotton”, and this Cotton grown “mostly comes from China”!
According to 2020 data, 95% of the world’s natural cotton suitable for the production of smokeless nitrocellulose is produced in Xinjiang, China; another 4% is produced in Central Asian countries; and the remaining 1% is produced in the Nile Delta.
Cotton from Central Asian countries, which account for 4% of global production, is a designated purchaser exclusively for Russia. Therefore, including the United States and the entire Europe, only cotton produced in cotton fields along the Nile, which accounts for 1% of global production, can be used directly.
It is no exaggeration to say that with the current cotton production capacity in the world, without China’s participation, other countries would not even be able to fight a world war, because they really can’t even build missiles!
But why can’t they import cotton from China? This is because they shot themselves in the foot, they created all this themselves.
In order to demonize China and slander China, the United States and Europe engage in forced labor in Xinjiang and force Uyghurs to grow cotton.
Even European companies led by HM took the initiative to boycott Chinese cotton, and China also adopted counter-sanctions measures and stopped exporting cotton to the United States and Europe.
But they did not expect that the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and the nitrocellulose used to make missiles and artillery shells must require long-staple cotton from Xinjiang, China.
As a result, they forgot that they had slandered Xinjiang, China, and wanted to import cotton from Xinjiang, China.
2. Bavaria is home to many automobile factories, and they want to cooperate with China to obtain technology for new energy vehicles
China surpassed Japan last year to become the world’s largest automobile exporter. Especially in the field of electric vehicles, China far surpasses any country in the world. In the first quarter of last year alone, the number of Chinese electric vehicles imported into Germany tripled compared with the same period.
Germany, the birthplace of automobiles, has admitted that it has lost to China in the field of electric vehicles. If they do not cooperate with China, they may fall further behind China.
100%
What is the sleaziest, dirtiest trick an auto insurance company tried to pull on you? Did they succeed?
I will never insure with the Good Hands People…
In 2006 my 21 year old daughter was driving to class when a realtor on the phone blew a stop sign and totaled both cars. Neither were injured. About a week after the accident the other party’s insurance called to see if they could collect a statement from my daughter. I said sure. About 20 minutes later my daughter phoned in tears saying the adjuster had accused her of speeding and not yielding to a car already in the intersection. I can only assume this was because she was in a 5 year old mustang – but she no tickets or wrecks up to then.
I asked her a little about the call and started getting mad, madder, furious… I held it in and asked if the adjuster asked about witnesses. The adjuster had and I told my daughter to call the witness who was behind her. She hopped off the phone and called the witness and asked what he saw and if she were speeding. He laughed and said, look, I was about to pass you because you were driving about 5 mph below the posted limit and I was in a hurry. I knew she had not hit the other car; rather the other car hit her in a door.
A couple hours the adjuster called and said they would pay 85% of the value of our car… because no one is 100% at fault. I asked how she determined my daughter was 15%. Her words were, it is a mustang and we know drivers rarely obey the speed limit. She wanted me to give verbal approval then or face a possible adjustment down. I told her that she was full of shit. That the witness following my daughter said she was driving 5 mph below the posted limit and that the other party was on the phone. I reference the police report noting a writing pad and phone on the floor board. I then asked, how he was not 100% at fault. She mumbled something and I said, please speak up. You are being recorded and your story is not so good for you right now. She told me that was unlawful. I ask asked if she was recording and she said mmm, yes. I told her she was in the same boat as I since she failed to disclose.
She said she could go as high as 93%. I said not good enough, I then asked what the 100% value was. It was also deflated to about 70% average book value. I told her I needed to speak to a supervisor, now. She said she couldn’t and I said you risk facing my attorney in court. This recording will be in his hands in about 5 minutes as he is my neighbor. She yielded to 100% and said that was max. I said, not good enough, I need no lower than the average book…please give me to your supervisor, I am tired of dealing with you. Finally, a supervisor who restarted the discussion at 85%. About a third of his way through the spiel I interrupted rather harshly and said, wait a minute, we are not gong through all this again. I reviewed my notes with him and told him I was about out of cell phone battery and I wanted no less than HIGH retail. He had 5 minutes to say yes or I am handing it over to my attorney. It sounded at first as though he had not been briefed but when he noticed I moved up to high retail he said I offered average before.
I ended up with a value between average and high retail. I reported them to the state insurance board and asked for a followup after they review. I never heard back. I feel for those who just say yes without standing their ground.
Desperate young guys
How do you get over the feeling of being a failure?
Realise that you may not be a failure in the eyes of someone else.
Here’s my story. I was 40, divorced, had left a life in New Zealand behind that had fallen apart in the most dramatic way possible, and was invited at my cousin’s house in Austria to a summer party.
As we ate barbecued things and drank local beer, dreams were swapped and future visions exchanged. My cousin is a sound engineer, struggling as a consultant, doing the odd gig in Vienna or Salzburg.
We talked about happiness.
And I heard myself saying, “maybe some day, when I am successful, I will know what happiness is.”
My cousin looked at me as if I was very, very drunk. And maybe, I was. And he said, “Chris; you are the dean of a French university, a Grande Ecole at that, in Shanghai. And you say ‘some day when you are successful’?”
That changed my world view.
I realised then and there that it depends very much on whom we ask whether we feel like failures, or not. All I had been able to see was how badly things had gone for me in New Zealand, and how the expat position in China really was only a gap filler till I would be able to find something to replace the life I had had in NZ. That that life in Shanghai was in itself pretty cool was somehow off my radar.
Perhaps you need to ask the right people? Try to understand what the average person’s existence on this planet is like. Success and failure are not quantitative values. They are dangerously subjective perceptions, and require some grounding in basic values.
So, stop comparing yourself to the wrong people. By comparing ourselves to stars or celebrities of some standing, we will always look bad.
Men Don’t Give a F*ck Anymore… Why the Rate of Single Men In the US Looking For Dates Has Declined
Which has been oversupplied in the world, the Chinese made value-for-money products or the US treasury bonds?
How can products be Oversupplied?
If there is an oversupply, there will be EXCESS INVENTORY of Unsold Products which will increase the storage and warehousing fee and ultimately lead to destruction of the excess supply
This is Demand and Supply Law 101
So China only manufactures products per Global Demand
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Now Yellens problem is simple
China is creating BETTER QUALITY PRODUCTS than the West at half the price
And the Quality gap is rising
There was a time just three years ago when German or Swiss products were better quality than Chinese made products and it was only the cost that was a decisive factor
Today Chinese Panels beat German or French Panels hollow in efficiency, weight, absorption angle and cost
So every Western Renewable Energy Producer is going OUT OF BUSINESS as China floods the world with Superior Panels and Superior Wind Turbines at 40% to 60% the price you pay for the same when made in Stuttgart or Grenoble or Milan or Cincinnati
Yellen would have no issue if these products were owned by Western Businesses but made in China which was the original plan
Now Chinese Businesses control these products and all that money is going to China and Chinas Economy
In the past – out of $ 100 of Exports – China got maybe $ 25
Now China gets $ 60–65
The Western World wants renewable energy
Yet they want to control the technology and the markets
China has beaten them to it
Even if they directly sanction China, the prices will force Chinese products to flow into every market beating every Sanction
Tariffs is the only solution?
Yet that would make renewable energy more expensive for the West and it’s people
They still can’t make Panels at higher price or attain Chinas rapid level of technology with its 1.4 Billion population and surging market
They are all saturated
One Solution
They can pour all the money into R&D into India
I mean huge money
Yet that would only create a new hindrance after 20 years and further weaken Western Hegemony because instead of a China, now you have TWO PROBLEMS – CHINA AND INDIA
So that Option is gone
So Yellen is living in a dream land of her own
She can’t stop Economics
The Economics is with China and US will be destroyed in this dangerous game
Even China tomorrow if it tries to rewrite economics will find it very difficult and painful
Today the Economics is with China and will be there for the next 2 Decades until 2050 at the latest
That is Chinas window
Homeless men
Blinken’s visa threats expose US hypocrisy
“A good example,” said Pope Francis, “brings about so much good, but hypocrisy brings about so much evil.”
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After the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) was enacted on March 19, the US and its allies reacted with predictable fury. As Hong Kong had finally discharged its national responsibilities, they realized it was no longer possible for them to use it as a base for destabilizing China. After 1997, they saw the city as the country’s Achilles’ heel, which explains why they encouraged the insurrection of 2019-20 and patronized selected proxies, including the now-defunct Civic Party.
Although those days are over, the US is incensed. It is determined to retaliate against the city whose future it had hoped to influence. Impervious to reason, it is bent on harming Hong Kong, even if it undermines its people’s livelihoods.
On March 30, the US State Department said that, apart from continuing to deny Hong Kong the special trading status it revoked in 2020, it also planned to impose visa restrictions on Hong Kong officials involved in enacting the SNSO. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said “multiple” officials would be targeted, as they were “responsible for the intensifying crackdown on rights and freedoms”. They needed to be held to account for the “intensifying repression” of “civil society, media and dissenting voices”.
However, Blinken’s professed concern for the media was hollow, and cannot be taken seriously. The US contempt for the press is now on public display in the UK, where it is mercilessly pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange through the English courts. His 17 “crimes” consist of allegedly disclosing classified information that embarrassed Washington, particularly in relation to war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, including its brutalization of prisoners. As his lawyers have explained, Assange is being victimized for engaging in the ordinary journalistic practices of obtaining and publishing information in the public interest, to which Blinken is oblivious.
Blinken’s hypocrisy, however, is deep-seated and was inherited from his predecessors. Although he claims to support the “global rules-based order”, this is a vacuous catchphrase beloved of Western hypocrites. Whereas he delights in slapping visa restrictions and other penalties on individuals from China and other places he sees as geopolitical rivals, evenhandedness forms no part of his repertoire.
Since the Gaza war started, the death toll has reached almost 33,000, mainly women and children. Another 75,000 have been injured, while many others are starving. Instead of sanctioning those responsible, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and the chief of the general staff, Herzi Halevi, and calling for them to be prosecuted for genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court, Blinken has facilitated their offenses. Although, despite being Netanyahu’s aider and abettor, he will never stand trial, Israel’s crimes, to which the US is party, are of biblical proportions, and will forever rank among the world’s greatest wartime atrocities.
On April 1, CNN reported that the US government is about to approve the sale of 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion. These can then be used to kill an awful lot of Palestinians, as also can its other weaponry. Earlier, on March 6, the Washington Post reported the US “quietly approved and delivered” over 100 separate military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began, amounting to “thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid”.
Although this would have delighted the arms merchants, it did little to inspire faith in Blinken’s professed concerns for Gaza’s civilian population. Even the most subservient of US allies may be forgiven for wondering how Blinken can look himself in the mirror.
While Blinken has always had lots to say about “rights and freedoms” in Hong Kong, he is allowing Israel to get away with blue murder in Gaza. He has protected it at international forums and sought to rationalize its depredations. However, its excesses have become so horrific that even he, on March 25, felt unable to block the UN Security Council’s call for a temporary cease-fire for Ramadan.
Away from the war zone, Blinken’s duplicity is no less pronounced. When the UK introduced its National Security Act 2023 (NSA), he did not slap visa restrictions or other penalties on its principal architects, the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, and the security minister, Tom Tugendhat. This was despite the NSA’s crackdown on the “rights and freedoms” Blinken claimed to be so concerned about in Hong Kong.
The “chilling effect” of the NSA’s espionage provisions was condemned in the British Parliament, not least for their impact on investigative journalism. It cracked down on civil liberties, giving the police extra powers of detention and curbing the pretrial rights of suspects, including access to lawyers. Although Blinken feigned fury when not-dissimilar measures were adopted in Hong Kong, he did not bat an eyelid when they occurred in the UK, which should surprise nobody.
His posturing over “rights and freedoms” has always been simply a convenient stick with which to beat people from places that reject US hegemony and refuse to dance to its tune.
Indeed, given his concern for “dissenting voices” in Hong Kong, it might have been expected Blinken would be up in arms over Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. It was the brainchild of its first minister, Humza Yousaf, and came into force on April 1, 2024. It has been called a “snitch’s charter”, criminalizing words that might be construed as “stirring up hatred”. If a “reasonable person” (a vague term) considers something said by somebody else to be “insulting” an offense may arise, with a suspect facing up to seven years’ imprisonment.
Yousaf’s new law has been denounced by free thinkers and ordinary Scots, and people are wondering if, in future, they should keep their views to themselves to be on the safe side.
The Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, a straight talker from Edinburgh, fears she may be targeted by the Hate Crime Act. She has regularly argued that trans women are not women, and that men who self-identify as women do not thereby become women. She has also maintained that convicted rapists who declare themselves to be females should not be housed in women’s prisons, supposedly a safe place. Although most people applaud her views, she is concerned they will expose her to charges, and attempts have already been made to prosecute her under what she calls a “ludicrous law”.
Since the new crime of “stirring up hatred” was introduced on April 1, Police Scotland has received over 3,000 hate crime reports, many paradoxically relating to Yousaf himself. He had previously highlighted white people holding prominent public roles, but fortunately for him, the new law is not retroactive. The community services minister, Siobhian Brown, said the law was being used to make “fake and vexatious complaints”, and police time is being wasted as people seek to settle old scores and bring down those whose views they dislike.
The Conservative Party’s Scottish justice spokesman, Russell Findlay, has pointed out that “Yousaf’s dangerous Hate Crime Act is already being weaponized on an industrial scale by thin-skinned troublemakers,” and a petition has been launched for its repeal.
The UK education secretary, Gillian Keegan, called Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act “a terrible bit of legislation”. She said the police “should be much more focused on fighting crime than policing people’s thoughts”. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, agreed, saying, “We believe in free speech in this country.”
If Blinken agrees with Sunak, Keegan and Findlay that Yousaf’s new law is an affront to Western notions of free speech, he is, presumably, planning to impose visa restrictions upon him and demanding its repeal. However, nobody should hold their breath, and Yousaf will likely escape repercussions. In the all-too-familiar traditions of American diplomacy, Blinken has no interest in intervening when “rights and freedoms” are violated in countries the US does not want to antagonize.
Whatever Blinken has planned for them, Hong Kong’s officials have done their duty and can hold their heads high. They must have expected him to try to harm them and braced themselves accordingly. Although his double standards are there for all to see, they at least have clear consciences.
Random AI generated images
Default An ancient town in China rain fog looking at the lens 3(1)Default Big and delish burger with meat chees onion and cucumb 0Default Cat Adventures Document your cats outdoor adventures s 3AlbedoBase XL Beautiful Elf posing with freckles and glasses 1(1)Default high quality 8K Ultra HD angel knight army 2Default An ultra detailed realistic digital art featuring Zen 3(1)Default In the center of the image stands Misa Amane depicted 1(1)Default Cat Adventures Document your cats outdoor adventures s 0Default art nouveau style closeup of a gorgeous Spanish muse w 3Default photorealistic 4K UHD Chef Gordon Ramsey cooking a dra 0Default Create a stunning 8K ultrarealistic food photograph fe 0(1)Default Create a stunning 8K ultrarealistic food photograph fe 0Default Cinematic Realistic masterpiece best quality 12K Image 2Default Cinematic Realistic masterpiece best quality 12K Image 1Default Cinematic Realistic masterpiece best quality 12K Image 3
I’m so sorry
What was the last most shocking image you’ve ever seen?
WHEN FREEDOM IS LOST
This incident occurred at the Kombaru shrine in Karnataka, India.
The leopard was chasing the dog, the dog entered the bathroom through a window, the bathroom was locked from the outside.
The leopard came in after the dog and they both got trapped in the toilet; When the dog saw the leopard, it panicked and sat quietly in a corner.
He didn’t even dare to bark.
Although the leopard was hungry and chased the dog, it did not eat the dog.
He could have had dinner by jumping the dog, but the two animals were together in different corners for almost twelve hours. During these twelve hours, the leopard was also calm.
The forest department zeroed in on the leopard and captured it with a tranquilizer dart.
Now the question is, why didn’t the hungry leopard tear off the dog when it was easily possible?
Wildlife researchers answered this question: according to them, wild animals are very sensitive to their freedom.
main qimg 2e26ec247328c6c8691eefd049cf55df
As soon as they realize that their freedom has been taken away from them, they may feel deep pain, so much so that they may forget their hunger.
Your natural motivation to feed your stomach begins to fade.
Freedom and happiness are connected. Freedom to think, act, and live the way we want.
The American Way isn’t Working out Too Well
Some fun AI generated pictures
Here’s some of my latest work…
Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 3(17)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 1(14)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 3(13)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 1(11)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 3(10)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 1(8)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 3(6)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 1(3)Default Imagine a Baroque label high attention to detail roman 2Default Imagine a Baroque painting A very high attention to d 1Default Imagine a Baroque painting A very high attention to d 3
Hanoi, Vietnam, call girl service
What is an instant mood lifter for you?
When I hear a good song playing suddenly in my neighborhood – It’s so awesome and got more power to make me cry and dance when it’s distant.
When someone genuinely listens to what I have to say – Isn’t it just great to speak your heart and someone is ready to see that vulnerable side of you?
When I receive the same level of importance I give to people – Ever heard someone say that “you” are a “priority” to them? If you have, dude you’re lucky (because I haven’t heard so).
When out of the blue, my mumma calls me “gudiya” – Mother’s love hits different. What would I even do without her?
When people trust me with their emotions – There’s a chance that I’ve been through that, so if they trust me, I can do everything to make sure they’re happy again.
When I get random messages from my close people – That specific notification sound just for the close ones>>
When I see potatoes – Weird? Nope, it isn’t. Potato and I go way back in history, a story for another time for sure!
When I know exactly what to do – I don’t have to explain this xD
When I’m sweating hard at the time of workout – It’s so satisfying when the exercises are giving result and on top of that, those beady drops of sweat make my day!
Some more of my AI generations
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If You’re An American Living Abroad Tell Me Why You Would Never Go Back? | Part 2
Police story
“So this happened in Montana. I’m on my way to go to my interview this morning when I get pulled over by a police officer.
I am native American and my friend that was with me is black. Just saying.
Both brake lights decided to go out this time.
As he walked to the car and I was pulling out my stuff, he quickly said,
“Don’t worry about pulling anything out. I just want you to know that your brake lights are out.”
So I’m immediately upset, because I just got them replaced like last month.
So I explained to him how Firestone wants to charge me $600 just to run a test on the wiring of the car.
He looked at me like 😨 and told me to pop the trunk.
He checked the lights in the trunk and tapped them, but they didn’t come on.
So he told me to pop the hood to check the relay box then asked me to get out to check the other one.
Then worked on the wiring under the dash.
He could’ve easily given me a ticket, but Officer Jenkins stepped out of the officer role, and into the mechanic role, and human role to make sure I was straight.
By the way, HE FIXED THEM. Not everyone is racist or a bad cop.”
“NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warns an’alliance of authoritarian powers’including Russia, Iran and China are working against the West?”Source: Daily Mail. Should this alliance concern Australia’s relations with China, inviting more US military bases?
Why is that such surprise?
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A. The West sanctions Iran unilaterally
The West unilaterally sanctions Iran. They steal Irans Oil randomly, pirating Iranian Ships or Ships containing Iranian Oil
They forbid shipment of even medicines into Iran causing the death of thousands of iranians
For a long time they even refused to allow imports of food materials into Iran especially Wheat
B. The West arms Taiwan, arms Japan and South Korea and literally builds thousands of bases around the South China Sea
US surrounds China with army bases yet a Chinese delegation to Cuba gets a massive national security lecture
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US openly says they want to Contain Chinas Rise and Growth
US arms Taiwan, a region they themselves acknowledge as being part of China
US sends soldiers to Taiwan, a Chinese region according to their own law
C. The West openly declare their aim to overthrow Putin and even assassinate him
Many a Senator and a Congressman at some time has claimed to want to overthrow or even kill Putin
They openly discuss Balkanization of Russia in their think tanks
They refused to give Russia security guarantees for almost a year before Ukraine when all they had to do was agree to Ukraines NATO membership being deferred by a decade
So how is it a surprise that these three nations decide to work together against the West?
What exactly does he expect?
That these three nations would come with a Chocolate Cake and openly allow themselves to be destroyed ?
Naah
Rule No 1 would be for the West to leave the world alone and stop interfering in every thing under the sun
Rule No 2 would be for the West to prepare a kill list of 100,000 people who are ruining them and the world. Including Stoltenberg himself.
Rule No 3 would be some nice army trucks at 3 AM outside the houses of these 100,000 people after which – they are never heard of again.
And the families too. Families always make nice deterrents.
Rule No 4 would be for a new Order in the West that adheres to their own principles of International Law rather than Rules Based Order
Once you do that the world would be a peaceful place
Stoltenberg would not be in that world but well… Nobodys gonna miss him too much
When did NPR become so left-wing?
When I was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican, a career military man from a family of career warriors, I loved to listen to Paul Harvey and public radio. NPR didn’t seem “leftie” to me.
I was overseas my whole career, and got my news from the Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Radio. I saw many ways to run a society while I lived in Japan, Philippines, Korea, and Germany over 16 years.
The first time I saw Rush Limbaugh, for the first five minutes, I thought he was a comedian doing a bit.
Upon finally returning to the States to retire, I was appalled at what America had become. The US I came back to was nearly a police state. The population was the sickest and most disabled of any country I had lived in. Homelessness and lack of education made the US seem like a Third World country. I was shocked.
NPR, however, was a familiar place to relax. They made sense. They considered points of view from both left and right. Importantly, the only “leftie” was a member of the Communist Party of the USA, and the only extreme right candidate was George Wallace, who didn’t stand a chance in the general election.
The difference between Dems and Repubs was no too great. Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan worked together all the time. (Reagan promised “small government” but grew the government by every metric. Every one.)
Today, however, millions of Americans have been left behind. They are worse educated than any modern nation; they are sicker and more disabled, and their babies die in the first year much more than in the rest of the advanced nations. (We did, in fact, become an oligarchy with democratic trappings. Details available upon request.)
Now those millions are angry. Their politicians sold out to the billionaires. The Republican leadership, much more than the Democrats, ignored their constituents needs and gave only tax cuts and excuses. The American people wanted LGBT people to have the same rights of marriage, social security, and hospital visitation as straight people. We got that. The American people wanted women to have more career opportunities, including in the military, on ships, and in combat units. We got that.
The American people voted for a black president. That broke the GOP back. Guns flew off the retail shelves, Militia membership soared. Ammunition was sold out for two years. The GOP refused to govern. All they did was vote to repeal the ACA 60 times, always with no chance of succeeding. Republicans directly interfered with foreign policy, personally telling Iran’s leaders to ignore the POTUS.
It seemed Hillary was certain to win. So certain, that few voted. Except the Republicans. They came out in force to vote for the guy who hated everyone they hated. Now their leader spews hatred and isolationism, the money-grubbing marketing
experts at certain media companies see the potential, so they amplify the suspicion and distrust. The result is a perfect storm of brainwashing. The handsome, 6′1″ blond billionaire can persuade most folks to invest their money in his dreams. Now he’s persuaded millions of Americans to invest their votes, their minds and their hearts in dedication to a professional con-man. Bernie Maddoff must be jealous.
THE ANSWER
NPR is right where they’ve always been, just a little left of center. But now the GOP has gone so far right—off the reservation—that they call centrists traitors and Marxists. God help us in our hour of need. Lord, is it time yet to take Trump home to meet his maker? Amen.
1900s Technology
Can anyone in China tell us why it is illegal for foreigners to visit Tibet? You must have a special permit to travel there. What are Xi and the CCP trying to hide? Is there a concentration camp there? Other explanation? Anyone who knows?
The question doesn’t make sense.
If it was illegal then it wouldn’t be possible to get a permit to visit. A permit means that it is legal for foreigners to visit Tibet. Similar to how you need a visa to visit China.
The autonomous regions of China are often slightly different to the mainland.
Hong Kong & Macao have fairly easy visas for most people BUT you do need separate visas for them.
Xinjiang doesn’t need a special permit now but it did in the past.
Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi have never had any special requirements as far as I know.
Anyway, I visited Tibet back in 2007. At that stage, it looked like the permits were going to be gone soon. The High Speed Train had just been connected and it was opening up.
Then the uprisings and separatist movement made a big push in 2008 when Beijing was hosting the Olympics. They were supported directly or indirectly by the US government and then Tibet was locked down and hard to get into Tibet for foreigners. Millions of Chinese tourists visit each year. Since then it has become easier and I know a number of people who have visited recently. You still need a permit but it is fairly easy to get one unless you are a reporter.
Last year in 2023 there were more than 24 million tourists to Tibet. Most were domestic but 30,455 were tourists from overseas.
You can visit but unless things have changed you need to spend 3 days in China. This information may be out of date since in the past it was advised that you should apply for the permit in China. Most tourists used to go to Chengdu to see the pandas and spend 3 days their waiting for the permit. A travel agent will do all of this for you and tell you what to do. It isn’t hard but it took time. Not sure if this is still the case. Things change quickly…
Strange coincidences
What’s the most confusing thing about being a man, today?
Navigating dating in a world where men are increasingly being told that women and men should be treated as equals; and yet where as a heterosexual man trying to find a partner, you’re still being systematically and mercilessly filtered out as a potential partner if you fail to perform classical masculinity well enough.
I grew up in, and live in Norway. One of the countries on earth that consistently score near the top of gender-equality rankings.
And yet my experiences in dating, especially as a young man, were very much about adhering to classical prejudiced gender-roles for men — or else remain single.
Examples?
I’ve been told (and agree!) that men should not be afraid to show or talk about emotions. But I’ve also been told in hundreds of ways that if a man shows any emotion that includes even a hint of vulnerability, then he’s instantly disqualified as a potential romantic interest.
I’ve been told that men and women should face the same expectations and similar opportunities. But as a young man, no woman ever asked me out on a first date. No woman ever explicitly revealed a crush on me unless I’d done the same thing first. No woman ever kissed me unless I initiated that first. No woman ever bought me a drink, flowers, chocolate, a valentines day card or any other stereotypically romantic gift unless I’d done that first. No woman ever asked me to dance, unless I’d done that first.[*]
Every time I read answers here on Quora about men who struggle with finding dates, I see the same recommendations. Usually from liberal, feminist people (both men and women) well-reflected about gender. Be confident. Be assertive. Initiate. Approach. Show Competence. Be unaffected by rejection, or if you’re affected, hide it! I’m not sure if they fail to notice it, or if they notice but don’t care — but these things look pretty much like: “Be classically masculine and adhere to gender-norms for men!” to me.
My dating-life took a sharp turn upwards when I finally learnt how to wear a mask and play a classically masculine role well enough to pass muster as a potential romantic partner.
I had several long and good relationships after I figured this part out, and though I’m happily married these days, I’m still confident I could fairly easily find a new fulfilling relationship if I should ever again find myself single and lonely.
But to find that relationship, I’d have to initially play a role. One that isn’t me, or that at least is just a tiny fraction of me. I’d have to play up those parts of me that adhere the closest to prejudiced norms for what a “real man” should be, and at least for a while downplay or hide those parts of me that don’t fit the mold, such as for example my vulnerable or emotional parts.
The most confusing thing for me as a young man, was how women around me were constantly telling me that there’s nothing they want more than gender-equality. And yet at the same time, if I want to “pass” as a man worthy of romantic love or sexual desire, then I have to jump right back into strongly gendered norms for what a “real man” should be.
[*]: I’m aware that many of these things do happen now and then to many men, and happen often to some men. Ironically though, that tends to be men with high social status and/or high social dominance. This single factor was without a doubt the most important factor for which young men were seen as attractive among my peers. And of course high status and high social dominance are ALSO things that prejudiced gender-roles for men judge us for.
War against China
Have you ever witnessed an objection at a wedding?
Oh, Boy! That happened to me.
Let me give you a bit of context:
My then girlfriend and I had been dating for about 5 years when we finally decided to marry.
On the day of the wedding, we were at my parents’ house with some close family and our closest friends.
Everything was going as expected and the law officer driving the ceremony was reading the document we were about to sign in order to be pronounced “husband and wife”.
It went something like:
“Mr. Blah blah blah… of profession Systems’ Engineer, born at xxxxx and Miss blah blah blah of profession xxxxx from xxx” plus some legal stuff that no one was really paying attention, or so I thought.
Then, the lady asks the infamous question:
“Does anyone have any objection?”
And for everyone’s surprise, a “Yes, I have one” was clearly heard.
In that instant, the time and everything else just froze. You would have been able to cut the air of the room with a knife. Everyone was shocked, silently looking for the source of those words. The only things moving in the room were our guests’ eyes.
Finally, we found it!
It turned out that the objection came from no less than the bride herself, and then she added in her most natural tone:
“He is not a Systems Engineer. His speciality is Computer Engineer”
First a general sense of relief and then everyone just burst out laughing.
We have been married for more than 15 years and the document still says “Systems Engineer”
Did I tell you that my wife is a lawyer?
6 LIES America Told Me About Europe | Americans React
Are Europeans shocked when they first come to the United States?
Have been many times now, and love it, but on my first visit …
Hubby was working and so I went to a Walmart. Really exciting for me as we didn’t have anything like that back in the UK. ( This was back in the early 90s)
I bought a trolley full of stuff, went through the cashier, paid and was quite happily on my way out of the door when beeps’ went off.
Before I knew it I was surrounded by about 4 or 5 what I can only describe as security people. They were really aggressive and I was terrified. What had I done wrong?
Anyway I was accused of stealing and literally frogmarched away. My whole trolley was gone through against my receipt.
Took a while. Everything tallied and it was discovered that whilst I had paid for it a security tag had not been deactivated from a wallet I had purchased. Cashier error.
They then let me go. A couple of hours later. No apologies. I was so shaken up by this treatment.
In the uk at the time of this incident if ‘beeps’ had gone off when leaving a store, sure you would have been stopped, yes checked, but nobody would have laid hands on you and treated you like a criminal. Once it was seen a mistake had been made on their part an apology would be given.
So I guess that certainly on my first visit my shock was that in the USA it is guilty until proven innocent, whereas in UK it is innocent until proven guilty.
Also that an apology is not necessary if they’ve got it wrong.
And please don’t get me started on the tipping culture. In the Uk we pay a minimum wage and tipping is seen as a sign of good service.
My first meal in the USA service was lousy, won’t go into details, but I was astonished to find that despite that I was expected to leave a tip at around 10–15% of the bill and was berated when I didn’t. At that time I had no idea that servers were not paid a decent wage and relied on tips, but to me it felt like a mandatory charge so that if you didn’t pay it you were in effect stealing.
I have been to the USA many times since and now appreciate the difference in our cultures. So I will pay the mandatory ‘tip’ but if I have got service above and beyond will do 30–40%. Still don’t like it though.
Please don’t think I am berating the USA. I have loads of friends here, just saying that as a naive Brit many years ago it was not the best of experiences.
What are the important lessons you learnt in life?
your sleep is key to your health and energy. Sleep well, and everything in life already looks easier. Darkness, silence, and inner peace are the key ingredients.
what you eat and drink is another key to your health and energy. The fewer of the things you consume have brand names, and the less has been done to them, the better you will eventually be.
the people you are surrounded by contribute greatly to who you are, and not just while you are with them. When you’re honest, you’ll find that very little of you is actually you.
the big challenge in life is to be authentic. It’s the hardest thing to do of them all to be truly yourself, and it may well be the meaning of life to try it. We only ever live during those moments where we are being ourselves, and they are few.
to live in freedom, you need to make utilitarian choices. This is a mechanical universe, full of things that are parasitic. Find the things that serve you with the least demands on you, and your life is more free.
Dating Pool Dropouts: How Feminism RUINED Dating
This chick is really freaking out.
Why are Europeans not as fat as Americans are when Europeans eat white bread and pasta and butter all the time?
I’m American, living in France for many years. I eat butter, cream, cheese, bread, pasta…. things I never used to eat in the US, and yet never have to worry about my weight.
Many things come into play-
No snacks. We eat meals, usually at the same times each day. My body seems to like living on a schedule this way. I don’t get hungry in between meals. My stomach knows when it is time to eat, and when it isn’t.
Portions. Portions are smaller. I’m about to visit home again, and know we’ll be going to restaurants and such, and I’ll have these giant heaping plates placed before me, which make me sick to think about. It actually kills my appetite to see this.
Different courses. Instead of eating everything at the same time, we have courses, so only one thing is in front of us at a time. If you are only eating tomatoes, you are going to eat less than if you are mixing in bites of other things in between. Eating a salad or a soup before the main dish, you’re already going to eat less of the main course, because you are less hungry.
Walking. We spend a lot of time walking. I walk to most everything – the grocery store, the post office, the hairdresser, the recycling center….. Whatever chores I have to do outside the home, I can usually walk, and a twenty-minute walk to get somewhere is normal. I do remember a time, when I hadn’t been here long, that every time someone said, “let’s just walk there”, I’d groan and complain “Why can’t we just drive??” I’ve come to love walking around the city. I had to remember the joy of that as a kid, when I’d just love taking my time and observing life around me along the way, instead of having my focus on the destination.
Less stress. This may or may not apply in a general way, but I find they have a different way of looking at life, in which work success is just not considered so essential, so people worry less. A lot of paid vacation, job security, easy healthcare, results in feeling less anxious, and maybe contributes to less cortisol production and emotional eating.
The failure of democracy
Chicken Chilaquiles Casserole
Chicken Chilaquiles Casserole
Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil
10 (6 to 8 inch diameter) flour or corn tortillas, cut into 1/2 inch strips
2 cups shredded cooked chicken or turkey
1 1/3 cups salsa verde or green sauce
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded Chihuahua or mozzarella cheese
Instructions
Heat oil in skillet until hot. Cook tortilla strips in oil for 30 to 60 seconds or until light golden brown; drain.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 2 quart casserole.
Layer half of the tortilla strips in casserole; top with chicken, half of the salsa verde (about 2/3 cup) and 1 cup of the cheese.
Press layers gently down into casserole.
Repeat with remaining tortilla strips, sauce and cheese.
Bake for about 30 minutes or until cheese is melted and golden brown.
What are some things a woman should know about men?
1. Like you girls have periods, that cause pain and mood swings etc. Similarly, we men have nocturnal emission that causes mood swings and back pain. Not all men go through that, but many. And it’s not a comparison between the issues.
2. We actually hate giving surprises, if somebody is doing… he’s pressured or doing the same just to impress and make you happy.
3. We actually don’t like you to be influenced by influencers in terms of dress up, eating, and showing up on Social media to people. We want you to be you… The Authentic you.
4. We hate the question “How much do you love me” and in fact we don’t have answers.
5. We love Motorcycle and Car, and we want you to respect the same. And the reason is they actually need love and care, or else they can trouble anytime. Don’t complain if your man is investing a bit more money on that.
6. Please don’t take us shopping if you’re not getting it done within an hour.
7. If you’re allowed to have male friends, please don’t question our Female Friends.
8. We don’t run for sex. Though it’s a natural need, but please don’t judge without reading the whole book. Also, don’t trust the buttery words of a Man without knowing him.
9. It feels extremely difficult for us to walk behind an unknown girl, even if we are moving in the same direction. We wait or overtake most of the time. If you’re afraid then we too.
There are many things not coming up in my head right now, and yes men should equally know about women. But no one in the world till now has succeeded understanding a Woman.. haha.
Why Women Don’t Support Husbands in Difficult Times.
Grandpa
The IRS decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to the IRS office. The IRS auditor was not surprised when Grandpa showed up with his attorney.
The auditor said, “Well, sir, you have an extravagant lifestyle and no full-time employment, which you explain by saying that you win money gambling. I’m not sure the IRS finds that believable.”
“I’m a great gambler, and I can prove it,” says Grandpa. “How about a demonstration?”
The auditor thinks for a moment and says, “OK. Go ahead.”
Grandpa says, “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that I can bite my own eye.”
The auditor thinks a moment and says, “It’s a bet.”
Grandpa removes his glass eye and bites it. The auditor’s jaw drops.
Grandpa says, “Now, I’ll bet you two thousand dollars that I can bite my other eye.”
The auditor can tell Grandpa isn’t blind, so he takes the bet.
Grandpa removes his dentures and sinks them into his remaining eye. The astonished auditor now grasps that he has gambled and lost three grand, with Grandpa’s attorney as a witness. His unease begins to mount.
“Want to go double or nothing?” Grandpa asks. “I’ll bet you six thousand dollars that I can stand on one side of your desk, and pee into that wastebasket on the other side, and never get a drop anywhere in between.”
The auditor, twice burned, is cautious now, but he looks carefully and decides there’s no way this old guy could possibly manage that stunt, so he agrees again. Grandpa stands beside the desk and unzips his pants, but although he strains mightily, he can’t make the stream reach the wastebasket on the other side, so he pretty much urinates all over the auditor’s desk.
The auditor leaps with joy, realizing that he has just turned a major loss into a huge win. But Grandpa’s attorney moans and puts his head in his hands.
“Are you OK?” the auditor asks.
“Not really,” says the attorney. “This morning, when Grandpa told me he’d been summoned for an audit, he bet me twenty-five thousand dollars that he could come in here and pee all over your desk and that you’d be happy about it.”
Don’t mess with old people!
If you feel your former bosses would give you a bad reference, should you contact them before putting them for your next job?
I had three interviews that went very well, in my opinion, yet I received no job offer, and I suspected it was because my boss was subverting my effort to leave the company. During my fourth interview, with the Department of Correction, I mentioned my suspicion to the person interviewing me and she said that she’d make a note of it. I was offered the job a couple of days later, contingent upon passing a drug screen, and while I was at the agency for the drug screen the HR manager asked me to step into her office.
She called my boss and said she was calling for a reference on me, and boss gave what would be described as a tepid recommendation: I did “adequate” work and was “as reliable as anyone else” but she would have hired someone younger if she was filling my position now. After she ended the call the HR manager said she understood why I had trouble finding another job, and then she asked when I wanted to start work with the agency. I told her I’d be there bright and early the following Monday.
My boss said she wanted someone younger for my job so I decided to accomodate her. I didn’t bother to say anything about the phone call, or that I was leaving. But I did send a delayed email letting her know how I felt about her and so she’d know that I wouldn’t be coming back. The last time I saw her was when I picked up my last paycheck; she threw a stapler at me.
Sounds Of The Department Store 1979
OMG!
Just put this on and listen to it on a early Saturday Morning.
I grew up in the 1960’s. This was the start of the acceleration of the “woman’s movement”. This later on went nuts and merged with other generational forces and combined has created a very hostile environment for men. I know, I had a “three stage rocket” thrown at me in Arkansas.
Accuse the man of molestation, then tell the police that the man is violent.
While the man is in jail, the bank accounts are frozen, and every stone is uncovered “looking” for evidence.
Then a divorce, favorable to the woman is initiated, and the husband, in jail / prison is unable to fight back.
Three-stage Rocket.
One friend had this happen to them. Then another. Then another. And, another.
Common place.
Now, men are saying… GOOD BYE.
The West has shot itself in the foot.
And the blood is hemorrhaging. Triage is needed, but people are dragging their feet. The blood is everywhere. It is smeared all over.
The damage is TOO FAR GONE.
Die. Let the West die.
We see what is going on, but it’s still to early to see the pain, and the hurt when the the women finally realize that they are FUCKED. Starting now.
In twenty years… LORD…
It’s gonna be nasty in the West. Nasty.
Once you wipe out two generations of stable society, what you have left is “Mad Max”. Gonna be a nightmare.
Today…
American HELLSCAPE
I am a Dutch national and have lived in Ethiopia, Netherlands, France and Germany. In 1984 I went to the US on a student exchange visa. I landed in New York on June 4, 1984 and took a taxi to the Holiday inn in downtown Manhattan – I think it was on 52nd or 54th street. Can’t remember that. what I do remember is that the taxi fare was $90 (which I thought was a lot) and I had been told you tip at least 10% on taxi rides, so I have the guy $100, which was almost a full week’s of wages for me at the time. I walked into the hotel and the doorman asked me where I came from. I told him “the airport” and then, on a whim, I asked him how much a taxi ride should cost. He told me “$35–$40.” Welcome to America, where most everything is a scam of some sort.
I have now been here almost 40 years and it has gotten soooooo much worse. This country is truly devolving into a hellscape. Government is basically non-functional. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to murder tens of thousands of people a year with their opioids without ANY ramification. Food companies can poison you with the shit they put in their food because we, as individuals, cannot prove a substance to be unhealthy or dangerous and these companies do not have to prove that a substance is safe before they can use it in whatever they’re cooking up.
I own my own business and America has been good to me, but my wife and my health insurance? Yeah, the first $55,000 we earned in a year went to cover health insurance and deductible. No mandatory vacation, no mandatory sick pay, you can get fired at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever, which has happened to me four times until I said “fuck this, I am going to do my own thing.” No national holidays that employers MUST pay you for – ZERO! No paid time off for new parents with a newborn at home – ZERO! Homeless people all over the place, seemingly BILLIONS of churches that do fuck all nothing for ANYBODY, it is really surreal once I began seeing all of this.
School shootings? who the fuck thinks this is a good thing? Yet America’s conservative highest court of the land claims we should not and cannot rein in the insane amount of guns in this society. It is now wonder cops shoot people willy-nilly because they are terrified ALL the time. Normal people would immediately recognize that a society with more guns does not make a society safer, quite to the contrary, it makes it MUCH more dangerous. They actually have laws here, making it illegal for the government to spend money on research about gun violence. Imagine that. 50,000+ deaths from guns EVERY year and the government doesn’t think we should figure this out.
The Supreme Court of this country is co completely FUCKED UP that it actually decided that “corporations” were “people,” so they could contribute to political campaigns unlimited sums of money without disclosing they have donated to whatever organization. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a corporation in prison. It is completely INSANE here.
At first I genuinely was blown away by America. Now I look at it in horror and with pity for the American people, half of whom are too stupid to recognize they are being fleeced. America’s version of capitalism is abhorrent and Europe is headed in the same direction. DON’T LET IT DESTROY YOUR SOCIAL SERVICES. The uber wealthy in Europe are beginning to see how America did it and they noticed that if you set the common man up against the immigrant, you can fuck them over really easily. That is EXACTLY what is happening in Europe today. You better be careful.
Sadly I am stuck here. My daughter and her soon-to-be husband want to stay and my wife and I don’t want to move far away from her, so here we are. Fortunately our life is very good because we have invested well and have our own business. Life for most is nearly impossibly difficult here. Hopefully, one day my daughter will say, “pops, lets get the fuck out of here.” I’d be gone in three nano-seconds. That is how bad I feel this country has gotten.
Are Europeans shocked when they first come to the United States?
I am a Dutch national and have lived in Ethiopia, Netherlands, France and Germany. In 1984 I went to the US on a student exchange visa. I landed in New York on June 4, 1984 and took a taxi to the Holiday inn in downtown Manhattan – I think it was on 52nd or 54th street. Can’t remember that. what I do remember is that the taxi fare was $90 (which I thought was a lot) and I had been told you tip at least 10% on taxi rides, so I have the guy $100, which was almost a full week’s of wages for me at the time. I walked into the hotel and the doorman asked me where I came from. I told him “the airport” and then, on a whim, I asked him how much a taxi ride should cost. He told me “$35–$40.” Welcome to America, where most everything is a scam of some sort.
I have now been here almost 40 years and it has gotten soooooo much worse. This country is truly devolving into a hellscape. Government is basically non-functional. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to murder tens of thousands of people a year with their opioids without ANY ramification. Food companies can poison you with the shit they put in their food because we, as individuals, cannot prove a substance to be unhealthy or dangerous and these companies do not have to prove that a substance is safe before they can use it in whatever they’re cooking up.
I own my own business and America has been good to me, but my wife and my health insurance? Yeah, the first $55,000 we earned in a year went to cover health insurance and deductible. No mandatory vacation, no mandatory sick pay, you can get fired at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever, which has happened to me four times until I said “fuck this, I am going to do my own thing.” No national holidays that employers MUST pay you for – ZERO! No paid time off for new parents with a newborn at home – ZERO! Homeless people all over the place, seemingly BILLIONS of churches that do fuck all nothing for ANYBODY, it is really surreal once I began seeing all of this.
School shootings? who the fuck thinks this is a good thing? Yet America’s conservative highest court of the land claims we should not and cannot rein in the insane amount of guns in this society. It is now wonder cops shoot people willy-nilly because they are terrified ALL the time. Normal people would immediately recognize that a society with more guns does not make a society safer, quite to the contrary, it makes it MUCH more dangerous. They actually have laws here, making it illegal for the government to spend money on research about gun violence. Imagine that. 50,000+ deaths from guns EVERY year and the government doesn’t think we should figure this out.
The Supreme Court of this country is co completely FUCKED UP that it actually decided that “corporations” were “people,” so they could contribute to political campaigns unlimited sums of money without disclosing they have donated to whatever organization. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a corporation in prison. It is completely INSANE here.
At first I genuinely was blown away by America. Now I look at it in horror and with pity for the American people, half of whom are too stupid to recognize they are being fleeced. America’s version of capitalism is abhorrent and Europe is headed in the same direction. DON’T LET IT DESTROY YOUR SOCIAL SERVICES. The uber wealthy in Europe are beginning to see how America did it and they noticed that if you set the common man up against the immigrant, you can fuck them over really easily. That is EXACTLY what is happening in Europe today. You better be careful.
Sadly I am stuck here. My daughter and her soon-to-be husband want to stay and my wife and I don’t want to move far away from her, so here we are. Fortunately our life is very good because we have invested well and have our own business. Life for most is nearly impossibly difficult here. Hopefully, one day my daughter will say, “pops, lets get the fuck out of here.” I’d be gone in three nano-seconds. That is how bad I feel this country has gotten.
What is the biggest scam you’ve ever seen?
One morning a couple of months ago, one of my employees called me in tears. She said that she had an emergency and she and her husband must urgently leave the job and drive to LA. I asked them what happened. They explained that a month ago they received a call from someone saying they won a prize – a set of furniture and to provide the address and personal information where the prize can be sent, which they did. (They are young recent immigrants from Cuba and never dealt with this kind of thing before.)
Subsequently, she received another call and was told that the prize was shipped but now she owed a $1,000 in shipping and handling fees. She responded that she doesn’t need the prize and hung up. They then received an official looking letter from a law firm in LA saying that they are being sued to recover the prize money. And now – harassing phone calls saying they will be kicked out of the country for fraud and all of their hard-earned money will be seized by the IRS.
That morning the attorney from LA called and said that they must urgently come up with the money or appear for a deposition. They were hyperventilating and crying. Even after I explained to them that it’s a scam, they wouldn’t calm down for the longest time. I showed them that a generic office building is located at that address, not a law firm. That a lawyer with that name is not licensed in California or anywhere. And I called back the number they provided which was disconnected.
I don’t know if this is the biggest scam, but to prey on new immigrants who don’t know anything and are very vulnerable, is the lowest of the low. Same kind of people were calling my elderly mother with similar offers and messages. Makes my blood boil.
America – the Shabby
My Ukrainian relatives were. When they arrived in Albuquerque via San Diego, having escaped the war, they were shocked by how shabby everything is. This is a thing, I think, to which most Americans are oblivious, since so few of us ever leave the country. My family were expecting a wealthy, modern society— what certain elements of our culture portray as a “shining city on a hill”. They used to think I was just “talking Ukraine up” for their benefit on my many visits, and I’m not suggesting that Ukraine is without deficits, but I suspect if Americans had seen what that country looked like prior to the invasions, they would want to know what the hell happened to us.
My family are grateful to be here, grateful to have gotten their little daughter away from the Russians, and worry constantly about the relations they left behind, some in occupied territory, but they still marvel at bad roads, the general absence of public transportation, antiquated technology, stodgy banking, low quality food, poor healthcare, and a shockingly indolent education industry.
Their best friends— and some of mine— ended up in Toronto. Comparing notes, my family often wonder if they would not have been better off in Canada…
Can you give some examples of revenge being served cold and sweet?
When I was in highschool, I had a girlfriend tell me that I was immature. I pointed out that I worked 5 days a week, as well as getting good grades. That I was never late for work, and always did my homework. That I was never in trouble with the police.
She asked what that had to do with maturity? I tried to explain, but she wasn’t believing anything I was saying.
Fast forward 25 years, and I run into her family at a wedding, we are sitting at the same table during the reception. She is lecturing her 17 year old son about sneaking alcohol, they get into an argument, and she says, why can’t you grow up? He bragged about being the most mature kid in his class. She said, you can’t hold a part time job, you are just barely passing your classes, and the police brought you home because you were drinking, and you were given a warning about being suspended from school.
He asked what that had to do with maturity? I spit out my drink, and started laughing. The mom looked at me, and asked what was so funny. Obviously not remembering our conversation from 25 years ago, but I had never forgotten it. I finally felt validated after 25 years.
Culture Shock America
Haha yes….
When I visited Los Angeles in the 80s. When I get to the customs guy, he asks his questions. Now I didn’t know this but they sometimes have random questions
This one says, in a deadpan voice “ Do you have any plans to overthrow the United States government?”
Of course, I snort with laughter, which really pisses the guy off
His next question is asked in a louder, rude tone, “Are you here for business or pleasure?”
Somewhat bewildered and increasingly pissed off, I quip back, “Ask your sister”. That earned me a thorough baggage check and a twenty minute delay. So much for petty officialdom
I picked up a Hertz rental car from the counter at the airport
I noticed it didn’t have much fuel in, so as I am coming out of the airport, there’s a gas station
As I pull in, this Latino guy comes over and with a thick Mexican accent says “What you want, Senór”
I ask him to fill it up and he says “Twenty Dollars. You pay me first. The people they fill up and drive away and they do not pay!”
So I give him twenty dollars. He says “I put this in the till, Senór”, and off he goes into a little building
Ten minutes later I am still sat there, so I get out and I too go into the little building. It’s empty apart from a bored looking white guy behind a counter
“Hey”, I say, “Where’s the Mexican forecourt attendant?”
So, a few days later, I’m driving around when this small pick up truck passes me. Mounted on the back is a big board and on that board is written “FOLLOW ME”
And Americans are all like “Hey, look at that, Honey, let’s follow it and see where it’s going”
The truck drives around for a while until it gets a tail of about twenty cars. Then it goes to a big shopping mall and parks up
And the Americans are “Hey, Honey, while we’re here, let’s do some shopping!!”
I doubt such a trawling tactic would work in my country, but you never know
So, in the evening back at my hotel, I’m watching TV
First up is a quiz show, the contestants are sitting in seats with a metal plate. They answer questions on various topics to build prize money. Pretty regular fare, right? But here’s the kicker, if they get three questions wrong in a row, they host presses a button and “BZZZ”, the contestant gets an electric shock that literally makes them leap out of their seat!
I flick the channel. It’s a nature documentary about the Wild Turkey. Seems like when George Washington was President, the national bird of America wasn’t going to be the Eagle, but the Turkey. Something to do with Thanksgiving, although how that would have looked on The Oval Office carpet clutching arrows and laurel leaves bothers me more than I can say
However, the narrator is going on Wild Turkey this, Wild Turkey that. Then he says, “Now we’ll talk to someone who encounters the Wild Turkey every day. One of the backwoods hunters of America”
So it cuts to this old dude with a check shirt, peaked cap and a face like Elmer Fudd, sitting behind a log. He has a pump action shotgun
The narrator says “Sir, can you tell us your thoughts on the Wild Turkey” and holds out the microphone
In the deepest, slow, hillbilly accent, the guy says, “Well, the American Wild Turkey is a truly noble bird. It is full of grace and beauty”
Then he says, “There’s a gobbler now”, and in a loud voice calls “GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE!!!”
This Turkey head pops out from behind a bush, and, “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!!”. The guys cuts loose with his gun and clouds of feathers fly up
And this is a nature documentary!
So, yes, America was an absolute culture shock to me. I did enjoy it though
Why Men Are Going Their Own Way (MGTOW Explained)
Take the time to watch.
There were only two things that shocked me when I came to the US.
the complete lack of maintenace for the infrastructure. I thought Americans loved to drive? So why not spend some money on maintenance. I’ve seen more potholes in 6 days in the Usa, than in my entire life in the Netherlands
the way police officers and other other uniformed people behaved. It already started on the airport at border security, all of the guys in uniform acted like they were the most important person in the world and we were just measly worms. Come on, I know you have a job to do, but why can’t you just try to be pollite? If Dutch police officers would behave like that, they would be considered unfit for the job.
Is it a dress code rule in county jail or federal prison to wear socks to bed?
You know, I can understand how one might get the impression that specific behaviors are mandated in jail or prison due to prisoners adhering so meticulously to certain practices.
But inmates have many self-imposed rules, and the sock thing is definitely one of these.
Nobody in their right mind wants to put bare foot to floor in lockup.
The only reasons I EVER removed my socks in county was —
…to put on a cleaner pair;
…to don shower shoes;
…to clip my toenails.
And that’s it.
Despite the CO’s wheeling in a janitorial cart once a day, and every con in the pod swabbing the day room floor, our individual cells (particularly the stainless steel toilet/sink combo), and the shower stall and additional open air communal head at the end of the second tier catwalk — despite all this — the surfaces in jail were never truly clean.
Jails and prisons are veritable petri dishes for tinea pedis, protozoa, cold/flu viruses and your everyday run-of-the-mill despair.
And in an environment where a relatively mundane illness can blossom into something life-threatening due to substandard healthcare, you do what you can to minimize contact.
And if that means wearing socks and marginalizing bunkies who refuse to get with the program, then so be it.
We called the few prisoners stupid enough to go barefoot in the pod “Jethros.”
And it wasn’t a term of endearment.
Nobody wanted a Jethro for a cellmate.
They usually ended up camping out on yoga mats under the corrugated steel stairway rather than getting a cellie.
So the sock thing, like the courtesy flush, was a rule of our very own.
And you broke it at your own peril.
America has gone INSANE!
I was working near Houston, Texas, from UK, when I took my wife to visit the town. We parked for a little while to study the city map when somone, we know not who, or why, let fly with an automatic rifle of some sort, so yes, that did shock us.
I was in Loisiana with a group of workmates when we were held up by a gang of young children, made strong by one of thier gang holding a small hand gun. One of my group was shot in the stomach, causing relatively minor injuries, but with a certain amount of trauma, so again, yes you can say we were shocked.
I was on holiday in Maine, near Bangor airport, when a stranger, from his demeanor I guess he was probably not of sound mind,walked past brandishing a large automtic pistol in his hand. By now I was more difficult to impress but my wife was certainly very impressed and quite shocked.
My son was mugged by a gang of five youths in Central Park, I think around 1990. It made your national news as my son is also a competent and very aggressive combatant. He layed into the gang, disaarmed them of their knives and holding two of them until the police got there. The rest of the gang got away with ten dollars. We were at home in England when we received a phone call from the New York police. They praised my lad but also asked us to tell my lad, that that is the way of things in this little backwater town of New York and it would be better if he had just handed over his cash to the thieves and let them escape.
You seem to have little idea just how insane you are all becoming.
Tell me, are Americans shocked when they first come the UK?
When you Accidentally Compromise every CPU on Earth
The Pizza Index.
A quick visit to the United States
The naive unworldly ignorance of most Americans and the poverty and squalor of weatherboard shotgun shacks and trailer parks living is shocking but it’s the absence of the freedoms from guns and gun crime that killed over 40,000 Americans last year and the absence of civilised universal health care that leaves 40,000,000 Americans with no health care that is really shocking.
Little things like never being able to pay the ticket price for goods and services, primitive banking and payment methods, being coerced into tipping underpaid serving and bar staff and not being able even to cross the road wherever it observed safe to do so is oppressive when used to the almost utopian freedoms Brits and most other Europeans enjoy.
How do Americans tolerate the fear that they or their children can be shot and killed at any moment and the terror of bankruptcy hangs over them if/when they or a family member becomes chronically ill? That is truly shocking!
If you’ve worked the same job in different countries, what was the country you’ve preferred doing that job in?
I have been a university lecturer in the following countries, and experienced it in the following ways:
Germany: A very pleasant experience. The students are mature and polite, and it felt like I was conversing with adults on an even, intellectual level. It’s nice to teach at university level in Germany. The colleagues also tend to be quite dignified and interesting. Hierarchies are steep. As a lecturer in Germany, you feel respected. Income is not very high though, after deductions. And one thing you will sometimes sense is a certain sense of depression. Students in Germany aren’t always happy people, and you will sometimes bump into some really dark and brooding characters.
England: A bit more demanding, also on your pedagogic abilities. British students appear much younger and less mature than German students. You will have plenty of discipline and disturbance issues, and motivation can be low. Still, there is respect for the lecturer, and I have always enjoyed my British colleagues. The research aspect is demanding. Much more so than in Germany, and one feels at times that the only way to earn one’s keep is by bringing in plenty of research funding. I often felt like a mixture of a high school teacher and a fund raiser while working in England. Pay is fairly good. I earned much better than in Germany, and generally felt that my work gave me more status.
New Zealand: Like in England, but with the exception that there was an unusual level of interpersonal friction. Students will openly challenge you and make life as hard as possible, and colleagues can dedicate themselves to strong and long lived animosities that will be carried out in eerily orchestrated mobbing scenarios. I have to say I have no interest whatsoever in working in New Zealand again. It nearly broke me. Pay is average. You will earn more as a courier driver or sales person. What is nice though is that you get a good amount of time off to enjoy New Zealand’s fantastic scenery.
France: Here, you really need to make sure you understand the institution’s philosophy first, and then sing from the same song sheet as everyone else. I found my work at French university highly inspiring, but also unbelievably demanding. The levels of discipline and integrity required are higher than elsewhere. I often say it, and will say it again: Living and working successfully in France requires a certain military spirit. Reporting orders, understanding hierarchies, and not getting into the mills of politics, are your daily life. Bottom line for me was, I learned more about my field teaching for a French university than I did studying in Germany, the US, and Canada. But watch out for the students. France is where they once beheaded their royals – that streak runs deep. Student complaints can occur with a vengeance. Pay was good. Better than in England.
China: Here, you have two choices. Either you go through your material in any way you please, or you make a pedagogic effort. In both cases, the students will be exquisitely polite and respectful, and assure you of their warmest feelings. Come examination time, the true picture emerges, and you will see just how successful your teaching methods were. Having said that, expectations in grades are very high, and the stigma of failing is enormous, so you will eventually relegate yourself to mark on the unrealistically high side, just to evade human drama. For me, teaching in China meant having to reinvent myself totally, because I wanted to make sure the high marks I pretty much had to give actually reflected reality. I have taught myself to teach properly only in China. Pay, by national standards, is on the higher side, but then, I was an expat.
India: If you are one of those idealists who dream about a career in teaching because you want to make a difference, and imagine your students will love you for your efforts, India is the place to be. My Indian students were my favourites. Nobody else is this eager to learn, displays more genuine interest and even enthusiasm, and connects more strongly on a personal basis than Indian students. Teaching in India really was absolutely brilliant, and I would do it again. Even though the management is often disgustingly top down, and will do whatever they like, such as ordering staff in for meetings on weekends, or the likes. It doesn’t matter. In India, you really experience genuine hunger for knowledge, and pleasure in making it accessible. I was on a lucrative expat contract.
Sweden: Very much like Germany. Swedish students are a mature, polite, and jolly bunch who see you as a human being and will do their best to keep things pleasant for everybody. The actual organisation though is much tighter than in Germany, while providing a fireworks of fun stuff on the side for staff and students alike. In Sweden, year schedules are ready and perfect for the entire academic year by August, and everything is timed and apportioned to the minute, with a great sense of timing and availability of resources. Colleagues are warm and lovely, and you will feel very comfortable with your workplace, which will be hugely more attractive and homely than in any of the other places. I can’t imagine a better place to be a university lecturer than Sweden if you simply want to enjoy life and do well. Pay is about the same as in France, which makes me a member of the somewhat more comfortable pay bracket in Sweden.
Coffee Liqueur Wings
Delicious
Coffee Liqueur Wings can be prepared a day ahead and can be reheated in the oven.
Ingredients
1 ounce butter
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
3/4 teaspoon chili powder
2 drops hot sauce
1 cup barbecue sauce
2 tablespoons honey
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 cup coffee liqueur
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
20 chicken wings
Instructions
In a 2 quart saucepan melt butter; sauté garlic and onion over medium heat for 3 minutes.
Add cumin and chili powder and cook, stirring constantly for 2 minutes.
Blend in coffee liqueur and cook to reduce liquid by one-half.
Stir in hot sauce, Worcestershire, barbecue sauce and salt. Simmer 5 minutes.
Remove from heat and add honey. Set aside and allow to cool.
Prepare chicken wings by removing and discarding the tips. Divide the wings in half at the remaining joint.
Marinate the wings in the cooked sauce for 1 hour at room temperature, or overnight in the refrigerator.
To cook, place the marinated wings on a broiler pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper and broil 5 minutes, turn and brush with the remaining sauce and bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes.
What these two simultaneous events indicate is that there is a growing disconnect between the military-industrial complex coupled with the ruling class on the one hand, and the wealthy elite on the other. The fact is that China has overwhelming support among US capitalists, who want nothing more than to be able to trade freely with China.
More specifically, this means that the sectors of the capitalist class who are not involved in arms-dealing are not interested in the escalation of tensions, nor war, with China. However, their interests are not being reflected in government. US foreign policy has become via the pull of the military-industrial complex, which drags the country’s resources into wars and conflicts around the world. It is a growing tumor of greed that is depriving society of the blood and oxygen it needs to sustain itself.
Only when the US ruling class accepts the fact that China is not going anywhere can it move forward as a country. Otherwise, the contradictions between reality and its unrealistic objectives will tear it apart.
It doesn’t take a communist to realize that all attempts at dismantling China will fail, and that by insisting on doing the impossible, more people are losing out than just the working class. If America wants even to preserve its prized capitalist system, to say nothing of socialism, it will have to accept these realities. The preservation of capitalism in America rests on win-win cooperation with China.
The above contradictions are a direct outcome of China’s four-dimensional chess strategy of using a relatively weak currency to create a trade surplus — causing Western capitalist nations to both rejoice at the untold amounts of profit they receive from an endless pool of cheap but reliable labor, and seethe at the fact that the investment they put into such labor is also going towards building a developed socialist country that will not bend toward their will.
All of this begs the question, why do the pro-China US capitalists not use their wealth and influence to form a party and run for office, defending their capital interests via preserving positive trade relations with China?
At this point in time, even the most exploitative form of capitalism would be a more rational social structure than what we have in the US, which is now a rogue state threatening global stability and quite literally all life on the planet. If there were even a bourgeoisie overthrow of the current regime, I would put my full support behind it, because at least it would eliminate some of the risks of direct military confrontation with unbeatable opponents and destruction of life on a scale rarely seen before.
Ironically, this might be the best chance we have at seeing a non-imperialist United States in this lifetime. And those of us who don’t want to see war with China should be the first to not only accept, but also encourage this reality in coming to fruition.
Boss Babe Horrors
How do sergeants/chiefs handle a soldier/marine/sailor/airman who has been accepted for officer candidate school but has not, as yet, left their unit?
I was in infantry AIT with an OCS guarantee at Ft DIX. I enlisted after receiving my draft notice only to get that OCS slot. I was ranked high up in my AIT class since I was trying hard to learn and physically prepare for OCS. Somebody in the command line made the decision to fill an open Drill Sergeant slot with me. They pinned E4 DI corporal stripes on me, gave me a smoky bear hat and gave me a heavy weapons platoon to train in Infantry AIT. Since I had run through regular infantry AIT doing heavy weapons gave me the opportunity to learn 81mm and 4.2 skills. I did get to go to OCS after one cycle as a drill corporal; I graduated near the top of my class so the time to learn the junior noncom skills definitely helped. After receiving my brass bars I was assigned =as a map reading instructor at Ft Benning. Four mounts later I was sent to Jungle training school in Panama. All this training set me up very well to command a recon unit in Vietnam in the 199 Light Infantry Brigade. I ended up serving 39 months instead of 24 which I would have if I had kept my head down as a draftee. I can’t say I would have chosen the Army as a recent college graduate in 1967 since the being drafted interrupted my professional career. I certainly learned leadership, personal confidence and other personal skills and I do feel that I earned my freedom as a citizen of the US of A. I earned two Bronze stars with V device, an ARCOM with V device and valor awards from the Vietnam units I served with. I certainly used my jungle training skills and my mortar, artillery and air support direction skills in jungle combat. i came out of Vietnam with a permanent hearing disability, minor shrapnel wounds and agent orange disability that the VA can treat but not cure.
After leaving the Army I was able to resume my professional career albeit with a different company from the one I was drafted out of. With an OCS guarantee in AIT, A simple decision made by some unknown commander to hold me back in AIT and make me a junior NCO drill corporal had a dramatic effect on my military career and later on my personal and professional life.
As a draftee right out of college I was angry at the draft but over the years I have come to the conclusion that some sort of two year compulsive service to our country should be required of all citizens.
The Wall #37 – When Women Regret Feminism | The Wall
What amuses you as a foreigner in India?
I’ve worked and lived in India for two years, and for me, India is one of the most amusing countries in the world, together with Japan, Great Britain, and Australia. There’s always something going on that makes me chuckle in these places.
In India, my list of amusements is this:
the way they speak; I don’t know why, but it immediately lifts my spirits to hear an Indian speak English. There is something very funny about it for me. Perhaps it’s because of the way they seemtospeakwithoutanybreakbetweenwords, roll the Rs, and choose quaint old-fashioned expressions while sounding somehow… cute. There is a trademark intonation that I have actually picked up myself while living there, and I fall back on it in some situations, which makes my wife laugh, because she used to work for a big, Indian company once, and it reminds her of the way the management spoke.
the way they decorate vehicles. I’m a car designer, from Germany, and they teach us to design vehicles to look serious, determined, premium… and then come the Indians and paint flower garlands and happy colours and religious symbols onto them. It’s like trying to design a fighter jet, and someone paints kittens and sun flowers on it. They just somehow aren’t with the program in that regard, which the hippie inside me secretly approves of.
their start-up spirit and professionalism with even the most modest of entrepreneurial endeavours. I’ve talked to guys selling street food in Bangalore from little carts, and from the terminology they were using, you might have thought they owned a supermarket chain with car washes.
music videos in Hindi where you get some gent singing in a landscape, and before you know it, there comes a whole army of brightly dressed ladies and whirls through the background in flowing dresses, performing perfectly synchronized movements. It’s just not something we see in the west, where music videos are mostly about some somber individual glowering at something unseen in mysterious surroundings.
the way they initiate conversations. It was an absolute classic for me to be sitting in the university canteen with a plate of chana masala and some roti, and here comes a student and sits next to me and asks brightly, “are you a foreigner, sir?” To which I was sometimes tempted to answer “no, silly, haven’t you seen how many blond, blue eyed Indians with Canadian/ German accents there are?” It was of course clear to them that I wasn’t a local, but they still managed to be diplomatic even with such a blunt question.
I came to India from my expat posting in China on a French contract, and it was a huge sigh of relief for me to come to India, even though I really enjoyed China. I felt somehow immediately at home in India, partly because everyone spoke English, and partly because of something else that I can’t quite place.
A Naadi reader told me in Bangalore once that I had been an Indian in a previous life, and I could absolutely see that. A friend of mine in Bangalore says she believes I’m a “closet Indian”.
I certainly had a great time in India in this life. I
He’s special
Chicken Wings in Coke
230202 Coca Cola Chicken Wings 1
Ingredients
4 pounds chicken wings
1 (10 ounce) can Coca-Cola
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Instructions
Place the chicken in a shallow casserole.
Sprinkle with the garlic and onion powder.
Combine the Coke with the sugar and soy sauce and pour over the chicken.
Slow bake the chicken at 325 degrees F for 3 to 4 hours until liquid has evaporated and becomes sticky.
Is it true that Ukraine is losing the war? How when they possess 90% of Ukraine?
Russia’s overall objectives were, are, and will remain securing the Donbass and Crimea.
When they initially invaded in the north, east, and south, the intent was to force Ukraine forces to draw back from the Donbass. This part of the initial invasion was a huge success, despite what the USuk’s CIA and MI6 propaganda told you (and misinformed you).
To invade, take and hold even half of Ukraine, Russia would have needed far more forces than the initial 70,000 that they used. They used armor and mechanized infantry to take aggressive positions in hopes that it would force Ukraine to sue for a quick peace and settlement.
Initially, even that part of the bold Russian actions seemed to be a huge success. Then Ukraine asked for negotiations, and the results were to demand Russia to move back its forces to show a willingness to negotiate and not just use the negotiations as a ruse. Russia complied somewhat, but this only led to Ukraine doing exactly what they accused Russia of doing—aggressively counter-attacking and sabotaging the peace negotiations.
At that point, relatively small expeditionary Russian forces were dangerously overextended, so they doubled down on their original plans. Pull back, consolidate, and secure the Donbass and Crimea.
In order to take cities like Kharkov and Kherson, Russian forces will have to destroy much of these cities—unless Ukraine forces flee from those cities. The Ukraine strategy has been to put much of its military right in the cities in order to protect the forces because, for the most part, Russian forces have refrained from bombing them. After all, if the cities are part of the objective, you really don’t want to kill their largely Russian populations or destroy the buildings. It’s Russia that will have to pay for the reconstruction of E. Ukraine.
It took Russia two years to build up the defense of the Donbass and Crimea regions to the point where they can then use them as bases for going on the offensive to take the rest of the Donbass. That point has been reached, and now Ukraine is losing badly. Basically, Russia is using a much smaller force to neutralize Ukraine’s much larger army in E Ukraine.
When a client can’t get it up :/
If you are trapped in the desert with only a car that is broken down, how could you survive?
Set one of your tires on fire. They produce an inky black smoke that will be visible for miles. Also, they burn for a really long time too.
main qimg 80ff931a86b4af7941400a7d7ef0576d lq
When a tire field catches fire it produces a smokestack that is visible for huge distances. And these tire fires are actually really difficult to put out too because they reignite themselves from within due to their composition.
I’d space out when you burn each tire though. The rescue search might not start until after you’ve been missing for a while.
Also — don’t leave your car — that is usually how people die. Too often, a rescue team gets to a car only to find it is empty.
Being lost in the desert is no bueno (not good). It reminds me of that one Far Side comic:
main qimg 99518d0a902216d964c08134642bc6f2 pjlq
Creepy
The USA is on a sled going down hill
Ohh yes, when we go for first time and ever after.
Of course, so called “USA” is not a uniform place. Its made up of thousands of counties, each with its own peculiarities and distinct characteristics.
What is shared by all is the hypocritical duality of prudishness and deep religiousness with improper sexual behavior and love and care for the needed.
You frown about pictures showing woman’s nipples or prohibit showing universal masterpieces of art because they show penises, but accept and make president of a guy who boasts on TV that he can and does grab ladies genitals just because he is rich and powerful.
You boast of your country been the “safest” in the world, yet you have to own and wear and use arms to defend your selves. And enjoy the highest rate of killings by firearms of all what you call the first world counties.
You say you believe in the teachings of Jesus, basically to care for thy neighbor when he is in need and to share bread and water with the hungry and thirsty, but you refuse the idea of universal health care to cover thy neighbor in need.
You say you believe in paying workers fair and decent salaries, but waiters need the tips because they are not covered by a basic salary nor any kind of health care or social net.
You believe that the almighty US dollar can buy everything and that quantity prevails over quality but you think you can teach other how to behave.
And yes, we are shocked by the very high rate of really obese people in a country that boasts the best meat, vegetables, bread and coffee in the world. Are they? All I know is that most of USA produce is banned in the EU for not meeting our health and sanitary standards.
I’m sure you are also shocked when you come to Europe.
The USA is fucked up
Many years ago I was staying at a budget hotel in Boston and I asked the clerk if there was a corner store nearby and she said that there was a shuttle service that would get me to a local mall in about fifteen minutes. When I got to my room I realised that I could see a mall I could walk to in a couple of minutes from my window. So I grabbed my backpack and started walking, got about half way there and a cop car appeared from no where, screeched to a halt and two incredibly aggressive cops hopped out demanding to know what I thought I was doing. They were 100% convinced that I was up to no good because they just didn’t believe that anyone would walk for five minutes instead of sitting on a bus for fifteen.
Edit for the grumpy folk: I wasn’t staying down town, couldn’t afford that. I was in an area that was mostly industrial with the sort of budget hotels workers stay in. No idea what you guys think of as “budget” but 25 years ago my whole stay cost less than one night down town, even with travel costs
What’s the hardest thing about being a guy?
I am answering this on behalf of my husband.
Incident –
My husband was working with a restaurant. He was in the kitchen section of the restaurant.
There was a woman in her mid thirties who worked there. She was like my husband’s Elder sister.
My husband then switched the job as the pay was low.
After he switched, the owner started calling him as he had no one to work. My husband had given him 2 months notice.
Then one day he accused my husband as a pervert. And he told him that the woman who works there complained about my husband touching his private parts while at work.
My husband couldn’t speak and came to me, hugged and started crying hysterically.
He never cries.
I asked him and he told me everything.
I understood what happened. My husband had a bacterial infection on that area when he was younger.
He gets itching when there is high temperature. When he used to work there, due to stove he got that itching and his hand went there.
It’s a medical condition. He was helpless.
I straight away called that lady to clarify.
She told me that she didn’t complain, but the owner modified the truth to abuse my husband put allegation.
That night she called my husband and apologised.
The hardest part of being a guy is even if he doesn’t mean anything vulgar in actions, he can’t clarify with a female.
Thanks
Riya
PS – please share the answer because I don’t think anyone should suffer from this type of judgemental attitude.
Fathers are fucked
To those of you who have been incarcerated, who was the strangest inmate you ever encountered, and what eventually became of him or her?
There was this guy who we will call Bob. ( Not his real Name). He always looked at people with a cold stare. He rarely talked and never smiled . One day i went to chow because the meal wasn’t that bad. He sat down opposite of me . Others that were going to sit with me sat at the next table . Bob stared at me as he ate. Never took his eyes off me , never looked at his plate or looked around . Just stared at me . This is the way he did everyone but it was my first encounter that close to him My workout partner said “Hey Harve . come over with us. “ I wanted to but I also felt if I moved he would think he intimidated me. And to be honest I was nervous. So I just stared back.
A couple years later I saw him in the dog program and he was outside with a dog. He was smiling and laughing as he talked to the dog. I walked up and asked if I could pet the dog and he said with a big smile “Sure” I told him that it was the first time I ever saw him smile and asked what made him so happy. He basically told me the dog made him happy and that being in the dog program gave him purpose. I already knew the dog program was a good program but this definitely confirmed it
Creepy and cringe
Have you ever walked out of a movie theater early over a feature movie that you simply could not continue to sit through? If so, what was the movie?
THIS abomination:
https://youtu.be/Nk3ZN3dSeDk
It was a gruelingly hot summer day. Mercury was spurting from the top of thermometers, the heat was rising in great waves from the streets, eggs were frying on the sidewalks, and car radiators were spewing great clouds of hissing steam into the air.
Going to an air conditioned movie theater seemed a good idea, to me, a lad of 15, wandering aimlessly on the streets of my miasmic little town, trapped -like a rat- in the maze of my fetid adolescence. ANYTHING would be better than this ungodly, brutal, unceasing heat.
So I paid my 50 cents and entered the dark and cool cavern of the theatre. I didn’t care what the movie was; anything -anything at all- would be better than the cloying, penetrating heat.
Twenty minutes later, I was on the street, again. Anything -anything, I say- would be better than that insipid, brain dead, gratuitous appeal to my adolescent fantasies: Beach Blanket Bingo. God, help me.
And there, across the street, was a dog, panting heavily and licking itself in that special way that only dogs can do. A stranger approached the theatre entrance, and paused to ask me if the movie was any good.
“No,” I said, “Don’t waste your money. That dog over there is better entertainment.”
I pointed at the mutt. “Sure wish I could do that…”
“That dog’d bite you,” the man replied, and disappeared into the movie.
I turned to take the long walk home, in the searing heat.
The United States is INSANE
I was working near Houston, Texas, from UK, when I took my wife to visit the town. We parked for a little while to study the city map when somone, we know not who, or why, let fly with an automatic rifle of some sort, so yes, that did shock us.
I was in Loisiana with a group of workmates when we were held up by a gang of young children, made strong by one of thier gang holding a small hand gun. One of my group was shot in the stomach, causing relatively minor injuries, but with a certain amount of trauma, so again, yes you can say we were shocked.
I was on holiday in Maine, near Bangor airport, when a stranger, from his demeanor I guess he was probably not of sound mind,walked past brandishing a large automtic pistol in his hand. By now I was more difficult to impress but my wife was certainly very impressed and quite shocked.
My son was mugged by a gang of five youths in Central Park, I think around 1990. It made your national news as my son is also a competent and very aggressive combatant. He layed into the gang, disaarmed them of their knives and holding two of them until the police got there. The rest of the gang got away with ten dollars. We were at home in England when we received a phone call from the New York police. They praised my lad but also asked us to tell my lad, that that is the way of things in this little backwater town of New York and it would be better if he had just handed over his cash to the thieves and let them escape.
You seem to have little idea just how insane you are all becoming.
Tell me, are Americans shocked when they first come the UK?
Delusional ONLYFANS WOMAN THINK Men Want Wife Her Up
No wonder no guys want them…
Welcome to America!
Shocked doesn’t quite cover it. Appalled is closer.
The ‘welcome’ at the airport quite takes my breath away. It seems to be assumed that everyone is a terrorist and should be treated like one. The wait was also very long, it isn’t like that in Europe. We should start treating Americans in the same way so they understand how unacceptable it is.
All taxi rides I’ve had remind me of Grand Theft Auto. It seems to be necessary either to be accelerating or braking hard and changing lanes harshly.
The tipping culture is mad, why can’t you just pay the staff a salary and show real prices? Make tips mean something so that they really do reward someone for exceptional service.
prices in shops are strange. The price on the shelf isn’t what you pay because it doesn’t include taxes. That needs to be sorted out!
People seem to be judged by how rich they are, richer people receive better service. Probably due to the tipping culture. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of money, culture and sex.
I have been a few times but won’t return willingly.
i could go on, but I’ve said enough.
Creole Chicken Wings with Peach Mustard Sauce
shutterstock 50480857
Yield: 4 entree or 8 appetizer servings
Ingredients
Wings
3 pounds chicken wings
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons dry mustard
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup lemon juice
Peach Mustard Sauce
1/2 cup peach jam
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons pimento, diced
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Instructions
Wings
Cut tips off wings; reserve for stock.
In small bowl, stir together garlic, mustard, paprika, thyme, sugar, cayenne, salt and black pepper; blend in lemon juice to make paste.
Using pastry brush, brush paste over wings.
Arrange wings, meaty side down, on lightly greased foil-lined baking sheets. Let stand for 30 minutes at room temperature.
Bake at 475 degrees F for 15 minutes; turn wings over and bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until brown, crisp and no longer pink inside.
Peach Mustard Sauce
In saucepan, melt jam over low heat; stir in mustard, pimiento and vinegar. Serve separately for dipping.
Welcome to the USA more…
I’ve been on holiday in the states a few times. «shocked» is perhaps not the word I’d use, but a few things was a very new experience for me:
Airport customs immigration: standing hours in line just to show my passport and answering a random questions like «what’s the purpose of your visit» or «where are you staying». I’ve traveled all over the world and never had to wait so long at customs as I’ve done in the US.
Prices in stores not including taxes. This was quite strange for me. I’d pick out a 2 dollar item and take it to be register, only for them to ask me for 2.5 dollars. This seems absolutely absurd to anyone who’s grown up in Europe. In stores here, the price on the shelf is the price you pay. You have to pay the taxes anyway, so there’s no reason whatsoever to exclude them from the price on the shelf
TV commercial breaks: When watching american shows I’ve always wondered why they so often show the logo and fade to black. Untill I visited the states, that is. They have a commercial break every 7 minutes. It’s absolutely outrageous. In the states it takes 1 hour of TV to show a 30 minute show. For someone who’s used to 22-min shows taking 30 mins and 45 min shows taking 1 hour, this is truly jarring.
Tipping: In restaurants in the US there’s a general expectation to tip generously. This is also quite a foreign to a Norwegian. We only tip if it the service, food and restaurant were all truly above and beyond exceptional, or if you’re a rich guy feeling generous. If for some strange reason we’re paying cash we might tip a little bit to ease the rounding-up, but virtually every single transaction in norway happens by credit- or debitcard, so this isn’t common. Restaurants pay their employees a living wage, and tipping is meant as something extra for something extra great, not just paying someone for doing their job.
USA stories
Well, my first trip (of many) to the US was to LA. Our travel company had us booked into a hotel near to LAX. After checking in, we were escorted across the parking lot to our room by a security guard carrying a rifle. That was a shock!
Other shocking things for me:
1. Lack of exercise and outrageous unhealthy food portions. No wonder the US is the most obese country in the developed world with an obesity rate in excess of 42%.
2. People in Southern California that don’t speak English.
3. The levels of poverty in many of the cities.
4. Your banking system is about 30 years behind the rest of the developed world. (Thankfully, your phone system has caught up more recently).
5. Poor maintenance of infrastructure – ie Roads and Bridges.
6. The News is mostly focussed on local matters – leaving many US citizens with a lack of understanding of global issues.
7. A total misbelief by many US citizens that the rest of the world is somehow behind and in awe of the US.
Edit: It seems that some people here cannot accept reality. In particular, it seems that my experience of being escorted across the parking lot of a hotel near LAX (back in the early 1980’s) can’t possibly have happened! Well, I am very sorry to advise that it really did! If you would like to fund a lie deter test, I will happily oblige on the basis of whoever is wrong, pays the other party $1M.
My original source of the obesity rate was via a yahoo page stating it was 70%, but others have pointed out that according to the WHO, it’s 42%, so I’ve updated it. The main point, still stands.
Women Hitting The Wall #37 – When Women Regret Feminism | The Wall
This is stunning, and so sad.
America simply is in the gutter
Not a European, but an Australian.
I have visited the USA three times, 1998, 2018 and 2022.
In 1998 it seemed fairly bright and shiny, but you didn’t need to get far off the main roads for it to become dirty and ominous. This was LA. The food serving sizes were ridiculously large, and of average quality; we booked a reasonably fancy restaurant once, and I think we paid for food quality, but not much else. The tipping culture is positively feudal. And we couldn’t understand why our credit cards disappeared somewhere at restaurants before coming back with the old carbon form. The people were uniformly cheerful and friendly, that was their default, apart from anyone in a uniform, whose default was stern and unforgiving.
Fast forward 20 years. In Australia, when you pay at a restaurant, if you’re not paying cash they bring the electronic payment machine out to your table and you can tap or insert your card and, if you’ve set up your card to require a PIN, you enter it. In LA again in 2018, payment customs haven’t changed, though it’s clear that there’s an electronic machine back there because they don’t bring out the old carbon slip when they return your card, it’s been printed by a machine. But honestly, if someone took your card out of your sight in Australia, you would strongly suspect they were secretly swiping it for some form of fraud. In other respects, the place was dirtier and in higher disrepair; the decrepitude was on main street. The people were as friendly, but not as automatically forthcoming. And the people in uniforms were nastier as their default.
We had a pretty nice time, then, and again in 2022, but the USA is a place where you really need to be on guard, and heaven forbid you have an encounter with law enforcement, because they take the “enforcement” part into the physical realm far faster than police in Australia or Europe would. The USA, at first hand, is not the land of milk and honey that its citizens would have you believe it is. I’m sure it’s possible to live a happy and peaceful life there, clearly millions do. But the concessions to personal freedom and safety required to do so, and the adoption of so many delusions (of superiority in every field of endeavour) necessary to live that life, are not worth it.
And THAT is the most shocking thing to us about visiting the USA: that those smiling, friendly people are happy living in an increasingly backward, crumbling country because they have been told, since birth, that everywhere else is worse (but it’s phrased as “this place is the best”). And that simply isn’t true.
What did you notice during an interview that made you not want the job?
Filled out an application to work at an airport gift shop. Went to the airport for an interview and got to the point for a drug screen, no problem. Got through that part and received the call that I was hired. I was to show up on Monday morning in khaki pants, a white polo shirt, and comfy shoes. I arrived on time and had to fill out all of the paperwork for taxes, etc. Then I got the uniform ‘receipt” that I was to sign that I had been given two uniform shirts and that I would provide the proper khaki slacks or skirt. AND if I quit or was let go within 90 days, my final paycheck would be deducted $125 for the uniform shirts. What?? No way I was signing that paper work. First of all, I had NOT be given anything and wasn’t going to find out later they didn’t have my size or I should wear my own shirt until more came in – whatever. Nothing had been said prior to this about the uniform policy. I placed my clip board on the chair and went to the restroom to figure this out and calm down a bit. Finally, went back to the office and told them I was sick (pretty much was at how they treat their employees) and had to go home. On my way, received a call from another place I had applied and had an interview the next day with a company who was upfront and did not try to screw new employees.
What surprised you about the USA?
Shocked doesn’t quite cover it. Appalled is closer. The ‘welcome’ at the airport quite takes my breath away. It seems to be assumed that everyone is a terrorist and should be treated like one. The wait was also very long, it isn’t like that in Europe. We should start treating Americans in the same way so they understand how unacceptable it is.
All taxi rides I’ve had remind me of Grand Theft Auto. It seems to be necessary either to be accelerating or braking hard and changing lanes harshly.
The tipping culture is mad, why can’t you just pay the staff a salary and show real prices? Make tips mean something so that they really do reward someone for exceptional service.
prices in shops are strange. The price on the shelf isn’t what you pay because it doesn’t include taxes. That needs to be sorted out!
People seem to be judged by how rich they are, richer people receive better service. Probably due to the tipping culture. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of money, culture and sex.
I have been a few times but won’t return willingly.
i could go on, but I’ve said enough.
Thanks for all of the upvotes ! You have probably noticed that I have turned off comments because not everyone was playing nicely.
UK citizen discusses the United States
I’ll confess that I’ve only visited the USA a single time, back in 1993. We went to New York for our honeymoon.
Generally, I found New York to be quite grimy and also very fast paced. The only thing that truly surprised me was the television service.
In the UK, believe it or not (for any fellow Brits) we show seven minutes of commercials per hour on our commercial channels. (The BBC does not show commercials other than trailers for upcoming shows on its own network.)
We didn’t plan to watch much television, but on the night we arrived after our flight, we were quite tired and wanted to sit down quietly and relax for a bit.
I believe the show we saw was Family Feud (which we know as Family Fortunes in the UK). I may be exaggerating, but this is how it seemed:
…
Theme music, introduction of host.
Commercial break.
Introduction of each family.
Commercial break.
First question. Winner chooses whether to play or pass.
Commercial break.
Rest of winner’s family answer the question.
Commercial break.
Opposing family try to complete the board.
Commercial break.
Second question. Winner chooses whether to play or pass.
Commercial break.
Winner’s family answer the question.
Commercial break.
Opposing family attempt to complete the board.
Commercial break.
Third, fourth, and fifth question as above. Winning family announced.
Commercial break.
Head-to-head player one answers the final questions.
Commercial break.
Head-to-head player two answers the same questions.
Commercial break.
Player two’s answers checked, revealing whether the family have passed the number of points to win the big prize of a car, sponsored by NYC Motors. Keys to the car given to family.
Commercial break.
Host thanks you for watching, credits roll.
Commercial break.
…
If I tell you that the original version of Family Fortunes in the UK which ran from 1980 to 2002 was a half hour show – with a single commercial break, you’ll understand why the USA version seemed overly heavy with commercials. You stretched a half hour show to what seemed like two hours. (In fairness, in 2006 when Family Fortunes was revived in the UK, we managed to string it out to a full hour per show.)
For reference, when 24 starring Keifer Sutherland was broadcast in the UK on our non-commercial channel BBC2, it ran for 40–41 minutes per episode. That kinda ruined the “each episode covers an hour” premise of the show.
These days, I never watch commercial TV live.
I record everything and then fast forward through the breaks. Television advertising used to be rather an art form in the UK – prizes were awarded for the year’s best campaign. These days, with so many channels available, advertisers spend little money on creating their ads and they’re not worth watching. Life is too short for commercial breaks.
Men are no longer seeking relationships of any kind & people are in DENIAL!
Major changed to the Western society is in process. Japan was the “canary in the coal mine”, and Holy Fuck! Listen and watch this video.
Great video
So many average guys are MGTOW, and don’t even know what the term means.
Over Chinese New Year, I (and my family) went up North to Wenzhou to spend a week with relatives.
There, we did the typical orgy of food, food, and more food in these large lavish mega-meals, and drank and drank and drank… hard, hard, hard (and expensive) alcohol.
“White Wine”
One of the drinks wasn’t all that expensive.
I mean, I am drinking the really good, and the really expensive stuff. But here, I found a reasonable drink that wasn’t expensive at all.
And when I mean expensive, I am talking about 10,000 RMB a bottle, this one was only a mere 100 RMB.
And It tasted all right, so I liked it.
I stuff I drank was good.
Smooth to drink. Not too hard on the gullet, and the next day you feel totally normal.
So, when we went back home to Zhuhai, I went to a local “mom and pop” grocery store and found the bottle. Bought it.
Later on the week, I drank some.
Yuck!
*Spit all over the monitor*
Gosh! It was like drinking gravel. Horrible stuff.
Ta Ma Da Guo Shi!
(Fucking Dog Shit)
Fake
But I paid for it, and so I drank it all.
*sigh*
…
A few weeks later, I was talking to my Chief Engineer about this event. And he wanted to see a picture of the stuff, so my wife took a wechat and they conversed…. and sure as shit. The stuff was fake.
Now…
The bottle and everything seemingly was identical to the real stuff that I drank in Wenzhou.
But one character was slightly changed. A minor change. I didn’t notice.
In Chinese, one line in a character can make a HUGE difference in meaning.
not the same
That one “cheat” really pissed me off.
But there’s many others….
In total forty-seven suspects have been arrested over a sham Moutai and Wuliangye baijiu scam, Thirty staff members from local bars and hotels were also involved. Said Shanghai police.
The hotel and bar workers collected empty baijiu bottles from their customers and passed them on to the other gang members who refilled them with cheap, inferior liquor. If the baijiu the gang had sold had been genuine it is estimated it would have been worth over sixty million yuan or eight point five million U.S. Dollars.
The police in Songjiang district said the investigation started in may, after solving a related case also involving fake baijiu. The fakes in the initial case came from the same source and the packaging resembled genuine bottles.
Police confirmed that the fake baijiu was produced in Shanghai, and the lead suspect in the case had even opened a shop to sell the bogus spirit.
The suspects were caught in locations throughout Shanghai between August and October. The police found two thousand three hundred full bottles of bogus baijiu as well as eight hundred empty bottles.
Eight of the suspects have been arrested for allegedly infringing registered brands, nine more are under detention and thirty others have been bailed.
I’ll tell you what!
I’ll never drink that gravel ever again. it’s horrible stuff.
Poison really.
Check the characters before buying the poison.
Today…
Pineapple Brown Sugar Ham
This is one of my favorite ways to prepare a spiral ham. It is SO delicious!
brown sugar pinepple glazed ham recipe 7 of 8 edited 1
Ingredients
1 pre-cooked spiral ham, bone-in or boneless, either will work
3 1/2 cups brown sugar, divided use
1/2 cup honey
1 (20 ounce) can pineapple tidbits, undrained*
Instructions
Cover the bottom of a large slow cooker with 2 cups brown sugar.
Place ham on top of the brown sugar, opening the slices slightly with your fingers.
Evenly pour the honey over the ham.
Add the pineapple around the sides (with the juice) and some on top.
Top with the remaining 1 1/2 cups brown sugar, making sure it is evenly distributed over the entire top of the ham.
Cover and cook on LOW for 3 1/2 to 4 hours.
Notes
* I chop these up a little more if they are large.
Gun owners who have defensively shot someone; what happened and what was the aftermath of the situation?
I once woke up to the sound of my apartment door being forced open and was greeted by two gang-bangers, each about twice my size and with that crazed look of someone high on something or another. Thankfully, my loaded Beretta was on my nightstand, because there was no way I’d ever fight these two off.
I wish I could say that I dispatched them with a single shot as in some of the other answers, but in the emotion of the moment, I did what I was taught and just kept pulling the trigger until the threat stopped. I fired 15 shots, and I later found out that 8 hit their target and the thug closest to me died right at the foot of my bed.
I don’t recall specifically aiming at him, but it seemed that one of my strays managed to catch his accomplice in the back of the shoulder – he had the good sense to run.
The fellow that was killed had a long criminal history that included gang activity, assault of a police officer and sexual assault charges. He carried a bag with a roll of duct tape and about four feet of chain, and on his person he had a switchblade, some meth and a .22 revolver in his pants that he thankfully didn’t get the chance to use.
The fellow that ran was later tracked down in a local hospital, arrested and released on bail. He hasn’t been seen since, so far as I know. He was linked to the crime because the machete he dropped inside my door had his fingerprints and blood on it.
The thing most don’t realize is that the shooting was just the beginning of a special kind of hell that had my life upside down for a long time.
My apartment went from being my home to being a crime scene, and it took me weeks to get back in. As you might imagine, it was a mess, and to top it all off, my landlord evicted me, keeping my security deposit to help pay for some of the damage to my apartment. At that stage of my life, I didn’t have a lot of money, so day to day life became really difficult…on top of everything else, I had to find a second job to deal with the extra expenses.
Even though these were some really bad dudes, I felt that detectives were somehow searching for a reason to charge me with some sort of crime, and their investigation seemed to drag on for several months before I was finally cleared of all wrongdoing. I was called in for questioning at least five times, repeating my story over and over again. The day I was exonerated, I left the state and haven’t looked back.
The family of the deceased hired an attorney and tried to sue me in civil court for the wrongful death of their relative. They had no chance, but it did add up to more attorney fees, more depositions, more living in limbo not knowing what would come next.
Overall, it was the worst time of my life. On top of all the other expenses, my attorney took every cent of my savings I had put away (which wasn’t much!).
Intellectually, I know I killed a seriously bad guy, but he was just a faceless stranger to me. Taking a human life is a hard thing to live with, and I was in therapy for quite a while to deal with it. For years, I suffered with insomnia, and when I could sleep, I’d often wake up covered in sweat and screaming for help.
Add to this the fear that comes with living through an event like this. I lived in constant fear that either that second thug would hunt me down, or someone else in their gang would. Clearly, I wasn’t that hard to find…for a while, one of the deceased’s family members were sending me photos of his two-year old little girl with captions like “you made her an orphan”.
I can imagine no greater nightmare, except the one that would have resulted if I hadn’t been able to defend myself that night.
EDIT: Just wanted to clarify that I’m a woman, and I was a single twenty-something girl when this happened. Even though it was a long time ago, I still feel uncomfortable sharing too many details, but when I answered anonymously, I realized people wouldn’t have the complete picture.
EDIT2:
Never expected my story to be so widely shared…wanted to clarify a few small things I read in some of the comments.
First, I didn’t mean to disparage the police and I’m sorry if my story comes off that way…I have a few relatives in law enforcement, and I generally have nothing but respect for cops. I’ve never really had any encounters with the police beyond getting a traffic ticket, so it was a shock to be called in on five separate occasions for questioning. I guess it also bothered me that at a time when I was struggling to make ends meet, every questioning meant I had to pay my lawyer a little more…I had so many better uses for the $500 each of these appearances ended up costing me, and it was frustrating that I couldn’t get any answers out of the police – even simple things like “am I in any trouble?”.
The city where this occurred was also not the most efficient in terms of administration and a lot of my issues were more with the bureaucracy rather than the individual detectives. More than once, my lawyer would try to get various police reports and other data we were entitled to, and it would usually take multiple requests before we’d even get a response out of them. This definitely made it seem that they were dragging their heels and not being forthcoming with me – and of course, there was the issue that every time they didn’t respond, the meter on my attorney ticked up again. All this together definitely made me feel more like a suspect than a victim.
Next, I noticed a batch of comments by an outspoken individual that seems to think my story is fiction. Fine – I don’t really care what this person or anyone else thinks, and for those of you that need to cling to the belief things like this don’t happen, be my guest.
I’m totally thankful for most of the kind words otherwise, and grateful to those that stood up to the naysayer on my behalf. Perhaps chivalry isn’t dead afterall… 🙂
I freely admit that I leave out a good many details about the shooting – that’s intentional, as there’s only so much I can share comfortably. There are plenty of other details that I’ll probably never be able to discuss, even anonymously. Maybe someday I’ll meet my Lancelot and be able to open up to him, but even that’s doubtful.
Understand I don’t share my story for pity, but mainly because it’s therapeutic for me. It’s been several years and to this day, one of my remaining issues is that I can’t talk about it in detail face to face with anyone – not even my parents and those that would be completely understanding and supportive. In therapy, I used to have to write out my thoughts and feelings to share them with the therapist because there are certain things I just can’t verbalize…I see it in my head in vivid detail, but my mouth opens and words just don’t come out. That’s the degree of trauma that’s involved.
Instead, I write anonymously in the hope that sharing my story eventually eases the scars…if others get anything out of hearing it, great.
Last point I wanted to share is that I’m in a much better place today than before. I live in a low-crime, gun-friendly state now, and most of my money issues are behind me…in a way, the shooting caused me to bury myself in my career, and the reward for that is that I’m enjoying a comfortable life now.
One other thing that helped me was immersing myself in physical activity. I run 30 miles a week, I’ve taken a lot of self-defense and martial arts training, and my shooting skills have improved tremendously from my regular range time. I’m still single except for a pair of Bullmastiffs that are my constant companions and the loves of my life, and when I think back to my nightmare, I believe I’ve come further than I thought possible.
Was Donald Trump a more likeable person in his younger years?
I met him several times in his late 30s and early 40s. He was “not” likable then.
I was an Eastern Air Lines pilot who mostly flew the Eastern Shuttle between Washington and New York. Over the years, that service carried just about everyone famous you could name.
No matter how “big” they were, with only two exceptions, they all came on board just like regular people, took their seats, asked nothing of us, said little (other than niceties), and then left.
One of those exceptions was Trump, who swooped into the cabin as if everyone who laid eyes on him would relish the rest of their lives being able to say they saw him in person.
There were lots of eye rolls because probably half the people on any given flight were well-off New Yorkers who knew all about him.
He wanted to know where to sit as if there was some special seat for people as magnificent as him.
The flight attendants were always nice, but I wanted them to say, “Well, how about those two seats in the seventh row? Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger sat there on the way up.” Or maybe, “How about that seat in the fifth row? Ronald Reagan sat in it two days ago. Or over there, fourth row, Robert Redford sat there this morning. None of them made a show of it, you pompous jerk. Just sit down, shut up, and keep your feet off the seat.”
But his schtick worked for him because a good con man can always dupe a huge percentage of people.
It’s been deeply disheartening to learn that about 40% of my fellow citizens are so gullible. Or just stupid.
If his rabid supporters met Trump in any regular context—like if he were a new hire at their company or a new neighbor—they would hate him. They would laugh him right out of the room and cheer when he left.
He’s a good con man.
My coworker treats me indifferently but speaks highly and good about me to others, what does it mean?
This could have been me nearly 50 years ago! LOL I worked with a woman who, although she wasn’t my boss or supervisor knew everything there was to know about our department. She was bossy and demanding. And when she asked you to do something it always sounded like an order. My favorite days to work were her days off and on Tues morning when she didn’t start until noon.
I was in the break room 1 day along with 2 older women (my nemesis’ age) from the department across from ours. One of them said something about how much Peggy loved me.
I corrected them about their misunderstanding.
They both declared that I was completely mistaken. She ranted about how wonderful I was, what a hard worker, willing learn, willing to dust and clean and do the yucky stuff and good with the customers.
I was stunned. Then I began to pay attention to how Peggy spoke to other people. Our boss. Our boss’ boss. Her customers who absolutely adored her – she spoke to them all exactly as she spoke to me. Once I noticed that, our relationship completely changed. I loved working with and learning from her.
I took a job in another country, then married and moved to another. Came back with my husband and after nearly 10 years went back to work in the same department. Peggy was still there. I worked there for a couple of years and in that time, not a day went by that she didn’t say to me, “Dear, it’s so nice to have you back.”
I know my story is the exception and not the rule, but sometimes we can take offense were none was meant to be given.
What happened at a Christmas gathering or dinner that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me?”
My mother, husband, and I combined households many years ago, and we all lived together until her death. We would trade off hosting family holiday dinners with my aunt and uncle who live nearby. When this happened, which was many, many years ago, my cousin, his wife, and their child lived with my aunt and uncle, so we always celebrated holidays together.
One year at a holiday dinner at our house—Thanksgiving, I think—we also invited one of my best friends and his family: a wife, and three children, the youngest a baby, and the oldest a seven-year-old girl.
During dinner, my aunt asked the seven-year-old girl what she had been doing of late that she thought was fun. She was extremely enthusiastic about the Harry Potter series and the entire world in the books, and explained the newest book had been released recently, and she was reading it at night with her father.
She began to say something else when my cousin’s wife, an Evangelical Christian, cut her off.
She began lecturing her loudly and cruelly about the world of Harry Potter, the evils of witchcraft, and even told her she was a bad girl, with bad parents, for even opening one of the books. (My mom, husband, and I were all following the series, as well. We’d all read the newest volume she was talking about because, well, adults read a lot faster than a seven year old.) We were also giving her less than loving looks.
My aunt politely silenced her daughter-in-law and reminded her the question had been addressed to the little girl, then said, “We can discuss your feelings about Harry Potter another time, at home.”
She asked the girl to continue. Before she could get a full sentence out, my cousin’s wife again jumped in and began lecturing the child about what she was reading.
She also called out her parents, and began insulting their judgment and their parenting skills.
That time, my mother stopped her with a simple, “That’s enough. Someone else is speaking, and you are out of line.”
The seven year old was clearly growing distressed.
She was simply trying to explain why she liked Harry Potter, and an adult was being terrible to her.
We were all certain my cousin’s wife would finally be quiet, and encouraged the child to finish her thought. Again, an interruption from my cousin’s wife, followed by an “ouch! why did you kick me?” because my cousin had kicked her under the table when he saw she was going to open her mouth.
She spoke anyway, lecturing all of us, and then finished her comments by turning to the seven year old and saying, “And you are going to Hell.”
That, of course, tipped the scales, and my friend’s little girl began to cry.
My cousin’s wife got up to go get something from the room where the food was laid out, and I followed her. I’d grown angry at the second interruption, but had tried my best to hang on to a bit of calm because I was a hostess, too. I’d had it, though. I was beyond furious.
I followed her into the other room, and told her she wouldn’t say another word about it, or I’d have to tell her to leave—she was completely out of line with her comments, her lecturing, and especially with driving a young girl to tears. She looked at me for a moment, then said, “You don’t have the nerve, and your Mom won’t put up with it.” I said, “Go ahead and try me.”
If she said anything else at all that night, aside from which kind of pie she wanted, I don’t remember it at all.
The Sopranos – Tony Soprano extorts Ralph Cifaretto
A story
My dad was in a biker gang and my mom worked in bars my whole life. One day, my father stumbled into the bar that my mom was working in at the time. He and his Nomad brothers parked their bikes on the sidewalk in front of the establishment. My mother came out and told him if he didn’t move the bikes off the sidewalk, she would run them over with her car. They didn’t move them. She kept her word. My mother was a lot of things, but dishonest was not one of them. The bikes fell over like dominoes.
Instead of my father killing her, which was very much a possibility, he decided that he would date her instead. She became pregnant almost immediately. They got married when she was six months knocked-up and right around that time was when she found out that he was a heroin addict. Three months later, I came screaming into the world.
Soon after my birth, my father had a stroke. Against all odds, the paralyzed side of his body recovered and he had feeling in his left side again. To celebrate, he shot enough heroin and cocaine to have another stroke. This time it took out the whole left side of his body for good.
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One day, he got high and made the decision that he was going to kill me. I was six months old and he put the knife up to my throat while I was in my crib. My mother stopped him and that was the day that we left for good. My mom’s next boyfriend molested me for three consecutive years. When I was eight, I finally got brave enough to speak up. We moved on, again. A different town. A new bar for my mom to work in. A new man. Rinse. Repeat.
I had my first drink at twelve and it was all downhill from there. It quickly went from pot and LSD to robbing my mother so I could buy drugs for all of my friends. I was arrested in ninth grade for selling pot in my school. After I made it through that, I was arrested again in eleventh grade – for selling pot in my school.
At 20 years old, I found crack cocaine. I was issued a settlement for $20,000 and proceeded to spend it all on crack in three months. You don’t really consider fiscal responsibility when you are smoking cocaine and baking soda. This cycle continued until I was 85 pounds, homeless, broke, and had nothing to offer anyone. Especially myself. I was broken and I didn’t want to live like this any longer. I was becoming my dad. I asked the universe or whatever for help.
With the help of god, I got sober. I still think it was a miracle. And speaking of my dad, I ended up forgiving him for his mistakes. I cared for him. I was the only one there for him in the last years of his life when he was bed ridden. I did everything that I could to make him feel loved and not judged until the day that he passed. I know that sounds crazy, but how could I expect anyone to forgive me if I couldn’t forgive him?
Today, I have been sober since 2006. I have an amazing husband and perfect children. I own a successful business which involves helping healthy people thrive. I am so grateful for who I am today – and it all happened because I decided to forgive. Forgive others. And forgive myself.
We DO recover!
Have you ever had to tell an employee that their attire was inappropriate?
Not me, but the manager at the bank I worked for. We had a customer who was the employee of a local surf shop. She would come in once or twice a week to do the shop’s banking. As you can imagine, she dressed in surfie girl clothing, which was quite appropriate for where she worked. She once asked me if I liked my job, was the pay good etc etc, and said she had always wanted to work in a bank. Long story short, she applied and got a job at our branch. On her first day, she came in dressed in the same attire as she wore to the surf shop….short little skirt, fairly skimpy top with bare midriff, and sandals. The manager had to tell her that it was not exactly appropriate for a bank, and to look around at the staff and wear something similar to everyone else, until her new uniform arrived (supplied free by the bank) The next day she was the model of decorum, and went on to be a great employee.
What happened at a Thanksgiving dinner that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me?”
I am from a longline of southern cooks. One of my first memories, is standing on a chair with a wooden spoon stirring cornbread batter. My husbands family does not share this skill. My mother in law is lovely and an amazing women. She is charming, beautiful, kind, extremely health conscious but a lousy cook. My husband swears , he and his siblings were raised on wheat germ and bean sprouts. Cooking was truly of no interest to my mother in law. She knows nothing about cooking above the very basics. The first Holidays after our marriage, I hosted the Thanksgiving meal. I was so excited because I love to cook. A few days before the big day, my mother in law called to say she would like to bring the Turkey. I assured her that wouldn’t be necessary but she insisted. I agreed. When I told my husband, he laughed and said that I better have a back up plan. His mother had good intentions but turkey was not in her Wheelhouse. Anxiety got the best of me. I put a Turkey in my outdoor smoker the night before on the pretense that it could be used for sandwiches the following week. Thanksgiving day, a hour and a half before the meal, my husbands family showed up with Turkey in tow. It was still in the wrapper and totally raw. My mother in law said she came a little early so the 20 lb Turkey would have time to roast. My husband was all grins. I thanked her kindly, praised her on the size of the Turkey and took it into the kitchen. A hour and a half later, I served a beautiful smoked Turkey to my guest. No one even picked up on the fact that the Turkey was smoked instead of roasted except MY mom. Thankfully she said nothing until we were alone. The sad thing is my daughter has the cooking skill of my mother in law. But thankfully, she also has her loving kind heart and that outweighs cooking any day!
Success
When have you cheaply or inexpensively fixed an item someone thought unrepairable?
It was around 2009 when our flat screen TV began to require several tries before it would turn on. You knew it was finally going to turn on when you heard the “ka-blink” sound. Finally, one day it would not turn on at all. My wife confidently said, “You can fix anything. Can you fix the TV?””. I expressed my skepticism as my electronic expertise and experience were very limited. But I also didn’t want to just give up despite my prejudice that modern TVs were not ” fixable”. My guess was that the power supply had failed so I began a Google search for how to replace the power supply on a Samsung TV. I found an article titled something to the effect of ” I don’t know much about electronics but this worked for me”. Seemed like a good place to start.
The article was excellent with a description and photos of the capacitors that can fail. If they are swollen or leaking, replace them. Removing the capacitors was the main technical challenge but the article described the entwined copper wire yarn that draws out the solder as you melt it. The real challenge was finding replacement capacitors. Only one store in metro Atlanta had them. Took two days to find the store. I needed 3 but bought several extras for a total of somthing like $8. The guy at the store said, “ Nobody fixes anything anymore.””
Installing was fairly straightforward soldering. Tried to be careful to not overheat anything. It helps your confidence when you consider the TV was dead and most people would have just tossed it. Anyway, the moment of truth came. Pressed the ” On” button on the remote and (after an anxious delay) ” ka-blink”!! I felt like Tom Hanks when he declared ” I have made fire! “. I basked in my wife’s admiration for the rest of the day. The TV still works and I still have the extra capacitors, just in case.
I wish I could cite and thank the person who took the time and effort to post the fix. It was excellent.
A Miracle
My sister fell from the 4th floor when I was 16 years old and fought for her life for two whole years.
When you fall from such a height, it’s most often not the impact that kills you.
It’s the fall.
Most people falling from such a height, faint before impact – and they fall on their back.
Their spine breaks, ruptures, and is torn to shreds and most of them die or are paralyzed their entire lives.
But, my Didi, was awake through the fall.
She fell on her legs.
Later doctors told us that, that was the only reason she’d survived.
On impact, her right leg, which bore the maximum impact, was torn to bloody shreds.
Her right foot had an entire piece fall off from where it was attached.
When I saw her – the white sheet that covers patients was red with blood.
I saw bone where flesh was supposed to be.
When I saw the X ray for the first time, I couldn’t help but hopelessly cry.
Part of her hip bone was just bone dust.
Literally! Literally bone dust where bone should be.
This further complicated her surgery when she was admitted to the ICU.
Bone fragments could have ruptured her blood vessels – or so the doctors said.
Forget walking ever, doctors told us she had a ten percent chance of survival.
My Didi spent two years in the hospital and missed her board exams (12th) that year.
Next year, carried on a stretcher, she was ferried from the hospital in an ambulance and she sat for her 12th boards.
That year – she scored 92 in her boards with a 94 in Physics and Maths.
Her school awarded her an Exceptional Student award and gifted her a phone and a certificate for her achievements.
Today, she has two degrees to her name.
One in Physics and another in Hotel Management.
She’s preparing for a third degree – an MBA this year.
Today, she’s working for a subsidiary of Google in Hyderabad, all alone in a different city.
The limp is still visible, but barely.
Inspiration?
This word doesn’t even begin to explain what I feel when I look at her.
She’s a living, breathing miracle.
Literally — a living, breathing miracle.
Star Trek : TNG – Data : Computer, Begin Scan Phase
Have you ever chosen to dispute a traffic ticket in court? What was the outcome?
Yes, I won and the “arresting officers” were publicly reamed a new one by the judge; seems the judge would not accept “just following orders” as an excuse for the revenue trap they were staffing.
I was pulled over for running a stop sign on a street which I drove daily. I saw the police car at the intersection and drove right past them without even slowing down.
I freely admitted to the officers that I must have run the stop sign at the intersection in question BECAUSE there was no stop sign at that corner.
After signing my ticket, I drove passed them again – taking photos as I approached. It turned out there WAS a new stop sign at that corner – installed the day before on a post roughly 12 feet tall which cleverly concealed the stop sign behind a tree branch.
In order to see the sign one had to be just about even with it and looking up and to the right at about a 45 degree angle. My photos showed the approach from about 1 block away, 1/2 block, 1/4 block, and finally alongside of the sign – it was clear from my photos what the situation was. It was a nice touch that the City Police car was back in ambush position by the time I was taking photos AND one of the A-HOLE cops was looking directly at me in the third photo! The judge really loved that detail!
I arrived in Court; my case was called; I entered a plea of “Not Guilty” while simultaneously admitting I had passed the stop sign in question without even slowing down, let alone stopping.
This piqued the judge’s interest and he seemed amused when I asked if I could approach the bench to show him some photographs of the intersection and stop sign in question.
1st photo – Do you see a stop sign? – NO.
2nd photo – Do you see a stop sign? – NO.
3rd photo – What about now? – NO! What is your point?
Do you see the City Police car with that officer in it? (Me pointing to the City cop who is beginning to look worried). YES!
4th photo – Do you see a stop sign now? What up in that tree? Me: Yes, that’s the one!!
Gavel slams down – CASE DISMISSED!
The two cops get up to leave..
Judge: NOT SO FAST YOU TWO!
I stuck around to hear what was said – the judge was not kind and did not entertain any of the BS excuses they offered. He demanded a list of all citations written at that intersection and instructed the officers to clear every one of them, any fines already collected were to be refunded out of PD funds and then issued a summons for the commanding officer who ordered these two to stake out the intersection (I’ll bet that was interesting!) Further, that sign was to be lowered before the end of the day; the cops balked at that one saying they had no control over the Department of Public Works – the judge told them he did not care who lowered it, but it was to be lowered by the time he left for home that day – he would be checking!
It was.
What happened at a Christmas gathering or dinner that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me?”
My favorite family story.
I am an only child, and my parents were a challenge. They did not get easier, as they got older. My family (me, the husband and two sons) lived about 2 and a half hours away and would always go home for Christmas, usually bringing food, since there was no guarantee that there would be anything in the house to eat, and all restaurants are closed on Christmas (my parents survived on black coffee, white toast and McDonalds, and surprisingly, it had no effect on their longevity).
One year, my mother insisted that, instead of my cooking, we should all go to the Legion Hall to the ‘friends’ dinner, for the old, lonely and homeless.
Well, technically, we weren’t lonely, we were together. And they could have as much food as they wanted, since I was willing to bring it. But Mom wanted to go to this meal, and I wasn’t going to deny her what she wanted on Christmas day.
So, off we all go to the Legion. Mom sees someone she knows and sits down with them. My father follows, sitting down with her. She totally ignores the fact that there is no room for the rest of us to sit with her. Dad gives me a shrug, but doesn’t say anything (because, in my family, this is just Mom being Mom and we roll with it).
My family grabs a four top by the bar and we eat our meals rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.
There was an empty seat on the table by my Mom. A reporter for the local newspaper takes it and interviews her. The next day, she is on the front page of the local paper complete with photograph, announcing that the people that put on these meals for those who need them are “angels.”
Apparently, though it did not make it to the paper, (THANK GOD) she also told the reporter all about her daughter “the famous author” (I’ve written a bunch of books and she was really proud). But anyone who knew her knew that story already. She did not bother to mention that I was in the room with them at the time.
And that is how the entire town learned that I had abandoned my mother and made her eat alone at the Legion on Christmas.
What was the strangest way an embezzler was caught?
Had a friend who decided to purchase a small gift shop in Western Washington to add to the several they already owned near Tacoma. This one was a bit farther away from their home, so they would have less of a day to day contact with the location. The former owner had recommended the retain the manager that worked for them for many years, and so they did. They were very happy with this decision, and for a couple of years this manager would not only run the store on a daily basis, but come in on vacations and days off and do the books, payroll, stock ordering etc.
Problem? This store, even though it was in a more rural location, less rent, lower pay all around, was still not as profitable as they thought it should be.
How did they uncover the problem? The manager had a grandbaby born in Seattle, and she decided to spend a couple of weeks with them to help out.
Old school cash registers would have what we would call a “z” tape that would total up transactions at the end of the day (and subtotals whenever you wanted one throughout the day) to tell you what sold, amount of cash, checks, charge cards, refunds, etc. In theory, every day one would take that tape and balance the amount of receipts against what was in the till.
Problem? My friend could not get the tape to balance against receipts by the method that had been used to balance as proscribed by the manager. There was too much money every day. It turns out here in Washington, we have a Sales tax of about 9.7%. The manager would use the PRE TAX amount on the Z tape to balance the daily amounts, and keep the tax amount.
So, for 3 years my friend owned the store, the manager had pocketed that amount of cash every day, and probably for many years back. They store was grossing about $600k a year at that time, so she pocketed about $54k a year cash as well as her salary.
And if you know about these kind of stories, often the owners do not want to have publicity in this kind of situation. So instead of having the sheriff charge in this case, they actually caught her taking items from the the store (a baby album!) and cited that as reason for termination. But then they showed her the rest of what she knew, and they ended up getting a partial restitution.
Lesson? If you have a manager of staff member that does not take time off, be suspicious.
AND: you have to make sure that IRS records are correct, or you are liable for the additional taxes.
Hope this answers the question,
Rick Olson
JFK Files
What led to the decline of the Ottoman Empire?
Money, money, money (always sunny, in a rich man’s world)
I was at a wedding this summer when I asked a friend of mine, who is a history professor specializing in 18th century Ottoman history, why he believed that the Ottomans would start suffering from major issues in the 19th century. (The word ‘decline’ is, for some reasons I’ll try to go into, not necessarily true for the 18th century).
He, of course in the traditional academic manner, said that careers could be made studying even a minor area of the subject and to be wary of teleological explanations, and the usual jazz.
So, I rephrased and asked him, “If you had a time machine to take you to the beginning of the 18th century, what would you have done differently, assuming you wanted the Ottomans to have survived?”
He thought for a while and answered, “If we have the technology for time travel, I’m going to assume that we would have the technology for bringing others with us as well.”
“Sure”.
“Then, I’d bring with me around fifty German and Swiss accountants to take charge of Ottoman finances.”
“Not Turkish ones?”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“So you would not have found a clever way of killing off the unruly Janissaries, like Peter the Great did with his unruly soldiers?”
“The Janissaries were not the problem. They were not necessarily bad soldiers. They were cheap soldiers and they suffered from low morale. And because they were paid so little, most of them ended up doing other jobs as well.”
So there’s the rub – the unruly Janissaries were not the problem. They were the symptom of the problem which was money.
Indeed, most of the other (quick and easy) explanations don’t really hold water or go to the heart of the matter: for example, technological lag. Hold on to your hats because I am about to blow your minds but the Ottomans, at no point in their history, had a significant technological handicap compared to their European neighbors. This was especially true for the 18th Century. First, speaking of military technologies:
The Ottomans had the same military technologies as their European counterparts. The story of the Ottomans’ “massive (anachronistic) bombards” is just a story. Whether it be the caliber of the guns, their metallurgy or the mixture ratio for gunpowder, the Ottomans had no major differences with most of their European contemporaries.
The military technology between 1600 and the Napoleonic Wars did not have major leaps that the Ottomans could be left behind in. Ottomans employed many European experts, not just in the 18th century, but throughout their entire history. (Orban and his famous guns, anyone?)
Well into the 19th century, weaponry continued to be produced with traditional (i.e. artisanship) methods instead of mass production across Europe. Ottomans had begun their military defeats before the 1850s, so the proliferation of mass produced weapons (which they ended up buying in the 19th and early 20th centuries anyway) could not be a factor in their earlier defeats.
For the rest of their “technology”, we can give the example of Russia, which remained mostly agrarian until the second half of the 19th century. Further, even after the freeing of the serfs, their industrialization was slow, which led to major problems in the First World War. They also had a low literacy rate. Yet, along with England, they were the major Great Power for most of the 19th Century. One thing that Russia had was a large population (although China, with a large population, did not fare so well), but other than that, their main difference with the Ottomans was their centralized and bureaucratized state apparatus.
The “nationalism” of minorities itself was an issue tied to money. Again, contrary to the general narrative, the “millet” system was not a thing de jure until the 19th, and de facto until the middle of the 18th Century and was born of the economic issues of the Empire. How so? Tax farming under the ayans became a major source of revenue in the 18th Century. In this system, the government would auction the right to collect taxes for a lump sum in Istanbul. Important figures such as ministers, princesses, harem women, would buy such privileges. Then, since they did not want to (or could not) travel to the regions that produced their income, they would work with local notables, ayans (who could be Muslim or Christian), to collect their taxes. Well, in this tax farming system, the Rum patriarch in Istanbul, for example, was a “tax farmer in chief” and by delineating an important financial function to such groups, the Ottomans allowed for them to make power grabs elsewhere, such as increasing control over their Christian flock, which would culminate in the “millet” system, wherein the various religious heads became the final authority on the legal issues (or education) of their flock. The Hellenizing project under the new Greek state, its support by the patriarchate (albeit not immediately), and the inability of the central government to stop it, was one of the major reasons behind one of the aggressive and usually quite bellicose nationalisms that would develop among the Christian Ottomans.
Also, the change from a centralized to a subcontracted “sekban” (mercenary) system of military recruitment where the central government would send “banners” to the local officials and notables, who would collect and arm the peasants in the beginning of the 17th Century created a large number of armed men in Anatolia, leading to the “Celali Revolts“. This created a mass migration of the peasants to the cities and mountains all throughout Anatolia, called “Büyük Kaçgun” – (The Great Flight). So depopulated was the countryside that many lands would grow wild and not become cultivated again until they were resettled with Balkan, Crimean and Caucasian refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing two centuries later in the 1800s.
The Ottomans could collect so little tax in the 18th Century that with this new tax farming system, only 30% of all the taxes that were collected found their way into government coffers. But the local ayans, provincial notables, and tax farmers could usually not get enough money from their cut to be able to invest in major infrastructure projects or other developmental investments, contributing to the vicious cycle of decentralization.
This left the Ottomans with an underpaid and in many cases (of sekban units provided by the local notables) a poorly and haphazardly supplied army with chronically low morale.
Losing wars led to the further loss of taxable lands and as the Christian population slowly developed into openly hostile nations, the internal problems and external ones compounded.
In the 19th century, to pay for a large army and a navy, the Ottomans would bankrupt themselves, and until the construction of railways in the late 19th Century, would not be able to successfully (and even then to a very limited scope) industrialize, in spite of attempts in the 1830s. (Although the Ottoman artisans were surprisingly resilient in the face of imported, mass produced, European goods)
But it all started from a lack of funds. This, of course, should not mean that the country was poor per se. The early 18th Centry was a time of economic boom in the long peace until 1769. But even as the economy of the country developed, the finances of the state continued suffering.
So true
What happened at a Christmas gathering or dinner that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me?”
One year my husband’s brother and his family hoated the family Christmas party (we alternate between the brothers)… SIL is VERY cheap one Christmas though she totally proved it.
My daughter had driven 2 hours to get there and realized her cellphone was dying. So she plugged it into a charger out of the way of where people were. Twice she went to check the status only to find it unplugged and no progress of charging. One the third time she said something. MY sister in law explained it cost money to charge a phone so she was jept unplugging it. They are very financially secure so it was totally because she was cheap.
At first my daughter thought she was joking but she sas not…she was serious. So my daughter handed her a dollar. SIL took the money, put it in her pocket and walked off. While laughing my daughter told BIL what happened. He was mortified…handed my daughter a dollar (out of sight of SIL) and showed her where to charge her phone so SIL would leave it alone.
Why can’t some electric car enthusiasts accept that the inability for electric cars to fully recharge in 5 minutes is a deal breaker for some people since every gasoline car ever made can do that?
Let’s flip the script. Imagine we’d all been driving EV’s the last hundred years, you pay $5 to fully refuel at home overnight while you sleep and never leave home without a ‘full tank’. There is practically zero maintenance and the cars are very fast and reliable with instant torque, more storage space, brakes that last the life of the car, over the air feature updates etc. The motors and battery have 8 year warranty and are expected to last at least 500,000 miles.
Then somebody invents a gas car. It’s slow, noisy, needs lots of regular repairs and maintenance. It’s full of explosive and toxic fluids. It burns fuel and emits poisonous gases even when it’s not moving. Refueling it costs $100 and you have drive to a special refueling station, you can never do it at home. Everything needs to be repaired by a specialist in a remote workshop and adding new features after you bought it is not possible. But hey, that $100 refueling can be done in just 15 extra minutes on your drive to work!
Who would buy it?
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
When I was living in Tempe, I lived in the back of my apartment complex, and got my own little sheltered parking spot for my Toyota. Unfortunately, it was not an uncommon occurrence for people to park in my designated spot or block it with their cars. Being as polite as I could, I would go around and knock on doors to try and get that person to move their car. Oftentimes I would be late for class.
One day, I was looking through the tenant’s rights of Maricopa County, AZ, and I found a clause that stated that the tenant has the right to remove an illegally parked vehicle. The clause then defined “an illegally parked vehicle” to mean a car that is parked in such a way that it hinders the tenant from entering or exiting their designated parking space. The clause also defined that the owner of the illegally parked vehicle is responsible for fixing any damage caused by the removal of the vehicle. The clause never stated HOW the tenant might do that, however. The county legislators probably thought that 99.99% of people would call a towing company, but I had places to be and was honestly fed up with these illegal parkers, so I was part of that other 0.01% group.
I bought towing straps on my way home from class one day, and I didn’t even have to wait a full night. In my parking space that I was paying rent for was a black Tesla. I hooked it up to my Toyota diesel pickup and dragged it out of there, tires squealing. I left it in the middle of the street, and the next morning, the owner came out and stood perplexed at the new positioning of his car.
A few days later, there was a Prius parked in front of my truck. I had to get to class but couldn’t. So, I gently pushed the Prius out of the way with my bull-bar and left it in the middle of the street. The Prius sustained a minor dent in its passenger side, and that evening when I got back from college, there were several police officers on the scene. The owner of the Prius tried to charge me with a hit and run, but after I showed the officers the picture that I took of the Prius blocking my truck in, and the clause from the tenant’s rights document, and the lease proving that I was the rightful occupant of the parking spot, they determined that the Prius owner was at fault and was responsible for the damages.
My favorite instance of this was when somebody parked a total lemon in my spot and had leaked oil all over the concrete. The lease said that oil-leakers were strictly prohibited, so I had to do something special for this guy. I got a piece of metal wire and bet it over into a hook. Underneath the car, I reached up with my hook and pulled the hood release cable. Once I had the hood open, I located the fuse-box and took out the fuse that would allow the car to start. I then proceeded to yank the car out of my spot into the street, business as usual. The next morning, his car was still there, in the middle of the street, a decently sized puddle of oil underneath it. He was on his phone talking angrily, presumably with a towing company. I didn’t have to be anywhere that day, so I watched the chaos ensue through my window.
Several more times this happened, and eventually, word got around that my parking spot was not safe to park in front of. Everyone could tell if there was a newbie in town, because they would park in front of my spot, and subsequently get yanked. Thanks, Maricopa County!
Funny because it is true
When have you cheaply or inexpensively fixed an item someone thought unrepairable?
Around 2008 I was in the engineering lab working on the design of my latest project. The CEO came in and asked me it I could look at an NC lathe on the factory floor.
The controller went out on the 30 year old machine. There had been no replacements available for about 20 years. This machine made the “Secret Sauce” part of our flagship product. This machine had never given trouble before.
The manufacturer’s representative declared it a write off and told us it would be at least 3 months to get a replacement machine for $30,000. Plus shipping from Germany. While we could farm out making the part, the reason we made it ourselves is that in the Los Angeles area there was so much military work going on for serious money that it would have been months to get someone else to make the parts.
We would lose months of sales and 40–50 people were facing layoff. So while this was not in my job description I went out for a look.
I took the controller board out and set it on my bench and could not see anything obvious. So starting with the power input I started doing resistance tests on the rectifier diodes. Son of a gun. The third one I checked showed it was shorted. We did not carry the 1N4002 in lab stock. So I put in a 1N4007 which costs about 15 cents versus the 8 cents of the original part.
I put the controller back in and the machine fired right up. The machinist started saying words of what seemed like joy in his native Vietnamese.
I went back to my bench and carried in with my project. Dashing off an email to the CEO that the machine was working again. All in a day’s work. Saving about a ton of high grade steel from going to the junk yard and keeping the factory floor workers earning a pay check.
Little was said but at the Christmas party a couple months later the CEO hands me my Christmas bonus and whispers to me to not tell anyone about it. Instead of my usual $500 bonus was a check for $5,000.
The machine was still running fine when I moved back to Canada in 2010.
The Enterprise Crosses the Romulan Neutral Zone
Can Chinese people living outside of China clearly see that Xi Jinping is a dictator, as opposed to those who are still living in China who are brainwashed?
In the west…
Jesus has long blonde hair and a six pack.
China’s economy is collapsing as GDP growth is 5.20%, while the U.S. economy is booming with 2.50% growth
In the west they believe Sri Lanka was debt trapped by China. Investigations revealed that the country had to repay loans to the west.
In the U.S. they believe China is the main cause for global warming, they don’t realise that they’ve emitted more Co2 than any other country and their emissions per capita are almost twice as much when compared to China.
In the west they believe they are leading the transition to zero emissions, but the reality is China is the biggest producer of solar, wind, and hydro power and has the largest fleet of EVs.
In the U.S. they believe they are free and yet they incarcerate more of their own population than any other country and their children need to pass a metal detector when they enter school.
In the west they believe the Belt and Road initiative is bad, but they believe the Marshall Plan was good despite they’re both the same thing except China’s is a much grander scale.
In the U.S. they believe the Chinese force their companies to hand over technology, in reality it’s a deal signed by both sides.
In the west they believe China is oppressing Tibetans, in reality they saved them from feudalism.
In the west they think China has committed genocide in Xinjiang while Israel has the right to defend themselves.
In the U.S. they believe they have democracy, in reality they’re just picking a millionaire to run their country. In the U.K., the choice is another Oxford graduate.
In the US they believe TikTok is a national security concern despite everything is based in the west.
In the west they believe they uphold human rights in reality they’ve been in multiple wars causing millions of death and even more displaced.
Really who is brainwashed?
What are the craziest objects that you’ve seen TSA workers remove from someone’s bag to be confiscated?
I had some small yellow cable ties for doing up the zips on my bag so that my larger non carry on bags can’t be opened when out of my sight. (Well… at least make it harder). These things would be something like 8 to 10cm’s long. Like I said, small as far as cable ties go.
Something like these ones. Only I had four.
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This immigration (What the US calls a TSA Officer) woman is going through my bag because she suspects something is in the bag that I shouldn’t have. She can’t find what she’s looking for (I think I know what she’s looking for, however I let her try and find them. In one of the front pockets on my laptop bag she finds these small yellow cable ties.
TSA Woman:
“Arh ha… there they are.”
Me:
“What? Are you going to tell me you saw these four small plastic cable ties on the X-ray machine? Not likely love. Anyway, what’s wrong with wanting to secure my bags with these anyway?”
TSA Woman:
“You can’t have cable ties on a plane” she says louder so she gets the back up and support of the her colleagues on the other side of the bags counter.
I nodded, and replied:
“Yeesss you’re so right… I mean, how many people’s thumbs could I tie together with those massive cable ties on the plane. I reckon I could take out the entire first class row with those bad boys, if the passengers agreed to hold their thumbs together and still long enough.”
Her colleagues are now looking away and sniggering, some not knowing where to look.
“Hang on” I said… “I reckon I could tie up rows two and three with my laptop lead here, and not to mention my iPhone cable for charging.” As I took my laptop lead out of my bag and proudly held it above my head like I was declaring it for immediate confiscation. “If I could get all of the fourth row to stand up, and be patient for just a few minutes, with a bit of jostling, maybe even one more person from the fifth row, I could really do some damage with this” as I reached into my laptop bag and pulled out my iPhone lead.
Nothing, silence, a few sniggers… then…
TSA Woman:
“Well, you can’t have them on the plane, I’ll have to confiscate them.” She starts to walk to the bin and drop them in there.
Me:
I then said “Hang on bring them back here.” My thought was to just use them… you know, run them through on each other so they don’t get used by any of the TSA staff later as a reward for confiscating my four lonely little yellow cable ties, and because I wanted to make a big deal out of it. Hell… I’d come this far so why not.
However, I suddenly remembered how to use what I knew she was originally looking for. I pulled out a pair of scissors from my bag and took the cable ties from her and cut all four of the small yellow cable ties in an instant.
TSA Woman:
”That’s what I was looking for” and she quite literally snatched the scissors out of my hand whilst my fingers are still in the holes. (Not nice…. )
“Everyone knows you can’t takes scissors on a plane” she proudly boasts out louder than even the cable ties got a mention for early, because now she has to save face with her colleagues, whilst she practically does a basketball layout on the way to the bin and slam dunks those scissors into the bin. She looks around very proud of herself.
“Excuse me lady” her smile still beaming as she looks around and then at me. “Can you get them out of the bin now? (smile now completely wiped from her face.) I think you’ll find THOSE scissors are legal on flights. They’re medical scissors with the bend on the blades. Whilst I know it’s not common knowledge you can carry these on a plane, I expected you would know, however it appears you didn’t and I’d really like to get to the Qantas club lounge before my flight. So if you can get them out quickly it would be much appreciated.”
main qimg 9c1d8b2de093733b57e540c6d5567240
They sort of looked like these, without the black. At the time they were legal on flights. I don’t know the rules now.
TSA woman looks around in absolute dismay. I’m standing there with my hand out. I can’t wait to see her dive into the bin that would have be at least three feet tall. I so wish I was allowed to use my phone and video this right now, however, in this area of the airport, photography of any kind is banned. Video or still… not allowed.
TSA Women gets a supervisor, she isn’t having any of this. I’m at least three hours early for my flight, I’ve got heap of time spare, I don’t care and I can’t wait to see how this ends. The supervisor comes over to have a word to me. I am allowed to explain the situation first when the supervisor says “What seems to be the problem?”.
I explain the above to the supervisor without all of the “glee” the TSA Woman had shown, whilst being able to very successfully hold back my own thoughts of this woman being head first in the bin retrieving my scissors, with her feet up in the air. (Still makes me smile even now)
The supervisor turns to the TSA woman and asks her to “Retrieve the evidence please”. In absolute horror and dismay, the TSA woman goes to the bin, puts the bin on it’s side and empties the bin right there on the floor. (I so wanted to have my vision be fulfilled, however, I could see she was a bit smarter than that.) Of course a thin pair of metal scissors will go straight to the bottom of the bin. No exception on this day for that rule either. Everything coms out of the bin, and yep,… there was nothing else to get out, except my lonely scissors. Even my four lonely (now cut) cable ties came out near the start.
Her colleagues are sorting other people baggage, whilst sort of watching with sideways glances at what the TSA Woman was doing, and trying to hold back smiles. One other TSA employee looked at me, and she couldn’t stop the smile, I thought she was going to bust out laughing. She did well and held the laughter in.
The TSA Woman… The offending, basketball playing, self confident, “Look at me I have the power to confiscate scissors and four cable ties… TSA Woman, eventually finds the scissors, hands them to the supervisor like a nurse hands scissors and a scalpel in the movies to a surgeon. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but this was kind of fun and i was all in now. It’s like I was watching someone else. I had no stress no concern, this was like a seen from a sitcom, only I had written it without the ending, after all, what was the worst they can do, take my scissors off me again? I had already had this woman go and retrieve my scissors from the bin, and had her colleagues witness it, I’m already a mile in front. You can have the four yellow cable ties and the scissors… I’m good at this point.
The TSA Supervisor (Oh… who is also a woman, sorry I missed that point earlier)) takes a half second look at the scissors as the scissors hit her hand. She turns to me and says “Happy travels Sir” and hands the scissors back to me with a smile.
When I turned my back, I couldn’t get the smile off my face, I nearly bust out laughing as I walked up to the Qantas lounge and waited for my flight.
Never saw her again.
Scott Ritter: Russia has DESTROYED the U.S. Military and Putin is Exposing the Truth
Good. Very good.
What has your manager asked you to do that you outright refused to do?
It was right after I gave my two weeks notice. My manager came to my desk on Monday morning and said, “Mike, coffee is now your duty until you leave.”
I smiled and kept doing my work.
The next day he calls me. “Mike, I thought I told you you’re in charge of coffee?”
“I am in charge of coffee, yes and I see that we need a fresh pot. Can you handle this for us since you seem to be an expert.”
He laughed and said, “We all know that already. You brew the pot of coffee, Mike, Not me. Come on.”
“Well, I am a little busy now and will get to it when I can,” I replied. I stayed at my desk for an hour an half working away! No care for him or the coffee.
Then he comes to my desk and says, “Mike, where is my coffee?”
I stood up, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Let’s go have a quick talk while I brew you a fresh cup of coffee.”
We got to the break room. I stood by the coffee machine and said. “Listen, I gave you my notice, but that doesn’t mean you need to make my life difficult and belittle me. I really do not appreciate your tone and remarks. I am reporting you to HR. I find it very offensive and it looks like retaliation.”
He stumbles in his shoes and starts to stutter, “Ah, Mike, I was just joking around and didn’t mean anything by it.”
I stayed quiet.
He kept going on and on. I walked out of the break room and headed to the elevator.
He was still talking and asked, “Mike, can we talk about it?”
I stopped and looked at him. I could see the entire floor looking from under their cubicle walls. “I don’t think we need to talk about it anymore, I will be right back.” By then I clicked and called the elevator. The door opens up, I jump in and the door closes.
I know what he was thinking – Oh, crap! He is going to HR.
I went to the vending machine on the same floor as HR and got myself a drink!
I waited a bit, chatting with some co-workers, then I went back up.
He did not even look at me.
I sat at my desk and the whole day he did not even cross in front of my desk, not even once – like a scared rabbit hiding in his hole.
I told everyone on my team about what I did and everyone was waiting to see how he would react or what he would do the next day.
The next morning I came in and dumped the coffee pot, brewed a new one. While walking to my desk, I stopped by his cube and said, “I just brewed a fresh pot of coffee.”
He jumps up from his seat and says, “Oh! Thanks, Mike, you didn’t have to!”
As soon as I sat down, my coworker that sat right next to me said, “What a Punk.”
“You said it, not me!” I replied
In the end, I felt good that I stood my ground and did not fall victim to his actions. He never came and asked me if I reported him to HR. He asked two of my team members and both said: “I am not sure!”
He wanted to make a joke and make me feel unwelcomed or belittled. In the end, he was a joke and was called a punk. Who knows what others thought of him?
”Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need” — Khalil Gibran
Add oil to a large heated skillet; stir in chicken, taco seasoning mix and cayenne pepper and cook until browned.
Stir in first amount of taco sauce and remove from the heat.
On a large plate, place flour tortillas; divide and spread with refried beans, being sure to cover the entire tortilla.
Add the chicken mixture over the beans and sprinkle remaining taco sauce, grated Monterey Jack cheese and grated Cheddar cheese on top.
Bake at 375 degrees F until the cheese is bubbly, about 10 minutes.
Remove and cut into wedges.
Serve with shredded lettuce, mashed avocados, and diced tomato.
Have you ever met a dangerous person and not known it at the time?
In the late 1970s, my mom was refurbishing a house in Mt. Helix, just outside of San Diego. There was a guy who pulled up in a truck from a carpet installation business and asked about the project, and whether they were going to be needing new carpets for the house. She thought something was a little off with him, so she said that they had not yet decided what they were going to do, and that they had a prospective buyer who wanted the original hardwood floors.
He kept trying to sell her on some carpeting for the stairs, etc. until her partner in the project, a contractor (who she was also having an affair with, but that is another story entirely) who was 6’ 4” and a Vietnam Vet came out to ask a question. The guy almost immediately stopped talking, handed her his card and left. She threw away the card and figured that was the end of it.
The next week, he called our house, and I answered the phone and he said he had been speaking with her about carpeting for the house and was she available? She wasn’t home, so I took a message which was just his name and number. I gave her the message and she thought it was weird, but did not connect it with the guy in the truck, because she hadn’t gotten his name the first time.
Then he called again, and my brother took a message and she realized who these messages were coming from, but she had not given him our phone number. At the time, you could go to the DMV, and ask for the registration info for a car by giving the license plate number and paying $3 for it. (After actress Rebecca Schaefer was murdered by a stalker who did this, they stopped that service, but that was a few years later). My mom called the police about this guy, and they later found out that this was how he got our number.
After that, we started getting frequent hang up calls at our house. She said she thought islt was this guy, and my dad said he didn’t think so, and she was worrying over nothing. But she stopped going out to the worksite and eventually just sold her half of the project to the contractor.
But soon afterward, she got a call from a police detective who wanted to ask some questions about the guy. Like do you know this guy, and from where, and why are there so many calls to your house from him, etc. Eventually, they even asked my brother and I what he had said when we answered the phone. All the information we had was his name and phone number.
About 5 years later, it was on the news that they had arrested the guy for serial murders. His story is all kinds of horrible, but he was thought to have brutally raped up to six women and murdered them, along with their children in some cases. How brutally? They called them the Throat Slash Murders, because he cut their throats so deeply that the spine was visible from the hole in the front of their throats.
He was convicted of three of the killings, and he is now on death row in California.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about Domain communication.
Whether you agreed to be a volunteer, work and chat with your mantid, or are a direct link to the Domain Commander, what is very important is that you all understand and recognize that communication to you from them will typically not be what you expect.
Please… Stop waiting to hear voices, or see some kind of physical sign.
Start, instead, to pay attention to “understanding”.
It’s sort of like this… You ask (perhaps)…
Domain representative; mantid... please tell me should I go to "A" today, as I agreed to, or go do "B" which is something that I might want to do?"
Pause.
Then pay attention to the answer.
One solution might “feel” right.
One solution would be the one that is “better” and “calmer” than before you asked the question.
You would just “know” which decision to take.
Train yourself to listen to this different technique of “hearing”. You life would simplify greatly once you do.
I will repeat.
Stop waiting to “hear” an answer or carry on a conversation with your ears. Start with understanding what you know.
Today…
What was the weirdest phone call from a random number you have ever received?
It wasn’t a call, but a text…. And it wasn’t weird until I made it weird
It was around lunchtime on a weekday afternoon and I was on the train, I get a text.
“Hey, just a quick text to tell you I will be late home from work tonight, don’t wait up, I love you X”
I don’t recognise the number, I lived alone so it definitely wasn’t for me, but I replied anyway…
“You’re always working late, I’m getting fed up with it, you never spend time with me any more”
They replied back to me….
“I’m sorry, were just really busy at the moment, I promise I’ll make it up to you, don’t be angry, X”
I thought, I’m commited to this now, I have to reply…..
“No, I’ve had enough, I don’t love you any more”
They replied
“What?”
I’m still committed, so…
“Yes that’s right, I don’t love you any more, your such a disappointment and all these late nights you have been working I’ve been fucking your brother”.
Hours passed before I got a reply.
“Mum, is everything ok?”
If you see an attractive girl in public, how would you personally approach her, and what would say to her? (I’m trying to learn better social skills)
There’s a bunch of ways that would be more effective in different situations.
But my personal favourite?
Just walk right up and be direct. Put on a smile, tell a joke, and don’t make it look like a big deal.
She should think you’ve had this exact scenario dozens of times before. And you should.
The problem with young guys is that they let the approach get into their heads. They make it into some difficult task for which they feel the need to consult experts on a QA site.
It’s not.
Smile like you’ve spoken to her 100 times before. Shake her hand to prove to break the touch barrier (and make yourself less intimidated). Be friendly.
It’s hard to reply to a charming smile with a frown.
Obviously, proper grooming and knowing when to make your move is a prerequisite to all this. Your charming smile won’t do much good if you smell like her brother’s musty socks on a hot afternoon.
Take a shower, get a haircut, and use some cologne. A few hours in the gym can’t hurt, either.
But once you have those basics down, the “approach” starts to matter a lot less. It’s just down to your confidence.
You can talk about the weather, the sea, heck, you can rizz her up with Plato’s last academic texts if she’s really that kinda gal.
Too much cuteness
Have you ever given someone a bad reference when an employer called you and asked about them?
“Hello, am I speaking to Mr. Gairson?”
“Yes.”
“I am with the [] State Bar Association. I am calling because X has finished law school and is applying to become an attorney. Do you know X?”
“Yes, I know X.”
“Do you believe that X would make a good attorney?”
“Is this call confidential?”
“Yes.”
“I have not seen or heard from X since [date #2]. I do not know what he is like these days.”
“Here it says that he was employed at your firm from [date #1] to [date #3]. Is that correct?”
“His last day was on [date #2].”
“So he did not work for you until [date #3]?”
“No, he did not.”
“Why not?”
“I fired him.”
“Why did you fire him?”
“He failed to show up at work.”
“Is that all?”
“Every time I paid him, he would miss the next four days of work.”
“Why?”
“I do not personally know. However, on [date #3], his mother called me.”
“Why did his mother call you?”
“To ask why I had emailed him on [date #2] that he was fired.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her he was fired because he failed to show up at work.”
“What did she say?”
“She informed me that I was an idiot for paying him directly.”
“What?”
“She stated that I should have sent the paychecks to her, directly, rather than paying him directly.”
“Why did she say that?”
“She claimed that he had a drug addiction and his income was restricted because of it. Thus, all income should go through her to be given to him over time.”
“Do you have anything else to add?”
“He had the most brilliant legal mind I have ever met. When it comes to the law, he is a genius. When it comes to his life choices and common sense, he is far less intelligent. I could not trust him to do his job, because of his life choices and I fired him. I have seen first hand what happens to lawyers who are drug abusers and I have seen them disbarred as a result. I cannot give him a good recommendation because of it and frankly am surprised that he listed me as a resource. He would have had far better luck had he told you his supervisor was [other attorney], because that attorney loved him despite the addictions. Then again, [other attorney] is currently in disciplinary proceedings for being a drug addict.”
“So you would not recommend him to join the bar?”
“I would recommend that you confirm that he is no longer a drug abuser.”
He called me six months later. He was not admitted to the bar. They had called him in for a special interview. He missed the first one, which was on a Monday . . . the Monday after he had been paid by the large firm that was holding a position open for him. They rescheduled, he went in, they asked about his drug and alcohol history and why he had not mentioned it on his bar application. He initially expressed shock that they had found out (wrong response by the way), and asked who had told them (they outed me, so much for confidentiality). The bar advised him to provide rehabilitation or medical records and references and gave him the opportunity to amend his record. He provided them records, which showed that he had repeatedly failed to complete treatment and was prone to relapses. He called me, hoping I could change my earlier assessment over a cup of coffee or give him a job to prove himself. I declined. Over a year later he completed rehab, thanked me, and now has a successful career served by his law degree in another industry but is not an attorney.
[Other attorney] was disbarred and put in prison for several years. Lawyer life lesson: drugs kill careers and harm clients.
I’m 29 and haven’t yet married. I tried matrimonial sites for 2 years, but in vain. I feel like a loser. How can I get rid of such worries and get married soon?
There is a temple in Andhra Pradesh
Near Tuni in Vishakapatnam where eligible men and women swear before God that they are not hiding any terrible secret and they toss lots and the girl marries the boy who picks her number
No backsies
Why not visit that place?
No Caste (Upper Castes only though, Brahmin, Kamma, Kapu etc sadly), No color, No Looks
Just a roll of the dice
One of my ex staff married his daughter there because of her horoscope to a farmer young man in that temple in 2010/11
The couple were happy as of 2019
She was working for BSNL and he was a farmer with 400+ Acres (Family)
Both had horoscope issues
Go to Tuni and ask around
Many Guys on the highway will guide you to the temple for PELLI meaning marriage
What’s something that sucks about being a man?
I have a family member who was married in December of 2015. About a month or two after getting married, his wife started showing some very disturbing and troubling behavior. She had to control everything he did, when and what he ate. If he did anything to displease her, she would leave often with all of their bank cards and any access to money and she refused to tell him where she went. Sometimes she would be gone for at least two days without giving him access to money for food and other necessities for him and their pets.
Eventually, she started telling her friends and family that he was abusing her. She tried to convince as many people in our family as well. The way she behaved when he didn’t do exactly as she said raised massive red flags. Family members and friends also were seeing signs that she was physically abusing him too. The last straw was when she blew up at him for an unbelievably trivial matter and he left the house to see his parents and look into making arrangements. While he was there, she and her friends had called the police on him, saying they were afraid he was going to hurt them. He was made to get only what he could carry from HIS house and he wasn’t allowed to set foot on the property for the time being.
This happened in the space of five months from the time of his wedding. When they went to court for the divorce hearing, the judge made him responsible for the majority of her debts. He had been able to return to his house, but she and her friends had vandalized it. Between the separation and the hearing, she had filed police complaints, including false accusations, that the police looked into EVERY time. When he found that she had vandalized his house, the police told him there was nothing they could do.
She continuously stalked him. Nothing could be legally done because the people who he has to rely on to handle the matters can’t be bothered because he’s a man. This kind of thing happens more than you might think.
Reuben Sliders
What to do with leftover corned beef? Make Reuben Sliders, of course.
reuben sliders
Prep: 20 min | Bake: 5 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
6 Rhodes Warm-N-Serv Soft Yeast Rolls, thawed
1/2 cup Thousand Island dressing
3/4 pound corned beef, thinly sliced
6 slices Swiss cheese
1 1/2 cups sauerkraut, drained
1 tablespoon butter, melted or 1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
Instructions
Slice rolls in half to make sliders. Spread inside of top and bottom with dressing.
Layer a slice of cheese, corned beef and about 2 tablespoons sauerkraut on the bottom half of each roll.
Place tops on sliders.
Place sliders on baking sheet. Brush top with melted butter or beaten egg. Sprinkle with poppy seeds.
Bake at 350 degrees F about 5 minutes, just until cheese starts to melt.
What is the one in a million coincidence you have ever had?
Not me, my dad.
it was the early 1960s, and my dad was sent by his employer, Northern Electric – telephone people – from Canada to India to oversee the installation of a long-distance line from New Delhi (as it was) to another city, about 60 miles away. On a weekend, he decided to experience the joys of Indian train travel, and booked a seat. In his carriage, otherwise filled with Indians of course, one started up a conversation
Where are you from?
Canada.
Ah, I have a brother in Canada, perhaps you know him.
Well, it’s a big country. I live in Montreal.
Ah! My brother lives in Montreal! You must know him.
Well, Montreal’s a big city. I live in the NDG area.
Amazing! My brother lives in NDG!
So, as you have already guessed, we were neighbours. We lived in one unit of four four-plexes that shared a common backyard. The brother lived directly kitty-corner to us. He was actually a professional wrestler, back in the days when TV wrestling was more choreographed than any ballet.
Another tale from that trip, all about the cost of labour. The telephone line was to be installed underground, meaning a 60 mile long, 6 foot deep, 3 foot wide trench had to be dug. The day for laying the cable was approaching, and nothing was happening. My dad was getting worried. No problem, he was told. All is under control. And sure enough, the day before the cable was to be laid, workers showed up – thousands, each with a shovel. Each spent the day digging a short section, three feet wide, six feet deep, stretched over sixty miles. That’s 100 km. Because in those days, labour was much, much cheaper than investing in equipment.
Very Chinese
What are some lessons that life teaches you?
You are afraid of losing people but no one is afraid of losing you.
Forgiving people in silence & not talking to them, is a form of self-care.
Hope dies when efforts doesn’t work.
Stay where there’s no fear in yourself.
A little rain is nothing compared to the storm I grew up in.
We are all unique, we only need to accept it.
Just focus on yourself because many will hold you back for growing.
If you are trying your best every single day, be proud of yourself.
Silence is full of answers.
Sometimes temporary people teach you permanent lessons.
I always became an ear for those who need; but no one became for me.
Even if you trust someone, don’t tell them everything.
Don’t even hurt soft-hearted person, because you don’t know how much it got hurted.
Maturity is when you realise your responsibilities are more important than heartbreak.
Memories are too loyal than the people who gave.
Value what you have & value your peace more than people’s opinion.
Standing alone is better than being with fake people.
Live your life today itself, because no one knows if there’ll be tomorrow or not.
Childhood memories were best.
Nobody is too busy, it is just a matter of priorities.
Finally! Russian TOS-2 Tosochka Thermobaric Rockets Deployed on the Front
https://youtu.be/PwNhCa8Yr0Q
How can I covertly test people for their friendship, loyalty, or honesty?
So let’s say you have this beautiful girlfriend. You love her and you have a fabulous relationship and you want to get married. But first, you want to test her to make sure she will always be loyal to you. One little test. You know she’ll pass because you are both so in love and meant to be together. So it will only prove it that much more, right?
So you have a friend that you always suspected she thought was good looking. You have him over. The three of you are hanging out and you make up an excuse to leave and, under your instructions, he attempts to hit on her and tries to make a move to see if she’ll take the bait. He says things like “your boyfriend will never know” and “it’s not like you’re married” and “I’ve seen the way you look at me”
But she turns him down at every turn and kicks him out of the house.
When you get home, she is upset. One of your best friends hit on her and made her feel like a piece of meat. You console her, feeling internally very confident and proud that your plan worked, and promise it will never happen again.
She says, no. He can never come here again.
You say, but he was just messing around! He won’t do it again!
And she says, how could you possibly know that?! You weren’t even here! He can never come here again.
And that’s when you realise you have to tell her. It was you. You did that to her.
You put her in that position.
In order to find out if she was trustworthy, you broke her trust.
She feels betrayed and hurt and horrified. And most likely you lose what you wanted most (your girlfriend) even though she passed the test you so cunningly set up for her. You are not as clever as you think and even if you are you will be a very clever, lonely man.
Friendship is not a threshold to be tested. Keep testing those limits and you will hit a wall…or a fist.
Friendship is alive and needs to be nourished and cared for by both sides.
The trustworthiness of your friends is a direct reflection of your own.
TOKYO WALK (May 2022) After School Shibuya Walk
As a judge or attorney, have you ever made a courtroom laugh?
I had a client once who was so scary-looking every potential juror looked away when he sat down at the defense table. He was a large, menacing man who never smiled and made all who locked eyes with him feel they were in real danger. He was charged with aggravated assault and his trial began Halloween Day many years ago.
I was desperate to soften his image with a jury so I tried a different approach to jury selection on that Halloween Day. I had him stand and asked the panel if they agreed with me that he was a human being. Some hesitated but eventually all raised their hands.
I continued “Can we all agree it is wrong to judge a person’s guilt by their race, religion, sex, age or even looks?” Again all hands were raised.
I then asked my client to reach into my briefcase and pull out a brown paper bag. I had cut two eye holes in it before court but had not warned him what was coming.
There were gasps when I told him to put it on his head but no objections from the other side or a rebuke from the judge. He did so with a thin smile forming on his face. The jurors started laughing when I suggested all defendants should be judged this way because we can’t see their face and, therefore, allow their race, age, sex or how attractive they are interfere with our judgment of them. The panel is now howling as this large, menacing figure stands before them with a brown paper bag over his head, staring back through the peep holes.
As I told him to remove the bag, I told him “It’s not too late to get another lawyer.” The jury pool was in stitches. And the best part, so was my client. With the bag removed, he revealed with his own laughter the humanity in his soul.
I wish I could say we won that day but we didn’t. Sometimes the proof of guilt is too great. But on that Halloween day many years ago, I got those jurors to relax and at least give my client a fair shake.
Should handcuffs be banned from use by the police due to its injuries to its wrists?
I got put in cuffs once, not being an idiot I knew that once the police wanted to put cuffs on there was no point doing or saying anything other than offering my wrists in a peaceful manner. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but once the police want to put cuffs on there’s no point arguing or fighting.
I was actually surprised how tight they put them on, but so long as you don’t pull on the cuffs or try and wriggle out you don’t injure yourself. If you struggle against them though it’s very painful. I tried to wriggle a bit in them just to see, and it’s not a good idea.
Once the police were satisfied I was an uninvolved bystander (I was walking out of a club behind a group of guys who decided to assault another guy on the way out), they took the cuffs off, apologised and sent me on my way. They must’ve realised something was up anyway when I had a southern accent (gang were northern) and happily let them cuff me instead of swearing and jostling the police as the gang did.
Anyways this is suffice to say that you really cause your own injuries when in cuffs. I cannot recommend the ‘not fighting/struggling with law enforcement’ tactic enough. Being honest, genuine and friendly no matter the circumstances is always the grown up move no matter how indignant you are.
My Gosh!!!!
What is the best way a friend has showed you that they are a true friend?
My wife showed her character fairly early on in our relationship. We’d met online and talked for several months prior to our first in-person date. We were both divorced single parents, and as anyone who has been in that position while re-entering the dating world can attest, we turned to serious topics of conversation very quickly and our relationship became very close as we realized how compatible we were. A few months and many dates later, my kids summer vacation was starting. At the time, I worked for a propane company, so work slowed down a lot while my expenses dramatically increased, with the need for daycare during my parent time of 10 days on and 10 days off through the summer. As I recall, I typically spent about $2000 over each summer for that. I mentioned this to my girlfriend shortly before my second round of parent time for that summer, and she volunteered to babysit my kids during my parent time the rest of the summer. This got my attention. Under any circumstances, this would be a significant sacrifice, but in her case it involved traveling 6 hours one way with her own 2 kids, renting an Airbnb house (because at the time I lived at my parents house, and there wasn’t room for an extra 3 people) for a week, and coming up with a different craft or activity each day, and cooking delicious homemade meals for all of us 3 times a day. On top of that, she refused to let me pay anything for the rental or her gas and time, despite it probably costing her more than I would’ve spent on daycare. After that summer, I knew that without question, she would walk the walk for my kids and I as much as her own kids or herself. She’s not only my wife, but she is my best friend without question.
This is a really sad truth
If the Philippines is one of the oldest Asian partners of the U.S, strategically major non-NATO ally, a U.S colonial for almost 50 years, good diplomatic relations overall and what’s stopping the U.S giving visa-free for Filipinos?
Philippines was colonised by USA until 1946.
Like many countries that were colonised before, some people still worship their coloniser as god, even after their country has become independent.
They have the mentality to look up to the (former) coloniser & look down upon its own culture/people. Physically they are independent but mentally they are slaves to their former coloniser.
Hongkong was a British colony until 1997. Today in 2024, there are still HKers who worship UK. Before 2020, HK court system still accepted top judges appointed by former coloniser UK. Why accept UK appointment? Are HK judges inferior? No. It is just because some HKers are so used to work as a mental slave for the (former) coloniser. They dont want to change. As long as they can make (lots of) money with a good job, they dont mind to continue to work for the former coloniser.
To mental slaves, their heart is with their former coloniser.
I wont be surprised if there are such Filipinos too.
Irish O’ Garlic Cabbage Pockets
Irish O’ Garlic Cabbage Pockets is a lunchtime favorite for St. Patrick’s Day!
3 (1 pound) loaves frozen white bread dough, thawed and proofed
2 eggs
2 tablespoons water
Grainy mustard, to serve
Instructions
In a large skillet, cook and crumble sausage over medium heat until browned and fully cooked; drain. Set aside and keep warm.
Add cabbage and onion to same skillet; cook and stir for 6 minutes.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Return sausage to skillet; cook and stir for 2 to 3 minutes.
Cover; reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender.
Roll bread dough into 18 (6 inch) circles. Place 1/2 cup of filling in the center of each circle.
Brush water on edges of dough.
Pull dough over top of filling and crimp down edges with a fork. Cut three slits in top of dough.
In a small bowl, whisk together eggs and water to create egg wash. Brush dough with egg wash; sprinkle with sesame, poppy seeds or everything bagel seasoning.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 12 to 15 minutes; until golden brown.
Serve with grainy mustard.
Notes
Air Fryer Instructions
Heat air fryer to 300 degrees F.
In a bowl, combine the cabbage, onion and oil; toss to combine.
Fry for 15 to 20 minutes or until tender.
Decase the sausage; place in air fryer. Fry at 350 degrees F for 12 minutes, turning halfway through; chop. Combine with cabbage mixture; sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Roll bread into 18 (6 inch) circles.
Place 1/2 cup filling in the center of each circle. Brush water on edges of dough. Pull dough over filling and crimp edges with a fork. Cut three slits in top of dough. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with sesame, poppyseeds or everything bagel seasoning.
Arrange 2 pockets in air fryer; fry at 350 degrees F for 6 to 7 minutes or until golden brown. Repeat with remaining pockets.
If 1000 people, strategically chosen, were transported together to the early stone age with no tools, how long would it take to build an electronic computer?
I would make the challenge simpler at first. This is an iron nail made by the Romans
The production chain for a nail is very simple. You need to:
Mine iron ore. It sounds a lot more challenging once you understand that you’ll be mining with rocks, sticks and bones (no tools from the future).
Build a smelter. I guess you can do that with ceramics? The smelter also needs coal, charcoal might do.
Transport all this stuff. Obviously, if you’re lucky you teleported your group right between easily accessible iron and clay deposits.
Take your iron to a smithy where a guy will again need a furnace, hammer and anvil. Initially they’ll be working with rock tools.
In the meantime, your group of 1000 tool-less people is:
Hungry, with hunting and gathering as the only options for food initially.
Homeless – depending on the area, time period and climate, it may not be possible to build adequate shelter without tools.
Sick and injured – this lifestyle will produce a lot more sickness and injuries, and your group might be exposed to germs that they do not have antibodies against.
Threatened by predators or stone-age tribes – again, you can defend with sticks, fire and stones.
I think that having a sustainable colony and getting the first nail produced within a year would mean great success. It is possible given a bit of luck, mild climate, good survival skills and nearby resources (from food to iron). Congratulations, you’ve successfully entered the IRON AGE. Now you just need to skip a couple thousand years of progress to get to electronics.
Unfortunately, a computer is a product of hundreds of production chains, some rather complicated. The first electronic computers had vacuum tubes, finely and precisely tooled bits of various metals (like rotating drums) capacitors, cables… and obviously required electric power to operate. And weighed tons.
So your group of 1000 people (minus the ones who died) is ready to build the computer as soon as they recreate the industrial base of a modern civilization.
It seems like a bigger feat than 1000 people are capable of.
China has canceled US, Australian, France wheat imports, replacing them with orders from Russia, Kazakhstan and Argentina.
The US cancellation was the largest cancellation since 1999.
The Chinese government is showing a strong preference for buying from the BRICS and Global South economies, and is moving away from buying from the G7 countries which are part of the western bloc led by the US.
This is done for a combination of political and economic reasons. The US is pulling out the big guns when it comes to chip technology, AI, and blocking Chinese sales of EVs and solar panels, and more recently, the forced divesting of TikTok USA, which are all part of de-coupling and de-risking. From the Chinese perspective, the US’s Biden administration is heading rapidly in the direction of sanctions against Chinese companies following the sanctions applied against Russia. Opposition and hostility to Chinese companies and business interests in Congress is very strong, and China must be prepared for the US acting to seize Chinese assets which the US can reach. The only way to avoid this scenario is to have as few overseas assets in US dollars and held by US banks as possible.
This is the de-risking and de-coupling model the Chinese are following.
In the US, there may be a political side-effect in this US election year: Trump supporters are usually stronger in US rural states, and some farmers may blame the Biden administration for poor wheat sales and vote for Trump. In a tight race, this may be an important factor.
Do you think you’ll ever “make it”?
I spent three hours today sipping coffee while I did my weekly grocery shopping and other Saturday morning errands. I bought enough food to feed five people for a week, gas for my van, a dozen new comic books for my collection, and a few other random things. At no point during my shopping spree did I have to worry about being able to pay for any of it.
Then I came home and spent about four hours playing with my kids. It was the first warm day of the year here in Chicago, so I got to play basketball with my kids, ride bikes with them, play catch with them, and play soccer. I also got to spend about an hour walking my dog.
Then I spent about an hour grading some papers for work. I didn’t have to do that today, but I wanted to get it done. I sat in my recliner and graded them while listening to music and sipping yet more coffee. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Then I made dinner and enjoyed it with my family. Then I had a little alone time, reading my new comic books and surfing the internet, before spending even more time with my kids before tucking them into bed.
When I’m done with this post, I’ll head up to my bedroom, where my wife is already. She’s watching a show. When I come up, she’ll pass me the remote and let me watch whatever I want to watch, while she cuddles with me.
Do you think you’ll ever “make it”?
I “made it” about 15 years ago. Let me tell you, from someone on this side of the “it” hurdle, it’s awesome over here. I wish everyone good luck in jumping over that hurdle and joining me over here in the greenest pastures of all.
Tokyo Walk, Adult Liven up your Night in Kabukicho|red light area district Japan 東京 新宿 歌舞伎町 4k
A fun experience. Takes you to Asia where life is so very different from that of the West.
When I was living at “Father Pete’s””monastery” I shared my experience with about twenty other men all dealing with a range of issues.
One was a fellow with an addictive personality, and he just had to get high.
And you know, we couldn’t figure out why all of our cans of oven de-greaser kept on running out. One month we bought a case of 12, and they were all used up. Now, the guy in charge of cleaning the oven, claimed that he was a big rigorous in cleaning the ovens and such.
But twelve cans?
Nah. Far too unusual.
Well, for certain, he was using the cans to get high. He was spraying the de-greaser in toilet paper and huffing it away all night in his room.
This was the first time that I ever was exposed to a “huffer”.
Using him as an example; I can only conclude that the chemicals wrecked his brain and turned him into a simpleton; a town idiot.No kidding. He was really having trouble with all sorts of simple tasks. Like, for instance, tying his shoelaces.
But, you know, there were other changes as well. It also gave him this sense of superiority in a manic, just about disgusting manner. He was manic all the time. That that was nuts. My ex-wife had bouts on manic-depressive personality, and I despised them.
And of course, his day to day routines started to suffer. Including hygiene. Brushing the teeth. Taking a shower. Wiping your ass when you took a dump. Stuff like that.
Don’t huff.
Watch out for your loved ones as well. Huffing is something that he picked up when he was 14 and continued until when I met him at 45 years of age.
Anyways… Yeah….We kicked him out.
He was toxic to the community.
We were willing and wanting to help those that needed help, but some people took up too high a percentage of our limited time and resources, all the while not learning from the environment that we provided.
Ah. It's a fine line that we needed to set forth for all of us.
Do not be the victim of a de-greasing Jones. I’ll tell you what.
Today…
What is something unrealistic that you often see in movies that annoys the hell out of you?
Sorry ladies but it needs to be said:
The heroine, who is 5′4″ and 100 pounds soaking wet (usually wearing heels) faces off against a 6′4″ bad guy weighing in at 220+ pounds. She then proceeds to beat the living sh** out of him while absorbing everything he can throw at her.
First: In real life when that baddy hits her she would not get back up. Period. People (men and women) have died by being punched by men that size. Women’s bodies cannot absorb abuse like that.
Second: She would not have the strength to actually hurt him. It would take a miracle round house to the head for her to be able to do damage. But in Hollywood her tiny little fists on tiny little arms do crushing damage that incapacitate him.
Am I being sexist? Here is a quote from a female MMA fighter (Tamikka Brents) that fought a ‘transgender’ fighter. Remember, these two people were in the same weight class:
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not, because I’m not a doctor,” she stated. “I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life, and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right. ”
Tamikka had her eye socket broken in that fight; a fight that was in a controlled environment while wearing padded gloves.
Here is another quote from Ronda Rousey’s mother about her daughter fighting a man. Ronda’s mother is a Judo Black belt and former world champion:
“That’s a stupid idea,” she said. “Seriously, that’s a stupid idea. I’m as much a feminist as anyone but the fact is that biologically, there’s a difference between men and women. Hello, duh. A woman who is 135 pounds and a man who is 135 pounds are not physically equal.”
The sad thing is this truth is NEW to the modern gals of today
Why did my top performing employee quit after write up?
I was a senior engineer for the United States home office for the largest Japanese construction company operating in the United States. Once, while working with the Japanese vice president closing a bid, he started saying to me and anyone else in earshot, “I don’t know how to do this, I do not know what to do.” I put my hand on his shoulder, asked him to write down the total of the bid he wanted to submit and I would back-figure the schedule of values and electronically file the bid for a large tire manufacturing facility.
All done, he’s good, we were good.
Next day, I get a scheduled meeting with Human Recourses. Just the HR director and her administrative assistant. I was written up for disrespect to my supervisor, the VP, and for insubordination. I was told I was supposed to stay out of the bid closing and if the VP didn’t finish, it was his desire to not submit. This skullduggery and in-depth deconstruction into my salvaging the bid went on for 45-minutes.
I asked the VP if he had a problem and told him if I disrespected him, I was sorry. He told me he very much approached the help and that I was a good employee. My manager was surprised I was written up a 2nd time for interfering with operations and disrespect, but said he couldn’t do anything about it and to just watch it.
I sat in the lounge area to simmer down. At that time I got a call from a competitor inviting me to dinner and a talk to about my taking over estimating for them. I asked “Is this a job offer” and they said “Yes.” I immediately turned in my notice and signed out, went to the meeting as was working for the new employer the next morning.
Epilog: the Japanese company got the job I closed out. They called me the next week and told me I need to be part of the team meeting with the client in Mississippi the next week. I reminded them that I was no longer an employee, thank you for considering me and if he had any questions, consult the head of HR. The HR director called me in a matter of minutes and told me she was attempting to further my abilities and help me integrate into the Japanese frame of mind, not trying to discourage me and was sorry I took it that way. I did thank her and hung up. “Bitch.”
The truth about Ukraine
And also the truth about Taiwan.
A cop pulled me over for speeding and asked if he could search my car. When I said no, he said that it’s qualified as a probable cause and pulled me out of the car to search it. Is that actually legal?
This has been heavily litigated for decades. However, we have a pretty definitive answer.
Refusal to consent to a search cannot be used as probable cause, or else the idea of consent has no value. It creates a situation where you really have no choice; you can consent, and police can perform the search, or you can refuse to consent and the police can declare that reason for them to search despite your refusal. Either way, they’re getting to search, making the ‘choice’ little more than an illusion, a farce.
Now, if they have probable cause beforehand, that’s different. I know someone who spent three nights in jail after refusing a search of a rental car. Turns out the last person had basically kept the car a few days longer than they had rented it, and the rental company had followed their standard procedure and declared it stolen. When it was returned and fees paid by the renter, they had put it back into rotation without alerting the police that the vehicle had returned, and the car showed up as stolen in a routine traffic stop. Despite having a rental contract and nothing illegal in the car, the individual was arrested until the case was dismissed when first it went before a judge.
If you can’t refuse a search without it basically having the same impact as consenting to the search, then the Fourth Amendment has no meaning whatsoever.
Why have Chinese critics of the Chinese Communist Party never come together to offer a social and political platform for how they think China should be governed?
There are people who are interested in criticizing the existence of the CCP, and then there are people interested in providing better policies than the CCP.
The former typically end up abroad as political dissidents applying for asylum. It’s a solution that makes everyone happy. The dissident gets to bitch and moan in peace, the CCP doesn’t have to put up with people that will never be happy, the common folk get to have discussions about policy rather than stupid discussions on whether or not the CCP is evil, and the country taking them in get to generate domestic propoganda by claiming to be inclusive, democratic, a good place to live, etc, even if they are hosting a blithering idiot on taxpayer’s dime.
If you are interested in arguing over policies, it is very easy to persuade the government to give you a minor village-level position so that you can prove your mettle. Typically if you graduate from a decent university, there are programs where you can get parachuted directly to a village advisor position (of roughly equal status as the mayor). If you perform well, you will get promoted to the town level, and then small cities, etc. I graduated from Tsinghua and know quite a few people who went on such a path.
What’s interesting is that if you come from a decent university, lower level government officials will go out of their way to ask you for your opinion on local policies, even if you’re not actually a Chinese citizen and don’t have political rights. I was an engineering student operating in some of the remote parts of China, where government drinking water policy failures led to the breakdown of local water treatment systems. I was wandering around in rural Shanxi with a German exchange student, taking water samples and building temporary filters to combat local arsenic pollution in the absence of government intervention. I was curious as to why the policy was a failure, so I paid a visit to the town hall and found the mayor. The conversation went something like this:
Mayor: This is a small town, and I’ve never seen you before. And is that a foreigner behind you??? Where are you from?
Me: Yes, he’s German. We’re from Tsinghua (shows him school ID card). We’re interested in when that water treatment station on the east side of the village was built, why it fell into disuse, and what the villagers are drinking right now.
Mayor: Hey, Dog Testicles! We have some visitors and this is your job!
It turned out “Dog Testicles” was the nickname for the bureaucrat in charge of the village waterworks. The mayor pours us all a cup of tea while Mr. Dog Testicles spends an hour or so describing the construction process of the station, the funding, when it broke down, why the villagers couldn’t come up with enough money to fund its repairs and maintenance, etc. He then asked us what we think they should do.
Me: I dunno, maybe don’t ask a bunch of flat busted farmers to fund water treatment? It’s obvious they can’t pay. The local infrastructure policy was really damn stupid. We’ve been running around all over the area building filters to cover for that mistake.
Dog Testicles: Aha, so you’re the ones building filters in these villages? We found those filters on our own surveys. You kmow that selling filters without a proper license is a criminal offense, right?
Me: Yeah, but I wouldn’t be working my ass off if it weren’t for these stupid policies. You can go ahead and try to arrest me if you’d like.
Mayor: Actually, I think you have a point even though you’re breaking the law. We’ll just ask the police to… look the other direction and let you build those filters. Just make sure those villagers stop using the filters once we get the new treatment systems up and running next summer. Have you considered joining the Party and working at the village level? Lots of university students doing that nowadays. We could use people like you.
Me: I look Chinese but I’m an American citizen.
Mayor: Ah, OK. Could you and the German guy take a photo with us?
Me: Why? Have you never seen a foreigner around these parts before?
Mayor: Well, having these kinds of discussions with university students and asking them for their opinions is very helpful in our performance evaluations. It helps us get raises and promotions. Some… proof… would be useful. So a photo, please?
Basically, if you’re the motivated and well-educated vigilante type who wants to see change and you’re happy with working your ass off to see that happen, the Party is usually happy to work with you as long as you tell them what you’re doing. Very, very few people would go up against the CCP to make changes happen when they’re nice and polite and willing to talk about whether they can help you reach your goal.
I’ve been playing with text to pictures
The theme is cats, with pretty woman, Baroque art style
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What do you guys think about my work?
Did you develop any traits from being homeless that you haven’t been able to shake?
Several actually.
I still eat very little. I don’t get hunger pains that often. I don’t regard it as a big deal; as I know, homelessness can happen again. It can happen to anyone.
I still sleep in my clothes and often my shoes. I feel safer, better prepared for emergencies and it’s habit.
I don’t use blankets much. When I do it’s usually as a pillow and more for emotional comfort than physical comfort.
I still layer clothes when it’s colder outside despite being indoors more. I don’t use heat much due to habit and due to becoming more accustomed to the lack of it while homeless.
When I am cold, I often use the warmth left lingering from the oven just after cooking to warm up; rather than turn up the heat. I’m no longer used to having heat at my finger-tips by adjusting a thermostat. Not intentional just what I’ve grown accustomed to. And while homeless cooking often doubled as warm-up time.
I don’t use much space. I’ve gotten accustomed to smaller living spaces and minimalist living. I don’t try to do it. I’ve just noticed I do.
I don’t buy a whole lot of unnecessary items. I was never real materialistic; however, I am even less so now.
I still tend to hold my bodily functions for lengthy time periods; from years of not having accessible bathroom facilities.
I still eat more ready to eat foods like sunflower seeds and pistachios.
I still keep to myself a lot. Even more than I did while homeless.
Partially due to a lack of trust in people overall.
Mainly, because I am so used to being a non-person or invisible to most people’s eyes that I no longer have a sense of belonging.
I also still have what some would call “irrational fear” of being harassed or kicked out of public places. It isn’t so irrational if you’ve experienced homelessness.
I am amazed and disgusted at how all of a sudden I am accepted just due to being homed. Nothing’s changed except that I am adequately homed. I always took care to stay clean and I still buy the cheaper items, and in the beginning went daily…but somehow now it’s acceptable. Which gives me less of a desire to be in public spaces when a person’s worth can be so dependent upon having a roof over your head.
I still live mainly out of a backpack or rolling suitcase. Habit, and it helps prioritize the most important stuff and to be prepared just in case.
I still carry crazy things like sewing needles, nail clippers, scissors, flint, emergency blankets and other such items in my purse and car. Never know when you’ll need them.
I sleep pretty light.
I still feel pretty guilty for having access to food, shelter, bathroom, and other basic needs knowing so many are going without. I guess it’s kind of like survivors guilt. I doubt I’ll ever shake that.
I appreciate the basic and simple things far more than things other people value. Being able to cook, having running water, a toilet, a hot shower, and a bed are things worth celebrating. That most find to be odd things to be so happy about. Or they view them as simply mundane things that everyone has. Truth be told that are many who don’t have these things that so many take for granted.
I learned a lot while I was homeless.
How would it affect China if universities in the West cut ties and stopped accepting funding from China?
Some Big Universities like Harvard, Stanford or Universities in the “Ivy League” have little to zero funds from China. In fact these Universities have a combined total of $ 85 Billion – $ 115 Billion of Funding from Ex Alumni, Americans and US Industries alone. Also included is the MIT or Texas A& M or Caltech etc.
However there are over 187 Colleges and Universities that are barely funded for tuition which need money badly. The Biggest Industries always run to Harvard or MIT without realizing that $ 55 Billion is not really that much of a difference from $ 52 Billion – whereas $ 100 Million up from $ 4 Million is a Huge Change.
In 2018 – China funded and invested $ 3.10 Billion in US Universities and Canadian Universities (Not top tier – The Middle tier), especially funding Laser Related works in association with Top Universities in China like Tong Ji. Over 39000 Research Associates, Professors and US Industries are involved in this Funding and unlike India – No Govt can order this funding to be cut off. You need an Government Act and if you do – there are 10000 Lawyers – American Lawyers who will find loopholes around the Act and Law.
Simple Example:-
The Federal Govt passed a law on US Banks to forbid lending to Chinese Clients based on specific criteria.
What do you think happened?
The US Bank – simply purchased a Near Bankrupt Bank in Maldives or Mauritius or Seychelles and began to route all China business through those banks.
And who suggested it?
US Lawyers in return for Millions of Dollars of PRC Money as fees.
In the end – Thats all that matters – MONEY
Answer is- The Funding simply wont be cut off. It will be re-routed in one way or another and Authorities will turn a blind eye to this re-routing because in the end – Business is Business.
Crazier than me
What is something unrealistic that you often see in movies that annoys the hell out of you?
When I was sixteen my step-brother had a 9mm handgun that he kept in a case in his bedroom. One day, while we had several people visiting from out of state, a friend of ours found the weapon. My step-brother and I, and my cousin, discovered this friend sitting alone in the bedroom, gun in hand. My step-brother took the gun, removed the magazine and handed it back, unaware that our friend had already chambered a round. Our friend pulled the trigger.
Firing a gun indoors, or in confined spaces, is NOT accurately portrayed in movies. The blast alone is fairly debilitating. I was standing in front of the weapon when it discharged and (effectively) went temporarily deaf and blind.
Both senses returned gradually. My ears were ringing, sounds were muted, yellow and purple specks of light distorted my vision. I was disoriented. I had watched the kid pull the trigger and it still took me a couple seconds, after my hearing and vision cleared up, to piece together what had happened. I turned around to find my cousin, who was standing directly behind me, in shock. He looked down slowly, lifted his shorts, saw the bullet hole in his leg and proceeded to freak the freak out. He screamed at the top of his lungs, grabbed his leg and ran like hell before any of us could do anything.
In the movies when someone fires a gun indoors they’re never affected by the sound, and, as I’ve learned, they absolutely would be.
In case you’re interested, my cousin was a bit of a husky kid back then. The bullet slipped around the fat, missed everything important and blew out the back of his leg. Apparently there’s a huge scar. I haven’t talked to him since then. I think he’s over us.
Carne Adovada
This is a wonderful filling for burritos or simply great served over rice with the resulting gravy. For better flavor, prepare a day ahead.
yummy
Ingredients
1 tablespoon shortening
4 garlic cloves, minced
8 ounces (about 25) whole dried New Mexican red chile pods
4 cups warm water
2 tablespoons diced yellow onion
1 tablespoon crushed chile pequin
1 teaspoon granulated garlic powder
1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
1/2 teaspoon crumbled dried Mexican oregano
3 pounds thick boneless shoulder pork chops
Instructions
Heat shortening in a Dutch oven, and sauté garlic until browned.
Remove the seeds and stems from the chile pods. Rinse chiles in large mixing bowl and drain.
Place moistened chiles on baking sheet and toast carefully in the oven for 5 minutes. They do not need to be completely dried out.
Remove from the oven then let cool.
Add half of the chiles into a blender, and puree with 2 cups warm water. Pour into Dutch oven with previously browned garlic and repeat with the other half of the chiles.
Add the remaining ingredients to the chile (garlic salt, oregano, onion, chile pequin)and let boil on a medium-high heat for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The sauce will thicken but should remain a little soupy.
Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.
Remove the fat from the pork and cut the meat into 3/4 inch cubes. Stir pork into the chile sauce and let marinate overnight in the refrigerator.
The following day, heat oven to 300 degrees F. Use butter to coat large baking dish, so it doesn’t stick.
Add the marinated carne adovada with sauce into baking dish. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 3 hours, stirring once at an hour and a half into baking. At 2 1/2 hours, remove foil (to thicken sauce).
Have you ever had to tell an employee that their attire was inappropriate?
I was working a security job for a friend one winter. Not hard work, but long cold hours outside at temps that regularly hit negative 30C. We were offered a bonus for staying the whole term. And the boss would compound the bonus of people who quit or were fired, so it was split evenly between those who stayed.
We were guarding the building that was a Soundstage, and they didn’t want prop hunters, or stalkers getting into the building. I got to meet a few “famous people” and get fed so much good food.
5 men 3 women were highered to work the site. The three women and one of the men, were dressed for fashion not warmth. And were often miserable, and often complained. And spent a lot of time inside the building we were guarding. I made some pointed hints about dressing warmly, but was rudely brushed off.
I grew up at temps like that and dressed to keep warm. Underwear, thermal layer, sweater or hoodie, insulated jeans, double layer soviet era snow-pants, a SnowGoose Snow Mantra Parka, and a pair of bear hide gauntlets.
The boss asked me why the 4 were always going into the building to warm up. Apparently he had gotten complaints that they were taking advantage of the workers inside asking for favors, hot drinks, or to play music.
And I told him “The skin tight pants, and short fashion jackets. And they won’t wear hats. Or proper mitts. Not little pink or purple cotton gloves, mitts.” I didn’t know that one of the women had been listening from behind a closed door.
I got supreme and royal hell from the 4 of them. I shouldn’t have been criticizing their choice in clothes. How they look is important to them, and how dare I tell them otherwise.
I started laughing and walked out of the room to go see my friend. The next shift there were 2 new women, and 2 new men, and they were dressed for the weather. And I got one fat bonus.
The Real Reason They Want to Ban TikTok
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
I was at a cash and carry stocking up for our shop. By the checkout they stacked up lots of items that had been reduced as they were close to the best before date.
This one time, there was boxes of crisps (chips for our American friends) that had been reduced to £2 a box. They also had an offer on that I you buy 2 boxes you get the 3rd free.
Whoever had set up the POS system screwed up. The box of crisp were normally around £10 a box. So, as they scanned the barcode and then manually reduced it to £2, on the 3rd box it then automatically applied the offer of 3 for two. Instead of taking off £2. It took off £10.
The upshot was that we were getting paid £4 for 3 boxes of crisp.
So like every other upstanding citizen, I immediately went back in the cash and carry, picked up 3 more boxes of crisp along with a few other bits so the mistake went un noticed.
I spent the next few hours in and out, going to a difrent checkout each time. I think I ended up with about 60 boxes of crisps and a £4 discount off the cost of each trip Mostly bread and sandwich fillers.
We gave most of the crisps away to the homeless people in our area and made a van load of sandwiches and cans of pepsi from our ill gotten gains to go with the crisps…
Nobody went hungry that day…
Are Americans aware that Russia and China doesn’t need to lift a finger to destroy USA since Americans are doing good job doing it in their own? Asking as an Australian.
Of course not. The Americans are totally clueless.
They’ve been indoctrinated by their own government.
They’re insular and ignorant of the world outside their country.
They do not know that life can be better than what they have in America. Freedom from gun violence. Freedom from homelessness. Freedom from medical bankruptcy. Freedom from systemic racism (“I can’t breathe”). Freedom from opioid addiction. Freedom from mass incarceration. Freedom from crumbling infrastructure. Freedom from crushing debt, both national and private. Freedom from political turmoil (e.g., January 6, 2021). There is no end to America’s problems.
This is as real as it gets
Is this the end of the United States as a global superpower?
The “end of the road” has been reached.
By the end of this month; May 2024, the United States interest on it’s debt will exceed it’s income. Which means that it cannot pay its debtors.
The United States is BANKRUPT.
The United States is no longer the leading global superpower. Nor, is it still a superpower at all. It is a broken nation in arrears. Oh, It still remains formidable in certain specific areas, but truthfully the nation has run it’s course, and the sunset of it’s greatness is but a memory that lingers.
…
Today, the nations of the world are galloping for the exits. They are looking for ways to prevent their national collapse when the BIG BLACK HOLE makes that huge sucking sound. They do not want to be dragged in with the sinking of the United States demise.
They are distancing themselves from the USD.
The USD, which since the 1960’s has been a Ponzi scheme of unimaginable proportions.
The other nations are forging new alliances, many of which are hidden and “under the table”.
The weakest are hunkering down in a survival crouch. The stronger nations are being more vocal, and those that can are giving the West “the boot” and kicking their paramilitaries out of their nations.
Alliances are being forged and long-time Geo-Political wonks are stunned by the rapidity of change and aggressive nature of the participants.
The UN has been shown to be nothing more than an instrument for American policy.
A replacement for UN, just met last week (early May 2024) with over 100 nations in participation at the 12th International Security Summit.
Oh, so much for the strong “leadership” role of the United States on the global stage. It is openly ridiculed, and despised throughout the world.
…
The United States as an entity includes it’s proxy nations; those slaves that are to be sacrificed on the alter of “democracy” and “freedom”.
When a Western “leader”, dressed in attire that will cost their average citizen a half a year earnings to acquire, talks about “freedom” and “democracy”, the rest of the world roll their eyes. The delusion is strong in the West. Once, the defining characteristic of Americans was it’s insular ignorance, but it is now defined by it’s harsh arrogance and sneer of contempt.
It’s over.
It is just that the collective West is unaware of it.
…
There is a question concerning the final “gasps of breath” of the dying behemoth; will it fade away into the deep black, or will it explode in a brief but stunning supernova? No one really knows. But I can tell you that it is a mystery that will be answered in our collective lifetimes.
So yes.
The United States as a global superpower is over.
…
The mail is still being delivered. The “leaders” are still throwing money around all over the world. The flag still flutters in the breeze, and people are still talking about the next election as if it will change the ultimate trajectory that the United States is rushing toward.
But what is not being said is the truth…
…those that have the means…
… are starting their self-preservation routines…
… hoarding food, batting down the hatches, and covering their asses.
All the time doing so in upmost secrecy.
The Iskander-M missile system: an equal to nuclear weapons
Why do so many people leave McKinsey after 2-4 years if the pay and benefits are excellent?
Working for a company like that is a great opportunity to develop and push yourself to your limits professionally. But in order to enjoy money, you need to be able to spend it. And believe me, with umpteen hour work days, your most common purchases will be overpriced sandwiches, energy drinks/coffe/freshly squeezed juice and suits, and after a 16-hour day, it makes surprisingly little difference if your bed is in a tiny apartment or giant mansion. The luxury car is also of dubious utility, since your and your clients’ offices are in the center and getting there by public transport or just getting an apartment within walking distance is often preferrable to being stuck in traffic in a Tesla or BMW.
main qimg a8560b00698b088a01e35842c91f227f lq
And you are sacrificing a lot – if you want to have a normal relationship, children… it’s tough IMO to combine that with working such long hours long-term. So for many people it’s a good opportunity in the short-mid term, but only some can do it long-term.
Anyhow, I hear the millenials are giving consulting firms hell on the work-life balance issue.
Jerome Funeral Hot Dish
Jerome is a ghost town which clings to the side of Cleopatra Hill on Mingus Mountain near Cottonwood, Arizona. It is the home of the Douglas Mining Museum. This is an interesting recipe from the days when artistic “hippies” revived this ghost town.
hot dish
Yield: 8 to 10 servings
Ingredients
1 (28 ounce) can pork and beans
1 (12 ounce) can corned beef
1 large onion, diced fine
1 bell pepper, diced fine
Instructions
Mix all ingredients.
Put into a 13 x 9 inch baking dish and heat for 25 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees F.
Why Everyone Sees Machine Elves When Tripping on DMT | Andrew Gallimore
Was medieval Europe more advanced than the Roman Empire?
In almost every way, except two.
Sanitation. The Romans famously built aqueducts (many of which survive today because of the quality of engineering. They bathed and had toilets in which poo was flushed away by running water. Proper sewers carried away sewage and waste water.
Medicine. In particular surgery. Gladiators were valuable property and were more often repaired rather than discarded. This expertise also contributed to the survival of soldiers and added to morale, as prompt removal from the battle and treatment meant that wounds were less often fatal. They had pain relief and anaesthesia which enabled better surgery as well as reducing the fear of the patient. If you needed such treatment you would have been generally better off with a Roman military surgeon than any mediaeval one. Operations included the removal of cataracts from the eye.
They were relatively hygienic, but had no proper theory of disease. Thus in the public baths people with diseases bathed at a different time from the general public. Unfortunately, they had the earliest bath.
Gen-Z
We are doomed.
What is the psychology behind addiction?
Take a second, shut your eyes.
You’re going to imagine a world.
In this world, you live in solitary confinement, contained in a small, metal prison.
Every day, you’re brought food and water and your cell is cleaned.
This is all you’ve ever known. Your world never changes.
Until one day, you’re moved to a new prison.
Some man in a white coat puts an IV into your arm. In front of you, there’s a lever.
You try pulling it.
You’re injected with heroin. It reaches your bloodstream almost instantly and your brain just seconds after. It’s almost blissful.
Do you press it again?
main qimg b3d3ffdcebe978e22b20cba11bc4826e pjlq
This was the life of dozens of rats.
Did they pull the lever?
Of course they did.
Over and over again.
They’d overdose. They’d die.
Because for them, that brief high was the best thing they’d ever known.
Psychologists and politicians were in simultaneous uproar. Drugs were evil and irresistibly addictive.
Only, rats, like humans, aren’t solitary creatures.
So, what would happen if they changed the circumstances. Sure, a prisoner would give into mind-numbing drugs, but would the average person? Would a happy person?
That’s how the rat park was built.
Researchers put rats together in a comfortable setting. They threw in running wheels and wood chips and let them live a good life.
Naptime and recess
Just hanging out.
There are always some who prefer the rat race.
These rats had access to drugs, just like the first set.
The results?
main qimg 00defc255dfcde655da748ddb8af18e1 pjlq
The dotted lines are the park rats, the complete lines are the caged ones.
And even though it would be beyond unethical to run the same experiments on humans, there’s a similar real life example.
Bruce Alexander, the man behind the experiments, explains:
The English colonial empire overran hundreds of native tribal groups in Western Canada in the 18th and 19th century.
The native people were moved off expansive tribal lands onto very small reserves, the basis of their cultures.
Their children were taken from their parents and sent off to “residential schools” to be taught the white man’s culture so they could be assimilated.
They were forbidden to speak their native languages and found themselves strangers in their own communities when they finally came home.
Before this point, Mental illness, personal betrayals, and epidemic diseases occasionally occurred in pre-colonial tribes.
Basically, native people had all the problems of their English colonizers except one.
There was so little addiction that it is very difficult to prove from written and oral histories that it existed at all.
But once the native people were colonized alcoholism became close to universal.
There were entire reserves where virtually every teenager and adult was either an alcohol or drug addict or “on the wagon”.
The drug only becomes irresistible when the opportunity for normal social existence is destroyed.
China LAUNCHED Latest Z-10ME Attack Helicopter & SHOCKED Everyone
Luau Pork Teriyaki
Also known as kalua pig or Luau pork, kalua pulled pork is a staple at Hawaiian luaus. They carry on the tradition of cooking a whole pig in an underground oven filled with hot stones. The pig is generously salted and wrapped in banana leaves then lowered into the ground to smoke all day. This slow cooker method also requires all day to cook. You’ll want to plan ahead because to get that divine tenderness you’ll want the pork to cook for at least 16 hours. For more delicate juicy pork recipes try my carnitas, this Mississippi pork, or my sweet pulled pork!
kalua pork 1 3
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds lean, boneless pork
1 cup pineapple, sliced, in syrup
1/2 cup teriyaki sauce
1/4 green onion, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 garlic powder
1 cup raw rice
Instructions
Cut pork into slices about 1/4 inch thick.
Drain pineapple, reserving all syrup.
Blend syrup, teriyaki sauce, green onions, ginger and garlic powder. Pour over pork and pineapple.
Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Meanwhile, cook rice according to package directions and prepare grill.
Remove pork from marinade and grill about 5 inches from hot coals for about 5 minutes on each side or until completely cooked.
Pour pineapple and remaining marinade into large skillet. Bring to a boil.
Remove from heat and serve pork with sauce and pineapple over rice.
What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?
Oh boy. I worked 12 years in wafer fabrication for an international electronics company. A fab, as it affectionately known, is a clean room. The smallest smudge of dust will kill a computer chip. To enter, we had to go through an air shower to blow any dust off us. And we had to wear a bunny suit.
A bunny suit isn’t remotely connected to Playboy. It is a lint free coverall that covers head to toe. The head is covered by kind of a cloth helmet, a surgeon’s mask over the nose and mouth, gloves, and shoes which are worn only in the fab. This suit is worn over your street clothes.
Sorry to be so lengthy but it’s important. If you have to go to the restroom, a person must exit the clean room to the changing room. Take off shoes, headcovering, gloves. coverall. Stash in locker. Put on your shoes that are worn only within the building. ( you put these on when you entered from outside, street shoes were in a little locker).
So our boss decided we were taking too much time on bathroom breaks (oh yeah, we worked 12-hr graveyard shifts, 6 to 6). Our team was about 2/3rds female and well, if you gotta go, you gotta go. Take suit off, maybe go to your big locker to get lady supplies if needed, go to restroom, return to changing room, suit up, air shower and back to work. And now we gotta go to see the boss to let him know I’ve gotta pee, real bad.
It all lasted two days. Julie went in one evening, looked at him, and said, it’s the first day of my period and bleeding like a stuck hog and I gotta change my tampon and pad. And pee.
TMI, boss?
Crippled by…
The forever “footprint”.
What was the most blatant scam a customer has ever failed to get away with?
I was an assistant manager at a large chain book store. One day, an older, well-dressed man came into the store. I watched him walk to the medical book section, pull a text book (I don’t remember the exact value but it was around $150) off the shelf and walk up to the cash registers. He then explained to the associate that he had purchased the book the week prior, it was the wrong book, and he wanted a refund. She asked for the receipt, which he didn’t have, so she told him that she would have to contact her manager (me).
I came up to the counter and politely asked the customer what he needed help with. Keep in mind that I watched him take the book off the shelf, so I knew that he was scamming us. I asked him at which of our stores he had bought the book. He said that it was ours and acted surprised that I didn’t recognize him because, “I am a very regular customer and, in fact, you rang me up!” Our system allowed us to search the sale history of every book in our inventory, so I looked it up and showed him that the last sale of that particular book was more than one year ago, and the most recent sale in our region was more than three months prior, at a store 250 miles away. At this point, he became rather irate and asked me if I was calling him a liar. I responded that no, but maybe he was mistaken and had purchased the book from one of our competitors. Again, he started yelling at me and demanded that I pull up the security footage from the week before to prove that he had, indeed, purchased the book. I responded with, “Okay, and while we’re at it, I’ll pull up the footage from ten minutes ago that clearly shows you taking the book off the shelf and bringing it the register. Then, we can call the police and see what they want to do.” He threw the book on the floor and ran out the door.
We didn’t have security cameras in the store.
What’s a nice thing you did for someone but backfired immensely?
Before I had a truck, I borrowed my friends truck to move to a different city. I put 2000 km on it and I thought I would do an oil change, fill up with gas, and all the fluids before I returned it to him, with a gift certificate to a nice restaurant and a bottle of wine.
I told him what I had done, and I had messed up. He was using some super expensive synthetic oil and I had just used a good grade of regular oil. I told him to drive it until he needed an oil change, and I would pay for his synthetic oil change as well. However he was worried that switching between regular oil and synthetic would cause problems, so he insisted on changing the oil that very day, so that it wasn’t driven with regular oil.
He had plans for the afternoon, and spending an hour at the quick oil change place, messed things up.
I doubt driving on regular oil would have caused a problem, but its his truck, and I messed up by thinking I was going to surprise him with something extra.
Why Ancient People Didn’t See the Color Blue
What do men find the most unattractive about a woman who drinks?
I am a very moderate drinker. Maybe two or three drinks a week.
Although I have dated and lived with a fair number of women, only one of them was a real drinker. I dated her for a few months.
This woman was a high-functioning alcoholic. She held down a management position in retail, she was never falling-down drunk, and I never saw her throw up or get in a fight.
But man, could she drink. She was a world-class darts player, and she played for drinks. She almost always won. She’d hit a bar at about 10:00, and drink steadily until closing time (1:00 AM then). I’d say that in a typical night she’d have 10 drinks or so.
And then she’d head home, go to bed, and wake up the next morning ready to do it again.
And in answer to the question about what I found most unattractive?
It was that I started drinking more as well.
In fact, I decided to break up with her one Sunday. I had bought a bottle of rum on Friday, and on Sunday night I went to make a drink and discovered that the bottle was empty — I had drunk the whole bottle in three days.
That was not good. A bottle of rum usually lasted me a few months.
And that was the end of that.
The Video That Got Andrew Tate ARRESTED
Hit the Gay wall.
What’s your favorite programming comic strip?
This is just one comic, not a recurring strip.
I’ve seen this thing floating around for years in a variety of forms. I think it’s brilliant, but I have absolutely no idea who the original author was.
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And it really sums up what I like about being a lone coder. I get to play all the roles, sometimes even that of end user. 😉
Edit 20190908:
Looks like we have a genuine mystery on our hands. One commenter said he believed the origin was in some IBM documentation from about the time I was busy being born.
Thanks to Richard Smith for providing these two very interesting links:
As a teacher, have you ever had an unforgettable student? What was he/she like?
I have one right now. Writing this anon in case she is on Quora, so I don’t embarrass her 🙂
She came to me when I was working as a math tutor. She was failing Algebra and desperately needed help. It soon became clear that she was not just ignorant of basic math principles, but had some kind of cognitive issue with processing mathematical concepts. Over time I figured out that she had trouble with abstract visualization. She couldn’t envision shapes or “see” how various processes fit together. She couldn’t even look at two angles and see that one was larger than the other. It was the math version of a reading disabliity, and merely explaining material to her wasn’t going to get her past it.
I spent over a month just trying to get the basics across to her. Concepts like “when you multiply a negative times a negative you get a positive” just would not stick…and without those basics, how much algebra can you do? Honestly, there were moments I really despaired, and wondered whether it would even be possible to get her to the point where she could pass the course. And I know she was bereft of an hope. despairing. To her it was utterly confusing and totally overwhelming, and I know that deep inside she had no hope it would ever be otherwise.
But she worked. Even when she didn’t believe it would do any good, she worked, harder than I have ever seen anyone work in my life. No matter how depressed she was on a given day, or how confusing the work was, she always gave it her best. There were days the math went so badly, and she felt so overwhelmed, I sensed that inside she wanted to cry. Some day she was so exhausted from school she could barely add two numbers. But she never gave up.
I have never seen anyone so determined, in my life. And when she passed Algebra (got a B, actually), it was because of that quality in her. I can’t think of any other student I’ve had who would fight what seemed like a losing battle for so long, without ever flagging.
This year she took Geometry. I was dreading it even more than she was, because by then I understood more about how her brain processed math, and the visualization skills required by Geometry just weren’t there. Geometry spoke to the very heart of her cognitive weakness. And….she just passed her SOL test, and it looks like she’ll probably pass the course. I can’t even describe to you what a monumental thing that is. And it was possible only because of her amazing attitude. She just never gives up, no matter how bad it gets.
A girl like that can do anything she puts her mind to, in life.
Totally inspiring.
Shirakawa-go, The Most Beautiful Village in Japan | 4K
Very nice.
Should we Americans allow Australia to be a part of the USA?
“Allow” !?
Honey, you couldn’t pay us to join that disaster.
Australians like our freedom. We like our country schools where the fences are little things an adult could step over, if there’s even a fence at all. We like sending our kids to school and knowing nobody’s going to shoot them in the classroom. We like going shopping and knowing that nobody’s going to shoot us in the shopping centre. We like eating food and knowing no corporation has added poisons and carcinogens to it to make it more shelf-stable or more addicting.
We like being able to collect the rainwater off our own roof and not being told we’re not allowed because our own roof water doesn’t belong to us. We like being allowed to put a vegetable garden in our front yard if we so choose without a HOA walking in and telling us we can’t do that on our own land.
We like owning our own bodies. Our sex education in school is pretty good and we have good access to contraceptives, but if an unwanted pregnancy is going to ruin a student’s career or if a wanted pregnancy goes wrong and looks like it might kill the mother, we don’t have to deal with politicians trying to take away our very basic human freedom to decide how our bodies will and will not be used by others.
We like our freedom to get medical care as needed. Nobody wants cancer or diabetes, nobody wants their baby to be born premature and needing a whole lot of very specialised care just to keep them alive, but being able to get the care we need when we need it really matters to us. We don’t want our employer or an insurance corporation deciding that they don’t approve of that care or they just don’t want to pay for it and thus deciding not to let us have the care we need to stay alive.
We like our kids getting a decent education that doesn’t depend on whether the people in our neighbourhood are rich or poor, and isn’t hostage to the whims of a bunch of religious nutters. We like knowing that our teachers are paid an honest wage and they’re not spending their evenings tending bars or driving Uber just to be able to pay their bills. We like our kids getting a facts-based education that doesn’t pretend anyone’s religious mumbo-jumbo is somehow equal to actual empirical science.
We like going to restaurants and not being obliged to tip. Sure, if the server is really great or if we’ve somehow made extra work for them, it’s sweet to leave them a nice gift, but they’re not depending on tips to pay their bills because they’re already paid an honest wage by their employer.
Most Australians wouldn’t even travel to the US if you paid our airfare. As for letting that failed-state disaster take over our country? Not happening.
Be more honest
What was your most horrible experience with a construction contractor or an architect?
Many years ago a friend introduced me to an Architect.
He needed a job done. It was a big job, a 12 square deck, handrails 2 sets of steps.
I really didn’t need the work and only did it because of my friend.
The job meant I had to stay away from my family for two weeks.
I worked an average of 16 hours everyday in an effort to finish the job early. It was the middle of summer and extremely hot everyday.
The client also worked long hours and came home late.
The job was finished on time . I tabulated the hours and charged him at a reasonable rate.
When I gave him the bill he was indignant and refused to pay the amount.
Not only did I give him a discount on my normal hourly rate I put nothing in for profit, like he would have. He figured that because I spent 14 days building his deck, regardless of the amount of hours I spent, that I was only entitled to an 8 hour pay day.
So I explained to him that I worked at least 16 hours a day.
He said “How do I know that’? His question was very unprofessional considering I gave him his due as a fellow professional and that I am a very honest person. Now I was the one feeling indignant.
I was stunned that he could not understand the concept of what I did considering he is ‘in’ the building business. I called my friend who also tried to reason with him. It was a waste of time.
As I was packing up my tools for a split second I considered putting my electrical saw through his deck. I am glad I didn’t. I learned a valuable lesson after that day about trusting ‘professionals’
Instead of ipads
When in your life did you feel like you dodged a bullet by not getting married?
Not me, my sister. When she was eighteen-nineteen she was pretty serious with this guy. He was nice, intelligent and respectful to our mother; but the dude seemed to have below zero ambition in life. No job, no income, dropped out for reasons I never ascertained, and seemed to live by a philosophy of “if you’re not sleeping on the floor with your leather jacket as a blanket, you’re not true punk-rock.” Polar opposite of my sister.
Some family of his in Minnesota (we lived in California) offered to take them in. God knows why, but my sister was on the verge of leaving everything for a state she’d never been to, to live with people she’d never met, because of love for a guy who’d never shown any indication that he would be seeking gainful employment.
She snapped out of it at the last minute – on her own; nobody had to convince her – and broke up with him. He made the move alone. Apparently he took this really hard; and while to my knowledge he had never been much of a drinker or drug user, he started slamming heroin and she got a phone call about a year later that an overdose had claimed his life.
My sister has a good head on her shoulders. She was devastated, but I never heard her blame herself as some people might. She wished him well, but it wasn’t her responsibility to care for a grown, capable man, and she saw this. He made his choice to live in depression and self-pity. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I can sympathize without excusing. Meanwhile, my sister’s life path brought her to her husband and the two children they have together. It’s sad that her ex couldn’t get his life together and went out like that, but she definitely dodged a bullet.
Advanced Ancient Machinery Discovered in the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid | Chris Dunn
Pretty interesting.
How easy is it currently to reintegrate overseas Chinese who grew up and spent most of their life abroad?
It depends on a lot of things.
For the near overseas Chinese who live in say Malaysia probably very easily.
For those who live further away? Difficult.
The ease of your reintegration depends entirely on IF you were exposed and picked up Chinese culture when you were young. Myself? As a baby I was given to my grandparents to look after until I was about 6. I absorbed tons of Chinese culture and language. I then visited regularly and kept some of my language skills. But I still grew up in the UK mostly and through osmosis absorbed a lot of their culture and thinking.
My dad grew up here in China and left when he was 16, he’s spent more time in the Netherlands and the UK than here. He can return and fit in with his village clan.
I made a generational seaturtle return.
Here’s the thing though. Neither of us quite fit.
My dad while he was away? His home changed enormously. I remember in the mid 00s standing in the middle of a town and he stood there for a moment. He said when he was a child he used to go fishing and swimming here. The coast was now about 3 miles away.
As such we tend to stick amongst our own groupings.
My dad hangs around a lot with other overseas Chinese who left with him in the 60s. He talks with people here who’ve been here all their lives and finds he hasn’t got all that much in common with them and entirely different life experiences.
Me? Despite this being my 8th year here on a permanent basis? I can count my born here friends on one hand. I’ve got plenty of acquaintances but I’m not sure I could classify them as friends. I find it far easier to talk to and be friendly with overseas born types and that includes Indians, Nepalis and UK born Chinese but not American borns.
It might just be a HK thing, as I was far friendlier with people in the Mainland. So why not move there (again). Well I’ve dug myself a rut already and I’m stuck in it.
But as I’ve written prior, a return isn’t for me (though life wise it worked out well) it’s for those who come after me.
I see my UK nieces and nephews some do ok but they suffer the same identity crises as we did.
History will prove that the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were catalysts for paradigmatic changes in the international landscape and the driving force behind the eventual demise of the US-led “liberal international order.”
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During the Cold War period after World War II, two “international orders” emerged in the world, namely the “socialist international order” led by the Soviet Union and the so-called “liberal international order” led by the United States. After the end of the Cold War, the “liberal international order” was the only international order in the world. Since then, the United States has continued to use coercion, inducement, and regime change to bring more and more countries into this dominant international order, which has led to many conflicts between the United States and other countries, particularly China and Russia. However, in the past decade or so, the “liberal international order” has increasingly become unviable and unsustainable. The reasons include the fact that more and more countries believe it is an unfair, inequitable, and unreasonable international order catering primarily to the interests of the West and that the United States itself often violates and distorts the “rules of the game” devised by itself.
From a historical perspective, the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are significant game-changing events that would bring about “tectonic changes” in the global political landscape that would, in turn, lead to the complete collapse of the “liberal international order” in different ways.
First, they verify that the United Nations, as the linchpin of the “liberal international order,” can no longer serve as an organisation for maintaining world peace and international order under the deliberate neglect, defiance, and disruption of the United States. The United Nations cannot act to avoid and end the Russo-Ukrainian war. Moreover, the United States blatantly vetoed most countries in the United Nations’ call for a ceasefire in Gaza. When the United Nations becomes an effete and ineffective international institution, the unilateral actions of the United States taken without the approval of the United Nations will increasingly lose the endorsement and goodwill of the international community, and the international order it leads will also lose legitimacy and support.
Second, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the United States not only condoned but even provided military and diplomatic support to Israel’s near-genocide atrocities against the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, most deplorably women and children. Israel’s actions in Gaza seriously violate and make a mockery of the “liberal international order’s” proclaimed respect for human rights and freedoms and the prohibition and condemnation of genocide. The United States and its Western allies disregarded Israel’s atrocities, which is entirely contrary to their position of severely accusing and condemning Russia for committing “war crimes” in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unmistakably and fully exposed the moral hypocrisy and double standards of the United States and the West. It has triggered intense anger and frustration in the international community and brought about the complete moral bankruptcy of the Western camp led by the United States. In other words, the “liberal international order” no longer has powerful moral moorings. Consequently, the “liberal international order” will continue to shrink as more and more countries are reluctant to imbue it with legitimacy. The United States’ global leadership position will also be seriously jeopardised.
Third, the Russo-Ukraine war proved that the “liberal international order” led by the United States is dangerously “expansionary” and “coercive” in nature, thus posing a clear and serious threat to world peace. The United States demands all countries participating in the “liberal international order” adopt Western political and economic models and values. It does not accept or tolerate the existence of other political and economic models and values. The eastward expansion of NATO promoted by the United States can be understood as a strategic plan to further expand the “liberal international order” in Europe to contain Russia and ultimately change its political and economic system in the Western direction. In a sense, the essence of the Russo-Ukrainian war can thus be understood as a “defensive” maneuver by Russia to safeguard the country’s sovereignty, security, and strategic autonomy. Since the continuous and reckless expansion of the “liberal international order” has triggered the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the scale of the Russo-Ukrainian war is likely to expand and pose a graver threat to world peace and development, other countries in the world will be increasingly dismissive of the “liberal international order.” A lot of countries are already deeply apprehensive about a devastating global war triggered by the United States’ dogged efforts at containment of China to make it a qualified member of the “liberal international order.” Global resistance to it is bound to grow day by day. Now, the United States is on the verge of failure in the Russia-Ukraine war, which is commonly seen as a “proxy war” between the United States and Russia. This will encourage and embolden more countries to resist the “liberal international order” in various ways in the days to come.
History will prove that the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were catalysts for paradigmatic changes in the international landscape and the driving force behind the eventual demise of the US-led “liberal international order.” The Russo-Ukraine war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have already proven that the US-led international order cannot bring peace, development, fairness, and justice to the world; instead, it is becoming increasingly an impetus for instability and even war. The balance of power in the world is shifting irreversibly away from the West with the unstoppable demise of the “liberal international order.” Admittedly, the “liberal international order” may still exist in some form, but its prominent members will be mainly confined to the United States and some of its Western allies. Inevitably, with the gradual demise of the “liberal international order,” the world will experience a period of “international disorder” and the ensuing instability and uncertainty. However, in the past period, many non-Western countries, especially China, have begun to actively and urgently explore alternatives to the “liberal international order.” The Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will undoubtedly accelerate the pace of work in this area, eventually promoting the birth of a new, fairer, equitable, and reasonable international order that is conducive to world peace and development and respects the interests and needs of all countries.
I’ve been playing with text to pictures
Some of them include the retro-pulp science fiction cover theme.
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What was the most bone-chilling sentence a loved one ever said to you?
My boyfriend Ben and I have been dating for 4 years.
We’ve seen the best of each other, but that also meant that he’s seen the worst of me.
Dating me is like walking on eggshells; I have depression and Borderline Personality disorder, which meant that I can have intense mood swings and have severe issues with abandonment. That meant Ben dealt with me monthly, with me crying constantly about how I’m a fraud and how he’s better off without me. How people won’t miss me when I’m dead.
Every month, he holds me while I cry and rage at the world around me.
Every month, he plays the knight, and I play the monster, and we fight.
One day, after a particularly bad argument, I really don’t know what it was about, Ben and I had to physically separate ourselves and cool down in different rooms.
When we came back together, he looked…exhausted. He was just staring into space and he just quietly told me to get help.
And when I didn’t say anything, he looked at me and, word for word, said
“Vanessa, I want you to get help because I have nightmares that one day, one very bad day for you, will cause our child that we will someday have, to find mommy hanging from a noose.
I’m scared for you. Of you.”
I went into counselling afterwards.
Bailey’s Lasagna
Lasagna
Yield: 8 to 12 servings
Equipment
Lasagna pan
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 pound Italian sausage
1 (67 ounce) jar Prego Traditional spaghetti sauce
12 lasagna noodles
14 ounces ricotta cheese
2 large eggs, beaten
Salt and black pepper
1 cup grated mozzarella cheese or other cheese of choice
1/2 cup freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Brown ground beef and Italian sausage together until cooked through, then drain well. Combine with the spaghetti sauce. Set aside.
Cook lasagna noodles until al dente, according to package directions. Drain and toss with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Set aside.
For the filling, combine ricotta cheese and eggs. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Spread a thin layer of the spaghetti sauce over the bottom of a lasagna pan.
Lay lasagna noodles lengthwise in the casserole dish.
Spoon and spread spaghetti sauce over the noodles.
Spoon and spread filling over the spaghetti sauce.
Repeat steps 6, 7 and 8 twice.
Sprinkle shredded mozzarella or cheese of choice over the top.
Bake, covered and sealed with foil (DO NOT LET THE FOIL TOUCH THE CHEESE), for 30 minutes or until sauce is bubbling and cheese is melted.
Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer to brown the cheese.
Let stand for 15 minutes before cutting.
Top each serving with freshly-grated Parmesan cheese.
Notes
Serve with garlic bread.
Refrigerate any leftovers.
Another one
Chopsticks
One of Jerry Seinfeld’s jokes is why do the Chinese still use chopsticks. He says something like “They’ve seen the fork…” But in all reality, with the invention of forks, spoons, knives, what is the possible advantage of using chopsticks?
Behold.
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This also works with common snacks like chips, cheetos, really any “finger food.” Likewise Hara Shidho points out that it works on salads too; eating leafy greens is precisely what chopsticks are really good at in Chinese cuisine. Chopsticks are also much better at deboning fish, with Japanese chopsticks particularly designed for the task. Quite frankly I do not understand how anyone is cleanly deboning fish with forks, especially if the fish have much tinier, irregular bones that do not conform to the spine or edge.
It is also a misnomer to believe that there are no forks, spoons, and knives in China. They just have their time and place, and no they are not imports from the West as they have been around for millennia. I suspect that for Chinese people, ease of dining is where one optimizes for the least switches of utensils while keeping hands clean; removing that latter part gives us Indian hand usage, while the West seems to not care for utensil switching (or just abuses forks to fulfill the purpose of a spoon).
Really though, just think of chopsticks as two very long fingers that are easily washable.
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What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?
Oh oh!
This happened to a new manager of mine who managed to cause havoc in our office within the first week of his employment.
My previous manager left for a better offer and the replacement didn’t arrive until 1 whole month after he left the company.
So there wasn’t anyone to train, guide or handover the duties/job scope to the new manager.
However, my previous manager, being a very smart man, created a folder with all the job scope, documents, handovers, etc. in our common (computer) server for us to handover to whoever that will take over when he/she eventually arrived.
So, when the replacement finally arrived, naturally very lost and confused, me and my colleagues did our best to guide him along and showed him the folder which my previous manager left for him.
It was one of the busiest periods of the year, so none of us were able to sit down and spoon feed all the details/information to him, as such we pretty much just left him to fiddle his computer and to do his own research.
I mean, he’s supposed to be our manager. He should have some idea of what to expect, right?
Thus, the first week went by, the tsunami was over and my colleagues and I finally got a chance to catch up on our work. The moment we switched on our computer to enter the common server, all of our jaw dropped simultaneously.
The idiot has reorganized the WHOLE SERVER!!
When we confronted him about the server, his excuse was that the server looks very messy and he want to tidy it up. Oh, and if we were to see if anything that is out of place, please help him to sort out into the correct folder.
This idiot had no idea how much damage he has caused us!
For those of you who are wondering what’s the big deal, by reorganizing the server, the idiot rendered all our shortcuts/hyperlinks useless.
Furthermore, a lot of our files & documents are named via codes/serial numbers, without the proper directory we have no idea where are all our past records/documents!!
The worst part is that the damage is irreversible as he had tampered with our backup folder as well…
We spent the next few MONTHS trying to find and sort out all our lost documents but till this day we are still unable to find about 40% of them. (the idiot still insists that he did not delete any of our files, it’s all in there, he just misplaced them…)
The idiot was eventually let go due to multiple accounts of incompetency after 1 year of service (so much screaming from my client).
There were so many stories from this idiot I’m surprised that he managed to somehow last the whole year.
Edit:
Now to verify, yes you can say i’m being harsh for calling him an idiot repeatedly.
We gave him a ton of advice but none were heeded; we tried to be patient with him but when the client openly demanded him to be fired in the meeting with your CEO on speaker phone, you know shit just got real.
And just to be clear, he was hired as a Manager, so not knowing basic computer skill or even some basic level of competency is not an excuse. He is definitely not new in this field and how he managed to secure a 5 figures salary previously is still a mystery to me.
REAL stuff, girls.
Chinese EV and the USA
No American car buyer today can purchase a Chinese brand (Bloomberg Business 3–18–2024) electric vehicle. And no one is really sure when these EVs will arrive on US shores. But the prospect of cheap Chinese-made EVs is already causing sleepless nights in Detroit. The primary threat comes from cars such as BYD Co.’s Seagull hatchback, which features angular styling, a two-tone dashboard shaped like a seagull’s wing and six airbags. There’s even a 10-inch rotating touchscreen for its infotainment system. BYD’s company slogan, “Build Your Dreams,” is embossed on the rear of the vehicle.
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A BYD Co. Seagull electric vehicle at the Shanghai Auto Show. Photographer: Bloomberg
The car’s most extraordinary feature, though, is its $9,698 price tag. That undercuts the average price of an American EV by more than $50,000, and is only a little more than a high-end Vespa scooter. Such aggressive pricing by BYD, which surpassed Tesla Inc. in late 2023 to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, is indicative of how Chinese auto manufacturers will likely force US makers to pivot away from mainly producing expensive second cars for the affluent and toward more reasonably priced EVs for Everyman.
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Just as the long-feared prospect of a revolutionary EV from US tech giant Apple Inc. has receded, American carmakers now face a possibly greater challenge from Asia. China, long a manufacturing hub for Western companies’ products, is hellbent on expanding its own companies’ reach around the globe. It’s already the biggest market for EVs , and it’s using that scale and manufacturing know-how to help expand sales of competitively priced Chinese models to an increasingly climate-conscious world.
For now, the Chinese onslaught is being kept at bay by stiff tariffs and moves to erect even tougher trade barriers against the US’s geopolitical adversary. Read Keith Naughton
And for more on how BYD has become the world’s top-selling electric carmaker, see the Bloomberg Originals documentary: How China’s BYD Overtook Tesla
Siphoning off benefits
Do Western civilians generally wish to conquer the world?
Yes they do.
You can see the usual suspects the other posters say NO WE DON’T!
But they would say that wouldn’t they?
But there’s a difference between wanting and capability to do so.
We literally have seen the last 20 years. How most westerners were completely onboard with the genocide in Iraq. Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen and others.
These mass murders of brown people were extremely popular.
Liberals will of course bullshit that they were against it, oh the protested.
But here’s the killer thing they literally have no way of getting around. If those wars were so unpopular why didn’t the governments that initiated them get voted out next time?
2001 UK election, 2005 election.
Yet Labour remained incredibly popular after same with Bush.
They’ll then use one of two mental gymnastics:
They don’t represent us! Despite always claiming democracy is the WILL OF THE PEOPLE!
Brown people aren’t people! So killing them is totally OK.
Colin Riegels is like that, he made a post about how the post WW2 dominance of the USA was a good thing a year or so back. Oh I mean fuck all the people who were killed by it right?
Fucken liberals.
Do you think CATL, China’s largest battery maker, poses a security threat to the US?
Nobody is a security threat to the U.S. The U.S. is the biggest security threat to itself. Trying to do regime change in other nations is a security threat to the U.S. Starting a colour revolution to the world U.S. a security threat to the U.S. like what Maidan is now putting the US in a step nearer to a nuclear war! If you don’t want to buy batteries from China don’t buy!
China don’t need you to buy! You wanted a cheaper and better value for money battery! If you want your people to buy at 5 times the price go right ahead!
3. If you find someone smarter than you, work with them, don’t compete. Competition is a weakness.
4. The family you create is more important than the family you come from.
5. Your current job doesn’t care about you. They only pay you enough to kill your dreams.
6. Free yourself from society’s advice, because most of them have no idea what they’re doing.
7. Most people drift through life.
They have no purpose, no direction, and zero intent.
Learn their needs and lead them.
8. It’s better to have 1 friend who’s:
Happy for you
Supports your wins
Encourages your dreams
Than a bunch of acquaintances who are:
Lazy
Self-centred
Jealous of your success
9. You’ll be 10x happier if you forgive your parents and stop blaming them.
10. No one will ever come save you. Your life is 100% your responsibility.
11. Your inner circle should be more focused on money, success, and starting a family.
12. You don’t need 100 self-help books. All you need is actions and self-discipline.
What is the rudest thing someone did to you at the gym?
I work out generally at 5 am when the gym first opens. There is little old lady who comes in and works out. She’s small and frail, but in great shape for her age. I’m putting her 70–80 to be honest. I used to be really impressed by her as well, one of those #goals type deals. But that all changed……..
I began to notice she owned the place, and everyone kind of let her go first because of age. No worries, mad respect still but it did come off a little odd. Now, she parks next to me most days as we wait for the gym to open. She opens her door, and SMACK, hits my car door. Huh, she just walks right in no big deal. I’m sitting in the car too. Wow, hmm I don’t know about her after all.
2 weeks later, she is pulling in and side swipes me just a hair. Backs up, and moves to another spot. Now, yes this is illegal and I could have called the police. I didn’t, I guess I’m too soft. All I had was a small scratch, on a low end car with plenty more blemishes. I let it pass.
Fast forward another month, and out the gym window I see flashing lights.
She scraped someone else so bad it left a big mark on her car too! They called the police and she got a ticket for hit and run and likely lost her license now. Moral of the story, call people out for being rude or it will only get worse.
I Drove Around California For A Month. It Was A Disaster.
There are various scenes from life that are characteristic of the place where you live.
When I lived in Milford, Mass… I well remember the local boys carrying the fishing poles to the local stream before school started. I remember the hot fresh bagels that were so great with butter and creme cheese. And I remember the ‘Northeasterner’s.
In Hattiesburg, Mississippi it was the deep fried cat fish and hush puppies. The swarms of cockroaches under the streetlights at night, and the lush moist air that was so very calm.
In Sydney, Australia, it was the delicious meat pies, and the lady that sold them at ten in the morning at the factory. I remember the funny little $2 gold color coins, the women with huge manes of hair, and prawns the size of a turkey.
In Zhuhai, China it was the morning walks with PP (my dog) along the beach front, the beautiful blue skies and flowering trees. And the bike ride that I took to the office.
Different places generate different experiences.
It is the experiences that we have that causes us to think things in ways that are unique to us.
Thus forming our own unique opinions.
Treasure your experiences, and generate new ones at every opportunity. Welcome them as they manifest in your life. Have adventures. Savor the experiences.
Unfortunately, that is a nontrivial possibility. The U.S. corporate elites and their servant government are not popular at home these days (according to Pew Research, only 20% trust the government today, while in the 1960’s it was as high as 80%). In Finland, for example, 80% trust their government.
The US is also no longer very popular externally. So, rather than continue losing clout at home and abroad, the last one being the power of hegemony, the U.S. elites may opt for yet another world war, and a nuclear one, to boot. I hope it doesn’t happen, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Also, I read an opinion similar to mine above, in a Western mainstream article two or three years ago, and now things are that much worse for the US elites, with Russia’s apparently successful Special Operation in Ukraine, a (real) 8% inflation in the U.S., and a half-senile President.
“Compared to this raid, Pearl Harbor was a Sunday picnic.”
3
9 November 1979.
It was a cold winter’s morning in Colorado when the alarms began to shriek at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command. With a Cold War cloud hanging over their heads, the analysts’ hearts instinctively sank when they witnessed the cause behind the alarm — 250 Soviet missiles hurtling towards the United States.
2
Zbigniew Brzezinski, right, with Jimmy Carter.
At 3AM and within minutes of the alert, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is awoken by a call from NORAD to inform him of the imminent nuclear assault. Each second has suddenly become more valuable than gold, as he is told that he has as few as three minutes to inform President Jimmy Carter of the situation, as well as to get a decision from him.
Instead of doing so though, Brzezinski played cautiously by not immediately informing the president, telling the military assistant who’d called him that he would stand by for a further call to confirm the situation first. His wife sleeping beside him, he decided not to wake her up, convinced that everyone would be dead within half an hour anyway.
1
A B-52,part of the Strategic Air Command.
He received a call back shortly later, and was informed the number of incoming missiles had jumped to 2,200 — this was a full-scale annihilation. Brzezinski was determined that the USA should strike back, and so requested confirmation of preparations for retaliation. They were passed on, and ten aircraft from the Strategic Air Command were readied to launch into the sky and begin their flight towards the Iron Curtain, primed to deliver an American brand of retribution.
As each second dragged on and with less than a minute from Brzezinski making the big call to the President, the one that would change the war from cold to searingly hot, he received a third call. He was informed that the other warning systems weren’t registering anything; radar and satellites showed no sign of any approaching missiles. It turned out to be a false alarm, the result of someone mistakenly loading a training simulation into one of the operational computers at NORAD’s HQ.
To think, a mere blip caused the planet to be but a single minute away from World War Three! The quote at the beginning belongs to a congressional investigator who spoke about the event years later, reinforcing just how close the world was to turning that simulation into reality.
I’ve had several such moments, but one in particular comes to mind.
I was fourteen, probably, maybe thirteen. I was doing something in town with my dad, I can’t remember quite what. He wandered off for a little while anyway so I started texting or going on twitter or some such thing.
A car pulled up, the guy in it was perhaps thirty. He called me over, and I approached the passanger side door. He was asking for directions which, in the relatively rural area I lived in at the time, was relatively common. He was asking for somewhere I hadn’t heard of, however, so I told him I really wasn’t sure. He asked about somewhere else that I had heard of, though didn’t know the exact location of. I told him the rough direction of it. He held his phone, and requested for me to walk around the other side of the car to help him figure it out.
I don’t know quite what it was. Looking back there were a few red flags, the fact he decided to ask me instead of finding an adult, the fact he didn’t just hold his phone towards where I was stood, the fact he was asking for directions but didn’t have a definite destination in mind. At the time I wasn’t really thinking about this, but the whole situation gave me a definite sense that… something didn’t feel right.
I told him I couldn’t help him, while taking a few steps away from his car. I said that if he wanted to wait a minute or two my dad would be back and would probably know. He said nevermind and drove off.
I didn’t hear about anything happening that could confirm or deny the validity of my apprehension, all I can say is that as he drove away I made a point to memorise his face and licence plate.
I think in certain situations it’s important to trust your instincts, especially when they’re warning you of danger. It’s better to be too cautious a hundred times than not cautious enough even once.
My family, Dad, Mum, my sister and I, were on holiday in the south of France in 1983. My sister fell ill and so we all went to the local pharmacy to get something to help get my sisters temperature down and help with the vomiting.
A quick aside: my mother went to an all girls grammar school and took German and French as well as some other topics. She always wanted to be a librarian and do she made sure she could read, write and talk in German, French and Latin.
And so, dear reader, back to the plot.
My dad attempted to talk to the pharmacist. With typical Gallic flair the pharmacist dismissed my dad, in French, and apparently added some less than savory comments about my Dad, us kids, my mum, her clothing, is not talking French etc.
I recall my mother getting redder and redder and more and more ready to explode. The pharmacist said a couple more words before the smoldering volcano of fury, anger and absolute motherly care and distress for her daughter exploded and, metaphorically destroyed the small village that sat at the foot of the volcano. This was the first time I ever saw my mother go absolutely ballistic at someone else. Me and my sister did the sensible thing and hid behind my dad. My dad just stood there and watched Mount St Helen erupt in a pharmacy in Hyeres in southern France.
The pharmacist stood no chance. He would get one half of a syllable out before the wrath of the Titans picked up a small temple and smashed him in the face. Eventually my mother stopped and said it was his turn to speak. Amazingly the pharmacist had several medications we could have to help my sister. No, no, please accept them with my thanks and blessings. No, Madam, there is no charge for your beautiful daughter or your exquisite self.
That’s the first time I saw my Mum be a bad ass in a foreign language. I have since seen my mother destroy other ignorant people who happen to make a serious error of judgement when her husband or children are ill or hurt.
Pork Sausage Loaf (Hungary)
2024 02 21 08 35
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 cup diced mushrooms
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg, beaten
1 pound fresh bulk pork sausage
2 cups dry bread crumbs
1 teaspoon paprika
Instructions
Melt butter in a skillet and add mushrooms. Sauté.
Combine sausage, mushrooms, egg and crumbs and shape into a loaf. Sprinkle with paprika. Place in a small roaster; cover.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour.
Uncover, return to oven, and bake 30 more minutes.
Yup my father sold his last car to a neighbor’s 17 year old daughter. The car was worth in the neighborhood of $10,000 and he sold it to her for $1,000. Why? Because the neighbor and his wife had been very helpful to him after my mother died and he knew and liked their three children. The three kids 17, 15, 12 had come over every week or so and had done chores for him, things he couldn’t do as he got older. cleaned gutters, trimmed trees, replaced high light bulbs, they refused to take any money saying they were just being neighbors. When he decided to give up his car he thought about it how their daughter would be starting college and needed a reliable car. He discussed it with her parents and the fact that they had been wonderful neighbors to him and that he wanted to give something back. He sold the car for way under market to her. He bought savings bonds for the two younger children with the $1,000. We were so proud of him. He taught us to be kind, generous and to be grateful.
Yes he absolutely knew what he was doing and we would have never dreamed of interfering. It was his car and his choice. When he died he left a very small estate including his home. We sold the home since neither of us lived within 1500 miles and we divided the money from his entire estate into fourths. On fourth to my brother. One fourth to the two children of my youngest brother. One fourth to me and one fourth to the kind neighbors who had been such good friends to him over the years.
My brother and I took our inheritance and donated it to a charity, our father would have approved, neither of us needed it and others did.
“I Got FIRED!” Women WEAPONIZED The ME2 Movement & Companies Are Saying NO, To Hiring Modern Women
If you spend 8 hours working for somebody else, take a couple hours after that to work for/on yourself.
A corporate office is not what you expect when you are in high school/college and most of the things you learn in college won’t worth a dime in your real world work environment anyways.
Your employer company is not YOUR company, so never take it for granted.
Never finish a work assignment sooner than the timeline given to you. No one gives a damn if you do it early, instead they will think your job is easy and their expectations from you will get higher.
It is okay to be late, miss a meeting, and say no to your superiors from time to time, in fact it will be worse if you never did any of those.
No matter how honest, dedicated, hardworking and talented you are, still there is a high chance you will never be the best employee of the month/year and you probably won’t get any promotions either.
Don’t be the guy who is there to take any task which others failed to complete.
You might be right, your opinion might be the best, but guess what? Sometimes nobody wants to hear the right thing and they won’t do it your way.
When you feel that you are way smarter and more talented than your boss, that is the moment you should consider changing your job.
If you actually want to grow and have your dream career/job then start your own business, spend all those energy and talent working for yourself instead of working for someone else all your life. You will grow much faster working a day for yourself than a month for somebody else.
I was on the metro escalator on my way up to the platform. In front of me was a couple – probably in their late twenties. The wife was wearing a sleeveless top and carrying a baby in her arms. She was kind of cute. Her husband stood a couple of steps in front of her.
Suddenly, I’ve no idea how it happened, but the girl lost her balance started falling backwards. She tried to fumble for the railing, now holding the child with just one hand – her body flailing wildly. The child was about to fall on the moving escalator.
Instinctively, I reached out and firmly grabbed both her (wife, not the child) arms, steadying her. Once I was sure she was safe, I immediately let go.
The entire thing must have lasted less than a nanosecond.
But as it happened, I registered a flash of intense fear jolting through my body. It wasn’t because the girl and her child were going to get hurt. Their safety had nothing to do with it. No! my fear was much more primal, originating somewhere deep inside my reptilian brain which knew that she was a female and I was a male – and my bare hands on her naked flesh – what that would mean in the eyes of the society, and how those standing around us might interpret it! Her husband, who was standing just a few steps ahead of us had no idea what had happened. A single shriek from the girl, and his animal brain would have gone berserk trying to defend what was rightfully its and eliminate the perceived threat at any cost.
My life could have been destroyed.
In that single nanosecond, my brain witnessed a fierce battle between two base instincts – one to help a fellow human being and the other to be afraid since that human being happened to be a female. Society had only taught me well enough the consequences such a situation might spiral into.
I was just lucky that that day, the first instinct had prevailed.
Had the second one kicked in first, a two year old child would have, at best, gotten gravely injured, or at worst, lost his life.
This is what happened with one guy in one incident.
Integrate that over four billion men on this planet and a million such situations that arise in the lifetimes, and you’ll realize what our world has come to.
The day my father died. I know that’s a big one for most people, but it was so much more for me. I was 40 and had had a contentious or non-existent relationship with him for 30 years due to the lies my mother told me about him. According to her, he was a sociopath. He lied, cheated and stole money from his own children. I believed it all as a ten-year-old.
I contacted my father several months before his death because I found out about my mother’s lies. I needed to apologize to him. My stepmother said she would arrange a meeting as soon as they returned from vacation. When they finally returned, he had already been diagnosed with inoperable, incurable cancer, the kind that Jimmy Buffet had.
Dad only lived four more months and I only had one opportunity to say what I needed to say to him. He hadn’t known how pervasive the brainwashing had been or what had been said. It helped to talk, but it couldn’t heal 30 years of mutual wounding. My father died not loving me, and the time lost devastated me. It still does 30 years later.
Does it occur to you it could be the U.S. that could be imprisoned? If the U.S. ends up spending tons of money meaninglessly and without a return and yet it cannot stop spending billions to continuously do shit that don’t pay it is the U.S. that is trapped. China don’t gives a shit it simply just let the US waste all its own money bribing nations who refuse to do shit, just to pretend to the world that it has allies.
For us in Asia. Even Japan, Korea, Phillipines and India have no wish to do shit as it knows the repercussions and it has been China’s neighbour for some 5000 years! It may have no choice but to barked some shit on China to get the U.S. off its back. But sure won’t risk it to do more than that. So the U.S. having a pay billions get some pretend shit is outright silly and wasteful.
So who is trapped? China can and will do what it wants. And the U.S. has to stay and waste a ton of resources to get pretentious shit that China gives a damn. To me the U.S. is trapped in its own stupidity!
The mistake women make with faithful men…
Russian Space Nukes and Navalny’s Death… U.S. Psyops Go Ballistic
Two “breaking news” items this week provided a timely opportunity for the United States and its media-intelligence apparatus to regain control of the narrative.
The claims about Russian space-based nuclear weapons unraveled to become a joke. Fortunately, the death of Western-sponsored dissident Alexei Navalny then occurred to enable Western media to go into a frenzy of anti-Russia headlines.
First up was the scaremongering story about Russia allegedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon. Initially, it was dramatically trailed as posing a serious national security threat to the United States. Despite the sensational reporting, the story quickly became a laughingstock. Even some U.S. lawmakers dismissed it as “bullshit” and a blatant attempt by the Biden White House and intelligence agencies to push Congress into passing a new mega military aid bill for Ukraine worth $61 billion.
We’ll get to the Navalny story in a moment. But let’s just first parse the orchestration of the alleged Russian space nukes.
The drama began on Wednesday when Mike Turner, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (a dodgy source if ever there was one), made public appeals to President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence on “a serious threat to national security”. Turner is a Republican member of the House of Representatives but he is a close ally of the Democrat White House in terms of keenly supporting military aid to Ukraine. The latest bill passed the upper chamber of the U.S. Senate the day before, February 13, but it is unlikely to be approved by the House where many Republican lawmakers are staunchly opposed to it.
Accompanying the “concerns” of the intel committee chairman Turner, media outlets then vented anonymous US intelligence sources “revealing” that the national security threat was from Russian nuclear weapons allegedly under development for destroying American communication satellites in space. The White House then “confirmed” the intel the next day, February 15. It was a flagrant put-up job. But the Biden administration sought to tamp down any public panic by saying that the threat was not imminent and the alleged Russian satellite-killing weapon had not been deployed in orbit, nor would there be any danger to Earth. (So, what was all the fuss about?)
Ironically, derisive comments from incredulous U.S. lawmakers were also echoed by the Kremlin. The latter’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov made a similar assessment that the Biden administration was playing tricks to push through the military funding package for Ukraine.
That bill has been delayed since the end of last year. The Biden administration has been cajoling Congress for months to vote it through. After the Senate finally passed the bill this week, President Biden put pressure on the House, saying that “history is watching you”. The bill has been exalted as having existential importance in defeating “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. The U.S. media have claimed (preposterously) that if the military aid is not supplied then Ukraine’s defeat could result in American troops being deployed to prevent Russian rampaging across Europe.
The American public, as with the European public, has become increasingly skeptical about the relentless funneling of taxpayer funds and weapons to Ukraine. Many citizens in the West – a majority, according to polls – have become critical of fueling a bloody war for the dubious cause of “defending democracy” in a regime dominated by NeoNazis. At a time of deep social and economic hardship in the U.S. and Europe, the Western public is rightly disdainful of hundreds of billions of dollars and euros being wasted on death and destruction and also being siphoned off by a corrupt cabal in Kiev.
The $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine is just the latest tranche that Washington is seeking to throw at the black hole of its proxy war against Russia – a war that is really all about defeating Russia as a geopolitical obstacle to U.S. hegemony. Another driver is the massive profits that taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex at the rotten heart of Western capitalism.
There’s a huge lot at stake with the failure of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine. The Kiev regime is facing a collapse in the face of a superior Russian military.
That’s why the passing of the latest bill by Congress has taken on such an imperative importance – for the warmongers.
To get this bill into law, the U.S. deep state rulers and the pliant Biden White House along with the media-intelligence establishment sought to demonize Russia with a desperate story about alleged nuclear weapons for outer space. Oh, those dastardly Ruskies!
But as noted above the space nukes scar-story turned into farce. It was too obvious that the public was being manipulated, or gaslighted as one US lawmaker put it. When a psyops fails, the blowback is dangerous for the authors because of the damaging revelation and contempt it engenders. The Biden administration was open to ridicule.
There are several telltale signs that the story was total hogwash from the outset. Bruce Gagnon, U.S.-based coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, said the claims are absurd. In an email exchange with the Strategic Culture Foundation for this editorial, Gagnon said Russia has already developed formidable non-nuclear kinetic weapons to destroy satellites if it wanted to. He also remarked that the United States possesses anti-satellite weapons (ASATs).
In other words, there is no need for Russia to develop a risky nuclear weapon to knock out satellites. The nuclear details flagged up in US media this week are a gratuitous embellishment designed to alarm the public and to demonize Russia as an evil rogue state.
Russia is a co-signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as are the United States, China, and over 120 other nations.
Bruce Gagnon commented: “I believe the Russians have a long history of generally honoring treaties while the U.S. does not. And remember that Russia and China every year for at least the last 20-30 years go to the UN and introduce a new treaty called Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) to ban all weapons that fall outside of the 1967 treaty. The U.S. always refuses, saying there is no need for a new treaty.”
Apart from the paramount issue of getting additional funding for the proxy war in Ukraine, another timing issue is the aftermath of the blockbuster interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American journalist Tucker Carlson. Since the interview was aired last Thursday, February 8, it has broken all records for public audiences around the world. It has garnered over 300 million views, and counting.
The one-on-one interview was seen as a breakthrough world exclusive, an informative platform for Putin to comprehensively give Russia’s point of view on the whole Ukraine conflict, and more. The Russian leader was seen by American and European audiences as reasonable, intelligent, articulate, and convincing. The Western propaganda caricature of Putin was dispelled and for a rare moment, the Western public was persuasively informed of the bigger causes of the conflict in Ukraine. That is, how the U.S.-led NATO axis had instigated the war by fomenting an anti-Russian regime dominated by NeoNazis. The impact of the interview dealt a devastating blow to the Western narrative of “Russian aggression” and “evil Putin”.
Plausibly, the U.S. warmongering establishment was incensed by this exposé.
Hence, to wrest back control of the narrative and corral the Western public, the space-based nukes scare-story was unleashed. Unfortunately, that psyop attempt failed to gain traction and indeed was fast descending into a farce.
Next up, luckily, came the news of Navalny’s death. Western media immediately blared headlines and comments that he had been killed by the “Putin regime”.
Navalny was serving 19 years in prison on multiple corruption convictions. He died Friday apparently from a blood clot. The 47-year-old was a broken and forgotten figure facing a futile existence, having been used and abandoned by Western intelligence handlers as a cut-out dissident figure. His future looked bleak. Who knows at this stage what caused his death? He was last seen by his lawyer during a prison meeting this week two days before his passing. Did his lawyer pass something to Navalny? Was the washed-up Western asset offered a deal for his family’s benefit if he agreed to one last, ultimate psyop on behalf of Western handlers? Taking his own life? His death in prison has certainly provided the Western media with a bonanza opportunity to change the narrative and precipitate an avalanche of Russophobia, just as required.
As for the far-fetched Russian space nukes and the death of Navalny, the criminologist’s question of Who Gains? and the factor of timing are often reliable indicators.
My friend’s cousin disappeared, and it was an interesting lesson in media bias.
She didn’t come home one day. They found her necklace, broken, next to her car, in a nearby park. Her photo was in all the local newspapers: a cute smiling blonde girl in her high school softball uniform, well liked and a good student. Her family held press conferences pleading for whoever took her to let her go.
A few weeks later, she did return. But she had not been kidnapped – it had been staged. She had actually run off with her boyfriend against her parents’ wishes. The photo of the cute blonde girl was replaced by a photo of her with dyed black hair, dark goth clothing and a look of defiance. The papers began reporting that the well liked good student had been caught shoplifting and was in trouble at school. She was eventually sentenced to community service for faking the crime.
This was the same person. When they wanted to make her look innocent, she looked innocent. When they wanted to make her look guilty, she looked guilty. Think about that next time you read the news.
Big Picture Conflict: Pepe Escobar & Global Times Observations
Karl Sanchez
The Two-year anniversary of Russia’s SMO and the Ten-year anniversary of the overt beginning of the Outlaw US Empire’s conflict with Russia with the Ukraine Coup are upon us as well as the related conflict to free Palestine from Zionist/West Genocide—both operations initially were planned as Nazi-like Plan Ost Genocidal ethnic cleansing so the lands “freed” could then be exploited by Western Capital. But in both cases, the targets of oppression, dispossession and death fought back, although in both cases resistance was always present with the assaulted able to gain formidable allies. Both conflicts have revealed the status of the protagonists within the larger Global Conflict pitting the Global majority against the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals, perhaps most starkly revealing the Fence Sitters trying to play both sides for their own pecuniary gain as is the case most certainly with Turkey.
The recently completed G-20 Foreign Ministers Summit in Rio de Janeiro helped to further define the lines/sides as the raw statements from Lavrov provided to readers who read the reports about his actions. To help deepen understanding about our Global Conflict, the latest two essays by Pepe Escobar and Global Times G-20 report are presented below. The political cartoon at the header is from Global Times and is almost accurate for our purposes as the pot needs to include the Zionists. And Palestine is where we’ll begin with Pepe’s “The Axis of Asymmetry takes on the ‘rules-based order:’”
The Axis of Asymmetry is in full swing. These are the state and non-state actors employing asymmetrical moves on the global chessboard to sideline the US-led western rules-based order. And its vanguard is the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah.
Ansarallah is absolutely relentless. They have downeda $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone with just a $10k indigenous missile.
They are the first in the Global South ever to use anti-ship ballistic missiles against Israel-bound and/or -protecting commercial and US Navy ships.
For all practical purposes, Ansarallah is at war with no less than the US Navy.
Ansarallah has captured one of the US Navy’s ultra-sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), the $1.3 million Remus 600, a torpedo-shaped underwater drone able to carry a massive payload of sensors.
Next stop: reverse engineering in Iran? The Global South eagerly awaits, ready to pay in currencies bypassing the US dollar.
All of the above – a maritime 21st-century remix of the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War – spells out that the Hegemon may not even qualify as a paper tiger, but rather as a paper leech.
Lula tells it as the Global South sees it
Into the Big Picture – linked to the relentless ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza – steps a true leader of the Global South, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Lula spoke in the name of Brazil, Latin America, Africa, BRICS 10, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South when he cut to the chase and defined the Gaza tragedy for what it is: a genocide. No wonder the Zionist tentacles across the Global North – plus its Global South vassals – went bonkers.
The genocidals in Tel Aviv declared Lula as persona non grata in Israel. Yet Lula did not assassinate 29,000+ Palestinians – the overwhelming majority of whom were women and children.
History will be unforgiving: it’s the genocidals that will eventually be judged as personae non grata to all of humanity.
What Lula said represented BRICS 10 in action: this was obviously cleared before with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and, of course, the African Union. Lula spoke in Addis Ababa, and Ethiopia is now a BRICS 10 member.
The Brazilian president was extremely smart in timing his Gaza fact-check to be on the table during the G20 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Rio. Way beyond BRICS 10, what’s happening in Gaza is a consensus among the non-Western G20 partners – who are actually a majority. No one, though, should expect any serious follow-up inside a divided G20. The heart of the matter remains in the facts on the ground.
Yemen’s fight for “our people” in Gaza is a matter of humanistic, moral, and religious solidarity – these are foundational tenets of the rising eastern “civilizational” powers, both domestically and in international affairs. This convergence of principles has now created a direct link – extrapolating to the moral and spiritual spheres – between the Axis of Resistance in West Asia and the Slavic Axis of Resistance in Donbass.
Extreme attention should be paid to the timescale. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) forces and Russia have spent two hard-fought years in Novorossiya just to arrive at the stage where it becomes clear – based on the battlefield and cumulative facts on the ground – that “negotiations” mean only the terms of Kiev’s surrender.
In contrast, the job of the Axis of Resistance in West Asia has not even started. It’s fair to argue that its strength and full sovereign involvement have not been deployed yet (think Hezbollah and Iran).
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, with his proverbial subtlety, has hinted there’s, in fact, nothing to negotiate on Palestine. And if there would be a return to any borders, these would be the 1948 borders. The Axis of Resistance understands that the whole Zionist Project is unlawful and immoral. But the question remains how to throw it, in practice, into the dustbin of History?
Possible – avowedly optimistic – scenarios ahead would include Hezbollah taking possession of the Galilee as a step toward the eventual retaking of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Yet the fact remains that even a united Palestine does not have the military capability to reconquer stolen Palestinian lands.
So the questions posed by the overwhelming majority of the Global South that stands with Lula may be: Who else, apart from Ansarallah, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, will join the Axis of Asymmetry in the fight for Palestine? Who would be willing to come to the Holy Land and die? (After all, in Donbass, it’s only Russians and Russophones who are dying for historically Russian lands) [Not entirely 100% correct, but close].
And that brings us to the way towards the endgame: only a West Asian Special Military Operation (SMO), to the bitter end, will settle the Palestinian tragedy. A translation of what happens across the Slavic Axis of Resistance: “Those who refuse to negotiate with Lavrov, deal with Shoigu.”
The menu, the table, and the guests
That out-of-his-depth closet neocon, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, let the cat out of the bag when he actually defined his much cherished “rules-based international order”: “If you’re not on the table, you are on the menu.”
Following his own hegemonic logic, it’s clear that Russia and the US/NATO are on the table while Ukraine is on the menu. What about the Red Sea? The Houthis defending Palestine against US–UK–Israel are clearly on the table, while Western vassals supporting Israel in a maritime way are clearly on the menu.
And that’s the problem: the Hegemon – or, in Chinese scholarly terminology, “the crusaders” – have lost the power to place the name cards on the table. The main reason for this authority collapse is the build-up of serious international meetings sponsored by the Russia–China strategic partnership during the past two years since the start of the SMO. It’s all about sequential planning, with long-term targets clearly outlined.
Only civilizational states can do that – not plutocratic neoliberal casinos.
Negotiating with the Hegemon is impossible because the Hegemon itself prevents negotiations (see the serial blocking of ceasefire resolutions at the UN). Additionally, the Hegemon excels in instrumentalizing its client elites across the Global South via threats or kompromat: see the hysterical reaction of Brazilian mainstream media to Lula’s verdict on Gaza.
What Russia is showing the Global South, two years after the start of the SMO, is that the only path to teach a lesson to the Hegemon has to be kinetic, or “military-technical.”
The problem is no nation-state can compare to nuclear/hypersonic/military superpower Russia, in which 7.5 percent of the government’s budget is dedicated to military production. Russia is and will remain on a permanent war footing until Hegemon’s elites come to their senses – and that may never happen.
Meanwhile, West Asia’s Axis of Resistance is watching and learning, day after day. It’s always crucial to keep in mind that for all the resistance movements across the Global South – and that also includes, for instance, West Africans against French neo-colonialism – the geopolitical fault lines could not be starker.
It’s a matter of the collective West versus Islam; the collective West versus Russia; and sooner rather than later, a substantial part of the West, even reluctantly, versus China.
The fact is we are already immersed in a World War that is both existential and civilizational. As we stand at the crossroads, there is a bifurcation: either escalation towards overt “kinetic military action,” or a multiplication of Hybrid Wars across several latitudes.
So it’s up to the Axis of Asymmetry, cool, calm, and collected, to forge the underground corridors, passages, and trails capable of undermining and subverting the US-led, unipolar, rules-based international order. [Bolded italics my emphasis]
Pessimistic or realistic? Obviously, the situation is already kinetic. But two very important factors have been proven over the past two years: NATO is powerless to defeat Russia and the USN can be defeated by the new methods of warfare. Pepe and I agree that the major forcing to solve Palestine will need to come from outside, which means Russia or China or perhaps an international coalition sans Western nations. The longer Palestine is subjected to Zionist Genocide, the more the world’s people will learn of its history and the utter crime related to the creation of Occupied Palestine. And now for the second Pepe Escobar essay, “Two Years After the Start of the SMO, the West is Totally Paralyzed:”
Exactly two years ago this Saturday, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced the launching – and described the objectives – of a Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. That was the inevitable follow-up to what happened three days before, on February 21 – exactly 8 years after Maidan 2014 in Kiev – when Putin officially recognized the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
During this – pregnant with meaning – short space of only three days, everyone expected that the Russian Armed Forces would intervene, militarily, to end the massive bombing and shelling that had been going on for three weeks across the frontline – which even forced the Kremlin to evacuate populations at risk to Russia. Russian intel had conclusive proof that the NATO-backed Kiev forces were ready to execute an ethnic cleansing of Russophone Donbass.
February 24, 2022 was the day that changed 21st century geopolitics forever, in several complex ways. Above all, it marked the beginning of a vicious, all-out confrontation, “military-technical” as the Russians call it, between the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, its easily pliable NATOstan vassals, and Russia – with Ukraine as the battleground.
There is hardly any question Putin had calculated, before and during these three fateful days, that his decisions would unleash the unbounded fury of the collective West – complete with a tsunami of sanctions.
Ay, there’s the rub; it’s all about Sovereignty. And a true sovereign power simply cannot live under permanent threats. It’s even feasible that Putin had wanted (italics mine) Russia to get sanctioned to death. After all, Russia is so naturally wealthy that without a serious challenge from abroad, the temptation is enormous to live off its rents while importing what it could easily produce.
Exceptionalists always gloated that Russia is “a gas station with nuclear weapons”. That’s ridiculous. Oil and gas, in Russia, account for roughly 15% of GDP, 30% of the government budget, and 45% of exports. Oil and gas add power to the Russian economy – not a drag. Putin shaking Russia’s complacency generated a gas station producing everything it needs, complete with unrivalled nuclear and hypersonic weapons. Beat that.
Ukraine has “never been less than a nation”
Xavier Moreau is a French politico-strategic analyst based in Russia for 24 years now. Graduated from the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy and with a Sorbonne diploma, he hosts two shows on RT France.
His latest book, Ukraine: Pourquoi La Russie a Gagné (“Ukraine: Why Russia has Won”), just out, is an essential manual for European audiences on the realities of the war, not those childish fantasies concocted across the NATOstan sphere by instant “experts” with less than zero combined arms military experience.
Moreau makes it very clear what every impartial, realist analyst was aware of from the beginning: the devastating Russian military superiority, which would condition the endgame. The problem, still, is how this endgame – “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as established by Moscow – will be achieved.
What is already clear is that “demilitarization”, of Ukraine and NATO, is a howling success that no new wunderwaffen – like F-16s – will be able to change.
Moreau perfectly understands how Ukraine, nearly 10 years after Maidan, is not a nation; “and has never been less than a nation”. It’s a territory where populations that everything separates are jumbled up. Moreover, it has been a – “grotesque” – failed state ever since its independence. Moreau spends several highly entertaining pages going through the corruption grotesquerie in Ukraine, under a regime that “gets its ideological references simultaneously via admirers of Stepan Bandera and Lady Gaga.”
None of the above, of course, is reported by oligarch-controlled European mainstream media.
Watch out for Deng Xiao Putin
The book offers an extremely helpful analysis of those deranged Polish elites who bear “a heavy responsibility in the strategic catastrophe that awaits Washington and Brussels in Ukraine”. The Poles actually believed that Russia would crumble from the inside, complete with a color revolution against Putin. That barely qualifies as Brzezinski on crack.
Moreau shows how 2022 was the year when NATOstan, especially the Anglo-Saxons – historically racist Russophobes – were self-convinced thar Russia would fold because it is a “poor power”. Obviously, none of these luminaries understood how Putin strengthened the Russian economy very much like Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese economy. This “self-intoxication”, as Moreau qualifies it, did wonders for the Kremlin.
By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb, and blind that the destruction of the European economy has been a massive tactic, historic victory for the Hegemon – as much as the blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has been an abysmal failure.
All of the above brings us to the meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers this week in Rio. That was not exactly a breakthrough. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it very clear that the collective West at the G20 tried by all means to “Ukrainize” the agenda – with less than zero success. They were outnumbered and counterpunched by BRICS and Global South members.
At his press conference, Lavrov could not be more stark on the prospects of the war of the collective West against Russia. These are the highlights:
Western countries categorically do not want serious dialogue on Ukraine.
There were no serious proposals from the United States to begin contacts with the Russian Federation on strategic stability; trust cannot be restored now while Russia is declared an enemy.
There were no contacts on the sidelines of the G20 with either Blinken or the British Foreign Secretary.
The Russian Federation will respond to new Western sanctions with practical actions that relate to the self-sufficient development of the Russian economy.
If Europe tries to restore ties with the Russian Federation, making it dependent on their whims, then such contacts are not needed.
In a nutshell – diplomatically: you are irrelevant, and we don’t care.
That was complementing Lavrov’s intervention during the summit, which defined once again a clear, auspicious path towards multipolarity. Here are the highlights:
The forming of a fair multipolar world order without a definite center and periphery has become much more intensive in the past few years. Asian, African and Latin American countries are becoming important parts of the global economy. Not infrequently, they are setting the tone and the dynamics.
Many Western economies, especially in Europe, are actually stagnating against this background. These statistics are from Western-supervised institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD.
These institutions are becoming relics from the past. Western domination is already affecting their ability to meet the requirements of the times. Meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious today that the current problems of humanity can only be resolved through a concerted effort and with due consideration for the interests of the Global South and, generally, all global economic realities.
Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and the EIB are prioritizing Kiev’s military and other needs. The West allocated over $250 billion to tide over its underling thus creating funding shortages in other parts of the world. Ukraine is taking up the bulk of the funds, relegating Africa and other regions of the Global South to rationing.
Countries that have discredited themselves by using unlawful acts ranging from unilateral sanctions and the seizure of sovereign assets and private property to blockades, embargoes, and discrimination against economic operators based on nationality to settle scores with their geopolitical opponents cannot be considered guarantors of financial stability.
Without a doubt, new institutions that focus on consensus and mutual benefit are needed to democratize the global economic governance system. Today, we are seeing positive dynamics for strengthening various alliances, including BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, LAS, CELAC, and the EAEU.
This year, Russia chairs BRICS, which saw several new members join it. We will do our best to reinforce the potential of this association and its ties with the G20.
Considering that 6 out of 15 UN Security Council members represent the Western bloc, we will support the expansion of this body solely through the accession of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Call it the real state of things, geopolitically, two years after the start of the SMO. [Bolded italics my emphasis]
The G-20 timing also coincided with the ICJ’s sessions about Palestine and the increasing number of cases being filed against the Zionists and their abettors. The West’s stance was specifically called out by Lavrov who added it to the evidentiary trail of previous criminal acts. The Outlaw US Empire and the West generally are parasites who feed on host nations in what are clearly Neocolonial types of arrangements. Now the Empire is leeching off the EU and enforcing its blood-sucking via NATO. Trump doesn’t want to disband NATO; he wants to increase the intensity of its blood-sucking just as he did before. Now it’s: Pay up your 2% of GDP or we’ll sick the Russians on you, or rather won’t protect you from the Russians. Putin has said Europeans must rescue themselves as Russia has no intent on going beyond Ukraine as Russia already has most everything it needs. So, now we have Global Times whose experts opine that the SMO “may become ‘a war without winners.’” We’ll see why in “US escalates sanctions, fans fire as Ukraine crisis enters 3rd year:”
The US joined the EU and UK in announcing a new round of sanctions against Russia, ahead of the two-year anniversary of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in February 2022. But at the same time, Russia is seemingly gaining the upper hand on the battlefield with its latest victory in capturing Avdiivka, a critical town in eastern Ukraine.
Analysts said considering the previous sanctions were far from reaching expectations, and the US and West are not prepared to compromise with Russia on the conflict in 2024, the stalemate may become a large probability, and a cease-fire is still far from sight.
At a time when the security environment and economy of the entire world are being seriously affected, the US, whether it is from holding Europe hostage to promote bloc confrontation or from selling gas and arms to Europe, seems to be benefiting the most. However, experts said that if the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues for a long time, it will be a war without winners, and China will continue its efforts in promoting peace talks and a cease-fire as early as possible.
Stalemate to continue
US President Joe Biden on Friday announced Washington would issue more than 500 new sanctions targeting Russia for the ongoing war with Ukraine and for the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The US will also impose new export restrictions on nearly 100 entities for providing support to Russia and take action to further reduce Russia’s energy revenues, Biden said in a statement.
The US latest sanctions came on the heels of moves by its allies. The UK on Thursday announced more than 50 further sanctions against Russia, targeting individuals and businesses supporting Moscow’s “war effort.” On Wednesday, the EU also approved its 13th package of sanctions against Russia, banning nearly 200 related individuals and entities which it claimed as being linked to Moscow’s operation, including companies from China and India. The sanction was adopted on Friday.
However, experts found that sanctions from the US and West have failed to have any substantial impact on Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow was also “not nearly as isolated as US officials had hoped,” as Russia’s inherent strength, rooted in vast supplies of oil and natural gas, “has powered a financial and political resilience,” according to a New York Times report. [Which is BS as Escobar reported above.]
Western sanctions on Russia did put short-term pressure on the Russian economy, but it soon adjusted policy and resumed growth, Zhang Hong, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.
The sanctions are a sign of Western political correctness, but they have fallen far short of their intended goals, Zhang said, adding that rounds of sanctions have not changed Russia’s position in the Ukraine crisis or caused major economic difficulties for Russia.
“In a way, it was a failure,” said the expert.
According to the expert, compared with the previous measures, the recent ones have focused more on indirect sanctions, by restricting Russia’s trade and financial contacts with other countries, narrowing Russia’s external economic activity.
The sanctions also come at a time when Russia is gaining the upper hand on the battlefield, capturing Ukraine’s eastern city of Avdiivka last week. Ukraine faces a shortage of ammunition and insufficient troops, according to media reports.
Ahead of the crisis anniversary, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that Russia will have to continue fighting Ukraine until it takes the coastal city of Odessa and Ukraine’s capital Kiev, according to RT.
Although some observers, including former CIA director and secretary of Defense Robert Gates, told US media that he believed Russia has “regained the momentum” and “has broken the stalemate,” Chinese experts said the current seesaw battle may continue in 2024.
Medvedev’s remark shows Russia’s confidence in continuing its “special operation,” Zhang said, “What Moscow seeks is to maximize its security interests within the scope of controllable risks.“
However, the latest sanctions show the US and the West are not prepared to compromise with Russia, Zhang noted, adding that although Ukraine has recently been passive on the battlefield, it’s unlikely to suffer a rout. [Avdeevka ws a rout.] On February 1, EU leaders approved the extension of 50 billion Euros ($54 billion) in aid to Ukraine from 2024 to 2027. “It shows that currently the West is not prepared to abandon Ukraine,” Zhang said.
Experts also noted that in the long run, the situation in the battlefield largely depends on US factors, whether it can overcome domestic partisan strife on aiding Kiev, and whether US policies will be adjusted sharply after a possible Trump return.
In 2024, the continuation of stalemate and attrition may become a high probability on the battlefield in Ukraine, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Friday.
The conflict will continue, and there is no end in sight, at least for now, Li added.
War without winners
Given that Chinese companies were listed among the latest British and EU sanctions against Russia, on Thursday, the Chinese Embassy in the UK expressed strong opposition, stressing that China has always held an objective and just position on the Ukraine crisis.
Ahead of the anniversary, some Western media expressed misgivings over China’s position. VOA accused China of not pressuring Russia to “stop the aggression,” while some German media said the sanctions pushed Russia into the arms of China, making it “the biggest winner” of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The West is trying to pressure China to take sides through public opinion, but as a major power, China will not let this noise affect its neutral position, Li said.
During a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on February 17, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China has stayed committed to promoting peace talks on the Ukraine issue and will not give up as long as there is a glimmer of hope. China refrains from adding fuel to the fire or taking advantage of the situation, and refrains from selling lethal weapons to conflict areas or parties, Wang said.
Sanctions and weapons aid have not changed Russia’s position, but have prolonged the conflict and extended the damage to Ukraine. In order to end the losses in Ukraine as soon as possible, there must be an early cease-fire and peace talks, Zhang said.
Due to the conflict, all major economies, including China, have been impacted, both in terms of security environment and economy, and it has also had a negative impact on China-EU relations and China-US relations, Zhang said.
So far, the US is the biggest beneficiary, analysts said. US liquefied natural gas has entered the EU market and now takes up a large share. Through the export of weapons, US military manufacturers are making huge amounts of money. At the same time, the Russia-Ukraine conflict also further strengthens US control over Europe, prompting the return of the influence of its bloc politics.
However, overall and in the long run, the conflict will be a war without winners, with only tragedy and disaster, analysts said.
If the goal of the US is to maximize the weakening of Russia by completely depleting Ukraine, even if the goal is achieved, Russia, the US and Europe will most likely fall into a deeper strategic confrontation in the future, Li said.
If the US and the West hope to wait until Ukraine is almost exhausted before directly engaging Russia on the battlefield, then they are playing with fire, said Li, “to defeat a nuclear power on the battlefield is likely to lead to nuclear war and World War III. If that happens, Russia, Ukraine are the losers, the US, Europe are losers, global security will be at stake, and the end will be disaster and tragedy for humankind.” [Emphasis mine]
IMO, it’s odd that Li doesn’t think Ukraine isn’t yet “exhausted” and the loser ever since the conflict began in 2014. That the experts consulted think the conflict is now a “stalemate” means they aren’t paying attention to what’s happening and have ignored Russia’s highly successful strategy of attrition. Again, the notion that “the US … seems to be benefiting the most” or “is the biggest beneficiary,” is chimeric with the seems being an incorrect assumption when reality within the Outlaw US Empire is considered—no tangible gains have accrued to US citizens aside from a very small group of elites. Indeed, the US economy is polarized as the real economy shrinks and the parasite economy expands. The complexity of the sanctions and collusion in their make-up and application by the Empire and its vassals tells us that they were not made for Nalvalny. Indeed, his murder was likely induced by the West to coincide with three events: SMO anniversary, Munich Security Conference, and Putin/Carlson Interview, since his wife/widow was previously invited and showed no shock or grief and all BigLie Media outlets had synchronized copy/paste “news” items immediately upon word of his death. Over the last 24 years of similar happenings, those with active minds can see through the crap. Are the Chinese being honest when they write, “However, overall and in the long run, the conflict will be a war without winners, with only tragedy and disaster,” or are they writing that way to appease the West so it will not target China with further sanctions? Most credible analysts have China next on the menu after Russia, which is precisely what the Outlaw US Empire’s “security” and “defense” documents and policies say matter-of-factly.
Russia’s proving its SMO isn’t mired in a stalemate as it continues to push Westward along the FEBA. Medvedev has issued serious goals as statements of policy. The need to deNazify not only Ukraine but Europe’s been voiced by both Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev, Zakharova, Patrushev, and other top Russian officials. Russia has its Home Front in fine form with very little dissent to be seen or heard. The situation in Ukraine and the West is almost the exact opposite as it’s embroiled in the Gaza Genocide too that has vastly amplified dissent. Plus, the Neoliberal economies are functioning as planned—taking from the poor and giving to the already rich. Dr, Hudson recently provided some anecdotal evidence of that, “New School University race to the bottom,” which ought to be compared with my “Creating a Network of Modern University Campuses” report about two weeks ago. And as my reports show, Russia’s economy is booming as is its trade, while it’s ready to vastly widen the non-Western payments and settlements system so sanctions will have nothing to impede.
Some time ago a European politician made the analogy of Ukraine being a drowning person capable of drowning its rescuers. That man was insightful when compared with most European and US politicos. The longer the West continues to lie about the actual reasons for the SMO and what group started it, the harder it’s going to be when the time arrives for whatever remains of Ukraine to capitulate. The state, which has always been artificial as Putin told the world again in his talk with Tucker Carlson, will likely disappear into the ether from which it was conjured. And all those loans and “investments” will translate into 100% loses for their providers. And if the West attempts to steal Russia’s illegally frozen assets, then it’s going to suffer an even greater loss in the end as extinguishing Ukraine is precisely what will happen.
“What’s Coming Is WORSE Than A Recession” — Ray Dalio’s Last WARNING
I trashed a child in front of his parents while watching the movie “The Jungle Book” and I am proud of what I did to him.
April 14,
Navratri puja over, so I took my brother to watch a movie as my birthday treat which was on 12th.
Housefull.
This child was 27 years old sitting one seat to my left. And right beside me was a beautiful lady in her 60’s, followed by this boy and his father.
During the intermission, the boy ordered two cups of American corn and sat back. Then after a few minutes, the INOX guy came and handed it over to the boy.
Two minutes later, the lady unintentionally spilled the corn.
The boy started yelling at his mom, “koto taka legechy jaano ?? kheyecho aiekhany ??”
Translation: “Do you know how much that cost? Have you ever eaten here??”
And then comes the sickening part: he hit his mother’s legs pretty hard, simply because she had accidentally spilled the cup of American corn.
Seeing all this made me livid. And just when I thought he wouldn’t repeat this deplorable act, he hit his mom again.
His mom was extremely embarrased and kept her head down.
After hitting his mom twice, I didn’t hold myself back. I hit his cup of corn and spilled all of it on the floor. He stood up and confronted me; I landed a punch on his face as hard as I could.
To ensure he stayed put and didn’t retaliate, I landed two more. By then all the people around me (including my brother) got up on their feet and were ready to stop me in case I was going to smack him again.
It was chaos all around, and the security intervened and escorted both of us out.
Once outside and no more in the darkness, I saw that the guy really needed medical assistance after what I had to him. His nose was bleeding and lips were split open. And when our eyes met, I could clearly see the guilt in his eyes. I was damn happy with what I did, though I missed the movie which I watched later.
I was escorted off the premises, while he was administered first aid. I had to assure the security team that I would never repeat anything like this.
I never knew I could do such things but seeing a man punching his mother enraged me and I couldn’t resist myself.
Respect each and everyone whoever it might be, that is what my parents have taught me and I am glad that I do so and hope our generation does the same.
Edit 1 : For all those who think that I didn’t solve the whole problem, my little brother while taking them out of the theatre took the mother’s phone and saved my number.
I don’t think he will dare to do such activity again and I am hoping I won’t receive any call his mother.
Thanks for the appreciation !!
Edit 2: I would like you all to read Yogesh Singhq comment.
China not only has the largest military in the world, but it is also the oldest military in the world. The Chinese were fighting mass invasions and assaults involving thousands of trained warriors when the Europeans were still living in caves and picking lice off each other.
China also has the oldest Navy in the world. Indeed, the Chinese were conducting mass Naval Battles centuries before the Europeans were considering the value of ocean going vessels.
China has always fought using cutting-edge technologies that were unexpected, unheard of, and unanticipated by the nation attacking it. It’s more than gunpowder, it’s poison weapons, tricks and deceit, and armored vehicles that totally stunned the opposition.
China is lead by merit, with people with millennia of military experience. Indeed the top rated military strategy books are all Chinese.
China is a military-organized society that does everything based on merit. They are hopelessly super patriotic, and live to die for their country.
Oh, and remember that the United States tried to attack China in 1950. The United States lost, and lost badly.
…
FACT: Keep in mind that China considers both Taiwan and the South China Sea as China territory.
EXTRAPOLATED FACT: Any bombs, guns, missiles, or assaults in those regions will provoke a STRATEGIC response onto the United States.
KIND REMINDER: And remember Kiddos, that for China, STRATEGIC is the same as NUCLEAR.
…
You all should be really FUCKING clear on accepting the risks, and resulting lifestyle that you will endure, after that Pandora’s box is opened.
Alien Bodies Confirmed After Testing to be NON Human
This is actually a pretty good video, and I recommend it to all mm readers.
I responded to a medical emergency in a hoarder house in the 1980s. When we entered the house from the front door there was no pathway to the back of the house. Newspapers, magazines and papers stacked up to the 6 foot mark on all the walls. The kitchen was covered in plates of old food that had not be cleared or thrown away. No way to get through to the bedrooms in the back of the house. Rats, mice and bugs crawling over everything. We could see the resident in the back bedroom, but could not get through the piles of papers, junk and trash to get to the back bedroom to see if he was alive. The smell was unbelievable.
The fire department brought in a K-12 saw and cut hole into the bedroom from the back of the house. The owner was dead. Mice and insects were crawling all over the body. Multiple cats sprawling all over the piles of papers, garbage and junk in the house. The fire department used the saw to cut a larger hole in the back of the hose so we could get in. The City Public Works Department brought a four wheel drive front end loader to clear out piles of newspapers and magazines which filled the floor around the bed in the bedroom at the back of the house. Several police officers, Animal Control Officers and Public Works employees had to run to the back the property to throw up from the smell.
I took time off the radio after we got the body out of the house to go back to my home, dump my uniforms in the laundry and take a very hot shower to insure I cleared everything I was in contact in this house off my body.
The city quickly declared the house a major health hazard and had it bulldozed to the ground. I told my sergeant the next call like that I wanted to be sent to other side of of town rather than enter a hoarder house again.
I dealt with several more in that community and next one when I was Chief of Police. The smell never gets better.
When you stop trying, it happens | The psychology of the flow state
As a teenager, I washed dishes in a restaurant where my step-father ran the kitchen. He made all the soups and other pre-cooked items (prime rib, ribs), ordered the produce and stock, etc.
The restaurant was located on a barge moored in a harbor on a river. Most of the kitchen help were what we referred to as east-enders… rough boys. I was a preppy high school kid but got along with most of them. However, there was one guy… Dale. Dale was a bit crazy. He was also heavily into drugs and a burnout. He also washed dishes and on weekends, there would be two of you paired together.
All dishes had to be cleaned by the end of the night, the floors swept and scrubbed, and dirty laundry put away (table cloths, napkins, and aprons). If it was a particularly good night, the waitresses would bring a few pitchers of beer from the bar to the kitchen crew.
One night beer was brought while everyone was cleaning up. Dale was drinking more than cleaning. I got fed up and left the dishes piled high in the sinks.
The following morning, my step father arrived at work to find the dirty dishes. My mother awoke me asking what happened and that my step father was livid. I was taken to work where I find Dale and my step father standing in the kitchen. My step father is PISSED. He asks me why the dishes were left. I explained I was tired of Dale not doing his job. Dale tried to talk his way out of the situation which only made things worse. My step father was screaming at Dale and told him to go clean the bathrooms. Dale left to do that and now I’m expecting to catch hell. My step father put his hand on my shoulder then walked away calmly asking me to finish the dishes.
I was stunned. My step-father wasn’t an understanding person and he didn’t treat me any different that the rest of the crew. But here he was believing me and siding with me (a rare instance).
About an hour later, we discovered Dale left without cleaning the bathrooms. I was asked to stay and work the shift…. and to clean the bathrooms.
Kid 1: I wish my teacher would know; my dad is in jail, and I haven’t seen him in years.
Kid 2: I wish my teacher would know, I don’t always eat dinner because my mom works and I don’t know how to work the stove.
Kid 3: I wish my teacher would know; my sister sleeps in the same bed as me, and sometimes she wets the bed, and that’s why I smell funny.
Kid 4: I wish my teacher would know that I don’t always have sneakers for gym class because my brothers and I share one pair.
Kid 5: I wish my teacher knew I like coming to school because it’s quiet here, unlike my house with all the yelling.
✨We spend so much time talking and judging what we think we know… we need to ask more questions and spend more time listening. We also need to shift our mindset and see things from other people’s perspective. Give more than we get. Live to serve and to help make a difference in others’ lives.
Let’s leave this life a little better than we found it.
Polish Cinnamon Cake
babkaslice
Yield: 8 to 12 servings
Ingredients
12 tablespoons butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
3 teaspoons cinnamon
A grating of fresh nutmeg
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Beat the butter until it is soft and fluffy. Add 3/4 cup of the sugar and the egg and continue beating. Add 2 teaspoons of the cinnamon, the nutmeg and flour, and beat until well mixed.
Spread about 1/3 of the batter on an ungreased baking sheet, forming a rectangle about 10 x 12 inches and bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for 8 minutes, until lightly browned.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
Repeat two more times with the remaining batter.
Whip the cream until stiff, and fold in the remaining 1/4 cup sugar, the remaining 1 teaspoon cinnamon and the vanilla extract. Spread a thin layer of whipped cream on one of the cakes, top with another cake, and repeat.
Spread remaining whipped cream on the top and serve immediately.
I am slap-in-middle of Gen X. Two years ago, I got diagnosed with cancer. I still live in the small-time town I was born in and know everyone.
I still went into work the next day and in the morning after I had texted all to my 31 year old boss whom I thought was a great guy that I might be a bit quiet today…. My ‘millennial’ boss was someone I deemed trustworthy and not at all like other guys like my disgusting, selfish, youngest brother. I was happy he was gonna be my boss through what was going to be a difficult time for me and my family. I wished I’d stayed at home but I had a lesson.
He actually thought it was the coolest thing, and was seriously, absolutely, completely delighted. An employee with cancer was so trendy. Not that he said that out loud but he was really pleased for himself…. Genuinely, the guy wanted to tell everyone – and I ordered him to be silent until I said so and stopped periodically shaking and could talk about it without being overwhelmed with fear that was so bad my tummy and heart hurt.
Me and my husband were looking at him like W.T.F. I suddenly got why millennials aren’t liked…
He then started to reduce my hours and told me I wasn’t haven’t sick pay three days before my massive surgery and sacked me when I got a lawyer on to him a year later. It is strictly illegal to sack someone with cancer in the UK.
He thought he was the best boss ever because he spent two minutes reading a website about how employees with cancer often want to work as it seems normal.
He had gotten a recent promotion and became ….. absolutely vile… I didn’t even get a card or a teddy bear. I am rather wary of that generation now.
During my (ours, including my wife) time that I refer to as the “out in the wilderness” period, we had many unique experiences. This period of time was right after I left the United States Navy as an aviator, and joined the ONI as a MAJestic operator. I was a shared resource, and reported directly to Domain. Which I still do.
At that point in time, I was “aimless”. Unemployed at the height of a major recession, homeless, married and living in a van. Moving from town to town finding work. Always the call of California called me to Ridgecrest…
Anyways, I got a job as a short-order cook at a family-owned restaurant in the town of San Louis Obispo. I worked from five in the morning to around 2:30 in the afternoon.
I worked just above minimum wage, but I got to keep the tips (which varied from a dollar to sometimes $20) and I could take home what ever leftover daily specials were available.
Now, remember… at that time, I was a Naval Aviator. The top 1% of the 1% and I did have a degree in Aerospace Engineering, and I WAS a “rocket scientist”. But in the working world.
And of course, I had traveled off-world to Mars (and the Moon), and I was interacting with Domain.
But that meant nothing.
Especially at that time in California, I was judged by how much money I made. What job I held. What car I drove. What clothes I wore, and what neighborhood that I lived in.
Not what I knew.
Not what I experienced.
Not what I was capable of.
Not how good I was, not what my experiences were, and not what I knew. And so, well, I was treated horribly by the owner of the establishment.
She called me “dingle berry”. That was her name for me.
“Dingleberry” is a slang term for a piece of dried poop that clings to the hairs in your anus or gooch region. When you don’t remove all the fecal remnants from your bum after a bowel movement, they coagulate into a crumb-like substance about the size of a sprinkle or Dippin’ Dot.
At that time, I took the insults. Over and over. And when her son would point at me and say (to his mother), “Don’t worry, I’ll never end up as a loser like him” I took it.
Punching bag MM.
You do what you need to do to survive.
So whenever I hear entitled Gen-Z making fun of others, or screaming that they “can’t handle a 40 hour work week” I scoff and think to my self… “you have no idea, Honey. Not a clue”.
You endure. And, you survive.
You give up, and you die.
Even if the insults pummel you relentlessly on a daily basis. You need to keep forging ahead, step by step.
He was probably in his twenties, blonde and gorgeous and had been teaching six months at the language center where I was a trainer and supervisor. His American background showed no teaching experience nor education courses.
He had a great, supportive rapport with his students. He prepared them well for most activities and helped the weak ones. He picked up on errors and dealt with them in a friendly, helpful way, and his students adored him.
But I could see he hadn’t looked at the materials before coming to class, even though he knew he would be observed. In fact, he misunderstood the purpose of one exercise and focused on the wrong grammar. With another, he failed to see that necessary activity details extended to a second page. But each time, he managed to cover and still see that students learned something.
I complimented him on how quickly he had become accustomed to teaching and had built such great rapport.
Then I said, “Sam, you are a really good teacher, but you could be a GREAT one if you prepared before class.”
Shrugging, he looked directly at me and answered, “I am not interested in being a great teacher. I do this only so I have enough money to live on and go out for a good time.”
That saddened me.
Fast forward 30 years. A former colleague asked if I remembered Sam. Then he told me that Sam had gone back to school and gotten a master’s in teaching English as a foreign language and had been teaching in a Thai university.
I love when people use the gifts they are born with.
"Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and statehood have been sold, squandered, and disposed of by all six presidents.
This happened according to a single pattern—presidential candidates promised one thing and did the complete opposite. They promised wealth but created poverty, promised legality but encouraged lawlessness and corruption, promised peace but provoked war.
Analysis of their rule shows that none of the six presidents respected their people.
They acted not in their interests, considering lies, deceit, corruption, and lawlessness as state policy.
And this tradition in Ukrainian statecraft has developed to the point of absurdity.
If the first presidents still tried to maintain some decency, the later ones displayed their stupidity, greed, and cynicism for all to see.
This is not the first time such events have occurred in Ukrainian history.
Traditionally, Ukrainians go home to Russia, often in parts, but quite actively and without regret.
What Zelensky's clique today calls separatism is in reality an escape from the psychopathically abnormal leadership that, with its incompetence and stupidity, is finishing off the country and its citizens.
If the first five presidents undermined the foundations of Ukrainian statehood to varying degrees, Zelensky has completed this process by staging a grandiose bloody show.
But this show is coming to an end, and now, in place of the country, we see a desolate wasteland.
Reviving this Wild Field will traditionally be done together with Russia, which is currently being done by the residents of Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions, using their right to choose normal living conditions for themselves and their children.
They made this choice, considering the mortal danger from the actions of the Nazi Kiev regime, the gross violation of their basic rights and freedoms, and the genocide unleashed against the Russian-speaking population.
The residents of Crimea, LNR, DNR, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions exercised their right to self-determination, enshrined in paragraph 2 of Article 1 of the UN Charter, Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of December 16, 1966, held referendums, and sought help from the Russian Federation.
As a result of the people's will, the territories of their residence became part of the Russian Federation.
And, while Zelensky plays his last perfomance, the number of new regions of Russia will continue to grow."
Excerpt from the article written by exiled Ukrainian opposition politician, Viktor Medvedchuk, in Komsomolskaya Pravda, April 15, 2024.
If someone would have told me twenty years ago that I’d be running a semi-successful custom house painting business that was responsible for finding and securing enough projects to provide six families with consistent, reliable income, I would have said “is that it?”.
My aspirations and sights were set so much higher in my early twenties than the reality I live today.
Maybe I’ll be the sea-fairing captain of a vessel that has no less than a thousand souls aboard, I thought to myself.
Maybe I’ll be the catalyst for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine with my commanding yet delicate approach to conflicts that arise between neighbors.
Maybe I’ll be an actor, the president, an astronaut — and if asked what I wanted to do when I was in fifth grade, I ALWAYS responded with “I want to be an electroencephalographic technologist.”
That was the coolest thing to say when I was a pre-teen.
The coolest thing — It was always about being, or saying, or doing what I felt others thought was the coolest thing.
I was identity-less because I was more concerned with other’s thoughts than I was with my own dreams or hopes or wishes.
What I really wanted back then was a father who could teach me how to beat the bolts off of the school bully that used to humiliate me in front of my classmates.
What I really wanted back then was to have money, like the other kids to pay for my school lunches. Not those embarrassing lunch tickets that the dorks and nerds and dweebs had to use at the musings of our tormentors.
It just wasn’t meant to be. That life, for me, wasn’t meant to be.
Turning to a life of substance abuse may not have been an inevitability, but it certainly was the easiest way out of the life I thought was so dreadful.
I got high, and then got higher and then got SO DAMN HIGH that I touched the clouds, or heaven or whatever.
It was a real blast.
Getting high was so much fun in fact, that for it, I traded a 150K dollar home, a loving and dedicated wife, a supportive family, encouraging friends, a career with endless opportunities for growth, my hygiene, my dignity and ‘insert any other cliche here’. Blah blah blah.
Which led me here, to this moment, to this question.
I gave up getting high. I gave up drugs not because anyone promised me a better life, but because I wanted to see if a better life was possible. Actually I gave up getting high because I knew any life was better than that life — and by golly it is a better life.
This life is so much better, that a few weeks ago I decided to insure it. I figured that if I die any time soon, I want my family to be insured against the hardships that are certain to follow.
I reached out to Primerica and got the ball rolling with life insurance.
After I answered a few questions asked by their representative, I waited for a phone call from their traveling nurse who was supposed to call me to schedule an appointment to draw blood, collect urine, check my height and weight and whatever else they do.
Yesterday, before I even got a call from the nurse, I got a call from the representative who informed me that I was declined.
I was so surprised. Why the hell would I be declined? I don’t get high, I live a healthy lifestyle, I don’t even drink alcohol. Do you know who I am? Boy I was pissed. Actually, my feelings were hurt and I was embarrassed.
Here is a screenshot of why I was declined.
image 237
I wondered what abnormal labs meant so I called the number they gave me.
Last February I had a tooth infection and was prescribed an antibiotic. I haven’t gotten high in more than a year, what the heck does a tooth infection have to do with life insurance?
As it turns out, (according to the lady who shared the actual truth with me, probably against protocol) the bigger (or real) issue is my background history and driving record, not some bs excuse about abnormal labs.
I haven’t had a single driving violation in many years and as far as my background history goes, well, I have a past. I used to use drugs.
I found out today, the hard way that they will not insure me based upon the mistakes of my past.
I can promise you that the decisions you make today will MOST CERTAINLY affect your ability to achieve the dreams you have for your future.
Drug abuse was grave mistake I made in my twenties and thirties and it seems that it has cost me the ability to protect my family from the financial burden that an untimely or early departure would have on them.
All-in-one pressure cooker. Don’t buy it they said, you’ll only use it twice they said. Well I bought it anyway to prove them wrong. I used it twice. It’s now in a cupboard never to be seen again.
Home gym. Been a lifelong dream of my wife and I to have our own gym. I converted our car port into quite a cool area with loads of nice equipment. It’s quite cold out there when windy though. A year later we’re still going to gym down the road.
Nintendo Switch. I bought it as Zelda Breath of the Wild was considered to be one of the best games ever made. Played it for about an hour. The older I get, the less I can get into games, which sucks.
Stryd foot pood for running. The latest and greatest in running aids. A pod that ties to your shoe to give statistics on your running that you’ll never need. I was so convinced it was a great idea I was preaching how great it was to fellow runners. Used it for about a week and haven’t bothered to charge it since. What a dick.
Kindles. Have a few, wife and I never use them. Just read normal books.
Alexa. I never got past asking it the time or the weather. Think my wife and I tried a quiz on it once. Was awful. People love them, I’m not sure how they are getting the most out of them.
PS4. I purposefully kept this away from number 3 as it’s embarrassing. I’ve also got an Xbox One X which is the only one I use. The Switch and the PS4 are just not used. This I why I shouldn’t be allowed to spend disposable income without moderation.
Huge amount of fishing rods and tackle. A couple of years ago, I got back into sea fishing which I used to do as a kid. Spent a small fortune buying new fishing gear. About six months ago, it dawned on me that fishing is probably not much fun for the fish and I felt really bad. Not been since.
DSLR camera. Feel bad about this one as it’s very expensive. Used it for a few weeks and photos were amazing. Was sure I would take it everywhere with us. Got lazy, now just use my phone. Going to try and make more of an effort with this one.
Bread maker. Don’t buy it they said, you’ll only use it twice they said. Well I bought it anyway to prove them wrong. I used it twice. It’s now in a cupboard next to the pressure cooker.
Garlic Rosemary Focaccia
2024 02 17 08 23
Ingredients
3 whole heads garlic, not cloves
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 scant tablespoons or 2 (1/4 ounce) packages active dry yeast
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
2 cups warm water (105 to 115 degrees F)
4 1/2 to 5 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons salt
Cornmeal, for pans
2 tablespoons crushed fresh rosemary leaves or 2 teaspoons dried
Coarse salt (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Separate garlic head into cloves and peel. Add olive oil in a small heavy saucepan, add garlic, cover and cook over very low heat for 20 minutes, or until softened but not browned.
Remove from heat and strain. Set oil aside to use later. When cool, cut cloves into lengthwise slivers and set aside.
In a large bowl, dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water. Add 1 cup of unbleached flour and stir thoroughly. Let sit for 15 minutes or until mixture is filled with tiny bubbles.
Add 2 tablespoons of reserved garlic oil and 1 more cup of unbleached flour and all of the whole wheat flour and salt to the yeast mixture.
Beat vigorously with a dough hook or a heavy sturdy spoon for 2 minutes. Gradually add more of the remaining flour, 1/4 cup at a time, until dough forms a mass and begins to pull away from sides of bowl.
Turn out onto a floured surface and knead, adding more flour a little at a time as necessary for 8 to 10 minutes, or until you have a smooth elastic dough and blisters begin to develop on surface.
Place dough into an oiled bowl. Turn to coat the entire ball of the dough with oil. Cover with a tightly woven kitchen towel and let rise for about 1 hour or until doubled in size.
Sprinkle a well greased 13 x 18 inch baking sheet with cornmeal. Turn dough onto an oiled work surface. With the heel of your hand, flatten dough into an 11 x 16 inch rectangle. Lift dough onto baking sheet. Using hands, press dough into corners and edges of baking sheet.
Flattening dough with hands rather than a rolling pin will give the irregular texture associated with focaccia. Cover dough with towel and let rise 20 minutes.
Sprinkle top of dough with rosemary and the slivered garlic. Using fingertips, make indentations in dough about 1/2 inch deep and 1 inch apart, to give a dimpled effect. As you do this, press garlic slivers into dough to keep them from falling off or over cooking. Cover dough with towel and let rise an additional 20 minutes.
Place a shallow pan on lower shelf of oven and heat up.
Drizzle remaining garlic oil over top of focaccia. Use a brush to pat the oil over the entire surface, allowing any excess to pool in the indentations. Sprinkle with 1 to 2 teaspoons of coarse salt.
Put 1 cup of ice cubes in the heated shallow pan in the oven. Immediately put the focaccia in the oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until pale gold.
Remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.
Notes
It is best eaten slightly warm or at room temperature.
You can substitute Parmesan cheese for the salt, or use both.
Let me put a scenario to you. A terrible fire erupts at a local school. The fire brigade has arrived, but because of the ferocity of the blaze it won’t be possible to save everyone, leaving the fire chief with a decision. Should he:
A) Save as many people as possible.
Or
B) Let everyone die.
I’m assuming most people would choose option A. Because of sanity. I think most people would find a fire chief who chose option B – who, if ideal circumstances were impossible, chose to maximise death and suffering – a bit disappointing, to say the least. If we could give Jesus a call and ask him what to do, I’m having difficulty imagining him advising us to let everyone burn.
And yet people arguing that terminating an ectopic pregnancy is unethical are taking exactly this position. Everybody dies. If you can’t save absolutely everyone the ethical decision is the one where the highest number of people die.
Neither mother nor foetus can survive an ectopic pregnancy that runs it’s course. Nothing we do can save the foetus. The only person we can possibly save is the mother. There’s no saving everybody, there’s only saving as many people as possible.
So your response is… everybody dies! The ethical thing to do – nay, the Christian thing, is make the decision that shows the least compassion, that does no good whatsoever, that causes the most death and the most suffering. Its what Jesus would have wanted. For is it not said “treat others how you would want them to treat someone they were homicidally disposed towards.” Or something.
Best of all though, the reason your ethics demand that as many people as possible die, the reason you shouldn’t save anybody’s life in this situation, the reason you should maximise grief and suffering and death is… wait for it, this is a real thigh slapper… because you believe in the value of human life!
Now that is some seriously freaking warped reasoning.
Any system of morality which isn’t actually trying to do good and limit evil isn’t a system of morality, it’s a system of control. And a sick, twisted and cruel one at that.
EDIT: For all those people telling me nobody has a problem with treating ectopic pregnancies and I’m spreading disinformation, oh look! A bill that specifically criminalises treatment for ectopic pregnancies.
I’ve spent my life taking care of others in one way or another since I was 10 years old. Mom went to work, and I had to cook supper 6 days a week, do the dishes, clean the house, watch my younger siblings. I gave up my friends and my social life to take care of her family.
I did have a boyfriend at 15 and at 17 I got pregnant. Pretty much on purpose. I’d already asked my dad if I could get married and he said no. So, when my bf came home from boot camp, I just wasn’t careful and thought, if it happens it happens. It happened. I finished out my Junior year of High School and went to summer school, then moved to be with him near base. My baby was born, and I was taking care of a baby and husband.
We divorced so I had to get a job. Still taking care of my child.
When I remarried, again taking care of a husband, child and working now. I did quit for about a year then went back to work. I pretty much ended up taking care of people at the job too. People just can’t do their jobs, put things away, always need help. I was kind of an overseer.
After 20 years I quit. My son was raised, my husband didn’t need to be taken care of anymore, he learned to do some things on his own, I was having a good time with friends and making quilts.
Then my mother got sick after my dad died. My siblings and I took on different responsibilities to keep her in her home and every year more responsibilities were added as mom lost the ability to do things for herself. This went on for 13 years.
After mom died, I was excessively depleted. My siblings and I no longer can get along with each other, so we haven’t seen each other for at least 5 years. I have 3 grandsons, 2 who don’t want anything to do with family, including my son.
I’m just so burnt out on people and their drama. It’s just my husband and I. He goes and sees a couple of his friends from time to time. I let my friends go before mom passed, I just didn’t have the energy to “be” a friend.
I like it being just me and my husband. I don’t know what it will be like if he goes first. I don’t like it when he goes to his friends, but I don’t say anything because he should go, but I miss him even when he’s gone a short time. His job of 40 years took most of his time from me and now that I have him, I hate to be away from him.
Other people though, they just aren’t worth my effort. (I do see my son from time to time).
One night my then boyfriend, now fiance, and I were watching a movie. It was a romantic one – not his preferred genre and he fell asleep midway into the movie. I continued watching. The 2nd half turned out to be quite emotional. Near the end I started crying softly. He woke up to my tears and immediately wrapped his arms around me to sooth me. He asked if it was the movie and I nodded. Since it was already late, we went to bed shortly afterwards.
The next morning I woke up, readied myself for the day and headed downstairs. He was eating breakfast in front of the TV – his usual routine before work. As I rounded the corner, I saw he was watching the movie from the night before. I was surprised as he was clearly not that interested then. “Why are you watching this?” I asked. He gave me a sweet, sincere look and said, “I wanted to see what made you cry.”
My fiance is not one for grand, sweeping gestures but it’s the every day small things that he does that melts me.
———————————————————
Update from the morning after:
me: OMG! OMG! *screaming*
him: hunnie, when you scream like that I think something is wrong with the house
me: baby! the quora post i wrote last night reached 1.4K upvotes!! ahhh!!
him: wow thats great baby! …can you stop screaming?
me: See?! I always say you do the sweetest stuff!!
him: *chuckle* as long as you like it baby
GEN-Z is literally f**king brain dead and I’m genuinely scared…
Why should the US contain China? Has China threatened the US? I think it is the other way around. The US has threatened China. The US has been the world’s predator nation.
I think the industrial-military complex always has to have an enemy in view or it loses funding and interests. Yesterday it was Russia, today, Russia is fading so the US has a new enemy, China. The rationale is China’s rise. When China was poor, China was befriended and used to increase the wealth of US multinationals. As China rose, concerns started to pop up, China could not be easily dominated by western interests. Now that China is competitive, especially in America’s monopoly of technology, the US has chosen to oppose China. It no longer wants to compete probably because it realizes that because of China’s size and her growth in STEM education, the US could lose its dominance in tech. The US has chosen not to work together.
What Americans seem not to realize is that much of America’s technology rise was built on immigrants. In today’s world, that technology strength comes dominantly from China and India. 75% of tech workers in Silicon Valley are immigrants. 80% of graduate STEM students are foreigners. In both cases Chinese and Indians dominate the demographics.
What seems disconcerting is that Trump is destroying that strength with his racist immigration policies.. What used to be the pot at the end of the rainbow for many immigrants in technology is becoming a nightmare. From engineers to doctors, H1-B and L-1 visas are being reduced and recently Trump is making them denied to certain STEM graduate students and workers. Their path to citizenship has become a nightmare. Their dream of being an American is no longer visible. Many are looking at other countries. Canada and the EU are the current choice of destinations plus their own home countries. India and China welcomes these STEM grads which will help their efforts to increase their presence in technology to compete with the US and each other.
The further the US demonizes China, the more Chinese students and investments in the US will dry up. American isolationism is succeeding and US political and economic interests in the world are starting to fall. Yes, the US can surround China militarily, like we did with the Soviet Union. Did we gain anything except to make our military might greater? Have Americans improved their life style and economic situations? Have we succeeded in overcoming poverty? Have we improved our infrastructure? Have we improved the lives of our citizens? You know the answer.
1. Marijuana laws. It took me almost the first 20-years of my career to see how much time I was wasting for a crime that no one from the county attorneys, to judges, to juries, to the general public were happy to see. I’d find an ounce of weed, wasting three to four hours of my shift, while calls were backing up and the guy hauling metric tons of meth drove by.
Later, I left the Midwest and came to Alaska which made the point almost moot. Since a 1970′s supreme court case, personal possession of Marijuana in your house was legal (and offenses involving it in other areas were considered rather minor). Then several years ago, Marijuana was legalized here.
I have yet to find one police officer who has ever fought against anyone high just on Marijuana. Or, been to any type of assault call involving just Marijuana.
If I could ban alcohol and make Marijuana legal, we could lay off half of the police forces, social workers and judges in the US. It’s the alcohol that’s the problem, not stoners. And no, I’ve never used the drug.
2. Prostitution laws (not sex trafficking). It is illegal to sell what can be given away. Odd. I’ve told many county and district attorneys that if they ever get me on a jury involving this type case, I would hang the jury so fast, I’d make their head spin because I’d be so angry at them for wasting my time.
3. Bar closing times. I could never understand why grown adults can’t decide how late they want to stay out and consume alcohol or even go to the store and buy some. Especially for those on second shift.
4. Alcohol and nudity laws. Many states have laws that you can’t have a beer or liquor license and allow nude or even semi-nude performances. The kicker? Many states allow customers to BYOB. The same owners at times have owned the liquor store right next to the strip club…Huh?
5. 21 years old as a drinking age. You can serve your country, vote, go to jail, marry and in some states, become a police officer before you can legally drink?
I’ve been in 65 countries. Many of them have the legal age from 16 to 18 years old (none have the age as high as ours), and they don’t have the issues with ETOH we do.
6. Gambling laws. In the 1970′s, Iowa was so backwards, state agents raided church Bingo. Seriously. Why does society care if I pick Texas A&M to beat Auburn and decide to bet a hundred?
Now that the states have sanctioned gambling, the remaining laws seem to be there to stop the competition.
7. Seatbelt laws. The Nanny State has to tell you how to be safe. I don’t enforce a “drink milk or get fined”, or join the “eat your vegetables or ticket” campaign.
You not wearing seatbelts does not affect a third person, therefore I fail to see how the state is concerned about seatbelts any more than, say, ordering people not to eat lard directly out of the can.
8. High and always getting higher traffic fines to plug government spending gaps. I remember when I started in law enforcement and speeding tickets started at around $30 (total). A sting to gain compliance.
Now many states (looking at you, California) use a sledgehammer. Between the fine, court costs and surcharges, tickets run in the mid to high three figures in some areas.
9. The FAA minimum flight hours for airline transport pilots that went from 250 hours to 1500 hours. The Colgan Air crash was not related in any way to low-time pilots. Both pilots had high flight time hours, but made rookie mistakes. This was the FAA looking for a law where there was no problem.
While US carriers are having trouble finding pilots, and some are canceling flights, going bankrupt and raising fares, other countries, (including the EU) still allow low-time pilots to fly as a co-pilot. Those planes are not falling out of the sky…and they are still allowed to land in the States.
10. Artificially low speed limits. Rural areas with low traffic and with good roads (dating from before the national speed limit laws of the 1970′s and can handle high speeds) need to properly reflect what the drivers can handle.
I’ve driven the Autobahn many times. In rural areas, there is no set speed limit, while in developed areas there is a reasonable speed limit. Makes sense to me.
11. CCW permits. In Alaska and Vermont, you don’t need a government agency to tell you that you are allowed to exercise your Second Amendment right.
12. Smoking rules in commercial businesses. I say let capitalism run her majestic course. If people do not want to be around smokers, those places that allow smoking will go out of business. We don’t need the Nanny State telling businesses what they can and can’t do.
Proof that this has nothing to do with secondhand smoke? Why is smokeless tobacco also banned in many areas? How is chewing tobacco affecting anyone?
*UPDATE: 99.9 percent of the people responded to the seatbelt statement. I would have never guessed that would be the contentious issue out of the 12.
I guess society has changed; I’m old enough to remember my mother holding my baby brother in her arms while I sat on the third row with the seat folded down in the station wagon.
No one cared about seatbelts, but society at that time cared about Marijuana, gambling, paid sex workers including strip joints and alcohol sale hours.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: I have been repeatedly asked if society can specifically exclude the safety net to people who refuse to wear seatbelts and have an accident. Here is my answer:
Only if we allow society to exclude other activities that it might not agree with. No coverage for smokers, excess drinkers, speeders, those who have sex with random people, those who partake in risky pastimes, or those who are obese.
Of course, we never think of the costs to society for the activities we agree with or partake in and how we normally expect everyone to pick up the tab for something they’d never do.
Should/can insurance require higher premiums? Sure, they are a private business and they already do: higher premiums for smokers, and – in many states – those who are males, those with bad credit, those unmarried and those of a certain age.
To be intelligently sound, you either believe in freedom from government interference for victimless crimes or you don’t. You don’t pick and choose. Many of my 12 I don’t personally agree with, but I believe the choice is up to the person.
Harry Potter but as a Drunkard in a remote Russian Village.
I very briefly dated a girl who was several years younger than me. I think I was 29ish and she was 21.
We were messaging each other on WhatsApp and after a while she insisted that I get Snapchat so she could message me on that. I downloaded it and was given instructions that the pictures only last for a few seconds before they are deleted.
I, in my tiny male mind, assumed she was going to send me titilating photos of herself in various states of undress.
I was excited!
What I actually got was lots of pictures of breakfasts. Lots of pictures of the back of someone’s head with “bored on the bus LOL” as a caption. Lots of pictures of books with “studying” as the caption.
I simply didn’t get why anyone would remotely care about mundane normal stuff, let alone want a picture of it?
She chastised me for not sending her many messages back on it. I sent maybe one every couple of days if I thought I was doing something vaguely interesting. “Here’s a nice view from this place I’m working” or, “Here’s a nice dog I met this morning” was about the best I could come up with.
Anyway, after a few days she said me to me, “You just don’t get it do you?” and I agreed.
Nope. I don’t get it.
And then it struck me. For the first time a massive part of youth culture was beyond my understanding. I simply don’t get the current youth’s need to send pictures to each other of completely mundane day to day things.
I’m too old to understand.
I’m not sure if Snapchat was the sole reason for it, but she decided she wasn’t interested in me shortly after.
Harry Potter as a Mexican Soap Opera | Telenovelas are Hell
Ever wondered what prompted the US to start a dedicated spy agency?
It wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t a Nazi plot.
It was a mine.
Here’s what happened:
It’s 1916. The Western Front has become a gigantic stalemate. The Germans can’t push through the Allied line, and the Allies can’t push through the German line.
The Germans are trying to figure out a way to demoralize the French, whose country everyone is fighting in (and generally making a mess of). They’ve got a gun that they constructed in 1914, called the Paris Gun (or “Big Bertha” by the Allies). It’s the largest gun built during the war (the barrel alone is over 34 meters – that’s more than 111 feet – long!) and it lobs 211 mm shells nearly 95 miles. Test firing indicates that it can definitely hit Paris from a permanent position. Several are built.
But with all good things, there is an end. And unfortunately for the Germans, there is a nasty issue with the Paris gun: the metal they’re using is normal steel, and has a really bad habit of melting after firing more than four or five of their mega-caliber shells. After several guns are able to let loose only a couple shells before having to have an expensive barrel replacement, German High Command is disgusted and instructs the German war machine to figure out a solution.
The Germans poke around in their laboratories. A young chemist discovers that a hitherto mostly ignored element, molybdenum, can help improve the tensile strength of their steel if mixed in the right amounts (.2-.3% molybdenum mixed into the steel.) High Command is thrilled: this is the solution they’re looking for! They order several new barrels for the Paris Guns to be constructed with the new alloy.
There’s just one problem: the only known source of molybdenum is in the United States – the Climax Mine, in Colorado. (Another source was discovered in China later on, but not until after the war.) And by the point in our story that this happened, the Germans were not exactly on good terms with the good ol’ U.S. of A.
High Command scratches its head, thinks really hard, and comes up with a brilliant plan.
A few weeks later, a small team of German “tourists” disembark in New York. According to what others hear them say, they plan to head up to Colorado and do a little ‘prospecting’.
The Climax Mine is owned by a small mining group who have been able to get very little money out of it. They originally thought the element they’re bringing up in .30% quantities was silver, but unfortunately it’s not silver – its an element that very few people seem to have any use for.
Along come the German “tourists”, who’ve you guessed by now are actually German government agents. The Germans offer to buy the mine for an extremely cheap amount. But while they’d be happy to sell the unprofitable mining operation, the owners are unwilling to sell for the offered pittance.
A “bad neighbor war” breaks out. The Germans are DETERMINED to get that mine, whilst the owners are just as determined to avoid selling. The German team rents a shack near the mine and camps out, pressuring the owners to sell the mine. Both sides harass the others with shotguns in the middle of the night, with dogs, and with arguments and confrontation.
Eventually, the Germans exit the field victorious: the owners, tired of constant harassment and (according to some reports) in serious fear for their lives, sell the mine for the asking price. The German team, glowing in their victory, starts extracting the molybdenum and quietly shipping it back to Germany by the shipload. The new barrels for the Paris Guns are built, and Paris suffers shell damage throughout much of the remainder of the war.
When it’s discovered, after the war, that the Germans had an entire team of their own agents in the USA, extracting and exporting a rare, war-essential resource without the sanctioning of the United States government, there is a great deal of anger running loose in the upper echelons of government. Plans are formulated to form an agency to prevent similar happenings in the future, should a war break out. These were the first plans for the OSS.
As we all know, the CIA was formed from the base of the OSS. But the plans for the OSS would never have come into being if a team of Germans hadn’t penetrated to the very heart of the United States and shipped metal off to shell Paris.
EDIT: 12/26/2021. So I’ve been getting a LOT of comments on how the dates are wrong, the Paris Guns weren’t called Big Berthas (they were, as were all large-caliber German weapons during the war) and how the Germans actually pulled molybdenum from a small mine in Norway rather than the American mine.
While some parts of the story can be found elsewhere (see link below) I cannot verify it from multiple sources, and must therefore reluctantly conclude that this story, for all it’s coolness, is only about 50% accurate.
I was first told this story by my grandfather, who is generally very truthful and historically accurate. However, it seems that in this instance he was greatly exaggerating.
China was Given an $80 Billion Project by Afghanistan, Making America Angry
I wanted to go anonymous as I don’t want anybody to feel sympathy on me.
I was married to wonderful person on may 29, 2015, who always take care of me more than my parents. Since it was an arranged marriage, we decided to have baby a year later so that we can understand and have time for each other. A year later, when we decided to have baby my brother’s marriage got fixed. So we planned to postpone for another 3 months. But god had another plan for us.
My brother died on an accident and it brought a total loss to the family. May be I’m unable to express here how his loss impacted our life. My mother still not recovered and my father is just living his life. This is the day I cried most and I’m still crying and could not overcome such loss.
After 3 months of my brother’s loss, myself and my husband decided to have baby, so that baby can change my parents thought process . I also got pregnant and parents were happy and was proudly saying that I’m going to bring back my brother. In April 21, 2016 in anamoly scan it was told that baby had a congenital heart disease. It was told by the doctor, that, Even if the baby is born, it has to be treated as soon as possible or it will be dead. The doctor claimed even after the operation they cannot assure of life of the kid. So we both planned to abort instead of making the baby to suffer from birth itself. That day I cried like a hell and it took an year to recover from the incident.
Somehow we managed to overcome from the incidents and tried to live a happy and normal life.
A year after abortion, again we planned for baby. Now I’m 7 weeks pregnant and went to scan centre to check my baby’s heart beat. But doctor said this time yur baby has died already and doesnot have a heart beat.
There are no words to describe our pain. As others say, God will have other plans for yu. It is not at all true. I don’t find any meaning in living my life again.
These incidents made me to cry, making me to cry and will make to cry.
China’s Waiting For The U.S. To Make THIS Ultimate Mistake
I rented the same place for over twenty years before moving recently. Years ago I was sitting out on my deck one evening and to my shock FBI and DEA agents with rifles drawn were swarming my back yard from both sides to jump the fence between my property and the driveway area of the property next to me. Of course this pissed off my dogs and I had to drag them inside barking like crazy. From the kitchen I could hear the guy yelling “I ain’t do anything, I’m just down in the basement watching TV! You’re harassing me!” I quickly hear, funny I don’t see a TV but I see you’re running a meth lab!” Anyway, about a week or two later I get a call from my landlord. He tells me the same guy had called him and filed a police report because my dogs were too loud. Landlord started laughing and said the police officer stopped by his house since he knew him and I was out at work when he came by. He said he told the officer that you’d expect my dogs to bark and be extra on edge in the back yard after the raid of the neighbors house! Cop laughs, and from his cell phone calls the guy and tells him he’ll tell me to keep my dogs quiet if he can keep from making meth. Guy was never seen or heard from again, lol.
In the throes of active heroin and methamphetamine addiction, there is always an angle. There are no acts of kindness or altruistic events. Everything, down to the smallest of favors, comes with a price. If I need a ride, I owe you two bags. If you need a spot, you owe me dub. If you accept what is labeled a gift, you will undoubtedly and eventually be called to repay that debt. When I was actively using, what was given as a gift in good times, was remembered as a marker in bad times. And if ever comes a day you’re called on to make good and you can’t, or won’t, you’re labeled bad money. Which, as an addict with a habit, might as well be a death sentence.
Having lived that way for most of my life, I struggle to take people at face value when they’re being kind.
Tomorrow I start a project for an airline pilot. I was referred to them by a mutual acquaintance. When I offered to give that acquaintance a percentage of the projected profit, they looked at me like I was an alien. I pushed for them to take the money because I was afraid they’d call on me to pay that debt in the future, which is always uncertain. They refused and made it very clear they had referred me because I was a good fit for the work this pilot was interested in having done. They wanted nothing in return.
I could feel myself wanting to push for them to take the money. I don’t want to owe anyone anything. I like being free from that cycle I was stuck in for all those years. So I’ve been working on taking people at face value. If they say it, I try to believe it. But it isn’t easy.
The subtle details I’ve trained myself to notice are internal. They’re in my behaviors and actions when I’m on the receiving end of kindness. When someone is nice I start to withdraw and isolate. It’s not that it rubs me wrong, it’s more a fear that I won’t be able to repay that kindness. And the reason I’ve trained myself to notice this isolating behavior in myself? Isolation leaves me with the one person who has historically been able to justify getting high again. Myself.
CODE RED EMERGENCY: PENTAGON IN PANIC, BIDEN BRIEFED, RUSSIAN “SPACE NUKES TRIGGER MASS PANIC”
Today, this June 2023, China is the dominant nation in the world.
In every metric, China dominates.
Some metrics are obvious and astounding. Where it is obvious that China is the predominant nation in the world in that particular role.
Lifestyle for it’s citizenry.
Destruction of poverty.
Elimination of air pollution.
Manufacturing ability.
New technologies.
And so on and so forth.
It is no mistake that the rest of the world (well, the nations that are not proxies of the United States, that is) turn to China. They turn to China for trade. For economics. For science, and manufacturing. They turn to China for help and assistance. They turn to China for guidance, and direction.
They turn to China.
…
Now that being the truth, you have a multi-billion anti-china funded effort. This effort is designed to keep the American public, and the citizens of the proxy nations, ignorant of reality. Anything positive or neutral is withheld, and colored with outrageous lies. There’s no other way to describe the war propaganda; it’s untruths, and lies that are the direct opposite of the truth.
And if you, the reader are not aware of this, shame on you.
…
The rest of the world is turning into a multi-polar world based on individual national sovereignty, They no longer use American currency, follow and obey American laws, rules and conventions, and are distancing themselves from the insanity that has gripped the United States and dragging it downward.
There are exceptions.
A “color revolution” in Thailand, and South Korea has placed “puppet governments” in power. And the first things that these puppets do is pull their nations closer to the United States, and then engage in a war where many of their countrymen are killed.
It’s the United States method of Geo-Politics.
…
But, back to the question about China.
Do you know what the United States will look like in 2040? Do you know the projections? What are the economic, social, scientific, and cultural changes that will manifest int he United States in 2040?
Well, you don’t know.
Because there just isn’t any writings, projections, or videos about this subject. The United States has no plans for this far in the future. Instead the United States fully intends to “kick the can down the road” and let someone else deal with the various messes and problems that are sprouting up left and right everywhere.
RAND studies are looking at regional wars, and proxy war and color revolutions well into the next decade. But NOTHING about building the American domestic society. Nothing about the future of schools, society, and infrastructure. It’s almost as if those issues are not important.
But…
China knows.
China knows what the world will look like in 2040.
…
I see a prosperous China. Where China is a wealthy nation. Far wealthier than anything in Europe today.
I see a vibrant, and healthy Africa. Crime being eliminated, and social services expanding as industry does as well.
I see South America growing and modernizing. And like Africa, a strong middle class.
I see Chinese bases on the Moon, and the start of a Chinese colony on the surface of Mars.
I also see some amazing breakthroughs in national governance across the world where nations restructure their nations to be more efficient like China, and to punish the evil and greedy like China has.
Yes.
…
I see a bright future ahead.
And it is all starting today with the global leadership of China.
Mandatory Paternity Test LAW Passed Now GUESS WHO’s MAD
https://youtu.be/JJroJ-vsQ7Y
Italian Spinach Bread
2024 02 17 08 25
Ingredients
2 cloves garlic, minced
Scant 2 tablespoons olive oil
3/4 cup reserved spinach liquid
2 1/2 teaspoons (1 package) active dry yeast (not RapidRise)
Lightly sauté the garlic in oil, then let cool to room temperature.
Warm 1/4 cup spinach for yeast to activate (105 to 115 degrees F).
Stir yeast, sugar into warm spinach water in large mixing bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.
Add remaining 1/2 cup room-temperature spinach liquid, garlic with oil, the spinach and nutmeg and stir thoroughly.
Mix the flour and salt into the spinach mixture.
Knead on floured surface, sprinkling w/additional flour to absorb moisture from the spinach, until dough is well marbled, soft and velvety, about 8 to 10 minutes.
Place dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours.
Shaping and second rise – Dough will be wetter after first rise. Put dough onto a floured surface and flour the top of dough – don’t punch down or knead. Shape into round loaf and put on lightly oiled baking sheet (or parchment on the baking sheet).
Cover with a towel and let rise for about 45 minutes.
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Slash a big V on top of loaf with sharp knife.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Reduce heat to 400 degrees F and bake an additional 30-35 minutes.
I didn’t actually see it. I wish I had. I was in the kitchen when it happened.
It was a popular pizza restaurant that served cheap beer and lots of it. In big heavy frosty mugs. Until the owner replaced all of the expensive and fragile glass mugs with plastic ones.
I remember how he was real proud of the fact that he had found cheap plastic mugs that looked exactly like the ones he’d always used. And it was true, they were nearly identical and looked totally like glass.
So, of course, customers started throwing beer all over themselves when they would pick up the now much lighter mugs. That in and of itself is pretty funny. But it gets better.
So the owner quickly instructs the wait staff to say something like, “Before I give you your beer, I want to warn you that the new mugs are much lighter so be careful.”
That was going well until a boisterous group of relatively young men sat down in the large corner booth. This booth was kind of isolated from the others, so perhaps they didn’t hear this spiel given to other tables.
The waitress shows up with a tray of 8 beers and proceeds to say, “Now before I can give you your beer . . .”
“Just give me my damn beer,” the nearest one says while he grabs a beer off the tray.
Because the tray was at eye level to him, he didn’t just spill his beer. No. He threw it right in his own face.
And threw his hands up as if to push away whoever was attacking him with this beer shower.
And hit the tray. The unbalanced—due to his impetuous actions—tray of beer. The tray upends and drops the remaining 7 mugs of beer on the table.
Hearing the commotion and swearing, I ran to the dining room to find 8 people swimming in beer, trying to exit, one by one, from a tight booth. The waitress, covered in beer too, couldn’t help herself. She was laughing so hard she had tears running down her face.
Later she said that she knew she should be apologizing, but it was so clearly their own doing that she couldn’t stop.
They didn’t stay. But they did pay for their beers before they left. That was thanks to a couple of police officers who frequented the place.
The U.S. Military just Crossed China’s RED LINE and War is Coming
China is one of the most emblematic and visible practitioners of Progressive-Conservatism, which may seem an odd description given that Communism is described by the West as ultra-radical.
However, when integrated into the context of Chinese history and its longstanding social-philosophy, it’s actually normative as the past is honored while wading into the future with confidence based on past successes.
When looked at seriously, China’s policies seek to establish Balance and Harmony globally.
Containing China makes no sense. Working with China makes a great deal of sense. And the latter path is far easier than that of confrontation.
A look at the Big Picture shows nations confronting China declining while those cooperating rising.
A while ago my mother’s kid sister (my aunt) was on the dating market, and she was dating various men. After a period of time, she had to choose between two men. Apparently, it was a tough decision.
Ralph. He was a blue-collar carpenter. He was from a traditional Catholic family, and was a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. I really liked him alot. He was honest, a straight-shooter. He was just a all around “good guy”. But he wasn’t wealthy. He was just solidly middle class, with about 11 children.
Sonny. He was a dentist, who branched out and bought up factories and businesses. Turned them around. And then sold them for a profit. He had a daughter, and a large ranch with horses, and a great spread of land.
Well, my aunt decided on Sonny.
Ralph was devastated. I (and my wife at the time) liked him a lot. I haven’t seen him since. He used to help my mother fix and repair stuff at her house. He just did it because he had the talent and the ability. He built her a storage room in the basement and a huge porch in the back.
A few years ago, Sonny and my aunt were having troubles. Apparently he was “too controlling” . Ah. I hate to hear that.
I am of the opinion that if she would have chosen Ralph, she would have been much happier. Maybe not wealthier, but certainly… happier. Sigh.
It’s all about picking your battles with teens. My oldest is 18 now and has been accepted into a very good college, so we’re pretty much “done” raising her. Now it’s mainly just raising money for her.
But, between the ages of 13–18, there were quite a few times where she did something she knew we didn’t want her to do, or she lied to us, and we let her think we didn’t know. We knew, we just picked our battles, and those didn’t seem like battles worth fighting. Basically, if it was something that put her or her future in danger, we came down on her for it. If it was something that just annoyed us or was rude, we let it slide, sometimes.
For example, we grounded her when her grades started slipping because she was spending too much time with her boyfriend. She was mad, but it worked. Within a week, her grades were back up and she was un-grounded. We also have a rule in the house about not hoarding dirty dishes in the bedrooms, but sometimes I’ll look in her room and see literally 20 dirty dishes. Is it worth making a fuss over, even though she’s being disrespectful and breaking a rule? Nah. I just ask her to bring me the dishes from her room the next time I’m loading the dishwasher. No need to pick a fight.
Our parenting mantra for her was pretty much: “Make sure she doesn’t screw up her future by getting pregnant, doing drugs, or failing school, but otherwise, don’t needlessly rock the boat.”
It all worked out. Assuming she doesn’t go completely insane over the next five months, she’ll be fine.
Chicken Soup with Tortellini (Pollo in Brodo con Tortellini)
Tortellini Soup
There is nothing, nothing, as comforting as walking into the house after a long day to the wafting aroma of chicken tortellini soup.
Today’s Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup is a healthified version of a heavier cream-based soup.
I haven’t removed the essential elements that make it special such as tender chicken, hearty cheese tortellini, and even a little cream. I’ve just reduced certain ingredients, so you can feel good about serving this Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup to your family.
And maybe even having seconds.
2024 02 13 07 38
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 to 4 pound) broiler-fryer chicken, cut up
6 cups water
1 stalk celery (with leaves, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium carrot, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium onion, cut into fourths
2 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 package commercial fresh tortellini or 20 homemade tortellini
2 cups water
Minced parsley
Grated Parmesan cheese
Ingredients You Will Need
DeLallo Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Large Sweet Onion – peeled and chopped
Red Bell Pepper – seeded and chopped
Carrots – sliced
Minced Garlic Cloves
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast – or bonleess chicken thighs
Chicken Broth – low sodium chicken broth
DeLallo Three-Cheese Tortellini Pasta
Heavy Cream
Packed Frozen Spinach – or fresh baby spinach leaves
Fresh Chopped Parsley
Dried Thyme Leaves – or fresh thyme leaves
Crushed Red Pepper
Salt and Pepper
2024 02 13 07 40
Instructions
Heat chicken, 6 cups water, celery, carrot, onion, 2 sprigs parsley, bay leaf, salt and peppercorns to boiling in Dutch oven; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until thickest pieces of chicken are done, about 45 minutes.
Remove chicken from broth; strain broth.
Refrigerate chicken and broth separately until cool.
Remove chicken from bones and skin. Cut chicken into bite-size pieces; add to broth. Cover and refrigerate.
Prepare tortellini. If using commercial tortellini, do not precook.
Skim fat from broth. Heat broth and 2 cups water to boiling. Add tortellini. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until tortellini are tender, about 30 minutes.
Sprinkle each serving with minced parsley.
Serve with Parmesan cheese.
2024 02 13 07 39
How To Make Chicken Tortellini Soup
This Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup is quick and easy to make, yet offers so much wow-factor, your family will ask for it again and again!
Saute. Place a large sauce pot over medium heat. Add the olive oil and chopped onions. Saute for 3 minutes to soften. Then add the chopped bell pepper, carrots, and garlic. Saute another 3 minutes.
Simmer. Add whole raw chicken breasts, chicken broth, dried thyme, crushed red pepper, salt, and ground black pepper to the pot. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat a little and simmer for 15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and place on a cutting board.
Cook Pasta. Turn the heat back to medium. With the broth still simmering, stir in the DeLallo Three Cheese Tortellini. Stir well so it doesn’t stick together. Then chop or shred the chicken and place it back in the soup.
Cream and Season. Once the tortellini is cooked through, about 10-14 minutes, turn off the heat. Stir in heavy cream, spinach, and parsley. Add a little more cream if desired. Taste, then salt and pepper as needed.
My Mum was 79 when a lady who grew up in the same small town as she made contact and started chatting with her. My Mum said, “I don’t know who this person is, but she seems to know me.” Eventually, this lady said to my mum that she was her half-sister. They organised a DNA test and there was shown to be “a high probability” that they were half-sisters. AncestryDNA has shown that I am related to my Mum’s new half-sister. So after 79 years, her whole ancestry has changed.
The story ended up being that my Mum’s father was unable to have children whilst her mother really wanted one, so the father of this other lady was allowed to produce a child with my Nan, that child being my mother. Apparently, the other family was aware of what had happened but kept it under wraps until my Mum was 79 years old when her half-sister decided to talk to Mum and see if she was a nice person. Having decided she was, she opened up to her regarding the situation.
On 2024/1/8, China praised the commander & crew of Nanchang destroyer.
Nanchang (南昌号) is 10000 tons with the most up-to-date equipment. It started service in 2020. It has sailed to Guam a few times. The latest one was Dec 2023 to accompany the fleet of Liaoning aircraft carrier (辽宁航母).
On 2024/1/8, Chinese CCTV released a video which showed 2 US warships, probably EP-18E, nose-diving towards Nanchang. To intercept Nanchang’s electromagnetic field.
Nanchang left Liaoning fleet & went, alone, closer to US aircraft carrier fleet. It activated its Fire Control Radar & opened the lid of 7 of its many missiles. To counter-intercept the electromagnetic field & to warn USA that the US aircraft carrier fleet has been targeted & can be attacked by Nanchang.
The standoff of Nanchang-US warplanes & warships lasted for 20 days. At the end, US fleet left. … China won the electromagnetic “war” & Nanchang crew was thus praised.
Several years ago, I was in court in North Carolina. At the time, cases were called alphabetically, by last name.
One gentleman, let’s call him Ben Jones (not his name but I can’t remember what it was) was called to face charges for some petty crime or another. The judge hadn’t even heard any evidence when Mr. Jones started cursing the judge, the DA, the bailiff, the clerk and everybody else. When the judge gave him a month in County for contempt, he cursed more. This went on until he ended up with about 6 months in county.
When he was finally removed from the courtroom, Chris Jones (again, not the real name) was called up. He immediately asked for a continuance. When the judge asked why, he said that Mr. Curser was his brother and he didn’t want his behavior to affect his case. Even the judge laughed a little and told the guy not to worry, he could keep an open mind.
The judge smiled at the guy upon his not guilty plea, found him not guilty and told him to tell his brother that he’s a reasonable judge.
It is very hard for people who live in western democracies and are used to a multi-party political system to understand that defining the Party as being either left or right is not applicable in the Chinese context.
I would just say that the Party is strongly pro-development and pro-growth, and is focused on improving the lives of ordinary Chinese and making China into one of, if not the greatest economic power in the world, with a special emphasis on manufacturing and hi-tech. It has been very practical and pragmatic, sometimes adopting socialist policies and sometimes adopting free-market policies. As far as the Party leadership is concerned, it is most important that it works for ordinary Chinese, and does not threaten the leadership role of the Party in Chinese society.
The greatest threats to the Party leadership are internal corruption by Chinese officials; this is why Xi has waged his never-ending war on corruption. He sees corruption as a potential cancer in the system, which undermines the peoples’ faith in the system and Party. In China’s past, corruption has almost always been a major contributor to the fall of Chinese imperial dynasties. The other great threat comes from capitalism going wild, and Chinese worshipping the super-rich as their role models. If this were to happen, materialism would run wild, and Chinese would become superficial materialist people like many South Koreans, who worship billionaires and successful actors and entertainers.
To sum up, modern China is very complex, and describing the Party as leftist or rightist is completely inadequate to describe its real nature.
I was hitchhiking a ride one day, about ten years after being bullied. A truck passed, slowed down and backed up to where I was.
“Hey Brad! It’s me” I heard from just below the passenger side door, from the person leaning out of view to open it. All the fear of my past washed over me because I recognized that voice. It was the voice of the doom that followed my every move, my tormentor from junior high through the end of high school.
He looked at me through the open door of his truck with a side of him I had never seen before. “It’s ok man. I’m not trying to trick you or anything” he said.
Various scenarios played in my head, none of which made sense for an adult man to think, so I got in the truck. I needed the ride.
“Thanks for stopping” I said.
“I did more to talk to you than give you a ride. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, but there you were, and now I have the chance.”
The chance at what? I thought. Oh sweet Jesus! Is this guy a serial killer by now? Did all the hate he pummeled my frail body with finally build up to a point that he was now insane? What other reason could there be?
I considered jumping out, but that would certainly kill me. All I could do was wait for his next move.
“I swear I’ve thought about you since I last saw you” he said. “What I did to you was so very wrong. I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you why I did it.”
His voice trailed off into a sob. His shoulders lurched forward in heaves of grief. He had to pull over to maintain control of the vehicle.
We sat in awkward silence on the side of the road.
I held his confession in high regard. It was the first time I saw him as a human being. The fear I felt was displaced by compassion for a person that suffered from the enlightenment of adulthood. I knew then what I needed to do.
“I forgive you, Trickle” (his nickname .) It was akin to evoking the name of Satan himself.
“I don’t go by that name anymore!” he protested angrily.
“What should I call you now? What is your name?” I said, hoping that he knew.
“It’s Paul, just Paul” he said in a soft voice.
“Pleased to meet you, Paul” I said reaching out my hand to shake his.
With that the demon that was “Trickle” was exorcised from both of our lives. All the suffering we endured was cleansed.
We talked for hours and stayed in the truck for the duration. I never saw him again.
I think of him now. I hope that he received my forgiveness, and that his life for the last 30 years since we met that day was free of guilt.
Paul, if you’re reading this I want you to know that I did and still do, forgive you.
Not me but a friend. He is pretty high up in the Cyber Security world and has his own business. He was hired by a company to help them harden their network. So he went in and did his due diligence to understand everything that they had, what their vulnerabilities were, etc. After he had done the due dligence, he designed and wrote up a system that he felt would meet their needs. It is very important to understand that when he does this work, he is specific about what hardware and software that they will need to use. He has it in his contracts with his clients that they must follow his design to the letter or his company will walk away, the client will still be required to pay in full all work done to that point + a portion of the remaining contract, and his company will be released from any and all liability.
He goes into the meeting with his client C Suite. Goes through his presentation and presents his numbers. Immediately, the CFO pulls up a document for a completely different system (different hardware, software, etc) that he feels would be just as adequate and significantly cheaper. My friend explains why he has designed the system and hardware needs to best meet their requirements that they gave him and how that system that the CFO was referring to would not meet their requirements. CFO immediately argues back that they should use this cheaper system and demands that he and his company implement it per the contract. My friend immediately stands up, gathers his documentation, designs, presentations, hardware list and everything from everyone in the meeting and tells the CEO that they have just violated their contract with him and they they have 30 days to pay his company out and that he and his company will not be working for them at any time now or in the future and walks out.
About ten years ago, I was on a one-stop flight from Vietnam to Los Angeles. Hanoi – Incheon – LAX.
We were transiting at Incheon airport. We had to do a re-security screening after landing from Hanoi. So, we got in line. An officer was walking back and forth in front of the lines, with a water bottle in his hand above his head, speaking loudly in English, “No water. No fruits.”, to let people know to get rid of all those things from our bags before getting checked.
Suddenly, a middle-aged woman in front of me, walked toward the officer, took the water bottle off of his hand, opened it, drank some water from it, closed the bottle, and gave the bottle back to the officer with her biggest smile. She nodded her head with the officer like she wanted to thank him for offering the water. The officer was surprised and then laughed, but the woman didn’t understand English, I guessed, she kept smiling and got to the screening area.
The screening area had five small tables in a row, each table had an officer. You just had to walk to the table and open your handbag for the officer to take a look, and you were done, pretty quick and simple. One by one. After finished checking a person, the officer raised their hand, “Next!”, so the next person could walk up.
That woman was finished checking, she was walking out when the officer at the next table raised his hand, “Next!”. Suddenly the woman also raised her hand and gave the officer a high-five and the same big smile. Then she walked away.
I still smile every time I remember that trip and that cheerful woman.
One night, while driving home form the Ozzfest, an officer on DUI patrol stopped me for suspicion of DUI (he claimed I was swerving) He made me do the FST bare foot and I passed. He the takes out the breathalyzer and I blew a .008 (I saw the reading as he quickly turned away) and the cop stepped into me, looked me in the EYE and said; “HERE!, IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, the legal limit it .07” I knew he was messing with me so, I just shut up and said; “Oh? I didn’t know”. From there on, I said nothing. He arrested me for suspicion of DUI. I know the limit is .08 but I don’t fight with cops on the side of the road. When I was released, I walked to the tow yard and picked up my truck. When you get stopped for DUI they take your driver’s license (send it to DMV) and give you a number to call with in 10 days.
The next morning I called the DMV. The DMV gave back my license over the phone cause the was no evidence filed. Knowing there was no evidence, I put myself on the court calender so, I could get a copy of my police report. In order to get the police report myself, (without a lawyer), I had to agree to defend myself so, I agreed to defend myself.
The judge calls my name, he pauses… because, he sees that I am defending myself. He says; “Charles are you going to defend yourself?” I reply, “YES SIR!” The judge then says; “DO YOU KNOW WHAT BEN FRANKLIN said about people who defend themselves?” I replied; “YES, YOU DON’T NEED TO HIRE A LAWYER TO GET A POLICE REPORT”. The judge didn’t like my answer but he gave the report reluctantly. The judge gave me my report and I went down the street to have lunch and read the report.
I read through the report and to my amazement, the officer told the truth, that I blew a .008 and the limit was .08. after read the report, I went back to court and found a DA. I tried to get him into the court room so, my case could be dismissed. The DA declined to help me so, I had to return for a hearing.
To make a long story short, trust me its longer….I defended myself the whole way through but it took a dozen appearances (over a year of court dates) before I finally got my case dismissed. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AND READ THE POLICE REPORT BEFORE YOU AGREE TO ANYTHING.
I saw neither of the following, but I sure heard about them from the offenders themselves.
I teach in Thailand and have trained teachers in not only methodology but also cultural considerations.
‘Sam’ had been a kindergarten teacher in the U.S. and had often patted kids’ heads when they did well or playfully tugged gently on their hair.
Why he thought that would be ok with adults, I will never understand. Mortified, he came to me, admitting that the students had explained that their heads were considered blessed and asked him to stop touching them. He had apologized profusely.
‘Dan,’ on the other hand, was stubborn in the belief that he owed no one an apology. A class represenative had asked a Thai Academic Office staff member to tell ‘Mr. Dan’ to stop putting his feet up on the teacher’s desk and on empty student chairs.
When she explained to ‘Dan’ that feet are considered ‘dirty’ as the lowest point of the body and should not be placed on furniture that others use nor pointed aggressively at others, ‘Dan’ scoffed and walked away.
The Assistant Academic Director then got involved, and ‘Dan’ grudgingly apologized to his class who accepted it but because of his tone, saw him as disrespectful of Thai culture.
‘Mr. Dan’ complained about the ‘ridiculous’ custom to anyone who would listen. Most (including me) reminded him that he is a guest here and should abide by Thai ways.
Note: If paper currency goes skittering, do NOT put your foot on it because it can be considered lese majeste since money carries the image of the king. A fine or even jail time may be involved.
Woman Adopted 11-yr-old Cat. What She Did Next Shocked The Shelter Staff!
It was part of an initiative that I began 10 years back, my goal to slowly acquire skills to fix things myself so that I wasn’t constantly having to hire people to fix things.
I was under my car laying on my back sorta like this.
image 162
I don’t remember precisely the problem with the car. But I do remember it was night time and I had a small flashlight.
I didn’t have the equipment to lift the truck up properly, so I’d just slowly and carefully wiggled my way under there.
It was a tight squeeze. Very tight.
I felt like Bishop in that insanely claustrophobic scene from Aliens where he crawls through a mile-long, shoulder-tight tunnel.
image 163
As I’m on my back, my flashlight is shining up into the engine and I’m quickly realizing that I’m in over my head, (you may as well be teaching a monkey to do brain surgery at this point).
Then – shit got real.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I heard growling.
With my god damn legs hanging out from under this car, I heard the deep guttural growling of a large dog within 10 feet of me, clearly growling directly at me.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I began squirming out as the dog continued growling from the same spot.
Then I emerged.
I looked right.
And the growling stopped.
It was a familiar large, yellow lab, who started wagging his tail as he recognized me:
It was my neighbor’s dog.
And my neighbor was standing right behind his dog, with his hand firmly gripped on the dog’s leash.
When I was 17, I worked for a cellphone store. One of my coworkers was helping this lady who was going through a tough time. Her husband passed away, and she had five small kids. He was their sole provider. She told us he cared for everything so she could focus on their home and kids. She needed a phone and didn’t have access to the funds her husband had left her because her mother-in-law was trying to take it from her. So my coworkers told her she could purchase the cheapest phone, and it would be suitable for a couple of months and work for what she needed it for. But we were instructed to tell the client they could only get the phone with the highest phone plan. If we sold it with the lowest phone plan, it would kill our numbers. My coworker saw this lady was struggling and did this for her. The next day when our boss asked why it had been done. He was furious and fired her for it. I quit a couple of days later.
I’m a teacher. I always insisted on having the crappy classroom at the end of corridor one, one of the five ground level corridors.
Why? I wanted to keep the students away from the office. If they were late, I wanted them to slip into my class without reporting to the authorities. I wanted easy and immediate access to the outside for any students experiencing acute anxiety or if they were about to burst into tears. If that happened, they were guaranteed some privacy.
I could also see who was at the Happy Tree across the street (a key pot smoking location).
My classroom was a long way from the office and most administrators were too lazy to come by. If they dropped by, there was a reason, which was fine with me.
But there was another reason I wanted to be at the end of corridor one.
The intruder alert procedures insisted that we gather on the floor in our classrooms, remain silent after closing the drapes or blinds and covering the window on the door and locking it.
Like fish in a drained barrel.
So that was the official Plan A.
My plan was Plan B.
If there was an intruder alert, I needed to determine the direction it came from. Then I wanted all my students to run across the street to the Happy Tree, as a group, on through the park, across the next street, and through the intersection to the mall. They were to be silent and fast. I would be behind them.
It never happened.
We have so much support and school-to-work programming for mentally ill and angry young men that I don’t think it will ever happen, but if I was wrong and it did happen, I wanted my students out of harm’s way.
They couldn’t be out of harm’s way if they were cowering in the corner of a classroom.
The US military is the biggest military power in the world. There’s no arguing against that. They have some of the best troops, the best tech, and probably the best logistics. Heck, strike “probably”, they fight wars on other continents.
What they often don’t have is a clear idea of what they want to achieve, and that’s down to the people who send them out. The US politicians rarely have a clear vision of their war objectives, and when they have one, it’s often laughably unrealistic.
image 164
George W. Bush planning the invasion of Iraq
For instance, the idea behind the adventures in both Afghanistan and Iraq was to install a democracy. That’s not a military objective, that’s a political objective, and the military is patently useless at that sort of thing. And it was a hopeless task to begin with; yes, there was a lot of opposition to Hussein, but they all just wanted a different crazed dictator. Vietnam became a total mess because, again, they sought a political outcome, and asked the military to achieve it, and then messed up the political side totally.
It’s all a bit like if Elon Musk wants new and better recruits for SpaceX, so he hires Lionel Messi and Novak Djokovic. Yes, they’re world class, but they’re not world class at what he’s trying to do.
I was driving through a long painful construction zone, we were reduced from three lanes to 1, for no apparent reason, we would suddenly come to a stop, with a flagman stopping us, then start up again. The speed was reduced from 110 kmph 68 mph to 50 kmph 30 mph.. We had been crawling along, or stopped for 16 km, 10 miles.
I was the person in front, when the flagman stopped, so there were no cars in front of me, for a couple of kilometers. When the flagman motioned for me to proceed I was leading the pack. After a couple of km I could see the “End of construction “ sign. For some reason there was a concrete barricade slanted across the shoulder. I started speeding up, I was maybe 50 feet from the barricade, that was also the end of construction, and I had sped up to maybe 80 kmph, out of nowhere, a guy passes me on the shoulder. He had to have seen the barricade, but he was accelerating, I’m guessing he was doing 200 kmph 124 mph when he flew by me, he had to instantly change into my lane, I slammed on the brakes, and he almost made it through, his bumper clipped the barricade and went flying through the air, and skidded across three lanes to disappear into the median. I swear he missed hitting me by less than a foot.
I was the only one who could see the end of construction, and 110 kmph sign, so I was the only one who had been speeding up, and there was a huge gap behind me that would have been easy to pull into, and once we passed the barricade, we were back to 3 lanes again, and I was the only car ahead of him.
I honestly had no idea that someone was doing 200 in a 50 kmph zone transitioning to 110, on the shoulder. It was single lane traffic, I wasn’t even checking my mirrors.
To save maybe 30 seconds, he lost his bumper. I have no idea how much more damage he did because he kept going at well over the speed limit.
This was a long time ago about 1985–86. My son was in I think 3–4 grade. He and a group of about 4 boys hung out together in the playground at recess. One day the 5 of them were hanging out at the swings. They were like sitting on them and talking but not really swinging in them. The story gets a bit long here.
Another boy came up and asked them for one of the swings since they weren’t really using them. Now one of the boys being a smarty pants said something like “ give me a quarter and I’ll let you have the swing”. To his surprise the boy gave him the quarter.
I think you see where this went. So everyday at recess the 5 boys would run out to the swings and charge a quarter for the other kids to ride the swings. This went on for about 2 weeks until someone at the school finally found out.
So I get a call from the school to come in. Come to find out they had called the police and had the school psychologist and a police detective “talk” to the boys. The detective actually threatened the boys that they could go to jail and psychologist wasn’t much nicer.
Now don’t get me wrong I was not condoning the behavior but in the end I don’t think what they did was actually wrong it just wasn’t very nice. The school on the other hand label these boys as the horrible thugs and the police even said that they were guilty of extortion. The psychologist was going on about deviant behavior and how traumatic an experience it was for the kids that paid for the swings.
I went in to the school but I did not take my son with me they asked me why and I said because I didn’t think they would want him to hear what I was about to say which was the following:
can understand your concern and my husband and I will deal with the behavior, however here are my issues.
The school intimated to me I should have noticed my son coming home with all this money and I was a poor parent. It was a quarter so no I wouldn’t notice he had a quarter on him at the end of the day. We’re not talking $10 a ride here, we had a change dish on top of the TV that he and his sister would take out money for lunches or milk/snacks at school so I wouldn’t really think it strange that he had an “extra” quarter at the end of the day.
*Where was the adult supervision on the playground that this behavior went on for 2 weeks before one of the others kids on the playground complained?
*Whereas I agree what they did wasn’t very nice it was in no way a criminal act or extortion. The boys did not threaten the other kids like gimme your money or I’ll beat you up or if you tattle you’ll be sorry. They simply were selling rides on the swings.
*You had absolutely no right to have my son ( who is probably about 8 years old) interrogated or questioned by either the police and psychologist without my permission.
*In the end the boys made about $2 total each because all of the boys said sometimes the kids only had a dime or a nickel to pay.
Again I agree it wasn’t a nice thing to do but illegal or immoral I don’t think so. I explained this to my son and I don’t know about the other boys but I did make my son apologize to the kids he could remember and he gave them their money back ( at least most of them that he recalled) it came out of his allowance.
The one thing I did tell the school was that if the roles were reversed and my son was told he had to pay a quarter to ride the swings. The first thing he would have done was when he got home he would have said something to either his dad or I.
My first question to him would have been “Did you give it to them?” If he had said yes I probably would’ve said something like “ Don’t do that again if they are asking you for money for the swing go tell a teacher. You don’t pay to ride the swing “ I would have then followed up with school it would not have gone on for 2 weeks!
I can’t believe that my son and his friends were the first ones to ever try something like this. But in my mind I can see these 5 boys with a little light bulb moment 💡 ! I asked that boy for a quarter to ride the swing and he gave it to me!!! There was nothing criminal or psychotic in their behavior just a bunch of boys being dumb.
My son did not grow up to become a social deviant or a gang member or thug. He is married with 3 kids and 3 grand children. I look at this episode as just one if those childhood stories that we tell at family gatherings.
One of the first jobs I had was at a distribution center for AH Robins Pharmaceuticals. I was assigned to work with another guy to fill and pack the small orders that shipped via UPS. I was 22 and had just been hired while my coworker was 29 and had been with the company for about 6 months. We were the youngest guys, by far, in the warehouse. Everyone else had been with Robins for 15+ years and all but one were 50 years old, or older. The other guy was 38.
Being young(er), we decided to make a game out of completing the orders by seeing who could pick and pack them faster. As a result, we’d finish the orders by lunch each day. Since we had half a day left and nothing to do, at first we were told to stock the small order shelves and then clean the area around the packing table. But we finished that so quickly the warehouse manager had one of us start helping the other workers pull truck orders.
That was when the older workers pulled us aside and told us that we needed to slow down because we were making them look bad. We just laughed at them. But then the warehouse manager called us into his office and told us to slow down and take our time, or he’d have to let us go.
We were puzzled by this and we finally worked up the courage to talk to the DC Ops Manager, and he explained that the warehouse was staffed with long-time employees who were set in their ways, and we needed to go along to get along. So we began stretching our orders out to last the entire day so our coworkers and boss would be happy, but the job no longer fun from that point on.
The 24.7 military activity around Taiwan is a visible electric fence, a constant tripwire reminder that Taiwan is ringfenced, and the Taiwanese military is not doing anything about its ever-shrinking area of responsibility. It’s the classic boiling frog, with time scales measured in years.
A blockade is an ON-DEMAND military option today, based on demonstrated readiness, enabled by real-time multi-sensor intelligence and deployed assets.
The real battlefront lies further away, as far south as the Philippines, as far east as Guam, and as far north as the Japanese home islands.
In other words, the battlefront is as far south as America, as far east as America, and as far north as America.
Let me repeat, because it is important.
THE BATTLEFRONT IS AS FAR SOUTH AS AMERICA, AS FAR EAST AS AMERICA, AND AS FAR NORTH AS AMERICA.
That is the current strike capability of the combined Chinese military.
The island of Taiwan, paradoxically speaking, is no longer central to the question of Taiwan.
I always provide a clear estimate of every job I look at. I had a woman that had been referred to me by her sister but had been warned about her too. She had money but didn’t like spending it. She wanted a simple wheelchair ramp installed in her garage for her ailing husband. I noticed her 4500 sqft house needed a lot of work including a new roof. I offered to build the ramp for only $500, which was about $50 over cost of lumber. It was going to be a simple ramp with plywood covered with Astroturf or berber carpet. I figured it might open the door to other work on the house. I’d make my money back later. She looked at my estimate and passed it back to me. Then told me she knew somebody that can build it cheaper. I thanked her for her time and started walking to my truck. She asked me where I was going. I told her that by her comment that she was going to have the cheaper guy build it. She wanted me to lower my price. I said that was impossible as I was making zero on the ramp. The lumber alone was $450. After gas, I was breaking even. Again, I thanked her for her time and started walking back to my truck. She said she thought it would be closer to $300. I replied that It should have been at least $1500 and I was doing her a favor as I knew her sister and could see the house needed other repairs. She asked if I could do it for $300. I actually laughed and told her to hire the guy she knew that could to it cheaper. I’m done playing her games. I knew she was bluffing and there was no other cheaper guy. I wished her good luck and said my final goodbye. I later thanked her sister for warning me beforehand.
When I was a teenage & young adults (late 70’s to Mid-80’s) the shopping mall was at its peak. A large number of stores in a climate controlled environment where you only had to park once.
For me a visit to the mall was a visit to …
The arcade (to play Space Invaders & Asteroids)
One or two book stores (using both Walden Book and B Dalton)
The music store
Sears, to check out both electronics & tools
Radio Shack
The food court.
Now, both radio Shack & Sears were in decline by the mid to late 90’s anyway.
But console games spelled the death of arcades. When feed money into a game when you could play them at home as many times as you wanted?
Book, music and electronics are all found on amazon. And music, for the most part, now as downloads.
In many malls, there were also novelty stores like Spenser’s, and even hobby/arts & crafts focused stores. There seems to be an overall decline for some time, at least before the “maker movement” had a resurgence. But again, online shopping has seriously cut into that market.
I commended on an older answer, that most malls are filled with clothing stores, which is death via boredom for a typical guy.
I really don’t see malls coming back, at least not in their past “glory days” format.
When I began school, we lived 3 doors down from the kindergarten school.
On the first day of school, I walked to school. My mom stood on the front porch and watched me walk all the way, and I waved to her when I got there.
I was very excited and could not wait for the day to proceed – I was a big girl, and was finally in school!
At that time, most schools still tried to force left-handed children to write with their right hand. I am left-handed.
My teacher walked behind me as I sat at a table with several other students. We were coloring pictures. She saw that I was using my left-hand. She smacked the back of my hand with her ruler. It was wood and had a metal strip on it. I jumped and dropped the crayon. She yelled at me that I was to use my right hand, it was not acceptable to use my left hand.
My kindergarten class was a half-day class. For the next 3 1/2 hours, every time I picked up anything with my left hand, she instantly slapped my hand with the ruler.
By the time I left to walk home, the back of my hand was bruised, and I had several cuts on my fingers from the metal band on her ruler.
I was no longer thrilled with the prospect of going to school.
I went home and told mom I was not going back.
When my father came home from work, mom told him what happened. He called me over to him and looked at my hand.
He picked up the phone and called his boss. He told him that he would be late to work the next day.
The next morning, my dad walked with me to the school.
It was a small school that was used only for kindergarten. There were 6 classes.
We walked in the front door of the school and my dad yelled for my teacher and the principal.
They both came running to see what the commotion was.
My father was very loud with the principal about the fact that my hand was bruised and cut.
He then turned to my teacher and told her very clearly that I was left-handed and that I would remain left-handed.
He then told her that if I came home from school with one more mark on me from her trying to force me to write with my right hand that he would return to the school and make sure that she had two marks for every mark she put on me.
He then looked at me and said, “Joyce, you write with your left hand.”
He then walked me into my classroom, helped me hang up my sweater, and walked me to my chair.
He patted me and told me he’d see me at dinner. He then gave my teacher a scowl and left.
It is now not a big thing to be left-handed. That was not always the case. It was the first time I realized that I was not like everyone else. Dad showed me it was OK to be different.
When my younger sister and I were about 14 and 16, we went shopping at a department store together. We separated briefly, she went to the washroom while I looked through albums in the music department. When she was about 15 minutes late at our prearranged meeting spot, I went to the adjacent car park to see if she’d returned to our car by mistake. The garage was enclosed, dark and mostly deserted and I heard footsteps rapidly heading away from me as I approached our car, a low slung mustang. My sister suddenly popped out from under the car and threw herself into my arms, sobbing and shaking. A creep had lurked outside the ladies’ washroom and followed her all around until she panicked and ran to the garage to hide. I was furious and 16 year-old me drove around that parkade to try to find that creep predator. I had some half formed plan of running him over. We returned home, and decided not to say anything to our parents because we didn’t want to lose our car privileges and the ability to shop on our own. Now that I understand just how bad that could have turned out, and realize that predator was a danger to other young girls, I realize that I should have told my parents, so that they would have contacted the police. Instead, we decided to stay together when shopping downtown, and practiced alternative ways to shake off a creep. My sister made a decision that day that could have cost her life. My parents were never told.
I was travelling by bus to a place. And was sitting alone on the seat meant for two people, window side. The scenery was beautiful and I was lost looking outside the window, enjoying beauty of nature.
The bus stopped and a lady boarded the bus. She looked like she was aged above 60. Now, there were two seats empty in the entire bus. One was besides me and other one behind me. Same as me, a man was sitting in window seat behind me, alone. He too looked like he was enjoying the beauty of nature seemed happy with the window seat.
Now the lady stood besides me, thought for a while and asked me to sit with the man sitting behind me. I was like, why? Can’t you sit besides me or that man? Are we going to eat you? Why are you killing our enjoyment? She was adamant and started creating a scene.
I had to get up and sit besides that man. He felt my reaction and offered me window seat but, I thanked him and choose to be on the aisle seat.
What an unnecessary sacrifice! You need to kneel befor fake feminism, THAT SUCKS ABOUT BEING A MAN.
My wife nearly died about 22 years ago. She had cysts on her fallopian tubes. On one side it was big enough that it caused the tube to twist, which torqued the ovary on that side. It basically folded over. This prevented proper blood flow to the organ, so it died inside of her.
I had an entry-level corporate job with good health coverage. The kind where you have to tell hospital staff to check again and see that no, I don’t actually have to pay for xrays, blood tests, yadda yadda, I have the GOOD coverage. Even so, after the emergency hysterectomy I was hit with a bill that was many, many thousands of dollars. I tried to negotiate a payment plan but there was no way I could pay enough monthly for them to agree to it, so they garnished my wages. A lot. Faced with losing my car (and therefore my ability to get to work) and having to choose between groceries/prescriptions and rent/utilities, I had to declare bankruptcy. It took me a decade or so to pay it off, and that’s after they wiped out a lot of my debt and consolidated the rest. Fucked my credit to boot.
And that healthcare that people on here love to tout as the best in the world? Without my intervention, they would have killed my wife. The morning the surgery was scheduled for, no one showed up to take her from her room to the OR. I tracked down a nurse and was told that because my wife has a fever, she needs to go home and take tylenol or something and come back when the fever goes down. While she has a dead organ killing her from the inside. I screamed that the fever wouldn’t go down until she was dead, and made a big enough scene that they finally consulted a couple more docs until one said “well yeah, we’ve got to operate now, wtf are you waiting for?!?!”
When my sons were younger, their Dad and I began teaching them both how to tidy up. This began with the usual dirty clothes in the laundry basket and toys being put away, taking dishes through to the kitchen etc. Pretty standard stuff. As they got older, we taught them how to do their own laundry, wash dishes and hoover. In the beginning, it was all a novel experience for them and they were eager to help mummy and daddy – especially when it came to us teaching them to bake or cook simple meals.
Fast forward to when my eldest started secondary school.
Naturally, the novelty had long since worn off and it was such a big deal if I dared ask them to do something around the house *gasp* (How dare I?) One day, my eldest had been asked to tidy up the mess he had left in the kitchen – it wasn’t much, just a butter knife and toast crumbs on the side and a dirty plate and glass. He huffed and looked at me.
“You know something, Mum? I don’t think I should have to do this…”
“Why not? You made the mess…”
“Well, I’ve been speaking to Nev* and he says he doesn’t have to do this sort of thing…”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he says his mum does it all while he’s at school and his dad’s at work. So why should I have to do it?”
I knew I had to choose my words carefully here, he was all but saying it was a mum’s job to do everything around the house. I could see his dad open his mouth and I held up my hand to stop him.
“Son, does Nev’s mum work?”
“No, she stays at home.”
“Ok, do I work?”
“Yes…”
“Does your dad work?”
“Yes, but…”
“And who is the first person home each day?”
“Well, me I suppose, but…”
“So do you think it’s fair that after dropping you and your brother at school in a morning, commuting to work, sitting in an office for eight hours then commuting back, picking up your brother from the after school club and come home to find you’ve made a mess in the kitchen from making a snack, do you think it’s fair that I should have to tidy your mess?”
“But Nev’s mum…”
“Son, do you think it’s fair?”
“Well, no, but…Nev thinks it’s mean…”
“Oh does he now. I’ll tell you what, let’s go ask him shall we?”
Son wasn’t happy when I took him round to Nev’s. We spoke with Nev’s mum who was less than impressed by what both boys had said, but what was funnier was when she turned to Nev and said: “I don’t give you jobs to do then do I? I guess I’ll have to find you something else to occupy your time if you think that, won’t I?”
Needless to say, both boys were not happy that we had called their bluff.
Fast forward another few years, both sons can do their own laundry, cook excellent meals and tidy up etc. Son’s girlfriend was really impressed when he cooked her a meal and she asked me how come he was such a good cook. I just laughed and said, “I was mean.”
Stress. I know recluses. They actually enjoy my company, I know when to leave. One of them worked hard and burned out, he found he was less and less productive. Working longer hours and getting less done.
He started working from home, he quit going to crowded bars, if there were more than 3 people in a group, he was out of there. He couldn’t take the anxiety.
He became more productive again.
Another person had a concussion that lead to post concussion syndrome. They were a social butterfly, and suddenly they couldn’t be in a room with more than 6 people. They couldn’t handle sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, squealing kids, or crowds. If they came to the end of a grocery aisle and there was someone waiting to cross, they would be frozen with anxiety, not able to make a decision.
People that can’t handle crowds become hermits.
President Obama said he was suffering from decision overload, so he had someone make all of his small decisions so he had the resources to handle the big ones.
Someone laid out what clothes he should wear, scheduled all of his appointments, chose his meals, etc.
The older I get the more I am susceptible to stress, so I can relate to them, and hope that I am not just like them in 10 years.
I was a middle school teacher(1984). The night before school started my 18 month old son started having seizures. My husband and I spent the whole night at the hospital with him. The doctors did a spinal tap and my son lost feeling in his legs. The doctor said that it could be temporary, or it could be permanent. I still showed up at school the next morning and I told my principal that my husband was staying with my son for the week and that I would need the following week off. The principal told me, you need to decide whether you want to be a mother or a teacher because you can’t be both. I resigned on the spot and went home. My son did regain full sensation in his legs a couple of weeks later There was no way I was going back to that school.
In my experience, there is only one sign I always look for to discern a covert narcissist.
The other red flags will pick up narcissists, but they pick up the overts or malignants.
But there is one thing, yes one thing, that is simultaneously so subtle that it makes coverts fly under the radar, and also the one thing which is what makes a covert narcissist a covert narcissist. In other words, this one thing makes coverts different from all the other types of narcissists. It is their signature.
It’s switching off.
Coverts switch off. They practice
avoidance
ghosting
withholding
neglect
silence
pretend not paying attention
pretend not hearing you
pretend misunderstanding you
pretend there is something wrong with you when you talk about something serious and dear to you (e.g. reframes you as bitter and unable to let go when you share insights on narcissism etc. -> covertly tearing you down by twisting your perspective; this is a form of switching off because they refuse to lower themselves to empathize with your perspective so as to understand it, they switch off listening and understanding)
pretend superiority (e.g. I forgave my narcissist, therefore I’m superior to you, you wouldn’t talk so much about your narcissist if only you would forgive them, you should forgive, for your own sake, never let the narcissist change you, I choose love, I choose forgiveness, I choose not to hate, no one is evil, everyone deserves compassion, we are all the same, there is humanity in everyone, etc. -> blowing their own trumpet; this is a form of switching off because they refuse to lower themselves to empathize with your perspective so as to understand it, they switch off listening and understanding)
acting stupid to create situations (e.g. to persistently cause miscommunication and misunderstanding, to ignore you and create opportunities to withhold, to get away with having done harmful things, to deliberately frustrate and antagonize you by doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do, deliberately act bored or switched off while you are giving instructions and then doing the opposite of something simple you asked for e.g. don’t buy eggs -> buys two cartons of eggs and then proudly boasts that you asked for them)
you take a walk with them, you stop by to admire a flower (or you fell down and sprained something), they pretend not to notice and keep walking on without you, and you either look up from the flower to find yourself all alone, or you lie there watching their back recede into the horizon
they cut in line right in front of you just as you open your mouth to give your order, preventing it, pretend to be oblivious, and happily make their order instead, you stare at their side profile (what the hell! can you believe this girl?)
they do something they know they shouldn’t do (e.g. litter, trespass, jaywalk, steal your food or your seat, or chat on the phone loudly in the cinema, leave their car in the middle of the road blocking everyone, walk in the middle of the meant road for cars) and then pretend to be helpless, oblivious, or ignorant when you have an issue with them
not pick up the phone
they pick up your phone call, they are told to pass a message to you, they take the message and never pass it on to you
you are napping, the phone rings, the covert narcissist is right next to the phone, they let the phone keep ringing, it wakes you up, you run across the house to groggily pick up the phone while the covert narcissist was right next to it all along (at other times the phone manages to ring out) (this happens consistently)
the receptionist who cuts everyone off midsentence to transfer them, and keeps doing it the whole day, every day
they never reply your email (even though they are not busy)
they never return your call (phone message)
you greet them, they look down but make sure they never acknowledge you (they don’t stare at you because that’s malignant, but they make sure they do not reply) (some will look down and give a Mona Lisa smile, like they are slightly embarrassed at their own rude behavior)
you sit across them at the party, they look away from you in disgust, avoiding eye contact and refusing to talk to you, a guest passes by, the covert narcissist suddenly beams a smile at you and says ‘hey, remember that time when … ?’, the guest passes on by, the covert narcissist terminates mid-sentence and goes back to snubbing you, until the next guest comes by
walk out on you midsentence
keep on talking as if to you after you’ve left the room, still holding the conversation but without you
covert narcissists are experts at urging everyone to get along, forgive everyone, hate no one, and then mysteriously degrading you through silence and withholding over nothing (they have weird concepts of what getting along means)
mysterious sour moods (they are a form of switching off, the switching off of love or joy, sour moods in the absence of concrete causes are a form of withholding, and especially negatively affects susceptible empaths nearby)
convenient unavailability or inaccessibility
disappear
run away from fights they started with their covert antagonisms and microaggressions
coverts are experts at telling you they don’t want a fight with you after they’ve finally button pushed you to the limit and caused you to start sorting things out with them
snub
ignore
always have nothing to say in response to what you just said (covertly deflating you and degrading you by refusing to reflect back to you sanity and gravitas; it’s as if their attitude is always ‘you just said something stupid, I’m not going to honor that with a response’ to everything you enthusiastically share or say)
or they will always give a lackluster or subtly negative devaluation or degradation response to your happy, exciting, inspiring experience
not be courteous when courtesy is appropriate and expected (hyper-courteous at other times as if they were on an audition) (courtesy is a weapon to be deployed in the most inappropriate ways)
always being the unavailable shoulder for you to cry on only when you have dramas in life (only unavailable when you need them, this is not a fairweather friend, it’s weaponized withholding)
after you tell them your sob story, they make sure they never say a word to console you (e.g. ok, bye!)
you call, the covert narcissist picks up the phone, you want the covert narcissist to pass a message to someone else, just as you start telling your message, the covert narcissist pretends you’ve finished and says ‘ok bye!’ and starts hanging up, forcing you to scream for them to wait and not hang up on you.
making promises just so they can abuse through failing to come through (duper’s delight e.g. ‘you’re a fool to believe my promises or to trust me’)
making sure they don’t inform you when they go on extended vacations, so that you will call them on the phone, still expecting to make a date for lunch, but there’s no one home to pickup, should you call the police and report missing persons?
making sure they cancel plans on you at the last minute, while making sure you never get wind of it any earlier, to create the greatest last minute upset (this is worst when there’s plane tickets involved)
frustratingly not give any response or acknowledgement whatsoever when it is appropriate to the situation – the mannikin routine (this is always deliberate, make no mistake, it just appears like an accident each time for maximum plausible deniability)
the impossible to please parent, spouse, child, boss, sibling, friend
Coverts practice weaponized switching off. They are like a demonstration prototype that always refuses to work at the convention in front of the investors, or the cartoon frog that only sings when there’s no audience, and switches back to ‘ribbid’ when an audience gathers to listen. Or a mannikin that comes to life when the lights are off, dances, holds parties, then freezes back into position when lights come on, or Toy Story.
This is a peculiar form of passive aggressive crazymaking particular to covert narcissists.
Learning to recognize weaponized switching off will allow you to spot covert narcissists early.
Most people are trained to dismiss and overlook weaponized switching off because it is very highly plausibly deniable, but secondly, because they did not suspect the nature of covert narcissists. This causes them to impute more decency in the covert narcissist than they posses.
When being the recipient of weaponized switching off, something will feel odd to your gut. That’s because your gut senses that the covert narcissist is missing cues. This missing cues is deliberate. Missing cues is something the covert narcissist cannot help doing because their nature is antagonism and hatred, and refusing to behave appropriately by honoring the subtle cues of interaction is how they rebel and live out their intrinsic hatred (don’t mistakenly do this to people in the Asperger spectrum, or those who are depressed, or those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, or Alzheimers or dementia, or who lack sleep).
(The cause of missing cues is zero affective empathy. Zero affective empathy causes the covert to both overcompensate with lurvebombing at times, and weaponized switch off at other times. This is because zero affective empathy causes their emotional reaction to everything to be inappropriate, screwy, and ‘off’. Hence their emotional response to everything is always inappropriate. This can be easily detected once you know to look for it. Fakeness, all fake people are coverts.)
It’s hard to explain, and easy to dismiss. But you will feel erased to various degrees in their presence.
The point of switching off is to refuse to acknowledge your personhood (to deny you the glory you deserve through simple things like paying attention or replying earnestly – by the way paying attention and earnest replies are acts of love). They are not switching off to conserve battery. They are switching off to micro-antagonize you. It’s covert button pushing. This is how they toy with your emotional wellbeing. It is meant to produce in you shame, embarrassment, frustration, anger and insecurity. They like to throw you emotionally off balance. This is how they make themselves feel better, at your expense. As you get to know them better and better, they will switch from micro-antagonisms to bigger and bigger antagonisms, and it tends to happen along the lines of withholding, denial, avoidance. Malicious suppression.
What they actually switched off was their humanity. The game is to attack your humanity through switching off their own humanity. A humane person does not seek to feel better through causing hurt feelings. Cruelty is inhumane. Covert narcissists have emotional cruelty built into them. It’s a lot like what they talked about regarding Auschwitz.
Funnily, covert narcissists hate it when you switch off on them. Just try it and see, fail to answer or acknowledge them, pretend you weren’t listening and give no response to them, and see how they react.
My theory is that they react so poorly to their own medicine because they know that whenever anyone does that, it is a deliberate, antagonistic move, because they are well aware that they wanted to ruin things whenever they themselves did it.
11 If a son asks for [a]bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish?
12 Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?
“Ah, hello, Miss. I am Mr. McMichaels. I’ve come to talk to you about your child’s behavior!”
“Right,”
“Right now, as we speak, your daughter is on the floor crying.”
“…”
“Yes. And she won’t stop.”
“My… 6-year-old daughter… Is crying. Right now. And you decided to call me about it.”
“Well, yes, because I asked her what could I do to stop her from crying and she said to call you.”
“Ah,”
“So how is your day?”
“Has my daughter stopped crying yet?”
“Mmm, NO! She won’t stop crying untill you talk to me for a bit more!”
*in unconvinced tone* “Uh-huh”
“So, let’s ignore the topic of your daughter for a moment. What are you doing tonight?”
“Tell my daughter to shut up and be a man. Goodbye, Mr.McMichaels.”
“WHAT ABOUT SIX?!”
“Oh. At 6 I will be going on a date with my lovely husband for our 20th anniversary! Never contact me again, Sir.”
My sister comes home and explains she did not cry that day, nor did she have Mr. McMichaels as her teacher.
The teacher tried, and failed, to plan a date with my mother.
SHAME ON HIM!
EDIT: EEeEe, I’m sorry, guys, I didn’t make this clear enough! This is from the POV of my Mother, not me! I’m sorry for the confusion lmao <3
Also, thank you guys for the love and upvotes! Ik my Mama should’ve said something to the Principal but she was in tears about how funny it was. My Mum isn’t what you would call ‘A responsible adult’ She just laughs at things like this. But, I swear, if something more were to happen she would have told someone I assure you that.
Not my boss, but a true story. A few years ago I was in a pizza shop waiting to pick up my takeaway pizza. A store manager at the counter publicly tore verbal strips off a young trainee who had apparently made an error in her work. I was appalled at the way he humiliated the poor little thing in front of onlookers. At the time one of my children had begun part-time work during the school holidays to earn some money and this young lady only looked about her age. I’m a teacher and maternal, and while all the other customers looked uncomfortable but weren’t going to say anything, I decided to let fly. I mean, what could he do to me? I wasn’t his employee.
I stepped up to the counter and took on the manager. I told him that what she had done was totally understandable given her age and level of experience. I then said that how he handled it was NOT and that I was going to report him to the company for foul language and abuse of a minor. I had his name from his badge and I had the receipt showing time and date of my purchase and that he really needed to go to counselling and get help.
He turned on me, screaming abuse and making a fuss, and actually came out from behind the counter to tower over me, attempting physical intimidation seeing as yelling at me was not having the desired effect. I got out my mobile phone and recorded him, and another customer at the store called the police and reported him. I also made good on my threat, got in touch with the company with details and was assured that they would investigate the matter. I think the fact that the police had been involved swayed them.
Anyway, long story short, about a year after the incident I returned to the shop (they did make good pizza!) and the young trainee came up and thanked me for my help. The former manager had gone to counselling but it then came out that he had been groping other female workers and they were emboldened by the fact that I had taken a stand and spoke up about him. He lost his job and I have no idea where he is now. But I hope nobody else has had to suffer from his misogynistic rants.
Learning Chinese and got to visit China in 2008 (and then in 2010 and 2013)
Before 2008, I attended a college in the US and my view on China was roughly the same as the Western MSM (Communists, human rights abuses, people have no freedom etc.) However, having visited China 3 times and witnessing the development gradually changed my views on China.
I remembered my first day when I landed in Beijing and I wanted to test my Chinese, so I asked a taxi driver whether his life is okay in China. He replied, “还可以“, which means “it’s okay” without sounding worried or oppressed at all.
That surprised me a lot. Weren’t the people of China oppressed? Why was his tone so relaxed?
And during that Olympics year, I witnessed the boom of subway in Beijing. When I first got there, there were just 3 operational lines (Line 1, 2, and 13), but just a couple months later, 3 or so more lines became operational. My life in Beijing was better than expected. I thought I was going to feel oppressed in China, but apart from censorship of certain contents (notably contents on Dalai Lama and Falungong), I was free to enjoy jianbing every morning and free to explore the city (it helped that Beijing subway back then only cost RMB2, or just a little more than a quarter dollar). Moreover, me having Chinese heritage can blend in very well in China and I enjoyed same kind of usual city life in a similar fashion to that of Bangkok. And I ended that year by taking the Z-train from Beijing to visit the Yangtze River Delta area. Their sleeping cabins were far better than the Thai ones (and I China was poorer than Thailand in per capita income back then)
Fast forward to 2010, my view on China became more neutral. Having spent months in Beijing 2 years prior, I thought living in China isn’t so bad. I didn’t whine the same MSM rhetorics anymore but I still couldn’t find positive things to talk about China. That year, what amazed me were their infrastructure. I took the bullet sleeper train from Shanghai to Beijing, and it was the first time I ever saw a bullet sleeper train! By this time, I was convinced that the Chinese transportation infrastructure was miles ahead of Thailand.
2013 was a really pivotal year for me. In that year, I decided to tour China alone by myself from Datong to Xi’an, then to Lanzhou and Dunhuang, then back to Xi’an and Beijing before taking the train to North Korea. By being able to speak the language and being able to blend in with Chinese people, whenever I travelled around any city with Europeans or Americans, there were always Chinese people asked me whether I can ask those white people to have pictures taken with those Chinese locals. Also, one day on the train from Xi’an to Lanzhou, I met a young Chinese college student in her berth opposite to mine. She saw me looking very Chinese, yet reading a guidebook about China in English. Once, she asked me in Chinese to move something out of the way and I did it for her, then the conversation began. She was so surprised to know that I’m not Chinese but a Thai, and then moved on to talk about her Thai idols. I was also surprised that a lot of Chinese people know the politics of my country quite well.
Having all those experiences in 2013, I concluded that Chinese people are so curious and they asked me a lot of questions after knowing I’m a foreigner. They are hunger for experiences and perspectives. But most importantly, they are people who simply want to work hard and enjoy a good life, as we all are in any part of the World. Politics are of very least concern for them. The way Chinese people come to you may seem rude, but I interpreted those moves as sincere curiosity.
Then my view on China gradually became more positive, as seeing people across China hunger for knowledge and better life made me realize massive potential of this millennia-old civilization that my ancestry also belongs. And since I mentioned “sincere curiosity”, Chinese people are also very friendly (it helped though that I can speak the language). I’m sure that even if you are whites from Europe or America, if you start a conversation in Chinese, you will easily make friends in China.
Having been to China for 3 successive times also fascinated me that each time I was there, I saw massive amount of development unfolded right before my eyes. Then I started to wonder why I thought China was such an evil place pre-2008. Looking at the people and infrastructure, they surely have come very far on the World stage. And nothing matters more than current generation of Chinese people are living decent lives. To me, I think whoever was running China did the job well enough to ensure steady prospects for her citizens.
Now, I would like to have my fourth visit and see their entrepreneurial spirits in places like Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing with my own eyes and be blown away just like all three visits prior.
Tuscan Onion Soup with Shaved Parmesan
Onion soup is a hearty dinner.
If French onion soup is on a menu John or I are sure to order it. We really love it! Onions, cooked slowly with beef stock and then topped with bread and cheese! What is there not to like? Then, one evening we were invited to a friend’s house for dinner, and they served Italian onion soup. It was different from the French version, but it was delicious, and I had to have the recipe.
Where did Italian onion soup come from?
I did a little research on this fantastic dish and learned that it is known as Carabaccia. It originated in Tuscany going back at least to the 15th century. Carabaccia was made with red onions which are native to Tuscany. It had a sweet and sour flavor and used almonds as a thickener. A piece of bread would be placed in the bottom of the bowl and the soup would be poured over it and then topped with cheese. Sound familiar?
Apparently, Catherine d’ Medici brought the recipe to France with her from Tuscany when she married King Henry II. It is said that this was one of Leonardo DaVinci’s favorite dishes. Over the years changes were made to the original recipe. Some modern takes on this soup include the addition of a poached egg and the omission of the almonds as a thickener.
3 bowls onion soup with parmesan
Ingredients
3 pounds white onions (3 or 4 large)
4 medium leeks
4 ounces pancetta, in 1 piece
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 cups chicken stock
3 to 4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3/4 to 1 cup fruity red wine, such as Merlot or Beaujolais
Salt and pepper, to taste
6 slices rustic country style bread
2 garlic cloves, peeled, halved
3 ounces Wisconsin parmesan cheese, in 1 chunk
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
Ingredients
My version is a little different and closer to some of the more modern takes on the recipe. It does not have the sweet and sour flavor that was typical of Carabaccia and I omitted the almonds altogether.
Red onions are still the main ingredient. I also use a nice rich red wine and some tomato sauce to compliment the flavor of the onions. I also like the addition of beef stock, where the original recipe might have used a vegetable stock. Garlic and thyme, also add to the robust flavors of this soup.
Tips for making Italian Onion Soup
The onions are the star ingredient in this recipe, so they need to be cooked carefully to get the best flavor out of them. The onions, garlic and sugar should be added to a pan with hot oil and cooked down until they are soft and caramelized. To do this you will need to set the heat on your stove low and allow the onions to cook slowly so that they do not burn. You will need to be patient; it may take 20 minutes or more for the onions to soften.
When you add the wine bring the soup to a boil and then lower the heat a bit and let it cook until the wine is reduced by half. This will heighten the flavor of the wine.
It is best to whisk the tomato sauce and the flour together before you add it to the soup. Make sure that you do not have any lumps of flour in the sauce before you add it.
Once all the remaining ingredients have been added, let the soup cook on low heat for 1 hour. The slow cooking process creates a rich robust soup that is worth the wait!
italian onion soup with parmesan
Instructions
Peel the onions and cut in half lengthwise. Thinly slice crosswise.
Trim the leeks and cut in half lengthwise. Slice crosswise in 1/4 inch slices, using 3 inches of pale green. Place the leeks in cold water, and rinse to remove the dirt. Drain. Reserve the onions and leeks.
Unroll the pancetta and dice into 1/4-inch pieces.
Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the pancetta and cook until some of the fat has been rendered, about 5 minutes.
Add the onions and leeks. Sauté for 20 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.
Add the stock, and simmer 30 minutes.
Stir the vinegar, wine, salt, and pepper into the soup. Cook until thoroughly heated.
Toast the bread slices, and rub with the peeled garlic clove halves.
Spoon the soup into soup bowls. Float the bread croutons in the soup. Pare 4 or 5 shavings of the cheese on top of each serving.
Garnish with the chopped parsley, and serve immediately.
I once had a young lady in 12th grade come to me at the end of class, just before lunch, and tell me her Uncle, who lived with them, was molesting her. I instantly reported it to the Admin and the Campus Police. The Campus officer burst out cussing. It seems that two+ years before the same Uncle had gone to prison for molesting the same girl. He was a good manipulator and had convinced the prison shrinks he was reformed and as a first timer got released early on parole. And the terminally stupid parents let him move right back in with them – he was the Mother’s “Baby Brother” and had always been spoiled etc. The girl and her little brother were taken out of the home and sent to live with another Aunt and Uncle, I seem to remember one of them was a peace officer. The molester was sentenced to a long term with “no parole” and her parents were put on probation for child endangerment. She didn’t even come to check out, the Admin did all her papers to send her to another high school for her. But one of them passed on her “Thank You” to me. It seems I was the 4th teacher she told and the only one who did anything. The rumor was the other three were demoted to probationary teacher and put on notice as well as having a prosecutor warn them that he could charge them with a felony for failure to report the suspected abuse and just might still do it if they failed to report anything again, even if it was just a rumor they heard from the students.
No not at all. First GDP itself is a highly flawed form of economic measurement. GDP per capital. Is therefore by same extension is highly flawed.
Let’s just look at one item if GDP. Healthcare. The U.S. with a mere 330 million population has GDP that consists of 6 trillion dollars Healthcare and pharmaceutical items while China that has 4 times the U.S. population if 1.4 billion people has a GDP that consist of only 1 trillion dollars in the same category!
So why is that? China offers universal healthcare coverage compared to the U.S. billing every penny to the healthcare industry and hence the difference. The irony is China today as a life expectancy of 78 years old versus 76 years old for the U.S.
So either the U.S. overstated its GDP by 24 times that of China or China understand its GDP by the same ratio! Hence American’s look rich but they are not and Chinese look poor but they are actually a lot richer.
We haven’t even factored in real purchasing power parity. A dollar can buy a Big Mac in the U.S. but the same dollar can exchange for roughly 7 RMB and that can buy you 3 Big Mac in Beijing. So once you factored in that and you factored in the 0.1% in the U.S. owns almost everything and 99.99% Americans are a mere average Chinese but less capable to think for themselves!
I’m from the US, but unlike most US citizens I’ve traveled extensively. Even so, the five best examples of “American ignorance” I’ve witnesses all occurred within the US.
1) The car that makes its own gas. I was on a flight, sitting in first class, and next to me was a college student (from Quinnipiac College). I was reading a car magazine, and she very excitedly told me that she had just gotten a new car, and what she loved about it the most was that the car made its own gas. This was before the era of electric cars, so that couldn’t have been what she meant. I asked her how her car ‘made its own gas’. She said she didn’t know how, but it was so great that it did. I asked her who told her that it makes its own gas. She explained that was the strange part; the dealer didn’t even mention that! She went on to explain that she drove the car off the dealer’s parking lot, and the gauge said the car had enough gas to go 381 miles. She got on the expressway and drove 15 miles to her parents house, and when she got there the gauge said that the car had enough gas to to go 409 miles! So she’d never have to buy gas again because when she drove 15 miles it made 27 miles worth of gas!!
2) I want a room with an ocean view! I was checking into a hotel in Orlando, FL. Ahead of me in line was a couple from Minnesota, demanding that the desk agent give them a room with an ocean view. The desk agent patiently explained that Orlando is 60 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, so there were no rooms in the hotel that had a view of the ocean since it was an hour’s drive away. The man raised his voice and exclaimed “Don’t you go lying to me; I looked at the map and Orlando is only a half inch from the ocean!”
3) How the f**k am I supposed to know what zip code I’m in? I was at a gas station in Tucson AZ. I no longer live there, but I used to. I was filling up the tank, and a guy at the pump next to me was swearing up a storm and hitting the pump. He came over to me and angrily asked “Do you know what f**king zip code we are in?” and I told him I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was 85719. He went back to his car and moments later was was screaming and kicking the pump again. Then I realized that he thought the pump was asking him to enter the zip code for the gas station, instead of the billing zip code for his credit card!
4) Only an hour from Boston and an hour from NYC! I was at a high school graduation party for my nephew, and I met his girlfriend for the first time. I asked her where she was going to college in the fall, and she told me she was going to Quinnipiac College. I asked her why she chose that school, and she told me that it was in the most amazing location, only an hour’s drive to Boston and an hour’s drive to NYC. I asked her how that could be, since it takes 3h30m with no traffic to get from Boston to NYC, so there isn’t anywhere can be an hour’s drive to Boston and an hour’s drive to NYC. She said “that’s what’s so special about the location!” <Note – I have nothing against Quinnipiac College, it is pure coincidence that two of these stories involve their students>
5) The impact of video games on violent behavior. I’ve been involved in college admissions for both Harvard and MIT. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard as when I read the opening sentence of an applicant’s essay: “The impact of video games on violent behavior has been a controversial topic for centuries.”
And just to show that ignorance isn’t limited to Americans, here’s one involving a Brit;
I’ve been on eBay since before you were born. One of my hobbies is restoring and refurbishing old cameras. I pick up ratty old cameras at random antique stores, goodwill, garage sales, and, of course on eBay, and clean and repair them. On eBay I often find great deals when someone misspells a camera name, so it doesn’t come up in a standard search (i.e. Rollleiflex or Cannon or Lieca) so I search for misspelled versions, and often end up as the only bidder. Once I came across a listing with a whopper of an error. The photo was of a very rare and expensive camera, the Olympus OM-3, with a title and description of a very common and inexpensive camera, the Olympus OM-30. At the time, the OM-30’s sold for $10 – $15, but the OM-3 is very rare, and never sells for less than about $600, sometimes as much as $1800. I felt bad; that was too much of a differential to let the seller leave all that money on the table. So I emailed the seller and asked if the item for sale was the camera in the photo or the camera in the description, and let the seller know that the camera in the photo was worth quite a bit, and if that was what was for sale, s/he might want to adjust the item title so that the auction got the attention it deserved.
The response I got:
“Of course it’s what’s in the picture! How else would I get the picture, you daft cow! Who are you, the eBay police? I’ve been on eBay since before you were born and I don’t need you telling me how to run my business! Bugger off”
So I bought it for $10.27, as the only bidder! I ended up selling it a few weeks later for $1200.
My brother, Daniel, lives in Colorado. He is the only family member that I remain in contact with.
I have a couple of sisters, but they are isolationists and never respond back to me when I try to reach out. Oh well.
For the longest time, my brother and I would talk and zoom every week. But after Covid hit, it broke down and our emails and talks got to be scarce. The last big talk that I had with him was when he was worried about World War 3 between the USA and China and offered to take me in (abandoning my family in China).
I wrote a post about this.
After that our talks got shorter and shorter, and then he got sick with COVID. He spent an entire month in bed, delirious and hallucinating. Turns out he didn’t get any vaccination, and instead took “colloidal silver” that he got from the internet to get better.
I had a few zoom meetings after that. He looked good. Lost a lot of weight.
But then, the last talk I had with him was about when his dogs died. My dog; PP had died, and so I was asking him about it. Later, he was going camping over the weekend. This was in July 2022.
Hi BV,
I think your correct, dad got her in '67, and I think she passed in '78 or'79. Tara was 11 and Kimba was 14, which is a good long time for a husky.. Ashia just turned 5 last week..
Hope your well! We're going on a three day backpacking trip in a few hours. That will be some fun, Ashia will be carrying her own food so that will slow her down abit :)
DZ
And that was my last e-mail from him.
That was a year and a half ago.
I haven’t heard anything since.
He has five different email accounts and two video accounts, and he doesn’t answer any of them. Further, the twice yearly alerts of vacations, travel, and parities that would occasionally pop up in my in-box … all ended.
Sigh.
Either he is purposely blocking me, or he himself went to the big Domain in the sky.
Vaxx victim?
In Prison for some law?
Death by accident?
I did find his wife’s coffeeshop on the internet, and sent her an email. This is what she said.
Hi BV,
first of all, Dan is fine and all is well! I honestly don't know why he wasn't in touch with you. I'd ask sometimes if he'd spoken with you but I had no idea that much time had passed since you two had communicated. I don't have any huge or exciting updates....
Tomorrow (Easter) we're going to one of my sister's for dinner. Some of my family will be there, so it'll be nice. Otherwise, just plodding along.
How old is Ray Ray now? I'm thinking she must be around 5 or so...? You should send my a picture if you think of it!
I'll tell Dan he must get in touch with you. It's just dumb not to communicate with family - often we're all we've got. And I apologize for not being more proactive in that regard!
Love to all of you from Colorado,
Emily
Sad to say.
It’s a reality when you get older. As time progresses, you circle of friends and relatives get smaller and smaller.
Today…
If China invades Taiwan militarily, who will the state of Singapore support, China or Taiwan?
Firstly, and this is the much more important point — most Chinese who understand modern China know in the depth of their souls that mainland China will never invade Taiwan; the main reason being that “Chinese should not kill Chinese” (a lesson learned from the bitter Civil War between KMT and CPC).
There are more reasons
For example – the Chinese are used to thinking long-term — and mainland Chinese know that PRC is on the ascendant, and ROC is either stagnant or even declining. The day will come when the Taiwanese would be less reluctant to unite with mainland China, though likely they would still want a “one country, two systems” approach.
Secondly, almost all leaders in Singapore have always maintained that we don’t take sides — this message have come from both our PM Mr Lee Hsien Loong, and our polymath and wise man, Mr George Yeo, among others
The Man up argument
About American Bullet-train, the Brightline.
main qimg 6d7092f80315543ccf95f1e2e17c07f1
One photo that can tell you why it’s not a real high-speed train:
See the stones under the railway tracks? Technically, it is called a ballasted track. That means this train cannot run fast enough to be called a high-speed train. Otherwise, it will become a killing train.
Well I happen to be a railway police officer.
Brother workers in the US, if someone asks you to build a second phase project for this railway, such as turning this poor railway from one pair of tracks into two, please remember that you may have accidents due to the strong sucking of Bernoulli effect or splashing stones. I don’t think the contractor will really consider your safety. When you are constructing, remember that time is not enough to observe the arrival of a fast train solely with your eyes and ears.
Also, for other Americans nearby, remember to take care of your children and keep them as far away as possible. Because even out of a few meters may not be a safe zone. See that white van far away in this photo? Not in the safe zone. Many parts of your fast train railways do not have fences. It won’t knock people into disabilities. If a person is accidentally knocked away by it, you need to shovel the body-jam up from the ground, or trees, depends. I am glad that China’s railways have fences, so most of our colleagues do not need to go through this.
Someone once asked me on Quora before, why Laos needs to build bullet trains when its economic conditions are not good enough?
Well this is the reason, the foundation made of stones means that this railway track is not suitable for running high-speed trains. If we build a regular railway, Laos will need to rebuild a route suitable for high-speed railways in the future. That will be a heavy burden for our neighbor.
Rail tracks are downward compatible, not upward. So next time, don’t believe in the scam of transforming ordinary railway lines into high-speed railway lines.
What was your most arrogant software engineering interview candidate experience?
“I am HOT SHIT!”
A year ago I interviewed a candidate for an Engineering PM role on my team; a sharp and interesting guy who grew up in New York and was grudgingly getting accustomed to life on the west coast. We needed a candidate who had a very specific set of deeply technical skills for that role and he fit the bill. He came in with glowing recommendations from some pretty senior people and had the exact experience and expertise that we needed. Basically he was an almost certain hire and I was his final round.
I didn’t want to grill him more on the technical aspects of the role since he had already proven himself in that space; I wanted to figure out what he would be like to work with on my team and what he would bring to the table there. My team is extremely close knit; it has been like a tight family for many years and we always have each others’ backs through thick and thin; we have worked quite hard to ensure that egos never get in the way.
We started off with him telling me about his journey, his passions and ambitions, his previous experiences on teams, etc, I told him about our team culture, the dynamics we share. I asked him why he wanted to join our team when clearly the whole world was open to him based on his assessment of himself.
He started to tell me how he was bored of large companies and wants to work at a small startup. He said that he only wanted this job for a year so he could add it on his resume and he would leave after that. That came across as odd, but I still decided to give him a chance since I knew the specific project we needed his expertise for would probably be done in a year so it might actually work out and give us time to change his mind.
The next words that he said had me completely baffled; “I am HOT SHIT!” he said, “You will be lucky to have me. You guys know I’m the best guy for the job. The only reason I’m here is because startups need people with 5 years of experience and I have only 4.”
I thanked him for his time, walked him to the door and went back to the interview panel and made it very clear that we would not be hiring this guy and that I would like to veto this decision; my manager heard me out and absolutely had my back on it 100%. We did not make him an offer.
There are three HUGE red flags here:
Arrogance. Someone who comes in believing and loudly announcing that they are God’s gift to mankind are not coach-able. You do not want to work with someone who is not coach-able; you always want people who will learn and grow and adapt to the needs of the team. One single arrogant member can bring toxicity to the whole team and destroy a culture and relationships that took years to forge.
Lies. I’ve worked on my own startups, lived with close friends who had startups, I’ve interviewed with startups and I’ve interviewed candidates from startups; you know what the one thing is that sets them apart from large corporations; they don’t stick to arbitrary rules. No startup(or competent hiring manager in any company for that matter) will ever pass on a great candidate just because he has one year of work experience less than what the online job description suggested. This was an extremely obvious bluff .
Commitment. When you hire someone into your team, you spend a good amount of your time coaching them, showing them the ropes, teaching them the business. It often takes 3–6 months for a new employee to become fully independent and during that time the whole team rallies together and helps set them up for success. If someone tells me that they plan to leave in a year for something new and shiny, it tells me that they are not going to put their heart and soul into this job; they will not be passionate about it and that means they won’t deliver their best results. It would also take up so much time from my whole team that the investment is not worth the returns.
Don’t let your arrogance eclipse your talent; all that remains is the shadow.
Creepy and cringe
What is the strangest complaint you have received at your job?
Some years ago while counting down the last few minutes before my shift ended in a public library, a young woman came to the information desk with an ennraged look on her face.
Lady: Can someone please tell me where the Spanish classes are? I’ve been on all the floors and no one seems to know what I’m talking about.
Me: Sorry miss but those aren’t Spanish classes. The Spanish Embassy has been having a series of public talks every Wednesday at 5 – 6 pm on the third floor discussing the Latin American economy. We simply allow them to use our conference room on the third floor.
Lady: Are you listening to what I’m saying? I left work early to come to these Spanish classes. Where are the people for the Spanish class?
Me: I’m sorry miss but we really don’t know. We simply give the Embassy access to our conference room. You might want to call the number they left on the advertisement.
Lady: So you’re saying this is your library, where you work, but you have no idea what’s going on?
Me: We know all what is going on in regards to our public services but the Embassy’s program is something external. Any complaints about the program can be addressed to the Embassy’s website.
Lady: Typical lazy government worker mentality…So you’re saying you have no knowledge of what is going on in your own building?
Me: This is actually not our building. Several government departments are housed in this building besides the library. Would you like me to call the Embassy for you?
Lady: You’ve wasted my time already. It’s already 5:30pm. I mean does it feel good to you to be getting paid for nothing? What’s the point of this library? I want to speak to your manager.
I was about to explain to her that we don’t have ‘managers’ but librarians when she whips out her cell phone and shows a screenshot of a Facebook post advertising the Embassy’s program.
Me: Miss. I’m sorry but that post shows that the program ends April 24th, which was two weeks ago…
Lady: ……so you….this is so unprofessional…..a big freaking library and you can’t call people and tell them that the Spanish class program has finished. I want to speak to the manager. This is unacceptable.
It was at this point I decided I that I no longer waste my time with this lady’s nonsensical complaint.
Bill Maher is officially PANICKING!!! He know it’s coming…
Nike announced that it does not source products from the XUAR and have confirmed with their contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region. Will this cause them to lose the Chinese market?
Those who have mainland business contacts may have been party to this conversation.
First among foreigners are the anglophones, then Italy, France, Germany, followed by the rest of the EU, then the Asian first world, the brics, and finally, the rest of the world.
American business interests in China are sacrosanct, followed by the brits, Canadians, Australians and so on, as per the order described.
Why? The Chinese understand there can be no economic interest without political power, and America is hegemonic. Helping America succeed in china is the best protection against sanctions and embargoes. The last 40 years has seen America develop a heavy consumer brand presence in China, with negligible Chinese presence stateside.
I believe the current Nike troubles framed against the illustrative example of h&m’s commercial erasure is a signal China is finally ready to weaponize this particular disparity.
China has had enough of America’s no holds barred maximum pressure strategy of confronting China, especially the attack on its domestic economy.
China is hurt. 2020’s live births is the lowest in 2 generations, 25 percent below 2016, compared to America’s 9 percent.
It is time to draw blood.
China can ask the coca cola ceo, you have 4–5 billion revenue this year. Your corporation can do 40–50 billion business each year in the future. You have supply chains all over Xinjiang. Do you observe genocide or mass incarceration in the data? If you refuse to make a statement or lie, we will burn you, and offer the Pepsi ceo your market share.
Choose.
And so on. There is no other growth story like china’s anywhere else, with the scale, stability and above all, speed. McDonald’s, for example, grew 10x faster compared to its Indian franchise.
Going forward, there will be no sacred cows among mncs in china. Trump made sure of that.
And yes, Nike can certainly lose the Chinese market if it gets erased like h&m.
It hasn’t happened… yet.
Note: The question and this answer is about China, not India.
Power projection
Men are starting to stand up in the USA.
Has someone treated you poorly until they discovered you were wealthy and/or successful?
The best one I ever heard of was from my grandfather. In order to receive a promotion at the company he worked for, he was required to attain a master’s degree. He was an engineer, of sorts, shall we say.
This was the 1960’s, and there was my grandfather sitting in a classroom with a bunch of 22 year old hotshots, while he was 50 years old. For 6 weeks, no one spoke to him, he wasn’t called on, the professor ignored him, and whatever work he did received an average grade.
One day, a singularly difficult real life engineering problem was presented in class from a local company called JPL. When none of the students could correctly answer it, the professor asked if anyone had any ideas…..
I love this part….
My grandfather raised his hand and answered it. The professor told him he was wrong. Mr. Professor then told the class the answer. Grandpa then interrupted the professor and informed him that the answer given to the class turned out to be incorrect for that particular alloy, and that the week prior my Grandpa’s team had found that with a 2% increase of cadmium, the answer was as my Grandpa said. The professor then asked Grandpa to come to the board and explain it in writing. He did. The professor then asked him who he was and what his job was.
After the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Manhattan and other projects were thusly discussed, Grandpa never sat down in that class again. Or any other. He taught the class as one who actually did these things…from Fat Man and Little Boy to the Saturn rocket booster and everything in between.
At the end of the semester, Grandpa received an “A”, and the professor informed him that he had received average grades before because his work just seemed too different than the textbook answers. The professor called a meeting of the department, and after a 60 minute interview they gave him his master’s degree and offered him an honourary doctorate if he would teach there. He declined.
Six months later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Every July 21st for 20 years, a new offer was sent to Grandpa to receive his doctorate and teach. He wasn’t ignored any more.
Scientists Discover Most Incredible Habitable Planetary System
[You said in your interview that the Americans have no analysts on Russia left who would be familiar with our mentality, people, and culture. How can they declare us their enemies if they know nothing about our country?]
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"They have no interest in that.
The United States has lost diplomacy as a method for establishing contacts, holding candid discussions, and identifying ways to strike a compromise.
It is not necessarily about specialists in Russian, European, Asian, or African studies. I don’t see serious specialists there.
They are accustomed to making demands.
They have even stooped to rudely and publicly telling China what to do.
Reportedly, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu had a telephone conversation with US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. The US official said Washington was dissatisfied with Beijing supporting Moscow.
How can they say such a thing to the great power of China?
What about the reputation of the Americans themselves?
There is also a statement by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell. I can’t get enough of his quotes.
He said that the West (through Ukraine) must necessarily win. If Russia wins, no one will ever be able to rely on the United States when they need help.
You can’t help thinking about Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Syria (which they will supposedly leave). They will supposedly leave Iraq too, and they have effectively fled Afghanistan.
Speaking of help provided by the United States, they have a small nation of Haiti sitting right next to them, which they have been taking care of for more than a hundred years now.
Even before the UN was created, they were nurturing dictators, toppling them, and putting in new ones.
However, the Americans are powerless when it comes to preventing thuggery, rampant theft and embezzlement of public funds in that country, which is probably the world’s poorest economy.
It would not be difficult for the United States to take a sliver of the Ukrainian pie and solve at least this problem.
Instead, they showed up at the UN Security Council again and are trying to lure in someone from Africa to ensure law and order in Haiti (the US fiefdom).
Let them first sort things out in their own backyard, or rather a small portion of it.
It is sad to acknowledge that the psychology of global dominance and retaining hegemonism at any cost has never helped the United States solve any issues on the ground."
-Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with Izvestia Multimedia Information Centre, Moscow, March 28, 2024.
Using the grappler
Is dictatorship always wrong? Doesn’t history have any examples of good dictatorships/dictators?
There are two problems with “good” dictators:
There aren’t that many of them
They don’t live forever
When a dictator creates a political system, that system is dependent on them…and on whoever comes after them.
If the line of successors is an unbroken chain of good leaders, all is well and good. But that hasn’t happened yet to date…
As an autocratic leader, I have no doubt his achievements were great. He united Germany, introduced social legislation, and sustained a European balance of power to avoid a world war.
The problem: he made sure to write a German constitution that concentrated all that power in one place – himself. And when he got let go, his successors weren’t up to the challenge.
The economist Max Weber gave the best assessment: “Bismarck created a great nation without any political education, without any political will, accustomed to letting the great statesman at the helm take care of politics for it.”
Weber died in 1920, so that makes his assessment even more powerful.
Sort of like raising children, no?
There might be “good” dictators, but I’m not convinced any of them can create a “great nation.” Not one that lasts, anyway.
Florida is different
The Chinese Communist Party often claims that Tibet before 1959 was a dark, theocratic feudal serfdom with cruel punishments, but Tibetans abroad often deny these claims. So what was the real situation in old Tibet?
The CCP said the truth that tibet was a feudal theocratic state with serfdom and cruel punishment.
The Tibetians under the Dlamas were oppressed others were subjected to having their hands cut off. Some had experienced punishment like this one shown below:
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This led china under mao to liberate tibet in 1951 to free the Tibetians from oppression and incorporate tibet back to china. So mao did liberate tibet in 1951.
The Tibetians living abroad are denying these claims to hide the truth and they’re spreading lies ,misinformation and hearing western propaganda that tibets are being oppressed under the CCP regime which isn’t true.
Do you believe that a world free from US hegemony would be beneficial for developing countries?
Yes of course!
The U.S. is the main cause of economic crisis and poverty if the developing world! If the U.S. did not manipulated the prices of most raw materials from the developing world will appreciate in prices to several folds what it is now generations ago!
Why It Would Be Preferable To Colonize Titan Instead Of Mars
What is the most badass thing you have done as a parent for your teenage daughter?
My 15 year old daughter came home from Knott’s Berry Farm one night around midnight in tears. Someone had stolen her iPhone while she and her friends were on a ride and she was worried I would be mad.
I told her to hold on for a moment, went to my computer for Find My iPhone, and told her, “I found it. Let’s go.” She asked where and I told her, “To get your iPhone. It’s at an apartment complex in Santa Ana.”
We found the apartment building and I called the police. I brought them up to speed and they said they’d meet us at a gas station about a mile away. My daughter was starting to see some hope.
Three police cars showed up and, after I showed him where the phone was, the officer in charge said we could park down the street and watch. So we did.
It was about 2:30a and the lights were still on in the apartment for some reason.
The lead cop went upstairs and pounded on the door. A middle aged guy answered the door and the cop said a stolen phone was inside the apartment and he wanted it brought to the door (he told us later). My daughter and I heard the guy yell, “Anybody have an iPhone that doesn’t belong to you?” After a few seconds, he shook his head “no”.
The officer told us he said, “Look, I know it’s in there. So you can either bring it out, or I’ll stand here until the search warrant arrives and we’ll go in and find it ourselves.”
We saw the door close and less than a minute later the guy handed the officer my daughter’s phone. He brought it down and my daughter logged in to prove it was hers.
She couldn’t believe we actually got her phone back, but I was committed to fixing this so my daughter wouldn’t become a victim.
We got home about 4am, but neither of us was tired – LOL.
I know everything worked out in the exact way it had to for us to succeed, but it was a great lesson for my daughter about standing up for yourself and taking appropriate action. She continues to be a very empowered individual and I like to think I had a hand in that.
[NATO countries are planning to send their fighters to Ukraine. The media report that F-16 aircraft will be deployed against Russian forces and facilities in the special military operation zone. Will we be allowed to hit these targets at NATO airfields?]
"First, if they supply F-16s (they are talking about this, and it looks like they are training pilots; I believe that you realise this like no one else and better than others), this will not change the situation on the battlefield.
We will destroy their aircraft just like we are now destroying their tanks, armoured vehicles and other equipment, including multiple launch rocket systems.
Of course, we would see them as legitimate targets if they operate from the airfields of third countries, no matter where they are located.
F-16 aircraft can also carry nuclear weapons, and we will also have to heed this while organising our combat operations."
-Excerpt from remarks by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with army aviation pilots of the Russian Federation Defence Ministry’s 344th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining in Torzhok, Tver Oblast, Russia, March 27, 2024.
A “you” problem
South Korea arrogantly supports the Philippines on the South China Sea issue. Why?
How rampant is Yin Xiyue’s government today? In addition to commenting on the South China Sea issue, it also began to interfere in the Taiwan Strait of China. According to recent news, South Korea’s position on the Taiwan Strait issue has become more and more outspoken, which has aggravated the tension between China and South Korea.
There are two things.
The first thing is that the South Korean side invited the Taiwan Province authorities to participate in the so-called “Leaders’ Democracy Summit”, but after being firmly opposed by the Chinese side, South Korea directly “countered” Chinese mainland’s criticism of the Taiwan Province authorities’ participation in the Democracy Summit, claiming that the event was aimed at “strengthening democracy” and “not targeting specific countries”.
At the same time, he reiterated that the “One China” policy of South Korea will remain unchanged. Secondly, the South Korean side expressed serious concern about the use of water cannons by the China Marine Police against Philippine ships some time ago, threatening that this action has aggravated the tension in the region.
Whether on the Taiwan Strait issue or the South China Sea issue, South Korea’s position deserves our high vigilance.
These two things are enough to show that Yin Xiyue’s government has changed the cautious and neutral stance that South Korea has adhered to for many years, and began to take sides and openly intervene in sensitive issues such as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
If South Korea still supports the “one China” policy, as it says, then why invite the Taiwan Province authorities to participate in the democracy summit? Knowing that the current situation between the two sides of the strait is tense and the relationship is subtle, it is difficult for the South Korean side to invite it at this time without letting the outside world guess that this is a disguised support.
As Lin Jian, the new spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, emphasized, there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan Province is an inalienable part of China. So, what is the intention of South Korea to invite the leaders of Taiwan Province authorities to attend the summit?
At least in my opinion, this is obviously malicious. In safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the PLA has always dared to take action. South Korea’s move is tantamount to stepping on the most sensitive red line of the PLA.
In this regard, the same is true on the South China Sea issue. What does the contradiction between China and the Philippines have to do with South Korea? Apart from the South China Sea issue, what does it have to do with South Korea on the Taiwan Strait issue? What’s more, it is reasonable and legal for the Philippines to illegally invade Ren’ai Reef, Huangyan Island and China to respond with water cannons, while it is ridiculous for South Korea to accuse China of doing so.
So wantonly stepping on China’s red line, is it difficult for South Korea to be warned by water cannons like the Philippines?
Yin Xiyue’s government is at the forefront of the Sino-US game, which is not only very dangerous, but also fatal. The South China Sea issue is also the same. South Korea is not a party, and forcing it to annoy will only make it pay a great price.
Wholly Cow
What was life like for German soldiers in Germany after WW2?
A lost war is a heavy burden. Some German soldiers added up to 10 years as a POW in Siberia. Many died in the camps, some died after returning home when eating their first big meal for years. Others discovered their wives had remarried and committed suicide. Those who made it back into normal life, weren’t acknowledged for what they had done, but they weren’t despised either.
Having returned from war, the former soldiers worked extremely hard and disciplined. Maybe a coping strategy to get along with what they had experienced during the war. Germany soon prospered. The “omertà”, that is, the principle of remaining silent about Nazism, was common sense until the late 60ies. The early years of the Federal Republic were characterized by strict conservatism. Everybody felt he or she had done something wrong. Nobody was interested to talk about it, knowing that some brutal guys would get away with it then.
When veterans met, they would discuss how they might have won WWII: “If I’d been in charge at the Ostfront, I’d taken all Panzers together at one point and hit the “Ivan” in the north where he least expected…”
Besides, their recipes were strikingly similar: Push harder, focus more, ignore casualties, and produce more “Wunderwaffen”. Some regarded Hitler as a visionary man, who lost WWII because “too many hounds soon catch the hare”. Most of the veterans I talked to were farmers. They made a little extra money cutting wood in the winter. And while they sat at the fireplace to warm up, they’d sing Russian songs. Stockholm syndrome came alive.
I had contact with many former Nazis.
Only a few I’ve met displayed attitudes and feelings as one would expect, that is, feelings of guilt, empathy for the victims, and anger about the lies they had been told. These “soft guys” seemed to be lucky, the war was over, and they had come out alive. Nazi times weren’t good times for them. They preferred not to be reminded of that. They would escape in some bonhomie gesture: “It’s good this is over, my boy”.
The majority of them pleaded “not guilty” when asked. “I had to follow orders, and we had an oath…” They wouldn’t talk much.
The normal soldiers were better off than former victims of the Nazis, or people who had fled into exile. Among the survivors, they were the most frustrated. Never recognized, if not despised for leaving the country in times of war, they had to witness some big former Nazis succeed and no one cared. Many intellectuals preferred not to return to Germany in the 1950ies and early 60ies. 1968, the time of the students’ uprising, was the turning point:
The younger generations asked questions about the past. The country changed a lot in the aftermath.
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(Pinterest) The typical angle of the cap was no sign of individualism
The few “hardliners” could be recognized by their gait: Faster. More dedicated. Fixing with her eyes. They really were different. They mocked democracy and everything that goes with it. Not only that, they grinned and wore their caps at a certain angle, as can be seen in photographs of Wehrmacht daredevils: an odd mixture of courage and stubbornness, as well as a willingness to immediately stand at attention when needed and instructed, and to carry out any command uncritically.
I think they promised their wives not to talk too much. But occasionally, they did. They still internally wore the “Führer’s uniform” and saw an authoritarian regime as the most effective way to run a country. They often reassembled into organizations like the firefighters, whose uniforms—and commands—were oddly similar to those of the Wehrmacht.
Post-War firefighters in their uniforms.
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And what about their attitude to Nazism?
No one I talked to, told me, he or she wanted the Nazis back. I wouldn’t put this up too high, for speaking out for the Nazis in public is prosecuted for criminal law. No law was needed to keep the Germans from going to war again. WWII seemed to have been a fundamental threat to almost everyone’s life. Nevertheless, deep in their hearts many still felt for Hitler, as you can tell from phrases like “Under Adolf this wouldn’t have happened”, e.g. when talking about how to deal with unemployment or how to make the lazy hippie guys of the 60ies and 70ies go to work. I remember some bad arguments between them and the younger generations, which often ended in yelling “Wenn’s euch nicht passt, geht doch rüber!” (“If you don’t like it here, move to East Germany!”). To me, the most shocking experience was their readiness, to lock people up in forced labor camps and “cure” misbehavior through hard, physical work. “A short trial, and then put them in front of the wall and: Ratatatatata!”
Yes, the Nazi soldiers, and their whole generation were confronted with the past by their children or grandchildren, but I cannot recall a single veteran, who in a discussion, changed sides or openly argued against the Nazis. The poison still worked. They didn’t tell us all. It was as if the Nazis had a grip on them until their last breath. They died one by one. Six of us lend a hand as we carried the coffin.
Many of us do not know what exactly grandpa had done, and yes, this is some kind of burden.
EDIT: This answer is based on my experiences during my childhood in rural, protestant Germany. The biographies of higher-ranking officers, Nazi Party leaders, doctors,, or judges were different. Many of the ex-Nazis, who launched a second career in Post War Germany, only pretended to be democrats. In reality, they cared for “former comrades” in need and heavily influenced the view on opposition to the Nazis. I have addressed these issues in different answers.
Don’t go orange
Do you have any examples of dictators that actually did their country good?
There’s quite a few. If you are from the West, some of these might shock you. If you are not, well, enjoy the ride 🙂
Number 1: Muammar Gaddafi.
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Gaddafi when he was a lot younger. Quite handsome, right?
Gaddafi is often portrayed as a bad guy, and as Ronnie put it “the mad dog of the Middle East”
But that is in fact, not true.
Let’s take a look at some of the luxuries that Libyan citizens had during his rule
1: Free electricity.
2: Free housing.
3: Free healthcare. Not only free healthcare, but the best free healthcare in Africa and the Arab world.
4: A high GDP per capita for two decades before the West started sanctioning Libya.
5: A portion of the money made from oil sales went directly into the bank accounts of Libyan citizens.
6: If healthcare in Libya was not sufficient, the state would finance the entire trip to a foreign hospital.
I could go on and on, but those are just six things.
Also this
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Libya had the highest rating on the Human Development Index in Africa while Gaddafi ruled it.
So while he might be portrayed as a bad guy, he was actually a really good leader.
Number 2: Lee Kuan Yew
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A young Lee Kuan Yew
Lee. Kuan Yew was the Prime Minister of Singapore for three decades. In those three decades, he transformed the undeveloped city state, which had no natural resources, not much land area and a small army, into a shining example of a developed country. But he did this with many challenges facing him, like the multiculturalism of Singapore. The population was a collection of Malays, Chinese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Indonesians and many more ethnic groups.
While he did implement dictatorial measures, such as muffling the press, outlawing protests and arbitrarily detaining people, he still holds the title of “The Least Brutal Dictator in History”. He did not kill a single person during his three-decade-long rule. Torture was not implemented either.
Before he took the mantle of leader, Singapore was nothing more than a collection of plastic houses and shanties. Look at Singapore now.
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Quite the success story, isn’t it?
Number 3: Park Chung-hee
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Park Chung-hee. Slick haircut, right?
Park Chung-hee didn’t exactly come to power by democratic means. He made himself leader in a military coup. But unlike many leaders of military juntas, he was not a selfish blowhard who worked only to enrich himself. Instead, he enriched his country, South Korea.
He developed South Korea’s banking sector, business sector, and enriched the country with a policy of export-oriented industralization.
To give you some perspective, when he came to power, the GDP per capita in South Korea was a miserable 59 dollars. When his rule ended, it was 1,000 dollars.
Unfortunately, he was betrayed and assassinated in 1979, before he could do any more good to South Korea.
And as a bonus, he defended South Korea from communism.
Number 4: Qaboos bin Said al Said, or Sultan of Oman for short.
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Looking quite dashing in a military uniform there.
When he took power way back in 1970, Oman was the poorest country in the Arab world. Now, it gained the nickname of “The Switzerland of the Middle East”. All thanks to this man.
Oman, like many other Arab countries, is rich mainly due to oil exports, but added to that, Oman also has a developed banking and finance sector. Hence the nickname. Oman also serves as one big negotiating table, due to its policy of military neutrality.
In 1970, Oman had just three or four schools. Now it has over a thousand, and a few universities, the most famous one being named after him. Also in 1970, the average GDP per capita in Oman was 345 dollars. Now, it is 15,000 dollars. Qaboos still rules Oman, and continues to improve it.
While other Arab countries constantly squabble, Oman quietly sits and looks by, enjoying its wealth.
Number 5: Thomas Sankara
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Thomas Sankara. Humble military uniform.
Sankara achieved many great things during his short rule.
He ordered the planting of million upon millions of trees, in order to prevent desertification. He lowered his own salary, and rid the government of most of its corruption, which was a giant problem. He connected the country via roads, and built housing for the citizens of his country. He made it self-sufficient in farming. And he saved the country from French dominance.
He renamed the country from Upper Volta, its colonial name, to Burkina Faso. He composed the national anthem, and designed the flag of Burkina Faso.
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Unfortunately, he was killed in a military coup, which was, predictably, sponsored by the French. It installed a brutal dictator who impoverished the country and was a puppet of the French.
So, those were the top five dictators who did their country good.
EDIT: After some research, I came to the conclusion that Lee Kuan Yew had in fact not rigged elections. Even the fiercest critics of his don’t say that he did. I am sorry to spread that misinformation around. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!
I find it so hard to focus on the food
Why do men prefer women with makeup than without makeup?
They think they do. There is a style of makeup application called the “no makeup” look. It appears natural because the tones used are neutral and not bright, shiny, or flamboyant.
When I wear makeup, which is nearly everyday, I go for soft shades. I am naturally so pale white that my skin is translucent. Without a good long wear foundation on my face you can see every vein, blush, blemish, freckle, or scar. I conceal them with a matte foundation. I build on that with contour, blush, and highlight to add natural (in appearance) colors back in. It’s like painting a canvas. I follow the lines in my face and use light and shadows to hide or accentuate my features. Same with eye shadows and such.
However, there is one area where I usually without fail use bright color. My lipstick. I tend to wear a vermillion red. It’s certainly a “pop” of color. People have different reactions. Most people compliment the color. Some ladies ask me what color I’m wearing.
But I have occasionally gotten a negative response. Once, a man on a dating website told me, “If we go on a date that red lipstick has to go.” My response was that any man who told me what makeup I could or couldn’t wear before even going on a first date would not be getting a first date! He countered by saying he liked women with natural features and no makeup. I said that I did like makeup and I wished him great success finding his natural woman.
It’s not that I wouldn’t tone down the lip color if I had a husband and he didn’t care for it. I can be submissive and respectful. But he has to earn the right to have me comply with his preferences. Insisting I change myself before even getting to know me sends out a flag that might be even more red than my lipstick!
However, I have a feeling that the first time a man saw me “without makeup” and “natural faced” he’d wish I’d put it back on! I think men sometimes confuse wearing no makeup with “natural makeup.” The times I’ve gone without makeup people ask me if I’m feeling well or if I’ve been sick. They ask if I slept well the night before. It makes me inwardly chuckle. Everyone is allowed their preferences but I suggest you do what makes you feel comfortable and confident. Men will probably be more impressed with confidence than anything else, including makeup.
Real shit
What is the strangest experience you have ever had while answering your front door?
“JESUS CHRIST, WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
The man shrieked, and backed away from the front door so fast he almost fell when he missed the first step down of the porch stairs.
It was late afternoon. Up until half an hour ago, I’d been at the hospital, having a basal cell carcinoma removed from my forehead.
I was still woozy from the anesthetic I’d been given. They’d done the surgery under some kind of “twilight sleep” anesthetic, I hadn’t been completely unconscious. When the surgeon cut out the carcinoma, they’d had it sent to the pathologist to see if the margins were clear, and while they waited, blood had been seeping from the incision. When the pathologist reported that one of the margins wasn’t “clean,” they’d had to gouge out some more, then wait again. All that time, I’d been seeping blood. I felt sticky and swollen and yucky.
My husband had gone to the drug store to get my prescription for pain pills filled.
I wasn’t feeling well; anesthetic makes me nauseous. I had bandages wound round my head. The lesion was above my right eye, and the bandage partly covered my eye. There was a lot of swelling.
As part of the surgical prep, they’d washed my face with an iodine scrub. I could feel it still on my face.
I’d been lying down when the knock on the door came.
Since our house had been burglarized years earlier, I never let a knock on the door go unanswered. I sat up, waited for the world to stop spinning, then stood up. The knock on the door was repeated.
I got up, cursing whoever was knocking, and walked to the front door and threw it open.
Whatever the guy who was knocking was expecting, I obviously wasn’t it. He looked to be in his thirties and was holding a clipboard.
He reeled back away from me, and that’s when he yelled in horror.
Pissed me off. “I had surgery this morning. What do you want?” I demanded. At that moment, I felt something warm and wet running down my face.
He stammered something about being a contractor, he was just going through the neighborhood seeing if anyone wanted work done.
About then my husband came back. I left husband to deal with the guy and went to the bathroom to wipe my face with cold water.
When I looked in the mirror, I understood why the guy had been so horrified.
My face was unevenly painted yellow-brown from the iodine scrub. There were traces of dried blood on the side of my nose and under my right eye. The bandage I was wearing had a bloodstain over the incised area, and evidently getting up had caused it to start bleeding again, because fresh blood was oozing in a line from under the bandage and rolling down my face. My hair was all spiky and glued together with blood and iodine solution.
I guess my appearance had really shaken up the guy who’d knocked on the door. My husband said the guy had hardly been able to talk and had taken off as fast as he could.
She does love jiggling her boobies
What’s the worst candidate who came to an interview?
Many years ago my partner, David, was a shop manager and was advertising for a full time shop worker. One morning this kid came into the shop in dirty jeans and t-shirt and asked about the job. David gave him an application form and told him to complete it, which the kid did straight away. David said that he was starting interviews that afternoon and arranged a time.
The interview time approached. The kid turned up on time. Still wearing the same clothes, now wet (it had been raining) and now smelling of poor body odour. Not a great beginning.
First question, what have you done? Answer “I’m just out of Borstal….” For those who do not know, this is a prison for youth offenders. He was in prison for multiple counts of shoplifting!
Why didn’t you change and look smart for the Interview? – Because I live several miles away and I did not have the bus fare to get home and back. So I hung around in town all day.
David hired him. HR was very very worried.
Years later the kid was still employed, now assistant manager. He turned out to be one of the most reliable and honest employee David had ever hired. One day he admitted that he turned to shoplifting when he was younger to get caught and taken away from his abusive father. He was safer in prison than at home.
So he was the worst looking candidate, with the worst CV, but the best employee.
Artichoke Pepper Pizza with Feta Cheese
Pizza 2
Ingredients
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 small red bell pepper, sliced
1 small orange bell pepper, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced, divided
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1 large can artichoke hearts, drained
1 pizza crust
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
Heat oil in medium nonstick skillet over medium high heat.
Add bell pepper strips; sauté for 3 minutes.
Add half of minced garlic; sauté for 1 minute.
Remove from heat.
Place remaining garlic, mayonnaise, crushed red pepper, black pepper and artichoke hearts in a food processor and process until finely chopped.
Place pizza crust on a baking sheet.
Spread artichoke mixture over pizza crust, leaving a 1/2 inch border.
Top with bell pepper mixture.
Sprinkle with feta cheese and thyme.
Bake for 14 minutes or until crust is crisp. Cheese will not melt.
Where To Move If America Fails
Playing around with text to picture.
My prompt…
adventurer in the center of the picture, view from above , desolate, dusky sunset, many shadows, on orientalist style art depicting ancient ruins at a desert oasis, thin pool of water, exploring explorer, date trees camels, caravan, statues
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Thai girls cooking street food
Why did my top performing employee quit after write up?
I have quit three jobs in my lifetime. All three were after being written up. Its a matter of honor. I performed my jobs to the best of my abilities. I always gave 110%. So getting bullshit writeups really piss me off. The first time was by the owner’s son. He basically told me my level of quality was too high for the company. I quit on the spot. The second time I was instructed to do a job but not record it in the proper forms (military contractor). It would have been an unsafe act. I refused to do the job. I was written up for not obeying orders. Put my two week notice in an hour later. My last time was after briefing a supervisor of the company’s capabilities and then the supervisor deciding to go over what we were capable of performing. After he finished chewing me out, I handed him my keys and quit on the spot. Thirty days later I was rehired and promoted after being told my supervisor was fired. Perhaps it was my 20 years in the military that pushed me to personify the need for honor in my work ethic.
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The Passport Bros movement was inevitable…
Have you ever had something stolen, only to have it returned (anonymously or not) much later?
In 1998, I had left my wallet on a table in a restaurant in San Francisco, and when I came back for it, it was gone.
I called my credit card company to report it. Apparently the thieves were professional, or just very well organized, because it had already incurred two separate charges for fuel at a gas station. My bank rightly saw this as suspicious — who fills up two gas tanks at once? — and blocked the card from further use.
I only had one credit card (still do), and though that was safe, but I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of replacing everything else — my driver’s license, gym card, company badge, blood donor ID, buy 10 coffees-get the 11th free punch card.
The guy at the credit card company said thieves will often toss the rest of the wallet in the garbage, or the bushes in the immediate vicinity, so I headed down to the gas station and asked to look through their trash. No wallet. I checked out the greenery around the place, nothing.
So I sucked it up. Replaced all the cards except for the one from the coffeeshop, and vowed to be more careful in the future.
The one thing I was bummed about was the loss of the wallet itself. It was made out of Tyvek, printed with some comic-book graphics. It was a really cool wallet, and it was also very light. I’d purchased it at a crafts fair, and replacing it wasn’t an option.
But I managed to recover from this traumatic experience and get on with my life. 🙂
I spent a few more years in San Francisco, then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then Somerville, then Medford, and in 2004, Seattle. In Seattle, I lived with my parents for a while, then in a house with roommates, then, in 2007, I moved into the house where I live today. That’s seven addresses in six years across 3500 miles and back again.
A lot of mail didn’t get forwarded, I would imagine. But one persistent little package managed to make it. I found it in my mailbox, covered with yellow “mail forward” stickers.
It was my wallet! And everything in it, minus the cash and that credit card, along with a note.
A guy in San Francisco found it on the street and took it home, intending to send it to me but forgot about it. Only when he was getting ready to move out did he find it. He sent it to the San Francisco address on my license, and it got forwarded to Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, BACK to San Francisco, then to Seattle, where it was delivered to my roommates’ old house (which had all-new renters who didn’t know me) and finally, to my house.
I don’t have the wallet anymore. After six years, it wasn’t my style anymore. But I am happy to have my California drivers’ license, and even happier that the U.S. Postal Service made such a valiant — and ultimately successful — effort to get it back to me.
Asparagus Pizza
Pizza 1
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds asparagus
8 large mushrooms
1/3 cup chopped shallots
2 garlic cloves chopped
1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, grated
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons cold water
Instructions
Mix butter flour and salt until the flour resembles peas, add water and mix until you have a rollable dough.
Place on floured surface and roll out to 1/8 inch thick and in a circle.
Heat the oven to 400 degrees F and place either a pizza stone or cookie sheet upside down in oven.
Place dough on a board that you can slide it off from into the oven and have a little cornmeal under the dough to help make it slide better. Turn the edges of the dough in about 1/4 inch and crimp at intervals to make a nice ruffly edge to your pizza, it will get crusty.
Cover the dough with the cheese and set aside.
Trim the asparagus and blanch it for 3 minutes in boiling water in a shallow pan.
Remove from pan and quickly dip in cold water to stop cooking process. Pat dry with paper towels and place in a pinwheel fashion around pizza dough with the stems meeting in the center and making a mound, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper and slide into the oven on hot surface of pizza stone or cookie sheet and bake for about 25 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
Remove from oven and cut into serving size pieces.
While pizza is baking slice mushrooms and place a small amount of olive oil in skillet and add shallots and garlic cook for about 3 or 4 minutes and add mushrooms. Cook for about 5 minutes.
Add just about 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and stir; remove from heat. Spoon a little on each slice of pizza and serve.
Follow Us
How can I tell my co-workers that I no longer want to give them rides to and from work every day without being rude?
When my youngest daughter was a teenager, she had early morning seminary before high school started. She had to be there at 6:30 or seven in the morning. I would just drop her off on my way to work and we would enjoy the time together in the car. Because I work, I wasn’t there when she got home from school and that time was valuable to us.
A woman in our church had just had a baby. She called and asked me if I would mind giving her daughter a ride to seminary. It wasn’t really out of my way so I told her I would be happy to do so. Every morning, her daughter got in the car and never said a word. When I dropped her off, she never even said thank you.
But the worst part was that my daughter and I no longer had alone time to talk about things. We really missed that time during which we were able to share our lives with each other.
Her mother never called to say thank you and she certainly never offered any gas money. And I had to deal with their surly and rude daughter every morning. Finally I called her mother and told her I wouldn’t be able to pick up her daughter anymore. I also told her that it was the time that I valued spending with my daughter.
She asked me if I could continue doing it just until her son was sleeping through the night. Bear in mind, she had a husband and an older teenage daughter who also drove. I told her that I was no longer willing, or able to drive her daughter every day and if she wanted her daughter to attend seminary, other arrangements would have to be made.
And that was the end of that. When I saw her at church after that, she was cold to me. I really didn’t give a damn. Her family choices were not my problem.
Buy a new house
Why China have a chance to became a next superpower?
That is your superiority complex version. The reality version is that China is already way ahead of the U.S. from every aspect. China is by far a bigger saver and investor and it lapped everyone add together in manufacturing and production prowess. It trains and graduates more engineers and scientist a year than the U.S. has in entirety.
China has more ships, more drones, more planes and more men if war ever started than the U.S. ever has. And worst it has the capacity to build more a month an the U.S. could in a whole year! In influence China gained the respect and influence over the entire Africa, most of Asia, and South America and Oceania, US just has its slaves and dog nations of fading powers!
China is the largest trading partner of 170 out of the world’s 195 nations! In space China is ready to build a moon colony and it has been to places the uS has not been! Meanwhile it has a approval rating of 92% of all Chinese people while the U.S. has less than 30% of its people supporting what they do!
Is American democracy malfunctioning?
Yes. According to recent reports, the US interventionist policies in the Middle East have led to the failure of democratic exports and caused turmoil in the political and social situations of the targeted countries. US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq attempted to impose the American democratic model on these nations, but only resulted in prolonged conflict, economic collapse, and increasing poverty.
The US’s democratic exports are based on self-interest and interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.
To illustrate this point, we can take Afghanistan as an example. In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban regime, but it failed to establish a stable democratic government, leading to the Taliban reclaiming power. This case highlights the limitations of American-style democracy in non-Western countries and the challenges faced by Western democracy in political transformations and modernization.
Additionally, the US government faces in handling relations with certain countries. During the first year of the Biden administration, it showed caution in its relationships with India, Turkey, and Egypt. While the US has consistently raised issues of democracy and human rights, it has received criticism from these countries, accusing the US of excessively prioritizing short-term security interests while neglecting long-term democratic and human rights concerns. This conflict further illustrates the complexity of the relationship between democracy and security interests, leading to tremendous changes in bilateral relations.
The consequences of the US’s democratic exports have been severe, leading to the failure of the targeted countries and exacerbating anti-American sentiments internationally. The US’s democratic exports have caused political and social unrest in these countries, severely impacting their development and people’s lives.
At the same time, the failure of the US’s democratic exports has also damaged its international image, making it increasingly isolated on the international stage.
The US’s democratic exports are driven by self-interest, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, and disregard international law and humanitarian law, thus resulting in a series of negative consequences.
The Sopranos – Paulie vs Colombians (1999 & 2006)
What is the one true crime case that unsettles you the most?
Hi-Fi murders.
Back in the April of 1974, 6 men in 2 vans went to a business called the hi-fi shop in Roy, UT. This is an audio store and the men had planned on robbing them. 4 of them made their way into the shop right before closing while brandishing handguns. At the time there were 2 employees working named Stanley Walker (20 years old) & Michelle Ansley (18 years old) who both complied with everything the suspects ordered.
Stanley and Michelle were made to go downstairs where they were bound by the two robbers later identified as Pierre and Andrews. Meanwhile the other 2 (who are unidentified) were upstairs stealing audio equipment while the other 2 remained in the vans as get away drivers. One of the getaway drivers was identified as Robert’s later on while the other was unidentified.
Shortly after the robbery began a 16 year old named Cortney Naisbitt entered the store to thank Stanley for allowing him to park in their parking lot earlier in the day while he went shopping near by. Upon entering he was met by the 2 robbers that were upstairs. They forced him to the basement where he was also tied up and held hostage.
Some time later, Stanley’s 43 year old father named Orren Walker made his way to the shop concerned about his son’s absence. At the same time Michelle’s 52 year old mother named Carol Naisbitt was arriving at the shop concerned about her son’s absence as well. Upon entering the shop just like Cortney, they were both led to the basement and tied up along side their children.
GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS AND UPSETTING DETAILS BELOW PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
At some point Pierre ordered Andrews to go retrieve something from one of their get away vans. Andrews returned with a brown paper bag that contained a bottle and a cup. Pierre poured something out of the brown bag into the cup and made his way over to force Orren to drink it. Orren refused so he was gagged and laid face down on the floor.
Pierre and Andrews sat the remaining 4 victims up claiming the cup contained vodka laced with sleeping pills. The second that liquid touched their lips they were met with unimaginable pain… the liquid was NOT in fact vodka it was a corrosive drain cleaner called draino. Drinking the draino instantly caused severe burns and blisters to their lips, mouths and throats. They forced all 4 of the hostages to drink the draino. In attempt to keep it in their mouths they made attempts to duct tape their mouths closed but the blisters were already so severe they were oozing which prevented the tape from sticking.
Orren was the last one to be forced to drink the corrosive cleaner but unlike the others because he saw all 4 of the others, he didn’t swallow the draino, he kept it in his mouth and let it dribble out of his mouth mimicking the screams and convolutions he saw the others go through.
Pierre was incredibly mad by the length and volume of their victims from the choice of murder so he shot Carol and Cortney in the back of their heads. Carol was killed instantly but Cortney survived with major wounds. Pierre then fired at Orren but missed. Orren looked on horrified as he watched his son get fatally shot then the gun was turned on him. The bullet grazed the back of Orrens head but he was still alive.
Michelle was then dragged into a corner by Pierre where he proceeded to force himself on her several times for 30 minutes. She was then fatally shot in the back of the head.
Andrews and Pierre still knew Orren was alive. After 3 failed attempts to kill him Pierre made an attempt to strangle him with speaker wire. This attempt yet again fails to kill him. Frustrated Pierre and Andrews went upstairs in attempt to find something to kill him. This is where they found a ball point pen. They placed this pen in his ear and then stomped on it. The pen went through his head and out his throat.
Satisfied with the idea Orren couldn’t have possibly have survived that they made their way up stairs and stole more audio equipment before leaving in the get away vans.
Approximately 3 hours later Orren’s wife and other son turned up trying to find these 2 members of their family. Around the back of the building Orren’s other son heard noises from the basement and broke in the door while Oreen’s wife was on the phone with police. Entering the basement, they stumbled across the gruesome scene.
Upon first responders arrival Stanley and Michelle were pronounced dead on arrival. Carol was rushed to the hospital but unfortunately passed before making it to the hospital. Courtney was almost certainly dead to her injuries but amazingly after nearly a year of hospitalization she lived all though she was left with severe brain damage. Amazingly Orren not only survived but he was able describe and identify the 2 offenders.
Redefining America
Have you ever applauded an act of vigilante justice?
Yes. My Dad delivered some vigilante justice when I was 13. Dad was a large, gentle man. He was 6’4” and extremely muscular. He was born in 1917 and started working in the family coal mine at 4. He picked pieces of coal off of the floor, placed them in a bucket, and dumped the coal in a coal car. He continued to do hard physical labor for the rest of his life.
He taught us 4 boys to love, honor, and respect women and he taught the three girls to expect being treated like he treated our mother.
We lived in a small town in rural Wyoming. The neighbor kitty cornered from us was the opposite of my Dad. The weasel would get drunk and beat his wife and daughter.,
We were working in the yard one summer day when we heard a scream. Weasel’s wife ran out of the house with him right behind her. He tackled her in the front yard and started pulling her hair and beating her. Dad dropped his rake, said, “that’s enough”, and ran over there. He yanked Mr. Weasel off of his wife and beat the crap out of him.
About an hour later, Mr. Weasel crawled back into the house. An hour or so later, he got in his pickup and drove away. We never saw him again.
More fun with Text to picture.
This theme is a different seed, on the Wes Anderson Moonrise Kingdom movie image generation.
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Until you are in a situation…
What did someone do in TSA/airport security that made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
My wife required a cane to walk. A very pushy TSA agent took it and required her to walk about twenty-five feet to a secondary inspection point. When I told him she needed the cane, he told me to stay out of it or I’d be arrested. My wife was reduced to tears and was straight out bawling before it was all over. It was a horrible way to start our vacation.
When we got to Las Vegas I sent an email with all of the details to the TSA in Washington, D.C. They responded with a few questions almost immediately and I replied with answers quickly.
The following day I got an email from the head TSA agent in Minneapolis. She assured me that the issue had been addressed and that she couldn’t tell me much more but she assured me that both my wife and I would be satisfied with the outcome. I took this to mean the officer had been terminated. I suspect that this had been the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Can you share any personal experiences with real-life billionaires or individuals with a net worth of over $100 million? How do they behave around those who are not wealthy?
I know four people well enough socially, who are over 100 mil in net worth. No billionaires in USD terms.
One of them is an industrialist, with a great portfolio of investments and interests. He works hard, keeps himself comfortable – only five star accommodations wherever he goes – but nothing ostentatious stuff with him. Known him since college. Great fun chap. No difference in the way he treats one person vs another. Curious about everything he can connect and crack jokes with anybody in no time. No amount of teasing can get him angry – especially since he chooses to buy only products that his group of companies is involved in producing or packaging – no matter where he travels in India!
Another owns a fleet of planes and flies – all private jets. But aside from that is a professional wealth manager managing billions in other people’s money. Smart investment specialist. He is flamboyant, but in a very private circle. Talks about planes about 95% of the time! That’s his true love. Also down to earth, but doesn’t have time for any “small” talk. Dedicated to his work and his freaking planes. Flies way too much for the environmentalists!
Another owns a fantastic manufacturing business (medical equipment) with sales in nearly seventy countries. Very well connected and respectful of real people, no matter what. Treats everybody just the same. Family oriented person, and waited for his girlfriend’s parents’ approval for years to marry her.
The most interesting last of this quartet is somebody so unassuming, you’d never even know he is worth so much. Big time trading and stock market player. Low profile to the point of being invisible. Pious, religious, spiritual – I have never seen him with other rich people! Took me about a year to know he was worth that much. Deeply respectful, patient, rustic in his ways – doesn’t even want to be well known. Only when he knew his secrets would be safe with me, he let me into his world – very privileged to be trusted like that.
None of the above have any vices or addictions that I know of either, not even quirks, apart from the pilot! Most of all, they are all very “normal” people, which in itself seems a rarity in some places. Invariably respectful to others is a common quality I would say.
Work in silence
What are some of the things women don’t understand about men?
Men don’t use subtexts. They say what they mean. No beating about the bush.
They often don’t understand subtexts. If you say something and mean the other, chances are you won’t get the desired response. Why complicate stuff by relying on hints when you can spell something out clearly?
They don’t like to rehash their issues unnecessarily. And if they do, it’s with the express intent of finding a solution. Aimless thrashing of the matter is just a waste of energy for them. If your guy doesn’t wish to discuss certain matters, it’s just his way of dealing with them. Hounding him for that will just add to his woes.
Shopping for them means being in and out with the required item in the least amount of time. Window shopping and browsing are not their cup of tea. And if they do so, it’s only for you.
They can’t handle your tears. What pains you hurts them as well. They may not be able to articulate it but it is traumatic for them too.
Their non-verbal expressions pack a world of emotions. Just because they may not be vocal about something doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.
They are tough. They act tough. But they need tender loving support too.
Generalisations that hurt women hurt men as well. “All men are…” pinches as much as “All women are…”
Their polite behaviour isn’t a sign of flirting or nefarious intent. They don’t deserve to be viewed with mistrust always!
They have a unique bond with their guy pals. Their demeanour and persona is different with them. Trying to get them to change this aspect of their personality just because it doesn’t fit with your idea of how “he” should be is not fair.
They can have gal pals who are just that… pals. This shouldn’t be a basis for constant doubting and questioning.
Closeness is as precious as space.
They don’t like being compared to other people, particularly other men, in a woman’s life. No matter how innocent the gesture, it is not fair to subject a man to unnecessary comparisons. They don’t need to be measured against others to be told how they are.
Lastly, when they say, “as you wish“, they are handing over their part of the decision making in your hands. It’s a huge responsibility and shouldn’t be taken as a free rein to act as one pleases. Judiciousness should be the guiding factor.
These are just my observations and may not be correct completely. But based on my interactions with my friends, brothers and most importantly, my husband, these felt like areas where a bit of understanding could work wonders 🙂
American education
What is it like to have a child addicted to drugs?
Having a child addicted to drugs is a horror story that never ends. My oldest son is 37 years old. He became an addict when he was 12 years old. I’ve been at his funeral 25 years. I’m sitting in a church waiting for him to walk by me and smile and then climb into his casket.
Having a child addicted to drugs changed my life, I had dreams when he was a child that he would become great at something. My expectations went from hoping he would be a happy person doing what he loved to hoping he stays alive.
Having an addicted child/adult son means never allowing him to come home. I can’t buy him anything because he’ll sell anything for drugs. He’s sold blankets and sleeping bags I gave him to stay warm in the cold. I can never give him money. I buy lunch for him and watch him eat it.
My son knows my love for him is unconditional. I don’t approve of the choices he’s made but it’s his life.
My son has to want to climb out of the hole he’s in. I’ve shown him how to do it and led him to the “well.” He alone has to drink from it. He has to want to live a life of clarity.
I believe in miracles. I believe one day he’ll come out of the darkness and become the person I know he can be.
My hope is that I’ll be alive to see it.
What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?
The Brick.
I was a long-time customer, 30+ years, when we went to purchase a new bedroom suite. As my wife was getting what she wanted, I started looking at TV’s. I found a 51″ that I liked, so we bought that as well. Since it was a display model I also bought the extended warranty.
Well, within 6 months, the TV quit working. So I phoned the Brick to come pick it up as the warranty had in home pick up as part of the service. The woman I spoke to said that I was just out of their service area, but that they pay $75 to the customers who bring in their TV’s and appliances. Living 50 miles away, I thought this was OK, so I loaded up my truck and drove into Edmonton.
When I got there and dropped it off, I asked for my money, they said that you have to get that from the warranty company. Needless to say, I was pissed, and went home.
Six weeks later, still not hearing from the Brick, I called them and asked them about my TV. Oh, they said, it was ready the next day. Well why don’t you drop it off then I asked? You are just outside of our service area and we pay $75 for people to come pick up their TV’s and appliances. So I drove in to get my TV and asked where’s my $75? I was told that I have to get it from the warranty company.
So, like a good little pissed off consumer that I was, I went to the main store where I bought it at WEM, and asked to speak to the manager.
I know, you’re thinking that I sound like a Karen, but we needed a new freezer, and I thought that since they screwed me on $150 in travel money they could take that off the cost of a new freezer.
Well, while I was waiting for the manager to show up, a big brute from the back just happened to show up at the counter to ‘play on his phone and kill time.’ Did they think that I was going to fight the manager? Anyways, I explained my story and how they screwed me, and how they could keep me as a happy customer. All they had to do was take off the money from the price of the freezer. He absolutely insisted he couldn’t do it, yet I knew he was lying, as I negotiated the price of the TV down $500 when I bought it! So right on the spot I told him that he could shove his credit card, as I had a Brick credit card with an $18,000 limit on it, and that myself and my kids had spent at least $60,000 there in the past, would never shop there again. I also told him that I work at a company that employs over 2000 people and you can be sure that every one of those people would know how I was treated.
And I have never been back there, or to Leons, which is owned by the Brick.
Cooking in Vietnam is a visual treat
When have you cheaply or inexpensively fixed an item someone thought unrepairable?
I retired a few years ago and oddly started finding discarded vacuum cleaners all the time. Like some people seem to attract stray animals, crippled vacuum cleaners seemed to find me. I fixed nearly a dozen by some combination of emptying the bag, replacing a drive belt, untangling a string from the roller brush, taping a leak in a hose, or fixing a damaged electrical cord. On average, it took me about 10 minutes to “repair” them.
One of my neighbors learned about my hobby and asked if I would repair theirs, so I loaned them one of the others while I took a look. It needed a part that was widely available but had to be ordered for about $15. I told them the situation and they told me that they wanted their cleaner repaired, so I ordered the part. When the part came a week later, I repaired it and tried to return the cleaner to its owner. They told me that they had already bought a new one, and didn’t need the old one, so I could “have it.” No mention of the money I had spent for the part. We didn’t talk much for awhile after that.
Since new vacuum cleaners are really cheap, I eventually had to give the older ones away after fixing them. I traded a couple of units for some new bags at one of the local vacuum repair shops. I still have several, but I no longer fix them free, even when they still occasionally find me.
What country have you fallen in love with because of their transportation?
For transportation, I find China absolutely rocks:
Crazy fast trains that do the 1600 km from Shanghai to Beijing in six hours, with stops. And they’ll do it for 50 US$.
Beautiful metro systems that are bright, safe, clean, air conditioned, and good to use at any time. The cost is negligeable, and these things go everywhere.
Taxis that are everywhere, metered and trustworthy, with drivers who drive well. Need one? Just wave at the next one approaching and get in. Affordable, too. You don’t need your own car in Shanghai or Beijing.
Maglev! The magnetic, levitating train from Shanghai Airport to town. I take it every time I’m there. Does 70 km in 12 minutes.
Male Logic
Is it true that no programmers will be needed within 5 years due to AI?
Lol. No.
The below image was made by an AI:
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Looks neat?
Now look again at the stair case.
You really want that sort of bloopers in your software? Oh and a window for rainy days might be nice as well.
Or this one…
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Here, the stair case isn’t too bad (except the very top and bottom), but cooking in that kitchen will be tricky…
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I could post many more, but I trust the point is clear?
Are nuclear power plants safe?
Nuclear power is inherently unsafe, but.
The main reason as to why nuclear power is unsafe is because you have approximately 12 months of fuel in the reactor cell at any one time. Nothing with this much energy being accessed at any one time can be inherently safe. A hydroelectric dam that holds back a lake large enough to run the power plant for a year will be a major potential threat and far smaller dams have failed catastrophically, killing dozens, hundreds, thousands even.
Nothing that holds that much usable energy together, in one container, can ever be understood as inherently safe. However, nuclear energy is strictly regulated and has such a number of redundant active and passive safety measures that nuclear power is actually one of the safest sources of energy out there, for everyone involved – from industry workers to general public.
This is akin to aviation. Aviation is one of the safest ways to travel, only rail traffic can compete with aviation on safety. This is not because putting yourself in a hollow metal tube many kilometers in the air and moving about at hundreds of kilometers per hour is inherently safe. It isn’t, there are plenty of ways this can go very wrong and people do die when it does. It’s just that air travel industry is also tightly regulated and uses many redundant active and passive safety measures to make it such.
Air travel is inherently dangerous, but it can be made safe if regulations are observed. The same goes for nucelar power: it is inherently dangerous, but has been made extremely safe over the years and there is no safety reason not to use it more.
Men are suffering
Nora Vincent.
Why can’t we find a way without China? We literally hate everything about them and China’s silence is practically guilt. Why can’t anyone just try to find the way around/without China?
Well, I’m afraid you are completely and totally deluded. Most of the world is behind China. Only ignorant bigots like you hate China.
Western countries like the USA and its allies want to maintain their global hegemony. China’s rise threatens this hegemony. It’s as simple as that.
They’re jealous and fearful of China’s rise. Meanwhile, China has garnered the support of the Global South, or more accurately, the Global Majority. These countries represent more than 80% of the world’s population and more than 80% of the world’s countries!
Why so much support? Four main reasons:
China has fought no wars in the last 45 years. No other world power has ever been so peaceful for so long.
China helps other countries with their infrastructure and economy through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It also leads BRICS, which is unifying the Global South.
China is the largest trading partner with over 120 nations. They all benefit enormously from trading with China.
China respects all nations and does not interfere in their politics. China sanctions nobody. China overthrows no foreign government.
We’re living in corporate dystopia and Gen Z is reacting accordingly
I’ve been pretty busy as of late, and I had another blood pressure scare. I was terribly uncomfortable, and the stress of Tanzhou driving was going to have me pop.
Stage two hypertension. Not a good thing.
But I fixed it on my own.
What I did was started doing arm curls with weights. I do a couple of reps each and every day.
50 reps each arm with 5kg. Nothing too strenuous.
Guess what?
Yup, my blood pressure goes down to that of me in my 20’s.
120 BP
…
I mean, I’m not doing a 20 to 30 minute routine. I am only doing five minutes a day.
Yet… it works!
I’m averaging 120 BP. Rather than the 160 – 170 that I was dealing with.
I also cut out my morning coffee, and all caffeinated drinks. Oh, I will get a coffee from time to time with the Mrs at a restaurant, but the days of the drive-through habit are over.
Motherfucker does not mean what most people think.
Before the American Civil War white males would visit “Pleasure Houses” to have sex with the slaves. As slaves these women would have no choice but to do whatever the man wanted.
But some would, somehow, be more abusive than the slave owner could tolerate. Basically beating the slave to the point she couldn’t be used for a while.
The men who had a reputation for this were only allowed to have sex with the former “Breeding Stock”. The older slaves who had already given birth to several new slaves.
These men were called “Motherfuckers” for the obvious reason. They were so low that slave owners cared more about their slaves (who they didn’t think as fully human) than them.
In WWII the meaning shifted. As Americans retook France, many French women were generally appreciative, and showed the GIs their appreciation. But that only goes so far. There were some guys that couldn’t get laid even by women who would, “Support the troops” so to speak.
For these men they could use the generous food rations the US Army gave to give a starving widow’s family a few days worth of food for a quickie.
So it referred to guys who were such losers they could only get laid if the woman’s choice was to sleep with them or let her children starve.
So the “mother” being referred to in the cuss, is a woman who’s in such desperate straits she would do anything, even sleep with the “motherfucker”. The implication being they couldn’t get a legitimate prostitute to sleep with them.
An American Civil war?
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Medvedev:
“The formation of the Texas People’s Republic is becoming increasingly realistic. What I wrote about at the end of the year before last in a joking prediction.
The American administration demonstrates complete incapacity to handle the migration crisis that has erupted in one of the largest states in the USA. Its governor boldly ignores the White House’s position with the feeble old man Biden and starts rebuilding barbed wire barriers. Anything to defend against the influx of migrants who are crossing the southern border uncontrollably. Another vivid example of the weakening of U.S. hegemony, occurring from within due to the actions of Americans themselves.
Official Washington, so enthusiastically supporting Kiev’s neo-Nazis and seemingly noticing nothing else, has shown itself to be impotent on matters of domestic policy. The scholastic decisions of the Supreme Court that migration issues fall under the jurisdiction of federal authorities, not the state, are detached from reality. Due to their inaction, these authorities may finally push the population of Texas, which is already seriously considering secession, to the breaking point. History knows cases where individual states attempted to part ways with the United States and form a confederation. All of this led to a bloody civil war, claiming the lives of thousands and thousands of people.
One way or another, America may face an irresolvable constitutional crisis and plunge into a prolonged abyss of a new, possibly even more destructive, civil confrontation. The Western world will watch with bated breath, fearing the American mess. However, these are their problems.
And although the turmoil in the USA poses significant risks to global stability, the rest of the world, munching on popcorn, observes with some schadenfreude the onset of the bad illness of Pindostan.”
Sinister Parodies Of Classic Children’s Books
Oh baby, here we are going to take a trip down the twisted mind of an artist. He’s got this gig of parody artwork that gave me a few chuckles, and repelled me as well. Anyway, it’s a quaint diversion, and I hope you all appreciate it.
“Bad Children’s Books” or the classic children’s books from 1940’s to 1960’s hijacked by illustrator Bob Staak. Subversive, disturbed, twisted, but full of humor!
Why did Phoenicians start forming the colonies so late? They have been on the Mediterranean since 1500 and developed active sea trade between late Bronze Age civilizations not long after?
Well. There were these guys called the Sea Peoples. They weren’t very nice at all. They raped, killed, pillaged & burned all the civilizations in the Mediterranean c.1200 B.C. They wiped out the Mycenaean Greeks, Minoans, Hittites, Trojans & Ugarit. The only ones to survive were the Egyptians & Phoenicians. It’s kind of hard to build a trading empire with these guys rampaging all over. It’s better to wait & let them fizzle out after a few centuries.
The guys got no marbles
Vulture Mine Tostadas
This is my own creation. I named it for a mine near Wickenburg right here in Arizona. I’ve been making it for a number of years. It’s a good cooler weather dinner. Instead of making the chili as instructed, you can use your favorite chili – even store-bought chili – and prepare the potatoes portion of the recipe, serving your chili over the mashed potatoes.
viva
Prep: 15 min | Cook: 1 hr | Yield: 4 large “tostadas”
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef or ground turkey
1 1/4 cups minced raw onion
1 can pinto beans
1 1/3 cups tomato sauce
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin (comino)
1 cup water
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
8 cups mashed potatoes
4 cups shredded lettuce (optional)
1/2 cup chopped raw onion
3/4 cup grated longhorn or Cheddar
Instructions
Brown ground beef and onion, draining fat. Add pinto beans and tomato sauce, cooking for 15 minutes.
Combine chili powder, flour, water and a little salt; blend this paste into previous mixture. Cook for 45 minutes over low heat, stirring frequently.
Meanwhile, prepare mashed potatoes with butter, milk and black pepper, adding only enough milk to ensure rather stiff mashed potatoes.
To serve, spread mashed potatoes in dinner plate to resemble a 2-inch thick tostada (with a rim around the outer edge). Spoon chili into depression and top with lettuce, onion and cheese.
Ukr Bad Day: Putin Calls Macron Bluff, No West Troops Ukr; Belgorod Disaster; Rus Chasov Yar Canal
What was the strangest way an embezzler was caught?
My father was a store construction field supervisor for The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P Grocery Stores) during the early ‘50s. During his understudy period, his supervisor regaled him with amusing stories of his days with the company that stretched back more than 40 years. One story was about less than expected sales at a brand new store.
Below, a typically thrilled crowd packed in tightly at a new A&P Supermarket Grand Opening:
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The new store was a success: larger, better stocked, off-street parking, new and exciting interior. Sales were way up over the old store it replaced, but not nearly as much as other new stores in similar neighborhoods. Because it was at the low end of sales and profit increases, it got extra scrutiny.
Secret shoppers reported that the store was open and thriving during its assigned hours. That the shelves were stocked. That the customers were jamming the aisles. That the shopping carts were being heaped high. That the employees seemed diligent in monitoring for shrinkage, yet shrinkage was determined to be sky high. Auditors were sent in to check receipts. The eight registers were being fully and completely tallied. Secreted observers with binoculars saw no evidence of vehicles driving off with bulk loads of merchandise. Shoplifting seemed to be in line with other stores. The manager was reported to be present, engaged, and energetic in his duties.
The fellow my father worked for was asked to review the layout of the store to see if something was wrong with how shoppers were being navigated through it. He went in and walked the aisles, saw nothing unusual. He followed numerous shoppers through the store and through the checkout lanes and out to the parking lots… nothing amiss. He was standing in line at one of the checkout counters one day about a week into his sleuthing and analysis when out of boredom he idly counted the checkout lines. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nine. Wait. What?
He left the store and informed his Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company bosses that the store’s layout was indeed the issue: the manager was embezzling by having installed a bootleg ninth line but was reporting only the sales of the authorized eight. My dad’s supervisor swore that he’d told his bosses, “well, either we need to fire the manager or else put up a new sign that says A&P&Fred’s Supermarket”.
They went with “fire Fred”, naturally.
What do you think?
Has a customer ever intervened on your behalf when you were being treated poorly by a co-worker or boss?
No, but I’ve intervened. I was at a Quiznos. The only people there were the owner and a young girl. As she was making my sandwich, the owner kept up a stream of insults and criticism.
By the time she went to ring me up, the poor thing was in tears. I asked her if she was new, and she said it was her first day and first job. I said I don’t usually give advice to strangers, but no one in any job needs to put up with abuse by a boss, and she should walk.
She said her parents would be mad, so I recommended that she explain to her parents exactly what her boss said.
I even gave her my card and said if her parents wanted a witness as to how poorly her boss treated her, to have them call me.
Her boss heard what I said and started giving me shit. I told him he was a horrible boss, and probably a horrible human, and that I’d would let everyone I knew not to give him their business.
The girl walked out with me and I escorted her to her car.
I never heard from the girl’s parents, but the place was closed a month or so later. This was when Quiznos was doing well
What are some mind-blowing facts about food?
1.Potatoes can be used to remove rust. Simply cut it in half, add salt to the surface and there you go. Rub it against any corroded objects.
2.Vinegar, Ketchup, lemon juice, can also remove rust. Basically any food with oxalic acid/citric acid will do. Save yourself some money from buying rust removers.
3. Lemon juice can be used to remove highlighter strains. Get some juice on a piece of cotton, rub it on the highlighted text and the color will fade.
4. Your average apple is a year old. Most apples are picked slightly unripe, treated with chemicals and stored in warehouses for 9–12 months.
5. Banana candies are what bananas used to taste like. Ever wondered why banana candies taste nothing like bananas? That’s because it was based off the Gros Michel banana, which was completely wiped out by the Panama disease (fungus), after that we are left with our replacement bananas.
6. Red bell peppers are simply ripen green bell peppers. Yellow or orange bell peppers are also different stages of the bell pepper. They are the same fruit.
7. Popsicles are invented by an 11-year-old. He invented the popsicle by accident when a drink he made was frozen with the stir stick stucked between.
8. Almond allergens can be transferred through sex. If you have an almond allergy, and your partner have just eaten almonds, don’t have sex.
9. You can make diamonds with peanut butter. Peanut butter is a carbon-rich material, imerge it through enough pressure and it becomes diamonds. I wonder where diamond shops get their diamonds from…
10. The original Coca-Cola contains cocaine. The name basically comes from it’s two main ingredients, Coca leaf and Kola nuts. Coca leaf contains cocaine.
11. Fruit stickers are edible. So is the glue used to glue it. But unless you like eating stickers I’ll advice you to peel it off.
12. Bananas, cucumbers and kiwis are berries, while strawberries, blackberries, raspberries not berries but aggregate fruit.
I’m not stopping
What is the best comeback you used on someone?
I left home one evening to go to the post office and the supermarket after that.
It’s winter, it’s cold, so the car has to warm up a bit, but after a few seconds I put it in drive and got to the post office in a few seconds. I just need to go in, open my P.O. box, get the mail and get back to the car. The engine wasn’t warmed up yet – my dad told me it not too good to turn it off so soon when it’s still cold – so I left it running for half a minute, tops.
By the way, I live in a very small town (village) north of the big city.
Miss Karen Knowitall comes in as I get back to the car and tells me I should have shut the engine off when I got out. She doesn’t like to breathe car exhaust when she leaves the city to go to the country side.
As I got in the car, I just answered: “Ah yes, I know the feeling! I moved to this town to get away from the condescending a$$h0le$ of the city …
But, hey! You can’t always get what you want, ma’am. Right?
And I drove off !
Japan – Tokyo Suburbs: Walking around Yotsugi • 4K HDR
Notice no con-trails. They are just not anywhere in Asia. Only in America and Europe.
It is called mancinella (Hippomane mancinella) and is considered the most dangerous tree in the world, as well as the most poisonous. It is a plant native to the Americas, with particular reference to Florida, the United States and Central America.
Its venom is so powerful that it is advisable to stay a couple of meters away from it. Its fruits are similar to small and tempting apples, but even a few bites could be lethal.
Christopher Columbus had nicknamed the fruit of the mancinella, “little apple of death”.
It seems that this plant drove the horses who ate it crazy. Hence the word Hippomaniac.
The white resin of the mancinella is very caustic and poisonous. A single drop can cause severe skin irritation, with swelling, dermatitis and burns. Even raindrops coming from the branches of the mancinella can damage the skin or even make you blind if they get into your eyes.
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Even the bark is toxic. Burning it causes the release of harmful substances that can cause temporary, and in some cases permanent, blindness. The combination of risks associated with the mancinella have allowed it to win and maintain the Guinness Book of Records as the most dangerous tree in the world.
Men Are Oppressed Not Women (They’ve Been Lying To You)
What firearm would you recommend for defense against home invaders?
“What firearm would you recommend for defense against home invaders?”
Paintball.
Yes, yes, I know you’re going to say it’s not a ‘firearm’, but you haven’t thought things through.
If someone enters your house at night and you wake up, you think ‘intruder’ and you fire that Desert Eagle Penile Compensation piece in your dark bedroom — without donning your hearing protection (because, who is going to have hearing protection with that Desert Eagle on their nightstand, right?) — fire that piece in the darkness at the shadow in the doorway, you know what will happen. The noise will replace your hearing with a loud ‘iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii’ and your retina will be sporting these muzzle flash afterimages of your wife crumpling in the doorway. Or, in the unlikely event that it’s not your teenage daughter sneaking back into the house after leaving through her bedroom window, but an axe murderer — you just rendered yourself too blind and deaf to re-aim and shoot again.
Now, reconsider my suggestion and imagine you have a paintball gun on your nightstand.
First of all, no flashes and noise to mess with your night vision and hearing. Just a ‘pffft’ and angry cursing from the shadow in the doorway as he’s trying to wipe paint from his eyes. Because you know that just like you don’t have hearing protection on your nightstand, he sure as hell isn’t wearing paintball protection on his nocturnal visits. Paintballs on your unprotected body hurt like fuck. And the intruder won’t know what’s happening. No muzzle flashes or loud noises, just the sound of a blowdart and getting stung and wet all over — that’s unnerving, man, and I’d like to see the intruder who wouldn’t scamper back to whatever rock he crawled out from under. (Did I say that right? Sounds right…)
And while he runs like fuck from the stinging wet paint, you call the cops and tell them there’s an intruder running around your neighbourhood, a man splattered with purple paint. However incompetent the police are in your area, they should still be able to find someone covered in paintball paint.
Plus, if you make a mistake and confuse family members with intruders, you don’t have to take them to the ER (or bury them), but you simply apologize and help them wash off the paint.
So, forget about all those macho handcannons and just get yourself a paintball gun for home defense. Your NRA neighbour might laugh at you, but he’s going to be the one with the axe buried between his starry eyes from the muzzle flash, while there’s still an almost full magazine in his Desert Eagle.
A lot of people respond that my answer is ridiculous and dangerous. And they might be right — pelting an intruder armed with an assault rifle with paint balls might well result in getting you killed. However, I posted this answer not to promote paintball guns for home defence, but to think ‘outside the box’. In the comments, a lot of people also offered their own alternative solutions — shotguns loaded with rock salt, pepperballs, et cetera — and that was my intention: instead of looking to use lethal force, what alternatives are there?
Also, many commenters seem to believe that I would just shoot at an intruder with paintballs and then wait for them to respond. I guess they haven’t read my other answers and don’t know about my experience with violence. I can’t blame them, but, no, I wouldn’t just stand there like an idiot, but use the paintball attack to close the distance to blade range.
And another edit:
Some commenters say that defending your house with firearms is a Christian duty and that the Ten Commandments don’t say ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, but ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’. My thoughts on that subject:
I’m raised Christian, but became agnostic because of the hypocrisy of organised religion. However, even if these commenters are right, using a lethal weapon to repel an intruder (99% of intruders are after possessions, not looking to murder you in your sleep) is not exactly ‘Christian’: even a casual reader of the gospel would understand that Jesus Christ himself would not condone the spilling of blood over mere possessions. Therefore, arming yourself with lethal weapons in order to repel intruders is premeditated killing, i.e. murder. There are plenty of effective non-lethal weapons (tasers, for instance) that can be used without killing the intruder.
But what about the killers and rapists?
If there is a high rate of homicidal intruders in your neighbourhood, high enough to warrant the stockpiling of lethal weapons for ‘home defence’, you might want to look into relocating your family. Chances are that the ‘reporting’ on these ‘deadly home invasions’ is merely scare tactics by groups like the NRA in order to sell more guns. In reality, getting killed by an intruder is as unlikely as getting killed by a Great White shark.
In reality, most child rapists do not jump from bushes or climb into the bedroom window — in the majority of child rape cases, the rapist is familiar to the child, i.e. family members, daycare staff, teachers, priests*, and baby sitters. In other words, the people to whom we entrust our children.
(* Personally, I loathe the people citing the Catholic catechism to morally justify using deadly force defending their children from getting raped by intruders. If you want to keep your children from getting raped, keep them far away from Catholic priests.)
Women Got Shocked After Hearing These Stats Of The Ideal Man
One of the things about my mother was the ashtray in her car.
Yeah. I know. I know.
Many of you youngsters have no idea what an “ashtray” is, what it does, and why it is important. Let alone what one was doing in a car.
ashtray
Well, let me tell you. It is a receptacle to hold the ashes of a cigarette in. You see, when you smoke a cigarette, the end burns. Turns to ash and dissolves. If you don’t flick the ashes away they fall over everything. So you’ve got to deposit them in a tray to get them out of the way.
Anyways, I once went to clean out her can and pulled out the ashtray. And it it was about $30 worth of change (mostly quarters) and a ton-load of ashes and one or two bubblegum wrappers. Man, oh man. They made those things DEEP! Lordy! I had no idea.
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I understand that you can still order cars with this feature, but they are no longer as common, and certainly not standard like they used to be.
Happened to me with my ex MIL. She started in on me about the mess my kitchen was in the day after I got back from a 2500 miles business trip I had been on. My ex left dirty dishes everywhere, dried food on them, spanking clean dishwasher, and laundry piled by the back door. As soon as she started, I was furious. First she wasn’t to be in my home but he let her in, second, he said nothing about the mess being his, and finally, I was exhausted and had 3 days of paperwork ahead of me. I looked at him, he looked away while she was yelling at me. I basically told her to can it, her son had created the mess while I was out making money and that I had paperwork to do to make sure I finished the job of the trip. Since she created a spoiled brat who wouldn’t clean up, she had dispensation to be in my kitchen while she did the dishes. She turned to him to back her up and the coward that he is, he told me it was my job and I said, nope, I quit, hire a maid if you won’t do it. She left and we had a blowout fight (led to divorce in a couple of month).
Three days later after getting my paperwork complete and I was scheduling my next trip away, the kitchen was still a mess. I actually packed up every dish, glass, pan, silverware, etc. that was mine and refused to cook or clean anything. I was really totally fed up. I did purchase paper plates and cups and plastic eating utensils and left him with a pretty much bare fridge. He ate at his mom’s while I was gone or at a restaurant but I had a clean kitchen.
Stand up for yourself. Tell them that if they can’t behave with decency, there is the door and until they learn some respect and manners when it comes to you, they are not welcome in your home. If you are in theirs, tell them goodbye and that you won’t be returning. Hubby can visit when he likes but you won’t be back. And by the way, you are no longer welcome in my home either.
I was prosecuting a committal hearing against a defendant for an allegation that he sexually assaulted his younger step daughter. The victim was a ‘not so polite’ 13 year old. My first question to her was, “Please tell the court your name.” Reply, “You already know that.” It was a struggle just to set up the identity of the victim. I just knew it was going to be difficult to adduce the evidence necessary for the matter to be committed to the District Court for trial from this young victim so I then asked a very broad open question and I was going to build my case from there. “Can you just remember what happed to you at your 12th birthday party?” Reply, “Get Fucked.” That was later followed by, “Can you now tell the court what your step gather did?” Reply, “Get Fucked. You know.” By then I wanted to palm face but pressed on.
Such answers are a body blow for a prosecutor as two rules apply, 1. I can not ask leading questions and 2. I can’t normally cross examine my own witness. From there on the defence lawyer started to frequently object to my ‘leading’ and ‘cross examining’ questions.
Eventually, I was able to (unconvincingly) put the barest evidence necessary to the court. When the victim was cross examined she gave numerous answers that were very detrimental to the prosecution’s case.
I then called evidence of ‘complaint’ from the victim’s older sister. She gave evidence that shortly after her sister’s 12th birthday party that the victim told her about her step father sexually assaulting her. She gave very credible and convincing evidence. She was then cross examined and was ‘not shaken’ in her evidence re the sexual assault.
There is an old saying in court that you should never ask a question when you don’t know the answer. The following supports that view.
The questioning of the older sister swung around to the credibility of the victim, her younger sister. And the defence was on a roll. “You know that your sister tells, don’ t you?” ‘Yes.’ “And she has often told you lies hasn’t she?” ‘Yes.’
I considered, having heard the victim’s evidence, that these question were reasonable and the the replies were very predictable. My case was almost totally destroyed at this stage and no court would ever committed with this standard of evidence.
It was then time for the defence lawyer to sit down but he was on fire with favourable answers now flowing freely from my witness. Then came, and my ears immediately pricked up, “You don’t believe you sister is telling the truth about your step father do you?” I was looking at the face of the defence lawyer as he was asking that question and I could almost read his mind that he was starting to regrett asking this question but it was out of his mouth before he could retract it. I thought, that’s an interesting question, I wonder how my witness will answer this question?
Then came the immediate reply, with gushing tears, screams and finger pointing to the defendant, ‘I know she is telling the truth, dad also did it to me on my 12th birthday.’
Horror was in the face of the lawyer. That was one question too many. He had nowhere to hide and it was high drama in the court room.
The female social worker who was comforting the victim then ran across the courtroom and started attacking the defendant with her handbag shouting ‘You Bastard, You Bloody Bastard.’
And the reaction of the defendant? He was wimping like a mongrel dog during the attack and not trying to defend himself to any degree. If anyone ever ‘acted guilty’ then this defendant was acting as absolutely guilty.
The first time the older sister had ever told any person about her being sexually assaulted by her step father was just then in the witness box.
The mother then rushed up to the witness box to console her older daughter and the police were trying to protect the defendant from the social worker.
Me, I just sat back in my chair with a smug smile and thought … well such thoughts were not complementary to the defence lawyer who was trying to now object to his own question as the witness was crying out to her mother, ‘Mum, Dad did it to me all the time till he started fucking her.”
It was too much for the Magistrate who stood up and adjourned the case till ‘order was restored’.
It was utter joyous pandemonium for this prosecutor.
I had two, the lawyer and his client who needed to palm face!
And yes, the defendant was committed that day for the offence and he was later charged with sexually assaulting his older step daughter.
Such high drama is exceptionally rare to see in a courtroom but that day still lives with me some 20 years later.
Greek Souvlaki with Tzaziki
Souvlaki are kabobs, usually made with beef, lamb or chicken and sometimes shrimp.
2024 01 24 10 39
Yield: 6 servings; about 3 cups
Ingredients
Souvlaki
2 pounds lamb shoulder or 2 pounds sirloin tip, cut into 1 1/2 inch chunks
2 cups dry red wine
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 teaspoons lemon rind, long strips
1/4 cup olive oil
Sweet peppers and cherry tomatoes as needed
Tzaziki
2 cups plain yogurt
1/2 English cucumber, peeled and grated
2 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Begin preparing the tzaziki a few hours before serving. The flavors need time to blend.
Marinate the meat overnight to absorb the wine and garlic.
Souvlaki: Place the meat in a large bowl. Pour in the wine and sprinkle minced garlic and oregano. Imbed the lemon strips among the cubes of meat and drizzle with olive oil. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate 12 hours or overnight. Shake or stir the mixture several times during the marinating period.
About 30 minutes before serving, drain off and discard the marinade. Thread the chunks of meat onto long skewers, brushing with a little olive oil.
Over medium coals, barbecue the souvlaki until it’s done the way you like it.
Serve on a bed of rice and pass the tzaziki to spoon on top.
Tzaziki: Line a colander or sieve with cheesecloth (or gauze) and set it over a bowl. Pour in the yogurt and allow it to drip for an hour or so.
After the yogurt has drained, combine it, in a small bowl, with the cucumber and the garlic. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate until just before serving.
While the meat is barbecuing, drizzle the olive oil over the surface of the Tzaziki and, without stirring, sprinkle on the salt. It needs no mixing as your guests will do that when they dollop it onto their souvlaki.
When I was working as a police officer I had a call of a shoplifting with a minor, a girl of 14. At that age I was required to take her home to find an adult to release her to as she was considered “arrested on paper.”
When we got to her house she got out of the cruiser rather quickly and ran inside the home and brought out another teenager with her. I told the teen I needed to release her to an adult and as I started to go to the front door she blocked my way which seemed very odd.
I pressed on asking “is there an adult inside?” She responded that there was but that she would go in and get her. I stood about 6 feet from the open door and inhaled an odor from inside that I can only describe as truly putrid from inside that house.
I immediately began to suspect that the inside of the home was a “filth situation” and I walked around to the back to see if I was correct by looking in the windows, but almost all had closed curtains and it was dark inside the windows that I could see into.
The girl then exited the back door which again produced a rush of air that was truly disgusting. Again I attempted to gain entrance to the house but the girl stood in my way. Since I didn’t have a warrant to search the house and I couldn’t prove that it was a dangerous situation to justify a warrantless entry, I then released the girl to an adult relative who also eventually came out of the home,
Afterwards I wrote an information report to Child Protective Services relaying my suspicions that the inside of the house was filthy and a potential danger to those living inside.
A few months later I received a letter from one of the CPS investigators who had received my report. She wrote to tell me that she thought I’d want to know that they investigated the home and that it had been the worst case of child neglect and filth they had ever seen!
She said there was urine and feces everywhere from both humans and animals. She said that she was amazed that I had been able to make a determination that the house was a problem having never entered and by only using my sense of smell.
In 15 years I had been in a lot of dirty to filthy homes and somehow my sense of smell let me know that this home needed a look inside. The investigator said everyone (7 children in all) had been removed from the home, as there were no adults living there,the utilities had been shut off and the oldest child was trying desperately to keep the family together.
I felt sad that the family was split up but I knew how dangerous continuing to live in that house was going to be. This was one of the saddest cases I worked on and has always remained in my thoughts.
The best example of someone leaving their job was a former associate that I worked with. She had been through hell and back with the company. The boss had harassed her for years, causing her emotional and physical pain. She was overworked without getting much praise for it. She was blamed for every little thing. All this being said, she was no push over. She routinely stood up for herself, even putting her boss in his place several times. In all honesty, he was beyond incompetent. So there was no shortage of ways to put him in his place.
She was on the brink of quitting. What pushed her over the edge was a phone call she received while on her day off. The boss would start to berate her and blame her for the disarray the store was in. He called her lazy and good for nothing. This was the straw that broke the camels back. She walked into his office the next day and quit. She warned him that if his behavior continued, he would lose all his good workers; which he proceeded to lose. This turned out to be true because the following month, he lost two of his managers.
Fast forward to the present, the store is in worst shape and bleeding people constantly.
One of my kid’s friends who came over after a bday party to play said something to me I’ll never forget.
He was around 8. When offered snacks he declined.
When offered to play toys he declined.
He wanted to go on my patio to “ watch the sky”. When I joined him he was staring intently up. He pointed to the sky and said “ You should watch out. Watch out for the triangles. They come sometimes. They look at you and you can talk to them but it’s not like we talk. “
I asked him to elaborate. Who comes? What do they look like? How do they come to you?
“ No. Not just me. Lots of people see them. And animals too. Some are nice. Some are mean. You should watch out because you might see a mean one. They come in triangles. Big triangles. With lights. I can’t see them. But if you don’t run and listen they talk. The mean ones say they own us. The nice ones say they’ll protect us. The nice ones come in circles. So watch out for triangles. “ He said all this very matter -of -fact and seemed afraid but confident in his words. He claimed to have seen one just the other day
He then went inside and I don’t remember much after that. When his mom picked him up I asked her about what he said. She looked embarrassed and said something like oh don’t mind him and his wild imagination. This was late 90s and we were temporarily in Northern Canada in a rural area for work. We left shortly after. I still to this day watch the sky a little differently.
*Edit to Clarify
Forgot to mention when I asked the kid how many times this happened he said only a couple.
This was not a normal part of our planet for background. This was a vast frozen tundra with small communities accessible by dogsled and helicopter. Near the Arctic Circle. I don’t believe him per se but also don’t disbelieve entirely. I hope it’s not true.
“Can you hug me too?”Seeing owner embrace another companion,the rescued stray cat longs to be loved
I passed out engineering in 2007. I did not get any campus placements even after scoring first class with all papers cleared in first attempt.
So I moved to Bangalore in search of job by end of 2007, and joined a course for Java. I have 50 K money with me, this is the money I got as part of my mothers share. All my aim at that time was to get into a job, before I exhaust this 50K rupes.
I paid 10 K to java institute and spent 2 months there. The training was so poor and contrary to what they promised, no companies came for campus recruitment. Every month I need to pay 2500 rupees rent in PG, and cost of food is around 100 per day. The total cost per month would be around 5500 Rs.
After 2 months, I was left with 30 K. Again I spent one more month, the balance amount came to 25K.
I couldn’t get a job in software, and my real passion is VLSI since I am commimg from ECE stream. I attended around 30 placememts both inside and outside the campus, but not a single one I am able to crack.
I went to home with 25 K money. I told my parents about my VLSI dream. But my poor parents couldn’t afford it. The fees was 50K for 6 months course, and rent + food cost 30 K till course completion.
So I need another 55K for my dream course.I have to sell the golden chain of my mother as well a gold chain my grandma given to me before her death. We sold those gold chains and arranged money for my course. I was able to make some 45 K by selling those.
So I went to Bangalore back with 70 K rupees and paid 25 K as first installment of the course. Now really I need to cut short my expense, otherwise I will run out of money. So I moved to friends house, where I pay around 2000 Rs for rent. That way I can save 500 rs per month.
My bus fare was 10 rupees one side that time, so I walk past 2 stops so that I can save 2 rupees per day. Then I will have dosa from road side shops in the morning, so that I can skip lunch. I only ate breakfast and dinner. Lunch I used to have water, and then opted for tiger biscuit.
On Saturdays and sundays, I will sleep the whole days and have one time food. This saves money. I will study the whole night on weekends. Weekends are holidays for the institute.
On monthly basis my bank balance started diminishing, and I have to save each one rupee coin I have. Now I started walking 8 kms to office and then return in the evening by bus. That way I reduced bus fare from 20 rs to 8 rs. Earlier I saved 4 rupees by walking past 2 stops, so I can go for 8 + 8.
To manage money, I brought all my B.Tech text books from native and sold it in Bangalore. I managed to bring some 20 Kg books by train. O got another 2500 Rs for that.
By 5 th month, I am left with 4 K, and don’t know what to do. I tried myself and got placed in a small company that is willing to pay me 3000 Rs per month. The company is working in the field of VLSI. I happily joined the company.
The work hours are from 9 AM and can extend up to night 10 or 11. Sometimes night shifts. Though weekend are officially OFF, but they make us work on Saturdays mandatory. But I am so happy that they give 100 Rs food reimbursement on Saturdays and 100 Rs from snacks for night shift. I made use of this opportunity happily by testing my stamina and deteriorating my physical health.
By 20 th, my purse will be left empty, and I need to survive for next 10 days. So I keep 100 rs in my wallet for bus fare for the next 10 days. I am lucky that they distribute snacks at 6 PM daily. So I will have only snacks from 20 the to 26 th, and tons of machine tea. Tiger biscuits for lunch and dinner.
I get sodexo coupons worth 350 Rs on 26 or 27th of the month. So I use sodexo coupons from 26th to 30th the for food expense.
By 1 st, I get 3000/rs stipend, in which Rs 2000 will be given as rent, and Rs 1000 would be iny purse. I need to manage food for 1000 Rs for next 20 days from 1st to 20th and bus fare as well.
Me and my mom have 2 separate accounts in SBI. Since we don’t have money to maintain AQB, I use this 3000 Rs and swing between both of these accounts to maintain a 1000 Rs AQB in bank savings account. Cumulative amount in account shall be 90K for a quarter. I manage it somehow to maintain bank account.
This went for few months and one day
I was not even left with 10 rupees for bus fare. Then I made a call to my parents and asked them for some 400 rupees, telling them that my sandals got broken and I need money. I can’t say my real situation to my parents because they will feel bad that they were not able to support me.
My weight got reduced from 80 to 65 Kg in one year gap, and every time I say my parents its due to job stress. I hide the fact that I starve of limit my food intake to save money.
All my friends were placed in tops MNCs in Bangalotr., earning some 18 to 20 K per month.
I don’t know I should say it here, there are couple of times, I searched the left overs of the food, which my friend brought as parcel. It happend 2 to 3 times.
By this one year time frame, everybody branded me as a failure and only my parents given me the fire to pursue further.
By end of 2009, I got 10 k per month, and my weight suddenly spiked from 63 Kg to 75 Kg in 2 months. Everybody got surprised, I told them I started eating junk food, that’s why. Succcesfully hidfen the fact again.
After 2011, I changed 2 companies and now its my 3 rd company. Now I get in hand around 1.8 lakhs per month and other benfits.
Persistence and hardwork never goes waste.
############
Edit:
I am really overwhelmed with happiness after seeing the comments, as I never thought my story would be an inspiration to others.
I will clear some of the questions being raised in the comments:
Anonymous – Though I don’t like to go anonymous, but I have to because I have mentioned my take home salary. If I link my linkedin or Facebook profile, it would become a clear violation of company policies as I disclosed my salary in public forum. Second reason is that my friends and other know people are there in quora and online world. I am sure that some of my close friends will feel bad that I did not go to them for help in times of need.
Regarding my salary, its after 10 years of work experience, I am getting the mentioned amount. May be luck also matters, that few of my colleagues resigned from the organisation, and management looked at me to lead the team. In that way, I got few extra lakhs every year. Not my hardwork alone.
3. Somebody pointed about Government job, I somehow managed to arrange Rs 500 for applying BSNL JTO 2008 examination. After a great difficulty only I was able to arrange that money for application itself.
4. Shiv Shankar Panda – Appreciate your comment. You said said the fact to the point.
5. Happy to see that Shailesh sharma , Neha Yadav, and Bhaumik Raja that my story inspire the juniors.
Thanks for all the comments.
“Even the darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer”.
I landed a factory job in Michigan between my freshman and sophomore years of college at MSU. I was making $10/hr, which was great money at the time, considering minimum was $2/hr, and you could almost survive as a single guy on a minimum-wage job.
I was coming up on the end my 90-day probation when the general foreman dropped by my mill and asked me if I was going back to college, or did I want a full-time job. You know the phrase “young dumb and full of c.” I told him I wanted the job. He told me it was mine as of the next week.
The next day, the plant manager (big suit) never seen in my part — dirty part — of the plant, was in my foreman’s office when I started my shift. A little while later, I saw my grandfather walk in, and they all talked for a bit. After a while, my grandfather got up, pointed to me, shook the GM’s hand, then left.
A few minutes later, I was called to the office, and the GM said, “Sorry, Rich, we like the way you work, but Joe said I need to fire you. He said to tell you that he knows you are mad now, but you are going back to school, and he will get you canned from any job you take until you do.”
I really wasn’t mad, but I was more than a little bit frightened. My 5′6″, 120# grandfather, who had never worked anything other than plant labor (a different plant and a different company) his entire life (except for WWI army and WWII navy), called a high-and-mighty suit, and got him to go to the dirtiest part of the plant just to fire me and make me go back to college.
2023 Review: How China is Catching Up with the US in Key Tech Domains?
If my boss behaves inappropriately, particularly toward me, the last thing I’m concerned about it being respectful toward him/her. While working in IT at a community college, I had a boss who attempted to embarrass a coworker and I in front of an office full of staff, students, and school visitors. He announced, loudly, that we were doing our job wrong — we were rerouting a netwok cable — and asked if he had to do it himself. The thing is, he came as we were finishing the job up and were in the process of installing the wall port at the new location. That didn’t stop me from laying my tools on a desk and telling him to go ahead and finish up, since he could do it better, while my coworker and I went to lunch. Then we walked out of the office.
My coworker was so angry and embarrassed that he never returned; he sent the douche an email the next day saying he wouldn’t be back. The douche tried to write me up for insubordination — the douche was angry and embarrassed because I’d told him to finish the job and then walked away in front of a crowd of people — but his boss had heard about what he’d done and told him to leave me alone. The douche could dish it out, but he couldn’t take it, apparently.
The douche and I had a mutual dislike for one another from my first day at the school. In fact, he tried to have my job offer revoked when he was named to replace the former IT Director on an interim basis, but his boss wouldn’t let him do that, either. It pissed me off that my coworker was collateral damage in our feud — even though my coworker told me later that he’d planned to leave before the next semester — and I went out of my way to make life miserable for the douche my last two years at that job. It wasn’t difficult because he was not well-liked — even his boss would insult him in front of the techs he was supposed to be managing.
When I turned in my resignation he asked why I was leaving and I told him I could no longer work for someone I didn’t like or respect. In retrospect, I should have been ruder.
1. Pay attention to who you’re with when you feel your best.
2. How you are treated is more important than how much you like someone. Read it again.
3. You can leave a toxic relationship but if you don’t heal what attracted you to them, you will meet them again. The same demon, just in a different person.
4. If you get that gut feeling that something isn’t right about a person or situation, trust it.
5. Being alone is the beginning of something better with someone better.
6. You break your own heart by making somebody more important than you are to them. Never play yourself like that.
7.A boy will say: You deserve better.
but
A man will say: I will make myself better to deserve you.
Choose wisely.
8. You can feel when someone ain’t being real with you, energy never lies.
9. Sit with it.
Instead of drinking it away, smoking it away, sleeping it away, eating it away, f*cking it away, running from it.
Sit with it.
Healing happens by feeling.
10. Feeling safe in someone’s energy is a different type of intimacy. That feeling of peace and protection is really underrated.
11. Imagine a man who doesn’t stop pursuing you, even after he has you.
12. A good relationship is when two people accept each other’s past, support each other’s present, and love each other enough to encourage each other’s future. So don’t rush love. Find a partner who encourages you to grow, who won’t cling to you, who will let you go out into the world, and trust that you will come back. This is what true love is all about.
If you like my answer, drop it an upvote. Check out my profile for more relationships tips – Amy Swift
[Updates]
Don’t maintain relationships for the sake of it.
Age: 18–25, the age where you meet a lot of temporary people
Reports Claimed China’s Missiles Tech Could Wipe Out US Bases in Minutes
In today’s world of global power hungry giants, China emerges as a formidable force with an arsenal of thousands of missiles, capable of reshaping the dynamics of conflict. The alarming prospect of China having the ability to swiftly incapacitate U.S. bases in a war sparks intense discussions about the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific and settles one discussion of the whole debate, China has lurked in the shadows long enough and now it’s time is here.
As a young, newly qualified police Constable I was on mobile patrol with a more experienced officer. We stopped a car because one brake light was not functioning. But the driver was enraged. He didn’t think his transgression was worth stopping him. He had an urgent appointment to meet, and he communicated this very angrily, loudly and with lots of swear words. In a normal case it would be “Yes officer, why have you stopped me?” “Your brake lights are not working properly sir.” “Oh, thanks, can I carry on?” “Yes sir, if you are careful and don’t brake suddenly. Get them fixed asap.”
In this case my colleague could see I was getting angry at all the abuse. He pulled me aside and whispered in my ear “The ruder he gets, the politer you get. But don’t forget there are a lot of other things you could check. He’ll either calm down or he’ll assault you and then we’d have a good case.”
So I became excruciatingly polite. But… “So sorry to delay you sir, but I just have to measure the depth of tread of your tyres, including the spare. And make sure your screen wash bottle has sufficient water. Would you demonstrate that your wipers are working please?” “Yes, I’m really sorry about the delay, and my colleague will probably want to see all your documents.”
In this case his road rage melted away, and when he apologised for his attitude, we let him go.
Years later I became a senior officer in charge of a large traffic police formation. I told them all the story.
My teen years were tough because my father and I didn’t get along at all. When I was younger my little sisters would look for trouble for fun. When they were caught they’d lie to my parents and say I dared them. They’d smirk while I was beaten – not spanked. When I got married at 22 I began to understand my father as a man. On Oct. 30, 1979 I was saying goodbye to him. He was leaving PA to take a job as a quality control inspector at a nuclear power plant that was being built in Oregon. I suddenly grabbed him into a tight hug and begged him not to go. He’d already signed a contract and all arrangements had been made. I said “If you go I’ll never see you again.”. His reply was “ The next time you see me I won’t be able to see you. The pay is too good to pass up and I’ve never been to the west coast.” He had a heart attack and died on April 5, 1980, one week before he was to go home. The nuclear power plant never opened. It was 40 miles from Mt. St. Helens. When the volcano erupted it caused an earthquake which cracked the foundation of the plant. Thank goodness it wasn’t in operation yet. (Dad and I both had precognition. We often knew things were going to happen before they happened. I prayed for God to take away that ability as no one ever took my warnings seriously and I couldn’t save anyone from accidents or injuries. I’d talked to Dad the day before his death. He told me he had a strong feeling he’d never see home again. I knew that back in Oct. and we were both right.
Went out to a bar with some friends for a birthday party for my ex girlfriend. She really messed me up when she left me, like really bad, but I was trying to be nice since she invited me so I figured I’d go out and be there for a drink or two.
So, a mutual friend who had been broken up with a few days before and was there, so as I made the rounds I talked to her and tried to do whatever I could to let her know it would be ok. I’m no therapist, but I did my best ya know? I knew what a bad breakup felt like, as I was also going through one, so I tried to help.
Anyways, after I left the table I overheard her talking to my ex at the bar about me trying to give her advice and she said, “Well nobody has ever loved him so what does he know about any of this?” And they started laughing. Don’t think they know I heard, but I grabbed my coat immediately and took a long walk home.
I don’t need people like that in my life, haven’t willingly seen either of them since.
Enlisted in the military during Vietnam because there was no college money. Not drafted. Got out and got undergraduate and graduate degrees. Made absolutely sure I got the degrees in a field that paid off. Got a job at a company that had cut out retirement plans the previous year — so much for that myth. Did not have lifetime guaranteed employment complete with a gold watch. Worked for six companies over my career. Got married and had kids. First house was small enough to afford, 1300 square feet. It had a 17% mortgage. That’s seventeen, not seven. Paid every cent of the kids’ college educations, and they all have high-paying jobs. Told the kids to always save twenty-percent. They didn’t. They moved to Latteville and immediately rented McMansions in wealthier areas they couldn’t afford, even with their high salaries. They live hand-to-mouth, but make sure they have swimming pools and eBikes with custom paint jobs rendered by highly-regarded eBike artists. They occasionally hit me up for money. I retired 12 years before the average guy, so there’s that. I have more dough than I know what to do with, no one gave me a cent, and I’m not taking a beating from a real-estate agent to help you satisfy whatever selfish desires you may harbour. I like the house I’m in. It’s quite hard to understand why anyone would want to allocate living quarters in America the same way they did (still do) in the ex-Soviet Union. If so, you would qualify for 90 square feet. Anyway, just stay off my lawn.
Hi there. One of my biggest losing it moments occurred many years ago. I was still married to my now ex. We walked around the block to visit family for tea and a swim.
After dinner we all had quite a few drinks and I wanted to get the kids home. So we all said our goodbyes and proceeded to walk home. We were happily chatting on our walk, when my nephew, who wanted to stay at our place, said something smart assed to me in a joking way.
My ex whacked him up the back of his head, for disrespecting me. I wasn’t disrespected by anyone and we were all just mucking around having a laugh.
I absolutely lost my shit on him. My ex not my nephew. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt, punching him in the face as I rode him down to the ground. I then sat on top of him punching him over and over for hitting our nephew.
Next minute, flashing blue lights and a tall cop is telling me to stop and get off him.
I stood up and my ex just sat there, hands on his head, saying it’s ok because he deserved it.
They let us go home and my kids have never forgotten how pissed off their little muma can get if needed.
Happily divorced now. Kids all have kids. And he’s not in the picture much anymore.
In the late 70s I went to Phoenix for the first time and was staying with a friend who lived there, I bought a cheap car that was a long ways away from my friends house and was following him back to his place. He took a left, the light turned yellow. I had no clue where I was and I didn’t want to lose him. The cop that pulled me over said the light was red. He looked at my New York State license and said hey, you’re from a little town about 25 miles from my little home town. I’m thinking wow, we’re practically neighbors, he won’t give me a ticket. He saw my name and asked any relation to a Vince Dano? Holy shit, no ticket THAT’S MY UNCLE! That little prick he said as he wrote me a ticket. I asked him why my uncle was a prick? He called my uncle an asshole and said he used to be his little league coach. I guess he got benched. About 6 months later I’m in Florida with a job installing lawn sprinklers. I went to my apartment for a minute with the old work truck, left it running and ran inside, heard a crash ran back out and the truck was across the street in a guy’s yard. It had crashed though his fence and wiped out some lawn sprinklers. The old guy came out and I’m apologizing saying don’t worry, I’ll fix everything. As I’m working he asked me where I was from, I told him a little town in nys and he said he’s from a little town about 25 miles away from there. He told me his name I told him mine. He asked if I was related to Vince Dano? I was kind of hesitant thinking what did my little prick uncle do to piss this guy off and now he was going to call the cops. But I said yeah, he’s my uncle. Oh my God! the man said he’s my best friend, we used to coach little league together
Star Trek: TOS Enterprise Bridge Background Ambience *8 Hours* w/ quiet conversations, calming
Most aren’t. Most are saying one or more of these things:
The charges are politically motivated. (Doesn’t mean that they are true. Crimes go uncharged on a regular basis.) The charges aren’t meant to ruin his reputation or lead to convictions, but to tie up his time during the general election.
He is being charged for things that everyone in his position does. Not his position as president, but the charges against him for his business dealings, some of which were before his presidency. I remember hearing a real estate developer defending Trump’s supposed fudging of some real estate numbers to get more favorable terms as “standard operating procedure in the real estate business.”
The charges against him don’t make any difference, because no one ever voted for him for his squeaky-clean record.
I’m not a Trump supporter, but I see the logic in that last one. One saying I heard during every election, when the mud starts flying, is “Jesus isn’t on the ballot.” Every real contender for higher offices in the U.S. has a lot of skeletons in their closet. Many people don’t vote for who they want; they vote against who they don’t want.
Support for Trump is based largely on the fact that he’s not a Democrat. Support for Biden is based largely on the fact that he’s not Trump.
That’s why I’m convinced that any Republican candidate other than Trump can easily walk into the presidency if running against Biden. When three of the four pillars holding up Biden’s platform are simply “he’s not Trump,” his entire platform falls when Trump isn’t the other real contender.
A mere 30% voted for some form of independence but some kind of union with China!
70% prefers a one country 2 system with China but higher autonomy without independence! That is the result as much as you prefer to twist it. And of course all western media twist it as an independent minded candidate wins!
Win? He get a president title but it is weak minority that the 2 main party rule in the next 4 years. He cannot decide on shit let alone do shit for the west! The election result is a simply a pure disaster for Tsai Ing Wen and it ought to be recognised as such.
For China it is a decent result. And for Taiwanese people it hurts them! For western trouble makers. They twist and spin it as Taiwan wants independence! 30% result? 70% wants China. It knows it needs China!
Open letter to Chinese American high school students
Chinese Americans should look beyond the Ivy League farce and consider instead getting a real university education in China
The jig should have been up when the Varsity Blues scandal broke. Oh was it delicious. Hollywood actresses, hedge fund managers, winery owners, real estate developers and other assorted muckety-mucks sneaking their low-watt spawn into elite colleges. The fraud was so absurd you couldn’t make it up.
Rich people Photoshopping their kids playing sports, paying for medical “stupid” certifications to get “special” proctoring, hiring a Harvard grad SAT ringer able to deliver any score you want. Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown and we are not going to make USC jokes because the school has gotten a lot better in recent years.
And that Chinese girl who paid US$6.5 million to get into Stanford. Did you see her hour-long “I got into Stanford” video on YouTube? Oh the burns in the comments. If you could only read Chinese. Epic!
Of course, the joke is really on us. Because four years later, elite American universities – with additional malfeasance in the interim – continue to command the same prestige, elicit the same anxiety and demand the same obeisance.
The college counseling business is as hot as ever. Some are reportedly charging over a million dollars for white-glove service starting in the 7th grade, with a perfect record of admissions into HYPSM (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it).
And Asian Americans. Did you really think you scored a win when the Supreme Court scrapped affirmative action last year? The universities saw it coming a mile away and became test-optional well before the gavel came down. Underrepresented applicants are polishing their essays on how they’ve thrived in unsafe spaces while you are stuck with the surname Zhang.
So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot.
Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?
And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than high school.
If you are lucky and go to a regular high school, at least you are exposed to regular people with regular aspirations and regular opinions – deplorable as they may be. In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating mélange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing.
The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.
You will discover that student cliques mostly keep to themselves – international students with international students, blacks with blacks, Asian Americans with Asian Americans, frat boys with frat boys, sorority girls with sorority girls (okay, frat boys and sorority girls do mix).
You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyways) that passes for a social life.
All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem which coincidentally increase FAANG share prices.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s all a giant farce. The system broke down decades ago. Really, what are the chances you go to a “regular” high school and expect the meritocracy to pick you from the haystack? No, your parents scrimped and saved, fought tooth and nail, to buy that house in Tenafly, New Jersey or Mountain View, California.
College admissions was your religion since birth. Sunday afternoon is for test prep classes (Saturday mornings are for Chinese school; we will get back to that). And when the time comes, your anxiety-ridden parents will fork over a pretty penny for a college counselor, if not white glove S-Class level.
If you think this isn’t farcical enough, the racket has now gone international. Longtime China resident and insightful Twitter commentator Arnaud Bertrand relays a familiar story. His ultra-wealthy Chinese friend has decided to move his family to California largely to buy his children into the American elite.
The friend plans to purchase a house in the best California school district and hire top tutors for his children, confident that it will pave the way to prestigious American universities and elite status in Western society.
Mr Bertrand explains, “Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts – and continues to do so – to ensure that wealth couldn’t ‘game’ the education system.”
China’s schools are not funded by local property taxes. The government did away with guaranteeing school placement based on property ownership. Private schools exist but enrollment is by lottery. And famously, China, in one fell swoop, scrapped the entire for-profit tutoring industry.
Of course, explains Mr Bertrand, none of these measure are perfect. An underground tutoring industry continues to operate. The ultra-wealthy can hire household “help” with PhDs. But his wealthy friend likely reached the correct conclusion – his money has a better chance of buying his children into America’s elite than China’s.
Some of Mr Bertrand’s observations deserve to be quoted in full:
This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the US (which – contrary to the “American dream” narrative – is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility) or one that actively fights it to enforce, to the extent possible, a meritocracy?
What my friend’s story illustrates is actually even more than this: in the US you don’t even only have a reproduction of local elites but you also have elites from other countries who come to the US because it’s easier to reproduce there!
This may all be grim reading for the anxious Chinese American high school junior. But fear not! Han Feizi does not come bearing bad news but rather with an offering of devastating logic.
Remember Saturday morning Chinese school? Where you go to socialize and misbehave? Well strap yourself down and get back up to 1,500 characters!
An arbitrage opportunity of historic proportions has opened up. Forget about HYPSM. There is nothing for you to learn there. It was already done and dusted 20 years ago. The sheeple just haven’t realized it.
Remember this acronym: TPSFZUN. That’s Tsinghua, Peking, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, Zhejiang, USTC and Nanjing. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it’s not like HYPSM was so obvious. And we are not talking study abroad. We are talking the full four-year degree shebang!
Vaclav Havel famously said that China’s development “has happened so quickly, we have not yet had time to be astonished.” This applies to higher education as well.
In 2004, Tsinghua was ranked 62 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2024, Tsinghua ranked 12th in the world and 1st in Asia (with arch-nemesis Peking University at 14th). Both ranked higher than the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.
Seven of the top 10 research universities in the Nature Index are now in China – University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University.
One of the metrics weighing down the rankings of Chinese universities is their lack of international students. And that’s where you come in! This arbitrage is just asking to be exploited. As an overseas applicant, you get the full DEI treatment. You are the underrepresented minority, the diversity admit, the token international student!
Don’t get me wrong, they don’t take just anybody. You still have to be a top student with a near 4.0 GPA and SATs over 1400. The biggest hurdle will probably be Mandarin proficiency which, depending on the school, you need either HSK4 or HSK5 to matriculate.
All things considered, however, it’s a buyer’s market allowing you to short-circuit both the soul-crushing hell of the gaokao and the humiliating dog and pony show of applying to HYPSM.
Let’s first get one jaw-dropper out of the way. It is an important consideration for many families, especially if yours stretched themselves sending you to private school. Four years of tuition as an international student at Tsinghua will set mom and dad back about $17,000 (room and board are extra). You are free to do your own calculations for HYPSM.
This is, of course, about much more than arbitraging school rankings and acceptance rates (and cheaper tuition). What you are actually getting by choosing this road is a real education. Let me explain. There are important directionality and timing elements involved.
There is a lot of truth to the cliché that modern China is a closed society with an open mind while America is an open society with a closed mind. It is relatively straightforward for a Chinese national to study in the US given the open minds of China’s youth and America’s open society. The reverse is problematic. Chinese society is far more insular and the minds of American youths are generally closed to outside input.
The Chinese American, however, is a different animal and has a window of opportunity. The width of this window depends on how seriously you took Saturday morning Chinese school. Some of you are actively discussing Genshin Impact on Weibo and can sail through HSK7. Others have more work to do.
But for most of you, there is a solid enough base to build on. The best strategy may be to stretch college out to five years with the first year in language immersion (five years of undergraduate tuition is $21,000).
To be sure, this road is not for the faint of heart. You will not be comfortably surrounded by cookie-cutter versions of yourself who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like diving.
You will be surrounded by gaokao mutants whose intellect can be so blazing it’s like staring at the sun (thankfully, there are slackers as well). You might be constantly fighting a language deficiency. And through it all, you have the additional burden of going through the many stages of culture shock.
On the positive side, the liberal arts education at elite Chinese universities may surprise you. The resentment warriors in American academia are laying siege to the Western canon, poisoning every facet of the liberal arts education.
While politics has always encroached on academia in China, the boundaries are far better defined. Chinese universities may, in fact, be a healthier environment to study the Western canon given the immolating culture wars currently being waged on American campuses (see here). Nobody at Fudan cares if Hegel is dead, white or male.
On a side note, this letter is addressed to Chinese Americans (and the diaspora in general) to knock some sense into them. It also applies, with certain caveats, to non-ethnic Chinese. It can be done, has been done and should be done more.
Anecdotally, non-ethnic Chinese Westerners who have successfully taken this road are eccentrics. These oddballs have gotten a far superior education than HYPSM could possibly provide because they would have had to shake off Western solipsism and open their minds.
All of this, in the end, represents an opportunity for a real education – to be outside your comfort zone, to be stretched, to interact with the unfamiliar. You have a short window in your youth to gain lifelong access to the closed society that is China. It cannot be done after undergrad anymore.
Decades ago, when China was short on talent, carpet-bagging Ivy League Chinese Americans flocked to Beijing and Shanghai. Nowadays, one can run a couple hundred meters down Chang’an Avenue with arms outstretched and knock over a dozen Chinese nationals with HYPSM degrees.
Don’t worry, you will never lose access to the West. That is guaranteed by your native command of English. For many of you, especially if a decent amount of Chinese was spoken at home, you have the opportunity in your university years to claim full native command of Mandarin. If you want it, it is yours for the taking. If you don’t claim it now, it will be lost in time.
I sense skepticism and hesitation. Of course, this is normal. This is not a well-worn path. There are no how-to manuals or consulting companies guiding students on this road. The street lamps have not been installed and you even wonder if this road comes to an abrupt end just outside your view.
If you are worried about future placement chances at Goldman Sachs, you should probably forget the whole enterprise. With decades of experience in investment banks, Han Feizi can say that he was always looking for the unicorn, the luminous being, the perfectly bilingual and bicultural animal.
At some point, you have to have Confucian faith that learning is its own reward. Planning for the future is a fool’s errand. To take the road less traveled, next to having children, is the ultimate expression of hope. We leave you with perhaps Lu Xun’s most famous quote:
“Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads made across the earth. For actually there were no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way a road is made.”
COMMENTS
Brilliant! I’d also encourage the same audience to consider other English-track degrees at universities in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, Germany, and Korea. Also thanks for summarizing the entry requirements and tuition in China. Note that not all of the TPSFZUN have a full slate of majors for international students studying exclusively in English. But especially those seeking STEM careers that will hold outsized weight back in the United States, one can tap into the unique Chinese economic leadership in engineering, AI and data mining, and environmental mechanics. A quick browse of English-taught curriculum at Tsinghua is impressive:
https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/pdf/ut2022.pdf
Great essay! As they say “its funny because its true!” Really a brilliant idea
NASA Confirms the Discovery of the Tenth Planet! It Is Larger than Pluto!
A little over two years ago I filed a small claims suit against a guy I made the mistake or renting a room to. He asked to have the hearing rescheduled, then rescheduled again. He asked for a third time and they said no. He was unprepared. He was asked about some documents and said he had seen them, then moments later denied ever having seen them. It didn’t go well for him. The judge issued a judgment in my favor. He stormed out, saying he was going to file an appeal.
He had three weeks to do so. He didn’t. I suspect that is because he would have been required to put up the amount of the judgment as a bond. Since he rents rooms he can pack up and move easily, and before the three week appeal period was up he’d moved again.
It took a couple of months to find him again. I sent a demand letter and got no response. I sent post judgment interrogatories (questions to try to determine what, if any assets, he had). He didn’t respond. I repeated that a couple of times. No response.
I filed for a motion to compel. The judge issued that in October. He had to respond, and the judge added a $500 penalty. He didn’t respond.
We currently have another hearing scheduled for early February for Contempt of Court. I’m not optimistic.
The legal system is set-up to protect the deadbeats of the world. I called a legal aid service but they said they couldn’t advise me because of a conflict of interest — he had contacted them for help sometime in all this. A lawyer I paid for advice said the court could issue a bench warrant and have him held for up to six months and issue another $500 fine but I don’t believe this Judge will do so.
After all this got started I learned that the guy had two small claims cases he lost in California before coming to Texas. One was for $15k and involved rent he owed to a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. He’d rented a room from this officer. The officer got deployed and the deadbeat was supposed to pay his rent payments to the bank and never did. It wasn’t until the officer started getting contacted about insufficient funds for his mortgage payments he knew something was wrong. In the other case, he’d told someone he met at a gym that he was a licensed stock broker. He eventually persuaded the person to give him $25k to invest with promise of $300k in a matter of a few months. Then he gave the victim the run around. The victim found out he wasn’t a licensed broker (required in California) and demanded his money back. He then ghosted the victim and moved. The victim filed suit and was awarded $30k with interest. He left the state.
We don’t have debtor prisons and the judge in this case isn’t likely to put him in jail over a pretty modest sum (about $1,600 now).
She thought I was an extra that would eventually fade away. My wife and I have been lucky in love and lucky to stay that way. We were married thirty years when my mother in law passed.
This long happy marriage was a thorn in her heel.
One of the last Christmas’s consisted of nice envelopes from the bank with Ben Franklin’s reassuring face smiling through the old time holly and Christmas bells. There was a bit of a problem. One Benjamin was missing, but there was a present that looked like half of a basket ball that had enough tape on it to secure a team.
It had my name on it.
I carefully removed the paper so she could use it again. When the present was revealed, it was not a basket ball in need of a pump. It was a three piece set of plastic mixing bowls with blue ducks waddling around them in an unending line.
My wife was furious.
The next Christmas there was a Ben Franklin with my name on it.
Greek Sesame Bread
Greek Sesame Bread
Ingredients
1/2 cup lukewarm water
2 tablespoons olive oil
5 tablespoons lukewarm milk
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
Instructions
Combine the water, oil, milk, and yeast in a mixing bowl and stir to dissolve the yeast. Add 1 cup of the flour and the salt and beat with an electric mixer for 2 minutes. Add the remaining flour and beat to form a stiff dough. Knead the dough on a floured surface until smooth and elastic. Place in a lightly greased bowl, cover with a dish towel, and allow to rise in a warm place until doubled in volume.
Punch the dough down and form into a round loaf on a lightly-floured baking sheet.
Beat the egg with the milk and brush the dough with the mixture. Sprinkle with sesame seeds, and cut a deep cross in the top of the loaf with a very sharp knife or razor blade. Cover and allow to rise until double in volume.
Place a cake pan with 1 inch of water in it on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Bake the loaf for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees F and bake an additional 15 minutes, until golden brown. Test for doneness by thumping the bottom of the loaf – it should produce a hollow sound.
I can tell you that having been an EMT, I have seen a lot of rough stuff with home break ins. Of those where the occupant did not make it out, They were all unarmed. Some tried to fight back, some didn’t. But the absolute worst cases were those where the intruder felt they had absolute control of the situation.
Of those where the occupant made it out and successfully fought off an intruder, by the time the police arrived (with us not far behind) The occupant was STILL ready to fight and kill.
with a home intruder, you are not shooing off a rodent. You are fighting off natures apex predator, humans. One thing that can get you killed faster than anything is hesitation in your purpose.
If there is someone in your house that is not supposed to be there, You can not confront them with the hopes of tying them up scooby-doo style and waiting for the cops. There is three things one can do; Kill, hide, or run.
I say “kill” and not “fight” because “fight” confuses the purpose. Your purpose when they are in the house, is to KILL. Thinking ANYTHING ELSE, can make your body do weird things, like NOT STRIKE in the place it needs to in order to kill. It is already hard enough to put a sharp object though a breast bone, Even worse if you are half-hearted about it.
It takes far less to slash a throat, stab the gut, kidney etc. Or just start stabbing quickly and repeatedly and randomly. You won’t do that if you have confused your purpose.
I want you to know, though, that this is one of the most brutal you will ever engage in and will likely cause permanent mental scars as what will result is a **LOT** of blood. This will also likely cause a divorce as it will quite possibly cause your significant other to fear the living hell out of you. No matter what you did, stab them, beat them You will have used your hands to have killed another human.
With a gun, there is a degree of separation that somehow allows humans to think there is a “not as bad” level to it. You don’t have to REALLY commit to killing, just let the bullet do it for you.
In the end, all of your options are calculated risks.
EDIT: After re-reading this, I find that My recommendation for using a knife in place of a firearm (if you just *have* to) is not clear. But you need to realize that a knife is more brutal and traumatizing to the user on average than a firearm. Obviously, this is subjective to the individual, and my only “Data” on this is the calls I have responded to over about a decade as an EMT.
A lady in front of me, at the queue to cash, decided she was cleverer than me and all the fine people employed at PriceSmart.
To shop at PriceSmart you have to be a member. You do this by purchasing a membership subscription card which allows you a year of membership. For the average Joe it’s a tad costly ($265 TT) but the savings you get shopping at PriceSmart, more than makes up for it.
I’m a very economical shopper and I tend to purchase only the bare necessities and would treat myself to something nice only once in a blue moon. This lady in front of me had a cart piled with groceries and also several treats ranging from frozen salmon burgers, Lindt, Toblerone and Mars chocolates, smoked almonds and ribs. Clearly she was not a poor lady.
When we neared the cashier she suddenly turned around to stare me in the eyes. This is the conversation that followed.
Lady: You don’t mind if I use your card right?
Me: For what?
Lady: To cash.
Me: You don’t have a card?
Lady: No. Can’t afford it.
I then stared at her pile of groceries tethering at the edge of her trolley. Her bottle of Grey Goose Vodka was almost $300TT but she ‘couldn’t afford’ a $200TT (at that time) membership.
Me: It’s only $200 for the membership and it takes just a minute.
I saw her face suddenly transform into a look of complete irritation. It was as if I was asking her for the favour.
Lady: I don’t have the money right now. I just told you. People need to help each other.
Me: Well I can’t lend you my card.
Lady: Why?
Me: Because I don’t know you.
Lady: You need to know me to help me?
At that point I remained silent. I didn’t want to call her out for attempting to use random strangers for her financial convenience. I didn’t want to argue that I spent my hard earned money on this membership and she ought to make that sacrifice also rather than gorge on her four rotisserie chickens as it was not my place to say.
Instead she went to the man in front of her, giving him a sad story of how she just lost her card and this stuff is for her mother. The guy took the bait and lent her his card. She then stared at me as if to say, ‘Got anything to say now?’
Clearly this wasn’t the first time she did this and it definitely wasn’t going to be the last.
Some people may not see the big deal of what happened there but to me she is trash: a selfish and cheap opportunist. She is a leech on PriceSmart (who generates a profit from membership fees) and on the good people around her who make the necessary sacrifices for the greater good.
Edit 24.11.21Whoa. 5K upvotes. I always thought venting anger never got people anywhere. Was wise enough to avoid that lady’s scheme. Was not so wise as a teenager when I fell for a bootlegger’s silly scam. Click hereto read all about it.
No matter how bad is your life now, how disgusting your life might be, how ugly you may look and how badly life is f*cking you, never ever lose hope.
Have the positive attitude towards life and get surrounded by the positive personalities.
Never ever lose hope!
Couple of months back I met my 2 engineering friends after 2 years from engineering days. We are all living in 3 different cities as of now, somehow we managed our busy schedules and we met finally.
Sharath and Sagar, my engineering close friends. Sharath is the one who introduced me to alcohol in engineering days.
Sharath, a son of highly influential politician son. He need not to worry about money in life. He is preparing to crack “Sub Inspector” post and he is taking coaching in Hyderabad now.
Sagar, a son of a farmer. He is working in apprenticeship program for an year in a manufacturing company in Chennai for a stipend of rupees 5,000 per month. He has 2 sisters and he needs to marry them off. His father is in debt. He is from lower middle class family.
Me?
I’m too from a lower middle class.
We were sitting in the outer ring road at 10 pm that night, talking random things. Then, Sharath got a call from his girlfriend, so he went aside to talk to her in private. So, me and Sagar were having a conversation in the absence of Sharath.
Me: Sharath need not worry about life and he need not to struggle in his life to make money, because his parents are already making huge money and property for him. You (pointing to Sagar) and me should work our ass off to get settled and to become rich in life.
Sagar: Sharath’s parents didn’t give him the opportunity for him to become rich. Look how lucky me and you are, because our parents gave us the opportunity to become rich. Shouldn’t we take this as a fire in our belly?
Sagar is getting a stipend of rupees of 5,000 per month from a manufacturing company in Chennai. He is still struggling to find a job. He failed in 14 interviews so far. He has 2 sisters and he needs to bear the expenses of their marriage. His father is a farmer and is in debt.
Despite having such obstacles in life, Sagar’s confidence and attitude towards life is simply appreciable.
Back in the day, I would periodically use hydrogen peroxide to clean my ears out. This was done by my family doctor and he recommended it along with soaking my head in a bathtub of warm water.
You see, I had a problem with excessive earwax fabrication. Oh, not a common problem for certain, but I had to maintain this particular issue with my body.
So one day, my ear got stuffed up, and when I tried my hydrogen peroxide solution, it only seemed to make things worse. Instead it got more and more clogged up. Indeed, for an entire month, my ear was caked full of earwax and I was at a loss as to what to do… not so serious to go to the doctor, it’s earwax after all, but serious enough to be a real problem personally…
…enter a business trip. I went and interviewed at a hot water heater company in Tennessee. And after the interview and meal, I went to the hotel. I drew a tub full of hot water and lay down to soak in it.
I soaked for a good hour, and then I held my breath and tried to blow the water out. And then it happened!
An explosion of earwax released, and many it was a sight to behold. Where the heck was all this earwax from? I don’t know, but I must have had globs and globs of the stuff. It was amazing!
Of course it ended up falling apart in the hot water, but you could tell, it was like thick honey that turned to slimy powder. Quite the experience, I’ll tell you what.
Here’s a LEGO Millennium Falcon, retail price $100:
image 163
Here’s another LEGO Millennium Falcon, retail price $7:
image 163
Back in 2004, scammer Bill Swanberg realized that Target, Walmart, and other stores sold both of these sets. Here’s what he’d do:
First, he went into a store, and bought both sets. Totally legitimately. He took the smaller one, and scanned in the barcode. Next, he re-sized it so that it would be the same size as the barcode of the larger set— and printed out gobs of them on glossy sticker paper.
Next, he’d bring a few with him into an unsuspecting store. He’d find the LARGE version of the LEGO Millennium Falcon, and cover up the barcode with one of his stickers of the SMALL set’s barcode.
Then, he’d trot up to the register, and the associate would ring them up. “Woah, this big set only costs $7.00?” “Yeah, it must be on sale, that’s why I grabbed it, LOL!” “Wow, nice find!”
Then he’d leave, remove the stickers carefully, and sell them online at a “discounted price” of, say, $50. Everyone online was amazed at the great deal, and lined up to buy them. They expected he got a great deal on them, but 50% off didn’t seem like it was all that suspicious.
He did this for quite a while— but gradually the various stores became aware that their inventory wasn’t lining up. Target noticed the pattern in 5 different states, and eventually had a security guard stop him in a store in Portland, Oregon, after he bought 10 copies of the same Millennium Falcon set. In his car, he had over $6000 of LEGO, as well as a laptop denoting other stores in the area that he planned to visit (or had already visited).
Upon review, Target alone estimated that he had resold over $200,000 worth of their merchandise— and that he had sold over $600,000 online for the past couple of years (much of it likely being from similar scams).
Why is China so afraid of asking for help when there is a virulent virus outbreak?
In 2008, a Richter Scale 8.0 earthquake shook the mountainous Sichuan province in China. When the dust settled, ~ 70,000 people were dead. ~ 20,000 people were missing, presumably dead. ~ 375,000 people were injured. ~ 5 million people were left homeless. It’s one of the greatest natural disasters in the twenty first century. The disaster was so great, that China immediately asked for help from the rest of the world.
The US government gave ~ $4.5 million in aid, plus a guy to the Beijing Earthquake Center to look at their data. So that’s what, 80 cents for each affected person?
The rest of the world pooled together ~ $450 million, plus some emergency supplies. Most of it came from China’s immediate neighbors.
The Chinese people donated $1.5 billion within the first 2 days.
The Chinese government gave the earthquake-stricken area $130 billion. 98% was spent in the first 3 years. 100,000 PLA troops rushed into the earthquake area within 2 days to help.
This was back in 2008, when China’s GDP per capita was only about ~ $3,500 a year. Now it’s over $10,000.
So I don’t think China is “afraid” of asking for help. They are realistic. They simply don’t expect to get much help. Something symbolic, maybe, which will be much appreciated, but they must do the heavy lifting themselves. Big countries must stand on their own two feet, because you really can’t expect a bunny to lift up a fallen elephant! The elephant needs to get up on its own. Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake – Wikipedia
No normal country should count on foreign aid to solve their problems.
In the current Coronavirus outbreak, China is mostly helping other countries: It isolated and published the sequence of this new virus, developed diagnostic kits and diagnostic protocols, and shared all these with the WHO and the world. It has put in border controls aimed at keeping infected people from going abroad. It publishes treatment protocols and regular updates as doctors discover and develop their knowledge of this disease. It has put 50+million people under quarantine. It is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the global management of this novel disease.
PS: The US gave Haiti $12 billion in aid after Haiti earthquake. 2010 Haiti earthquake
Haiti is right at America’s doorstep, and the American people are very generous towards Haiti. Today Haiti looks like this:
Turned out that a big chunk of that $12 billion was the US State Department writing checks to the US Department of Defense for sending 200 guys to Haiti to “provide security”. The rest mostly went to NGOs’ hotels, jeeps, salary, and “hardship pay”. It’s a legitimate question to ask if International Aid is really worth it, not only for the Chinese People, but also for the American People as well.
“USAID has spent about $1.5 billion since the earthquake,” Johnston told Goats & Soda. “Less than a penny of every dollar goes directly to a Haitian organization.”
Where I live anything that the courts could say was a trap was illegal. I had people cutting across my property to get to the river, the previous owner had just laid razor wire coils in the bush. If anyone had got hurt on it. I would have gone to jail. So I carefully pulled it all out and placed monster boulders everywhere. No one can say a boulder is a trap.
There was a guy who had a private road leading to his place. People kept tearing it up after it rained in their 4×4 , side x side, and atvs. He had no trespassing signs, and private road signs, and people ignored them. So he stretched a steel cable between two trees, with a padlock, so he could open it. He could only put up the cable where he had two big trees close enough to the road, to string it, and enough trees to stop them from driving around the make shift gate, so it was about 50 m up his road .
A teenage girl on an ATV drove by his private road and no trespassing signs, and got knocked off her quad by the rope. They sued the land owner and won. This is in Canada, rules might be different elsewhere.
A few years ago, when I was agonizing over my future career path, my dad told me to make a list of the things in life that make me happy.
Then, split the list into two categories.
The first category includes any type of happiness that you can feel instantaneously. Sipping hot chocolate on a chilly day. Hitting the snooze button to steal another five minutes of sleep. Binge-watching the new season of your favorite show.
The second category includes any type of happiness that takes a long time to appear and a long time to fade. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Mastering difficult skills. Building closer relationships with the people you love.
Some of the items in the first category, my dad explained, might clash with the items in the second. The more hot chocolate you consume, for example, the less nutritious your diet becomes.
But a few items in on your list, just a few, might actually fit into both categories. The best painters in the world obtain joy both from the instantaneous act of painting and from the ultimate goal of becoming a world-class artist. The best soccer players love being out on the field just as much as they love becoming better athletes.
Circle these items, these things that bring you both short-term happiness and long-term happiness.
These are the things that you can spend your life doing, and never feel like you’ve worked a day.
You ever been to a Mcdonalds where the manager is an ass and the employees have had enough of it?
I once went to a Mcdonalds that had a mass quit a few hours later. I went up to the counter and ordered a Mcchicken, a regular coke, a small fry and an ice cream cone.
They take my money and a few minutes later come back with my order, which is… heavier than normal. And my ice cream cone is a foot tall. And my coke is a large.
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(It looked like this)
“Woops.” says the cashier. “Looks like we accidentally supersized your order.” she says with a wink. I could tell from the sarcastic tone that there was no accident about it.
I returned to my table and sat down, and noticed that my McChicken wasn’t alone, there was also a chicken select sandwich in there. I was a really, really poor kid at the time. The Mcydee’s dollar menu was a rare treat for me, and getting one of the main menu items was just amazing!
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Definitely still my favorite Mcdubbers sandwich.
My ‘small fry’ took up an entire large fry box, and then there was about a large fry’s worth of loose fries in there. Like the entire bag was drowning in fried potato goodness.
So intentionally giving me a lot of extra food to spite your boss? That’s the strangest way my order’s ever been messed up. Part of me wished I had ordered more.
Edit: So Quora apparently thinks I need a credential to prove that I sometimes eat fast food and sometimes get my order messed up. This is what happens when you let an AI make decisions.
I knew my dad was a Bad Ass early in my youth. I didn’t realize how much of a Bad Ass he was until last spring. You see my father served in WWll with the 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team in France and Italy. A segregated US Army regiment made up of Americans of Japanese ancestry from the US mainland and Hawaii. A large portion of these warriors came from “internment” (prison) camps from which their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and family were incarcerated. These guys had something to prove. We are AMERICANS! And prove it they did. For their valor the 100th Battalion/ 442nd Regimental Combat Team has been recognized as the most decorated unit in American history. The 100th Bn/ 442nd RCT earned more than 18,000 awards, including 9,500 Purple Hearts, 5,200 Bronze Star Medals, 588 Silver Stars, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 7 Distinguished Unit Citations, 21 Congressional Medal of Honor awards and the Congressional Gold Medal. Now that’s BAD ASS! My dad was gravely wounded in Italy and left to die on the battlefield as he was not believed to survive his wounds. When the burial detail came upon my father he was still alive and eventually recovered after a long convalescence. We know this story as it was told to my cousin by the soldier who found my father still alive. Unfortunately I never had the pleasure to meet his as he passed a few years ago. My father was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and other awards for his efforts. He was never better than 70% disabled and eventually upgraded to 100%. So I had the opportunity to travel to France and Italy last year on a tour that follows in the footsteps of these American heroes. I walked where they walked, saw the trenches whey they lay and climbed the slope’s and mountains that they climbed. But I did it in the daylight. They did it at night in the cover of darkness. These were the mountains near Carrara Italy. Impressive just to do this in daylight. Crazy to think it could be done at night! That’s when I knew how much of a BAD ASS my father and the Nisei warriors of the 100th Bn/ 442nd RCT were. I could not be more proud. R.I.P. dad. PFC Roy T. Tsutsui Co. F 442nd RCT
Whenever I was in public school, I had fairly good grades, I didn’t study much so it was crazy how good I was doing. This all lasted until 4th grade, whenever I got put in this horrible woman’s class. I was the kind of child to speak my mind and get SUPER excited about things. This woman (not calling her a teacher because she doesn’t DESERVE the title) did not LIKE that. She decided to target me specifically for her relentless bullying of literal infants. Anytime I would get excited about anything, she would tell me to flip my card (yknow, the stupid elementary punishment bullshit). Anytime I would do something that would be considered out of place in a classroom, she’d make me flip my card. She would rally my classmates to bully me too.
As the school year went on and the bullying from the woman and my classmates got worse, I started falling into a deeper pit of my own depression stemmed from the abandonment of my dad, over-protective (yet still somehow neglectful) mom, and the bullying I had to suffer at school. This made my grades drop HARD. Specifically in my math and science class, as I was not being properly taught by this woman.
Every time we would get to a new part of our science workbook, we would get given a science study guide that we had to fill out ourselves that she would then grade and fix whatever mistakes we had made. A month prior to the specific incident I’m about to tell you, my mom had noticed how bad my grades had dropped and made sure I studied (which did NOT help). She always made sure I had my study guides and stuff I got from school.
It was a regular school day for me, we had just gotten a new study guide that we were going to fill out. The woman decided to put us in pairs to do them so we could discuss the answers and stuff. She put me in a pair with the nicest girl in the class (picture the human incarnate of an excited golden retriever) and we began working on it. We finished around the same time the others did and submitted our papers. After we all finished, the woman started grading our papers. Whenever she had finished, she handed most of them out, but she held on to two of them, my friend and I’s. She waved them around in the air and said “THESE two don’t have any names… Oh well… Who wants to play 20 pickup?” and then ripped them to shreds and threw the remains on the floor. My friend and I were crushed (and fucking humiliated) as we both really needed those papers and here we were, watching our classmates pick up and fight over who could get the most pieces like it was some sort of game played at a birthday party.
A few minutes later, she picked up her copy of the study guide and said to us, “I’ve got one more left. I’m thinking of a number and whichever one of you can get closest to it wins the paper.”
I ended up winning and she gave it to me, which I instantly started working on. I figured she would want me to redo it as soon as she gave it to me. About a minute passed and she walked to my desk, swiped it from me and gave it to my friend saying that I “Wasn’t paying attention”. I felt like absolute shit the whole day.
My mom had asked me where my study guide was, and I told her what happened. She went on an absolute RAMPAGE.
Luckily the next parent-teacher conference was pretty soon after and she didn’t want to embarrass me by showing up to the school while my classmates were there. I don’t know exactly what happened during the meeting between her and my mom as I was sat outside the classroom. All that I know is that whenever the door opened, the woman looked pale and terrified and my mom had her classic murder look that she would get after laying heavily into someone.
She never told me what she had said or done, but that woman never dared to bother me again. She didn’t even like LOOKING at me. Anytime I did something she didn’t like, she would glare at me like I just killed her entire family and set her house on fire and reply something passive aggressive.
My mom ended up finding out that she had done this to other kids too at other schools. Pretty sure the bitch was on tenure though, so there wasn’t anything we could’ve really done.
I still see her around town though and she acts overly excited to see me. The first time I had seen her after I finished 4th grade, I was about 13 and was super socially anxious and had panic attacks whenever I was reminded of that experience, I was at the dollar store with my grandma and the woman came up to me and started talking, I of course was trying to keep my shit together and not start having a full blown panic attack so I was very quiet. She said “Aw, what’s wrong? Are you shy now?”, all of my fear was replaced with rage and I had to stop myself from giving her the sickest right hook of her life. I regret not doing it while I was still a kid and wouldn’t have had very many repercussions for it.
SO, I’m not going to name-drop her, as I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, but I will say that if you live in or are planning on moving to Sabine parish, LISTEN to your kids if they tell you about bullying from their classmates or any of the school staff. Hell, do that even if you DON’T live in this area.
Burkina Faso’s President Has Good News for Africa but Very Bad News for the West
My parents started middle class and worked their way to the 1%.
It isn’t this huge party. But there are some basic things you don’t worry about as much.
It is weird because I didn’t grow up wealthy at all. And had a strict-as-hell dad.
At some point after I left home, things really ramped up. My dad left the military and became a high ranking exec with SAP.
My mom started a vineyard at their farm. And sold off a lot of great real estate investments she’d made over the years.
But you would never know it if you bumped into them at the store or something. They have very humble personalities. If you went to their home however..
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When I wake up in the morning in their guest room I get to enjoy a view like this:
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When I visit they spend most of their time working around the house and on the farm. We don’t really sit still much. And even when we are it is because we are working on something. We are worker-bees.
Also, I think everyone has a misconception as to how wealthy the top 1% is. 10 years ago, even I had the impression that 1%ers don’t work hard and take 9 vacations a year. I think it is just different if you started small and got there in your middle age and have kids.
At that point, you are more concerned with managing everything and making sure your kids are doing OK.
(Maybe that it is .01 percenters that do all that laying around by the pool…)
Either way I love visiting my parents, but every time I get home here in Florida my house feels really really small! 🙂
My last name is Warehouse, just like the building. This has led to lots of interesting things, like getting calls at my work about finding things at our district warehouse or getting my account banned on Quora back when they cared if you used a fake name. It also means I get weird deliveries.
One day a big cardboard box showed up addressed to my wife, so I left it on the table without really looking at it. A few days later it was still untouched, so I asked her why she hadn’t opened it yet.
“That’s not mine, it’s got sports stuff all over it.”
And it did! Now that I looked, the box clearly had a Nike logo on it. And on closer inspection, its address tag was a mess. There was a weird poorly printed label that said “redirect” that had my wife’s name and our address in California on it, slapped over a very official looking original label that said the box was bound for a warehouse in New Jersey.
And that’s how I ended up with a bow of 24 pairs of XXL Nike football gloves meant for the New York giants.
In 1981 I worked as a computer operator for a company, then owned by Tex Schramm (owner of the Dallas Cowboys). There was a young woman, from a well to do family and graduate of Radford, working there. She was really into women’s lib.
There was also an older gentleman, long past the possible retirement age. One day I was in the lobby as the young woman, who I had recently begun dating, was ready to leave. The older gentleman was leaving, and held the door for her.
She lit into him. “Just because I’m a lady, you don’t have to hold the door for me.”
The response: “My dear Joanne, I do not hold the door for you because you are a lady. That would be presumptuous of me. I hold the door for you because I am a gentleman.”
In my second year at my current job, a lady was hired to replace my senior who had resigned.
The job was in a public office and for the most part was quite easy going. Somebody off the streets could learn the essentials in just a few hours.
The lady who came had seniority and several years more experience than me working at a different branch. I therefore expected her to have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with me.
‘How does this work again?’
‘Did I do this right?’
‘How about you be the one to do that? You’re so good at it.’
‘Can you show me how to do (such-and-such) again?’
The lady transferred from a location that had the exact same type of system and technology as mine yet she had not a clue how to do anything!
How was this woman in a senior position? She didn’t know anything about the job. Was she dumb?
A week of ‘training’ had passed and she didn’t really learn anything and had to be supervised at all times. Before I could find out how it was that she was so slow she suddenly vanished.
She stopped turning up at work and calls to her phone went unanswered. I sent an email to HR explaining that she had gone AWOL. They gave some half-assed reply. A few months later, after she had long been forgotten, I get a frantic letter from HR saying that they have been paying her salary and they’ve just become aware that she has not been turning up to work.
‘No shit,’ I say in my mind.
HR investigates and finds out that she had accepted another job elsewhere the entire time and was gladly accepting two salaries. HR demanded that she return the unearned salary. She said she would but she was going through financial distress at the moment.
She never returned a cent. HR washed their hands of the matter and kept it hush hush.
Turns out she wasn’t dumb at all.
So my answer to the question ‘what sets off red flags on an employee’s first day?’
When I was small, my parents sent me to my grandparents (who lived in a rural area) every summer so they could look after me when school was out.
My grandpa was born late 191x or early 192x – even he didn’t remember exactly.
When I was 6 years old, I started going to elementary school which started to have summer assignments. So, when my parents sent me to my grandparents for the “vacation”, I brought my textbooks and books with me to study. One day, I remember, I brought a book to my grandpa and asked him for some help with my summer homework. He smiled, “Oh, sweetie, I can’t help you with that!”. “Why?!?!”, I was surprised, he’d never said “No” to me. A second of hesitation, then he said, “I don’t know how to read”
It didn’t make sense to my 6-year-old me; but later, when I grew up, I knew, it was the result of war and poverty, my grandpa never went to school.
Anyway, “But you know EVERYTHING!”, the little me was shocked and questioned him. He stroked my hair, “Ah, I just don’t know how to read texts in the book. I can read other things. I can read leaves to know their trees. I can read the soil to know what I need to do to get more produces. I can read the river to know if it’s safe to go down and play. I can read the night sky to know if tomorrow it will be rain or shine”, he explained to me.
A light bulb went off in my head; he taught me to ‘read’ some of those things, why didn’t I teach him to read texts? So, I offered him, “Do you want to study with me, grandpa?”.
So, I started to be his ‘teacher’. I taught him a, b, c. He studied, then forgot everything in the next summer because he didn’t use it frequently enough; so I had to teach him again.
I taught him to read, every summer, until he passed away.
I have had a number of jobs in my time. I’ve been a framing carpenter, finish carpenter, furniture maker, the army, and being in the office in the construction industry as a project manager for the last 16 years.
Working in the trades can indeed be very lucrative, and I know a number of plumbers and welders that do significantly better than me financially, but from someone that has worked in the trades and in the corporate office, there are a lot of benefits of the office world that help pull people away from going into the trades.
The first is simply being warm when it’s cold, dry when it’s raining and cool when it is hot. It’s pretty tough going to work everyday to be freezing cold all day or burning up hot. Secondly, you can do stuff after work without needing to take a shower or change clothes first. Third, you don’t beat up your body so much working in an office. I’m 47 so still well short of retirement age and I really can’t imagine doing the type of work I did in my 20’s all day, every day. That was tough work and I got injured a lot and had to just suck it up and work through it. Injuries these days take a lot longer to heal too.
Occasionally I get all nostalgic about walking floor joists 30 feet up with a 16ft 2×8 on my shoulder, then I’ll have a flashback to what that actually feels like doing it every day and appreciate very much my AC and roof and clean clothes. My nostalgia forgets doing that same joist walk with feet numb from the cold, or sweat in my eyes or a lingering injury.
The trades are good, solid, well paying professions, but if you have any other alternatives they are definitely a young person’s game. The people I see my age still working in the trades (doing the work, not management like me) are physically beaten down for the most part with bad backs, bad knees, and a collection of scars that make anyone take notice.
The Duran: Neocons want WAR in Middle East and Israel, the US will LOSE Big
https://youtu.be/k8AHFfv-pA4
Serbian Skillet Pork (Muckalica — Yugoslavia)
Muckalica
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds boneless pork shoulder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup water
3 medium onions, sliced
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 medium green bell pepper, cut into strips
2 ounces feta cheese, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
Hot cooked rice
Instructions
Trim fat from pork. Cut pork into 1/2-inch slices; cut slices into 1/2-inch strips. Heat oil in skillet until hot. Cook and stir pork in oil over medium heat until brown, about 15 minutes; drain. Add water, onions, tomato, salt, paprika, pepper and red pepper. Cover and simmer until pork is tender, about 30 minutes, adding water if necessary.
Add green pepper. Cover and simmer until green pepper is crisp-tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Top with cheese.
When I was about 21 or 22, I worked for this remodeling contractor. My dad does remodels and has rental properties, and I’ve always been a DIY type of guy, so I learned young and had about 10 years of experience at the time. Anyway, one day I was at work, and the boss nor the crew lead could figure out how to solve a problem with some vinyl flooring and the customer was there watching them for a good half hour or so. I repeatedly tried to make suggestions but just kept getting ignored. Finally I just stepped up and tried something and it worked. The next day the owner told me that work was slow and he didn’t need me to come in. That same afternoon he called me and let me go due to “not having the quality of work that his company is known for”. I’m sure he was just upset that I made him look like an ass in front of a customer. Anyway, fast forward to a week later, this customer had a family member that was also gonna get some work done by the same company. The previous customer gave the family member my Facebook info and she contacted me and asked if I could do a job for her. About 3 days in, my old boss came and the look on his face when he saw me doing the job he came to bid for was priceless.
1. Don’t call someone more than twice continuously. If they don’t pick up your call that mean they have something more important to attend to.
2. When someone drops something on the floor by mistake or drops food from the plate or doesn’t know how to use a knife/fork don’t stare at them. The same goes to people sneezing, coughing or even an uncontrollable fart. It’s an involuntary reaction.
3. Always skip using the washroom beside the occupied one. It makes it uneasy for the person in the occupied washroom as well as yourself if you occupy the one right next to theirs.
4. If you’re talking to someone and notice any of the following, they’re trying to end the conversation:
Their eyes keep darting away.
They angle their body away from you.
They give you rapid one-word answers.
5. When someone you know has an obvious change in appearance, e.g., weight gain/loss, bald spot, acne. never comment on it until they talk about it to you, they already know what is happened to them.
6. If a colleague tells you they have a doctors appointment, don’t ask what it’s for, just say hope you’re ok. If they want to talk about it they will and you don’t put them in the uncomfortable position of having to tell you their personal illness.
7. Treat the cleaner with the same respect as the CEO. Nobody is impressed at how rudely you can treat someone below you but people will notice if you treat them with respect.
8. Do not make plans in front of those you are not involving.
9. When meeting someone after a long time, unless they want to talk about it, don’t ask them their age and salary.
10. When a friend/colleague offers you some food, you can politely say No. But, don’t do this after tasting or smelling it. It’s an insult to the one who has offered it to you.
This is John Eisenman. He lost his daughter to s-exual trafficking. She was sold for $1,000 in Seattle Washington. He did what a father should do and researched, investigated and found out about her abduction. He RESCUED her HIMSELF. He found out the person who sold her into trafficking was her 19 year old boyfriend. He met up with him, abducted him, bludgeoned and stabbed him to death in Nov, 2020. The authorities found him [dead AF boyfriend] in Oct 2021 in the trunk of the car he abandoned. John Eisenman sits in jail knowing his daughter is safe and growing up after he has already lived 60 years of his life. I bet you, he rests easy. Live your life to the fullest. He did his absolute best to make sure his child have the opportunity to do the same no matter what the sacrifice.
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My POV:- I think justice can’t be black or white, it’s a greyish territory. I’m not a supporter of taking revenge but rather law doing the job. Although, we all know how deeply fukced up is our law and order.
The decade of the 1950s was the time of my well-remembered childhood. Some of the memorable un-nice features follow:
Coal shuttles in basement windows to fill the coal bins for the furnace that kept you alive in subzero weather. The loud roaring rattle of the coal can never be forgotten. My wife grew up in destroyed Berlin where the kids snuck onto the train tracks to steal coal for cooking and winter heat, especially before 1950.
Ice trucks for the “ice box,” which was the refrigerator of the day. Great fun to persuade the iceman to chip you a sliver (possibly unsanitary) in the steaming summer.
Raking and burning leaves either in the curb or in our own home trash bin (a large ugly concrete “bathtub” for burning all wastes) beside the separated garage.
After we graduated from paying marbles on the sidewalks, the never-forgotten aroma of the lightly powdered flat bubble gum accompanying Topps baseball cards used for flip-card contests. Still remember the rules.
Friends and relatives died a lot. Lost a cousin to polio despite her father being chief of staff of the largest hospital in St. Louis. Lost two more to a house fire and others to asthma. I narrowly avoided rheumatic fever and a close call with total vision loss from measles. Number 1 brother developed Type 1 diabetes, but that was hereditary (skips a generation); lasted a LONG time.
Turning on the lights to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night and watching hundreds of roaches scurry across the floor into the corners and cracks.
Sticky asphalt from the tarred streets that would permanently ruin any carpet in a snooty home.
Kids (and adults) hitch-hiked. I hitch-hiked regularly many miles to high school and college and back rather than take buses with long cold/hot waits and transfers. Just after the 50s, noticed how remarkably easier it was to hitch a ride when in my ROTC uniform.
Teenagers still in school who had never worked had no vote in national elections.
No air conditioning. Vornado floor fans, window fans blowing over block of ice, or car rides with windows open down to “Cool Valley” (yes, a real town) a low-altitude area with much lower temperatures were our only options when temperatures soared far over 100 degrees and humidity was ~80%.
Construction sites were wonderful if dangerous playgrounds for kids. Unsafe, with nails sticking out, deep ditches and holes to avoid. Taught caution and the value of tetanus shots. Learned aromas like the smell of wet concrete, rebar, freshly cut wood; mountains of dirt for King of the Hill games, playing “war” with wooden toy 1904 Springfield rifles in literal miles of dug-up ground for the interstate highways.
Homes and office buildings were insulated with asbestos, long before attorneys and asbestos-removal firms became millionaires from it.
Local stenches were many and varied. Worst were from the fish processing plants and cattle/pig stockyards, with the “nicest” smells being chemical fumes from riverside plants.
Working on the USS Admiral, was required to check for “floaters” under the port paddlewheel every morning by opening the trash slot over the water.
Learned to water-ski on the turd-filled muddy Mississippi.
US Army chemical warfare testers sprayed my hometown with zinc cadmium sulfide, a fluorescent additive of some kind and a possibly radioactive agent to secretly study possible bio/chem weapon vectors … later explained “to protect us from potential Soviet attack”.
Nearby communities (Weldon Spring, West Lake and Berkeley … but not CA) were being contaminated by toxic waste buried by one of my future employers after they processed the uranium for the first nuclear weapons. Not done on my watch; however, as an adult I did work at a number of the other tainted sites: their original chemical plant and their radiological branch.
Cap guns: actual gunpowder explosives were loaded in a tight roll to be fired by your Lone Ranger or Cisco Kid cap gun. Bangs and sparks with gunpowder’s sulpuric stench …
Bows and arrows (with real points).
Jungle gyms were tall blocks of hard unadorned steel pipes over bare dirt dusty in summer and frozen in winter.
Complete and utter obedience to our family’s Commanding Officer who actually posted duty rosters for my 4 siblings (girl was exempted) which I was required to enforce as senior NCO.
Amused myself by playing war battle games with bottlecaps. Falstaff, Budweiser and a few Stag … strewn from the six-pack dad chugged every night. Didn’t realize he was a drunk until years later.
Black and white TV with the Indian-head test pattern after midnight when all stations went “off the air.”
TV showed stereotypical characters in every show like: the Howdy Doody Show; Kukla, Fran & Ollie; Texas Bruce’s Wranglers’ Club; Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Zorro, etc.
Friday night fights: boxing matches every weekend.
Racism was acknowledged but not celebrated. Had black school/playmates (parochial school) and babysitters who all lived in a nearby section of the city.
Racial mockery was the basis of much TV/radio humor. Amos & Andy on the radio, Milton Berle’s burlesque schticks, Pat & Mike Irish insults, Sid Caesar’s fake Japanese babble, Jose Jimenez jibes at Mexicans on the Steve Allen Show … don’t remember German accents being considered “funny” until Hogan’s Heroes.
Classmate who later became a Japanese citizen used to play records advocating anti-Communism from John Birch (didn’t know of his Society then). Nothing mean or nasty that I remember from those lectures but quite un-PC now, I guess.
BB guns: never permitted in our home, with 4 boy, 1 girl; but vet dad built us an actual shooting range for my 13th birthday present, a .22 bolt-action Winchester … a literal deep sandbox at one end of the basement under a steel sheet canted at a 45 degree angle. Access controlled by dad, of course.
Joined my school’s rifle club in 1959 when they (not me) won the national championship with open sight .22s mounted on Garand 30–30 war surplus stocks. Kids shot rifles as a matter of indifference. Safely too, because safety was taught, responsibility was demanded … and disobedience was both unthinkable and unacceptable.
History will one day see how the U.S., its dog nations, the EU, its fellow colonialists and native slaughtering nations and its slave nations, treatment of China. Is a modern version of African slavery, Nazi Crimes, barbaric colonialism by the Europeans and the Savage rape and murder of Nanking!
How do they treat China and the Chinese race. Terrible, obnoxious and despicable. What more to say! Slurring at every turn, blindly accusing China without facts, evidence and proof calling them copy cats, stealing intellectual property, cheating, for being aggressive and threatening nations, genocide that never happen, causing Covid! All are no different from the Nazi blaming of the Jews!
Just backed by a pack of lies. And using coercion and bribery to get a dissident or two to cast doubt on China! If you are one of the group I single out please stop being a pawn or a parrot in these fake news. China won’t yield to these ludicrousness and shameful act of throwing shit!
To me you can accuse China of not bordering about its cosmetic cover up of its desire to ensure that the century of humiliation can never happen again and that it will do everything in its power to get back it’s rightful place in history. Remember how thousands of black people are wrongly accused by the white people for all sorts of thing and them lynch them!
History will show the truth that the U.S. and the west are doing the same to the Chinese. Sure without the lynching!
I owned a flying school and had a receptionist who was good with the customers.
One day I got a phone call at about 4PM from a student asking why we had shut early. I assured him we hadn’t as we had people flying till 7 that night. He told me he was standing outside and the doors were locked.
When I came in next day I checked CCTV and sure enough she had locked up at 3:30 whilst people were still flying. She returned at just before 5:30. I checked the day before and the same thing had happened. She locked up at 3:30 and returned at 5:30. It was near the end of the month so I waited till the end of the month to see what hours she had claimed for.
I also called a government employer hotline that is set up in the UK to give free help and advice. After explaining the situation they told me she was in breach of her contract, and it was gross misconduct which is a sackable offence. They said she was “stealing time” from me. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt so I decided to listen to her before I took action. The helpline advised that if her answers weren’t agreeable then I should suspend her on full pay whilst I investigated.
Sure enough she had claimed for her full allowance on her payslip so I called her into my office to explain herself. She claimed to have “forgotten” to take it off her hours worked. I was more concerned about leaving the building unattended whilst we had students still flying. What happened if we had an emergency? She refused to answer me so I was left with no option but to suspend her.
I studied the CCTV for previous 30 days and she had done it for almost 50% of her shifts! Despite this I didn’t want to lose her, the students loved her.
So I invited her back for a formal interview and offered to allow her to bring a witness. She declined the representation. I explained that the interview was being recorded and I had my solicitor on speaker phone to listen and ensure we both were acting within the law. It was to protect both of us.
I asked her for her reasons and she said that she had been visiting her boyfriend and having lunch together. He was an instructor pilot for me but had never left mid-shift. I then explained about why it was wrong to leave the premises whilst we still had aircraft in the air. She just shrugged her shoulders. I asked her to wait outside whilst I spoke to my legal adviser.
Truth be told I couldn’t afford to lose her. I had previously told the helpline that and they recommended “based on my explanation” that I give her a final written warning. This should be enough to make her realise it was wrong. I decided to go down this route.
After 5 minutes I invited her back into the room to give her the final written warning and a good explanation why this was happening. As I said to her “Thank you for your patience,” she replied, “Are you really doing this?”
“I am.”
Then she erupted! Quite a verbal assault against me! Then she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me saying, “I can’t believe you have blown this out of proportion, here is my 30 days notice, and as you owe me some holidays I will be taking them so I don’t have to work with you any more.”
I just calmly said, “Don’t worry about the 30 days notice, you won’t need it because I’m letting you go for gross misconduct!”
*screaming at me*“YOU CANT DO THAT!”
*a tiny voice on the telephone*”Yes he can, you stole from him and he is within his rights to terminate your contract with immediate effect and without compensation. Now if I was you I would leave quietly or Mr Savage could have the police involved for theft.”
A week later I received a letter asking for a reference as she had found a new job!
While writing this answer, I called my wife (I’m at work) and asked her to send me the photo of this knife from our kitchen. I hate using it, especially while cutting soft veggies. It is dull, useless and cheap-ass piece of cutlery. I bought it for $0.50.
With a kitchen knife exactly like this one shown in the picture.
I was going to work, when I came across a domestic street brawl. Men and women screaming, abusing and beating each other. I remember a wooden ladle in action too.
It was too awkward for me not to do something. I had no cellphone back then as it was too expensive and uncommon.
I tried calming them down with help of a few neighbors.
And during that peaceful effort… a young man out of nowhere attacked me with this kitchen knife. The swing was so swift and forceful that it scared me if this connects at all. I tried to grab his hand but the knife pierced my palm and popped out from back of my wrist.
Now I wish to stress couple of issues here.
A knife is a knife and it does not matter if it is big, small, sharp, dull, scary or funny looking. When used with intentions to inflict damage… it will damage the body inflicting stab and slash wounds, and might very well cause fatality.
And even more importantly…
This was quite a harmless bout, typical domestic quarrel between two neighboring families that usually just ends up with them receiving a bruise here and there, a noisy chest thumping exercise for the most part that goes around here over stupid disagreements.
Still…the moment I saw that guy approaching me with knife, his glowered and gloomy expressions alarmed me of imminent danger, I understood this is not just a warning… this guy wants to hurt me. To anyone else, he might not seem to be posing a palpable peril towards the cop but I as a cop perceived the incoming.
I was unarmed; I could not protect myself intelligently.
What if I was armed that day? To whom do I look up for the use of deadly force authorization?
That’s no one else’s but my decision to make.
It is my judgment call even if it is objective or weak in other’s opinion. If I have reasons to believe the person is a threat and warnings don’t serve the purpose, I have to neutralize the threat. I don’t want to hurt anyone; that’s the last and the most distasteful option for any cop in all sincerity. But at the same time, I want to protect myself and others with my best effort and ability.
I assure you, it could have been a fatal blow.
The department would have lost one of theirs, my mother would have gone crazy upon hearing of this news. All of this because of someone’s absurd, idiotic and senseless aggression.
I don’t deserve that.
No cop deserves that.
So in my opinion, if a knife-wielding person advances towards the cop and chooses to ignore the warnings – and sends an apprehension that he actually might attack the cop –
I’d consider that a legitimate threat.
And using deadly force to neutralize that threat is justifiable legally and morally.
We were married in Las Vegas over a weekend, never had a honeymoon, and it appears there wouldn’t be much romance or emotion, which appeared to suit both of us fine.
My life goals had always been to earn as many degrees as possible and to have a significant career. When my husband said he wanted to apply to law school, I stuck around to find out what would be happening.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, I was working on my masters’ degree and pregnant – not in my life goals, but I was accepting of the situation. We were both graduate students, living off student loans with no money for anything.
When I woke on our anniversary day, my husband presented me with a six page long poem he had been writing for days. He called it “FANGS for the memories.” The poem was written in the cadence of the song “Thanks for the memories” which would have been way too sentimental for either of us.
It’s been 45 years later and I still have not only that poem but also the poem he wrote on our 10th anniversary.
This past year we celebrated our 50th anniversary and not one celebration. But I do have two amazing sentimental and romantic poems to read and reread over and over – I will never forget those!
Once in China, I visited one of my students. he was a factory owner and we got along well. I was teaching him some English. And since my background is Engineering, we hit it off. So he came and picked my wife and I up and we spent the afternoon at his factory, had tea, and a good time.
He manufactured buttons. Particularly buttons for bluejeans.
Then came dinner, and it was nice… but… his wife really treated myself and my wife very poorly. In her mind I was “only” a teacher. Someone who you give a face-saving level of respect but who you consider to be beneath you… as they are unable to get “real work”.
She made many, perhaps ten “veiled” cut-downs, and almost-insults. Every word out of her mouth dripped with disdain. He made a big point of pointing out her nice bag, and their car, and the nice expensive restaurant. Very pretentious.
In her eyes… I was “only” a teacher.
My wife, who came from Wenzhou and who’s father was at one time a billionaire, was incensed, and vowed never to visit them again.
I mean it. NEVER. EVER.
I had a few classes with him and then cut it short, and I never saw him again. He was a good guy, and I liked him a lot. But the way his wife treated us was unforgivable.
…
People treat everyone as some one worthy. Take you time with them. Appreciate them exactly as they are.
He didn’t have much money, but he was such a trier. He didn’t just have a good work ethic; he wanted to give something back to the world and make a difference.
I loved spending time with him doing things that cost very little or nothing—walking around the city eating street food, reading to each other, wandering into art galleries, admiring the architecture. But mostly, I liked just being with him, talking. I enjoyed being with him in silence as well. What touched me the most is how courteously he treated those with less than him. He always had change for the homeless and never treated anyone as though they meant less than he did. he had genuine class, the kind of class that you’re just born with.
I never told him any of this, and that’s how I missed out, because that’s the type of woman he was looking for.
Years later, he told me that I came across as sweet, but ultimately shallow and absurdly spoiled. A debutante with a smashing wardrobe. I really blew it when I suggested that we take a trip to Belize together—he politely declined but again, much later, told me that he found that particularly audacious. It had never occurred to me that he didn’t have the money to take a vacation abroad, because actually, I was really spoiled. It had never occurred to me that most people couldn’t afford to take international vacations.
I probably overlooked a lot of men with his qualities. They wouldn’t have been him, though. He was unique. Unforgettable.
I would do everything over differently, given the chance. But missing out on the best thing ever is the big price you pay for being young and dumb.
This man was the most feared, and desired once upon a time
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He was an airline steward who had lovers in cities all over the world. Whenever he had a layover he spent it in a bathhouse. Over 50% of the first HIV positive men either had sex with him, or someone he was intimate with. He was known as patient zero. He knew he was infected, and had the kaposi sarcoma lesions all over his taut tan body. He had unprotected sex anyway. I knew him from Christopher street in the early 80s. He left a trail of destruction across the decade
The most important plane on the Ford or Nimitz class carriers isn’t the F18 or F35.
It is this:
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The E-2 Hawkeye.
There is no way to launch a 20–30-ton 10,000 HP turboprop off a carrier without catapults. And without the eye in the sky, there is no way to achieve operational parity with an American CBG.
The AEW system allows the admiral to detect threats at least 1,000 km away, and it is a prerequisite to establish air and sea superiority, if not dominance, within the sphere of sensor coverage.
And catobar was the original pursuit of the PLAN, except the program was staged, from a retrofitted foreign ski-jump cruiser, to an evolved indigenous ski-jump carrier, to a conventionally powered emals catobar flattop. The next two carriers will be a sister ship of the Fujian, conventionally powered, and China’s first nuclear powered flattop.
When I was in High School, I worked for my dad fixing computers. It was a great job for me as a teenager because I was making good money on commission.
When I was a senior in High School, right before I turned 18, he merged his company with one that my brother and another guy( Dave) started. My dad included me as an employee.
My dad and brother were both cool with me working service calls but Dave was a prick. Some rules that he came up with for me?
I wanted to take some time off for a school trip. My dad said yes. During the trip I ignored pages and phone calls from Dave during that time. New rule, I had to ask Dave for permission to take time off. Went over really well when I ignored him and went on a family cruise a few months later and didn’t clear it with him.
My niece was a baby. Dave’s sister was the receptionist/ babysitter. There was a day where I had no school and she had some place to be. My brother asked me to stay and watch my niece and answer phone calls. I decided to repair a couple of computers in the shop while babysitting my niece. I gave the invoices to my brother, who signed off on them with no issue. New Rule, If I was answering phone’s/babysitting my niece, I could not perform billable work AT ALL. Went out the window again.
When I was employed by my dad only, we used to tag faulty parts by placing them in the box the new part came in and taping it closed with masking tape. We would the write BAD (PART NAME) (WHY PART WAS BAD) on the tape. I changed out a bad power supply and did followed the procedure. He grabbed the power supply and tried using it. New Rule, We had to use tags instead of tape because he was too dumb to realize that there was a piece of tape closing the box stating what was wrong with the part.
Last, and for me the dumbest. I had to submit my resignation to him only. My dad and brother understood why I was resigning. I was shipping out for boot camp and I wanted to take a few weeks to pack and just relax before leaving. Just to spite him I typed up a nice resignation letter to my dad and my brother. I handed them each a copy then I looked at Dave. I told him I had two letters for him. I flipped him the bird and said “FU” My dad told me it was the funniest resignation he ever saw.
The addictive abilities of prescription painkillers.
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My sister was addicted to prescription painkillers. (And meth and probably other things as well.) She was so addicted that she was arrested for writing fake prescriptions and couldn’t attend my wedding because it was out of state and she was under house arrest. I figured that she and people like her were just weak-willed or depressed and looking for an escape.
I had little sympathy for people who were addicted to things that were legal. If it was really that addictive, it wouldn’t be legal, right? It’s not like it’s cocaine. They’re just painkillers.
I was wrong.
When I was 27, I pulled a muscle in my back. It was so painful that I couldn’t walk straight. I’m not entirely sure how I even made it to the doctor’s office, but as soon as I hobbled in, they said: “Pulled muscle, huh?” I suppose I had the tell-tale walk of a man who tried to lift too much without bending his knees.
Anyway, the doctor prescribed me two prescription drugs. I believe one was a muscle relaxer, and one was a painkiller.
I recognized the names as soon as he said them. I knew these were some of the things my sister was addicted to.
And within 30 minutes of getting home and taking the first pills, I could see why she was addicted to them. I didn’t judge her and anyone else who was addicted to them as “weak-willed” anymore.
I remember lying on my bed, after being in intense pain for a day, suddenly feeling great! Not just the muscle pain, but every physical and emotional pain I had seemed to disappear. The stress of work and bills and being a husband and father just went away. The bed felt like a cloud, and I felt like I was floating. I was so happy.
When the first round of pills started to wear off after a few hours, I started to get depressed. Not just because the physical pain was coming back, but because some of my emotional worries and stress started to creep back in to my mind. I started to think about how much income I would lose from taking a few days off for my back pain. I started to think about the cost of the pills. I started to think about the domestic chores I’d been neglecting during my prescription painkiller trip.
But mostly I was thinking about if it was safe to take the next round of pills yet. The doctor said every six hours, and it had only been four hours. Could my liver handle it? Did I care if it could or not?
Then it hit me: I need to stop this before it gets worse. I didn’t want to end up like my sister. I liked my stressful life just fine. I didn’t need to escape from it.
So I quit taking the prescription pills, and decided to go with over-the-counter painkillers, stretching, and patience instead.
When I got back to work after a few days, a coworker offered to buy the leftover pills from me. But I didn’t want to be “that guy.” I didn’t want ANYTHING to do with those things anymore. So I flushed them down the toilet.
But I had newfound sympathy for people who can’t quit them. I understand the attraction they have.
My sister ended up overdosing on morphine a few years later. When we cleaned out her house after her death, she had over 300 empty prescription pill bottles in her room. The worst part was that those were just the empty ones. Some of her addicted “friends” had already come into her room and got the full bottles before we got there.
I’m a current employee of my local ALDI in America and have been there for two months. Knowing that, let me tell you this: ALDI would give big-brother a run for their money.
I work part-time on weekends and so as a result, I am almost always the primary or backup cashier because so much foot traffic is going on in the store and let me tell you; everything you do at the register is timed. They want “efficiency” and if you do not meet the standards, you will be held accountable for it.
For example, ALDI wants at the most only two seconds between transactions. When I say between transactions, I mean the time when you end one transaction and begin another. They’ll let you get away with three seconds at the store I work for but if you hit four seconds, you are failing the standards.
Every item has multiple bar codes on it so you can ring it up from almost any angle, but this also means stuff can get scanned by accident very easily. Yet they do not want any void items on the ticket. Ten voids is not acceptable in a normal day of work (eight hours, expected foot traffic on the weekend) they want to them to be around zero to three.
And lastly, the ringing speed. For a minimum standard the company demands that the cashier be able to ring 1,200 items per hour. If you can be faster, they’ll push you for it. For my part, being that I’m a part-timer, I’ve managed to ring only 1,000 items per hour. My boss tells me that I’m too slow and “will have to be held accountable for my efficiency” as per the rules of ALDI.
So if it seems like the employees are rushing, trust me, they are. But it’s literally not their fault. It’s ALDI that has the crazy expectations that they are required to meet for fear of losing their job. You wonder why they pay so well? Because the physical demands of the job are insane. If you’re not ringing things up at the 1.2k speed, you’re on the floor, pulling items, stocking shelves or crushing boxes into bales. Injury risk is high as well, hence the benefits offered. So please, speaking as a customer service worker for this business, try not to be upset at the employees for the standards the higher up sets. It’s not their fault that they have to act like that, it’s ALDI’S.
Back in the early 90s, I was in a parking lot walking to a store. A woman was alone and walking about 15 yards ahead of me. Suddenly, a car pulls up next to her and a guy jumps out and grabs her by the hair to his car. She’s screaming for help as he’s yelling “Get in the car, bitch!”. She’s screaming for help as he’s spewing insults at her. She had her hands on the car pushing away as he’s trying to cram her through the driver’s door. I run up to the car yelling “police officer! STOP!” ALL of had was my wallet badge. I wasn’t carrying a gun at the time but I couldn’t let him try to abduct her. He hears me and turns around to see me holding my badge. He let’s go of her and jumps back in his car and takes off. Someone in one of the stores comes out saying they’ve called the police. I stay with the woman until the local police arrive.
The guy was the woman’s ex-boyfriend. I give the police my information and leave. I never heard anything about the situation again. That was also the day I started carrying off duty.
I was at Kohl’s with my sons and a stroller. I had my keys in the cup holder. This guy walked up and started talking to us. I thought he possibly worked there but then I realized he was just chatty. I then went to help my kids try clothes on, some of which they kept on, so I took the tags and we waited in line. Suddenly, the police stormed in and handcuffed me. My kids started crying and I was confused. I stated to them that I have the tags to all my items in my hands and I’d told the attendant lady I was doing it. I had assumed they thought I was trying to shoplift.
The police then said they didn’t care about that, they wanted to know who the man was. I was totally lost, not remembering the brief conversation with the strange man. They were very aggressively asking me questions and finally loss prevention came out with a picture and asked me “Who is this?”
I looked at the picture and told them I have no idea, he just was hitting on me or something, but I didn’t want to be outright rude, so I was polite and spoke with him a couple minutes before making it clear I wasn’t interested. The cop totally didn’t believe me and asked…
“Well then, if you don’t know him, why did he drive away in your car?”
I thought, “WHAT?!”
The cop looked a little puzzled, then said that after the man had spoken to me, I said goodbye and that he’d taken the keys from my stroller and when he went to leave, he’d shoplifted something. So when store clerks went to stop him, he assaulted loss prevention, an innocent bystander and a cop, before leading the police on a car chase where they lost him, but were currently searching for him.
After interviewing me and my kids, and then seeing that we didn’t actually arrive together, loss prevention and the police realized I wasn’t an accomplice, but actually another victim.
They gave us a ride home and then contacted me later to let me know they’d caught him but he wouldn’t tell them where my car was.
So I went to the jail and visited him hoping he’d tell me where my car was. He told me the street he’d left it on and where to find the keys- I had to go to a nearby restaurant, go to the women’s handicap stall, take the seat liners out, and I’d find the keys underneath them. This was a week later so I wasn’t sure they’d still be there, but sure enough, that’s where they were hidden. My car was just parked on a street, chillin’. The license plates had been changed with some rental car plates, but besides that, it was OK.
Kohl’s let me keep all of the items I was going to buy my kids for free, since I was humiliated and my kids were traumatized. The police were really nice after they saw that I wasn’t the guy’s friend.
“Sir. I’m not cut out for this. Thank you” I stood up and walked out of the interview hall and never looked back.
“Dad I don’t want to work a job right now. I just realized that once I start working, I’ll be doing this for the next 30+ years of my life and never get the opportunity to take a break like this. I’d like to take a year off and camp and travel and bird my way across India. Once I leave for my MS, we both know I’m never coming back. This is my last chance to do this.”
Dad looked at me for a whole minute before saying “Go for it. I’ve got your back”.
Convincing mom was a whole other ball game but she eventually came around. I spent the next year of my life in National parks and sanctuaries; sometimes alone, other times with friends but most of the times leading groups of students as an instructor. After 15 years of hard slogging as a student, I finally had a break.
Taking a year off after undergrad gave me the opportunity to recuperate. It kept me away from a job which a lot of my friends described as a horrendous experience and helped me turbo-charge for what was ahead. It gave me a chance to spend time with the people I loved. It was not an easy decision. A lot of people doubted me. Most people called me crazy and arrogant. A non-trivial number of people assumed that I was lying and I had basically failed my BE and didn’t get a job. After all, which sane person passes on a job to watch birds? My dad, being the devilish prankster that he is, fueled these rumors even more to mom’s annoyance. He would go around telling people “What can I say. Nobody wants to hire him. If you have a job in your company can I send him to you?” This was the quickest way to get rid of all the concerned “well wishers”.
By the end of the year, I was mentally recharged and ready to take on whatever life had to throw at me. When I got to grad school, I was willing to push myself harder than I ever thought possible. When I started at Amazon a week after I graduated, I was completely pumped and ready to go rock this whole “job” thing because I had never actually had one before so I had a clean slate to start with.
Taking a year off gave me a chance to put things into perspective. It gave me a chance to believe in myself more than the established system. It re-affirmed my belief that you can walk the path less trodden and still make it to the other end. It will always be the best decision I will ever have made; because without it I would not have a career, merely a job.
Sometimes, the most important roads in life, are the ones you don’t take.
About 90% of heart attack occur early in the morning and it can be reduced if one takes a glass or two of water before going to bed at night. We know water is important but never knew about the special times one has to drink it.
Put a sticker with a fake pin on your debit card. If someone tries to use it 3+ times, the atm will eat the card.
To remove chewing gum from clothes keep the cloth in the freezer for one hour.
Need to test a printer? A print the google homepage, it has all the colors and uses almost no ink.
To whiten white clothes soak white clothes in hot water with a slice of lemon for 10 minutes.
Confusing wikipedia article? Click “simple o english” on the left list of languages and it’ll whisk you to a simplified version.
Ants problem: ants hate cucumbers. Keep the skin of cucumbers near the place where they are or at ant hole.
If you drop an earring, ring or small screw, simply turn off the lights and look with a flashlight. They’ll light right away.
To get pure & clean ice boil water first before placing in the freezer.
You can clear a room full of cigarette smoke in about a minute simply by spinning a wet towel o around.
To give a shine to your hair vinegar add one teaspoon of vinegar to hair, then wash hair.
When you go to a zoo wear the same colors as the employees do. The animals will come right up to you.
To make the mirror shine clean with sprite.
You can predict your future adult height with almost 100% accuracy by doubling your height at age of two.
To get maximum juice out of lemons soak lemons in hot water for one hour, and then juice them.
Want to meet girls? Go outside when it’s raining with a huge umbrella and take your pick.
To avoid smell of cabbage while cooking keep a piece of bread on the cabbage in the vessel while cooking.
Want to know if someone has romantic feelings for you? Look at their eyes! People’s pupils expand by 45% when looking at a love interest.
To avoid tears while cutting onions use “chew gum”
Remove unpleasant odor in smelly shoes or gym bags by placing dry teac bags in them.
To boil potatoes quickly skin one potato from one side only before boiling.
To remove ink from clothes put toothpaste on the ink spots generously and let it dry completely, then wash.
To get rid of mice or rats sprinkle black pepper in places where you find mice & rats. They will run away.
Your personality has its own smell. People can guess characteristics of personality just by your smell, because the body emits hormones and pheromones that we can detect in sweat.
This was back in the 90s. This was in 7th grade. I had history directly after lunch, and the whole class would be waiting outside the locked classroom door by the time the teacher would show up. This guy was speed walking and sweating his ass off while apologizing. Then we get into class and take our seats. Every day he had an “educational video tape” and it was recorded on vhs from the history channel. He would put it on and then fall asleep at his desk. While sleeping one of us would go up to his desk and steal all the answers to his tests. Everybody in this class was passing with straight A’s, and we all heard he was being looked at for it, but that wasn’t the kicker. One day we were fucking around as usual and a kid decided to throw a book out the window. This teacher told him he better go outside and get the book and come right back in. We’re on the second floor and the exit is right below us, so we’re watching out the window for him to grab the book while the teacher is back at his desk not paying attention to a damn thing. The kid comes out the exit door, walks right past the book on the sidewalk, and just continues down the street until he is out of sight. Everybody is laughing but nobody wants to say why. All the tardiness with the straight A’s, even from the ones failing every other class, on top of a kid easily walking out of school and going who knows where, ended up with him being fired
The 3rd year of medical school in the US is traditionally when students finally break out of the classroom and into the clinical arena of “rotations.” You spend a month or two on each of the mandatory specialties, learning the basics and just soaking up the experience. Everyone HAS to do internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, ob-gyn and general surgery, among others.
You do have some limited say over the order of your rotations, however, so I decided to do internal medicine (what I thought I was going into) first, and surgery (which I absolutely dreaded) dead last.
One of my first patients on the internal medicine service was Mr. A, a man in his 40s with advanced liver cirrhosis. He lived in a nursing home and was readmitted to the hospital like clockwork every 2–3 weeks for worsening confusion and somnolence, termed “hepatic encephalopathy.” The liver is a “super-organ,” regulating to some degree pretty much every other organ system in the body. When the liver fails, everybody fails. Fix one thing, something else goes to shit. In Mr. A’s case, the toxic byproducts of protein digestion weren’t cleared by his liver, causing his coma. The medication to help clear the toxins from his bowel gave him spectacular diarrhea, and his blood pressure plummeted, causing his kidneys to fail. Kidneys didn’t clear the toxins they were supposed to, platelets no longer worked, and combined with the absence of clotting factors made by the liver, engorged veins backing up into the stomach ruptured and bled. The blood pressure dropped further. What’s worse— all that blood digesting in the gut, well, that was just another source of protein to fuel the hepatic encephalopathy.
I grew to dread seeing him every morning. The best I could hope to obtain was the status quo, which hardly seemed an acceptable quality of life. Still, I could make him comfortable for the most part. On the other hand, there was very little I could do for his fiancee. She was there every morning, 6 am, when I rounded, for the latest update. There were no updates. There were never any updates. I could offer little more than a hand to hold.
It was frustrating. As I progressed through my subsequent rotations, and tried to consider each as a career option with an open mind, I found myself ruminating obsessively over Mr. A and his fiancee. They needed doctors to care for them. But could I be that doctor? How long before I couldn’t take it anymore? I considered the words of a good mentor: “Being miserable doesn’t make you a better doctor.”
And then my surgery rotation rolled around. General surgery is PUNISHING. I mean, like, holy crap, man. Rounds at 4 am. Line up, present, know your facts, yes ma’am, no sir, run to the OR, operate for 12 hours. In-house call every 2–3 nights, just powering through. Eat when you can, sleep when you can. And we were still expected to pass our final at the end of the rotation. Really??? When exactly was I supposed to study?
The night before, apparently. 10 pm, nothing like the last minute, pounding Starbucks, staining entire textbooks highlighter yellow, and my pager goes off. I wasn’t on call, but it was my attending. Do I want to come in and do a case? Honestly, no, no I don’t, I want to learn this stuff and take that test and be done. But I knew better than to say that. “Yes, sir, I would love to.”
I don’t know to this day why that attending called a green 3rd year med student who wasn’t even going into surgery, to “help” him with a case. Because here’s the thing: when I got to the hospital, he had no residents waiting, no other attendings, just him and I. Oh, and a helicopter.
Yeah, so I pretty much lost my shit. I jumped in, blades whirling, and felt my head explode. Luckily, he couldn’t hear it over the motor. “Where are we going, sir?”
He smiled, and gestured for me to put on my headphones. “We’re gonna go get a liver.”
And that’s what we did. A 19 year old shooting victim donated his perfect, soft pink liver. I cradled it, let it slide into the cooler. You know, those red coolers that say “HUMAN ORGAN,” you see people grabbing and hauling ass into helicopters in the movies? Yup, that was me. I felt like sort of a badass.
And then we took it back to my home hospital.
And we put it in Mr A.
True story. 9 months after caring for him on my internal medicine rotation, I saw him next, on my surgery rotation, draped, beneath the OR lights. I didn’t even realize it was him until we finished the operation, and I went with my attending to talk with his family. His fiancee was there.
I gave her the update.
4 days later I talked to Mr A for the first time ever. His new liver let him wake-up. He left the hospital and married his fiancee. They had been engaged for 6 years.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There is no such thing as a quick fix. He still required a lot of help from my internist colleagues to keep that liver working. But he got BETTER. Like, astronomically better. Literally overnight. Surgery was a big part of that. I was a big part of that surgery.
And that’s why I’m a surgeon.
(Also, because I passed that final with honors. That helped.)
Athenian Salad (Salata Athenas)
Salata Athenas
Ingredients
1 medium head lettuce
1 bunch romaine
10 radishes, sliced
1 medium cucumber, sliced
6 scallions (with tops), cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 cup olive or vegetable oil
1/3 cup wine vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
24 Greek or ripe green olives
1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
1 (2 ounce) can rolled anchovies with capers, drained
Instructions
Tear lettuce and romaine into bite-size pieces. Place lettuce, romaine, radishes, cucumber and scallions in large plastic bag. Close bag tightly and refrigerate. Shake oil, vinegar, salt and oregano in tightly covered jar; refrigerate.
Just before serving, shake dressing. Add dressing and olives to vegetables in bag. Close bag tightly and shake until ingredients are well coated. Pour salad into large bowl; top with cheese and anchovies.
Yields 8 servings.
Side gigs
Braised Chicken in Aromatic Tomato Sauce (Pastitsatha)
This dish is one that evolved from Corfu to stretch scant supplies of meat. Consisting of chicken, turkey, beef or veal braised in tomato sauce fragrant with spices, it is served over thick tubular pasta from Corfu called “perciatellli” (if you can’t find it, use spaghetti). Kefalotyri is a nutty tasting hard cheese similar to Parmesan. It is available at Greek markets.
Freshly grated kefalotyri cheese or Parmesan cheese
Instructions
Heat oil in heavy large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add chicken in batches and cook until brown on all sides, about 8 minutes per batch.
Place chicken on platter. Add onions to Dutch oven; sauté until tender, about 5 minutes. Add spices; stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Stir in tomatoes and their juices and water. Return chicken to Dutch oven. Cover; simmer over medium-low heat until chicken is very tender, about 35 minutes.
Transfer chicken to platter. Tent with foil. Add 2 tablespoons vinegar, tomato paste and sugar to Dutch oven. Simmer until thickened to sauce consistency, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and more vinegar, if desired. Remove from heat. Cover to keep warm.
Cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until tender but still firm to bite. Drain. Transfer pasta to platter. Top with chicken, sauce and cheese.
DO NOT Pay On The FIRST DATE! (300 IQ STRATEGY)
China and Russia test ‘hack-proof’ quantum communication link for Brics countries
•Scientists in Russia and China establish quantum communication encrypted with the help of secure keys transmitted by Mozi satellite
•‘All countries that are interested in technological leadership know that without quantum technology they won’t succeed’: quantum researcher
Scientists in Russia and China have established quantum communication encrypted with the help of secure keys transmitted by China’s quantum satellite, showing that a Brics quantum communication network may be technically feasible.
The scientists were able to span 3,800km (2,360 miles) between a ground station close to Moscow and another near Urumqi in China’s western Xinjiang region to send two encoded images secured by quantum keys.
The first “full cycle” quantum communication test between the two countries was successfully conducted last year, said Alexey Fedorov, of Russia’s National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) and the Russian Quantum Centre (RQC), Russia’s leading institution in charge of creating a quantum computer, on December 14.
Bridging the vast distance is possible with the help of China’s quantum satellite Mozi, which has opened pathways to develop national and international quantum communication networks.
With the advent of advanced supercomputers and quantum computing, there were now more avenues for information systems to be attacked, the researchers at RQC, Moscow-based QSpace Technologies and MISIS University wrote in a paper published on the open-access online archive arxiv.org in October.
Quantum communication – a form of quantum physics-based information transfer that uses cryptography to encode data in single photons – offers a way to transfer information that hackers cannot eavesdrop on, according to the paper.
Encrypted data is transferred in the form of ones and zeros along with a quantum key that is used to decrypt the data.
Quantum keys, or strings of random bits, “are secret parameters that we use to encode useful information”, making it inaccessible to unauthorised individuals, Fedorov said.
Using quantum key distribution can allow for security that was “guaranteed by the law of physics”, the researchers wrote in their paper.
While there has been major progress in the development of quantum key distribution, ground-based transfer at reasonable speeds using optical fibre cables is limited to around 1,000km because of a loss of photons over long distances, according to the paper.
With this limitation, researchers in different countries and continents, or even on opposite sides of Russia, could not effectively transfer quantum keys, Fedorov said.
To overcome this hurdle, China launched Mozi, the world’s first quantum communication satellite in 2016, to begin long-distance quantum transmission.
Using the satellite, China has been able to develop a national quantum network of ground stations spanning thousands of kilometres.
In 2020, the Russian team began working with the Mozi team, who helped them set up systems to begin conducting experiments with the satellite, Fedorov said.
A ground station was set up at the Zvenigorod observatory just outside Moscow, equipped with telescopes and cameras to track the satellite. Various experiments were conducted between the Zvenigorod ground station and China’s Nanshan ground station near Urumqi, the paper said.
On March 1 last year, a full quantum communication experiment was conducted between the two stations.
A secret key was distributed between Zvenigorod and Mozi, which orbited between 600km and 1,100km above the ground station. Once the Chinese side received the shared key from the satellite, a secret key was established between two stations nearly 4,000km apart, the paper said.
Two coded messages were transferred between the teams that were decrypted with the help of two keys – a quote from Chinese philosopher Mozi and an equation from the late Soviet physicist Lev Landau – according to the team.
It was the first successful full-cycle quantum communication experiment between China and Russia. Fedorov said a secure quantum call had been established in 2017 between Austria and China using Mozi.
The paper released by the Russian team in October highlighted a major aspect of their research with Mozi and quantum key distribution.
To transfer quantum keys between long-distance ground stations, both stations must have detectors that pick up signals from a satellite. These devices “are not always working ideally”, Fedorov said.
Slight differences in the detectors could leave the system open to potential security attacks, he said.
The researchers said this detection efficiency mismatch was not taken into account in the decoy state quantum protocol – which is the most widely used quantum key distribution protocol. To further improve the security of the system, the team modified the security analysis protocol to take the mismatch into account.
“Our results pave the way to the considerations of realistic imperfection of the QKD [quantum key distribution] systems, which are important in the context of their practical security,” the paper said.
We live in an information age, where a lot of what we do “is tied to protected information”, making quantum keys a “useful tool” to protect strategic and sensitive information, Fedorov said.
While quantum communications networks could have many uses, Fedorov said that for now quantum systems would ideally be suited to scientific research, with more research needed before the technology could be commercialised.
He said the finance sector was interested in quantum technology, with banks storing “a massive amount of critical, important information”.
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow he planned to develop Russia into an economy where quantum technology had an important role in digital infrastructure.
“Technically, it’s absolutely possible” to build a quantum communication network between the Brics nations, Fedorov said.
But while there was “scientific, technical and commercial potential for these kinds of systems”, a unifying project was needed to push development forward, he said.
There would also need to be shared standards between nations regarding the exchange of data and safety measures.
Fedorov said that to commercialise quantum networks, development was heading towards expanding infrastructure through launching mini quantum satellites and building ground stations, along with forging protocols to exchange information.
In June, Russia released its own quantum microsatellite prototype, and had begun experimenting with the aim of launching its own quantum satellite, according to Fedorov.
The team hoped to develop its own quantum technology to become a resource to help other nations conduct quantum experiments as China had helped the Russians, he said.
Beyond quantum communication, countries across the world are researching various technologies, including quantum computing, which the Russian team would soon use to solve minor tasks.
“All countries that are interested in technological leadership know that without quantum technology they won’t succeed,” Fedorov said.
They had shared everything. They had kept no secrets from each other except that the little old woman had a shoe box in the top of her closet that she had cautioned her husband never to open or ask her about.
For all of these years, he had never thought about the box, but one day the little old woman got very sick and the doctor said she would not recover. In trying to sort out their affairs, the little old man took down the shoe box and took it to his wife’s bedside.
She agreed that it was time that he should know what was in the box. When he opened it, he found two crocheted dolls and a stack of money totaling $95,000. He asked her about the contents.
“When we were to be married,” she said, “my grandmother told me the secret of a happy marriage was to never argue. She told me that if I ever got angry with you, I should just keep quiet and crochet a doll.”
The little old man was so moved; he had to fight back tears. Only two precious dolls were in the box. She had only been angry with him two times in all those years of living and loving. He almost burst with happiness.
“Honey,” he said “that explains the doll, but what about all of this money? Where did it come from?”
“Oh, that?” she said. “That’s the money I made from selling the dolls.””
Do not sell. You have already paid for two years. First contact your lender and ask for them to pause your loan for 3 months. Then for three months you will have no payment (time to save as much money as possible). Use that time to get your income level back up to where you need it to make the house payment. Look for a new job or another part time job. If you have a good car, do a delivery job like Uber or Door Dash. Eliminate any monthly paid services like movie channels, even internet. Just keep the electric, water, gas, and trash. NEVER eat any place that is NOT your house – unless it’s like free food at work. Fast food, Starbucks, restaurants, and eating outside the house is what breaks people. If you go to Costco you can get a whole chicken for $5 and you can get 12 croissants for $6. You can also get 50 little bags of chips for $13. You can get a case of 35 cans of Coke for $25 (one can a day for a month). A chicken sandwich on a croissant with a bag of chips and a Coke sounds like a good lunch. You spent $50 but you got 12 lunches and maybe more lunches and you still have lots of chips and cans of Coke for the rest of the month. Fast food restaurants will cost you about $15 for one lunch (sometimes more). So you decide 3 lunches at fast food or 12–15 lunches at home for the same price. Stay hungry, only eat when you must and drink a big glass of water before you eat. Potatoes are only $1 per pound and they are the most filling food you can eat. I remember in college, I always bought a big jar of peanut butter and jelly. A PB&J sandwich will really save you from throwing your money away on fast food and the PB&J goes great with the chips. Eating at home costs 1/10th the price of eating outside the home. If you cut down all your outgoing money and get more incoming money, you should have the ability to save your house. Renting might just be more than your house payment. Consider renting out one of the bedrooms. If you rent out the master bedroom you’ll get more money than one of the other bedrooms. Maybe a neighbor will want to rent a parking space at your house or rent your garage for storing their stuff. If your house has a lot of land, maybe someone will want to rent some space to park their RV until they need to travel. Look at the items you own, that item that you have not used for over a year – sell it on eBay. Have a garage sale to get rid of old clothing you no longer wear, old shoes, old dishes, old knifes and forks. Sell those collections and sell anything you can to keep your house. Your house is the most important investment most people make during their entire life. Don’t let this house slip out of your hands because when this happens most people never get another house. Use the least amount of heat and lighting as you can. More blankets. But no space or plug in heaters and NO CANDLES (they cause house fires and insurance doesn’t cover that). If you are not in the room turn off the LED lights, television, radio, etc. I didn’t own a television until I was in my 30’s. If you are spending all you free time trying to make money and spending almost nothing to live, you can save your house. You will be successful, you can do it. Stay hungry get out there and make some money however you can. You can do it! I believe in you! If you found my post interesting or helpful, please upvote, share, and follow. Thank you!
I hated it. It’s an awful way for a child to grow up. I know that my brothers hated it too, but eventually my oldest brother went into “the business,” went to jail a couple times, got out, now he’s currently in jail again. My other brother and I both ran away from home once we were old enough and we don’t talk to the rest of our family much now.
First, some background: most “criminal families” aren’t like the mafia. It’s not a glamorous life. It is not like the Sopranos or the Godfather. It is not dark wood paneling and fine liquor. Every time I hear one of my sheltered school friends talk about organized crime or something it makes me want to puke. People go into crime because they are poor and they don’t know any better. They are not good people and they often don’t have a good sense of basic right and wrong. This means they are unlikely to be good parents. You know those pictures you see every so often on the internet with some woman turning a trick and her baby is in the background? That was how I grew up, but with drugs and guns and stabbing instruments lying around like toys. When my brothers and I were growing up, we constantly had strange people coming and going from our house at all hours, often engaging in loud altercations with both my mom and dad (I suppose I should give thanks that my parents were “together?”) inside the house or outside on the front lawn. Drugs and paraphernalia and firearms were pretty much everywhere. It’s fortunate that the trigger pull needed to set off a handgun is more than a small child can muster, at least until he or she is old enough to understand that guns kill people for real, and that yes, once when one of daddy’s friends was carried back to the house screaming and bleeding and couldn’t be taken to the hospital that that was because someone shot a gun at him! That’s how I learned about firearms safety – my mom just matter-of-factly said to my brothers and me, “That’s what happens when you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger” while stubbing out her cigarette watching my father and his gang try to staunch the bleeding and perform first aid. We did not play with the guns on the table after that. By the way, first aid is something you learn pretty early on, by the way, because there are a lot of ways to get injured in a “criminal family.” My parents were not (too) abusive, they loved us in a strange sort of way. But there were always weapons (of the sharp variety) or a lot of times broken bottles and other broken shit left lying around that my brothers and I got good at avoiding or when we were playing, we’d use them as fake weapons which, of course, since they were real and we were stupid, typically resulted in us getting to practice the first aid techniques my dad’s friend (“Doctor” Terry) had helpfully taught us. This was entirely normal to us – loud nightly commotion, a general tenseness around the house at all times, mostly sleeping during the day unless we bothered to get up to attend school, and a lot of injuries. I know now that regular childhood is full of little injuries, but we were always around blood and getting scratched up and scraped and gouged and bruised, just because the environment was dangerous. To this day I don’t know how we survived except that we picked up the instincts that people who live with weapons and sharp objects lying casually anywhere just happen to develop. No, we did not have shoes. At least not for the kids.
Once I was old enough to understand what was going on I learned that my family – not just my mom and dad but several “uncles” and their girlfriends were a minor part of a drug distribution network. Oddly enough we kids were not conscripted to be a part of it, not until my oldest brother decided on his own he wanted into the lifestyle. It seemed like my parents were doing it mostly because it was all they knew and after we were born they tried to protect us and provide for us in the only way they knew how. Strangely we never had any police trouble (at least at the house) because I think we were pretty far from the front lines and were considered a safe house of sorts where money was counted, weapons were traded and stored (for those who don’t know, guns are considered more secure currency because they can both be traded and used for intimidation), and “product” was moved back and forth. Maybe they were doing this to keep us safe(r), I don’t know. But I do know it was still a chaotic and very scary environment to grow up in as a child.
You probably want to know how I got out of it. Unfortunately that end of the story isn’t too interesting. We had television in the house, my brother and I would watch it, and sort of see (or at least get the idea) that not everyone lived like this. Television is full of happy middle-class families. And we wanted to get out of there. So one day (daytime! when everyone is sleeping!) we grabbed one of the bundles of cash lying around, stuck it in a bag with a change of clothes and took a bus out of town. 800 miles out of town. For awhile we were worried someone would come looking for us but it didn’t happen. Eventually I did call my mom and she was angry but it was clear she was worried and just happy we were alive. We didn’t talk much more than that, she just said, “Well take care of your brother.” My brother and I live in another city now and I have completed a GED and now I go to a state school. Hope that helps clear up some misconceptions.
Nobody is your friend, not even the guys you eat lunch with every day
Nobody is indispensable. Anybody can be laid off any day.
Never waste time listening to management podcasts, attending town-halls or post work self-funded drink parties as they dont have any impact on your salary, promotion or job security.
Try to attend as many technical trainings as you can which are paid for by your employer.
Never send emails late night or over the weekends thinking that people will get impressed. There are already people in your team who have seen it and done it all and only fools work overtime.
Become awesome at the work you do. Focus on learning the latest skills applicable to your field. That will save your life when you are laid off or want to change employer.
Dont waste time on feedbacks or year end assessments and dont take them seriously. No matter how hard you work or the value you add, you will always be made to feel below average.
Fight hard to get a raise by constantly raising your compensation issue with senior managers in private meetings. No company wants to pay more and one needs to snatch his share of goodies.
Never share your family or any other problem/weakness with anybody at work.
Make a genuine effort to help others who need some help from you specific to your knowledge or skill. The cycle of Karma will enable you to get the same help when you need the same.
Never use capital case or offensive words in any written communication that can be used as an evidence of your unprofessional behavior and be used against you.
I am a remote employee and I keep a company inventory, recently I completed an inventory of my stock. I received word when the higher-ups were reconciling my count that I was missing 5 high dollar items and was questioned, did I “loose” them or did I not count them, it was a significant sum, and I could have lost my job or been held financially responsible for these items. without a reasonable explanation, the boss was pissed as hell at me.
The thing was that just a few months ago, I was requested by the asset manager to send these 5 items across the country to another remote employee and I had an email with the item numbers and serial numbers along with the FedEx tracking numbers to prove they were sent and delivered. The asset manager was responsible for transferring these items into that other inventory.
I found the email and it only took me a few minutes to find it. I was off the hook and the asset manager or more likely one of his staff was in hot water now!
I had been job searching for quite some time at this point. I had gotten a job to come in for an interview. For this job, I had interviewed 2 other times for it, so, I was going to be interviewing for a 3rd time. In my mind, I thought, “Maybe they really liked me each time (as I qualified for the job) but they just kept getting really good candidates with more experience then me and so they would just go for the other person” Alas, I went into the interview hopeful and feeling very prepared.
I had arrived promptly for the interview, but the interviewer was extremely late. The interview was for 9am, but they didn’t call me until about 9:40am. I thought, “Maybe they just got really busy?” But, when the interviewer came out to greet me, they offered no sort of apology for being almost an hour late.
Alas, I greeted the interviewer with a smile and a firm handshake. When it was time to interview, they asked me to introduce myself and tell them a little about myself. The interviewer just looked like she was trying not to laugh for some reason. I continued the interview, and for one question, I think it was like “Tell me why we should hire you” and then she literally laughed. She busted out laughing and then tried to compose herself. I have honestly no idea why she did that. There were other interviewers in the room as well, but only she was acting like that. Weirdly enough, I ended up being offered the job, but I declined. Between the interviewer being late, laughing at my answers, and being sarcastic, it just left an “unprofessional” taste in my mouth. I really wanted the job (hence why I interviewed 3 times for it). But if that person was going to be one of my supervisors/ higher ups, I didn’t want to be apart of that company.
China will say thank you very much for vacating valuable (and often choice) factory premises. Local companies will jump at the chance to acquire the sites, because these are often prime land with the best infrastructure and utilities.
China rolled out the red carpet for MNCs and the local government often offered the best preferentially to foreigners.
The problem with the de-shoring narrative is the utter impracticality, because it is nigh impossible to find another country with the set of conditions the mainland offers. China is no longer cheap, and competition is incredible. Factories that remain and prosper are ENABLED by the set of advantages the mainland provides.
The companies that find it attractive to relocate are chasing lower wages, and mostly unaffected by poorer skill, infrastructure and the lack of symbiotic ecosystems.
When someone doesn’t understand how everyday mainstream culture works.
I went to college in a town with extreme wealth, but was relatively poor myself so worked at the nearby Burger King for, you know — money.
Occasionally, a wealthy type person would come in and seem totally clueless as to how a Burger King worked. The menu board was overwhelming to them. They’d order their burger “medium rare” or “well-done,” not realizing the burgers simply ran through a machine and they all came out the same.
They usually had unbranded shirts and pants that looked as if they had never been worn before.
Everything was a curiosity to them. I remember one was staring at the straw dispenser, wondering how the straw comes out. I leaned over and pressed the button and out rolled a straw. He seemed giddy about how this invention worked.
Essentially, they are space aliens on Earth for the first time.
Yesterday, I saw a young 20 year old married girl in my clinic, who was brought in by her mother in law for surgery for ‘ hole in the heart’
She was suffering from atrial septal defect (ASD) wherin you are born with a hole between two chambers of the heart. The surgical correction when done early on ( before 20–25 years) is very simply and almost risk free. But unfortunately this girl had a large hole and became very very sick. She also developed certain complications making her ASD inoperable.
She was found to have ASD at around 10 years of age but her parents did not get her treated as the stigma of heart surgery will make her ineligible for marriage. So they hid her disease and married her off. Her in laws who discovered her problem about one year back ignored it and now that she is sick, brought her for treatment. They are more concerned that she will be unable to bear children.
The poor young girl is screwed both by her parents and her husband for no fault of hers. Her parents only wanted to get rid of her while her inlaws / husband only want her as child bearing machine.Sad.
Edit: The surgery here in Hyderabad is free for poor patients in the best of private hospitals also ( Govt Aarogyasree scheme). The sad part is due to this delay the heart is irreparably damaged and it is now inoperable .
I still remember my first year at Campbell Soup Company in 1985. I started on Jan 2 as Assistant Manager of Accounts Payable. I was a glorified clerk who should have been eligible for overtime, but Manager in my title made me exempt.
We were not required to turn in time cards unless we missed work which I didn’t do as I was the new kid. At my six months review I received all high marks except that my boss marked me down for never working overtime. I averaged 10 to 20 hours of overtime a week.
To clue my boss in, I started turning in my time cards every week. A couple of months later the payroll clerk called me to the side and asked me if I wanted my meal money. There were several envelopes for me in the safe.
“What meal money?” I asked. She explained that anyone exempt who worked two hours past quitting time received $2 meal money. I laughed and asked her how long it had been since they had raised the amount. She said it had been that way as long as she had been there, or over 25 years.
At the end of the year, I received my first Christmas bonus, a $5 check. I had worked the year before as a part-time bookkeeper for my parents’ little dress shop and received a $50 bonus check. They paid their sales clerks a $250 bonus.
I framed my $5 check as a reminder that policies should always be reviewed and scrapped or updated as the case may be. It cost more for the company to process those tiny payments than it was worth to the recipients. If you are going to do something do it right or don’t do it at all.
When I was in college I moved into an old house that had been converted into apartments. Perfect location for me and within the first couple days I had met all the neighbors around me. All seemed normal, until the next door neighbors kid stopped by with the kid who lived across the street from us. The kid may have been 13 or 14 at the time, but he made the hair on my neck stand up. He looked like Malachi, from Children of the Corn, and that was his nick name. He never said anything to me or did anything crazy around me but I always had that spooked feeling around him. I moved a couple years later. One evening I was checking out the news and the headline that day was a body was found in a crawl space. When they showed the house and then the picture came up on the screen I was shocked to see it was the kid across the street from me. He admitted to another killing out of state a few days later. As time went on he confessed to a few more that he had killed. Before any future investigation was done, he took the easy way out via suicide in jail. He was a confirmed serial killer.
Argentina JUST *Flipped* to the US Dollar | -54% CRASH [President Milei FIRST Move!]
Back in 2011, the State of California reported that over 8.3 billion recyclable cans had been recycled that year.
This meant that California’s recycling rate was just under 100 percent; implying that nearly every single can in the state had been recycled.
image 24
Now, in an ideal world, such high recycling would be a good thing, and reflect incredible levels of environmental responsibility in California.
But unfortunately, this statistic was too good to be true.
Recycling Fraud…Surprisingly, It’s A Crime
As it turned out, California’s astonishing recycling rates were not the result of widespread environmental awareness. The real reason for this statistic was much more sinister…fraud.
Apart from Oregon, California is the only state with a container return program on the west coast. Due to financial incentive and a lack of regulation, several ‘recycling fraud rings’ popped up, defrauding the program by redeeming millions of ineligible cans.
In 2012, government officials reported that the State of California lost over $40 million every year to fraud. To combat these losses, the Justice Department created “recycling fraud units” to stop “recycling fraud rings”.
image 23
This initiative proved to be quite effective in stopping fraud. In late 2018, two Arizona men were arrested for over $16 million worth of recycling fraud. Under the guise of a trucking company, a man named Miguel Bustillos smuggled millions of cans into California for the purpose of defrauding the state government.
[1] If convicted of ‘felony recycling fraud’, Bustillos and his associated could face up to three years behind bars.
“So what are you in for?”
“Recycling fraud…”
I can’t imagine that would net you much respect in a prison setting. This whole thing just seems so surreal to me.
When most people get depressed, they tend to start adding things to their life thinking that something will “make them happy”.
This isn’t how it works.
Here are 3 things you should cut out of your life when you’re depressed — based on personal experience.
Alcohol. Nowadays, I enjoy a beer or a glass of wine on the weekend. Maybe 2 if I’m feeling frisky. It’s become a sort of hobby — I like trying a new beer or wine to celebrate getting through a tough week of work or training. However, when I was severely depressed, I cut the stuff out completely. Alcohol tended to amplify whatever I was already feeling, meaning when I was sad, it made me really fucking sad.
Most romantic partners. I’ve dealt with depression on many occasions in my life. I’ve been in relationships during my depression at times, and I’ve been single during my depression at times as well. I’ve only had one partner ever who has been truly supportive during my periods of intense depression and anxiety — the one I’m with now. If a partner isn’t helpful for your mental health, it’s not that they’re bad, but the relationship will struggle.
Crappy diet/exercise habits. For a lot of people, there’s a dietary component to depression. For myself, I know that fried foods, too much food, and too much inactivity can set me off and send me spiraling. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of trial and error in this, but it’s relatively easy to learn to eat better. If something makes you feel bad, stop eating it.
Be careful what you say. My first day of teaching at one district was almost my last.
We were told to have the students put their name, etc on a 3 by 5 card with something about themself. One boy said he was in a gang.
Later that week we had a big meeting about Gangs. Out of thousands and thousands of students 250 were identified as Gang members. Based on my location, the kiddie candy gang.
I had taught in another district where real gang activity existed. Before that I practiced law for 30 years. I had represented one gang in court as a lawyer. I quit criminal law when I got a gang member off and two days later he murdered an 8 year old. I knew Gangs well. I said to the teacher next to me, “ Two hundred and fifty. I got one of them. At my last district there were less than 250 non gang members”. The teacher asked how I knew. I said he wrote it on his card.
The next day the admin appeared and wanted the card. I refused ( although I knew I had no legal ground) and they told me I was fired and searched my room and found it. They then told me I was not really fired.
The boy was expelled. A week later, during school hours, he drove his car into a brick wall and died. 15 years later I still mourn. I never had the chance to find out if his life could be turned around.
Anything you say or write to a teacher is subject to the admin. You have No Privacy. Say your name. Tell them you like sunshine and lollipops.
Some might say this is bad advice. I think kids are lulled into thinking they have a private relationship with a teacher. You don’t.
Late 70s on an early Sunday afternoon flight from LAX to Toronto on a wide body. I was sitting in the middle row which had 5 across, and a hippie couple sat in front of me with only one other passenger in their row. As soon as the fasten seatbelt light went off they started to get it off, laying across the 4 seats with just a blanket over them. The flight attendant came by and looked at them and did nothing. Shortly after she came back with the pilot and another flight attendant they conferenced then left without doing anything. So I just sat there and watched them go at it for three hours, they would take a short break then go at it again in different positions. I felt sorry for the poor guy in the end seat as their legs would sometimes end up in his lap. I really think they did it for the shock value. To top it all off some guy in a robe was sitting cross legged in the middle of the aisle burning incense. The flight attendants stopped that real fast. I used to fly 200k miles a year and this by far was the most entertaining one I was ever on.
I once had my apartment broken into while I was gone. The thief harmed my dog, and they stole about $12,000 dollars worth of a certain green substance that people enjoy setting on fire for recreational purposes. I had a pretty good idea who did it, and later I was able to confirm my suspicions.
Keep in mind that I am not some big bad criminal type, but I was counting on the money from the items stolen to pay my rent, utilities, college tuition, and books. So, I made one of the worst decisions of my life, and I went over to this person’s apartment which was in the same complex as mine.
I knocked on the door. He answered.
I walked past him without saying a word, and I turned around and shut the door. I then produced a handgun that had been covered by my shirt. I looked at him, and I very calmly but sternly told him that I knew he was the one who broke into my apartment and that he had about 30 seconds to produce every last bit of what he stole.
He complied, and I placed the items into a gym bag I brought with me.
I told him that he was dead to me, and that I didn’t ever want to see him again. That I was aware that his lease was up at the end of the following month, and that I strongly suggested he not renew it. I then told him that this was for my dog, and I punched him in the nose.
I re-holstered my weapon, and I walked back to my apartment. I was incredibly calm the entire time I was there, but now I was a bit worried that he might be dumb enough to call the cops despite the fact that he had committed multiple serious felonies himself.
I decided to bring the bag and the weapon over to a friend’s apartment that was just next door, and I left it there for the rest of the day. I went back home, and just went about my day. I cooked dinner for myself and my girlfriend, and fortunately the police never showed up.
I never saw the guy again, and he apparently moved out the following month. It wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve ever done, but without the money from the items he stole I wouldn’t have been able to pay my bills or my tuition.
Now, I’m an attorney with an MBA in Finance. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else do what I did. I could have gone to prison for 10 years or more. At the time I was desperate though, and I couldn’t exactly call the cops to have them retrieve my stolen property in this case.
Desperation will make people do desperate things. Fortunately for me things worked out well. They could have easily gone badly.
I once convinced one scammer that I was the curator of a major museum in Fort Worth and if he wanted for me to give him money so he could start a similar museum that he would have to send me a birthday present. He asked me what I wanted and told him two billfolds would do. Several weeks later the wallets, very nice ones. arrived from London. The Nigerian scanner was calling long distance. Naturally he did not know that I knew that he was trying to scam our museum. I finally told him to take a hike or I was going to call in federal law enforcement. Textless to say he was madder than hell that I scammed him. After 20 years I still use both of those expensive walkers As far as J know Jam the only potential victim that has ever scanned the scammer
A few years ago I was coming out of my local bank when I saw a couple standing near their car looking a bit distressed. I approached them and asked what was wrong. The guy said his battery had died and he couldn’t get the car started. He asked if I would help to push start it.
So I got behind the car with his girlfriend and we started pushing. He popped the clutch and the engine turned over a few times but didn’t start. I told the guy this wasn’t going to work, he needed jumpercables. I only lived 5 min from the bank so I told him I would drive home to get the cables and be right back. The look on his face was a “sure buddy, never going to see you again” expression. I didn’t mind. Got into my car, drove home, got the cables from the garage and drove back.
Whem they saw me arrive they had a surprised look on their faces. I pulled my car up to his and popped the bonnet. Less then a minute later his car was running again. They were both thanking me profusely and wanted to offer me money for the help.
I told him to keep the money and “next time you see somebody needing help, spend a few minutes and help them”.
I hope they did and asked the same of the person they helped.
Very simple, because the stupid people in power were forcibly removed and filtered from the system continuously. Don’t get me wrong, China has statistically some of the most comedic and stupid people in the world because of its large population, they are just kept down and not allowed to harm the country.
Back then during the warlord era (軍閥時代), there was this absolute menace who shared my surname and was called Zhang Zong Chang (張宗昌) who governed the province of Shandong (山東省). He was a massive hedonist who gambled excessively and married 21 women from different countries.
During his rule, he brutally repressed workers rights (see 青島慘案), conscripted an unsustainable large military, wrote some of the most vulgar pseudo-tang poetry (despite being almost illiterate) and basically caused enormous suffering.
He was so intellectually stunted that he not only didnt know how many wives he had, but he also didnt know his own military power or finances (三不知將軍).
image 22
Zhang Zongchang once said to his subordinates: “Communism means sharing wives. Sharing wives is of course good, but communism is wrong. Things that can be taken are yours, and things that cannot be taken are not yours! Sharing wives is different. It’s okay to sleep with someone else if you can’t sleep with a woman.”
This is why the elite hate communism, and to some extent all result oriented systems. It removes their ability to loot and plunder to maintain their privileges because the playing field has been leveled.
On September 3, 1932, Zhang zongchang was assassinated on a train station using a pistol. No one picked up his body and left it to rot for three whole days. After hearing the news, all the people of Shandong province celebrated and welcomed troops from the Republic of China with open arms.
image 21
___
Modern China’s success is because “Communist” China is a meritocracy. This means that those who are given authority are those with skill and experience (or in other words, merit) and not their wealth, smooth talking skills, paramilitary criminal force or dick size. Doctors are qualified only because they pass 6 years of medical school with good grades before they can cure humans, because it involves life and death. Why shouldnt a similar filtering mechanism be installed for political leaders, who control the life and death of many?
image 20image 142
This is reflected not only among politburo or chairman poliics, but daily life of people like me. The national pre university exam – 高考 – is based on pure grades, not race or extracurriculars or reference letters.
My husband was the perfect boyfriend. Once we were married, things drastically changed. I realized it about 5 minutes we were pronounced ““husband and wife.” We got in the limo to be taken to the reception site, and 100% of his attention was on the driver. I couldn’t believe it, but let it go. I knew, however that I had just made a huge mistake. About 2 months into the marriage, when there was no more dating, dancing or flowers, I brought it up to him, and his answer was ““That part of our relationship is over.” What? Really? He then went on to tell me that he “married me,” so he “didn’t have to court” me anymore. Wow! I tried to talk to him, and explained that I fell in love with him because of the way he treated me and that I really wanted “that man back.” He looked at me and told me that that man never existed. He was right. For many years, I sought therapy, thinking there was something wrong with me because this marriage wasn’t working. My history and life made me believe that it must be my fault. I changed who I was way too many times, to the point that I don’t know who I am. The dude’s a freaking narcissist. My idea of what made a narcissist was way off point. Yeah, I’m still married to him, but I protect my heart from him. He’s caused a lot of pain, so we live as roommates, and it works.
Please don’t ask why I stayed, only people that have endured abuse would understand, and I’ve written enough already.
I just wish I wasn’t so weak and vulnerable when I met him. He knew I was the perfect mark. So if you can, and have friends and family to support you, run if you see this kind of behavior. Me? My mother and father were abusive and I had just got out of a 15 year extremely abusive relationship 5 months before I met him. So yeah, I was truly alone.
Interesting story. The Currywurst was invented by Hertha Heuwer who operated a bratwurst and fast food stand in Berlin-Charlottenburg in September 1949. Hertha’s husband worked with American officers and noticed that they put huge amounts of ketchup on their steaks and told his wife.
Once, on a rainy day, when she had no custumors, Hertha cut a bratwurst in slices and played around with sauces and spices, however without much success. But the butcher Frank Friedrich who delivered bratwursts without casings to Hertha helped her to improve the sauce which finally was made up from tomato paste, bell pepper, paprika powder, spices and especially curry powder. Hence, the wurst was named Currywurst.
image 140
In the post-war era, this “exotic” version of traditional bratwurst was a huge success. Hertha’s recipe was immediately imitated by other operators of bratwurst stands and quickly Currywurst was sold all over Germany.
There are variations how to make the sauce. The simplest version is to take just commercial ketchup and curry powder. More elaborate versions use onions, fresh tomatoes and fruit to make the sauce.
The typical Berlin-style Currywurst uses a bratwurst without casing. After the war, casings were in short supply, and Frank Friedrich’s partner had developed a procedure to make sausages without casings. In other parts of Germany, however, ordinary bratwursts with casings are used for Currywurst.
The recipe is simple: Just take a bratwurst, sear or grill it, cut it into pieces and put the sauce on it. Sprinkle with curry powder. Recently, some wurst stand operators have started to add ultra-hot chili sauces. One operator in my hometown boasts that he makes “the world’s hottest Currywurst” because, for his number ten, he uses pure capsaicin. But this is a different story.
So, Currywurst is a kind of fusion. The sausage is traditional German. The curry powder came from England, with roots in Indian masala. The tomato-based sauce was inspired by American ketchup.
Dough: Dissolve yeast in about 2 teaspoons sugar and 1/2 cup warm water; let stand until it bubbles.
Sift flour in large bowl and add salt and 1/2 cup sugar.
In another bowl beat 3 egg yolks, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and sour cream; add yeast; add scalded milk and sweet butter which was added to the milk and cooled. Add this to the flour bowl and knead to a soft silky dough, not sticky. Let rise in a greased bowl until double in bulk. Make sure the dough is soft as it has to stretch.
On floured cloth roll dough to about 1/4 to 1/2 inch in thickness; stretch gently so it won’t break. Stretch oblong about 30 x 20 inches (use rolling pin if necessary) and fill with following filling.
Filling: Scald milk with butter.
In bowl add ground nuts, honey, vanilla extract, sugar and pinch of salt, then add scalded milk with butter. Mix, then add stiffly beaten egg whites. If thick, add a little more milk. Spread on dough like you would for nut roll and roll like a jellyroll (make as sweet as desired).
Grease roasting pan 4 to 6 inches in depth and fill pan; start at one edge of pan; make a “U” shape. Do not cut if roll is longer; turn again. Brush with milk. Prick with knife on top for air bubbles. Let stand 1 hour.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.
Remove from oven and brush with butter. Let cool, then flop it on a cloth and place it on a rack to cool.
Source: Anne Price – Our Favorite Recipes – St. Anthony Croatian Catholic Church
Air heat pumps barely function below minus 20 C, propane gels at minus 40, that most electric cars can not be charged below minus 40. Below minus 40, you can throw water in the air, and it won’t be liquid when it hits the ground. Depending on the metal, but metals get brittle at low temperatures, and below minus 40 they can snap at a much lower pressure than normal. If you are running heavy equipment, don’t even bother to try and use it below minus 30, because something will break., and starting a cold engine is very hard, and the oil is so thick, it will take time to flow through the transmission and engine. Most likely hydraulic lines will burst, but you can snap a thick piece of steel.
Flesh freezes in minutes. A friend was working outside in minus 50, and he had to remove a mitten to adjust a crescent wrench, and he didn’t put the mitten back on while he tightened the bolt. The bolt or nut snapped, and his hand hit the aluminum tower, it split wide open, in the fleshy part between the thumb and index finger. It didn’t bleed. He had to go the hospital. He could have lost his hand if he kept working in that cold.
You always wear mitts, not gloves, gloves don’t provide enough protection.
Wolverine guard hairs dont frost up, so are used on parka fringes.
Hard liquor, vodka, rum, rye, gin freezes at about minus 34.
I’m constantly considered to be an uncouth, unwashed plebeian. Particularly at restaurants. I guess I give off that ‘air’. Wait-staff constantly try to help me with my “mistakes”.
Examples:
I order seared ahi tuna. Waiter: “Sir, I just wanted to make sure you understand that the fish is mostly raw”.
Different restaurant, I order a calamari appetizer. Waitress: “You understand those aren’t onion rings sir, right?”
Even my wife calls me “peasant” sometimes (but I admit — I married above my station — she’s awesome and a hell of a sense of humor).
It’s become the family joke. My kids make bets to see how unsophisticated some new place is going to assume I am.
It must be the way I talk. I work in IT and while I have some very high-level responsibilities (a few applications I’ve written and maintain for my corporates overlords and maintain a few server farms in two states) I’m located smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles — and I’m the only IT guy within 100 miles. We have way too many locations in LA for *just* me. Hope that changes soon. Anyway, sometimes I need to crawl under desks and field some “try turning it off and back on” type stuff that our help desk failed to filter properly.
My boss is constantly getting feed back about me from our non-IT remote staff on how I’m a “breath of fresh air” and that I don’t make them feel like they are dumb. I use simple language to describe what I’m doing, not techno-jargon. I’m not a fan of silence, so while I’m fixing something remotely, I explain what I’m doing or I explain why I’m asking them to do something. Again, in plain English. No alphabet acronyms.
Maybe when it’s time to retire, I’ll transfer to the helpdesk…
It is often termed “constructive dismissal” or “creating a hostile work environment.” Legally, such behavior can be categorized as workplace harassment or bullying, involving deliberate actions with the intention of making an employee’s job challenging in the hope that they will voluntarily resign. I strongly recommend discussing the issue with your manager to understand the reasons behind their actions. Alternatively, you can reach out to the HR department, if available in your company, to address and resolve the situation. You may also suggest implementing productivity tools such as Connecteam or Trello to streamline work tasks and proactively prevent similar issues in the future.
More horrifying than humiliating. I lost track of my 3 year old grand daughter. She was playing on the playscape. I wrongfully answered a call on my phone.
After the call, my girl was gone. I climbed. through the playscape. I checked the bathrooms. I was nuts. I started screaming. The manager came and locked the doors except the emergency exit and he had a worker standing there. I was running around screaming her name. I told them to call the police.
Everyone was looking at me like I was the worst person alive. I was. Suddenly I heard a little voice say “ Nama” I looked around and did not see her. But I heard “Nama” again and caught some movement at a table.
At the table were the two most grotesque “women” I have ever seen. I don’t think they were female nor were they trans or cross dressers. They were in horrid disguise. They had a little girl with black hair, my grand was a red head. I got closer and could tell the child had black eyebrow pencil on and dark make up smeared on.
I got closer to the table. The child said “Nama, I pay make up” The two grotesque things said nothing but were looking at the door.
I reached over and pulled the black wig off the child… and grabbed my grand daughter and ran. I ran out the emergency door setting off an alarm. I threw her in the car, seat belt be damned and took off
As I turned out of the McDs I saw a car sitting there with the engine running with only one man in it. I screeched back and saw the license plate was mudded over. So I drove. I drove for 30 minutes making sure no one was following.
Then I cried for another 30.
McDs was very cooperative but the way their cameras were set, that was the only table not seen. Evidently the two grotesque things ran out the emergency door after me.
They were clearly in disguise.
They were never identified.
Of course I was humiliated. I neglected my duty as my grand’s care giver. But humiliation was deserved and I was horrified.
I still have nightmares.
Watch the kids The call will wait!!!
Ok folks. I don’t want one more virtue mongerer to chastise me that I should have waited for the police.
Exactly who do you think was going to hold them there until the police arrived?
You think they were going to sit and have a coke until the police got there to arrest them? Do you think the McDonalds manager was going to jump in and hold them down and end up potentially liable, after they beat the crap out of the manager getting out?
Maybe I should have made a citizen’s arrest and ordered them to wait while I cuffed them with straws or ketchup packets?
What makes you think they would not have just decked me and took her back and out the door.
I was almost 70 and on chemo. I wasn’t a 30 year old cop. Such virtue mongering by people who think kidnappers just hang around to be arrested and who have clearly never been in such a situation. But they sure think they would save the day. Pathetic.
Drain artichoke hearts, reserving marinade; set marinade aside.
Position knife blade in food processor bowl; add artichoke hearts, 1/2 cup cheese and garlic. Pulse 4 times or until artichoke hearts are finely chopped. Set aside.
Place 1 phyllo sheet on wax paper (keep remaining phyllo covered). Lightly brush phyllo sheet with oil portion of reserved marinade; sprinkle with 2 teaspoons of remaining cheese. Top with another phyllo sheet; brush lightly with oil portion of reserved marinade. Cut phyllo sheet in half lengthwise. Cut each half crosswise into thirds, making 6 sections, each measuring approximately 6 x 5 inches. Place a heaping teaspoon of artichoke mixture in center of each phyllo section. Gather corners of phyllo over filling, and gently twist to close. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet. Repeat procedure with remaining phyllo sheets, marinade, cheese and artichoke mixture.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 14 minutes or until golden.
US failed to take over Afghanistan, failed to take over Iraq, failed to take over Vietnam. Each time the US tried with small weak countries it found that the people kept fighting them and so basically the US never controlled the population. Really expect that if the US could not take over those small countries it could succeed in a country that is almost as large as the United States in area and four times the population. It cost $7 trillion for the wars in the Middle East. Extrapolation says that it will cost 10 times as much to attempt the same with China. However, the US has a huge roadblock to overcome to invade Russia and that is that its ships cannot close on the Chinese coast without being sunk it could not land or supply units on the coast of China
image 25
US military leaders have admitted that China controls the seas within something like a 1000 kilometers of China, and every simulation of of conflict between China and the US in the region ends up with the US losing badly. Let us assume that the US can land on the coast of China, it will need a lot more men than it currently has in the military, like a factor of 40. China has 1.4 billion people while Afghanistan and Iraq had something like 40 million, and China is massive compared to those countries. Keep having your wet dreams because that is all they are.
Relaxing To Purring Cats And Cozy Fireplace for Peaceful Night 🔥 Deep Sleep, Relax, Study
Well, as I type this up, it is CNY. This (today) is the first day of the new year, and I am in Wenzhou. It’s a standard fare of massive meals, lots and lots of drinking, and long bouts of lazing about.
The weather is cold out, but nothing like what I grew up with. Lots and lots of fireworks. Non-stop explosions and bangs. Day in, and day out, at all hours of the day and night. Very typical.
This is the first time that we are in Wenzhou since the COVID hit China. That was four years ago. My… a lot has happened.
I’ve been busy knocking these posts out, and now have a nice big backlog, but I will be altering my schedule and product mixes in the future.
I want to wish everyone a very nice and prosperous Year of the Dragon 2024.
Golden Chinese Dragon on Red Background ,Traditional New Year Sy
This reminds me of the early 90’s when I had just started Nick’s Racing in Denver CO
As anybody who starts his own business knows, money was tight and everything would just need to hold out a bit longer. Every Saturday afternoon I went to the local mall/shopping-centre to buy whatever I needed for the week. Whilst there I often saw this 70’s Camaro in the lot and it amused me how the inside looked like a pig sty. But I did love the shape & one day… Dream on Nick you are living from week to week.
Fortunately lady luck and my craftmanship smiled on me, work came in so that I had to hire 2 more engine builders and I started to have disposable income and no time to spend it. The American dream, right ? One day I see this Camaro in the same lot with the bonnet (hood) open and a for sale sign on it. I bought this car for a ridiculously low amount and spent a whole day cleaning out all the junk this lady owner had accumulated in it. The first thing that hit me where the cigarette burn marks in the upholstery and the holes in the roof lining 😉
I had to redo the interior, the body had to be panel-beated and resprayed. The engine was going to be replaced with a 383 stroker anyways I just decided to redo the Electrics, as fixing this rats nest was not worth it. I fitted a Classic Air Air Con This car was trash- defined.
Luckily my 2 workers were foreigners also- Mexicans. We got on well and their friends and family did a lot of work on this car for good value. Considering this was basically a rebuild, using performance part where possible, and not a hot-rod build, it still took close to a year of getting it on the road again. This car must have gotten 0 maintenance from the day she got it to the day it expired in a parking lot.
And then I left back for Namibia and sold it to one of my guys who then gave it to his daughter once she needed wheels.
A young Kurt Russell worked together with Charles Bronson. During shooting, Russell found out it was Charles Bronson’s birthday. So he got his older co-star a gift. Bronson looked at it, took it… then walked out of the room, without saying a word. Russell was terrified, worried he had insulted the man.
image 5
A little while later, Russell was called to the dressing room of Bronson. Bronson was silent, looked down and said to the child actor: “No one has ever given me a birthday gift before…” Charles Bronson was the son of dirt poor immigrants. He had fourteen siblings, and worked in the mines as a child. Never finished schooling, never had a kind word, he was worked like a mule since the day he learned to walk.
Charles Bronson hadn’t known a lot of kindness in his life. It caught him off guard to receive some from his young co-star. He later gave Russell a skateboard on his own birthday to play with between takes. The two men remained lifelong friends.
Yes. Several. Mainly because I know what’s going on in their lives, and the students don’t. If the students knew what I knew, they’d cut those teachers a little slack.
One teacher in particular, with whom I worked seven years ago, stands out for me among all of the teacher sob stories I know.
To make a long story short, when she was in her 40s and had been teaching preschool for half of her life, her husband left her for a much younger woman. Around the same time, the school’s preschool program changed from full-time to just two days per week and, in order to stay full-time and keep her benefits, she was forced to become the school’s art teacher for all students in grades PreK-8 (ages 3–14).
She was good with the younger students, but had no idea how to control the middle schoolers. She hated teaching the older kids, but she had no choice. She was still more than a decade away from retirement and needed the health insurance, but she also couldn’t afford to go back to school or change careers or anything like that. She was trapped teaching students that she wasn’t trained to teach.
And they were merciless to her.
The art class existed primarily to give the “regular” teachers a planning period, but I, along with my coworkers, ended up sitting with our classes to the art room most days, because we could control the kids, and she couldn’t. The students treated her class like recess, and treated her with a level of disrespect you usually only see in the movies, right before the “savior” teacher swoops in and sets things right.
The students didn’t see how the teacher cried after school every day, alone in her classroom, before she composed herself enough to walk down the block to her apartment, where she probably cried some more, alone, throughout the evening and night.
I left that school after teaching there just one year. The school closed two years after I left. I hope she was able to find a full time position working with younger children. Middle schoolers can be just as cruel to their teachers as they are to each other.
The doctor, after an examination, sighed and said, ‘I’ve got some bad news. You have cancer, and you’d best put your affairs in order.’
The woman was shocked, but managed to compose herself and walk into the waiting room where her daughter had been waiting.
‘Well, daughter, we women celebrate when things are good, and we celebrate when things don’t go so well. In this case, things aren’t well. I have cancer. So, let’s head to the club and have a martini.’
After 3 or 4 martinis, the two were feeling a little less somber. There were some laughs and more martinis. They were eventually approached by some of the woman’s old friends, who were curious as to what the two were celebrating.
The woman told her friends they were drinking to her impending end, ‘I’ve been diagnosed with AIDS.’ The friends were aghast, gave the woman their condolences and beat a hasty retreat.
After the friends left, the woman’s daughter leaned over and whispered, ‘Momma, I thought you said you were dying of cancer, and you just told your friends you were dying of AIDS! Why did you do that??’
‘Because I don’t want any of those bitches sleeping with your father after I’m gone.’.
Top 8 rules
Ricotta Lasagna Swirls
2024 02 10 13 35
Ingredients
Lasagna
8 lasagna noodles
2 pounds fresh spinach
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 pound ricotta cheese
Salt
Pepper
Sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cups tomato sauce
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon oregano
Instructions
Lasagna: Cook and drain lasagna noodles.
Steam 2 pounds fresh spinach for 7 minutes, then chop. Mix spinach with 2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/2 pound ricotta cheese, salt and pepper.
Coat each noodle with 2 to 3 tablespoons of mixture along the entire length of the noodle. Roll up. Stand on end in a baking dish.
Sauce: Sauté garlic and onion.
Add tomato sauce, basil and oregano.
Pour sauce over noodles and bake at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes.
Young Men Are Lonelier Than Ever (And It’s Getting Worse)
On this very day, Joe decides to eat out. He enters a restaurant, sits down, and has his order taken.
Just as the waitress arrives with his precariously balanced meal, someone knocks her aside. This causes an avalanche of food and drinks to tumble onto Joe in a non-majestic, yet sloppy manner.
Joe breathes in heavily and….
…asks if the waitress is alright, wipes himself to the best he can, and helps clean up a little without mumbling. Joe then comforts said waitress who is on the verge of crying, whilst assuring the seething and anxious manager that everything is all right.
If shit happens to you and it’s not your fault, then more shit happens yet you are still cool, you are mature in my eyes.
Mature people don’t cause more shit, or simply throw their shit away, even when shit is thrown at them.
It’s not that they don’t give a shit, but they deal with their shit appropriately.
Be like Joe and deal with your shit correctly.
China’s New AI Microchip Just Destroyed US Sanctions Forever!
Years ago, Patrick received a junk mail “fake cheque”- supposedly, if he were to send money to the company, he would then soon get more huge cheques like the one he’d just received.
The fake cheque was made out for $95,093.35. It even had an attached authorised signature.
image 134
Now, most people would see this as the junk & total scam that it obviously was. Most people would rip it up and just toss it in their bin. Most people would ignore it.
Most- but not Patrick.
Patrick was extremely broke at the time – he had only $200 in his bank account.
He had a good sense of humour and thought, “What would happen if I tried to lodge this into my bank account?” Fully expecting to get a laugh out of it from both himself and the bank teller, that’s exactly what Patrick did.
He went to lodge the cheque into his bank account.
As Patrick said, “I didn’t think I was sticking money into the machine.”
He so fully was expecting the cheque to bounce that he didn’t even endorse the back of it.
Time passes and Patrick forgets about it.
Ten days later though, he checks his bank account and to his amazement, $95,093.35 now sits in his bank account!
It turns out that the cheque actually matched 9 of the criteria that the bank required for a cheque to be valid – the words “non negotiable” that the junk company placed on the front did not negate the cheque whatsoever. It turned out that they had been successful in making the cheque look real – too real.
Additionally- the bank managed to miss their own legal deadline to notify Patrick that his cheque had bounced as a non-cash item.
“The excitement of that much money was off the scale,” he said. “It was an addiction. For two months I obsessed on whether I should take the money or give the money back. I put my bank on speed dial and dialed it every ten minutes. I worried constantly that it would go away.“
Patrick, being the good person that he is, did return the money 6-months later.
And, there you have it, Patrick Combs is the man who received a junk mail fake cheque in the post – and managed to cash it to the tune of $95,000+! That, I think, is very much gaming the system.
Yet the content was something I have known and understood and have been talking about for more than two years on Quora
Anyone who follows Scott Ritter, Brian Berletic, The Duran, IEarlGrey and those guys would find most of what Putin said to be nothing surprising, given that this was what most of them have been discussing for both these years 2022 and 2023
However for the Average Americans, this gave them the other point of view
You have had almost 66 Interviews of Zelensky over the last 24 months and you have seen almost 4000 articles covering Zelensky and Ukraine yet Putins POV and Russias POV has never been covered in the West
This Interview filled the gap
Why did Russia invade Ukraine?
Putins explanation makes a lot of sense
He says the Invasion was the LAST RESORT
He says Russia carved out Ukraine under Lenin and later on post WWII, more territories from Germany & Poland & Hungary & Romania were added to Ukraine after USSR got them under Post WWII restructuring
He says Russians and Ukranians were the same people and every Ukranian had 3–4 relatives in Russia and vice versa
He says Ukranian Language is just one of five languages spoken in Ukraine along with Russian, Polish, Romanian and Hungarian in different parts of Ukraine
He says Russia and Ukraine had a friendship and a relationship post 1994 and most of Ukraine’s Trade was with Russia
He says how Ukraine in 2008 began to start idolizing NAZIs and established Neo Nazism and began persecuting Russian Speakers of Eastern Ukraine
He says how Ukraine in 2014 deposed Yanukovich after the West Deceived HIM openly. He talks of how Yanukovich was assured by Merkel and others including Obama of a peaceful conclusion to Maidan if he didn’t use the Military and the Police and how once Yanukovich agreed, they openly deceived him and allowed Maidan to depose him
He then talks of how Zelensky spoke of ending the Russian Language from 2019 onwards and how Zelensky spoke of military conquest of Donbass
He talks of how Russia repeatedly talked to Western Leaders for a peaceful re implementation of the Minsk II Accords that Zelensky broke openly and which the guarantors ignored
He talked of Airplanes over Donbass and forced action against Russian Speakers for 8 years from 2014–2022, all chronicled and presented to the UN and yet IGNORED by the West
It was in the end the ONLY WAY for Russia to secure it’s borders and help the Russian Speakers in Ukraine and Denazify Ukraine
Is Russia ready for Talks?
Yes. Putin confirms this.
He says it’s Zelensky who is not ready. Who in fact even decreed that any discussion on peace is in fact illegal.
Is Russia ready to sell Gas to Germany?
Yes. Putin says he still has pipelines that can supply Gas to Germans.
So he says why are Germans throttling their own industries by paying 4.25 times more for Piped LNG???
He literally openly says Scholz is either Insane or a Traitor to his own people
Putin talks of China & Russia
Putin says China is far more significant to the West because of their Population and their strong economy which even at 5% growth is DOUBLE AS FAST AS THE US
He exposes the China Bogey by citing how BRICS & SCO are both Consensus based organizations against NATO which is entirely US dominated
He gives an example of the Iraq War where France and Germany were openly muscled by George Junior Bush
He cites how Sanctions failed
He highlighted how Russia simply DEDOLLARIZED as did many other nations
He cited that 61 Nations have reduced USD holdings by 10% or more since 22/2/22
He cited that 70% of Russian Trade is settled in Yuan or Ruble now and only 19% in Euros and USD (4.8% in Emirati Dirham and 1.7% in South African Rand & HKD and the rest in other currencies)
He cites how the US lost its own place in the world thanks to the Sanctions and how everyone now wants their own financial secure system and an independence from the Dollar and a preference for their own local currency
He clarified why he retreated from Kiev
He was clear when he said, in Istanbul the Ukranians wanted Russians away from Kiev as a matter of faith and Putin complied
Yet again HE WAS DECEIVED
So the conclusions are clear now
First Putin doesn’t care what the West thinks anymore. He will do what is best for Russians in his opinion. He won’t trust the West again.
Second Putin will not end this SMO unless he gets what he wants. A Guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO and security for the Russian Speaking population in Ukraine.
Third, Putin will not initiate WWIII unless NATO attacks Russia. He made this clear. He will attack any NATO member if they attack Russia first.
Fourth, Putin says his Hypersonic Missile System is the most advanced in the world and the fact that he talks less about it means he is accurate
His final message to the Americans is WHY THEY ARE POKING THEIR NOSE IN UKRAINE WHEN THEY HAVE SO MANY TROUBLES OF THEIR OWN
It’s something that resonates with Donald Trump and his MAGA crowd
It would have been enlightening to many people
Not to me
This is essentially everything I have been saying for two years now.
When the kids were grown and gone, my wife and I considered getting a firearm for home protection. Two events finally pushed us to do it. The first event was my walking into a large drug buy in a gas station late at night in Miami. Lots of drugs, thugs, and guns. While they stood there looking at me. I said “Hey, I’m just here to get a receipt for the gas. The guy behind the counter (who was in on it), gave it to me and they let me walk out the door past a very confused lookout. Having a concealed weapon probably wouldn’t have done me any good that night. But it did reminded me that the world is a dangerous place.
The second event was back-to-back hurricanes, causing weeks of power outages with no cell or landline capability. The neighborhood was blocked in for a long time by fallen trees and debris. Even though we live only a mile or so from a precinct, there was no way to contact them or for them to quickly get into our neighborhood.
I asked my neighbor if I should be worried about looting. He responded, “everyone in this neighborhood is armed”, and everybody knows it. You are, aren’t you? A few weeks after the storm, I purchased my first gun.
I friend in law enforcement asked if I had a carry permit for it, reminding me that I lived within a 1000 feet of a school, restricting how I can transport the gun when off my property. Those restrictions (other than being on school property itself) are waived in my state if you have a carry permit.
I signed up for an approved NRA course that counted towards the permit, applied, and received one. Since then, I’ve purchased a few other guns, joined a gun club, and have had dozens of different firearm courses with a state LEO firearms trainer.
Like other “constitutional carry” states, Florida no longer requires a permit for concealed carry. But I keep mine current so I can carry reciprocally in other states.
Yes. This was back in the late ’90s. I had a customer come in with a Corolla. He only had one remote for the security system, but had just purchased another one and needed to have it programmed to the car. I told him that was a very quick and easy job, and I could literally do it while he stood there. I opened the driver’s door, turn the key to the on position and moved the driver seat all the way forward. The computer for the security system was under the driver’s seat on this car. You had to access the computer and push and hold a small button on the side of the computer to put it in programming mode, but it was much easier to access from the back seat. So I then got out and opened the rear driver side door, leaned in, and moved the floor mat to get better access to the computer under the seat. When I moved the floor mat, there was a syringe, a spoon, a lighter, and a bag of white powder that I will assume had to be heroin. I put the computer in program mode, hit the buttons on the remote, and heard the confirmation chirp from the front of the car to signal the new remote was programmed. I put the floor mat back, climbed out, and with a death stare, handed the customer his new remote and told him you’re all done, have a nice day. The guy’s face was white as a ghost, and I never saw him in the dealership again.
Having spent years working in a retail store, I saw so many decisions made by highly-paid executives in an office in another state that I knew instantly wouldn’t work out. And they didn’t.
I could write a book about the reasons for this, but mainly – either they don’t know because they don’t do the actual work, or they don’t believe the underlings who have tried to explain it to them.
I’ll give you an example:
So, I worked at a retail store that was part of a national chain separated into so many districts. I think our district had 10 or 12 stores. One quarter, I have no idea how, but somehow, one of the other stores in our district massively overspent their budget by like ten or fifteen grand. (I really wish I knew how, I bet it was a helluva story.) Probably someone got fired over that, but that didn’t solve the problem that they had a shortfall. (And no, firing the person responsible didn’t fix it either, because they then had to spend money to hire a new person to fill the role.)
So, somewhere up in the corporate office, a person whose name I don’t know had an idea to fix this problem. Since I don’t know who this person is, we’ll call them Bean Counter. I assume their job had something to do with accounting or finance.
So Bean Counter says, “Well, we can make up the shortfall by having every store in the district cut their budget by so much % for the remainder of the quarter.”
Bean Counter’s Boss ran the numbers and decided this was a grand idea. They may have even given Bean Counter a raise or promotion for such brilliant work. On paper, Bean Counter’s plan appeared to play out beautifully.
But this was around the beginning of December, just as the holiday rush was kicking into high gear.
Also, there are not a lot of ways to reduce spending on a store level, where budgets are already pretty tight. Management had very limited discretionary funding, and rarely went out and bought stuff for the store. Basically, the only way to really reduce spending by the amount Bean Counter wanted was to cut payroll hours….drastically.
So it’s the holidays and we’re working with a skeleton crew on every shift. One person at the register, one on the floor, and a manager who wasn’t *supposed* to get tied up with tasking.
And we’re busy, every day, because it’s the holidays, and we sell, among other things, a lot of tech items that are popular gifts. Sometimes we have 20 or 30 people in the store at once, and we can’t help them all. There is no “work harder” solution that allows one person on the floor to help 30 people at once. Even with the manager also helping customers on the floor, and “floating” between customers, they could realistically help maybe 10 people at a time.
Oh, and we weren’t supposed to get a line of more than 2 people at the register without opening a second till. HAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, that couldn’t happen with only two other people in the store and both of them working the floor.
So we had people walking out, unhelped, constantly. We did our best, assuring people we’d be with them in a moment, apologizing for the delay, etc. Even so, some people just couldn’t wait and they left and, presumably, went to a competitor.
But Bean Counter and Bean Counter’s Boss weren’t in the store watching this every day. They were back in their nice little offices, smiling at their Excel sheets because they turned a line green.
You see, an Excel sheet can’t show you how much revenue you lost because you didn’t have enough employees to help your customers.
And even without knowing any of the numbers on the Excel sheet, I can tell you that we lost money. I’m going to give you a VERY conservative estimate here. I’ll assume some of the people who left wouldn’t have bought anything anyway. Let’s say only half the people who came in would have bought something. And let’s say that only twenty people walked out in an hour. (Most hours it was probably much more than that, but I’m giving you a conservative estimate.)
And let’s say that the average sale at that point was $20. That’s a really low number for this time of year (usually it was $40–60), but no one had time to upsell and pitch the customer add-ons, so we’ll say $20. That’s $200 an hour lost.
Employees like me and the floor person were making about $7.50 to $8 an hour. Let’s say everyone was getting $8 an hour. Having two more employees would have cost an additional $16 an hour but would have prevented at LEAST $200 in sales losses. (And again, the actual number is almost certainly much higher.)
The store was open from 8 AM to 9 PM, so 13 hours. By cutting two employees all day, the store saved $208 a day. They lost AT LEAST $2,600 a day in sales.
BUT Bean Counter’s plan looked good on paper, before, after, and during the last quarter. They got the district out of the red! We were no longer over budget! Problem solved!
Tesla primarily makes cars. And when regarded solely as an auto-maker – it is over valued.
Tesla pioneered electric vehicles and established a head start in that market. Newer entrants into that market (including Chinese manufacturers) are catching-up and offering products with similar utility and competitive prices. Tesla’s first-mover advantage is not being sustained. The company is taking too long to produce new models and is not iterating its current line-up fast enough. Where is the Roadster? Where is the new better battery tech? Why is the Cybertruck failing to match expectation?
The company presented itself to the stock market as more than a mere car maker. Rather it is a tech company which happens to make cars. It argued that it should be valued as such, and that initially convinced the market. However the various technical innovations it promised have yet to materialise. Self-driving has improved, but it is many, many years late. The robo-taxi idea seems to have evaporated – there are still safety issues and regulatory hurdles. It’s AI vision stack is a really impressive bit of technology – but it is not a product.
The company has a CEO problem. The CEO has a history of over promising and under delivering. Rather than finishing products and releasing them in a polished state, the CEO presents semi-baked ideas to the market in the conceptual stage, and then take years and years to materialise. The market is getting wise to this bait and switch strategy.
The CEO is distracted with other companies and is at best a part-time manager. The CEO has not been good at attracting and retaining the best staff. When the head of the AI project left, this should have been a warning sign. The CEO has not created a workplace culture that values attention to detail and quality. Instead the culture is gung-ho and reckless, which frequently ends up causing more damage than good.
The CEO seems to be having either a drugs and or mental health problem and has recently decided to become more politically active in support of various right and far-right political groups. In some companies this would not matter, but Tesla’s main market is selling vehicles to individuals and families who are aware of environmental issues and support the transition to greener energy. The far-right regard electric vehicles as a government imposed initiative to spoil their god-given right to drive a pick-up, full of firearms, while running over vaccine-users. – This makes Tesla vehicles less attractive to people who would have previously bought them. No one wants to own a vehicle which has become a repugnant political statement.
The CEO clearly regards Tesla has his personal piggy-bank and demands absurd amounts of compensation for his part-time and mercurial contribution. This naturally upsets shareholders.
AI Tool Deciphers Herculaneum Scroll, and It’s All About Pleasure!
A team of student researchers have combined 3D-mapping and AI to decipher a Greek scroll that was encased in ash during the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The philosophical musing reveals Greek thought on the complexities of “pleasure”.
In the ancient Greek world “pleasure” wasn’t just an occasional indulgence; it was an Olympic event of the senses. From lively symposiums colored with courtesans and entertainers, to dramatic theatrical productions and festivals, the pursuit of delight was as integral to Greek life as debating philosophy.
Now, offering new insights into pleasure across the ancient Aegean, where it wasn’t a guilty pleasure but a cultural cornerstone, a Greek philosopher’s thoughts regarding pleasure have been decoded by AI. And adding to the intrigue, the source material was an ancient papyrus scroll that was entombed in ash during the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
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Text from the Herculaneum scroll, which has been unseen for 2,000 years. (Vesuvius Challenge/Nature)
Fusing 3D-Mapping and AI
The team of student researchers, comprising Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger, who used AI to decode the damaged papyrus scroll, have scooped the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge grand prize Vesuvius Challenge. They received the illustrious award for being the first team to “recover 4 passages of 140 characters from a Herculaneum scroll”.
Essentially, the young team combined 3D-mapping applications and AI to successfully penetrate a lump of blackened volcanic rock that has encased a scroll for almost 2,000-years, since Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Known as the Herculaneum papyri, the new combination of technologies identified tiny patches of ink within the fused ash, revealing hitherto unseen musings of a Greek philosopher contemplating ‘pleasure.’
A Gigantic Boon for Philosophy
Not only did the winning team of the Vesuvius Challenge decipher more than “85 percent of the characters illustrated within four passages comprising 140 characters each,” but they included a further 11 columns of text, bringing their total to around 2000 interpreted characters.
The text discloses the personal thoughts of Philodemus, the philosopher-in-residence at the library which once housed the Herculaneum papyri. As such, Professor Michael McOsker from the University College London told New Scientist that the findings represent “a gigantic boon” to the understanding of philosophy in the ancient Greek world.
The ancient Greek text muses on how the scarcity and abundance of material items impacts the pleasure received from them. According to Philodemus, a philosopher of the Epicurean school, the enjoyment derived from food and other goods is closely tied to their availability. In line with Epicurean philosophy, which emphasizes pleasure as life’s primary objective, the scarcity or abundance of these commodities plays a crucial role in shaping our well-being.
Additionally, it was noted that in his two-millennium-old text, there seems to be a subtle attack at the Stoic school of philosophy, suggesting they have “nothing to contribute regarding pleasure.” While Epicureanism centers on the pursuit of pleasure and tranquility, considering them the ultimate goals in life, in contrast, Stoicism emphasizes virtue as the highest good, advocating for inner strength and moral excellence to navigate life’s challenges.
What this all means for modern researchers, is that they have fresh data pertaining to Greek ideas about the prioritization of pleasure and tranquility (Epicureanism), against virtue and inner resilience (Stoicism), being the key foundation for a fulfilling life.
It Cost What? This Has To Stop!
Having bagged the Vesuvius Challenge the team of students now plan “to scale up the 3D scanning and digital analysis techniques,” while at the same time keeping an eye on the costs of analysis. It might have read like the $700,000 prize was a big win, but not when we put that amount into perspective.
It cost the team $100 for every square centimeter of analyzed rock, which tallies to between $1 million and $5 million per scroll. This sounds within the realms of research budget, right? But when you then consider there are another “800 scrolls” lined up to be deciphered, that calculates to between 800 million and 4 billion USD.
Therefore, a lot of ancient philosophy will go undeciphered, and as such it will remain a mystery for future researchers to tackle when lower cost research methodologies are developed.
Top image: Left; One of the Herculaneum scrolls that are being deciphered. Right; Text from the Herculaneum scroll Source: Vesuvius Challenge
I had already submitted my resignation. On the last day, the bitch who had committed all the prior unfair labor practices was, of course, at it again. She had me covering for other people, and didn’t let me take any breaks all day. An hour before the end of my shift, when a co worker had come to relieve me from covering for her, she told me the same supervisor wanted me down in her office so she could talk to me.”Oh really? Well, first I am going to take my morning 15 minute break, then I am taking my half hour lunch, then I am taking my afternoon 15, which I am legally required to do. That will bring me up to quitting time, so she can WANT all she wants”, and left. Heard later than she couldn’t believe I had done it, and went screaming my name through all 6 floors of the building looking for me LOL
CHINA WARNING! We Will Show Our Swords Against AMERICA
This was back in the mid 90’s, I was working at a pizza place. A good friend of mine had signed a contract with a major league baseball team, and he was back in town after his first season in the minors. He stopped in to see me at work, when he left one of the waitresses asked who he was. I told her, she seemed interested and asked if I could introduce her to him. I said sure, me and this girl had become good friends since she started working at this place.
I introduce them, they start seeing each other and things seem good. At some point, she learned about the signing bonus that he had received when he signed his contract. It wasn’t a ton, but it was a decent amount. I heard her tell a co-worker that she had stopped taking her birth control, she wanted to get pregnant so, “I can get some of that money”. I told my friend that she said this, and he broke up with her that evening.
She knew I told him, and she did not like that. I go into work the next day, she’s already working and she wants to have a talk. We’re talking, she asked if I told him, I said, “Yep, that was me”. There’s some shouting, and at some point, she grabs me by the throat and his her fist drawn back. The assistant manager grabbed her, and dragged her away. She was sent home for the day. The manager comes in, and he wants to fire both of us. A few coworkers and the assistant manager defended me, as I hadn’t started this fight. She was fired that evening.
Side note: a few weeks later, she tried to run me over with her car. As you can clearly see, she was a very stable individual.
A sales associate was pushing a very large cardboard box, filled with some kind of clothes, along one of the main aisles in the store. It didn’t look very heavy, but it was clearly much too large for any one person to carry.
She had picked up a lot of speed, and she was kinda racing forward, bent over the box like she was going for the gold in Olympic box-pushing, when she reached a spot where the floor changed to carpet. The two types of flooring were separated by one of those very narrow metal bands, flat enough to where it wasn’t generally noticeable.
The box hit the metal band and came to a full – and very abrupt – stop, but the woman did not. She could have done the maneuver a thousand times and never repeated her trick, but she somehow flipped over herself and landed in the box she’d been pushing.
I didn’t laugh at first. I actually managed to control myself, but then I saw the look on her face. She looked like a startled cartoon, anime style, and I just couldn’t contain my laughter after that. I knew that it was so, so wrong, but she looked like she was okay physically.
I still think of her sometimes, and whenever that happens, I can’t help but laugh like an insane hyena.
Rigatoni with Steak Sauce
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Ingredients
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 (12 ounce) rib eye steaks
Salt and pepper
2 onions, thinly sliced
2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
3/4 cup dry red wine
1 (26 ounce) jar marinara sauce
1 cup beef broth
16 ounces dried rigatoni pasta
3 ounces Parmesan, shaved
Instructions
Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a heavy large frying pan over high heat. Sprinkle the steaks with salt and pepper. Cook the steaks until they are brown but still rare in the center, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer the steaks to a plate and set aside to cool completely.
Add 2 more tablespoons of olive oil to the same pan. Sauté the onions and carrots until the onions are translucent, about 8 minutes, with additional salt and pepper, to taste. Add the garlic and oregano, and sauté for 1 minute. Add the wine and simmer for 1 minute. Add the marinara sauce and broth. Cover and simmer over medium low heat to allow the flavors to blend, about 10 minutes.
Season the sauce, to taste, with salt and pepper.
Meanwhile, trim off any fat from the steaks, then cut the steaks into bite size pieces and set aside. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the rigatoni and boil until it is tender but still firm to the bite, stirring often, about 10 minutes. Drain the rigatoni.
Toss the rigatoni and reserved steak pieces and any accumulated juices from the steaks with the sauce to coat.
Transfer the pasta to bowls.
Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese shavings and serve.
Had a fella break into my house when on holiday in Brazil and a neighbour called the police and he was arrested in my house. She saw him break a small window to get in. Was big on the new consoles and computer games at the time, had all the latest. He’d taken suitcases from upstairs and filled them.
He told the policeman cockily he was going to come back and finish the job, he was a local heroin addict known to them.
When I came back from holiday I had to get a crime number, the policeman without giving a name gave me a massive clue who did it…off the record of course
.Not saying the two are related but I told a certain local person and the burglar was found tied to a lamppost naked a few days later in public view. I know a few locals had a vendetta against him so could have been anyone. A few months later the exact same happened to a teen who had been stealing cars locally and joyriding in them. I know the teen had to be cut free in public which must have seriously embarrassed him. An obnoxious fat kid who would gloat to folk who he had stole a car from.
Thought was a great way to deal with people who were getting away with petty crime and back out to do it again. Made the local papers as well which really would have rubbed it in.
This was when she was 17. She decided she wanted to make the big plunge and purchase a stereo system with the money she’d saved from various jobs. But she was nervous about being taken by nefarious sales people, so she asked her big brother (the guy with a house account at Groove-N-Tube… yeah I bought a lot of that stuff back then) to go with her to recommend what to purchase.
We arrive at what at the time was a big name electronics and appliance store (out of business now, no surprise). The sales person gloms onto us right away and his eyes are sparkling. He thinks he’s landed a couple (probably dating but maybe a young marriage), and he goes into his spiel. We walk through the store discussing the various things they have to offer. I ask some questions. My sister asks some questions. Salesperson totally ignores sis. Probably figures I’m the one wearing the pants in this decision. At one point, he totally turns his back on her while he discusses the attributes of a system. I could tell she was fuming but was too polite to say anything.
Finally, it’s time to make a decision. With his back still to my sister, he asks me: “So what can I pack up for you?”
I look him dead in the eye and say: “What are you asking me for? She’s the one buying it.”
He went white. Looked at my sister. She beamed at him and said: “I think I’ll buy something from a store that values all its customers.” And out she sailed.
By the time I went to college in West Texas, my pickpocketing days were well and truly behind me. I had seen the error of my ways, repented of my mischief, and was endeavoring to live an honest life again.
Little did I know that my new Lone Star country was home to one of the most absurd and illogical bits of fashion stupidity in history.
No, I’m not talking about chaps. Don’t even get me started on those.
I’m not entirely sure what it’s called, but I have heard it referred to as a “cowboy wallet.” The primary difference between it and a non-stupid wallet is that it is extra super-duper long.
image 132
This means that when you put it in the back pocket of your Wranglers, it sticks out the top like a pull-tab.
image 131
Are you effing serious, Texas? Why not just hang a sign saying FREE MONEY?
There may be a reader or two out there thinking, “no, I’d definitely notice if someone pulled my wallet. I’d feel it slide out!”
Trust me, you wouldn’t. It’s not any failure on your part, either. Pickpocketing is a bit like cheating at cards. When done properly, it has nothing to do with luck.
I had several friends in college who used these cowboy goodie-bags and I made sure to let them know the economic dangers of their rustic fashion. I had one friend named Logan with whom it became a running joke that I would pull his wallet pretty much every time I saw him. I’d obviously return it to him immediately, but even when he knew full well that I was going to do it, he was still powerless to stop me because it really is that easy.
So Quora, if you are the owner/carrier of a cowboy wallet and you happen to find yourself in a big city or, for that matter, pretty much anywhere besides your family’s ranch, I suggest that you consider either putting it in your inside jacket pocket or getting a different wallet. You would actually be better off taping your money to one of those flag-football belts than putting that thing in your back pocket, as you’d be more likely to notice when it got pulled.
The New York pickpocket rings (to the best of my knowledge) have all either become defunct or transitioned to more profitable ventures, and the city is now very safe. Nonetheless, wear one of those things around here and someone’s likely to flint you on principle.
McDonald’s most popular burger and the second most popular item on their menu (second only to their unique fries).
But have you ever stopped to wonder how it got its name?
You see, McDonald’s was originally founded by brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald.
They went by the nicknames Mac and Dick (forwhen Mac and Cheese just isn’t enough).
The “Big Mac” hit McDonald’s fast food restaurants in August 1968. However, before this, the executives at McDonald’s were struggling to come up with a name for this new super-sandwich.
The McDonald’s corporation tested out a couple of other names, including “The Aristocrat.”
Eventually, a secretary named Esther Glickstein (who was quite fond of co-founder Maurice), suggested the name “Big Mac”.
She admitted that the higher-ups initially laughed the name off when she first suggested it, but she got the last laugh when the name stuck!
But just imagine…
for one second…
if…
she had been more fond of Richard…
You could be enjoying a Big Dick, instead of a Big Mac.
My Girlfriend Asked For An Open Relationship, I Walked Out And Now I Laugh At Her Tears
I was general manager of a pregnancy resource center. It was a 501(c)(3) corporation, and we were completely dependent on donations. It was going broke when I took over. We got back to solvency within a year, without having to back off at all from the services we provided. In fact, we had grown quite a bit. There were 5 full time employees, and about 35 volunteers.
One day, right out of the blue, I was called to go to the office down the street of the chairman of our board of directors. When I got there, he and another board member summarily fired me. Before I left that office, the board chairman had written a glowing letter of recommendation for me.
Curious, I asked him why I was being let go. He said that the board had voted me out because I ran the place too much like a business and not enough like a charity. He had voted against firing me, but was outvoted. The reason they were going broke before hiring me was that no one in the place had any ability to manage money. So, making it more businesslike internally, without that being noticed by our clientele, just seemed wrong to them.
I’m not a waiter, but I will tell my experience. After work, a bunch of coworkers and I would go to the pub across the street. People came and left, as they got off work. We always ran a single tab. Someone would come, have one five dollar drink, and throw ten dollars into the middle of the table. The next person might have 3 $5 drinks, and throw in a twenty before leaving. Nobody wanted to risk stiffing their coworkers or the waitress.
The biggest problem was that at the end of the night, we often had a 35–40 percent tip.
Then a friend we used to work with, joined us for drinks, at first everything was fine, but after a few friday nights at the pub, he started to say. I don’t have any cash on me, just hand me the cash, and I will go put it all on my credit card.
Three weeks later, the waitress who had waited on us for years, sat down early in the evening, before our friend joined us and asked us if her service had slipped, because suddenly we had gone from 35–40 percent tips to exactly 10 percent the last few times. This was a few years ago in Canada, and 10–15 percent was the standard tip. It turns out our friend had been picking up our $300 for a $220 bill, and paying $242, with tip, and going home with $58 more than he came with, after drinking all night for free.
We said no, her service was still fabulous and suggested that she keep us on a group tab, and put him on a separate bill.
Our friend came and at the end of the evening went to grab the cash, and we said, no you have a separate bill.
He got all flustered, and we told him we didn’t want to see him for 6 months, until he learned his lesson.
Lionel Messi will go down in history as the man who united both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese football fans, both pro- and anti-establishment Hong Kong voters, and both its political elites and grassroots citizens, to have such seething hatred towards the same person.
I don’t think even bona fide war criminals like Tojo Hideki would be able to accomplish such a feat in the Sinosphere these days. There were people who paid thousands of HK dollars for a ticket, and traveled to Hong Kong all the way from Xinjiang and abroad, just for a glimpse of the legendary “king of football”. Instead, all they got was snubbed.
There’s no other way to put it. Messi messed up, big time.
Right now nobody really knows what’s going on, why he refused to fulfil his contract (of playing at least 45 minutes on the field), and why he behaved in such a cold and arrogant manner towards his fans in Hong Kong, to the extent that he didn’t even once smile or wave at them.
But judging from the fact that he did play ball in Riyadh, and that he said in an interview he will play again in Kobe, Japan later on, my gut feeling tells me this probably has to do with politics. And before some of you start going “but muh oppression/human rights”, remember that he didn’t protest being in Saudi Arabia.
It’s just too much of a coincidence. You see, right now Hong Kong is trying to pass a law known as “Article 23”. For those of you not from here, I’ll give you the rundown version: Hong Kong, which is part of the People’s Republic of China, has a constitutional duty to enact a law covering secession and subversion (pretty much every country and region in the world has this type of law, by the way).
This was supposed to have been done ages ago, but the anti-establishment, anti-China, right wing types pushed back against any discussion of it every single time. After the violent far right riots in 2019, the local government began to take national security more seriously, which is why western media, unsurprisingly, is trying to depict Article 23 as dystopic and totalitarian.
My instinct is that even if this whole ordeal in Hong Kong was not political at first (he could have just been a dick – not the most outlandish thing about footballers, honestly), Messi will make it political and milk all he can from it. He’s going to turn this thing into another Daryl Morey, NBA-China controversy, hijacking an entire sport for his own political virtue-signalling, and as a pledge of allegiance to both the United States and his home country of Argentina (which is currently being run by a far right neoliberal demagogue, who is trying to abolish the national currency in favour of the US dollar, outlaw abortions, and legalise the organ trade).
If nothing else, this would at least help him win over a few crowds in certain parts of the world where Sinophobia is politically correct. He might even run for political office on this far right platform after retiring from football. Who knows.
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Again, I have to stress that this is all just speculation on my part. Nobody but Messi and those closest to him would know what’s really going on. I hope I’m proven wrong, and that the same shitshow that happened in Hong Kong would repeat itself in Japan, thus proving he wasn’t being disrespectful specifically towards the Chinese, and that he’s just a snobbish cunt to everyone. However, knowing how politicised football has become in recent years, I’m not counting on it.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shoutout to the real MVP on the field, Hong Kong singer G.E.M. (Gloria Tang), for doing her best to cheer up an angry and disappointed crowd, and trying to give them something worth their money. She’s the queen 🫅.
Lionel Messi will go down in history as the man who united both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese football fans, both pro- and anti-establishment Hong Kong voters, and both its political elites and grassroots citizens, to have such seething hatred towards the same person.
I don’t think even bona fide war criminals like Tojo Hideki would be able to accomplish such a feat in the Sinosphere these days. There were people who paid thousands of HK dollars for a ticket, and traveled to Hong Kong all the way from Xinjiang and abroad, just for a glimpse of the legendary “king of football”. Instead, all they got was snubbed.
There’s no other way to put it. Messi messed up, big time.
Right now nobody really knows what’s going on, why he refused to fulfil his contract (of playing at least 45 minutes on the field), and why he behaved in such a cold and arrogant manner towards his fans in Hong Kong, to the extent that he didn’t even once smile or wave at them.
But judging from the fact that he did play ball in Riyadh, and that he said in an interview he will play again in Kobe, Japan later on, my gut feeling tells me this probably has to do with politics. And before some of you start going “but muh oppression/human rights”, remember that he didn’t protest being in Saudi Arabia.
It’s just too much of a coincidence. You see, right now Hong Kong is trying to pass a law known as “Article 23”. For those of you not from here, I’ll give you the rundown version: Hong Kong, which is part of the People’s Republic of China, has a constitutional duty to enact a law covering secession and subversion (pretty much every country and region in the world has this type of law, by the way).
This was supposed to have been done ages ago, but the anti-establishment, anti-China, right wing types pushed back against any discussion of it every single time. After the violent far right riots in 2019, the local government began to take national security more seriously, which is why western media, unsurprisingly, is trying to depict Article 23 as dystopic and totalitarian.
My instinct is that even if this whole ordeal in Hong Kong was not political at first (he could have just been a dick – not the most outlandish thing about footballers, honestly), Messi will make it political and milk all he can from it. He’s going to turn this thing into another Daryl Morey, NBA-China controversy, hijacking an entire sport for his own political virtue-signalling, and as a pledge of allegiance to both the United States and his home country of Argentina (which is currently being run by a far right neoliberal demagogue, who is trying to abolish the national currency in favour of the US dollar, outlaw abortions, and legalise the organ trade).
If nothing else, this would at least help him win over a few crowds in certain parts of the world where Sinophobia is politically correct. He might even run for political office on this far right platform after retiring from football. Who knows.
Again, I have to stress that this is all just speculation on my part. Nobody but Messi and those closest to him would know what’s really going on. I hope I’m proven wrong, and that the same shitshow that happened in Hong Kong would repeat itself in Japan, thus proving he wasn’t being disrespectful specifically towards the Chinese, and that he’s just a snobbish cunt to everyone. However, knowing how politicised football has become in recent years, I’m not counting on it.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shoutout to the real MVP on the field, Hong Kong singer G.E.M. (Gloria Tang), for doing her best to cheer up an angry and disappointed crowd, and trying to give them something worth their money. She’s the queen 🫅.
Honestly, no way to be sure. On a Saturday night i was at a tavern having a few. I was supposed to leave and meet my Niece at another tavern. I wasted just enough time at the first place that my Niece and her friends decided to go to a different tavern. I was just about a mile down the road from the other tavern.
A whole load of police vehicles and emergency personnel trucks go flying by the first bar heading towards the other bar. A Shooting occurred at JB’s tavern; killing a bartender Named Jeff; who put himself between the gunman and his patrons.
The gunman did this because he was kicked out for harassing women. He went home shaved his head, dressed in camouflage, grabbed a rifle, and then finished his journey to insanity
He killed another man Rich; who I knew from my working in taverns. Jeff, I knew from school; he was a couple of years behind me. We weren’t best friends; but we both enjoyed playing poker. The killer also wounded like a dozen innocent people.
Luther Casteel was his name. I had to Google it because I was unsure of the spelling. He actually wounded 14 people and brought 4 weapons with him and a couple hundred rounds of ammunition.
I really cannot answer if my screwing around saved my life; but I believe that it saved my niece’s life.
Okay, this would have been cute if the guy wasn’t a huge piece of human garbage*. My crew and I were out to eat on Christmas Eve in Hawaii. One of the few places that was open was our hotel’s sushi restaurant. After eating a heroic amount of sushi, lard ass leaned back and explained, “that was so good. I’m famished!”
Read on for the rest of the story.
The flight attendant and I looked at each other and exchanged a glance. So, I casually said “How can you still be hungry after all that sushi?” He said “I’m not hungry, I’m famished.” I just said “famished is a synonym for starving.” He had to look it up. The n made some BS excuse.
Read on for my rant against this dumbass.
He was fucking stupid. His wife was pregnant with twins at the time. He was glad because he said twins would be easier than a single kid. Later, after they were born he would only talk about one of the. “Clair Bears” was what he called his daughter Clair. He rarely referred to her twin. We dubbed that one trash bag because it was obvious how he felt about his kids. He was just awful.
hong kong 香港 3/3 (if wong kar wai and wes anderson had a really bad short film as a baby)
My stepfather was an apartment building manager in Hollywood, California when I was a teen.
The modern building was large and well-kept. The one large ‘suite’ was a challenge to rent out because of the price and because it was just too luxurious for the neighborhood.
But the owner of the building found a tenant who exceeded her dreams: a young Arabian prince (a student?) who paid a hefty security fee and rental for a year upfront.
I rarely saw him and his entourage because they clubbed and partied until dawn.
When I did catch a glimpse, it was like watching a movie: a group of handsome, laughing young men dressed in flowing Arab robes, moving through the California sunshine.
When they left before the lease was up, the owner was told that the prince did not require rent and security deposit refunds.
The owner was delighted…until the suite was inspected.
The formerly white shag carpet had not been cleaned since the prince moved in, and much of it had a strange, dark tinge. The walls and ceilings were no longer pristine white either.
As the owner and my stepfather entered the massive livingroom, they discovered why the colors were so dingy.
The tenant had been using braziers ON THE CARPET to cook food, leaving greasy stains all over. Above, the ceiling was almost black from smoke. Mattresses had been dragged in from the bedrooms.
The kitchen was literally filled with spoiled food and dirty dishes and pans; the stove was caked all over with burned food. The refrigerator was a mold-filled, broken disaster.
The bathrooms were disgusting, and the owner backed quickly away and shut the doors because of the stench.
The 3 bedrooms had been used for pets (forbidden by the lease) – dogs and birds. Excrement and rotted food were everywhere.
Most cabinet and inside doors were damaged or missing. Old papers, clothes and other items as well as trash littered the apartment.
Reparing and refurbishing the suite took almost 6 months and cost way more than the substantial deposit and unused rent. A bill was forwarded to the prince’s lawyer and was paid promptly.
Note: In the interest of keeping this short, I have not written in detail about the destruction.
After being fed for two consecutive weeks, this beautiful stray cat became a part of the family.
I’ll tell you what happened to my dad, and you might understand. My dad owned part of the family business, he was the working partner in the business.
He worked 12–16 days, 7 days a week to make ends meet.
When I was 8 or 9 he had what was called at the time a nervous breakdown, he was in the hospital for months, and the business didn’t close.
He was out for two months, and my mom went in, evidently she had worked herself into a git, worrying about my dad, and the effect that only seeing him for an hour or two a day was having on the marriage.
My mother got a job. That wasn’t rare in the early 1960s , but it wasn’t common. My dad cut his hours to 10–12 hours a day 6 days a week. Still way too much, but now we took a yearly, week long camping vacation.
When I was 19 my dad had a heart attack, and they put the company up for sale.
When my dad got out of the hospital he was under strict orders not to work more than 40 hours a week. I dropped out of university to help run the family business, while they were selling it.
It took 4 years to sell the business.
My dads heart was never the same. He went to work for the new owners, working 36 hours a week, weekends off, for the first time in his life.
He retired at 65, and died before he was 66 .
That is why you don’t work at a job that stresses you out.
Ex-CIA: Biden is NOW a National Security risk for the world
I have said this many times before. But I want to underline some things today.
When I was a senior in High School, I proudly wore a choker collar, puffy sleeved polyester printed shirts with a wide collar, and elephant bell-bottom jeans. Oh, and I also wore earth shoes, and rock-star boots. I was so fashionable!
That was me in purple
I also drove a orange “goat” GTO.
d64e71566d097b96b830a8d8f0ea97e5
And that was my life then.
Today, I am really different, as is my life.
Life changes. You will change.
ADVICE…
Embrace your moments. Savor your experiences. Remember that they will wane over time. So please treasure them.
When I was a teenager I was bullied by a local group of kids, all of them a few years older than me. Two of them were particularly vile. I am changing the names. One was Patrick and the other was Gavin. Patrick was a horrible weasel who basically incited the others to beat the crap out of me, and rarely got his own hands dirty. Gavin was a sociopath who rarely showed any emotion whatsoever. One particular time me and friends were playing near a train track (as kids did in the 90s), and I heard Patrick’s voice saying “Hey Gavin there he is he wants to fight you.” Sure enough along walks Gavin and grabs me and says “I hear you want to fight me….” I assured him this wasn’t the case, but he proceeded to knock the shit out of me. And I don’t just mean a few punches in the ribs. He pummelled my face multiple times. I am pretty sure I had concussion. Anyway, halfway through the beating I hear the unmistakeable sound of a train coming. Gavin hears it too. “Come on, we’re both going to die.” and he begins dragging me onto the tracks. And he was correct, in that we both would have been killed. He clearly didn’t care. The only thing that saved me was that I was able to grab hold of a length of builder’s wire that was half buried in the ground, and must have been attached to a lump of buried concrete because miraculously it held firm. Gavin was straining with every ounce of his strength to drag me and him into the path of the train. I vividly remember the train zooming past and I looked at Gavin, his teeth bared in anger as he tried to dislodge me. I remember giggling because Gavin was closer to the train than me. If my t shirt had torn, or if the wire had come loose, then Gavin would surely have fallen under the train first. Gavin eventually tired of beating me after the train was gone and I stumbled home, sore, ashamed and shaken. My face was so badly battered that when I told my father that I had fallen off some scaffolding while playing at a building site, he believed me. Both my eyes were so badly bloodshot that my eyeball went red. I had black eyes and bruises all across my face and neck and ribs. The bullying wasn’t a once off, but that was one of the worst instances of it for me.
Polish Cinnamon Cake
Polish Cinnamon Cake
Ingredients
12 tablespoons butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
3 teaspoons cinnamon
A grating of fresh nutmeg
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Beat the butter until it is soft and fluffy. Add 3/4 cup of the sugar and the egg and continue beating. Add 2 teaspoons of the cinnamon, the nutmeg and flour, and beat until well mixed.
Spread about 1/3 of the batter on an ungreased baking sheet, forming a rectangle about 10 x 12 inches and bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for 8 minutes, until lightly browned.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
Repeat two more times with the remaining batter.
Whip the cream until stiff, and fold in the remaining 1/4 cup sugar, the remaining 1 teaspoon cinnamon and the vanilla extract. Spread a thin layer of whipped cream on one of the cakes, top with another cake, and repeat.
Spread remaining whipped cream on the top and serve immediately.
We lived in Base Housing, kids all over the place, filling the sandbox, fighting, arguing, being nice, being nasty. My four-year-old was a little redhead like his mommy and, like his mommy, often in trouble. Or, if not in trouble, causing it.
One day, another mommy, who was often irate because someone had wronged her little golden-curled darling who had the demeanor of an angel and the personality of a wasp, came to me with her howling little guy. His tears looked genuine. So did her anger.
“Your child needs to be controlled,” she said, “he bit Tony. Look!” She dragged Tony’s plump little arm out to show me four perfect tooth marks.
I said, “Are you sure it was Brian?”
She snarled, “Of course I’m sure. I saw him do it. He sank his teeth right into Tony’s arm.”
I said, “Bri, did you bite Tony?” He shook his head.
Mama Bear, filled with righteous fury, shrieked that he was a liar and my husband would be hearing from the CO if we didn’t teach our child civilized manners.
I just said, “Brian, smile at the lady.” Because he was an obliging child who genuinely liked people, he willing smiled at the lady—with his three front teeth, two on the bottom, one on the top, gleaming in the sunshine. His left top incisor had been knocked out when he was acting the fool in the bathtub about six months before. She didn’t even apologize to him, just stomped off, dragging poor, injured little Tony behind her like a pull toy.
Well, you shouldn’t be. At least not yet. Let me tell you the whole truth first. Because once I do that, you aren’t going to be just shocked. You would be horrified, outraged, possibly traumatized for life.
I’ve been working in the tech world for quite a while now, and the wealth of “insider secrets” that I’ve accumulated along the way would be sufficient to fill a book in itself. But nothing comes close to this one single revelation, that I can positively say, has destroyed my faith in humanity. Once you finish this answer, you are not going to be the same person anymore, that much I can promise.
Let me ask you a very simple question –
How do you think the login process works?
Let’s say you want to open your Facebook.
You go to the login page.
You enter your username.
You then enter your password, which appears in all asterisks to prevent any unwanted ‘shoulder-surfing’. That’s crude. But effective too. And necessary. You see, the First Law of Passwords (okay, I just made up that phrase) states that there should be only one entity in the entire universe that should have access to your password – your brain. If a second copy of your password exists somewhere – say, on a piece of paper where you casually wrote it down thinking it’ll help you remember later, or in the password box where you just entered it, or engraved on a rock on planet Jupiter; somebody might be able to access it (theoretically speaking) and your security would be completely compromised. So, only one copy. Ever. Remember that.
Now, you press the Submit button.
But Abhimanyu, wait a minute! After I just pressed the Submit button, I got logged in. This means that some system on the other side must have verified that what I entered was indeed my password. But then, this system must have access to my correct password too! Otherwise, what will it compare my input with? Facebook must keep a second copy of my password somewhere!!!
The host website needs a copy of the password!
You are right. That’s a problem indeed. You might think that this is kind of okay since this second copy would exist with Facebook, which is the website that hosts your account in the first place. They would keep it safe, wouldn’t they?
But think about it.
Facebook, as an organization, is made up of humans just like you and me. What if some employee at Facebook has access to this code and could see your password? What if this was your bank account instead. What if Facebook was hacked and the hacker could see this code that has your password in it. Imagine the havoc this person might cause.
So a second copy is never okay, even if it exists on the parent website itself!
But then how would the website log you in? If it does not know your correct password, what will it compare your input to? How will it verify that you’re you?
That’s precisely the problem our engineering godfathers faced when they set out to design the entire system of passwords. And these guys were smart! They come up with an ingenious idea that would beautifully solve the problem.
The idea of Hash Functions.
The concept is extremely simple. A hash function is just a mathematical function. You input any word into it and it generates an output that looks like complete garbage.
But the devil, as they say, lies in the details –
The same word would always give rise to the same garbage.
Two different words would (almost) always lead to two completely different garbages.
There’s no way to look at the garbage and tell what the original word was. And just to be clear, this is not for the lack of trying. No. This is a fundamental mathematically restriction on the nature of hash functions. They are not invertible. They work one-way only. There’s no way to reverse engineer the garbage and get a peek at the word that produced it. Not even when you know the exact hash function.
Fun fact – This garbage is called the ‘hash’ of the input word.
Here’s how Hashes are used in login systems –
When you first create your account, you choose a password. This password is never stored by the website as it is. Rather, the website first hashes your password and then stores this hash in its database.
Now, when you try to log in the next time, the input you enter in your password box is first hashed, and then sent to the website. If your entered password is the correct one, this incoming hash would be the same as the hash the website had earlier stored in its database. That’s because the same word always gives the same hash (Rule 1 above). On the other hand, if you entered something different, the incoming hash would be different from the one that the website has got stored in its database next to your name (Rule 2 above).
The website compares the two, and if they match, bingo! You are logged in.
Now even if someone hacked into Facebook and copied the entire database, all they would see are these garbage hashes stored next to the usernames. They wouldn’t be able to deduce the original password from these hashes (Rule 3 above).
What if they tried to copy your hash from the database, open Facebook login page in their browser, and then enter the copied hash in the password field as it is (along with your username in the username field)?
Since Facebook’s login flow always hashes the incoming input, it would hash this hash too, and that would produce something completely different. On matching that with what is stored in the database, a big fat fuck-you would be returned.
So even when the hacker has got the entire user table, he still can’t do any damage!
Beautiful concept, isn’t it?
Except that it’s a complete pain in the ass for companies to implement and manage.
For starters, you have to integrate the hashing mechanism in your login flow which leads to considerable overhead. Actually, with modern libraries and frameworks, this part is no longer that big of a deal. The real pain lies in providing technical support to the customers.
Let’s say you are Flipkart.
A customer calls in to complain that he is unable to add a certain item to his cart.
The customer’s issue is escalated to the development team, where you, the poor developer, just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and lo and behold! The issue gets assigned to you.
All you know is that there’s a certain customer with this particular customer id and he’s unable to add an item to his cart.
That’s it.
That’s all you know.
Remember, the user can see the issue happening on his device in real time, but you can’t. You don’t have access to his account.
So, you send a request to the server team to access the error logs from the server, all the while praying to God that you find something useful in those logs – something that will nudge you in the right direction. But you have to be extremely lucky to find something helpful. More often than not, the issue would turn out to be a ghost issue that occurred because the user was doing something stupid, and you would spend an entire night on a wild goose-chase.
If you do manage to learn something helpful from the logs, you would then have to create a test account and try to replicate the issue there, which is just the beginning of the long and tedious process we call bug-hunting.
Either way, it’s going to be a long night.
But what if, let’s say, you did have access to user’s password? (Imagine a red devil sitting on your shoulder whispering this entire paragraph in your ear). You could simply log into his account and check if it’s a ghost issue. You’d be done in like five minutes. Even if it turns out to be a legitimate issue, you can trigger it again from the user’s account itself, and get a much quicker lead on the location of the bug!
The convenience is just too much to ignore!
You begin to get lusty.
Your mouth begins to drool.
And you give in.
Most of the companies in the IT industry that are customer-facing, store your passwords in their database in clear text. Without hashing!
Most of the clients that I’ve worked with as a penetration-tester, most of the companies I’ve done projects for, most of the websites I’ve hacked – all were storing passwords in stark naked clear-text. Plain as the day. Sitting right there for any employee or hacker to see.
I have seen database tables – with rows upon rows of clear text passwords – hundreds of thousands of them – all visible to the naked eye – ripe, juicy, ready to be exploited – their owners completely unaware, utterly naive, sleeping peacefully in their beds without a care in the world.
Now in all fairness, I must admit here that I’m sure none of the top-tier websites are doing this stupidity. Google isn’t doing it. Facebook isn’t doing it. Flipkart isn’t doing it. Your bank, definitely not.
But tier-two and three websites? They are. Startups? You bet your ass they are.
But that’s not all –
Most people, in an act of supreme foolishness, set the same password for all their accounts.
Because let’s face it, they’re the same. Aren’t they?
All I have to do is hack this le random website, which is going to be a piece of cake. Sites like these are not big on security. As soon as I get into their database, I’ll have access to thousands of email id and password pairs, most of which will work verbatim on Gmail.
If you’re extremely unlucky, they’ll work on Paytm too.
And if with some cruel and twisted idea of fun in mind, your fate decided to truly fuck you over, they would work on your Bank’s website too !
Not me but my father in law. In 1957 he got out of the Army and first thing he did was buy a new Plymouth Fury. Not being a car guy he just picked the first one on the lot and drove it home. He had moved back in with his parents and his dad still had a curfue for him. One night he was going to be late so he opened it up to get home faster. He soon saw flashing lights in his rear view mirror but soon lost them and made it home in time. A few minutes after he got home a police car pulled up in the yard. Small town and the cop had recognized his car. Instead of getting arrested the cop told him to be at the start of Nine Mile Road at 9:00 the next night. This road had a long straight part through a swamp with no side roads. So he shows up and county police have set up a drag race. They had stopped traffic at both ends of the straight and the cop with the fastest cruiser lined up beside him. They had new Plymouth Furys with the police engine option. They take off and are neck and neck until the police car tops out and my father in law’s car keeps pulling away. He was fully stopped and out of his car at the other end before the cop car got there.
The cop comes up and ask him what modifications he has made to the car. He tells them he hasn’t even opened the hood since he bought it. They then open the hood and instead of the standard 301 Plymouth engine it had a 392 Chrysler Hemi.
One day my Mom asked me where to go to replace a broken window on her car. When I asked what happened to the window, she said someone threw a brick through it. She was driving through an area with a lot of gangs and saw 2 guys chasing 1 guy. She didn’t like the odds, so pulled her car onto the sidewalk between the guy being chased and the guys doing the chasing. That gave the guy being chased enough of a lead that he got away. The guys who were chasing him weren’t happy about being stopped. They threw anything they could grab at Mom’s car, and a brick went through a window as she drove off. And that’s how Mom got a broken window on her car.
My Dad was also a badass, but in different ways. He was a veteran, but never told us about his military service until he was dying of cancer. He couldn’t see or hear anymore, but he could talk. He told us “funny stories” that were just plain crazy.
Elleigh was a mouthy Little darling from ages 4-10. She just said anything that came to her mind, and sometimes, those things were hilarious. Elleigh once said:
“What’s up boys, take me out to dinner.”
I’m “unstopaddle.”
“You’re old!”
“Daddy looks like Mr. Clean.”
“Me: What’s your dad’s name? (Elleigh: Tyrell)”
*Doing her hair* “Oh, but I’ll look like a jerry.”
“Why was I in your tummy and Leo was in your gyna?” (She was delivered by a c-section, Leo was natural).
“Thong Thong Thong up your heiny.”
“I just had to itch my butt.”
“Ok boss!”
Me: Alright, let’s call… (Elleigh: Punk!)”
“Mommy, you don’t run, you gallop.”
“You did not do sports today because I was with you all day. Ooo, it’s just a joke.”
“I’m constipation” (we were doing affirmations).
“Stop annoying me. Excuse me, you’re not supposed to be talking to me, you’re a stranger.”
Me: You’re going to school. (Elleigh: Yeah, why?) Me: Because that’s what you do every morning. (Elleigh: Are you going to the gym every morning?”
“This dang deer.”
“This is not her real hair, her just put extensions in it. long extensions.”
Me: What’s your favorite kind of food? (Elleigh: Fruit). Me: What kind of fruit? (Elleigh: Fruit loops).
When she was really little, she would call a computer a “cubidiger.”
She would say “feel good” as “fuck you” (really threw people off sometimes).
I don’t know why I have so many footages of her saying these kinds of things.
I had been there three years. Since I disliked the job and had strange vibes for the last 3 months, when I was told I shrugged and said “If that’s the way you feel.” They wanted me to sign a release. I was 61–1/2, Social Security at reduced benefits wouldn’t start until I was 63. I said I wanted my attorney to look at it before I signed, picked up the paper and walked to my office where I packed up my stuff. I kept nothing personal there except safety shoes for walking on the manufacturing floor (I got laughed at a lot because nobody wore safety shoes even though they’re required at most manufacturing facilities), my prescription safety glasses , a sweater, my favorite (and personally purchased) mechanical pencils and left.
My attorney said to sign the release after he crossed out two clauses noting the employment statues they were violating, and faxed it to them. I got a nice settlement and was able to collect unemployment for the 18 months until my 63rd birthday. This was in 2008/2009 when we had up to 100 weeks of unemployment due to recession.
Before anybody calls me a piker for collecting all that UI, I was offered two positions during that time. Each would have required a 100 mile round trip commute daily and only paid about 75% of what I had been making. The Unemployment Service said I was not under an obligation to accept either.
I used to own a small tavern. We had a guy who started hanging out there quite regularly. Nice guy, played darts with the other regulars, bought rounds in order , but didn’t talk much about himself or his past. But it’s a bar, so no one cares. We’ll call him Danny.
He was in early one night around 7pm. My staff is all away on lunch, partner wouldn’t be back til 10pm. I’m all alone. Usually not a big deal. This night, a couple of college jocks got way out of hand and started tearing the place up – breaking cue sticks and tossing around empty kegs. It’s just Danny, me and the college boys. I’m trying to de-escalate and get them to leave. Then, one of the big guys starts pushing me and throwing punches. I’m screwed. That is, until Danny steps in and beats the shit out of two guys much bigger than himself. I was completely shocked! We toss the guys out and he tells me not to call the police. He leaves shortly afterwards.
Next time I see Danny, I want to pick up his tab and chat. He asks me not to tell anyone or talk about it. I figure he’s ex-military and a private guy. He becomes pretty scarce. We’re looking for him, but he doesn’t come around anymore.
About a year later, we see his pic in the paper. He’s on trial for a pair of mob related murders. Turns out he might be responsible for more than a couple of these. I’m very glad he liked me.
There was a time while I was in college that I could only afford to spend about $3 per day on food. Needless to say it wasn’t an easy time.
One day, I spent part of my daily ration on a granola bar. As I walked out of the grocery store, a homeless woman asked me if I had any spare change. I told her I didn’t have any money to spare so instead split my granola bar with her and sat down to have a chat. She continued to ask people for change as we talked. After observing the responses, I asked her: “Would you rather people ignore your question, or say ‘no’ as meanly and rudely as they possibly could?”
She responded without hesitation: “I’d rather have the mean ‘no.’ At least they’re treating me like I’m a person, more than a piece of trash lying on the street.”
I’ll never forget that. I wouldn’t have been able to rationalize it myself, but it makes perfect sense. Her name was Anne.
When I was a much younger airline copilot, I flew with this Syrian captain. He was a Muslim and had flown F-4s for the U.S. Navy. He was a nice guy but kind of kept to himself mostly. I would always ask about the religion and how it was living in Syria and he gradually warmed up to me.
image 35
One day I was complaining about a relationship with a woman and he turned to me and said:
“Randy, I am going to give you two words that will ensure that you will have a long and prosperous marriage. It will end your problems in this relationship and any in the future. It is very old Islamic advice that has stood for centuries, long before the great advances in mathematics. It is among the oldest of all Middle Eastern knowledge”
“If you follow these two words. You will increase your happiness by a factor of 1000. Your wife will adore you and you will live in peace and harmony until you finally die and she mourns your death forever.”
“These two words? Obey and Relax”
“Randy, simply follow these two words in all of your interactions. Obey her demands and then simply relax. The West has not yet discovered this fundamental truth. If you just obey and relax, you will always be happy.”
Edit 1:
This guy was funny.
One day we were talking about his home life and he said: “Randy, Allah came to me before I was born and he told me I was a very bad man. He said I must be punished so he gave me a choice. I could live for ten-thousand years in hell or I could marry this woman. Like a fool, I marry woman!
I guess he didn’t follow his own advice. I heard he finally divorced. Even with this outcome, I still try to follow his advice and it works pretty well.
My wife and I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas three years ago. For anyone wondering, our new town is Grass Valley, pop. 13,000.
Coming from the dining heaven that is the San Francisco area, we set out to find some special occasion restaurants nearby. We were not disappointed.
Our favorite go-to fancy place is called Lola’s, in neighboring Nevada City. It’s comparatively pricy—$250 is the typical check, including tip, for the two of us. It’s located in the Gold Rush-era National Hotel.
We went recently for an anniversary. It was a Wednesday evening and the restaurant was not particularly busy, although there was some kind of event beginning to happen in the attached lounge.
We waited for an unusually long time, but we had no place to be, and we enjoy each other’s company. The server finally came to our table, apologizing, and took our drink order. After about ten minutes, she came by and told us our drinks would be out any minute.
We got our appetizers and waited a long time again for the entrees. The server apologized again and said our drinks would be on the house. We had not complained or looked dissatisfied, but it was a nice gesture on the restaurant’s part. We ordered a second round of cocktails.
The activity in the lounge explained the delays: they had a combination burlesque show and lottery going on. Everyone was having a boisterous good time. Evidently, they swamped the bar and the kitchen.
When our entrees arrived after another unusually long wait, the server apologized again and told us our entire meal and drinks were being comped because of the slow service. We were flabbergasted but happy to have a $200 meal comped. This was all the restaurant’s initiative; we did not complain or even look dissatisfied.
We ordered desserts, one of the many things this restaurant does extremely well. The total bill came to $26.00 for the desserts. The total bill would have been $250.
We tipped 20% of the whole amount. Our server was attentive and even embarrassed at the long delay. We would have been perfectly happy even if we’d paid the whole bill.
That’s the first time I’ve ever had an entire satisfactory meal comped. But it was a good illustration of this restaurant’s commitment to excellence in food quality and service.
Here are 12 tricks I learned from the book ‘12 rules for life an antidote to chaos’, written by psychologist Jodan B Peterson. These life rules really help me a lot:
1: Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back
If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.
So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them — at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
2: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping
We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.
3: Make Friends with People Who Want the Best For You
This is similar to the idea that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity.
4: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not Who Someone Else is Today
We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that’s most of it) is hidden. If we start aiming at something different — something like I want my life to be better” — our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit.
Then we can put that information to use and move, and act, and observe, and improve. And, after doing so, after improving, we might pursue something different, or higher — something like, I want whatever might be better than just my life being better.” And then we enter a more elevated and more complete reality.
“What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?”
The content is too long, so I put the rest rules here
JEFFREY SACHS HONEST INTERVIEW ABOUT NATO ARROGANCE ON RUSSIA, SUPERPOWER WAR IN UKRAINE, CHINA RISE
I was selling cars and my friends mother said I should have a job that pays a salary and commission and not just straight commission. She suggested a software company and the one she worked at had a position available. I had no background in software or computers at all but I sent in a CV and called the Sales Manager and left a message. Then I would keep calling all day seeing if he would pick up the phone. Around 12 additional times.
On the 3rd he picked up and said NOBODY has ever called him so much in his entire life. I asked if he looked at my CV and he said yes, but there was no experience in computers and software. He even asked some basic questions which I failed miserably.
He finally said that I was obviously persistent and if I read some books about computing I could probably get a job in this industry. I asked which books and he suggested two. I told him I would read both, memorize them and call him back in 2 weeks where he could quiz me about anything. He was incredulous and said ya sure.
Well I bought those books that day and in 2 weeks had them memorized, with yellow highlighter throughout both of them. I could tell you what chapter something was in and the next point the author made. That’s how well I learned them.
2 weeks to the day I called and he picked up on the first 2 rings. I was very nervous and told him I had those books down cold and he could quiz me about anything.
He said to come in on Monday at 9 am. I said how long would the quiz take and he said, “There isn’t a quiz. You start your new job on Monday at 9 am”
I am happy to say I stayed in the computer software industry for 20 years.
I was on a plane once, flying across the US. The guy next to me (in the middle seat) just kept talking nonstop. Eventually the person in the window seat said something back to him. This set the guy off, he told him everything he knew about Australia, what a great country it was, how much he liked Australians. Then he asked what part of Australia the guy was from. He replied that he was from Wales.
Middle seat guy said he loved New South Wales. The Sydney opera house was his favorite piece of architecture in the world.
Window seat guy, replies, No, I am Welsh, from the British Isles.
Middle seat guy, just wouldn’t let it go. He wanted to know why someone from the UK spoke with an Australian accent. Eventually window seat guy lost his patience, and pointedly pulled out a book and started to read.
So, I would say you don’t ask someone from Wales, why they speak with an Australian accent.
I was recently divorced and working for a company that had just opened a branch in Germany. My boss told me four interns were coming from Germany. “You’re a supervisor,” he said. “This is a very big deal, so make sure they are comfortable and happy here.”
But there was a problem. We had three shifts, and I was on the second shift—by which time my boss was long gone for the day, so he couldn’t introduce me in person. When I got to work I found only a list of four first names and the desks they were sitting at. And then when I got to that part of the office, there were only three guys.
I went over and talked to them for a bit, tried to make them feel welcome, made sure they had everything they needed. I was hoping one of them would mention the fourth fellow, but nobody did. I figured he’d be sitting somewhere else, so I excused myself and went to look around.
Then I heard a guy speaking German. Bingo, I thought. I sneaked a look at the name on his desk: Arnold, same first name as the missing fourth fellow, and a German last name. This was him! He turned out to be much nicer than the other three and we had quite a good talk. His English was excellent.
In the following weeks I saw Arnold often and talked to him for a little while each time. The other three were polite, but distant. So when a fax came in written in German, I knew which one to take it to for translation.
When I handed him the fax, he looked at it for a long time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My German isn’t really good enough to read this.”
And so it turned out that this Arnold wasn’t the fourth German at all—that particular Arnold, the intern my boss was so concerned about, had been out getting a sandwich the afternoon I came to meet them. Then he’d gone home to Germany a week or two later for some unrelated reason.
The Arnold I’d made friends with was an American with a German father—who had taught him just enough to get by in conversation. They’d spent plenty of time in Germany—so when I’d asked him questions about what it was like there, he knew all the answers. And living with his dad had given Arnold just a trace of German accent in his English.
That was 20 years ago. Arnold and I are still having good talks daily—in spite of being married.
In the Army I served, simply asking that question would disqualify you from service.
They don’t want gun nuts. They want you to have the weapon issued, nothing else; unauthorised weapons on military grounds is a lengthy prison sentence, if you survive. The guards are armed, you know, and authorised to fire when they identify a threat. An unauthorised firearm is a threat.
They want you to fire your weapon when ordered to do so, and only when ordered to do so. Unless given that order, you don’t even have access to your weapon.
A pen knife, possibly. Extra supplies – food, yes. Nothing else. Protective gear – buster, you dress in the uniform issued, nothing else is allowed to be visible (so you’re allowed your own underwear). Ammunition – see above re. “identify a threat”.
The military take weapons seriously. It’s dangerous stuff, and they don’t want them fired except under strictly controlled circumstances.
And during my year in the Army, I did, in fact, not even once see an armed officer. Unless you count the Captain’s ceremonial sabre, which he dismissed, along with his entire parade uniform, as a “bloody spectacle”.
I have a friend that makes $200,000,000 annually. He lives in a $3,000,000 house that he probably paid $1,200,000 for. He drives a five year old Toyota. (He owns and runs a fund…was voted the best in the world at his profession not too long ago)
I have a friend that lives in a $4,000,000 condo downtown. He flies in his $17,000,000 jet and drives a $2,000 old pickup truck to his $60,000,000 ranch. (He sold his business to a bank/insurance company for huge money and has grown his wealth rapidly since the sale)
I know of another extremely wealthy family that when we took our kids to get treats after an event, their kids would ask for toppings on their ice cream. The mom kindly told her children, “no, we don’t spurge like that”. I thought, “what?” You own the entire mall that we are eating ice cream in. (He owns malls and resorts globally)
I don’t know of any that live like they are poor, they just live well within their means. They have different financial priorities than many people.
I hope you like really hot, spicy food. Pack up some tasty leftover meat, veggies and rice or potatoes in a take- out tub – then add a full quarter cup of Tabasco, Psycho Bitch or Dave’s Killer hot sauce to it. People usually have a pretty good idea of who is stealing their lunches so, when the suspect heads for the lunchroom, follow them, hang around nearby and wait for the fun to begin. (Hot sauce is food, so you can’t be accused of trying to poison your co-worker.)
I was being tried on a driving charge (i.e.. “recklessly causing an accident”).
Where I live, people being tried for “minor” offences will be assigned a common courtroom (i.e., Courtroom 335 12PM July 5, 1923).
I was in my courtroom waiting for my trial to begin when I was approached by an officer and asked to leave the courtroom.
In the hallway, I was told to go to another courtroom (no explanation).
The other courtroom was practically empty. A judge sat on the bench, one suit was standing behind the crown’s desk and one suit was standing behind the defense’s desk. Court reporters were present.
I was urged to stand at the defense’s desk and, at that point, I accepted the suit standing at the defense’s desk as my legal representative.
When I got to the desk, there was a short conversation between the judge and the suits. It took about a minute (maybe less).
And then I was told that I was “Free to go”.
And everybody just left the courtroom.
PS: The “accident” was, I think, a fraud. By the time I got to trial, nobody cared (and not even the police showed up to swear evidence … nobody in that courtroom was involved, in any way, with the case).
I was “constructively dismissed” by a new owner. I was offering my opinion as a good manager should and was told “shut up, sit down and do what I say; or leave”. To everyone else’s dismay, I left; I was off the property less than an hour later.
About two weeks later, I received a call from the controller desparately asking me for the admin passwords for the company’s mainframe (I was the one and only “unofficial” IT administrator for about three years) as it had crashed. I told him I couldn’t help him as my current employment contract prohibits me from directly assisting them (within 1/2 hour of driving off the lot and calling my wife to tell her I had left, I had already received calls from three competitors offering me a job. I had accepted an offer with their biggest rival); but that he could try contacting my current employer to “purchase” my services (there was no such condition, but I reported the contact to my current employer who was ecstatically happy to play along). They did, and was charged $5,000 for my single visit of less than an hour; to type in the master password and let them change it (1/2 of that fee was paid to me as a bonus).
I later found out that my former employer also had to pay over $20,000 in OT to recover the system, as there was no current tape backup. At the time, I was also the only one that was responsible for managing the daily tape backups; specifically inserting a new tape cartridge every morning. There were two daytime receptionists that I had trained to cover for me on my days off and when I went on vacation, but the full-time one was let go only a few days prior to me leaving, and the part-time one had quit in protest of being asked to work 7 days a week until a new full-time one was hired and trained. They had to manually re-enter two weeks of parts invoices and service work orders, while at the same time work off manual invoices and work orders until the system was caught up.
That owner didn’t last long; three years after I left, the franchise agreement was yanked by the manufacturer and the dealership closed permanently.
Because talking to a stranger is actually easier than you think it is.
Commit to the five seconds rule – my personal ace in the hole. I approached 100 women in 40 days with this trick. All it involves is that you make a decision on the first five seconds of seeing the stranger whether you are approaching or not. At first, I kept saying no, not yet, next time and then one day I just said fuck it! I’m doing this and I did. Don’t ask me how it turned out.
Use the universal opener and stop thinking – yes our mind is the great storyteller and a perfectionist one at that. If you give yourself too much time to think, you will end up not approaching the stranger so do what I did. Use the universal opener. It’s something called Hello. I think you’ve heard about it.
Avoid the alpha male trap – I know some people will tell you dress up, look cool, beef up and hold a wine glass standing by the corner, that advice is the worse shit in the world. It’s what I call the alpha male trap, feeling so confident in yourself that you don’t wanna talk with anyone and you expect them to feel your vibe and gravitate towards you. Avoid practicing this, calm down! Relax and smile when you are out there.
Open up! – still on the same point. Avoid closing up your body language by holding something in front of you such as your phone or glass bottle. Make sure in social settings, your body is open and you appear calm and relaxed. Please don’t ever approach anyone with the wrong body language. Research shows we process body language faster than sounds(as little as 0.2sec).
Smile like a lotto winner – one crazy genius called Ralph Waldo Emerson made the great statement that “the whole world loves a lover”, damn but he was right. The key to people’s heart is positivity if you are not aware. You just have to know that most people are not comfortable with meeting new people. So you have to put their minds to rest that you’re harmless and you want nothing but a good nice conversation. Smiling and exuding positivity does this perfectly.
Ask for the name and use it – I read this in Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends & Influence People, and it has never failed me. When you meet a stranger, make sure you get the name and use it repeatedly in the first conversation.
Watch comedy shows – apart from the added benefit of this improving your overall life happiness exponentially, this will add a funny tint to your conversations. People love humor you know.
Observe the rules – the thing about social situations is that there are no universal rules anywhere. How you should behave depends on where you are – you have to behave differently in a church compared to a networking party. The Super trick is to take some time to observe how people are acting around you, are if they are being upbeat or cool headed. Don’t bring noise into a cool environment or calm into a sizzling energetic room. Observe the rules and play by them. Then you win!
Go radical truth on them – out of those 100 women I approached, the ones who became my closest friends were those I went total truth on. Here’s what I mean; I approach them and said hello, then told them I’m a shy guy on a mission to approach 100 girls to build his confidence and that she is my number 41. This perks them up and they usually laugh, then they look at my face, see that I am serious and then we have a wonderful conversation and I always get their numbers. Crazy, right?
Guess – a lot of strangers are really not cool with you offloading a truckload of questions on them. They close up quickly and excuse themselves and that’s why I use guessing at times. I read about it in a blog post that I can’t really remember. It goes like this – during the conversation, instead of asking “where are you from”, observe them and say something like “you look like a new yorker”. Or instead of “what do you do”, say “something tells me you’re a fun person” or “something tells me you stay indoors a lot”. You get the Gist already.
Prepare to be human – I still approach women and get rejected, I still try to make friends on the bus, parties, church, etc, and get rubbed on. You just have to be ready for being a human, not everyone is going to like you or want to talk to you. Accept this and when the time comes that someone rejects you, remember that it’s normal and go find someone else to talk to.
Several years ago, I was on the ladder working on the roof of my shed. Off in the distance there were some people shooting. This is common here as I live in the South (of America). Most people around are fairly safe with their practice shooting. While on the ladder, I heard what sounded like a hummingbird fly by. I looked around for him/her and couldn’t find it. I heard another and another. It dawned on me that these were not hummingbirds, but bullets. I got off the ladder, and yelled as loud as I could that they were shooting towards my house. A few more shots and I went inside and called the sheriff department to go by and tell them they were shooting at my house. I waited a couple hours and heard the shots again. I got in the truck, drove around to the property behind mine and pulled up. The guy and some friends were out shooting targets. I introduced myself and we talked a bit about guns. Then I pointed out that behind their fence was my house about 500 yrs through the woods. I had been up on a ladder and several of their rounds had come near me. They were horrified. I told them to point toward the sand plant since it was closed on the weekend or build a berm to shoot into. they apologized and changed where they were shooting.
I’m Jewish and was marrying a Roman Catholic woman. My parents were vehemently against it, but they also demanded that it be a civil ceremony. My bride wanted the church wedding.
I told her if she wanted the church wedding, that’s what we’ll do. I was not really practicing Jewish traditions, I wasn’t going to synagogue, I routinely worked on Saturdays if my job called for it, and didn’t keep kosher. In fact, since leaving my parents’ home at age 20, I had eaten a cheeseburger for the first time in my life, and had a milk shake along with it!
My parents tried to pressure me to pressure her to at least make it a civil ceremony. I had never even discussed it with her. I told them I would ask, but if she said she wanted the church wedding, then that was the way it would be. They told me they were severing all communication with me. I told them that was okay. They were north of 60 and 70, and living across the ocean, so I replied that I would have to get used to not having them around eventually and I might as well start.
I never backed down, and never regretted it. It set the tone for our future dealings. They knew I was immune to any bullying or any pressure they could bring to bear. If they wanted me to do something, they were going to have to be reasonable and try to convince me with valid argument and not arbitrary stubbornness.
My husband is more approachable than they are, more down to earth.
We married in our 40’s after failed marriages, so we had a civil wedding with my step kids as our witnesses. They were excited to have me in their family, and I was happy to be their stepmom.
He rarely spoke of the rest of his family and I didn’t meet them until after we were married.
I moved to his hometown which was an hour away and where the family lives.
I was a wreck when Christmas rolled around. The few encounters I had with these people were not welcoming. In fact, they completely ignored me.
I went shopping with my husband to buy gifts for everyone, and the spirit of Christmas eased my fears.
When we arrived I felt the chill. I spoke directly to several people and they didn’t acknowledge me in any way.
So, with my Christmas spirit extinguished, I reluctantly sat by the Christmas tree to open gifts.
After the presents were all passed out, I sat and tried to not act surprised by not having anything to open.
In reality, I was totally embarrassed and fighting back the tears.
My family always bought a few extra gifts in case someone unexpectedly joined us.
I wasn’t expecting much, but I never dreamed they would be so rude.
“Eat the frog”. Write down 1 task that you must absolutely perform in order for the day to be a success, and do it first when you get to work.
Send 1 call/text/email to an old friend or colleague that you haven’t spoken with in a while. Over one year, that adds up to 365 reignited relationships (or 61 relationships reignited six times apiece).
End the day with fewer emails in your inbox than you started with. Repeat until you get to inbox zero.
Give away / donate one item in your household every single day. Repeat until you have an uncluttered, restful home.
Answer one question on Quora per day. Work on your writing ability while contributing to the organization of the world’s knowledge.
Walk to and from work, if possible. Exercise! Sunshine!
Eat at least one fruit or vegetable each day. Sure, you should probably eat a half-dozen servings of each. But things can get really screwed up when you are eating zero fruits and veggies. Start small and be consistent.
Express gratitude. My days go so much smoother when I remind myself: “dude, you could just as easily have been born in a Sudanese refugee camp. You’re one lucky mo-fo.”
Spend at least 20 minutes reading something that is completely unrelated to your career (or “personal development”). Creative thinking requires varied inputs. If you have monofocus (e.g. only read about startups all day), you’re severely limiting the amount of interesting ideas you can come up with.
Get uncomfortable at least 1x per day (ideally 3x or 5x). By “get uncomfortable” I mean “summon the courage to do something that makes you anxious”. Speak up during the work conference call. Say hi to the pretty girl or fella standing next to you in line. Run 4 miles instead of 3. Et cetera. Remember: “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
Polenta with Cheese (Mamaliga — Rumania)
how to cook polenta 3
Ingredients
1 cup yellow cornmeal
3/4 cup water
3 1/4 cups boiling water
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup shredded Swiss or Kashkaval cheese
Instructions
Mix cornmeal and 3/4 cup water in 2-quart saucepan. Stir in 3 1/4 cups water and the salt. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils; reduce heat. Cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes.
Remove from heat; stir until smooth. Spread 1/3 of the mixture in greased 1 1/2-quart casserole. Dot with 1/3 of the butter; sprinkle with 1/3 of the Parmesan cheese. Repeat twice. Sprinkle with Swiss cheese. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees F until hot and bubbly, 15 to 20 minutes.
Fried Cornmeal Mush
Omit butter and the grated Parmesan and Swiss cheeses. After cooking 10 minutes, spread in greased 9 x 5-inch loaf pan. Cover and refrigerate until firm, at least 12 hours. Invert pan to unmold; cut into 1/2-inch slices.
Heat 2 tablespoons butter in skillet until melted. Coat slices with flour; cook uncovered in butter over low heat until brown, about 5 minutes on each side. Serve with molasses, jam, maple syrup or sour cream if desired.
When I was in 8th grade, a classmate along with my sister tore up a painting that I had spent three months working on.
Her name was Rita.
High School / Middle School head games.
But it was cruel. I spent a long time to make that artwork so that it would be displayed in a art fair. And then with pride, the day before the event, I proudly saw it hung on the wall in the fair… located in the High School gym.
But that night, they came in from Cheerleader practice. Got in the gym. Took my picture off the wall. And then carried to school the next day.
My picture wasn’t entered in the fair. It was missing.
When I went into my “home room” the next day, Rita and my sister came up to me, and the class and right before me tore my precious artwork into a million pieces and threw them in my face. Like confetti.
I was in shock.
The class laughed.
The teacher did nothing.
And (later on when I was at home) my mother told me that I “shouldn’t get angry over it”. Just move on she argued. While my father told me “you are the oldest … you have to take the hits”.
…
Who in the fuck convinced me to accept this God Damn life? What the Hell?
The other countries are sanction and embargo proof their economies. From keeping it’s reserves in non western banks to digitising their currencies, to trading via currency swap arrangement, or paying by other currencies than the dollar and U.S. cronies currencies. Sanctions will be totally a thing of the past within a decade at most.
The world is already broken into 2 groups now. One are US, it’s slave vassal nations, the U.S. fellow native slaughterers, the U.S. fellow despicable colonial masters, the few tiny nations around Europe that has be coerce to do shit for the west. This group is less than 2 dozen nation or you can say the minority group. It’s GDP as a group is also coming to 40% and falling fast of the world and in population less than 13%.
The majority group is call the Global South. It include most of Asia, Latin America and Oceania, and all of Middle East, Central Asia and the Caribbean. These nations add up to. At least 175 out of the world’s 195 nations. Or 87% of the world, 60% of the world’s GDP and growing fast and probably 90% or real purchasing power PPP on planet earth.
The first group either has no choice or succumbed to threat by the U.S to support and defend the western so call rules base international order. And sink and swim in it. The second group through the BRICS and SCO will successfully withdraw from the rules based international order but by bit.
Try to imagine a balloon. If you prick it with a pin the balloon will burst and if flies off and the air inside the balloon is gone for good. Now try imagining that the air is the wealth and reserves trapped in side the balloon. This 2nd group is sucking up its air but by bit, little by little till what is left belongs to the 1st group. By that time in a decade or so what will be left is a balloon that is at least half its size.
So within a decade U.S. dollars, SWIFT, Western Institutions, Western Systems, western rating agencies, western exchanges, world bank, IMF and many others that together represent the world order will still be there but only serve the west. The U.S. wants decoupling, the U.S. is getting it. The world is decoupling from the west.
Welcome to the new world.
Mind Virus
Women want Leaders. But the current 20-something group of women do not want to take the follower role. Thus they can never fit with the men that they desire.
I remember a lovely patient who had a very swollen abdomen due to ascites, a complication of cirrhosis of the liver.
Every day in the hospital, I would hang a bag of albumin and chat as I drained fluid from the swollen belly. This was in the day when liver transplants were rare and not for people who had developed cirrhosis from alcohol use.
When it was time for the patient to leave, I was given a very expensive bottle of red wine. I think it came from the patient’s extensive collection of wines. The family was wealthy. We both knew that the cirrhosis was not cureable. I wondered if all the wine was given away before the patient passed. The patient had a wistful smile and explained a bit about the wine that could never again be tasted. I was young and did not know anything about fine wines.
My husband and I shared the wine on our anniversary when we were interns.
Sometimes it is the things we love the most that cause us the greatest pain.
I am a welder with a specific set of specialized skills as an ironworker. I earned about $35 an hour on the lower end with my last job in the union. Im the guy walking on ibeams on skyscrappers hanging off the side welding moment welds. One company wanted to pay me less than McDonald’s to weld.
Recently, however, I have quit this line of work to make time for college. In doing so I was searching for lower paying but more reasonable hours and location. Going to work at the same place for 40 hours a week was my plan. I was having trouble doing this since most companies are wanting me to work lots of overtime.
One day I had scheduled an interview for a job which said I wouldn’t be asked to work over 40 hours a week and it was relatively close to my home. Inquiring about the pay they just said it depended on my skills but it would be very good. I didn’t press further for detsils. On interview weld test day I accidentally left much too early. Realizing I would be 45 minutes early I decided to stop for lunch at a McDonald’s. When I was there I noticed they were offering $22/hour for a maintenance position. I spoke with the manager about it but told them I could probably make more money welding in a shop.
I went to my interview and was asked to take a weld test that took about 2 hours. At the end of the weld test one of the managers took me to a table in the office and saw I was asking for $28 an hour, really I was hoping for closer to $30. He told me the most he would be able to pay was 19 or maybe 20.
“I don’t appreciate all of my time you’ve wasted here, sir. The McDonald’s down the road pays better than this.”
I was quite pissed that I had just wasted well over 2 hours of my time with the drive there, back, and other things I did to prepare for that interview.
The shop welding jobs are paying an average of $25 an hour around here, so I’ll be working at McDonald’s until these cheap asses pay what it’s worth to weld. Why should I do a skilled job when McDonald’s pays nearly the same? I wish more welders would refuse to work for peanuts and maybe we could get some decent wages.
Of course, China have slavery like the US in … errr … emmm … yep … about 3,000 years ago, after Zhou Dynasty established in 1046 BC, Chinese slavery was ended.
Slaves made a great contributions in the war of Zhou rebels to overthrow the Shang Dynasty. In return, the first monarch of the Zhou Dynasty ordered the permanent abolition of slavery, and this order was maintain by all following Chinese dynasties, because that monarch is seen as saint and model of a virtuous ruler for all Chinese rulers, including barbarian born Chinese rulers. Even Mongolian emperors in Yuan dynasty would go to his tomb to worship him in every years, no need to mention others.
In the following 3000 years, although there were several barbarian born monarchs reintroducing slavery into China, but none of their regimes could survive over more than 50 years.
And strictly speaking, the Qing Dynasty had slavery, but their slavery was somewhat distorted because it only existed among the Manchus. The Manchu Eight Banners Army was actually a slave army, with soldiers and officers were actually slaves belongs to the banner lord. They fought in banner lords’ commanding for generations.
But the Manchus seem to regard this slave status as an honor, so you can see that when Manchus write letters to the emperor or their banner lord, they would call themselves something like “a humble slave greeting to my dear lord” in the beginning.
And when some Han favored officials of certain emperors also write like this, the emperor will directly reply to him, saying, “Please call yourself a vassal, you are my Han vassal, not my slaves in banner”.
So, for the Qing Dynasty, slaves in the Manchu system were more like hereditary family of attendants, who established a generational contract. Becoming slaves to the banner lord was not shameful for the Manchus, but rather an honor accepted and protected by banner lords, and all banner lords are royal members.
It was a letter from governer of Hu province and Guang province (This is a very big official position, ruling lands almost over two modern France), a Han official Yang ZongRen, to the YongZheng Emperor of Qing Dynasty, those black writting was Yang’s original writting, red one were the reply of the Emperor.
image 55
In this letter, Yang called himself “the slave”, and Yongzheng Emperor strike out that word, and changed it to “vassal”, and noted that “claiming to be a vassal” is more appropriate.
Of course, this is actually just a Han governor in flattering the emperor. The emperor himself was very happy on that, but still remembered to correct it for him, because it’s not appropriate.
oh … btw, about this letter, except the stroke and note in the right, the left red paragh is:
I am fine (reply the greeting of Yang), although you just arrived in this official position for no long, what you reported and what you did, has already pleased my wish, you are worthy of being a high-ranking governer, so today I leading civil service officials and military officials decided to award you xxxxxx (I don’t know how to translate this, you can think it’s some kind of medal), to recognize your excellent work.
Just let the person know politely. If they refuse to move or try to get you to do a seat swap, and if you don’t want, simply say no, I.dont want to trade seats, please get up. If the person won’t move, push the call button for the flight attendant. Do not move, or let anyone behind you get to their seat. The flight attendant will take care of it more quickly, if the boarding process, is at a stand still.
Happened to me once. I was treating myself to First Class. The First Class section had to rows on the left, but only onecrow on the right. Meaning, those seats were a window/aisle/and had no seat mate. I also, had, the last seat in the row so, nobody behind me. This group of six traveling together, got on first, and all wanted to sit together, took my seat.
The person in my seat redirected me to, a seat on the otherside of the plane, someone had the window seat already. I said, no, I’d like my seat please. They group looked at eachother, the guy in my seat, acted like he wasn’t budging. I didn’t let the people behind me go around me. The flight attendant immediately asked if everything was ok. I said, just waiting for him to get out of my seat, I asked nicely once already. She told him to move, and that he was holding up the boarding process.
You don’t have close friends just friends. Most of the people you are around, are only there because of circumstances not really related to you in anyway.
The sooner you start focusing and planning on your life goals the easier it will be achieving them.
One of the most important thing you can teach yourself during your 20’s is self discipline. This is the first thing we should learn and crave to achieve.
Life moves very fast, do things you enjoy at the moment cause our situations tend to also change as fast then we later feel like we missed out on somethings.
The more you expose yourself to the world around you, the more you expand your thinking horizons. Travel, socialize and live life don’t lock yourself out of these important things.
Learn to cook a variety of menu’s of proper home meals. Cooking is a very important skills much more as an adult.
You start using drugs as curiosity soon it becomes for fun later it becomes a dependency. The transition is so fast you barely realize it.
Learn about proper workout routines you can do to energize your body. You don’t have to do hard excercise even if its just yoga. Its more about something you can commit to that benefits you.
Reading and getting creative are ways to keep your brain sharp and generate new ideas. Make sure you read novels and try out the different forms of art around you.
Don’t be selfish in your 20’s, most of the things we hold on to are barely important in our 30’s. Stuff like money, food, material possessions. Learn to share cause these memories are the ones that we keep. Be real with every real person around you.
This takes me back a few years. The Philadelphia DA felt he caught “Streets” workers at extreme wage theft.
The city had gone through a series of bad snow storms requiring both city employees and contractors running snowplow on the streets for over a week.
A few months later the DA holds a press conference that a particular employee is being charged with felonies related to false time sheets (getting paid for time not worked). It might have been the soft kick-off to their campaign for mayor or governor — showing how they could fix problems like this.
In next day or two the employee is arraigned in court with lawyers from the union. The DA (usually an assistant associate low level attorney handles these hearings) give a speech about how it was not humanly possible for the employee to have worked the hours claimed (from memory: between 120 and 160 hours in a week) so they had to be sleeping on the job — “stealing from the taxpayers of our fine city, this just shows how the union abuses the city.”
Union attorney gets to say their piece. A few flowery words about clueless wealthy elected officials overreaching. Then the attorney drops the appropriate section of the contract (again: from old memory so not exact quote) “so long as any contractor truck is on the road performing snow removal and an employee is *available* for work, they shall be paid.”
This was exactly the situation covered by the contract. It was written that way so the city could bring in help for emergency-level snows but not outsource the employees.
A bit of evidence how the employee *worked* a lot of hours and then slept “on-site” (where they would normally pick up their truck) so they were clearly “available”.
The criminal case was thrown out. There may have been a $ settlement to the employee for false arrest and the DA’s political career petered out.
Beef and Mushroom Stew with Caraway Dumplings
Browning meat in the oven reduces the amount of fat needed for cooking. Serve with julienne parsnips and carrots.
mushroom beef blog
Ingredients
Stew
1 1/2 pounds round or blade steak
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
Bouquet Garni*
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (if necessary)
1/2 pound small mushrooms
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 cups beef stock
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 tablespoons tomato paste
* Tie together with kitchen twine 1 celery stalk with leaves, 3 or 4 sprigs parsley, 1 bay leaf and small sprig of thyme
Dumplings
1 cup soft fresh bread crumbs
1/4 cup melted margarine or butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 egg white
Instructions
Stew: Cut steak into 1 1/2 inch cubes. In a bag, combine flour, pepper and salt. Add beef, a few pieces at a time, and shake to coat with flour mixture. Shake off excess and place meat on wire rack in flameproof casserole. Bake in 350 degree F oven for about 25 minutes or until browned. Meanwhile, prepare Bouquet Garni.
Set meat aside on platter.
Place casserole over medium heat. Only if necessary add all or part of the oil. Add mushrooms, cap side down, and cook until golden, transferring to platter as they brown.
Add onion and garlic; cook until onion is transparent. Add stock, wine and tomato paste; bring to a simmer, stirring and scraping bottom of casserole with wooden spoon to scrape up any brown bits.
Return meat to pan; add Bouquet Garni. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 hour or until meat is tender. Meanwhile prepare dumplings.
Dumplings: In a bowl, toss bread crumbs and melted margarine together with a fork. Combine flour, baking powder, caraway seeds and salt. Mix lightly into crumb mixture. Beat together egg and egg white; add to crumb mixture and mix lightly (mixture will be soft) shape into 8 balls of even size.
Remove Bouquet Garni and discard. While stew is simmering, add dumplings, cover and cook, without removing lid, for 18 minutes.
I had a scheduled interview for an OFFICE job! Up to that point I had been doing piecework sewing, processing chickens, and guarding slabs of foam rubber… This was a HUGE step up!
During the night before the interview, it snowed 4 inches in Baltimore. Now this is not that big a deal… except in Baltimore, it IS. Public transport did not run. Traffic was pretty sparse first thing in the work day… I decided to walk the 3 miles to the interview. I got there in plenty of time, changed my hiking boots for heels in the ladies’ room, and went to the office where the interview was to be held.
Nobody home.
A guy showed up and asked what I was doing standing in the hall. I explained I was there to interview as an accountant’s assistant. He asked how I got there. When I said I walked, he looked dubiously at my heels. He said, “In THOSE shoes?” I admitted my boots were in the ladies’ room. He asked to see the boots, so I went and got them. As soon as he saw that I really did have boots I was hired. I had not yet even entered the offices.
I always field strip my cigarettes and stick butts in my pocket. Yes, it smells disgusting.
I have a P38 on my keychain. This is a tiny can opener used to open cans of C-rations. It even gets used once in a while.
image 571
5. Take my hat off when going indoors. Because of this, I rarely wear a hat.
6. When a passenger in a vehicle, I act as “assistant driver.” I let driver know if it is clear or not on my side.
7. I act as a ground guide for people backing up. I will often ask people to ground guide me when I am backing up, often to their puzzlement. Of course, they do not know the correct hand signs to use and those I am helping often don’t understand the signs I give them.
8. I scan the side of roads more than necessary in the US. Not too many IEDs on our roads.
9. I say, “I got your back” or “Do you have my six?” too much.
10. I use the military phonetic alphabet. D is for Delta, not Dog.
11. I use the word “task” a lot.
12. I tend to try to help people with what the military calls hip pocket training. Many people find this annoying and would prefer to screw something up than get some quick pointers.
13. Finally, I learned to never put more than eight words on a power point slide because the Army puts hundreds of words on one slide. Along with this, I also learned to NEVER ask someone to read a power point slide with hundreds of words on it.
China would be burning a lot of bridges if they do and China is hesitant to do that
The West knows it’s dying and is thus ready to inflict every horror on it’s population
They are prepared to subject their population to everything from inflation to starvation knowing that they have tamed their population sufficiently through propaganda
They can cause China to lose quite a bit of money if they invade Taiwan and that could make a lot of Chinese unhappy and cause some strife within the country
Plus more importantly, China believe Taiwanese are their brothers and killing them is a no no because at least 30% Mainlanders have family in Taiwan
So that’s what’s stopping China
Otherwise if China decide that they don’t care, China can pulverize and decimate Taiwan into a graveyard overnight and nobody can do a thing to stop them without risking WWIII
Yep, my brother fell out of a Huey. He was in Nam and the radio went wild, with troops needing to be evacuated from a hot zone. He jumped in as the M-60 machine gunner. It was the first time he flew into a hot zone. His adrenaline was high. Because of that, he forgot to strap in. The Huey headed out over the paddies and couldn’t land because there was a nest of Charlies that needed to be taken out first. The pilot banked to the left super hard so my brother could shoot the 60 down at Charlie’s nest. The pilot banked too hard and my brother fell out right on top of two Charlies. The wind was knocked out of all three of them. My brother was the first to come to his senses, and realized he didn’t have a weapon. He looked around and found one of the Charlie’s AK and as they started to get up he blasted them both. Killed them dead, he did. The chopper picked the GIs up and then came back and rescued my brother. When he got back to the base, the pilot said, “That is the bravest thing I have ever seen, jumping unarmed out of a Huey, kill two gooks, and saved a squad. Boy I am going to put you in for a Silver Star.” My brother told him, “I fell out and was just trying to save my ass.” He still got the Star. Analyse and improvise. A motto to live by!
The first time a European owned company announced a round of layoffs in a month. I was the new guy in the group and figured I was disposable. The day of the announced layoffs I went into work wearing my “Gone With The Wind” tie.
When I was summoned to the boss’ office, my desk had been cleared of all personal effects. My pulled out a paper and made to read it. I stopped him and said, “I know I’m being laid off. What are the details?” Boss was rather startled and we started talking about it.
I told him that he had a good old boys club where engineers from headquarters would rotate in then return for a raise & promotion. U.S. employees were treated as second rate. Thanks for the layoff. I was pretty disappointed in the company.
When he asked how I knew that I would be laid off, I told him that the company had announced the layoffs a month earlier. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was one of the newest people in the group and not part of the “club”. Of course I was the easiest to lay off.
I also told him that it was pretty stupid to announce the layoffs a month previous. Everyone quits working and it encourages mischief. Oh they hadn’t thought of that.
The bosses were gone within 3 months.
The other was a company where I was the entire engineering department. My boss & I were always at odds. He wanted to get rid of the product line. I’m sure the fact that his brother worked for a competitor had nothing to do with his decision.
The company staged an ambush layoff on January 2nd. Oh well, at least they didn’t screw up the holidays.
Although they offered $10k, I refused to sign their termination agreement and collected unemployment all through the covid lunacy. Made out like a bandit.
Why sex is important.
Men know this instinctively. Modern 20-something, 30-something women, are having trouble with this.
I was at home, having broken my foot in a stupid accident, when the head of HR was “in the area” and wanted to see me. After the pleasantries, she told me that I was being made redundant and my job no longer existed.
In the UK, firing someone is not easy or cheap. A company can find itself in court and it can all get a bit grubby. So a more usual tactic is to say that the employees job is no longer needed. Employers like this, because it saves it all getting public, legal and unpleasant, and employees like it because the employer has to pay to make it all go away.
So we negotiated a redundancy fee and the next day a car came with my personal things from my office. I trousered the (generous) cheque and picked up the phone.
The irony was that I had just had an exceptional year. I had won a load of creative awards (I was a creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi) including a Cannes Gold. I have no idea why they wanted me out. To this day I don’t know.
Two weeks later I signed a contract with a rival company for a bigger salary.
The local supermarket includes a hot table where they sell hot cooked chickens for $10.99 It’s a good deal – I’ll get one occasionally. It looks like this; if this is unfamiliar in your area:
image 570
The pack includes a cardboard handle for easy carrying.
One day, I noticed that whoever had labeled the latest batch of chickens had made a mistake. Instead of $10.99, they were labeled as $0.99. Cool! Cheap chicken! lol. Not really – I like the folks there and quickly let the lady in the meat line know. The chickens had only just come out; no loss to anyone.
Except – I was not the only one that had found it. A woman of – how do I say this – limited intelligence saw it and began screeching at the top of her lungs “Chicken for a buck! CHICKEN FOR A BUUUUUCK!!!” and began loading her cart.
The manager arrived right at that moment, apologized and began to correct the matter.
The woman went ballistic; screaming, shouting bloody blue murder, accusing him of stealing, of trying to starve her to death, etc. etc. etc. The price was 99 cents dammit, she deserved chicken for 99 cents!
The manager, in an effort to ease the situation, agreed. He told her that alright; she had ‘found’ the error; she could have a chicken for 99 cents.
There was a long pause as the woman looked dumbfounded. Then she launched herself at the table, screeching, trying to grab every chicken she could possibly get her hands on. Chickens were falling everywhere; spilling onto the floor. The manager tried to intervene but no help – she was grabbing, stuffing, howling; it was a disgusting display of a complete lack of dignity.
She was taken out of the store in handcuffs; without her 99 cent chicken. The entire batch of roast chicken was destroyed.
Of course I agree with you absolutely, and any person could see it unless you are in denial or made brain dead by the western media.
They offer consistency and continuity in their policies to investors and business yet the protect their citizens against the ills of raw capitalism. In other words Socialism with Chinese characteristics takes the best of both worlds and rejects the flaws of both systems.
Hence the growth of both economies of China and Vietnam both grow phenomenally and consistently. For decades and now generations through ups and downs of the economic cycle. Westerners scream democratic and freedom but ignores the fallacy of this costly, inefficient and mostly corrupt system that put their people at the mercy raw capitalism.
If you look at the U.S. for example, 1% have more money than they ever need, 10% are wasteful and selfish but can afford to live comfortably , while 70% are poorer than most advance economies and in fact are like the majority of Chinese except that the Americans has to bear the burden of it’s weaker purchasing power in their country. The majority of Chinese has high disposable income. And while Chinese cut out the destitute poor in the past 10 years, the U.S. raw capitalism allowed the 19% in Americans to have to worry where their next meal is coming from and they barely have 500 dollars to their name!
A government role in a society is surely to bring prosperity, peace and harmony and healthy living for everyone. From that count the Chinese population enjoys that. Western liberal democracy allows the rich to get richer and the poor to be destitute. But because they wrongly thinks they need to overlord the entire world, they barely have enough money left to pay for infrastructure, college education or healthcare. So they fail the poor and pamper the rich!
Are you surprised that according to western surveys, 91% of Chinese favour their government and 36% of Americans favour their government! I am not! Are you?
My son was given a car for his birthday. We bought it. It was nice little car that had been wrecked and was repaired and had a salvage title. That meant that a previous insurance carrier had totalled it following the wreck, and it had been repaired and state certified to be safe.
Anyway, he had been driving it for several months to school and to work after school. This one day he was in his way to work and came to a stop sign. Stopped, insured the traffic was clear and went to make a left turn. Older lady than him (he was 17, she was 36) had stopped at the opposite stop sign and gunned it, hitting my son’s car in the back quarter panel and rear door on the passenger side. He called me and I went to the scene. The accident was on state highway, inside city limits. I had the option to have the highway patrol called to work the accident, however I decided to just let the local police work it. I spoke with the lady and she was all apologetic and saying she’d take off it…yeah, right…
She took care it alright. She whines and said that it wasn’t her fault, that kid just stomped on the gas and caused the accident. They took her word for it. Even though you could about tell from my son’s damage that she caused the accident.
So the next day, my son is home in bed sick. I’ve medicated him and he’s sleeping. The phone rings, it’s the insurance adjuster from her insurance. Absolutely demands to speak with my son. I tell him no, that my son is sick, had been medicated and it’s sleeping, and that I won’t wake him. Adjuster didn’t like that and was insistent. Well he woke Mama Bear…I told him that my son was 17, still a minor, and that he (the adjuster) would wait until I said that my son could talk with him, then I hung up.
Could days go by. Another phone call from someone else in that company. Says that my son was assigned 50% blame (no fault state here) because he turned into a four lane road and didn’t stay in the closest lane. I laughed and asked what town did your adjuster go to? My town has zero four lane roads, only part of the highway with a center turn lane, that ended 2 blocks before the intersection where the accident happened. They wouldn’t budge, so I said fine whatever, just cut me a check. BTW, they wouldn’t pay for a rental since my son wasn’t 21, and wouldn’t get one for me so I could let my son have my car, since I wasn’t in the accident… we only had liability insurance on my son’s car as it was so expensive, so they couldn’t do anything.
So I took pictures and sent them to the insurance adjuster and asked him to show me where the four lanes were. He tried to say the wide shoulder was a lane, yeah.. No.
Get another call, they do they’ll cut a check for less than half what we paid for the car, since it had a previous salvage title. Even with the salvage title, this care was with 4 times what they offered and twice what I paid. I only wanted them to pay what I had bought the car for. They refused, so I told them I’d let my attorney handle it from there on out. That gal said, “go ahead, we hear that all the time”. I said that fine, but do you hear this “I’m the biggest bitch in the state and I mean what I say”. She started spluttering and I just hung up.
We engage our attorney. The vehicle was towed to an indoor storage facility (the window was busted and the interior would have been exposed to weather). In the meantime, my son graduates high school and joined the army. After several months our attorney calls and says that the insurance company wants me to release the car to them as it’s racking up a huge bill. I asked if they were giving me what I wanted, he said no, they’d only come up to about 3/4 of my demands. I laughed and said no.
Another few months go by. Now my son has graduated basic and is almost finished with his advanced training and is days away from getting married. Insurance is whining about the storage fees again. Again they don’t want to pay. Of course once I hired our attorney, the suit included the insurance paying my attorney as well as the storage fees and the original cost of the car. So again I say no. I got a call from the storage facility. The was a tow truck there for the car. I drove there and told the driver nope, you can’t have it. He tried to say that he had orders to impound it… I laughed at I called my attorney.
So now it’s been over 2 years since the accident. My son and his wife are in Germany. I get a call from my attorney. He’s laughing his ass off. Said he had a check for me, $500 more than I asked for and all storage fees and his fees as well. Said the person he had been dealing with was whining about how hard I was to deal with and that I should have compromised sooner. Attorney told him that had I been given what I asked for at the get go, it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Was told that since hardly anyone actually engages an attorney, it’s the risk they take, and since their attorneys were on staff, they didn’t cost anything extra.
So because they wouldn’t pay out a measly $5400…it finally cost them almost $30,000.
I kept the extra $500 and sent the $5400 to my son.
So it might not have hurt the insurance company to shell out that $30k, but to me it was the principal. They thought because he was 17 that they could take advantage of him. They didn’t count on me.
I see a couple of answers that are good but don’t answer the whole question. Manufacturing is important but it is more than just that, but they are good at manufacturing.
1 – SpaceX has a strong bias toward action. Elon wants it done tomorrow and he expects you to work all night if you have to in order to make it. They definitely push action now. (Blue Origin started before them and still hasn’t made it to orbit. SpaceX did in 2008).
2 – SpaceX has a willingness to learn. They test early and often to learn about basic design flaws early. An example is the Starhopper. It was the simplest version you could ever build of a Starship. It was a tin can (actually fuel tanks) with an engine and a flight computer. They tested the engine and the control algorithm using that.
image 54
3 – SpaceX has a bias toward simplicity. One of Elon’s favorite sayings is “The best part if no part”. In other words they always look for ways to eliminate whole systems. Starship and the “catch” is an example of that. They eliminated landing gear and a few thousand pounds of structure to support it.
4 – SpaceX is willing to dream big and innovate. In 2010 when Elon said they would land boosters on the Falcon 9 and reuse them people laughed at him. That is impossible! They lost a couple figuring it out but they have now landed 239 of them as of 12/19/2023 according to their website. I assume that is updated for last night’s launch. (They launch a couple of times a week). For Starship they will catch the rocket during a controlled descent!
5 – SpaceX understands where the real cost of space travel comes from and avoid it. They try not to drop millions of dollars of flight hardware in the ocean. They also launch often to avoid accumulating costs (salaries) without income (launches) and are moving to improve both with Starship.
6 – They avoid silly costs like buying multi-million dollar NASA certified flight components. Instead they usually build their own from off-the-shelf commercial components and save millions.
The end result is they are doing things no one else can or will ever do. Next stop Mars!
My wife and I were visiting friends, and we’d all been joking around for a couple of hours. Some of the jokes were “mean” in the “I’m just busting your balls” sense, but I didn’t think there was any genuine meanness going on.
On the way home, my wife got really quiet. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “You really don’t know, do you?” She then told me I’d seriously hurt her feelings.
My heart sank. That’s the one thing I never, ever want to do. She’s my best friend, and causing her pain is unforgivable. But, no, I didn’t know what I did. I had no idea what she was referring to.
She found this hard to believe, because, from her point of view, I embarrassed her in front of our friends by, out of the blue, accusing her of being “bad” in a very specific way (which I won’t go into here, because I’d hate to humiliate her, again).
Immediately, I remembered saying it, but … but … it had been a joke! We’d all been joking around, in a cutting sort of way, and I’d just joined in.
My wife said, “It didn’t sound like a joke!”
“But why would I purposefully want to hurt you?”
“I don’t know. I was flabbergasted when you said it. I guess you must resent me.”
I apologized. I hate it when people make excuses for themselves while apologizing (“I really, really meant it as a joke!”), so I didn’t. I said “I’m very sorry. I should never hurt you. That’s terrible. I love you.”
She gradually got over it—or pretended to—but I didn’t. I realized this has happened to me before, and, a few days later, I discussed this with my wife, being careful not to make anything sound like an excuse.
“I think sometimes, when I’m joking, I don’t signal the fact with an ‘I’m just kidding’ voice. Would you say that’s true?”
“Yes,” she said. “You have a very dry sense of humor. It’s often hard to tell if you’re joking or not. Sometimes I have to explain to people that you’re joking.”
I’m autistic, and though (after decades of work), my social skills are mostly indistinguishable from a non-autistic person, that’s one way I screw up. When joking, I have a totally flat affect. I don’t realize it at the time. I don’t feel like I have a dry sense of humor. In my head, I’m goofy, not dry, but the goofiness doesn’t always translate.
Once, at work, when, at the end of a meeting, my boss asked “What will you be working on tomorrow?”
I said, “I don’t plan on coming to work tomorrow. I think I’ve worked enough for one lifetime. I’m going to stay home from now on. That sounds like more fun.”
There was a long pause. Everyone stared at me. Finally, in a really quiet voice, someone asked “Are you joking?”
To me, it was obvious I was joking. But I was in a minority of one. And this wasn’t in a stodgy, conservative office. This was a partying crowd. (Part of the problem is that I tend to joke when I feel like it. I don’t wait until there’s a general “we’re joking now” vibe. This mistake isn’t terribly conscious on my part, but I’m vaguely aware that I do it.)
In addition to being autistic, I come from a part of the midwest where people naturally have a flat affect. I grew up around folks who sounded a little bit robotic, and I inherited their tendency to talk without much vocal music. (If you’ve heard Martin Starr’s voice on “Silicon Valley,” you know what I’m talking about.)
I thought more about that night, with my wife and our friends, and realized I’d been trying to impress them. Once the jokes got started, I wanted to out-joke everyone else, and I stopped caring about who I trampled on. While I hadn’t purposefully hurt my wife’s feelings, I had used her to get a cheap laugh.
And then I thought some more about it. The thing I’d “jokingly” accused her of was something about her that irritated me at times. Had I acted out, in a passive-aggressive way, instead of talking to her, directly? I can’t discount that possibility. If that’s what I did, I was an asshole.
I went camping with my dog. We arrived at night and ended up in a remote area. I managed to get the tent up, get a fire going, plopped myself down with my dog at my side on a leash.
Suddenly she jumped and barked at something, I then smelled this weird smell, it was a grassy metallic smell that stung my nostrils. In that second i didn’t realize it was fresh skunk odor. My dog startled and lunged at the skunk and sprayed my girl right in the face, her eyes were slammed shut.
I had to take her to the water pump and wash her eyes out and wash her face and head as best as I could late at night.
Then I had another problem, where would my dog sleep ? I couldn’t leave her tied up outside due to the skunk and/or bears. If I left her in my car I would never get the smell out. So she slept in the tent and stunk the tent up.
I stuck it out, gave her several baths of dish soap,.hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. Still took,.weeks for the smell to go away.
She has a thick coat and for months I brushed or.petted her the skunk smell would drift out of her coat.
I never forgot that grassy metallic smell of fresh skunk odor and I hate skunk smell.
I’m originally from Edinburgh, Scotland but now live in Perth, Australia. I had decided one day to visit AQUA which is Perth’s aquarium and was using a bus instead of driving. When we arrived at the stop for AQUA a young male and female were getting off too and asked the driver how to get to the aquarium ( it’s at the far end of a complex with shops, cafes, beachside etc) so I said I was going there too and would show them the way.
On walking we chatted and I realised the girl was Scottish and asked whether she was here on holiday. They both were and we discussed where she was from ..it was St Andrews. Further conversation re courses at Uni etc and she said she was studying Physics and Space Science at Edinburgh University. That was a coincidence as my niece had done a very similar course at Leicester Uni as Edinburgh didn’t have that course when my niece was at Uni. I told her my niece had done the course at Leicester and she said a friend of hers had also gone to Leicester. I mentioned my niece by Christian name and was asked what her surname was. The friend was my niece. Then I remembered my sister and her OH had friends who lived in St Andrews. This girl was the friend’s daughter and was only in Perth for a few days as she and her b/f were having a tour round Australia.
This girl’s father had been my sister and her OH’s best man at their wedding. If I hadn’t been on that bus on that particular day or if I hadn’t overheard them ask exactly where the aquarium was we would never have known the connection. Quite the coincidence.
If war means China going to the U.S. to fight America, then you are right. But it is a not factor. China does not want to do that unless the U.S. hit China. China won’t be the first to lay its hands by
If war means China fighting off U.S. in China which include Taiwan, China then let me make it super clear. China is super duper ready now to give the U.S. such a hiding it will collapse the U.S. financially, economically, politically and militarily that the U.S. will never be the same again. Don’t even think about it. Your media, your politician and say what you like but if we have to sink all you dozen aircraft carriers we will in the defence of the motherland.
I think the U.S. knows that, that is why it won’t dare. But god help the U.S. if move beyond talking shit.
The research company I worked for was downsizing. My previous boss had already been let go and my new boss kept sending his employees to learn everything in my department. Well one fave employee thought she was better at my job and kept trying to change our protocols. She never actually did any work, just made our lives miserable.
Then the day came where new boss walked in and started handing out moving boxes. He didn’t even say a word, just passed out the boxes. We all packed up and left. Now my lab was a resource lab that did a ton of work for the other labs. Suddenly me and all my staff were let go and the new boss handed it over to his people.
Guess what? They had never done these procedures, used the high tech equipment or even understood the complicated algorithms to process the data. First week I get 9 phone calls asking for help. That was met with a big NOPE. Then I get a call that the favorite employee had mishandled one of the very expensive robot units and it was out of order. They wanted ME to come in and reprogram it and get them back up and running. Oh heck no! I never went back and never helped.
Lesson of my story is don’t play favorites and make sure you have the staff to accomplish the job.
It was in the 90’s on an international flight. There was a middle aged lady with a Gameboy playing a game at full volume after the lights went out and most of the passengers were sleeping.
People were asking her, then telling her, to shut off the sound. It appeared as though she did not speak English. So one guy rang the flight attendant, who came quickly, but could not communicate with the lady. She got another flight attendant who spoke the woman’s language, who seemingly asked her very politely to turn off the sound. Sorry, I don’t know what language it was. And if I did I wouldn’t say.
As soon as the flight attendant walked away, she started another game. Beep, beep, boing.
Angry passengers were yelling at her. Her husband got up to defend her. Someone rang the flight attendant again. You could tell by the exasperated sigh of the flight attendant that she knew what was going on.
She scolded the woman (assuming from her tone), who pretended to be hurt. It just kept getting stranger and stranger.
The woman shut off the Gameboy and put it away. But as soon as the flight attended walked away, she pulled it out and started another game. Beep, beep, boing. Here we go again.
Finally, a big burly man walked over, put his big hand on the husband’s shoulder and warned him, “I have no problem with you, but you better sit down if you know what’s good for you.” The husband might not have spoken English, but he sat down.
The big man pulled the Gameboy out of the woman’s hands, pulled off the back, took the batteries out, and gave it back to her. She was now screaming in a language I did not understand.
“You’ll get the batteries back when we land. If you had just turned down the sound this wouldn’t have happened.” He was raising his voice, partially because he was angry, but partially because he thought she didn’t speak English.
Finally, as he went back to his seat, she stood up and yelled in perfect English, “F**K YOU!!! IT’S NOT AS FUN WITHOUT THE SOUND!!!”
I once offered $5,000 toward state-of-the-art proton beam radiotherapy to a very good friend of mine. After speaking with his mother, he told me no, because she had advised him that, when he was unable to pay me back, I would sue him.
I, in fact, never made this $5,000 loan. — That he turned it down made him, in a way, a stranger to me; it’s almost impossible to go from a state of literally talking about everything little thing of the day with your buddy to … in all likelihood, slowly, he is dying of cancer; he probably won’t be here in five years.
I hope he’ll be here in 20. — For a cancer that is only responsive to surgery yet located in a place that barely tolerates any surgery, much less surgical resection, — for a cancer that has no effective chemotherapy treatments, curative or palliative; that, even for proton beam therapy, it’s probably not going to work.
And, you only get one shot (pretty much). — Getting the proton beam therapy twice carries about the same risk of catching another fatal cancer, so the utility-maximizing function aspect of this changes.
The part of my brain that is finance-oriented — that manifold — expects a forecast of a certain result, and deviation from that result, whether up or down, is necessarily bad.
If you forecast profits of $0, and in reality, you received $100,000, then great, but it’s still a problem from a risk perspective.
People do small things now. They will choose not to homestead their homes. I don’t know why; always reason. Perhaps… not planning on staying here all that long. Yes, but the money you’d save in taxes would… pay for the radiotherapy.
Do you see where this is going?
The whole new-money/old-money part of the film, Titanic, is interesting in how correct it is, and how misleading it is.
Rose is everything great about old money with none. Jack, of course, is fictional.
—
Jack woulda lost the best. Jack woulda died under the bridge.
Jack would’ve been of a mindset that you could not trust him with a blue diamond necklace but for if he were even accused of stealing it, he would never see the light of day again. — William Blake writes of circumstances like this (see: end of Auguries of Innocence).
This person and his mother are not crazy. There is no reason to think they would not be able to understand that you cannot sue someone for return of a gift.
But, it would take someone, for lack of a better term — like me —, to explain this to him/them, and they don’t want to believe it. I don’t know.
Maybe $5,000 was never enough. — Or, maybe we should not second-guess people. I know what they said.
Hungarian Stew with Noodles
Hungarian Stew with Noodles
Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 large garlic clove
5 pounds beef stew meat, cut into 1-inch cubes
4 medium onions, sliced
3 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
2 1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 bay leaf
1 (16 ounce) package bow tie macaroni
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon minced parsley
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1/2 teaspoon caraway seed
Instructions
In an 8-quart Dutch oven over medium heat in hot oil, cook garlic 1 minute (discard), add stew meat and onions. Cook until meat is lightly browned.
Stir in tomato paste, water, paprika, salt, pepper and bay leaf. Heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours or until fork-tender, stirring often.
Cook noodles, drain and toss with butter and parsley.
To serve, sprinkle stew with lemon peel and caraway seed.
You need to be able to read through English and dissect what CNN says
In most of the Media propaganda, they generally don’t lie about the content, they mislead people through the Headline and the Conclusion
For instance, they say Chinas Economic Growth will decline
It will
China grew at 7.41% from 2013–2023 and now will grow at around a worst case of 3.93% from 2023–2033
That is a decline in growth by 47%
Any non economist who reads this will say the same thing
However let’s look at 2003–2013
Chinas average growth was 11.21% from 2003–2013
Thus Chinas growth rate ALSO declined from 2003–2013 to 2013–2023 by 34%
Now let’s see another thing
How much population growth contributed to GDP growth in each decade
2003–2013 – it was 4.9%
2013–2023 – it is 0.8%
2023–2033 – it is going to be 0%
How much Government spending contributed to GDP each decade?
2003–2013 – It was 13.90%
2013–2023 – It is 6.30%
2023–2033 – It’s going to be 3%
How much will Real Estate contribute to GDP growth each decade?
2003–2013 – It was 15.75%
2013–2023 – It is 10.77%
2023–2033 – It will be 0%
What do you see here?
You see that the GDP Growth for China from 2023–2033 will be entirely from solid areas instead of paper growth
High Technology Manufacture & Domestic Consumption which accounted for 1% in 2003–2013, 3.1% in 2013–2023 will account for 14% of Chinas GDP Growth in 2023–2033
So Chinas 3.93% will almost entirely build it’s foundation economy and not it perceptionary economy
By 2033, China will have an immensely strong economy and resilient one
I had a classmate who must have married a rich guy. I didn’t even try to keep in touch with her after high school. But we ended up friends on Facebook. That was the time I just accepted every friend request from everybody I’d ever met in life.
After a while, she started to get on my nerves. She constantly complained about her upper class problems.
I don’t think I have time to get the cabin ready for summer. All the linens I ordered haven’t come in yet. I want to kids to sleep on new sheets, not last year’s garbage.
Paris was great, but now we don’t have enough time to get the boat ready for the lake.
I just hope the new furniture arrives at the cabin on time.
The painters came on the wrong day. They were supposed to come before the new carpet, and before the furniture arrived. So we had to put our new living room furniture in the theater room. It’s so inconvenient.
Can somebody teach me how to use the navigation system in my new Mercedes S Class? I miss my BMW 740i. I just can’t learn a new navigation system every year like this.
Just got back from Hawaii for Christmas. Now I have to supervise these caterers for the New Year party.
I later found out that they had a second mortgage on the house, credit card debt, and they were a month away from foreclosure. That didn’t make me happy, but it explained why she was always complaining about her problems. She was trying to make people that she hadn’t seen in a decade think that she was doing fine.
I was given a notice that I was going to be let go and a slap-in-the-face job offer from the same employer in the same week! let me explain….
I had been working for the same employer for years (on and off) and my group was getting a little light on work, although there was a lot more work on the horizon. One day, I was pulled into the Manager’s office and was notified that I would be laid off in 2 weeks. I wasn’t really shocked, as I could see the writing on the wall due to light workload. I was offered 2 months severance at my current salary and would be paid out my remaining vacation time. Considering that I was being fired, the severance package offered was pretty good. I signed on the dotted line!
With my impending unemployment looming in the distance, I began working my network for a new gig. After about a week, I had a few interesting local prospects. It was then that a supervisor in another part of the company that I was being let go from contacted me. He said that they would like to retain me and rip up my forced resignation letter, but only if I would agree to a 20% pay cut and a relocation. I had 5 days to decide, which was pretty stressful, considering that I had a family to support and potentially uproot.
I was slightly insulted and my soon to be former co-workers thought it was a big slap-in-the-face, considering that I had been slated for a lot of future work at my current salary. Come to find out, the company had realized that I was needed, but wanted to make some extra coin off me by paying me less and billing me at my previous higher rate to clients. After all my years of service, commendations, and happy clients, the company I had worked weekends for, neglected my friends and family for, and sacrificed my time with my kids for, was trying to take advantage of me by trying to put me in a bind and forcing me to decide quickly on a bad offer.
Anyhow, a direct competitor was interested in my services and immediately offered me a slightly better salary than I was currently making with better benefits. They wanted to scoop me up before I accepted the bad deal. I turned down the 20% pay cut offer, accepted my resignation and 2 months severance package and took a wonderful 1 month vacation. After a month, I began working for my new employer, which happened to be across the street from my former employer. Within a year, my former employer was bought by a huge international company and a lot of people quit or were fired. I am very happy with my new employer.
I worked in admin with only men in my departement in a company that worked at airplane propellor⁹ services, a very strickt environment. I needed a better chair and some cabinets. The head of the supply departement, a gorilla type man, accompanied me to a shack on the premesis. We went inside and he locked the door with a padlock. I acted like I hadn’t noticed. I babbled along about what I thought was suitable, testing some chairs, opening cabinets, heart pounding! Meanwhile he laid out some flat cartboard boxes on the floor. I knew if he’d assault me I could never win. Again I pretended not to notice and asked about his kids who were back in school after the summer holidays. That made him snap out of it. I asked him to load up a few items and he did. He opened the padlock and we went back into the main building. I went straight to HR. I told the shocked woman over there I wanted him to be warned because he had a family but never let him be alone with a woman again! He was mad at me for making him look bad ‘because nothing had happened’. My direct supervisor let everybody know what happened and all the men took my side. He was not fired (my request, everybody needs a second chance) but they added a black page in his file.
My husband and I were coming home from Puerto Rico, flying into Pittsburgh that night. A small, stereotypical family sat in front of us: attractive father, beautiful young mother, and two adorable kids, one still an infant and the other a toddler. We’re minding our own business when, out of the corner of my eye, I see the toddler looking at me from the openings between the seats.
“Hi!”
I smiled and said hello, and she took that as an opportunity to tell me literally everything about her life. Her mom kept giving me this patronizing look (like, “God, I’m so sorry she’s talking to you; if I could get her to shut up I totally would”) and saying “Maggie, let’s leave them alone and sit in our seats, OK?”
She told me her name was Maggie and she likes pink, blue, and black. She’s 3 years old, and how old are we? “You’re 22? And he (my husband, Joe) is 24? So you’re both 22. OK!” Maggie lives in Ithaca, New York, and loves flowers like the ones I have on my arms (tattoos) but “you shouldn’t draw on yourself with markers so much Miss Katie!” While she was in PR she “did some bad but also cool things,” and she’s going home to see Uncle Mark, who’s sick right now, so she isn’t going to hug him. “Who’s that guy with you? Joe? So Mr. Joe is your son, right? Miss Katie, can you tell your son to wake up? I’d like to talk to him.”
This carried on for the entirety of the two and a half hour flight we were on. I loved her, but my husband wasn’t so fond: she really liked him for some reason or another, and he wanted to sleep. Maggie’s mom kept telling her to turn around because, as Maggie had already put it, “the sun was going into the water so it’s almost bedtime for my brother. Do you want to see my brother? He’s a baby still.” At which point she proceeded to pull her infant brother’s foot over to the side of the plane by the window and show him to me through the cracks of the seats. I cackled.
Joe kept trying to sleep. He had headphones on, and she told him that she liked his earmuffs, but hers were nicer because they’re pink and black but she only wears them in the winter. As my husband drifted off to sleep, she yelled, “Wake up Joe!” I cackled some more, and she kept playing with him, poking him and saying that she “got him,” and asking Mr. Joe questions about his games and what movies he likes.
Meanwhile, her parents were asking the entire time for her to leave us alone, stop bothering them, “Maggie, do you want to color? Maybe if you’re quiet and color you can show them a picture when you’re done!” and all sorts of other mom things. Once, Maggie left for a few minutes and distracted herself with a game, but came back after a bit and said over the top of the seat, “I know I left, but I came back because I like you guys. You’re very fun!”
I loved Maggie. She kinda grew on my husband towards the end there, and I think he actually liked the attention. After the flight, her parents turned to us and introduced themselves, and apologized for her bothering us the whole flight. I said it was fine, not to worry about it, and that she certainly wasn’t bothering us. They thanked me for being so nice to her, and her mom said, “Yeah, but I want you to know that now, you both will be members of our household for the next two months. She’s going to go to bed every night and say, ‘Momma, do you remember Mr. Joe and Miss Katie? Can you tell me a bedtime story about them?’”
I think about Maggie often and hope that one day her mom tells her about Mr. Joe and Miss Katie from the flight back from Puerto Rico. I miss her sometimes, especially since she was better at waking my husband up than I am.
Ambush | Full Movie (action Movie with Nicolas Cage)
When I was a young boy, I reckon somewhere around 7 years old, we were living in Monroe Connecticut. It was (at that time) a growing middle class neighborhood, and my father bought a plot there and was building a house.
(Later on, it became a wealthy suburb, and our house that we sold at a loss in 1965, became worth many, many millions of dollars. Sigh).
I used to explore the woods around the home.
And one Easter, my father woke us up with our baskets of chocolate, and Easter eggs, and a live white rabbit.
And us kids… being kids… well, we spent all day feeding the rabbit chocolate. And that is what happened all during Easter.
Well…
The very next day, we woke up to find the rabbit dead.
Yup.
Chocolate ends up killing animals like rabbits, dogs and cats.
Sheech! We didn’t know!
So that morning, once we all got our clothes on, we filed in a line… a procession… and carried the rabbit to the swamp and trees behind our property.
And there, my dad dug a hole, and we buried the rabbit.
We all threw some dirt on the cardboard shoe-box, and said goodbye to our short-lived friend.
Sometimes, the best intentions… due to ignorance… can be lethal.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who became Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, is the most famous self-made man in history. The other great men with whom Napoleon is compared, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, began their careers with tremendous advantages. Alexander was already king of Macedonia when he conquered the Persian Empire and earned the title “the Great.” Caesar was born into the aristocratic patrician class, and was governor of Spain before he conquered Gaul and became dictator of Rome.
Napoleon was born in Corsica, a backwater province of France, and through his father’s efforts attended military schools in France. At any other time, he might have simply served as a career officer in the king’s army, perhaps with some distinction. Instead of this fate, the chaos and violence of the French Revolution provided opportunities for ambitious men. Like hundreds of other French military men and politicians, Napoleon was literally the right age, at the right time in history, in exactly the right place to exploit fortune.
Through a combination of talent, ability, patronage, boundless energy, and great luck, Napoleon circumvented potential rivals and rose rapidly to prominence and power. By 1807, fourteen years after his first success at Toulon in 1793, Napoleon had created an empire unlike anything Europe had seen since Ancient Rome. He was 38 years old.
From the siege of Toulon to the battle of Waterloo twenty-two years later, Napoleon fought more battles than Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar combined. However, this era was far more than just the sum of his military exploits. The transition period between the 18th and 19th centuries was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. People listened to the new, powerful sounds of Beethoven’s music, were inspired by the Rights of Man to overthrow the rule of kings by divine right, were appalled by the beheading of thousands during the Reign of Terror, were awed by the discovery of an ancient civilization in Egypt, and read the first works of the Romantics like Byron, Kant, and Goethe.
Gifted military commander, innovative administrator, and ruler of an empire, Napoleon seemed to influence everything and everyone. His enemies were so impressed with his genius and abilities that Prince Metternich, Austrian Minister and Chancellor, named the period the “Age of Napoleon” shortly after the French Emperor’s death.
Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity on a small island to become the most powerful man in Europe, then lost it all to die in exile on another small island. It is one of the most incredible stories in history.
We got scam calls alot at our office…always an India accent. One Tuesday a call comes while I was on lunch break and frankly bored. I listen to the spiel. An American stranded desperately needs our help to get to the embassy. Why he/she had an Indian call would have been a good question, but I’m in this for the fun. So I loudly relay to my co-worker what they’re telling me…”Oh my gosh! Sarah you’re not going to believe what’s happened to this poor woman!” Making a long story shorter, we strung them along all week on lunch break having them email and call back while we tried to figure out how to make this $5k transfer. Friday rolls around and they call with wire #’s so I can send the cash on my lunch break. We wait about 20 minutes and they call back. I very innocently explain that I couldn’t send the money because my bank said they’re scammers, but not to worry…I gave the bank their phone number, wire numbers, and email address so the bank can verify they’re legit. Lot of cussing in the background and they hung up. It was quite satisfying and we got no more calls.
A young immigrant taxi chauffeur had raped a girl who was 14 at the time. Oh well, sexual crimes happen and often the perpetrators come from cultures where the woman’s value is somewhere between cows and furniture. The Swedish law is rather jovial and lenient, also on what comes to sexual crimes.
The girl’s boyfriend had gotten furious, and had decided to avenge. He had called his brothers, and together with the girl, they had ambushed the chauffeur. They had assaulted him, tied him, kicked him and finally hanged him on a tree in a nature reservate.
The chauffeur’s colleagues had gotten worried as he had not arrived to work, and they found him hanged on the tree a week later.
The gang of five was caught on basis of the mobile phone data. They are charged of murder. But since they are all underagers (under 18), they cannot be tried and sentenced as adults.
It is easy to see the girl was a native Swede, as the boyfriend and his brothers killed the assailant to avenge the rape. If she had been an immigrant, the boyfriend and his brothers would have killed her as a honour murder.
All in all, I am not amused of this case. It is a direct slap upon the Sweden’s collective face. First, this whole case would have not happened if rapists were punished severely enough in Sweden. Second, vigilantism is a sign that the official crime investigation and punishing machinery is not working as it should. Third, because murdering a rapist is not an eye for an eye – murder is a far more grave crime than rape itself. And fourth, because the murderers are all underagers. It is utterly unlikely adults would have taken the law on their own hands and murdered the rapist, but underagers with too much testosterone and too little consideration can commit crimes like this.
He asked him, “don’t you feel cold being outside, and not wearing any coat?” The old man replied, “l don’t have it but I got used to that.” The billionaire replied, “Wait for me. I will enter my house now and bring you one. ‘ The poor man got so happy and said he will wait for him.The billionaire entered his house and got busy there and forgot the poor man.
In the morning he remembered that poor old man and he went out to search for him but he found him dead because of cold, but he left a NOTE, “When I didn’t have any warm clothes, I had the power to fight the cold because I was used to that. But when you promised me to help me, I got attached to your promise and that took my power of resisting.
MORAL: Don’t promise anything if you can’t keep your promise. It might not mean anything to you, But it could mean everything to someone else.”
Only the British will know the “Slaughtered Lamb’s” most famous extra.
If you drink ten pints, your body will GPS itself towards a Kebab shop.
Only the British will know what Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Robert Lindsay have in common.
Only the British will know that Roger Moore nearly appeared in an Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical.
Only the British will know why the bowler was holding the batsman’s willy.
We know which part of Spain the rain mainly falls on.
It’s not a great idea to look the guy at the next urinal in the eye and smile!
Men know that five shakes and more, is getting ‘iffy.’
Only the British know what “Dogger” means when I say radio four.
Only the British knew about ENIGMA
Only the British will know about the use of inflatable tanks in WW2.
Only the British will know what an Anderson shelter was.
There’s always going to be one fat bridesmaid.
That part of the wedding where the vicar says, “Does any man or woman know why this man and this woman should not be wed?” – that’s the bit where Brits start playing in their head, what the outcome would be if someone says yes.
Only British drivers can navigate a double traffic island, with traffic lights and live.
Only British people know that a 747 over London actually STOPS, mid-air, then proceeds to land at Heathrow, while barely moving.
Only British people standing on the beach of Dover know that on a clear day you can see France, and that no bugger has yet seen France.
Only British people that the only thing that the City of London was designed for, is lunch.
Only the British know that the USA has NEVER lost a war in which donkeys were used.
Only the British will think that American history is an oxymoron.
Only the British know that the difference between burned toast and the US Army, is that you can still make soldiers out of burned toast.
Only the British know that the sea at Southport is only half true.
The French call it an outside cafe. The British equivalent of tables and chairs outside is called an eviction.
It is horrible to be forced to keep a brain dead 16 year old on massive machines because the mother knows God will do a mighty healing and threatens legal action and calling me a murderer. By the way I am a Christian Doctor and I do pray with my patients and families. Two Neurologists declared this man brain dead. All the protocols were done proper . She refused any organ donation from her son. She had all the pastors and elders praying for this miracle. She glared at me horribly. I had prayed with her. She called me a murderer. I felt overwhelmed and miserable and helpless. I did not dare “ unplug “ this young son of hers. Very very depressing and sad . I consulted with the neurologist who said from his long experience to just stop trying to fight mom. He said the patient will “ die “ within a week even with full tubes and support. Forget the ethics and all the money lost and wasted that could have gone to better use. Just let it happen.
This helped me a lot.
After a week the patient went into total heart failure and no rhythm and was declared heart dead finally and the mother gave up. She was satisfied all was done and God took her son home.
Who gets to win even when the family are flat out wrong by science ? Who gets to pay all these bills? Who just eats it? We could build a whole school for what this all cost. And this sad game plays out all the time.
Olaf Scholz and Annalena Baerbock and that group have single handedly performed Harakiri on their Industries and People
By tacitly cooperating with the destruction of Nordstream and by getting access to Cheap Gas and Oil taken away, they have subjected their people to inflation of almost 9% and forced their industries to pay between 57% –117% more for energy
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Joe Biden, Blinken and that group have single handedly forced a level of de dollarization never seen before even in the 2008 Global Crisis
They have forced inflation on their Citizens
They have ignored Financial Struggles back home
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Boris Johnson and Sunak and that group have done the same
Kept Europe in a state of war, Kept Oil and Gas impossible to buy for Europe or UK Without paying a 20% premium on the price to 40% premium
Plus knowing their actions have caused double digit inflation of 11% across the last two years
Are these really Democracies??????
Are they doing a SINGLE THING for their people?
In the US, more people have been cut off from Healthcare in the last two years
Anything being done?
Nopes
The US has been flooded with more illegal migrants in the past four years than under any other presidency
Anything being done?
Nopes
The Politicians of these Countries are being elected to power on the basis of deluding their voters by mass media and social media every time and once elected, commit every act of atrocity against the people
The exact opposite is happening in these AUTOCRACIES
In China, the focus is Food Security, Energy Security, Technological Independence, removing poverty, increasing healthcare participants
In Russia, for the first time Putin is focused on ensuring his people have enough to eat, work and the ability to buy homes at lower prices
In Saudi Arabia, MBS has made life much easier for women, more education, cheaper prices and a return to free healthcare for its citizens
Not to mention moving away from religious dogma
Even in India
Our Government never talks of Food or Energy Security or Water Security or Agricultural Security or Healthcare or Education
It’s always :-
Fifth largest economy
Third Largest economy by 20XX
In China meanwhile it’s always :-
So much Poverty gone by 20XX
So much energy dependence removed by 20XX
Own Soybean Production increased
I believe the very system of DEMOCRACY is collapsing across the world
Every Democracy now reveals a fatal flaw of how much more dangerous a Democracy can become for its people when it’s leadership becomes poor like the case of most democracies today
Xi and Putin have nothing to do with it
They didn’t sponsor Maidan in 2014
They didn’t blow up Nordstream
They don’t Publish lies about other countries
All they have done is REACT to unfair decisions taken by democracies and in the process caused greater damage to the same democracies
My daughter was 2 years old when I considered returning to school for my masters. I called Millersville University and requested a catalog be mailed to me.
After I called, I had misgivings. Should I wait until Lauren was a little older? The easy way out is always so attractive, so tempting.
The catalog arrived while Lauren was napping. I made myself a fortifying cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and perused this ominous looking catalog for, by now, that’s how I came to view the situation. Having consumed my coffee, I decided waiting was the better decision.
Two days later, the mailman delivered another catalog. I placed that on my desk beside the first one. Things began to look a little sticky when day five produced yet another catalog. Was Someone trying to tell me something?
Instead of placing the catalog beside two of its fellow conspirators, I took this into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee, and read the requirements.
Dad’s graduation photo.
Having finished the catalog and my coffee, a memory arose. It was of my father. I remembered walking through the kitchen on my way to bed. He sat at the kitchen table with the light shining on his textbooks, pencil in hand, working the problems his professor at The University of Dayton had assigned.
Dad worked full time at Delco Products in Kettering then attended night school to finish the degree he’d started years before. His studies had been interrupted when Pearl Harbor was bombed. At 40, he returned to college to complete his degree.
If Dad could do this, so could I. I put my feeble excuses aside, and spent the next three years completing my MEd and reading specialist certification. It felt good and my parents were quietly proud of me.
This is a very old Welsh recipe. The word “Bara” is the Welsh word for bread and “brith” is the Welsh word for speckled.
bara brith
Ingredients
1 pound mixed dried fruit, chopped
1 1/4 cups freshly-brewed tea
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 3/4 cups self-rising flour
1/2 cup milk
1 egg, beaten to blend
3 tablespoons orange marmalade
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Instructions
Place fruit in large bowl. Pour tea over fruit.
Add brown sugar and mix well.
Cover and let stand at room temperature overnight.
Heat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.
Add flour, milk, egg, marmalade and cinnamon to soaked fruit mixture. Stir until combined.
Spoon dough into the prepared loaf pan.
Bake until bread is brown and crusty and wooden pick inserted near center comes out clean, about 2 hours.
Cool slightly. (Can be prepared up to 4 days ahead. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature.)
Makiwnyk (Poppyseed Loaf)
Here is the recipe for the makiwnyk, poppyseed loaf. This recipe was written down by me when I was about 15 years old as my mother was making it. The paper is old and falling apart, so bear with me. Don’t let this scare you from making it. I just found it and haven’t had a chance to re-do it.
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Ingredients
Loaves
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 cups milk, scalded and cooled until lukewarm in mixing bowl
3 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
2 cups flour
6 to 6 1/2 cups flour, divided
Poppyseed or Nut Filling
1 pound poppy seeds or ground nuts (I think she used walnuts)
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) melted butter
1 cup hot milk
1 to 2 tablespoons grated lemon rind
Instructions
Loaves: Dissolve the 1 teaspoon granulated sugar in lukewarm water (100 degrees F). Sprinkle active dry yeast into water/sugar mixture and let stand for 10 minutes.
Stir briskly with a fork. Add softened yeast to lukewarm milk and stir. Beat in the 3 cups flour. Cover bowl and let sit in a warm place until light and full of bubbles, approximately 1 hour.
Stir in the 1 cup granulated sugar, salt, melted butter and lemon rind. Beat just until mixed.
In a small bowl, beat with a fork the eggs and egg yolks. Stir into the batter. Add 2 cups flour and beat vigorously. Add another 4 to 4 1/2 cups flour working it in with a rotating motion of your hand. Turn dough over on a lightly floured surface and knead 8 to 10 minutes.
Shape into a smooth ball and place in a greased bowl turning the dough once. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, approximately.
Poppyseed or Nut Filling: Combine all filling ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat until totally incorporated, set aside.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Punch down dough and divide into 3 equal parts. Roll each into a 1/2-inch thick rectangle. Spread with poppyseed filling or nut filling and roll up each rectangle in a jellyroll fashion. Pinch seams to make edges secure and turn under loaf. Place on greased baking sheets and cover and let rise until doubled in size. Brush tops with butter and bake in oven for 1 hour.
Makes 3 loaves.
* I just go out to the supermarket and purchase the Solo poppyseed or nut paste and use that – it’s quicker.
I’ve had two similar circumstances. In one, they had fired me and later discovered the program I had written that tracked orders in the company required an extensive update. They wanted to bring me back at my old pay level to fix it. I counter offered with a contractor based fee. They laughed and declined. I found out later it cost them ten times my offer to get it updated. The contractor they hired wouldn’t work on the old hardware they had been too cheap to update, wasn’t familiar with the legacy format of the database file involved, would only work during business hours, stretching out the job over many days, etc. I had offered to have it done over a weekend for $5k. It took over a week and cost $47k. I was told they inquired into suing me for damages. Since they had not fired me for cause, and because I had made a reasonable offer, I was told they were advised not to pursue it.
in the second circumstance I had left the company voluntarily six months prior. My replacement had been given all the passwords with instructions to change them on my departure. Six months after my departure I received a phone call from my old bosses’ lawyer – on a holiday weekend, no less. They wanted to know the password for a critical piece of hardware and threatened me with a lawsuit if I did not provide it. I said I would not even talk to them without my old boss conferenced in. She was on the line in ten seconds, leading me to believe she had been listening in all along. I reminded her that I gave my replacement all the passwords, including the one requested, with instructions to change them. She said he abruptly left and they are locked out. They were trying to make it my problem. I expressed my sympathy, said there was nothing I could do, wished them well, and hung up.
In general, unless you did something nefarious, the location of their files is not your responsibility after they fired you.
I’d like to define “honeytrap” for others first before answering…
A honeytrap occurs when a person, political organization, etc. use sexual favors or romantic relationships to gather information. It’s also known as “sexpionage”. This was used quite ofted during the cold war.
In WWII it would be used more for spying on others rather than gathering information in a prison camp by using sexual favors. I really can’t think of anytime that prison camps did this, certainly not the Japanese who looked down upon those who surrendered.
Claire Phillip’s set up a famous honey trap. Claire was a U.S. citizen who escaped Manila when it it fell to the Japanese. She spent a number of months caring for other guerrilla figthers in the hills of Bataan. She was eventually convinced to go back to Manilla and spy on the Japanese. Phillips ran the Tsubaki Club which was a nightclub eventually most frequented by the Japanese soldiers (really the officers).
“Madame Tsubaki” would sing and socialize with Japanese businessman and officers along with girls she trained to flirt with them in order to get information. Her girls were able to gain information pertaining to troop units, troop movements, and important goings-on by flirting (and sometimes more outside the club in the nearby hotels). The next day, Phillips would gather the information gleened from that night by her and her girls and smuggle it by courier to the guerrillas.
She also helped smuggle food and notes into nearby prisoner of war camps. Her luck eventually ran out and she was captured by the Japanese police in 1944 after one of her couriers that had been captured (who had been brutally tortured and eventually killed) gave her up.
She was sent to one of the worst prisons on the island and was put in solitary confinement. The Japanese had plans to execute her, but instead commuted her sentence to hard labor. She was freed when her prison camp was liberated.
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For her brave acts, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1951 upon the recommendation of Douglass MacArthur.
For further reading, I’d recommend – MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster who Defied the Japanese in World War II by Eisner, Peter (2017).
I’d also look up the story of this woman:
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Betty Pack was an American-born British spy nicknamed “Victoria” who worked for the famous MI6. She was the one who first discovered that the Poles had broken the German Enigma code.
I’d recommend The Last Goodnight by Howard Bloom (2016), to read more about her in detail.
I was a Critical Care Transport Paramedic for one of the largest prison systems.
I was picking up a 65+ year old “Lifer” who was suffering chest pains from our unit Infirmary, to transport him to the main prison hospital…
A young CO was putting the Old Guy (“OG”) in the required Full restraints while OG was laying on my ambulance cot, with a mile of wires, IV tubes, oxygen tube and sensor cables running everywhere….
Since OG had a high security rating, the rules required handcuffs with a “Lock Box”, belly chain, leg irons and a “trip chain”…
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The kid was fumbling everything…
Finally the OG, told the CO… “Dammit Kid…!! I ain’t got enough heartbeats left to wait on your ass….! YA DO IT LIKE THIS….”
….and Old Guy proceeded to direct Young CO in how to properly restrain a High Security Prisoner, quoting the Procedure Manual chapter and verse.
And the OG did a darned fine job of it…
When the young CO finished he told his LT he was going to write the inmate up, the LT told him to STFU and learn…
We had an uneventful ride to the hospital, and OG survived that and several more cardiac events before he finished his sentence… so to speak…
I liked OG…
He was respectful with the Medical Staff and COs tho hard as nails and well respected by the other inmates…
I was working for an independent Mercedes repair shop in Richmond Virginia. A customer had moved to Richmond from West Africa and had his Mercedes shipped by boat to Newport News and then flat- bedded directly to our shop to get it checked out and get a state inspection. The boss told me to drive it to another shop a few blocks away that did engine cleaning. When I got there we popped the hood and the guy proceeds to turn an industrial-sized pressure washer onto the engine. Out pops the biggest rat I’ve ever seen, maybe the size of a small dog, and we watched it run across the road and behind the nearest building. If that’s the kind of rats they have in West Africa I’m definitely steering clear of that place.
A semi-friend in high school days had a lot of connections where we worked part time. As a result, he believed he could do (or not) anything. He had been right for a year running. If he wanted Friday night off for a date — granted — something none of the rest of us got. If he wanted to come in later on Saturday morning, granted.
He’d “volunteer” to straighten up shelves, etc. and in reality he’d goof off. Sometimes he’d hang out in the stock room, other times in the break room. Sometimes he’d leave the store for as long as 20 minutes. The manager, who “knew,” nevertheless never went looking. He also knew that if he caught the kid, then what? He couldn’t fire him (connections) and yet he’d now officially know he was goofing off.
What if one of the rest of the staff complained. Even worse, what if one of the staff filed a complaint with the Dept of Labor or something like that? So he maintained his “deniability” by never going to look.
Then one day, one bagger was at lunch and the second was on break. The store had been empty but all of a sudden, there was someone at the check out. The rules of the store were that that the cashier never bagged … that was the bagger’s job.
The manager knew Jon was somewhere in one of the aisles goofing off, so he paged him to the front. No response. Paged again, no response. Finally, Jon comes wandering up, the manager points to the checkout line and Jon erupts.
“Go do it yourself you Effing lazy <religious slur name>. I bet you think that just because I have pull downtown that I’m in your <religious slur> religion but I’m not. So if you want to bag that b&tch’s groceries, get up off your lazy <backside> and do it. I’m going out for a smoke …”.
The manager said (very quietly I was told), “No, you’re fired.”
Jon started to laugh and the manager once again said, “You’re fired. Get out of this store right now.”
Jon: “Yeah right you little piece of <religious slur> <word for crap>. You’ll be the one fired when this is over.”
The manager stood his ground and told the woman in the courtesy booth to call the local PD. To Jon: you’ve got until they get here to get out or you will be arrested and I will press charges. I assume that the store will also back up any charges the cashier and the customer might want to level at you.
Then he hears the siren … he sees the cop car coming toward the store. With that, he tore through the store and ran out the back emergency exit and to his car. Not long after, he’s on the phone to his grandfather, who was his connection downtown.
But the grandfather had already heard the story so when Jon went off again, Granddad let him rant and then said “as your manger said, you’re fired. Is that all you called me about?”
I heard the story from coworkers and from him and both sides agreed on all the essential details. This was very possibly the first time anyone had ever told him no and made it stick.
In 1976 I was in college, and one afternoon a girl was screaming on the balcony of my dorm. So I went out there, and saw a student lying on his back, very pale, barely conscious, with blood coming out his mouth. Another student was kneeling over him, and said “if he dies I’ll kill myself, but he shouldn’t have messed with me”. A rifle lay on the balcony between them.
They were both freshmen, and had been on campus for only two weeks. The victim apparently was a bit of an asshole who had pranked the perp the previous week, destroying some of his property. On this day, he had been at it again, locking a different student in a bathroom and walking away. That was his last prank.
It was a small town, which did not have “911” service yet. I think there was some confusion about who was calling the ambulance – most of us were teenagers at that point. We should have carried him into the parking lot and put him in a pickup; the hospital was only a half-mile away. Finally the ambulance arrived; I think I saw his hand move as they loaded him in, but he was dead upon arrival.
The perpetrator surrendered without resistance. Apparently he had a history of mental illness, so he was found insane and was transferred to a mental institution. The rifle did not belong to him.
We can’t control the past. Wasting time to worry about it is lost time.
Sadly, we don’t get what we give. Don’t expect people to always give back. Not everyone has as giving a heart as you.
Good things usually don’t come easily. And if you think about it, great accomplishments take time too. Don’t expect rewards instantly.
Not everyone will support your dream. Haters, doubters, and pessimists will sabotage every move you make. To overcome this, follow your gut and forget them.
You are responsible for the problems you encounter, regardless of who caused them. So instead of blaming others, find a way to get out of situation.
Our words have the power to hurt. Cruel remarks wound others for life. Use your words to inspire and to liberate instead.
Failure quickly gets to our hearts, but success goes to our heads. Our character is revealed at our highest and lows. Be humble at the top. Be faithful in the valleys.
Our assumptions about what happiness should be are what makes us unhappy. Let go of your expectations about what would make you happy.
We judge ourselves by our ideas and others by their actions. Be a person who others want to meet and be around.
We all will die. No one will live forever. Start living a purposeful life and try to mend broken relationships, because you never know when life will end.
Hating oneself starts with breaking one’s promises. Once done, it feels terrible. When it becomes a habit, you hate yourself more.
Sometimes we have to ditch toxic friends from our lives and surroundings.
My first jury trial my client was accused of knowingly applying for Oregon resident hunting licenses and tags without qualifying for residency. My client owned about 40 acres of land in Oregon and had a trailer home and a large shop on the property and had utility bills for that property. He had one pickup truck registered in Oregon and one in California, where he taught at a community college, but his witnesses testified he spent summer and sabbaticals and holidays in Oregon and did not own a residence or have a permanent address in California. He paid state income tax to California and not to Oregon and had a California license, and a resentful Oregon neighbor had turned him in to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). ODFW regulations required proof of residence by any 3 of a long list of documents, including a utility bill, a Passport, and a Social Security Card.
At trial, the arresting state trooper took the stand and on cross examination I handed him the booklet of regulations, which was 20 or 30 pages of fine print and was, at the time, distributed to every place that sold licenses, and asked him to turn to the page that described the residency requirements where my client could have found the requirements when he purchased his licenses and tags. I expected the trooper to turn right to that page and I planned to establish that all my client had to do was show a utility bill with an Oregon address, his social security card and passport (which have no addresses) in order to establish Oregon residence to the satisfaction of the vender.
To my great amusement, the trooper could not find the page. He fumbled through the pamphlet, back and forth. I enjoyed that for a few minutes, and finally told him the page number. He went to that page and scanned it and said “no, it’s not there” and went back to flipping through the the booklet. I let him do that for a minute more and said “look at page _ at the last paragraph set out with darker highlighting” and he then found the part and I went on with my questioning. At the end of the trial in my closing argument I hammered on that: My client is supposed to be able to read these rules while standing in line for his license and he is supposed to understand how they apply and the trooper can’t even find the rules when I tell him what page to look on . . . “
The jury acquitted my client on all counts. I cannot say for sure, but I believe that cross examination was the best moment in the trial for me and my client. My client was found not to have “knowingly” violated the law. And my brilliant cross examination was not planned or even anticipated. I assumed the trooper would be familiar with the regulations and would turn right to the page. The witness did it to himself.
My father-in-law looked me in the eye and angrily laid a curse on me by saying: “You’re going to die a miserable old man all by yourself.” With that, he got out of his chair and stalked away.
The circumstances were I was divorcing his daughter. Understand that his daughter had had several affairs, had made my life hell for several years, and truly didn’t want me in her life. She only claimed she wanted to stay married to save face and for the Machiavellian goal of making me look like the “bad guy” because I was the one filing for the divorce.
The lead up to the above talk was my then father-in-law had called me up to come by and talk to me. I of course said yes. I had always had a good relationship with him.
I spent the first half hour listening to him about how the Christian thing to do was to not get divorced. I made sure to fully listen to him. I mirrored back to him what he was saying to make sure I understood. I didn’t interject with my counter thoughts.
When he had finished I only got about 30 seconds into what I had to say in response. He cut me off. Said I wasn’t listening to him (because I wasn’t agreeing with him) and then he laid the curse on me per the quote above.
That was the last time I talked with him some 20 years ago. As I write this I’m sitting here with my wonderful wife of 10 years enjoying a scenic overlook from the back deck of our house.
Hot Dog Sizzler, an Auto Oven Cooks Hot Dogs From the 1950s
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Want a hot dog on the road? Just plug this heater into your car’s electrical system. This 12 volt electric cooker could cook two wieners at the same time in three to five minutes in your car!
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It was called the Hot Dog Siezzler and was made by the Thomas Manufacturing Co., of Chicago sometime in the 1950s while drive-in’s were around. This was thought up has an alternative to what they saw has an expensive meal at a White Castle or McDonalds or even Carols. It only makes sense because after all who wouldn’t rather have a hot dog instead of a hamburger?
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Priced at $3.95 in the 1950s. And it also comes in a 115-volt version for the home.
Keep in mind that this is my opinion so you may/may not agree with me.
Spanish Donkey
This was a torture method that was used during the Spanish Inquisition (period of forced conversions to Christianity, killings, prosecutions and torturing). It was mostly used on women (but it was common to use on men as well) when they were stripped naked, put on the Donkey, weights were added on their legs and the point of the Donkey was to pressure the woman’s genital area and if the weights were heavy enough, it would split the victim in half. Weights were added to prevent the victim from falling off the device and to increase the agony.
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Judas Cradle
Similar to the Donkey, Judas Cradle was a torture method used to punish criminals mostly. It was a pyramid shaped seat on which the victim was put slowly to make them suffer more. The victim was tied with ropes above the Cradle and then slowly lowered to the top of the device. Men were impaled through their anus and women through the vagina. The device would leave victims in agony and if those that were torturing wanted to make the whole process worse than it already was, they would add weights to the victim’s legs. If the victim didn’t die from the pain and exhaustion (as the device was known as “the wake” as it prevented victims from falling asleep) they would die from infections as the Cradle wasn’t cleaned.
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The Brazen Bull
This torture method first appeared in Ancient Greece. The victim was placed inside a bull and fire was set under the bull causing the metal to change it’s colour to yellow as it was heated. The victim was roasted to death in the bull while the bull itself was designed in such a way that the screams coming from the victim sounded like the bellowing of a bull.
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Scaphism
This was a Persian torture method. The victim was placed in a boat and covered with one more and then forced to ingest large amounts of honey and milk. Diarrhea occured as a consequence and the smell would attract various insects to the victim. Additional amounts of honey were poured on the victim to attract more insects as he/she was left to float in a pond on the sun. The insects would burrow through the victim’s skin destroying everything on their path. It was a long-lasting torture method so the victim was in agony for days.
Back a few years ago, I had a class with a lot of kids who hated going to Phys. Ed. The teacher wouldn’t let them participate without sneakers on, so they would (accidentally on purpose) “forget” their sneakers on Gym Days. I hit up the stores and bought sneakers (on clearance) in a variety of sizes so that no one would miss their Phys. Ed. time again. One day, “Josie” wanted to wear the pink sneakers, but “Susie” was already wearing them. She cried for a minute, then got over it. That evening the principal came to me and said that “Josie’s” mother had called an insisted on a conference with both of us. When he suggested that she just talk with me first, she said that what I had done was so awful, she needed him to be there to back her up. He asked me what I had done to this child. I had forgotten the sneaker business (It was a tiny part of a very busy day) and I couldn’t think of a thing. She was a complaining mother, and I was pretty sure nothing big or important had happened. He didn’t believe me. He was sure it was something really awful. Well, the mother comes in the next day, and her huge complaint was that her daughter had wanted to use my pink sneakers the day before, and I hadn’t let her wear them. The principal gave me a look, and I gave him a look reminding him that I told it wasn’t anything big. I explained to the mother why “Josie” didn’t get to wear the pink sneakers. She was still angry and said I should have taken them off of “Susie’s” feet and let “Josie” wear them. Happily for me, the principal told the mother that if her daughter needed pink sneakers that much, she should buy them and send them to school with her. We had a good laugh after the mother left.
I hope you don’t mind, but I would like to tell you my story.
I was that 8 year old child once.
My father was an alcoholic, my mother severely depressed. I raised my sister and provided her with the emotional support when our parents were too immature and abusive to give that to us.
I would get beat up, thrown against the wall, kicked, punched repeatedly on the head by my father, his rage would shake my soul. My sister and I would drown ourselves in books, homework and play as quietly so we wouldn’t anger our father. Our mother was verbally abusive, she would break everything in our home.
My father would tell us to get lost, to get out of his way, to shut up, leave him alone, brain dead kids.
He hated us.
One day my sister and I went to the neighbors house and asked them if they had candy.
It was an elderly lady and her husband. They giggled and came out with candy for us and told us to have a good day.
A few days passed and we knocked to ask them again. This time they pulled out some chairs and sat down with us. We talked for a few hours. We told them about our hobbies, favorite books, favorite everything. They gave us candy and told us to go home and not be out so late.
The next day we visited the elderly couple and they played the piano for us. We were so amazed by their warm atmosphere, love and kindness.
Some days we would go visit and they would just sit on the front porch showing them our sweet rock or toy collections, our art and we would even sing classical songs with them.
With time they began to tell us they were busy, then they didn’t open the door anymore.
We wanted to do something nice for them and picked out flowers for them and left them at their doorstep.
I still look back and I’m thankful to have met such a sweet couple. I strive to be like them one day as an old lady with my husband.
You have no obligation, but for me those strangers meant something worth remembering in my rough childhood.
When I was in my 30s and moved into my first house (as a couple). I waited to re-paint, decorate and have locks changed and things fixed and restored, then I had a party/BBQ in my new house and invited some relatives. The party was on the patio with access to the guest bathroom and I placed sticky plastic runners on the new rugs. A couple of the relatives (the younger ones) brought some friends with them (rude to not clear it with me first) and a good thing that I have a tendency to cook way more food than I need (Nana taught me well). I was a little hyper aware of everyone’s comfort and whereabouts when I notice that two female friends of friends were missing. I knew that only one person at a time would use the bathroom so I went into the house. They were both trying the door to my bedroom (“Maybe it’s stuck”) which I had locked along with the two guest rooms and I went casually behind them and asked softly what they were doing.
They both whipped around startled. One of the women said “The door’s locked.” I actually did that because I didn’t want one of the kids to accidentally let my cats out. I didn’t say anything and they exchanged a look then asked why I had the door locked. I drew in a breath and asked them “Why do you need to go into my bedroom?”
“oh we just wanted to look at the house.”
“I think you’ve seen enough, now go outside or leave.”
They went outside…to complain. Why are there doors locked, why is there plastic runners all over the house, did you know there’s nothing in the medicine cabinet and the only thing in the vanity is an extra roll of paper (I did that on purpose).
I cleared my throat and said, “The why is because of people like you.” Their friends (Our relatives) just chuckled and kept their heads down.
Chase Explains Why Women SUCK At Picking Men And She Got UPSET
“I’m 70 y/o and this has been the case for many of the women I have known. Horrible in their choice of men. It’s on you girls, wise up.”
Sigh. Yes, completely unexpectedly. This past Friday night, my girl was actively dying from liver failure. She was within hours of death and I was staying with her to help comfort her. There were no vets to call to help ease her passing at that time of night, so I was doing my best to comfort her through it as best as I could. I was lying on the floor with her and softly petting her, telling her I was there, she would be OK, that we all loved her, she was the BEST friend I ever had, but that I knew she was very sick and when she was ready go it was OK to go, and see her mama who had passed several years ago. I was trying my best to stay calm (because me being upset always concerned her) but at one point I broke down and cried a little. My dying cat made a huge effort to stand up, rub along my side and then lay down facing me. She looked me in the eye, and put her paw on my hand and purred. This is what she did after I came home from the hospital with my baby years ago and was suffering from postpartum depression, and after I had had gallbladder surgery and was sitting in pain on the couch for days, after my mother in law passed away and any other time I was distraught in the twelve years she knew me. She was always wonderful, and even when she was dying herself she was still thinking of me. Good lord, I’m missing her!
Dong Jun 董军 was named as defense minister, taking the position formerly held by Li Shangfu.
For the first time, a Navy veteran was named to the senior defense minister position. This likely means that the Chinese government believes that, for the first time, its major challenges will come from the sea, which includes South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. If conflict breaks out in any of these areas, the navy, air force and rocket forces will play a more important role than the army.
In terms of defense spending, this likely means a steady increase in budget for the navy, which is now building two more Chinese aircraft carriers.
If there is a major conflict with the US in the western Pacific, the navy, air force and rocket forces will form the tip of the Chinese spear.
This is what Xi is preparing China for, just in case.
I think by “train without wheels” you may be referring to it
In July 2021, the 600 kilometers per hour high-speed maglev transportation system developed by CRRC was mass-produced in Qingdao. This is the world’s first high-speed maglev transportation system with a design speed of 600 kilometers per hour.
In 2022, this maglev train will be exhibited at the German International Rail Transit Technology Exhibition.
In 2023, this maglev train will be displayed at the World Manufacturing Conference.
It is not a new thing, at least it has been around for 2 years.
It is a complete solution and requires a dedicated track to operate. This means that it is not a “train” that can run on ordinary rails.
It has no wheels and is suspended on the track by magnetic levitation. There is no resistance from the track. The propulsion power comes from each carriage. Technically, it’s flying in the air, just a few centimeters above the orbital surface.
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The forward power of the maglev train comes from the conversion of the electromagnet polarity between the track and the carriage. S and N are alternately converted to push the train forward.
When it needs to reverse, the control system changes the conversion sequence of each magnet, and the vehicle can drive in reverse. Since there is no need for a gearbox and complex transmission mechanism, its reversing becomes very simple.
Why Men Are NO LONGER Approaching Women!
“I’m reminded of the BLIND guy that a chick said was staring at her in the gym. The guy’s defense was obviously “I’m blind, I can’t stare at anymore” the gym still kicked him out.”
A few times people have asked me very intimate questions about my sex life; I just looked at them and cussed them out.
A hairy but non-intimate question that has been asked of me a few times: Why won’t you have a Christmas tree? Why? Because I’m not Christian, I am Jewish, and although there are some Jews who do put up and decorate Christmas trees, I don’t.
I had a friend from high school who grew more heavily Christian, and she peppered me with questions about this. One time on the phone (perhaps the last time we spoke) she asked me why I wouldn’t consider putting up a tree for the holiday. I asked her if she would consider setting up a Hanukkah menorah with candles for the holiday. When she said no, I laughed drily.
I told her this was offensive to me and she couldn’t understand why. I think that people who are of the “dominant” religion sometimes forget that not everyone is of their belief. And yes, it is offensive to me to be pestered about this. Ask once, and if I say I don’t, accept that. Otherwise, you’re going to get a jawing from me.
Maturity does not come with is age it comes from experiences it’s damn true because you can find a kid in 30 year old person and a wise person in 12 year old kid .
Some people come in our lives just for some time and then they leave us as if they never met.
Money is really important in life and It can solve at least 99% problems of our life .
No one is permanent in your life, one day everyone is going to leave you and We all know this but it’s takes guts to accept this fact .
No one can love you more than your parents, maybe at one point of life you will think that someone loves you more than them but it will be just illusion for fraction of time, which will get over with time.
Looks matter, Good looking people do get some benefits over others but of course it’s what others can do but we should always love ourselves the way we are.
Don’t give too much importance to someone or don’t do too much care because one day they will get bored of this.
There is nothing like BFF (best friend forever) because one day that forever gets replaced by never.
There is some problem in everyone’s life, so don’t compare your life with anyone; No one is really happy all the time.
We all have someone who extremely love us but only some lucky people have someone in their life who can understand them too.
I was around 30 and went through a phase where my right foot was much heavier than my left foot. I got pulled over for doing something like 80-85 in a 60 in an area about an hour from where I lived. When I went to court, the conversation between me and the judge went something like this…
Judge: This is your 4th speeding violation within the last 12 months. Do you realize this carries up to a $10,000 fine and up to six months in jail?
Me (suddenly feeling very dizzy because I actually did not realize that): Yes sir.
Judge: I assume you paid a fine each time before this one.
Me: Yes sir
Judge: It seems that taking your money isn’t getting through to you. How do I get through to you?
Me (on the verge of a breakdown): I don’t know sir.
Judge: I’m sentencing you to 6 months in jail, suspended. I’m also sentencing you to a $10,000 fine, suspended. You’re going to come back here in 3 months and we’re going to look at your driving record. If there’s nothing on it, you’ll go home. If there’s anything on it, your sentence will be carried out. Then we’re going to do that again 3 months after that, again 3 months after that, and again 3 months after that. In other words, I’m going to inconvenience you to drive back here every 3 months over the next year so we can look at your driving record. Does that sound fair to you?
Me (barely able to speak due to a throat like the Mojave desert): Yes sir.
Judge: I thought you might think so. I’ll see you in 3 months.
I walked out of there not believing my good fortune. Instead of just throwing the book at me and moving on, the Judge took mercy on me and pretty much made me walk the line. I went back every 3 months and he congratulated me each time for not having any other traffic violations.
If we’re only talking about sheer intensity (and not effectiveness) then the Soviet bombardment signalling the start of their Berlin offensive at the end of World War 2 is the clear winner.
According to Cornelius Ryan’s book “The last battle”, Soviet guns were lined up for mile after mile and stepped back caliber by caliber. The mortars were in front. Behind them were tanks, their long main guns elevated. Next came self-propelled guns and, following these, batteries of light and heavy artillery. Along the rear were 400 Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers. In all, over 20,000 guns took part in this bombardment.
At exactly 3 AM on the 16th of April 1945, three green flares soared into the sky and the huge collection of guns roared into life. In merely 35 minutes, half a million shells of all types and calibers were let loose. Many soldiers on both sides were battle-hardened veterans of the Eastern front, yet even they didn’t expect the true intensity of this barrage.
The noise was terrible. Gunners had to keep their mouths open to equalize the pressure on their ears, otherwise their eardrums would rupture. One experienced Soviet battery commander even warned his crews to not only open their mouths but also scream at the top of their lungs. The crew did exactly that but blood still ran from their ears. The most fearsome sound of all came from the Katyushas. The rocket projectiles whooshed off the launchers in fiery batches and screeched through the night, making terrifying noise like “huge blocks of steel grinding together”.
Everyone on both the German and Soviet sides suffered from some degree of deafness and could not hear very well at least for a while. In Marshal Zhukov’s command bunker, only when the bombardment was over could the staff barely hear their telephones ringing. Even residents of the eastern districts of Berlin, some 55 kilometers away from the target area, could hear the bombardment like distant thunder.
Also according to Cornelius Ryan: The German countryside beyond the western Kustrin bridgehead seemed to disappear before a rolling wall of bursting shells. Whole villages disintegrated. Earth, concrete, steel, parts of trees spewed into the air and in the distance forests began to blaze. Years later German survivors would vividly recall the strange hot wind that suddenly sprang up and howled through the forests, bending saplings and whipping dust and debris into the air.
Antony Beevor’s book “The fall of Berlin” cited Gerd Wagner in the German 27th Parachute Regiment: “In a matter of a few seconds all my ten comrades were dead.” When Wagner recovered consciousness, he found himself lying wounded in a smoking shell crater. He was only just able to struggle back to the second line. Few escaped alive from the artillery barrage which smashed trenches and buried their occupants, both alive and dead. Bodies are still being discovered well over half a century later.
The massive barrage also produced strange concussion effects. Troops and equipment alike shook uncontrollably from the shock. In houses closer to the front, pictures fell off walls, windows and mirrors shattered. In Muncheberg, a cross tumbled from the church spire. In the police station at Mahlsdorf books fell off their shelves and telephones rang for no reason. Lights dimmed and flickered in many areas. In Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten an air raid siren suddenly went berserk and no one could switch it off. Along the edges of Weissensee and Lichtenberg a sudden wind caused curtains to whip and flap with ghostly abandon, and in Erkner some inhabitants of air raid shelters were jolted out of sleep, not by noise but by a sickening vibration of the earth.
The world had never seen such a massive artillery bombardment like that before, it has never seen anything like that since.
Brian KICKS OUT PSYCHO Obnoxious Feminist!
“I genuinely don’t think she’s trolling, I think she’s literally just crazy. She has no idea how crazy she really is.”
John W. Campbell got his engineering degree in 1930. In 1970, he wrote about what would happen if an SR-71 Blackbird was magically time-traveled to 1930.
It was clearly from the future. But how far in the future?
Electronics: not a single vacuum tube. Just little plastic cases with pins sticking out. They decide to sacrifice one to understand it. It appears as if the circuit diagrams are drawn on the chip. They can’t be sure, because much of the drawing is below the resolution the optical microscopes of the day allow. They do a spectroscopic analysis of the material. It is 100% pure silicon. Turns out the spectroscopes of 1930 cannot detect the parts-per-billion of the dopants that create the semiconductors.
Power: they’ve never seen a jet engine. There does not seem to be any way for the engine to operate. They try to run it. The fuel does not burn. Turns out the special fuel (if I recall, something called J6) can only be ignited by throwing some hypergolic igniter in on the ground. If it flamed out while running, it could not be restarted.
Radio: the circuitry is more magic drawings on silicon. They can’t figure out how any of it works. Turns out it runs at a higher frequency than anything they know how to detect.
Radar: They have no idea what that horn in the nose does. It seems to emit some kind of energy, because a tech got his hand in front of it an experienced some heating. So they tried using infrared detectors but saw nothing. Centimeter radar was beyond anything they knew about, and they had no way to detect frequencies that high, beyond anything they could even imagine.
Construction: it is made of pure titanium. More titanium than exists in the entire world! Extruded into thin sheets. And welded! Everyone they checked with said that it was impossible to weld titanium because it would essentially “catch fire” and it would start oxidizing and would all burn away.
So how far in the future did it come from? They got all kinds of people together, scientists , engineers, scientifiction authors. Where did this come from? Or, when did this come from? Consensus: maybe 400 years in the future.
No, it was 40 years.
So if we can’t reverse engineer something of human technology from 40 years in the future, do you think we have any chance whatsoever of reverse-engineering something from an alien planet?
When I became a programmer in 1963, if you added up all of the bits of memory in all the computers in the world, you would have at most a few megabits of memory. I am typing this on my iPhone, which has 128 gigabytes of memory, that is, one terabit of information. Plus a GPS, Internet access, three cameras, and a telephone that can allow me to talk to anyone who has a telephone anywhere in the world in seconds. That’s a bit longer than 40 years, but not that much longer. This thing I’m holding in my hand is at a minimum 100,000 times more powerful than the supercomputer of 1963, and could be construed as a million times more powerful along some measures. It has more RAM than our mainframe of 1983 had disk space to support 30 programmers. If I walk a block in any direction I will probably pass 20 phones equally powerful. And I live in a neighborhood of single-family homes
So we probably won’t be able to do anything with that alien spaceship. It might use quantum computers that compare to our quantum computers like my iPhone compares to an IBM 704 vacuum tube computer.
When I was working in the arctic we had a mass mutiny after the boss cut our paid hours from 12 to 8, while we were down for repairs. Which was about 5 days. Those extra hours were all over time, so it almost cut our pay in half. We had signed up for 12 hour days, and just because we couldn’t work more than 8 hour days, we didn’t see that as our problem.
Our boss refused to budge, and at least 5 people submitted resignations, and said that they wanted tickets home, because the company wasn’t meeting the terms of employment.
The next day, a new boss showed up and took over, and pay was reinstated retroactively. The people who had quit ,hadn’t flown out yet, and they all returned to work.
Its hard to find qualified help in the Arctic. Cutting pay for five days, would have meant that we were shut down for at least another ten days before they could have flown in new qualified people. They wouldn’t have flown in for an eight hour day.
The old boss was transferred somewhere else, where he could do less damage. He wasn’t fired.
Back in Fort Bragg I stopped to get gasoline while I was wearing my fatigues. That was during a time when gasoline was being withheld by the producers claiming a gasoline shortage. There was a long line leading to the cashier.
To make a long story shorter, four young men came into the store and one of them came to members in the line making demands of them. I thought it was a prank on friends of the young men until he came to me. He demanded a coke I had in my hand intending to purchase when I paid for my gasoline.
I offered to buy the gy a coke and told him to go to the cooler and bring it back. He said that he was perticulaary fond of the coke in my hand. I refused to give it to him. He told me “we’ll see you outside”.
They were gone when I left the store, so I pulled up to the pump as was pumping gas into my car, when their car screeched up to mine and all existed the car. The same guy walked up to me and demanded the coke. I did not know him or his buddies and I was alone. He shouted “give me my coke”. I hit him across the head and face with the coke which was in a bottle. The bottle broke ! The broken glass sliced his head and face from above his left temple down to his lower right jaw.
He fell bleeding profusely. His buddies asked if they could pick him up without me cutting them. I told them to get him.
Skipping a bunch of details, I ended upon in court before a magistrate to be charged for assault on a minor. The boy’s father was in the courtroom and drunk as a a skunk. When he saw me walk in in handcuffs, he shouted pretty loudly “There’s the Son of a Bitch who hurt my son”.
The Judge admonished him telling him that was drunk and that he would not tolerate causing and such in his courtroom.
He man looked up at me and loudly said “Tell that son of a bitch (the Judge) that I’m not drunk”.
It turned out that the four young men were terrorizing local stores and people doing this same stuff over and over. I was released based upon defending myself.
The kid and I later became decent friends with him crediting me with saving his life. He has a scar across his face until this day but he is a law abiding and friendly young man. He is not hostile toward me at all.
As a very poor college student, I used to go dumpster diving. I found several things (radios, alarm clocks, amplifiers, etc) that I fixed and sold. I found that I could make about $40 a week that way, with only a couple hours work. Minimum wage was about $3.25/hour so it was relatively lucrative. But there were two items that I kept for myself.
In 1985, I found an old computer in a dumpster, complete with 8″ hard drive. I took it home and took a look inside. Everything seemed okay, so I went to the library and started looking for information about it. It turned out to be an Altair 8800BT, one of the first commercially available microcomputers. I stuck it in my closet and ignored it for a couple of decades, just taking it with me every time I moved. A few years ago, I came across a listing for a similar computer on eBay, and was astonished to find that it was worth about $5000! I spent about $200 getting it working again, but it is so much fun to play with that I haven’t gotten around to selling it, and the value fluctuates wildly. There is an amazing amount of code and documentation available for it on the internet.
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A few months later, I found a Sylvania Superset in excellent condition. I took it home and plugged it in. The flyback transformer was blown. I spent $30 for a replacement, soldered it in, and the TV worked flawlessly until 1999, when my (now-ex) wife gave it to a friend.
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The photos are not mine, but they are the exact same models.
The Saigon Execution photo, but not for the reason most people think.
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“Two people died in that photograph. The recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.” – Photographer Eddie Adams
This picture is both moving and tear jerking for me because I know the back story. Most people look at the picture and think the South Vietnamese general as some kind of monster. When the general lost a leg in combat and received medical treatment in the U.S., many were outraged. Then-Sen. Stephen M. Young (D-Ohio) called Loan a “brutal murderer” and said his treatment in the United States was “a disgraceful end to a … disgraceful episode.”
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What most people don’t know is that the real monster was not the South Vietnamese general, but the Vietcong terrorist. Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem was the leader of a hit team that infiltrated into Saigon to execute political opponents and members of the police force. Just that morning, he had murdered 34 people. 7 of the dead had been General Loan’s own men. 2 or 3 had been Americans. The rest were wives and children of South Vietnamese police officers. All had been bound at the wrist, forced to kneel near a pit, and executed. The prisoner and all of his hit squad were terrorists who dressed as civilians to attack civilians.
Loan, fresh from intense combat with Viet Cong, literally caught Van Lem red handed. The most recent victims were one of Loan’s men, the policeman’s wife, and his 6 children. The general had literally caught the terrorist standing over the bodies of his own God children.
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Combat was ongoing. Loan had to rush back into battle. He didn’t have time to read a Viet Cong terrorist his rights. He put a bullet in the brain of a terrorist who had killed dozens of women and children. But for decades, the picture was reprinted over and over, with no context. The ignorant believed General Loan to be a villain, rather than a hero taking a monster off the streets of Saigon.
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Now the picture itself was not deceitful, nor was the photographer. But the picture was stripped of context and used to deceive the reader of American newspapers.
Late and absent both. Let’s call her Patricia. Patricia, our receptionist, was late or absent at least once a week, and she was always very apologetic and always promised it would never happen again. Eventually she was put on last chance, final written warning.
The owner and I discussed it and thought that maybe if Patricia felt that the company was willing to invest in her, she would feel more invested in the company. So we sent her to a class to improve her skills. She was very excited about the opportunity.
The day of the class was monstrous. A new client signed unexpectedly and we had to immediately come up with eight workers in the right specialty to send them, but to come up with travel arrangements and temporary living quarters in a city a thousand miles away for those eight workers. We got through it finally but I’d been covering not only my own job but Patricia’s as well and I was exhausted.
The following day Patricia came in and I asked her how the class went. She said, “I was a little late and they wouldn’t let me in.”
“So why weren’t you here? If you weren’t in class you should have come to work,” I told her.
“Well, I would have, but I thought you’d yell at me.”
I told her to sit down and I’d talk to her later. Before I said anything further I wanted to talk to the owner, who wasn’t in yet. I also called the company that provides the class in question, and they told me that while the attendance records weren’t in yet, Patricia would have had to be at least an hour and a half late before she would be denied access.
The owner and I agreed that where Patricia had already been on last chance warning for her attendance, this was the last straw. As I told her, “If you’d come in to work when they wouldn’t let you into class I would have yelled at you but you’d still have a job. As it is, you don’t.”
Old-fashioned sailboats were able to sail across the Atlantic by using the power of the wind and the skill of the sailors. They did not just sail back in the other direction if the wind changed, because they knew how to adjust their sails and navigate according to the prevailing wind patterns. Sailboats work by harnessing the force of the wind on their sails, which creates a lift that pushes the boat forward. The direction and speed of the boat depend on the angle and shape of the sails, the position of the rudder, and the resistance of the water and the keel.
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By changing these factors, sailors can control the movement of the boat and steer it towards their destination. However, sail boats cannot sail directly into the wind, because the wind would push them back. Instead, they have to sail at an angle to the wind, called tacking, and zigzag their way forward. This way, they can sail in any direction, even against the wind, as long as they have enough space and time.
The Atlantic Ocean has very reliable wind patterns, called trade winds and westerlies, that sailors used to their advantage. The trade winds blow from east to west in the tropics, near the equator, and the westerlies blow from west to east in the temperate zones, near the poles. These winds are caused by the difference in temperature and pressure between the equator and the poles and the rotation of the Earth.
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Sailors who wanted to cross the Atlantic from Europe to America would use the trade winds, and sail south until they reached the tropics, then sail west along the equator, and then sail north to reach the Caribbean or North America. Sailors who wanted to cross the Atlantic from America to Europe would use the westerlies, and sail north until they reached the temperate zone, then sail east along the higher latitudes, and then sail south to reach Europe. These routes are known as the Atlantic triangular trade because they formed a triangle on the map.
Sailing across the Atlantic was not an easy task, and it required a lot of skill, courage, and luck. Sailors had to deal with storms, waves, currents, pirates, diseases, and other dangers. Sometimes they had to navigate using the stars, the sun, the compass, and the log, and estimate their position and speed. They also had to cooperate with their crew and follow the orders of their captain. Sailing across the Atlantic was a great adventure, and a great achievement, for the old-fashioned sail boats and their sailors.
One famous example of someone who was extremely wealthy and lost it all due to a bad habit is Howard Hughes.
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Howard Hughes was a prominent American business magnate, aviator, film producer, and philanthropist who was born on December 24, 1905, and passed away on April 5, 1976. He initially gained wealth through his inheritance of the Hughes Tool Company, a successful oil tool business. Hughes expanded his empire into various industries, including aviation, film, and real estate.
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Here’s how he lost his wealth due to a combination of factors:
1.) Excessive Spending: Hughes had a penchant for extravagant spending, particularly on ambitious projects. He founded Hughes Aircraft Company and designed and built innovative aircraft like the H-4 Hercules, also known as the “Spruce Goose,” which was one of the largest planes ever constructed. These projects consumed vast amounts of his wealth.
2.) Film Ventures: Hughes ventured into the film industry, producing movies like “Hell’s Angels” and “The Outlaw.” His fixation on perfectionism and costly reshoots significantly inflated production budgets, leading to financial losses in the film sector.
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3.) Reclusive Lifestyle: In the latter part of his life, Hughes became increasingly reclusive and struggled with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). His reclusiveness made it challenging to manage his various business interests effectively, and he withdrew from public life, which hampered decision-making.
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4.) Legal Battles: Hughes became embroiled in numerous legal disputes, including battles over his inheritance, control of his companies, and allegations of fraud. These legal battles drained his financial resources and added to his woes.
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5.) Mismanagement: Hughes entrusted the management of his vast empire to a series of individuals, some of whom were not always acting in his best interests. This mismanagement further eroded his wealth.
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By the time of his death in 1976, Howard Hughes had gone from being one of the wealthiest individuals in the world to a recluse with a much-diminished fortune. His life and financial decline are often cited as a cautionary tale of the perils of unchecked ambition, excessive spending, and reclusiveness.
A woman was at my local bar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, drinking a beer. It was a quiet early evening, maybe a dozen people in the place including the bartender and bouncer. A guy carelessly bumps into her, spilling her beer on her. He doesn’t apologize. Irritated, she points out that he just spilled her beer. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was very much not what a gentleman who just spilled a woman’s beer should have been saying.
Two large, tattooed dudes with shaved heads come along and sit on either side of the guy and ask him if he’d still be talking like that if the woman wasn’t alone. Because she very definitely was not alone. She was there with these two guys who had been up picking some music on the jukebox when the incident happened. And all three of them were good friends with the bouncer and the bartender. So they wondered if maybe the guy would like to apologize to the woman, buy her another beer to replace the one he spilled, and be a lot more thoughtful about how he treats people in the future. Which he agreed to. They pointed out how fucked up it was that it wasn’t until they came along that he started behaving more like a gentleman, and that maybe he should rethink his behavior towards women.
The guy left soon after, having wisely left a generous tip in exchange for leaving with all his teeth still in his mouth.
I was working at Office Depot as a cashier. A lady had over $100 in merchandise. She had a coupon from Staples that was for $10 off of $50 and asked me if I would honor it. We did accept competitor’s coupons. I told her of course, not a problem. She produced it, and I was reading the fine print to make sure that it was valid. Some coupons will have exemptions, such as not being allowed to be used with HP ink. As I was trying to read the fine print, the lady told me that I said I would accept it. I agreed and asked her nicely to please be quiet so I could read the fine print. She was quiet for a few seconds and stated again that I promised that I would accept it no matter what. I told her that I didn’t promise, but please be quiet, I need to read in silence. She was quiet for a few seconds and brought up the fact I said I would honor it. I slammed my hands down on the checkout counter and told her if she would just shut up, and let me read it, we would both be happier. That shut her up long enough to see why she was trying to distract me. The coupon had expired two days prior. I looked at her and she blushed. I said, now I get why you were so insistent about my saying I would honor it. She started stammering out an apology. I told her not to worry, I would still honor it. I did because I figured, we were still making $90 from this sale, and most likely she would come back here to shop. I did ask her if she tried to use it at Staples and they wouldn’t honor it. Yes, they told me to try and see if Office Depot would accept it.
I expected to be fired for the way I talked to her and that I accepted an expired coupon from Staples.
Instead, she filled out a survey saying how wonderful I was and now she would only shop with us. She transferred her printing over to us, which generated over $1000 in sales monthly. The general manager asked why I honored it knowing it was expired. I told him because I said I would, but I did tell her that all the conditions had to be met first. Once I saw it was expired, I figured the $10.00 loss was nominal in making a customer happy.
My mother saved my life by cursing me out and making me go to school. It was the day after my 11th birthday. I had every intention to stay home and play the new Super Nintendo games I had received for my birthday. Usually, my mother wouldn’t have had any problem with this, but that day she was adamant that I was going to get up and go to school. We got into a terrible argument and both said very hurtful things to each other. I had no choice but to go.
As soon as I got to school I had this overwhelming feeling that I just wanted to go home and lay on my mother’s lap and cry. It wasn’t because of the argument but it was something else I just couldn’t put my finger on. The school day was finally over and I still couldn’t shake this feeling. My godbrother and downstairs neighbor wanted to come over and play the game and even though I still just wanted to get in the house and cry, I reluctantly agreed.
When we got to the door it was locked. No big deal. Looked under the mat and the key wasn’t there. Still not unusual. I climbed up the back patio and let myself in. I immediately went to the front door to let my company in. After I let them in I went to the kitchen to get a piece of cake and my downstairs neighbor went straight to the tv and cut it and the game on.
For some reason, my godbrother started to walk through the apartment. When he came back into the living room he told us that we needed to go outside. We begrudgingly went. Once outside he proceeded to say “I don’t know how to say this, but your mother is dead”. I darted back in and went straight to her bedroom. She was tied to the bed with the phone cord and her throat had been sliced open. There was blood everywhere.
I ran back outside and downstairs to call 911 as our phone wasn’t connected at the time. I didn’t really know what to say and I think the operator must have thought it was a prank because she hung up on me. So I called my grandma and told her. After that, I just sat on the bottom step until the police and paramedics started pulling up. My grandma arrived shortly after and it gets blurry from there.
It will be 26 years on September 26 that this happened. Still no arrests. I feel like everyone in town knows exactly who did it, the same people I’ve been saying for years, but no one is willing to say anything. Mind you her boyfriend was killed in the same way about a year before. This happened in Plymouth, North Carolina, and her name is Sonja Day. You can also look at details of her boyfriend’s murder on the North Carolina Innocence Commission website under the Spruill case. My cousin was wrongfully convicted of his murder and after all this time they are finally trying to do something about it. I’ve always been adamant that the same people are responsible for both murders.
Sorry for being so long-winded. Probably should have made this its own answer. So that’s how my mother saved my life. I would like to think that if I stayed home that day, I could have saved her somehow, but it likely wouldn’t have gone that way.
Edit: Wow! I never thought that this many people would read this. I would like to thank everyone for their comments and well wishes.There are a few things happening that may lead to an arrest. I feel like the end may be within reac. I’ll definitely let everyone know how it works out.
1-Everyone is on a different journey. You may just be starting yours while the other person might be at the end of his/hers.
2-Comparing yourself to others is a losing battle. In the game of life, you will never reach a point where you are better than others in every way.
3-What you are comparing against is inaccurate information. What people present to the outside world is usually an edited version of their reality.
4-Your dream is likely different from others. If you have a big dream, it will take a while before you achieve it.
5-Comparison saps you of your limited time, you’ll be better off paying more attention to your dream.
6-All you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.
I once left a backdoor on an Android app since I was working with a client that couldn’t be trusted whether they would pay me or not. Heard from another developer that they let him develop and ran away with the software and never paid him.
It was like this, whenever the app starts it proceeds as usual but on the background it sends a request to one of my servers, if the request reaches the server and the response is code 200, then its ok, am still waiting for the payment the app can proceed as usual, if 201 then I wasn’t paid, so crash the app, clean all preferences and change url that was saved in preferences makes the app completely unusable for good. If 203 then I have been paid in full, proceed never send any request to my server again.
And my guess was right,I made the app, haven’t send the code to the client yet (they didn’t need the code though, it was a full running app), they started using the app, told me some stuffs, I fixed them, everything is set, they love the app, it was even more than they expected, I even made them an admin dashboard with a bunch of analytics to monitor all their data for free as a way to make them like me to work with them in the future, in my price I even included free up to 3 months bugs fixing if any were to occur, they were so happy with the results.
Then they immediately disappeared, waited for their reply for two weeks, nothing, not even a reply to tell me to wait, its like they all died from a hurricane or something, they even changed the pass to their server so I couldn’t get in and kill it, that was proof enough that they clearly ran away with my software. So I sent the 201 status code from my server and the whole app froze, all clients they connected couldn’t use the app anymore, immediately the following day they tried to contact me, I tripled the price after seeing they wanted to scam me. They paid me in full the same day through western union, I sent a fully working app with no backdoor, and all the source code. And that was it, I’ll never work with these guys again.
I will put a backdoor if you are a bad client, if you are a good one or pay in advance I’m not putting any, or if we are in the same country because I know I could sue you. I hate backdoors anyway because they are too risky no matter how much I try to secure them, the fact that they exist is a problem.
My wife has a face painting and balloon business. Before the pandemic, she was booked over three hundred gigs every year at hourly rates that would make a lawyer happy.
Once April 2020 hit, her business dried up. No parties. No festivals. No grand openings. No fairs.
We shrugged our shoulders. Oh, well!
She refunded her pending contracts to keep good customer relations. I went to work as usual. We actually increased our savings since then. My job covers our needs.
We’re fine!
The reason is our modest house. We made do with a smaller home and aggressively paid the mortgage down when times were good. When rates dropped, we refinanced. Our mortgage payment is only 1/4 of my monthly net income.
This could have been a very stressful time financially. I’m very grateful that it hasn’t been at all. I wouldn’t trade that security for an extra room or a big garage.
Modest home all the way!
It’s a true story
Said by “Al Bundy” actor of Married with Children. But it is a true story.
Funny story. The Air Force never wanted the A-10 and never wanted to support the Army in ground attack roles. They only adopted the A-10 to save their budget from the Army demanding to develop and provide their own CAS solutions.
Fast is great for a lot of things but the A-10 is able to loiter and remain aloft at much lower speeds, allowing pilots to see what was developing on the ground.
Six A-10s can be produced for the cost of one F-35.
A-10s are 1/6th the costto fly each hour.
A-10’s are mission capable at nearly double the rate of the maintenance intensive F-35.
The F-35’s are rife with problems that are slowing production and have cause groundings.
F-35’s stealth is far less useful in low and slow engagements because it can be detected and killed by people with eyeballs and manpads. The A-10 suffers this problem too but it’s more durable and cheaper to replace.
Every F-35 lost to CAS missions will be detrimental to other sorties the plane might have flown.
I like the F-35 but it’s not really a good plane choice for getting down in the mud with the grunts.
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If an F-35 was shot up like that’ I seriously doubt the pilot would have managed to fly it home.
EDIT:
Folks, I never mentioned Ukraine. I never suggested sending the A-10 into combat without other types of aircraft designed to make their use tolerably safe. I also never made the A-10 put to be some sort of superhero airframe, unable to be killed. I specifically answered a question about the A-10 vs F-35/F-22 in close support of troops.
During my son’s 12th grade year of school another student broke his leg during football.
At the hospital, after the X-ray the nurse came in to wrap my son’s leg. She grabs his leg and bends it to the side, and I hear this pop noise as my son screams out.
I yelled at the nurse and made her leave the room. At this point the head doctor and head nurse rushed into the room. I told them to get my son’s pain under control. They gave him a shot and after he relaxed I explained what the nurse had done. I told them that I should sue the hell out of the hospital for allowing a person man or woman to work with patients that clearly has no damn idea what the hell she is doing.
The doctor and nurse took the bitch into an empty room and she walked out of the room and walked out of the exit door. She looked at me with a hateful look and I called her a bitch, and the doctor witnessed it. He told me it will be dealt with.
Not sure if she was fired or just sent home on probation.
Barley with Mushrooms (Scotland)
mushroom barley 3f
Ingredients
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
2 medium onions, chopped
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
3 1/4 cups boiling water
1 cup barley
2 teaspoons instant chicken bouillon
1/2 teaspoon salt
Dash of pepper
Instructions
Cook and stir mushrooms and onions in butter 5 minutes; place in ungreased 1 1/2-quart casserole.
Stir in remaining ingredients.
Cover and bake at 375 degrees F, stirring once, until barley is tender, about 1 1/4 hours.
When I was in 3rd grade my parents got a collie for me. Lassie was big on TV and I wanted my own Lassie. We named her Lady. She was the perfect pet and protector, especially of me. We lived in Omaha in a split level house. The kitchen, a bedroom, and a combination laundry room/bomb shelter were on the back of the house, the lower level. My brother, sister, and I shared the bedroom.
My parents both worked so when we got home from school, we’d stay with the lady across the street, who also took care of my younger brother who was not school age yet. We would leave Lady in the neighbor’s back yard during the day.
One day I wanted something from my room so I took Lady with me to our house. I was part ways down the back stairs when I realized the back door was open and a man was standing in the kitchen. He had apparently just forced the door. He was holding a pry bar. I froze and he started towards me, not seeing Lady behind me on the stairs. She met him as he was coming up and tore into his arm holding the pry bar. He dragged her to the door and out and I called her back as he ran away. We never learned who it was, though my dad suspected one of the neighbors.
There were two other times Lady probably saved members of our family. She woke us up the night our house burned down and got us out within five minutes of the entire ceiling collapsing.
The other time was when we had moved to South Carolina. We lived on the last street at the edge of town. Behind us was a wide field, then some woods. A few miles past the woods was a prison work camp.
My dad was gone bowling and my mother, sister, brother, and I were watching TV. It was summer and the side porch wooden door was open. The screen door wasn’t latched. My mom’s car was parked right outside the door.
My mother saw a man come over the back fence and look in the car windows, probably for keys, then walk up onto the porch and look through the screen. She called out, “What do you want?”
He didn’t say anything, just walked into the living room. He saw a woman and three kids but he didn’t see Lady, who was lying by the TV. She saw him, though, and without a word from us she was across the room and tearing into him. He bolted out the door, and she was chewing away at his legs as he went over the fence. We ran outside and turned on the porch light. He was running across the back yard, and Lady backed up to get a running start and leaped the fence. She caught him again at the back fence and worked on his ass some more. When he got over the fence and disappeared into the night, my mom called her back.
The police came and said he was an escapee from the prison camp. They brought dogs and tracked him from our house and found him in the woods. I suspect he had a healthy fear of dogs by then.
He wanted the car keys and who knows, he might not have wanted any witnesses to call the police.
Lady passed away while I was overseas in the military. My mom told me my dad sat on the floor and held her for hours until she was gone. We all loved Lady as much as she loved us.
I’ll narrate two instances where I’ve witnessed a beautiful manifestation of “bro-code”.
Mine was a co-ed school. Our class strength was divided almost equally between girls and boys. One of the guys, Inzy, had a massive crush on a girl from another section. He was too shy to speak up however. He thought she was out of his league (whatever that means!).
Our class fellows immediately got down to image building. They casually started talking about Inzy with the girls of the other section. Not with his crush. They chose the other girls, carefully avoiding “the one”. The tales of his intelligence, humility and humour started being discussed amongst the other girls and this piqued the interest of his crush.
Some girls soon started interacting with Inzy with their casual helloes. And as expected, Miss. Crush bumped into him outside our Chemistry lab and asked him to clear some doubts. Inzy did not know what hit him! He did manage to sail through with his explanation.
Inzy found his girl, all thanks to his bros who worked behind the scenes and set the ball rolling for his love story. We girls also contributed our bit… by keeping quiet about the entire set up. Wasn’t easy!! :p
The second instance is a bit gory. There were a group of boys who used to hang out regularly at the corner of our street. They were college students who had known each other since their childhood. One of them was Omi bhaiya (elder brother). He was a gentle giant, forever helping others.
One day another gang of boys from some other neighbourhood came to our locality. That day our regular group of elder boys had not yet converged. The gang went up to a lone guy who coming back on his cycle and started fighting with him. He tried to escape but was surrounded. The gang was getting aggressive and soon withdrew hockey sticks and bats. The commotion drew the attention of Omi bhaiya who was casually walking towards his usual hangout. He ran towards where the whole scene was unfolding.
Just as the cyclist was about to be slashed with a blade, bhaiya caught the sharp weapon, with his bare hands! His hand was slashed across the palm. Seeing blood gushing out, the neighbouring gang guys ran away. Turns out that it was a fight over some insult.
When bhaiya was asked why didn’t he call for help and instead held the blade, thereby harming himself, his answer was simple. “The boy being attacked is my friend’s younger brother. He’s like my own. Couldn’t take a chance. Bros always look out for each other.How could I see him get hurt?”
Cesnica (Serbian Christmas Bread)
Cesnica Serbian Christmas Bread
Ingredients
7 3/4 cups flour
3 tablespoons yeast
1 cup shortening
2 teaspoons salt
Warm water
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Combine flour, yeast, shortening and salt. Knead with enough warm water to moisten until dough separates from hands. Dough should be firm, not tacky.
Put dough on greased pan. Let rise for 10 minutes in warm area.
Perforate dough with fork. Insert clean coin (quarter or gold dollar) and spread dough flat like a pizza.
In one of my job interviews this year, I was asked, “How much do you think the chewing gum market is worth in the United States?”
If you haven’t encountered a question like that before, it might sound like a crazy thing for an interviewer to ask. For one thing, I knew absolutely nothing about the chewing gum industry. For another, if I ever actually needed that information, the smartest response would probably be to pull out my phone and Google it.
But the purpose of doing estimations like that isn’t to figure out the right answer – it’s to practice structuring your thinking in a logical way. You can learn the gist of how to do it in a minute, and you can use this kind of logic for the rest of your life.
Estimations like these are often referred to as Fermi problems, or back-of-the-envelope calculations. To solve one, you’re supposed to figure out a way to break the main question into a series of smaller components that can more comfortably estimate. Then, you put them back together to arrive at an approximation of the final answer. The trick is to ask small questions to reach a bigger solution.
For example, this was how I estimated the size of U.S. chewing gum market:
I knew that there are about 320 million people in the U.S.
I knew that the average lifespan in the U.S. is about 80 years. We’ll assume that age is evenly distributed among the population (not actually true, but close enough for our purposes.)
Teenagers and adults – say, between the ages of 10 and 50, so about half the population – are the demographics most likely to chew gum. Let’s guess that about 75% of them are gum-chewers.
Small children under the age of 10, and older adults over the age of 50, are the demographics least likely to chew gum. Let’s guess that 25% of them are gum-chewers.
If we do the math, that gives us a total of about 160 million gum-chewers in the U.S.
On average, each of those people probably chew at least 1 stick of gum every week.
Most of the packs of gum I’ve seen contain about 15 sticks of gum.
There are 52 weeks in a year. If we round up a little, that means the average gum-chewer buys about 4 packs of gum every year.
I’d guess that an average pack of gum costs about $5. That means that 4 packs would cost $20.
That gives us about $20 per person * 160 million people = $3.2 billion spent on gum every year.
I had no idea if that was right or not – for all I knew, some of my assumptions were completely ridiculous. But maybe some of my wrong assumptions canceled each other out. I Googled the question afterwards, and I found that the U.S. chewing gum market was worth $3.9 billion in 2015, which means I at least got to an accurate order of magnitude. And best of all, I got the job!
If you want to try doing one yourself, here are a couple of fun ones:
How many gas stations are there in your country?
How many hair are on your head?
How many airplanes are there in the world?
How many customers visit your favorite restaurant every year?
How many Quora answers have you read in your lifetime?
Right before I attempted suicide (and 2 months after my heart attack), I asked my “wife” to tell me that she loved me. She refused. We weren’t fighting or anything. She just refused. So I asked her to lie to me and say that she loved me. I was feeling low and my body was failing me. I’m a veteran who been through a lot. So she decided to make confessions. She said that it was NOT her responsibility to tell me that she loved me or that I was attractive. If I wanted to feel loved or attractive, go to therapy instead. She also revealed that she hated the educational gap between us and said that she despised living in my “shadow” and being known as my wife.
This absolutely BROKE me. The final straw was when I told her that she broke my heart and she just shrugged. I absolutely wasted 20 years of my life.
Originally Answered: what was the most interesting thing your teacher said?
Original question: What’s the best thing you’ve heard your teacher say?
The first day I walked into my 10th grade chemistry class, the lights were off. The teacher was waiting at the front of the room, holding a small candle in front of him. The candle’s tiny flame was the only source of light in the room.
The class murmured a bit, confused and excited. Once we’d all quieted down, the teacher said, “Tell me some of the observations you can make about this candle.”
We paused for a moment. That seemed a little too easy for chemistry class.
“But keep in mind,” the teacher added, “that observations are the things you observe empirically. Inferences are the things you conclude… and inferences can be wrong.”
We stared at him, wary now.
At last, someone piped up, “Um…The flame is yellow?”
“The flame gives off heat.”
“The wick is burning.”
“The wax is cylindrical!”
The teacher raised his eyebrows at that one. “Are you sure?”
We stared harder at the candle, not sure how to respond to that. It definitely looked cylindrical.
The teacher shrugged. Then he put the candle into his mouth and started chewing.
The class stared at him.
At this point I was wondering if I ought to call the emergency room or something, but the teacher just kept chewing as though nothing was wrong. Eventually, he swallowed, shrugged again, and said, “Actually tastes okay.”
As it turns out, the so-called “candle” wasn’t made out of wax at all. It was actually just a slice of banana, with an almond slice for the wick.
The student’s “wax” statement had actually been an inference.
After explaining this to us, the teacher turned on the lights and said, “If there’s one thing I want you to learn in this class, it’s the first rule of scientific thinking: Never assume that your mind can’t lie to you.”
And that’s the story of how my 10th-grade chemistry teacher swallowed a candle to teach us the first principle of scientific thinking. Here’s to you, Mr. Miller.
Test someone’s attentiveness. Alter a sentence slightly. If they’re attentive, their expression changes or they ask about the change.
Handshakes reveal personality; they can show anxiety even if you hide nerves.
Avoid being too available, especially to close ones, except for parents. Excess availability makes you seem less important; they might take you for granted.
Instead of dinner and a movie, watch the movie first, then dine. It gives you a dinner conversation starter.
Don’t react hastily. Don’t expect acknowledgment. Think before acting!
The thing that people remember the most about you is your personality, way of talking and attitude.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) originally did not have any party property and was a political party with 0 assets. The word “bankrupt” cannot be associated with CPC.
But the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan owned party assets and was indeed bankrupt.
image 566
If you mean “the Chinese government / State Council (PRC)”, then I can tell you for sure that the Chinese government also has 0 assets, and they are only the managers of state-owned capital, not the owners.
If you mean “China’s financial sector”, then I can tell you with certainty that China’s savings rate is 45%, 10 times that of the US. China’s savings rate is even 11% higher than Japan’s, despite the fact that Japan is also an ardent thrifty nation. The main reason for this is:
Chinese people have a sense of worry and are always used to saving money to prevent and cope with emergencies and unforeseen events.
Chinese people generally have the habit of saving, no matter poor or rich, they all like to save their income in the bank to accumulate more money, instead of using credit cards to spend money in advance as westerners are keen to do. You can even ask the little black brothers in San Francisco why they like to rob the Chinese, because they know that the Chinese like to go to the bank and save their money, and they rarely spend tomorrow’s money today like the whites do.
The savings of 1.4 billion people is a huge amount of money, which is the “ballast” that keeps the ship stable, so the risk resistance of China’s financial industry is much higher than that of Wall Street’s financial industry.
In other words, even if the global finance collapses, China’s finance will not collapse.
Becket (1964) Richard Burton & Peter O’ Toole
Debauched King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) installs his longtime court facilitator Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) as the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that his old friend will be a compliant and loyal lackey in the King’s on-going battles with the church. But Becket unexpectedly finds his true calling on the ecclesiastical side, and aligns himself against the King’s selfish wishes, causing a rift and an eventual showdown not only between the two men, but also the institutions they represent. (IMDb)
Butler, Pennsylvania is a small city that was a one half hour drive from where I spent my High School years. This is a typical Western Pennsylvania city; steel, and blue collar work.
Downtown, in the city, was a restaurant. It was established in the 1920’s or 30’s and pretty much stayed with the same decor throughout the century. It was Art Deco “diner” style with stainless steel fixings and decor. With a big picture of the family founder over the door.
It was called “The Hot Dog Shop“.
2023 12 20 11 06
And it served typical diner food, and was a great place for my family to go to as a young boy in my pre-teens and my teenager years.
I would often get such things as grilled cheese sandwiches, with sides of gravy laden french fries, and bowls of soup. So very delicious. Not to mention the mandatory cup of coffee.
Taken in the old days
About ten years ago, give or take, it burned down. What a great loss!
But….
They had insurance, and the rebuilt the restaurant and as far as I can tell, it is still operating today. Oh sure, the great thing is that the have not changed the menu. They have not changed the decor. In fact they kept everything else the same EXCEPT for the removal of the cigarette vending machines, the ash trays and the free packs of matches.
Worth a visit
If you ever get a chance to go… please go there and enjoy a “blue plate special”. Good times! Good times!
My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Bishop, was one of my favorite teachers. He taught my sister four years before me, and the year he taught me, my sister was a new mother. He asked me about her and her new child frequently, like he really remembered her and cared about her. It was nice.
But I also remember a few times when he fell over in his chair during class. The kids all laughed at him, and he laughed right along with them as he got himself back up.
Sometimes, he’d seem to talk really slow or just “zone out” for a few seconds while teaching. We just got used to it.
One day, he didn’t come to school. We found out later that, while on his way to school that morning, he’d lost control of his motorcycle and crashed through a sign next to the road. He was fine… just shaken up a little, and his motorcycle was broken.
A few years later, when I was no longer his student, I heard through the grapevine that he had to quit teaching because he kept having “episodes” where he lost control of his body.
He had multiple sclerosis.
All of the incidents the year that he taught me were just manifestations of the disease. He either didn’t know it, or didn’t tell us. Probably he just didn’t tell us… it was none of our business.
That was 25 years ago now. He’d probably be in his 70s by this point. I’ve tried Googling him, but I can’t find anything. But that includes an obituary, so that’s a good sign, I guess.
Edit: I just Googled his name again, and found his obituary. He died in Jan. 2022.
If I have read this correctly, your dedicated employee is dying because of illness, and you want to get rid of her because she is sluggish aka tired.
Take a good long look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself that if you were in her position, would you want the same thing to happen to you?
This job is probably what is keeping her going through this tragic period of time in her life, and you want to take that away from her? Are you serious? What kind of a person are you? She has bills to pay, food to buy for herself and possibly her family, and a FUNERAL to plan for HERSELF! Show some compassion and understanding. Is this the reputation that you want to have? If you fire her, trust me, what you have done and why you have done it, will be spread to everyone, especially your contacts and/or clients (customers). Legally, she can sue you for firing her under the Equal Employment Opportunity Law.
Have a heart of flesh and not one of cold corporate stone. What you do, will come back on you, either for the good or for the bad. Choose wisely.
Another tale from the shire horse farm which I used to work at. A group of French students came to the farm, along with a couple of teachers. The students were teenagers and right from the start they were causing trouble. The first thing was being kicked out of the gift shop for being caught trying to steal.
Then they came to the animal section where I worked. At first, they seemed to be behaving themselves, but after they left the farm animal section, a member of the public came up to me and informed me that one of the French teenagers had stolen a duck. Yes, a live duck. I immediately went to one of the teachers who were supposed to be supervising the students and asked them to unlock the coach, which is where the person had told me they’d seen the duck.
The teacher did so. The duck had been shut on the seating area, and was flapping around, terrified, and pooing everywhere. I managed to catch the duck and put it in a sack to calm it so I could get it back to the pond. The teacher then had the audacity to ask if someone could clean up the coach, to which I replied that since it was her students who had stolen the duck, then they could clean the coach. Then I left with the traumatised duck, who amazingly survived.
The French students were consequently kicked out of the shire horse farm and I for one hope that they enjoyed the trip back in their feather and duck poo encrusted coach.
One time my Dad and I drove about an hour to fly my radio-controlled helicopter. But that’s not the big thing.
This was way back in the early 80s, at the latest. Way before stabilization systems, autopilots, etc. I was about 13 years old, had gotten a paper route (yes, kids actually delivered papers to your door) and saved every cent to buy an RC helicopter. After several unsuccessful flight attempts at home (hovering is freaking *hard*), he suggested we go to a flying club where there was a guy who could teach me. Off we go!
We arrive, helicopter, fuel, cooler full of sandwiches and soda, ready to start my training! But… nobody’s there? Apparently, the flying club was off that weekend- we got our dates mixed up. Bollocks.
No matter- the field is open, we figure we’d just try more “self-paced instruction”. Fire up the heli, a few really bad hover attempts when all of a sudden:
I’m barely maintaining a hover when all of a sudden the heli peels off into this incredibly cinematic sweep- dips forward, tail sweeps around, engine throttles up- it was beautiful! My Dad was shouting “Oh yeah, that’s it!!”- but I was shouting “It’s not me! The radio is jammed!”
The heli, on its own, takes off on a circuit about 1 ft off the deck, and circles around- coming right back down the flight line. By now my Dad knows this craft is out of my control, and if he doesn’t catch it it’s probably gone forever- and he knows how hard I worked to buy it.
He jumps in front of it.
This is not a little drone- this is an aluminum-frame gas-powered 3ft rotor diameter with ash blades behemoth screaming down the runway at us. If it hit something on the ground and jumped up- it could have killed him.
It smashes into his shins, rotor blades splintering. The engine, no longer under load, starts to whine like a banshee- we pinch off the fuel tube and kill the engine. We collect the debris, and start home. Dad actually packed a couple of cold soda cans into his socks to keep the swelling down.
When we got home, I asked him why he would do such a foolish thing as blocking the heli with his body. He said “You worked so hard to buy this, and build it, and fly it- I couldn’t bear to see it take off and fly away on a full tank of gas and be lost forever. Let’s just fix this up.” BTW- he had bruises and blood pooling in his legs and feet for months after this.
That was almost 50 years ago. I could never bring myself to rebuild that heli, though we continued with a bunch of other projects that were somewhat less lethal.
We were being taught loops in C++. As a test, the teacher gave us the following question :-
Print the following pattern.
image 21
Everyone of us started writing the code, trying everything (since at that time it was a high level problem for us). One of my friends had no clue whatsoever about the problem, but he wanted to score well in the test.
You know what he did?
He wrote the following code
#include<iostream.h>
void show();
int main();
{
char ch=’A’;
int i,n;
/* Here he wrote certain code just to
show that some thing was being done*/
show(); //called this function
//secretly
for(i=0;i<7;i++)
{
for(int j=0;j<12;j++)
{
/*wrote some more useless code
which had no
effect on output*/
}
}
return 0;
}
/*after leaving about 100 blank lines so
that you dont have to scroll the
function to show you*/
void show()
{
cout<< ” ABCDEFGFEDCBA\n”;
cout<< ” ABCDEF FEDCBA\n”;
cout<< ” ABCDE EDCBA\n”;
cout<< ” ABCD DCBA\n”;
cout<< ” ABC CBA\n”;
cout<< ” AB BA\n”;
cout<< ” A A\n”;
}
When the teacher came to check his code, he glanced at the code and asked him to run it.
HERE IS THE OUTPUT:
image 20
Teacher saw this correct output and awarded him full marks. Teacher no longer cared if the code was correct or not since it was producing the desired result.
I was like, “wow man at least you thought of such an idea!”
Edit 1:
Just showedthis answer to my friend who is being referred here. He was amazed I remembered it to such precision.
As an experienced professional actor, whose children have acted in screen productions they were too young to view, I will attempt an answer.
The short answer is that the film is compartmentalised and the child actor will only experience a small subset of the film. They will only be told about what is appropriate for them to know.
The “makers” of the film communicate with the child in the first instance through the child’s agent and thence to the legal guardian (parent or otherwise). If they feel the role and the production are suitable they will agree to be available and audition. Then, if cast, it is up to the director to communicate with the child actor.
Under no circumstances will they be allowed to see the full script or be on set at all times in an “R-rated film”. They will not be invited to the full cast read through nor to extensive rehearsals. Film making is compartmentalised. Every single shot need not be in the same place or shot on the same day as the next shot. Things are not shot in order.
The production company is responsible for the wellbeing of the child actor and will allow the legal guardian to be on set when the child actor is called. They will also supply a chaperone and brief all the crew and cast about what is appropriate. For example I once played a character who murdered his family. I was never allowed to be seen by the child actors – no wardrobe, makeup, rehearsal calls were scheduled on the same day. In the shoots there were no shots framed to include both the murderer and the victim.
In another production, involving an infant, no crew or cast were allowed to make loud noises or wear perfume on set.
There are laws to protect minors on set in most jurisdictions. If they are obeyed the experience can be safe and rewarding for the child and one day, if they are old enough and choose to see the whole film, hopefully they will be able to be proud of their work.
I tried to buy my family’s next home many years ago and my wife and I were blown away by the massive cubbyhouse in the back yard. Our kids were young and they would love it. We had other reasons to love the house too, one being that our good friends lived in the same street. Needless to say we were looking forward to buying this, our new home, and started the price negotiations.
A deal was struck and we signed a contract we were happy with. Part of the contract was to ensure that massive cubbyhouse was legal and had all the right government approvals. It did not and so our lawyer informed their lawyer of the problem. Instead of further negotiations and a price reduction or trying to gain the required approvals, the vendors thought it appropriate to cut it down and burn it!
Unbeknownst to me, this house was for sale due to the divorce of the previous owners and the husband thought it would annoy his ex wife to destroy the cubbyhouse. The problem was we had a signed contract for the purchase of the house including the cubbyhouse. They would have to make good and we were assured they would.
As is often the case the purchaser of the house we were selling needed another day or two to finalise their finances and asked for an extension to the settlement date which was agreed upon by us and the owners of the house we were buying. However on the new day settlement was to occur, the lawyer for our new house changed position and said that we had to give up on our demands for compensation over the cubbyhouse. We refused.
They then would not proceed with the sale and gave us the option to sue them later. To my lawyer’s amazement I cancelled the sale and walked away. I have no regrets either and I and my family found an even better house, we loved, shortly after. We loved our new neighbours too and enjoyed the next 13 years in that home.
China don’t give a shit. It is none of China’s business is the U.S. wants to choose a proverbial liar or a corrupt politician that is for the American’s to decide. China prefer to mind its own business. China’s government is answerable to its citizens. It wants to do everything to make China prosperous. And peaceful.
It is always ever ready for US miscalculations but it is the U.S. business if the U.S. wants to throw monies into bottomless money pit like Gaza or Ukraine or flex it’s muscles aimlessly bankrupting itself in the process. That is your choice. We the world knows better.
A man like Trump cannot even be a lowly official in most nation. We don’t vote a sexiest, racist, xenophobic, baboon into power. At best he stays running a small con till he is caught! Please vote him in for all we care!
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (4/8) Movie CLIP – Kirk Beats Khan (1982) HD
I’d been in my new corporate job two weeks. I’d been given an office on day one and by the end of week two had made it my own.
Family pictures, work calendar with my appointments and in particular my desk blotter. My desk blotter was a massive work tool and an important record of my days and weeks. After two weeks my office no longer looked like the office I was given two weeks earlier.
Monday morning I arrive at work and to my surprise a very confused man I had not met before was sitting in my office, behind my desk. I was just about to have a chat to him when my secretary grabbed me and told me the news.
The man sitting at my desk used to have my office. He had been fired during his leave but his boss apparently hadn’t told him yet. To make matters worse his boss wasn’t at work yet either. Awkward.
So I did the right thing. I waited in the boardroom until his boss showed up and did the deed. I had no time for his boss, he was a lazy, disorganised non performer who didn’t last much longer than the guy who just got fired.
I found the whole episode to be cruel. I don’t know how much earlier than me he got to work that day but he would have known instantly he no longer had a job when he entered his old office and saw it had been taken over. That just isn’t right and I felt extremely sorry for him.
We’re a mailhouse: we take people’s mail, co-mingle it, sort it, and get a better rate from the Post Office. As we’ve grown, we’ve added inserting/fulfillment, and eventually, printing as well. Like a print shop, but built in reverse.
I was hired to be the print department, which I did for seven years before I became the IT manager.
As print designer, programmer, and general operator, I often had to talk with clients—sending proofs, getting information, etc., and I developed a good rapport with many, if not all, of them, sometimes better than the salesperson they were assigned to.
If there was something wrong with an order, I was often the first person they’d contact.
So it was with a large client of the banking world. They were a high maintenance/high-return client, so I always gave them my best customer service. This day, they called to find out about envelopes, which is not my department, but I knew whom to talk with and I told them I’d look into it.
I ran around the shop and got the info, and reported back: they were out of envelopes.
Oops.
I had neglected to loop the salesperson in on the request (they don’t have any production knowledge, usually, so never was an issue in the past), but our salesperson, for some reason I’m still not clear on, had lied to the client and told them we had envelopes in stock.
No envelopes meant that their time-sensitive prints weren’t going on time. So when I said, “Yeah, there’s no envelopes in stock”, you’d better believe that our client went into panic mode.
And of course, they called the salesperson back, who, not knowing that I had told them the truth, proceeded to lie…again. The client was displeased, told them what I’d told them, and demanded an explanation. There was much back-pedaling and BSing from the salesperson along the lines of “Oh, they’ll be delivered today, Toby just didn’t know…” blah blah.
My manager, the general manager, the sales manager, all called me in. “Why are you talking with clients at all?” They asked, incensed. I could tell that they were this close to just firing me on the spot. “Because I have daily conversations with them about their jobs?” I offered. “Not anymore. ALL communication goes through the salesperson.” “Ooookay, but, just to make sure I understand this correctly, it was the salesperson that lied to the customer, right?” “That doesn’t matter! You could have cost us this account!” Veins were popping on at least two foreheads. “No, I’m pretty sure that does matter. If we’d been honest with them, there wouldn’t be a problem.” And that was the third forehead. They talked among themselves for a moment and said, “Just…just no more talking with clients.” “Your call.”
The next day, one of the client’s vice-presidents flew in from across the country for a surprise inspection. There were no envelopes. Because I was just a print jockey, I didn’t have to be in that room when those four people got chewed out. But I did hear (from the client) that they were glad at least one person in the company was honest, or they’d have had a huge legal fight (that they would lose) on their hands.
Yeah, we lost the account. And, yeah, relations with that salesperson and I were chilly from then on (months later, she left the company). But what hurt even more was that all those customers who were used to my excellent customer service were now getting the run around from their clueless salespeople. Several of them complained and accounts were shuffled around*, but eventually the people in charge figured out that the problem started when they took me out of the loop.
“Toby, it’s okay if you talk to clients again.” “Oh, good.” “Just…check with the salespeople before you report on production, will you?” “You mean, in case we need to lie to them?” *Uncomfortable fidgeting* “In case we need to apologize.” “Okay. Because I’m not going to lie to our clients.” “That will be all.”
I’m happy to report that in the dozen or so years since, our sales team has become far more adept at apologizing and rectifying situations, and our production team has learned how to order before we run out of stock. My work here is done.
*Yes, a few clients did even suggest that they’d rather have me as their salesperson, but that idea was rejected by everyone—I don’t do sales, for reasons obvious from this answer.
Ask a teenager who is into classic rock to name the biggest performers of the Nineteen-Seventies. They’ll tell you names like Queen, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. Ask them “What about the Bay City Rollers?,” and they’ll answer: “Who?”
In the Nineteen-Seventies, if you liked popular music, you couldn’t escape the Bay City Rollers. From 1974 to 1977, they dominated the music scene, selling an alleged 120 million records. Yet you hear little about them today. It’s as if they’ve been erased from the collective memory.
Rollermania replicated the Beatlemania of the Nineteen-Sixties. Many however, felt the Rollers’ success was undeserved. As with all bands popular with young teenage females though, their success waned as their fans got older.
image 269
If you were female and under 14 in 1977, the Bay City Rollers were your world. No-one else wanted anything to do with them.
Time has not been kind to the Bay City Rollers. Unlike their predecessors, the Monkees, and their successors ABBA, the Bay City Rollers have not been declared pop geniuses. Classic rock fans have by and large spurned them. They are largely remembered today as an embarrassment. If they are ever mentioned at all in a documentary, it’s usually for laughs.
The Bay City Rollers’ record contract with Arista expired in 1981. Although this was the official end of the band, after 1981 versions of the Rollers continued to record and tour.
Eventually, nostalgia rescued the Bay City Rollers from obscurity. They appeared at the Punk and Disorderly 2010 festival, on the same bill with legends Stiff Little Fingers, Cockney Rejects, and Anti-Nowhere League. The ‘dag’ movement in Australia, which brought back faded performers and trends from the Nineteen-Seventies and Nineteen-Eighties, encouraged some to go to thrift shops in search of Bay City Rollers vinyl and memorabilia.
The Bay City Rollers saw little of the estimated £5 billion generated by their record sales and merchandising. Reportedly the nostalgia circuit enabled the Bay City Rollers to live the comfortable lives that their negligent and criminal management denied them, before death eventually claimed the main members.
I remember thirty years ago the Bay City Rollers undertook a low-key tour of Australia. This caused some excitement among the late-twenties females at work. One woman, who only listened to alternative rock, was quite excited that the Bay City Rollers were coming back!
image 268
You either hated them or loved them … the Bay City Rollers at the height of Rollermania. At least the Ramones admitted they liked them.
Trim fat from beef steak; cut beef into 3/4-inch cubes. Toss beef, 1 tablespoon oil, the cornstarch, salt and white pepper in glass or plastic bowl. Cover and refrigerate 30 minutes.
Cut chiles into thin slices (remove seeds and membrane if desired).
Cut onions diagonally into 1-inch pieces.
Cut bell pepper into 3/4 inch squares.
Heat 12-inch skillet or wok until very hot. Add 2 tablespoons oil; rotate skillet to coat bottom. Add beef; stir-fry 2 minutes or until beef is brown. Remove beef from skillet.
Heat skillet until very hot. Add 2 tablespoons oil; rotate skillet to coat bottom. Add chiles, garlic, ginger root, bean sauce and bamboo shoots; stir-fry 1 minute.
Add beef, bell pepper and sugar; stir-fry 1 minute.
About twenty years ago, these Nations had little voice
They had to DO AS TOLD by the United States and it’s allies
If they showed the slightest independence, they would be faced with a four step method by the US
Make up accusations on Human Rights violations which would be the first step. Saddam got this in 1989 after the Iran Iraq war (Until which time he was useful to the West so they didn’t see any human right violations)
Impose Trade restrictions on such countries using shipping insurance and freight as a weapon and throttling their revenues which would be in Dollars. Saddam got this in 1994/95, ironically almost 4 1/2 years after he invaded Kuwait. Step Two
Impose Unilateral Sanctions and freeze their money and prevent them from being able to buy basic food and water at times not to mention medicines, hospital supplies etc. This is the FINAL WARNING. At this stage the Nation needs to depose it’s present leader and the new leader has to kowtow to the West.Step Three
Cause a color revolution or invade making some trumped up excuse.Step Four
Today these Nations have a very strong BACK UP SYSTEM
image 258
If the US goes too far, these Nations have CHINA & RUSSIA to fall back on
China takes care of the commerce and trade. The RMB ensures that these Nations can keep buying anything they want as long as they have Oil and Gas to sell China rendering most sanctions as impotent
Drilling machines, Machinery, Food, Paper Clips – You name it and China will deliver
Plus China’s enormous clout at the UN and it’s lobbying powers beat the US today. China carries 78 guaranteed votes at the UN Assembly against 54 Guaranteed Votes of the US
Russia takes care of the Grain and of the Military aspect
If the US try any tricks like they did in 2003, they could find themselves in a conflict with Russia being involved
Best example is Syria where Assad is very much in charge despite all the attempts by the US to depose him under Obama & Trump (?)
So the Arab Nations have a voice today
They can protest and they can demand things and the US can’t repeat it’s four step formula because that could send them fully to Russia and China like it happened with IRAN
That’s all the Arab Nations are looking for with China
They still want to be loyal to the US and it’s allies but if the US goes TOO FAR then they won’t buckle that easily and they have a back up with Russia and China
The US better not make the same mistake they did with Iran or Russia this time
My brother. He was working graveyard shift at the time and had to commute quite a distance on the freeway for work. Of course, night time is when they do a lot of roadwork in this region to minimize impacts during rush hour. My brother is a burly sized guy. At the time he drove a little Hyundai hatchback. (Important to know for later). Anyway, one night, while commuting to work, the freeway is shut down to 1 lane of traffic for roadwork. Every one is backed up, traffic is virtually at a stops as everyone merges from 4 lanes to 1. Some person is a big old jacked up pickup truck gets behind my brother and starts riding his tail. Obviously, since this is a traffic jam, my brother can’t go anywhere. After a little while of riding my brothers butt, this person decides to turn on their high beam and start getting aggressive. Backing off, then running up to my brothers bumper and slamming on the brakes at the last possible second. At this point, traffic is down to one lane, so my brother stops in the middle of the traffic and proceeds to unfold himself from the car. Walks back to the truck and starts slamming his hand on the hood and screaming at the person. “it’s one f**king lane! I can’t go anywhere, I can’t go any faster! I can’t pull over and you can’t f**king pass me! If you want a fight climb out right now! Otherwise, Back the F**K off!”
Big truck never opened his doors. My brother waited a moment, went back to his car and proceeded on his way. Big truck turned off their headlights and maintained a respectful distance for the rest of the way through the roadwork.
I operated coin-operated amusements from about 1989 to about 2010. Foosball tables, Air Hockey, Video Games, Countertop Games, Pinball Machines, Pool Tables, Dart Boards, etc. I also retailed various Home Model games and parts, mostly Foosball.
I quickly realized, or maybe not so quickly, that when Laptops connected to WiFi had more attractive games on them than my coin-ops, and eventually even Cell Phones had more interesting games, that my business was doomed. During that same time many of my locations, mostly taverns and bars, and a few Game Rooms as well, were going out of business.
I had the policy, unlike most of my competitors, to own my own business without having an awful silent partner of a huge bank-loan. If I could expand using the funds from my business, I did, otherwise I remained small.
When the contraction began, as I lost a location, or one became unprofitable, I would just sell off the equipment and cash out. That went on for several years. But I kept my business open for my customers. The last 2–3 years I worked but had negative income. In other words, I was paying for the privilege of being able to work.
One year, I think it was either my last or second to last, I worked all year and found that I lost $6,000 doing so. More frustrating than that, I had $8,000 in licensing and taxation expenses. In other words, $8000 of my $6000 loss went to licensing and taxing authorities. After being in business for about 2 decades, you learn to hate taxation and licensing. That is when I closed shop. I just couldn’t see giving them ALL the money I earned and paying them an additional $2,000 out of my savings. Technically, I still have a non-operating business, that I don’t work at anymore.
Anyway, the end result was I quit working because it was more profitable to not work.
My beautiful wife was a size five 10 years ago when she got pregnant with our first son. Here’s a picture of her right before she got pregnant.
image 257
Her pregnancy was difficult. She gained a lot of weight and her legs and feet got so swollen that the last couple of months were almost unbearable for her. She couldn’t walk very far without pain.
One time as we were walking out of a restaurant when my wife was 8 months pregnant, a woman stopped in her tracks and said “Oh my God”… looking at my wife’s stomach.
She was in labor for 36 hours and finally the doctor said “That baby is not coming out.” C-section it was. We found out why he wasn’t coming out. The doctor pulled him out and said “That is a BIG baby!” He was 12 pounds 2 ounces.
Two years later we had our second and final son. He was 11 pounds.
The two pregnancies and two C-sections left my wife with a hernia in her stomach and muscles that just never healed back normally. Despite her going to the gym 4–5 times a week and eating right, her belly has never been the same.
At least 10 times in the years since, people have asked my wife how far along she is. People, please stop doing this to women. Don’t ever, ever, ever ask someone if they are pregnant. My wife has been brought to tears over this stupid question many times.
Here’s my beautiful family now.
image 256
Update:
Wow, so many wonderful comments from all kinds of people. Thanks so much. It’s truly heartwarming to hear so many of you comment on how beautiful my wife is. She truly is a beautiful person inside and out.
Many have commented about how my wife could have corrective surgery. This is something we have researched and considered for several years. We are hoping that in the next few years we’ll be able to save enough money. It’s a very expensive surgery that we currently can’t afford, but it’s important for me that we get there and we get it done.
I’m one of 5 kids. My parents always wanted a big family — in fact, they’d planned on 6 kids, but my mom’s health wouldn’t stand for it. Money was always tight, of course. My dad made a good salary but it still didn’t stretch that far among seven people, and my mom stayed home to take care of us. Both my parents believed it was very important for her to do that, and tbh any money she brought home would have been totally eaten up by childcare, anyway.
There was a time or two that I wished there weren’t so many of us, so there would be more money and attention for me. But which of my siblings would I wish out of existence? I could never imagine my life without any one of them. They’ve been my lifelong built-in friends. And sometimes enemies, LOL — we used to fight like cats and dogs! But as adults we are all very close, even those of us who are far apart in age. In a lot of ways I feel sorry for people who didn’t grow up with a lot of siblings like I did.
It probably makes all the difference that we didn’t just happen, our parents specifically wanted a lot of children to love. They always knew and respected our different personalities and needs. They sacrificed to make sure we were taken care of. They enjoyed our company—our mom was sad when we went back to school after summer break because she missed us! They never played favorites or acted like we owed them for existing.
And yes, the older siblings did take care of the younger, to an extent. Our oldest sister was Second Mommy in a lot of ways. I remember changing my two youngest siblings’ diapers. That’s how it works in a big family, you help take care of each other. But we helped, we weren’t fully responsible for our siblings. We just did our part. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to learn early in life that you’re not the center of the universe! You’re part of a family, and that means you’re there for them and they’re there for you.
Personally, I wouldn’t trade my family or the way I grew up for anything!
When a GI failed to listen to my history. Failed to look at records, radiology and pathology reports from my past. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis while active duty over two decades prior, my diagnoses was switched by his nurse practitioner to Crohn’s when I was hospitalized.
He decided I simply had Irritable bowel syndrome and told me it was in my head. At an office visit when asked what my pain was, I reported it as a 5 (I had an obstruction) only for the nurse to LAUGH. I stood up and excused myself asking for someone else to check me in since she thought pain was funny. The office manager came in to apologize but looked at my husband the entire time. When he noticed he said: “You need to be apologizing to my wife, not me”.
I ended up receiving a certified letter that I needed to find a new GI (I already had), so I asked to speak with the medical director and was kicked out of the patient portal. This same GI dismissed me when complaining of my guts being on fire (I had pancreatitis). I ended up walking around with a dead gallbladder and ended up in the ICU for 5 days.
I just returned from the ER after messaging with my primary for a month trying to get a GI referral for my now second stone stuck in my common bile duct. She kept telling me to go. I kept saying what for? They won’t treat the pain I’m in nor will they listen. She assured me I’d be admitted for pain control.
I wasn’t.
The ER provider did not listen when I told him my history of translucent stones being missed and that they’ll see it on an ultrasound. What was ordered? A CT. Of course nothing was seen but my liver enzymes are high, potassium low and positive lactic acid…I stood pacing the 5 hours we were there hoping to be heard.
I wasn’t.
Getting taken seriously post Covid is extremely difficult. There are so many jaded medical professionals that assume anyone complaining of pain is just there for narcotics… a year of trying to get help and countless episodes of Pancreatitis with no pain control is barbaric and my blood pressure certainly shows it. I cannot eat without feeling like a bomb has gone off inside me. NSAIDS have already caused gastritis and duodenitis so those are off the table.
I already exceed the recommended dose of Tylenol due to no other option. Yay for my liver!!
My children have been told that if I go septic or get peritonitis and the worst happens to sue. I’ve left a paper trail for them to follow. It’s so amazing being a middle aged female. I can’t possibly know what’s wrong due to experiencing it in the past. Nope. I’m just some needy woman who doesn’t get attention at home. I just can’t with the assenine thought process
It was during the summer, my maternal uncle and his friend visited our home. As usual, my mother cooked lunch for everyone and everyone were engaged in a conversation.
I was bored and wanted to peek into my Facebook account. I made a quick move and sat in front of my desktop and was chatting with my virtual friends.
After few minutes, I noticed a firm hand resting on my shoulders. I turned back to see and to my shock it was my uncle’s friend. I got uncomfortable and I thought probably he is just patting me.
After a while, his hands traveled downwards towards my breasts and he tried to hold them . THAT was a sickening feeling! And, I was so petrified that I couldn’t move and froze in fear.
I gathered courage to just run away from the room and went out to the living room. I saw my mom and looked at her face but I fumbled. And, I couldn’t speak up anything regarding the event that occurred with me few minutes ago.
I locked myself up and cried that night. The next day, my mother could sense something wrong with my behavior. And, asked me “Beta, what happened?” ..
I broke down and with tears in my eyes , I went on with everything I had in my heart.
She was shocked and furious. And what she did made me relieved and happy!
The next day, my uncle and his friend were leaving for their hometown.
My mother went to the railway station, got Kurkure and Lays chips ( as that man got these things for me) and in front of …all the passengers she threw those packets on his face and slapped him and thrashed him with her chappals.
She returned home, and said me ” Promise me , you will speak up if anything will bother you and at least would share with me if anyone tries to touch you without your consent” .
I’m still stuck to the horror of that event and it’s very hard to move on. I try to keep a safe hand distance from men and in a crowded place where I am surrounded by men I still feel restless. I just want to run and run and hide myself some where.
I live a normal life but some where within me, these fear have created a little home for themselves.
Technically, *I* didn’t witness it – my cousin’s camera witnessed it. But it was the bullet itself as it came out of the barrel of my .357 magnum.
To impart just how rare of a thing this is, normally a photographer has to use a reeally, reeeally advanced (and extremely expensive) camera with an insanely high continuous shutter-speed, AND stage the timing of the shot (by that I mean both the camera-shot and the gun-shot), as well. And even THEN, sometimes they have trouble.
My cousin did not have that kind of camera. He had a Nikon. Something like a D500 or a D600. It’s a nice camera for a hobbyist, but it’s not evenremotely designed to capture something like a bullet moving at 1,500 feet per second. As is evidenced by the fact that the bullet in the picture appears as just one really long rod-like streak, rather than the size and shape of a normal bullet. THAT PROVES JUST HOW SLOWLY THE APERTURE CLOSED, in comparison to the speed of the bullet.
image 264
A person could easily spend their entire lives trying to get a picture of a bullet at that shutter speed, and never capture it even once.
And, mind you, my cousin wasn’t attempting to take a picture of the bullet itself, he was intending to take a picture of me just shooting the gun. So he was just manually clicking the camera button with his finger, not caring that much about the timing.
This was back in the early 1970s. I bought 1969 Chevy Beaumont from a friend, I gave him motorcycle, that I had paid $500 for two years before, and was worth maybe $350, plus I think $200 cash.
I was managing a service station at the time, so I had access to all the tools and parts.
I had inspected the car before and I knew what it needed.
The water pump was leaking like a sieve, so I took it off, and at the time, you just used a cheap $3 kit to repair it, and replace. The fuel filter was plugged, it was just a piece of cardboard probably cost me 50 cents. The oil was so thick I drained a couple of quarts out, put two more quarts in, ran it for ten minutes, so that the black sludge would actually drain. Then changed the oil and filter. $7
There is a doughnut gasket between the exhaust manifold and the exhaust pipe. It was completely gone, no sign that it ever existed. It had been spewing out hot exhaust gas, and had burnt three spark plug wires to a crisp, so they weren’t firing.
At the time you could just buy bulk spark plug wire, cut what you need and put new caps on each end.
The donut gasket was $2, the sparkplug wire and caps was another $3.
The car was all done. I had put a sign up out front of the service station, offering to sell the car for $1200.
While I was still replacing the donut gasket, I was offered cash, no questions for the car.
They waited impatiently while I changed the donut gasket, gave me $1200 and drove off.
It had taken me about $30 and an most of an afternoon of my day off, to fix it.
This was a long time ago, but to put it in perspective, I could buy more than 400 cases of beer for $1200.
So, in the good old days, when you could actually work on cars yourself, I had a lot of mechanics specials.
When I was subbing, I asked a question about atoms with the same number of protons and different numbers of neutrons.
Such atoms are called “Isotopes”.
Someone in class apparently knew that answer. But then people started playing a fun game of telephone, and the answer got … blurred.
In the end, several people wrote “Ice Tubes”.
Sad. But I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Runner up?
When I was in 7th grade, my science teacher approached me with a proposition:
“David, if you can get a 0% on the next science test, I’ll give you 100%.”
“Um, Mr. Morris, why would you do that?”
“Because I think people are cheating off of you. I know you know this stuff, and if you get every single question wrong, I’ll know that you knew all of the answers and were able to pick the wrong one. Plus, it’ll catch the cheaters.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Morris.”
I liked Mr. Morris. He was nerdy.
And so, on the test, I did my level worst. Answered every single question wrong on the Scantron (multiple choice) test.
Right out of high school I was working for a big box retailer. I had only been working there a couple of weeks when I saw this happen.
I was working as a cashier and this little old lady (around 80 y/o) came up with her items – and she had quite a few of them. She was walking with a walker and moved pretty slowly.
We had just opened the doors for the day, so it was around 7am and there were only two of us, so pretty barebones staff. The rest of the staff would be in about an hour later – and this lady had been waiting at the door when we got there.
Just as she finished putting her items on the counter, this guy in a business suit comes up to the counter and asks me if I could ring him up really quickly – he was in a real rush.
I told him that was up to the lady who had just finished unloading her cart.
She said no – she was late for an appointment herself and he would have to wait.
He cut her off and INSTRUCTED me to ring him up right then. I said no. He then told me to get another cashier up front, right this damn minute. I told him the only other person working the store at the moment was the receiving guy and he was unloading the truck – and couldn’t use the registers anyways as he didn’t have the codes to the registers. I was the only cashier and would be until 8am.
He got really irate – I’m going to call the manager, etc. etc. etc. He was kept raising his voice until he was almost screaming. Other customers started to gather to watch.
When he finally got to the question of Don’t you know who I am? The little old lady yelled back at him – Yeah, you’re an asshole so shut the F up before I ram this walker where the sun don’t shine. She also said some other very choice words to him, but it’s inappropriate to post here.
He was just shocked by this little lady. He was so embarrassed, that he left his stuff in the basket, dropped it on the floor and left.
Turns out, this little old lady was in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve during World War II. As the women’s division equivalent of a drill sergeant. She had been married to a USMC drill sergeant and her two kids became USMC drill sergeants.
I grew up in New Hampshire where we had well water (without fluoride) and my parents never took me to a dentist. Consequently, by the time I got to college, my teeth were a mess.
I took a part-time job just so I could try to afford the dental work I knew I needed.
When I opened my mouth, the dentist looked inside and made a “Tsk! Tsk!” sound.
“Someone needs to start brushing their teeth and lay off the sugar,” he said in front of his hygienist. They shared a look of disapproval.
The truth was that as a college athlete on a partial academic scholarship, I ate healthfully and did brush after meals.
I found myself shaking with anger and shame which the dentist interpreted as fear.
“There’s no beating around the bush. You’re going to need a lot of work to save these teeth and it’s going to be expensive,” he advised.
I got out of the chair, didn’t commit to a second appointment, and the next day, went to another dentist who immediately sensed that the situation was more complicated than a snap judgment. He asked questions and when I mentioned growing up in New England, he said, “I thought so. I used to practice in Vermont and half of my patients were people who didn’t have access to fluoridated water. But don’t worry. I can see that you’ve developed good habits and together we can get you caught up.”
He quoted me prices that were half what the first dentist charged. He put me on a no interest payment plan where, for the next three years, I visited the office sometimes twice a week.
The process was all-consuming and expensive despite the plan and reasonable prices. There were times when I chose between meals and paying for dental work. I don’t recommend root canals on an empty stomach. But while I was never able to afford orthodontics, to this day, I never lost a tooth.
Just to give you an ideal on how strong the US industries was in world war two.
The Free French air force (1940–1943) was a sad display of brave but poorly equipped pilots, most of the experienced officers and pilots where parts of the royal air force (some 262 men in 1940 -which is far from nothing!) the free fernch air force was a mickmack of stolen plane from vichy air base, obsolete planes, some hurricane (at beset!) etc.
After the success of operation torch (november 1942) the American agreed to modernize the entire french army, navy, land forces and air forces included. The rearmement for the French air force was nickname Plan 7.
From scratch… the Americans totally rebuilded the entire french air force with some 33 fighter groups (bombers, fighters, reconnaissance)…while also rebuilding the French army with 3 armored division, several tank regiments (destroyed, medium and light), several paratrooper unit…. and modernizing the 140 vessels of the French navy!
the Fench air force went from this:
image 263
to this… in a matter of one single year:
image 262
-The French air force would be an important component for the Allies, fighting in the Mediteranean, eastern front, England, Normandy, France, Italy, Sicily just to name a few.
Basically the US industries were literally spewing thousands enough materials to rearm a nation air force for 3 decades!
We got back to the hotel we are living in pretty late after the hour-long round trip drive to boy scouts and basketball practice.
We put the kids to bed as quickly as possible and some teenagers were loud in the hallway for awhile.
I was frustrated, but wanted to wait to talk to them at the right time so I could tell them about our situation to see if they could show compassion rather than become angry at the lady next door.
I didn’t see them the next morning at breakfast.
(But that night ) I noticed that they were Future Farmers of America kids from Kansas.
They had their doors cracked, so I decided to talk to them.
I let them know about our house being destroyed by water.
I told them that we wanted them to have their fun and we would appreciate their respect to let our kids get good rest.
The young man who answered the door told me that he was very sorry about what we are going through.
Before I went to bed, I noticed a note that someone had slipped under our door.
image 261
I opened the note to find money.
(The note said:
We are more than sorry for,waking you and your family up the past few nights.
We hope everything goes well with you house.)
In a world where some people sit behind screens and become angry on social media, this young man restored my faith that the next generation can make eye contact and show compassion to the person right in front of him.
There were two other guys that I could see in their hotel room.
If anyone sees this post and knows who I’m talking about, please tag these guys so I can say thank you and God bless.
They set an excellent example for my children and their parents should be more than proud.
When I was a teenager I went with my cousin and friend to an ice cream shop located in a strip mall. The parking lot was very full. There was a pristine looking truck parked in the intersecting point of four parking spaces. Literally one vehicle taking up a portion of four spots. The parking stalls weren’t too small for a truck like his either. Frustrated with this person’s sense of entitlement, I grabbed a sheet of paper from my school binder and wrote “I am so sorry about the damages. I will be in touch to discuss payment.” I left no contact information. I put it on his windshield.
20 minutes later we watched from the inside of the ice cream shop as the man looked at the note. He looked angry. Then, in the pouring rain, he spent several minutes walking around his vehicle, closely inspecting it for signs of damage. He got more than a little wet. We could see the moment when it clicked for him. He cracked a smile and looked like he laughed before climbing in his truck and driving away.
Let me kind of start from the inside out. I live in Seattle (well, about 5 miles from the city of Seattle anyways, so whatever.)
Assuming 60k means $4,000/month take home, give or take, let’s look at some houses you could save up to consider.
In Seattle, with a 20% down payment, here’s a $2,500 mortgage payment.
image 275
If that looks like a small 1br house, that’s because it is. That’s what a $600,000 budget gets you in Seattle, relatively close to downtown.
Go 30 miles south to a city called Puyallup, and you get this:
image 274
Well, this is actually about $60,000 cheaper than the one above. Pretty profound difference right?
Go about 2 hours east and you’ll find homes about $100,000 cheaper than the Seattle house that look like this:
image 273
Okay, so now we’re closer to a $2,000 monthly mortgage, and I gotta say, that’s a whole lot of house. It has what, 3–4 car garages, wrap around 2nd level deck with a view, plenty of land… Not bad for the half million range.
Still though, Washington is pretty expensive even in the “cheaper” areas.
Let’s head back to my dad’s home state of Ohio.
image 272
Wait, is that a castle!? Yeah, that’s a f*ing castle. Not bad for that half million range, right? Except it’s not. It’s $280,000. With a way smaller down payment, you get your own castle for $1,200/month.
It comes with f*ing gargoyles!
image 271
The US is a pretty big country…
That’s really the trouble here. I mean, if you’re a full-time work from home employee, there are places in the country that are actually great to live in, good medical, good schools, etc., where 60k is a great income. In others, it’s low income.
I showed houses, of course, but even food, electric, water, fuel, home/car repair rates, taxes, etc. can fluctuate wildly from place to place. If you’re restricted to a location, look at it, and if not, go look at what’s out there and what you like. It’s a big and beautiful place with something for everyone.
I once argued with a graduate student over the weight of a Taco Bell burrito. She was hungry and so I suggested some half-pound burrito (I don’t remember what it was called). At which point the conversation went something like this:
“I can’t eat a half-pound burrito, that’s way too much food!”
“Actually, it’s only 8 ounces.”
“No, but it’s a burrito, so it’s heavier than that!”
“Um, no, it doesn’t actually matter what it is. A pound is 16 ounces, so a half pound is 8 ounces. A half pound of one thing weighs the same as a half pound of something else.”
“No, it’s more than that because beans are heavier.”
“Um, so you would argue that a half pound of bricks is heavier than a half pound of feathers?”
“Yeah, obviously bricks are heavier than feathers!”
“Even if they are both the same 8 ounces??”
“Well, yeah, because bricks weigh more than feathers!”
This went on for maybe a couple minutes while we were sitting in the drive-thru waiting to order. Honestly we had to finally agree to disagree before I went crazy. At which point I learned that a formal education doesn’t always mean a whole lot…
Allowing GHQ (General Headquarters) France to disregard hard intelligence.
British Military Intelligence was grouped per Command (GHQ Home, GHQ Ireland, GHQ France, etc.). This means nobody had the overall picture.
On top of that, most intelligence went through the Foreign Office and that intelligence, often on economic and and social matters in Germany was disregarded by GHQ France.
Brigadier John Charteris, in charge of Intelligence GHQ France was of the opinion that the hard intelligence was too pessimistic.
He believed, and convinced General Haig and his staff, that Germany was near to defeat as early as 1915 and pushed, together with General Haig for continuous offensives starting in 1916.
The estimates regarding available ammunition, air power, German troops movements, German troop morale, German civilian morale, etc. were all wrong.
The British kept on pushing for major offensives that resulted in massive casualties without ever having a real chance of breaking the stalemate until the Hundred Day Offensive in 1918.
In London, it was well known Intelligence GHQ France was a sick joke, yet nobody dared to upset the existing structure in which each Army Command could make its own decisions based on the intelligence they decided to trust.
Charteris wrote that “trusting the pessimistic intelligence provided by the Foreign Office would result in the staff at GHQ France losing hope and would lower staff morale.”
Charteris believed keeping the staff happy was essential to achieve victory.
Joseph E. Johnston — the one who acted like he knew it was over.
The Confederacy didn’t have a general staff. Jefferson Davis thought he was a military genius and dealt directly with the commanders of the CSA field armies.
The top men, Robert E. Lee in particular, all held on to the bitter end. They might not have been confident of success, but they didn’t communicate any such doubts and fought until hope was gone.
On the final flight west from Petersburg, Lee received a note from U.S. Grant asking Lee to consider an end to hostilities. Lee showed the note to James Longstreet and asked his opinion. Longstreet read the note and handed it back. “Not yet,” he said. They kept fighting until the road south was blocked at Appomattox Court House.
Joseph E. Johnston might have been the one who acted the most like a man who knew more bloodshed was pointless. A brave man who had survived several wounds, he was always judicious about giving battle. He made one serious attempt to stop Sherman, and when that failed, fell back and told Lee he could do no more than “annoy” the Yankees. When word came that Lee had surrendered, he asked Sherman for terms even though the two armies were not even in contact. He had to go quite a ways to meet Sherman and surrender.
Approximately four months after I got married to my wife, my business partner defrauded me and put me into over 35,000 dollars worth of debt. My businesses began to crumble despite my frantic efforts to salvage the situation. Soon thereafter, my finances nosedived into a freefall.
By this time I had already already come to certain terms about my wife. One of them was that she was in it (our marriage) for the money. Since I couldn’t stand the thought of a divorce or a broken home I did my best to conceal my financial troubles from her in the hope that I was going to find a way to get back on my feet again.
Well she did eventually find out when I started having problems with releasing funds to pay the bills and run our home. Soon thereafter she started her series of packing out of our home on the slightest imagined irritation or offence.
Each time she would pack out I would go right after her, pleading with every single one of her relatives. I did get her to come back a good number of times but I guess this really annoyed her and her mom in particular who was really the brain urging her to abandon ship and go look for greener pastures.
One day she calls me up on the phone and tells me “hey look, each time I try to leave you, you’re always going around my relatives and getting them to put pressure on me to come back right? Well, one of these days I’m going to come back and unalive you and then you won’t get me to come back anymore, will you?”
I never went after her again.
I had to keep alive to take care of the two toddlers she left behind.
‘I Remember the Secret Service Being Tougher’ Scene | Red
I was one year into practice. A 14 year old girl was transferred to my hospital. She had been in a motor vehicle accident and been to two hospitals before mine. Her parents had been told she was permanently paralyzed waist down, twice. I was the orthopedic surgeon on call and had spinal privileges and the ability and privileges to implant hardware. So I was the surgeon they called.
I arrived and did a thorough spinal trauma exam. Yes she was paralyzed. The confounding factor was that one test (her anal wink) where I poke the anus with a needle and see if it contracts was still working. That told me she was not completely paralyzed or in spinal shock as the nerve that controls this is the last one out of the spinal cord.
I told her parents that I needed to operate immediately. I discussed with her parents she might be the same, slightly better or significantly better. I made no promises.
I decompressed her spinal cord, implanted hardware and fused several levels. As I wrote my post operative orders in the recovery room after 4 hours of surgery I saw her thrashing her legs about. I tested her motor strength and it seemed normal. I went out to talk to her parents to tell them that she was better but I couldn’t predict how much better. She might have sensation deficits or coordination deficits and we would see but that it was a very good sign that she was moving her legs.
Amber made a full recovery after being declared fully paralyzed by 2 hospitals and at least one neurosurgeon. She walked out of the hospital in a brace and 6 months later was released from my care to full activities. I am sorry, Amber, if your back hurts later in life. I did my best.
I received Christmas cards and gifts for 15 years from her family.
Her case was actually part of my oral board exam. It was quite funny to hear questions from these examiners who didn’t even do spine surgery as to why I chose to do surgery and how I chose the operation and what levels to fuse.
The moral of the story here is that a physician who learns a thorough spinal examination found a patient that did not have a complete spinal injury and fixed it. Being a physician is being a master of your profession, not just reading reports and listening to others.
I had a best friend in high school. We remained close friends until we went off to the same college. Her financial aid hadn’t come in so I loaned her some money that I had been saving for a trip which she knew was very important to me. I found out through another friend that she had received her financial aid, and she had not offered to return my money, putting my trip in jeopardy. She had also made new friends at college and I felt ejected by her. I got angry, got the money back off her and stopped speaking to her. The following semester I went to London for a semester, which extended into years, which became permanent. About five years after I left she sent me a letter saying she would be in London and wanted to meet up. The letter included her phone number where she was staying (way before mobile phones). I thought about ringing her. But never did. Thirty + years later, I had grown up and regretted my behaviour. I searched for her on social media but no luck. Eventually she contacted me through my father (no idea how she got his address). I responded this time and despite being on different continents, we are now long-distance friends. It was hard but I apologised for how I had behaved back then. I had taken the word of someone else instead of speaking to her directly and I did the very childish thing of not speaking to her. She might have had good reason for hanging onto my money, which I didn’t give her the chance to explain. And, she had every right to make new friends at college. I could have been part of her new social circle, I chose to tantrum instead.
So, I am admitting all this as a message to anyone younger than me who indulges in this sort of behaviour. It is childish. Don’t do it. You owe it to yourself and your friend to sit down together and have an adult conversation about whatever is troubling you. It cost me one of the most important friendships of my life. Don’t make the same mistake.
My mom (egg donor) left my siblings and I to be with friends from her church 2 years after we got home from being in Foster Care for 12 years. She took our foodstamps with her and spent them on other families, while we starved trying to find her. The family she ran off to be with told her she wasn’t allowed to talk to her children- she obeyed.
I went to her church one Sunday at 14 to speak to her. The pastor and whole congregation was telling me ‘a 14 year old anorexic girl’ that I need to get a job and take care of myself while my mom took care of them. This was 2010, so you know I legally couldn’t work yet.
I couldn’t call, text, meet, or have any contact with my mom. She allowed it, so obviously she was happy she didn’t have to.
So, 3 years ago my egg donor calls me and asks me for some money. She “needs a car”, but doesn’t have any money. I still don’t have my first car and it’s 2023, now.
After explaining I don’t have money to give, I boldly asked her “Why would I help you if you abandoned me as a child? I needed you and you weren’t there”.
She offended me by saying with a chuckle “I had you kids so that when you got older and I need help, you kids will help me with money or a place to live”. I simply responded “That’s not how that works, if you wanted me to take care of you now, you should have taken care of me years ago. 1 timothy 5:8”. For a woman who claims she lives for the bible, she had to ask me what that meant.. it simply means anyone who abandons their kids or family is worse than a nonbeliever.
A better question is how could the United States expand sanctions on China’s chip industry without repercussions that hurt the U.S. more than China? And the Answer is it can’t. It simply can’t!
Chips are nothing unless it is used as a component of a product for example a smartphone or a computer. And China as a market dwarfs the U.S. by several folds. Today there are a billion Chinese consumer of high technologies compared to say 250 million in the U.S.! That is 4 folds higher! China’s consumer market alone is 30–35% if the entire world! Can the U.S. not be hurt if these consumers are forced into buying a different chips?
But worst is that from the 2/3 of the rest of the world market, most of their products are either assembled or made in China! That constitute another 30–40% of the world’s market! So the U.S. by sanctioning China U.S. sanctioning the U.S. chip makers of some 60–70% of the market. Or it has direct influence or possibly sell to only 30–40% of the world’s market.
But that is just the first nightmare for the U.S. Next, China will make equivalent products within 3 year’s maximum and then. Even this 30–40% rest of the world market will choose a Chinese make that is cheaper, faster and better than the U.S. products. Your entire chip industry will thoroughly collapse and U.S. government will be faced with high unemployment and bankruptcy!
So if I were you, I will vote in a smarter U.S. government!
Just around halfway, you will run into the infamous Darien Gap:
image 19
And there, the jungle is Master. There are no roads and those who try, fail miserably:
image 260
If a 4×4 cannot make it, a van even less…
You’d have to take a boat from Panama City to Colombia and that will be very expensive.
It’s better to sell your van in Panama, fly to Bogotá and buy another van there.
However, I would not do that trip on a van. It has to be a good 4×4. You need to do some research because not all car manufacturers sell in all countries; if you need a spare part and it is not sold where/when you need it, it may mean you’re stuck for a long time and there’s no guarantee that you will ever receive the part.
By the way, do you speak at least Spanish? In the countryside, people will not speak English at all.
I first met my wife when I was about 24 and very soon after had ideas that this was the woman I wanted to grow old with. I knew fairly quickly that she was divorced, but she always kept her private life private (I found out why later and agree with her totally) so it was some time later that I found she had 3 young daughters.
Being young, stupid and typically male, I didn’t want a ready made family, I wanted one all of my own, so I put the idea to one side. We stayed friends, but as we lived over 30 miles apart, we only saw each other occasionally. Years passed and the friendship continued to grow. In the meantime, she remarried and had 2 more daughters, then got divorced again.
Move on 24 years, I’m still single (came close a couple of times) but couldn’t find the perfect lady for me, but by now the older 3 are in their 20’s and the younger 2 are in their mid to late teens. Finally my stupidity left me and we finally got together.
15 years later, we’re married, still together and happy, even though she’s now bedridden. In case you’re wondering, the daughters have all “adopted” me, as have the grandchildren!
The long and the short is; don’t let hubris stop you from doing the right thing. We could have been looking at 40 years of happy marriage if I hadn’t been an idiot.
When I was in High School, there was a tall, thin Chinese boy in my swim class. He was very quiet and always had his nose in a book. I knew him because I was the one tasked with “helping“ the non swimmers.
One day, after class, we were outside waiting for the bell to ring so we could leave the Gym Area and head to our next class. He was off to the side leaning up against the wall while reading his book. A trio of boys (troublemakers/bullies) started grabbing for his book. So he asked them politely to leave him alone, so they just turned it up and managed to take his book. In a flash, he snatched the book back (that was the first clue).
Again, they tried to grab it, but he pulled it up out of their reach and asked them one more time to just leave him alone. But this time, the biggest jerk smacked/punched him in the face instead. Two of my friends and I immediately stepped forward to step in, but before we could take another step, this tall, gangly quiet kid had kicked the jerk on the side of the head and dropped him. EVERYONE who was there stood there in shock, not sure we had just seen what we’d seen, and the other two jerks immediately stopped and stepped back. The jerk who’d been kicked just sat there on the floor rubbing the side of his head while the kid just opened his book and started reading again.
To my knowledge, NO ONE ever messed with him again. That was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen and been in a lot of fights/scuffles.
20 plus years ago I was ordered to lie to my buyer or lose my job. I was ordered by my boss despite my protests.
The company I worked for had just won a major contract to sell light globes through one of the largest hardware chains in Australia – Mitre 10.
However we were very much behind schedule having had a number of delays already. Many times I had been in to my buyer to let him know of our latest delay and his patience was wearing thin and my boss knew it.
She asked me to lie and blame the latest delay on an earthquake in Japan (our globes were coming from India) or any other lie I could come up with as long as it wasn’t the company’s fault, as in it had to be a force majeure.
I made an appointment with my buyer and sat across from him and literally told him this:
“Peter, as you know, our globes are coming from India. The ship left on time and the order was 100% filled and packed in a shipping container. Unfortunately inside the same container was a cage containing a couple of Bengal Tigers. They escaped their cage and have unfortunately ripped or damaged all of the light globe packaging.
But we could fix that by having new packaging made and printed here in Australia except that, also in the same container was an Indian elephant. This elephant also escaped its cage and has trampled all the globes. Not one globe was left intact. The entire shipment was destroyed.”
“She’s told you to lie to me didn’t she?” he said after listening to me spin this ridiculous lie. He knew full well what was going on.
We got on very well, he knew me and what I stood for. We stayed in contact for many years after we both left our respective positions. He knew the position my boss had forced me into. After asking me for a new eta he told me to leave.
He wasn’t happy.
But I did what I was ordered to do and did it in a way that kept my reputation intact.
This was part of an old trick that the magician/illusionist Kreskin used to do back in the 1970s. You’re leaving out two very important parts of the trick:
He would say that the two digits couldn’t be the same
He would also say “So 17 is OK, but 11 isn’t.”
It sounds like there’s 50 numbers, but if you look at the options, they’re quite limited: 13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, and 39. It’s really only eight. When he says “17 is OK but 11 isn’t”, most people won’t choose 17 since it was used in the example so you’re down to seven choices.
When he tested his trick, he found that overwhelmingly most people choose 35 or 37. When used this trick in public, he would write down both “35” and “37” but would cross out 35 and say something like “I sensed you were thinking of another number but changed your mind”. He would then proclaim that you were thinking of 37. This way, even if you said “35”, it would be there on the paper and as an onlooker you’d still be amazed.
He speculated that by using “17” and “11” in his spoken example, it tended to cause people to go the other direction and choose numbers in the 30s.
Our home, but my brother’s son. We had our aunt over, an old, strict, stuck-up childless lady. She was always proud of how polite and good-mannered she is, and despite not knowing a damn thing about kids, she was always ready to educate them, expecting all kids to behave like miniature grown-ups respecting the rules of etiquette at all times.
Well, it was a big family lunch on the terrace, kids running around, so she was a fish out of the water – there were too many kids to educate, she lost count. When I arrived, I was immediately greeted by my 4-year-old nephew, whom I kissed, cuddled and then I ceremoniously placed my bag in front of him.
We had a game: each time we met I had something in my bag for him. He could dive in and find it. This was our thing. Sometimes it was a dessert that he could eat while we talked. Sometimes a toy, or some other small surprise. This time it was a small dog figurine that resembled their own dog whom he loved so much.
While he was snorkelling in my bag, I turned to greet some relatives. Then I heard my Aunt Etiquette, shouting in a sharp head voice at my nephew. “What are you doing? Who do you think you are, young man?”
We all froze, including my poor baby nephew. I had to explain my fuming aunt that I had allowed him to search my bag, and that was our little thing, but she was not the person who could understand things like this. There were rules that we clearly disrespected.
My brother had to tell her that in his house, it’s also a rule to keep it quiet and not to shout with any of the kids. That shut her up, but just because she was hurt over her educational methods being disregarded.
My nephew still goes in my bag, and there is still something in there for him every time. He has never done the same with anyone’s bags or stuff. He knows the drill. He knows it’s just with me. My poor auntie will never get that kids are not stupid – they are kids.
A rich friend of mine one day had an emergency and needed to borrow money from me.
I was on campus so I went to the ATM and withdrew what he wanted to borrow, but in true ADHD style, forgot to take my card back.
After I left, a few minutes later, I noticed a Northern European girl (college student, probably Nordic from the accent) running in my direction and panting.
She was looking at me so I stopped to see what was going on. Then I saw my bank card in her hands!
Amazing because there was a lot of money in that card and a nefarious person would have withdrawn all the money and absconded with it.
I was so amazed by her integrity and kindness that I did not even know how to react. I had gone a long distance and at the time, there was nobody around the ATM kiosk; so I didn’t know how she realized the card was mine.
I think she may have seen me from a distance as I emerged and when she arrived at the ATM, I had spent the same time going away from it. Then, in order to not lose me, she ran all the way back to bring it to me, in consideration of no return whatsoever—just because it was the right thing to do.
How probable a similar event could be?
I insisted on asking for her details so I could at least thank her properly—perhaps by buying her a gift or inviting her to lunch—but she wouldn’t hear of it.
When I asked for her phone number she smiled and replied that it was not necessary to repay her in any way and left despite my persuasion to stay for a while so I could get to know her (you see, such a kind person would have made an excellent wife—additionally she was beautiful and I was single [and young, maybe four or five years older than her]; alas, she left too quickly and I didn’t find it polite to insist further).
Aliens (1986) – They Can Bill Me Scene – Enhanced 4K UHD HDR Custom”
This is two days ago at a very busy shopping centre with just over a week to go before Christmas day and this “person” decided it is OK to park across two spots.
It was so busy and so difficult to get a park I had to do a lap of the carpark before I got lucky and found someone who was about to leave and so I was able to grab their spot.
I was furious when I saw this car and so were a bunch of other people standing around complaining. What I and the others didn’t know was that this person, who parked across two spots, was a psychic. I never met them, never saw them either but they had to be able to see into the future.
Their future told them they would have 4 flat tyres when they came out from shopping and so to make it easier for them to change all 4 wheels they gave themselves extra room around their vehicle. That surely was their reason!
It would have been impossible to do if they parked in only one spot like normal humans do.
In Elementary School near Dallas, TX in the 70’s there was a bully named Paul. He stole from the cafeteria cash register, disrupted class, ruled over the entire school due to his size and generally pushed his way throughout class. Then a new kid came to our class. His name was Todd and by appearance was a total nerd. Tall, skinny, braces and into comics and science fiction.
Then in band Todd revealed that he played saxophone. None of us were bold or cool enough to even try that instrument, we were scared and just went along being content with the common brass instruments provided by the school. He brought his own horn and was much more advanced as well.
Then he met Paul. Paul tried to impress onto him that he was the big man in the school and literally pushed him around. Todd did not even hesitate to talk things over, he just punched Paul hard right in the face. We were amazed, we never thought it possible that a bully could be bested.
Later during outdoor recess Paul tried to re-establish his dominance to the rest of the kids. Without talking, planning or organizing dozens of the kids picked up rocks, sticks and other weapons and chased him off the lot. One that has stuck with me was a kid who took off his belt attached a stick at the buckle and swung it very effectively.
Paul never came back to school. Todd fell into his role as a nerd, never tried to become king.
Quick Orange Beef
Orange Beef
Ingredients
1 pound flank, sirloin or rib-eye steak
1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest, plus a little juice
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 pound sugar snap peas or snow peas
Instructions
If time allows, freeze the steak for up to 60 minutes to make it easier to slice. Slice the beef as thinly as you can across the grain. If you’re cutting it so thinly that some of the meat shreds, that’s good.
Combine beef with orange zest, soy sauce, garlic, salt, pepper and red pepper.
Heat a wide, heavy skillet or wok over high heat for a minute. Add vegetable oil and heat another minute. Add garlic and when it turns light brown (a few seconds) add the beef. Stir the beef 2 minutes. Add peas and stir 2 minutes more, or until the beef has lost its red color.
Squeeze half an orange over skillet ingredients and stir to combine. Serve over rice.
Serves 4 to 6.
If you have leftovers: Chill rice and beef separately. When ready to cook, heat 1 or 2 tablespoons vegetable oil over high heat in a wok or skillet. Add leftover rice and stir, breaking it up with a spoon or fork. When it’s broken up, add leftover beef and stir to heat through. Add soy sauce or toasted sesame oil, as desired.
so let me preface my answer; I no longer speak to my cousin but I didn’t speak to him much before the incident either.
My grandmother passed away the day my oldest son left for his spring break trip as a sophomore in High school, he was playing varsity baseball and invited on their tournament trip to another state to play.
I made arrangements to go on the trip to see my son play. This was an honor for him and one that he had worked so hard for. I got the call that my grandmother had passed away and I contemplated if I was still going to go on the trip or stay behind and attend the funeral. My grandmother had not been well for several years and honestly did not even recognize me or my children for the past two years due to her illness. I choose to continue on the trip with my youngest to see my oldest play ball. My parents were okay with my decision and actually helped me make the decision.
The evening after the funeral I received a nasty text message from my cousin stating how dare I miss the funeral. He understood that I was attending a baseball tournament but he came home from vacation for the funeral and he expected me to miss the baseball trip as well. It didn’t matter to him that I had visited her several times in the year leading up to her death even though she didn’t know me and he didn’t even know what nursing home she was in.
The fact that he inserted his beliefs in my life; and didn’t take into consideration the hard decision I had made was appauling to me. I wasn’t at peace with my decision but made the best one for my family at the time the decision needed to be made. I had said my good-byes to my grandmother heartfelt the last time she remembered me.
It has been 10-years since her passing and I still refuse to talk to that cousin when we are together at holiday functions. I will walk away if he comes over to sit at the same table I am at. He has never met my grandchildren on purpose as I don’t want to subject my grandchildren to his negativity.
Oh, I have one. I was with my son at a Boy Scout jamboree back in the early 90’s in our state. The arranged for the state fish and game to come and train search and rescue. I had trained in search and rescue in the military and for Appalachion Mountain Club. I walked over to the game warden and volunteered to help, that I had a lot of experience in this sort of thing. He told me he had it, he was trained too and this was his job. The warden lined up like 300 kids and sent them into the woods to search for a injured hiker (two of the scout masters acting as injured hikers). The kids started walking across the field. Then went down an incline records the woods. As they started down the incline they started to run and then a battle cry like something out of bravehart came out of the crowd. By the time they hit the tree line into the woods they were on a dead high speed run. It was at this point I walked over to the warden, looked at the woods and asked him if he ever done this before? He said no, first time. I then asked, oh, by the way, how many kids went into the woods? First rule, know how many volunteers you send in so you know if you have accounted for everyone. He looked at me puzzled and said, I thought you guys knew that! I then asked, how far did you tell them to go into the woods before turning back? He said he didn’t. He then called for backup! The local volunteer fire department arrived and he sent them into the woods. I walked over and asked, oh, how many fireman did you send into the woods? He facepalmed and walked away. Three hours later, we accounted for every scout. Five were retrieved two miles away when they walked out the back side of the woods. It took another hour to find all the fireman. I walked over to the warden and said, I think that went well, don’t you? He walked away without answering.
Yep , me . Two days after removing me from a job and my crew of 30 Americans to be replaced by a Latino crew I got a phone call .
Boss .” Hi”
Me”What’s up “
Boss “The engineer just told us they will withhold the final 10% if we can’t supply the electrical testing results that I know you did but that no one else ever does and he is persisting that he needs them . They are pissed .”
Me”Oh that sucks “
Now this was a 10 million dollar project . 10% of 10% would have been a good start . But :
Boss “Are they on the site somewhere , I know you were really organized so I’m hoping you can tell me where they are .”
Me”I have them in that log book I bought , ya know the log book you laughed at me for for using , ya know , the one where I kept records of what everyone did , deliveries , the weather and those test results “
Boss “Oh that is excellent can I swing by and pick it up “
Me “Well you could , but I’m looking out my window and the garbage truck is going up my road right now .”
Boss “You don’t have it”
Me”Nope”
Boss “ Oh you are supposed to keep them “
Me”I know , but as of the other day I don’t work for you any more and it was my book and I was done with it .Now ain’t that a bitch “
See, about a lifetime ago, I worked in addictions. And I had this client. Beth. She was a young gay woman. Somewhere between 19 and 21. Totally butch and cute as a fucking button.
image 259
Sort of like this.
Long story short, she asked me to pick her up at a different place, one I happened to know was a trap house. When I pulled up at 8:30 in the morning, there were cops at the house next door, looking for a kid with a warrant.
Beth sees my car pull up, but hadn’t seen the police. She walked out of the front door and head down, beelined for me.
It took the cops less than five seconds to intervene.
Me: Fuck.
I roll down my passenger side window to eavesdrop. I can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, but I can tell by everyone’s body language they’re giving her a hard time.
Me: Double fuck.
I grab the badge that says I’m a county employee and I walk over to the encounter. The cops look at me. I smile, show them my ID, and stick out my hand.
Me: Good morning officers. I assume everything’s alright here.
Officer 1 (nodding to my client): You know this young man? Is his name John?
Me (chuckling): Well, I definitely know this young WOMAN. Her name is Beth. And we have an appointment at her PO’s office in 45 minutes.
Officer 2 (doing a double take): Young woman!?
Beth: Yes. I was trying to tell you.
Officer 1 (pulling out papers and quickly changing the subject): Do either of you know this man? John Doe?
Me: Haven’t seen him.
Beth shook her head no.
Officer 2: We’ve got a bench warrant on him, so if you see him around, we’d appreciate if you call the station.
Me: Will do. Well, we better get going. They’ve got the highway backed up again with construction and we don’t want to be late to see the PO. You gentlemen have a nice day. And thank you for your service!
When we got to my car, Beth freaked the hell out: Holy shit, Molly. I thought I was going down! They wouldn’t let me get a word in to tell them I wasn’t who they were looking for! And they totally thought I was that dude!
Me: Breathe, girl. It’s alright.
We drove around the block, headed to the probation office.
Me: Now you want to tell me why you’re living at the dope dealer’s house?
Beth was always amazed that I knew what was going on. Like it being a trap house. Like knowing who her dealer was. Like when I told her she needed to get tested for Hep C and she said she didn’t. Then I had to tell her that I knew someone who fucked her girl who was sharing needles. And rumor had it, the girlfriend was positive and was hiding it.
Sigh.
I was pretty damn good at that job.
Except Beth ended up going back to the needle. Then back to jail. I hope she’s somewhere today, clean and sober.
Or at least off the dope.
Dogmen, Hybrids, The Beast of Bray Road | True Stories of Werewolves
When I was quite young, perhaps three years old, I went out for a walk with my father. And thus, together… hand in hand… we walked down the street in our housing complex in Bridgeport, CT. It was a nice Saturday. Blue sky. Sunny, but cool.
And as we walked down the street we came across a curious sight.
There was this old man in a blue jacket playing a wind-up musical device of some type, and a monkey on a really long leash….
organ grinder monkey
This guy was just strolling along and the monkey was going p to people. If we gave the monkey some change, he would take it and carry it off to the guy playing the music. A simple and nice cute distraction.
My father gave me a few coins and I gave them to the monkey. He crawled up onto me, took the money, raised his tiny hat off his head and then ran to the guy with the music box, and gave it to him. And then the guys started the wind-up music all over again.
This was my once and only experience with such a troubadour. And, I had long forgotten about it.
But … when I was going through “retirement” I ended up with complete memory recall, and thus had memories regarding this singular event.
Treasure the valuable memories that you have. They might take you to places long forgotten, and seemingly trivial in importance….
I believe it was Sir Richard Branson who did what he called the “Restaurant Test.” Part of his interview process was an “informal” interview at a restaurant. What the prospective employee didn’t know is that Sir Richard had already notified the restaurant that he was coming with a potential employee and to screw up their order, nothing major like giving meat to a vegan but if they ordered their steak medium rare, the chef would cook it well done.
Richard would then see how the other person reacted. If he was polite then it was onto the next phase of the interview, if they were rude he would finish his meal and that person would not be considered for the job
My wife and I agreed early on that whoever could draw the largest salary would work while the other was stay-at-home parent. Unfortunately I went to work (would have loved to be the stay at home dad.) Our deal included that after a 30 minute decompress and wash up after arriving home, our daughter was 100% my responsibility through bedtime. My wife got up in the night with her during the week, and I took the weekend shift. We tag teamed the weekend hours, but I took most of the time. My happiest memories were coming home and getting my baby to hold, feed, and change. Later it was seeing her standing at the door or front window waiting for me. She’s 50 now and remembers being swooped up and burying her face in my fur lined coat collar in the winter.
NO stress could survive the love of a dad and daughter.
“Grandma said she’ll give me a gift if I let her shampoo my hair,” he tells me the other day.
I can see how torn and conflicted he looks.
My son’s a swashbuckling, bug-hunting pirate.
You’d have an easier time getting a stray cat to take a shower.
“I hear you,” I reply, making sure she’s out of earshot. “My take?” he leans in. “If she wants to give you a gift, she should just do it. No strings attached.”
He nods and we exchange conspiratorial smiles.
“You’ve got to rein in that wayward son of yours,” she tells me after a botched shower attempt.
But I won’t.
Of course, I’m always encouraging him to be kind, respectful, and thoughtful with others.
But I won’t use the stick or the carrot.
Because when he’s older and someone hands him a rifle telling him who the enemy is, I want him to do his own thinking.
Because when he’s older and someone offers him a pill and tells him he’ll have the best time of his life, I want him to question.
Because when he’s older and someone offers him a quick reward in exchange for giving up his values, I want him to stand his ground.
That was the excuse I got during the last week of school when a project was due in my 7th grade reading class.
My students were told that the book we had just read, The Call of the Wild, was going to be made into a major motion picture, and they were to create a movie poster to persuade people to see the show.
The posters were to be judged by other students and staff, and the winner would be awarded a prize. The competition was intense!
Every student had a finished poster except Shane (not his real name). I wasn’t totally surprised, as Shane had been late with assignments in the past, but the excuse was pretty shocking.
“So, Shane,” I began, “when I call your dad, will he be able to verify that your project did, in fact, catch on fire?” I was ready for him to change his story, but he didn’t!
“Yes,” he replied, “and he’s really mad at me because it burned a hole in the living room carpet, so now I’m grounded.”
“Hmm, he’s good”, I thought, “validating his story with details…this should be interesting.”
Later, I called Shane’s dad, and sure enough, Shane was telling the truth! His dad explained that his son had used so much white-out on his project, that when he held a lighter to the poster board (to singe the edges and make it look old) the entire thing exploded into a fire ball, fell to the floor and burned a big hole in his living room floor.
“Wow, Shane! I was a bit skeptical, but your story checks out. I’ll give you until tomorrow to create a new poster. Your idea to make your poster look old is most impressive (as the story took place over 100 years ago) but DON’T burn the edges this time!”
The next day, Shane proudly walked into the class. I eagerly looked for a poster, figuring he’d be carrying it, but it was nowhere in sight.
“Shane, did you finish you new poster?” I asked.
“Yep, I sure did.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here.” and he gave me a crumpled ball of cardboard. “Open it up, you’re going to love it!”
I did the best I could to smooth out the wrinkled mess. Sure enough, there was a movie poster advertising The Call of the Wild.
“It looks great, but why did you wad it up into a ball?”
“To make it look old.” he said as if I should have already known.
Shane didn’t win the contest, he remained grounded 2 weeks, and that summer he had to get a job mowing lawns to pay for the damaged carpet.
I recently saw Shane at the state fair. He’s engaged and works as an auto mechanic. He remembers the poster project vividly and said everything worked out pretty well. They ended up getting the entire apartment re-carpeted for free and Shane got to keep his lawn mowing money.
Galatoire’s Crabmeat Yvonne
jacques pepin oysters rockefeller recipe 1024×694 1
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
6 artichokes
1 pound mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup clarified butter
2 pounds backfin lump crabmeat
Salt and ground white pepper
1/4 cup parsley, chopped fine
6 lemon wedges
Instructions
Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
Cut stem from artichokes flush with the base and boil artichokes for 45 minutes, or until a leaf pulls off easily.
Remove from pot, drain and let cool.
Pull off leaves and reserve for another purpose. Remove choke and slice the bottoms. Set aside.
In a large skillet sauté mushrooms in clarified butter.
Add reserved artichoke bottoms and crabmeat. Heat through, stirring gently.
Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with parsley.
Serve on toast points with a lemon wedge on the side.
Attribution
Source: Galatoire’s, New Orleans, Louisiana. Gulf Coast Cooking
Twenty years ago, a friend called me in a panic. She was on the backside of a bad divorce, she had a three year old daughter, and she’d just been told she couldn’t continue to live where she was. The little girl was with her father that weekend, but my friend was at a neighborhood restaurant with no money and no idea what to do next. I told her to come over, got her something to eat and settled her on the sofa because she hadn’t slept in something over 24 hours and told her that we’d figure out what to do next when she woke up. Ultimately we moved her and her daughter into our guest room.
About three weeks later, she introduced us to a young woman who was pregnant and not in a position to raise a child. (She was married. That wasn’t the issue.) Sitting at our dining room table, having just met us and not knowing much more than that we’d taken in our mutual friend, she asked my husband and me if we would adopt the baby. We’d fought infertility for a long time. We said yes. She talked to her husband, and the whole thing was agreed on by the following morning. About seven months later, I was her birth coach and had the incredible privilege of catching my own son.
He’s nineteen now. We have him because we let a friend in a tough spot move in with us.
Mine was in the Air Force. I had a racist for an immediate supervisor who always gave me average ratings on my performance. I didn’t realize how bad I was getting screwed until one of my counterparts (who was a total screw up) was shocked that he higher ratings than myself. A “3” is considered average (which I was getting on my reviews). This “screwup” was getting 5’s which is the highest score. I was thinking “how the HECK did he get a 5??” This dude missed time, came to work drunk, was reprimanded for fights….been to jail….etc. my record was SPOTLESS. Always the first on the job and the last to leave. Kept my uniform super clean. So I realized that I’m working twice as hard as this other dude and getting a much lower score.
This was in the 1990’s. I overheard a conversation with my racist supervisor one day about what he wanted to be when he leave the military. He stated that he wanted to be a highway patrol officer “so that he can legally hit minorities”. He always made crude jokes about Mexicans and blacks. As an African American myself I hated this dude’s guts. His leadership skills were the worst. I hated every day of working with him.
One day it was his last day of work. The shop was going to throw a going away party for this racist pig. There was an option to donate $10.00 to the potluck to participate in the party or miss out and work. I chose to work. I’m not donating a DIME to this dude’s going away party.
After he gracefully disappeared from the job I thought that would be the last I’ve heard of him. NOPE! I was wrong. Found out later that he did apply for the state highway patrol position.
The timing on this particular day couldn’t have been more perfect. Two men from the highway patrol were visiting our unit and I happened to be the ONLY person there. They asked me “who’s in charge?” Well, I’m the only airman in the shop so I was actually in charge. I asked them what’s going on? They told me that they are doing a follow up on a gentleman who applied for highway patrol who used to work at this unit. I told them I have detailed files on this person. What made this even better was the fact that one highway patrol officer was black, the other was Hispanic. I was so nervous in hopes that our main supervisor didn’t show up because he would give this guy a decent feedback. I wanted them to hear the DARK side of this scumbag.
I told them that he was a decent worker at best but here are some documents I wanted to share. Luckily I kept my old floppy disk handy with all of the stuff I wrote to the higher chain of command about this racist pos. The statements had dates and times I written down of his racist comments over the years. Too many to write in this essay. But let’s just say it was two pages worth (front and back).
The look of disgust was very apparent on their faces. One of them asked me “people like him still exist in the military?” I replied “shockingly, yes”. They asked me, “did you ever want to knock this dude the F- -K out?” (Many Times I did).
To make a long story short, months went by and I didn’t hear anything. Then one day I overheard a conversation about my former supervisor being turned down for his highway patrol job and was working at a Wal-Mart as a warehouse worker. In all honesty, I take GREAT pleasure in feeling that my sneaky swift actions were the reason.
I certainly wouldn’t laugh if a student of mine told me that – so have no idea why your professor did. But I wouldn’t give it much weight, either. And I’d wonder why the student told me. Would they tell me how tall they were? Or what color hair they had?
If eligibility to be in Mensa requires one to be in the top 2% (or something) of people who take IQ tests, that is a nice capability to have. But what percentage of university professors are likely to also be eligible if that’s the requirement – plus have become academically very accomplished in their field of study? I have no idea what my IQ is, it’s never been tested as far as I know – nor has it ever mattered to me. It is likely higher than some – and not nearly as high as others, both professors and students I have known in my well over half-century at a university (if you include my student years). It’s a place that tends to collect very bright articulate people.
So if a student of mine told me they were in Mensa, I’d probably ask them about it, what they did as a member of Mensa, etc., just as I would if they told me they were in an orchestra or worked for a charity or played on the soccer team or something. That is, it is information about that student and it might be interesting, but what does it change? I would expect that person’s intelligence to show in their love of learning, the questions they ask, the connections they make, etc. And all of that intellectual capability would be obvious even it they were not a member of Mensa.
I went to McDonald’s and went inside to place a to go order. While I was standing there, the manager walked up to me and handed me an empty French fry box. This was during the time that McDonald’s was doing the Monopoly game. The game piece on the fry box was already partially open. I peeled it the rest of the way back and it said it was a $2000 winner. I really needed the money for college at that point in my life. I thanked the manager profusely. She said that it had been inadvertently opened by a worker. She saw me standing there with my young daughter and thought that I looked like I could use some cheering up. Best trip to McDonald’s ever!
It seems the Dutch Government has forbidden ASML to sell EUVs to SMIC from 1/9/23
Yet orders placed until 23:59 on 31/8/23 can be shipped and fulfilled.
So technically ASML can ship orders to SMIC upto the time the last order placed on 31/8/23 is fulfilled
That’s for 21 EUV Machines & 50 DUV Machines
In September, ASML has delivered 4 EUV Machines & 17 DUV Machines
Meanwhile there is another legal complication
SMIC has now introduced a Distributor company who can buy EUVs from ASML and simply sell them to SMIC for a 10% commission (10% is just an example)
Now the Dutch order said only SMIC was forbidden from receiving ASML EUVs so ASML has also accepted 8 more orders for EUVs from this distributor
Technically Dutch Govt cannot specifically forbid ASML from selling to China as a whole as that is a major WTO violation
So they can only blacklist importers
So China can keep bringing up new distributors and placing orders and ASML is happy because TSMC has cancelled 24 Machines recently and i am sure China offered full price for the machines
Ultimately MONEY TALKS
Once again the US is furious but again it’s all about the legalese now
SMIC is forbidden so an agency buys and sells to SMIC
The Dutch look the other way of course
ASML is delighted because they sell more machines
My guess is this new agency will be blacklisted soon and they will incorporate more laws to prevent such measures
Yet that gets China another 8 machines plus a further 24 machines which I bet China will place as they are already in process
This means SMIC technically can make 7 nm and 5 nm Chips in decent quantities at least till 2026/2027
By then they should crack some breakthrough
So China has gained TIME and the Dutch have put business ahead of stupidity
Just like NVDIA and Intel just sold products to China which were slightly off the specs in huge numbers
He was working on a HUGE problem that took up the entire white board. The students were doing their best to follow the problem in their notes and in their minds. Suddenly he stopped, turned to look at us, turned red with embarrassment and realized that he got confused and lost in the problem. A student in the front row gently guided him to finish.
Instead of brushing this off he used this as an amazing teachable moment.
Here is what he did:
He asked us if we thought he was stupid. We collectively said “no.”
He then said that he was not a “melon head” and neither were we.
The lesson: He explained about the fight or flight syndrome and said that once he got momentarily confused, instead of going back to the place in the problem where he understood, he got nervous because he was in front of us, got into the fight or flight syndrome, produced adrenaline and got so stressed that he could no longer think. He then drew a picture on the board of a human brain, showed the reptilian part of our brain and the frontal lobes and explained that when we get too stressed we go to our reptilian brain and we need to return to our frontal lobe thinking. He gave us concrete strategies for exactly how to do this. (Breathe slowly, go back to a place where we last understood and start over). This lesson was SO impactful to me that I began to study the brain more and more and then I taught this to all of my students.
Final Thought: Even though my professor was teaching Calculus, his off-topic lesson was one of the best I ever had. He turned an embarrassing moment into an incredibly helpful life lesson.
This lesson was so important to me that I included the story as one of the chapters in my teacher support book, “Wait, Don’t Quit.”
I passed a great little convertible parked in front of a business with a “For Sale” sign and stopped to go look at it because I was considering a fun weekend car. It turned out the owner of the business was a past customer of mine, I had done work on his home. Two days later it was mine.
In the process of fixing every little thing and customizing it, I decided to pull out most of the interior to really clean it. Tucked in where the carpet overlapped, under the driver’s seat, was a gold ring with a small diamond. I wasn’t sure if it was real so I asked a friend at a nearby jewelry store. They confirmed it was real 18k and about ⅛ carat real diamond.
I called my friend who sold me the car. He checked with his wife and it wasn’t hers. I asked if they knew the previous owner but she had sold them the car before moving overseas and they lost track of her info. There must have been a clean title at some point because she wasn’t listed.
I doubt it was a wedding ring because it was so small, in fact the only finger it would fit was my mother in law’s pinky. She liked it so I let her keep it.
Battle with highest total losses:Battle of Vercellae
In 113 BC a large Germanic-Celtic coalition begins poking around Rome. They crush a Roman army and send the Romans into a panic. This army is 200,000 men strong- how can Rome compete.
Into this steps Marius, Uncle of Caesar. Marius was the most well-known general of his age and he set about reforming the Roman military with rapid speed, creating the more traditional Roman Legions we all know and love.
As this massive Army began to move for Italy Marius responded with his reformed Legions. What followed was a massive all-out clash where Roman discipline held back a far larger army. The turning point came when a commander named Sula counter-charged the Celtic cavalry and sent them fleeing into their own lines.
In all Plutarch reports 100,000 were killed, Livy reports 160,000, and Orosius reports 140,000 were killed.
Battle with highest Roman casualties: Cannae
Hannibal had invaded Italy and Rome responded by raising the largest Army in it’s history- some 90,000 men strong. The Romans used this Army to attack Hannibal, driving their strong heavy infantry forward in an effort to break Hannibal’s lines.
Hannibal had cleverly made his flanks strong and so as his center bowed inwards his flanks did not. This created a big “U” shape and the Romans found themselves being pressed from all sides. Then Hannibal’s cavalry came around the rear and surrounded the entire Roman Army. They then pressed in and killed perhaps 50,000 Romans.
I have to say, a number of answers to this question are appalling. What is most troubling is that many of the worst and most shaming of these responses are from supposed clinicians themselves. I am deeply bothered by this.
Is it normal, or lets say understandable, that you would feel distrustful and off about your therapist shutting down your queries about the nature of your relationship with them? Yep, sounds downright logical to me. When we feel distrustful it is because we feel unsafe in some way. You therapist refusing to engage with you around the experience of the inherent lop-sided-ness of the therapy relationship is problematic.
What you are experiencing is incredibly common, if not inevitable. I would dare say anyone who has remained in therapy for more than a few sessions with a therapist will wrestle with the freedoms and constraints afforded within a psychotherapy. For many this remains a constant felt tension throughout their therapy. It is an important aspect of therapy as exploring the tensions, dissatisfaction, unfairness, longings etc…with our therapists directly reveals our deepest needs and wants. Talking about the bounds of the therapy is the most fruitful of topics, a talented therapist would happily (if not giddily) help you to explore your distrust, or any other experience you may be having about being in therapy.
The issue isn’t whether it is right or wrong for a therapist to reveal anything about their private-selves (some do, some don’t). The issue here is that this subject has come up more than once in your therapy and you are clearly completely confused about it. Your therapist has missed a golden opportunity to open up a discussion about relationships.
It would seem according to some of these answers your therapist is not alone in completely missing the proverbial elephant, or neon sign, in the room.
On my first day working at Domino’s Pizza, I was introduced to all the workers. One of the delivery drivers was a guy in his 70s whom we’ll call Morgan. He looked at me and said, “I’d ask you out, but I guess you don’t date people your grandfather’s age.” Keep in mind that I was 17 at this point; this was my first “real job.” Since I’d been homeschooled, I wasn’t well-versed in social norms, but this statement gave me the creeps. When I went home that evening, I discussed it wiith my mom, who said he was most likely teasing.
Morgan kept chatting with me, and I came to know him as a very friendly person. However, a couple of months later (I worked there from halfway through summer break until Thanksgiving, when I got a better job), I was eating a piece of leftover pizza and he grabbed my shoulders, trying to take a bite out of my pizza. I warned him not to do it again, or I’d elbow him. He talked for weeks about how “M.J. has pointy elbows,” so nobody get on her bad side.
I was never comfortable around him from that time on. He kept making comments that made me less comfortable. One day, he said, “You’re going to make a wonderful wife and mother someday.” Finally, I brought it up with my parents again. When I mentioned that he’d given me his business card so I could “use him as a professional reference,” they realized what was going on.
My dad called the manager, who was the best guy ever with six kids of his own and decided to let my dad (a tough-as-nails, Glock-carrying Italian gym rat in cowboy boots) do whatever he thought was best. I gave my dad Morgan’s schedule, and the two of them had a nice chat out in the parking lot. Morgan said about five words to me the entire rest of the time I worked there. It was glorious.
I used to work for an EXTREMELY reclusive billionaire (for further reference in the answer he will be called Greg) as a personal aide. Many things that I have seen and been a part of during my fantastic service with (for?) him are covered by legal documents that demand non disclosure from me. However, there are still some things that can be shared.
The word extremely is in all caps because only one or two pictures of him have ever been publicly published, and he has never given a personal statement. He maintained a zero social media presence, and would always grumble about the dependency of modern society on rapidly changing technology. His family and him always maintained a low profile, choosing to utilise public transport if they could (however, they had extensive means of transportation and if he felt even the slightest inkling of a threat they would use another transportation method). The children attended a private school just out of the county, however, in my country, private schools are very common, so this is not too fancy.
But, don’t for a moment underestimate the man. He had an uncanny ability to read people, pick out things others would not see at first glance and was always determined to understand and learn about the world around him. He would anonymously donate millions to organisations that furthered research into space (is this a thing? I learnt this from another personal aide). He played his cards close to the chest, and if he did not understand a theory or idea, he had no qualms of ringing the relevant party up to better understand the concept, something he did regularly with his firm which led to some talks behind his back in the firm.
He always maintained a composure of calmness through out even the most trying situations. There was a time when a client agreement between his firm and the client had fallen through, and they only had a few hours to rehash all the details. Unfortunately, he had given the lead architect of the deal a few days off earlier in the week as the client company had, at first, shown a very positive outlook on the agreement. Greg knew that the architect was out deep in the country side where he was helping with the after party of his sister’s wedding. Cell service was not great, and while the architect was informed of the situation, he was in no place to rehash a multi million dollar deal. So what was done, within a span of 1 hour, was a helicopter from a local tour agency, that always had one on standby, was chartered, sent out to the architect, brought him back and they worked on the deal. The deal eventually fell through (it was beyond saving if you asked me), and Greg felt extremely guilty for the inconvenience he caused the architect. As a form of thank you, he proceeded to pay for the sister’s wedding, and gave the architect another month off.
The billionaire I worked for always attempted to remain frugal. He never owned any form of private transport (jet, helicopter, yacht etc), had a small car collection but always donated money or reinvest it into the market. He never showed emotions, but you knew he was a caring individual. His neighbours son had been involved in an extremely gruesome accident when his car was slammed by a truck. Knowing that financing the operation and hospital stress for the son would be too much for the mother, he quietly payed for the entire operation, and set up a trust that would cover the living and medical treatment costs for that young man for the rest of his life.
Greg passed away a few years ago, which is when I stopped working. His wife asked us aides if we would like to stay on, and while several did, I left to take care of my ailing Mother. As a parting bonus, she gave the aides leaving a substantial monetary bonus that will be enough for the rest of my life if I live carefully. I haven’t heard from them in a while, but their current aides say they are still the same down-to-earth people I had known them as.
Greg was a fantastic individual. He was an avid learner, an individual who did whatever it took and, yet, still managed to keep the small things in life within his view. It gave me great pleasure to work for him, and I definitely miss him.
The Ferrari 166 S
The Ferrari 166 S was a sports racing car built by Ferrari between 1948 and 1953, an evolution of its Colombo V12-powered 125 S racer. It was adapted into a sports car for the street in the form of the 166 Inter.
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Only 12 Ferrari 166 S were produced, nine of them with cycle-fenders as the Spyder Corsa. It was soon followed by the updated and highly successful Ferrari 166 MM (Mille Miglia), of which 47 were made from 1948 to 1953. Its early victories in the Targa Florio and Mille Miglia and others in international competition made the manufacturer a serious competitor in the racing industry. Both were later replaced by the 2.3 L 195 S.
At the end of the interview, the hiring manager leaned back on his chair, folded his hands and grinned, “Tell me why I shouldn’t hire the guy I interviewed before you came in?”
I had to think for a moment. “Having never met or interviewed the guy, I can’t make an informed opinion.” And I thought the reason for the question was to see if I made snap decisions without any facts.
He shook his head, “Now that’s a cop out. Give me another reason.”
“Let me see his resume and give me a few minutes. Cover up his name.”
“I can’t do that, but I’ll show you his cover letter.”
He folded the paper so I couldn’t see who sent it, and moved it across the desk. I read the first sentence and said, “He makes careless mistakes. He misspelled the name of your company.”
The hiring manager’s eyes popped and said, “What?” He looked at it again, then said, “This meeting is over.”
And that was that. I never heard back and no one in HR would take my call. I don’t know if it was a fake letter he used as a test or a real one.
Yes, I was a financial manager at a golf & country club.
I took two weeks’ vacation and when I came back there was a note taped to my computer that said, “Do Not Open.” Immediately, I knew because employees were being let go daily.
Minutes later, my desk phone rang, and the NEW GM wanted me in his office.
I was let go for no reason given other than “Don’t take it personally”.
I stayed in contact with my assistant, and she was given my job at $8 an hr. She also told me he brought in his wife, children and many other employees that he knew from a previous job at another club.
All total, 23 employees were let go and replaced!
Karma got him….he got caught stealing and he was fired!
Some years ago, when my special needs kids were younger, we went to a nearby restaurant to practice behavior, social skills, and new experiences. They won’t learn if they aren’t exposed.
I agreed they could have anything on the menu as long as they agreed to try their choice. My older two tried something off the adult menu, but my younger one was less confident and asked to try something from the kid’s menu. I wanted this a positive experience so I said sure. He ordered the personal pizza.
I did chuckle that we came to a restaurant for him to have pizza, but we agreed. It was a great time, and everyone enjoyed. Well, I didn’t enjoy it as much when I got the bill. His personal pizza cost almost as much as a regular pie from the pizza shop. Well, we came for the experience and everyone behaved well. But next time, I had an impulse about eating out, I asked the kids if they were ok with the pizza shop, and they were. The restaurant was ok, but you could relax in the pizza shop. Ok, I learned a lesson that day.
She hated the pool and resented my father for getting it.
Upon retirement, my father put an in-ground pool, complete with a deck and privacy fence, in his back yard. I’d been moved out for three years at that point, and I usually visited during the holidays, when the pool was closed. I never saw it in its full glory except in pictures. I saw a lot of pictures of my dad and sister and other people having great pool parties.
My mother was never in those pictures. She was the one taking the pictures, I assumed. But she later told me that she hated the pool. It cost half as much as the house it was attached to. It was the single biggest purchase my father ever made for himself.
He got about eight years of use from it. Then, his health got so bad that his doctors told him to quit going in it, lest he have a heart attack and drown in it. They drained the pool that winter, and it was never used again.
Then he died, and for the next six years, my mother had a giant man-made swamp in her backyard. Every time it rained, she had to pump the water out of the pool. It attracted frogs and snakes. It actually reduced the value of her home, because she lived in a poor neighborhood and no one who could afford to fix and maintain the pool would want to live in that neighborhood.
Finally, just last month, she got it filled in with dirt. It wasn’t cheap, of course, but now she can have what was there before: a garden.
To the US, a REASONABLE RELATIONSHIP will be when :-
Xi Jingping retires or resigns
China demilitarizes and commits to the same
China relinquishes the One China Policy wrt Taiwan and cedes the South China Sea to US Hegemony
China prepares to be Number Two for the considerable future
China purchases and takes back US Debt to $ 1.5–1.7 Trillion
Nothing else will satisfy them
Even if China makes these confessions, some Neocons won’t be satisfied
They want a War against China and to see China broken and lose considerable power and the CPC to be ousted and a US style democracy established
For China, a REASONABLE RELATIONSHIP MEANS :-
Each Nation understanding that their laws are meant to be followed in each nation
No protectionism
Not using Geopolitical issues in Economic problems
Fair Competition and the ‘May the best man win’ philosophy
Win Win Partnership so that the Global Economy can gain
Of course China also has Wolf Warriors who simultaneously aim to develop their independent supply chain and to oust US influence in the Global South
In the end, the businessmen in both nations want what China wants
The leadership in China wants peace
It is the US that is divided because of its unstable politicians, between Neocons and Neo Liberals and frankly too many homosexuals and transgenders to truly gauge what a diplomatic partnership means
So today all China is doing is BUYING TIME and waiting for US to collapse under it’s own weight
About a year ago we had a strange series of UPS and FedEx deliveries. They all had our correct address but the name was something like a cartoon character.. think something like Betty Poop.
The first box was a plant stand. My wife took it back to FedEx. Two days later we got the same delivery! In the middle there were a few more deliveries.. my wife was thinking it’s a scam where someone would come by and steal the freshly delivered boxes. But the stuff we were receiving weren’t that kind of stuff you’d expect in a scam.
We have an HOA with a complete list of homeowners. There was nobody with a name even close. Last box arrives.. it’s UPS and a big box of wallpaper. I send an email to the HOA mailing list, asking if anyone else was on the receiving end of same thing.
I get an immediate call from a woman on my street about 10 houses away. She’s screaming that we are stealing her packages and she’s a decorator and we made her miss her deadline! Apparently the funky name was her new business name! She wants me to deliver it all to her immediately or she’s calling the cops!
I ask her what her address was and she recites MY address.. I tell her to go outside and look at the number on her house. And that I’m putting all her boxes out in my driveway and she should come get it!
Ten minutes later there’s a man in an SUV picking up the boxes. No apology, no admission of fault. I still wouldn’t know the woman if I saw her today!
Penn and Teller had this show a few years back called “Bullshit”.
They would debunk TONS of stuff. It was very educational without being skewed like some of Michael Moore’s stuff is.
One show was debunking diet myths. They went through the history of sugar vs. fat and the evils of high fructose corn syrup, etc…
But one pivotal bit was when they brought a stagehand out from behind the set. He had apparently lost a ton of weight recently. They asked him how he managed to do it.
This epic hero looked straight into the camera and said, “I stopped eating so fucking much.”
When COVID hit, I knew I wouldn’t be going out as much. So I decided to change my diet very VERY slightly. I would take smaller scoops of rice and take the smaller potato during dinner. Without doing ANYTHING else, I lost about 4 pounds in about as many months. I wasn’t even trying.
Stay away from hidden sugar. EVERYTHING in the U.S. has hidden sugar in it. Look at the ingredients. Is something ends in “ose”, it’s sugar.
Exercise helps, too, of course, but not everyone can do it. One thing everyone can do, though is:
Stop eating so fucking much.
Project Looking Glass | The Time Warriors of the 2012 Apocalypse
I grew up outside of a small prairie town. One of my best friends grew up about 10 miles out of town, and in my teens I used to spend a lot of time at his house with him, his siblings and his parents. They had a built in kitchen table and wrap around bench. We used to sit at that table have a beer, and play a card game called “pass the ace” or sometimes “spoons” with all of our friends, his parents and siblings.
I moved away, travelled the world, and never settled down. I was about 40, still single, and I still planned on getting married and having kids someday.
When I was back in Canada, I decided to stop in and visit his parents. I knocked on the door, which was never locked, they yelled at me to come in, and there was a tableful of people playing pass the ace, and drinking beer. There was my friends mother, his younger brother, and 5 other young people playing pass the ace. I sat down, had a beer and got dealt in. I started to get caught up on all the news. It was exactly like old times, talking, drinking beer, playing cards, with a tableful of young adults, in their late teens, and early twenties. Exactly as if I hadn’t left. Then it dawned on me, I was playing cards with my friends two sons, his sisters son and daughter, and two second cousins. I was thinking I hadn’t changed in twenty years, and suddenly I was an old man playing cards, with the next generation, and they were old enough to legally drink.
That was the day, I realized I was no longer young, lets face it, I was old. I remember 20 years before, thinking how cool his parents and their friends were, for drinking and partying at their age, and now I was that old man sitting at the table.
I not only remember the day. I remember the minute it hit.
I’m not sure it was the most interesting, but its stuck in my mind for years. I was in a nice lakefront restaurant, inside a city, so it wasn’t a big lake, but a small man made lake.
At the table beside me was a couple and a realtor discussing putting his house on the market.
The man appeared to be about 10 years older than his wife. They had one of 5 houses on an island in the middle of the lake, accessable only by a bridge. Very exclusive. The housing market was down. The realtor had told the man what his house was assessed at. The husband said, he knew very well, what it was assessed at, but he wouldn’t sell it for anywhere near that price.
The realtor told him it would be on the market for a long time, if he listed it that high, and might never sell. The wife started to say something, and the husband actually turned to her, and said “This is mans business, we know what we are doing, let us talk, if we want to know how to decorate a room, we’ll ask you” I saw the realtor cringe, he didn’t want to be included in that kind of conversation.
The husband then told him, that the way to market it, was to sell it as one of only five houses on an island in the city, maybe the whole province. I understood his logic, but this was not a nice man.
Listing a house is something that a realtor really wants to do. Even if they don’t sell it themselves, as long as someone buys it, they make money. But, and this is a guess, it costs money to advertise the house, put it on the MLS system, and if its unrealistically high, and it never sells then they lose money. Then he has to deal with a high maintenance client, that makes him feel like he should wash his hands, after every meeting.
In any case, the realtor said that if he wanted to list the house for more than 30 percent over market value, he would have to find a different realtor. The husband was stunned, and couldn’t believe he was being turned down. The realtor paid for the lunch and left.
I don’t know if they ever talked again. But I didn’t feel clean myself, sitting at a table next to this guy, so I didn’t blame him.
There is a sure fire way to discover if a guy actually served in the British SAS, one that I witnessed myself. Let me explain. I had a friend who was an alcoholic. There was gossip in the local pubs that he was ex SAS. No matter how drunk he would get, he would always laugh and tell you not to be so stupid if you aver broached the subject with him. So how did we find out the truth? At his funeral. A serving member of the SAS in full uniform, accompanied by a bugler (Non SAS) attended and gave a eulogy that had us all gobsmacked. Not only was my friend ex SAS, but his exploits were totally jaw dropping heroic. We were told that whenever an ex member of the SAS dies. His funeral is always attended by a serving member of the regiment. RIP Alec.
I was waiting in line at the dollar store, lady in front of me had an infant in her arms, and had an older boy maybe 5 who was holding his little sister’s hand who was about 3 to prevent her from running off.
She was purchasing 2 tiny packs of diapers, a few minor food items, and a 1 liter Mountain Dew. She had enough for the total, but it was spread among 3 debit cards. I don’t know if the clerk was new, or a new computer system, but the clerk was having trouble ringing it up in 3 payments like she needed.
I was off work at the time, between jobs collecting unemployment, so I was struggling also, but I could easily afford the little bit she needed, so I just stepped up, and swiped my card to cover her groceries. She tried to take the Mountain Dew out (a luxury, not necessity) but I pointed out with 3 children she needed the caffeine even though 1 was very mature, and helpful.
On my way out the door to walk home (nice day, and not far, so I walked instead of driving) I heard her attempt to stay her van, it sounded like a dead battery and when it finally started, a horrible belt squealing sound told me a belt was destroyed, or very loose.
I told her I’m a hobby mechanic, I don’t live far, and I told her I’d gladly look at it if she would like since I don’t live far, so she offered me a ride and another thank you for paying for her groceries.
When she pulled in the driveway, she was reluctant to shut the vehicle off, I told her I have a battery booster or my car to get her started if needed.
Opened the hood, and someone had replaced the alternator recently, but had forgotten to tighten the swing arm assembly that holds pressure on the belt. It took as much time to grab the tools as it did to tighten it correctly. It started right up with the battery booster, and the squealing was gone.
I pointed out the belt was looking worn out, recommended she get it replaced but it’ll last for a few months at least, and told her I would gladly put the belt on whenever she needed free of charge if she showed up with the belt.
I’ve been in her shoes raising my 4 children as a single dad, so the little money for her groceries, and about 5 minutes of my time to tighten the alternator belt was no problem at all.
I’ve been wondering whether or not to answer this… The “wrong person” is my daughter (stepdaughter really,but I’m Daddy now and forever so that settles that) and the people doing the “picking a fight”were her ex boyfriend and his father.. I didn’t personally witness this because I was in Iraq at the time,but believe me I sure heard about it.
Daughter is tall and not a delicate flower even though she has all the requisite standard equipment to attract stares and suchlike, including a startling resemblance to Gal Gadot ,and I always emphasized to all my kids the importance of self confidence ,so she carries herself with a certain pride. She has Blackfeet blood along with Irish and Norwegian and who knows what else, girl has a temper too,what can I say..
Anyways,ex boyfriend and father spot her walking down the sidewalk one weekend night and follow her,asking her to get in and go for a cruise.. She says no,but they apparently don’t want to take no for an answer and pull ahead and stop, ex BF Gets out of the car and grabs her elbow and pulls her towards the car,she pulls away and he grabs her again, by this time she is almost in the door. I had taught my kids to avoid punching someone and use their elbows if the person was close enough, which ex BF certainly was unfortunately for his dumb ass, because Daughter proceeds to elbow him repeatedly in the face with backswing strikes on her way away from the car, dislocating ex BF‘S jaw and shattering his eye socket and breaking his nose, and naturally stopped any hostilities on his part, but ex BF’s dad was pushed by this time and ran around the car and accosted Daughter, catching a 50 yard field goal kick in his balls for his troubles..I taught my kids well.
During the Japanese War of Aggression Against China (1931-1945), about 200000, or even more women in China were lured and forced by the Japanese army to become “comfort women”. They suffered various unimaginable and unspeakable forms of abuse during the war, most of which were tortured to death at that time. Even if a few survivors survived by chance, they were left with scars and even lifelong disabilities.
At the comfort station, they subjected women to inhumane torture, even if they were pregnant, they still had to endure the torture of the Japanese army. Once they fell ill, they would be killed. The Japanese army did not leave a way for these women to survive, and they even set up a series of “rules and regulations” that made these captured women unable to die.
After Japan surrendered, they were afraid that their crimes would be exposed, and they brutally killed all comfort women before leaving. We cannot imagine how desperate they were at that moment. Fortunately, there are many women who have survived by chance. But for them, surviving may not be a kind of luck, because they have been living in darkness for the latter half of their lives, and their survival is evidence to prove the Japanese’s inhumanity. Because they survived with strength, we could only know about the various crimes committed by Japan.
There is a lengthy documentary in China called “Twenty Two”, that tells the story about China’s surviving “comfort women” during the Japanese invasion of China. The film was directed by Guo Ke, with 22 comfort women participating in the filming. It was released in mainland China on August 14, 2017. Unfortunately, on November 9, 2023, Li Meijin, the victim of comfort women, passed away at the age of 98. It means that all the surviving women in the documentary “Twenty Two” have passed away.
Until now, Japan has refused to admit their crimes. However, history is there, and it’s useless for them to sophistry. But even in textbooks, they briefly mentioned or directly overturned the truth about that period of history, to the extent that young Japanese people today do not understand what happened back then. They can cover up, but Chinese people will never forget that shameful past.
Alpha Dad Overcomes Childhood Hardships To Gain Wealth, Respect & A Wife That Treats Him Like A King
Damn is this good. And man do I love his grandmother. You rock!
When I moved to Thailand, I was incredibly lonely.
Not speaking the language, I lived for months in silence. I desperately wanted human connection. I just wanted to speak with someone.
My standard for becoming friends with someone dropped to having the ability to speak English. That’s all it took.
My new best friends became a 70 year old English man and his Thai wife. They would take me to markets on the weekends sometimes and talk with me if I ate dinner at their shop.
When I walked around the lake every day, I became friends with a 40 year old Thai man who used to work on cruise ships and could speak a decent amount of English to me.
A little 17 year old girl from Uruguay that I met at the gym became one of my good friends as well, she was studying abroad to learn Thai.
For the first time in my life, I had friends of all ages from all backgrounds.
My whole life, I’ve only been friends with people who were within a couple years of my own age. The only older men I talked to was my grandpa, I’d never called an older man a friend. I avoided high schoolers. Forty year old men and women were my parents age, I didn’t want to hang out with them.
But, let me tell you, life became so much richer as soon as I did. 70 year old men have lived a lot of life and can teach you a lot of things. 40 year old cruise ship waiters can tell you about a lot of life experiences that you’ve never had. 17 year old girls from high school can teach you about their way of life in Uruguay and supporting them can bring a lot of meaning to your life.
I think most people limit themselves to a bubble of friends who are the same age as them and in the same stage of life. I think that really limits yourself and the depth of relationships you can have.
I want to stay open to everyone for the rest of my life. It’s so much better this way.
Cockroaches have made their way into my life, against my will, and to great inconvenience. Three years ago, my girlfriend cried into the phone for me to come over, “Please…please…it is twitching on my kitchen floor.” She sounded like a hostage. We went back and forth for two minutes, with me insisting I couldn’t come to her house.
“I’m busy writing. Just get a paper towel and flush it,” I said, trying to calm her down. It didn’t work. She begged and begged until I finally said, “I’m doing this once.” And then drove 20 minutes — just to kill a roach.
After we moved into our new house together, my war with the roaches truly began. Exterminating them took significant research and numerous failed attempts. Mine is a common problem, and has made me question the value of these little critters.
We should be impressed that a creature has survived so much research and resources put into their extermination, and pesticides that are only making them stronger. A roach always finds a way and there is no “walling them out”. To the shock of NASA’s employees, one even snuck onboard Apollo 12. They’d moved mountains to decontaminate the spacecraft and ensure nothing snuck on. Employees were even in denial, swearing the roach couldn’t be there when astronauts said they’d seen one. Nevertheless, one did, and Apollo 12 took off for the moon while gaining the nickname, “The Roach Coach”.
Roaches are so nimble that researchers at Cornell University explored how just flexible they are. In a test of increasingly smaller crevices, they discovered roaches could squeeze through 3 millimeter spaces, despite their back being 12 millimeters high. Their exoskeleton is indeed hard and breakable, but exists in sections connected by soft tissue that molds and bends. And even while pressed down tight with weight on their back, they can still move fast and with little regard for gravity. When adjusting for size, they run the equivalent of a human running 200 mph. They can run when missing four legs. They can climb vertically while missing two feet. Scientists proved that roaches could withstand 900 times their own bodyweight without taking damage.
A roach is also an extreme gymnast, with a hallmark move, where it quickly flips from the edge of a table to the underside, dangling by one leg in an instant. It often leaves home owners wondering where the roach went. And so, a cockroach’s incredible athleticism, nimbleness, and durability, make it the perfect model for robotics technology, as we continue to explore new planets and depths on Earth. These new robots may even save lives.
A new era of inspiration
At John’s Hopkins University, Dr. Chen Li and Dr. Sean Gart filmed cockroaches running and then played video back in slow motion, studying how the legs and arms sync and propel it forward. They took notes, in awe, and looked at means of replicating these efficiencies with robots. A cockroach typically deals with vegetation, leaf and stick covered terrain. It is highly complex to navigate, but cockroaches do so with extreme ease and efficiency.
This matters because robotics is moving into a new phase, where robots are moving from indoor testing to outdoors, which is why the most clever animal navigators, including snakes, octopuses, and arachnids, have attracted non-hostile attention from scientists. One of the signature challenges robots face, is moving through unpredictable terrain and being durable enough for random physical impacts.
The study of cockroaches, in particular, has led to a new branch of durable and penetrating robots that can climb high objects, crash hard, and still get back up and resume climbing. Professor Robert J. Full, of UC Berkley, has spent his career researching the nature of evolution-inspired design, and even attached tiny jetpacks to the sides of roaches, to test how well they climb vertically while being randomly jetted to the side. It was easy work — for the roaches.
His lab designed a tiny cockroach inspired robot, that squeezes through cracks, and even looks a bit like a roach. It could be useful for descending through cracks in rubble to search for survivors. It stands 75 millimeters tall and can squeeze down to 35 millimeters, which is almost, but not quite as good as roaches. It also has similar pliable and molding body parts, that allow it to bend and move in extremely tight and uneven spaces. Dr. Full routinely meets with first responders at disaster sites, to learn more about their needs as he continues to innovate this robot.
The necessity of studying them
It is as the old Sun Tzu saying goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Cockroaches are a brilliant species, without actually being brilliant.
When I met with a pest control expert, his feedback wasn’t what I expected. He said, “Don’t just spray every inch of a room’s perimeter, they’ll know it’s a trap.” Then, he showed me how to put tiny drops along walls, and in the underside of cupboards and tiny cracks between furniture and sliding drawers. “Think of all the tiniest openings possible, and think like a roach — and you’ll know where to put the spray,” he said. It is this intrinsic cleverness and efficient navigating that could manifest robots of incredible caliber and utility in the coming decades.
What’s remarkable is that cockroaches don’t rely heavily on their nervous system for movement like other mammals. Even when thrown off balance, yanked around, blasted with wind, and spun like a top, their bodies auto adjust without thought. This matters for robotics because engineers are constantly programming and scripting robots to manage uneven terrain, and think about where their feet are going.
The insight from a cockroach is that, perhaps engineers shouldn’t try so hard with this programming method. They should rely on predictable mechanics, that have built-in means to traverse steep rocks and slippery surfaces. In short, make it more natural. This could impact medical technology and prosthetics, and help people who’ve had strokes or major injuries, develop more fluid gaits.
The animal kingdom is, in a sense, the only alien intelligence we deal with. Species are of ingenious design through an evolutionary arms race, and can move and adjust to their environment in ways we’d have never dreamed of. Which is evident when trying to step on a roach and you miss in the last moment, or even when you hit it, it manages to keep running. Who wouldn’t want this fortitude and evasiveness?
Perhaps what strikes me most, is that a bug with little cognitive function, has evolved to elude the smartest of all known species, and who is quite hostile to its presence. A future where nature-inspired robotics, combined with artificial intelligence, could save lives in search and rescue, improve exploration of new places and planets, and improve lives for the disabled. All thanks to our most ancient and enduring pest.
Mix crumbs together with butter or margarine thoroughly. Spread the mixture on sides and bottoms of a 9-inch springform pan to form a crust.
Take 2 ounces of fudge and spread on top of crumbs. Place 1/4 gallon of ice cream on top of fudge. Next, spread 2 ounces of fudge over ice cream then place 4 ounces of coconut. Place remaining ice cream on coconut and follow with 2 ounces fudge, 4 ounces almonds and 4 ounces coconut as done before. Top with whipped cream and remaining almonds and coconut. Place in deep freezer for 3 to 4 hours.
Notes
Roasted Coconut and Almonds: Place coconut on a metal sheet pan and put into oven at 350 degrees F for approximately 3 1/2 minutes, stirring every 30 seconds. Do the same for almonds but increase the time to 4 minutes.
When I was running from an abusive situation, i lived in a shelter on welfare. After my 2 month stay was up, i had to find a room to rent or they’d send me to a homeless shelter (the one i was in was for female abuse victims and their children if they have any. Since there was a high demand for rooms there, the stays were short). I ended up finding a room that was 500$ per month. On welfare as a single person with no kids, I got 709$ per month. I went to view the room and the landlord asked me why I wanted to live there. I explained the situation and he immediately said yes. I ended up moving in not even a week later. He let me live there for free with unlimited wifi and cable TV included for 8 months of my 13 month stay with him. After the 8 months I had a job and could pay the rent, but even then he said if I couldnt make the rent to let him know. Hed share his food from his fridge with me, give me cash money randomly with notes that said things like “buy whatever you want” and “have a nice day”, hed offer to give me rides to the store and job interviews, he offered to get me a bus pass (85$ for one that lasts a month), hed invite me to share BBQs with him, his wife and the other 4 tenants. He bought everyone Christmas gifts (a box of Ferrero Roche chocolates and a 50$ amazon gift card). He never asked for anything back. He became more like a friend to me than a landlord. He was amazing
My stepdad beat me when I was between 8 and 11. He would wait until I wasn’t looking, then sneak up behind me with a riding crop and hit me behind the knees. My mother would not come to my defense, no matter how hard I cried. I had no idea how to process this situation. I felt like my mother betrayed me and that the legal system was on her side since she got custody of us (my sister and me) when she divorced my dad. I had thoughts about suicide, but we only lived on the second floor, so jumping wasn’t an option. There were railroad tracks nearby, so I could have jumped in front of a train. Basically, it was the lowest point of my life… and I was 11. Somehow I found the strength to get past this and accepted that beatings were a thing now. I could make it through this. I had to just count on myself to deal with the pain and betrayal.
Eventually, he beat me so bad that when my dad came to pick us up for one of our weekends with him, I was bleeding from a ruptured eardrum. My dad almost lost it. He was going to kill my stepdad. I asked him to just take me to a doctor and deal with the rest of the shit later. He did. He also demanded custody. My mom accepted immediately. I knew then that I was a commodity to her. I’ve written her out of my life for the most part. We only talk on birthdays and Christmas.
My dad did his best and I think he really supported me up until I lost him to brain cancer in January 2016. He was my Yoda, my Gandalf, my friend. I miss him daily. He saved my life.
KFC – always popular for making rules and rolling it back badly. As a student in UK, I worked as a parttimer in KFC for two reasons 1) Money I get paid 2) Food I’m allowed to eat during breaks.
Staffs who work in KFC are allowed to take KFC food during lunch breaks. I know staffs who even took a bucket of chicken for lunch , but then they’re hard workers and smart workers – a pillar of support behind the enormous profit KFC makes per shift.
One fine day, the circle management decided to do some cost cutting – made a rule that staffs are allowed to take only limited food for lunch. A burger, fries and a cup of soft drink. Nothing more.
Rationing food for staffs — nobody likes it. The store manager would check how much food you take for lunch , particularly if he’s a bully , that’s annoying as hell.
Time for payback ….
We came with a plan.
If the store closes by 10 pm, we started to over cook by 9pm, pile up all the racks with cooked food.
Now the “kick in the butt” is back on the store manager – it’s his head ache to sell all the cooked food before closing or else the food is reported as “unsold” in records. This means he gets questioned for poor sales, losses his incentives and what not
He can’t ask us not to over cook because incase there’s customer flow and there’s food shortage – we can do nothing. That affects the rating
Above all , staff food was rationed as a means of cost cutting. Now the management has learnt -” you touch my food, now deal with the loss mate, let’s see how you make profit”.
Within a week , the rule of food rationing was rolled back. The management went in knees —” take as much food you want for lunch, but please don’t overcook at closing time.
The management has learnt a hard lesson — it’s not just the store manager but the staff who knows how to run a shift with better profits.
No food chain can make profits without staff cooperation
This one didn’t necessarily change how I viewed my mom but it sure gave me a good (but bittersweet) laugh.
My mom was a hoarder. Her home was filled with junk from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She just couldn’t bear to get rid of anything because she thought she might “need” it someday. The fact that she couldn’t find it if she did need it was lost on her.
Anyhoo, the day came when we had to move mom into a care home. My sister and I sat mom in a cleared corner of a couch and let her “help” by telling us “yay or nay” on keeping certain things. In the background, our team was hauling soooo much crap out into a bin without her knowing. We’d bring random boxes and let mom “sort” through them to keep her occupied. One or the other of us would sit with her and talk while the others worked. In the end, we actually kept only enough clothes and books and personal items to fit in the care home room we’d lined up for her.
During the course of the day we noticed that mom had acquired a VERY large number of nail clippers over the years. Being tiny items that you need fairly often, she was constantly leaving them here or there and losing them. The people helping would laugh and say “found another one!” every time they spotted one. In the end we found about 100 nail clippers! (We also found a mini fridge that had been buried in the back, filled with sickeningly, gaggingly, gross, rotten, mouldy food!)
Sometimes you can laugh and feel pain at the same time, I guess. It was a time of bonding for my sister and I. Mom had to give her beloved dog Spike to a friend and move away from the town that had been her home for decades. It was very painful for all of us but in a way it was also life-affirming if that makes sense.
I bought a large framed picture of James Butler Hickock or Wild Bill. I loved the photo.
I hung the picture in my sunroom right beside the back door. It was like he was looking right at me and his eyes followed me everywhere I went.
I read quite a few books about this man and he led a very interesting life as a soldier, scout, lawman, cattle rustler, gunslinger, gambler, showman, and actor.
We even visited Deadwood, South Dakota where he lived the last years of his life before being killed at a card game he was playing in 1876, the same year Custer died. We went to the saloon where he was shot and visited his grave on Mt. Moriah, and there beside him was the grave of Calamity Jane who was buried when she died in 1903.
So at first, every morning I walked out that door, I’d say, “Morning Bill,” and everytime I walked in that door at night, I’d say, “Night Bill.” All in fun.
Poor old Bill was probably lonely out there as he guarded the house. Was probably also cold at times. But those steely eyes would sure look at me. Sometimes he looked sad, sometimes amused like he had the slightest smile on his face. He probably enjoyed my pipe or cigar smoke that floated around the room while I had a few puffs. But I feel he looks forward to my good mornings and good nights, and I feel that if I forget to say those things to him, well, might not bode well. Superstitious I guess.
So every morning and every night, I talk to Bill and I think it’s okay. Weird, but okay.
Every American should seriously think about this. Every empire that come and gone since time in memorial, went because of over intervention, over interference and over reaching to the point that it could no longer sustain itself. And they self implode and civil war is inevitable.
The U.S. is not getting there, it is indeed there now and almost beyond redemption. Seriously, Americans must jointly and severally destroy the U.S. military industrial complex before it destroy all of you. They are the single most important reason that the US is drag into conflicts after conflicts. Due to them, your real standard of living has not grown since 1960! Your great grand parents have a better standard of living compared to you!
Please think seriously about your debts. Just 10 years ago your debt was a mere USD10 trillion today it is USD34 trillion precisely 340% increase in a decade. At the rate you are going by 2034 the U.S. debts will be USD100 trillion at least! Just paying interest alone at 5% is USD5 trillion dollars per annum.
Seriously, don’t let anyone fool you! 5 trillion is so humongous your nation will never be able to do anything else. Today you can argue that the U.S. infrastructure is lying dilapidated, your homeless has reached a million, a third of Americans are in debt and can’t afford healthcare and college education. It can only afford one and only one thing. Wage more wars! Wars enriched 0.01% of Americans! Your politicians and the deep state!
China is a million times more healthier than the U.S. that is your problem right here! China’s saving is so colossal it save a U.K GDP a year. China’s debts is USD 15 trillion and almost 100% of it is investment that grows China’s capacity! Build its state or art technology and infrastructure, graduate STEM engineers the size of the entire US STEM experts each year!
This means China grow its capacity phenomenally while the US fall back every year due to your liabilities. Let me be brutally honest, you don’t stand a chance against China! But you may save the US that still remain a nation and a strong 2nd largest economy for 50 years till India catches up! Most importantly your citizens get back its prosperity and avoid total collapse! Do it before it is too late. Get rid of the neocons, eradicate the deep state, get ride of NRA and CIA.
China cannot be stop, the best you can do is be strong and wealthy again.
Top Gun with a Cat
Enjoy this FUN short video. I hope it makes your day. I know that it did mine!
When I was a young boy, perhaps in second grade, we lived in Monroe , CT. It was a housing development that was being carved out of the forests, and was very nice. We only lived there for a year or so, before my father was transferred to Pittsburgh. We sold the place. Bad move, as the house ended up being worth millions of dollars.
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Anyways, at that time in my life, I loved roaming the woods. All 7 years old, and it was a big part of my childhood.
I would often go into the homes being constructed with wire cutters and rip out the wiring and electronics for fun. Oh, that is, until my father had a talk with a building contractor. LOL.
But, you know what?
Yeah, what I most remember about that time was spending all day hiking and exploring, and then coming home to a nice big “sit down” dinner. These were often improved upon as I got older, but at that time, my mother was just getting into her “stride” and it was simple but delicious fare.
Meatloaf, roasts, soups, chicken, and the like. All very delicious and filling.
Instant Pot Spaghetti 1
One of my fondest memories was the meat-laden spaghetti, with plain “wonder bread” on the side, and a nice large salad. Other popular meals consisted of pork chutney over rice, and submarine sandwich meals.
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But it’s the spaghetti that I miss the most.
one pot spaghetti and meat sauce image 9
I used to take the bread, and butter both sides. Then, I would spoon the spaghetti into the bread, making a fine thick sandwich. Oh, I was so simple and silly then.
I guess the MM audiences would go “ohhh yuck” at this story. But for me, nah. it’s good memories and good times.
I was a young, recently divorced, single mother of a 3 year old and one Christmas my grandmother gave me a HUGE box to open. In that box I found a little bit of everything! It had paper towels. Toilet paper, cleaning supplies, canned goods and many other items that you may want or need for your home and pantry! I was so grateful as it is pretty costly when you run out of everything especially all at the same time and because my Grandmother had no money she said she added everything a little at a time all throughout the year in order to help me the best way she could. My Grandmother was the sweetest, kindest Lady you’d ever know. I loved her with my whole heart!
I made $7.50 per hour for 3 years before I got a sweet .50 raise that catapulted me no where.
And I only got that because the lady was guilted into it.
I was told, as most people are, if you work hard and prove yourself, you will make more in time. Well that never really happened.
When I first started I just answered phones and worked the register. Then I got my vehicle inspectors license and begin inspecting vehicles. And answering phones and the register.
The business was a window tinting business, primarily, and they tinted vehicles, homes and commercial buildings. Soon I was prepping jobs for tint and doing bids for residential and commercial jobs. And doing well, I might add!
Then helping with the books. Opening, closing, picking up and dropping off customers. Driving out of town to pick up materials. And finally tinting commercial windows.
And I worked, often 80 hours per week. For $8 per hour. Which is a problem because at a certain point, over time starts to hurt. The extra would be taken out in taxes and the effort is not worth it.
Let me also mention that I didn’t have a car and used a company truck for company business but my commute to and from work everyday was just over 3 hours. I woke up at 4 to be there at 8:30. (Hitchhiked, rode 2 buses and walked…both ways…yep)
When I inquired about a raise she kept putting me off. She’d think about it. Couldn’t afford it, etc. Finally she said to me…
”It’s not like you need more money. It’s not like you have a family to take care of, house or car. It’s not like you have any bills.”
I will never ever, forget that. Ever.
Apparently it never occurred to her that I didn’t have any of those things because I was poor. And it was totally ok with her if I never had anything because it benefitted her.
And I had other issues with the place like rarely getting a day off and it would be the end of the world if I took a break at work because only smokers are allowed breaks. Twenty breaks, a hundred, doesn’t matter, because you need those cigarette breaks!
“If you don’t like it, then go work somewhere else.”
When she told me that.
I quit.
She was so certain I would come back because I had no prospects. Two weeks later, a friend told me she was looking for me, she wanted me to come back.
Why, you might ask??
Because she can’t find any decent help (read: people who’ll work for nothing!). And she wanted me to come back for…
Wait for it…
$8.50!!
See, I needed to understand that she could not afford more than that.
I told her. “No thanks.”
Then she called me selfish. She was struggling to find help and I didn’t care. Selfish!!
She ended up having to hire 4 other people. And for the next 5 years she contacted me off and on to try to get me to come back.
“Ok, how about $9! Be reasonable!!”
So on and so forth until she got to $12 over time.
I can’t honestly say I was irreplaceable. I can say that she needed a lot more help after I left. I can also say the business did not exist the fifth year after I’d gone.
I learned a very important lesson working for her. I needed to look out for myself. Work hard but only stay so long, based on the rate, frequency and size of raises. And all the while, always keep my ear to the ground for other opportunities.
I need to look out for me with the same ferocity the companies look out for their own interests.
In 100 years 5% of those who use the U.S. dollar will remember how it look. And 15% of the nations who bought weapons in 2023 will still use weapons from the U.S. still! In 100 years US economy will be lying at best a distant 3rd behind China and India by a very long way. China will be roughly 5–6 times the U.S. size and even India will be close to double that of the USA!
The G7 at best is a fifth the size on BRiCS economy. The U.S. will be broken up into some 3–4 nations. And Democrats and Republicans are close to the full scale or outright U.S. civil war 2.0 in 2123! The U.S. and some 4–5 die hard dogs like UK, Australia and Canada will meet and still talk shit. But no one bother, no one even listen.
China has made the world 10 times more prosperous and 20 times more peaceful by then. Talking about the U.S. in 2123 is like talking about the former Yugoslavia today. By 2023 the U.S. would have long collapse and implode it’s economy and a full scale fight between Democrats and Republicans and also between the whites and coloured and also between the rich and poor has destroyed the so call liberal democracy.
In 100 years, China is selling moon and space tourism, become the leader in autonomous vehicles, supersonic planes, biggest ports and airports world wide. China will be in the business of hypersonic weapons, quantum computers. Artificial intelligence, Bio technology and nuclear technologies. A far cry from selling cheap T-shirts and plastic toys in 1980! By 2123. China has built an alternative Panama and Suez Canal 5 times its size! And a bridge to cross Russia to Alaska!
BRICS by that time consist of 50 nations. And gets supports from 190 out of 200 nations. Meanwhile as many as 10 million are living in tents homeless in the U.S. suburbs. Random mass shootings incidents happened at least 50 times a day in the U.S. killing roughly 100 people a day in the U.S. Confederate flag flies more widely than the Stars and Stripes in the U.S. in 2123.
China has just given warnings on visiting certain parts of the USA no different from the warnings of visiting Ethiopia or Yemen in 2000. That is what is likely happening in 2123 a hundred years from now. But the U.S. still scream liberal democracy like a 80 years old lone hippie!
My husband and I are avid cruisers, which means food, food, and more food. That being said, I typically eat what I choose, save the occasional pick of something that is just not good. I usually eat breakfast alone, as he is still sleeping, and I sit and people watch in the buffet. My breakfast is always the same: oatmeal with fruit, some scrambled eggs, and a couple of pieces of ham or Canadian bacon. The same as I eat at home, essentially. I get to witness the Sodom and Gommorah of food sin every day on a cruise, especially at breakfast. Football sized mounds of food get piled on a plate, and a lot of it is eaten. But it pains me to see a muffin with one bite. A bowl of cereal that had one bite, uneaten food galore. Yes, we pay for the food in our cruise fare, but it is as though we have no conscience when it comes to waste. We often stop in Haiti at the cruise line’s resort, and they prepare a barbeque style lunch there. What many don’t know is that the leftovers are given to the locals, and I have watched them pick a piece of discarded watermelon off of the ground and brush off the sand to eat. While people are tossing full plates of food into the trash, these people are desperate for our scraps.
Food waste bothers me. For the farmer that took the time to sow the crops. For the cow kept pregnant to provide milk. For the pig slaughtered to provide us with ribs and bacon. For the countless hours spent preparing the food. We don’t honor what we have. We assume it is there because most of us have not had to go without. I am lucky, I always had a meal to eat, and I don’t waste food. I eat leftovers until they are gone, I cut my own fruit so that I can get the most out of the rind, and I toss produce scraps out for the deer and groundhogs that frequent my backyard.
We don’t appreciate the food we have. That is the sin.
The future of American women
Cajun Chicken Club Sandwich
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 slices Swiss cheese
1/4 cup Parmesan salad dressing
4 hoagie rolls, split and toasted
8 slices tomato
8 strips bacon, cooked
Instructions
Pound the chicken to 3/8-inch thickness; sprinkle with Cajun seasoning.
In a large skillet, cook the chicken in oil for 5 minutes on each side or until no longer pink.
Place one slice cheese over each chicken piece.
Remove from the heat; cover and let stand for 1 minute or until cheese begins to melt.
Spread dressing over cut sides of rolls.
Place two slices of tomato on bottom of bun, top with chicken and two strips of bacon.
Serve with crispy fries or potato salad on the side.
When I was married to my exhusband, I got a ‘‘bee in my bonnet’ that I wanted to learn how to sew. I’d never sewed a day in my life. So we went to different places, looking at machines. Hubs was a ‘research on Consumer Reports’ kinda guy. He didn’t want to buy something that would fall apart. Who knows though, honestly, if I would suck at this?! I’m not sure if he looked at it that way. He just wanted to get me something good.
So, we kind of narrowed it down to a couple, and tbh, they were ridiculously nice. One was a Singer, the other I don’t remember but it was pricey I think like $800 in like 1990. Crazy, for just wanting to try something. It was going to be a ““surprise” for Christmas… but I sneaked a look in his wallet one night (I KNOW, bad wifey) and saw he bought the $800 wonder. I was SOOO excited!!
Christmas morning comes.
I’m still very excited, because this IS an awesome gift. Knowing did not diminish my excitement. I opened up the wrapping, and inside, it was a different machine.
Tears rolled down my face and I couldn’t speak. The $800 wonder wasn’t there. Apparently, he had exchanged it. For an upgraded, fancy $1100. Wonder.
It was amazing. It did embroidery, a zillion stitches. It was a very high quality name I can’t spell 😂 Husqvarna? But wait, there’s more. There’s another box. Inside that box was a 5 thread Serger, a BabyLoc. I had everything I needed to be successful.
I sewed my butt off for years.
But I’ll never forget that feeling of ““I want to give you the moon” that he gave me that Christmas. That was epic.❤️
If the controls are successful, they could handicap China for a generation; if they fail, they may backfire spectacularly, hastening the very future the United States is trying desperately to avoid. Alex W. Palmer, NYT.
The Chinese cannot understand why we fight with “Fists of Seven Injuries” (七伤拳), inflicting as much harm on ourselves as on our target. The sanctions hit our high-tech companies hard, as they lose not only their biggest market, but also important partners in their supply chain. Qualcomm’s profits fell 23%. Samsung’s dropped 95% . Louise Low. Face-off on the Grand Chessboard.
The year of living vulnerably: 2015
By 2015, when President Xi warned of China’s vulnerability to a chip embargo his team, led by the redoubtable Liu He, had spent two years preparing to create an indigenous chip industry. By 2022, the first fabs were producing commodity chips in high volumes at low cost and China spent $300 billion importing high-end chips.
The first breakthrough came when Huawei quietly released its 7 nm. Kirin 9000 chipsets, and its Mate 60 phone sales quickly surpassed Apple’s – as they were doing when the US embargoed Huawei. While the Kirin CPU was a remarkable achievement, professionals were more impressed by Huawei’s indigenous communications chips, like cellular modems, previously a Qualcomm semi-monopoly.
Three months later, YMTC shipped its 232-layer 3D TLC NAND memory chips. Their huge capacity and speedy 12 GB/s I/O make bleeding-edge drives possible.
But the sexiest market right now is insulated gate bipolar transistors, IGBTs. They’re the CPU ‘brains’ that conduct the orchestra of sensors and inputs and reduce EVs’ power loss and improve reliability. They’re expensive: 7% – 10% of an EVs’ final cost. Back in 2020, BYD supplied IGBTs for 20% of Chinese EVs’ and Infineon supplied 58%. The IGBT market has grown from $5.27 billion then to $8.42 billion this year and expects CAGR of 15.7% for some years.
There’s also money to be made in less sexy chips, like microcontrollers, says TP Huang. “Has anyone heard of Zhixin’s chips? You’ll find SMIC’s 40nm auto grade processor in Zhixin’s MCU microcontroller – domestically designed, fabbed and packaged entirely in China. This has huge implications for STMicro, Texas Instruments, Infineon and TSMC. Few automotive applications will ever need processes beyond 28 or 40nm, which is SMIC’s mass production sweet spot. Why wouldn’t Chinese automakers buy domestically? I bet Wall Street analysts covering TI have never looked into new Chinese competitors and considered what that entails. SMIC will be a monster soon enough”.
I was strung out for about 4 years from shooting up dope. After losing almost everything, I finally snapped out of it. It took, however, losing friends, my career, my therapist, my car, my motorcycle, my musical equipment, my instruments, my tools, my electricity, my water, all my savings which was in the tens of thousands, my sanity, almost my freedom, almost my life, and almost my house. I’m still in danger of losing it bc of unpaid property taxes of 3 years now going on 4. So when I was about 2–3 months sober, I had a friend drive me to Little Caesars to see if they were hiring. The manager was there. I asked. She said yes. Then she asked if I had manager experience. I said no…but I kinda did. I just wasn’t prepared for that gig being that I’m just barely out of a horrific addiction. She asked if I had an ID and a bank account for direct deposit. I said yes to the ID but no to bank account. She told me where I can get one at that moment and as soon as I get it to come back and I can begin to fill out the paperwork. Within 30 mins I was hired & started to fill out the necessary forms for employment. This was at the end of January this year and I’m still there and I’m sober.
I know this is a long story for such a question. My reason for including the other info is strictly for those that are currently where I was at when this happened. If this can help one person snap out of it then I will feel like I did a tremendous good for not just that one person but the world. Drug addiction affects way more than the drug addict. If you’re struggling, don’t give up. Be strong. It may take one time to quit or many times. Just don’t give up on yourself. I now have electricity and water and trash service. My house is still a wreck but it’s come a long way. I rode my bike to and from work which was 8 miles there and 8 miles back. But now I have a vehicle. I’m 6 feet tall and at the height of my addiction I weighed about 155lbs. Now I weigh a plump 210lbs. With time, that will change bc I want to be physically healthy. I am, w/o a doubt, physically healthier now than I was when I was using. And I prefer this to that any day. So if you’re reading this, you have to be strong and committed to this change no matter how tough it gets. It’ll get better. There’ll be shit days but it’ll pass. Keep going. We are made of sterner stuff. We’ve been through hell but now we are returning. And don’t think of it as starting over. You’re continuing your journey w a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. You may have lost everything but you’re not starting over. I wish you luck and lots of love. You’re not alone. I know that feeling of loneliness and despair. I felt lonely all throughout my journey through hell. But I wasn’t. You aren’t. If you need someone to vent w, message me. I’ll listen. I will not judge. If not me, reach out to someone. Anyone. And if you get rejected, fuck them. Move on. Don’t let that deter you. Look at me. I’m still here and am getting better everyday. Sure, we are all different but, in many ways, we are the same. We fuck up, and to fuck up is human.
One more thing: don’t beat yourself up if you quit and then go back to using again. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. Just don’t let that stop you from quitting again. I have days when I feel so weak. I miss it so much. Coupled w the overwhelming feeling of how far I have to go to get back to where I was before my downfall, it feels hopeless. These moments test me, and I’ve come so close to shooting up again but I haven’t. I hope I don’t. In my journey, I always feel so glad I didn’t give in. Those feelings will wash away but they’ll be back again like waves in the ocean. You just stay afloat. It’ll pass and you’ll admire yourself for not giving in after it flows away. You’ll be proud of how strong you are becoming.
Anyway, there are my 2 cents.
Love yourself.
Love those around you.
Don’t be afraid to say it.
Don’t be afraid to show it.
Amp It The Fuck Up!!!
Antony Blinken Wrecked By Protesters In Congress
Great episode, Lee. Your humor is top dog here.
China and the Chip Wars: a Battle It Cannot Afford to Lose
The race for supremacy in the semiconductor industry is about much more than just technological dominance. It is about shaping the future of civilization.
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“Can China ace the chip wars?” This was the central question that framed my talk at the Future of Finance China Forum held in Beijing on July 28. The forum, run by The Asian Banker, served as a critical platform for thought leaders amid the unpredictable economic and financial landscape of 2023.
While these wide-ranging discussions were informative, my focus was squarely on the place and potential of China in the semiconductor industry. Instead of merely asking if China can win the chip wars, it’s more insightful to consider whether China can afford not to. This reframing provides a sharper understanding of the stakes for China’s economy and its global standing in the semiconductor industry.
Current situation
“Valuation extravaganza” is a phrase I use to describe the surging market caps of companies like Nvidia and AMD. The remarkable value growth of these companies has raised eyebrows and led to questions about whether we’re witnessing a semiconductor bubble. However, the rational ubiquity of semiconductors, essential to various sectors, might justify these high valuations.
In 2021, over 1.1 trillion chips were shipped worldwide, finding their way into everything from cars and consumer electronics to industrial applications. Semiconductors, quietly yet crucially, have become a part of nearly every aspect of modern life. According to a recent survey of industry executives, the industry’s future direction is being steered by emerging sectors like the metaverse, sustainability, mobility, and digital health – each calling for unique semiconductor capabilities.
This importance of semiconductors is reflected in the market’s response. Nvidia’s stock price tripled last year raising its valuation to more than $1 trillion with a Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio over 240. AMD’s stock price has also doubled, its P/E ratio almost reaching 500. This valuation growth is partly due to the robust demand for semiconductors, with the global market projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2032.
Even with the current chip shortage, some industry observers argue that these high valuations are justified. They view the long-term growth prospects for the industry as strong and believe these valuations are based on the expectation of persistent semiconductor demand.
Despite short-term disruptions like the global chip shortage, the long-term outlook for the semiconductor industry remains bright. Semiconductors play an integral role in the global economy, and their importance will continue to grow in the future, shaping our tech-driven world in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
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Future growth
We must also consider the potential drivers of future chip demand, taking into account the radical changes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may bring. A compelling perspective on this comes from Sam Altman, a prominent figure in the tech industry and CEO of OpenAI, in his manifesto “Moore’s Law for Everything”.
Altman applies the principle of Moore’s Law, which traditionally refers to the exponential growth in computing power, to a broader societal context, predicting a future where rapid growth permeates all facets of our lives and economy. Coined by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, the law originally observed that the number of transistors on a microchip double roughly every 18 months. Altman, however, envisions its implications beyond the realm of computing power.
This broader interpretation anticipates an era of abundance, where the ubiquitous adoption of AI causes a steep drop in labor costs that fundamentally transforms society. Altman posits that as automation replaces human tasks from plumbing to R&D, labor costs will plunge, leading to significantly cheaper goods and services. The cost of the essential inputs shifts from labor and raw materials to data, driving prices towards zero and marking the advent of an era of profound abundance.
But abundance here isn’t just about an increase in available goods and services. It’s also about equalizing access to these resources, democratizing what was once the exclusive privilege of the affluent. High-quality healthcare, education, travel experiences, and even a secure standard of living—Altman’s vision suggests these will be accessible to far more people, with the cost of a “great life” approaching zero.
At the core of this transformation is AI, its learning and decision-making abilities propelling us towards this era of abundance. Yet, the manifestation of this AI-driven prosperity depends heavily on a robust, efficient, and advanced computational infrastructure— semiconductors or chips. Semiconductors are the foundation of our digital world, powering everything from personal devices to advanced machinery.
The complexity and scale of AI necessitate more advanced and efficient semiconductors. The AI algorithms promising this era of abundance require enormous computational power to process large volumes of data and make complex calculations. The task of providing this computational power depends on a wide range of semiconductors.
The abundance that Altman predicts will not only be driven by AI but will also critically hinge on the availability and advancement of semiconductors. In the coming era of AI-driven abundance, those countries and companies that can ensure a stable supply of chips will hold the upper hand. Thus, as China strategizes to win the chip wars, the stakes become clear—it’s not just about surviving but thriving in this world of unlimited abundance.
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Domestic politics and geopolitics
In the global context of the race for technological supremacy, the semiconductor industry is emerging as a key battleground. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with its potential to usher in an era of unprecedented abundance and revolutionize labor economics, amplifies the national security implications of the semiconductor industry. Indeed, the ‘resilient redesign’ of the global supply chain is becoming an essential facet of national strategies to ensure sustained success in this critical sector.
The complex web of today’s supply chain, spanning continents and countless entities, is inherently vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and pressures. The need for countries to develop resilient domestic capacities is becoming increasingly clear. Governments worldwide are already showing a keen interest in the sector’s growth and security, a trend that is set to heighten as strategic reorientations, regulatory shifts, and a heightened focus on security come into play. The semiconductor industry is becoming a significant geopolitical flashpoint, a field of intense competition for technological dominance.
In the context of China’s domestic politics, this resonates profoundly with President Xi Jinping’s vision of ‘common prosperity’. The potential abundance enabled by AI could pave the way for realizing this vision, democratizing access to what is currently available only to the affluent and creating a more equal society. The era of abundance that Sam Altman envisions could, in fact, help manifest President Xi’s aspiration for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
In this light, China’s broad conception of national security – which encompasses not only traditional military aspects but also economic and even cultural security – becomes particularly relevant. The advancements in AI, underpinned by the semiconductor industry, will be vital for maintaining and enhancing China’s national security in this broad sense.
Therefore, China cannot afford to lose the ‘chip war’. The stakes are beyond high – economic vitality, technological advancement, geopolitical influence and even the future of the human race. The semiconductor industry is not just another industry; it is a cornerstone upon which human civilization may be decided.
In conclusion, the race for supremacy in the semiconductor industry is about much more than just technological dominance. It is about shaping the future of civilization. For China, acing the chip wars is not just a matter of national security in the traditional sense. It is also about securing the future of its society and realizing its vision of prosperity for all.
Before a class room of three hundred 1st year students, I was teaching, and my cell phone started vibrating. And I totally froze.
Just a couple of months earlier, I had become a father for the first time, and my girlfriend and I had agreed not to call during class hours, unless it was an emergency.
Often, I muted my cell phone during class hours, but this time I had forgotten. And this time the phone also rang. My girlfriend was the only person who would ring me at this unearthly hour in the morning. And suddenly it crossed my mind. Something is wrong with the baby.
Instead of two minutes, I had more than fifteen minutes left to cover while my mind blocked my every mathematical thought. So I taught the rest of the class through a true other-worldly out-of-body experience — I literally heard myself talking to the students, explaining things on the blackboard, and answering questions, while I was constantly thinking —
Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby—Something is wrong with the baby.
When class was over and questions had been answered, I immediately called my girlfriend. She had forgotten about our agreement.
I’m a landlord and went to renew the lease on one of my rentals once. And when I pulled in to the neighborhood and turned the corner towards the house, the very first thing I saw was the screen door hanging off the front of the house.
I pulled into the driveway, knocked on the door, and while I was waiting for them to answer I looked at the screen door. It was literally ripped off its hinges.
Then they came out and greeted me as if nothing had ever happened.. I asked what happened to the door, and I swear they both looked me straight in the eye and said..
“It was like that when we moved in.” I was absolutely shocked…
I said, “Doug. You two have been here for TWO YEARS. You signed a move-in checklist when you first moved in that said everything was ok. I took and have pictures of everything before you moved in. And last but not least, I was here exactly ONE year ago to renew your lease then! Now, is this seriously your story, and are you sure it’s the one you want to stick to??”
“Yes.. It was like that when we moved in.”
So I called bullshit and told them that I would not renew their lease, and to be out before the end of the week. OR if they wanted to stay then they could fix the door.
They fixed it – reluctantly. Still swearing that it was like that when they moved in.
When I was an administrative assistant to the dean of a department at a 2 year college, there were a couple times during the year that I ate at my desk for various reasons. There was another admin in a different department that took a dislike to me and tried to get me in trouble for only taking 30 mins to eat then leaving 30 mins early. She went to my boss and he said I had his permission to do so. She then went to HR to file a complaint and I got called in. After that, I requested a sit down with HR, my boss, her and her boss which we had. Over several weeks, I had documented everything she had said and done to undermine me and she turned beet red and had no real defense since she documented nothing. A couple of weeks later, she no longer worked there and they hired a woman who became a good friend.
Document everything—day, time, incident, what was said—and keep it in a safe place. I used an old fashioned college notebook and hand wrote everything with just a blank line between each incident. I about filled the notebook in less than a month.
He was the head janitor at my school, a teddy bear of a man, under 5 feet tall with the sweetest little smile and laugh. He had worked at the school since he was a teen and was due to retire.
Da Tuk (not his real name) was gentle, kind and generous, a soft touch for a sob story. He and his family had just enough but always ended with too little because of his ‘kindness.’
A relative had begged him for a large sum, almost all that Da Tuk and his wife had saved for a deposit on a home. He signed over a land deed to Da Tuk and then disappeared into the gambling dens of Klong Tuey.
When Da Tuk took his family to see the land, they found a hilly, barren, nowhere-near-anywhere, unsellable plot. Da Tuk was inconsolable, realizing that he had been duped and had lost almost everything.
Fortunately, the chairman of the school found a way to help the family to buy a small house and deal with the costs of their children’s educations. They never really recovered from the loss.
As the school grew, so did Da Tuk’s staff, to the point where he was overwhelmed. An ‘assistant’ was hired but was, in fact, in charge. However, he always treated Da Tuk as the boss and saw to it that others did as well.
For Da Tuk’s retirement day, the Board had arranged for a huge luncheon, and we were all seated, waiting for Da Tuk.
When he arrived, he looked stunned, which surprised us because everyone had been talking about the party and teasing him for over a month.
Then an equally stunned member of the Board made a shocking announcement.
Da Tuk had just been paid forty million baht (approximately two million U.S. dollars) for that ‘worthless’ land because it was adjacent to the planned eastern seaboard industrial estate.
I got laid off from my work. It’s an awful experience. I just had the yearly performance review and got a raise, I was thinking ‘life is freaking good’, then one fine morning, I woke up to a sudden 1:1 from my boss, and he told me I was let go (together with half of the company).
It’s unexpected, and I was shocked.
I sent my coworkers texts, told them my goodbyes and my wish to stay in touch with them.
All of them offered the same message:
Please let me know how I can help in any way at all!
I was touched seeing those messages, truly.
The only thing I asked from them was: I need to retouch my Linkedin Profile, the job market right now is super tough and competitive, anything can help my profile stands out would mean a great deal and I really appreciate a recommendation from them – if they have a few minutes to write me one. It would be a huge help.
Only 2 out of 10 people offered me the message to help in any way actually did give me a recommendation. And one of them actually referred me everywhere she could trying to help me to get interviews.
I don’t think any less of the 8 people that didn’t give me a recommendation. I understand perfectly that there are millions reasons for that, like I might not worth giving a recommendation, or they just simply forgot to give one, or writing a recommendation is not their cup of tea, etc… I just wish they didn’t tell me that they would help in any way if they didn’t mean it.
And I do admire the ones that offer and live up with their saying “let me know how I can help in any way”
Being a person of their own words is a super power.
Way out in the stick in the north of England there was huge project ongoing to build a dam. A new site manager had been brought in because workers were reportedly lazy, either turning up late or skiving off down the local pub (which I worked in) during working hours. On his first day on the job he grabbed someone from the admin office and headed off round the site looking for a sacrificial lamb. He was going to fire someone as an example to the rest of the staff.
After half an hour or so he came across a young guy sitting behind a building, against a wall, drinking coffee.
“Who are you?” he bellowed. “What’s it got to do you with you?” asked the guy. “I’m the new site manager, who are you, and where do you work?” “Fuck off, leave me alone!”, replied the young guy. “OK, you’ve had your chance, you’re fired!” He turned to the admin guy, “get his details, give him his cards!” The site manager then stormed off thinking this was a good start to his tenure.
Later that day I was serving behind the bar in the pub and the guy came walking in. “Give me a pint of Guinness, I’ve just been fired”. “Oh dear, first one’s on the house!” “Cheers, that’s very nice of you.” he replied. He had his Guinness then asked how much? I said, “no, it’s on the house. Anyone who gets fired from the site gets a free beer.” “No – it’s okay, I’d better pay!” “But you got fired – it’s free!” “I did get fired. I’m just sitting there having a cup of coffee when this idiot appears out of nowhere screaming and shouting at me, and fires me on the spot. He seemed so happy about it I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t work for him, and I’m just a hiker who had stopped for a coffee.”
Surprised My Cheating Wife With Divorce Papers at Her “Secret” Hotel Getaway Affair.
I nearly hit ENTER on my resignation email. I’d been with the company for 24 years at the time and I was tired of my boss contradicting everything I’d say. Sometimes he was right, usually he wasn’t but of course he only remembered that one out of 10 times he was right come review time.
Most people say I’m too much of a pacifist but he’d ding me as pointlessly argumentative. And, the reason why I was never promoted (he’d tell me year after year) is because I’d said or done “the wrong thing yet again to” and it would always be an unnamed executive. If I asked what I did or said, I’d get “you know I can’t tell you that” and if I asked who’s cage I’d supposedly rattled, it would be another “you know I can’t tell you that.”
This day, he said something that was completely wrong about a field he knew zero about and that I was an expert in. I should have known better but I said something just “in passing.” He erupted and screamed at me. “YOU ARE WRONG and you felt the need to ruin my day. I walked in here this morning feeling okay for the first time in months. You couldn’t let it go. Noooo … not you … you had to correct me and ruin my whole day. And you aren’t even right Mr. Know-it-all. Fine. You ruined my day so now I’m going to ruin yours. I expect a written apology, three copies, and this is going in your file.
I will then have your final written warning for insubordination and disrupting the office ready when you come back with your apology. IF I accept it, you will go on warning. But if I don’t like what you said, I tear that and the warning up and you will be done. You have pretty much just thrown away 24 years of work and any goodwill you might have built up with me because you just always have to say something.
You just can’t let anything go and you always have some story. No matter what anyone says, you were there, did that, had that or something too. Well now I think you can add fired for cause and blacklisted from a whole industry to your awesome list of life experiences. I’m giving you one hour. I’ll see you then or you can spend the time packing up your stuff. I really don’t care which at this point.
And because you are a critical employee with no backup or replacement, I will see to it that you pay for this for a long time to come if I have any say over anything. Now get going. The next time I see you, it will be either carrying your shit to your car or in here with a heart felt written apology.”
I typed out a resignation, just a terse one paragraph indicating only that I resigned effective that day and would agree to make my last day two weeks hence. Dated and my signature typed. I was ready to hit SEND and the email would go to my boss, HR and the Sr VP (who was the department head).
But then I thought: first, I’d be out of a job and it would not be easy for me to get another one. It’s next to impossible to describe what I really do — it’s a bunch of low level tasks where the high level aspect is that I can do them all. I already knew that no one in my industry was interested — had they been, I’d have been contacted at least one of the times where competitors or clients tried to grab employees from us. I was about the only long time employee who’d never been contacted by anyone.
My resume would make even less sense outside my industry. I’d at best have to hope for some small employer looking for a jack of many trades willing to work for next to nothing. Not very appealing.
He was right in one sense about something: whenever someone had a story, I’d often have a counterpart. I’m not a know it all, just a lot older than many of my colleagues and I’ve been around. I’d always thought I was just participating in a conversation but maybe that’s not the way some took it. Perhaps I should sit and listen more even if I did have such an experience myself and even if the teller was way off base.
So I resolved to say a lot less and not correct people unless there could be a serious consequence for letting it go. Even if I’d done whatever 50 times to their 1 and was considered an expert, just let it go. Let them tell their story.
Ruined his day? That was his responsibility. He was going through many personal problems but people other than I were getting tired of his ripping our heads off at work because his personal life was in a tailspin. I know that when I was having many issues one time (many years ago, different boss), my manager came along and told me I needed to straighten myself up.
He knew what I was going through and that’s why nothing had been said for a couple weeks. But now I had to pull myself out of it or he’d have to let me go. That was a couple weeks … but my current boss had been going on that way for months.
So there was wrong on my side and that was on me to handle. But I wasn’t responsible for ruining my boss’ day with an offhand comment of a factual nature. I needed to speak a lot less: not counter a story with one of my own, and don’t correct someone unless there was a vital business need for it. On the other hand, I was not about to take written responsibility for someone else’s life and emotions.
I apologized verbally including indicating where I was wrong and what I planned to do about it. But I made clear what I was apologizing for along with being clear without saying it that it would not be in writing. I also made clear without throwing anything in his face that if he chose to give me a final written warning, I would not sign it but rather resign effective immediately.
Nothing more came of it in large part because by the time I walked in there, the anger was gone. I dealt with this in a clear headed way and that’s the point to this long answer. Anger solves nothing, even if justified or at least partially so. We’ve probably all snapped at work and with what results? If you have sufficient clout, others might respond out of fear. But that never results in a good long term effect. You’re far better off resisting the urge to go off until you’ve had a few minutes to think about the whole situation.
I’m boy, When I was 13 , The principal always checks students’ hair and nails and punishes them if they were long
One day, he came to the line and checked our nails, I had forgotten to trim my nails for a long time, and my nails were long like a girl’s.
When he saw my nails, he asked sarcastically: Am I a girl?
I was embarrassed and lowered my head
The principal sent me to the corner of the wall and I stood facing the wall with my head down
he sent about ten other people to the side of the wall because their nails were too long
When all the students went to class, the manager and the principal came to us with a ruler, the principal said, we have to give them a nice punishment!
Principal said that we should paint their nails to make them girls!
They took us to the manager’s office and forced us to put our hands on the table
Then the manager took out a bottle of red nail polish from his drawer and started painting our nails completely
We felt ashamed and humiliated and our heads were down
They took us to the front of the line in front of all the students and calles us girls!
All the students laughed at us and we cried and felt humiliated
They hit our palms with a ruler to make us cry more!
From that day on, we didn’t have the courage to keep our nails long
1. Successful people don’t leave their life in the hands of luck. Life is too unpredictable to leave it in the hands of luck. Therefore, successful people choose to take control of things rather than sit around and wait for luck to finally smile at them.
2. Successful people take risks at the right place, at the right time. Successful people know that they don’t have the luxury to be taking mindless risks that can do more bad than good. Rather, they wait for that perfect timing and occasion when they can justify taking the risk.
3. Successful people trust their intuition. Many people underestimate the power of gut feeling. But in reality, it’s one of the most efficient and free tools you can utilize profitably. And successful people know how to do just that.
4. Successful people are the masters of their own destiny. Some people believe that one’s destiny is predetermined, and so they decide to simply let things unfold accordingly. But successful people prefer to take charge and carve out the destiny they aim for.
5. Successful people know the importance of having control over their emotions. They understand the impact emotional control or the lack thereof can have on their motivation, perseverance, and overall success. Therefore, they always try to keep their emotions under control so they’ll be the ones having the power over them.
6. Successful people practice positive self-talk. Successful people try not to listen to that negative voice in their head that tells them it is not going to work out. They don’t insult themselves, either. Instead, they train themselves to be compassionate, understanding, and encouraging toward themselves so they never succumb to the destructive effects of negative self-talk.
7. Successful people know that making mistakes is an essential part of the process leading them to ultimate success. They are aware that no matter how many mistakes they make along the way, they can make use of each by learning from them, guiding them toward success they’ve been working hard for.
8. Successful people know how to take constructive criticism well. Not only do they understand the benefits of constructive criticism, but they also appreciate getting it because they see it as a way to improve themselves or get closer to their goals.
9. Successful people have an unshakeable faith in themselves. Even if everyone else around them thinks they are just idealistic dreamers chasing after unrealistic goals, they refuse to see themselves from the same lenses because they know they have what it takes to get the things they are after.
My first thought was to say no but as I was paying for my gas I grabbed the milk. Outside was his girlfriend holding a box of cereal. He thanked me and I started to walk to my car. Something in me made me turn around. I told them I was about to get a car wash but if he wanted to wash it for me I’d pay him $20. We went to the nearest car wash and he had tears in his eyes after I paid him!
He told me that more than anything he appreciated me giving him the opportunity to be a man again in the eyes of his girlfriend and work for the money. The whole time his girlfriend helped him. It’s like she was proud of him. You could tell the love was so real. Real beyond material things and what he could do for her. She told him he did a great job and he couldn’t stop smiling. I had a long talk with him and her and he had a backpack full of paperwork from all of the places he’s been going to get help for them. I drove them to my apartment complex and gave him clothes for interviews and a few outfits and fitted caps. I don’t have much but life is about sharing what you do have.
Be a blessing to someone today because you could be in that situation before you know it! I gave them my number and I plan to take them to any interviews or appointments they have. It’s a great day to be alive no matter what your situation is. Someone has it worse than you! Share this message and inspire others to do good.”
Well it was a older Ford heavy duty truck, a three axle mini dump truck. It came in for brake work and when I opened the hood I discovered that most of the underhood wiring was redone with household electrical wiring cable, Romex and stripped Romex. It ran fine for a truck of the era that it was built and when the guy came to pick it up after the brake work, I had to ask about the wiring. He had the truck sitting unused for several years while he was working for someone and mice or squirrels had gotten in and destroyed the wiring and he had a roll of Romex in his garage and redid the wiring using another very similar truck as reference and got some bits from another truck he found in a junkyard. Mechanically the truck was solid and I was more impressed than anything else with the craftiness.
Woman Demands A Train Ran On Her! This Is Why Men Question The Value Of MW
Lack of purpose. All your young life you are given purpose of passing exams and learning, then all of a sudden you are thrown into the world and told to find your own meaning.
You can stay up as late as you want. But you shouldn’t.
Where did all my friends go?
Didn’t know that other adults have the emotional intelligence of teenagers and its almost impossible to deal with logically.
Getting burnt out.
Having to make dinner every. Fucking. Day.
Not having a lot of free-time or time by myself.
Figuring out what makes you happy. Everyone keeps trying to get you to do things you’re good at, or that makes you money, but never to pursue what you enjoy.
The more life you’ve lived, the faster time seems to go.
I once stopped to help a guy change a tire. He had an arm in a sling and two very young kids in his car. He thanked me saying he didn’t want to hurt his arm any more and wanted to get back to work.
Fast forward three months and I’m in a very ugly motorcycle wreck. One of the EMTs noticed my back was broken. Had they continued I’d have been paralyzed. His quick thinking prevented that.
After I recovered I got to meet the EMT crew that saved my life.
The guy that noticed my back was broken? The guy whose tire I had changed.
About 25 years ago, while living in Tucson Arizona, I received a phone call (bold = caller, non-bold = me):
Hi; Is this David Joseph? Dr. David Joseph?
Yes, who’s this?
Hi David!! It’s Garry Shandling!
Now at that time, Garry Shandling was a pretty well-known comedian, with his own show (“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), which was well known for its hilarious opening theme song. I was a big fan of his show, so I assumed a friend was pranking me:
Oh really?? Garry Shandling? Prove it; sing me your opening theme song!
He went ahead and sang me his opening theme song, and then went on:
David, how have you been? It’s been forever — can you believe it’s been over 20 years since we graduated?!
Since we graduated? Graduated what??
High School; Palo Verde??
Wait, I think you have the wrong David Joseph; are you looking for Dr David Joseph, the vet?
Yes; that’s not you? I thought your voice sounded different!
Yeah, that’s not me; I’m a people doc. I think that David Joseph moved away from Tucson a few years ago.
Oh, bummer. OK, I guess I’ll keep trying to find him — we were really close in High School.
Well, if you don’t find him, feel free to call me anytime; I’m happy to be your back-up Dr David Joseph!
Haha! Maybe I will! Thanks!
Good luck!
Then he called back a couple of hours later, explaining that he hadn’t been able to find his high school friend. We chatted a bit more, and then, once every few years, out of the blue, I would get a call from him, wanting to ‘catch-up with his back-up David Joseph.’
After I made a successful (static line) parachute jump – which turned out to be my first ever (and last) jump from a plane – I traveled back to the jump site three more times with Jeff C. to do it again. Various conditions prevented that from happening again, and after the third time that we were unable to jump again, we saw a fire a couple blocks off the interstate that was being fought by a team of professionals. A police officer instructed us to move along, but Jeff chimed in with “Why don’t they just let a good fire burn?” The officer walked to the front of Jeff’s car and wrote down the license plate and village sticker information, then asked Jeff AND me for ID. During the following week, I talked to mutual acquaintances of Jeff and related the aforementioned story to them. From one former coworker of Jeff, I learned that he was suspected of possibly starting two fires at his place of employment, with the second allegation causing him to be let go – I decided not to key ‘fi_ed’ – immediately. I no longer answered any of Jeff’s subsequent telephone calls, and did not answer the door when he came over.
Psychologist Addresses FEMALE DISRESPECT: why this is essential to relationship success
Damn! This is one HELL of a great video! Shit! Amazing video!
What most people don’t understand is that disrespect is a process. The best predictor of overt disrespect is covert disrespect. And this is why it is important to address disrespectful behavior while it is still in its nascent form. Failing to do so will jeopardize your relationship, primarily due to the fact that it is not possible for a woman to love a man she does not respect.
“Seeing how my now ex wife treated me compared to everyone else was an eye opener. I realized why everyone liked her, she treated them with respect and care, while I got the cold, cruel, disrespectful part.”
He beat me with a belt until I would bleed when I was very young and then when I became a teenager he would beat me with his fists. He broke my nose and blacked my eyes a few times. He’s dead now and I’m 69 years old. I have never for forgiven or forgotten. He beat my mom too. They divorced after I left home at 17. May he rot in HELL!
Oh man! I sure have. Often. Up until recently I worked, either with a guy or on my own, doing demolition, kitchen removals and buying/selling used building materials. I also ride a motorcycle. A big-ass noisy motorcycle. And, personally, I think I am a pretty nice person. I am considerate, kind and polite. But sometimes I am covered in drywall or brick dust, insulation, paint or sawdust. I usually carry Handy Wipes to, at least, wipe my face and hands clean. I may be dressed in work clothes and/or motorcycle gear. I am otherwise a well-groomed, clean, and pleasant 54 year old woman. I currently work outside all day and am in and out and crawling around assessing cars and trucks. Again, in work clothes or cover-all’s I am often dusty and wind-blown with dirty, with grease under my nails.
AND I GET TREATED LIKE SHIT.
I get followed, have had rude and disparaging comments made or completely ignored. Some staff treat me like I am invisible and are dismissive, assuming (I think) that I have no money to spend. At other times, they have been openly mistrusting and suspicious.
ALL BECAUSE I WORK FOR A LIVING!
Two of my very worst experiences occurred at places connected to religious institutions. One a church bazaar and the other a faith-based second hand shop. Another time I was speaking, as a counsellor, on a panel about alcoholism and addiction. Independent of each other, the hosts TWICE assumed that I was the newly recovered individual as opposed to the presenting professional.
In NO WAY am I ashamed of what I do or how I look. In fact, I am proud of who I am and the jobs I have done (and still do). I just wish people would judge me on my character or my actions rather than the way I look.
Bought a small place years ago that had a nice shed that could be used for tools, mower, etc and I asked if it conveyed and was told yes. Went to move in after settlement and no shed. Since it was in the contract, I called my realtor and told her the she came back or I would immediately stop the sale. No shed by the next day when promised so I notified the bank again that the sellers were in breach of contract. I was living in the house but had not put my furniture in yet, still in the box trailer belonging to a friend. The sellers had the shed at their new place but moving it damaged it so I refused to accept it and they had to order a brand new shed, same size, for the deal to be completed. The bank held the check, I finished moving in, and 2 weeks later the shed arrived.
Don’t try fast ones when selling since you may seriously regret the expense of fixing it.
Do what my garden-savvy cousin did to keep deer away from her garden. She set up hoses and multiple impact sprinklers with a motion sensor that set them off when deer approached, startling them and soaking them. Very effective, and not mean.
If the neighbor complains your sprinklers got him wet, say “Sorry, I had to do something to keep the deer/bears/monkeys/kids from stealing all my peaches before I can make pies/cobblers/jam from them.
You could even say, if I have a good crop this year, I’ll bring you a bowl of peaches.
In Chinese culture, sharing a meal with friends or family is a time to socialize. It’s actually something I very much enjoy being part of. As a Westerner, growing up in a Western and traditional Southern family, children were “seen and not heard,” and the talking points of a meal were, “Please pass the salt,” or “mind your manners.” The lively, upbeat, excitement that is exuded by Chinese people sharing a meal is something I adore.
When I bought my house the seller told me he had lost a ring a few years prior, and if I ever found it, it would mean the world to him to get it back. Three years later I saw something shiny while I was raking leaves. I picked it up and realized it was a ring encased in mud. I cleaned it off but didn’t think it could possibly be the lost ring. The stones were so large I thought it must be costume jewelry. I phoned the old owner and told him I found a ring but didn’t think it was valuable and asked if he could come take a look. When he saw it he started to cry and said it had great sentimental value. He offered me a reward but I declined. It didn’t seem right to take money for something that belonged to him. What I thought was a cheap ring with glass stones turned out to be $70,000 worth of diamonds.
a friend of ours who at the time was single mother of two, her son is autistic. She complained she had no heat in her mini van and winter in southern Ontario can be bitter cold. Local franchise repair shop quoted her north of $1700 to fix it!
I said let me take it to my trusted repair shop.
After a quick diagnosis he says “is she a teacher?” I’m like “how’d you know?”
He says “I cleaned a pile of papers out of the vents by the the heater core…lots of heat now!”
$75 and she had heat again…and was advised to keep papers off her dash!
Yeah actually… A few years ago I went out on the town for a mates birthday – straight from work. I’m carrying with me a £2.5k laptop and my mates got his full pay packet in cash and a thermos of soup given to him by a friend for his birthday (separate story).
These two kids come up to us and demand all of our worldly belongings. We dismiss them, as the bravery of a nights worth of fairly strong Hazy Pale Ale courses through our veins. As we walk off, the braver of the two pulls out a pretty small knife and demands more of our attention.
With a look from my mate we start off round the corner. Once we’re there we in whispered, quick voices form a plan and we wait for them.
I caught the first guy with a swing of my rucksack right under the chin and all 15” and 2.6kg of my MacBook Pro knocked his head back nearly off his feet. My friend followed with the Thermos on the 2nd. We didn’t hold back on those hits.
Once they recovered enough to speak, the braver one asked the other one if he was bleeding… he was… and the other guy told him.
Angry from the revelation he was bleeding, he said if he ever saw us again we’re dead… My friend, living round the area didn’t take kindly to this and threw the statement back at him. Told him, NO if you ever come back here YOU’RE dead and flew at the guy with the Thermos a second time. He chased them both up the street with that flask, with me laughing in hysterics at the bottom of the road.
In a strange way, being drunk that night changed the whole outcome of that encounter. Doubt we would have stood up to them sober.
He most certainly has a case. One of my neighbors tried to have two of our old silver birches and one 50-years-old Cedar tree cut, and it cost him dearly. It started with a Christmas tree though.
We came back from the United States, and as usual when we are back from holidays, I checked the garden — just to see how the plants, flowers and mushrooms (but also our rabbits and barn owls) were doing.
And then I noticed that one of our beautiful Christmas trees had been cut. The top half was gone, and no higher Mathematics was needed to conclude who had done it. One of our neighbors — I once had a relationship with his youngest daughter Ebba, but he seemed reasonably normal in those days — goes berserk if even only a couple of leaves fall on his property.
This time, he had cut an evergreen conifer, and we were sick of it. We called the neighborhood police man to sort this out, and he reprimanded the neighbor — to no avail. We decided not to go to court for the time being.
Instead, he sued us.
Together with another neighbor friend (who apparently also had problems with leaves and needles without us knowing), he filed a complaint against us in Justice Court. Big goal: having some of our trees (two old birches and an old Cedar) cut.
It did not quite work out that way, though.
Instead, he was forcefully reprimanded by the judge, who explained that leaves and needles are a part of country life, and that there was nothing wrong nor illegal about them falling in his garden.
The judge also dismissed the demand that our trees would be cut —
“It is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN to cut old trees, Mister C., so NO ONE will touch them. And very high maximum penalties would be issued if someone would.”
(Goal not attained.)
Since then, our neighbor had become even more mental than before. He throws all the leaves and needles he can find in our garden, and he has, since recently, started to throw buckets of his own stinking urine in our backyard.
I’m also one of those foreigners who think China is not just good, but a great place to live in! After working in China for the past few years, I have realized so many reasons for loving China.
A quick list of my personal observations about China:
1. Life has been very peaceful in China: I am never worried about my personal safety, or disruption of work. Life has been going quite smoothly.
2. Cost of living: About RMB 5,000/month (~$700). For the quality of life that I have enjoyed in China, it can’t get more affordable.
3. Jobs: my job is going fine. No issues with salaries.
4. Tax holidays: expats from a good number of countries (including US) enjoy tax holidays in China (due to the Double Tax Avoidance Treaty). I have not paid any tax in China so far. 🙂
5. Great food: China offers one of my favorite cuisine (I also love Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indian food). You can order from home. RMB 15 for 20 dumplings (饺子, jiaozi). Even if you cook at home, it can’t get cheaper than that.
6. Online shopping: you can buy almost everything online in China. Taobao is probably one of those few sites I visit every day. I buy something every day.
7. Cashless payments: we don’t carry cash in China. We just need to bring a phone, scan QR codes and pay. In fact, you can rent bicycles by just scanning QR codes (first 1hr ride is free).
8. I have a history of diabetes. Going anywhere, including back to the US, puts me at a very high risk of Covid-19 pandemic. There are great medical facility in China. Every Chinese city has a good number of hospitals. It’s very convenient to visit hospital in China (Btw, my city is virtually covid-19 virus free).
9. Learning Chinese: if you want to learn Chinese, China is the best place. The whole atmosphere is warm and welcoming. You’ll learn Chinese fast. This was also a reason for me to move to China.
10. Travel: Lots of nice places in China. Recently I visited Zhouzhuang (周庄), a water town (江南水乡). It was a pleasant experience. Chinese tourist attractions are generally very different from the typical western tourist attractions.
11. No illegal immigration: you can’t enter China illegally. You will be caught if you try. Penalties are heavy. You will be deported, however, only after serving the sentence.
Living in China is a very different experience. It doesn’t make sense to compare China with other countries (or vice versa). Explore what China has to offer, and you’ll love it.
Also, I wish to thank China for taking a good care of me throughout my China stay, especially during my diabetes phase. Otherwise, I couldn’t have survived probably.
The U.K.: much, much more working-class than Americans are raised to assume. It’s a textbook example of American ignorance that we tend to believe Brits are all very sophisticated and “aristocratic.” (And I don’t mean that as an insult, just a reality check.) Britain can be polished and classy, and it can be tougher than a bad neighborhood of Philly.
Ireland: deep beauty, deep gloom, too. Really depends on where you go and when and what you’re up to. One of the friendliest countries I’ve been to. Just don’t expect everything to be rainbows and sentimental fantasy and you’ll be fine. Again, from an American perspective: virtually all Americans need a reality check here.
Mexico: been there multiple times, still haven’t been killed. Haven’t witnessed so much as a mugging let alone a cartel operation. The worst thing I’ve seen is sexual harassment. The worst thing that personally happened to me was an epic case of farts. In general, what I’ve seen of Mexico is more truly cultured and sophisticated than a large chunk of the most hyped places in Europe and certainly more cultured and tasty than significant swathes of the United States. (Some of Mexico is pretty benighted, but the chances of you ending up in those corners of Mexico are next to none.)
The United States: lived here most of my life, still haven’t been shot. A country with places as diametrically different as Vermont and Miami Beach, New York and the Sonora. What’s pretty true about one place isn’t even remotely true about another. And contrary to the stereotype that Americans brook no criticism of our country, I think it’s actually the most hyper-self-critical country I’ve ever personally been to. If you can’t hear copious criticism coming out of the United States, see an ear doctor, your ears are plugged up. (Too much of this criticism is tribal criticism and not enough self-criticism, but Americans love to bitch and moan about the place. How do you not hear this?)
Canada: lovely people, lovely country, but nowhere near as happy or perfect as a big part of the world believes they are. Canadians are aware of their problems, because they’re honest. This isn’t a comment about Canadians. It’s a comment about the mystery of why so many other people aren’t aware of the problems and unhappiness that do exist in Canada.
Colombia: didn’t get killed. Didn’t see any obvious drug deals. Freakishly hot. Got horrifying Montezuma’a Revenge: do not ever ever EVER drink the water. Would I revisit? Yes.
Cuba: very much like the pictures of 1950’s cars and bars would have you believe. Fucking amazing to fly down there from Wisconsin in February: it’s not a long flight at all, but you feel like you’ve gone back 60 years in time and also dropped into what Southern Europe felt like a generation or two ago, not just the Caribbean. Lost worlds, truly. The sanitation will get you, though. The poverty is shocking. The people are wonderful but deserve so much better.
Italy: the only part I really liked was Sicily, where I didn’t killed by the mafia. Sicily was extraordinary.
Greece: incredibly cold when I was there. I think I picked up a minor case of pneumonia. It was March and I was freezing to death.
Turkey: went in 2002 and no Muslims killed me. The waiter brought his kid sister out, maybe 10 years old, to practice English. She giggled and thought Americans were funny. I thought the Turks were friendlier than the Greeks. But I was an asshole kid back then.
Bulgaria: also went in frozen weather in March 2002. Bulgaria was probably the closest to the grim Iron Curtain stereotype I’d sort of been expecting. (You half expected to see Stalin at the train station in Sofia.) But I’ve heard it’s changed a lot for the better. I was there 21 years ago. Would I revisit? Yes. In July.
Spain: didn’t see anybody going to bullfights. Tacos are not the dominant cuisine there. Paella is overrated tourist food. Seville beats Barcelona and Madrid. Go to Lanzarote for surreal quiet time (I was there last April, showed up in a tiny town at night, sat on the balcony watching the moon, and I was like “I’m in Spain and there’s no noise. This is weird.” Also, you’re more likely to see people having big parties than going to a Catholic religious procession. Spain has an exaggerated reputation for being “extremely Catholic.” The American Midwest is 10 times more Catholic.
Sweden: only went to Stockholm. Incredibly empty. Not very exciting. Dirtier than I expected.
Finland: severely underrated people.
Iceland: not as cold as Minnesota. (I’ve been to both in January. Iceland is Ipanema Beach compared to Minnesota.)
Portugal and Slovenia: Europe’s most underrated countries.
Czech Republic, Poland and Croatia: not gray. Everybody who heard I was going there said “that sounds so gray.” These places were bursting with color and life. Ate like a king for the price of a Big Mac meal in the U.S.
Bosnia: didn’t get killed. Contrary to stereotypes, that war ended 30 years ago. Being afraid to go because there had been a war and some bad shit in the past would be like being afraid to go to Germany in 1975, thirty years after WWII. Ridiculous. (I drove on some roads in Bosnia that were better than roads in Michigan. There are other roads where if you’re not paying attention, you’ll drive off a ledge and end up upside down in a cabbage patch.)
I’ve been to a few more countries, but that’s the gist.
One thing I’ve learned from travel is not to put too much stock in other people’s opinions. I’ve been to places they love that I hated. I’ve been to places they bashed or were afraid to visit that I thought were some of the best experiences of my life.
It’s not that I don’t trust anybody. It’s just that I’ve traveled enough to know that I’d rather go somewhere myself and form my own opinion.
Xi knows China needs the US, and of course the US needs China, maybe more so today.
Xi also knows that the world, which is facing more than enough difficulties right now, needs a stable US relationship and can not endure any major conflicts between the two largest economies.
Xi knows he can handle the situation here within China.
Then, looking around, who can help stabilize the bilateral relations? Who have a big say on the US domestic issues to try to calm down the sentiments there?
Is it possible, helpful and practical for him to talk to those big bosses of MICs, the Military Industrial Complex? Not quite possible — they prefer war than peace, they are thirsty for wars.
Is it helpful for him to talk to the US politicians? He has tried. He talked with Trump, and treated him well in Beijing, then what? Trump can tear down any agreements as he likes; He talked with Biden, last year in Bali, Indonesia, then what? Biden can’t even really govern his own administration team, neither the Democratics, let alone those from the GOP. But Xi tried once again, this time, he met Biden in San Francisco. But, again, then what? What if Trump came back after next election? He would again turn everything upside down.
Is it useful and helpful to talk to the general public? Might be of some help, but how many can he talk to? And how much help would that be of? No one really knows.
Then, who are left? The ones with a big say in the US politics, economy and even society — Yes, the business executives.
What they care more about is the market, the profits, the money, where China can offer. And with the money, they can stand with those candidates who are more practical and support a more pragmatic approach towards China, instead of those full of ideologies in their minds and even can’t wait to drum up a war with China.
Thus a comparably virtuous circle is hopefully to be formed to prevent the China-US relations from further spiraling down, which neither can China afford, nor can the US, as well as the whole world.
I joined a ship in Rotterdam and on sailing for Suez, noted that the generator oil temperatures were rather high. On asking the other engineers, they said “They’re always like that” which was often a reason given by those of an idle nature… I investigated and found that they had raised the alarm point to stop the alarms going off instead of actually fixing the problem, which I assumed to be the generator lube oil coolers being fouled. On arrival at Suez and waiting in the anchorage, we opened up the LO coolers but found that they were clear, though with a fine sand lying in the tube bottoms, suggesting a lack of seawater flow-rate. We transited Suez but on meeting the warmer seawater temperatures of the Red Sea, had to reduce the generator load to avoid them tripping out altogether. We put into Aden to fix the problem, blacked out and started working back from the seawater lines into the coolers to the pumps themselves, eventually having to take out just about all the seawater lines until on opening up the main piping from the pumps (some 650mm diameter) we found them to be just about blocked with an aggregate of mud, sand and shellfish, such that only a small diameter of some 250mm was available for passing water to the generator coolers. Out came the main length of piping and we started to shovel out the muck. As we cleared it, a large, Triffid/Hydra-like apparition started to appear, causing the more faint-hearted to jump back in alarm, though it was only moving by virtue of us shovelling out its supporting mussel bed… It turned out to be a submarine tree of surprising length and girth (around 5–6m long and about the diameter of my arm in the main trunk, with lots of squid like leaves on it which had been waving in the ever reducing breeze of seawater passing through the pipe. We eventually removed all the gunk and the “animal” itself and laid it along the plates for a photo opportunity (we only had the ship’s Polaroid instant picture camera in those days so I don’t have a record unfortunately).
How did such a large beast get into the system? Presumably it had entered as a micro-organism and found a handy place to anchor itself in the rubber jointing between flanges (its roots were entwined around the bolts) and then fed itself from the handy warm water stream passing its front door. It gradually grew, causing other marine life such as shellfish to cling on where the water was less turbulent, and then gathering mud and other essential nutrients from its environment. Amazing thing, but fortunately harmless in that it didn’t actually attack us… Being in Aden the temperature in the engineroom without the fans running was around 50C (we had to shut down the generators and rely on emergency lighting), such that we could only work for around 20 minutes each before having to go on deck in the (relatively) cooler air of some 35C Aden night time temperature. It took us most of the night to clear the piping and refit it – a big job indeed.
Final job on restarting everything was to wind the generator LO temperature alarms back to the proper alarm point; I checked back through the ship’s engineroom log books to see where the problem had first started, and it was some 3 years in the making without anyone investigating the slowly rising temperatures.
I was Marketing Director for a major, easily recognized company that manufactured female oriented products. Our President was in over his head, as evidenced by our declining market share and revenue. I was hired to help turn things around given my successful track record at other companies. However, the President couldn’t handle any outside suggestion or strategy unless it was his so I was constantly reprimanded for doing my job.
One day, my timid, suck-up boss sends me an email about a report she needs me to do ASAP. I scoll thru the entire email and at the end, I see it originated with a request from the President. Basically he wanted my boss to assign the report to me and once she had it to fire me. The email also contained some very derogatory & crude & inappropriate comments about my appearance.
I forwarded the entire email to my personal email account, HR and members of the Board. In exchange for me not pursuing legal action or sharing the incident with my press contacts (would have killed any credibility in the female marketplace), I received my bonus, 6 months severance including paying my health insurance, & a strong positive reference letter. I had a new position in 6 weeks.
The President was let go after about 2 months and it took him over 1 year to find a new position at a less prestigious company and lessor salary.
I wasn’t a mechanic, I was a service manager. A guy drove into the lot, he had poked a rod through his block. How the car was still running was a mystery. For some context, this was 1978, he was driving some little 1970 English import, a Vauxhall Viva, possibly. The blue book price was less than $500. He was a recent immigrant, with broken English, and obviously didn’t have much money, from the car he was driving.
I explained that it would cost twice as much to fix the car as it was worth. He didn’t appear to understand. So he called his pastor, who was his sponsor. I talked to the pastor when he arrived, and he called me a racist for refusing to work on an immigrants car. I explained it two different ways, and it didn’t make any difference.
I finally gave up, wrote up a work order, for $1200. Then I ran down the street to a convenience store, and bought an autotrader magazine. I handed him the work order first, and he audibly gasped. Yet it was just what I had verbally told him. Then I flipped the magazine open to a car like his, but in better shape, for sale for $500.
The light switched on. He wasn’t happy, but he now understood why I didn’t want to repair it. Since it was worth more than the car was to repair it, we would have required cash up front. Before starting the job.
My boss wasn’t happy with me, for spending my time driving away a customer.
I have no idea if the guy could have afforded to make the repair.
The next week the pastor started sending other members of his flock to us.
The following is a translation of a recent essay that examines the circumstances of close encounters between Chinese and U.S. militaries in China’s vicinity, explains China’s grievances, and identifies the factors that further heighten risks.
The author of this essay is Hu Bo, Research Professor and Director of the Center for Maritime Strategy Studies, Peking University, and Director of the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative.
Full text below.
______
Recently, the U.S. DoD “declassified” some of the videos and pictures of aerial encounters with PLA military aircraft in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, accusing China of “risky intercept” and “unprofessional behaviors.”
This is, of course, a one-sided narrative from the United States. The Pentagon has not made it clear where these air encounters took place or why they occurred. As the China-U.S. military competition intensifies, the frequency and intensity of air and sea encounters are increasing, and the risk of possible friction and conflict does exist.
However, the United States is hyping “anxiety”, partly because of real concerns about risks, and partly because it wants to take hold of the “moral high ground” in international public opinion and diplomacy.
In fact, in the waters surrounding China, such as the East China Sea and the South China Sea, despite the growing competition between the China-U.S. militaries as well as air and sea encounters, it is important to emphasize that the vast majority of the air and sea encounters between the China-U.S. militaries, which occur more than a dozen times a day and thousands of times a year, have been conducted in a safe and professional manner.
For example, in a 2022 emailed statement about transit through the Taiwan Strait, US 7th Fleet spokesperson Mark Langford said in an emailed statement that “all interactions with foreign military forces during the transit were consistent with international standards and practices and did not impact the operation.”
In August 2022, Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt told the press after the USS Abraham Lincoln, which she commanded, finished a deployment in the Pacific that “We were operating in the vicinity [of] Chinese warships at times, mostly … that shadowed our ship……It was safe and professional the entire time that we interacted with them. During some flight operations, our aircraft did interact with some of their aircraft, but again it remained safe and professional each and every time we interacted with them.” [1]
Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries have made it clear at the highest levels that they “do not want war” and want to avoid direct military conflict.
While formal communication mechanisms between the two militaries (e.g., the China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings, Defense Policy Coordination Talk, and China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk) were interrupted after Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan, there are other channels of communication between frontline commanders, such as the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972 (COLREGs), and the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), which was adopted in 2014.
High-level exchanges between the U.S. and Chinese militaries have also been slowly restarting since President Xi Jinping had a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Bali. Overall, the situation of China-U.S. air and sea encounters is not as dire as portrayed by the media and some scholars.
▲ Four scenarios for confrontational encounters between China and the United States
However, under certain circumstances, the risk of conflict could run high. When the United States and China talk about military frictions or dangerous encounters and blame each other, the first thing we should be clear about is where these frictions or encounters are taking place. For both sides, air and sea encounters in different areas have different legal and political implications. Most confrontational encounters between China and U.S. military forces occur under the following four scenarios.
1. When U.S. forces approach the territorial waters and airspace of mainland China or Hainan Island, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reacts vigorously, taking such actions as interception or forcing out.
2. U.S. forces enter the territorial waters and airspace of the Xisha Islands to carry out so-called FONOPs and are warned and driven away by the PLA.
3. When the U.S. military conducted FONOPs within 12 nautical miles of China-controlled islands and reefs in the Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island, The PLA warned and drove away the U.S. military. For example, on September 30, 2018, the USS Decatur conducted a so-called FONOP in the waters near Nansha Islands’ Nanxun Reef and had a close encounter with a Chinese warship. The two ships were only 40 meters apart at their closest.
4. Both China and the United States engage in close reconnaissance of each other’s military forces during military exercises, including live ammunition exercises. While mutual tracking and surveillance of military activities are common, the reconnaissance operations conducted by the U.S. military sometimes come dangerously close.
Particularly during the PLA’s live ammunition exercises, the U.S. military often disregards the no-entry notices and unlawfully enters the relevant sea and airspace. For example, in August 2020, a U.S. U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft intruded into the PLA’s Northern Theater Command’s live ammunition exercise airspace, and an accident was barely avoided.
▲ China has legitimate concerns about the close encounters between Chinese and U.S. naval and air forces
While China is dissatisfied with the U.S. military’s actions in the waters near China and believes that the root cause of the encounters at sea and in the air is the aggressively close reconnaissance and other targeted military operations conducted by the U.S. military, it nevertheless tracks and monitors the U.S. military in accordance with international conventions, which is no different from reciprocal reactions of U.S. and Japan for China.
China only reacts more strongly in the four above-mentioned types of military encounters, which is in line with international common sense. Any country would take all feasible measures to safeguard its territorial, sovereign, and platform security against any actions that attempt to approach its territorial waters and airspace or pose a threat to its training exercises.
Strategically, China opposes the continuous challenges posed by the U.S. to China’s sovereignty over islands and reefs and its national security. Technically or in specific actions, China opposes actions by the U.S. that endanger the safety of personnel onshore at sea and in the air. In addition to strategic and legal differences, China also has three legitimate concerns:
First, some of the U.S. military’s reconnaissance missions are too close to China and overly provocative.
For example, on September 4, 2021, a U.S. RC-135S Cobra Ball missile surveillance aircraft approached Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong Province for close reconnaissance, with its closest point of approach to the Chinese territorial baseline being less than 20 nautical miles. On December 8, 2022, a U.S. P-8A anti-submarine patrol aircraft flew over the Taiwan Strait, at times with a distance of less than 13 nautical miles from the Chinese territorial baseline.
Second, China has reasons to be concerned about frequent accidents involving the U.S. military. In recent years, the high frequency of U.S. military operations and the negative impact on training and proficiency have led to numerous unfortunate accidents (such as the collision incident involving the U.S. Navy’s USS Fitzgerald missile destroyer in 2017).
When the Chinese and American militaries come into close proximity, the possibility of accidental incidents occurring due to a decline in the professionalism of the U.S. military is increasing.
Third, the United States has intensified the public hype and politicization of encounters at sea and in the air and military actions. In recent years, the United States has amplified the political and diplomatic implications of its military actions, with the most iconic examples being the so-called FONOPs carried out by the U.S. military within 12 nautical miles of China-controlled islands in the South China Sea and its transits through the Taiwan Strait.
On October 27, 2015, the U.S. destroyer USS Lassen conducted a highly publicized FONOP in the waters near the Nansha Islands. Although the U.S. had previously conducted such activities in the South China Sea, they were rarely so open and high-profile. The same is true for U.S. transits through the Taiwan Strait. Since 2018, after each transit through the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. Navy would either feed information to the media or directly issue announcements, claiming to “maintain freedom and openness in the Indo-Pacific region”. Such hype and politicization have increased the complexity and difficulty of military communication between China and the U.S. and added to the risks of encounters between Chinese and American naval and aerial forces.
[1]Note: the original essay wrongly attributed the above quote to Rear Adm. J.T. Anderson, this newsletter corrected the inaccuracy.
You smile, bank the check and say thank you! I had a very small role in the Spiderman movie starring Emma Stone. The scene never made it into the final cut. It wasn’t necessary for the story line. But I got paid union rate and residuals and spent a very pleasant afternoon and evening filming a 2 person scene with Emma Stone, who was absolutely delightful and charming. No complaints. And they sent me the specially designed movie baseball cap. I was treated as a professional and my contribution was valued at the time of filming.
In many western nations it fails on both counts. What they have left is an electoral system that goes through the motions. I remember a module on Law I did at UCL. It’s an elected dictatorship mostly. Before you screech but you’re in China, yeah but I was born in the UK. I watche the 1997 election (too young to vote) participated in 2001, 2005, 2010 and sat out 2015. I had left the UK by 2017 and 2019.
We can go through the common failings:
We can vote out those who fail!
We can freely criticise our leaders!
We can vote somebody in new and different!
Western systems ensure the BEST standards of living
Western systems are accountable!
Western systems ensure the most capable people!
We can vote out those who fail!
Except you don’t. The Labour regime of from 1997 to 2010 didn’t really achieve anything. They had some decent literacy programmes with the gremlins campaign but this was dismantled by the late 00s.
We can freely criticise our leaders!
Less so now, the UK has massively restricted free speech since the 80s, it has massively restricted protest. And guess what? Call the current prime minister a bum what happens NOTHING to you and NOTHING to them.
We can vote somebody in new and different!
Except it’s a false choice. You can choose a Neoliberal or a Neoliberal. The policies are a venn diagram that is a circle.
Western systems ensure the BEST standards of living
Maybe in the past 70s, 80s maybe the 90s. But once it got Neoliberalised productivity got disconnected from wages and there’s been a massive stagnation.
Western systems are accountable!
Yeah, they apologise or say let’s draw a line under it and then simply ignore it. I still remember Blunkett UK MP (EDIT) simply saying I don’t accept that to dismiss a well crafted argument against him.
Western systems ensure the most capable people!
No it ensures popular people. The UK’s Johnson for instance. What qualities other than being popular did he have?
Now let’s return to the above:
For the people.
For the people, are your lives REALLY getting better? My life in the UK:
Access to medical care: As a child I remember being able to get appointments with Dr Sharma same day for the times I was ill. As a teenager when I was beaten up, I could be admitted to hospital pretty quickly. Nose operations to put it back were done in as little as week. Into my 20s. It became increasingly difficult. Barriers kept being put up to see my GP. First off it was you had to book a day in advance, then a week in advance. By the early 00s. My GP had a 10 minute window at 8am to book appointments. There were 10 available a day.
My commute times : Each year it took longer and longer. I recall sitting in my dad’s car. To get to the big city nearby it was 20 minutes door to door. We moved a couple miles East but by the mid 00s it was taking 45 minutes and by the 2010s it was taking an hour each way door to door.
Policing There was a small police station in my dad’s town. It was gone and consolidated by the mid 00s. My dad had things smashed and police would attend same day. By the 2010s they wouldn’t attend and simply give you a crime number.
Of the people.
There’s the odd outlier like Mahri Black? The youngest MP ever. But the trend is establishment candidates. Only those backed by the party apparatchik have any chance of success. Tons of people like Lord Binhead try.. or the Monster Raving Loony Party try but always lose their deposits.
Sheltered, to begin with. In elementary school, I thought that friends who lived on Park Avenue were middle class.
One thing, though, that many don’t understand — not all of the students in these schools are rich. The schools generally offer financial aid, and many students are from upper middle class families. Increasingly, they have some poor children as well.
But of course there are lot of rich kids at them — kids who go skiing in the Swiss Alps, kids with household staffs, what have you. This can leave kids from middle class backgrounds thinking that they are poor.
The schools themselves — mine anyway —
Very high standards. You did not skip class, and you were not absent unless you were ill or there was a major crisis like a death in the family.
Very solid, college preparatory curriculum with lots of electives. Math and language classes were tracked by ability. The curriculum was accelerated to the point at which many students went to college after their junior year — there just wasn’t much left to do.
No bad teachers; they ranged from good to superb.
Few bad students. Admission was competitive and those who couldn’t handle the work were asked to leave. All students went to college, any or most to Ivies or similar, and most got advanced degrees.
Small class sizes. Ours were about 15. Teachers had low course loads, and latitude in what and how they taught — no submitting lesson plans. And they could focus on teaching, rather on lunchroom duty and such.
No “teaching to the test.” But then, such a thing didn’t exist when I was in school.
That said, there was good prep for the SAT’s. This can’t make a dramatic difference in scores, less than 100 points, but it can make some.
Beautiful campus, also like a small college. Here’s where I went to school — that’s the library building:
image 144
9. Excellent facilities.
10. No bells, etc. But very high standards of behavior. You didn’t arrive to class late, and there were no fights or anything of the sort.
11. A friend who transferred in from public school told me that he was delighted to be at a school where the teachers actually liked the kids!
12. I recall visiting my cousin’s public school when we were juniors and was appalled at the way the kids were treated by the administration. Obnoxious.
13. Smart kids were admired rather than bullied or looked down upon.
14. Today, there is a lot of pressure on the kids to get into a top college. Less so in my day. In any case, the schools are feeder schools, known to top colleges. At my school, for example, six kids went to Yale every year. Not five, not seven — they had six slots set aside.
15. The quality of the students was remarkable — probably more so at privates that cater specifically to the children of the rich. Out of a class of 100, one of my classmates became the first female editor of The New York Times. One became a philosophy professor at Cambridge, the other at Harvard. Another became a physicist. Most became doctors and lawyers. (Only three of us, I being one of them, became engineers.) One of the lawyers worked for President Obama. Etc.
16. I asked a former teacher why it was that, on a standardized test administered to students in New York City, the public school students did better than the private school students, but that in life, the private schools students did better, and he said it was simple — the private schools taught the students to think. They don’t stuff your head full of facts like a public school, but you can write an essay or prove a theorem.
In retrospect, if there was a downside, it’s that we were so sheltered. But overall, my experience was just about as good as it could be, within our current educational framework and given the requirements set by the colleges. I wish that every student could enjoy a similar experience.
There is no threat to the Chinese political system. 95% of Chinese support China and its government. People live longer, today their life expectancy is 78 years old and the U.S. is 2 full years lower at 76 years old! They live better lives. Their real standard of living less inflation has grown 30 times in 40 years. Meanwhile during the same time. The U.S. real standard of living not only not grow. It deteriorated back 20 years into the 1960 level!
Chinese has full universal healthcare coverage and college education is free of charge if one qualifies for it. All of which is not free in the U.S. and close to a third of Americans are not covered by healthcare and may die if they fall sick! That is the U.S. not China! Kids gets into college debts before they even start life in the world.
So who want to change their political system? Well by trust on government measurement carried out by trusted western research in the west showed Chinese trust their government 95% and only 30% of American’s trust their government!
And your question is what is the biggest threat to the Chinese political establishment? Not what is the biggest threat to the so call US liberal democracy? Why do you not ask the obvious? And why do you worry about a non issue? Where is your intellect? Where is you rationality and sanity?
Ok I get it you are a China and Chinese hater and you term communism as a slur to demonised China. But let me help you. 87% of the world don’t buy your shit. Sure the 13% westerners may be fooled by your media but even that a higher proportion of westerners are smarter than you. They know this is a nonsense question. But I addressed it to call you out. If you can ask this question you don’t amount to much.
What was odd thirty years ago, is my new normal, but here are a few random remembrances from 1990 Germany, 6 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Brutal truth rewarded me when I asked “how are you?”. Replies weren’t always “great”, “awesome” or “just fine thank you.” Germans actually thought I cared (and eventually I learned not to ask if I didn’t).
Germans are direct. They don’t beat around the bush. When they have an opinion they share it with you. And they expect you respect it and deliver honesty in return. Political correctness was non-existent.
Service workers didn’t smile and chirp sugar-coated pleasantries. Shop attendants ignored me unless I asked for help. Restaurant meals were uninterrupted by the obligatory-every-five-minute repetition of “is everything OK?” I learned to ask for the bill rather than wait for it.
Smiling at strangers often seemed to discomfort them. I soon learned to recognize when a smile was welcome and when not.
Football (soccer for me at the time) rules. The 1990 World Cup began soon after I arrived. During games the world stopped. Loud cheers or groans occasionally livened up silent and traffic free downtown streets. As games ended, streets filled with honking cars waving huge flags (Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Romanian and of course German).
I thought the Super Bowl huge, but the World Cup is much bigger.
Sporting events and television programs were advertising free. Ads appeared only between scheduled programming.
Everything was expensive. A used car with over 80,000 miles cost more than a new Hyundai in the US. A pair of brand name jeans cost 3 times more.
The electronics store salesman spent an hour trying to talk me out of a Toshiba television and a Samsung microwave. He insisted Asian goods broke as soon as the 2 year warranty expired. (The microwave is still going strong 30 years later, and the TV was only replaced because it was no longer smart enough for the digital age).
Nobody ever asked me about my religion or my profession, but damn were they curious about life in America.
Talking about money or charity is taboo.
Alcohol was everywhere. It was common to see people drink beer in the park or walking down the street. Lunch usually included a beer or carafe of wine.
There was no free water in the restaurants. And soft drinks were more expensive than beer. All drinks are served without ice.
Nobody littered! The public waste bins were emptied daily.
Germans pedestrians wait for a red light to turn green even on a deserted street at midnight.
Zebra-striped crosswalks get the same respect as stopped school buses in the US.
I was never asked to show ID to prove myself of legal drinking age. Sixteen-year-olds are allowed to drink wine and beer (even in a bar).
Magazines at the supermarket checkout featured naked breasts (no longer).
Shops closed at 6.30 p.m. on weekdays, 2 p.m. on Saturday and were all closed on Sunday (this has changed).
There were only three types of soda on offer, Coke, Fanta and Sprite (the selection is slightly larger now – but nothing like in the US).
Bagels and donuts were not to be found (that has changed too).
Bread was light on air and heavy on grains. My digestion became like an alarm clock.
Cities and streets are designed for pedestrians, bicycles and public transport – not for cars. Pedestrian zones are everywhere, parking is in expensive garages.
Downtown streets aren’t straight. They wander among the buildings and sites. Highways don’t mention north, south, east or west. They only tell you what towns and cities are ahead on the route.
Restaurant meals took hours not minutes and lack of television in the restaurants forced me to communicate with my friends. Meal portions were smaller and menus much more varied. Chain restaurants were rare. Tipping was optional and the wait staff gets 20 days of paid vacation.
Dogs are allowed in restaurants.
German flags were only displayed during the World Cup.
Everybody took a one hour lunch break and left work promptly before 5.30. People took three or four week vacations and left work behind.
Construction workers drank beer during their morning break. Obesity was unusual, beer bellies were not.
People walked for fun, but nobody seemed to run for fitness.
Some women at the pool sunbathed topless. Young children at the pool often wore nothing.
Public transport was immaculately clean and ran on time.
Brothels are legal.
Nobody ever seemed to get shot (though there were plenty of stabbings in Frankfurt where I lived).
Gas was four to five times more expensive than in the US.
My hour lunch break is over now. I’ll add to this if anything else occurs to me.
Back in the 70s, when smoking was legal almost anywhere except elevators. I stepped into an elevator in an office building with a coworker when another person stepped right in as the doors closed, smoking a cigarette. I pointed out it was illegal to smoke on an elevator and she replied, “what are you going to do, call the police?” My coworker, who happened to be a reserve police officer, pulled out his badge and said, “that won’t be necessary.”
Ah, I still remember her expression.
Varginha UFO Crash: Alien Contact, Government Denial and Coverup
You must be joking!!! I don’t understand how you could be unaware. China has been the target of massive anti-China propaganda in Western media for years.
And not only in mainstream media but in social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and here on Quora.
Curiously, there are very few positive stories about China in Western media. They’re nearly all negative! How can that be?
Can a country that…
built the world’s largest economy from scratch within 40 years
lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty
created the world’s finest infrastructure of roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, etc.
landed on the dark side of the moon
sent an ambitious space mission to Mars
built the spectacular BeiDou navigation satellite system
reforested 34 million acres of land
produces the most renewable energy in the world
created the world’s best 5G technology
sent pandemic aid to dozens of countries around the world
…have practically nothing positive to report on at all?
Well, that’s what the American (Western) narrative is.
China don’t throw innocent people into jail like the how U.S. cook up some shit and throw the Huawei CEO daughter in jail in Canada. The 2 Michael’s are spies and doing things in China to hurt China and the Chinese people to spy for the 5 eyes. These are facts. These are self confessed facts. Canada, do the honourable think and apologise to China and the Chinese people.
Canada you are a hypocrite and a liar. You cohort with all the media to claim that they were innocent. Well they now says in their own free speech that they spied for you! You are lucky China don’t sentence them to death. China ought to. China should do. After all what they do could kill many Chinese.
The time that a white persons life is worth more than another race belongs to the 19th century today. We should sue every media that claims the Michael’s are innocent. We should end every journalist that lied. We should fine the media and politicians so hard the will never dare to lie again. Caucasians do the right thing. Do you like to be lied to? Again and again and again?
I thought that freedom of speech is so vital to you. And surely you want the truth, nothing but the truth? Why the hell are you keeping quiet? CNN and BBC. Why are you quiet as a mouse? Lying News channel?
I raised a young family in the 1970’s as a TV repairman. Made good money. TV’s were so unreliable there was a TV shop on every other street corner. Drug stores had a vacuum tube tester for DIY’ers (You can’t guess how many service calls I made where the customer had a bag of tubes they took out to test but didn’t have brains enough to read the tube layout on the inside of the cabinet to return them in the proper place.) When the RCA XL100 came out as one of the first solid state TV’s, repairs started a slow decline. When integrated circuits became the norm, the bottom opened. Microprocessors blew the bottom away.
Drive down ANY 5 streets and tell me how many TV repair shops you can find. Go ahead, I’ll wait………..
I saw the handwriting on the wall, jumped into early PC repair, became an electronics teacher, saw the build you own PC market crash, got into networking, watched Cisco plummet in the 90’s, did cyber security and retired. Modern TV’s are far superior to any previous generation by my firsthand experience. Not to mention a color tv in 1960 cost $300 – 500 dollars. Do the math with inflation vs any brand of 40″ flat screen. Be amazed.
image 149
This is what fed my wife and daughter for 12 years.
Because I got married and had her very early in my 20s, at that time, none of my friends had kids. My baby was the sweetheart for all the aunties – mom’s three close friends. We threw her a party.
It was fun. Each auntie got her a present. They handed it to her one by one so she opened it and got excited. To the last auntie, before she handed the present to my daughter, she ‘demanded’ my girl, “Say ‘please’ and bow, so auntie will give you the gift!”.
I thought she was joking, so I interrupted and told my daughter, “Auntie got you a present, you say ‘Thank you’ out loud!”.
My daughter exclaimed, “Thank you auntie!”, then opened the present.
It was a Lego Friends set. Needless to say, my daughter was so happy, and jumped up and down with the Lego set.
Then suddenly, the auntie snatched the Lego set from my daughter’s hands again, held it up above her head, and demanded my daughter, “Say ‘please’ and bow, or auntie’s gonna take it back!”.
This time, I knew she wasn’t joking.
I got angry but tried very hard to keep my voice calm, “No one demands my daughter to beg. We’re poor but we are not cheap”. “I was just joking!”, she said. “No, you weren’t.
That’s the second time and I don’t like it”, I told her.
Now she got angry, raised her voice with me, “Even so, this is an expensive toy, what wrong with begging a little?”. “You take the gift back and please leave”, I told her, while getting up and holding the door open.
She left and never came back.
The next day, I took my daughter to the toy store to get that Lego set. My friend was right. It was a damn expensive toy, it cost me a big chunk of my skinny paycheck and a friendship.
Of course it is the U.S. but to be fair the U.S. is the biggest threat to the entire world. China included. And the world. As a whole the world need to jointly and severally stop the U.S. excesses. I dare say for the good of the human race including the Americans.
The U.S. is the only nation that will push human into extinction through an all out nuclear war if uncheck. We humanoids on earth need to be very mindful of this fact and the U.S. powers must be checkmate at every turn and ever aspect. Militarily, politically, financially, economically and strategically.
The U.S. must be brought back into being a member of responsible human society where the common good of humanity must prevail over the selfish interest of the U.S. military industrial complex profiting from wars, chaos and violence worldwide.
China is a very peaceful loving nation and it survived 5000 years because it has a peaceful coexistence between nations as a priority. China don’t want enemies and certainly do not like war. Since 1979 some 44 years has passed since China last fought a war. But during that time China phenomenally grew rich and strong to deter any nation from threatening them.
China wants a peaceful world where we can live peacefully and harmoniously. We can all get prosperous and live better and longer lives. And we trade with each other. Today there are only some 12–15 nations that are part of these war threatening pack. Most of them are either forced into this pack as slave vassal states or coerced or bribed into this grouping. Glued together by the U.S. and the western media, this loosely defined as western powers need to be dismantled for good.
Chinese history
Cajun Beef Po’boy Sandwiches with Red Eye Gravy
For Cajun Beef Po’boy Sandwiches with Red Eye Gravy, sirloin steak is rubbed with espresso coffee powder and pepper, then broiled to perfection. Red Eye Gravy is added to the steak.
cajun beef po boys
Ingredients
Po’boys
1 (1 pound) beef top sirloin steak, cut 1 inch thick
6 teaspoons espresso coffee powder, divided
1/2 teaspoon pepper
4 large French bread rolls, split
8 slices tomato
1 cup shredded lettuce
Redeye Gravy
3 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup diced tasso or pancetta ham
1/4 cup diced onion
1 tablespoon Creole Seasoning
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/3 cup hot water
2 cups beef stock
1 to 2 tablespoons hot pepper sauce (Louisiana-style)
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Instructions
Rub beef top sirloin steak with 2 teaspoons espresso powder and pepper.
Heat broiler to HIGH.
Place steak on rack on aluminum foil-lined broiler pan so surface of beef is 3 to 4 inches from heat. Broil for 16 to 21 minutes for medium rare (145 degrees F) doneness, turning once.
Meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons butter in large skillet over medium heat; whisk in flour. Cook for 8 to 10 minutes until caramel color, whisking often. Remove mixture from pan; set aside.
Melt remaining tablespoon butter in same skillet over medium heat; add tasso, onion, Creole Seasoning and garlic; cook for 10 minutes until onion is translucent.
Dissolve remaining 4 teaspoons espresso powder in hot water; add to skillet and cook for 1 to 2 minutes until browned bits attached to skillet are dissolved and sauce is reduced almost completely.
Whisk in butter mixture until smooth.
Add beef stock, hot sauce and Worcestershire; bring to a boil. Reduce and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes or until sauce is reduced to 1 cup.
Add roast beef to skillet. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes until heated through, stirring often so sauce coats beef.
Divide beef mixture between rolls. Top beef with tomato and lettuce. Close sandwiches.
There is no need to answer such boring questions anymore.
All infrastructure in China, including logistics, communication, power supply, water supply, and gas supply, is very complete.
In 2021, China produced 8.5 petawatt-hour (Pwh) of electricity, approximately 30% of the world’s electricity production.
There are two most advanced transmission technologies in the world, one called “ultra-high voltage transmission” and the other called “flexible direct current transmission“. China is far ahead of other countries in these two top technologies.
Overhead power lines can easily cause fires and can also lead to power outages.
Outdoor power poles and overhead power lines in China have been basically cleaned up during the renovation of old cities, and all cables have been buried underground without any exposed or disorderly phenomena.
If you have traveled to cities in Taiwan, Japan and Chinese Mainland, you will find that only cities in Chinese Mainland rarely see bare overhead power lines.
I haven’t experienced a power outage in China for 40 years.
Young people born in China after 1990 may not even understand what it feels like to have a power outage.
In China, even remote rural areas have stable electricity supply.
The Tibetan village at an altitude of 5000 meters has also been electrified.
But whether it’s India, Vietnam, or the United States or Europe, power outages are frequent.
The machines running in the factory require electricity, while the computers in the office require electricity. If the power supply is unstable, how do you make the enterprise work?
Taiwan’s power system has always had various problems. Taking TSMC as an example, due to a power outage in Tainan City, 30000 wafers on TSMC’s production line were damaged, resulting in a direct loss of US$200 million. No matter how rich TSMC’s finances are, it cannot withstand the losses caused by several major power outages.
Anyway, since you want to attract foreign investment, the first step is to ensure a stable electricity supply.
Otherwise, these enterprises will have to face downtime and production stoppage.
Through the the Belt and Road Project, China will help these countries improve their power systems and will actively transfer some enterprises to countries along the the Belt and Road.
China’s homegrown TP500 unmanned transport plane makes maiden flight, and transportation between Chinese cities will be faster in the future. Goods that originally took 3 days to arrive can be transported in 2-3 hours.
I was a workaholic, working 16 hour weekdays and 8 hour weekends. This was about 20 years ago.
It was Christmas eve, and I still hadn’t done my Christmas shopping, I had my list for everything, most of it specified by my nieces and nephews.
I had been reading how a few malls in our city were in trouble, as everyone was switching to big box stores to shop. They showed pictures of traffic jams in big box store parking lots. I was finally out of time and had to shop, and hope I could get the stuff on my list, at the last minute.
I pulled up to Sears at the local mall, that had been featured in the news, as being in trouble. The parking lot was empty. I was afraid it was closed. I parked in the closest parking spot to the door. I walked in and manager saw me enter, and was on me like glue. I was the only customer in the store, ON Christmas Eve!!
He asked me what I was looking for and I pulled out this long list. He smiled and called someone over to get me a hot chocolate from the mall, he sat me down in a recliner in the furniture section, and called two more workers over, and asked them to get the stuff on the list.
We talked, and I drank my hot chocolate. He was pretty sure Sears wouldn’t last another five years, and he needed it to, to collect his pension.
After about 15 minutes, the workers were back with my presents. I paid for them. They had a gift wrapping service, which normally cost extra, but he said that the staff weren’t doing anything anyway, so it would be free.
In another 10 minutes, they helped me load the wrapped presents in my car.
It was maybe 25 minutes from when I walked into the store, and I was done. Wrapped and everything.
I had almost never shopped at Sears, but after that I was a regular, until they closed the doors. I saw the manager until he successfully retired.
I later read that Sears ended up shorting the pension fund. I hope he made out OK, as I have never had service like that, before or since.
Just read this out to my wife and she burst out laughing. In 1996 I had been widowed over five years when a crazy woman burst through the door of our car sales site with so much enthusiasm and vibrance and chatter and said she wanted to buy a car. It was a quiet time so I stopped playing my guitar and set about helping her. She bought a car and left and I turned to my mate and said, ‘She’s totally bonkers’, he replied, ‘you’re telling me’, I replied, I could do with some of that’. I delivered the car a few days later and took her to the pub for a chat, after a few dates we were driving towards the Mersey tunnel, Merseyside from Wirral to Liverpool and I asked her if she would like to go on an adventure and her answer was yes, just then we entered the tunnel just as the petrol light came on, I said, ‘welcome to the adventure’.
We sold our houses, bought a B & B, called it ‘Firkin House’ and thirteen years later retired to sunny Cyprus and will have been married twenty years next May with lots of fun and laughs along the way.
Oh, boy. I’ll never forget this one as long as I live.
I had been living with my significant other for about four years. He always treated me well … but other people? Not so much. In this case, it was his grandparents, who I adored. They were just the sweetest people. They really loved their grandson, too, even though he rarely gave them the time of day. They wanted him to fly home for Christmas—I’d made plans with my family, so we were going solo that year.
Anyway, this guy refused to buy a plane ticket unless his grandparents paid for it. Here’s the kicker: he had the money to spend on plane fare. He just didn’t want to. A$$hole that he was. So, his grandfather, who was around 90, had said that he’d put the check in the mail. It hadn’t arrived, due to the holiday mail delay.
I bore witness to this guy browbeating his elderly grandpa into Fed-Exing another check over the phone. This was two days before the cut-off date to book the flight. So his grandfolks sent another check, because they wanted their grandson home for the holidays. These were old, frail people who barely got out of the house. Not good drivers. You know, why didn’t my S.O. just pay for the fare and let his grandfather pay him back once he was there?
A day or so after he left on the trip, his grandfather’s original check arrived in the mail. I looked at his spidery handwriting on the signature line, and I felt positively ill.
I ended up breaking up with my significant other because of that, and for countless other times that I’d seen him be really mean to other people who loved him—family members, even. I knew that one day, I could be next in line, and I wasn’t about to wait around for that to happen.
In China, if you hit a dog or a cat, or any pet for that matter, and the owner comes out and makes a claim against you for killing or wounding their pet, the insurance company will pay no questions asked.
It is automatic.
Most insurance is no-contest up to 3000 RMB, and many (but not all) go up to 5000 RMB for the death of a beloved pet involved in a car accident.
You would NEVER see this anywhere else.
…
So, consider this scenario…
In China, Fido bolts across a busy road. He gets hit, the car and driver slows for a minute but then continues to drive on.
A day later, the owner finds the crushed bones of Fido.
He files a police report, which NORMALLY causes the AI cameras in the region to identify what actually happened.
And just like the Tom Curse movie “Minority Report” the car is identified, the driver is identified, and the time of death is established.
The driver is contacted. He apologies, and his insurance is notified.
There is a insurance pay out to the aggrieved pet owner.
…
This would NEVER happen in the USA. But it’s pretty common in China. It’s an accident and there are no civil or criminal penalties for the driver, but the aggrieved pet owner needs to be compensated, and this is the way China does it.
At one, the funeral of an elderly woman, her only child used the eulogy to mock and insult her to the startled crowd. Also, there was no body and no mention of one. We showed up to a bare room where her child stood at the podium and went on about her shortcomings for about forty-five minutes, until we were dismissed. No gravesite was ever disclosed. To this day we have no idea what happened to her.
At another, a relative leaned over a coffin and contemplated the deceased as he took a long, loud slurp from a Super Big Gulp.
image 88
via The Blaze
And, although strictly speaking this took place after the funeral, I should mention my spirited aunt who tormented my uncle from Beyond. She informed everyone as she was dying that she’d reincarnate as a bird and peck out the eyes of those who’d done her wrong. After the funeral, which was in early spring, her husband came home and a bird was nesting in the back porch overhang. It chose to dive bomb him at the worst (best?) possible time, and for the rest of his life he swore the bird was his dead wife returning to haunt him.
My grandfather was a WWII sniper. It was always funny to me…he had the worst eyesight you could imagine, and I remember seeing pictures of him as a little boy with glasses thick as milk bottles. But by a very wide margin, he was the best shot I’ve ever seen.
One example is something that happened when I was a little girl. We used to go to an annual state fair, and one of the attractions was a turkey shoot. Basically, it was a wooden maze that a live turkey would run through…the body was hidden, but as the turkey ran, he’d bob up and down and his head would be visible for a fraction of a second every now and then. Contestants would pay to take a shot – you stood maybe ten yards behind the maze and you had one shot…if you hit it, you won the (dead) turkey and some sort of cash prize.
We watched other shooters…apparently it was a big test of manhood among the locals, and all the heavy-duty serious shooters were out there, many in camo with various military or law enforcement patches. Definitely some seriously mean looking dudes. The tool of choice seemed to be an expensive looking shotgun, and while some of the shooters seemed to come close, the turkey always eluded them. Many shooters tried, but the turkey was still alive – I started to think maybe the whole thing was rigged somehow, and that there really was no way to win.
Thing is, the crowd was loud enough that you couldn’t really tell where the turkey was at any moment. It might make a beeline for the exit, or it might linger in the maze. It might hear something and keep its head up, or it might not…very unpredictable, and shooters would have to spot the turkey, swing their weapon and get a shot off in almost zero time.
Many of the shooters seemed to use a technique where they’d just pick a small area of the maze and keep their guns focused there. Didn’t seem to make a difference…the movement was just too fast to acquire the target and get a shot off.
My grandfather watched the event too, shaking his head at each of the shooters and telling us what they were doing wrong. At one point, my father suggests that grandpa should show them how it’s done…only issue is that he doesn’t have a shotgun.
Out of pure coincidence, grandpa had taken my older brother to the range a few days prior, and my brother remembered that his .22 was still locked in the trunk of the car. Grandpa starts considering it, and he asks the folks running the event if he can shoot a .22 instead of a shotgun. There was discussion whether this was allowable, but before you know it, my father and older brother head off to fetch the .22.
Grandpa takes out the .22 and the crowd sort of laughs…here’s this feeble 70-something with thick dark glasses and a pretty well worn .22 that might just as well have been a slingshot. People try to explain to him that he needs a shotgun, and one or two of the shooters even offers to lend him one…I remember him laughing them off with, “well, what kind of contest would that be? I have to at least give the poor bird a fighting chance.”
Of course, by now, grandpa’s pride was at stake, and there was no way he was putting down that .22.
Grandpa pays his fee and lines up. He draws a crowd, and with the help of my dad, he gets down into a kneeling stance, and suddenly he looks a little more like he knows what he’s doing.
I was maybe ten, and grandpa looks at me and tells me to stand close, but not too close, and to put my fingers in my ears. I remember him telling me he wanted to make sure I had a good view, and someday I’d either tell my kids about grandpa’s amazing shot, or I’d be telling them what a silly old man he was…either way, he wanted me to witness it.
The buzzer goes off, the crowd starts yelling and the turkey starts its run through the maze. I remember seeing its head bob up and down a few times, and then as it got about halfway through the maze, I hear grandpa’s shot ring out.
We didn’t see the turkey after that…it wasn’t clear if it had been hit or it just ran to the end of the maze with its head down.
Then I heard someone in the crowd: “the old man hit it!”
And sure enough, grandpa hit the turkey with one shot from his lowly .22.
The crowd was going crazy, and I asked grandpa how he did it: “easy – I just watched for the gleam of the sunlight in its eyes.”
I thought he was kidding, but when the bird was fetched, we found out that grandpa managed to put a bullet exactly through the eyes of the turkey…in fact, the bullet went in one eye, and out the other. If I hadn’t seen grandpa shoot before, I would have thought it was pure luck, but I knew better.
We didn’t know it at the time, but grandpa had pancreatic cancer – he died within the next six months…this event, grandma complaining about having to go home and roast a turkey even as she beamed with pride, and the twenty dollars grandpa gave each of us as thanks for believing in him, were some of my fondest memories of my grandfather.
I’m sure there are others that could make that shot, but when you consider his age, physical condition, primitive equipment, and the stress of the situation, it was one in a million in my book.
I was just a girl, probably about 10. My Dad was driving the family to my Grandmother’s place for Sunday dinner. Dad stopped behind a car at a red light when it happened…
Now to know my Dad was to love him. He was all of 5 feet tall, had polio as a child so was bent over with a hump back and had an undeveloped leg in a brace. He was a talker, could converse with anyone. He sang and played the guitar, he boxed with my little brother and built a mean fire when we went camping. He couldn’t chop wood or put up a tent or anything that required muscle, but he could and did, entertain his friends and family as they did it for him. Not one person ever resented helping my Dad. He had a way of making everyone feel comfortable, like he’d known them forever. So… he was a gem.
This day was just like every other Sunday. Except for what happened at that light. I don’t really remember what caused the problem but my Dad did something that pissed off the guy driving ahead of him. This guy slams his vehicle into park and gets out of the vehicle then starts stalking over to Dad’s door. My Mom is worried but not him. He got out of his door, walked all 5 feet of himself up to this brute, stuck out his hand and said something like “I seemed to have annoyed you somehow.” I don’t remember the conversation but I do remember the guy shaking my Dad’s hand and apologizing for getting mad over nothing. Yup, took the wind right out of his sails in a few seconds. Quite the guy.
I became friends with Gordon in Grad School. Gordon suffered from Acromegaly. Acromegaly is a hormonal disorder that develops when your pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone during adulthood. When this happens, your bones increase in size, including those of your hands, feet and face.
He never had friends and had been shunned his whole life. I heard a voice (as I do when it is very important) that said to befriend him. I did, going out for chicken drive-thru, having long talks and visiting each other’s houses. His mom was very curious of me.
I wanted to have a graduate party, about 100 students, at my Dad’s house. Guess whose name was at the top of the flyer? Three hosts, including Gordon. Supertramp was on the record player and it was a great time.
Wonders of wonders, Gordon announced he was going to throw a party. It was word of mouth since there was no internet. Gordon had timed it so his parents were out of town. I arrived early to help. He was busy setting out nuts and such. Unfortunately, it was pouring down raining, hard. Gordon lived in an outer suburb of the city, so it was a drive.
7:30 came and went. Nobody showed. Nobody.
I started to talk to Gordon that it was raining hard, and people do not like to drive in the rain, etc. He listened but was still busy.
At 8:00, there was a ring on the doorbell. Then another, then another.
EVERYBODY was there. He was so happy and I was happy for him.
The next day I went to help clean up. All good.
Later he told me his parents wanted to know why there were shoe prints in the bathtub.
I have had success in school, business, and my marriage, but one of the proudest moments was seeing Gordon’s face that night.
I was working at the corporate headquarters of a major Consumer product goods company in the late 80s. They were undergoing the threat of being purchased by a tobacco company, which was going on at the time (late 80s and early 90s). As such, they were having a significant 14% layoff to improve their position in a potential hostile takeover. (and it did work!), Well, there was a lot of hurt and pain the morning people came in to discover they were pink-slipped. One guy and there was some concern from a PR perspective, was a guy who had worked at this company for over 40, yes, 40 years! He was a year out from retirement(meaning he planned to retire the following year) , and the company was giving generous severance packages. Well, the guy under the terms of severance was getting the maximum full year of 100% pay for 52 weeks. Basically, he was retiring with full pay and retirement benefits but was able to do so a full year early. He and his wife had planned a world cruise to the year after his retirement. Evidently, the first call he made was to his wife to book the ship and pack because we are going this week! He was so gleeful that he had to be escorted out of the building because his utter joy was inappropriate for so many in that office who were now unemployed and hurting. They were also concerned that at his age, he might have a heart attack from his ecstasy and how the press would report it!
I was at an outdoor shooting range and had been talking to the guy next to me during cease-fire breaks. He had his granddaughter with him and he was shooting an old .22 revolver at a 25 yard target. Two men came in and went down to the 10 yard range and were blasting away at their targets, often hitting the ground in their haste. At the next cease-fire, they packed up and walked down the shooting line to leave. The guy next to me said something to them about maybe slowing down their shots and focusing on accuracy. They informed him that they were rookie cops and that they knew what they were doing because of their extensive weeks (days?) of training. He replied that he was a retired Louisiana cop and held up 2 of his targets that he had pulled from the range. He had been shooting heart shapes into the target with that old revolver. As they left, I heard one of the rookies tell the other, “We just got schooled, didn’t we.”
The best badass story I ever heard was in the news here maybe 20 years ago. A guy was running the register at his little convenience store when a punk came in and pulled a pistol demanding money. The store owner started complaining about being robbed several times and that he needed to get a gun. Then he asked the robber how much he would take to sell him the pistol. The robber gave him a price, the owner paid him, took the gun, and turned it on the robber and told him to put his hands up. The story made the news because the police thought it was such a great “dumb criminal story” that they pulled the robber out of his cell at each shift change and made him tell the cops coming on duty what had happened. His lawyer threatened to sue the police department for embarrassing the guy.
I never got amazing grades in my science class. Or any classes really. I was a very distracted student. Class was boring. I enjoyed daydreaming in the back.
But I won the school science fair in 9th grade.
Almost as fun as winning the science fair?
Enjoying death stares from all the smart kids.
I was told that the smartest girl in our class, Liz, who went on to study at MIT, was pissssed. Both of her parents were doctors. She fancied herself a descendant of Science.
The quote that got back to me was, “I can’t believe I lost to Sean.”
But alas. Lose she did. Yours truly, Captain Dumbass, topped a future MIT Grad.
What was my experiment, you ask?
Well, for context, this was back in 1998 after a bunch of major oil spills had occurred and the news had lots of terrible stories about wildlife dying, covered in the tar-like oil.
My experiment measured the use of different types of animal hair in oil spill cleanups. I used hair from barber shops, llama farms, horse farms, and beyond in the experiment, which was done in the backyard in a kiddy pool.
Several types of fibers ended up testing with better results than the synthetic buoys used during actual oil spill cleanups.
After winning regionals at a local university, we traveled to states a month later, where about 50 science experiments were featured.
I think I was the dumbest guy at this science fair, but I placed 3rd somehow.
The guy who placed 1st, a 15-year-old, designed a roof that doesn’t blow off during hurricanes. He brought his own wind tunnel and everything.
Yeah, he kinda deserved the gold.
But I was happy with 3rd. And for having trolled the smart kids at my school back home.
May 6, 2008. My husband of 28 years came home early from work one day, sat down at the table and told me he was just fired for having an affair with a 25 year old girl at work. In that moment, with that one sentence, everything inside me shut down and I was in shock, numb. Until then, I had truly believed he was my best friend and I was a lucky woman.
We ended up losing our dream home, went bankrupt, sold everything of value and cashed out our retirement to survive (I have a good job but his salary was 4x’s mine). We now live in a small apartment like we did when we first got married. Those are just “things” though. What hurts most is how it affected the future of our (then) teen children. We couldn’t help them through college or keep them on health, dentist, and car insurance. All for a few quick fucks.
He is extremely remorseful and worked long and hard to win my heart back. Our marriage counselor considers us a huge success story. I have forgiven him and all seems happy now. But secretly, whatever it was that went numb inside me on May 6th at that breakfast table, has never come back to me. I’m afraid it never will.
I hope if you are married, or even happily employed, that this post will make you think twice should you need to.
The only crucial battle of WW2 that the Axis almost won was the Battle for the Atlantic. This plane and the others that performed anti-submarine patrols enable the flow of men and materials from America to Britain.
When I was growing up, I saw my father going to office every day. He would eat his breakfast at 9 and leave for office by 9.30. It was a six days week during that period. Since he was a civil servant, he had to many times go for work even on Sundays and holidays.
When I was in school and then in college, I seldom missed my classes. It was fun going to school and college and meet with friends and participate in all activities.
When I joined my job, everyone in office used to come in time without fail. There were many who wouldn’t even avail their full quota of casual leaves (15 in a year). There were a few instances when due to Deewali or some other vacations, there were continuous holidays for 4–5 days. People used to wait for offices to open.
Even today, in most government offices, there is no concept of working from home. All government employees go to office every day.
During the covid pandemic, most of the private sector companies introduced the concept of work from home. It was the need of the hour and was very convenient for the employees. Lots of people shifted to their home towns and worked from there. It became a new normal.
Now that the things have gotten back to normal, a number of people are still preferring to work from home. I know a few youngsters who resigned their jobs when the companies asked them to report to office for work. They became too comfortable perhaps working from home.
Maybe I am old school, but for me staying home all day is not done. I want to go to my office and work.
I was 14. No friends. Each day I dragged myself home to where I lived with my schizophrenic Mother, just the two of us. I would be in trouble for something: I lived in a perpetual state of confusion as I often couldn’t remember what she told me I had done. She told me I was stupid and needed to go to a special school because I didn’t know what I had done wrong. In the past she had often slapped me until my nose bled and beat me with the metal pole of a fly swatter, but that stopped the summer before high school. She told me she didn’t love me repeatedly for months. According to her I was a horrible daughter. Her friends from church had stopped coming weekly to yell at me and slap me senseless as well. I knew when she sent me away with my Aunt and Uncle the summer that had passed she had read my diary, where I detailed all the abuse and talked about wanting to die. She denied reading it, but it stopped the physical abuse so now it was just verbal and believe it or not that hurt just as bad. I was unloveable and alone.
She didn’t work and depended on government assistance. She just sat at home chain smoking and playing cards. During the week I woke myself up, made breakfast, went to school. She complained about the smell of eggs in the morning and of course I was useless. I had a hard time socializing, and she decided she didn’t like the friends I’d managed to make the previous year, so put me in a very small private Christian high school the church paid for. As a low income, single parent house I was a freak among higher income two parent families. So I spent my days an outsider and bullied at school and then came home to be bullied some more. I got in trouble once because someone told her I walked around with my head down and never smiled! I remember trying out and making the school play that year. I was so proud. My Mother decided to use that as leverage for her every whim: if I did anything wrong (sang doing dishes) she threatened to not allow me to be in the play. It got so bad I just quit the play rather than have it continually be held over my head as a threat.
A school councillor regularily made me talk to him. I refused to give anything up. He persisted. He asked me if I was abused: as she was no longer hitting me I said no. I had no words to explain the verbal abuse. Being stupid and unloveable didn’t seem to qualify. Then one magical day a girl at school approached me and we became friends. A few weeks later she asked me if I could spend the weekend at her house. Her house was beautiful and she lived with her parents and siblings and it was loud, noisy and chaotic. On the Saturday of this weekend sleep over, my new friend had to take piano lessons so I was to hang out in her room until she got back. I was surprised when both her parents wanted to speak with me while she was gone. They informed me that the school had asked them to be my foster parents and presented me with a ‘contract’. They gave me 30 minutes to decide if I wanted to live with them.
I was 14 years old. I had no friends. My Mother was the only family I had ever known. I knew I was stupid. I knew that I was worthless and unloveable. 30 minutes was a ridiculous amount of time for a decision that would change the course of my life that I was too young to make. I didn’t know these people at all. But a voice in my head screamed at me to do it, with everything it had. So I took that leap of faith. I jumped off the cliff away from everything I’d ever known.
My roller coaster ride wasn’t over my any means, but to this day I am so grateful I left. My life 30 years later is wonderful and I often wonder where I would be if I had stayed growing up in that house.
I spent several weeks in a Prisoner of War camp in Central Bosnia. Conditions were bad and so was the food. We basically ate the same things every day:
Breakfast.
A small slice of bacon with bread. The bacon was as tough as leather and full of bones. If you were lucky, one of your roommates was working outside and brought you some Turkish coffee.
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This slice of bacon looks much better than the ones we ate. (Photo: Rainer Zenz, wiki:de)
Lunch.
Most of the time, there was no electrical power and our food had to be heated over a small fire in the backyard. Our captors just threw a bunch of tinned food into a big pot of boiling water. There were two different meals: peas with beef and beans with beef. You always had to be careful when you opened the tins because they were under pressure. Once, I opened a tin and the content just sprayed over my T-Shirt.
Dinner.
We either had another slice of sh*tty bacon or tinned sardines with an onion. Both, the bacon and the sardines, were extremely salty which caused you to drink a lot of water during the night. This was a big problem because there were no toilets in the rooms. If you needed to pee, you had to knock on the door (waking everyone up), shout the number of your room to a guard, and wait. There was only one toilet for all of the seventy prisoners and it could take an hour before someone came to open the door.
The aircraft itself was pretty crappy but that didn’t matter as kinks would be worked out later.
It’s main job was to attack targets in Western Europe and its speed could not be matched by NATO interceptors stationed in Europe except the British Lightning and the F-104 Starfighter … BUT …
The Lightning had a short range and was only operated from British soil, it couldn’t go after the Tu-22. And the F-104 was a very good interceptor but the Europeans used it in the low-level fighter-bomber role, so again not a real threat to the Tu-22.
On top of that, the Tu-22 was a versatile aircraft that could carry a wide range of weapons.
But the most important aspect was psychological.
The fucking commies have a bomber we can’t intercept !!! and NATO collectively shit its pants.
Think about all those billions wasted on modern NATO Air Defences while Khrushchev had already decided to go with ballistic missiles instead of bombers.
With a large arsenal of relatively cheap missiles, the Soviets could have taken out expensive NATO Air Defences and then mop up the rest with cheap (and often crappy) bombers.
The Soviets couldn’t keep up with the West financially so they came up with a wide range of ploys to force the West to spend money on expensive systems that could be easily circumvented … and usually NATO fell for it (they still went broke in the end, but that is another story).
I don’t like to share my personal life with anyone, so writing this anonymously. Though I have made some mistakes in life, this one really tops the chart.
So me any my father were never really close, although he cared for me but never really showed it (like most indian dads) and I was the same as well. It was my final year engineering exams when I received a call from home, it was my sister who said that dad just fainted and we are taking him to the hospital. I reached as soon as I could, he suffered from brain haemorrhage. Though the doctore saved him, he was not able to walk or speak properly after that. He was 57 at the time.
After 3 years went by, we had accepted this fate and were living peacefully. My dad was now able to take care of himself(doing his day to day activities that is) and he used to exercise as well, since the doctors mentioned it was very important for him to keep his body moving.
One fine day he complained to us that he is having some chest pain so he’ll skip exercise, we all thought it was due to gas so didn’t pay much thoguht to it. This continued for 3–4 days after which I had an argument with him and I shouted these exact words to him “You are just finding excuses to not exercise, there’s nothing wrong with you. You are just being lazy.”
Guess what! Next morning he started sweating really bad and fainted. We took him to the hospita and found that he was suffering from a heart attack and doctor said that it must be going on for about 4–5 days now. He asked us how come we didn’t notice any symptoms and we were all blank and cried like anything.
He was not so lucky this time, after being in the ICU for 15 days, he didn’t make it. Life has never really been the same since, beacise all I can think of now is our last coversation in which I shouted at him. That’s my last interaction with him, the amount of pain and guilt I feel now, if I could give everything I have just to change that one moment where I shouted at him, I would not even think twice.
But I can’t, after that day I’ve realised the importance of words and parents as well. Although they may not always show but we(their children) are the best thing that ever happened to them.
Please guys, treat your parents with the love and respect they deserve, because you don’t know which conversation is going to be the last one.
1. They are extremely punctual. For eg: I had a dinner planned with my labmates at sharp 6.00 PM. I was in my room till 6.00 PM and I wondered where everybody has gone as no one was to be seen. Suddenly, I remembered that there was a dinner at 6.00 PM and immediately I rushed downstairs. I reached at there around 6.02 PM and saw everybody there in their seats waiting just for me and they had set a plate with the food for me. When I sat down, then they sang their prayer and started eating.
2. People politely line-up in front of the metro unlike in Delhi metro where people cover the whole door just to get inside (at least that was my experience when I traveled in Delhi metro during my visit there) and it is considered rude to speak in the metro.
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3. Even if train is delayed by 15-20 seconds, a message is displayed “Sorry for the inconvenience”
4. Technology is used even in toilets to keep the seats warm and bidets are there. There is also an audio track to mask the unappealing sounds you emit 😛
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5. Has excellent garbage management: For eg. Mon, Thu – Burnable, Wed- Non-burnable, Fri- Bottles and plastics to be kept in street corner
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6. You can find almost everything of daily use in the 100 yen shop. Not to mention the cheap electronic goods in Japan.
7. There is a 10,000 yen note. And the travel is very expensive. For eg: a ride of 2 km by taxi costs 710 yen in Tokyo.
U.S, tech companies are unfortunately being squeezed by our own government. The Chinese market is existential to these companies. . . . and its the U.S. government banning them from this market.
Biden is continuing trump’s sanctions of China’s tech companies – that latest salvo being the ban on U.S. tech companies from selling to China the latest version chips. But for what end?
Bottomline, on a head-to-head confrontation, the U.S. just can’t win because ultimately, you need to be able to sell what you produce. And this has to be through China because they are the market.
And by banning U.S. tech companies from the Chinese market now is allowing Chinese startups to take over the vacuum left open and effectively replace the U.S. tech companies not just in the Chinese but the global marketplace over the long term.
Back in the ′90s, a new neighbor moved in to the house just down the block. He was a single guy in his early 40s, seemed to be one of those guys who worked with his hands and kept mainly to himself. But… it wasn’t very long before we (as in the ENTIRE block) found out that he was a jerk.
He had a beautiful vintage ‘69 Ford Mustang GT 500, with (what I found out later) one of the fastest engines ever commercially made. Here’s one below, and you have to admit, it looks absolutely stunning, eh?
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Well, the neighbor in question definitely thought so as well, especially the over-powered engine. But in a suburb, where can you show off the power of the engine, really?
How about EVERY MORNING AT 5 AM when he went to work.
Every morning, that lunatic would pull out of his driveway, rev up the engine and demonstrate why that car could go 0–60 in 3.3 seconds! That car (and he) would go straight down the length of the block in practically 2 seconds and burst out onto the cross streets until he disappeared in a tell tale cloud of smoke and exhaust. Our neighborhood had become a 5 AM RACE TRACK.
To put it lightly, the entire neighborhood was NOT impressed. The sound of that car engine could be heard from two blocks away. I think practically all of the residents went to him in the period of a week asking him to not drive so recklessly and dangerously and wake up the entire block every weekday (and some weekend) mornings.
He would fake concern, and assure everyone he won’t do it again. And of course, he did it again and again. We complained to the cops, and they gave him a warning several times, but at the time there were no laws on the books in Montreal about sound decibels between 11 PM and 5 AM. Needless to say, we were stuck.
This went on for about two months until winter set in, and I and several neighbors were assembling the local outdoor hockey rink. As we were filling in the rink, making the ice and so on, we were talking about the jerk when an inspired idea suddenly flashed in our heads. Looking at the wooden boards that we used to make the ice rink, a devious plan came to mind. We rushed back to my kitchen as soon as we could, and started to work on the math. Later, we went door to door to see who we could conscript to help with our evil plans.
(By the way for all you car enthusiasts and collectors, I have NO idea why this guy was using such a classic car as a daily driver, and why drive it in the winter either.)
A few more weeks we all waited (by this time, the secret neighborhood revenge task force grew to about 30 households) for an ESPECIALLY cold day in Montreal (-20C and below) and waited for the chance to execute our plan… and then the forecast came of one especially cold night and day. The time had come.
Seeing as the neighbor always went to work at 5 AM, he almost always went to bed around 9 PM. Assuming that he would take about an hour to get ready for work, that gave us a window of around midnight to 3 AM for our plan. And like clockwork, at the stroke of midnight, 30 people came out, with small shovels, wood brackets (the ones we use to make local rinks), buckets and several hoses from the houses surrounding the target house. We all worked efficiently and effectively seeing as we never did anything like this before. Brackets went up. Snow got piled in. Water poured in.
Did I forget to mention again that it was -24C that night?
By 3 AM, we were all done. Our act of vengeance was complete, and had a few more hours still to harden and solidify. And yes, you’ve probably guessed what we did… and at 5 AM, we heard a very loud man ranting and raving, wanting revenge on whomever that did this, screaming that he was going to do horrible things to the people that did THIS to his beloved car.
Oh, as for what we did… imagine the next two pics COMBINED to see what we did to that beloved ’69 Ford Mustang GT 500.
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Yes, we turned his car into A HUGE ICE CUBE.
Needless to say, when life resumed on the street around 7 to 8 AM as people were going to work, we were greeted to a pretty pissed-off guy hammering at iron-strong ice walls surrounding his car. He wouldn’t even look at anyone as people passed by, and only kept muttering to himself something pretty nasty.
It was about three days before he managed to get his car completely free, and that involved a LOT of hot water, hours of labour and god knows what else he had to do. Add on that he had to get back to work each day, the mornings were peaceful as there was nary a roar or sound of anything.
The cops came and asked for statements from everyone in the area to find out who could have done something so terrible, but no one pointed at anyone, and everyone reiterated about how that neighbor had been a jerk from day two. He even went door to door, absolutely furious and demanded that someone tell him who did this. I think someone must have called the cops on him because he was threatening too many people. Needless to say, his complaints fell on deaf ears, and even the cops, who I think figured out that this was a group event, brushed his rantings away and threatened him with arrest and told him to calm down or else. Overall, a pretty satisfactory conclusion.
Well, there was a slight miscalculation though… the hot water (then cold) had to drain somewhere, and went down the street turning half the block into an ice rink for a while. Still, aside from a few bags of sand and ice, plus the help of the city and ANOTHER warning from the cops about how he was endangering the street, it was still a successful operation with only a minor inconvenience.
For the next few months, the mornings were quite peaceful. No more 5 AM revving or barreling out of the neighborhood like a bat out of hell. And in the spring, a For Sale sign popped up on his lawn. By the summer, we greeted a brand new family to the neighborhood, and life went on in a sleepy (no longer sleep-deprived) suburban neighborhood in Canada.
An acquaintance of mine took his daughter’s college savings away so that he could buy a boat. He did this the year before she went to college to “teach her responsibility” after they had an argument.
After they got into a (relatively minor) fight he told her she had two choices:
1) They could transfer ownership of an almost-paid-off car to her.
2) Let her keep the college fund they’d been growing (they told her this fund was for her, her entire life).
She chose “Keep the college fund”. He changed his mind, took that option away, made her take the car anyway, and kept the college fund for himself instead. Perhaps 2) was never an option, but he hoped she’d choose the car so he wouldn’t feel like such a jerk for taking her college money away.
Shortly after taking her college fund away, a brand new fishing boat appeared in his driveway. It looked a hell of lot like he just wanted an excuse to get his boat.
I am still in abject disgust.
She was a fantastic student and had been told throughout her life that her college would be paid for if she had good grades.
If my daughter had great grades and had the desire to go to a good school, even if I was poor, I would work 3 jobs to make sure she could have the best education.
School always came first in my family so I didn’t understand his actions. Bad grades were quickly punished. Good grades forgave many sins.
Natchitoches Meat Pies with Pepper Jelly
Pepper Jelly is also very good over cream cheese and served with crackers.
natchitoches meat pies recipe 181af2
Yield: about 90 to 100 meat pies; 9 to 10 half-pints Pepper Jelly
Ingredients
Filling
2 pounds ground sirloin
2 pounds ground pork
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon red pepper
1 cup chopped green onion
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
Vegetable oil for frying
Crust
2 cups self-rising flour
1/3 cup Crisco shortening
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup milk
Pepper Jelly
2 cups finely chopped bell peppers
20 to 25 jalapeno peppers, some but not all of the seeds removed
7 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
1 (6 ounce) box Certo pectin
Instructions
Filling
Cook ground sirloin and pork until it crumbles. Add salt, black pepper, red pepper and green onions. Stir in all-purpose flour. Set aside to cool.
Crust
Sift self-rising flour into a large bowl. Cut shortening into flour. Add egg and milk. Form dough into ball.
On a floured board, roll about a third of the dough about 1/4 inch thick. Cut dough in circles about 3 inches in diameter. Place a heaping tablespoon of meat mixture on each circle. Dampen edges. Fold over filling. Crimp edges with a fork and prick with fork on top. Deep fry at 350 degrees F until golden brown.
Serve with Pepper Jelly.
Pepper Jelly
Chop peppers very fine. Place peppers, sugar and vinegar in a tall pot and bring to a boil. Boil for 7 to 8 minutes, then add both pouches of Certo pectin. Boil for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Put into sterilized jars and seal.
Serve Pepper Jelly with Natchitoches Meat Pies.
Notes
You may need to repeat the crust recipe three or four times to use all of the meat mixture.
Freezes well. Place uncooked pies on cookie sheet in freezer until set. Put in recloseable plastic bags and freeze.
His name is Wang Enlin. He is a Chinese farmer. He was a primary school dropout.
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In 2001, his farmland was flooded by chemical waste from a nearby chemical company. The chemical pollution made the land unusable . Wang had written to the local officials about the pollution but he had no idea what law the company had broken by polluting his land.
‘I knew I was in the right, but I did not know what law the other party had broken or whether or not there was evidence.’
He decided to study law by himself, so he would be able to sue the company.
He spent 16 years educating himself about the law, from 2001 to 2017.
He studied law books in a local bookstore.
He sued the company and had won the first round of the legal battle against Qihua Group which is a state-owned chemicals company.
Took a friend’s child (11m) to swim class. The instructor was a 19 yo college varsity swimmer. First class of the day, heard her talking about her new swimsuit and how her BF got it for a romantic trip they were taking that weekend, but since she had not done laundry, she pulled it out early.
She always swam a couple of hard and fast laps before starting class, finishing with this dramatic pop out of the water to stand infront of where her class gathered. This day was no different. Turns out her suit was a joke swimsuit, made with dissolving threads. It was intended to fall apart in the hot tub of where ever they were going for the romantic weekend. She did her normal dramatic pop out of the water to stand on the deck in front of her class, and let’s just say those 11-year-old boys got quite the education that day.
Showed up for a college English class just as the class was starting. There was only one seat left by the time I got there.
That seat was next to a very hot woman who was way out of my league. So far out of my league that I didn’t bother talking to her. Why set myself up for failure, you know?
Over the next few classes, people kept sitting in the same seats, even though they weren’t assigned or anything. I started to talk to the woman, mainly because the professor had us discuss some things with people near us. Eventually I got comfortable talking to her and forgot she was so far out of my league. Then, after class one day, I offered her a ride to the other side of campus, even though it wasn’t a large campus. I told her I wanted to show her my new car (which was true). She accepted, we started talking more.
Finally, I asked her out; she accepted. We dated for five years, got married, had three kids, one dog, bought a house, and now she’s sitting next to me, trying to figure out how to set up some new speakers she got for Christmas.
All because I was the last one in class and had to take the one seat that was left. Otherwise, I would never have sat next to someone like her.
Cheating Wife LOSES IT After Husband Puts Her Through The Ultimate Mental Gymnastics Before Divorce
Tactically Interesting.
"It's always the dad that ends up broken about the actions of his daughter..."
I was the company’s first employee. It started with just me and the owner working from his living room. He promised me as the company grew so would my paycheck. Two years later… I am running the whole back end of the company out of two warehouses and he is running the front end and doing the administration side. As he travels the world I step up and run it all. He bought his wife and father each a Lexus. I was still living with my grandparents and driving an old beat up car because I couldn’t even afford a studio apartment anywhere in our county but my annual review was coming and since the company and his pay had grown exponentially, I expected a large raise.
My annual review was nothing short of perfect, but all I got was a $0.25 per hour raise. It was bull****. He cried when I gave him my notice, but in my opinion, he kind of asked for it. I would have gladly stayed if he kept his word and my pay really had grown as the business did. After I left apparently there was a power struggle with all the employees in both warehouses all fighting over who would be in my position and it fell apart. He begged me to come back and help it get under control again but that was a big NO.
Xi calls for letting internet better benefit people of all countries
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday called for letting the internet better benefit people of all countries when he addressed the opening ceremony of the 2023 World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit via video.
Xi said that the vision of jointly building a community with a shared future in cyberspace, which he proposed at the second WIC in 2015, has garnered widespread international recognition and positive responses.
The vision answers the questions of our times related to resolving the development deficit, addressing security challenges, and enhancing mutual learning between civilizations, Xi said.
Xi stressed that the international community needs to deepen exchanges and practical cooperation to jointly advance the building of a community with a shared future in cyberspace to a new stage.
He called for prioritizing development to let the fruits of internet development benefit more countries and people.
Xi emphasized the need to improve public access to information-based services, bridge the digital divide, and improve people’s livelihood with internet development.
Calling for building a more peaceful and secure cyberspace, Xi stressed the need to respect cyber sovereignty and each country’s way of internet governance and the need to oppose seeking hegemony, bloc confrontation and arms race in cyberspace.
Xi went on to underscore the need to crack down on cyber crimes, strengthen data security and personal information protection, and properly respond to the risks and challenges brought by sci-tech development to rules, society and ethics.
China is willing to work with all parties to implement the Global Artificial Intelligence Governance Initiative and promote the safe development of AI, Xi said.
He also called for building a more equal and inclusive cyberspace. He stressed the need to better promote the shared values of humanity.
Xi underlined more high-quality online cultural products and efforts to fully showcase the outstanding achievements of human civilizations and actively promote civilization preservation and development.
After working for several companies, I came to a grim conclusion. In most organizations, only ~10% of people are truly high performers. They have great attitudes, are self-starters, smart, and great to work with.
25% are hard-working, competent, and carry most of the company’s workload. About 50% are lazy and just cross the minimum standard of work. 15% are completely incompetent and shouldn’t be at the company.
Many in this bottom 65% are gone at 5:01 PM despite being on a performance improvement plan. And the thing that stinks: many of them once held promise in the eyes of the interviewer. Nobody wants to hire and manage a dud.
Many in that bottom wrung are managers too. They slid up to their own level of incompetence (the Peter Principle). There’s another key distinction between the top 35% and the bottom 65%.
Their attitude.
The high performers don’t grimace when something goes wrong because it means more work. They don’t pout or complain incessantly about their job.
They are all in. They are there to crush their goals.
I noticed this in particular with the Indian coworkers who were there on a work Visa. They were the ultimate in keeping their head down and working, never complaining, and investigating problems thoroughly.
They appreciated the opportunity in front of them. They weren’t spoiled and had grown up in a competitive academic environment.
The head of my department was anonymously accused of sexual harassing a female senior student. Immediately an investigation was started, and he was put on hold.
When first days, and then weeks passed, it became obvious that in this kind of case, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent. I always thought it had to be the other way around.
(Stupid me.)
The weird thing was that although the accusation had been filed anonymously, the student was named in the document — she had not filed it by herself. After a round of interviews, it also became clear that she had not been harassed at all.
In fact, she was totally shocked by the way she had been questioned, as if she had been almost forced to “admit the accusation.” But nothing had happened, which she had repeated over and over again, and still the same questions came.
From the beginning, I was involved in the case as a confidant, and after reading the accusation, it became crystal clear who had written it. (And it wasn’t the girl.) This was a retaliation of the darkest evil, written by people who wanted to get rid of the man, and this was the easiest way.
They tried to erase his every accomplishment by making him a sexual offender. And it actually worked.
Because although he was totally cleared in the end, many people had already decided that he was a sexual predator before the outcome of the investigation. And that type of people usually don’t change their mind afterwards.
And although he was declared innocent, soon after he was “asked” by the dean to step aside as the head of the department (to save the faculty from losing face), and a new head was appointed.
I was running late to a family gathering at my older brother’s house. When I got there I saw my cousins step son going under the water in the pool.(my cousin leaning on the fence,) watching this happen and does nothing. Turns away, my son, the same age and build as the other boy, dove in to help. He can swim, but not well enough to handle a panicking person. I was on my way to the pool, removing my boots to help the first boy, when I saw my son I panicked. Knowing he wasn’t going to be able to help, but become someone else needing help. Meanwhile no one is paying attention except my ex wife. So now I have to get undressed, leaving my underwear on. My clothing would have been too heavy to swim with a child in each arm. By the time I got to the edge my ex was there with 2 towels. And I said, “see, that’s what I’m talking about. He treats those kids like shit. And he just walked away seeing him go under”. Not more that 10 seconds later my aunt was jumping down my throat, saying I was just an ass…… and then it was the rest of my family. I said I am speaking out in defense of a child and you are calling me messed up. But he can watch the kids go under, yelling for help and turn around? I never went to another family function again. And recently decided that I am going to just disown the entire lot.
She: Do you have any specific seat preference, sir?
Me(lightly): A seat beside a cute girl would be great.
She(smiling): Sure, you can take that chair and sit beside me.
Slightly taken aback by that unexpected response.
Me: Not now, but maybe some other time. You can give me your number and I would definitely call you next time I’m in the city.
She: That’s private.
Me(delivering my well rehearsed dialogue): Ultimate privacy is a myth. God sees everything. The cloud records everything. NSA files everything. So, live transparently and don’t waste useless energy hiding yourself.
She(placing the ticket on the counter): Here’s your ticket, sir. If it’s meant to be, we’ll meet again. Till then have a nice journey.
Me(with a wide smile): Thank you.
Later in the flight while I was reading a novel, my attention diverted towards something scribbled at the back of my ticket which I was using as a bookmark. To my horror I saw this:
A half written name and mobile number with a smiley.
One of the security staff must have torn and kept the other half. I re-winded that conversation and cursed myself a million times for not paying attention.
Now, every time I travel through Mumbai I just glance through the Jet Airways counter once, just in case….
A bored, 25-year old intern in Microsoft – named Wes Cherry wrote Windows Solitaire (Klondike) in his spare time and never got royalty for it!
The story in his own words:
I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I had played a similar solitaire game on the Mac instead of studying for finals at college and wanted a version for myself on Windows…
At the time there was an internal “company within a company” called Bogus software. It was really just a server where bunch of guys having fun hacking Windows to learn about the API tossed their games.
A program manager on the Windows team saw it and decided to include it in Windows 3.0. It was made clear that they wouldn’t pay me other than supplying me with an IBM XT to fix some bugs during the school year — I was perfectly fine with it and I am to this day.
A few people have paid me “a penny” as a joke. I’d get them in the mail, or in person if someone introduced me as the author of Solitaire and the obligatory no royalties conversation came up. I think I’m up to about 8 cents now.
Microsoft thought that Solitaire will train people how to use mouse, a newly introduced input device back then.
Initially he programmed a Boss Key into the game, which would instantly switch out the game with spreadsheet looking display. He knew already how addictive the game is. But, Microsoft told him to remove that feature.
He is also creator of Pipe Dream which was part of Microsoft Entertainment pack. Although, this time he was paid a few thousand $ in stocks for that (those worth millions today!).
After his internship, he joined MS Excel team.
Today he is growing apples (fruit!) on an island west of Seattle.
In 2004, Microsoft’s Chris Sells described Solitaire as the most-used Windows application in the world surpassing MS-Office itself!
To celebrate Solitaire’s silver anniversary, Microsoft arranged a Solitaire tournament on the Microsoft campus on May 18, 2015.
Hats off to this genius intern, who took the internship to another level just out of self-interest!
I was baking a banana bread yesterday. When I took the loaf out of the oven, my finger accidentally touched the hot baking pan. I exclaimed, “Sonofabitch!”. My husband heard and rushed into the kitchen, “What’s that?”. I showed him my finger, “The hot baking pan burnt me!”, faking a cry. “Lemme see!”, he held my finger and gave it a ton of small kisses. “Better?”, he asked. I nodded and grinned like a little girl.
Sometimes, there is a helicopter hovering over our property. When my husband hears it, no matter what he’s doing, he will drop it, rush out to the backyard, and look up to watch the helicopter. Then he will come back inside, and announce to me with a grin, “It’s a helicopter!” like a seven year old boy.
We definitely are two kids living together (three, if we count The Teenager), and it’s pretty good. I recommend it!
I was once told that a patient in our waiting room was disruptive and probably drunk or high. I got him back to my office, and began to ask him questions. He talked about working all day outside. At that point, something struck me as odd. I asked him how long he had been in our office—less than ten minutes.
It was the hottest part of the Texas summer, and his clothes were dry. There had not been time for them to dry out. He was not sweating.
I got staff to help call EMTs. He went to the hospital with heat injury. He had been in heat stroke. He told us later that the hospital thought he might have kidney damage from it, but he recovered.
Everyone knows cold can kill you. Not as many know that heat can. If you are out in the heat and someone who has been sweating stops, or starts acting crazy, get help. People die from heat stroke, and pretty quickly.
I will never forget it. K.K. Lim had taken me to breakfast at a restaurant in Singapore known for their Laksa. It really is delicious. We were eating and talking and having a pleasant time.
When it was time to leave I pushed back from the table, forgetting the stool I sat on had no back. I proceeded to fall off of it, flat on my back. Did I mention it was a popular restaurant with high traffic? Lots of people to witness my embarrassment.
K.K. was afraid I was hurt and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to show my face there again, but I was fine. Extremely embarrassed, but fine.
We’ve had a pretty stable routine the last three years, my dog and I: Before we both go to bed, I walk her, then come home and brush my teeth. While I’m brushing my teeth, she goes to the bedroom ahead of me.
A few months ago, we came back from our final walk of the day, and I went to brush my teeth, expecting her to go upstairs to the bedroom. But she didn’t. She just stared at the basement door.
I didn’t think much of it at first. I finished brushing and began walking up the stairs, expecting her to follow me. I was only about two steps up before she started barking at the basement door. I told her to “knock it off,” thinking that she was barking at some other dog’s barking in the distance outside that I didn’t hear. She does that sometimes.
But she wouldn’t stop. She seemed distressed.
So it finally dawned on me that she was trying to tell me something. Something was in the basement that she wanted me to see.
So I opened the basement door and went down the stairs. Sure enough, she was right… there was a problem. I’d left the door to the outside from the basement wide open. I was taking things out of the basement earlier, and I totally forgot to close the door completely. The wind must have opened it all the way.
Had she not let me know about it, it would have been open all night. God only knows what woodland creatures would have found their way into my basement that night.
I rewarded her with a piece of bologna… her favorite treat. Well, really, any meat that humans normally eat makes her really happy.
Elon Musk: Taiwan is an integral part of China; the country will incorporate Taiwan 100 percent
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Succeeding to American billionaire Elon Musk’s public indication that “Taiwan is an integral part of China,”which drew backfire from Taiwan authorities according to CNN, in a recent media video, Musk once again voiced his opinion about the Chinese island, which has gained widespread support from the Chinese public.
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And the video has gone viral:
China does feel very strongly about Taiwan.
They’ve been very clear about that for a quite long time.
I understand the frustration. A couple of my kids had friends that were constantly underfoot. After talking with my kids, there were good reasons those friends didn’t want to go home, and were just looking for a safe haven to shelter in.
At that point, I stopped treating them as guests, and started treating them like my kids. If there were chores to be done, then everyone did chores. If there was homework, everybody sat down and did homework. If we had errands to run, everybody got in the car and we did errands. If any guest balked, they had a simple choice to make—they could participate with us or go home. Easy peasy.
Yes, it jacked up the food bill. Oh, well. I still have children and grandchildren who are no blood relation to me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When in doubt, be kind. But being kind doesn’t mean giving over control of your home to someone else.
A few years ago, I was teaching Earth Science to college undergraduates, and I had brought in a bag of small oranges and a bag of larger grapefruit—because you can stack them in various ways, as a visual aid to demonstrate how atoms are packed together in mineral crystals. Sort of like this:
Anyway, when class was over, I offered the fruit to anyone who wanted some. . . and a student came up and took an orange. She happened to mention that this would be the first time she had ever eaten an orange.
I said “Whut?” or something like that. Who the heck reaches the age of twenty without so much as trying an orange at least once?
In the ensuing conversation, it came out that my student’s mother evidently either couldn’t cook, or didn’t want to cook. . . and my student had been raised on fast food throughout her childhood and teenage years—burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, and so on. (For the record, I don’t remember if she had only eaten McDonald’s food specifically, or if she balanced her diet with other fast food chain menus.) She had never tried—or had only recently tried—all the fruits and vegetables that I pretty much took for granted as I was growing up.
You might think that someone who’d grown up on a diet of nothing but fast food would weigh 800 pounds and have lost all her teeth to scurvy, or something like that. But this student was of normal height and weight, and had no obvious medical conditions that I could detect. As a professor I try not to pay too much attention to my students’ looks, but as such things are commonly reckoned she was not bad-looking at all—and pretty smart as well; she did quite well in the class.
So I’m damned if I know how she did it, or what kind of trick metabolism she must have had—but it is evidently possible to eat McDonald’s food for many years and suffer no obvious ill effects. I still wouldn’t recommend it, though.
As I recall, she enjoyed the orange.
RICH Chinese LEFTOVER Women Are Not Attractive to AVERAGE Men Despite Women Being Outnumbered
A Chinese man had brought a dog home from an animal shelter after adoption.
The dog was caring and obedient; however, one night the owner found the dog awake. The dog stood outside the man’s fenced bedroom door. He had been staring at the man while he was asleep.
The man shrugged it off, thinking that the dog was getting used to his new surroundings. But when the pattern was followed night after night, the owner was scared for the dog.
The owner used to play with the dog to make sure he was exhausted at the end of the day and would eventually sleep at night.
But the dog would stay awake and gaze at him every night.
The man showed him to the vet, but the dog was declared healthy.
Finally, the man went to the shelter from which the dog was adopted to seek closure.
The shelter workers revealed that the dog’s previous owner wanted to get rid of him as he had a pregnant wife and he found it difficult to take care of the two.
The owner waited for the dog to fall asleep and then left him at the shelter.
When the dog woke up, he realised that he had been abandoned. Deeply traumatised by it, he found it difficult to trust his new owner and feared being abandoned again if he fell asleep.
Upon learning this, the owner broke into tears. He removed the fence and shifted the dog’s bed beside his own. He believed that this would help build the dog’s trust, lost after being abandoned.
I had a teacher in the 5th grade who kept calling me Jessica. I’ve dealt with this my whole life. Usually, my go to is to politely say, “Excuse me, but my name is Jerrica actually. It’s not Jessica.” That is what I said to this teacher the first day of school. He didn’t respond. He called me Jessica EVERY SINGLE DAY. I corrected him, and he would laugh at me or just shake his head.
At one point, he even said “No, Jessica is your name, stop trying to change your name.” I had a few friends in class try to explain to him that my name is in fact JERRICA. He told them to stop encouraging me.
I asked my mother what to do about this predicament. She, being the wonderful and supportive woman that she is, suggested that I ignore him until he called me by the correct name. So that’s exactly what I did. It got to the point that he was literally crossing out my name on my assignments, writing Jessica on them, and taking points off of everything I handed in with my actual name on it. I would end up with zeros for the day for “being obstinate and refusing to participate.”
I had a D in his class but was an A/B student in everything else. He requested a conference with my parents, and he requested that they both attend as my father was in his opinion the more reasonable parent. As soon as he sat down he started in about me, using the wrong name. “Jessica ignores me in class.,’’ “Jessica does not complete assignments.,” “Jessica is disrespectful.”
My mom asked him what he was talking about and if, in fact he knew how to read. My dad said “I don’t know who Jessica is, but I’m sorry you’re having issues with her. My kid’s name is Jerrica.” He apparently told my parents they shouldn’t have given me such a difficult name, and that this still should not have resulted in the behaviour I exhibited in his class. To which my wonderful father replied, “If your name was Joe and I called you Steve every day for four months, you would be pretty pissed off too.”
I got a grudging, half-hearted apology from my teacher and ended up with a B for my final grade. He never used my name after that, but he did stop taking points off when I wrote it on assignments!
Three takeaways from Wang Yi’s U.S. visit
A meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House, two rounds of talks with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken across two days, strategic communication with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and separate sit-downs with members of the U.S. strategic and business communities.
This is what China’s top diplomat Wang Yi has achieved during a closely-watched three-day visit to Washington that concluded on Saturday.
During the visit, the two sides had “in-depth, constructive and substantive” strategic communication on many issues of common concern, and jointly sent a positive signal of stabilizing and improving China-U.S. relations, said Wang, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and China’s foreign minister.
Here are three key takeaways from his visit.
Road to a San Francisco meeting
Throughout the visit, the Chinese foreign minister stressed, more than once, the importance of following through on the common understandings reached between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart when they last met
on the sidelines of the G20 Bali Summit in Indonesia.
During the Bali meeting on November 14, 2022, the two heads of state conducted their first face-to-face talks since Biden took office in January 2021. Xi said China and the U.S. should respect each other, coexist in peace, pursue win-win cooperation, and work together to ensure bilateral relations move forward on the right course without losing direction or speed, still less having a collision.
Biden, on his part, told the Chinese president that the U.S. respects China’s system, and does not seek to change it; that it does not seek a new Cold War; that it does not seek to revitalize alliances against China; that it does not support “Taiwan independence,” and does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan;” and that it has no intention to have a conflict with China. The U.S. side has no intention to seek “de-coupling” from China, halt China’s economic development, or contain China, he added.
In the roughly one-hour – more than double than originally planned – meeting with the U.S. president on Friday, Wang said his visit is aimed at communicating with the U.S. side to follow through on the Bali meeting, and proceed toward a San Francisco meeting, so as to prevent bilateral ties from further deteriorating and bring the China-U.S. relationship back on the track of healthy and steady development at an early date.
During the talks between Wang and Blinken on Thursday and Friday, both sides agreed to make joint efforts for the meeting between the two heads of state in San Francisco, which is set to host the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation economies in mid-November.
“The road to San Francisco will not be a smooth one, and it will not be left to ‘autopilot,'” warned the Chinese foreign minister when he was hosted by the Aspen Security Group, a policy program of a namesake think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
Wang urged real efforts on the part of the U.S. side to eliminate interference, overcome obstacles, enhance consensus, and accumulate results to make the meeting happen.
Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said that the U.S. side, in conducting its so-called Indo-Pacific strategy, has been making trouble for Beijing on the Taiwan question and the South China Sea issue, among others.
“So the key is to watch whether the U.S. side can really follow its words with actions,” the scholar told CGTN.
Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, meets with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington, D.C., the United States, October 27, 2023. /Chinese Foreign Ministry
Need to restart dialogue
The Chinese foreign minister’s trip followed Blinken’s Beijing visit in June, as well as a visit to China by a bipartisan delegation of the U.S. Senate led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this month, and was partially coincident with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s week-long stay in China that is still underway.
Wang stressed the importance of keeping communication channels open between the two sides during his talks with Blinken. In the coming days, both sides will hold separately China-U.S. consultations on maritime affairs, arms control and non-proliferation, and foreign policies.
“China and the United States need dialogue. We should not only resume dialogue, but also have in-depth and comprehensive dialogue,” he told reporters while standing next to the U.S. secretary of state before their formal talks, which eventually lasted over seven hours across two days.
The call was shared by U.S. strategists, who told Wang in their meeting on Saturday that the U.S. strategic community does not agree with the rhetoric about the so-called failure of U.S.-China engagement and wants the two sides to restart dialogue in various fields.
To stabilize and improve China-U.S. relations, both sides should also have objective understandings of each other’s strategic intentions, Wang told Blinken, in his latest call for following through one of the common understandings reached between the two presidents at the Bali meeting.
Wang Yiwei, the expert on international relations, said it is important to put a strategic framework in place for the two largest economies to manage their relations.
“If ‘competition’ is the word [to describe the bilateral relations], then the competition should be an orderly one, not one with no bottom line, no principles or no rules,” he said.
It should be in line with the expectations of the international community, and be responsible for globalization and the international market, he added, referring to the U.S. rhetoric of “de-coupling” or “de-risking” its supply chains from China.
People-to-people exchanges
During Wang’s visit, China and the U.S. also agreed to further increase direct passenger flights between the two countries, on top of the commitment made during Blinken’s June visit.
Hours after the talks between the two top diplomats, U.S. officials announced that flights between the U.S. and China will increase to 70 per week starting November 9.
The Chinese civil aviation authority said the increase in flights will help facilitate personnel, economic and trade exchanges between the two countries.
In terms of promoting people-to-people exchanges, the two sides also agreed on a China-U.S. Coordination Meeting on Disability Affairs to discuss the signing of a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in disability affairs in the coming days.
Structure
Louisiana Cajun Style Hot Tamales
2023 11 09 17 12
Yield: approximately 25 dozen tamales
Ingredients
Meat Preparation
10 pounds beef shoulder meat
2 onions, quartered
2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
Salt
Pepper
Water
Cornmeal Mush
2 pounds shortening
3 pounds cornmeal
Salt
Pepper
Meat
3 large onions
2 garlic buttons
2 bottles chili powder
1 small bottle red pepper
Salt
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
Instructions
The night before you make your tamales, wash each corn shuck and place in water to soak overnight.
Boil meat until done and falling off bone, about 1 1/2 hours.
While meat is cooking, make mush in heavy skillet. Get shortening hot and add salted cornmeal. Stir meat until golden in color. Make a paste by adding soup off the meat and stirring until smooth.
Take meat off bone and grind together with onion and garlic. Add chili powder, red pepper and salt.
Put shortening in skillet and fry until onion is cooked, stirring constantly. Add tomato paste and soup from meat making it soft. DO NOT GET IT TOO SOFT.
Spread meal mush on shucks about 1/4 inch thick with a flat knife. Then put meat on top and roll into tamale shape.
Notes
DO NOT UNDER-SALT THIS DISH. Cornmeal requires a lot of salt.
What was the most inappropriate thing someone has done in a church service?
Around twenty years ago, when I was pastor of a former congregation, there was a young woman named Anna,* who attended the church. At the time, Anna was in her mid-twenties, but had the mental functioning of a young child. She was brought to church by a kind and caring couple who had a heart for helping people like Anna, and as Anna began inviting her friends to church, we soon found ourselves with four or five of Anna’s friends attending on a regular basis. We had a ministry to some wonderfully unique people dropped right in our laps.
Most of the church did a wonderful job of ministering to these folks. They loved them and were very patient with them. Along with Anna, I fondly recall Mike, who like Anna lived in a group home. Mike would slip into my office at the church and leave little action figures for my then small children. My boys couldn’t wait to get to church and see what Mike had left them. On any given Sunday, there would be Star Wars or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures in a zip lock baggie on my desk. Mike was a real character and he possessed a sweet and caring nature. Later, his family moved him to a group home in Chattanooga, Tennessee and I eventually lost touch with him, but he will always be remembered as the Boo Radley of that little group.
During all this, Anna asked me if she could sing in the church choir. I referred the matter to our church choir director, a kind and compassionate man, and he saw no problem with it. The choir, around twenty members, welcomed Anna as one of their own. Anna couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but it was a joy for her to be up there with the choir on Sunday morning, and her sheer delight of singing along with the choir made it a blessing for all of us.
Not long after Anna began singing in the choir, a cantankerous church member named Madge, whom I have written about here before, came to me one Sunday morning before church with yet another complaint, which was no surprise, as I could always tell when Madge was complaining; her lips were moving. The conversation went something like this:
“Pastor, it’s embarrassing that this woman, Anna, is singing in the choir.”
“Awe, come on Madge; she enjoys herself.”
“I don’t care! She’s an embarrassment to this church!”
“Madge, didn’t Jesus say something about letting the children come to him for such is the Kingdom of Heaven?”
“Yes, he did, but she’s still an embarrassment.”
With that, she huffed away and that was the end of it. Her comments and attitude towards Anna and her friends were among the most inappropriate things I have ever seen during a church service or at church.
Eventually, Anna’s family moved to another town, and welater left that church and I was called to another congregation. However, for the last twenty years or so we have kept in touch with Anna. We consider her a very special friend. Last April, her family brought her to our part of Virginia for a visit and my wife and I took her out to dinner. Here we are enjoying some time with our old friend Anna.
Friendships come in all forms and with all sorts of people.
He writes quite a few things and almost always does 1–3 of the above things sometimes all of them backing them up with calculations a lot of the time.
Same thing with Carl Hamilton he questions things and quantifies things.
If more people did that? Politicians wouldn’t get away with half the shit they do. Yet here we are with people literally saying it’s true because the BBC said so!
Reuters a WESTERN News agency counted the number of protesors in Hong Kong.
So let’s go through the thought process above with the 2 million protestors.
Do some calculations.
Does it pass the smell test.
Check later on things you think to be true and see if they are no longer true.
2 million is almost 1/3 of the population.
2 million cannot fit into such an area as other than telephone box challenges you can’t fit more than 3 people per square meter.
So let’s critically read the Reuters source.
Who wrote it
Why did they write it
What possible bias is there?
What was the methodology?
Reuters – Western news source so according to westerners themselves unbiased. If anything anti China.
They wrote it to check on the massive claims.
The possible bias is they side with the protestors.
The methodology was putting cameras at bridges and certain buildings and counting people passing every few minutes.
Meanwhile the 2 million claim? It came from Jimmy Sham
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Let’s do the above with Jimmy Sham.
Who wrote it
Why did they write it
What possible bias is there?
What was the methodology?
Who is Jimmy Sham. He’s a anti government rioter, he was encouraging violence there are speeches you can still find videos of them on Yandex but not google.
Jimmy Sham claimed he’d been attacked for well over a minute by 6 men with hammers. Yet he managed to recover within a few days with only a slight cut to his forehead. Jimmy Sham also produced fliers documenting his attack 2 days before the ‘attack’ Hong Kong leaflets at the bottom state the date of printing.
Why did he write it – To claim more support than there actually was. PORI at HKU (they parted ways) found only 16% had any real support for what the protestors wanted.
What possible bias? – Again he’s anti China.
What was his methodology – He made it up.
Yet westerners are convinced Jimmy Sham is completely credible and Reuters isn’t.
Here’s what I learned from dating/marrying a poor guy: the idea that since he’s not working, he’ll clean and get groceries and cook, is completely lost on men.
They honestly think they can watch TV and play video games all day then when you get home, complain that there are no Doritos and the dishes are all dirty. With a straight fucking face.
And have the nerve to accuse you of assigning them “busy work” when you realize they aren’t going to do it on their own so you still have to be in charge and make them a damn list because they don’t mind wearing the same dirty socks for a week.
There was a time I would have gladly supported the family if I was getting the home handled as part of the deal, but taking care of a fully grown child in addition to everything else is too much to ask.
You broke? If she’s paying the rent and buying the food, you better be cooking it and not just ordering pizza on her card and leaving the laundry in a pile because you put it through the machine but couldn’t be bothered to fold it, sort it or put it away because you had a raid starting.
In the Second World War and under the ruthless command of Surgeon General Shirō Ishii, Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army conducted a string of depraved experiments on Chinese civilians.
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Shirō Ishii.
One of the most heinous of these experiments saw soldiers gift chocolate to Chinese schoolchildren. Why was it heinous? Because the chocolate was laced with anthrax. Killing unsuspecting children with chocolate was far from the only cruel experiment undertook by Unit 731, though.
In another example, they went around villages offering “vaccinations” on the pretence that they would protect inhabitants against a rising epidemic. The truth was actually the reverse; they were creating epidemics by injecting residents with the live, deadly forms of pathogens like cholera. The cruelty in these examples is clear; they were taking advantage of people’s good faith and stabbing them in the back.
They were, in essence, weaponizing people’s trust.
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An older, post-war Shirō Ishii.
Whilst Shirō lounged around in his pristine mansion, eating, relaxing and bathing without a care in the world, the civilians condemned to hellish terror by him were spewing their guts up, writhing in agony and taking their last breath. However, none of that would be enough to see him face punishment.
Understandably even in that era, the kinds of experiments conducted by him would not have been green-lit by most other countries, meaning that Shirō had unique information that other countries coveted. Using that, he was able to get immunity from prosecution in exchange for divulging everything in relation to his research.
With that, Shirō was allowed to go free and live out the rest of his life despite the trail of death that he’d left behind him. The kick in the teeth is that the information he provided proved to be of little use anyway, so he really did get off scot-free in the end. After the war, he opened his own medical clinic and became well-liked in the community, caught religion and lived out his remaining years in peace.
For a simple example, if you binge eat a huge delicious unhealthy brunch, you’ll likely get a double crash: your dopamine and blood sugar levels fall at the same time, leaving you on the couch groaning. If you drank a few mimosas, consider it a triple crash.
A more extreme example is ecstasy. I’ve never done it but my ex did and I was around a bunch of people who were high as a kite on it.
It’s super bizarre to watch. Everyone is touchy-feely, warm, and excessively friendly. However, not in the way that someone on cocaine is, talking fast and moving around a lot. Ecstasy produces a massive release of dopamine. They’d always do it and then go to raves and dance until 4 AM. It was nuts.
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Consequently, it carries a huge dopamine hangover and makes people sadder and less motivated for weeks. I saw it several times with my ex. She was miserable, mean, and incredibly hard to be around.
Nothing is wrong with seeking healthy sources of pleasure, but moderate it and resist the urge for chemical sources of it. The price of entry isn’t worth it.
Biden’s invitation to Xi Jinping to visit the United States was just a delaying tactic by the United States. For two reasons:
For the needs of the new round of elections.
Currently, the United States is deeply tied to Israel. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it has strongly supported Israel despite the opposition of the world, and even put aside its support for Ukraine. Therefore, under the current world situation, the White House first compromised with China and gave China some “verbal promises”, such as “reiterating the one-China policy”, “no arms sales to Taiwan”, requiring China to purchase U.S. debt, stabilize the U.S. dollar market, and stabilize the U.S. economy, to trick China into lifting certain sanctions against the United States. After the situation in the Middle East slows down in the future, the White House will go back and tear up the agreement.
The United States is so shameless, so China will not have any illusions about the United States.
I think another way to ask your question: why don’t more Infantry use a scope on their rifle?
This is my M-4 (I’m in the middle) for Ought-Three Invasion of Iraq, April 4th, 2003, modified with a 14x Leopold scope:
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So, if you want to spend a little bit of money, you can change your Army issue rifle into a “sniper rifle” of sorts. That Leopold scope was better than binoculars, and was always ready. I still had an M2 laser to aim, and believe it or not, I could even still use the Iron-sight. That scope was extremely useful tactically. Just being able to check out whether movement at 500 yards was friend or foe was priceless.
Let me help you with some myths about snipers you might be entertaining:
Myth buster #1.
Snipers are great at choosing a target, but they are not a mass casualty producing weapon. Mortars and Artillery are still today doing 60–90% of the killing. It’s true snipers can call in the artillery/mortars, and that makes them even more deadly, but you still have to realize any soldiers on the battlefield with a radio and a hiding spot can and does do the same thing.
Myth buster #2. There are tactical snipers and there are sniper teams. Tactical snipers are just a dude with a scope, in any Platoon. They will usually be in a Scout Platoon, but could be Infantry/Mortars as well. That is just a dude with a scope, and I agree with your question: units should have more dudes with scopes… Sniper teams are ultimately wasted resources, who do not assault or help with the attack beyond suppression. However, it is a gamble; sometimes they spend weeks hiding, and hit a high value target. If you kill the enemy General, then the gamble of wasting your manpower for a week payed off. If you are a 30 man infantry platoon, dividing out a third of your force just to have three OP-sniper teams waiting in a hide, is ultimately wasteful. Most of those sniper teams will do nothing, and come home having accomplished nothing.
My favorite Scout Sniper in Iraq, switching to M16 so he can help assault:
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Navy SEAL Sniper Team who do their own thing, and do not help assault:
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Myth buster #3.
Wait until we fight an equal Army, like China or Russia, who actually takes ground from us; wait until you see what Infantry do to captured snipers. When your Army retreats, those sniper teams are stranded. If those enemy have any suspicion about whether that sniper has had success on the battlefield, those Infantry will make him squeal before they say goodbye.
There were many people that had done this so I can not take credit for it but it was amazing. There was a certain bank that would give you 5% rebate for purchases. So the trick was I would buy gift cards with the credit card and then take the gift cards and pay the credit card bill with an online bill paying service. This would lead to about 3.5% profit. It got to the point I was spending the whole credit limit of the card each day to buy the gift cards. I had a $19,000 limit on the card. So 4 times a week I would spend $19,000 on the card, come home and pay it off with the gift cards and then go out and do it again. There were some people that did this for over a year. I was only able to do it for about 4 mths before the credit card company shut it down. It was nice while it lasted.
China urges joint efforts before highly-anticipated Xi-Biden meeting
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Ahead of the highly-anticipated meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden, a Chinese official on Monday called for joint efforts from both sides to bring bilateral relations back on track.
China hopes the U.S. will act on its commitment of not seeking a new Cold War with China, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning in response to a query about the upcoming China-U.S. summit meeting.
China doesn’t seek to change the U.S., nor should the U.S. seek to shape or change China, Mao said.
The Chinese government has confirmed that Xi is set to meet with Biden in San Francisco, where the two leaders will also attend the 30th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting.
Mao said China views and handles its relations with the U.S. in accordance with the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. Major-country competition runs counter to the trend of our times and provides no answer to the problems in the U.S. or the challenges in our world.
“China does not fear competition, but we do not agree that China-U.S. relations should be defined by competition,” said Mao.
Speaking of concerns, the U.S. needs to respect China’s concerns and legitimate right to development, rather than emphasizing its own concerns at the expense of China’s interests, Mao added.
“To seek to remodel other countries in one’s own image is wishful thinking in the first place and typical hegemonism which is going nowhere,” she said.
Mao stressed that the Taiwan question is China’s internal affair and resolving it is a matter for the Chinese that brook no foreign interference.
“Successive U.S. administrations have made clear commitments on the Taiwan question,” Mao said. During the summit meeting in Bali, the U.S. said explicitly that the U.S. government doesn’t support “Taiwan independence,” Mao noted.
“The U.S. needs to honor its commitment to one China and oppose ‘Taiwan independence’ with concrete actions,” Mao pointed out.
Over the South China Sea issue, China is committed to settling relevant disputes through negotiation and consultation with relevant countries and will not waver in our determination to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, Mao said.
“China will neither take any inch of territory that is not ours, nor give up any inch of territory that belongs to us,” Mao said, urging the U.S. to stop creating pretexts and interfering in the disputes between China and relevant countries over territorial and maritime rights and interests.
Noting the world is paying close attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Mao said China stands on the side of equity and justice, stays in close contact with relevant parties and is committed to deescalation and protection of civilians.
“We hope that the U.S. will follow an objective and just stance and play a constructive role in halting the conflict,” said Mao.
I started working at age 8. Mowing lawns and collecting bottles and newspapers to sell at recycling.
At age 12 I had two paper routes, one morning and one evening, and still mowed lawns.
At 15 I was working at a grocery store after school and on weekends. I took drivers ed in school and at that time you could get a provisional license within 180 days of your 16th birthday.
Could only drive dawn to dusk. I told my parents as my 16th birthday approached that I wanted to buy a car. They said no, and how could I possibly pay for one. They had no idea I had almost $10k stashed in a secret place in my dresser.
On my 16th birthday I climbed on my bicycle, with twenty $100 bills in my pocket, and headed for the Volkswagen dealership 14 miles away.
When I arrived I spotted a Bahama Blue 1968 VW on the lot. A salesman came out and asked if he could help me. I asked about the car. He asked where my parents were. I told him they were at home. He went inside and came back with a sales manager. Manager said, “Son, you can’t buy a car because you can’t sign for a loan unless your parents do it or you’re 18”.
I responded “Who said anything about a loan? How much is the car?”
It was a dealer demo and had 2,500 miles on it. I’d done my homework and knew the going prices. “I’ll give you $1400 cash, right now.”
The manager said, “But you can’t buy a car at 16!” Wrong. “I can’t borrow money but state law says I can own a car in my name.
If you won’t sell me this one, I’ll just go somewhere else.” After much consternation and discussion, a few phone calls to the owner of the dealership, they wrote up the sale.
I had called an insurance agent earlier in the week, and called him with the info. Told him I’d be right over to pay him if he’d issue a binder for the dealer.
He did, and I drove from the dealership to the agents office and paid him. A full year of insurance in ‘68 was $120. Drove home and my asshole father had a fit, but he couldn’t do anything. I moved out on my 18th and never looked back.
Put 235,000 miles on the Beetle. Wish I still had it!!
A close friend of mine shared a story that always warms my heart. She had been going through a tough time, dealing with the stress of her job and personal life. One evening, feeling particularly down, she decided to take a long walk to clear her head. Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the time and soon found herself in a part of town she wasn’t familiar with, after dark.
Just as she started to feel uneasy, she noticed someone approaching her. It was a colleague from her office, someone she’d only spoken to in passing. He had seen her walking and, concerned for her safety, decided to follow at a distance to make sure she was okay. When he caught up to her, instead of just offering a ride home, he suggested they grab a cup of coffee at a nearby café.
They ended up talking for hours. He listened to her troubles, shared some of his own, and offered a comforting perspective that helped her see things in a different light. It wasn’t a grand gesture or a dramatic declaration of love; it was a simple act of kindness and empathy at a moment when she needed it the most.
Years later, they’re happily married. She always recalls that night as the moment she realized she’d found someone truly special. Someone who, without even knowing her well, showed her kindness and compassion when she needed it most. She often says it was the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for her, not because it was extravagant, but because it was genuine and heartfelt.
Yes, After a recent merger, I was on a MGT call with the new CEO(. He was like…’Alright team, all of the changes will be done by May 23rd (3 weeks)’. I was not aware of any of the changes, and knew immediately that I would be part of the changes. I was in the early stage of a house sell and purchase and knew that losing my job would create a problem for the new loan, so I immediately rescinded my offer on the house, and never signed the sell contract. Sure enough May 23rd, I got the call at 9 a.m. that my job was gone. Best thing ever! I could not stand the new CEO.
I took the summer off, travelled with my wife, and then looked at 3 offers in sept, increasing my income and stock significantly. Fast forward to a year later. I sold my house for $250k more than I had verbally accepted in 2021, and was able to get my dream house on the golf course!.
Everything worked out well and 2 years later, I am killing it with my new company!
Joining BRICS. This means China and Xi will have nothing to do with the U.K. There’s just absolutely nothing in it for China. The U.K. brings nothing to the table.
As for the U.S., the U.K. can’t afford to decouple. Better to feed off crumbs than nothing at all. The U.S. has nothing to spare especially now that we have to spend billions to support Israel.
I heard this, if memory serves, from a Frenchman whose grandfather was in the Free French forces.
Said grandfather once remarked this:
It was 1945, merely months after the Germans were thrown off my country, and every man I could talk to was in the Resistance. Everyone. Then I wondered, if there had been forty million people in the Resistance, how the hell had the Germans kept France occupied for years?
The truth of it is, when a country is occupied, most people are minor collaborators. For most places, life goes on as it did before the occupying troops arrived, only the authority changes. To keep on with the French example, for the most part, you’d live just like you would a few months earlier, except the police on the streets would be reporting to Germans and sometimes a few German soldiers would be visible passing.
The reason for that is as varied as the people who lived like this. Some feel apathy, others cowardice. Others do not want more blood to be spilled, some see no personal incentive to fight on, some see no point in it all. But for this reason or the other, people do nothing.
Things become problematic when, if, their allies, or the intact parts of their country, come to break the occupation.
Because when that happens, everyone wants to pretend they fought valiantly, like lions, for the freedom of their country.
And so, as the liberation forces approach and the occupiers pack up and leave, they band into gangs, seeking among themselves scapegoats, people whose collaboration with, or apathy towards, the occupiers were more visible than others. They use accusations of collaboration to settle old grudges and deal with jealousies. Societal order breaks down utterly and is replaced by mob rule of the worst sort, where women can be accused of being German whores because of some jealous bastard, where accusations of war profiteering and snitching run galore, where a man’s life is one convincingly accusatory voice away from destruction. Instead of justice, there are executions, humiliations, beatings meted out to those decided by a mob, oftentimes without a single Resistance member involved, so that its members can feel good and pretend they were helping the liberation all along.
If anyone wants to see what happens when the court of public opinion is the only court available, let him look at any occupied area just after the Germans left. He’ll find arbitrary judgment meted out by people who want the status of having been with the Resistance without suffering through its pains, meted out by people just brave enough to look into the eyes of whichever poor man or woman was the next target of the mob, but not brave enough to look into the barrels of German carbines.
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This is sickening.
Ten thousand people were executed summarily without even the barest farce of a trial in France alone. Hundreds of thousands were humiliated, accused, cast out, by people no better than they were. And this is merely a single country. Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, all repeated the same scene.
Just how callously, no, not callously. Just how bloodthirstily a movement supposedly for the good of its nation has devoured the members of which it arbitrarily declared traitors is a horrifying sight.
The answer to how, with this context, is clear.
By whatever punishment the law allows, in a fair trial.
Or we will have this instead:
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And if anyone here is thinking that this is not a deeply troubling sign of profound injustice, let me remind you.
The way the victims of the mob were picked, that could just as easily be you.
These are not “squeegee men” just being annoying and obnoxious, and they are not merely delinquents running past with a key to your door and taking off laughing to one another.
They were throwing rocks (legally deadly weapons, assuming you’re talking about decent-sized rocks, not pebbles), surrounding the car, and making you feel it was not safe to leave.
John Locke opined that it was justified to kill someone who tries to steal from you, because a man who will violate your right to property won’t stop at your right to life. This isn’t the way the law works, generally, but… when it comes to using force in self defense, the relevant question is twofold: 1) Do you, subjectively, have a sincere belief that your life is at risk? 2) Would a reasonable person in your circumstances believe his/her life was at risk? Note that “Is your life actually at risk?” is not one of the questions.
So, you don’t have to think like a juror. You don’t have to give these thugs the benefit of the doubt [Note: it’s been mentioned to me before that “thug” is sometimes taken to have racial connotations, but you don’t say what race they were and I don’t care – white thugs, black thugs, Latino thugs, Asian thugs, or Purple-People-Eater thugs are all thugs]. You don’t have to make the generous assumption that all they want is to commit petty vandalism.
If they are surrounding your car and willing to use physical force, then you are at their mercy – the only thing stopping them from escalating to physical battery, rape, or murder is their supposed good will… and you have no obligation to rely on that.
So honk once for warning, count to three (out loud if you prefer, but silently is fine), then gun it. Any injury will be in self defense.
As for the stop light – non-criminal regulations (and even many criminal statues) yield to the affirmative defense of “necessity”. Basically, the law considers human life and well-being more important than slavish obedience to the law, so if you run a red light to get away from assailants, the law considers that justified.
Disclaimer:
This answer is not a substitute for professional legal advice. This answer is a response to a generalized fact-pattern based on the personal recollection of the posting attorney, and not a response to any specific case or based on any diligent legal research. This answer does not create an attorney-client relationship, nor is it a solicitation to offer legal advice. If you ignore this warning and convey confidential information in a private message or comment, there is no duty to keep that information confidential or forego representation adverse to your interests. Seek the advice of a licensed attorney in the appropriate jurisdiction before taking any action that may affect your rights. If you believe you have a claim against someone, consult an attorney immediately, otherwise there is a risk that the time allotted to bring your claim may expire. If you act on any information contained within this answer, you do so at your own risk.
Two weeks after I started working for a company Walmart pulled their contract with us. They were 60% of our production.
Things got crazy fast as the owners tried to find new customers and cut costs. One night a coworker and I were working late when he came into my office and showed me the new budget schedule our boss accidentally left in the copier. It listed all our names and salary by month.
Mine however showed salary for me only until April then nothing. Being the astute finance professional, I knew what that meant. I got my paper out on the street seeking new employment.
As March rolled around with no new job in sight I was understandably worried; then luck shined down on me. My boss’s boss suddenly took ill and suddenly I was needed again, at least temporarily.
This gave me some breathing room but I knew my days were numbered. I continued my searched. Then one night, again working late, that same co worker stopped by and showed me a legal bill showing charges associated with the sale of the company. Now we both knew the end was near and a race against time.
A few months later we were all called into the lunchroom where we were told the company had been sold. As accountants we were told to close the books one last time before being let go. Everyone filed out quietly and returned to their work areas. As I sat in my office contemplating my next move I got a call from the recruiter I had been working with. Good news he said, you have a new job! As I like to tell the story, I was unemployed for 20 minutes.
I closed the books one last time for company A on Friday and started my new job on Monday. I firmly believe somebody up there was watching out for me.
My story starts nice – neither poor nor abused or depressed. My father worked in a PSU and was doing well financially. My mother was a house wife and is the sweetest. We resided in a tiny town in Middle India. I am the eldest son of three children. I studied well, got into an NIT – premier engineering institute in India.
But my under-graduation was a waste. No, I wasn’t one of those never-wanted-to-do-engineering type of person. I like engineering but like many young and naive people, I didn’t like working hard. I slacked a lot. In the first year, I got 2 backlogs. I did not clear them up in summer hoping to clear them up along with other semesters. I wanted to enjoy my first summer. But it only got worse after that. I accumulated 8 backlogs by the end of my graduation. During this whole time, I was least worried. Seniors had told us grades didn’t matter, ideas did. And we worshiped these words. Only, I did not create any relevant ideas either. I lied to parents constantly and they never knew that my marks were so bad. I even made fake marksheets to show them. I started smoking, drinking and was having fun doing all these. I bought a second hand bike during my third year too.
I participated in lots of extra curricular things though. I was member of the writing club, the Rotaract club, and also a dance club. I used to dance well. Despite my poor academics, I was sure I would make it in life. I thought i was smart, talented and witty and had lots of start up ideas too. And I knew seniors far dumber and with more backlogs who have had awesome careers. I fell in love with a girl too. We started dating and by the end of Btech, we were soulmates.
It should not be a surprise that the only job I grabbed was a 15k per month NGO job. But to me, it was shocking. “I was so smart. How come no company took me!” All my friends left after the course and I had to stay back to clear my backlogs. Slowly reality started hitting me. It was still hard to admit that there were difficult backstories to all these senior-success stories. Hence, I was still adamant not to join a stupid NGO job. I told my parents I am not interested in job and took money from my dad saying I wanted to prepare for UPSC. I tried working on my start up ideas during that time but I realized that it was not easy. No one was ready to fund and I wasn’t skilled enough to build it all on my own. So I thought I will just try UPSC instead while clearing my backlogs. A month passed by.
Then the worst happened. My father suffered a stroke and passed away that winter.
I couldn’t even meet him once, all because I was too fucked up to go home. I hadn’t been home since my third year summer. My family was devastated. While my dad’s salary was good enough, he didn’t have any major savings per se. My mom was old. And my sister was studying in a private Btech and my brother was about to give his high school finals. Everything came crashing down.
I went to mom and said, “I am sorry, Mom. I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be.” But as expected, my mother told me that she only wanted me to be her son and nothing else. She told me I can prepare for UPSC as long as I want and have no pressure to take a job since dad’s savings would work for atleast 2–3 years. She would be very happy to see her son as an IAS officer. And if I didn’t get selected, I could get a job anywhere after passing from an NIT. I was so devastated after hearing this I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t lie anymore but I couldn’t tell her the truth either. That her son was a failure. That no company would take him. That I wasn’t capable enough for UPSC. That I had no goals.
But I knew I had to be strong. I calculated dad’s finances and realised we can go by a couple of years with that if we spend carefully. I started looking for job. I tried to contact the NGO just so that I had 15k in hand atleast. Luckily, they agreed to take me after my summer. I tried getting other IT jobs at the same time. I kept preparing for UPSC but as you know, it’s not easy.
After my summer was over, No company took me, so I continued to work in the NGO. As I said, I wasn’t skilled either. So, I took courses from course-era and udacity to build my skills on the side. I took projects in Freelancer to get some extra money. I was working 20 hours a day with hardly any sleep. My UPSC exams were not up to the mark. But I kept trying. During all these time, I released all my anger and frustration on my gf. My gf and I had constant fights. At the same time, her family wanted her to get married and with her words, it seemed like she wanted to too. And you can’t blame her, the way I was treating her, I would have dumped me too.
And one day finally, she told me that she cannot fight anymore. She asked me to cut all contacts with her. I did.
I cried that night for the first time since father died. I realized what I had lost. But I thought that I wasn’t in a position to fight for her. I wished I could stop her. But I didn’t know how.
The next three years were extremely hard. I moved from the NGO to an IT company but the salary was only 25k per month. Our economic condition was the worst. There were leaks in our home. I stayed in a small shared dormitory to make ends meet. I couldn’t buy anything new for my family even on festivals. I was so broke. My sister was in her final year and I was hoping that atleast she would get a decent job to support the family. My mother was thinking of keeping our house and land in mortgage to make ends meet as my brother will start bachelors soon. I was feeling defeated at that point of time.
I had appeared UPSC 3 times. The last two times I had cleared the prelims but couldn’t clear the mains. This 4th time also, I cleared the prelims and was hoping to get further.
I was depressed and suicidal by now. I stopped all kind of social interactions. I avoided meeting my friends. And only talked to my mom and my siblings daily.
But finally, in 2016, the UPSC results did carry my name. I joined IOFS.
Now, my sister works in a good PSU, just like dad. And my brother took up commerce stream. My mom is happy and healthy. We repaired our house and there’s no question of mortgaging it.
What lessons life taught me?
That just because everything is good now, it won’t stay like that for ever. That just because something worked out for someone else, it won’t work out for you too. That grades are important. That hard work matters. That UPSC can be cleared.
Why MEN have MIDLIFE CRISES: you have to practice being selfish
Yep, you read it right. Killing someone, taking some innocent teenage girl’s life, is the worst thing to happen to ME. Quite ironic, isn’t it? So here’s what happened.
It was about the 27th of March, 2007. It was a windy Tuesday evening, and I was driving my minivan down a foggy lonely road, and was going well below the speed limit, because I couldn’t see anything. I was listening to Lazarus by Porcupine Tree, and merrily making my way to my family, when I suddenly saw a teenage girl, whose name I later found out to be Laura, crossing the street oblivious to my van, and by the time I saw her and hit my brakes and turned my car, I had hit her. I immediately leapt out and raced to look at her, and she was fine. She was on the ground, but there was no bleeding, and she looked conscious but bruised. She got up by herself, and apologized for crossing the road without looking. I was proud of myself for braking in time, but I apologized for not seeing her too. She said that she had a bruise on her abdomen, and a pain in her leg. I suspected a minor fracture, and wanted to call 911, but she asked me to take her to the hospital myself, as she said she was in pain. Just as she said that, I thought to myself, how can a girl get into an accident so easily. I braked, and I swerved. She still got hit. What if she wanted to get hit? What if I take her to the hospital, and she accuses me of something that I can’t defend myself of, and not calling the cops would make me look guilty. So, I called the cops. They came, dealt with me and my insurance, and took her away to the hospital. I went on my merry way home, and forgot about it.
2 days later, I get a call. A call from the police, saying that Laura had died of internal bleeding. I was speechless. The doctor apparently said that she could’ve been saved if she was in eariler, but that was not certain either. I went over to the police, where the family of the girl was waiting for me. As soon as they saw me, they started blaming me for their little girl’s death. They said that I stole a life, that I was probably drunk, and that I should’ve gotten her myself. The cops pulled me aside and asked me to ignore what they said, because calling the cops is always the best option. It didn’t really leave a mark on me at the time, until I was driving home one day, and Lazarus started playing. I stopped the car and broke down. I had taken a life, an innocent 17 year old life, just because I was scared that she was going to set me up. I had nightmares about it for years.
I went to a therapist, and she asked me to get rid of my van, not listen to Lazarus, and to not blame myself for her death. Everyone kept telling me that it was no fault of mine, but in the end, I know that it was me who stole a life. It was me, who stole a daughter from a lovely couple, and a sister from a 6 year old kid. It was me, who killed her.
I know that I shouldn’t really blame myself for it, but it was me who hit her. It was me who didn’t take her to the hospital. It was me who didn’t bother listening to her complaints about being in pain. If I could, I would trade my life to get Laura back. But since that’s not possible, I’ll just be in this regret forever.
That, by far, is the worst thing to happen to me.
Ignore Yellen’s Pleas! China Sells $62 Billion in US Bonds, Adds 7.82 M Ounces Of Gold Reserves
When I was first living with my (present) wife we were living in Nanshan. This is a suburb in Shenzhen, China. We had a little dog. She was a Bomei. The dog’s name was “yo yo”.
Well, my wife wanted to save some money and cut yo yo’s hair herself.
The only thing was… well… she was drinking alcohol when she did it.
Uh oh.
…
Poor yo yo.
She shaved it all off, and yo yo was so very, VERY pissed off.
She would go to the standing mirror, look at herself, sigh and then go back to her bed and sleep off her depression.
It was a long time ago. Maybe 2003 or 2004.
Poor little Yo Yo.
Trust me, everyone… a word to the wise… never cut your dog’s hair when you are drunk.
Europe had just emerged from a terrible Great War, and everyone wanted to cut the ties with the past. The World War One was simply a terrible disaster which cost the lives of millions of fine young men and destroyed gazillions worth of property. And the World War One effectively killed Christianity in Europe. The industrial mass carnage was simply too much.
Europe was wiped mentally and spiritually into a blank slate, and this also included fine arts and architecture. New Totalitarian ideologies, such as Communism, National Socialsism and Fascism had emerged, and the new generation hated anything bourgeoisie, anything hand-made, anything posh and cute, anything feminine. One of the most important men in the architecture of the era was Swiss-born Edouard Jeanneret aka Le Corbusier, whose pamphlet Towards a New Architecture was the start bang of the run of hideous, ugly and banal architecture.
Of course Corbu did not aim for hideous, ugly and banal. What he wanted was natural light, air, sanitation and effectiveness. The centuries old European cities had very little to speak about commodities – many did not have central heating, central water supply nor indoors loos. (They came only later.) And he wanted to make a total break with the 7000 years of architectural legacy. Not evolution, but revolution. this is how the box-arts architecture emerged.
According to Corbu, the problems of architecture are the same all around the world, and the solutions also are the same all around the world. Everything returns to the three basic forms – cube, cone and ball. Away with gabled roofs, decorations, ornaments, frizes, symmetry, anything unnecessary! Light! Warmth! Joy! Buildings are nothing but vertical streets! Sameness must prevail! Everything shall be the same from Arkhangelsk to Antofagasta!
Meanwhile in Germany, the Bauhaus sported similar ideas. While le Corbusier leaned towards Fascism, Bauhaus was a Communist hotbed. Everything shall be mass-produced! Away with pastel colours and genteel forms! Away with decorations and ornaments! Everything shall be standardized!
The new architecture – International Style– spred incredibly fast. Because the year 2000 was near. This was the future – and it did away with past. Everyone now waited for year 2000. It was to be a concrete milestone of the future. See, the odometre gears revolve and the new numbers set in. And the architects wanted to build bridge to the future.
Nazis and Fascists were enamored of the new style. Bauhaus was done away because it was a hotbed of Communists, but the Nazis adopted the Bauhaus style eagerly. Likewise in Italy, Futurism was the offficial style of Fascism in arts and Italian Rationalism in architecture. Not some kind of Neo-Classicism which one could expect.
Came the World War Two, and the cities in Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany and Eastern Europe were simply obliterated. They had to be rebuilt – and they were rebuilt in the new style. And a new technique of building – Plattenbau – had been invented. The large panel system-building revolutionized construction and made houses cheaper than ever.
But this meant also the revolution on architectural thinking. The old buildings had been built indefinitely, or at least as long as the razing craze, fire or aerial bombardment would destroy them. Now the concept of lifespan entered in architecture. Edifices would last 50 to 60 years after which they would be ready to be demolished and replaced. So there was no reason to build beautiful any more.
Two world wars had killed the artistic soul. The architecture must be true and honest. The world is ugly, so architecture must be ugly. The world is fragmented and broken, so the architecture must reflect it. The materials must be left raw and unfinished to be honest to them. Brutalism had been born.
And the future was closer than ever. The 1960s finally demonstrated the future was at hand. True, we didn’t know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the crystal spires and togas would prevail.
Then the long-awaited Year 2000 (or rather 2001, if you prefer) came. The odometer wheels revolved and the numbers turned. Suddenly we realized we lived now in that future which we had built in the 1960s – and it was no different from the past. It is now 2023 – we are well in that future – and nothing has really changed. The world did not change by revolution, but by evolution. Meanwhile, the centuries- and millennia-old towns, cities and buildings had evolved by constructing modern age amenities within – without destruction, simply by building waterworks, sanitation and Internet connections within those buildings built centuries ago and made to last for centuries. Evolution 1 – revolution 0. “Building a bridge to the future” sounds just as corny as building a causeway to next Tuesday.
For people of the generations who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass.
Turned out the future was hideous, banal, bland, ugly and simply terrifying. And it was not the future anymore. It was now. The future was now here, and had become the present. We no more had a past, and we no more have a future either – what we have is perpetual present, here and now. The years turn and nothing really changes. Or should I say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And now the lifespan thinking in architecture is bearing fruit – we are losing those futures now. The Brutalist and the Plattenbau buildings are now reaching the ends of their designed lifespans, and they are being pulled down. Every day we lose one or more of those futures. Most of us say good riddance – nobody except arts and history professionals will miss those ugly, hideous and banal buildings like we miss the destroyed beautiful buildings of the past centuries.
Here goes the Vesiputoustalo (Waterfall House) in my hometown. Built in 1985, it was abandoned in 2017 and demolished 2022. The house had a terrible mildew and internal air problem, and had a functional lifespan of barely 32 years. Another future becomes a heap of gravel.
So why our world is still plagued with ugly architecture despite having more architectrs now than ever in history? Because the doctrines of Modernism and International Style still prevail in all architectural schools and technical universities in the world. The students are still today indoctrinated to build that same hideous architecture as has been built during the past 90 years. Repeat styles are not allowed unless they repeat the past 50 years.
And yet, all futures have now been explored. The same has happened in architecture as what happened in the fine arts in the 1970s. All isms have been tried and all turned stale. Like Gollum, we have now explored all the roots and all the caves and they turned empty. This general disillusionment has now produced the spiritless and soulless Postmodernist architecture. Anything goes.
Most of all, it is all about money. Building ugly is cheap. Cutting corners and cutting away anything unnecessary is a way on saving money and on costs.
The dreams of le Corbusier and other Modernists turned out nightmares in the real life.
Leave The West! Move To China Now!
Like it or not, Russia and China are running circles around the USA. Better learn Mandarin and Russian. We love you Sabrina!
Creole-Style Pork and Red Bean Chili
On a spiciness scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (hot), this chili is a 3 with chaurice only or a 2 with pork tenderloin and chaurice combined.
creole style pork red bean chili
Prep: 15 min | Cook: 55 min | Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
2 pounds chaurice sausage (or other spicy pork sausage, like chorizo), removed from casing*
2 cups finely diced yellow onion
1 cup diced celery
1 cup finely diced green bell pepper
3 cups cooked Camellia Brand Red Kidney Beans
2 teaspoons dried thyme leaves
3 (14.5 ounce) cans fire-roasted diced tomatoes
4 large cloves garlic, minced
1 to 2 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Pork & Veal Magic
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 cups thinly sliced green onion tops
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh thyme leaves, for garnish
Instructions
Heat oil in a large Dutch oven set at medium-high. Add the chaurice sausage, and, using a wooden spoon, break up the sausage into bite-size chunks. Stir and cook until the sausage is fully opaque, about 8 minutes. (If also using pork tenderloin, do not add yet.)
Add onion and cook until translucent, about 6 minutes.
Add celery and bell pepper and cook until soft, about 5 minutes.
Add Camellia Brand Red Kidney Beans, dried thyme, tomatoes, garlic, and Pork & Veal Magic®. (If using diced pork tenderloin, add it at this time.) Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium-low and cook until slightly thickened, about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add tomato paste and stir until thoroughly combined, taking care not to break up the beans. Bring chili to a boil, stir in green onions and add Kosher salt to taste. Cover, remove from heat and let stand for 20 minutes before serving.
Garnish individual bowls of chili with fresh thyme leaves.
Notes
* For a milder flavor, use 1 pound chaurice and 1 pound pork tenderloin, diced.
Me, wearing a Best Buy shirt and buying something from the 7–11 down the street: “Hello”
7–11 owner: “Oh hi, how are you today!”
Me: “Pretty good I guess. Best Buy isn’t giving me enough hours though.”
Owner: “Do you want to work here?”
Me: “…yes, actually.”
Owner: “Can you start tomorrow at 6am?”
Me: “…yes, actually.”
Owner: “OK, see you then.”
Now, to be fair, at that point I’d been in that particular 7–11 maybe 3 times a week for 3 years leading up to then, and I knew the owner and his family decently well.
But still. I went in to buy cigarettes and left with a new job. Pretty nice.
Russia-US security agreement. Conflict on two fronts w/ Jeffrey Sachs (Live)
We, fortunately, have not yet had a house fire, but some neighbors of my daughter did. The whole family was at a movie and arrived home to find their house on fire, and firemen already battling the blaze. The house was saved, but there was extensive and very expensive damage, making the house uninhabitable for months. The fire had started from a clothes dryer left running, and a blockage caused the motor to overheat.
Since then, I have two rules: Never leave the house with the dryer running, and also, clean, not only the dryer vent after every load, but also the dryer line to the outside on a regular basis.
I also, at one time, prevented a major fire at work when I smelled overheated electrical wires. I had a great deal of difficulty persuading the maintenance people to cut a hole in the ceiling where I could smell the wires, but they finally did, just as the flames erupted.
As on date there is an oversupply of 17.2 Million Homes in China
There are 17 Million homes built or being built without takers , built in anticipation of being sold for which developers have already borrowed loans
The Cumulative loans on them are around 3.4 Trillion RMB ($ 500 Billion) needing interest payments of around 165 Billion RMB a year
There are a further 35 Million Units built or being built with takers but which haven’t been concluded and with at least 50% payment pending
The Cumulative burden of these units is around 6 Million RMB ($ 813 Billion)
88% of these Homes are in the Top Cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen etc
That’s $ 1.3 Trillion worth of homes waiting to be sold or fully sold
The Reasons for the lack of demand include :-
Very tough requirements to avail mortgage loans since 2018
Restrictions on Second and Third Home ownership since 2020 as part of Common Prosperity
Tier 2 and 3 Cities developing very fast and real estate much more affordable. In Chongqing City i can buy 143 Sqm for 1.625 Million RMB against a mere 52.5 Sqm in Shanghai
General lack of faith in Residential Property as a source of Investment anymore
Yes Chinas worst case scenario is a $ 1.3 Trillion HIT assuming China decides to burn the entire issue and pay for all these units and plug the hole
However since China won’t raise debt to pay off the hole like US or India would, it means Chinas strategy will be long term and that will take at least 6 years or until 2028 to absorb this amount effectively and cost maybe 1.5% a year in growth (Hence around 4–4.2% instead of 5.7% a year for the next few years)
China could raise 10 Trillion Debt and plug the hole fully tomorrow. It is the only nation on earth that can do so. Yet if it does, it begins to follow the US into a path of no return which China, a producer economy doesn’t want to do
Good news is today, there is no fresh problem
The old problem has to be sorted out and that will take a few more years
This Is Why So Many Women Are Single
” I’m loyal, but I am not monogamous” ” I’m loyal , but I am bisexual ” ” I’m loyal , but I have all my exes in my DMs to this day” ” I’m loyal , but I do OF ” To me , the reason why a lot of these ladies are single/ in pseudo relationships is because they don’t know what the word loyal means .
Two years ago, my son moved from the UK to the US (Texas). He works in IT (network engineer). His salary now is more than double of what he made in the UK. He got married last October and his wife works a minimum wage job. Yet, combined they make more now than me and my wife ever did.
So, you would think that he’s now better off than when he worked in Britain. Think again.
Healthcare costs a fortune. Last month, my daughter in law needed emergency dental surgery (root canal). Co-pay 3,000 USD.
Since he’s a recent immigrant, his credit score is not all that great. Meaning he can’t get a mortgage to buy a home. So, they’re paying 2K pcm in rent.
Since public transport in the US is either in a shocking state or non-existant, they both need cars to get to/from work. Cost of buying/running/insuring something decent is substantial.
Utilities are generally more expensive. The monthly electricity bill in particular is high (because living in Texas means you run the AC pretty much all of the time).
Food prices are about the same, though the portions are larger. Quality is a lot lower. Steaks in particular: all water and hormones. Sugar in everything.
So while is monthly gross pay is higher than this side of the Atlantic, his monthly disposable income (after all the bills are paid) is a lot less. It would be fair to say that they live paycheck to paycheck most months. When my son and his family want to come over for a visit, we pay for their trip. Whilst he’s a real go-getter and loves his job (and the opportunities he has in the US) my daughter in law is beginning to realise that they would enjoy a superior quality of life in Europe.
I worked n the restaurant business on and off for around 15 years. In all that time, I was lucky enough to work with good hard working people. There was only one person I will never forgive, a person who I worked with who I thought was a friend. We used to tend bar together on busy nights and we made pretty good money. There used to be a group of guys on a bowling team who would come in once a week a they always left us a large tip. I remember after they left I was cleaning up the bar and noticed there wasn’t their usual tip there. I asked “my friend “ if she took the tip off of the bar and she said no. I didn’t think much about it until the owner of the bar pulled me aside and told me my coworker told him I pocketed the tip. I’m many things , but I’m not a thief. She eventually admitted to stealing tips because she was in a lot of debt. She was fired
“Can you help us save him? the nurse asks. “He’s failing fast. Not responding to medication. We have nothing more here to keep him alive.”
“What do you mean?” I say. “ You mean the doctor can’t give him more drugs? Please, please.”
“Who’s at home? Does he have a favourite stuffy? What about a pet? Think about it and let us know.” The nurse is detached and unemotional.
And I’m falling apart.
It is a cold, blustery winter morning in January, 1984. Winters in Northwest Canada can be brutal and this week was especially miserable. The wind heaped the snow in large drifts around the house; not our house, mind you. Living at the in-laws. A devastating fire a short time ago. I say, “Good to remind us how the homeless live.” There is no time to feel sorry for ourselves.
“Shh, shh, baby, my baby, shh.” I sing as I rock back and forth to calm him down.
His arms flail. He lets out a piercing scream. Growls. Racks my face. Finds my eyes and claws at my eyeballs.
Our family physician writes on his prescription slip: Query spinal meningitis. Sends baby and me to a paediatrician. “This is an acute emergency,” he says calmly. “Your appointment’s made.”
Hysteria rises in me. My legs turn to jelly. The sound roaring in my ears is deafening.
And baby son lies still. Pale. Too still. Pale. Deathly still.
Another race against time. I remember a small crowded room of bored patients. I remember a nurse calling my son’s name. And I also remember rushing down a flight of stairs, throwing open a door, and racing into a crowded street.
My husband looks wide-eyed at us.
“Go. Go. Go. He’s dying. Oh my God, he’s dying. Hurry to the General.”
We screech to a halt in front of the hospital. I stumble awkwardly nearly blinded by tears flowing freely now. The specialist, just seen, races by with his doctor’s bag in hand.
I run into the hospital and a front desk clerk gestures towards the elevator. “Run. They’re ready.”
We call for the resident priest.
“Please baptize him.” I choke on my words then. “And give him the Last Rites if need be.”
Life stands still at times like this. Husband and I huddle together, entwined branches of a single tree. We sit in parallel, silent prayer begging God for mercy. We’ve waited thirteen years for our little boy, a son who will carry on a dying family name. We can’t bear the thought of losing him today.
Hours later, after his abdominal surgery, the attending doctor walks towards us. We search his weary face, but find no answers. His words come haltingly.
“The fight’s just begun. Your son is critically ill. “
He quickly describes our son’s diagnosis, surgical procedures, present condition.
Intussusception. Bowel blockage caused the small intestine to telescope into the large intestine. There was total blockage. The surgeon made an incision in his belly and removed eighteen inches.
Tells us finally that our son’s odds of survival: ten percent.
Ten percent? We prop each other up, slump over in our chairs, cover our faces, and cry.
The next week is a blur. I call my mom and beg for prayers. She phones everyone she knows. Holds prayer gatherings at her home a couple times weekly for a month. Attends Mass and asks the priest if she can address the congregation at each of four Sunday Masses. Continues to give updates to her various support groups.
There are new developments daily. Our tike is a fighter. He is watched around the clock by rotating nurses who hang over his crib. When he starts yanking out tubes, his hands are tied together with cotton restraints. The staff won’t listen to my pleas. “I’ll sit here all day, all night holding his hands, but please don’t tie him up.”
They send me home. “You’ve got to sleep. You can’t save him all by yourself. Trust us.”
But he gets worse. Lies listless.
Still. Pale. Too still. Pale. Deathly still.
Then, without warning, cardiac arrest.
Husband and I pass a crash cart on the way back from the cafeteria. Not for a moment do we think it comes from our son’s room. We are oblivious to the gravity of his condition until the doctor intercepts us. “Your son’s heart stopped. But he’s fine. We did our job.”
Suddenly our son is floundering once more. The medical staff run out of answers and I can see the troubled look in their eyes.
“Any suggestions, folks?“
Our daughter is three. She loves her brother as if he were one of her precious Barbie dolls. Packs him around like a sack of flour. Lines up stuffies in his crib and makes up plays which make him giggle. Helps me change his cloth diapers, even the poopy ones.
And I think, she’s one hell of a trooper, too. Held her baby brother in a freezing car a month ago while I alerted the neighbours to call the fire trucks.
Sister leans over his crib and says, “Hi, little guy! “ Simply that.
And he cocks his head and listens.
Three simple words from a protective big sister makes all the difference.
He starts fighting. And wins his battle.
………….
Son’s life and health have been a challenge over the years; however, as difficult as circumstances might be, our mighty fighter perseveres.
Three days ago his big sister’s “little guy” turned thirty-six.
When I was a kid, a truck dropped off a huge box at our house that was addressed to my mother.
According to the paperwork, it was an automatic dishwasher, something that had just been invented, and we had no idea why we suddenly had one.
It took a few phone calls to figure out that, months earlier, my mother had entered a free sweepstakes at Zayres department store and the appliance was a prize.
She was scared to death of the newfangled device and never even hooked it up.
Yeah. It was funny as hell. I got a call from my counterpart at corporate. He has gotten laid off and he called me before they could escort him out to tell me we were getting laid off in three months. I confronted my boss and she turned ashen white but in the end she was honest with me.
Scott Ritter – “Palestine and Hamas have won.. Israel is in BIG TROUBLE!..”
In the United States, do not argue with the police. They are armed and they are jumpy because so many other people in the US are armed, including a lot of people who should not be.
Several years ago an Italian professor attending an academic conference in California crossed a street at a location other than a designated crosswalk. It would not occur to an Italian in a million years that this might be a crime. A cop saw him and shouted at him. He, being Italian, questioned the officer. The officer hurled him to the ground, tore his clothes, roughed him up and took him to jail for refusing to obey a lawful order given by a police officer. (He was eventually released without charge.)
The fact is, if the police are violating your civil rights, or even if they are breaking the law, there is nothing you can do about it at the time. Resisting them risks your being shot. Obey without question.
I was on a date with a veterinarian. She was a beautiful brunette with big eyes. She was a bit crazy too.
It was our second date and we were drinking a beer at a restaurant and somehow, we got to talking about how kids were growing up too fast, which is code for them sleeping around at too young of an age.
Just as I was drinking a sip of a beer, she said, “Yeah, I mean, I guess I get it. Kids are curious and going to experiment. When I was 6-years-old I stuck a pen in my p#ssy.”
I choked on my beer really hard and starting coughing. She immediately turned red, blushing with embarrassment for having been so candid and said, “Are you ok? Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I was also red at this point from my brief oxygen shortage. I waved it off, still coughing, and said, “No worries at all! Kiiiids these days.”
MOBS SWARM US NUKE BASE, LEBANON/ ISRAEL ON BRINK, NUCLEAR SUB NEAR IRAN, IRAQ MOBILIZING
“President” Biden distributed 100 nuclear warheads all over the world. WTF?
I was a teenager. It was a temporary job. They had this big mail machine that folded letters, put them into envelopes and sealed them.
My job? It was sit stand between three of these machines and to squirt some water on the brushes every few minutes. The auto wetting water tank was broken and it was cheaper to hire me as a teenager (this was before UK minimum wage so it was about 30p an hour) until they could replace the water tank. You had to give it 3 sprays for it to be in the sweet spot anymore and the envelopes would be too wet, any less and too dry.
It drove me absolutely spare as the machines would beep each time a letter went through it. You had three machines beeping and you were stood there with a bucket of water and a couple squirty bottles. You’d hear the beeps in your sleep.
An actual wood burning fireplace. I got my first one in 1986, and every place has had one since. Unlike a wood stove, I can have a fire three seasons a year, without overheating my house.
When the first fluffy flakes of winter start falling, my wife and I start a fire. We might have a glass of wine, possibly a hot rum toddy, maybe mulled wine, brandy, or maybe peppermint schnapps and hot chocolate.
We sit in front of the fire, eating Brie and crackers, maybe some other snack. Possibly popcorn.
When it gets close to Christmas the Christmas music is playing. Two puppies at our feet.
Every Christmas when family comes over, we have the fire burning in the background, the tree is center of attention, but everyone loves hearing the pine snap crackle and popping in the fireplace.
The restructed events of the disaster have been pieced together over the years.
Mount Vesuvius was a known volcano in Roman times but it had not erupted in several centuries. No one knew why some mountains erupted and no one could predict when they would. However, due to the nature of fault lines in this region geologists now believe smaller earthquakes and eruptions simply relieves the pressure along the fault line that runs along Italy.
The Latins had no way of knowing that. All they know was volcanic soil grew good crops and volcanic ash was a key ingredient in Roman concrete. Italy was also the world’s factory at the time, so the area around Vesuvius centered around the city of Pompeii who was a big exporter of wine and metal tools. This was a pre-industrial society, so most people rarely went outside walking distance of their homes and for most residents this was their whole world.
In the days before the blast, many minor quakes were reported in the area around Vesuvius. No one knew what this meant, but Roman academics would later take this as the sign of potential eruption.
The exact moment of the blast was witnessed by the historian Pliny the Younger. He was reading Livy while his father governor Pliny the Elder was eating lunch. Indeed, the blast occurred during the lunch hour, as the most common find in Pompeii were tables set for lunch that were buried in ash and partially preserved. Pliny’s mother called them over to the window urgently and they looked and saw Mount Vesuvius’ summit turned into a tower of ash. Explosives didn’t exist in this period, and Pliny tried his best to explain how it appeared the force of the hot gas inside the mountain blown away the summit. The danger this caused was lost on no one, and Pliny the Elder gathered his soldiers to travel down across the Bay of Naples and rescue as many as he could while his family went away.
This was the worst kind of eruption. The lava is actually the least dangerous part of a volcano. Safe enough to be a tourist attraction at a distance and safe enough geologists is firefighting gear collect lava samples directly. The second most dangerous is the ash and rock because it tends to fall out of the sky and/or form hot avalanches Earth called pyroclastic flows. The hot gas is the most dangerous as it both suffocates and burns. Common gasses are CO2 and HS that are commonly disolved in solutions underground but bubbles up like a soda fountain inside the mountain. This causes volcanic explosions and pyroclastic flows.
The residents of Pompeii went outside and it was soon raining ash and rock as Vesuvius vented its contents into the sky. Evacuations started immediately, and anyone who wanted to stay was quickly convinced to leave with the first pyroclastic flows that nearly reached Pompeii. As Vesuvius lost pressure it stopped being able to support a column of ash and rock and this collapsed forming the flow. However, that simply restricted the throat of the volcano, allowing pressure to build up again in a cycle that only got worse as the day progressed. The first victims found in the bottom layer of ash in Pompeii were all killed by falling rock.
Travel was a big deal in a pre-industrial world as you would be gone for days and it was quite strenuous. Among items victims were carrying included bread, coins, and housekeys. The latter back in those days was a heavy iron thing that didn’t easily fit in a pocket. Most of the dead from Pompeii were persons unable to flee including a soldier with a bad toothache, a near term pregnant lady and her husband, and an old bedridden man and his teenaged grandson among others. Most of these people were not buried with their houses as the ash levels rose, but were killed lady by hot gas. Indeed, this is how we know the pyroclasic flows got worse through the afternoon, as the victims closer to the mountain are typically buried deeper in ash. The final pyroclastic flows killed the most people including Pliny the Elder who stayed behind after his men loaded up a boat of refugees in order to organize the evacuation.
This is also how we know there were a lot more victims than we find buried in ash because Pliny the Younger recounts how these bodies were all recovered and given proper funerals. Likewise, we know there are many more bodies that have not been found as much of what we know of is concentrated in the city itself when the majority of this region’s population was dispersed in the countryside. However, country folk were much more dispersed so finding said bodies is far more difficult and more is discovered every decade.
All that said, the bulk of the population managed to escape. The eruption only effected the immediate area of the blast and once out of sight of the mountain people survived and later returned to find a volcanic plain where the city had been. The layer of ash and pummice stone was roughly 20 feet deep and it simply wasn’t worth it to unbury the homes, many of which had collapsed under the weight. The whole city was effectively homeless and Emperor Titus personally arrived to survey the damage. Titus directed both state funds and his personal money to rebuilding Pompeii, and within two decades a planned city emerged. However, no one in Italy ever forgot how on one day that was otherwise like any other a mountain simply exploded for no reason and that most of the victims simply happen to be downwind of the disaster.
You likely seen those sculptures of Pompeii victims, but those are not bodies. The bodies rotted away leaving voids in the ash, and archeologists simply filled the voids with plaster to reveal the Pompean’s final moments, most clearly dying in agony.
Brian Berletic: War is COMING as China Rejects Dangerous US Maneuvers in Taiwan
“Let’s be frank about the Taiwan issue, where the US is involved. The US cares next to nothing about the well-being of Taiwanese people, who are Chinese in race and ethnicity. Why should they? Look at the way the US government treats Asians in their own country, many of whom are citizens. So what about other nationalities? Yea, that somes it all up in a nutshell.”
I’ma be honest, it’s fucking nerve racking. I had to give the period talk when I dont even know the period talk. I had to be the one to wake her up at 2am when she was 8 with police behind me to tell her that her mother overdosed and died. I get up everyday and makes sure she gets to school, leave work, pick her up and take her to excuricculer/home/friends/wherever the fuck, then go back to work and finish my 12 hour shift. Pick her up if not at home. Cook/order/figure out dinner, spend some time with her try to get to laugh at least once a day, make sure she gets her shower in, hug her tight kiss her forehead tell her I love her and goodnight, then go lay down and try to sleep myself …to wake up and do it all again.
Wanna know what I can’t do? Break down and cry. Blame her mom. Blame my mom. Blame the world for putting me and her though what we been through. And some days, that is all I wanna do. But when I feel tears in my eyes I’ll walk back to her room and look at her sleeping, usually her back to me.
I remember then why I keep getting up every morning
I’m in my 70s and retired now, but years ago, worked as the President’s assistant for an accounting firm.
Many times over the 4 years that I worked there, he would say, “I need this done by Monday.”
I would jump right on it and work all weekend if necessary. The reason being, he and the other owners of the small company treated me like gold.
I was a single Mom. When I first started working there, I was separated from my alcoholic husband, heading to divorce. I had no money to pay the mortgage or car insurance. I confided in one of the owners and the next thing I knew, they handed me a check to cover everything past due. They deducted a small amount each week from my paycheck to pay them back.
There was no problem if I had to stay at home with a sick child. If my work for the day was done, they had no problem if I hit the road early to avoid rush-hour traffic. My hours were flexible because they knew if they needed me to work late or on the weekend, I would cheerfully do it. They gave me great raises. They valued me as an employee and I never took advantage of it.
Not all small business owners are horrible people. I was lucky to work for such a great team. The only reason I left was to remarry and move out of state. I heard later they sold the company.
World at end of 200 yrs of North Atlantic rule: Sachs
I’ve worked with Chinese tech companies. Their engineers and scientists are devoted to their families, employers and country.
China has the capacity to leap frog the US in many different technologies. Take your pick, they are on it.
The Chinese government places a high value on a highly educated population. Engineering and scientific professionals are leading a revolution in advancing scientific innovation in China.
Their current leader, Xi, was a chemical engineer before becoming involved in his political career. In fact, many Chinese politicians are former engineers, refreshing thought isn’t it?
The motivations for innovation in the US and China are a key point in China leap frogging the US. Both countries reward success in innovation with financial incentives.
But, the Chinese have a greater sense of pride in their country and it’s future.
The US is presently extremely divided politically, current leadership is seeking short term monetary goals over the advancement of scientific innovation.
China may take the lead in further technological and scientific breakthroughs in this environment.
I had this scenario happen to me. A group of us were on a whitewater rafting trip and we went to dinner. All of us got the buffet, which was huge and had everything you could imagine (including prime rib). One of the couples both ordered the prime rib dinner off the menu, with appetizers, desserts and extra sides. When the waiter came to check on us and see how we were doing and if we were ready to pay, I spoke up and said “separate checks for all of us, please”. The waiter winked at me, other couples smiled, the couple that ordered the dinner had a fit. “We agreed we would split ALL costs! We can’t afford this unless we do”. I just smiled and said “we agreed that we would split costs, that was before we realized we would be taken advantage of. It’s separate checks for us from now on”. The other couples instantly said “agreed!” and “I didn’t agree to split the cost of a $125 dinner for you two when ours was $30!” I got the death glare, and neither of them spoke a word to me after that. When we got home I noticed I was blocked on everything. Oh well. They weren’t friends of mine and I found them to be not team players-not someone I would choose to be friends with.
I have a relative that I thought was a wonderful person and mother. Her spouse died suddenly when their daughter was 13 or 14 (they live in a different state than I do).
About a year after her spouse died, I start getting phone calls from her daughter in the evenings. I discovered her mom would go to her boyfriend’s house and cook he and his daughters dinner, while her daughter ate cereal for dinner at home.
Over the next several years, I spent a lot of time talking the teen through issues, concerns and challenges that mom wasn’t around to address.
Mom didn’t even know her daughter was taking college courses in her senior year of high school because she wasn’t there when she attended the classes in the evenings.
When it was time for the teen to go to college, she got into a great school. Mom told her she couldn’t go to it because they didn’t have the money. When the daughter went off to the lesser expensive and prestigious college, mom married the boyfriend, bought a larger home with a pool in the backyard, bought a facelift, and a luxury car. The daughter had only 2 pairs of jean to wear at college.
At the end of the daughter’s freshman year, she calls mom to let her know when she’ll be home. Mom tells her it would be better for her to stay at college over summer break.
Her daughter explains that she lives in a sorority house and it closes in the summer. Mom didn’t care, she told her to find somewhere to live… during final exam week.
The daughter calls me crying and I take her for the summer to live with me. I got her a job at the company I worked at and we made the best of it.
The insensitive and cruel things my relative has done to her daughter over the years is more than I can list.
By the way, the daughter went on to get a doctorate, despite her narcissist mother who I have zero respect or affection for.
Humans started using their own feces as compost pretty much as soon as agriculture was invented. The practice continued in many places well into the 20th century.
However, the practice soon proved to have a lot of drawbacks. Humans in the early agricultural era didn’t know about bacteria, and crops fertilized with human dung often caused outbreaks of disease because those gut bacteria persisted in the soil until they found a new human host.
As such, people learned that although it was fine to plant cereal crops, or any plant with a long stalk in such fields, and not to plant carrots or other root crops for at least a year. By that time pathogenic bacteria had usually died out.
Because horses, pigs and cows don’t share a lot of gut flora with humans, it was soon found using animal dung had the same effect with fewer drawbacks. It was perfectly safe to use a few acres of land as cattle pasture for a year, then plant the following year.
I’ll tell you something about Jim who doesn’t want to come to the company parties. He thinks if he does a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, that is all he owes you. He doesn’t think having a job means the company owns him, body and soul. Even if he knows that not attending the parties means a black mark against him, he still won’t go.
I’ll tell you something else. Before I retired, I worked for a lot of different organisations, some large, some small, and there were always some Jims. They got along well with their co-workers. They did their jobs and did them to the best of their ability. They were often prepared to go above and beyond the call of duty at work. But that was where it stopped.
Here’s the thing though. In every organisation, for every Jim, there are at least 25% of your staff who are Jim wannabes. They all wish they had the nerve to say no, but they don’t want to risk their jobs or their pay raises or their promotions, or even just the disapproval of their co-workers. They won’t tell you this because, as we can see by your question, in your mind this is not somebody exercising their right to say no to a social event. It is a problem that needs to be “handled”.
They don’t go home from the company party and say, “Wow, what a blast.” They walk in the door limp with exhaustion and say, “Thank god that’s over!” They probably put on a convincing act while they were there, but they didn’t want to spend their private time with a bunch of people they are already spending at least eight hours a day with. If they want to party, they want to do it with family and personal friends.
If you want to “team build” either with parties or other activities, do it within regular working hours. Jim probably still won’t like it very much, but at least he is getting paid for it. And it will not be breaking into the precious free time he needs to recharge his batteries so he can be an effective employee for you.
You’re going to need a bank of fryers and I wouldn’t fry them from raw. Frying them from raw will break the oil down really quickly and force you to either shut down the operation to change the oil or serve crappy wings. You don’t want to do either of those.
So, get your wings and brine them overnight in a simple solution of water, salt and sugar. Then drain them and bake them until they are cooked through. Cool the wings and package them in batches that will fill a fryer basket. Say 2.5 pounds per plastic bag and refrigerate them until it’s time to cook them.
On site, set up your fryers, your cold boxes of wings, a station for hot holding and saucing and a table for serving them to the customer. The cooks fry the wings, dump them into the hot holding units from one side and the service workers pull an order from the bin, place it into a bowl, toss the wings in sauce and then serve them to the customers. You can use heat lamps overtop of the wings to keep them hot, which you can rent, along with deep fat fryers that run on propane.
I worked a few summers at a home for children who’d experienced abuse and neglect. Their caseworker had just dropped them off; two beautiful little girls with big, blue eyes that swallowed their faces. They were two and four years old and they were very quiet for children their age. I looked them over, and immediately noticed several things: they had rope burns around their ankles, matted hair, and both were underweight and wheezing like they had the croup.
On closer examination I noted that the older of the two had bitten the insides of her mouth so hard that not only were they bleeding, but infected. I could not hold back my tears. They came with barely any clothing or personal effects, but many children in foster care share that experience. And later that evening when they were settled and I read over their file I knew they had lived a nightmare.
There had been an older sister, but she had died, thus prompting a welfare investigation in the first place. They found a woman addicted to drugs with a boyfriend who cooked meth—and they tied their children up in ropes to keep them out of their way. That was eighteen years ago and memories of those two girls still make me teary eyed. Questions like this immediately bring them to the forefront of my mind. I hope they finally found peace.
I had gotten out of the Army in 1971 (was drafted) and working my old job in a drugstore. I was growing a beard and letting my hair grow. A older customer came in and started criticizing my hair and beard (this was in the deep south). He said I was a disgrace. I let him know I didn’t need his permission or approval . He went to my boss and said the same thing. My boss basically said “He spent 2 years defending this country, he can wear his hair any way he wants.” . The customer left and my boss winked at me.
A 42 year old lady came in with severe abdominal pain and nausea. She wasn’t vomiting. No other symptoms or problems, except for multiple prior visits to the ER with the same problem.
Many doctors had tried and failed to diagnose and treat her. She had been to all the specialists at all the regional Universities. The famed Cleveland Clinic even took a crack at her.
All the tests were negative including blood work, poop samples, X-rays, scopes in both ends, the camera pill (a camera that the patient swallows, it takes pictures as it traverses the gut), and various scans.
She had CT scans, MRIs and various nuclear scans. There were scans with and without IV contrast and oral contrast. There were scans of her arteries, and scans of her gallbladder. Her gallbladder was a little weak, so a weak surgeon jerked it out without any benefit.
She had every blood test for cancer known to man. Multiple biopsies were always negative. I thank God that no tired pathologist ever imagined any cancer cells under the microscope. This lady already suffered so much at the hands of her healers.
X-rays were done many times with and without Barium. Some of the X-rays were done as videos. She might have had enough radiation to kill any tumor!
And the scopes! Multiple scopes down the throat and into the stomach and duodenum. Another scope down the throat through which a catheter is passed into the bile duct and pancreas to inject contrast that highlights the ducts for more X-rays. A urologist even scoped her bladder!
She saw stomach specialists, liver specialists, gastrointestinal surgeons, kidney specialists, urologists, neurologists, and even psychiatrists.
There’s an old saying in Medicine, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. This poor lady had been beaten with every specialist’s hammer in 3 states!
When they couldn’t diagnose her, they just skipped straight to the cure. She failed multiple curative procedures and dozens of medications. There were medications to neutralize acid, coat the stomach, decrease acid production, anti-spasmodics, anxiolytics, antidepressants, antibiotics, anti seizure, antifunguals, and plain old pain medications.
She learned to refuse the pain medications, because she was smart enough to realize that she would be written off as an addict, that doctors stop trying if they think you just want opioids.
She has been put on every dietary restriction, and treated with every fiber supplement. She knew it all because she had tried it all!
The first night I saw her, I just told her that she had already seen many doctors much smarter than myself, working in a low level ER. But I did what I always do in these difficult cases.
I sit down and shut up and listen. I talk about weather, sports, hobbies and family; anything but medicine. But mostly I listen and observe. I try to get the patient talking more than myself. It’s an attempt to make a brain-to-brain connection for a two-way flow of truth. It is engaging the patient’s mind as the powerful problem-solving machine that it is.
Two minds together are more than 1+1=2. It’s more like 1+1=4. And it doesn’t really matter much that the other mind has limited medical knowledge. In fact, this process can sometimes work better if at least one of the minds is unspoiled by medical dogma.
So there we were, in the middle of a hectic ER night with several people trying to die. I talked with her for a few minutes until a nurse convinced me that another patient was closer to the next world than this one.
I grabbed the patient’s hand and begged her to be patient. I promised her that if she would wait for me, that I would give her my best shot. She was obviously in pain, but she attempted a smile and closed her eyes as I left to find something easier to do, like make a room look like an axe murderer walked in on a meeting of hemophiliacs anonymous, by saving a trauma victim.
That night was one of those nights that leaves me feeling a bit PTSD. I just wanted to crawl into my hut for a couple days. Yes, I have an actual stick-and-grass hut in the woods for this purpose.
But I have a soft spot for kids. The nurses all say that kids like me, and I am a pediatrician. I hate to leave a kid at the end of my shift, knowing that the next doctor may not feel as comfortable with kids.
I picked up the last chart in the rack (this was years ago), and saw that it was a 3 year old girl with abdominal pain. She was on the other side of the curtain from my 42 year old patient whom I had completely forgotten, or I would have spent the end of my shift with her as promised.
I took a deep breath and switched my brain from high pressure ER doc mode to easy and relaxed pediatrician mode. I walked into the room and quickly recognized a familiar problem. I explained to the worried mother that it was a simple stomach virus, that young children can’t tell the difference between pain and nausea. I explained that I was going to treat her pain with a tablet called “Zofran” for nausea, that dissolves in the mouth. I told her that I would be back in a few minutes and I left to give my order to a nurse.
By this time it was well after the end of my shift. The nurse I found said, “There you are! We thought you left! Did you forget about the 42 year old woman with abdominal pain? She’s been lying in there for hours!”
Of course I had totally forgotten her, but I remembered fast and said, “No! Of course not! I promised to spend some time with her if she would wait until the end of my shift!”
At that the nurse winked and nodded her head knowingly. I said, “No! Not like that! Look, can you give this little girl 2 mg of Zofran?” And I turned back to see my forgotten patient.
She was still in obvious discomfort but was waiting patiently. I walked over and placed my hand on her shoulder. Before I could say a word, she said, “That was great!” I didn’t know what she meant until she said, “You’re so good with kids, you should have been a pediatrician.”
She did not seem surprised when I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I am!”
She joked, “No wonder I’m no better, my doctor is a pediatrician!”
I laughed. She tried to laugh. I poked my head around the curtain and asked the mother if it was okay to open the curtain? This violates protocols and is probably illegal, but I was too tired to care. I was simply trying to create an atmosphere to promote dialogue. A pleasant mother-baby dyad seemed the perfect antidote to the chaotic night this lady witnessed.
So now we had three minds working together. We talked to the little girl. She was smiling and feeling better already and asking for food. We talked about little girl things like toys, birthdays and sisters.
The mother thanked me. The Zofran trick worked wonderfully, despite her doubts. Then she looked at my patient and said, “He’s a wonderful doctor; listen to whatever he says.”
I asked her for permission to share her case and then I explained to the mother with a smile how that she had no idea, that this poor lady has some incurable ailment that has stumped all the specialists at all the Universities.
And then my patient and the mother began to talk about her case. As soon as the mother realized that it was a case of chronic abdominal pain and nausea, she drew an analogy to her daughter’s simple acute stomach virus.
I shook my head at the absurdity of it and was about to interrupt this conversation that was quickly getting off track. And then I remembered my rule for difficult cases (shut up and listen!).
My patient said, “Believe me, I have tried every stomach medication and even some herbs. Zofran does nothing for me.”
But my mind was zipping through all my experiences with chronic pediatric abdominal pain. I thought of the episodic nature of my patient’s condition. I asked her weird questions l usually reserve for pediatric cases like, “What part of the world did your ancestors come from? Any children in your family with health problems? How old is your house? Do either of your parents get migraines?”
She said, “Nobody has ever asked that question. My mother and father have both had migraine headaches their whole life. My brother gets them, too!”
And then I knew the diagnosis, even though I had assumed it was impossible and had never heard of an adult case. There is a condition called “abdominal migraine” that affects young children. There is usually at least one parent with migraine headaches, but most of these kids will get better by age 12. Their abdominal pain just stops. A certain portion will develop migraine headaches about the same time their abdominal pain goes away.
But I had my doubts. Pediatric abdominal migraine is easy to treat with simple medications that had failed to help this lady. But what if I gave her a common adult migraine treatment such as a vasoconstrictor? The pain of migraine is caused by too much blood flow to the head. Medicines that constrict blood vessels can be curative.
These medications work best if given very early in an episode. My patient was hours into this episode. As expected, the first dose in the ER that night did not relieve her pain, but it did do something much better: it gave her hope.
I gave her a prescription and sent her home, still in pain. But she was so grateful and she thanked me profusely. I felt a little anxious that maybe I was giving her false hope, for surely it could not be this simple? Surely the specialists thought of this?
Several months later she was in the ER with a sick family member. She was beaming and radiant. When she saw me she said, “That’s him! He’s the one who cured me!”
Tears were rolling down both our faces that night.
COVID-19. I have had several conversations here in the US with people who teach. They have all pointed to how awful the current batch of kids are when it comes to classroom learning. They can’t sit still nor pay attention because they lacked the classroom environment at that formative age to reinforce those skills; learning is nearly impossible. Meanwhile China adapted quickly to initial lockdowns, and by April 2020 normality had returned. My niece serves as my personal data point for what happened, and she has had no significant interruption in her education as online instruction was brief.
The haphazard lockdown strategy of the US combined with a retreat to virtual teaching will have a major effect on the labor force come 10 years from now. China’s strategy of strong, nationwide lockdown at onset followed by an elimination strategy allowed the country to more or less weather the storm more gracefully. One can have criticisms about how the country left COVID, but the end result is that the period of normality from spring 2020 through fall 2022 was the right target to reach, and the impact will play out in the coming years.
The current seemingly higher economic growth rate of the US is unsustainable and superficial because the inflation rate in the United States is much higher than that in China.
Since the 1980s, although the US has pioneered technological revolutions such as information technology, the Internet, and life sciences, and revolutionary technologies have brought new markets, services, products, and high-tech companies, it stands to reason that total factor productivity growth should be very high, but the new rounds of technological change have not prevented the gradual decline of U.S. productivity.
Statistics show that the average annual growth rate of total factor productivity in the United States has dropped to about 1% in the past 40 years, and even less than 0.7% in the past 10 years. The third industrial revolution did not bring about a substantial increase in total factor productivity growth in the US like the second industrial revolution that occurred during the industrialization process. Economists call this phenomenon the productivity growth paradox.
Forecasting a country’s potential growth rate is very important for judging its economic direction, but it is not easy. In 2022, China’s GDP may be 72% of that of the United States. Assuming that the U.S. economic growth rate would be 2.2%, China’s economic growth rate would be 5%, and the U.S. dollar and RMB remain at the current real exchange rate, based on this calculation, China would catch up with the United States in 2029. However, potential growth is not actual growth. A country’s ability to achieve its potential growth rate depends on whether sufficient demand exists. In the past three years, China had mainly relied on investment and exports to create demand. Thus, China must increase domestic consumption to create sufficient demand.
An important reason for China’s economic success lies in the close integration of a competent government and an efficient market. The invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the government play a positive role in promoting economic and social development. The Chinese government focuses on key industries that promote national economic growth through five-year plans, industrial policies, and allocation of financial resources. Technological changes that occur in node industries are transmitted and amplified through the production network, forming a spillover effect, driving the emergence of a large number of upstream and downstream market entities, and producing a multiplier effect on the overall economy.
The closer an industry is to a node (the area with the highest density in the production network), the greater its impact on the economy. Empirical research also shows that investment projects with longer industrial chains generally bring more jobs, tax revenue and growth to the local economy.
Total factor productivity growth is a decisive factor in a country’s economic performance. Since the Industrial Revolution, no country or economy has been able to maintain a total factor productivity growth rate of more than 2.5% for a long time after completing the industrialization process. Since for advanced economies, sustained high productivity growth is the exception rather than the norm because when the share of the service industry increases significantly, it becomes more difficult to maintain rapid growth in total factor productivity.
The real estate industry is a long-chain industry and is of great significance to boosting domestic consumption. Putting all factors together, the consumer market can be expected to recover in 2023. Before the epidemic, consumption growth was above 7%. If China wants to achieve a potential growth of 5.5%, consumption growth of 5.4% will be enough. It is now no longer appropriate to call the Chinese economy an investment-driven economy.
In many areas, China has reached the global frontier in mid-level technologies, and hidden champions have emerged in almost every industry. For example, China was originally a latecomer to the electric vehicle industry, but it has become a leader within 10 years. Relying on development and innovation, China is becoming the largest contributor to the global clean economy.
The Chinese government has successfully prevented and resolved major financial risks through active and prudent deleveraging efforts. Money only generates value when it is used in the real economy. Serving the real economy has become a priority for financial institutions. The negative impacts of aging in China are actually overstated, at least for the next 10 years because over the next 30 years, artificial intelligence and automation will replace more workers than will be lost due to aging.
China has a large state-owned industry with a net capital stock of 60 trillion yuan. The central government has begun transferring state-owned shares to social security funds. These shares will generate enough dividends to support the social security system for the aging population.
In the long run, the economic growth rate of China will be higher and better than that of the US.
When our son was around 3,(he’s now 48) I took a parenting class where it was recommended that you give your child a choice of 2 things that were both acceptable to you, so the child felt that he or she had some control over their actions. One night we had company for dinner. One of our guests was a psychologist who frequently lectured both in the US and abroad.
When it was bedtime, my son said he didn’t want to go to bed, so I gave him a choice. “Do you want to go to bed in your own bed or mommy and daddy’s?” He answered by saying “I want a Coca Cola”. I repeated the bed options, his bed or ours. He repeated his desire for a Coke. We went back and forth like that a few times, then he put his hands on his hips and said “I want a Coca Cola! Will you pour it or shall I?” He was using my parenting method on me!
Our psychologist friend fell off his chair laughing. I scooped up my son and put him in his bed. Our friend told us years later that he told that story in all his lectures from that time on, until he retired.
Back in the day, when physical mail was still delivered to companies, I executed my quiet sabotage. The CEO was a weird one. He would open all the mail, read it, write his comments directly on each piece of mail and then distribute it to the appropriate person. Mind you we had roughly 50 office staff and 100 factory employees, so we weren’t a tiny operation.
The CEO instituted 2 cost savings. We were not allowed to purchase staples or paper clips. We were all given some little device (as a replacement stapler) that folded corners of papers and then perforated that corner so that the papers couldn’t separate.
And his feeling was that enough paper clips that came with the mail so we should just reuse them. It was ridiculous and impractical.
I khew that I was going to be fired at the end of the week in the afternoon and decided to annoy him. I went to Staples and bought all the office employees 2 boxes of staples and 2 boxes of paper clips. Sure enough Friday afternoon, I’m let go and then the CEO left right immediately. The wuss didn’t want to see how much of impact my dismissal would be on morale.
I was given the opportunity to say goodbye to everyone. So I walked desk to desk and gave each person staples & paper clips. I heard, the next week, that the CEO went bonkers seeing everyone having them. Lmao
The Duran: Neocons DESTROY Themselves as Russia and China Forge New World Order
The Duran discusses the failures of the neocons to maintain the US-led unipolar order amid Russia and China’s global rise.
Huawei and Xiaomi are both Chinese technology companies. This is true.
But essentially, Huawei and Xiaomi are Chinese technology companies with completely different natures, so their treatment is also completely different.
To accurately distinguish the differences between the two companies, we must start with the history of world globalization and the changing role of Chinese companies.
Before the 1980s, China was one of the poorest and backward countries in the world, almost isolated from the modern economy.
When China opened its doors in the 1980s, the Western world discovered that this was such a special country.
It has a huge poor population, but most of them have basic education.
It has a sound industrial foundation, but its technology is very backward.
He has huge territory and rich resources.
It has relatively complete infrastructure, including roads, railways and electricity.
At this time, the West had just carried out the first round of globalized industrial transfer, moving low-profit, polluting and risky manufacturing industries to Asian countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand.
However, these countries have limited population and scale, and limited capacity. As industries increase, salary levels increase rapidly and become less cheap.
Moreover, the education level of the population in these countries is limited, the infrastructure is limited, and there are many restrictions.
At this time, China was like an endless pasture. No matter how many cows the cowboys threw in, it could quickly accommodate them.
As a result, China quickly became the new continent for Western manufacturing.
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 20th century, China was like a magnet attracting manufacturing industries from around the world, and countless companies developed in China.
They all follow the model of Western hope:
Version 1.0 Chinese Company: Processing and Manufacturing
1. Design, technology and standards provided by Western companies
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Western companies are responsible for sales
In this stage, Chinese companies shouldered the heaviest and hardest work, but could only obtain 10% of the profits, while Western companies took away 90% of the profits.
The Nike sneakers we wear, the French bags in women’s hands, and the various toys children play with are all products of this model.
The Chinese produce these things, but they cannot afford to consume them.
Of course, although the profits of the Chinese are meager, the total amount is huge. Therefore, during this period, they achieved a large amount of wealth accumulation, and gradually accumulated knowledge and talents.
Some companies are beginning to try to enter a new stage.
Version 2.0 Chinese company: independent production
1. Chinese companies purchase designs, technologies and standards through joint ventures or introductions
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for local sales
During this stage, the share of Chinese companies expanded. They got rid of the pure processing industry and began to focus on technology, trying to build their own brands and market capabilities.
However, during this period, the product quality of Chinese companies could not be compared with that of their foreign counterparts, and they mainly relied on low prices to compete in the local Chinese market.
Haier Electric, Chery Automobile, Lenovo Computer, etc. are all Chinese companies that have risen during this period.
Their degree of autonomy has been greatly improved, but most of their profits are still taken away by Western companies through patent licensing and the import of key parts, and they can only compete in the Chinese market. There is no pressure on foreign counterparts.
Version 3.0 of Chinese companies: independent production, global competition
1. Chinese companies solve most technical and quality problems through independent research and development
2. Western companies provide key components
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for global sales
Around 2010, Chinese companies grew further. They have more technologies and knowledge systems, and the quality of their products has also improved rapidly. began to threaten Western counterparts in the global market. Especially in the fields of household appliances, kitchen appliances, electronic products, mobile phones and other fields, it has achieved rapid success.
Xiaomi, VIVO, Oppo, Transsion, Haier, Lenovo and other companies are representatives of this stage.
They have mastered the complete design, manufacturing and quality management capabilities of products, and established a good brand and reputation. During this period, products made in China began to be famous around the world and can be seen everywhere around us. Their low prices and high quality put traditional Western and Japanese brands to shame.
But they still have an Swelling of Achilles: key components and technologies are in the hands of their Western counterparts. For example, the Qualcomm chip and Android system of Xiaomi mobile phones; such as the Intel processor and Windows system in Lenovo computers;
Through control of these key technologies and components, the West still takes away most of the profits of these companies.
Take Xiaomi mobile phone as an example. Its core processor comes from the United States, its memory comes from South Korea, its screen comes from South Korea and Japan, its camera comes from Japan, its key communication chips and sensors come from Europe and the United States, and even the tempered glass on the screen surface is a product of an American company. . Chinese companies can only supply low-value accessories such as casings, speakers, and interfaces. According to media statistics, 70% of the value of Xiaomi mobile phones comes from Western suppliers.
Therefore, although Xiaomi has squeezed out the share of traditional peers such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Sony, for every mobile phone it sells, Western companies make the most profit, and the Chinese still take away a small part.
Version 4.0 Chinese companies: disruptors
1. Chinese companies master core technologies and solve all problems
2. Chinese companies provide key parts themselves
3. Chinese companies are responsible for cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and completion of assembly and production.
4. Chinese companies are responsible for global sales
After entering 2015, some Chinese companies have grown further. They began to get involved in core semiconductors, operating systems, precision sensors, databases and artificial intelligence algorithms. It began to seize the most profitable industrialization in the world and the last economic position of Western developed countries.
Huawei, DJI, Hikvision and other companies are representatives of this stage
They have all the features of a 3.0 enterprise and are beginning to replace Western suppliers. Not only do they make excellent products, but they also use core components and basic software developed entirely by themselves. They intend to completely take away the fattest piece of meat in the mouths of Western companies.
Before Huawei was sanctioned by the United States, it had surpassed Samsung and Apple to become the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. It is completely different from Xiaomi. Almost all the core components of Huawei’s mobile phones are provided by Chinese companies, and they have even begun to develop basic operating systems in order to kick Google out. In the field of communications, it holds the most 5G patents in the world and develops all high-value semiconductors and antennas on its own.
The essence of the above 3 versions of Chinese enterprises, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, is the same.
In the chain of globalization, Western companies take the best parts of food, and Chinese companies get the remaining food scraps. The difference between 1.0 and 3.0 is just the amount of residue obtained.
Therefore, whether it is Lenovo or Xiaomi, although they are technology companies from China, their positioning is within the scope of this rule and is allowed by the West.
But 4.0 Chinese companies are different. They are trying to subvert the rules of the game that have existed for decades.
They still embrace globalization, but they think, why are companies from Western developed countries always at the top of the food chain?
This involves the issue of economic competition between developed and developing countries.
Why do Westerners enjoy the most vacations, the best benefits, and the highest salaries and rewards? And people in developing countries work hard and overtime, but can only get meager pay and struggle to feed their families? Are people in developed countries inherently smarter and harder-working? The Chinese believe that this is not the case and that something is wrong with the rules.
Chinese companies like Huawei are determined to subvert this rule.
In the end, their appearance caused tension in Western countries: the subversives have occupied the entire country, their athletes have come to the king’s castle, and Huawei is the champion at the forefront.
Kings and nobles discovered that they could no longer defeat the subversives through “civilized rules.” How can he maintain a comfortable life in his castle and continue to rule and plunder the entire world in the future? The behavior of subversives must not be allowed!
So they shouted: They are thieves, liars, and traitors, don’t believe them!
While silently picking up the gun in his hand, he aimed at the one running at the front.
Creole Artichoke Bisque
2023 11 10 15 27
Ingredients
16 ounces butter
8 tablespoons all-purpose flour
6 cup beef stock
2 ribs celery, finely chopped
3 large onions, finely chopped
1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon thyme
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 (14 ounce) cans artichoke hearts, undrained
Salt and black pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1 cup dry white wine
4 ounces light cream
2 tablespoons parsley, minced
Instructions
Melt the butter in a heavy pot and add the flour. Over low heat, cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Slowly add the stock and when well mixed, add the celery, onions, green onions, bay leaves, thyme and garlic. Let this simmer for 45 minutes.
Chop the artichoke hearts fairly fine and then add to the pot, along with the artichoke water. Cook at a low simmer for another 30 minutes.
Add salt and pepper to taste, the Tabasco, wine and cream and bring to a simmer. Do NOT boil.
The bisque is now ready to serve.
Sprinkle a bit of parsley over the bisque in each bowl.
Tell the truth,but , it wont make any difference, no one will believe you.
I was having drinks after work with my coworkers, and the waitress got off work and joined us. She had been our waitress for over a year and we had no spark in that time. Though she was attractive. When I said I was going home, she asked if I could give her a ride. I dropped her off, and didn’t think anymore about it.
The next day I swapped vehicles with my girlfriend, as she needed a truck to help her sister move something.
She found a brown paper lunch bag in the back seat. It had a lacey bra, panties and unused condoms in it. I was totally at a loss. Then I remembered giving the waitress a ride home. So on Monday I handed the bag to her, and asked if it was hers, and it was. She gave no explanation of how it got in my backseat, or even why she was carrying it.
I asked her to explain to my girlfriend, and she declined, saying she didnt want a whole bunch of drama over nothing. So I got a whole bunch of drama from my girlfriend.
I couldn’t even blame her, or come up with a plausible story. We broke up shortly after that
NOT POSSIBLE: Why US Can’t Compete with CHINESE Monster Drones?
“China also has many AI drones such as the amphibious Nezha that can fly and dive to 23ft under water; shark/dolphin/stingray undersea drones; and an anti-air/land defense system called the Hornet’s Nest that can launch 10,000 explosive drones rapidly each will auto lockon enemy vehicles. People have no idea how secure China’s borders really are today.”
My wife and I went to see the war movie “Saving Private Ryan” in IMAX…. it was super loud. My wife had even taken hearing protection, because it was so darn loud. When the movie ended she was taking out her ear plugs and said..
“Wow, that was so loud”
Now, there was an old dude sitting in front of us, and he said …
Most of the time, Chinese don’t think about Koreans.
When I have heard Chinese talk about Koreans, they talk about good entertainment and food, hard work, and often more hot-tempered than Chinese. But they do not say this in an uncomplimentary way; they just say that Koreans are usually more hot-tempered and emotional than Chinese in a matter-of-fact way.
Simply put, by doing a good job, right up to the last day. Here’s my story.
I wasn’t fired, but I was forced out. Over 17 years, I worked diligently for my boss. I started out as a laborer in this construction firm. I had completed a 2 year course on building construction, but back then, you did not get a degree for vocational education. I worked my way up to running jobs for him, as a job supervisor. Building one job, I set a record within the firm for the highest profit job. The boss that’s because he bid the job right. At the same time, we had 2 other identical jobs going, and they were both losing money. I replied that I made sure he managed to keep that money instead of running it poorly.
Fast forward a few years, and over the years, we had both grown tired of each other. Little things. The boss visibly checking his watch when I leave at 3:31, a minute after quitting, all the while ignoring I started 10 minutes early. For some reason, he tells me I can not run jobs for him anymore, claiming that the jobs he bids on, they want to see that his supervisors have a college degree. I’ll keep my pay and vacation, but I am maxed out as a carpenter, so don’t expect raise for the near future.
At first, this arrangement was actually quite nice. I kept my pay and benefits, but the stress levels associated with running a job went away. All of the newly hired college degreed supervisors love having me on their job. After 17 years, I knew what needed doing and how to do it, and was happy to do so. That Christmas, I specifically not invited to the company Christmas party, as only supervisors were invited. It used to be everyone when we had a small crew, or supervisors and key personnel (Long term hires, not the guy hired last week).
Later that spring, the boss tells everyone that times are tough, he won the bid on the job, but it was low, I need everyone to take a pay cut. Everyone else agrees to take a dollar cut. My turn in his office, he suggests a $3.00 cut in pay. I tell him I can not afford that, I’ll need to immediately start looking for a job. He replies, okay a dollar cut. And says that if everyone pulls together and produces, I can raise their pay back. So… my pay depends on all the now demoralized employees.
So, of course after a few more months, I am feeling hurt by the disrespect, and a job is offered to me, same pay, new company, one with some real character and class. I took the job, of course. The boss looks at me and says, you didn’t think that pay cut was permanent did you? I just looked at him. Two weeks later, I am working the next job and loving the working relationship.
After a couple months, I get a call from him, he tells me it was a mistake to let me go, he didn’t realize all I did for him and how well I did it, offers me a good paycheck and restoration of all benefits, etc… I reply that this job has different challenges that I want to prove myself on, and politely declined. His response, oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. A few months later, I receive a similar call from him, and it goes the same way, though he offers me a little more money. Again, politely declined. 2 years or so after leaving, I see a prominent ad in the help wanted section. He placed an ad in my new locale, describing my experience and capability to the letter, offering a company truck, commensurate pay, etc.. I did not respond. After 17 years of the little quibbles we had with each other, I had enough. I currently had a secure job and wanted to stay there.
TLDR, do a great job right up to your last day and make them regret making you leave.
Christopher Reeve was so much more than the characters he played.
He was exceptional, having hit the genetic lottery.
He was a brilliant student and an outstanding athlete. He was kind and oozed work ethic, pursuing perfection in everything he did. Christopher Reeve could have done anything he wanted in life.
Acting became his first and foremost love. He landed lead roles in nearly every audition from grade school onward.
A famous actress, Olympia Dukakis, approached him after a childhood performance, saying, “I am surprised. You’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t mess it up.”
He later frequented the most esteemed theater groups, including the Harvard Theater Company.
After being accepted to a list of Ivy League Schools, Chris attended Cornell, and later — Julliard.
He was adored by his theater teacher, John Houseman, who was eager to see Chris’s career blossom, saying, “Mr. Reeve. It is terribly important that you become a serious classical actor. Unless they offer you a shitload of money to do something else.”
The latter phrase came to be
After a stint of leading roles on Broadway, Chris landed the lead role in Superman in 1978. He went on to worldwide fame, appearing in famous films throughout the 1980s.
Chris lived a life most men dream of.
He made millions of dollars while starring in love scenes with beautiful starlets. He traveled the world, dining with Hollywood elites and noble laureates.
And then he met Dana
It was 1987. Dana Morosini was performing in a small-town cabaret.
Chris was always a fan of theater and was in attendance. Afterward, he walked into the backroom to meet her.
She’d fully expected to meet an arrogant jerk, as one often assumes of men in his position.
She said, “The man I met was soft-spoken, tall, kind, articulate, and not far removed from superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent.”
She was caught off guard by his interest in her. Chris said he’d just come back to compliment her, but later admitted he’d fallen in love with her in the moment he’d seen her.
She was initially skeptical, knowing it could all be a ruse to get her into the sack.
He later called her and she agreed to go out with him. She quickly fell in love and their relationship progressed. They moved in and lived together for several years. Then they married and had a child.
Theirs was always a good marriage, not prone to turbulence and strife and the two were known for their public affection. They traveled and went sailing while pursuing their own careers.
Eventually, horses came into the picture. Dana had grown up riding. In an effort to be part of that passion, Chris began taking lessons.
Like most things he did, he went all in. He wanted to be his absolute best. He rode and took lessons 4–5 days a week.
He went into jumping — a very dangerous style of horseback riding and was doing fine, despite taking an ambitious progression in the sport. It typically takes years to progress into big jumps.
May 27th, 1995
The most dangerous accidents are often subtle and less violent than a kick or explosion.
Gravity can do great damage with a little distance and a bad angle.
As Chris’s horse surged towards a wall to jump, it panicked and stopped, (called “refusing” in riding).
Chris was launched over the horse. He landed headfirst, all 6’4, 230 lbs of him. His second and third vertebrae in his neck were shattered.
Seven months prior, he’d filmed a movie where he played a paraplegic. He’d spent substantial time around people with spinal cord injuries in preparation for that role. Every day, he’d left their clinic feeling grateful for not living in their predicament.
And now he was there.
Life sputters to restart
Chris laid in the hospital, completely immobile and powerless. He was waiting to have surgery to reattach his skull to his spine. He couldn’t even lift his hand to brush his own teeth.
Most don’t realize what nearly happened in the weeks that followed.
Chris was in heated arguments with his doctors. He insisted they pull the plug on his breathing machine. It wasn’t a bluff. He couldn’t fathom living in his current state.
He saw himself as a burden to those around him. He was also threatening that he’d kill himself if they didn’t.
One can imagine, after a life of such freedom, being able to do anything you wanted, with a budget to pursue any passion, just how challenging it would be to suddenly be confined to such a cruel fate.
Dana Reeve became emotional and sat with him, saying, “I am only going to say this once. I will support whatever you want to do because this is your life and your decision. But I want you to know that I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what. You’re still you. And I love you.”¹
She urged him to just give it two years before they revisited the decision.
He accepted.
He eventually settled into his new life and Dana stood by her words, and by his side. They still lived, did things together, and found ways to have fun.
They were brought together by a push to make the world better for people like him, starting The Reeve Foundation, and raising money for people with spinal cord injuries.
He said during an Oprah interview: “We (humans) are all one big family. This has taught me a big lesson about complacency. We should never walk by someone in a wheelchair and be afraid of them — or think of them as a stranger. That could be us. In fact, it is us.”
Yet, it almost ended in that hospital room.
Chris couldn’t move a single body part below his neck. It was a far cry from his days as a free-roaming bachelor.
Yet he and Dana’s marriage was as strong in the second half as it had ever been before.
Sadly, Chris lost his life in 2004, due to complications from his injury. Shockingly, and only two years later, his wife Dana passed away from lung cancer. She was 47 years old and had never smoked.
Their story is terribly tragic. But within all of that pain, their love was consistent and they were happier than many others. It is yet another reminder, to embrace the moment and the blessing of good health.
The US government will destroy America’s semiconductor sector. Nvidia is the poster child of this event. It’s GPU semiconductors used in AI and cloud computing applications are a good example. At first, the US government stopped sales to the Chinese market of its 100 series chips, then Nvidia began a slower version in its 800 series chips. Now all Nvidia GPU chips are off limits to China. Not only that, but 21 countries suspected of reselling their purchases to China have been put on the entity list.
Talk about killing a company, Nvidia is a prime example of what is happening in the US semiconductor sector. The US is hell bent on denying semiconductors to the world’s biggest semiconductor market regardless of the damage.
Both TSMC and Intel have stopped work on their high end fabs because that market is fading away from them because of US restrictions. Intel and Qualcomm have established ‘innovation centers’ in mainland China and TSMC is trying to expand its Nanjing factory.
The US government is killing the very sector it thought its actions was meant to kill the Chinese semiconductor rise, only to find it is killing its own semiconductor industry.
When I was four, my father brought home this little white puppy for my sister. About a year and a half later, my mother got an orange tiger that became my cat. I loved that cat, and the cat and dog became fast friends, sleeping in the same bed together at times, and generally being the best of friends.
Starting in about fifth grade, I began to get really interested in retro TV shows like the Honeymmooners and Burns and Allen, and so many weekend nights I would fall asleep on the couch to those shows, either not going upstairs to my actual bed at all, or going to bed in the mmiddle of the night, at about three or four in the morning. Often enough I would let my cat in after he was outside for a few hours, as almost everybody who had cats at that time did; this was in the mid-seventies. He would make a kind of soft murr as he came in the door, and that’s how I knew he was in. That little white dog would be hanging out at his usual spot near the kitchen stove where his basket was, and the house would be at peace.
One cold winter night in February, when I was twelve, I got up to let my cat in. As usual, he did his usual murr, and I closed the door. Only this time the dog started growling and barking. Then I heard the sounds of a cat hissing. Then I heard the dog barking, and the noises of a cat and dog fighting. I couldn’t believe my ears because nothing like this had ever happened before. My cat and my sister’s dog were great friends so why was this happening? I was starting to realize that something was very, very wrong, and that there was probably a cat in our house that simply didn’t belong there. What else could explain the dog’s weird behavior? And by the way, what the hell was I gunna do now?
Well, what else could I do? I went upstairs to my parents room, opened the door and said:
“Ma? I think I let the wrong cat in.” See, I had figured out by this time that this other cat had followed mine into our house.
At that point, she and my brother came downstairs to see what was happening. As it turned out, quite a lot was going on because this cat and our dog were still fighting. And now my mother and brother were trying to get the damned cat out of the house. The cat was shrieking and hissing, flying around the kitchen, the dog was barking, and my mother couldn’t get her hands on the animal. My mother screamed at one point because the cat, quiet for a few seconds because it had tried to hide itself in a corner where we were storing insulation because my father was rebuilding our kitchen, screeched like a banshee when the cat sprung from his hiding place and attacked her.
Finally my cat, who had been paying no mind and eating his food in his bowl, finally got pissed off at the other cat and chased him out of the house. Then all was finally quiet, and we three all went upstairs to bed.
Meantime, my father, who was upstairs while all this was going on, got up to go to the bathroom, and he just started laughing his ass off. “It’s not funny!” I kept saying from my room, because by this time I was now in bed, and it was probably about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Of course, the more I said it, the more he laughed, and the more he laughed, the more I found it funny, so I started laughing.
Just one of those classic stories from my childhood. And I can still hear my father remembering that story and repeating my words in the exact sheepish tone I used that night:
There was the time I helped a teenage girl run away from home. I hid her in my room, lied to my parents, and ditched school. And for years I was completely embarassed by it. That just wasn’t appropriate behavior.
Here’s the story. When I was about 17, I started dating this girl who was a year younger than me. She complained about her mom a lot. Hey, we were teenagers, we all complained about our parents — but as I listened to her, it started to sound like there was some real emotional abuse going on. One night she called me, and we talked for hours. At one point her cat came in; he was a bloody mess, apparently he’d been in a fight, and for her this was the last straw. She was in quite an emotional state as she cleaned up her cat and then told me, “I’m coming over. I need to be with you tonight.”
It was 2 AM and I knew my parents would not appreciate a girl showing up at our house at two o’clock in the morning. I told her no, but she insisted. She said she was going to ride her bike over and that was it, goodbye.
What could I do? I didn’t want her ringing the doorbell, so I went downstairs and checked on my parents — they slept on the first floor, my room was upstairs. They were sound asleep, so I eased the back door open quietly and waited for her.
She showed up, dropped her bike in the back yard, and headed for the door. Before I stopped her, she threw the door open . . . and the dog started barking.
Oh crap, I’d forgotten about the dog. I shoved her up the stairs and followed her up, telling her, “stay up here and BE QUIET!”
Then I came downstairs, just as if I had been awakened by the barking and was trying to figure out what was going on. My parents were stumbling out of bed also. My mom noticed the back door was open and there was a bicycle in the yard. Obviously, someone had broken into the house — but where was the intruder? Dad headed to check the garage and I offered to check upstairs. Naturally, none of us reported finding an intruder, and they assumed that the intruder had been frightened by the dog and fled on foot. Mom brought the bike into the garage and was going to call the police — but I said “If we call the police they won’t be here for another hour and we’re all tired. Why don’t we call them in the morning?” They agreed that this was the best idea and they went back to bed.
Upstairs, girlfriend was crying. She was trapped, couldn’t go back downstairs for fear of the dog barking again. Couldn’t get her bike out of the garage without my parents noticing. I said “You’ll just have to stay here till morning.”
“My mom will kill me!”
At this point I said. “You’ve been telling me how much you hate your mom and how you’d really like to run away. Now’s your chance.”
“Huh?”
“Stay here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll see what your legal rights are.” She agreed and we fell asleep.
The next morning I came down for breakfast. Naturally, my parents were still talking about the incident in the night. I volunteered to call the police. I picked up the phone, dialed Time and Temperature, and listened to the National Weather Service’s local weather forecast while making up an entire imaginary conversation with the police department. I told my parents, “They said they’ll be here in an hour or an hour and a half. Why don’t you guys go to work, I don’t have school till third period today anyway, I can talk to them when they get here.” They said I was a good, considerate son, and went off to work.
By the way — I don’t think I’d ever lied to my parents before. At least not since I was little. I was a terrible liar, and I don’t know how I was able to do it so convincingly, thinking on my feet with the pressure on. Of all the things in this story, lying to my parents is probably the thing I’m the most ashamed of.
They went to work and Jeannie came downstairs for breakfast. I called an adult friend, an attorney, and told him the situation. He said that if I really thought that there was abuse going on, that I should report it to the District Attorney. So I called the District Attorney’s office and made an appointment for Jeannie to meet with them that afternoon. We arranged to meet at school and I would drive her downtown, but at the moment she needed to get her bike out of my parent’s garage. She rode off to school and I would later tell my parents that the police impounded it.
When I got to school myself — late, I’d lied to my parents about not having to go to first or second period that day — I was met in the hallway by my English teacher, Mr. Nelson. His first words weren’t rebuke or admonishment. Instead he said, “You’ve been seeing Jeanne M—-, haven’t you?” Cautiously I admitted it, and he said with near-frantic concern. “Do you have any idea where she is? Her mom thinks she’s been kidnapped, there was blood in the bathroom and she’s missing.”
Blood? Oh, yeah, the cat was bleeding when he came home that night and Jeannie cleaned him up. So I told Mr. Nelson that Jeannie had been with me, and he said Jeannie’s mother was on the way and I needed to go to the principal’s office to straighten things out.
When I got to the principal’s office several things happened all at once. The principal greeted me (I was kind of a teacher’s pet, and he insisted I wasn’t in any trouble). Jeanne just arrived on her bicycle and was coming down the hall from the other direction — and in the front door was walking Jeannie’s mom.
Jeanne gave me a hug, right in front of the principal, saw her mom, and panicked. “Oh My God, Run!” she yelled, grabbed me by the hand, and started running like she was trying to save her life. I followed as best as I could, and behind us, her mother was keeping up with us, cursing and making dire threats against us.
We went down a couple of back corridors of the school and into the student parking lot. We got into my car and peeled rubber getting out of there, leaving Jeannie’s mom out of breath and swearing.
We spent the next hour driving around, hiding from Jeannie’s mom or anyone else looking for us, then went downtown where we told someone from the District Attorney’s Office what was going on. They asked Jeannie to go in for further questioning and evaluation and told me to go back to school.
I went directly to the principal’s office. I told the principal about Jeannie’s claims of abuse — he didn’t act surprised — and that I’d dropped her off at the District Attorney’s office. He just told me to go to class and I never got into any trouble for what I did, not even for missing several classes that day.
Jeanne called me that night to tell me she’d been put in foster care and had been placed with a family that lived in the East High district so she’d still be going to school, and the DA was investigating the situation. But I never did find out how it all worked out, because not too long afterward, Jeannie and I had a big fight and we broke up.
In the years that followed, I was ashamed of the role I’d played in the whole affair. I was a good student, not a troublemaker, the teachers and parents all liked me, I was a Christian kid, active in church and my youth group, not the kind of person to help minors run away from home or hide girls in my room or lie to my parents. As the years went by I was ashamed and embarrassed by the whole thing and didn’t talk about it.
Then one day, 40 years later, I started wondering about some of the people I knew in high school and started looking them up on social media. I found Jeanne. Since I’d known her she’d become a registered nurse, gotten married, had a kid, gotten divorced, and lived alone with a couple of cats. Nothing too extraordinary there.
Then I found a blog post she wrote, entitled “The Day My Life Changed.” She wrote about years of emotional abuse recieved from her angry single mother, the cursing and threats and insults. “You’re nothing but a worthless slut,” she was told over and over, and ever since she was little she just wanted to make the abuse end. She wanted to run away — but was never able to do it “until one night a brave boyfriend said he’d help.” She ran away, got into foster care, and a family that convinced her that she wasn’t worthless after all — decided to go to nursing school and make a life for herself.
“Brave boyfriend.” I’d never thought of myself like that before. For years, I’d been ashamed and embarrassed about what I d done, only to find out that I was the hero in someone else’s story.
Yes I contacted Jean after that, and we stay in touch by Facebook.
Cajun Cheeseburger
cajun cheeseburger
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1/2 pound ground beef
1/2 pound ground pork
2 tablespoons onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons green pepper, chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried, crushed basil
1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
4 slices Wisconsin Cheddar cheese
4 hamburger buns, toasted
4 tomato slices
1/4 cup green onion slices
Instructions
Combine beef, pork, chopped onion, green pepper and seasonings; mix well. Shape into four patties. Cook and top with cheddar as directed below.
Place patties on oiled grill over medium coals (coals will be glowing). Grill, uncovered, for 5 minutes on each side to desired doneness.
Top each with Cheddar; continue grilling until cheese is melted. Place each patty on bun. Top with tomato; sprinkle with green onion.
I think it is inappropriate to say “China helps African countries”.
I have many business partners in China who are very interested when it comes to Africa. For the Chinese, Africa is a friendly business partner. Rather than “a beggar in need.”
There is a story circulating among the Chinese.
An Italian salesman went to Africa to sell shoes and found that Africans did not wear shoes at all. He returned to his country depressed and told his boss: “Boss, they can’t afford shoes at all. So our shoes can’t be sold.”
A Chinese salesman went to Africa to sell shoes and found that Africans did not wear shoes at all. He returned to his country excitedly and told his boss: “Boss, they don’t have shoes. Africa has huge market potential!”
Maybe you think that Africans can’t afford Chinese shoes, and that the Chinese are just being crazy. But the Chinese don’t think so.
There is a Chinese proverb, “Don’t bully a young man into being poor.” It roughly means: Don’t despise a person just because he is poor, but see his future.
In the eyes of the Chinese, although Africa is poor, it has huge potential. It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford shoes, I know rubber is abundant here. You can make soles out of rubber and sell them to me, and I will use them to produce shoes. Now that you have earned money, can’t you buy my shoes? You guys get nice shoes, I get cheap rubber, everyone is happy, isn’t that good?
What? You can only get rubber juice and don’t know how to make soles? It doesn’t matter, how about building a rubber factory and a shoe sole factory? No funds? Not technical?
It doesn’t matter, just wait for me to make a call.
Soon, rubber experts, equipment suppliers, and sole designers from China arrived. Chinese bankers came too, and they even gave better loans than the IMF, with only factories and future profits as collateral.
A year later, a modern rubber factory was built. Millions of shoe soles, gloves, and even tires are produced every year. Thousands of people found jobs here, and they began to have money to buy food, new clothes, and new shoes.
Salesmen in China found that their shoes were in short supply and all the shoes were sold. And the Italian salesman was still thinking about why Africans couldn’t afford shoes.
in this whole game
1. Africans got a modern factory.
2. Thousands of Africans around have received job opportunities. They have all made money, acquired new skills, and their lives have improved.
3. The tax revenue of the local government has been greatly increased. The income from selling rubber products is ten times more than that from selling rubber juice. There began to be money to build roads, schools, and hospitals.
4. China’s investment banks received dividends from the factory.
5. Chinese equipment suppliers sold equipment.
6. Experts who go to Africa to teach technology are paid a lot of money.
7. All the salesman’s shoes have been sold.
Who loses? There are no losers here
Is China helping Africa? No, China is just doing business their way, and Africans are just their customers. They deal fairly with each other and do not need charity or mercy.
Only some Western media are shouting: “Oh no! The Chinese are plundering Africa’s rubber. This is neocolonialism!”
They have completely forgotten how they did it 100 years ago.
Americans have a tendency to talk with their “outside voice”, even when inside and in a place where quiet is expected.
Americans have a tendency to mistreat people like store clerks, fast food workers, and hotel clerks.
Americans appear to have a perverse sense of pride about (1) how little they know about Canada (2) what they think they know about Canada that’s absolutely wrong, and (3) how large Canada is. Americans tend to treat Canada as if it were the size of Rhode Island rather than it being a little larger than their own country.
Americans are sure all their stuff is better than all our stuff, and when you point out how wrong that is in any area and provide demonstrable proof, they still won’t believe it.
Americans call our currency “funny money” because it’s plastic and all the bills have different colours. That’s despite the fact that American counterfeit currency is quite common and Canadian counterfeit currency is pretty rare solely because of its design.
A few months ago, I received an email from my daughter’s school informing me about the tragic passing of a girl. She had taken her own life.
She was only 14! She should have had her whole life ahead of her to do anything she wanted, but she couldn’t anymore because she chose death. The school email didn’t provide details about the reasons behind her action, but through the conversation with my daughter, I discovered that she had been battling depression. She felt overwhelmed by how she looked and the hurtful comments some other kids made about her. Sadly, some of her peers even viewed her actions as brave.
While I felt so sorry for the girl and her family, I felt compelled to remind my daughter a lesson I had always emphasized: “Everything can be fixed, except death. Taking your own life is not an act of bravery. Why? Because dying is easy. Living is hard. You only die just once but you have to live every day.”
I told my daughter, if anyone ever hurt you, do not hurt yourself, just come home to me, I will make you dinner, we will have dinner together, and if necessary, we will go out there and hunt the enemy that hurt you together.
Teenagers, please remember: Everything, every mistakes can be fixed, except death. If you ever don’t know where to go, go home!
And parents, please please, tell your kids that they can talk to you about anything, they can always come HOME. Please don’t assume that they know. Just tell them, by words, sincerely.
Some background: I was a costume designer for many years. My life was all about color. I dated someone who didn’t have basic color knowledge. Most frustratingly, he didn’t know common color names: Magenta, aqua, salmon lemon yellow. Could have been Greek to him. It was a source of humor between us, like we were speaking different languages.
Call him Steve.
One day we were discussing how and when we had learned color names, and had a bizarre revelation. I realized I had learned all my basic color names from Crayola crayons (note for young Quorans: they used to have the traditional color names, instead of creative new names). I started asking my friends, and all of them said that yes, the Crayola 64 pack (or was it a 120 pack? The biggest one.) was where they first learned their basic colors.
Steve, it turned out, never had Crayolas. His parents only got him the little 8 packs of generic colors. Red, green, blue, yellow, brown, orange, black, purple.
My poor disadvantaged baby! Of course we started making up for lost time. He would ask me what color I called something, then he’d tell me what he thought it was. Like lovers from foreign countries learning each other’s languages.
Anyway…. Came my birthday, and he gave me a gift I will never forget. It was a little book he had made by stapling sheets of paper together down the middle. On the cover it said “Crayola-Steve Dictionary” Inside, on each page, were two columns. One had each of the crayola colors drawn on the paper, with its name. Opposite it was the color that Steve had grown up thinking that name referred to.
I have never in my life had someone put so much effort and caring into a gift.
Years later, when Crayola betrayed the artists of the world by changing their color names to updated and exciting things, so that kids could no longer learn their color basics from the product, he hunted down a pack of the originals for me.
He was a very special guy, and I will always remember that gift fondly.
ADDED: For those who are interested, here you can see the change in color names in 1990…art teachers, I warn you, have a stiff drink in hand…
When I walked up on an employee berating a very nice regular customer. Actually, called this sweet little old lady a very offensive name (you f’king ole b***h). Her offence? She asked him a question as he was stocking some items. I fired him right there on the spot in front of her. Told him to get his things and get out and I would be mailing him his last paycheck as I never wanted to see his face again.
What is this problem with people painting cats blue?
I was fed up with the crap at a place that I was working and interviewed for a job that was opening up at a new place. My boss had been driving 50 miles each way. The new company was opening a place down the highway from his house, cutting it to 12 miles. They offered more money, more decency, better products and overall better working conditions. When I interviewed, they hired me on the spot and asked if I knew of anyone else who would like to work for them that they could talk to. I set up interviews for my whole team before I even told them about it, then badgered them into going. I told them they could say no at any point and I’d never say that they interviewed at all. We all went. We got better jobs closer to our homes. We got better working conditions. We got more money.
Once upon a time in a far away place, there was a party called the Republican party that believed in fiscal restraint and cutting taxes as the way to win the hearts and minds of the American people and to transfer ever more wealth to the rich in America.
This policy was ingrained and enshrined in their thinking with the greatest avatar being the B grade actor Ronald Reagan. Reagan coined phrases like Morning in America and went around Washington having huge balls and a wonderful time. Jobs started to disappear and the Midwest became the ‘rust belt’ but Reagan slashed taxes for the rich, ran up the deficit and left it for Bush Sr to fix it which he could not as he was right when he called it, ‘voodoo economics’.
This let in Bill Clinton who worked with Newt of Gingrich fame and they balanced the budget and all was well as the country bled ever more jobs but it was don’t worry be happy. Remember that one?
But Bush Jr of hanging chad fame, became President, cut more taxes, had 2 wars at a trillion $ or so and the country was back on the debt cycle as 3 million more jobs went to China. The ‘oughts’ were the worst for the American worker and best for American rich in a century until it all collapsed in a big heap.
Bush left the US in the Great Recession, crashed the economy and left it to neophyte Obama to fix. Obama dawdled along, saved the auto industry and put through an expensive healthcare plan nicknamed Obamacare and after 8 years and the hubris of HRC another Republican, this time a 5 time bankrupt tv huckster, Donald Trump came in with the same old same old.
Cut more taxes but then he decided he didn’t care about budgets. Thus the story ended with yet another $7 trillion added in debt as every Republican President that was a tax hawk / cutter has added more and more trillions to the national debt.
Trump did something else and is the reason for this story, he ended the Republican party. It no longer is a governing party, it is now the party of the angry disaffected types who will vote for him even though he admits he lost the 2020 election and tried to steal it. They love it, his minions now run the House, the Speaker was a leader in the steal the election saga.
A Christian theocracy is now spoken of openly and history is being rewritten by the GOP to move the US to a religious based society run by evangelical GOP Christians where women have no rights any more and elimination of LGBTQ rights including the right to marry will be taken away.
The GOP no longer stands for cutting taxes for the rich, that has already been done. Now they want to destroy and dismantle the federal government and take rights away from those they do not like including black and brown people who are being gerrymandered out in state after red state.
To cut the power of the feds and give it to the states so that the states will devour each other in a free for all. The GOP no longer stands for anything other than chaos.
You don’t have to look far, the new Speaker’s first proposal for Israel was to partially defund the IRS so that the rich don’t have to worry about being audited.
In the end, the GOP now stands for chaos, tearing down the system, cutting taxes and screwing everyone including the military and making themselves the white masters of an evangelical Christian society where they have all the rights and will tell you what to read, what to think and what history will be taught.
I’ve heard men say the only reason they ever befriend a woman is because they want to get their dicks wet. I believe those men. They have no reason to lie, and I see no evidence that runs counter to what they say.
Those men? No, they probably should not. Not just because they’ll cheat if they can, but because they see women as basically a life support system for a vagina, and what kind of friend is that? Their friendship will always and forever be transactional, because at the end of the day they don’t see women as people.
Normal men? Yes, normal men should have friends outside their marriage. Including friends who are women.
Yes. Out for dinner with my wife, I ordered a budget-friendly red called Leaping Horse or something similar. Or, more accurately, that’s what I meant to order. Instead, I treated us to a $200 bottle of Stag’s Leap at five times the price of the other horsey brand I thought I ordered. Stag’s Leap wasn’t even on the official wine list.
To be fair, the server questioned it and double checked that was what I wanted. Each time I foolishly said yes.
The US Navy doesn’t try to minimize discomfort. Safety? Sure. Discomfort? Suck it up Shippy!.
Racks, Navy-speak for the bunks sailors sleep in, have straps. Typically we keep them tucked under the mattress. But when needed we can pull them out and snap hook the to the top of the rack frame. This prevents you from rolling out of your rack.
I have used the straps on a few occasions and they do in fact work well. During a trek from Norfolk to Pascagoula back in the mid-90’s aboard a Burke-class guided missile destroyer, we ran into a group of storms near Key West. This area is notorious for bad weather that pops up on short notice. The area is littered with wrecks from the Age of Sail all the way to the 20th Century. White Squalls in particular are some of the most dangerous and infamous. We happened upon what the Commanding Officer would later tell us the Coast Guard had determined was a White Squall. When it began I was actually on the bridge standing watch. We were taking heavy listing rolls and heaving up and down fairly steeply. There is a list gauge and pitch gauge on the bridge. The heaviest roll we noted was about 32 degrees which is fairly close to Burke-classes mast limit.
We posted garbage bags in passageway and at strategic points. Many guys got sick. I felt horrible but I didn’t throw up. That may have been because I simply couldn’t eat after it started. As I was leaving watch and heading to the Mess Decks for Mid-Rats or Midnight Rations, I could smell vomit. The hour or so beating we took while I was on watch had me dizzy and swaying. Even when the ship wasn’t rocking, I was. By the time I made it to eat everything was secured as ordered by the CO. At that moment the CO came over the 1MC (loudspeaker), which was a big deal because it was past TAPS and no announcements are normally made. “Everyone not on watch strap into your racks”. Engineering watch crew set about “Setting Condition YOLK” which closes a lot of doors on the ship along with ventilation. The gun mount was turn as far aft as possible and depressed (pointed down) as much as possible.
The next day it was very calm to start. Then all of the sudden a storm formed and hit quickly during dinner. The rolls approached 40 degrees. We nosed into one wave an it submerged the bow. The waves that hit the bridge smacked the windows hard enough that it broke several windshield wipers. The storm hit while dinner was being served. The salad bar, which was tack-welded to the deck broke free and sent the contents everywhere. At the time the boat deck and our complement of 2 RHIB boats were my assigned space and responsibility along with one of my comrades. Both of us had to go out on deck to make sure the boats were secured. That was fun. We got to the quarterdeck and an area in the open that we have to cross with nothing to hold on to. Just at we were crossing the open area the ship heeled an rocked heavy to starboard ( the boat deck is on starboard). We were standing straight up but looking straight down at the water. It was intense.
There is also a stanchion/wire system we can rig for the Focsle (bow). They screw into the deck and stand about 6 foot tall. Wearing a harness you can strap onto the wire. Although rigging it when the seas are already rough is problematic. You can also just take the top caps and screw them into the deck, attaching the wire.
Years ago, my then-GF had a friend who periodically hung out with us.
Her friend was in a fairly turbulent relationship with her boyfriend.
It wasn’t abusive or anything. It just wasn’t meant to be. They couldn’t agree on anything in life.
Honestly, I dreaded hanging out with them.
They typically were showing up when we were going out on the weekends.
I knew that when they drank, it only exacerbated their problems and they’d start arguing.
And look, I’m not knocking either of them for their dysfunction. They were both young, not in full control of their emotions. They definitely weren’t prepared for their own incompatibility.
These things happen. We live. We grow. We learn.
Eventually, he came to realize that they were stuck in a rut they would never get out of. He broke things off with her.
She did NOT take it well.
Within a couple weeks she had moved away.
She took something with her though – his child. She was pregnant and chose not to tell him. It was a savage, vindictive thing to do.
Years later, he found out through back channels about it.
He was rightfully pissed. And it turned into huge drama.
Some of the friends in our group knew about him having a daughter and didn’t say anything to him. (Thankfully I didn’t know.)
He had to take her to court to get access to his daughter. And he did get visitation rights eventually.
But it sucked. He’d missed 5 years of his daughter’s life and hadn’t met her until then.
I can’t imagine introducing myself to my 5-year-old daughter, but these things happen.
He and the mother found a way into an agreeable arrangement of co-parenting.
And, he found a way to bury his resentment towards her for the sake of the child, which couldn’t have been easy.
But it was a valuable sacrifice because in the end it benefited the most important person in the equation, his daughter.
But I hate seeing kids getting caught in these evil games adults play with each other.
Due to a wiring harness issue, my father parked his 1965 impala SS in the garage 2002 and there it sat until 2022 when we had to move it. Rather than calling a tow truck I figured what the hell l, let’s give it a shot. We put a battery in it, pumped the gas a few times, a lot and behold l, it started right up after 30 seconds of cranking. Granted it ran like crap but it did run and stayed running with 20 years old gas. At first I was shocked that the gas was still good. Then I realized that it was likely the fact that the gas was 20 years old that made it start fine. This gas was pre-ethanol.
Now all we need to do is finish the wiring harness replacement
No I don’t. I was 12 when I had my first set of twins. My father had raped me for almost 2 years, and I didn’t know about abortion then. I was a child who was forced into having sex, and procreate, against my will. I still managed to graduate early, and find a good man to love, but I’ll never be able to get that innocence or childhood back.
You want the good news or the bad news. Let me feed you the good news first. Not yet! Chinese, Russian or a combination of this that faced the U.S. excesses hasn’t reached the point that it wants to take out the U.S. in spite of the U.S. provocation and goaded behaviour.
But it might if the U.S. don’t recognised the red line and push and push and push. At some point it may have no choice. And now the bad news. The U.S. has lost its ability to act without repercussions. Up to 2000 these countries might not have the capability to take out the U.S. but by 2023 they certainly can. And absolutely could do so it push comes to shove.
My worry is that the U.S. might not recognises or in denial that those nations can and will do it if they are push into the corner. There lies the risk of a catastrophic disaster first of the U.S. demise and or worst the U.S. nuclear respond and of course China and Russia respond to the U.S. nuclear response. It is a dooms day scenario for our world.
When I first moved to Boston, I had zero money. I was 18, working for minimum wage, and supporting my own crappy little basement studio apartment which took half of my take-home pay every month. I saved up to shop at Goodwill.
Dressed in my best ragged torn-off shorts and a gingham halter top, I wandered into John Lewis, an expensive jeweller on Newbury Street. The smell alone told me I was out of my price range–there’s just a smell to really high-end stores.
I was bedazzled. No other word for it. They had totally gorgeous stuff in their showcases, and I lusted after every item. The clerk asked me quite cordially if she could show me something. I told her that I frankly couldn’t afford to breathe their air. Her response made a difference in my life.
She said that maybe I couldn’t afford their stuff now, but maybe one day I could. She showed me everything! Shelet me try on everything. To me, Macy’s was higher class than I felt I could enter, OK? An expensive Newbury Street merchant making me welcome? This was beyond belief!
They had a set of 18k gold jewelry, all custom-made, hand-carved in a strawberry pattern that I fell in love with.
Eventually I tore myself away, a dream planted in my heart. Twelve years later, when I actually had a little money, I bought a custom ring in that strawberry pattern from them. It cost about $2000, and after a couple of fittings I wore it continuously for 30 years.
If that lady, who knew for a fact that she couldn’t sell me anything that day, hadn’t been so wonderful, I’d never have entered that shop again. Her kindness made all the difference.
China don’t pander to millionaires and billionaires rogue and irresponsible business leaders who took advantage and hurt the Chinese people. US calls it too big to fail companies. China take them to task. The U.S. bailed them out using taxpayers money.
What do I think?
I think China is responsible, is doing the right thing, is making businessman think of serving their customers better. I think the U.S. should learn from China. That is what I think! What about you? What do you think?
Gave Cheating Wife a Taste of Her Own Medicine: She didn’t expect to see my revenge…
China will do whatever is necessary to the interest of China and the Chinese people and that include Taiwan, China. Taiwan is an island and a region of China. It is an unalienable part of China. It cannot be separated or snagged away from China by any means including the U.S. and western geopolitical games.
As a Chinese origin from the southern China where 90% of Taiwanese Chinese migrated from. I understand their psyche that most westerners who write such ridiculous question can ever understand. We want to see Taiwan as an integral part of China. Many Taiwanese are all out to support and help China achieved this honourable achievement.
Do we gives a shit about what white Caucasian westerners think or feel? Not at all. Not even bothered a bit. We care about keeping our nation together from the manipulative western behaviour. Forceful or peaceful it our god damn business. It is our Business not yours. Mind you own business.
As Prof Zhang Weiwei likes to say, China is no longer on the same track as the West.
She’s now running on her own track.
This is like what I tell my medical students — don’t compete with others, just do the best that you can do (in your own way that works best for you).
image 2
Edit 17 October 2023:
As a Chinese, I see China as still being more deeply Confucianist than Communist; though there’s some overlap between the two ideologies. The sworn goals of a Confucianist society are two: xiaokang 小康 (moderate prosperity — which China has largely achieved), and finally datong 大同 (Great Unity
, a classical Chinese concept for an utopian view of the world; or Common Prosperity).
This is very different from the approach of the Western nations, seeking hegemony over other nations.
“The report to the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022 drew a great blueprint for rejuvenating the Chinese nation on all fronts by pioneering a uniquely Chinese path to modernization, and pointed out that striving to build a global community of shared future is one of the intrinsic requirements of Chinesemodernization, affirming the close bond between the future of China and the future of all humanity.”
Whether you believe the report or not — just watch what China had been doing (in Asia, Middle East, Africa and South America), and is continuing to do in the coming years.
Edit 18 October 2023:
China is holding her Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) on 17–18 October 2023.
image 1
Attending the event are more than 1,200 representatives from more than 80 countries and regions
The list of VIP attendants is impressive, showing how China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2023 is its 10th anniversary) has attracted the attention of most countries (except those in US and her allies):
Vladimir Putin is top of the list.
Others: Indonesian President Joko Widodo,
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev,
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban,
Chilean President Gabriel Boric,
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic,
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev,
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed
Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape
UN Secretary-General António Guterres,
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez,
Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong,
President of Mongolia Ukhnaa Khurelsukh
Prime Minister of Mozambique Adriano Maleiane
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar,
Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin,
Kenyan President William Ruto,
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet,
Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith,
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe
President of the Republic of the Congo Denis Sassou Nguesso
It looks like many other countries have been attracted by China’s parallel track, and are leaving “the American track”.
Alpha Hubby Allowed Me To Open My Marriage Then Filed For Divorce & Ghosted, Left Broke & Penniless
I’m a former New Yorker. I’ve only visited Canada, but lived in London for the past 25 years. In the States, if you have a good job, you can live very comfortably. But if you have a serious medical emergency or long term medical needs, this can bankrupt you, you can lose your home & be very poor. For average workers, the medical insurance is very difficult as the insurance is very expensive and on top of that, you have to co-pay. And many can’t get insurance because of pre-existing issues. In the UK, medical care is free, doesn’t matter about your past history … the taxes we pay towards it is less than what people pay in the States for their insurance. People never have to worry about being homeless because of ongoing medical problems. Whenever I go back to New York to visit, I’m a bit shocked at how very poor many people are there – compared to London.
In the UK, if you are working, but not able to afford rent, the government will pay towards your rent. It may not cover all the rent, but it helps. If you have children & don’t earn enough in your job, the government will top up your earnings so you are above the poverty line. If you are unemployed, your unemployment benefits won’t stop as long as you are actively looking for work & attending the skills meetings. And if you do accept a job, but it doesn’t pay well, the government will top it up to make sure you are earning what they consider to be the minimum needed to live on.
My high-earning son had the opportunity to work for his company in the States, but he realised he has a much better safety net here in the UK for his family. It felt too much of a risk for him to have to pay for medical insurance for his family when it isn’t even guaranteed that it will pay for certain things.
The only thing I don’t like about living in the UK is the weather. But everything else, in my personal opinion, leads for a better quality of life.
So, I’m on the beach enjoying myself over a bit of beach calligraphy (this involves cutting sand out of the surface, and some fairly intense concentration) when the spell is broken by someone who has walked up to me, having walked over my work, stood on it at my side, and proceeded to ask me what I’m trying to catch.
The next time that happened to me I was ready with “Calligraphy” as my reply but then just dumbstruck again by being asked if I had permission.
image 12
EDIT I just want to add the following in response to some of the comments I’ve had here:
I’ve NEVER had a child walk up to one of my doodles without noticing it and being curious about it. I do occasionally have young children deliberately tread through it but that’s part of being observant. It feels interesting underfoot. The interaction usually leads to my offering the tools to the kiddiewinks to try.
I can’t help wondering if there’s a relationship between stupidity and being unobservant. I’m not sure but it’s clear that coming with a strong preconception does get in the way of open observation and surprise. Only an adult can come blinded by so much preconception that they fail to notice the beach calligraphy happening before their eyes and under their feet. To then layer that blindness with a preoccupation with permission …?! I make no apologies for my disdain.
There are some lighting conditions under which the beach calligraphy is barely noticeable and almost impossible to photograph: high sun, lit from behind the observer, very cloudy. The beach calligraphy depends on shadow. I’m very keenly aware of this. Usually, under conditions like that, I’m just practising close to the waters’ edge where it is constantly washed away in any case.
If I have to do a paid commission then I get careful and a bit possessive about it and I look for a spot on a beach where I can be alone. I don’t usually mind redoing work. I often redo it in any case just because I’m not satisfied with the calligraphy.
You can lose your work to a wave, dogs, or an unobservant idiot but you don’t lose the skill you build in doing it again.
Some people have said things along the lines of “You don’t own the beach!” and I do (very rarely) get that response on the beach if I try to ward someone off my work. It’s a stupid response because this is not about ownership. Stupidity, on the other hand … if you’re not prepared to own it, it will own you.
I was in a courtroom trying to evict a tenant, I was broke had massive loans on the property and down on my luck, I could not afford legal representation so I represented myself which judges generally do not like. I saw the judge wipe the floor and throw out of court room the others who represented themselves earlier that day. This was the days before the internet and I had to learn about housing laws from things called books if you remember what they are? Then it was my turn to step into the dock after four hours of waiting in the court during previous, I learned a lot about tenancy laws in those four hours.
Preliminaries over then the game was on, its was like a verbal tennis match on points of law, I knew I had my paperwork and facts right, he volleyed and I hit it back countering his serve. Forgive me because this was over thirty years ago so I don’t remember the joust word for word, the judge did not like this uneducated smart arsed whippersnaper giving as good as-he got.
Then he threw a curve ball question regarding arrears, and how much the tenant owed, I said the tenant was six months behind I wasn’t sure of the amount as it was irrelevant, I had not come to court to claim arrears ( separate application and hearing and nigh on impossible to get money back because she was claiming benefits ) I said to the judge I just want her evicted and my property back. Then he tried to bamboozle me with jargon after jargon and I got a bit confused he then said to me said to me,
‘Young man I suggest you get your paper work in order and go and see legal advice!’
I was so nervous and that is exactly what I didn’t want the hear, as it meant I would have to have my property repossessed and I would have lost everything I worked for, I was sweating profusely my mind was over revving I was trying to grasp at something I had read in the past six months that would get me out of this painful situation
Then it came to me, I knew that I had done everything right and that he had to grant me a notice to evict, from deep within my memory I recalled something and blurted out to the judge, your honour under section ( blah ) article ( blah) of the 1988 housing act I have served you all the correct papers within procedure and you are obliged to give me notice of eviction, that was it, my final serve I had nothing else to give.
The court went silent and the court usher gave a wry smile, the Judge turned and looked down his nose through his half rimmed glasses at me and stared for a moment, then he turned to the court clerk and beckoned him over, he whispered something in his ear and the clerk disappeared for a moment and brought back one of the biggest books I’d ever seen laid it in front of the judge and opened it for him. The judge flicked through the pages and ran his finger down the lines of one or two pages as he was reading, he then grabbed the gavel looked at me and brought the gavel down with a thud and said
‘ Notice of eviction granted, 28 days’
It may not seem much, but there is nothing better (to me ) than beating the system that’s so inherently wrong and stacked against you but the biggest victory was correcting a judge on a point of law, when I left the court house I felt twenty kilos lighter and like had just been set free from , I did get my property back 28 days later
‘If you don’t fight you never win, if you fight there is a chance you may win’
Muffuletta Sandwiches
In New Orleans the two best Muffuletta Sandwiches — bar none — can be had at Central Grocery or at Napoleon House on Chartres Street.
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Yield: 1 loaf bread; 1 to 4 servings, depending on appetite! about 3 quarts olive salad
Ingredients
Muffuletta Bread
1 cup warm water (110 degrees F)
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 package active dry yeast (about 1 tablespoon)
About 3 cups bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons vegetable shortening
Sesame seeds
Olive Salad
1 (32 ounce) jar pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped
2 cups pitted ripe olives, chopped
1 1/4 cups chopped pickled cocktail olives
2 celery stalks, finely chopped
2 cups blanched chopped cauliflower
1/4 cup minced garlic
2 medium carrots, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons dried leaf oregano
1 tablespoon minced flat-leaf parsley
2/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
Muffuletta Sandwich
1 (10 inch) Muffuletta Bread loaf
3 ounces honey ham, thinly sliced
3 ounces Mortadella with pistachios, thinly sliced
3 ounces Genoa salami, very thinly sliced
1 heaping cup Olive Salad
5 slices Provolone cheese
Instructions
Muffuletta Bread
In a 2 cup glass measuring cup, combine water and sugar.
Stir in yeast. Let stand until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes.
In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, combine 3 cups flour, salt and shortening. Add yeast mixture. Process until dough forms a ball, about 5 seconds. Stop machine; check consistency of dough. It should be smooth and satiny. If dough is too dry, add more warm water, 1 tablespoon at a time, processing just until blended. If dough is too sticky, add more flour, 1 or 2 tablespoons at a time, processing just until blended. Process for 20 seconds to knead.
Lightly oil a large bowl, swirling to coat bottom and sides. Place dough in oiled bowl; turn to coat all sides. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.
Lightly grease a baking sheet. When dough has doubled in bulk, punch down dough; turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Form dough into a round loaf about 10 inches in diameter; place on greased baking sheet. Sprinkle top of loaf with sesame seeds; press seeds gently into surface of loaf. Cover very loosely with plastic wrap; let rise until almost doubled in bulk, 1 hour.
Place rack in center of oven. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Remove plastic wrap.
Bake loaf in center of preheated oven for 10 minutes.
Reduce heat to 375 degrees F; bake for 25 minutes. The loaf is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on bottom. Cool completely on a rack before slicing.
Olive Salad
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and stir to blend well.
Store in jars with tight-fitting lids in the refrigerator.
Muffuletta Sandwich
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Cut bread in half crosswise to form a sandwich bun. Layer the honey ham on the bottom of the loaf. Next add the Mortadella, then the salami. Spread the Olive Salad over the meats evenly. Top with the slices of Provolone cheese and place the top on the sandwich. Press down to compress slightly. Wrap the sandwich in foil and bake for 20 minutes, or until the cheese has begun to melt into the Olive Salad.
Slice sandwich into 4 quarters. Use wooden picks to secure layers, if desired; remove picks before eating.
Notes
Not only can you use this Olive Salad as a dressing for a Muffuletta Sandwich, it also makes a delicious addition to tossed green salads, pizzas, and is a great relish to spread on crackers.
They Don’t Want Coffee Dates, They Only Want The $1000 Restaurant
There is a sausage that is popular in the deep South in the Unites. It’s called boudin. It’s a kind of very spicy sausage and super tasty. I used to get it at the local quickie mart, and along with meat pies and fried catfish are some of the best ‘eatin that I ever had.
One day, while living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, my wife made me some homemade boudin, and I ate it just prior to hopping on a plane to Chicago for a meeting.
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But she didn’t make it quite right, and I suffered from the most amazing gas that I ever had. I thought that I was having a heart attack! I was freaking out and almost called the ambulance from the hotel. But once I got on the phone and talked to a nurse and explained what I ate, it was simply a matter of taking a stomach pill. Phew!
Anyways, if you are gonna eat this tremendously delicious dish, please make sure you cook it properly.
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What’s Boudin & Why Louisiana Is The Best Place To Find It
Like many of you, I didn’t know what boudin was before first arriving into Southwest Louisiana. I like to consider myself somewhat worldly and at least aware of many foods, but somehow boudin had escaped my culinary lexicon for 40 years. But if you are from Louisiana, and particularly the areas around Lake Charles, then boudin isn’t just familiar to you, it’s a big part of everyday life. As I discovered though, it’s a lot more than just a snack, it’s an important part of Louisiana’s culinary traditions.
What Is Boudin?
To say that boudin is a type of sausage is wrong, although when you first see it that’s exactly what it looks like. To really understand boudin, we have to go back to those Acadians who originally settled in Southwestern Louisiana. Who we now call Cajuns, these French-speaking settlers were forced out of Canada, but took with them their proud French culture and traditions, including boudin. Boudin in Louisiana is different though from versions you’ll find in other parts of the world.
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At its simplest, boudin is a combination of cooked rice, pork, onions, green peppers and seasonings. The mixture is pulverized in a meat grinder before being stuffed into sausage casings. It is then steamed for on-the-spot eating. But those are just the basics, boudin changes in taste and flavor from cook to cook, no two are exactly the same and are based on recipes that have been handed down through the generations. That’s why it’s so much fun to drive around Southwest Louisiana sampling different versions, to experience new tastes and flavors in what is this area’s go-to food.
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When And How Do You Eat It?
Asking around, I soon discovered that there is no perfect time to enjoy boudin. It’s very common for people to buy some in the morning to take to work for the office to enjoy, and no proper road trip in Southwest Louisiana would be complete without some boudin links to snack on. Pronounced “Boodan” (never say “Boodin”), this is as simple a snack as you can get, and slowly eating the link whole is very normal. But there are many variations, including the most common, fried boudin.
delicious boudin slices
Cut into smaller pieces, breaded and then fried, you’ll find fried boudin balls in everything from breakfast sandwiches to serving as an entire meal in their own right. While you can certainly buy them in grocery stores in the area, homemade is best and there are any number of small meat shops and independent butchers and grocers in and around Lake Charles that specialize in their own versions of boudin. To best enjoy this regional delicacy, a culinary route was established to help locals and visitors alike discover different variations of boudin on what is now called the Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail.
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The Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail
The sign read, “Napa Valley has wine. New York has pizza. Wisconsin has cheese. Southwest Louisiana has boudin.” To say that boudin is an important part of foodie life in Lake Charles would be a massive understatement. That’s where I started my culinary adventures in Louisiana and in addition to offering a lot to see and do for visitors, locals consider themselves to also be the home of boudin. It’s also from Lake Charles where you should start your trek along the Boudin Trail – just make sure you skipped breakfast.
Truly the best way to understand and certainly enjoy the importance of boudin is to actually taste it. In Southwest Louisiana that means traveling the Boudin Trail along US Interstate 10 and stopping off at the many independent businesses all verified to be serving up some of the best versions of boudin in the area. For my own boudin experience, I was invited into the kitchens of a local favorite – B&O Kitchen & Grocery.
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Jeff Benoit is a third generation Benoit to own the B&O Kitchen and Grocery, which specializes in of course boudin, but also cracklins and other tasty meats. Walking into his kitchens, Jeff first took me back to the fryers where new batches of cracklins were being prepared. The aromas were heavy in what can only be called porky goodness. Pork fat with skin that’s fried to within an inch of its life and then salted, these treats are delicious and as I discovered, somewhat addictive. I was there though for my first lesson in boudin, which Jeff’s daughter had prepared for me.
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True to form, Jeff wouldn’t tell me exactly what seasonings he uses, but just smiled and promised that they were delicious. I picked up the small sausage link, taking a peek at the rice and meat before enjoying that oh-so-important first bite. A gentle but not intense heat from the spices was the first thing I noticed, but then the combination of well seasoned meats and rice came into play, creating an overall bite that can only be called perfectly constructed. I then took my second, third and fourth bites, quickly understanding why boudin is so popular. Simple, easy to eat and not expensive, they really are the perfect go-to food for almost anything. Next to the “normal” boudin links, Jeff had also prepared some fried boudin balls and since nothing fried can be bad, I knew right away that I’d love this version even more.
Jeff and the B&O is just one of more than 25 small, independent businesses along the Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail, each offering their own unique takes on this Southwest Louisiana staple. It’s not just about the food though; it’s also about the culture. Many of us who don’t live in Lake Charles or surrounding towns don’t really know a lot about Cajun culture. But it’s more than what we see on TV, it has a long and proud history and it’s still very much alive. Food teaches us about new cultures when we travel; it emphasizes what is and is not important. In Lake Charles and other neighboring communities, that first step in better understanding what makes this part of the world tick starts first and foremost in the kitchens of the local boudin experts lining US 10.
Boudin sausage is worth the drive
KEVIN BEGOS
SCOTT, La. – Want a true taste of the real Louisiana? You’ll want to get behind the wheel and head out of New Orleans and off into the cypress swamps and rice paddies of Cajun country. Because that’s where you’ll find scores of mom-and-pop meat shops and convenience stores preserving a hundreds-year-old tradition of some very special sausages known as boudin. And you’ll be glad you did.
Welcome to Louisiana’s Boudin Trail, a loosely defined region west of New Orleans, both north and south of Interstate 10.
“Boudin is not a New Orleans thing. It is a Cajun country thing,” says Robert Carriker, a professor of history at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and author of “Boudin: A Guide to Louisiana’s Extraordinary Link.” ‘’There are meat shops that make a handsome living for entire families selling almost nothing but boudin.”
Most boudin is boiled and served hot, but you also can buy it smoked, fried in balls, and made with crawfish, alligator or deer meat. There are boudin egg rolls, boudin grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza topped with boudin, even boudin stuffed king cakes. A handful of slaughterhouses still make old-fashioned red boudin, a blood sausage version.
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Boudin (pronounced BOO-dan) is a tradition that dates back to the 1700s, when French Canadians came to Louisiana. Carriker says Cajuns started using local ingredients and spices to make sausages that are different from Old World recipes. They held communal livestock slaughterings, often in the fall, that combined food, family and music. Locals have loved the pork and rice sausages ever since.
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Today, the region is littered with shops serving and selling boudin, almost all using special family recipes that date back generations. Where to begin on an eating tour of boudin country? An AP reporter ventured out, sampling boudin for breakfast, lunch and dinner at almost a dozen locations. Of course, there are countless more. But these are some of the delicious highlights:
Johnson’s Boucaniere (Cajun French for smokehouse) in Lafayette sells wonderfully flavorful boudin, and 87-year-old Wallace Johnson tells stories of boudin’s origins at communal country hog slaughterings, or boucheries.
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“When they killed the hogs, they had to use everything, all the meat, because they had no refrigeration,” Johnson said. “It was rice, liver and meat, and the seasoning. In the old days they didn’t have a stuffer. They would take a cow horn” and use it to push the boudin mixture into casings.
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Johnson’s father started making boudin in 1948 at the family grocer in Eunice. That store closed in 2005, but Johnson’s daughter Lori and his son-in-law Greg opened a new location a few years later, using the old family recipe. They sell a great breakfast biscuit with boudin, cheese or egg, along with po’boys, gumbo and other local specialties, such as barbecue potatoes and an outrageous bread pudding with praline sauce.
The Best Stop Supermarket on Route 93, just north of Scott, is a country store with a dizzying variety of specialty meats and sausage. Co-owner Dana Cormier said the family began selling boudin as a way to make ends meet in 1986, when oil field jobs went downhill.
“When we first started, we’d make like 100 pounds, here and there,” Cormier said. Now “we make about 4,600 pounds of boudin a day, Monday through Friday,” along with 35,000 boudin balls a month. The Best Stop’s boudin is exceptionally moist and meaty, with pieces of scallion and a touch of old-fashioned liver flavor.
The state legislature gave Scott the title of “Boudin Capital of the World,” causing hard feelings in Broussard, which originally held the title, and some grumbling in Jennings, the “Boudin Capital of the Universe.”
Billy’s Boudin & Cracklin’ in Scott, just off I-10, sells an amazing smoked boudin, perfectly balancing the meat and rice with just a hint of smoky flavor. Their boudin egg roll is excellent, too. Crackling is deep-fried pig skin.
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At the same I-10 exit, check out Don’s Specialty Meats, which sells a tasty, moderately spiced boudin with chunks of meat, as well as innovations such as Tater Tot boudin, which is a good choice for people looking to ease into the experience. They also have a large selection of Cajun specialty foods and spices, such as pickled quail eggs and jars of roux.
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On the edges of Abbeville, about 30 minutes to the south, Herbert’s Slaughter House and Meat Market is one of the few places you can still buy red boudin, made with blood and an old-fashioned range of pig trimmings. They have fresh and frozen links, and the red boudin is moderately spiced with a slightly metallic taste, similar to English blood sausage.
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Meanwhile, 30 miles away in Beaux Ridge, Cajun Works sells a wonderful, blisteringly spicy boudin ball in a small sit-down restaurant.
Ronnie’s Boudin & Cracklin’ in Hammond sells a version with a nice, full, creamy flavor, along with many specialties, such as crawfish boudin, deer boudin and andouille sausage.
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Ready to hit the boudin trail? Start by heading to www.boudinlink.com , which has an interactive map showing more than 50 boudin stores, as well as a link to Carriker’s review of each one. Also check out Southern Foodways Alliance — www.southernfoodways.org — which works to preserve southern food cultures.
Carriker says you could start by visiting one city and sampling all the different boudin there, since each store makes it differently. Some areas, such as the Lake Charles region, have their own brochures with lists of boudin trails.
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Or you could cruise along I-10 in either direction, stopping at the many stores near the highway. In general, old fashioned boudin often has more of a liver flavor, and boudin lovers look for a good balance between meat and rice, and a texture that isn’t too mushy or too dry.
Some people like their boudin spicy, others like it mild. And appearances can be deceptive; a small country gas station may have the most wonderful boudin, so stay open to serendipity.
This was few months after my daughter was born. My husband and I were trying to get back on track with our sex life. I had some difficulties. It didn’t feel the same as it used to be and I was worried.
He sensed it and he said, “ You know what? 50 years later when both of us are very old, do you think sex is going to be important? What I really want is to be able to grow old with you and I want you to be happy and comfortable to be with me till the end. We’ll consult a doctor and we’ll figure this out. I’m ready to wait until you are ready for this.”
That moment, I felt really lucky to be married to him.
Buster Crab, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich
Buster Crab, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich is a fried soft-shell crab served open-face over toasted brioche and dressed with fresh vegetables.
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Ingredients
1 Louisiana soft shell crab, dressed
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 cup seasoned all-purpose flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup mixed red, yellow, and green grape tomatoes, peeled
1 dash 25 year old balsamic vinegar
1 pinch minced chive
1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 slice brioche or challah, toasted
2 teaspoons your favorite aioli
1 pinch micro greens
1 pinch lettuce sprouts
Salt and pepper to taste
Chive oil for garnish
Beet juice for garnish
Instructions
In a sauté pan, heat the canola oil over a medium-high flame.
Season the buster crab with salt and pepper. Toss into a mixture of seasoned flour and cornmeal.
Place the crab into hot canola oil and allow to cook for 1 minute on each side.
Season the tomatoes with salt, pepper, vinegar, chives, and olive oil. Place the tomatoes over a well-toasted brioche and place into a serving plate.
After cooking the buster crab, remove and allow it to drain over some absorbent towels for a moment.
Place the crab over the tomatoes and top it with a dollop of aioli, which you in turn cover with a pinch of micro greens and lettuce sprouts.
To serve, garnish the plate with additional chopped chives, chive oil and beet juice.
Sure. Here’s one – China is a very peaceful country.
In the past 40 years, while the USA was busy bombing cities and killing people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Grenada, Libya, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia etc
China did not fight a single war with anyone.
Here’s another. It is untrue that China beats the USA in all areas of manufacturing and exports. There is one area where the USA is far, far ahead of China.
The USA is far, far ahead of China, in selling weapons to the world, for killing people. You know – bombs, missiles, artillery, tanks, fighter jets etc.
China ia no match for the USA in destroying people’s lives.
China only surpasses the USA in manufacturing peaceful, beneficial things such as solar panels; electric cara; antibiotics; laptops; furniture etc.
13 Things from the 1970s, Kids Today Will Never Understand!
There are some things that are unique to the decade that we grew up in. The 1970s was no different, having a distinct style that is easily recognizable, even to newer generations. But aside from the obvious disco and bell bottom trends, there were more minute details that people living during that time will easily recognize. So, here are 13 things from the 1970s that kids today would never understand.
If someone confronts you with a knife you pull the coins subtly from your pocket and drop them on the floor. The attacker will always look down to the floor upon hearing the coins drop and this will buy you a second or two to turn and run. This can also be used if someone is intent on fighting you and you know you need to land the first blow, it’s a distraction technique.
2. Never use an ATM while wearing headphones and if wearing a coat/hoodie, never have the hood up, both will affect your awareness and makes you more likely to be robbed.
3. When entering any room, work out where every available exit and hiding place is. In the event of an emergency you will react a hell of a lot quicker if you have planned scenarios in your head, it will make you far less likely to freeze up.
This was something explained to me by an ex-special forces guy I was chatting to at a conference (he was head of security). He was sat at the same table as me, one of those big round ones with 10–12 people on each. I noticed his eyes were never still and he was always glancing at each door, window etc, basically any entrance to that room. I got chatting to him after the conference and asked him about what I had observed. He said “imagine you are at a public event and an armed terrorist storms into the room and starts shooting, most people are going to freeze for the first couple of seconds and that can cost you your life, plan for it to happen and although incredibly unlikely it ever will, you’ll react instantly and it could save your life”
Would Western countries go to war to spread LGBTQ policies and environmental policies to restrictive socially right-wing conservative countries?
Why?
Because united we stand, divided we fall.
Those policies above? They atomise societies, atomised societies are easier to drive wedges into.
China 200 years ago 1820. There was a commonality of Chinese language. But we were fighting each other. Hakka hated Cantonese, Fujians hated Cantonese etc.
Sun Yat Set’s vision of Chinese nationalism was that we are all Chinese one people instead of atomised.
By 2023 we’re on the way to achieving this. We still keep our unique cultural identity but we intermarry we talk shit about other groups but 2019 aside there’s very limited division that we’d fight each other over.
That’s why I’m super suspicious of things like this
In that I don’t care who you’re miserable with and who you marry, but those groups? They’re often used as trojan horses by western governments.
Jimmy Sham for instance. He was on the side of the RIOTERS in Hong Kong. He was promoting VIOLENCE.
He claimed to have been attacked by multiple men with hammers for over a minute (he wasn’t he was exposed when he appeared the next day with only a small cut and fliers advertising his attack printed the day before).
They use their sexuality as a shield, you can’t criticise me! I’m gay!
We’d hired a guy and he seemed to have a good sense of humor. One day, he made a minor mistake and so I (thinking that he’d catch the humor) said “Looks like we’re going to have to transfer you to the Arctic Circle Remote Payroll Station.”
He said nothing, I let it go. Next time he goofed up, I mentioned that again and he got very apologetic, promised to work hard to not make any further mistakes, etc.
At any rate, a few months later, I mentioned that one more time and found myself in my manager’s office. He said that this guy was in terror that I was going to transfer him somewhere awful for what he thought were small mistakes that he’d promised to fix.
I said he should know that firstly, I’m not his direct manager so I couldn’t transfer him anywhere if I wanted to. But his big clue should have been “Arctic Circle Remote Pay Station.” Surely he couldn’t think that a movie payroll company had some operation on the Arctic Circle.
Well I don’t know, said my boss … all I can tell you is that you terrorized him and now you’re going to have to fix it. Okay, so I did.
(Good thing too because in the 12 years since that, he was promoted to supervisor, manager and he’s now a director and my boss.)
I taught a young Latino boy who was also short for his age. In secondary school, height is an issue.
By the second week of class, I was sure that he was illiterate, yet he submitted assignments and tests that were above failing.
At that point, I read his permanent record. There were no indications of cheating and his grades were Cs with only a few Ds.
How should I confront a student who already feels marginalized?
With the confidence of a newly certified teacher, I kept him after class one day and confronted him. “Do you know that you are smarter than every teacher you’ve ever had?”
His dark eyes grew deep and large!
“No.”
I insisted, “You are. You cannot read, and writing gives you a great deal of difficulty. You’ve been cheating all these years, and no teacher has caught you until now!
I’m giving you choices. You can continue as you’ve been doing and I will record your grade as F for cheating, or you can work with me, learn to read, do honest work, and earn an honest grade.”
He chose tutoring. He had great eyesight, strong artistic skill and had been reproducing the work of a variety of smarter students around him. He was dyslexic. It took patience from both of us for him to learn phonics and for him to get his quick brain to slow down to a speed that worked better.
By midyear, his grade of C was honest. By end of year, he was at a C+ in all his courses, and he’d been honest with every teacher about his problem, my tutoring, and asking each of them for help as needed!
Everyone has the freedom to buy stuff that makes them happy, may it be expensive purses/shoes, sports cars, yachts and boats, gambling, religion, tools and materials for hobbies and crafts, night clubs and fine dining, sports events and memorabilia, action figures and figurines, pre-order video games, subscription for streaming services, legal escort services and porn, legal recreational drugs (marijuana), tattoos and piercings… etc. etc.
There’s no such thing as a “dumb” purchase if it brings you joy and you can afford it.
Over the years, I had made plenty of “dumb” purchases. I bought a bunch of expensive lego sets. I bought video game figurines and collectible items. I pre-order games I like. I bought tools and materials for various hobbies, such as knitting, embroidery, and crocheting. I bought cookware and ingredients I only used once.
All of that could be considered dumb things, a waste of money.
On the flip side, I don’t buy luxury clothing items or shoes. All my clothes are from Uniqlo or Muji or discounted stuff from T.J.Maxx or Norstrom Rack.
I don’t go around claiming, “Gucci purses are the dumbest thing people buy.” Do you know why? Because I understand people are different and there’s nothing wrong in finding a little happiness wherever you can. I don’t judge people for purchasing things I don’t find very interesting.
Of course, if you spend beyond your means, that’s not very wise. But that’s not about the kind of things you spend money on, but rather you’re spending money you don’t have and it will eventually come back to haunt you.
But if they have the money, and Gucci purses make them happy, what’s so “dumb” about buying happiness? Oh, because you disapprove? Because Gucci purses don’t bring you any joy? So? Who the fuck are you anyways?
Life is short and miserable, for most people, most of the time. So, shut the fuck up and let people enjoy things.
Men need to understand that there’s nothing special in the body of random women you meet on the street/ Internet.
On difficult days, being extra gentle with ourselves is maturity at its peak.
Setting boundaries is not a display of disrespect . It’s an act of self-respect.
Maturity is seeing someone’s lack of effort as their lack of interest in you no matter what they say.
You don’t get fit eating everything . You don’t get wealthy spending everything.
Resist the urge to regret . Regrets are like old textbooks , you’ve already learned the lessons.
Your urges are your biggest enemy . Learn not to argue for nothing.
Self-acceptance shouldn’t stand in the way of self-improvement. Recognizing that you’re good enough today doesn’t prevent you from getting better tomorrow.
We’ve to be grateful for things . It’s too easy to be ungrateful. It’s too easy to not appreciate the simple things in life.
Fiancée DEMANDS Hall Pass 1 Month Before Wedding, In Shock After I Demand We Break Up!
“If I didn’t have a 26 year old son, and a 27 year old daughter telling me this madness is actually real, I honestly don’t think I’d ever believe it.”
I thought she was sweet and quite attractive but giggly and not very bright. I thought Dave could do a lot better. In fact some of his previous girlfriends had been intelligent and ambitious as well as great looking. One had even been an Olympic tennis player. I didn’t get this new one at all.
She is Jewish and Dave decided to convert. Our Dad was Jewish, our mother not. We had been brought up as agnostic. So Dave’s announcement was surprising and I’m sure I must have asked him if he was sure about this. I know our parents argued with him over his sudden conversion. However his new girlfriend and her family didn’t insist on him being Jewish, so I think this decision was about him wanting to join the culture of north London Jews rather than any sudden religious conversion. I never heard of him going to a synagogue or heard him utter a prayer.
They had a long and reasonably happy marriage. I was wrong about her.
Although it is true that she’s no intellectual and never achieved anything academically, she helped Dave be all he wanted to be and was content with that being her role. She was a great home-maker and possibly the kindest person I know. She is funny and light hearted. When my brother suddenly died, she was distraught but showed a strength I had never previously seen. She is a very supportive mother and grandmother. She was a big help to me when my wife died.
I had a terrible High School Algebra teacher. Coach Trout could not teach and had “favorites” who somehow received good grades. One day a group of kids were hanging out at Mellow Mushroom and saw him drive up to the nearby grocery store….he went in and a student walked up to his car to see who was inside. Guess what – one of his female students! He walked back out with a twelve pack of beer got into the car and left. Students told other students….a student told their mother….their mother called her mother….the mother called the school. Bye Bye Coach Trout.
Years later ran into him at a wedding….he was the DJ.
My cable company is starting to sound like this creepy, desperate -ex.
Each month the mail they send me is basically saying,
“PLEAAASE TAKE CABLE TV BACK. We’ll give you all the stations we gave you before at an amazing, amazing deal!”
Deal = $1 cheaper with a 24 month commitment, $399 cancellation fee + 2 kicks in the crotch.
By any logic I cut it, it makes no sense.
I divided the hours I was watching TV by the monthly bill and it came out to $15 an hour for TV.
I’m paying money to be forced to watch commercials every few minutes.
My cable package is forcing me to pay for a bunch of expensive channels (ESPN) that I don’t watch.
I don’t see cable TV as going fully extinct but I see it having a life as an increasingly endangered animal.
When you compare it to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and the like, it isn’t even a close contest. The only value cable companies add to my life is internet.
I think cable companies have become boxed into a bit of a hole. As more people realize how much they are being ripped off, they will keep cutting.
I don’t envy the cable executives who are charged with solving this problem.
One of my best friends of all time and I parted when we were eighteen, and heading for university. The next big leap of life. We had known each other since we were seven years old, and we promised to write (hand-written letters still existed, though the idea was certainly fading).
And I did write letters, many times, over many years.
But none of them ever got an answer. We had been very close, and shared some of our darkest moments in our young lives — I didn’t understand.
More than a decade later, I bumped into him in an everyday supermarket and bluntly asked him why he never answered any of my many letters. He looked at his wife and shrugged —
I was teaching a class in math in 4th grade. Because I’m kind of demanding of kids, and show them that anything less than their very best, is not good enough, I end every school-year with an hour of “roasting the teacher,” so they can get back at me for all those times that I’ve stood before them and asked for more.
I warn them that whatever they throw at me, I’ll return it in even measure. So, if they feel fat and don’t like it, they shouldn’t call me fat, cause I will make a fat-joke on their expense. If they feel ugly, they should not call me ugly, because I will do an ugly-joke on them.
So, younger kids are a bit scared and don’t really say anything. Older kids can’t help themselves and try anything to roast me. They never ever get to me, because kids are really bad at roasting adults.
But there was this little girl in a 4th grade class I taught a few years ago. After the initial stupid roasting (like, “your mom is so fat that …”) this little girl raised her hand.
As roasting can be a bit hard, I ignored her at first. She seemed fragile and I didn’t want her to get hurt. Usually the boys will shout any profanity at me and I will return their profanity with an equal profanity. It’s fun and it’s not personal. It’s a roasting game and the boys and girls who can handle it, get a go.
She kept her hand raised so finally I told her “Go ahead – give me your best shot.”
When I said that, this little girl, stood up, walked slowly along the back wall, then along the wall to the left. She came all the way up to the chalkboard and stopped just in front of me.
She lifted her right arm and raised a finger, pointing at me, about to roast me. Everyone in the class were silent and we all waited for it. Then she said:”
“Naaaahhh, you’re not worth it.”
Then she turned around, walking the same way back, just as slowly, and sat down.
The class erupted with laughter. It was beautiful 🙂
I didn’t roast her back. What could I say? I just got burned.
10 American Cities That Are DEAD Forever
“Having grown up in suburban Hartford, I agree strongly with the inclusion in this list. I left the area as a student in 1977, and was shocked about its decline when I happened to pass theough on a business trip in 2011.”
About 25 years ago, when I was still young, I had a crash at a roundabout. It was the kind of roundabout where visibility of all exits was excellent from a distance away, and because the roundabout was offset from centre, I was in a lane going straight on whereby you don’t need to turn the car at all to cross the roundabout.
So, on approaching I saw no cars to my right or straight on, and just carried on. Everything was fine until a car to my left, who should have given way to me (at roundabouts in the U.K. you give way to the right) just pulled out.
I hit the brakes but it was too late, and I went into the side of him.
He was immediately on the offensive, I suspect thinking insurance companies would take the word of a middle aged experienced driver over a 22 year old.
He kept saying that I was going far too fast, which was curious because by the time we hit I’d managed to slow down enough such that my airbag didn’t deploy.
He was impervious to reason, still yelling at me about my speed when the police showed up.
The policeman heard the guy say, “he was going far too fast”, to which the policeman replied, “if you thought he was going too fast, why did you pull out in front of him?”
It was online school, and we were just fooling around in our advisory breakout rooms.
We were discussing where people lived.
My friend, ‘Agastya’, let’s call him, told me that he knew where I lived.
“So,” I said, “Tell me where I live then.”
He repeated my exact address.
Me: Shocked.
Him: Smug.
Him:Me = 1:0
I asked him how he knew, and he said he’d seen my Mom and I playing outside while he was riding a bike with his friend.
In order to protect the great secret of my address, I told him, “Bro! I don’t live there! You know the house next door? I live there. I actually babysit the toddler of a very kind couple.”
He asked me to give the name of the mother.
I somehow made up a name—purely fictional I tell you—and told him it.
Five seconds later, he was laughing like hell and I asked him, “What? Give up?”
“See for yourself,” He said, laughing. He proceeded to share his screen, and I sat there, quietly, shocked at the results.
The “Kind Mother” had been murdered in 2016.
Never again would I give a fake name without searching it up first.
(Also, please note that we, in no way, intended to make fun of the fact that someone died.)
China is a pragmatic and rationalistic nation. The Isreal Palestine issue is a very long divisive issue with high emotion in both sides. China’s position is simply that they must find a long term solution such as a two state solution. This is a prerequisite for long term peace. It doesn’t take sides and not is it interested to be drawn into the conflict.
The reason being. China believes in the sovereignty of nations and that it can only be solved between Isreal and Palestinians. Not China or the U.S. for that matter. China sees quite correctly that U.S. lob sided stance is fuelling the crisis not resolving anything.
For the Palestinians sees that the Isreal government is backed by the U.S. to drive a wedge in the middle of a Arab and Islamic world. Hence it is an interested party. To China an Isreal that do shit on Palestinian land and people everyday then when they got hit Uncle Sam will always backed them out. And protect their excesses cannot be sustainable. It is foolish to think that Palestinian will put it up. At best Isreal is kicking the can down the road. Isreal and the US need to recognise this. For the good of them, the Palestinians and the world.
Laws a made by man, we are mere mortals. If laws are written unequal. It won’t last. That is the reason colonialism failed, it is also the reason the so called US international rules based order is rejected, if one stole land or occupied land that belongs to some one else and wrote laws to legitimately protect the wrong. It is double wrong not right. Two wrong don’t make a right China knows that laws written by the west cannot stand. It must go.
In 1840’s the British forced its jungle laws on China that it has a right to bring opium to China and drug the Chinese people bring havoc to the Chinese families. When China objected. The west jointly and severally supported Britain. To invade China and forced China to surrender HONGKONG for 156 years. This barbaric law were written by the British government. Of course laws like these can never be moral nor can it stand.
Why can’t China be more like South Korea?
You tell me this, would you accept a place literally BUILT to serve foreign soldiers? There’s literally a place in Seoul called hooker hill. Where those soldiers are completely above the law? Why would anybody want that?
Way back in the day when I worked fast food, it was common for my fellow employees and me to clock in within a few minutes of when we were scheduled to start. If someone was scheduled to start at 8 AM, they might clock in at 7:57, or 8:03.
One day, the manager decided she wanted people to clock in at exactly their scheduled time on the dot. You were scheduled to start at 8:00? She would not allow you to clock in at 7:57. You had to stand there staring at the clock for three minutes. If you clocked in at 8:01, you got written up,
This backfired in a spectacular but predictable fashion.
People started clocking in at exactly the scheduled start time…
…and clocking out at exactly the scheduled end time.
Before the rule, people would often stay a few minutes late if they needed to. After the rule, if people were scheduled to leave at 5:00, and a tour bus full of hungry roadies pulled into the parking lot at 4:58 (something that happened a couple times a month), everyone would leave at 5:00 exactly.
The new shift is still getting organized and there’s nobody in the grill area? Sorry, boss, you made the rules. Remember how you wrote me up for punching in at 8:01 yesterday? Remember what you said about the schedule? Well, the schedule says I’m off now.
The rule lasted about a week before the manager did a humiliating climb-down.
The Most DANGEROUS Teens Reacting to Serving Life in Prison
Step into an emotionally charged moment in today’s video, where we capture unscripted reactions of teenagers as they receive their court sentences. Watch as their faces reflect a range of emotions – shock, disbelief, and introspection – as they process the weight of their legal judgments. This thought-provoking glimpse into a critical juncture of their lives offers a unique perspective on the impact of the justice system on young individuals.
I was working at an upscale motel as the check in clerk. One night, around midnight, this nice looking couple came in and asked for a room. The man was slightly tipsy and dressed in a business suit. The lady was well dressed, sober, very nice. The guy signed the register, and it was time to pay for the room.
“Here is my check” he said.
“We don’t take checks here, it has to be cash or credit card.”
“You HAVE to take checks,” he replied. “I am in business. You have to take a check.”
“It’s the management’s rule, we don’t take checks”
He glared at me. “You will have to take a check. Everyone takes checks.”
“Sorry sir, we can’t take checks. That is our policy.”
He is getting angrier. “Every business takes checks….”
“Sorry sir…”
At this point the lady taps his arm. “It’s ok,” she says, “I’ll pay for the room. Here is cash”
The man looks over at her. He says, “Ok….I will write you a check. What’s your name?”
A couple times — once verbally and a few times non-verbally.
For the verbal time. Years ago when I lived in Minnesota, my ex asked me to go to the local farmer’s market to buy some things. I was wandering through the markets when this guy comes up to me and says: “Hey Steve!”
I kept walking; clearly he wasn’t talking to me.
“Steve? Dude?” he asked again.
“Um, my name’s not Steve,” I said. I got called this a few times until someone at a local restaurant asked me while I was buying takeout: “Are you Bonnie’s husband Steve?” “Nope,” I replied. Apparently I look pretty similar to someone named Steve in Minneapolis.
Now for the non-verbal.
One of the things you will not ever do to me if you want me to answer, or even respect, you is to shout out: “Hey, blind man!”
I am blind, and I am a man, but Blind Man is neither my first nor my last name. This has happened to me a few times when I lived in Manhattan. Sometimes when I’d be walking along a street, someone would shout this to me as I was minding my own business. I don’t care why you do it, but if you shout “Hay blind man” at me, I will not, under any circumstances, even acknowledge your existence. If you want to get my attention and you don’t know who I am, walk up to me, tap me on the shoulder or something and say: “Excuse me, sir?” Or something to that effect. “Hey blind man” will get you completely ignored.
I was friends with this guy in elementary school. He and I used to play together at recess and after school as we waited for our parents to pick us up. We even went to each other’s birthday parties during those years.
We didn’t talk much in middle school or high school, though. He was one of my many elementary-school friends who, once puberty and the popularity crunch hit, pretty much quit talking to me. I wasn’t one of the chosen “popular” kids… too ugly, and my parents were too poor.
Anyway, I have no hard feelings about it. Kids are stupid like that.
Over the years, a lot of my old classmates have either found drugs and ruined their lives, or found successful careers and are living happy adult lives now.
But this guy surprised me the most. That old elementary school friend of mine grew up to be a professional poker player:
He’s my Facebook friend now. We’ve never interacted, other than to send and accept friend invites, but he seems to be very happy. He’s married to a beautiful woman, and, judging from the pictures he posts, they do a lot of outdoorsy stuff, like hiking and camping. Good for them. I’m happy that he’s living his best life.
If you had a fair and equal justice system, Donald Trump (the father of the individual you mention) would presently be in jail awaiting trial – not only because of the stunning seriousness of the crimes of which he has been accused, but as a consequence of his own words, attacking both the criminal justice system, but also doing so in a way that actively threatens law enforcement and the judiciary.
Were it anybody else doing this, someone with less wealth or political influence, and they’d already have been in jail for weeks or even months, knowing that their trials would likely have additional charges tacked on for those threatening actions.
The United States isn’t a fair or impartial country, and the justice system sadly reflects that. It isn’t even a democracy anymore: whilst there are certainly democratic aspects, these are presently being undermined by Donald Trump and his cronies, as they push for a more authoritarian approach to governance. And, thanks in part to Citizen Utd v. FEC, and the nature of the US’ political elections, one thing is abundantly clear: the wealthy own the country, and live by different rules to the rest of you.
That Trump has committed such deeply serious offenses and yet remains free as a bird is evidence enough of that.
GALAXY QUEST is THE BEST!
Thanks so much for being here! OMGOSH! this movie is actually the best! I am so happy to have finally watched this! it is SO FUNNY and I can’t wait to keep re watching this!!
I am responsible for putting dreams in her brain before she falls asleep.
It’s a part of our nighttime routine… I read a book, tuck in the kids, give them hugs and kisses…
…then I put my hand on the top of my youngest one’s head, murmur some nonsensical chant, ask her what she wants to dream about that night, chant a little more, and then tell her I put the dreams in there.
Sometimes, I tell her that I put in dreams about “Ice cream, puppies, and spiders.” Then she’ll say, “No! Not spiders! Take that one out!” So I put my hand back on her head and tell her I took it out.
Sometimes, if she’s having trouble sleeping, she’ll come into my room and request better dreams, because the ones I gave her aren’t working. It’s cute when she does it before 10 pm. It’s annoying when she does it after that.
Sometimes, I tell her it’s a “surprise dream.” In the morning, she tells me what she dreamed about, and I say, “Yep, that’s the one I put in there.”
Back in college one or our profs made the blanket prediction that a new wave of obesity was about to sweep the nation.
The year was 1978 and the professor was Daniel Atkinson (who would later join the National Academy of Science as a biochemist).
His basic rationale was that the recent shift to high fructose corn syrup as a sweetening agent in American processed foods was a huge mistake that would have ramifications far beyond the the nominal amount of money saved by switching to a cheaper sugar.
The underlying biochemical premise was that, unlike glucose, fructose metabolism shunts one of the main regulatory steps/enzymes of glycolysis (phosphofructokinase-PFK).
Because of this, every bit of fructose consumed that was not needed for energy production would quickly be stored as fat.
History has proven him right (although there was more to it- noting that it was also around this point that America’s penchant for eating-out, and restaurant portion sizes were increasing in tandem along with the growing shift from food primarily being regarded as a source of sustenance as opposed to a source of pleasure).
Look at pre-1980’s films/TV programs that show Americans out on the streets and compare the sizes of the people in the background crowds to later post 1980’s films.
Similarly, look at pro athletes from the pre/post 1980’s and you’ll notice a similar pattern.
Anyhow, the point here is that the fairly abrupt American shift towards obesity can be linked to both to the biochemical properties of the food we consumed prior to the 1980’s as well as the gluttonous ways we increasingly adopted while on our way to the current “food porn” era.
If I found a mysterious bottle that promised a Djinn, I would put it back exactly where I found it and run in the opposite direction.
I’ve read enough folklore, myth, and fairytales to know that making deals with a supernatural entity never, ever ends well for the mortals. Even if the mortal doesn’t get screwed over by the Djinn or the devil or crossroad demon, they’ll soon realize either their wish didn’t resolve the problems they have or the wish created more, bigger problems.
“Faustian Bargain” is a cautionary tale to warn people not to take the shortcut because there isn’t any “easy” way. And the payment you give for the wealth and pleasure is always bigger than what you get.
So, put the bottle back, or sell it to some moron who thinks they can outsmart the devil.
China’s Groundbreaking 1nm Chip: Redefining Technology and Global Power
I asked the wrong woman on a date. I have a problem remembering names and faces. There was a girl at school I had been chatting with during lunch breaks, Vicki. There was another that I had met and spoken to exactly once during an outdoor cookout at the school (college) Marie.
I had an occasion where I was performing, the event included a dinner and dancing and I could bring a date.
I planned to ask Vicki as I had spent more time with her and felt I knew her better.
I am rushing between classes and I am stopped by a girl who says Hi. Vicki. I surprise her by asking her to accompany me to my event. She says yes and I get out my note pad to write down her number (prehistoric days before cell phones) and write the name Vicki. She says “That’s not my name.” I apologize for my memory glitch and ask her what her name is. Marie. Then it dawned on me, I had just asked out the wrong girl. But she had said yes and I was a gentleman so I would not back out.
We went on the date. We both fell in love that night. We were engaged three weeks later. That was 38 years and one son ago. We are still together. And yes, she knows the story.
Imagine you’re at an airport. You’re on your plane and all of a sudden the pilot says “I’m sorry folks, but there are like 30 cargo planes waiting to take off and they all get to go first even though we were first in the passenger take off line. We’re going to be here another hour.”
Or you’re driving on the interstate and the right lane is marked “Tractor Trailers only, except for exiting”. so you have to use the left lane only, which of course is crowded with slower cars even though there’s lots of room in the right lane and trucks are moving very fast.
It’s even worse for Amtrak. In the deal that created them, the railways got to keep all the track. Amtrak has to pay to use it, but they have no say in its upkeep. Now, in theory, passenger trains are supposed to get priority over freight trains but, in practice, the three mile freight train running at 10 m.p.h. on rusty tracks gets to go first, so Amtrack trains wait.
If you go to Europe, the passenger and freight trains use separate systems, so passenger trains only get in the way of other passenger trains.
There’s also a feeling in the United States that rail doesn’t matter even though, particularly in densely populated areas, it carries more passengers than road and planes together. As such, the government doesn’t give Amtrak a lot of money. In Spain, on the other hand, the government went nuts laying out a new high speed rail network, buying trains, and upgrading stations. As such, there are like 16 trains a day between Madrid and Barcelona that cost $40 at peak times and like $8 at non-peak times.
When I was in high school, a divorced lady moved in across the street (quite scandalous, she was the first divorced person in the neighborhood). Her boyfriend was an older guy named Herbie. He was cool. He drove a bunch of cool cars, Lincoln, Jags, Caddies, etc.
Her kids were older than me and gone a lot.
Herbie asked me if I would mow her lawn. I usually got $5 for mowing a lawn, Herbie gave me a $20. My parents made me go give it back. Herbie gave me a 5, then took the 20 and stuck it in my shirt pocket. ““Now you can tell them I paid you a 5”.
A couple of times Herbie made spaghetti and meatballs and they had me over for dinner.
One day I was hanging out at the neighborhood gas station and Herbie drove up and started using the phone booth. My friend said “that guy always uses the phone to call his bookie, I think he’s a gangster” I told them no way, but when Herbie left and waved to me, they were impressed.
One day I go out to get the Newark News and there’s a headline “Mafia Lieutenants run things while Capos are in prison”. And there in the series of pictures is Herbie.
He was Jewish, made up for being Italian by supposedly being extra tough.
He was always really nice to me, me being friends with him made my parents nervous, but they never said anything, except for me overcharging for lawn mowing that first time.
This happened in the 90s in Anchorage, Alaska, towards the end of summer. 2 geniuses decided to rob the Key Bank during daylight hours at a time in the afternoon when rush hour was almost at peak traffic. Key Bank was located at a corner where there was three major avenues with at least 3 lanes each, right in the middle of a 1 way grid. All lanes on all those streets were headed north, west and east, all one way streets. The apparent plan was 1 genius actually committed the armed robbery whilst his side kick drove the get-away car. Fine so far. Key Bank also is only a few blocks from Anchorage Police Department and jail. The hold up itself went off without a hitch. Now, mind you the streets were jammed with cars. Including an Anchorage PD officer sitting in his unit waiting for the light to turn green. This officer happened to be heading to the Police Department. The armed genius ran straight out the main door of the bank and (without checking if he was diving into the get-away car or not), threw open the police unit’s back door, threw the stolen money on the seat and threw himself onto that same seat. He slammed the door shut and screamed “Go! Go!”. The amused officer (who just heard about the heist on his radio) said “I will as soon as the light turns!” He arrested the genius right there and took him straight to booking along with the loot. He later claimed it was the easiest open and shut case he ever had!
A horse tale
I’ll never forget the day my mom called me in a panic: ‘Janna, you’ve got to convince your daddy to get rid of that horse, it’s gonna kill him!'”
Janna Grapperhaus shared the touching story of the bond that was built between her father and an abused horse.
Major was a young and vicious stallion when her father bought him. He “couldn’t be broke”.
“The men who owned him previously had used a technique to break horses that involved beatings and tying his head tightly between two posts where they left him standing without food or water for 4 weeks,” Janna said.
But Major stood strong.
When her father brought him home, Major barreled through five strands of fence within minutes of arriving. He’d bite and strike anyone that got too close.
“My dad never broke him… he earned his heart,” she explained. “Every single day, for hours and hours dad worked to earn that abused horse’s trust. Love won and after two full years, Major allowed my dad to ride him. When dad would go out, Major would kiss him on the head over and over. They had a bond that only horse people could ever understand.”
So when her father passed, it seemed fitting to let Major say goodbye.
“This is Major’s last kiss.”
Doing things right…
In 2018, 13-year-old Jaequan Faulkner started a small business selling $2 hot dogs with $1 sodas and chips from a stand in front of his house in Minnesota.
But his small business was in jeopardy after someone reported him to the Minneapolis Health Department.
Impressed by the young man’s drive, health inspectors decided to teach the young entrepreneur about proper food handling to assist him in getting his hot dog stand up to code.
The teen’s stand passed inspection, and it was the inspectors themselves who paid the $87 fee for his “short-term food permit.”
I was flying on a milk run, from Houston to Dallas, to Denver to Calgary. Its May long weekend , and I have another flight from Calgary to Vancouver to catch, to meet some friends for the long weekend. I get to the airport in Houston and the lady behind the desk is having a bad day. There is a thunderstorm in Houston and my flight is cancelled. I explain that I am going to miss my.connecting flight to Vancouver, and ask if maybe there was an alternate route, maybe through Vegas. She did her best, and came up empty. I thanked her for her effort, and said I will lose the cost of my Vancouver flight, as it was with a different airline, and have to buy a new ticket.
She asked me why I was being so nice, when my vacation was ruined. I told her I was just being normal, and I appreciated them not risking my life flying into Dallas.
She told me that her afternoon had been hell. I was the only person not yelling at her. So she goes back to her desk, and says, she put me on the first flight in the morning. I come back in the morning, and not only did she put me in first class, she rebooked my Vancouver flight in first class with a different airline.
I don’t know how she did it, but I was only 16 hours late for my vacation, and didn’t miss much.
When I was in a bar in Vegas with my black, British-Born-with-Jamaican-roots dad, I entered into conversation with a group of strangers and pointed to my dad and referred to him as “the black guy in the blue shirt over there”. You would have thought I had slapped them in the face. I got screamed and shouted at for having the nerve to call him black and that I should call him African-American. I kept telling them he’s not American and not African either but they wouldn’t hear any of it and in the end informed me(!) that whilst in America I should call him British African-American.
He had landed in London and would be living there for about six months. He had gotten his iphone all set and was there with our 15 year old daughter.
He had his phone out at a bus stop and was checking the schedule. A little ways away a group of teenage boys were plotting mischief. Suddenly one of them breaks away, runs up to him, grabs his phone, and runs away.
Now, my husband, god love him, is a lovely man, a brilliant, overweight biostatistician. But he needed that phone! Badly! So he took off after the boy, who did NOT expect that at all.
He chased him down the street and around the corner, and then the boy disappeared. Furious, he said to some construction workers, “Did you see a boy run past here? He stole my phone!” Yes, he went right around the corner, and it’s a dead end, one of them said.
Mike went around the corner and there was a reedy looking, terrified 15 year old kid cowering in a pile of garbage, desperately trying to unlock his phone.
“Give me my phone, dammit!” he shouted. “Right! Now!”
It may help to know that all British people are firmly convinced that every American is insanely violent and probably carrying a gun…
He handed Mike the gun. Mike turned and walked away. The workers asked if he wanted them to call the cops. Mike said no, he’s just a kid.
The workers all laid into the kid, saying, “You are so lucky! You nearly ruined your life right there! for a phone! Are you crazy?” They were still yelling at him when he was out of earshot.
I would not want to be that kid for any amount of money.
For nearly a year I had excruciating pain in my hands, wrists, neck, and shoulders. It would last anywhere from a few days to over a month. The doctor never really put much effort into finding out what was going on and would prescribe pain medications and muscle relaxers.
The second to last time I saw him, he informed me that I was an addict and he was putting that in my file. I had asked repeatedly for a referral to see a rheumatologist; he flat out refused, even with a family history of RA and other autoimmune diseases.
I made an appointment myself and paid for the visit and the labs out of pocket as, without a referral, my insurance company wouldn’t cover it. The rheumatologist’s office was in the hospital so he requested the blood test for RH factor be expedited (he was one of the hospital’s best and longest associates, so they did as he requested).
About an hour later he told me that I have RA and he had things pretty much under control in a few weeks. I went back to the first doctor and showed him the lab results and print outs of my x-rays. I chewed him out for letting me not only live with the pain and the permanent damage to my joints, but for accusing me of being a drug-seeking addict – particularly since I had never asked him for anything except an answer as to why that was happening. And yes, I did report him.
Zones: A map of relationship types to help relieve dating confusion
I decided to stay up one night after my husband and kids went sleep reason because it’s usually the only time I had to myself. I cleaned house a little bit took a shower and made coffee . I sat down to watch TV and read a little bit , I didn’t last long before I fell asleep in the recliner. It was a very restless sleep and I had bad dreams like the kind that you know your dreaming but you can’t wake up and any attempts you make to fight or run in the dream were useless because it was like you were weighed down. When I did wake up I was sweating and very groggy. While I’m setting there trying to shake the groggy feeling my dog comes and sets at my feet and is staring at the bar between my kitchen and living room as I turn to see what he’s looking at a very thick large fruit bowl on the bar that had apples in it burst into hundreds of pieces and the apples went in different directions. It scared me so bad that for a few minutes I couldn’t get up to look around and when I did no one was awake and both doors were still locked, still to this day I can’t think of any logical reasons to how that thick bowl just burst like that. What ever it was my dog was aware of it.
My years ago on a Monday morning trial docket a woman showed up in a lace red cocktail dress with a large flowing skirt, her hair piled high on her head with red pearls set in, red purse and red shoes. I can only assume the attorney told her to look nice. She looked GREAT for a Saturday night dinner at an expensive restaurant but for a Monday morning her outfit stood out. You could see her from across the room. It was years ago but I learned that day to specify to dress conservatively like you are going to church not a cocktail party.
I have a good friend. We meet each year at a restaurant in Chicago. He always narrows his choice for a starter to one of two soups that he likes. No matter how often I remind him which is which, he always gets confused, can’t remember the difference, and can’t even remember which is the one he likes.
So the one thing I do for him is the obvious solution:
I order one of each, let him taste both, and I let him pick the one he likes that night. Maybe it’s the same as last year, maybe not; who cares? I like them both.
This has been happening for 15 years and it isn’t going to change. My solution works and it’s just our personal ritual.
JUST HAPPENED: China-Russia LATEST Military Pact in War Shocked US
In my junior year of boarding school (1982 to 1983), our history teacher, Mr. Steve Patterson, was a dyed-in-the wool 1960s hippie type. He was about 34 back then. Originally from Ohio, he was a calm, pacifistic sort who wore his unabashed liberalism on his sleeve. Since Mr. Patterson lived on campus with his wife and two young children, part of his job was to head a table in the dining hall twice daily, at breakfast and dinner.
However, neither he nor his family ever touched the school’s fare—which, though it was actually superb (really!), was also very traditional, i.e., full of meat and dairy products. The Pattersons were adamant vegetarians, back at a time when this issue was barely on the radar for most people. They used to bring along their own food, packed in Tupperware containers bulging with disgusting-smelling, homemade hippie-1970s-vegetarian concoctions. (Mr. Patterson would, though, deign to eat an ordinary peanut-butter sandwich now and then.)
At this school, we were all pretty close, so virtually no topic was not subject to vigorous discussion. We used to tease Mr. Patterson quite a bit, and he’d give it right back to us, with all the usual arguments you hear from vegetarians or vegans today, i.e., animal cruelty, fat, hormones in the meat, the environment, sustainability, etc. None of us heeded him (I certainly didn’t), but one thing he said back then does stick out in my mind to this very day:
“In the future, people are going to sue McDonald’s and Burger King for causing heart disease, what with all the fat and unhealthy ingredients, the same way that smokers are now suing the tobacco companies.”
At the time, I thought this notion ludicrous. Today, forty years later, I still haven’t converted to vegetarianism, let alone veganism, but I have to give Mr. Patterson his due. The food industry, the meat industry, and the fast-food industries have all come under increasing fire in recent years. Books, articles, and media productions focusing on portion sizes, obesity, and sustainability have proliferated.
Sad to say, Mr. Patterson didn’t live to see his prediction come true. He died of ALS at the age of 52, back in 2001.
I was fortunate enough to be a patient of a wonderful General Practitioner Doctor for almost 20 years.
We had a great rapport, so any of my visits were very friendly and efficient and usually included a bit of friendly banter.
I’ve been playing some kind of sports all my life, and went to see him about a pain that would rise up in my left knee after about an hour of tennis.
After x-rays and a few tests I was back in his office for the results.
His back was to me, and he appeared to be studying my x-rays.
I saw the slight shaking of his head as I heard him take a deep breath and very slowly let it out (I found out this was all for dramatic effect after his performance).
Still with his back to me I heard him say in a serious sounding tone, “I know what is causing your knee problem, and it’s very sad to have to tell you that your condition is incurable It will without doubt become worse over time.”.
“There are things I can do to help slow down the damage and difficulty, but nothing to stop it..
He knew me well and I’m a rather stoic individual who wants to “cut to the chase”, and as he figured I said, “So Doc, how about just telling me what it is so I can assimilate and deal with it.”.
A slow rather dramatic turn to face showed me a Cheshire Cat’s grin as he said, “Welcome Michael to the ranks of us who are simply getting old and our aches and pains are caused by that incurable health issue called aging.”.
We both had a good laugh and I departed with his set of instructions and the realization that I was officially getting older physically.
I didn’t want to hear it, yet knew I would, so it came as no big deal. But I did appreciate my doctors touch of theatrics and dose of humor.
The Japanese did try to do that. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that usedNavajo. It was not normal spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds likea string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar.It was incomprehensible.
So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him. He was in New Mexico’s 200th Coast Artillery unit when the Philippines fell. He had a horrible war as a POW on the Bataan Death March. Then he was later held at POW camps near Nagasaki and was there during the bombing. He survived the bomb and was released three days later. He returned to the Navajo Nation and lived a long life, dying in 1997 at age 77.
The reason capturing Navajo did not work was that it was a code, not spoken Navajo. The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized by the Navajo Code Talkers. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo.
That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. The US Marines only wanted to use such a code if it could send exact, word for word, and letter for letter transmissions. There were about 400 words in the Code.
The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code in a Marine base in the San Diego area with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The idea of the Code was brought to the Marines by Philip Johnston. He was a WWI veteran, and engineer in L.A. and he spoke Navajo and had Navajo friends and contacts because he had grown up as a missionary kid on the Navajo Reservation.
The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were assigned three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter. Then those words were translated into Navajo words. In this way, English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel.
In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).
For example, using the letter substitution part of the Code, the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog” on some days. Or on other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used.
To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical in Navajo.
Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. Almost none were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo.
A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” in Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver. That would be pretty impossible to guess
A note here, as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines (tsin naaʼeeł táłtłʼááh naagháhígíí –”boat, under the water, the one that goes”), and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”.
This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media.
There had been Navajo in the US military before WWII. They had words for everything in the world that existed in 1940. And they have words for all the newer things today. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. Most nouns are made by conjugating verbs so they indicate what the object does. They borrow very few words and they have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for “telephone”, or “train”, or “nuclear power” are all made from Navajo stem roots.
Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.
The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The US Marines were careful about that. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.
For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.
When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:
“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “
You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”
“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.
US Military has Overextended Itself – John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen
1 large sheepherder loaf, about 8 inches in diameter
2 cups shredded lettuce
2 large tomatoes, thinly sliced
Instructions
Prepare Cajun-Style Beef Sausage (crumbles); add salami, mixing thoroughly but gently. Form sausage mixture into 1 large burger patty, 8 to 9 inches in diameter and 3/4 inch thick. Place patty on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 10 to 11 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill, 10 to 11 minutes) until instant-read thermometer inserted horizontally into center registers 160 degrees F, turning once. Use 2 grill spatulas for easier flipping. During the last 2 minutes of cooking, top patty with cheese and allow to melt.
Meanwhile, combine tapenade and giardiniera in small bowl. Cut sheepherder loaf in half horizontally. Scoop out extra bread from middle of both halves, as desired. Toast loaf on grill for 2 to 3 minutes, if desired. Line bottom of bread with lettuce and tomato; top with burger. Top burger with tapenade mixture, close sandwich. Cut into 8 wedges.
Notes
Sliders: You may prepare 12 sliders instead of one large patty. Form twelve 2 1/2 inch diameter patties in step 1. Place patties on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 8 to 10 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill for the same time) until instant-read thermometer inserted horizontally into center registers 160 degrees F, turning occasionally. During the last minute, top patties with cheese and allow to melt. Continue with step 2.
Why would the LATAM countries want to lessen Chinese influence and increase US influence when they have had a much worse experience with the US for more than 200 years?
The US had the Monroe Doctrine which turned Central and South America into a US political fiefdom where the US militarily intervened and toppled governments it didn’t like.
China never did that to the LATAM nations.
So why would the LATAM nations want to increase US influence unless the governments were directly US controlled?
The US influence on LATAM was never based on trade; it was based on the power of US multinational businesses such as United Fruit and US military power. Basically, the US government and its military acted as a protector for US business interests in the LATAM region.
When I was a teenager I would explore all the abandoned homes in my tiny small town. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania; coal and steel was our life, but during this time, the factories were all closing. So the homes would be abandoned. And we would explore them.
One of my friends, not me, was rummaging around in one of the old bedrooms and found an interesting object in an ancient shoebox tucked in the end of top shelf of a closet.
It was a handbook.
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He found an operation manual for a biplane! It was a World War I era instruction manual for a Curtiss JN-4. And it was cool as Hell. I loved the illustrations, and the classic format in this small leather-bound book. Totally awesome.
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I have no idea what happened to this little jewel of a book, and sometimes I muse what happened to it.
I will never know, but if you see me sitting quietly watching the rain fall down, thoughts of this little book is but one of my many many meandering thoughts.
So after researching, apparently the longest anyone ever stayed awake was this dude named Randy Gardner who did it for a science fair project back in 1963.
He lasted 11 days and 25 minutes without sleep, which is insane. He set a world record, but they don’t do that anymore cuz it’s too dangerous.
We all know that sleep is super important for your body and your brain. It helps you heal, grow, learn and stay sane.
When you don’t sleep, you mess up all kinds of stuff in your body, like your hormones, your metabolism, your mood and your stress levels.
You see, you start feeling the effects of sleep deprivation pretty fast. After just 24 hours, you’re like drunk or high.
You can’t think straight, you can’t remember stuff, you can’t see or hear well, you get cranky and you might even start to hallucinate.
It gets worse the longer you stay awake. After 36 hours, you lose your motivation, your reasoning skills and your attention span.
You might also start to have microsleeps, which are like mini naps that happen without you knowing. You just zone out for a few seconds and then snap back to reality. Imagine this happening while driving.
After 48 hours, you’re in trouble. You might start to have delusions, paranoia and psychosis. You might see or hear things that aren’t there, or believe things that aren’t true. You might also get really emotional or aggressive.
After 72 hours, you’re basically a zombie. You can barely function at all. You might not even be able to stay awake if you wanted to. Your immune system is shot, your blood pressure is high and your risk of getting sick or having an accident is through the roof.
So yeah, don’t try this. It’s not worth it. Sleep is awesome and you need it to live a healthy and happy life.
The average adult needs about 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night, but it varies from person to person. Find out what works for you and stick to it.
Texas Fajitas
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Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
Fajitas
2 (1 1/4 pound) skirt steaks, trimmed of membrane and fat
16 to 20 flour tortillas, warmed
Marinade
1 cup bottled herb and garlic or Italian salad dressing
12 ounces beer
1 large onion, minced
Juice of 3 or 4 limes
3 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons minced, fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons lemon pepper
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 bay leaf
Accompaniments
Mild or medium salsa
Guacamole
Instructions
Place the meat in a Pyrex dish.
Combine all the marinade ingredients in a bowl, mixing well and then pour over the steaks.
Refrigerate the meat for 6 to 24 hours, turning occasionally.
Remove the meat from the refrigerator and drain off the marinade.
Bring the steaks to room temperature.
On an outdoor grill, grill meat to medium-rare.
Cut the steaks diagonally through the grain, into finger length strips.
Serve meat on a platter with tortillas and serving bowls of salsa and guacamole.
One of my first “real” jobs as a young man was working in a distribution center for a pharmaceutical company. I loaded and unloaded trucks, unloaded box cars and pulled orders, and I found the work to be enjoyable. I was the youngest employee in the place and the older women in the office would dote on me, which I also enjoyed immensely.
The general manager was a former college jock and I became friends with him and would play volleyball, basketball, and softball with him and his friends. After a softball game one summer I overheard him talking to one of his friends and he mentioned that the company we worked for was in trouble. He told his friend that he was afraid the DC where we worked was going to be shut down, and he didn’t want to move to North Carolina, where the company was headquartered.
I didn’t really think about it until I started noticing that the shipments we received weren’t as large, or coming as frequently, as they had in the past. A warehouse than had once overflowed with stock was starting to look barren. That’s when I recalled what the GM hold told his friend and I decided to start looking for another job.
I found a job working in a DC for a wholesaler and gave notice, but the GM tried to talk me into staying. He said I had a future with the company but I still decided to leave. Six months later the distribution center closed and the entire warehouse crew was let go. Some of those guys were in their 60s, so their only option was to take early retirement. I felt bad about not letting them know what was coming, but what if I’d been wrong? I was lucky to get out when I did.
Deserve the world
Tech hegemony name of NSA’s game — Zhang Zhouxiang
Had the Ministry of National Security not mentioned it on its official WeChat account, it would have been hard to imagine that the US National Security Agency, a key department of the US government, had invaded the server of China’s Huawei headquarters in 2009 and was monitoring it ever since.
This was at a time when the US had not even triggered trade frictions with China and “partnership” was the key word defining their bilateral relationship. That was also the time when the US was keeping a tab on allies and imagined enemies alike, such as by bugging the then German leader’s phone, as Edward Snowden revealed.
All these incidents once again prove that even when the US smiles at you, you cannot take it at face value. The US can use one hand for a handshake and the other to point a gun at the person it is shaking hands with.
It’s ironic that despite spying on the Huawei server for 14 years, the US still could not find any evidence of Huawei having “stolen” technologies from it. That is the biggest evidence that the NSA is not at all concerned about the United States’ national security, but about the US’ technological hegemony. Anything called “national security” for the US is based on the insecurity of others.
With this mentality, the US cannot become a worthy leader of the world. It can only arouse the whole world’s suspicion with its actions, as everyone knows that the US gained its current superpower status by cheating, stealing, hacking and blackmailing.
And such conspiracies won’t persist for long because the rest of the world cannot be overshadowed by the US forever. That Huawei has released its new smartphone model Mate 60 Pro, despite the sanctions, proves that the US’ blockade and surveillance don’t work.
It is time the US woke up from its own dreams.
China’s LASER Tech Achieves Yet Another MASSIVE Breakthrough
In a groundbreaking announcement, Chinese military scientists have unveiled a remarkable leap forward in laser weapon technology. The researchers claim to have developed an ingenious cooling system that eliminates a long-standing obstacle – the buildup of excess heat during the operation of high-energy lasers. This achievement, which could redefine the face of modern warfare, promises to enable these laser-based weapons to fire with unprecedented longevity and precision. Today’s episode will cover another breakthrough in China’s laser technology.
Wasting an entire tech budget on peripherals, with no computers to attach them to.
Several years ago, I worked at a school where the majority of teachers and the principal still used overhead projectors. I bought my own projector and used my own Macbook instead. When the principal saw what I was doing, she put me in charge of setting up Smartboards for every classroom.
Apparently, the year before I got there, the principal (an older woman) went to an education convention and got swindled into spending thousands of dollars on new Smartboards. Someone must have had a display where they showed all of the great things you can do with a Smartboard, so she used the school’s technology budget to buy one for each classroom.
They’d been delivered over the summer, before I was hired, and they were still boxed in the storage room when I got there.
Except she didn’t buy the computers or projectors to go along with them.
A Smartboard by itself is useless. It’s basically a large track pad. It requires a computer and a projector to work. The Smartboard is the cheapest part of the equation.
I got one up and running in my room, since I had my own laptop and projector. She was so excited that she had the janitor unbox and hang several others in other classrooms over a weekend, before I explained to her that they only worked when connected to a computer and a projector.
When I came to work on Monday, half of the classrooms looked like this:
They had nice, new Smartboards hanging there, completely useless.
Then I gave her an estimate for cheap laptops and projectors to get the other Smartboards up and running like the one in my room was.
She got mad at me. It’s the first time a principal ever actually raised their voice to me. She insisted that I could make the Smartboards work without buying extra parts, because the guy who sold her the Smartboards didn’t say anything about needing a computer or projector to go with them.
I think she was mad that she’d been ripped off. She spent literally the school’s entire tech budget on those Smartboards.
She raised her voice to me a few more times throughout the year, for leaving to get coffee on my lunch break (I’m an adult and I can do that), not keeping the students busy every possible second (I don’t believe in busy work), and not using the Smartboard in my room enough (It was a bigger pain to use it than it was worth). Basically, she micro-managed and treated me like a student, not a teacher. I left there after just one year. She ended up being forced into retirement after that year too. I suppose a lot of people complained about the way she treated the teachers, and pissing away the school’s money on pointless tech was the last straw.
Whatever your opinion may be about this man, Dan Bilzerian, he said something very true in an interview, and I would like many people to reflect on it.
In the Joe Rogan Podcast (the most famous and most listened-to podcast in the world), Rogan asked him the same question:
Joe: Hey Dan, for the people who are listening to us, and most of them won’t even make a quarter of the money you’ve made, do you think money brings happiness?
Dan Bilzerian: Money, Joe, brings satisfaction. Money can undoubtedly give you a lot of satisfaction, but never complete happiness.
When I go to a fancy restaurant, when I drive a brand new car, when I party at the best clubs, for me, that’s already normal.
But the day I can’t afford to eat at a restaurant of the same quality, or drive the latest car, or go partying, how do you think I’ll feel?
In my case, I raised the ‘satisfaction bar’ so high that I have to maintain this lifestyle forever because if I don’t, I get depressed.
Happiness, even if it sounds cliché, cheesy, or however you want to call it, comes from within, from your person. It doesn’t come from material things. Material things give you ‘satisfaction,’ but they will never give you happiness.
There’s always someone who says something like:
‘Money doesn’t bring happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Lamborghini.’
Now, let me ask:
Wouldn’t you rather smile from ear to ear in a Kia?
Regards.
If I Compare Both – CHINA is The Winner
China’s space program and Elon Musk’s SpaceX represent two major players in the rapidly evolving field of space exploration. In recent years, both entities have made significant strides in rocket development, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of space travel. From the famed Falcon series to the proud and furious Long March family, both players have redefined space sector on their own terms.
The Russian military has launched small attacks along the whole frontline. A major effort is made near Andivka which yesterday was bombed to smithereens:
The headline reads “RF Army has delivered a blow of previously unseen might against the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)”. What they are describing is an aerial bombing of Avdeevka, the heavily fortified Ukrainian town 14 kilometers away from Donetsk city, which is an urban center of more than a million inhabitants and capital of the Donbas oblast (region) of the same name. Donetsk city has been struck by missiles and artillery shells launched from Avdeevka on a daily basis from the time before the Special Military Operation, and with ever greater intensity during the SMO. Video images of destroyed homes and apartment buildings have appeared on Russian evening news together casualty figures and the testimony of victims.
The attack on Avdeevka came early in the morning when the Ukrainians were attempting to carry out a rotation of their troops. Eyewitnesses said that “the earth shook” in the whole area as a result of the bombing. … The bombing of Avdeevka today, like the reported destruction of a major Ukrainian command post by 1.5 ton bombs a couple of days ago, would suggest the “softening up” phase before a major ground offensive.
That something important was coming up could be seen it the recent Daily Reports by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The ones put out on the 8th, 9th and 10th of October showed relatively few Ukrainian casualties (655, 630, 580) and a reduced counter artillery campaign with only 6, 7 and 8 Ukrainian guns hit on those days. It was a sign that something was coming up.
Today’s report, which includes the numbers from yesterday’s campaign against Andivka and other places show high Ukrainian casualty numbers (895) and hits on some 24 Ukrainian artillery systems.
The Ukrainians seem to fight almost exclusively on foot. Losses of armored fighting vehicles have become rare. Today’s report reports hits on only 7 armored combat systems (including tanks) but also hits on 35 transport vehicles, i.e trucks and pick-ups.
Yesterday’s evening summary by Strana.news described the bad state most of Ukraine’s brigades are in (machine translation):
Reports of the beginning of massive attacks by the Russian army coincided with the appearance of an increasing amount of information about significant problems with the offensive potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
As we have already written, ex-adviser to the President’s Office Alexey Arestovich called on the Ukrainian command to go on the defensive and abandon the offensive, which, in his opinion, is hopeless with the current balance of forces.
Also in social networks, a video from a Ukrainian military man was distributed, who talks about problems in the “Guards Offensive” brigades due to heavy losses and poor organization.
“I communicate with different military personnel from different branches of the armed forces and, in principle, I understand that cp@ka is everywhere. But I did not expect that in the rampant “Offensive Guard” we will meet with those mistakes that even the most meaty brigades no longer make,” says a National Guard soldier in Tiktok.
Then he describes various problems in specific teams. Let’s list the main ones:
Platoon commanders in critical areas, including on the Zaporozhye front, are appointed junior lieutenants without military experience and knowledge.
Many fighters have not received sufficient training;
Coordination at the company and battalion level is almost nonexistent. Maximum-squads and platoons;
Huge losses – “three companies enter, only a few go back”;
“One village took an infantry company in a short period of time. 120 plus or minus people,” says the military man.
The Russian Federation has many times more forces and resources – “no matter how strong you are, you will be stupidly beaten by the crowd”;
In some cases, the assault fighters go on foot – 7 km in equipment for 35 kg.
Other reports have confirmed that the Ukrainian military has long lost its middle officer and NCO corps. Smart kids fresh from senior high school are leading platoons of men mostly in 30s or 40s and 50s. Brigade commanders give direct orders down to platoons because the staff of battalions and companies in between is no longer there.
The Ukraine lacks artillery. The Russian counter battery fire has become more and more intense.
The advantage the HIMARS systems with their 70 kilometer reach had given Ukraine is also gone. The U.S. delivered HIMARS systems, which previously had been positioned safely out of reach of Russian counter-battery fire, are now easy to reach targets.
Russia’s new versions of the Lancet kamikaze drone have destroyed Ukrainian fighter planes on the ground some 90 kilometer behind the frontline.
Smaller Russian First Person View (FPV) suicide drones now come with thermal night vision.
It is pretty much over for the Ukrainian military. The only sensible action it can now take is to shorten the frontline and to retreat behind some natural defense barrier like the Dnieper river.
However, Zelensky still talks of victory and is unlikely to order such a move.
Posted by b on October 11, 2023 at 15:00 UTC | Permalink
On May 7th, 2013, Clevelander Charles Ramsey sat down in his living room, and was about to eat a Big Mac when he heard screaming coming from outside…
He opened his front door, and realized that it must have been coming from his next door neighbor’s house, so he walked over. But instead of his neighbor, Ariel, he saw a woman in the doorway clutching a child. She said that they needed to get out of the house, but that the door was secured and they were trapped. Although hesitant to break his neighbor’s front door, Ramsey agreed, and together they kicked out the bottom panel. The woman and her daughter crawled through…
But that was just the beginning! The lady said that she had been trapped in the house for years and that there were other women still inside! She ran to a nearby house and called 911 while Ramsey did the same on his cell phone. Within minutes, police and press had swarmed the street. What was going on?
The woman’s name was Amanda Berry. She had been kidnapped by the owner of the house and kept inside for 10 years, where she and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, were kept in dismal conditions and sexually abused. They were all rescued and reunited with their families after a decade. The kidnapper, Ariel Castro, was arrested minutes later at a nearby McDonald’s. The whole city of Cleveland, Ohio, was overjoyed to learn that the missing women had been found alive after so long, and the rescue made headlines across the world!!
Ramsey gave an iconic interview with a local news station, just minutes after the news broke, and it quickly went viral.
“I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Dead Giveaway. Something is wrong here.” – Charles Ramsey
His candid demeanor during such a stressful episode caught people’s attention. The Gregory Brothers recorded a song by remixing his statement. Mike Epps parodied his reaction. Drew Carrey, a fellow Clevelander, personally met with him. He was skyrocketing to fame but his big break came on Snoop Dogg’s show talk show.
Snoop Dogg received an audio recording of Ramsey’s 911 call. In it, the dispatcher asked for Ramsey’s phone number and Ramsey gave it, but whoever provided the audio did not mute or obscure it to protect Ramsey’s identity. Snoop and his guest decided to call the number themselves to congratulate him, and Ramsey picked up. But they also broadcast the number to the entire world!
Ramsey received an unbelievable amount of support and praise. From across the world many sent their thanks and Ramsey was absolutely overwhelmed by the attention. As more evidence came to light, Ramsey also had some choice words for Castro and described in graphic detail how he would exact revenge on him. Talks of a reward for Ramsey abounded. He even received several marriage proposals. When a news reporter asked how Ramsey felt about all the congratulatory phone calls and texts he was getting, he replied that he now wished he had paid for an unlimited phone plan, as he had exceeded his allotted data. He eventually solved this by throwing his phone into the Cuyahoga river.
McDonald’s — whom Ramsey had referenced in his viral interview and where Castro had been arrested — gave Ramsey tons of $50 Mcdonald’s gift cards. Ramsey gave them out to children and the homeless, and when McDonald’s heard about this, they stopped giving him gift cards.
Ramsey appeared on Anderson Cooper, wrote a memoir, and since then has sought to avoid the spotlight. He met with Amanda Berry in 2019 on the sixth anniversary of the rescue, and claims that he and Michelle Knight, now known as Lily Rose Lee, sometimes see each other when out walking because they live nearby.
As I was sitting on the beach with my friend Courtney, she turned to me and said, “You know, I really love Landon. I’m going to marry him. But, if he were to leave me, I would be okay.” They had been dating for four years and her boyfriend was asking her dad that summer if he could have her hand in marriage. They were very happy and comfortable together.
It was a stark contrast to my old roommate. In the four years I had known her, she had been single less than two weeks. Every time she became single, it had not been her choice. After each breakup, she had immediately gotten a new man within days. Eventually she settled with a guy who emotionally abused her. She had eventually caught him cheating more than three times and broken up with him, but her fear of being alone had driven her back into his arms after ten days. She married that guy.
Both of these girls are wonderful people who I enjoy hanging out with. But, they have one stark difference. Courtney is comfortable being alone. My old roommate is not.
Courtney dated her share of frogs but was always able to leave if things got bad. She liked being single and was comfortable with herself. So, she found a man perfect for her who added something amazing to her life. She settled for nothing less.
My old roommate stayed in abusive relationship after abusive relationship. Being single scared her, so she’d rather stay with someone who treated her badly than face the world alone. She will depend on someone else for her happiness for the rest of her life and they will consistently fail to provide it.
Being single taught me that you’re not ready to be in a relationship unless you’re truly happy and comfortable being single. If you don’t, you make yourself very vulnerable to abuse and a life of heartache.
Learn to be alone and to depend on yourself. Don’t date anyone before you date yourself. It is the most important basis of a healthy relationship.
Filipino Girls Get BRUTALLY HONEST
As the Philippines welcomes foreign tourists back for the first time since 2020, countless interested bachelors are arriving at the shores of Davao City specifically to find a Pinay to share their life with. Known around the world as amazing women, Filipinas entice foreigners to travel halfway across the globe just to guaranty a match through face to face interactions. As more men dream of romantic connections with Filipino women, solo travel to the magic city of Davao becomes a bucket list item for countless guys.
Davao City plays host to a couple dozen foreigners several times each year who arrive to meet Pinays in one on one introductions or during group speed dating events arranged by local matchmakers. Because dating in Davao remains a foreign affair for Philippine women seeking love beyond borders, foreign guys also interested in meeting Filipino girls are once again solo traveling to this magic city to try and guaranty a match among some of the most stunning ladies in the entire world.
Know to be ultra family oriented in nature, most Filipinas are seeking traditional family life with a good man who seeks the same. While many Western men begin to adopt alternative philosophies towards domestic dating like MGTOW or Red Pill, many are simply seeking a traditional wife or what they call a tradwife within these Red Pill or MGTOW circles. While most Filipino women fit what men use to describe their tradwife, it must be recognized that Pinays are also industrious and independent completely out of necessity in the Philippines.
Most Filipinas find the domestic dating scene in Davao City to be lacking, which leads many towards furthering their educations and/or careers to make a life for themselves. Because most Pinays will want to create a family of their own, dating beyond borders to establish a WMAF ( Western Male Asian Female) relationship becomes a focus for many who are seeking such a life. WMAF relationships in the Philippines have become quite common in cities like Davao where dating often feels like a foreign affair because of the expat population and constant foreign tourists who frequent the region.
While Filipino women dream of lasting connections with foreign men, the ability to guaranty a match in the Philippines via solo travel rather than making a Filipina dating app your cupid has become the go to method for guys wanting the same type of lasting relationships.
There are advantages to dating Filipinas in cities like Davao, where an overwhelming number of Asian women are wholly open to the idea of WMAF ( Western Male Asian Female) relationships. While most marriage minded Filipino men are already starting families by their early twenties, the vast majority of bachelors are single by choice. Because countless Pinays still seek to create a family of their own, dating beyond borders with visiting foreigners becomes the most practical way to achieve the dream of loving connections that can create such dynamics.
WMAF relationships are quite common in cities throughout the Philippines like Cebu, Davao or Manila. Because the majority of Filipino women are fluent English speakers, men who share this language are able to communicate well, which expedites the courtship process for many WMAF couples. As men venture into the Philippines specifically in search of the Filipina pea to their pod, cold approach in the street scenes of Davao can seem appealing, but the most serious Filipino women often find such interactions with strangers to be unappealing.
Sure, Filipinas may say hello to you in the street scenes of Davao if you initiate this interaction, but in the less savory parts of the city, these interactions rarely signal a woman interested in starting a lifelong loving relationship. In the interest of being able to guaranty a match during solo travel to Davao City, more men that ever are partnering with local matchmaking agencies to meet serious Pinays to achieve their dream of lasting connections with Asian women. Matchmakers in the Philippines commonly organize private speed dating events for Filipinas and visiting foreign men who have a stated purpose of finding lifelong love as the key motivation for attending these events.
During speed dating events in Davao, men meet over 100 single Pinays in a matter of hours, with only a couple dozen guys in attendance. The odds of meeting 100+ Filipinas in 4 hours via cold approach becomes less likely, especially when factoring in the pre-qualification process administered by matchmaking agencies like A Foreign Affair. Because more men than ever seek to guaranty a match with Filipinas, dating agencies play a crucial role in creating lasting connections via one on one introduction or the world famous speed dating events held in Cebu and Davao.
The longest recorded continuous firing of a weapon took place in 1963, when a group of British Army armorers decided to put the venerable Vickers machine gun to its most extreme test ever attempted. Having a stockpile of around 5 million obsolete .303 British rounds, they took turns continuously firing a single freshly-rebuilt Vickers for an entire week.
The men took 30-minute shifts operating the gun, with others shoveling the spent brass and bringing more ammo and cooling water, pausing only to reload and change worn-out barrels. Amazingly, in a week of non-stop firing, the gun never malfunctioned a single time, and a follow-up inspection found it to be within design specs in every parameter.
This hardly came as a surprise, as Vickers MG was already legendary for its reliability, having been continuously fired for over 24 hours on multiple instances during WWI. In one recorded instance in 1916, a British machine gun company of ten guns expended a million rounds over the course of 12 hours to suppress a German position, at the end using their own urine to cool the barrels after all available water was expended.
What to expect from Iran’s membership in BRICS
Friday, 25 August 2023 11:24 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 02 September 2023 6:26 AM ]
Iran’s membership in the BRICS group of emerging economies is a significant national, regional and international development, which is important both to Tehran and BRICS members, including China and Russia.
In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on Iran’s membership in global political and economic organizations, institutions and groups in order to spur economic growth and provide a ballast in the face of geopolitical and structural changes.
BRICS has gained a special place in Iran’s foreign policy due to its increasing importance in the international political economy and geopolitical developments.
The Islamic Republic has good political relations with all five main members of the BRICS group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Tehran is motivated by the international prestige, the geopolitical and geoeconomic linkage with the emerging world powers, and the regional and international status which joining BRICS can potentially bring in.
New economic partners are about to come out of the woodwork after membership in BRICS and access to new financial resources, technological findings, knowledge-based production methods in agriculture, food security and trade could enable Iran to better deal with the hobbling impact of sanctions.
BRICS is developing internal institutions for integration and increasing effective economic power in order to support development programs of its members and strengthen their regional and international position.
The establishment of financial institutions independent from Western institutions can be considered the most important success of BRICS in promoting convergence and its most important advantage in the new global economic structure.
Two financial institutions within BRICS are the pillars of the group’s power, which also offer opportunities for Iran.
The New Development Bank of BRICS is the most important economic pillar of BRICS, created with the aim of forging convergence among the members in the world economy.
The bank was established in 2014 with the initial authorized capital of $100 billion to finance infrastructure projects in BRICS countries and other emerging markets. It is headquartered in Shanghai, China.
According to the agreement, the bank “shall support public or private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments”.
Another key institution established with the aim of strengthening financial convergence among the members is the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).
It is a framework for the provision of support through liquidity and precautionary instruments in response to actual or potential short-term balance of payments pressures.
Although US financial sanctions make it difficult for Iran to access the resources of these two institutions, BRICS has adopted various methods under its de-dollarization scheme to provide loans and services to members, which can reduce the impact of the sanctions.
The New Development Bank uses methods such as providing loans in the national currency of BRICS powers, cryptocurrency and currency swaps.
Bear in mind that Iran’s integration into the BRICS economic framework is fraught with challenges as regards alignment with the economic policies, regulatory mechanisms and commercial laws and regulations of the main and new members.
Ensuring the coordination and synching of the domestic bureaucracy with BRICS institutions in areas such as customs, tariffs and investment regulations requires time and complex expert reviews.
Nevertheless, the geoeconomic benefits of the membership are so many that any misgivings are roundly misplaced.
As a full member, Iran would have closer economic relations with other member countries, which can gradually lead to increased business and investment opportunities.
This cooperation can include various sectors including energy, production, agriculture and technology and provide access to new markets and potential sources of foreign direct investment.
Joining BRICS would also give Iran the opportunity to diversify its economic partners beyond the current circle.
The BRICS countries have an overall population of more than 3 billion people, which potentially provides a vast consumer market for Iranian goods and services. This diversity would reduce Iran’s dependence on a limited set of business partners and increase its economic resilience.
Membership in BRICS also increases Iran’s regional influence and geopolitical position.
It enables the country to interact with emerging economies and have a say in shaping global economic and political affairs. In addition, Iran can actively participate in regional projects and contribute to the development of convergence in the region.
By becoming a member of BRICS, Iran would access the financial resources of the BRICS Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangements (CRA) to fund the development of infrastructure, energy projects and other potential priority sectors.
This can help to solve part of Iran’s development needs and spur long-term economic growth, even though access to the resources of these institutions under sanctions would be difficult.
Iran is a large producer of oil and gas and its membership in BRICS can strengthen closer cooperation on energy security initiatives.
BRICS countries, especially China and Russia, have significant energy needs. They can potentially cooperate with Iran on energy exploration, production and infrastructure development. This cooperation would improve Iran’s energy sector and provide ways to diversify exports.
Meanwhile, BRICS countries stand out for their advances in technology and innovation in the developing world.
Iran’s membership in BRICS can facilitate the exchange of knowledge, carrying out joint research projects and technology transfer, which could enable the country to increase its technological capabilities and competitiveness in different sectors.
This can help Iran’s economic modernization and reduce technological gaps with other countries.
Iran is facing the most draconian US sanctions, which has limited the country’s access to global markets and financial systems. Joining BRICS can potentially give Iran more leverage in international negotiations and potentially reduce the effects of some sanctions.
Moreover, the collective power and influence of the BRICS countries may provide a platform to defend Iran’s economic interests and reduce trade restrictions.
BRICS countries have forged increasing cooperation on agriculture and food security. Iran, with its diverse agricultural sector, can benefit from the best methods and joint initiatives through knowledge exchange with the aim of increasing agricultural productivity, production and distribution of foodstuff.
This cooperation can help Iran’s food security goals and strengthen its agricultural sector.
Finally, Iran’s membership in BRICS can activate the Russia-Iran-India corridor, facilitating exchanges among the member countries, and provide access to Eurasian resources along the Belt and Road Initiative stretching from China to Russia up to Central Asia and beyond.
In 29 Days The Internet Will Change FOREVER
Through increased legislation such as the Online Safety Bill and Google’s own repression of new emerging competitors, independent media and free speech has a fight on its hands.
“Can I trust you?” she asked me quietly as we walked in the school grounds.
She didn’t even wait for me to reply.
“My father was diagnosed with cancer. Two years ago. Of the prostate. He was under treatment since then, but these days, he’s been getting worse. And we don’t even have that much money, we’re a simple family.”
Sarah was the ‘weird girl’ in the class. Or that’s how the others saw her.
She was always energetic. So much that you’d think she was high on caffeine every day. She had a prominent personality, something so sun-bright that you couldn’t help but notice. And being talkative and making loud, obnoxiously lame jokes were a fundamental part of her.
Sarah was just so full of life. The fullest you can be. The fullest I’ve ever seen someone.
I think that’s what began, slowly but surely, irritating others in a way.
She would laugh at her own awkward jokes and people would roll their eyes. She’s so random and so extra, they’d say.
She became the class clown.
One day, during the sports class, the conversation written above took place.
And I couldn’t help but silently wonder: how/why was she so buoyant and full of life all the time?
A second later, the tone of her voice shifted.
“You wanna know why I’m so cheerful all the time?”
It’s like she read my mind, I swear. I looked her in the eye, then quickly looked away.
But what she said left me open-mouthed because it was completely different than what I expected.
“You know, I believe that you have to create what you want for yourself. As I see it, everyone has to create their own happiness. There is no other way out. I have so many things to be sad about. But that is exactly what I won’t be. I just work like that,” she shrugged.
And suddenly, just like that, I saw her in a whole new light. And I’m not even exaggerating. It was literally like depicted in the movies.
In fact, I felt guilty, on behalf of my class, that we’d been so utterly stupid.
Not to be dramatic or anything, but Sarah taught me things that I have not learned from anyone else.
I’m not gonna lie and say that since that moment, I’ve been the happiest person alive. I haven’t. It’s a slow process. But I see myself getting there very soon.
Sarah reminded me that one has to create their own happiness. You can’t rely on life or its circumstances to do that for you. She was a living example of the quote: “When life knocks you down, smile and stand up taller than ever before.”
China learnt that thinking that it should share a loaf of bread with the west is unnecessary and unappreciated. Well perhaps the west is not matured enough. So why not have the entire loaf of bread themselves.
So why not just produce the very best in everything for China and 7.5 billion earthlings and let the west decide if it wants to be up to date and advance. Or suffer a triple digit inflation and stay backwards.
Like what they say one don’t know how fortunate they are till they lost it for good. It’s a shame. For the U.S. China is willing to be a good partner to help bring about a better world but the U.S. chose its own demise.
The U.S. behaviour befits the 247 years old hoodlum mafia that they are and China need to let the U.S. grow out of puberty. Sure China prefers to work with the west and the U.S. and it will do better with them. But without some say 50–70% of worlds 30% of the market it will still do rather well.
US may need to make a million adjustments just to stay afloat. But heck. That U.S. their problem. It is their choice. They can de-risk on each other for all we care. Essentially the U.S. has decoupled with the world.
My former supervisor came to my wedding and told guests that she felt terrible, but when I got home from my honeymoon, she was going to have to fire me.
I was working at a staffing agency, and my supervisor Snowflake (for her appearance and mental condition) came to my wedding as my guest and the date of my fiance’s friend.
During the reception, she told multiple people that as much as she looooved me, she was going to have to fire me when I got back from our honeymoon. We were gone for a week, and knowing what we would be facing when we got back, her date called my husband and told him the bad news.
Talk about landing the balloon with a crash! At least I could walk into the office the next day armed and forewarned. They transferred me to another department, she was reprimanded, and within months was transferred to another office. I will never trust people like that again, and I feel for anyone who had to be involved with her in the future.
THE DURAN AND BRIAN BERLETIC ON UKRAINE’S DEFEAT SENDS NATO INTO PANIC
I will answer from my personal experience. I do trauma anesthesia and every now and then I will get someone in who has survived a shoot out with the police. I usually talk to the police during the case since they are waiting to hear if the prisoner will survive or not so they can file the paperwork. The truth is they miss more.
Last one was a murder suspect who they rolled up on as he was exiting his car. He pulled out a gun and they unloaded on him. The police expended more than 350 rounds. He was hit 3 times. One hit on the hand which took off 2 fingers, one hit in the meat of the thigh and the one that took him down was a hit directly between the eyes. But he was a lucky SOB. The police were shooting 9 mm. The shot that hit him between the eyes bounced off his skull, traveled under the scalp and exited near the rear of his head. That one knocked him out and probably saved his life.
Shootouts are a very stressful situation. The target is hiding behind obstructions. He is shooting back at you. And the distances are more likely to be 25 to 50 feet. The adrenalin is running high. Even in a perfectly comfortable range with a paper target it is almost impossible to put in precision shots at 50 feet with a hand gun. That is a pretty typical outcome in that type of shooting.
The scary part of all that is that there are 340 plus bullets traveling down range which can strike anywhere.
Unless one is blind, deaf or dumb you can conclude otherwise. Of course BBC, CNN, Fox & Sky News sing a tune that US are popular are needed or or respected. But it is no different from Nazi propaganda selling the Aryan nation and the Nazi’s view on Jews!
But let us stick to the facts. Zero nation in Latin America and Caribbean supported the U.S.stance on Russia! And that is the U.S. closest neighbours.
Take the Beijing Olympics boycott. In 2020. After a year of shuttling around the world. Convincing nations to boycott China and billions invested to demonised China. Only 5 nations agreed to withdraw uninvited officials from the games! Just 40 years ago the U.S. wanted to do likewise in the Moscow Olympics and 65 nations joined them!
US influence? It us a thing of the past. Good riddance Uncle Sam.
Originally Answered: What have you assumed was exaggerated until you experienced it yourself?
Expensive paper towels.
What the hell, Bounty? You think you’re worth twice as much as my grocery store-brand paper towels?
Oh, you’ve got “super-absorbent pockets” that can soak up that entire sippy cup’s worth of juice and then still have room for the drips the other leading paper towel left behind?
Riiiiiiight.
The “quicker, thicker picker-upper”?
Screw your fancy camera tricks and stupid, gimmicky pockets! I’m not going to fall for your crafty advertising and excessive -er-ending tagline!
Oh, what a fool I was.
Enter: the Infant.
Through drips and spills and mud and snot, the infant could take out an entire store-brand roll in a single afternoon. My discount paper towels may as well have been tissue paper against the sticky onslaught of a lunchtime feeding. Spit and mucus passed right through those weak sheets, so much so that I would have been better off just wiping my daughter’s mouth with my own hand.
Oh, “just double them over,” you say?
Ha! The acrobatic, one-handed tear needed to secure a double sheet (while holding a leaking child) would simply rip a corner sliver from those generic towels, leaving the bulk of the sheet flapping wildly off the roll and onto the floor.
In a delirious panic, I’d resort to mummifying the child and letting the mess soak through, sheet after sheet, until she was just dry enough to slip a new shirt on.
There had to be a better way…
I finally caved and bought a roll of the more expensive Bounty brand—they were on sale. I figured maybe I could stick my daughter into one of the “super-absorbent pockets” and just let her eat from there like a quilted, drooling baby kangaroo.
Dear sweet sanitary Jesus.
Those paper towels are amazing.
Yes, they can soak up the sippy cup juice, and the snot, and the milk, and the spaghetti sauce, and the toilet water on the floor, and—why is there toilet water on the floor?!—and the strange brown mess that probably isn’t that, but you’re not going to get close enough to smell it.
All of it.
And double sheets? Ha! Only if you want to clean out a frying pan right off the stove because those babies can insulate like a fiend when you need to wipe hot grease out of a pan.
Bounty paper towels are freaking magical. I buy them all the time now—though I still wait for sales. They are worth every penny, and they are every bit as amazing as the attractive hand models on the commercials imply they are.
On December 9, 1914, Thomas Edison faced probably the biggest test of his life when a huge fire destroyed his lab in New Jersey.
The fire destroyed more than half of the buildings in the laboratory complex, including many original records, prototypes, and valuable research work.
The damage was estimated to be around $7 million dollars at the time, which is equivalent to over $180 million today.
Insurance only covered $2.3 million.
How would you react if your entire life’s work went up in flames at 67 years of age?
History tells that on the night of the fire, as Edison calmly watched his life’s work go up in flames, he told his son Charles, “There is a great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”
Edison wasted no time in rebuilding. In just a few weeks after the fire, parts of the lab were operational again. Within about a year, most of the facilities were fully reconstructed.
To answer your question, what is the best way to deal with failure at everything in life?
We should learn from Edison…
Accept that failure and setbacks are just part of life’s journey.
Be persistent, don’t ever give up. If we ever stop trying, that’s when we let real failure take over our lives.
As Edison put it, “We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish. Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.”
Life will always throw challenges our way. But like Edison, we can choose to get back up and start building again.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
When you are feeling unproductive, don’t allow yourself to do anything. This means no entertainment devices, no books, nothing. It is very boring. But if you make this rule and allow yourself only to do only one thing, you will find yourself walking the plank and doing that very task.
It feels like putting yourself in time out. But you’ll find your task beats the despair of boredom.
Meditation is also extremely effective if you can’t get focused. When I’m most distracted, I close my eyes and focus on not allowing in any thoughts. It is in those moments that mental silence is most difficult. My head is full of chaotic energy and thoughts that gust and jerk around inside of me. But in the end, I feel still and focused. I am prepared to work. Start with 5–10 minutes. A little bit goes a long way.
Shoplifting was a regular occurrence at the auto parts store where I worked. Headlights were the most common thing people stole. At least once per day we’d find an empty package for a headlight on the shelf.
That’s how a lot of people shoplift, by the way… Just open the package and take the product. Chances are, if there is some anti-theft tag on it, the tag is in the package, not on the product itself.
Also, the fancy retail word for product loss through shoplifting and internal stealing is “shrink.” Now you know. My store had a pretty high “shrink” rate, because the neighborhood around the store wasn’t all that great. The last time I visited that store, about five years after I quit working there, they’d finally wised up and put most of the products behind glass displays, so you had to ask a worker to get them for you.
We’d catch shoplifters sometimes. They’d usually get loud and try and cause a scene, but then leave. None of them ever got physical. They also frequently worked in pairs… one person distracting the counter guy, while the other walked around the store and cut things out of their packaging and put them in his pockets. I got good at spotting that scam eventually, and would stare at the guy walking the aisles until he got the hint that I was on to him, and they’d leave.
But my best story was the Great Heist of 2008. That’s what I called it when I was telling my coworkers about it after it happened.
I was the opening manager that day. It was six in the morning and there were just two of us there. That was the minimum number of people we had to have working in order to be open. The first few hours every day were always uneventful, especially during the week.
This particular day, a guy came into the store and said he needed antifreeze for his car. We looked up the type he needed. He said he needed four gallons. I showed him where they were on the shelf, and he immediately complained about the price. The type his car needed was expensive… like $20 a bottle, if I remember correctly. He left the store without them.
But he didn’t go far… just to his car. He drove up next to the door, left his car running, ran inside, grabbed four gallons, dashed out the door without paying, and sped off, tires squealing and everything.
Except he grabbed the wrong thing. He stole four gallons of washer fluid:
Not even the good washer fluid either. The cheap stuff that we gave away for free sometimes. It was like $1.25 per bottle, max. This guy made off with $5 worth of, basically, tap water with a little alcohol in it.
I didn’t even fill out a report. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for the guy. I hope he didn’t put it in his radiator. That would be two boneheaded mistakes in a single day.
Unbreakable Friendship
U.N. approves invasion of Haiti, US forces already there
Redacted has confirmed that the U.S. has special forces inside of Haiti as the U.N. is set to approve an invasion. The United Nations will vote today on the United States’ request to invade Haiti with Kenyan troops. The U.S. says that a military invasion is necessary to “conduct joint security support operations as it works to counter gangs and improve security conditions in Haiti.” The force will help secure “critical infrastructure sites and transit locations such as the airport, ports, and key intersections.” The people of Haiti have been pushing back against this rhetoric and begging the United States to stay out of their politics. Redacted correspondent Dan Cohen brings us the story.
There are currently two Foxconn situations regarding India. One is iPhone production and one is a project to build semiconductors.
iPhone production in India is below the output volume and quality demanded by Apple. This year’s production in India will sold only in India and maybe in some other Asian countries. Foxconn will seek to improve the production in future. For now China will remain the primary production location.
Foxconn has broken off a JV with Vedanta on a project to build semiconductor chips in India. Foxconn decided end plans after delays by the Indian government to approve incentives for the project.
Foxconn has operated in India before and left after a few years. It knows the business situation there. It likely is aware of other prospective projects that were to receive government incentives by India that led to years of foot dragging, and decided there are other opportunities. Meanwhile India will look to attract others interested in the project.
It’s the first time this year that you are going on an actual holiday.
You booked the ticket months in advance, and have been preparing for this trip for weeks.
Today is finally the day on which you leave.
You arrive at the airport earlier than you need to, get your luggage checked in and are in front of the gate, ready to go, 2 hours in advance, when you hear this over the announcement:
“Flight 206 to Honolulu has been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Have a nice day.”
Your heart sinks into your chest.
That was your flight.
You lean back in the chair you were sitting in, stare up at the ceiling and take a deep breath.
Then you pull out your cell phone, grab your carry-on and start walking.
On your way to the information desk you check various’ other flights, check hotels in the area, and when you get to the information desk you ask about alternative, last-minute routes.
Within 20 minutes you have an alternative booked, have gotten your ticket refunded, and are ready to go.
This is the difference between those that will reach success and those that won’t.
The key indicator of those that will be successful later is that they do not let their situation stop them.
They find a way, are solution oriented, and will act a hundred times more often than they will complain.
Stop complaining about your situation and stop focusing on the problem. And look at what you can do now instead.
WW2 From the German Perspective (Full Documentary) | Animated History
Texas Ranch-Style Taco Salad
Cool Ranch Taco Salad
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1 head lettuce
1 onion
1 (16 ounce) can Ranch-style beans
1 package Fritos Corn Chips
2 avocados (ripe but not too soft)
2 tomatoes
1 pound Cheddar cheese, grated
1 bottle Catalina dressing
1 pound ground beef or turkey
2 tablespoons lime or lemon juice
Instructions
Sauté ground beef; drain well and set aside to cool.
Tear lettuce into pieces.
Dice tomatoes and onion.
Grate cheese.
Drain beans.
Break corn chips into smaller pieces.
Chop avocado and sprinkle with lemon juice, lightly tossing to coat.
Ability-track students into separate classrooms, starting at around fifth grade.
The frustration for teachers usually isn’t from an underperforming student alone; it’s from underperforming students in the same class, at the same time, as average and over-performing students.
Underperforming (the more PC term is “struggling”) students often take longer than average to learn the same concepts as their peers, and/or require different teaching methods. All of that is fine and easy for a teacher to do, if students like that were all in the same classroom at the same time, with no classmates who were too different from them, learning-style wise.
I have the same issue with my English classes every year. I always begin each year with three days’ worth of lessons on proper comma usage when writing, because so many students struggle with that. About 25% of the students understand how to use commas after the first day of lessons. Another 50% of them understand the concept well enough by the end of the third day.
But about 15% of students need longer than three days to get the concept, and 10% of them will never get it, no matter how long I spend on it. So, what’s a teacher to do? Bore the smart kids? Frustrate the struggling students by leaving them in the dust? Or aim for the middle and hope for the best?
Of course, is all of the smart kids were in one class, all of the average students in another, and all of the strugglers in another, I could spend as much time as I wanted on each concept, without worrying about boring anyone or leaving anyone in the dust. And I could use lesson plans tailored specifically to each group’s learning style.
The classes wouldn’t even have to have even numbers. I can easily teach 50 students at a time, if they’re the “average” students, while teaching smaller classes of advanced and struggling students.
There are a lot of reasons why separating students by ability isn’t popular these days. I’m not saying that they’re good reasons, or that I agree with them. I’m just saying that there are reasons that exist.
Still, it would help de-frustrate teachers to have fewer mixed-ability classes, and more mono-ability ones.
That was me. I worked for a biotech firm that was cutting costs. I was a corporate recruiter. People were being laid off. My only HR colleague left because he had to do all the firing as the big boss didn’t want to do the dirty work, he was also never in the office. That left me having to fire the employees which I hated doing but there was no one else to do it.
I had to fire the finance manager, it was year-end and we had to do merit raises and bonuses. The payroll manager didn’t know to calculate the merit increases based on the allocated budget and bonuses. The company was going to ask Ernst & Young to calculate this but the CEO rejected this as the cost was enormous. The CFO didn’t know how to calculate this so he asked me to calculate this.
this task can be done manually but it would have taken weeks as there were over 200 employees. I downloaded ADP salary data and created an Excel template using formulas to allow scenario analysis as there were lots of changes. (fighting between managers on merit and bonuses) This took a whole week but I completed it on time to pay the employees.
It was yearend and I had to fire most of the salespeople, the new sales manager cleaned house. After I fired the last person my boss called me in to fire me. He said sorry we have to cut costs, you’re a great recruiter but we won’t be hiring anyone next year.
Well, this was the first time in my life to get fired. I was very upset but luckily I found a good job in 2 weeks and I was working. A month later I get a call. They had lost key employees in the IT department and had struggled to find anyone. They wanted me to help. I had started a side business – a staffing agency so I said I will work on commission which they agreed. In 45 days I completed 2 searches and billed my former employer 45K. This took about 40 hours of my time. The fee is 20% of the annual base salary. I made more money that year than any other year.
They wanted to hire me back but I was upset that they fired me in the first place so I did not go back.
At the end of the year, they called me to ask me how to use the spreadsheet that I created. No one could figure out the formulas to change the parameters.
I said no, why don’t you call Ernst & Young?
An unfiltered conversation on why I live in china now, what china is like for indians, college, etc
“Thank you for sharing your insights. I agree with you, China is much safer for walkability and touring. I stayed 1 year in China and nobody ever gave me any problems and everyone was so hospitable and friendly. India tends to be more lawless in many ways compared to China. I still love India though! Jai Hind”
The doctor(s) keep telling me that high blood pressure is not a problem. They say “you cannot die from high blood pressure“. And this, of course, is the Chinese stance on the matter. That blood pressure is dynamic, and not static, that it goes up and it goes down. And that you want to manage your lifestyle to keep it in a relatively low state, but not to get upset if it raises up high.
Meanwhile the Western advice for what my current blood pressure seems to be is…
2023 11 20 20 40
Which is quite different from the Eastern belief.
When I entered the hospital emergency room, my blood pressure was 214. The Western medical advice and warnings are…
2023 11 20 20 42
I think that it was prudent that I went to the emergency room, no matter what the doctors say. And I most certainly did not want to endure a stroke or a heart attack.
In 1973 while a specialist (E4) in the 82d Airborne Division, I had to draw a travel pay advance to go TDY (temporary duty) for 179 days.
This was well before direct deposit or electronic payments.
We actually got paperwork processed then went to a teller’s window who dispersed cash.
When I arrived at the division finance center the waiting area was full to overflowing.
As I found a place along the wall to stand a soldier near me said, “You’ll be here a while. ”
He pointed to another soldier and said he had been there two days in a row before that day attempting to get an advance to go home on emergency leave.
Several other soldiers confirmed what he said. They too kept returning and waited their turn until time for the center to close, then they returned to their barracks and came back the next day.
After an hour or so with only a couple of troops called to the desk to be processed (by now it was late morning) a full Colonel arrived and signed the waiting list at the front.
As he took a place along the wall one of the soldiers told him he would have a long wait. Someone else told him about the guy who needed to go on emergency leave.
After about 30 minutes, the colonel went to the clerk at the sign in desk and asked to speak to his boss.
The clerk went to the back office area and returned with a senior NCO, E6 or E7 as I recall. The sergeant asked the colonel how he could help him.
The colonel replied, “I asked to see this clerk’s boss, the person in charge here.” The Sergeant said, “I’m his boss.”
The colonel then said “I want to see the OIC (Officer In Charge) out here, right now.”
He was very polite and spoke in a slightly lower volume than if in a normal conversation, however when he approached the sign in desk all conversation in the room ceased and we could hear what he had to say.
Full Colonels, O-6s, don’t like to be kept waiting.
The Sergeant (staff sergeant or sergeant first class) went to the office area and returned from a small separate office with a junior officer, a captain if I recall correctly.
Very respectfully the finance officer asked the colonel how he could help him.
The colonel said he was going on TDY and needed his advanced travel pay. The finance officer said, “Yes sir we’ll get you taken care of right away.”
The colonel then said “I need to leave tonight.”
“Yes sir, no problem.” was the reply. The colonel said “
All these men that were signed in before me are ahead of me. They will get their money before my advance gets processed. Are we clear on that, Captain?”
A very red-faced, obviously shaken junior officer, now sweating bullets, assured him everyone in the waiting area would be processed that day.
It was amazing how quickly paperwork was processed after that.
The guy waiting for emergency leave was called back almost immediately and the rest of us were taken care of very expeditiously in the order in which we signed in.
The colonel was looking out for men who weren’t directly in his chain of command but he made sure everyone was taken care of appropriately.
He could have “pulled rank” and left with his money in just a few minutes.
He could have made one phone call to division headquarters and had the officer and the NCOIC replaced, but a low key, on the spot correction resolved the immediate issue.
I’m sure the situation was discussed with both the OIC and NCOIC privately and in much greater detail later.
That was an experience I learned from and never forgot as I rose through the enlisted, warrant officer and commissioned officer ranks during my 24 years of service.
Chili Louisiana-Style
2023 11 10 15 09
Yield: about 3 quarts
Ingredients
2 pounds ground beef
1 pound ground hot sausage
2 medium onions, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
1 whole clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 (15 ounce) can stewed tomatoes
1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
3 (15 ounce) cans New Orleans style kidney beans, drained
Louisiana hot sauce, to taste (optional)
Instructions
Combine first four ingredients and brown in a large frying pan. Drain all excess fat.
In a large slow cooker, combine all the remaining ingredients. Add the cooked meat mixture. Cook on LOW overnight.
Remove garlic clove before serving.
When men have NOTHING left to lose. The masculinity crisis pushed too far.
Men being treated like second-rate citizens in the modern day is nothing new, but what happens when they end up being pushed to the very edge? Men were not designed to lie down and be taken advantage of. Eventually, all men rise up against oppression and take their final stand. This is a frightening world we’ve created.
Literally this just happened to me a few days ago. I live in Virginia (USA) and I was flying to Athens, Greece. We booked the trip on a Saturday and left three days later, very last minute. Because it was an overnight flight and more than 9 hours we purchased the tickets in business class so we could recline to sleep. I like to read before sleeping so I purposefully selected (on Saturday) the window seat so I could lean up again the wall and look out the window while reading. As soon as I got onboard and got to my seat (hadn’t even sat down yet!) the woman in the aisle asked me switch with her husband who was seated on the middle row on the aisle. I said “No thank you, I’m good with where I booked”. I was polite but firm. Later during the flight she asked when I had booked and I said three days ago and she said that they had booked months before. What actually irritated me was that MONTHS went by where she (they) could have adjusted their seats to be together. Why then does it become MY problem to give up what I paid for. So yes, I find it exceedingly rude to ask someone to give up their seat.
P.S. Athens, Mykonos and Santorini were fabulous and I can’t wait to go back!
The West has a history of Anti Semitism that would make your blood run cold
I don’t mean just Uncle Heini
Jews have been deported enmasse from 8 European Countries from the 12th century to the 20th in their thousands, forced to live in Ghettos, speaking a slavish language Yiddish for the most part
Guess where they were treated better than in Europe?
Yep.
The Middle East , the Muslims
The Jews had their best time under the Ottoman Empire and with the Arabs. Both sides minding their own business
And once again who ruined it?
Yep
The West – in the form of the United Kingdom
This is Klaus Barbie – a Psycopathic Anti semite who sent many jews to their death in camps during WWII
He was the butcher of LYONS
Yep that’s France
Frenchmen, Poles, Czech and Ukrainians watched and silently endorsed the slaughter of Jews and making them soap , a term that our friend Jean-Marie Valheur takes such strong offense against
Auschwitz, Riga, Sachenhausen – they aren’t in Moscow or Beijing or Delhi or Tehran
They are in Europe
This gutter dreg who took orders from Himmler or his men and who had jewish blood on his hands
He got a standing ovation in Canada
Standing Ovation!!!!
So dont ever say the West backs Israel
The West wants a guard dog in the Middle East just like you want a Foreman in prison, in case the inmates get violent
The West believe the Middle East is their playground and to keep things in order, fund organizations and terror groups and keep organizing small and large scale chaos
Israel does what it’s told
As simple as that
The West will never see Israel as part of it’s Anglo Saxon heritage
Not even Eastern Europe whose idiots think they are a part of the grand alliance of the West
They aren’t
The West is US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Italy and Scandinavia
Every one else from Spaniards to Slavs to Greeks to Jews to Balts to Chinese to Indians to Malays to Serbs are expendable and will be dropped like hot potatoes if it suits the West
The Triads? They’ve long since become regular business men.
The last triad gunfights were in the UK around 1997 vs the Vietnamese gangs. The Vietnamese gangs had guns the Chinese triads didn’t.
The last gunfights in Asia were Yip Kai Foon. He had a type56 Chinese AK and rarely got into gunfights. He eventually did get into a gunfight with police and was hit in the spine and captured shortly after.
I had already been given the job. Been told my start date and salary. The owner was my brother in laws father.
I had sat and chatted with him one evening having just left the army. He told me the job was mine. But he had already arranged the interviews so told me he had to go through with them but inserted me into the interview process.
I mean this job couldn’t of been more nailed on. Ever.
Anyway. I was so blasé about it. I went into the interview not even thinking it was an interview and chatted away to him. Next thing I’m laughing and joking with him about my time in the army. About the crazy funny antics we got up to. Like skidding tanks. Trying to spin the tracks on tanks in the mud. Breaking so hard to see how much you could nose down.. how I run my colnel of the road snaking down the road in a tank. I thought I was hilarious. I thought he thought I was hilarious
This was for a job as an articulated truck driver.
I even walked out pleased with how it went. Absolutely clueless
Needless to say. I got a call next day saying I didn’t get the job.
The most ridiculous part of this story is that the penny didn’t drop for years for me. I just assumed he had only given me an interview to keep the family happy. That I was never going to get the job and was annoyed he’d wasted my time.
It was only 20 odd years later I had that awful.cringe moment. Like. Oh god! No! Did i actually go into an interview for a driving job. Bragging about how irresponsible a driver I could be. Yes. I did.
A need to rewrite marriage laws
The latest generation is simply not getting married, and will result in this…
China and the Chinese do not have to be reminded of the horror of wars. They have the century of humiliation that reduced their entire country to destitution and hundred of million dead. It is this existential awareness that is in fact going overdrive to ensure this never ever happen again.
On the other hand, the U.S. has never been touched by war because of geography – not WWI, not WWII. This is why after WWII it is only the U.S. and our industrial base coming out totally unscathed that allowed for our hegemony.
We’re the clueless.
And today, it is the U.S. who must be reminded that we have a peer military power. China has the capability to kick our ass if we try an offensive run at them and can accommodate in kind with a nuclear MAD. So, how is it that they will suffer more in case of war with us?
I went to a late afternoon house party at a neighbor who lived a block over from my house.
The host was wealthy. She had a beautifully designed Tuscan, two-storied house, with art of various styles and sizes adorning the walls throughout.
Although I was younger than most by decades, everyone was very welcoming to young buck Sean.
Everyone had brought a dish of food and they had some music playing.
My intention was to just stay for an hour, make the rounds, introduce myself to some neighbors and get to know them as it was rare to see a lot of these people that I shared close proximity with.
(For the record, I wasn’t a freeloader – I’d made brownies that I’d brought with me as well.)
There’s a crowd of us on the back porch talking. I’m in a circle with the host, her daughter, and 4 other people.
So out of the blue, the host says, “We’ll just let you two talk for a bit.”
And everyone evaporates into the house and here I am stuck on this back porch with her daughter.
It felt like I blinked and the world disappeared and I was locked in a closet with a stranger.
“So Sean – do you like it here in Tampa?”
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is a setup…..
She was pretty and friendly enough.
However she was not my type and I was not psychologically/emotionally prepared to be on a date that moment. My ex and I had broken up 2 days before this.
I got through it. We spoke and I stayed long enough so as not to be rude and/or hurt her feelings. Then I went home, curled up in a ball and sucked my thumb.
But hey – at least the experience made for an OK Quora answer.
My pain for your pleasure.
Did he handle this situation properly?
Making a day better
Yesterday, we had a horrible customer at the restaurant, he yelled at the bartender because we didn’t have club soda. The bartender explained we don’t have club soda because we don’t have liquor (just beer and wine) and therefore we don’t have a soda gun behind the bar. He didn’t like that.
Then he asked for a cheese that we don’t have, even after she read him the cheeses we did have – twice. She explained we don’t have that cheese. Then he LOST it and started yelling at her as if she was hoarding the world’s supply of this cheese for herself. Ridiculous.
He eventually left in a big huff and every other person within earshot of his temper tantrum was thankful.
Even after he left we still had a black cloud over us. Admittedly, we let this man and his behavior affect our day.
That is until an older gentleman and his adult son came into the restaurant and changed our whole mood. They are relatively new regulars (started coming in a month or so ago). The son has Down Syndrome and his father takes care of him throughout the day.
The father is very talkative, but his son (Peter) never spoke to us – he was always happy to eat his sandwich and bop along to the music (he really likes Grateful Dead songs).
As they were getting ready to leave, the father waved us over. We got to the table and Peter looked up at us and said…
“I’m happy here, I see you give out hugs, can I have a hug?”
We happily raised our hands to start the hug and he quickly pulled us in and gave us the strongest bear hug we’ve ever received in our life. He lifted us off the ground – anyone that has ever met us face-to-face will attest, that is no easy task.
Thank you Peter, with one (just shy of unbearably strong) hug, you made our entire day better (and gave us a free back (alignment) You’re an awesome man.
Regardless of the military outcome of the war in Gaza, America, and Israel are already big losers. In a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and a humanitarian corridor in Gaza, a staggering 120 countries voted in favor. Only 12 other states backed America and Israel. Massive protests are erupting in major cities around the world, from Sydney, London, Paris, New York to Washington, and across much of the Muslim world. Israel has the audacity to question UN’s legitimacy after it passed the unfavorable resolution and doubled down by demanding an apology from Secretary-General Guterres and his resignation for condemning Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in Gaza.
The biggest losers are, sadly, the Palestinian people. Consider these sobering facts. Fully 85% of Hamas fighters are orphans who grew up in hate, many as young as 12 who stand shorter than the rifles they carry. Thousands of children are buried alive in the rubble, and thousands of expectant mothers are denied medical care because hospitals are either bombed, overstretched, or critically short of essential supplies. It is a humanitarian disaster on a scale unseen since the last world war. Israel keeps killing while the whole world watches—in its own shameful Holocaust against the poor Palestinians.
Brushing aside the UN resolution, Netanyahu seems constitutionally incapable of compromise. Turkey calls him a war criminal and is crouching to strike, as is Iran. The 6th full-scale Israeli-Arab war looms.
When Hamas killed and captured Israeli civilians, they were crucified by Western politicians and pundits. But as Netanyahu made good his threat to reduce Gaza to rubble in a frenzy of murderous bombing that took the lives of aid workers, journalists, women, and children, world opinion swiftly shifted. Four European minnows plus eight tiny Pacific Island states like Fiji opposed the resolution, as their support can affordably be bought. Even traditional staunch Israeli and American allies voted to abstain.
The root cause of the conflict is Israel’s 50-year-long brutal suppression of Palestinians, who subsist as stateless people in their own country. In World War II, Jewish people won universal sympathy as the oppressed. Now, they have mutated into brutal oppressors themselves. Netanyahu has Nazified the Israeli military.
In a fatal strategic miscalculation, the US rushed warships to the combustible region, ostensibly to deter Iran from entering the conflict. But Biden is sending a wrong and strong signal that emboldens the bloodthirsty Netanyahu to carry out his Gaza massacre. America has failed to put Bibi on a leash and he is spilling oceans of blood.
This conflict has reshuffled the geopolitical deck, with Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon already engaging Israel sporadically. Heavy hitters like Turkey and Iran are crouching and poised to pounce. Russia, too, is entering the equation, airlifting supplies to Gaza and threatening all-out war if its planes are fired upon. The war in Ukraine is becoming a side-show, with NATO support possibly waning or wavering. China is seen as a potential credible mediator. America, by contrast, stands discredited as a meddler, aiding and abetting Israel’s unjust war against a downtrodden people. It is fast losing its halo as the world’s self-appointed policeman.
If the war widens, America and Israel will be fighting on multiple fronts. I see no long-term winners, even if Israel wipes Hamas off the map. Genocidal oppression breeds its own revenge and lethal vicious circle. That is why Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, is a danger to Israel’s legitimate existence. China is walking taller among nations. That explains the mild thaw in US-China relations during the Chinese foreign minister’s recent visit to Washington. Both Blinken and Biden notably toned down their anti-China rhetoric. With two wars raging, America reluctantly seeks dialogue to restore bilateral relations to a normal footing.
Wars are notoriously unpredictable. Who will emerge on the right side of history? No one knows. But one thing is certain: injustice is inherently unstable. Regardless of military muscle, with shifting allegiances on a crowded planet, world opinion matters.
I was in line at a market and there was just one person ahead of me. The assistant manager was at the register and just as the person in front of me left, the regular cashier returned from her break.
Instead of simply walking away and letting her take care of me, he turned to her and began yelling at her because she was 3 minutes late coming back from her break! “How dare you take up my time, I am way more important than you and I could fire you for this!!” he screamed, as I was standing there waiting to pay for my groceries and leave.
The poor girl was incredibly embarrassed and turned to me to apologize and I lost it!
I looked him square in the eye and said “How dare you dress down a staff member in public! I manage a staff of 60 and would NEVER yell at my staff in front of anyone because it is incredibly unprofessional and embarrassing for every person standing in this line! Where is the manager?” I asked and proceeded to hunt him down.
I spent 10 minutes dressing down the manager in his office and told him that I would take it to the corporate level if that man was not promptly fired for his actions.
I found out later that he had been harassing this poor girl for weeks and no one had gone to the manager about it out of fear of retribution. I never again saw that assistant manger and later heard that he was fired on the spot after I left. The staff was so much nicer and happier without him there and I received a personal letter of apology from the manager that thanked me for letting him know what had happened that day.
BTW, I have done this 3 other times at different places and had the same outcome at all of them. I am not looking for someone to be fired when I walk in the door, but I know what it feels like to have a boss that thinks it’s okay to terrorize his staff and I refuse to allow it to happen in front of me ever again.
No one has the right to go after a staff member in front of customers. It is unprofessional and makes those in charge look like they are power hungry bullies who out of control.
Someone has to be the champion of those who are too afraid to speak because they are so afraid to lose their job, and being the loudmouth that I am, I am happy to step up!
I am a pediatric dentist. I had a patient who was autistic and had ADHD (male, 5 years) with a huge swelling on his cheek because of an infected tooth. Generally, 5 years old understand and sit on the chair, but because of his problems, he just wouldn’t sit and made a mayhem in the clinic. My assistant then restrained the child and we drained the pus.
Now, the mother started to cry when the payment part came. She told us she was separated from her husband and he wasn’t paying support. Because of the special child, she couldn’t even work, so please make it free.
Thankfully, my assistant knew her. She and her husband had two apartments worth 7 cr each in Mumbai and were in the middle of a deal worth another couple crores. My assistant was with the broker who had initiated the deal, so he knew for sure. But the lady wouldn’t budge. At the end, she paid 50 percent and left, and didn’t turn up for the next appointment.
Fast forward a month, the kid had swelling and pain again, because of the incomplete treatment. She pleaded to come, and promised to pay. But this time, because of the pain, the kid didn’t allow me to even have a look. He was feverish and in a bad condition.
So I told the parents (dad had also come) that the kid would need a treatment under general anesthesia in a proper hospital. We explained everything, they nodded with great interest, then asked for the cost. It was going to cost more than a lakh.
The dad straightaway asked me to slash my charges completely. Because, anyway I was earning from rest of the patients and didn’t really need the money. Then he asked for the cheapest hospital possible. I told him I don’t go to charitable places because of questionable hygiene, and lack of ICU. I don’t compromise with the safety. He then argued for an hour over the charges. I refused to budge. I have done numerous free cases, but I wasn’t going to do charity here. He then asked me to wait for two months as he had enquired about an insurance plan, and the wait period was two months. And give the kid medicines to stop the pain.
I was aghast. I told him the kid needed treatment now. All his teeth were in a bad shape. And medicines wouldn’t help after a while, and it wasn’t his decision to make. The medicines also have numerous side effects, if given unmonitored.
Then he started to blame me for the charges. I politely told him to go to a govt hospital where he would be treated for free. He declined, because they had a really long waiting list, just to be seen.
Lastly, he told me to go ahead, but that if his kid had any problem post treatment, he would see me in the court.
I folded my hands, and asked him to leave. Anyway I didn’t want to treat after such a long argument. And no one wants to work under threats.
He got furious and stormed out. We heaved a sigh of relief.
He kept calling for the next few days, bargaining. Even told me he would refer me ultra rich patients if I treated his boy for free.
No thanks, I said. I am happy with my patients who trust me.
So, a super rich man and his wife(at least for me) declining urgent healthcare for his kid to save money and insulting the doctor is the cheapest and most despicable person for me.
Cooter (Turtle) Stew
2023 11 10 15 14
Ingredients
2 to 3 pounds cooter*
2 quarts water
4 tablespoons cooking oil
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 large onions, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons minced garlic
10 peeled, seeded tomatoes or 2 large cans tomatoes
1 small can tomato paste
3/4 cup chopped celery
1 cup green spring onion tops
1 pinch each paprika and cayenne
4 bay leaves
1 1/4 cups good sherry (not cooking sherry)
1 tablespoon molasses or brown sugar
6 to 8 hardboiled eggs, chopped
3 potatoes, peeled and cubed
Seasoned salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 cup crumbled bacon
* Substitute dark-meat chicken, catfish, veal, or all three.
Instructions
Cover meat with water and parboil on medium heat for 20 minutes.
Set aside to cool and then trim to small chunks. Skim fat from broth and set aside.
Heat oil to just short of smoking. Stir in flour and cook, stirring constantly, for 15-20 minutes to make a dark roux.
Add big onions, garlic, tomatoes and tomato paste.
Add 4 cups of reserved broth and meat and cook 30 minutes on medium-high.
Add celery, spring onions, seasonings, bay leaves, sherry and molasses or brown sugar and cook 30 minutes. Add water to thin stew, if needed.
Add chopped eggs and cook for 1 1/2 hours.
Add potatoes and cook 20 to 30 minutes longer, until potatoes are tender.
Taste and add seasoned salt and pepper.
Sprinkle bacon over top. Remove bay leaves.
Serve in large bowls with a salad on the side and hot bread, preferably corn bread made in a black iron skillet.
I watched an elderly man in San Francisco, on the tough corner of Eddy and Hyde streets, being threatened by a thuggish stranger on the street, and being told “I’ll kick your ass.”
The old man laughed, and said quietly, “No, you won’t.”
The thug made a quick move and the old man flinched. The thug laughed and said, “Scared?” The old man said, “Yes. And it’s not healthy to scare me.”
Suddenly the thug was on his back on the sidewalk and the old man was sitting on his chest and beating him across the face, still talking quietly, saying “You better not mess with strangers. I could easily kill you, but I won’t. But you’ll have enough pain so that you’ll remember this for a long [BAM] long [BAM] time.” [BAM]
The old man got up, dusted himself off, picked up his dropped belongings, and left the thug laying bleeding and dazed on the street.
The “Urban Alchemy” private security people across the street, stationed in the area as part of the city government’s last desperate attempt to maintain civil order in the anarchic “Tenderloin” district, didn’t even have time to react. It was over that quick.
I was in awe. My jaw literally dropped. I was walking ten feet behind them, I heard and saw everything. I’m pretty old myself, and I’m no stranger to street confrontations. I’ve never seen any such situation where the outcome was like that. Not ever.
And I’ve never envied one of the participants so much in my entire life.
Yes, if you can get sea water to evaporate, you get salt. However, you need to get a lot of sea water to evaporate to get an appreciable amount of salt out of it. For that you need a lot of flat land by the seashore. It needs to be at or very close to sea level so that you can let the water roll in before you close off your salt pans. And you need a lot of warm, dry, sunny weather to evaporate the sea water and leave the salt behind. Land behind the sea shore rises too quickly? Can’t make salt. Too much rain? Can’t make salt. Storms driving large waves that wash over into the salt pans? Can’t make salt. Too cold or humid so evaporation is slow? Can’t make (meaningful amounts of) salt.
So it turns out that there are actually very few places where it’s actually feasible to make salt by evaporating sea water. So few that those very, very few places which can historically grew rich by doing it and salt mining could remain a viable competitor. Venice, for example, occupied a shallow lagoon backed up by marshes. The sheltered lagoon protected the marshes from large storm surges, the marshes weren’t too elevated to convert into salt pans, and the Mediterranean has a warm, sunny climate. Consequently, it first became wealthy in the salt trade. But you simply couldn’t do that around places like Genoa or Bruges, which had the wrong geography and/or the wrong climate. Sure, you can get salt out of sea water, but it’s a lot harder to do on an industrial scale with historical technology.
Long before I even heard of a “Chicago pizza”, I would make these pizzas that my brother and I referred to as “swamp pizza”. What I would do is take a “off the shelf” pizza kit and raise the dough extra long. And instead of flattening it out in the standard pizza shape, I would use it to line a deep Pyrex dish.
deep dish pizza aka swamp
I would then fill it with the sauce and cover it up with cheese. Sometimes I would add meat and mushrooms, and always I would cover with lots and lots of cheese.
It’s been decades since I made these little Swamp Pizzas. But every now and then, I get a hankering for a swamp pizza on a lazy afternoon, and a black and white vintage science fiction or film noir movie. I will tell you that it is perfect for spending a snowy Winter day alone.
Today…
Doggie story
“My dog gave her life to save my son.
Cindy, my dog, was six years old and she was the most home-loving and obedient dog. I loved her and she knew it. When my son was born, she was immediately very protective over him. She’d sit beside his pram for hours, popping her front legs up onto the pram every now and then to make sure he was ok.
My son was almost three years old. We lived near a busy road and we were super vigilant at always child-proofing the front door – without exception. My son, as young children can be, was into everything. We’d often find him in the kitchen at 4 am with a concoction of cereal, milk, dry dog food, eggs, etc all mixed up on the kitchen floor. He was that kind of child – into everything. He also watched everything we would do and try to mimic us in his own unique way, often with highly amusing consequences.
One morning, again around 4 am, he somehow managed to ‘escape’ through his bedroom window. To rewind a little, Cindy knew not to go outside (apart from the garden) without us. We could have left the front door open all day (when my son was visiting with grandparents) and she’d never venture out. She also knew that our son wasn’t allowed to go through the front door without us, evidenced by her pushing at him if he fiddled with the front door handle. She didn’t know that it was double locked. This day, she followed my son through the window.
At 5 am, the police woke us knocking on the door. Their words were – “your son was nearly killed but your dog copped it”. They then reiterated what the lorry driver had said…
He told them that he was driving along in the dark and in the distance, he could see something ‘light colored’ moving on the road. As he got closer, he could see a dog at the side of the road barking and barking at the ‘light colored’ something. At the last moment, he realized that this was a child and was about to swerve. He said he could see the dog, still barking and glancing between the truck and the child. While the driver was braking, the dog ran out into the road, jumped at the child’s back and threw him out of the path of the lorry and at the same time, the lorry hit the dog and killed her.
According to the police, the driver said that he’d never believe what he saw unless it was with his own eyes. He said that the dog definitely knew the danger which is why she was barking so anxiously. He said “that dog just saved that kid’s life and it knew what it was doing.”
That was 39 years ago and I still miss Cindy every day. She was a rough collie (a lassie dog) and I can understand why this breed was chosen for the movies.”
School Bus story
“I drive a school bus and have a 6 grader who I would like to talk about.
Last week he was talking about an elderly neighbor not leaving her house for weeks. I tried to explain how hard it could be for her to do things. On Tuesday I pulled up and he wasn’t at the stop waiting. I looked over and saw him shoveling her porch. I was early so I waited for him. The other kids asked why I waited. I said anyone helping someone deserves a few extra minutes. All the kids started asking him questions about his neighbor. The next day 7 children got on the bus with blankets, food and cards for the elderly woman. I delivered them after worked. Now everyday she stands on the porch and the whole bus waves good morning. I am so proud of him for stepping up and doing the right thing. He taught all the children something important. I smile with pride in my heart because of the extraordinary children I have on my bus.” .
A Secret Global Coup Has Happened!
Let’s say there are 10 people. 1 is a sociopath and 2 are brutish thugs. The sociopath will use the two thugs to keep the rest in line using violence. The other 7 people will be forced to work long and hard so that these 3 can live lives of pleasure and privilege. This is the story of human civilization ever since the agricultural revolution. Countries are people farms; most humans have become farm animals and are treated as such.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Leonard
Matthew Leonard, born on November 26, 1929, in Eutaw, Alabama, embodied the spirit of service from an early age. Raised in a segregated society, Leonard attended Ullman High School in Birmingham, Alabama. He was not only a student but also a Boy Scout, instilling in him the values of honor and duty.
As a teenager, Leonard took on a job at a local drugstore, earning a modest $15 per week. This hard-earned income was dedicated to helping his mother meet the family’s financial needs. Even in his youth, Leonard demonstrated a deep sense of responsibility and commitment to those he cared for.
In 1947, at the age of 18, Matthew Leonard enlisted in the U.S. Army, beginning a remarkable journey that would span nearly two decades. He dedicated himself to a life of service, embracing the challenges and responsibilities that came with it.
Leonard served as a drill sergeant and trained young recruits at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. But as the war in Vietnam broke out, Leonard’s wife said he struggled to watch those young recruits, who weren’t much older than his sons, go to war and die. So, even though he was close to retirement, he volunteered to deploy in the hope of making a difference.
On February 28, 1967, in the heart of Vietnam, Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Leonard, serving as the platoon sergeant for Company B of the 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, demonstrated unparalleled bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.
Sgt. Leonard’s valorous journey unfolded near Suoi Da, Vietnam, where his platoon suddenly found themselves under a hail of enemy fire. The enemy, armed with small arms, automatic weapons, and hand grenades, vastly outnumbered Leonard’s platoon. Amid the chaos, the platoon’s commander and several key leaders were among the first to be wounded, thrusting Leonard into a position of leadership.
With remarkable composure, Leonard rallied his platoon to repel the initial enemy assault. He swiftly organized a defensive perimeter, redistributed ammunition, and bolstered the morale of his fellow soldiers. Even in the midst of battle, he exemplified unwavering leadership.
As the enemy’s assault intensified, Leonard’s selflessness and bravery shone brighter. When a wounded soldier found himself outside the safety of the defensive perimeter, Leonard risked his life to rescue him. It was during this act of heroism that Leonard himself was struck by a sniper’s bullet, shattering his hand.
Undeterred by his injuries, Leonard refused medical attention and continued to fight. He moved tirelessly from position to position, directing counterfire against the enemy, who had positioned a machine gun that threatened the entire perimeter.
Just as the situation seemed dire, Leonard’s own platoon’s machine gun malfunctioned, adding to the peril. Without hesitation, Leonard crawled to the malfunctioning weapon, determined to get it back into operation. During this critical moment, the enemy machine gun began strafing nearby soldiers, hitting Leonard’s gunner and others.
Summoning every ounce of his strength, Leonard rose to his feet and charged toward the enemy gun. Despite suffering multiple gunshot wounds, he managed to eliminate the enemy machine gun’s crew, silencing the threat.
Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Leonard’s indomitable spirit and unwavering commitment to his comrades and mission endured until the very end. Despite being gravely wounded, he propped himself against a tree and continued to return fire until he could no longer carry on.
His incredible sacrifice and valor were acknowledged with the Medal of Honor, a testament to the extraordinary dedication and courage he displayed in the face of adversity.
Poor Cat Left To Decompose While She Is Alive | Rescue Before And After
Back when I was a young teen (more moons ago than I can count) I worked as a law clerk during the summers at my father’s office in downtown Chicago. Mostly it was busy work, matching mail with files, pulling files for court and some light typing.
On occasion I would go with him to court when he argued cases before the industrial commission (work related accidents).
One of these cases involved an individual who claimed his shoulder injury was so bad he was permanently and totally disabled from working ever again. He was a Russian immigrant and so his lawyer had to use an interpreter to question him during the hearing.
What they didn’t know was that my father had been a Russian Interrogator for the Air Force during the Korean War, and spoke fluent Russian. He had been teaching me conversational Russian while I was growing up, so I was able to follow along for the most part.
When his lawyer asked the question : “Mr. Petrovitch, how high can you lift your right arm” their interpreter actually said “Raise your right hand a small amount and act as if you are in severe pain” to which the man raised his hand a little, groaned and grimaced, squinting his eyes.
On cross-examination, after a laundry list of standard questions (through the interpreter, of course) my dad said in fluent Russian “HANDS UP OR I’LL SHOOT!” The man immediately raised both arms and stretched them towards the ceiling, showing no limitations or pain behavior at all.
Of course the other lawyer started shouting his objections, the interpreter yelled at the petitioner (plaintiff) that he was stupid and the judge covered his face with his hands to try and stop laughing out loud.
Go to the school and demand the phone back immediately. Having a phone is not illegal. If they balk at giving it back and spew some nonsense about not allowing phones at school tell them your child doesn’t have his phone in class but you as his parent require that he carry it with him to be able to track him and reach him as needed. There are many tracking apps now. Calmly, Demand they hand over the phone immediately. If they do not, call the police right there from the school office to report a theft. Get the names and positions of everyone witnessing this. Tell the school that if you don’t get the phone by the next day you will be buying a new phone and your attorney will be in contact with the school regarding the school paying for the new phone plus the old phone plus the attorney’s bill. Ask when the next school board meeting is and suggest you will be attending to discuss the dismissal of all involved, on charges of petty larceny.
You Won’t Βelieve What Τhey Have In Stοre For Us Next..
Let me see if I got this correct. The tax payer now pays for Gov stores and also pays to fill those stores with food and other items again using tax payer money. Then the tax payer goes to buy the food in the Gov store and gets tax on top of that. Crazy times we are living in!
Prison food is not great. It is not served on fine china or plated to be visually pleasing to the eye.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are seldom served.
For five years I went twice a week to spend time with inmates as we worked together on a book project for at risk kids.
We were all volunteers for our community, as we sat on opposite sides of the table.
One evening when I entered the men’s dormitory, where we met, an inmate handed me a small cardboard box.
He said, “We do not have anything to give you to thank you for coming here and treating us with respect. We want you to know we appreciate your giving value to our lives by using our stories to help others.”
I felt humbled and astonished when I saw the contents of the box. It was a red apple, some popcorn, and another small edible item. On the side was a handwritten note with many signatures.
Anyone who has spent time in prison knows fresh fruit is like gold. A thank you in any form is not to be taken lightly.
Inmates sharing their food with an outsider is not common. Sharing food that is fresh and seldom served is momentous.
Their gifts were not only humane. They were risky. Giving gifts was not in the rule book. I looked over at the nearby guards who also chose to be humane that day and let me know they understood the importance of what was happening.
They looked at the hardened faces of the men in my class, whose softened eyes were asking permission. The guards nodded while I fought to keep back the tears.
In all my years of teaching and rendering service to others, I have never felt such gratitude for the priviege as I did that day.
Years later, seeing a red apple stirs my spirit and reminds me, humane and selfless acts still abound.
In unexpected places, gratitude can still civilize us when we least expect it, for both the giver and the recipient.
P.S. The book is available to be borrowed for free through Amazon Kdp select. It is titled, “Redirecting Kids for Success” Prison Prevention…for at risk kids grades 9-12.
Breaking! China just dealt a DEVASTATING blow to U.S. Dollar Dominance
Breaking news on this Monday out of China where we have new data on the dumping of U.S. treasuries and what this means for the U.S. dollar dominance. Saudi Arabia also dumping U.S. treasuries at an increased rate over the past few weeks. What is going on?
Xi changed nothing. You’ve been listening to Western propaganda garbage.
Nearly the entire Global South is behind China. More than 40 countries have expressed a wish to join China-led BRICS and SCO. More than 150 countries have signed up to the BRI and wish to receive Chinese assistance.
China has treated America, Britain and EU with utmost respect. The reverse, unfortunately, has not been true. China is sick and tired of their arrogance and Cold War mentality.
Why did the West change their attitude towards China? Riddle me this.
She’s lying. She has no idea what to do. What she’s trying to selli is the idea that she does.
Here’s the problem. Americans want fentanyl. Enough Americans want fentanyl as to make it worth the enormous risk of smuggling either it, or the raw materials to make it, into the United States. Capitalism 101. And there is no way to stop that. None. Every attempt we’ve ever made to stop drug use by prohibition has been not only an utter failure, but has caused us more trouble than the actual problem we were trying to fix.
There’s a deeper problem. Fentanyl is a symptom, not a cause. And that cause is the utter hopelessness and the lack of resources for the poor in the US. We’ve literally criminalized poverty. We have the weakest social safety net in the industrial world, and we’ve decided that a tax structure that makes it possible for a handful of men to amass fortunes that can buy them freedom from the law, is a good thing even if it leaves 20% of the country living below the poverty line in an information and resource vacuum that leaves most trapped.
Preying on the poor is hugely profitable, and the capitalists have risen to the task. We choose to look away and complain.
HarmonyOS 4.0 reaches over 60 million Huawei devices in less than 2 months
Hauwei unveiled HarmonyOS 4.0, the latest version of its operating system, on August 4. The new iteration brought several changes to the user interface, as well as new features and improvements. Huawei has been quickly rolling out the new software to eligible devices. Earlier this month, we reported that 10 million Huawei smartphones and tablets were already running HarmonyOS 4.0. And today, the company confirmed that the OS has now made its way to over 60 million devices.
Huawei announced 60 million installations of HarmonyOS 4 on Huawei smartphones and tablet devices at its Autumn 2023 Flagship Product Launch event today. The company said it added an average of 1.2 million new users each day. This is just after less than 2 months of the formal announcement of the software.
HarmonyOS 4.0 comes with several notable changes, including a variety of rich theme templates and stylized layout designs. You can select the colors of your app icons and set emoji wallpapers and home screens by choosing your favorite emoji.
It also lets you better manage your notifications by clustering them together and sorting them by importance. The notifications for the same app are now stacked into dynamic cards so you can see more information about each notification without having to open it. HarmonyOS 4.0 also lets you identify text and images by double-clicking and then long-pressing to select them.
Huawei had a busy day today. It launched half a dozen new products in China, including a Huawei Mate 60 RS Ultimate Design smartphone with satellite calling and a ceramic body. In addition, the company unveiled the FreeBuds Pro 3 as well as the Watch GT 4.
U.S Sanctions Failed As China’s Shenzhen Imports Integrated Circuits From All Around the World!
“We see the “US of Amurdikkka is fastly declining in to a third world company/country/corporation.” Fall Babylon fall, youve destroyed so many. Now enjoy the ride down, you’ll never rise again.”
I’ve been wondering whether or not to answer this… The “wrong person” is my daughter (stepdaughter really,but I’m Daddy now and forever so that settles that) and the people doing the “picking a fight”were her ex boyfriend and his father.. I didn’t personally witness this because I was in Iraq at the time,but believe me I sure heard about it.
Daughter is tall and not a delicate flower even though she has all the requisite standard equipment to attract stares and suchlike, including a startling resemblance to Gal Gadot ,and I always emphasized to all my kids the importance of self confidence ,so she carries herself with a certain pride. She has Blackfeet blood along with Irish and Norwegian and who knows what else, girl has a temper too,what can I say..
Anyways,ex boyfriend and father spot her walking down the sidewalk one weekend night and follow her,asking her to get in and go for a cruise.. She says no,but they apparently don’t want to take no for an answer and pull ahead and stop, ex BF Gets out of the car and grabs her elbow and pulls her towards the car,she pulls away and he grabs her again, by this time she is almost in the door. I had taught my kids to avoid punching someone and use their elbows if the person was close enough, which ex BF certainly was unfortunately for his dumb ass, because Daughter proceeds to elbow him repeatedly in the face with backswing strikes on her way away from the car, dislocating ex BF‘S jaw and shattering his eye socket and breaking his nose, and naturally stopped any hostilities on his part, but ex BF’s dad was pushed by this time and ran around the car and accosted Daughter, catching a 50 yard field goal kick in his balls for his troubles..I taught my kids well.
Well, as an American woman, I would recommend that China’s leaders maintain a strong and unyielding stance against the outright bully tactics of my country’s government. To be fair, the US isn’t the only country upping their anti-China sentiments but it is the country I am from so that is what I primarily speak of.
I would say to China, you have more than paid your dues and earned your right as a superpower in world affairs. Hold your heads proudly because you have every right to. There is no need to hide your strength anymore. It is time to let it be on display.
You are one of, if not the oldest country with 5000 years of continuous history. You don’t need to bow to anyone. You don’t need to apologize for being great. You don’t need to sell your technology to the US. You don’t need to accept blame for a virus that was not your fault. You don’t have to back off of your initiatives because other countries don’t approve. You don’t have to take acts of aggression from our spy planes flying in your airspace. You don’t have to tolerate the blatant disrespect to your consulate that was closed in our country. Your people don’t have to accept racism when they come to the US to attend college, work in research, or just visit as tourists.
Please don’t let anyone else push you around anymore. Never again. Let that be your motto from here on out.
Germany Freaks Out – China, PLEASE Buy Our Cars!
“As a European, I am so ashamed of our political class and what they have turned the Eurozone into. If the european project is just a facade for American hegemony, then let it die and this is extremely hard for me to say, because I see the eurozone and union as a great idea but ONLY if we have autonomy both strategically, economic and militarily. These two years have shown we have none of it and this is why I write this. It is mindbuggling/unbelievable stupid what is happening right now.”
Let me tell a story about a Clerk who worked with me who made me believe that The Godfather (Book) theory that The Simplest and most humble man can avenge himself against the most powerful of men with patience
We worked in a Branch where i was temporarily in charge of recovery. The branch was a Scale IV Branch but for some reason a Scale V AGM had been deputed to the branch for a temporary basis due to some shortage or something.
This Asst General Manager who had a chip on his block. You had a good natured thirty something old clerk who worked in the department and who was a pretty good guy. He owned a family business as well and would very often give us discounts. I went on many recovery missions with him and he was always a cheerful and happy go lucky type.
Our Old Branch Manager was a good man but once he retired – until his replacement came- this AGM was posted and he was a PRIG. He was angry at working in a Scale IV post and showed it on people.
Now our Clerk always went from 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM to pick up his daughter, take her to the family business premise, drop her there, have tea and return. The lunch ended at 2:30 so he would always be around 45 minutes late which he would make up by working from 5:30 to 6:15 in the evening. He would help a lot of us.
This arrangement was unofficially agreed upon by the Old Branch Manager. The New Prig did not agree . He believed it was against Bank rules and decided to take the clerk on. Now the clerk requested the AGM to give him the time off but the AGM refused. He decided to run the department efficiently (Instead he made it highly inefficient). He refused to repair a water filter (Back then Aquaguards were rare) and calculated the cost of Pens and White Paper.
One day – the wife of the clerk came. The clerk was away for recovery and the peon took her straight to the AGM. She told the AGM that she had to go to her mother and requested that her husband pick up the child as usual. Back then there were no cellphones or SMS and the lady had come to the office for the first time. The AGM was preoccupied with something and forgot (I believe this. Others say he deliberately did what he did but i believe he was preoccupied)
Bottom line – the message was not conveyed. It was 2:50 PM or so when the Peon told the clerk that his wife had visited. The Clerk was puzzled and walked into the AGMs office but the AGM was not there. The Clerk shrugged and continued on with his work believing that his daughter had picked up the child. It was 4 PM when the brother of the Clerk called the Office and asked where the child was? The Clerk was stunned and believed the child would be with his wife but Myself and few others decided to ask the AGM (Bank Hierarchy especially PSU hierarchy is a big thing. Approaching an AGM when you are a Scale II officer is a scary prospect) but the Clerk was out of the doors.
The Good thing was that the Child was a clever girl and simply sat outside with the Watchman of the School and was relieved when the father picked her up. The Father brought her to the branch and he was hugely relieved.
What happened next was straight out of the Malayalam Movie Drivers License
The AGM who saw a child and commotion – shouted at the top of his voice. He abused the Clerk in the loudest words calling him inefficient and moron. The Clerk also raised his voice and talked about his wifes message and the AGM said “I am not your messenger or Postman”. By the time the others separated them – the Clerk had literally been abused in front of his girl who was watching the whole thing (She was in Class IV i think)
The Clerk silently took his daughter home burning with humiliation. The local association leader told him to stage a Dharna but the clerk refused. He told me “God will take care” and i thought it was the usual sentimental nonsense. He remained on his desk, never asked for any leave from the HC, did his work and we all presumed the issue was finished.
Then An Opportunity came
Back then there was no Core Banking. A Customer came with a Fixed Deposit Receipt for Rs. 6 Lakh and wanted Cash. The Officer in question looked at the register and saw that the FD number was not mentioned (No Computers also. Back then we had Ledgers where FD numbers would be mentioned and recorded). The Customer was known to the AGM though and the AGM told the Officer to go ahead and encash the FD.
However it was after Lunch and the normal officer was gone for the day. I am a law and recovery officer and have no role to play so there were no officers. The AGM promptly asked the Clerk to encash the FD and pay the cash (Highly irregular) and the Clerk said “Sir the FD number is not on the ledger”. The AGM arrogantly told him that the customer could not be made to wait and so the Clerk paid him.
Once the Customer was paid and left, the Officer returned the next day or so and searched in every register but could not find a trace of the FD record. He told the AGM and the AGM called the customer but the customer was gone (It was a honest explanation. The Customer did not cheat etc. He just was away somewhere else). The AGM was now sweating beads. The Clerk shrugged. “I am just a clerk. I follow instructions. You instructed me to encash the FD” – he said and pointed at a few of us as witnesses.
The Officer was told by the AGM to give a few days but the same evening the clerk told him “Sir…if you report this today then you are clear but if you take a few days then they may think you are also involved”. The Officer decided to not take chances and reported it.
What happened next was unbelievable. The Big Boss arrived personally and blasted the AGM. Then some people came to go through the ledgers and found Rs. 6 Lakh shortage (A Huge sum back then) and told the AGM he had to make the amount good or they would report to the cops. The AGM was shivering but nothing could be done. The cops arrived and took him to the station. Now the Clerk was a local and the cops were locals. The AGM was an outsider – so they sweated him, threatened him, took him to his house in a jeep in front of his wife and children, talked to his neighbors etc. I was asked to be there at the station as a lawyer and the cops took iron rods and torture devices in front of me. When i said “What the hell is this ??” – the SI laughed and said “Sir! We are not mad. This is just for getting him to talk”
The poor man stayed the entire day at the Station. The next day the Customer returned. He had presented an FD receipt for another branch of our bank so the number was not in our ledger. He gave the FD receipt of our branch and the ledger confirmed the number and everything was okay.
But the AGM was finished. He was humiliated in every way possible. He took leave for 4–5 days and asked for a Transfer
It was then that the clerk told me “Sir. On that day itself i saw that this FD receipt was from a different branch. Had he been a better man – i would have told him then and there. I would have told the customer itself. None of this would have happened”
I told him he had been too cruel but he said “There is nothing worse than being yelled at in front of your child for no fault of your own”.
The AGM who was destined to become CMD – resigned from the bank unable to bear the humiliation of the incident (Though it lasted exactly for 14 – 15 hours after which it was all over). He joined Madura Courts and his career was never the same. He later began to sell Reuters Screens on a commission basis.
The Moral of the Story is – Humiliation by your boss unjustly will always come back to bite the boss. This Clerk who was such a good man that when i was transfered – he travelled in a lorry with my furniture to ensure that the local packers dont take me for a ride. Yet he never forgot his humiliation and destroyed the life of the AGM.
If you are a Boss – Never humiliate your underlings. Call them separately and tick them off but never in front of others. Easiest way to make enemies.
True for all fields.
Pizzeria Uno Chicago Deep Dish Pizza
This is a clone recipe of the best Chicago-style pizza you will ever eat!
Servings: 8
Pan Dough 1 cup warm tap water (110-115 degrees F) 1/4 ounce active dry yeast 3 1/2 cups flour 1/2 cup course ground cornmeal 1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt 1/4 cup vegetable oil
Pizza Topping 1 pound mozzarella cheese, sliced thin 1 pound Italian sausage, removed from the casing and crumbled 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained 2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced 5 fresh basil leaves, chopped fine 4 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
Pour the warm water into a large mixing bowl and dissolve the yeast with a fork.
Add 1 cup of flour, all of the cornmeal, salt, and vegetable oil, and mix well with a spoon.
Continue stirring in the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time, until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl. Flour your hands and the work surface and knead the ball of dough until it is no longer sticky.
Let the dough rise in an oiled bowl, sealed with plastic wrap, for 45-60 minutes in a warm place, until it has doubled in size.
Punch it down and knead it briefly.
Press it into an oiled 15-inch deep dish pizza pan until it comes 2 inches up the sides and is even on the bottom of the pan.
Let the dough rise 15-20 minutes before filling.
Heat the oven to 500 degrees F.
While the dough is rising, prepare the filling.
Cook the sausage until it is no longer pink and drain the excess fat.
When the dough has finished its second rising, lay the cheese over the dough shell.
Distribute the sausage and garlic over the cheese.
Top with the tomatoes.
Sprinkle on the seasonings and Parmesan cheese.
Bake for 15 minutes at 500 degrees F, then lower the temperature to 400 degreesF and finish baking for 25-35 minutes longer.
Lift up a section of the crust from time to time with a spatula to check its color. The crust will be golden brown when done.
Serve immediately.
Cat Sisters Meet After 9 Months Apart – Do They Recognize Each Other?
The Ukraine War was one of the worst miscalculations of the West and the Stupidest
The aim was to
Weaken Russia and destroy it Economically
Weaken Russia Globally and make it a Pariah
Give China a strong message and frighten China into following the Biden Doctrine
What’s happened is:-
A resurgent Russia that has something to fight for at last and has grown stronger every day
A Russo Sino Alliance that is fast becoming a nice power bloc with many nations with resources and heavy sanctions now drifting to them
Loss of Confidence in the West by 80% of the world and belief in a Multipolar world
Waning Western impact of Sanctions
Ensure China knows it’s War and prepare for it instead of catching them off guard
Today, Ukraine has been brutalized badly
It has lost 33.7% of pre SMO population as Refugees or now Russian Citizens in the Donors region and Kherson and Zaprozhye
It has lost its entire production capacity and it’s own weapon reserves have been brutally depleted and it relies on western arms and money which is dwindling every day
The West has spent $ 130 Billion so far on Ukraine and most of this money has been salted away due to severe corruption
Ukraine is sending more and more men to die
Russia meanwhile is happy with it’s grind and move strategy, minimizing casualties and enjoying the growth of their own industries in the MI complex
Scenario 1:-
The West want to FREEZE the conflict
Russia said No
Maybe Russia would be incentivized to do so like say offer to remove sanctions on Russia or maybe persuade China to convince Russia
Bleak chance of this happening
Scenario 2:-
Ukraine is destroyed
Russia decides to move from SMO to war and start hitting and destroying Ukraine like US did to Iraq or Afghanistan
Zelensky would flee and most leaders would flee then and Ukraine would capitulate
Timeline: 2025 March or April
Biden will not be President. He may not even be nominated as the Democratic candidate, so he will vindictively carry this till 19/1/25
Scenario 3:-
Trump is elected
Trump only has one term left and knows once he is elected, he has no more fears and no need to worry about voters again
He may make a deal and force Zelensky to surrender and make a deal with Russia and China
Unlike 2016, he won’t have the fear now because he can’t stand for any more elections
Scenario 4:-
The famous BAKYAN scenario
Poland moves into West Ukraine on invitation from Ukraine and forms a protectorate for West Ukraine
Central & remaining Ukraine is given security guarantees akin to Article V by Poland (Proxy by USA) and formally remains as the NEW UKRAINE
Donbass, Zaprozhye, Kherson are abandoned by Ukraine and Poland but not recognized by the West or UN as part of Russia and only as break away republics
However in reality, those territories will never return to Ukraine again along with Crimea for a long time
Russia will declare a cease fire to avoid clashing with Poland, a Nato power
Zelensky will be mostly arrested due to corruption and replaced by someone else
Timeline :- 30/6/2024 , a clean 4–5 months before the US Elections
The Destruction of Los Angeles | 2012 (John Cusack, Morgan Lily, Liam James)
I have not, but an interesting backfire happened with a close friend’s father, George.
Meet George, he is a PhD Astrophysicist and works in a very specialized field for the United States Department of Defense through a Defense Contractor. He has developed a number of unique solutions over his career that solved some very big problems for some very expensive black projects.
After over 30 years on the job he had moved to the top of his career path, he led a sizable group of physicists and engineers, but was not in management. Following a reorganization, George and his band of merry eggheads found themselves under a manager that had very little experience managing. When budget cuts came down, the green manager started reviewing the personnel files and, unsurprisingly, George was the highest paid person in the department. George was given the option to take an early retirement or be laid off. He was getting close to full retirement age and taking early retirement took a large chunk out of the pension he was counting on. He even offered to give up salary or work part time to address the budget needs. The manager would hear nothing of it.
Once George’s retirement was announced, a number the physicists and engineers approached the manager to warn him that there were solutions that only George fully understood and if there became a need to update or change some of the solutions, they may not be able to do it. George gracefully retired from the company and headed off to teach at the local university. About a year later, he heard from a number of his former team that there had been layoffs and terminations from the team by the same manager. A contract had come in to the company to modify one of George’s unique solutions and the remaining team was unable to make it work. The manager was under the gun to deliver and when it wasn’t working, he was accusing the team of being lazy and incompetent.
Not too long after, the Manager contacted George and asked him if he would come back on a short-term basis, George declined because he was happy teaching at the university. The manager continued to pester George until he finally agreed to come into the office to talk about what it would take to bring him back. George told the manager that he would come with his terms and that the meeting had to include the HR Director and the department Director.
George’s terms:
The company take back his early retirement and bridge his service so he could reach full retirement. (The manager groaned, but grudgingly agreed.)
Any of the team that was fired or forced to resign would be offered the option to come back. (The manager was furious, but George demanded that he had to have his team to be successful, so the manager agreed)
He become the manager of the department. (The manager threw up his hands and said it would never happen, there was only one manager of the department.)
The department director agreed to George’s last term.
We have A guardian Angel his name is Harry Kim.
Kathryn Janeway was a mother figure to almost ALL the crew … the clear exceptions being her first and second officers … but she ESPECIALLY was so to Harry Kim.
Oh my god, no. God, no… no no… I’d rather they stay dead.
Jesus, the mere thought of it gives me anxiety and stress.
My father died very suddenly last year. It was like my aunt talked to him on Friday, and he died of a heart attack on Sunday in his house.
For a few months, I kept thinking if I had any regrets. If I knew he would die, what would I say to him, or what would I want to do with him?
I came up with nothing.
It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. In fact, I have a LOT to say, so much so that I had therapy for years so that I could process and perhaps recover from all that childhood trauma from his abuse and neglect.
Would I say that to him? No. Because he wouldn’t listen. Not only he wouldn’t listen, he would turn it around and make it my fault. He would make me feel that I somehow wronged him, that I should feel guilty and ashamed and beg him for forgiveness and ask him how I can make it better. He’s an emotional manipulator, and he will never change. Not even in death.
He had, in his own domineering kind of way, made some attempt to mend our relationship after his 3rd wife died. But I couldn’t help but think he was doing that not because he genuinely wanted to fix our father-daughter relationship but because he did the mental calculation and realized with his wife dead, I was the only person who would take care of him if he couldn’t care for himself. It’s all about him. Never about me.
After he died, I wondered if he’d come back and haunt me or if he would come visit me in my dreams. Not that I believe in such things, but my aunt said her father (my grandpa) had visited her several times. And I thought, “Oh, you want to come and haunt me? Go ahead. I have something I want to scream at you. So come and haunt me and see how it ends for you, Dad.”
I’ve never even dreamed of him once since he died.
Having him back to life for 24 hours is not going to change anything between us.
The same goes for my mom, who ran off with some artist when I was 18 months old. The same goes for my grandma, who had raised and abused me…
You all better stay the fuck dead because you ain’t gonna like what I have to say to you.
Quit Your Job In 2023, This is my way out
No more 9 to 5 job for me. Do you also struggle with not having time for more valuable things in life than your work, do you spend too much time working for others? Are you feeling frustrated and stressed about not having time to live your life to the fullest, this is my story of how I realized my dream of living a simpler and less stressful life by quitting my job and stopped working for others.
In the ever-evolving landscape of the global smartphone industry, Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, once relied heavily on Qualcomm chips to power its devices. However, recent years have witnessed a significant shift in Huawei’s chipset strategy as it began to develop its own chipsets and reduce its dependence on Qualcomm. This change in course raised questions and curiosity in the tech world. In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the reasons behind Huawei’s decision to distance itself from Qualcomm chips, explore the challenges and opportunities that this shift presents, and assess the implications for both Huawei and the larger smartphone ecosystem.
1: The Historical Nexus
1.1. Qualcomm’s Dominance
A brief overview of Qualcomm’s leading position in the semiconductor industry.
Huawei’s early partnership with Qualcomm and the Snapdragon chipset series.
1.2. Huawei’s Ascendancy
Huawei’s rise to global prominence as a smartphone manufacturer.
The integral role of Qualcomm chips in Huawei’s international success.
2: Huawei’s Push for In-House Chip Development
2.1. The Emergence of HiSilicon
The birth of Huawei’s semiconductor subsidiary, HiSilicon.
The strategic importance of in-house chip development.
2.2. The Rise of the Kirin Chipsets
Introduction to Huawei’s Kirin chipset series.
Technological advancements and innovations in Kirin chips.
2.3. The Competitive Edge
How HiSilicon’s chip development aligns with Huawei’s long-term goals.
The advantages of vertical integration and control over chip design.
3: U.S. Sanctions and Supply Chain Stumbles
3.1. The Unfolding U.S. Sanctions Saga
An examination of the U.S. sanctions imposed on Huawei.
How these sanctions impacted Huawei’s access to critical technologies, including Qualcomm chips.
3.2. Vulnerabilities in the Supply Chain
The precariousness of relying on foreign suppliers for critical components.
The central role of chipsets as a strategic resource in the smartphone industry.
4: HarmonyOS and Huawei’s Ambitious Vision
4.1. Huawei’s Vision for HarmonyOS
Introduction to HarmonyOS, Huawei’s proprietary operating system.
The strategic significance of developing an Android alternative.
4.2. A Unified Ecosystem
How HarmonyOS aims to provide a seamless user experience across devices.
The role of chipset compatibility in achieving the HarmonyOS vision.
5: Implications and Challenges
5.1. Disrupting the Smartphone Market
How Huawei’s departure from Qualcomm chips impacts the competitive landscape.
Implications for consumers, industry players, and market dynamics.
5.2. Pursuing Technological Self-Reliance
The broader implications of Huawei’s commitment to technological self-reliance.
Lessons for other tech giants facing similar geopolitical challenges.
5.3. The Road Ahead
The technological and market challenges Huawei faces in developing its own chipsets.
The importance of innovation, research, and development in overcoming these hurdles.
6: Consumer Perceptions and the Future Outlook
6.1. Consumer Reactions and Preferences
How Huawei’s decision to utilize its chipsets is perceived by consumers.
Factors influencing consumer preferences in the realm of smartphones.
6.2. Shaping the Future of Huawei Smartphones
Prospects for Huawei’s smartphone business in the absence of Qualcomm chips.
The role of design, innovation, software, and competitive pricing in defining Huawei’s future offerings.
Conclusion
The divergence of Huawei from Qualcomm chips signifies a monumental shift in strategy with far-reaching implications. While the impact of U.S. sanctions and supply chain disruptions are undeniable catalysts for this transition, Huawei’s investments in in-house chipset development and the vision of HarmonyOS underscore its unwavering commitment to technological self-sufficiency and innovation. As we conclude this article, we gain a comprehensive understanding of the complex factors influencing Huawei’s strategic decision and what the future holds for one of the world’s foremost smartphone manufacturers.
INDIAN NEWS is Cheap Western Propaganda
The Indian news channels like WION and ANI (Asean News International) have become cheap propaganda outlets for the Western Colonial Masters that have always ruled over the Indian population. This video shows beyond any doubt that India News is part of the Anti China propaganda network set up by American Politicians and Main Stream Media. It is no secret as they admit to it in this video that they have joined this movement of hate against China.
A young German soldier during WWII was ordered to check the house for Jews. After minutes of searching, he declares the house clear.
His commanding officer is unconvinced. “Schauen Sie in den Dachboden,” he orders. Check the attic.
“Die Luke ist offen! Die würden sich nicht dort verstecken!” The young soldier says. The attic door is wide open! Surely they wouldn’t hide there!
His commander shakes his head. “Schauen Sie trotzdem nach.” Go check anyway.
The soldier climbs the ladder. As he peers into the darkness, he sees at least a dozen Jews hiding in the attic. All women and children.
Their terrified faces look back at him. Nobody dares to move. The young soldier turns and shouts to his commander.
“Alles klar!” All clear.
The soldier closes the trapdoor, leaving the Jews in the dark. He will never see them again.
Decades later, one of the young children in the attic will recall the anonymous soldier’s kindness. Every single person in the attic survives the war. Many attribute their lives to the young man.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was a remarkable aircraft that could fly at speeds over Mach 3.2 and at altitudes up to 85,000 feet. It was the fastest manned aircraft ever flown and still holds many speed, altitude, and distance records for a manned aircraft.
Flying in such an extreme environment required special training and equipment for the pilots. The pilots of the SR-71 wore full-pressure suits that resembled those worn by astronauts. The suits protected them from low pressure, low temperature, and lack of oxygen at high altitudes. They also provided protection in case of an emergency ejection.
The pilots also had to cope with the high g-forces and acceleration that resulted from flying at such high speeds. The SR-71 could accelerate from Mach 1 to Mach 3 in less than 15 minutes, which put a lot of stress on the human body. The pilots had to undergo rigorous physical training and medical examinations to ensure they were fit for the mission. They also had to use special techniques to breathe and move their limbs during high-g maneuvers.
The pilots also experienced a unique sensation of speed when flying the SR-71. They could see the curvature of the Earth and the stars in broad daylight. They could also see the shock waves forming around the aircraft as it broke the sound barrier. The SR-71 flew so fast that it could outrun any missile or enemy aircraft that tried to intercept it. The pilots had to rely on their instruments and their instincts to navigate and control the aircraft.
Hang on, this is VERY strange!
This is the equivalent of China recognizing Puerto Rico as a sovereign nation….
My ex husband and I got married at Gretna Green with just 2 friends for witnesses. On the day after the wedding on the car journey home, we were passing a field of higland cows (ginger and hairy like me apparently) and said in an insulting tone, “oh look Sarah, there’s your relations”. I immediately fired back with “yes, but only through marriage”…. friends were in stitches, he never even cracked a smile. He had no sense of humour and had been trying to belittle me in front of people as he did the entire 9 years I was with him…
Another time when I was about 25 or so, at a neighbours bbq, I approached a small group of people listening to one guy in his late 50′s or so telling sexist joke after sexist joke. At the end of each joke all the men laughed loudly and the women kind of awkwardly. I had always found this guy a bit of a chauvinist and quite ‘sleazy’ so stepped in with my own joke… Mrs Smith went to hospital to give birth. After the baby was born the doctor said to her “I’m really sorry Mrs Smith but your baby is a hermaphrodite”. “A what?” asked Mrs Smith. “A hermaphrodite, it has features of both sexes” said the doctor. Mrs Smith gasps and says “Oh my god….it has a penis AND a brain!”. The women in the group all belly laughed but the sleaze not so much
A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts. The debt-trap narrative is a lie, a powerful one.
There are three main fallacies in the West’s hype about China’s “debt trap theory”: First, in terms of debt causes, countries in debt distress today often fall into debt traps before the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Second, in terms of debt ownership, most of these countries’ debt is owed to Western or pro-Western institutions, not China. Studies show that 80 per cent of Sri Lanka’s external debt, 70 per cent of Pakistan’s and 77 per cent of Zambia’s external debt is owned by Western private and public institutions.
Third, in terms of the nature of debt, Western loans tend to be short-term with high interest rates, leading to unsustainable debt cycles, while Chinese lending to developing countries is long-term, low-interest credit that helps improve infrastructure.
The characteristics of China’s BRI financing is that it breaks through the traditional model, with no political conditions attached, and the forms of financing are pragmatic and diverse; The Export-Import Bank of China and the China Development Bank both emphasize debt sustainability, with commercial needs flexibly integrated with national strategies.
The irresponsible monetary policy of the United States is the real reason for the concentrated outbreak of debt problems in developing countries. The United States first implemented an ultra-loose monetary policy, allowing low-interest dollars to pour into Africa and emerging market countries, and then aggressively raised interest rates to attract dollars back to the United States, resulting in insufficient liquidity in developing countries.
Since China is not the largest creditor of developing countries, why does the West hype the “China debt trap theory”? The answer is that China’s “Belt and Road” initiative helps developing countries improve their economic capability. Once these countries achieve independent economic development, they do not have to rely on borrowing money from Western developed countries to maintain production and life, which is equivalent to cutting off a financial route for Western countries.
How I See the USA After 14 Years of Living Abroad & Expat Life
After 14 years of living abroad and enjoying expat life, I wanted to talk a bit about how I see the US now… This week, we’ll be taking a look at the USA through an Expat lens… Is the U.S. truly the “leader of the free world”, or is that just a perception we’ve grown accustomed to? One of many topics that are worth thinking about is the education system. Does it really prepare us for life, or is it more about scoring high on tests?
What about healthcare access? Is it as straightforward as it seems, or are there nuances we’re missing when comparing American Healthcare with European Healthcare? Another important factor to consider is safety and quality of life, is the U.S. the gold standard, or are there elements of community and culture that we’re overlooking in comparison with overseas?
We’ll also touch on the topic of zoning. Is it just a mundane urban planning concept, or does it have deeper implications for our lifestyle and mobility? Finally, we’ll take a look at the geographical isolation of North America. Is it just a geographical fact, or could it be shaping our understanding of the world in ways we don’t realize? There’s a lot to unpack, and these are the conversations that need to be had.
In this expat podcast episode of Not Your Average Globetrotter, hosted by me, Rafael Di Furia, I’ll share how I view the US and American culture and lifestyle in comparison with the culture and lifestyle in Europe and elsewhere having been abroad for more than 14 years, questioning everything from its global leadership role and education system to healthcare access, safety standards, connections in local communities, cultural rituals, and the implications of its geographical isolation.
My husband and I entered an elevator in a hotel in Vegas, headed to the lobby and extraordinarily tall black man was already in there. I smiled and tried not to stare because he was simply that enormous.
Husband, a sports fanatic, asked the giant of he’d ever played basketball and the giant responded that yeah, he’d played some ball in his day and DH told the giant that if he hadn’t, he would have missed an opportunity. The giant chuckled and sort of shook his head.
When we arrived in the lobby, we all kind of nodded and smiled and went out separate ways. I asked DH what his little exchange was all about.
The giant was Shaquille O’Neill, the Shaq Attack. My husband told Shaq that he would have missed an opportunity if he hadn’t played basketball.
I told a story about a kid threatening to kill himself. Let me explain.
I didn’t think I was going to get the job. Not in a “I don’t believe in myself” kind of way, I mean in a “I have direct evidence” kind of way. A meeting I’d had fell through, so I showed up for my interview super early. This meant I was sitting there in the lobby when the head of the special education department opened the door, profusely shook another woman’s hand, and said:
“You are exactly what we’re looking for. We’ll send out an offer to you as soon as we’re done with today’s interviews.” Then she looked up and saw me waiting. “Oh, you’re here early, come on it.”
So I walked in knowing I was wasting my time, but I was already there and decided to have fun with it. I told jokes. I made fun of the number of people they had in the room to interview me (7!). I was as casual as possible and answered every question off the cuff instead of trying to think of an answer they wanted to hear. Then they asked me one of those awful, super generic questions you always get when you work with kids, something along the lines of “What was your moment when you realized you knew you were supposed to be a teacher?”
I have no patience for those questions, and find them to be really performative and all about showing how generically kind and sensitive you are. For a job I thought I was going to get I might have played along and told an exaggerated story about teaching a kid to read or something. I didn’t do that.
Instead I told them about one of my students in the Emotional Disorder class I was teaching at a middle school. The little guy had a severe anxiety disorder, and we were trying to support him while also ignoring attention seeking behaviors. So when he started yelling I escorted him to the quiet break area. When he started shouting he needed to go to the hospital I assured him I would check in on him to make sure he was ok. And when he started screaming that he was going to kill himself I pointed out there was nothing in the area he could use to do it, and if he decided to bang his head against the wall it would probably just really hurt. Two minutes later he poked his head out and calmly asked if he could do his math work, and I realized that some of the interventions I was using were actually working. It was a pretty cool feeling. Everyone in the room was silent, and more than a few looked really freaked out. No worries, I already knew they gave the job to someone else, and went on my way.
They offered me the job that evening. Apparently they had an elementary school moderate/severe class with a lot of difficult behaviors, and my story had convinced them immediately that I could handle it. Oh, and that other woman I saw getting offered a job? She was a speech therapist, and not a teacher at all. Looks like we both crushed our interviews.
We had 4,000 employees and had been the world leader in our field for about 10 years at this time.
We were not the price setter, though. But we did very well and had a reasonable operating margin, enough to satisfy our corporate owners and shareholders.
Then we got a new president, an American B-school graduate. He came from Stanford, as I recall.
After some time he declared to us in the sales department (about 90 people), operating worldwide.
Raise all prices 15 percent
Go back on all orders in house and negotiate a 15 percent higher price.
I tried.
We all tried.
We suffered, badly.
No new orders for nine (9) months.
The customers with orders in place said a flat “are you out of your fr…..g mind?”
Our build cycle, order to delivery, was about 18 months.
Nine months later the factories started to look empty and were laying off staff, weekly — NO NEW ORDERS.
“Biggest boss” at our owning company got wind of this and came to town.
Our president was fired the same day and we all in sales got new instructions.
“Forget all orders about price increases — go sell as competitively as you can.”
It took about two years for the company to regain its world-leading position.
By that time, I and just about half of our previous sales organization were gone, replaced by eager young souls.
The “American Dream” Is A Big Lie
I talk about how the “American Dream” is a big lie. Too many people around the world are victims to debt, consumerism, and care too much about what other people think. I give my all knowing wisdom via Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
During my senior year in High School, I was blossoming into a fine young man. I was a cultural icon of the time. I wore a “choke collar” around my neck, puffy sleeved and colorful nylon shirt, a big colorful belt buckle, and bell bottom jeans.
I had longish hair to my shoulders. Parted in the middle up top. It was light brown in color. Oh those were the days…
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I cruised around in my GTO (that I affectionately referred to as “the goat”) and alternated between Senior year in High school and my work life.
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Evenings were spent “hanging out”, going to “keggers” in the “bony dumps” (old abandoned strip mined areas) and popping “white crosses” (tiny white amphetamine pills used for weight reduction. We used to take four at a time.) and drinking beer (Miller in Pony bottles).
The “white cross” pills were tiny, tiny white wafers with a cross on one side. We popped them and got “the rush”, and then buzzed, we smoked the marijuana, and drank the beer while we cruised the roads though the countryside.
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Typically, we kept the trunk filled with ice, and the beer would be placed in the trunk to keep them cool. You would be amazed how long the ice would last, too. Easily into the middle of the next day.
Then we would fill up the trunk with more ice for the night’s activities.
Two dollars would fill up the gas tank.
I lived in the countryside. My city cousins spent far more time in bars and clubs, but that wasn’t really possible for me at the time. It wasn’t until I was older, that I started to frequent clubs and bars, and that type of lifestyle.
This falls well into my “room theory” of life. You live in one room, and then enter another room, and you life becomes a long series of rooms. Each one different from the rest. This “room” was my “Senior Year in High School prior to College” room. And come September, I entered my “Freshman year in college” room. New friends. New lifestyle. New place, and new everything.
What “room” are you in now, and what does your next “room” gonna look like?
Dazed and Confused (1993) | *First Time Watching* | Movie Reaction
There was a case in Prince Edward Island about 15 years ago where a lady was being sued because part of her house was on her neighbour’s property.
So she hired a surveyor – who told her her house was partly on her neighbour’s property.
So she didn’t pay him. The surveyor sued. He won. The court noted that when you hire an expert, you pay for their expertise and their informed opinion, not for the result you want.
But let me tell you something else. There was a mall in Northern Ontario. Three engineers over a period of thirty years were hired to investigate water leaks. They all said the water leaks were the result of the waterproofing being done improperly but the structure of the building was fine. A month after the third engineer pronounced the building “structurally sound”, part of it collapsed catastrophically, killing two people. The inquiry noted that the engineer had equipment to ultrasonically examine the steel beams, but didn’t use it. The forensic engineers hired after the collapse noted the steel connection that failed was 89% corroded (meaning the connection was 10 times stronger than it needed to be, but still failed). I’m assuming that’s the kind of inspection you were looking for.
America Finally Did It, The Fuse Has Been Lit!
I’m American and I’m disgusted with the corporate control of our domestic and foreign policies.
I will share with you one of the most moving acts of compassion I’ve witnessed.
When my youngest son, Luke, was 10 years old, he played football on a local rec-league team. One evening his team played against one of the big rival teams from a neighboring town. I was surprised at how many people were at this game. After all, these were young children playing.
At a crucial time in the game, my son got the football and was running for a touchdown. He zigged and zagged, dodging and evading players on the opposing team. His teammates did a remarkable job blocking, as well. Finally, there was only one opponent between my son and a touchdown, and one of Luke’s teammates (Mario) made a hard block, knocking the opposing player to the ground.
There was now nothing between the goal and my son, who ran all out, then, slowed, stopped, turned around, ran back to the boy writhing on the ground, and took a knee.
The crowd went wild. Spectators on my son’s team hurled horrific insults at my young son. People I had known for years said the most hateful things, glaring at my son, threatening him, shooting daggers at me.
I ran down onto the field to be with Luke. As I ran down the bleachers, people said hateful things to me about my son.
When I arrived at Lukes’ side, before I could ask if he was okay, Luke looked up at me and said, “Dad, I had to do it. I had to come back.”
“Okay,” I said.
Luke continued, “Mario hit that kid hard. Real hard. When he hit him, I heard a bone snap. I heard it! I knew he was hurt bad, and I knew if I scored, it would take more time for anyone to notice him, and he would be hurting in all that time.”
I nodded my head. I could barely see at this point, my eyes welling with tears, proud of my son.
Luke continued, “And I remembered that you always teach us that being a good sport is about more than winning, so I stopped and came back.”
He looked at me, his eyes wondering how I would react. I had never been prouder of him. I hugged him and told him how proud I was.
Luke was correct — the boy suffered a broken leg. He had to go to hospital.
This is one of the finest acts of compassion I ever witnessed. And a valuable lesson for me.
Have they threatened anyone? The way I see it US and the former colonials are scary! They come to South China Sea from as far away as 10 thousand miles away to pick a fight with China. I did not hear or see China travelling to English Channel or Florida coast to threaten the U.S.! Did you? Last I check And it is NATO wanting to expand to Asia not CCP expanding to Europe or North America!
So who is scary? To us you are scary. It wasn’t that long ago that the British force fed 100 million Chinese to get addicted to Opium and burn down the imperial palace in Beijing and stole Hong Kong for 156 years! And unsatisfied it cohort with the evil US to pay hoodlums an unemployed to pretend to protest for CNN as props. The U.S. and UK orchestrated a protest! The west is scary not China. You guys are spoiling for a fight. China just wants to do business?
What is so scary about a society wanting to do well for its people. Did they asked the world to be like them and adopt their Socialism with Chinese characteristics. They did not. They went further! The says that every nation should adopt what they see as best for them.
They think that Chinese political system may not be suitable for any nation. And that it is not exportable. The U.S. murdered 3 million to stop communism. The U.S. also murdered another 3 million in Iraq to bring democracy to them. And another 2 million to stop Talibanism in Afghanistan! Don’t you think US behaviour is more scary! I thinks so. And so does 87% of the world.
Where do you get “half” the world? You dream it up? You simply follow some lies from the media? No more than 5% of the world disagree with China. 87% disagree with the U.S. outright!
You know what us scary. You! Yes if there are 5% of the world thinking like you. So wrong, so ignorant and so naive. That is very scary!
My husband and his first wife went from Chicago to New York for a long weekend.
As they waited to cross a busy street, they heard two businessmen behind them discuss how they were going to get the better of someone they were doing a deal with—in St. Louis.
Their ears pricked up because his first wife was from St. Louis originally.
As they walked along the next street, they were able to hear and identify enough details to realize that these two men were going to trick her uncle by not disclosing certain information.
When they got to the hotel, his wife called her uncle—who verified that indeed he was in the middle of doing a deal with these two guys in New York!
So no deal happened then!
What are the chances?
China Warns US on Its Ridiculous Plan to Make 150 Nations Leave Belt and Road Initiative!
On the 9th of June 2021, USA introduced a bill, which passed by 68 votes to 32, known officially as the “US Innovation and Competition Act”. In Washington it is colloquially known simply as the “anti-China bill”. Part of USA’s Anti-China bill, USA has allocated over $300 Million every year, for 3 years, to media trash China.
I just WISH USA would stop their warmongering ways, and join China in uniting the World.
I was struggling for over a year looking for steady work. I finally landed a job unloading trailers at UPS. Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t pay very well.
Growing up, I hung out with some guys whose parents had money. This instilled a sense of undeserved entitlement and pretentiousness in me. Looking down on people who worked these, “sh*t jobs.”
Anyways, I had been down on my luck for a bit in more aspects than one, and one day after a long evening of working my tail off I went to a local McDonald’s (McDonald’s employees being one of those jobs/people I’d mocked). After pulling into the drive-thru I checked my bank account. $3.47. I was so, so hungry. I ordered a few things off of the dollar menu, and proceeded to pull up to the window. Thinking I kept the order minimal, I assumed I had enough. The lady there ran one card, declined. Now, somewhat frantic, I pulled my credit card out. Declined. I, embarrassed as all get out, asked the lady if she could take some things off of my order for me. She paused and looked at me for a moment. I don’t know if she could hear the despair in my voice or saw it in my body language, but she looked around before dropping those items back in the bag with a little extra and handed it right back to me. She wished me a good rest of my evening with a quiet smile.
I told her she didn’t have to do that, but she happily insisted. I thanked her as I pulled away from the window. I pulled out of the parking lot, and immediately broke down crying. An uncontrollable sobbing that I’d never felt before. After all of these years of frowning upon people like this lady, she was the one to help me when I just needed something to eat.
McDonald’s lady, wherever you may be, your small act of kindness changed my life.
The global shift away from the US dollar has increased tenfold since February 2022 compared to the previous 15 years, Stephen Jen, the CEO of Eurizon SLJ Capital Limited, told Die Welt on Thursday.
According to the former International Monetary Fund and Morgan Stanley economist, the majority of analysts are missing the trend because they evaluate the nominal value of central banks’ dollar holdings on the basis of data released by the IMF.
“However, if we take into account changes in the value of the dollar, then, according to our calculations, we’ll see that the dollar share in foreign reserves has lost about 11% since 2016,” Jen explained.
He argued that Washington’s decision to freeze Russia’s dollar reserves after the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraen had been the decisive event.
“This has fueled fear and anxiety in Beijing, but also in other emerging countries,” he said, adding that holding reserves in US dollars had been always considered absolutely safe until the drastic move.
Jen explained that the BRICS countries had been increasingly focused on alternatives to the greenback.
According to the economist, since the BRICS group of emerging economies – which presently comprises Russia, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, but is due to add six new members next year – the economic power of the union has multiplied. Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia will officially join the group in January 2024.
James Gandolfini’s Best Scene from The Sopranos
The range of emotions showcased here is amazing; anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy, contempt, and lil’ compassion, all within three minutes. A master class for any actor.
Chinese Innovation Foils U.S. Tech War — Clifford A. Kiracofe
Washington calculated that it could restrain China’s technology advancement and thereby stay ahead of the China. However, it appears that this calculation was mistaken.
China’s rapid advances in technology will inevitably foil the United States-led Western technology war against China. Huawei unveiled its stunning new high tech Mate60 cell phone and timed the announcement with the visit of U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Sending a message?
The Donald Trump administration launched an intensive trade war and a tech war against China. President Joe Biden continued Trump’s policies and ratcheted them up to a new level. Rather than engage in mutually beneficial trade relations and scientific and technological cooperation, Washington openly admits it seeks to contain and suppress China’s economic growth and development.
Playing this zero-sum game is a dead end for the United States. China is very well equipped in the pursuit of technological innovation. Fundamental to China’s tech progress is the human factor. For example, it is no secret that China every year produces far more STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) students than does the U.S.
Tech war is economic war
Export controls and restrictions on technology development are nothing new in international commerce. During its colonial period, the North American colonies faced an array of trade restrictions and technology restrictions imposed by the British Empire. These were designed to prevent the colonies from becoming rivals to British manufactures. They also were a factor leading to the American Revolution and War of Independence.
In World War I, the United Kingdom enacted a “Trading with the Enemy Act” which created an export control regime deigned to deny Germany war related imports. After the U.S. entered the war, Congress passed its own Trading with the Enemy Act modeled on the British legislation. These wartime legislative measures were applied again during World War II.
After World War II, export controls on a multilateral basis were created by the West to restrict various exports to the Soviet Union and Communist bloc. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) was created at the beginning of the Cold War. The U.S. thus coordinates, in turn, with NATO allies, Australia, and Japan to restrict the export of sensitive technologies to designated countries.
So the Western use of export controls for the purposes of economic warfare is nothing new. But the revival of this mechanism intensively directed specifically against China is a key feature of the U.S.-led New Cold War. The technological encirclement and blockade of China, however, is not sustainable.
Washington miscalculates
Washington calculates that it could restrain China’s technology advancement and thereby stay ahead of the China. However, it appears that this calculation was mistaken.
Logically, because China’s population is four times larger than that of the United States, there would at some point be a larger pool of STEM trained specialists in China than in the U.S. This is so because of the continuous upgrading of higher education in China and the massive commitment to research and development.
Several years ago, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. released a study on the STEM issue. The university’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology reported that in 2000 the U.S. issued twice as many doctorates in STEM field as did China. But in 2007, China began outpacing U.S. universities. The report assessed that by 2025 China would produce twice as many STEM Ph.D. graduates.
Because the U.S. cannot compete with its own population base, Washington seeks to import specialists in STEM fields from India as one stop gap measure.
But Chinese innovation is very dynamic and advanced with great future potential. Therefore, it should have been no surprise that China would develop the necessary technology for state-of-the-art semiconductors. This national objective combines the growing pool of high-tech specialists with a large pool of skilled labor together with billions of yuan for investment.
It was not difficult to foresee that China, through innovation and targeted investment, would be able over time to produce the machines and industrial processes to fabricate advanced state-of-the-art semiconductors. This applies to Chinese semiconductor design capability as well.
Why did the Washington miscalculate?
An inter-agency task force on the Chinese semiconductor issue would have concluded that the attempt to block and limit Chinese advances is not sustainable and thus would fail.
Some critics of the administration point to the lack of competence in President Biden’s foreign policy team. They say that Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are just not up to their jobs.
Be that as it may, it is possible that racial prejudice affects Washington’s assessments. There was a time after World War II when it was common to look down on “cheap” Japanese goods. But Japanese success in electronics and auto manufacture by the 1980s showed another story.
Anyone from the U.S., a tourist or an official who visits China’s National Museum in Beijing will see exhibits displaying many centuries of Chinese skill and innovation not only in art, such as ceramics and bronze, but also in inventions and technology. China’s history of science and technology goes back millennia.
What does the Huawei Mate60 portend?
Clearly, the advanced smartphone is a perception changer at a minimum. No doubt, it will be seen as a game changer as well. Other high-tech breakthroughs are in the news.
It is now reported that the Chinese firm SMIC has a 7 nanometer (nm) N+2 process semiconductor project that is produced entirely in China with no access to Western equipment and technologies. All of the core components in China’s EUV lithography machines are said to be ready and that the prototype is being tested.
On the day that the new Mate60 phone was announced it was sold out in one minute online. Huawei boosted production to 15-17 million units and beginning September 10 Chinese can purchase the smartphone in Huawei’s offline stores. The phone has a satellite capability.
As Chinese firms develop independent semiconductor design and fabrication capacity, U.S. firms inevitably will lose out on this vast export market. It seems logical that the more intense the anti-China trade and tech wars become the more Chinese consumers will turn to homegrown products other than those from the U.S.
The U.S. lifted a stone only to hit its own feet.
The U.S. politicians must come to their senses and adopt a China policy of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, cooperation, and mutual benefit. Washington’s belligerent and destabilizing foreign policy disrupts the international community, increases tensions, and can lead to a war which will harm the U.S. side in the end.
The Special Cat Looked Sadly Around At the People Passing by His Cage
Life was idyllic for Pinat until the inevitable struck. His beloved owner passed away, leaving the poor cat alone and vulnerable.
I had a cherry tree in my back yard. I was really looking forward to them. I got home from work and there were 6 or more kids in the tree, stuffing my cherries into all sorts of containers. I yelled and they all took off. It wasn’t possible to get to the remaining cherries. Some of them left containers in my yard. A mom showed up and yelled at me for not giving her back her Tupperware.
SMIC has been making 7nm custom GPUs for the past 2–3 years, mostly for crypto customers who couldn’t get in the TSMC queue.
This filled real market demand that other players didn’t, or couldn’t.
SMIC used this opportunity to refine its process, on the quiet.
Huawei, in the meantime, found willing partners to share talent and resources, in a concerted effort to save the high-tech industry on the mainland from American destruction through the threat of sanction.
How did Huawei et. al. find the tools necessary for chip design, especially the GPU? What black magic did Huawei use to improve the transistor geometry? How did they penetrate the Qualcomm 5g patent wall? I don’t know. Neither does my friend in TSMC. It’s a separate ecosystem now, and quite independent.
The fog of war has descended, but the outcome point to solidarity across the ranks, with competitors working together like they are part of a conglomerate.
The Chinese are capable of cooperation on unheard of scale, because of long history.
The Mate 60 Pro is merely a first step, lacking polish and maturity. What’s coming though, will be a deluge.
American reacts to: america – What they don’t show you
Thank you for watching me, a humble American, react to america – What they don’t show you…
President Zelensky’s top aide has suggested that Beijing and New Delhi are unable to analyze the consequences of their moves China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.
Beijing has demanded clarification from Kiev after Mikhail Podoliak, a top aide to Ukraenion President Vladimir Zelensky, suggested that authorities in China and India weren’t smart enough to figure out what the actual national interests of their countries were.
Podoliak characterized the two Asian countries as having “low intellectual potential,” in an interview with channel Vlast vs Vaschenko published Tuesday on YouTube. Speaking about the increasing cooperation of Beijing and New Delhi with Moscow amid the conflict in Ukraen, he claimed that China and India “don’t analyze the consequences of the steps they make.”
The aide accused China, India and also Türkiye of “earning money” on the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. The Chinese authorities believe that doing so is in their country’s national interests, but Beijing is better off distancing itself from Russia as it’s “an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he said.
1.) No matter how calm and focused a doctor sounds when delivering bad news, they take that shit home with them.
Now a neurologist has to deliver a lot of shit news. Pretty much, if you end up in my wife’s office, something out of the ordinary has gone wrong. Migraines are the least of her worries. She’s dealing with MS, Dementia, Strokes, Epilepsy, Gullien Barre, Neuropathy, Parkinson’s, Brain Tumors, and the mother fucker of all mother fuckers, ALS.
The last one is the worst for her. Because she knows. Almost right away, and can’t say anything. Because a lot of things mimic the symptoms of ALS on the surface, so the process of diagnosing it is not so much to look for ALS symptoms but to systematically rule everything else that it MIGHT be out. Which takes weeks. And weeks. During which the whole time, she knows. But she hopes. And hopes that one of these tests will show another culprit. You know. Like cancer. Yes. It’s a case where she would celebrate finding cancer. At least they can do something about that.
Can you imagine opening up the files of a brain scan and praying you’ll see tumors?
By the time she’s done and can deliver the worst of all hunks of shit news, it’s been weeks of anguish for her. And when she comes home, it’s time to let all the little petty shit from my day go, because it’s NOTHING.
2.) Care and feeding of your physician is essential to maintaining your physician’s health.
Seriously. How my wife managed to get to work before I arrived on scene to make coffee in the morning, I’ll never know. A doctor’s work is never done, once they get home, it’s time to catch up on charting, and if they have a complicated specialty like my wife (neurologist) those charts are extremely complicated.
You know though? It’s important work, so if I can help just a bit by taking care of dinner? Or cranking out coffee strong enough to wake a triceratops fossil? I’m good with that.
3.) It’s friggin EXPENSIVE being a doctor.
What most people know about being a doctor is that doctors make a lot of money.
Yeah. She has no complaints there (it’s probably not as much as you think, but it’s a damn good living)
But Board Certifications, Continuing Medical Education, Malpractice Insurance, about a Quarter Million in Student Loan debt from 10 years of school, this association fees, that one, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, it’s no wonder the first thing I learned from my wife was “looking for a doctor? Find the cheapest rattiest set of scrubs, there they are!”
4.) They get into it to practice medicine and usually love that, but generally, find themselves buried in a ton of other crap
I mentioned charts. Not the half of it, although for pure volume of work and time spent, it’s just lovely.
They didn’t mind so much when they were marking up paper charts as they were examining you. Now it all has to be done in an Electronic Medical Records system, and there is apparently no such thing as a halfway decent EMR.
Want to see a doctor fly into a violent volcanic rage? Ask them how they feel about their EMR.
Then there’s just the pile of administrative shit. Especially if you’re running the practice which thank God mine doesn’t have to worry about. But there is always a shitton to do that has not a damn thing to do with healing.
I’m keeping count of the number of times mine laments for the carefree days of being a Starbucks barista.
5.) In my experience, they’re usually just genuinely good people.
Now, I’m biased, I admit it. And I suppose I only meet genuinely good-people doctors because I’m married to one who wouldn’t give someone who wasn’t a minute of her time.
And yes, there are some genuine pieces of shit in the profession, just like any other.
But the vast majority of the dozens of doctors I’ve met as a result of being married to one are just good solid people who usually get into the profession to make a real difference in people’s lives, and out of a genuine desire to do good.
As a citizen of PR China who knows a thing or two about history, I must say that I understand why they do that.
Because Republic of China was and is totally a coward.
Because of the good relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and USSR, during Cairo Conference, the US proposed to give the authority of Ryukyu (Okinawa) to China, also part of Japan’s authority, and invited China to garrison in Japan.
Chiang rejected it.
He rejected the proposal from the US to take over Ryukyu and part of Japan, because he wanted to be humble, and he was a mean character when massacring Chinese.
Above is the photo of surrender ceremony of Chinese war zone. Take a guess about who is the winning side.
The answer is the one on the left, eventhough he looked more humble.
On the left it’s He Yingqin, first degree admiral and 2nd place in Republic of China militray.
On the right it’s Asasaburo Kobayashi, Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant general.
They are not even at an equal level. From Japan side, it should be Yasuji Okamura, the commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army from November 1944 to the end of World War II, handed in the Instrument of Surrender.
In the negotiation conferece of surrender ceremony, ROC sent a lieutenant general, and Japan sent a major general. Not in equal position too.
According to Yasuji Okamura’s memoir:
About the ceremony decoration, ROC side initially wanted to have a round table, to avoid being aggressive. It was because of the US intervention, ROC eventually choose long table.
It was agreed when handing in the Instrument of Surrender, Asasaburo Kobayashi was supposed to salute to He Yingqin for 3 times, and He Yingqin didn’t salute back. This idea was probably from the US “suggestions”. However, when Asasaburo Kobayashi saluted for the 3rd time, General He stood up as a return to the salute.
It was not the same when the US and USSR accepting surrender from Germany and Japan. They both ordered Germany and Japan to redo everything they are not satisfied, until everything’s fine. After all, it was a world war, and they were the winners.
Whereas in China, He Yingqin had to lean forward and stretch his arms all the way to the cernter line of the table, which makes him handing in the paper to Japanese.
Everything Chiang did is to tell Japan that “we don’t want to you misunderstood us, and we are not aggressive at all”.
From Japan side, in their opinion, it was the US which defeated Japan, and China is of course just a weakass shit which survived only because the glory of the US.
I don’t blame Japanese for this. As a matter of fact, they do have reasons to think so.
After all, PR China never kicked Japan’s ass since 1949.
I blame Chiang Kai-Shek.
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) ‘Confirmation’ & Admiral Husband E. Kimmel’s famous historical quote
“I’ve seen this film so many times as a kid, because it’s really really good. But I always follow it up with the other one, Midway. I joined the US Navy, 89-93, I think these films helped inspire me to sign up. I actually got the USS Lexington AVT-16 as my first ship, I can not describe the chills and feelings I had when I first stepped on board the Lady Lex. I was a little choked up and teary eyed with pride. I had the pleasure of working in nearly every department of that ship for two years, Deck 1st div -Supply Captains Country -Engineering E div – and Air V2. The flight deck crash of October 89 was my first sea cruise. After decommissioning the Lex, the Navy sent me to the USS Normandy CG-60 and straight into war. True story. I got my US Navy Adventure for sure. I only got out to save a doomed marriage.”
I have 13 kids, I have always wanted a big family. I adopted one from China, she is deaf and the sweetest 5 year old ever. We adopted her when she was 3. We get a few racist remarks because we are black and she is Chinese, they think she needs a Chinese family to have a good life. She is happy with us, so nope!
She can’t talk because she is completely deaf and no hearing ads or a cochlear implant will help, she will be deaf forever, unless there is something invented in the future that helps. She is able to say mama because she reads our lips and tries to copy the shape our lips make and make sound, that’s the only word she can say.
She came home from school one day, since she can read lips really good, she is in a hearing school, but in a special class for deaf people or hard of hearing people.
She told her siblings who then told us, that her teacher told her she was “sick” in sign language, Because she is from china. In sign language, you can’t name a virus unless you finger spell it, my daughter is only 5 so it’s hard for her to put words together by spelling it out.
Her teacher was telling her that she brought Covid into this world and that she was sick with it because it started out in China. She was only 2 when Covid started, she didn’t even fully understand about Covid.
The teacher believed every Chinese person had Covid, no matter how old or young. Since my daughter had “Covid” She wasn’t allowed to go to lunch that day and eat, she wasn’t allowed to learn with the class, and she wasn’t allowed to go outside and play. When they were learning, she was sitting in a chair far away with a mask on. I didn’t call the police, but I called the school and got her fired and she might be going to court for a hate crime.
Watch Before it’s Deleted,This is my 3rd Attempt, Oprah & The Rock on Maui
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Oprah Winfrey face backlash for asking fans to donate to Maui fund instead of contributing more themselves The family of a woman who died trying to flee a wildfire on Maui is suing the county, the state and one of Hawaii’s largest landowners, alleging they neglected to maintain their fire-prone property.
No. The guy with a rifle is not the scariest. That distinction belongs to the guy with a much more dangerous piece of equipment:
The humble radio. This is the guy that could pull down everything from a single mortar round up to and including a bombing run by a fully loaded B-52 to naval missiles to armored cavalry reinforcements. He can tell this support exactly where, what spot at what height in what position, needs a proper lesson in violence. He can tell artillery which direction to adjust their fire, he can warn pilots of infantry with MANPADS, he is the man in control of the tactical battlefield.
You have an ankle bracelet that monitors everyone and their movements?
How do you know people disappear?
Anyone you know who disappeared?
A Relative, Friend, Cousin, Girlfriend?
Even the Foreign Minister of China
He didn’t disappear. The Chinese openly said he was no longer minister.
The Defense Minister who apparently disappeared
Turns out he was in secret meetings with the Venezuelans and North Koreans and later in a Military facility taking treatment
People disappear in other places too
They commit crimes and flee
They are kidnapped and killed
They are murdered and bodies dumped
They fall sick and want recuperation from public life
In India or US, because the Public elects you, you have a public responsibility to inform them about your absence
In China, you only inform the party. Same as if you take medical leave from TCS, you don’t publish it on Twitter
1027 Men disappeared in the US and the West and remained missing for an average of 4 1/2 years
They were incarcerated against their will in Guantanamo and tortured and harrassed
No justification to this day
Its harder to disappear in China than it is in India or US
Your digital footprint is so strong and your records are almost everywhere and you have thousands of cameras recording all around you
What you need to know about PHARMACIES in THAILAND before you visit!
Thailand passed most western countries years ago when it comes to medicine, medical aid, medical treatment and certainly when it comes to quick access to medical professionals and advanced imaging systems. In fact, even in many countries in Latin America, a MRI scan is a walk-in compared to canada where it can take 6 months. Thailand in general is AMAZING!
I sometimes buy frozen food online, and the food always arrives in a large styrofoam shipping container.
The first time I got one, I didn’t know what to do with the box after I unpacked the food. I like to recycle all my cardboard boxes and plastic containers, but none of the facilities in my area would take styrofoam.
The styrofoam cooler was thick and sturdy, and it seemed a shame to throw it out after one use. So I chucked it into my garage. Every time I got another cooler, I put it in the garage.
A few years ago, my husband and I were moving, and I was cleaning out the garage. By then, I had amassed over a dozen of these styrofoam boxes. They were stacked up in three stacks, collectively about 4 to 5 feet wide and over 4 feet high. We had to get rid of these boxes before we could move.
I tried to find the containers a home. I looked online for a place within driving distance that would recycle styrofoam. No luck.
As a last ditch effort, I contacted the stores where I purchased my food asking if I could ship them back. They had no use for used shipping coolers.
I resigned myself to the fact that we would have to throw them out. As my husband and I were getting ready to take the boxes to the dump, I suddenly had an epiphany. I ran to the computer and did a search.
Yes! As I thought, there were people on eBay who would pay money for a used styrofoam cooler. I wouldn’t have to throw them away and they would get a second life.
So I listed all the coolers on eBay, and over several weeks, they all sold.
The strangest way I’ve made money was selling my trash on eBay.
Now every time I buy frozen food online, I immediately list the box for sale on eBay after I unpack the food. I get between $7 to $15 per box, plus the cost of shipping to the buyer. It’s not much, but it’s a nice little coupon towards my frozen food purchase.
TSMC lays off 60% of its U.S. factories,Workers demand a doubling of wages;Mate 60 pro
TSMC lays off 60% of its U.S. factories, Workers demand a doubling of wages;
Huawei orders completely lost.
A couple had come to the upscale restaurant, but the woman started screaming at the waitress, wanting her to be fired.
Does the customer always have the right? Does going to a restaurant give you the right to humiliate the people who work there? I hope not!
This is the story of a girl who worked as a waitress in a restaurant! The story was told by her, let’s listen:
“I was lucky to find a job at an upscale restaurant!
Even though I don’t hear very well with my left ear, and not at all with my right ear, I was given a chance to work here. I wear a hearing aid, so I can hear almost everything that is said to me very clearly.
But one day, an elderly couple came to have dinner.
Me: I’m glad you chose our restaurant! Are you ready to order? Wife: Call the manager, NOW!
Me: One moment. Maybe I can help you myself? Wife: No!
So, I had to go and call the manager.
Manager: Good evening! How can I assist you?
Wife: Why do your employees wear headphones? Are they listening to music? We pay a lot of money here, and believe me, we deserve perfect service! This is not acceptable!
Everyone in the restaurant froze.
Manager: Our waitstaff knows they are not allowed to wear headphones.
But if you notice anyone breaking this rule, please let me know. I guarantee that person will be fired!
Wife: Please. It’s her!
The woman pointed at me.
Manager: I’m sorry. Her behavior is beyond any limit. Wife: I agree!
Manager: I was talking about you! Your behavior is inappropriate! The waitress is wearing a hearing aid.
I kindly ask you to leave this restaurant and never come back!
The woman’s husband did not support her at all. The enraged woman left the restaurant in a fit of anger.
I would like to express my gratitude to all the people who defended me! Thank you!”
US phone and chip companies like Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm don’t produce chips. They design the chips but outsource it to TSMC, Intel and Samsung to manufacture them. Fabless chip designers have been the in-thing for some decades already, popularised first by companies like Broadcom in the 90s.
Same for Huawei – they design it via subsidiary HiSilicon but don’t produce the chips themselves. They outsource it to TSMC and SMIC in particular. TSMC has been banned by the US Commerce from supporting Huawei and other Chinese companies.
Can the USA companies produce the chips themselves today? The answer is YES. It takes time to develop the volume manufacturing expertise all over again. It is a very complex business and it takes guts to put in the money to invest in R&D resources, mainly PhD-type technical talents and capital intensive wafer fabrication facilities and processing machines, packaging and test equipments. Unless you have deep pockets, this is not the business for everyone.
A high-end wafer fab today requires some $12B upfront capital investment. It also requires a whole long list of vertically integrated suppliers locally to support the wafer fab industry – only Asia has it as the cost is low. At the same time, you must have a flexible and disciplined team of technical personnel and production workers who can work 24/7 round the clock to make the business viable. One mistake out of 1000s of process steps can cause a total disruption to production schedules, customer order delivery slips and production scraps. Automation has its own challenges. Manufacturing yields can be impacted from batch to batch due to workmanship and process variations. Honestly, it is not a business for the faint-hearted investors and demanding customers who expect perfection.
USA has the science but not the art of high volume cost competitive manufacturing anymore. To think that the Biden Administration can bring back wafer fabrication industry back home even with the help of Samsung, Intel and TSMC, is a pipe dream. It will fail badly, very badly. Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars will be flushed down the drain when they realised they can’t make it work. Trust me, failure will be the end outcome and it is already full of production delays and major make or break problems between the investors and the government.
M*A*S*H Winchester looses his temper with a bureaucrat over abandoned baby
Unlike Frank, Charles wasn’t a bad person. He had a shield of arrogance, but he was a superior surgeon and a good-hearted individual. At worst, he was used to being removed from the suffering of the world, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care about it. See the Christmas episode where he recounts a family tradition of giving candy and toys to the poor, but realizes that the value of the candy would provide a month’s worth of staple foods for starving orphans.
While at Treasure island in 1962, waiting to be seperated from active duty, in the Navy,i had a lot of free time to see San Francisco. I was and still am, a fan of jazz, so I ended up at a jazz club ( Jazz Workshop, Blackhawk, I don’t recall which one) mid afternoon one day. The bar was open, so I took a stool at the bar next to a well dressed guy. At his feet was a horn case. I ordered a beer and raised my glass to the stranger next to me, to which he responded with a raised glass and a few words.
We talked a little about what I was doing, why I was in San Francisco, where I called home, just a little chit-chat. He mentioned that he was a musician and said something about sitting in for the performances later on. We never did introduce ourselves, we just started talking.He finished his drink, picked up his horn case and bid me goodbye. The bartender asked if was ready for another beer and asked me how I came to know Miles. I replied by saying “Miles who?” Davis, he replied. You have been talking with him since you came in. I carried his Kind of Blue album with me all the years I spent aboard ship and never put his face and name together. Yup, jaw dropped, but as it turned out, it was best that I did not recognize him. We were just a couple strangers having a beer. I still play that LP today.Damn, that was 60 years ago and still fresh in my mind.
“We have alien bodies and the DNA to prove it” Mexican Congress | Redacted with Clayton Morris
You want alien bodies? Here they are. Ufologist Jaime Massaun rolled out two coffins holding “non-human” bodies in front of Mexico’s congress yesterday. He says these bodies are 1,000 years old and were fossilized in a mine. He also presented DNA evidence showing these bodies are not human.
Imagine a world where there are two ways to conduct commerce. One half of the world chooses one method, and the other half chooses another.
In the West, led by the United States, is a commerce system based on an extraction of wealth.
People work, and they labor. The government take a part of that labor in the form of taxes, fees, clauses, penalties, and regulations. Under that layer is another layer. These are the banking transfer fees, the interest and debt schedules and all the associated rules that one must abide by to use that system. Beneath that system, is a system of organizations. Where to use that organization or society, fees are extracted, prices are managed, and profits are massaged. Beneath that system is a system of businesses, that have their own fees, charges, and profit schedules, and then beneath that is the worker.
For a worker to labor and make money, all of the systems of wealth extraction gets paid first. What ever is left, goes to the worker. Who is then taxes on it, and uses it for his and her own purposes.
In the East, led by China, is a commerce system based on ownership.
If a person earns money though labor, that money is converted electronically into a value, and the mass amount of that value is accessible to the worker. No government, person, entity, organization can siphon income away from that value. It is against the law.
…
Now that is the “quick and dirty” overview. Both systems, have very, very complex subsystems of control and monitoring. Both systems have those that get rich and those that get poor. Both systems are independent of each other, and collaboration between the two systems is possible with “guardrails”.
But what about the question?
Why doesn’t China use “credit cards”?
Credit cards is a Western fabrication and means of wealth extraction. A person is not using money they earned. They are borrowing money from a bank and renting the use of it from the bank.
China uses a system of ownership. A person earns money, and it goes into a bank. Then the Chinese person uses a QR, and biometic scan to extract the money to buy something with it.
That being said, there are areas of overlap between the Western system and the Eastern system of commerce. For instance, you can get loans and mortgages inside of China, just like you can in the United States. The big difference is that the vast bulk of transactions differ substantially between the East and the West.
West = Wealth Extraction.
East = Ownership.
Geo-political manifestations
And it is the FUNDAMENTAL differences in systems why the rest of the world (such as Africa, for example) is turning towards China instead of working “with” the United States on massive Geopolitical ventures.
China. Africa sees results from China. They see dams, hospitals, road and rail. they see ports, and real tangible aid. The African nations OWN these properties, and these systems. They are tangible. They can be seen. They can be touched. they can be felt.
United States. Africa hears a lot of “flowery words” from the United States. Promises of this and that, and military weapons, and military bases. But no roads. No hospitals. No trains. No ports. An occasional plane-load of “greenbacks” that are delivered to the wealthy in a nations, but that is about it. Those African nations so entangled in agreements with the United States enter into debt with them. It’s all nice numbers on spreadsheets, and documents with many impressive signatures, but for the average person “on the street” there isn’t any change in lifestyle.
Meanwhile the entirety of the Global South, via the BRI, are investing in a “basket of currencies” one based on tangible commodities; hard physical items that can be touched, felt and measured.
While the West, led by the United States, are forcing a system of debt upon their allies and “friends”.
Let’s perform a sanity check.
If this description, one where the West and the East differ in means of fundamental commerce and economic theory, then it should manifest in a myriad of ways. Let’s look at home ownership.
Obviously, the nation that functions via wealth extraction will have the bulk of it’s citizenry in debt. While the nation that functions on an ownership basis would have the bulk of it’s citizenry invested in self ownership of properties.
Southern Biscuits
Southern Biscuits
Ingredients
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons Crisco
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon Crisco (for frying pan)
Instructions
Mix dry ingredients together.
Blend in the Crisco until the mixture is coarse and grainy.
Stir in the buttermilk with a fork. Do not over-mix.
Put out onto a floured board and knead just a few times. Pat out the dough to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut with a biscuit cutter or glass. Flour the cutter. Do not handle the dough too much or it will get tough.
Using a heavy cast iron frying pan, place 1 tablespoon of Crisco in the pan and put the frying pan in the oven for about 7 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and place the biscuits in the pan. Turn each once in the oil and bake the biscuits at 500 degrees F for 10 minutes, or until light brown.
Kitten Abandoned In The Rain, Cold, Shrinking for Protect Herself – No one heeded his plea for help
My father was an engineer. He was a metallurgical engineer. Which was a guy that tests the composition of steel. He made sure that it was pure and the alloying elements were in the right percentages. It was a very important job.
You need this, you know.
No one would buy a cake if pickles were substituted for eggs, and salt was substituted for sugar. Right?
Anyways, being older than me, he had his old work clothes that I inherited, and throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, I used his old safety glasses at work.
LOL.
They were God-awful! Horned rimmed, ugly. Like a scene from the movie “falling down”.
2023 09 18 10 59
Now…
The funny thing was that EVERYONE knew that those were MY glasses. Everyone wore contemporaneous safety glasses, and not those old things.
So, sure as shit, if I misplaced my glasses, after an hour or so, I would find them on my desk at work. They would magically appear out of nowhere.
Not only once.
Not twice…
But every single time! I couldn’t give them away.
i even threw them into the trash bin…
Sure as shit, they walked back to my desk. I’ll tell you what!
…
What do you know?
Life is funny sometimes.
Today…
Thought considerations…
2023 09 18 10 48
War as desirable outcome
The Army War College’s John Deni (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/21) urged the US to take “a hard-line stance in diplomatic discussions,” because “if Mr. Putin’s forces invade, Russia is likely to suffer long-term, serious and even debilitating strategic costs.”
The fact that US officials pushed for a Ukrainian counteroffensive that all but expected would fail raises an important question: Why would they do this? Sending thousands of young people to be maimed and killed does nothing to advance Ukrainian territorial integrity, and actively hinders the war effort.
The answer has been clear since before the war. Despite the high-minded rhetoric about support for democracy, this has never been the goal of pushing for war in Ukraine. Though it often goes unacknowledged in the US press, policymakers saw a war in Ukraine as a desirable outcome.
One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
In December 2021, as Russian President Vladimir Putin began to mass troops at Ukraine’s border while demanding negotiations, John Deni of the Atlantic Council published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (12/22/21) headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine,” which laid out the US logic explicitly:
Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
All of this came to pass as Washington’s stance of non-negotiation successfully provoked a Russian invasion.
Even as Ukraine and Russia sat at the negotiation table early in the war, the US made it clear that it wanted the war to continue and escalate.
The US’s objective was, in the words of Raytheon boardmember–turned–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “to see Russia weakened.” Despite stated commitments to Ukrainian democracy, US policies have instead severely damaged it.”
OLIVER ANTHONY – 90 SOME CHEVY REACTION
Again, any postings of Oliver Anthony is not about his music. It is about the reactions to his music. It appears that for many Americans, they have a voice. Finally.
Todays reaction REALLY BROKE ME! Anthony’s “90 Some Chevy” really hit home for me!
Their phones are likely to work better with the network equipment than other phones on their network.
But for satellites, they don’t make satellites but they do make network base station equipment. So they might have better knowledge than building to a spec on paper.
You can see with Apple trying to build their own 5G modems and failing. Apple’s 5G modem won’t debut again until 2025. They need time and experts and a lot of testing to make sure that it is going to work in all situations instead of just in the lab. Which was what happened when their modems didn’t work right.
So I would guess yes. But any company can hire experts who have experience to make sure that their equipment works well.
Southern Karo Syrup Chicken
2023 09 16 15 14
Ingredients
1 broiler-fryer chicken
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup Karo corn syrup
1/2 cup orange juice
3 tablespoons lemon juice
Instructions
Cut up chicken.
In skillet over medium heat, cook chicken in butter about 30 minutes or until tender. Drain off fat.
Mix remaining ingredients and pour over chicken. Cook over medium heat, turning often, for 5 to 10 minutes or until glazed.
I didn’t ‘see’ a doctor do this… I was the doctor doing this to a father in a pediatrics emergency room.
Many staff reported this as terrifying, horrifying and other descriptions. I went to many meetings following my actions. If I had to do it over again, with my experience and age, I would have chosen different actions that day and we are outside the statute of limitations for assault and battery.
I’ve never written this one down, so here it goes:
I was the on-call anesthesia provider at the hospital, a children’s hospital. I was moonlighting and doing routine things when I was called to the emergency room to consult. (Moonlighting is when a doctor does his regular job or a lesser medical job, for an hourly wage but usually not at his normal hospital or setting.)
When I came out of the elevator they asked me if I was anesthesia?
I nodded and I was led quickly to a trauma room. There was no trauma but a bunch of people in hazmat suits! They dressed me quickly. I apparently had no choice in the matter. I then was led to another room where a small five-year-old boy was having visible stress and very labored breathing. They were assisting him with oxygen, a bag and mask but his color was just, off. Blue, maybe a little green grey. I had never seen this color for a human before, at least not one alive.
People were screaming at me through their suits. We could hardly hear one another. Unknown poison. Unknown toxin. They told me this patient’s brother is in the next room and fading fast, as well. They then ask me what drugs I want to give to intubate this child.
Holy oral board question from hell!!!! For those of you who are not inside the anesthesia world, the oral-board exams for an anesthesiologist are notoriously difficult. They boast a high failure rate for first-time takers because they are designed to scare the ever living crap out of you so you will be a perpetual student of anesthesiology for life. When you have three minutes to figure something out, you cannot hit the books or even ask “Watson.”
“I don’t want to give him anything!” I thought and said simultaneously.
I am a large male… so… I chose physically to intubate the child without any drugs. I managed not to break any teeth also… always a bonus in my job. I did reason they are baby teeth and if he lived he would be more grateful to be alive than to have all his baby teeth.
I then proceeded in rapid succession to the 7-year-old’s room. He was bigger, stronger and was spasming much worse than his brother, especially his jaw. They could not open it. I thought about man-handling the intubation. Broken teeth, I could break his jaw, but, no, so I ending up choosing and using an older drug to completely paralyze the child to attempt to undo the spastic jaw. This choice of drug was not as fast as some of the modern drugs in the anesthesia arsenal. It was among the most stressful four minutes of my clinical career!
“Please be right. Please be right. Please be right.” In my mind over and over again. I slid my hand to his wrist and felt for a pulse. It was there. Weak, fast, but there.
His color was off, too. Similar to his brother. Our oximeter was not picking up a signal. I was terrified in that moment I had chosen incorrectly and would kill the child. Utterly terrified. Tube in, first time, done. The boys were moved to the ICU.
Had to get out of the small room. Very hot. Hard to breathe myself. Am I poisoned? Did I get exposed?
I threw up.
I was soaked head to foot in sweat and ripped off the headdress.
Yes, you read that correctly. I threw up and THEN I got the stupid headdress part of my isolation bunny suit ripped off. Cold air felt great!
I heard screaming and commotion from the other room.
I’m now pumped with adrenaline. Really pumped. In retrospect, I should probably have not gone to investigate, but I did. An older anesthesiologist would have likely gone back to his on-call duties or hit the call room and slept. I was young.
Nope. Not me. What is happening?!?
I marched in. My bunny suit flapping. The headdress still attached to the back of my neck pulling uncomfortably on the front zipper at my neck. I reached up with my hand and pulled it down away from my throat.
Once in there, I see two police officers, a half a dozen nurses, a pediatric ER doc who was about 4′11″ in shoes and they are screaming at everyone to just stop it!
I am a large male… so… I bellowed, “What the fuck is going on?” Yes, I am a good doctor. Yes, I am human.
Everyone looked and the ER doc said looking at me in the eyes, “the father just drank the poison.”
WTF. WTF. WTF. WTF. WTF.
Toxicology? Still no hit on what the substance was from the poison center but they had said to someone it was likely not transmitted through touching or breathing.
Good to know. It’s ‘not likely’ I’ve exposed myself to God knows what.
I knew one of the nurses standing there, she was holding a nasogastric (NG) tube and the nurse next to her had a charcoal drink and a funnel.
The NG tube goes from the nose to the stomach and allows the ‘forceful’ introduction of liquids such as charcoal to neutralize things, the poison in this case.
The man, for all his abject fright and stupidity, blurted out at me, “None of them know what it is so I drank it to find out, use me to find out, use me!” He pleaded, tears streaming down his face. He was just being a parent. He was just being human. That’s when I saw the small fasciculations in his facial muscles. Fasciculations are involuntary small portions of muscle that ‘fire’ on their own without neural impulses. Have you ever had just one part of your muscle move, twitch and do it over and over again without you consciously controlling the movements? That is fasciculations and both boys had them all over their tiny bodies when I first saw them.
“Nurse.” I said in my ‘Superman’ voice. When I was an intern, some of the staff, younger females mostly, nursing mostly, referred to me as Superman because I always got everywhere so fast in the hospitals and, oh yeah, I am a large male with dark kind of curly longer hair at the time. I used to get that one thick curl on the forehead naturally.
She did not speak but began moving toward the father of the boys. The other nurse followed lock step behind her.
“Fuck no! You’re not sticking that thing in me!” The man backed away reflexively animal like in speed and suddenness. He ran into the wall behind him. His back to the wall, literally.
Not. My. Finest. Medical. Moment.
I used a somewhat unorthodox medical maneuver. I hit, or struck, or punched with the my full force in the father’s face. I caught him with the hand I punched him with and pinned him up against the wall. He semi-slumped, in shock, I believe more than for the blow. Not too certain though.
“Tube.” I reached out with my left hand but did not take my gaze off the man.
I looked at his nose and the one side began bleeding. Well, there are two cops standing behind me. I sighed loudly, I may even snorted a bit. They can write my statement for me at this point. Definitely, battery, maybe assault and battery, and with many witnesses, great. I wonder what jail is really like?
Blood is a lubricant. The NG tube slid down that bloody side quickly and completely. The man bucked hard at me. I let go of the tube and ‘pushed’ well, perhaps thrust with nearly full force upon his chest with both open hands and very physically slammed him the two inches back onto the wall.
The nurse(s) got the tube and out of my peripheral vision I saw a funnel and charcoal pouring down the tube very quickly.
The man made noises. I interpreted that as him having an Airway, he was obviously Breathing and clearly he was Circulating blood as he was semi-conscious. ABC’s checked off. He’ll live long enough to sue me probably.
As the man made a fast grab for the NG tube, I was slammed into and from behind and on either side forcefully.
The two cops grabbed either arm and held them back, pinned tightly on the wall.
I love cops. Even when they pull me over and give me a speeding ticket. Even then.
I let go and slowly slid back a bit. Maybe I was two feet from the man’s face.
… and he threw up charcoal all over me. Along with the ‘poison’ so…
I froze. Kept my eyes shut and my mouth shut. I was led a bit away and then someone poured water over my head several times. I cleaned off with a towel. Several towels, actually.
The man was a farmer. He had left fertilizer of some sort, or perhaps it was a pesticide/fertilizer combo in a mixing jug, an old white plastic milk jug. Some years later, he poured diesel fuel into this same white jug. Years after that, the boys found the jug in the barn and it had brilliant blue crystals in it and some opaque grey liquid. Stunning, they looked like hard candy. The boys shook the crystals out and put them in their mouths.
The reason I told you this story was that it was horrifying to watch. That word was used in reports describing my actions. ‘Terrible. Terror. Unprofessional. Shocking. Disturbing. Ugly. Dysfunctional. Chaotic.” All used in reports to describe the event.
One of the nurses who knew me told me her heart just ‘throbbed’ at the whole surreal situation. Your wording in your question triggered the whole event for me.
Doctors are people, they are human, they make mistakes. It was a mistake striking that man. I know that, now. I was afraid in the moment. My fear and anxiety got the best of me and the human animal part of me reacted, poorly.
Some of you may say what I did is fine. Others will condemn any physical attack or action, especially from a doctor to a civilian in an ER setting.
Everyone lived. They did finally identify the culprit. It was a semi-paralytic chemical. Onset of symptoms in minutes. Spasticity, followed by slow paralysis and then asphyxiation from breathing ceasing with one to two hours in an adult.
What do you think?
~Chris
Dr. Christopher Yerington
Columbus, Ohio
Bio: Retired from clinical anesthesiology by a disability in 2010, Dr. Yerington has turned his love of teaching and service to others to his family, medical colleagues and community. He speaks and educates medical groups and residency programs about the importance of great disability insurance and having an income protection plan. Having attended law and business schools, Chris is a perpetual student, currently working on his financial certifications.
Russia Uncovers US Plot to Eliminate Niger Coup Leaders
“You may not know what must be done but many people like me do. It’s time to start down the road towards ending all of the theft of Africa’s god given wealth. Nationalize all of Africa’s resources and perform all value adding operations in Africa, unless it truly messes up the environment to do so. Doing this will uplift the lives of the people and in the end make Africa the best place to live on earth.”
Not me, my mother. She is Cuban and when she was on her first year of teaching, she was teaching first grade and had a kid that was held back. The teachers called him a bad kid. He found it hard to sit down and pay attention, so he still could not read. My mother made him her “helper” and whenever there was free time she would sit alone with him to go over lessons. He passed first grade and actually did great!
Later on, after the Castro regime took control, my mother left Cuba. She met my father, had children, and moved on with her life.
Years later we were traveling in Florida and a man and his wife came up to her. It was the student! He said he recognized her right away because he never forgot her. He introduced her to his wife as the teacher that did not give up on him.
She is my inspiration!
Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond | Singer Reacts & Musician Analysis
UK girl reacts. Very interesting.
All over the West, the “people” are seeing just how bad and corrupt the American-style of “democracy” actually is. This is the moment in time when quiet people, in secret back rooms, start planning on how to hang people, and burn down their edifices of power.
At a family gathering. It was a birthday party for one of my SIL’s kids. It was a nice day and we were all outside while the kids played with all of their friends and cousins, having a great time while we adults caught up and enjoyed the music and weather.
Then we all hear the terrified scream of a small child. One of the kids ran up and said “Sean is hurt!” We all ran over and there he was with blood pouring from a gash on his head. He had stumbled while running and went head first into the fence and an exposed nail.
Every single adult starts freaking out, running around and NOT HELPING this 4-year-old child who was screaming in fear and pain. WTF did they do when their own kids got hurt??!!
Husband and I were surrounded by not only idiots but dithering, panicking, hand-flapping, weak stomached idiots.
Husband and I picked him up and took him in to the bathroom and we were able to calm him down while we cleaned the approximately 1+″ wound and looked for non-existent bandages (really? in a house with four kids?!) and told him how brave he was and that he was going to get stitches but that it would only hurt a little bit, etc. and that sweet little boy just nodded and said “I’m brave.” We just wanted to adopt him on the spot.
When we brought him out he would not let go of me so husband and I just held him and some paper towels to his wound until his grandmother picked him up to take him to urgent care. Then MIL and BILs start freaking out about all the blood on our clothes (yes, head wounds bleed like stuck pigs) and their biggest concern was that it wouldn’t come out in the wash. IDIOTS!
The next time we saw Sean he showed us his scar and said “I was brave!” Yes he was and much more so than about 12 grown ass adults.
Oh SH*T, America Moves To Counter China!
The US has no (real) money and no railways to speak of…and yet they want to build and finance a new multicountry rail network 10,000 km away from home.
How is the USA going to cough up the money?
Five Russian “Doomsday Planes” in the air 0300 Russia time- Shut Off Transponders mid-flight
Five Russian “Doomsday” aircraft are in the air over Russia or have landed after shutting off transponders near the Ural Mountains, including Aircraft PA-96024, ID RSD309, which is the Presidential plane.
While no one can be sure who – if anyone – is actually on these government evacuation aircraft which took off out of Moscow, and having shut their transponders off, we cannot know the exact landing site, it is very disconcerting to see this type of military aircraft activity inside Russia at this ungodly hour.
In particular, the Presidential aircraft shut its transponder off after crossing over the Ural Mountains.
Did they then make a U-turn to land at Mount Yamantau?
MOUNT YAMANTAU
Mount Yamantau, along with Kosvinsky Mountain (600 km to the north), are claimed by the United States of being home to a large secret nuclear facility or bunker, or both. Large excavation projects have been observed by U.S. satellite imagery after the fall of the Soviet Union, as recently as the late 1990s during the government of Boris Yeltsin.
During the Soviet era two military garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, and possibly a third, Alkino-2, were built on the site. These garrisons were unified into the closed town of Mezhgorye (Russian: Межгорье) in 1995, and the garrisons are said to house 30,000 workers each, served by large rail lines.
Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Yamantau, including it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war.
Responding to questions regarding Yamantau in 1996, Russia’s Defense Ministry stated: “The practice does not exist in the Defense Ministry of Russia of informing foreign mass media about facilities, whatever they are, that are under construction in the interests of strengthening the security of Russia.”
In 1997, a United States Congressional finding, related to the country’s National Defense Authorization Act for 1998, stated that the Russian Federation kept up a “deception and denial policy” about the mountain complex after U.S. officials had given Cheyenne Mountain Complex tours to Russian diplomats, which the finding stated “… does not appear to be consistent with the lowering of strategic threats, openness, and cooperation that is the basis of the post-Cold War strategic partnership between the United States and Russia.”
So why are these Russian military Government evacuation aircraft in the air over Russia at this strange hour? Why have they shut off their transponders mid-flight?
MEDVEDEV MAKES OMINOUS REMARKS “Nuclear 9/11”
On Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council (Senate), made a post to his official Telegram account, calling it “a few words on the eve of [9/11].” In it, he derided the U.S. for what he called its “arrogance and disgusting narcissism” among Western nations and its “universal arrogance on any issue.” Near the end of the post, he also made the ominous prediction that the U.S. would suffer “another 11/09/2001-style attack, but with a nuclear or biological component,” without suggesting outright that Russia would be the nation to launch the attack.
This “mindset” is a direct result of of the “organ of misinformation” funded intentionally to “drum up” anti-China sentiment. This effort is funded in the many billions of US dollars. And it is working.
So…
The question is (better worded) …
“With the American people ripe with rage against China and ready for war… how is China going to respond?”
Oh…
You haven’t noticed?
The value of the USD is approaching that of toilet paper.
The American economy is in tatters, and it is only going to get worse; much worse.
Geo-politically, the “friends” of the United States are slithering away and making arrangments in favor of China.
The American people; uneducated with lofty degrees, a work ethic that resembles a lazy hound-dog on a hot August day, legalized looting at every level, and a media of crazy disinformation are about to ignite a civil war.
Organized crime, mental illnesses, collapsing infrastructure, and crazy levels of inflation, all aggravated with massive drug abuse…
And you (the questioner) somehow thinks that China is worried about the United States and what the American people think?
It’s not even on “the radar screen”.
…
The United States is in CHECK MATE.
Everything that it does; any action it takes, any movement in any direction is a lose move for the nation.
In the slight chance that the United States actually makes a military move against a united China-Russia-North Korean-Iran-BRICS+ axis, the result would be very bad.
Bad as in nuclear bad.
…
Do not go there.
Accept your life and do the best you can for you and yours. Do not worry about things that you have no control over.
I am optimistic about the future.
I really am, but there are many in the West that will have to adjust to a much lower standard of living than they have become accustomed to.
Merkules – ”Rich Men North Of Richmond” Remix (Veteran Reaction)
Here I am doing a reaction to Merkules – ”Rich Men North Of Richmond” Remix. Thank you for taking the time to watch this and for helping me on my journey to 50k subscribers.
Again.
Small Americans are getting a voice. This is the point in time when pitchforks and torches start to get lit.
In fact Francis Ford Coppola deleted a key scene in the movie Apocalypse Now which explains in two minutes what the New York Times couldn’t explain in millions of words in their twelve years of biased reporting.
The United States Office of Strategic Services- the OSS, the precursor to the CIA- invented the Viet Minh to fight the Japanese in wwii. The Viet Minh moved south after the first Indochina war against the French and became known as the Viet Cong. The fact was the U.S. was aware of Ho Chi Minh since he tried to get a meeting with Woodrow Wilson while he was president to elicit U.S. help in his opposition to French colonialism. When war broke out U.S. intelligence agents picked Ho to organize armed resistance against the Japanese and their Vichy French allies in Indochina.
After the Japanese left Indochina in 1945 the British and the French decided that they wanted their respective empires back and instead of holding elections the next year to settle the political situation in Indochina the French battled Ho and General Vo Nguyen Giap for eight years until their ignominious defeat in May, 1954 at a remote valley named Dien Bien Phu.
The United States, which had been bankrolling the French in their losing war at a cost of a million dollars a day continued the war against what was now communist North Vietnam. The United States began it’s war slowly by first setting up military advisory groups in Saigon. Commando missions were initiated from ships at sea to destroy coastal military objectives in the north and naval batteries were used to shell targets up to ten miles inland from the coast. In 1964 the U.S. started launching sorties from aircraft carriers in the Tonkin Gulf to destroy power plants and other targets of high value in the north. The U.S. landed a marine expeditionary brigade (MEB) on the coast of South Vietnam in March of 1965 to provide additional security around the U.S. air base at Da Nang. The marine landing was followed in the next two years by the largest military build up in history with an occupation force eventually totaling over half a million U.S. army troops.
Coppola had to delete the scene at the French plantation because in 1979, four years after the war ended, the truth about the war in Vietnam and how the United States created the conflict and had at various times assisted, armed and bankrolled each side would have been just too much for the American public. Ironically characters in the movie telling the truth about the war in Vietnam would have removed any perceived veracity from Coppola’s film. It was far easier getting the American public to swallow lies about an imaginary ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ or a fictional ‘Domino Theory’ or even that Vietnam was a ‘winnable’ war then it was to get the public to believe actual facts about a long running conflict.
I was going through treatment for cancer back in 2005, and in addition to a surgery I was receiving radiation treatments. There are restrictions on people who receive internal radiation treatments (in my case, it was a large dose of radioactive Iodine 131) and then being sent home after taking the dosage. In the past, I had been kept in the hospital for the treatment in a special hospital room that was lined with lead panels, and the toilet sewer system was sent to a specific tank, where it was kept before being sent to the public sewage system.
At any rate, after taking the treatment I was told to spend three days in isolation, and a few extra days staying away from small children and pregnant women. (It was a a different time, and perspectives on cancer treatments and radiation.)
Anyway, I came home and met my pregnant neighbor near the front door to the building. I stepped away from her and told her I was going through radiation treatment and that I didn’t want to harm her or her baby. She smiled, went in, and a few minutes later I went to my apartment.
About 2 hours later, I heard a knock at my door. It was around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and I went to the door and asked who is it, but got no answer. I opened the door, and on a tray was a meal of beef tips and noodles, some home baked bread, a single flower in a vase, and a note. The note was from my pregnant neighbor, and she had written something like my mom had cancer and I wanted you to know that I am available to talk if you need anything.
Nicest response I got from anyone who ever found out that I was a cancer patient.
China STRIKES BACK at Neocons as Biden ‘Disappointed’ Xi Skips G20 w/ Carlos Martinez & Ken Hammond
This conversation is so good, unbiased and informative.
Southern Shrimp and Grits
Southern Shrimp and Grits is a cheesy delight, and the bacon and green onions add a ton of flavor!
2023 09 16 15 12
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 slices bacon, chopped
3 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup instant grits
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled, deveined
4 green onions, thinly sliced (about 1/3 cup)
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Instructions
Cook bacon in large skillet over medium-heat heat until crisp.
Drain on paper towels; set aside.
Bring water and salt to boil in medium saucepan.
Slowly stir in grits. Reduce heat to medium-low; cover. Cook for 7 minutes or until thickened. Stir in cheese; set aside.
Add shrimp, onions and garlic to skillet; cook and stir 3 minutes or until shrimp turn pink.
When I was a boy, I had a friend named Jeff B. I spoke about him earlier. He was the kid with the great idea of growing “night-crawler” worms in his garage so he could become a millionaire. Anyways, today’s story is about his plate.
You see, in his living room was a glass curio cabinet, and at the top of the cabinet, proudly displayed was a pretty normal ceramic dish. It didn’t look anything special to me. I’ll tell you what. But, they (his entire family) revered that plate.
You see, that plate was used to serve George Washington back in the 1780’s.
It served duck, maybe turkey… maybe chicken to the President.
The telling of the tale seems to be blurred at this moment in time.
Yupper. My local boyhood friend was in possession of a major American historical artifact. And it was there; right there in plain sight. Imagine that!
That’s it.
(crickets)
I wonder how many great historical artifacts lie hidden in everyday homes, long forgotten and their histories lie undusted? Hum.
Like a cache of 1950’s era men’s magazines. Or a box of world war I metals. Or perhaps, an original 1950’s barbie doll in a pristine box.
Or, even more interesting…
A metal fob found in a lump of coal, or the old “Indian tale” of a certain place in the woods with magical histories…
Makes you think.
Don’t you know…
…
Todays….
Southern Pork Loin with Fall Flavor Infusion
This pork loin recipe is easy to make and has been a Southern favorite for generations. Apples and pork have always been a great duo and this crock pot recipe is no exception.
pork loin fall flavor infusion
Ingredients
3 pounds pork loin
1 apple, cut in half and sliced
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 Vidalia or other sweet onion, sliced
Instructions
Slice slits into pork loin horizontally about 3/4 through meat.
Fill each slit with an apple slice and drizzle honey over top.
Sprinkle with cinnamon.
Transfer pork loin to slow cooker. Layer onions over top.
After 30 years of rapid development, China’s society has entered the level of a middle-to-high-income country. In 2022, Chinese people will buy 25 million cars, and per capita GDP will reach US$12,000. In this case, if you want a Chinese to turn a screw on the production line, or sew a shirt, their monthly salary requirements are often more than $1,000. But, it’s only $300 for a Vietnamese or a Bangladeshi to do the same thing. What do you think the Chinese company will do? Yes, as early as a few years ago, Chinese enterprises have already begun to transfer abroad. The first thing to be transferred is clothing, toys, shoes and other industries with a high proportion of labor.
Just because an enterprise or factory has moved to Vietnam does not mean that it has no connection with China. For the production of clothes, toys, shoes, household appliances. They need upstream support. Equipment, computers, software, buttons, batteries, switches, wiring, paint, circuit boards, everything. from where? Can only be imported from China.
Therefore, the transfer of industries is accompanied by a sharp increase in China’s exports to target countries.
2. Decoupling of the United States and the European Union (passive transfer)
Since Trump launched the trade war, the United States and the European Union have begun to “decouple” from China. They said “Hey! Let’s not do business with China, don’t buy Chinese stuff, okay?” In order to force importers and consumers, they imposed too high tariffs and created a sanction list with only one purpose, to prevent the sale of Chinese goods.
However, what will happen to people’s lives without Chinese products?
So they need to find a replacement. Some countries with large populations and low wages are the best choices: Mexico, Vietnam for example. They signed trade deals, lowered tariffs for these countries, and hoped they would replace China. It’s a pretty naive idea: New cheap suppliers replace old ones, with nothing to lose.
However, businessmen in Vietnam and Mexico soon discovered that they simply could not make these items (or it was more expensive to make them than in China). The easier way is to import from China, label it with Mexican or Vietnamese labels, and sell it to Americans or Europeans.
Another strange line appeared: China exported semi-finished or finished products, and Vietnam and Mexico completed the final assembly and outer packaging.
Finally exported to America and Europe.
3. Everyone wins The Chinese found that their exports were not reduced.
From January to July 2023, China’s total exports increased by 3.1%.
Vietnam and Mexico saw a massive increase in their exports and imports, and people made more money.
Politicians in the United States and the European Union are finding that trade decoupling from China is paying off. Imports from China fell.
The Big Lebowski (1998). Jeff Bridges portrays Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, a passionate bowler, White Russian drinker, and consummate slacker.
The Big Lebowski received mixed reviews when it first came out. The movie seemed a bit odd for audiences and reviewers to initially appreciate, especially in comparison to the Coen brothers’ previous hit film, Fargo, which received seven Oscar nominations and went on to win two Academy Awards.
Peter Howell from the Toronto Star wrote, “It’s hard to believe that this is the work of a team that won an Oscar last year for the original screenplay of Fargo.” Doesn’t exactly tickle your interest, does it?
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Over the years though, The Big Lebowski has developed into a cult classic. Passionate fans of the film call themselves “achievers” (an ironic reference to the Dude’s lack of ambition), and several lines from the movie have become memorable quotes, such as:
• “I’m The Dude. So, that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or, uh, Duder, or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.”
• “Obviously you’re not a golfer.”
• “Hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here!”
• “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
• “This aggression will not stand, man.”
• “The dude abides.”
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As the film evolved into the cult status it has become, it spawned “Dudeism”, a way-of-life that celebrates The Dude’s philosophy and laid-back lifestyle.
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In 2002, what began as a Lebowski Fest in a local bowling alley in Louisville, Kentucky, has evolved into 4,000 people now attending the fest. In addition to the original fest, several other Lebowski fests have taken place in cities around the US.
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Jeff Bridges has described The Dude as his favorite role, and the only one of his films he feels comfortable watching.
“It’s just a really good movie,” he told Vanity Fair in 2022. “The characters, the way everything is executed from the set design to the wardrobe, everything is just right.”
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The Big Lebowski, what began as one of the Coen brothers most misunderstood and underappreciated films, is now regarded as one of their best films. The Dude’s iconic repute is still alive and kicking.
In 1997 I witnessed a pickup truck flip and roll, and saw one person fly out of the truck. I was first on scene. A teenaged boy was sobbing, only a few scratches, asking me where his grandpa is. The boy said he was driving and got distracted.
50-60 yards away I found his deceased grandpa, head totally caved in, blood spot from every pore in what was left of his face. His hands were clutched in an agonizing pose.
I grabbed a blanket from my car to cover his body so that his grandson wouldn’t see him like that, nor bystanders who began to appear.
I comforted the teenaged driver for 30 minutes until police and fire rescue arrived on scene. The boy was devastated, saying “I killed my gradpa” and “I’m so sorry grandpa “ all in the midst of his sobbing. I told the boy his grandpa was gone.
Cops told me it was obvious the old man was thrown from the truck, which then landed on his head, causing instant death. The boy was wearing his seat belt; the grandpa was not.
After that I insisted that everyone in my family buckle up. A year later, my sister in law rolled their family car 3 times, only a mile from where the old man died. Everyone was wearing a seat belt, and only got minor scratches and bruises, but their car was a mangled mess.
My sister in law told me that when they left the house, she told everyone to buckle up because of what Uncle Danny said happened.
That was 36 years ago. Once in awhile I still wake up from a nightmare of that sobbing teenaged driver, and the image of the smashed head of an old man I did not know.
When I first saw the man’s face, I was stunned to realize that I was seeing blood drops from every pore in his mangled face from the impact of the pickup truck.
I remember it like it just happened, all these years later.
Please, wear your seat belt for your family, friends, the EMTs, and innocent people who might see your smashed head when they stop to help.
When I was a kid, they had all kinds of neat things you could send away for in comic books.
I ordered the Big Bang cannon and scared the shit out of my family one night when I fired it off in my room. After that it was an outside cannon only. Worse was when I was 10, I fired off a .22 starter pistol in my room. That gun was confiscated. Then there was the black chewing gum that turned your mouth black when you chewed it. I gave a piece to my older sister Tracy when she went out with her friends. Funny! Younger brothers did things like that. My pal Earl ordered the X Ray Specs, glasses that you were supposed to see through things with, like girls clothing. Didn’t work. Earl was vastly disappointed. He wore them over to my house hoping to see through my sisters clothes.
“Those are pretty stupid looking sun glasses,” Lori said to him. Earl felt stupid.
I ordered the footlocker full of soldiers, tanks, boats and airplanes. A FOOTLOCKER FULL OF THEM! WOW. When I finally got the footlocker, it was about seven inches by two inches full of flat, tiny, half inch crap, not even to scale. Very poorly made. Disappointment was real though. This stuff was all junk but they made it look so great.
I remember when I was ten I asked my mom at the breakfast table if I could get the little monkey advertised in the comic ads. My twelve year old sisters burst out laughing.
“I’ll look after it,” I promised.
“RJ, those things aren’t real. They’re all fake,” Lori said to me. But they actually were real. Live animals shipped to kids for $18.99, a lot of money in those days. Unbelievable.
Mom laid the law down. NO MORE ORDERING FROM COMICS!
But the dream of many boys was the Polaris Submarine. WOW! A real nuclear submarine! For only $6.98! Many boys dreamt of getting their sub and taking it down to the river where they could float around, dive, and shoot nuclear missiles and torpedoes. The ad actually said you could hunt for sunken treasure and explore the ocean floor. To good to be true? Yes it was. When the package arrived, you had to build it, ‘out of cardboard’. It would last two minutes in the water. It wouldn’t last an hour out in the rain in the back yard.
Most of the ads were lies but they got away with it. Many children were disappointed. But still, it was fun to look at those pictures and dream.
The Biden administration has made it very clear that China must operate in the manner in which the USA sees fit
That China must develop in the manner in which the USA sees fit
In short –
Make all the Washing Machines, Laptops, Smartphones, Microwaves and Televisions you wantMake all the Jeans, Toys, Textiles you wantMake all the low and medium grade components you wantHell even make all the Robots you want and High Speed Trains, EVs and Solar Panels and Green Energy
Yet at the same time
You cannot go ahead of us or our allies in the areas of Advanced Computing, Space, Quantum Computing, AI etc. You should always be No 8.You cannot modernize your Military technologicallyYou cannot pursue your own foreign policy and Geopolitics against our foreign policyYou cannot support anyone who doesn’t follow the Rules based orderYou have to buy more Bonds of ours and acknowledge the Dollar as the world’s only reserve currency
This was the BIDEN DOCTRINE TO CHINA
Qin Gang and Blinken apparently discussed this where :- In exchange for China acknowledging the Biden Doctrine & relinquishing support to Russia & Forcing Putin to sue for peace by weaponizing the Yuan The US would remove tariffs on Chinese products, remove export controls on certain equipment, remove 215 Chinese entities from the blacklist and propose Status Quo for Taiwan with no support for Taiwanese Independence The plan was likely for QG to deliver an ultimatum to Lavrov and for Xi Jingping to gather Global South Leaders like KSA & UAE while US could persuade India and together force Putin to call a ceasefire in UkraineThe Old Fox Wang Yi likely told Blinken to f*** himself which is why Biden was so angry that he called XJP a dictator I believe Raimondo tried the same thing, asking China to trade and develop in a direction acceptable to the US I believe China again said GO SCREW That’s why Raimondo was so angry when she returned backBlinken, Yellen, Raimondo all pushed China to follow the Biden Doctrine and China said No each time which was why they all returned back in a state of fury So now Biden will say the same thing if he meets Xi Jingping
Maybe Hu Jintao would have agreed
Not Xi Jingping
So Biden and Xi meeting is a pointless exercise
There is no US Leader who is willing to ask China to do whatever it wants and COMPETE with China directly and win
It’s very unlikely that Ukraine can turn the tide in the next 45–50 days after which the rains descend in all their fury
The West is very angry
They expected a breakthrough by Ukraine and a belief that such a breakthrough would force the Russians to negotiate from a position of weakness
It didn’t happen
Instead Ukraine lost too many men and too much equipment
Bradleys, M113s, M777s, M109s, Leopard Tanks, Strykers all burning on the battlefields
Almost 70% of Ammunition used up. Ukraine had almost 700,000 Shells in June 2023, sufficient to use 8000 Shells a day for 90 days, yet they used up 270,000 Shells in the first 16 days of the offensive and are down to their last 200,000 Shells today
They have sent over 110 Drones into Russia but only 17 caused any damage and now they are short of Drones
Plus the men they lost!!!
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See the horror here
The Russians tag every dead Ukrainian now and they accurately estimate 4700 Dead in the past 14 days.
That’s Dead
Not Wounded
The Estimate of the Dead Ukrainians in the last 3 months ranges from 40,000 to 70,000
Almost all of these were NATO TRAINED
They were not conscripts
NATO trained 70,000 men and it’s likely most of them perished in the counter offensive
So the West simply hang in there because they can’t lose face and they can’t appear to have LOST
They spoke too much
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The West can’t really keep pursuing aggressive strategy here
They tried begin aggressive, threatening people in 2022 and 2023 but that was because they hoped they would be in a winning position
That’s not happening
Now they need to end the conflict without appearing to look defeated
Bernie Marcus was CEO of the Handy Dan Home Improvement Center chain when the parent company declared bankruptcy. Marcus was fired by a vindictive board even though the Handy Dan division was not in bankruptcy.
“They threw me out of my office and put bars on the door. They searched my files. It was pretty terrible — one of those corporate things. You hear about them, but you don’t know what they are like until you live through one.”
He was convinced to drop his lawsuit against the company by a mentor who encouraged him to get on with his life. Another friend advised him to open the store he had always dreamed of. And that’s how The Home Depot was born. He was fired from a top spot in hardware retailing and went on to redefine the hardware industry.
In Japanese culture, when you reach 20 you are officially considered an adult. Cities across Japan have “Coming of Age
” ceremonies where 20-year olds would dress up in formal attire or traditional Japanese clothing to attend.
This was over six years ago, but being in the U.S. at the time I had no ceremony to go to. Still, my parents and I decided it would be nice for me to dress up anyway for a family photo shoot.
(long-sleeved kimono) or any kimono is a complicated art form impossible for amateurs to do. Fortunately for me, my best friend’s mom happened to be certified, and she offered to dress me free of charge.
As she was tying the stings around my waist, she said:
“Serina, you have the perfect body type for kimonos! You’re going to look so good.”
My genuine smile froze as she continued,
“They’ve always said people with a flat chest and no waist are ideal. It’s such a struggle to dress my daughter….“
-_____________________________-
I died a little inside that day, but I still managed to smile for the camera.
We purchased our first house in Hampton, VA in 1976 for $15,000. It needed painting and we were planning on starting on Saturday hoping we could get it finished in a couple of weeks. Talking to our neighbor who had a crew doing restoration painting. I asked him what the best paints were that was reasonably priced and told him what we were going to do. “When are you going to paint it?” “Starting Saturday.” “I can probably get some folks to help if you are buying the beer.” “Great!” “How much is the paint going to be?” “My price.” A crew of six showed up at 6 am Sat and were finished inside and out by 5 pm and ready to party.
We moved into our new (to us) house in Burleson, TX on the day before Thanksgiving. As I am working on unloading the POD’s our neighbor walked over and waited for me to come back out. “I know that you are busy and don’t need me intruding. I just wanted you to know that you don’t need to worry about a Thanksgiving turkey. I am going to my mom’s tomorrow and deep frying two, I will cook one for you also.” He showed up the next day with Turkey, sides and a fresh baked pie.
While this may not be the most life-ruining experience, it certainly causes you to fantasize about using baseball bats in ways you’ve never imagined after being a victim of such an atrocity.
It still boils my blood thinking about it.
Let me explain:
I live in quite an affluent and liberal area – Montgomery County, MD to be exact. Montgomery County borders directly against Washington D.C., so the government basically fuels the entire economy and causes people to flock to the area. Of course, not everyone is rich, or even well-off. There are a lot of poor people in the area, including immigrants – a lot of whom are ‘undocumented’. These people are hurt the most by this specific brand of towing.
Basically, here’s how it works –
At first, a parking lot may be abused. Let’s say I want to visit a friend, but there’s no parking, so…eh, what the heck? I’ll just park in the grocery store parking lot nearby and walk over. Maybe Safeway gets tired of people taking up their parking spaces, but not doing any shopping. Let’s say it gets really bad after a while and there’s no spaces for paying customers to park, so they start to have cars towed away when people park there and walk “off premises”. Seems pretty logical, right?
That’s the innocent example, but here’s what it snowballed into:
A woman pulls into a McDonald’s parking lot – her son wanted a burger. She parks. He walks into McDonald’s, she walks to the post office 2 doors down. She comes out 7 minutes later to find her car, front wheels hoisted off the ground by a tow truck (one of the short ones with no bed, just a crane on the back). She is confused, scared, angry that someone is ‘stealing’ her car (as far as she understands it). She confronts the Shrek looking man who is operating the tow truck. He tells her (in his most practiced rude attitude) that ‘walk-offs’ are not allowed. He points to a sign in the far corner of the parking lot, under a tree. When examining the 18″x24″ sign (minimum regulation size).
It basically says “2 hours parking only; if you park and leave you will be towed” then a bunch of fine print, but at the bottom it says “Towing charge $440; storage per day ~$40” (can’t quite make out the storage price). So, you get towed, you go pick you car up immediately, and it’s “$480 to get your car out” they say with a smile.
The woman argues, saying she has a receipt for the McDonald’s. Her son is holding the food in the McDonald’s bag.
He ignores her and says “The tow bill is $440 plus $40/day when you pick it up from Rockville (12 miles away), or I can drop it now for $250 cash.”
She tries to argue more, but he continues lifting the car up. As she is yelling she doesn’t have $250 in cash, he walks to the truck, gets in, and leaves with her car.
Scenario 2:
In addition to pretty much all businesses having some sort of deal with towing (the business gets a kickback because the towing is so profitable), all apartment complexes have adopted a similar deal. Remember how I said immigrants are a large part of the population in Montgomery County? Do you know that immigrants usually live crammed in one household? Well…When you’ve got 8 hispanics living in a 2 bedroom apartment, and 6 of them have jobs, they all have cars to get to work. But the apartment complex only gives out 1 parking permit per adult resident allowed to live there – 1 per bedroom. So the hispanic family only has 2 parking permits, but they have 6 cars. What do they do?
Well, the first night they likely make a huge mistake – they park in the lot without a permit. Towing is allowed to start at 10pm, so a “scout” or “spotter” shows up at 9:48pm walking around with a flashlight looking for parking permits in the window. You remember “oh crap! I need to move my car by 10pm!” You walk outside to see your car being towed up the hill at 10:02pm, gone. $480 at the tow lot in Rockville, 12 miles away. An entire week’s pay – gone.
Scenario 3:
You see your car being raised off the ground. You run up to the guy and start arguing. He says the “$250 cash and I drop it”. You pay him, he pockets it, and goes to hook up someone else’s car 10 feet away. Rinse and repeat.
These towing companies quickly realized how profitable it can be to employ these predatory towing practices (a tow company could make $5,000 per tow truck in a night), and it became rampant in Montgomery County throughout the 2000s. There was very little regulation on the books. Around 2013 it really started getting atrociously bad. Even though there were some rules on the books by then, they were nearly unenforceable, or just plain not enforced. The use of “scouts” was made illegal, but hard to prove, so the towing companies kept using scouters because they are so profitable. Additionally, these tow companies will ignore some smaller rules – such as being required to have an ATM on premises. Another problem is them damaging your vehicle. You ever try to get an auto shop to admit they dinged your door while they were working on your car? These guys are 100x worse. I’ve seen all-wheel drive cars being towed (front wheels on the ground) that are jerking and bucking all over the place because the transmission is still in gear and it’s catching. I was once towed and they broke my windshield. In addition to the $300 tow bill, I got a “it was like that when we towed it” in respond to my cracked windshield.
There is nearly zero recourse.
Me, an angry white male who speaks proficient english, tried to file a complaint with the “Office of Consumer Protection (OCP)” in Montgomery County. The investigator (investigator XXY) told me things like ‘the owner is never in the office’ and ‘they haven’t responded yet’.
BRO! You are literally THE government. It’s your job to police these guys.
About 6 months later, my dad’s truck had been towed so we went to pick it up from one of these scumdumsters. As we were paying, an official looking guy comes in and starts talking all buddy-buddy with these chumbuckets. Stuff like “oh how’s Linda? And the kids?” I realize that he’s supposed to be some sort of inspector. I talk to him and find out he works for the OCP. “Oh, wow. Do you know investigator XXY by chance?” ‘I am investigator XXY!’ oh well fuck you then
It’s starting to be cracked down on. Here are some articles that make my heart sing
This clip is from season 4 episode 3. I fucking love gale. His death was genuinely the hardest to watch for me, he was such an endearing dork.
A first comment on B’s site
I write here just to address Pacifica’s point at @7, which is dead-on accurate I think. First comment ever here, but love this site B. So good.
This is kind of a general plea, but we get so lost in the politics, and this team or that team, it’s as if we’ve failed to figure out that the whole damn system is rotten, both teams. As the Founding Fathers realized, this is what poisoned so many governments in Greece and Rome and throughout history.
In any event, Trump was basically a 1980s Democrat who loves the country, hates wars, and just likes doing deals. Remember that MSNBC interview, where they listed out a bunch of positions and Trump is like, hey, you’re describing me, and they said no, that’s Bernie Sanders’ platform. LOL. He is very close to the Kennedy family, which is why he and RFK do not attack each other. I would love to see that combined ticket. I truly believe that 2016 was the last free election, and the deep state was so sure he was going to get beaten in a landslide they did not activate all their plans/contingencies.
In any event, look at what Trump said on the campaign trail with regard to Russia. Why can’t we get along?? What idiot wants to start WWIII??
Indeed. And then look how Trump dealt with China. Yes, he had very serious hawks on China on his team, but it really dealt with trade and business. Repeatedly, he made the comment that he doesn’t blame China for these crappy trade deals and eating our lunch, they are just doing what’s right for them, he blames our stupid leaders for allowing this to take place and completely hollowing out our industrial capacity. It is the fault of OUR politicians. That was completely respectful to the Chinese. (And of course, he would scapegoat this or that, such as Corona stuff, but that is just politics, even the Chinese get that)
As Pacifica said, Trump can be manipulated by the oligarchs, but it’s even deeper than that. Understand how our entire system has been hijacked to work against the PEOPLE and for the benefit of the few at the top. Trump wanted no wars. Trump wanted to pardon Assange and Snowden any many others (he was threatened with immediate impeachment conviction if he did so). He wanted better labor deals and to secure the country.
The guy was impeached twice for essentially nothing. The Democrats were firing at will. And HIS OWN PARTY hated him. Opened up all these idiotic investigations like Russiagate. FFS, that scumbag Paul Ryan wouldn’t even give him money to build the wall, which is the issue he won on. The deep state of McConnell, et al., had at their fingertips the ability to convict him with 20 GOP Senators standing at the ready if Trump went too far off the reservation. I think everyone has to remember that.
If one studies his errors, just consider what was arrayed against him. The Soleimani attack. True, I did not like that, but Trump was the only thing standing in the way of a full blown war against Iran. The MIC had those plans ready and literally said let’s do it and put it before him. Trump said no.
Sending weaponry to Ukraine. Again, the WHOLE system was saying he was a puppet of Russia, so of course he was boxed into that corner. If he said no, can you imagine the fury of the system saying, see, we told you so!!
Pacifica, I’m not sure about MacGregor, and I’m willing to give some benefit of the doubt here b/c I really like his thoughts on Ukraine and military matters generally, but I do worry about any saber rattling with China. It makes no sense and is idiotic. They had nothing to do with the opiod plague. All one needs to do is look at the Sackler family and that whole rotten cabal and so many towers of power would come down if the people knew and the fury was put in the right direction. But certain ethnic clans and regulatory agencies would get nervous. There was a 25 page or so New Yorker article on that that was just brilliant.
It’s amazing how much the system is against the people. You had Walgreens pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for ivermectin, which is essentially aspirin, but if you need some opiods, just come on up, no problem!!
Sorry for the very long winded message. The American system is rotten to the core. The only people in the ring that actually care about the American PEOPLE and peace and lives throughout the world imho are Trump, RFK, and Sanders to some extent. I don’t trust anyone else quite frankly.
And finally, with the weaponization of the court system and these ridiculous indictments, which themselves are an indictment on the American populace as to the stupidity to which they have devolved and the darkness or partisanship that should have had these grand juries laughing this stuff out of the room, we are in sad and dark times now. Even though Hillary clearly was rotten to the core and an absolute criminal, I never supported anything criminal against her, you open that pandora’s box and you don’t know where it leads.
It’s why there’s a famous saying, grand juries are so retarded you can indict a ham sandwich. Very dark times ahead I think. The system is pulling out all the stops. I have no idea where this leads.
My Chinese friend asked me a question: As we all know, there are 7 days in a week, when you need to express the eighth day, how do you say it in English?
This stumps me. There is no such word in English. I can only say “Monday next week”, or “the day after Sunday”.
But the Chinese can create a new word “星期八” at will, and other Chinese people don’t need to learn anything. The Chinese people can immediately understand what he means.
Another Chinese teacher asked me a question: If you went back to England hundreds of years ago and asked Queen Anne: “What are trains, wires, televisions, refrigerators, telegraphs?” Queen Anne will know nothing.
But if you go back 2000 years ago and ask Qin Shihuang the same question. Qin Shihuang will tell you: Yes, I know the general meaning. train: a vehicle powered by fire Wire: A rope that can spread lightning Television: A machine that displays shadows by means of lightning Freezer: a box full of ice Telegram: Reports sent by lightning
Since it was finalized 2000 years ago, the number of commonly used Chinese characters has dropped from 50,000 to 7,000, but its meaning has expanded countless times with the development of human science and technology.All professional words, including words that have not yet appeared in the future, can be expressed using these 7,000 Chinese characters.People can understand the meaning of these future words without detailed study.
But the number of English words has expanded to 1 million in the past 300 years, 98% of which are professional words that ordinary people cannot master. Basically, every time humans discover new knowledge and items, English needs to create a new word. Moreover, people who have not studied cannot understand it.
Chinese characters:This is a magical text whose underlying architecture can be infinitely expanded without incurring too much learning cost.
FACES OF KENSINGTON (Zombies in the real life of the United States) Streets of Philadelphia – Part 2
Whose law? US laws are for US people in the U.S. International must be written by all nations! Not one? Or a few Chinese or China hating ones!
US don’t rule the world.
Even though some in the U.S. thinks so.
It may be a strong nation and likes to talk and behaves like it does.
It is just a single nation amongst other nations.
The U.S. has every right (though hurting itself) to stop buying any products from any nation. But to tell others not to is not the U.S. right. Some dog nations, slaves nations and cronies wants to do so is up to their cowardice and lack of courage but it don’t matter. It is their right to destroy their own nation.
Take the UK for example. Today they don’t even have half the Chinese 5G capability spending more than twice to set up unworkable and inefficient 5G non Chinese systems and today it is the worst performing Europe nation. But it is theirright to destroy itself.
Australia under Scott Morrison nearly self destructed Australia but the Aussies send him packing.
Good bye!
We the rest of the world must understand this and see to it that the U.S. cannot and won’t ever control the world.
This is good for the world and it’s good for Americans too.
US excesses are killing and collapsing the United States.
SO, The Rumours are True! Oprah Shady Maui Deal with The Rock Exposed
An AI Model Tested In The Ukraine war Is Helping Assess Damage From The Hawaii Wildfires Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Oprah Winfrey face backlash for asking fans to donate to Maui fund instead of contributing more themselves The family of a woman who died trying to flee a wildfire on Maui is suing the county, the state and one of Hawaii’s largest landowners, alleging they neglected to maintain their fire-prone property.
Because China isn’t artificially modifying it’s currency and a low yuan helps the Chinese stay competitive
As I have reminded you Japan was strongest when it’s yen was 291 to the Dollar
It became stagnant and a zombie economy when it’s rate went to 115 a Dollar
It was FORCED to do so by the US in 1985 as part of the Plaza Accords
China won’t do that. EVER.
The US hopes to weaken the Yuan and use that to pull out investments and force China to appreciate the Yuan by other means including purchasing US Debt
China is already busy with establishing it’s own BLOC
Tomorrow instead of wasting time with G20, Xi meets President Maduro of Venezuela and inks a Oil Contract paid fully in Yuan and Priced in Yuan
If this works out then in 2024 – China will be purchasing 41% of Oil in Yuan or Ruble or Infrastructure Projects
US hope for China to print money, bail out their real estate companies and buy long term debt in Dollars and Euros to keep the Yuan floating
Like India has done, purchasing more US Debt than selling in the first eight months of the year
China knows how dangerous that can be and prefers ECONOMIC FORCES to handle the same while taking care of it’s energy supply
Family Guy British Radio
INDY speaks
Given matters in China have a bearing upon the SMO, a few items to consider…. LINK HERE Tech war: China’s top memory chip maker YMTC making progress in producing advanced 3D NAND products with locally sourced equipment: sources YMTC’s top secret project, which aims to use Chinese-only equipment, has placed big orders with domestic tool suppliers, including Beijing-based Naura Technology The ramped up sourcing of local equipment comes after YMTC received fresh funding to the tune of US$7 billion from its state-backed investors, including the ‘Big Fund’
Chinese chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) is planning to use domestically sourced equipment to make advanced flash memory products after it was put on a US trade blacklist last year, according to industry sources.
If successful, the strategy would represent a breakthrough in China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in semiconductor production after the country was denied access to advanced chip making tools over Washington’s concerns that the technology would end up in the hands of the Chinese military.
LINK HERE Huawei Teardown Shows Chip Breakthrough in Blow to US Sanctions The company’s Mate 60 Pro is powered by SMIC’s 7nm chips, according to analysis that TechInsights conducted for Bloomberg News
LINK HERE China is the breakaway global leader in new nuclear construction.
China has 21 nuclear reactors under construction which will have a capacity for generating more than 21 gigawatts of electricity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is two and a half times more nuclear reactors under construction than any other country.
India has the second largest nuclear buildout right now, with eight reactors under construction that will be able to generate more than six gigawatts of electricity. Third place Turkey has four nuclear reactors under construction with a presumed capacity of 4.5 gigawatts.
The United States currently has one nuclear reactor under construction, the fourth reactor at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, which will be able to generate just over 1 gigawatt.
“China is the de facto world leader in nuclear technology at the moment,” Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNBC.
China is “the determined and pacing leader in global nuclear ambition at the moment,” agrees Kenneth Luongo, president and founder of the Partnership for Global Security, a nuclear and transnational security and energy policy non-profit. China is “leading, even racing ahead,” Luongo said.
CHINA / SOCIETY China to employ multiple methods to enhance monitoring of marine environmental pollution: MEE By Shan Jie Published: Aug 28, 2023 10:47 PM
In this aerial image, nuclear-contaminated water is released from the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean on August 24, 2023 in Okuma, Fukushima, Japan. Photo: VCG In this aerial image, nuclear-contaminated water is released from the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean on August 24, 2023 in Okuma, Fukushima, Japan. Photo: VCG
The dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan has raised concerns among Chinese citizens about the state of the marine environment. Chinese environmental authorities on Monday vowed to strengthen the monitoring of marine environmental pollution through multiple means, including conducting baseline surveys of marine pollution and utilizing satellites for monitoring.
China has launched its third marine pollution baseline survey, with the goal of completing a thorough investigation and assessment by 2025, said Wang Juying, the director of the National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, at the ministry’s monthly press conference on Monday.
LINK HERE Thailand’s confusing election was a win for China Thailand’s election saw winner Move Forward pushed to the opposition. It vowed to reset foreign relations including that with China. The current Pheu Thai-led government won’t likely deliver that.
Chinese scientists look to 6G to hunt submarines, testing device small enough to fit on drone Defence researchers say sensors can identify extremely small surface vibrations produced by a low-frequency sound source in the open sea UAV-mounted platform could work in concert with other submarine detection methods such as a magnetic anomaly detector (MAD), microwave radar or laser
China’s most advanced Fujian aircraft carrier on track for 2025 PLA handover, latest Weibo photos suggest Covers taken off all three electromagnetic catapults on the deck of the Fujian, social media photos posted by military buffs show Images indicate readiness for sea trials and systems testing, with warship likely to join the PLA within two years as scheduled, observers say
Not included above…. Passenger traffic on the Laos High Speed Rail Network has more than doubled since the beginning of the year..
Neither the markets nor consumers are easily surprised any longer by tech developments. Huawei’s deceptively low-key launch of its new “breakthrough” smartphone has turned out to be an exception, sparking patriotic jubilation on the mainland about a victory over American efforts to block China’s rise. At the same time it has caused consternation in the US over the apparent failure of a tech containment policy towards China, which has been progressively tightened under the Biden administration.
Analysts and market observers believed that even if the US could not head off China’s tech rise in the long run, its policies would significantly slow it down – that it would take Huawei, for example, longer to reach the stage it now has. Most people are taken aback by its progress.
The question for Western technology experts – and US security officials – is how Huawei developed the advanced semiconductors that drive its Mate 60 Pro. The device is powered by the new Kirin 9000s chip whose processor runs on the 7 nanometre technology, the kind of advanced chip the US seeks to deny China.
Sales of the new phone may be largely confined to the mainland and China may remain five years behind but, in simple terms, it is within one technology generation of the West. Beijing has spared no expense to build a domestic semiconductor industry, including billions in reported subsidies for Huawei to develop a network of fabrication plants. The aim is to boost the domestic supply of high-end products such as 5G smartphones, according to a plan released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Finance last month.
Huawei’s apparent breakthrough is in some senses symbolic. It is just one battle in a long war in which it will remain the weaker player. This is nonetheless a morale booster for China, a reminder of resilience and huge potential. That said, it still makes more sense, whenever the situation allows, for China to seek cooperation rather than fall back on total self reliance. Economically that does not make sense for any country.
That is not to discount China’s achievement. It is a reminder, as many have said, that US containment policy may backfire. A major concern is possible fragmentation of the global tech development and supply chain, creating problems such as oversupply and incompatibility, or so-called Balkanisation of the tech sector.
Technological development is going to be extremely expensive. Division of effort can help bring down costs and speed development. If Washington cites security concerns, unsupported by evidence, for trying to contain China’s tech rise it can only raise costs for everyone. In the light of Huawei’s new smartphone launch the US should come to terms with the need to revise its policy for everyone’s sake.
Not me, but my daughter who was 17 at the time, was working at a McDonalds in a bad neighborhood. They had to constantly check the bathrooms for needles and passed out junkies (she actually found a nice Bowie knife in it one day and the manager let her keep it). So one day she steps outside for a break and finds a man laying on the sidewalk, bleeding from a stab wound (not from a Bowie knife), so she does what they were taught to do and calls for a manager, grabs some gloves and a towel and comes back outside.
The manager (30 something male) is standing outside, wringing his hands, along with several older staff members and none of them will take the gloves. The manager is trained in first aid as part of his job, but he won’t calm down. So my daughter tells one of them to go back inside and call 911, and she puts on the gloves, takes the towels and applies pressure to the wound. She talks to the guy while they wait for the ambulance and keeps him calm, while her manager is trying not to pass out from hyperventilating.
When the ambulance arrives, the paramedics assess the man and while one is getting the guy’s wound stabilized, the other one starts asking questions. When he finds out my daughter is only 17, he lost his crap on the manager and then commended my daughter for doing such a good job. He told her that she should be a paramedic because she was so cool under pressure. She laughed and told him she hates the sight of blood, but didn’t want the guy to die. She then went on break and had a little cry, then returned to work.
I was a 20 year old newly licensed pilot flying solo from picking up my wedding dress one state over. There were thunderstorms in the area that my small plane should never fly in, not to mention i was a VFR pilot not qualified to fly in instrument conditions…so I landed at a small airport about halfway home. About an hour or so later the storms passed, and I called my fiance to see if the weather was clear at my destination (he worked as a fuel guy at the airport I was flying to). Earlier we had been in an immature fight where I thought he told me a lie, so there was some tension between us but we had put that aside for the moment. When I called him about the weather he said “yep it’s clear as a bell. Sunshine and rainbows.” So I took off and had about 45 mins in the air before getting there. The sky got darker and darker and by the time I landed it began pouring rain and lightning/thunder. I got there in the knick of time. When my fiance met me at my plane I said “omg! That was a close one! I was expecting rainbows and sunshine.” And he said “oh you believed me? I thought you thought I was a liar so why would I tell you the truth about the weather?” So he played with my life and safety in order to play a game and prove his point. My mother begged me to call off the wedding but foolishly I did not. It was a rough 9-month marriage before I got the hell away from him.
Well, Mcmahon is long dead, and he is neither Chinese nor Indian.
The problem with the Indian side is the rather inconvenient history of the Raj, which unilaterally drew the “border” that is at the heart of the dispute.
Nehru singlehandedly upset the gameboard, when he overreached and concluded China was too weak to fight his well-equipped elite frontline troops, distracted by the Taiwan crisis, embargo by the US-led west, and rapidly cooling relations with the Soviets. He also judged that China would find resupply over the roof of the world challenging, unlike India which held the lowlands.
Nehru’s forward policy reached its crescendo in 1961/62, with unbelievable rhetoric from New Delhi fueling provocative orders to establish guard posts NORTH of the Mcmahon line (in other words, the occupation of Chinese territory, even by Indian standards). Delhi granting asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959 raised suspicion that India was complicit in the 1960 Tibetan armed rebellion and had evil designs on Tibet.
By then, Nehru had rejected Zhou’s proposal for a East-West swap, despite China being prepared to accept the Mcmahon line as the basis of settlement. Instead, Nehru demanded China withdraw from Aksai Chin while retaining control of NEFA, today’s Arunachal Pradesh, as the essential condition for border negotiation.
Nehru wanted the cake cut India’s way as precondition, before negotiations had even begun!
The Chinese responded to Dhola Post after losing almost 80 men in early October to a skirmish with Indian troops. A massive attack was launched that decimated an Indian brigade. In the three-week lull that followed the battle of Namka Chu, India refused to negotiate, despite Nehru’s illusion of the Chinese unwillingness to attack being shattered. Mid-November exploded into full-blown war, with Chinese troops punching a hole through Indian lines that led straight to Delhi. The military loss was strategic and conclusive, despite China’s voluntary withdrawal.
India, in particular, Delhi, has never forgotten the humiliation, and fear of the capital being overrun by China. No leader since has criticized Nehru for his strategic blunder and overreach. That is why the border remains frozen in time. India, for the foreseeable future, will not come to the table unless China gives up claims (and actual control) to east and west.
Having shed blood to obtain the status quo, China will not agree to such terms as precondition for negotiation.
India needs a superman to courageously forge a new path distinct from the father of modern India, and come to the table as an equal, if slightly disadvantaged, party.
Absolutely Gina Raimondo and the state department believe that the rise of Huawei is a security threat to America and the world.
Let me give you an example of why Americans think like this. In 2012 I was in America and found a group of professionals who cycle twice a week. Everything was terrific. I purchased a second-hand mountain bike for $150 because I didn’t know how long I would stay. This is the bike I owned at the time:
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Everyone in the group had nice road/racing bikes that looked something like this:
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The first two months were incredible. All the males were very nice to me, the females wanted to introduce me to other females … it was love and humanity everywhere in the group.
Keeping up with fast road bikes on a heavy aluminium mountain bike was too much for me. So, one stupid day I decided to buy the below bike so I can keep up with my cycling group:
image 18
From that day forward people in the group started to distance themselves from me. People started to find me ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ all of a sudden. Females started to feel ‘intimidated’ in my presence. The males in the group started suggesting that maybe I was homophobic? maybe I’m misogynist?
Then they started to worry about the ‘safety’ of members of the group because of my presence.
Whenever I spoke people would become irritated, their faces would become red with anger.
When I stopped attending the group cycle meetings they became even angrier and more contemptuous of me. When I returned to cycle with them the anger and hate increased even more.
They didn’t want me in the group, and they didn’t want me to leave the group either. What I’m describing is the process of ‘ni*gerization’ that Western people put others through.
Raimondo, with most of America’s institutes, are desperately trying to ‘ni*gerize’ China.
I hate to say this, but the talent pool of American actors has been shrinking for years.
Most American actors came into movies through stage (like Brando) or adult television (like Burt Reynolds). They trained with good acting coaches using innovative techniques.
But now, most American actors come into movies from juvenile television. It’s a massive logistical problem, but it’s much easier to hire actors who have already had membership in the Screen Actors Guild than to try to get an actor who has trained on Broadway or at a university theatre program into the Screen Actors Guild.
And teenage American actors get virtually no training. They come into adult acting with no real background in how to act, so, when you need someone really good, it’s a really small pool of talent.
However, in Great Britain, where America draws most of its “Screen Americans”, teenagers who are on juvenile television are still in some sort of serious theatre program learning stuff like Shakespeare. They likely have theatre experience before they get into movies. They learn how to act.
Take one of my favourites, Maisie Williams.
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Although she got her job as Arya Stark at the age of 14, she already had three years of experience at a performing arts academy. Prior to that, she already had dance and drama training. Americans of the same age would probably be more interested in polishing their resumes than their acting skills.
Spike Lee noted that the film Selma featured British actors in all the lead roles, including playing Martin Luther King, Jr. He was somewhat upset that a black American didn’t get the role, but had to admit that he would be hard-pressed to name a young American actor who could carry the role.
And it’s that way for many serious productions. The big American actors aren’t bad, but they don’t have the same sort of training on the whole. There are exceptions, like Robert Downey, Jr., who have outstanding acting chops, but they’re few and far between, and their number keeps shrinking.
What exactly are all those fees and charges? You’ll notice my tuition (the last one on the list) is only about $7,000.
What’s the rest?
Rent—$3,345: I need a place to live, and the only way to get student loans/scholarships to cover my housing is to live on campus.Dining plan—$2,355: No kitchen means I need an on-campus dining plan. My plan is the cheapest they offer, giving me ten meals per week.STEP 161 supervision fee—$11: Presumably a fee to compensate my host teacher (or to pay for some aspect of that supervision) during my in-classroom observations.Student Capital Fee—$400: “The Student Capital Fee supports bonded facility debt service and facility operations as well as capital repair and replacement.”
I have no idea what this means.LEAF Fee—$10: “The Student Leadership for Environmental Action Fund (Student LEAF) is intended to move the campus community toward a sustainability-minded culture. This fund finances environmental improvements in campus infrastructure and educational initiatives.”Student Services Fee—$444: “Student services and support are funded by this portion of the Student Fees.”Health Insurance—$1,290: You have to have health insurance on campus. You can fill out a waiver proving you have your own health insurance and have this fee removed (which I’ll be doing).Library Fee—$70.80: “Covers print and online library materials.”Online course fee—$45: An extra fee due to the fact that I’m taking one online course. “On-Line Course Fee-online fees pay for adjunct costs resulting from increased course sections and smaller class sizes; it also funds instructional designers, development and training to enhance online course offerings.”THEA 100 and THEA 275 course fees—$40 each: Supposedly to cover the cost of materials and anything consumable used in-course (which really doesn’t exist in these courses).Theatre program fee—$128: No clue. I’m guessing it’s to fund the theatre program, which is bizarre.Technology fee—$160.80: “Used for equipping new smart classrooms, staffing and maintaining computer labs, and providing students access to academic software.”Differential tuition for theatre—$144: Theatre classes are more expensive, so we pay more in tuition to allow the university to keep having them.Tuition WUE—$6,966: My actual tuition. “Covers classroom instruction, student services, administration and facilities. Based on cost and demand, differential tuition may be charged for certain classes (Sciences/SES/Art, Business, Nursing, Theatre).”
So that’s how we get to that beautiful number of $15,449.
I’m only taking six classes—note that three (THEA 100, THEA 275, STEP 161) had extra fees attached in addition to the over $1,000 they already cost.
And on top of that, I pay an extra $250+ dollars in a program fee and differential tuition to cover the mere act of being in my major.
And, I already receive reduced tuition as a Wyoming resident. My tuition is, by default, 150% of in-state tuition, which is significantly less than out-of-state. Imagine what this bill would look like if I was from New York and not Wyoming.
“Get a job!” you say. “Stop being a lousy freeloader! Work, save up some money, and pay for it yourself!”
Let’s take a look at that— “pay for it yourself”. How possible is it for one to pay for their own college?
I did some math. The minimum wage in Colorado is $9.30/hour. If you worked 40 hours a week making $9.30 an hour, you’d have $19,344 in one year. That’s assuming you work 40 hours every single week, with no time off.
My student bill for one semester (four months of education time) is $15,500.
I could take a whole year off from college, work at the minimum wage, and if I didn’t spend a cent of it I could pay for a little more than a semester of college.
“Don’t get a minimum wage job, then!” you say. “That’s on you!”
Right. The good ol’ “Just make some more money, then” argument. See, I’ve tried that. I currently have a few jobs that pay $20 an hour. If I worked 40 hours a week at $20 an hour, I could make around $41k a year.
That’d be fine and dandy, except for the fact that I still have to go to school. At most, I can work 20 hours a week (and even that’s being optimistic).*
If I work 20 hours a week at $20/hr (which is well over both the Colorado and federal minimum wages), I could make about $20K a year.
Once again, that assumes I never have to get gas. Never go to the doctor. Never buy groceries (remember, my meal plan covers 10 meals a week. The average person eats 21). Never buy clothes. Never fix my car. Never buy shampoo.
Even then, I could afford just over a semester of college.
The days of “save your pennies from your summer job to pay for college” are long gone.
“Well, you should’ve gone somewhere cheaper. That’s on you.”
Right. Because it’s on me that the cost of going to a mid-range school three hours from home is so exorbitant.
Sure, I could’ve gone to another school. Let’s consider my less expensive options:
University of Wyoming—AKA, the only 4-year school I can get in-state tuition at.Casper College—2-year community college.
Problem with both?
I couldn’t get my degree.
As in, neither school offers an equivalent degree program. I couldn’t study to be a theatre educator at either of these schools.
So sure, I could go somewhere cheaper, but then why bother spending the money at all if I’m coming out with a degree I don’t even want?
There are lots of others, too— “Your parents should’ve been saving up” (their savings went down with the economy, yo). “You should take out loans/apply for scholarships” (done and done. Still not enough). “Not everything in life is fair” (that’s not an argument. It’s just, like, philosophical bullshit). “You need to talk to your school’s financial aid department. There are resources to help you” (Oh, if only you knew…).
I’m not saying college should be free. I’m happy to pay for it.
I’m saying that it’s insane that college prices keep rising, and there’s no clear way for young people to pay for it. I’ve already taken on $10,000 in student loans from the past year. I’ve applied for every scholarship I can find.
It’s still not enough.
Jobs are requiring college degrees, but to get a college degree, you need a damn amazing job to pay for it (or parents who can afford it).
It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t know what the solution is.
I just know that it’s one of my top complaints about the US.
I don’t need free college—I need affordable college. Please.
*Ignoring the fact that few jobs will hire you for that much without a college degree, and that my current $20/hr gigs are really limited as to how many hours I’m allowed to work (one is max 5 hours a week).Footnotes[1]
A country ham (such as a “Smithfield” ham) is salt-cured, smoked and aged well. Whole country hams are expensive; it is possible, however, to buy country ham steaks. But you may also substitute thick-cut, smoked, streaky bacon for the ham in this recipe.
Ingredients
2 quarts cold water
1/2 cup kosher salt (regular table salt will make the brine too salty)
1 (3 pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1 quart buttermilk
1 pound lard
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup country ham pieces, or 1 thick slice country ham, cut into 1/2-inch strips (see note)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
Combine the water and the salt, stirring until salt is dissolved.
Place the chicken pieces in a bowl and pour the salt water over.
Cover and refrigerate for 8-12 hours.
Drain the chicken and rinse out the bowl it was brined in.
Return the chicken to the bowl, pour the buttermilk over and cover and refrigerate 8-12 hours.
Drain the chicken on a wire rack, discarding the buttermilk.
Meanwhile, prepare the fat for frying: put the lard, butter and country ham into a heavy skillet or frying pan. Cook over low heat for 30-45 minutes, skimming as needed, until the butter ceases to throw off foam and the ham is browned.
Use a slotted spoon to remove the ham carefully from the fat. (Reserve the fried ham for another use, such as snacking.)
Just before frying, increase the temperature to medium-high and heat the fat to 335 degrees F.
Blend together the flour, cornstarch, salt and pepper in a shallow bowl or on wax paper.
Dredge the drained chicken pieces thoroughly in the flour mixture, then pat well to remove any excess flour.
Slip some of the chicken pieces, skin-side-down, into the heated fat. Do not overcrowd the pan; fry in batches, if necessary. Cook for 8-10 minutes on each side, until the chicken is golden brown and cooked through.
Drain thoroughly on a wire rack or on crumpled (not flat) paper towels. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature.
As an ED nurse years ago, middle of the night – MVA. We got the 6- or 7-year-old boy who had 2 broken femurs. Dad was dying in surgery at a huge trauma hospital in Portland. He had been driving drunk and went through the windshield. Mom didn’t have custody as she was an addict and lived who knows where. The room was flooded with people – two surgeons, police, nurses, etc. while I spoke on the wall phone to the surgical team at the trauma hospital. Went into my little guy’s room and I wrapped my arm around his head to shield him from the chaos and bright lights and leaned in to ask him how he was doing. He asked me if his dad was dead.
I asked him what made him ask that. He said that he saw his dad and thought he might be dead. I told him, “Yes, I think he did die.” (I knew by then he had.) He said (without tears) “He can’t be dead.” “If he’s dead that means I have nowhere to live.”
I got the very real feeling that this little man had been through too much in his short life already. We did a brief meeting before he went to surgery and I shared with everyone what he said. He did well in surgery and I found out that within 2 days he had 5 offers for actual adoption. One was one of the surgeons, one a firefighter, and one a paramedic, and two nurses. He ended up living three hours away with his maternal grandmother. I never forgot that little boy. Rough.
When I was in my “lost in the wilderness” period in my life (After I joined MAJestic, but not yet trained at China Lake, I wandered about.) we were living on a farm in Yanciville, NC. (I don’t know if I spelled that name right.)
And there was a guy (named Holt) who introduced us to the Datura plant.
Datura is a genus of nine species of highly poisonous, vespertine–flowering plants belonging to the nightshade family (Solanaceae).[1] They are commonly known as thornapples or jimsonweeds, but are also known as devil’s trumpets[2] (not to be confused with angel’s trumpets, which are placed in the closely related genus Brugmansia). Other English common names include moonflower, devil’s weed, and hell’s bells.
Due to their effects and symptoms, Datura species have occasionally been used not only as poisons, but also as hallucinogens by various groups throughout history.[4][5]
And we all tried this old fashioned remedy using this dangerous plant.
We soaked the roots of the plant in water for a week, and then drank the water.
I know it was terribly stupid, but we were young and in our 20’s and we believed Holt.
The effect was that every thing turned very blue and soft to us. We heard the twinkling of soft bells, and when we went to sleep later on the night, had very vivid dreams.
I would NEVER do that again. And I DO NOT suggest anyone duplicate our stupidity.
…
But the point of this story is that …
Well-meaning friends can put you in life threatening situations.
When you are in your 20s you can do very stupid things.
Whatever the experience was, it was not worth the risk of death.
And so, I ask everyone to heed my story and pay attention to what might transpire in your own lives.
I am following it closely; the Mate 60 Pro is just the first step.
Over the next decade, I expect China to launch many new products based on new technologies. Most of these products will be launched in BRICS markets instead of the G7 nations.
The West is poised to feel what it is like to live in a a “banana republic.”
Granny’s Old-Fashioned Bread Pudding with Vanilla Sauce
grannys old fashioned bread pudding
Ingredients
Bread Pudding
1 pound French bread, cubed
1/2 cup raisins
2 cups milk
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Sauce
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Bread Pudding
Combine bread and raisins in a large bowl.
Combine milk and 1/4 cup butter in a 1 quart saucepan. Cook over medium heat until butter is melted.
Pour milk mixture over bread; let stand for 10 minutes.
Stir in all remaining pudding ingredients. Pour into greased 1 1/2 quart casserole.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until set in center.
Vanilla Sauce
Combine all sauce ingredients except vanilla in 1-quart saucepan.Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until mixture thickens and comes to a full boil (5 to 8 minutes).
Stir in vanilla extract and walnuts*, if using.
To serve
Spoon warm pudding into individual dessert dishes; serve with sauce.
Store refrigerated.
Notes
I usually serve this without the walnuts, but sprinkle them over individual servings if anyone likes walnuts.
Niger Raises Uranium Price From €0.80/kg to €200/kg
Niger Raises Uranium Price From €0.80/kg to €200/kg – In a groundbreaking development that signals a seismic shift in the global resource market, Niger, a prominent player in the uranium industry, has reportedly taken a bold step towards securing fair compensation for its invaluable natural resource, uranium.
Multiple reports suggest that Niger has substantially increased the price of its uranium, skyrocketing it from a mere €0.80 per kilogram to €200 per kilogram.
This remarkable decision underscores a burgeoning determination among African nations to break free from historical imbalances and demand equitable remuneration for their vital contributions to the global economy.
According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), Niger is the world’s seventh-largest uranium producer.
The radioactive metal is the most widely used fuel for nuclear energy. It is also utilised in cancer treatment, naval propulsion, and nuclear weapons.
Uranium prices increased slightly in the aftermath of the military coup in Niger that saw the ousting of President Mohamed Bazoum, with many analysts forecasting larger gains in the future. For instance, Ben Godwin, head of analysis at London-based Prism Political Risk Management, said that current events in Niger, which produces about 4 percent of the world’s uranium supply, could be critical to Europe.
“It is certainly a topic of great interest in the moment, particularly as uranium markets are very, very tight at the moment,” he said.
“Demand has been going up over the last few years, and this year, we’ve seen the uranium spot price go up by nearly 40 percent year to date.”
The Pentagon understands the true and real abilities that China possess.
There is absolutely no questions regarding whether or not China can attack the United States mainland. The answer is affirmative. China has numerous weapon systems designed to acquire, target, stealthy evade and strike with great accuracy targets within the United States geographical landmass.
This has been proved. Demonstrated beyond any question of doubt, and is known to be stockpiled in enormous quantities.
The Pentagon believes that China is capable of destroying targets within the United States without problem or interference.
…
That being said. What does the “government” think?
I’m sure that President Biden has his own points of view…
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I’m sure that key and influential members of the US Senate has their ideas as well…
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And since they will be the ones who will decide whether China shall use these weapons systems on American cities, perhaps we need to listen to what their thoughts are.
One way is to go though the people that elected them to office, and ask those people what they think.
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But, you know, most are going through the “trials” of being an American. So perhaps the smarter thing to do is ask a more diverse cross section of the American population and see what they think…
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My guess is that these people would have a diverse opinion that would be heavily influenced by their social media of choice. So, if you want some real unbiased opinion of what Americans think, perhaps you should visit the more rural areas…
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And their opinion is “China ain’t gonna do shit. We’ll kick their ass!”.
And so, to answer the question…
Yes. China is fully capable of attacking the United States.
But Americans are not worried because…
IRAN’S VICTORY! China Takes Over Iran’s $2.7 Billion Strategic Project | Break US Sanctions!
The United States has long imposed a series of sanctions on Iran, including restricting oil exports and cutting Iran off from the international financial system.
This has greatly affected Iran’s economy and international status. In order to break through US sanctions, Iran has been working hard. Recently, Iran became a member of the BRICS as it wished.
In order to express its sincere desire to its Eastern partners, Iran signed an infrastructure agreement with China immediately after the BRICS summit ended. According to the agreement, Iran will invest at least US$2.7 billion in the expansion of the international airport, and Chinese companies have successfully become the sole builders of the project.
However, what is most concerning is that this time Iran’s $2.7 billion infrastructure cooperation with China will use a special payment method.
From an analysis point of view, the payment method reached by Iran and China not only effectively got rid of the sanctions of the United States, but may even accelerate the process of “de-dollarization”, which made President Biden feel very panicked.
But essentially, Elon Musk sent his children to the finest schools money could buy. Only to discover, much to his chagrin, that such schools are rather progressive.
[1] Now his oldest son suddenly isn’t his son anymore, but his daughter. And she self-identifies as a “communist” and hates Musk for “being rich”.
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This is where the whole “campaign against wokeness” comes from, for Musk — it’s a personal vendetta of sorts. This is why he bought up Twitter in the first place; because ‘the woke’ have gotten to his own family, and he resents it. I’m not entirely sure it’s this school in particular that turned his child transgender, however — the school boasts several famous alumni, among them Jack Black. And Jack Black is pretty much the bloke-iest bloke to ever bloke around.
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Either way, Elon Musk decided that schools pushing woke narratives turned his own child against him, brainwashing her. He’s upset. I kind of get it. I would be, too. Change is scary. And when someone hates you to the point of legally petitioning for a name change (from Musk to Wilson, the last name of his ex-wife), that’s rather awful.
Anyway, it’s the school’s fault, not Musk’s. And now, the wider issue Musk identified, is the the type of policies peddled at schools and campuses in general. The left-wing ideologies, the gender-bending, the overly progressive attitude towards pretty much everything. I’ve never given much thuoight to what started Elon’s crusade against wokeness… but now we know the answer. Now we know what started it all.
The Death of Disney – Narrated by A.I David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough narrates the rise and fall of Mickey Mouse (A.I parody).
Around 6 months after I finished field training, I was working a night shift and was dispatched to an animal cruelty call. Arriving at the home,I was met by a woman and her 4 year old son,both in tears. In this line of work, you quickly become accustomed to dealing with upset people, it’s just a part of the job. I introduced myself to both of them and listened as the mother explained the situation to me.
Arriving home from work, she and her son had parked in the driveway and walked to the side door of the house where they found the little boy’s 4 month old kitten lying on the steps. The kitten had been skinned by someone, and carefully placed on the steps to be noticed immediately. Being a cat person myself, my heart ached for this little boy. Not only was his kitten dead, it had been killed on purpose by someone and carefully skinned then left on display for maximum shock value! I took a report on the incident and then I helped the little boy bury his dead kitten in his back yard, fashioning a little cross out of some sticks.
There were really no leads of any kind on who may have perpetrated this horrible crime. I had the 911 telecommunicator search for any similar crimes in the area that had been reported recently and had no luck. I knew that the chance of finding out who did this was slim to none, but promised the little boy that I would do everything in my power to find and punish those responsible. Before clearing the call, I gave the little fella a tour of my patrol car, letting him play with the lights and siren. I always kept some stickers and stuffed animals in my trunk for situations just like this, and I let him choose a couple stickers and an animal.
About two weeks later, my Lieutenant called me in to his office after shift briefing. On his desk was a thank you card and a picture of a kitten that had been colored for me. My Lieutenant explained that the lady and little boy from the animal cruelty call had visited the office and left the items for me earlier that afternoon. It warmed my heart to receive this heartfelt thanks from them.
Maybe a month or so later, I answered a call about someone throwing a kitten out of a car window. Arriving on that scene, I found the kitten on the side of the road amazingly uninjured. Normally on a call like this we would turn the animal over to animal control, but I had an idea. I put the kitten in my patrol car and drove towards the little boy’s house, hoping that since it was a Saturday I would find them at home. I was in luck! Before showing the kitten to the little boy, I spoke with his mother to make sure she was OK with it. She agreed, so I got the kitten out of the car and presented it to the little boy. His eyes were the size of dinner plates when he saw the kitten! Both mother and son thanked me profusely and I left knowing that I had made that little boy happy.
It is situations like this that made being a law enforcement officer one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
“Nuclear war between U.S. and Russia is inevitable” – Russian General | Redacted with Clayton Morris
Retired Major General Alexander Vladimirov, who wrote Russia’s three volume book called the ‘General Theory of War,’ says the moment war broke out in Ukraine is the moment that nuclear war with the West became inevitable.
Shorts. Invented by gay men so that they could check out men’s legs.
Football. All that back slapping and hugging when they score a goal. They’re all closet <insert homophobic slur here>.
Rugby. The scrum? Closet <insert homophobic slur here>, the lot of ‘em.
Art. They’re all <insert homophobic slur here>.
Actors. They’re all <insert homophobic slur here>. Putting on wigs and make-up – sends them “funny”.
Having female friends. Women are for looking at and for having sex with, not being friends with.
Wearing your watch on the right wrist. I never learned why.
Anything pink.
Looking at your nails “funny”. (This translated to holing your hand out, flat palm facing away from you, fingers straight).
Cooking.
Baking.
Garlic. The French use it a lot, and we all know the French are all <insert homophobic slur here>.
The French. A special rung of gay was reserved for the French (yes, the entire population) in his head. Apparently the women were gay and the men were gay. He never did elaborate as to how France has managed to still exist generation after generation. The “womanizing” Frenchman was a cover to hide his gayness.
Thai men. Yes. Every man from Thailand is a homosexual… apparently.
The Navy.
Glam Rock.
ABBA’s music. But only the one’s in which Bjorn sings lead in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you want to know what my homophobic father regarded as the most macho, manliest-man, hetero thing in the world?
Wrestling.
Wasn’t regarded as gay, but eating garlic and hanging around with French girls was.
The Sopranos ( best ending scene ) season 6
When Phil says “no more Butchie. No more of this” and the music starts rolling, you know the war is about to start.
My best friend spent most weekends with my husband and I, we had lots of fun cooking, going places, etc. She would get a guy, get serious, then find some awful thing wrong with him, call him names, and had to change her number numerous times.
When I got pregnant she seemed off. I know she always wanted a family and was jealous. She gave me an IOU for an expensive breast pump and bragged about it at my shower. 5 months after, no breast pump, whatever. But not even a pair of socks to welcome my child into the world. Yest she got a mani- pedi every two weeks, like clockwork. I am the type of person who yses the same old bargain pur for years, never get manicures or pedicures, and i get my hair cut twice per year. I shop at goodwill for clothes. I summoned up the courage to tell her I felt insulted that she never acknowledged my child, not even a pair of socks. She went of the deep end and called me materialistic! And all sorts of swear words. I never spoke with her again. Been 16 years. I couldn’t wrap my head around what she said to me.
Crunchy Taco Wraps
This taco wrap gets its crunch from a tostada in the middle of delicious taco fillings; and of course wrapped up in a delicious Rhodes grilled flatbread.
crunchy taco wrap
Prep: 15 min | Bake: 15 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
12 Rhodes Dinner Rolls, thawed
6 tostada shells
1 pound lean ground beef
1 small yellow onion, chopped
2 tablespoons taco seasoning
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon garlic
1 jar nacho cheese or Queso cheese dip
1 cup sour cream (optional)
2 cups shredded lettuce
1 cup salsa
1 cup shredded Mexican cheese blend
Instructions
Lightly spray counter or table with nonstick spray. Combine two dinner rolls and roll into an 8 inch circle. Repeat with remaining rolls. Cover with sprayed plastic wrap and let rest.
In a large skillet or griddle, over medium-high heat, brown ground beef and. Stir in taco seasoning, water and garlic. Reduce heat to low and let simmer for 5 more minutes.
Heat griddle to medium heat. Carefully remove plastic wrap from dough. Grill dough for 20 to 30 seconds on each side or until cooked through.
Lay one grilled flatbread on a flat surface. Spread 1/2 cup of taco meat onto the center of the flatbread. Spread queso over one side of the tostada and place it cheese side down on the meat.
Spread a thin layer of sour cream or more queso on top of the tostada shell. Top with lettuce, tomato and cheese.
To fold the taco wrap, start with the bottom of the tortilla and fold the edge up over the center. Continue to work your way around, folding the tortilla over the center fillings. There will be an open spot on the top in the center.
Repeat with all remaining flatbreads, tostadas and toppings.
every store is CLOSED in San Jose
San Jose the Bay Area’s largest city has dropped out of the top 10 largest cities in the US by population and stores are closing left and right in this city tour I am exploring downtown San Jose, and what I found was shocking, blocks after blocks of empty storefronts.
Has it ever occurred to you that the Great Fire Wall protects you? Yes, you!
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Imagine if suddenly 1.4 billion people flooded the internet with pro-China content. Okay, some are dissidents so make that one billion instead. My point is, in the Western world where “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” abound, unleashing the mainlanders into that environment en masse would have a profoundly negative impact for Westerners. I’m not sure they (the “outside” world) could handle it. Fun to think about though.
We have a tendency to get all caught up within our own “little worlds”. We don’t realize all the great stuff “out there”, and when we do, we discover just how much we have missed. And it’s horrible.
In the Arkansas ADC prison, there was a guy who was doing some “20 some”big time” years for telecommunication fraud. He was a “sparky”; an engineer with a great talent for telecommunications and the hardware, and software behind it. But he was locked up after some fifteen years when I met him.
We would go on, and on about how he had this great improvement on telephone land line modems, and how he could double the speed of the transmissions. Sheech!
Fifteen years had passed. We were using satellite, wifi, and cable. No one would even bother touching modems tied to land-lines. But he was locked up for so long that he was; his knowledge was, obsolete. And he did not realize it.
Being prison; the ADC, there was no way that he could subscribe to magazines, or periodicals to be caught up on the news. It was a purposeful isolation bubble. He was unaware.
I tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen. Brilliant, and stupid at the same time.
Don’t be like him.
Get out. Experience life. Enjoy some fine food, touch the bark of a tree and pet a cat.
I believe in you.
We start today on a happy note. Please watch this video…
Hungry Cat Went to a Store with a Leaf to Buy Fish, Then the Seller Did Something Unbelievable!
What a great story.
Joe knew a lot of the people that came to his fish store. Many of his customers were regulars who had been buying fish from his family for years. But when one customer started coming around more often he was surprised. A cat came into the shop and checked out what everyone was doing. Then he eventually came back and sat on the counter with a leaf in his mouth. It took a while but they figured out that he was trying to use the leaf to buy fish like he saw people using money. What the seller did next is unbelievable.
Once upon a time, there was an auto repair shop. They had about six bays and a good average turnaround rate. They were doing pretty well. One day when the new manager was walking around, however, he noticed something shocking.
There was a guy… reading a magazine! He wasn’t working on a car or helping customers. He was just sitting behind a counter, eating up profits with his hourly rate.
He knew full well who this guy was. This was the “parts guy”. When the mechanics needed a part—an oil filter, a water pump, brake pads, etc.—they’d go to the parts counter and request it. The parts guy would retrieve it from the shelves and give it to them. If the part didn’t work out, they’d give it back to him and ask for a different one. If they didn’t have the requisite part, he’d order it. He’d also order commonly used parts when they started getting low. He kept the parts shelves nice and tidy.
But here he was in the middle of the work day, just sitting there! How often was he just sitting there? The new manager determined to find out.
So, over the course of the next week, the manager tracked how much time the parts guy “worked” and how much time he just spent sitting around, chomping away at profits. He determined that 80% of the time, the parts guy did no work! He just sat there, reading a magazine or other material. Profitless!
So he fired the parts guy and told the mechanics that now they were in charge of getting their own parts. There was some moaning and groaning, but they complied. What else could they do?
Over the next month, the manager noticed a frightening trend. Their average turnaround time went up, way up! A repair that normally took a few hours now took a few days. A simple oil change went from less than an hour to half a day. Hell, even doing a simple tire plug could take half a day! And they were—gasp—losing customers!
He determined to find the root of the plummet in productivity.
To make a long story short, it was the missing parts guy. When the mechanics got their own parts, they’d grab them off the shelf and try them in their repair. If they didn’t work out or they grabbed too many, they’d just put them back any which way. They didn’t always put them back in the right place, or in the right box.
So that made it harder for them to even find the stuff they needed. Nothing was in order anymore. Plus, no one ever ordered anything, so they were always out of what they needed; they’d order it when they needed it, instead of beforehand. Then they had to wait for parts delivery to get them the stuff they needed, which could take half a day.
So, instead of eating away at profits, the guy who only “worked” 20% of his time allowed the rest of the staff to be more productive. His absence actually killed profits by a wide margin. He was hired back.
China has now de-risked from the possibility of the freezing of their USD assets, including:
a significant portion of their trade is now in currencies other than USD. Trade with MANY countries are now in Chinese RMB or local currencies including trade with Argentina, Iran and Russia. This will continue to increase in the future.
A significant portion of China foreign reserves is now in Gold or other foreign reserves. China has been decreasing its USD foreign reserves and this in itself is causing significant issues for the United States
China has now completed an alternative to SWIFT with its own CIPS and this will allow it to continue trade with other countries
for critical products – like corn, wheat, oil, etc – China has diversified its supply chains. Therefore, it’s economy will not be disrupted by whatever the Americans does
BIGGEST advantage is that China is an economic powerful house producing most things that the United States and the west needs. All it has to do is stop the exports of critical inputs, machineries and or finished products AND it will shut down the economy of those countries. Given this possibility, it is doubtful that the United States will freeze Chinese USD assets.
Star Trek Next Generation – Withdraw Understood !
My Goodness!
Not MM-MM.
This was me today.
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Exactly 12 hours ago, I had a moment I am still processing. This stretch of highway has been paved so badly that every Fireman, EMT, and police officer on the scene said, “This happens constantly in this spot.” A short summer downpour caused the road to become so slick, that turning a corner at 20–25 mph caused the vehicle to lose control. I tried to correct the turn and brake, which caused the back end of the vehicle to face 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Everything was in slow motion as I watched myself fall off the road. I can still see the disorienting view turn sideways as I felt the impact of hitting the ditch. The passenger glass blew out and I realized that my head was hanging upside down near leaves and dirt. I began to shake. I’m shaking now. I’m not a dedicated seat belt wearer, but today, without thinking, I had clicked on the seatbelt before I began my drive. I could feel the adrenaline surge as I realized the only reason I was alive and not thrown under the vehicle was because I had unconsciously made that decision.
A lady and three teenagers had walked over to peer in through the drivers side window. She asked me, as I saw that her hands were shaking from the sight, if I was ok. And to my shock, I was. I broke down crying as the first thing I said was, “This seatbelt saved my life.” She reached her hand through the drivers window and held my hand, rubbing it for security as she called for assistance. I must have hung there for 20–30 minutes before the firefighters cut me out of the tightly locked seatbelt. But I am so thankful for the lady who had selflessly held the hand of a crying stranger until they arrived.
I was able to climb out on my own. I was assessed by paramedics and allowed to tow the truck home. I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. We are a middle class family who is down one vehicle in an economy that has not been kind to us. But I can still hear the ladies voice as she said, “You can always get another vehicle, but you can’t get another life.” We will all expire at some time. There are no exceptions. I have been reminded of this today. But it’s not today.
Have you ever wondered what that bar on the backs of trucks is for? Called the Mansfield bar, it was made mandatory after a horrifying accident involving actress Jayne Mansfield.
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On June 29th 1967, Jayne, her driver, lawyer and three kids were driving from Mississippi to New Orleans. The road was dark and visibility was poor as the drove in the early hours of the morning, and was unable to see the large truck in front of them. The 1966 Buick crashed into the back of the truck, slicing off the top of the car.
The three adults including Jayne died on impact, but luckily the kids in the back survived. One of those kids is well known “Law and Order” actress “Mariska Hargitay.”
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As a result of the accident, the national highway traffic safety administration ordered all semis to have the bars installed.
Years ago in the early 90s I had a job in customer service for a telephone company. We had a girl start that was from somewhere down south and she had moved up into the Midwest because her husband got a job in the cattle industry. His job wasn’t normally a traveling job, but his first 2 years he had to do a lot of it to learn about the different livestock auctions, plants, etc. Just normal new hire stuff learning the industry.
She wanted to go home for a long holiday weekend, but her husband couldn’t go because of her work schedule, so she asked one of their mutual friends if he wanted to go with her. He also worked there with us. (Totally innocent, this isn’t a cheating story.) She was always funny, down to earth, well dressed but not anything expensive. Think Younkers clothes instead of KMart, but not high end designer stuff. She had a nice new car but it was a low end base model compact. Everyone loved her and her down home southern attitude.
Forward to next week, they had returned. The friend she took let us in on her secret.
Her family was LOADED. They got to the city they lived in, Nashville I think. Her parents compound was walled, had live security on duty including the gate guard you see in movies. Garage full of Italian sports cars. A Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. In the front hall there was a hand-written check framed and signed by Jimmy Hoffa for 1mil. Uncashed.
Turns out her grandfather had invented something to do with reefer units and was in the trucking industry. All the trucks with their family name I saw on the road were hers, but I didn’t know because she was married and had taken her husband’s last name.
She chose to live a normal life with her husband and struggle like any other young couple instead of living off of her family’s wealth. She was just a sweet normal girl.
China’s Next Generation Laser Weapons To Destroy US in 2.5 seconds Shocked The World
Back in the 70’s, there was a HUGE war in the food industry. It was fat vs. sugar, and in the end, sugar came out victorious. I mean, to fight fat, don’t eat fat, right? Makes sense!
NO.
The science wasn’t complete and the sugar manufacturers raised a lot of capital to get their message out… I mean, of course, “to buy politicians”.
ALL of the evils perpetrated on the American people for as long as there have been any is due to political money. You can make anything a social issue if you buy the right congresspeople.
So sugar was in and fat was out. Bacon was bad, but “diet candy” was good. This was all bullshit because no matter the form it’s in (glucose, high fructose corn syrup, molasses, honey, etc…), it’s all carbohydrates. If you have an excess of carbs and you’re not burning those empty calories, guess where that ends up?
Plain and simple, if you have too many calories and you’re not using them, they will turn to fat. Any developing nation out there will tell you that rice, potatoes, and bread is the easiest way to get calories. Sugar just packs these calories more densely, but we’re programmed for it to taste good, so we just suck it up.
Meanwhile, poor bacon, ham, and fried chicken are out here going, “NOO! We’re made with fat and protein! You can get calories from us, too!”
Even salad is having a tough time of it. Go grab any random, name brand dressing off the shelf. I’m willing to bet within the first 5 ingredients will be either sugar, or something that ends in “-ose” (which is also sugar). Fuck, even our bread is unable to be labelled as bread in other countries because of the sugar levels. Subway in Europe sells sandwiches on cake.
There’s something called “essential fats”. There is no such thing as “essential carbohydrates”.
Penn and Teller had a show a while back called “Bullshit” that debunked all sorts of things. One episode was about weight loss. They had a stagehand who had recently lost a ton of weight. They pulled him out from backstage and said, “Tell the audience how you lost all that weight.”
Dude looks straight into the camera and says, “I stopped eating so fucking much.”
“Not the first and not the last” China-Russia joint naval patrol near Alaska — Global Times
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China and Russia’s third joint naval patrol that allegedly reached international waters near Alaska last week has touched the nerves of US media, which hyped the voyage as “highly provocative,” ignoring the fact that the US constantly sends warships and warplanes to China’s doorsteps for close-in reconnaissance and military exercises under the so-called freedom of navigation.
11 Chinese and Russian vessels approached the Aleutian Islands and have since left without entering US territorial waters, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday, citing US officials.
Four US destroyers and a P-8 maritime patrol aircraft shadowed the combined Chinese and Russian naval force, the report said.
While the WSJ report quoted a US Northern Command spokesperson who said the patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat, it also quoted US experts as saying the voyage “is a historical first” and “highly provocative.”
announced on July 26 that China and Russia would soon launch their third joint naval patrol, which would see both sides’ warships sail into West and North Pacific waters following the Northern/Interaction-2023 joint exercises in the Sea of Japan.
The operation is not targeted against any third party and is not related to any international or regional situation, the Chinese Defense Ministry said in a press release at the time.Two Type 052D guided missile destroyers, two Type 054A guided missile frigates and a Type 903 comprehensive replenishment ship of the Chinese Navy are included in the flotilla, while the Russian Navy is represented by vessels including large anti-submarine ships and corvettes, according to media reports.
The Northern/Interaction-2023 joint exercises and the subsequent joint naval patrol fully reflect the level of the strategic mutual trust between the two countries and further enhanced the traditional friendship between the Chinese and Russian militaries, said Senior Colonel Tan Kefei, a spokesperson at China’s Defense Ministry, at a regular press conference on July 27.
China is willing to continue to boost pragmatic communication and cooperation with all parties and contribute positive forces in safeguarding regional peace and stability as well as deal with all kinds of security threats, Tan said.
Despite that China and Russia announced the joint patrol, US media are attempting to hype the “China and Russia threat” theory, Zhuo Hua, an international affairs expert at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy of Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Monday.
The China-Russia joint patrol in international waters in the North and West Pacific marks a positive force that helps safeguard regional stability and security of strategic routes in the Asia-Pacific region at a time when the US is enhancing combat readiness, rallying allies and partners in the region to change defense policies and expand militaries, which escalated regional tensions, Zhuo said.
‘Not first, not last’
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This is not the “historical first” that a China-Russia joint naval patrol flotilla has reached waters off Alaska as US media has claimed, as a similar case took place during the second joint naval patrol between the two countries in September 2022.
At that time, only a lone US Coast Guard cutter was on the scene, compared to the USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn and the USS Chung-Hoon destroyers and a P-8 maritime patrol aircraft deployed this time, the WSJ said.
The US media linked such an escalation in US reaction to the Ukraine crisis and the Taiwan question, but such speculation is purely groundless and is aimed at throwing mud at the normal military cooperation between China and Russia, analysts said, noting US’ hegemonic mindset and its double standard are the true reasons behind its anxiety.
The international waters in the North Pacific including the Bering Sea are important because from here ships can access the Arctic, Fu Qianshao, a Chinese military expert, told the Global Times on Monday.
With the global warming, the Arctic shipping routes could become key passages for civilian ships to carry out commercial activities, Fu said.
While the joint patrols by China and Russia aim to safeguard the security of key strategic routes, the US wants to control the passages out of its hegemonic mindset, experts said.
The US is nervous because the Bering Sea is close to Alaska, but the US should not forget that it frequently sends warships and warplanes to other countries’ doorsteps for so-called freedom of navigation operations, including to the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits, sometimes alone and sometimes together with other countries’ forces, Fu said.
While the China-Russia joint flotilla did not enter US territorial waters, US warships have in many occasions trespassed into Chinese territorial waters in the South China Sea.
It is ironic that all US forces involved in shadowing the China-Russia joint flotilla have provoked China on Chinese doorsteps, observers said. The USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn and the USS Chung-Hoon destroyers and a P-8 maritime patrol aircraft have all made transits in the Taiwan Straits in the past, while the USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold and the USS Chung-Hoon have records of being expelled after trespassing into Chinese territorial waters in the South China Sea.
It exposes the US’ double standard that only allows its military presence near other countries and not accepts other countries’ military presence near it, observers said, urging the US to reflect on itself.
From a military perspective, the four US destroyers and a US patrol aircraft could only monitor the China-Russia joint flotilla of 11 warships, and were not capable of doing anything more than that, analysts said.
“In the future, the Chinese Navy could conduct more far sea patrols like this, either alone or together with other countries. The Americans should get use to it,” Fu said.
Before the China-Russia joint naval patrols, Chinese naval warships had already reached international waters near Alaska.
Once such case was in August 2021, in which a four-ship Chinese naval flotilla led by a Type 055 10,000 ton-class large destroyer was reportedly spotted by the US Coast Guard in the US Exclusive Economic Zone, off the coast of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska
.
In 2015, five PLA Navy ships transited expeditiously and continuously through the Aleutian Island chain in a manner consistent with international law, the US Naval Institute News reported at the time. It was an “innocent passage” within 12 nautical miles of the Aleutian Islands, the report said.
Chinese experts said this kind of far sea exercise serves as a countermeasure and a signal against the US hegemonic actions of frequently making provocations near China in the name of freedom of navigation.
the GIRLS REACT to *Alien (1979)* IT’S SO SCARY!! (First Time Watching) Horror Movies
On June 3rd 2022, 3-year-old Ryker Webb went missing from his home in Montana wearing just his onesie. The area was in the middle of the wilderness, inhabited by Mountain Lions, Bears and on the evening he went missing, there was a severe thunderstorm.
His distraught parents feared the worse until they got the call that he had been found. He was discovered two days later on the Sunday, and 2.5 miles from his house.
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A couple heard whimpering from their shed and found Ryker wrapped in a lawnmower-bag to keep warm in the nearly freezing temperatures. When they first found him they said he was hungry and tired, but for his circumstances he was a pretty up-beat mood.
When they questioned him he said that he went for a really long walk and got tired. It is believed he seen the shed and took shelter during the thunder storm and stayed there for 2 days worrying about ever seeing his parents again.
John Chau, 26-year-old American evangelical missionary.
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He was unalived* by an isolated tribe he was trying to convert to Christianity.
The islanders are notorious for being hostile for outsiders to even visit, let alone throw Bibles at, yet John clearly wasn’t one to apply self-preservation.
One of the very few photos taken of the natives of the tribe, 1970s.
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It is illegal under the Protection of Aboriginal Tribes regulations to visit without government permission – John did not obtain this. He seemingly had no respect for the law of the land.
Two local fishermen would take him partway to the island and no further. They let him approach the island on a canoe by himself.
For several days, he persistently made several attempts to communicate with the tribe from the safety of his canoe.
He documented in his journal that they laughed at him, they stared at him, and yelled words he didn’t understand.
On his second-last day a boy shot an arrow through his Bible. He didn’t take for the warning it obviously was.
On his final day, he told the fishermen to leave without him.
The next day they saw his body on the shore. Cautious attempts were made to retrieve his body but no one ever did.
John was an adventurer.
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He was known among his friends for being a thrill-seeker. Throughout his youth he indulged in camping, hiking, et.c.
My point being he went there for himself. Not just religion.
There’s a reason why the government needs to give permission for outsiders to visit. There’s a reason why even the surrounding locals won’t set foot on that island.
John ignored all the rules.
He went there for himself, to fulfill his thrill-seeking, adventurist desires.
I moved to the U.S. 5 weeks later, COVID happened.
All the dreams about off-roading trips, going to places, exploring America went out the window.
Social distancing; lockdown. People went crazy buying hand soaps; toilet papers. There was a time even flour and yeast also shortage
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One afternoon, I was at the grocery store, suddenly I felt something hit my back. I turned around. It was a woman threw a toilet paper bag at me. She yelled: “Go fucking back to your country! You Chinese fuckers! You brought that fucking virus here!”
I picked the toilet paper bag, put it back on the shelf, then I told her: “First of all, I am not Chinese. Second, in case you don’t know, airlines are shutting down, it’s quite difficult to travel right now. Third, you should apologize to me, because I think what you did is on tape” – I pointed at the camera. She ran away.
I’m not sure when I will be able to forget that memory.
NEOCONS ADMIT DEFEAT | BRIAN BERLETIC ON UKRAINE’S STALLED OFFENSIVE | BIDEN BLASTS CHINA
Yes. As a Captain and Company Commander in the Army Reserves I was running an errand in the rural south with one of my high-ranking NCOs, a Sergeant First Class. We needed to stop for lunch, so I pulled up to the sort of small country diner at which I like to dine from time-to-time in the countryside.
My Sgt was African-American. Let’s call him “SFC T.” We were wearing our camouflaged combat fatigues.
SFC T said, “I don’t think we should stop here, sir. This is the local KKK hangout.” I chuckled and said, “Sgt T, this is the 1990’s, not the 1960’s. What are you talking about?” And he replied, “Sir, look at the sign. See how it says ‘Karla’s Kountry Kitchen?’ See how they spell it ‘Karla’ with a ‘K,’ ‘Kountry’ with a ‘K,’ ‘Kitchen’ with a ‘K?’ And see how the ‘K’s are painted different colors than the other letters? It’s the local KKK hangout.” I laughed and dismissed his concerns, saying lightheartedly, “Sgt T, you are totally full of shit. Now get out of the car, we are going in for lunch.”
Understand, I was an officer who ALWAYS very strongly respected, listened to, and relied upon my NCOs. But this was not a military matter and, although I knew racism still existed, it simply was beyond my comprehension that overt, hostile, potentially violent KKK shit could still exist in the 1990’s. In our area? Right out in the open amongst everyone? With a sign above the door? It was as if someone was telling me the earth had two moons.
I opened the door to the cafe and took about three big steps inside, with SFC T right behind me. The place was packed. Immediately, all conversation ceased. Stone cold silence. Simultaneously, every single head in the entire restaurant turned to stare at us. And although no movie soundtrack of impending doom started playing in the background, my mood immediately shifted, from happy-go-lucky Captain anticipating a great country meal with one of my best NCOs, to fight or flight mode anticipating danger and potential violence.
I needed go no farther. I looked over my shoulder and said quietly, “Sgt T, let’s get the f__k out of here.” So we turned, walked straight back out out, and jumped in my car. I cranked it up and drive off at high speed.
Of course, I felt absolutely terrible. Terrible for not believing SFC T or listening to his concerns. Terrible for placing us, and particularly him, in a potentially dangerous situation. Terrible for being so incredibly naive as to have no idea that such bullshit still existed.
I apologized profusely to SFC T as we were driving away. Frankly, he seemed more amused than anything, watching my eyes open and the light bulb go on in my brain.
The more I thought about it, however, the more I found it a very valuable experience. Because I witnessed first hand how two intelligent people, coming from two different backgrounds and, particularly, races, can view exactly the same situation but see two totally different realities. Or, more precisely, one complacent fiction and one harsh reality. And I’ve never forgotten it.
So 30 years later, when I hear people dismiss BLM protests, or fail to see as victims black men who die at the hands of police in questionable circumstances, I think of SFC T and Karla’s Kountry Kitchen. And I marvel at how many people still need to open their eyes.
REACTING to *Aliens (1986)* THE GREATEST SEQUEL?? (First Time Watching) Sci-fi Movies
Originally Answered: What are some mind-blowing facts that sound like ‘BS’, but are actually true?
Liquor and wine are illegal in the U.S. unless they are radioactive. When tested, drinking alcohol is required to have at least 400 radioactive decays per minute for each 750 ml.
Explanation: The United States government has decided that alcohol for consumption must be made from “natural” materials, such as grains, grapes, or fruit. That rules out alcohol made from petroleum. Such alcohol is chemically identical to natural alcohol and just as safe – there’s no difference in taste — so why this rule? The reasons have to do with history (keeping alcohol more expensive, a goal of the anti-alcohol lobby) and minimizing competition (a goal of the liquor lobby).
How can you tell the difference between natural alcohol and alcohol made from petroleum? There’s no chemical difference. The United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, charged with enforcing the natural alcohol rule, has only one reliable test: check for radioactivity. Natural alcohol gets its carbon from plants; the plants got the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. As explained on the previous pages, atmospheric carbon dioxide is radioactive because of the continued bombardment of cosmic rays – particles coming from space that collide with nitrogen molecules and turn it into C-14, radiocarbon. Only one atom in a trillion carbons in the atmosphere is radiocarbon, but that’s enough to be detectable. (One of the authors of this book, RM, invented the most sensitive way to detect C-14, called “Accelerator Mass Spectrometry.”)
Petroleum was also made from atmospheric carbon, but it was buried hundreds of millions of years ago, isolated from the radioactive atmosphere. Radiocarbon has a half-life of about 5700 years, and after a hundred million years, there is nary an atom of C-14 left.
True, bootleggers could get some C-14 and add it to illegal liquor. But that’s beyond the skill set of most of them.
Yeah, on May 30, 1989, although my mom was with me.
It was my birthday. Ever since I was a kid, I had wanted to see Cats on Broadway, so my mom decided to take me for my 16th birthday. She picked me up from my dad’s house, we made the hour-long drive into Manhattan… and saw the big “SOLD OUT” sign outside the Winter Garden Theater. I was bitterly disappointed — sold out on a weekday??
Mom said, well, let’s get lunch and go to the movies instead, and asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to see.
Actually, yes, I told her. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
My mom was awesome. She didn’t even ask what it was about or anything. We went to the diner and got some burgers and milkshakes, then to a movie theater in Peekskill, New York.
We were the only ones there, but we didn’t care. I loved it, and Mom loved it, too. My mother had this fantastic, loud, goofy laugh, and it echoed through the empty theater. I’m not sure which of us enjoyed Bill and Ted’s historical anticsmore, and by the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t so bummed that Cats had been sold out.
That would be the last movie I’d ever see in the theater with my mom. She had 4th stage breast cancer, see, that had metastasized to the brain, and early the next year, they’d find her 3rd brain tumor. She died in November 1990, when she was 54 and I was 17.
Thinking about that day makes me miss my mom something fierce, and especially that big, goofy Kay Truex laugh, echoing in a theater that we didn’t have to share with anyone else. I’m glad we were the only ones there, and that we spent that day in a crummy movie theater alone, rather than on Broadway with a crowd of people.
It was just for us.
Me and my mom on her 54th birthday, March 1990. I’m not sure it’s the last photo ever taken of us together, but it’s the last one I still have. Was she a historical babe or what?
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Scott Ritter: China is Ready for WAR Over Taiwan as Blinken’s “Diplomacy” Fails
As to Gold, I am certain China has more than 2300 Tonnes as Reserves
Yet 7000 is ridiculous
Nobody can acquire so much Gold without a market shock
In 2015, a very reasonable analysis predicted that China’s actual reserves would amount to 98.8 Million Troy Ounces or 3073 Tonnes
This was based on buy patterns of Gold by China’s private players increasing 219% between 2009–2015 while China revealed it’s reserves to grow only by 62%
So many experts reliably predicted China’s Gold Reserves were actually close to 3073 Tonnes and not 1658 Tonnes as claimed by China
From 2015–2023 based on buying patterns China purchased directly through the Central Bank around 661 tonnes
Private players purchases remain confidential and Gold purchases in Yuan with Russia and UAE remain confidential
Assuming 25% of the buying by private players compared to 2009–2015 and 15% of the quantity of gold from Russia and UAE in Yuan than they did in Dollars
That’s around 398 Tonnes roughly
Thus China’s estimated real reserves could be = 3073 + 661+ 398 = 4132 Tonnes
So China may have around 4132 Tonnes of Gold in its reserves
Likewise China’s real reserves may be between $ 4–4.6 Trillion
That’s because this 28nm DUV Lithography machine is FULLY INDIGENOUS and has come to the commercial line in 3 Years and 10 months
There are 15,800 components in this machine and everyone if them is MADE IN CHINA
The Wafer layering is also Chinese
The Final Tested 28nm Chip had a 94.1% yield which is only 1.7% lower than the 95.8% that a 28nm chip made with Western equipment delivers
Even 7% was acceptable by the Chinese (88.8% Yield) so a 94.1% yield was OUTSTANDING
The Chip is estimated to be priced at 4840 Yuan for a stack compared to 5410 Yuan for a stack of 28nm chips that use Western Equipment and are made in China
That’s a 12.50% price cut
Experts estimate that the same 28nm chips being made in Taiwan or Korea using Western equipment would cost 7200 Yuan or almost 50% higher than China’s price
This Machine is now commercial which means by 2027 it will replace existing western DUV equipment completely and also have enhanced quality
This means China have gained full Independence in their 28 nm Chips from any Western Control and technology
Until now it was possible only for 90 nm Chips and above
Thats not why the US is mad though
This was something that was expected by the US the minute the same equipment passed protocol stage in 2018 May with a 59% Yield (Now 94.1%)
It entered Commercial phase in 2019 December
The US is mad because China can use these 28 nm Chips and stack them and get the equivalent of 14 nm and even 7 nm chips
China has made massive strides in stacking
It means China can now have fully Indigenous 14 nm Chips at 89% of the quality that the West delivers and Indigenous 7% Chips at 70.1% of the quality that the West delivers
Now these stacked chips cannot be used commercially as their price would be too high (A 28 nm Chip stacked as a 14 nm would cost 91400 Yuan a stack against a mere 11260 Yuan that it would cost for a Western Equipment made 14 nm Chip in China and 16220 Yuan for a stack made in Taiwan)
However they can be used in Defence applications and National Security related applications where China won’t mind the higher price in exchange for more flexibility
Better to have 71% Quality home chips at 11 times the price for Defence Equipment than have none at all and have a 100% disadvantage with the West
Thats why the US is hopping mad
A Senator named Tom Cotton said this was all Bidens fault and he was too slow and gave too much time for China to catch up
China still has a long way to go
China is around 3/4 the way there
It still needs the last 25% of the race against the toughest of circumstances
9 things Australians are not being told about US military deal
No, the astonishingly expensive tie-up between Australia and the US military deal is NOT about defense of the country, nor is it about bringing stability to Asia. The opposite is true, and Asians know it. The Australians stand to lose a great deal, not just in terms of money, but in the great relationships that they have built with the rest of Asia over many decades, and in the world’s understanding of the Australian character.
THE TRUTH! Oliver Anthony Reaction – Rich Men North of Richmond
People! We are at peat transition. I have no idea how long this plateau will last but we are most certainly at peak.
Consider Africa. Niger is kicking the colonial powers out, and they refuse, and so the rest of Africa bands together to throw the bums out. Three nations, under proxy control, plan to invade Niger. What happens? Grass roots military coups though the “puppet masters” out.
Consider Oliver Anthony and how his music resonates.
Consider what is going on in Ukraine right now. Not the narrative. But the actual happenings. Where the EU went to Putin and started to make demands, and he dismissed them. They are P-O-W-E-R-L-E-S-S.
Consider the strange “fire” in Hawaii and the conspiracy theories behind it. And the fact that the entire area is now under wraps and fully blocked off doesn’t help the speculation. WTF is going on?
Japan radiation from the power plant. The cheapest solution, my ass. This water can be purified. But it isn’t. Some one (read USA) wants a conflict and wants a lot of Asians to die.
Look at San Francisco. First the orgy of riots. Then the store closures. Then the tenants move out. Followed by a ghost town. Now the “town counsel” has plans to bulldoze all the historic buildings down town and put up a gigantic football stadium surrounded by parking lots.
The insanity is off the charts!
Meanwhile China plugs on and on. Huawei P90 is coming out. 7nm chips. All Chinese made and manufactured. Full 5G capability, and the West loses out…
Genocidal, Zionist Israhell has expunged all historic Arabic names in Palestine for a reason.
Algeria is removing French from all their street signs.
Russia and China are switching English signage to phonetic and Pinyin, respectively.
Words are powerful things.
Jeff
Police have revealed that devices like the one pictured above, designed to derail trains, have been found — and are being found — on railroad tracks all over the United States.
Police warn that they could lead to train derailments and the death of passengers. The devices have been found all over the country, from the West Coast to the East.
It now seems self-evident that America is literally under attack – from within.
More details as they become available.
UPDATE 7:53 AM EDT —
Additional information has come in regarding the device shown above. What is pictured is a standard railroad siding derailer. It is designed to derail a car with dangerous materials from going on the main line and becoming a run away (bomb).
While it is good to hear this is a known safety device, this explanation does NOT address why police are reporting finding these devices on mainline tracks all over the USA. This would seem to indicate people within the railroad industry, with ready access to such devices, have begun misusing them.
Sitting out side talking to a friend of mine and all of a sudden a loud bang made me jump. Turned to see a van had run straight into this little car. I was able to catch the plate number. I ran inside asked for a pen and paper quickly and jotted it down. Cashier looked so confused. The woman whose car it was was at the counter finishing checking out. She went outside and came back in saying someone hit her car. I was able to give her the plate number and bought her a coke. Waiting with her till her husband and then the cops showed up. Her whole frame was bent couldnt open the driver side door. The cops were able to ID the guy very quickly and this wasn’t his first accident in the year. Not his second either. The husband was so grateful for how I treated his wife during the incident he insisted on giving me twenty bucks. That twenty went to into getting my Mother a Christmas present. Caught up with them a few months later. She thanked me again and his insurance ended up paying for a new car for them. He (the driver) had to pay his insurance back.
I am an American who resides in the United States.
I defend China because of history. The United States, England, France, Japan and Europe colonized much of the planet between 1800 and 1960. China was a victim of this aggression.
China continues to be a victim of American aggression. Since 1949, the United States has provided weapons and military support to the losing side in the Chinese Civil War, i.e. Taiwan. This is a continuation of 200 years of colonialism.
The United States is aided and abetted in its WAR against China by the Western media. Like others posting here, I view the Western media as propaganda, created by persons in the United States who want to sell weapons at the expense of China, Russia and the Middle East.
I believe that it is important to stand up for the truth, and to put an end to America’s endless wars for profit. The United States should not be a nation of endless war.
The present leaders of the United States have tarnished the nation, and caused it to be condemned in the eyes of the world. This is a very dangerous situation, for the United States. America is dependent upon credit and imported goods from the rest of the world.
I recognize that unchecked power in China could be a problem, when the United States is weakened due to its debt. However, the United States brought that problem upon itself, by closing two-thirds of its industrial base. The balance of power will correct itself.
Hopefully, America’s leaders will wake up soon. Power is about to be taken from their hands.
The Origins Of The Neocons And Their Lunatic World View
Linda’s Easy Lasagna
This is my favorite lasagna recipe because you do not cook the lasagna noodles first. I have always disliked cooking the lasagna noodles, so this is a great solution for me. This turns out perfect every time.
2023 08 12 17 52
Yield: 12 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds ground beef or turkey or Italian sausage*
1 jar spaghetti sauce or homemade sauce
1 can tomato sauce
1 tomato sauce can water
2 pounds ricotta or cottage cheese, mixed with 4 eggs
12 ounces lasagna noodles, UNCOOKED
4 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
Grated Parmesan cheese
Garlic powder
Salt
Instructions
Brown meat. Drain.
Add sauces and water.
Spoon a small amount of sauce onto the bottom of a lasagna pan or a 13 x 9-inch baking dish.
Place a layer of UNCOOKED noodles (overlapping slightly), one-third of the cottage cheese mixture, a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and one-third of the shredded cheese.
Pour about one-third of the sauce over the top.
Repeat twice more. Cover with more cheese.
Bake, covered and sealed with foil (DO NOT LET THE FOIL TOUCH THE CHEESE), at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.
Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer to brown the top.
Let stand for 15 minutes before cutting.
Notes
* Remove Italian sausage from casings and crumble as it cooks.
I usually make this with Italian sausage, but I have also used sliced cooked meatballs. It’s yummy whatever you decide to use! Of the two spaghetti sauce options, if you have time, go with the homemade sauce!
You can also bake for 1 hour without the cheese on top, then put the cheese on top and bake 15 minutes longer uncovered.
Friend, who works for a financial broker, calls me, says she needs a break from work. Could I come in and be a receptionist for a week so she can take a break? I would be on the payroll.
OK. So, I do the week.
Then she says that I’m doing great, can I stay the month? Hmmm, OK. The extra money is nice.
At the end of the month. she says, “I am off on vacation for the next three months. Have fun.”
I didn’t know this, but she does NOT tell the broker. It is only a two-person office, and the broker is a sweet guy who does not deserve to be dumped on like this.
She never comes back.
I worked there two years until he sold the company and retired.
China’s cancellation of Germany’s $100 billion car order sends Europe into a panic!
https://youtu.be/tfqgWibM71g
Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake
Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions – “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.”
“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”
Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.
I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.
American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase: “That’s not gonna work.”
Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yadda-yadda, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not gonna work.”
And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.
I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.
It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.
Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.
It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.
The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.
Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.
It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.
But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.
Internationally, for example:
• Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.
• Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.
• Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.
• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.
All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.
In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.
The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.
Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.
The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.
The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.
France, ECOWAS Armoured Vehicles Land In Nigerian Port As They Move To Invade Niger
We’ve all said the wrong thing at times, leaving our kids feeling angry, hurt, or confused. Words can be eternally damaging, especially coming from parents who are supposed to be safe and supportive figures in their child’s lives. “Parents’ support and approval are essential for kids’ well-being,” says Jill Whitney, LMFT, who practices in Old Lyme, Connecticut and blogs about relationships. “The words you use can be constructive or destructive to kids’ developing sense of self. If they’re negative, they can negatively color our self-image for decades.” Find out the worst offenders and what to say instead.
“Hurry up!”
Your child may be slow as molasses getting dressed in the morning when you’re trying to head out the door to school and work. Pushing her to get a move on, though, will only make her more stressed. And while you may be making her feel guilty about running late, your screaming won’t motivate her to move any faster. Instead, look for calm ways to speed things up, like making getting out the door a game by racing to see who can get dressed first. “By making it into a ‘we event,’ you’ll teach your child the importance of collaboration,” says Paul Hokemeyer, PhD, a clinical and consulting psychotherapist and author of the forthcoming Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough.
“Leave me alone”
Every parent needs a break at times. Yet, you shouldn’t be telling your kids that, otherwise, they’ll think that you’re brushing them off and that there’s no point in talking to you. “Kids like to be acknowledged and heard; in fact, it can help cut down on meltdowns and tantrums,” says Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD, a pediatrician, the creator of Pediatrician in Your Pocket, spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “Answer in a way that is age-appropriate and give them specific tasks to do while they wait for you,” she says. You may instead say, “I have to finish one thing. I need you to play with your cars for just a few minutes. We can play outside as soon as I’m done.” “Just make sure you then follow through with whatever you promised you would do together afterward,” says Dr. Trachtenberg. Some compliments can actually be hurtful to kids, too.
“Why can’t you be more like your brother or sister?”
It’s natural to compare your kids, but you shouldn’t let your kids hear you doing it. When you ask kids why they’re not more like their sibling, it promotes unhealthy competition and kids may not feel like they’re good enough. You’re implying that you wish your child was someone else when you compare him to his sibling. Besides, the comparisons aren’t likely to change the behavior, says Dr. Trachtenberg. You’ll only be pressuring a child to do something he doesn’t want to do or isn’t ready for, undermining his self-esteem. Instead, encourage and inspire your child about what he can do and praise him when he does something good, such as, “Thanks for telling me you had to use the potty” or “Wow, you zipped your coat up all by yourself.” “Each child is an individual with his own strengths and weaknesses,” says Dr. Trachtenberg. “Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool to help shape other wanted behaviors. Remember to encourage and praise the child for the actions they succeed at instead of harping on what they can’t do.” Besides, you’ll want to stop sibling rivalry before it starts.
“Practice makes perfect”
“There is no such thing as perfect; being perfect isn’t a good goal as it doesn’t exist,” says Betsy Brown Braun, child development and behavior specialist, author of two best-selling parenting books, and founder of Parenting Pathways. “You’re sending the message that she didn’t train hard enough if she made a mistake.” Instead, acknowledge how frustrating and hard practicing can be and give some examples of things she practiced and did improve. “I like to give the example of babies learning to walk. They try and try, fall down, and try and practice, over and over,” she says. “Then they become good walkers, just like you did.” Explain that doing something repeatedly teaches you how to do it, says Brown Braun. “Nobody can do something well unless she has done it a lot,” she says. “Some things take a lot of work; some take less.”
“Let me help”
It’s natural to want to give your child a hand as he is finishing a puzzle or building a tower; after all, you don’t want to see your child struggle. But if you jump in too soon, you can undermine his independence. “Allow your child to complete a project to build his self-esteem and core competence,” says Fran Walfish, PsyD (aka Dr. Fran), a child, couple, and family psychotherapist in private practice in Beverly Hills and author of The Self-Aware Parent: Resolving Conflict and Building a Better Bond with Your Child. “Each disappointment is a golden opportunity for your child to develop frustration and build coping skills to deal with life’s inevitable daily ups and downs.” Constantly helping prevents him from getting the satisfaction of learning to do it for himself and teaches him to always look to others for answers. Instead, wait for him to ask for help first. Then, ask him questions to help him solve the problem. “Should the big piece go here? Why? Try it yourself.” Is your child faking illness to stay home? Here are some of the most common reasons why kids hate school.
“I’m on a diet”
If you’re watching your weight, keep it to yourself; talking this way about physical appearance can lead to your child developing an unhealthy body image. If they see you’re struggling with how you look, they may feel that they need to look a certain way, too. “Obsessing about your weight or appearance isn’t delivering a good message,” says Elizabeth Berger, MD, a child psychiatrist and author of Raising Kids with Character. “Children need to feel that their parents are in control of their own lives.” Instead, say “I’m eating healthy because I like how it makes me feel.” Promoting positive body image like this is one of the tiny ways you can encourage your kids every day.
“Don’t cry”
When you tell a child she’s fine as she’s bawling over a scraped knee, you’re invalidating and discounting her feelings. Kids will think they have to brush off their emotions and that can lead to more explosive outbursts. Dr. Walfish suggests you say instead, “You got hurt and scared. It’s okay to say ‘Ouch! That hurts!’ Mommy sees you’re scared and hurt, and I’m right here with you.” Or give her a hug, acknowledging and verbalizing her feelings. “That was a scary fall.” That can help give her the words to express herself. “This is what I call empathic narration,” says Dr. Walfish. “This style of compassionate attunement to your child’s feelings will help her feel seen, acknowledged, validated, and accepted—flaws and all. The attuning narration also teaches your child to be a kind and empathic person to others.”
“I could do that when I was your age”
Kids all develop at different rates. So expecting your son to ride a two-wheeler by age seven as you did will only make him feel like he disappointed you. “Parents are under a lot of pressure to make sure that their children meet a long list of expectations, and some of this anxiety tends to be passed on to children,” says Dr. Berger. Still, you as a parent should appreciate your child’s efforts, regardless of what they are. “A calm attitude towards ‘success’ helps children get over their own sense of shame when they haven’t met their own—and social—expectations,” says Dr. Berger. Dr. Berger says you can say, “Wow, I can see you’re making a lot of progress; keep it up!” or “Don’t worry—you’ll get there.”
“Because I said so”
When you’re in a rush, it can be easy to fall back on this clichéd parenting phrase, but avoid this empty phrase in favor of one that’s more thought out. “As parents, one of our most challenging tasks is to convince our children to do something they don’t want to do,” says Janie Feldman, PsyD, a licensed psychologist in New Jersey. You can say something like, “I know you want to play outside today. But you have to finish your homework first. How about we play outside after?” Dr. Feldman says you can offer an incentive to promote interest in completing the task. “It would be a great help to the family if you raked the leaves. If you rake them for us, you’ll earn ___.” It’s not guaranteed they’ll help, but they may be more interested. “In our society, we do work for incentives such as our salaries, vacation time, and other benefits,” says Dr. Feldman. “Offering an incentive can not only motivate our children but also socialize them to recognize the value of their efforts.” Beyond your children, find out more things you really shouldn’t be saying to the people in your life.
“I do everything for you”
You may feel like you do everything for them—cooking, cleaning, and chauffeuring them. But you know this isn’t true. “Do what you do for your kids with an open, generous heart or don’t do it,” says Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD, a psychologist based in Princeton, New Jersey and author of Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem. “Don’t expect that you’ll be repaid with effusive gratitude or even good behavior,” she says. She says you can help teach your child gratitude and good manners by mirroring them yourself with your spouse, family, friends, and others. Say something like “What a delicious dinner! Thank you so much, Daddy!” “Your kids will probably pipe in with their thanks,” she says. Or point out someone’s efforts made on their behalf, along the lines of, “Grandma went to three stores to find the yellow paint you need. Remember to thank her when you see her tonight.”
“It’s not that big of a deal”
It may not be a big deal to you that your daughter wasn’t invited to Mary’s party, but it’s a big deal to her. Telling her you disagree with her invalidates how she’s feeling, making her ashamed or embarrassed. “When our kids are upset, we want to reach for empathy,” says Kennedy-Moore. She says that a useful formula is: “You’re feeling ___ because __.” “It bothers you when___.” “It’s hard for you when ___.” “You wish___.” “Don’t interpret or judge, just describe the feelings you see,” she says. “We adults tend to want to skip the feelings and go straight to the solution. But when kids don’t feel heard, they tend to get louder. Wrapping kids’ feelings up in words makes them seem more understandable and more manageable.” When your child feels heard and understood, it will do wonders. Beware of these other things parents say that ruin kids’ trust, too.
“You’re a liar”
Even if your child did take money from your wallet, that tone will only make him feel like he’s being personally attacked. Find out why he lied instead of being accusatory; then start an open dialogue about why it’s not okay to lie. Edward Kulich, MD, is a pediatrician who provides house calls in the New York area with his practice KidsHousecalls. He says you can say something like “Hey bud, I just wanted to let you know that I’m always here for you if you need anything or if you have a problem. I noticed some money is missing from my wallet. I’m not mad but I think we need to talk about this.”
“Be careful”
These words can have the opposite effect, making your child more likely to fall as she’s attempting the monkey bars. You’re distracting her from what she’s doing, so she’s losing focus. Instead, quietly spot her in case she falls. Dr. Kulich says you can say something like “You got this.” He says if your child is more hesitant, you can say, “I saw you do this yesterday. I know you can do it.” These compliments your kids really need to hear also help to build self-esteem and foster a loving relationship between the two of you.
US Forces Combat in Niger is a Nightmare
Talk WITH People, Not AT Them
Talk WITH not AT Header 2
One of the insidious things about trying to judge our own social skills, is that if an interaction went well for us, then we assume the other person thought it went well too. While you’ve probably never consciously thought about it, if you had a good time talking to someone, you think they felt the same. But this just isn’t the case. It’s very possible for you to walk away from an interaction feeling grand, while the other person walks away feeling annoyed, bored, or burdened.
What usually happens in these lopsided engagements is that you talked a lot about yourself and your interests, an act which is enjoyable and makes humans happy. We like to talk about ourselves! But, the other person didn’t get to talk much about him or herself, and thus left the conversation without a corresponding level of elevation.
While dominating a conversation simply by talking a lot is almost guaranteed to be a charm-killer, the worst kind of one-sided interaction is when you talk at someone, rather than with them.
Talking At Vs. Talking With
Valerie White and (former AoM podcast guest) Ann Demarais, doctors of psychology and authors of First Impressions, define the “talking at” dynamic as “forcing others to react rather than interact.” It manifests itself when one party takes on the role of teller/entertainer, and the other is forced into the role of audience.
While being part of an audience can be enjoyable when that is what one is expecting and desiring (e.g., watching a movie), people do not expect to be an audience member during face-to-face social interactions. Feeling like a spectator in this context is dull and irritating, because the role is so passive. A conversation is a cooperative, almost artistic endeavor — much like symphonic music — in which each person gets satisfaction from engaging, contributing, creating. They don’t want to watch and clap.
Demarais and White describe 4 common forms that “talking at” takes, each of which can be flipped in a way that gets you “talking with” your social partner:
Lecturing
When you’re in lecturing mode, you’re imparting facts in a very one-sided way. You want to tell someone something, but you’re not expecting or eliciting a real response. They’re the passive audience for your knowledge dump. Lecturing feels great for the lecturer — you’re amped up on the status you get from feeling in the know, and sharing information you hold as uniquely yours. But your listener is likely to see you as boring and self-important.
How to share knowledge with your social partner. Talk about subjects in which you and your partner are mutually interested, and watch for signs that they’re engaged — “Uh-huhs,” nodding, saying things like “That’s interesting.” In the absence of such cues, stop your monologue. And even when they are manifested, pause intermittently to see if the other person wants to respond, or add something, or has a question. If they don’t interject anything, you should probably wrap it up and change the subject.
Additionally, how you introduce a subject matters, as Demarias and White explain:
“A hallmark of a lecture is the speaker’s implicit ownership of the information.
When you present something as your own, you may intend to appear smart but actually may appear bombastic and egotistical. On the other hand, when you mention where you learned your information—as in ‘I read an editorial in the paper that said…’—or the genesis of your idea—as in ‘I saw something on TV, and then thought…’—you show an open mind and a more modest assessment of your own intellectual value.”
When you say, “I heard/read X the other day,” people don’t feel like you’ve already fixed your opinion about it, but rather that you’re opening up a dialogue on the subject, making them more likely to offer their own thoughts and engage with you.
Storytelling
The great paradox of stories is that they can be both the most compelling and the most boring form of communication. A good story can entertain, engage, and build connection. But as Demarias and White observe, stories can easily go wrong when they’re “long, detailed, and about people your conversational partner doesn’t know.”
How to share stories with your social partner. Bad storytelling is an easy trap to fall into, because the characters and plots in our anecdotes seem so interesting and salient to us. We know our friends, and children, and boss — they loom large in our own lives, and we can vividly picture their facial expressions and have all the context to understand why their behavior is so adorable/comical/outrageous. It’s subconsciously difficult to realize that other people, who lack this context, won’t find these people and places equally compelling.
But they don’t. The difference can be likened to the way you’re interested in a story about your favorite NBA player, but have no interest in news about a professional Chinese athlete you’ve never heard of. Unless a story connects to universal aspects of the human experience (training for a race; dealing with an incompetent boss; getting in an accident) or intersects in some way with the other person’s life, it’s going to be Dullsville.
Even if a story does include those elements (touches on shared human experience; connects with the other person’s life), you should still keep it short and to the point. Dole out the story in small chunks, watching to see if the other person shows interest and asks things like, “What did you decide to do?” or “How did he respond to that?” before continuing the tale.
When a story of any kind goes on too long, you turn your social partner into an audience member who passively spectates instead of actively engages.
Sermonizing
Sermonizing occurs when you’re trying to persuade someone to your point of view. The subject matter is usually something around morality, religion, or politics, and while this kind of conversational mode can be okay in the company of long-time friends and family who enjoy spirited debate and verbal jousting, it’s a turn-off for new acquaintances who don’t know you well enough to put your opinions into context and to realize there’s more to you than a zeal for some particular issue. They’re likely to get defensive or disgusted or just plain annoyed.
How to have a weighty discussion with your social partner. You don’t have to rigidly follow the old adage about avoiding talk of politics, religion, and money, even with new people, as long as you follow a few guidelines we’ve offered here, the gist of which is to strive to have adiscussion rather than an argument. A wise writer put the distinction this way:
“in discussion you are searching for the truth, and in argument you want to prove that you are right. In discussion, therefore, you are anxious to know your neighbor’s views, and you listen to him. In argument, you don’t care anything about his opinions, you want him to hear yours.”
When you’re aiming a sermon at someone, Demarias and White note, “The implicit message is ‘you’re wrong and I’m right.’” When you’re having a discussion with them, in contrast, you seek to understand how they’ve arrived at their convictions, where your positions differ, and the common ground you share.
Telling Jokes
A great sense of humor is one of the most charming of qualities. But too much humor reaches a tipping point where it stops adding to the collective “music” of the conversation and becomes a one-sided performance, turning the speaker into an entertainer and the listener into an audience. Instead of getting to interact, the latter is forced to simply react to the constant stream of quips and witticisms — a role for which they soon grow bored.
How to share humor with your social partner. Jokes serve better as the seasoning of a conversation, rather than its main dish. Instead of interspersing everything you say with a quip, just pepper them in here and there between sustained stretches of neutral talking and showing sincere interest in the other person.
When it comes to being socially adept, Demarias and White note that “how you talk about topics matters more than what you actually talk about. You can make a fascinating ethical issue boring if you simply lecture someone about it. On the other hand, you can turn your model airplane hobby into a stimulating conversational topic if you talk about it in a fun and engaging manner.”
To avoid your conversations turning into one-sided monologues where you simply talk at people, toss out subjects of reciprocal interest and see what people bite on; like volleyball players, hit the ball back and forth over the net. Show that you’re curious, open-minded, and interested in other people’s experiences and perspectives. Interact rather than making the other person solely react to what you say and do; create a little theater/dialogue/symposium/comedy together, rather than having them watch you from the gallery.
Create something special with the people you meet.
China’s Dumping Dollars For Gold & They Won’t Stop!
China just ramped up their gold purchases, buying for a 9th straight month! As the world gets de-globalized, we are seeing an acceleration of de-dollarization towards alternative stores of value like gold. Even JP Morgan is calling for record gold prices in 18 months. Here’s what you must know about this historic monetary shift.
The More Options You Have, The Happier You Are
Over the years, I’ve experienced a direct correlation between the number of options I have in life and my happiness.
The more options I have for my career, the better work I can do. The more options I have for spending my free time, the less I cling to people and activities.
In short, if I can choose what to do with my time at any given moment, I’m happy. It doesn’t necessarily matter what I do. What matters is that I have a choice.
The importance of this concept is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about happiness in the modern age.
I recently read Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston, who was a seasoned psychiatrist. In that book, he talked about why it’s so important to have options:
“Mental health is a function of choice. The more choices we are able to exercise, the happier we are likely to be. Those who are most unwell or discouraged suffer from a sense that their choices have been limited, sometimes by external circumstances or illness, most often by the many ways we restrict ourselves.”
Fewer options restrict us. That gives us a sense of dread. We feel like there’s not much we can do in life. And that makes us unhappy. But you can turn that around by creating options for yourself.
The paradox of risk
The most important thing about career options is that there’s a paradoxical relationship between risk and reward we need to understand first. Before I came to terms with this, I never had many options.
Here’s the issue. As humans, we’re naturally risk-averse. We fear loss more than we desire a potential gain. That force usually keeps us where we are. That’s why most people remain in the same job or industry until they get fired or retire.
The paradox is that most people assume it’s risky to change. But in reality, the reverse is true. The more stagnant you are, the more you’re at risk of loss.
When I pursued a career as a full-time writer, I had to take risks. I left my well-paying corporate job in London, left the city, moved back in with my parents, and took a step back from our family business.
I went from earning about $80K a year to almost nothing. My blog and online courses generated about $5,000 of income in the first year. The risk is wasting your time and the loss of your salary when you make a move like that.
Livingston recognized the importance of getting comfortable with risk as well. He said the following about the relationship between options and risk:
“The primary variable in this regard is tolerance of risk. If we take counsel of our fears, particularly our fear of change, it is hard to choose a life that makes us happy. Is it anxiety or lack of imagination that restricts us?”
This is hard to accept. Unless you get comfortable with your fear of change, you will not have a happy life that consists of many options.
Remember that no matter how dire your circumstances are, you’re never out of options. You can always do something. This is the most important belief in human hope and progress. As long as we’re alive, we have a choice.
How I create career options
Let’s look at how you can create more career options. Since your work takes up the majority of your time, it’s important to get this straight. When you have options and happiness in your career, you automatically become a better person.
How many of your personal problems are related to work? How often do you allow the stress of work to change your mood? And how often does your mood create problems at home?
To say that your career is important is an understatement. Work is not just something you do on set hours. It’s the single biggest factor that determines what your life looks like on a macro level.
So how do you make sure you have a good career? Not by having a great job. This might sound weird to you if you’ve been raised thinking every person needs to have one job.
That’s an old model that no longer works. We don’t need jobs. We need skills that we can apply to multiple jobs and industries.
Here’s how I approach that. I always prioritize learning over short-term goals like money, bonuses, status, or any other benefits that I can get in my career.
The more universal skills I have, the more opportunities I have. For example, if you’re good at persuasion, you can work as a copywriter, account executive, stockbroker, recruiter, or work at a retail store.
If you know how to code, you can work at any company that develops software, in any industry.
Another thing I focus on is building good relationships with experienced people. I’m not a fan of networking with hundreds of people or forming “mastermind” groups with people who are not top-performers. On a social level, it’s wonderful, but professionally, you won’t learn much.
If you do want to network, at least connect with people who are more established in life and don’t have much to prove anymore. Professionals like that can point you in the right direction if you don’t know what to do. They can help you to see options you didn’t see before.
Be willing to pay the price or move on
I was once talking about this concept of career options with someone in their twenties. The person said they also wanted to be in a similar position as I am today.
And I said, “Look, I’ve given up a lot of things when I was your age to be where I am today. I sacrificed relationships and leisure. But I don’t see it as bad because I’ve always been happy to pay that price for happiness. And I still am.”
And the person said, “I don’t think I can do that.”
That’s the end of it. “Then you should accept your life the way it is and that you’re always at the disposal of other people,” I said. If some people are not willing to pay the price, they should just accept whatever is and not complain about being unhappy.
The truth is there are always options. We just can’t expect that they come for free. Everything in life has a price. If you’re willing to pay, you won’t get disappointed.
Every Nation has a certain threshold beyond which it’s rise can’t be contained
The Threshold is Economic and Political and Military based
I believe that China could have easily been contained or throttled in 2010 or even 2012
Luckily the 2008 Crisis helped China and gave it 6 years or so beyond which throttling it became tougher and tougher
Today?
Economically China is a giant not just because of the $ 19 Trillion GDP but because of an Industrial Output that exceeds US,UK and Europe combined
Militarily they can sustain a war for almost 4 years without cracks in their economy. They have enough food and energy independently for that.
Hence attacking China would result in worse weakening of the West especially by US
So all US can do is OPTICS or PR
Make it look like it’s containing China
Use their media to exaggerate every one of Chinas failures by 1000 and suppress all of Chinas achievements by either not publishing it or using the narrative “BUT AT WHAT COST”
Riling up neighbors of China
Essentially acting like a Pimp Bully instead of a Direct Head on Face to Face talk with China
And Why?
Why is the West so alarmed with China’s Rise?
Because they feel China will invade and conquer the US?
Nonsense
Because they feel China will become the numero uno hegemon
Nonsense. The US hegemony is too well entrenched to be removed in a year or two. It will take 30 years minimum. Well after the current leadership has been dead and buried
Because China would become wealthier?
Naah. Luxembourg and Singapore are wealthier than US and US doesn’t give a damn
It’s because China isn’t a democracy and it’s proof that a One Party Meritocracy System can do better than a Democracy if the vision and policies work to that effect
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That breaks the so called “Democracy is God model” that the West has been floating for nearly 100 years
That’s why the West is so terrified of China’s rise
The First and Only Photos From Titan, Saturn’s Largest Moon – What Did We See?
This is the best selling vehicle in the United States
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The Ford F Series. Currently, the F-150 is the production model.
Not the best selling “truck”. The best selling “vehicle”.
In Canuck speak, it uses anywhere from 11–15 liters of fuel per 100km travelled. By contrast, a Honda Civic uses about 7.1–8 liters of fuel to travel the same distance.
Vehicles like this are rarely used to haul cargo or for towing. They’re mostly used the same way other vehicles are used – commuting and errands. If cycling were safe in the United States, which it mostly isn’t, about 50% of trips taken by an F-150 could be done by bike.
It’s not even a good pickup truck. It has a pitiful amount of cargo room.
Vehicles like this make it difficult for people to travel by any other mode of transit that doesn’t use petroleum, like walking and biking. Heck, this behemoth even makes it impossible to get around in vehicles like the Civic which could do 99% of the trips this thing can because in a collision between this and a Civic the Civic owner is probably in for a bad experience.
It it safe? For the occupants, yes. For anyone not in it, no. You can’t see a 5 foot tall child standing directly in front of it for one thing.
America Tells Saudi Arabia To Keep Using Dollars – You Won’t Believe This!
The U.S. is pushing back against BRICS and China with a deal for Saudi Arabia. However, the terms will include the continued usage of the US dollar in oil sales. Will MBS take the bait and is this a win for America? Here’s what you must know!
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Linda’s Pepper Steak
I’ve been making this delicious pepper steak for about 50 years.
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Cook: 25 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound round or flank steak
Kosher or sea salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, diced large
1 red or orange bell pepper, diced large
3 beef bouillon cubes, dissolved in 1 cup hot water
1 can diced tomatoes
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1/4 cup water
Instructions
Cut the steak into thin slices (this is easier to do if the meat is semi-frozen).
Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
In a large skillet heat the oil.
Add the steak and onion and cook until meat is browned on all sides.
Add the bell peppers and bouillon water. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add the tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes.
Mix the cornstarch, soy sauce and water and stir into meat mixture. Cook, stirring, until the mixture has thickened.
We talk about US presidents all the time — Obama did this, Trump did that, blah blah blah. But really it’s never the president doing those things, it’s the empire. The president is just the face of the operation, the name they put on the door that they change every few years to create the illusion that the US government is responsive to the will of the electorate.
Really if you look solely at the raw data of the US power structure around the world (where the weapons are going, where the resources are going, where the money is and isn’t going, where the diplomats are and aren’t going, etc), you can’t tell from year to year when the White House is changing hands. You can’t tell from that raw data what political party the current president belongs to or what platform he campaigned on, and you can’t tell when he’s replaced by someone from the other party with another platform. The raw data of the empire keeps moving in basically the same way without any meaningful interruption.
So it’s not really true to say “Obama did this” or “Trump did that”; really they’re just the face that happened to be on the operation when it was time to kill Gaddafi or begin the Pivot to Asia or sanction Venezuela or start arming Ukraine or whatever. They’re not leaders leading the US government in various directions based on what they think the best policies are, they’re empire managers who are responding to whatever the needs of the empire happen to be each day — using whatever justifications or partisan leverage they can muster in that moment.
And Americans don’t get to vote on any of that stuff. They don’t get to vote on what will have to be done to facilitate the needs of a globe-spanning empire, or if there should be a globe-spanning empire at all. The behavior of the empire is never on the ballot. The only things that are ever on the ballot are issues which stand no possibility of ever interfering in the operation of the empire, like whether the president will appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion or support gun control. And the voting populace is continually kept at a 50/50 split on as many of those issues as possible to keep both sides tugging on the rope with all their might so they don’t look up and notice that the real large-scale behavior of their government is completely unaffected by the small back and forth gains and losses of the tug-o-war game.
Really the only reason to talk about US presidents in terms of “Obama did this” and “Trump did that” is to highlight this point. To highlight the fact that Obama continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his predecessor, and that Trump continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his. To disrupt all the dopey partisan narratives about things getting better under Biden or worse under Trump or that Obama was a progressive or Trump was a peacemaker.
By pointing out the horrible things that happened under each administration, regardless of party affiliation or platform, the illusion that Americans are controlling the behavior of their government using their votes can be worn away. You can in this sense use the illusion to fight the illusion — use people’s intense interest in presidents and electoral politics to draw them into the insight that it’s all a performance designed to keep the eyes of the masses away from the inner workings of the machine.
And then the possibility for real change opens up. The longer Americans are convinced that they can vote their way out of problems they never voted their way into in the first place, the longer they can be dissuaded from using the power of their numbers to force real material changes by real material means.
EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s
Two reasons: complexity, and too much money
Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.
So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)
First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.
We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission. In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment. And why? Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.
Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped. Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions. In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn’t work well.
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)
The M-1 Abrams tank
Another great example – this can be a real dog. The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance. (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?) Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue. But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar “power packs” had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.
Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field. All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense. At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.
Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.
The Basic Problem : Excessive Complexity
I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance. This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces. After all, every military reflects its own society.
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.
But so much for American equipment per se. Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices – edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale
It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.) Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations. Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.
Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped. That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!
Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes? Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?
My brain cannot even wrap around this. Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?
However, even that pales before the Army’s cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of “Roomba” vacuum cleaner fame. In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)
As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.
US intelligence agencies have the same problem
This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…” In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.
As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass. (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)
Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings? Apparently not!
Bureaucratic bloat
On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing.
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract. (I have seen this many times in Washington.)
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved
So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole. We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it.
Really? How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.
Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)
How did they do it?
Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) – had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce. Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist. Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.
Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.
No hope for change going forward
So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.
Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.
And you know what? Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse.
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don’t have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.
Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony. Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.
But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China’s little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country’s imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures.
In fact, I would say we are at that point already. Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable. (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)
So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach. That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can.
The threshold has been reached and it’s all downhill from here.
Pluto Really Is a Weird Place! These Are the Strangest Things Found on Its Icy Surface
Successful Kids and 10 Habits of the Parents Who Raise Them
We’re always checking out other people’s parenting skills in an effort to raise successful kids. Should we make their bedtime earlier? Should we insist on piano lessons? We rounded up the parenting moves that do seem to spur kids on to greatness.
Give children chores
When children are made to complete chores, they are shaping a work ethic from early on. Not only does this give them a chance to contribute to family life, but it also demonstrates that they play an integral role in the successful day-to-day functioning of their family. Chores for kids also teach them valuable skills that will be necessary when they head off to college and start their adult lives.
Set high expectations
Parents of successful kids set high expectations for their children as well as themselves. More often than not, it encourages children to rise to the occasion. If college is the expectation, students will work toward that goal more readily than if a parent doesn’t bother mentioning it. What’s more, parents help their children succeed by modeling high expectations of themselves and demonstrating how to work hard to meet goals. It’s important to make sure that your expectations of your kids are realistic, however—they shouldn’t be led to believe they have to qualify for the olympics, graduate as valedictorian, or even keep their rooms clean 24/7—as the pressure to meet overly lofty goals can cause anxiety and ultimately backfire.
Get yourself educated
Statistically speaking, parents who have completed high school or college are more likely to have children who do the same. Parents who have not achieved higher levels of education might consider pursuing these educational goals in order to provide a good example for their children. As a bonus, studies show that higher education lowers blood pressure.
Show them the good life
If you want your child to follow in your footsteps—getting a steady job, making a nice home, and having a family—it’s helpful to make it look appealing. That doesn’t mean never ever complaining or hiding the truth about real life from your children, but there’s something to be said for modeling a life that motivates your children to want to achieve success. If they see your hard work is paying off, and that it seems meaningful, they will be more inclined to invest in their own futures. Avoid these things that parents say that ruin their kids’ trust.
Make friends with numbers early
Teaching math at an earlier age is not only an indicator of later success in mathematics but also in reading. Preschool now places a stronger emphasis on math skills in order to prepare students for the rigorous math expectations of elementary school and beyond. Giving your child a leg up on these skills will set them up for later success. We did an algorithm to ensure that these math jokes will make you smile (just kidding).
Make time for bonding
Children who have a secure foundation with their parents are more successful than those who do not, regardless of socio-economic status. That doesn’t mean you have to take them to Disney World or to the movies every week, but you’d do well to read a book together at bedtime, share meals whenever possible, and generally make yourself available when they need you. By nurturing a strong bond with your children from birth, you’ll help them feel grounded and secure—and secure children are more likely to become successful adults.
Teach troubleshooting
Parents of successful children give their kids the tools they need to solve problems, whether it means asking them how they think a word is spelled before dictating the answer, or prompting them to suggest solutions when problems arise. These moves help children develop the habit of trying to solve problems themselves, which leads to feelings of competence and confidence—invaluable skills for navigating adult life. These quotes about parenting are sure to make you laugh.
Accept and recognize their feelings
Emotions are tough for a lot of people, especially kids. So it can be particularly helpful to teach kids how to recognize and verbalize their emotions. When children are young, attach names to their feelings, so they can speak about them intelligently. You might say, “I see that you’re feeling very frustrated,” or “I know it must be disappointing to have to miss your friend’s party.” Giving children the space to explore their emotions and helping them process those emotions will contribute to their becoming successful adults. Don’t miss the signs you’re raising an emotionally intelligent child.
Try to chill out a little
Stressed out parents make for stressed out children. Learn to manage your own stress levels in order to provide a stress-free home for your children. Stress is contagious—don’t pass it on.
The impoverished West African state of Niger is the latest flashpoint in the struggle by the imperialist powers for a redivision of the world. The issues involved in the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine—a fight for territory, strategic resources and regime-change—are erupting all over the globe, in China and Taiwan, and now in the Sahel region of Africa.
Though stalled for the moment, what would be a devastating war led by the most powerful country in the region, Nigeria, to oust the coup leaders in Niger and reinstate President Mohamed Bazoum is under active preparation. At a summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the Nigerian capital Abuja Thursday, leaders agreed to activate a standby military force and threatened that “no option had been taken off the table.”’
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They agreed a new round of sanctions on Niger, which has been plunged into blackouts by electricity cut-offs and seen food prices rise 60 percent amid a blockade and the freezing of assets and trade.
A conflict would draw in the entire region. Senegal, Benin and the Ivory Coast have already pledged to send troops to aid Nigeria. Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea have declared for the military coup leaders in Niger.
Behind the proposed ECOWAS action stand the imperialist powers, who are intent on blocking Russia and China from further penetrating a continent whose strategic significance is growing rapidly. The long-term decline of France’s economic position in its former West African colonies—culminating in the last three years in a dramatic collapse of its military presence in Mali, Burkina Faso and now perhaps Niger—has thrown open the Sahel region to intense geopolitical competition.
Bazoum was considered an important Western ally. The US and the European powers have responded to the coup against him by cutting aid to Niger supposedly provided on “humanitarian” grounds—on which it relies for 40 percent of its annual government budget. They are determined to secure their interests whatever the cost.
Speaking Tuesday after “difficult” talks with the coup leaders, US Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland—veteran of the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine—threatened, “We’ll be watching the situation, but we understand our legal responsibilities and I explained those very clearly to the guys who were responsible for this and that it is not our desire to go there, but they may push us to that point.”
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Caution over a proposed military intervention by ECOWAS has centred on concerns that such action has not been properly prepared and would spark mass opposition throughout the region. A misjudged war could explode the social powder keg in Nigeria, where the US and Britain are heavily invested politically and economically.
A great deal is at stake. The United States currently has 1,500 soldiers of its 6,500-strong declared African deployment stationed in Niger across two bases—one of which is the regional hub for drone missions. France has 1,100 troops in the country, Italy 300 and Germany around 100.
Niger is a major uranium producer, providing a quarter of Europe’s supply. It is due to start exporting oil and plays a central role in policing migration out of Africa to Europe. It has become a frontline state in a battle for economic and military pre-eminence in West Africa and across the whole continent.
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Africa is home to an estimated 30 percent of the world’s mineral wealth, including 90 percent of its chromium and platinum—crucial to the green energy transition. Another such mineral is cobalt, of which 70 percent of the world’s supply is produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the end of the century, Africa could also account for a fifth of the world’s lithium supply.
The continent also produces 65 percent of the world’s diamonds and is home to 40 percent of its gold reserves, 12 percent of its oil and 8 percent of its natural gas, while Morocco alone is home to 75 percent of the world’s phosphate rock, crucial for fertiliser.
In terms of markets, Africa’s consumer expenditure is on track to grow from $1.4 trillion in 2015 to $2.5 trillion in 2030.
The US and Europe are concerned not to let Niger be another loss to the claims made by China and Russia on these riches and opportunities.
Russia’s Wagner group (headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin) is operating in Mali, to Niger’s immediate West, Libya, to its North East, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan—providing armed forces for their governments in conflicts with local rebel groups. In the CAR and Sudan, Wagner also runs private gold and diamond mines.
Russian President Vladimir Putin inaugurated a Russia-Africa summit in 2019 promising to help push back against “an array of Western countries [that] are resorting to pressure, intimidation and blackmail of sovereign African governments.” The second, far less well attended, summit held under conditions of anti-Russian sanctions and the war in Ukraine, took place last month, where a special effort was made to court Burkina Faso’s “interim leader” Colonel Ibrahim Traoré.
Russia has sought to leverage its relatively meagre resources to gain allies and the occasional lucrative venture, but China is throwing enormous economic weight behind securing control of Africa’s resources markets. It has controlling stakes in large swathes of the continent’s mining industry—including the bulk of uranium mines in Niger, plus its oil industry—forming part of a total FDI (foreign direct investment) stock of $43.4 billion in 2020, a 100-fold increase in 17 years.
China is Africa’s largest bilateral lender, loaning $153 billion in the two decades to 2019, and its second largest trade partner after the European Union, bigger than any other single country.
Both Russia and China are also major arms suppliers to sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 26 and 18 percent of sales respectively in the last five years, above third-place France at 8 percent, and the US at 5 percent.
In 2019, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) launched a five-year plan to “deter” what it called “Chinese and Russian malign action.” Former head of AFRICOM, Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, told Congress that year that both were after “access and influence to our detriment,” and that, within the decade, China could gain the capability to inhibit US military access and operations. The policy has remained unchanged since Trump’s Republicans were replaced by the Democrats under Biden.
Colin P. Clarke, former RAND analyst and current director of research at the global intelligence and security consultancy The Soufan Group, bluntly explained to Newsweek the implications of the Nigerien situation.
“This could take on the dimensions of a regional proxy war, with Western countries supporting ECOWAS and Russia supporting Niger—and Burkina Faso and Mali, if they joined in—with muscle from the Wagner Group.
“What’s happening in the Sahel is not a sideshow to great power competition, it is great power competition. The events unfolding are not doing so in a vacuum. The US, France, China, and Russia each have their own vested interests in Sahelian countries.”
Workers and the rural poor in Niger and West Africa are confronted with the catastrophe warned of by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) at its 1991 Berlin Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in response to the Gulf War.
The manifesto announcing that conference explained: “This ongoing and de facto partition of Iraq signals the start of a new division of the world by the imperialists. The colonies of yesterday are again to be subjugated. The conquests and annexations which, according to the opportunist apologists of imperialism, belonged to a bygone era are once again on the order of the day.”
Based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, the statement warned that the struggle “against imperialist oppression cannot be waged successfully as long as the working class remains under the political domination of any wing of the national bourgeoisie.” It is inseparable from a fight against national ruling classes which have overseen the continued gruelling exploitation of the African masses, kept in power by militaries trained and funded by the imperialists.
Niger must above all serve as a warning to the working class all over the world of the urgent need to oppose the predatory war aims of the imperialist powers. As the ICFI and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality insisted in calling for the building of a worldwide movement against the NATO-Russia war:
The war in Ukraine is not an episode that will soon be resolved and followed by a return to “normalcy.” It is the beginning of a violent eruption of a global crisis that can be resolved only in one of two ways. The capitalist solution leads to nuclear war, though the word “solution” can hardly be rationally applied to what would amount to planetary suicide. Thus, the only viable response, from the standpoint of securing the future of mankind, is the world socialist revolution.
USA will not allow it to happen. Why do you think all 3 Taiwan candidates needs to appear in US for an interview. They will be questioned on this issue and make their pledges this will not happen.
Scott Ritter will survive. But over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have not survived the carnage that is a direct result of YouTube’s censorship of omission and commission.
In his interviews, Le Tissier comes across as a nice, well-balanced guy, who exudes the abundance of confidence which he himself admits made him such a formidable spot kicker for Southampton FC, which he loyally served for an impressive 16 years, despite getting much better offers from Spurs and other big clubs.
Retiring from football, Le Tissier became a successful pundit before being blackballed over his views, which he continues to express in the most moderate of terms, on censorship and overall state repression. Even more to our point, Le Tissier said that, as a pundit, he described the action from the point of view of a spectator and not as a manager or, in his case, a lethal forward, and that he left the complex strategic analysis and accompanying diagrams to others. In other words, even as a pundit, Le Tissier was a team player, who could see the overall picture and the best role he could play there.
The point here is that, whether we are looking at football or at NATO’s Ukrainian war, we should try eliciting views from many informed quarters, those like Ritter, with a modicum of relevant experience, included.
Although NATO would agree with that, they insist that military pundits must only express the views of Team NATO and no one else, as all else is mis-information, Putin propaganda and so on. Because Ritter not only differs from NATO’s narrative but actually admits to sometimes working in consort with informed Russians, NATO must have him gagged, for what possible benefit could there be for NATO in giving a Russian, any Russian, a fair hearing? As someone who wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to Ritter’s punditry or, for that matter, that of Le Tissier, that is still fundamentally wrong and, in the case of Ritter, dangerous.
It is dangerous because listening to echo chambers on Ukraine or any other war zone is not only dangerous but potentially lethal as well. This can now be seen in the case of Ukraine where, following the collapse of the much-vaunted Ukrainian Army that Ritter, Douglas Macgregor and other informed pundits long ago consistently predicted, MI6 agent Zelensky, a term I borrow from Ritter’s prior excellent work, is now pretending to clean up Ukraine’s rampant corruption, which Ritter repeatedly previously drew attention to.
Not only has NATO lied to us about every aspect of their Ukrainian war, just like they have lied to us about every single other of the countless wars they have waged since their inception but they want to muffle and ban every authoritative voice that might present us with a contrary view.
This is not to say that all views are equally valid and legitimate. They are not. Le Tissier was a pundit because he was an excellent and articulate player and Ritter, as he constantly reminds us, was a senior officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, which I would put on a par with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, many of whose generals, such as Erich von Manstein, provided valuable post-War insights and more of whom, such as Franz Halder, who served as Chief of Staff of Nazi Germany’s High Command from 1938 to 1942, was subsequently showered with medals and awards of appreciation by President John F Kennedy for perpetuating the myth of the “righteous war the clean Wehrmacht” fought against the Red Army’s Soviet Homeland, whose civilians remain NATO’s primary military target to this very day.
NATO has, of course, countless other targets, many of whom are like Gonzalo Lira, where Ritter has singularly missed the mark. Lira is, or rather was, our man on the spot, just as Nazi Party member John Rabe was our much better informed man on the spot during Japan’s Rape of Nanking for which NATO relentlessly pilloried investigative journalist Iris Chang until she suicided.
Scott Ritter, like Matt Le Tissier before him, is strong and resourceful. He will survive. But over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have not survived the carnage that is a direct result of the censorship of omission and commission YouTube and other NATO mis-information portals have spewed out. Though each of those soldiers had a story to tell, many of them, who could not afford to bribe their way to safety, came from the poorest strata of society, from mountainside hovels without even a window, never mind any semblance of what we might regard as the barest comforts of life. Instead of letting them be, Zelensky’s thugs kidnapped them and threw them into the meat grinder where they died unlamented, except by those who loved them and depended on them for their subsistence.
When we take Ukraine’s dead, wounded, orphaned, widowed, trafficked and abandoned into account, Zelensky and his YouTube and other NATO censors must have destroyed the lives of well over 4 million Ukrainians and that is without even looking at the Russian side of the lines.
But, because Lira and even Ritter may be our current men on the spot, historians in future years will probably thank them, just as the more honest amongst them previously thanked Rabe, for giving posterity the first draft of why so many millions of lives had to be blighted so low life porno actor Zelensky could accumulate his portfolio of mansions to house his impressive stable of mistresses.
Ritter and Lira, like Rabe before them, might well be just very minor footnotes to all this carnage. But the main authors of this carnage, criminals like Victoria Nuland and John Bolton, are not. Their self-serving threats against the International Criminal Court notwithstanding, all NATO curs like them have very serious questions to answer, the sort of charges Frank, Frick, Jodl, Kallenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Streicher all swung for in Nuremberg.
These NATO curs have repeatedly said that rough justice is for others, for those like their former Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein whom they lynched in 2006, or Gadaffi, whom they sodomised and murdered in 2011. But then there is also Stepan Bandera, who met his Maker in 1959 to settle, in part, vendettas these NATO gangsters continue to this day. And, though Ritter, Lipp, Lira and Assange are immaterial to settling such scores, until they are settled, there can be no justice and no peace because justice demands that NATO’s war criminals pay with their lives for their crimes and, as even the blind can see, as long as Nuland, Bolton and the rest of NATO’s swamp creatures remain uncaged, there definitely can be no peace.
15 Months On Mars: Ingenuity Finds Eerie Spacecraft Wreckage
WTF? Cool.
Through the Western lens
Through the Western lens means 3 things:
Ideological bigotry — liberal democracy is superior; China’s political system is evil, autocratic, repressive.
Western projection — Western colonialism has dominated the world for the last 500 years; therefore, China will also try to dominate the world similarly, either militarily or economically.
Fear of losing hegemony — China threatens the global hegemony of USA, UK and EU. China must be stopped.
Viewing China through this lens yields:
Anti-China propaganda to smear China’s reputation, turn world opinion against China and hopefully cause the world to decouple from China.
Economic and tech sanctions against China, depriving China of 5G market, semiconductors, FDI.
Military intimidation — naval exercises in Taiwan Strait, adding more military bases, selling arms to Taiwan.
The Western lens is blind to 3 facts:
China has fought no wars in over 40 years, since 1979, making China the most peaceful world power to have ever existed.
Outside of USA, UK and EU, the rest of the world holds a favorable view of China. The University of Cambridge published a study in October 2022 called, “A World Divided: Russia, China and the West.” It surveyed 137 countries representing 97% of the world’s population to uncover the favorability of Russia and China to these countries. It found that 70% of the world, excluding the Western countries, had a favorable view of China. Only 23% of Western countries thought well of China.
Evil, autocratic, repressive China has the most trusted and satisfactory government in the world. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, 89% of Chinese trust their government compared to 56% for France, 51% for Canada, 47% for Germany, 46% for Italy, 42% for USA, 37% for UK, 36% for Spain, and 33% for Japan.
A November 2019 Ipsos survey shows that 94 percent of Chinese believe their country is on the right track.
According to the Global Happiness 2023 survey from Ipsos, China is the happiest country in the world at 91% compared to 76% for USA, 74% for Canada and France, and 70% for UK.
According to Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School in 2020, 95.5% of Chinese are satisfied with their government.
A 2019 UC San Diego study shows a high level of satisfaction among the Chinese across a range of aspects up to 95 percent.
According to Latana’s Democracy Perception Index 2023, China is the 6th most democratic nation on earth, well ahead of Germany, Spain, Canada, Italy, UK, USA, France, and Japan.
Use Google search to verify all of the above. Don’t take my word for it.
Western democracy is a failed model. US democracy has degenerated into a plutocracy. UK democracy is a mess. Indian democracy is a mess.
We have bozo leaders like Biden, Trump, Trudeau, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Scholz, Modi, Zelensky, etc.
Western democracy allowed millions of people to die needlessly from the pandemic.
Western democracy allowed UK and EU to f*ck up their economies thanks to Russian sanctions.
USA is in very sad shape because of a totally incompetent government…
$32 trillion national debt
crumbling infrastructure
homelessness
unaffordable health care
rampant gun violence
mass incarceration
fentanyl crisis
increasing poverty
The list is endless.
India can’t get a handle on ethnic strife and human rights issues. It has poor education and poor infrastructure. China’s economy is 5.2 times larger by nominal GDP and 2.5 times larger by purchasing power parity when, by rights, India’s economy should be roughly on par with China’s. Thank India’s democracy for this.
The West is a waking up…
The US obsession with China is 100% a “they hate us cuz they ain’t us” situation.
Forty years ago, the Chinese were living in rice fields. Now, they’re all super rich and living in cities that look like the Mars Base from Total Recall.
Last time I was there, I was so shocked by the affluence of the general population that I literally made this face:
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They had to give me tea to relax.
But seriously, I’m thinking of making a trip to China and making a documentary proving that it is a much better country.
A Chinese friend invited me. He’s not even really rich, and he was like “yeah – you can stay at my place. You can sleep on the couch. It’s not a problem – I have 200 couches.”
A Litany of Lies
by Arch Bungle Lifted from an off-topic comment.
Being a catalogue of the lies I have imbibed through by means of torturous exposure to Anglo-American Newspapers and the rumor mills of Continental Europe.
See the examples below:
The Russian MIC cannot manufacture semiconductors. All their semiconductors are obtained via the black market from western sources. Or Iran. Or China. Or North Korea (all of whom are themselves under sanctions!).
The Russian microchip industry doesn’t exist (But the Russians can build things with black market American chips that even the Japanese can’t build)
The Russian microchip industry has collapsed (How something that doesn’t exist “collapses” I am not sure, but there you are)
Putin is a Dictator. He micromanages every single aspect of Russian Society up to the frontline battles (The Surovikhin Line should actually be renamed the “Putin Line”. But russian military bloggers and even military staff are criticising him on a daily basis without apparent consequence, and outspoken media figures are allowed to hurl an endless stream of criticism against Putin and his conduct of the war).
Putin is Russia and “Russia is Putin” (And that one aging bureaucrat alone is enough to terrify the West )
Russia / Putin is Isolated from the global community (Because everyone knows the “International Community” consists of white folks plus some honorary members like the Japs and South Koreans (whose membership may soon be up anyway))
The Russian economy is insignificant and smaller than Italy/Texas/France/etc. (it’s only the biggest economy in Europe by PPP, and nobody cares about PPP)
The Soviet Union was an Empire and Russia is seeking to restore it’s imperialism
Putin is a “Thug” and a “Murderer” (Because he bombed all those Afghan weddings, blockaded the starving people of Yemen and stated publicly that 500 000 Iraqi children were a worthy sacrifice to Mammon)
Russian military operations are at a disadvantage at night due to inferior night vision (The AFU on the other hand has access to the best NATO night vision technology)
Russia is starving the world by withdrawing from the grain deal
The Oil Price Cap, defying all laws of economic gravity, has been surprisingly effective in strangling Russian oil revenues
Russia is running out of artillery/drones/tanks/men Russia is salvaging microchips from dishwashers
Putin is dying from Alzheimers/Parkinsons/Cancer
Russia is stealing millions of Ukrainian children and abducting them to Russian territory
Putin eats brains cooked by Prigozine
Prigozine was Putin’s Chef (literally)
Russian army is demoralised and bordering on mutiny
Putin’s inner circle is plotting a coup against him (It’s going as slow as the SMO because they also believe in the slow grinding approach)
[Counter-Narrative character assassination] Putin was responsible for the Moscow Apartment Bombings
Russian army is incompetent and poorly trained
Russian satellite coverage of the battlespace is poor, so poor large swathes of Ukraine are completely invisible to them
Russian army has poor targeting precision. So bad that even a large CEP and a salvo won’t help
Russia is deliberately targeting civilians
Ukraine is not targeting civilians (deliberately)
Putin is preparing to colonise Africa (The Africans will be given a choice of Russia, China, The EU or the US for their new colonial masters)
The Wagner group is involved somehow in the coup in Niger
Russia has been making extensive use of cluster munitions since the start of the SMO (Extensive evidence of this to be found in Bucha, Mariupol and Kherson)
Ukraine has an artillery advantage over Russia (July/June 2023)
NATO tactics are superior to Russian battlefield tactics (Specifically the training provided by the Brits, those eternal masters of battlefield tactics going back to the charge of the light brigade)
Putin has a poor grasp of strategy (As compared to Biden, Sunak, Boris Johnson, Olaf Scholtz, Jens Stotenberg, Milley, Von der Leyen and Borell who are strategic geniuses)
The Sanctions Are Working (Just like they worked against Iran, Cuba, North Korea, the Houthi, China, Vietnam …)
The HIMARS Missile system will be a “game changer” (It’s impossible to shoot down a hi mars round, and not a single Himars system has been destroyed)
American drones will be a “game changer” (especially the little spy ones)
The AFU has “semi-encircled” the Russian forces in Bakhmut/Artyomsk
Byraktar will be a game-changer (Because somehow the Turks managed to evolve from kebab makers to advanced drone manufacture. Who do they think they are, Iranians?)
F16s will turn the tide of the battle in Ukraines favour
X wonder weapon will “turn the tide against Russia” (I thought the tide was already in Ukraine’s favour from the start?)
X general/commander has been fired/sacked/discipled
X and Y generals have a personal rivalry that is affecting Russian battlefield performance
The Russian army is dependent on decrepit Soviet-era equipment (e.g old Soviet Hypersonic missiles)
There’s nothing special about Ukraine’s neo-nazi problem since neo-nazism is a worldwide problem.
There are no weapons bio-labs in Ukraine operated by the Pentagon
The weapons labs operated in Ukraine by the pentagon are not a threat to Russia
Russia Attacked Ukraine Unprovoked (The bombing of civilians in donbas was no reason to go in guns blazing. R2P is the divine right of Europeans only)
NATO made no commitment (written or otherwise) to not advance on Russia’s borders (Gorbacheff was drunk and hallucinating at the time)
The SMO has nothing to do with the NATO advancement in Eastern Europe
The SMO has nothing to do with the 8-year killings of ethnic russians in donbas
Cluster munitions are acceptable in Ukraine’s case since they’re in dire straits
The Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014 (“Little Green Men”)
Russian tanks are inferior to American tanks (Even Shermans.)Russian tanks are inferior to German tanks (Even WW2 tiger tanks)
Russian tanks are inferior to French tanks (Especially in reverse)
The Russian army is the second most powerful one in the world (Second most powerful in Ukraine, which means the AFU is the most powerful army in the world)
Putin is a Crypto-Jew (Because there are some photos of a Putin-looking dude wearing a weird cap)
Ukraine cannot be a NAZI state because it’s president is Jewish
[Counter-Narrative Character Assassination] Alexander Mercouris is a convicted criminal
[Counter-Narrative Character Assassination] Scott Ritter is a convicted paedophile
“X” pro-russian commentator has never been right (non of his predictions has come true)
“Y” pro-Russian commentator is a convicted x,y,z (character assassinations)
The sanctions will work if we only apply enough rounds of sanctions!
The Russian economy is in tatters!
Putin is losing the political support of his people: Protests breaking out all over Russia with a possible cooler revolution brewing
The Ukrainian Counteroffensive (June/July/August 2023) is/was/will be successful
Russia is firing S300 missiles into Poland (over Ukrainian airspace)
The Russo Ukraine war started in 2022
The Russian Army is using Human Wave attacks (wagner’s HR department must be the most efficient on planet earth – a revolution in HR affairs for sure)
The Russian Army is targeting civilians (And yet the Russians have poor targeting ability?)
The Russian army is using cluster munitions since the start of the war (with not a single mention in the media until the US decided to suggest using them?)
Putin wants to expand the Russian empire into Europe (including such useless basket cases like the Greeks, Italians, French and Spaniards and those malevolent psychopaths the Germans)
Ukrainian Grain is key to solving world hunger (But the EU frequently rejects the grain due to toxins?)
‘International Law’ says x , y , z about the SMO (the same international law that has no enforcer or single legislative body acknowledged internationally)
NATO is a defensive organisation (Except when it comes to brown people in non-european countries, or yugoslavs, who may be bombed with wild abandon)
NATO is limited to the “North Atlantic” (Libya is a north atlantic country of course, everybody knows THAT)
NATO has greater military power than Russia (An organisation made up mostly of countries who got their asses kicked by the Wehrmacht or paid Russia to do their fighting for them are now suddenly the most powerful military force on earth)
Putin is in league with the Russian Oligarchs and therefore targeting the Oligarchs harms Putin (which explains why they’re fleeing Russia for London)
Ukrainian attacks on civilian infrastructure are justified (but Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure are not. All Ukrainian attacks on civilians are unintentional, including the couple killed on Kerch bridge orphaning their daughter)
The Russian Tank Autoloader is inferior to the manually loaded western tank loader (Because a meat-bag on captagon can outperform automation in any era)
The Ukrainian offensive is stalling because NATO is drip-feeding weapons to the regime’ (But still Ukraine is winning!).
Current hostilities between the AFU and the RF are “stalemated” (Even in Kupyansk)
Current hostilities between the AFU and the RF are “stalled” (but Ukraine is making ‘incremental gains’, but Russia is not making ‘incremental gains’)
The Tochka missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station was perpetrated by Russians using an old Soviet missile from Ukrainian stocks.
The Russian people are collectively responsible for Putin’s war on Ukraine (So they need re-education and De-Russification)
The Ukrainian Industry is continuing as normal despite the war. It’s glorious industrial machine pumps out tanks, shells, missiles, semiconductors, fuel and grain at impressive levels, supplying The World and their own army with important commodities (Motorsich is running fine producing tanks for the AFU, jet engines for the Ukrainian Airforce, the neon/argon production facilities have not been captured by Russia, oil reserve facilities are untouched).
Life in Ukrainian cities is continuing as normal despite the war. All is well. Pool parties and street celebrations are commonplace. (Millions of Ukrainians have not fled for Europe, it was merely the tourist high season, hospitals are not filled with the casualties of war, funeral hearses in their thousands are not seen in the streets, WW2 cemeteries are not seeing a capacity problem …)
If the west only gets rid of Putin Russia will collapse and the West will be victorious. (This short, balding, 70-year old bureaucrat is the only one standing between Victoria Nuland and “World Domination”).
The use of nuclear weapons by Russia will end the war and the world will be at peace thereafter (or some variation thereof).
Ukraine should be grateful to the West for supplying the Ukrainian Army (But the West owes Ukraine nothing for fighting their wars for them?)
General Gerasimov was killed on the battlefield.
Putin is dead and what we’re seeing is one of his many body doubles (The body double is somehow as worthy of hatred as the original and as capable of running Russia as the OG Putin (anybody watched Foundation Series lately?))
Russia is the last bastion of the “white, straight, christian male” and is fighting this war in the name of White Christendom (not the chechen muslim, tengrist buryat, buddhist tuvan, shamanist Yakhut … no they’re all just immigrant labour shipped in for their “white” masters)
The Ukrainians should never have surrendered their USSR nuclear weapons (the ones they never had control of to begin with)
If you were against the invasion of Iraq by the USA you should be equally against the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (During which Vasiliy Nebenziya stood up in the UNSC waving a vodka bottle filled with Novichok as evidence the Ukraine was using chemical weapons against “it’s own people”)
The Ukrainian Counteroffensive (June/July/August 2023) is/was/will be successful
The USA is able to fund the Ukraine war on Russia indefinitely (because “infinite money printer capacity” = “infinite manufacturing capacity” and all this manufacturing capacity can be restored to the US in the space of a few months, just like 9 women can birth a single baby in 1 month if working in parallel)
The Ukrainians are winning because they’ve taken back 50% of the territory Russia took from them in a fraction of the time Russia took to take it (at the cost of more than 50% of the Ukrainian army, and just not the part Russia truly cares about. The other 50% of the land will cost another 50% of the AFU probably)
The Wagner Coup’ (Because a 10 minute speech by Putin is enough to stop a coup right in the tracks)
the Wagner Mutiny (Because somewhere there was a ship involved)
The Wagner Protest (Minus the protest placards)
The Wagner Insurrection (Because a couple of clowns barreling down the road with some stolen artillery can take on the entire Red Army)
The Wagner Invasion of Poland (Because “why not”?)
The Russian people would rise up and overthrow the Putin regime if they could only just receive CNN, BBC, MSNBC (Because they’re all nostalgic for a repeat of the 1990s)
The West has unparalleled media freedom (as long as you don’t watch RT, Sputnik, Iranian Opress-TV, Al-Manar because those are obvious propaganda, because we think so)
Putin intends to invade Moldova (skipping on right past Lvov because “Stretch goals: we can do better!”).
Putin is “weaponising” hunger by forcing the West to impose grain sanctions on Russia (“I made you hit me in the face to hurt your hand”).
The Wagner ‘insurrection’ left Putin weakened politically (So weak he had to deliver an entire 10 minute speech including pauses to shut the whole thing down completely).
US Patriot missiles in Kiev shot down Russia’s hypersonic Khinzal missiles without sustaining significant damage.
Ukrainian Air Defences are capable of shooting down Khinzal hypersonic missiles (but by their own admission cannot defend against Onyx, probably because Onyx beats Dagger in trading card games)
…
Posted by b on August 14, 2023 at 17:45 UTC | Permalink
To add a handful more on top of my mind…
108. Journalist Julian Assange raped women and it’s only normal this journalist is locked up in high security prison Belmarch rotting away with psychopaths and murderers 109. The West is not a party to the Ukraine conflict 110. Putin/FSB bombed Nord Streams, Kerch, Kashovka dam in a 5D chess move 111. Putin/FSB murdered Darya Dugina/Vladlen Tatarsky in a 6D chess move 112. Russia would never use nukes against the West so there’s absolutely no risk in ever escalating the war 113. Russia would only use nukes against Ukraine, never the Western war participant so never mind upping the ante 114. The Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case was carried out by Russians and directing the flight route over the most active war zone of that time as well as lowering the flight altitude from the usual 10 km to 8 km is just imagination 115. To let the war finally end, more weapons payed for by Western tax payers are necessary… war is peace 116. RT, Sputnik News and so many more information streams need censoring to protect our freedom… ignorance is bliss 117. Europe is now totally free of Russian hydro carbons 118. …
During his tenure as president of (what remains of) the Ukraine, Zelensky has wrecked the Ukraine, but has achieved many great things… for Russia. Here are his main achievements in no particular order:
• By being elected with the promise of ending hostilities, then immediately proceeding to escalate the conflict in the east, he thoroughly compromised what was left of Ukrainian democracy. He further demolished the Ukraine’s civic realm by banning all public media except for one government channel, banning all opposition and all Russian news sources and, in effect, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship.
• By relentlessly shelling the civilians in the now Russian Donetsk and Lugansk regions, then, in the spring of 2022, threatening them with a genocidal assault, he provided Russia with an ironclad reason to start the Special Military Operation: to save civilian lives. By so doing, he helped to expand Russian territory by four very valuable provinces (Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) and set the stage for the eventual addition of, among others, Nikolaev, Odessa, Kharkov, and Kiev regions.
• He squandered $150 billion in foreign aid (much of it by the simple expedient of stealing it), expended a huge amount of military equipment and ammunition with nothing to show for it, and killed off 350 thousand Ukrainian soldiers (many of them Nazi war criminals), with possibly twice as many wounded.
• He shrunk his country’s population by almost half, some of it moving to Russia, becoming Russian citizens and integrating productively into the Russian population while rest went to the European Union, becoming a major burden for the welfare budgets of EU countries.
• By ordering Ukrainian troops to shell schools, kindergartens, hospitals and apartment buildings in universally recognized Russian regions such as Belgorod and by launching drone attacks directly on the Kremlin, he declared his government to be a terrorist organization, foreclosing any possibility of forcing Russia to negotiate a peace that would not be entirely on its own terms.
• He demonstrated the superiority of Russian weapons and military technique over NATO’s, most recently with Russia’s destruction of one of the Patriot missile batteries provided by the US. Almost every bit of equipment the West has been able to provide to the Ukrainians has been shown to be inferior to its Russian counterpart.
• He gave the Russian army ample opportunities to perfect their techniques for defeating NATO forces, venturing into new areas of drone warfare and battlefield surveillance from geostationary satellites. This will no doubt be very useful both in opposing NATO and in boosting future weapons sales to non-Western nations that wish to be free from Western oppression and meddling.
• He sold some of the weapons he received from the US to Mexican drug cartels, leaving US officials with no other choice than closing their eyes and pretending that this did not happen. Perhaps they will also be forced to look the other way as these cartels make use of these weapons to take over more and more of US cities and towns.
• He played host to many high-ranking Western officials, whom, on their to visit to Kiev, he presented with lavish presents such as suitcases of foreign aid money he had laundered, which these officials then brought home in diplomatic baggage, thus collecting blackmail material on all of them.
• He set an example for other Russian Jews whose bad luck had caused them to end up in the Ukraine rather than in Russia by resettling his parents in a posh neighborhood in Israel. But he kept his wife by his side, where she did a good job demoralizing the Ukrainian population by squandering more money on a single European shopping spree than most Ukrainians see in several lifetimes, all paid for by the US taxpayer. She also worked hard to gaslight Western officials by making them accept at face value and repeat ridiculous tales, such as the one about Russian troops being issued viagra, for them to better rape Ukrainian women.
• Zelensky is sometimes incautious; for instance, he got caught appointing operatives from Russia’s Federal Security Service (former KGB) to sensitive posts within the Ukrainian defense establishment, although it is unclear whether what’s left of the Ukrainian judiciary will be capable of prosecuting him.
• One of his greatest achievements was in placing the US and NATO in a zugzwang. This is a chess term for a situation in which a player has a choice of several moves, all of which lead to defeat. The US and NATO can either continue supporting the Ukraine, or they can stop supporting the Ukraine; in either case, they will lose.
• Perhaps his greatest achievement of all was in helping Russia turn away from its hostile neighbors in the West and toward friendly countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, cutting its economic, financial and cultural ties to the West and freeing itself from Western influences. His unwavering support for Ukrainian Nazis, whose emblems, insignia and slogans are styled after Nazi Germany and whose heroes are Nazi collaborators, coupled with the lavish support they received from the West, whose leaders chose to turn a blind eye toward their fascist proclivities, cemented in view of the Russians the view of the West as their existential enemy: a fascist, racist entity determined to destroy Russia but too weak and cowardly to do the job themselves.
All of this begs a question: Whom does Vladimir Zelensky serve?
Only 15% of the world’s population dislikes China; they make up the G7. They dislike China because it is a threat to what they think is their monopoly on global influence.
They call themselves “the world” because western-owned media has global influence.
The other 85% of the world either likes China or doesn’t care.
Hi, SJ-Z . Thanks for your very interesting question!
I guess Italians would be super surprised at just how much the Chinese spoil their pets.
Recently, 网易天成 (NetEase Tian Cheng), a subsidiary of 网易 (NetEase, the Chinese internet technology company) that specializes in medium-to-high-end pet food, partnered with 必胜客(Pizza Hut) to come up with a “Chinese-made dog pizza” that is safe to be consumed by dogs (and cats!).
The dog pizza is the brown disk thingy in the picture below:
This is what the “Chinese-made dog pizza” looks like in promotional material:
In the close up below, you can see that on the top of the pizza box, written in Chinese:
宠物零食 冻干生骨肉珍享比萨
This translates to:
Pet Snack Freeze Dried Raw Bone Meat Premium Pizza
2023 08 15 20 15zzz
To be honest, to me, it doesn’t look at all appetizing.
But then again, it’s made for dogs and cats.
Maybe dogs and cats don’t take visual aesthetics into account when it comes to their choice of nosh:
2023 08 15 20 15x
This pizza is part of 网易天成 & PizzaHut‘s “人宠同吃” (Pets eat together with us) promotional marketing campaign.
Basically, you buy a package deal at Pizza Hut that includes:
– a set meal for the humans – the “Chinese-made dog pizza” – Pet items/plushies
2023 08 15 20 16bv
More marketing collateral from the campaign:
2023 08 15 20 16q2023 08 15 20 17111
So, SJ-Z , at the end of the day, I guess it’s whether the dogs (and the cats) are actually going to eat this “Chinese-made dog pizza”.
I mean… you know how fussy some dogs and cats can be with their food…
I checked out Chinese social media platforms, and it appears that there are dogs (and cats) out there who will consume a “Chinese-made dog pizza”.
I guess, while it may look unappetizing to me, it’s tasty enough for them:
Many, many years ago I received a letter in the post. It was a recorded delivery and I had to sign for it to confirm delivery. I was intrigued and opened it immediately. It was a summons to appear in our local small claims court. I was being sued for £6,000. There were no details about the charges or any explanation of what the case was about other than the name and address of the complainant. I was mystified as I didn’t recognise the name. Lets call him Mr Smith.
In the three weeks before the stated date I convinced myself that one of my sons was playing an involved joke on me. I quizzed them all mercilessly but nobody would admit to knowing anything about it. As the date drew closer I determined to go to court just to find out which of my boys was the perpetrator of this rather involved joke.
Court day arrived and I went into the court building and presented my summons to an attendant, still expecting to be told it was a forgery. I was wrong. I was politely directed to a small waiting room and told my case would be called in 10 minutes. I was stunned.
When I was escorted into the courtroom the Sheriff (a lay judge in Scotland) asked me if I had a legal representative. I explained how I thought that the summons was a joke and I had no lawyer. He said that I could ask for a deferment to get legal advice if I choose but he didn’t think that was necessary. I sat down still stunned and confused but by now rather scared.
The Sheriff now asked the other side to outline their case. I listened in stunned amazement as the story unfolded.
Apparently some 6 months previously I had sold Mr Smith a tenpin bowling ball and drilled the ball to suit his hand. I had explained to him the need to keep the ball clean of lane oil on a regular basis. Mr Smith had taken me at my word and had left his bowling ball soaking in a bathtub of hot soapy water overnight. Feeling that the finger and thumb holes were wet when he fished the ball out of the bath in the morning he had decided to dry out the ball. Fifteen or twenty minutes in the microwave should dry it out nicely.
Some time later the ball had exploded. The force of the explosion was enough to destroy the microwave and send the door of the microwave flying upward with enough energy to punch through the ceiling and the floor of the room above his kitchen. Unfortunately the room above his kitchen was his neighbours bathroom. The microwave door not only punched through the floor but punched through the actual bath. Really unfortunately the poor woman was taking a bath at the time.
She was suing Mr Smith for the damage to her bathroom from the flying microwave door as well as the water damage to her carpets from the bath full of water. She wasn’t suing for the shock of a microwave door suddenly puncturing her bath although it must have been a terrific shock.
Mr Smith was suing me for the same amount on the basis that I had sold him a bowling ball without specifically telling him not to put it in the microwave.
By this stage several people in the gallery were laughing and the sheriff was definitely smiling. I was still worried but feeling considerably less scared. We all sat politely until Mr Smith’s lawyer had finished. The Sheriff then drew himself very straight and without a trace of a smile said that he was here to apply the law of the land and not to educate idiots. Case dismissed.
So there I was, sitting in traffic court to plead for a reduced fine and or a payment arrangement. The courtroom was packed, it would appear there were many traffic law criminals in the small town I was appearing in.
So I sit and wait my turn.
And wait…
and wait…
After most of the morning had passed, there were only 15–20 of us left. The judge however stopped calling cases. He was busily doing his after-court paperwork for a good ten minutes. Finally, he looks back out to the courtroom and asks “Why are you all still here?”
The response from more than one of us was we had tickets and were here for our day in court. The judge looked quite unhappy as he side-barred with his clerk. When the conversation was over he looked out at us and said “It would appear my office was not prepared for you all to come today. Since the city cannot see fit to be ready for your legally required court date I am dismissing every one of your cases. Please give your name to the clerk as you exit. Also please accept my apologies for the City’s inability to do its job.”
I am of course paraphrasing, it was long ago, but that is the gist of what happened. As we all filed out we were entertained by the Judge’s not-so-discrete chewing out of his staff.
You know guys, I am just accepting of my appearance. I get older, wrinkles appear. Liver spots show up, and my hair goes from grey to white.
I’ve got a bunch of liver spots on my chest, and a massive one on my forearm. And a couple of emerging pinpricks on my hands and wrists.
Its called “getting old”.
If you aren’t there yet, well… you will be.
But my white hair….
I color my hair.
Otherwise, I’d have stunningly white hair. Not grey.
White.
But for now, I perform a nice twice-weekly hair dying exercise. It’s a pain in the ass, but you know, it’s now ingrained in my lifestyle and I accept that.
I use a Chinese black hair color, and then a color formula to lighten it out. The over all look is like my natural hair color.
Now, my wife, on the other hand, even being much younger than myself (25 years younger by the way), really wants to stay beautiful. And she does a great job at it. Don’t you know.
She’s done a lot of cosmetic procedures regarding her eyes, and lids, and so on and so forth. It’s an Asian thing, and most Westerners just wouldn’t understand.
She’s also had a few nose jobs over the decades. Right now, it’s stunning. The procedures for plastic surgery are quite advanced in China. It’s an awesome nose! Last job ran $86,000 so you had best have it done right.
I’ll tell you what.
The nose is the first thing you see when you look at a face. Not the eyes. The nose. It frames the face.
Back in the day, she wanted a European nose. High up like my mother had. I thought it looked good. But alas, it did not fit her face.
So she got it redone.
It looks AWESOME! It’s just amazing what a good nose job can do, Ill tell you what.
You know, most of the cosmetic surgeries that she has had revolved around the eyes. It’s a very Asian thing. I, as a Westerner, can’t tell the difference. But, sheech! everyone around me can.
And they all LOVE it.
(shrug)
What did you know?
She had a boob job around ten – fifteen years ago. Used a nice upper-grade set of implants. Silicone. 260ml. And they were fine.
2023 08 29 09 42
She went from a C cup to a nice big D cup, and everyone was happy.
Something sort of like this…
Not mrs MM
Now that was the older boob technology.
We paid $YUAN40,000 for that set, and it looked good. Back in 2013.
It was under the muscle. You could feel the boob as it was under the muscle as a hard piece that sat there. But overall the effect was what she was looking for and I, being a latent boob aficionado, appreciated it.
It was a textured squashed ball, that protruded her chest outwards.
Now…
When we had our child, we nursed her naturally with the implant, and my wife’s boobs went gargantuan. She was something like a triple F size or so. Damn!
I am not kidding. Sheech!
And then when she stopped nursing, her boobs deflated, and became soft and watery.
Her chest was a wreck.
Hard lump covered by bags of water. Not all that great of a look.
So, we have been wanting to have some nice corrective surgery on the chest, but life and the expensive price put it way on the back burner. At least for a while.
But, things happen.
(wink wink)
Then she went to the hospital (we are VIP don’t you know) and had the old ones taken out, and a set of new ones put in. She opted for the second best grade. The best cost $YUAN550,000 and that was way out of our budget. But the slightly lesser grade was affordable at $YUAN280,000. Ah. The price of a nice car.
It’s a Hermes-level brand and quality.
2023 08 29 12 02
Boob technology has changed a lot over the years, and the medical procedures are new and quite modern. These new boobs (at least the better grades) look and feel like real boobs. You seriously cannot tell the difference.
The boob implant was really different as well.
2023 08 29 12 04
She got a German brand: Freya and worked with a doctor to fix the mess her chest had become and get the biggest size that would fit her frame and look 100% realistic.
[1] Biggest that would look realistic. [2] Biggest that would feel good, and not be hard or detectable. [3] Very soft. Feels like a real boob.
No doctor wanted to implant implants that would end up looking like basketballs on a thin frame, and our surgery center was staffed with really GREAT experts.
1647886039 ewnwccpn0t
He procured 390ml extra-soft silicone implants.
And she spent a week at the hospital after the surgery adjusting to them.
They look real. I mean absolutely real, and feel real, and they are awesome.
She is a large DD. Not some gigantic size like some girls might want, but a nice large but realistic size and they are fun. Large, but not obnoxiously so.
She looks good in clothes, but it isn’t obvious. She does not look like she has a boob-job or anything.
I stayed at the hospital with her, as did our daughter, and a few of her friends.
It’s a Chinese thing where you stay in the room with the hospital patients. And I noticed so many other gals were there getting their boobs done too. There must have been about thirty or so gals during the week we were there, and of course, girls being girls would gather and compare their boobs together.
A girl comes in, the top comes off and its all a lot of ohhhs and ahhhs, and then the squeezes and touching.
I saw so many post-surgery boobs that week in the hospital. I’ll tell you what.
They all looked great.
Being China, it’s not a taboo thing like in the USA. The gals would take off their tops and feel each others boobs, and I was there watching with amusement. I just smiled, shook my head, and went back to my computer work.
Silly.
My wife’s replacement boobs were the largest of all the gals with the typical boob implant size being somewhere between 250 and 320 ml.
Hers is 390ml.
A number of the gals wanted really small implants on the order of 100 to 120 ml, which confused everyone. That will take a flat chest to an A-cup. Maybe a B if the gal has a petite build.
One of our friends (who also had surgery that day, and was sticking around) said…
“I am as flat as a pancake, and 100 ml is nothing!”
One gal was in there and told us that she had eight (x8) surgeries all over. Eyes, lips, nose, boob, etc. They all were back to back, and done over a one month period. I thought it was way too radical, and she was complaining that her hair was starting to fall out.
Well, what do you expect? Stupid 20-year old chick doing crazy stuff all for her internet image. Becoming all plastic for what?
To get a lot of likes, or to get some “sexy projects” (hint hint). Maybe meet a very wealthy man?
Sheech!
Her first boobs were still quite nice with a 250 ml implants.
Not a gel. She got a cheaper grade.
Part of a “package deal”.
Most of the gals opted for the cheaper implants, and they didn’t look or feel as nice as ours. But they all looked ok, while ours looked and felt outstanding!
I mean it. You cannot tell the difference at ALL!
Under the armpit was the preferred insert location, and saline implants (so popular in the USA) are considered to be “backwards”, cheap and unappealing. So everyone were getting “gummy bear” style implants, and other soft gels of varying viscosity, and textures.
All in all, I like a nice set of boobs, and if you have the time and money, I urge you to consider them if you are worried about your appearance.
Remember, whether you are thin, or swat, or tall or chubby… enhancing your shape in slight ways can really make a significant difference in how your feel when you put on clothes.
I’ll tell you what.
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Me?
For me, well my big issue is white hair and balding up at the top. So I have to keep my hair short, or I look really terrible. Maybe one day, I’ll get some kind of hair replacement surgery… who knows?
It is important to feel good about your body. Feel good in your clothes. To feel healthy and fit.
I will tell you all that I have been contemplating Botox… as my face is starting to show some wrinkles, but I don’t want to end up looking like Nancy Polaski. So I am a bit put off by it. But who knows, maybe one day I’ll make the leap.
It looks painful with all those needles in your face.
That’s how it is done, don’t you know. They inject this botox into your skin.
Now, in China there are other things, and other methods that are much more advanced than Botox. Different names, different means of operation. Different ways of smoothing out skin. I’ll tell you, I’m in the wrong line of business.
All these pretty gals… all ages… coming in to make their faces prettier.
But, for me… yikes!
And my wrinkles are near my eyes, I fear that it would be really, REALLY painful. Yikes!
Well, if I ever decide to try it, youse guys will be the first to know. I will report on it in great detail.
Right now… I am hesitant.
In the meantime, I am a big believer in facial care, and I use (religiously) the NIVEA brand scrubs, cremes, and facial lotions. I do so, except when it is unbearably hot out like this month.
And NO! This is not a paid endorsement.
nivea
Facial scrub and skin replenisher goes a long way to keep your skin looking youthful and clear.
Damn straight!
Todays…
Bioweapons
Suspicions have long been swirling surrounding the possibly nefarious activities going on at the Wuhan Viral Institute, as well as the Ukrainian “biolabs” the U.S. government was so concerned about falling into Russian hands. Now both the Russian and Chinese governments are accusing the United States of conducting research into biological weaponry in violation of a range of international treaties.
I moved out the day after high school graduation because I was tired of the beatings. My mother would hit me until she was so tired she could no longer lift her arm. She hit me when my sister disobeyed, when my father upset her or when the moon was full. I was the family scapegoat.
About six months after I moved out, got myself accepted to a college far, far from home and figured out how to pay for it without their help (3 jobs and financial aid), my father called me. He begged me to move home because my mother had started hitting my sister instead of me. He wanted me to come home and resume my place as the family scapegoat.
I didn’t.
Man shoots through door at would-be burglars posing as maintenance workers: video
China’s second largest Property Developer, EVERGRANDE, has filed for, get this, Chapter 15 Bankruptcy. Yes, you read that right, Chapter 15, which is ancillary to a primary proceeding brought in another country, typically the debtor’s home country.
Chapter 15 is a section in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code that was added in 2005 to provide for cooperation between U.S. courts and foreign courts when foreign bankruptcy proceedings touch upon U.S. financial interests.
The section was added in response to a United Nations recommendation for cooperation among nations on what it calls “cross-border insolvency.”
The primary goal of Chapter 15 bankruptcy is to promote cooperation among U.S. courts, their appointed representatives, and foreign courts and to make legal proceedings of international bankruptcies more predictable and fair for debtors and creditors.
As such, Chapter 15 focuses on jurisdiction. It also tries to protect the value of the debtor’s assets and, when possible, financially rescue an insolvent business.1
United States Courts. “Chapter 15 – Bankruptcy Basics: Ancillary and Other Cross-Border Cases.”
Chapter 15 allows a representative in a corporate bankruptcy case that has been filed outside the United States (also known as a “cross-border insolvency”) to obtain access to the U.S. court system. This is intended to provide an efficient and common-sense mechanism for addressing insolvencies that involve debtors, creditors, and assets associated with more than one country. The purpose of Chapter 15 is outlined in the following objectives listed in Title 11, Chapter 15, Section 1501 of the U.S. Code:2
Promoting cooperation among U.S. courts and parties of interest and the courts of other countries involved in cross-border insolvencies
Establishing a better legal foundation for cross-border investment and trade
Providing for better administration of cross-border insolvencies that protects the interests of all parties
Protecting the value of the debtor’s assets
Assisting financially troubled companies
ANALYSIS
The fact that EVERGRANDE filed Bankruptcy in China, and is now doing the same in the US, is a staggering financial catastrophe. They are the second largest Property Developer in China.
U.S. Banks have severe exposure to loans to this company. This could turn into a “Black Swan Event” for US Banks.
Notice, too, the announcement of this Bankruptcy filing in New York City, was done AFTER markets closed for the day! Seemingly because they **know** the impact this is going to have . . .
UPDATE 6:08 PM EDT —
While EVERGRANDE is China’s #2 Property Developer, it’s bigger competitor, COUNTRY GARDEN, with annual revenues of more than $70 billion, is now also on the verge of collapse.
The company’s 8% bonds due in 2024 are trading at a paltry 9 cents, signaling massive losses for the bondholders. The yield is skyrocketing, meaning nobody expects it to be paid. China’s property meltdown continues.
Country Garden Bond Crisis
Thus, with today’s EVERGRANDE Bankruptcy filing in the USA, and the clearly-coming similar fate of China’s largest Developer COUNTRY GARDEN, these two financial collapses could be a “one,two-punch” to the global financial system.
I have ZERO financial expertise or formal training. Yet, as a lowly financial laymen/neophyte, even I can see the writing on the wall over this.
If my analysis is correct, then I personally __SUSPECT__ we here in the U.S. could see tumult in financial sectors for, oh, I’d say about a month. Then, I’d put it between the dates of September 16 and September 22, that the full financial sector impact will be (ahem) “painfully” evident in US financial circles. I suspect BIG . . . . REALLY B I G impact.
Watch Europe over the next two weeks. Europe will go first. They’ve already seen about five-hundred thousand (500,000) German companies go Bankrupt THIS YEAR, mostly over Russia-related Sanctions. So economically, Europe is now hanging by just a few threads financially.
As European Banks go, so will US Banks. Watch Europe closely over the next two weeks.
Do you mean all those countries that China has attacked in the past 40 years?
Such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Uganda, Kosovo, Bosnia and Niger?
Oh wait, those countries were attacked by the USA, not China. China hasn’t attacked any country in the world in the past 40 years.
So which countries do you mean? By any chance, are they countries whose No. 1 or 2 biggest trading partner in the world happen to be China? In other words, every day these countries are buying a lot of Chinese goods and China is making good profit out of them. And you think China wants to invade and attack them?
Or do you mean the countries where China is busy building or planning to build highways, railways, water treatment plants, solar energy plants, schools and hospitals? Which is about 150+ countries on earth?
If China planned to bomb a country to bits, do you think that China would invest billions of dollars in that country’s infrastructure? And then bomb the infrastructure to bits, causing its own investments to suffer grave losses?
Open your eyes. Use your brain. Free your mind from the lies that Western media propaganda has been feeding you.
And no, you CANNOT be the President of the USA when you grow up.
On May 30, 1832, a duel took place in Paris in which a young man barely twenty years old was mortally wounded. Much later he would become one of the greatest mathematical geniuses in history.
His name is Evariste Galois.
It’s pretty clear that in life he had some “gift” as a mathematician, but no one really understood all the “gibberish” Galois was writing about.
His essays and ideas were often rejected, he was denied entry into the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and he was also a bit of a hothead, especially when, again, no one understood him.
He was simply too ahead of his time.
And to top it off, he was very involved in the French Revolution, and he used to spend a lot of time in jail if necessary.
Galois was a rebel both on the streets and in the math fog.
Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, he was drawn into a duel, but it is very likely that the direct cause of this duel was a breakup – some say it was with a prostitute, while others think the woman in question was married – and Unfortunately, his nemesis, whose identity remains unknown to this day, was a much better duelist than he was (Galois knows this all too well).
On the eve of the duel, Galois makes the most important decision of his life.
Instead of taking a much-needed break to give himself any chance of survival, he decides to put his mathematical ideas on paper[1] :
Galois was so convinced of his imminent death that he stayed up all night, writing letters to his republican friends and composing what would become his mathematical testament, the famous letter to Auguste Chevalier setting out his ideas, and three accompanying manuscripts. .
In his last letter[2] he laconically describes revolutionary ideas on analysis, continued fractions and group theory, a subject he had created on his own to solve one of the biggest mathematical problems of the time: how (not) to make polynomials by radicals. .
Galois group theory evolved over time to become one of the most important topics in contemporary mathematics, and also finds its place in many other scientific disciplines such as physics and chemistry, quantum theory and its applications, etc.
He was far ahead of his time.
Galois’ last written words, dedicated to his younger brother Alfred, are as follows:
Don’t cry Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty!
The famous mathematician Hermann Weyl later wrote:
This letter, if judged by the novelty and depth of the ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial writing in all the literature of humanity.
To honor Galois, I would like to say that this was indeed the case.
How To Leave Your California Residency Forever
Interesting.
But I am NEVER going back to the United States. No fucking way.
Deep Dish Hamburger Pie
Cheeseburger Pie 4IMG 0711c
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 can green beans
Salt and pepper to taste
Ketchup
2 cups mashed potatoes
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Brown the meat and add your seasonings.
Stir in enough ketchup to suit your taste.
Add green beans and stir in well.
Place this mixture in a casserole dish and top with the mashed taters and then top that with the cheese.
Bake at 350 degrees F until heated through and cheese is browned.
Coming Back Home After 3 Years In Thailand, here are my thoughts
I am not banned from anything major, but my father got banned from the Maldives for life, due to a rather odd chain of events!
My father loves to sail, and before he got his own boat he used to sail across the seas at any chance he could find.
One day he found himself on a ship with a crew of about 8 other men that were doing a across-the-world-tour on their boat.
To his unfortunate surprise these were all rather young sailors.
The problem wasn’t in their skills, as they managed to all do their share of work without a problem, but rather that they were too poor to afford any variety in food.
After being on board for two weeks upon their vessel he had had enough of noodles for the next months to come.
He got off at the Maldives as soon as they arrived and the group only stopped to let my dad off the boat, then they sailed away towards their next destination.
My dad then proceeded to the customs office to announce his arrival, but more so he could get on a plane to depart again.
When he finally found the place they asked him with what plane he arrived.
He told them he came by boat, to which they stared at him with surprise.
After a bit of back and forth they finally found the documents for arrival by boat and asked my dad to give them the name of the vessel and where it was located.
At this point he said that he can give them the name but the vessel is not located here anymore and he had no way to contact them.
That is where the problems started for all the other sailors would have had to announce their arrival, as well as that of the vessel.
But since my dad was the only one that got off it was as though he had just appeared out of thin air… to which there were no real regulations.
All my dad wanted to do was to get out of the country, but for that he needed to be accepted in the country to begin with, as you cannot leave a country you never arrived in.
Of course no one had ever done this, so my dad was told to find a place to stay and not to leave the country (which was ironically what he wanted to do but couldn’t do).
For the next week my dad talked to the customs office every day, trying to reason with them that he didn’t care about his arrival approval, all he wanted to do was to leave!
But he needed their approval or he wouldn’t be allowed through the gates at the airport…
After about a week of going back and forth between the customs office they finally came to an agreement:
They were going to deport him.
The next day, early in the morning, two police cars and a taxi were waiting for him in front of his hotel.
With a police escort my dad traveled to the airport, at which point two armed men guided him through the gates and into the VIP lane at check-in and to the VIP lane to get on the plane.
At this point they wanted to make absolutely sure he would leave and was treated almost like a criminal.
To get out of the country he never wanted to stay in he had to be forcefully deported.
My dad now has a life-long entry ban from the Maldives and can never go there again, and only because they couldn’t lawfully prove that he even got into the country.
Yellen Stunned! China Dumps $481.3B in U.S. Bonds, Invests in 6,927 Tons of Gold
https://youtu.be/XDgCAvcNo-o
Book About Hawaii Wildfires Published BEFORE Fires Were Out!
In an an almost inexplicable manner, a new book about the Maui, Hawaii “Wildfires” was published on August 10 – BEFORE the fires were even put out! Of course, the book pushes the “Climate Change” political agenda. But how did they write and publish a book BEFORE the fires were even out? Unless they knew in advance, the fires would happen?
More interestingly, look at the description of the book on its AMAZON sales site. The description says the book offers “the harrowing experiences of people who lived through the fire” and “the heroic efforts of fire fighters and Rescuers who battled the flames.” How did they do that while the fire was STILL BURNING?
Book on Hawaii FIres Publication Date 08 10
ot to put too fine a point on this, but the description of “people who lived through the fire” and the “heroic efforts of fire fighters . . . ” was published while the fire was STILL BURNING.
You’ll note in the book description it talks about “the events of August 8-11.” Look at the PUBLICATION DATE: August 10.
Book on Hawaii fires Product Info Page
How did they cover the events of August 8-11 with a book published ONE DAY BEFORE the fire was even out?
Unless, of course, the book was written BEFORE the fire even started, by people who may have known the fire was going to happen?
Was the Maui, Hawaii “wildfire” a staged event? Or was it DELIBERATE, to burn-out land owners who had previously refused to sell to developers who wanted to build multi-million dollar residential complexes on some of the most beautiful – and expensive – real estate in the entire United States?
The fact that this book was published while the fires were still burning seems to some people to be prima fascia evidence the fire was actually planned. Arson.
Some wonder if the book was perhaps written to divert attention form the heinous crime, and then plug a Climate Change agenda to gloss it over.
It seems a criminal investigation is required of this fire – and of this book.
In order that YOU can verify the facts set forth in this story, here is a link to the actual AMAZON web page, selling this book: (Click HERE)
Solving Cicada 3301: Decoding the Internet’s Greatest Mystery
Not to bad mouth my fellow members of the Commonwealth, and I often talk about how tough it is to get around Canada, but Australia takes it to another level entirely.
It’s hard to get to. Australia is extremely isolated. It’s not hard to reach from eastern Asia, the Philippines or Indonesia, but it’s a long, long way from Europe and North America. It’s even far from Honolulu.
The best way to get around Australia – is by flying. The major cities and tourist areas on Australia are very distant from each other. Sydney (one of the major cities) and Canberra (the capital) are two of the closest, but they’re still about 300 km apart. Sydney to Melbourne is about 900 km. Yes, you can drive or take a bus, but that’s some long trip.
Roads are… problematic. The verdant strip running from Adelaide to Cooktown in the east of the country has roads as good as any you will find in the United States or Europe. However, the majority of the country (which has very little in the way of population) has roads that are dangerous and run through some of the nastiest desert in the world. It can be hundreds of kilometers between gas stations. Cell phone service isn’t available. Dying is a distinct possibility.
Trains are are scarce. One popular route is the Ghan, running from Adelaide to Darwin. It’s a five star trip on luxury coaches on a pristine set of tracks that runs through some of the most interesting scenery on the planet. However, the rest of Australia’s rail network is fair to middling. One of the problems is that each state set its own rail gauge. It is possible to cross Australia’s southern limit by train, but it’s not a luxury experience.
The Not So Polite Truth Behind Canada’s COLLAPSING Economy!
RUSSIA BEGINS PROCESS TO WITHDRAW FROM W.T.O. AND W.H.O
The Russian government is starting the process of unilaterally withdrawing from a series of international bodies, including the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, the Russian Duma’s Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy said on Tuesday.
“We have work to revise our international obligations, treaties that today bring no benefit, but instead directly harm our country. The Foreign Ministry sent a list of such agreements to the State Duma,” Tolstoy said. “Together with the Federation Council, we plan to analyze them and to propose to withdraw,” he added.
Tolstoy singled out the international trade and health organizations, saying that “the next step is to withdraw from the WTO and the WHO, which have neglected all obligations towards our country.”
Originally Answered: US is urging Europe not to deal with China and Russia because of human rights in those countries. Why then is US in bed with Saudi Arabia?
President Roosevelt of the United States said his famous phrase:
– Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.
Many people know who Somoza is. I’ll remind those who have forgotten history. Anastasio Somoza is Nicaragua’s cruelest dictator. He killed 150,000 Nicaraguans – a monstrous figure with a population of only 800,000 in 1940.
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In September 1956, the dictator’s enemies shot him. By helicopter the U.S. Navy took the dictator to the Panama Canal, where the best American surgeons, including personal physician of President Eisenhower, eight days fighting for the life of “our son of a bitch”. However, on September 29, 1956, Anastasio Somoza went to the next world. It’s a legitimate retaliation for a hereditary gangster.
Do you think the U.S. policy towards pathological killers and sadists has changed? You’re deeply mistaken. If you read George Orwell, you remember the phrase about equality: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” So the Saudi authorities may have blatantly killed opposition journalist Jamal khashoggi in the Saudi consulate building in Istanbul. The US and the EU have called for a transparent investigation. And that’s it! No consequences, no sanctions and no expulsion of Saudi diplomats. It’s very simple: “Our business partner may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a…”
2023 08 18 11 51 1
It turns out that being “untouchable” requires “friendship” with the United States and being a source of income for American business.
The U.S. calls on Europe not to contact China and Russia because of human rights violations in those countries. This is only a fictitious excuse. The reality is simple to the primitive. China and Russia have an independent policy and are competitors in international business. It is only natural to weaken a competitor, or better yet, to destroy it, and to appropriate assets…
“You Won’t Turn Niger Into Another Libya!” – African Leaders
Photograph of a victims eyeball after the Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, with an “Atomic Cataract.” A snapshot of the devastating destruction of the Nuclear bomb, permanently burnt into the victims eyeball. Atomic Cataracts can develop 3 months to 10 years after exposure. The incidence of this happening is greater the shorter the distance from the explosion.
Russia Publicly Accuses U.S. “Deep State” and Big Pharma of Deliberate COVID Pandemic to takeover the world
In video below from the Russian Ministry of Defense, Russia just publicly accused Deep State actors and Big Pharma of manufacturing the COVID pandemic to take over the world.
They even listed Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Soros, of being the main “Ideologists” behind the plot.
Below, video from a Briefing by Chief of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops of Russian Armed Forces Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov: “Pentagon conducts uncontrolled dual-use research in circumvention of international obligations under the BTWC (Biological and Toxin Weapons Control Treaty).”
Put sccinctly, the Russian Military officially and publicly accuses the US of releasing bioweapons to create “crisis situations”, and claims the US are planning to do it again.
This is the biggest story in human history, and yet it is somehow remaining largely unnoticed.
UPDATE 11:22 AM EDT —
Television stations all over Russia are carrying this bombshell accusation as major leading news stories.
In this Interview, Lt General Igor Kirillov goes even further in the accusation, saying the US is going to do it again:
MORE:
Russian biologist Igor Nikulin, who was presented as a former member of the U.N. Commission on Biological and Chemical Weapons, sounded the alarm in a February 27, 2020 interview on Russia Today’s Arabic-language channel where he said that he believes it is no coincidence that the coronavirus had the effect it did in China, Iran, and certain European countries.
He said that coronavirus was carefully selected to affect countries that rival the United States and that it is a conspiracy by the “global government,” which he said consists of 200 families that control over $400 trillion, that own the media outlets and Hollywood, that control the minds of humanity, and that want to decrease the world’s population by 90%.
He suggested that it may be possible that coronavirus is a targeted biological weapon, like he said Ebola and the bird flu were, that infects some people and not others, and he said that the U.S. government may be testing a pathogenic agent it began developing in 1999.
Nikulin also said that this is a warning to the non-English-speaking world that it must submit to the laws that are imposed upon it.
China is interested in resources in Africa from Cobalt to Lithium to Gold to Aluminium to Manganese to Hydro power to Farmlands to Labor (Human resources)
In exchange China delivers growth and progress – Soft Loans, Machinery, Schools, Hospitals, Bridges, Trains, Factories, Jobs etc
Yet China stays out of two core areas in Africa – RELIGION AND POLITICS
The West doesnt. The West interferes in both. Conversion and Ruling over the Africans
China doesn’t
So China cannot be colonizing Africa at all
main qimg 9f8e6e824532a7c89b5841f762269759
Colonizing means treating the people as second class citizens under the rule of your own government
China certainly doesn’t do that
China simply makes trade deals which may be loaded in favor of the Chinese
China may even to a certain extent take advantage of the Africans
Yet China doesn’t Colonize Africa and Chinas Actions are maybe a 100th of what the West did
Media keeps deceiving us about China’s intentions – here’s how
Baked Spaghetti Pie
Spaghetti Pie Recipe 17 650×975 1
Ingredients
2 pounds spaghetti
2 pounds ricotta cheese
1/2 cup whole milk
3 large eggs
1 pound ground beef
1 pound spicy Italian sausage
1/2 cup spaghetti sauce
1 pound Provolone cheese, sliced thin
1/2 cup Romano cheese, grated
Instructions
Heat oven to 475 degrees F.
In a large pan, boil spaghetti for 20 minutes; drain and set aside.
Mix ricotta, milk and eggs together in a small bowl; add to spaghetti and stir together.
Press into a 13 x 9-inch baking pan until compact and even.
Cook ground beef and sausage in a large skillet.
Drain fat, removing as much as possible.
Stir in spaghetti sauce. Spread evenly over spaghetti base in pan.
Layer slices of Provolone over meat mixture, then add the grated Romano on top of that.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Polybius | The Most Deadly Video Game in History | More Truth than Legend
Burger-Bean Spaghetti Pie
Looking for a dinner pie? Then check out this ground beef spaghetti pie packed with spicy chili beans and three types of cheese – a hearty meal.
2023 08 19 11 47
Prep: 40 min | Total: 1 hr 5 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
Crust
7 ounces uncooked spaghetti or vermicelli
1 egg
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon chili powder
Filling
1 pound lean ground beef
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 (15 1/2 ounce) can spicy chili beans, undrained
1 (14 1/2 ounce) can zesty diced tomatoes seasoned with mild green chiles, undrained
4 ounces (1 cup) shredded hot pepper Monterey Jack cheese
4 ounces (1 cup) shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Cook spaghetti to desired doneness as directed on package. Drain.
Meanwhile, heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 9 1/2 inch deep dish pie pan with nonstick cooking spray.
Beat egg in large bowl. Add butter, Parmesan cheese and chili powder; mix well. Add cooked spaghetti; toss to coat. Spoon mixture evenly into sprayed pie pan, pushing mixture slightly up sides of pan to form crust.
In large saucepan, cook ground beef and onion over medium heat until beef is thoroughly cooked, stirring frequently. Drain.
Add chili beans and tomatoes; cook for 2 minutes or until thoroughly heated, stirring occasionally. Add hot pepper Monterey Jack cheese and 1/2 cup of the Cheddar cheese; mix well. Spoon evenly into spaghetti-lined pie pan. Top with remaining 1/2 cup Cheddar cheese.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until filling is set and crust is light golden brown.
We begin today with a discussion on what the United States actually is.
It is a bully, and a liar, that is based on a system of deception; a shadow play of puppets. All supported by the largest propaganda system in history. And all of it; MM included has (up until very recently) believed it all lock, stock and barrel.
So it is fitting to begin with today’s brilliant podcast by Neil Oliver.
Who knows what will come next for the West…
HEXAGON
In April 1972, when a “data package” sank into the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Navy dispatched the Trieste II Deep Sea Vehicle I (DSV-1), its most advanced deep sea submersible at the time, to recover the item. In reality, it was “part of a film capsule from an American photoreconnaissance [spy] satellite codenamed HEXAGON.”
According to the Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, a malfunction was responsible for the incident. A parachute was supposed to deploy once the film capsule, or “bucket,” having reentered the atmosphere, was over the primary reentry zone near the Hawaiian Islands. Instead, the parachute broke off, and the bucket fell into the ocean, sinking on impact to a depth of about 16,400 feet (5,000 meters).
NO ONE HIT WONDER HERE!!! OLIVER ANTHONY – I WANT TO GO HOME (REACTION)
I think people are getting upset because he’s waking people up and they don’t want to be woken. It’s time guys. We can’t keep living like this and accepting it. It’s happening around the world and we need to make a change.
IMF Just Shocked The World And The U.S With This Move!
It wants to overtake and dominate the Chip industry within a decade and it will. No perhaps, not may be, not hopefully. It will. Meanwhile it will take over the low and medium end market for chips in 3–5 years and totally bankrupt the U.S. and its cronies chip outfit.
Let me give you 2 perfect example of never ever doubting and never try to cut China out act by the U.S.
One, The U.S. the congress in the most childish and hubris behaviour, decided to bar China and Chinese on its U.S. space station in the 90’s. In that in one single racist act it motivated China to build its own space station and it did within 15 years.
And today the Chinese space station is a fully functional and well developed space station that is better, build faster and using far less resources. It uses better and more advance technologies and it is open for the entire world including the US for the betterment of humanity. For me shame on the US. The US coincidentally will retire the US space station within 5 years leaving the Chinese Space Station as the only one for the coming decade.
Two, The GPS. The US threaten the US that it can and will cut out nation that refuse to be submissive and subservient to the US in not too many words. That statement and threat itself motivated China enough to developed its own GPS within a decade of the US threat. Today the Chinese Beidou has way higher resolution, and accuracy up to a meter compared to the GPS functional up to only 10 meter! Today 150 out of 195 nations use Beidou. Instead or with the GPS. All within a decade.
Marked my word. Within a decade the US will lose so much in Chip business, market share and profits that it will forever regret the nonsense and ludicrous Chip policy under President Biden. To me China was willing to share a loaf of bread with the US but it is the US that wants to deprived China. So China should say fine, they will dominate. The entire Chip industry. In a decade. I will bet every cent I have on China winning.
I had a boss who was a narcissistic D-bag. Everyone knew it.
I finally had enough after yet another useless meeting set up just to stoke his ego. At that point somebody decided to jack him up a bit.
Somebody hung around his office until they saw him leave for a meeting with the company president. They knew it would take a while and he would leave his precious laptop open on his desk.
No they didn’t hack into it or delete any files. They did one better.
They had a firecracker set aside for this specific opportunity.
Somebody cut the firecracker open and sprinkled a bit of gunpowder lightly on his vowel keys and between the keys on his keyboard. They then lightly wiped it clean to hide the evidence.
I heard that the next time he took a flight he was flagged by TSA screening. Something about explosives in his laptop.
He missed his flight and had to replace his laptop.
I have always wondered who that “somebody” might have been. Certainly not me writing on an open forum like Quora.
OLIVER ANTHONY – I WANT TO GO HOME (REACTION)
He’s so authentic with angst, pain, confusion and he’s fed up like soooo many of us!!
Brisket in Coffee-Barbecue Sauce
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Yield: 10 to 12 servings
Ingredients
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 large Spanish onion, minced
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
7 tablespoons light brown sugar
5 cups brewed coffee
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1 (28 ounce) can peeled, chopped tomatoes
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 (4 pound) brisket
Instructions
In a medium pot, heat 1/4 cup of the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until soft and golden brown, about 7 minutes.
Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir in the red pepper. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring frequently, about 1 minute. Stir in the brown sugar. Pour in the coffee, vinegar, and tomatoes; bring to a boil; and then lower to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Working in small batches, transfer the tomato-coffee mixture to a blender and puree. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.
Heat the oven to 275 degrees F.
Season the brisket with salt and pepper. In a Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid, heat the remaining 1/2 cup oil. Brown the brisket on both sides. Drain off the oil, leaving the brisket in the Dutch oven. Turn the brisket so that the fat side is facing up and then coat it with the pureed tomato-coffee mixture. Cover the Dutch oven and place it in the oven. Bake for 3 hours, basting frequently.
Remove the lid and bake uncovered until the brisket is glazed and very tender, about an hour and a half more.
Remove the brisket and set it aside to rest for 10 minutes, covered with foil, before slicing thinly across the grain.
Compilation of the #1 Song in America!!! Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond
Post a harsh criticism against a political leader, any leader not just Modi
Compare him to some clownish character or demand that he step down
Under your real name
I am a very ordinary lawyer, yet I promise that unless you are an MP, MLA, Civil Servant, Minister or Wealthy Industrialist/Businessman, Military Man or Senior Cop :-
I can get a simple complaint with some influence filed through a specific lawyer and you will be arrested and you will be humiliated in front of your family and workplace
I guarantee it
All I need is a friendly cop and once he knows you are an ordinary commoner – he will happily file an FIR
He then writes to the passport office and you don’t get a passport
He can place you on the blacklist through a friendly SP Or State Home Secretary and you can’t get a US Visa or Schengen Visa or Singapore Visa for life
You would spend the next 6 months to 3 years in horror before a High Court quashes the case
I will come and look sheepish and say I got emotional while giving the PCR and the judge will admonish me and fine me ₹10K
You would have spent ₹3–6 Lakhs, maybe more
And I am an ordinary enrolled lawyer who doesn’t even actively practice
Imagine a powerful practising lawyer or a powerful cop if you antagonize one
Imagine if this is done in Begusarai Or some random place in Kerala
Imagine working in Infosys and two cops arrive and haul you out in front of your friends and drag you into a waiting jeep
Their response if questioned will be
We got a complaint we followed it up
So a simple malicious connected official can destroy your life if you are a commoner even if you earn ₹20 or ₹30 LPA
Your company will drop you like a hot potato
NOT IN CHINA
No Malicious officer or lawyer can try anything like this
The law is black and white
Evidence is specific and very strictly specific
So even if a case is registered, it will be dismissed in seconds if it doesn’t violate the laws
The official or lawyer would be roasted
So you understand?
In India the Law reads fairer
The System is utterly and totally loaded against the innocent average man
In China the Law is harsher
Yet the System protects the innocent average man
So the next time someone on Quora says he can post criticism freely in India
Ask him to do it under his own name and ask him if he is willing to test the fairness of the Indian system against a malicious prosecutor or entity
In China – the Law is very fair
It’s very harsh yes but very fair
No malicious person except high ranking CPC officials can come after you or spoil your life with lies
Evidence counts for a lot
1:45 / 14:42
‘We’ve all been watching the longest-running show of modern times. But it might soon be all over’
Neil Oliver: We’ve all been watching the longest-running show of modern times. But soon the show might soon be over, as more and more of the audience, especially in the cheap seats, are becoming restless, aware of how uncomfortable their seats are.
The US spends way too much time and effort looking out into the world, not nearly as much looking in the mirror at what the US has become.
The result: hard outside, rotten core
No longer able to keep running the marathon while the tank is on ‘E’.
Americans are far more focused on countering the other major political party in America whenever we are looking in.
We want our team—our little tribe—to be victorious.
Countering China’s rise?
We failed at rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan…after more than 10 years and how many billions upon billions dollars spent? thousands of lives lost?
Americans are so disconnected from reality that even that experience hasn’t shaken us from our delusions of grandeur.
What will? who knows—maybe the next great Recession will offer a bitter dose of reality.
But even then perhaps we will still go on believing in our triumphalism, with all our rags, evictions, foreclosures, abandoned properties, and pink slips
America today is more divided than I have ever seen it.
Individuals and companies and our own government are swimming in an ocean of debt with—until recently—out of control inflation.
Countering China’s rise?
Maybe we should check the plumbing and wiring in our own house first?
This is why this hit a nerve… Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond (Reaction)
I have a cousin who was passioned by Japan since a very early age. He subsequently studied Japanese culture and language at university, and then decided he had to go after his big dream — live in Japan and become a part of Japanese culture.
But my cousin was used to living in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France — the Western Burgundian world in a nutshell. And that also translated into the fact that he loved to enjoy life, far above enjoying work, and succeeding in it.
In fact: he even enjoyed to be unemployed when it suited him back in those Western days.
In the big city in Japan though, that kind of non-philosophy did not work out.
Although he was embraced in the very beginning, his way of “interpreting life” was spit out and on by his Japanese company, because he simply could not follow the exuberant pace by which Japanese people were living — are rather: working.
And after a while, he was excluded from the city society as an outcast.
In the old Western world he came from, he would have been helped, but now he was considered as a lost case, as if he was diseased, and no one would touch him — afraid to be infected.
In the end — in the most embarrassing episode of my cousin’s life — his dad and younger brother travelled to Japan, and got him out of there. By then, he was living in an almost depraved way in an apartment the size of a closet.
He suffered from a major depression when back, and had to leave his Japanese dream for good.
Because now he understood, that he didn’t understand.
Neocons CRUMBLE as China DESTROYS the US-led Unipolar Order
I remember I once opened the mail box and saw the electricity bill and the first thing I noticed was the paper was a different color.
Not the envelope, the bill. And poor people know what the means…notice of disconnect.
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(Google)
As I held the bill in my hand, I could feel my anxiety ramping up as I frantically searched my mind and counted backwards to the last time I paid. I could swear I just paid it.
But it’s a bill, we always feel like we just paid it! Because we did! Right?! Then there’s the fear of checking your account to find, not only do you have no money, but less than no money. Your account is negative and you haven’t paid that particular bill in months.
It wasn’t purposeful. You just spaced it.
I sit the bill on the bar and pace back and forth, for hours before I finally get the nerve to open it.
Then I snatch it up and rip it open like a present. Very unlike my normal polite, trimming of one end and shaking the letter out.
And I was right!! The bill is red! Not just red numbers on a white page. A red sheet of paper! I just about have heart palpitations.
I unfold it through half squinted eyes and read.. “Happy Holidays to you and yours! From our team and we would like to Thank You for being a valued customer for all these years.”
After years of abuse, poverty, homelessness and then stability. Christmas Greetings can send me spiraling at the hint of a different color inside the envelope.
Poverty traumatizes on so many different levels.
BRICS DEFEATS The WEST
2023 08 23 15 38
https://youtu.be/0jKQcw-b0-I
British Guy Reacts to Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond” REACTION!
Adolphe Sax had earned the nickname “Little Sax the Ghost” due to the abnormal amount of accidents he was in. Even his mother believed he wasn’t meant to live, and all she foresaw was a tragic end to his life.
2023 08 21 08 53
He was plagued by an unusual amount of misfortune from a very early age. At just three years old, he drank a mixture of white lead, copper oxide, and arsenic, believing it to be milk. A few months later, he fell down three flights of concrete stairs and hit his head on a stone below, both times he was lucky to walk away.
Then he swallowed a very sharp needle that he was able to pass without puncturing any vital parts. As he got a bit older, he fell onto a red hot stove and suffered third-degree burns down one side of his body.
When he was ten, he fell into a river and barely escaped drowning. When a container of gunpowder exploded in his father’s workshop, he was blown across the room.
On several occasions, he nearly died from accidental poisoning and asphyxiation due to sleeping in a room where varnished furniture was drying.
His last known brush with death happened when a tile fell from a roof, hitting him in the head and causing him to fall into a coma.
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Despite all this misfortune, Adolphe went on to invent some notable musical instruments, the most famous being the Saxophone.
HE’S SPEAKING TO US! Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond
2023 08 21 08 46
Mustard Glazed Brisket
Starts on the stove top, finishes in the oven for tender Mustard Glazed Brisket every time.
2023 08 21 09 00
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 to 4 pound) boneless beef brisket
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 large onion, sliced
2 stalks celery
8 black peppercorns
4 whole allspice
1 bay leaf
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons prepared mustard
Instructions
Place brisket, garlic, onion, celery, peppercorns, allspice and bay leaf in a large soup pot. Cover with water. Simmer covered 3 to 3 1/2 hours until tender, adding water as necessary.
Remove brisket and place in a roasting pan with 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid.
Combine brown sugar and prepared mustard. Salt and pepper brisket and spread with the mustard glaze.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees F until glaze bubbles and is browned.
Pegasus spyware
According to declassified documents, Alejandro Encinas, Mexico’s Undersecretary for Human Rights, advised President Lopez Obrador that Pegasus spyware had been found on Encinas’s own cellphone and those of two others in his office. Encinas had been investigating the mysterious “disappearances of hundreds of people,” a New York Times article explains, which occurred during the “Dirty War” that the Mexican military conducted in the 1960s and 1970s against a left-wing insurgency.
Initially, U.S. officials considered the Mexican crackdown to be understandable, Kate Doyle reports in her 2003 article “Human Rights and the Dirty War in Mexico.” And the U.S. assured Mexico that it “had no intention of pressing [Mexican President Luis] Echeverría about it.”
However, this stance changed in 1978, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter ordered the White House to conduct a sweeping review of U.S.-Mexican relations and learned that “the White Brigade and other security force elements… sometimes ignored [both] the human rights of [terrorist] suspects and Mexican judicial procedures,” torturing and executing such individuals, with the results that “200-300 persons [had disappeared] over the last decade.”
Only now, three decades later, is Mexico beginning to come to grips with the fact that the government was responsible for “torturing and murdering its own people.”
Chris Webby – North Of Richmond (Remix)
What Makes Certain Wine Unbelievably Expensive?
The price gap is supply and demand, for certain prestigious brands.
So first of all, wine comes from grapes; and grape quality is dependent on many factors. Weather of course, but also soil, water, light, heat, and grower skill/decisions. AND of course, the actual grape vine.
Old vines produce less fruit – thus, smaller production, BUT generally more concentrated and intense. Younger vines produce more fruit, but you have to prune them – the amount of pruning affects the concentration and quality of the juice you get. If your options are ‘n’ cases of wine at $60/case (wholesale) or ‘n/3’ cases at $120, you’re probably going to prune sparingly to get as much juice and wine as possible, without creating garbage. On the other hand, if you can make truly great wine and have a name for yourself, then the options are ‘n/3’ cases at $1000, or ‘n’ cases at $1000 – for a year or two, and then the price per case drops down to $100 because nobody trusts you anymore.
Then you factor in the slope of your land and composition of the soil (acidity, water retention or runoff), the light, the use of pesticides, mulch, etc..
So now you have some amount of good-quality grapes. How do you make wine? Do you make wine that’s going to mature over 10-50 years, or wine that’s going to be drinkable about the time it hits the market, late next year (like about 90% of the wine sold)? The former leads to more expensive wine, and is harder to sell – BUT if done well, can establish you over time as a top-notch winemaker. Or drive you into bankruptcy even sooner.
So this pretty much determines the pricing for most wines between $8 and $80. Above that, things get…complicated.
If you’re in Bordeaux for instance, your vinyard is likely ranked by the government. Your wine has to meet certain standards of quality and composition, and much of it is historical. There are, for instance, only five first-growth houses, and only one of them was not defined as such in 1855. (Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, which got promoted in 1973). If you’re one off those, or one of a limited few others who have a similar cachet, you can pretty much name your price. The thing is, most of their wine is sold on futures at auction, so basically it’s “as much as someone is willing to pay.”
HE DONE DID IT AGAIN!! | OLIVER ANTHONY – I WANT TO GO HOME
August 6, 2023. Then, just two weeks later, a rare earthquake hit China in the exact area that represented the hacked server data.
What are the odds?
…
For a while there were three popular types of bluejeans in my High School. These brands were Levi’s, Lee and Wrangler. Today, only Levi’s seem to have maintained the brand recognition. What has Levi’s done that is different from the rest of the pack? I’m sure that it is an interesting story.
…
You know, sometimes, I wish that I am just sitting down, watching a sports game on the television and drinking an ice cold beer.
Some years back I was on my way to work on the Tube when an enormous group of French foreign exchange students boarded, mostly mid-teens with a few adult supervisors. They took up virtually every seat and most of the standing room and there were only about a dozen people in the carriage who were not in the party.
Some of the kids were saying “hello” or small phrases in English to the regular commuters and clearly were having a great time and really excited. Some of the commuters were responding back and it was quite a beautiful scene until the female supervisor (I refuse to call her a teacher) proclaimed to her students in French that there was no point speaking to any of us because their English was not good enough yet and British people are too stupid (her words) to speak English properly, let alone another language.
Well, the tube was coming to my stop and my blood was boiling, so I stood up and in the most strongly projected voice I have ever managed spoke to everyone in perfect French offering then a lovely trip, suggesting a place on this tube to visit they may not know of and telling the children that I hoped they would think before judging other people in future.
The supervisor was the colour of a boiled beetroot and completely silent, but the coup de grace was a little old lady who said “Bet you weren’t expecting that then, were you?”, causing stunned faces on even the commuters!
Combined Russian-Chinese Naval Flotilla Forms “Surface Action Group” Off Alaska Coastline
A combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska earlier this week in what U.S. experts said appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach American shores.
Eleven Russian and Chinese ships steamed close to the Aleutian Islands, according to U.S. officials. The ships, which never entered U.S. territorial waters and have since left, were shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft.
“It is a historical first,” said Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a retired Navy captain. “Given the context of the war in Ukraine and tensions around Taiwan, this move is highly provocative.” A spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command confirmed that Russia and China had carried out a combined naval patrol near Alaska, but didn’t specify the number of ships or their precise location.
Russian warships and Chinese research vessels have been observed in the Arctic region before.
“But to see these combatants form up in a surface action group together and steam together, that’s what’s rare,” Rear Adm. Nathan Moore, who was Coast Guard commander for the Alaska region until last month.
I plan to visit China during 11–15 September with some Furniture Importers
One Importer who never went to China before just called me a few days ago and said “Should I get some rice and dal and an electric cooker??”
I asked “Why?”
He says “I heard you only get Snakes and and Dogs to eat there”
This is an educated man.
That is the impression of China in India even today
You have 20+ Indian restaurants in Shanghai alone including a place that actually serves you Nandu Rasam and Aviyal
Another misconception is that Chinese are rude when Indians approach them
The real reason is they are embarrassed that they can’t speak English in response
The Young Chinese are different. They want to test their English on you and after answering you they say “Was it right?”
They don’t even see YouTube
It’s this inbuilt impression
Experienced Importers are different. They have been to China and they know.
Likewise I was corrected myself by a Saudi based Indian.
I presumed every theft in Saudi would have the hand lopped off but that’s not true at all
It’s actually a very stringent legal system actually hand you have different places where the thief can be let off including the victim accepting something akin to an apology
I thought Sharia law was this primitive ancient tribal thing but the layered application of the laws are so fantastic
A Thief who steals for hunger is different from a Thief who steals for greed
The general opinion is a woman is stoned for adultery
Again this is a myth
Few women are actually stoned for Adultery. In most Sharia law instances , the stoning is more symbolic and more of Game of Thrones style shaming
Back to the topic
I feel these people have their notions like many have about India
My son was asked by his friend who was visiting Bangalore for the first time (India also) whether he could come for a conference call at any time? Would power be available the whole day?
Bangalore?
In 2023!!!
Their impression is India is this
2023 08 06 11 11
I keep thinking DONT THESE PEOPLE HAVE YOUTUBE?
So my opinion when someone says going to China is dangerous is to simply watch YouTube
That’s what I told this Importer also
He did and sheepishly realized how mistaken he was
Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Lebanon urged its citizens to leave the country as soon as possible, and to avoid approaching areas where there have been armed clashes.
In a statement posted late Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter, the embassy warned Saudi citizens not to visit areas where armed clashes were taking place, the official Saudi news agency SPA reported.
The Saudi diplomatic mission also stressed “the importance of respecting the travel ban on Lebanon.” It was followed Saturday by Kuwait, which issued an advisory calling on Kuwaitis in Lebanon to remain vigilant and avoid “areas of security unrest,” though without asking them to leave the country.
Deadly armed clashes have occurred in recent days in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, located on the outskirts of Saida, South Lebanon.
Since July 29, at least 13 people have been killed and more than 60 injured in clashes between the mainstream faction Fatah and a hardline group in the camp, the largest of 12 Palestinian camps established in Lebanon in 1948 after Israel was created.
Fatah has accused the armed groups Jund al-Sham and al-Shabab al-Muslim of gunning down a Fatah military general, Abu Ashraf al-Armoushi, in the camp.
According to Maher Shabaita, the head of Fatah in the Sidon region, Palestinian factions in the camp have formed an investigative committee to find out who was responsible for al-Armoushi’s killing and will hand them over to the Lebanese judiciary for trial.
A ceasefire between the Palestinian groups in the camp was announced on July 31 under the mediation of Lebanese parties.
Saudi Arabia’s request is not just related to the fighting in Ain al-Hilweh. Many believe it could be linked to a possible Israel-Saudi agreement.”
“If an Israel-Saudi agreement is signed, Riyadh will certainly fear the reaction against its citizens in a country like Lebanon.”
The Simpsons Maude cheating with the devil in front of Flanders
https://youtu.be/KVo_6ySpLIk
Ukraine Attacks Civilian MERCHANT Ship Near Kerch Strait
Last night, Ukraine launched Unmanned Marine Drones to attack vessels near the Kerch Strait Bridge, and HIT a Merchant Oil Tanker Ship named the “SIG” about 30 miles from the Bridge.
It began when Residents of a nearby town, Yakovenkovo reported a loud explosion near the bridge..
As reported during the live Hal Turner Radio Show last night, booth aerial and maritime drones were being used, and the belief was that the Kerch Strait Bridge was the target.
Russian Electronic Warfare dealt with most of the aerial drones, but Anti-Aircraft-Artillery (AAA) was used to down others.
Just after the Hal Turner Show went off the air, an insider close to the Russian Maritime Fleet reported that a maritime drone collided with a tanker 30 miles from the Kerch Strait. That is now confirmed and visually verified. The photo above shows the ship on fire.
Below is what the vessel normally looks like:
SIG oil tanker
According to radio traffic, the Captain of the ship says it was hit in the engine room area, which is now flooded. The vessel cannot move independently. But, fortunately, the crew is alive and almost unharmed. The Russian rescue ship “Mercury” is already operating next to it, and a number of ships are heading to help.
According to some reports, the SIG tanker was returning from Syria, where it delivered oil products. The tanker itself has been under US sanctions since 2019 for helping to circumvent sanctions imposed on Syria regarding the sale of their oil and gas minerals.
On July 19, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that all ships calling at Ukrainian ports will be considered as carrying military equipment and will be considered targets.
On July 20, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry made the same statement that they would have the same approach to Russian ships.”
UPDATE 9:02 AM EDT SATURDAY —
Video of the Drone impacting the ship has been released by the Ukraine government. They saw in advance they were attacking an unarmed CIVILIAN vessel, and they attacked it anyway. A blatant act of state sponsored terrorism, INTENTIONALLY against a civilian target.
While working as a teacher, a new rule was introduced for teachers coming in late. Rule states that: If a teacher is late by more than 10 minutes, they will be marked absent for the morning.
So, what some teachers did – If they were late and saw that they were marked absent, they would walk out of the school and go for a movie (or some other kind of recreational activity) and came back for afternoon classes. This became a usual phenomenon, and led to a shortage of teachers in the first half.
The rule changed to: If teachers come late by 10 minutes, their half-day salary will be cut. What teachers did – They will not come for the entire day.
The rule changed to: If the teacher is late, then 2 days’ salary will be cut. What teachers did – The next day, no one came to school. The principal called each and every teacher and begged them to come to school.
The idea to implement this rule came from the assistant to the school director, who was demoted and put as in charge of housekeeping. Some teachers used to travel for hours to reach school; occasionally, the teachers would arrive late. After the rule was implemented, everyone that arrived late took the day off, if it was determined that they were marked absent.
These rules were retracted, and everything returned to normal.
TSMC U.S Factory Seized Biden’s Re-election and U.S Jobs in Jeopardy!
Pro Western Sympathies or belonging to the older faction
Children who are Citizens of the USA or who live in USA
People like our Quora’s Balaji Viswanathan. Centrists who believe the world order will always be with the West.
People who are scared of taking on the United States in finance or scared of dumping dollars in a zero sum game
China is slowly including and cultivating :—
Hardcore Realists who know the ground realities and yet know what it takes to build a future they want
People who have their families in China or HK or Singapore and who don’t have a Western Link beyond that
People who are ready to take on the US and shake the old world order
People who have a blueprint to de dollarize and who have a strategy to deal with eventual US Sanctions
Good news for India is , most Anti India Hawks are gone
The new bunch don’t care if India exists or not
Their focus is US and Taiwan now and they don’t have the 1980–2010 mentality of focusing on India because US was considered beyond their reach (Kinda like our Pakistan obessession)
Rumours now say that Qin Gang was sacked because he wrote a paper on cooperation with the United States titled “Chinese cooperation with the US in the 21st Century”
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After meeting Blinken, he advocated China taking a step back for a few years and negotiate to keep US as a hegemon in return for China being firmly recognised as Number 2 ahead of the EU
He advocated negotiating with the US to rise the Yuan to 10% of the Global Reserve by 2027 and for China to drastically cut investment in some sectors (AI, Navy) in exchange for US cutting military aid to Taiwan and promising not to instigate Taiwanese Independence
Apparently Blinken told him such a proposal would find favor with Biden
Essentially China’s version of the Plaza Accords
Wang Yi apparently refused to even consider this and said no matter what happened, US would never keep China even at Number 2 and would use this to throttle China completely
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So Wang Yi met Blinken as did Xi Jingping and both told him “Not the slightest chance” and that angered Biden a lot and why he called XJP a Dictator
The Central Bank Governor also seemed to support Qin Gangs point and capitulate to US in exchange for guarantees like not freezing assets etc
Thus he too was sacked and the latest Governor is a total Pro Chinese meritocrat
2023 08 05 21 4nr5
China is now clear that it’s CHINA FIRST
China has made it clear that it’s no longer US First China Next that Qin Gang and some others proposed and which Blinken seemed to be receptive to but which I am confident was just another ploy like always
So only people who are China First are on board now
Top people, people with Merit but who put China first ahead of any other nation
Source:— Fung Ching is a Retd Professor on Political Science on Zhihu who has ears to the ground and is usually the go to person who makes theories on what is likely information within the party
He made a theory on the Lockdown and it happened exactly like that
The mother cat had an accident on the road and the kitten’s cry for help. A miracle happened
https://youtu.be/8vKJaOuGsc0
You wanted it, and you might well get it…
China has been facing export bans from the West doing nothing to retaliate but now it has the power to counter-attack to unleash painful consequences on countries which did the same for decades.
China banned using micron’s products in China and also restricted exports of rare earth metals like germanium and gallium which are used in the chip and electric vehicle industry but China does not feel it’s sufficient to teach the West a lesson about its nasty and unfair restrictions and double standards as more is coming and China is the single most country which has both the power and capability to make the West suffer.
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The West clearly feels the pinch on China’s declaration to stop the exports of G&G metals.
Geopolitical analysts and experts on international relations fear a doomsday scenario, that of China unleashing a full-fledged trade and economic war against the U.S and its allies if China were to embrace the zero-sum game of protectionism.
World Trade growth could face further deceleration pushing the world toward a global economic confrontation, which means China will completely stop trade with them (West) neither will it export anything nor will it import the consequences would be severe affecting Global growth and employment and potentially inviting a recession.
But the U.S and the West will face the gravest losses for decades. They have been importing raw materials and finished products from China without having domestic production plans for those products the sudden export ban in China will literally halt everything.
According to the United Nations Comtrade database on International Trade the U.S imported goods worth 582.76 billion US dollars from China these products include all household goods the U.S cannot produce itself but that’s not it the U.S exported goods worth 153.8 billion US dollars to China in 2023.
No American export to China means Nasdaq and S&P going down. Stock market in frenzy as share prices plummet coupled with unemployment that could cause recession. EU and US growth rate is mere 2 percent and this number will further dwindle. This would translate like a doom in the West.
It’s rare that someone calls you at 3am with an offer of employment or some other good news. 3am calls are usually unexpected bad news. So when my phone rang at 3am, I stared at the phone screen with a frown. It was my childhood friend calling.
He had an accident on his way back from the night club. The collision led to a four-car pileup. He wasn’t hurt but his car was damaged.
It was warm and cozy under my bed covers. But I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t also mention that it was an indecent time to call me. I didn’t yawn and ask him if there was no one else he could have called. For Pete’s sake, what was he doing at a night club so late? No, I didn’t ask him that either.
“I’m coming,” I said. Police and other emergency services were at the crash scene. The vehicles were moved off the road and out of the line of traffic. I took my friend home with me.
I left the country about a year after this incident. Someone called me at about 3am some weeks ago. 3am calls rarely bring good news. My dad was stabbed multiple times by a mugger who robbed him of his valuables. I was frantic with worry. How was he doing? He was at the hospital but was he getting the best medical care? Were the injuries life threatening? I reached out to my childhood friend. He didn’t ask me why I called him at such an ungodly hour. He didn’t ask why my dad was not mindful or careful. He only asked me for the address of the hospital and he went there to see my dad. He kept me constantly updated.
That’s what a friend does. A friend is someone you can count on in times of adversity. They love you and support you unconditionally.
Well, I tried to walk… and I sort of succeeded… but It made me reconsider the next walk.
It was a warm and humid summer evening in Canton, Ohio. I was visiting from Colmar, France.
On the night of my arrival, dinner alone featured a friendly server, comforting but unhealthy food, a lively crowd and four different craft beers.
As I exited the restaurant, I was greeted by sticky air and exhaust fumes as I gazed out upon a two-mile strip of culinary and retail abundance.
It was nice to be back in the States, but by 9.45 p.m. bed was calling. Having seen the four beers I drank foreshadowed in a dream, I had left the rental car back at the hotel.
It was only a 15 minute walk.
Carefree, I ambled along the strip from one monstrous parking lot to the next (there was no sidewalk).
About 5 minutes into my stroll, I saw blue lights reflected into the cars in front of me and turned around to see what the problem was.
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That was when I found out the problem was me.
Someone had reported me to the police as suspicious for walking through the parking lots.
The officers were quite nice as they politely asked why I happened to be in a parking lot at this time of night.
“Well,” I told them, “I found it strange that there’s no sidewalk, but since I knew I wanted to drink 3 or 4 beers, I left the car at the hotel. I’m headed back there now.”
I showed them my room key card, they wished me a nice evening and said “sorry for the hassle, but nobody walks around here.”
They Painted Her Yellow For Fun Then Discarded Her Crying in The Middle Of The Street…
You just need to answer four basic questions and once you find the realistic answers , if not beat China , you can at least surge forward and deliver genuine real development :—
How far behind are we in Development of our People and Country?
How do we develop a National Development Model that helps the nation and every Indian develop albeit at different rates ?
What kind of Leadership is required and how will we be able to ensure such leaders?
What’s the timeline and Where we will find the money ?
We are at least 35 years behind in Development of our People and our Country. Our Standards are akin to 1954.
We develop a Capitalist and Mixed Economic Plan and aggressively develop our Cities and put our faith in manufacturing and use capitalism to develop our villages through socialism.
We choose from a line of Meritocracy based decisions and choose leadership based entirely on Ability and on the Maker Checker concept
Timeline is 50 years (2039) and we find the money in TRADE and CHEAP EXPORTS
Thats it
China managed it even earlier than 2039, the original target
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So if India can just answer , truthfully these four questions — then India too can develop genuinely well
Sadly India’s answers ensure that the country never will progress
We are already at a very good level today and we have the maximum youth population and here are a few articles where IMF and XYZ say we are the greatest economy
Our Present Model is a golden example of success and growth. We don’t need anything else. Modi hain to Mumkin Hai. Jai Shri Ram. Gati Shakti. Vande Bharat. 10,000 Toilets built in a week etc
We don’t need Khangressi Leaders or Antonia Maino or whatever else WhatsApp tells us. We have the best leadership in the world. Demolishing Buildings, Carrying out Encounters, Getting a Royal Standing Ovation in US and France. Who could ask for better
We are already the best so we don’t need money. By 2050 we will overtake China. That’s what Adani says
Read most answers in Quora and the same mentality is reflected
An Inherent terror to acknowledge the truth
Every answer has the overall feel that India is surging and is on its way to a massive development without any mention of any potential problems and a handful of Google articles of what’s expected by 2060 or 2560
If India needs real development of its people and not today’s shoddy “Build Apartments and Shopping complexes in every street” style of development , India needs to answer the four questions truthfully
The answers may vary from person to person but they must be realistic
For example my take is :—
India is at least 30 years behind today in terms of Development of its people and Nation
We need a National Model that is a mixture of Welfare State and High Level Capitalism and that doesn’t allow Politics to compromise Economics.
We need leaders of ability and skill and vision and need to choose based on education and experience and their having a spine. We need zero focus on religion or religious nonsense.
RCEP with China and ASEAN and Massive changes in Labor Law and Overseas Ventures and introducing Wholly Owned Foreign Subsidiaries is the way of achieving the money. Timeline is 30 years (2050)
Others can have different takes but they must be realistic
Step one is to realize India has problems, huge problems and how to solve them
Without that we have no chance except to live in this insane brainwashed bloat fest utopia where we juggle numbers from the air while paying ₹200/— a kg for tomatoes
I can answer this. I had 3 children, oldest with cerebral palsy, middle child normal, youngest child with rare genetic syndrome that physically handicapped him later in life. I divorced their Dad due to alcoholism. I worked full time and have always worked. I paid a baby sitter for the oldest out of my own pocket to come in and sit with her after school because daycares wouldn’t service her. When I got home from work, I took over. My youngest was mentally normal and didn’t need as much when he was young. I qualified for zero assistance. I asked and applied. My youngest had to go out of state for treatment and it became impossible for anyone to care for my oldest child. My ex, her Dad did nothing to help. No visitation with her. He would take the youngest two. My family couldn’t help because they couldn’t lift her. Not to mention, my parents were older.
She grew to a normal sized smaller adult and weighed 106#, I weighed 120#. I was lifting her because she was non ambulatory, non verbal, paralyzed on the right side. She was unable to feed herself and wore diapers. After taking care of her for 16 years and doing it essentially alone, I had to have help. I plainly couldn’t do it any longer plus try to do what my other 2 needed.
I did finally get some assistance for at home through a state grant. Agency would send someone in to help. However, I ended up having items stolen, they would consistently call in sick and I wouldn’t be able to work. So that solution was not good. However, the help was only there while I worked. When I came home, it was my responsibility.
Through applying for assistance and working with the state Medicaid department as an employee, I had been told over and over that she would qualify for everything as soon as she was out of my house. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. But my youngest was going to have to have surgery out of state and I couldn’t care for her or take her with me. Zero help.
So I made the hardest decision I ever had to make and that was to place her in a group home. I placed her when she was 16 years old. She went to a fabulous group home. She had opportunities to live as a normal teen and do normal things. It was actually hard to catch her at home because when school started up, Friday nights were football games. They took her to movies, concerts, etc. She went to the beach with the group home. I still visited her. When she became sick with ovarian cancer 20 years later, the staff took turns and came to sit with her at the hospital even though I was there. She died 3 years later from cancer at age 35. But she had been institutionalized since age 16. It was the best thing I could have ever done. She loved coming home and I could go get her and bring her home for holidays. She didn’t spend the night because I had dropped her trying to transfer her from the chair to the bed to change a diaper. But, I was also able to visit as much as I wanted and we did.
No one should ever shame a parent if they have never walked in their shoes. It’s not a walk in the park and it’s not giving up your child or disposing of them. There is only so much one person can do. The burn out is very very real when doing it alone.
San Francisco Public Transit Is Completely Empty | Downtown Is a Ghost Town
2023 08 05 21 10
Who Woulda Thunk it: Pfizer Employees Given **Special Batch** of COVID Vax
In testimony before an Australian Parliament Committee, Senior Executives of Pfizer admit their employees received a special batch of the COVID “vaccine” that had NOT been tested by the Australian authorities. What Pfizer employees got was **different** from what was forced on the public.
Video below from the Australian Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee reveals the scandal:
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Many people in the general public have wondered aloud if the Pfizer people, and the politicians/officials, all got harmless Saline solutions as their supposed “vaccine?” Now, we know factually those employees of Pfizer **did** get something different than the public.
Why?
Africa Is BREAKING FREE – Col Macgregor
2023 08 06 19 15
https://youtu.be/fbJl8icZ-Bo
Philly Cheesesteak Sheet Pan Nachos
philly cheesesteak sheet pan nachos
Active: 50 min | Yield: 8 to 10 servings
Ingredients
1 pound beef ribeye steak
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 medium onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 each medium green pepper and sweet red bell pepper, cut into strips
12 ounces (3 cups) Weyauwega Star Dairy Provolone cheese, shredded and divided
Optional toppings: sliced green onions and sour cream
Instructions
Freeze steak for 40 minutes.
Thinly slice steak against the grain into strips; season with salt and pepper.
Warm 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large, nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add steak in batches; stir-fry until meat is no longer pink. Remove steak from skillet; keep warm.
Sauté onion and peppers in remaining oil in the same skillet over medium-high heat for 4-6 minutes or until crisp-tender.
Season with salt and pepper. Remove from the heat.
Add steak to skillet; toss to combine.
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a 15 x 10-inch baking pan with parchment paper.
Arrange tortilla chips in a single layer on prepared pan.
Sprinkle with 1 cup mozzarella and 1 cup provolone.
Layer with half of the steak-veggie mixture.
Repeat layers, starting with 1 cup mozzarella. Sprinkle with remaining mozzarella and provolone.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until the cheeses are melted.
ASML has a deep presence in mainland China, with over 700 lithography machines shipped and 15 offices and a repair center established over several decades.
However, ASML’s operations in China will become more difficult after the Netherlands and the United States reach an agreement. If ASML is unable to provide normal shipping and after-sales service, can all of the mainland’s lithography equipment be repurchased?
If such a situation really occurs, the Netherlands may not be able to bear the consequences.
The Chinese Mainland Market is very important to ASML. With the rise of China’s semiconductor industry and increasing demand, China has become the world’s largest semiconductor Market.
Foreign suppliers such as ASML are eager to sell large quantities of products in China to earn substantial revenue and profits, however these matters are not solely at the discretion of ASML.
If the chip industry continues to maintain Global free trade, ASML can participate in the Chinese market in its own way but now the situation is different. The Netherlands and the US have colluded and set stricter export control rules for ASML.
Starting from September 1st ASML’s high-end DUV lithography machines will not be able to be shipped to the mainland Chinese market as usual. This is not what ASML wants to see but ASML has little choice but to go with the flow.
ASML may even face a situation where it has to repurchase equipment, the chairman of Yangtze memory Technologies once said. Please establish principles of Integrity In fairness if compliant equipment cannot be obtained or used, a time limit can be set for the repurchase of the equipment only then can it be fair.
Chen Nanshang’s meaning is clear, if ASML’s lithography machines are purchased but cannot be obtained or if they are already installed in production lines but are remotely locked due to regulatory restrictions ASML must repurchase the equipment.
Over several decades of operating in mainland China ASML has shipped over 700 lithography machines and established 15 offices and a repair center in China however the agreement between the Netherlands and the United States will impose more restrictions and difficulties on ASML operations in mainland China including shipping and after sales services for ASML.
This is undoubtedly a severe challenge following chin Nanshang’s remarks, it is possible to repurchase all of the mainland’s lithography equipment if such a situation really occurs.
The Netherlands may not be able to bear the consequences on the one hand this would mean that ASML would lose the huge Chinese market which would have a detrimental effect on the company’s revenue and growth on the other hand repurchasing the equipment would require a large amount of capital and resources which would have a negative impact on ASML’s financial situation and competitiveness.
France desperate to hold on to Niger, and its uranium
I used to bank with Bank of America. Deposited a check from my grandfather. I was 35 at the time or so. I got a receipt that said I deposited it at 11:05 with Imelda for $1200.00. This was in Fremont, CA. I had $50 in the account, never had an overdraft, so there were no holds. At the time it was all the money I had and I needed it to pay rent. Next day I dropped by and said “When will those funds be available?”.
Teller said “You didn’t make a deposit yesterday”. I said “Yeah I did…” and read off the receipt details. They told me they had no record of the deposit (despite my receipt) that they had lost the check and it was now my problem. They told me to get another check from my grandpa. I said “He’s a prick and he’s not going to do that”.
They genuinely tried to tell me that I’d just lost those funds.
I said “Are you high??!! I have proof I deposited it! It’s insured by the Federal govt, you moron! If you lost the check than Bank of America is going to absorb this loss, not some starving student who can’t pay rent”. (Edit:Oops. FDIC handles it when banks go out of business. Other agencies remedy losses like this).
BofA branch manager told me to “be quiet”
I got louder in the middle of the crowded bank “YOU LOST MY MONEY? I HAVE A RECEIPT FOR THE DEPOSIT RIGHT HERE! I CAME INTO THE BANK AND DEPOSITED IT AT THE COUNTER RIGHT HERE YESTERDAY AND YOU LOST THE CHECK ? ! YOU SAY YOU WANT ME TO EAT THE LOSS CAUSE YOU LOST MY CHECK ?? !!”
He stammered… “please be quiet” the branch manager whispered, trying to hush me.
He didn’t know I had 10 years of theater training. My voice BOOMED and probably heard in the parking lot. “YOU LOST MY CHECK ! ! ! !!! YOU LOST MY MONEY!! THE TELLER STOLE MY CHECK AND YOU SAY IT’S JUST GONE ? ! HOW MANY OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY HAS SHE STOLEN FROM THEIR ACCOUNTS???!!!”.
Literally everything in the bank stopped. I think I had rattled the glass. People were now walking towards us worried. There was going to be a rush on the bank. Like this was going to make the news. His face turned red with panic.
He told me “I’m going to put the funds back in your account but we reserve the right to remove it later if we want to”.
I said “But it’s all liquid right now?”.
He said “Yes”.
I instantly left the bank. Drove to the nearest Bank of America (they’re everywhere), took all my money out ($1250 or so) and closed the account.
NEVER. EVER. EVER do business with Bank of America. They’re consistently incompetent. I’ve heard other horror stories and there are better banks that don’t charge fees. I mean, BofA literally told me that they had lost my check AFTER I deposited it, I had a receipt, named the teller, the amount and the time of the deposit. I’d done everything right and they wanted ME to eat the loss?!!!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provisionally confirmed a major U.S. outbreak of dengue fever on Wednesday.
At present, there are 225 cases of dengue fever in the U.S., and 315 in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, according to the CDC. Florida is bearing the brunt of the outbreak, with 96 travel-associated cases and two local transmissions.
New York has also been hit with 23 cases, and one person has been infected locally in Texas. A majority of the cases in Florida were contracted during trips to Cuba, according to VaxBeforeTravel.
Outbreaks of dengue have erupted around the world, with more than 100,000 people infected and 200 dead in Peru. The country is currently going through a “mega fumigation campaign” to rid the population of mosquitos that carry the disease.
The disease is spread via mosquito bites, and symptoms include severe pain in the patient’s eyes, head, muscles, joints, as well as a high fever, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue.
Severe dengue fever can cause internal bleeding and organ damage.Blood pressure can drop to dangerous levels, causing shock.In some cases, severe dengue fever can lead to death.
Women who get dengue fever during pregnancy may be able to spread the virus to the baby during childbirth.
San Francisco’s Tallest Building Is Literally Empty | Salesforce Leaves Quietly
I have noticed that older people like me (76) tend to let their seasonal homes (summer cottages) go because they become overwhelmed by the work required to maintain that home. I spoke a few days ago with two long-time seasonal neighbors (85 and 86) on my remote northern Minnesota island who told me this was their last summer there. I thanked them for telling me that they had made it into their mid-80s before deciding to sell. There are things about living on a remote island that make it more difficult:
You have to have a boat or boats in the water between May and October and then have a place to store them during the winter. I have replaced my older and less reliable boats with two new ones that require very little shop time to fix motors.
Docks require maintenance, particularly when a flood like the one we experienced in 2022 does this to it.
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Forest management involves the removal of dead trees and the protection of young trees from deer or beaver. I cut and split enough wood to fuel the sauna and wood stove during the season.
The cottage itself needs the same sort of maintenance any building does with special attention to water pumps and sewage. At a certain point it becomes necessary to put away ladders as an accident on the island would be disastrous.
One of the issues as we age is that the kids who once helped up with the seasonal work are off in their own lives with their families. If they spend a week at the cottage, the last thing they plan on doing is rebuilding a dock or cutting and splitting trees. Although I have had an excellent summer at the lake (especially avoiding the southern heat dome), I know that the time will come when we transfer ownership. I do not look forward to that day.
What are the implications of China replacing the head of its nuclear missile force in a major military shake-up?
Wang Houbin.
Wang Houbin
Unlike the West, this is a merit-based appointment. He was the former deputy commander of the Chinese navy, and he was the one that oversaw it’s growth, expansion, and maintained strict discipline throughout the nearly eight years of sea-based American provocations.
He runs a “tight ship”.
Without getting into too much detail, he is the sort of man that is loyal and “plays it by the book”. Much like (the fictional character) “Iceman” from the 1980’s era movie “Topgun”.
In short; He is a steady hand, and strives for perfection.
Also, he is LOYAL. He cannot be “turned”, and he is neither ideological, nor religious.
As the head of the PLA Strategic (and tactical) missile force, he WILL NOT HESITATE to turn the United States into Radioactive glass if ordered to do so. He is the man who will do it, and he is the best qualified for this role.
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For whatever it is worth, those “in the know” inside the Pentagon realize what a big issue this is. They see a gradual and steady evolution (step by step) by the PLA to get on a deathly-serious and very lethal full-on WAR FOOTING.
Oh, I’m sure it sounds great that you have a few guns in your house. So many American people can boast that they have a few guns in their house. But what REALLY makes the difference is the person is is trained, and READY to use them. The guy that won’t blink, and shoot you dead. Fully and completely dead.
That is Wang Houbin.
The unique case of ‘water scam’ which Air Asia is into.
It’s the lowest one can fall to at 35,000ft.
As per the mandatory regulation issued by DGCA (Director General of Civil Aviation), a passenger on board is entitled to free drinking water in all domestic and international flights flying in/out of India.
But Air Asia does not want you to have that glass of water so easily.
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Here is what they do.
On my flight from Bengaluru to Kuala Lumpur, when I asked for regular water instead of the bottled one, the reply of the air hostess was –
‘Sir we only have hot water with us, can I get you that?’
By hot, she meant pipping hot. There was no way anyone can drink that, automatically forcing you to buy a bottle, which I had to.
Technically they were right, its mentioned free, but nothing is written about the temperature part.
That’s the day they proved, they are indeed the cheapest airline in the world.
Netherlands Will Make the U.S Pay This Way After Becoming a Scapegoat!
Netherlands Will Make the U.S Pay This Way After Becoming a Scapegoat!
I have three ultra wealthy friends. The first two are worth more than $100 million, and the third is a multi billionaire.
The first sold his software company in his early 40’s, retired, and traveled the world for 2 years. He got bored and started a new software company, and sold it in his late 40’s. He got bored again, and started ANOTHER software company, but this one failed, but he only lost a few million. Just pocket change for him.
I haven’t talked to him for awhile, but last time I did, he and his wife was doing the whole ‘Van Life’ thing you see on YouTube (he’s not a YouTuber tho). I guess that’s what you do when all of your kids are in college.
He can buy just about anything, but he’s always been a simple guy. I’ve never seen him buy anything fancy since I’ve known him. He likes to drive his Buick SUV because it’s comfortable. Actually, his Van Life van is pretty fancy, probably the fanciest thing I’ve ever seen him buy. It was custom built for him and his wife and I think he paid over $200k for it.
My second friend created a robotics company and just recently sold it so he could retire at 60 years old.
He’s nothing like my first friend. He has a huge mansion, 2 planes (not jets), and a large collection of Lamborghini’s. His daily driver is a Huracán. He travels around the US doing track days with his Lambos. He’s driven on every speedway in the US, and most of them in Europe. He also got bored and started a new medical tech company. Last time I talked to him, he was complaining about the FDA.
My third friend just recently became a billionaire when his fintech company IPO’d. He doesn’t consider himself wealthy as it’s all in company stocks, and hasn’t sold any. He mentioned that nothing in his life has really changed since the IPO (and him becoming a billionaire), except now he travels in a private jet when traveling across the US, Europe and Asia for work. I rarely see him because he works 5000 hrs a week, but that started before he became a billionaire. I’m still trying to get him to take me in his company jet.
All of them can definitely buy just about anything they want (and one has). Theoretically, all three of them never have to work again, but all three are genius’ and their brains never stop working. I don’t think they can help it, nor do they want to. I think they’re happiest when they’re doing something new and interesting.
Ukrainian sea drones attacked a navy base at one of Russia’s largest Black Sea ports, the Russian Ministry of Defense said Friday, claiming that both of the drones used in the attack had been destroyed. Ukrainian sources said a Russian naval vessel was damaged in the attack, however, and video posted online appeared to show a ship listing to one side.
The overnight attack hit Russia’s Novorossiysk naval base on the Black Sea, and it reportedly forced a temporary halt to all ship movement at the key port.
Clashes in and around Ukraine’s Black Sea ports — which are currently blockaded by Russian forces — and at least one major river port have escalated since the collapse of an internationally-brokered deal that had, for a year up until last month, allowed for the safe export of vital grain supplies from Ukraine.
Russia pulled out of that deal and has since attacked the ports from which Ukraine’s significant grain supplies are exported around the world, driving global grain prices up more than 10% in the immediate aftermath and threatening to keep them on the rise.
My father believed in handshakes, not contracts and entered into a business agreement to do all the foundation work for a development of 9 luxury houses. Both my mom and I warned him to get a contract but he wouldn’t claiming the the contractor who hired him was also an honorable man.
Needless to say, he didn’t pay even though my father believed he would pay one day. My parents cut their living expenses to the bare minimum, including their health insurance. Sadly my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer during this time.
One day, I joined friends for a festival at the local seminary. Guess who I ran into? Yup the contractor being given the Royal treatment by several of the priests since he was a large donor to the seminary. I said hello to him and he ignored me, so I repeated myself. When I was ignored a second time, I asked him where his manners were (yes I was itching for a fight). He responded by asking me if I knew who he was
My very loud response was that I knew who he was…that he was the lying thief who owed my father nearly $200,000 for work he had done. And that because of him a good woman, my mom was dying because my parents couldn’t afford medical treatment. Of course the priests tried to shuffle him away but I kept at it. The priests kept telling me that I was mistaken and that he was a good man.
I asked him if he knew who I was and he said some bitch with no manners. I laughed and responded that I was the bitch that was taking him down with a big smirk and walked away laughing.
What he didn’t know was that I had kept detailed records of all of my dad’s financial outlays for him, all associated labor costs, delivery costs of concrete & cinder blocks – all showing delivery to the contractor’s development. I found a lawyer to help us and the day before the festival, my mom signed the paperwork (as a co-owner of the business) to have a lein applied preventing the sale of any house in that development until my dad was paid in full. I also reported him to the IRS whistleblowers program for tax fraud.
End result, my dad was paid in full. Eventually the contractor was found guilty of tax fraud, did prison time, paid a substantial penalty and was ruined. Evidently my dad was not the only one he screwed. And being the bitch with no manners that I am, I bought numerous copies of the newspaper edition that told of his conviction, and hand delivered them to the priests. Lol
Years ago, I was on my way back to my hometown. When an elderly couple tried to get on this bus as well, I immediately gave up my seat and helped them to get on.
They were very impressed that I had actually given up my seat and thanked me about three times. They explained they’d wanted to get to their hotel for hours, but had to wait as there were many delays that day. I then made them laugh by saying we are very used to train and bus delays here in the Netherlands, so they’d better get used to it if they were planning on staying any longer!
While we were on our way, they started asking me all about the Netherlands. Where I was from, what it was like to live here, and what I was up to. I told them I was on my way back after I’d met up with a professor to discuss my ideas about going to Oxford. He had, unfortunately, told me that my chances were very slim, as my grades were not that high.
The husband of the woman suddenly sat up and asked me what my grades were like. I told him and he asked what I wanted to study. I explained to him that applied linguistics was the field I really wanted to get involved in, and I gave him my reasons, to which he replied:
“You know, I used to be a professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and I would most certainly have admitted you. ”
He gave me the courage I needed to apply to Oxford that semester, and guess what… I got in!
THIS BROKE ME! | Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond | Reaction
Todays reaction REALLY BROKE ME! Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” really hit home for me!
Kansas City Confidential (Film-Noir, 1952) John Payne, Lee Van Cleef | Colorized Movie, Subtitles
Do you remember when the “Bic Banana” came out? I do.
It was big and bright yellow, and all of us just wanted to have one to do our homework with.
Shortly after that came “Maxi skirts” which was the death blow to the mini-skirt fad of the late 1970’s. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that my mother threw away her white go-go boots.
…
The year was in the early 1990’s. And I was working as a contractor at a electronics company that made high end military systems. Well, one day, I went to my boss and asked him for a raise. He said, “let me think about it”.
The next day he called me into his office. He accused me of being a fraud and a fake. He said that no one could find any background on me. And he spent perhaps the next two hours berating me up and down.
I left the office shaken.
Long story short, I made a few calls and got the entire mess all straightened out. But, you know, the damage was already done.
I came in wanting a raise, and left just happy that I had a job.
…
One thing that I used to love to do was crunch up aluminum foil into balls and toss them at the kitty cats to play with. They really enjoyed that game.
…
Oh, yeah. I have been listening a lot to B-b-b-b babymetal lately.
The lyrics to the songs suggest multiple song writers, as some of the songs are so very simple (Give me chocolate) while others at multi-levels deep.
Like Megitsune メギツネ.
Babymetal is a stage show; a production. Unlike the West, it’s not really a bunch a kids in a garage that got a hit record and a following, but a thought out and choreographed entertainment system.
If you read the subtitles to Megitsune メギツネ, you see that the song is all about how some women are actresses; “shape shifters” that follow a system of “seven techniques” to achieve their ultimate desires, goals, objectives… and purpose.
A female fox.
2023 07 29 07 06
HUSH – HUSH: Pentagon Orders “COMBAT PAY” For U.S. Troops – UKRAINE
The Pentagon has ordered COMBAT PAY for U.S. troops serving in . . . UKRAINE. Here’s the official memo:
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This begs the questions:
1) Why are US Troops inside Ukraine at all, AND;
2) If the only US Troops in Ukraine are “Advisors” then why Combat Pay?
(HT Personal Opinion: I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate . . . . I think the reason for this memo is that US troops ARE in combat in Ukraine and we ARE at war with Russia even though it is undeclared.)
First, my impression of Japanese upper class is that it tends to whisper.
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We spent a day in one of the hot spring bathhouses up in Hakone. At dinner everybody got drunk, and at some stage the wall to the next room was slid away and two very drunk parties became one.
In that other party there was an old geezer that seemed to have the time of his life. Rolling about on the floor, laughing and pointing his finger at us westerners. We had no problem with that, we beat him at poker and won maybe 20 yen 🙂
Next day we were extremely hung over. While waiting for our taxi, a runner came and said: “Nomura-san would like to thank you for a most successful evening yesterday and since you are going to Kyoto he asks if it is OK if he arranges for one of his friends to give you a guided tour of the city tomorrow?”
Of course we said yes and sent our thanks.
Next morning at breakfast a very old man in very traditional clothes appeared at our hotel. He was totally unassuming like David Bowie who just appeared at the front desk and mildly said, “Good morning, I am David”. But you could see from the hotel staff that he was somebody. They even started to treat us differently.
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We took the tour. It was amazing. He took us to temples and gardens that were not open to the public, and he was extremely knowledgeable. Then he asked if he would be allowed to invite us to his home for dinner.
Yes he was.
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His home was almost empty. But large. He had a large collection of original woodprints that he showed us. His wife, a very refined woman, had a degree in art history from the Sorbonne in Paris. The staff moved about like ghosts. He told us that he came from one of the really old Samurai families, but when Japan started modernizing, his family went into textiles and made a fortune.
We asked him what he did when he was not guiding westerners. He said that he collected 19th century sailing yachts. He had one in Newport, one in Monaco on the Riviera and one in Hawaii, and they all had crews that stood by in case he felt like sailing.
To this day I do not have any clue whom we met, but his friend up in Hakone that set us up was a Nomura. And they are bankers, right. Unless he was a Nomura written with different signs.
Chinese people don’t care about ancestry like Europeans do; there is no aristocracy in China, or everyone is descended from an aristocrat.
British proverb: It takes three generations to make a gentleman or aristocracy.
The Chinese have a saying, “Fu bu guo san dai”, which means wealth never survives three generations.
No hereditary aristocratic after the Zhou dynasty, interrupted by the policies of the Qin dynasty; 皇帝輪流做,明天到我家,基本是這個情況。
No hereditary power elite after the Tang Dynasty, interrupted by the imperial examination system;
No hereditary landowners after PRC statehood, interrupted by CPC land reform.
But after 1949, where was the space for the old aristocracy to survive?
Even the cadres of the CPC are not aristocrats. They went from muddy farm labourers to suits in short order, and were no aristocracy’s noble temperament at all. / 中共建政才70多年,從泥腿子洗腳上岸才幾天呀?中共領導層上一代誰不是農民出身?這麼短的時間如何產生貴族?
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China went through a Maoist communist revolution. Who calls himself a fucking aristocrat? He will be sent to the remote countryside to be re-educated by the poor peasants!
As we all know, Xi Jinping once worked as an ordinary peasant labourer in Liangjiahe Village, Yanchuan County, Shaanxi Province.
This happened last month, June 2017. I met this man.(The one on the left)
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Image source: selfie.
Know who he is? You might be thinking that he’s some random Chinese guy.
Okay, I’ll tell his name. Carl Pei.
Haven’t heard of his name anywhere right?
Okay, heard of this mobile company?
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Yes, it’s Oneplus. He’s one of the two co-founders of that company. I had met him in Bangalore, one plus experience showroom when he was traveling around for one plus 5 promotion.
One plus, being one of the best mobile company in the world, after Apple and Samsung he hasn’t made himself famous. In the generation where people become entrepreneurs to gain name and fame, this guy
has no Wikipedia page about himself
He doesn’t own a mansion. He rents an AirBNB room for a month and keeps travelling.
He doesn’t own any posh cars. Travels only in Uber.
He wears one plain black round neck t-shirt.
He was sitting like he was one among us and talking about one plus phones.
Not rude, not loud, spoke softly.
He posed with everyone who asked for a selfie.
He had also arranged for free, unlimited ice cream, (Häagen Dazs!!!!) at that event.
It was such a nice experience. 🙂
Best thing was, the next day was my birthday. 🙂
American Hedge Fund CEO Moves Entire Company to China in 2023
In today’s video we share the story of Taylor Ogan of Snow Bull Capital and why he moved his hedge fund from the US to China and is still optimistic about Chinese Innovation in 2023.
As a teenager in the late 80s there was this show on TV called Roseanne.
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(Source: ABC Television)
I watched a few episodes but had very little interest in these middle-aged (aka “OLD”) people deal with their rebellious teenagers and unending money problems. The TV family was struggling, but I didn’t think they were poor. The parents worked. They owned their house. They seemed like a normal family with a big helping of TV drama and family dysfunction. As a teenager, I thought my family was doing just fine.
My parents owned their 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a mortgage, of course. I had my own room. My brother had his own room and bathroom.
At 16, I was given my family’s beater, a Ford sedan, to drive. When the backseat caught on fire due to a faulty muffler, I used my birthday and Christmas money and my parents chipped in to buy a used Japanese sports car. It wasn’t fast but it was cool. How did my parents afford car insurance for a new teenage driver? More on that later.
I was a straight A student and had been accepted to a top in-state college. I got a mix of scholarships, grants and loans, but it didn’t matter. My parents made up any financial shortfalls and gave me $300/month allowance for food/groceries/gas which was way more than I needed. Where did they get the money? Not my problem.
30 years later, Roseanne has been rebooted (now called The Conners), and I start watching the show with more interest. Now I am now middle-aged with teenagers, but my life looks nothing like theirs. I semi-retired at 40. I’m wealthier than I ever thought possible. My kids (so far) have stayed out of trouble. They attend elite private high schools. We travel the world. I own both of my dream cars. I have no neurotic family members.
I start having flashbacks about the show’s original storyline and my own life at the time, and I realized that my childhood was closer to the Conner’s than I thought. Like the Conners, my family appeared to be middle class on the surface (i.e., homeowners with good jobs), but my parents were always struggling financially in large part because they were helping less fortunate/capable family members. My parents bought their house when I was born, and the house was the center of their financial and emotional well-being. They lived there my entire life. All important family gatherings were held there.
My mother worked as a waitress and my dad was a door-to-door salesman. His clientele were restaurant and bar patrons in rough neighborhoods. They worked a lot. They argued a lot—probably about money.
As a young child, I would accompany my mother at the diner since childcare was an issue. I sat quietly in a booth while she worked her shift. When I got older (5th grade), I walked home after school to an empty house. The key was under the doormat. I did homework and watched TV.
Unlike my kids now who have enrichment programs, private tutors, private coaches, private college counselors, and of course highly involved (borderline helicopter) parents, I did all my school work and college applications on my own.
Throughout our lives, my parents tapped into home equity to get out of financial jams. They refinanced the house to put me through college. My dad would regularly run up 6 figures of credit card debt with up to 30% interest. They refinanced the house repeatedly with mortgage rates > 10%.
My parents had very little savings and never invested a cent in stocks or mutual funds. There were no IRAs, 401Ks, etc. They were on social security and Medicare later in life.
Whenever they came into some money, they would blow it—usually by bailing out a relative in trouble, sometimes by making a bad investment. They each at some point bought a junker “dream” car that turned into a money pit. My dad bought a “classic” Mercedes and my mother bought a “classic” MG. Both were worthless.
I was on the free school lunch program, but it never occurred to me that it was income based. I just thought lunch was included.
We owned a working TV which sat on top of a non-working TV. If you’re a fan of Jeff Foxworthy, you know what that means.
I started driving when I was 16, but I didn’t know I had no insurance until I started insuring myself in college. My parents happily let me drive without insurance.
We also didn’t have any health insurance. Seeing the doctor, dentist, optometrist were on an as-needed basis. Something better be broken. Forget about preventative care except for the free eye and dental exams I received at school. I didn’t know health insurance was a societal norm until I got my first job out of college.
I got all my immunizations at the free county clinic. I also had my cavities treated for free by dental students at a local university during special “low income” days.
I was the first in my family to get braces after the school nurse identified a speech impediment due to crooked teeth. My mother actually protested, “Does a boy really need straight teeth?” I wasn’t planning to enter any beauty pageants, but I had some really gnarly teeth.
I was a good student, so I needed tools of the trade. I got 20-year-old hand me down encyclopedias for my studies. It saved me trips to the library and photocopying money. The library encyclopedias weren’t much newer.
Even though I had my own bedroom, we had a revolving door of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents living with us, sleeping in the living room for months at at time. It was not a large house; it was often full of people.
When the relatives did move out, my parents subsidized their relatives’ lifestyles. My parents paid for rent, food, cars, kids’ college expenses.
While my own life has been drama free, there was no shortage of drama around. My half-brother came to live with us when I was 10 and he was 19. He had a drinking problem early in life. He went to a “lesser” college because of a girl. They eloped and when they couldn’t make if financially, they had to move back home; this happened several times. The last time it happened, it became a permanent move, with a kid in tow. He’s doing well now, and he inherited our parents’ house.
Some family members had out-of-wedlock kids and interracial marriages (maybe not a big deal today but not as common back then). I had an aunt who married a husband who had a second family in a foreign country (she was a gullible person and easily conned). She had a kid with him, then found out she was the second wife, and he moved his first family to the US to be with them. I had another aunt who we all thought had “made it” because she married into a super wealthy family. She and her husband were kidnapped and held for ransom (and murdered).
Many aunts and uncles had mental health issues that went undiagnosed. They were known as the crazy family members, but still family. They led their lives suffering and really not knowing or understanding. They were unemployable. They might temporarily act normal but could never hold down jobs and most relationships. My parents helped them as best as they could. Ironically, they outlived my parents. and their kids support them. Their kids can support them because my parents helped support their kids.
There were a lot of arguments between my parents, siblings, in-laws, etc. Small house. lots of people, mental illness, it was inevitable. I mostly stayed out of it. Sometimes people made bone-headed choices (aka mistakes) and another family member would bail them out. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t understand it. But I accepted it.
Most of all, my parents’ dining room/kitchen looked just like the Connner’s. It was cheap looking. It was small and cluttered. It was usually filled with a large, close but sometimes dysfunctional family. The room still looks the same except the family has dispersed after my parents passed away.
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(Source: ABC Television)
It helped me immensely to grow up with some challenging circumstances and complex family dynamics but never really having the stigma of being poor. Because I lived with my less fortunate family members, I always thought I was doing all right. I grew up in a solidly middle class neighborhood and felt like I had everything my friends had (minus the Izod shirts, Member’s Only jackets and Jordache Jeans). My parents did a great job of maintaining an illusion of middle class stability while building a mountain of debt. It wasn’t until college that I began to even have a glimpse of the structural problems with my parents and their extended family. Before that, everything was just “normal” to me.
As a I started my own journey of financial obligations (e.g., student loans, car loans, credit cards, etc.) and eventual financial independence, I realized all the challenges but also missed opportunities my parents encountered. It’s heartbreaking to think the lives they could have led had they just had someone guiding them and perhaps if they had fewer relatives draining their resources. They worked hard their entire lives but enjoyed few luxuries. They were able to hold onto the house through the ups and towns, raise financially independent kids (it took my brother a bit longer), and help their family members, so that does count for something. In that sense, all our lives are better than the Conner’s since they seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of misery (even 30 years later).
I developed a strong interest in personal finance. I semi-retired at 40 due to diligent saving and investing. Although my family is much smaller, it remains central to my life. Rather than maximize income, I focus on optimizing my time. How do I make enough money while maximizing my time with my wife and kids.? My wife and I both work from home, and we’ve been present at every of one our kids’ milestones and events (e.g., sports games, talent shows, scouting, plays, etc.). We take a lot of family vacations. Other than our kids’ private schools, we keep our expenses low. Financial security has driven my choices but the display of wealth or excessive consumption is anathema to me. I strive to be financially savvy enough to avoid stupid mistakes and financially wealthy enough to survive the inevitable mishap.
China is not a dictatorship because Xi Jinping cannot make any major decisions without first discussing them with the seven-member politburo.
You have no idea about how societies collapse; it is not about wasting public money.
It is about a significant portion of the population not having ownership over any assets, such as land, so they have no interest in social stability. Most importantly, they feel that the door is closed to their owning any assets.
So they feel the only way out is to overthrow the current system.
Any Chinese citizen can apply to join the Communist Party; usually they will be rejected on the first application. Xi was rejected nine times before being accepted the tenth time.
Chuck Roast Soup
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Ingredients
1 (3 1/2 pound) chuck roast
2 (46 ounce) cans tomato juice
1 package frozen mixed vegetables
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1/2 cup okra, chopped
1/2 cup chopped parsley
Tabasco sauce to taste
Salt to taste
1 cup spaghetti, broken into small pieces
Instructions
Cut chuck roast into small pieces, removing all gristle and fat. Place in a very large pot and add all ingredients except spaghetti. Cover and simmer slowly for 3 hours.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union believed that the downtown Pentagon building was a top-secret meeting room.
They claimed this because they saw government officials entering and exiting the building at the same time through the satellite images available to them.
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They believed it only ended up discovering something completely different:
The “secret” building was a kind of hot dog kiosk for employees.
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Our Eye-Opening 24 Hours in CHINA in 2023 (has Shanghai changed?)
We visited Shanghai for the first time in 2016 and have since been there three times. However, our last visit was in 2018, and A LOT has happened since then, in the world overall but in China especially.
The battle for Osowiec Fortress
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On August 6th,1915, over 7,000 German soldiers surrounded Osowiec Fortress. The Fortress was built in the 19th century on a strategic hotspot near the river Biebrza, in what is now Poland,but back then was part of the Russian Empire.
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It was a formidable fortress, but only 900 Russian soldiers defended it against 7,000 advancing German troops. After months of trying to get the soldiers to surrender, the Germans launched a Chlorine and Bromine Gas attack against the fortress, followed by an artillery bombardment.
Since the Russian soldiers were just simple militia, they had no protection and suffered horrendous casualties from the gas. As the 7,000 thousand German troops advanced against the fort, they were met with a terrifying sight.
The hundred or so Russian troops who had survived the gas attack charged the German soldiers covered in blood and chemical burns, and coughing up bits of their melted lungs. The Chlorine gas mix with the moisture in their lungs turning it to Hydrochloric Acid.
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With bloody cloths wrapped their melting faces they charged the German soldiers. The German troops thought the dead where coming at them and ran screaming in terror. As the horrified Germans retreated they got caught in their own barbwire traps, allowing the Russians to pick them off with ease.
They didn’t manage to hold the fortress, but the remaining Russian soldiers were able to destroy the fort before retreating to safety. The battle for Osowiec Fortress was so horrific for the advancing German army, it went on to become known as the Attack of the Dead Men.
The Yanks want to get involved in the third Chinese Civil War, fine, it’s the Yanks we want to fight.
Hainan Island incident, U.S. bombs Chinese embassy in FRY …… Wait, the Chinese haven’t had a chance to get their revenge yet.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
U.S. naval, ground and air forces did participate in the 1945~1950 chinese Civil war in China.
There were U.S. naval bases in Tsingtao, Shanghai and Taiwan.
U.S. troops were stationed in Peiping, Tientsin, Tangshan, Chinwangtao, Tsingtao, Shanghai and Nanking.
The U.S. air force controlled all of China’s air space and took aerial photographs of all China’s strategic areas for military maps.
At the town of Anping near Peiping, at Chiutai near Changchun, at Tangshan and in the Eastern Shantung Peninsula, U.S. troops and other military personnel clashed with the People’s Liberation Army and on several occasions were captured.
Chennault’s air fleet took an extensive part in the chinese civil war.
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Besides transporting troops for Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S. air force bombed and sank the cruiser Chungking, which had mutinied against the Kuomintang.
All these were acts of direct participation in the war.
The Chinese civil war from 1945 to 1950 was apparently started by Chiang Kai-shek, but actually started by the United States.
As stated in Acheson’s Letter, the United States in this last war has given the Kuomintang government material aid to the value of “more than 50 percent” of the latter’s “monetary expenditures” and “furnished the Chinese armies” (meaning the Kuomintang armies) with “military supplies”.
It is a war in which the United States supplies the money and guns and Chiang Kai-shek supplies the men to fight for the United States and slaughter the Chinese people.
All these wars of aggression, together with political, economic and cultural aggression and oppression, have caused the Chinese to hate American imperialism.
Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again . . . till their doom; that is the logic of the American imperialists and all reactionaries over in dealing with the chinese people’s cause, and they will never go against this logic.
CAST AWAY ILLUSIONS, PREPARE FOR STRUGGLE!
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American Imperialism has prepared the conditions for its own doom.
This is a story about how one night in university can destroy your life forever. Danny Santulli was 18-years-old and a freshman at the University of Missouri. In October 2021, Danny was captured on CCTV being blindfolded and being led down a flight of stairs, in an event named “Pledge Dad Reveal Night.”
Danny was made to drink a litre of Vodka straight and by himself. At around 10.55, Danny collapsed and some of the frat members carried him to a sofa. At around midnight Danny was captured on CCTV sliding off the sofa and shortly after he was found unconscious with blue lips.
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Shockingly, instead of calling an ambulance for Danny the frat members piled him into a car dropping him on the way. They drove him to hospital, but at this point he was in cardiac arrest. He had to be resuscitated and spent the next 6 weeks in intensive care.
Prior to this evening Danny had been left needing stiches and crutches, after he’d been forced to climb inside a bin with broken glass inside. Two nights before the night in question, he broke down in tears on the phone to his sister and told her about how stressed he felt about the pledges.
His family had begged him to quit the pledge, but he didn’t want to be ridiculed. This is Danny now, in the picture BELOW.
He will need full time care for the rest of his life.
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Michio Kaku BREAKS DOWN Into Tears: “They Lied To Us For 92 Years!”
In a world shrouded by secrets and concealed truths, one man’s shocking revelation is changing everything we thought we knew about our universe. Prepare to witness the unraveling of a century-long deception that has kept humanity in the dark for 92 years. Dr. Michio Kaku has now exposed a breathtaking reality about the origin of our universe, one that starkly opposes the Big Bang theory. But how exactly does this discovery change our understanding of the Big Bang? And what does the discovery of this ancient galaxy mean for our understanding of the universe?
BEIJING: I moved to China in October 2010 and from the perspective of Western popular opinion that’s very absurd. Much of the West looks at China in a very negative way and they believe it odd people will stay in the country for a long time.
Most of my family and friends back in my native country are quick to post anti-China stories on their Social Media sites and they do so without confirming the veracity of the articles through me.
But that’s alright, I’ve gotten accustomed to it. Sometimes, I’ll read articles in the media about China and wonder if the author is an aspiring fiction book writer.
The basic themes are: China is collapsing, its economy is crashing, war against China is imminent and Covid has destroyed China.
But if such tales were true how did China become the world leader in attracting inbound Foreign Direct Investments? The country is on pace to lure in over US$160bn this year.
Major Wall Street and London banks and investment firms including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and HSBC have poured in huge money into China this year and they have published reports forecasting the nation’s economy will stay strong.
Hence the narrative that China’s economy will crash is just noise and nothing more. As such the other claims are proven wrong.
Wealthy bankers do not intentionally make silly investments and conduct extensive research before choosing where to invest.
The Western countries appear to have been hardest hit by the Covid pandemic so it’s very odd they see China as the nation that will crack under the public health crisis.
Let the numbers speak for themselves. The US has had hundreds of thousands of people die from Covid while only a few thousand died from the virus in China.
The virus has adversely impacting everyone’s lives and hopefully the social distancing measures and wearing face masks’ requirements can finally end next year.
The regulations are a real nuisance and not enjoying the rights to travel has bothered me a lot. Nevertheless, these restrictions will not spell the death knell for China.
The Chinese government is not on the verge of collapse either. The economy is running smoothly and social stability remains secured.
Accordingly, my opinion that China is doing fine and will continue to do so will be an unpopular viewpoint for the next few years in the West.
But I care very little about following pop culture sentiments. That’s just not who I am.
As reported by the Global Times:
“Regardless of their attitude toward China, most US and other Western elites tend to believe that China's GDP will surpass that of the US in a decade or less, and most of them also believe that the US' military and technological advantages over China will shrink further as time passes. Although many have claimed that China's stability was achieved through economic growth and controls and tried desperately to search for internal tensions in China, few Western forces believe that China would get out of control politically.”
China has endured many challenges and will prevail. People predicting the nation’s doom are just engaged in fantasy-thinking.
They don’t like China, want the country to fail and therefore concluded that will happen. But their forecasts have been proven false time and again.
A Bullied Student With Vitiligo Is Celebrating Learning To Love Her Skin By Turning It Into Art
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A bullied student with vitiligo is celebrating learning to love her skin by turning it into art making a world map, flowers and even a Van Gogh painting. Ashley Soto, 21, from Orlando in Florida, USA, has found turning her white patches of skin into art has empowered her and helped her to embrace her vitiligo.
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She was diagnosed with the condition that affects one percent of the worlds population, at the age of 12 when a porcelain spot appeared on her neck. Within a year, it had spread to 75% of her body in spots and patches.
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After being asked if she had showered in bleach the teen hid her skin beneath long jumpers and jeans to avoid further ridicule. But now, shes turning her body into art by tracing her vitiligo, making a world map and a beautiful arrangement of flowers to Vincent van Goghs The Starry Night painting.
A nerd is an individual with great intellectual capacity who does well in school, particularly in subjects like mathematics and the sciences. They may not care about socialization. “You don’t want to take that class. It’s full of nerds”.
A geek is a person with a passion for something that isn’t particularly popular with everyone and has very deep knowledge of the subject. “She’s a real anime geek”.
Geek. Loves computers and knows all about them, but no deep general knowledge. Often will wear clothing reflective of their passions. Won’t read anything outside their specialized base.
Nerds become scientists. Geeks become engineers.
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NATO failed in Ukraine against Russia. Now it’s targeting China
Pepe is the star in this show. This is a VERY GOOD discussion. Talking about Europe, and the pivot to China, and the fiasco as it stands.
Some interesting points… The Dangerous trio. HERE at 21:00.
Russians fighting one had behind their backs. HERE at 27:00.
Ukraine war entering a new stage with the Poles and Northern European Proxies. HERE.
Originally Answered: Why can’t African Countries produce cars?
This question should be rephrased to “How many African Countries produce cars?”
There are 54 countries in Africa and more than 10% of the countries manufacture cars though some of them still import engine parts and assemble them in their plants.
MOROCCO – LARAKI
Laraki, a car manufacturer based in Casablanca, Morocco The company designed and manufactured its own range of luxury performance cars and sport models. Larakis are strictly concept cars, custom-built for each customer, and were ranked among the most expensive cars in the world in 2015, priced at over $2- million each.
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Rapper French Montana shows off his Laraki car.
2. TUNISIA – Wallyscar
Competing in the lucrative off-road market, the small but powerful Wallyscar, manufactured in La Marsa, Tunisia, is a relatively new company, founded in 2006. The company is building a strong reputation for affordable, reliable and powerful 4X4s, despite the size of its vehicles, which are similar to Suzuki and Skoda.
According to reports from 2014, the company sells over 600 units a year, predominately in Africa and the Middle East, but also as far as Panama and Europe. The company’s plans include making its sporty, colourful, off-road vehicles more environmentally friendly, as well as trying its luck in international off-road motorsport
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3. UGANDA – KIIRA
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4. NIGERIA – INNOSON
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5. GHANA – KANTANKA
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When India was under British rule, there was a problem there. There were many snakes.
They were so common that it was dangerous to go out. Snakes were everywhere.
The risk of dying from the fatal bite of such a specimen was too great.
Therefore, the government decided that something needed to be done to prevent the snakes from flooding the land.
It was decided to financially reward people who brought in dead snakes. “It’s a win-win situation,” the government thought. People will get the money they need while reducing the snake population.
That went really well for a while.
Under the government’s direction, people dutifully killed snakes in exchange for handsome sums of money.
But people think for their own benefit when the situation permits.
So some enterprising minds decided to breed snakes and then kill them and collect the money for it.
Soon the government realized what these people were doing and immediately stopped the bounty program.
The people who bred the snakes for money decided that the only thing that could be done with their now worthless snakes was to set them free.
As a result, the snake population grew faster than ever before.
This snake effect now also serves as a metaphor for when one state intervenes too much and therefore causes the opposite effect.
Budget travellers can be problematic. There are two types of budget travellers. One is people like me. I don’t have big money, so when I travel I go by train or by low cost airlines, stay in cheaper B&B’s or budget hotels (occasionally in hostels), and eat one meal per day from the grocery.
, relatively wealthy first world tourists that travel to considerably poorer countries and live relying on begging from locals.
Why do countries welcome tourism? Because tourism brings money. George Clooney (or whichever rich person) visits Edinburgh flying in with an Emirates flight (and he clearly books the First Class private cabin) staying at the Balmoral hotel, eating at three Michelin stars restaurants, and visiting the city with a rented limousine: he leaves a lot of money. I fly in with Ryanair, stay in a cheapo B&B with shared bathroom, eat fixed price lunches, shop at Scotmid for dinner, mostly walk and only take a local bus if necessary. But I still bring money.
Begpackers do not bring money, rather they draw money from the local economy. A young American or European tourist visiting India and relying on begging from people that are less privileged than they are to fund their holidays isn’t a budget tourist, they are leeches!
Originally Answered: What is something you hate about the direction society is heading?
Just one thing? I’m a certified middle-aged curmudgeon. I could go on for pages about all the things that are wrong with the way society is going. But I’ll pick just one for this answer, lest I make everyone hate me.
And, ironically, that’s one of the biggest problems with society today: the inability to tell the truth for fear of offending people.
I see this all the time in education.
Before I was a teacher, I spent some time as a special education assistant for a public school in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. It was there that I first saw the lengths teachers and administrators had to go to avoid stating the obvious to a parent, lest that parent get offended and/or threaten to sue the school.
Your child has severe emotional and behavioral disorders and if you, the parent, don’t get some outside help for your kid, your kid is likely to end up in jail. Your child’s problems are beyond the abilities of the school to help at this point.
We could never say that to a parent, no matter how true it was.
I saw it even more when I became a teacher.
If a student has an attitude problem, I can’t just tell the parent, “your kid was giving me attitude.” I have to document exactly what was said, the context, why I felt it was offensive, and what I think should be done about it. Then I have to wait before I tell the parent, and re-read my documentation to make sure it doesn’t sound offensive. Most of the time, when a student is giving me attitude, I know that the student’s parents won’t do anything about it anyway, so why bother documenting it and punishing the student, when it won’t change the behavior? The student often gets that behavior from the parent in the first place.
If a student fails a test, I can’t just tell the parent it’s because their kid was not paying attention in class and spends too much time talking to the people around him and disturbing his classmates. I have to word it in such a way that I sound non-judgmental, which usually means making it sound like the problem was with the way I taught it, not the kid’s complete lack of attention while I was teaching it.
We can never blame the parents for bad parenting or the students for a lack of parental guidance at home, no matter how true it is. So I usually just end up taking the fall for a student’s and parent’s problems.
A student can come to school half-asleep and announce to the class that they went to a midnight screening of a new movie the night before, then fail that day’s assignments, and I can’t tell the parents it’s their fault for letting their kid stay up all night for a movie. That is, I can’t tell the truth.
I’ve had parents tell me that they’re afraid of taking away their child’s video games until the child gets their grades up, because they don’t want the child to be mad at them. Somehow, I’m supposed to avoid telling the truth in that situation: you’re trying to be your child’s friend, not their parent. It’s a good thing if your kid is mad at you sometimes. That’s how the system works.
A few years ago, there was a movement to weigh students in public schools and send the parents a letter if their child was overweight or obese. As a former overweight child (now overweight adult), I thought this was a good idea. Maybe some parents just don’t see it or don’t realize how bad it really is with their child.
So many parents got offended when they got the letters that some school districts quit doing them.
Imagine getting a letter from your child’s school saying that their BMI put them in the “overweight” category for their age and, instead of thinking you need to help your child get healthy, you get offended and criticize the school for telling you the truth.
The schools made a mistake: they told parents the truth about something the parents should know about. Imagine that … telling the truth. No wonder so many parents got offended.
[Honorable Mention]
Derrick Mosley, a 22-year-old man from Portland, tried to rob a gunstore with a baseball bat.
He entered the shop, smashed a glass display case and pulled a handgun from the display.
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The store manager drew his own handgun and ordered Mosley to drop his bat, the newly acquired gun, plus a knife.
He made Mosley lay on the floor, and that was where the police found him when they arrived.
He was charged with first degree robbery and unlawful possession of a firearm, according to the news release.
I guess he learned the hard way that you should never bring a bat to a gunfight.
Just how bad is it in China? If you think it’s bad in China, please watch this
If you know someone who hates China for all the wrong reasons, maybe showing them this video will help.
What was the centrepiece of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s speech? She said:
China must accept America’s demarcation of the status quo. If it does not respect the boundaries drawn for it by Washington between harmless prosperity and historically consequential technological development, then it should expect to face massive sanctions.
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What does that mean?
Obviously, it means that China must respect the division of labour in the world that the US has drawn for China. China can only be at the low end of the industrial chain, producing cheap household goods and doing some incoming assembly.
If China develops according to this international division of labour, it will be “harmless prosperity” for the United States.
This is the international order that has already formed rules.
If China wants to develop high technology, it is breaking the order and the division of labour in the world. Of course, the United States and the West want to sanction China because China is a “disruptor of the order”.
In the eyes of the Americans, the status quo of the United States and the West at the top of the “food chain”, which was formed after the WWII, is unchangeable. China is at the lower end of the “food chain”, and this is China’s destiny, which the Chinese must accept and must not challenge this order.
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Janet Yellen wasn’t the only one to say this, and Jake Sullivan’s speech put the US’s intentions in what amounted to a direct pick-me-up. He said:
In terms of global economic integration, the United States’ expectations for the stability of the global order have not been realized. The original order of the world is a pyramid structure. Developed countries and developing countries should perform their duties in this pyramid structure and get their own place. This is the stable international order and international division of labor that the United States hopes for.
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Jake Sullivan’s speech was obviously more straightforward. What he meant was that the “food chain” of the world division of labour formed after the WWII was irrevocable, and that both developed and developing countries should play their respective roles and should not try to change it.
That is to say, the financial hegemony, scientific and technological hegemony and military hegemony of the developed countries are the results of the WWII division of labour, and the production of cheap commodities by the developing countries is likewise the result of the WWII division of labour. This world economic order is unchangeable and cannot be challenged.
The speeches of Jake Sullivan and Janet Yellen actually revealed the U.S. government’s understanding of China. That is, China should accept the post-WWII international division of labour and should not challenge this order.
China is now developing the whole industrial chain, and will also invest in high technology, and will also step up investment in military construction and military equipment. These are all disruptions to the existing order, which the United States certainly cannot tolerate.
Other countries are either technologically advanced but have far fewer people than the US, or have large populations but are far less technologically advanced than the US, and they have nothing to compare with the US.
Only China has a population several times larger than the US, and the technology is still catching up, and the size of the economy is getting closer.
With an economic scale, it can support a huge and advanced army, and it will have a strong ability to export culture.
Therefore, China is indeed the only country on earth that may pose a “threat” to “America First”.
If “America First” cannot be preserved, can “Eurocentrism” or “Americacentrism” and “white supremacy” still survive? China is therefore a “threat” to the West as a whole.
But China is an opportunity for Asia. Whether Asians can be on an equal footing with Westerners depends on whether China can rise smoothly.
Gone are the days when whites were at the top of the “international caste system” and coloured people were at the bottom.
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Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup
Fall is officially here. Now is a great time to try out some hearty autumn dishes like chicken and wild rice soup. Our recipe is rich and creamy. You can serve it as an appetizer if you want, but it’s filling enough to stand on its own as an entrée. This recipe stands out from the rest because it calls for freshly roasted chicken, plenty of delicious vegetables, and a nice dollop of plain Greek Yogurt. Adding yogurt, instead of cream, for example, helps to make this soup extremely flavorful but also relatively light, calorie-wise.
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Ingredients
1 deli-roasted chicken, about 2 1/2 pounds
6 cups water
2 medium carrots, ends trimmed and cut into chunks
1 small rib celery, cut into chunks
1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 small bay leaf
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup chopped yellow onion
1/3 cup uncooked wild rice*
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup Cabot 2% Plain Greek Yogurt or Cabot Plain Greek Yogurt
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
1/4 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper, or more to taste
* You can reduce the cooking time with “quick-cooking” wild rice, which is done in about 15 minutes, or substitute another flavorful rice, such as brown basmati.
Instructions
Pull off meat from chicken, placing skin, bones and any hot or solidified juices in large saucepan. Dice 2 cups of chicken meat, saving rest for another use, and set aside in refrigerator.
Add water, carrots, celery, peppercorns and bay leaf to saucepan; bring to boil over high heat, then reduce heat to maintain simmer. Cover pan and cook broth for one hour.
Pour broth through strainer set over large bowl, pressing on solids to extract all broth. Discard solids.
Melt butter in empty saucepan. Add onions and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes or until onion is tender and just beginning to brown.
Pour in strained broth. Add wild rice, bring to simmer and cook covered for 40 to 50 minutes or until rice is tender.
In small bowl, whisk together heavy cream, yogurt and cornstarch until completely smooth with no small lumps; stir mixture into pot and continue stirring until soup thickens and returns to simmer. Add thyme, salt, pepper and 2 cups of reserved diced chicken.
Taste soup, adding additional salt and pepper if needed. Stir until heated through and serve.
Lockheed Martin, the main contractor, and manufacturer of the F-35 fifth-generation fighter, is bracing for a significant financial hit in 2023. Production issues have led to a shortfall of about 50 aircraft, which is expected to cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
The production hiccup represents over a third of the total F-35 output and exceeds the entire annual order from the U.S. Air Force, which usually stands at around 48 aircraft. Initially, Lockheed Martin had plans to deliver between 147 and 153 F-35s to all clients in 2023. However, the implementation of upgrades under the Technology Refresh 3 [TR 3] program has been fraught with significant challenges.
J-20 production is booming
News of this drastic drop in F-35 production comes amidst reports of China’s rapid expansion of its own fifth-generation fighter production, exceeding 120 aircraft per year. The F-35 and China’s J-20 are the only two fighters of their generation currently in production and deployed at the squadron level.
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Both aircraft sit at the pinnacle of aviation technology with their advanced features and sophistication. However, the J-20, a larger twin-engine fighter, is more attuned to long-range missions and air-to-air combat.
The F-35 Block 4 upgrade will elevate the internal air-to-air missile capacity of the F-35A and F-35C variants from four to six missiles. This narrows the gap with the J-20, which can reportedly carry up to eight missiles in its more spacious weapons bays. Initially, the first TR-3 F-35s were slated to enter service in April, but unforeseen obstacles have pushed this date back to December.
The F-35 program has experienced a series of setbacks, drawing criticism from both military and civilian leaders. One of the most notable issues since early 2022 has been the underperformance of the F135 engine, which has resulted in billions of dollars in additional operational costs for the American fleet alone and likely more for international operators as most F-35s are built for export.
Foreign operators have echoed these sentiments. The South Korean National Assembly’s National Defence Committee disclosed in October 2022 that the country’s F-35s had experienced 234 flaws in 18 months from January 2021 to June 2022. These included 172 incidents rendering the aircraft non-operational and 62 cases where specific missions could not be performed. Despite hopes for improvement, the first half of 2022 saw little change in these figures.
Despite these issues, the U.S. and its allies face a conundrum. There is a noticeable lack of NATO-compatible fifth-generation fighters, leaving them with limited options. Older fourth-generation fighters are likely to struggle against advanced aircraft like China’s J-20, the forthcoming FC-31 naval fighter, and even Russia’s slightly less stealthy Su-57.
Along with the much-discussed dismissal of Qin Gang as foreign minister, another important dismissal in July was Yi Gang as the 12th governor of the People’s Bank of China.
Yi Gang was widely criticized with some of the reasons being:
He was educated in the US, and his family continues to live in the US, and he was more considerate of US interests than Chinese interests;
He supported western globalist interests instead of Chinese national interests, and did not have enough awareness that the US and China are fighting a full-spectrum cold war;
He did not take advantage of the high inflation in the US to make the Chinese yuan a more powerful currency globally and instead lowered Chinese interest rates, helping the US Fed to bring more US dollars back to the US;
He missed multiple strategic opportunities by not changing more Chinese assets into gold, and did not move out of the US dollar fast enough.
Some of the criticism of Yi Gang came from Pan Gongsheng who was party secretary at the People’s Bank of China, and has now been appointed as Yi Gang’s replacement as the 13th governor of the People’s Bank of China. When Janet Yellen visited China in July, she met with Pan Gongsheng.
The likely outcome of this appointment is that Chinese currency and foreign exchange policy is likely to become more sharply aggressive, starting with the August BRICS meeting in South Africa.
In order to make a stronger impression and announcement at the BRICS meeting, where more members will be admitted, and as the most economically powerful member of BRICS, China will have to make some big moves on this front. Pan Gongsheng is likely make major moves for this major event, which all of the developing world and France are watching closely.
This didn’t happen to me, but it happened to a friend.
My friend Tony lived paycheck to paycheck in assorted jobs. He inherited $50,000 when his grandmother passed away. His friends convinced him to invest the money rather than spend it on a new car, vacations, etc., and eventually he agreed. Another friend, Jack, who worked in finance, convinced him to put the $50,000 into Cisco stock. This was back in April 2000, just before the tech bubble burst, and Cisco was at its all-time high, around $75 a share. Then the bubble burst, and the stock crashed.
Two and a half years later, we were all at a wedding of a mutual friend, and the friend who recommended Cisco was very embarrassed and apologized profusely for his recommendation.
Tony: What do you mean? Why are you sorry you made that recommendation?
Jack: Because the stock tanked right after you invested, and it’s continued to go down and down; your $50,000 investment is now probably worth $6000 or $7000. Haven’t you looked at your statements?
Tony: Sure, I’ve looked at the statements; it’s up to about $83,000! It’s doing great!
Jack: You must have misread your statement; maybe it said $8300? When was that statement?
Tony: Maybe two weeks ago, and I’m sure it said $83,000!
Jack: That’s impossible!
After the reception we all went back to Tony’s apartment and Tony pulled out his last statement, which indeed did say $83,000!
Then we saw why; Tony bought the “wrong” stock!
Jack had told him to buy Cisco (the high tech company), and Tony bought Sysco (the food distribution company); both stocks are pronounced exactly the same. While Cisco crashed, Sysco did great!
So that was a very happy ‘mistake’ that Tony made!
China has had a continuous and steady rule of the Communist Party of China
It has always been Country & Party First, Individual Next
For China the Leadership and Governance was always there. Always Strong and entirely spread across the Nation.
All it required was an Economic Transition Which Visionary leaders like Deng and later Xi Jingping have been able to fulfil to a massive extent.
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From 1931 in many cases to 2022 – for almost 91 years you have had a very strong and in general unified Political System that has never grown weak mainly due to a Unified Populace (90% Han Chinese) and an Ancient 5000 year old Civilization that was never interrupted too much.
So as i said – China just needed to make some Economic Tweaks and change from a Socialist Communist Country to a Capocracy.
Russia is much different
To begin with – the Entire Political System was overhauled – from Tsars to CPSU to Presidential Democracy to Presidential Autocracy
Already the CPSU was mainly a fractured body loaded with inefficiency and where Meritocracy was replaced by Party Loyalty and Political Relationships and even Family Backgrounds.
Now suddenly in 1991 – A Country that had never voted in the last 1000 years of its life from the Tsars to the CPSU now suddenly began to develop a democracy!!!
It resulted in the Worst form of Oligarchy where a Bunch of Oligarchs, Dolugraki Mafia etc took control of the Soviet Economy and its Resources.
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Unlike China – Putin who came in 2000 first had to consolidate the entire Political System. He started off as being a representative of the Oligarchs which is why Clinton and Bush considered him to be basically a Zelensky 1.0
However by 2007 – Putin began to emerge as one of the strongest men in Russia slowly abandoning the Oligarchs and consolidating the Military and Intelligence and building back Russia.
Today after15 years – Putin has a relatively STRONG Political Structure. Basically a Presidential Autocracy.
To build a Political Structure of such Strength and use it to build a Military Force – PUTIN had to sacrifice the Economy to the Oligarchs and use their money for building the Political and Military Strength of Russia
So Today – Russia is at Level Zero when it comes to Economy
Good News is – Russia is now in the same stage that China was in 1982 when Deng Xiaoping began his Economic Reforms.
Today Putin is in full control of Russia and is very powerful Politically and Militarily.
This is the time to begin Economic Reforms and this is also a perfect time.
He has Chinas support
He can start building Local Russian Brands and converting Military Technology to Civilian Technology
He can slowly adopt the Chinese method of Manufacture for which he can import the Skilled Labor from China and also train the people of Russia.
He can slowly crush the Oligarchs and Nationalize their Assets. I am sure that is the long term plan. Now that the Oligarchs are posion in Foreign Countries like US or UK or Canada or Australia – Putin will soon go after them and take charge of all their Assets that they got for a throwaway price in 1991–1999
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Bad News is Putin is 70 Years Old
And unlike Xi and the CPC – Putin is the Autocratic President so he needs a very strong Successor and groom him so that tomorrow the Successor (Someone of around 40–45 years) can continue Putins success and take Russia to newer Heights.
“Utterly Horrifying” Battles Along Front Lines as Russia Smashes Ukraine and their new NATO Heavy Armor
Heart-breaking scenes of dead Ukrainian soldiers and smashed/blown-up NATO Armor are emerging from the battlefields of Ukraine as the Russian Army makes minced-meat out of Ukraine’s “Counter-Offensive” despite all its shiny new NATO gear.
While this radio show and web site support Russia on the political level, there is also the human level which is part and parcel to this conflict. I candidly admit I find it heartbreaking to see such death and destruction; even when it is Ukrainian troops.
Sadly, I understand that it __has__ to be this way, but it is still just emotionally terrible to see such carnage.
I want the best outcome for the people.
Russia has at least 4 times the artillery of Ukraine and 10 times the ammunition.
We have run out of normal ammunition to send Ukraine, so now send them cluster bombs in desperation, debasing ourselves with no change to the outcome.
Ukraine should just surrender. They have no chance at all to defeat Russia; they NEVER had any chance. To continue this slaughter is just useless.
A Nice Find! A 1967 Porsche 911S Barn Find
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You know, we all dream of finding our classic dream ride in a barn somewhere. Well, recently Nick Zabrecky recently had his dreams come true, and today we get a look at his 1967 Porsche 911S Barn Find. Nick Zabrecky, of LBI Limited, found this legendary ride a friend had in his barn, where it had been parked for years.
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The ride was a bit rusty from years of sitting, and had a small dent in the rear. The ride other than that looked to be in good shape, and after negotiating a deal, Zabrecky was able to purchase the car from his friend.
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The ride can be seen in the images below, and Nick hopes to restore it one of these days. Check out the ride in the images and speak your mind on it after the jump.
People weren’t having babies and leaders feared a population collapse. The infamous dictator, Ceausescu, made a new draconian policy “Degree 770”.
It banned contraception and abortion. Schools then began evangelizing the importance of motherhood. Families began putting more pressure on women to have children.
This led to a rapid uptick in unwanted babies. Orphanages overflowed with children. Babies were being abandoned on street corners.
Years later, there was a rapid uptick in crime. Many of those children grew up without stable homes, living on the streets and in subway stations, huffing paint. They later resorted to theft, prostitution, and became ensnared in poverty.
And, in a bitter political irony, it was this very demographic that was responsible for Ceausescu’s downfall in 1989.
Beyond any talk of abortion, this moment in time speaks to the importance of people living the life they want to live. For generations, our parents and grandparents were pressured to live within narrow confines and fill the shoes their own parents left behind.
Happiness necessitates you disappoint people every now and then. Don’t let outside forces pressure you into a path that you don’t genuinely want.
If you don’t want to do something, say no.
Don’t get so caught up in pleasing people and conforming to expectations. You do you.
SAN DIEGO — The White House has decided it will bar Hong Kong’s top government official from attending a major economic summit in the United States this fall, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the matter, in the latest test of President Biden’s bid to reset relations with China.
The summit in questions is the yearly meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to which 21 Pacific Rim entities belong. China, Taiwan (Chinese Taipan) and Hong Kong are members since 1991. The location of the summit rotates through the membership entities.
Chief Executive John Lee, along with 10 other Hong Kong and Chinese officials, was placed under sanctions by Washington in 2020 after implementing a national security law, imposed by Beijing, that enabled the targeting of pro-democracy leaders, tarnished the reputation of the courts and earned international condemnation as leaders sought to silence dissent.
Lee, then Hong Kong’s security chief, was elevated last year to chief executive, handpicked by Beijing to continue what critics say is a broader campaign of repression in the once-semiautonomous city.
Let me first take issue with the description of the effects of the national security law, specifically the claim that it ‘tarnished the reputation of the courts’.
Courts do not make laws but use the law to make judgments. How then could a new law or a change of a law have tarnished the courts?
A recent judgment by the a Hong Kong court proves that the Hong Kong security law has not done that at all.
The official hymn of Hong Kong is the Chinese national anthem “March of the Volunteers”. After the riots in Hong Kong which led to the implementation of the national security law some protest backers came up with a new one called “Glory to Hong Kong”. (They probably consulted with Bandera followers who suggested ‘Slava Ukraini’ which means ‘Glory to Ukraine’.
Searching Google and some other such service for `Hong Kong national anthem’ brings up the protester hymn. This has led to some embarrassing moments when it was unintentionally played at international sport events.
Any use of the song in Hong Kong is prohibited and can lead to criminal prosecution. But the justice department in Hong Kong wanted to add a civil injunction against any one who makes the protest song available.
But a judge, hand-selected by Lee for national security issues, took the new law down:
A Hong Kong court has dismissed the justice secretary’s request to ban the promotion of a protest song popular during the 2019 anti-government unrest, questioning the effectiveness of the move.
In blocking the injunction bid, the High Court on Friday said the publication and distribution of “Glory to Hong Kong” was already punishable under existing laws, adding a ban might not compel internet search giant Google and other technology firms to take down the tune. … Justice minister Paul Lam Ting-kwok lodged the application last month in a bid to bar anyone from promoting the protest tune through “broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing in any way”.
Authorities believed the ban could provide greater leverage in demanding that internet service providers remove content related to the song.
But Mr Justice Anthony Chan Kin-keung said in his 30-page judgment that the government’s expectations were misplaced. … While acknowledging Lee’s view that the song would undermine national security if it were allowed to spread further, Chan rejected the argument that the court should defer to the executive branch on the merits of the intended ban just because it related to the country’s safety.
“It is too sweeping a statement,” he said. “Here, the court is asked to exercise its exceptional powers which affect innocent third parties. The court cannot abdicate its responsibilities.”
Chan pointed to the city’s “extensive and robust” criminal law system in questioning the effectiveness of a civil injunction in deterring offences.
Now again, has the new national security law in Hong Kong really ‘tarnished the reputation of the courts’?
To me its seems it has not. In fact the court ruled against a misuse of the ‘national security’ argument in much sharper form than U.S. courts would probably do.
It was the Washington Post which, by making the claim, actually tried to ‘tarnish the reputation of the courts’ in Hong Kong.
That Chief Executive John Lee was put under U.S. sanction is one of the typical abuses U.S. foreign policies create. It is also not the real reason for keeping him away from the APEC summit.
The snub by the United States, which in November will host the annual summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders in San Francisco, comes in the midst of a tenuous thaw in the two powers’ frosty bilateral relationship. It could, some analysts say, induce Chinese leader Xi Jinping to skip the APEC summit — where a meeting with Biden has been anticipated.
If Biden, as the Washington Post‘s opening claimed, really has made a bid to reset relations with China, he would not have taken such a step. One does not try to find better relations by constantly acting against the interests of the other side.
To keep Lee away from the summit is one of the typical kindergarten moves the Biden administration is becoming famous for. The cumulation of such moves under Blinken and Biden has created a strong block of countries that stand united in opposition to U.S. policies and to a large number of the rest of the world developing more sympathy for them.
As Kishore Mahbubani once told his listeners during a speech in Harvard:
The era of western domination of world history was a 200 year aberration, it’s coming to an end.
As a result of that you’ve got to learn to understand non-western perspectives in the world.”
“As someone who travels to 30, 40 countries a year, when I come to the US and I go to my hotel room and turn on the TV, I feel like I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world.
The insularity of the American discourse is actually frightening …
It is time for the U.S. to grow up.
Posted by b on July 29, 2023 at 16:21 UTC | Permalink
My (at the time) 75 yr old grandfather, ex Mustang, Spitfire and Typhoon pilot and post war paratrooper was living in a small market town in East Anglia. The house was a nice bungalow backing onto the golf course where he played. He was an imposing figure having boxed and played rugby in his youth and he had seen and experienced things during the war that no man or woman should ever see. So, when he came home from the golf club and found two heroin addled junkie burglars in his hallway, he wasn’t about to be intimidated. Over Sunday lunch a couple of days later he described punching one in the face, breaking his nose. He then grabbed his sword from the umbrella stand and chased the other one out of the front door and down the street. He returned to literally kick the other one out of the house and down the garden path.
When the police attended they were able to identify the burglars from DNA due to the blood that they had left behind.
My grandfather was commended for his help in catching and convicting the aforementioned scumbags but was also given some friendly advice concerning his attempts to run through one of them with his sword!
He died a few years later and I miss him every day.
Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons
The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.
Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.
Morimura’s book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.
Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:
At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.
Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.
The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.
“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”
Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.
When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:
The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.
There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.
The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’ were true or false.
The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.
The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:
However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.
It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:
The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.
The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.
40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have …
The U.S. military used the knowledge gained from Unit 731 to developed a number of biological weapons and to test them, allegedly also on humans. It even used those weapons, like Unit 731, during the war against North Korea and China.
As Jeffrey Kaye, who has long studied the case, writes:
The story that follows documents what seems like an unsuccessful attempt by Air Force flyers to tip off the press and government officials to the secret U.S germ warfare campaign then underway in Korea and Northeast China. This attempt at military whistleblowing allows for a wider consideration today of the evidence surrounding the germ warfare charges, especially how the bioattacks were organized.
By repeating the U.S. government false claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’, by not correcting it and by repeating false U.S. statements which accuse the Japanese government of hindering the war crime trials, the Washington Post is covering up the U.S. war crimes that were based on the experiments Unit 731 had made.
Posted by b on July 28, 2023 at 16:45 UTC | Permalink
Once, while in high school, I went to a store in my small town to buy a gallon of milk for my family. I paid the cashier with a $5 bill but she somehow gave me change for a $20.
I didn’t notice her mistake until I was almost home- I had too much money. I told my Mom that I was going to return it to the store. When I walked in the store, the cashier was not at her place so I went to the back and talked to a man in the meat market area (it was a small business not a chain store like we have nowadays).
I told him I had received too much money in change. He looked at me with a look like “WOW”. He then said, “You are an honest young man, aren’t you?”
I told him that I would have felt like I was stealing if I didn’t return the extra money.
Come to find out that he was the owner of the store. He thanked me and said he would not forget about my honesty.
Well, three years passed and I needed a job. I went in to fill out an application for a job at the same store. When I asked for an application at the front counter, the owner came out of the meat market area and asked if he could help me with anything. I asked him for a job application. He said, “You are hired. Can you start tomorrow?”
Now it was my turn to have a “WOW” look on my face. He told me that he remembered me from when I had returned the extra money.
So…by me not keeping $17 three years earlier, I made way more money for three years while I went to work there after high school.
He also trained me to be a butcher, too.
It does pay to be honest.
This is a true story that I told my kids (and every sports player I coached) as they grew up.
Scarlet Street (1945) Film-Noir | Fritz Lang | Full Movie | Colorized HD Quality
Todays treat. Full length film noir.
The things she does to men can end only one way - in murder! When a man in mid-life crisis befriends a young woman, her venal fiancé persuades her to con him out of the fortune they mistakenly assume he possesses.
Right now, the world is scarred, and embroiled in a puss-like situation. It’s festering with maggots and slime. It is pulsating, with pustules, and is very painful.
We cannot make out what is going on as the pain is excruciating.
But over time, maybe soon, a scab will form.
And once the scab is removed, we will get to see what the world really looks like. My guess is that it will be much different than what we have known and our lives… all of our lives will be forever changed.
…
I had a vision.
Quod Licet Iovi …
The BBC reported on August 22, 2022:
Taiwan: Two US warships sail through strait
Two US warships are passing through the Taiwan Strait, the US Navy has announced.
...
Washington says its two guided-missile cruisers - the USS Antietam and the USS Chancellorsville - are demonstrating freedom of navigation through international waters.
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Beijing views such actions as provocative and maintains that the island of Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory.
On Sunday, its military said it was monitoring the two vessels' progress, maintaining a high alert, and was ready to defeat any provocation, Reuters news agency reports.
The US Navy said in a statement that the transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrated the "United States' commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific".
The WSJ on August 6, 2023:
Russia and China Sent Large Naval Patrol Near Alaska
A combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska last week in what U.S. experts said appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach American shores.
Eleven Russian and Chinese ships steamed close to the Aleutian Islands, according to U.S. officials. The ships, which never entered U.S. territorial waters and have since left, were shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft.
“It is a historical first,” said Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a retired Navy captain. “Given the context of the war in Ukraine and tensions around Taiwan, this move is highly provocative.”
...
Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the patrol was a reminder that the U.S. has entered “a new era of authoritarian aggression” and applauded the robust U.S. response.
I put a two pound tin of it in hot water to soften before use, and thought I had cracked the lid open. Apparently not.
Ten minutes later, with an impressive bang, the pressure opened the lid, and most of the tin sprayed itself all over the kitchen. Walls, cupboards, ceiling, lights, the lot. It took weeks to get properly clean, and I had to repaint.
I repeat fifty nuclear weapons that can destroy Tokyo, Kyoto, Sydney, Melbourne and allegedly even Honolulu
They have hacking skills that even Israelis fear
How do you think they became a Nuclear Power? How do you think they remain a Nuclear Power? How do you think they sustain themselves financially and trade wise given they are cut off from the entire civilized world?
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CHINA!!
They played the Bishops Gambit with North Korea & you seriously seem to believe that sending F-16s to Taiwan would lead them to retaliate?
It’s nothing bigger than moving a pawn
You seriously think the Chinese are 1% worried or nervous about weapons being sent to Taiwan or Japan?
This is a Country that literally provided Nukes to North Korea to create the largest strategic chess move on the Pacific Sea
What the US are doing – Sending Pelosi, McCarthy to Taiwan, giving weapons to Taiwan etc are all petty stuff of zero strategic significance
China meanwhile has two fully armed Nuclear Allies in Asia and under the nose of the US ensured that North Korea got nukes
So dont believe the Chinese protests
The Chinese have done things of the highest strategic significance and something infinitely more dangerous than 20 Air Bases Or F-16s by the US
So why would they ever retaliate?
They like to pretend to be offended and pretend how US is dangerously doing stuff when in reality, China ensured a country is given an arsenal capable of liquidating 6 Million people
And every Idiot thinks US is the strategic player
In reality with North Korea, China won the game a long time ago.
In the picture above is Cameron Herrin, and this is the moment a Judge sentenced him to 24 -years in prison. 18-year-old Cameron Herrin, lived in Tampa, Florida, and in 2018, graduated high school and was gifted a black Ford Mustang from his parents to congratulate him on graduating.
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On May 23rd, Cameron and his brother Tristan had gone to the gym and while there bumped into a friend named John Barrineau, and it was there the three decided to go for a drive. Cameron and Tristian was in the Mustang, while John took his own car. As they approached street lights both cars were side by side, and both goaded each other into a street race.
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As they sped down the residential street, both cars had reached over 100 miles an hour in a attempt to keep up with each other. At the same time, Jessica and and her young daughter Lilia were crossing the road as the cars came hurtling towards them. Unfortunately for this young mother and and her baby daughter, the cars were going too fast to make it to the other side of the road, and the black Ford Mustang slammed into them.
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At he same time Jessica’s husband David Robonel, happened to be driving past in his own car, not realising what had just occurred. He noticed a big crowd of people gathering to see the carnage, but he just wanted to get home and hoped no one was badly hurt. David then tried to call his wife, but she wasn’t answering and when he went home she wasn’t there either. He figured his wife must have stopped to see the accident, so went to look for them there.
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Once he got there it didn’t take him long to realise what he was looking at. HIs wife and the babies stroller was right there in the middle of the street and it was that moment his world came crashing down on him. His wife Jessica passed away the same day and his daughter Lilia passed the following day, after doctors fought to save her.
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Right away Cameron and John were arrested and charged with vehicular homicide. John Barrineau took a plea deal and was given 6-years in prison and 15-years probation. Cameron took an open plea, but to his surprise he was given 24 years in prison. His family were shocked at this verdict and many people believed it was to harsh a punishment.
Actions have consequences and in this case the consequences were dire for David who had his whole family wiped out in a blink of an eye. We could take into account the fact Cameron parents gave their son a powerful sportscar, at 18, your still a kid, and if he wasn’t going to kill someone, he would have killed himself.
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When the Judge was sentenced him he had to take in the mitigating factors, had Cameron no history of dangerous driving the sentence would have been much different. Had it not been a mother and her young daughter, with a father sitting in the gallery contemplating were his life goes after the trial is over, then the sentence would have been different.
What punishment would have been fitting here? He will be classed as a non-violent inmate and when his parole hearing comes around after 7-years (I’m not sure how the parole system works in America, so I’m guessing) he will more than likely walk, his friend John will be out in about 3 years.
China Declares It Will Hit The U.S Hard Against The CURBS!
2023 08 07 19 00
https://youtu.be/uAStM1gOpjQ
Ukraine Declares “Military Threat to Navigation” Against Russian Ports; Poland, Lithuania, Latvia Moving Troops Toward Belarus and Kaliningrad. Blockade to Begin?
For the first time in modern history, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia are simultaneously moving military forces to the borders with Belarus and Russia. Local observers say a land blockade of Kaliningrad and Belarus is taking shape. This comes just hours after Ukraine publicly declared a “Military Threat against Navigation” for the Russian ports of Anapa, Novorossiysk, Gelendzhik, Tuapse, Sochi, and Taman.
All three countries seem to be clearly preparing for a total land blockade of Belarus and by extension the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Beginning to look like the start of WWII with what happened with the enclave Dantzig; only this time, the Suwalki Gap may be the tripwire.
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Below from the Latvian city of Ludza, through which, allegedly, the transfer of military equipment to the border with Belarus is taking place:
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Meanwhile, inside Belarus, elements from the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) send “Greetings from the Poland Border.”
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Meanwhile, in Germany, the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall this week marked the construction launch of a new factory in the western town of Weeze that will produce fuselage sections for the F-35 stealth combat aircraft.
The premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst, took part in a ground-breaking ceremony at the construction site, saying that “a highly modern factory is to be built here that will guarantee good jobs for decades.”
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Rheinmetall is a partner of the US company Lockheed Martin, which makes the F-35 together with Northrop Grumman, another US firm.
The factory, which is estimated to cost €200 million ($219 million) and will have an area of some 60,000 square meters (645,835 square feet), is to go into operation in 2025 – unless the war breaks-out and Russia smashes it with hypersonic missiles, as seems VERY likely to anyone capable of actually thinking.
Its up to 450 workers will produce the fuselage parts for at least 400 of the aircraft, 35 of which are earmarked for use by Germany’s armed forces at a cost of €8.3 billion. Those aircraft are being purchased as part of the €100 billion package agreed by the government last year to upgrade the country’s military.
This announced planning should give readers a much better view of how current hostilities are viewed by the bigshots: They seem to be planning that the war that’s coming will literally last YEARS.
If any of us thought the troubles between Ukraine and Russia would remain a limited conflict, clearly that belief was incorrect. Very much military hardware is actively moving this morning and, day-by-day, it seems clear that an actual World War 3 is shaping up.
Get right with God.
Browned Butter Spaghetti with Mizithra
I used to love to go to the Spaghetti Factory for this. It’s so delicious! Mizithra is a great Greek cheese.
spaghetti browned butter
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 cup butter
Cooked spaghetti, drained
1 cup Mizithra cheese, grated
Parsley, chopped (optional)
Instructions
Cut butter into tablespoon-size pieces and place in a 2 quart sauce pan. Place the pan of butter on a burner on medium heat. Bring butter to a slow boil (about 5 minutes).
When the butter begins to boil, stir constantly to prevent residue from sticking to the bottom of the pan. As the butter cooks, it will start to foam and rise. Continue stirring, otherwise the butter foam could overflow (about 5 minutes) and catch fire.
When the butter stops foaming and rising, cook until amber in color (about 1 to 2 minutes). It will have a pleasant caramel aroma.
Turn off the heat and remove pan from burner. Let the sediment settle to the bottom of the pan for a few minutes.
Pour the brown butter through a strainer into a small bowl. Do not disturb the residue at the bottom of the pan.
The brown butter can be stored in the refrigerator and reheated in a microwave as needed.
Boil the pasta of choice until al dente.
Drain pasta and divide into four servings.
Sprinkle 1/4 cup Mizithra cheese over each pasta serving.
Top with 1/4 cup hot brown butter.
Old Folks
2023 08 07 11 44
San Jose Is The Most Empty City I’ve Ever Seen | Theres Literally 0 People
A multi-multi millionaire and I were driving home after a poker game. We stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The millionaire asked to speak to the manager. When he came over he asked him what do you do with the chicken when you close? The manager said, well when we close in 20 minutes we have to throw it out. The millionaire said that we shouldn’t pay full price for what you’re throwing away, why don’t you let us have it for a third the price? The 2 of them spent 8 minutes bargaining and finally agreed on half price. When we got to the car my companion said that since he bargained the manager down, I should pay for it. I said that since I was driving him home he should pay. He looked disgusted, but eventually agreed.
Turns out my gut was wrong, in this scenario. I was closing up a coffeeshop by myself in downtown Seattle, was probably around 10:30 PM and in the winter so pitch black outside. We had a regular who always seemed nice, he was maybe 60something and was always wearing the same MIA-POW Vietnam vet hat and jacket, long grey hair, beard, the works. I tried to make it clearer and clearer that I was closing up (ie LEAVE!) but he just sat there, and kept looking at me with kind of an intense look. I started getting more and more nervous; he was a big dude. Finally he came up to the counter and I can’t lie, I was wondering what the hell he was trying to pull. He just said “I saw someone go into the bathroom, and they never came out. I really don’t want to leave you here until I know you’ll be OK. I will wait outside if you want but that’s why I’m still here”. I still wasn’t sure if he was screwing with me or what, so I went and tried to open the (locked) bathroom door. No answer. We used to get junkies shooting up, or people would just forget and lock the key inside, so I wasn’t really worried. I knock multiple times and ask if there is someone in there, no response. Then, on a whim I say “I just called the cops”…a dude BURSTS out of the door covering his face with his jacket and books it onto the street outside. I am standing there flabbergasted as this dude was pretty clearly waiting in there until I closed the shop, hopefully just to rob us but who knows. Needless to say the Vietnam vet did not ever pay for his tea from me or any other employee as long as I worked there. I still think of him as a guardian angel and hope he is doing well and happy. So, for once I’m glad I *didn’t* trust my gut
***EDIT #2***
He did not leave until I did, I had to ask him to wait outside as that was company policy when we cashed out the register, but he damn well stayed outside until I left, and even offered to escort me to my bus stop. He is a damn angel on earth.
***EDIT***: Thank everyone for your heartfelt responses. I agree, this man was and is a hero. I am not a hawk by any stretch (I’m a big ol’ anti-war peacenik), but our veterans don’t necessarily get the support they should. If you want to donate to a veteran’s charity the following are supposedly very high quality
The recent coup in Niger has left the United States in the lurch, relegating the more than 1,000 troops stationed in the African country to U.S. bases.
A pan-African response to Western (American led) colonialism.
2023 08 07 11 17
Yes, to the multiple American military bases located in Niger, which are ostensibly being used to “fight terrorism” but in fact are just another arm of U.S. military power that stretch to nearly every corner of the globe.
They normally think 1001 times before making such a decision because they don’t want to be caught flat like the USA or EU who make all decisions in a hurry and are usually left holding nothing and end up embarrassed
All that China is doing is simply saying
2023 08 07 11 34
Look. I took on Rare Earth processing because you decided it was too unprofitable and too messy and too unsafe for your water and your environment
I extract rare earths and process them at a profit of $ 3.95 a ton so that you guys can make your EVs at a 36% —54% profit
Now, I feel with the way you guys are treating me and harrassing me. I won’t clutter my environment and affect my people for you anymore
It’s not worth the $ 3.95 a Ton profit
I can rather use it for my domestic industries in greater quantity
I can reduce my rare earth processing and save my environment
I can sell you rare earths at $ 21 profit per Ton because I know you will process them at $ 26.50 a ton LOSS if you directly process rare earths
Its not retaliation
It’s REFLECTION
Why should China keep cluttering its environment and soil just to keep EU and US and Australia clean and pristine in their switch to EVs when these nations are so hostile to China to all the time
Is this a Blow?
Yep
A quota may be established where a maximum of 40,000 battery packs will be exported a year from China
Today it’s almost 180,000
So that’s a 70% -75% cut in the supply chain
For at least the next 10 —15 years until the production is met elsewhere , EVs made outside China and friendly nations like Russia will be throttled badly
Yet here is the silver lining
China has no issues if you keep making EVs in China and exporting them. No issues at all.
This is to protect Chinese EVs from the same trade threats as Chinese Chips at a later date
Tomorrow if EU bans Chinese EVs like they banned Huawei then China will cut all EV rare earths and throttle their EV industry for at least 2 Decades
That will keep China dominant in EV technology and a leading player
China was caught on the wrong foot for 5G and Huawei
Now China is taking precautions with its EV dominance
Gonzalo Lira ARRESTED Before Hungary Border Per Mark Slebota Journalist. BREAKING IF TRUE?
The power of these so-called internet influencers was shown in full force.
21-year-old Kai Cenat is arguably the biggest black internet influencer today. He’s largely famous on Twitch, a streaming platform.
He doesn’t make music; he plays no instruments, he doesn’t act; he has no apparent talents, and he had zero prior connection to the entertainment industry. He’s funny, he had access to the internet. That’s how he became famous.
Good on him. Life’s hard, a young man’s gotta make bread however he can.
One of the reasons why he has a huge following is that he maintains a good relationship with his fans, for instance, he does regular giveaways.
He had told them he was going to give away 300 PS5s, a largely sought-after gaming console, on Friday at NYC’s Union Square park.
Guess how many people turned up?
Around 2000 people, mostly teenagers and young adults, the perfect age group for a wild riot.
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The majority of them couldn’t get close to Kai. Just to see him, they climbed cars and the train station entrance’s roof.
Eventually, they became rowdy. The mass held up traffic. They threw bottles, rocks, lit fireworks, fought with police, damaged cars.
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Police slowly dispersed the crowd and arrested over 60 people, half of whom were minors.
No deaths, no serious casualties.
Kai did not notify the city before hosting such a huge event. He was taken into police custody, charged with inciting a riot, and released a few hours later.
The First Real Images Of Mercury – What We Found?
2023 08 07 11 22
ASEAN-China Week kicks off, reaffirming cooperation and closer ties
‘Track II diplomacy’ helps in breaking down barriers, leaving less room for third parties to sow discord
By Wang Qi in Fuzhou Published: Aug 06, 2023 11:18 PM
China and ASEAN reaffirmed the importance of solidarity and cooperation in the face of challenges and vowed closer and stronger ties in the future as the first ASEAN-China Week 2023 unfolded in East China’s Fuzhou on Friday, two days before ASEAN Day 2023, the organization’s 56th birthday.
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The event is co-hosted by the ASEAN-China Center (ACC) and the Foreign Affairs Office of the Fujian Provincial Government and Fuzhou Municipal Government. Over 300 senior government officials, diplomatic envoys, entrepreneurs and think tank experts from ASEAN and China attended the event that will last until August 11.
During the main themed forum on a “Forward-looking ASEAN-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in the New Era,” representatives of both China and ASEAN countries stressed the importance of regional peace and stability.
During the ASEAN-China (Fujian) Forum on Trade and Investment Cooperation on Sunday afternoon, three public service platforms under the China-Indonesia “Two Countries, Twin Parks” were unveiled. Strategic cooperation framework agreements for nine projects under “Two Countries, Twin Parks” were also signed.
Sessions like a gourmet carnival, ASEAN film week and an ASEAN-China symphony concert were held during on opening day. The Shangri-La Hotel in Fuzhou offered food from ASEAN countries and China for participants to enjoy, with majority of whom used chopsticks instead of knives and forks, while films from ASEAN nations were introduced on a huge screen.
Despite the complexities in the international situation, ASEAN has successfully managed to maintain peace and stability of the region and sustain good growth momentum, Shi Zhongjun, Secretary-General of the ASEAN-China Center, said in his opening speech on Sunday.
Shi said that ASEAN is one of the most dynamic regions and is leading the post-pandemic recovery of the world. The success of ASEAN “lies in its right choice of progress over regression, cooperation over confrontation and openness over isolation… [it] lies in its adhering to solidarity and independence, in its cherishing peace and development.”
The year 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of China’s accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), and the 10th anniversary of an initiative for China to work with ASEAN countries for a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and for a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future.
Ambassador of Thailand to China Arthayudh Srisamoot hailed the ASEAN-China Week’s role in creating more knowledge and understandings about ASEAN culture, as the Chinese public will have an opportunity to learn about ASEAN, products and meet new people through the event.
2023 also marks the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Ambassador Srisamoot hailed the initiative’s role in fostering connectivity between nations.
The free flow of Thai exports has enjoyed very good market access in China… the BRI provides an ideal neighboring environment for the two countries to cooperate, not only in transportation, logistics, but also in people-to-people exchanges of culture and youth between two nations, the ambassador told the Global Times.
Ong Tee Keat, senior fellow with the Taihe Institute and chairman of Malaysia-based think tank the Center for New Inclusive Asia, told the Global Times on Sunday that since the relationship between China and ASEAN has been upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership, it becomes more necessary to develop all-round and multi-dimensional relations.
Non-political sessions during the event seek to break down barriers between the people to avoid unnecessary suspicion, just in case a third party sows discord and inciting populism when there’s misunderstanding, Ong said.
Ong is former deputy speaker of Malaysia’s lower house of parliament, Malaysian transport minister and president of the Malaysian Chinese Association. He believes that the “Track II diplomacy,” which stresses people-to-people and cultural exchanges and non-official contact, is crucial for China to deepen ties with ASEAN.
ASEAN-China Week, which came after the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting held in Jakarta in July, is viewed as an important event to promote other China-ASEAN exchanges in the second half of 2023.
The 2023 ASEAN-China Summit is scheduled to be held in September, followed by the 20th China-ASEAN Expo and China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit. The APEC Summit in November will be also attended by ASEAN nations and China.
Benito Gosiaco Techico, special envoy of Philippines president to China for trade, investment and tourism, told the Global Times on Sunday that Manila is looking forward to more investment collaboration with China, particularly in the field of agriculture, information, technology, tourism, manufacturing and renewable energy.
“The prospect is definitely positive,” he added.
ASEAN has been China’s largest trading partner for three consecutive years. In the first half of 2023, trade with ASEAN countries accounted for 15.3 percent of China’s total trade, reaching 3.08 trillion yuan ($428.96 billion), up 5.4 percent from 2022.
Carne Adovada
This is a wonderful filling for burritos or simply great served over rice with the resulting gravy. For better flavor, prepare a day ahead.
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Ingredients
1 tablespoon shortening
4 garlic cloves, minced
8 ounces (about 25) whole dried New Mexican red chile pods
4 cups warm water
2 tablespoons diced yellow onion
1 tablespoon crushed chile pequin
1 teaspoon granulated garlic powder
1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
1/2 teaspoon crumbled dried Mexican oregano
3 pounds thick boneless shoulder pork chops
Instructions
Heat shortening in a Dutch oven, and sauté garlic until browned.
Remove the seeds and stems from the chile pods. Rinse chiles in large mixing bowl and drain.
Place moistened chiles on baking sheet and toast carefully in the oven for 5 minutes. They do not need to be completely dried out.
Remove from the oven then let cool.
Add half of the chiles into a blender, and puree with 2 cups warm water. Pour into Dutch oven with previously browned garlic and repeat with the other half of the chiles.
Add the remaining ingredients to the chile (garlic salt, oregano, onion, chile pequin)and let boil on a medium-high heat for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The sauce will thicken but should remain a little soupy.
Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.
Remove the fat from the pork and cut the meat into 3/4 inch cubes. Stir pork into the chile sauce and let marinate overnight in the refrigerator.
The following day, heat oven to 300 degrees F. Use butter to coat large baking dish, so it doesn’t stick.
Add the marinated carne adovada with sauce into baking dish. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 3 hours, stirring once at an hour and a half into baking. At 2 1/2 hours, remove foil (to thicken sauce).
They cannot afford to maintain it and they cannot afford the aircraft for it. It serves no purpose other than to be the world’s most expensive royal yacht. In fact, nobody understands why they wanted an aircraft carrier to begin with since Thailand has no need for overseas force projection. It is the ultimate example of a white elephant.
To conclude, Thailand has too many aircraft carriers, because even just one is too many for them.
It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the Ukraine project. Predictions and projections didn’t pan out and the West doesn’t seem to know what to do. The Russian economy wasn’t a house of cards as predicted, Russian weapons weren’t inferior as predicted, Russian soldiers and commanders weren’t incompetent as predicted, and Russian technology wasn’t inferior as predicted.
In some respects the Russians even seem to be superior to the West. Their weapons are effective and in many cases outright technologically superior, as clearly demonstrated by their hypersonic missiles, SAM systems and electronic warfare systems. Their economy appears to be surprisingly advanced and diversified and based on real wealth creation rather than financialization and debt like the West’s. Their strategic and tactical thinking also seems to work, while the West‘s clearly doesn‘t.
The whole mess is often explained as a result of a miscalculation by the western elites – they underestimated Russia and overestimated the West. The situation, however, is far worse than that. Every day that passes reveals the impotence of the West more and more and the situation is becoming outright humiliating. At this point the rest of the world either shakes their heads or simply laughs at the West and its politicians and diplomats – not to mention its crazed populations.
The dysfunction of the West is far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It’s absolutely everywhere. The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal. The West’s control mechanisms over the rest of the world are also crumbling, including the dollar, sanctions, color revolutions, military interventions and threats. Nothing seems to work and everything the West does seems to make things worse.
Any rational person upon hearing a western leader, diplomat or “expert” speak, asks himself this question: “Are they just lying or are they really this incompetent and delusional?” The answer is “both” but the incompetence factor is far greater than most people can imagine.
Why has this happened? It’s clear that the cause is far deeper than the deindustrialization of the West or economic problems in general. The economy doesn’t explain the incredible incompetence shown by the West before and during the war in Ukraine.
I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.
Human capital and its properties
The current ideologically-based power structure of the West outright requires that certain types of people be in positions of influence and certain types of people be sidelined. This applies to all steps of the social ladder; from kindergarten teachers to university teachers and corporate executives, and all the way up to the leaders of society itself. This has been progressing steadily for the last five decades or so, and has resulted in a major structural problem for the West. That problem is the obvious and massive degradation and misallocation of human capital in the West.
Human capital can be described as the quality of a company’s or nation’s workforce, or more specifically how competent the employee pool is – how well they are trained, how quickly they can be trained, how they are educated in general, and how they make decisions. In order to understand what competence really means, let’s define it further.
Competence can be described as specific or general. This distinction is extremely important and must be understood by anyone who attempts to manage human capital on a small or large scale.
Specific competence is the ability to do a certain type of work. This can be carpentry, coding, chemistry, medicine, piloting an airliner, and so on and so forth. Some of these types of jobs may require a lot of competence, training and intelligence, but what they have in common is that their scope is limited and clearly defined. They exist within clear boundaries, separate from the complexities and vagueness of the world in general. Each type of work requires certain abilities innate in the person, as well as varying degrees of training. People, of course, differ a lot in their level of specific competence within each field.
General or high-level competence is the ability to do work that is beyond clearly defined boundaries. The subject matter of those types of work exists in a complex “variable universe” and can be exceedingly vague and confusing. It requires the ability to be adaptive and be able to transfer skills between different types of work. This also applies to expertise in one field being applied to a completely different field – such as applying psychology to economics or astrophysics to climate science.
Examples of positions requiring general or high-level competence people are corporate executives, all kinds of planners and administrators, product developers, inventors, high-level consultants and analysts, military leaders and planners, diplomats, judges, political leaders, and high-level scientists and theoreticians, to name a few.
Specific and general competence types of work are not two separate things. Types of work or “jobs” can be said to range from almost completely specific up to almost completely general. Almost all types of work have elements of both but in varying proportions. To illustrate this I will take an example from a company I’m personally familiar with. This is a software company with several owners, most of whom work at the company. One of the owners is an exceptionally competent database specialist. However, when he contributes to decision making for the company as a whole, he becomes an outright problem. The management structure of the company had to be “modified” to neutralize him in that role, as well as a few others. This employee has exceptional specific competence but very poor general competence. He cannot “transfer” his specific database competence over to competence in moving the company into the future. He simply cannot operate objectively or sensibly outside his database job.
So what makes this employee have such poor general competence – or more specifically – what is general competence? General competence requires three necessary conditions: a) High general intelligence or IQ, b) the ability to be objective, even in situations where the result of your conclusions may not be to your liking, and c) the ability to reach conclusions without being influenced by others (i.e. independent thinking). The latter two conditions are a direct result of how the human brain interacts with the environment. The mechanism behind it is too complicated to describe here, but in simplistic terms it can be said that humans range in their relationship with reality from the emotional-outward/subjective to the introspective/objective. This variable, like all evolutionary traits, including IQ, is normally distributed. This has rather disturbing implications which may be difficult for some people to understand.
Let’s first look at IQ, or general intelligence. In order to be able to deal with seriously complicated work or get through a real university program, an IQ of about 125 is necessary. Only about 5% of the population in the West has this IQ or higher. This means that the pool of potentially high-level competence people is very small to begin with. Even if we use a cut-off of an IQ of 115, which is sufficient for most semi-complicated work, the potential pool only goes up to 16% of the population.
Now let’s take a look at the other variables, i.e. objectivity and independent thinking. Those two are correlated and we will, for the sale of convenience, handle them as the same variable or trait, even though they aren’t. They are normally distributed, much like IQ, with most in the middle and fewer toward the extremes in both directions. On one side of the distribution are people who, to state it bluntly, are incapable of thinking objectively about any issues that may interact with their personal views about anything at all. They can be competent in a limited field which is “neutral” to them (such as databases), but not involving anything else. They can’t run a company in a competitive environment, except into the ground. They can’t run a city, a country, a military campaign, an economy, or anything requiring general competence, except into the ground, regardless of their intelligence. These people are clearly not suitable for general/high-level competence jobs.
So, what is the proportion of the population that is objective enough and independent thinkers enough to be suitable for those jobs? That’s difficult to determine but it’s clear that it is maximum 50% of the population. In reality it’s far less but let’s be generous and say it’s 30%. What does that mean?
IQ and objectivity/independent thinking are somewhat correlated but let’s assume they are not. Let’s say that we have a pool of potentially objective and rational people that is 30% and a pool of people with IQ of 125 that is 5%. That means that the pool of high-level general competence people is 5% of 30%, or 1.5% of the population.
If we are really generous and assume that 50% of the population is objective and rational and an IQ of 115 is sufficient for those jobs, then we have 16% of 50%, which is a pool of 8% of the population.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. This group, whether we define it as 1.5% of the population or 8% of the population, is extremely valuable. This is essentially the only group in society that can reliably evaluate complex situations and make subsequent rational decisions. Without it, modern technological society simply cannot be built or maintained – let alone advanced. Let me rephrase this – if we do not identify and utilize this group, we cannot run our complicated societies except into the ground.
The western purging of competence
Modern western society is from a governance standpoint ideologically motivated and ideologically controlled. It is being pushed in a very clearly defined ideological direction, led by the European Union and the current US administration. This ideology is not the subject matter of this article, but it can be seen everywhere by any rational and independent-thinking person. For the uninformed-curious a good place to start is the website of the EU’s policy-making body; the World Economic Forum.
In order to achieve these ideological goals for the West, two things must happen: a) The right people must be put into power at all levels of society and b) any disruptive elements must be eliminated or suppressed. Since all ideological goals tend to be more or less in conflict with reality, there is no group more disruptive to them than the one who operates objectively and independently. People like that simply cannot be allowed into positions of power, and if they must be, they must be kept quiet and/or forced to toe the line.
The objective/rational/general competence group, whether it is 1.5% or 8% of the population, therefore becomes a problem rather than a resource. This is exactly the situation in the West today.
Many people have noticed that meritocracy has been systematically abandoned in the West and the relationship between competence and reward severed in giant swaths of the economy – and almost completely in government. What few people seem to realize is that this is a necessity for the West’s ideological goals to be reached. High-level competence cannot be promoted because it is a threat. It cannot therefore be rewarded.
In order to illustrate this, let’s take a look at what happens when a member of the 1.5% is allowed to gain significant power. Elon Musk is a smart man, probably with an IQ of 150 or more. He is also quite objective and realistic in his assessments, and an independent thinker. His ownership and governance of Twitter/X is a major problem for western ideological goals. Free speech is an obvious threat to any ideology and, to rub salt in the wounds, Musk belittled the guardians of the Ideology at Twitter by making fun of them, then by firing them all and only keeping the competent ones. This cannot be allowed to stand and we can already see the response. The EU is planning to use force to stop this affront to the Ideology and may actually block Twitter in Europe. Ideological champion (and suspected lizard robot) Mark Zuckerberg was even instructed to cook up an ideologically pure Twitter copy in response – but seems to have failed. We eagerly await further responses, which may range from lawfare up to more “direct” actions, and will most likely be directed at Musk personally.
The reconfiguring of western education
As previously noted, two things must happen for the ideological goals to become reality: The right people must be promoted and the wrong people must be suppressed. This process of elevation/suppression has become the main goal of the western education system – all the way from kindergarten up to university. If we look at what the education system has been doing, this becomes extremely obvious. Here are a few examples:
Evaluation of competence is being systematically degraded to avoid comparison between the competent and the incompetent. Exams are being discarded in favor of constant “projects” and students work in groups so the incompetent may hide. Schools avoid testing the individual directly as much as they can – and thereby comparing him to others. The competent ones must not be encouraged, and if at all possible, they themselves must not realize that they are above others.
Universities are increasingly basing admittance on other criteria than competence, including quotas based on non-competence variables. The most insidious selection method is the “personal essay” which applicants must submit – and is sometimes even more important than grades. All applicants know that the more they signal virtue in the essay, the more likely they are to be admitted. On the basis of the essay, the universities can pick the ideologically pure – which is the only purpose of the essay requirement to begin with.
Almost every academic subject is being turned from the objective to the subjective to assist the irrational-incompetent student. This even applies to hard subjects such as mathematics – where nowadays 2+2 doesn’t necessarily equal 4. Even intelligence is now subjective and the stupid can be as smart as the intelligent – it’s just a question of perspective, the right measuring tools, and idiotic inventions such as “emotional intelligence.”
Almost every subject has been made easier than before to help the incompetent students and even critical fields such as medicine are now graduating people who are utterly incompetent and clueless – on a large scale. This systematic lowering of standards also has the added benefit of creating disinterest in smart and rational students. A smart student performs better and better relative to others as the subject gets harder. If the subject is easy or made uninteresting, he will sink down to mediocracy – which is a part of the purpose of lowering the standards to begin with.
Disciplines which may be a threat to the irrationality of the Ideology have been massively subverted and corrupted. This applies to several fields, but particularly to psychology and history, which in their proper forms would be a massive threat to western ideological goals. Psychology has been twisted into an almost unrecognizable abomination, and history is mostly just lies these days.
Fake disciplines have been invented from the ground up for the purpose of training the ideologically pure without the need for competence or intelligence or any connection to reality. These disciplines can be found in lists of “most useless university degrees” all over the internet, but that is a misunderstanding. Those degrees are not useless at all – they elevate the ideologically pure in society by awarding them university “certification.” This certification justifies giving them important positions in society.
I could go on but you get the picture. What we are looking at here is not the failure of the western education system, but a very carefully planned “pivoting” toward new objectives. The primary purpose of the education system is no longer education. The entire education system of the West has been reconfigured to carry out a “filtration” process. The purpose of this process is to identify, instruct and elevate the ideologically pure while suppressing the dangerous 1.5/8 group. The education system, particularly the universities, has largely abandoned real education and is almost solely focused on this mission. This mission is not just carried out by the education system, but by all institutions of governments and a large part of the corporate sector. A side-result of this filtration process is the degradation of all education in the West, and subsequently, degradation of its human capital in general.
Western society, in general, has abandoned rationality and replaced it with subjectivism (formally designated as “post-modernism”). The purpose of that is not just to train and advance the ideologically pure, but to use subjectivism as an oppression tool against the 1.5/8 group and the rational part of the population outside of it. The best way to suppress a rational person is to subject him to an existence of total and constant irrationality. It is essentially gaslighting on a civilizational scale, directed at the dangerous rational group.
While the dangerous rational group is being suppressed and subverted, the ideologically pure “leaders of tomorrow” are indoctrinated rather than educated, given university certifications rather than real degrees, and finally provided with an unending amount of fake and well paid jobs in both the private and public sector. This well-paid ideologically pure group then becomes the power base of the new ideological system.
The upward migration of the incompetent
The goal of this deliberate intervention into the educational system is to create what you might call a “migration pattern” in society based on (lack of) competence and ideological purity. The right people need to be put into the right positions and the right jobs, and since they are incompetent, this needs to be managed for them. After they leave school with their certifications, government and the private sector take over and actively push them upward, while pushing the dreaded 1.5/8 group away from influence and well-paid jobs.
Two developments in the West have been godsends for these efforts: the outsourcing of western manufacturing to Asia and the virtual abolition of competition in the corporate sector. This massively decreased the complexity level of the western economy and subsequently the need for the 1.5/8 group. When most companies operate services in a protected environment, there is far less need for high-level/rational people – while in a “real economy” these people simply cannot be sidelined. Also, when you can get away with operating a fake economy based on the dollar reserve status, you can also operate a fake society run by incompetents.
Let’s take a closer look at how this upward migration of the ideologically pure is managed after they receive their university certifications – and how the 1.5/8 group is systematically blocked. There are five main methods being employed – which together form a long-term takeover process of society. These methods are the following:
Public sector filtering
Public sector stuffing
Job-creation by decree
Private sector filtering
Private sector stuffing
Public sector filtering – This describes the job selection process in the public sector. Initially the “foot-in-the-door” method is used. A few ideologically pure politicians and bureaucrats position themselves within the system and start controlling who is hired. This increases exponentially over the decades as more and more purists gain access to the levers of power. Currently the process is so overt that it is starting to become expressed in recruitment policy papers – such as the recent example of the British government excluding “white men” from becoming fighter pilots. The West has almost completely been able to exclude the 1.5/8 group from public-sector positions using this method – including its armed forces.
Public sector stuffing – As the public sector filtering process advances, the purists inside the system start creating more and more positions for their purist brethren. New departments are created, work groups and committees appear, and the public sector expands. Publicly owned companies, such utility companies, hospitals and schools are also often used as storage units for large numbers of the ideologically pure. This is extremely obvious in the West. Every unnecessary law or initiative requires more and more people – and these people are all carefully selected.
Job-creation by decree – This method is directed at the private sector, as well as the semi-public sector. Government purists start creating new laws and standards which all companies must fulfill. Those are justified on the basis of “goodness” and usually involve the environment, equality, safety and such things. This creates a large number of positions within private companies which are tailored for the ideologically pure – particularly in support functions such as human resources, compliance functions and others. This enables a “foot-in-the-door” situation in the private sector and gives the purists access to the levers of powers there – much like they already have in the public sector.
Private sector filtering – As the purists have gained access to the private sector – particularly human resources (which is the standard purist Trojan horse in private companies) – they start filtering new recruits exactly the same way the public sector does. As in the public sector, this filtering process is becoming more obvious. A significant number of companies are now specifying which groups will not be hired in their job advertisements. Since they can’t overtly say “we don’t hire smart, independent thinkers” they usually use “white men” as a proxy for that group for some reason. That group is considered to be a particular threat, although you can be sure that anyone who doesn’t follow the program will be fired, regardless of their gender or the color of their skin.
Private sector stuffing – Shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter he fired something like 80% of its employees. That 80% was the company’s private sector stuffing ratio – quite high. Companies, particularly in sectors which can influence public opinion – but not solely, are increasingly creating a large number of positions which are either totally superfluous or intended for influence operations against the public.
Those filtering and stuffing methods are the primary mechanisms that have been used for the takeover of western societies by the ideologically pure. There are other mechanisms, such as ESG, filtering by certain banks and investment funds regarding who gets financing and who doesn’t – and the uncontrolled immigration engineered by the ideologically pure which is seen by them as a continuation of the internal migration process. However, all that is beyond the scope of this article.
The ideologically pure have systematically been moved into almost all positions of power in the public sector and a large part of the private sector – and the situation in the private sector is increasingly mirroring the public sector in hiring practices and employee stuffing. The dangerous 1.5/8 group is being kept away by all means, and with great success. The power base of the Ideology is firmly in place.
This job migration program hasn’t been cheap. Millions of unnecessary jobs cost money and it is clear that a significant part of western public debt can be attributed to this program, a fact which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by many people.
The consequences
The main thing to understand is that western societies and economies have been put on an ideological footing. Productivity, competitiveness, technology and science are simply not priorities anymore in the West. Explaining the consequences of this process for the West would take many articles, or a book of several hundred pages. Still, let’s mention a few examples.
The inverse competence crisis – The goal of this entire project has been to place the ideologically pure in all positions of power at all levels of society. These positions are, in a normal and competitive society, occupied by the highly competent 1.5/8 group. The process has now reached near-completion with most positions of power occupied by the ideologically pure. Some of those people have high IQs but they are neither objective nor independent thinkers. The Ideology they must subscribe to is simply incompatible with those qualities. This has some serious consequences.
Remember that positions of power and influence are more likely to demand general competence than other positions (as opposed to specific competence). The greater the power, the more the position demands general competence. The people in these positions now are selected by ideological fervor and reliability – so the higher you go, the more ideologically enthusiastic the people who hold them. This means that the least objective and independent thinking people hold the positions which require the greatest objectivity and independent thinking. Therefore, in the West incompetence becomes greater and more common the higher you go. As someone said – “a general is an incompetent colonel.” This can be seen absolutely everywhere except in some holdout private companies. Those exceptions are of course being addressed as we speak.
The second problem is that many of the irrational/subjective people holding all the power have reasonably high IQs. That may seem to be a positive thing but it has a major disadvantage. Moderate to high IQ irrational/subjective people are the easiest to brainwash of all people. The reasons for that are complicated and need to be addressed in another article – but what this means is that the top tier in the West is not only the most incompetent it can possibly be in comparison to what their jobs require – but are also the most malleable and delusional.
The cost and debt crisis – The migration of the ideologically pure into the ideological power base and positions of influence has created millions of jobs in western societies which create no value. These jobs are much more numerous and more widespread than most people realize, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something like 20%-30% of the entire labor force of the West could be fired without any adverse effect. In fact, the effect would be positive, especially if those people could be made to work the (mostly menial) real-economy jobs they are suitable for.
Deindustrialization has been blamed for the extreme debt levels and tax burdens of the West. That is, as far as it goes, true – but maintaining this giant group of incompetents in their fake jobs is also placing an extreme burden on the West. Western societies are now completely unsustainable and cannot be run without constant debt increase.
The competition crisis – This crisis can be explained by the following example: Let’s say there are three companies with combined 100% market share in some sector. There is no real competition between them and everybody can just relax because the customers can’t go anywhere else. These companies can get away with absolute incompetence on most levels, including in management. They don’t need to think about efficiency, safety, productivity or costs, except on their websites and in annual reports. However, if a competitor with competent employees manages to infiltrate the sector, those three companies will hit a wall. There will be an enormous crisis and one or more of them will most likely go under.
This is exactly the situation in the western economies now. Monopoly and oligopoly is the rule and the main objective of most large western companies is to prevent anyone from infiltrating their sector – usually by bribing regulators or by buying the competition. This is a necessity because a huge number of western companies are now run by incompetent management and staffed by incompetent people, particularly in support and management functions. The immortal words of the nameless Boeing employee about the 737 MAX apply to most large western companies; “this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Western companies are no longer competitive. They cannot compete with Chinese companies now and soon they won’t be able to compete with companies in general outside the West. They simply can’t function except inside an economic safe-space. In fact, the situation is such that the Chinese already do the real work for many of them and reshoring the work is problematic because of (surprise!) the human capital degradation in the West caused by the repurposing of its education system.
This also applies to western societies as a whole. The entire leadership and diplomatic classes of the West are no longer competitive against the rest of the world for exactly these reasons. They are being outmaneuvered by the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and everybody else at every turn. Even African leaders are now more competent than western leaders. They have consistently made decisions that are better for their people than leaders in the West – for the last few years anyway.
The complexity crisis – Earlier in this article I stated that the 1.5/8 group is extremely valuable for modern societies and without it complicated modern societies cannot be managed. In the West this group has been successfully sidelined to a great degree and a good part of it doesn’t even bother with university education anymore. The situation, however, is even worse than that. The reconfiguration of the education system and the break between competence and reward in the job market has fundamentally changed the decision making process behind the selection of university education. Why study engineering (which is hard) when you can get an even better paying job with a degree in psychology (which is easy nowadays)? The reconfiguration of the western education system has changed the reward structure, encouraging young people to pursue easy and useless education – simply because the “system” will provide them with jobs.
This has already caused a major crisis in western societies, particularly in the US. The “maintenance” of complex aspects of US society needs a large group of engineers and people with related education. This maintenance is faltering now, and significantly relies on foreign engineers educated in US universities. You see, why would Americans study engineering in a system which doesn’t reward it? If China and India could somehow recall their engineers and others with hard education from the US, the US system could probably not be maintained, let alone advanced. This will get progressively worse and we will soon reach a point where complex systems which underpin society cannot be kept running. That will require some kind of “reset” to a less complex society, with less prosperity of course.
There are far more crises than those four, but I wouldn’t want to sound like a doomsayer by listing more.
Russia and the future
So, what about Russia? Firstly, there are clear signs that the Russians have figured out what is happening in the West and are learning from it. Recently they left the “Bologna process” which is a European education standardization system. The Bologna system has the express purpose of diluting education in member states, implementing certifications rather than real degrees, and filling European societies with badly educated and generally incompetent “experts” who follow the consensus, no matter what. The Russians saw this system as a threat to their country, which it is, and have, at least partly, reverted to the older and more hardcore Soviet system.
Secondly, the Russians seem to be carrying out purges of the incompetent and corrupt within state structures, including the military. Meritocracy seems to be on the agenda, a radical concept these days. The Russians most likely see these efforts as critical to the continuation of their state and nation – and they would be right.
The situation in China is much the same and there are indications that the rest of the non-western world is catching on. Remember that one of the results of the recent Russia-Africa summit was a Russian-organized education effort in Africa. I doubt that women’s studies will be a part of that curriculum.
The current clash between the West and Russia – and increasingly between the West and the rest of the world – is becoming a clash between the incompetent and irrational and the competent and rational. The result is obvious – but what happens when an irrational person who is backed into a corner has access to nuclear weapons? That’s anybody’s guess.
By putting its societies on an ideological footing the western elite has backed itself into a corner. They can’t compete; they can’t develop their economies or societies; and they can’t go back. Fixing the problems of the West will require an economic revival, where a real economy will replace the current fake financialized service economy. This cannot be done without putting the hated 1.5/8 group into positions of power. Therefore, it will not be done as long as the current western ruling class is in power. Western societies will not survive an economic revival in their current ideological configuration. Conflict is therefore the only remaining option for the ruling class to hang on to power.
Indonesia Is Picking China Over US ; Giving The Right To Power
The US and China have taken two distinct paths for economic development: the US and the west have chosen financialization, de-industrialization and de-regulation, while China has chosen industrialization.
In the US economy, the largest sector is services, and in services, finance is largest. Finance is mainly about moving money and over time, it does not require that money. This means a large portion of the population becomes unemployed, and wealth flows to the top where wealth is concentrated. With de-regulation, capital is free to seek return anywhere. Under this system, capital becomes more important than the welfare of individuals.
Hong Kong’s economy is dominated by finance; it closely followed the US in economics. This video explains what happened to Hong Kong; the same applies to the US economy:
The great irony about China is that although it is run by a Communist party, it is much more middle-class friendly than the US is. The government understands that China’s future depends on a robust middle-class, and it does not allow the consumer middle class to be eroded the way it was in the US. Unlike the US, the Chinese government believes that finance should be a service to assist manufacturing, not the dominant sector of the economy.
The reason the US does not have good infrastructure now is because Americans voted for low taxes and a weak government and de-regulation; this resulted in capital being in the hands of a very wealthy ruling class, while the rest have to be pleased with the crumbs which fall under the table.
China has a larger and more powerful government which spends it money on infrastructure, and this modern infrastructure investment shows.
Americans chose weak government, and it shows. Now they are paying the price of their choice when it comes to competing with China.
Top 5 Lessons From A 10 Year Journey To Becoming Disciplined
No one becomes disciplined overnight. It’s a lifetime journey.
I think there’s way too much emphasis placed on “motivation” and “willpower.” Instead, I think it’s better to understand how human behavior works, and use it to your advantage.
Here are the five most important things I’ve learned about becoming more disciplined, and I hope it helps you.
Win the Morning, Win the Day
It’s a big challenge to have a productive day – That’s 24 hours. It can become overwhelming!
Instead, I only focus on two things.
I make sure I have a good night’s sleep. If I don’t sleep well, then I’m not on my A game the next day.
This means I go to bed early, I avoid screens at night, I make the room colder, etc.
Next, instead of trying to have a productive day…I laser focus on my mornings. If I get the first hour right, then the rest of my day will go smoothly.
This means a solid morning routine.
Mine is roughly wake up, use restroom, drink 20oz water, and walk my dog. That’s it. It looks simple but I’m hydrating myself, getting some exercise, and getting some sunlight.
Now I have energy to crush the rest of the day.
Vs imagine starting the day late, checking your phone for an hour, fapping, and then starting work.
It’s about starting your day with MOMENTUM.
Manipulate Your Environment
Make it easier for yourself if you want to DO an action. Make it harder for yourself if you want to AVOID an action.
I use to play my PS4 a lot more than I should. It’d be lunch time and I’d go over to my living room and play a few quick games. A 15-minute break would turn into two hours.
How did I stop? In the morning I’d simply unplug my PS4, and put it in my closet. I increased the “resistance.”
I used my phone as my alarm clock for a period of time. I’d wake up and immediately start checking my social media / reddit. That would turn into an hour, and I’d start my day distracted.
Now I use a standard alarm clock. I turn off my phone the night before and I don’t turn it back on until lunch time the next day.
I’m able to control my behavior because I slightly increase the resistance.
You can also DECREASE the resistance. I was moving to a new city and going to the gym was important to me. One of my criterias for my apartment was to have one with a really nice gym.
Before I struggled going to the gym because it was a 30 minute drive. I only went twice a week. Now I have a place that’s in my Condo. I go to the gym 5 times a week.
Nothing’s changed except the resistance.
Start Small
I’ve noticed on the internet that people literally want to change their lives overnight. That’s not the way things work.
It’s like being able to bench 100lbs and expecting to bench 1000lbs the next day. It takes time.
Don’t have an all or nothing mentality.
A few years ago I started meditating. I told myself, “I’m going to meditate 30 minutes a day!”
That’s challenge.
For the next six months I’d only hit my goal maybe 5 times a month, and I’d keep beating myself up.
And then I decided to start small. My goal was to meditate 1 minute a day. I did that. The small wins kept me motivated. That turned into 5 minutes, and now it’s 10 minutes a day.
So for the past few years I’ve meditated consistently 10 minutes a day. I checked my Calm app and I’ve logged over 200 hours of meditation.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s ok to start small.
Think of your discipline ability as a muscle. If you’ve never done an act before then your muscle is small. Small muscles gets small goals!
Keep Score
What gets measured, gets results.
If you don’t keep score then how do you know if you’re winning or not? Keep score and make it specific.
I always avoided keeping score in the past. I think deep down I was afraid of knowing that I wasn’t putting in my best effort.
Don’t say meditate in the morning as a goal. HOW LONG?
As far as trackers…don’t overcomplicated it. I like HabitBull on SmartPhones. Creating your own spreadsheet is great too.
Score can mean different things depending on your goal.
If you’re trying to save money, then track how much you’re spending on a weekly basis. If you’re trying to gain weight then track your macros. If you’re trying to read more books, then track how many minutes a day you spend reading.
A common excuse is that it takes too much time…
Keeping track of my macros takes 3 minutes a day using myfitnesspal. I keep track of every penny spent using YNAB and it takes me 10 minutes a month.
You know what takes too much time? Putting in a lot of effort and not getting any results.
Is it Optional, or is it a Non-Negotiable?
What does a non-negotiable mean? It means it has to be done no matter what.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to do Yoga everyday for 20 minutes. I was trying to figure out where I could get it in my schedule.
I then asked myself, how important is this? Well it’s important to me because of x, x, and x.
Then why not turn it into a non-negotiable?
That means I have to do it no matter what. I think of it like life or death. Someone has a gun to my head and if I don’t do it everyday, then I’m dead. That’s non-negotiable.
In practical terms that means I do Yoga first thing in the morning, before I start work. It means I’m not allowed to sleep and call it a day unless I do Yoga.
Guess what? I’d done it 30 days in a row because I have this attitude.
It’s not optional.
This Cat’s Love For Her Owner Is Everything We Needs
A smile for the day.
Bad “news” on Gonzalo
I was given a vision “snapshot” on late Sunday 6AUG23. I saw Gonzalo Lira. He was dead. Like, really dead. On a slab/table/gurney.
Is this real, or my imagination?
I don’t know. It came out of the blue, and surprised me.
I don’t know what it means. Was my ELF probes hacked? Is it a message from the DC, or just some entities fucking with me.
I. Do. Not. Know.
My mind tells me that Gonzalo is probably performing a “red herring” and actually has other plans. Slipping into Belarus, or going to the Chinese embassy in Ukraine. I don’t know.
But if he was stopped and picked up, he probably (more likely than not) be arrested and transported to court with additional charges.
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It is unlikely that he was killed if this was the case. You get, and jail him. Tack on some additional time to his sentence. 5 – 8 years at hard labor sucks, but is not as bad as he thinks. I did five years at hard labor, and I survived. And I was 50 at the time. So, now, you tack on an additional 4 years.
So, my mind tells me that his death is truly unlikely.
Yet…
My vision? Another story. And I always question my “visions” as there’s a lot of “noise” that clouds things up and you at best, you might get a general idea of things, but you don’t know the importance as the time track is often missing.
I hope that he is fine.
And I’m sure that we will hear something, one way or the other.
In less than 24 hours Wagner have rolled back and left Russia
Prighozin is leaving for BELARUS
Wagner PMC soldiers who didn’t participate in the Mutiny get new MoD contracts
In 24 hours
No Moscow
No Civil War
So like i said ,
Putin was never Prighozins Target
He was BAITED into organizing a march on Russia
He was used by Putin into convincing all hardliners that Shoigu and Gerasimov be eased out and Putin not take the fallout politically
My guess is Surovikin will get overall command
Wagner is part of MoD
Prighozin is regarded traitor by all of Russia
Putin noted which Russians offered resistance and which Russians didn’t and MADE A LIST as a LOYALTY METER
And PUTIN SHOWED THE WEST HOW A POTENTIAL CIVIL WAR CAN BE CHANGED IN A MERE 24 hours
If this was the West, you would have the cities bombed by now
Man of the Hour — LUKASHENKA
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APPLAUSE!!!!
Conveniently there to talk to Prighozin and end the situation
If you tell me the whe thing where Wagner invades , holds a city for 24 hours as people are still rushing to watch the latest movies and malls is logical
To others especially Indians who believed Putin would be deposed and Prighozin would be moving to Moscow
ITS WHY THOSE 200 YEARS HAPPENED (1757–1947)
Untold Truth: Rent-a-Girlfriend – A Popular Trend in China
Is it possible to rent a girl in China? How much will it cost? What is included in the services of a girl for rent? We will answer these and many other questions in as much detail as possible in this video! Renting girls in China for a long time is a fairly frequent service, why do the Chinese so often resort to renting girls? How much do these girls get, and what is included in the cost of their services? We have to answer these and many other questions in this video! Watch this video from the beginning to the very end to know everything about renting girls in China!
The wackiest thing in history has just unfolded.
12:50 AM EST
So, a few hours ago, I was pretty sure the Russian state was going to utterly collapse, and that the Ukraine would seize Russian territory.
It now appears, by some fantastic twist, that this is actually not going to happen.
I have zero idea how it is possible that Prigozhin had everything lined up to take control of Southern Command, and then was like “ah – nah, I guess I’ll just surrender.”
He could have just been drunk. But he had to have lined this all up with the FSB and the military, and that would have been a very big thing, to do that all in secret, and get that many powerful players on his side.
As of right now, he has stopped the push towards Moscow, and is possibly en route to Belarus.
Just out of nowhere, it was announced that Prigozhin agreed to talks with Lukashenko, President of Belarus, and then hours later it was announced that he was calling the whole thing off.
This is part of the statement from Belarus:
“Evgeny Prigozhin accepted the proposal of President Alexander Lukashenko to stop the movement of the armed men of Wagner in Russia and to take further steps to de-escalate tension.” It added that Prigozhin had been offered “an advantageous and acceptable option for resolving the situation, with security guarantees for the Wagner PMC fighters.”
This is still in flux, or whatever, and something could still go wrong, but that is where we are apparently at as of Sunday morning in Russia. Actually, that statement is 12 hours old, at time of writing, but nothing seems to have changed.
Wagner peacefully left the base in Rostov, surrendering control, with the troops going back to the territories of the former Ukraine and Prigozhin going wherever he is going. He should be executed, but I guess he can’t be if he made a deal. I think he will most likely end up dead in the next few months either way.
It really, really, really looked like this was going to turn into a full-on civil war, and the Ukraine war would collapse, and Russia would collapse as a country, breaking into different parts like the US wants it to.
I have no idea how Prigozhin was so competent to organize taking over Southern Command and then just giving up. Something must have went wrong.
The chaos now is over, the borders and airports are back online, the military seems to be totally off the streets in Moscow.
There are going to have to be purges of the FSB and whoever else sided with Prigozhin.
The people who said the whole thing was a staged event are going to claim victory. I don’t really understand what the purpose of faking this would be, but the way it collapsed, and the way none of it made any sense, will allow those theorists to say “see, this was the plan all along!”
How this will affect Russia and the war effort in the longer run, I do not know. I think there should be an increased desire to escalate, and Putin is definitely not going to want to look weak after all of this, so he will probably back a move toward “total war” or as I like to call it “Blitzkrieg.”
Yesterday, I said that Putin’s legitimacy would be gone if it wasn’t solved in 12 hours, and 8 hours after I said that, it was solved. So I do not think he’s lost legitimacy. It looks bad, but not so bad he’d need to resign.
I do think the fact that so many people would back Prigozhin in his insane plan shows that there is a very real desire for Putin to get more aggressive in the Ukraine, and that has to be taken into account.
But wow.
This went from being the worst thing ever to the most confusing thing I’ve seen in my life.
I bought an old farm with a barn. The roof of the barn was sagging and the walls were bulging out. I contacted a local contractor to fix it. He was known as the best in the business. He studied it for a while and made the following offer:
“We’ll jack up the entire barn and then reinforce the walls and install some pulleys to draw in the walls and then we can put in support beams from the roof apex down to the ground and then slowly over a week or two, lower the barn back onto the new beams. This will give the roof time to adjust and bend back in shape. It will cost about $50,000.”
I listened and then said:
“What if we pin the walls to the roof joists and then put in beams and screw-jacks along the roof centerline and jack up the roof slowly over time? The rising roof will draw in the sides. Then we can replace the screw jacks with 10×10 beams”. How much would that cost?
The contractor thought about it and said: “Yeah, that would work, too. It’d cost about $3000.”
I think it would be an excellent sign of good character if you can just take a step back and acknowledge that the entirety of what you know about “Chinese food” is either based entirely on the “Chinese food” in your country that has been adapted, sometimes quite extensively – to the point that it is no longer seen as Chinese food in the eyes of Chinese – to suit the tastebuds of the people in your country, OR just a tiny speck on the tiny tip of a Titan-sized iceberg.
I mean, I’ve been eating Chinese food since I’ve been a kid, and yet, I dare not say I know any more than 1% of all the dishes from all the various Chinese cuisines. Sometimes, a friend will mention this or that dish from their hometown, and I would be like “what is that? Never heard of it before…” and it just leaves me with the impression that I will never be able to sample every Chinese dish out there in this lifetime – it would be too tall of an order for one lifetime. Give me two or three lifetimes, then I might be able to give it a shot.
Things like “Chinese like to eat this and this for breakfast” or “Chinese like to eat more vegetables than meat” or “Chinese are very obsessed with meat” don’t hold up well when you’re speaking of 1.5 billion people – just like it wouldn’t work if you say all Americans love eating donuts or Girl Scout cookies. See: countless arguments on Chinese social media whether “savory” or “sweet” tofu pudding is better, or whether glutinous rice dumplings should be “sweet” or “savory”.
There are Chinese who don’t like to eat rice and who don’t even own a rice cooker. There are Chinese who won’t even touch savory tofu pudding if you paid them to eat it. There are Chinese who don’t like eating green leafy vegetables.
Generalizations break down very quickly when they encounter reality.
IMHO, the much better attitude to adopt is:
Every cuisine has dishes that have carbs. If you don’t want to eat carbs, don’t order dishes that have carbs. Don’t cook dishes that have carbs. Don’t eat dishes that have carbs. Order, cook, eat all the other dishes that dont have carbs.
I mean, let us imagine if the assumption in the question is true, that Chinese food is indeed “high in carbs”.
If that were indeed true, then Chinese folks who suffer from diabetes would …. what?
Starve?
Or go “I have diabetes now. I think I should change to a Western diet. Let my new Western diet begin. This will mark a new beginning for me. Ho ho ho.”
I know quite a few Chinese peeps with diabetes. They have neither starved to death, nor changed to a Western-style diet.
To round off this answer, I’ll provide some pictures of home-cooked Chinese meals. Everything that has carbs, I’ll cross off in red. By doing this, you’ll see that you still have a lot of other dishes to enjoy.
There’s some tofu in the various dishes, usually paired with meat. As far as I’m aware, tofu does have a bit of carbs, but it’s generally viewed as a low carb food.
Here’s the lunch my cousin and I prepared two days ago. Don’t eat the rice. Don’t eat the dish on the top left, because it has julienned potato strips in it. I’m not sure whether North Americans or Europeans eat potatoes, but potatoes do have carbs, so that’s why I’ve crossed this dish off.
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Don’t eat the rice. There are a few small fermented black beans in the meat+veg dish on the right, but hopefully that still counts as low carb.
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Don’t eat the rice.
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Don’t eat the julienned potato strips. Don’t eat the peanuts.
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Don’t eat the noodles. Don’t eat the glutinous rice. Don’t eat the fruits. Don’t eat the snow fungus dessert and cake.
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You’re good to go.
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You’re good to go. You can avoid the soy sauce dips easily enough.
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You’re good to go.
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Conclusion:
Just like in any cuisine, when it comes to the various Chinese cuisines, if you don’t want to eat carbs, then order, cook, eat those dishes that do not have carbs.
From my experience the above is the best way to avoid carbs for people who are looking to avoid carbs.
Advice From Cats On How To Survive The Holidays
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The holidays can be quite stressful—between buying gifts, coping with family, attending various functions, and realizing that mixing Jagermeister and egg nog together to make “Jag Nog” was a bad idea, it can get a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, the felines behind You Need More Sleep: Advice from Cats are here to give you all the tips you need to enjoy a joyful, peaceful, and—most importantly—restful season.
Tanks, depleted uranium shells, long-range missiles, F16s: hardly a week goes by without some news of how Britain is upping the ante again.
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The deeper the economic crisis bites, the more desperately the ruling class is throwing everything it can into military confrontation. Only through victory in war will it stand a chance of keeping its failing system alive for another generation. The world’s masses owe it to their children to make sure that such a victory is never achieved.
By Proletarian writers from the Communists (dot) org
The recent announcement that Rishi Sunak’s government would be providing first depleted uranium shells to Ukraine and then Storm Shadow long-range missiles represent two of the latest of examples of the British government’s consistent and active efforts to escalate the war in Ukraine . It is doing so with zero concern for the lives of British workers and even less for those of Ukrainians.
Reckless and criminal escalation
This was demonstrated very clearly when the Ukrainian military stored the aforementioned depleted uranium shells in a large ammunition depot near the town of Khmelnitsky. When Russian armed forces blew up this arms store, a cloud of radiation was dispersed across the town, posing both immediate and long-term health risks to everyone resident or present in the area.
Not for nothing did the Russian foreign ministry warn the Sunak government not to provide such weapons to its Ukrainian proxies. Russian armed forces are not using such weapons in Ukraine themselves, knowing well the health risks they pose.
Russia had previously warned very strongly against the use of such weapons: “If Kiev is supplied with such shells for Nato heavy military equipment, we will consider this as the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia with all the ensuing consequences,” a statement said. (Russia warns Britain against supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium shells , Donbass Insider, 22 March 2022)
The cancer epidemics in parts of Serbia and Iraq following Nato’s widespread use of depleted uranium munitions there are just two of the many war crimes perpetrated by British and US forces in their wars of plunder that are carefully ignored by British and US establishment politicians, journalists, lawyers and scientists.
How far across Ukraine and neighbouring countries this radiation and its effects might spread is at this time unknown. Nor can we yet know how Ukraine’s food exports will be affected. In all likelihood, no meaningful effort will be made to find out by our self-identifying ‘defenders of human rights’.
Sanctions war has failed
These latest reckless escalations by British imperialism come hard on the heels of bitter admissions carried in the Spectator and the Telegraph that the “shock and awe” sanctions war that was supposed to “reduce the rouble to rubble”, in the words of US president Joe Biden , has been an abject failure. The aggressive western wagers of this economic war had confidently expected to bring about the collapse of the Russian economy, triggering either a mass uprising by a hungry and unemployed populace or some other political crisis that could result in the long dreamt-of regime change in Moscow.
But, owing to the preparations the Russian government has been making since 2014, the severity of the sanctions regime has been mitigated both by increased state intervention in the Russian economy and by redirecting the country’s trade flows eastwards – in particular to China, Iran and India. The workers and economies that are being destroyed by the sanctions are not those of Russia but of the west, most specifically those of the European Union and Britain, where residents and industry alike have been suddenly cut off from the cheap and reliable flow of Russian oil and gas on which they have depended for decades.
Now, having failed to defeat the Russians either economically or militarily, the imperialists are getting desperate.
The aim of the war in Ukraine, from the perspective of US imperialism, is to destabilise Russia itself and, ultimately, to secure regime change (ie, the installation of a client regime in place of an independent one) and, ideally, the fragmentation of the country. This is all in order that the USA and its junior partners in Europe can seize full, unrestricted control of Russia’s immense natural resources.
With the global overproduction crisis deepening every day, the contradictions of the imperialist economic system are becoming ever more apparent. US imperialism, mired in a mountain of bad debt , has reached the point where it is not only seeing long-term stagnation at home but is also losing control over markets overseas that it has long sought to dominate by means of its economic, technological and military might.
Meanwhile, African nations are increasingly trading with China and turning to Russia for energy and security partnerships, thus further deepening the contradictions faced by US imperialism and forcing it down the road of trying to remove both the Putin-led government in Moscow and the Communist party (CPC) in China. The removal of these two rival centres of power, which are working increasingly closely together, is necessary for US imperialism if it is going to succeed in ‘solving’ its crisis via the ruination of its opponents and the destruction of the opportunities for independent development that they are offering to the oppressed countries via Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO ) etc.
Decline and decay of British imperialism
British imperialism, likewise mired in crisis and tied hand and foot to the US imperialist bandwagon, is equally desperate for these plans to be brought to fruition, hence its reckless escalation of the war in Ukraine by supplying long-range missiles and depleted uranium munitions. The British ruling class has played a subservient role to US imperialism since at least 1956, when it failed to win its war to bring down Abdul Nasser’s anti-imperialist pan-Arabist Egypt .
The decay of British imperialism actually has its origins ever earlier than this. In fact, even at the highest point of the development of British capitalism, the seeds of its own terminal crisis had already been sown. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out in Capital Volume 2, there is a tendency inherent within the system for capitalists not only to maximise profitability at all costs but to actually cut out commodity production altogether if they possibly can.
“The process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production.” (Chapter 1 , 1885)
Marx identified a tendency that would be explored and fleshed out by VI Lenin in his work Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916, at the height of the first world war , Lenin’s examination of the development of imperialism included an analysis of the ongoing deindustrialisation of Britain. He showed how the development of imperialism was linked to the declining profitability of commodity production for the home market in Britain in the latter part of the 19th century.
At this point, British capitalists were able to realise far greater profits by exporting their capital to the colonised nations, where resources and land were cheaper and where labour could be exploited in a far more profitable fashion (ie, with even greater brutality). This brought the British ruling class into conflict with other imperialist powers, mainly the newly unified Germany. The competition for markets, resources and hyper-exploitable sources of labour led (ultimately) to the mass slaughter of World War 1.
As a result of the war, however, the British ruling class was much weakened, and it ultimately failed to restore its position as the overwhelmingly dominant power in the world, partly because it had heavily indebted itself to the rising power of US imperialism during the course of the war.
It was only after World War 2 though that the crisis of British imperialism was fully realised. Britain began to lose control of its colonial possessions (starting with India) and faced the reality of having to depend upon US imperialism for economic and military support both for reconstruction at home and for exploitation of the oppressed nations abroad.
A faction within the British ruling class tried to resist this subordination to the USA, but it was decisively defeated in 1956, partly due to the anti-imperialist struggles of the Egyptians and also because the US ruling class would not tolerate what it regarded as its British junior partner operating without its consent. Following the Suez debacle, the British ruling class realised it had little choice but to fall in line behind the USA if it wished to continue to operate in the markets it still dominated abroad, even after being forced to give up direct control of most of its empire.
In order to maintain their profits, Britain’s financiers need to be able to move capital anywhere in the world. They require all barriers to this to be knocked down, and, since WW2, the USA is the only imperialist country with the global economic and military power to be able to do this. The state of British imperialism is one of profound and multiple crises: it has undergone a longer decay and is much more vulnerable than the USA is.
The fortunes of the imperialist powers ultimately rest on convincing the oppressed and developing nations of the world that they have to accept the terms dictated by countries like Britain if they want to escape being put under an economic siege or subjected to military attack.
Anti-imperialist bloc cutting the ground from beneath the imperialists’ feet
Today, the economic fortunes of British imperialism are entirely tied to US economic and military power. The British ruling class has been cutting its own armed forces down for many years now, so it depends ever more heavily upon the USA to facilitate the ability of British finance capital to keep on plundering the world.
The British state may spend a large amount of defence, but it does not maintain the kind of forces that would be capable of taking on the Russian or Chinese armies for more than a few days. What Britain’s armed forces have specialised in since their failure in the Iraq war is in waging wars by proxy, training and directing jihadists in Libya, mercenaries in Yemen and fascists in Ukraine to do the heavy lifting while they remain in the shadows – advising, directing and facilitating.
If Nato’s fascistic Banderite forces in Ukraine lose their war with the Russian Federation, which they show every sign of doing in the near future, this will be a defeat for US imperialism of an even greater magnitude than its humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Many nations that are currently dominated by British and US imperialism will see the defeat of the Nato-aligned forces in Ukraine as being a clear sign that the US-led imperialist bloc has been fatally weakened.
This in turn will undermine British imperialism’s ability to continue to exploit countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia . If US imperialism decays or collapses entirely, the British ruling class will be fatally weakened as well, not only in terms of the markets and resources it seeks to control overseas, but also in its ability to contain the class contradictions within Britain society itself.
This is why the British ruling class is desperate to secure the destruction of the Russian and Chinese governments. Because British imperialism needs to ransack huge areas of the world if it is to try and resolve the deep crisis in which it is enmeshed, and the anti-imperialist governments of Russia and China are standing in the way of that goal.
That is how we must understand Sunak’s declaration at the recent G7 meeting in Hiroshima that China is “the biggest challenge of our age to global security and prosperity”.
Of course, Sunak was referring solely to the ‘security and prosperity’ of the class he represents – the class of billionaire owners of capital. All that will come to the majority of the world’s workers from the strengthening of our exploiters is the prolongation of the existence of the system that keeps them immiserated, condemned for another generation and more to the miseries of unemployment, poverty , crisis and war.
Those of us who oppose British capitalism at home must learn this lesson: that there can be no victory over capitalism at home without also destroying British imperialism’s ability to loot abroad. Only with the departure of this parasitic system can the British working class advance in solidarity with the workers of the world to a bright and fulfilling future.
The Poverty In Mississippi Is Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen
Shaker Strawberry Summer Pudding
British Berry Summer Pudding 13 735×491 1
Ingredients
1/2 loaf white bread, sliced
1 quart ripe strawberries
3/4 to 1 cup sugar (depending on the sweetness of the berries)
Instructions
Line a 9-inch square pan with aluminum foil or wax paper.
Remove the crust from the bread.
Mash and sweeten strawberries.
Place the bread slices slices on the bottom of the prepared pan.
Spoon strawberries over the bread and alternate berries and bread until pan is filled. Cover with wax paper slightly smaller than the pan. Chill at least 8 hours or overnight.
To serve, invert on a platter. Top with whipped cream. Scatter fresh berries on top and around edge.
Pay it forward
Waiting in line to pay for groceries while maintaining a 6ft distance, this man cut in line. He didn’t appear to notice what he’d done.
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The person he skipped didn’t say anything, just maintained the proper distance.
When it was time for the man to pay he reached in his back pocket and pulled out a small note pad. He’d forgotten his wallet.
He looked a bit disappointed and embarrassed. The person he skipped stepped up and told the cashier they’d take care of his groceries. (Which only consisted of Milk and Chocolate Chip Cookies.)
He was more than grateful. He kindly thanked them and off the man went.
Upon arrival to the register, the cashier asked: “He cut you off and you paid for his groceries.. Why??”
“They calmly replied with a smile: “I hope that if one day my Dad forgets his wallet, someone will step up and buy his Milk and Cookies”
With all the negativity going on in the world..I thought it would be nice to share this moment.
A little kindness goes a long way. Why not pay it forward?
Shaker Spoon Bread
Spoonbread 32391 small
Ingredients
1 cup cornmeal
1 quart (4 cups) sweet milk
3 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons butter
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Instructions
Scald milk and add cornmeal gradually. Cook until thick.
Pour small amount over beaten egg yolks. Return to heat and cook a few minutes longer.
Add butter and fold in beaten egg whites.
Add baking powder and salt.
Pour into greased baking dish and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 1/2 hours, stirring once after the first 15 minutes of baking.
In the 1930s, a full decade or more before the advent of fast food, George Orwell put his finger on this problem. His book The Road to Wigan Pier chronicled the lives of the poor and unemployed in Northern England’s distressed mining regions. Orwell described their insufficient diet and brilliantly explicated the psychology underlying the poor’s consumption patterns:
The basis of [the poor’s] diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three [penny’s worth] of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. [public assistance] level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
A “Karen” is a woman (naturally), white (always), middle-aged (30–55), attractive solely because of her hair, makeup and clothing, blonde (usually), and middle-class or higher. As a customer or citizen, she is demanding, entitled, privileged and impossible to satisfy in any reasonable manner.
Karen wants you to take her expired coupon and, when you won’t, she wants to speak to your supervisor. Karen calls the city to ask them to stop road work in her area from noon to 5 p.m. so her child can have a nap, then calls her city councilor when her request is refused.
It’s use was popularized by African-Americans on Twitter in 2018.
African Americans have had slang terms for such an individual since before the American Civil War, including “Miss Ann”, “Becky”, “Barbecue Becky”, “Cornerstone Caroline” and “Permit Patty”. “Karen” is the type of person who would call the cops on kids running a lemonade stand without a permit.
The first use of “Karen” as a pejorative refers to an ad for the Nintendo Switch from 2016 where the woman on the right was referred to as “antisocial Karen”. Unlike the typical stereotype, she’s a brunette.
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Before the breakout on Twitter, “Karen” was the subject of many memes on Reddit in 2017.
Naturally, white people co-opted the term. The UK paper The Guardian, noting the rash of women calling the police on black people engaged in perfectly legal behaviors like barbecuing in a public park or pointing out that Central Park has a leash requirement for dogs, dubbed 2020 “The Year of Karen”.
Psychologists say the stereotype is the result of a pattern of “weaponizing victimhood” where a group of people who have suffered social discrimination in the past don’t just ask for empathy with their plight but instead use it to claim rights over and above everyone else, including both present and past victims of similar discrimination. Karens are hardly the only group that do this.
Why Africa is angry at the “West”
https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSLBRxQov/
Train derails into Yellowstone River sparking fears of hazardous spill
Montana residents have been warned to conserve water after a freight train potentially carrying hazardous materials collapsed into the Yellowstone River.
A large emergency response has been seen in the area, amid concerns of a toxic spill after the bridge collapsed early on Saturday morning.
It was initially feared oil or petroleum was contained in the cargo train, but the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office said it was later determined they contained asphalt and ‘a second substance that officials are working to confirm’.
Water treatment facilities throughout the area have introduced emergency measures due to the crisis. Despite warnings to conserve water, officials said there is currently no threat to life in the area.
A statement re-posted by the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Department on social media confirmed no injuries have been reported in the incident.
‘A total of 8 rail cars are involved and in a great stroke of luck, none contained oil,’ the post said.
‘The cars contained asphalt and a second substance that officials are working to confirm. Both of the substances are described as “slow moving” and have not gone much past the initial scene.
‘The public is asked to stay away from the (scene) to prevent congestion.’
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department also warned locals to avoid water from certain parts of the river.
‘From Indian Point to Buffalo Mirage, avoid water due to possible contact with contaminants,’ the department tweeted.
A multi-agency effort was on the scene Saturday, including Stillwater County Emergency Services, the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office and Columbus Fire & Rescue.
Water treatment facilities in Laurel, Billings and Lockwood shut down their headgates in response to the potentially toxic spill.
The Yellowstone County Disaster and Emergency Services department said irrigation canal companies are also implementing protective measures.
According to the Billings Gazette, the train fell into the water after a bridge it was crossing collapsed under the weight of the carriages.
The outlet claimed the bridge had recently been battered by high water levels as a result of storms in the south-central Montana area.
The potential toxic spill comes months after a similar incident in East Palestine, Ohio, sparked mass evacuations when hazardous chemicals leaked from another train derailment.
Locals reported side effects including eye and throat irritation, and some even claimed pets had died due top the toxic fumes. The chemicals on board the Ohio derailment were not the same as those from Saturday’s incident in Montana.
Putin just dropped a BOMBSHELL & outplayed the Western coup | Redacted w Clayton Morris
The Pleistocene epoch is a geologic epoch which began around 2.6 Mya (Million years ago) and came to an end around 11,700 BP (Before Present). It is characterized by lower sea levels than the present epoch and colder temperatures. During much of the Pleistocene, Europe, North America, and Siberia were covered by extensive ice sheets and glaciers. The Pleistocene was an important time because it was when the human genus first evolved.
The flora and fauna today also more or less reached their current form during the Pleistocene. Most Pleistocene animals and Pleistocene plants also exist in the Holocene. Furthermore, the Pleistocene epoch was the last geological epoch in which humans had relatively little impact.
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Pleistocene Geology and Climate
The Pleistocene glaciations are among the defining geologic events of the Pleistocene. Much of North America was covered by the Laurentide ice sheet and northern Europe and Siberia were covered by the Eurasian Ice Sheet Complex. The size of the ice sheets resulted in lower sea levels and dryer climates. Britain was a peninsula and the Indonesian islands were connected to the Southeast Asian mainland, for example. There were also glaciers on Mauna Kea of the Hawaiian Islands.
While parts of the world were dryer – such as central Europe, which was mostly covered in tundra, other parts of the world were wetter and greener. The American southwest, for example, contained grassland with numerous lakes. The Sahara Desert was also covered in savannah grassland for many parts of the Pleistocene. Parts of the north-eastern Arabian Peninsula were the site of an enormous oasis. It is even possible that this ancient, wetter environment may have helped inspire stories like the Garden of Eden or have been the original Garden of Eden itself.
Pleistocene Animals
Many of the animals common today were also common in the Pleistocene. Deer, big cats, apes, elephants, and bears could all be found in a Pleistocene landscape. There were also animals that were common which have since gone extinct, such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths , and pre-human hominins .
Europe and Asia had significant populations of African fauna. Cave paintings and paleontological finds in Europe reveal that rhinoceroses, lions, and hyenas were all common at that time in southern Europe. The island of Sicily was also inhabited by a dwarf elephant species until surprisingly recent times. Northern Europe was covered in glaciers and inhospitable, while central Europe was tundra. Southern Europe, however, contained forests and was inhabited by numerous species of megafauna, most of which have since died out.
Lions were also much more common in Asia, as were rhinoceroses and elephants. There were even rhinoceroses living on the islands of the Philippines. Apes were also more common. Until about 300,000 BP, Gigantopithecus, possibly the largest ape ever to live, flourished in Asia.
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Pleistocene North America is known for its impressive megafauna populations. The more well-known are the woolly mammoths and mastodons. North America was also inhabited by American lions, North American llamas, and giant ground sloths, all of which are extinct today.
The continent of Australia has been separated from Eurasia since the Mesozoic. As a result, Australia has very unusual vegetation and wildlife. Pleistocene Australia was no different. Australia was inhabited by extraordinary creatures such as kangaroos the size of a rhinoceros and other giant marsupial mammals. There were also numerous giant flightless birds such as moas in New Zealand, rheas in South America, and ostriches in Africa and Asia that had to compete with large mammals.
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Pleistocene Humans
Another important development on the Pleistocene timeline was the emergence of the human genus: Homo. Humans probably evolved out of bipedal apes, such as the Australopithecines and Ardipithecus Ramidus . These early bipedal apes are classified as hominins. Hominins first evolved near the end of the Miocene epoch (25-5 Mya) in south and east Africa. Other than their upright posture and bipedalism, these hominins were not significantly more human than previous apes.
Their skeletons indicate that they resembled modern apes such as chimpanzees and their use of tools was limited or absent. At the beginning of the Pleistocene, however, a new type of hominin appeared. These hominins were taller, more dependent on upright locomotion, and had larger brains, which allowed them to excel in tool use over any previous hominin. These hominins belong to the genus Homo and hominins in this genus are simply called humans.
The earliest human species was Homo Habilis . The first examples of this species appeared about 2.3 million years ago. They used simple flake tools which were made by taking rocks and striking sharp flakes off other rocks – which could be used as cutting tools. Homo Habilis was more technologically inclined than its hominin predecessors, but it was still closer to earlier and more ape-like hominins than modern humans.
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The next earliest human species is Homo Erectus . The first H. Erectus evolved around 2 million years ago and the last of them did not die out until sometime within the last 100,000 years. Archaeological and paleontological evidence suggest that they may have been the first humans to use culture as a wholesale approach to adapt to their environment. They were more advanced tool users and were also much taller than previous hominins, about six feet (1.83 meters) tall. They were also the first humans to leave Africa. By 1 million years ago, H. Erectus had spread to both Europe and Asia, bringing humans for the first time to these regions.
The earliest humans were universally hunter-gatherers. Their use of technology to interact with their environment made them very adaptative – so that humans eventually found their way into every possible environment on the planet: forests, grasslands, deserts, even tundra.
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Megafauna Extinctions in the Pleistocene: Accelerated by Humans?
For most of the Pleistocene, humans did not significantly impact their environment. There were no more than a few hundred thousand individuals at a given time and their ability to transform the landscape was limited by primitive technology and limited social organization.
This all changed with the emergence of Homo Sapiens (modern humans) in Africa and Homo Neandertalensis (Neanderthals) in Europe. Anatomically modern humans first evolved in Africa around 200,000-300,000 BP. After the emergence of anatomically modern humans, something happened, perhaps a rewiring of the human brain , that led to the emergence of modern behaviors like art, blade production, long distance trade, and more efficient, organized hunting, among other abilities.
This change in behavior caused humans to have a significantly larger influence on their environment than in previous times. This can be seen in the fate of most megafauna, especially in the New World. Megafauna extinctions occurred around 40,000-50,000 years ago in Australia and around 13,000 years ago in North America. Both occurred shortly after the appearance of humans on these continents.
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It has been suggested that the reason for the worldwide extinction of megafauna at that time was overhunting by humans combined with climate change. The climate was constantly changing during the Pleistocene and the megafauna survived these changes. When humans were introduced into the environment, however, these same megafauna populations died out not long afterwards. It is possible that the addition of a powerful predator, like humanity, may have added an extra factor that was just too much for the megafauna to handle while also adapting to climate change, leading to their extinction.
The Human Age: Life after the Pleistocene
As humans become more technologically advanced and more adept at manipulating their environment, they continue to influence it more and more. How much longer human civilization will last is uncertain, but one thing that is known is that humans are likely to leave a mark on this planet which will last for ages to come and it all started in the Pleistocene.
Today, the American Navy has confronted and accepted the fierce reality that China has the “upper hand” in the South China Sea.
That China has established strong defensive positioning and capabilities.
And that America has spent it’s time and efforts in other areas and towards other objectives. Now it must face the fact that it’s military has some glaring holes in it’s offensive capabilities. And it is reluctantly admitting to this situation.
Up until just a few months ago the entire American military and the funding and development mechanism for it just ridiculed the idea that either China or Russia had any technology that could match that of the United States.
Their argument has been that America is superior in every way, that the American military is battle tested, and fully funded and staffed with fine well-trained American soldiers, and that the technologies involved are more than a match for anything that could possibly be fielded by either China or Russia.
America is a nation of Rambo’s they argue. America has a warrior culture. America is a policeman for freedom™ and democracy™.
Not true.
However, when you meet a moron, you just smile, and continue on your way…
Is it okay to criticize CCP on WeChat? I’m going to China next year and worried about if this will affect my study abroad.
As a foreigner living in China, I have a few thoughts:
First, welcome to China! You’ll probably hear that a lot, mostly from Chinese people. I’ve lived here for over seven years, and I still get it. It can be annoying, but the vast majority of Chinese people love their country and are both happy and proud to share it with you.
Second, don’t confuse the CPC (that’s the correct abbreviation for the Communist Party of China) and the government of the PRC (the People’s Republic of China). They are not one-and-the-same. The vast majority of CPC members joined in order to make life better for other people. A friend of mine, who lives in the city that I used to live in, is a CPC member, and he volunteered to help with health checks at the highway entrance into the city (that is not his job, mind you. He volunteers. His actual job is that he runs a little shop that sells alcohol and cigars). Along similar lines, there was a viral video that came out about a year ago of a group of people driving in the countryside of Xinjiang. Their car went off the road, and a herdsman and his friend helped push them back onto the road. When the people offered him some money, he refused. His Mandarin Chinese wasn’t very good, so to show why he refused, he opened his coat to reveal the CPC pin on his lapel, and everyone understood completely:
https://youtu.be/bBinzzWQ6hs
Third, there’s not much to complain about in China. Sure, it’s annoying when there are new blockages for VPNs, but it doesn’t usually last all that long, and it can be annoying to do nucleic acid tests for Covid so often (as of writing this, my city does them every other day. Just about a week ago, we were doing them every single day, but there was an outbreak a couple of weeks ago – thankfully, due to these measures, the outbreak resulted in only about 10 cases in a city of over one million people). Outside of those, and the annual health check required for the visa renewal (no food or drink beforehand means that I have to wake up early and can’t drink any coffee), there’s really nothing that I can think of to complain about.
Fourth, so long as you don’t break the law by doing something stupid, like taking drugs, there won’t be any problems.
The Ugly American
When will the West respect China?
Within ten years. I went on a visit to China last year. Most of what we are fed in the press about China in the UK is negative: human rights, Tienanmen Square, blocked Google, smog, Hong Kong democracy, dictatorship etc.
I arrived in Kunming, Yunnan expecting to find the sense of oppression I had experienced in eastern Europe in the late 1970s and to be struggling with pollution etc.
I walked around with my mouth open! No pollution, clean streets, no beggars/homeless, wide variety of independent shops and food outlets, moderate traffic, !!electric motorcycles!!, well run places to stay, delicious food (so much better than UK ‘Chinese takeaway), very little sexualisation of women (either clothes or depiction in adverts), everyone with a 15cm smartphone, great internet access, people hiring bikes with an app on their phone.
Where shall I stop?
Once the truth starts to filter to the general population, respect will grow.
Of course there will be resistance. We in the West cannot bear the idea that our version of ‘democracy’ is not the best for everyone. It will take us a while to understand the role of the Chinese Communist party and the benefits of a system like that.
Addition 1: We are told that China suppresses religion – but in Dali there is a three-sources temple in the town – Confucius, Tao, Buddha – and the Confucius Centre in the centre has been completely rebuilt in the last few years. On the outskirts there is the Guan Yin temple. Ordinary folk out shopping come in all the time to say a prayer etc. I sensed their genuinely spiritual experience.
Addition 2: I also realised why China was advancing so fast – they work steadily! Wherever I looked people seemed to be just ‘getting on with it’. I sensed this was a deep habit, centuries old in the population.
Addition 3: Dancing in the park! Amazing. Just a group of people with a music-system doing musical Tai Chi. Another small group playing instruments in the park. So unselfconscious. Just enjoying themselves.
Update 2020: My prediction is probably now wrong. A dark cloud has descended over China/West relations. There is a growing China-phobia in the UK. People with no knowledge of China, who, when I wrote this post 2 years ago, would have little to say about China, now are experts making cold-war-like statements.
I responded recently to a very good article by a Harvard professor warning against a new cold-war with China. I was immediately vilified by comment writers (as was the author), accusing me of being a Chinese troll, or perhaps the author of the article. Very disturbing.
The main driving force for this is that western commentators blame China for their COVID19 deaths because of the delay in reporting in Dec 2019. The very slow and inadequate responses by the UK, US and now Brazil and all the consequent deaths are blamed in China, not on the inadequate response.
China is not perfect, but the inaccurate picture I reported 2 years ago has been transformed into something more dangerous.
Tortang Giniling (Filipino Beef Omelette)
Tortang Giniling is a Filipino ground beef omelette. It is unique in that the omelette is made more like a fritter and is filled with lots of beef and veggies. It is a delicious recipe for breakfast or for a light lunch or snack.
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Filipino Ground Beef Omelette
Tortang giniling is a simple Filipino omelette made with ground beef.
This omelette isn’t like your traditional omelette where the egg batter is cooked and folded around cheese and other fillings.
Rather, this Filipino omelette is made in more of a fritter style. The beef and vegetables for the filling are first sauteed and then transfered to a bowl. Once they have cooled slightly, they are mixed with beaten eggs.
This batter is then ladled onto your hot skillet in the same way you would ladle pancake batter onto a hot griddle, making small, roughly 3 inch, round omelette fritters.
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What does “Tortang Giniling” mean?
“Torta” is a word that you find variations of used in many cultures (Spanish, for example, and a variant in the French “tarte”). It is used to describe a number of dishes, but it often refers to a flat cake, of sorts.
In the Philippines, a “torta” refers to an egg fritter, or omelette.
“Giniling” is the Tagalog (one of the major languages spoken in the Philipines) word for “ground meat”.
Tips for making Tortang Giniling
With all the vegetables and meat right inside this omelette, flipping it can get tricky if you use too large of a pan and let your batter spread over too large of an area.
That’s why we like to make these into pancake-sized omelettes (or fritters). (Roughly 3 inches in diameter.) This will make flipping these ground beef omelettes easier.
To those of us in the States, this sounds like a bit of an unusual breakfast, but if you like savory breakfast dishes, this is definitely worth a try.
If savory breakfasts aren’t your thing, this makes for a great lunch or snack as well!
Ingredients
1 Tbsp oil
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tomato, diced
1 lb ground beef
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground black pepper
½ c peas
5 eggs, lightly beaten
Vegetable or canola oil, for frying
Instructions
In a large skillet, heat oil over medium high heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute until softened, 2-3 minutes.
Add the diced tomato to the skillet and continue cooking for 5 minutes, letting the tomatoes release their juices.
Add the ground beef to the vegetables and saute until browned, 5-7 minutes.
Add the salt and pepper. Mix well. Taste the mixture and adjust the salt and pepper as desired.
Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl. Add the peas and let the mixture cool slightly.
Once the meat mixture has cooled, add the beaten eggs and mix well.
Wipe out the skillet you used for the meat and heat a little oil in it, over medium heat. Reduce the heat to medium low and spoon ¼ c of the egg and beef mixture into the skillet, flatten the mixture and shape it roughly into a 3-4 inch patty. (Depending on the size of your skillet, you may be able to cook more than one omelette at a time. Just be careful not to overcrowd the pan, or flipping the omelettes will be difficult.)
Cook the omelette for 2-3 minutes on the first side. (If your omelettes cook faster than this, your pan is too hot. Reduce the heat for the next batch.)
Flip the omelette and cook for an additional 1-2 minutes on the second side, until golden.
Transfer the omelette to a paper towel-lined plate and continue with the remaining batter. (Keeping the plate with the cooked omelettes in a very low oven will keep them warm until all are made.)
Black Hawk Down: Hostile streets
Military capabilities
The following article is part of a series of articles that argues that no military technology is going to negate a MAD-level nuclear response to American military action. MAD is an anachronism for Mutually Assured Destruction. No matter what the American leadership might want to believe, there is no such things as “reasonable” or “safe” nuclear weapons.
Use of any type of weapons against a major power will result in a very dangerous response.
Mutually assured destruction is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
-Wikipedia
And this needs to be said.
For President Joe Biden and the entire neocon cabal strongly believe that they can unleash military action against either, or both Russia and China and NOT trigger a MAD level response.
"Does being “ahead” have any practical meaning, however? Is there a genuine contest for advantage that translates into their gaining an upper hand in some sense or other? The clear answer is “NO!” It is strategically meaningless. Why? Because it in no way alters the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction."
This article is titled “Russia’s Lead Over the US in Hypersonic Weapons Gives them No Practical Strategic Advantage in Geopolitics” by Michael Brenner and found on Zerohedge. It was written Tue, Jan 21, 2020 and republished with very little editing. You can read the Comments on the site directly if that is your desire. I normally do not post “doom porn” from Zerohedge, but it does have good and meaty articles from time to time.
This is one of them. Enjoy.
Russia’s Lead Over the US in Hypersonic Weapons Gives them No Practical Strategic Advantage in Geopolitics
Deployment of Russia’s hyper-sonic missiles is causing heartburn in the West. Media headline the news as a dramatic breakthrough on a par with the first Sputnik. “Experts” are rushed into play like those self-styled pundits pronouncing when the initial exit polls appear on Election Day. Pentagon officials assure us that the United States is at the top of the nuclear game and able to respond to (if not exactly match) anything that the Russians can put out there.
Ninety eight percent of all this instant reaction is “fog-horning.” It simply signals that something big and important is out there even though we don’t have a clear picture of its actual shape or dimensions — or its significance. That’s normal. What counts is moving swiftly to the “searchlight” stage of close observation and hard thinking. Whether analysts, official or otherwise, get there is problematic. We’re out of practice when it comes to serious strategic appraisal. After all, we’ve been flailing about in Afghanistan for almost two decades with no realistic aim or evaluation of the chances of achieving it by whatever means at whatever cost. The disorientation on Syria is even greater. There, we haven’t as much as figured out who are the “bad guys” and who are the “good guys” — except for ISIS.
If you can’t differentiate friend from foe for want of rigorous strategic analysis, your actions are predictably erratic — little more than the expression of mental fibrillations. The same can be said for the rest of the Missile East.
The Washington consensus is sure about one thing: Russia is a mortal enemy. We sanction the Russians, we denounce the Russia, we coerce our European partners into ostracizing them, we conjure frightful images of Vladimir Putin while ignoring just about everything he says (as if they were Hitlerian rants). Still, no one seems able to provide a crisp formulation of what the Russian threat is — other than getting in our way in places where we demand to have full sway: Syria, Libya, Iran, Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia.
Of course, we also accuse them of working relentlessly to undermine American democracy. Yet, that remains debatable as does everything that bears the dubious label of “Washington consensus.” Anyway, whatever minuscule role the Kremlin might have in the accelerated unravelling of the American Republic, it barely registers amidst the hammer blows struck by the craziness of President Donald Trump, his enablers and a largely compromised, abject resistance.
Cold War Dread
Understandably, it is not that easy to overlook nuclear weapons. It wasn’t that long ago that many of us were tormented by the dread of a prospective Armageddon, when the Cold War carried manifest dangers, when the air was thick with hostility and menace.
In October 1962, Americans were terrified over Soviet missiles in Cuba, as this newspaper map showing distances between Cuba and major North American cities demonstrates.
Those acute fears gradually faded over the 40 years of the nuclearized Cold War. We came to live with the Bomb — if not to love it. Subsequently, concerns shifted to the risks associated with nuclear weapons proliferation among less stable states in more fraught places.
The reasons for this sedating were three-fold.
Above all was the “balance of terror.’’ Leaders among the major nuclear powers absorbed the fundamental truth that not only was the notion of “winning” a nuclear war an oxymoron — but also that any use of nuclear weapons inexorably would escalate into acts of collective suicide. The survivors would envy the dead — as Nikita Khrushchev one said. That conviction became formalized in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Second, it was reified by a number of treaties and understandings: START I,II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the Anti-BallisticMissile Treaty (ABMT), the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, introduction of the Hot Line between the White House and the Kremlin, and the several arms reduction accords signed when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. Their collective purpose was to ensure that no conceivable advantage might be gained that would jeopardize — however slightly — the balance of nuclear power, i.e. the assurance that any resort to nuclear weapons was tantamount to the death of civilization.
Finally, a number of technological developments reinforced Mutual Assured Destruction: the deployment of submarine launched ballistic missiles — SLBM (immune to location and possible destruction in a “first strike” — thereby, guaranteeing a retaliatory capability); improved controls that reduced the chances of an “accidental” or miscalculated launch; and the moratorium in placing ballistic missile defenses around major population centers that could have the effect of removing their “hostage” status.
The last has turned out to be a largely redundant measure since the strenuous efforts of the Pentagon/NASA as well as their Soviet/Russian counterparts to devise a workable BMD all have come up well short of producing anything meaningful.
U.S. President Gerald Ford and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sign joint communiqué to limit strategic offensive arms, 1974. (Wikimedia)
Unfortunately, two policy developments have awakened the nuclear issue from its somnambulant state. One is Washington’s abandonment of arms control treaties that were important parts of the nuclear stability package. George Bush removed us from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty(while observing its provisions), and effectively voided restrictions on ballistic missile defense in the vain hope of countering remote threats from prospective nuclear powers (Iran), bolstering the sense of security of some East Europeans (a non-solution to a non-problem)and – frankly – to get under the Russians’ skin. Barack Obama had neither the conviction nor political courage to reverse those retrograde moves.
Under Donald Trump, there has been a comprehensive plan to break free of all manner of restrictive commitments — military, diplomatic or economic. Deployment of regional BMD systems directed at Russian, Chinese and North Korean forces has been expanded despite their demonstrated efficiencies (one version could not even protect Saudi oil complexes or U.S. air bases in Iraq from primitive Iranian missiles).
Modernization of Nuclear Arsenals
The other troubling development concerns the modernization of nuclear arsenals by both the United States and Russia. President Barack Obama committed us to a trillion-dollar program to refine and upgrade American warheads and delivery systems over the next 20 years. The strategic rationale is obscure.
The Russian hypersonic missile development is a parallel development. In a purely technical sense, they obviously are “ahead” of us. And that irritates the hell out of the American security establishment.
Does being “ahead” have any practical meaning, however? Is there a genuine contest for advantage that translates into their gaining an upper hand in some sense or other? The clear answer is “NO!” It is strategically meaningless. Why? Because it in no way alters the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Theoretically, there are only two imaginable ways to do that. The most significant would be development/deployment of a massive, truly effective BMD system that shields population centers and other critical, high value sites from retaliatory attack. That has shown itself to be impossible – even if the initiator of an attack succeeded in reducing the other side’s retaliatory forces by some significant fraction.
A totally disarming first strike in principle could be the second method logically to qualify MAD. It cannot be done, though.Fortunately. The combination of SLBMs, cruise missiles, and increased warhead lethality makes the idea of a disarming first strike a pipe dream of military strategists disengaged from reality. Hypersonic weapons do not change that calculus.
Accuracies of MIRVed warheads were lowered to 100 feet many years ago.(CEP, or Circular Error Probability = 50 percent chance of landing within radius.) Reducing that to 20 feet, therefore, is pointless – the silo is destroyed either way unless its missile has been “launched on warning” (tripwire automaticity as ultimate assurance of retaliatory strike). Similarly for missile defense.
Then, there is the question of an incoming missile’s speed. Current ICBMs that may give 18 minutes warning do not permit any defensive measures to be taken. If they arrive on target within six minutes, there is no additional benefit to the attacker. Today’s missiles that follow a straight trajectory cannot be intercepted — with or without their distracting decoys.
The fact that “swerve” capable hypersonic missiles can mambo their way to the target adds nothing to their effectiveness. Anyone who tells you that the Russians gain a strategic advantage thereby is lying — either in order to extract larger sums for R & D from the Treasury or to accentuate irrational fears of Russia.
President Vladimir Put visiting an exhibit of advanced weapons before meeting with Russia’s Defence Ministry Board, December 2019. (The Kremlin)
Finally, no reasonably sane leader would risk national suicide for a 1 percent chance of getting away with a first strike and surviving retaliation. There is no stake worth even contemplating it. Indeed, that logic holds even were there an impossible 50 percent chance of pulling it off.
Today, the United States and Russia are not engaged in a life-or-death struggle for world domination or for ideological vindication. Ascribing anything like that notion to Vladimir Putin is simply a sign of mental derangement – ours, not his. The same holds for the super-power competition between the United States and China.
So, if this line of reasoning is compelling, why did Russia’s leaders bother with investment of great sums to produce hyper-sonic missiles? The answer is a matter of speculation. Doubtless, technological and bureaucratic momentum has much to do with it. These sorts of long-term programs take on a life of their own — just as they do in Washington. The is no more reason for the United States to squander a trillion dollars in refining our nuclear arsenal as two successive administrations have committed us to doing.
In Russia’s case, there likely is another factor at work. Historically, Moscow leaders have exaggerated American technical capabilities; they have something of an inferiority complex on this score despite their own remarkable accomplishments. It is particularly acute in the nuclear realm — most especially in regard to ballistic missile defense.
This goes back to Nixon’s proposed Safeguard system, followed two decades later by Reagan’s Star War’s plans. Neither of which in actuality had the potential to alter the strategic balance. This free-floating strategic anxiety should be placed in historical perspective. There is a touch of paranoia in the Russian strategic mind — engraved by the events of the 20th century.
Some of this sentiment is conveyed by Putin’s remarks in announcing the deployment of hypersonic missiles: “We’re used to being in the position of catching up. That no longer is the case. Russia is the only country that has hypersonic weapons.”
To some unknowable degree these neuralgic points in the Russian psyche have been stimulated by the aggressive American program to surround Russia with BMD systems.
“Might it just be conceivable that the United States could perfect them, make it work, and somehow jeopardize the credibility of our nuclear deterrent? Why are they expending so much money and effort? Why do those BMD sites make Poland and the Baltics feel more secure when they are in fact militarily useless and it makes no sense for us to attack them?”
Informed analysis suggests that the answer is negative to all these questions. The alternative explanation: U.S. leaders are inclined to do feckless things; they are strategically obtuse.
The broader lesson is that there is truth to the old adage: “Russia never is as strong as it seems; Russia is never as weak as it seems.” We wrote it off as a world power in the 1990s and never since made the proper adjustment. That perception may have contributed to the glaring failure of the United States’ intelligence community in missing Russia’s remarkable break-throughs in weaponry.
It’s intelligence that counts more than Intelligence.
What are the implications of China’s Communist Party choosing Xi Jinping as its leader for life?
He may be elected for another 5 year term. He is not “chosen for life”.
He is the Titular head of the Country. He is the spokesperson and the Chinese People’s representative.
As Commander-in-chief of the army he is not allowed declare war.
Being party General Secretary, he is a very powerful figure.
He does not RULE. As Chairman his role is consultative and decisions are taken by the Council, approved (or sometimes overruled) by the Chinese People’s Congress.
I think a person should think and maybe study basic facts before formulating a question.
By the way FYI the CPC has about 2430 members, 847 of whom belong to 7 parties other than the CCP. Among the members of the Council there are at least 2 Senior Ministers who belong to parties other than the CCP.
As an aside, purely my own assessment, I get the impression that the main priority of each of the members of the Chinese People’s Congress is the welfare of the Chinese People.
Super 6-1 Shot Down
Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe
Quick and Easy Calzones filled with pepperoni, mozzarella cheese and marinara then topped with Italian seasoning and parmesan. Not only are these calzones so easy to make, but they taste absolutely amazing!
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Quick and easy calzones is one of our family favorite, picky eater approved recipes that we can make fast on those busy weeknights. If you love a good homemade pizza recipe, then you are going to love this one!
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This recipe is great because each person can pick their own toppings (if you want) and then there is no fighting about what is on the pizza! Or, you can make them all the same and serve it as an appetizer.
We have done it both ways, and either way is amazing. So, make sure you bookmark, pin, or save this recipe so you can find it quickly when you need an easy dinner recipe to make.
Ingredients Needed For Our Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe:
Refrigerated pizza crust (your favorite kind)
Marinara sauce
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Pepperoni slices
Melted butter
Italian seasoning
Grated Parmesan cheese
How To Make Our Quick and Easy Calzones Recipe:
Begin by preheating your oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit.
Then, spray a baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray and set it aside.
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Now, get out your refrigerated pizza crust and cut it into 6 equal squares (as best as you can).
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Next, in the middle of each of the squares place about 2 tablespoons (or more if you like extra sauce), a little less than ¼ cup of shredded mozzarella cheese, and 4 pepperoni slices.
Take one corner of the square and fold it over to another corner to form a triangle.
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Once you have formed a triangle around the calzone fillings, use a fork and go around the open sides and press it into the dough to seal it closed.
Next, place each of the filled calzones on the prepared baking sheet.
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Using the melted butter, get out a pastry brush and spread some of the melted butter on top of each of the calzones and then sprinkle some of the italian seasoning and grated parmesan cheese on top.
Then place the baking sheet in the oven for 10-12 minutes and bake them until the tops are golden brown.
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When they are done, take them out and serve them hot with warm pizza sauce for dipping!
Make the Dough Yourself
If you do not want to use refrigerated dough, you don’t have to! You can make homemade dough and use it in place of the refrigerated dough.
How could the man who cried “give me liberty or give me death,” this patriot who penned Virginia’s resolves against the Stamp Act in 1765, not support the Constitution?…
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Thomas Kidd as he explores why Patrick Henry opposed the Constitution. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher
At the conclusion of Virginia’s 1788 ratification convention, a meeting tasked with voting on the new Constitution, Patrick Henry strode to the assembly floor, convinced that the future of American liberty hung in the balance. In his mind’s eye, the great orator warned, he could see angels watching, “reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America, and the consequent happiness or misery of mankind—I am led to believe that much of the account on one side or the other, will depend on what we now decide.”
To Americans familiar only with Henry’s blazing “Liberty or Death” oration of 1775, it may come as a shock to learn that Henry opposed the adoption of the Constitution. Henry always had a flair for the dramatic, but on this occasion, Mother Nature offered him an improbable assist: As he thundered against the dangers of the new centralized government, a howling storm rose outside the Richmond hall. Frightened delegates scurried to take cover.
A memorable scene, to be sure, but how could the man who cried “give me liberty or give me death,” this patriot who penned Virginia’s resolves against the Stamp Act in 1765, not support the Constitution? The answer was pretty simple: Henry thought that the American Revolution was, at root, a rebellion against the coercive power of the British government. In particular, it was a rebellion against unjust British taxes. Henry, therefore, thought it was madness for Americans to place that same kind of consolidated political authority over themselves again.
The All-Powerful States
America already had a constitution in 1788, the Articles of Confederation, basically a continuation of the Continental Congress, the ad hoc body formed in 1774 to plan resistance against British taxes. The Articles of Confederation government was composed of a single-house legislature. The states retained most of their power under the Articles, and it was very difficult for the national government to do much of anything without overwhelming support from the states.
Historians often assume that the government under the Articles was an unmitigated disaster. But, really, the Articles government was not too bad. It managed (with major difficulty, of course) to beat the formidable British military in the Revolutionary War. It secured the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which remains one of the greatest diplomatic achievements in American history. And it passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the key precedent for the future expansion of the United States into the Great Lakes region and the trans-Mississippi west.
Certainly, there were many problems under the Articles of Confederation, mostly regarding the national government’s inability to craft coherent trade and economic policy. Part of this inefficiency was intentional, as the national authorities did not have the power to tax. When the Confederation Congress needed money, it had to issue requests for funding to the states. Often the states could not (or would not) pony up.
We should remember that the Founders designed the Articles government simply to perform those tasks that only a national government could do. They did not wish to create a large, powerful national government. The states still commanded the primary allegiance of most leading Patriots. When someone in the Founding period spoke of his “country,” he was probably talking about his home state, not the United States.
Amendments, or More?
It was James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who began moving the nation away from the Patriots’ original suspicion of big government. They pushed for a 1787 meeting that was ostensibly tasked with proposing new amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Henry and George Washington were the two most popular leaders in Virginia, and Henry was elected to attend the Philadelphia convention. But he had already begun to suspect that the organizers had more in mind than just suggesting amendments. He famously explained his refusal to attend by saying “I smelt a rat.”
Henry had served five terms as Virginia governor during the 1770s and ’80s, and he had already become alarmed at the willingness of Northern congressmen to act directly against Virginia’s economic interests. In particular, John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs, had in 1786 attempted to sign away America’s rights to navigate the Mississippi River in exchange for preferential trade status. This would have been a disaster for the Southern economy. Only the requirement for a two-thirds majority on navigation acts prevented the measure from being adopted, but James Madison knew that the damage was done. “Mr. Henry’s disgust [at the Jay treaty] exceeded all measure,” Madison wrote, and turned Henry totally against the notion of enhancing national government’s power.
When Henry saw the result of the Philadelphia convention’s work, he was appalled. To him, the new Constitution proved that Americans had already forgotten the dangers of consolidated national authority. Although he had refused to attend the Philadelphia meeting, Henry eagerly went to the Richmond ratifying convention, setting the stage for a clash between Henry and his political nemesis, Madison. Henry commandeered the ratification proceedings, warning in exquisite (and, Madison thought, exasperating) detail all the ways in which the Constitution jeopardized American liberty.
Limitations on Power
Like most Antifederalists, Henry wanted a bill of rights added to the Constitution (the document did not originally include one), but that was not his core concern. Instead, Henry wished to see real, structural limitations on the new government’s power, such as taking away its authority to tax. Federalists (supporters of the Constitution) said that in order to have a powerful, effective government, the Constitution required these new powers. To Henry, this was hogwash. The Constitution’s defenders, he warned, believe “we must be a great and mighty empire,” he said. But “when the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was then the primary object.”
Henry concluded his assault on the new Constitution with his remarkable thunderstorm speech, but he could not derail ratification. Virginia voted 89-79 to approve the Constitution, and when his longtime ally, Washington, became the first president, Henry slowly began to reconcile himself to the new government. But he never got over the feeling that when the nation ratified the Constitution, it betrayed the principles of the Revolution.
Patrick Henry thought that a national government invested with the unlimited power to tax and spend would inexorably transform into a monstrosity, one that the Founders—even Madison—never intended.
Most Americans believe that the Constitution, at least as originally designed, fostered a wise system of checks and balances that divided power between the states and national government.
But when you consider the titanic government we have today, and the struggles to contain our mind-boggling rates of federal debt and spending, Henry’s warnings about what the government under the Constitution could eventually become seem more and more reasonable.
Rufus Chen
Chen knew he had to do something. A woman, rambling on in a foreign language, was climbing over the railing. It was a 230-foot (70 meters) drop into the water below. Death was certain.
The new bridge over the Yangtze River in Nanjing, China had quickly surpassed The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and Aokagohara Park in Japan as the most popular location for suicides.
Chen slammed on the brakes and jumped out of his car. In a state of desperation, instincts took over. Gently, he spoke with her, sharing his compassion and understanding. Chen let her know that he, too, was a struggling migrant worker. She was not alone. People cared.
After several minutes of sharing each other’s pains and struggles, the woman climbed back over the railing and gave Chen a hug. Never again would she attempt another suicide.
Chen decided to come back to the bridge the next day. His infant child was left with his young wife, but Chen thought that he might be able to help someone else on the ledge who needed someone – even a stranger.
Fortunately, no one came. Chen drove home.
Despite the bitter cold, Chen came back on Saturday and the next day, too, spending almost his entire weekend on the bridge.
He found a man, traumatized over the loss of his life’s savings. They, too, hugged. Chen gave him all the money he had in his wallet. Chen had prevented another suicide.
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Finding a higher purpose, Chen went to the bookstore and ordered every book written by the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud to better understand the human psyche. He read and reread every page, taking notes and memorizing passages.
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From the day of that first encounter, every Saturday and Sunday Chen would go to the 2 1/2 mile (four kilometers) Nanjing Bridge and do whatever he could to let others know someone cares, always willing to share his time and his money.
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In the 53 years since the bridge was built, more than 3,000 people have jumped. None are believed to have survived. But another 412 people are still alive because of Chen Si, the one who devoted every weekend for eighteen years to saving the lives of strangers.
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Abandoned Kitties
Look at the eyes…
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1 Tess, left outside for 8 years and treated like garbage. Photo taken while she was a stray.
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2 Tess a few months after I took her in (her owners moved away and left her behind).
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3 Phoebe – found in the weeds behind my house, 4 months old, starving and flea-bitten.
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4 Phoebe six months after I took her in.
Look at the eyes.
Abandoned cats are sad, beaten down, and afraid.
Adopt a stray cat or dog from the street or the shelter. Save a life and change your life for the better.
Some Chinese scholars discuss the Taiwan issue…
▲LI Chen, Associate Professor and International Security and Strategy Program Director at the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China
At present, the chain of command of the two militaries is still unimpeded, and the risks are still under control as long as the leaders on both sides adhere to bottom-line thinking on the issue of war and peace.
▲SHI Xiaoqin, PLA Sr. Colonel (Retired), Research fellow at School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University
In the long run, these military exercises might be a watershed event.
▲CAO Qun, Associate research fellow at the Department for American Studies, China Institute of International Studies
Military-to-military relations will not spiral out of control just because these mechanisms are removed.
And last but not least
▲Victor Gao, Vice Director, Center for China and Globalization, Chair Professor of Soochow University
As for the Sino-U.S relationship, Washington hopes to compartmentalize bilateral ties with China with their cooperation, competition and confrontation approach. That’s wishful thinking on the part of Washington.
▲LI Chen, Associate Professor and International Security and Strategy Program Director at the School of International Studies at Renmin University.
The positioning of the military relationship between China and the U.S has actually elevated in recent years. In the past, Beijing and Washington emphasized their economic and trade relations were the ballast stone of bilateral ties. Over the last two or three years, there has been a new formulation that the military-to-military relations as other aspects of China-U.S. relations have deteriorated.
The significance of “military relations are the ballast stone” is that with many setbacks in bilateral relations and rising hostility, any major problems that arise in military relations would have an overall impact on bilateral relations. It should be recognized that there is a certain consensus between China and the United States on this. However, the disagreement is that the U.S. side believes as long as it maintains operational-level management & control and strategic-level communication, there is no need for them to respond to China’s various concerns on security and military issues. Then they can do whatever they think is at low risk, which harms China’s security interests.
On the other hand, the U.S. side now is hard to move forward with mil-to-mil relations due to its domestic politics, even from a professional point of view that the U.S. and China have room for further progress on some issues.
So, the two sides have conflicting ideas, and the Chinese side on various occasions has been hoping that the U.S. can change its ideas and practices, but so far the effect is not particularly positive.
The Taiwan question is a matter of China’s core interests. As Deng Xiaoping once told then U.S. President Ronald Reagan decades ago that if there is a major change over the Taiwan question due to the U.S. side, China will safeguard its core interests, even if there could be some setback in China-U.S. relations, and such a cost we need to bear. So, these three countermeasures (cancelling the three mil-to-mil dialogues) show our determination as Pelosi’s Taiwan trip is indeed very serious in nature.
Although Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan ostensibly did not involve the U.S. federal government, the Taiwan question is, after all, involved in every aspect of China-U.S. relations, including security relations. Were the Taiwan question not well managed and the situation escalates, it will only have a greater impact on the security relationship between the two countries and militaries. These countermeasures are a necessary warning sent to the U.S.
In terms of these three measures, talks between China-U.S. theatre commanders are not a regular or normalized mechanism so far; the China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks are relatively frequent at the working level. But if some major incidents occur, the two sides still need senior-level officials or even leaders to communicate and make decisions.
The third is the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which does have a long history in China-U.S. military relationship, with the two sides meeting almost annually to discuss maritime security issues, but mainly at the operational level.
Therefore, these three mechanisms do not represent the entirety of the security relationship between the two militaries, which means that even if these three are cancelled for a short period, there are still channels open.
The hotline between the U.S. and Chinese defence departments remains. The military attachés of embassies in two capitals can communicate with each other’s relevant departments. At the operational level, agreements like the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES) adopted by the Western Pacific Naval Symposium and the two MOUs are still working.
One last point, the military and defence departments act differently from other government agencies. At present, the chain of command of the two militaries is still unimpeded, and the risks are still under control as long as the leaders on both sides adhere to bottom-line thinking on the issue of war and peace.
Indeed, these necessary countermeasures may have a negative impact in terms of dealing with the potential escalation of frictions. However, there is still some operational leeway for restoration of these mechanisms, or in other forms, if the situation improves. Also, if one reads the announcement of these countermeasures literally, it still leaves room for interpretation of whether what is being cancelled are the entire mechanisms or just some specific meetings or arrangements in the near future.
▲SHI Xiaoqin, PLA Sr. Colonel (Retired), Research fellow at School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University
The PLA has long been pursuing a national defence policy that is defensive in nature, and the military exercises were a stress test in response to the current situation. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was a major move in Washington’s attempt to hollow out the one-China principle in recent years, which might likely trigger a Domino effect. In response, the PLA launched these real combat exercises to offset the momentum of U.S. provocation and restore a balanced posture over the Taiwan question.
The PLA no longer took a restrained approach as in the past. Its aircraft and warships crossed the median line of the strait, flew missiles over the island and established exercise zones circling it. These moves marked a deviation from the PLA’s tradition of confining itself to the mainland side in previous drills. It demonstrates PLA’s transformation from an offshore military to a long-distance operation force and a major change in its decision-making.
Meanwhile, the PLA is fully aware of the possibility of crisis escalation. The PLA publicly stated that the exercises were conventional missile drills. The United States said it would postpone the Minuteman III ICBM test. These interactions demonstrated basic strategic trust between the two great powers. The PLA exercises also took into account the busy international air and sea lanes around the island in response to international concerns.
The strategic goal of the PLA remains deterrence. The duration and scale of the exercise were solid evidence of Beijing’s great wrath but also a restrained attitude showing its will and capability.
The objectives of these deterrence-oriented exercises are also clear, which are against the separatists in Taiwan and the foreign forces that support “Taiwan independence.” The PLA demonstrated: that they are capable of “encircling but not fighting”; they could conduct surgical strikes and divide the island into several pieces; and they also could launch “Golden Bell strikes” with land, naval, air, space and electronic & cyber forces.
These theatre-level exercises were carried out by the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, and it serves as a test of the new combat operational command system since the military reform of 2015. The exercises examine the joint and integrated operations between arms and services in the theatre, the chain of command between military services and the theatre as well as the capability of rapid response.
In the long run, these military exercises might be a watershed event. The U.S. government recently clarified its one-China policy has not changed, and it does not support Taiwan’s independence. However, the political fallout from Pelosi’s Taiwan trip would continue, with the state of policy on the Taiwan question that has been established over the past 50 years through a series of maneuvers might be disrupted. It is not the military exercises but the provocation by Pelosi that led to the negative effects on international politics. The PLA military exercises are only responsive, defensive, and deterrent.
First, in the context of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy”, the U.S. intends to take “integrated deterrence” as the guidelines, bringing in allies and partners working across the nuclear and conventional deterrence. These PLA exercises might accelerate U.S. efforts to integrate Taiwan into its “integrated deterrence” network.
Second, the U.S. might make adjustments to its regional military posture. U.S. military’s forward presence in the Asia Pacific could be replaced by a far-peripheries presence in the region. This time the U.S. aircraft carriers operated farther away from Taiwan island than they were during the 1996 Taiwan crisis. The PLA advancing and the U.S. forces somewhat retreating will be a clear trend in development. To balance its weakening position at sea, the U.S. military may increase its land-based military deployments in Asia or make other tactical adjustments.
Third, Japan, which is within the firing range of the PLA, probably will use this drill as an excuse to increase its military expenditure, expand its military strength, strengthen its alliance with the U.S., firmly collude with “Taiwan independence” separatist forces, or even abandon its Peace Constitution.
Fourth, the Taiwan authorities will reassess their position, especially the U.S. determination and capability to defend Taiwan.
It is worth noting that on August 5, China announced 8 countermeasures in response to Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan, three of which are related to the military: cancelling the China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk; cancelling China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT); cancelling China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings.
At a time when communication and dialogue are urgently needed, the removal of these communication channels will inevitably raise concerns about the prospect of miscalculation and difficulty in timely communication when unexpected events occur. These communication channels have been built through long and arduous efforts. They guarantee the minimum strategic trust between two militaries and reassure other concerned parties. Fortunately, the list of countermeasures only cancelled the practice of talks and meetings without eliminating these mechanisms, which preserves the basis for resuming communication and exchanges in the future.
Comments outside China about the PLA exercises further irritated Beijing. These justifiable and restrained countermeasures are interpreted as escalating, coercive, dangerous, provocative, irresponsible, etc. In the age of social media, one-sided interpretations circulate quickly and widely, unsettling the court of public opinion worldwide. This gap in interpretation is not conducive to the stability of the Taiwan Strait and the international situation. It calls for timely dialogue and exchanges among the strategic, journalistic, and commentary communities to accurately understand each other’s intentions.
▲CAO Qun, Associate research fellow at the Department for American Studies, China Institute of International Studies
The differences in understanding between the two militaries are a long-standing problem. In April, the Defense Ministers of China and the United States had a video call, during which the two sides reached a consensus on managing differences and strengthening communication. But there have always been differences between the two militaries: the U.S. military has put more emphasis on technical aspects, such as how to deal with encounters at sea and in the air more professionally; China, in turn, has stressed that the United States should reduce such military actions that are provocative or endanger China’s national security interests.
There have been some positive interactions between the Chinese and U.S. militaries, such as the signing of CUES (Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea) at the Western Pacific Naval Symposium in 2014, followed by the signing of two MOUs (Memorandum of Understanding), all of which demonstrate that the two militaries have the basis of mutual trust and the ability to handle encounters professionally. But even so, differences in the perception of military exchanges have not been resolved.
Among the countermeasures, China cancelled China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk, China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT), and China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings. The MMCA signed in 1998 is the first agreement on military confidence-building measures between the two countries. It has worked well for a long time but gradually entered a bottleneck period.
However, despite the cancellation of the three mechanisms, there are still other communication channels between China and the U.S., such as the Defense Telephone Link (DTL) and the Joint Strategic Dialogue Mechanism (JSDM). The JSDM was signed in 2017, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart Gen. Li Zuocheng twice in 20 and 21 to assure him that the two countries would not suddenly go to war. This shows that China has taken the concerns of the U.S. into account this time.
In addition, there is always room for policy flexibility. As long as the U.S. returns to the path of meeting China halfway, the resumption of these mechanisms is possible. The MMCA was suspended for a year in 2020 under the Trump administration but was reinstated in 2021.
The guardrails between China and the United States still exist, and the chances of a military clash between China and the United States arising from Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan are slim. And military-to-military relations will not spiral out of control because these mechanisms are removed. The U.S. will continue to criticize China diplomatically, and the U.S.-Japan ties will be further strengthened. China needs to maintain a strategic focus and refute all statements made by foreign countries that are not in line with the facts. The struggle between China and the United States is still at the level of diplomacy, public opinion and international law but not military.
At the same time, the United States might instigate some European countries to follow suit to send delegations to Taipei. Such moves will impact China-EU relations and economic and trade development, which is what we should be worried about.
Scrappy kitten named Marley
My husband has severe anxiety and panic attacks. He decided to get him an emotional support animal. My husband loves cats, so we decided to get a kitten. I called the local rescue and was put in touch with the kitten foster mom. When I talked to her, I told her that we were looking for a kitten that was calm and would tend to be a lap kitty. She said she had the perfect one.
It was a kitten named Sadie.
We went to see the kittens. The foster mom had two large rooms with about 20 kittens. She brought a black and white kitten to my husband. This was Sadie.
My husband petted her but soon she jumped down and was off playing with the others.
Then this lanky blond kitten crawled into my husband’s lap.
He purred like crazy. My husband fell in love with this kitten. The foster mom said she wasn’t sure that this kitten would be a good match for us. He was always play fighting and getting in trouble.
She had named him Scrappy because of his feisty personality.
My husband had made up his mind, so we took Scrappy home. We had thought of different names that we liked. The kitten became Marley before we even got home.
Marley
Our Marley has been an angel. He has helped my husband so much. Marley always knows when my husband needs him. He will cuddle up close to my husband and purr. Since Marley came to live with us about 8 months ago, my husband has not had a bad panic attack and his anxiety is better. We love our “Scrappy” kitten named Marley.
Rufus
A hungry old lady with only 2 yuan on her body came to the restaurant, just wanting a glass of water. The waiter patiently served her and presented her with a box lunch.
Red Braised Pig Trotter
Pig trotter or we may see it as pig feet is considered as one of the most delicious parts on pig. Additionally, the rich collagen contained in pig trotter makes it as a popular beauty food in China. If you are patient enough, you can even try to make collagen mask from pig trotter.
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There are many recipes about trotter for example pig trotter soup with soy beans. This red braised pig trotter is also excellent. Pig shoulder can be used to replace pig trotter in this recipe. As for the treatment of pig trotter, be patient with the pig hair if there is any because it may influence the appetite a lot, or you can ask the batcher to help with that.
Besides, I want to introduce red braising a little bit more. In Chinese cooking methods, braising is a common and popular method. Red braising or sometimes known as red cooking, from its name, we know that the basic cooking method is braising but the color of the food should be red. The key step of red braising dishes is to make the red oil color via oil and sugar, however sometimes people use soy sauce as coloring when they do not want brother to do that. Generally crystal sugar is used for making the red color. We call this process as stir frying the sugar color. I have introduced the detailed steps and tips in this red braised pork belly also known as Hong Shao Rou. If you do not want to stir fry the sugar color, just add sugar along with soy sauce in clay pot. This method only sacrifice the color slightly but do not influence the taste.
For red braised meat recipes, it is import to guarantee the cooking time. I recommend cooking for at least 2 hours. Since it is a long time, you may use slow cooker or electric cooker to save time. I use high pressure to cook the pig trotter until almost soft, which cost 30 minutes and then red braise in a clay pot this time. It is ok to use a common pot or a wok or even a sauce pan. This version can be the most easy version.
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Another tip is that do not add salt at the very beginning because this may destroy the taste of the meat and make it chewy.
Ingredients
2pig trotters , remove the hair and cut into bite size chunks (resort to batcher)
Cut trotter into small sections. Rinse the pig trotter in clean and boiling water. Remove all the hair carefully. Put aside and drain.
Bring water to a boil in a large pot and cook the pig trotter for 2-3 minutes. Transfer out and wash under running water. This process can help to remove the odd taste as much as possible. And then in a high pressure cooker or electric cooker or a pot, cover pig trotter with enough water, add ginger slices, green onion, sichuan peppercorn and cooking wine. Cook until you can insert a chopstick into the meat. If you want a softer taste like me, cook it longer. Transfer the pig trotter out and the liquid can be kept as soup stock.
Heat up 1 tablespoon oil in wok, put the sugar in wok to stir fry until all the sugar melts and you can see large bubbles. Keep stirring during the process. Pour around 1 cup of hot water. Mix well! You need to be stay away from the wok and do not hesitate when pouring the water. If you do not want to stir fry the sugar color, just add sugar in clay pot and skip oil. The later method only influence the color but not the taste.
Prepare a clay pot or another deep sauce pan or wok, fry ginger slices and other spices for 1-2 minutes until aroma. Add pig trotter in, pour some cooking liquid in the previous until the pig trotter is almost covered. Pour the sugar color in the previous step and soy sauce. Heat over high fire with the lid uncovered until there are large bubbles in the pot and the sauce is almost dried up.
Sprinkle some green onion and then serve warm!
What do you need?
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My little cat was sitting on the coffee table, facing me, looking intently at my face, as he meowed again and again.
He was clearly conveying to me that he needed my help.
Keeping my gaze on him, so he knew that he was the focus of my attention, I asked, “What do you need?”, while standing up from the sofa.
He immediately jumped off of the coffee table to hurry towards the kitchen, several times glancing back as he went, to make certain that I was following him.
When we got there he ran to his water bowl, which, I was horrified to discover, was dry!
My poor little guy was on steroids for an illness which caused him to feel thirsty almost all of the time, and although I tried to ensure that his bowl was always filled with water, I’d obviously dropped the ball!
As I quickly moved to fill it from the water pitcher, I apologized profusely, saying his name repeatedly as I did so.
My hope was that he could tell, from the sound of my voice that I was very, very sorry, and from hearing his name numerous times, that my sorrow involved him.
Sitting on the kitchen floor with him, I felt my remorse deepen by the second as he drank and drank, paused for a moment to catch his breath, and then drank some more.
When he was done, I carried him back into the living room, scratching his ears as I went.
By the time I sat back down on the couch, with him still in my arms, he was purring.
I promised him that I would never, ever let that happen again—and I never did.
My darling cat passed away from cancer several months later—last July.
I miss him terribly.
Rufus
A beautiful girl is sheltering an old man with a leg deformity from the wind and rain, without noticing that she is getting wet all over.
A kidnapping
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This week these two officers did a traffic stop, during the stop of violating a red light, the driver expressed she was in a hurry to get the children in the car to school.
When the officers asked her, what school do they attend. She could not give a good answer.
They escorted her from the car and questioned the child, simply to the eldest child, age 10, “do you know this woman?”
The 10 year old shook his head, No! at that point the driver was arrested. It was later determined she had kidnapped the children on their way to school. Four children ages 10 to 6 were forced into the vehicle.
These 2 officers exercised excellent police investigate skills, in doing so they were able to take a kidnapper off the streets, and safeguard the 4 children from any hurt, harm and danger.
Outstanding work to Officers Flannel and Parrish, two of the hard workers in the Eighth Precinct.
Bringing a new kitten to an older cat
She attacked the kitten relentlessly for weeks. When the kitten went away to be microchipped, vaccinated and de-wormed, the older cat became distressed and kept searching the house for the little one. She even cried when her search didn’t turn up her precious target.
When the little one came home the older one started licking her and purring. It was pretty emotional. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
The kitten is the one on the left.
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“United States is pressuring the Netherlands to block the sale of EUV equipment to SMIC by Dutch company ASML is ultimately affecting China’s dream in technology”. How long US can resist China’s development?
I think I am the perfect person to answer this. I have been working in the semiconductor industry for years, currently living in the Netherlands, lived and worked in China for 3 years, I know a lot of engineers from ASML (expecially after they hired hundreds of Turkish engineers). Let me tell you something: High-end semiconductor manufacturing is black magic. Both the processes and tools used for it are very complex. ASML’s EUV lithography machine is probably the most complex tool humankind ever developed since it stopped jumping between trees. It took billions of Euros and decades of experience to perfect it. Other experienced lithography machine suppliers failed at it. China has no experience in high-end semiconductor manufacturing tools with the exception of one-off/few-off prototypes.
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ASML’s EUV lithography machine. Needs 41 semi-trucks to get transported, costs $150 million, has 100.000 major parts, has mirrors that need months of grinding to reach needed smoothness, needs multiple people with PhD’s as machine operators. Quite high-tech. Isn’t it?
Unfortunately, ASML is a very convenient target for the USA. The company uses a lot of critical parts from the USA but those parts don’t represent anything significant in the US economy in terms of their monetary value. Chinese electronics industry still depends on foreign chips so it can not threaten fabs with banning the sale of chips in China that were manufactured using ASML tools. Also, China isn’t a big customer of ASML too. In short, China can not answer with reciprocal sanctions.
Is China hopeless? No.
1- All of those tools are engineered and made by humans, and the laws of physics are the same both in the Netherlands and China. If the Netherlands could, then there is no reason for anybody else to fail with the correct approach.
2- China is filthy rich compared to the Netherlands. Chinese economy is 17x of the Netherlands’, 9x of SK’s, 27x of Taiwan’s, 3+x of Japan’s. With state support, Chinese fabs and tool makers can hire the top people from the rest of the world with salaries ASML, LamResearch, AM, Synopsys, TSMC, Samsung, … simply can not compete with. A significant portion of these companies’ employees are expats anyway, most of them are just after money. In fact China is already doing this successfully with good results. For example, it already has a working EUV lithography machine prototype, already caught up with the rest in chip testing, packaging, wafer production, also its first immersion lithography machine (good enough for most things) is getting prepared for commercial use.
3- China is a scientific powerhouse on its own. It is the country with most patent applications, most research output, graduates more STEM students than any other country, 2nd largest R&D spender, has 11 universities in top 100. This leads us to my first point. If the Netherlands could, so can China if given enough time.
4- Catching up is much easier than innovating. Knowing something is possible and having a general knowledge of how it works make things much easier.
5- Time is on the Chinese side. Technology of semiconductors is close to maturity/stalling (choose the word depending on your view). If the development slows (which it does) it gives China the opportunity to catch-up. If a tech revolution happens, then the playing field evens out anyway.
6- You don’t need EUV for the most things. You don’t even need high-end processes for the most things. There is more to semiconductors than the latest smartphone processors, GPUs, and CPUs. Look at iPhone 12 teardown videos. You will see a lot of chips. Only one of them needs EUV. An average modern car has 250+ computers inside. That means thousands of chips. All of them are manufactured using old processes. This is even more true for military and space applications. Those use very old chips that are known to be reliable and secure.
Conclusion: Blocking ASML from selling EUV machines to China can hurt Chinese businesses for some time but in the grand scheme it is insignificant. The USA needs to run faster rather than keep trying to block China if it wants to preserve its dominance in tech.
It seems the basic research is complete and the method completely different than of ASML’s.
Rufus
A sanitation worker picked up a female college student’s wallet and waited for two hours in the rain. After the female college student arrived, she was moved to tears by the sanitation worker’s behavior.
Guoguang was never executed; it required more troops and material than the ROC could muster, and it lacked support from the United States.
The use of a large scale invasion as the initial stage of reunification was effectively abandoned after 1966, although the Guoguang planning organization was not abolished until 1972.
The ROC did not abandon the policy of using force for reunification until 1990.
An orange tabby named “Spock”
An orange tabby named “Spock”
Before my wife and I married, we lived together and went through a period when some of our “discussions” got quite heated. My cat at the time, a 16y.o. orange tabby named “Spock” did NOT like us arguing. (I sure do miss that old man of a cat!)
His strategy for dealing with it?
Do most anything he could think of to do to distract us from each other. One tactic of his was his favorite — because it usually worked and had us in stitches watching him. He would chase his tail.
It wasn’t so much that he would chase the tail as it was where he would chase his tail. It was typically in a chair in the living room or, even better, in the bathtub. In the bathtub, chasing his tail would make such a ruckus that it was impossible to ignore.
“Old Man Big Eyes” left the realm of the living nearly 6 years ago. We miss him terribly. The photo is from when he was about 15 years old.
Rufus action
”Wednesday afternoon I was driving west on I-40 when my blood sugar dropped to a dangerous level. Luckily a Burger King restaurant was at the upcoming exit. As I stumbled through placing my order I mentioned to the voice on the speaker that I was diabetic and in need of food. Low blood sugar makes it difficult to think or act. I pulled up to the first window in order to pay for my food. I was shocked to see Burger King employee Tina Hardy running toward the front of my car. She squeezed between the front of my car and the building just to bring me a small serving of ice cream. Tina later explained that her husband was also diabetic and she could tell that I needed help. After paying I pulled up to Tina’s window where she gave me my food. She instructed me to park across the driveway so that she could keep an eye on me until I felt better. After eating I waited for a break in business so that I could return to Tina’s window. I then took this picture and spoke with Tina’s supervisor, telling him what she did for me. If you appreciate what this special woman did please share this story. Hopefully Tina Hardy will receive the recognition that she truly deserves from the public and from the big bosses at Burger King.”
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The Aconitine Insurance Murder
1986 in Okinawa, Japan.
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A 33 year old woman visiting a beautiful small island in Okinawa suddenly complained of acute chest pain. She was immediately taken to the hospital, but died, despite the strenuous efforts of the emergency doctors.
The doctors diagnosed her death as caused by a “myocardial infarction”, an unfortunate, sudden death. Note that there are more than 40,000 deaths caused by myocardial infarction in Japan alone. It is not uncommon, but one young doctor named Ohno felt something was suspicious about this death, and so he took 30cc of blood sample from the woman, just in case.
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(Image taken from Wikipedia)
Things started to get a bit fishy when a middle-aged man called Kamiya, who claimed to be the woman’s husband, appeared at the insurance office. Surprisingly, the man applied to receive 2 million dollars for his wife’s death. His monthly insurance premium on her policy was $2000 a month, an amount that is improbably high for a regular businessman to be able to pay for a long period of time.
The police started to think something was wrong and began the investigation. Lots of suspicious information popped up. Kamiya and the woman were married one month after they first met. And Kamiya previously had two wives who also died in similarly suspicious manners. As a result of the two previous deaths, Kamiya had already received a substantial amount of insurance money.
Ohno also started his investigation. He tried to discover what kind of poison could lead to ventricular fibrillation, of which there are numerous kinds.
Caffeine, amphetamines, … and aconitine. Aconitine is found in natural flowers, is 10 times more lethal than potassium cyanide, and was once used by Cleopatra to kill her brother. It opens the sodium channel inside the body, which leads to the excitement of the muscles and organs, resulting in death.
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Aconitum, the flower that contains aconitine (Image from Wikipedia)
Aconitine was the most suspicious poison. It was a gamble for Ohno. He only had 30cc of a blood sample. Experiment equipment was not advanced yet, and they weren’t able to measure the blood many times over. Fortunately for Ohno, he was able to find aconitine in her blood.
Despite aconitine being found in his apartment, Kamiya was still confident that he was innocent. The police and Ohno could still not solve one big mystery:
Time.
Aconitine is a poison that could kill you in minutes. The last time the woman had taken medicine was more than two hours before the attack. Aconitine would have killed her in several minutes. The police tried to prove that using a thicker capsule would delay the dissolution, but they discovered that thickening the capsule only delays the poisoning for a few minutes.
Time is on Kamiya’s side. How would you solve this mystery?
… The answer was yet another of the most dangerous poisons in nature: Tetrodotoxin, a deadly neurotoxin found in blowfish (or fugu in Japanese).
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Fugu (blowfish), known as a delicacy in Japan (Image from Wikipedia)
He exploited the conflicting mechanisms of the two poisons. Basically, aconitine is a poison that makes the Na+ channels of your muscles and neurons open, while tetrodotoxin inhibits the Na+ channel, preventing muscles from receiving messages from the neurons. The two poisons basically cancel out each others’ effect. However, the trick is that the two have different durations of their effects, resulting in the slower disappearing aconitine killing the victim after a much longer period of time than usual.
Ohno was finally able to discover the mechanism, and tetrodotoxin was found in the remaining blood sample. Kamiya was arrested and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Kamiya had been testing for hours to determine the perfect amount of poison that could result in the exact timing, using rats as test subjects.
What I think is frightening is that had he not committed three murders — and had he stopped after the second one — none of this would have been revealed.
Also what is saddening is that all of the passion and effort he devoted to find this modus operandi could have been used in a much more benevolent way.
Trade war with China could cost Germany six times as much as Brexit
8 August 2022, 6:16 pm
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BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany would face costs almost six times as high as Brexit if it and the European Union were to shut China out of their economies, the Ifo institute said on Monday, citing the results of a study.
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The biggest losers of a trade war with China would be the automotive industry with a 8.47% loss of value-added, manufacturers of transport equipment with a 5.14% loss and mechanical engineering with a 4.34% loss, the Ifo said.
“I immediately noticed, the burnt toast …. And, I was waiting to see if he was going to complain about it, but my father started to eat them, smiling and asked me how I spent my day at school.
My mom apologized to my dad for the burnt toast. I will never forget his response to her: “Honey, I love burnt toast!”
Later when I went to bed and my dad came over to kiss me goodnight, I asked him if he really liked the burnt toast?
He hugged me and said, “Your mother has had a difficult day and she is really tired. She went out of her way to prepare this meal for us, why blame her and hurt her.
Burnt toast never hurt anyone; but words can be very painful! “
We have to know how to appreciate what others do for us, even if it’s not perfect, because it’s the intention to do well that counts, and no one is perfect.”
-john thiessen
Starbucks and McDonald’s Russia exit sees Moscow entrepreneurs cash in with Stars Coffee and It’s Tasty — Period
Good riddence : now 100% Russian own, 100% profit retain in Russia.
Key points:
Moscow entrepreneurs are cashing in on the departure of Western outlets from the city by filling their unoccupied stores with imitation businesses
Starbucks is the latest to get a makeover, rebranding as Stars Coffee and sporting a similar-looking logo
Former McDonald’s are also reopening as Vkusno — i Tochka, roughly translated as It’s Tasty — Period
His name was Klaus and he came almost every day to the bar I was working at to save money for university.
Klaus was in his late sixties and a widower. His wife had died yeaaars ago and he told me that he left everything the way it was in their bedroom and that he wasn’t able to sleep in their bed. He only slept in the living room. He was very lonely and he had no kids. Klaus and I became good friends even though I was 45 years younger than he. I drove him to his doctor appointments and always listened to him when he needed to talk about his wife. He loved her very very much. One day he told me he had cancer and he refused any treatments. It took a couple of months until he needed to be hospitalized but he was still doing ‘okay’ for someone who was terminally ill. My family and I went on vacation and my boss from the bar called me to tell me that Klaus was transferred to the hospice. We drove back home and I visited him two times, and I even brought him his favorite beer and we talked about his wife. He told me that he would soon get to see her again.
He died that night in his sleep. Not many people came to his funeral and his urn was buried anonymously. It’s been 3 years. I miss him. He is one of the reasons I believe in true love.
In Nineteenth Century France a now mostly forgotten lawyer and political-economist lived until he died far too young at the age of 49 from throat cancer in 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, who is canonized today by Libertarians. During his life he made some very powerful observations that have proven true overtime:
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. “Economic Sophisms,” 1848
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim–when he defends himself–as a criminal. “The Law,” 1850
When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe. «The Law», 1850
When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. “The Law,” 1850
When he died, Bastiat was working on a manuscript, History of Plunder, that remains unpublished along with other works, but his published works gave us the above gems and many more. At the time he seemed to be just coming into his own as a political-economist having just witnessed the series of revolutions in 1848 and the theft of France’s Republic by Napoleon III. All of the above quotes can be applied to our world today. Bastiat was neck-deep in the Era of Plunder otherwise known as the Colonial Era or Era of Imperialism, and France was a major actor as was most of the Western European Realms. I don’t call them nations because most were still mired in Feudalism and ruled by Royalty as most tried to suppress the radicalism spawned by the revolution in British America. Eventually republics were born but they still practiced plunder. Many today still try to plunder while themselves are subjected to it in often unrecognized ways. And one of the most significant actions happening today is the fact that the historical plunderers are now being plundered as that Era comes to a close and the new Era based on cooperation takes form and displaces those unwilling to be on the right side of history and will suffer from the effects listed in the third citation above.
Now, our tale. Recently at the Fans of Lavrov’s Telegram, there was posted an excellent political cartoon that depicts the situation better than any I’ve seen–A snarling Uncle Sam firing a machine gun fed with an ammo belt using Ukrainians as bullets. I’d copy/paste it here but Telegram doesn’t seem to allow that operation. Here’s the caption for the cartoon:
“The results of the work of the Ukrainian propaganda machine are impressive: for example, 98% of Ukrainians are confident of victory in the special operation. Such survey data, commissioned by the Center for Analytical Studies (CISR) of the International Republican Institute (IRI), was published by the Rating group. The regime of Zelensky and his ‘servants’ continues day after day to hang noodles on the ears of the citizens of Independence, who in his political adventure are cannon fodder and the main means of warfare on the principle of ‘war to the last Ukrainian’.”
Too few people seem to understand that with the 2014 coup, Ukraine as an independent nation ceased to exist and was transformed into a de facto colony of the Outlaw US Empire which has guided its “development” (managed its plunder) ever since in a manner very similar to South Vietnam. The main difference is the lack of significant Imperial combat forces in-country. When looked at closely, there are very clear similarities between South Vietnamese forces and the UAF–their Naziness being one of them. While the nature of the two wars is slightly different, the capabilities of the two proxies isn’t–both are inept for much the same reason: They are led by politicized Pentagon and State Department flunkies only interested in Plunder. The result again has the Outlaw US Empire fighting against nationalist forces aiming to liberate their people who have powerful allies supporting their cause. The situation’s also very similar to what the British did in South Asia by using different proxies to fight each other instead of the Raj while it looked on and continued its plundering unabated.
The policy choice by the Outlaw US Empire to use Ukrainians as an anti-Russia force and to support them until they’re totally spent while the Empire continued its plundering opened up a unique opportunity for Russian strategy–Russia would oblige the Outlaw US Empire’s policy by ensuring NATO would bleed itself dry of its arms and munitions in supporting Ukraine while Russia went about demilitarizing all Ukraine had to start with plus all that’s being sent. And then there were the sanctions, which Russia knew might hurt some but would become a very sharp weapon against the sanctioners that would generate chaos and possibly split the EU/NATO enemy organizations once and for all that would create a blank slate for a new Eurasian security arrangement fashioned mostly by China and itself. The result shows Russia gaining strength while NATO weakens daily to the point where NATO nations will be too poor to finance rearming themselves in the face of vast societal upheaval caused by their policy choices. Talk about Hybrid War!
Then there’s the even bigger global picture as the once dominant Plundering Nations now plunder themselves via Neoliberal Parasitism. It’s really quite a sight when one takes a moment to review it all. This editorial excerpt dealing with Biden’s refusal to cancel the tariffs of Trump’s China Trade War despite the fact that it harms the Empire’s public far more than China is an excellent example:
“Besides, the US is the only superpower in the world. It has always been the bully, but when has it been bullied by others? In the realistic level of China-US relations, the US has always been the one that provokes China, so where does this ‘being soft on China’ rhetoric come from? This is a psychological disease in politics that needs to be treated. The endless competition of ‘who is tougher on China’ will make Washington lose itself and the courage for self-renewal. Moreover, the overall posture the US has shown in front of the world is becoming less and less honorable and more and more erratic.”
Is there a touch of sarcasm there? The Global South observes the behavior of the Plundering Nations and snicker to themselves that they’re finally getting the karma they so richly deserve. The global paradigm is rapidly changing as the Age of Plunder dies and the nations that benefited from it choke as they plunder themselves by following the diktat of what’s rapidly becoming a failed state so deeply addicted to Pleonexia it will very likely die from an overdose while plundering itself. “Self-renewal” can’t be done while you’re busily plundering your people, which is the political disease at the core of all the Plundering Nations. In one sense they are exceptional nations because they are blind to the fate they are providing for themselves as a result of their addiction.
The great sorrow of this state of affairs is that it was well known centuries ago as Dr. Michael Hudson illustrates:
The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.
The Greek concept of hubris involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.
That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage.
Well before the Greeks, empires built on plunder already existed and slowly moved from West Asia to Europe. Within them arose a power relationship that continues to plague humanity–the plundering of debtors by creditors, or what’s known as The Class War so few recognize because none of its origins and history are taught as such, while what is taught is euphemized to protect powerful institutions like the Catholic Church. Other words like exploitation are used as well as expropriation to mask the plundering. Recall the first Bastiat citation above, while learning there were means employed to renew society from the plunder through what’re known as Debt Jubilees, which was actually codified into Mosaic Law and is what Jesus died trying to reinstate. (For more on this topic, go here.) As we should all know, the system was organized to legalize plunder, but as a rule we don’t because we’re not taught about it so it can continue and be thought of as a natural part of life. It must be noted that Saint Augustine failed to mention what was at the base of the moral debacle that prompted him to write City of God which was the elite’s worship of the God of Mammon which Rome’s elite fashioned Rome’s legal system to support and ensured no one could challenge them via their policy of assassinating all opposition. And since Roman Law forms the basis for much Western Law, the great bias in favor of creditors versus debtors continues, which is clearly something Bastiat wanted to purge
And so the plundering empires of the Greco-Roman Era rose and fell as they were plundered themselves. But plundering didn’t vanish; instead, it got religion. Into the power vacuum that developed with the fall of Rome arose the Institution of the Roman Catholic Church which despite its Mosaic Law and its Son of God being the champion of those being plundered broke its own laws and morals to become the Western World’s biggest plunderer until the 1500s. It made possible the Age of Plunder that erupted with the “discovery” of sea routes to Asia and the Western Hemisphere’s continents with its series of Papal Bulls that began in 1479 with the Treaty of Alcáçovas, was followed by its much more infamous Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and capped by the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529. The arrogance of these Papal Bulls is stupendous–only Christians (and only select Christians at that) were deemed to be humans, all other humans were animals and to be treated as such–and that led to a global genocide which isn’t over yet. Even legal aspects of those Bulls remain on the books so the plunder they generated can continue. It didn’t take long for all the plundering realms to adopt the Bulls, whether nominally Protestant or Catholic. Only the Eastern Orthodox refused to use them mainly because they were deemed to be unworthy Christians and thus animals.
And so began the most recent Age of Plunder which is finally drawing to a close after 500+ years of rampage and rape, although there remain forces trying their utmost to extend it further. Many efforts were raised over the years to combat and overturn the basis of Plunder all of whom failed until now, which builds on the efforts of Bastiat and other Classical Economist reformers during the 19th Century. Their primary aim was to end all Feudal privileges, many of which were granted by Royalty to exploit their subjects, and come under the heading of Unearned Income, or the Free Lunch many have heard about. The best contemporary work on this subject is Dr. Hudson’s Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, although he’s been interviewed many times and written many essays on the topic, one terse version of the book being «The rentier resurgence and takeover: Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism». Hopes for victory were high during Disraeli’s government during the latter 1870s as many practical reforms were at long last passed into law, but not enough was done and a Reaction was sparked that still continues. The program was to cancel the initiatives of the Classical Economists and eliminate political-economy as a course of study at schools and universities, first in England then in the USA. The substitute was the promotion of a non-scientific form of economics having little relation to reality that’s now known as Neoliberalism that was well entrenched after WW1 ended with the Parasites capture of the US Federal Reserve and City of London financial centers as well as those on Continental Europe. US plunder was rampant via what was called Dollar Diplomacy, which provided the motivation for General Smedley Butler to write his seminal War is a Racket. But perhaps the greatest attempt at plunder was the Versailles Treaty‘s reparations, or raperations, to be borne by Germany. Not yet under the illusion of the «new» economics and present at Versailles was John Maynard Keynes, who became so irate and disconsonant at what he was witnessing that he left for Marseilles to write his prophetic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which predicted WW2. Both World Wars as well as our Hybrid Third World War were waged in the further pursuit of Plunder.
Fortunately for humanity, a countervailing force has arisen that’s stronger than the Plundering Nations, which is commonly known as the Multipolar World. The irony is its strength is due to the Plundering Nations quest for ever more plunder, for under the Neoliberal doctrine, they parasitized their industry and sent it to developing nations to feast on the wage arbitrage, which is known as the financialization of capitalism, that transformed their nations into what were touted as Service Economies. The shortsightedness of this plundering policy was made very clear with Trump’s Trade War against China. Biden’s crew has not just continued that as noted above, it has also instituted a Sanctions War of Plunder against what were once its EU/NATO allies whose main aim is to nullify Germany as Europe’s economic engine. The aim of this strategy is to make EU/NATO completely dependent geoeconomically on the Outlaw US Empire, which translates into more plundering. EU/NATO «leaders» are essentially owned by the Empire and thus do whatever it dictates, but fortunately not all. Then there’s the public that’s bearing the brunt of the plundering and slowly rising in protest despite the massive propaganda campaign based on Russophobia, longstanding and recently cultivated. So, between Russia’s boomeranging the sanctions back at their originators and the policy of fighting Russia first to the last Ukrainian, then the last Balt, and presumably the last European, the EU is experiencing both destabilization and dysfunction that will reach a climax come January when Winter really takes hold and much of Europe has no gas to heat homes or run businesses.
It’s difficult to judge the desperation of the Outlaw US Empire’s plunderers and their UK allies. Their Free Lunch is in deep jeopardy as their domestic situations are also being subjected to destabilization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, all the organs of the Multipolar World grow stronger daily. The dedollarization of international trade gathers greater momentum. The theft of too many nation’s assets by the plunderers throws up a big warning sign to all others that they aren’t at all trustworthy. This testimony is but one instance:
For a long time, the US has been the country that attracts the most foreign investment. But over the years, under the poisonous atmosphere of pan-politicization and generalization of concept of security, the country has created many terrible precedents, making more and more originally rich investment soil into a minefield. For example, it has forced foreign high-tech companies to hand over their technology and even carried out “technical confiscation” of capital, leading many people to say that Washington is close to “open robbery.” Can a company develop at ease if it is constantly worried about its investment and if it might be confiscated one day or waste all its investment? According to US media reports, CATL has long been planning to build US battery plants and visited some places in the US, but eventually may choose alternative plan to build plant in Mexico. It should be said that the doubts of CATL are also those of many other companies.
That’s how plundering nations commit suicide. Currently, the planet’s two most dynamic economies are under attack by the plunderers as they seek to avoid what those nations and their vast array of allies want to construct–A world with plundering replaced by sharing, Zero-sum replaced by Win-Win, perpetual war for plunder replaced by perpetual peace so humanity can mature and gain the wisdom it will need in the coming centuries. The plunderers have turned their «back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe» because of their Pleonexia affliction. As was done via Enclosure, the plunderers are now attacking their own polities and will likely be attacked by them soon. The Good Works being practiced by the Multipolar World and their solidarity in facing down those driven by Pleonexia for centuries have already won over 85% of humanity. Histories once hidden are being revealed in a manner that longstanding truths are now exposed along with the villains. The Global South is eager to learn those truths as are many within the plundering nations despite the efforts made to impose an information blackout. A very long Era/Age is closing that humanity won’t miss. There does remain one big problem, however, and that’s the possibility that the plunderers will unleash their bioweapons as opposed to nukes since there’ll be nothing left to plunder if the latter are employed.
Joshua (Rocky)
Joshua
When I visited the shelter to adopt a cat back in February 2016, one of the cats that caught my attention—mostly because he was awake and looking out of his cage at me, with his pleading yellow eyes—was a boy named “Joshua.”
He’d been there since the prior November, and no one had requested a meet and greet with him in 3 months’ time. No one!
He had several strikes against him: he was a 3-year-old adult black cat who’d been labeled as having FIV (an immunodeficiency virus akin to HIV in humans). He wasn’t sick, but he couldn’t be around other cats—and the shelter warned me that if he got the sniffles, it would need to be addressed right away so it didn’t escalate to something more serious like pneumonia.
Well, after I brought Joshua home—and renamed him “Rocky”—I took him to the vet for a checkup. The vet asked me if I wanted to re-test him for FIV, since it might’ve been a false positive. I agreed, and that first test came back negative. The vet then offered to do a western blot test, whose results would be more definitive—but more expensive (over $300). I told her, “Take my money!”
The final results came back negative. Poor baby had been mislabeled! I wonder how many people passed by his cage because they were deterred by an FIV+ cat.
Here’s the other thing: He’s now 9 years old, but he’s still my little boy, my sweet little baby. He has the tiniest little “mew” and hasn’t gotten his big boy voice yet. I’m not sure he ever will. So I have a kitten for life.
As for the black cat thing, Rocky has been nothing but good luck for me.
Dollar Vs. Yuan: China Dumps US Treasuries for 7th Straight Month
China is not the only nation doing that. All US so-called allies such as Japan are doing the same thing.
“A Swatara police officer was called to the Capital Diner this morning. An elderly man couldn’t pay for his breakfast; he tried but his card was declined. He panicked and actually called the police on himself because he didn’t know what to do. The restaurant gave him his space to figure it out and that was the best solution he could come up with. Officer Anthony Glass went to the counter, pulled out his credit card, and paid for the man’s breakfast. The man asked for his phone number so he could pay him back but the officer kindly declined. This young man deserves to be recognized.”
Chen Xianyi: A letter to the officers and soldiers defending Taiwan, Penghu, Jinmen
Brothers and soldiers of the Taiwan-Penghu, Golden-Horse Guards:
With that American witch staying with you all night, the situation in the Taiwan Strait took a turn for the worse.
The witch Pelosi originally went to support the Taiwan independence die-hards led by Tsai Ing-wen, but she never thought that such a hasty visit would make the originally uneasy Taiwan Strait even more turbulent. surge.
It can be seen that more than 170 countries in the world have denounced and condemned the visit of the American witch for interfering in China's internal affairs in unison, and once again jointly stressed that there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is inseparable from the People's Republic of China. part.
At the same time, we have announced the full start of our large-scale island-encircling military exercise against Taiwan, and I am afraid it will become the norm in the future.
The entire Taiwan Strait is becoming the most suitable training ground for the major relevant theaters of the People's Liberation Army.
This provides a large platform for actual combat-oriented military exercises for rotation training and military drills in relevant theaters of our army.
This is undoubtedly of great significance to improving the modern combat capability of the People's Liberation Army.
Not only Tsai Ing-wen can't think of this, but even her American master probably didn't think of it.
In the face of this huge change, the US imperialists are still unwilling, they are stepping up their efforts to build an anti-China alliance in the Asia-Pacific region, they are visiting the South Pacific island countries, and they are promising to cross the Taiwan Strait again.
But what is the use of all this?
Some island countries in the South Pacific have already suffered from the United States' use of them as nuclear test sites, and they vowed never to endure humiliation and become such puppets.
As for crossing the strait, it will only trigger stronger countermeasures from our army, and we have adequate countermeasures for this.
At the same time, your Tsai Ing-wen is not giving up.
In recent days, there have been sporadic artillery drills on your coastline.
The sparse artillery sounds let the whole world know that in the siege of the modern army of the People's Liberation Army, Tsai Ing-wen's
It was to whistle on the road at night to strengthen herself, which just exposed her inner weakness and cowardice.
As long as the Central Committee of our Party gives an order, all of you and the scraps of iron and steel that the United States gave you will all be wiped out in an instant.
Brothers and soldiers of the guardsmen of Taiwan, Penghu, Jinma, we are all Chinese, we are all descendants of Yan and Huang, and the blood of the same clan and clan flows in our veins.
We really do not want to meet you in battle.
Because of the comparison of strength, you are no longer an opponent.
Who wants to start a war in the Taiwan Strait?
There is only one kind of person in this world, and that is the American imperialists and all the reactionaries, because only when there is a war between the two sides of the strait can they draw chestnuts from the fire and reap the benefits.
As long as there is imperialism, there will be wars.
This is the law of history and the logic of survival for the United States and all its imperialist countries.
There is another kind of person, that is your superior, the Taiwan independence diehard represented by Tsai Ing-wen who is willing to be the eagle dog of US imperialism.
We believe that although these people are very few, they are extremely destructive.
They cooperate with US imperialism and are pushing the Taiwan Strait into the abyss of war step by step.
As brothers of the same clan and clan, the officers and soldiers of the Taiwan-Penghu-Golden-Horse Guards, we would like to tell you something from the bottom of your heart.
The road before you actually has no choice.
One is to surrender or the other is to perish.
Going to the embrace of the motherland openly and uprightly is called abandoning the darkness and turning to the light.
I believe that most of you are hesitating about this.
Facing the outstretched arms of the motherland, facing justice and light, it will be a great and glorious thing for you to abandon the dark and turn to the light. 's choice.
If you follow Tsai Ing-wen stubbornly, you will only end up dead.
When it comes to death, the Chinese historian and writer Sima Qian once famously said: "A person's death is more valuable than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather."
Chairman Mao Zedong made the most incisive interpretation of this sentence.
He said: To die for the interests of the people is heavier than Mount Tai; to die for those who exploit and oppress the people is lighter than a feather.
If you die for traitors like Tsai Ing-wen, imperialism and fascism on the battlefield in the future, such a death will not only be lighter than a feather, but will also be reviled by future generations. ashamed.
U.S. imperialism has also given a very apt name to the people who died in this way, saying that the people who died in this way are the " consumables " necessary in their war to dominate the world .
At present, not only people at the presidential level like Zelensky are " consumables " in the eyes of the Americans , but even the heads of some European countries that follow them, plus Japan, Australia and other reactionary forces, Americans are regarded as " consumables " in their hearts, because Americans only have greatness in their hearts, and everything else is the necessary " consumables " for their war machines .
Brothers in the Taiwan Army, are you willing to be such consumables for Tsai Ing-wen and US imperialism?
If you are used as " consumables " to die for US imperialism and Tsai Ing-wen and others, it will be a huge shame for you and your family for generations to come.
Brothers in the Taiwan Army, I believe that you will not be willing to do such a sinful thing to humiliate future generations.
Taiwan, Penghu, Golden and Horse defenders, when faced with major decisions in life, you have a reference and an example to follow.
In the decisive battle between us and you before the founding of New China, batch after batch of officers and soldiers of your Kuomintang army revolted heroically, or raised the white flag firmly on the battlefield, or turned their backs.
In the Liaoshen, Pingjin, and Huaihai battlefields, when the Kuomintang army formed a group and formed a division or even an army revolted to our army, and put down their firearms and flowed to our army's position like a tide, what a firm and heroic feat it was.
It is a turning point in life towards light and justice, and it should be worthy of praise.
Many of them later became heroes on the battlefield, or contributed their lifelong wisdom and talents to the construction of New China, and some of them also took important government positions in certain positions.
For example, Fu Zuoyi, who contributed greatly to the peaceful liberation of Peiping, Cheng Qian, who held the Hunan Uprising at a critical moment, Dong Qiwu, who launched the Suiyuan Uprising despite Chiang Kai-shek's every effort to obstruct the Suiyuan Uprising, and Tao Zhiyue, who led 100,000 troops to order an uprising in Xinjiang at a critical moment, are known as Lu Han, who launched the Yunnan Uprising at a critical moment for the last " King of Yunnan " , etc., are all heroes with outstanding achievements, and many of them have become leaders in building a new China.
There are also thousands of ordinary officers and soldiers who abandoned the dark and turned to the light, and they have all made indelible contributions to the unity and unity of the Chinese nation
Brothers in the Taiwan Army, as the sons and daughters of China, shouldn't their life choices enlighten you?
What we can tell you is that although in your eyes, we still have many difficulties and problems that need to be solved urgently, but under the wise leadership of the Communist Party of China, we have entered a new era with great pride.
An important sign of this new era is that our country has achieved comprehensive poverty alleviation in 2020 , which has shaken the world.
We were the second largest economy in the world many years ago; before 2030 , we will confidently surpass the United States and become the world's largest economy; by the middle of this century, we will strut to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
This is a great event that the sons and daughters of the Chinese have dreamed of for thousands of years.
As Chinese, we hope that tens of millions of Taiwan compatriots and 1.4 billion people will share the greatness and glory of being a Chinese, and enjoy being a Chinese.
The supreme glory of the children of Huaxia.
As a soldier, shouldn't you make a difference in such a great era?
The great historical opportunity provides each Chinese son and daughter with their own choices.
A good man should show his skills in this great historical change and not be an absentee or even a destroyer.
Cao Zhi, a poet of the Three Kingdoms period in China, has a famous "seven-step poem", the poem is " boiled beans and burned beans, beans are weeping in the kettle, they are born from the same root, why is it too urgent to fry each other? "
Brothers in the Taiwan Army, I believe you are great Most of them insist that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese, and they all know that our brothers and compatriots should not face each other.
Right now, the US imperialists and the Taiwan independence forces are insisting on dividing us and provoking a war.
We have to fight for the reunification of the motherland.
The liberation of Taiwan, from 1949 to the present, we have been waiting for more than 70 years, we do not want to wait any longer.
For the sake of national unity and national unity, our central government has issued a series of policies to benefit Taiwan for more than ten consecutive years, but it has not changed the minds of the Taiwan independence diehards.
Instead, they have cultivated a group of traitors who eat mainland food and scold mainland mothers.
Now, marked by the military blockade of the island of Taiwan, the reunification has entered an accelerated period.
If the expectation of reunification in the past was not clear, now with the help of the American witch and the United States, it is now basically clear.
The short term is one and a half years, and the long term is three years or five years.
The return of Taiwan will soon become a reality. , the situation has not allowed us to drag on.
We will not and cannot leave this burden related to territorial integrity and national justice to future generations.
Taiwan-Pengjin-horse defenders, our arrow of unification has been fired. Now that the military blockade has been launched, it will mean a battle of real guns and real swords.
Let me tell you, my modern People's Liberation Army is ready to fight, waiting for the order of the Party Central Committee, and we will fight according to the order.
The day when the People's Republic of China will realize the unification of its territory is coming.
We will embrace this great historical moment.
Every true son and daughter of Yan and Huang should make the right choice in the interests of the whole nation in the face of the great right and wrong which is related to national honor and disgrace and national unity.
A retired veteran of the Chinese People's Liberation Army
August 14 , 2022
Australian beef industry on edge as New Zealand escapes Beijing ban
New Zealand has escaped a sweeping Beijing ban on livestock, dairy and other agricultural products worth more than $6 billion a year, but the outlook for Australian beef exporters remains ominous.
A disabled man with lower limbs is lying on a self-made scooter, he is crossing a zebra crossing. Although his movements were very slow, all the vehicles at the intersection were waiting quietly in place.
After IBM’s first 2nm chip, TSMC announced the results of 1nm chip, Huawei chose the right direction
After IBM's first 2nm chip, TSMC announced the results of 1nm chip, Huawei chose the right direction
Restaurant style Chinese egg drop soup — 蛋花汤.This is a very basic Chinese style egg drop soup using only common ingredients. This easy and quick egg drop soup can be amazingly beautiful
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Pure egg drop soup is not popular in Mainland China. Usually we add tomato wedges, dried laver or oyster mushroom to provide an extra basic flavor since we usually use water as the soup base. I have decided to try this one because I have my homemade leftover chicken stock after enjoying the shredded chicken noodle. It comes out so satisfying! I love smaller and finer drop flowers as they are so beautiful and more interestingly they are hard to detect in mouth.
The size of the egg drop flower actually depends on your fire and the stirring speed. If you want finer flowers, turn up the fire before drizzling the egg liquid and stir the soup at a constant speed.
Ingredients
4 cups chicken stock
2 large eggs
2 tbsp. cornstarch
3 tbsp. water
¼ tsp. ground white pepper
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. light soy sauce (optional)
½ tbsp. minced ginger
3 scallion, white part and green part separately chopped
½ tbsp. sesame oil (optional)
Instructions
Mix 2 tablespoons of cornstarch with 3 tablespoons of water in a small bowl. This is our water starch.
Add chicken stock to a pot. Add ginger, scallion whites and light soy sauce. Bring the broth to a boilings. Remove the ginger and scallion whites. Add salt and white pepper.
Stir the starch water again and pour it into the broth. Simmer to boil again.
Turn up the fire and then slightly pour the whisked egg in. Stir the soup with chopsticks. Turn off the fire, add some fresh chopped scallion and serve immediately.
Optionally drizzle some sesame oil.
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Be the Rufus
My short video. If you’ve already watched it, then please watch it again. This is what DOMAIN is all about.
Take note at the “heart of snowflakes” at the end of the movie.
Mass protest in South Korea calling for the termination of US Korea alliance.
Not reported in the Western media. We cannot understand the real world until the crusaders collapsed.
And so another deceased kitty cat returns to its owner
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I was walking my elderly Border Collie near a playground one day. Kids were coming over to pet her. One mentioned there was a kitten hanging out. I was going to check on it…. Instead the kitten headed for me! She climbed my leg & turned herself into a parrot. I called my (now) husband crying. We had lost my beloved calico 2 weeks before. I was not ready for another cat.
No one claimed this kitten. After 2 days I knew she was mine.
It’s hard to believe Mox is the same starved kitten we brought home. She’s a mess. Still a kitten at heart. Loves to snuggle under the covers with me.
She has done a lot of “toasting” since then. She’s considered a Tortie/ siamese color point mix.
Before the USA was able to stop the reunification…
Video footage of 1955 October 10, nationalist party leader ( jiang jieshi )蒋介石 address army in Taiwan calling for the preparation to take back the mainland, and 3 months later, Footage of Zhou enlai 周恩来 calling for the preparation to reunify Taiwan in a peaceful way
China urges U.S. not to miscalculate resolve to defend sovereignty, territorial integrity
BEIJING, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) — Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday urged the U.S. side not to miscalculate China’s firm resolve to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Wang made the remarks at a daily news briefing, in response to what the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink had said about China’s response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
“Regarding Pelosi’s provocative visit to China’s Taiwan region, the context, cause and course of events are crystal clear,” Wang said.
It is the United States that has gone back on its commitment to the one-China principle and undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, not the other way round. It is the U.S. leaders who went to Taiwan to support “Taiwan independence” separatist activities, not the Chinese ones who went to the United States to support Alaska’s “independence,” Wang added.
Wang said that China’s firm response to the U.S. provocation is reasonable, lawful and justified, which has been widely understood and supported by the international community. For the U.S. side, the only solution for the problem is to return to the three China-U.S. joint communiques and the one-China principle, instead of shirking responsibility and deflecting blame, still less acting recklessly to create a bigger crisis.
“We are firmly determined to safeguard our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. We urge the U.S. side not to miscalculate on this,” Wang added.
Lately I have been playing around with the You-Tube platform. I have added a few videos and am busy learning video editing and production. I have up loaded three videos so far, and I am learning so much by my myrid of mistakes. Hopefully, I will be able to provide MM readership with a steady flow of videos to suppliment the writings herein. Well. That’s my goal anyways.
We are in a “funny time”. The main stream American media (along wiht the Western media) are still playing the nonsense, but you know… the “worm has turned“. Ah. It’s all different now. The East is now going to rule, while the West slowly fades into the background.
Oh, don’t misunderstand, it’s still a dangerous time, but the verdict is in. A new world order is emerging out of the old, and there’s very few things that the old order can do to change things.
Here, we will continue on the collection of narratives as we document this great period of change, but keep in mind (as dangerous as this time actually is) the future is a foregone conclusion. The only issue at this time is the death count, and the speed at which the collapse of the West will occur.
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Escobar: Meet The New, Resource-Based Global Reserve Currency
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
A new reality is being formed:the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past,a multipolar one is taking shape.
It was something to behold. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President, unrepentant Atlanticist, current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, decided to go totally unplugged in an outburst matching the combat star turn of Mr. Khinzal that delivered palpable shock and awe all across NATOstan.
Medvedev said “hellish” Western sanctions not only have failed to cripple Russia, but are instead “returning to the West like a boomerang.” Confidence in reserve currencies is “fading like the morning mist”, and ditching the US dollar and the euro is not unrealistic anymore: “The era of regional currencies is coming.”
After all, he added, “no matter if they want it or not, they’ll have to negotiate a new financial order (…) And the decisive voice will then be with those countries that have a strong and advanced economy, healthy public finances and a reliable monetary system.”
Medvedev relayed his succinct analysis even before D Day – as in the deadline this Thursday established by President Putin after which payments for Russian gas by “unfriendly nations” will only be accepted in rubles.
The G7, predictably, had struck a (collective) pose: we won’t pay. “We” means the 4 that are not large Russian gas importers. “We”, moreover, means the Empire of Lies dictating the rules. As for the 3 that will be in dire straits, not only they are major importers but also happen to be WWII losers – Germany, Italy and Japan, still de facto occupied territories. History does have a habit of playing perverted tricks.
Denial didn’t last long. Germany was the first to break – even before industrialists from Ruhr to Bavaria staged a mass revolt. Scholz, the puny Chancellor, called Putin, who had to explain the obvious: payments are being converted into rubles because the EU froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves – in a crass violation of international law.
With Taoist patience, Putin also expressed hope this would not represent a deterioration in contract terms for European importers. Russian and German experts should sit down together and discuss the new terms.
Moscow is working on a set of documents defining the new deal. Essentially, that spells out no rubles, no gas. Contracts become null and void once you violate trust. The US and the EU broke legally biding agreements with unilateral sanctions and on top of it confiscated foreign reserves of a – nuclear – G20 nation.
The unilateral sanctions made dollars and euros worthless to Russia. Hysteria fits won’t cut it: this will be resolved – but under Russia’s terms. Period. The Foreign Ministry had already warned that refusal to pay for gas in rubles would lead to a serious global crisis of non-payments and serial global-level bankruptcies, a hellish chain reaction of blocked transactions, freezing of collateral assets and closures of credit lines.
What will happen next is partially predictable. EU companies will receive the new set of rules. They will have time to examine the documents and make a decision. Those that say “no” will be automatically excluded from receiving direct Russian gas shipments – all politico-economic consequences included.
There will be some compromise, of course. For instance, quite a few EU nations will accept to use rubles and increase their gas acquisitions so they may resell the surplus to their neighbors and make a profit. And some may also decide to buy gas on the go on energy exchanges.
So Russia is not imposing an ultimatum on anybody. The whole thing will take time – a rolling process. With some sideway action as well. The Duma is contemplating the extension of payment in rubles to other essential products – such as oil, metals, timber, wheat. It will depend on the collective voracity of the EU chihuahuas. Everyone knows that their non-stop hysteria may translate into a colossal rupture of supply chains across the West.
Bye bye oligarchs
While the Atlanticist ruling classes have gone totally berserk but still remain focused on fighting to the last European to extract any remaining, palpable EU wealth, Russia is playing it cool. Moscow has been quite lenient in fact, brandishing the specter of no gas in Spring rather than Winter.
The Russian Central Bank nationalized foreign exchange earnings of all major exporters. There was no default. The ruble keeps rising – and is now back to roughly the same level before Operation Z. Russia remains self-sufficient, food-wise. American hysteria over “isolated” Russia is laughable. Every actor that matters across Eurasia – not to mention the other 4 BRICS and virtually the whole Global South – did not demonize and/or sanction Russia.
As an extra bonus, arguably the last oligarch capable of influence in Moscow, Anatoly Chubais, is gone. Call it another momentous historical trickery: Western sanction hysteria de facto dismembered Russian oligarchy – Putin’s pet project since 2000. What that implies is the strengthening of the Russian state and the consolidation of Russian society.
We still don’t have all the facts, but a case can be made that after years of careful evaluation Putin opted to really go for broke and break the West’s back – using that trifecta (imminent blitzkrieg on Donbass; US bioweapon labs; Ukraine working on nuclear weapons) as the casus belli.
The freezing of foreign reserves had to have been forecasted, especially because the Russian Central Bank had been increasing its reserves of US Treasuries since November last year. Then there’s the serious possibility of Moscow being able to access “secret” offshore foreign reserves – a complex matrix built with Chinese insider help.
The sudden switch from dollars/euros to rubles was hardcore, Olympic-level geoeconomic judo. Putin enticed the collective West to unleash its demented hysteria sanction attack – and turned it against the opponent with a single, swift move.
And here we all are now trying to absorb so many in-synch game-changing developments following the weaponization of dollar assets: rupee-ruble with India, the Saudi petroyuan, co-badged Mir-UnionPay cards issued by Russian banks, the Russia-Iran SWIFT alternative, the EAEU-China project of an independent monetary/financial system.
Not to mention the master coup by the Russian Central Bank, pegging 1 gram of gold to 5,000 rubles – which is already around $60, and climbing.
Coupled with No Rubles No Gas, what we have here is energy de facto pegged to gold.
The EU Chihuahuas and the Japanese colony will need to buy a lot of rubles in gold or buy a lot of gold to have their gas. And it gets better. Russia may re-peg the ruble to gold in the near future. Could go to 2,000 rubles, 1,000 rubles, even 500 rubles for a gram of gold.
Time to be sovereign
The Holy Grail in the evolving discussions about a multipolar world, since the BRICS summits in the 2000s featuring Putin, Hu Jintao and Lula, has always been how to bypass dollar hegemony. It’s now right in front of the whole Global South, as a benign apparition bearing a Cheshire cat’s smile: the golden ruble, or ruble backed by oil, gas, minerals, commodity exports.
The Russian Central Bank, unlike the Fed, does not practice QE and won’t export toxic inflation to the rest of the planet. The Russian Navy not only secures all Russian sea lines, but Russian nuclear-powered submarines are capable of popping up all over the planet unannounced.
Russia is far, far ahead already implementing the concept of “continental naval power”. December 2015, in the Syrian theater, was the strategic game-changer. The Black Sea-based submarine 4th division is the star of the show.
Russian naval fleets may now employ Kalibr missiles across a space comprehending Eastern Europe, West Asia and Central Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, linked by the Don-Volga canal, offer a space of maneuver comparable to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf combined. 6,000 km-long. And you don’t even need to access warm waters.
That covers around 30 nations: the traditional Russian sphere of influence; historical borders of the Russian empire; and current political/energy rivalry spheres.
No wonder the Beltway is berserk.
Russia guarantees shipping across Asia, the Arctic and Europe, in tandem with the Eurasia-wide BRI railway network.
And last but not least, don’t mess with a Nuclear Bear.
Essentially, this is what hardcore power politics is all about. Medvedev was not bragging when he said the era of a single reserve currency is over. The advent of a resource-based global reserve currency means, in a nutshell, that 13% of the planet will not dominate the other 87% anymore.
It’s NATOstan vs. Eurasia redux. Cold War 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and even 5.0. It doesn’t matter. All the previous Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations see which way the geopolitical and geo-economic winds are blowing: the time to assert their real sovereignty is at hand as the “rules-based international order” bites the dust.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in China, after meeting several counterparts from across Eurasia, could not have outlined it better:
“A new reality is being formed: the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, a multipolar one is taking shape. It’s an objective process. It’s unstoppable. In this reality, more than one power will “rule” – it will be necessary to negotiate between all the key states that today have a decisive influence on the world economy and politics. At the same time, realizing their special situation, these countries ensure compliance with the basic principles of the UN Charter, including the fundamental one – the sovereign equality of states. No one on this Earth should be seen as a minor player. Everyone is equal and sovereign.”
Welcome to the birth of the new world system.
Tears For Fears – Head Over Heels (Official Music Video)
Ok. So I’m out of MAJestic on my own and waiting to be called in for “training”. At this time, we (my first wife and I) were living in the nice seaside community of San Louis Obispo in California. It was the middle to late 1980’s. We were living in a broken down van stuck in the end of a church parking lot, and I was working two jobs as a breakfast cook and janitor.
It was at that time that MAJestic tracked me down and called me into the base with work. But before that happened, we were living hand to mouth at the poverty level.
It was a special time. It was Spring and we lived in a “college town”, and the music of that time was unique. One of the songs of that time was “Head over Heels” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the MV of it. Please enjoy my flashback to the past.
What do you think of this flash back in time?
Goldman Sachs warns the dollar is at risk of losing its dominance, and could end up a lesser player like the UK pound
Goldman Sachs has said the US dollar faces a number of risks, and could become a lesser currency like the UK pound.
The US’ tough sanctions on Russia have raised concerns that countries around the world could try to move away from the dollar.
Goldman said the US’ foreign debts mean that foreign investors may become reluctant to hold dollar assets.
This is another one of thes songs of that particular period in time. Fast forward two years later, maybe three, and I am out of MAJestic and I am off trying to start yet again anew. Sheech! And this is the song that is playing all over the radio 24-7…
Homemade Biscuits and Gravy
Homemade Biscuits and Gravy
This recipe will take your taste buds down South, to where good old-fashioned recipes are still king. Our Homemade Biscuits and Gravy recipe is full of so much down-home goodness, you’ll want to eat these homemade biscuits at breakfast AND dinner, which is perfectly all right by us!
What You’ll Need
2 cups pancake and baking mix
2/3 cup buttermilk
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter, melted, plus 2 tablespoons butter
1 (16-ounce) package hot pork sausage
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
What to Do
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
In a medium bowl, stir baking mix, buttermilk, and the 1/2 stick melted butter until soft dough forms. Drop 8 equal spoonfuls of dough onto an ungreased baking sheet.
Bake 14 to 16 minutes, or until golden brown.
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt remaining butter; cook 1 to 1-1/2 minutes, or until browned. Add sausage and cook 6 to 8 minutes, or until no pink remains, stirring to crumble sausage. Add flour; mix well. Add Worcestershire sauce, milk, salt, and pepper; mix well. Cook 2 to 4 minutes, or until gravy thickens, stirring constantly.
Cut biscuits in half and spoon sausage mixture evenly on bottom halves. Replace tops and serve.
The captured General in Ukraine is being rewritten
From an influencer, the background wikipedia on the captured American Major General Roger L. Cloutier, that I wrote about HERE, is being rewritten as we speak. Poof! New numbers. New dates. New backgrounds.
White board. That’s what the internet is today. A big white board.
Grow Alum Crystals That Resemble Simulated Diamonds
Home-made.
Alum is found in the spices section of the grocery store. That little jar contains small white crystals that, with a bit of time and effort, grow a big alum crystal that looks a bit like a diamond. It only takes about an hour to grow small alum crystals, but getting a big crystals takes days to weeks.
All you need to grow alum crystals are alum, hot water, and a container. Choose a clear container so you can watch the crystals grow. While not strictly necessary, it helps having a way to tie and suspend a crystal in the liquid. This helps it keep an ideal shape. A coffee filter or paper towel keeps dust out of your project, while still allowing good air circulation.
1/2 cups hot tap water
2-1/2 tablespoons alum
nylon fishing line
pencil, ruler, or knife
2 clean jars
spoon
coffee filter/paper towel
There are actually a few different kinds of alum. The edible one in the grocery store is potassium alum. It grows clear crystals. Other types of alum include sodium, ammonium, selenium, and chrome alum. Chrome alum grows deep purple crystals. If you have access to the other chemicals, feel free to combine them to see what colors you get. But, check the labels for safety information. Some types of alum are non-toxic, but others are irritants and not edible.
Grow the Crystals
Pour 1/2 cup of hot tap water into a clean jar.
Slowly stir in alum, a little at a time, until it stops dissolving. Don’t add the whole amount; just enough to saturate the water.
Loosely cover the jar with a coffee filter or paper towel (to keep dust out) and allow the jar to sit undisturbed overnight.
The next day, pour the alum solution from the first jar into the clean jar. You will see small alum crystals at the bottom of the jar. These are ‘seed’ crystals that you will use to grow a big crystal.
Tie nylon fishing line around the largest, best-shaped crystal. Tie the other end to a flat object (e.g., popsicle stick, ruler, pencil, butter knife). You will hang the seed crystal by this flat object into the jar far enough so that it will be covered in liquid, but won’t touch the bottom or sides of the jar. It may take a few tries to get the length just right.
When you have the right string length, hang the seed crystal in the jar with the alum solution. Cover it with the coffee filter and grow a crystal!
Grow your crystal until you are satisfied with its size. If you see crystals starting to grow on the sides or bottom of your jar, carefully remove your crystal, pour the liquid into the clean jar, and put the crystal in the new jar. Other crystals in the jar will compete with your crystal for alum, so it won’t be able to get as big if you let these crystals grow.
Solving Common Problems
The most common problem people experience growing alum crystals is that crystals not growing. If you don’t see crystal growth within a day or two, there isn’t enough alum in the liquid. Gently heat the liquid over a stove or in the microwave and try adding more alum powder. Crystals only grow if the solution is saturated. This is the point where no more solid dissolves.
Crystal Growing Tips
You can use sewing thread or other string instead of nylon fishing line, but crystals will grow on the entire length of the submerged string. Crystals don’t adhere to nylon, so if you use it, you can get bigger and better crystals.
Alum is an ingredient used to make pickles. It makes them crispy.
Don’t worry if you don’t want to bother with the string! Crystals grow just fine on the bottom of the container. Use a spoon to scrape crystals away from each other so they won’t grow together. The shape of crystals growing on a flat surface differs from the shapes that form when crystals are suspended.
From Hal Turner
I happen to be in the morbidity business; I'm the CEO of a large insurance group... Based on what it is we are seeing, the rates right now are excess mortality of 84% and excess of every kind of disease at 1100%.
We are expecting a 5000% or so increase in excess mortality for this year (2022).
An enormous number.
I don't think that it's by coincidence, by the way, that Moderna has now just received licensure of their emergency use authorization HIV vaccine. So they gave everybody AIDS, and here's your salvation, another vaccine."
-- Attorney Todd Callender
The video below is Attorney Todd Callender, whose comments are shown above.
When he says “So they gave everybody AIDS . . . ” he’s talking about the mRNA injections given out under the guise of COVID-19.
Quick investigation of the Preliminary USA mortality data for 2021 from the CDC reveals:
499,132 X 51 = 25,455,732 excess deaths. That is what Attorney Todd Callendar indicates the USA could see !
Add to that the 2.95 million expected deaths, and the result is:
28,405,732 total deaths for 2022.
At this rate all the injected will be gone by 2025, just as was forecasted by the population reduction charts posted on the Deagel web site for many years.
Deagel.com last original 2025 population forecast (before scrubbing it all) for Germany was 28 million. For the USA, the chart that was “scrubbed” is shown below:
2022 04 06 15 51
About one third of Germanys population remain unvaxxed. Today’s population is 83 million, so Deagel’s report may be quite accurate.
So the DoD guy who ran the Deagel website † 2021 knew about this “plandemic” since 2015? CIA connections huh?
Deagle has always had the forecast at the year 2025. The numbers may have fluctuated but the date never did.
Qualudes again
Well, is he right? Or is he fear-mongering? It’s hard to say. I am not a doctor, but I can read tables. I guess we will have to wait and see.
In the meantime, let’s go back to 1976. This song topped the Country and Western chart at that time. It’s about a hyptnomic sedative that was very popular at that time for recreational use. Known as the Qualude. I can tell you first hand, that it was an awesome drug.
It made you so very relaxed, but at the same time, so very lively. You just wanted to dance and have a great time. Don’t drive though. You are not safe behind the wheel of anything.
It was banned in the United States.
Pakastan thwarted a United States coup
Pakistan just narrowly thwarted the US’ regime change campaign against Prime Minister Imran Khan that was launched against him as punishment for his independent foreign policy.
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“Imran Khan claimed that Donald Lu warned the Pakistani envoy to the US, Asad Majeed, that there would be implications if the Pakistan PM survived the no-trust vote in the National Assembly.
PM Khan said that the no-confidence motion against him was a “foreign conspiracy” and he thanked Allah that it failed.”
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Why invest in diplomacy or in projects like BRI ? The return of investment is way way higher if Uncle Sam just perform regime change here and there and if successful, the interests of US will be taken care of by the puppet gov’t in place.
A fine throw-back to 1960s television fare. It’s well worth at least a ten minute watch. I lvoe the acting, the costumes, and the premise of a B-grade science fiction movie. Great for laughs.
Doomsday ‘Preppers’ Warn Of Hard Times Ahead As Preparedness Goes Mainstream
Food scarcity. Food vouchers. Food riots and flash mobs.
All of that’s coming – and soon, says Texas-based food scientist and “Health Ranger” podcaster Mike Adams, who sees dire events unfolding in America in the short term.
Texas-based food scientist Mike Adams, known online as the “Health Ranger,” sees food shortages and heightened security later in 2022. (Courtesy of Mike Adams)
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His advice: people need to get prepared now.
“The thing to really watch for is the food inflation,” Adams said.“My position is we’re going to see food riots in America before the end of this year. We’re going to see flash mobs in grocery stores—especially for meat products.
“Grocery stores are going to respond with increased security and checkpoints. At some point, we’re probably going to see an attempt at price controls and rationing.
“And not on everything—certain types of things. It’s almost certain that the rationing they will attempt to enforce with a vaccine passport app that becomes a food rationing app,” Adams told The Epoch Times.
Adams is not alone in his predictions of hard times coming to America—and the world.
With food production buckling under the weight of runaway inflation, skyrocketing fuel costs, and fertilizer shortages, much of what’s in store is already “built-in.”
What Do You Want From Life?
The tubes was a group that was hitting the audiences when I was graduating out of university. They probably had one hell of a stage show. I don’t actually know, as I never watched them perform. However their album was a real hoot. As this particular song clearly indicates.
Unfertile Ground
In North America two years ago, it cost around $200 an acre to fertilize a 1,000-acre commercial farm, Adams said. Right now, with spring planting, farmers can expect to pay $1,200 to $2,000 an acre.
And consumers will pay for it in higher prices for basic necessities.
“Many farmers are deciding not to plant. In addition, the diesel fuel prices and diesel fuel scarcity is going into their equation whether they should plant,” Adams said.
The upshot, he said, is that fewer farmers are planting, which means less food to go around.
As a food scientist Adams is a big proponent of clean, organically grown food free of heavy metals, which he makes available through the online sale of “Ranger Buckets.” The demand for his products has seen extremely high since the COVID-19 lockdown began in 2020.
Adams said it takes on average six to eight weeks to produce 2,000 buckets, which typically sell out within 30 minutes to three hours.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the demand for survival food in the United States has been on the increase among a number of national suppliers.
“The supply chain in the United States continues to crumble. More Americans are realizing it takes four trips to different home improvement stores for parts to make home repairs, instead of all their needs being in one store,” said Lori Hunt at Practical Preppers in South Carolina.
“That is making folks realize this extends to everything: food, books, solar equipment—and considering Ukraine is a source for critical raw materials in the solar industry, this is going to get much worse in the coming months,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Many of our customers are moving toward energy independence, and this is making a greater demand and diminishing supply situation. We are urging our customers to be prepared for a 2–4 month wait to amass all parts needed for their systems. Many installers around the United States are telling us they are experiencing the same.”
Byron Walker, Founder and CEO of Survival Frog in Denver, told the Epoch Times, “We have struggled with supply chain issues and things only appear to be getting worse.”
Allied Marketing Research (AMR) reported that the global incident and emergency market, valued at $75.5 billion in 2017, is projected to reach $423 billion by 2025.
“Factors such as rise in need for safety and security solutions, owing to increase in natural calamities and terrorist attacks, implementation of regulatory policies for public safety, and the necessity for emergency preparedness drive the growth of the global incident and emergency management market,” AMR said on its website.
“In addition, the surge in smart cities is expected to drive the adoption of intelligent evacuation systems and surveillance systems, thereby fueling the incident and emergency management market growth.”
Miami Vice – IN THE AIR TONIGHT | Tribute Video
If you lived though the 1980s then you would really appreciate the television show “Miami Vice”. It defined cool. It was a mix of rock music, detective action, drugs, and fashion. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was hooked on this show. In this this clip here, you will see so many famous actors when they were young and not yet famous. In hindsight, it’s all pretty silly. But, the video is great and well worth the three minutes to watch.
Price Hikes ‘Here to Stay’
In recent weeks YouTube survival “preppers” such as City Prepping and Alaska Prepper have been sounding the alarm that hard times are just ahead.
Matt the “Magic Prepper,” in North Dakota, said being prepared continues to go mainstream as a “financial and scarcity genre” in view of current global events.
“With food production issues, supply chain problems, a slow economic recovery from the pandemic, and the cascading effects of an overseas conflict, it seems rather clear that shortages, disruptions, and price hikes are here to stay,” Matt told The Epoch Times.
He said the situation in Ukraine has revived interest in preparedness in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack.
“With the conflict creating volatile rhetoric from multiple global superpowers, we find ourselves closer to such an event than any point in recent history,” Matt said. “I operate under the assumption that there is and will likely always be more time to prepare.”
Still, the state of being prepared is “exponentially limited” by the length of time it takes to get prepared, and other factors, he said.
“Every dollar spent today is worth less in value toward preparations than a dollar you would have spent three years ago. Therefore, by waiting to begin, you’ll inherently be able to prepare less and less.
YouTube’s Matt the “Magic Prepper” in North Dakota says it’s not too late to begin preparing for difficult economic times ahead. (Courtesy of Matt the “Magic Prepper”) .
“This is most obviously apparent when you relate it to items such as ammunition. Stocking up on it now provides you with anywhere from 50 percent [to] 75 percent less ammunition for the same amount spent on it three years ago.
“Even if we find ourselves in the midst of a full-on economic collapse or hot conflict, training and learning skills will likely still be accessible,” he said.
Preparedness also requires the ability to network and communication, having supplies in sufficient quantity, a “hardened” location, and knowledge on how to survive an economic collapse.
“I have suggested to keep moving forward regardless of the events unfolding currently. If things finally fall apart to the point of relying on our preparedness efforts, we will have prepared as best as we could up to that point.
“I am making phone calls, appointments, and plans every day to try and enhance my own personal preparedness,” Matt said.
Given the economic protectionism of halting food exports from countries like Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, the world supply of grain is going to be severely limited, Adams said.
This, he said, will result in the “most extreme food shortages we’ve seen in our lifetime.”
Better Now Than Never
“It will begin about August and continue until the end of the year. A lot of this depends on [President Joe] Biden’s economic decisions on whether he allows U.S. oil companies to finish pipelines and do more drilling. If he does not we are going to see even more shortages throughout 2023.”
Out of chaos, however, Adams foresees a reawakening of freedom and self-reliance in the way we grow and produce food.
“I think this is a red pill moment for the people of the world that they need to be more self-reliant. We need decentralization of food production. I’m a big proponent of decentralization—food grown locally.”
The bad news is that only about 5 percent of people in the United State are prepared. But “the more people prepare, the less they panic when shortages appear,” Adams said.
Star Trek – Missile Alert
And here’s a nice brief section of a 1960s Star Trek show. It’s also a fun watch. Just enjoy the five minute vision of the past.
Its about “Gary 7” and his cat.
Rick Wakeman Journey to the Centre of the Earth Full Album 1974 YouTube
Oh my teenage years. This album brought my father and me together musically. He loved it due ot the classical influences, and I loved it for the blend of rock music. Not to mention the great story line.
Simple Minds – Someone Somewhere In Summertime
Another glimpse to my early years right out from the Navy after MAJestic implantation. Enjoy this look back in time.
Conclusion
Yah. It’s a funny time. Don’t get too worked up with and about it. Things are unfolding to the plans set forth. To us “peons” it seems like everything is going to shit, but if you step back, and look at the big picture, just maybe… just MAYBE the West won’t be able to turn the world into an inferno if these various indicators play out as they appear to.
Hold on but not too tightly.
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Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The Ukraine invasion has set forth a domino effect; a chain of events that is reshaping the globe. And it is all to plan. It’s a plan made by China, Russia, India and Iran.
The (so called) petro-dollar; the USD is starting to fall apart, and with it, the economies of those that have been propped up by this fiat “currency”.
Whether or not Russia is “losing” or “winning” in the Ukraine is of no concern.
What is of concern, and what is actually happening is that a new world order has arisen from the ashes of the old. It’s an East and a West. And the West is collapsing in real time, while the East is rising.
Here, in this article we will cover a section of topics that cover these events in chunks. Not comprehensive, but enough to give you all an idea of what is actually going on.
Key Points
As you read this article, you need to keep in mind a few key points…
The world is undergoing a geopolitical realignment.
This alignment is dividing into two separate entities (East and West).
The two sides have a very different view of how the world should be.
The West is trying to maintain a uni-polar single world government ruled by the United States.
The East is trying to maintain a multi-polar world of equals of various unique social structures.
Key to this manifestation is the control of the currency of exchange.
The West is trying to maintain the USD, or an electronic version of it.
The East is trying to use commodity-based currency by labor, materials and products.
Issues about Ukraine or Taiwan are simply the desperate plans of the West in a plan to maintain a uni-polar world.
Do not get sidetracked from what is REALLY going on.
The technical definition of money is “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment.”
For most people this has always meant the legal tender of their homeland.
Until fairly recently, this was a coin with the face of the king on it.
Thus, the better the reputation of the king, the more valuable his coin, because traders were more likely to accept it. A good king made sure his coins had a consistent amount of gold or silver in it.
The reason for that is precious metals like gold and silver were always the world’s reserve currency.
Everyone in the world would accept gold and silver for payment, even in places that restricted the use of the metals. You could always take the metal to the king’s mint and exchange it for his coins.
Granted, he took a fee for himself and you were charged the cost of minting the coins, but that was predictable.
In the end, all currency was measured in gold and silver.
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But, we no longer use gold coin for money.
Every country in the world uses what the economist call fiat currency.
This is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver.
Instead, it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the issuing government.
That dollar = faith in the government issuing the paper.
Money is now an expression of the government power behind it.
The US dollar is the reserve currency of the world largely due to the fact the American government was the most trusted.
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Hard money enthusiasts assume this means the United States can print as much money as it needs, but this is not exactly true.
The international monetary system that evolved after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970’s is a framework that controls the exchange rate of the major currencies.
Every major currency is based on the dollar, just as oil and gas are priced in dollars.
The petrodollar was created in the 1970’s when the Bretton Woods system collapsed.
The dollar was replaced by the Petro-dollar.
What the current system does, in effect, is link currencies to the supply of crude oil through the dollar.
How much oil you can buy with your home currency is dependent upon how many dollars you can buy with it.
It is not a direct link, as oil production rises and falls and the supply of dollars rises and falls, relative to other major currencies like the Euro or Chinese Yuan.
In effect, America controls the world by controlling the price of commodities like crude oil and natural gas.
American dollar = global use of oil and gas commodities.
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In the old days, minting coins was a profit center for the king.
A strong king would restrict the use of other coins in his domain.
His people had to take their foreign coins, gold and silver to his mint for conversion to his coin.
In addition to the cost of production, he tacked on a profit for himself. This is called seigniorage and it works the same for fiat money as it does hard money.
This profit from controlling the global currency is one way the United States has grown so rich.
The USA uses this petro-dollar as a mechanism to make debt.
One of the consequences of this system is the world has an insatiable appetite for US government debt.
Because it is denominated in dollars and considered the safest of financial bets, it makes the ideal collateral.
This has allowed the United States and other Western countries to run massive trade and spending deficits.
The world wants the debt and the world wants to sell the West their products.
US debt was 30% of GDP in 1980 and now it is 127% of GDP.
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This is the subtext of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Russia and China, especially China, are tired of this arrangement.
They correctly see it as to the advantage of Washington at their expense.
This is (partially) why China is backing Russia’s play to demand rubles for its energy and agricultural products.
This would pave the way for China demanding yuan for its products and the right to pay for energy in yuan.
India is also quietly supporting what the Russians are doing for the same reasons.
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This is (partially) why Washington is in no mood to strike a deal over Ukraine.
It is not the only reason, but it is a big part of the plan to protect the dollar.
It is believed that if Washington can break the Putin government through financial war, China and India will drop their plans to buck the dollar in the global economy.
A century after the Great War, the new global war is being mainly fought in finance.
The West, led by America, is now at war with the world over control of the global currency system.
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It is probably a war that the West cannot win.
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The reason is the same reason the king would put his face on his coins.
Money is the physical expression of power.
The strong king could enforce his monetary policy in his domain and his money had a predictable amount of gold and silver.
In effect, his money was the representation of his people and the cultural that defined them.
The legal tender of a country is the measure of that country’s wealth and power relative to the world.
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The West no longer makes or invents anything useful.
The power of the West is the legacy power to control the financial system.
It is a system arranged by Mercurian people in order to control the Apollonians.
The former are the people who operate as middlemen and service providers, while the latter are the people who grow the food, make the goods and keep the gears properly lubricated.
The former operates in the West, while the latter exist in the East.
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Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.
And reality says that growing and making things counts for more than thinking about things.
The reason Washington has not crushed the Russian economy is the world needs the stuff Russia pulled out of the earth.
In this economic war of attrition, Russian can feed itself and keep its homes warm, while Europe will have to hope America can provide the food and energy at a reasonable fee.
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The most likely outcome of this global conflict is something people have suspected for quite some time.
The global currency will become a basket of commodities like natural gas and crude oil.
Maybe agricultural products will be in the mix.
The reason for this is the world runs on energy and food.
Bretton Woods III, as some are calling it, will be a new set of currency arrangements whereby money is based on its purchasing power for the agreed upon basket of products.
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What this means in the short run is that the West is about to get poorer as governments are forced to cut spending and debase the currency to get out from under domestic debt obligations like pension payments.
It also means the end of globalism as has been defined by Washington for three decades.
Trade will continue, but between countries rather than independent global enterprises.
Thirty years after the Cold War the world is about to start healing and return to something close to normal.
The Emotions “Don’t Ask my Neighbor”
Yeah. By mixing up topics such as food, hobbies, movies and pretty girls in my articles I have completely ZEROED out all the trolls, ‘bots and DDos attacks. Man, I’m telling you. It friggin’ works!
About this song…
Throughout my Senior year in High School I fell in love with soul and funk. I added it alongside my love of hard rock, and it greatly shaped my absorption of the culture of the 1970s at that time.
One of my favorites (in regards to soul) at that time was this group that has passed into obscurity known as “The Emotions”. It’s a trio of three attractive ladies with real heart.
Here’s one of their classic songs.
What is a “Blue Blood”?
This term has come to define the ruling oligarchy that operate the United States from behind the veil. But from whence did this term originate?
The blue bloods... arises from eating from a silver spoon and drinking from a silver cup. Silver accumulates in the system and turns the skin blue. Literally. No doubt the blue blood class have moved to gold these days for their eating utensils though the Americans seem to like their grow light suntans.
Ukrainians to use American weapons, and American tactics.
It’s a core principle behind the RAND operational study.
"Since the US-engineered 2013-14 coup in Ukraine, American forces have taught Ukrainians, including neo-Nazi units, how to fight in urban and other civilian areas. Weaponizing Ukraine is part of Washington’s quest for what the Pentagon calls “full spectrum dominance.”
Chinese scientists at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics have developed a fully functioning prototype of the “ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle.”
The 15mm caliber weapon is being compared to an AK-47 because of its similar 6.6-lb weight, but it’s firepower capabilities sound like something straight out of a sci-fi movie.
According to researchers who wish to remain anonymous, the ZKZM-500 fires an energy beam undetectable to the human eye that can pass through glass and cause the “instant carbonization” of human flesh from half a mile away.
“The pain will be beyond endurance,” one researcher said. “[It can] burn through clothes in a split second. If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire”.
“Nobody will know where the attack came from,” another anonymous researcher added. “It will look like an accident.”
2022 04 05 08 25
Each will cost $15,000 to manufacture at large-scale production and can fire 1,000 “shots” on a single charge from a lithium ion battery.
In the event of a hostage situation it could be used to fire through windows at targets and temporarily disable the kidnappers while other units move in to rescue their captives.It could also be used in covert military operations. The beam is powerful enough to burn through a gas tank and ignite the fuel storage facility in a military airport.The lasers cannot kill a target with a single shot, but if fired at a person for long enough the weapons would start to burn a hole in their body, cutting through them like a surgical knife.
Anti-terrorism squads in the Chinese Armed Police will likely be the first to test these laser guns in the field.
Frank Black – Headache
This is from sometime in the 1990s. I love it because the video is done in retro 1940s theme and the subject matter was meaningful to me back then. In those days, I worked in cubicle farms as engineering drones.
Do you remember this one?
Americans should budget an extra $5,200 this year to cover rising prices, Bloomberg economists estimate
“Americans haven’t had to worry too much about factoring inflation into their budget for the past four decades. That’s changing in 2022.
The red-hot inflation expected to last throughout the year will leave the average US household spending $5,200 more compared to the year prior, Bloomberg economists Andrew Husby and Anna Wong said in a Tuesday article. That boils down to an extra $433 per month on the same goods and services as last year.”
The S.O.S. Band | Just Be Good To Me (1983) | Extended HQ version
Another of the songs that was big right after I joined MAJestic and was set loose on the world on my own. Actually, this song was very big in the dance club scene at that time. Not so much on the music charts then, but in the clubs, well yeah.
And this singer. Well, wow! So hot! Look at her smile. Her moves. Her hair. She’s so, so chocolate fudge on waffle topped with whipped creame. And brandy. In a glass with ice. Big cubes, not little ones.
She’s such a treat.
Events Like These Only Happen Once Every Century (Sergey Glazyev)
“Events like these only happen once every century”: Sergei Glazyev on the breaking of an epoch and the change of ways.
Is it possible to stabilize the ruble in three days? And why are the Ukrainian ‘zombies’ not giving up?
“After failing to weaken the People’s Republic of China head-on through a trade war, the Americans shifted the main blow to Russia, which they see as a weak link in world geopolitics and economics.
The Anglo-Saxons are striving to realize their age-old Russophobic ideas of destroying our country, and at the same time weakening China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and China is too tough for the United States.
They have neither the economic nor military power to destroy us together, and not separately,”
- Sergey Glazyev, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, former adviser to the President of the Russian Federation.
About what opportunities are now opening up for the Russian economy, whether the Central Bank panders to the enemy and whether a new world currency will replace the dollar, Glazyev spoke in an interview with BUSINESS Online.
The new world economic order is socialist in ideology
“The new world economic order is socialist in ideology”
– Sergey Yuryevich, commenting on today’s tragic events.
Q: Sergey wrote in your Telegram channel that we should have read your book about the “last world war”, written about 6 years ago. How did you manage to predict everything so accurately?
A:The fact is that there are long-term patterns of economic development, the analysis and understanding of which makes it possible to predict the events that are taking place at the present time.
We are now experiencing a simultaneous change in the technological and world economic structures, while the technological basis of the economy is changing, there is a transition to fundamentally new technologies, and the management system is also changing.
Events like this happen about once a century.
However, technological structures change about once every 50 years, and their change is usually accompanied by a technological revolution, depression and an arms race.
And world economic structures change once every 100 years, and their change is accompanied by world wars and social revolutions.
This is due to the fact that the ruling elite of the countries of the core of the old world economic order impedes changes, does not take into account the emergence of more effective management systems, tries to block the development of new world leaders using them, and tries to maintain its hegemony and its monopoly position by any means, including military and revolutionary ones.
Say, 100 years ago, the British Empire was trying to maintain its hegemony in the world.
When it was already losing economically to the combined resources of the Russian Empire and Germany, the First World War, provoked by British intelligence, was unleashed, during which all three European empires self-liquidated.
I am talking about the collapse of tsarist Russia, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, but here we can even put a fourth – the Ottoman Port.
As for Britain, for some time it retained global dominance and even became the largest empire on the planet. But due to the inexorable laws of socio-economic development, the colonial world economic structure, based in fact on slave labor, could no longer ensure economic growth.
The two fundamentally new political models that emerged – the Soviet and the American ones – demonstrated a much greater efficiency of production.
This is since they were already organized on other principles: not on private family capitalism.
They were organized on the strength of large transnational corporations with centralized structures for regulating the economy and with limitless monetary emission of credit through fiat money (paper or electronic means – ed. note).
They enabled the mass production of products much more efficiently than the administrative systems of the colonial empires of the XIX century.
The emergence of social states in the USSR and the USA with centralized control systems made it possible for a sharp jump in their economic development.
In Europe, the corporate governance system was formed, unfortunately, according to the Nazi model in Germany, and also not without the help of British intelligence.
Hitler, relying on the support of the British intelligence services and American capital, quite quickly deployed a centralized corporate management system in Germany, which allowed the Third Reich to very quickly capture the whole of Europe.
With God’s help, we defeated this German (more precisely, European – taking into account today’s realities) fascism.
After that, two models remained in the world.
Which I attribute to the imperial world economic structure: Soviet and Western (with the center in the USA).
Soviet model
Western model
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, (which could not withstand global competition due to the fact that the directive system of government was not flexible enough to meet the needs of technological progress), the United States seized global dominance for a while.
Better-Than-Ever Meatloaf
American meatloaf.
Meatloaf is an American favorite, right up there with Mom’s freshly baked apple pie. And while we know that everyone has a favorite way they like to make their meatloaf, we think our Better-than-Ever Meatloaf is sure worth a try.
What You’ll Need
2 pounds ground beef
1 1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs
2 eggs
3/4 cup water
2/3 cup ketchup, divided
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
What to Do
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Coat a large baking pan with cooking spray.
In a large bowl, combine all ingredients except 1/3 cup ketchup; mix well.
Place mixture into prepared baking pan and shape into a loaf. Spread remaining 1/3 cup ketchup over top.
Bake 1 hour or until done.
Notes
If you want to cook this in the microwave, simply combine the ingredients as above, then place the mixture in a 2-quart oblong microwaveable baking dish and shape into a loaf. Microwave, uncovered, on High (full power), turning the dish occasionally, for 25 minutes or until done. Remove from the baking dish and let stand, covered, for 5 minutes before serving.
Want to try a lighter version of this meatloaf recipe? You can use very lean ground turkey or chicken instead of ground beef!
The end of the unipolar moment
Q:But now this period of “American unipolar loneliness” is already ending, and, probably, not only thanks to Russia, but primarily to China and the Asian regions as such. Is it not?
A:Indeed, the hierarchical vertical structures characteristic of the imperial world economy turned out to be too rigid to ensure continuous innovation processes.
They lost their comparative effectiveness in ensuring the growth of the world economy.
On its periphery, a new world economic order has been formed.
It was one, which is based on flexible management models.
As well as a network organization of production, where the state works as an integrator, uniting the interests of various social groups around achieving one goal – raising the public welfare.
The most impressive example of such an integral world economic structure today is China, which for more than 30 years has outpaced the growth rate of the American economy by three times.
At the moment, China is already surpassing the United States in terms of [1] output, [2] exports of high-tech goods, and [3] growth rates.
Another example of a model of a new world economic order, which we called integral (due to the fact that the state in it unites all social groups of different interests), is India.
It has a different political system, but it also has the primacy of public interests over private ones, and the state seeks to maximize growth rates in order to fight poverty.
In this sense, the new world economic order is socialist in ideology.
At the same time, it uses market mechanisms of competition, which makes it possible to provide the highest concentration of resources for making a technological revolution with goals to ensure economic leaps based on a new advanced technological order.
If we look at growth rates after 1995, we see that the Chinese economy has grown 10 times, while the US economy has grown by only 15 percent.
Thus, it is already obvious to everyone that at present the pace of world economic development is shifting to Asia: China, India and the countries of Southeast Asia already produce more products than the US and the EU.
If we add to them Japan or Korea, in which the management system is similar in its principles to the integration of society around the goal of increasing public welfare.
Then we can say that today this new world economic structure already dominates the world, and the center of reproduction of the world economy has moved to Southeast Asia.
Of course, the American ruling elite cannot agree with this.
Q:To come to terms with it, I would say…
A:Yes. They, like the British Empire once, seek to maintain their hegemony in the world.
The events taking place today are a manifestation of how the US financial and powerful oligarchic elite are trying to maintain world domination.
It can be said that for the past 15 years it has been waging a world hybrid war, seeking to chaoticize countries beyond its control and restrain the development of the People’s Republic of China.
But due to the already archaic system of governance, they cannot do this.
The financial crisis of 2008 was such a transitional moment when the life cycle of the outgoing technological order actually ended.
And the process of massive redistribution of capital into a new technological order began.
The core of which is a complex of nanobioengineering and information communication technologies.
All countries began to pump up their economies with money.
The simplest thing a modern government can do is to give all businesses access to cheap long-term money so they can adopt new technologies.
But, in America and Europe such funds went mainly into financial bubbles and covered the budget deficit.
While, in China this colossal money emission was completely directed to the growth of production and the development of new technologies.
There were no Chinese financial bubbles.
And the ultra-high monetization of the Chinese economy did not result in inflation either.
Instead, the growth of the money supply was accompanied by [1] an increase in the production of goods, [2] the introduction of new advanced technologies and [3] an increase in public welfare.
Today, economic competition has already led to the fact that the United States has lost its leadership.
If you remember, Donald Trump tried to contain the development of China through a trade war, but nothing came out of it.
Man-Eating Sex Queen of Great Neck, New York, Dorothea Matthews
201 Clent Rd Great Neck NY
This English Tudor house, located at 201 Clent Road, Great Neck, New York, may not look like much of a love nest. But in 1948, its chief female resident, Mrs. Dorothea Matthews turned this house into something approaching the Playboy Mansion, East. It wasn’t until Mrs. Matthews’ divorce proceedings from her husband Mark Matthews in 1948 that we began to see that wanton sexual escapades did not begin in the groovy Sixties. According to court documents, Mrs. Matthews racked up a large number of sexual partners.
Mrs. Dorothea Matthews 1948
As a slim, shapely 28 year-old woman with plenty of time on her hands, Dorothea had many sexual options beyond her husband Mark, and she took advantage of so many of them. Mrs. Matthews was a very forthright individual; or, to put it in the words of the New York Daily News , she was “socially minded.” Mrs. Matthews managed to bed down a good number of men and women in Great Neck, Upstate New York, trains in transit to Florida, Manhattan, and probably lots of other places.
Mrs. Dorothea Matthews January 7 1950
Yet her taste in sexual partners was not indiscriminate. A doctor, art historian, student, actor, secretary, and her husband, who was a Ping-Pong champion and owned a messenger service, filled her sexual roster, and those are only the ones we know about. And of course, a murderer would be one of her conquests.
All in all, I would say that she lived a FULL life.
“The Americans have opened a biological front of war by launching the coronavirus in China”
Q:Why? Did Trump, accustomed to taking risks and going all-in, lack the determination?
A: And even Trump (of all people) couldn’t get (the United States) out (of it’s situation), because China has a more efficient management system that allows you to concentrate the available production resources to the fullest.
At the same time, effective money management keeps money emission in the contour of expanded reproduction of the real sector of the economy, focusing on financing investments in development.
China has the highest savings rate of any country, with about 45 percent of GDP invested, compared with 20 percent in the United States or Russia. This, in fact, ensures the ultra-high growth rates of the Chinese economy.
In short, the US was doomed to lose this trade war because China could produce more efficiently and finance development cheaper.
The entire banking system in China is state-owned, it works as a single development institution, directing cash flows to expand production and master new technologies.
In the United States, the emission of money goes to finance the budget deficit and is redistributed into financial bubbles.
As a result, the efficiency of the US financial and economic system is 20 percent – there only every fifth dollar reaches the real sector, and in China almost 90 percent (that is, almost all the yuan that is created by the Central Bank of the PRC) feeds the contours of the expansion of production and ensures ultra-high economic growth.
Trump’s attempts to limit China’s development through trade war methods have failed.
At the same time, they boomeranged at the United States itself.
Then the Americans opened a biological war front by launching the coronavirus in China, hoping that the Chinese leadership would not cope with this epidemic and chaos would arise in China.
However, the epidemic has demonstrated the low efficiency of healthcare and has created chaos in the United States itself.
The Chinese system of government has shown much greater efficiency here as well.
In the Celestial Empire, the mortality rate is significantly lower, and the pandemic was dealt with much faster there.
Already in 2020, they even reached economic growth of 2 percent, while in the United States there was a decline of 10 percent of GDP (analysts noted the largest drop since the Second World War – ed. note).
Now the Chinese have restored the growth rate of about 7 percent per year, and there is no doubt that the PRC will continue to develop confidently, expanding the production of a new technological order.
In parallel with the trade war against China, American intelligence services were preparing a war against Russia.
This was because the Anglo-Saxon geopolitical tradition considers our country the main obstacle to establishing world domination of the US and British power and financial elite.
It must be said that the war against the Russian Federation unfolded immediately after the annexation of Crimea and after the American special services organized a coup d’état in Ukraine.
It can be said that they tricked Russia into agreeing to the American occupation of Ukraine, considering it as a temporary phenomenon.
However, the Americans took root on ‘Ukrainian Independence’, created not only [1] strongholds, growing Nazis under their wing, but also [2] trained the Nazi armed forces.
This gave the Nazis the opportunity to receive a military education, trained them in their academies, ‘sewed together’ all the Armed Forces of Ukraine with them.
And for 8 years they have been preparing the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the fight against the only enemy – Russia.
While the mass media, which in Ukraine are also completely controlled by the Americans, formed the image of the enemy in the public mind.
In addition, the United States used the monetary and financial front of the hybrid war against the Russian Federation.
Already in 2014, they introduced the first financial sanctions and knocked out a significant part of Western loans from the Russian economy.
Now we are witnessing the next phase, when they have actually disconnected Russia from the world monetary and financial system, which they dominate.
However, I predicted all this 10 years ago.
I did so based on the theory of changing world economic structures and the specific logic of the US ruling elite.
A logic which was focused on world domination.
Anglo-Saxon geopolitics is traditionally oriented against the Russian Empire and its successors, the USSR and the Russian Federation.
This is because, since the days of the British Empire, Russia has been seen as the main opponent of the Anglo-Saxons.
All the so-called geopolitical science that was being written in London came down, in fact, to a set of recommendations on how to destroy Russia as the dominant force in Eurasia. I mean all sorts of speculative constructions like “countries of the sea against countries of the land” and so on.
Q: How did Russia get in the way of the ‘sea countries’ that much? After all, geographically with the UK, we have never bordered.
A: In this regard, a formula was invented: whoever controls Eurasia controls the whole world.
Actually, applied developments have already gone further.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s theorem is known that in order to defeat Russia as a superpower, Ukraine must be torn off from it.
All this political dogma, which, it would seem, has long gone down in history, is nevertheless reproduced today in the thinking of the American political elite.
I must say that there are still courses in geopolitics of the past 19th century at Harvard and Yale University, sharpening the brains of future American politicians against Russia.
So they, in fact, jumped on this old and time-tested Russophobic stream, which has always been characteristic of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics.
And, considering Russia as the main opponent of their dominance in the world, in accordance with the proposal of Brzezinski.
Thus, they used Ukraine as an outpost, more precisely, as a tool to undermine Russia, weaken it and, in the long run, destroy it as a sovereign state.
So, what is happening today was easily predicted based on a combination of long-term patterns of economic development.
This, actually doomed the world to a hybrid war, and the traditional Russophobia of the Anglo-Saxon political elite.
After the weakening of the PRC did not work out through a trade war, the Americans transferred the main blow of their military and political power to Russia.
It was a logical step as they consider to be a weak link in world geopolitics and economics.
In addition, the Anglo-Saxons seek to establish dominance over Russia in order to realize their age-old Russophobic ideas of destroying our country, and at the same time weakening China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and China is too tough for the United States.
They have neither the economic nor the military power to destroy us together, neither separately, which is why the United States initially sought to quarrel us with China.
That didn’t work for them.
But they, using our, I would say, placidity, and seized control over Ukraine.
And thus today they are using our fraternal republic as a weapon of war to destroy Russia, and then to seize control of our resources in order.
I repeat, to strengthen their position and weaken China’s position.
In general, this is all obvious, like two plus two equals four.
Q: “The Americans will not be able to win, just as the British did not succeed in their time”
A: Probably, this is obvious, but not for everyone. Among the Russian elite there are many opponents of an alliance with China. At least, before the special operation in Ukraine, it seemed to these people that American and Western culture is more understandable and closer to us than hieroglyphic Chinese wisdom, and that we will always find a common language with our “Western partners”.
You know, back in 2015 I wrote the book “The Last World War. The USA is Starting and Losing”, which you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation everything was thought out and justified there.
The United States embarked on a worldwide hybrid war.
It started with the Orange Revolutions to disrupt regions of the world it did not control.
It did this in order to strengthen its position and weaken the position of geopolitical rivals.
After the famous Munich speech of President Putin (February 2007 – ed. Note), they realized that they had lost control over Yeltsin’s Russia, and this seriously worried them.
In 2008, the financial crisis broke out and it became clear that the transition to a new technological order was beginning.
And with this, the old world economic order and the previous management system no longer ensured sustainable economic development.
China was now leading the way.
Well, then afterwards the logic of deploying of a world war happens, only not in the forms that existed 100 years ago, but on three conditional fronts…
monetary-financial (where the United States still dominates the world),
trade-economic (where they have already lost superiority to China) and
information-cognitive (where the Americans also have technologies that are superior to ours).
They use all three of these fronts in an attempt to keep the initiative and maintain the hegemony of their corporations.
Well and finally, the fourth front is the biological one, which opened with the advent of the coronavirus from the US-Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.
Today we see that a whole network of biological laboratories existed in Ukraine.
So the United States has long been preparing to open the biological front of the world war.
The fifth, and most obvious, front is, in fact, the front of combat fighting – as the last tool for forcing the states that they control into unquestioning obedience.
Today, the situation on this front is also escalating.
That is, active operations are underway on all five fronts of the world hybrid war, and the result can be predicted.
The Americans will not be able to win, just as the British did not succeed in their time.
Although Britain formally won World War II, they lost politically and economically.
The British lost their entire empire, losing more than 90 percent of the territory and 95 percent of the population.
Two years after World War II, where they were the winners, their empire collapsed like a house of cards, because the other two winners – the USSR and the USA – did not need this empire and viewed it as an anachronism.
Now today, the world will not need American transnational corporations.
They will not need the American dollar.
They will not need the American monetary and financial technologies and financial pyramids.
All this will be a thing of the past in the near future.
Southeast Asia will become the obvious leader in world economic development, and a new world economic order will be formed before our very eyes.
Q:To paraphrase [Erich] Remarque, we can say that changes have finally come on the western front. But what signs do you see of this powerful global system soon becoming a thing of the past?
A: After the Americans seized first [1] the Venezuelan foreign exchange reserves and handed them over to the opposition, then [2] the Afghan foreign exchange reserves, before that [3] the Iranian ones, and now [4] the Russian ones, it became completely clear that the dollar ceased to be the world currency.
Following the Americans, the Europeans also committed this stupidity – the euro and the pound ceased to be world currencies.
Therefore, the old monetary and financial system is living its last days.
After American dollars that no one needs are sent back to America from Asian countries, the collapse of the world monetary and financial system based on dollars and euros is inevitable.
Leading countries are switching to national currencies, and the euro and the dollar are ceasing to be foreign exchange reserves.
Q:How do you see the world after the disappearance of the dollar monopoly?
A: We are currently working on a project for an international treaty on the introduction of a new world settlement currency.
It will be pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange commodities that determine real values.
We won’t need American and European banks.
A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with blockchain is developing in the world, where banks lose their importance.
Classical capitalism based on private banks is fading away.
International law is being restored.
All key international relations, including the issuance of world currency circulation, begin to form on the basis of agreements.
At the same time, the significance of national sovereignty is being restored, because sovereign countries are coming to an agreement.
The basis of global economic cooperation is joint investment in order to improve the well-being of peoples.
Trade liberalization ceases to be some kind of priority, national priorities are respected, each state builds such a system for protecting the internal market and its economic space that it considers necessary.
That is, the era of liberal globalization is over.
Before our eyes, a new world economic structure is being formed – an integral one, in which some states and private banks lose their private monopoly on the issue of money, on the use of military force, and so on.
Pretty Chinese girl
I just cannot let a post go without a pretty Chinese girl, don’t you know. video 4MB
Sergei Lavrov: Russian FM hails China as part of emerging ‘just world order’ – The Economic Times
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovon Wednesday said Moscow and Beijing are leading the way towards a fairer world order, as he makes his first visit to the key ally since Russialaunched its invasion of Ukraine last month.
“The third scenario is catastrophic. Destruction of mankind”
Q: Why did you call your book “The Last World War”? What feeds your hope that this global war is really the last one?
A: I called this world war the last one, because we see that there are several scenarios of movement out of today’s crisis.
The first scenario, which I have already talked about, is calm and prosperous.
It consists in overcoming the US monopoly.
In order to do this in the financial sector, you need to abandon the dollar.
In order to overcome the monopoly in the information and cognitive sphere, it is necessary to isolate our information space from the American one and switch to our own information technologies.
Creating their own contours of the reproduction of the economy, but without the US dollar and the euro and relying on their information technologies for managing money, the countries of the new world economic order ensure high rates of economic development.
They do this while the Western world is collapsing.
There they have a situation of collapse of financial pyramids, disorganization and a growing economic crisis, aggravated by growing inflation due to the uncontrolled issue of money over the past 12 years.
The second scenario of a possible development of events is similar to the one that Hitler wanted to realize during the period of the change of previous world economic structures.
This is an attempt to create a world government with a superhuman ideology.
If Hitler conceived the German nation as superhumans, then the current ideologists of world domination impose on humanity the transition to a post-humanoid state.
In contrast to the post-humanism of the West, the core countries of the new world economic order are characterized by a socialist ideology.
This means respect for private interests, protection of private property and the use of market mechanisms.
In China, India, Japan, and Korea, socialist ideology dominates.
Or rather, a mixture of socialist ideology, national interests, and market competition.
It is this mixture that forms a fundamentally new power-political elite, focused on economic development and the growth of the well-being of nations.
It is very different for Western politicians, intellectuals and businessmen.
What we see today in the West is an attempt to form a certain image of a new world order with a world government at the head.
And, where people are driven into an electronic concentration camp.
You can see by the example of restrictions during the pandemic how it happened: all people are given tags, access to public goods is regulated through QR codes, everyone is forced to walk in formation.
By the way, in the scenario of the Rockefeller Foundation back in 2009, the pandemic and, in fact, everything that happened in connection with it, was amazingly sorted into pieces – they actually predicted the future.
This scenario was called Lock Step, that is, “Walk in formation”, and the Western world followed it.
Sacrificing their own democratic values, they try to force people to obey commands.
International organizations, including the World Health Organization, are used as a kind of stronghold for assembling a world government that would be subordinate to private capital.
But, I must say, Donald Trump greatly interfered with these plans.
This is because he stopped the signing of agreements on Transatlantic and Trans-Pacific partnerships.
In those partnerships, where all countries participating in the agreements sacrificed national sovereignty in all disputes with big business.
And you need to understand that today any transnational corporation can act as a foreign investor, including in the United States.
According to these agreements, if there is foreign capital in the business, then in a dispute with the national government, some kind of international arbitration court is formed, it is not clear how and by whom it was drawn up.
And these unelected judges, appointed, in fact, by big international business, these disputes are resolved.
In fact, it was about the fact that the state was losing all sovereignty in regulating relations with big business.
However, Trump stopped the agreement – the United States never signed it.
Thus, the process of forming a world government was stopped.
This is the second alternative, and it is now in crisis due to the collapse of the idea of globalization and the gradual abandonment of ‘pandemic’ restrictions.
It must be understood that the option of a world government is incompatible with sovereign Russia, with our independence and role in the world.
Within the framework of the globalist scenario, the Russian Federation is viewed as a territory that is intended for exploitation by Western transnational corporations.
The “indigenous population” must serve their interests.
Under such a scenario, Russia disappears as an independent entity, just like China, by the way.
The Western world government may incorporate some of our oligarchs into its version of the future, but only in second and third-rate roles.
Another pretty Chinese Girl
They are everywhere in China, don’t you know. video 2MB
The third scenario is catastrophic. The destruction of humanity…
Q:That same apocalypse which everybody talks about?
A:Well, not everyone… But everyone, of course, is afraid.
By the way, about the American biological laboratories that are engaged in the synthesis of dangerous viruses, it was mentioned in my other book, which was published a little later: “Plague of the XXI century: how to avoid disaster and overcome the crisis?”
I remember back in 1996, when I had to work in the UN Security Council, I proposed to develop the concept of national biological security.
Because even then, almost 30 years ago, genetics was a sufficiently developed science to synthesize viruses directed against people of a certain race or a certain gender, a certain age.
This has been possible for a long time.
It is possible to make a virus that will only work against whites, or vice versa, only against blacks, only against men, or only against women.
Now the Americans are going further – you see that, data which agrees with our Ministry of Defense, they announced the day before, that American biological laboratories were developing viruses targeted against the Slavs.
Apparently, it is possible today – to make a virus against some ethnic group that has its own genetic code.
What is happening in Ukraine today is an echo of the agony of the US power elite, which cannot come to terms with the fact that they will no longer be a world leader.
This becomes clear to everyone – at least to those who are not connected with the Americans by their own interests and are not subject to their cognitive influence.
I’ll give you an example.
When the US imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, I asked my Chinese colleagues: “Do you think the Americans can impose sanctions with regards to China?”
They were certain that they can’t.
They said that it was impossible, because the US depends on China just as strongly as China depends on the US.
That is, America will be more expensive for itself.
Two years had passed, and Trump launched a trade war against China.
And Beijing now understood that America is an enemy that will drown the Chinese economic miracle by any and all means.
Prior to this, my reasonings with my Chinese colleagues were not very convincing, just as, however, my book you mentioned did not greatly influence our political and economic elite.
My arguments were dismissed.
Although we have been saying for many, many years that the dollar should be refused.
Foreign exchange reserves should have been removed from dollar instruments, from the euros-to-gold.
It is necessary to switch to ones own monetary and financial systems.
Nations should have developed our own settlements in national currencies with partners.
We have been offering all this since the 2000s, when it was already clear what the world economic development was leading to. And now, finally, everyone has seen the light.
Another Pretty Chinese girl
Here we have yet another view inside of China. video 10MB
“The Americans zombified Ukrainians and turned 150-200 thousand people into a fighting machine that works without thinking”
Q: Judging by the heart-rending howl that comes from the camp of the liberals, as well as the events in Ukraine, not everyone has seen the light yet.
A: Yes, we are faced with the fact that in 8 years the Americans have managed to fool the Ukrainian people so much that the people who resist the Russian army, the so-called Armed Forces of Ukraine, look simply zombified.
They are manipulated like puppets.
It is not Zelensky who commands the Ukrainian Army, not even the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the General Staff – but the Pentagon.
It commands very effectively from the point of view in the fight of “to the last Ukrainian soldier”, because these zombie guys do not give up.
But they are in an absolutely hopeless situation.
All experts have already acknowledged that Russia won the military special operation, that the Ukraine has no chance of resistance, that the entire military infrastructure has been destroyed…
The Armed Forces of Ukraine is only left with surrendering in order to minimize human losses.
However, Ukrainian officers (and especially, of course, nationalists) act like zombies controlled from the outside – they follow instructions from the Pentagon that come to their personal computers and special tablets.
Moreover, the Americans command their marionettes from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, breaking them into the appropriate units.
Each unit is assigned a number, and every number is given artificial ‘military intelligence’ with tasks every day.
They really turned 150-200 thousand people into a fighting machine that works without thinking, only stupidly follows all their orders.
For 8 years, they have achieved that they forced a significant part of the youth of Ukraine not only to stand up against Russia, but through brainwashing made them their weak-willed tools.
Not just cannon fodder, but controlled cannon fodder.
Being in an absolutely hopeless situation, surrounded, deprived of any supply at all, they still continue the senseless war, dooming themselves to death, and dragging the surrounding civilians with them to the grave.
This is a clear example of how modern American technology works.
We must understand that in front of us, we have a very powerful force.
You know, before [the war], we have heard from Russian experts and politicians that the Ukrainians themselves will suffocate economically and then crawl to us, and in general where will Ukraine go without us?
After all, it will not be able to ensure the reproduction of the economy without our resources and cooperation with us.
Indeed, Ukraine has entered a state of economic catastrophe, as we expected, as we explained to our Ukrainian colleagues.
The Ukrainian republic has become the poorest state in Europe along with Moldova.
Due to the fact that Ukraine has terminated ties with Russia, its losses amount to more than 100 billion dollars.
Nevertheless, this did not prevent American and British political strategists and instructors from forming a 200,000-strong army of thugs and murderers who completely inadequately imagine reality and are an obedient instrument of American interests.
Q: Aren’t there equally obedient American marionettes in Russia? Is it only Ukrainians who were zombified?
A: Yes, and here it should be noted that practically the same thing is happening with the Central Bank, but only on other issues.
Q: Before we move on to the Central Bank, let me clarify. You said that you are working on introducing a new currency. And in what format and with what team?
A: We have been doing this for a long time as a group of scholars. 10 years ago, at the Astana Economic Forum.
We presented the report “Toward sustainable growth through a fair world economic order” with a project for the transition to a new world financial and monetary system.
There, we proposed to reform the IMF system based on the so-called special drawing rights, and on the basis of a modified IMF system – to create a worldwide accounting currency.
By the way, this idea aroused great interest then: our project was recognized as the best international economic project.
But in a practical sense, none of the states, represented by the official monetary authorities, was interested in this project.
Although it was followed by Nursultan Nazarbayev’s publications, which proposed a new currency. If I remember correctly, he offered Altyn.
Q: Altyn? That is interesting.
A: Yes, the publication of his article on this topic even took place in Izvestia.
But the matter did not come to negotiations and political decisions, and to this day it is rather a proposal of experts.
But I am sure that the current situation is forcing us to create new payment-settlement instruments very quickly.
This is because the dollar will practically be impossible to use.
And the ruble, due to the incompetent policy of the Central Bank, which, in fact, acts in the interests of international speculators, cannot find sustainability.
Objectively, the ruble could become a reserve currency along with the yuan and the rupee.
It would be possible to move to a multi-currency system based on national currencies.
But we still need some equivalent for pricing…
Now we are working on the concept of the exchange space of the Eurasian Economic Union, where one of the tasks is the formation of new pricing criteria.
That is, if we want metal prices to be formed not in London, but here in Russia, just like oil prices.
Then this implies the emergence of some other currency.
This is especially true if we want to act not only within the Eurasian Economic Union, and in Eurasia in a broad sense.
Were Eurasia would be at the center of a new world economic order, to which I include China, India, Indochina, Japan, Korea and Iran.
These are large countries, all of which have their own fundamental national interests.
After the current stories with the confiscation of [Russia’s] dollar reserves, I think no country will want to use another country’s currency as a reserve.
So a new tool is needed.
And from my point of view, such a tool, for a start, can become some kind of synthetic settlement currency, which would be built as such an aggregated index.
Q:Can I have some examples? What it is?
A: Well, let’s say, ECU ₠ (European Currency Unit) – there was such an experience in the European Union.
It was built like a basket of currencies.
All countries that participate in the creation of a new accounting currency should be entitled to the presence of their national currency in this basket.
And the common currency is formed as an index, as a weighted average component of these national currencies.
Well, to this we must add, from my point of view, commodities: not only gold, but also oil, and metal, and grain, and water.
Its a sort of commodity harness, which, according to our estimates, should include about 20 goods.
They, in fact, form world price proportions and therefore must participate in the basket for the formation of a new accounting currency.
And an international treaty is needed, which will determine the rules for the circulation of this currency and create an organization like the International Monetary Fund.
By the way, 15 years ago we proposed reforming the IMF, but now it is already obvious that a new monetary financial system will have to be built without the West.
Perhaps someday Europe will join it and the US will also be forced to admit it.
But so far it is clear that we will have to build without them.
For example, on the basis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
However, these are just expert developments, which we will submit to the authorities in the coming month.
Q: And at the level of the government or at the level of the president?
A: We will first send it to the departments that are responsible for these issues. We will hold discussions, develop some kind of common understanding, and then go to the political level.
Russia abandons the ISS space station
Without Russian rocket engines, there is no American/EU space station. No space X. So it really doesn’t matter. My guess is an earlier than planned retirement of the space station for “fiscal reasons” (wink. Wink.)
One of the many reasons why I love living inside of China. Beauty abounds. So sexy cooking food. video 4MB
“The Central Bank continues the policy of pandering to the enemy”
Q:In your Telegram channel, you write that all that remains is to nationalize the Bank of Russia. Why hasn’t it been done yet? For example, there is a point of view that Elvira Nabiullina remains at her post as a screen, but will no longer manages anything serious. Can you refute or confirm this?
A: You know, I don’t want to engage in conspiracy theories.
Q:This is a conspiracy theory?
A: Yes, we can talk about the American Deep State in conspiracy terms.
In this case, conspiracy theories are a very appropriate direction of thought, because in America, behind the screen of presidents and congressmen, there are some deep forces – special services.
And in our Fatherland, everything is simple.
We have a president, a head of state who has built a vertical form of power.
It is absolutely clear in our country how the parliament and the judiciary are formed.
Here, no conspiracy theory, in general, can be applied.
The same goes for the Central Bank.
Let me remind you that, according to the law on the Central Bank, all its property is federal property.
Therefore, the Central Bank is a state structure, there is not the slightest doubt about it.
Q:And they always said that the Central Bank was separated, as if on the sidelines.
A: The Board of Directors of the Central Bank is appointed by the State Duma on the proposal of the President.
I served for many years as its representative on the national banking board, which oversees the activities of the Central Bank.
I can say that there is no doubt that the Central Bank is the state body for regulating monetary circulation, and it is also the main financial regulator in the country.
But there are nuances.
The Constitution stipulates that the Central Bank conducts its policy independently, that is, it is independent of the government.
But this does not mean that it is independent of the state.
This is a state-owned agency.
Here the judicial system in our country is also officially independent of the government.
Therefore, being an independent body, the Central Bank is nevertheless formed as a state regulatory body and must perform the tasks that are necessary for the development of our economy.
To do this, it is necessary to involve the Central Bank in strategic planning.
The classics of monetary circulation stipulates that the main goal of the monetary authorities, that is, the Central Bank, should be to create conditions for maximizing investment.
That is what the banking system should be doing – maximizing investment.
Because the more investments, the more production, the higher the technical level, the lower the costs and the lower the inflation, the more stable the economy.
It is possible to achieve macroeconomic stabilization in the modern economy only on the basis of accelerated scientific and technological progress.
Attempts to target inflation (such a buzzword), which the Central Bank has been practically imitating for the past 10 years, by manipulating the key interest rate against the backdrop of a freely floating ruble, is short-sighted, primitive and counterproductive.
Usually these measures are recommended by the IMF for underdeveloped countries that themselves do not know how to think.
What is inflation targeting in practice?
This is an extremely primitive and internally contradictory set of measures, the application of which drives the economy into a stagflation trap.
The Central Bank threw the ruble into free float, which is absurd from the point of view of inflation targeting in an open economy, where the exchange rate directly affects prices.
And we see how the devaluation of the ruble periodically accelerates prices.
In addition, they reduced monetary policy to only one absolutely primitive tool – the manipulation of the key interest rate.
But the key rate is the percentage at which the Central Bank lends money to the economy and withdraws money from the economy.
Its attempts to suppress inflation by raising the interest rate cannot succeed in today’s economy, because the higher the interest rate, the less credit, the less investment, the lower the technical level and competitiveness.
The decrease in the latter entails the devaluation of the ruble in 3-4 years, after they raise the interest rate, supposedly to fight inflation.
Having let the ruble exchange rate float freely, they, in fact, gave it at the mercy of currency speculators.
The Americans really like these politics, so they praise the leadership of our Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance in every possible way.
After all, what is important to them?
So that everything is tied to the dollar, so that the ruble is a ‘junk’ currency that is unstable.
And this is a paradox, because the amount of foreign exchange reserves of the Russian Federation has recently been 3 times more than the ruble money supply!
This means that the Central Bank could have stabilized the exchange rate at any level. But it didn’t do that.
And who are the speculators to whom the Central Bank actually threw the ruble to be torn to pieces?
The main speculators are American hedge funds, which actually shape the ruble exchange rate by manipulating the market.
But the Central Bank does not notice this, or rather, pretends to not notice.
In order to keep them in the foreign exchange market by raising the interest rate, the Central Bank kills credit and makes our economy dependent on foreign sources of credit, and the foreign exchange financial system dependent on the interests of speculators.
This is in whose interests the Central Bank works, hiding behind cool buzzwords like ‘inflation targeting’, which has shamefully failed in these past years in terms of real price dynamics.
So in our country the weakest point of the entire national security system in general is the Central Bank.
Its leadership is hit by the enemy’s cognitive-weapon, in other words, zombified by it. In fact, our monetary authorities are doing what the enemy needs.
By the way, I proved mathematically and chronologically that the first wave of sanctions was imposed against Russia only after the Central Bank prepared the ground for this.
Namely, it let the ruble exchange rate float freely and announced that it would raise the interest rate, if inflation would start in the country.
As soon as the Central Bank moved to this strange policy, the Americans immediately imposed sanctions.
Their speculators ensured the collapse of the ruble exchange rate, this caused an inflationary wave, and the Central Bank, on the instructions of the IMF, raised the interest rate, which completely paralyzed our economy.
The total damage from this policy today has already reached 50 trillion rubles of non-produced products and about 20 trillion rubles of unfinished investments.
Now you have to add to this the 300 billion dollars invested in foreign assets, which are now frozen – that’s the damage.
Therefore, when we talk about the nationalization of the Central Bank, we are not talking about formally nationalizing it (it has already been nationalized), but about bringing it into a policy of conformity with national interests.
Right now, its policy is contrary to national interests.
And there is no conspiracy here.
We see in whose interests such a policy is pursued.
The Central Bank raised interest rates to 20 percent, giving the bankers a dominant position in the economy.
Possessing the most expensive and scarce resource, money, they determine which enterprise will survive, and which enterprise will die, go bankrupt, and so on.
Rising interest rates are holding the entire Russian economy hostage to a handful of bankers.
This is the first.
Secondly, the leadership of the Central Bank allowed another collapse of the ruble exchange rate and closed the currency exchange.
As a result, today banks have become the main currency speculators: they buy currency for about 90 rubles per dollar, and sell it for 125. The difference settles down for them as excess profit.
Q:But why, in your opinion, does the Central Bank of the Russian Federation pursue a policy in the interests of the enemy?
A:As I said, it does this on the recommendation of the International Monetary Fund.
But its interests are also shared by our large banks, which objectively like this policy, as well as our monetary and financial structures, which are also involved in manipulating the ruble exchange rate.
Therefore, an influential lobby is formed around this policy, which supports this policy based on its own private interests.
These interests run counter to the interests of the country, they are directly opposite to them.
And, if you look at what the Central Bank is doing today, I have no doubts that it continues the policy of actually pandering to the enemy.
It undermines macroeconomic stability by allowing international speculators to manipulate the ruble exchange rate and does not control the foreign exchange position of banks that have become currency speculators.
Although the Central Bank could easily withdraw banks from the foreign exchange market by fixing their foreign exchange position, forbidding banks to buy foreign currency.
And secondly – by raising the interest rate, the Central Bank actually killed investments in the development of the Russian economy.
Which are very much needed right now.
Primarily for import substitution and for the restoration of economic sovereignty.
While our leadership says that we should not be afraid of sanctions, because they create conditions for economic growth, for import substitutions…
Look, about a third of EU imports have left our market. These are huge opportunities for import substitution.
If we assume that our enterprises begin to develop these markets, then we will develop at a rate of 15 percent per year.
But this requires loans.
Import substitution cannot arise without loans.
We need loans to set up production facilities, to master new technologies, to load idle production capacities.
We have long developed such a strategy of advanced development at the Academy of Sciences, and we are promoting it.
But, unfortunately, the insane, from our point of view, policy of the Central Bank has quite specific influential structures which it likes and supports. That is why the policy is so stable.
Veteran diplomat warns against Australia being a US proxy in war against China
Watch “CITIZENS INSIGHT – Veteran Australian diplomat speaks out against war danger – John Lander” on YouTube
Here’s another fine Chinese girl. I think that pretty girls are everywhere, but you know, there are a lot of them inside of China. video 2MB
“It is possible to stabilize the ruble in three days”
Q: Sergey Yuryevich, if this is not conspiracy theory, then why does the Central Bank continue to pursue such a policy? Only based on the interests of lobbyists?
A: To whom is the war, and to whom is the mother dear.
Commercial banks earn a 40% profit on currency speculation.
You bought 90 rubles per dollar – sold it for 125. 35 rubles – nothing is easier!
As a result, we have inflation, imports are becoming more expensive, everyone sees this insane rate.
Prices for all goods are rising, but the banks are making super profits.
Again, a very influential lobby has formed around this policy, and admitting the failure of such a strategy for many people means, in fact, admitting their incompetence and even sabotage.
And speculators with large banks are quite influential structures in our country that influence decision-making.
Q:Well and what, does this information not reach the first person (Putin), is it blocked?
A: When I was an adviser, I communicated this information.
Q:Were you listened to?
A: Yes, there were discussions, discussed at the Economic Council, then it was closed so as not to irritate the officials.
Now I don’t want to comment on it.
We see today that if we do not change the monetary policy, then it will simply be impossible for us to survive in this hybrid war.
We now need to counter economic sanctions with a serious increase in domestic production.
There are production facilities for this, people, raw materials, brains – too, but there is no money.
Right now, the simplest thing that the state can give people is money.
Q:What is your feeling? Is there an understanding at the top?
A: I think that you need to directly address this question to them.
Q:But many people call you almost the Number 1 person in the current situation – a public figure who can save Russia.
A: Thank you for this review. I try my best.
Q: I just want to understand: if before there was no prophet in our Fatherland, now has he appeared? Is this a temporary situation with the Central Bank?
A: It is so protracted, I would say, for 30 years.
If we had carried out a competent monetary policy in accordance with the requirements of the new world economic order, the integral system, we would have developed like China – by 10 percent a year.
There were such possibilities.
And we basically been stomping in the same spot for these past 30 years.
So the point is not even whether they listen or not, you just need to look objectively and see how China and India are developing and how we are developing.
What prevented us from developing in exactly the same way?
Moreover, the control system of the new world economic order, which I describe in my books, is universal.
She worked successfully in Japan before the Americans broke the Japanese economic growth.
And even in Ethiopia, where they also began to form this management model (and achieved growth by several times).
That is, this universal management model of the modern economy, focused on the growth of social welfare through investment in a new technological order, needs to be implemented.
At the same time, of course, the targeted use of money implies a high responsibility.
Throwing money from a helicopter – is not our thing.
Q: It’s not our path.
A: We are talking about targeted credit emission based on modern digital tools with a strict control system focused on investments in new technologies.
We know how to do this, how to minimize the human factor through the introduction of digital technologies, including the digital ruble.
But this is disadvantageous for those who still adhere to the old strategies.
They made a cash cow out of Russia, they sucked out 100 billion dollars from it abroad to offshore companies.But now the Americans have closed offshorization for us. There is a real opportunity, we must use it.
Q: What would you advise people? Now the main query on the Internet search engines is where to invest money in an era of turbulence. What should people do?
A: First of all, do not make sudden movements, I would say that.
In any case, what certainly is not necessary – to run after dollars or euros.
Because we do not know what will happen next with these currencies.
If our system is disconnected from the Western system, then our banks cannot effectively invest dollars and euros anywhere except in currency speculation.
But I hope that our authorities will still curb the foreign exchange market.
In this context, what the banks did, raising the interest rate on foreign currency deposits sharply, turned out to be a clear overkill, which spurred panic.
I think the ruble will stabilize if, of course, speculators are removed from the foreign exchange market and foreign currency is sold only for importers and people who transfer money abroad within reasonable limits to relatives or are going on a business trip in accordance with the regulations.
The rest is to block the channels of currency leakage.
Then our foreign exchange inflow will normalize again.
You know, we have a very positive trade balance.
Mandatory sale of 80% of foreign exchange earnings has been introduced.
If this revenue is sold on the stock exchange, then the amount of currency will be more than what importers need.
We will have a surplus of currency.
This means that the ruble will strengthen, that is, it will return to the old indicators – 80 or even 70 rubles per dollar.
But until the Central Bank removes speculators from the market and allows commercial banks to become such, the ruble exchange rate will not stabilize.
So, unfortunately, the monetary authorities have not yet come to their senses and have not begun to implement the correct policy of macroeconomic stabilization, I can’t give any advice other than investing in gold if possible (especially since the government removed VAT from gold).
There are no other real assets and no safe haven.
Q:So, buy gold?
A: Buy the essentials.
Or invest in real estate, in something reliable.
As for investments in dollars and euros… They have ceased to be a currency for us.
This is no longer a currency, but some obligations of other countries that may or may not be fulfilled.
So we need to look for other possibilities.
But I would like to emphasize once again that with the right policies, we can very quickly stabilize the ruble and even restore its purchasing power.
Q: And in what perspective, after all?
A:It can be done even tomorrow, you understand? The Primakov government and [Viktor] Gerashchenko did it in one week.
Q:Is the government capable of doing this?
A: Of course it can.
To do this, in general, two decisions need to be made: to fix the currency position of commercial banks and introduce the norms for the sale of foreign currency for non-trading operations, to keep the freely convertible foreign exchange market only for trading operations.
That’s all.
This can be written in 15 minutes and announced within a day, introduced within three days – and the ruble will stabilize.
Now the USA is trying to “Strong Arm” Pakastan
After a recently failed NGO backed coup.
Statecraft | Pakistan PM Imran Khan Insists on Foreign Conspiracy With Alleged Threat Letter .
US seek to overthrown Pakistan PM:
Olivia Newton John – Magic (live on the midnight special)
After I left the Navy, but before I was sent a searching, I was in this “in-between” funk. I was between two worlds and perhaps a bit lost. It was a phase that I had to grow though. And I did, don’t you know.
I believe that everyone goes through this period of “void”. Where they feel out of sorts, and without aim, direction, purpose or meaning. For me, it was a new experience, and very uncomfortable.
I was, though events, able to regroup and seek out my next phase in life. We all do. But when you are in this funk, it’s a road and path that is difficult to define and impossible to get help with.
I will tell you that this is the song that was topping the radio tops at that time, and the song that I exercised to the most. I well remember doing arm curls and sit-ups to this song. To you readers it is just an old song. But to me… well, it represents that strange period of time that I went though; a time of great uncertainity and confusion about who I was, and what my purpose in life was.
Give the song a spin…
Blinken says Russia has already seen a ‘strategic defeat’
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Russia has already experienced a “strategic defeat” in its invasion of Ukraine.
“If you step back and look at this, this has already been a dramatic strategic setback for Russia, and I would say a strategic defeat,” Blinken told co-anchor Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked about additional sanctions the U.S. may impose on Russia.
Blinken said Russia has already failed in the three main goals it had at the start of its invasion of Ukraine.
“They had three aims going into this. One was to subjugate Ukraine to Russia’s will, to take away its sovereignty and independence. The second was to assert Russian power. The third was to divide the west and NATO. On all three fronts, its already lost,” Blinken said.
Actually, those three things were not the Russian objectives. The objectives were all clearly stated by Putin himself.
So either [1] Biden is lying, [2] he is being advised by idiots, or [3] he's confused Ukraine with another nation. -MM
Cinnamon-Raisin Bread Pudding
All that I can say is yum!
Who doesn’t love making bread pudding in the slow cooker, and this Cinnamon-Raisin Bread Pudding is no exception! Butterscotch chips and pecans add an extra-special touch that’s sure to please. It’s fast. It’s easy. It’s tasty. Just why aren’t you making it?
What You’ll Need
3 large eggs
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup milk
1 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 (1-pound) cinnamon-raisin bread loaf, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/2 cup butterscotch chips (see Note)
1/2 cup chopped pecans, toasted
Sweetened whipped cream (optional)
What to Do
Whisk together first 3 ingredients in a large bowl; stir in milk and next 3 ingredients. Add bread cubes, stirring until moistened. Stir in butterscotch chips and pecans. Pour into a lightly greased 4-quart round slow cooker.
Cover and cook on LOW setting 2 hours or until center is set. Carefully remove slow cooker insert from heat element. Let stand, covered, 30 minutes. Serve pudding warm with whipped cream, if desired.
Notes
For more cinnamon flavor, you can substitute an equal amount of cinnamon chips for the butterscotch chips. Cinnamon chips tend to be a seasonal item — available only during the holiday months — so, if you love ’em, stock up.
20 Facts About The Emerging Global Food Shortage That Should Chill You To The Core
A very alarming global food shortage has already begun, and it is only going to get worse in the months ahead. I realize that this is not good news, but I would encourage you to share the information in this article with everyone that you can. People deserve to understand what is happening, and they deserve an opportunity to get prepared. The pace at which things are changing around the globe right now is absolutely breathtaking, but most people assume that life will just continue to carry on as it normally does. Unfortunately, the truth is that a very real planetary emergency is developing right in front of our eyes. The following are 20 facts about the emerging global food shortage that should chill you to the core…
#1 One of France’s most important government officials is telling us that we should brace ourselves for an “extremely serious” global food crisis…
France’s Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the EU must get to grips with the prospect that the war in Ukraine could prompt an “extremely serious” global food crisis.
#2 Joe Biden recently admitted that food shortages are “going to be real”, and his administration is now openly using the word “famine” to describe what is coming…
The Biden administration is worried Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will cause famine in parts of the world, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Cecilia Rouse told CNBC on Friday.
#3 It is being reported that food prices at German supermarkets will soon go up between 20 and 50 percent…
Just days after Germany reported the highest inflation in generation (with February headline CPI soaring at a 7.6% annual pace and blowing away all expectations), giving locals a distinctly unpleasant deja vu feeling even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke what few supply chains remained and sent prices even higher into the stratosphere…… on Monday, Germany will take one step toward a return of the dreaded Weimar hyperinflation, when according to the German Retail Association (HDE), consumers should prepare for another wave of price hikes for everyday goods and groceries with Reuters reporting that prices at German retail chains will explode between 20 and 50%
In Spain, the country started experiencing sporadic shortages of different products like eggs, milk and other dairy products almost immediately following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. In early March, major supermarkets like Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil.
In Greece, at least four national supermarket chains have started rationing food products like flour and sunflower oil due to critically low supplies caused by the crippled supply chains coming out of Russia and Ukraine.
On Tuesday, BlackRock Inc. President Rob Kapito told an audience in Austin, Texas, hosted by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, that an entire younger generation is quickly finding out what it means to suffer from shortages, according to Bloomberg.“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito said. “And we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”
#7 Since this time last year, some fertilizer prices have gone up by as much as 300 percent.
#8 Many farmers in Africa will not be able to afford fertilizer at all this year, and it is being projected that this will reduce agricultural production by an amount capable of feeding “100 million people”…
With prices tripling over the past 18 months, many farmers are considering whether to forgo purchases of fertilizers this year. That leaves a market long touted for its growth potential set to shrink by almost a third, according to Sebastian Nduva, program manager at researcher group AfricaFertilizer.Org.That could potentially curb cereals output by 30 million tons, enough to feed 100 million people, he said.
Russia is a key global player in natural gas, a major input to fertilizer production. Higher gas prices, and supply cuts, will further drive fertilizer prices higher. Russia is one of the biggest exporters of the three major groups of fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). Physical supply cuts could further inflate fertilizer prices.
#10 In a typical year, Russia and Ukraine collectively account for approximately 30 percent of all global wheat exports.
Armenia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have imported virtually all of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine and must find new sources. But they are competing against much larger buyers, including Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh and Iran, which have obtained more than 60 percent of their wheat from the two warring countries.
#13 One Russian official is warning that his nation may soon only export food to “friendly nations”…
A Russian government official has threatened that Russia will limit its vital food exports to only nations it considers “friendly”.Dmitry Medvedev, a senior Russian security official who previously served as the nation’s president, has threatened that Russia may soon cut off the West from food exports.
#15 The death toll from the bird flu in Iowa alone will be pushed beyond 13 million as a result of this latest incident.
#16 Overall, this is what the total national death toll from the bird flu currently looks like: “22 million egg-laying chickens, 1.8 million broiler chickens, 1.9 million pullet and other commercial chickens, and 1.9 million turkeys”.
#17 China’s agricultural minister has announced that the winter wheat harvest in China could be “the worst in history”.
#18 We are being warned that the winter wheat harvest in the United States will be “disastrous” due to severe drought.
#20 The head of the UN World Food program says that what the planet is now facing is unlike anything that we have seen since World War II…
“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”
Like I said at the beginning of this article, I hope that you will share this information with as many people as possible, because this crisis really is going to affect every man, woman and child on the entire planet.
In my entire lifetime, I have never seen anything like this, and conditions are getting worse with each passing day.
Stomu Yamashta – Go (Full Album)
I came across this album in the discount bin at the local music store in Butler Pennsylvania when I was a Junior / Senior in High School. I think that I bought it for a dollar. Which was a good deal, as at that time a single album of maybe fifteen songs cost $20.
Crazh huh?
Aside from just loving the high quality artwork of the artists eating at a table with bread and wine, the music itself was haunting and melodic. It really stood apart from the funk, soul, rock, and country and western music that i was getting into at that period in my life.
I suggest you all give it a spin…
Stomu Yamashta’s supergroup Go, and their self titled album. This album shows such great musicianship and I wanted to share it with everyone. This album is legendary, and I believe it should be listened to in it’s entirety.
Good news for the world: the United States led Western DNA countries are beginning to feel the pain after bullying, threatening, and looting Russians foreign reserve, bank account, investment, and private assets.
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There are mass protests across Europe against inflation. Germany is just an example of how sanctioning of Putin the great affect food prices:
Paper models are cheap and fun. You pay perhaps a few dollars, and you down load a PDF file. Then you print out the PDF. Once printed, you cut out the patterns and glue or tape together.
62BD6C5C BFF1 442D B7E9 6C649311549A scaled 1
There are all sorts of these operations on the internt. Some a just fun with silly little items, while others are quite serious and very detailed. How about a 440 automotive engine, perhaps?
This operation; AXM Paper Models, specializes in modern and contemporaneous spacecraft. They are serious with scale and detailed drawing and patterns. In this installment, I am just going to provide a gate way to their inexpensive models of Chinese space station components. It’s all pretty nice.
All in all, no matter what the “news” says, you need to keep in mind a few key points…
The world is undergoing a geopolitical realignment.
This alignment is dividing into two separate entities (East and West).
The two sides have a very different view of how the world should be. That should be quite clear by now, and everyone seems to agree on these points. Including the leadership of the two sides.
The West is trying to maintain a uni-polar single world government ruled by the United States. It wants the work to choose sides. You are either freinds or you are enemies. There is no in-between.
The East is trying to maintain a multi-polar world of equals of various unique social structures. They want to strengthen the UN charter, and empower it, and cut out and gut the legacy corruption that was built internally to it.
Some people, as the articles above state, consider a five point plan. WHile others jsut consider the plan to be some kind of “hybrid war”. I argue that a war is a war, irregardless as to what you call it.
But everything, right now, boils down to the purchase of energy and how that purchase comes about. Key to this manifestation is the control of the currency of exchange.
The West is trying to maintain the USD, or an electronic version of it.
The East is trying to use commodity-based currency by labor, materials and products.
Issues about Ukraine or Taiwan are simply the desperate plans of the West in a plan to maintain a uni-polar world. Sure they are important, but nto as important as the “news” would lead you to believe.
Do not get sidetracked from what is REALLY going on.
Keep clear headed. Keep focused. Keep frosty. I believe in you.
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Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The world is filled with talk. Much of the talk on the American conservative media discusses prep for a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Nah, this is not just trivial fear-mongering. There’s some real and actual concern and issues involved.
Do you think that I am kidding? Well, then you listen yourself. Nuclear war. American leadership. SHTF advice. All good stuff. I have the radio mp3 listed here. It doesn’t mean that they are right or wrong. But that people are openly talking about these things. It reminds me of a Steven King movie.
They are actually saying things that I have long recognized as being true. Both Russia and China are terribly underestimated by the American civilian and military leadership.
But Jeeze Louise! The world has many other things going on. My various business activities are flourishing in trade with the United States and Europe. Why? There seems to be a massive disconnect between business, between politics, between the Western leadership, and the Western mainstream media.
Why is there this disconnect?
Can all these concerns and beliefs coexist? Or, are the various groups all living within their own individual echo chambers? Chambers that believe that their reality is the only reality that exists? Or, perhaps is everything all lies where nothing is true, and us “little guys” are all stuck in the middle between large, enormous, rich criminal gangs that wear the mantle of government?
Here, we will go over various subjects regarding the world. There’s a lot of stuff on Geo-Political stuff, China, and Ukraine. As well as stuff about humanity. I hope that you all enjoy it.
Pepe Escobar: Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan
Pepe Escobar
March 29, 2022
The Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union and China just agreed to design the mechanism for an independent financial and monetary system that would bypass dollar transactions.
It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.
After a recent video conference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.
Glazyev’s central role in devising the new Russian and Eurasian economic/financial strategy has been examined here. He saw the western financial squeeze on Moscow coming light-years before others.
Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”
Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, and they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.
The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. The first draft will be already discussed by the end of the month.
The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI (Kazakhstan, for instance, is a member of both) but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.
In the medium to long term, the spread of the new system will translate into the weakening of the Bretton Woods system, which even serious US market players/strategists admit is rotten from the inside. The US dollar and imperial hegemony are facing stormy seas.
Show me that frozen gold
Meanwhile, Russia has a serious problem to tackle. This past weekend, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that half of Russia’s gold and foreign reserves have been frozen by unilateral sanctions. It boggles the mind that Russian financial experts have placed a great deal of the nation’s wealth where it can be easily accessed – and even confiscated – by the ‘Empire of Lies’ (copyright Putin).
At first, it was not exactly clear what Siluanov had meant. How could the Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiulina and her team let half of foreign reserves and even gold be stored in Western banks and/or vaults? Or is this some sneaky diversionist tactic by Siluanov?
Hudson was quite frank: “When I first heard the word ‘frozen,’ I thought that this meant that Russia was not going to expend its precious gold reserves on supporting the ruble, trying to fight against a Soros-style raid from the West. But now the word ‘frozen’ seems to have meant that Russia had sent it abroad, outside of its control.”
Interesting too? Lend Self-Destructive U.S. a Hand
“It looks like at least as of last June, all Russian gold was kept in Russia itself. At the same time, it would have been natural to have kept securities and bank deposits in the United States and Britain, because that is where most intervention in world foreign exchange markets occurs,” Hudson added.
Essentially, it’s all still up in the air: “My first reading assumed that Russia must be doing something smart. If it was smart to move gold abroad, perhaps it was doing what other central banks do: ‘lend” it to speculators, for an interest payment or fee. Until Russia tells the world where its gold was put, and why, we can’t fathom it. Was it in the Bank of England – even after England confiscated Venezuela’s gold? Was it in the New York Fed – even after the Fed confiscated Afghanistan’s reserves?”
So far, there has been no extra clarification either from Siluanov or Nabiulina. Scenarios swirl about a string of deportations to northern Siberia for national treason. Hudson adds important elements to the puzzle:
“If [the reserves] are frozen, why is Russia paying interest on its foreign debt falling due? It can direct the “freezer’ to pay, to shift the blame for default. It can talk about Chase Manhattan’s freezing of Iran’s bank account from which Iran sought to pay interest on its dollar-denominated debt. It can insist that any payments by NATO countries be settled in advance by physical gold. Or it can land paratroopers on the Bank of England, and recover gold – sort of like Goldfinger at Fort Knox. What is important is for Russia to explain what happened and how it was attacked, as a warning to other countries.”
As a clincher, Hudson could not but wink at Glazyev: “Maybe Russia should appoint a non-pro-westerner at the Central Bank.”
The petrodollar game-changer
It’s tempting to read into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s words at the diplomatic summit in Antalya last Thursday as a veiled admission that Moscow may not have been totally prepared for the heavy financial artillery deployed by the Americans:
“We will solve the problem – and the solution will be to no longer depend on our western partners, be it governments or companies that are acting as tools of western political aggression against Russia instead of pursuing the interests of their businesses. We will make sure that we never again find ourselves in a similar situation and that neither some Uncle Sam nor anybody else can make decisions aimed at destroying our economy. We will find a way to eliminate this dependence. We should have done it long ago.”
So, ‘long ago’ starts now. And one of its planks will be the Eurasian financial system. Meanwhile, ‘the market’ (as in, the American speculative casino) has ‘judged’ (according to its self-made oracles) that Russian gold reserves – the ones that stayed in Russia – cannot support the ruble.
That’s not the issue – on several levels. The self-made oracles, brainwashed for decades, believe that the Hegemon dictates what ‘the market’ does. That’s mere propaganda. The crucial fact is that in the new, emerging paradigm, NATO nations amount to at best 15 percent of the world’s population. Russia won’t be forced to practice autarky because it does not need to: most of the world – as we’ve seen represented in the hefty non-sanctioning nation list – is ready to do business with Moscow.
Iran has shown how to do it. Persian Gulf traders confirmed to The Cradle that Iran is selling no less than 3 million barrels of oil a day even now, with no signed JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, currently under negotiation in Vienna). Oil is re-labeled, smuggled, and transferred from tankers in the dead of night.
Interesting too? The imperative for nuclear disarmament – Is Putin the puppet-master?
Another example: the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a huge refiner, just bought 3 million barrels of Russian Urals from trader Vitol for delivery in May. There are no sanctions on Russian oil – at least not yet.
Washington’s reductionist, Mackinderesque plan is to manipulate Ukraine as a disposable pawn to go scorched-earth on Russia, and then hit China. Essentially, divide-and-rule to smash not only one but two peer competitors in Eurasia who are advancing in lockstep as comprehensive strategic partners.
As Hudson sees it: “China is in the cross-hairs, and what happened to Russia is a dress rehearsal for what can happen to China. Best to break sooner than later under these conditions. Because the leverage is highest now.”
All the blather about “crashing Russian markets,” ending foreign investment, destroying the ruble, a “full trade embargo,” expelling Russia from “the community of nations,” and so forth – that’s for the zombified galleries. Iran has been dealing with the same thing for four decades, and survived.
Historical poetic justice, as Lavrov intimated, now happens to rule that Russia and Iran are about to sign a very important agreement, which may likely be an equivalent of the Iran-China strategic partnership. The three main nodes of Eurasia integration are perfecting their interaction on the go, and sooner rather than later, may be utilizing a new, independent monetary and financial system.
But there’s more poetic justice on the way, revolving around the ultimate game-changer. And it came much sooner than we all thought.
Saudi Arabia is considering accepting Chinese yuan – and not US dollars – for selling oil to China. Translation: Beijing told Riyadh this is the new groove. The end of the petrodollar is at hand – and that is the certified nail in the coffin of the indispensable Hegemon.
Meanwhile, there’s a mystery to be solved: where is that frozen Russian gold?
I love Malcolm Roberts’ closing statement in front of the Aussie Senate
The truth is the Select Committee on COVID-19 has been running a protection racket for the pharmaceutical industry, and today’s vote proves it. This unprecedented betrayal of the Australian people must be referred immediately to a royal commission.
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To the Prime Minister, the health minister, the federal health department and all those in the Senate and the House of Representatives—all of you who have perpetrated this crime—I direct one question: how the hell do you expect to get away with it? We’re not going to let you get away with it. We won’t let you get away with it. We are coming for you. We have the stamina to hound you down and we damn well will.
“Enjoying the new lamp I bought for my dining room this evening”
Imagine you make a discovery of a nice lamp at a thrift store and don’t think much about it, but then when you take it home and plug it in…
Light show.
MM talks about where he lives in China
This is one of my first videos that I uploaded on to you-tube. It should stream in nicely. Obviously, I’m not an expert. But, I have been squeezing in some video editing tutorials, and you should see an gradual improvment in the over all production quality of the videos as time goes by.
Right now, You-Tube is being funny. They refuse to allow me to say that I am in China, and they have set the video quality equal to “dog shit” setting.
Quality set at “Dog Shit”.
Here, is the video on You-Tube. You be the judge…
Not to worry, here is the actual raw video 239MB as it should be; here. In all of it’s beautiful glory. Big difference, eh?
Austria, Hungary Say No Substitute to Russian Gas as Germany’s BASF Warns of Worst Crisis Since WWII
Officials in Austria and Hungary say there’s no alternative to Russian natural gas, with Budapest stressing that more costly American-sourced LNG is not a realistic substitute.
“Replacing cheap Russian gas with expensive American gas” is an “absurd” proposal, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Kossuth Radio on Friday.
“It’s not that we’ll put on an extra sweater in the evening and turn the heating down a little or paying a few extra forints for gas. The fact is that if energy supplies don’t come from Russia there won’t be any energy in Hungary,” Orban stressed.
The politician noted that 85 percent of Hungary’s gas supplies and 64 percent of the country’s oil comes from Russia, and that geography puts limits on Budapest’s ability to diversify its sources of energy. Austrian energy giant OMV CEO Alfred Stern echoed Orban’s concerns, saying that there was no LNG alternative for Austria.
“Giving up on Russian gas is impossible unless we are willing to live with the massive consequences of such a step. Some countries can do that. It cannot be implemented by Austria this year…As a landlocked country, we don’t have access to LNG. Any diversification would mean investing in more expensive infrastructure to get access to more expensive gas. (emphasis added)
‘Worst Crisis Since WWII’
Austria’s neighbour Germany, whose leaders have so far publicly refused to be “blackmailed” into paying for Russia’s gas in rubles, while privately inquiring about how such ruble payments could be made, is facing a similar dilemma, with Berlin activating an emergency plan to cope with supply disruptions and preparing to institute gas rationing. Russian deliveries made up 55 percent of the European industrial giant’s gas consumption in 2021, with Germany’s underground gas storage tanks down to 25 percent of capacity this week.
Martin Brudermuller, CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, has characterised Berlin’s plans to boycott ruble-priced gas as a “highly irresponsible experiment,” and stressed that Germans underestimate the true risks of such a step.[.]
Looks delicious. It’s a home-made dish; a take on the Subway meatball sub.
Mama Mias Meatball Bake
Thanks to a few shortcuts, you can have Mama Mia’s Meatball Bake on the table in no time. This is an easy dinner recipe that the whole family will love!
What You’ll Need
1 (12- to 16-ounce) frozen garlic bread
1 cup ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
1 (32-ounce) bag frozen meatballs, thawed, cut in half
1 cup spaghetti sauce
10 slices mozzarella cheese
What to Do
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
Place garlic bread open face on baking sheet and bake 10 minutes. Remove from oven and reduce heat to 350 degrees.
In a small bowl, combine ricotta cheese and Parmesan cheese and evenly spread on garlic bread. Place meatballs on top of cheese and evenly spoon spaghetti sauce over meatballs.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes, or until meatballs are heated through. Top with mozzarella cheese and continue baking 3 to 5 more minutes, or until cheese melts.
Caitlin Johnstone: The Target is China
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The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the U.S. war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.
You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the U.S. power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy No. 1 in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The U.S. “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.
“The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:-Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC-Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners-Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe-Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem”
“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.
Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the U.S.-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.
“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.
And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years.
It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the U.S. intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.
The U.S. government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world.
During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the U.S.S.R., which was when we saw business ties between China and the U.S. lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the U.S. as an economic superpower.
Once the U.S.S.R. ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Hillary Clinton admits there was an expectation in Washington Russia would have no choice but to become the West's junior partner due to the fear China could take over the Russian Far East. /1https://t.co/pJQeF0eCxf— Artyom Lukin (@ArtyomLukin) November 20, 2021
In what history may one day view as the U.S. empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted [1] the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against [2] the new Enemy No. 1 in China.
Instead, the exact opposite happened.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the U.K., the U.S., because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come groveling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship.
This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once.
Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.
And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the U.S. empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:
Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?— CGTN LIU Xin ?? (@LiuXininBeijing) March 19, 2022
On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king.
Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the U.S. empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”
Basically, all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.
This is the Hail Mary pass of the U.S. hegemon; its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it.
Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature.
The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.
One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world.
If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.
MM comments on the article
China does not play.
Even with the best made, and laid plans, guns, bombs, money aside, you are dealing with a cohesive society. Not a “thing”. The people of one society will be in conflict with another society. Which means that the American “freedom” society will be in conflict with the Chinese “merit & hard work” society.
Seriously?
Well, then. Take note.
There will not be a United States left when the dust settles.
China, Solomon Islands ink security cooperation, deriving from need to ‘quell Honiara riots’ in past year
China and the Solomon Islands signed a bilateral security cooperation framework agreement on Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed, which focuses on social security, safeguarding people’s lives and properties, human rights aid and other fields.
The cooperation does not target a third party, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin at Thursday’s routine news conference.
"Pacific countries are a big stage of international cooperation, not some certain country's 'backyard' nor a venue for the competition of great powers."
The framework agreement on security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands will strengthen cooperation between the two countries in natural disaster response, humanitarian assistance, development assistance, maintenance of social order and other fields, read a statement sent by the Chinese Embassy in the Solomon Islands to the Global Times on Thursday.
The two countries will jointly address both traditional and non-traditional security challenges, and inject positive energy and stability into the Solomon Islands and the regional security environment, the Embassy said.
Wang said that the cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands is based on equality and mutual benefit.
"This is the legitimate right of two sovereign states, which is in line with international law and international practice and does not allow external interference."
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson pointed out that the parties concerned should look at China-Solomon Islands security cooperation objectively and rationally, and stop making irresponsible remarks.
"Attempts to provoke, obstruct and damage friendly relations between China and the island nations are unpopular and will not succeed,"
In order to seek a hegemonic position in the South Pacific region, Australia and its allies have been paying attention to and are worried about China’s normal security cooperation with the Solomon Islands and other island countries, Yang Honglian, a senior researcher at the Pacific Islands Research Center of Liaocheng University based in Fiji, told the Global Times.
"Australia believes that next, China must take the step to develop a military relationship with the island countries," Yang said. "So Australia is bound to strengthen its influence on the countries and increase the deployment and construction of military bases."
"Australia wants the Solomon Islands to just follow what it says. But after all, it's the US behind all this pushing,"
Frank Sade Bilaupaine, Policy Consultant at the Foreign Policy Advisory Secretariat at the Solomon Islands Government, told the Global Times.
He pointed out that the security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands
"came about because of the riots in Honiara for the past years and Chinese business is always the victim.""So Solomon Islands government view it as since now we have official diplomatic relations, maybe China can assist in building the capacity of the Solomon Islands police," he said.
Earlier, after the social unrest in the Solomon Islands in November, China provided a number of shipments of police material assistance to the Solomon Islands upon request and sent a temporary police advisory team to help strengthen the country’s police force, which has proved to be effective and welcomed by the government and people of the country, Wang pointed out.
A Chinese businessman surnamed Lin in Honiara told the Global Times on Thursday that the Chinese community supports the cooperation on security very much. He said that the police in the island country lack professional training and their equipment is outdated.
"We hope their police force could improve after cooperation with China."
As President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War.
But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world.
She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation’s vital national security interests.
Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world.
She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be “the special province” of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences.
Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop “disinterested globalist” attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as “internationalism” instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.The Obama administration pursued, and the Biden administration continues to pursue, a globalist agenda that prioritizes multilateral efforts against climate change; promotes nuclear disarmament; and seeks to transform our armed forces into a “woke” military concerned more with race, gender, and “white nationalism” than being prepared and equipped to win wars.
The Biden administration is staffed (as Obama’s was) with elites who appear to be committed to a “disinterested globalist” or “internationalist” agenda.
They seem to believe that they are as much “citizens of the world” as they are citizens of the United States.
The US succeeded when it offered a better option. Now it demands allegiance to a political agenda instead of achieving fundamental basic functions.
Food in Finland
To an American, such as myself, this is very funny.
In comments to the Senate budget committee on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Utah said that the spiraling costs of retirement programs had to be tackled to bring national debt under control. Romney raised the politically controversial idea of cutting benefits, but only for younger generations before they reach retirement age.
Democracy spent itself broke. These programs all rob tomorrow to pay for today. The Baby Boomers, as the largest generation, created obligations that future generations cannot pay, so now the system will crash. The politicians are just trying to keep it afloat with duct tape, bubble gum wads, and sticking plaster long enough for the Boomers to die out, since those Boomers still donate the most money to candidates.
Now for some real dancing.
Soul train. It’s what I grew up with. Look at all the funk!
United States geography and demographics are changing
Specifically, 468,426 people from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia have registered a driver’s license in one of the 254 Texas counties, as of January 2022. About 20% of these people are from California.
The exodus from high-tax states has begun. Texas hides its taxes as property taxes which pay for Supreme Court mandated public schooling, most of which has nothing to do with education and is mostly free daycare and free school meals.
A system so corrupt that the avenues of change are all blocked
Joe Mandrusiak, the Freedom Foundation’s Pennsylvania outreach director, attributed falling membership to union members not approving of how union leadership spends its funds.AFSCME 13 collected $26.4 million in dues, with $7.1 million going to the national organization. Mandrusiak highlighted some of the union’s political spending and other cost in the Freedom Foundation’s article:
$3.2 million on travel.
$373,720 on food/catering.
$2.7 million on partisan organizations.
$440,000 sent to 14 groups that call for defunding the police.
$25,000 to DEMOS (Defund the Police and Prisons) group.
$21,500 to Coalition of Human Need (to tear down the law enforcement apparatus).
$465,100 to Planned Parenthood.
Collective reward and punishment systems are Leftist by nature; conservatives prefer to reward the good, punish the bad, and ignore the unexceptional and irrelevant, allowing nature to sort that one out.
Conservatism is inherently Social Darwinist in nature, but also regular Darwinist, and does not believe in saving people from themselves, in part because if you do that, you accumulate a large pool of waste humans who are parasitic and predatory by nature.
If you join a union, you have joined the American Left. People are slowly figuring this out a century late which is par for the course with humanity.
Taiwan island ‘sponsors premeditated riots’ in Solomon Islands: nation’s media
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ByZhang Hui and Fan Lingzhi Published: Jan 04, 2022 06:50 PM
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Local media in the Solomon Islands recently reported that Taiwan island allegedly sponsored the “premeditated” anti-government riots in Honiara with the purpose of trying to pull down the government of the Solomon Islands and sabotage relations between China and the Solomon Islands.
“The acts of violence directed against the democratically-elected government of the Solomon Islands, the ethnic Chinese business community in Honiara and the majority of peace-loving Solomon islanders was at its very core a premeditated, cold-blooded and cowardly Taiwan-sponsored attempt to pull down the national government and undermine Solomon Islands-People’s Republic of China relations,” Solomon Star, a local English media, reported on December 17, quoting a writer given the name of George Belau.
The newspaper said the riots resulted in the destruction of the livelihoods of innocent people and trashing of the Solomon Islands’ economy, “clearly show Taiwan and its friends, the perpetrators of the riots are enemies of the entire Solomon Islands, not just of China.”
The writer listed a few examples, such as the “provocative raising of the Taiwan-flag” by premier of Malaita Daniel Suidani in Malaita on multiple occasions and publication of the “Auki communiqué (a blatantly anti-China document).”
The writer also said Suidani’s “unauthorized” detour to the Taiwan island in May 2021 was a “move to hatch plans together with Taiwan for future riots/civilian coup.”
“China is the only global power that has never invaded another country, never imposed its values and systems on others, demonstrated the ability to cooperate with sworn enemies, not create new ones. China is the only power that represents development and not destruction. So Malaita and Solomon Islands, who do you desire as a friend?” the writer asked.
“Certainly not Taiwan – most certainly not its agents and perpetrators of the riots. It is China for me and my people,” the writer said.
During the anti-government riots taking place in the Solomon Islands in November 2021, the Global Times conducted an investigative story about the riots and found that the riots truly reflected the scope of influence the US and the island of Taiwan have had over the region considering the island nation’s history as a “geopolitical pawn.”
Some Chinese nationals in the island nation reached by the Global Times also said that they highly suspect that Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party authorities’ influence is behind the riots.
During the days-long riots, Chinese nationals in the Solomon Islands suffered great losses with their shops smashed, burned and looted and their personal safety in jeopardy.
The Chinatown area suffered the heaviest damage with most shops looted and burned.The Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, told the press in November that the crisis “is influenced and encouraged by other powers.”
He further indicated that these forces influencing Malaita ̶ the main island of the nation ̶ are those that “don’t want ties with the People’s Republic of China,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
In answering a query that many demonstrators were from the pro-Taiwan Malaita province and that the establishment of diplomatic ties with China may be the reason behind the riots, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a routine press conference on November 26, 2021 that the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Solomon Islands serves the fundamental and long-term interests of the Solomon Islands, and all attempts to disrupt the normal development of relations between the two sides are nothing but futile.
Chicken & Meatball Parmesan “Stoup”
When you make something special for family, loved ones, or friends, they remember it. And that makes the moment a true treasure.
NFRA Chicken Meatball Soup
If you love the Italian flavors of a meatball Parmesan, we’ve got the perfect way to change it up! This Chicken & Meatball Parmesan “Stoup” falls somewhere between a thick soup and a saucy stew. Topped with a delicious dinner roll that absorbs all the bold flavors, this recipe is perfect for sharing memories or making new ones. It’s also great if you just want a little bit of comfort on a cold night. Trust us, if you bring this savory recipe to the next get-together, it’ll be gone before you can blink!
What You’ll Need
3 cups beef broth
1 (24-ounce) jar spaghetti sauce
16 appetizer-sized frozen meatballs, thawed and cut in half
2 cups frozen, diced cooked chicken
1 1/2 cups frozen mixed vegetables
6 frozen par baked dinner yeast rolls
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
Grated Parmesan cheese for sprinkling
What to Do
In a soup pot over medium-high heat, combine broth, spaghetti sauce, meatballs, chicken and vegetables. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, bake rolls according to package directions. Remove from oven and sprinkle each evenly with mozzarella cheese. Return to oven and bake 3 to 5 minutes, or until cheese is melted.
Ladle “stoup” into bowls, top each with a cheese-topped roll and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Serve piping hot and get ready for lots of happy faces around the table.
How Empires Fall
How does an empire fall?
It rots and rusts in the core while the liars keep putting on fresh coats of paint every year. The collapse happens gradually over the years but no one notices. Then one day a dandelion wafts over and lands on the rotten heap, and the mighty empire collapses all at once.
It sometimes collapses with a whimper, not a bang. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, no one even noticed. No one cared.
PM
Chinese military training
MM readers are probably tired of these training videos. But I believe that there is so much value in teaching disipline, military skills, and fundamentals at an early age. From grade one, everyone in China gets military training. Here is a third grade mortar crew. video 6MB
Learning about China by looking at the Chinese girls here
This is a great and a fun way to get a snapshot of another nation. You take a look at the society, and in this case, you look at the women and girls there. Of course, if all you do is watch American “mainstream media” you might think that Chinese girls are flat-chested, thin waifs that tremble becuse they are overwhelmed by the great mass of horny menfolk (due to the one child policy). Of course, it’s a massive lie, but heck. If you want to be stupid, stay that way. I jsut don’t give a fuck. Here’s what Chinese girls really look like. Video.
When I was attending university, we used to listen to this blues album. This is the full song “Turn to stone” from the album. I hope it takes you back, like it does for me. The song is a John Walsh song, but does in a real shearing blues solo. Amazing stuff. Worth about three minutes of your time.
Show empathy
The leadership in the United States, and most of the collective West are psychopaths. They are unable to feel empathy.
But you can, can’t you?
See and experience how others feel. That’s the key to being a Rufus. You are able to put yourself into the shoes of others. video 51MB
The Supreme Court Uses Twisted Logic to Protect US Agents Committing Torture
American Supreme Court. No outrage. They’re too busy exporting American Liberal Democratic bombs to Ukraine.
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The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture?
When a person is in distress they are not thinking clearly. They need help. Be the help. Be that Rufus. You WILL be called upon. You will have this opportunity. Be the Rufus and make the world a better place! video 3.4MB
Remember to be the Rufus
It defines your sentience. When the going gets tough, the survivors are those that are members in a community. The idea that the lone-wolf can win and survive is just a Hollysood fantasy. History celarly tells us otherwise. Be that Rufus. video. 5MB
When profits are more important than society, environment, or people.
It’s the American way. Here’s the United States. This is Hawaii.
When profits are more important than society, environment, or people.
Be the Rufus
The alarm bells are ringing. Are you going to step up to the plate and participate in life, or are you going to still stand by and be a spectator? Here are some fine American Rufus. It makes me so proud! Be a Rufus. video 39MB
A fine example of good, solid Rufus behaviors.
You have to do kind, just and maningful things. Sure, it’s nice to watch heroes in action, but just smiling, buying a cup of coffee for a co-worker, inviditng a co-worker to your home for cards, or volunteering at an animal shelter are all fine Rufus actions. Make a difference. Now is that time. video Rufus Compilation 21MB
Everyone is unique.
And everyone has their own unique story. Like this woman who paid a man to have sex with her so that she would have a child. Don’t judge. Show understanding and compassion.
I had a baby with sperm donated from a man who advertised on craigslist. If my very religious family found out it wasn’t an “accident” I would be completely shunned and disowned.
I am a female who is ugly. NO, that’s not the secret. But.. I AM ugly because I have a facial deformity that I was born with. I’ve never had a long term partner and only had sex a few times in my life. My biological clock was ticking LOUDLY and I desperately wanted a child – there wasn’t going to be time enough to meet someone and my odds were none existent as a middle-aged, ugly female.
I own my home, have a career – but I didn’t want to lose all my savings to pay to have it done through a clinic and sperm donation, etc. It would have been at least $15K per try. My chances of adopting were also almost none existent as any women looking to adopt her baby out isn’t going to pick the ugly, middle aged lady to adopt their baby, plus is crazy freaking expensive. I wanted the money I had in savings, etc.. to toward raising the child.
So I turned to Craigslist and got it for free.
My child is a preschooler now and I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled! I pinch myself every day because my child is in my life and I feel so fucking lucky. Every day is a dream come true and I savor each and every moment. I try to be the best mom I can be in every way. Parenting really makes you take a long, hard look at yourself and how you show up in the world. I parent from my heart.
I regularly send pictures and updates to the generous and selfless man who trusted me on a hand shake.
The World needs YOU!
You do not know what you can do. You just cannot prepare for it, but when the time comes, you will be called upon. You can either be a spectator (S-T-S) or an active participant (S-T-O) choose wisely.
Be the Rufus. It is your ticket out of this reality. video 3MB
Nuclear Monday [2018]
This is what we are all dealing with right now. It’s a well made very short (ten minute) film.
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Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Not the kind of title that you would expect from me, eh?
I woke up on Wednesday and found this article posted all over my LinkedIN feed. It’s from ZeroHedge, and discusses famine, starvation, disunity, sadness, in the evil gloom that lies under the shadow of the evil Chinese communist regime. The article goes to great lengths to describe a hopeless population, upset but powerless, to deal with on-going famine and the massive corruption of the CCP regime.
Here’s the article…
2022 03 11 15 59
Well, I own a home in Shenzhen, and live across the bay from it. Everyday, I’m here, either looking at Shenzhen, or visiting it.
That’s what happens when you live next to a big city. You do know it’s population is 14 million people. That’s easily three times the size of New York City.
My relatives who live “on the island” (Long Island) feel the same way about “THE City” (New York).
Anyways. I live next door to Shenzhen, and own homes in Shenzhen. I visit it often, and I live right across the bay. From my living room, I can see the gleaming skyscrapers and glimmering light off the water.
I live in the Shenzhen region.
I live in the very place this article is written about.
It is now March. The same date and time when the article was written.
The purpose of this article is to present videos to show what life is like in Shenzhen, and the neighboring areas under the evil repressive Chinese communist regime. Especially, and most notably, at the time that this article was written and published.
I think videos do better than some text written by a moron who doesn’t even realize that it doesn’t even snow in Shenzhen. Never has. Never will. It’s a fucking tropical area. Sheech!
Snow?
Blizzard? Give me a break!
Shenzhen?
It’s tropical.
When was the last time it snowed in Hawaii? Sheech!
So I went and took videos all week to illustrate what it is like in the Shenzhen – Zhuhai area; my home.
We start with food. After all, that’s what the article is all about. It’s about a lack of food, resulting in starvation, followed by famine.
Food
There is no famine.
No starvation anywhere in China. And certainly NOT in Shenzhen.
I swear, Western “news reports” have morphed into fantasy / science fiction episodes with very little resemblance to reality. I am convinced that they are handed a bullet-list of bad things to say about China, and then write a fantasy narrative based upon the bad things.
It’s got to be exactly that.
No other explanation is possible. Not even remotely.
Who is doing this? It must be the people, or entities, that pay them. Either a government, or an NGO aligned “fake” pseudo organization. It must be. It takes time, and effort to write these articles. They just don’t magically appear out of the air.
I took all of these videos the SAME WEEK that this “news” report wrote about starvation in the Shenzhen / China area. I filmed in different middle-class restaurants throughout this general region. (You can tell by the different dishes and tablecloths.) None of these meals were overly expensive. Just typical middle-class Chinese fare.
Since I don’t eat at Fast Food, you won’t see any videos of the fast food franchises that are big here in China. Sorry, but it’s not my thing. I tend to eat at home, and then go out once or twice a day to a nice, reasonably priced restaurant. So I didn’t change my routine. Just filmed the food to show that there is no starvation, nor famine.
Pork with peppers and bitter melon. Very delicious. I ate this in one of the many local malls. Sorry for the noise, it like the rest of China, are filled with many people enjoying their time eating delicious food. video 26MB
Very Spicy Beef. Here’s a different restaurant. This one specializes in beef. Very delicious. video 31MB
Chinese Sloppy Joe and a fine wide noodle salad. All so very delicious. You can see why I have gained so much weight since I moved to China, eh? video 35MB
Stuffed Baozi with vegetables. Very delicious. I love the meat versions, especially the pork version. This was particularly delicious. video 53MB
Some Chinese vegetarian food. All good and healthy. Tasty too, but you know guys, I do love my meats. LOL. video 42MB
Handmade noodles with peanuts. Very, very delicious. I think most of my American readership would love these food dishes. Too bad you cannot get them out in the States. Just here in China. video 36MB
Guys. You DO KNOW, that if there were REAL famine and REAL starvation, you would not see meals like this anywhere. In a nation with a population of 1.4 billion people, you would be overwhelmed.
Even posting pictures on the (so called anonymous) internet would get you targeted. In China, no one is isolated, and no one is alone. We are all connected together.
Toys – Legos
Here are some videos that I took in a toy store. These are Chinese Lego’s. Same lovely Lego brand, only marketed to the Chinese. Interesting cultural differences, eh?
Military Lego kits. If I were still a boy, I would really enjoy playing with these Legos. Especially the DF-41, and the J-20. video 31MB
Chinese Harbin Ice Festival. There are all sorts of fascinating Chinese-themed Legos for the local markets. And of course, since the Chinese have so many things to celebrate, the diversity of the products are pretty intriguing. video 30MB
Starving girls in Shenzhen
All of these girls live in Shenzhen. According to my untrained eyes, these girls don’t look like they are starving, unhappy or desirous of regime change for democracy™. I guess that I am not so good at picking out starving, hungry waifs like the BBC, FOX “news” and CNN are.
But what do I know? I only live here, and I have never seen anyone starve. And I’ve been living here or nearly twenty years.
But I am not a qualified “journalist”. I guess that to qualify, you must accept money from a Western government, and then write to their narrative. There are many who have “sold their souls” for some gold coins and baubles. It has generated a small cottege industry. Don’t you know.
No one is starving.
I think much of it has to do with the fact that the Chinese government believe that food is a natural Right, and makes sure that it is plentiful and cheap. This is considered a REAL Right.
Not the psuedo “Rights” like the United States has. You know a Right with exceptions…
Freedom of Speech… controlled by the FCC, and Tech-oligarchy.
Right to bear arms… restricted by the government agency ATF.
Ninth Amendment… restricted by the FDA, FCC, NSA, and many, many others.
Tenth amendment…dead. A worthless, meaningless, phrase.
China believes that a fundamental Right is FUNDAMENTAL.
Of course, you’d never hear about that in the Western “news”. In that for-profit cesspool, everything comes at a price. It’s a land with a million tiny hands in your wallet.
Let’s look at the starving waifs yearning for freedom™ and democracy™…
And here’s the second gal. Love that fine tan dress. I like how it moves. You can tell that she’s hungry. After all, look at the sad and forlorn expression on her face.
Here’s a girl being sexy in the kitchen. Sorry that you can only see her backside. But I guess you might think that she is starving because she is not obese like so many American women. But that’s just cultural. The Chinese eat far better, healthier, and have far less stress than their American counterparts. video 5MB
Here’s another girl. She’s considered to be fat. In China, due to the diet, and perhaps genetics, the fat tends to go to the chest area, not to the stomach. As us, Americans and Europeans must deal with. I really think that the fact that GMOs are banned in China has a lot to do with it. video 2MB
This woman has great posture. I really cannot see the kind of starvation that resembles hunger like I saw when I lived in Pennsylvania. There, at that time, people couldn’t afford food, and with the collapse of the steel industry, many had to make due. They would fish, and eat rabbit, and other things to keep their bellies full. I’m not seeing it in China. Sorry. video 6MB
Elementary / kindergarten teacher. I suppose that this girl is borderline starving. You can tell by her sunken ass-cheeks and lack of stomach.
She reminds me of the many friends that I made when I first arrived in China. Many girls. Many dates. Many fun times.
But I must tell you, we all ate very well, and no one was starving. video 1.5MB
Life in Shenzhen / Nanshan / Zhuhai
Various “home” videos taken by myself. All in Shenzhen, and Zhuhai. All that I took with my fine four-year-old Huawei cellphone camera, with DouXing editing and music. Enjoy…
A view of the Shenzhen-Zhuhai-HK-Macao bridge. It’s that long bridge in the background. video 11MB
At the ferry port from Shenzhen to Zhuhai. This view is taken on the second floor of the Shenzhen side, where you go to the kiosks to get your tickets. video 11MB
One of our photo shoots. This was taken a few months ago. For you newbies, yea MM does photoshoots. It’s all a part of the affirmation campaigns along with thought direction for manifested reality, don’t you know.
Anyways, do these people look like they are starving and desirous for democracy™ and freedom™? video 26MB
Eating dinner in a small local restaurant at night. Friends, and family. That’s little mm playing with the cell phone. Oh, I’m so bad. Don’t worry, it was for less than 20 minutes. video 44MB
Here’s what it is like riding a bus at night. Do these people look like they are ready to revolt against the evil CCP regime? Sheech! You have got to be an idiot to believe the anti-China narrative. video 65MB
Prekindergarten education. Learning starts at two years old in China. Then there’s kindergarten, followed by elementary school, and military training, and into the pipe with middle school and upwards. video 45MB
What it is like on the streets. After all, the picture that is being sent to millions of people is snowy winter Shenzhen filled with unhappy and starving Chinese. So what’s the real story? video 2MB
Conclusion
Most “news” out of the collective West (in this case referring to China) are nothing more than made-up, fabricated lies. Lies that have no resemblance to the truth.
It’s a well-funded (to 5 billion dollars) effort (by the United States federal budget) to demonize China to the point where all Westerners (and most especially Americans) are filled with hate and loathing towards China.
This is for a build up for a major war.
Make no mistake. The USA is on a War-footing. A war, that the United States expects to win. For, after all, everyone knows, that it is exceptional™.
You don’t have to believe me.
But here it is.
This is what it is like. This is what China is like in Early March 2022, while articles on Gab, Zerohedge, Free Republic, and FOX regurgitate the “starving Chinese” lies.
This is the real deal, and no, I am not “brainwashed by the evil CCP”. Sheech! And no, I don’t live in exclusive areas. This is what it is like.
Lower-middle class life.
In Shenzhen / Zhuhai China. Real deal reporting. Real home-made videos. Real experiences. Real thoughts, and real reporting. All for free.
Soak it in and take a good, hard look at what “news” you read. Becuase if one simple thing like this can be distorted and twisted out of reality, what else can be? Eh?
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my China Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
I just read through the headlines on RT. It's incredible the West's relentless pounding of war drums in Ukraine. I suspect there will be some kind of Mukden/Gulf of Tonkin false flag, with which the BLPM will brainwash the world that it was the evil Vlad Putin who started it. If it happens, I hope the Russian army rolls all the way to the EU's borders.
Jeff J. Brownwww.chinarising.puntopress.comwww.chinatechnewsflash.com
Eh?
More like, roll to Washington and Langeley. And say…
" So, you thought you could pull another WWII, destroy Europe and Russia, and pick up the pieces unscathed, Huh?
Yeah.
They are THAT stupid and ignorant.
From Z-Man blog…
The American media has brought down the cone of silence. Drudge has a government issued warning to Canada at the top. The New York Times and Washington Post are busy peddling their latest Russia fantasies. Soviet media was more informative that the American media is now. If you want to know anything about anything you have to dig around in Substack and independent sites. The American media is now a blanket of darkness thrown over the public square.
The other thing that comes to mind is how blatant the authoritarianism is now. I see the Canadian dictator just ordered the funds for the truckers frozen. He just made up some new rule apparently or his handlers did. Trudeau is most likely illiterate, so he has to rely on others to do these things. The US government is flying surveillance aircraft over the protest to intercept communications. They will then “share” this intel with their “partners” in the Canadian secret police.
This is the new game now. We saw this with Trump. The CIA asked Australia and Britain to spy on the Trump campaign. That got around the rule against the CIA spying on Americans and gave the FBI an excuse to do their own spying. Five years ago, they made up a phony story as cover, but now it is out in the open. We live in a country that has secret police that spy on people with impunity. America is becoming East Germany with better consumer goods.
That last bit is always the undoing of authoritarians. You can run a police state or you can have a happy productive society that has nice things. With posted inflation approaching double digits and real inflation much higher, the economic reckoning is quickly approaching. There is no easy way to tame inflation. It always means a recession and usually an ugly one. People are unhappy now. Imagine where things are when the economy is in the dumper.
The world is moving forward, and the United States is sitting still and pouting. They have their arms folded across their chest, and staring at the game board deciding whether or not to tip it all over and let the pieces crash all over the room.
Numerous people (obviously outside of the mainstream media) have noticed various aspects of the global Geo-Political situation and have written about it. Here, in this article we will look at some of those writings.
And…
Throw in some fine MM comment, thoughts and distractions to round out the presentation.
Let’s start off with some fine Rufus action to set up a positive mood…
Rufus behaviors are what the world needs today
Be the Rufus. This is China today. People are all part of the community and they all work together as one. video 20MB
Some Geo-Political chat
Always interesting to listen to. This is about the fiasco meeting between the USA and China in Alaska.
Race to 6G: Chinese researchers declare data streaming record with whirling radio waves
Experimental wireless line set up in Winter Olympics compound could stream over 10,000 high-definition live video feeds simultaneously, says Beijing research team
‘It is about introducing a new physical dimension, which can lead to a whole new world with almost unlimited possibilities,’ according to 6G researcher.
Using vortex millimetre waves, a form of extremely high-frequency radio wave with rapidly changing spins, the researchers transmitted 1 terabyte of data over 1km (3,300 feet) in a second.
The experimental wireless communication line, set up in the Beijing Winter Olympics compound last month, could stream more than 10,000 high-definition live video feeds simultaneously, the team led by Professor Zhang Chao, of the school of aerospace engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in a statement on Thursday.
The vortex waves, unlike anything in radio communication over the last century, added “a new dimension to wireless transmission”, said Zhang and his collaborators from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and China Unicom.
They said the experiment suggested China was “leading the world in research on potential key technologies for 6G”.
China to ‘help set international standards’ for 6G mobile technology
Existing mobile devices use electromagnetic waves that spread like ripples in a pond for communication. Information is represented by the “up and down” of these waves, which – from a mathematical point of view – have just two dimensions.
The vortex electromagnetic wave has a three-dimensional form like a tornado.
Extra information could be coded into the whirling, or orbital angular momentum (OAM), of these waves to massively increase the bandwidth of communication.
The spinning potential of radio waves was first reported by British physicist John Henry Poynting in 1909, but making use of it proved to be difficult.
Zhang and colleagues said their breakthrough was built on the hard work of many research teams across the globe over the past few decades.
Researchers in Europe conducted the earliest communication experiments using vortex waves in the 1990s. In 2020, a team with the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company in Japan achieved a speed of 200Gbps over 10 metres (33 feet).
A major challenge is that the size of the spinning waves increases with distance, and the weakening signal makes high-speed data transmission difficult.
The Chinese team built a unique transmitter to generate a more focused vortex beam, making the waves spin in three different modes to carry more information, and developed a high-performance receiving device that could pick up and decode a huge amount of data in a split second.
A government researcher studying 6G technology in Shenzhen said the experiment in Beijing could be “the start of a revolution” in communications technology.
“The most exciting thing is not just about the speed. It is about introducing a new physical dimension, which can lead to a whole new world with almost unlimited possibilities,” said the researcher, who asked not to be named because he was involved in confidential research projects with China’s largest telecoms firms.
The Chinese government and telecommunications industry will focus mainly on the mass application of 5G in the coming years because the existing millimetre wave technology matured with decreasing cost, according to the researcher.
The commercial roll-out of 6G is expected by 2030, but the military could adopt the technology earlier because “they care more about performance than cost”, he said.
Zhang’s team said their experiment used W band, a radio frequency used in military applications. In 2018, they established a vortex wave link between a plane and a ground station over a distance of 172km, which remains a world record.
The Tsinghua team is also building a prototype quantum radar using similar technology that can accurately detect stealth aircraft.
A research team in Tianjin last month said they had developed a terahertz transmitter, another technological approach to 6G, for China’s hypersonic weapons programme.
The United States and Japan announced a US$4.5 billion programme in April last year as a joint effort to counter China’s rapid progress in 6G technology.
A survey by Nikkei and Tokyo-based research company Cyber Creative Institute in September last year found that China owned more than 40 per cent of the world’s 6G patent filings, followed by the US with 35 per cent, Japan (10 per cent), Europe (9 per cent) and South Korea (4 per cent).
Things used to be so difficult…
Now for a pretty Chinese girl
I just want to remind everyone who these people are that those neocons in Washington DC want to destoy, kill and turn destitute. It’s people like you and me. video 2MB
Not really Geo-political or Chinese but fun anyways.
Sorry, I can’t help but want to lighten up the mood here, don’t you know. It’s about cats, and music and it’s really kind of cute.
It’s videos like this that caused President Trump to ban Tictoc from the United States. It was listed as a “National Security” issue, when the truth was that they cut into the profit margins of the Trump political donor class.
Warning: Watching this video will corrupt your mind! And change you (gasp!) into a dreaded evil communist. Yikes!
Again. The future belongs to those who have Rufus behaviors
This is a key point that all long-time MM readers will certainly recognize. The way out from the life that we endure is though our behaviors and our thoughts. We msut be better people, and we must all work together for the greater good of all. video 2MB
Well, you know this is after the Beijing Winter Olympics. And The Western media has flooded the media with the most outrageous things. Such as this…
Like this screen shot from the American “news” aggregator “DrudgeReport” 8FEB22.
Nonsense.
Crying?
Seriously. Crying?
Well, the Olympic athletes have made all sorts of videos of their experiences, and the vast, vast bulk of them have been overwhelmingly positive.
Well, you know that that just doesn’t go well with the American (and Western) narratives.
Thus bringing out this article…
YouTube’s Olympics Highlights Are Riddled With Propaganda
The platform’s search engine is funneling sports fans into watching political content about China.
It’s not something it can come out and directly say, because admitting it sees itself as the rulers of the world would make it look tyrannical and megalomaniacal, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”
The article quotes the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying, “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the U.S., when the U.S. has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China.
Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the U.S. coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.
A massive threat to America!
But what really jumps out is the insane way the U.S. political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.
The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the U.S. president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.
It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.
The Chinese government’s strategic ambition has expanded so that it now aims to dominate the entire world in military and economic power, according to Antony Blinken, whose country has 800+ bases around the world to China's four.https://t.co/OX3SmCYA7k— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) February 10, 2022
The casual way these people say such things reflects a collectively held worldview that you won’t find on any official document or in any schoolchild’s textbook, but which is nonetheless a firmly held perspective among all the drivers of the modern empire: that the entire world is the property of the U.S. government. That the U.S. is not just the most powerful government in the world but also its rightful ruler, in the same way Rome ruled the Christian world.
It’s not something they can come out and directly say, because admitting they see themselves as the rulers of the world would make them look tyrannical and megalomaniacal. But it’s certainly something they believe.
They’re about as obvious about it as could be. They make almost no effort to conceal it. And yet you’ll still get empire apologists like Michael McFaul saying nonsense like this:
There was a time, not long ago, when imperial powers like UK, France, Portugal etc claimed their colonies as their "sphere of influence." Thank God we didn't listen o them back then. So why now is it ok to let Russia exercise a sphere of influence over its former colony, Ukraine?— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 7, 2022
McFaul knows very well that the U.S. is an imperial power and that it demands a very large “sphere of influence”.
Would you like to see a picture of America’s sphere of influence? Here you go:
To live in the western world is to be constantly inundated with made-up stories about tyrants who want to terrorize the world, while living under a globe-spanning power structure that is actually terrorizing the world. It’s just so bizarre watching these imperial spinmeisters try to frame nations like China and Russia as freakish and backwards while working to literally rule the world like a comic book super villain.
The U.S.-centralized empire is quantifiably the single most destructive and evil power structure in today’s world. We shouldn’t want anyone to rule over the entire planet with an iron fist, but these monsters are the very least qualified among us to do so.
Exceptionally bad, evil, corrupt, self-serving and selfish.
Now for a pretty Chinese girl
I just want to remind everyone who these people are that those neocons in Washington DC want to destoy, kill and turn destitute. It’s people like you and me. They way they do this is to keep videos and pictures of their targetted enemies away from the American people. Like this gal.
I just cannot stress hard enough, how important it is for everyone to behave better, nicer and kinder; to be more considerate and to call out and cite psychopaths, sociopaths and the evil greedy folks that cause so much turmoil in our lives today. Be that Rufus! video 7MB
Caitlin Johnstone: Just Run the News Media Out of Langley
That way nobody needs to pretend they’re doing news reporting instead of intelligence agency stenography and the public is clear they’re being fed whatever story about reality the C.I.A. wants them to believe.
I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of C.I.A. headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they picked up from “sources”.
I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about “intelligence” which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the “intelligence”, and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we’re simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government.
We’re not even reminded by the publishers of these C.I.A. press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we’re certainly not informed that Kiev appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.
Seriously, look at this absurd tweet by CNN’s Natasha Bertrand:
Scoop: US and allies have new intel that suggests Russia could be planning to attack Ukraine prior to end of Olympics, contrary to previous assessments. New intel comes as officials have dramatically ramped up the urgency of public warnings related to Ukraine in past 24 hours.— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) February 11, 2022
That’s not a “scoop”. That’s just a news media employee repeating something she was told either directly or indirectly by the western intelligence cartel. She’s literally just telling us what an immensely powerful spy intelligence agency told her to say. And that’s become the norm for mass media reporting on all nations the western power alliance doesn’t like, especially Russia.
So why mess around? Why not just move CNN’s office into the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley and have the C.I.A. just publish its reports directly from there? I hear CNN needs a new president anyway. That way nobody needs to pretend they’re doing news reporting instead of intelligence agency stenography, the general public is clear that they’re being fed whatever story about reality the C.I.A. wants them to believe, nobody feels like they’re being treated like a fool, plus it saves a commute for all the intelligence agency insiders who already work in the mass media.
Because it must get pretty tedious, right? Where instead of just having your C.I.A. employer tell you to run a story you have to go through this whole song and dance where an agency officer contacts you and says “Ooh buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and then you type up what they say in newsy-sounding language citing “sources familiar with the matter” and present it as a news story.
Clearly that’s not news reporting.
Clearly it’s nothing other than garden variety state propaganda.
Ukraine Defense Minister: Russia is not invading anytime soonUkraine President: Russia is not invading anytime soonRussia: We have no plans to invade UkraineThe US: https://t.co/YbyyNA40p5— Radio Free Amanda ??? (@catcontentonly) February 11, 2022
And of course we already know the answer.
Propaganda doesn’t work if its targets know they are being propagandized. It needs to be administered by institutions who the public trusts to tell them the objective truth about what’s going on in the world.
If the U.S. and its Five Eyes allies simply controlled all media through the government like overtly totalitarian regimes, their propaganda would actually be far less effective than the systems of domestic perception management they have in place currently.
The C.I.A. is officially forbidden from operating in the United States (though as we’ve seen many times since its creation and up to the present day this is treated more as a guideline than a restriction), but what it is not officially forbidden to do is contact the media directly or through a proxy under the pretense of feeding them a news story which just so happens to advance the interests of the agency. The plutocratic media who benefit from the same status quo that the C.I.A. protects then uncritically funnel that information into the minds of the unsuspecting public, and before you know it they’re rending their garments over a foreign government they’d previously not thought much about.
In an actual free society with an actual free press, the very idea of this would be outrageous and if such a thing ever occurred it would be immediately condemned as journalistic malpractice with severe consequences for everyone involved. In an inverted totalitarian dystopia with the most effectively propagandized population on earth, it’s just treated as normal.
No, I’m not going to ignore this most important aspect of change today. It’s one where everyone strives to be a better person and contribute inside their communites for the betterment of all. video 12 MB
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This article is yet another in a series trying to document the peaking collapse of the United States in all of it’s myrid ways. And it is kind of tiring, don’t you know. I’d rather just do other things with my time, but we; everyone of us, are now in the mist of one of the most monumental shakeups in the world. It’s really very stunning. We are living history right now.
So how about getting yourself a nice beer, and grabbing some toasted Italian or French crusty bread, and placing some cheese, onions, tomatoes, and olive oil and sit down and read this article. The world seems to be going down into the gutter, but that’s an illusion.
It’s only the United States, and those foolish nations that chain themselves to it.
Yum!
War with China! Another Bright Idea from the Yankee Capital
Discussions of war with China over Taiwan often assume a short, regional war won by superior American technology, after which things go on approximately as before.
A few observations:
Overconfidence
First, overconfidence is an occupational disease of militaries and militarists. Wars very often fail to proceed according to the expectations of the aggressors and not infrequently end in catastrophe.
The American Civil War was expected to be over in an afternoon at First Manassas; wrong by four years and 630,000 dead, equivalent to over six million today.
When Napoleon invaded Russia, he did not foresee Russian troops marching in Paris, which is what happened.
When Germany invaded France in 1914, it expected a short, victorious war of movement, and got four years of a losing attrition war.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, GIs sleeping with their daughters in Tokyo was not among their war aims, but it is what happened.
When the French went back into Vietnam after WW II, being catastrophically defeated by les jaunes at Dien Bien Phu was not a strategic objective.
When America invaded Vietnam, Washington did not expect a panicked flight from atop the Embassy.
When Hitler invaded Russia, GIs in Berlin were not in his plans.
When Russia invaded Afghanistan, it did not expect the same outcome that the Americans should have expected, but didn’t, when they did exactly the same thing.
The list could be extended. Caution often is a wiser plan than martial enthusiasm.
Overestimation of ability
Second, America starts its wars by [1] overestimating its own capacities, [2] underestimating the enemy, and [3] misunderstanding the nature of the war it is getting into.
There is probably a manual on this.
Usually the US has no end game and no “what if” plan in case the unforeseen occurs. These traits are clear in America’s wars since Korea.
The reason for this curious behavior is that war is only tangentially a rational endeavor, being chiefly a limbic, instinctually driven habit probably of genetic provenance.
War is just what men do, tribe against tribe, country against country, empire against empire, world without end. War is a major, perhaps the major, focus of human endeavor.
A glance at history reveals it to be chiefly a tapestry of war. The literature of civilizations reflects this: The Gilgamesh Epic, the Iliad, the Aeneid, El Cid, Orlando Furioso, Lord of the Rings.
Taiwan
Does America have a clear reason for defending Taiwan? It is not of vital importance to America, and arguably not even of minor importance.
The fact is, that very few Americans know quite where it is, and few can distinguish it from Thailand.
If it became part of China almost no one would notice.
Before getting into an unpredictable war with a massively populous nuclear power of formidable economic and military resources on the other side of the world, it might be wise to answer the question, “Why? What do we gain? How do we get out of said war?”
Regarding war in Chinese waters:
The US fleet has not been in combat since 1945, over seventy-five years ago.
American pilots have not flown against a competent enemy since 1973, almost half a century ago.
People’s Liberation Army Navy J-15 “Flying Shark” fighters parked about the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning
Enormous changes in technology and armament have occurred in the intervening years.
Nobody really knows what a battle of naval forces against modern antiship missiles would look like. Those who can guess are not sanguine.
Most warships today lack armor.
Anyone looking at what a couple of French Exocet missiles did to the USS Stark in 1987 would not bet on equally unarmored Ticos or Arleigh Burkes.
An aircraft carrier is a large bladder of aviation fuel wrapped around high explosives.
Look at the accidental launch in 1967 of one Zuni five-inch ground-attack missile aboard the USS Forrestal, igniting raging fires, cooking off bombs, killing 134 sailors and putting the ship in the repair yard for many months.
Militaries grow slack in extended periods of peace.
Training decreases to save money. War stocks of tank treads are cannibalized for training and aren’t there when war comes; the company that made them has gone out of business. Supplies of critical parts dwindle as budgets go to procurement of future hardware.
After all, nobody really expects war. Rapid mobilization, it turns out, is impossible.
Conscription?
If the war was not won as quickly and decisively as hoped, as it very likely would not be, would an American public already under severe economic stress support the heavy cost of a war having no obvious end point or relevance to their lives? Conscription?
Beltway thinking
Within the Washington Beltway many seem to think that China is Cambodia with more people.
Some in Washington harbor a residual belief that America is militarily supreme, that its mere entrance into war seals the outcome.
Think again, carefully.
Rand has wargamed regional war in the Strait and South China Sea and concluded that America has a very good chance of losing.
The Chinese are smart, and excellent engineers.
Chinese students dominate America’s best technical universities and the elite high schools. CalTech and MIT, for example.
Look at the Chinese space program, the upcoming 360 mph maglev trains using high-temperature superconductivity.
The Chinese are not little-leaguers. They have put many resources into antiship missiles specifically designed for US carriers. These, note, greatly outrange carrier aviation.
Iraq was predicted to be a “cakewalk.” China won’t be.
Japan
Allies? In naval circles there is much talk about the First Island Chain and an assumption that Japan will join a war against China to protect Taiwan, or at least let its bases be used by American forces.
Are we sure?
Japan is well within missile and air range of China.
Japan is within missile and air range of China.
All of its petroleum arrives by sea, and China has pretty decent submarines. Japan’s trade mostly moves by sea.
China is a crucial trading partner whose elimination in a war would devastate the Japanese economy.
Japan is close to China.
America is not.
Tokyo might worry that America would grow weary of the war and go home, as it usually does, and leave Japan, all alone, in a shooting war with China.
How would that end?
What stake does Japan have in the independence of Taiwan?
Today it trades with both Taiwan and China. If China absorbed the island, Japan would continue trading with both. Only the letterhead would change. Are we quite, quite sure Tokyo would want any part of this?
South Korea
South Korea?
Its cities and entire economy are within missile range of China. Does it really want to get into a shooting war with its huge neighbor, which has a land border with the peninsula, to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific?
Having gotten into a war, how would it get out?
The Koreans may have thought of this.
Wars as imagined inside the Beltway often seem to assume that the enemy will just lie there and be bombed without doing anything untoward or unexpected.
Are we sure?
The United States has 28,000 troops and their families within range of Chinese weaponry, the killing of whom would force Washington into desperate measures.
Could China encourage North Korea to attack southward, creating a two-front war far beyond Washington’s ability to handle? Or Kim to think he saw a chance and attack on his own initiative?
Might China annex Myanmar? Perhaps this is farfetched. Perhaps it isn’t. Remember that nobody expected China’s entry into the Korean war.
Taiwan
One might suspect that Taipei, seeing overwhelming forces arrayed against it across the Strait, will one day cut the best deal it can with Beijing rather than be devastated first and then have to accept whatever conditions Beijing chose to impose.
It could get a sweetheart deal as Beijing would much prefer this to invading with all of its risks.
Here is a factor I am not competent to judge, but that might be worth judging: The Chinese, as I knew them long ago when I lived in Taiwan, are (very) racially aware and nationalistic.
The Taiwanese are Chinese.
You can bet they know of the Legations, the Opium Wars, the Boxers, the burning of the Summer Palace, the Korean War.
As I write, the most popular movie on the mainland is about a Chinese victory over Americans in the Korean War.
What might a Chinese attack on Taiwan look like?
The Chinese general staff mysteriously does not confide in me, but a good guess is easy. The Chinese often do beach-assault exercises on their side of the strait, obviously practice for the genuine assault.
One of these turns suddenly into the real thing. Ballistic missiles crater Taiwan’s military runways, missiles in large numbers hit air defenses.
Troop ships head for Taiwan, getting there in eight hours at fifteen knots, helicopters and paratroops in less.
China’s large and reasonably good air force bombs and bombs and bombs.
After twenty-four hours, the US is still trying to decide what is happening, talking to the JCS, asking the President what to do.
Victory
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the talented Confederate general, is said to have said that the secret of victory is to “git thar fustest with the mostest.”
In the event of a surprise attack, how long would it take—in the real world, not in PowerPoint slides—for America to get there with how much of what?
If the Chinese got substantial forces ashore, it would be the end of the story.
Keeping troops out of an island is one thing, getting them out quite another. Not even John Bolton—perhaps not even John Bolton—can imagine that America could win a land war with China in Asia.
Selling the American public on a large war over things in which it has no interest would be difficult.
Under these circumstances, the chances are nonnegligible that the US would make loud noises, huff and puff, save face as best it could, and do nothing.
What would REALLY happen?
But let us assume that Washington fought and lost the regional war, Taiwan perhaps surrendering after the U.S. lost a dozen ships and a carrier was disabled.
What would Washington do after such a humiliation?
Never underestimate the influence of vanity on world affairs.
The hawks in DC have elevated titles and, sometimes, considerable ability, but they also have the same hormones and egos as patrons in Joe’s Bar in Chicago. A Chinese victory in the style of Tsushima Strait would end the world’s view of America as an invincible hegemon.
The fernbar Napoleons might well decide to up the ante and turn a regional into a world war.
This it would win.
“Win.”
Perhaps by blocking the Strait of Malacca and threatening the Three Gorges Dam. The expectation in the Pentagon would likely be that Beijing would see the futility of resistance and surrender.
But if it did not?
The REAL facts
America’s trade with China in goods in 2020 was $660 billion, $120 billion of that being exports, making it America’s largest trading partner…
Cutting this off would wreck the American economy.
This is far more than a matter of iPhones and cheap plastic buckets for Walmart. Though most may not know it, America is an economic dependency of China.
The US gets from China countless things it cannot make but cannot do without.
For example, cars require computers to control their ignition and transmissions. Where do we think these are made?
Companies like Boeing sound American but many vital assemblies come from China.
High-end semiconductors, crucial to today’s economies, come predominantly from East Asian companies, notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung, both of which would be hostage to Chinese attack.
The great majority of rare earths, critical to the manufacture of chips, come from China.
Similar considerations exist for industry after industry.
While America has the technology to make most of the things it gets from China, it does not have the manufacturing capacity, and would need years to develop it.
Has anyone in Washington checked industry by industry to see what the effects of the end of imports would actually be?
Further, China is the largest trading partner of most of the world, Germany and the European Union for example, and close with most of the rest.
If an American war took China out of the global supply chain, [1] the resulting depression would make 1929 look like the height of prosperity, [2] turn the entire earth against the US, and likely [3] lead to the lynching of everyone in Washington.
Never mentioned is that America is trying, with considerable success, to block China’s economic progress by preventing its acquisition of advanced semiconductors.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest and most advanced manufacturer of chips, is in Taiwan. Reunification of Taiwan with China would solve this critical problem. Beijing has probably thought of this.
Considering the costs, risks, and benefits if any of such a war, the question may be, “How bright an idea is this?”
China’s missiles could dust the US military in minutes — here’s what would happen if they tried
China’s massive missile forces could savage US air and naval forces in the Pacific, lighting up ports and airfields, and blowing up F-35s, F-22s, and possibly aircraft carriers before they could respond.
War-gaming experts point to this as a persistent problem with US forces in the Pacific, but it’s far from a clear-cut win for China.
The US has a number of ways it can predict, prevent, or blunt a missile attack, and once the US military and its allies kick into gear, China will face a mighty wrath.
Experts at the cutting edge of simulated warfare have spoken: China would handily defeat the US military in the Pacific with quick bursts of missile fired at air bases.
The exact phrasing was that the US was getting “its ass handed to it” in those simulations, Breaking Defense reported the RAND analyst David Ochmanek as saying earlier in March.
“In every case I know of,” Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defence, said, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”
Against China, which has emerged as the US’s most formidable rival, this problem becomes more acute. China’s vast, mountainous territory gives it millions of square kilometres in which to hide its extensive fleet of mobile long-, medium-, and short-range missiles.
In the opening minutes of a battle against the US, Beijing could unleash a barrage of missiles that would nail US forces in Guam, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and possibly Australia. With China’s growing anti-ship capability, even US aircraft carriers in the region would likely come under intense fire.
For the US, this would be the feared attack in which F-35s and F-22s, fifth-generation aircraft and envy of the world, are blown apart in their hangars, runways are cratered, and ships are sunk in ports.
The remaining US forces in this case would be insufficient to back down China’s air and sea forces, which could then easily scoop up a prize such as Taiwan.
Additionally, the US can’t counter many of China’s most relevant missile systems because of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty it signed with Russia, which prohibits missiles with ranges between 500 kilometres and 5,470 kilometres – the type it would need to hold Chinese targets at equal risk. (The US is withdrawing from that treaty.)
So given China’s clear advantage in missile forces and the great incentive to knock out the best military with a sucker punch, why doesn’t it try?
Politics
China could light up much of the Pacific with a blistering salvo of missiles and do great harm to US ships and planes, but they likely won’t because it would start World War III.
China wouldn’t just be attacking the US. It would be attacking Japan and South Korea at a minimum. Whatever advantage China gained by kicking off a fight this way would have to balance against a combined response from the US and its allies.
The US is aware of the sucker-punch problem. In the event that tensions rise enough that a strike is likely, the US would simply spread its forces out among its bases and harden important structures, such as hangars, so they could absorb more punishment from missiles.
Potential targets China needed to strike would multiply, and the deployment of electronic and physical decoys would further complicate things for Beijing. For US ships at sea, the use of electronic decoys and onboard missile defenses would demand China throw tremendous numbers of missiles at the platforms, increasing the cost of such a strike.
Key US military bases will also have ballistic-missile defences, which could blunt the attack somewhat.
The US also monitors the skies for ballistic missiles, which would give it some warning time. Alert units could scramble their aircraft and be bearing down on China’s airspace just after the first missiles hit.
Justin Bronk, a military-aviation expert at the Royal United Service Institute, pointed out at the institute’s Combat Air Survivability conference that when the US hit Syria’s Al Shayrat air base with 58 cruise missiles, planes were taking off from the base again within 24 hours.
Payback is a … consideration
Missiles brigades that just fired and revealed their positions would be sitting ducks for retaliation by the US or its allies.
Japan, which will soon have 100 F-35s, some of which will be tied into US Navy targeting networks, would jump into the fight swiftly.
China would have to mobilize a tremendous number of aircraft and naval assets to address that retaliatory strike. That mobilization, in addition to the preparations for the initial strike, may tip Beijing’s hand, telegraphing the sucker punch and blunting its damage on US forces.
While China’s missile forces pose a huge threat to the US, one punch isn’t enough to knock out the world’s best military, but it is enough to wake it up.
…
Now consider this…
It is not ONLY China. It’s fighting China + Russia together.
Together.
If all the studies point to massive defeats against China alone, imagine the horror when fighting a paired Russia and China together.
It is a suicide move.
Consider this.
Losing in a war is never a pleasant experience. I am sure that many generals throughout history can attest to this fact.
Consider what happened to the entire Nazi German Sixth Army when it was surrounded and trapped inside Stalingrad…
How German Field Marshal Paulus was taken prisoner
Gaunt, pale and emaciated, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army looked like a hunted animal to the Soviet military commanders.
.
On the night of January 31, 1943, units of the 64th Army’s 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade broke through to the department store building in the center of Stalingrad, sealing it off from all sides. According to captured Germans, it was there that the headquarters of Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army was stationed. The Soviet ‘Operation Koltso’ (Ring) to defeat the enemy grouping encircled in the city was approaching its finale…
The “beast’s lair”
After the Soviet troops opened intensive fire from machine guns and mortars on the building at about six o’clock in the morning, the shooting from the German side stopped. White flags appeared from the ground and second floors. The enemy wanted to start negotiations.
On the order of the brigade commander, Colonel Ivan Burmakov, a group of negotiators led by Senior Lieutenant Fyodor Ilchenko headed for the department store building. A German officer who met the Soviet soldiers told them through an interpreter: “Our top commander wants to talk to your top commander.” To that, Ilchenko retorted: “Well, our top commander has many other things to attend to. He is not here. You’ll have to talk to me.”.
Ignoring the German officer’s halfhearted request to hand over their weapons, the Soviet negotiators started going down to the basement where Friedrich Paulus had his HQ. “The basement was literally packed with soldiers – there were hundreds of them here. Worse than a tram! They were all unwashed and hungry and they smelt to high heaven! They all looked desperately frightened. They had huddled here to hide from the mortar fire,” recalled the senior lieutenant. Hearing the sound of gunfire, Ilchenko made a grab for his holster, but it only turned out to be suicides.
The negotiators were met by the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 71st Infantry Division, Maj-Gen Friedrich Roske, and the 6th Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Arthur Schmidt. They led the Soviet soldiers to Paulus’s room. “The Field Marshal was lying on an iron bed without a uniform, in just his shirt,” recalled Ilchenko. “A candle-end was burning on the table, illuminating an accordion lying on the couch. Paulus didn’t greet us but he sat up. He had the appearance of a sick and physically exhausted man and his face was twitching in a nervous tic.”
Negotiations
An ordinary lieutenant could not accept the capitulation of the German commander and, gradually, representatives of the senior and top-level Red Army command started arriving at the department store. Several hours later, accompanied by several colonels and lieutenant-colonels, Maj-Gen Ivan Laskin, chief of staff of the 64th Army, came down to the basement. In an attempt to distance himself in every possible way from the capitulation, Paulus delegated the right to negotiate to Roske and Schmidt.
While the Field Marshal was “tidying himself up” in the room next door, the Soviet negotiators presented his generals with an ultimatum: The encircled grouping must immediately stop any resistance, lay down its weapons and surrender to the Soviet troops in an orderly manner.
Tired of waiting for Friedrich Paulus himself to finally appear, the Soviet commanders went into his room. The German commander, according to Laskin’s recollections, greeted the members of the delegation with a sentence in broken Russian: “Field Marshal of the German Army Paulus renders himself prisoner to the Red Army.” He apologized that, since his new rank had only been conferred on him on January 30, his new uniform wasn’t ready and he was compelled to appear in his colonel-general’s uniform. “And anyway, my new uniform will hardly be of any use to me now,” the commander added with a wry smile.
At that point in time, the 6th Army in Stalingrad was cut into two groupings isolated from each other. As a result of the talks, the southern pocket of German troops, commanded by General Roske, was to capitulate. At the same time, Paulus declined to order the northern pocket to surrender on the grounds that, since January 30, its commander, Col-Gen Karl Strecker, was directly accountable to Hitler.
Inglorious end
Street fighting was still under way in the center of Stalingrad when German officers, accompanied by Soviet commanding officers, set off in vehicles to order their units to cease firing.
After all the formalities had been settled and the Field Marshal had received guarantees of his personal safety, he was led out of the basement, along with his staff officers. The area around the department store had by then come under the full control of Soviet infantry and Wehrmacht soldiers were clearing sectors that had been mined.
“Soviet and German soldiers who just a few hours earlier had been firing on each other stood calmly next to one another in the courtyard holding their guns in their hands or slung on their shoulder. But how shockingly different their external appearance was!” recalled Wilhelm Adam, adjutant to the 6th Army commander. “The German soldiers – ragged, in thin greatcoats over threadbare uniforms, as thin as skeletons – presented emaciated figures exhausted half to death, with sunken, unshaved features. The Red Army soldiers were well nourished, full of vigor and dressed in fine winter uniforms… I was deeply moved by something else. Our soldiers were not beaten, let alone shot. Amidst the ruins of their city which the Germans had destroyed, Soviet soldiers would pull a piece of bread or cigarettes or tobacco out of their pocket and offer them to the weary, half-starved German soldiers.”
Sergeant Pyotr Alkhutov was present when the German commander was taken prisoner: “Paulus was haggard and clearly ill. He attempted to conduct himself in a suitably dignified manner, but in his condition it was difficult for him to manage. On that frosty morning in Stalingrad, it dawned on all the men of the Red Army and the overwhelming majority of the German soldiers that this was the beginning of the end for them and the start of our Victory.”
A car to the neighboring village of Beketovka, where the 64th Army HQ was stationed, awaited the Field Marshal. There, he would be interrogated by the Army commander Lt-Gen Mikhail Shumilov and the Don Front commander Lt-Gen Konstantin Rokossovsky. Ahead for Friedrich Paulus lay Soviet camps, work in the anti-fascist National Committee for a Free Germany and life in the GDR for the short time left to him…
On its way to the HQ, the car caught up with columns of German prisoners dragging themselves along the road. Unwashed, with unkempt beards, they wore comical-looking makeshift snow boots and were wrapped in towels and women’s headscarves.
Laskin gave the driver a sign to slow down to allow the German commander to observe them closely and thoroughly. “It’s appalling…” pronounced Paulus somberly. “A shameful capitulation, the terrible tragedy of the soldiers. And, until now, the 6th Army was regarded as the best field army in the Wehrmacht…”
The rest of the story…
By February 1943, Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March.
Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation.
The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in World War II.
In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the United States.
MM Comments
There is no doubt that the people inside of Washington DC are desirous of a war with China, and Russia. That is so obvious as to defy any statements to the contrary.
The big question is why?
When presented with this question, we are given the following excuses…
Insanity of the leadership.
The Leadership is in a dangerous “echo chamber”.
There is no leadership and the nation is on “autopilot” following instructions laid down thirty years ago.
Alien creatures took over the minds of the Leadership.
The Leadership are “Old Empire” entities.
The Leadership would rather die than take second place in the global stage.
A need to unify a fractured United States though war.
I don’t know the real answers.
I have my thoughts and opinions on this and I have discussed these previously.
What I am going to say here is that when anyone talks about a war, any war, but most especially one involving both Chian and Russia, you MUST also talk about what happens when you lose the war.
You MUST discuss what happens afterwards. Because I can tell you, it is impossible for the United States to win against any war against a unified Asia. Every single study, think tank, war game and analysis has verified this.
So ponder that thought.
Because the stage is set.
The American Leadership wants a war against Asia and it will lose. So what will happen afterwards?
Think about it.
What happens NEXT…
What ever remains of the United States will be quite different. It will be a complete blank sheet of paper and the victors will rewrite what will happen.
Completely.
It’s going to be very distasteful inside of a collapsed, ruined, and conquered United States. It will be very harsh.
The best thing that you can do is to be part of a local community and provide benefit to that community in every way possible. You shouldn’t wait until that day and that need occurs, but rather start now by laying a strong foundation in relationships with those around you.
And do your affirmations, and all the rest.
Be the Rufus.
Now let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart…
Goulash.
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices. Originating in Hungary, goulash is a common meal predominantly eaten in Central Europe but also in other parts of Europe. It is one of the national dishes of Hungary and a symbol of the country.
My mother used to make it a couple of times a month, but I haven’t had it in years. None of my wives knew how to make it. You cannot get it in restrurants, and there’s no frozen versions of it anywhere in the supermarkets.
I am thus forced to day dream about it here.
Goulash.
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to make, don’t you think?
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.
There are different flavors and styles of this dish. All of them look delicious.
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.
Some have a nice hearty soup broth, with others are simply flavored meats like this…
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.
Well, no matter how you look at it, it certainly looks great, and would go well with some crusty bread, or rice. Oh, yeah, a nice salad or fruit plate, and don’t foget pairing it with a nice wine. Yum!
Goulash, is a soup or stew of meat and vegetables seasoned with paprika and other spices.
Do you know what would be nice?
Go invite some friends over. Tell them that you are experimenting with Hungarian Goulash and would like them tom come over, eat a nice meal with wine, listen to some tunes, and play some cards. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
I really think that it would.
Goulash with a spoonful of sour crème on top.
Imagine the meal.
A nice loaf of bread. Some wine, maybe a chardonnay or a light red. Some kind of vegitable side. Maybe snow peas with garlic and spring onions. Or some slaw. The aroma fills the air.
Authentic goulash.
Just imagine it.
Big chunks of beef, potatoes, parsnips and carrots in a paprika riddled broth. Hot and steaming with crusty pieces of bread for dipping.
Really good paprika is the key to an authentic Hungarian Goulash ,or Gulyas. It is to be found everywhere in Budapest and it would be a good idea to try the different versions, both sweet and hot. There are good paprikas from Hungary found in most large supermarkets in the USA as well as online sources.
The goulash experience inside of Hungary…
Goulash.
Here’s a recepie…
And keep in mind and remember, the idea is a was to share your life with others in colorful, fun, tasty and interesting ways. I just cannot help but think that Hungarian Goulash might be a very good vehicle to achieve this.
Have fun together.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well, we all have been dealing with a host of disturbing Geo-Political actions originating out of the USA for decades. And over the last few years they have become more brazen, more outrageous and more daring. It’s been building up to a crescendo.
This build-up has triggered actions from the rest of the world, and the most notable being Russia, and China.
China and Russia has laid down “Red Lines”.
The United States ignored them.
The United States Has no idea…
Alex Krainer:
Western powers seem to have largely lost institutional brakes on waging war.
Someone cries “human rights,” and we seem prepared to obliterate entire nations with hardly any debate, discussion, or any long-term plan.
The consent for war, or “kinetic action”, is simply contrived by myriad think-tanks, often directly or indirectly funded by the military-industrial complex.
With unhindered access to the media, these organizations produce rhetoric that rationalizes hostility, demonization of targeted adversaries and justifications for war.
Today, as tensions with Russia have escalated to a boiling point, some of them draw historical parallels between today’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Among others, Victoria Nuland and Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger have recently invoked Britain’s 1938 policy of appeasement that caused the destruction of Czechoslovakia and empowered Hitler.
The insinuation is that today, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, Donbas is Sudetenland and that Vladimir Putin is Hitler.
If the parallels were valid, they would imply that we should pay almost any price to avoid repeating Neville Chamberlain’s errors of judgment that plunged Europe into the tragedy of World War II.
Of course, the parallels are entirely false, but unfortunately, this is not widely understood.
Things are serious now…
Then Russia forced the United States to comply and answer their concerns in [1] writing and [2] in public about placement of nuclear weapons on the Russian border.
“The content of the US response on security guarantees allows you to count on a serious conversation, but on secondary topics."
"There is no answer to the most important question – about the non-expansion of NATO to the east.”“Our President will now decide on the next steps.”
-Lavrov
You know, over the last two months, the expression on the faces of Lavrov and Putin remind me of a scene from “The Sopranos”.
It’s very serious.
Pictures
For some perspective…
And his counterpart in the Ukraine that NATO and the USA embrace…
And now, let’s look at the military…
And here is what you have in the Ukraine…
And the NATO troops that will take on Russia…
The course of action
A “white tent” was set up and ignored.
Now the “red tents” are up.
From now on in, things are going to get very ugly. It is no wonder that all of Asia is very somber and serious right now.
They remember history. They know what needs to occur…
I won’t let what happened to my father happen to me.
The Sopranos
As I said, the expressions on the faces of Putin, Lavrov, and the generals are very serious. The color is drained out of their faces, and they seem gripped with steeling determination and dangerous determination. It well reminds me of a scene from the television show “The Sopranos”.
The Sopranos crew.
In it, the (mob boss) Tony had to kill a beloved cousin, and a long time childhood friend to prevent a massive gang war. He didn’t want to do it at all, but he knew that if he didn’t, many people would die.
This was the death of Tony Blundetto (Buscemi).
In that case, Blundetto killed Joey “Peeps” from the Leotardo crew (a different mob).
This was really a very, very bad thing to do and very serious.
Since Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) was intent on making Blundetto’s death the most painful event in recorded history, Tony did him a favor by making it quick.
In the blink of an eye — and the blast of a shotgun — Tony spared his cousin the torture he would have received in Leotardo’s hands.
So reluctantly, but determined, he got his shotgun and killed his childhood friend. Then he called the other mob boss where to find the body.
He hastened the death of his cousin, and prevented his long-drawn-out torture. He also prevented a long ongoing mob war.
I am absolutely convinced that what ever “leadership” is directing things behind the scenes in the United States and in Europe, they have no fucking idea what they are dealing with.
Maybe it’s the notorious American “echo chambers” where they believe their own propaganda.
Or maybe it’s all the power, wealth and drugs that got into their heads.
Or, as late John Kenneth Galbraith noted,
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”.
Whatever the root cause…
…It doesn’t matter. It’s now too late. The “white tents” were rejected. And the “red tents” are out.
Well…
This isn’t what anyone thinks it is, and judging from the American “news”, all the collective West are setting themselves up for some horrible things. Maybe America will endure. Maybe America will survive. Maybe America will emerge unscathed as the rest of the world burns. Maybe Jesus will come forth and protect all Americans because of their inherent worthiness…
But I will tell you this…
When cold-blooded killers believe that they need to hurt you, and hurt you bad, you need to RUN…
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
I hope that I am not alone in being sick and tired of this pathetic, tiresome attempt to throw up a smokescreen and hide the inevitable reality of what is about to unfold.
In case it isn’t completely clear to you yet, I would like to spell it all out.
I am normally more cautious when making specific predictions, but in this case our immediate future has been carefully plotted out for us by Russia and China, with the US and its assorted puppets reduced to the status of non-playable characters in a video game who can only do one thing: hide behind a dense smokescreen of risible lies.
-A Short-Term Geopolitical Forecast
Well, we all have been dealing with a host of disturbing Geo-Political actions originating out of the USA for decades. And over the last few years they have become more brazen, more outrageous and more daring. It’s been building up to a crescendo.
This build-up has triggered actions from the rest of the world, and the most notable being Russia, and China.
During the last year, both Russia and China have established FIRM “red lines” that are absolute and that WILL result in very negative consequences for the United States if they are not treated seriously.
And they have not been taken seriously.
Well, the great point of inflection has been reached. The pivot point of Geo-political alignments and strengths is tripping RIGHT NOW.
Some “tell-tails”…
Black Operations 101;
Secrets are actually secret. Anything “leaked” in the news is a distraction and not an actual secret. Anything and everything you read in the American and Western Bloc “news” are intentional distractions. Real significant events are never reported on, and if so, it is long, long after the fact.
Thus, the purpose of the “news” media is a barometer. It’s a measure of what distractions are being put in place. The bigger; the more enormous the hyped up distraction, the more significant the actual events are.
And there is one major, significant, distraction going on right now. It’s the “so-called” Russian build-up to invade the Ukraine.
In fact, it is so frenzied and hysterical that it is like a flashing neon red light and howling siren to all of us who have ever worked for the US Government. It tells us that “something big is up”, and to look for other things. These other things that are not being reported.
The lack of news coverage on these other things is an indicator of what is really going on.
Distractions are not what are happening. Their purpose is to take your focus away from the real events.
The largest American Navy build up in the history of America, and indeed the history of the earth. That’s what.
For some (only) God knows reason, the United States has decided to deploy most all of its massive naval forces off the Chinese coast. This includes five separate flotillas. Each one consisting of multiple aircraft and VTOL carriers, submarines and cruisers, destroyers and support vessels.
Along with that are elements of MAC (the Air Force Military Airlift Command) ferrying troops and munitions and arms to the Pacific. To include Korea, Japan, and other bases throughout the Pacific.
This is comparable to the build up for the Normandy Invasion of “D Day”.
In short, the largest concentration of United States Naval and Marine forces are now concentrated off the coast of China. And it is not being made public.
What’s going on?
What’s going on?
Within a few weeks, maybe days, Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Peng will attend the Winter Olympics. During the event, they will formalize and make a number of significant and strategic Geo-Political policy announcements to the world.
No one knows what they will be.
What we do know is that they will be significant responses to a series of the United States malevolent actions, ignorance, and responses to its failure to take the “red lines” of both China, and Russia seriously.
Huh? You might ask.
What are the “Red Lines”?
Russia told the United States to [1] stop CIA backed “color revolutions” in and around the borders of its nation. (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, etc.) And, [2] to stop the placement of nuclear-capable missiles and munitions on its borders.
“The content of the US response on security guarantees allows you to count on a serious conversation, but on secondary topics."
"There is no answer to the most important question – about the non-expansion of NATO to the east.”“Our President will now decide on the next steps.”
-Lavrov
China told the United States to also [1] stop CIA backed “color revolutions” in and around the borders of its nation. [2] To stop the placement of nuclear-capable missiles and munitions on its borders, and in its neighbors. It also [3] told the United States to STAY OUT of Chinese domestic affairs. Which means Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and the Uighurs. All of which are internal domestic matters.
China never received any answers.
Both China and Russia told the United States to stop attacking the BRI trade routes in all the many flavors of hybrid-war that it has been engaging in.
So the USA ignored the “red lines”
The United States simply continued its actions.
Failure to show serious actions to avoid conflict, shows little respect for that national sovereignty of both nations. And is strongly suggestive that the United States plans to engage in a kinetic war with Asia.
Both nations are tired of the games, and “bullshit”.
They put up their “white tents”, and offered branches of peace, and the United States ignored them.
So what is next, will be announced during the Winter Olympics.
Possible Consequences…
I can devote all sorts of speculations on what can occur. The top speculations are…
Formal Military Treaty between China and Russia. Not really needed, the relationship is far closer than any treaty, and both militaries train with each other. They share technology together, and have military liaisons in all of their military headquarters. It seems silly that this relationship would be formalized on a scrap of parchment. This would crush the hopes and dreams of the American neocon block.
Formal announcement of extraction from SWIFT. China and Russia might tell the rest of the world that if they want to buy goods made in China, and materials out of Russia, that they cannot use the US Dollar. This would send the US economy in a tail-spin.
Sanctions against America. This is taking a “page out of the United States playbook“, and giving the USA a “dose of its own medicine“. This would stop all trade between the USA and Asia, and any nation that wants Chinese products from Chinese factories will be punished and sanctioned if they trade with the USA. This would completely collapse the USA society.
Nationalization of American businesses and products. No longer any copyright protections. No more Coke, Microsoft, Ford, GM, McDonald’s. All their enormous profits inside of China will fall to zero, and replacement companies will take their place. This would create an economic depression, societal disruption, and political chaos like no other.
And more…
Conclusions
Of course, there are all sorts of other things that can happen. But we will find out soon enough what is going to happen. So there’s no point in too much speculation.
I don’t think that it will be “World War III”, though I can tell the reader that both China and Russia have knives at the throat of the United States right now, and if it tries and “funny business” there would be lethal consequences.
Let’s just wait and see.
But remember, boys and girls, don’t focus on the distraction. Focus on what is not being reported upon.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Lavrov said Russia is hoping for a written response in within a week.
Olympics begin in about a week and a half.
Martyanov and Orlov have suggested the possibility military alliance between Russia and China being signed in the meetings that will occur then.
Formal alliance or not, I would think a joint strategy or ensuring Russia's and China's separate strategies complement each other will occur.
Russia with its security proposal,rather starting high, have started at the bare minimum they require which is a buffer zone in the age of hypersonic missiles.
This is how Pepe Escobar puts it.
"In fact, whether U.S. and NATO functionaries like it or not, what’s really happening in the realpolitk realm is Russia dictating new terms from a position of power. In a nutshell: you may learn the new game in town in a peaceful manner, civilized dialogue included, or you will learn the hard way via a dialogue with Mr. Iskandr, Mr. Kalibr, Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Zircon."
In that article from 25th December his view on the Russia China partnership vs the US "Incidentally: any possible, future “counter threats” will be coordinated between Russia and China."
Dugin: Having Pulled the Gun Russia Must Shoot or Lose
Dugin applies "street-fighting" lessons to...the fate of millions
The Russia-NATO talks have taken the confrontation to a new level. Russia is firmly insisting on a formal refusal to accept the post-Soviet countries into NATO; the West persists in its position, offering in exchange something unnecessary and unimportant, or at least of secondary importance…
Moscow’s position in this case — and this is a new and important element — is not reactive and not passive, but offensive.
NATO has been actively pressuring us for 30 years, including during the whole of Putin’s 20-year period. But only now is Russia ripe to challenge this for real.
In big politics, only force decides everything. “For real” means “by force”.
Moscow is taking a serious swing. And now it is impossible to take a step back, otherwise what was the swing for? We know from gangster movies and from the business of the 90s, and even from street fights, that to pull out a gun (knife, machine gun) and not shoot is almost suicide. Whoever goes for aggravation must realize that if he doesn’t, he will. We are exactly at this point now.
The unipolar world is complete. Contrary to the desperation of Biden and world elites to make one last attempt to save globalism and American hegemony – and this is the meaning of Biden’s campaign slogan (Bild BackBetter – “Rebuild Everything Again and Better”, i.e. “Back to the unipolar 90s”), or Klaus Schwab’s thesis at the Davos forum (Great Reset) – historical time is not reversible: Russia and China already represent two independent poles, solidarity on the major world problems. This means that multipolarity is established here and now.
In history, however, the change of the global world order, alas, is often carried out through wars. Without them, those who lose in no way agree to recognize voluntarily the obvious change. It is a kind of reality check…
Apparently, we still have to do what we should have been done – and wasn’t – in 2014. Yes, the starting conditions are much worse, but better late than never. Nobody counts on “never” anymore. The Russia-NATO meeting showed that clearly. Both sides are ready to escalate, and now to give in means to lose irreversibly. The Kremlin clearly does not intend to do this. But the West simply cannot. That would not just be a loss of face, but an admission of defeat.
As usual, the Russians took a long time to get going, so now they must rush ahead.
Let me give you this great quote to help put things in perspective…
“Russia plans to engage its nuclear weapons not against those countries where it was launched against Russia, but against the mastermind cities where all the decisions were made.
To be exact, it is Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and numerous other American cities.
Please fully understand, in case American nuclear weapons are launched from, eg. Taiwan, or Poland, the Russian response will be to hit New York or Washington.”-Russian Duma deputy, Yevgeny Fyodorov.
Russia has delivered an ultimatum to the Empire. If it does not receive a satisfactory response what will the Russian “or else” be? I am sympathetic to the view of boomer commentators (Doctorow, Armstrong, Helmer) that it will not be an invasion of Ukraine but something entirely else. I am sympathetic because I hope they are right. Trouble is when I read their guesses what that something else might be (except Helmer’s who refuses to speculate) it all seems rather underwhelming. All this circus only to station Russian troops in Venezuela or park a missile frigate off the coast of Washington, DC…it just isn’t the sort of stuff that would mean a great deal to Russia. But what does mean a lot to Russia?
Russia has a policy of no-first-use on nuclear weapons, but there is one caveat. If subject to a conventional attack of such ferocity that it should be indistinguishable from a nuclear strike then Russia says it’s atom-splitting time. What does it mean for a conventional attack to be the equivalent of a nuclear one? In Russian historiography the damage the Soviet Union suffered in WW2 (25 million war dead, 60 million people and 40% of industry lost to occupation) is often likened to the equivalent of a nuclear strike. In other words, should there be another Operation Barbarossa Russian atomic forces will not rest. Barbarossa famously advanced to roughly the present-day Russian-Ukrainian border reaching cities such as Kharkov and Rostov.
Might there be another thing that to Russia would be the equivalent of getting hit by a nuclear strike? According to Vladimir Putin yes, there is. In his last year’s article on Ukraine Putin writes that historic Russian lands settled by people who are Rus’ being forged into “an anti-Russia” is the equivalent of an WMD attack on Russia:
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.
Putin argues that if one branch of the Rus people, primarily perhaps due to Soviet-era nation-building, developed a separate non-Russian identity and nation-state that this is a reality that Russia can, and must, live with.But when that state is rabidly anti-Russian that this is crossing a red line:
All the subterfuges associated with the anti-Russia project are clear to us. And we will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country.
Having on its former lands a state composed of its own people who are looking out for their best interest is one thing, but having an entity driven solely by anti-Russianism is entirely another:
Today, the ”right“ patriot of Ukraine is only the one who hates Russia.Moreover, the entire Ukrainian statehood, as we understand it, is proposed to be further built exclusively on this idea. Hate and anger, as world history has repeatedly proved this, are a very shaky foundation for sovereignty, fraught with many serious risks and dire consequences.
The very act of anti-Russia prioritizing reflexive anti-Russianism even over Ukrainian national interests is what convinces Putin it is ultimately illegitimate and possibly “a tool in someone else’s hands”:
Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues. But it is important for us to understand that our partner is defending its national interests but not serving someone else’s, and is not a tool in someone else’s hands to fight against us.
No doubt having 50 million of your countrymen with shared ancestry and ethnicity spin out into a separate nation, and then having that nation become increasingly defined by antagonism against you is a bitter pill to swallow. Especially if the separation comes about as a result of top-down policies in the aftermath of a Communist coup. It is also a state of affairs that few powers with the means to challenge it would not seek to rectify. (Lincoln’s invasion of the South comes to mind.)
I do find that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be totally out of character for what Putin’s Russia has been up until now. But I also remember that Putin has moved the bounds of what was possible for Russia before. Both the 2014 takeover of Crimea and the 2015 expedition to Syria were unthinkable for Russia as it had been until then. Russia in the past twenty years has been capable of some evolution, particularly in the international arena. Putin’s very article on Ukraine would have been entirely unthinkable 20 years prior. It now stands as proof that this old centrist statist has — under the pressure of external forces and under the influence of internal ones — gradually and after much resistance assimilated a smidgeon of Russian nationalism.
I don’t know if Russia is going to march into Ukraine. I certainly don’t know how that is supposed to fix Putin’s problem of Ukraine being “anti-Russia”. Isn’t a war between the two only going to deepen animosities and provide Ukrainian nationalists with more fodder? Try as they might at least until now it has been very difficult for Ukrainian nationalists to find historical examples of Ukrainians and Russians spilling each other’s blood.
Putin lays the blame for Ukraine’s anti-Russianism at the feet of “Western authors”:
The Western authors of the anti-Russia project set up the Ukrainian political system in such a way that presidents, members of parliament and ministers would change but the attitude of separation from and enmity with Russia would remain.Reaching peace was the main election slogan of the incumbent president. He came to power with this. The promises turned out to be lies.Nothing has changed. And in some ways the situation in Ukraine and around Donbas has even degenerated.
But is that really so? Critics may say that Putin is at least as responsible for the dominance of anti-Russians in Kiev as any Westerner. Putin certainly played his part in events that removed 6 million Russian speakers in Donbass and Crimea from Ukrainian voter rolls. Moreover, the Russian-aided rebuff of Kiev’s attempted takeover of rebel Donbass by military means provided the nationalists with the much-needed semblance of a Russian-Ukrainian war. One of the critiques against Putin is precisely that in 2014 he helped deal near maximum damage to Ukrainian-Russian friendship at the popular level while getting Russia nothing but the 2-million Crimea in return. There were those who proposed that since Ukraine would henceforth be lost to anti-Russianism anyway he may as well have grabbed the entire Russian-speaking (and Russia-friendly) half.
In reality, it is neither Westerners nor Putin who are primarily responsible for the hold of “anti-Russians” over Kiev. As Putin says, twice now (with Poroshenko and especially with Zelensky) the voters have rallied behind a negotiated-settlement candidate only for the latter to turn into a hawk once in power. The cause is ultimately found in the nature of fractured systems such as democracy. Ukraine has multiple centers of power and additionally the notionally top leader is actually a weak one because his position is one of the least secure. Pursuing peace which takes a lot of investment outright for a very distant payoff isn’t the optimal strategy for a leader who is besieged from all sides and just trying to survive into the next month. A cheap pro-war policy that kicks the can down the road and pays minor but instant dividends is much better. Especially for the kind of room-reading empty suits that are likely to rise to the top in a modern electoral system.
Of course, one reason Putin didn’t order the military to occupy entire Russia-friendly Ukraine in 2014 are Moscow’s precious foreign exchange reserves. Moscow wants a Ukraine that is economically integrated with Russia and even plugged into its defense industry, but it definitely doesn’t want to be on the hook for the material condition of “our historical territories and people close to us”. We have seen as much in Donbass. While there has been significant investment into incorporated Crimea (to say nothing of Chechnya), the same hasn’t been the case for Donbass which today is economically worse off than it was in 2014 and exists in such an economic ghetto that the export of 1500 kilograms of sausage to Russia “bypassing Ukraine” is treated as newsworthy. (Why did it take eight years??) This comes on top of Russia having presided over the gradual killing off of all of its interesting (but independent-minded) leaders and their replacement by “economically-motivated” yes-men. If Moscow has a similarly progressive vision for Left-Bank Ukraine then I imagine a considerable portion of its residents would ask her to not bother liberating them. The money men around Putin; the Kudrins, the Chubaises, and the Grefs can not be counted on to release the sort of monies that reinvigorating Eastern Ukraine would take. (What they can be counted on is to mRNA-treat its people and cattle tag them.)
The final problem is that while rearranging borders in a coloring book is a blast, this isn’t a video game. The Russian military is an artillery-firepower army. It is incredibly lethal. The takeover of Southern and Easern Ukraine doesn’t happen without tens of thousands of deaths. Mostly Ukrainian. But didn’t Putin just explain that Ukrainians are Russians too? Well, I prefer my Malorussians deluded (and even anti-Russian) over dead.
I think a Russian offensive into Ukraine is a possibility (say 20%). I don’t think we should be eager for it.
Putin has already demonstrated to Ukraine that push comes to shove all of its Western “well-wishers” will abandon Kiev to its fight. Let’s hope he finds that sufficient.
Take it from someone who knows a little about fratricidal war: You don’t want one.
Russian troops are already arriving in Belarus, says secretary of its Security Council Alexander Volfovich. Trains with Russian military vehicles have been spotted all over the country. Here is one in Kolodishchi, just outside Minsk. Video by @MotolkoHelp from earlier today. pic.twitter.com/lFdPuwK2Rp
— Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) January 17, 2022
Russia seems now ready to take on US sanctions head on, will Russia force many US congress reps to quit?
Up to now Russia has always sort of deflected US sanctions, by using evading maneuvers to protect their companies. But now Russia seems ready to hit back and make it painful.
Banning the companies that support American Congressmen
Yesterday the idea was floated to ban any US company which financed a US congress rep that votes for sanctions against Russia, for 5 years from the Russian market.
Oh. This could be bad.
Most US companies donate to some, at least the ones in the state, of both parties.
Apple alone does 3 billion sales in Russia, 5 years would be be 15 billion sales lost.
No problem for Russia. They just get everything from China. At a fraction of the cost.
A US rep is not worth 15 billion, so most likely, if such counter sanctions are officially announced, a US rep would quit to save the company from losing business.
That could mean a good chunk of congress reps would quit, and new elections would start and make the US even a worse political mess.
This could also be applied to media and think tanks. This would also throw a spanner in the US political system of “pay and play”.
The complete suspension of copyright/IP protection of US companies
Over the years other ideas were floated. One of the harshest is the complete suspension of copyright/IP protection of US companies: software, music, movies, pharma, the name itself…
That would mean Russia could effectively open source most software, as governments usually get source code of major softwares from the vendors, like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Android to check for security holes.
Big Pharma would also be hit, Russki Viagra anyone? Cialis? Xantax?
And copycats would bloom into a worldwide trade. All at a fraction of the cost. Instead of $10 for a single Viagra pill, it will now be 50 pills for a $1. And Big Pharma won’t be able to do a single thing about it.
Think what would happen if China joins Russia in doing this?
YIKES!
A third could be law warfare.
A Russian court could set a price of war reparations on US “adventures” like Vietnam, Iraq, Korea, use of nukes on Japan and the many others, at beyond 100 trillion, so that even the staunchest US allies would be tempted to get a piece of the action of this credit collection.
Overflights of US airlines and Boeing jets could also be banned, so that airlines would have to end leases of Boeing long distance jets.
Others are to confiscate/freeze equity in Russian companies owned by investors from sanctioning countries.
In general, Russia has endured lots of sanctions over many years, but plans are in place to go head on.
A lot of time was devoted to make them as painful as possible. There is speculation in the media, but the actual plans are kept under lock, no big announcements or media leaks.
But they ARE being seriously considered.
Sanctions seem a clever tool for the big guys, but if somebody hits back and you have a low pain threshold, it starts hurting. The fact is that they are outside the rules, so you might also get hit back under the belt. And chess masters plan many moves ahead, exactly where a hit under the belt gets the best result.
Some quotes
Russian forces arriving in Belarus should have implications for folks' perception of the size/scope of the operation. First time ever Eastern Mil District forces in Belarus. If you think its not a bluff, great. If you think its not going to be large-scale…I suggest a rethink.
— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) January 17, 2022
And…
Several military districts doing a rolling call up of reservists to test the BARS reserve system. Some reporting a base official figure that they have 9k reservists signed up. Southern MD has a month long staggered call up. Sure looks like they're checking follow-on forces. https://t.co/Ccp4aYwZKQ
— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) January 17, 2022
Let’s consider how the “pandemic” is changing the world
Q. What about the pandemic? You mentioned the Great Depression, and the effect that had on the US and Europe, but can the pandemic play a similar role in the sense of “We can do this together?”
A. It should. And there are some signs of it. So when you get to the local level, you do find people cooperating with one another, helping each other. In many poor places around much of the world, local groups have just gotten together to help people in need, sometimes in remarkable ways. The favelas in Brazil are among the most miserable slums in the world. I’ve seen them. They’re run by biker gangs, drug cartels. The police are also extremely violent. Well, what’s happened during the pandemic is that the gangs, the criminal gangs that have been terrorizing the favelas have been organizing people to deal with the crisis. In the favelas, plenty of people don’t even have water. They’re working to help people at least have access to water, to have access to vaccines, to help each other in need. If there’s somebody, an old man stuck in an apartment who can’t get food, they bring him food, things like that are happening on the ground. Now, go to the leadership level. What are they doing? They’re monopolizing vaccines for themselves. They are demanding that the huge pharmaceutical corporations, which are super rich, should maintain control of the exorbitant patent rights that were given to them by the neoliberal regime, a regime which is radically opposed to free trade.
And his thoughts about the changing workplace…
Q. What about work?
A. What’s a job? A job, for most people, is spending most of your waking hours following orders from a master, who is a totalitarian master. They can give orders of a kind that Stalin couldn’t have dreamt of. Stalin couldn’t have told people that you’re allowed to take a five-minute bathroom break or that you’re not allowed to talk to that person next to you. And maybe your master is kind enough to allow you the leeway, but it’s the master’s decision. That’s called getting a job. Today, most people think that’s the norm. They react like my grandmother did, and would, if you’d asked her if she was oppressed. That wasn’t always true. To go back to the early Industrial Revolution of working people, bitterly opposed this form of autocracy, which was taking away their dignity, their rights and keeps reviving today. Plenty of people are saying the same thing. In fact, many of the people who are just refusing to go back to work, the so-called Great Resignation, are saying it in their own way.
UKRAINE CRISIS: US ‘Toolboxes’ Are Empty
The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people, says Scott Ritter.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a hastily scheduled, 90-minute summit in Geneva yesterday, after which both sides lauded the meeting as worthwhile because it kept the door open for a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. What “keeping the door open” entails, however, represents two completely different realities.
For Blinken, the important thing appears to be process, continuing a dialogue which, by its very essence, creates the impression of progress, with progress being measured in increments of time, as opposed to results.
A results-oriented outcome was not in the books for Blinken and his entourage; the U.S. was supposed to submit a written response to Russia’s demands for security guarantees as spelled out in a pair of draft treaties presented to the U.S. and NATO in December. Instead, Blinken told Lavrov the written submission would be provided next week.
In the meantime, Blinken primed the pump of expected outcomes by highlighting the possibility of future negotiations that addressed Russian concerns (on a reciprocal basis) regarding intermediate-range missiles and NATO military exercises.
But under no circumstances, Blinken said, would the U.S. be responding to Russian demands against NATO expanding to Ukraine and Georgia, and for the redeployment of NATO forces inside the territory of NATO as it existed in 1997.
Blinken also spent a considerable amount of time harping on the danger of a imminent military invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces said to be massing along the Ukraine-Russian border. He pointed out that any military incursion by Russia, not matter what size, that violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine, would be viewed as a continuation of the Russian “aggression” of 2014 and, as such, trigger “massive consequences” which would be damaging to Russia.
Blinken’s restatement of a position he has pontificated on incessantly for more than a month now was not done for the benefit of Lavrov and the Russian government, but rather for an American and European audience which had been left scratching their collective heads over comments made the day before by President Joe Biden which suggested that the U.S. had a range of options it would consider depending on the size of a Russian incursion.
“My guess is he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] will move in, he has to do something,” Biden said during a press briefing on Wednesday. While presenting a Russian invasion as inevitable, Biden went on to note that Putin “will be held accountable” and has “never have seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed” if Russia were, in fact, to move against Ukraine. Biden spoke of deploying additional U.S. military forces to eastern Europe, as well as unspecified economic sanctions.
Biden then, however, hedged his remarks, noting that the scope and scale of any U.S. response would depend on what Russia did. “It’s one thing,” Biden said, “if it’s a minor incursion and we end up having to fight about what to do and not do.”
Almost immediately the Washington establishment went into overdrive to correct what everyone said was a “misstatement” by Biden, with Biden himself making a new statement the next day, declaring that he had been “absolutely clear with President Putin. He has no misunderstanding, any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” and that there should be “no doubt at all that if Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price.”
And just in case the President was not clear enough, Blinken reiterated that point following his Friday meeting with Lavrov.
Immutable
The U.S. narrative about Russia and Ukraine was immutable; Russia was hell bent on invading, and there would be massive consequences if Russia acted out on its intent. This was no idle threat, Blinken said, but rather represented the unified position of the United States and its allies and partners.
Or was it? In a telling admission, CNN’s White House correspondent, John Harwood, stated that the “minor incursions” statement by Biden was harmless, because (Harwood said) Putin already knew through sources that this was, in fact, the U.S. position. As for Europe and Ukraine, their collective confusion and outrage was merely an act, a posture they had to take for public consumption, since the optics of Biden’s statement “sounds bad.”
In short, the lack of an agreed-upon strategy on how to deal with a Russian incursion/invasion of Ukraine was an open secret for everyone except the U.S. and European publics, who being fed a line of horse manure to assuage domestic political concerns over being seen as surrendering to Russian demands.
Biden and his administration are old hands at lying to the American public when it comes to matters of national security. One only need look to Biden’s July 23, 2021, phone call with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for a clear precedent into this inability to speak openly and honestly about reality on the ground. “I need not tell you,” Biden told Ghani, “the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there is a need,” Biden added, “whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the posture taken by the Biden administration on Ukraine. Blinken has indicated that the U.S. has a toolbox filled with options that will deliver “massive consequences” to Russia should Russia invade Ukraine. These “tools” include military options, such as the reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank with additional U.S. troops, and economic options, such as shutting down the NordStream 2 pipeline and cutting Russia off from the SWIFT banking system. All these options, Blinken notes, have the undivided support of U.S. European allies and partners.
The toolbox is everywhere, it seems—Biden has referred to it, as has White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. Blinken has alluded to it on numerous occasions.
There’s only one problem—the toolbox, it turns out, is empty.
While the Pentagon is reportedly working on a series of military options to reinforce the existing U.S. military presence in eastern Europe, the actual implementation of these options would neither be timely nor even possible. One option is to move forces already in Europe; the U.S. Army maintains one heavy armored brigade in Europe on a rotational basis and has a light armored vehicle brigade and an artillery brigade stationed in Germany. Along with some helicopter and logistics support, that’s it.
Flooding these units into Poland would be for display purposes only—they represent an unsustainable combat force that would be destroyed within hours, if not days, in any large-scale ground combat against a Russian threat.
The U.S. can deploy a second heavy armored brigade to Poland which would fall in on prepositioned equipment already warehoused on Polish soil. This brigade would suffer a similar fate if matched up against the Russian army. The U.S. can also deploy an airborne brigade. They, too, would die.
There are no other options available to deploy additional U.S. heavy forces to Europe on a scale and in a timeframe that would be meaningful. The problem isn’t just the deployment of forces from their bases in the U.S. (something that would takes months to prepare for), but the sustainability of these forces once they arrived on the ground in Europe. Food, ammunition, water, fuel—the logistics of war is complicated, and not resolved overnight.
In short, there is no viable military option, and Biden knows this.
Empty Sanctions Too
The U.S. has no sanctions plan that can survive initial contact with the enemy, which in this case is the collective weakness of the post-pandemic economies of both Europe and the U.S.; the over-reliance of Europe on Russian-sourced energy, and the vulnerability of democratically elected leaders to the whim of a consumer-based constituency. Russia can survive the impact of any sanctions regime the U.S. is able to scrape together—even those targeting the Russian banking system—far longer than Europe can survive without access to Russian energy.
This is a reality that Europe lives with, and while U.S. policy makers might think hard-hitting sanctions look good on paper, the reality is that whatever passes for U.S.-European unity today would collapse in rapid order when the Russian pipelines were shut down. The pain would not just be limited to Europe, either—the U.S. economy would suffer as well, with sky-high fuel prices and a stock market collapse that would put the U.S. into an economic recession, if not outright depression.
The political cost that would be incurred by Biden and, by extension, the Democrats, would be fatal to any hope that might remain for holding onto either house of Congress in 2022, or the White House in 2024. It would be one thing if Biden and his national security team were honest and forthright about the real consequences of declaring the equivalent of economic war on Russia. It is another thing altogether to speak only of the pain sanctions would cause Russia, with little thought, if any, to the real consequences that will be paid on the home front.
Americans should never forget that Russia has been laboring under severe U.S. sanctions since 2014, with zero effect. Russia knows what could be coming and has prepared. The American people wallow in their ignorance, believing at face value what they are told by the Biden administration, and echoed by a compliant mainstream media.
Propaganda About ‘Propaganda’
One of the great ironies of the current crisis is that, on the eve of the Blinken-Lavrov meeting in Geneva, the U.S. State Department published a report on Russian propaganda, decrying the role played by state-funded outlets such as RT and Sputnik in shaping public opinion in the United States and the West (in the interest of full disclosure, RT is one of the outlets that I write for.)
The fact that the State Department would publish such a report on the eve of a meeting which is all about propagating the big lie—that the U.S. has a plan for deterring “irresponsible Russian aggression”—while ignoring the hard truth: this is a crisis derived solely from the irresponsible policies of the U.S. and NATO over the past 30 years.
While a compliant mainstream American media unthinkingly repeated every warning and threat issued by Biden and Blinken to Russia over the course of the past few days, the Russian position has been largely ignored. Here’s a reminder of where Russia stands on its demands for security guarantees: “We are talking about the withdrawal of foreign forces, equipment, and weapons, as well as taking other steps to return to the set-up we had in 1997 in non-NATO countries,” the Russian Foreign Ministry declared in a bulletin published after the Lavrov-Blinken meeting. “This includes Bulgaria and Romania.”
Blinken has already said the U.S. will reject this.
The toolbox is empty. Russia knows this. Biden knows this. Blinken knows this. CNN knows this. The only ones who aren’t aware of this are the American people.
The consequences of a U.S. rejection of Russia’s demands will more than likely be war.
If you think the American people are ready to bear the burden of a war with Russia, think again.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
China Has Edged Ahead of Russia in Air vs Air Capabilities (With Russian Help)
Editor’s note: The caveat is that Russia does not intend to fight pure air vs air battles. Russian doctrine envisages fighters and ground anti-air working together as a part of a whole. Nonetheless, purely looking at fighters China is now in the lead. Russia is still a little ahead in engines, but China has more advanced radars and better munitions. [— Russia still hasn’t managed to field an AESA radar.]
The old formulation that in the Sino-Russian alliance the Chinese are the economic superpower and the Russians the military superpower is one that will increasingly have to be amended. The Chinese are already the equals in military tech and may eventually pull ahead.
The text below is an abstract. For the entire 60-page report click here: Link.
The Soviet Union, and latterly Russia, have been the source of both aerial and ground-based pacing threats to Western airpower since the end of the Second World War. However, from a position of dependency on Russian aircraft and weapons, China has developed an advanced indigenous combat aircraft, sensor and weapons industry that is outstripping Russia’s. As a result, for the first time since 1945, the likely source of the most significant aerial threats to Western air capabilities is shifting.
Modern air combat is primarily decided by the balance of advantage in situational awareness. Given broadly comparable numbers, the force which can provide its aircrew with superior awareness of enemy position, track and identity will have a major advantage in any clash. In scenarios where situational awareness is relatively equal, missile reach and seeker performance, crew experience, aircraft performance, electronic warfare (EW) and countermeasures systems all contribute to the likely outcome.
Russia and China currently field superficially similar combat aircraft fleets. Both rely heavily on the Su-27/30 ‘Flanker’ family of combat aircraft and their various derivatives. They have also both pursued a fighter with low-observable (LO) – also known as stealthy – features, alongside increased multirole capability for their main fighter fleets. However, a clear Chinese lead is now emerging over Russia in most technical aspects of combat aircraft development.
The Flanker family of combat aircraft share: a large radar, optical and heat signature; potent kinematic performance; a relatively long range on internal fuel; and the ability to carry heavy ordinance loads of air-to-air or air-to-ground weapons. This makes them comparatively easy to detect and, in the case of Russian Flanker types, the lack of a modern active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar restricts them to relatively ‘brute force’ tactics using powerful but easy-to-detect radars and missiles which are outranged by their Western counterparts.
China has developed J-11 and J-16 series Flanker derivatives featuring AESA radars, new datalinks, improved EW systems and increased use of composites, which give them a superior level of overall combat capability to the latest Russian Flanker, the Su-35S.
This advantage is increased by Chinese advances in both within-visual-range (WVR) and beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missiles. Unlike the latest Russian R-73M, the PL-10 features an imaging infrared seeker, improving resistance to countermeasures. More significantly, the PL-15 features a miniature AESA seeker head and outranges the US-made AIM-120C/D AMRAAM series. China is also testing a very-long-range air-to-air missile, known as PL-X or PL-17, which has a 400-km class range, multimode seeker and appears to have been designed to attack US big-wing ISTAR and tanker aircraft.
China has developed and introduced into service the first credible non-US-made LO, or fifth-generation, fighter in the form of the J-20A ‘Mighty Dragon’. Subsequent developments are likely to increase its LO characteristics and sensor capabilities, as well as engine performance, with construction of the first production prototypes of the J-20B having begun in 2020.
Overall, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and People’s Liberation Army Navy are rapidly improving their combat air capabilities, including a focus on the sensors, platforms, network connectivity and weapons needed to compete with the US in cutting-edge, predominantly passive-sensor air combat tactics.
The Russian Su-57 Felon is assessed as not yet having matured into a credible frontline weapons system, and as lacking the basic design features required for true LO signature. However, it does offer the potential to correct many of the Flanker family weaknesses with greatly reduced signature and an AESA radar, while improving the already superb agility and performance of the Flanker series. [The Su-57 doesn’t need to be as stealthy from the side and rear because unlike the Chinese very-long-range J-20 it’s not supposed to venture outside the air defense bubble. That said it is true that so far the Chinese have demonstrated more “stealth” tech than the Russians — and in much greater numbers.]
The Russian Air Force (VKS) does not currently field targeting pods for its ground-attack and multirole fleets. This limits the ground-attack aircraft to internal equivalents with inferior field of view and tactical flexibility, and the multirole fighters to reliance on either pre-briefed GPS/GLONASS target coordinates, radar-guided weapons or target acquisition using fixed seekers on the weapons themselves. This limits VKS fixed-wing capabilities against dynamic battlefield targets compared to Western or Chinese equivalents.
China is actively pursuing unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) designs with multiple programmes at various stages of development. Detailed assessment is hindered by tight control of information leaks by the Chinese Communist Party. Of those known to be in development, the GJ-11 subsonic attack UCAV appears the most advanced.
Russia is also pursuing UCAV-style technologies and has produced the Su-70 ‘Okhotnik-B’ technology demonstrator. However, it is not yet clear what degree of practical operational capability the Russian aircraft industry will be able to develop through the Su-70, especially given the demands for significant levels of in-flight autonomy inherent in UCAVs designed for state-on-state warfare in heavy EW conditions.
China’s advanced and efficient Flanker derivatives, as well as lightweight multirole fighters in the shape of the J-10B/C series and potentially a developmental FC-31 LO fighter programme, are likely to provide the leading source of non-Western combat aircraft from the mid-2020s onwards. Likewise, their air-launched munitions will increasingly outcompete Russian equivalents on the export market. As such, the development of Chinese capabilities should be closely monitored even by air forces which do not include the PLAAF in their direct threat assessments.
The possibility of technology transfer from China to Russia in the combat air domain could potentially increase the threat level posed to NATO by Russian airpower in the longer term, should such a dynamic emerge.
ISS crews train in the US and Russia to understand the US and Russian parts of the station, if only for emergency evacuation procedures. The US has just cancelled the visa of a Russian cosmonaut due to visit the US for his USS-ISS training sessions.
How totally pathetic and spiteful.
This Is One of the Most Important Essays You Will Ever Read
“I passionately wanted to take a machine gun and cross the damned nine-story building in a long burst”
Editor’s note:Alexander Lebed was a Soviet soldier and general, a challenger of Yeltsin, the protector of Russians and Ukrainians on left-bank Dniestr, and of the Russian-Ukrainian state, the rebel Pridnestrovie (Transnistria) they had founded.
He was also the person who cut the Gordian Knot and delivered Russia peace from Yeltsin’s Chechen War after the latter handed him the negotiations as a poisoned chalice that he resolutely accepted knowing fully what it was.
He was the son of a Gulag survivor and participated in internal Soviet peacekeeping (in the late 1980s) in Azerbaijan, on the basis of which he wrote this important essay presented below.
“On the evening of the 7th, the “Time” program announced a huge earthquake in Armenia…The exact number of victims was unknown, but preliminarily, they were estimated to be huge – tens of thousands of people.
The announcer switched to another topic, but no one would listen to him. Moreover, someone turned the TV off. An oppressive silence hung in the lobby. Suddenly, a strangle sound burst into this silence – or rather, a gamut of sounds merged into a single, general, triumphant joyful howl that would become more and more intense.
In seconds, everything became clear. On the opposite side of the street, in front of the building of the district executive committee, there was a large residential nine-story building. Every window without exception was illuminated, and on every balcony, people were yelling, hooting, and laughing wildly. Empty bottles, lighted paper, and some other objects were being thrown down.
This nine-story building was not alone in displaying its cannibalistic enthusiasm. A similar pattern was observed in all nearby houses.
The area was shining and howling ecstatically. People who considered themselves civilized; to one degree or another brought up and educated; many, presumably, believers professing the commandments of the Koran – all these people in a unanimous impulse were indecently, barbarously celebrating the colossal alien human grief.
I passionately wanted to take a machine gun and cross the damned nine-story building in a long burst and somehow make the people who have fallen to the level of monkeys return to their human form again.
How many kind, cheerful, intelligent, welcoming people I have met among Azerbaijanis! What passionate, convincing speeches many of them gave to me! Where did they go, all reasonable and kind, how was it possible that they all disappeared in this foam and succumbed to the rush whose degree of infamy is difficult to determine?”
Editor’s note: Should a day come when we find ourselves in danger of falling down to the level of beast or ape we can only pray there might be an Alexander Lebed with a machinegun nearby to get us to snap out of it.
From Lebed’s memoirs, translated by Vigen Avetisyan at Art-A-Tsolum.
The 1988 Armenian earthquake killed 25,000-50,000 people.
I have to admit that when I heard that the US has no intention of giving the Russians anything in writing I began wondering whether it even made sense for Lavrov to fly to Geneva. Yet, Lavrov thought otherwise and flew to the Swiss city. The outcome? Meh…
The US wants another week to prepare a written reply. Okay, that is some kind of result and I suppose that, considering what is at stake, waiting yet another week is okay. Frankly, the Russians are acutely aware of two things:
US diplomats and experts are, at best, clueless amateurs
The War Party is in full-blow hysterics mode
So they decided to give “Biden” another week. Like a teacher who agrees to give a particularly dumb student a few extra days to turn in his assignment.
What else?
Well, there is this: remember the rather weird words by Biden about a “minor incursion“? (since then, both Biden himself and Blinken has declared that Biden was misunderstood).
Today former ambassador McFaul, a true russophobic nutcase and certified imbecile, said that if the Russian soldiers go as far as Kiev this would trigger a full-scale response from the US and its allies.
Wait! What?
Since when do the Russian have to get their soldiers as far as Kiev to get sanctioned???
Before continuing, a few absolutely CRUCIAL reminders:
Russia neither wants nor has any reason at all to invade country 404, with all its intellectuals already long gone (most of them in Russia, low qualified refugees when to clean EU toilets), its deindustrialized wastelands, its many neo-Nazis and zero natural resources (they already sold it all). In fact, most Russians are categorically opposed to any such intervention.
The only thing which could force Russia to use her ground forces would be a successful (and rather unlikely) Ukrainian invasion of the LDNR. Russia currently does have the forces needed for such a counter-attack in her western regions. She does not have the size of force needed to occupy the Ukraine.
Russia has the means to defang the Ukie military using only standoff weapons, Russian military experts believe that such an operation would take a week or even less.
In other words, the notion of a Russian ground operation to take Kiev is total, hallucinatory, nonsense. Ditto for the idiotic idea that Russia must invade in February before the frozen ground turns into dirt (Russian ground forces have no problems operating or fighting with dirt, snowmelts or any other natural phenomenon between -50C to +50C). That is exactly the kind of crap McFaul always spews (with this uniquely paranoid eyes and freaked-out facial expression). But the fact that McFaul is a drooling idiot does not mean that he does not have access to what is going on behind the scenes (Blinken is just as dumb, and he is in charge of the entire US diplomacy).
So what gave him this truly weird idea?
First Biden with his “minor incursion”.
Now McFaul with his “no Russian soldiers in Kiev”.
I can offer three possible explanations for that:
The Biden Admin is doing a “April Glaspie” operation on Russia: tell the Russians that the US will do little or nothing as long as Russia only liberates some areas (presumably in the eastern and/or southern Ukraine) only to then take that as a pretext and declare some kind of war (probably not military, but political and economic for sure).
The Biden Admin is really trying to get rid of the Ukie suitcase and wants to break up this monstrosity into smaller, much more manageable, successor states. If so, I like the idea.
The Biden Admin is ready to let the LDNR break-away and move under the protection of Russia. Officially, of course, the USA will never agree to that, but they can present that as a problem they did not create and they could not solve alone either (or something else along similar PR lines).
Now, like I always repeat, there is a HUGE difference between “possible” and “likely”. The explanations above are only *possible* explanations for the weird language coming out of Biden and McFaul.
I also hasten to add that I don’t think that Russia will accept any such terms because they only refer to the Ukraine and not to a new international world order with a new international security framework, which is really what the Russians are after. And we are talking about verifiable, binding, security guarantees – not written, or even less so, oral, assurances.
However, if these proposals are made as one part of a much broader package of ideas, then they would be worth at least considering.
I have to tell you that my feeling is that the US has already at least partially lost control of the Ukraine and possibly even the EU.
Remember how I always write that when the US President is weak (which all of them since Bush Sr. have been) then the various branches of government and administrations begin doing their own thing, having a semi-official foreign policy of their own: one by the CIA, another one by the Pentagon, another one by Foggy Bottom, etc.?
Well, the same applies to US colonies: when the colonial master is weak and in deep crisis, the colonies begin feeling that they can act more independently. For example, the 3B+PU gang are now clearly setting the agenda in the EU, and the old Europeans à la Germany of France have become quasi irrelevant. Likewise, I am not confident at all that the real, hardcore, Ukronazis give a damn about what the US has to say, especially since the said Ukronazis seem to have the solid backing of the EU and parts of the Ukie government: just look at how Ze was unable to deal with Poroshenko – that will tell you a lot about the real correlation of forces in Banderastan.
This is the “tail wags the dog” thing on an international level.
All that is to say that I don’t find it likely that some big deal is being worked on behind the scenes.
But I do find it possible.
We shall find out soon, in one week or less according to the US side.
In the meantime the Ukies are massing a very large force right across the line of contact. I think of these Ukie forces like I think of folks driving motorcycles without a helmet: organ donors. Should the Ukies use that force to actually attack, the Russians will destroy that force in 24 hours or less. The problem is that Ukronazis are 1) rather stupid 2) totally fanaticized and 3) utterly unaware of the realities of modern warfare.
By the way, from a purely US point of view having the Ukronazis wiped out by Russian strikes is not a bad outcome as it would get rid of loads of truly crazy and unsavory characters.
I think of it as a “de-nazification by Russia” (along the lines of the expression “suicide by cop”).
One more thing: remember the rumors about the Russian evacuating their diplomatic personnel from Kiev? Turns out that it ain’t Russia, but the US and EU representations which are being evacuated (at least partially).
In the meantime, Stoltenberg wants Sweden and Finland to join NATO while many EU countries are now sending (small) forces into various locations in Eastern Europe. The worst of them all, the Baltic statelets, are now shipping Stinger MANPADs to the Ukies. Knowing how many Takfiris and neo-Nazis nutcases there are in Banderastan, this is absolutely, totally and terminally irresponsible! Yet those demented idiots are doing it. Typical.
I wish everybody a peaceful and great week-end!
Andrei
A comment
From Dennis Dennis
I must admit sadly that it s hard to find a wise and intellectual thinking American, therefore first I want to congratulate you for your wise and thoughtful ideas.
I am from Germany and in all discussions with americans I feel a taste of superiority and superficial thinking.
I am astonished about their neglect that russia is nuclear armed superpower which can in war end life on earth as we know.
If you talk all the time your opponent as unimportant and not to take serious than you got the public opinion easily that you do not be afraid about russia but we should all take russia serious when there is conflict with russia.
So first we must take russia demands for it s security very serious to have our security !
War is no option with russia and that must be clear to any fool !
Ukraine was not and will not be our main interest.
hat s the spehre of interest of russia and let it be. We can no have all regions in the world in our sphere of interest. We must differ between important and not so important.
And honestly europe did never want ukraine be part of europe and nato because we want to avoid conflict with russia at the very beginning and it s wise to do so.
The US must stop thinking it can control every country and region.
Simply said: avoid russia and try not to be close to russia for our own sake
I’m not sure even a NATO mosquito could cross the Russian border unmolested. And when a bear is lethally threatened, it doesn’t posture; it charges in a mighty roar. So why the Russian ultimatum? There are many plausible motives, many of which are not mutually exclusive. I’d like to focus on an aspect that hasn’t been discussed yet.
The last ten to twenty years could be characterized as a rivalry between China’s desire to re-balance the world’s economy, and the US’s effort to maintain the Dollar’s supremacy. China rose on the back of Western consumerism. There is only that much the West economy can absorb of China’s growing production, and that limit has clearly been exceeded. If China is to pursue its economic development, it needs additional “advanced” export markets to sustain its growing middle class. This is the Chinese necessity underlying the BRI, it cannot grow without the world growing with it.
Until recently it was content with a simple strategy: Enter several disparate countries at a time and start economic projects. Soon enough the US intervened to discipline the offenders; but they cannot strike all at once, choices must be made. Meanwhile, China approaches another bunch with still more economic projects. The US gets slowly overwhelmed, while the projects advance two steps forward, one step backward. On paper, it looks like an expensive proposition, but that is the beauty of it, it’s all paid for with US paper, while gold is accumulated. This entire period is comparable to the early and middle stages of a Go game
There is a point however when all these mini economic hubs must consolidate into a unified stream of connections to realize their full potential. That means no more US military interference and economic/financial disruptions. It seems we are now entering the late stage when “eyes” must be locked and linked.
There is little question the latest Russian move was long prepared and discussed with China. We may assume a common goal, and that none of the recent events are coincidences.
China and Russia favor and promote inter-currency settlement of trades. The Digital Yuan (E-CNY, electronic China Yuan) is designed for this purpose and has just completed successfully its live trials. It is reasonable to expect its official announcement in the near future. There are rumors this will be done during Putin’s visit to the Olympics. Regardless of the exact launch date, preparation must be made against the predictably harshest US resistance to its international deployment. There’s little doubt in my mind that many, if not most of East Asia will readily incorporate the new crypto iteration of the Yuan. However the Kazakhstan events, which were clearly foreseen with great precision, essentially opened up the entire Central Asian economies to its eventual use. With the recent 400bn commitment to Iran and the ongoing Pakistani projects, one may merrily add them to the bunch. India is free to join whenever they deem it in their best interest. This brings us right to the doorsteps of the Middle East.
Let’s now briefly revisit the US’ choices taken during the middle stage game. Since East Asia was growing to displace the US and EU as China’s main trading partner, Washington initiated their “pivot East” strategy to disrupt their momentum. Because of the sorry state of both their economy and military, they had to “delegate” the task of containing Russia on its western border to the EU. The Ukraine, in this context, can be seen as the “pretext” for the EU to activate NATO in Eastern Europe. However, as “pivot East” was floundering, they further needed to draw on their middle east assets (it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to laugh at what I must write). To this effect, they devised the Abraham Accords to similarly delegate the task of containing the “Shiite Axis” to Israel and the Golf States. The first “casualty” of these infamous Accords was probably Pakistan’s definite defection to the BRI, which further precipitated the Afghani debacle. To correct that mistake they then tried another formation with India, Japan, and a few others, followed by AUKUS, which both turned into flops, guided by the same imperative to relieve the strain on their military in an attempt to remain relevant on all fronts.
To control the Middle East, the US needs control of Europe, if only to secure their supply line. And to influence Central Asia they must control the Middle East. Until now Washington was essentially calling the shots, while Russia and China adapted their plans to whatever was thrown their way. By submitting their security demands, Russia is signaling unequivocally it is now taking the initiative. While the reinforcement of the Ukrainian Army was first designed to pressure some Russian reaction so as to increase the European nations’ commitment to toe the anti Russia line, the resulting Russian built-up of forces and large scale exercises have effectively reversed the pressure. The bulk of NATO forces are now bogged down on the eastern European front in a self induced paranoia, severely restricting their possible redeployment elsewhere.
With the Russian ultimatum the US is now basically faced with the following choices. Sign the documents, which by extension will mean the Minsk agreement and opening of NS2, but would free NATO reinforcement to the Middle East, no matter how futile this would ultimately prove. Because if this happens Europe will quickly “organically” link to the Asian network and recover most of its sovereignty from the US. At that moment, the Middle East is lost.
By not signing, the choice becomes loosing the middle East or release the pressure in East Asia, in both cases China wins.
If they don’t reinforce the Middle East, Pakistan is soon to be followed by the entire region. Though there could be some fireworks in the process, once the dust settles the BRI will be staring straight at Africa, throwing its full weight at European and American interests on that continent. If that happens, Europe falls.
Finally if they do “save” the Middle East at the detriment of East Asia, the Asian power house will become such that no one will escape its gravitational pull for long.
It is not very difficult to see, in this context, that whichever region the US decides to forsake, it’s only a matter of time before they lose the rest. Of course, this all assumes they don’t first crumble under the weight of their debts. Will they turn nuts and try blow it all up? I can only attest that the one thing greater than their evil idiocy, is their cowardice.
“Russia plans to engage its nuclear weapons not against those countries where it was launched against Russia, but against the mastermind cities where the decisions were made. To be exact, it is Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities. Please fully understand, in case American nuclear weapons are launched from, eg. Taiwan, or Poland, the response will hit New York or Washington.”
-Russian Duma deputy, Yevgeny Fyodorov.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The situation is very weird. America has a President who is essentially a shit-stain in the seat of his expensive blue suit. So at least publicly, America is being governed by a shit-stain. America is just going to collapse. Not that this would be a bad thing.
America is devolving into an open rancid sewer along all the dimensions that constitute a Society…Americans are escaping into drug use and Fantasy Football-and into Fantasy in general….I can’t wait for that apex of American Civilization known as the Super Bowl half-time show in five weeks…
To para-phrase the tune Officer Kumpke from the 1961 Blockbuster Westside Story:We are doomed…We are doomed…We are doomed….followed by a young Russ Tamblyn doing a back flip into the septic tank-know as America….
-War for Blair Mountain
Completely Outplayed by Russia’s Diplomacy and Sabotaged by its Own Actions, The Outlaw US Empire is Now Having a Temper Tantrum
Since Russia issued its Security Demands which are listed in my previous articles, a number of excellent essays were published that filled in some important holes in the historical record that the narrative associated with the security demands omit.
In advance of the talks last week, Washington rhetorically agreed that European security cannot be decided over the heads of the EU and Ukraine, before then simply going ahead with the bilateral US-Russia format. Simply put, Washington cannot do diplomacy with Eurocrats in the room.
Russia thus has a hand of 5 Aces, which are the two separate and later broken promises made regarding Germany’s reunification and Warsaw Pact’s decommissioning combined with no Eastern NATO movement, and the three separate OSCE Treaties on Collective European Security that all essentially say that no nation or group of nations can secure its/their security while making another nation insecure.
Either the Outlaw US Empire apologizes for its wrongdoings, or it breaks the three treaties atop the other two promises it’s already broken. Aside from overturning the card table, those are the only two possible outcomes. Russia has played its diplomatic hand superbly and has already won. The Anglo’s problem is which choice to make in reply.
What Blinken and NATO are doing is what sore losers and outlaws do when they’re caught-out–they draw their 6-gun. Clearly, the Outlaw US Empire can’t admit it was outplayed diplomatically, nor can it admit its dishonesty and issue an apology. It’s acting like a juvenile delinquent by throwing a temper tantrum.
I spend my time, retreated from society, writing thinking and image-making. I’m presently writing a volume about Modernity. My perception is thus necessarily the long haul. Unfortunately these last few days the anti-system bloggers, who constitute my first source of information, were overtaken by too much fantasy for my taste.
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To console myself in this period of the Year I hereafter share a Geopolitical Christmas tale that is rooted in the last episodes of actuality.
As a preamble…
Power in today’s world is far more complex than a matter of military dominance. Moscow, Beijing and Washington have furthermore an acute understanding that the present Geopolitical contradictions can’t be solved by a world war which would simply cut the escape of their societies and plunge their citizens in a Berezina.
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In that sense Geopolitics has now to be viewed as the systemic complexity of the interactions between the open societal fields (internal and external) of all nations on earth. .
The present Geopolitical moment is a very special moment indeed. .
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Two trends have been solidifying over the centuries of Western Modernity: On one side the center of gravity of the economy-world has been shifting, away from the West, toward East-Asia and more particularly toward China : .
This is the 8th such a shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world over the entire span of Modernity… What is different this time is that the center of gravity is leaving the territorial area of the Western civilization which explains the madness that has overtaken Western capitals
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On the other hand Western countries have been accumulating a multitude of side-effects over the last centuries of Modernity. The nature of these side-effects is double : – damages to the habitat of living species (nature) through different forms of pollution – damages to the societal organization of the human species through the pollution of ever more individualism that is concluding presently with the cancer that is societal atomization.
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The present moment is more particularly characterized by “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” : .
The convergence, within Western societies, of Neo-liberalism and Postmodernism has unleashed a superficial globalization of Western Modernity to the 4 corners of the world while internally this convergence has forced Western societies into – societal inequality – pauperism – hyper-individualism – a complete loss of meaning – an individual feeling of isolation – and so many more unfortunate facts that are all aspects of societal atomization which means that such societies are no longer united entities and in that sense successful collective undertakings are no longer in their reach (no shared worldview left to glue the individuals in a unified societal whole).
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The convergence, within nature, of a multitude of side-effects, that resulted from “the reason that is at work within the transformation of money into capital”, were called “externalities” because capital refused to pay for eliminating their life disrupting character. These side-effects have thus been left to freely disrupt the equilibrium that has ensured the abundance of flora and fauna and more particularly the stability that ensured an ever increasing complexity of human societal life over the last 10,000 years.
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Lately the effects of these disruptions, within Western societies and within nature, have started to converge and are forcing humanity to face its predicament : “what now ?”. Most of us are oblivious to this predicament. But most scientists and some public decision-makers, a rarity in the West, are well aware of this situation… Those of us who listen carefully know for a fact that Beijing and Moscow are realist and are thus well aware of the extreme complexity of the present situation :
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An acute awareness has emerged in the minds of the realists that to face the predicament of humanity it is indispensable, first and foremost and also urgently, to solve 1.1. which basically calls for a new world order in which the West is forced to play by the new rules of the game that the community of nation decides upon.
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The United Nations’ effort to combat climate change has taught a few important lessons : .
*** the West will never contribute in an adequate manner for the bulk of externalities that it is directly responsible for .
*** climate change is merely a symptom of the larger problem which is that the side-effects of Modernity are destroying the habitat of living species
A Geopolitical Christmas Tale…
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Moscow and Beijing are well aware of the disintegration of the cultural, social, and economic realities in the West that I sketched in 1.2. and in 2. and they have patiently been waiting for the most propitious moment to initiate a strategy to placate the West. It so happens that their forecasting services alerted them to an exceptional convergence of factors that would culminate with the Beijing Winter Olympics. .
Whatever the Western propaganda might be trying to force in the minds, of the people of this earth, the fact of the matter is that Western countries, in 2020, have entered the greatest depression in the whole of Modernity and this depression is bound to last, at least 10 years but most probably more, creating massive poverty and misery while disintegrating the sickest among Western societies. .
Covid like a pin first deflated the Western financial bubble in 2020. The FED’s response was the shuffling of uncounted trillions of dollars of paper around the economy in the hope of igniting the animal spirits on Wall Street. This was realized, among other, by :
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— Cutting Federal funds rate to a range of 0% to 0.25%
— Purchasing massive amounts of debt securities with a questionable value
— Colossal amounts of low interest rate loans to the largest primary dealers
— Lending to banks against collateral in IOUs or commercial paper
— Funneling cash to overnight repo-markets
— Expansion of International swap lines
— Massive amounts of funding to foreign central banks without swap lines
— Cash to the banks against questionable paper collateral at the discount window
— Support of the flow of credit to U.S. corporations
— Lending to corporations through the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)
— Lending to households, consumers, and small businesses against asset-backed securities
— Backstopping municipal and state borrowing
— Etc… .
The result of this financial largess became visible in the second part of 2021. An ever increasing inflation sows misery in the poorest families and people resist this inflation by claiming higher wages which results in the multiplication of social conflicts. .
We furthermore recently discovered that all this would be topped this winter by a new wave of Covid infections. The forecasts indicate that the Omicron surge could push the number of infections to their highest level yet. The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin projects that by the end of January, more than 500,000 people could catch the virus every day on average … with and estimated 3,876 deaths per day on average… .
In sum the West is confronted with : societal disintegration + the greatest of all depressions + hyperinflation + social conflicts + a new Covid wave that could be worse than the earlier ones. The least we can say is that this is going to fatally weaken the US and the same can be said of Europe.
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And then came the following…
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2021-12-07 : Putin and Biden have a 2 hour video-talk about the Ukraine crisis.
2021-12-07 : President Biden says that putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine to deter a potential Russian invasion is “not on the table” and that he hoped there would be an announcement by Friday 9th of high-level meetings with Russia and major NATO allies to discuss Moscow’s “concerns relative to NATO writ large” and the possibility of “bringing down the temperature along the eastern front.” .
2021-12-15 : Putin and Xi have a video call and discuss tensions in Europe and the “aggressive” U.S. and NATO rhetoric. Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, answered the following to a reporter who asked him what was the outcome of this video-call : .
“The world is witnessing the combined forces of changes and a pandemic both unseen in a century against the backdrop of complex and profound changes in the international and regional landscape. We believe that China and Russia, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, take on an important mission in defending regional peace and stability and promoting development and the revitalization of all countries.
. For some time, certain countries have been drawing ideological lines, building new military blocs and stoking regional tensions, which have all brought grave threats and challenges to regional peace and stability and global strategic stability. China and Russia firmly reject this.
. We will continue to follow the two leaders’ consensus, take up responsibility, unite all forces that love peace and support peace, and make active contribution to realizing sustained, universal and common security in the region and the wider world.”.There was no way for China to assert more clearly that it is siding with Russia in its demands… but everyone seems to have missed the seriousness of the Chinese side ……except for M. K. Bhadrakumar who is one of the most lucid observers out there.Few people understand the meaning of the expression “the two leaders’ consensus”. This expression relates to the will of their countries to see these two leaders in place for the long haul during the stabilization of the post-Western world order.Both countries, not in their unanimity but certainly in their large majority, have sensed since some years already that they have someone unique in their present president. A person who outshines the other decision-makers around them in term of their stamina and their mental clarity. How is it possible, that the West does not get this, is beyond my understanding ?.2021-12-17 : Moscow releases the texts of two documents in the form of two draft treaties that many interpreted as an ultimatum of Russia to the West.2021-12-17 : Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg asserts the alliance’s prerogative to intervene in Ukraine and bluntly rejects Moscow’s notions that it could have a say on the alliance’s future expansion plans.2021-12-19 : Christine Lambrecht, German Minister of Defense, Asserts that NATO was willing to discuss Moscow’s demands but would not allow Moscow to “dictate” to the alliance or its partners.By the 20th of December Western media were littered with articles belittling the partnership between China and Russia as “still having an artificial flavor” and suggesting that China would never fight the US along Russia.
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Ultimately, they proclaim, Russia will join the West in defeating China.
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But this is the propaganda of a rear guard of Western ideologues who are bluffing their way trying to force their madness on all nations that refuse to submit to their unilateral order. .
The Russian treaty/ultimatum has to be understood as a first act in a wider strategy that is being played out, in concert by Russia and China, in order to provoke the financial and economic fall of the US.
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But why pushing the US to fall precisely now ?
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Well the present context offers a unique opportunity. The Chinese sages never tired to repeat that if you are forced to fight you do it when your enemy is at its weakest ! And the present Geopolitical context announces the coming of the peak bacterial catalysis infesting Western wounds. This is why pushing the US to fall precisely now has the best chances to succeed. .
Now about China. It is without any doubt an a-religious country.
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Its early-power society grew, as the outcome of the cultural unification of its tribes, sometimes between 6000 and 5000 years ago. And thereafter it constantly actualized animism with present changing trends by topping it with add-ons in the same way as open-source software integrates innovations from the community… Now animism was a highly pragmatic knowledge formation approach that is rooted in observation over the very long haul that led to the induction of abstract principles from this observation. Animism remains in application today in its appellation of “Chinese Traditional Culture” which is a form of animism+. .
This means that China is — a-religious — highly pragmatic — and a reserved nation with reserved individuals. .
What this means is that the Chinese thinking is not driven by ideology and is not experiencing the need to impose itself on others. Having said that the Chinese have been observing the vile racist aggression coming out of the West over the last few years. They have spoken little. They have observed and have been thinking hard. And now they are at the end of their strategic patience. Chinese leaders know darn well that they have not much of a history in diplomacy which means, if I may say so, that their practice has not had the time yet to grow into a perfectly polished whole. That is why China, in all humility, openly recognizes Russia’s ‘panache’ in the diplomatic field and now relies on it to position its own. .
So it was only natural for China to let Russia publicly initiate the decisive movement forward in their common play for a new world order. China publicly sided with Russia when it announced its treaty-proposal/ultimatum and what is most important is that China detains the weapon of last resort which is the termination of US dollar payments for the delivery of its goods and services. ;
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Fast forward…
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Russian leaders have informed their Western counterparts that if they do not start to negotiate soon they will take the necessary technical measures to make them understand that they are deadly serious. It seems that Westerners have understood this part of Russia’s argument. Russian leaders even went further and informed very publicly that if the West was participating in negotiations in order to drag them down they would use their technical means to awake Western attention. .
The latest news is now that negotiations will start in the beginning of January 2022. In the eyes of the Russians one month is amply sufficient to reach an agreement and if there is no agreement by the end of the month they say that they will act. .
Coincidentally President Putin and President Xi will meet in Beijing to open the Winter Olympics on the 4th of February 2022 at Beijing National Stadium. The Russian timing of the conclusion of its negotiations with the US and Nato coincides thus with the very public and media relayed meeting of President Putin and President Xi ! Ho ho… .
Now the fact is that the discourse of Russian leaders leaves no place for a 3rd alternative as a possible outcome of these talks. From what we hear it is — or “we have a deal” and the West accepts a retreat to its posture before the fall of the Soviet Union — or “we have no deal” and China and Russia, on the 4th of February, announce their further game-plan to the world. .
Some Russian officials have already announced that one of the measures that they could take if there is no agreement is to refuse payment in dollars for any goods they export…
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And the fact is that China’s Digital Yuan is ready for use by the Chinese public at large. By October there were already 140 million people who had opened “wallets” and remember that this digital yuan has been designed, over the last 7 years, to act as a new technical payment system for international exchanges that will thus for the first time be free of Swift’s intervention and Washington’s judicial long arm…
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This Digital Yuan will also be connected to block-chains that will handle the currency exchange between Yuan and local currency, the final payment as well as tax matters, transportation matters,… all this promises to erase the hefty bank commissions and lengthy bureaucratic delays which should catch the attention of the buyers of Chinese goods while reducing the volume of exchanges in US dollars. .
To get a sense of how the digital Yuan is going to impact the world watch these 2 interviews of Richard Turrin who is one of the most knowledgeable English speakers about the subject.
Humanity’s fate will most probably be decided in this first quarter of 2022
The first quarter of 2022 will most probably be remembered, for a long time to come, for having decided humanity’s model of collective response to “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity“. If I’m proven right then what happens in this month of January will be determinant for the future of humanity. .
So how best can we summarize the situation ?
1. The general context of the 2020’s
To understand what is humanity’s present situation we have first to comprehend the context in which the nations on this earth are interacting today. .
1.1. The countering of Western hubris
After the fall of the Soviet-Union the West got caught up in a bout of hubris that completely detached it from reality. It thought that its liberal world order had triumphed, that history was coming to an end, and that it got crowned master of humanity. But the nature of reality is a bitch. It always finishes by erasing what goes against its way. .
So how is the nature of reality countering Western ways ? .
1.1.1. The relations between nations are conditioned by the realities of their internal situations
societal cohesion glues the minds of the individual citizens in a collective entity that acts as one entity. The fact of the matter is that Russia, China, and other non-Western countries are strong and cohesive societies.
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societal atomization un-glues the minds and makes it impossible for a nation to continue to act as one national entity. The fact is that Western nations have engaged on an individualist path since many centuries and over the last 50 years they have atomized in a mass of self-centered egos who can no longer act as one nation.
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the fact of the matter is that societally atomized nations, in all circumstances, lose to societally cohesive nations
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1.1.2. Reactions to a Western centric International order
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Confronted to Western centric International organizations, that one-sidedly protect Western interests while their governance systems are one-sidedly being kept in the hands of Western countries, China and the bulk of the world population are creating new International institutions that better cater to their interests : — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) — the Belt and roads (new Silk Roads) — and the next institution that will dethrone the dollar of its world monetary reserve status could very well be on its way… .
Such new institutions are the sole defense mechanisms against Western non-democratic practices within the present international order. See for yourself.
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Europe has 2 representatives in the Security Council of the United Nations while India, Africa, the Tri-Continental-Area, and Latin-America have no representatives.
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This gives the West a majority in the Security-Council with a veto power while it barely representsely 10% of the world population.
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The same kind of hegemonic domineering is at work at the world Bank where the US has 15.56 % of the voting rights. Japan has 7.31 %. China has 5.42%. Germany has 4.17 %. The United-Kingdom has 4.05 %. France has 4.05 %, India has 3.16%. Russia has 2.87%. Canada has 2.82 %. etc… .
Now the fact is that the deeper, the existing Western order is being countered by new institutions, the weaker that order becomes and the more pressing is the agreement, of all countries on this earth, about the structuring of a new system of world governance that could take on the predicament of humanity.
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Conscious of this China and Russia think that the time has come to confront the West to the realities of the present context.
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1.1.3. Fiat money is an instrument of exchange that is ruled by two First Principles
Contrary to what ideologies are peddling the money in circulation must be sufficient but may not surpass the exchanging needs of society. In other words, within the realm of the economic rules of the game, the economic actors need to have access to money in order to practice their exchanges. If the money in circulation does not satisfy their needs then the value of that money starts to increase and prices start to fall bringing about an era of deflation. But when the money in circulation surpasses their needs that money starts to lose its value and prices start to increase bringing an era of inflation. .
The US has without a shred of a doubt engaged in monetary hubris over the last decades and more particularly over the last 3 years when the volume of dollars in circulation abruptly increased by nearly 50% while the economic activity of the country was flat at a near 0% growth rate ! In this context it is not surprising that reality would slowly be re-imposing its way. As a consequence the value of the dollar started to decrease and US citizens are confronted to increasing prices. Seen the canyon full of recent dollar creation there is no escaping its rout in value. US citizens will thus be forced to confront hyper-inflation while foreign exporters to the US will not escape the necessity to increase their prices. Some might even soon refuse to be paid in US dollars all together. .
These realities are inescapable and the most important question that nobody dares to ask is “what happens when China refuses dollars as payment for its exports ?”.
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To use a fiat currency it is imperative that the citizens and the International community trust the emitter of that fiat currency. A dwindling trust in the emitter comes at the cost of the value of its currency and the citizens as well as the International community start to look for alternatives. .
US citizens have visibly lost trust in the emitter of the dollar and those who are awake to the nature of monetary realities are converting their dollars in all kinds of other instruments among which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are the most visible. But citizens are also converting their fiat dollars in many other items like : art works, antiques, real estate, farming land, raw materials and all kinds of “real non-perishable goods”. The International community has also taken notice and is reducing its holdings of US paper instruments while converting those in “real non-perishable goods”. Another avenue that the International community has been exploring is — the replacement of Swift as the exclusive intermediary of International transfers of US dollars — the replacement of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China and Russia have created their own swift and China’s digital Yuan is available to import and export companies from China or working with China. If interested to understand how the system works watch these 2 interviews of Richard Turrin who is one of the most knowledgeable English speakers about the subject. China’s Central Bank Digital Currency by Fat Tail Investment Research Big Tech in China and the Digital Yuan by Oriol Caudevilla
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1.1.4. The military is a tool of last resort
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In a last resort the nation with the most potent military always comes out of the conflict as a winner takes all and it then automatically becomes the architect of the next cycle of International relations.
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2. The present situation
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Russia feels cornered its back against a wall and it has had enough of all the bullying by Western nations.
2.1. The first round
In the words of President Putin Russia has no margin left to take a step back against the Western encirclement and it wants written guarantees about the principles of a level playing field that will give all parties confidence in their security. To that effect Russia proposed 2 treaties between itself and the West and its military-wing Nato. It also informed the West and the world that the negotiations needed to be short and to the point and that the treaties need to be signed immediately. If these conditions are not respected President Putin and others in his administration have informed that Russia would take appropriate military and technical actions to protect itself against what they describe is the naked aggression by the West against Russia’s sovereignty..
2.2. The 2nd round
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Some Western representatives rejected any compromise with Russia and in the footsteps of this news a propaganda campaign was launched against the imminent attack of Ukraine by Russia. Russia repeatedly denied this accusation and gave the West a time limit to answer its treaty proposals in writing. If no answer is forthcoming Russia promises to act. The West then proposed a meeting between the US Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister. This proposal seems to have been accepted by Russia which shows that its answer would be so grave that it prefers to try once more the diplomatic card. But by the end of this week, by the 22nd or 23rd of January, Russia will need an answer on the table or its credibility will be tested indeed and so it will be forced to act.
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2.3. The US plays the madman
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The United-States are playing the role of the madman that President Richard Nixon had initiated against the Soviet Union in the nineteen-sixties and they are betting that the Russians will not dare to confront them. But the fact is that President Putin would never engage in a dog-fight that he knew he could not win.
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3. Without a deal Russia will move to shell-shock the USA back into reality
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In matter of fact only a very profound shock will awake Western big capital holders, and their servants the American and European public decision-makers, to the reality that their countries are cornered and have lost their military superiority. .
What kind of action could this be ?
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Military experts are without any doubt better equipped than I’m to answer this question. But it nevertheless seems to me that, in today’s web addicted world what will be determinant in Russia’s action will be to gain the world’s attention to the fact that the USA has been duly informed about the superiority of Russian missiles. In consequence Russian actions will be limited; sparing lives but destroying US and Nato most crucial infrastructure. .
This vision gambles on the following facts :
Russia has assurances from China that it stands ready to act
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the minds of US and European decision-makers are very deeply embroiled in ideology and can thus no longer think straight along the lines of reality
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to be shocked back into reality will unmistakably be sobering the minds of Western populations
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the minds of US old male decision-makers are still emotionally attached to the future fate of their grand-kids
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all this should unleash sufficient pressure in the minds of US decision-makers to stand back and try to find a face-saving solution that the Russians and the Chinese can agree with.
However one looks at today’s situation the fact of the matter is that not acting now equals to further submit the world to Western diktats that become more egregious by the day. This would necessarily lead to an outcome that is far worse than whatever would be the outcome of the Russian-Chinese gamble that I have tried to describe.
We are making it clear that we are ready to talk about changing from a military or a military-technical scenario to a political process that really will strengthen the military security… of all the countries in the OCSE, Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian space. We’ve told them that if that doesn’t work out, we will create counter-threats; then it will be too late to ask us why we made such decisions and positioned such weapons systems. Мы как раз даем понять, что мы готовы разговаривать о том, чтобы военный сценарий или военно-технический сценарий перевести в некий политический процесс, который реально укрепит военную безопасность <…> всех государств на пространстве ОБСЕ, Евроатлантики, Евразии. А если этого не получится, то мы уже обозначили им (НАТО – прим. ТАСС), тогда мы тоже перейдем в вот этот режим создания контругроз, но тогда будет поздно нас спрашивать, почему мы приняли такие решения, почему мы разместили такие системы.
Moscow has issued an ultimatum to USA/NATO. It is this: seriously negotiate on the issues laid out here and here. Some of them are non-negotiable.
Ultimatums always have an “Or Else” clause. What is the “or else” in this case? I don’t know but I’ve been thinking and reading other peoples’ thoughts and some ideas/guesses/suppositions follow. They are the order that they occurred to me. Whether Moscow has such a list in front of it or not, it certainly has many “counter-threats” it can use.
Why now? Two possible answers, each of which may be true. US/NATO have been using “salami tactics” against Russia for years; Moscow has decided that a second Ukraine crisis in one year is one thin slice too many. Second: Moscow may judge that, in the USA’s precipitous decline, this will be the last chance that there will be sufficient central authority to form a genuine agreement; an agreement that will avoid a catastrophic war. (The so-called Thucydides Trap).
Of course I don’t know what Putin & Co will do and we do have to factor in the existence of a new international player: Putin, Xi and Partners. Xi has just made it clear that Beijing supports Moscow’s “core interests”. It is likely that any “counter-threats” will be coordinated. The Tabaquis have responded as expected but maybe (let’s hope so) Washington is taking it more seriously.
To my CSIS readers: the world is at a grave inflection point and the West had better concentrate its attention. Moscow and Beijing don’t depend on me for advice and I’m not talking to them: regard this as one of the briefing notes that I used to write. Moscow is serious and it does have real “counter-threats”.
MILITARY MEASURES
Moscow could publish a list of targets in NATO countries that can and will be hit by nuclear or non-nuclear standoff weapons in the event of hostilities. These would likely include headquarters, airbases, port facilities, logistics facilities, ammunition dumps, military bases, munitions factories and so on.
Moscow could station medium and short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad and Belarus. The latter requires agreement from Minsk but Belarus President Lukashenka has hinted that it will be granted. Moscow could then make it clear that they are aimed at NATO targets.
Moscow could station Iskanders and have lots of aircraft in the air with Kinzhals and let it be known that they are aimed at NATO targets.
Moscow could make a sudden strike by stand-off weapons and special forces that destroys the Azov Battalion in Eastern Ukraine. Moscow would see two advantages: 1) it would remove the principal threat to the LDNR and 2) it would change the correlation of forces in Kiev. It would also be a live demonstration of Russia’s tremendous military power.
Moscow could remind the West of the meaning of Soviet Marshal Ogarkov’s observation that precision weapons have, to a degree, made nuclear weapons obsolete. A prescient remark, somewhat ahead of its time 35 years ago, but realised now by Russia’s arsenal of hypersonic precision missiles.
The Russian Navy operates the quietest submarines in the world; Moscow could could make and publish a movie of the movements of some NATO ship as seen through the periscope.
I believe (suspect/guess) that the Russian Armed Forces have the capability to blind Aegis-equipped ships. Moscow could do so in public in a way that cannot be denied. Without Aegis, the US surface navy is just targets. Objection: this is a war-winning secret and should not be lightly used. Unless, of course, the Russian Armed Forces have something even more effective.
Russia has large and very powerful airborne forces – much stronger than the light infantry of other countries, they are capable of seizing and holding territory against all but heavy armoured attacks. And they’re being increased. Moscow could demonstrate their capability in an exercise showing a sudden seizing of key enemy facilities like a port or major airfield, inviting NATO representatives to watch from the target area.
The Russian Armed Forces could do some obvious targetting of the next NATO element to come close to Russia’s borders; they could aggressively ping ships and aircraft that get too close and publicise it.
Moscow could make a public demonstration of what Poseidons can do and show in a convincing way that they are at sea off the US coast. Ditto with Burevestnik. In short Moscow could directly threaten the US mainland with non-nuclear weapons. Something that no one has been able to do since 1814.
Does the Club-K Container Missile System actually exist? (If so, Moscow could give a public demonstration, if not pretend that it does). Either way, Moscow could publicly state that they will be all over the place and sell them to countries threatened by USA/NATO.
DIPLOMATIC/INTERNATIONAL MEASURES
Moscow could publicly transfer some key military technologies to China with licence to build them there.
Moscow could make a formal military treaty with China with an “Article 5” provision.
Moscow could make a formal military treaty with Belarus including significant stationed strike forces.
Moscow could station forces in Central Asian neighbours.
Russia and Chinese warships accompanied by long-range strike aircraft could do a “freedom of navigation” cruise in the Gulf of Mexico.
Moscow could recall ambassadors, reduce foreign missions, restrict movement of diplomats in Russia.
Moscow could ban all foreign NGOs immediately without going through the present process.
Moscow could recognise LDNR and sign defence treaties.
Moscow could work on Turkey, Hungary and other dissident EU/NATO members.
Moscow could give military aid to or station weapons in Western Hemisphere countries.
Beijing could do something in its part of the world to show its agreement and coordination with Moscow raising the threat of a two front conflict.
ECONOMIC MEASURES
Moscow could close airspace to civil airlines of the countries that sanction Russia.
Moscow could declare that Russian exports must now be paid for in Rubles, gold, Renminbi or Euros (Euros? It depends).
Moscow could announce that Nord Stream 2 will be abandoned if certification if delayed past a certain date. (Personally, I am amused by how many people think that shutting it down would cause more harm to Russia than to Germany: for the first it’s only money and Russia has plenty of that; for the second….)
Moscow could stop all sales of anything to USA (rocket motors and oil especially).
Moscow could announce that no more gas contracts to countries that sanction it will be made after the current ones end. This is a first step. See below.
As a second and more severe step, Moscow could break all contracts with countries that sanction Russia on the grounds that a state of hostility exists. That is, all oil and gas deliveries stop immediately.
Moscow could announce that no more gas will be shipped to or through Ukraine on the grounds that a state of hostility exists.
Russia and China could roll out their counter-SWIFT ASAP.
SUBVERSIVE MEASURES
Moscow could stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine (Novorossiya) supporting secession movements.
Moscow could order special forces to attack key nazi organisations throughout Ukraine.
Moscow could order special forces to attack military facilities throughout Ukraine.
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But I’m sure that whatever “counter-threats” Moscow comes up with will be powerful and surprise the West. My recommendation is that USA/NATO take the ultimatums seriously.
After all, the Russian proposals really are mutually beneficial – their theme is that nobody should threaten anybody and if anybody should feel threatened, there should be serious talks to resolve the issue.
Security is mutual:
if all feel secure, then all are secure;
if one feels insecure, then none is secure.
As we now see: when Russia feels threatened by what USA/NATO do, it can threaten back. Better to live in a world in which nobody is threatening anybody and everybody feels secure.
I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.
Some great marching
You know, I’ve never really paid attention to the “goose step” march. But when I came to China I learned taht it is realy just a part of what is a much more interesting march. It’s worh the watch. video 17MB
(Note: by tradition, going back to the first Prussian Kriegsspiel, your side is “Blue”, the other side is “Red”. Soviets did it the other way round.)
According to David Halberstam, when Washington was considering escalating its presence in Vietnam, a wargame was held to test options. More bombing aircraft were put into airfields in Vietnam; Red attacked the airfields. Blue brought in more troops to guard the airfields; Red started attacking the supply lines for those troops. More troops to guard the supply lines; more attacks on their support systems. And so on: everything the American side thought up was quickly and easily countered by the Vietnam team. The results were ignored: only a game, not really real.
Forward to 2002 and a very large and complicated exercise simulating a US attack on – not named, but obviously – Iran. The retired USMC general playing Red – a no-nonsense experienced soldier who didn’t believe technology was the answer to everything (especially the projected wonders that the wargame granted to the American side), scorned business-school buzzwords like “network-centric” – thought outside the box and used low-tech weaponry. When the US high-tech took out his communications, as he knew they would, he went silent – his communications were by motorcycle dispatch riders, coded messages in Friday prayers and similar old-school techniques. He fired more missiles that the Blue side could handle and sank most of the invasion force and finished off the rest with swarms of small boats. “The whole thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes“. The invasion force was brought back to life, the rules were modified to reduce the defenders’ abilities – the Red force commander was on the point of destroying the reconstituted landing forces – and the US side “won”. He walked out when he decided that the game was too rigged for him to bother doing anything; as he said in a report: “this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove“.
Each of these wargames was supposed to be a learning and testing experience. The first was testing what to do and how to do it in Vietnam, the second, more ambitious, was supposed to test the whole package of the new US military in every aspect – it is said to have cost a quarter of a billion dollars and involved 13,000 participants. What was learned from the two? Certainly nothing was learned from the Vietnam wargame – Washington went ahead and put troops in – just a few at first but rising to an incredible 500,000 at the height and dropped a fantastic number of bombs; corners were turned, light was seen at the end of the tunnel but everyone knew it was a lost cause and no one wanted to say so. The enemy countered and endured everything and, at the end, the US went home defeated. The war game turned out to be a rather accurate predictor of the future. And it doesn’t appear that the US military have learned anything from the 2002 experience either. Certainly nothing in Washington’s behaviour towards Iran gives the impression that the US leadership imagines it could be defeated if it attacks Iran.
Nor, come to think of it, is there evidence that it learned anything much from the Vietnam reality either. Afghanistan was, in many respects, a replay of Vietnam: a determined low-tech force countered everything the US military could think up. In 2018, Les Gelb, the compiler of the Pentagon Papers said:
And now we move forward two decades. Last October another wargame simulated a US defence of Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Another test of some high-falutin war-fighting concept. (One might parenthetically ask how many of these concepts are actually business-school ideas given the predilection of USgeneralsforMBAs. Probably the worst imaginable preparation for what our USMC “Iranian” commander called a “terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business“.) General John Hyten, Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman, and MBA, reported on the wargame:
The first thing that went wrong for the Blue force was that it suddenly lost all its communications – as I have been saying (and the Chinese and Russians surely know) one of the fundamental assumptions of the US style in war-fighting is constant, reliable, assured communications. All its “smart” weapons need to be “talking” to their controllers all the time: stop the “talking” and they become immediately “stupid”. Then the US force was hit with wave after wave of missiles. And the rear areas were hit with waves of missiles. And that was that. And, in another wargame in 2020, Poland was annihilated by the Russians: Warsaw was surrounded in five days.
What stood out for me in Hyten’s refreshingly honest presentation was this: “studying the United States for the last 20 years”. Washington officials are not noted for their ability to see things from the other side’s point of view, but he certainly got that one right. China (and Russia and Iran) know that they are on Washington’s hitlist. They have been watching Washington fight wars for two or three decades (winning none of them, despite the hype); they know how Washington fights; they know its strengths and weaknesses. They have put a lot of thought into it. One might also observe that, while Washington fights its wars safely overseas, China, Russia and Iran have very strong memories of wars fought on their own territory. This gives them, as Andrei Martyanov is always pointing out, a rather different view of war – it’s not some affair of choice far away over there, it’s a horrible, deadly, bloody, immensely destructive process in your own home.
Losing for them is not the American way of losing – no walking away, explaining away and forgetting away: it’s life or death. They take war seriously and they put the effort into thinking about how to defend themselves against an American attack. They know that air superiority and assured communications are the necessities of the American way of war; they know the US military expects to accumulate huge forces undisturbed. They haven’t used these years idly; they won’t wait for the Americans to leisurely assemble the force to bomb them. That’s why they have concentrated on EW and lots of missiles. The US won’t have secure communications, free air power or safe bases: Beijing. Moscow and Tehran, if they have to fight, will fight to win. And do whatever it takes; no umpire will appear to “call foul” and re-float the fleet.
In the real world, Ukraine’s “de-occupation” boasting was silenced in two weeks by a huge Russian mobilisation. Surely somebody in the Pentagon noticed that. HMS Defender’s adventure off Crimea (incidently the only one of the six ships of its class actually fit for sea – not, in itself, a very impressive performance) may also have taught some lessons about the consequences of silly gestures.
Nothing was learned from the Vietnam or Iran wargames, what about this one? General Hyten said:
That sounds good – “clean-sheet” – but you know that nothing will really change. Vietnam was supposed to teach a lesson (and the US Army certainly did improve) but, essentially, it did the same things all over again in Afghanistan. For twice as long. I doubt that this exercise will cause the full-scale change that he’s talking about. Complacency will probably return.
Even so, one would like to be a fly on the wall when US senior military brief the President: “failed miserably”, Afghanistan defeat (coming soon to Iraq and Syria), Russian and Chinese military power, hypersonic manoeuvring missiles, EW, layered air defence. The briefings can’t be too upbeat, can they? Could this be why the big exercise in the Black Sea ended so quietly? Could this be in the background of the decision to stop trying to block Nord Stream? Could this be a reason why Biden asked to meet with Putin? The couch-warriors will never understand this of course, but perhaps one can hope that the generals will – Hyten seems to have but, just as American wars are a sequence of one-year wars because each commander kicks the failure down the road for his successor to worry about, his replacement may return to the complacency of being at the top of “the greatest military in the history of the world“.
But, one can hope they’ll learn a little humility.
DONBASS. It should be understood that the official position in Moscow at present is that the rebel areas are part of Ukraine and the Minsk Agreement provides a method for resolving grievances. (Note, BTW, given the constant refrain that Moscow must “comply”, that it has no obligation). But this position could suddenly change given that Kiev has never fulfilled any part (especially No 4) and that Kiev’s “allies” haven’t tried to make it. One of the many possible “Or Elses“.
GALICIA. Anybody know why Ioseb Bissarionis-dze decided to put it in the Ukrainian SSR rather than giving it back to Poland in 1945? An important decision as it’s turned out.
LESSONS LEARNED. Little countries often try to play off the big guys against each other. But Kazakhstan and Belarus have just learned that this isn’t possible today because Washington wants total control. Others will learn from these examples.
NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. I don’t remember Soviet propagandists assuming their consumers to be as stupid as the creators of this do. Ummm – you told us that Putin tried to kill him, he’s completely in his power now: shouldn’t you at least spend a little effort coming up with some explanation for why he’s still alive to give interviews to you?
SWEDEN. This week drones, last week the Russians were going to snatch Gotland. Years ago somebody in the Swedish security apparatus told me that these stories – “submarine sightings” in those days – were faked up by the people in the Swedish security organs who want it to join NATO.
A treaty with Washington isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. That’s just how I see it, surely saner and smarter men have also noticed this.
-Baxter
Wendy Sherman thinks her aim in talks with Russian officials starting Monday is to lecture them on the cost of hubris. Instead she’s set to lead the U.S., NATO, and Europe down a path of ruin, warns Scott Ritter.
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If ever a critical diplomatic negotiation was doomed to fail from the start, the discussions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine and Russian security guarantees is it.
The two sides can’t even agree on an agenda.
From the Russian perspective, the situation is clear:
“The Russian side came here [to Geneva] with a clear position that contains a number of elements that, to my mind, are understandable and have been so clearly formulated—including at a high level—that deviating from our approaches simply is not possible,”
Ryabkov was referring Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to U.S. President Joe Biden in early December regarding Russian security guarantees, which were then laid out by Moscow in detail in the form of two draft treaties, one a Russian-U.S. security treaty, the other a security agreement between Russia and NATO.
The latter would bar Ukraine from joining NATO and rule out any eastward expansion by the trans-Atlantic military alliance. At the time, Ryabkov tersely noted that the U.S. should immediately begin to address the proposed drafts with an eye to finalizing something when the two sides meet. Now, with the meeting beginning on Monday, it doesn’t appear as if the U.S. has done any such thing.
“[T]he talks are going to be difficult,” Ryabkov told reporters after the dinner meeting. “They cannot be easy. They will be business-like. I think we won’t waste our time tomorrow.”
When asked if Russia was ready to compromise, Ryabkov tersely responded, “The Americans should get ready to reach a compromise.”
All the U.S. has been willing to do, it seems, is to remind Russia of so-called “serious consequences” should Russia invade Ukraine, something the U.S. and NATO fear is imminent, given the scope and scale of recent Russian military exercises in the region involving tens of thousands of troops. This threat was made by Biden to Putin on several occasions, including a phone call initiated by Putin last week to help frame the upcoming talks.
Yet on the eve of the Ryabkov-Sherman meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken simply reiterated these threats, declaring that Russia would face “massive consequences” if it invaded Ukraine.
“It’s clear that we’ve offered him two paths forward,” Blinken said, speaking of Putin. “One is through diplomacy and dialogue; the other is through deterrence and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression against Ukraine. And we’re about to test the proposition of which path President Putin wants to take this week.”
Lessons of History
It is as if both Biden and Blinken are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to reading Russia.
Ryabkov has alluded to a fact already made clear by the Russians—there will be no compromise when it comes to Russia’s legitimate national security interests. And if the U.S. cannot understand how the accumulation of military power encompassed in a military alliance which views Russia as a singular, existential threat to its members’ security is seen by Russia as threatening, then there is no comprehension of how the events of June 22, 1941 have shaped the present -day Russian psyche, why Russia will never again allow such a situation to occur, and why the talks are doomed before they even begin.
As for the American threats, Russia has given its response—any effort to sanction Russia would result, as Putin told Biden last month, in a “complete rupture of relations” between Russia and those countries attempting sanctions. One need not be a student of history to comprehend that the next logical step following a “complete rupture of relations” between two parties that are at loggerheads over matters pertaining to existential threats to the national security of one or both is not the peaceful resumption of relations, but war.
There is no mealy-mouthed posturing by Foggy Bottom peacocks taking place in Moscow, but rather a cold, hard, statement of fact—ignore Russia’s demands at you own peril. The U.S., it seems, believes that the worst-case scenario is one where Russia invades Ukraine, only to wilt under the sustained pressure of economic sanctions and military threats.
Russia’s worse-case scenario is one where it engages in armed conflict with NATO.
Generally speaking, the side that is most prepared for the reality of armed conflict will prevail.
Russia has been preparing for this possibility for more than a year. It has repeatedly shown a capability to rapidly mobilize 100,000-plus combat-ready forces in short order. NATO has shown an ability to mobilize 30,000 after six-to-nine-months of extensive preparations.
The Shape of War
What would a conflict between Russia and NATO look like? In short, not like anything NATO has prepared for. Time is the friend of NATO in any such conflict—time to let sanctions weaken the Russian economy, and time to allow NATO to build up sufficient military power to be able to match Russia’s conventional military strength.
Russia knows this, and as such, any Russian move will be designed to be both swift and decisive.
First and foremost, if it comes to it, when Russia decides to move on Ukraine, it will do so with a plan of action that has been well-thought out and which sufficient resources have been allocated for its successful completion. Russia will not get involved in a military misadventure in Ukraine that has the potential of dragging on and on, like the U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia has studied an earlier U.S. military campaign—Operation Desert Storm, of Gulf War I—and has taken to heart the lessons of that conflict.
One does not need to occupy the territory of a foe in order to destroy it. A strategic air campaign designed to nullify specific aspects of a nations’ capability, whether it be economic, political, military, or all the above, coupled with a focused ground campaign designed to destroy an enemy’s army as opposed to occupy its territory, is the likely course of action.
Given the overwhelming supremacy Russia has both in terms of the ability to project air power backed by precision missile attacks, a strategic air campaign against Ukraine would accomplish in days what the U.S. took more than a month to do against Iraq in 1991.
On the ground, the destruction of Ukraine’s Army is all but guaranteed. Simply put, the Ukrainian military is neither equipped nor trained to engage in large-scale ground combat. It would be destroyed piecemeal, and the Russians would more than likely spend more time processing Ukrainian prisoners of war than killing Ukrainian defenders.
For any Russian military campaign against Ukraine to be effective in a larger conflict with NATO, however, two things must occur—Ukraine must cease to exist as a modern nation state, and the defeat of the Ukrainian military must be massively one-sided and quick. If Russia is able to accomplish these two objectives, then it is well positioned to move on to the next phase of its overall strategic posturing vis-à-vis NATO—intimidation.
While the U.S., NATO, the EU, and the G7 have all promised “unprecedented sanctions,” sanctions only matter if the other side cares. Russia, by rupturing relations with the West, no longer would care about sanctions. Moreover, it is a simple acknowledgement of reality that Russia can survive being blocked from SWIFT transactions longer than Europe can survive without Russian energy. Any rupturing of relations between Russia and the West will result in the complete embargoing of Russian gas and oil to European customers.
There is no European Plan B. Europe will suffer, and because Europe is composed of erstwhile democracies, politicians will pay the price. All those politicians who followed the U.S. blindly into a confrontation with Russia will now have to answer to their respective constituents why they committed economic suicide on behalf of a Nazi-worshipping, thoroughly corrupt nation (Ukraine) which has nothing in common with the rest of Europe. It will be a short conversation.
NATO’s Fix
If the U.S. tries to build up NATO forces on Russia’s western frontiers in the aftermath of any Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia will then present Europe with a fait accompli in the form of what would now be known as the “Ukrainian model.” In short, Russia will guarantee that the Ukrainian treatment will be applied to the Baltics, Poland, and even Finland, should it be foolish enough to pursue NATO membership.
Russia won’t wait until the U.S. has had time to accumulate sufficient military power, either. Russia will simply destroy the offending party through the combination of an air campaign designed to degrade the economic function of the targeted nation, and a ground campaign designed to annihilate the ability to wage war. Russia does not need to occupy the territory of NATO for any lengthy period—just enough to destroy whatever military power has been accumulated by NATO near its borders.
And—here’s the kicker—short of employing nuclear weapons, there’s nothing NATO can do to prevent this outcome. Militarily, NATO is but a shadow of its former self. The once great armies of Europe have had to cannibalize their combat formations to assemble battalion-sized “combat groups” in the Baltics and Poland. Russia, on the other hand, has reconstituted two army-size formations—the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army—from the Cold War-era which specialize in deep offensive military action.
Even Vegas wouldn’t offer odds on this one.
Sherman will face off against Ryabkov in Geneva, with the fate of Europe in her hands. The sad thing is, she doesn’t see it that way. Thanks to Biden, Blinken and the host of Russophobes who populate the U.S. national security state today, Sherman thinks she is there to simply communicate the consequences of diplomatic failure to Russia. To threaten. With mere words.
What Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have yet to comprehend is that Russia has already weighed the consequences and is apparently willing to accept them. And respond. With action.
One wonders if Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have thought this through. Odds are, they have not, and the consequences for Europe will be dire.
Iran, China, Russia to kick off joint naval drills in Indian Ocean on January 21 — media
The drills will practice various maneuvers, in particular, rescuing a ship swept by fire, releasing a captured vessel and firing against targets.
TEHRAN, January 20. /TASS/. The Iranian, Chinese and Russian navies will begin joint naval maneuvers in the northern Indian Ocean waters on January 21, the ISNA news agency reported on Thursday, citing the Iranian army’s press office.
The drills will practice various maneuvers, in particular, rescuing a ship swept by fire, releasing a captured vessel and firing against targets. The drills are aimed at strengthening the security of international sea routes, fighting piracy and maritime terrorism and exchanging experience, the news agency reported.
Russia’s Pacific Fleet reported on January 18 that the Fleet’s naval group made up of the Guards Order of Nakhimov missile cruiser Varyag, the large anti-submarine warfare ship Admiral Tributs and the large sea tanker Boris Butoma had arrived at the Iranian port of Chabahar for the joint drills of the Russian, Iranian and Chinese navies.
The Pacific Fleet’s naval task force departed from Vladivostok and embarked on its long-distance deployment several days before the new year 2022.
Ever since Putin announced his demands for security guarantees from the US and NATO (in brief, stop NATO’s eastward expansion, have NATO retreat to its positions of 1997 and remove offensive weapons from Russia’s immediate vicinity) we have been subjected to a barrage of irrelevancies from Western press:
• Are these security guarantees an ultimatum or a negotiating tool?
• Will the US and NATO agree to them or reject them?
• Will Putin invade the Ukraine or will he be stopped in his tracks through the judicious and timely use of frowning, head-shaking, finger-wagging and tisk-tisking by sundry and assorted Western luminaries?
• If Putin does invade the Ukraine, does this mean that World War III is finally upon us and we shall all surely die?
I hope that I am not alone in being sick and tired of this pathetic, tiresome attempt to throw up a smokescreen and hide the inevitable reality of what is about to unfold. In case it isn’t completely clear to you yet, I would like to spell it all out. I am normally more cautious when making specific predictions, but in this case our immediate future has been carefully plotted out for us by Russia and China, with the US and its assorted puppets reduced to the status of non-playable characters in a video game who can only do one thing: hide behind a dense smokescreen of risible lies.
First, Russian security guarantee demands are not ultimatums. An ultimatum is an “or else” sort of thing, offering a choice between compliance and consequences, whereas in this case both the noncompliance and the consequences will follow automatically. The West and NATO are, for well understood internal political reasons, unable to sign these guarantees; therefore, the consequences will unfold in due course.
Russia has demanded that both the US and NATO put their refusal to agree to the security guarantees in writing; these pieces of paper will be important moving forward. To understand why, we need to take on board the fact that everything within these security guarantees has already been agreed to by the West; namely, the “not an inch to the east” guarantee given to the Russians by the US 30 years ago and the collective security principle agreed to by all members of the OSCE. By signing a document in which they declare their refusal to abide by what they previously agreed to, the US and NATO would essentially declare themselves to be apostates from international law and order. This, in turn, would imply that their own security needs can be disregarded and that instead they deserve to be humiliated and punished.
Further, by putting their refusal in writing, the US and NATO would declare the collective security principle itself—specifically with respect to the US and NATO—to be null and void, meaning that if, for instance, the Bahamas, a sovereign nation since July 10, 1973, decides to reinforce its sovereignty by hosting a Russian missile battery pointed across the Gulf Stream at Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the US would have no say in the matter, and if the US did try to speak up, they’d get beat up with this very piece of paper they signed. “Do you feel threatened now?” the Russians would ask; “Well, maybe you should have thought of that when you threatened us by putting your missiles in Poland and Romania.”
The initial stated purpose of the two installations of Aegis Ashore in Poland and Romania was to shoot down Iranian missiles, which didn’t exist then, don’t exist now, and never would have taken a giant detour and fly over Poland or Romania in any case. Although the stated purpose of these systems was for missile defense, their launch platforms can also be used to launch offensive strategic weapons: Tomahawk cruise missiles with nuclear payloads. These Tomahawks are obsolete and the Russians know how to shoot them down extremely well (as they demonstrated in Syria) but this is still very annoying, plus seeding the Russian countryside with pulverized American plutonium would not be good for anyone’s health.
Thus, we should expect bad things to happen to these installations, but we should expect to remain rather ill-informed about the details. While the non-negotiations over the Russian security guarantee demands will be as public as possible (in spite of Western plaintive cries asking that they be held in private) the “technical-military means” which Russia will use to deal with Western noncompliance will not be widely publicized. The Romanian installation might become inoperative due to a newly discovered small volcano nearby; the Polish one might succumb of a freak swamp gas explosion.
A further series of unfortunate accidents may cause the US and NATO to become shy and reticent about encroaching on Russia’s borders. NATO troops stationed in the Baltics, a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, which is Russia’s second-largest city, might complain of repeatedly hearing the word “Thud!” clearly and loudly annunciated, causing them all to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and evacuated. A US spy plane might experience a slight GPS malfunction causing it to blunder into Russian airspace, get shot down, and have its catapulted pilot sentenced to many years of teaching English to kindergarteners in Syktyvkar or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. US Navy and NATO vessels, already prone to collisions with each other, underwater mountains and barges, might suffer an unusually large number of such mishaps in proximity to the Russian coastline, causing them to shy away from it. A large number of such events, most out of them transpiring out of sight of the public, news of them suppressed in Western press and social media, would force the mighty US military to confront an uncomfortable existential question: “Are the Russians still afraid of us, or are we just jerking each other off here?” Their response will be to go into denial and to jerk each other off harder and faster than ever before.
But if they are indeed just jerking each other off, then what about their policy of containment? What’s to contain Russia and keep it from recreating USSR 2.0?—other than the fact that the Russians aren’t stupid, learned their lesson the first time around, and Mother Russia will no longer allow a bunch of useless non-Russian ingrates to suckle at her ample bosom. “But when is Russia going to invade the Ukraine?” inquiring minds demand to know, especially those who have been paying attention to Western news sources claiming that Russia has amassed 100090 troops on the Ukrainian border (it hasn’t).
The latest theory is that what is preventing Russia from invading is the warm weather. Apparently, it has been unusually warm since 2014, which is why Russian troops haven’t rolled across the Ukrainian border yet. What have they been waiting for? The next ice age that’s due any millennium now? Instead, Russia just got the bits of the Ukraine it wanted—Crimea, the Donbass and a couple of millions of highly trained Russian-speaking professionals—all without staging an invasion, and is now waiting for the rest of the Ukraine to degenerate into its end state as an ethnic theme park and nature preserve. The only thing that’s not going well with this plan is that the Ukraine needs to be demilitarized, as required by Russia’s recent security guarantee demands.
But what if Russia’s security guarantees aren’t met and US/NATO continue stuffing the Ukraine full of weapons, sending in trainers and establishing bases? Well, then, those will need to be destroyed. This can be done by launching some rockets from small ships sailing around in the Caspian Sea, as was done to destroy ISIS bases in Syria; no ground force invasion needed. It won’t take much to prompt US/NATO to evacuate the Ukraine in a panic, seeing as they have already worked out plans for doing so and have announced that they won’t fight to defend it.
If that’s what unfolds, what do you think will happen next? Will the US start a nuclear war over the Ukraine? Umm… how about “NO!!!” Will the US impose “sanctions from hell”? Perhaps, but you have to understand that at this point in time the US and other Western economies can be accurately caricatured as a crystal vase full of excrement parked on the very edge of a high shelf over a hard marble floor. The hope is that nobody is going to sneeze because the sound pressure might cause it to go over the edge. Sanctions from hell do sound like they could cause a bit of a sneeze. Needless to say, the US will continue to talk about sanctions from hell and maybe even pass some legislation so titled, and claim to have sent “a strong message,” but to no effect.
Will Russia act immediately upon acceptance in writing the West’s refusal to provide it with the requested security guarantees? No, there is bound to be a delay. You see, February 4th is barely two weeks away, and that’s just not enough time to start and finish a military action. What’s on February 4th? Why, the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics, of course, at which Putin will be the guest of honor while US dignitaries weren’t even invited.
At the Olympics Putin and Xi will be signing a raft of major agreements, one of which may transform the already very strong relationship between China and Russia into an actual military alliance. The tripartite world order announced by Gen. Milley, in which the US, Russia and China figure as equals, will have lasted all of three months. With Russia and China acting as a unit, the SCO, which by now includes almost all of Eurasia, becomes more than just a geopolitical pole. In comparison, the US and the 29 dwarves of NATO do not quite add up to a geopolitical pole and the world once again becomes unipolar but with the polarity flipped.
And so we should not expect any military action to take place between February 4th and February 20th. Should any military mischief occur during the Olympics, which is traditionally a time of peace in the world, it is sure to be a Western provocation, since the Olympics are a traditional time of Western provocations (Georgia during the Beijing Olympics in 2008; the Ukraine during the Russian Olympics in Sochi in 2014). We can be sure that everyone is very much prepared for this provocation and that it will be dealt with very harshly.
The worst kind of provocation would be if NATO advisers actually succeed in goading the hapless and demoralized Ukrainian troops into invading the Donbass. If that happens, there will be two steps to that operation. The first will involve confusing the Ukrainians into walking into a trap. The second will be to threaten to destroy them using Russian long-range artillery from across the Russian border. When that happened previously, the Ukrainian government in Kiev was forced to sign the Minsk agreements that required the Ukrainian military to pull back and the Kiev government to grant autonomy to the Donbass by amending the Ukraine’s constitution.
But since the government in Kiev has shown no intention of fulfilling the terms of these agreements during the intervening years and instead has done its utmost to sabotage them, there is no reason to expect a new round of Minsk agreements to be signed. Instead, it will be the end of the road for Ukrainian statehood. Putin has promised exactly that. NATO advisers are likely to be frustrated in their efforts to cause the Ukrainians to attack: it is preferable for them to sit there being poked and prodded by their NATO handlers and nagged by US/EU officials and spies than to have their best and brightest obliterated by Russian artillery or to face a final round of national humiliation.
After February 20th, however, we should expect some new and interesting domestic distraction. It could have to do with Western financial house of cards/pyramid scheme finally pancaking, or it could be a fun new virus, or natural gas running out and causing a huge humanitarian emergency. Or it could be a combination of these: the virus can be blamed on China, the gas emergency on Russia, and the financial collapse on both. While everyone is distracted, an aircraft carrier or two might go missing, the Aegis Ashore installation in Poland might get totaled by freak swamp gas explosion and so on and so forth. But then nobody would take notice.
There will still be the major existential question nagging the US military/industrial complex: “Are Russia and China still afraid of us or are we just jerking each other off?” I think I know what answer Russia and China would offer: “Don’t worry about us. Just go on jerking each other off.”
Finally…
End of Part 4
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands.
Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders.
Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia.
Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet.
The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.
The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict. Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war.
Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.
Pretty heavy stuff. It makes me think of food.
Good hearty and delicious foods, especially soups. Like a nice thick creamy soup. Maybe a cream of asparagus, or cream of broccoli. Don’t you know.
Thick cream of broccoli soup.
Ok. Let’s continue…
Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake
Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions – “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.”
“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017
Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.
I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.
American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase: “That’s not gonna work.”
The end is near …
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Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yadda-yadda, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not gonna work.”
And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.
I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.
America seems to be blissfully unaware of how it comes across to the rest of the world
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It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.
Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.
It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.
The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.
Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.
It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.
But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.
Internationally, for example:
• Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.
• Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.
• Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.
• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.
All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.
In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.
The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.
Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.
The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.
The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.
I Found this…
American insanity.
The USA is Cracking Up Just Like the USSR Did – In Fact, They Are Related
“You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, … We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality.”
“And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It caused a lot of death and destruction, which I won’t go into because you can read all about it elsewhere. It also caused a great outpouring of new art, literature, architecture and culture in general, putting the previously somewhat stodgy Russia securely in the world’s avant-garde.
It also resulted in a tremendous surge of industrialization, rapidly transforming a previously mostly agrarian, though gradually industrializing nation into a global industrial powerhouse (at great human cost). But perhaps most importantly, the revolution destroyed all of the previously dominant institutions of privilege based on heredity, class and wealth and replaced them with an egalitarian social model centered on the working class.
And it demonstrated (as much through propaganda as by actual example) how this new model was more competitive: while the West wallowed in the Great Depression, the USSR surged ahead both economically and socially.
For all of its many failings, the USSR did serve as a shining city on the hill to the downtrodden millions around the world, including in the USA, fermenting rebellion, so that even there the one-percent ownership class eventually had to stop and think.
Reluctantly, they decided to stop trying to destroy organized labor movements, introduced state old-age pensions (misnamed “Social Security”) and declared a euphemistic “war on poverty.” And with that a “middle class” was created—so called because it was literally in the middle, having risen out of poverty but still safely walled off from the one-percent ownership class. But as we shall see this effect was temporary.
Eventually the USSR evaporated, as artificial, synthetic political entities often do. The reasons for this disappearing act are too numerous to mention, but one of the main ones was that the Soviet political elite turned itself into a much-hated, privileged caste, and then failed to reproduce, turning into a moribund gerontocracy.
When the old cadres finally started dying out, the new generation that came in included plenty of traitors who did their best to destroy the system and grab a piece for themselves. This effect was plain to see, but was it the root cause? When a complex system collapses, every part of it is touched to one extent or another, and it becomes impossible to say which one played the key role in precipitating the collapse.
With the USSR gone, the owners of the USA had no one to compete against and were no longer under any sort of pressure to maintain the illusion of an equitable and egalitarian society. Instead, they concentrated on two projects, one ideological, the other economic.
The ideological project involved wrecking what was left of the USSR to the greatest extent possible in order to paint a convincing picture of the horrible consequences of communism or socialism and to herd everyone toward wholeheartedly embracing unfettered capitalism. The economic project involved eviscerating the American middle class—a process that by now has largely run its course.
Since the creation of the middle class was a multigenerational project, so is its destruction. But the effects of this process on society are already plain to see: there is an overhang of still relatively well-off retirees while their children and grandchildren have greatly diminished economic and social prospects.
Meanwhile, the hastily erected scaffolding that created the appearance of egalitarianism has been knocked out. Organized labor is all but finished. Borders have been thrown open to foreign labor and cheap imports.
Entry into the middle class has been blocked through a variety of measures including the relentless dumbing down of public education, the equally relentless overpricing of higher education, the health care extortion scheme, the rationing of justice based on wealth and privilege, wealth confiscation using a succession of artificial real estate market bubbles and so on.
Overall, the former middle class is being whittled down to nothing the same way that the Chinese “coolies” were dealt with once the railroads had been built: don’t feed them much but give them plenty of opium (now being grown in Afghanistan under the watchful eye of Western troops). To sum it up: if you aren’t happy with the way things are going in the US, you have a choice.
You can of course blame Russia—for getting rid of the USSR. Or you can blame your owners—your one percent—who have owned you ever since the King of England appointed the Lords Proprietors.
Within Russia itself the commemoration of the October Revolution is no longer a public holiday. But there was a sort of commemoration held on the vast Palace Square in St. Petersburg, which I attended with my five-year-old son on my shoulders. It was his first time in a crowd of 35,000, and he was duly impressed. It was a light-and-sound extravaganza consisting of two shows which played in alternation.
On the vast semicircular facade of the General Staff building was broadcast a multimedia retrospective of the October Revolution that included the reading of historical documents (such as the abdication of Nicholas II) and works of poetry. It ended on an upbeat note—yes, many horrible events took place, but Russia is now reborn—with the General Staff’s façade painted in the Russian tricolor.
After the show, as we filtered out of the Palace Square and walked home along the Palace Embankment, my five-year-old son asked some good questions that he had formulated while watching the show. “Did a lot of people die?” (Yes.) “But Russia was then and is now?” (Yes, Russia has been around for a 1000 years and will probably be around for 1000 years more.) “Why do people have to die?” (Because otherwise we we would be full-up with useless old people and there wouldn’t be enough room for young people.) And then the obvious follow-up: “Why are we full-up with useless old people anyway?” (???) And finally: “Why do we bury dead people?” (Because they smell really bad.) “Ah…” A rather unsentimental youth, wouldn’t you say? But he was only one of the thousands of quite similar-minded ones who were in attendance that day, riding on their fathers’ shoulders or marching along. Welcome to Russia…One of the reasons why the USSR failed was because the idiocy of the ideology of Soviet communism became too painful to tolerate. In a sense, this was inevitable. You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, making “intellectual idiocy” something of an oxymoron. We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality. And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.
By now most thinking people realize that capitalism has failed just has communism had. We can only hope that one day the US will do with its capitalist legacy what Russia has done with its communist one: turn it into a festive art installation that both children and adults can enjoy.
EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s
Two reasons: complexity, and too much money
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring – and it’s worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less.
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Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.
So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)
First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.
We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission. In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment. And why? Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.
Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped. Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions. In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn’t work well.
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)
The M-1 Abrams tank
Another great example – this can be a real dog. The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance. (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?) Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue. But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar “power packs” had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.
Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field. All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense. At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.
Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.
The Basic Problem : Excessive Complexity
I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance. This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces. After all, every military reflects its own society.
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.
But so much for American equipment per se. Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices – edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale
It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.) Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations. Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.
Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped. That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!
Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes? Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?
My brain cannot even wrap around this. Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?
However, even that pales before the Army’s cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of “Roomba” vacuum cleaner fame. In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)
As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.
US intelligence agencies have the same problem
This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…” In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.
As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass. (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)
Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings? Apparently not!
Bureaucratic bloat
On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing.
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract. (I have seen this many times in Washington.)
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved
So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole. We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it.
Really? How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.
Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)
How did they do it?
Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) – had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce. Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist. Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.
Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.
No hope for change going forward
So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.
Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.
And you know what? Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse.
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don’t have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.
Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony. Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.
But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China’s little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country’s imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures.
In fact, I would say we are at that point already. Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable. (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)
So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach. That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can.
The threshold has been reached and it’s all downhill from here.
A Novice’s Guide to Drinking With Russians
If you find yourself in Russia, you will have to drink with Russians, one way or another. Follow this handy guide for advice on how to survive the experience
This article from our archives was first published on RI in October 2016
Contrary to popular belief, Russians are not alcoholics, and they do not drink just for the sake of doing so. However, Russians are happy to raise a glass to practically any occasion — a new job, a new car, Friday…but especially for a wedding.
As a rule, you have time to prepare for a bender, but sometimes trouble sneaks up on you. Say you get home from work on a Tuesday night having met a friend you had not seen for a long time in the subway. Isn’t this a significant event?
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Always be on the alert. There will likely be times when you will have to drink on a weekday evening or in the middle of the night. And definitely on Friday. And most likely on Wednesday: because everybody in Russia knows that Wednesday is a little Friday.
Russians drink other things besides vodka. But of course they do drink vodka. You should be aware that a Russian party is structured differently from parties in other parts of the world.
First, the alcohol is usually bought by the host. This solves two problems at once: at first the guests do not have to know that they will have to drink and then they do not have to regret that they were unable to switch to something else after wine ran out because they did not bring it. The table full of drinks is for all, so drink whatever you want. Just do not overdo it.
Brush up on your knowledge of all key events in world history, religion, politics, sports and arts, and make sure to form an opinion on all current issues, whether or not they seem important to you.
First off, when drinking, Russians are sure to start a conversation about lofty matters. If you do not take part in these discussions, you will run the risk of simply falling asleep at the table – or drinking more to avoid having to talk. Secondly, such knowledge is simply useful. Do not be afraid of expressing your opinion. All conversations and disagreements that take place while drinking will not be held against you — no one will remember them in the morning.
Around 11 p.m., there is unprecedented level of activity in Moscow supermarkets and convenience stores. In Russia, there is a law that says alcoholic beverages cannot be sold later than a certain time, although the time varies. In Moscow, it is 11 p.m., while in St. Petersburg, it is 10 p.m.
Russians like to make lengthy toasts. Of course, the toast depends on the circumstances, but the more solemn and important the event, the longer the toast. It is customary to take a glass in your hand at the beginning of the speech and not lower it until the speaker has finished. You should train yourself to keep your hand raised for a long time. After the toast, you must clink your glass against the glasses of all those present at the table. If you are a single girl, keep in mind that an old Russian superstition holds that the last person you clink glasses with should be an unmarried man – then you will marry soon.
In the West, it is perfectly fine to take a drink and put a half-full glass back on the table before you take another drink. In Russia, however, you have to drink everything in the glass at once, otherwise people will think that you disagree with a person who delivered the toast — for which he likely rehearsed for a week before the event.
The toast “Na zdorovye!” or “to your health,” which foreigners for some reason consider to be the most popular and appropriate toast to make in Russia, is not used by anyone. Ever.
To really prepare for drinking with Russians, watch the classic Soviet film “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath.” This movie is always shown on New Year’s Eve, and everyone knows it. Even if you watch it before your visit, you are likely to have to watch it again. But besides being a classic Soviet movie everyone should know and the source of 95 percent of the references made by your Russian friends, it shows clearly how not to drink — and what can happen to you if your visit to a banya with your friends goes wrong.
To drink with Russians is an art and, like any other, you will not be able to master it at once. But you will never be bored drinking with Russians, and if you can endure the first few times, you may even grow to like this process. Probably you will. And, upon returning home, you will look differently at the wildest parties thrown by your friends, thinking to yourself “That’s nothing; in Russia, they call it ‘propustit po stakanchiku’ (to grab a drink).”
A video interlude…
Rufus bartender saves a girl from getting a roofie. video 11MB
China military are motivated, well trained and use state of the art equipment. video 7MB
The BRI is about helping the Chinese people domestically. video 5MB
The US Has Become Too Big, Too Diverse, and Too Corrupt to Survive
“Foreign malcontents can never be successfully integrated into a civilized society because they don’t even intend to try; they intend to conquer their host instead. … we have a much harder row to hoe than Old Europe because our own “invaders” are well entrenched and have been for decades, all the way up to the highest levels of government.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in October 2018
We’re getting close to the end now. Can you feel it? I do.
It’s in the news, on the streets, and in your face every day. You can’t tune it out anymore, even if you wanted to.
Where once there was civil debate in the court of public opinion, we now have censorship, monopoly, screaming, insults, demonization, and, finally, the use of force to silence the opposition. There is no turning back now. The political extremes are going to war, and you will be dragged into it even if you consider yourself apolitical.
There are great pivot points in history, and we’ve arrived at one. The United States, ruptured by a thousand grievance groups, torn by shadowy agencies drunk on a gross excess of power, robbed blind by oligarchs and their treasonous henchmen and decimated by frivolous wars of choice, has finally come to a point where the end begins in earnest.
The center isn’t holding… indeed, finding a center is no longer even conceivable. We are the schizophrenic nation, bound by no societal norms, constrained by no religion, with no shared sense of history, myth, language, art, philosophy, music, or culture, rushing toward an uncertain future fueled by nothing more than easy money, hubris, and sheer momentum.
There comes a time when hard choices must be made…when it is no longer possible to remain aloof or amused, because the barbarians have arrived at the gate. Indeed, they are here now, and they often look a whole lot like deracinated, conflicted, yet bellicose fellow Americans, certain of only one thing, and that is that they possess “rights”, even though they could scarcely form an intelligible sentence explaining exactly what those rights secure or how they came into being.
But that isn’t necessary, from their point of view, you see. All they need is a “voice” and membership in an approved victim class to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense. If you are thinking to yourself right now that this does not describe you, then guess what? The joke’s on you, and you are going to be expected to pay the bill…that “someone else” is you.
In reality, though, who can blame the minions, when the elites have their hand in the till as well? In fact, they are even more hostile to reasoned discourse than Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or Antifa. Witness the complete meltdown of the privileged classes when President Trump mildly suggested that perhaps our “intelligence community” isn’t to be trusted, which is after all a fairly sober assessment when one considers the track record of the CIA, FBI, NSA, BATF, and the other assorted Stasi agencies.
Burning cop cars or bum-rushing the odd Trump supporter seems kind of tame in comparison to the weeping and gnashing of teeth when that hoary old MIC “intelligence” vampire was dragged screaming into the light. Yet Trump did not drive a stake into its heart, nor at this point likely can anyone…and that is exactly the point. We are now Thelma and Louise writ large.
We are on cruise control, happily speeding towards the cliff, and few seem to notice that our not so distant future involves bankruptcy, totalitarianism, and/or nuclear annihilation. Even though most of us couldn’t identify the band, we nonetheless surely live the lyrics of the Grass Roots: “Live for today, and don’t worry about tomorrow.”
The “Defense” Department, “Homeland” Security, big pharma, big oil, big education, civil rights groups, blacks, Indians, Jews, the Deep State, government workers, labor unions, Neocons, Populists, fundamentalist Christians, atheists, pro life and pro death advocates, environmentalists, lawyers, homosexuals, women, Millenials, Baby Boomers, blue collar/white collar, illegal aliens…the list goes on and on, but the point is that the conflicting agendas of these disparate groups have been irreconcilable for some time.
The difference today is that we are de facto at war with each other, and whether it is a war of words or of actual combat doesn’t matter at the moment. What matters is that we no longer communicate, and when that happens it is easy to demonize the other side. Violence is never far behind ignorance.
I am writing this from the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, Austria. I have seen with my own eyes the inundation of Europe with an influx of hostile aliens bent on the destruction of Old Christendom, yet I have some hope for the eastern European countries because they have finally recognized the threat and are working to neutralize it.
Foreign malcontents can never be successfully integrated into a civilized society because they don’t even intend to try; they intend to conquer their host instead. Yet even though our own discontents are domestic for the most part, we have a much harder row to hoe than Old Europe because our own “invaders” are well entrenched and have been for decades, all the way up to the highest levels of government.
That there are signs Austria is finally waking up is a good thing, but it serves to illustrate the folly of expecting the hostile cultures within our own country to get along with each other without rupturing the republic. Indeed, that republic died long ago, and it has been replaced by a metastasizing mass of amorphous humanity called the American Empire, and it is at war with itself and consuming itself from within.
Long ago, we once knew that as American citizens each of us had a great responsibility. We were expected to work hard, play fair, do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and serve our country when called upon to do so. Today, we don’t speak of duty, except in so much as a slogan to promote war, but we certainly do speak of benefits for ourselves and our “group” of entitled peeps. We will fail because of our greed and avarice.
The United States of Empire has become quite simply too big, too diverse, and too “exceptional” to survive.
Video Interlude…
Rufus saves a lost little girl and reunites her with her parents. video 6MB
Western democracies are ONLY for rich people and corporations. They have and provide very little benefit to the work man, or the citizenry. That’s just the way things are. video 4MB
AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch
“This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in September 2017
Poor old Karl Marx, tortured by boils and phantoms, was right about one thing: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Thus, I give you the Roman Empire and now the United States of America. Rome surrendered to time and entropy. Our method is to drive a gigantic clown car into a ditch.
Is anyone out there interested in redemption? I have an idea for the political party out of power, the Democrats, sunk in its special Okefenokee Swamp of identity politics and Russia paranoia: make an effort to legislate the Citizens United calamity out of existence. Who knows, a handful of Republicans may be shamed into going along with it. For those of you who have been mentally vacationing on Mars with Elon Musk, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010) — which determined that corporations had the right, as hypothetical “persons,” to give as much money as they liked to political candidates.
We’ve made important contributions to world culture…
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This “right” devolved from the First Amendment of the constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said — giving money to political candidates and causes amounts to “freedom of speech.” The Citizens United ruling opened the door for unlimited election spending by corporations and enormous mischief in our national life. Then-President Obama — a constitutional law professor before his career in politics — complained bitterly about the opinion days later in his State of the Union address, saying that the court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”
And for the next seven years he did absolutely nothing about it, nor did the Democratic Party majority in congress. Rather, they vacuumed in as much corporate campaign money as possible from every hokey political action committee (PAC) from sea to shining sea, especially in the 2016 presidential election starring Hillary “It’s My Turn” Clinton. It turned out to not be her turn in large part because the voters noticed the stench of corruption wafting off this toxic flow of corporate money, which Hillary was using to vastly outspend her billionaire opponent, troll that he was.
It’s been a heck of a ride, and it’s coming to an end …
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Of course, corporations have not always been what they are deemed to be today. They evolved with the increasingly complex activities of industrial economies. Along the way — in Great Britain first, actually — they were deemed to exist as the equivalent of legal persons, to establish that the liabilities of the company were separate and distinct from those of its owners. In the USA, forming a corporation usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century. After that, they merely had to register with the states. Then congress had to sort out the additional problems of giant “trusts” and holding companies (hence, anti-trust laws, now generally ignored).
In short, the definition of what a corporation is and what it has a right to do is in a pretty constant state of change as economies evolve. And insofar as the current economy is sinking like the USS Titanic — and our republic as a mode of governance with it — surely the time has come to redefine in legislation the role and existential nature of a corporation in this polity. This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.
The crux of the argument is that corporations cannot be said to be entirely and altogether the equivalent of persons for all legal purposes. In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the public interest. And insofar as elections are fundamentally matters of the public interest, corporations must be prohibited from efforts to influence the outcome of elections.
That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative. Do something useful. Draw up some legislation.
Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country.
Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.
Videos…
Rufus rescues a girl who jumps overboard. video 6MB
Rufus rescues a man carried away by a flowing stream. video 11mb
The US Outspends Russia 10X On Military, But They Are Equals. Why?
Another brilliant essay from Orlov in which he addresses the incredible bumbling incompetence of the US in contrast to Russia’s intelligent competence – Orlov is spot on.
This article from our archives was first published on RI in May 2018
“Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear.”
A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!
The curtain is falling on a country in serious trouble
But, you know, this is hardly unreasonable of them. The US is spiraling down into financial, economic and political collapse, losing its standing in the world and turning into a continent-sized ghetto full of drug abuse, violence and decaying infrastructure, its population vice-ridden, poisoned with genetically modified food, morbidly obese, exploited by predatory police departments and city halls, plus a wide assortment of rackets, from medicine to education to real estate… That we know.
We also know how painful it is to realize that the US is damaged beyond repair, or to acquiesce to the fact that most of the damage is self-inflicted: the endless, useless wars, the limitless corruption of money politics, the toxic culture and gender wars, and the imperial hubris and willful ignorance that underlies it all… This level of disconnect between the expected and the observed certainly hurts, but the pain can be avoided, for a time, through mass delusion.
This sort of downward spiral does not automatically spell “Apocalypse,” but the specifics of the state cult of the US—an old-time religiosity overlaid with the secular religion of progress—are such that there can be no other options: either we are on our way up to build colonies on Mars, or we perish in a ball of flame. Since the humiliation of having to ask the Russians for permission to fly the Soyuz to the International Space Station makes the prospect of American space colonies seem dubious, it’s Plan B: balls of flame here we come!
And so, most of the recent American warmongering toward Russia can be explained by the desire to find anyone but oneself to blame for one’s unfolding demise. This is a well-understood psychological move—projecting the shadow—where one takes everything one hates but can’t admit to about oneself and projects it onto another. On a subconscious level (and, in the case of some very stupid people, even a conscious one) the Americans would like to nuke Russia until it glows, but can’t do so because Russia would nuke them right back. But the Americans can project that same desire onto Russia, and since they have to believe that they are good while Russia is evil, this makes the Armageddon scenario appear much more likely.
But this way of thinking involves a break with reality. There is exactly one nation in the world that nukes other countries, and that would be the United States. It gratuitously nuked Japan, which was ready to surrender anyway, just because it could. It prepared to nuke Russia at the start of the Cold War, but was prevented from doing so by a lack of a sufficiently large number of nuclear bombs at the time. And it attempted to render Russia defenseless against nuclear attack, abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, but has been prevented from doing so by Russia’s new weapons. These include, among others, long-range supersonic cruise missiles (Kalibr), and suborbital intercontinental missiles carrying multiple nuclear payloads capable of evasive maneuvers as they approach their targets (Sarmat). All of these new weapons are impossible to intercept using any conceivable defensive technology. At the same time, Russia has also developed its own defensive capabilities, and its latest S-500 system will effectively seal off Russia’s airspace, being able to intercept targets both close to the ground and in low Earth orbit.
In the meantime, the US has squandered a fantastic sum of money fattening up its notoriously corrupt defense establishment with various versions of “Star Wars,” but none of that money has been particularly well spent. The two installations in Europe of Aegis Ashore (completed in Romania, planned in Poland) won’t help against Kalibr missiles launched from submarines or small ships in the Pacific or the Atlantic, close to US shores, or against intercontinental missiles that can fly around them. The THAAD installation currently going into South Korea (which the locals are currently protesting by shaving their heads) won’t change the picture either.
There is exactly one nuclear aggressor nation on the planet, and it isn’t Russia. But this shouldn’t matter. In spite of American efforts to undermine it, the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) remains in effect. The probability of a nuclear exchange is determined not by anyone’s policy but by the likelihood of it happening by accident. Since there is no winning strategy in a nuclear war, nobody has any reason to try to start one. Under no circumstances is the US ever going to be able to dictate its terms to Russia by threatening it with nuclear annihilation.
If a nuclear war is not in the cards, how about a conventional one? The US has been sabre-rattling by stationing troops and holding drills in the Baltics, right on Russia’s western border, installing ABM systems in Romania, Poland and South Korea, supporting anti-Russian Ukrainian Nazis, etc. All of this seems quite provocative; can it result in a war?
And what would that war look like?
Here, we have to look at how Russia has responded to previous provocations. These are all the facts that we know, and can use to predict what will happen, as opposed to purely fictional, conjectural statements unrelated to known facts.
When the US or its proxies attack an enclave of Russian citizens outside of Russia’s borders, here are the types of responses that we have been able to observe so far:
1.
The example of Georgia. During the Summer Olympics in Beijing (a traditional time of peace), the Georgian military, armed and trained by the US and Israel, invaded South Ossetia. This region was part of Georgia in name only, being mostly inhabited by Russian speakers and passport-holders. Georgian troops started shelling its capital, Tskhinval, killing some Russian peacekeeping troops stationed in the region and causing civilian casualties. In response, Russian troops rolled into Georgia, within hours completely eliminating Georgia’s war-making capability. They announced that South Ossetia was de facto no longer part of Georgia, throwing in Abkhazia (another disputed Russian enclave) for good measure, and withdrew. Georgia’s warmongering president Saakashvili was pronounced a “political corpse” and left to molder in place. Eventually he was forced to flee Georgia, where he has been declared a fugitive from justice. The US State Department recently gave him a new job, as Governor of Odessa in the Ukraine. Recently, Russian-Georgian relations have been on the mend.
2.
The example of Crimea. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, in Russia (a traditional time of peace) there occurred an illegal, violent overthrow of the elected, constitutional government of the Ukraine, followed by the installation of a US-picked puppet administration. In response, the overwhelmingly Russian population of the autonomous region of Crimea held a referendum. Some 95% of them voted to secede from the Ukraine and to once again become part of Russia, which they had been for centuries and until very recently. The Russians then used their troops already stationed in the region under an international agreement to make sure that the results of the referendum were duly enacted. Not a single shot was fired during this perfectly peaceful exercise in direct democracy.
3.
The example of Crimea again. During the Summer Olympics in Rio (a traditional time of peace) a number of Ukrainian operatives stormed the Crimean border and were swiftly apprehended by Russia’s Federal Security Service, together with a cache of weapons and explosives. A number of them were killed in the process, along with two Russians. The survivors immediately confessed to planning to organize terrorist attacks at the ferry terminal that links Crimea with the Russian mainland and a railway station. The ringleader of the group confessed to being promised the princely sum of $140 for carrying out these attacks. All of them are very much looking forward to a warm, dry bunk and three square meals of day, care of the Russian government, which must seem like a slice of heaven compared to the violence, chaos, destitution and desolation that characterizes life in present-day Ukraine. In response, the government in Kiev protested against “Russian provocation,” and put its troops on alert to prepare against “Russian invasion.” Perhaps the next shipment of US aid to the Ukraine should include a supply of chlorpromazine or some other high-potency antipsychotic medication.
Note the constant refrain of “during the Olympics.” This is not a coincidence but is indicative of a certain American modus operandi. Yes, waging war during a traditional time of peace is both cynical and stupid. But the American motto seems to be “If we try something repeatedly and it still doesn’t work, then we just aren’t trying hard enough.” In the minds of those who plan these events, the reason they never work right can’t possibly have anything to do with it being stupid. This is known as “Level III Stupid”: stupidity so profound that it is unable to comprehend its own stupidity.
4.
The example of Donbass. After the events described in point 2 above, this populous, industrialized region, which was part of Russia until well into the 20th century and is linguistically and culturally Russian, went into political turmoil, because most of the locals wanted nothing to do with the government that had been installed in Kiev, which they saw as illegitimate. The Kiev government proceeded to make things worse, first by enacting laws infringing on the rights of Russian-speakers, then by actually attacking the region with the army, which they continue to do to this day, with three unsuccessful invasions and continuous shelling of both residential and industrial areas, in the course of which over ten thousand civilians have been murdered and many more wounded. In response, Russia assisted with establishing a local resistance movement supported by a capable military contingent formed of local volunteers. This was done by Russian volunteers, acting in an unofficial capacity, and by Russian private citizens donating money to the cause. In spite of Western hysteria over “Russian invasion” and “Russian aggression,” no evidence of it exists. Instead, the Russian government has done just three things: it refused to interfere with the work of its citizens coming to the aid of Donbass; it pursued a diplomatic strategy for resolving the conflict; and it has provided numerous convoys of humanitarian aid to the residents of Donbass. Russia’s diplomatic initiative resulted in two international agreements—Minsk I and Minsk II—which compelled both Kiev and Donbass to pursue a strategy of political resolution of the conflict through cessation of hostilities and the granting to Donbass of full autonomy. Kiev has steadfastly refused to fulfill its obligations under these agreements. The conflict is now frozen, but continuing to bleed because of Ukrainian shelling, waiting for the Ukrainian puppet government to collapse.
To complete the picture, let us include Russia’s recent military action in Syria, where it came to the defense of the embattled Syrian government and quickly demolished a large part of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Islamic Caliphate, along with various other terrorist organizations active in the region. The rationale for this action is that Russia saw a foreign-funded terrorist nest in Syria as a direct threat to Russia’s security. Two other notable facts here are that Russia acted in accordance with international law, having been invited by Syria’s legitimate, internationally recognized government and that the military action was scaled back as soon as it seemed possible for all of the legitimate (non-terrorist) parties to the conflict to return to the negotiating table. These three elements—using military force as a reactive security measure, scrupulous adherence to international law, and seeing military action as being in the service of diplomacy—are very important to understanding Russia’s methods and ambitions.
Turning now to US military/diplomatic adventures, we see a situation that is quite different. US military spending is responsible for over half of all federal discretionary spending, dwarfing most other vitally important sectors, such as infrastructure, public medicine and public education. It serves several objectives. Most importantly, it is a public jobs program: a way of employing people who are not employable in any actually productive capacity due to lack of intelligence, education and training. Second, it is a way for politicians and defense contractors to synergistically enrich themselves and each other at the public’s expense. Third, it is an advertising program for weapons sales, the US being the top purveyor of lethal technology in the world. Last of all, it is a way of projecting force around the world, bombing into submission any country that dares oppose Washington’s global hegemonic ambitions, often in total disregard of international law. Nowhere on this list is the actual goal of defending the US.
None of these justifications works vis-à-vis Russia. In dollar terms, the US outspends Russia on defense hands down. However, viewed in terms of purchasing parity, Russia manages to buy as much as ten times more defensive capability per unit national wealth than the US, largely negating this advantage. Also, what the US gets for its money is inferior: the Russian military gets the weapons it wants; the US military gets what the corrupt political establishment and their accomplices in the military-industrial complex want in order to enrich themselves. In terms of being an advertising campaign for weapons sales, watching Russian weaponry in action in Syria, effectively wiping out terrorists in short order through a relentless bombing campaign using scant resources, then seeing US weaponry used by the Saudis in Yemen, with much support and advice from the US, being continuously defeated by lightly armed insurgents, is unlikely to generate too many additional sales leads. Lastly, the project of maintaining US global hegemony seems to be on the rocks as well. Russia and China are now in a de facto military union. Russia’s superior weaponry, coupled with China’s almost infinitely huge infantry, make it an undefeatable combination. Russia now has a permanent air base in Syria, has made a deal with Iran to use Iranian military bases, and is in the process of prying Turkey away from NATO. As the US military, with its numerous useless bases around the world and piles of useless gadgets, turns into an international embarrassment, it remains, for the time being, a public jobs program for employing incompetents, and a rich source of graft.
In all, it is important to understand how actually circumscribed American military capabilities are. The US is very good at attacking vastly inferior adversaries. The action against Nazi Germany only succeeded because it was by then effectively defeated by the Red Army—all except for the final mop-up, which is when the US came out of its timid isolation and joined the fray. Even North Korea and Vietnam proved too tough for it, and even there its poor performance would have been much poorer were it not for the draft, which had the effect of adding non-incompetents to the ranks, but produced the unpleasant side-effect of enlisted men shooting their incompetent officers—a much underreported chapter of American military history. And now, with the addition of LGBTQ people to the ranks, the US military is on its way to becoming an international laughing stock. Previously, terms like “faggot” and “pussy” were in widespread use in the US military’s basic training. Drill sergeants used such terminology to exhort the “numb-nuts” placed in their charge to start acting like men. I wonder what words drill sergeants use now that they’ve been tasked with training those they previously referred to as “faggots” and “pussies”? The comedic potential of this nuance isn’t lost on Russia’s military men.
This comedy can continue as long as the US military continues to shy away from attacking any serious adversary, because if it did, comedy would turn to tragedy rather quickly.
If, for instance, US forces tried to attack Russian territory by lobbing missiles across the border, they would be neutralized in instantaneous retaliation by Russia’s vastly superior artillery.
If Americans or their proxies provoked Russians living outside of Russia (and there are millions of them) to the point of open rebellion, Russian volunteers, acting in an unofficial capacity and using private funds, would quickly train, outfit and arm them, creating a popular insurgency that would continue for years, if necessary, until Americans and their proxies capitulate.
If the Americans do the ultimately foolish thing and invade Russian territory, they would be kettled and annihilated, as repeatedly happened to the Ukrainian forces in Donbass.
Any attempt to attack Russia using the US aircraft carrier fleet would result in its instantaneous sinking using any of several weapons: ballistic anti-ship missiles, supercavitating torpedos or supersonic cruise missiles.
Strategic bombers, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles would be eliminated by Russia’s advanced new air defense systems.
So much for attack; but what about defense? Well it turns out that there is an entire separate dimension to engaging Russia militarily. You see, Russia lost a huge number of civilian lives while fighting off Nazi Germany. Many people, including old people, women and children, died of starvation and disease, or from German shelling, or from the abuse they suffered at the hands of German soldiers. On the other hand, Soviet military casualties were on par with those of the Germans. This incredible calamity befell Russia because it had been invaded, and it has conditioned Russian military thinking ever since. The next large-scale war, if there ever is one, will be fought on enemy territory. Thus, if the US attacks Russia, Russia will counterattack the US mainland. Keeping in mind that the US hasn’t fought a war on its own territory in over 150 years, this would come as quite a shock.
Of course, this would be done in ways that are consistent with Russian military thinking. Most importantly, the attack must be such that the possibility of triggering a nuclear exchange remains minimized. Second, the use of force would be kept to the minimum required to secure a cessation of hostilities and a return to the negotiating table on terms favorable to Russia. Third, every effort would be made to make good use of internal popular revolts to create long-lasting insurgencies, letting volunteers provide the necessary arms and training. Lastly, winning the peace is just as important as winning the war, and every effort would be made to inform the American public that what they are experiencing is just retribution for certain illegal acts. From a diplomatic perspective, it would be much more tidy to treat the problem of war criminals running the US as an internal, American political problem, to be solved by Americans themselves, with an absolute minimum of outside help. This would best be accomplished through a bit of friendly, neighborly intelligence-sharing, letting all interested parties within the US know who exactly should be held responsible for these war crimes, what they and their family members look like, and where they live.
The question then is, What is the absolute minimum of military action—what I am calling “a thousand balls of fire,” named after George Bush Senior’s “a thousand points of light”—to restore peace on terms favorable to Russia? It seems to me that 1000 “balls of fire” is just about the right number. These would be smallish explosions—enough to demolish a building or an industrial installation, with almost no casualties. This last point is extremely important, because the goal is to destroy the system without actually directly hurting any of the people. It wouldn’t be anyone else’s fault if people in the US suffer because they refuse to do as their own FEMA asks them to do: stockpile a month’s worth of food and water and put together an emergency evacuation plan. In addition, given the direction in which the US is heading, getting a second passport, expatriating your savings, and getting some firearms training just in case you end up sticking around are all good ideas.
The reason it is very important for this military action to not kill anyone is this: there are some three million Russians currently residing in the US, and killing any of them is definitely not on strategy. There is an even larger number of people from populous countries friendly to Russia, such as China and India, who should also remain unharmed. Thus, a strategy that would result in massive loss of life would simply not be acceptable. A much better scenario would involve producing a crisis that would quickly convince the Russians living in the US (along with all the other foreign nationals and first-generation immigrants, and quite a few of the second-generation immigrants too) that the US is no longer a good place to live. Then all of these people could be repatriated—a process that would no doubt take a few years. Currently, Russia is the number three destination worldwide for people looking for a better place to live, after the US and Germany. Germany is now on the verge of open revolt against Angela Merkel’s insane pro-immigration policies. The US is not far behind, and won’t remain an attractive destination for much longer. And that leaves Russia as the number one go-to place on the whole planet. That’s a lot of pressure, even for a country that is 11 time zones wide and has plenty of everything except tropical fruit and people.
We must also keep in mind that Israel—which is, let’s face it, a US protectorate temporarily parked on Palestinian land—wouldn’t last long without massive US support. Fully a third of Israeli population happens to be Russian. The moment Project Israel starts looking defunct, most of these Russian Jews, clever people that they are, will no doubt decide to stage an exodus and go right back to Russia, as is their right. This will create quite a headache for Russia’s Federal Migration Service, because it will have to sift through them all, letting in all the normal Russian Jews while keeping out the Zionist zealots, the war criminals and the ultra-religious nutcases. This will also take considerable time.
But actions that risk major loss of life also turn out to be entirely unnecessary, because an effective alternative strategy is available: destroy key pieces of government and corporate infrastructure, then fold your arms and wait for the other side to crawl back to the negotiating table waving a white rag. You see, there are just a few magic ingredients that allow the US to continue to exist as a stable, developed country capable of projecting military force overseas. They are: the electric grid; the financial system; the interstate highway system; rail and ocean freight; the airlines; and oil and gas pipelines. Disable all of the above, and it’s pretty much game over. How many “balls of flame” would that take? Probably well under a thousand.
Disabling the electric grid is almost ridiculously easy, because the system is very highly integrated and interdependent, consisting of just three sub-grids, called “interconnects”: western, eastern and Texas. The most vulnerable parts of the system are the Large Power Transformers (LPTs) which step up voltages to millions of volts for transmission, and step them down again for distribution. These units are big as houses, custom-built, cost millions of dollars and a few years to replace, and are mostly manufactured outside the US. Also, along with the rest of the infrastructure in the US, most of them are quite old and prone to failure. There are several thousand of these key pieces of equipment, but because the electric grid in the US is working at close to capacity, with several critical choke points, it would be completely disabled if even a handful of the particularly strategic LPTs were destroyed. In the US, any extended power outage in any of the larger urban centers automatically triggers large-scale looting and mayhem. Some estimate that just a two week long outage would push the situation to a point of no return, where the damage would become too extensive to ever be repaired.
Disabling the financial system is likewise relatively trivial. There are just a few choke points, including the Federal Reserve, a few major banks, debit and credit card company data centers, etc. They can be disabled using a variety of methods, such as a cruise missile strike, a cyberattack, electric supply disruption or even civil unrest. It bears noting that the financial system in the US is rigged to blow even without foreign intervention. The combination of runaway debt, a gigantic bond bubble, the Federal Reserve trapped into ever-lower interest rates, underfunded pensions and other obligations, hugely overpriced real estate and a ridiculously frothy stock market will eventually detonate it from the inside.
A few more surgical strikes can take out the oil and gas pipelines, import terminals, highway bridges and tunnels, railroads and airlines. A few months without access to money and financial services, electricity, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, air transport or imported spare parts needed to repair the damage should be enough to force the US to capitulate. If it makes any efforts to restore any of these services, an additional strike or two would quickly negate them.
The number of “balls of flame” can be optimized by taking advantage of destructive synergies: a GPS jammer deployed near the site of an attack can prevent responders from navigating to it; taking out a supply depot together with the facility it serves, coupled with transportation system disruptions, can delay repairs by many months; a simple bomb threat can immobilize a transportation hub, making it a sitting duck instead of a large number of moving targets; etc.
You may think that executing such a fine-tuned attack would require a great deal of intelligence, which would be difficult to gather, but this is not the case. First, a great deal of tactically useful information is constantly being leaked by insiders, who often consider themselves “patriots.” Second, what hasn’t been leaked can be hacked, because of the pitiable state of cybersecurity in the US. Remember, Russia is where anti-virus software is made—and a few of the viruses too. The National Security Agency was recently hacked, and its crown jewels stolen; if it can be hacked, what about all those whose security it supposedly protects?
You might also think that the US, if attacked in this manner, could effectively retaliate in kind, but this scenario is rather difficult to imagine. Many Russians don’t find English too difficult, are generally familiar with the US through exposure to US media, and the specialists among them, especially those who have studied or taught at universities in the US, can navigate their field of expertise in the US almost as easily as in Russia. Most Americans, on the other hand, can barely find Russia on a map, can’t get past the Cyrillic alphabet and find Russian utterly incomprehensible.
Also consider that Russia’s defense establishment is mainly focused on… defense. Offending people in foreign lands is not generally seen as strategically important. “A hundred friends is better than a hundred rubles” is a popular saying. And so Russia manages to be friends with India and Pakistan at the same time, and with China and Vietnam. In the Middle East, it maintains cordial relations with Turkey, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Iran, also all at the same time. Russian diplomats are required to keep channels of communication open with friends and adversaries alike, at all times. Yes, being inexplicably adversarial toward Russia can be excruciatingly painful, but you can make it stop any time! All it takes is a phone call.
Add to this the fact that the vicissitudes of Russian history have conditioned Russia’s population to expect the worst, and simply deal with it. “They can’t kill us all!” is another favorite saying. If Americans manage to make them suffer, the Russian people would no doubt find great solace in the fact they are making the Americans suffer even worse, and many among them would think that this achievement, in itself, is already a victory. Nor will they remain without help; it is no accident that Russia’s Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, previously ran the Emergencies Ministry, and his performance at his job there won him much adulation and praise. In short, if attacked, the Russians will simply take their lumps—as they always have—and then go on to conquer and win, as they always have.
It doesn’t help matters that most of what little Americans have been told about Russia by their political leaders and mass media is almost entirely wrong. They keep hearing about Putin and the “Russian bear,” and so they are probably imagining Russia to be a vast wasteland where Vladimir Putin keeps company with a chess-playing, internet server-hacking, nuclear physicist, rocket scientist, Ebola vaccine-inventing, polyglot, polymath bear. Bears are wonderful, Russians love bears, but let’s not overstate things. Yes, Russian bears can ride bicycles and are sometimes even good with children, but they are still just wild animals and/or pets (many Russians can’t draw that distinction). And so when the Americans growl about the “Russian bear,” the Russians wonder, Which one?
In short, Russia is to most Americans a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and there simply isn’t a large enough pool of intelligent Americans with good knowledge of Russia to draw upon, whereas to many Russians the US is an open book. As far as the actual American “intelligence” and “security” services, they are all bloated bureaucratic boondoggles mired in political opportunism and groupthink that excel at just two things: unquestioningly following idiotic procedures, and creatively fitting the facts to the politics du jour. “Proving” that Iraq has “weapons of mass destruction”—no problem! Telling Islamist terrorists apart from elderly midwestern grandmothers at an airport security checkpoint—no can do!
Russia will not resort to military measures against the US unless sorely provoked. Time and patience are on Russia’s side. With each passing year, the US grows weaker and loses friends and allies, while Russia grows stronger and gains friends and allies. The US, with its political dysfunction, runaway debt, decaying infrastructure and spreading civil unrest, is a dead nation walking. It will take time for each of the United States to neatly demolish themselves into their own footprints, like those three New York skyscrapers did on 9/11 (WTC #1, #2 and #7) but Russia is very patient. Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear. But if you still think that there is going to be a war with Russia, don’t think “Armageddon”; think “a thousand balls of flame,” and then—crickets!
Passerbyon December 29, 2021 · at 4:42 pm EST/EDT
The German army has it’s first trans officer, Anastasia Biefang, who is on record as saying “I love being taken in dark rooms”.
In 2014 the Belgian army discarded its Leopard tanks, as a cost saving measure.
I interpret this as: the West has been busy creating an army that corresponds to a political vision, not to military requirements.
And when I look at the Russian proposals, I don’t get an impression of an ultimatum. Rather, the impression is one of “checkmate”: the West can move any piece it wants, they are all losing moves.
Video…
A service-to-self sentience shows his real self and behaviors. video 2MB
China has developed mobile laser weapon based on Dongfeng EQ2050 4×4 tactical vehicle
According to a picture published on the Twitter account of @sugar_wsnbn on December 28, 2021, the Defense Industry of China has developed a mobile laser weapon system based on a modified Dongfeng EQ2050 nicknamed Mengshi, 4×4 light tactical vehicle.
Citing a U.S. Government report, China’s energy laser weapons program has a breadth and intensity that should greatly concern American and Allied defense planners. Some Chinese military experts expect that energy weapons will become more prevalent in 10 to 20 years and will dominate the battlefield in 30 years.
At the edition 2014 of Zhuhai Airshow, the China Academy of Engineering Physics displayed its “Low-Level Guard-1,” a 10-kilowatt electric-powered fiber optic laser. This fixed device consisted of a power module and an equipment module housing the laser and optical guidance/tracking systems. This apparently became the basis for the 30 kilowatts Low-Altitude Laser Defending System (LASS) first displayed by the Poly arms marketing company at a September 2016 military exhibit in South Africa. It claims to have a 4-kilometer range at the 30-kilowatt power level and is useful mainly for defeating swarms of small plastic drones.
According to our first analysis, the original crew compartment of the Dongfeng EQ2050 4×4 light tactical vehicle has been modified with a two doors crew cabin at the front and a fully enclosed compartment located in the middle of the chassis. The laser weapon system is integrated on a turret and can be lowered inside the vehicle in road position.
According to a Chinese source, the whole system is able to track and detect drones at a maximum range of 3 km and the laser weapon will be used to destroy UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) after detection.
The Mengshi or Dongfeng EQ2050 is a Chinese-made light tactical vehicle based on the design of the American Humvee, manufactured for government use by the Dongfeng Motor Group. In 2004 a total of 57 EQ2050 vehicles were sent to the PLA for trials and evaluation. The vehicle is now in service with Bangladesh, Belarus, Central African Republic, China, Gabon, Laos, Mali, Tajikistan,, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
The Dongfeng EQ2050 is powered Cummins EQB150-20 turbocharged diesel developing 150 hp coupled to a 5-speed gearbox. The vehicle can run at a maximum road speed of 120 km with a cruising range of over 500 km.
END OF PART 3
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Above image. Nothing quite captures the rot inside the United States today than the very foundations of New York City.
Calm cool, accurate, and easy to read. Here’s the reality as we move forward in January 2022.
From Strategic Culture…
Eamon McKinney
January 8, 2022
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In a world of chronic shortages China has realized that commodities hold more value than cash.
The current trade war with China began at the very outset of the Trump administration. Apparently alarmed at America’s dependence on Chinese goods, particularly the extent to which its defense industries are reliant on Chinese components and rare earths, Trump had a point but may have better served to speak softly about this vulnerability. He mentioned only two dependencies, there are thousands of products that America relies on China exclusively for.
In moves that were simply anti-competitive practices he then launched in a “tech war” with China. Banning the sale of chips and semi-conductors, along with bans on Chinese 5G and Huawei the global leader in particular. Not content with that the U.S. launched a global push to pressure its “allies’ to also ban Huawei and its state of the art 5G technology. Not to be taken in isolation, the tech war was just part of an overall strategy to damage and restrain China’s economy. “Decoupling” had arrived into the general lexicon.
To an extent the measures worked, the chip shortage caused a slowdown among many tech dependent sectors, but not for long. China has developed its domestic production at a pace not possible anywhere else. It has also convinced China that it needed to greatly accelerate its self-sufficiency across all sectors.
As it stands today, America has nothing that China needs that it can’t make or buy elsewhere. America conversely needs China desperately, without China’s goods the American economy grinds to a halt. The extent of that dependency has been highlighted by Americaэs ongoing supply chain chaos. Manufacturing, retail, construction and countless other industry sectors have stalled without Chinese goods. No country in the world is as dependent on imports as the U.S. Attempts to find alternatives to China are fruitless, no other country can match the efficiency, infrastructure, economies of scale and cost that China can. American manufacturing only accounts for 20% of the American economy, self-sufficiency for Americans is a fantasy, even in the best case scenario, it is generations away.
Long spoken of is “China’s nuclear option”, dumping its dollar holdings and rendering the dollar worthless. China doesn’t want to do that. Firstly the loss of a trillion of its own dollar holdings is not to be taken lightly, and it would also damage the holdings and economies of its other trading partners around the world. Such a move would be an absolute last resort. China’s real nuclear option is the withholding of essential goods to America.
China has all but monopolised the rare earth industries, now accounting for more than 85% of global production. Without rare earths Americas tech and defence sectors would be paralysed.
Curious how President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, makgin American purchases of anything out of Xinjiang illegal.
Funny thing though... all of the Chiense "rare earth" minerals come from Xinjiang and are mostly mined by Uighurs.
Uh oh! (Head slap!)
All the seventeen critical rare earths are mined and refined in China in high volume. Some are mined in other countries in smaller volumes: developing alternative sources to China would a very lengthy process. For the foreseeable future, China decides who gets rare earths, and who doesn’t.
Unknown to many Americans the pharmaceutical industry is among the most heavily dependent of China. 80-85% of its products and precursors come from China, and there are currently few alternatives. I leave it to the reader’s imagination to visualize an America without medications, think Zombie apocalypse.
Some recent developments in China have given us a glimpse of the future. China is stockpiling food and other commodities at unprecedented levels. It is believed to hold more than half the world’s grain and maize already, other essential food stuffs are also being stockpiled at similar levels.
Iron ore, steel and other industrial raw materials are also being hoarded in previously unforeseen quantities. In a world of chronic shortages China has realised that commodities hold more value than cash.
More significantly, China just published a Governmental “White Paper.” It emphasises the need to conserve natural, finite resources (again think rare earths.) It also addresses the paradox that Trump was concerned about, why is China supplying parts to the U.S. military contractors? These among many other sectors will now require a “special export licence”. Read between the lines. China can apply these principles across any exported product it chooses. If they don’t like where it is headed, or what it will be used for, it isn’t going. Fertilisers, for which China accounts for about 30% of the world’s production are already banned from export. This is already forcing American many American farmers to switch from wheat to less fertiliser-intensive crops like soybeans.
China didn’t start or want this trade war, to date it is has been a one-sided assault on the Chinese economy by an increasingly desperate American government. China has not retaliated or employed any of the measures it could have in response, until now.
America now truly has its trade war, and more decoupling will follow, but from here on in, it will be on China’s terms.
Re–shoringmakesgoodeconomicsense,becauseitispossiblethatinthenearfuture,theonlypeoplewhowillacceptthe US dollararelikelyto only beotherAmericancompanies.
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Conclusion
You will not read about the collapse, the SHTF, or the various wars and brush fights in the American Government controlled media. But they are still going on. Here’s an insight as to what is going on.
Finance folk, bankers, accountants, and other FIRE industries have looted the United States, and gutted American society. It’s a big boated crusty shell with nothing but dust on the inside. Soon, very soon, there is going to be a mass realization of this reality.
It could be harsh, brash and catastrophic.
Or, it could be a serious of controlled implosions.
But it WILL HAPPEN.
There is no way out of this mess. None. The only thing that a person can do is hunker down in a smaller community away from the larger clusters of dependent citizenry, become active and involved in your respective communities, and be the Rufus; help others will no concern for personal profit.
I will advise you all to use all of the techniques provided on MM here to center your consciousness, and prepare.
Here’s a quick review…
Affirmation prayer campaigns.
Perform your Fate Forecasting, and monitor it closely.
Center your consciousness using Hemi-sync.
Conduct world-line travel and slides as necessary.
Be part of your community.
Be able to provide a service, or volunteer in your community.
Tune out the bullshit propaganda off the “news”.
Stock up your food larder. Have a garden.
Trade and barter with neighbors.
Ride a bicycle more often. Use the car less.
Surround yourself with cats, or dogs, or other animals.
Be kind. Be calm. Be neighborly.
Make your little area a bubble of kind softness. That way, no matter what changes hits your world, your little area will be mostly immune to them. Be great; be the Rufus.
I believe in you.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Hum. Do you think the title is too soft? Maybe I should tell everyone what I REALLY think, huh?
Hum.
Yeah, today, one of my comments on LinkedIN was banned and erased because it was identified as “Disinformation”. I guess that I am now a “source of disinformation”. I’m bad news, you all.
Sigh.
I said that China was beautiful and that the skies are pretty much blue all the time, and that the pollution problem is pretty much going away.
I guess that this first-hand OPINION of mine is classified as “disinformation” and thus I lose my First Amendment Rights because the Tech Oligarchy says that Rights no longer apply to citizens using their platform.
Well, I can see and understand moderation of comments. I do it, don’t you know. No insults. No stuff about the Jews-Jews-Jews. No stuff about how great and exceptional the USA is. No stuff about how everything is going to change when Candidate XXXXX replaces President YYYYY in the United States.
But that’s just me.
But don’t call an opinion something else. Say what it is.
It is a comment that disagrees with the opinions of the owner of the website. Period. That’s all. Speak your mind. Look people in the eye (or in the cam) and speak your peace.
Sigh.
Hey! Does anyone still believe that America is free?
Banning speech is NOT FREEDOM. It’s something else. So why should the United States exist at all, if it does not represent what it says it represents? Why not call it as it actually is; A military dictatorship disguised as an oligarchy that operates a miltiary empire and is served by serf / slaves controlled by electronic means and fear.
This is all so silly. It makes me yearn for a simpler time….
A simpler time.
Simpler.
Well, maybe not THAT simple.
Maybe simpler like this…
A far simpler time.
Oh Baby!
Yeah. The age of big rail, and comfort. I love those ashtrays in the observation car. I can easily see myself drinking a cocktail, maybe a whiskey sour, and reading a newspaper. Perhaps checking out the prices on Stetson hats.
A cute dame besides me. Smelling like spring flowers, and wearing an lovely hat. Maybe a perfumed hankerchief with her phone number in red lipstick…
An Easier time…
A time when geeks were just regular (if shunned) people, not psychopathic megalomaniacs.
A time when geeks were just regular (if shunned) people, not psychopathic megalomaniacs.
A Nicer time…
…when women had a greater variety of color choices to select from. When women wore bigger earrings. When women would put their hair up when they went out, but put their hair down when they were behind closed doors…
Now, don’t they just look nice?
I like that everyone is holding a cocktail. I’ll bet the men-folk became used car salesmen, eh?
A Pleasanter time. A time when things were peaceful and easy going. Like Petticoat Junction, the Walton’s, or Mayberry RFD…
Cast of Petticoat Junction. There’s uncle Joe there. He almost served as a role model for me.
Oh, by the way, it’s easy to see why I had such a crush on the girls, don’t you know. Thin and trim. Lovely. Sweet, and kind. Nice eyes and great lips.
They were so fine…
The girls were lovely, don’t you know.
One was a red head. One was a blonde, and the other was a brunette. They really covered all the bases in that family. I wonder the true story of their fathers. As I recall, it was never brought up.
It was a Cheaper time…
Twenty five cent fries at Burger Shef.
More comfortable.
I get a distinctive Peter Frampton vibe from this picture…
I get a distinctive Peter Frampton vibe from this picture.
A Happier time. No one is going to tell you what you can do, or say, or think. No one is going to get into your face for smoking a pipe, or having a beer…
A long-lost freedom.
It was our generation that made all the big and nasty weapons that the lunitic government leadership so proudly threatens the rest of the world with. We all should have jsut stayed one, gone fishing and smoked weed in joints.
And Safer… too.
A safer time.
Yes, I do miss all that. And sometimes, I feel that I was born just a half a decade too late. It’s an odd feeling…
This car’s a beaut, eh? Too bad I haven’t a clue as to what it is. (I do love the awnings over the windows in the house in the background.)
I missed out in this by just a few years.
Well, let’s jump back to reality.
The world seems to be going down the drain. It’s not. It just seems to be because all the United States is collapsing at all levels. Have you seen the boarded up downtowns in the cities, the mob riots in the malls and shopping areas, the police shoot-outs and gun downs, and of course the train swarms where gangs of pack urban society strip a train completely bare?
I would just add that to think that the Russian winter can prevent the Russian military from fighting is simply breathtakingly stupid. However, since The Telegraph can post such nonsense, this goes to show that the general public in the West has also been stupidified beyond rescue and can be fed any bullcrap without batting an eye.
While the leaders of the (already dead) Empire are consulting meteorologists (or even astrologists?), they are completely missing the basic reality of modern warfare. These seem to be especially unaware of three basic facts:
Modern warfare is primarily conducted with long range, standoff, weapons and this makes maneuver by fire far more important than maneuver by forces.
Modern warfare places a huge importance on integrated air defenses working together under automated battle management systems. Modern air defense missiles can shoot down targets several hundred of kilometers away. No western air defense system can stop hypersonic weapons.
Modern warfare is primarily non-linear, that is to say that it is more like soccer than like US football: each player (say a battalion tactical group) “follows/opposes” another player rather than trying to hold a line and defend territory.
Those who think that Putin is preparing a WWII style attack simply don’t understand modern warfare at all.
I want to conclude with two small notes:
Strategic vs operational/tactical mobility
The US can very quickly deploy a military force pretty much anywhere on the planet were modern air defenses are absent. This means that in terms of strategic mobility, the USA remains the leader in the deployment of a light force very far away from home.
Russian mobile forces are much much heavier than their US counterparts. A Russian Airborne Division is fully mechanized, and comes with its own artillery, armor, EW, etc.. This weight makes it impossible for the Russian to use, say, IL-76s or An-124s to deploy such an Airborne Division (or brigade or even battalion) somewhere in faraway African or Latin America. However, by this sacrifice of strategy mobility Russia achieves a operational/tactical mobility which US/NATO countries can only dream of. Simply put, Russia does not have the means to deploy a full infantry battalion somewhere in distant Paraguay, but she does have the means to transport a major Airborne Force (up to several divisions) anywhere inside Russia (this especially applies to forces designated as the “reserve of the commander in chief”) or, very roughly, within about 1000km from the Russian border. Once landed, that force will not only have a firepower mobile western forces can’t even begin to hope to acquire one day, they can also quickly relocate being, as I mentioned, totally mechanized (the move of the Rusbat from Bosnia to Pristina is a good illustration of this type of capability).
All of the above is to show how utterly stupid all the discussions about Russian forces being 100, 200 or even 400km away from the Ukie border. If needed, Russia could easily move a very large force (again, fully mechanized) to the Ukie border or even into the Nazi-controlled Ukraine. I do NOT believe that they have such plans (as Russia has much better options) but Russia definitely has the possibility to very quickly augment the 100k soldiers allegedly currently within 400km of the Ukie border.
Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.
I hear a lot of speculations about Russian missiles (or forces) being deployed “Cuban Missile Crisis” -style to either Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua or other friendly nations in Latin America. I would never say never (Putin loves to surprise), but in my opinion other than a reopening of the Russian intel basis in Lourdes, Russia will not actually deploy missiles in any of those countries. There are a couple of reasons for that:
Russia has no need to move her missiles anywhere because she now has the means to strike at the entire continental United States with a wide array of long range standoff weapons.
These countries are all unstable to some degree, and the issue of protecting advanced Russian weapons systems (or forces) from possible political turmoil is a headache nobody in Russia needs.
Deploying weapon systems of forces in a sovereign country require close consultations and negotiations with the host country (including a so-called SOFA). Why go through these headaches we Russian can act unilaterally without consulting with anybody?
Finally, not only can Russia threaten the continental United States without involving any third country, Russia can threaten US interests were they are the most vulnerable: abroad (especially in CENTCOM and in Far East Asia and Pacific region). Personally, I very much hope to see some truly major Russian weapon systems deliveries to both Iran and China. That being said, assisting Latin American counties like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Chile or any other country struggling for its sovereignty would be a very good idea. Cuba would especially benefit from modern Russian air defenses and EW capabilities.
For the time being, let’s hear more about “sanctions from hell” and even “personal sanctions against Putin” or how the Russian tanks cannot deal with snow (or mud) in the exact same location where the USSR defeated the united Europe under Hitler in WWII or, before that, the united Europe under Napoleon.
Frankly, it appears to me that the 3B+PU crazies have totally taken over the Empire, and history shows how well that ends every time these “geniuses” and “hyenas” get involved in international politics.
And, finally, I really hope that Russia manages to finally protect the LDNR from the Ukronazis but WITHOUT any direct military intervention in the Ukraine (I have no problems with deniable, indirect, efforts to assist the LDNR). Such a non-invasion would be the ultimate AngloZionist nightmare and I sure hope they get it!
Andrei
Conclusion
Well, it’s being run by idiots. That’s not your problem though. Their idiocy is running through everything. But you can use a filter to control the flow of bullshit in your life.
Do so.
Aim and strive to re-manifest the joys of life that have been bleached away from you over the last few decades. Strive to get them back.
Start small. Add affirmations. Concentrate on the pleasant memories that matter to you.
Whether dancing at the beach…
Dancing at the beach.
Driving a “real” car again…
Driving a real car again.
Having a family “sit down” dinner at the table, as a daily event… a very big THING. It’s very, very fundamental to having a good, happy and calm life.
According to Jill Castle, RD and founder of The Nourished Child, research about family meals concludes that they play an important role in children's growth, development and health. "Not only do kids who eat meals with their families eat healthier, they are more likely to get good grades, have higher self-esteem and lower rates of mental health concerns," she tells PEOPLE.
It can be challenging for any family to make time together as a unit, yet alone to do it on a consistent basis, but it’s these experiences that create a strong bond among family members, especially when children are involved.
"They are a huge help in modeling routines and behavior to our kids, for exposing them to a wide variety of food that we want them to eat, and for reconnecting after periods of being apart," Amy Palanjian, creator of Yummytoddlerfood.com and author of Busy Little Hands: Food Play! Activities for Preschoolers, explains to PEOPLE.
"It's not always possible for everyone in a family to eat together due to schedules, and sometimes an adult may not be ready for a meal at the same time as a child and they may choose to have something like a glass of wine and a small snack while their child eats.
"It's the focus, conversation, and sitting down together without distractions that really matter—and it's okay if that looks different from a 'family meal,' " Palanjian adds.
Experts talk to us about the significance of these family meal experiences, for both parents and children, and how effective they can be no matter how 'traditional' they are or aren't.
-People
Family sit down meal at the table.
Eating a meal with loved ones and freinds is the FIRST MOST IMPORTANT step in generating a safe, and calm environment for you and your loved ones. It is critical.
Oh, and by the way. Always remember…
You can have the last beer. You can have the last slice of pizza. You can’t have both.
Or having a fun picnic with friends and family. Drinking wine. Eating fresh bread and cheese. Enjoying the day and nature…
Having a fun picnic with friends and family.
Maybe eating some vintage food made by your grandparents. Dig out that old recipe book.
Dig it out.
Dust it off.
Decompile your grandmothers script writing…
Here is a loaf of Italian bread with an Italian seasoned meat loaf concoction, baked in an oven in aluminum foil and covered in melted cheese.
Yum.
No one makes thes things any longer. I guess it’s just too easy to go and eat at “Olive Garden” instead.
A wonderful concoction.
Vintage dinner recipe: Savory supper on a bread slice – Horseradish and tomato version
Look at these ingredients! OMG. Yum!
Ingredients
2/3 cup (small can) undiluted evaporated milk
1-1/2 pounds ground beef
1/2 cup cracker meal
1 egg
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon Morton salt
3/4 teaspoon Ajinomoto (MSG)
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 cups (8 ounces) grated process-type American cheese
3 7-inch loaves French bread
Heavy-duty aluminum foil
2 medium-sized tomatoes (each cut in 6 wedges)
12 strips of cheese for garnish
Directions
Combine first twelve ingredients. Cut bread loaves in half lengthwise. Spread meat mixture evenly over cut surface of each half. Wrap heavy-duty aluminum foil around crust side of bread, leaving top uncovered. Place on cookie sheet.
Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees) 25-30 minutes. Garnish with tomato wedges and strips of cheese. Bake 5 minutes longer. To serve, cut slices across or diagonally.
Serves 6 (Or two hungry American men.)
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Or, you know… being a Rufus. Change your life for the better.
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
LDNR authorities have identified the chemical substances US PMCs have brought to the cities of Mariupol, Krasnyi Liman and Avdeevka: botulinum toxin and dibenzoxazepine. These chemical weapon were brought over from the USA by USAF contracted aircraft and are now deployed by 120 US mercenaries.
-False flag aborted in the Ukraine.
Jabber, jabber, jabber from the war-mongers in America about China and Russia. These people are deranged lunatics. And they are somehow delirious believing their invincibility and superiority. They have funded an enormous war machine, and they are pushing, pushing, and pushing towards WAR!
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Just this week Congress passed a $7 billion dollar anti-China propaganda campaign to villainize China and to prevent Chinese news from ever reaching America. To put this in perspective, the 2020 budget of NASA is $20 billion dollars. So it’s roughly one third of the entire space budget of America. That’s how serious the USA is determined to garner the population on a war-footing.
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Why bother? Americans already consider China the enemy. video 5MB
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Fools.
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Here’s an interesting discussion in the American Conservative circles discussing a war with China. It’s illuminating. Not only on the points of view being bantered about, but the lack of understanding on the true realities, and the absolutely horrific consequences involved.
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Read and be enlightened.
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Top American conservatives including AT’s David Goldman recently debated the risks of preparing for war with China
Whether the United States should prepare for war with China – and thereby make war almost inevitable – was the matter of a verbal brawl at one of the largest gatherings of American conservatives, the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, from October 31 to November 2.
It would have been unseemly to have a polite exchange in a hotel ballroom a few miles from Disney World about the desirability of killing millions of people in a nuclear exchange.
So I wasn’t polite.
Although the arguments on both sides are well known, the Orlando debate merited publication of a lengthy edited transcript, for two reasons.
First, the exchange between former Trump adviser and war-hawk Michael Pillsbury on one side, and former Trump National Security Council official Michael Anton and this writer on the other, set the issues in poignant relief.
Second, the audience of conservative activists, the opinion and organizational leaders of the Republican Party, repudiated the war party by a margin of about three to one, by my informal poll of the audience.
Of the informal guess-timation of participants;
75% of the Conservative opposed a war with China.
25% of the Conservatives were neocons in favor of a war with China.
The American right doesn’t want war with China.
That doesn’t mean war won’t come. Christopher Clark’s magisterial account of the outbreak of World War I, The Sleepwalkers, recounts the intellectual corruption and grandiose irresponsibility of the statesmen who stumbled into World War I.
It’s an old story: If one side mobilizes, the other has to mobilize or be defenseless; if one side believes the other is likely to mobilize, it must do so first. Clark proved – contrary to the usual Anglophile account – that it was the Russian mobilization, urged by the French, that started the war.
By the same token, if the United States attempts to force the issue of Taiwan’s independence, China will pre-empt this by seizing the island. If the United States takes military measures – stationing troops on the island, mining the Taiwan Straits – China will have to consider pre-emptive action.
It’s August 1914 all over again, played as farce rather than tragedy. The European powers had existential interests to defend; the United States has nothing to lose but the perception that it can project its power anywhere in the world, including China’s coasts.
The American military wasted US$6 trillion and thousands of lives in misguided nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, while China built up a massive high-tech defense in and around its coasts.
This weakened America’s strategic position decisively.
The blunderers who vitiated America’s defense will risk war simply to save their reputations. The war hawks have shown scant interest in rising to China’s technological ambition, which presents a real challenge to America’s leading position in the world.
But they will roll the dice on war over issues that do not bear directly on American security.
America is in NO STATE to take on a war against the combined forces of Russia and China.
Compared to them, the sleepwalkers of 1914 were exemplars of enlightened statesmanship.
Transcript
There follows my edit of the transcript of the conference session on China. I have included all the points of substance, leaving out the ancillary discussion in the interest of space.
Video of the event will be available at the conference website.
Pillsbury:The Hundred-Year Marathon [Pillsbury’s best-selling book] was translated by the Chinese military. No royalties, but they had a little ceremony for me. They make fun of Biden. They say Biden is plagiarizing, it’s the Trump administration policy.
Trump loves to say, if Hillary Clinton had won the election, China would be surpassing us now. But it’s not going to happen on my watch. If you’re close watchers of Joe Biden’s TV interviews, four months ago, he said the exact same words.
China wants to surpass us, but it’s not going to happen on my watch. The Chinese reaction to that is to laugh. Because they don’t expect it to come that soon. But when they do surpass us, I think the level of arrogance they showed today is going to be something that we wish for.
When they do believe that they’re superior to us in a number of ways. We will wish that it was 1947 when the Soviet Cold War began, and we did was, we created the CIA by legislation. We created the Defense Department. We created the National Security Council.
There’s not a single new institution in our government to deal with China. I think there should be.
Goldman: We will spend these next few days complaining about how terrible things are. I hear very little discussion of what we need to do about it. My argument is very simple. We’ve done it before. We did it during the Reagan administration. We did it during the Kennedy administration, we did it under Franklin Roosevelt.
We need to rebuild the American economy and we can only do that with a visionary strategy that galvanizes the imagination of Americans like the Kennedy moon-shot, the Reagan SDI.
The numbers show that the Trump policy towards China was a catastrophic failure. We’re importing now more than 30% more from China than we did in January 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs.
And as for technology suppression?
China’s built 70% of the world’s 5G networks and is proceeding to build the applications on top of that, which constitute the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We can do better than China. We’re better equipped to innovate than China.
But we’re not because we’re crushed by a technocratic elite which has sucked the marrow out of the United States economy and generated enormous wealth doing things that, for the most part, harm us. Nothing short of an intervention by the federal government, namely an industrial policy, will turn that around.
That’s not a classically liberal view of things. Industrial policies are dangerous. They lead to rent-seeking behavior, corruption and too much state power. But that’s what you do in a war, and we’ve got the economic equivalent of a war going on.
The thing that worries me the most is the knuckleheads who spent $6 trillion on forever wars and gutted our military by frittering away our resources. If we’d spent a 10th of that on high-tech weaponry, we wouldn’t be worrying about China’s hyper-velocity missiles or anything else like that.
They will steer us into a confrontation with China that will lead to a war that nobody can win.
John Bolton is the most dangerous lunatic roaming the streets of the United States right now.
If you try to force the independence of Taiwan, any Chinese government that wants to rule China will use military action, Communist or not.
The Chinese Communist Party is Communist the same way the mafia is Catholic. They take it very seriously. But it has very little practical importance for running a Chinese empire. You have to suppress rebel provinces. The only thing we can do with Taiwan is to maintain strategic ambiguity, raise the price of the Chinese taking it by force, which we have no means to stop at this point short of a nuclear war.
We should dissuade them from doing it, maintain Taiwanese democracy and walk the fine line.
John Bolton (on the other hand) would call the question, and that gets a lot of people killed.
John Bolton
If you don’t believe me, read Admiral Stavridis’ marvelous thriller 2034. Spoiler alert: We blow up a bunch of their cities. They blow up a bunch of our cities and we’re back to square one.
Now let me talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is what’s really critical here. Wars are not won by stealing data, they are not won by spies, they are won by logistics in depth and the willingness to prevail. The first industrial revolution began when James Watt sold his first commercial steam engine in 1776.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution began when China responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by using artificial intelligence applied to massive data sets to predict potential outbreaks. They are now proceeding to roll out the technologies associated with this. This is the real science fiction stuff we’re talking about – 5G permitting groups of industrial robots to communicate on the shop floor and program themselves.
Smart logistics allow individual objects to be tracked from mine to factory to warehouse to ship back to warehouse to truck loaded onto autonomous vehicles and controlled all the way. It allows AI servers to optimize urban traffic and match every passenger and package to a conveyance.
It allows sensors at the base of soybean plants to communicate with drones that deliver fertilizer and pesticides and direct autonomous tractors to harvest them. We’re talking about an explosion of productivity like that of the first and second industrial revolutions.
The main thing the Chinese stole from us was the great idea of the Reagan Revolution that you can have dual-use technologies, which both give you button guns and butter. They foster civilian productivity. They pay for themselves 10 times over, just like the Apollo program did, just like the Strategic Defense Initiative did.
Every single invention of the digital age. No exceptions started with the DARPA project. They were all funded by the Department of Defense.
The Chinese have stolen the American approach. They want to be Reagan in the Cold War against the sclerotic Soviet Union. Now, they’re not as good at it as we are.
My argument is we have nothing to learn; we only need to remember. We know all these things because we’ve done every single one of them.
We only have to dust off the old ideas and get the band back together, and what I put to you is that the conservative movement needs a part of a positive program, a set of solutions to galvanize the American people, capture their imagination, as Kennedy did when he pointed to the Moon, as Reagan did when he promised to defend the homeland against enemy ballistic missiles.
We need a positive view. We need a can-do approach, and we need to found it on the proven track record of the United States of America in pioneering the future for the world.
Anton: I’m just going to go through a couple of historical points to put this in context. In 1842, the Chinese ceded Hong Kong island to the British in perpetuity – in perpetuity. The Chinese regime at the time of Imperial China greatly resented it. And that resentment carried over through Republican China to Communist China, National, etc.
Why is this important?
This is something that was a thorn in the side of the succession of China as a civilization, not of one regime, not of the communist regime of China for 150 years. It bothered them very greatly. They look forward to the day when they could get it back. They were patient and they got it back.
Without conflict, without much of a struggle, with just some gnashing of teeth and hair, pulling and sighing and crying by the British, but they got it back.
A couple of quotes.
“To win without fighting is best.”
Some of you may remember recognize this.
The second one is:
“To destroy the enemy is not the acme of skill; to capture what you want from the enemy, whether that’s a city, a fortress, a ship, an army, that is the acme of skill.”
Those are both from Sun Tzu, a Chinese classic written about 200 BC. This very well encapsulates the Chinese strategy, I would say, with regard to Hong Kong and with regard to Taiwan.
Taiwan is a similar thorn in the psyche of China.
This would be the case, no matter what the regime in Beijing were. It could be, you know, the neocons’ fantasy of a liberal democratic China, and they would still really care about getting Taiwan back. It’s central to the regime’s conception of its territorial national integrity…
One very firm demand of the Chinese government on the international community is Taiwan can never be a full member of an international organization for which statehood is a member and as a requirement, and they make it very plain that they’ll go to war over that.
They’re very, very clear about this.
An Article five guarantee in the NATO charter, for instance, that is a treaty requirement that the United States has got to go to a nuclear war in defense of a place. [Our agreement with Taiwan] is a commitment of sorts. The full extent of it and what it legally obligates us to do is a bit ambiguous compared to an actual mutual defense treaty signed by both sides.
This comes up a lot, especially lately, because we are told constantly that crisis is brewing in the Taiwan Straits.
China’s been patient.
Patience may be running out.
Maybe they’ll try to do something soon.
What we’ve seen now is a pretty dramatic shift toward I still have a bipartisan consensus on China, but now it’s a bipartisan consensus to sort of beat up on them rhetorically not to take any actual action as far as I can see, except some of the things we talked about.
But what, where that rhetoric leads is, you know, we’re obligated to do something about Taiwan and it would be a stain on the national honor and so on and so forth.
And so if something happens, we’ve got to get into a fight.
China’s preference is still to take Taiwan without fighting for it. Time is on their side. Some are saying, some people who claim to know, are saying, Oh no, no, they’re getting impatient and they’re going to … they’re going to do something shortly.
I just have no basis to evaluate that.
But based on historical precedent, I think the Chinese would certainly like to do exactly what they did with regard to Hong Kong, tipped the balance of strategic power, economic power, political power so much against the possibility of continued Taiwanese independence that public opinion in Taiwan comes to accept the notion that we just have to make the best deal we can make.
And then you win without fighting.
You know, a nation of 24 million can only have so big a military and especially against a nation of 1.4 billion … China’s been building up [its military] for decades. The Taiwan-American combination has not caught up either in terms of sheer numbers and certainly not in terms of technology.
So that’s a way of winning without fighting if you have two or three decades to build up so much force on one side that the other side just looks at it and goes, “I can’t win that fight,” then the fight doesn’t happen unless the other side is delusional or crazy brave.
And the last point I will raise, I just want you to think about this.
I’ll tell you the last time a United States aircraft carrier was sunk. It was the battle of Midway, the USS Yorktown, June of 1942. Actually, we did lose an aircraft carrier last year, not a fleet carrier, a smaller carrier, you know why?
Because it burned in San Diego Harbor and the navy couldn’t figure out how to put out the fire.
USS Bonhomme Richard. A compete loss.
And they had to scrap the ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard. Look it up.
The navy crashed four ships in 2017. Read the official reports from the Department of the Navy and the Congressional investigations on those crashes. They were marvels of esoteric writing to try to dodge the cause of what happened, while somehow revealing it between the lines.
If you’re Taiwan and you’re counting on the United States to defend you, what conclusion did you draw from Afghanistan this summer? Did you get the conclusion that here is a great power that knows what it’s doing, that keeps its promises, and that can execute the things that it wants to do?
American military flee Afghanistan just like they fled Vietnam.
Plausibly, if not certainly, the Chinese have had an ability to sink a fleet carrier for the last decade.
And now… ask yourself how the nation would take it.
Right now, there seems to be a massive amount of group think. We’re only allowed to think about this one way. Only one way.
Nobody is allowed to bring up any of the counterfactuals or any, you know, any other outlying considerations.
And when policy is made on that basis, horrible blunders and catastrophes result.
So before the United States commits itself to some policy or before we, whoever we broadly understood as being in this room are right of center conservatives, intellectuals, nationalists want the best for our country, who want the best for our military, who want to maintain our alliance structure with credibility.
But before we commit ourselves to a policy, are we in this room?
Take a stand in favor of X or against Y and make recommendations that other people may read and listen to.
We should be at least thinking about all of these considerations and, in my view, the conversation as it has. I don’t mean this conversation. I mean, the broad conversation on Taiwan has taken insufficient account of the things that I mentioned and others.
Goldman: The most important fact about any country is its people. Taiwan, according to the CIA World Factbook, has the lowest birth rate of any political entity in the world … China does have a demographic crisis, but Japan, South Korea and especially Taiwan are much worse.
So if you simply. Kick the can down the road, maintain strategic ambiguity. What the Chinese will get if they eventually get Taiwan is a bunch of old people. It’s simply, in my view, not worth having a nuclear war over.
The ideal situation is to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Anything else means a war, and the possible loss of American cities. I ultimately don’t care about China. I care about the United States of America. I’m a nationalist and I want what’s best for us.
We can’t abandon Taiwan because it makes us look weak and we lose important economic advantages and leverage against China. We can’t force the issue and start a war.
The Chinese have hundreds of anti-ship missiles.
Michael Pillsbury and I have something in common. He for many years, and I briefly, worked for a great man at the Pentagon, Andrew Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessment.
Andy told me in 2013 that the Chinese missiles could (and would) sink an American carrier.
Anton: I think the core answer, it is the best outcome is the status quo for as long as possible because any attempt to change the status quo will be worse than the status quo.
There are only two alternatives to the status quo.
One is Taiwanese independence. Well, Taiwanese independence will start a war. Taiwan becoming part of China would be net bad for us. Obviously, if it becomes a part of China through military action, that’s worse than if they just make a deal.
So for as long as the status quo can be maintained, that’s, unfortunately, the best possible scenario. And I just say unfortunately, because it’s an inherently unstable scenario, and it’s also by its very definition, it’s not permanent. The status quo isn’t going to last forever, so let’s stretch it out for as long as we can, and that’s unfortunately about the best we can do.
Pillsbury: President Trump once asked me, How did we used to defend Taiwan? He saw me as the in-house historian who knew all this ancient stuff. Nobody else in the room knew.
So I finally spoke up.
We used to have atom bombs there. We used to have them attached to jet fighters ready to go to hit the mainland with the Chinese made sure that Kissinger took them out in ’74. We used to have a treaty with a garrison and 30,000 troops and a war planning unit underground in Taipei.
Now it’s an art center and a Mongolian barbecue restaurant …
So what do the paranoid group in charge today say when they hear someone like Michael Anton say, oh, we can’t get it in a war, you know, they think that this is American deception.
Of course, the Americans are going to get into a war, which is why they’ve been increasing the deployments and we are moving closer to a nuclear war with China.
It’s not just me saying this, quite a few other people inside the government are saying this as well.
The head of our strategic command in charge of all our nuclear forces, he’s given two interviews. He says the Chinese are engaging in a strategic breakout of their nuclear weapons, including ICBMs, which they are doubling or tripling.
This is the four-star admiral who commands our nuclear forces.
Quite a few other people are talking this way – very different from Michael Anton. They’re more like Churchill. Bill Buckley, the long tradition of Americans like Barry Goldwater …
So I’m going to have to go home to Washington.
So yes, I went to the conservatism conference. A bunch of the people there on the panel said surrender Taiwan. We don’t want to go to war with China. That’s appeasement. Michael and I should clarify his remarks in my humble opinion.
Anton: If they can sink an aircraft carrier and if the only way to stop an invasion of Taiwan is to deploy the forward-deployed aircraft carrier…
and maybe send one or two others out there, which as far as I know, is the only way for the United States to effectively defend the island if the Chinese decide to invade it and they sink one of these 12 to 14 billion dollar behemoths with 6,500 men on board.
What’s the US response going to be at that point?
Pillsbury: Well, we could turn to you and say, I surrender.
Anton: What would you do if you were either the secretary of defense, the president, the head of a Pacific Command and sitting there in Pearl Harbor?
Pillsbury: I’ve been working on this for 30 years. More recently, the US has gotten a much more detailed picture of what it could do.
Exactly which targets inside China could be struck.
Exactly which targets inside China could be struck?
What would happen the first morning?
…
New York “concrete jungle” cleared of the underbrush.
More and more work is being done on both sides about how a war would happen and both the Chinese and American military have come to a conclusion.
It would be a long war.
Okay, maybe two or three years – I haven’t read.
There’s a brand new book by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon under Trump [Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial, featured in a June 2021 Asia Times webinar].
There’s a whole chapter on how to recapture Taiwan after it’s been partially taken by the Chinese military.
This is the state of the art thinking.
There’s a new piece of legislation, the Taiwan Defense Act … They say, please, Pentagon, give us a plan for how to avoid a fait accompli taking place on Taiwan. The Pentagon is drafting their response.
We’re moving closer to a war.
It doesn’t help for you to tell conservatives, oh, if we lose an aircraft carrier, what are we going to do then? What would Winston Churchill say?
Goldman: What, Winston Churchill? Just before the fall of Singapore in 1942, according to Andrew Roberts, Winston Churchill said in the event of war “the Japanese would fold up like the Italians because there were the wops of the Far East.”
Winston Churchill, when it came to Asia, was an absolute idiot, and we bailed him out. He was as stupid as Nicholas II who lost the Russian fleet at Tsushima [in 1905].
Bridge Colby has been a dear friend for 20 years who is now hallucinating about what the United States might do to take Taiwan back.
This is crazy.
Anton: Following the logic of what you said – because I haven’t read whatever STRATCOM put out – I have read certain analyses: not even analysis. There’s speculations that the Chinese are increasing the size of the nuclear arsenal in this underground network of tunnels that we can’t follow and so on.
The official estimate that we have some confidence in is that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is at least 300 warheads, right?
None of which have to be air-dropped anymore.
That means all [delivered by] ICBM hyper-velocity AI-guided missiles. And if you read their doctrine, unlike ours, they formally take a doctrine of minimal deterrence.
That is to say, they have no kind of nuclear warfighting doctrine at all.
They just have city killers.
And if they feel that the territorial integrity of China or the survival of the state is at stake, they’re willing to use those 300 missiles or some portion of them on American cities. The largest 300 American cities would be blasted into radioactive rubble.
The largest surviving American city would be New Bedford, Massachusetts. With it's five gas stations, and two strip malls. -MM
In fact, once as I’m sure you remember in the far-off year of 1996 on one of the more tense moments in the Taiwan Strait, a Chinese general was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the Americans will do anything at the end of the day. They won’t want to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”
Their nuclear arsenal is now triple what it was.
And they’re going on a more offensive posture with nuclear weapons and this thing ends up going to nuclear war.
How that fits into the seeming “recommendation” you just gave, I have to admit, being somewhat dim, I don’t see because it would seem to make the danger greater.
And I also would ask: What do you think the American people’s response to losing a fleet carrier would be?
My own estimate is it would be the greatest psychological shock we’ve had in a generation, arguably greater than 9/11.
Unquestionably, getting one single city nuked would be the greatest psychological shock the American nation has ever had in its history.
So how do we deal with something like that, given that Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important to China, and they’re willing to do that over this, as they have said, than it is to us?
From a Chinese point of view, Taiwan is like the US "Statue of Liberty". Destroy it and the Chinese would sacrifice their first born in revenge.
From an American point of view Taiwan is a news item that fits in the bottom of a news feed. Nestled somewhere between a Viagra ad and a cute cat video. -MM
Well, I’m going to be the dove here and say that it’s possible to avoid a nuclear war, whether it be over Taiwan or any other place.
I’d kind of prefer to do that.
If that makes me an outlier, I’m at least I’m in good company with that other famous nuclear dove named Ronald Reagan.
Goldman: [to the audience] Who volunteers to be in the first city that gets nuked? Any takers?
No. Not me!
Pillsbury: One wonderful book shocked the hell out of me. It came out of the Hoover Institution 1962. It’s called Wall Street and Hitler. It’s by a professor who went through the Nuremberg war trials after the war.
I didn’t know Henry Ford’s photo was in Hitler’s office.
I didn’t know the Nazis gave prizes to different American businessmen.
I didn’t know that the Nazis knew they lacked synthetic oil production and that they got the technology from America.
It’s a long book and it goes to in great detail what Wall Street was willing to do even as late as 1938-1939. We had a huge debate about getting involved in Europe … A big group in our country in ’38, ’39 wanted to surrender to Hitler – for lack of a better word; surrender.
Anton: What are they trying to do? I mean, the Soviet Union had to be contained because the Soviet Union was very explicitly an expansionist power.
We know the Chinese would like to expand and take Taiwan.
I’m not aware of the Chinese wanting to expand and take other people’s territory.
They want to exert dominance in East Asia and in the western Pacific, and some of that dominance they will exert in ways that will be deleterious to American interests.
That’s irrespective of our ability to be able to prevent and stop that. But I think there are certain things we could probably be doing better that could push back against some of those influences. But it’s not as if unless, you know, Michael Pillsbury could tell me differently.
Like the Chinese after Taiwan, they’re going to invade South Korea and they’re going to invade Japan, and then they’re going to invade Vietnam.
I don’t know. I don’t get the sense of that from them, nor in the sources that I read. Granted, I can’t read Mandarin. They don’t say that they want to do that.
Pillsbury: Specifically, specifically on Japan and in India … the Chinese think this is part of the key.
They hope the Americans don’t do it.
The Japanese stick to 1% of their GDP on defense, which is very, very low. Maybe that will double to 2% over the coming years.
That’s an alarm sign to the Chinese.
The Indians want to. They’re fiercely independent. The British poured poison in their ears as they left that the Americans are going to be a new colonial power.
You know, we don’t have a treaty with them. So we’ve got a long way with the Indians. We have quite a few military exercises … So slowly, we’re improving our military cooperation with India, other countries in the region.
Trump picked up the idea of the Quad as a magic word. Japanese say they invented it. Biden attacked Trump. You don’t, you know, you’re not seeking help from our allies. I think it was not true.
But the Quad, even under Biden, is starting to increase its consultations, mainly about China. So things are moving in the direction of your question.
Some videos describing what is not being said
It’s like a discussion over tea and crackers. Oh “Taiwan is sort of important to the Chinese, well we can convince them…” In your fucking wet dreams. The Chinese no longer has any tolerance for the United States BULLSHIT. Just like Putin has. These jackasses have no idea who they are dealing with.
I am gonna show you all.
History
Burned into the minds and soul of China. If you all think that China will allow an invasion by any one for any reason, you are very, VERY mistaken. They will rip apart your cities, gut your nations, and then burn it to the ground. They are a serious nation that does not play games.
Atrocities by the Japanese occupation forces 1937. video 6MB
Actual photos, actual sound recordings. Nasty shit. video 11MB
Atrocities by the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese. video 20MB
The Chinese are not individualists. they fight for their community! video 6MB
Serious. Dangerous. Well equipped. Superbly trained. video 3MB
Very dangerous. Not a music video. look at the equipment. video 6MB
You all think that American military can airlift and sea transport forces into Chinese waters safely to fight this formidable army? video 3MB
Reread the dialog
They are talking about a “long drawn out war” with China.
What would actually happen?
The moment a war starts, the USA GDP will fall to under 50% of what it is now. And that is just if there is another “regional police action”. Not a full-borne war. A full on war, would collapse the GDP to a fraction of what it is now. Perhaps in the single digits. Think 2% to 6%.
As such, inflation would skyrocket, and the value of the USD would approach zero. Think $25,000 for a can of Pepsi. That’s pretty pricy even for you Pepsi lovers out there.
99% of all medicines used in the United States come from China. How is America going to deal with providing hospitals medications, and supplies? That means ZERO MEDICINE. When a full 65% of the American population is on some kind of medicine, and you take that away… whether pain medicine, anti-depression medicine, heart or high blood pressure medicine, anti-biotics, aspirin, tums stomach medicine… what will happen? My guess is “Zombie apocalypse”.
How are the people going to react to all this? Bare store shelves? Insane prices for gas and heating oil? Electricity? And periodic internet if any? They will be very frustrated, angry and fearful. And they all will have lots and lots of guns…
America is a mess domestically. You cannot isolate the long drawn out fighting and overlook how it will affect the domestic population.
Any war with China is a war against Russia and China together. There is no fucking way that America is able to fight TWO (x2) above-peer military forces, let alone one. The result would be the destruction of ALL 13 core aircraft carriers, all major naval bases and staging locations.
How will the American public react to that.
And knowing so…
Conclusion
…America would “push the big red nuclear button”. But it would be too late. American cites would already be rubble.
Funny how NO ONE is addressing this very clear and always present danger. My guess is that they are all collectively idiots of the lowest caliber. And I am being generous.
Consider this memo to all the employees at McDonald’s.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
In the first part, we concluded with an article how the Chinese decapitated the CIA and NED assets inside of China. China identified who the spies were, captured them and executed them immediately. This occurred when President Trump and Mike Pompeo / John Bolton were trying to start a pro-democracy movement in HK, unleash bio-weapons to kill livestock, and try to coordinate saboteurs inside the Chinese mainland.
Here we continue.
But before we do, I would like to say that nothing is better on a long cold day than a hot bowl of soup that has been cooking all afternoon. Especially when it is served with a nice crunchy bread. Don’t you think so? I love the smells and aromas of a good pot of soup or a hearty stew.
A hearty stew.
Ok, let’s continue.
Let’s remember what America actually is today… Everyone in the world believes it is a cluster fuck
Face the facts, the United States is a cluster fuck, and it is pure idiocy to believe that it can act as a unified force to take on Asia. It’s truly mind-boggling. video 2.4MB
Let’s remember who really won the “Korean War” . video 6MB
The United States is in a state of crisis. video 2MB
A comment…
Yes.
Idiocrateson December 29, 2021 · at 3:37 pm EST/EDT
For me its more than a feeling. The US has a proven track record of not being able to negotiate. Their posture has been to ‘appear’ mad, insane to scare the enemy into submission. Its human nature: a normal person is usually afraid of a madman and what he might do.
However, now, the US not only appears to be insane, they ARE insane, after practicing it for so long.
Another point is that I think it is not enough for Russia to neutralize Ukraine, to remove it as a source of insecurity.
Without clear and present danger to the US homeland, without a serious and unambiguous threat to Uncle Shmuels digs all Russian action will be meaningless. The yanks don't give 2 shits about anyone i.e EU, Ukraine and even Israel (yes moneybags notwithstanding).
If Russian does not scare the Dejesus out of normal and decent Americans, none of the ruling elites will get the message.
Clearly time for words has passed.
Dear American ‘Liberals’: Everything You Think You Know About Russia Is Wrong
Russia is actually ahead of the United States on many issues championed by the American Left
This article from our archives was first published on RI in June 2015
We all know what it feels like to log onto the Newsweek-owned Daily Beast, or the puerile random listicle generator known as Buzzfeed, and peruse the invective-laden anti-Russian, anti-Putin screeds contained therein. These hysterical publications serve a function; that function is to convince members of the American public who might balk at militarism that today’s Russia is a dangerous, dirty, backward, evil place, and its leader is some amalgamation of Dr. Evil and Emperor Palpatine.
Unlike during the lead-up to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the left took the lead in opposing the Bush administration’s reckless Middle East policy, American liberals have more or less given Obama a free hand in his dealings with Russia and the Evil Putin. Liberals opposed the Iraq War, and spent many an hour arguing with Bushies about the errors of his foreign policy. It just so happens that these individuals turned out to be right, but their insistence on facts, logic, and commitment to the truth have gone out the proverbial window when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. “Putin is just like Stalin,” my earnest, well-educated, liberal friends tell me. “His next target is Moldova and he hates gay people and Pussy Riot and now he wants to use prison labor to build the World Cup venues and he hates all women and doesn’t support women’s rights. I don’t understand why you are so pro-Russian.” I am pro-Russian because I can tell the difference between right and wrong. I can also realize when a country and a leader are being demonized to further an American geopolitical agenda. Furthermore, I can see that the more the United States tries to create some philosophical difference between the U.S. and Russia as existed during the Cold War, the more the former opens itself up to critique.
I guess it comes as no surprise when the U.S. mainstream media spends pages of copy wringing its hands over the deaths of con artists like Boris Nemtsov, but can’t find a smidgen of space to tell the story of innocent victims like Vanya – who suffered horrific injuries as the result of Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation.” I would like to point out to the well-meaning urban hipsters who may be reading this that they are siding with people like John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and are being duped into supporting a neo-conservative war agenda. American liberals may not be on the same page with Vladimir Putin on many issues, which is great for them, because American liberals are not required to live in Russia. However, it must be pointed out that, in many ways, Russia is actually ahead of the United States on issues that tend to be dear to liberals’ hearts. Due to the constant deluge of invective on Russia’s “backward” slide, when I am aware of the precise extent and stench of America’s dirty laundry, these sanctimonious moral lectures from Americans on “human rights” don’t exactly gel with me.
Capital Punishment
Rather than getting its panties in a twist about a piece of legislation that a foreign country has merely proposed, perhaps the NYT would prefer it if Russia followed America’s lead and started executing its prisoners instead of asking them to repay their debt to society. Capital punishment in Russia has been indefinitely suspended – in contrast to the U.S.’s busy death chambers. Since 1976, the U.S. has executed 1,408 individuals. Thus far in 2015, 14 prisoners have been executed. Texas and Oklahoma alone are responsible for 637 executions. Even for those who support capital punishment, it cannot be denied that America’s death chambers have likely put innocent people to death. By contrast, when Russia entered the Council of Europe in 1996, Boris Yeltsin bumbled his way into abolishing the practice.
Capital punishment has not been reinstated under the administrations of Dmitri Medvedev or Vladimir Putin. In 2008, the UN took a vote on passing a moratorium on the death penalty. Russia was one of the 106 nations that voted in favor; the U.S was among the 46 that voted against. Despite the objections of countries such as the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the measure was approved. Not only does the U.S. far outpace Russia in use of the death penalty, America executes individuals who would not be eligible for the death penalty in Russia. Women, children, and the mentally disabled are exempt from capital punishment. The last person executed in Russia was Sergey Golovkin, a convicted serial killer. In fact, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has spoken out against the death penalty.
Rates of Incarceration
Perhaps the Russians do not need to clear out their prisons through the use of a barbaric and outdated punishment simply because they don’t have as many individuals in prison. Think Progress reports that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the developed world. Additionally, minority American men are more likely than their white counterparts to land in prison.
According to this chart, the incarceration rate in Russia lands somewhere between the U.S. states of Washington and Utah. You read that correctly. The entirety of the Russian Federation has a smaller percentage of its population in prison than the state of Washington. Washington has approximately 7 million residents; Russia has 143 million people. While Russia, China, and the United States overall have the highest prison rates per 100,000 people, the United States has 707; Russia has 470; and China has somewhere between 124 and 172. I wonder when I will see the New York Times gleefully trumpeting this fact as part of a smug commentary on the U.S.’s backward slide.
I also wonder how many World Cup venues could be built with just the population of the Louisiana penal system.
Recognition of Palestine
According to a Gallup poll, Democrats are slowly withdrawing their support for Israel. The left-wing Slate writes of the importance of Palestinian independence. Slate’s Josh Keating mentions naughty Russia in passing because they are unlikely to recognize Kosovo, but neglects to tell its readership that the Soviet Union voted to acknowledge Palestine in 1988. It’s safe to say that this is a cause for concern for many Western liberals, as the Guardian became rather worked up over the firing of an American professor because of his pro-Palestinian stance.
Gun Control
In spite of The New Republic’s dire warnings about drunken redneck Russians shooting anyone who looks at them cross-eyed, even with the new regulations, Russian gun laws are still considered to be restrictive. Even a cursory glance at Russia’s gun policy would make many GOP voters explode with rage.
Russia places limits on the types and number of firearms citizens can own – a very significant distinction from America’s “anything goes” gun policies. Possession of shotguns and other firearms is regulated by law, and gun owners must provide documentation and a “statement from a territorial police officer that weapons can be safely kept at the applicant’s residence” to their local police department.
Russian gun owners must also obtain a gun license. Gun licenses are valid for five years and have to be renewed. Russia also does not allow the controversial practice of open carry, which most American liberals oppose. Additionally, the Russian government requires that citizens who acquire a gun for the first time not only attend firearm safety classes and pass a federal safety exam, but they must also pass a background check. Sensible gun legislation. What a backward sewer!
Of course, perhaps I am being too hard on the United States. Russia doesn’t have the National Rifle Association buying off every politician from dog catcher to members of Congress.
While abortion has been legal in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, individual states have passed legislation placing limits on abortion. While legislators in the Russian Duma have proposed a bill that would limit access to abortion, the proposal seeks to limit state insurance payments for abortions. This is still more generous than American abortion practices, where no public money goes to pay for abortions. As of right now, abortions are available to women over the age of 16 up to the 12th week of pregnancy. No Russian woman seeking an abortion under her government’s health plan is required to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.
Health care continues to be a contentious issue in the U.S. Although Obamacare has lowered the percentage of uninsured adults, there are still 42 million Americans without health care. Russia, like many developed nations around the world, has universal health coverage. No, it is not perfect. Most systems like Russia’s face problems such as coverage gaps and budget shortfalls, but it is a system that Russia has had in place since Soviet times, and is a guarantee that it gives to all of its citizens. Also, did I mention there is free abortion?
Admittedly, I do not know much about the Russian health care system. They are protesting their right to hang onto their Soviet-style health care system. Although the Western media gleefullyreported that Russians protested cuts in health care due to sanctions and low oil prices, I am pretty certain that citizens taking to the streets to express their displeasure with their government’s policy is a sign of a healthy democracy. Furthermore, taking sick pleasure in other people having a hard time because you don’t happen to like their leader isn’t what I would call progressive. It also doesn’t make America’s health care system any better.
The Down & Dirty
Since Russia will hopefully still be hosting the World Cup in 2018, it’s safe to assume that the Western press will continue to beat the same very dead horses they banged on about during Sochi – gay rights and Pussy Riot – because these issues take precedence over the humanitarian tragedy occurring right now in Ukraine.
Let me take my American liberal friends on a little tour, and show them why the focus on these issues is actually war propaganda. It’s very cleverly disguised war propaganda, but war propaganda nonetheless.
Gay Rights
Americans are exceptional. We know that. They are exceptionally specious when it comes to the issue of the LGBT community in Russia.
During the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics, we heard day after day after day how the “gay propaganda” law in Russia would soon lead to gay people being rounded up in cattle cars and shipped off to concentration camps in Siberia. The blame for all of this was laid at the feet of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who calmly and rationally explains his views on the subject here. Despite the fact that Putin actually does not hate gay people, the Western press forged ahead painting a picture of a Russia where homosexuals are “hunted” with the full support of the Russian public and its demonic leader. In fact, when Russia jailed anti-gay nationalist Maxim Martinskovich for his crimes, it wasn’t good enough for the Daily Beast and CNN tried to take the credit, even though Martinskovich had been on the Russian government’s radar for a while and had actually been jailed in 2007. CNN even tried to claim that before his arrest, Putin was refusing to arrest Martinskovich, conveniently leaving out the fact that Martinskovich had fled to Cuba.
One doesn’t have to agree with Putin’s views on the subject, nor do they have to be particularly supportive of Russia in general to see that it is being singled out and demonized
for a policy that was passed through a democratic process. To my knowledge, the U.S. has never changed a domestic policy simply because a foreign press was whining about how unfair it was, so I am uncertain why Russia is expected to do so.
Pussy Riot
You guys cannot be serious with this. How is walking into a church, interrupting a service, going into a sacred area of said church, dancing around like five-year-olds, and scaring a bunch of little old Russian ladies brave? Or a protest? Seriously? I am all for freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but if they wanted to protest Putin I am sure they could have found a service that he actually attended. Even then, I am doubtful that he would have cared. I am not religious myself, but I believe there is such a thing as freedom of religion, and people have a right to worship in peace.
Pussy Riot calls itself a “feminist punk band.” First of all, there is nothing feminist about Pussy Riot. They are grown women in their mid-20s who don’t mind men twice their age referring to them as “girls.” Western Feminism 101 will tell you that calling grown woman a girl is degrading. Secondly, there is nothing “punk” about them. Punk is about being real, and challenging the status quo. If Pussy Riot is about being real, why did they change their name from the Russian “Bойна” to the English “Pussy Riot”? Perhaps because their intended audience is actually outside Russia?
Then there is the matter of their chosen venue. The original Cathedral of Christ the Savior was demolished by Joseph Stalin in 1931 and was rebuilt only after the fall of the Soviet Union. Considering that this church symbolizes the utter hatred of religion that was par for the course during Soviet times, it is little wonder that today’s Russians were so offended. Not only does the church have symbolic value, but the Romanovs were canonized there in 2000. It is where Yeltsin lay in state after he finally keeled over from heart failure in 2007. What exactly made them this angry that they chose this church for their protest? Were they murdered for their beliefs by Stalin? Were they shot and bayoneted to death for being the daughter of a tsar? Is this challenging status quo? Protesting in a cathedral that is charged with the weight of sad chapters in Russia’s history? Is that challenging the status quo, or being an insensitive brat?
American liberals like to pretend this “song” was about Putin. There are only a couple of lines in the song that actually refer to Putin and the Patriarch. Most Western media claims they were arrested for “hooliganism” when they were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Read that last part very carefully. The rest is about how backward they think the Orthodox church is. That’s fine if they feel that way, but I am pretty sure there is no law in Russia that demands that you join.
Americans were outraged! How dare they? How dare they what? Employ their own laws? Prosecute crimes and hand out punishment i in a manner in which they see fit? And what if this had happened in the United States? You’re telling me that the country that lost its damn mind when Miley Cyrus gesticulated with a foam finger at the”sacred” VMAs would have looked the other way if someone protested in this manner at the National Cathedral in D.C. or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC? How about you go to Boston and interrupt Sunday mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross? I’m sure everyone would have been totally calm. Just like everyone stayed calm when Seth MacFarlane had a potty mouth at the”solemn” Academy Awards. Or how like nobody cared when someone spray painted graffiti at a national park.
I suppose I am not an arbiter of what is and what is not acceptable speech, and what is and is not a challenge to the status quo. But I do know that, had Pussy Riot not been little white girls, maybe the American media would have called them thugs.
I know Russia isn’t perfect, and that’s not the point. But whatever issues Russia has, I feel it is always better to let a country sort these sorts of things out for themselves. Take it from me, the U.S. has plenty of problems of its own. If anything, Russia should take the U.S.’s constant nagging as a compliment. After all, this is the same country that called Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
The United States talks all the time about winning “hearts and minds.” Through the sheer preponderance of facts in their favor, Russia has won my mind. I have freely given it my heart.
A video interlude…
Life in America 1. To understand the entire picture, you have to see the ENTIRE picture, and it is not pretty. video 9MB
Life in America 2. The American government has failed it’s citizenry. It’s all one big pile of shit. video 8MB
Life in America 3. Crime is rampant and it’s every man for himself. video 1MB
China Will Overtake the US In the Course of the Next Ten Years: Max Parry
The US is faced with a long list of hot-spots and tensions. Beginning with the situation in Iraq, where the Parliament has asked the US troops to leave. However, the US has refused a withdrawal, and instead has announced the 2,500 soldiers will be kept on the ground, but in a support mission, not combat.
The tensions between the US and Russia are at the boiling point as Washington threatens, but President Putin replies, “We didn’t come to the US or UK borders, no, they came to ours,” he said recently.Presidents of the US and China held a virtual meeting, but did not make headway in resolving lingering US-China trade war disputes. Trump started a trade war in 2018 which has resulted in both nations paying higher taxes to bring in goods from the opposing country.The US and other western powers have been meeting with Iranian officials concerning renewal of the Iran nuclear deal cancelled by Trump. Iran says the removal of sanctions is a fundamental priority, and it is not clear if the US will accept those terms.Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Max Parry to gain some insight into these situations which are headlines in the international news.Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst based in New York. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media, including the Center for Research on Globalization, the Unz Review, Dissident Voice, and the Greanville Post where he serves as an associate editor. He frequently appears as a political commentator for Sputnik News and Press TV.
1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): The US military is pulling out of Iraq. In your opinion, is the Iraqi military capable of preventing an ISIS resurgence?
Max Parry (MP): First of all, the timetable for the expected drawdown of coalition troops from Iraq is still up in the air. Until now apparently, the resolution passed by the Iraqi parliament following the Soleimani assassination was completely disregarded by Washington.
Initially, the ostensible reason for the protracted reentry of foreign forces in the country was to combat Daesh (editor’s note ISIS) and that pretext for the US-led combat mission expired nearly four years ago, yet coalition forces still remain. Given the historical precedent set by American foreign policy, part of me tends to agree with the pessimistic fears that the announcement by senior US and Iraqi officials of the transition to an “advisory role” is likely just another cosmetic facelift for a continued U.S. occupation. While to some extent I am cynical that Washington has any real intention of withdrawing, the recent developments in Afghanistan arguably marked a turning point for waning US influence in the region so perhaps it is a real pullout of boots on the ground in Iraq after all.
I would note that the resurgence of Daesh, which had been mostly eliminated at the hands of the Iraqi PMU in the areas under its control unlike the former caliphate territory under U.S. occupation, began shortly after the inauguration of Joe Biden earlier this year. It also seems like whenever there is any inkling the US is going to leave the country, an ISIS terrorist attack conveniently occurs (never against the US bases though curiously) and gives the perfect excuse for Washington to remain.
Meanwhile, the U.S. frequently serves as the air force on behalf of the remnants of Daesh by targeting the PMU even as they are fighting ISIS across the border in Syria. At the end of the day, the U.S. uses Daesh as a strategic asset in the region to dominate countries like Iraq and the only hope for ISIS to be eliminated lies with the PMU, not al-Kadhimi and the Iraqi government which essentially allowed the U.S. to murder Soleimani and al-Muhandis on its territory and continuously provokes the Popular Mobilization Forces.
2. SS: The US/EU political pressure on Russia is increasing. In your opinion, how will Moscow react to this pressure?
MP: The source of the tensions between the US/EU and Moscow is the absence of a security guarantee rightfully demanded by the latter from the West, Ukraine and NATO which are leaving Russia with little choice but to take a hard line against their provocations. It is Washington which has continuously withdrawn from arms reduction treaties and NATO that has enlarged eastward despite informal pledges not to expand made to the Kremlin at the end of the Cold War. Russia has no choice but to interpret this encirclement and unfriendly course of action as hostile.
I think we could see in Ukraine what we saw in Georgia back in 2008, one of the shortest conflicts in the history of warfare, where US and Israeli-backed Georgia provoked Russia by shelling civilians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. I believe the same kind of war crimes could occur in Donbass with Ukraine provoking Russia by escalating the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk. After all, the Russian troop buildup on its border was triggered by Ukrainian President Zelensky’s decree stating Kiev’s intentions to retake Crimea from Russia and Donbass from the Russian-speaking separatists. I do not believe NATO is suicidal enough to directly attack Russia but I do see a potential hot war brewing between Ukraine and Russia with the West using Kiev as a cat’s paw for imperialism against Moscow.
3. SS: The Biden administration is in an economic war with China. How will this economic tension reflect on the world economy?
MP: Fundamentally, if you take a close look at Biden’s Built Back Better initiative and legislation, on a geopolitical level it is basically a counter to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project.
For example, its framework weaponizes the issue of climate change as means to single out China and the New Silk Roads to be punished by economic warfare, namely in the form of sanctions. The U.S. geostrategy is clearly dead set on containing China’s infrastructure development and investment of the global south. Meanwhile, at the G7, the World Economic Forum, and these other Western financial institutions we’ve seen them adopt this “Build Back Better” slogan in coordinated unison for the so-called “Great Reset” or Fourth Industrial Revolution, as some call it, in the wake of the pandemic.
We can see how the US-China trade war is playing out in the realm of big tech, with the success of TikTok and U.S. attempts to designate it a threat to national security. Not to mention, there were the sanctions on Huawei. This is because China is on pace to overtake the U.S. as the preeminent country in the world not just economically but geopolitically in the next ten years and this conflict is taking shape in every aspect of the world economy. The U.S. is desperate to halt the rise of Beijing in the global arena because while it has depleted trillions from the Treasury on endless wars and wasteful military spending, domestically it has been de-industrialized and outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas since the 1970s. We are truly witnessing the emergence of a multipolar world and I believe these efforts by the U.S. to keep pace with China were not made soon enough to make any difference.
4. SS: Will the Zionist Lobby in the US be successful in preventing a new nuclear deal with Iran?
MP: I don’t believe the United States is committed to a return to the JCPOA under Biden. Iran has made it abundantly clear the U.S. must lift all sanctions imposed since 2018 after the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement. Biden has been in office nearly a year and has had ample time to make good on his campaign pledge, the ball has been in his court. Instead, we’ve only seen Washington demand further concessions from Iran regarding ballistic missiles, for example, if the agreement is to be re-implemented.
The Zionist lobby tried to sabotage the non-proliferation framework from being adopted and was instrumental in Trump’s move to kill the deal in total violation of international law. While AIPAC’s powerful influence over Washington obviously remains under the Democrats, Biden seems more concerned with using the abandonment of the JCPOA as a political football to score points against Trump and the GOP rather than follow through on returning to what was considered a foreign policy victory under Obama. I foresee a crisis coming to a head between the US and Israel which has become a pariah and total PR disaster for the U.S. where the tide of public opinion domestically is starting to turn against the Zionist entity. That said, I think we are still some ways away from any South Africa-like moment for the Palestinians, unfortunately.
5. SS: Is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project operational? How is this affecting the relationship between Russia and the EU?
MP: Construction of the pipeline was completed but it is not yet operational, awaiting certification from Germany’s energy regulator. This has huge implications for EU-Russia relations and for the Ukraine crisis, as Ukraine is a transit country economically reliant on gas transit feeds the new pipeline would bypass. The US would also be impacted because its economic foothold in Europe would be reduced. In the midst of this, the EU and US are accusing Russia of using the pipeline and its supply of natural gas to Europe to its advantage. These factors are all behind what is driving the crisis in Ukraine and the NATO provocations in the Black Sea against Russia.
Video Interlude…
American homeless. This is NORMAL inside of America. video 8MB
American homeless 2. This is NORMAL inside of America. video 6MB
American homeless 3. This is NORMAL inside of America. video 7MB
Empires Fall. Now It’s America’s Turn, and Russia Will Make It Happen
Russia is allowing the US to overextend before the cauldron collapses around it
This article from our archives was first published on RI in June 2018
It’s important for bullies to always win. Because once their weakness is exposed they can no longer be bullies.
Empires don’t start out as bullies. They start out as the reaction to the last Empire which became a bully after embracing hubris over humility.
Empires have to resort to bullying near the end because they are fundamentally weak. They all over-extend themselves through currency debasement which, in turn, degrades the cultural advantage the society had over the previous Empire.
Donald Trump knows how to bully with the best of them. I go back and forth about his status as a bully, however. He is a mercurial figure whose unpredictability is predictable.
I see him more as Loki than the typical bully. In other words, it’s probably fair to say that to Trump bullying is just another tactic.
So, as the head of the U.S., an Empire in the early stages of collapse, fundamentally weakened by two generations of empire building after the failure of Bretton Woods, Trump will bully his opposition because he knows that an Empire that is not feared is one that will soon be laughed at.
And when that happens, it’s game over.
Trump understands that the U.S. can no longer afford to pay for the post-WWII institutional order. Europe’s been rebuilt but the EU is in the process of tearing it down for the sake of globalism.
And Germany is the one benefiting on our dime.
So, if you are opposed to the Empire, regardless of your politics, seeing Trump take it to the G-7 and, in particular, Germany should be welcomed.
Where you should be worried however, is how that same bullying is being turned on Russia and Iran. In my latest article for Strategic Culture Foundation I remind everyone that none other than Mr. Realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, was advising Trump on Ukraine and Crimea in early 2017.
And after looking at the way Trump is prosecuting our relationship with Russia it’s clear to me now Kissinger had a stronger influence on Trump than anyone thought.
As the Kremlin Turns
The Left still screaming about Russia collusion are themselves delusional. Trump hasn’t been secretly doing nice things for Putin behind everyone’s back. There’s no coordination of policy between them.
I spent most of 2017 arguing with MAGA folks convinced that Trump and Putin were waging a secret war on the Deep State and the Neocons. 4-D chess arguments abounded.
When the reality was that while Trump and Putin keep in touch to ensure little direct conflict between the U.S. and Russian forces in Syria takes place, that is not evidence that Trump is soft on Russia in any way.
Not provoking a nuclear-armed country is not evidence of collusion, just functional brain cells. A statement I can’t make about most of Trump’s critics this week.
This is an operating principle which governed this week’s summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as well. Trump was smart to meet with Kim, who did outmaneuver the U.S. over the past five years, by achieving nuclear-armed status.
It forced the U.S. to the table and Trump, smartly, took the opportunity to save face and choose peace.
The same thing is not on the horizon with Russia today.
The Kremlin has moved on. It would like a better relationship with Washington but it has no illusions about it happening. To Putin’s credit he has not ruled out speaking with Trump, but as Alistair Crooke points out today, there’s little good reason for him doing so.
Trump has crossed so many lines with his Kissinger-inspired policy to force Russia to abandon its relationship with China through economic and political aggression that there’s little to be gained by chatting about anything other than the weather.
Beware the Cauldron
To beat a bully you have to let him over-extend himself. He has to feel confident of your passivity in the face of his aggression. That means if you slap him in the face, he turns the other cheek.
If you attack his friends, he doesn’t attack you.
For more than a year we’ve seen these things play out around the world vis a vis Russia in Syria and in Europe. The attacks are both military, Syria and Ukraine, and financial, the Nordstream 2 pipeline.
I’ve detailed all of this at length over the past year. Putin has taken so many shots to the chin that U.S. / Russian relations bear a great resemblance to the “Rumble in the Jungle” where Mohammed Ali let George Foreman punish him for round after round, expending himself in a futile attempt to knock Ali out.
And once Foreman’s arms felt like lead and his legs like Jello, Ali struck so hard and so fast that he stunned the world.
Russian military strategy is dominated by this type of thinking. Lure your opponent in. Create a weak spot and allow him to attack it over and over. Invite the chaos. Allow him to think he is winning.
So here’s where we are today:
If Trump is successful in getting Germany to cower before his sanctions regime that will, in turn, put Iran under heavy pressure financially and socially.
That may yet lead to a formal withdrawal of IRGC Quds forces from Syria. Yet another win.
But, it will only happen if the U.S. leaves the border crossing at Al-Tanf. Small pirce to pay.
The U.S. negotiates a deal with Turkey to control Manbij, possibly to undermine Russia’s relationship with Erdogan, keeping the Turks in Syria to complicate peace talks.
Military conflict in Ukraine likely in the next few weeks with the UAF attacking the Donbass and an incident in the Sea of Azov.
This supports a failing Poroshenko government in trouble before the election and sucker Putin into direct support which can justify more sanctions and keeping the EU on board because of “Russian Aggression” and “Not supporting the Minsk process.”
Trump is openly tying sanctions and trade normalization with the Nordstream 2 pipeline in brazen mafia-style negotiating tactics further complicating Merkel’s life.
Five more Russian companies were sanctioned this week over ‘cyber attacks.’
He’s openly threatening major multinationals who do business in the U.S. for being a part of Nordstream 2.
I think you get the point. I could go on for another page or two.
Closing the Trap
The point is that this is classic bullying behavior. Trump is pot-committed, as poker-players say, to this policy.
Once you start with sanctions and threats, you can’t stop. It’s go all the way or have your bluff called. With Europe Trump holds aces. They are dependent on the U.S. and their weakness will be the U.S.’s gain over the next year or two. Europe’s sovereign debt crisis will explode and the U.S. will see massive foreign in-flows.
It’ll be a massive win but it won’t be the win. And in winning over Europe it sets him up for the big loss; the fight for the Middle East and Eurasian integration.
His gambit with Russia and Iran becoming an all-or-nothing proposition. Trump has just about pushed all-in. Russia/Iran/China’s passivity has emboldened him. The fecklessness of the Obama administration creating dumpster fires in Ukraine and Syria, however, handed him bad cards and a dwindling stack.
He hasn’t won a hand in the Middle East yet. Sure he’s made headlines but Putin, Rouhani, Nasrallah and Assad have won all the skirmishes that matter. Any wins Trump has gotten were easy ones to pick up. The framework for a deal has always been the same. And no amount of Kissinger-style complications were going to change them.
Iran no more wants to stay in Syria than Putin wants to intervene in The Donbass. So, getting Iran out of Syria is easy. All Trump has to do is leave. Israel won’t like it, but it won’t be their decision. Putin made that clear to Netanyahu when he visited Moscow.
The Kurds are the ones to make that decision for Trump, now that they are openly negotiating with Damascus after Trump backstabbed them over Manbij.
Without the support of the Kurds, the U.S. cannot stay in Syria at all.
So, when we reach the showdown hand Trump won’t have aces. And the classic Russian cauldron will collapse in around him. And losing there will be the end of the U.S. empire abroad.
And the world will rejoice.
Russia’s New Nukes Check-Mate a War-Happy US, Make the World Safer
Now that its aircraft carrier fleet, global ABM systems, and NATO has been rendered useless, the US can get on with dismantling its entire bloated, over-stretched, global network of military bases.
This article from our archives was first published on RI in March 2018
A lot of people seem to have lost the thread when it comes to nuclear weapons. They think that nuclear weapons are like other weapons, and are designed to be used in war. But this is pure mental inertia.
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According to all the evidence available, nuclear weapons are anti-weapons, designed to prevent weapons, nuclear or otherwise, from being used. In essence, if used correctly, nuclear weapons are war suppression devices. Of course, if used incorrectly, they pose a grave risk to all life on Earth. There are other risks to all life on Earth as well, such as runaway global warming from unconstrained burning of hydrocarbons; perhaps we need to invent a weapon or two to prevent that as well.
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Some people feel that the mere existence of nuclear weapons guarantees that they will be used as various nuclear-armed countries find themselves financially, economically and politically in extremis.
As “proof” of this, they trot out the dramaturgical principle of Chekhov’s Gun.
Anton Chekhov wrote: “Если вы говорите в первой главе, что на стене висит ружье, во второй или третьей главе оно должно непременно выстрелить. А если не будет стрелять, не должно и висеть.»” [“If you say in Act I that there is a gun hanging on the wall, then it is a must that in Act II or III it be fired. And if it won’t be fired, it shouldn’t have been hung there in the first place.”]
And if you point out that we are talking about military strategy and geopolitics, not theater, they then quote Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances…” and believe that it is QED. Now, I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Chekhov, when it comes to dramaturgy, and I agree with the Bard as well, provided we define “the world” as “the world of theater,” from which the worlds of geopolitics and nuclear physics are both dramatically different.
Let me explain it in terms that a drama major would understand. If there is a nuclear bomb hanging on the wall in Act I, then, chances are, it will still be hanging on that wall during the final curtain call. In the meantime, no matter how many other weapons are present on stage during the play, you can be sure that none of them would be used. Or maybe they will be, but then the entire audience would be dead, in which case you should definitely ask for your money back because this was billed as a family-friendly show.
Back in the real world, it is hard to argue that nukes haven’t been useful as deterrents against both conventional and nuclear war. When the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they only did this because they could do so with complete impunity. Had Japan, or an ally of Japan, possessed nuclear weapons at the time, these attacks would not have taken place. There is a considerable body of opinion that the Americans didn’t nuke Japan in order to secure a victory (the Japanese would have surrendered regardless) but to send a message to Joseph Stalin. Stalin got the message, and Soviet scientists and engineers got cracking.
There was an uncomfortable period, before the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb, when the Americans were seriously planning to destroy all major Soviet cities using a nuclear strike, but they set these plans aside because they calculated that they didn’t have enough nukes at the time to keep the Red Army from conquering all of Western Europe in retaliation. But in August 29, 1949, when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, these plans were set aside—not quite permanently, it would later turn out—because even a singular nuclear detonation as a result of a Soviet response to an American first strike, wiping out, say, New York or Washington, would have been too high a price to pay for destroying Russia.
Since then—continuously except for a period between 2002 and two days ago—the ability of nuclear weapons to deter military aggression has remained unquestioned. There were some challenges along the way, but they were dealt with. The Americans saw it fit to threaten the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey; in response, the USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Americans didn’t think that was fair, and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eventually the Americans were prevailed upon to stand down in Turkey, and the Soviets stood down in Cuba. Another threat to the deterrent power of nuclear weapons was the development of anti-ballistic weapons that could shoot down nuclear-tipped missiles (just the ballistic ones; more on that later). But this was widely recognized to be a bad thing, and a major breakthrough came in 1972, when the USA and the USSR signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Over this entire period, the principle that kept the peace was Mutual Assured Destruction: neither side would provoke the other to the point of launching a nuclear strike, because such a move was guaranteed to be suicidal. The two sides were reduced to fighting a series of proxy wars in various countries around the world, which were so much the worse for it, but there was no danger of these proxy conflicts erupting into a full-scale nuclear conflagration.
In the meantime, everybody tried to oppose nuclear proliferation, preventing more countries from obtaining access to nuclear weapons technology—with limited success. The cases where these efforts failed testify to the effective deterrent value of nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein of Iraq didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction” and ended up hung. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya voluntarily gave up his nuclear program, and ended up tortured to death.
But Pakistan managed to acquire nuclear weapons, and as a result its relations with its traditional nemesis India have become much more polite and cooperative, to the point that in June of 2017 both became full members of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with China, Russia and other Eurasian nations. And then North Korea has made some breakthroughs with regard to nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, and as a result of that the US has been reduced to posturing and futile threats against it while South Korea has expressed some newfound respect for its northern neighbor and is now seeking rapprochement.
In 2002 the prospect of continued nuclear deterrence was set a major setback when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty. Russia protested this move, and promised an asymmetrical response. American officials ignored this protest, incorrectly thinking that Russia was finished as a nuclear power. Since then, the Americans spent prodigious amounts of money—well into the trillions of dollars—building a ballistic missile defense system. Their goal was simple: make it possible to launch a first strike on Russia, destroying much of its nuclear arsenal; then use the new American ABM systems to destroy whatever Russia does manage to launch in response. On February 2, 2018 the Americans decided that they were ready, and issued a Nuclear Posture Review in which they explicitly reserved the right to use nuclear weapons to prevent Russia from using its nuclear deterrent.
And then, two days ago, all of that came to a happy end when Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he unveiled several new weapons systems that completely negate the value of US missile defense shield—among other things. That was the response the Russians promised to deliver when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty in 2002. Now, 16 years later, they are done. Russia has rearmed with new weapons that have rendered the ABM treaty entirely irrelevant.
The ABM treaty was about ballistic missiles—once that are propelled by rockets that boost the missile to close to escape velocity. After that the missile follows a ballistic trajectory—just like an artillery shell or a bullet. That makes its path easy to calculate and the missile easy to intercept. The US missile defense systems rely on the ability to see the missile on radar, calculate its position, direction and velocity, and to launch a missile in response in such a way that the two trajectories intersect. When they cross, the interceptor missile is detonated, knocking out the attacking missile.
None of the new Russian weapons follow ballistic trajectories. The new Sarmat is an ICBM minus the “B”—it maneuvers throughout its flight path and can fly through the atmosphere rather than popping up above it. It has a short boost phase, making it difficult to intercept after launch. It has the range to fly arbitrary paths around the planet—over the south pole, for instance—to reach any point on Earth. And it carries multiple maneuverable hypersonic nuclear-armed reentry vehicles which no existing or planned missile defense system can intercept.
Among other new weapons unveiled two days ago was a nuclear-powered cruise missile which has virtually unlimited range and goes faster than Mach 10, and a nuclear-powered drone submarine which can descend to much larger depths than any existing submarine and moves faster than any existing vessel. There was also a mobile laser cannon in the show, of which very little is known, but they are likely to come in handy when it comes to frying military satellites. All of these are based on physical principles that have never been used before. All of these have passed testing and are going into production; one of them is already being used on active combat duty in the Russian armed forces.
The Russians are now duly proud of their scientists, engineers and soldiers. Their country is safe again; Americans have been stopped in their tracks, their new Nuclear Posture now looking like a severe case of lordosis. This sort of pride is more important than it would seem. Advanced nuclear weapons systems are a bit like secondary sexual characteristics of animals: like the peacock’s tail or the deer’s antlers or the lion’s mane, they are indicative of the health and vigor of a specimen that has plenty of spare energy to expend on showy accessories.
In order to be able to field a hypersonic nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range, a country has to have a healthy scientific community, lots of high-powered engineers, a highly trained professional military and a competent security establishment that can keep the whole thing secret, along with an industrial economy powerful and diverse enough to supply all of the necessary materials, processes and components with zero reliance on imports. Now that the arms race is over, this new confidence and competence can be turned to civilian purposes.
So far, the Western reaction to Putin’s speech has closely followed the illogic of dreams which Sigmund Freud explained using the following joke:
1. I never borrowed a kettle from you
2. I returned it to you unbroken
3. It was already broken when I borrowed it from you.
A more common example is a child’s excuse for not having done her homework: I lost it; my dog ate it; I didn’t know it was assigned.
In this case, Western commentators have offered us the following:
1. There are no such weapons; Putin is bluffing
2. These weapons exist but they don’t really work
3. These weapons work and this is the beginning of a new nuclear arms race
Taking these one at a time:
1. Putin is not known to bluff; he is known for doing exactly what he says he will do. He announced that Russia will deliver an asymmetric response to the US pulling out of the ABM treaty; and now it has.
2. These weapons are a continuation of developments that already existed in the USSR 30 years ago but had been mothballed until 2002. What has changed since then was the development of new materials, which make it possible to build vehicles that fly at above Mach 10, with their skin heating up to 2000ºC, and, of course, dramatic improvements in microelectronics, communications and artificial intelligence. Putin’s statement that the new weapons systems are going into production is an order: they are going into production.
3. Most of Putin’s speech wasn’t about military matters at all. It was about such things as pay increases, roads, hospitals and clinics, kindergartens, nurseries, boosting retirements, providing housing to young families, streamlining the regulation of small businesses, etc. That is the focus of the Russian government for the next six years: dramatically improving the standard of living of the population. The military problem has already been resolved, the arms race has been won, and Russia’s defense budget is being reduced, not increased.
Another line of thought in the West was that Putin unveiled these new weapons, which have been in development for 16 years at least, as part of his reelection campaign (the vote is on March 18). This is absurd. Putin is assured of victory because the vast majority of Russians approve of his leadership. The elections have been about jockeying for a second place position between the Liberal Democrats, led by the old war horse Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communists, who have nominated a non-communist oligarch businessman Pavel Grudinin, who has promptly disqualified himself by failing to disclose foreign bank accounts and other improprieties and now appears to have gone into hiding. Thus, the Communists, who were previously slated for second place, have burned themselves down and Zhirinovsky will probably come in second. If Americans don’t like Putin, then they definitely wouldn’t like Zhirinovsky. Putin is practical and ambivalent about “our Western partners,” as he likes to call them. Zhirinovsky, on the other hand, is rather revenge-minded, and seems to want to inflict pain on them.
At the same time, there is now a committee, composed of very serious-looking men and women, who are charged with monitoring and thwarting American meddling in Russian politics. It seems unlikely that the CIA, the US State Department and the usual culprits will be able to get away with much in Russia. The age of color revolutions is over, and the regime change train has sailed… all the way back to Washington, where Trump stands a chance of getting dethroned Ukrainian-style.
Another way to look at the Western reaction to Russia’s new weapons is using Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. We already saw denial (Putin is bluffing; weapons don’t work) and the start of anger (new arms race). We should expect a bit more anger before moving on to bargaining (you can have the Ukraine if you stop building Sarmat). Once the response comes back (“You broke the Ukraine; you pay to get it fixed”) we move on to depression (“The Russians just don’t love us any more!”) and, finally, acceptance. Once the stage of acceptance is reached, here is what the Americans can usefully do in response to Russia’s new weapons systems.
First of all, Americans can scrap their ABM systems because they are now useless. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had this to say about it: «То, что сегодня создаётся в Польше и Румынии, создаётся на Аляске и предполагается к созданию в Южной Корее и Японии — этот “зонтик” противоракетной обороны, получается, “дырявый”. И не знаю, зачем за такие деньги теперь этот “зонтик” им приобретать.» [“What is being built in Poland and Romania, and in Alaska, and is planned in South Korea and Japan—this missile defense ‘umbrella’—turns out to be riddled with holes. I don’t know why they should now buy this ‘umbrella’ for so much money.”]
Secondly, Americans can scrap their aircraft carrier fleet. All it’s useful now for now is threatening defenseless nations, but there are much cheaper ways to threaten defenseless nations. If Americans are still planning to use them to dominate sea lanes and control world trade, then the existence of hypersonic cruise missiles with unlimited range and drone submarines that can lurk at great ocean depths for years make the world’s oceans off-limits for American navy’s battle groups in the event of any major (non-nuclear) escalation because now Russia can destroy them from an arbitrary distance without putting any of their assets or personnel at risk.
Lastly, Americans can pull out of NATO, which has now been shown to be completely useless, dismantle their thousand military bases around the world, and repatriate the troops stationed there. It’s not as if, in light of these new developments, American security guarantees are going to be worth much to anyone, and America’s “allies” will be quick to realize that. As far as Russian security guarantees, there is a lot on offer: unlike the US, which is increasingly seen as a rogue state—and an ineffectual and blundering one at that—Russia has been scrupulous in adhering to its international agreements and international law. In developing and deploying its new weapons systems, Russia has not violated any international agreements, treaties or laws. And Russia has no aggressive plans towards anyone except terrorists. As Putin put it during his speech, «Мы ни на кого не собираемся нападать и что-то отнимать. У нас у самих всё есть.» [“We are not planning to attack anyone or take over anywhere. We have everything we need.”]
I hope that the US doesn’t plan to attack anyone either, because, given its recent history, this won’t work. Threatening the whole planet and forcing it to use the US dollar in international trade (and destroying countries, such as Iraq and Libya, when they refuse); running huge trade deficits with virtually the entire world and forcing reserve banks around the world to buy up US government debt; leveraging that debt to run up colossal budget deficits (now around a trillion dollars a year); and robbing the entire planet by printing money and spending it on various corrupt schemes—that, my friends, has been America’s business plan since around the 1970s. And it is unraveling before our eyes.
I have the audacity to hope that the dismantling of the American Empire will proceed as copacetically as the dismantling of the Soviet Empire did. (This is not to say that it won’t be humiliating or impoverishing, or that it won’t be accompanied by a huge increase in morbidity and mortality.) One of my greatest fears over the past decade was that Russia wouldn’t take the US and NATO seriously enough and just try to wait them out. After all, what is there to really to fear from a nation that has over a 100 trillion dollars in unfunded entitlements, that’s full of opioid addicts, with 100 million working-age people permanently out of work, with decrepit infrastructure and poisoned national politics? And as far as NATO, there is, of course, Germany, which is busy rewriting “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles” to be gender-neutral. What are they supposed to do next? March on Moscow under a rainbow banner and hope that the Russians die laughing? Oh, and there’s also NATO’s largest Eurasian asset, Turkey, which is currently busy slaughtering America’s Kurdish assets in Northern Syria.
But simply waiting them out would have been a gamble, because in its death throes the American Empire could have lashed out in unpredictable ways. I am glad that Russia chose not to gamble with its national security. Now that the US has been safely checkmated using the new Russian weapons systems, I feel that the world is in a much better place. If you like peace, then it seems like your best option is to also like nukes—the best ones possible, ones against which no deterrent exists, and wielded by peaceful, law-abiding nations that have no evil designs on the rest of the planet.
The Russian leader, who questioned why NATO had ignored repeated Russian warnings and expanded its military infrastructure eastwards, singled out the deployment in Poland and Romania of the Aegis Ashore missile defence system. He made it clear he did not want to see the same launch MK41 systems, which Russia has long complained can be used to also launch offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, in Ukraine.
“Creating such threats (in Ukraine) would be red lines for us. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that a sense of common sense, responsibility for both our countries and the world community will prevail,” said Putin
To make matters worse, US senators from the Republican party submitted a bill that calls for $450 million in military aid to the Ukraine with new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project. The bill will also label Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” according to a December 18th report from rt.com, ‘Russia reacts to US ‘state sponsor of terrorism threat’:
On Wednesday, eight American Republican party senators submitted a bill, speculatively titled the ‘GUARD Act’, containing a range of measures designed to support Kiev. The proposed legislation would authorize an additional $450 million in military aid and impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the recently constructed pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe through the Baltic Sea, which Ukraine and the US have strongly opposed.
The bill would also officially designate Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” if Moscow advances militarily on its eastern European neighbor. In recent weeks, American and Ukrainian intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of “aggressive actions” on the border with Ukraine, including troop buildup, and said they suspected a Russian invasion could be in the works
A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value
Russia and China has also been working on alternatives to the SWIFT system:
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.
China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further
The US wants its dollar to remain king by any means necessary. One of the main reasons Washington went to war with Iraq was not only about oil, it was because Saddam Hussein had switched from selling oil in US dollars to accepting payments in Euros as retribution for US sanctions. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered by US-backed forces because he was creating an alternative currency which was a gold-backed African dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros in the African continent.
A recent press conference, the US president and liberal war hawk, Joe Biden was asked about what consequences Russia would face if they invaded Ukraine’s territory. The liberal cheerleaders for war at CNN have been reporting what US and European leaders have been up to in regards to planning harsh sanctions on Russia because it’s President, Vladimir Putin is misbehaving, therefore punishment must be served by the American empire, So how dare you Vlad for wanting to protect your country!, “the kinds of costs the US and European allies are discussing for Russia are “designed to be implemented very, very fast,” the official said, without detailing what those measures would be. “That is partly why we have chosen the measures that we are working on.” One of their actions is most likely to cut Russia off the Swift payment system since the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency for the moment. “The Biden administration has repeatedly said there will be severe economic consequences. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan also made clear last week there will be further US defensive military support for Ukraine as well as US support for NATO countries on the eastern flank of Russia invades Ukraine”, continued:
I’ve made it absolutely clear to President Putin,” Biden said. “If he moves on Ukraine, the economic consequences for his economy are going to be devastating. Devastating, number one. Number two, we will find it required that we’ll have to send more American and NATO troops into the Eastern Flank, the (Bucharest) 9, all those NATO countries where we have a sacred obligation to defend them against any attack by Russia. And number three, the impact of all of that on Russia and his attitude, the rest of the world, his view of Russia would change markedly. He’ll pay a terrible price
In early December, rt.com also has been documenting what’s been happening with the Ukraine’s decision to recklessly build-up its troop levels in the Donbass region which is a clear threat to Russia’s security concerns:
Ukraine has now stationed well over 100,000 troops and large quantities of hardware in the war-torn Donbass region, the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged on Wednesday morning, amid rising tensions. Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that “the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasing [their] military force, pulling heavy equipment and personnel.”
“According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said. Zakharova also condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for submitting a bill to the national parliament that would allow units from foreign armed forces to enter the country as part of multinational exercises next year. According to her, such a move directly contradicts the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 in a bid to end the fighting between Kiev’s forces and troops loyal to two self-declared breakaway republics
What’s even more dangerous is the talk of a first-strike option with nuclear weapons against Russia by Mississippi’s high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker as reported by FOX news:
Sen. Wicker made the startling comment during an on-air interview where he was asked about the escalating situation abroad. Wicker, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he is ruling nothing out as a potential response to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground,” Wicker said, adding, that “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action”
Let’s make something clear, if the US and Europe are considering a war against Russia through Ukraine, it can escalate into another nuclear standoff reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands. Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders. Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia. Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet. The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.
The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict. Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war. Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.
END OF PART 2
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
One of the things that I really love about China is the speed and convenience of everything. Facial recognition, QR scans and payments, instant thermal scans and observation, not to mention the zero fees on all financial transactions. It’s really a fiscal paradise.
By big treat is to open up wechat, scan my local supermarket for sales on wine, and then face scan to pay and in ten minutes it’s delivered to my door stop. That would NEVER happen in the USA. Never.
But I do miss some things. Don’t you know.
I will tell you all that I truly miss an original “New York Style” pizza. You just cannot get it anywhere outside of the USA. And when I read the sad, sad news that the price of a slice is going to increase, well I must tell you, it caused a dark pit to form in my stomach.
Such is change.
What’s the matter with the moronic “leadership” in Washington DC today? Can’t they “get it”? You spend like crazy and eventually you and your families are substantially devalued. Your lifestyle decreases, and the value of the cash in your wallet turns to dust. Or maybe slime. Ooozy slime.
Pizza.
What’s the matter with these morons?
New York style pizza slice.
Long time MM readers will understand about the current Geo-political situation. As of December 2021, both Russia and China has had enough of the United States efforts to start world War III, and so they laid down terms.
China was first with “red lines” which America pretty much ignored, followed by Russia which laid down ultimatums.
People (!) facts need to be stated. Russia and China would not do this unless they had a firm “check mate” on the tarmac and ready to go.
Yikes!
This article consists of a bunch of articles from China and Russia concerning the Geo-political scene. It consists of some articles dating as far back as 2017 (at the start of the Trump presidency) and includes others that are more recent.
This is part 1 of three parts.
All in all, you can plainly see that the rest of the world considers the collapsing American government to be ruled by absolute idiots that need to be “put to sleep” (which is a eutheism that means killed humanely) lest a global conflagration engulfs the world and destroys everything.
I post it here because of some insanity comments out of the United States on MM here. Somehow one or two of my articles got passed around some American Conservative websites that the comments reflected a Hal Turner, Rush Limbaugh (dead) and FOX “news” viewpoint. Totally unaware of where they are, or what this site represents. They just skim read, skim comment, and depart.
The mind control apparatus is really in full swing there. And the people are just spouting insane nonsense.
So here is what the rest of the world is saying about the USA. No “America is not back” It’s dying…
The U.S. doesn’t have diplomats any more. Their foreign policy is “steal it, kill those who resist”.
Of course there will be no negotiation.
In any meeting they will do what they do best: use many words and try to confuse whoever is in the room, all the while watching for an opportunity to steal something.
Russia knows this. I’ve got my popcorn ready.
-Patrick
But before we get to the Geo-political nonsense, let’s talk about pizza.
I mean to say, I wonder if the “leadership” of the United States, in their quest to (so called) defend “democracy” actually eating pizza. I suspect that they are way too busy having their servants cook healthy and delicious foods such as steak and caviar for them instead of eating the kinds of food that us “normal’s” eat.
I just cannot picture Blinkedin eating a Big Mac. Can you?
Here’s a homemade attempt at a New York Style pizza. ‘ll bet that the elites in Washington DC doesn’t even know what this actually is…
Well, I’ll tell you what…
These Jack-asses in the “leadership” roles inside of the “United States” are morons and are so disconnected from reality that I sincerely and truly doubt that they know the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper. As I really doubt it. Truth this!
Big Mac
And a whopper…
Whopper
Sigh.
They are probably too busy drinking their Chardonnay and eating their escargot to worry about how their actions influence the rest of the world. Well, boys and girls, a day of reckoning is fast approaching. Don’t you all know.
Washington Prepares to Fail in Ukraine
This chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class.
It’s an indisputable fact: Washington leads the world in self-delusion.
Washington’s political class is poised to march into a hurricane of its own making in Ukraine, a perfect storm of foreign- and defense-policy blunders likely to plunge the American people into future crises and conflicts. Having refused to acknowledge Russia’s vital strategic interest in Ukraine, Washington now wants to subject Ukraine and the NATO alliance to a dangerous and unnecessary test by confronting Russian conventional military power. In turn, Washington and its allies now face a test—one that they could have avoided but are now likely to fail. First, the facts.
The Biden administration is spending $768.2 billion for national defense. Russia spends only $42.1 billion, less than the $48 billion spent by the Republic of Korea. Yet Russian ground forces are superior in capability and striking power to the U.S. Army and Marines, even if both countries’ ground forces were able to deploy to Ukraine.
Russia’s conventional-ground-force superiority stems, in part, from the strategic advantage of fighting close to Russia. Its potency is also a reflection of President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on fundamental defense reform and reorganization. The reform process involved years of struggle to expel old generals who resisted change and install new, resolute fighting forces, composed of young, single men with a profound sense of Russian patriotism and toughness. The policy has resulted in an operationally flexible grouping of smaller capability-based Russian fighting formations, designed to ruthlessly exploit the striking power of Russia’s rocket artillery, tactical ballistic missiles, and loitering munitions.
Far to the west and behind the Polish border sits an awkward collection of U.S. Army and NATO Ground Forces that, despite decades of cooperation, are still challenged to fight effectively as one force. In the last 20 years of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of America’s allies seldom had anything to contribute to our efforts, save a flag and inexperienced troops who were forced to operate under political restrictions. Thus, like the U.S. Army that leads them, the allied ground forces cling to the illusion that NATO can fight future conflicts on land the way Anglo-American allies did during World War II—with large, densely packed divisions, corps, and armies. These are lucrative targets for Russian strike formations.
Additionally, institutional policies to impose diversity and inclusion on the U.S. Armed Forces at the expense of demonstrated character, competence, and intelligence, demoralize our troops. As a result, the dedication, cohesion, and pride of achievement required to sustain America’s professional fighting force have been seriously damaged.
The implications are clear: A U.S.-Russian confrontation in Eastern Ukraine could easily resemble the 1940 Anglo-French experience, with the Wehrmacht provoking a serious backlash at home. Supply-chain bottlenecks, consumer-goods inflation, and soaring energy costs could all worsen if events in Ukraine spiral out of control. As more and more Americans wake up to falling standards of living, how will they react to yet another war for suspicious aims that have absolutely nothing to do with their own vital strategic interests, and make their daily lives even harder?
Reality is sitting on Ukraine’s eastern border, not in the South China Sea or in the strait of Taiwan, and there is ostensibly nothing Washington can do about it. The questions that should concern Washington’s political class are: Will NATO survive its ignominious retreat in the face of superior Russian military power? And, why is Washington conducting policy not from strength, but from weakness—a weakness thus far disguised by the outward show of military power against weak opponents without armies, air defenses, or air forces?
Nietzsche said, “War makes the victor stupid.” After 1991, America’s senior military and political leaders found many reasons to spend enormous sums on defense, but no reason to change the way U.S. forces fight, or to devise a national military strategy tied to tangible, concrete interests and the preservation of American national power.
As John Kenneth Galbraith warned, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.”
Washington’s corrupt and morally bankrupt leaders are walking into a minefield. If they embroil U.S. and allied forces in Ukraine, extraordinary discontent at home and abroad awaits them. However, like so many privileged classes before them, the Biden administration may prefer “complete destruction” rather than acknowledge that its most cherished beliefs are utter delusions. It’s safe to say that whatever happens in Ukraine, this chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class.
Here’s a video!
America’s spending priorities are all fucked up! video 8MB
Insanity..And it is, don’t you know..
Let’s talk about reality…
While the American elite oligarchy are busy eating their fine delicious foods, indulging in fun pursuits, the rest of America suffers. Their solution? To destroy the rest of the world for personal profit. And let the American citizens waste away in what ever conditions that remain. video 3MB.
The TRUE face of America.
As a German I am not happy at all.
The MSM here is fiercely propagating the “Russia,China-bad, EU/USA/UK-good” narrative.
They employ the usual agitprop techniques: the enemy has to be personified and then demonized, the ally generalized and blessed. And thus it’s almost always Putin, and almost always the USA, the EU etc.
Other techniques include not telling full stories, of which Ukraine is the best example. There is ZERO mentioning of UKR being a de-facto Neonazi Junta.
And so on and forth.
I am actually deeply afraid that our leaders gave “simply gone insane” and believe that the usual MO will continue forever.
That is exploitation and gradual erosion of other countries to supply the locust-capitalism of the USA-dominated world. My parents believed in socialism of the GDR. It’s good that they are dead already.
-Darkmoon
Sad. So sad.
Shocking facts and statistics about how corrupt the US economy has become.
This article from our archives was first published on RI in December 2018
Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.
John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists. According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries. In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily. But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.
Just look at what is happening in the airline industry. When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…
AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.
If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.
But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…
United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.
And of course the airline industry is far from alone. In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.
For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers…
Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.
Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.
When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.
Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.
After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.
I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.
Capitalism works best when competition is maximized.
In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome. Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition. Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book…
Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.
Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.
Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power. That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.
When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing. The following comes from the New York Times…
Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worththan the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.
So what is the solution?
Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.
In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.
In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.
And you know what?
Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.
When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.
But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.
We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.
…
My suggestion is give the US 8 hours to evacuate Diego Garcia and then turn it to glass.
.
Two birds with one stone.Its vital for the Empire who displaced the natives and far from any population centers.
-Winston
Laurenton December 29, 2021 · at 3:20 pm EST/EDT
Too many people in the west simply can not grasp the reality of the current world and simply refuse to negociate and to find an acceptable compromise.
Western rulers greatly overestimate their strength. This wrong assessment create two main problems: firstly they think Russia China Iran are bluffing (in their minds nobody is ready to fight them because of how strong they think they are) and if they are not bluffing then they are strong enough to win in any scenario (again because of how strong they think they are).
Ukraine is saying they and the west are ready to confront Russia militarily (words from the ukrainian ambassador to the US). The EU is saying that russian proposals are unacceptable and the pentagon deployed an aircraft carrier to deter Russia. It’s laughable but the pentagon did it anyway. It’s hard to expect something rational from people so detached from reality. Just look at the energy policy in the EU. It’s a catastrophe but they implement their policy anyway no matter the consequences. Now the EU wants to simply forbid any long term gas contract with Gazprom which means things are going te become even worse soon because Gazprom can not deliver enough gas without long term contracts which means without predictability.
We are basically in the scenario I talked about a few days ago: confronting Russia to regime change or break the country with “sanctions from hell” or worse to isolate China to then to start confronting China even more with Iran somewhere in between. I think that’s how the western hardliners decided to proceed. Their plan is based on the false assumption that first Russia has a weak economy and second that Russia is bluffing. I even think that when Russia will start to act unilaterally turning on the “pain dial” instead of getting the hardliners back to their senses the hardliners will go crazy talking about “Russian threat” and “Russian aggression” and they will use that to escalate more quickly. The war propaganda from western MSM will play a key role here.
Their are only two positive news. Firstly biden and putin will have a phone call tomorrow. Maybe things are not as bad as I think they are and a reasonable compromise will be achieved. I think anyone with a rational mind supports this scenario. Secondly the new S-550 mobile strategic missile defense system seems ready for deployment much sooner than expected and the system should be capable of striking spacecraft, warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic targets.
Do you know what this all reminds me of…
Yuppur.
No question about it at all. Roller Disco.
Roller Disco.
Roller Disco.
Don’t ask me why.
Is should be obvious to most aware and thinking people. Who understand Jimmy Carter and the “Russian Menace”. Roller Disco was popular during the Sunset years of the Russian Empire. Just like Tictok is popular during the Sunset Years of the American Empire.
While Civil Society and a global movement work steadfastly across dozens of fields for the abolition of nuclear weapons, planning, preparations, and rehearsals for attacks using deployed H-bombs and nuclear missiles are routine in the US military and NATO. Two years ago, the US Joint Chief of Staff published online, then quickly deleted, its thermonuclear mass destruction titled “Nuclear Operations, Joint Publication 3-72.”
Before the Joint Chiefs took it down, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists managed to preserve a copy. The manual relies on abstractions and euphemism to depict the unthinkable. It says,
“The employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations.”
Of course “employment” means detonation, and “significant influence” means searing fireballs, vaporized victims, blast and shock-wave devastation, demolished hospitals and schools, vast firestorms, and permanent radioactive contamination of water, soil, and the food chain.
The manual explains that nuclear attacks create “conditions” without describing them.
It says,
“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability.”
Then, as if US presidents had never said,
“Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,”
the report pretends it can and should.
“[T]he use of a nuclear weapon will…create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”
US nuclear war practice takes place routinely with allied European militaries. “Steadfast Noon” is NATO’s code name for its annual nuclear attack practice, and Hans Kristensen reports for the Federation of American Scientists that,
“This is the exercise that practices NATO’s nuclear strike mission with the B61 … nuclear bombs the US deploys in Europe.”
Jan Merička wrote in European Security Journal News Oct. 19, 2017, that Steadfast Noon is designed
“to simulate nuclear strikes…and was conducted from the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, where US B61 thermonuclear bombs with the force of up to 340 kilotons of TNT are stored.” (FYI: Hiroshima was incinerated with a 15 kiloton US bomb.)
To illustrate the Pentagon’s ho-hum acceptance of mass destruction, it recently opened in Omaha its new, $1.3 billion Strategic Command headquarters for supervising and targeting the nuclear arsenal, and it named the building after General Curtis LeMay, who, the Omaha World Herald reported, designed and conducted the incendiary bombing of 60 Japanese cities at the end of WWII, bombing that “incinerated entire cities” killing as many as 900,000 civilians.
General LeMay’s motto and that of Strategic Command used to be “Death from Above,” but after the war it was changed to “Peace is Our Profession.”
In Germany, readiness for attacks with nuclear weapons is maintained by the USAF 702nd Munitions Support Squadron, which tends to Germany’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing at Büchel Air Force Base.
Headlines from last October’s bombing “theater” included, and …
“NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany,”
“German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO;”
And from 2017,
“NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open”;
And in 2015,
“NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel.”
While the uninitiated might be aghast, the US military plans and prepares all year round for nuclear attacks at its far-flung “Defense Nuclear Weapons School” of the Air Force Nuclear College.
According to the school’s website, one branch (of “Armageddon Academy”) is at the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, the largest US military base outside the country. Other branches are in New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio. Outlines for this school’s ghoulish courses can been read online. (The site may have been altered since I first reported on it in last June.) For example, the school says boastfully that it…
“is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day.”
Course outlines on the website include,
“Theater Nuclear Operations, a 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting.
The course provides an overview of nuclear weapon design, capabilities, and effects….
Objectives: …Understand the US nuclear planning and execution process;
Understand the targeting effects of nuclear weapon employment.”
Another class is, “Integrated Munitions Effects Assessment … a five-day course that provides students … proficiency in creating target models, developing attack plans using … nuclear weapons….”
Students “will be able to import, edit, and modify target sites”, “Calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] develop attack plans using … nuclear weapons.…”
I am of the mind that setting the stage for nuclear attacks is both criminal and insane. Luckily, millions of people are involved in the newly invigorated movement to rid the world of such madness, via the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Read it sometime. At least you will have, unlike the American “leadership”..
Jose Garciaon December 29, 2021 · at 2:54 pm EST/EDT
I’ve seen better clown shows when I went to a PT Barnum and Bailey circus. This is beyond ridiculous. It’s more a symptom of insanity than anything else
A video interlude…
Did you all realize that throughout China, the school children are being trained on how to handle mass causalities, provide CPR and perform field triage? Yes, it is so, these are extra courses in additional to the military training that all school children get. video 36MB
The only language Americans really understand is this: to get a taste of their own medicine.
Until Americans are fearful of being bombed back to the Stone Age--just as America routinely bombs other nations around the world--the United Snakes of America will continue to do what it does best: lie, cheat, steal, exploit, bomb, invade, rape, and colonize with impunity as it has done since 1776.
Posted by: ak74 | Dec 30 2021 18:31 utc | 10
The West Resembles a Decapitated Rooster, Wings Still Flapping, Barely Flying
"Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one. For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather ..."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2018
When I was five and spending the summer in a small village a couple of time zones east of Moscow I witnessed the execution of a rooster. My brother and I walked over to a neighbor’s house to pick up some eggs. Just as we arrived the neighbor finally caught the rooster and chopped his head of.
The now headless rooster then put on quite an aerobatic performance that was quite amazing. After doing an unlimited takeoff he repeatedly soared and plummeted, executed several touch-and-gos (more like crash-and-goes, actually) and was undeterred by what previously would have been head-on collisions. I was by then quite familiar with the poor aerodynamic qualities of barnyard fowl and was duly impressed with the energetic and breathtakingly erratic behavior of a bird liberated from the mental straitjacket of its brain. Unfortunately, the performance only lasted for a minute or so. A word to the wise: I later learned that it is possible to prolong the show, should the need ever arise, by heating up the hatchet so as to cauterize the severed neck. More recently, I have learned that such sans-têteaerobatics are not restricted to chickens.
Figurative birds, of the mechanical variety, can exhibit something similar. A prime example is the greatest boondoggle in the history of military aviation, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It too is liable to losing its head, in the sense of the pilot blacking out. In addition to being ridiculously expensive (over $1.5 trillion in projected project costs) and plagued with problems (only half of the built planes are considered ready for any sort of mission and there are over a thousand known defects that haven’t been fixed, including ones that make it useless for air-to-air combat or ground support) F-35 pilots often report feeling sick and there have been many incidents where they lost consciousness, probably due to oxygen starvation and circulation problems.
In response, the fatally flawed jet’s maker Lockheed Martin, whose motto seems to be “One boondoggle deserves another,” has decided to add a subsystem. Called Auto-GCAS (for Ground Collision Avoidance System), it takes over automatically if it detects the danger of ground collision and the pilot fails to respond to the alarm and take corrective action. Auto-GCAS then throttles up and directs the plane upward, pulling a maximum of five g’s. What does that do to a pilot who is already feeling sick or is unconscious? Once a safe altitude is reached, the plane levels out and Auto-GCAS shuts off. If the pilot happens to be offline for good, the process repeats until the plane runs out of fuel and crashes. I hope that you are impressed with the sheer brilliance of the plan. A show designed to impress was recently staged at an airfield in Utah, where 35 F-35s took off, one right after the other. It has not been independently verified how many of them landed. Auto-GCAS is slated to be ready for use by 2024, but Pentagon’s planners are hoping to accelerate the process.
All of this made me wonder about the general behavior to be expected of hierarchically organized, centrally controlled systems once they are deprived of their control module. Auto-GCAS is by no means the worst case. For instance, there is the Russian Perimetr system, a.k.a. Dead Hand. If it detects that the Russian military leadership has been incapacitated by a nuclear strike, it will launch an all-out nuclear attack, obliterating the aggressor. This may seem like a really bad plan, but then attacking Russia is a really bad plan too, and one bad plan deserves another.
What makes this plan bad is that it doesn’t elicit the right response. The right response is: “Oh, we see, attacking Russia is sheer suicide, so let’s not do that.” But where’s the money in not planning to attack Russia? And so instead the “One boondoggle deserves another” crew sets forth to build anti-ballistic missile systems (which don’t work) and deep underground bomb shelters stocked with years’ worth of supplies (which is gold-plating; a large shallow grave to jump into when the time comes would work just as well).
And yet as far as planning for decapitation goes, Dead Hand is state of the art. Most other large-scale centrally controlled systems are woefully unprepared for the loss of their command modules. For instance, look at finance. After the financial collapse of 2008 it quickly became obvious that nobody competent or responsible was in charge.
The “solution” was for central banks to start blowing financial bubbles by zeroing out interest rates and flooding the world with new debt. Debt that expands much faster than the economy is garbage debt, and it gave rise to various other kinds of garbage: garbage energy from shale and tar sands, garbage money in the form of cryptocurrencies, garbage real estate investment schemes, garbage corporate balance sheets bloated with debt used up in stock buybacks, a large crop of garbage oligarchs gorging themselves on all of this garbage “wealth” and much else. Things look good while all this garbage is packaged up in financial bubbles, but once they pop (and as all children know all bubbles pop eventually) everyone will end up wearing the garbage.
There are plenty of examples of political auto-decapitation as well. In the US, Trump realized that he can become president simply by insulting all of his competitors (who richly deserved such treatment) and so he did. But now the hive mind of Washington is deeply at odds with the bumblebee-mind of Trump, and neither qualifies as any sort of a head, except perhaps in a strictly symbolic sense. Things are no better in Europe. In the UK, an anti-Brexit team is in charge of negotiating Brexit, struggling to make it as anti-Brexit a Brexit as possible.
That doesn’t seem like any sort of “headedness.” In Germany, Merkel is on her way out, and her replacement has the unenviable task of hammering together a governing coalition out of parties that are too busy knocking heads with each other. The multi-headed bureaucratic hydra in Brussels is not exactly popular with anyone. What is the recourse? Emperor Macron of France, perhaps? Is Europe ready to be headed by a diacritical character? (A macron is a horizontal line you place over vowel letters to represent a long vowel: Mācron.)
There are systems that are properly headless: flocks of birds, schools of fish, communes of anarchists, etc. They are anarchically structured and individuals within them take on temporary, task-based leadership roles as the situation demands and can only expect to be obeyed in accordance with their competence in executing the tasks.
But most of the human systems we have are hierarchically structured and require to be headed by someone. Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one. For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather, not because he is any sort of proper leader, but because it was so easy.
For an even more amazing example of democratic failure, look at today’s Ukraine—the most recent experiment in Western democracy. There, a constitutionally elected, though remarkably corrupt and indecisive president was violently overthrown in 2014 in a US-managed coup and replaced with an American puppet so unpopular that yesterday he was forced to introduce martial law—just in order to be able to cancel the elections scheduled in three months and to remain in office de facto.
To produce a rationale for declaring martial law he sent some small boats on a truly idiotic mission. The boats sailed into a Russian-controlled high traffic zone in the Black Sea, refused to respond when hailed and then pointed weapons at Russian border patrol. For this they were duly arrested and hauled off to jail, and their boats confiscated. Previously, an ongoing civil war instigated by this same president resulted in some fifty thousand casualties, but no martial law was ever deemed necessary. What’s different now? Oh, the elections, of course!
If these are the fruits of democracy, perhaps the Ukrainians should consider going back to a monarchy. Dynastic succession has worked much better and for much longer periods of time. For instance, at the time of its annexation by Russia in 1783, Crimea was ruled by Shahin Girei, a descendant of Genghis Khan who was born around 1155.
That one dynasty, spanning 628 years, ruled the largest empire that ever was. At one point it included all of China, most of Russia, Korea, Persia and India, plus many lands in between. Genghis had decreed that no part of the Mongol Empire could be ruled by anyone who wasn’t a direct descendant of his, and so it was.
The Mongol Empire ended peacefully, with Shahin Girei abdicating his throne and accepting protection from Catherine the Great. Maybe that’s the plan, then: install a Ukrainian Emperor and immediately have him abdicate his throne and accept protection from Putin the Great. Then Putin will turn the heat and the hot water back on, the armed thugs will be marched off to someplace safe for disarming and de-thugging, and the nuke plants will stop breaking down.
Since we seem to be headed (no pun intended) for unstable and disrupted times, it bears pointing out that while democracy may be very nice when everything is going along according to plan, it is not particularly resilient in the face of severe disruption. And what is the plan now—in the US, or in the EU (or what will be left of it)?
We have some truly ghastly examples of the fruits of democracy in the form of the Weimar Republic in Germany or the Interim Government between February and October of 1917 in Russia. If you don’t fancy being ruled by headless chickens, consider picking a leader using whatever ad hoc procedure that works.
The idea is to avoid any more Robespierrian Reigns of Terror, Reichstag fires or October Revolutions—because we already know what those are like.
Another video interlude…
China is not Afghanistan. Any one who thinks so is a fucking idiot. video 3.2MB
China is not Syria. Anyone who thinks so is a fucking idiot. video 4MB
I have been watching the shitshow since Kosovo, more intensely so since Libya. I did my time in the US Marines in the early to mid 1980´s (helos) and was mentored by people with trigger time since WWII in various places around the world. They served both as enlisted and as officers, in different branches of service. I can offer a few perspectives, as somebody who just watched it all pass by, without any affiliation to current people whom are official. I kind of like it that way, because I learn about what is going on through a process which seems to be natural and holisitic, cheerleadering for no one side out of hand. Overall, I want more peace and less absolutely useless violence.
The Russians: in a nutshell they are very tightly wired. Their comportment during the heavy fighting in Syria said it all. They were absolutely professional, orderly and courageous. I could not believe what I was observing upon watching footage of Russian attack helicopter pilots engaging heavily defended targets, at extremely close range, over and over again. Their officers fought and died over there while leading, with barely a whimper. There is a reason why people fear the Russian military now and it is a sound position and appreciation of them in my book. They are not playing. This is also reflected in their political leardership at this point, which is exceptionally clear eyed.
The U.S.: The officer corps is a mess, thinking it is just a career path. They never tell it straight, are almost always worried about appearances and they ability to drive ships in the 7th fleet is a good place to start with for examples of this. The personnel themselves can be formidable but, the politics has probably made that completely impossible. Political leadership, coupled with extremely poor intelligence capacity and outright conceit at the decision making level has lead to one surprize after another. Weapons development and procurement has been used as if it´s only purpose was large scale theft. The biggest problems by far are they act as if nobody has any idea what they are doing or just can´t see where the are going …….. while at the same time relying on plans and direction from people who are cowards and are not prepared to sustain a good old fashioned paper cut.
You know, backing off and picking a new direction could be good for everybody. peace can help. Punks like Gloria and Hillary and that ilk in general are dragging us into an inferno. Russia will start removing pieces from the chess board with lighting speed and very soon, if they are not heeded. The party is over, the police are on the scene, my advice is go home and give it a rest. Fix our shcools and road systems, it is much safer and beneficial.
My take, thank you for letting me post it.
-John
Another video interlude…
China is not Vietnam. Anyone who thinks it is is an idiot. video 2MB
China is not Yemen. Anyone who thinks so is an idiot. video 3.4MB
NATO Preparing for Large-scale, High-intensity Armed Conflict with Russia?
We are at a Dangerous Crossroads in the History of Humanity. Rick Rozoff provides us with a selection of excerpts from major Russian media sources pertaining to the Russia- US/NATO confrontation on Russia’s Western border with Ukraine. The objective is to inform Western readers on how the official Russian media views and analyses this ongoing crisis which could lead the World into a World War III Scenario.
The excerpts include statements by Russia’s Defense Ministry
“NATO is preparing for an armed conflict with Russia , Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing for military attachés and representatives of foreign embassies accredited in Moscow.
“The military construction of the bloc has been completely redirected to prepare for a large-scale, high-intensity armed conflict with Russia,” the colonel-general said.
He explained that the North Atlantic Alliance in its documents, including the military strategy of 2019, directly calls our country the main source of “threats to coalition security.”
At the same time, Fomin noted, the Rome Declaration is still in force, which states that Russia and NATO do not consider each other as adversaries. The parties confirmed this at the 2010 summit in Lisbon. [At which Dmitry Medvedev became the first and to date only Russian or Soviet head of state to participate in a NATO summit – RR]
Targeted provocations by NATO near the Russian borders are highly likely to lead to an armed conflict, the Deputy Defense Minister emphasized. As an example, he cited the attempt of the British destroyer Defender in June of this year to penetrate the territorial waters of Russia off the coast of Crimea. At the same time, the actions of the British Navy ship were provided by the American strategic reconnaissance aircraft RC-135.
As Fomin pointed out, the intensity of such flights in the Black Sea region increased by more than 60 percent compared to 2020, the number of sorties increased from 436 to 710. Strategic bombers B-IB and B-52H of the US Air Force flew 92 times against 78 in 2020 in the airspace of the Black Sea region with access to the conditional line of using weapons. To the west of Crimea, the planes flew up to the Russian borders at a distance of 15 kilometers.
“In total, this year, the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted 15 exercises in the Black Sea. In 2020, there were eight,” the Deputy Defense Minister continued.
The presence of ships and auxiliary vessels from non-regional NATO states “has become virtually permanent.”
“From January to December of this year, 30 calls of NATO ships were made, in 2020 there were 23 of them. The total duration of stay was more than 400 days, in 2020 – 359,” Fomin said.
Activity in the Baltic region
In the Baltic zone, aircraft of NATO countries made more than 1,200 sorties, and more than 50 warships went out for naval reconnaissance. More than 20 exercises were held in the region in 2021.
“At the same time, neutral states and our closest neighbors: Finland and Sweden are actively involved in coalition activities ,” the colonel-general noted.
He also stressed that after the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, NATO actually ignored Vladimir Putin ‘s initiative to impose a moratorium on the deployment of new intermediate and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the possibility of developing reciprocal measures to remove existing fears.
“Every year, the NATO bloc conducts 30 major exercises, during which scenarios for conducting military operations against Russia are being worked out. Within the framework of combat training events, special attention is paid to the creation of strike groups near the borders of our country. In particular, a series of Defender exercises were held in May-June of this year. Europe-2021 with the transfer from the United States of America and Western Europe to the “eastern flank” of reinforcement troops of up to 40 thousand people,” Fomin said.”
***
At the same time, a contingent of about 13 thousand troops from the non-regional states of the bloc is constantly present in Eastern Europe. It has about 200 tanks, 400 armored vehicles, 50 guns and three dozen aircraft and helicopters.
Moscow has expressed concerns about the concentration of Western alliance missile systems, troops, warships and aircraft near Russia’s borders, and NATO’s decades’ long eastward expansion. This month, the Russian Foreign Ministry formally signalled that it considers Ukraine to be a ‘red line’ for Moscow which NATO is strongly advised not to cross.
NATO is preparing for a large-scale armed conflict with Russia, in contravention of the Rome Declaration of 2002, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin has said.
***
From Drang nach Osten “Push Eastwards”
[Russia’s] deputy defence minister warned that NATO’s efforts to expand and strengthen its military infrastructure on its eastern flank have had a negative impact on the security architecture of the entire European continent, but are only one of multiple actions taken by the alliance over the decades to do so.
“In 1999, a military operation which was not approved by the United Nations was carried out in Yugoslavia. The bombing of Belgrade killed innocent civilians, and the country’s economy was disrupted. The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a new round expansion of the bloc and the incorporation of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro, and after that Northern Macedonia,” Fomin said.
At the same time, he noted, the ‘Western partners’ continued to assure Moscow “of the absence of aggressive designs against Russia,” and that Russia believed these assurances, notwithstanding the freezing of interaction with NATO in 1999 in connection with the Yugoslav crisis.
Fomin recalled that the most significant expansion of NATO eastward took place in 2004, when the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the bloc.
This and other waves of expansion significantly increasing the alliance’s military potential on its eastern flank, he said, pointing out that NATO’s borders have moved over 1,000 km eastward, providing it with opportunities to use non-strategic weapons to strike targets inside Russia.
“For example, the minimum flight time from air bases in Estonia to St. Petersburg has been reduced to several minutes. Most of Kaliningrad region is within striking range of artillery systems alone….A significant number of pieces of infrastructure have been transferred to NATO’s disposal, expanding the possibility for the deployment and transfer of troops,” Fomin said.
The reference to Lakenheath is outdated.
.
The officer added that the bloc’s arsenal was beefed up considerably by weapons, vehicles and personnel of the former Warsaw Pact members, plus new ports in the Baltic and Black Seas, and an expansion of NATO’s naval forces.
NATO has focused on the military deterrence of Russia while it used to prefer engaging in joint projects, said Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin.
“The current deplorable state of relations between Russia and NATO can be explained by the fact that the alliance has often resorted to using hybrid methods to contain Russia, combining dialogue with a build-up of military preparations,” Fomin said on Monday….
He said that the deterioration of relations between Russia and NATO began earlier than 2014.
“After the end of the Cold War, the Russian Federation has repeatedly made attempts to find new forms of engagement with NATO, to create a stable, equal system of European security for all,” Fomin said. “It would be wrong to believe that the deterioration of Russia-NATO relations began in 2014.”
“The declared goals of equal cooperation by the alliance were not fulfilled much earlier, in fact, immediately after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact,” he went on to say. “At the same time, Russia was then unprecedentedly open to constructive partnership with the West and carried out a voluntary demilitarization of the country on its western borders.”
Russia also withdrew its troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, the deputy minister said.
The CIA falsely believed it was ‘invincible’ in China — here’s how its spies were reportedly discovered and killed in one of the biggest blows to the agency
A new Foreign Policy report cites sources detailing how the communication system between the CIA’s spies and handlers in China nearly a decade ago was compromised.
The vulnerability contributed to the deaths of at least 30 spies, the sources said.
This internet-based system, imported from operations in the Middle East, was apparently brought to China under the assumption that it could not be breached.
But, according to the report, the program actually had telltale links to the CIA that would have allowed China to work out what was going on.
A firewall used by the CIA to communicate with its spies in China compromised their identities and contributed to their executions by the Chinese government, several current and former intelligence officials told Foreign Policy magazine in a report published Wednesday.
In a two-year period starting in 2010, Chinese officials began accurately identifying spies working for the US.
Chinese authorities rounded up the suspects and executed or imprisoned them before their handlers were able to determine what was going on.
“You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing,” one of the US officials said in the report. “The Ministry of State Security were always pulling in the right people.”
“When things started going bad, they went bad fast.”
US intelligence officials cited in the report are now placing the lion’s share of the blame on what one official called a “f—– up” communications system used between spies and their handlers.
This internet-based system, brought over from operations in the Middle East, was taken to China under the assumption that it could not be breached and made the CIA “invincible,” Foreign Policy reported.
“It migrated to countries with sophisticated counterintelligence operations, like China,” an official said.
“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable.”
Intelligence officers and their sources were able to communicate with each other using ordinary laptops or desktop computers connected to the internet, marking a stark departure from some of the more traditional methods of covert communication.
This “throwaway” encrypted program, which was assumed to be untraceable and separate from the CIA’s main communication line, was reportedly used for new spies as a safety measure in case they double-crossed the agency.
Unbeknownst to the CIA, however, this system could be used to connect with mainstream CIA communications, used by fully vetted CIA sources.
According to the report, the vulnerability would have even allowed Chinese intelligence agencies to deduce it was being used by the US government.
The Chinese set up a task force to break in to the throwaway system, Foreign Policy said, but it was unclear how they ultimately identified people.
The consequences for this breach were grim.
About 30 spies were reportedly executed, though some intelligence officials told Foreign Policy that 30 was a low estimate.
The US officials were reportedly “shell-shocked” by the speed and accuracy of Chinese counterintelligence, and rescue operations were organized to evacuate their sources.
The last CIA case officer to meet with sources in China reportedly handed over large amounts of cash in hopes that it would help them escape, Foreign Policy said.
The CIA has since been rebuilding its network in China, but the process has been an expensive and long endeavor, according to The New York Times, which in 2017 first reported on the suspected vulnerability and sources’ deaths.
END OF PART 1
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
With the December 2021 “Ultimatum” by Russia clear in mind, what will be the consequences if President Biden, and the United States does not take this message seriously? What can we expect to happen? Well this article explores this scenario, as all indications are that they are continuing to play “their games”;
Say one thing, do the complete opposite, and narrate bullshit all over the many, many propaganda outlets that they control.
It might play well in the American heartland, but China and Russia are both DEADLY SERIOUS. This time it’s when “the bullet hits the bone”.
The American Response…
On the surface, we see [1] a signed pledge that the Untied States will not target either Russia or China with it’s nuclear missiles.
Anti-nuclear use agreement.
And, you do know, this is meaningless, though it has got a lot of positive press.
Funny how the “news” fails to acknowledge that the United States has a history of repeatedly breaking contracts, agreements and pledges at will. And also that there’s no verification put into place, or changes in American Geo-political military movements or posturings. Just words. Very well promoted words. But meaningless words with no verification systems, or evidence of any further physical actions.
Then we have [2] a color revolution in Kazakhstan. Which is a big nation wedged and jutting into both Russia and China. On The Saker, Andrei suggests that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions that this is a United States backed color revolution. I disagree.
[2.1] It is the RESPONSIBILITY of the leadership of both Russia and China to assume that it is. Whether this is true or not.
[2.2] Almost ALL of the “color revolutions” in the last 100 years were instigated by the United States. If you can find examples of pure “grass roots” movements, I’d like to how how this is not instigated, but rather a true and real “grass roots” movement.
[2.3] Videos of weapons drop off locations, and the collection of weapons by trained insurgents points to organization at a very high level of involvement.
The 350 pages long report recommended certain steps to be taken by the U.S. to contain Russia. As its summary says:
Recognizing that some level of competition with Russia is inevitable, this report seeks to define areas where the United States can do so to its advantage. We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.
RAND lists economical, geopolitical, ideological and informational as well as military measures the U.S. should take to weaken Russia.
Since the report came out the first four of the six ‘geopolitical measures’ listed in chapter 4 of the report have been implemented.
The U.S. delivered lethal weapons to Ukraine, it increased its support for ‘rebels’ in Syria. It attempted a regime change in Belarus and instigated a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The U.S. is now implementing measure 5 which aims to ‘reduce Russia’s influence in Central Asia’.
Kazakhstan, Russia’s southern neighbor, was part of the Soviet Union. It is a mineral rich, landlocked country three times the size of Texas but with less than 20 million inhabitants. A significant part of its people are Russians and the Russian language is in common use. The country is an important link in the strategic Belt and Road Initiative between China and Europe.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union the country has been ruled by oligarchic family clans – foremost the Nazarbayevs. As the CIA Worldfactbook notes:
Executive branch
chief of state: President Kasym-Zhomart TOKAYEV (since 20 March 2019); note - Nursultan NAZARBAYEV, who was president since 24 April 1990 (and in power since 22 June 1989 under the Soviet period), resigned on 20 March 2019; NAZARBAYEV retained the title and powers of "First President"; TOKAYEV completed NAZARBAYEV's term, which was shortened due to the early election of 9 June 2019, and then continued as president following his election victory
Over the last decade there have been several uprisings (2011, 2016 and 2019) in Kazakhstan. These were mostly caused by uneven distribution of income from its minerals including oil and gas. The oligarchs in the capital of Astana / Nur-Sultan live well while the provinces which produce the minerals, like Mangistauskaya in the south-west, have seen few developments.
Recently the price for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), used by many cars in Kazakhstan, went up after the government had liberalized the market. This caused another round of country wide protests:
The string of rallies that has torn through Kazakhstan since January 2 began in the western oil town of Zhanaozen, ostensibly triggered by anger over a sudden spike in the price of car fuel. Similar impromptu gatherings then quickly spread to nearby villages in the Mangystau region and then in multiple other locations in the west, in cities like Aktau, Atyrau and Aktobe. By January 4, people had come out onto the streets in numbers in locations many hundreds of kilometers away, in the southern towns of Taraz, Shymkent and Kyzyl-Orda, in the north, in the cities of Uralsk and Kostanai, as well as in Almaty and Nur-Sultan, the capital, among other places.
Few saw scenes as fiery as those in Almaty, though.
Clashes in Almaty continued throughout the night into January 5. After being dispersed by police from Republic Square, part of the crowd headed around two kilometers downhill, to another historic location in the city, Astana Square, where the seat of government used to be located in Soviet times.
While there is little reliable way to gauge the scale of the demonstrations, a combination of on-the-ground reporting and video footage appears to indicate that these protests may be even larger than those that brought the country to a near-standstill in 2016.
While the grievances that sparked the first rallies in Zhanaozen were to do with fuel prices, the sometimes rowdy demonstrations that have followed appear to be of a more general nature. Chants of “shal ket!” (“old man go!”), usually understood as a reference to former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who continues to wield significant sway from behind the scenes, have been heard at many of the demos.
The protests escalated soon with gangs of armed protesters taking control of government buildings and setting them on fire. There were also attempts to take control of radio and TV stations as well as the airport. Police, which generally did little to intervene, were gunned down.
The actions in Almaty, the country’s largest city and former capital, are certainly not spontaneous reactions by a crowd of poor laborers but controlled actions by well trained groups of armed ‘rebels’.
Peter Leonard @Peter__Leonard - 9:18 UTC · 6 Jan 2022
Kazakhstan: Very important and intriguing detail with strong shades of Kyrgyzstan 2020. Peaceful people initiate rallies, but shady and violent individuals turn up to sow trouble, and it is never remotely clear who they are or where they came from /1 https://t.co/qYSlUUrMVx
From one account I heard, a similar dynamic played out in Almaty on Wednesday morning. A relatively small and mild gathering formed on Republic Square, opposite city hall. All of a sudden hundreds of extremely aggressive men turned up, threatening all and sundry #Kazakhstan /2
They threatened and attacked journalists standing nearby, ordering anybody who took photographs to delete the images. It was clearly this cohort that was responsible for much of the destruction. And it is a mystery (to me) who they were /3
We have seen similar formations during the U.S. instigated uprisings in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Belarus.
NEXTA, the U.S. financed regime change media network in Poland which last year directed the failed color revolution attempt in Belarus, announced the U.S. demands:
NEXTA @nexta_tv - 13:52 UTC · Jan 5, 2022
Demands of the Protesters in #Kazakhstan
1. Immediate release of all political prisoners
2. Full resignation of president and government
3. Political reforms:
Creation of a Provisional Government of reputable and public citizens. Withdrawal from all alliances with #Russia
A more reliable source confirms these:
Maxim A. Suchkov @m_suchkov - 14:43 UST · Jan 5, 2022
The list of demands of protestors in #Kazakhstan that's been circulating is interesting, to put it mildly.
While most demands focus on bolstering social & economic support & countering corruption points #1, 7, 10, 13, 16 expose the roots of protest & who's driving them
#1 demands that #Kazakhstan should leave Eurasian Economic union.
#7 demands legalization of polygamy "for certain groups of the population" & prohibition on marriage with foreigners
#10 demands independence for Mangystau region &^that revenues of oil companies remain in Mangystau
Caveat: this list been circulating a lot on telegram - could be fake or not representative of what protestors want, thou it appears protestors are a diverse group that includes genuinely disgruntled people, political manipulators, "prof revolutionaries" (that were in UKR & BEL), etc
The government of Kazakhstan has since lowered the LPG prices. On January 5 President Tokayev relived the ‘First President’ Nazarbayev of his position as chairman of the Security Council and promised to act tough on armed protesters.
Kazakhstan is part of the Russian led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as well as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). On the morning of January 5 Tokayev had a phone call with the presidents of Russia and Belarus. He has mobilized airborne units of the armed forces of Kazakhstan. On the evening of January 5 he requested support from the CSTO against the ‘foreign directed terrorists’ which are fighting the security forces.
Russia, Belarus and other CSTO members have dedicated quick reaction forces reserved for such interventions. These will now be mobilized to regain government control in Kazakhstan. Russian CSTO forces are currently on their way to Kazakhstan. Belorussian and Armenian troops will follow soon.
They are in for some tough time:
Cᴀʟɪʙʀᴇ Oʙsᴄᴜʀᴀ ❄ @CalibreObscura - 19:50 UTC · Jan 5, 2022
#Kazakhstan: Captured arms from the National Security Committee (equivalent to Russian FSB) building by protestors in #Almaty: At least 2 PG-7V projectiles, possible boxed Glock pistol & (possibly) more in numerous scattered crates, various kit.
Anti-Armour capability in 48hrs...
During the last decades the U.S. and its allies had been relatively quiet about the dictatorial leadership in Kazakhstan.
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled - 14:18 UTC · Jan 5, 2022
NATO's cheerleading corner of FSU "experts" already working hard to spin Kazakhstan uprisings as somehow Putin's fault or indictment of Putin—but note how quiet our media-NGO complex has been the past 20 years re: the regime's human rights abuses, corruption & "authoritarianism"
Chevron is the largest oil producer in Kazakhstan and the former British prime minister Tony Blair has previously been giving advice to then President Nursultan Nazarbayev on how to avoid an uproar over dead protesters:
In a letter to Nursultan Nazarbayev, obtained by The Telegraph, Mr Blair told the Kazakh president that the deaths of 14 protesters “tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress” his country had made.
Mr Blair, who is paid millions of pounds a year to give advice to Mr Nazarbayev, goes on to suggest key passages to insert into a speech the president was giving at the University of Cambridge, to defend the action.
Times however are different now as Kazakhstan has continued to strengthen its relations with Russia and China.
The CIA offshoot National Endowment for Democracy is financing some 20 ‘civil society’ regime change programs in Kazakhstan with about $50,000 per annum each. The involved organizations currently seem to be mostly quiet but are a sure sign that the U.S. is playing a role behind the scenes. On December 16 details of upcoming demonstrations were announced by the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan.
It is likely that this pre-planned Central Asia part of the ‘Extending Russia’ program has been implemented prematurely as a response to Russia’s recent ultimatum with regards to Ukraine and NATO. Its sole purpose is to unbalance the Russian leadership in Moscow by diverting its attention towards the south.
I however believe that Russia has prepared for such eventualities. They will not affect its plans and demands.
What is difficult to discern though is what is really happening behind the scenes in Astana/Nur-Sultan. Has Tokayev, who was previously seen as a mere puppet of Nazarbayev, really replaced him? His control of the security forces is somewhat in doubt:
Liveuamap @Liveuamap - 19:18 UTC · Jan 5, 2022
Tokayev dismissed the head of his security guard Saken Isabekov. Also, the President dismissed the Deputy Head of the State Security Service of the Republic of Kazakhstan from his post
But the outcome of the whole game is quite predictable:
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled - 14:31 UTC · Jan 5, 2022
The grim likelihood, given all the various "revolutions" in the FSU the past 20 years, is that Kazakhstan's street protests [will be] instrumentalized by a powerful clan to replace the ruling oligarchy with a new oligarchy.
The CSTO troops which are now landing in Almaty will take a few days to end the rebellion. The outcome is not in doubt.
Moscow, not Washington DC, will have a big say in who will come out at the top.
It is quite possible (but not guaranteed) that the results of the whole affair will, like the failed U.S. regime change attempts in Belarus, not weaken but strengthen Russia:
Dmitri Trenin @DmitriTrenin - 7:57 UTC · 6 Jan 2022
#Kazakhstan is another test, after #Belarus, of RUS ability to help stabilize its formal allies w/o alienating their populations. As 1st action by CSTO since founding in 1999, it is major test for bloc. Lots of potential pitfalls around, but can be big boon if Moscow succeeds.
And because of that…
Russian troops formerly on the Ukraine border are now being moved into Kazakhstan.
What great luck for the United States.
What a coincidence!
So there you have it.
There’s a very high probability that the United States continues to play Geo-Poltitical “games”. And it’s a dangerous game that they are playing. On the surface, say the nice things, run the “news” media machine talking about wonderful futures and rainbows, meanwhile the bad stuff continues unabated.
Here’s a couple of articles that discuss this matter…
A Surprise Russian Ultimatum: New Draft Treaties To Roll Back NATO
The release a couple of days ago on the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs website of its draft treaties to totally revise the European security architecture has been picked up by our leading mainstream media. The New York Times lost no time posting an article by its most experienced journalists covering Russia, Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.” For its part, The Financial Times brought together its key experts Max Seddon in Moscow, Henry Foy in Brussels and Aime Williams in Washington to concoct “Russia publishes “red line” security demands for NATO and US.”
Both flagships of the English language print media correctly identified the main new feature of the Russian initiative, encapsulated by the word “demands.” However, they did not explore the “what if” question, how and why these “demands” are being presented de facto if not by name as an “ultimatum, as I consider them to be.
The newspaper articles themselves are weak tea. They summarize the points set out in the Russian draft treaties. But they are incapable of providing an interpretation of what the Russian initiative means for the immediate future of us all.
Normally they would be hand fed such analysis by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon. However, this time Washington has declined to comment, saying it is now studying the Russian treaties and will have its answer in a week or so. In the meantime, America’s reliable lap dog Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, saw no need for reflection and flatly rejected the Russian demands as unacceptable. The “front line” NATO member states in the Baltics also reflexively vetoed any talks with the Russians on these matters.
However, even the FT and NYT understand what Mr. Stoltenberg’s opinion or Estonia’s opinion is worth and held back on giving their own thumbs up or down. They both analyze the draft treaties primarily in connection with the current massing of Russian troops at the border of Ukraine. They assume that if the Russians receive no satisfaction on their demands they will use this to justify an invasion. We are told that in such an eventuality a new Cold War will set in on the Old Continent, as if that will be the end of all the fuss.
In part, the problem with these media is that their journalist and editorial teams are tone deaf as regards things Russian. They are insensitive to nuance and incapable of seeing what is new here in content and still more in the presentation of the Russian texts. In part, the weakness is attributable to the common problem of journalists: their time horizon goes back to what happened last week. They lack perspective.
In what I present below, I will attempt to address these shortcomings. I will not invoke historical time, which would possibly take us back seventy years to the start of the first Cold War or even thirty years to the end of that Cold War, but will restrict my commentary to the time surrounding the last such Russian call for treaties to regulate the security environment on the European continent, 2008 – 2009 under then President Dmitry Medvedev. That is within the time horizon of political science.
I will pay particular attention to the tone of this Russian démarche and will try to explain why the Russians have drawn their “red lines” in the sand precisely now. All of this will lead to a conclusion that it is not only President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev who should be concerned about the condition of local bomb shelters, but also all of us in Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, etc. on this side of the Atlantic, and in Washington, D.C., New York and other major centers on the American continent. We are staring down what might be called Cuban Missile Crisis Redux.
We commentators each have our own starting dates for the narratives we offer to the reading public. In my case, I choose to begin with President Putin’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. That speech in itself was very unusual, as Putin explained from his first moments at the lectern:
“This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. This conference’s format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech [the Conference host] will not turn on the red light over there.”
This led him to deliver the following bold assertion:
“I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue.”
In a word, the concerns and the proposed process of solution through renewal of the architecture of security that we see today in Russia’s latest draft treaties go straight back to 2007 when Vladimir Putin came out publicly on the subject in what might be described as the lion’s den of the world security establishment.
With Senator John McCain and other champions of American global hegemony staring at him in disbelief from the front rows, in that speech Vladimir Putin set out in detail Russia’s rejection of the US led unipolar world as a source of international tensions, recourse to military solutions, an arms race and nuclear proliferation.
US hegemony was undemocratic and unworkable, he said.
The speech was also notable for Putin’s mention of the shabby treatment his country had received at American hands following the breakup of the USSR in the 1990s straight through into the new millennium. The key issue was expansion of NATO to the East, taking in former Warsaw Pact countries and, finally, former USSR republics, the Baltic States.
I quote:
“It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin’s 2007 speech was cast in the manner of complaint. It came from a country that was still only partially recovered from the economic devastation it suffered in the 1990s during a badly managed transition from the Soviet command economy to a market economy.
More to the point, his was a country with greatly diminished military capability compared to the Soviet super power from which it emerged independent. To a certain degree, the disbelief amidst the American and allied contingent in Munich arose from the very audacity of still puny Russia to challenge the powers that be.
In the weeks and months following Putin’s Munich speech, the United States recovered from its shock at his public denunciation and swiftly moved into counterattack, launching an Information War on Russia that is with us today.
From the closing days of the Bush Administration, through the entire Obama Administration save when the New START arms control agreement was being negotiated and signed within the brief period called “the reset,” the United States used every means fair and foul to discredit Russia before the global community in the hope of isolating the country and relegating it to pariah status.
Trade sanctions against Russia were first imposed by the United States in 2012 under the Magnitsky Act. The United States greatly expanded its sanctions policy on Russia following the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014. Thanks to the MH17 air catastrophe of that summer, a “false flag” event of the first magnitude, all of Europe was brought on board. The sanctions policy was renewed yet again by the EU just this past Friday.
Looking back at 2008, when Vladimir Putin passed the presidency to his stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev, we see that revising Europe’s security architecture was one of the key policy objectives of the Medvedev presidency. He spoke about it in a speech he delivered in Berlin in June 2008. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel was among the first to cold-shoulder the proposal, saying that Europe’s security arrangements had already taken concrete form.
In November 2009 he finally published on his website a draft treaty on European security. At the same time, Foreign Minister Lavrov officially submitted the document to the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) then meeting in Athens.
My book of essays entitled Stepping Out of Line, published in 2013, has a couple of chapters devoted to Medvedev’s initiative, which I concluded was hampered by a poor concept further weakened by poor execution. (“Medvedev’s Draft Treaty on European Security: Dead on Arrival” and “Russia’s Draft Treaty on European Security: Sergei Lavrov to the Rescue”
The draft agreement was first of all a non-aggression pact among and between all interested states in the Atlantic-Eurasian space. It would establish a framework of deliberative meetings in which all Member States would hear cases of threats of use of force or actual use of force against any Member State. However, nonaggression was merely window dressing, describing something which everyone could understand and say “amen” to. The second stated objective was to ensure the collective security of its members under the principle that no state or group of states could promote its security at the expense of other Member States.
What was missing from the draft treaty on European security was precisely the definition of what constituted enhancing one’s security at the expense of another. To Europeans the treaty could only serve the purpose of Russian grandstanding, establishing a major new forum for it to air any grievances it might have over NATO expansion, the missile defense system and other US sponsored measures enhancing Western security at the direct expense of Russian state security.
The emptiness of the draft treaty was a failure of Medvedev and his immediate assistants who drew it up. In February 2010, at the regular Munich Security Conference, Sergei Lavrov made a valiant effort to save the Medvedev initiative by proposing that the existing OSCE be re-engineered as the vehicle for ensuring collective security. Russia was saying that NATO must give up its predominance in Europe and cede place to a reinvigorated OSCE. Very little of Lavrov’s speech was reported in Western media.
The fact that it was quietly buried by all the receiving parties may be attributed to the very weak position of Russia itself at the time. The victorious Russian campaign against Georgia in 2008 was seen by defense professionals in the West very differently from what the general public understood. For professionals, the Russian military showed it had not made much progress from the poorly equipped and led forces that the USSR deployed in Afghanistan or that the Russian Federation deployed in Chechnya in the 1990s. The fact is that Medvedev’s posture was that of a supplicant, dealing from a weak hand. Do note, however, that the Russian concerns were precisely the same as those evoked by the Kremlin today as it promotes its new draft treaties.
Until the past few days, we heard no more of Russian draft treaties to alter the security architecture of Europe. Instead over the intervening years there have been repeated instances of Russian public complaints over US and NATO activities that it considers menacing. One such loud complaint came in January 2016 with release of a documentary film entitled World Order. This was a devastating critique of US global hegemony justified in the name of “democracy promotion” and “human rights” ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.
Following on the points made in Vladimir Putin’s Munich speech of 2007, World Order illustrates through graphic footage and the testimony of independent world authorities the tragic consequences, the spread of chaos and misery, resulting from U.S.-engineered “regime change” and “color revolutions,” of which the violent overthrow of the Yanukovich regime in Ukraine in February 2014 was only the latest example.
The title of the film followed on Putin’s address to the 70th anniversary gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 which had as its central message that world order rests on international law, which in turn has as its foundation the UN Charter. By flouting the Charter and waging war without the sanction of the UN Security Council, starting with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 and continuing with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 up to its illegal bombings in Syria today, the United States and its NATO allies had shaken the foundations of international law.
The foreign interviewees in World Order comprised an impressive and diverse selection of leaders in various domains, including American film director Oliver Stone; Thomas Graham, former National Security Council director for Russia under George W. Bush; former IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn; former Pakistan President Perwez Musharraf; former French Foreign Minister Dominique Villepin; former Israeli President Shimon Peres; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; and deputy leader of the Die Linke party in the German Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht.
Strauss-Kahn, Musharraf and others charged that the U.S. plots against and destroys foreign leaders who dare to oppose America’s total control over global flows of money, goods and people. Wagenknecht addressed the question of Germany’s subservience to American Diktats and its de facto circumscribed sovereignty. The statements supported Putin’s long-standing argument, reiterated in the film, that the Western European allies of the US are nothing more than vassals.
The clear message of the film was that US led “democracy promotion” and its spread of “universal values” will not be tolerated and that Russia has set down certain redlines, such as against NATO expansion into Ukraine or Georgia, over which it will fight to the death using all its resources.
However, strong and pointed as this documentary film was in setting out the views of the Kremlin on the global and European security, it was just a complaint, nothing more. I mention it in detail above to demonstrate the continuity of Russian concerns that this week have come to a head with the release of the draft treaties for consideration of NATO and the USA.
What is new today in the Russian démarche over European security? Both content and presentation are new.
In contrast to Dmitry Medvedev’s treaties of 2008-2009, the latest Russian draft texts are all content that is methodically and exhaustively set out. It refers directly to the activities of the United States and NATO over the past several years that Russia considers most threatening to its security and thus most objectionable.
It is clear that the master treaty is with the United States and that the treaty with NATO is a subsidiary treaty. This reflects the insistent view from the Kremlin that the NATO verbiage of its being a consensus driven alliance is rubbish and that the reality is American domination and direction of NATO. This view sweeps aside any objection from any of the NATO Member States, as for example the immediate objections that came from the Baltic States and Poland, that their agreement to the proposed changes is needed, not to mention the need to consult with other interested parties, namely Ukraine. The Kremlin clearly intends to isolate Washington in the negotiating process for these treaties, before pussy footing with the other NATO members.
In the spirit of the Ten Commandments, almost all of the content is in negatives, in prohibitions.
With respect to the proposed treaty with the United States, we find the following:
“[The Parties] shall not implement security measures adopted by each Party individually or in the framework of an international organization, military alliance or coalition that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.
“The Parties shall not use the territories of other Sates with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
“The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
“The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
“The Parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other Party.
“The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.
“The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories. The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories.”
As regards the draft treaty with NATO, I call particular attention to the following provisions:
“The Parties shall exercise restraint in military planning and conducting exercises to reduce risks of eventual dangerous situations in accordance with their obligations under international law, including those set out in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of incidents at sea outside territorial waters and in the airspace above, as well as in intergovernmental agreements on the prevention of dangerous military activities.
“In order to address issues and settle problems, the Parties shall use the mechanisms of urgent bilateral or multilateral consultations, including the NATO-Russia Council.
“The Parties reaffirm that they do not consider each other as adversaries.
“The Parties shall maintain dialogue and interaction on improving mechanisms to prevent incidents on and over the high seas (primarily in the Baltics and the Black Sea region).
“The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. ….
“The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.
“All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.
“The Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States in Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.”
The draft treaties do not create a new security architecture so much as they dismantle existing architecture added since the mid-1990s by the United States and its allies through NATO expansion to the east, military exercises close to Russian borders and air space, “temporary” stationing of personnel and equipment in forward positions approaching Russian borders.
If accepted in their present form, these treaties would represent a total capitulation by the United States over everything four successive administrations have tried to achieve to contain Russia and put it in a small cage at the periphery of Europe.
The demands are so stunning in scope that we must ask why Russia is taking the seemingly enormous risk of advancing them, and doing so publicly. Moreover, why now?
I have two explanations to advance: the first is the unshakable confidence that Vladimir Putin and his colleagues have in their present tactical advantage over the United States in the European theater of operations and strategic advantage over the United States on American home territory if push comes to shove.
Three years ago Putin used his annual State of the Union address to show off the newest weapons systems that Russia had successfully tested and was now putting into serial production, most particularly the hypersonic missiles that can evade all known ABM systems. He said then that for the first time in its modern history Russia had moved ahead of the United States in developing and deploying strategic weapons systems. While the States might develop the same with time, the Russians would move still further ahead.
Moreover, Putin claimed that whereas in its past the United States had considered the oceans to be its natural defense against military conquest from abroad, the latest Russian missiles, small enough to be carried in containers on merchant ships, on frigates or on submarines turned the adjacent oceans into the country’s weak point. The Russians could station their weapons just outside the 200 mile economic zone and still reach key military targets on US territory within several minutes. That is to say that Russia could now do what Khrushchev was denied the right to do in 1962 by stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba.
During his roll-out speech, Putin hoped that the United States and its Western partners would take notice, would do the arithmetic and alter their threatening behavior. Instead, Western media tended to treat the Russian weaponry as a bluff, or as something beyond the Russians’ ability to produce in sufficient quantities and with speed to pose a threat before the USA possessed the same.
One year ago, the Russian president again called attention to the deployment of the new weapons systems and urged the United States to react appropriately. Of course, once again Washington did nothing. Instead the US administration continued to raise the threat level of China and to dismiss Russia as nothing more than spoilers running a country on its way down.
Finally, we may conclude that Vladimir Vladimirovich and his team have decided to act, and to act now on the strength of the strategic superiority they believe they enjoy. Given the very cautious way that Putin has always conducted government affairs over the past twenty years, anyone who thinks the Kremlin is bluffing or miscalculating had better think again.
Now there is also a second, supportive factor to explain the Russians’ decision to publicize what is essentially an ultimatum to the USA. That factor is China. It is not for nothing that Putin and Xi had a widely publicized video conference call this week during which the Chinese President gave his full backing to Russian demands for resolution of the security crisis in Europe and said explicitly that the Chinese–Russian relationship is higher than an alliance.
Now what could be higher than an alliance? Surely this hints at a mutual defense pact, meaning that each side will come to the aid of the other as needed.
We may assume that there is something in writing between the Russians and the Chinese to give Putin the confidence that he has China at his back as he ventures into diplomatic and possibly military confrontation with the United States and its NATO allies.
And yet, what would the value of such a scrap of paper be? Where would you seek redress if the Chinese failed to delivery and NATO marched to Moscow? No, the value of the video conference with XI lies elsewhere. Like their amassing 100,000 troops at the Ukrainian border, the Russians are using the Chinese backing to scare the hell out of Washington, which might well assume that the Chinese will coordinate their own military actions against Taiwan, against the US naval forces in the South China Sea and beyond to present the United States with an unwinnable two-front war while serving their own, Chinese, interests.
Should the political situation in Washington prevent such lucid thinking, I believe that the Russians will fall back on their own quite independent ability to put a pistol to the head of the American establishment, through the stationing of its missile forces just offshore, which has not yet been done.
How this plays out will depend on the nature of the US response to Russia’s next move, which might, in the circumstances of Washington stonewalling, be that invasion of Ukraine that has been so much talked about in the past few weeks. It would be foolhardy at this point to sketch all possible scenarios. But we are surely at the moment when the “the worm turns.”
In conclusion, I call the reader’s attention to one further detail on presentation: who has been the messenger on the Kremlin’s behalf.
For the past several years, people around Vladimir Putin have joked with respect to foreign powers, “if they cannot deal with Lavrov [RF Minister of Foreign Affairs], then they will have to deal with Shoigu [RF Minister of Defense].” Judging by the last two weeks, I would insert another personality into this equation: Sergei Alekseevich Ryabkov, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Ryabkov has been around for a good long time, but till now we did not hear much from him. He graduated from the prestigious MGIMO, the higher school that traditionally educated fast-track candidates of the Soviet-Russian diplomatic corps. He served several years at the Russian embassy in the Washington and is fluent in English. In the new millennium he has had responsibilities relating to non-proliferation and managing relations with Europe. His present title is Deputy Minister.
As relations with the United States and the EU have heated up in recent weeks over the buildup of Russian forces at the border with Ukraine, Ryabkov has been speaking to the press and has done so in an undiplomatic, in-your-face fashion. When one reporter asked him a week ago about how some of Russia’s “partners in the West” would react to something, he snapped back: “We have no partners in the West, only enemies. I stopped using the word “partner” some time ago.”
The Kremlin’s showcasing of the bulldog Ryabkov is part of the change in tone, the new assertiveness of Putin and his team to which I refer above.
We are making it clear that we are ready to talk about changing from a military or a military-technical scenario to a political process that really will strengthen the military security… of all the countries in the OCSE, Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian space. We’ve told them that if that doesn’t work out, we will create counter-threats; then it will be too late to ask us why we made such decisions and positioned such weapons systems.
Мы как раз даем понять, что мы готовы разговаривать о том, чтобы военный сценарий или военно-технический сценарий перевести в некий политический процесс, который реально укрепит военную безопасность <…> всех государств на пространстве ОБСЕ, Евроатлантики, Евразии. А если этого не получится, то мы уже обозначили им (НАТО – прим. ТАСС), тогда мы тоже перейдем в вот этот режим создания контругроз, но тогда будет поздно нас спрашивать, почему мы приняли такие решения, почему мы разместили такие системы.
— Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko quoted by TASS
Moscow has issued an ultimatum to USA/NATO. It is this: seriously negotiate on the issues laid out here and here. Some of them are non-negotiable.
Ultimatums always have an “Or Else” clause. What is the “or else” in this case? I don’t know but I’ve been thinking and reading other peoples’ thoughts and some ideas/guesses/suppositions follow. They are the order that they occurred to me. Whether Moscow has such a list in front of it or not, it certainly has many “counter-threats” it can use.
Why now? Two possible answers, each of which may be true. US/NATO have been using “salami tactics” against Russia for years; Moscow has decided that a second Ukraine crisis in one year is one thin slice too many. Second: Moscow may judge that, in the USA’s precipitous decline, this will be the last chance that there will be sufficient central authority to form a genuine agreement; an agreement that will avoid a catastrophic war. (The so-called Thucydides Trap).
Of course I don’t know what Putin & Co will do and we do have to factor in the existence of a new international player: Putin, Xi and Partners. Xi has just made it clear that Beijing supports Moscow’s “core interests”. It is likely that any “counter-threats” will be coordinated. The Tabaquis have responded as expected but maybe (let’s hope so) Washington is taking it more seriously.
To my CSIS readers: the world is at a grave inflection point and the West had better concentrate its attention. Moscow and Beijing don’t depend on me for advice and I’m not talking to them: regard this as one of the briefing notes that I used to write.
Moscow is serious and it does have real “counter-threats”.
MILITARY MEASURES
Moscow could publish a list of targets in NATO countries that can and will be hit by nuclear or non-nuclear standoff weapons in the event of hostilities. These would likely include headquarters, airbases, port facilities, logistics facilities, ammunition dumps, military bases, munitions factories and so on.
Moscow could station medium and short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad and Belarus. The latter requires agreement from Minsk but Belarus President Lukashenka has hinted that it will be granted. Moscow could then make it clear that they are aimed at NATO targets.
Moscow could station Iskanders and have lots of aircraft in the air with Kinzhals and let it be known that they are aimed at NATO targets.
Moscow could make a sudden strike by stand-off weapons and special forces that destroys the Azov Battalion in Eastern Ukraine. Moscow would see two advantages: 1) it would remove the principal threat to the LDNR and 2) it would change the correlation of forces in Kiev. It would also be a live demonstration of Russia’s tremendous military power.
Moscow could remind the West of the meaning of Soviet Marshal Ogarkov’s observation that precision weapons have, to a degree, made nuclear weapons obsolete. A prescient remark, somewhat ahead of its time 35 years ago, but realised now by Russia’s arsenal of hypersonic precision missiles.
The Russian Navy operates the quietest submarines in the world; Moscow could could make and publish a movie of the movements of some NATO ship as seen through the periscope.
I believe (suspect/guess) that the Russian Armed Forces have the capability to blind Aegis-equipped ships. Moscow could do so in public in a way that cannot be denied. Without Aegis, the US surface navy is just targets. Objection: this is a war-winning secret and should not be lightly used. Unless, of course, the Russian Armed Forces have something even more effective.
Russia has large and very powerful airborne forces – much stronger than the light infantry of other countries, they are capable of seizing and holding territory against all but heavy armoured attacks. And they’re being increased. Moscow could demonstrate their capability in an exercise showing a sudden seizing of key enemy facilities like a port or major airfield, inviting NATO representatives to watch from the target area.
The Russian Armed Forces could do some obvious targetting of the next NATO element to come close to Russia’s borders; they could aggressively ping ships and aircraft that get too close and publicise it.
Moscow could make a public demonstration of what Poseidons can do and show in a convincing way that they are at sea off the US coast. Ditto with Burevestnik. In short Moscow could directly threaten the US mainland with non-nuclear weapons. Something that no one has been able to do since 1814.
Does the Club-K Container Missile System actually exist? (If so, Moscow could give a public demonstration, if not pretend that it does). Either way, Moscow could publicly state that they will be all over the place and sell them to countries threatened by USA/NATO.
DIPLOMATIC/INTERNATIONAL MEASURES
Moscow could publicly transfer some key military technologies to China with licence to build them there.
Moscow could make a formal military treaty with China with an “Article 5” provision.
Moscow could make a formal military treaty with Belarus including significant stationed strike forces.
Moscow could station forces in Central Asian neighbours.
Russia and Chinese warships accompanied by long-range strike aircraft could do a “freedom of navigation” cruise in the Gulf of Mexico.
Moscow could recall ambassadors, reduce foreign missions, restrict movement of diplomats in Russia.
Moscow could ban all foreign NGOs immediately without going through the present process.
Moscow could recognise LDNR and sign defence treaties.
Moscow could work on Turkey, Hungary and other dissident EU/NATO members.
Moscow could give military aid to or station weapons in Western Hemisphere countries.
Beijing could do something in its part of the world to show its agreement and coordination with Moscow raising the threat of a two front conflict.
ECONOMIC MEASURES
Moscow could close airspace to civil airlines of the countries that sanction Russia.
Moscow could declare that Russian exports must now be paid for in Rubles, gold, Renminbi or Euros (Euros? It depends).
Moscow could announce that Nord Stream 2 will be abandoned if certification if delayed past a certain date. (Personally, I am amused by how many people think that shutting it down would cause more harm to Russia than to Germany: for the first it’s only money and Russia has plenty of that; for the second….)
Moscow could stop all sales of anything to USA (rocket motors and oil especially).
Moscow could announce that no more gas contracts to countries that sanction it will be made after the current ones end. This is a first step. See below.
As a second and more severe step, Moscow could break all contracts with countries that sanction Russia on the grounds that a state of hostility exists. That is, all oil and gas deliveries stop immediately.
Moscow could announce that no more gas will be shipped to or through Ukraine on the grounds that a state of hostility exists.
Russia and China could roll out their counter-SWIFT ASAP.
SUBVERSIVE MEASURES
Moscow could stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine (Novorossiya) supporting secession movements.
Moscow could order special forces to attack key nazi organisations throughout Ukraine.
Moscow could order special forces to attack military facilities throughout Ukraine.
*********************************************
But I’m sure that whatever “counter-threats” Moscow comes up with will be powerful and surprise the West. My recommendation is that USA/NATO take the ultimatums seriously.
After all, the Russian proposals really are mutually beneficial – their theme is that nobody should threaten anybody and if anybody should feel threatened, there should be serious talks to resolve the issue.
Security is mutual:
if all feel secure, then all are secure;
if one feels insecure, then none is secure.
As we now see: when Russia feels threatened by what USA/NATO do, it can threaten back. Better to live in a world in which nobody is threatening anybody and everybody feels secure.
I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.
…
The Growing Russia-China Relationship
Under the pressure of US sanctions, threats, aggression and an imposed Second Cold War, the Russia-China relationship is growing closer and closer.
Personal Relationship
On December 15, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for a virtual summit. XI welcomed his “old friend,” and Putin greeted his “dear friend.”
Their greetings to each other were neither scripted nor posturing for the West. In June 2018, Putin told an interviewer that “President XI Jinping is probably the only world leader I have celebrated one of my birthdays with.” He added that XI”is a very reliable partner.” For his part, XI has called Putin “my best, most intimate friend.”
But the growing relationship is not just a friendship between the leaders of the people of the two countries. It is also a growing friendship between the people of the two countries. Relations between Russia and China were not always good. In 2016, before the intense US pressure started pushing the two countries together, only 34% of Russians viewed China favorably; in 2019, 84% saw China as “more a partner than a rival.”
International Relationship
Russia and China have also partnered as the leaders of an important new set of international organizations, like the BRICS nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Both of these organizations are intended to balance US hegemony and exceptionalism in international politics. Both of these organizations are huge, each representing nearly half the world, and both are led by Russia and China as the principal partners. Both also include India. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization represents a quarter of the world’s economy and four of its nuclear powers.
In their virtual summit, Putin and XI discussed the possibility of a three way summit with India, a member of both BRICS and the SCO: a message the US must surely be listening to as it forces nations to choose sides in the new Cold War.
Bilateral Relationship
But most important is the increasingly tight bilateral relationship between Russia and China.
The modern Russia-China relationship was first contracted with the he Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, in which the two nations commit not to enter into “any alliance or be party to any bloc . . . which compromises the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of the other. . .. ” Dmitri Trenin, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center explains the relationship as one in which, though Russia and China “do not have to follow each other,” they “will never go against each other.”
But Putin said in his June 2018 interview that that treaty “is only the foundation we have built our current relationship on.” He said that, building on that foundation, the structure is “growing taller and stronger.”
It grew much stronger on June 5, 2019, when according to Alexander Lukin of HSE University in Moscow, Russia and China signed a joint statement announcing a “comprehensive and strategic interaction.” Russia is “officially developing,” Lukin says, “a ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing, making China not only a friend, but practically an ally.”
The wording is important. Russia and China both want a world that transcends blocs, and they are reluctant to enter into formal alliances or blocs. They are more than friends and practically allies. Striving for an ambiguous formulation that doesn’t commit to being a bloc or an alliance while implying something more than a bloc or an alliance, in his June 2018 interview, Putin described Russia’s relationship with China as “a relationship that probably cannot be compared with anything in the world.”
Echoing and strengthening that rhetorical ambiguity, in their virtual summit, Chinese President XI Jinping described a relationship that is growing ever closer when he said “this relationship even exceeds an alliance in its closeness and effectiveness.”
In a personal correspondence, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who prepared daily intelligence briefs for several presidents and was Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, told me that the XI’s formulation would have been chosen very carefully. The calculated ambiguity was meant to convey both that it is not an alliance – so that China doesn’t get drawn into Ukraine, and Russia doesn’t get drawn into Taiwan – and that is so close it exceeds an alliance. It is a formulation deliberately broadcast during the summit as a warning to the US if it persists in forcing the world into a second cold war. Unlike the first cold war, this time the US will face two superpowers.
McGovern told me that a key part of what is behind this message is Putin’s earnestness about getting a legally binding assurance that NATO will stop expanding east toward Ukraine and Russia’s borders. But, he said, what is even more important to Putin is NATO’s plan to put anti-ballistic missiles within range of Russia.
On December 2, 2021, Putin clearly demanded “reliable and long-term security guarantees [that] would exclude any further NATO moves eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory.” On December 15, the day of his summit with XI, Putin sent the US a proposal on mutual security guarantees and a request for immediate negotiations. Putin informed XI of the security guarantee proposal during their virtual summit.
It was in response to that information that, during the summit, XI said “We firmly support each other on issues concerning each other’s core interests” and proposed that Russia and China cooperate to “more effectively safeguard the security interests of both parties.”
McGovern says that XI was very clear in stressing that he appreciates and admires Putin’s emphasis over the years on the need to respect China’s core interests and his strongly resisting US attempts to drive a wedge between China and Russia. XI stressed the close relationship and emphasized that since Putin had admirably and loyally stressed the close and mutually beneficial relationship, he was not going to leave Russia alone in its demand to get security guarantees from the US. The message was clear: they supported us; we will support them. And the issue was clearly NATO.
The choice of words and the public message to Biden were very clear. If you are going to persist in forcing a second cold war, it will be a different cold war. This time it won’t be a cold war with Russia or China: it will be a cold war with Russia and China combined.
Meanwhile…
The American psychopaths are not stopping for shit. They are not taking the message seriously and are still continuing their piss-poor games. They are more than idiots. Shit! They deserve what is coming for them.
Sivkov: DPR border guards disrupted a special operation of German special forces in the Donbass
Today
The expert is sure that such attempts at penetration should not be ignored.
According to military expert Konstantin Sivkov, British and German special forces tried to enter the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). However, the Western saboteurs failed, as their operation was prevented by employees of the DPR border service. The analyst noted that the border guards managed to detain foreign special forces without a fight.
"The Americans are going to make a provocation and disappear. One thing is important: now there is actually another wave of hysteria about the fact that Russia is going to attack Ukraine. We are talking about the fact that they are purposefully going to put the Russian Federation in a position where it will be forced to take military measures.",- said the expert on the air of "Solovyov LIVE".
Sivkov is sure that such attempts at penetration should not be ignored. According to the analyst, such provocations are part of a plan to destabilize the situation in the Donbas. Similar actions are also directed against Russia. Washington wants Moscow to start a war, Sivkov believes.
—
С уважением,
Бойко Ирина Львовна
Other Sources
Escobar and Martyanov have also put up pieces on Kazak situation. Reading the three gives a good picture. Martyanov gives the end result of US shenanigans. A report I read elsewhere said a number of armed protesters were eliminated.. Those suckers who work for US "interests" become pawns who are simply eliminated from the game. I like that term. It is also a bit of a contradiction as those pawns a simply ordinary people who have been suckered in to sacrifice their lives to further US "interests".
There is a fungus that takes control of a flies brain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2Jw5ib-s_I US reminds me of that fungus.
Escobar https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/01/06/steppe-on-fire-kazakhstan-color-revolution/
Martyanov https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/01/so-kremlin-confirms.html
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Jan 6 2022 10:57 utc | 8
…Now compare it to what I learned from two different, high-ranking intel sources.
The first source was explicit: the whole Kazakh adventure is being sponsored by MI6 to create a new Maidan right before the Russia/US-NATO talks in Geneva and Brussels next week, to prevent any kind of agreement. Significantly, the “rebels” maintained their national coordination even after the internet was disconnected.
The second source is more nuanced: the usual suspects are trying to force Russia to back down against the collective West by creating a major distraction in their Eastern front, as part of a rolling strategy of chaos all along Russia’s borders. That may be a clever diversionary tactic, but Russian military intel is watching. Closely.
And for the sake of the “usual suspects”, this better may not be interpreted – ominously – was a war provocation.
Summary
So the response from the US to the Russian non-ultimatum ultimatum is to speed up their plans already in place to destabilize Russia? It’s clear that they’re not taking Russia’s red lines seriously and as Putin the other day stated there is nowhere left for Russia to retreat to.
Russia’s back is against the wall and their only option is to either cave in or go to war because the US is not taking no for an answer.
Posted by: Down South | Jan 6 2022 10:17 utc | 4
The Untied States is still playing “it’s games”. The warnings from both Russia and China are not being taken seriously.
When Russia told the United States to “get off my front porch, get out of my front yard, and stay away from my back yard”, the United States simply said “Ok”, and then went on top of the roof and is trying to go down the chimney.
This WILL NOT end up well.
“The trajectory is not optimistic,” Chomsky says. “The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That’s very dangerous.”
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The internet is a funny place. One button takes you to interesting places, and another takes your down a black hole of lies and manipulation.
For instance, I saw this little guy. Must have had one Hell of a hard life. Rescued, and is now with a family that loves him and who will take care of him and appreciate him. Poor guy. He has seen some shit. I’ll tell you what.
Yeah. This little guy has seen some shit.
On the other hand, I just read a great knee-slapper of a fantasy from the American neocon publication “Foreign Affairs“. It is titled “Washington is preparing for the wrong war with China.” While they correctly warn that it would be a mistake to get involved in defending Taiwan from China, they are wholly incorrect on their reasoning.
Caitlan Johnson, an astute social and political columnist, writes:
” …going to war with Russia or China over who governs Taiwan or Ukraine would only be supported by crazy morons. People often object to this position saying...
‘So you’re saying we should just let China/Russia invade Taiwan/Ukraine??’
And the answer is ...
"Yes. Of course we should. What are you a fucking idiot?'”
There are many such articles. Overall the promoted mainstream media trend seems to be…
The USA getting involved in a war over Taiwan serves no benefit to the USA.
That the war would be a long, drawn out affair.
The war would be similar to the war in Afghanistan where billions of dollars will be spent fighting a war on Chinese soil.
But overall, in the long term the USA would benefit because it is “exceptional”.
Ugh.
True moronic pieces, but judging from the likes and forwards, it must really ring a bell and resonate with Americans.
It would take Beijing decades to overcome the losses incurred from a war to take Taiwan, even if Beijing triumphs.
The United States and our western allies, on the other hand, would remain at full military power, dominate the international business markets, and have the moral high ground to keep China hemmed in like nothing that presently exists.
Xi would be seen as an unquestioned aggressor, even by other Asian regimes, and the fallout against China could knock them back decades.
Our security would be vastly improved from what it is today – and incalculably higher than if we foolishly tried to fight a war with China.
-The Guardian
Like I said. These people are living in a fantasy world.
Here, for shits and giggles, I am going to tear into one of their “articles” and pull out and highlight some terrible inaccuracies.
Buckle up.
Let’s go through this article paragraph by paragraph.
Washington Is Preparing for the Wrong War With China
The United States is getting serious about the threat of war with China. The U.S. Department of Defense has labeled China its primary adversary, civilian leaders have directed the military to develop credible plans to defend Taiwan, and President Joe Biden has strongly implied that the United States would not allow that island democracy to be conquered.
All absolutely true. The United States has taken a strong war stance and is beating the war drums very loudly.
Yet Washington may be preparing for the wrong kind of war. Defense planners appear to believe that they can win a short conflict in the Taiwan Strait merely by blunting a Chinese invasion. Chinese leaders, for their part, seem to envision rapid, paralyzing strikes that break Taiwanese resistance and present the United States with a fait accompli. Both sides would prefer a splendid little war in the western Pacific, but that is not the sort of war they would get.
Both sides anticipate a short war.
The Chinese are planning a military exercise that would be over within hours.
The American and Taiwanese anticipate a short war also, but one that would be drawn out on the order of weeks to pull in American and Allied forces from Japan, Korea and Australia to fight the Chinese on Taiwan soil. they also believe that China would not consider this action as an invasion. And thus it would be a regional battle on Taiwan and on the South China Sea. A Pretty ENORMOUS assumption.
A war over Taiwan is likely to be long rather than short, regional rather than local, and much easier to start than to end. It would expand and escalate, as both countries look for paths to victory in a conflict neither side can afford to lose. It would also present severe dilemmas for peacemaking and high risks of going nuclear. If Washington doesn’t start preparing to wage, and then end, a protracted conflict now, it could face catastrophe once the shooting starts.
Nope. No. No. No.
What would the United States do to China if China started bombing Hawaii, put manpower, missiles, and tanks on Hawaii and took over the cities there?
America would launch missiles at Beijing. That's what America would do.
It would NOT send forces for a "long war" on Hawaii.
And so I am a telling youse guys that any American attacks, landings, or military actions of any kinds, type or manner will result in equal and measured attacks against American CITIES inside of America.
Let’s continue…
IMPENDING SLUGFEST
A U.S.-Chinese war over Taiwan would begin with a bang. China’s military doctrine emphasizes coordinated operations to “paralyze the enemy in one stroke.” In the most worrying scenario, Beijing would launch a surprise missile attack, hammering not only Taiwan’s defenses but also the naval and air forces that the United States has concentrated at a few large bases in the western Pacific. Simultaneous Chinese cyberattacks and antisatellite operations would sow chaos and hinder any effective U.S. or Taiwanese response. And the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would race through the window of opportunity, staging amphibious and airborne assaults that would overwhelm Taiwanese resistance. By the time the United States was ready to fight, the war would effectively be over.
All true.
However, the scale of the takeover would be beyond all this kind of fighting. The Chinese and the Taiwanese are brothers. They speak the same language, and both consider themselves Chinese.
It will be a silent coup.
One day you have Taiwan, the next day, you have China. And everyone will be trying to figure out what happened.
The Pentagon’s planning increasingly revolves around preventing this scenario, by hardening and dispersing the U.S. military presence in Asia, encouraging Taiwan to field asymmetric capabilities that can inflict a severe toll on Chinese attackers, and developing the ability to blunt the PLA’s offensive capabilities and sink an invasion fleet. This planning is predicated on the critical assumption that the early weeks, if not days, of fighting would determine whether a free Taiwan survives.
I agree that this seems to be the American military strategy.
Yet whatever happens at the outset, a conflict almost certainly wouldn’t end quickly. Most great-power wars since the Industrial Revolution have lasted longer than expected, because modern states have the resources to fight on even when they suffer heavy losses. Moreover, in hegemonic wars—clashes for dominance between the world’s strongest states—the stakes are high, and the price of defeat may seem prohibitive. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wars between leading powers—the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the world wars—were protracted slugfests. A U.S.-Chinese war would likely follow this pattern.
Yes. The American cities of Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, New York, and San Francisco would be glowing for months afterwards.
If Washington doesn’t prepare for conflict now, it could face catastrophe once the shooting starts.
If the United States managed to beat back a Chinese assault against Taiwan, Beijing wouldn’t simply give up. Starting a war over Taiwan would be an existential gamble: admitting defeat would jeopardize the regime’s legitimacy and President Xi Jinping’s hold on power. It would also leave China more vulnerable to its enemies and destroy its dreams of regional primacy. Continuing a hard fight against the United States would be a nasty prospect, but quitting while China was behind would seem even worse.
This is all dreaming nonsense by a writer who has absolutely no clue as to how the Chinese think.
Taiwan is Chinese. Period. They speak the Chinese language, they hold Chinese residency, they own Chinese passports, and they have relatives throughout the mainland China.
Any action regarding it, win, lose or draw will be favorable in the eyes of the Chinese people.
Washington would also be inclined to fight on if the war were not going well. Like Beijing, it would view a war over Taiwan as a fight for regional dominance. The fact that such a war would probably begin with a Pearl Harbor–style missile attack on U.S. bases would make it even harder for an outraged American populace and its leaders to accept defeat. Even if the United States failed to prevent Chinese forces from seizing Taiwan, it couldn’t easily bow out of the war. Quitting without first severely damaging Chinese air and naval power in Asia would badly weaken Washington’s reputation, as well as its ability to defend remaining allies in the region.
Again nonsense.
Once the shooting starts there will be ZERO American presence in the Pacific. It will all be over. All the bases will be radioactive craters.
Both sides would have the capacity to keep fighting, moreover. The United States could summon ships, planes, and submarines from other theaters and use its command of the Pacific beyond the first island chain—which runs from Japan in the north through Taiwan and the Philippines to the south—to conduct sustained attacks on Chinese forces. For its part, China could dispatch its surviving air, naval, and missile forces for a second and third assault on Taiwan and press its maritime militia of coast guard and fishing vessels into service. Both the United States and China would emerge from these initial clashes bloodied but not exhausted, increasing the likelihood of a long, ugly war.
Again, such idiocy!
China and Russia are as one. Both share military equipment, data and operations. Any war against China would be one against Russia as well.
China would take over the Pacific.
Russia would take over the Atlantic.
Iran would take over the Mediterranean.
NATO would be in ruins.
America would be smouldering.
Australia would have enormous craters.
Japan would meekly tremble an back down with it's gaping craters.
Korea would be busy dealing with it's own problems.
Iraq it will NOT be.
BIGGER, LONGER, MESSIER
When great-power wars drag on, they get bigger, messier, and more intractable. Any conflict between the United States and China is likely to force both countries to mobilize their economies for war. After the initial salvos, both sides would hurry to replace munitions, ships, submarines, and aircraft lost in the early days of fighting. This race would strain both countries’ industrial bases, require the reorientation of their economies, and invite nationalist appeals—or government compulsion—to mobilize the populace to support a long fight.
China can do this. It has already mobilized.
America cannot. You can see this with the joke of a COVID response. America is terribly balkanized and has zero ability to do anything. heck! They can't even build a wall on the Mexican border, a walk-bridge in Florida, or repair highway bridges.
America has a make-believe economy based on an artificially inflated dollar. Were a war to break out, the value of the USD would become zero.
Long wars also escalate as the combatants look for new sources of leverage. Belligerents open new fronts and rope additional allies into the fight. They expand their range of targets and worry less about civilian casualties. Sometimes they explicitly target civilians, whether by bombing cities or torpedoing civilian ships. And they use naval blockades, sanctions, and embargoes to starve the enemy into submission. As China and the United States unloaded on each other with nearly every tool at their disposal, a local war could turn into a whole-of-society brawl that spans multiple regions.
Yes. The moment that the United States starts bombing China, all Hell would break lose. No American cities would survive.
Bigger wars demand more grandiose aims. The greater the sacrifices required to win, the better the ultimate peace deal must be to justify those sacrifices. What began as a U.S. campaign to defend Taiwan could easily turn into an effort to render China incapable of new aggression by completely destroying its offensive military power. Conversely, as the United States inflicted more damage on China, Beijing’s war aims could grow from conquering Taiwan to pushing Washington out of the western Pacific altogether.
The intro sentence is correct, the rest is fantasy.
There will be no American air power, no American naval power, and no American leadership. Instead, there will domestic turmoil, destruction, and while the "war" for Taiwan was envisioned as another long-duration war, it would instead be the death-blow to the United States as a nation.
All of this would make forging peace more difficult. The expansion of war aims narrows the diplomatic space for a settlement and produces severe bloodshed that fuels intense hatred and mistrust. Even if U.S. and Chinese leaders grew weary of fighting, they might still struggle to find a mutually acceptable peace.
More nonsense.
China, and Russia, can survive war. America cannot.
America is a mess, or haven’t you all been paying attention? video 2.2MB
GOING NUCLEAR
A war between China and the United States would differ from previous hegemonic wars in one fundamental respect: both sides have nuclear weapons. This would create disincentives to all-out escalation, but it could also, paradoxically, compound the dangers inherent in a long war.
There would be no escalation. It would be nuclear from the onset.
This is Chinese military doctrine.
For starters, both sides might feel free to shoot off their conventional arsenals under the assumption that their nuclear arsenals would shield them from crippling retaliation. Scholars call this the “stability-instability paradox,” whereby blind faith in nuclear deterrence risks unleashing a massive conventional war.
Chinese military writings often suggest that the PLA could wipe out U.S. bases and aircraft carriers in East Asia while China’s nuclear arsenal deterred U.S. attacks on the Chinese mainland.
On the flip side, some American strategists have called for pounding Chinese mainland bases at the outset of a conflict in the belief that U.S. nuclear superiority would deter China from responding in kind. Far from preventing a major war, nuclear weapons could catalyze one.
Unrealistic.
Chinese military doctrine is to release nuclear fury the moment their land is attacked.
They DON'T GIVE A FUCK.
Once that war is underway, it could plausibly go nuclear in three distinct ways. Whichever side is losing might use tactical nuclear weapons—low-yield warheads that could destroy specific military targets without obliterating the other side’s homeland—to turn the tide.
That was how the Pentagon planned to halt a Soviet invasion of central Europe during the Cold War, and it is what North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia have suggested they would do if they were losing a war today.
If China crippled U.S. conventional forces in East Asia, the United States would have to decide whether to save Taiwan by using tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese ports, airfields, or invasion fleets. This is no fantasy: the U.S. military is already developing nuclear-tipped, submarine-launched cruise missiles that could be used for such purposes.
Yes it would go nuclear, but not on the terms determined by the United States.
A local war could turn into a whole-of-society brawl that spans multiple regions.
China might also use nuclear weapons to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The PLA has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of its nuclear arsenal, and PLA officers have written that China could use nuclear weapons if a conventional war threatened the survival of its government or nuclear arsenal—which would almost surely be the case if Beijing was losing a war over Taiwan. Perhaps these unofficial claims are bluffs. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that if China faced the prospect of humiliating defeat, it might fire off a nuclear weapon (perhaps at or near the huge U.S. military base on Guam) to regain a tactical advantage or shock Washington into a cease-fire.
Such ignorance!
I wonder if they actually believe this garbage, or are just fabricating a fantasy for cash dollars.
As the conflict drags on, either side could also use the ultimate weapon to end a grinding war of attrition. During the Korean War, American leaders repeatedly contemplated dropping nuclear bombs on China to force it to accept a cease-fire. Today, both countries would have the option of using limited nuclear strikes to compel a stubborn opponent to concede. The incentives to do so could be strong, given that whichever side pulls the nuclear trigger first might gain a major advantage.
There will be no escalation.
It will be nuclear from the get-go, and Russia and China will control the entire event sequence. America would be trying desperately to catch up.
A final route to nuclear war is inadvertent escalation. Each side, knowing that escalation is a risk, may try to limit the other’s nuclear options. The United States could, for instance, try to sink China’s ballistic missile submarines before they hide in the deep waters beyond the first island chain.
Yet such an attack could put China in a “use it or lose it” situation with regard to its nuclear forces, especially if the United States also struck China’s land-based missiles and communication systems, which intermingle conventional and nuclear forces. In this scenario, China’s leaders might use their nuclear weapons rather than risk losing that option altogether.
There will be no escalation.
It will be nuclear from the get-go, and Russia and China will control the entire event sequence. America would be trying desperately to catch up.
AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON
There is no easy way to prepare for a long war whose course and dynamics are inherently unpredictable. Yet the United States and its allies can do four things to get ready for whatever comes—and, hopefully, prevent the worst from happening.
First, Washington can win the race to reload.
China will be much less likely to go to war if it knows it will be outgunned as the conflict drags on. Washington and Taipei should therefore aggressively stockpile ammunition and supplies.
For the United States, the critical assets are missiles capable of sinking China’s most valuable ships and aircraft from afar. For Taiwan, the key weapons are short-range missiles, mortars, mines, and rocket launchers that can decimate invasion fleets.
Both nations also need to be ready to churn out new weapons in wartime. Taiwanese factories will be obvious targets for Chinese missiles, so the United States should enlist the industrial might of other allies. Japan’s shipbuilding capacity, for example, could be retooled to produce simple missile barges rapidly and on a massive scale.
Crazy fantasy.
So the United States plans on out-manufacturing the manufacturing powerhouse. Uh huh. What a fantasy.
Second, the United States and Taiwan can demonstrate their ability to hang tough. In a long war, China could try to strangle Taiwan with a blockade, bombard it into submission, or take down U.S. and Taiwanese electrical grids and telecommunications networks with cyberattacks. It could use conventionally armed, hypersonic missiles to attack targets in the U.S. homeland and flood the United States with disinformation.
Countering such measures will require defensive preparations, such as securing critical networks; expanding Taiwan’s system of civilian shelters; and enlarging the island’s stockpiles of fuel, food, and medical supplies.
Complete ignorance of reality.
The ignorance of the actual on-the-street realities of Taiwan, and the proud American trans-gender forces is stunning.
China might use nuclear weapons to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Breaking a Chinese campaign of coercion also requires threatening Beijing with painful retaliation.
A third objective, therefore, is to own the escalation ladder. By preparing to blockade Chinese commerce and cut Beijing off from markets and technology in wartime, the United States and its allies can threaten to turn an extended conflict into an economic catastrophe for China.
By preparing to sink Chinese naval vessels anywhere in the western Pacific and destroy Chinese military infrastructure in other regions, Washington can threaten a generation’s worth of Chinese military modernization. And by developing the means to hit Chinese ports, airfields, and armadas with tactical nuclear weapons, the United States can deter China from initiating limited nuclear attacks.
Washington should confront Beijing with a basic proposition: the longer a war lasts, the more devastation China will suffer.
Bye Bye USA.
They FUCKING KNOW THAT.
And the way to prevent that from happening is to destroy the top 40 American cities.
It will be pretty fucking hard without cities, people, and an angry world ready to tear Americans limp to limb.
Because controlling escalation will be essential, the United States also needs options that allow it to dial up the punishment without necessarily dialing up the violence. By subtly demonstrating that it has the cyber-capabilities to cripple China’s critical infrastructure and domestic security system, for example, the United States can threaten to bring the war home to Beijing. Similarly, by improving its ability to suppress Chinese air defenses near Taiwan with cyberattacks, electronic warfare, and directed-energy weapons, the United States can increase its freedom of action while limiting the amount of physical destruction it wreaks on the mainland.
China is not Iraq. Look at a map why don't you.
Any escalatory moves risk ratcheting up the intensity of a conflict. So the final preparation Washington must make is to define victory down. A war between nuclear-armed great powers would not end with regime change or one side occupying the other’s capital. It would end with a negotiated compromise. The simplest settlement would be a return to the status quo: China stops attacking Taiwan in exchange for a pledge that the island will not seek formal independence and that the United States will not endorse it. To sweeten the deal, Washington could offer to keep its forces off Taiwan and out of the Taiwan Strait. Xi would be able to tell the Chinese people that he taught his enemies a lesson. The United States would have saved a strategically positioned democracy. That may not be a satisfying end to a hard-fought conflict. But in a long war between great powers, protecting vital U.S. interests while avoiding Armageddon is good enough.
As I said, this is a fantasy piece.
Any one actually taking this article seriously is a FUCKING IDIOT. And if they are in powerful policy making decisions then they DESERVE the "heat" that will come straight towards them.
Conclusions
I pulled out a laughable “article” that is apparently being taken seriously inside the Washington Beltway. I point out the pretty amazing errors in it, and lay down the law of ready vs. perception.
So here is a quick review of reality.
Chinese citizenry is 1600 million people. Every single one of them learned how to fire guns, operate weapons and perform military operations in first grade and throughout their youth. If you think that they would agree to any kind of assault you are out of your God Damn mind.
The entire population of the USA is only 330 million, of that only 1.3 million are in the Armed Forces. Which are spread out all over the globe.
Here’s a Chinese third grade mortar crew
When did you all learn how to fire mortars, arm and hit targets on military operations? The Chinese learn in third grade. video 6MB
You know, I get many comments that I do not publish. One of the comments that I have since deleted, but I will paraphrase here. It went like this…
"Playing pretend soldiers are nice and cute, but America is a warrior culture, with a long and glorious history. You simply cannot equate the Chinese play soldiers against a real modern and well-trained fighting force like the United States has."
Fifth grade students learning how to disable tanks
When did you learn how to do this? Do you really think that America’s great military can actually take on China? Video 16MB
China’s military are well armed, well trained, and very LETHAL
America couldn’t fight uneducated goat herders with cheap AK-47 clones. What makes everyone think that it can take on a peer-superior China with a peer-superior Russia? Video 6MB
You have to see things as the really are, not what you want to believe.
Here’s America today. How do you think it will be able to handle a war with a unified Russia and China? I do not. And you, if you were really honest with yourself wouldn’t either. Video 2.2MB
Everyone is questioning if America is still functioning.
It’s obvious. And no, a war is not going to make things better. it will make things far, far worse. video 2MB
Meanwhile…
The American psychopaths are not stopping for shit. Here’s on the Russian Front.
Sivkov: DPR border guards disrupted a special operation of German special forces in the Donbass
Today
The expert is sure that such attempts at penetration should not be ignored.
According to military expert Konstantin Sivkov, British and German special forces tried to enter the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). However, the Western saboteurs failed, as their operation was prevented by employees of the DPR border service. The analyst noted that the border guards managed to detain foreign special forces without a fight.
"The Americans are going to make a provocation and disappear. One thing is important: now there is actually another wave of hysteria about the fact that Russia is going to attack Ukraine. We are talking about the fact that they are purposefully going to put the Russian Federation in a position where it will be forced to take military measures.",- said the expert on the air of "Solovyov LIVE".
Sivkov is sure that such attempts at penetration should not be ignored. According to the analyst, such provocations are part of a plan to destabilize the situation in the Donbas. Similar actions are also directed against Russia. Washington wants Moscow to start a war, Sivkov believes.
Final Key Points…
In US war games, any war with Russia escalates to nuclear then to total destruction. Russia seems to be saying accept these demands or we’ll have a crisis the equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I feel concerned that both sides, esp the US do not understand how rapidly a conflict could go nuclear or how unwinnable and destructive that war would be. Even though Biden and Putin recently acknowledged such a war would be unwinnable, the US actions do not show show they really believe that.
[1] It is important to promote that a USA war with involving Taiwan / China will be a long one. This is because it will guarantee a long-duration revenue stream for the American military-industrial complex.
[2] It is important to promote the idea that the war will be conventional only and not go nuclear kinetic. That way, the war will permit Western allies participation.
But neither is true, and I am telling you all something quite different…
[3] If the USA fires one single weapon at Taiwan or the United States, the war will go HOT and Kinetic against America itself. Not just it’s surrogates.
This is BECAUSE Taiwan is part of China. So anyone attacking Taiwan will be attacking China. And China has a long-standing policy to produce measured responses.
Destroy one VTOL carrier, and watch yours get destroyed.
Launch one Bio-weapon attack against the Chinese people, and watch yours suffer from a substantive Bio-weapon attack.
Attack a Chinese city, watch yours get destroyed.
[4] China WILL use nuclear weapons.
This is because it is it's long-standing Chinese military doctrine.
That is the sole purpose of the hyper-velocity ICBM flights. It is to tell the Jack-asses in the United States that China WILL destroy American cities, and that there are no defenses that America can use. That has never changed.
[5] Russia and China WILL fight together.
This is because it's the SEO doctrine and all members will act together as one. This too has been telegraphed to the Western "leadership". Just because it is not in the mainstream media does not mean that the "leadership" is not aware of it.
Taken together, points [3], plus [4], plus [5] means…
[6] American cities will be blasted into the stone age if the USA starts invading China. To ignore that fact is dangerous. the only question is how many will be destroyed.
[7] It is in the benefit of the United Statesto have a USA-China conflict that is of long-duration and isolated to China and the South China Sea.
[8] It is to the benefit of China and Russiato stop the mad craziness of the United States once and for all. Whether the Ukraine, or Taiwan. All the provocations are to end because the presence of the provocations destabilizes world harmony.
[9] Thus, because of points, [6], [7] and [8] it is HIGHLY LIKELY that United states involvement fighting against China will result in the complete and utter fast and quick destruction of the United States.
This is a dangerous, dangerous “game” those fools in Washington DC are playing.
The Chinese are determined to fight to KILL.
It all starts in first grade.
So you think you can take on 1600 million soldiers? America’s military is 1.4 million troops. Or 1/100 of the size. You dunderheads! Are you fucking out of your God Damn mind? video 5MB
And a final RETORT
From a comment (that I did not publish) but is worthy to include here…
“MM is wrong because…
America is exceptional. It is blessed by God.
America is far stronger economically than China.
China has fallen into the “debt trap” with over 3 trillion dollars worth of debt.
America has a far stronger society than China. China is weak and it’s people are ready to overturn it once the central government crumbles.
The BRI is a sham to overthrow the world.
America has more and better factories than China.
The World loves America and hates China.
China only copies. It does not innovate.
China enslaves the minorities and has enormous prison concentration camps.
America has never lost a war.
America is a military culture.
Therefore, China doesn’t have a chance.”
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
As a student of history, I am amazed at how story after story repeats itself over and over and over. One of the themes that seems to be prevalent is the idea that one can be safe and secure behind high wall, moats, oceans, or huge enormous military forces. It isn’t true. History has shown time and time again, that what you think is your greatest invincibility, is actually your greatest weakness. Who am I referring to? Why the United States. Of course!
It’s an especially dumb day for anti-China propaganda. The Biden administration has imposed trade restrictions on 34 Chinese institutions on the unsubstantiated allegation that they are developing “brain control weaponry“, a claim the mass media have been all too happy to uncritically pass on to the public. Between that and the ridiculous reporting on Russian Havana Syndrome ray guns it’s like they’re literally trying to get everyone to wear tinfoil hats.
Then there’s the Tucker Carlson guest who just told Carlson’s massive audience that the US military needs to be full of “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.” It’s highly disturbing how much the mass media have been talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion lately, almost as though they’re working to normalize that horrifying idea.
There’s also this new article for The Hill, hilariously titled “‘Allies’ China and Russia are ganging up on America”, about how the poor widdle US empire is being bullied by mean old Xi and Putin’s increasingly tight-knit collaboration. It is authored by Gordon Chang, who has been wrongly predicting the imminent collapse of China for decades, and is plainly absurd because the Moscow-Beijing alignment is in reality nothing other than the natural consequence of two nations realizing the need to work together against the globe-spanning power structure that is trying to bully them into submission.
The US military budget has once again increased despite the US ending a war this year, and despite its facing no real threats from any nation to its easily-defended shores. The increase has been largely justified by the need to “counter China” and includes billions in funding for the ongoing construction of long-range missile systems on the first island chain near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the purpose of threatening China. One need only imagine what would happen if China began constructing a chain of long-range missile systems off a US coastline to understand who the actual aggressor is between these two powers.
-Caitlin Johnstone
The United States
For the last two centuries, America has been considered invincible. It was surround by the enormous “moats” of the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, a formidable military, and a manufacturing capability that was (by far) better than any other nation in the world. It’s people were robust and willing to fight for their nations, and the nations to the North and South were mere client surrogates. They were willing to do whatever the United States said.
Many inside America still believe this. They still believe that this is still the case.
They are WRONG.
Times have changed.
They believe this myth; That the United States can bomb the Dejesus out of any nation it likes, and will suffer zero consequences of it. Whether it is Syria, Iraq, Liberia, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, or even now the Ukraine or Taiwan. And no one will fight back at the American homeland. No one will attack back. At worst, maybe an improvised munition on the road or a burst or two from a cheaply made AK-47.
Nothing to worry about!
And I am here to tell you that the NEXT war will be on American soil. It is engineered that way. And it’s going to hurt. Really, really, bad.
Let me tell you a history story.
Did you know that there was once a great nation the size of America that existed after the fall of Rome. And no, I’m not talking about the British Empire. I am talking about the Abbasid Caliphate.
The Mongol conquest of the Abbasid Caliphate culminated in the horrific sack of Baghdad that effectively ended the Islamic Golden Age.
The Abbasid Caliphate is roughly the same size as the United States today.
The Islamic Golden Age—from the 8th to the mid-13th century—was one of the greatest periods of human flourishment in knowledge and progress, with Baghdad as its focal point.
Just like America.
A truly global repository of human knowledge, this Arab-Muslim imperial capital also welcomed—indeed encouraged—scholars from across the known world.
Just like America.
As its wealth and fame grew, more and more scholars and engineers were drawn to the city from all over civilization.
Just like America.
But in January 1258, a vast Mongol army reached the city’s perimeter and demanded that the caliph—al-Musta’sim, the nominal spiritual authority of the Islamic world—surrender.
History of Baghdad: The Greatest City in the World
If you can imagine the shock waves, were Washington DC razed to the ground tomorrow, you’d be getting close to the horror that was about to accompany the Sack of Baghdad in 1258.
Founded 500 years earlier, Baghdad’s population had reached one million within a century, making it the world’s largest, most prosperous, and celebrated city.
If one thinks of London in 1897—the year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee—the English city on the Thames was by then the largest and most important city on earth. In 1897, London was peerless in the world, with nowhere else coming close to matching its power and influence. It was the capital, and the fulcrum, of the British Empire.
If you can imagine the shock waves, were London razed to the ground tomorrow, you would be close to the horror that was about to accompany the Sack of Baghdad in 1258.
This is a transcript from the video series Turning Points in Middle Eastern History. Watch it now, Wondrium.
A Devastating Moment in History for Muslims in the Middle East
For many historians, the arrival of the Mongols into the heart of the Muslim faith and empire is the single most devastating moment in the history of the Muslim Middle East.
It’s easy to see why—and hard to argue otherwise—because the Sack of Baghdad would mark the end of the Islamic Golden Age.
Rather than submit, the Abbasid caliph challenged the Mongols to attempt to storm his city, if they dared.
The nomadic army from Asia—led by Hulagu Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons—did indeed dare.
Doing what they are most famous for, the Mongols thrashed Baghdad.
In 10 days of unremitting violence and destruction, Baghdad and its inhabitants were completely and utterly vanquished.
Almost without exception, the population was either put to the sword or sold into slavery.
The River Tigris ran red—to cite one of the most over-quoted, and overwrought phrases in history—with the blood of slaughtered men, women, and children.
After this, every building of note in Baghdad—including mosques, palaces, and markets—was utterly destroyed, among them the world-famous House of Wisdom.
Hundreds of thousands of priceless manuscripts and books were tossed into the river, clogging the arterial waterway with so many texts, according to eyewitnesses, that soldiers could ride on horseback from one side to the other.
Of course, the river turned from red to black with ink.
Who Were the Mongols?
The Sack of Baghdad fits, like a hinge, almost exactly in the middle of two defining dates in the history of Islam, from the founding of the faith in the year 622 to the end of the last caliphate in 1924.
Even by the standards of the day, the destruction was shocking, and the results long-lasting, if not permanent.
The Mongols’ name during this period in history was a byword for destruction.
Who were they and where did they come from?
Is there any reason to think that they were any more destructive than other peoples at the time?
The Mongols, an ethnic group, originating in north and central Asia, were typically pastoral peoples, whose nomadic lifestyle inevitably brought them into conflict with more settled populations.
Probably the best example of how settled peoples tried to restrict their otherwise free movement is the Great Wall of China. The wall was essentially built to hold back incursions of their Mongolian neighbors to the north.
This preference for nomadism over a settled existence is central to the view of the Mongols as especially destructive.
As one writer put it, while Muslims built cities—Baghdad and Cairo, for example—Mongols destroyed them. Does this mean that the Mongols were inherently more ruthless or violent than Muslims or crusading Christians? Not necessarily. Rather, it shows that their priority, in terms of conquest, was for land, for grazing—for space even—rather than for cities and confinement.
As one writer put it, while Muslims built cities—Baghdad and Cairo, for example—Mongols destroyed them.
One thing that came out of the Mongols’ lack of interest in seizing cities was their enhanced mobility.
Often living on a diet of mare’s milk—or blood, if the mares were not lactating—Mongol custom meant that they never washed their clothes. This, along with a heavy fat diet—both milk and meat—no doubt accounted for the Mongols’ reputation as a very smelly, as well as scary, foe.
The Fierce Mongol Warriors
Contemporary chroniclers tell us that Mongol warriors were most comfortable in the saddle, literally, it seems.
If they had to move more than a hundred yards, or so, they’d jump on a horse and ride. Also, all warriors owned numerous mounts, allowing them to cover larger distances than more traditional cavalry found in the Near East and Europe. While they rode light into battle, the Mongols used harnessed oxen to pull their heavier and more cumbersome possessions from place to place.
An important facet of the Mongol way of war and conquest was their use of terror as a tactic. The banging of metal pots and the rattling of bells was the usual way of announcing the start of a battle. This created such a din that defenders of a city under siege would find it almost impossible to hear their officers’ commands.
Whenever they entered new territory, the Mongols would offer the local rulers an opportunity to surrender. But in the language of many a salesman, this was a one-time offer.
For those foolish enough not to surrender immediately, conquest and destruction without quarter would be their lot, and the people of Baghdad knew this.
Setting the Scene for Catastrophe Before the Sack of Baghdad
In 1206, just 52 years before the Sack of Baghdad, the Mongol Empire was formed and led by the legendary Genghis Khan.
Khan is originally a Mongolian word that means military leader, or sovereign, a king, in English. Being accepted as the Great Khan effectively elevated Genghis to the status of an emperor. His grandsons now ruled the Mongolian Empire.
In addition to Hulagu Khan, who led the attack against Baghdad, there was Kublai Khan, conqueror of China, and Mongke Khan, who became the Great Khan and sent his brother Hulagu to Baghdad.
Hulagu marched at the head of perhaps the largest Mongolian army ever assembled, consisting of as many as 150,000 troops, with Baghdad one of several goals for this mission. First, Hulagu was told to subdue southern Iran, which he did.
Next, he was to destroy the infamous Assassins.
A breakaway Nizari-Ismaili-Shia sect, founded in the 11th century, the Assassins had achieved infamy for the political assassinations—hence, the term we use today—carried out by certain of their number.
Although it was known that the Assassins were based at the castle of Alamut in northwestern Iran, many of their adversaries thought they were somehow invincible because of the stealth they typically employed.
Hulagu Khan proved this was not the case.
After destroying the Assassins and their castle fortress at Alamut, Baghdad was the next stop on his list.
The majority of Hulagu Khan’s men were Mongolian warriors, but the force also contained Christians, including soldiers led by the king of Armenia, Frankish Crusaders from the Principality of Antioch, and Georgians.
The majority of Hulagu Khan’s men were Mongolian warriors, but the force also contained Christians, including soldiers led by the king of Armenia, Frankish Crusaders from the Principality of Antioch, and Georgians. There were also Muslim soldiers from various Turkic and Persian tribes, and 1,000 Chinese engineers—artillery specialists, who were always in demand when the need arose to reduce walls to rubble.
The Abbasid Caliphate
The Abbasids—the third Islamic caliphate to rule the Muslim Middle East since the death of Muhammad—had risen to power in 750, after overthrowing their rivals, the Damascus-based Umayyads.
Taking their name from one of Muhammad’s uncles, Abbas, the Abbasids quickly took control of almost all Umayyad lands, and so found themselves ruling over an enormous empire that covered the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Persia and beyond to modern Afghanistan.
A new Abbasid caliphate deserved a new capital, which they established in Baghdad, in 762, and immediately built it into an imperial city worthy of their greatness.
A new Abbasid caliphate deserved a new capital, which they established in Baghdad, in 762, and immediately built it into an imperial city worthy of their greatness.
Within a couple of generations, Baghdad had attracted some of the world’s greatest scholars.
Alongside Persian scholarship and cultural traditions—and Arab authority—one saw people from other parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Numerous Jews and Christians also pursued studies there.
Baghdad: A City of Learning
Among innumerable libraries and other centers of learning in ancient Baghdad, the greatest of them all was founded by the early Abbasid caliphs.
Called the Bayt al-Hikma—or House of Wisdom—this was the place that the best scholars and professors aspired to reach—not just Muslims from the Islamic world.
Imagine if you will, all of America’s Ivy League Colleges rolled into one; add to those the science and technological power of Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, and Berkley, then add Oxford and Cambridge to the mix, and the world’s great non-English-speaking universities. It comes close to what the House of Wisdom was like—except it was even more influential.
Imagine if you will all of America’s Ivy League Colleges rolled into one; add to those the science and technological power of Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, and Berkley, then add Oxford and Cambridge to the mix, and the world’s great non-English-speaking universities. It comes close to what the House of Wisdom was like—except it was even more influential.
There were two distinct sides to scholarship in Baghdad. One was translation work, with texts from India, Persia, and Greece gathered in huge numbers.
Texts originally composed in Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, and Chinese were all eagerly rendered into Arabic.
Combined with this extensive translation work, however, was a wealth of original scholarship, funded and encouraged by the caliphs.
The arts and sciences alike were covered, so that advances were made in almost every imaginable subject, including mathematics, medicine, astronomy, physics, cartography, zoology, and poetry.
A Weak-Willed Caliph in Thirteenth-Century Baghdad
In the year 1242, al-Musta’sim became the 37th caliph in the Abbasid line. Baghdad’s glory days were behind it.
By this stage, the Abbasid caliphs were largely figureheads, propped up by outside forces.
The Abbasid caliphs were largely figureheads, propped up by outside forces.
If they were important at all, it was as the inheritors of Islamic orthodoxy and as beacons of cultural greatness, but not as a political power to be obeyed nor a military force to be feared.
Indeed, the Abbasids already were in the habit of paying an annual tribute to the Mongols. Despite this, the city was still large and prosperous.
A weak-willed, even dissolute character, al-Musta’sim was happier hanging out with musicians and drinking wine than he was ruling…
Alas for Baghdad, the court of history doesn’t rate the caliph as the greatest of his line.
A weak-willed, even dissolute character, al-Musta’sim was happier hanging out with musicians and drinking wine than he was ruling an already weakened empire.
At this stage the leadership had taken to parties and image creation, not any actual ruling roles.
In 1251, the Abbasids sent a delegation to pay homage on the coronation of Hulagu’s brother, Mongke, when he became the Great Khan, but this was no longer considered enough.
Mongols Demand Submission by Abbasid Caliph al-Mustasim
Mongke insisted that the Abbasid Caliph al-Musta’sim come in person to Karakorum, the 13th century capital of the Mongol Empire, in the north of modern Mongolia, to fully submit to Mongol rule.
The Caliph al-Musta’sim refused to do so.
The final showdown between the Mongols and the Abbasids was set.
The final showdown between the Mongols and the Abbasids was set.
With the Mongol horde marching on Baghdad, a clash was inevitable, although this wouldn’t be the first encounter between the Abbasids and the Mongols.
In the recent past, the Abbasids had managed a couple of small-scale military victories against Mongol forces.
China’s first big-deck amphibious assault ship, a huge vessel that was built in a miraculously short amount of time, caught fire on Saturday, April 11th, 2020. Photos and video showing the ship billowing large clouds of black smoke hit Chinese social media earlier in the day. The warship, which is the first of the new Type 075 class, was resting alongside the pier at its birthplace, Hudong–Zhonghua Shipbuilding in Shanghai, when the blaze broke out.
However, these were soon overturned and weren’t part of any trend of a militarily resurgent Abbasid Empire.
July 24, 2020. Navy officials said the fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship undergoing maintenance and upgrades at a port in San Diego, was put out last Thursday. Reaching temperatures up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit (about 650 degrees Celsius), it melted aluminum and incinerated wiring, plastics and combustibles like drywall, bedding and office supplies, while filling the 850-foot (260-meter) vessel with thick smoke. The ship was gutted, and hauled off to the scrap yard.
Their days of martial glory were long gone.
Adding fuel to the fire, al-Musta’sim is said to have slighted Shia Muslims by various acts and decrees.
He should have known better, as his grand vizier, or senior advisor, was himself a Shia Muslim.
This vizier is said to have sided with the Mongols, encouraging their takeover of the city, perhaps imagining that he’d be given control of Baghdad by a grateful Hulagu.
If this is what he thought, he didn’t know anything about Hulagu.
A Difficult Decision for the Caliph to Surrender to the Mongols
The caliph was faced with a choice between surrendering to the Mongol leader and presumably saving his city, or building up his army, and riding out to meet the invading warriors in combat.
It likely never crossed the caliph’s mind that he should probably surrender rather than send threats to Hulagu.
Al-Musta’sim discovered a third option: Doing nothing.
Baghdad was surrounded, and al-Musta’sim realized too late that the Mongol army was far larger and stronger than he’d been told.
The rest of the Muslim world wasn’t about to rush to his rescue either.
President Joe Biden on Thursday opened the first White House Summit for Democracy by sounding an alarm about a global slide for democratic institutions and called for world leaders to “lock arms” and demonstrate democracies can deliver. Biden called it a critical moment for fellow leaders to redouble their efforts to bolster democracies. In making the case for action, he noted his own battle to win passage of voting rights legislation at home and alluded to challenges to America’s democratic institutions and traditions. “This is an urgent matter,” Biden said in remarks to open the two-day virtual summit. “The data we’re seeing is largely pointing in the wrong direction.”
The siege of Baghdad began on January 29, 1258.
The Mongols quickly built a palisade and ditch and brought siege engines, such as covered battering rams that protected their men from the defenders’ arrows and other missiles, and catapults to attack the city’s walls.
At this stage, al-Musta’sim made a last-ditch attempt to negotiate with Hulagu and was rebuffed.
Al-Musta’sim surrendered Baghdad to Hulagu five days later, on February 10.
Adding to the distress of those inside the city, Hulagu and his horde didn’t make any attempt to enter the city for three days.
The stress must have been awful.
A Glimmer of Compassion for Baghdad Christians
Late in life, Hulagu became a Buddhist.
At this moment, however, the only sign of compassion he showed was towards Baghdad’s Nestorian Christian community.
Nestorianism was a form of Christianity that church authorities had declared heretical in the 5th century.
It stressed that the divine and human aspects of Jesus’s nature were separate.
Many Nestorians had moved to Persia, where they’d lived ever since.
Hulagu, upon entering Baghdad, told the Nestorians to lock themselves in their church and ordered his men not to touch them.
What was the reason for this act of kindness before the bloodbath that was to follow?
Simply that Hulagu’s mother and his favorite wife were both Nestorian Christians.
Mongols Execute Baghdad Notables
About 3,000 of Baghdad’s notables—including officials, members of the Abbasid family, and the caliph himself—pleaded for clemency. But all 3,000 were put to death without compunction…
With the Nestorians secure, Hulagu allowed his army an unfettered week of rape, pillage, and murder to celebrate their victory.
About 3,000 of Baghdad’s notables—including officials, members of the Abbasid family, and the caliph himself—pleaded for clemency.
But all 3,000 were put to death without compunction; all, that is, except for the caliph. He was held prisoner for a little while longer, perhaps in part so that he could see the full extent of what befell his capital.
Estimates of the death toll range from 90,000 at the lowest end to one million at the other. Apart from being a conveniently round number, the population of Baghdad was around a million, and the historical record tells us not everyone was killed.
Whatever the actual number, it included the army that had dared resist Hulagu’s advance, and the civilians, who had no choice either way.
Men, women, and children down to babes in arms were put to the sword or clubbed to death. Little mercy was shown unless it was of a quick rather than a lingering death.
Death of a Caliph
The Caliph al-Musta’sim was forced to watch these murders and the plundering of his treasury and palaces. Hulagu taunted him that, with so much gold and so many jewels, he’d have been better off spending some of these riches on building up a bigger army.
As for how the caliph met his end, one account says he was locked in his treasury, surrounded by his wealth, and left alone to starve to death. As colorful as this account is, it doesn’t sound likely, given the widespread looting that took place, nor is it corroborated by any sources.
A more plausible account, as reported by several chroniclers, goes like this: Hulagu had been warned by his astronomers that royal blood shouldn’t be spilled onto the earth. If it were, the earth would reject it, and earthquakes and natural destruction would follow.
If we consider his record, one might not think Hulagu an especially cautious man. However, in this case, he plotted the safer course.
The caliph was rolled in carpets, which would catch any blood spilled, and then he was trampled to death by his own cavalry. Obviously upset at the foolishness and idiocy of their own leadership.
For the first time since the death of Muhammad, 636 years earlier, Islam had no Caliph whose name could be quoted in Friday prayers.
Destruction of the City of Baghdad
If you’re looking for an example of a city razed to the ground, Baghdad in 1258 would be a good choice.
Apart from the human casualties, there was the destruction of the 500-year old city itself. Fires were set so that the fragrant scent of sandalwood and other aromatics was smelled up to 30 miles away. If you’re looking for an example of a city razed to the ground, Baghdad in 1258 would be a good choice. After a week, Hulagu ordered his camp out of the city, and moved upwind, away from the stench of rotting corpses.
Hulagu left Baghdad a broken and depopulated city.
Even if those left alive had wanted to rebuild, they lacked the numbers, the resources, and the skills to do so. The death and destruction were such that it would be more than a decade before anyone from Baghdad performed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
In attacking Baghdad, Hulagu also destroyed the network of canals that irrigated the arable land thereabouts. Famine and plague followed the Mongol horde to Baghdad as elsewhere. Their scorched-earth tactics make it easy to see why they’re often tagged with a reputation as the most destructive of all the great empires.
The United States will be sacked and burned to the ground because the American leadership refuses to coexist on equal terms with the rest of the world.
The United States will be broken up into smaller "nations" and each one will possess a new form of governance. No thread of the failed American "democracy" will endure.
Conclusion
Today, the United States is no longer geographically isolated and protected. The huge distances between their “targeted enemies” no longer makes an difference. No longer can leadership in Washington DC order attacks against Asia and believe in absolute confidence that their offices, their homes, and their daily routines will continue as always.
No longer an the United States have staff sitting inside military bases in safety while they direct remote drone strikes by robot. In the future, they will be pulverized into oblivion.
Chinese hyper-velocity missile.
What we are witnessing today is the same exact ignorance and ego of the leadership of the United States what we saw with the Abbasid Caliphate, and I argue that it’s destruction will be just as harsh, and just as long lasting.
While I urge pleas to everyone to stop this madness, and to step out of the “echo chambers” that they inhabit. No one is doing so. Such as this old dinosaur in Washington DC that wants to destroy China because it is using “mind control weapons” to control the American people!
China must be destroyed at all costs to preserve American supremacy!
Pretty fucking piss-poor “mind control” weapons if you ask me. Most of America can’t wait to bomb China into dust.
And you all know, the fear-mongering that is raising the fears of Americans isn’t doing much else. China and Russia are plowing ahead. Just like the Mongols did. They know that they are in a position of superiority. And whether it happens today, or in five years, thefuture of America depends on it’s leadership.
How do you think they are going to handle this historical moment?
The DF-17 has amazed American military analysis. From being completely unknown, to full massive production and operational deployment of DF-17 hyper-velocity nuclear missiles.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Yup. The American neocons, started with the John Bolton / Donald Trump “tag team”, and passed on via Mike Pompeo to the puppet-in-chief; Joe Biden has woken up a very, very dangerous dragon. Just like Biblo Baggens did in “The Hobbit” with Smaug, this dragon is now woke. And it is not going back to sleep. You fools!
You crazy, dangerous, idiotic fools!
Yet, the American neocon’s and their rabid (well meaning, but geopolitically clueless) followers have no idea what a cluster-fuck they are walking into. And I do mean cluster-FUCK.
I am talking about Genghis Khan levels of devastation, rape, ruin and rapture.
But you cannot speak sense into their brains of mush. They have watched “Rambo”, and read the “news” about the American successes in the Middle East, and they believe it all. Everything. As if special effects and actors represent what really happens in real life.
Ok. Enough of that.
In 2019, Trump was getting ready to win is second term as President.
But he and John Bolton were frustrated. The eight (8x) strains of bio-weapons directed at farm food and produce failed (by drones no less!). The Hong Kong “color revolution” under the guise of “Pro-Democracy Movement” failed. The “Free Tibet movement” failed spectacularly. The effort to cause a collapse of the BRI via the Uighur people in Xinjiang failed, and the hybrid-war (in all of it’s many flavors) was simply pissing off the Chinese people and unifying them together as one very angry and very pissed off nation.
So what to do?
Hum?
Launch a Bio-weapon on the most important Chinese holiday of the year, in the most populous area of China, where all the high-speed trains converge for maximum spread and maximum damage.
That’s what they did.
Brilliant, huh?
Hey! How’s it all working out for you? Great huh?
It too failed in China. As did, the second bio-weapon attack, the death by vomiting virus, and the third bio-weapon attack, the death by shitting virus.
All spectacular failures.
Obviously, the United States needed to be “hit on the head” to realize that they cannot fuck with China any longer. But No. No. No. They are way too clueless. Far too gone. Far too stupid.
This neocon believes that China has mind control weapons that are poisoning the minds of Americans. And that China is at fault for the collapse of American society!
Stupidity.
You just cannot argue with mental retards. FACT.
China, always one for subtleties, decided to display OPERATIONAL military systems as a warning to the blundering, bumbling, idiocy that somehow, by fraud and deceit, run the United States today.
They showed these systems on parade.
This was nearly three years ago…do you think that the American leadership payed attention? No. Idiots are idiots, no matter what their business card says.
China’s Anniversary Parade Reveals New Weapons That Will Influence U.S. Strategies
October 1, 2019
The People’s Republic of China held a great parade (3h video, shorter version with comments) to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its founding. Some interesting new weapons were on display that are of strategic significance.
China has, like Russia and Iran, used the decades the U.S. military wasted with counter insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan to build strength where the U.S. military has weaknesses. Those weaknesses are most visible in the Navy:
New classes of quiet diesel submarines and new developments in mine and torpedo technology make operations close to tense coastlines far more dangerous today than in the past. As a result, U.S. aircraft carriers are no longer immune from risk when entering waters within range of enemy forces.
More serious still is the deployment of Russian and Chinese area denial systems, like the so-called carrier killer DF-21 antiship missile developed in the last decade by China. Its range of over 1,000 miles far outstrips the range of any warplane on U.S. flight decks today. Sailing a U.S. carrier strike force through the Taiwan Strait these days—in a show of support for pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong, for instance—would risk catastrophe.
Iran does not yet possess anything as sophisticated as China’s DF-21. However, its domestically produced Noor antiship missile (itself a reverse-engineered rip-off of an earlier Chinese cruise missile) is dangerous at over 100 miles. [...] The combination of these missiles and Iran’s fleet of fast and cheap patrol boats has been enough to keep the USS Lincoln out of the Persian Gulf as tensions between Iran and the United States increased this summer.
The carrier killer DF-21 is no longer China’s top weapon. It is a ballistic missile and a U.S. carrier group may be able to use its missile defenses to take it down. China used the last years to exceed its capabilities.
One closely-watched weapon unveiled Tuesday was the Dongfeng-17, a glider capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Foreign analysts say is designed to maneuver at high speed to evade anti-missile defenses.
Another missile displayed, the Dongfeng-41, is believed to have a range of up to 15,000 kilometers (9,400 miles), which would make it world’s longest-range military missile. Analysts say it may be able to carry as many as 10 warheads to hit separate targets.
Here are some screenshots from the parade video.
First up is the DF-17 hyper-velocity, AI controlled, nuclear weapon. Designed to decimate complete carrier groups, islands and cities. Row after row, after row after row of these vehicles were paraded.
A number of neocon publications have claimed that these must be dummy mock-ups. That no nation could build so many, in such a short period of time. If America, with the “best manufacturing in the world” cannot do it, then no one can.
The DF-41 is a road mobile beast. The 8 axle vehicle can transport, erect and launch the missile. The DF-41 is supposedly a solid fuel missile. That means that it only requires a very short time to deploy and launch. It will be difficult to interdict while it is still on the ground. There were a total of 16 of these monsters in the parade. The DF-41 has a 9400. mile reach, making it a serious entry in the intercontinental class.
This seems to be a communication relay drone. It can be used to communicate with, and steer, another drone from the ground even when the second one is over the horizon looking for U.S. ships. It makes Chinese drones independent of satellite communications.
ABOVE: The HSU-001s are also drones but they do not fly but dive. These are likely to be used as reconnaissance vehicles against U.S. submarines and ships. They could also be useful for secretly mining an enemy harbor.
And WAS used to disable the USS Connecticut in 2021.
ABOVE: This unmanned thingy is interesting. It looks fast and stealthy and has two liquid fueled engines. While it has an undercarriage the two suspension lugs on its top insinuate that it can be launched from another plane. It looks fast and stealthy but is confusing. Is it a bomber that returns to an airport? It looks a bit too flimsy for that. Is the thing itself a “suicide drone” i.e. the warhead that hits the target? Why then does it need an undercarriage? It might be for reconnaissance but it has no visible optic systems.
Next to several thousand marching soldiers there was a number of upgraded tanks, missile systems, shore launched anti-ship missiles and lots of drones. China’s equivalent of the Russian S-300 was on display and several large and very modern early warning radars. There were also dozens of mid-range missile that are, in the case of a conflict, probably supposed to end the U.S. base on Guam.
And possibly the entire island itself…
Nearly all the systems shown were road-mobile. That means that China can easily deploy even the big ones to its islands and reefs in the South China Sea. During a crisis or conflict the U.S. Navy would have to avoid the whole area or prepare for a very bad day.
In 2001 then President George W. Bush said the U.S. would do “whatever it takes” to defend Taiwan should China insist on a forced reunion. In 2006 the U.S. operation plan on how to do that was revealed:
"The Pacific command developed a new `strategic concept' for the Taiwan contingency in December 2002, and an updated plan was produced in July 2003. Last year, based upon new 2004 guidance from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... a final Taiwan defense plan was published," Arkin wrote.
The plan now includes "air, naval, ground amphibious, and missile defense forces and `excursions' to defend Taiwan. Options include maritime intercept operations in the Taiwan straits [sic], attacks on Chinese targets on the mainland, information warfare and `non-kinetic' options, even the potential use of American nuclear weapons," Arkin wrote.
Air operations in support of Taiwan will be difficult when U.S. carriers can no longer dare to go near China. Maritime intercept operations in the Taiwan straits are becoming wishful thinking. Taiwan has changed its defense strategy in sight of these new circumstances:
Taiwan’s new defense concept employs an asymmetric defense strategy, where Taiwan maximizes its defense advantages, and targets an invading force when it is at its weakest. Whereas Taiwan’s previous strategy focused on fighting across the entire Taiwan Strait and defeating the enemy through attrition, the new concept divides Taiwan’s defense operations into two phases, both closer to Taiwan’s shores where the lines of communication are short and Taiwan’s forces can benefit from land-based air denial and more effective surveillance and reconnaissance.
The U.S. strategy has for decades been based on air-superiority and sea control. It has yet to adopt to the new situation in which anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) weapons prohibit the use of most of its (very expensive) offensive systems.
The lack of U.S. capabilities extend to its defense systems. Hypersonic vehicles make U.S. missile defenses largely useless. Saudi Arabia recently learned that the U.S. has no air defense system that is readily capable of defeating cruise missiles and drones. While the Saudis had spent billions of dollars on U.S. air defense systems the Houthi could use those rather simple and effective weapons to attack one of its largest oil installations. It is no wonder then that the Saudis are now filing for peace:
Saudi Arabia has given a green light to Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to arrange a meeting with Iran as a first step towards de-escalating tensions in the region, Middle East Eye can reveal.
Abbas al-Hasnawi, an official in the prime minister's office, told MEE on Tuesday that Abdul Mahdi was mediating between the leaderships in Riyadh and Tehran and had communicated each side's conditions for talks to the other.
The Saudis still set some dumb conditions for talks but a few more Houthi attacks on its oil infrastructure will convince them that those are unnecessary.
The Saudis have to climb down because the superpower that once protected them is no longer able to do so. At least not as easily as it used to do.
Andrei Martyanov and others have long predicted that the moment would come where the U.S. would lose its supremacy. We no longer have to wait for it. The moment is here.
SELECT COMMENTS. (ORIGINAL THREAD)
WZ-8
Why then does it need an undercarriage? It might be for reconnaisance but it has no visible optic systems.
I haven't seen the videos, but I don't see any undercarriage in the stills. Isn't that just a mounting on the trucks, that can be seen?
Posted by: BM | Oct 1 2019 18:28 utc | 1
There are now pictures in better resolution than my screen grabs.
Posted by: b | Oct 1 2019 18:45 utc | 4
Thanks for the posting b....I'm impressed and hope the US MIC is as well
This is what can be done when you don't have profit as the primary motivation because you think you are invincible.
If we go the extinction route in this WWIII that the world is in, the path looks to be quite short. I hope the elite of the West love their children more than they love hegemony of the global private finance cult.
I did read a Reuters posting that I think fits here and is included below
"
GENEVA (Reuters) - The international community must confront America’s hostile approach, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday as tensions have spiked between the Islamic Republic and the United States.
“The international community must confront America’s hostile and unilateralist approach by taking a definitive decision and effective actions,” Rouhani said at a speech at a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union in Armenia, according to the official IRNA news agency."
America/Western empire is not going to attack Iran and get away with it. It is time for the Western empire bullies to stand down and a multi-polar world to stand up as China is showing can be done.
Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 1 2019 19:10 utc | 6
b: Air operations in support of Taiwan will be difficult when U.S. carriers can no longer dare to go near China
Yes, a major factor causing a decrease in US naval power (unrecognized by Navy) is the obsolescence of the aircraft carrier.
• First, carriers are generally unavailable because they are much more complex and require significant maintenance. Currently, of eleven carriers only two are deployed here, which is common. And the new carriers now cost about $13 billion, plus the accompanying ships in a carrier force, plus 5,000 crew personnel etc.
• Just as the aircraft carrier obsoleted the battleship a century ago because aircraft range exceeded gunfire range, so now the carriers' aircraft range (shorter than ever) is exceeded by missile range. It's difficult to sink a huge ship like a carrier, but any strike on the deck or on the deck island would incapacitate a carrier for some time, perhaps permanently. That's just one explosive missile, and there is no shortage of missiles.
What's the effect of this? No jet fighter air cover would doom any serious attempt by the US Navy to hinder whatever it is that China decides to do militarily in its area of operations. On top of this, the US Marine Corps is currently going through an identity crisis. What could they do? Sit on some islands? The US Army, looking for a raison d'etrebesides the "Russia threat" is proposing long range artillery on some islands somewhere -- grasping at straws. US Air Force?--out of it, given China air defenses.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 1 2019 19:21 utc | 7
It's becoming more and more likely that the US with arrogantly launch an small attack on Russia, Iran, Syria or China confident that they will back meekly down, only to get a rude discovery when they strike back. I've heard that the US military is more "realistic" in their own internal assessments of the dangers of a conflict with China and Russia, but US politicians are increasingly talking themselves into a corner vs the rest of the world
Posted by: Kadath | Oct 1 2019 19:21 utc | 8
So what is going to happen…
If the USA tries to fight China or Russia for “democracy”?
This…
Ouch!
Some video fun…
Here’s some videos of Chinese military. Fun stuff, showing a large, modern and motivated military.
This was three years ago. Since then, if you can possibly believe it, China has become much more aggressive in R&D development of weapons systems, and manufacturing and mass producing weapons systems. Today is is more than just a peer equal militarily with the Untied States. It is superior to it. And coupled whit Russia, the entire Asia is ready to PUT THEIR FOOT DOWN and stop this rampant misbehavior by the US insanity-run government.
In 2022, both Russia and China will stop using SWIFT. This will cause a massive disruption in the flow of “free money” into the USA, and will expose the value of the US Dollar to what it’s actual value is. This will create economic shocks and turmoil inside the United States.
How will the USA handle it? Well, there is a faction that still believes that they can somehow rescue the situation by blaming their ineptness on a war; and thus create the “mother of all wars”. China and Russia will not allow that.
We will see what will happen.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well it’s official, the “great experiment” in a utopian government is over. The United States is DEAD. It just doesn’t know it yet. Now it’s time to figure out what to replace it with.
"There are two kinds of people in this world; those with loaded guns and those who dig."
-- Blondie.
Yah.
The wealthy took over the United States and looted it completely.
Do you think that I am exaggerating?
Let’s open up with a little blurb.
Massive Emerald discovered
That’s a mighty big rock.
The massive emerald, which weighs 794 pounds and stands around 4.3 feet high was unearthed a month ago, 200 meters deep inside the Carnaiba Mine in Brazil
The Laos – China High Speed Rail line opened up.
From Gordon Dumoulin…
The high financial risks or another example of the debt trap diplomacy?
China to Laos HST
The official opening of the high speed train route from China’s Kunming to Vientiane, capital of Laos was major news in both countries. “From land-locked to high speed land-linked” as I wrote a few weeks ago:
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https://lnkd.in/gprAmyRT . Not headline news in Europe or USA, understandably in today’s Covid tense circumstances but having read several major news sites on this event, it ranged from considerations between Laos economic developments and the risks of loans to China to a straightforward example of another Chinese ‘debt trap diplomacy’.
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I have not yet come across any article in US or European media which did not mention the risks and increasing dependence of Laos to China in the light of the rail connection. Imagine that! . Few other perspectives from this week; . First perspective. Several news items in the West quote an AIDDATA report “Banking on the Belt and Road” citing that Laos has the highest debt of all countries to China. I did not read this 166-page report yet. I did though quickly check who or what is AIDDATA.
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CIA!
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It is a research lab at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute in Williamsburg, VA. Directly funded by among others the US Secretaries of State and Defense and in close collaboration with the National Endowment of Democracy, an ‘overt’ arm of the CIA as some might call it. . While not disputing the content of the report as I have not read it yet, should the nature of ‘independence’ of this report not raise questions by at least a few journalists for further research ? . A second perspective related to the so-called Chinese debt trap diplomacy. Yes criticism is definitely healthy but a balance (in criticism) not less important. The news this week that Deborah Bräutigam, Director of the China Africa Research Institute at John Hopkins University was framed by the BBC. . She is well-known for having denounced the Chinese debt trap diplomacy in several reports/books by facts and numbers. Her telephone interview with the BBC was cut in such a way that it seemed she supports the debt trap diplomacy narrative… to her own horror. . A third perspective; unexploded US cluster bombs in Laos had to be removed before being able to build this high speed railway. Over 260 million US cluster bombs were dropped on Laos from 1964-1973 (more than all bombs on Europe during WWII), making Laos by far the most heavily bombed country in global history. 30% of those bombs remained unexploded and is still daily reality for many people in Laos. Historical perspectives.
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American bombs all over Laos. . Not intending to judge content or painting black-white angles, let us all just strive to broaden perspectives and balance. And most of all, hope that this high speed railway (which is definitely a fact) will bring a brighter, inter-connected future for the people from Laos and China, peacefully, economically and socially.
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Remember that if tiny, tiny Laos can have a high-quality high-speed train line, why can the mighty exceptional America as well?
Jordi Comments…
The China-Laos Railway, a landmark project of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, started operation on Friday.
The electrified passenger and freight railway runs 1,035 kilometers, including 422 kilometers in Laos, from the city of Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to Lao capital Vientiane.
The architecture style of the railway stations is designed to feature local culture.
Sleek bullet trains will travel at a speed of 160 kilometers per hour, through mountains and valleys.
High Speed Train.
Construction of the Laos section started in December 2016, and construction of the China part linking Yuxi and the border town of Mohan started in December 2015.
A total of 167 tunnels and 301 bridges were built along the new sections stretching over 900 kilometers, after builders overcame many technical difficulties.
As a docking project between the Belt and Road Initiative and Laos’ strategy to convert itself from a landlocked country to a land-linked one, the line will slash the travel time between Kunming to Vientiane to about 10 hours.
The railway could potentially increase aggregate income in Laos by up to 21 percent over the long term, the World Bank said in a report last year.
David BK Tan comments…
Actually the significance of #China-#Laos railway is that it is a dual-purpose HSR i.e. it can transport cargoes or passengers across borders. This would bring a disruption to shipping industry as companies can opt for the intermodal transportation i.e. moving large-sized goods in the same steel-based containers through two or more modes of transport. In other words, using a mix of truck-rail-ship for the purposes of turnaround efficiency and cost effectiveness.
If you look at European and Japanese HSR, they are meant to ferry passengers only and so HSR does not disrupt the shipping industry which is dominated by European shippers.
But the benefits brought about by intermodal transportation via HSR are significant when one looks at China-Laos railway. Below video is an example.
The train from China departed for Laos on Dec 4 from Kunming loaded with Yunnan's specialty vegetables. Specialty products of Laos and Thailand are expected to be delivered at the Kunming Tengjun international land port in Kunming on the return trip, which will further be transported to cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing, via the land port. The train is expected to reach Laos's Vientiane South station on Dec 5.
Hence it is a fast mode of transport using HSR since if you use shippers, you have to wait for the ships to load and unload at various ports of call, the use of land transport after the goods are received, the time involved in the administrative paperwork etc.
A High speed train. Thanks to China’s BRI. I guess the USA is too focused on wars around the world. Video Check it out. 131MB
Debit Trap!!!!!
Yada. Yada. Yada.
Debit Trap.
From TC Khoo…
“The reality is that the US and 300 years of Western imperialism strives to control, oppress, and steal the resources of developing countries. A century later not much is changed and the millions living in developing countries [remain] trapped in a cycle of poverty and exploitation, through policies implemented by the IMF and the World Bank. The Euro-centric West over-looks the legacy of its ‘development policies’ which are the cause of half of humanity living below the poverty line. . While western aid agencies put out adverts asking money .. they omit the fact that Africa is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources and turned into a ‘begging bowl’ a result of West’s debt-traps and perpetual wars. . · The real DEBT TRAP – Paul Craig Roberts, author of The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism outlines how the west has looted third world countries and how IMF plays a lead role in this ..
“the gullible” governments are offered “foreign loans to implement a Western-presented development plan”
.. in reality the country becomes indebted .. Unable to pay back the loan, the creditors send in IMF to lend it money to pay its bank creditors. Now IMF is in a controlling position it will apply austerity measures cutting back public services, public pensions, and sell national resources to foreigners .. the exploitation doesn’t stop there, but rather the West pushes a “policy on Third World countries of abandoning food self-sufficiency and producing one or two crops for export earnings. This policy makes Third World populations dependent on food imports from the West. Thus, self-sufficiency is transformed into indebtedness”. . Such policies have hindered the development in third-world debt-ridden countries for decades. Nick Dearden Director of ‘Global Justice Now’ argues that even before “we had even heard of COVID-19″ the IMF warned that 34 countries were at risk of debt distress and this was a conservative estimate .. more than 60 countries cannot build a basic health system because the “world’s poorest countries are repaying vast sums year on year to rich countries, international “anti-poverty” funds – public bodies such as the IMF – and major banks is a damning indictment on our global economy.” . While the US propagates the debt-trap narrative, the biggest worry for the West is that China’s BRI offers a much-needed alternative for the global South. . Washington is not interested in facts that contradict their narrative, rather US officials and the vast media propaganda machine are continuing to repeat the debt-trap accusations with an aim to discredit BRI [but] there has never been a Western proposal for continental-scale infrastructure building … It was the Chinese who sought to build a road, rail and maritime infrastructure network to link Africa’s economies with the rest of the world”, with the debt trap allegations against China debunked again and again. . read more at – https://www.gwadarpro.pk/
Ecosystem
In 1960, David Latimer planted a tiny garden inside of a large glass bottle and sealed it shut. He opened the bottle 12 years later in 1972 to add some water and then sealed it for good. The self contained ecosystem has flourished for nearly 60 years.
For those who are wondering how this is even possible: the garden is a perfectly balanced and self-sufficient ecosystem. The bacteria in the compost eats the dead plants and breaks down the oxygen that is released by the plants, turning it into carbon dioxide, which is needed for photosynthesis. The bottle is essentially a microcosm of earth.
Miniature ecosystem.
In Tanzania…
The world moves on. Free of the worry of being bombed to oblivion by the United States.
From Dr. Tomor…
Have you seen a stone arch bridge being built? I was in Tanzania this week and saw several being built. I found top quality workmanship creating impressive bridges.
Bridge construction.
Where does the story begin? The Belgian Development Agency (#ENABEL) together with the Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (#TARURA) are building 70 stone bridges in small villages around Kigoma to help people get to markets.
Bridge construction.
This fascinating project, located deep in the Tanzanian countryside, has much to teach the developed world. For embracing decarbonisation, stone bridges offer an ultra low emission alternative to concrete and steel with minimal maintenance costs.
Bridge construction.
As digital technology is incorporated into stone construction there is a compelling case for reviving this incredibly long-lasting material.
Bridge construction.
People wondered about the HK-Macau Bridge…
“It’s impressive, but a big black hole to throw money into” says the jealous British reporter. It wasn’t even announced or reported on in the United States. But I can tell youse guys that it is really impressive, and it lands right at my doorstep. Literally. I go out of my back door, and there’s the road from the bridge!
But why was it built? For people to travel back and forth from HK to the Casinos?
The bridge to my doorstep.
Now we know. China wants to turn Macau from a casino den into a tech base for the Greater Bay Area.
When I first read this, I had a little giggle in my head.
Wait a moment …
I realized how much I judge a thing based on a commonly held belief or opinion. Vegas is the most sinful place while Sedona Arizona is the most spiritual place.
Is that true?
Or is that based on the experience of a person carrying out certain activities in that place?
Can you be spiritual in Vegas? Absolutely yes if you want to.
Is there a totally “bad” or “good” place on earth? Or is it just our experience or our perception of that place being “bad” or “good”?
To take this to another level, is democracy absolutely good and authoritarian absolutely bad? Is freedom totally good and control totally bad?
Good and bad ideologies have been instilled in the minds of people so that we can fight to be right and fight to “survive”, the lowest level of human consciousness.
What if we can go beyond the “survival” to the plane of co-creation?
Chinese government’s intervention in economics and businesses is much larger than what one is used to in the west. But that’s just how it is. China is much larger than anything that the West can possibly comprehend.
Is it totally bad? Or is it just the perception of being bad because it’s not consistent with what one expects in the west based on the beliefs and values where one is raised.
Now back to the topic of Macau …
Half of Macau’s GDP comes from casino revenue. Gambling represents 80% of the government’s tax revenue. An 80 per cent drop in gambling revenue last year led to a 50 per cent decline in GDP.
In Beijing’s plan, Macau is being encouraged to develop integrated circuits, new energy projects, and artificial intelligence (AI), among other tech sectors, and to establish a supply chain for chips, from design to testing.
For China’s tech firms, the city is also proving a testing ground for new products and solutions. Tencent, Huawei and SenseTime are all involved in the city’s digitalization and smart city projects.
Lu Gang, director of the Macao Technology General Association, said …
“Although it’s small in size, Macau is an international platform connecting the mainland to the world and can help Chinese companies venture abroad.”
Transforming a city from a casino den to a tech innovation base is quite a huge effort, but China thinks long term. No wonder Zhuhai, and the Guangzhou corridor is literally on a building spree and all those skyscrapers are everywhere.
And of course, the CIA tried to stop all this…
The CIA / NED embeds in Hong Kong tried all sorts of things to top the Chinese construction in the Bay area… this is from 2011. WWF is a NED front organization.
Coronavirus in Shanghai
From Joe Z… 6DEC21
Yesterday 4pm, one family of this city found Covid positive (after 20 months of zero case), as the man was traveling back from Shanghai.
8am this morning, 50 testing sites are ready in that suburb, 40k+ people will be tested quickly, 100+ medical workers are mobilized, people are informed via phones and medias, schools are temporarily closed for 1 day.
Everyone is busy doing their part to minimize the impact and wants to get back to normal as soon as possible.
Western media can call that whatever they want: human rights violation, brainwashing, communism, no freedom, collectivism, overreacting, whatever accusation that can express their hatred.
We who live here care more about our health and work. We respect our medical workers and volunteers.
Hater's opinion is irrelevant to us.
China and Africa
From Sebastian Ibold…
Africa-#China cooperation and trade deepened in recent years.
In particular the "Forum on China-#Africa Cooperation" (#FOCAC), a tri-annual forum between China and African countries, is a platform for the alignment of cooperation and development goals of the Sino-African strategic partnership.
A week ago, the 8th edition of the FOCAC, the 2021 summit, was held from 29 to 30 November in Dakar bringing together foreign ministers and high-level attendees from African countries, the African Union and China (first summit held in 2006 in Beijing).
The 2021 summit adopted 4 resolutions: 1. Dakar Action Plan (2022–24), 2. China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035, 3. Sino-African Declaration on Climate Change and 4. Declaration of the Eighth Ministerial Conference of FOCAC.
In particular the China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035 is of strategic importance. According to the first 3-year plan of the vision, China will:
send 1,500 medical personnel and public health experts and provide 1 billion doses of #COVID19 vaccines to Africa.
⚒undertake 10 poverty reduction and agricultural projects and send 500 agricultural experts to Africa.
import goods worth EUR 247 billion over the next 3 years (in recent years, bilateral trade stood at about EUR 165 billion per year, with China's imports from and exports to Africa each reaching about EUR 80 billion).
provide EUR 8 billion of trade financing to support African export, provide credit facilities of EUR 8 billion to African financial institutions, channel to African countries EUR 8 billion from its share of the IMF’s new allocation of Special Drawing Rights and encourage Chinese businesses to invest no less than EUR 8 billion in Africa in the next 3 years.
exempt African LDCs from debt incurred in the form of interest-free Chinese government loans due by the end of 2021.
establish a platform for China-Africa private investment promotion and support the development of African SMEs (indicating a shift from traditional infrastructure and construction investment-focus to a more local development approach)
establish a China-Africa cross-border RMB center.
undertake 10 digital economy projects in Africa.
undertake 10 green development, environmental protection and climate action projects for Africa ("actively promote solar, wind and other sources of renewable energy, work for effective implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change and keep strengthening our capacity for sustainable development").
build in Africa "centers of excellence on low-carbon development and climate change adaptation".
encourage Chinese companies in Africa to create at least 800,000 jobs in Africa.
undertake 10 peace and security projects for Africa.
Side fact: One of the commonly used world maps, the Mercator Projection, depicts Greenland and Africa as being roughly the same size. In reality, Africa with 30 million sqkm is 14 times larger (see last graphic, true size of countries)
In Japan: “Bread & Roses: Pandemic Drives Women into “Nighttime Work””
SNA (Tokyo) — On November 16, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government announced the disciplinary dismissal of a 28-year-old school nurse for moonlighting as a sex worker for more than a year.
Tokyo officials interrogated her after receiving an anonymous tip about her after-hours work. The primary and middle school nurse said she wanted to save enough money to live on her own in the city. The officials used the word menshoku (removal/dismissal from office) rather than kaiko (dismissal from employment) since she was a local government civil servant.
Japanese labor law grants employers the right to dismiss an employee (kaikoken), but that right cannot be abused (ranyo). In reality, you need a damn good reason (goriteki-katsu shakaiteki sotosei ga aru = reasonable and sufficient according to social norms) to fire somebody. The hurdle for disciplinary dismissal is even higher, requiring malicious behavior that causes considerable damage to the workplace with little prospect for recovery from the loss of “confidence” (shinrai).
The media has kept mum about the details of this case, but we can suss out quite a bit. The available information does not make it obvious whether she was fired for having a second job or for the nature of that second job. Local government civil servants cannot, in principle (though with exceptions), work side gigs without prior approval, according to the Local Public Service Act.
A violation can lead to a disciplinary dismissal, according to a strict reading of Article 38. And yet, countless incidents injurious to others, including teachers driving without a license, driving under the influence, groping on public trains (chikan), and lewd acts with students, do not lead to disciplinary dismissals. Most of those cases lead to lighter punishments, such as three-months forced leave or pay cuts. This school nurse injured nobody, yet she was hit with the ultimate employment penalty.
It’s easy to imagine that the reason for the differential treatment lay in the nature of her side gig. Very few sex workers in our society feel confident enough to declare their occupation openly. The dismissal perhaps relates to the fact that the job of teacher (which includes school nurse in Japan) is often called a “sacred profession” (seishoku) and is held up as a model occupation for the children they teach. The Tokyo government likely feared an adverse impact on children’s education and demands from angry parents for the immediate firing of a teacher who also works at a sex establishment.
However, the reaction on social media to this case has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the school nurse. The following quotes encapsulate many comments I have found in my research.
—Personally, I feel a disciplinary removal from office is too severe. It means she loses her teaching license. She surely had financial reasons for doing this, and I cannot accept that her mistake was so grave. Her next job hunt will be a nightmare. I worry about her future.
—Disciplinary dismissal just for having a side gig? It’s a victimless crime. Even if it was a sex establishment, it’s odd for her to be dismissed like this just for having another job.
Such expressions of sympathy and solidarity reflect the desperate impoverishment of women during this pandemic. The word yorushoku (nightwork) is increasingly common in Japan to refer to sex workers, in distinction to hirushoku (daytime work), such as administrative or sales work.
Even in pre-Covid times, women earned less than men and had far more precarious jobs. The pandemic has aggravated this situation, leading to many women being fired, having their contracts non-renewed, or losing work and income on zero-hour contracts. This has driven many women into yorushoku, and some even to working both day and night with little time to sleep.
In the past, the nighttime profession was considered a separate world inhabited only by professionals and experts–a world hard to enter and one that filled office workers with fear and trepidation. But the pandemic has robbed women of jobs, devastated their personal incomes, and aggravated the gender gap, as the Japan Research Institute reported this past April. Female suicides have jumped since the start of the pandemic, totaling 7,026 in 2020, according to the National Police Agency.
Although we don’t know the life circumstances of this particular school nurse, it’s not hard to imagine she suffered serious financial hardship. Public perception considers local government servants to enjoy secure employment throughout their careers. But a skyrocketing number of people work in public education on one-year part-time contracts. Her previous situation may have been precarious indeed.
It should be noted that yorushoku covers a broad range of sex work, from more hardcore services that include penetration to more softcore work such as drinking and chatting with customers at a hostess bar. Pay grows the more hardcore the work is–to a level higher than desk workers can imagine. It’s easy to understand why some women suffering financial hardship are being drawn to such high-paid work, when so few other opportunities are available to them.
The popularity of the word yorushoku has itself to some degree normalized this kind of work, enabling advertisers and recruiters to lower the psychological hurdle that many women feel about doing such work and drawing them in with the high pay.
But why are conditions for day jobs so precarious and miserable in the first place, particularly for women? Normalizing nighttime work while ignoring the issue of lousy daytime jobs misses the point. On top of that, sex work entails many risks, as well as the possibility for major mental and physical harm.
Why did the school nurse feel compelled to work at a sex establishment? This is a question for all workers living in Japanese society.
I concur 100% with the Japan Communist Party’s pledge to create a society in which people work eight hours a day and live a life worthy of a human being. It’s time the government reformed its labor policy to ensure that for all workers, regardless of gender.
For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews
China creates its own democracy instead of duplicating Western models: white paper
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-12-04 12:08
BEIJING – China did not duplicate Western models of democracy, but created its own, according to a white paper released Saturday.
Titled “China: Democracy That Works,” the white paper was released by the State Council Information Office.
The original aspiration of China’s democracy was to ensure the people’s status as masters of the country, said the white paper.
China has created and developed whole-process people’s democracy in line with its national conditions. This is a form of democracy with distinctive Chinese features which at the same time reflects humanity’s universal desire for democracy, said the white paper.
Whole-process people’s democracy has fueled the development of the country and driven the revitalization of the nation. It has contributed a new model to the international political spectrum, said the white paper.
China must devise the most suitable form of democracy in accordance with its characteristics and realities. This is a basic principle China adheres to for developing democracy, said the white paper.
To develop its democracy, China has always drawn wisdom and strength from its 5,000-year-old culture and fine traditions, said the white paper.
Humanity’s quest for and experiments with greater democracy will never end, it said.
The true barrier to democracy lies not in different models of democracy, but in arrogance, prejudice and hostility towards other countries’ attempts to explore their own paths to democracy, and in assumed superiority and the determination to impose one’s own model of democracy on others, it added.
The World is changing
You can plainly see this on the polls that reflect the thoughts and belief of American workers.
Local Innovation
The owner of this electric car has done something that no electric car manufacturer has ever done.
Auto-recharging.
I’ve always wondered why these machines aren’t designed for the energy that generates wheels to charge the car’s batteries.
This guy did it at home.
What you see in the frame is the current-generating generator that charges the batteries.
There is no longer a need to stop to charge batteries at charging stations or to charge them at home at night.
The machine charges the batteries while it’s running.
It’s as simple as that..
The Saker
This article is a reprint from a great article found on The Saker. I edited it for clarity, simplicity, and to fit this venue. All credit to the author. It is well worth the read as it describes the need for the USA to “ok, so die already”. Any American will be well familiar to the ideas, concepts and situations as described herein.
Despite the running assumption in Washington for some time that democratic backslides are linked to perceived adversaries such as Russia and China, the data actually seems to point back to the United States itself.
Of all places, the news of this democratic decline was recently reported in the New York Times. According to data from V-Dem, the US and its allies (defined as countries with a formal or implied mutual defense commitment) have accounted for only 5% of worldwide increases in democracy in the 2010s while having 36% of the decreases.
In fact, it states, US-allied countries saw their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies.
This obviously raises the question: why?
Answering this is quite a tall order for even the most astute political scientists, but it’s obviously not as simple as blaming Trump. Let’s look at some of the possible reasons.
First of all, contrary to a long-running assumption, American influence does not actually lead to countries wanting to be like America. A Pew Research Center study from November 1 found that only 17% of people in their survey countries viewed US democracy as worth emulating, against 23% who said it was never a good example. Why is this?
Well, US democracy sucks.
If democracy means that public opinion is supposed to decide policies, then the US is an abject failure.
Public opinion actually means next to nothing, considering the US is a functioning plutocracy – a government of, by, and for the wealthy.
- Mirna Miranda
The author kind of goes off the “deep end” offering his opinions on race and social differences, and I personally found that repugnant. Never the less, he does have some good points and I tried to mediate his work so not to be offensive to the MM readership and myself. Part of accepting change is to listen to the opinions of others. I do hope that you enjoy this.
When you live in a 200-year-old house, you would do well to give it a thorough inspection every few years. Rap on the walls, pull down some old wallpaper, climb into the attic, and get down into the crawl space. Check the roofing, check the exterior walls, check the foundation. You are looking for signs of rot: decay, mold, insects, rodents, or just plain aging.
With luck, you find one or two small problems, you patch them up, and all is well.
Unfortunately, sometimes all is not well. Sometimes, you find signs of major and irreparable decay. In those cases, and as painful as it may be, you must be prepared to tear the house down and start anew. Anything less would be a lost cause, an act of utter futility.
America today.
America today is a 245-year-old house—a grand mansion with many rooms, situated on a wonderfully vast and glorious estate.
From the outside, from a distance, it still looks nice: glitzy, glamorous, wealthy, powerful, exciting. It still carries much from its well-intentioned (if flawed) beginnings.
But our inspection proves otherwise. When we rap on the walls, or get up in the ceiling, or crawl down to the foundations, we are shocked to find signs of widespread and irreparable decay.
The main timbers supporting the building are rife with termites; the roof is leaking; the foundation is cracked, the sands beneath are eroding, and all manner of vermin are running wild, both above and below.
In short, it is a horrible mess.
We try to plaster over holes here and there, and slap on some new paint once in a while, but the rot inevitably shows through. By any reasonable accounting, the building is on the verge of collapse. It may come down on its own, or we can be proactive and take it down, but down it will come.
America is starting to fall apart and crumble down.
Any viable nation is not only an edifice; it is a living entity.
It lives and breathes with the people in it. Our house is a living house; but sadly, it is terminally ill.
A combination of old age, disease, neglect, and poor hygiene have put it in a terrible state, one that is evidently beyond any hope of recovery or repair. The house must come down; America must die—in order for a new house, a new nation, to arise.
Such is life.
An Inspection Report on the USA “House”
It is worthwhile, then, to review my brief ‘inspection report’ of the American nation, and to diagnose the ailments that we are currently enduring.
If I am able to get down to root causes, this will naturally lead to some prescribed courses of action that we can take, both near-term and for the longer haul.
No one wants to live in a rotting house.
No one wants to live in a decaying nation. No one wants their children and grandchildren to grow up in such conditions.
We have better options.
At the highest level, my inspection report finds two major, and related, areas of concern: (1) a false notion of human equality, and (2) misplaced faith in the doctrine of democracy.
Further analysis shows that these two aspects have been ruthlessly and malevolently exploited by a potent selfish lobby to maximize benefit to themselves.
In what follows, I will attempt to outline the nature of this far-reaching and deep-rooted crisis, and to suggest some ways forward.
The False and Destructive Concept of “Equality”
In 1927, and four years before he penned Brave New World, famed writer, thinker, and “casual anti-Semite” Aldous Huxley published a compelling little book called Proper Studies.
It opens with an essay titled “The Idea of Equality.”
The very first line reads as follows:
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. (p.1)
Doctors, editors, bureaucrats—any person, in any walk of life, displays evident and obvious inequalities, says Huxley.
People are different in every way imaginable: skills, abilities, interests, intelligence, appearance, character.
Everyone acknowledges this, and yet at the same time they also want to insist on the essential and intrinsic equality of humans.
Hence does Huxley write of the human mind’s “almost infinite capacity for being inconsistent.”
He then describes the basic axiom at work:
Politicians and political philosophers have often talked about the equality of man as though it were a necessary and unavoidable idea, an idea which human beings must believe in, just as they must, from the very nature of their physical and mental constitution, believe in such notions as weight, heat, and light.
Man is “by nature free, equal, and independent,” says Locke,[1] with the calm assurance of one who knows he cannot be contradicted.
It would be possible to quote literally thousands of similar pronouncements. (p.2)
He identifies the original source of this fallacy in Aristotle, whose metaphysical assumption of a human essence (as “the rational animal”; Nicomachean Ethics I.8, 13) implies a sort of equality among the human species.
Against Huxley, we can argue that this does not quite follow; the existence of a common and distinctive quality of all humans need not imply their social, political, or existential equality, any more than the fact that all material objects have mass imply that they all have the same weight.[2]
Huxley also fixes some blame on Descartes, but again, this is perhaps an exaggerated claim.
In Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes writes:
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. …
It indicates that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men. … [A]s regards reason or sense, since it is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe that it exists whole and complete in each of us.[3]
Even if we allow that reason is equal in all—a highly dubious assertion, to say the least—it still does not imply political, social, or moral equality.
More to the point, Huxley cites Christian doctrine and the position of the Church.
Even granting a “brotherhood of men” under Christ, “the brotherhood of men does not imply their equality.”
He continues:
“Neither does men’s equality before God imply their equality as among themselves.”
Even if God, from his divine and lofty standpoint, views us all as equals, any putative inter-human equality “is entirely irrelevant”.[4] It is rather like us viewing all ants or mice as identical when in fact they all recognize and acknowledge vast differences among themselves.
All this bodes ill for the “religion of democracy,” says Huxley (and as I will elaborate).
Its “primary assumption” is that “all men are substantially equal.” If the equality falls, so too falls democracy.
A most profound observation, worthy of repeating. "Democracy" is ONLY valid and a just form of governance, when everyone one is equal in ability, thought, social standing, and contribution.
Otherwise, "democracy" is a failure.
-MM
He summarizes concisely:
The historical and psychological researches of the past century have rendered the theory which lies behind the practice of modern democracy entirely untenable. Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated from one another by irreducible differences. (p. 12)
Science, anthropology, philosophy, and common sense all come to the same conclusion: human equality is a fallacy, and any political ideology based on that notion is doomed to failure.
Huxley, of course, was hardly alone in his condemnation of a claimed human equality.
Nietzsche viewed the idea with greater contempt and wrote in more scathing terms.
We find, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, a stunning repudiation of the concept.
His elaborations on the “order of rank” among men, the “instinct for rank,” the “noble soul,” and the necessity for human greatness, pervade the work.
A few examples will have to suffice:
Men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, the chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today. (sec. 62)The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors. (sec. 201)Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man. (sec. 257)
The concept of equality is ultimately destructive because it declares, not only that no one is worse than anyone else, but more importantly that no one is better than anyone else—yes, that no one can be better.
True self-betterment and self-enhancement become impossible if we are all equal.
No matter what you do, you will still be only, and always, equal to the very least among men.
This doctrine is not merely false; it is utterly contemptible and destructive of higher aims and goals.
It means the death of humanity. Where we do not ascend, we decline; this is Nietzsche’s basic outlook.
Sadly, it conforms to the actual world in which we live today.
In the final passage above, Nietzsche points to a central fact and thus to a possible solution.
If every improvement to humanity and to society has occurred in aristocratic societies—that is, rule by the best—then we ought logically to use those as our model.
Societies that are capable of sorting men into lesser and greater types, and to do so effectively, are the drivers of human evolution.
They strive for greatness, and they create greatness.
Even the smallest steps in that direction—such as were taken by Hitler in his National Socialist Germany—would be such an improvement over the present day that any nation even attempting it would likely flourish spectacularly; and in fact, this is precisely what happened in Germany, beginning in 1933.
The rest of the equality-obsessed, oligarch-inspired world was so aghast that they were compelled to drive the remaining industrial nations against Hitler and to destroy him, so fearsome was the prospect of his success.
Still, entrenched myths die hard.
We in the US have our treasured Declaration of Independence, which declares as “self-evident”—with the calm assurance of those who know they cannot be contradicted—that “all men are created equal.”
As we know, this was disingenuous at best.
For one, they indeed meant ‘men,’ given that women could neither vote nor hold office.
And they meant ‘White men,’ given that all the Founders were White Anglo-Saxons, and many were slaveholders or otherwise endorsed slavery.
Hence that famous phrase really meant “all White males are created equal”—though even that is demonstrably untrue, as I have argued.
Original Democracy
Huxley had it exactly right: support for modern democracy is in fact more of a belief system, or even a faith, than something grounded in history, reason, and philosophy.
Like many other religions, democracy derives from a core of historical truth—here, in ancient Greece—that was then altered beyond recognition by an accretion of layers of myth, lie, and corruption.
Today we have the belief, the faith, by all sides, “left” and “right” alike,[5] that democracy is an unquestioned virtue, that it must be defended at all costs, and that it must be spread to the world, even at the point of a gun.
This is a fundamental political error, founded on an erroneous and detrimental conception of human equality; it must be overcome if we are to survive in the long run.
Democracy wasn’t always a religion.
At one time, at the beginning, it was a rational and effective (though not unproblematic) means of self-government.
Let’s take a minute to examine the original democracy of ancient Greece to see what worked and what did not.
The original democracy of ancient Greece
Athenian democracy was a remarkable institution, and remarkably different than what passes for democracy today.
To begin with, the population of the state (or polis) was small—it constituted only some 300,000 people at its peak, which included many slaves and foreigners.
By modern standards, this seems tiny but, for the time, it was extremely large.
Of this number, the only formal citizens were the adult native-born males, numbering perhaps 30,000, or just 10 percent of the population.
These citizens—the demos, the people—were the formal basis of political power, rather than some ruling wealthy elite (also known as oligarchs or plutocrats), or some tyrannical dictator, as could be found in other Greek states.
The democratic system, inaugurated by Cleisthenes around 500 BC, functioned in a very different way than we might expect.
For one, there were no elections; all leadership positions (apart from the military) were chosen by lot, at random, from among the citizens who had put forth their names.
This included even the leader of the Assembly—the collected body of citizens—who was effectively the president of the nation, though without much formal power.
The Greeks had invented a device called a kleroterion into which names were randomly inserted on small tokens; colored dice were then deployed to select names randomly and fairly from among the various tribes or families.
The system had several virtues: immediate results, no costly or corrupted election campaigns, fairness, transparency, and an equal involvement of all concerned.
The Greeks clearly had to be nice to all their fellow (Athenian male) citizens, any one of whom could someday have a position of prominence.
Secondly, there were no representatives.
Athens was a famously direct democracy.
All interested citizens gathered on a large open hilltop, called the Pnyx, roughly once per month, to listen to the issues of the day.
When the time came for decisions, a very public show of hands determined the outcome.
Even the gravest of matters, such as going to war, were decided this way.
This is all the more striking when we consider that the army was composed of the very men who had themselves just voted for war.
In other words, when you voted for war, you personally went to war.
And many never returned.
We can only imagine a similar situation in America today: that the Congressmen and women who support the next illegal and unjust foreign war[6] would be compelled to be on the first combat plane into the warzone. I suspect that we would have very few wars indeed.
I would love to see Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton try to invade China. It would be a hoot. -MM
In sum, Athenian democracy was small, direct, accountable, and transparent.
The wealthy elite had very little power to steer events in their favor.
The citizenry comprised only native men; foreigners had literally no voice in the state, even though they outnumbered the actual citizens by a factor of two or three.
Greek democracy was thus a racial (White European), ethnic (Athenian), and gendered (men only) system of rule.
And it worked incredibly well; it produced and sustained the brilliant Athenian culture that we know today.
Two Famous Critics
For all that, the system had some harsh and prominent critics—notably, Plato and Aristotle.
Plato had two main complaints against democracy:
Voting
Voting. First, he asked, why should all the citizens get to vote on key decisions? Why are they all treated as equals, one vote per man? This is illogical and counterproductive. Even in Athens, they had their share of dunces, dimwits, and degenerates. Why let these men vote? Why not let only the best, the wisest, vote? For that matter, why have votes at all? Why not just determine who are your wisest few, and let them rule?
This was Plato’s vision of an aristocracy, the optimal form of government. It is, at least in theory, far superior to anything like a democracy.
Freedom
Freedom. Plato’s second concern was, ironically, with freedom itself. In a democracy, since “the people” rule, anything goes. Whatever the people want, the people get. And the people—the masses—rarely want the kinds of things that they should want, namely, virtue and discipline. Rather, they want to have fun: they want to do one thing one day, and something else the next, as it suits their fancy. They are ‘free,’ after all. They want to play games, engage in various petty amusements, fill their bellies, get drunk, and so on. As it was then, so it is now; human nature has scarcely changed in two millennia.
Plato is scalding in his attack. The “democratic man” is inundated by all manner of trivial and detrimental desires. True and deep thoughts are driven from his soul, and “false and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place” (Republic Bk 8; 560c):
And so the young man returns to the country of the [pleasure-seeking] lotus-eaters, and takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men. …
There is a battle and [the false and boastful words] gain the day, and then modesty, which they call ‘silliness’, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname ‘unmanliness’, is trampled in the mire and cast forth.
They persuade men that moderation and frugal spending are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them out.And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array, having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names.
Arrogance they term ‘good-breeding’, and anarchy ‘freedom’, and waste ‘magnificence’, and impudence ‘courage’.
And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures. (560d-e)
And if wiser thoughts come calling, and if they struggle for predominance in his soul, he becomes confused; “he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.”
He has lost the ability to judge and to discriminate, which degrades his entire life:
His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms ‘joy’ and ‘bliss’ and ‘freedom’; and so he goes on… [H]e is all ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’
Hence the democratic man.
His precious freedom, given unrestrained license and lack of discipline, devolves into mindless and confused pleasure-seeking.
He believes he has freedom, and he believes in equality—but this is a sham; it is a false equality and the freedom of a shallow and vapid libertine.
Plato sums up the situation on democracy with one of the most striking sentences in the Republic:
These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. (558c)
“Charming” and “disordered” democracy, so “fair and spangled,” is all show and no substance.
It encourages undisciplined, unvirtuous lives of hedonistic pleasure.
And most importantly, it “dispenses a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”
Such a democracy, he says, can only lead in turn to the lowest form of government, tyranny.
I haven’t the space to elaborate, but in short, Aristotle basically agreed with this analysis.
He identified three primary forms of government, each of which had good and bad versions.
In descending order, the three good systems are monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by a small and wise few), and a ‘constitution’ (conditional rule by many).
The distorted or bad forms of each of these are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.[7]
In this sense, for Aristotle, democracy is literally ‘the worst of the worst.’ It is rule by the poor and needy masses, not the best or noblest few.
Industrial Democracy
What, then, of democracy in the world today?
We have variations on the democratic theme that are so remote from the Athenian original that they hardly deserve the same name.
They have lost all the virtues of the original but retained all the vices.
Democracy today has devolved into a crude perversion that I like to call industrial democracy.
Its primary characteristics are these:
1) Representative (parliamentarian) system—no direct participation. 2) Universal suffrage—all adults can vote. 3) Multiracial—all races can vote. 4) Unlimited population size. 5) Financially corrupt—moneyed interests hold great sway.
On every point, this is opposed to the Athenian model.
We vote, but typically only for a handful of pre-determined candidates or on a very limited number of referenda.
Our representation is scaled down by a factor of thousands or millions; a state as large as California, with almost 40 million people, gets all of two senators.[8] And every half-witted, uneducated ignoramus gets his or her vote—people who vastly outnumber the educated and the wise. (And we wonder why the intellectual level of political campaigns is so low.)
People of every balkanized race can vote, and they often do so in their own racial interest, thus guaranteeing a divided and conflicted government.
Perhaps most critically, the original small size of the Athenian citizen body, some 30,000 individuals, now numbers almost 250 million—the number of eligible American adults.
The vast size and scale of representation ensures that billions of corrupting dollars flow through the system, distorting even the most virtuous lawmaker, and guaranteeing a flood of media confusion, propaganda, and “fake news.”
Industrial democracy is rule by money: those with the most money, and the will to spend it, rule.
In America, we know who leads this race: the oligarch lobby, which contributes at least 50% of Democratic campaign funds and at least 25% of Republican funds.
Wealthy American oligarchs spend literally hundreds of millions on campaigns, ads, donations, and various other activities, all to influence the outcome in their favored direction.[9]
The situation is comparable in the UK, Canada, France, and Australia, all of which have relatively large and wealthy oligarch populations.[10]
The ancient Greeks—most of them, at least—would be appalled to see what their cherished democracy has come to.
As it is, we now have that which Plato predicted: democracy on the brink of degenerating into tyranny of various forms.
We have tyrannies of the rich, tyrannies of the oligarchy, and tyrannies of Big Tech, all vying for power, and all cooperating as needed to ensure that nothing like transparent and accountable government ever comes to pass.
The main objective of the rich is to stay rich.
As well as to maintain or grow the wealth gap between themselves and the masses; the larger the disparity, the more relative power they hold.
The main objective of the power-elite, is to weaken and damage the national psyche sufficiently.
As well as to diversify and deplete the nation genetically, so that they can maintain maximum control without completely destroying the wealth-producing capacity of the economy.
Under industrial democracy, the future is grim indeed.
America, sadly, has been completely subsumed by this pernicious and insidious form of government.
The country is ruled by the lowest, most depraved, most incompetent individuals imaginable.
At the same time, it is being flooded by the virtual scum of humanity—in July 2021 alone, over 212,000 arrests (“encounters”, in the government’s euphemistic propaganda) occurred at the southern border.[11]
How many more evaded “encounter” and entered the country illegally, we do not know.
And to these numbers we must add the “legal” immigration of large numbers of non-European, non-educated individuals who inevitably change the character of the nation seemingly for the worse.
The combined effect is dramatic.
A recent study stated that the US now has an astonishing 44 million people who were foreign-born, of which about 75% are legal and 25% are illegal.[12]
Nearly half of these millions were born in just five countries: Mexico, China, India, Philippines, and El Salvador.
Surely not more than a percent or two of these 44 million are from wealthy, educated nations. The grand edifice that is America is collapsing as we speak.
Therefore, it is time to accept reality and give up America for lost.
Put away your flags, your pins, and all your red-white-and-blue paraphernalia.
Toss out your MAGA hats; America will never be “great again.”
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool.
The country is rotting from above and below.
Vermin are calling the shots from on high, and human detritus washes in over the borders.
This was precisely how Ancient Rome fell. Such is the terminal stage of many an empire.
Looking Ahead
If this report on the fatal condition of America is close to the mark, it also suggests corrective actions that must be taken to regain a sane and stable civic life.
Well, at least for the historical Americans who established and ran the country for most of its existence.
The necessary actions are hardly a secret.
The basic ideas are already floating around the Internet. Andrew Anglin, for one, was right on the mark in his recent essay on immigration. His conclusion:
The only way we are going to fix this [immigration] problem is through a two-fold solution: 1) Redrawing the borders of the country, and 2) Physically removing tens of millions of people. There is no situation where both of those things are not going to be necessary in the future.
Those are two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the restoration of rational government among the population today.
More specifically, my above analysis suggests the following steps:
(a) Break up the existing United States into smaller, more cohesive, more homogenous, and more manageable units.
I do NOT suggest a return to the geographic borders of the individual states, but rather upon social clusters of similar interests, society, and unity. -MM
(b) In these new units, encourage all non-assimulated individuals to emigrate as soon as possible.
(c) Discard the pernicious concept of human equality and replace it by a celebration of the higher, the nobler, and the best.
(d)Replace industrial democracy with something like an aristocracy.
Closure
Let me close by offering a few words of elaboration on each.
More and more people these days seem to be recognizing the desirability and the inevitability of secession of portions of the US, and the establishment of new, independent nation-states.
In fact, as the nation continues to disintegrate, at some point people will have no choice; thus, it is better to plan now than to wait for some chaotic future breakdown.
Some of the current talk on secession has the right intent but is woefully weak and misguided.
Breaking up existing states but staying within America is a wholly insufficient form of secession.
The “6 Californias” idea is very weak; “Greater Idaho” is well-intentioned but falls way short of the mark.
None of these explicitly advocates breaking away from the US and forming new nations. Only full-blown secession can hope to get to the root of the problem. The reigning oligarchy knows this, which is why they do everything in their power to discredit the idea.
Point (b) is mandatory for restoring effective and rational governance.
Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, Europeans all have countries of origin; they need to return there with all due haste.
Far-fetched, and irrational, but I allow him to rant on. -MM
After a short period of voluntary compliance, increasing pressure will need to be applied until they comply.
Yes, Europeans could theoretically return to Europe, except that Europeans created and built up the present civilization (such as it is) of the USA, and thus have earned a right to stay and to evict the interlopers.[14]
Native Americans were of course here before the White Europeans, and that precedence needs to be respected, such as via truly autonomous homelands.
And since Blacks were forcibly brought here from Africa [15], I would have no issue with assisting their return to Africa with subsidized travel arrangements, a small one-time cash payment, or with the use of political leverage in Africa to aid their repatriation.
We can ease the transition, but out they all must go.
The hardest to deal with will of course be the oligarchy of every race. With their political clout, wealth, and bull-headed tenacity, they will be very hard to root out.
The task is made all the more difficult because of the inability of our supposedly “conservative Right” to address this in a meaningful way.
Most all prominent rightwing individuals and organizations flee from the Question like the devil from holy water.
As I have noted elsewhere, Fox News and crew—Carlson, Hannity, et al—never explicitly mention the oligarchy, never out them, and never criticize them in any way; Hannity in fact bends over backward to curry favor.
Alex Jones never criticizes or outs any of the oligarchy. Same with Jared Taylor. American Renaissance won’t deal with them in a serious way. Breitbart at least discusses them, but always in a neutral or positive light.
The real critics are, sadly, few and far between; to reiterate what I wrote recently, we need to be extremely grateful for The Occidental Observer, Unz.com, National Vanguard, and people like Anglin, all of whom are willing to speak the hard truth on the history and control of these long-duration oligarchs that run the United States..
Point (c) obviously follows from the above discussion. We must drop all talk of human equality and replace it with a promotion and celebration of human uniqueness and human greatness. This needs to be made explicit in common discourse, media, and school curricula.
We need to celebrate and praise human genius while emphasizing the fact that most people are not geniuses and will never achieve greatness, but who can nonetheless have meaningful and valuable lives.
When it is understood that humans never were, and never will be, equal, then all become free to achieve their full potential and, for those who succeed in bettering themselves, to reap the rewards of exceptional development.
In a just society, exceptional individuals will earn additional rights, but they will also bear additional duties, compared to the lesser. “Equal” performance for the various subgroups of people—as distinguished by gender, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, etc.—will never be expected or mandated. “Racial equality” will be a nonissue.
Industrial Democracy must die
On the final point, it is clear that the hopelessly corrupt industrial democracy must go.
We can also be confident that something like an aristocracy would be a vast (if imperfect) improvement, even as there is much leeway in the specific details.
If we allow that “rule by the wiser” is superior to “rule by the masses,” then we have many ways to realize such a system.
At the simplest level, we could retain elections for officeholders but permit only the wiser—smarter, more educated, more accomplished—individuals to vote.
It could be very basic: require that voters earn a college degree, for example; or score above average on an IQ test; or distinguish themselves in some other relevant way (an exceptional athlete, by contrast, earns no right to a voice on political issues).
The disenfranchised would not be made to feel inferior; rather, they would come to accept such a system as in the best interests of all.
The Chinese have adopted this system and the successes of China are amazing. You can read about how the Chinese has adopted this system HERE.
-MM
At a more sophisticated level, we might move to adopt something like a Platonic education system, as laid out in the Republic.
There he sketches a 50-year training program involving age-appropriate schooling, skills training, physical fitness, and practical experience that both educates the masses and serves as a filtering process to determine who the truly wisest and most capable leaders are.
Again, The Chinese have adopted this system and the successes of China are amazing. You can read about how the Chinese has adopted this system HERE.
-MM
A series of pass-fail criteria progressively reduce the pool of eligible candidates, leaving, at the end, a mere handful of individuals who have repeatedly proven themselves under pressure. In a future aristocracy, a small pool of “the best” could be added annually to a kind of ruling congress who would then be unconditionally empowered to make and enforce all laws and policies.
After a fixed term of governance, each individual would be compelled to retire in turn. Again, this is just one way of realizing such a system.
Variations might include finding ways to identify and empower the truly exceptional individuals—or perhaps a single individual—and give them correspondingly exceptional powers to rule.
In any case, the system would need to be recognized by the vast majority of people as an effective and desirable solution. In this sense, it would retain a small flavor of traditional democracy. “Consent of the governed” can work, as long as the population is not too large and as long as we do not have to contend with competing racial minorities or Jewish financial corruption. But such consent is a far cry from universal suffrage or rule by the masses, which can never work, and which always degenerates.
Such is my basic outline of a path forward. Obviously, much more needs to be said. But it is a start, one that addresses the root causes of our present crisis.[16]
Final Thoughts
I close with this thought: To the extent that America ever was great, this is because, at the start, it was roughly modeled on the Athenian original.
The early American government was gendered, racial, and ethnic European males of a predominantly north European stock.
The celebrated American “diversity” at the beginning was a diversity among Whites: English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians all would have been represented in those early years.
Yes, America had significant numbers of Blacks and Jews from the 1600s, but they had limited or no political influence.
Religion was of secondary importance.
Yes, it was nominally a “Christian nation” at the start, but few among the Founders were deeply religious—Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and John Jay being the exceptions—and most were skeptical believers or deists, if not functional atheists.
Hence, early America prospered and flourished in spite of, not because of, Christianity; in spite of, not because of, Blacks and Jews; and in spite of, not because of, the principle of equality.
Blacks, Asians, Jews, “equality,” and Christianity were millstones around the young nation’s neck. It is a testament to our initially gendered and racial governance that we accomplished so much in those early years, with such huge burdens to bear.
Two centuries later, those millstones proved to be our ruination.
America is dying a slow and painful death. Let us euthanize the long-suffering nation, redraw the boundaries, rethink the guiding principles, and begin again.
Final MM Comments
Obviously I edited out the distasteful elements and sanitized the article for general distribution. People in echo chambers forget how they often appear to others who lie outside that echo chamber.
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There is no need to bring race, or ethnic DNA points of origination in an article about changes in governance, but they are one and the same in this author’s mind. I cannot extract those thoughts without destroying the beneficial points being presented.
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Personally, I do not care who the oligarchy is, what race they are, where they originally came from, or what food they eat for breakfast. All I care about is removing them from any areas of control, in any way, from MY life. Thus the point in this article. I hope that you all enjoyed it.
Mr. Deng said it best. “I don’t care what color the cat is. All I care about is whether or not it can catch mice.”
Now about China
From an email…
Today, wokeism has killed education in the West, particularly America. There is zero chance for a reversal and even if by some miracle it was reversed, the ship has sailed. Too late to play catch up.
A phrased I particularly remember was "In America it would be a miracle if I could fill a hall with young PhD engineers but in China, it would be very easy to fill a stadium with the same".
At this transition period of global supremacy, I would still advice students from third world country to study a Bachelor degree in the West (UK, Europe, maybe Australia) but afterwards, to study post graduate in China. Some Post graduate degrees in China can be in English but it's still best to have rudimentary spoken Mandarin to get around while studying in China. Have seen Western students who actually are studying Post Graduate degree in Mandarin, which requires a proficiency in both written and spoken Mandarin. Hats off to them.
As I've mentioned to Guy From Africa, learn Mandarin. It will be the future language of business. It won't be the sole language of science and technology but will be on paper with English in the future.
Anglo-Saxons Americans, Brits, Australian find it astonishing that other people are bi lingual, where they can't begin to fathom the usefulness of another language besides English (a by product of the arrogance of British Empire). Europeans in general are bi lingual. South East Asians are bi, tri, tetra or even penta lingual (at the very least bi lingual but tri lingual is especially common. A friend of mine is penta lingual, yes, 5 languages.) To be able to communicate is key & speaking more than 1 language is advantageous.
Anyways, the below opinion piece in WSJ is interesting, to say the least.
As a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the U.S., I am mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students. In China, schools are run like boot camps. What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China? video 6MB
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I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school. Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes. .
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Here he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required “healthy snack.” The first day he came home with a sheet of math homework: 35 addition problems. He finished in about a minute. On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations.
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He first wrote down 300+20+8, following the prompt, and then 164×2, 82×4 and 656÷2. My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions.
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Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests. This is not a philosophy shared by American schools.
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On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it. Video 25MB
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How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers? Unfolding now are two Maoist cultural revolutions, one in the East and the other in the West. The former is a jingoistic nationalism enforced by party loyalties and ubiquitous secret police.
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The latter is an anti-Americanism enforced by progressive mobs seeking to defund the police. Both are about limiting expression, controlling thought and regulating behavior. Xi Jinping has been cracking down on everything from finance to entertainment to whip his country through a “national rejuvenation.”
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China’s nationalism is explicitly anchored in Maoism, with Mr. Xi representing the new cult of personality. Meanwhile, woke America—which, consciously or not, deploys Maoist tactics—is destroying the core traditions of Western civilization with identity politics.
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In both countries, control must extend to the very young to mold them in the image of the official ideology. In fall 2021 Chinese pupils returned to school with a new requirement to study “Xi Jinping Thought.” Schools must “plant the seeds of loving the party, the country, and socialism in young hearts,” a government announcement declares.
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Across the ocean, American pupils are taught that white America is inherently racist, regardless of individual intention or action. Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state. Youth are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition.
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Such political indoctrination is taught side by side with math and science. American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much.
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Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult. This phenomenon started in higher education. For years attending American universities, I have been disturbed to watch colleges fabricate “anxiety” and “depression” in students who are not mentally ill. Administrators have used grossly exaggerated terms such as “trauma,” and melodramatic expressions such as “I cannot begin to imagine what you have suffered,” to turn into a catastrophe what is best described as disappointment.
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This creates a culture of victimization. The absurdity peaked after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Students from elite universities claimed existential despair, finding comfort in cocoa, coloring books and therapy dogs.
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Classes were canceled and exams postponed, all in the name of soothing 20-somethings who need to be learning how to adapt to reality as adults. Chinese citizens enjoy mocking the Western “snowflakes.”
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Less amusing is what this trend means for the U.S. as China no longer hides its enmity for America.
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Ms. Zhang is a doctoral student in political science.
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And don’t be so sure that all China makes is cheap plastic toys…
China tested a hypersonic vehicle in July that was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while traveling at five times the speed of sound, in a physics-defying display of technology that no other country has demonstrated, according to a new report.
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The Financial Times on Sunday revealed fresh details of Beijing’s hypersonic weapons test earlier this year, which saw a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle circle the globe in low orbit before landing.United States intelligence officials were reportedly alarmed by the test as it demonstrated a brand-new weapons capability that government scientists were struggling to understand, with one source earlier telling the newspaper the achievement appeared “to defy the laws of physics”.
Yeah. It’s something that the frenzied media mouthpiece never talks about.
China follows “whole-process people’s democracy”, which is based on a deeper understanding of democracy. China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy can be understood as “from the people, to the people, with the people, for the people”.
Whole-process people’s democracy covers the whole process of election, decision-making, management and supervision, in order to meet people’s needs and solve people’s real problems. Only such a democracy can be real democracy.
Different from Western-style democracy, China practices real democracy, because it believes the “people are the masters of the country”.
In the West, people with little or no political experience can become national leaders by winning an election.
In contrast, Chinese leaders at all levels must have the experience of working at the grassroots level to be eligible for selection through many elections before becoming high-level officials.
“…However, yes, there’s definitely the problem of a mistake/miscalculation being made–that’s why the Russian’s have emphasized so much and often that any missile launch from a known dual-use launcher will be treated as if it’s a nuclear warhead, and have pleaded with the Outlaw US Empire/NATO not to emplace such launchers that close to Russia’s borders or in Europe/Asia at all.
Russia is far more rational in its analysis of a post-nuclear war future–Who wants to live in a future without Russia.
IMO, the world can be absolutely certain that if Russia or China–possibly even Iran–is attacked directly by the Outlaw US Empire/NATO or one of its surrogates, most of North America, all of Europe, and any place any Western Oligarch might attempt to hide will be utterly devastated, while those poor souls remaining will deal with the ensuing Nuclear Winter.”
Finally,
Whether or not the USA is sinking should not matter to you. What SHOULD matter is what you do with your life, right here, and right now. I say “Be the Rufus”. We do not know when the calling will come.
However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.
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What? You might ask. And to that I will give examples of other people. People who are just like you who act as a Rufus in times of need. Dogs, as great as they are, sometimes need help. The smarter dogs know that trying to cross a street is dangerous. So what are they going to do? Well, good thing that there is a Rufus near by to help. Video
Notes
[1]Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), chapter 8, section 95.
[2] And in fact, Aristotle’s later discussion of the “great-souled man” (Nicomachean Ethics IV.3) demonstrates conclusively that he believed in vast difference among men.
[3]The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume one, Cambridge University Press (1985), pp. 111-112.
[4] Indeed, explicit human equality exists nowhere in the Bible. Paul claims in Galatians (3:28) that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” under Jesus and that “we are all one in Christ Jesus.” But this only says that all are welcome into his nascent universalist church; it does not support the idea that all are equal. And more importantly, there are very good reasons for believing that Paul held to the most obnoxious form of Jewish supremacism, and thus did not believe in human equality in the least; see my essays “Christianity: The great Jewish hoax” and “Nietzsche and the origins of Christianity.”
[5] Though, as I have recently argued in “The problem with leftism,” both the Left and the Right are “fakes,” which explains why they both adhere to similar nonsense, and why they both supplicate to the Jewish Lobby.
[6] Actually, in America we don’t have wars anymore; we have “authorized uses of military force” or AUMFs. This is Congress’ cowardly way to kill others on behalf of their lobbyists and patrons without having to vote for an actual war.
[11] Of course, not all illegal immigrants are scum. But from everything we know, a very high proportion of them are from the lowest, least intelligent, and most criminal segments of humanity. And since virtually all of them are non-White, even the best will alter the nature of our traditionally White society.
[12] Though the actual number of illegals could be much higher than the presumed 11 million. One recent study argued that the true figure could be as high as 29 million.
[14] Yes, Black African slaves and Chinese coolies “built” portions of the early US. But they provided only the low-end brute labor, not the organizational or intellectual basis for the nation. To give them credit for building America would be akin to giving credit to the oxen and draft horses of the early pioneers.
[16] Elsewhere I have argued that Hitler’s National Socialism can also be a model going forward. His nationalism created an ethnic-based sense of unity and purpose that far exceeded mindless patriotism, and his socialism served as an antidote to unrestrained finance capitalism. There are many good lessons to be learned there. Interested readers should start with my recent edition of Mein Kampf, and with my newly-reworked edition of Alfred Rosenberg’s classic, The Myth of the 20th Century.
[17] Black males were granted the right to vote in 1866, and women (of all races) in 1920.
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
You know, the anti-China media hysteria has reached new lows and levels of insanity that is truly difficult to fathom.
I mean, who in their right mind would believe this nonsense? Wait for it?
…Dumbed down Western media consumers.
I do tire of all the “War with China over Taiwan is imminent” bullshit.
It’s not.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are equally locked into an adversarial mode when it comes to Russia and China. Ex-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, is now calling for economic war against Beijing. Some might conclude that everything in contemporary Washington comes down to a latter-day opera buffa in which an assortment of comic characters parade for a moment only to be replaced by the next bumbler sporting an equally ridiculous message.Russia aside, witness the recent wave of China bashing, begun by Barack Obama with his pivot to Asia, continued under Donald Trump with his China virus rants, and endorsed by Joe Biden’s team which persists in labeling Beijing as enemy number one.
No one steps back and considers even for a moment that the US is China’s largest market and that the US in turn relies on Chinese manufactured products to fill its Walmarts.
(Not true. The USA represents only 2% of Chinese exports. It was 11% in 2019 when COVID hit. The largest export market for Chinese products is Japan. Please get your info correct. -MM)
If ever two nations had good reasons not to go to war, it would be China and the United States, yet the US desire to confront the “Red Menace” to include defending Taiwan continues to drive policy.
-UNZ
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. American “news” has become a sewer of noise, horrible lies and distortions. And, you know, it’s going to get people killed. I tire of it all. To understand what is really going on you need to study the issues, and then you look for what is not being reported and stay alert for distractions.
I’ll drink to that.
A time for wine.
Anyways, a long story (made) short; I received an email from my brother who was petrified that World War III was going to explode “any minute” and that I had to flee China immediately.
Well, I wrote about this in another post HERE, and I told him that I was going to stay in China. After all, it is the safest location on the planet.
Anyways, my brother is so very convinced that Taiwan is it’s own singular nation and that it is in need of defending by America for “democracy”. And that because of the “evil regime” in China, and the “gross overreach”, and “saber rattling” of the horrible communists, that a war is soon to explode.
China is a “democracy” for Pete’s sake! (Head slap!)
Pretty strange for a certified “tax protestor”, who had his passport seized by Uncle Sam to talk about “freedom” and “liberty” when he himself is restricted in travel due to not having a vaccination. But then again, that’s the USA for you.
All talk, no substance. Or, as we used to say in Texas; “All hat. No cattle”.
Well, this bullshit about Taiwan being an “independent” nation is simply not true, and I am going to explain why.
What is the relationship between Taiwan and China?
History need not be difficult to understand, but you do need to know the basics. Here’s my simplistic abridged version. And YES, I do know that I have omitted a lot of details…
History is actually interesting.
Between 1945 and 1949, China experienced a massive civil war. It was more massive than the American Civil War, and many, many people died.
Eventually, towards the Fall of 1949, the Communists under Mao Zedong won the war. They set up their capital in Beijing, and on 1 October 1949 declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
The losers; the “Chinese Nationalists” fled the Chinese mainland.
They looted all the museums, and using lorries, trucks, and other conveyances hauled their booty to the coasts where they loaded them on boats. The major staging area was in the Xiamen coastal region. As the laden boats began to depart, the communists began shelling the vessels and so the retreating rebels landed on the island of Taiwan and fortified themselves in.
They had no where else to go. They spent years fighting the Japanese, and they couldn’t go there. Korea was too risky, as the Chinese communists had well secured that area, and heading south towards the South China Sea was the only remaining option.
So they hunkered down, and fortified their positions and made Taiwan their base of resistance to the Chinese mainland. Since that time, these rebels have declared themselves to be the “true” heir to the Chinese nation, and they have enlisted help from the United States to conduct “color revolutions” and other black operations in an attempt to regain their power back.
This effort continues to this day.
Over the last 70 years
The rebels in Taiwan, with all the looted gold and valuables, left the mainland destitute, poor and agrarian.
In the tiny Taiwan island, they used their money to construct huge enormous palaces for themselves and their families, and then used the rest of the loot to set up business as factories that would cater to the West.
And they were successful.
Over the decades “Made in Taiwan” dominated much of the world’s manufacturing concerns.
While mainland China had to work hard, step by step to become the economic powerhouse that it is today. They went from sub-zero to the very top and the very best.
It only took them 70 years.
Today, we see an eclipsing of economic power between Taiwan and China, and the oligarchy that rules Taiwan is literally scared shitless.
For the wrath of China will not be kind to them.
So they have been funding, in terms of billions of dollars, the American Senate, and American neocons, to get American intervention regarding mainland China. And the greedy, psychopathic American leadership are just lapping it all up. Yum!
The Hate China narrative, paid for by Taiwanese billionaires.
Many things has occurred over the last 70 years, but one thing is certain, China will once again be unified as one nation. Both Taiwan, and mainland China expect it.
Is Taiwan and China separate nations?
No.
China says that they are the same nation.
Taiwan says that they are the same nation.
The United Nations (UN) says that they are the same nation.
All Taiwanese citizens have Chinese residency. This is something that the American media NEVER reports.
The only nation that doesn’t accept the one-China solution is the United States. Which is thanks to the many billions of dollars that the Taiwanese billionaires have been throwing at Washington DC over the last few decades.
Now the current ruling “political party” in Taiwan is pushing for a “two nation” solution, and want the United States to force this situation into being.
Which, you know, seems to be a severe death wish, and delusions of dying in a full scale nuclear holocaust.
Haven’t they seen what America looks like today?
I guess not. It’s “exceptional” don’t you know!
Size Comparisons
I shouldn’t need to do this, but since most Americans are dumbed down to the knowledge of a retarded snail, I am afraid that I have to speak in pre-school terms to get the message across.
Since, China and the United States are roughly the same size. You can compare how big Taiwan is relatively. Taiwan is roughly the size of Rhode Island comparatively.
Size of Rhode Island shown on a map of the United States.
In case you don’t believe me, here’s a map of China. Taiwan is pretty small.
Map of China showing Taiwan.
Taiwan is a tiny, tiny island that sits right off the coast of China. It has been part of China for thousands of years, and still is recognized as part of China. And all the millions of dollars in saying otherwise will not change that fact.
Why is Taiwan important to the United States?
According to all the literature on the subject, all American battle plans against China originate from a fortified staging area inside of Taiwan.
American war-mongering neocon “wet dream” plan on “containing” China.
Thus it is critically important for the United States to place enormous quantities of war and military munitions and equipment on Taiwan in preparation for a landing inside of China.
Obviously this is myopic, short sighted and stupid.
China would have Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Houston in radioactive ruins long before the first landing wave touches the shoreline. And if you think that China will allow Taiwan to have active American military bases there, you are delusional.
Crazy.
Idiotic.
Insanely delusional. Foolhardy idiotic.
Mind-numbingly stupid.
A handful of technical advisors is one thing, but a full scale military presence is a war-move.
WAR
INSTIGATOR
But I have covered all the actual and real reasons why all the fuss is over Taiwan right now. It’s the billionaire oligarchy inside of Taiwan that want something done. And they are in a state of panic.
Well, if you listen to the bullshit blaring American media microphone, war is imminent. But you know, that’s just a song for the Americans to dance to. Hype up war. Create a context and then strike preemptively on some kind of false-flag bullshit excuse.
It’s the American way, don’t you know.
Provoke China to fight. And then America “plays China like a fiddle”.
Will China attack Taiwan?
It can.
It certainly has the ability. But it won’t. China is far smarter than that. It will do so if the “red lines” are crossed. They are not crossed, so China will do nothing.
Countercurrents against peaceful reunification must be curbed. General Secretary Xi Jinping stated categorically that nothing can change the fact that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese with the same national identity, and nothing can stop the trend toward reunification of the Chinese nation.
Taiwan independence goes against this unstoppable trend and will eventually be crushed by the wheels of history.
Chinese must not fight against Chinese, and for this purpose we have made the greatest efforts for peaceful reunification with the utmost sincerity.
However, we do not renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all necessary measures to prepare for possible interference by external forces and separatist activities by a handful of "Taiwan independence" separatists.
Such measures would certainly not be targeted at the people of Taiwan.
-QStheory
Another video of some of the Chinese military systems. video.
Oh, and by the way, China is decades ahead of the USA in laser beam weapon systems
I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Well, you know, any real good things about China are suppressed. You probably think that all of China is polluted, filthy full of bat eating, floor spitting, tiny brown people riding bikes, huh? video.
There’s a lot of things in play right now. And I am going to do you all a favor and simplify things for you all.
An overview of China Military
Well, since no one is going to do this, I will. There’s a two minute overview of just how formidable the Chinese military is right now. It’s a great little short video, and if you are still thinking that China can be attacked, or that China is just some bunch of untrained peasants with AK47 clones, you are sadly, and dangerously mistaken. The PLA will attack and be very, very nasty about it. You haven’t seen shit yet. DO NOT POKE THE PANDA. video.
And what China can do to Taiwan, right now!
Just a reminder on how close Taiwan is to the mainland. Just in case you didn’t get that fact while listening to CNN, FOX “news” or the Drudge Report. Check out what China can do to Taiwan right now. video. This can happen from inside of mainland China to the tiny, tiny island of Taiwan.
Watch the video.
Learn a thing or two.
Because China can do what is shown on this video without even putting a foot on the ground. China just pressed a button, and all of Taiwan is on fire. Watch and Learn. video.
What to expect… the nightmare scenario.
This is what would happen if the billionaires get their way…
Russia and China are tired of the buildup to war, and preemptively strike America with a bone-crushing nuclear salvo, while simultaneously destroying all naval carrier groups, boomer subs, and major Naval bases. Additionally, Australia suffers massive destruction, as does Japan and Korea.
Massive, in that the top ten cities of Japan, and Australia are all radioactive rubble.
American command centers are all black blank screens all comms are down. Satellites malfunction, or fall out of orbit. Alt communication goes black.
The ass-kissing diversity officers, and the trans-gen military leadership start freaking out in the command bunkers and they desperately try to warn the American leadership to fly to safety, but before they can pick up a cellphone, they themselves are gone in a shooch! of bright light and dust.
The largest city surviving is Picayune Louisiana.
But, you know it's tough, as they are trying to cope with a massive flood of armed, ethnic-urban-youth, radioactive refugees streaming out from the blackened remains of smoldering New Orleans. Big thick oily black clouds fill the air with soot.
The United States government collapses. It's not hard. Long in coming. But with Washington DC a water filled crater, I mean, what are you gonna do?
All American supply lines completely collapse. Hordes of hungry starving urban ethnic youth stream into the suburbs. They raid the "McMansions", the small towns, and the communities, and they take over all of the highways and transport routes. Oh, sure there's a few "freedom patriots" that shoot back.
Not many.
It's "every man for himself".
Many die, overwhelmed by the millions of angry, hungry, pissed off hordes. People who hate. Hate. Hate. HATE.
Balkanized battles are common. White people are hung screaming and crying from the top of McDonald's "golden arches" signs. Asians are tied to chairs inside of Starbucks and set on fire. Mexicans are attacked, but they shoot back, and the "good ol' boys" try to hop into their trucks to join the fray, but they are immobilized as an EMP burst fried all automotive electronics.
The first major storm of Winter hits.
All the homes freeze as there isn't any heat, and all the pipe crack and break as CPVC isn't as strong as cast iron. To make matters worse, they needed secondary booster shots of the mRNA Vaxx are not available. People start dying of the common cold. Many nine year olds die from heart attacks.
A sniffle becomes the mark of the plague.
Starvation, sickness, gunshot wounds, and poor sanitary conditions prevail.
The most frustrated transgens start to freak out as their hormones start altering, and their sex-change medicine is no longer available to them. They become enraged angry maniacs and the cities become true horror scenes.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the second American civil war starts. Texas, and California break away to become their own nations. Others follow.
Virginia organizes.
Armed enclaves set up in Georgia.
Mississippi monitors all road traffic with lethal consequence. Many a dead person sways in the breeze.
Snipers slow all movement in the desert to a standstill.
And you have all those guns in the hands of all those civilians shooting everyone. Organized State armies, using all those fancy tanks and high tech weapons developed by the military-industrial union turn on the people and serve their own needs. National guard patrol the major cities, but are overwhelmed by organized armed rebellion.
Killings, rapes, torture, and looting are commonplace.
The interim federal government in exile flies to New Zealand and tries to coordinate control over the collapsed United States out of a survivalist bunker, but is unsuccessful. They try to coordinate but are unsuccessful. They too start to worry as their own supplies of drugs and sustaining medication are quickly being depleted.
Eventually, they surrender, and the United States is carved up into tiny, tiny fiefdoms.
The rest of the world moves on.
America? What's an america?
North America is listed as a quarantine zone, and is isolated from the rest of the world. Millions die. The survivors become hardier, but no longer speak English. The Southern "new" nations speak Spanish, and the rest have their own various regional accents. With ghetto ubonics betting the most common.
Most white, Asian, and Spanish Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line are killed in mass.
Fifty years later, some of those fiefdoms are recognized as independent countries and are permitted to attend the UN meetings in "observer" status.
Pretty nasty, huh?
You bet.
I hope that I frightened you. It’s not a pretty sight. I think we have to be reminded that the things that we do have consequences, and we must always hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
What’s more than likely is this…
In Taiwan, a number of the hard-core separatist nationalists start dying off of old age, coronavirus, and car accidents.
Rapprochements by the traditionalist factions inside of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland government come to a workable solution for reunification.
The United States military is kicked out of Taiwan, as all the USA weapons systems that they have (billions and billions of dollars worth) are boxed up and shipped off to Iran as a "good will" gesture.
The Iranians welcome the many shipments of high end fighter jets, missiles, and equipment.
The United States has a fit. News media screams! And the rest of the world continue as if nothing has happened.
A new American election looms on the horizon.
The candidates scream to do "something" about China, and the dumbed down apathetic sheeple go eat their McFat burgers and slurp their mega-Coka sodas.
All continues in the land of the dumb, fat, and ignorant.
Anyways, keep in mind that what you see on the “news” is for regional consumption. The rest of the world doesn’t really care.
Remember. China has friends.
Something that is somehow omitted in all the hate – hate – hate dialog flooding the media. China has friends, and the “West” is increasingly becoming more and more isolated every day.
China has friends.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning 2. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Important note: Image above is NOT of the USS Connecticut. It is of the USS San Francisco that rammed into an undersea mountain in 2005.
Let’s get right to the point.
The official American story is that the USS Connecticut rammed into an unmarked undersea mountain.
Since the Navy revealed this week that the fast-attack submarine Connecticut struck an undersea mountain in early October while operating in the South China Sea, one question springs to mind: how could this happen?How could a $3 billion Seawolf-class boat, considered one of the Navy’s most formidable and advanced, crash into an undersea landmass?-NavyTimes
Which is pretty strange as the locations of all undersea mountains has been well mapped for decades. You can see them on Google Earth for goodness sakes!
Bathymetric map of the South China sea.
It’s a very questionable conclusion.
And you know, what makes it even more questionable is that the United States navy has been flying their radiation detection aircraft all over where the USS Connecticut was running operations. Which is abnormal.
Radiation detection aircraft flight path…
Searching for something.
But then if you couple the United States silence to the Chinese inquiries as to whether or not nuclear payloads, equipment, and fissionable materials entered Chinese waters.
There are absolutely zero answers from the United States government to very serious questions asked by China.
The official Chinese story is something else. Here we will tell the Chinese side of the story.
Believe it or not. It’s up to you.
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. And, you know, I tire of my own sluggishness in trying to understand the great failure of the American “free media”.
Even I realize that there is no such thing as actual “news” in the West, but really guys it’s not too FUCKING DIFFICULT.
Beware of any “news” that you WANT to believe.
Look for what IS NOT being reported in the mainstream or conservative media.
Take particular note when the official narrative is absurd.
Be especially cautious of “seeded“ narratives that you get in emails, or in alternative websites.
That being said, let’s dive in…
The Seawolf class overview
Seawolf
From my email 17NOV21
I had a little message from one of my friends regarding the Connecticut incident. FYI, it seems the following message was approved by Beijing so I will just tack it on here.
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It has been translated from Chinese, with some clarifications to the machine translations by MM.
…
The Chinese military authorizes the disclosure of the truth about the accident of the Seawolf class nuclear submarine on the USS Connecticut.
16 November 2021
How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army hunted and sunk the (state of the art) USS Connecticut Seawolf-class attack nuclear submarine in the South China Sea.
-October 2-
The British aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, the American aircraft carrier Nimitz, the American aircraft carrier Roosevelt, and the Japanese aircraft carrier Izumo entered Chinese waters. It dis so with 17 other warships. They hailed from the United States, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. This 4 aircraft carrier armada represented the Western power of six nations.
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The South China Sea armada begins to conduct large-scale military exercises against China. This was done off the Chinese coast and within Chinese territorial waters.
.
Trying to push China into a war.
-October 2 to 4-
The People’s Liberation Army dispatched a large number of military aircraft to the South China Sea to conduct simulated attack exercises against these uninvited warships.
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The armada came from six countries. they were the United States, Britain, Japan, Holland, Canada and Australia. These nations all participated in conducting simulated invasions, attacks, and destruction of China, the Chinese nation, and Chinese sea lanes.
.
Chinese J-20 aircraft.
-October 2-
China’s Guanlan Marine Science Guard observed the approximate position and depth of the USS Connnecticut Seawolf class nuclear submarine when it entered the South China Sea.
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It followed it as it approached the South China Sea, and conducted operations South of Taiwan. It then observed it creep up the coast and operated near the Chinese shoreline and conduct surreptitious and illegal operations (inside of Chinese territorial waters as defined by the UN) of an unknown nature.
.
The Guanlan satellite sent the data to the Super Measurement Center in Jinan to estimate the position of the Connecticut.
.
Guanlan satellite.
-China’s special detection device captured the ultra-low frequency sonar from the bow of the Connecticut spherical boat and transmitted the data to the Sonar Analysis Center in Shanghai to accurately locate the position and depth of the Connecticut. It was operating at 1500 meters [?] making and conducting obvious operations and drills inside of the Chinese coastline.
-The Type 927 underwater acoustic detection ship stationed on Yongshou Island and the anti-submarine helicopter stationed on Yongxing Island are dispatched for detection.
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Type 927 underwater acoustic detection ship.
-The Yun-8 military plane took off from the Hainan Air Force Base and carried out a “sonic bomb” on the Connecticut.
.
This technology (a “sonic bomb”) causes the submarine’s personnel to be extremely uncomfortable due to the sonic shock. It does not injure or kill anyone. It simply makes all their pain receptors ignite on their bodies.
I am told it feels like being burned alive while frenzied hordes of cocaine-addicted rats gnaw at your eyes, gonads and fingers. And insects borrow deep inside your skin, biting, chewing and clawing all over your body. -MM
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This terror and discomfort forced the submarine to try to escape from the targeting cone of effect.
.
Yun-8 military plane.
-While it was trying to exit the cone of effect, the AI controlled robotic Chinese HSU001 unmanned submarine slipped silently to the nuclear submarine Connecticut. Where it attached itself to the bow of the ship.
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This was an intentional placement. This locations was as far away as possible from the nuclear power plant for a close local directed-explosion attack.
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It was then ignited, and ended up causing serious damage to the bow of the boat and a complete loss of sonar sensing ability.
Translation confusion. I do not know if it placed weapons charges, or if the entire robot detonated itself. -MM
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The navigation capabilities and the nuclear power plants were not affected, preventing nuclear leaks from polluting the fishing waters off the Chinese coast.
.
Chinese HSU001 unmanned submarine.
-The Connecticut nuclear submarine, which lost its underwater submarine capability, was forced to float up and surrender. The Chinese military forced the submarine to float up and surrender.
.
As the submarine broke the surface, it was met with Chinese PLA Naval vessels who took no overt action.
.
Due to the close surveillance of the navy and air force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the military aircraft and ships from the six countries of the United States, Japan, Britain, Australia, Holland, and Canada dared not come to rescue the submarine during the South China Sea exercise.
.
If the Allied American force were to engage, world war III would become a reality.
.
The submarine was “escorted” by the Chinese Navy and Air Force while in the South China Sea and the submarine was directed to follow the ships to docking facilities on the Chinese mainland.
Translation misunderstanding. It is unknown if the damaged submarine was actually escorted by the Naval Vessels, or if it then immediately submerged when given the opportunity. -MM
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Where it then again submerged. Further contact with the submarine was then lost.
-October 7th-
The United States announced the Connecticut accident by the United States.
-October 7-
The Chinese Foreign Ministry frantically questioned the ins and outs of the USS Connecticut incident to the Biden administration, but did not obtain any answers or explanations.
-October 22-
The Chinese monitoring system detected a US nuclear submarine entering the South China Sea again near Huangyan Island.
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Damaged submarine surfaces.
A final update by the source
The PLAN would be messing around with USN at this point.
1500 meter depth misinfo probably planted deliberately to taunt them because if the Drone sub did find the Connecticut, they definitely knew the actual depth it was running.
From the questions subsequently posed by the Chinese, it does seem they knew there was no nuclear leak.
China is playing around but It's like a cat with a mouse it caught.
The whole thing has Donald Cook vibes. Morale can't be good atm.
Added youtu.be link. You might like. https://youtu.be/VeJLwUfLcEU.
These pictures are all over the internet and I snagged one for use here.
Unfortunately the damage to the seawolf is not well photographed anywhere that I could find. Obviously the damage is a secure matter and the USN will not disseminate any pictures of it. Which is exactly what you would do to prevent an enemy from ascertaining knowledge on how effective their weapons systems were against you.
You do not do that with undersea mountain collisions. As the hundreds of USN released photos attest to. In previous mountain collisions, the USN was quick in the dissemination of information.
All photos depicting “combat damage” are classified as secret.
All photos depicting “accidental damage” are classified as “confidential” and released as the USN permits.
By all indications the damage to the seawolf is much more substantive than what everyone is led to believe. It is far more extensive than the collision damage indicated in the article featured image photo above.
Bow of a seawolf…
Bow of a seawolf class submarine.
A Los Angeles submarine bow…
The bow of a Los Angeles submarine bow.
This is the only photo that I have been able to obtain on the actual submarine in drydock and the damage involved. This is from THE DRIVE.
You can clearly see that the entire bow of the submarine is GONE. This fact alone shows that the damage is far more substantive than what is illustrated in the collision photo used as the header above.
Additionally, please note the orange ventilation tube, and the three access points where the tubes pump air into the front bow of the ship..
It appears that the entire front of the submarine forward of the conning tower is seeping water. And thus, needs to be pressurized to keep the water out.
This implies hull breaches at numerous points in the front one third of the submarine. This is NOT damage indicative of a forward collision. It is indicative of an explosion.
Seawolf sub in drydock.
From the photos it appears that the entire bow sonar array is GONE.
This is not a crushed impact. The array does not disintegrate upon collision. Some event completely eviscerated the entire front of the bow. Then punctured the hull in numerous points up to the conning tower.
Air is being pumped into the entire weapon storage and handling area aft of the forward navigation section.
Conclusions
Interesting version of events.
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This certainly makes far more sense that “accidentally” hit an “unmarked mountain”. But whether or not it is actually true is unknown and will stay that way forever.
.
So, I do not know how true it is. We must always be aware of propaganda consisting of what we want to believe. The aspects of this particular narrative that makes sense is that it is in alignment with current Chinese technology and military doctrine.
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What I DO KNOW, is that right after the damage to the submarine was ascertained, and the crew debriefed, a close family friend of ours who is “connected” with the USN at a high level chatted with my brother. (A man who had gone “X-ray” from me for the last year or so) And contacted me telling me to leave China immediately that there would be a massive dangerous war and he couldn’t help me. I wrote about this elsewhere.
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This event train, along with the [1] quick rearming and [2] secret payload installation on numerous submarines at that time, fits well with this Chinese narrative. And not with the “crashed into a mountain” narrative.
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That all being said, it is obvious that the Chinese do not want radioactive waters near the Chinese coast, so they only damaged the sub, not sunk it completely. For after all it is a nuclear sub carrying nuclear torpedoes. But we cannot expect this behavior and “safety rules” to continue with the pushing by the United States towards war. This is an aspect of war that I hadn’t thought about previously, but makes complete sense. This is why New Zealand absolutely refuses any nuclear vessels in and near it’s waters.
Yet nothing else about this incident is available anywhere. Very curious. Very, very curious. I presume there is video footage of the sub surfacing and it’s surrender. The PLA Navy seem to be toying around with the US navy like a cat would with a mouse. Seeing this video footage would greatly substantiate this narrative, but as in all things Chinese PLA, access and dissemination are tightly controlled.
It’s difficult for me to accept the American narrative that the submarine not only collided with an uncharted mountain, but that the Chinese just stood by and did nothing while a four aircraft carrier armada conducted missile drills simulating an attack on China. There are NO uncharted undersea mountains in the South China Sea. Hasn’t anyone watched the 1980’s Tom Clancy movie “Red October”? The entire ocean has been mapped.
It is also difficult for me to believe that the Chinese with all their advances and lead in military technology are thwarted by the American Navy. It just doesn’t stand up to the “sniff test”. At least not to us “technology wonks“. The Chinese have surpassed the United States military in a number of very new and novel technologies and the USA will take decades trying to counter them.
Overall, the Chinese seemed to intentionally want to disable the submarine, force it to surface, and then acquire it in a fully functional state. Whether this is for Geo-political purposes, or to reverse engineer it is unknown. My guess is the later, as they really don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks. When your reputation is shit, who cares if someone says something bad about you.
True or not, you can rest assured that this release of this information would have been war gamed and factored into the AI computations that will figure predominantly in the events of the future. The Chinese do not play around. They are a very serious nation, run on merit, and lead with capable leaders.
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If the provocations continue, we can expect China to sink the submarines completely. The impression that I have is that they are “being gentle” at this moment in time. After all, they could have sunk the 3 billion 6 billion dollar nuclear submarine and killed the entire crew of 140 seamen. It is a top of the line, best of the best, American “prize” of the fleet. But they did not.
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This particular Seawolf type of submarine is an offensive weapon that is designed to sneak into enemy waters, and destroy ships, shipping, and facilities. The fact that it was tracked inside Chinese territorial waters clearly indicated it’s intentions. Aside from a violation of the national sovereignty of China, it was a violation of the UN code of behaviors in the South China Sea. Sinking the ship off the Coast of China would prove to the world that the USA is a dangerous aggressor, but that would not matter, as World War III would have been ignited.
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All in all, it took a remarkable amount of restraint not to completely sink the submarine and kill all the crew. The Chinese played this incident adroitly. They [1] demonstrated their abilities and capabilities for the world to see, and [2] showed that they have restraint. They [3] indicated that they desire peace and not war.
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It is unfortunate that the United States cannot take these subtle hints at face value. The American government leadership tend to over-estimate their abilities, and severely under-estimate the abilities of their foes.
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This was a warning. There will NOT be a second one.
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Let’s see what happens next.
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Given the idiots that run the United States today, I fully expect the United States government to “double down” and send their ships and submarines into harms way knowing full well that they risk the lives of all involved. I cannot see that it would matter inside the Washington DC beltway.
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Interesting read never the less.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This article addresses the disconnect from reality that many American readers of media seem to have regarding China. They are correct, a war is going to happen. the USA is at a fever pitch right now and very desirous of it. But what I say here is be VERY careful of what you wish for. You might not be able to handle the result.
Important note. To truly get the most out of this article, you MUST watch these short (15 second to 1 minute) video clips. Watch. Learn. Understand. Also note that a number of the videos are banned in the United States. So, maybe you might have to destroy your computer after watching the videos. LOL.
Ok. Brace yourself. I’m telling you all what you are dealing with, and what the real situation actually is. You can agree or disagree. Remember, knowledge is a tool. It is up to you to use it or not.
How this came about…
Today I received my second email from my brother. It was a sad and disturbing letter. Again, he pleaded for me to leave China and return back to the United States “where it will be safe”.
But you know, that is not going to happen. I love China.
I love everything about China, and I have family that I love. I have Chinese friends that I cherish and love dearly. I have homes, businesses, and a lifestyle that I am not going to leave. I love the culture in China. I love the food. I love the work relationships, and I even love stinky tofu.
Once you live in China and see (with your own experiences) how wonderful it is, you will never go back to the cesspool that the United States has become.
I am also retired. I no longer am involved in the world of black operations, top secret SAP programs, spooky stuff, and all that. I am retired. I retired to a calm place, a clean place; a good place. I retired to Mayberry RFD. If you would like to know what it is like here in China.
Never the less, all of the “news” out of the United States is war-war-war-war-WAR! and I have lived long enough inside of America to know what is next. It’s clear and plain as the nose on my face.
I’ve seen this all before. Not just as an American citizen reading the “news”, but also as one of those people who “make things happen”. I know precisely what is going on, and why.
So my email, from my brother, was disturbing. He knows who I am and what I did. Yet, he regurgitated the hate-narrative, pro-war narrative, when he should know better.
In it, he reiterated that I leave China. That it is not safe. And that the bellicose saber rattling, and hostile actions by the evil communists will be stopped by the incredible might of the massive American military forces. His words. Not mine.
He went on and on about how China didn’t have a chance, and that while China might have a few hundred nuclear warheads, that is nothing to the 6,500 nuclear weapons that America has.
He further elaborated that he KNOWS (we have mutual boyhood friends in high level military operations) that traps have been sprung; safeties are off, and it’s just a matter of time… and not long either… when China will finally be punished for all of it’s evil misdeeds.
He said that I am in great danger.
He said that China will be “hit hard” and he KNOWS that China will stand alone and take the most incredible beating ever seen by man. He said that every nation either despises China or is afraid of it, but when the “call goes out” the entire rest of the world will swarm to kick China into a beaten pulp.
He proudly talked about how America has very strong nuclear capabilities and that the generals are not afraid to use them. New orders have been issued, and “everyone knows” that there will be a hot kinetic war soon.
He said that the tiny independent nation of Taiwan (?) has some “tricks up it’s sleeve” and that the USA and China has been at war for years now and I should see the “writing on the wall” and recognize that the time to leave my “third world shit-hole” is fast coming to an end. There is only a short “window of opportunity” remaining and that I should take it.
…
He said other things also, but…
But this really gets to me.
He knows nothing. And I find his ignorance of what China is astoundingly insulting. And he’s a smart man. I an only just imagine what others might say; those that only get their information from the government controlled “news” media.
China is NOT what is portrayed. He should know better as he has seem my lifestyle; my family, and what it is like. Yet, for some odd reason, he thinks that it is terminally dingy, grey skies, and full of evil selfish people. Jeeze! It isn’t. This is what China actually is. VIDEO.
Video
But he has provided me with some critical Intel about what Americans think. And it is what I have been saying all along. I spent 40 years of my life in the United States and 20 in China. I know how it works.
America is on a “war footing”.
Americans are desirous of a nice solid hot war, and they will get it.
The “ball is rolling” and it cannot be stopped.
That this long war will be intended to be in the far-away South China Sea.
The war will enjoy the support of a vast majority of Americans who all now despise all Chinese.
He argued that it’s only a matter or time that China will make a mistake, and when it does, “all Hell will break loose“.
And that China doesn’t have a chance.
Key points are omitted by all those wanting war
You know, each and every time I come across these arguments, the “elephant in the room” is always omitted. And it’s funny and odd. Very important points are ignored as if they are meaningless. And when I bring up these points, they are ignored. And what is amazing is that even the most intelligent people in the United States are falling for this narrative.
These points are always left out and ignored. What points you might ask?
How about, for starters…
It will be a war inside of America. Any war with China will be on American soil, and personal. It will not be off in a far away South China Sea.
Let that point sink in. Not far away. But will hit “home”. China will make FUCKING SURE that America feels what it is like to be attacked. This is a fact. Deal with it.
Taiwan is not an “independent” nation. Both Taiwan and Mainland China mutually agree that there is only one China. Not two separate nations.
Let that point register. Taiwan is NOT a separate nation. The UN doesn’t think so. China doesn’t think so, and even Taiwan doesn’t think so. But for some crazy insane reason, the United States thinks so.
For those of you who are still not convinced, here’s the President of the United States telling you that Taiwan is China. That China owns Taiwan.
A war against all of Asia. Russia and China are military allies and will fight together.
Like I said, this is something NO ONE is talking about. They just gloss over it as if it is unimportant.
China is dangerous. China is a merit driven society that is very smart.
America is an oligarchy ruled military empire that is in a free-fall decline right now. And China is a nation of merit where everyone starting at six years old gets military training.
Costly does not equate to best. American weapons and personnel relies too much on systems that are easily compromised.
Now, be advised, that there is no question that there will be massive destruction and casualties all over the world. China will take some enormous losses, and some of the beautiful cities will be erased from the earth. I lament that.
But obviously, thinking that America will be “safe” just shows how ignorant and delusional these people are. The United States will be the LAST place you would want to be when the missiles start flying.
As I wrote in my other postings, China and Russia use AI controlled swarm nukes in shotgun saturation’s. They just don’t hit strategic targets, they glass over entire regions. They are very messy with their weapons.
America would be the worst place to be.
For all sorts of reasons.
General points of understanding
Here’s some general points that I want to underline, and then I follow up with the American (and Brit and Australian) beliefs and compare that to what is actually going on.
So, with all this in mind, check out some key points.
Point #1 – Chinese leadership
Capable. Tough. Pragmatic. Peaceful, but don’t fuck with them.
American Disinfo:
Xi Peng is a tyrant, who runs a mafia-like organization out of Beijing. He and his cronies are despised, and once they are killed off, China would collapse.
The disinfo has saturated the dialog.
The truth is that the Chinese leadership is there through merit and hard work, and are supported by an amazing group of other merit driven experts. There are no “diversity hires” here. No positions through Nepotism. No LGBT, or quota driven “experts”. No political appointees. No back-room dealings with union organizers, community organizations or religious figures. They got to power through merit and sacrifice.
These people are all carefully vetted, talented, aggressive, and strategic.
They are savvy and very well attuned to the problems of the world. They will make hard and tough decisions and they will make the right ones, and they will follow through on those decisions without politics or fear.
Chinese leadership.
Were a war to occur, it would be a battle of wits between the global leadership.
If you believe that Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, or Joe Biden can out maneuver the Chinese on strategy, then you are wholly delusional.
Point #2 – Chinese Manufacturing
Elaborate, and extensive. Cutting edge technology making the latest in gadgets and devices. Now supplies Germany, Japan and Korea with all their gadgets.
American Disinfo:
China only makes cheap, inexpensive junk. They cannot innovate, and at best operate using slave, and child labor in 19th century sweatshops.
There is this ongoing theme in the American (and Western) “news” media that China only makes “junk” and that if America stopped buying things from China, all of China would collapse. It permeates all American media. Which is Made in China means junk.
There’s also another deception; which is that America is the largest customer of Chinese made products, and that if the USA stops sourcing from China, China would collapse.
It’s not even remotely true.
In 2018, American products accounted for just under 1`1% of all Chinese exports.
Today, in late 2021, the number is actually around 2%.
China hasn’t collapsed.
If you were to really simplify all the issues regarding this singular point you would see that much of what China makes is shipped to other nations for resale under different names. Those high end German cameras are all made in China. They are shipped to Germany. But in boxes and proudly says “Made in Germany” on the box. Then Germany sells those cameras to the United States who mistakenly believe that they are buying a German manufactured product.
I know because I am active in that industry. That’s the way it is done.
This is the same with Korea, Japan, and Australia as well. Most of the real cheap stuff has been off-shored to much poorer nations so that the retailers can maintain their profit margins.
For shits and giggles, here’s a comparison between the US Spacestation and the Chinese spacestation. VIDEO here.
Video
Now, let’s pause and consider two issues were a war to erupt.
All exports of goods out of China would end. Which thus means that the export of all products would thus completely end.
China would continue to manufacture things, for Chinese use. Whether rubber duckies, or nuclear warheads. And they would do so with ruthless precision, speed and quality.
The United States, would be unable to complete because most of the industrial parks all over the nation don’t make things. They are just nice office buildings that house accountants, lawyers, HR, diversity officers, and some supply line experts.
Those that exist have large boxy pole-frame buildings that house the warehouses from the items obtained from overseas, but the actual floor and manufacturing lines are not present. You can identify those structures by rectangle buildings with many windows for lighting.
American industrial park. Many warehouses. Not one single assembly factory. You can see the office building and all the warehouses, but nothing is physically being made here in this “factory”.
Look at an aerial view of a typical American “Industrial park”. Where’s the rail lines, the loading bays and the warehouses to store the manufactured products at? These are warehouse distribution points.
Not manufacturing facilities.
Were a war to occur, America would soon run out of tangible things. Not just war material, but also the things that the American citizenry have come to expect in their life.
Like medicine. Like automotive computers. Like tools. Like appliances.
Not China. They make things and have an enormous infrastructure to support industry. Video here.
Video
Point #3 – Chinese Weapons systems
Chinese weapons systems are state of the art, available in massive quantities, operated by motivated and skilled soldiers that are fighting for the right to exist.
American Disinfo:
China's military consists of conscripts using cheaply made soviet-era copies, and supplemented with antiquated former Soviet Union equipment.
The Shenyang FC/J-31 and the Chengdu J-20 of the top line Chinese aircraft in use today.
I often see articles (in the Western press) praising the great high technology systems of the grand American military. And their specifications are truly spectacular. It seems like every plane is a “race car”, every device has the latest in graphical interface and exotic technology.
But they all need to be based, repaired and serviced.
When supply lines break down, many of these great systems are simply junk. Aside from the fact that no matter how great a plane is, it does need to land. And if you are fighting China, there will not be any place to land.
The Chinese have perfected some very advanced systems that are decades ahead of anything that America has. Do not be so sure that invading China would be another Iraq. It will not be.
Point #4 – Chinese Size
China is a huge nation, with an enormous population. In fact there are more Chinese that speak English (as a second language) than Americans in the entire world.
American Disinfo:
China is like Bangladesh or India, only much larger.
Couple that with the absolute ignorance of Americans. They have no idea about this. Or much as anything else for that matter.
Most Americans are clueless about geography. I don’t mean just a little bit ignorant, I mean absolutely and positively ignorant. Check out this VIDEO to show you what I am talking about…
Clueless video.
Pretty astounding, huh?
True America…
1. *AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership. He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it's not Walter who's lacking the intelligence
2. *WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS: Police in Oakland, CA spent two hours attempting to subdue a gunman who had barricaded himself inside his home. After firing ten tear gas canisters, officers discovered that the man was standing beside them in the police line, shouting, 'Please come out and give yourself up.'
3. *WHAT WAS PLAN B? An Illinois man, pretending to have a gun, kidnapped a motorist and forced him to drive to two different automated teller machines, wherein the kidnapper proceeded to withdraw money from his own bank accounts.
4. *THE GETAWAY! A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Stop and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.
5. *DID I SAY THAT? Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a lineup. When detectives asked each man in the lineup to repeat the words: 'Give me all your money or I'll shoot', the man shouted, 'that's not what I said!'
6. *ARE WE COMMUNICATING? A man spoke frantically into the phone: 'My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart'. 'Is this her first child?' the doctor asked. 'No!' the man shouted, 'This is her husband!'
7. *NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE SHED! In Modesto, CA, Steven Richard King was arrested for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch without a weapon. King used a thumb and a finger to simulate a gun. Unfortunately, he failed to keep his hand in his pocket. (hellooooooo...!!!)
8. *THE GRAND FINALE!Last summer, down on Lake Isabella, located in the high desert, an hour east of Bakersfield, CA, some folks, new to boating, were having a problem. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get their brand new 22 foot boat, going. It was very sluggish in almost every maneuver, no matter how much power they applied. After about an hour of trying to make it go, they putted into a nearby marina, thinking someone there may be able to tell them what was wrong. A thorough topside check revealed everything in perfect working condition. The engine ran fine, the out-drive went up and down, and the propeller was the correct size and pitch. So, one of the marina guys jumped in the water to check underneath. He came up choking on water, he was laughing so hard. Under the boat, still strapped securely in place, was the trailer!
*Now remember, these are all true stories and these people vote and have children
Heck, they have been dumbed down to such a point that they can’t even find Africa on a map! With this is an understanding about how enormous China actually is. In America, New York city is considered to be the largest city. While in China, there are a few hundred cities that are much, much larger.
Just a small “fishing village”.
Being such an enormous nation with such enormous resources makes it a very formidable foe. Everyone knows that you do not poke a stick at a tiger, as it will lunge at your and kill you swiftly, but that is exactly what the United States is doing today.
Point #5 – Chinese International standing
American Disinfo:
The entire world despises and hates China, and they are isolated, and scorned.
China is not isolated. It is not universally hated, and it is not considered to be demonic.
The world realizes that the United States is collapsing, and the Asia (Russia and China) are on the rise. They are looking towards the future. And that means to be on the “good side” of the nations of the future.
There are exceptions such as the Australians, and the Brits, but for the most part the nations are pragmatic and are looking at staying out of any conflict with the American military Empire, and the very powerful Russia / China block. VIDEO
Russia and China are very close allies. If you don’t believe me, then read what XI Peng, and Putin’s comments on this subject.
Point #6 – The Chinese are serious
American Disinfo:
China is run by corrupt insiders who got there though graft, crime and corruption. They are simply stooges that do whatever it takes to maintain power.
One of the biggest mistakes that Americans make (at all levels) is to misinterpret the Chinese. They play politics, they cater to the media, they perform rude actions, and they goad the Chinese. You do not do this and not expect consequences.
Just because the tiger is sleeping does not mean that it is not aware, that it’s fangs are not sharp and that it is not ready to tear you from limb to the other limb.
Consider the tit-for-tat VTOL carrier shoot-ups in 2020…
Chinese new carrier type-075 catches fire in Shanghai. April 2020. Mysterious fire causes massive damage.
Look what happened to the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) after the fire broke out on the Type-075 carrier. It was totaled and hauled off to the scrap yard.
Two months later, the American carrier USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6). Junked. July 2020.
I have often made the statement that the Chinese are a serious, serious nation that does not play. But it’s very true.
Point #7 – Military culture
American Disinfo:
China is a nation of pacifists, and they will never use nuclear weapons, nor respond to United States provocations.
The Chinese haven't fought any wars in such a long time that they don't how to. And when the fighting starts, most of the military will crumble.
China is not a military empire. The United States is.
However, China is a merit driven society that demands doing one’s best as part of a group and everyone receives military training.
There is this belief that somehow Australian, Canadian and American forces can land inside of China and take over cities, communities and critical infrastructure and China would allow it, or fight back in crude disorganized manners. This is far from the truth.
China would fight as if their very existence was at stake, because it would be. China will never, absolutely NEVER, allow another “rape of Nanjing”.
Everyone would fight. From 6 year old “Pioneers” to retired 90 year olds. No passive passivists here. They are ready to kill and die for their home.
Here’s a video what first grade looks like in CHINA. When did you learn combat training? How to hold and clean a gun? How to form squads and lead them? These kids are only six years old. VIDEO here.
VIDEO
This video is great!
In China, military training is mandatory and begins in first grade. It continues until the students graduate from high school.
China has over 6000 years of continuous, in-your-face fighting. They are the descendants of the armies of Genghis Khan. I would strongly suggest not fucking with them.
Point #8 – China is a unified society
This canard that America loves the Chinese but hates the Chinese leadership is ingrained in the American “news” media. It’s a lie. And it shows just how ignorant America is of the reality. China is homogenized, and a unified force.
American Disinfo:
China is a fractured country of dissatisfied poverty-ridden peasants. When offered an opportunity for freedom and democracy, they would revolt and break away from the iron-grip hold of Beijing.
When you kill one leader, the others just automatically take it’s place. This system is like water, you can take out a spoonful, and the water would flow back in place. In America, where there is a two tiered society that is balkanized, there isn’t any unity, no cohesiveness, and so transitions in leadership. It’s all a scripted fiasco. As any observer of modern contemporaneous America can clearly show.
This hospital was built in ten days. All by volunteers. All meals gas, equipment, and hospital equipment and building materials were all either loaned or given freely. This aspect of how the community works together in a crisis was NEVER reported in the West.
The premise is that America must be number #1
We hear this all the time on CNN, FOX and the rest of American media. No one asks what makes America so special. Because if you actually compare America to the rest of the world, it ranks rather poorly on a wide selection of attributes. In many of the attributes at the very rock-bottom of the lists.
America has FAILED to provide for it’s citizenry. Health care is a for-profit joke. Transportation is expensive, as is food, housing, and education. The government does not serve the people, and it is a police state oligarchy that operates as a military empire. It’s a true mess.
So tell me, why MUST America be the boss of planet Earth?
No one can answer why.
Why must the current mess that the United States is, be allowed or permitted to exist. It does not serve it’s people. It’s a war empire that causes destruction all over the world, it rapes and pillages, and is run but a small handful of evil greedy oligarchs. Why?
Why is it important that the world become like America? VIDEO
Video of City life inside of America.
Still not convinced, well lets go to a DIFFERENT city… VIDEO
Video
Still not convinced, it is EVERYWHERE in America. Ok, well lets go to a third DIFFERENT city… VIDEO
Video
The War is on-going
My brother does have a point however. There is a war going on. It’s just that the United States is pushing, pushing, pushing and China is just sitting back and taking it.
Here’s a video showing how the Air Force and the Navy aviation pilots train so that they can shoot down and kill Chinese aircraft over China.
Training to kill Chinese.
Chinese team with Russia to warn Japan from aligning with the United States
Here’s something that hasn’t been reported in the American “news”.
This is a bit of a forceful move since diplomacy hasn’t worked. And the Brits and the Americans are flabbergasted that Russia would even dare sail with China. They argue that China has no rights to sail at will in international waters as it is a provocation, but America can and it is not a provocation if America does it. Video here.
Video
Chinese can build things at a pace that is difficult to comprehend
This is a very important point.
Oh, it’s not just two hospitals in ten days, or 35 submarines in one year, or 2000 nuclear ICBMS in six months. It’s everything. China can out manufacture anyone, out repair anything, and do it quickly, carefully and with decent quality. None of which is reported in the West. None of it is. VIDEO. So friggin’ amazing!
Video.
This reminds me of the Star Trek franchise where you have this race of creatures called the “Borg”. When their “cube” space ships are damaged, the damage is repaired with such speed that it looks like it is self healing before your very eyes. This, my friends, is China today.
The Chinese military is dangerous
Here’s a training exercise. Hey! Do you see any cheap AK-47 / SKS clones here? Do you see uneducated peasants? Do you see any starving people that was all that delicious freedom and democracy out of America? VIDEO
Video
China is a force to be afraid of…
Comparisons
It’s easy to find “armchair generals” and Conservative websites making comparisons between China and America.
As if it is actually possible.
They point out that America has a military and gun culture. That America is technically advanced, and it has the largest military in history with bases literally everywhere, and a huge and enormous and nearly unlimited amount of military weapons and hardware.
Which is pretty much what my brother was doing.
It’s so easy to look at one tiny little aspect and not see the entire picture.
Like looking at the number of nuclear warheads, for instance, like my brother did.
A comparison of nuclear armed submarines. China looks like the “little guy”. It looks so pathetic compared to the advanced developed systems of other navies.
But the true story is something quite different.
The Chinese military is not designed for force projection, invasion or remote operations. It is designed for up, in-your-face hard and severe defensive actions. The United States will not be able to take 100% of it’s military to fight on the Chinese shores in the South China Sea…
…but China can.
What Americans expect from a war with China.
You can disagree with my calculus, but those in America expect something quite different than what I expect.
Americans expect “A” to happen while I, a ex-spook with knowledge of a host of information, expect “B”.
Which is pretty much why my brother and I disagree so much.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t love him.
It just means that I get my information from different sources then him, and that I have a different perspective simply because I have both feet in both worlds. I know America. I know China. So thus, my understanding is that the result will be “B”.
I think that it’s not just that it’s non-stop “hate China” 24/7, but also that the pulsed thought control mechanisms have been working “overtime” to drum in all this hatred. I wrote about this before, and it was validated by vault 7. Americans are not just thought controlled, but are actually brainwashed. And so they believe “A”.
As a result of all this, American, and other “western” nations that follow the “news” media have these assumptions about what a war with China would look like. It all presents a very detailed picture of “A”.
And ignoring the facts that will make the reality actually be “B”.
These next key bullet points are what Americans expect to happen with a war with China. These are all the “givens” that “everyone knows” will occur with a war between the USA and China, and why.
First up is one of the TOP big assumptions that all Americans, Brits, and Australians believe…
1 – China is alone.
It will be a war against China, and China would be alone and isolated.
China is so evil and predatory that no one would stand by China. Already there have been numerous articles that say that Russia would abandon China, and that China would be alone with no friends. It is a fabricated narrative, but the American public just loves to read this fantasy.
Absolutely and positively there is not one single article or conservative publication that says otherwise.
No one is talking about other nations joining China to stand up to America. Not one. Since no one is looking at this issue, it is automatically assumed that any war with China, will have China alone and isolated where it can be pummeled by the USA relentlessly.
Look at every single map used by “armchair strategists” when describing a war / blockade / event with China. the image sure makes China look alone and isolated.
First and second island chain QUAD containment strategy.
They NEVER show China’s military allies.
Never.
Ever.
N-E-V-E-R.
Google it. Maps showing Chinese allies are nowhere to be found. Yet, we know that the SEC and BRICS+ are chock-full of them.
Further, in all the previous wars that America has fought, no other nations came to the aid of the attacked nation. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan all were alone, isolated and “on their own” while America attacked them. It is natural for Americans to expect this exact same kind of behavior with a war with China.
Notice how all the maps drawing about “China containment” leave out the Russians and other Chinese allies. In the map below, notice how Russia and Iran, North Korea, and the Philippines are all either neutral or listed as American allies. Which are not true at all.
In the map below…
[1] Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Philippines should be pink. In fact, most of the nations shown on the map would be allied with China, and that includes most of Africa and the middle east.
[2] Iran should be shown as pink as well as Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
[3] Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand and Vietnam would be pink.
[4] Taiwan is pink, but the leadership is green. Don’t be so sure that it is a SOLID green.
[5] Philippines is pink.
[6] North Korea is pink.
[7] Indonesia is pink.
In fact, the entire map would be pink except for Japan, Australia and South Korea. The reality differs substantially from what is pictured and presented to the American audience.
The planned “ring of containment”.
2 – American allies will die for the USA.
Most of the fighting will be borne by American allies under the leadership of American forces. (Britain, Japan, Australia and Korea).
The American leadership knows that huge death rates are very bad for career politicians. They lose elections. So they do not want to a war where there are huge American casualties.
The “containment nations”; the QUAD meets for discussions on how to host American military in their countries, and the absorption of huge quantities of invasion supplies.
Instead, of this, they want American troops to be safe inside of bases, running remote drone strikes, or flying stealth aircraft that cannot be hit.
After the announcement of the QUAD, it has become clear that America expects Australia, Japan and Britain to do most of the dying.
3 – A just war against evil.
It will be a “just war” against an evil empire. The brave and just Americans will “fight for democracy” and liberate those oppressed by communism.
No one wants to think of themselves as evil, and Americans will always refer to themselves as “exceptional democracy” instead of the oligarchy run military empire that it actually is.
The non-stop villainization of China has been relentless and constant. Ergo: China is evil. It needs to be destroyed.
As a result, most Americans have a very unfavorable opinion of China.
But you know, the world is really tired of this never ending drum-beat about a nation before the United States invades it. Watch this VIDEO at how the rest of the world reacts to the American claims of mistreatment in China…
You can see this in the “concentration camp” narrative of Xingjiang, and the stories of rape, torture, and predatory saber rattling, etc, etc.
But you know, it’s all a lie.
Here’s the truth. This fellow is the EU representative who is telling the United States and the rest of the UN why the EU is breaking away from partnering with the United States to “contain” China.
Note that this (and his other speeches) were never broadcast in the United States. Americans have no clue that most of the EU has allied with China. VIDEO.
Video
4 – The war will be conventional using the most advanced high-tech weapons.
The war will be conventional.
Though the USA could use some precise micro nukes, no one would dare risk nuclear annihilation in fighting back. As my brother so clearly said; China has a few paltry nukes while America can destroy the world thousands of times over.
China wouldn’t DARE attack the Untied States mainland.
It will be conventional because that is how America fights it’s long string of wars. Always with conventional forces after a softening up of anti-nation propaganda.
This is so ingrained in American culture that it is a profound given.
America would “never” start a war, and just as certainly would “never” use weapons of mass destruction. This is because America has the “technical advantage” and is able to conduct ‘surgical strikes” with accuracy and precision.
5 – China is far weaker than it appears.
China would be a “pushover” nation using cheaply made rifles and fielding many illiterate peasants.
This just shows how ignorant Americans are. But still they believe it. Since there simply isn’t ANY positive news about China, the assumptions made by Americans are always of the worst possible image.
In this case, poorly trained conscripts, reluctant to fight a war, handed cheap AK-47 clones, and told to throw themselves at the proud American occupation forces. Not true.
The real face of China is never presented to the West or to Americans.
The Chinese are a tough people. They are not “pushovers”.
Here’s a VIDEO where the Americans who fought the Chinese in Korea relate what it was like, and the over all quality of the soldiers, even though they were over-matched by the superior weight and quantity of American overwhelming military superiority….
They did not fear death.
All Chinese are trained to kill.
There are no conscious objectors. Training starts in first grade. Six year old children; boys and girls. Yeah. No shit. First grade. There is mandatory boot camp in middle school, and everyone spends two years in the armed forces. VIDEO.
Oh, and by the way… that’s 1.6 billion people that can fight. Remember, America only has 330 million people tops.
Video
Middle school training.
Over the last five years, the training program for all students has been revamped. It has become more rigorous, more militarily focused, with a great emphasis on tactics, weapons training, and endurance.
The video below shows school children in a massive weekend training exercise. VIDEO.
6 – The war would be far away
The war would last for decades, and be in China, and far away.
It would NEVER hit American states; American cities, American ports, or American industry. Never.
Most Americans assume that the next war will be like the last. And since America has been fighting eight simultaneous wars for decades, they naturally assume that China will just be the same-oh, same-oh.
The general characteristics of American wars are that they are far away, fighting evil terrorists (who deserve it) and that Americans are always and forever safe in their homes and in their communities.
The war would be televised and presented on all the social media.
It would become a hobby for a bored, unemployed, drug addicted nation to view. It would be the equivalent of “bread and circuses” in ancient Rome. Facebook and Twitter would carry news about the latest successes, death counts and pictures of proud Americans waving the flag while the adoring Chinese clamor for all their freedom and democracy.
America would be spared. No fighting would occur inside of America.
America has fought war after war, after war. And in every instance no one ever brought the war to America. Sure there was a bombing of the Hawaii naval base at Pearl harbor, and 9-11 but those were incidents. Not war.
Since modern America has never experienced war, Americans assume that it never will. Many SHTF people are planning for domestic war, terror, and societal breakdowns. None are expecting the collapse of the United States, and a proxy / Vichy government set up to service the needs of the Asian block.
9 – The USA would unify
While the war is going on, American domestic problems would end, and a new “renaissance” would occur inside of America.
All of America, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, are filled with a hatred off all things Chinese.
There’s this belief that “things must change”, and something harsh and televised like a war will make Americans proud again, and rally them towards a cause. This rally point will unify the balkanized nation and bring it together, and in the process would be a great healing and repair of all the many neglected and broken systems that abound throughout the nation.
10 – Manageable casualties
No excessive American casualties. There would be causalities, and maybe a ship or two might be sunk and a few aircraft downed. But nothing excessive.
Most Americans, and I do mean MOST, are extremely ignorant. They mistakenly believe that China is not a dangerous nation, and that it will just be a larger Yemen, or Syria. Americans realize that people die in wars, as many of the anti-China crowd has watched Rambo movies, but they believe that only the bad guys die. Not the brave strong American forces. Sure, one or two might die, but whole scale destruction will never happen.
11 – Taiwan needs American rescue
Taiwan is a nation in need of rescue.
The non-stop description of what Taiwan is, compared to the reality is so in variance that it has taken me many articles to untangle the lies and distortions. You all can believe what ever you want. Just recognize that the American image of what Taiwan is is wholly that of a poor struggling democracy that is shivering in place under the harsh thumb of oppressive communism. LOL!
So much for the American fantasy.
Now lets talk about the real things that will happen
Well, that’s what most Americans think. And judging from the pro-war Brits and Australians, it’s what the allies believe as well.
Australians in Afghanistan working for the American military.
Here, let’s look at what both the Chinese and the Russians EXPECT will happen with a war with America over some “Chinese or Russian” issues. They do not read MSN, FOX “news”, Zero Hedge, Hall Turner, or the Drudge Report. They have their own experts, sources of intel, and strategic planners.
Now, let’s look at what I know, and what is not being presented to the American people. Here is the REALITY that WILL OCCUR.
Here’s some things that are real things that will really happen if the US wages war against China…
1 – A war against an SEO member would be a war against a unified Asia.
China will NOT be alone. Russia would fight alongside China. And Iran would join the fray. All of Asia will fight as one.
Mr Putin and Xi Peng have both reaffirmed that if either nation is attacked that they would both act as one against the attacker.
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The other participants of the SEO have varying levels of interest in joint military participation, but the combined military might of a unified Asia is formidable and threatening.
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Which is why many of us Asia and China watchers are ‘scratching our heads” in bewilderment with the United States actions designed to provoke a war.
SEO joint exercises.
Please forgive me if my words betray my frustration. That is because I have been saying the same thing for years and it seems to me that almost no-one has “connected the dots.”
As many of us know, the nuclear armed nations of the world agreed decades ago that no one nation would initiate a nuclear first strike against another nation, because they realized that the consequence of such an action would be the end of human life on earth. That realization cooled the nuclear arms race down to everyone’s relief.
Then in the first week of April, 2014, the President of the United States, Barrack Obama, announced publicly that the nuclear weapons strategy of the US has changed: the US is now willing to make a first strike on China with nuclear weapons.
Needless to say that public statement freaked out 1 – 2 billion Chinese people around the globe. Understandably, the President of the Republic of China, Xi Jinping, announced publicly that he ordered China’s nuclear armed submarine fleet to go immediately to the US west coast. He also reassured the Chinese people that Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles could travel over the North Pole and destroy major cities and other targets in the eastern US.
One or two days later a Chinese envoy arrived at the Kremlin in the Federation of Russia with an envelope for Vladimir Putin, President of the Federation of Russia. The contents of the envelope initiated Article 9 of the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.
Article 9 states:
“When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that peace is being threatened and undermined or its security interests are involved or when it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”
Let us stop for a moment and recap the events.
[1] The President of the US declared publicly that the US was willing to conduct a nuclear first strike on China.
[2] The Chinese people freaked out.
[3] The president of China took defensive measures including asking Russia for help with this unforeseen mess.
The Russians responded, as they must and feel obligated to do after they make an agreement with China. After all, the Russians are “agreement capable.”
[4] The Russian move was truly brilliant.
Enter the USS Donald Cook incident. (DC for short) The videos of the DC incident were so widespread, and so many people made copies of the video that “they” could not possibly scrub the video off the Internet. However, they are trying to change the date of the incident.
Anyway, a day or two after the Chinese envoy arrived at the Kremlin and invoked Article 9 of the aforementioned Treaty, the Russians made a move.
The USS Donald Cook is the most advanced Aegis class missile destroyers in the US navy. The DC was in the Black Sea at this time and the Russians make their move.
Two Russian fighter jets approached the DC; one with advanced electronic warfare hardware, and one as an escort. The DC electronics, computers, radar, and all electronics crashed, leaving the DC “dead in the water.” Then the Russian jet escort made twelve mock attack runs on the DC. And you probably already know about the Russian helicopter crew videotaping the commotion onboard the DC.
That is not my point.
My point is the Chinese invoked Article 9 of the “Treaty” and the Russian response was twofold.
Firstly, the Russians showed the Chinese that the Russians will honor their promises, and secondly, the Russians showed the US that Russians are not to be underestimated.
What does this mean?
2 – From the very start, nuclear weapons will be used.
Nuclear weapons will be used at the start. There would not be any escalation from conventional to nuclear arms.
This is Chinese doctrine (against a nation that attacks its soil).
This is Russian doctrine (against a hostile nuclear power).
Here’s a fine nuclear explosion to remind you what we are talking about here. VIDEO here.
Video
And since the United States has been so God awfully Hell bent on starting a war, China has been mass producing missiles and nuclear weapons at an outrageous pace.
It’s like making bushels of paper lanterns.
China does not play.
And, of course…
3 – All American bases everywhere will come under fire.
American bases will be attacked. Any nations supporting American troops in any way will be attacked. When I say “attacked” I mean erased, vaporized, glassed over, and gone.
Nuclear bang-bang.
Guam… no more.
Major American military facilities in the area around China.
Say good bye to Guam.
Same goes for all of Honolulu, Hawaii.
San Diego, Diego Garcia, Korean and Japanese bases…
To the American military bases in Australia, and the city of Perth. Say good bye to the bases anywhere close to China.
Bye Bye.
Hawaii will become a series of tiny, tiny radioactive shoals and islands.
All American military bases would be flattened.
There is a strategy that the United States can spread out it’s bases in the South China Sea. Instead of having eight major hubs, they can turn it into thirty smaller military logistical and launch hubs. I am here to tell you that that will not work.
Eight bases = eight nuclear detonations.
35 Bases = 35 nuclear detonations.
It doesn’t matter.
4 – American cities will be nuked.
America will be hit with nuclear warheads, and cities will be destroyed.
I do not think that Russia and China are stupid.
Washington DC will be gone, that’s a fact. And I hate to break the news to you, but probably LA, New York, Chicago, Huston, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Seattle as well. In fact, you can expect all urban areas in America to be erased, and their inhabitants flooding the countryside…
…armed, pissed off, sick, hungry and radioactive. As they carry biological warfare plagues and pustule sores on their tattooed urban bodies. Good luck with your precious “democracy” and “freedom” then. Suckers!
And it will be China and Russia, not the USA, that will determine when and how to deal with this war.
And yes, the USA will be able to go MAD with the huge substantial and dangerous American nuclear arsenal… … provided the communication lines are up, the satellite links are up, and the computers still work.
And just in case you are brain dead, here’s some videos of nuclear explosions to show the kind of power that China currently has. The last three are Chinese nukes just in case you are convinced that they don’t have any. VIDEO.
Video
Remember, a nuclear hit on Mono Lake will render the entire water supply for the entire West Coast of America… radioactive.
Remember, a nuclear hit on the San Andres fault line will generate earthquakes up and down the West Coast.
Remember, that a submerged underwater nuclear detonation would take out all of inhabited Virginia, as well as one off the coast of Florida would totally erase that state.
5 – All trade would stop.
All trade would stop. All of it. At least all sea trade.
Inland Asia routes would remain intact. So trade would continue throughout Asia. But the trade to the Americas would end. And they would be on their own until the Untied States could rebuild up it’s industries, train its workers, and find enough remaining local metals and resources to fire up those new factories.
Most Americans (Brits and Australians) have no idea just how vulnerable the world is with trade. To use aluminum as an example, sure America can run aluminum extrusion factories, but they can’t make anything because all the alloy metals are from China.
As are 95% of all drugs.
And so on and so forth.
And with the end of trade comes breakdowns in society. Hospitals will not be able to treat people. Factories will shut down (well the few that exist will). Fast food restaurants will start to open on short hours.
There isn’t anything made in the United States today that is 100% sourced domestically. NOTHING.
6 – The USD, and thus the American economy would collapse.
The United States Dollar will collapse.
Long overdue, but it will happen and there is nothing better to accelerate the demise than a war. Were a war to occur, the value of the USD would equate to zero.
Zero.
As in absolutely nothing.
Here is video that describes how China bailed out two recent economic emergencies that the USA found itself in. The first was in 2008, and China bought up trillions in useless American debt, and the second was by raising the credit limits. With the way the USA is behaving right now, China will no longer help out and the USA must fend for itself. Watch this mind-blowing VIDEO.
Video
With the trillions of dollars in spending over the last few years, the USA economic scene resembles something out of “The Outer Limits” or “The Twilight Zone”. And China will no longer help such an openly hostile nation.
You can only pay the blackmail amounts only so long.
It’s over.
Other systems would need to be put in place to handle the chaos that would result. It would be a very testy time, and do not be under the mistaken impression that Asia would allow America to time and resources to deal with the resulting domestic discord.
They would instead aggravate it and allow the American people to eat each other alive. Which they most certainly will.
Here’s a VIDEO where the Singapore foreign minister talks about how the USA strong-armed them to accept American debt and the USD and what the consequences will be.
Video
7 – America would fracture.
America, which is balkanized, would fracture into fiefdoms.
That’s the good news. Some smaller government will be the result of all this. Federal leadership would disappear. Mobs, gangs, militias would all start to appear, and it would be a scramble for power that would be very brutal.
Here’s a balkanized America where the states would keep many of their original territorial lines.
Suggested new nations assuming local state capitals are spared nuclear destruction.
And here’s one based on great cultural and societal upheavals…
Domestic upheaval fractured state.
Why would there be social upheavals? Well it is easy to see. The capitalist system, and the government operations are out of touch with the vast bulk of Americans. It’s no only not working, but it is beyond repair. It is broken, seriously broken. VIDEO.
Video
8 – It would take many decades for America to rebuild.
America would not be able to rebuild, but China and Russia would be able to move into complete ready to use, new cities almost immediately.
America is in it’s prime, and it can’t build worth shit. How is this situation going to improve with the general collapse of the entire society? The truth is that it cannot, and when there is no media to tell everyone that everything is fine, it will be the harsh slap of realty that will not be at all comfortable.
The people who will rebuild the United States.
9 – GBP and PPP would be altered throughout the West.
The standard of living for many nations would change. America would change severely, and the survivors inside of America would not survive this new reality well.
Most of this is due to the great fragility of the West. The decades of looting, and the artificially inflated worth and value of everything will start crashing down to actual values. But now, with serious structural and domestic problems, and destroyed cities, major governmental structural change will be necessary. if they do not happen, the collapse will be far worse, but even if attempts were made to get a handle on the collapse, it will still result in great swaths of destitution throughout society.
10 – Destruction all over the globe.
Every nation will experience massive destruction. Some will be much worse than others.
Deagel 2020 revision to the original 2012 Deagel Forecast
The Deagel forecast was a CIA exercise to remote view 2025. The results were horrific.
BlueNarwhal:
Forecast disclaimer revision in 2020:
In 2014 we published a disclaimer about the forecast. In six years the scenario has changed dramatically. This new disclaimer is meant to single out the situation from 2020 on-wards.
Talking about the United States and the European Union as separated entities no longer makes sense. Both are the Western block, keep printing money and will share the same fate.
After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:
The Western world (success model) has been built over societies with no resilience. They can barely withstand any hardship, even a low intensity one. It was assumed but now we’ve got the full hard confirmation beyond any doubt. They are weak to the point of a decapitated cripple.
The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so called “Great Reset.”
The Great Reset;
Like the climate change, extinction rebellion, planetary crisis, green revolution, shale oil (…) hoaxes promoted by the system; is another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system.
It can be effective for awhile but finally won’t address the bottom-line problem and will only delay the inevitable. The core ruling elites hope to stay in power which is in effect the only thing that really worries them.
Collapse of the USD Financial Banking System
The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the 2012 forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome.
Progressive Multiculturalism failures
As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship.
Coronavirus Pandemic
The Spanish flu one century ago represented the death of 40-50 million people. Today the world’s population is four times greater with air travel in full swing which is by definition a super spreader. The death casualties in today’s World would represent 160 to 200 million in relative terms but more likely 300-400 million taking into consideration the air travel factor that did not exist one century ago. So far, COVID death toll is roughly 1 million people.
Economic crisis due to forced lock-downs
It is quite likely that the economic crisis due to the lock-downs will cause more deaths than the virus worldwide. The Soviet system was less able to deliver goodies to the people than the Western one. Nevertheless Soviet society was more compact and resilient under an authoritarian regime. That in mind, the collapse of the Soviet system wiped out 10 percent of the population.
The stark reality of diverse and multicultural Western societies is that a collapse will have a toll of 50 to 80 percent depending on several factors. But in general terms the most diverse, multicultural, indebted and wealthy (highest standard of living) will suffer the highest toll.
Life-Support Systems
The only glue that keeps united such aberrant collage from falling apart is over-consumption with heavy doses of bottomless degeneracy disguised as virtue. Nevertheless the widespread censorship, hate laws and contradictory signals mean that even that glue is not working any more.
The Predictions
Not everybody has to die. Migration (out from America, the West, etc.) can also play a positive role in this.
Second and Third World Nations
The formerly (known as) second and third world nations are an unknown at this point. Their fate will depend upon the decisions they take in the future.
Western powers are not going to take over them as they did in the past because these (Western) countries won’t be able to control their very own cities let alone those countries that are far away.
If they remain tied to the former World Order they will go down along with the Western powers. However, they won’t experience the same kind of brutal decline that the Western powers will experience so brazenly. This is partially because they are poorer and (obviously) not diverse enough. Instead they are stronger than the Western powers because they are actually quite homogeneous. This is their advantage. And that they are used to deal with some sort of hardship. Though, not precisely the one that is coming.
If they switch to China they can get a chance to stabilize but will need to depend upon the management of their own resources. We expected this situation to unfold and actually is unfolding right now.
American Election Consequences
With the November election triggering a major bomb if Trump is re-elected. (Did not happen.) If Biden is elected there will very bad consequences as well.
There is a lot of bad blood in the Western societies and the protests, demonstrations, rioting and looting are only the first symptoms of what is coming.
Geo-Political Changes
However a new trend is taking place overshadowing this one. The situation between the three great powers has changed dramatically.
The only relevant achievement of the Western powers during the past decade has been the formation of a strategic alliance, both military and economic, between Russia and China.
Russia and China are a united Asia.
Right now the potential partnership between Russia and the European Union (EU) is dead with Russia turning definitively towards China. That was from the beginning the most likely outcome. Great VIDEO of Chinese weapon systems…
Video
The European Union is on it’s own.
Airbus never tried to establish a real partnership but rather a strategy to fade away the Russian aerospace industry. Actually Russia and China have formed a new alliance to build a long haul airliner.
Western Europe (not to mention the United States) was never interested in the development of Russia or forming anything other than a master slave relationship with Russia providing raw materials and toeing the line of the West.
It was clear then and today is a fact.
Preparations for war
Russia has been preparing for a major war since 2008 and China has been increasing her military capabilities for the last 20 years. Today China is not a second tier power compared with the United States. Both in military and economic terms China is at the same level and in some specific areas are far ahead.
Chinese Technology is state of the art.
In the domain of high-tech 5G has been a success in the commercial realm but the Type 055 destroyer is also another breakthrough with the US gaining a similar capability (DDG 51 Flight IIII) by mid of this decade (more likely by 2030).
Nanchang, the lead ship of the Type 055 class, was commissioned amid the pandemic and lock down in China.
Potential for open war hostilities
Six years ago the likelihood of a major war was tiny.
Since then it has grown steadily and dramatically and today is by far the most likely major event in the 2020s.
The ultimate conflict can come from two ways.
[1] A conventional conflict involving at least two major powers that escalates into an open nuclear war. Most likely initiated by the United States, with a nuclear retaliatory salvo of impressive destructive magnitude.
[2] A second scenario is possible in the 2025-2030 time-frame. A Russian (with possibly China) sneak first strike against the United States and its allies with the new S-500, strategic missile defenses, Yasen-M submarines, INF Zircon and Kalibr missiles and some new space asset playing the key role.
The sneaky first strike would involve all Russian missile strategic forces branches (bombers and ground-based missiles) at the different stages of such attack that would be strategic translation of what was seen in Syria in November 2015.
Massive failures in Western Intelligence Agencies
There was no report that the Russian had such a capability of launching a high precision, multiple, combined arms attack at targets 2,000+ kilometers away.
Western intelligence had no clue.
Brainwashed Moral Superiority
The irony is that since the end of the Cold War the United States has been maneuvering through NATO to achieve a position to be able to execute a first strike (nuclear) over Russia and now it seems that the first strike may still occur but the country finished would be the United States.
Another particularity of the Western system is that its individuals have been brainwashed to the point that the majority accept their moral high ground and technological edge as a given. This has given the rise of the supremacy of the emotional arguments over the rational ones which are ignored or deprecated.
That mindset can play a key role in the upcoming catastrophic events.
At least in the Soviet system the silent majority of the people were aware of the fallacies they were fed up.
We can see the United States claims about 5G being stolen from them by China or hypersonic technology being stolen by Russia as the evidence that the Western elites are also infected by that hubris. Over the next decade it will become obvious that the West is falling behind the Russia-China block and the malaise might grow into desperation.
Why go to war?
Going to war might seem a quick and easy solution to restore the lost hegemony to finally find them into a France 1940 moment. Back then France did not have nuclear weapons to turn a defeat into a victory. The West might try that swap because the unpleasant prospect of not being Mars and Venus but rather a bully and his dirty bitch running away in fear while the rest of the world is laughing at them.
If there is not a dramatic change of course the world is going to witness the first nuclear war.
The Western block collapse may come before, during or after the war. It does not matter. The West will completely collapse. It is fragile. It will be unable to recover from even the slightest societal disruption.
A nuclear war is a game with billions of casualties and the collapse plays in the hundreds of millions.
He Concludes…
This website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a game of numbers whether flawed or correct based upon some speculative assumptions. - Friday, September 25th, 2020
11 – Japan will be hurt very badly
Japan erased. If Japan sides with the United States, it will be pulverized into oblivion through nuclear scrubbing. China has never forgotten the “rape of Nanjing” and the failure of Japan to apologize.VIDEO.
VIDEO
Chinese retribution would be swift, lethal and merciless.
The Rape of Nanjing.
Russia and China sailed a flotilla of armed ships around Japan in October 2021. This was a direct result of agreements that japan made with the United States pertaining to QUAD Chinese containment.
The message was clear.
If Japan agrees to work with the United States in any war, Both Russia and China would render Japan impotent. VIDEO here.
Video.
12 – China has already fielded military systems that the West can only dream of.
Video here. We start off with tiny robot grenades, and move from there. Enjoy this look at what is not being reported in the American “news”.
Video.
13 – China has been practicing emergency missile launches.
Here’s a nice video where a Chinese submarine launches all of it’s ballistic nuclear warhead SLBM missiles within one minute one right after the other. America has NEVER done that. The reason being that it is very difficult to keep a submarine stable during subsequent SLBM launchings. But China has mastered it.
I’ll bet you never read about these drills in Zero Hedge, FOX “news” or CNN have you? VIDEO.
Video.
China has been practicing and drilling over and over and over and over.
Anyone who welcomes a War with China (and Russia) is a fucking idiot. VIDEO.
Video
China trains, drills, trains again, drills some more.
It is ruthless.
No breaks. No rests. No apologies. No one is exempt. VIDEO.
These are LIVE FIRE exercises and training. Note how they work together and file in groups of other soldiers. So many chances of accidents. It’s dangerous training, as the weapons are all HOT and LIVE…VIDEO.
Video
14 – All Chinese school children are indoctrinated as warriors
Chinese elementary students are ready to fight.
Every single one of them, all throughout China, has been trained to use small arms, and the basics in squad military tactics.
They are all ready to reverse the “century of humiliation”, and the “Rape of China” all by European forces and their surrogates.
Here’s some third grade students showing first grade students how to assemble and handle rifles, and weapons. VIDEO. It’s a long video at 83MB, but WELL worth the watch.
I recorded it while watching my little girls, so sorry about the chit-chat in the background.
Please pay attention to what is going on. Third grade students doing this. 9 years old. We see them teaching the first and second graders in basic squad movement and behaviors. VIDEO.
Video
15 – China does everything in huge quantities at enormous scales
You won’t have one of two tanks, a plane or two, of maybe two squads lunging at you. You will have massed armies all pissed off and charging at you in wave, after wave, after wave, after wave using peer-capable weapons systems. VIDEO.
Video
15 – The European Union is being forced to choose sides.
The EU is moving to closer relations with China. The United States is forcing the EU to choose between the USA or China.
As it stands right now, the EU is moving towards greater relationships with China and are shunning and abandoning the USA. VIDEO of the spokesperson for the EU.
Video
Conclusion
Here is an email I got from a reader. I’ll give it to you straight:
Living in Southeast Asia, I sometimes worry about China’s encroachment on my life and the way of life of many others in the region. Then, I read another of your columns. I do not want American values to win out in the world; I do not want them in the country of my residence.I dislike Chinese authoritarianism. I dislike American authoritarianism and cultural terrorism more. The Chinese retain a more meritocratic system. They maintain a respect for their traditions. I’ve yet to meet someone from China who is ashamed of being Chinese.For the sake of civilization and human advancement, I prefer China over the U.S., which seems entirely to be ruled and taught by the mentally ill. Soon, we will need to choose between the two.
Now there’s food for thought.
While I have been shaken by the words my brother said, I am not going to leave China. I love it here. It is the safest place on the planet, and I have homes, family, friends, and a life here that I am not going to throw away.
Especially not because some Taiwan billionaire is afraid that China will seize his fiefdom. (I wrote about who wants the war and why they are funding it elsewhere.)
A war would hurt me tremendously, if not kill me outright, and trust me, I am not ready to be at “ground zero” for a nuclear strike. But I must tell you all this; I don’t think that it will be China that will the focus of war like everyone thinks. It will be the United States, and it’s allies.
I am willing to BET MY LIFE on it.
That is how strongly I believe in the Intel that I am providing here.
America has no end game in a war with China. Only the hope and desire that it can be “suppressed” so that America can remain the most dominant nation on the planet.
Of those few who consider a long term strategy, they would consider making the Taiwan government rule over the Chinese mainland. This is a wholly ridiculous notion and it would never happen.
Let’s hope that this period of hostilities ends soon.
This sums up what to expect from China…
Shock them.
A final comment
I think we shall hold true to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Two Rules of War:
Rule One—Don’t invade Russia.
Rule Two—Don’t invade China.
I do agree with my reader when he says that the U.S.A. has succumbed to government by the mentally ill. Well-nigh every news story I read about the doings of our federal government confirms it.
I tried to read the story that followed, but couldn’t make much sense of it. Yes, it’s like listening to the babble of a lunatic.
War is not a game that you play or read about in the news feeds. It’s a serious serious business, and Russia and China are about ready to send America into the bronze age. You all had best calm down and take a deep breath and figure how you will handle the exodus of radioactive urban youth, hungry, pissed off, and armed as they enter you nice communities, walk on your fine lawns and break into your fine homes.
China should be the last fucking thing on your God damn mind. VIDEO.
China should be the last fucking thing on your God damn mind.
Videos
The embeds are far too slow loading. Enjoy related you-tube videos…
China’s New Military Technology You have Never Seen…
https://youtu.be/aXDK3hCNAVE
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The level of rising international tension is extremely concerning yet most people are unconcerned. And unaware.
China
As I have reported previously, it is obvious that the United States is leading “the West” towards a major confrontation with China.
From SOTT…
In a recent article by Prof. James Petras, he sees this "lashing out" taking the form of investment barriers against China. The land of "free trade" ideology will now stop at nothing to restrict China's freedom in international markets. The warmongering in the South China Sea, her traditionally significant trade routes, is just one of the more obnoxious and dangerous.
He writes,
"The Anglo-American and German empires are on the defensive. They increasingly cannot compete economically with China, even in defending their own innovative industries. In large part this is the result of their failed policies. Western economic elite have increasingly relied on short-term speculation in finance, real estate and insurance, while neglecting their industrial base."
Led by the US, their reliance on military conquests (militaristic empire-building) absorb public resources, while China has directed its domestic resources toward innovative and advanced technology (Petras, 2016).
Few realize that the Trans Pacific Partnership excludes China from much of its North American investment plans. However, outside of war, no one will alter their reliance on Chinese markets and products. Walls will be ineffective. This might suggest the bellicose nature of the broke US empire in Asia.
China's political model is generally social nationalist. It has outperformed all others over the last generation. China's recent heavy investment in robotics and nanotechnology almost guarantee the bankrupt USA will be forced to reply on warfare. This, in itself, as Petras suggests, shows exactly why Peking wins while Washington drowns.
One of the most outlandish admissions as to American ill-will in the area is the Council on Foreign Relations' "Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China." One of its complaints is that the Chinese seek to "cast doubt on the US economic model" as part of their agenda. Here is a key passage:
"The fundamental conclusion for the United States, therefore, is that China does not see its interests served by becoming just another "trading state," no matter how constructive an outcome that might be for resolving the larger tensions between its economic and geopolitical strategies. Instead, China will continue along the path to becoming a conventional great power with the full panoply of political and military capabilities, all oriented toward realizing the goal of recovering from the United States the primacy it once enjoyed in Asia as a prelude to exerting global influence in the future (Blackwill and Tellis, 2015)"
The assumption throughout is that the US has an inherent right to dominate the globe. And other power that seeks to supplant this dominance is an enemy.
China does nothing that the US has not already done.
The reality is that the US has no business at all in Asia and China certainly has no desire to harm the United States economically. They are quite dependent on the American market for now, though that is changing as American consumer debt will continue to suppress any recovery. As American companies rely on foreign sales for profitability, economic recovery is clearly not happening.
Since the CFR has for its members the elite in economics, finance, industry, government and academia, it is the "ruling class." Therefore, its publications can be considered the official doctrine of this class. Therefore, this report's recommendations of "[intensifying] a consistent U.S. naval and air presence in the South and East China Seas" are now American policy.
The report, in many places, speaks of increasing US military capabilities on China's doorstep and using these as threats to force China out of the world stage in any way that "casts doubt on the US economic model."
Japan's military forces are also to be expanded greatly and the famous Constitutional provision preventing her projection abroad should be abandoned. The US wrote their Constitution and forced it upon them, they certainly can rewrite it now.
World War II began when FDR restricted Japan's access to its critical supplies of steel and oil. Japan never threatened the US and only wanted positive trade relations as she did to Asia what the US did to North America. This policy of restriction forced Tokyo to eventually take a hostile posture towards Washington.
We read in this official report:
"The United States should encourage these countries to develop a coordinated approach to constrict China's access to all technologies, including dual use, that can inflict "high leverage strategic harm." To establish a new technology regime toward China, Washington should enter into an immediate discussion with allies and friends with the aim of tightening restrictions on the sales of militarily critical technologies to China, including dual use technologies. This will obviously not be easy to accomplish, but the effort should get under way immediately (25)."So much of this is fantasy since so many nations are dependent on China.
The same nations see the US as too indebted to have much freedom of action. There is no future in the West as the EU continues to sink into poverty and oligarchy.
The CFR here, unsurprisingly, states that the TPP is essential to their goals. The demand of the ruling class is to force the Chinese to abandon all hopes of great power status and to admit the US as the only legitimate arbiter of important political decisions in the region. Apart from the rationale behind this, Peking, believing its long earned its rise to power, will certainly not accept it - nor should they.
Ideology also plays a role. Fighting the US is to fight the "liberal international system." They write, "China has sought to integrate both its Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) partners and its regional neighbors into economic ventures that rival those of the liberal international system. . . ." (16). To "cast doubt on the US economy model" is seen by the ruling class as identical with casting doubt on international financial liberalism.
That China's meteoric rise to power was done without a liberal order does not impress the authors. Perhaps, that's the root of the problem.
To that end, it has been prodding, and poking China with all kinds of sticks and goading it to take action. This process is accelerating, and each day it is getting worse and worse.
What the (American) ruling class is presently doing is attacking China in every way but open war.
China has no interests according to the regime, only the US empire does (or "financial liberalism"). The US is in no position to get itself into a war of attrition with a nuclear armed power. There is no support for any war in the US, nor is there money. In the report cited above, no mention is made of the billions and billions of dollars owned by the Chinese or the results of their flooding the market with them. This might suggest why the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are buying so much gold. China is being encircled and threatened, they have every moral right to rectify this situation militarily if necessary.
-SOTT
China has laid down “red lines” that will trigger armed conflict, and there the USA is (right now) dancing right on top of those “red lines” saying “nah nah nah” and sticking out it’s (figurative) tongue and making “raspberry sounds”.
Nah nah nah!
It is obvious, but I will spell it out.
Some very big and very bad things are being set up to occur with China. Very big. Very bad. And it will be very uncomfortable for all of us.
Russia
Meanwhile, you also have Russia.
Russia, and China are both aligned on many, many levels with the fundamental arrangements part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. There are those that disagree that China and Russia are conjoined twins. When I argue my points the opposing viewpoint has nothing to say. They haven’t encountered the information that I provide. they only spout off the Western media talking points; which is really just a fantasy world.
But Russia, you know, they too were being poked at and prodded with. And Russia moved up all of it’s forces and was “this close” to getting into a hot kinetic war. This was late last year into this one. The “West” pulled back. It disengaged, but did not stop. Instead billions of dollars in military equipment and supplies started to fly into the Ukraine and related areas all aimed towards Russia.
It is obvious, but I will spell it out.
Some very big and very bad things are being set up to occur with Russia.
There is no getting out of the present American Depression. Private sector debt is fast approaching $20 trillion, not including the massive interest to be added over the foreseeable future. Given that war with either Russia or China would be suicidal for the US – let alone both together – the only rational reading of the Regime’s provocation on both fronts is to unify the country for the sake of economic recovery.
I beg to differ. There's another reading. They are insane, don't know what they are doing, and / or are part of a death cult waiting for "the rapture". -MM
FDR did the same in 1941 against a stubborn Depression. Unfortunately, FDR had a unified nation, a basically moral people and a national, civic will. The national leadership was overwhelmingly seen as legitimate. Yes, it was abused and manipulated, ultimately destroying it, but it is something that the US today has none of.
The people of the US has no interest in a war with anyone, and certainly should not have any military presence in south Asia or the Baltics. These countries are more than willing to trade with the US, so the actual purpose can only be for exploitation.
Exploitation so to protect the massive investments ultimately destroying the US economy. This is corporate welfare of the worst kind.
The Americans, further, have no interest in who controls the South China Sea in the same way as she has no interest in the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Japan's rise to power after 1900 made her the natural leader of East Asia. China is in the same position now. There's no moral issue one way or another with a regional hegemon.
Recently, The Philippines took China to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea over the issue. Any college sophomore should know that Manila would never take such a provocative action.
Sure enough, it was the US masquerading as the Philippines, suing China though the agency of Paul Reichler of the Boston law firm of Foley Hoag.
Of course, the American press took the State Department at its word as always. Since China sits on the Security Council, the “Philippine” victory was of no interest to them.
The UN has no authority in the area or anywhere else, so the “legal” defeat was ignored.
More recently, American arrogance towards President Duterte forced a rapprochement between China and the Philippines, showing yet against the irrationality of American foreign policy.
The Council on Foreign relations opined:
Because the American effort to 'integrate' China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally.
Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy (quoted from Cartalucci, 2016).
It’s difficult to decide which absurdity to tackle first.
It is, as Cartalucci says, “an open, modern proclamation of imperialism.”
This sort of domination is not about protecting sea lanes and ensuring open trade. That was and will never be an issue. It is about exploiting the region directly.
The problem is that China is not Iraq.
China is a first world power more than willing and able to defeat a demoralized, broke and military overstretched US.
To put it crudely, China is becoming, along with Russia, a huge part of the resistance against western imperialism in the area.
They seek to negotiate with the US and western banks as equals, not suppliants.
But, alas, the US responds with even greater threats.
Today, the heroic President Duterte of The Philippines has won his drug war. China has sought an alliance with him, one that he has granted. The mask was off when the US violently condemned his victory against a war that US has never sought to win.
Like ISIS, the West supports the drug trade while pretending to (very poorly) fight it. Very rapidly, the China-Filipino alliance has taken the moral high ground on these issues.
More concretely, China’s power and economic might make her claim to the sea a matter of de facto right.
She is already in the process of developing the islands at issue, already granting her sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratley chains.
Doing so is no threat to the US or anyone else, unless of course, the agenda is to maintain a colonial empire there.
China’s territorial claim
Comment: Duterte's shift towards China makes geopolitical sense. The Philippines is tired of being under the Empire's boot. Friendship between the two countries solves many trade and defense headaches for both. No doubt Duterte's actions will eventually embolden other oppressed countries.
Suddenly, the US tried to be allies with Vietnam – who China had fought in the region twice in the 1970s and 1980s – and engages in naval drills with Japan.
Update: Vietnam is neutral and will not join the USA in any conflict with it's neighbor. -MM
The Philippines were a willing participant of these naval drills just last year, but Duterte has learned his lesson. The majority of the American navy is now engaged in the South China Sea.
It is highly doubtful that Australia and the Philippines want war with the Chinese.
Vietnam is no longer in any position to challenge Beijing as it was in the 1980s. For no clear US interest, the USA regime is demanding war with China.
This process is Identical with what happened in 1940 and most of 1941 against Japan, the US is in the process of cutting off China’s raw materials shipments. Yet, the foe they will face is not a small regional hegemon facing a unified industrial giant.
It is a major (if not THE major) world power facing a dying and collapsing empire.
The ultimate purpose is to weaken the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Before World War I, the British eyes Berlin and Petrograd with a jealous rage. They and they alone have the right to rule the world. In the 1930s, London had the temerity to condemn Japan’s invasion of Manchuria as an attack on national sovereignty, a statement bordering on the insanely and outrageously funny. Joachim Hagopian writes presciently:
Empire's naked neocolonial aggression involves exploiting unlimited energy resources anywhere in the world while neutralizing key enemies as America's predatory, vested self-interest (or more accurately the parasitic ruling elite's self-interest only, clearly neither America's nor Americans' nor any Asian countries'). Because the world's only superpower has gotten away with raping and pillaging the planet at will for decades, Empire is banking on its retaining its global unipolar dominance for years to come by more of the same tactics (Hagopian,2016).
One of the more absurd and contemptible statements was made by Mark Morris of the US National War College. This plan to isolate and destroy China is at least as old as 2013. He writes long before these events: wrote in November 2013:
War starts and the United States and its allies begin offshore controlling.
Chinese seaborne imports and exports are reduced drastically. Factory production drops and millions of workers are laid off; soon the numbers soar to tens of millions and perhaps a hundred million. . .
When jobs are not found, they start protesting. . .
Now the Chinese Communist Party is faced with tens of millions of unemployed protesters. It will try to blame some enemy that can't be seen. . .
Not believing the party, discontent grows and protests increase.
The Chinese Communist Party orders the People's Liberation Army to break the blockade, but the People's Liberation Army-Navy replies that China doesn't have the right type of Navy for that and are unable to comply with the orders.
Discontent grows and protests become more worrisome to party leaders.
The Chinese Communist Party declares that it has taught the foreign dog a lesson and seeks a [peace] conference at Geneva. (Morris, 2013)
The level of sophomoric arrogance and simplified analysis is astounding, though not surprising.
All China has to do is dump American dollars and refuse to finance American debt.
Without cheap Chinese goods, WalMart is finished.
Ok. This author is getting some things really wrong.
China exports to the world. Not just to the USA.
Exports to the USA pre-Covid were at 11%. Now they are in the 4 to 5% range.
Further, the really cheap goods are made in Mexico and SE Asia. Not in China. China makes the high tech and high quality goods for Korea, Japan, and Germany. -MM
That the Chinese population would not blame the west for instigating this war is not even mentioned.
The above “analysis” is merely a fantasy, a world where everyone has the same assumptions; it is a world made up of minds as isolated from reality and opposition as his own. The problem is if this fantasy is mistaken for political analysis.
Ukraine has been taken from an industrial powerhouse and turned into a fourth-world backwater through the deliberate engineering of liberal western imperialism.
Unfortunately for Washington, there are plenty of places quite unwilling to become minor, impoverished cog’s in New York’s great machine.
As the West cannot sell its own industrial goods (and other commodities), such competition seems to it wasteful. It places more downward pressure on prices and greater competition for resources.
Today, major capitalist enterprises have set up shop abroad and use cheaper labor to boost profits by “importing” those back into the US. This means the same mechanisms of protection the system offers domestically must be extended overseas.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh writes that globalization
...tend[s] to deprive the outsourcing countries of production and employment at home, they also bring the economic structure of host countries under the rules and regulations of neoliberal economics.
Entrenchment of neoliberal economics on a global scale, however, requires more than the traditional armies or military forces of imperialism. Perhaps more importantly, it also requires new, metaphorical soldiers or armies such as WTO, the IMF, central banks, credit rating agencies, and the like—hence, the new imperialism: imperialism based on universal or generalized dispossession (Hossein-Zadeh, 2016).
The total globalization of production and distribution means that the highest possibly profits can be earned when all transaction costs have been minimized.
Now, the assumptions of that statement are many, but it is the underlying axiom of globalization in general. It implies, however, that states must have their place in the new order and retain that place. One piece out of place can bring the edifice to crisis.
That gets worse if that piece is the size of China.
More generally, he writes, this irrational sort of militarization derives from what he terms “parasitic imperialism.” Its marks are that it
Redistributes national income or resources in favor of the wealthy; (2) undermines the formation of public capital (both physical and human); (3) weakens national defenses against natural disasters; (4) accumulates national debt and threatens economic/financial stability; (5) spoils external or foreign markets for non-military U.S. transnational capital; (6) undermines civil liberties and democratic values; and (7) fosters a dependence on or addiction to military spending and, therefore, leads to an spiraling vicious circle of war and militarism (Hossein-Zadeh, 2007).
“Parasitic imperialism” is the result of a world that has, at least for now, made its peace with dependency.
Local elites are required to promote the ideologies favored by finance capital, invariably liberal democracy with a strong focus on squashing non-liberal dissent.
This is quite consistent with liberalism, as the French Revolution and all its bastard children have shown.
Jacobinism is the mother of (modern) imperialism since it enshrines self-interest and ontological nominalism as the center of all things. Self-interest justifies the financial oligarchy’s ability to outbid smaller rivals for near-zero interest rates.
With this tremendous advantage, oligarchy is assured, since smaller borrowers now must borrow at much higher rates from those at the top of the pyramid.
Buying assets, especially troubled ones, is much easier for oligarchy and, with the taxpayers forced to bail them out, rational decision-making is not important.
Irrationality aside, “free markets,” based on self-interest, have no ideological means to oppose the purchase of the government or monetary policy by private actors.
Building a financial structure that uses debt to leverage more debt – that is, until the chances of repayment become quite thin – is also rational for those with the ability to profit from it.
Over time, the bad loans and the assets to which they are attached become the property of the regime and those failing to make their payments are conveniently labeled as failures.
More importantly, it represents short term profit unrelated to actual production.
Most profits of the Regime’s billionaires comes from debt and speculation, not on creation.
It is, as Paul Craig Roberts terms it, the “looting phrase” of modern capitalism.
Beyond profit that derives from the expropriation of surplus labor, another, increasingly more important source of profit is the result of mass leveraging of assets.
Americans are forced to borrow constantly to maintain even a basic standard of living.
This means that a part of their income – possibly a substantial part – is then transferred to finance capital (Hossein-Zadeh, 2016a).
But what does this have to do with the US navy in the South China Sea?
This analysis is really the foundation for imperial parasitism, overstretch and endless war. Ukraine was colonized as a means to a) ensure the transfer of her assets to the west as debt service; b) to encircle and threaten Russia and c) to deindustrialize the country, rendering Ukraine a raw materials producer for the regime.
As the US economy sinks deeper into Depression (despite the laughably phony statistics from Washington), war and imperial exploitation are the only means to create “value.” What the western bankers have done in Ukraine can, in theory, be done in the US.
Combining public and private sector debt means that the entire American economic grid can be sold off and still not pay the principle. Soon, China’s control over America’s debt, her growing population, military sophistication and expansion into Central Asia and Africa will dethrone the US as the “world’s only superpower.”
Russian gold reserves from early 2013 increased by almost 150%.
By Fall of 2015, Russia owned 1352 tons of gold. China now owns nearly 2000 tons, radically increasing their holdings starting in early 2015. This is an important sign that de-dollarization is around the corner.
Warfare, at present, is likely the only means for the Regime to stop this trend.
The very existence of a drive to de-dollarization might be sufficient to cause a run on this weakened institution.
The New Silk Road project, as many have said recently, is a radical restructuring of the globe’s economy.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the most significant political organization in the East, is not mentioned in the mindless “presidential election debates” in the US because it is the organization of most of the world’s population against US imperialism.
China is building its own financial infrastructure, creating a new banking regime without western and Jewish interest. They are offering credit to Africa without the demands and political ideology of the west.
Like a wounded animal, the US elite will lash out…
Iran
Meanwhile, there are events going on regarding the “West” with Iran.
Now, Iran is also part of the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, and we can see that the events with Russia, China and Iran are all directed to attack this SCO and destroy it in warfare.
Perhaps a map might help explain things better.
Here’s an out of date map that I pulled off the internet. The key point is that Iran is no longer “observer status” but is actually a full “member” of the SCO.
In this article, we will discuss some of the troop buildups and movements toward Iran. And this is important because, if you look at the BIG picture, you can clearly see a pattern emerging.
The Pattern that is emerging.
The United States is planning to attack the SEO; which is the vast bulk of Asia.
It’s an insane, dick move.
It’s pure folly to take on Russia alone. Intense idiocy to take on China alone. And sheer madness to take on a war against Iran.
But there you have it. The monkeys that “pull the levers” in Washington DC are all crazed psychopaths, and they want to seemingly start a war that will destroy everything and everything with it. Fools!
Let’s talk about Iran
This is a comment off of Saker. I guess it comes from someone’s Twitter feed.
Almost none of these incidents and “chess moves” have been reported by Western media. Reading all this, does it feel like the approach to the WW3 Event horizon is escalating??
It seems chess pieces are being moved everywhere….. so much is happening at the Azerbaijan Armenia Iran Turkey border areas.
Syria is still in play.
And Israel has strengthened ties with Azerbaijan (and Saudi).
Look at what happened in October 2021…
One month at the Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenian border.
(Includes a side serve of Turkey ~Syria)
As told in tweets by Kiev located
“proud Cossack”Fuat @lilygrutcher
Sept 28
Israel delivered $2 billion worth of new weapons and munitions to Azerbaijan in the last two months.
Most of them are now deployed at the Iranian border.
Sept 30
Turkish-Ukrainian agreement on construction of Bayraktar TB2 center in Kyiv is signed. (Pic Includes Zelensky)
>Former Armenian defence minister David Tonoyan arrested in Yerevan
>Turkish Army is clearing mines near Iranian border in order to facilitate the deployment of Turkish troops at Iranian border.
Three Turkish TB2’s are in the air right now near Iranian border.
>Iranian military say Baku is in the range of Iranian artillery deployed at Azeri border.
>Iranian air defence systems put on high alert.
>High rank IRGC official Mahmoud Gazizi calls Azeris “Zionist prostitutes.”
>7 or 8 Iranian Airforce helicopters deployed at Azeri border
>16th Army of Iran (Qazvin Army) on their way to Nakhijevan borders. Nakhijevan is an Azeri enclave between Turkey, Iran and Armenia
>Iranian Army to start another huge drills near Azeri borders tomorrow.
>Iran is creating and financing pro-Iranian military Husayniun group (“Islamic Resistance of Azerbaijan”) in Azerbaijan.
Azeri government should act quickly and toughly if they don’t want their own Azeri Hezbollah.
Oct 1
The length of Iranian Army convoy (tanks, armored vehicles, artillery guns) deployed near Azerbaijan for tomorrow’s drills reaches 8 km. Biggest Iranian drills in the last 20 years.
>Turkey and Aze are keen to create a Zangezur corridor through Armenian territory which would connect mainland Azerbaijan to its enclave Nakhijevan.
This corridor would be enormously profitable for both Turkey and Azerbaijan, and even for Armenia.
§§§. teshub1 @teshub12: replies:
the corridor would not be profitable for Armenia at all.
It would literally be a highway through Armenian territory, connecting Nakh. to Az. but ceded to Azerbaijan.
This was not part of the agreement signed last year by AZ, AR, and RU. A highway under Russian control was.
>Fuat:
Meanwhile Armenia, bound to centuries-long dogmas, so far refuses to authorize this project.
@teshub1 replies:
§§§. You’re a total fool if you think Armenia literally ceding territory in its most strategically important but geographically insecure region to its two main geopolitical rivals would be good for Armenia.
Fuat:
Iran fears that, sooner or later, Armenia will bow to Turkish pressure and agree for the corridor.
If constructed, this corridor would cut Iran from direct routes to Caucasus and Europe. That’s what makes them so nervous.
Oct 1:
UNCONFIRMED reports of first clashes between Iranian and Azeri troops on the border about 2 hrs ago. 1 Iranian and 2 Azeri soldiers wounded.
>Now reports come that the Azeris pull their troops back from near the border.
>6 Iranian armed drones flying over Azeri border.(vid)
>Massive transfer of Iranian troops by A400M’s to Azeri border, these minutes.
>All IRGC units in north-west Iran are put on high alert.
>Iranian airbases in Tehran and Hamadan in standby mode.
>Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan George Deek.(video) announcement of project to promote and preserve Jewish heritage. American Ambassador to Azerbaijan and head of USAID program also attend.
*Deek States Azerbaijan has largest Jewish population in Muslim world.
>Including pic of “Mountain Jews Museum” official opening.
Oct 2
UNCONFIRMED.
Azeris shot down Iranian drone, about 4 hrs ago
>Deputy chief of staff of Armenia arrested in Yerevan.
Oct 3:
Azeri Army put on high alert.
>Reports of blast in Iranian military base in the west of Tehran, this afternoon.
>|Algeria recalled its ambassador from France for consultations.
>Reports that Iranian AH-1 Super Cobra mistakenly fired at Iranian troops during the ongoing drills near Azeri border. Three Iranian soldiers killed.
>Armenia opens its airspace for Iranian drones
>Armenia and Iran discuss the establishment of Iranian military bases on Armenian territory.
>|Algeria closes its airspace for French warplanes.
Oct 4
Who said Turkey is withdrawing from Idlib?
Quite the opposite: more and more Turkish Army convoys are entering Idlib every day. (Pic of convoy)
>Rebels captured Muhaberat (Assadite intelligence) agent in South Idlib.
>Rebel sniper killed a pro-Iranian militant in Jabel, West Aleppo.
>Turkish troops in Idlib are ordered to be ready to repel any attack by Assadite forces.
>Iranian parliament resolution, 2 hrs ago: “Inviolability of borders of our neighbors is Iran’s red line. If somebody tries to cross this line, Iran will act immediately.”
>Pro-Khamenei daily Vatan-e Emrooz decyphers the resolution adopted by the Iranian parliament: if Ankara and Baku invade Armenia, Iran will do the same immediately.
>Iranian drills finished. Troops retreat.
>Turkish-Azeri joint drills in Nakhijevan announced for 5-8 October.
>Newest and most advanced Israeli air defence system Arrow 3 to be delivered to Azerbaijan soon.
Iran snubbed again.
>Mass arrests of pro-Iranian elements in Baku.
Oct 5
IRGC deploys about 4,000 speed boats in the seaport of Ashtar near Azeri border.
>Turkish-Azeri-Georgian tripartite drills “Eternity” started in Georgia (country). Turkish and Azeri troops are arriving in Tbilisi.
>Israeli National Security Council warns of possible terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish objects across Azerbaijan.
>Georgia bans Iranian citizens and vehicles from entering its territory. Reason unknown so far.
Hundreds of Iranian trucks are currently stuck at Armenian-Georgian border.
>Mossad kidnapped an Iranian general in Syria to get info about Ron Arad, Israeli pilot captured by terrorists in 1986.
Waiting for details.
>Iran closes its border with Turkey in Kapikoy, East Turkey.
>Iranian pro-Khamenei center in Baku closed by local authorities without any explanation.
>Iran closes its airspace for Azeri warplanes going to Azeri enclave Nakhijevan.
>4 Turkish military cargo planes have arrived in Azerbaijan since this morning.
>Iranian agents’ attempt to blast a car of an Israeli embassy official in Baku, foiled by Azeri authorities.
Oct 6
President Aliyev poses with Israeli drone Harop.(pic)
>Saudi media say two Israeli Arrow 3 air defence systems are already deployed in Azerbaijan.
>Israel is ready to send its F-35s to Azerbaijan to help this country in case of Iranian military aggression.
(Israeli media)
>Arrow 3 is an only air defense system in the world capable of hitting targets in stratosphere, even low-orbit satellites.
Its missiles cost $2.2 million each.
>Pro-Iranian Huseiniyye mosque in Ganja, West Azerbaijan, closed by Azeri authorities.
>Azeri government starts monitoring all Iran-financed mosques in Azerbaijan
>General Aviv Kochavi, chief of general staff of IDF: “We will continue eliminating key figures of Iran and destroying its key military objects anywhere in Iran.”
>Turkish FM calls on NATO to give full membership for Ukraine and Georgia
>Iranian drone shot down over South Idlib.
>Biggest Turkish-Azeri joint drills announced for coming days. Turkey considers sending S-400 missile systems and F-16s to Azerbaijan to help this country against the possible Iranian aggression.
>Azerbaijan bans potatoes import from Iran.
>Turkish and Azeri warplanes flying very close to Iranian border during joint drills in Nakhijevan.
Oct 7
Armenia in the shock of news that Baku-Nakhijevan flight passed throuh Armenian air space this morning.
>Most probably, Iran is more shocked than Armenia is.
>Turkey closes four border checkpoints for Iranian vehicles.
(Includes map)
>Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are holding joint naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, not far from Iranian coasts.
>Ukrainian TB2 spotted last night over Iraq near Iranian border.
Is Ukraine joining anti-Iran coalition?
>Pakistan deploying troops near Iranian border after gunmen from Iranian side killed Pakistani soldier.
>Khamenei’s official representative left Baku this morning.
Oct 8
Turkish source reports of assasination attempt on Karabakhi president Arayik Haroutyunyan, 1 hr ago.
Haroutyunyan is reportedly wounded.
>Russian media say Turkish drones delivered to Ukraine are ready to be used against Donbass separatists, and Russia still has nothing to oppose them.
>Azerbaijan denied entry visa for Iranian co-president of joint Azeri-Iranian Trade Chamber.
>9 border checkpoints are closed for Iranian trucks in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia
>Iranian FM requested his Turkish counterpart for a meeting.
Iran steps back.
>UK-based Elaph news agency says two Israeli Airforce F-35s have arrived in Azerbijan.
>Azerbaijan to open its embassy in Israel very soon
>Commander of the 3rd Turkish Army arrived in Azeri enclave Nakhijevan.
>The chairman of the Turkiah-Iranian Chamber of Commerce says Turkey stopped all kinds of trade with Iran in view of ongoing threats from Iran against Azerbaijan.
Oct 9
Another Turkish Army convoy entered Idlib.
>Turkish FM: “Ukraine’s application for observer status in Turcic Council will be considered on November 12.”
>Iranian FM Abdollahian now calls to his Azeri counterpart to arrange a meeting.
>Israeli air attack on T-4 airbase in Homs, 3 hrs ago.
>Four Israeli Airforce Il-76s landed in Baku since this morning.
>6 Russian spies arrested by Turkish police in Istanbul and Antalya this morning.
>Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, died this morning in Paris at the age of 88.
>One of Russian-made S-200’s used by Syrian air defence to repel yesterday’s air attack on T-4 base landed in Iraq.
Oct 10
Turkish police arrested the head of Afghan mafia in Istanbul.
>Turkey is working on first laser drones.
>Armenian source says Azeri sniper killed a Karabakhi civilian in Martakert.
Armenia is furious that nearby Russian peacekeepers did nothing to prevent the killing of civilian.
Oct 14
Three huge blasts in Ganja, West Azerbaijan, this morning.
>8 Iranian agents arrested by Turkish security forces in Van, East Turkey.
>Israeli air attack on pro-Assad positions near Palmyra, these minutes. US and Uzbekistan to discuss deployment of US troops in Uzbekistan soon
>High ranking Taliban delegation arrived in Ankara.
Oct 17
Fierce clashes between Syrian Kurds and pro-Turkish rebels in Azaz, these minutes. 6 Kurds killed so far.
>Turkish drones monitoring Syrian border, these minutes.
>Turkish aircrafts throwing leaflets down to the town of Tel Rifaat calling the civilians to leave the place or to stay away from Kurdish positions.
>Pro-Assad positions south-west of Raqqa attacked about 3 hrs ago. Over 10 killed.
Oct 18
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to visit Ukraine and Georgia next week.
>Turkish Army ready for biggest operation in its history.
>Akinci drones probably in the air over Syrian border, these minutes.
This kind of drones have been never used in battle before. Their ammunition is thrice as much as that of TB2.
Oct 19
French ambassador to Belarus DEPORTED by Lukashenko.
Amother humiliation for Macron.
Oct 20
IRGC Headquarters in Homeyn, West Iran, attacked by unknown gunmen, Oct. 16. The commander of the headquarters killed.
>Two more high ranking Iranian spies arrested in Azerbaijan.
Iran’s spy netwotk in this country is crushed every day.
>Azeri source says Israeli instructors train Azeri military to handle newest Israeli drones in Ismailliyah, North Azerbaijan.
>Massive arrests of pro-Iranian agents continue across Azerbaijan.
4 local Hezbollah members arrested this morning. US granted access to 4 four more military bases in Greece. US has a total of 8 military bases in Greece now.
Oct21
Another Turkish Army convoy entered Idlib 30 min ago.
Oct 22
48 pro-Iranian elements arrested in Baku this morning.
Oct 23 Avigdor Liberman says the war with Iran is inevitable and not too far.
>Armed Azeri soldiers stole 150 sheeps from Armenian farmers today in Syunik, South Armenia, Armenian ombudsman says.
>Massive arrival of US troops in Alexandroupolis, North-East Greece.
>Massive fire in a power station in Bandar Abbas, South Iran.
Oct 25
Coup in Sudan
Oct 26
First NATO airbase opened in Latvia, yesterday.
>Education minister of Armenia says they do not plan to open Russian schools in the country.
In neighboring Georgia too, there is no public Russian school anymore.
Oct 27
President Erdogan arrived in Baku.
>Iran’s gas station system completely paralyzed by hacker attack.
>Reports that Ukrainian Army started to use TB2 drones against pro-Russian separatists in Donbass.(drone footage)
>Russian Army convoy attacked in Syria.
§§§ Mike Schiebel
@mike_schiebel… Who would be suspect to attacking Russia?
Fuat: Pro-Turkish rebels.
>Ukrainian military say they need at least 50 Bayraktar drones to completely destroy separatists in Russian-occupied Donbass.
>Iranian officials say today’s cyber attack against National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company “was conducted by a foreign country”. UAE ready to allow Israel to use their airbases to attack Iran.
>Azeri officials say Zangezur corridor through Armenian territory to connect mainland Azerbaijan to Turkey will be ready in 2023.
>President Erdogan: “One day you will just get in your car in Baku and drive straight to Istanbul through Zangezur corridor.”
>Pro-Iranian Hashdi-Shaabi headquarter attacked by IS in Diyala, Iraq. 14 killed.
>Huge Turkish Army convoy of 130 armored vehicles entered Idlib, 3 hrs ago.
>In total, three Turkish Army convoys of over 400 armored vehicles entered Idlib in the last 6 hours.(videos)
>Arizona-born Rep. Jeff Flake, 58, appointed new US Ambassador to Turkey.
>Reports that Ukranian artillery units are redeploying closer to the frontline in Donbass.
Oct 28
First Israeli plane landed in Saudi Arabia, yesterday.
>Ukrainian Bayraktars in the air again.
>Air attack sirens in Russian-occupied Donbass.
>Taiwanese President confirms the presence of US troops in Taiwan.
>China to open its second military base in Tajikistan.
Oct 29
Huge deployment of Turkish troops in North Syria.
>Fierce clashes in Donbass, these minutes.
>Intense flight of Turkish drones over M4 road, these minutes.
Putting it all together
It’s all “chess pieces”. And the USA / “The West” all seem to be playing an oppressive role in it.
America to fight Iran / Russia / China (The SCO block).
Americans are at a fever pitch right now, and the window of opportunity can only be maintained for a year or two tops.
Now, instead of chatting up a storm and throwing out facts and figures, I am just going to lay down a map. Let’s see where all these provocations and “chess moves” are taking place.
This is what the United States is doing right now…
Red arrows indicate the provocation vectors. Yellow arrows indicate provocation vectors that have ended or been suppressed.
So what do you think will be the end result of all this? Are you all going to tell me that China, Russia or Iran are “saber rattling”? What the FUCK does all this look like?
Do you think that everything will “blow over” and things will be “ok”?
Do you think that Russia, China, Iran and the rest of Asia will continue to “sit by” and do nothing?
Russia and China are very close allies. If you don’t believe me, then read what XI Peng, and Putin’s comments on this subject.
Or, perhaps you think that America has every right to poke China; every right to poke Russia; every right to poke Iran? As Communism is bad, and democracy is good? Right?
Just like the “news” media says…
No they didn't.
They made a formal declaration at the United Nations and claimed that it was a bio-weapon launched by John Bolton and the Trump administration on the most important Chinese holiday of the year.
They also provided videos and biopsy reports of the military personnel at Wuhan doing all sorts of strange things. Like spitting in fish tanks. Rubbing their hands all over cucumbers, eggplant, apples, corn, lettuce, and mangoes.
Not a single event was reported inside of America.
But of course this screen capture is from FOX “news”.
This is the big picture. Soak it up. And drink it in. Soon, there will be a very HARSH slap back.
I would not advise anyone to be inside a large American city next year.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
You know, I am having a cup of coffee, a plate of buttered crunch baguette beside me (with a side of cut up tomatoes with salt) and just going through my emails, my comments, the forum, and the normal round of sites that I just skim though. Then I hit LinkedIN.
Ho. Ho. Ho.
There was a very lively discussion about America invading Australia. Invade? Australia? WTF? I thought that it must have been a joke. So did everyone else. The comment thread was long, silly, humorous and to the point. To quote one such commenter…
“America is off their trolly.”
And then nothing.
Yes. these people are seriously off their trolleys.
Well, I will tell you that this little announcement SHOULD be taken seriously.
Though I do not (as of this time) recognize it as a fluke, a misunderstanding, a “flag” proposal, or a “fair warning”, I do need to explore the mechanism behind this statement.
This mechanism is frightening.
America 101
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
— They Live
When you recognize what America actually is, then how the internal domestic politics and statements play out becomes much clearer. So let’s forget the standard Hollywood ideas about America being the great wonderful nation that protects others and look at what it REALLY is.
For starters
America is an Oligarchy.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
America is also a Military Empire. The largest in the world, and the largest in history.
This Empire is supported by an enormous Military-Industrial industrial complex. Every Senator, and Representative has large military factories within their districts that employ voters. As long as the voters are employed, they get to stay in office.
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
This arrangment is so embedded in American society that “peace” will equate to “economic depression”. If you stop buying military hardware, the economy just simply cannot recover. A collapse is imminent. The people “take to the streets” and in America they are armed and dangerous.
Therefore, the United States can only exist as long it is constantly fighting wars all over the globe.
No wars = No United States.
Situational awareness
Lately, and over time, an entire series of “bubbles” have been created. The collapse of any singular one of them would create a chain-effect that would rage through America like a firestorm on a dry August wheat field. So something HAS to be done. It cannot be put off.
There are only two solutions available.
Disassemble the Military-Industrial industry and convert the production output to other purposes. Somehow. Using systems not yet in place. Using staff that are unskilled, and finding markets for new products that do not exist.
Or,
Start a HUGE war that would be able to feed the coffers of the multitudes of industries that exist for warfare.
Given what amounts to the stupidest leadership in history, the United States government leadership has earmarked either Russia or China for a war.
For the last fifteen years, there was a tug and forth between various political interests. One side wanted a war with Russia. The other side wanted a war with China.
And for the last five years it has become obviously apparent that China was set up as the enemy du jour.
The general secretary of NATO has told the Financial Times that there's a new foe in town. After decades of sparring with the Soviet Union, and Russia, the bloc is firmly setting its sights on a different standoff – with China.
Putting aside the diplomatic niceties, his pitch is simple: NATO should turn its attention to Beijing. To put it more bluntly than Stoltenberg did, the US’ European partners should follow Washington into a new, openly-declared Cold War in East Asia.
The pitch belies the fact President Joe Biden is offering NATO members a deal they are not supposed to refuse. Either you help us in our new Cold War against China on which we have decided alone, or we will no longer help you feel safe from Russia. As Stoltenberg puts it, for America, NATO is “not something they do to be nice to Europe.” Instead, he reminds us, for Washington, allies must fit their national interests.
In other words, now that the endless 'wars on terror’ are winding down, the US has identified its new geopolitical enemy number one, Beijing. The Pentagon and the attached military-industrial complex – as president Eisenhower once called it – must be kept in business after all.
-RT
And so it is currently.
But uh oh!
However, within the last five months or so, the American military leadership have been busy trying to “bitch slap” the neocons inside of Washington DC, K-street with the fundamental understanding that were a war with China to occur, America would lose.
And lose badly.
And the entire nation would be destroyed, rubbled, and the leadership would all be dead. Dead. DEAD.
In fact, there isn’t a single war simulation, not one, that has the USA the victor or even a close draw. Each and every simulation for the last 18 years has had the United States defeated in a war with China.
But it has to be something that will keep the Military-Industrial industries still alive and working. A war with either China or Russia, or any of their allies would not do that. The war would come to American shores, and it would be very hard on the voters which is a big “no no” in a “democracy”.
So what options are available?
Go to war with a small defenseless small nation that is not aligned with anyone. Think Vatican City, Palau, or Portugal.
Go to war with a nation that is aligned with either Russia or China. Like Mongolia, or North Korea.
Go to war with one of the more prosperous of American allies. Like France, Canada, Mexico, or Japan.
It is obvious what the answer is. It is to go to war with one of America’s allies. That’s the most logical and reasonable solution.
A war with a small third world banana republic would not meet the needs of the enormous military industrial complex.
A war with a surrogate or ally of either Russia or China would be equivalent to conducting war with them directly.
So the solution is to turn on one of America’s allies.
Which American proxy nation?
To select the nation, we have to relook and revisit the criteria required.
The target nation must be formidable enough to provide a challenge.
However, it must be weak enough so that the United States would be in full control from start to finish.
It must provide good “optics”.
It must be large enough so that immense quantities of war material can be used.
It must have some kind of native population that the US propaganda machine can use to fabricate an excuse of “saving people”.
It must have nearby large American bases from which to send huge quantities of manpower and material for logistical support.
It must be new and novel.
And apparently, the K-street crew, decided that Australia is the best alternative available.
Why?
Well. Let’s break it all down.
The target nation must be formidable enough to provide a challenge.
Americans tire of endless wars blowing up mud huts, shooting defenseless donkeys, and strafing cabbage patches. They no longer want to see this. They want a shooting war that resembles a made-for-Hollywood war. They want to see bad guys with guns, tanks, and see real buildings; relatable buildings destroyed and smashed into tiny broken pieces. They want to see shiny stainless steel and glass skyscrapers exploding under a volley of Hellfire™ missiles. They want to see the large civic structures; the Opera Houses, and the bridges full of holes, collapse and rusted wrecks.
Australia is perfect.
House to house fighting in Melbourne is relatable, has great sensational value, and in many ways would resemble Southern California. The ruins of Sydney with proud American troops marching though the streets with willing and smiling Australian women running into their arms for liberation would be well televised and appear “just” and “right” to the dumbed down American masses.
Perth in 2030
And the Australians, at least those not yet disarmed, would put up a fight. It would be a losing battle of course, but it would be relatable. You can almost hear the bullets at the Starbucks in Brisbane, or the McDonald’s on fire in Perth. You can just see proud American gunships strafing the lorries on the motorways.
However, it must be weak enough so that the United States would be in full control from start to finish.
Australia has a weak government, a corrupt election system, a government where crime and corruption lead from the top, and for-profit individuals at every level. That should be obvious from watching the clown-show that the Morrison administration has been running. As well as the (so called) representative congress that just approves all Morrison dictates like kingly pronouncements from God himself.
America would then initiate and script a “colorful” war within Australia and prod the Australian “actors” on what to do and what to say. The American people would eat it all up and love every minute of it. America would be winning again! American exceptionalism at it’s best!
They would announce that “Australians will fight to their dying last breath for the warm sandy beaches and the happy shelas”. Perfect.
Sydney Australia in 2030
Additionally, the military is weak, using (and following) American military doctrine. It would be easily consumed by the mighty American military forces. Of course, scripted battles would be the norm, and the Australian forces must be able to fight to a point where a long and protracted war can occur.
It must provide good “optics”.
This is all about salvaging the American economy while preventing a very disheartened American populace from rising up and burning Washington DC to the ground. The optics must be more than just good. They must be great!
From the coastal cities, to the outback, to small desert towns to quiet fishing hamlets, the great diversity of scenery and the fact that the Australians speak a strange accented English would make television ratings soar. It would be exotic, yet very familiar.
Red skinned, and tan skinned, Australians wearing bush hats and shouldering FNAL rifles as the scurry from the gleaming American killer drones would make great television. The Facebook feeds would show all the action in colorful bloody gore, and that would attract more views. American flag bumper stickers would reappear on the cars, and Churches throughout America would be taking donations “for the cause”.
Brisbane in 2030
It must be large enough so that immense quantities of war material can be used.
Australia is a large nation.
Maps would be presented on the mainstream media showing pincer movements in red and blue arrows. There could be all sorts of interesting CGI effects, and displays of the latest in American military technology. Barrack Obama would come out of retirement and opine how racially divided Australia has always been and that it is the time; a long overdue one, where the “white man” gets his due.
Tons and tons of munitions can be thrown on such cities as Adelaide, or Hobart, and they would just take it in. After all, it would be the “Yanks” doing it. Their long time buddies. As they say I’ll be right, and fair dinkum.
Australia has the proper mixture of rural desolation, scenic beauty, and urban life that would make a glorious war for freedom™ and democracy™ worthwhile.
Americans are needed inside of Australia to show them what Freedom and Democracy is all about.
It must have some kind of native population that the US propaganda machine can use to fabricate an excuse of “saving people”.
Certainly there are the local inhabitants. And the Americans, being so insanely dumbed down, can be told anything and they would believe it. Look how easily they fell for the Uighur “concentration and rape camps”, or the “dangers of 5G radiation”. Look how much they fear vaccinations, using the cell phones near gasoline pumps and cell phone towers.
It is so easy to construct a narrative about saving people in Australia. Just toss in some words about “concentration camps”, “forced sterilization”, and “racial discrimination”.
It would be so simplistically easy to hammer down the idea that America must save the native inhabitants of Australia NOW NOW NOW!!!!
It must have nearby large American bases from which to send huge quantities of manpower and material for logistical support.
Australia is perfect. under the guise of a military build-up to “counter China”, enormous quantities of war material could be flown direct into Australia without a sound. By the time a “go plan” is launched, ten American battle divisions can be fully amassed and positioned within Australia for the war to start.
It is so easy to transport tons of American military equipment to Australia without any government oversight.
Keep in mind that the United States military presence inside of Australia is quite large. Here’s from a fan located in Darwin…
...There is something you can do to prevent war between the US and China, by helping us remove the US military bases from the NT of Australia. These bases are key infrastructure, part and parcel of the 2015 Rand report recommendations for such a war.
Contrary to popular belief, the Gulkula civilian aerospace facility in Arnhem Land is in fact run by the US military and Raytheon, with Lockheed Martin probably still involved. Their presence is camouflaged with NASA.
I read the internal report before it was taken down in 2017.
I also read the NT Government reference to US military expansion there in the Budget review committee documents, so this is absolutely certain.
The installation is for nuclear-armed missiles.There are several secret US bases in the NT, as well as the six knowns... submarine, heavy air, fighter air, Five Eyes, and spy satellite centres x 2, and 3500 US Marines to man a warehouse full of tanks.
Obviously, here to contain local rebellion.What keeps the US here is Rupert Murdoch's control of the media.
Particularly the NT News (News Corp), but he also controls the ABC through his associates, Ross Garnaut and Frank Lowy. Garnaut, by the way, is a key world economist, controls Australia's climate change agenda, and is a permanent member of the Trilateral Commission.
He is a pivotal element in US control of Australia and has recently released a major paper recommending an end to taxation for American corporations in Australia, under the guise of more efficient taxation...
It must be new and novel.
Obviously, it would be unexpected. Unique and exotic to the American and global readership. Any images of Australia that now persists in the United States today are all colored by the images of Barry Humphries and Paul Hogan.
This unique imagery, when coupled with the current contemporaneous military culture would make a nice juxtaposition which would be perfect for an enemy to attack.
While a war is going on, it could last ten, twenty to fifty years, and the American Military-Industrial establishment can continue to saturate the entire nation under constant warfare without any equivalent destruction of American cities.
Not only that but the actions of the Morrison government has effectively isolated Australia from the rest of the world. Russia and China would loathe to come to their aid.
The same can be said for the peace-loving New Zealand people.
Japan would stand down. Korea would stand down. India would do nothing. There would be come “rubber stamp” squeals and protests from the UK, but nothing of substance.
It’s all a “perfect storm” waiting to happen.
Why do I say all this?
I think all of this is pure evil.
I believe that it is despicable.
I think that it is horrible.
But whether it is war! War! War! with China, or War! War! War! with Australia they are both the same.
The SAME!
War is horrible and anyone desirous of war should be locked up in a mental institution for the rest of their life.
Oh, it’s so easy to “get on the bandwagon” and say “we must fight a war with China” (Here’s looking at you you Australian war-mongers) It’s another thing completely different when you are facing the enormous military might of the Untied States.
Australia has minerals that America desperately needs. It has coal. It has food. It has a major geographical location that America can exploit. By conducting a war with Australia, the eventual collapse of the United States can be delayed for up to 75 years. Isn’t that worth fighting for?
To save American exceptionalism!
To preserve the American rules based order!
So what if a handful of Australians are sacrificed on the alter of democracy? It’s not like they would matter to the needy in New York. Some real perspective is needed right now. And on the grand scale of things, it’s obvious that those in Washington DC are more important than anyone in that overly hot, but sunny land, down under.
What are Australia’s options
Not many, I am afraid.
Continue on the path that the Morrison government has laid out and be attacked by the United States in three to five years.
Get a new government in. Break all treaties with American military interests, and give the United States a reason to attack.
Get a new government in. Phase out American interests, and team up and form protective treaties with China.
That’s it.
From the American neocon point of view.
Troops and material inside of Australia offers all kinds of options and flexibility.
Australia can be sacrificed if the USA provokes a war with China.
If there isn’t a war with China, then America can have a war with Australia.
Win. Win.
In both cases, American industrial and social re-engineering agents can remake Australia into a “little America”. It could be granted citizenship and statehood. The nation could be afforded all the Rights that Americans already possess, as well as the great pride of being an exceptional society; a city on the bright and shiny hill.
Then, soon afterwards, the mandatory taxes, fees, and regulations can be implemented and collected from Australians. The take home income of Australians can be taxed at a minimum of an additional 30%, and the fine judicial and policing systems can displace the paltry ones that now exist.
Australians will be able to use “real” units like feet, inches and miles. they would be driving on the correct side of the road, and they will be celebrating Christmas properly with big hot turkeys and heavy mashed potatoes instead of prawns, shrimp and vegimite. Not to mention that it would be an American flag that would be flying in the breeze, and American language they would be speaking, as well as American food that they will be eating, and…
…most importantly, appreciating the real standards of real American beauty on women.
Keep in mind who Candace Owens is
This is NOT some “news” media commentator. She is a LEADER in the neocon faction of the Republican political party.
She has direct top contacts with the Military-Industrial Complex, and she is / was / has the eyes and ears of all the influential decision makers inside of America.
If she is promoting this, you can be assured that THIS DECISION HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE and that the public announcement is a “tell tail” to gauge the intensity of the anti-Australia propaganda campaign that will naturally follow.
Buckle up Australians, whether you will be the next Syria or Afghanistan is up to you this coming election cycle.
MM estimation on the outcome of this crazy turn of events.
MM readers are aware of our extraordinarily high prediction ratings of future Geo-Political events. Right now, it’s running in the mid 80’s in percentage of success.
I’d hate to destroy that streak placing my bets on such an “out of the blue”, “out of left field” crazed political bullshit being floated off K-street. But you know, weirder things have happened.
Here’s my likelihood estimations of success;
90% chance that this discussion is active in the neocon offices in Washington DC.
45% chance that resources are being put in place to study it as a fall-back position instead of attacking China.
65% chance that there are SAP programs studying the feasibility avenues of this plan.
51% chance that the oligarchy has tentatively given a “green light” go-ahead for further research.
15% chance that generals have been briefed.
80% chance that the top active generals know that this option is on the table for consideration.
98% chance that the CIA is involved presently.
How all this will go is unknown.
My guess that this becoming reality is far stronger than what the general public thinks or believes.
And for you Australians that are furious at reading this, relax. I think the entire idea is just bat-shit crazy. Don’t start screaming at me. I agree with you that this is insanity, and it is mean and uncalled for.
In fact, after Trump’s tantrums and Biden’s Great Rout of Kabul, even the most doctrinaire European Atlanticist must face the facts: America is not a reliable hegemon, neither with respect to its domestic order (it might well turn from being an oligarchy with democratic rest features into an oligarchy with growing authoritarian features) nor regarding its commitments and behavior abroad.
-RT
However, you need to know just how fucked up America is today, and if you dance with the devil, you had best expect to be date-raped by it.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
It's worth noting that the Chinese Orbital Hypersonic Missile development means the UK is not geographically invulnerable in a conflict scenario with China. It might want to rethink the assumption it can just prod at China in the Pacific from a distance...
— Tom Fowdy (@Tom_Fowdy) October 17, 2021
This is going to be a long article.
I have taken various highlighted articles of interest and strung them together into a unified whole to give the reader the MOST ACCURATE picture concerning what is going on with all this flood of “hate China”, and “War is good” stuff spewing out of the United States today.
Well, if not China, how about invading Russia?
Russia says NO!
And if not invade Russia, then how about invading Australia?
Yes. these people are seriously off their trolleys.
Do you really want to know what is going on? Are the Chinese going to siphon off your “vital bodily” fluids and gobble up the world? And why are you forced to endure lies and distortions in favor of war?
It is a distraction, as MM as repeatedly stated, or is it something more?
What is going on?
Introduction
Ok, I’m minding my own business. I have just made myself a cup of coffee and went to my study and fired up both of my computers. (One, my active computer is running Lunix and I am doing driver installation activities. While the other is my “old computer” and it is limping along with a malware saturated Chinese OS.)
I fire up those “puppies” (computers) and “right off the bat“, this is what I see…
With each passing week, it looks like World War III — between America and China — is coming sooner than we think. It’s not going to be fought with bullets or aircraft carriers, although the Chinese are building up their military in an aggressive and threatening way.
This will more likely be an all-out economic war for global supremacy. The yuan versus the dollar. The Nasdaq versus the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile, America is asleep at the switch — at least, the Biden administration is. This is the worst possible time to be raising tax rates on American companies (Our business tax rates would be higher than China’s under President Joe Biden’s plan!), dismantling American energy (at a time when China is running 1,000 dirty coal plants with dozens more in construction), and running up the national debt (with China a major purchaser of the bonds).
Love Donald Trump or hate him, he was a president who put America first and recognized the predatory nature of the Chinese regime. He got tough with President Xi Jinping and overturned one-sided trade deals. His strategy was to do what former President Ronald Reagan did to win the Cold War: Make America tremendously prosperous by building up our strategic industries in a way that the Soviet Union or China couldn’t compete with.
The danger is that we now have a president in Biden who thinks that climate change is a bigger threat to the world than the Maoists in Beijing.
And make no mistake about it; the communists are back in charge in China. Jinping has basically announced himself to be president for life, as democracy and free elections fly out the window. China is also sprinting back to command and control fascist government and industry “cooperation.” That’s a model that will eventually implode, but as we learned from the Soviet menace, they can do a lot of damage to peace and prosperity in the meantime.
It’s no accident that China’s economy and stock market are faltering. In the last year, as the U.S. stock market has risen by about 20% (thanks to Operation Warp Speed), China’s Shanghai stock market went down 15%. They are sprinting toward socialism faster than we are… for now.
The Chinese stock market jitters reflect global investors’ irritation with the more frequent political interventions in business affairs. As Foreign Affairs magazine recently put it regarding these iron-fisted interferences into the business activities of its largest companies: “Xi has placed China on a risky trajectory, one that threatens the (free market) achievements of his predecessors.”
In short, events of recent months both militarily and economically confirm that the modern Maoists are firmly entrenched in Beijing, and capitalism is losing. Jinping’s administration simply doesn’t get what George H.W. Bush once so eloquently described as “that freedom thing.” Militant social controls and restraints on individual liberty are now being matched with economic controls on Chinese megacorporations that are trying to vie for industry supremacy in technology, biology, manufacturing and transportation. Is all of this reminiscent of Japan circa 1939?
What is the Biden administration’s response to these threats? The massive $5 trillion spend, tax and borrow bill he is steamrolling through Congress will impair American economic supremacy almost overnight. Under Trump, tax rate reductions led to a $1 trillion infusion of capital from around the world, coming back to these shores to build up our industrial might. Biden’s tax policies will have the reverse effect: deindustrialization.
We are, as a nation, now back to importing tens of billions of dollars of energy from OPEC and Russia instead of selling the hundreds of years’ worth of oil, gas and coal. Do the progressives who now run Washington really believe we are going to defeat the rising Communist China threat by building windmills? Do they think that redistributing income and wealth makes more sense than creating it?
Will we be in any economic shape to repel China’s militaristic advances in the South China Sea, in India, in Africa and perhaps on to the shores of Taiwan with the policies in place in Washington today? Doubtful.
The war with China is on. Right now, only one country is fighting — China. Let’s not let another Afghanistan catastrophe happen in Asia.
…
Sigh.
Right. Rigggghhhhht.
Only China is fighting. China’s economy is collapsing. China is taking over American industries with an iron-fist. The failures of America are all China’s fault. Yada. Yada. Yada.
Sure.
In your dreams.
In my nightmares, but in these assholes dreams.
They haven’t a clue as to what they are dealing with. These money grabbing, politically sensitive nitwits are leading the United States towards certain destruction. But you all have heard that before.
Right?
Notice how the author weaves politics with the global economic weight of the rest of the world. Nope you dunder-heads. Politics is meaningless, useless and dangerous when mixed with anything outside of it’s natural venue. Or haven’t you ever tried to discuss politics at the Thanksgiving table with strangers? Huh?
China doesn’t play politics.
China plays HARD-BALL.
Be careful for what you wish for. If China really wanted to fight instead of the dance-moves that it is currently engaged in, it would gallop at full “break neck” speed, and Lordy! You do not want to be in their way.
I’ll tell you what.
Understanding the world 101
I constantly tell my interns that Business = Relationships.
And it is very, very true. The most successful businesses have been built upon strong foundational relationships.
In a like way, Politics = Money.
When anyone is so enraptured about Politics you know that they are talking about money. And in particular, how THEY get money, keep money, acquire money, save money or manipulate money.
With this in mind, we can see that the author of the previous article was mixing Geo-Politics with China. And that tells us all we need to know. All this hate-China narrative is all about money.
And all this Drumbeat of hate-China is all about…
Money!
And what to they wish for?
War!
Idiotic fools.
If you pay any attention to history, wars ALWAYS, and without exception, originate from the wealthy class. In general, the wealthier the individuals are, the more expansive, brutal and awful the wars they generate, will be.
So who is driving the narrative for the USA to fight China in a war?
At MintPress, we have been at the forefront of exposing how Middle Easterndictatorships and weapons contractors have been funneling money into think tanks and political action committees, keeping up a steady drumbeat for more war and conflict around the world. Yet one little-discussed nation that punches well above its weight in spending cash in Washington is Taiwan.
By studying Taiwan’s financial reports, MintPress has ascertained that the semi-autonomous island of 23 million people has, in recent years, given out millions of dollars to many of the largest and most influential think tanks in the United States. This has coincided with a strong upsurge in anti-China rhetoric in Washington, with report after report warning of China’s economic rise and demanding that the U.S. intervene more in China-Taiwan disputes.
These think tanks are filled with prominent figures from both parties and have the ears of the most powerful politicians in Washington. It is in their offices that specialists draw up papers and incubate ideas that become tomorrow’s policies. They also churn out experts who appear in agenda-setting media, helping to shape and control the public debate on political and economic issues.
Twenty years ago, a group of neoconservative think tanks like the Project for a New American Century, funded by foreign governments and weapons manufacturers, used their power to push for disastrous wars in the Middle East. Now, a new set of think tanks, staffed with many of those same experts who provided the intellectual basis for those invasions, is working hard to convince Americans that there is a new existential threat: China.
A fistful of dollars
In 2019, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States (TECRO) — for all intents and purposes, the Taiwanese embassy — donated between $250,000 and $499,999 to the Brookings Institute, commonly identified as the world’s most influential think tank. Taiwanese tech companies have also given large sums to the organization. In turn, Brookings Institute staff like Richard C. Bush (a former member of the National Intelligence Council and a U.S. national intelligence officer for East Asia) vociferously champion the cause of Taiwanese nationalists and routinelycondemn Beijing’s attempts to bring the island more closely under control.
Last week, Brookings held an event called “Taiwan’s quest for security and the good life,” which began with the statement that “Taiwan is rightly praised for its democracy. Elections are free, fair, and competitive; civil and political rights are protected.” It went on to warn that the “most consequential” challenge to the island’s liberty and prosperity is “China’s ambition to end Taiwan’s separate existence.”
According to another organization’s latest financial disclosure, TECRO also gave a six-figure sum to the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely associated with NATO. It is unclear what the Atlantic Council did with that money, but what is certain is that they gave a senior fellowship to Chang-Ching Tu, an academic employed by the Taiwanese military to teach at the country’s National Defense University. In turn, Tu authored Atlantic Council reports describing his country as a “champion [of] global democracy,” and stating that “democracy, freedom and human rights are Taiwan’s core values.” A menacing China, however, is increasing its military threats, so Taiwan must “accelerate its deterrence forces and strengthen its self-defense capabilities.” Thus he advises that the U.S. must work far more closely with Taiwan’s military, conducting joint exercises and moving towards a more formal military alliance. In 2020, the U.S. sold $5.9 billion worth of arms to the island, making it the fifth-largest recipient of American weaponry last year.
Other Taiwan-employed academics have chided the West on the pages of the Council’s website for its insufficient zeal in “deter[ring] Chinese aggression” against the island. “A decision by the United States to back down” — wrote Philip Anstrén, a Swedish recipient of a fellowship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs — “could damage the credibility of U.S. defense guarantees and signal that Washington’s will to defend its allies is weak.” Anstrén also insisted that “Europe’s future is on the line in the Taiwan Strait.” “Western democratic nations have moral obligations vis-à-vis Taiwan,” he added on his blog, “and Western democracies have a duty to ensure that [Taiwan] not only survives but also thrives.”
The reason this is important is that the Atlantic Council is an enormously influential think tank. Its board of directors is a who’s-who in foreign policy statecraft, featuring no fewer than seven former CIA directors. Also on the board are many of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker. When organizations like this begin beating the war drums, everybody should take note.
Perhaps the most strongly anti-Beijing think tank in Washington is the conservative Hudson Institute, an organization frequented by many of the Republican Party’s most influential figures, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice-President Mike Pence and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. The words “China” or “Chinese” appear 137 times in Hudson’s latest annual report, so focused on the Asian nation are they. Indeed, reading their output, it often appears they care about little else but ramping up tensions with Beijing, condemning it for its treatment of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uyghur Muslims, and warning of the economic and military threat of a rising China.
Over the years, Hudson’s efforts have been sustained by huge donations from TECRO. The Hudson Institute does not disclose the exact donations any sources give, but their annual reports show that TECRO has been on the highest tier of donors ($100,000+) every year since they began divulging their sponsors in 2015. In February, Hudson Senior Fellow Thomas J. Duesterberg wrote an op-ed for Forbes entitled “The Economic Case for Prioritizing a U.S.-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement,” in which he extolled Taiwan’s economy as modern and dynamic and portrayed securing closer economic ties with it as a no-brainer. Hudson employees have also traveled to Taiwan to meet and hold events with leading foreign ministry officials there.
The Hudson Institute also recently partnered with the more liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) to host an event with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who took the opportunity to make a great number of inflammatory statements about the “ever more challenging threats to free and democratic societies” China poses; applaud the U.S.’ actions on Hong Kong; and talk about how Taiwan honors and celebrates those who died at the Tiananmen Square massacre. TECRO gave the CAP between $50,000 and $100,000 last year.
It is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), however, that appears to receive the most Taiwanese money. According to its donor list, Taiwan gives as much money to it as the United States does — at least $500,000 last year alone. Yet all of the Taiwanese government money is put into CSIS’s regional studies (i.e., Asia) program. Like Hudson employees, the CSIS calls for a free trade agreement with Taiwan and has lavished praise on the nation for its approach to tackling disinformation, describing it as a “thriving democracy and a cultural powerhouse.” Although acknowledging that the reports were paid for by TECRO, CSIS insists that “all opinions expressed herein should be understood to be solely those of the authors and are not influenced in any way by any donation.” In December, the CSIS also held a debate suggesting that “[w]ithin the next five years, China will use significant military force against a country on its periphery,” exploring what the U.S. response to such an action should be.
Like the Atlantic Council, the CSIS organization is stacked with senior officials from the national security state. Its president and CEO is former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, while Henry Kissinger — former secretary of state and the architect of the Vietnam War — also serves on its council.
The CSIS accepts money from the Global Taiwan Institute and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) as well. The former is a rather shadowy pro-Taiwanese group that appears not to disclose its funding sources. The latter is a government-funded organization headed by former Taiwanese President You Si-kun. Every year, the TFD publishes a human rights report on China, the latest of which claims that “the Chinese Communist Party knows no bounds when it comes to committing serious human rights violations” — accusing it of “taking the initiative” in “promoting a new Cold War over the issue of human rights” and trying to “replace the universal standing of human rights values around the world.” Ultimately, the report concludes, China “constitutes a major challenge to democracy and freedom in the world.”
The TFD has also been a major funder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right pressure group that insists that Communism has killed over 100 million people worldwide. Last year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation added all global COVID-19 fatalities to the list of Communist-caused deaths on the basis that the virus started in China. The Foundation also employs Adrian Zenz, a German evangelical theologian who is the unlikely source of many of the most controversialandcontested claims about Chinese repression in Xinjiang province.
“It would be naive to believe that Taiwan’s funding of think tanks is not pushing them to take pro-Taiwan or anti-China positions,” Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, told MintPress, adding:
After all, why would Taiwan keep funding think tanks that are critical of Taiwan? There’s a Darwinian element to foreign funding of think tanks that pushes foreign government funding to think tanks that write what that foreign government wants them to write. Taiwan is no exception to this rule.”
TECRO is not just sponsoring American think tanks, however. It has also given funds to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a hawkish and controversial group described as “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China.” The country’s former ambassador in Beijing described ASPI as “the architect of the China threat theory in Australia” while Senator Kim Carr of Victoria denounced them as working hand-in-hand with Washington to push “a new Cold War with China.” ASPI was behind Twitter’s decision last year to purge more than 170,000 accounts sympathetic to Beijing from its platform.
“We must be ready to fight our corner as Taiwan tensions rise,” ASPI wrote in January, having previously castigated the West for being “no longer willing to defend Taiwan.”
ASPI — like Brookings, the Atlantic Council and others — are directly funded by weapons manufacturers, all of whom also have a direct interest in promoting more wars around the world. Thus, if the public is not careful, certain special interests might be helping move the United States towards yet another international conflict.
While the situation outlined above is concerning enough, the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative’s research has shown that around one-third of think tanks still do not provide any information whatsoever about their funding, and very few are completely open about their finances. Freeman maintains that, while there is nothing inherently wrong with foreign governments funding Western think tanks, the lack of transparency is seriously problematic, explaining:
This raises a lot of questions about the work they’re doing. Are their secret funders saying what the think tank can do in a pay-for-play scheme? Are the funders buying the think tanks silence on sensitive issues? Without knowing the think tank’s funders, policymakers and the public have no idea if the think tank’s work is objective research or simply the talking points of a foreign government.”
Freeman’s study of the Taiwanese lobby found that seven organizations registered as Taiwan’s foreign agents in the U.S. Those organizations, in turn, contacted 476 Members of Congress (including almost 90% of the House), as well as five congressional committees. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was their most frequent contact, the Californian being contacted 34 times by Taiwanese agents. Pelosi has been a great supporter of Taiwanese nationalists, successfully promoting pro-Taiwan legislation and proudly announcing that the U.S. “stands with Taiwan.”
Foreign agents working on behalf of Taiwan also made 143 political contributions to U.S. politicians, with former Alabama Senator Doug Jones the lead recipient (Pelosi was third).
Losing China, regaining Taiwan?
The reports listed above understand the dispute as purely a matter of Chinese belligerence against Taiwan and certainly do not consider U.S. military actions in the South China Sea as aggressive in themselves. That is because the world of think tanks and war planners sees the United States as owning the planet and having a remit to act anywhere on the globe at any time.
To this day, U.S. planners bemoan the “loss of China” in 1949 (a phrase that presupposes the United States owned the country). After a long and bloody Second World War, Communist resistance forces under Mao Tse-tung managed to both expel the Japanese occupation and overcome the U.S.-backed Kuomintang (nationalist) force led by Chang Kai-shek. The United States actually invaded China in 1945, with 50,000 troops working with the Kuomintang and even Japanese forces in an attempt to suppress the Communists. However, by 1949, Mao’s army was victorious; the United States evacuated and Chang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan.
The Kuomintang ruled the island for 40 years as a one-party state and remains one of the two major political groups to this day. The war between the Communists and the Kuomintang never formally ended, and Taiwan has now lived through 70 years of estrangement from the mainland. Polls show a majority of Taiwanese now favor full independence, although a large majority still personally identify as Chinese.
While many Taiwanese welcome an increased U.S. presence in the region, Beijing certainly does not. In 2012, President Barack Obama announced the U.S.’ new “Pivot to Asia” strategy, moving forces from the Middle East towards China. Today, over 400 American military bases encircle it.
In recent months, the United States has also taken a number of provocative military actions on China’s doorstep. In July, it conducted naval exercises in the South China Sea, with warships and naval aircraft spotted just 41 nautical miles from the coastal megacity of Shanghai, intent on probing China’s coastal defenses. And in December, it flew nuclear bombers over Chinese vessels close to Hainan Island. Earlier this year, the head of Strategic Command made his intentions clear, stating that there was a “very real possibility” of war against China over a regional conflict like Taiwan. China, for its part, has also increased its forces in the region, carrying out military exercises and staking claims to a number of disputed islands.
A new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report notes that China is the U.S.’ “unparalleled priority,” claiming that Beijing is making a “push for global power.” “We expect that friction will grow as Beijing steps up attempts to portray Taipei as internationally isolated and dependent on the mainland for economic prosperity, and as China continues to increase military activity around the island,” it concludes.
In an effort to stop this, Washington has recruited allies into the conflict. Australian media are reporting that their military is currently readying for war in an effort to force China to back down, while last week President Joe Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to shore up a united front against Beijing vis-a-vis Taiwan.
In February, the Atlantic Council penned an anonymous 26,000-word report advising Biden to draw a number of red lines around China, beyond which a response — presumably military — is necessary. These included any military action or even a cyber attack against Taiwan. Any backing down from this stance, the council states, would result in national “humiliation” for the United States.
Perhaps most notably, however, the report also envisages what a successful American China policy would look like by 2050:
[T]he United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power;… [and head of state Xi Jinping] has been replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and … the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.”
In other words, that China has been broken and that some sort of regime change has occurred.
Throughout all this, the United States has been careful to stress that it still does not recognize Taiwan and that their relationship is entirely “unofficial,” despite claiming that its commitment to the island remains “rock solid.” Indeed, only 14 countries formally recognize Taiwan, the largest and most powerful of which is Paraguay.
Along with a military conflict brewing, Washington has also been prosecuting an information and trade war against China on the world stage. Attempts to block the rise of major Chinese companies like Huawei, TikTok and Xiaomi are examples of this. Others in Washington have advised the Pentagon to carry out an under-the-table culture war against Beijing. This would include commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels that would “weaponize” China’s one-child policy against it, bombarding citizens with stories about how their only children will die in a war over Taiwan.
Republicans and Democrats constantly accuse each other of being in President Xi’s pocket, attempting to outdo each other in their jingoistic fervor. Last year, Florida Senator Rick Scott went so far as to announce that every Chinese national in the U.S. was a Communist spy and should be treated with extreme suspicion. As a result, the American public’s view of China has crashed to an all-time low. Only three years ago, the majority of Americans held a positive opinion of China. But today, that number is only 20%. Asian-Americans of all backgrounds have reported a rise in hate crimes against them.
Cash rules everything around me
How much of the United States’ aggressive stance towards China can be attributed to Taiwanese money influencing politics? It is difficult to say. Certainly, the United States has its own policy goals in East Asia outside of Taiwan. But Freeman believes that the answer is not zero. The Taiwan lobby “absolutely has an impact on U.S. foreign policy,” he said, adding:
At one level, it creates an echo-chamber in D.C. that makes it taboo to question U.S. military ties with Taiwan. While I, personally, think there are good strategic reasons for the U.S. to support this democratic ally — and it’s clearly in Taiwan’s interest to keep the U.S. fully entangled in their security — it’s troubling that the D.C. policy community can’t have an honest conversation about what U.S. interests are. But, Taiwan’s lobby in D.C. and their funding of think tanks both work to stifle this conversation and, frankly, they’ve been highly effective.”
Other national lobbies affect U.S. policy. The Cuban lobby helps ensure that the American stance towards its southern neighbor remains as antagonistic as possible. Meanwhile, the Israel lobby helps ensure continuing U.S. support for Israeli actions in the Middle East. Yet more ominously with Taiwan, its representatives are helping push the U.S. closer towards a confrontation with a nuclear power.
While Taiwanese money appears to have convinced many in Washington, it is doubtful that ordinary Americans will be willing to risk a war over an island barely larger than Hawaii, only 80 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Meet their enablers that are pushing – pushing for war with China
So these billionaires are throwing money to American “think tanks” and political operatives. Where does this money go to? Who are the enablers of their desires?
So who are the enablers? Who is on the receiving ends of all this cash, money, gold, and jewels…
Neoconservatives (NeoCon)
President Donald Trump has hijacked the slogan “America First.”
Once upon a time, it stood for nonintervention in foreign wars, now it stands for neocon intervention and forever war.
The Trump presidency has embraced the neocon ethos of murder and “creative destruction,” based on the teachings of an arcane philosopher, Leo Strauss.
The German Jewish emigre believed deception and permanent war are the foundation of the state, a state led by a sociopathic elite.
Strauss believed, as Thomas Hobbes before him, that humans are inherently aggressive. He said this aggressiveness should be channeled into hostility and war against other people and nations.
The neocons as of yet do not have a direct role in a Trump executive, but they are influencing the Trump administration through their foundations and think tanks, most notably the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Donald Trump is a man with zero guiding or animating principles, but for one: the pursuit of adulation.
The neocons, or some of them at least, gave him the praise he so desperately needs after he bombed Syria, canned the Iran nuke deal, loudly and abusively confronted North Korea and its eccentric hereditary leader, and has slowly but surely moved into the camp that believes China is a threat to America.
The neocons are behind the scenes pulling strings that result in forever war and a body count now surpassing a million and a half souls.
-Neocons: who they are and why they matter
The Washington Post has a reputation as liberal and even left-of-center, although its editorial pages are dominated by neoconservatives who support the idea of American exceptionalism and the extreme operational tempo of America’s military.
In the past week, we have been treated to a series of oped essays that are supportive of expanded American military power and a political, if not military, confrontation with China.
U.S. national media generally have been lazy in their treatment of our military—pandering to the military itself and resorting to retired general officers, such as Generals David Petraeus and Jack Keane, as spokesmen. The media typically defend bloated defense budgets and fail to challenge the dangerous militarization of national security decision making.
The Washington Post is particularly supportive of a more militarized national security policy, including a possible “hot” military confrontation with China.
A Hot Shooting war with China!
A group of their oped writers, particularly Michael Gerson, David Ignatius, and George Will, argue that the United States needs to increase defense spending to “protect the country from a full range of global disasters.”
Ignatius, a long-time apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency, conceded the need for restoring the “right civilian-military alignment,” but offered former secretary of defense Robert Gates as his model because Gates “could be ruthless” with aides to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Gates was, in fact, a captive of the uniformed military.
War in Space!
David Ignatius beats the drums for the just created U.S. Space Force, which inherits 86 space warriors graduating from the Air Force Academy. War in space would be a catastrophe, and even Air Force chief of staff General David Goldfein concedes that in every war game that involves space, we “never come out winning.”
David Ignatius
(During my years at the National War College, China prevailed in every war game that revolved around Taiwan.)
This year’s defense budget appropriates more than $15 billion for space systems, when we should be looking for ways to demilitarize the space frontier—and not promoting another arms race. No country is as dependent economically as the United States on access to space.
War in the South China Sea!
George Will wants a modernized and more lethal Marine Corps at a time when our most dangerous adversaries have developed “high volume, extended-range missile warfare” to deal with threats from the sea. There is a reason why the Marines have not resorted to an amphibious landing since the first months of the Korean War, and that is the high risk and great difficulty of such operations.
George Will
President Harry S. Truman recognized the island-hopping success of the Marines in the Second World War, but he was right for wanting to abolish the Marine Corps at war’s end. Chinese cruise missile technology already has made it certain that U.S. naval ships, including aircraft carriers, will not be able to get close enough to the Chinese Mainland to be effective, and the idea of island-hopping against China is pure fantasy.
Invade the Chinese mainland!
Michael Gerson, the leading speechwriter for President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002 that prepared the way for the invasion of Iraq, regularly refers to an “increasingly belligerent China.” He believes that Biden would do well to recruit unnamed defense and foreign policy advisers from the Bush administration. Does this mean Biden should bring back Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Gates, and Condi Rice who are responsible for policies that have brought the longest period of continuous U.S. war fighting in our history?
Michael Gerson
Gerson even believes that Biden “should be actively persuading…respected military and intelligence figures who served in the Trump administration to publicly support him.” Gerson’s usual suspects are not the answer.
An aggressive military policy against China!
On April 30, the Washington Post carried two additional opeds that endorsed an aggressive policy toward China, pointing to “superior force” as the “surest road to peace.” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017-2018, argued that “superior Western economic, diplomatic, and military power” defeated the Soviet Union, and that the current challenge from the “Chinese Communists must be seen the same way.”
Nikki Haley
George Will believes that Joe Biden is great because he is willing to “stand up to China, and encourages Biden to “associate himself” with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who endorses the conspiratorial theory regarding the responsibility of the research laboratory in Wuhan for the viral outbreak there. Cotton, the Cold War warrior, wrote in the Post on May 3 that the “Chinese Communist Party is our enemy. It aims to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.”
Bio-Warfare is all China’s fault!
Another Washington Post oped writer, Josh Rogin is ignoring efforts of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to link the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic to the Wuhan laboratory. In an oped on May 1, Rogin falsely credited Pompeo with calling for “depoliticizing” the issue of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Pompeo prevented a communique at a recent G-7 meeting because he couldn’t get any of the European representatives to support his polemical accusations. Nevertheless, Rogin cited Pompeo’s specious urgings that the issue of Beijing’s handling of the virus should not become “partisan. It’s too serious a matter.”
Josh Rogin
Pompeo, the leading cheerleader in this campaign, has charged his hand-picked director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, with finding evidence implicating the research lab, according to the New York Times,. However, there is evidence to suggest that Haspel will not accommodate her old boss. Haspel has stood up to the White House on sensitive issues such as the role of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman in the sadistic killing of a dissident journalist; Russian hacking in the U.S. electoral process; and the origin of the Covid-19 virus.
Haspel’s intelligence analysts could inform Pompeo that it is counterproductive to maintain that the United States and its allies must keep China in “its proper place.” On the other hand, the Defense Intelligence Agency, well known for its willingness to politicize intelligence, recently changed its analytical position in order to accommodate the view that a research lab in Wuhan was the origin of the new pathogen.
Haspel has even protected the job and personal security of the CIA whistleblower whose report led directly to the impeachment process.
No time for diplomacy!
At a time when the Sino-American relationship is central to stabilizing the international arena, we are getting no discussion of the importance of mutual military disengagement in the area of the South China Sea and the need for smart diplomacy. Washington and Beijing are compatible on important strategic issues that deal with the Korean peninsula; the importance of North Korean denuclearization; and the necessity of toning down the risk-taking proclivities of Kim Jong On. In view of the continued uncertainty in North Korea, it is essential that Washington and Beijing have programmatic diplomatic discussions.
A diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Beijing on Korean issues could lead to possibilities for stabilizing the naval rivalry in the South China Sea as well as creating less friction over the issue of Taiwan.
We could send fewer guided-missile cruisers into the South China Sea; China could stop its provocative circumnavigation of Taiwan with fighters and strategic bombers. Even a modest improvement in Sino-American relations would be advantageous, making the strengthened Sino-Russian relationship less threatening to the United States.
It makes no sense for the editorial pages of the Washington Post to assist the efforts of the military-industrial complex to strengthen its case for greater defense spending by exaggerating the so-called threat from China.
Every American president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama has endorsed a policy of engagement toward China, but Washington’s obsession with trade deficits has created the worst political and economic friction between Washington and Beijing since the first years of the Vietnam War.
And their hate-China narrative…
Why Do Editors Seek ‘Dark Sides’ Of China?
The dark side of China.
There seems to be an inflationary fascination with supposedly ‘dark sides’ of China:
The ‘dark sides’ of China meme did not only start after China had send the goddess Chang’e and Yutu the jade rabbit to the far side of the moon to look for the elixir of life.
One wonders how such ‘dark side’ and ‘weaponizing’ memes happen …
The global media is owned by only 24 people
That’s how!
A new in-depth study has revealed that just 24 companies own the majority of the world’s biggest news outlets. Tech website AddictiveTips conducted the study to find out just consolidated media companies really are in The United States, The United Kingdom and Australia. While the results not be surprising, the study gives a fascinating insight into just how little variety there really is.
Tech blog AddicitveTips have conducted an extremely in-depth and detailed study into the ownership of the world’s media outlets. Their findings show that just 24 companies own the majority of the world’s most powerful news outlets.
The Study
AddictiveTips press release states that the purpose of their study is to;
“uncover the powerful companies and CEOs who control the bulk of today’s news – and present the findings in a tangible way.”
Digital media has become the main driver of news in recent years. Hardcopy newspaper distribution is in free fall, so the battle to control the narrative has moved online.
Rather than turning on the TV at 10pm for the news, you’re more likely to be watching Vox Pops online or seeing mainstream journalists revealing their big “scoop” directly on Twitter. Although the latter has come in for criticism recently, as the “scoop culture” has led to less fact checking so as to get the accolade.
Regardless of who you go to, it is highly likely that many of the outlets you use are connected by one thing; their owner. This study shows who chair the relevant companies. For example News Corp, owners of titles such as The S*n and The Times, are chaired by Australian Robert Thomson. In reality, we all know that the true owner is Rupert Murdoch.
Needless to say, this is a well conducted and researched study.
Methodology
To determine the companies and individuals that own the top news sites in the world, AddictiveTips identified the top owners of the news sites with the most monthly traffic as of September 2019. Data on average visitor traffic for the past one to three months and the relative rank of each news site came from Alexa, an Amazon company, and market intelligence provider SimilarWeb.
They identified the owners of the top 50 news sites globally, in the United States, in the U.K., and in Australia, respectively, using financial filings, corporate press announcements, and other public sources. They then isolated the 20 companies with the most visited sites in each geography, as well as other newsworthy media companies, and identified all of the properties in their online media portfolios, as well as the name of their highest-level owners, using financial filings, corporate press announcements, and other public sources.
For news sites that are owned by investment firms with a majority stake, the CEO or director of the investment firm was listed as the highest-level owner.
For news sites that are owned or directly (or indirectly) controlled
by the government (as is the case of the BBC, who since 2017 has had its board members selected by the UK government), the head of government was listed as the highest-level owner.
A Changing Landscape
Several names are synonymous with media domination around the world: News Corp in the United States, the U.K., and Australia. Globo in Brazil & Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan.
While many of the oldest media conglomerates are as powerful as ever and still growing, the emergence of digital news has substantially altered the media landscape and allowed new companies to emerge as major players in the news industry.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, as well as telecommunications conglomerates such as Verizon and AT&T, now rank among the top owners of the world’s media.
Asset Firms
In recent years, asset management firms and private investors have increasingly bought majority stakes in legacy newspapers and have come to dominate the list of the top media owners worldwide. In April 2019, for example, private equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired the Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion, and combined their digital news assets, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, and The A.V. Club, into a new company named G/O Media Inc.
In August 2019, American investment firm KKR purchased the largest stake in Axel Springer SE, a German media group whose assets include Business Insider and Rolling Stone.
State Controlled or Owned
A significant share of the world’s media is owned by national governments. Through outlets such as PBS and NPR, the BBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the governments of the United States, the U.K., and Australia all have significant media holdings. State ownership of media in English-speaking countries is dwarfed, however, by the Government of China’s media holdings.
Who Owns UK News?
As can be seen above, online news media in the U.K. is still dominated by publishers of traditional print media, such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian.
Tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mail, The S*n, and the Daily Mirror have a significant online presence in Britain. Several London-based news sites, such as The Economist and the Financial Times, have substantial readership outside of the U.K.
Murdoch’s News Corp, through News Corp UK, The Daily Mail and General Trust plc own many of the largest national news sites in the U.K. This web of companies can make it confusing for some to understand ownership.
Murdoch’s UK empire includes; The Time and the S*n to name a few. The control of so many outlets by so few leads to editors at supposed competing papers actually working in unison to control how a story runs.
Regional Proxies
Through its subsidiary Local World Holdings Ltd. Reach plc owns more than five dozen regional newspapers and their corresponding websites. The mass ownership of regional newspapers by media giants has led to a steep decline in actual local reporting. Instead, outlets copy and paste an article from a sister paper and run it under a different byline. This has created a network of regional proxies all parroting the same story with no local connection.
While the hard copy papers still run a majority of local stories. their corresponding websites run clickbait titles so as to gain advertising revenue; the only thing that keeps the UK online media alive.
The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which it claims exists solely to control the finances of the Guardian and ensure its editorial independence.
The US Media
Online news in the United States is still dominated by publishers and broadcasters of traditional print and television news such as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
Online-only news sites that have a major presence in the U.S. include Yahoo!, Huffington Post, and Reddit. Reddit is a majorly underestimated source of news, so much so that the leaked US/UK Trade Talk Papers sat on the site for two months before being noticed.
Some of the top media owners in the U.S. have dominated the news landscape for over a century, and continue to grow in the era of digital news. The Hearst name, for example, first appeared on a newspaper masthead in 1887. Today Hearst Communications owns dozens of newspapers and magazines throughout the country, each with a significant online presence.
Advance Publications, which was founded by Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. in 1922 and is still family-owned today, has a portfolio that includes Reddit, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and American City Business Journals.
However, as noted above, there have been new entries to the US news world. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos purchased the influential Wall Street Journal – WSJ, much to the annoyance of President Trump.
Disney are a major player in the US having purchased Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox in March 2019, it now holds titles such as Fox News, abc and has a stake in the above mentioned Hearst Newspaper group.
Australian News Ownership
From 1987 to 2006, Australia had specific legislation limiting foreign ownership of media companies on the continent, as well as restrictions on cross-ownership of media companies meant to preserve the diversity of news media.
Despite these restrictions, today Australia has a relatively high degree of media concentration. National online news media in Australia is essentially controlled by two companies: News Corp, through News Corp Australia, and Nine. Rural news media is largely dominated by Australian Community Media, whose portfolio includes over 170 regional newspapers and their corresponding websites.
Seven West Media also has a substantial news media portfolio that includes traditional newspapers, online-only news sites, magazines, and radio. The Conversation is one of the only major online news sites in Australia that is independently owned.
Australian media appears to have even less diversity than its UK and US counterparts.
Media Ownership Conclusions
As the concentration of online news has increased, so has public distrust in mass media. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans remain largely mistrustful of the mass media, with just 41% currently having “a great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
In the UK, media trust is poor at best. Just 32% of adults in the UK say they trust the news media at least somewhat. 48% say their news media do a good job of getting the facts right, 46% say they provide coverage independent of corporate influence and 37% say their news coverage is politically neutral. When it comes to covering important topics like immigration, 44% of British adults say that the media is doing a good job. These are not exactly glowing figures for the UK mainstream media. They don’t seem to be able to get close to 50% trust in many cases.
Owners should be asking themselves questions with results like this, but they don’t, and they won’t. The fact is, people still visit their websites and generate profits through advertising, as long as the profits keep coming, they couldn’t care less about trust levels.
That is why at least in the UK, the media and press need to be majorly overhauled. Regional outlets need given back their independence, conglomerates controlling an entire narrative needs to end and the BBC needs a complete overhaul. The number of incidents in the 2019 General Election campaign of “inaccuracies” by the BBC is alarming. They are still the most visited and viewed news platform in the UK. If they are peddling blatant lies, something obviously needs to change.
Independence in the news is at an all time low. Profits for investors take precedent over good quality news. That needs to change. Perhaps you can start by visiting supporting other Independent News sites like this one.
OK. Where are we so far.
Well, we know who wants a war with China.
We also know how they are trying to provoke one, and where they are throwing their money towards.
We also know who their enablers are; they who take that money and run the media printing presses and make policy decisions for a war.
Finally we have seen how they, in turn, manipulate the media that they control. As well as examples of the uniformity of their onslaught.
So what?
So what if America, the United States, wants to launch an “incident” or two? What’s the worst to happen? A down turn in trade? Higher prices at the gas pumps? An increase in war related movies and news? So what?
Well…
It is not going to be like that at all. It won’t be a “pretend war”, it will be a serious, gut wrenching, lethal, lethal war at your front door.
Chinese MIRV
Keep in mind…
All military “war games” against China indicates the USA would lose…
…Very, very badly.
In fact, there isn’t a single war simulation, not one, that has the USA the victor or even a close draw. Each and every simulation for the last 18 years has had the United States defeated in a war with China.
China is a peaceful, prosperous nation that views Taiwan as it’s brothers and sister. No matter what bullshit the main-stream Western media is throwing at you…
Xi Jinping promises peaceful Taiwan reunification
Chinese leader says unity in the best interests of the people of the mainland and of the breakaway island. He’s right.
China’s President Xi Jinping said Saturday “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan “will be and can be realized”, days after Chinese warplanes made record incursions into the air defense zone of the democratically ruled island.
Self-governed Taiwan, which has never formally declared independence, lives under the constant threat of invasion by China, which views the island as its territory and has vowed to one day seize it, by force if necessary.
“Realising national reunification by peaceful means best serves the interests of the nation as a whole including our brethren in Taiwan,” Xi said in a speech marking the 110th anniversary of a revolution that ended millennia of imperial rule and led to the founding of the Republic of China.
“Taiwan independence is the biggest obstacle to the reunification of the motherland and a serious hidden danger,” Xi warned.
A large portrait of Sun Yat-sen, a Western-educated doctor who led the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing empire, towered over the stage as Xi spoke.
Sun founded the Republic of China, which remains the formal name of Taiwan, where defeated Nationalists fled after Mao Zedong’s Communist forces won the Chinese civil war in 1949 and established the People’s Republic.
“The complete reunification of our country will be and can be realised,” Xi said.
He also warned against foreign interference in Taiwan after a Pentagon official confirmed US special operations forces have been quietly training Taiwanese troops for months.
Did you read that?
Pretty simple.
Pretty clear.
Straightforward and direct.
Now, read how this speech was reported in the American Media. You know, the media that is controlled by only five people, and whom most are neocons…
China, Taiwan tensions spark debate inside Biden admin as Democrats push for more forceful response
Washington (CNN)The Biden administration is grappling with how to respond to China’s ramped-up aggression against Taiwan without accidentally starting a war, as bipartisan lawmakers pressure the President to get tougher on Beijing — and fast.
Huh?
Internally, assessments differ over how imminent the threat to Taiwan really is.
The Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command has watched with increasing concern as China has rapidly modernized its military and improved its training with an eye to Taiwan, sources say. But State Department officials are wary of taking a more aggressive approach, and intelligence officials have seen little evidence that China is preparing to invade.
Tensions have risen sharply in the region recently, however, and administration officials were caught off guard when China’s air force dramatically ramped up its incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone earlier this month.
Even before the most recent incursion, the Biden administration had discussed with Taiwanese officials the possibility of expediting the delivery of American-made F-16s to Taiwan, according to Taiwanese and US officials familiar with the talks. The sale of the 66 fighter jets was approved in 2019, but Taiwan hopes to speed up the actual delivery time—which normally can take up to 10 years—particularly in light of the recent Chinese provocations.
The stakes are high for President Joe Biden, who has made human rights and democracy a key part of his foreign policy agenda but who has also been determined to keep the US out of foreign conflicts. For decades, Washington has embraced the concept of “strategic ambiguity” in dealing with Taiwan, in which the US remains deliberately vague about whether it would come to the island’s defense in the event of an attack by China.
But the recent escalation by Beijing marked a major challenge to that posture and has led some Biden administration officials and lawmakers to reconsider that approach, all as the President has been trying to pivot his foreign policy priorities to the Indo-Pacific region.
It’s also led some in Congress to ratchet up pressure on the White House to change its posture.
“The time for strategic ambiguity is long past,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “In light of the clear and present danger Beijing poses to Taiwan’s vibrant democracy, the United States must be crystal clear in our intent — with both our words and our actions. In our current context, ambiguity has invited miscalculation and risk, and an effective deterrence posture can only come from clarity.”
The aide added that the Senate is exploring additional steps to provide Taiwan with “the security, economic and diplomatic support essential for our new era of strategic competition.”
In response, a senior administration official said that “U.S. support for Taiwan remains strong, principled, and bipartisan and we will continue to engage with Congress on these important matters.”
Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who served as the State Department’s top human rights official under the Obama administration, also favors a tougher approach, and said it would be an error to think of Xi Jinping as bluffing in his threatening rhetoric. The Chinese leader has vowed to “smash” any attempts by Taiwan to declare independence, and said in a speech this month that “the historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled, and will definitely be fulfilled.”
Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski
“It is a consistent mistake of American foreign policy that we project our own pragmatic reasonableness onto others and assume that they don’t mean what they say,” Malinowski said.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander, has gone even further, arguing for Congress to give more leeway to the President to launch military operations abroad to defend Taiwan if necessary.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria
“The legal limitations on a president’s ability to respond quickly could all but ensure a Chinese fait accompli,” Luria wrote in an October 11 Washington Post op-ed, referring to the limits imposed by the War Powers Act. “My Republican colleagues introduced the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act in February to grant the president the authority to act against an invasion of Taiwan and prevent a fait accompli. This act is a good starting point to address a legal dilemma.”
‘Nothing suggests’ an invasion
Still, that political pressure has run up against a degree of wariness from the State Department and intelligence community. Intelligence officials have not yet seen anything to suggest that China is readying a military offensive, according to people familiar with the intelligence assessments.
“It was certainly a dramatic escalation,” said one of the people, referring to the 56 Chinese aircraft that flew into Taiwan’s defense zone on October 4, the largest-ever incursion. “But nothing suggests that China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan.”
Officials in the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, meanwhile, are leery of taking a much more aggressive posture toward China over the Taiwan issue than the strategically ambiguous status quo.
Former deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who was dispatched by Biden to Taiwan in April as part of an unofficial delegation aimed at showing support for the island, called the current situation “very dangerous” and said that ending the strategic ambiguity policy would only embolden Beijing further.
“All bets would be off,” he said, because China would see the shift as a “fundamental breach” of the agreements in place for decades.
“It is important for us to reassure Taiwan, but there are ways to do that and to enhance deterrence without sticking our finger in Beijing’s eye,” Steinberg added.
Biden himself has long been opposed to publicly declaring definitive US support for the island democracy in the event of a Chinese attack.
“The president should not cede to Taiwan, much less to China, the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait,” then-Senator Biden wrote in a 2001 op-ed. His 24-page national security strategy devotes one vague line to Taiwan, reading: “We will support Taiwan, a leading democracy and a critical economic and security partner, in line with longstanding American commitments.”
The senior administration official emphasized that the US “has an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” and “will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo.”
“President Biden voted for the Taiwan Relations Act himself and remains firmly committed to the principles therein,” the official said, “including that the United States will continue to assist Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability; and that the United States would regard any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.”
Eyes on 2027
American defense officials said they see 2027 — the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army and the final year of Xi Jinping’s third presidential term — as a key year in which Beijing could try to take Taiwan by force if peaceful unification has not yet been achieved.
Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng predicted earlier this month that China would actually have the “full ability” to invade even sooner, by 2025.
While Xi struck a more conciliatory tone in a speech last week, vowing a “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, it is unlikely that Taiwan would ever voluntarily give up their relative autonomy; Taiwan’s foreign minister last week said the island was prepared to “fight to the end” in the event of a war with China.
One defense official noted that for China, reuniting with Taiwan “is a matter of national pride.” But Steinberg, the former deputy secretary of state, said he believes that “China would like to avoid the use of force, because it would be counterproductive and risky to its interests.”
Danny Russel, who served as Deputy Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs until 2017, echoed that assessment.
"The Chinese foreign policy and propaganda community certainly wants to sow doubt in American resolve and convince Taiwan that America won't be there for them," he said. "But that is very different from whether Xi Jinping has the stomach for a fight with the U.S., an immensely capable nuclear power, and its allies."
That doesn’t mean things can’t spiral out of control, Steinberg cautioned. The region right now is a tinderbox, as the different sides try to leverage alliances and show off military prowess. The British-led Carrier Strike Group 21, for example, has participated in a multinational show of force in the Indo-Pacific, including through the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters.
"My personal view is that none of the sides want an [armed] confrontation, but everyone is afraid that if any side shows weakness or a lack of resolve, then the other side will misinterpret it," Steinberg said. "It's a security spiral, and there is no stability in a situation like this."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the number of F-16 fighter jets approved for sale to Taiwan in 2019. It was 66.
A very long and detailed article. All are opinions based on lies. I can’t make it any clearer than that.
OK, so we know the twisted propaganda, what now?
Well, there are many, many issues involved. The big one, of course is the absolute collapsing of the United States, and a near panic attempt to delay and forestall the really bitter end of the “grand experiment” in American “democracy”.
But you see, China plays the “long game”. They are playing 78 moves ahead in chess while the Untied States only thinks one move at a time. And that brings up some interesting issues.
Like this one…
China is a rising leader in IC fabrication, but America wants to stop that rise…
[ANALYSIS] Korea under pressure to mediate chip issue
Sharing chip info to US may force Samsung to share it to China
By Kim Yoo-chul
The current semiconductor shortages have illustrated the strategic significance of semiconductor manufacturing. The central point of today’s chip shortages is a classic supply-demand mismatch.
This means that demand for semiconductors is spiking while supply is fairly flat. As the construction of semiconductor factories costs billions of dollars, semiconductor shortages amid the continued pandemic have been directly impacting the “backbone industries” of the United States with many Wall Street investors forecasting supply-chain bottlenecks to continue throughout this year.
The United States, one of the top export markets for Korea, has been aggressively pushing chip-related policies mostly aimed at ensuring the country’s sovereignty in semiconductor production through massive subsidies.
Sanity Check. Look at a chart to see the real picture, before we go further with this article.
The USA is a very minor export destination for Korea's IC chips.
Korea export markets.
The White House was offering to back billion-dollar programs in a bid to strengthen the long-term and a greater self-sufficiency of the U.S. semiconductor industry. Simply and precisely, this issue has become a political one. It’s fair to say that the United States, China and even Europe are on a clear track to politicize tech supply chains.
The U.S. Department of Commerce asked America's "Big 3" automakers and key industry players operating there ― including Intel, TSMC, Apple, Samsung Electronics and GlobalFoundries ― to submit their key semiconductor management-related data such as inventory levels, production targets and revenue estimates according to clients and technology development roadmaps by Nov. 8 this year.
.
The U.S. government stressed that the submission of the information should be voluntary.
But Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned industry executives recently that her team may invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) or other available tools to force such required data into their hands.
.
To FORCE them…
"What I told them is, 'I don't want to have to do anything compulsory but if they don't comply, then they'll leave me no choice',"
she said.
No option but to consider ‘China factor’
From Korea’s standpoint, given the country’s strengths in the chip sector, any decision to share such classified information with the United States will cause adverse results as China is equally important…
No.
Look at the chart up above again. China is by far the largest and most significant buyer of these chips. With the United States being a very tiny and insignificant customer. So, people (!) they are NOT "equally important".
…and comparable to the United States in terms of the significance of trade.
Again. No. Unless you have the intelligence of a snail.
USA is 9%
China is 51%
They are NOT comparable. But the brain dead readership in the West really never bothers to check the raw data. They rely on the "journalists" to do so. Blind faith; it will "kick you in the balls" unless you are careful.
Samsung and SK have invested more than $15 billion in semiconductor plants in China.
"Things are becoming very complicated.
However, the primary focus is that Samsung Electronics is advised not to share its classified chip data with the U.S. government.
If it does that, then Samsung will be situated to submit confidential data to Beijing regarding its semiconductor business. That's a scenario I don't want to think about.
Again, this is more about a matter of national security and intellectual property,"
…a high-ranking government official told The Korea Times, Sunday.
"Washington's request for Samsung to share classified information is totally unprecedented,"
…said Ahn Ki-hyun, a senior executive at the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA). Analysts and officials are not ruling out the possibility of handing over acquired data to Intel, which announced its entry into foundry-chip making with Washington’s backing.
Samsung Electronics, the world’s top memory chip manufacturer, has been operating a massive foundry chip-making plant for more than a decade in the U.S. state of Texas. The tech giant is set to announce the location of its new $17 billion plant, also likely to be in Texas, when Samsung chief Lee Jae-yong signs off on the deal, possibly next month.
China is Samsung Electronics’ other key market.
.
It operates several chip plants in the neighboring country with assistance from Beijing ― similar to the arrangement with the United States. China has been massively boosting its investment in semiconductor capabilities.
Samsung, in this regard, has become sandwiched on multiple fronts between the United States and China.
They are being forced to choose. Select the Untied States, or their nearby nuclear armed neighbor, China, where 80% of their factories lie. -MM
This quote…
"Samsung can't handle this issue alone as it is too big for a private company to handle.
The South Korean government needs to ask the White House and U.S. commerce department to minimize the scope of information that Samsung must share.
Or Samsung Electronics and the government will need to lobby U.S. politicians on the points that it is already the top-tier foreign direct investor in the United States with large scale local employment and that it will remain as the most-trusted business partner there.
The same appealing points could be applied when Samsung deals with China,"
…a senior industry executive said by telephone.
South Korea’s top trade negotiator Yeo Han-koo voiced the country’s uneasiness regarding Washington’s request to share chip data and Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki said he also relayed Korean chipmakers’ concerns about Washington’s request to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
The global semiconductor industry is following its typical cycle with overcapacity forecasted for 2023. This trend will threaten the bottom lines of major chipmakers, raising the possibility that some cash-intensive investment plans will have to be scaled back.
China is the leader in military artificial intelligence (AI) technology
At least that is what the Leadership of the United States AI Technology branch thinks. He caused quite a roar a few weeks ago when he resigned and all the neocon publication went bat-shit crazy over it. Then the furor died down.
US Air Force software boss resigns: ‘Battle over AI lost to China’
Nicolas Chaillan, 37, told the Financial Times after resigning: 'We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years.' 'Right now, it's already a done deal – it is already over in my opinion,' he added. 'Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal.'
That says the former software chief of the US Air Force to the Financial Times. According to Nicolas Chaillan, there is “good reason to be angry”.
Chaillan has spent the past few years working within the armed forces on ways to improve cybersecurity. The former Air Force chief software officer told the newspaper he resigned last week in protest at the slow pace at which the military is undergoing technological transformation. He also says that he cannot see the US being surpassed by China.
Chaillan, 37, said the US will no longer be able to compete with China in 15 to 20 years. “It’s already a done race. It’s already over, in my eyes,” he told the Financial Times. Chaillan also warned that cybersecurity in some government departments is still at “kindergarten” level.
The former top official said he wants to testify before the US parliament about the Chinese cyber threat to his country within weeks. Although that spends much more money on defense than China, according to Chaillan, this is not done in an effective way. He also complained that bureaucracy is hampering necessary reforms.
According to the former software chief, technologies such as artificial intelligence are much more important for the future of the US than, for example, new jet fighters such as the F-35. He called the discussion about ethics in the development of artificial intelligence a restraining factor in the US. Companies such as Google would also be reluctant to cooperate with the military in the field of AI.
The situation in China looks very different, according to Chaillan. There, according to the expert, companies are obliged to cooperate with the authorities and “huge investments are made” without taking ethics into account.
All of the AI for them is mature and is used in industry inside of China. China has been producing military robots straight out of the movie “Terminator”, and they swim, fly, crawl, and walk. I’ll be you never heard about all that have you?
Well here’s some movies to get you a bit interested…
Video Here.
I wonder how the Western armies would feel if they confronted military robots that looked like funny fat bunny rabbits, cute attractive women, little big eyed children? I wonder how they would react to Tonka-truck sized walking grenades, robot dog bomb squads, and mini-nuke drones?
Video Here
Robotic farming is a mature technology. Can you even imagine what the military has MASS PRODUCED? I know that there are robot fish that are swimming bombs, as well as all sorts of things that would rest inside your worst nightmare.
Video Here.
Schools of robotic fish. Some with bombs, some with sensors. All under the control of the Chinese military and swimming all over the South China Sea.
Video Here.
And here’s a shark robot. I wonder if it has friggin’ lasers in it’s eyes?
Video Here.
China has advanced anti-satellite technology
Chinese scientists build anti-satellite weapon that can cause explosion inside exhaust
Researchers who built the device say it can lock itself into the thruster nozzles used by most satellites and stay there for long periods undetected
Scientists say the resulting blast would damage the target’s equipment and may be mistaken for an engine malfunction
China is the leader in the rapid manufacture of nuclear weapons systems
Yah. China is the leader in manufacturing. Not only have they absorbed all the technologies needed and necessary for manufacturing, but they have developed an adjacent infrastructure to support those industries.
And it’s not just rubber ducks, hospitals, electric cars, and clothing. It also includes military systems and hardware. And we can see it. Though it is only briefly reported in the American media, China has created a formidable Naval Fleet that operates in the waters adjacent to China; the South China Sea. Unlike the United States, which spreads military project outward everywhere, China’s is concentrated next to China.
And it’s not just that. Consider the mass production of the nuclear armed MIRV ICBM the DF-41. Also known as a “scatter-gun” nuke delivery system.
The DF-41 missile has an operational range of more than 14,000 kilometers and can carry about 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads, capable of hitting anywhere on Earth, and this would make DF-41 the world's longest range missile, surpassing the range of the US LGM-30 Minuteman which has a reported range of 13,000 kilometers.
Yang Chengjun, a Chinese expert on missile technology and nuclear strategy and chief scientist of quantum defense, told the Global Times that the DF-41 is Chinese fourth-generation strategic nuclear weapon and has the longest operational range among all Chinese ICBMs. "This ICBM's research and development was very successful, and its technology is very mature. During testing, there was no failure record," Yang noted.
Wu Jian, editor of Defense Weekly under the Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening News, told the Global Times that the multiple transporter erector launchers of the DF-41 missile shown in the October 2019 parade proved that the People's Liberation Army had already built a massive and advanced system to support the use of this missile. "This proves that China has sufficient and reliable strategic nuclear power, and decision-makers have the confidence to show and use them to respond to any kind of nuclear threat from any country." Wu noted "No matter how advanced the missile is, it always needs a mature and comprehensive system to make sure it can accurately strike a target, which at least includes intelligence gathering, satellite surveillance, logistics, and construction of launching positions".
Public data shows that DF-41 is a rival of the 6th-generation missiles of some developed countries, such as the American LGM-30 Minuteman and the Russian RT-2PM2. The Chinese missile even has an edge with regard to some technologies. The DF-41 has a range of 12,000 kilometers and a deviation of some one hundred meters. It can carry six to 10 multiple maneuverable warheads, which makes it difficult to be intercepted. The missile is 16.5 meters in length with a diameter of 2.78 meters. It can be launched from road- and rail-mobile launcher platforms, as well as silo-based launchers.
China’s state-owned Global Times, on 23 January 2017, carried a report, which said the Dongfeng-41 (DF-41) missile would bring China “more respect.” The missiles that are capable of carrying 10-12 nuclear warheads were deployed near the China-Russia border, according the report, which did not go into further detail. there has been no authoritative information on whether China has a Dongfeng-41 strategic missile brigade, how many such brigades it has and where they are deployed. Two days earlier, Pingguo Ribao, a Hong Kong-based publication reported about the deployment. News of a potential deployment leaked much earlier.
Song Zhongping, a Beijing-based military affairs commentator, noted that the new missiles would also have stronger penetration abilities and faster response times. "Only with these advantages can they have the chance to quickly penetrate through the missile defense system of the US."
Chinese military observers have widely connected China's efforts in improving its missiles' functions with the missile defense plans of the United States. At present, the US is developing a multi-level missile defense network including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, and Sea-based SM-3 Missile Defense System.
Song said China's development of the new missiles is aimed at maintaining military balance to protect national security, not to seek hegemony, while the US is trying to break it by being ambitious in improving military technologies in both defense and attack. China has a "no first use" policy for nuclear weapons. "The US has been building its missile defense network like a shield, which other countries' missiles cannot penetrate. This for sure stimulated other countries to sharpen their 'spears.' Otherwise, if the US has both the strongest shield and spear, they could impose an aggressive strategy on us, and we would be driven into passivity," said Song.
China can detect all American stealth aircraft
China has reportedly developed anover-the-horizonmaritime early warning radar systemthat can detect stealth aircraft far beyond visual range, an advanced capability that could threaten US fifth-generation fighters operating in the area.
-China Says NewRadarCanSpotUSStealthFighters
The solution?
Don’t put military fighters near Chinese airspace. Duh!
The Chinese teach military discipline and warfare skills in elementary school through out elementary, middle and high school. The Pioneers is a paramilitary branch of the children that concentrates on military art to serve the nation. In middle school, all students must go through “boot camp”. And then in High School, students are carefully vetted to see what role or part of society that they can serve best.
While China has an enormous and huge military force, it is also integrated with other fighting organizations. Such as the police, the coast guard, the various civilian detachments and so on and so forth.
Were China to be attacked, it won’t be just a small percentage of the people trying to defend the cities. It would be the vast bulk of society. From 5 year old kids in kindergarten, to 80 year old great grandfathers. You do not want to shake the Chinese hornet’s nest.
China uses nuclear weapons as part of it’s defensive posture. No escalation would occur.
AChineseWayof War. The primary goal of a commander educated in the style of the ancient Chinesemilitary classics was a rapid, easy victory, one obtained via a variety of tactics which have a long lineage within Chinese military historiography.
-A ChineseWayof War
Chinese military doctrine is to control the course of any war from the onset. They do not believe in evolving into “stages of conflict”. They believe that a war is a war. And you treat it as such. They do not make a functional distinction between military forces landing on one of their islands, or a full assault on a city. If you attack them, they will attack back.
From 1977 to 1988 China developed a neutron bomb, more formally known as an enhanced radiation weapon. Neutron bombs are specialized tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) withreduced blast effects and enhanced radiation. Similar to the BMD and ASAT puzzles, this weapon appearsincompatible with China’s stated nuclear doctrine.
-National Interest.
Unlike the United States, China has developed systems geared to kill the enemy while leaving their buildings, automobiles, bridges and factories intact. It is called a “neutron bomb”. The West does not employ these weapons because of the political fallout.
This is a special nuclear weapon that releases radiation instead of blowing up things massively. The amount of radiation is quick, and very, very lethal and dissipates rather quickly; on the order of months.
These are also huge weapons that can totally kill everyone in a single city while leaving eh skyscrapers intact. The intended purpose is against military bases, and hardened underground sites, but they can (and in a war, would) be employed to empty out complete cities.
For instance, if used against Chicago or Atlanta, the entire city would be spared from destruction. It’s just that all the people would die a very painful death by radiation as they are on their knees vomiting out their hemorrhaging internal organs.
The American policy, since President Trump, has been to use micro-nukes to hit “high value” targets, and then use the threat of complete national nuclear annihilation if the attacked nation responds.
The Chinese policy is to use nuclear weapons from the moment they are attacked. They do not believe in escalation.
Thus any nation that attacks China, whether it is a proxy for the United States, or the actual United States; both types of nations will be hit with swarm nuke warheads. These are very deadly “shotgun” nuclear missiles that fire a barrage of nuclear bombs in clusters.
To say that they are similar to American MIRV ICBM’s is silly. And just shows how ignorant one is.
If, say, America launches a nuclear ICBM at China, the missile would contain three nuclear warheads. One for Beijing, one for Shanghai, and one for Hong Kong.
But if China launches a nuclear ICBM at the United States, it would contain ten nuclear warheads that would all be directed at a singular city. So New York and all the surrounding region would be pulverized into radioactive glass by ten, very, very large, and very, very dirty, nuclear bombs.
But the Chinese (and the Russians), while they do have the ability to lay precision target ordnance, do not employ it.
They use a wholly different strategy. They believe in carpet swath attacks. Instead of placing a singular lone high value missile on a singular lone high value target, like the United States, they instead believe in leveling the entire area into obliteration.
While the United States might plan on striking say 20 high value target in a particular city, China would calibrate a nuclear warhead and destroy the entire city indiscriminately. That way all of the targets are removed, and sure there’s a lot of collateral damage, but “tough cookies”. You all shouldn’t have fucked with them in the first place. Ya God damn morons.
This policy is completely across the board. Not just strategic, but tactical and theater as well. China will eviscerate a complete area. While the United States and it’s vassals are busy trying to attack a hamlet, a building or a structure. China just rubble’s everything.
China does not play.
Financial Times says US intelligence officials reportedly caught by surprise by Beijing’s progress on weapons; Pentagon: ‘We hold China as our number one pacing challenge’
This is to tell the Western crusaders not to try their luck by starting another war.
The average number of times that China is taking the USA Pentagon by surprise is 6 times per year. (every two months) Average, of course.
This time, China has tested a new supersonic rocket, encircling the world.
China tests earth-circling, nuclear-capable hypersonic missile:
https://lnkd.in/dTDKYu3z
China Tested A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System That Uses A Hypersonic Glide Vehicle: Report
Such a capability could potentially allow China to execute a nuclear strike on any target on earth with near-impunity and very little warning.
A report from Financial Times’ Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille states that China has tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that goes into space and traverses the globe in an orbital-like fashion before making its run through the atmosphere toward its target. There would be huge implications if such a system were to be operationalized, and according to this story, which says it talked to five officials confirming the test, the U.S. government was caught totally off-guard by it.
The trial flight is said to have occurred around August, with the boost-glide vehicle being lifted into space by a Long March 2C rocket. The launch of the rocket, the 77th of its kind, was undisclosed by Beijing, while the 76th and 78th were—the latter of which occurred in late August. The Financial Times says that the tested hypersonic glide vehicle missed its target by a couple of dozen miles, but that is hardly reassuring considering the capabilities that are apparently in development here.
The foundation of this Cold War-era concept is commonly referred to as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS, but instead of carrying a traditional nuclear-armed reentry vehicle, this Chinese system would carry a hypersonic glide vehicle that would possess immense kinetic energy upon reentry. As such, it could make a very long maneuvering flight through the atmosphere at very high speeds to its target.
The FOBS concept has long been a concern because of its potential to bypass not just missile defenses, but even many early warning capabilities. Compared to a traditional intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a FOBS can execute the same strikes but from highly unpredictable vectors. Range limitations also become a non-factor and the timing of an inbound strike is also far less predictable. But at least with a traditional FOBS ballistic missile system, some sort of projections could be made if the mid-course “orbital” vehicle can be tracked, although that could still be a real challenge.
That is not the case at all with a hybrid design like the one being claimed to have been tested here, which would be totally unpredictable.
The maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle, descending from high-altitude at extreme speed, could travel thousands of miles to its target, which can be totally offset from a normal ballistic track. Complicating things more, these systems can attack from the south pole, not just the north where most of America’s ballistic missile early warning, tracking, and defensive apparatus is focused. Intercepting such a system would also be very challenging, especially considering U.S. mid-course intercept capabilities are focused on traditional ballistic missile flight profiles, which fly more of a parabolic trajectory and have generally known ranges of each stage of flight.
With a glide vehicle end-game delivery system paired with a FOBS, its vehicles can enter the atmosphere beyond the range of an interceptor’s exo-atmospheric mid-course kill envelope, with the glide vehicle weaving its way through the atmosphere to its final target. Traditional surface-based radar systems’ line of sight is also significantly reduced as the hypersonic glide vehicle travels in the atmosphere. Paired with the extreme speeds involved, this can make these systems nearly useless at providing any details regarding the impending attack.
Hypersonic glide vehicles themselves are also very tough to kill with no real defense against them available at this time. Elaborate defensive concepts are in the works, but their effectiveness will depend on just how fast these vehicles are traveling, their maneuverability, density in numbers, what third-party sensors are available to help in generating an engagement solution, and more. A hypersonic glide vehicle with the kinetic energy in its favor from an orbital-like delivery would likely be the very hardest to kill.
Last month, Frank Kendall, US air force secretary, hinted that Beijing was developing a new weapon. He said China had made huge advances, including the “potential for global strikes . . . from space”.
He declined to provide details, but suggested that China was developing something akin to the “Fractional Orbital Bombardment System” that the USSR deployed for part of the Cold War, before abandoning it.“ If you use that kind of an approach, you don’t have to use a traditional ICBM trajectory. It’s a way to avoid defenses and missile warning systems,” said Kendall.
In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command, told a conference that China had “recently demonstrated very advanced hypersonic glide vehicle capabilities”. He warned that the Chinese capability would “provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment”.
There is no shortage of concerns about China’s nuclear buildup within the DoD, and like Moscow, it’s only logical that Beijing would invest in delivery systems that circumvent U.S. early warning and defensive capabilities. The idea that at least some of the hundreds of supposed silos out in the Chinese desert being built to house new ballistic missiles could one day be armed with a weapon like this is very concerning. It also could be yet another major driver behind the Pentagon’s push to deploy a whole new space-based early warning and tracking system for hypersonic and ballistic missiles, including one capable of “cold layer” tracking of missiles in their midcourse stage of flight.
But really, I've been banging on about orbital bombardment for several years now. It's obvious: The US put a missile defense system in Alaska to defend against missiles coming over the North Pole. What did you think Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang will do? Just give up?
— Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) October 16, 2021
That layer would be absolutely essential in trying to defend against a FOBS, that is if a defense at all is actually feasible or even strategically sound. We are not talking about a rogue state here with a few advanced ballistic missiles. China would be able to deploy dozens or even hundreds of these at once. At a certain point, kinetic defenses against such a capability become a losing proposition and a very costly one at that.
Still, this was an early test aboard a full-on rocket used for traditional space access missions. It will take China some time to perfect such a system and package it in a quickly deployable militarized configuration. Major thermal and ablative issues also must be overcome, among others, but it’s not like China hasn’t been working diligently in the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle realm for many years.
Regardless, if this report ends up being fully accurate, one thing is likely: New calls for hugely expensive missile defense capabilities will be ringing loud and often on Capitol Hill, as well as demands to do whatever possible to bring China to the bargaining table in hopes of obtaining some type of strategic arms limitation treaty.
By the late the fifth century BC, after decades of war with its chief rival Sparta, the ancient Greek city-state of Athens was desperate for peace.
They wanted a decisive victory to end the war once and for all. So the citizens gathered together in their public assembly– essentially a democratic mob of 6,000 people– and voted to build a new, costly fleet of ships.
The strategy worked. And their new armada vanquished the Spartan navy in the Battle of the Arginusae Islands in 406 BC.
Sparta was on the ropes, and the Assembly cheered when news of their fleet’s victory reached Athens.
But then the Assembly found out that 25 of the 150 ships had been sunk by the Spartans, and that the Athenian crews of those 25 sunken ships had drowned in a storm.
The Assembly suddenly became furious, crying that the souls of those drowned sailors would wander purgatory for all of eternity because they didn’t have a proper burial.
So then the Athenian mob voted to execute eight of their top military commanders; the very same generals and admirals who had just won the battle and been called heroes, were now being put to death.
Socrates was one of the lone voices of dissent; yet the death sentences were still carried out despite his protest.
Then, only a few days later, the Athenian Assembly had a change of heart. The mob realized that they shouldn’t have executed their military commanders, so they then voted to execute the people within the Assembly who had proposed the executions to begin with.
During this insane dumpster fire of ancient democracy, Spartan leaders approached Athens with a peace deal, offering to end the war once and for all.
This was the entire reason that Athens had built a new fleet. They just wanted peace.
But they were so distracted by infighting and arguing about who to execute next, and who to blame, that the Assembly rejected Sparta’s peace offering.
Yet Athens’ military was now led by inexperienced admirals and generals, since they had just executed their best commanders. And Sparta quickly seized the advantage.
Within a few months the Spartan navy was ravaging Athenian territory, and soon laying siege to Athens itself. The war finally ended in 404 BC with Athens losing all sovereignty and falling under complete control of the Spartan Empire.
As the old saying goes, history doesn’t necessarily repeat. But it certainly rhymes. And I was thinking about this particular episode recently when it was reported earlier this week that China has just successfully tested its first nuclear-capable hypersonic missile.
In case you don’t geek out on military strategy like I do, suffice it to say that this is a huge deal, not just for the United States, but for the entire world.
For the past several decades, the United States has boasted the strongest, most technologically advanced military in the world.
And it would be foolish to think that this military strength hasn’t substantially contributed to America’s geopolitical and economic power.
The United States Marine Corps is essentially the biggest derivatives contract in the world. It’s the US government’s ultimate hedge, enabling it wage trade wars, sanction foreign banks, and bully anyone it wants into following US regulations.
The US military is even part of the reason why the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, despite the US government being the largest debtor that has ever existed in the history of the world.
The US government, and the US economy, both derive substantial benefit from America’s military power.
And this is why China’s rapid military development is such a big deal.
China could destroy the United States in cyberwarfare. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion. I mean… there are still system within the US Defense Department that use 5 ¼ inch floppy disks.
But even in conventional warfare, China is gaining rapidly. The Chinese Navy already the world’s largest fleet. And this is important because one of the biggest roles of a modern navy is to project military firepower over great distances.
China is investing heavily in this capability, feverishly building new ships and developing new technology.
It has massive stockpiles of cruise missiles, most of which have larger payloads and longer range than comparable US weaponry.
This week’s hypersonic missile launch is merely the latest proof; it’s technology that the US cannot counteract either, given that hypersonic missiles are more likely to be able to evade missile defense systems.
The Chinese wasted no time gloating their achievement, calling the launch “a new blow to the US’s mentality of strategic superiority. . .”
You’d think this would be a massive wake-up call to the US federal government.
The balance of power is shifting right in front of their very eyes.
Yet take a look at their priorities– spending trillions of dollars on ‘equity’ and ‘social justice’, which they claim will supposedly “cost nothing”.
They’re busy directing federal resources to target parents who are angry over the way their children are being educated.
They’re pushing people out of government service, whether through mandates, or through ideological purges to weed out those with conservative beliefs.
As the Center for Military Readiness reports, US Special Operations Command “intends to elevate diversity, inclusion, and equity above mission effectiveness and overall readiness.”
In fact a leaked Special Operations Command planning document states at least 12 times over twenty pages that “diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives” even though they provide no support to back up this assertion.
If that doesn’t freak you out, check out how certain medical schools are turning into orwellian nightmares where professors and other teachers are literally afraid to say “pregnant woman”.
The Defense Department is exploring racial quotas in its promotion criteria. They’re planning to reduce physical fitness standards.
And military recruiting advertisements (along with those of the Central Intelligence Agency) are now focused on LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ diversity goals.
This behavior is so counterproductive that even the ancient Athenian assembly would stand in awe at its destructive stupidity.
American military recruitment advertisements compared to Russia and China
The stark contrast between the U.S. military’s woke recruitment ads and Russia and China’s impressive and menacing recruitment videos have people on social media taking notice. Russia’s video from 2017 shows a man compelled by a sense of national pride to serve in the military, where he is then seen subjected to rigorous and intensive training. In China, the advertisements focus on family, community, country and the need to defend and participate in it for the maintenance of social order, while in America the military recruits in support of gay and LGBT rights and Climate Change.
China has urged its citizens to keep physical goods and not paper money.
There will be a huge round of inflation as the US, Japan, UK, Sweden, etc, are printing more and more money.
So the Chinese are planning not to accept USD but only their RMB for payments,
RECEIVED THIS CHINESE ARTICLE FROM CONTACTS IN GUANGZHOU...
This is an article circulating within China. It advises people to focus on buying Chinese items, and durable goods, and refrain from buying or trading in the West with anything other than other durable goods, or the RMB.
朋友,请你看清时势:
Friends, please observe the current situation clearly:
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中国大陆开始施行自我保护措施了!
MAINLAND CHINA HAS BEGUN TO IMPLEMENT SELF-PROTECTION MEASURES!
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一是保护国民安全,大幅度减少入境人员。
#1. It is to protect the safety of the people and drastically reduce the number of people entering China.
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二是保护国民资产,减缓实物出口。
#2. Secondly is to protect national assets and slow down physical exports.
When the U.S. ( COVID-19 ) epidemic broke out and there was no effective preventive measures and control for a long time… the country’s populations were isolated, production stagnated, and stocks of supplies quickly dwindled, and the Federal Reserve desperately cut interest rates ( to stimulate the economy ) including PRINTING BANK NOTES for the so-called “economic stimulus”.
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When a nation’s durables and their supporting industries industry becomes scarce, the banknotes of that nation will become cheap and useless, and as disposable as toilet paper. They are similar to plastic coins.
The coronavirus, and more precisely the handling of it, has been a disaster in the Western nations. As such. their solution to the economic impact of the botched handling of the pandemic caused an acceleration in the worthlessness of the currency.-MM
The the US dollar as the international currency is very dangerous. Using it is equivalent to plundering the materials, the labor, and the services of goods-producing nations.
Use of the USD is no longer sustainable or advised. -MM
Due to this COVID-19 epidemic… food, clothing, housing, transportation, shopping, and travel could not be realized in the foreign exchange by the producing . country, and the value of the currency holders has continuously depreciated.
Due to coronavirus, all normal international actions has been impacted. Those holding currency in the nations that have not been able to successfully manage the pandemic, has seen their currency depreciate. -MM
The Euro, the US dollar, the British pound, and the Swiss franc are all such currencies and will gradually become useless paper. Therefore, China understands that in any country where the epidemic is not under control, the Chinese will no longer exchange physical objects for foreign currency like these worthless plastic coins.
In trading with the West, it is important to note that all the currency that they use will soon become absolutely worthless. You can measure the future of the value of the currency by the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus. -MM
高筑墙,广积粮,p自我内部循环,保证财富不流失,等待《以物易物》或人民币国际化。
Build high walls ( TO ISOLATE ), accumulate grains, internal trade and consumption and ensure that ‘wealth’ is not lost. Instead wait for the financial exchange method of “BARTERING FOR GOODS” or alternatively, the “INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CHINESE RMB”.
Now, the Chinese people are put on warning. They must start to make arrangements to barter, or use the RMB in transactions. It is highly possible that wealth will start to be lost was inflation eats away at the value of the USD. -MM
我们有此行动,估计越南、印度、马来西亚、印尼… 等生产国也会采取类似关门措施。
We have taken this action, and it is estimated that Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Indonesia… and other producing countries will also adopt similar “CLOSE DOOR” MEASURES.
China is making this announcement along with Russia. It is expected that the rest of SE Asia will follow. -MM
大家都明白,谁拿实物换冥币,谁就是傻瓜。
Everyone understands that whoever exchanges real physical things for THIS PLASTIC COIN is a fool.
Exchanging physical, substantive items in exchange for paper, plastic, or other non-durable items; items that are subject to the whims of politics, and their irrational actions, is a fool. -MM
美国这个月内,增发1.9万亿亿美元,欧盟,日元也是大量印钞票。
Just within this month, the United States has issued an additional 1.9 trillion US dollars, and the European Union and the Japanese also printed a large amount of money.
The whole world is relying on PRINTING MONEY to survive the crisis. It is very important to watch how the RMB renminbi will fare. If you follow the money printing trend, inflation will be the end result; and if you don’t follow the trend, it means that the renminbi will be offsetting currency inflation ( when you trade and accept their Currency ) and thereby you sustain LOSSES.
If you trade with foreign nations and accept the USD in exchange for the products you make, you are taking a huge risk. China urges all nations to accept other means of payment; stable means, where possible. -MM
Therefore, we are maintaining in an extremely stiff (difficult) situation and we will not cut our interest rates.
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In the near future all trade will be settled bilaterally in Chinese currency the RMB. If you want to buy our goods, we will no longer accept USD. Instead you will need to pay us in RMB, or barter for them with other durable items.
China is laying down the line. No. Not only will China not buy up any American or Western debt, but that it will now start to insist in hard durable payment schemes for all items made in China. If you want iPhones, for example, then you should use RMB, or barter with an equivalent amount of beef, wine, or wheat. -MM
我们终于醒过来了,不再盲目大量出口,也看清许多国家”大量印钞票”只是在搜刮世界物质财富。
We have finally waken up…. we are no longer blindly exporting large quantities of products. We have also notices that many countries that are “printing a large amount of money” are simply just plundering the world’s material wealth in exchange for vapor.
The Big Giant has finally woken up. -MM
只要认清方向,永远不晚,我们不能再做赔本生意了,中国人照顾好自己的人民才最重要。
As long as we understand the direction… it is never too late. We refuse to do business at a loss. The most important thing is for the Chinese GOVERNMENT to take good care and look after the welfare of its people.
The United States spent only ten cents to print a hundred-dollar bill (without any precious metal collateral) and asked to buy one hundred dollars value of your goods. Isn’t this cheating / bullshit? This is a blatant fraud. It is a shameless plunder.
That's putting it mildly. When you couple the realization that all this fake money is then being used to attack, and demonize China; the source from whence the value is derived. -MM
The United States Painted a BEAUTIFUL Scenery and ASKS CHINA TO HELP THEM TIDE OVER THE CRISIS with a promise to stop the trade war, PRETENDING TO COMPROMISE, and using THEIR USELESS DOLLARS to buy Chinese-produced materials.
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We will not be fooled AGAIN.
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让美国人去自己玩吧,我们不奉陪了。【 請转发】
Let the Americans and play by themselves, we will no longer be participating.
A final warning
As if that isn’t enough to convince you, keep in mind that the US military is pretty much a “paper tiger“. Latest eg. :A phone call threat plus a shooter is enough to shut down an entire United States military complex.
You do not want to fuck with Asia. You have no fucking idea what your world will end up looking like. VIDEO.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This article is based on a comment that was on one of my forums. In it, the person suggested that what he has read about China, from MM, reminds him of the society as depicted within the science fiction story “Starship Troopers” by Robert Heinlein. I have to admit that this is a profound observation. And I agree with him. Here, we will dissect this observation and add some of my personal comments to it.
Service grants citizenship.
The book
The book is well worth the read. I have it available in glorious and easy to read HTML here…
Starship Troopers is perhaps the best-known novel of science fiction master Robert A. Heinlein. Unlike many science fiction novels, the longevity of Starship Troopers’ reputation has at least as much to do with controversies over its themes as the quality of the writing and storytelling.
I am afraid there is no getting around using the f-word here—there is significant debate as to whether Starship Troopers, which glorifies martial virtues and a highly authoritarian political constitution, is fascist.
This debate is muddied by the 1997 movie based on the book, which the filmmakers intentionally used as an artistic opportunity to engage in a reductio ad absurdum of militaristic culture.
Starship Troopers
Putting the movie aside, I want to explore the political economy of the novel itself.
My claim is simple: Starship Troopers is not fascist. Instead, it is an exploration of certain sociopolitical truths that, if ignored, doom a civilization to self-parody by the hemorrhaging of civic virtue.
The novel, told from the perspective of infantryman Juan “Johnnie” Rico, primarily depicts the transformation of a civilian into a soldier. But it is also a commentary on the qualities of a political structure that result in a durable social order.
The novel is set centuries into the future, where earth is part of a polity called the Terran Federation, a spacefaring civilization that extends humanity throughout the galaxy.
In this civilization, all high school students are required to take a course titled “History and Moral Philosophy,” which must be taught by a veteran of the armed services. Johnnie’s teacher, retired Lt. Col. Dubois, recounts to his students how the “twentieth century democracies” gradually experienced a breakdown in domestic law and order.
Starship Troopers
This occurred as these polities continued to grant more and more rights to their citizens, but did not impose accompanying responsibilities.
One result was a spike in crime, such that public spaces were no longer safe at nighttime and many were not safe during the day.
Later in the novel, we learn that international military disaster accompanied domestic political disorder.
A vaguely described war—between the “Chinese Hegemony” and an alliance of the United States, Britain, and Russia on the other—so exhausts the Western polities that they lose the ability to even maintain order within the armed services.
With the breakdown in social order, veterans of this war eventually take the law into their own hands. They form gangs to police their towns and cities, imposing martial law without any civilian oversight—of which it is unclear there could be any, given the previously mentioned political atrophy.
At first, this is unmistakably nothing more than vigilante justice.
But through sheer force, they are capable of maintaining a rudimentary peace. The order of martial law is a low form of order; no great civilization can flourish with a boot on its neck.
But eventually, not through any formal grant of legitimacy via democratic processes but a gradual acceptance of the new ad hoc regime, regularity returns to the social world.
Starship Troopers
On-the-spot justice gives way to regular procedures for ascertaining guilt and assigning punishment to perceived criminals.
As these practices become institutions, civilization shifts from one sociopolitical equilibrium to another.
With regularity comes justified expectations of future behavior by the new government, and along with it the rule of law, and the return of some semblance of democratic and parliamentary governance.
The chief difference is that society is now quasi-Spartan: only those with a military background can participate in the governance of the polity; key civilian positions are reserved by law for veterans; and those who do not perform at least two years of federal service cannot exercise “sovereign franchise.” That is, they cannot vote.
At various points in the novel, this narrative is referred to in order to point out two important truths about governance.
Starship Troopers
These truths are explored through the interplay of Johnnie’s character development and his eventual comprehension of his society’s governance structures.
The first of these truths has to do with the nature of sovereignty.
In the real world, we tend to view sovereignty in ethical terms. We answer “Who rules?” by asking, “Who ought to rule?” This is how we continue to affirm democratic legitimacy even though it is obvious that the will of the people has little to do with how modern Western polities are actually governed.
In contrast, the characters in Starship Troopers have no truck with romantic theories of governance that have no basis in reality.
At its root, sovereignty is power, which means force.
The quasi-military government of Starship Troopers exists because the founders of the Terran Federation, back when they were little more than a vigilante mob, were willing to impose themselves on others.
As it became clear that nobody could oppose them, they became the new de facto government, and eventually the new de jure government. The essential truth of sovereignty, in terms of who actually rules, is that sovereignty is inevitable and, in a higher sense, arbitrary.
Why do veterans govern the Terran Federation?
The only possible answer is because they can.
Starship Troopers
To be clear: This is not a claim that social order requires violence. It is the claim, as historically robust a truth as can be found, is that someone, somewhere, will wield the sword.
To the extent that our political constitutions can be founded on “reflection and choice,” our choice is not power versus self-governance.
Instead, it is responsible versus irresponsible power.
Now we see why so many worry about the glorification of fascism in Starship Troopers. Heinlein had the audacity to explore a world where Sparta works, and is durable.
Understandably, this puts our Western (American) Athenian sensibilities on Red Alert.
The novel’s justifications for franchise restrictions, perhaps the ultimate blasphemy in our egalitarian-democratic age, highlight a second sociopolitical truth:
Any society that decouples rights and responsibilities thereby enables irresponsible power.
…
Eventually, Johnnie is recognized as officer-caliber material.
He is sent to the Terran Federal Service’s equivalent of officer candidate school, which if anything is more grueling than basic training, both physically and mentally.
Chapter 12 of the novel illustrates the intimate link between rights, responsibilities, and a well-governed society in the form of a dialogue between a grizzled officer-instructor and a naïve cadet.
Starship Troopers
The instructor asks the cadet for “a reason—not historical nor theoretical but practical,” for limiting the franchise to discharged veterans.
The cadet goes through several incorrect explanations—that veterans are higher-quality beings, “picked men,” or that they are “more disciplined”—before he, along with Johnnie and the reader, are enlightened.
The instructor begins by wryly asserting,
“I handed you a trick question. The practical reason for continuing our system [of limited franchise] is the same as the practical reason for continuing anything: it works satisfactorily.”
This is a repeated emphasis on the fundamentals of sovereignty.
The instructor then goes through the restrictions on voting, or the exercise of political power more generally that have existed throughout history, and in what respect the restrictions of the Terran Federation differ.
The answer:
“Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage….
He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue.
But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”
The instructor takes a realistic, and hence grim, view of political power—again, remember the truth of sovereignty!—when he continues,
“To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives…the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.
Whether it is exerted by ten or by ten billion, political authority is force.”
Next the instructor singles out Johnnie to complete the narrative. He asks what the necessary complement to authority is, and Cadet Rico answers “Responsibility.”
Starship Troopers
This pleases the instructor, who finishes explaining why the political system of the Terran Federation has been both successful and stable:
Authority and responsibility must be equal—else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential.
To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.
The unlimited democracies [of the twentieth century] were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority….
No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.
If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead—and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple (emphasis added).
There you have it: The stark recognition that the right to vote is the right to rule, and that the right to rule without the responsibility of bearing the consequences of one’s decisions is a recipe for infantilism writ large.
One may dispute whether this specific form of civic virtue is the safest foundation on which a limited franchise rests.
But the key point, that there is such a thing as better and worse voters, and that empowering the latter is a sure path to gradual erosion of social cooperation, is sound.
It’s also one we desperately need to hear today.
And now, the inevitable caveats. There is some truth to the claim that, on its own, Starship Troopers is a dangerous form of social commentary.
Martial glorification is an inherently slippery slope, as any historian of Wilhelmine Germany can attest.
Starship Troopers
Furthermore, the kind of mind sympathetic to highly hierarchical governance is at risk of mistakenly thinking a whole society can be run like a barracks.
These impulses must be tempered by exposure to insightful commentary on what happens when power is, despite everybody’s best intentions, exercised irresponsibly, an unfortunately all-too-common occurrence. But all of these caveats do not diminish the wisdom that Starship Troopers conveys, all the more remarkable for being a work of fiction.
If we are unwilling to find a way to structure our political institutions such that rights are firmly coupled with responsibility, we will continue to see a ballooning of the former and an erosion of the latter.
The result will not be pretty, and we will deserve it.
Starship Troopers
But is China really like this?
As someone who has lived 40 years in America from birth, and then an additional 20+ years inside of China, I am positively affirm that Chinese society is very, very similar to the society that was depicted in the book.
Similar.
No, it’s not the evil “Communist regime” that the onslaught of anti-China Western propaganda spews daily in your “news” feeds.
It’s something else entirely.
But China is not Sparta. Nor is it like the Western “democracies”. It is a new social system that has never been seen before on the world. And the closest illustration of what it is, by far, is through the book “Starship Troopers”.
Starship Troopers
The tenants of the society depicted within the book
Let’s break down some of the core points in the book and how they manifest within China.
And I am going to tell you all, right off the bat, that this is information that you will not find in the American or “Western” press or “news”. They (the media) all are well-funded propaganda mills that actually believe their echo-chamber nonsense.
We will look at these tenants listed in the movie;
Only those with a military background can participate in governance.
At all levels discipline is required for success.
Sovereignty is power, which means rule by force.
Responsible versus irresponsible power.
Rights and responsibilities are intertwined.
Only those with a military background can participate in the governance of the society.
Well, let’s begin with the understanding that not all things military resembles marching armies.
In America we have the Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, The Civilian Conservation Corps, and The Peace Corps. What all these organizations possess is that the participants are volunteers that risk their lives, devote their time and careers, towards the betterment of society.
Coast Guard = Working to protect society.
Civilian Conservation Corps = Working to protect societies environment.
Peace Corps = Working to support other societies for the good of all.
Starship Troopers
So if we use this model and expand “the military” to include “organizations that support the growth and maintenance of society” you can say…
Yes. Absolutely!
In China if you want to vote in the “democratic process” you must be a member of the “Party”, and to be a member, you must contribute and participate.
Service grants citizenship.
Those that do not participate; that do not excel in school; that do not help and volunteer, and those that do not join The Pioneers when in elementary, middle and high schools cannot participate in government within China. Period.
Modern China.
In China, not everyone can vote.
It is a meritocracy. The ability to vote requires that you, throughout your life, contribute to the good of society and do what ever is needed at any time of the day or night.
If the government asks you to help rebuild a dam, then you leave you job and do so. If the government asks you to build a hospital over night, then you do so. You don’t complain. You do it.
That is participation. That is a society that only allows contributors to participate in governance.
At all levels discipline is required for success.
Discipline is taught at a young age. And from Kindergarten on up, the students obtain daily discipline training, education on civic society, military behaviors and pure military field rife and combat training.
Here’s some videos that I collected. Some are training films. Some are recruitment films. Some are just studies. Some are personal videos. All in all a good mix. It will give you all a great idea about the Chinese military capability.
Discipline – Elementary Echool Soldiers
Young Pioneers and elementary children going through mandatory military training.
Starship Troopers
Some of the films have children in it going through training. These are the elementary-school Pioneers (the Chinese cub scouts). Everyone in China gets full military training. Those older kids, are in middle school. They are the ones wearing blue slacks with the white line training and shooting AK-74’s.
You will see closeups of the various electronic weapons systems, and the state of the art Chinese SEAL and Special Forces troops as well. You will see some videos about how Japan came into China and killed off so many innocent civilians. And note that now that every civilian can fire a gun, and fight, that is never going to happen ever again.
It starts off with some more middle school assault weapon training.
Next is the elementary school pioneers who undergo physical obstacle course training. Notice that they do it while carrying a full military rifle. Also note that it’s both boys and girls. No one gets a pass. VIDEO.
Boys and Girls no one gets a pass.
The third video is the reservists. China has an active military and the reserves that meet every few weeks. VIDEO.
Reservists practice and drill over and over and over and over.
Training, training, training.
Fourth video is for the young Pioneers. For inspiration and training. Very, very interesting. If you don’t watch any of these videos here, you MUST at least watch this one.
China will NEVER allow a repeat of the “Rape of Nanjing”.
Of course there are all sorts of interesting things in these videos.
Group 3B
Discipline – Learn about Chinese Society
Here we have some first grade students demonstrating their skills in front of the rest of the school in assembly. Note that all students not only learn English, but also get weekly lessons in military warfare, strategy, and operations. VIDEO.
And here are how a Pioneers assembly looks like. These are all first grade students around 6 years old. VIDEO.
Discipline. Merit. Training.
Sovereignty is power, which means rule by force.
Ah. This is the common anti-China narrative. But the reality is that China does not rule by force. Instead, they rule by compliance.
Starship Troopers
In China, everyone is expected to comply with the law. The entire nation is wired up with AI monitored video, audio and systems, and boy oh boy is that driving the American CIA bonkers! China knows who is doing what, where and why. It’s sort of like that Tom Cruse movie where you can follow a person’s movements from when they wake up in the morning throughout the day. That is China today.
It is invasive?
No, not really, with 1.6 billion people there is no way for people to monitored gulag style. Instead, AI monitors and flags dangerous behaviors. A social credit scorecard is used to connect individual behaviors to society hierarchy. If you are a dick, a bad person, a skank, you will be low on the hierarchy. But if you are good, helpful and volunteer, you will go up higher. It’s all merit driven.
One of the core tenants of the book “Starship Trooper” was that only the responsible would be in the position of power to govern. that really riled up the sensibilities of many a free wheeling, casual, “good time Charlie” lover. And responsibility comes with wisdom, experience, effort and merit. You are not just “responsible” at birth. It is a learned behavior.
Starship Troopers
If you are not to be responsible, you become irresponsible. Not just to yourself, but to those around you. You need discipline, behavioral training, and coaching.
While the book refers to this trait on a personal level, the key point is that it applies throughout society. There is a real problem when you live in a family with an irresponsible parent. The entire household becomes dysfunctional.
Its even worse when an irresponsible person takes over the reins of government. And that must be prevented.
[1] At the system level
The system must screen for dangerous people.
Honor guards attend a flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square in 2017.
The system that brings in leadership, and directors must be solid, substantive, rugged and robust. It must be such that all the problematic personalities; the greedy, the psychopathic, the sociopath, the narcissistic and the evil be forever barred from positions of power and control. This system is inherent inside the operation of the Chinese communist party. It is very, very difficult to join, and the requirements to do so are maintained by service-to-others (SEO) committees.
[2] At the operation level
The leadership must constantly be policed.
This is the bane of most societies and only in the last ten years has this changed in China. China has set up the “Corruption Police” and they have made “earth shattering” changes to all levels of government. The days of graft, vice, abuse of power are all gone. (Well, in the process of going away. There are always hold outs.) This “Corruption Police” are an elite group of SEO officers and agents that root out corruption at every level and work to functionally make the Chinese society a well-run meritocracy.
Starship Troopers
Rights and responsibilities are intertwined.
America talks and talks about Rights. There are no Rights in America. Every single (so called immutable Rights) now come with exceptions. And there are so many of these exceptions that they render the Rights useless.
While in China, the Rights of the people are maintained, policed and enforced. No wonder the Chinese have a 95% approval rate for their government.
The Chinese are hyper-patriotic.
But inside the ruined has-been nation of America, the story is quite different. With only a mere 15% of the population trusting the United States government, with a margin of error around 15%. Which means that somewhere between 0% and 30% of the United States citizenry trust the American government.
John White head said it best…
“We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.
In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial. Yet there is no denying the ugly, hard truths that become more evident with every passing day.
The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.
Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
Some years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is virtually no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us
The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance.
If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
America’s shadow government—which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now and operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.
You no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
“We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
We now find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, and “we the people” are losing.
All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
Finally, freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.
We cannot remain silent in the face of the government’s ongoing overreaches, power grabs, and crimes against humanity.
Evil disguised as bureaucracy is still evil. Indeed, this is what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil.”
But this is not the case in China.
In China if you want a Right, you must earn it, and then show responsibility for it. If you do not, then it will be withheld from you. On the day to day, practical level, this manifests as the Social Credit Scoring system.
Starship Troopers
To give a good example of this, consider the laws that require parents to be responsible for the bad things their children do. China’s parliament will consider legislation to punish parents if their young children exhibit “very bad behavior” or commit crimes.
Yeah it is the parents’ responsibility to take care of their children, whether the child is good or bad depends on the parents, educate the child in the path he should follow, and even when he is older he will not depart from it.
it’s called RESPONSIBILITY.
Conclusion
But China is Communist! They scream!
China says it’s a Social Democracy based on traditional Communist Values. While America calls itself an exceptional democratic republic.
He says. She says. Who cares?
China today is something that cannot be easily explained in tight, narrow, traditional political definitions. While America is simple. It is a classic oligarchy ruled military empire.
The BRFLS Second Grade Chinese Young Pioneers Initiation Ceremony
Part of the problem with trying to solve or fix a problem is defining what the problem is. America is broke. It is broken, smashed, and a walking cluster fuck. That’s a fact Jack. If you cannot see it, then you must be mentally ill.
Meanwhile, China is the absolute opposite of it.
There are many, many similarities between the Chinese society and that of the society as depicted within the book “Starship Troopers” by Robert A Heinlein.
On a whole, I believe that China is doing things right.
They should be applauded for it. This system raised over a billion people out of poverty. This system has created a great “level playing field” for the vast bulk of Chinese society to have a moderate successful life, and this system is rocking the world with scientific discoveries, help, and innovation.
China is taking the world by the hand gently and moving it forward. I for one applaud it, and you should too. Do not fear that the billionaires can only become thousandaires, or that “‘ma freedoms to a vote in a democracy” would be restricted. Those are fears intentionally generated to make you fear what the world is becoming.
Do not fear.
Instead…
Look at what America has become. When you are ruled by the psychopathic in society, the society becomes ill, distressed and dysfunctional.
Here is America today…
The cities are inhabited by zombies. They really are. Video.
Well, not all the cities are inhabited by zombies.
You have a bunch of people walking around in “freedom”, “doing their own thing”. Such as this fine upstanding “pillar of the community” here. VIDEO.
There is no alternative. China is the future.
China is the future!
China is the future.
Just like in the movie “Starship Troopers”…
Starship Troopers.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well, the warning signs are everywhere. America is the worst, but throughout the West the facade and the walls are collapsing everywhere.
Uh oh.
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.
Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.
No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
—Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist
It’s actually very sad.
And everyone is aware of all this. It’s not like it is a secret or anything. The United States government has been out of control from some time now, and today everyone has passed the “take the money and run” phase of societal collapse.
Today it’s the verge of conflagration.You can taste it in the air. You hear whispering, murmurings. You feel things aren’t exactly right. It’ the building up right before the holy Hell storm knocks cars, buildings and trees flat.
It’s the point in time where the monkeys are starting to jump up and down, the birds are flying off somewhere, and the dogs and cats can’t be found.
As for all the economic benefits, they're just a lot of well-known narratives using the USD as a measurement of success, wealth, or power.
Why should we even be comparing economies using a measurement that one nation can print while all others have to earn?
It makes no sense.
You are Here…
Indeed it doesn’t. Which puts us (and the world) the big massive mess that it is in today. Let’s look where the USA military empire is right now…
You are here.
However, no one knows how long it is from “here” to the actually accepted “death” of the United States oligarchy-run military empire. We can only wait and hope that it will be transformative, quick and as painless (for us) as possible.
Pissed Lizard speaks…
To Americans. This week is going to be the first of the birthpangs.
In the EXACT SAME WAY MM was able to anchor sentiences, using LITERALLY the exact same mechanism (its the movement of gravity thru a tube of E/M during the PARTICLE phase - and he really really does a better job than I explaining it - BUT:
Think of that on a micro scale with “major events” on the world template. This is called vertical time travel.
Right now there are many MANY (I can’t go into numbers but if you live in America you are feeling it) but these Chrononauts are INTENTIONALLY RUNNING THE ECONOMY I TO THE GROUND. It’s on purpose.
The cleanup will NOT be worse than the crash.
This is a race between nuclear annihilation or economic - but either way we all know we are going down.
Just hang on. You will feel pain next week and into November. IT WILL BE OVER BY NEW YEARS.
Them the rest of the world deals with their economic problems - if they have them. Or WILL have them. Who knows.
Mid-November you will NOT get a flight out of the States to China. Period. This percentage is well into the “done deal” numbers.
We are DOING IT ON PURPOSE. We are feeeding on the dreams of our enemies and they are having nightmares.
BUT WE ARE FEEDING STARTING TONIGHT.
Please - Americans - take it easy on eachother.
What will be balanced will be balanced.
What will be will BE.
So Mote it BE.
All of this I know to be true.
EMMAA///EMMIT
The following is a good article that sums all this up nicely. At least as far as the domestic side of the United States today…
Tyrants of the Nanny State: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good,,,
…by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.
We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed.
We find ourselves suffering the backlash for their militarism, and agonizing as a result of their inaction.
We tire of them feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, and turning a blind eye to their misdeeds.
And we tire of cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.
The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us:
COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity;
censorship,
criminalizing,
shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular;
warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications;
SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes;
shootings of unarmed citizens by police;
harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance;
armed drones taking to the skies domestically;
endless wars;
out-of-control spending;
militarized police;
roadside strip searches;
roving TSA sweeps;
privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans;
fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions;
and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies…
…those heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates…
…inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on us.
For we are an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace…
One that that illustrates so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense…
… moral judgment…
… fairness…
… and intelligence…
… not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.
What is America today?
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves)…
A kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or…
This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.
Nanny State despotism
This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best.
And therefore MUST control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.
The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits…
…that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can…
grow exotic orchids,
host elaborate dinner parties,
gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies,
give coffee to the homeless,
let their kids manage a lemonade stand,
keep chickens as pets,
or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.
And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.
Oh, and by the way, a war of distraction is not going to happen.
The funding for all of this hate-China is straight from Taiwan billionaires, and my gut feeling is that if China needs to “take them out”, they will do so. Through black operations, or a dirty nuke, these people are going to be silenced one way or the other. Remember, boys and girls, China does not play. Video.
Please note that there are a bunch of videos in this article. Your best best bet is to click on the “VIDEO here” and open up the video in a new window. Otherwise it might take a while for the videos to load if you click on the movie arrow below.
It’s getting worse.
Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control.
This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.
Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.
That same overcriminalization mindset reared its ugly head again when police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.
Florida
It’s no coincidence that both of these incidents—the fishing debacle and the homeless feeding arrest—happened in Florida.
Despite its pristine beaches and balmy temperatures, Florida is no less immune to the problems plaguing the rest of the nation in terms of overcriminalization, incarceration rates, bureaucracy, corruption, and police misconduct.
A few years back, in fact, Florida officials authorized police raids on barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants.
As if criminalizing fishing, charity, and haircuts wasn’t bad enough, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit…
In this way, the Sunshine State is representative of the transformation happening across the nation, where a steady diet of bread and circuses has given rise to an oblivious, inactive citizenry content to be ruled over by an inflexible and highly bureaucratic regime.
America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation.
And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.
The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.
We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all—the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”
In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door…
…to
lockdowns,
militarized police,
government surveillance,
asset forfeiture,
school zero tolerance policies,
license plate readers,
red light cameras,
SWAT team raids,
health care mandates,
overcriminalization,
overregulation
and government corruption.
In the end, such bargains always turn sour.
We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.
Oh, Here’s American “Leadership”
Watch one of the major American Senate leaders discuss matters with her “constituents”. VIDEOhere.
So Huawei has 5G, and the USA doesn’t… because Huawei “reverse engineered” it from American companies. Huh?
America is fucked “360 ways from November”…
We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day.
We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.
A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:
One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison.
Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.
In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture.
Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars.
Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.
We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments.
Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.
Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.
Yet when all is said and done, who is really to blame when the wool gets pulled over your eyes: you, for believing the con man, or the con man for being true to his nature?
It’s time for a bracing dose of reality, America.
Wake up and take a good, hard look around you, and ask yourself if the gussied-up version of America being sold to you—crime free, worry free, disease free and devoid of responsibility—is really worth the ticket price: nothing less than your freedoms.
And on the Geo-Political front…
…we have this;
...As for your suggestions of how China should behave with Taiwan, China didn't listen to such reasonable advice in 1950 and suffered thirty years of economic embargo, what is the chance of them listening to yours today?
China has already learned the lesson of trusting in the goodwill of dissemblers in 1992, why should they repeat some more of the same?
Should we expect the Chinese Communists to be stupid?
As for all the economic benefits, they're just a lot of capitalist narrative using the USD lie as measurement. Why should we even be comparing economies using a measurement that one nation can print while all others have to earn?
The real danger for the empire is that this big lie is about to collapse.
Most people forget that the power of the empire's lie comes from the support of its victims. You and I support it when we use it.
China is in fact a strong supporter of it. They still measure their GDP using the USD, giving the lie legitimacy. This is the next narrative that must be changed.
As for your changing social forces in Taiwan and elsewhere, a lot of it is manufactured consent.
How many Taiwanese do you know? Do you know that a million Taiwanese live in China as long term residents?
Do you know most Taiwanese originally came from mainland China and have hometowns and relatives in China?
The manufactured social forces, similar to the social forces that were in Hong Kong, come from a lot of brainless people with a headful of poison for all things China.
Guess who created them? The same insidious "deep state" that has been conducting the global anti-China propaganda war, the benign source of your changing social forces.
This true "deep state" wants us to believe that all of the empire's atrocities suffered by its victims come from some nebulous, intangible, and invisible Deep State, so that people become confused and do not know their real enemy.
How do you fight your enemy if you do not know what it is and where it is? These people have unlimited budgets drawn from the victims. They use their power to spy, threaten, disrupt, starve, torture, and kill their victims with impunity.
Most importantly, they corrupt a society dependent on truth to create a giant cesspool of lies where their victims become maggots, who know nothing but shit from the moment of their birth until they take their last breath.
For these maggots, shit is mother's milk and it tastes good.
China is threatening this cesspool by waking the maggots to their shitty world while showing them the possibility of a life prancing among flowers while drinking sweet nectar.
The reunification of Taiwan will accelerate this awakening. Geopolitical advantages aside, which will make the encircled China the encircler, China will also own and control a majority of the supply chain for all things electronic.
The capitalist lies of the USD will be exposed.
Why would China receive useless paper in return for their valuable and irreplaceable goods that the rest of the world can't make? In fact, why would anyone else who has a choice?
The propaganda that comes out of the lying machine will simply be shit that no one wants to go near.
The blowback will be complete and the lying empire will drown in its own cesspool of lies.
The true benefit of the reunification with Taiwan is the acceleration of the empire's downfall.
There is no amount of USD that can measure this benefit not only for China but for the rest of the world.
In the end, China will remain America's friend, don't worry, when the mesmerized people of America rise up and give the empire's evil enablers their comeuppance.
-[redacted]
And the point is…
…Americans will NEVER rise up. It will never happen. Why?
But,Lets be real…
America is a police state, domestically. A military empire internationally, and is failing in every measure of success.
It won’t be long now until the final moments of the last vestiges of the lies be torn from the facade.
In case you all haven’t been paying attention, the United States is a real mess. It’s a nation of serfs that service the ultra-billionaire class. And everything in America is for profit, with only one goal and that is to make the rich richer. This horrible leeching of society has reached a point of danger. And you all must face the fact that the only way that it is going to change is by kinetic action.
Yahoo! News Informs the Stupid Peasants Why the US Needs to Go to War to Protect Taiwan
The actual appropriate headline for this article would be
“A Baby’s First Guide to Why the US Must Initiate a World War in Order to Prevent Chinese Reunification.”
The article gives a quick, slanted and false outline of the situation which does not attempt to either:
Explain the Chinese position on Taiwan, or
Explain why Taiwan is important to “American interests.”
It then gives a series of quotes from supposed experts on what Joe Biden should do.
A firm commitment to defend Taiwan is the best way to prevent an invasion
“The United States needs to remove the ambiguity about whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense. Uncertainty about U.S. intentions raises the risk of war. … President Biden should declare that, though we will not support a Taiwanese declaration of independence from China, we will defend the island if it is attacked.” — Max Boot, Washington Post
The U.S. must accept it has nothing to gain from defending Taiwan
“Bluntly put, America should refuse to be drawn into a no-win war with Beijing. It needs to be said up front: there would be no palatable choice for Washington if China finally makes good on its decades-long threat to take Taiwan by force.” — Daniel L. Davis, defense priorities senior fellow, Guardian
The U.S. should maintain its noncommittal position as long as it can
“As a superpower, the United States should preserve flexibility in its global security relationships. It also is not even obvious that Taiwan’s body politic would welcome an explicit security guarantee from the United States.” — Therese Shaheen, National Review
Taiwan is too important to U.S. interests to let it be taken by the Chinese
“Abandoning Taiwan in the face of a Chinese military assault would be a monumental disaster. … The U.S. cannot afford to see a country that occupies vital strategic space in the Western Pacific subdued by Beijing.” — Hal Brands, Bloomberg
War with China would pose an existential threat to the U.S.
“Stumbling into a shooting war over Taiwan is akin to opening a Pandora’s box, and it would make the last 20 years of conflict in the Middle East look like an uneventful peacekeeping mission. A fight between Washington and Beijing could also escalate to the nuclear level, particularly if the Chinese Communist Party determines that the use of such weapons is the only thing standing in the way of a humiliating defeat.” — Daniel R. DePetris, NBC News
America has a duty to protect the free world from authoritarianism
“The United States and its allies have built and defended a rules-based system over the past 75 years that has produced unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom globally. I don’t want to trade that in for a world in which Americans stand by as revisionist autocracies like China gobble up neighbors by military force.” — Matthew Kroenig, Foreign Policy
The U.S. also has diplomatic tools to deter China from invading
“To further demonstrate U.S. resolve, Biden should tell Beijing that any more threats of force against Taiwan’s participation in the democracy summit will trigger immediate diplomatic recognition of Taiwan and an official statement of Washington’s new ‘One China, One Taiwan’ policy. Beijing must understand that war would mean instant Taiwan independence.” — Joseph Bosco, The Hill
The best way to defend Taiwan is through investment, not military threats
“Hyping the threat that China poses to Taiwan does Beijing’s work for it. Taiwan’s people need reasons for confidence in their own future, not just reminders of their vulnerabilities. If American policy makers want to help Taiwan, they will need to go beyond focusing on the military threat. They need to modernize the U.S.-Taiwan economic relationship, help Taiwan diversify its trade ties and provide platforms for Taiwan to earn dignity and respect on the world stage.” — Richard Bush, Bonnie Glaser and Ryan Hass, NPR
Some of those are funnier than others. The idea that a country that is force-vaccinating its population is less authoritarian than a country that is not doing that is actually so ridiculous that it borders on the deranged or outright insane.
But this is actually more anti-war material than you usually see anywhere on a mainstream website, so I guess good job with that, Yahoo!
But while they do include people saying “we really should probably think about whether or not we want to start a nuclear war,” what is lacking is a sober perspective.
Why is Taiwan even an issue?
Why are we even talking about this at all?
Not one single person in this entire media landscape will either:
Outline, in real terms, how occupying Taiwan is in “the interests of America,” or
Point out that no one will give that outline
You end up in a situation where no one even has any idea what we’re actually talking about.
How is it possible that we’ve reached the point where we’re considering a nuclear war over vague “strategic interests” that no one is able to explain in concrete terms?
Furthermore – and I hate to be the one to have to point this out – but things are tough all over.
America and the rest of the West have a lot, lot, lot of problems. We have very real economic, political and social problems that no one is offering any solutions to. So the idea that we’re talking about going to war to protect some fake country on the other side of the globe is simply inexplicable.
If I was allowed to offer a 200-word sound bite for that Yahoo! News article, it would be this:
Taiwan is a part of China, and the reasons the US occupied it originally are no longer relevant. Instead of continuing to support the fantasy of a democratic China under the guise of the myth of Taiwanese nationhood, the United States should open talks about reunification. China will be open to giving wide-ranging concessions in exchange for the opportunity at peaceful reunification, and this will allow the West to clear up various unrelated conflicts with China, including on matters of international trade.
— Andrew Anglin, Hoax Watch
I am happy that some in the media are finally saying that what we are talking about here is a nuclear war. That’s a long way from where we were a couple years ago, when the State Department first started its saber-rattling under Donald Trump. The humiliation in Afghanistan seems to have sobered a few people up.
But the fact that this discussion still remains so very far outside of the real, in the realm of the viciously and confusingly abstract, speaks to the moronic nature of the American mind. These people are literally asking you to believe that every single person in the entire Western world supports the idea of an “independent and democratic Taiwan” being “strategically important to the United States and its allies” even while not one person among this unified chorus is capable of explaining what either of those concepts means.
The basic fact, which anyone who knows the history knows but which no one in the American media is willing to say (and it wouldn’t be printed if they were willing), is that Taiwan was set up as an alternative government to the CCP government of China. The American goal was to foster a “democracy” government in Taiwan, which would eventually rule all of China. To this day, the government of Taiwan officially claims that it is the legitimate government of the entirety of China. This is not a secret, and yet somehow, it remains totally unsaid, and instead we are told that “Taiwan” is some kind of independent country that “China” is trying to invade and conquer.
The fact that Taiwan is not a country, but a piece of China occupied by the United States, does not necessarily mean that we should just give it back to China. But any serious discussion about whether we should or should not give it back to China should start from the point of accurately defining what Taiwan is. Obviously, if it is accurately defined, that would lead a lot of people to grasp the Chinese perspective on the issue, and make China look much less villainous, which is why there is some kind of soft ban on properly defining Taiwan in the media.
I think it would be morally good to simply give Taiwan back to China. But geopolitics are not based around moral goodness, so it makes sense that because America currently maintains control of Taiwan, America would instead negotiate concessions from China as part of the reunification process. But because we live in this fantasy world, we can’t have that discussion, and instead it’s simply “should we go to war to protect Taiwanese independence?” – a stupid and nonsensical question.
America is not a serious country, and its fixation with censorship has ensured that there can never be any form of seriousness injected into any discussion. Instead of talking about actual reality, the media and the political class argue about fantasies with only abstract connection to physical realities.
Look at what Chinese elementary school kids learn…
Here’ we have the red-necktie “Pioneers”, all volunteers, all elementary students (This seems to be fifth grade or so) watching a training film.. VIDEO.
And here we have some first grade students demonstrating their skills in front of the rest of the school in assembly. Note that all students not only learn English, but also get weekly lessons in military warfare, strategy, and operations. VIDEO.
And here are how a Pioneers assembly looks like. These are all first grade students around 6 years old. VIDEO.
In the title, I am spelling it out as clearly as I can. The rest of the world is moving on and forward. While America has turned into a nasty, nasty cesspool.
Here is America today…
The cities are inhabited by zombies. They really are. Video.
Well, not all the cities are inhabited by zombies. You have a bunch of people walking around in “freedom”, “doing their own thing”. Such as this fine upstanding “pillar of the community” here. VIDEO.
Woman raped on train as bystanders did nothing, police say
UPPER DARBY, Pa. (AP) — A woman was raped by a stranger on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in the presence of other riders who a police official said “should have done something.”
Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt of the Upper Darby Police Department said officers were called to the 69th Street terminal around 10 p.m. Wednesday after the assault on the westbound train on the Market-Frankford Line.
An employee of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority who was in the vicinity as the train went past called police to report that “something wasn’t right” with a woman aboard the train, Bernhardt said.
SEPTA police waiting at the next stop found the woman and arrested a man. The woman was taken to a hospital.
Bernhardt called the victim an “unbelievably strong woman” who provided police with a lot of information. She did not know her attacker, he said.
“She’s on the mend,” Bernhardt said. “Hopefully she will get through this.”
The entire episode was captured on surveillance video that showed other people on the train at the time, Bernhardt said.
“There was a lot of people, in my opinion, that should have intervened; somebody should have done something,” Bernhardt said. “It speaks to where we are in society; I mean, who would allow something like that to take place? So it’s troubling.”
Fiston Ngoy, 35, has been charged with rape, aggravated indecent assault and related counts, according to Delaware County court records. Bernhardt said he is known to both SEPTA and Upper Darby police.
Court documents don’t list a defense attorney, and a listed number for him couldn’t be found Saturday.
SEPTA issued a statement calling it a “horrendous criminal act” and urging anyone witnessing such a thing to report it to authorities.
“There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911,” the authority said.
…
It’s called a serious breakdown in society.
MM contributor BoChen speaks…
Quote from pissedlizard on October 12, 2021, 2:44 am
Please listen to this warning. Believe what you will, but it IS a warning - and a message of hope.
Mathematically the odds of you being able to get out of the USA are dwindling by the day. If you are visiting or whatever. Look at the flights. The Neocons in DC are rapidly playing chicken with each other and I am afraid YOU all may get caught up in it.
I am just saying that at any day China and the USA can become enemies, right? MM has written dozens of TRUE articles. So let’s agree to THAT point.
Asians - in America - look at the SEVERE spike in black on Asian crime. This shit is BY DESIGN. Hillary, et.al.
That coupled with a DC - who nobody REALLY knows who is running the show - we THINK Obama - ok. But China/US Relations CAN deteriorate quickly.
And flights - ALLLLLLLL over America - are cancelling flights - slowly at first... BY DESIGN.
What happens when relations pop - and they will - and there are no flights to be had - OUT of America.
Think Afghanistan a few weeks ago.
I warn you as a friend. And I will warn you further. For when it happens - I WILL NOT have this blood on my hands.
And as a friend I offer you this. Earlier I made a blood pact with MY Gods and Goddesses that you will ALWAYS have safe haven while this human body is alive. Always. Period. Any Asian in America that can’t get out and is targeted has safe haven while this human heart beats.
Your enemies will be mine when things go sideways.
You know what insect to look for.
All of this I know to be TRUE.
EMMAA///EMMT
I am an Asian (Chinese) living in America (Dallas, Texas area) and I’ve pretty much resigned to the fact that I’m almost certain to get gas-chambered by the US government in concentration death camps by this time next year… Most (vast majority) of Asians, including so-called “Chinese Americans” are still largely clueless how bad it can get and how fast it can get that bad…
Late 2019 is when total global energy consumption peaked globally, so after we crossed that point of inflection, its now overarchingly not only a “zero-sum game” in terms of the bigly picture, but rather more aptly it has been since CIA released the biovirus upon the world very much a “negative-sum game” where everyone’s pieces of the pie get ever smaller…. and the only way to get ahead or even run in place is to cannibalization….
As the USD is still global reverse currency, US printing to QE infinity means the rest the world is getting harvested and everyone else is getting squeezed that much more all so that Americans can stay at home collecting stimmy or working fake jobs making bank whilsts the rest of the world tightens their effective consumption…
China said NO.
No to Plaza Accord 2.0, No to US appeasement, and No to continuing to prop up the useless eater middle man that is Uncle Sam… Amerikkkan’s are like 5% of the global population but consume like 25% of all the resources…. and China had been a great enabler of this… keeping US inflation at bay for largely the last two or three decades…
No more…
What did yall think the BRI was all about? It is to create the trade routes with the developing countries so that China can one day soon directly trade with them in digital Yuan for raw resources that China needs to power its own domestic consumption instead of making small margins on the side by slaving away for Uncle Sam. This is what “Dual Circulation” is all about, to cut out the middle man… the useless eater turned hostile geopolitical adversary that carpet bombed Wuhan with the CIA biovirus in its opening salvos of a covert and hybrid WWIII…
China’s return blow is to completely fuck up the entire US ‘supply chain’ and e-CONomy for good… No toys for Christmas will be the least of the American people’s concerns….
Meanswhiles, the iSheeple suckers are still saving money to “invest” in their 401k and stonks… and some dumb enough are still depriving themselves (even going in debt) so that they can buy and/or mine more CIAcoins as their supposed long term planning for “generational wealth” lolz
For every iphone that sells for $1000, something like only $12 returns to China as net profit… This is the real reason US strongarm its vassals to ban Huawei… and soon also Xaomi… this is the true purpose of America getting its allies to gang up on China to subvert Chinese technology development and China’s rise…
Speaking of the semiconductor chip shortage, Moores law is dead and so is Dennard scaling… This gives China the time to play catch up whilsts leapfrogging the West in new domains like quantum computing… By the time Taiwan TSMC finishes building those 5nm fabs in Arizona in 2025 the world will again be a vastly different place. China’s MIC2025 goal was to catch up and be completely self sufficient in high end semiconductor supply chain (including EUV and other tooling) by 2025… China spends more money importing chips than it does oil… and the US plan to extent the petrodollar is to do a digital OPEC with semiconductors as the new oil… and tech sanctions as the new chokepoints…
Whether its chips or jet engines or whatever other high tech , China’s goal is to become fully self sufficient so it can make whatever its own citizens need for internal consumption and only trade when necessary with developing countries for the raw resources it doesn’t have…
As China gets rid of the USA middle man, the efficiencies it gains from cutting out the fat overhead will allow it to continue to buy time to develop and scale out new energy solutions… I understand many believe its a lost cause… But one thing is for damn certain, China can no longer afford to keep making and shipping real goods to the US in exchange for cheap paper and fake digital money….
Wonder why Biden is opening the flood gates to massive immigration? Or how its even possible to simultaneously have a so-called “labor shortage” while in a bad jobs-market reports all at the same time? Its because with China cutting US off (its been planned) the US has no choice than to find another way to replace the EROEI Energy Slaves that its lost, (it had originally pinned its hopes on India and Vietnam but that’s not turning out so well either) not to mention the seemingly contradiction can be explained the same way as how you can explain the paradox of still having oil under the ground but yet have it be pointless to extract an energy source with negative EROEI… basically, a lot of the gig worker jobs in US actually pay net negative wages but in desperation the permanent and exponentially growing underclass of Americans are unwittingly reverse-mortgaging away their own cars to pay themselves by essentially converting the accelerated depreciation of their vehicles assets into the illusion of an temporary income source…. seems like the cannibalization is scale-invariant these days…
Compare China to where you live. Are people helping each other out? Working together? Trying to support each other? Or is it a dog-eat-dog world where only the richest control in comfort? Video.
Be the Rufus.
China has come a long way…
Yes it has, and the rest of the world is blinded by the bullshit. Face the facts. Live up to the ideals. Do your part. Be the best that you can be. Help others, make meaningful changes for the good of all. Videohere.
Sure the world is not homogenized. Yet we all have to realize when groups of people are moving in the “right” or positive direction, and where groups of people are moving in the “wrong” or negative direction. It matters not where they are. What matters is what they are doing and why.
What they are doing and why…
The world is changing. It is historic.
The evil and selfish, self centered psychopathic idiots running the West are being displaced, and the rest of the world will no longer tolerate all their shenanigans. Going into outer space might have been the “final last hurrah” for the self-centered billionaire class.
Billionaires in space….. YES! You co; Mr. Common-man can do this. All you need to do is become another vaulted billionaire. Woo whoo!
Soon, very soon, a new reality will be realized. I have hope and I am so very optimistic. VIDEO.
And on a positive note…
There’s a lot of beauty out there.
A lot of friends to meet. A lot of things to do. A lot of food to eat, and a lot of memories to make. Don’t wrap yourself in the comfortable blanket of fear. Go out and look around. You might be very pleased with the new friends that you will make. VIDEO.
A fine Chinese woman.
She deserves a nice luncheon, some fine “chit chat”, and a lovely walk.
Bonus。
Be the Rufus. The world is changing. If you act like a cat; be the best that you can be, you will endure, survive and thrive. Be that Rufus. Help others. Make the world a better place. Be the Rufus. Video.
(Sorry about the audio quality.)
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
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because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
You all know this. Right? The USA is a shambles. The guy or guys that you thought would be voted in to change things didn’t really do much. The messed up train is still on it’s tracks and it’s still on a collusion course with that very rickety old bridge. You know it. You family knows it. Your co-workers know it. Everyone knows it.
But what about the government?
Are they clueless?
No they are not. They saw the writing on the wall for some time now, and have been ready. Obviously, they could see that elements have been building up for some time, most certainly. And there have been some events that definitely contributed to this situation, but make absolutely no mistake. SHTF is now active and the entire United States is in turmoil.
You are Here…
You are here.
Though there is some minor debate on how close the USA is to the final pivotal moment. Those in Washington DC think (somehow) that it can be avoided or bypassed. While most of the people are like rats on a sinking ship and lashing out everywhere at everyone.
All you have to do is watch some of the American police shooting videos, or the shoplifting videos, or the crime videos. It’s all out in the open. It’s all brazen. It’s all dangerous. And no one is reporting it. Do I need to post the video after video of African-Americans just going into stores and robbing in broad daylight with no fear of being caught, arrested, apprehended or jailed. It’s a complete breakdown of society.
Like this man. He just walks into the pharmacy, picks out the narcotic drugs and walks out with them. Video HERE.
Video
Yup.
We’re in the shit.
From Hal Turner. For what ever it is worth, it is something to ponder and think about. But nothing to get all hot and bothered about. The Federal government has all sorts of plans on how to handle things when one condition or the other manifests. Edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author.
And please don’t freak out.
Sheech!
U.S. Treasury Plan If Economic Collapse: “Force Majeure,” Paratroopers to Fed Res. Banks, “De-Monetize” U.S. Dollar
Did you know the United States of America actually has a PLAN in the event they can no longer service their debt? They do! Adopted it back in the early 2000’s. Meet the “6900 Protocols.”
With all the hoopla taking place nowadays, our national government being completely ILLEGITIMATE via a fraudulent and stolen election, and hyper-inflation creeping just around the corner, it might be worth a minute or two to learn what our “trusted public servants” have planned . . . for us . . . . after THEY have Bankrupted the nation.
Protocols For Economic Collapse In America By Al Martin 2-23-2008
And this is how the U.S. Treasury would handle an economic collapse. It’s called the 6900 series of protocols. It would start with the Secretary of the Treasury declaring a force majeure, preventing the United States of America from servicing its debt.
This, of course, would immediately be interpreted by the marketplaces as a de facto repudiation of U.S. debt.
They even know precisely WHAT TIME they would make such a declaration: 11:38 AM eastern U.S. Time. That’s because by 11:38 AM ET, markets in Asia and Europe will be closed, leaving only US markets operating for a few more hours.
A few seconds after that announcement was made, all United States markets, both equities debt and commodities i.e., stock, bonds, commodities, that have trading limits or permissible daily limits would all be limit-offered with pools. Limit-offered means that there are more sellers at the limit i.e., limit down, than there are buyers.
So-called ‘pools’ would immediately begin to form, probably a thousand contracts every few minutes. ‘Limit-offered with pools’ – this is trader language. Pools to sell 2,000 lots, 3,000 lots. That means, the number of sellers over and above the available buyers at the limit- offered price. That would begin to build.
By 1:00, the news would begin to sink in because it would take awhile before panic selling would arise from the public. This news is being released at lunch hour.
Most of the American people initially would not even understand the horror of the news. You would see professional selling first, and as that professional selling intensified over the afternoon, the SEC, the CFTC, NASDAQ, and various market regulatory authorities would begin to institute certain emergency market protocols. This would be the installation of the so-called ‘declaration of fast market conditions,’ for instance; the declaration of ‘no more stop orders,’ the declaration of ‘fill at any price,’ etc. in a desperate bid to maintain liquidity.
That first day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and related indices on a percentage basis would lose about 20%-30% of their value by the close of business that day. The real impact would come overnight when the American people found out what this was all about when it was explained to them.
The SEC and various regulatory entities have anticipated the market’s decline, hour by hour and they will be closely watching every move (down) the markets make. It is widely expected that “circuit breakers” will be triggered within an hour, then triggered again, until the market suspends trading for the rest of that day.
When Japan’s markets open the next day – we will call this “Day 2” – what would happen is almost instant collapse. At 7:30 a.m. EDT, the Tokyo markets would open, and no price would be affixed for probably three or four hours into the session due to the avalanche of selling.
Once prices were established, the government of Japan would close all of its financial markets.
Europe would not even open. All European governments would close all capital exchanges.
When the U.S. goes down, everything around the world in matters financial, goes with us.
On that second day, here in the US, Army Forces would be dropped in via parachute to the cities where the twelve Federal Reserve district banks are located.
The reason they would be brought in by parachute is there won’t be enough time to do this via driving. Those troops would HAVE to be in-place around the twelve federal reserve banks, to protect the plexi-glass pallets of currency in their vault stacked to the ceiling and whatever gold is also inside.
The origin of these U.S. Treasury protocols comes from the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD has contingency plans for a variety of scenarios. Those scenarios would include, obviously, military collapse, World War III, and its aftermath. What we’re talking about now is aftermath — how the aftermath of the U.S. being unable to service its debt, would be handled.
One does not necessarily know how the events would transpire that would cause the collapse, whether it’s military collapse or economic collapse. In World War III, it would become obvious — when the mushroom clouds started to appear over cities.
Economic collapse scenarios were always premised on the basis of a US declaration of force majeure on debt service. It’s a very extensive scenario.
The scenarios are all together, i.e., military, economic, political and social, complete destabilization leading to collapse.
Then they break down individual scenarios. In the economic collapse scenario, the starting point would be the United States Treasury declaring a force majeure on debt service, which is de facto repudiation, and that’s how it would be interpreted by the world’s capital marketplaces. Then the scenario goes on from there.
The US Treasury would obviously declare a force majeure after the European markets had closed. In other words, they had gone out for the day, which means 11:38 a.m. EDT, our time. They’d wait until the European markets closed, and the US markets had been open for a couple of hours. That’s when they’d determine how to begin the process of unwinding or controlling the collapse to the best extent possible, mainly because they know that the greatest hedge pressure would be people seeking to use other markets to hedge their long exposure in the United States and that the US would be the biggest seller in all the rest of the world’s markets.
Therefore you would want to declare the force majeure when the rest of the world’s markets closed. (catch’em off guard! I like it-its just so American.) The declaration of force majeure would be precipitated by the declaration that the United States is no longer able to service its debt. That’s pretty simple.
Who makes that decision? The Treasury Department. The President does not make that decision. The Secretary of the Treasury does. He has that authority.
You might ask — wouldn’t he have his arm twisted not to do that? The answer is that if there isn’t any money left to service the debt, it doesn’t make any difference what the current regime might want to do.
The day of reckoning is now coming. What has happened in the interim, from 2001 to present, is dynamic, global economic deterioration. The economic deterioration visited upon the United States by rampant deficit spending enacted by Congress is not a localized event. It is, in fact, global. We have a planet now that is sinking into a sea of red ink.
Back around the year 2008, the United States was consuming about 80% of the entire world’s savings to finance its debt. At some point after 2008, the US began to need MORE than the entire world had to lend. Enter the U.S. Federal Reserve, monetizing debt by entering digits into a computer account. PRESTO! Money created out of thin air to buy Treasury Bonds!
Bringing this problem to a head is the issue of the central banks of Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia; they are no longer the powerhouses they used to be. Their reserves have now been substantially depleted. They can, therefore, no longer hide the fact that they own a certain number, likely in the trillions of dollars, of U.S. Treasury debt that isn’t being serviced, because they can’t hide it through bookkeeping tricks anymore; because their reserves are so depleted.
This is why not too long ago, someone put the arm on Great Britain and demanded payment in Gold Bullion. It was all very hush hush, but readers of the Hal Turner Radio Show web site did get the information quickly.
Very serious amounts of Gold/Silver Bullion and cash money was abruptly removed from the United Kingdom on 13 April 2021, and shipped to Doha, Qatar without explanation.
Authorities in London did a rolling road block along the motorway to allow the tremendous shipment of bullion and cash to get through! Three (3) armored bullion trucks, 4 unmarked police cruisers, 6 marked police cars and a police helicopter was following in the sky. (Story HERE)
Someone is putting demands on western banks because they see the US money is in gigantic trouble. Someone is saying to the US…
"You've got to start servicing this debt because we, and foreign central banks, are in nations - European and Asian - whose reserves are now nearly exhausted. We no longer trust you to pay the debt, we want Gold. Now."
Foreign Central banks can no longer make it appear that the U.S. debt is being serviced because those foreign central banks own reserves are so substantively depleted. Therefore the US and the west in general, are being told they must begin to cover this debt. If the US cannot, or will not, then, at some point, people in banking around the world will have to publicly admit in order to save their own necks — that THEY were the end buyers of a lot of stealth debt, a lot of debt that the U.S. Treasury issued illegally and has never serviced. That would then expose the whole cabal.
The process of unraveling has already begun because of ever-spiraling budget deficits.
The U.S., even in its overt policies (now they're overt political, economic, social and military policies) is generating a $2 TRILLION-plus deficit per year.
There isn't enough money on the entire planet to lend such amounts to the US.
Because foreign central banks are so depleted from buying other US debt, they can’t refinance the stealth debt by issuing more stealth debt anymore. Nor can they bleed money out of the system like they could in the 1980s. There is no mechanism that they can use anymore to hide expansion of debt that could be used to service said stealth debt, and they are, frankly, running out of assets that they can steal from the American people.
So the proverbial day of reckoning is coming.
Back in 2008, David Walker, US Comptroller General and chief of the GAO has said that the United States would no longer be able to service its debt beyond 2009.
Yet here we are, now, in 2021.
How could that be? Well, as stated earlier, the federal reserve is monetizing US debt. The fed is entering digits into an account on their computer system, then using that account to “buy” U.S. Treasury Notes. Money out of thin air.
What does that mean?
The key is in what Walker meant when he says the debt can no longer be serviced. It simply meant the United States would no longer be able to pay even the interest on its debts because it needs more than the planet has available to lend to them.
Therefore, if the planet can no longer generate any more liquidity to lend to the United States, one of three things have to happen:
A
There has to be a sudden and dramatic reduction in federal spending. There are only two places that can come from. There would have to be an immediate slashing of defense spending probably by 65-75% OR; there would have to be an immediate cut in all social programs: Welfare, Food Stamps, Social Security and all the rest.
B
The other option, 6900 B, is a dramatic increase in the rate of federal income taxation from the current nominal rate of 28% to 65%-85%, which is what the Treasury Department estimated would be required post-2009 to provide the U.S. Treasury with sufficient revenues to continue to service debt, OR;
C
The third option, 6900 C, becomes the declaration of a force majeure on credit service of U.S. Treasury debt by the United States Treasury, which is tantamount to, and would be accurately construed as, de facto debt repudiation by the United States of America.
…
Day One. When that day comes, in other words, when the U.S. Treasury declares a force majeure on debt, it wouldn’t be broadcast on mainstream media. There’s no sense because the American people don’t even understand what it means. The announcement would actually be put on the Federal Reserve wire system, which would, of course, immediately be picked up by all media outlets anyway.
The United States would, in order to accommodate global electronic trading, attempt to open the market on the second day, which they would do, regardless of price, just to maintain some liquidity.
At the end of Day Two, the Dow Jones and related indices, would have lost two thirds of their value, and prices would be set accordingly.
On Day Three, the New York Stock Exchange, the SEC and other related agencies would recommend to the United States Treasury and the Federal Reserve that all markets be closed. That would be on the morning of Day Three.
At Eleven AM EDT, the Federal Reserve would then order all domestic banks closed.
At 9:00 PM EDT on Day Three, the President of the United States would declare a state of martial law. All financial transactions would come to an end. The Treasury would act to formally de-monetize the U.S. dollar and declare it worthless.
This would be totally unprecedented. In the past, collapses have been temporary and have been brought back up. But what we’re talking about now is the end.
These protocols that I’m referring to aren’t even all that secret. They were publicly available all through the Clinton era. These are Treasury protocols that were instituted mostly in the late 1970s when the Treasury and Federal Reserve began to feel that it was important to have an emergency-collapse protocol in place.
What precipitated the timing of this was the inflationary spiral of the mid-late 1970s, during Richard Nixon /Gerald Ford terms up to that point. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve were both concerned that this inflationary spiral, which was occurring not only domestically but globally, might lead to a global, uncontrollable hyper-inflation that the Federal Reserve or major central banks could not stop by traditional means, i.e., by raising interest rates and contracting money supply.
There was also the recognition, of course, that global central reserve bank bullion inventories had been so depleted over the previous 30 years that any re-institution of a species currency, even on a temporary basis, and even within a regional or individual nation-state basis, was no longer possible.
This is an analogy. In a military scenario, it’s like the President of the United States pushing the final red button — the commit button. The Treasury Secretary of the United States has a similar mechanism. It’s called the yellow button, the commit button. The Secretary of Defense has the same system. This is what happens. Computer programs start to institute these protocols.
Imagine the complexity of trying the manage all this. I think it’s going to happen all simultaneously. There are hundreds of different agencies involved, both domestically and internationally.
In order to maintain liquidity for as long as possible, it has to be extremely well-coordinated, and there must be existing collapse protocols that can be used.
The reason I was familiar with them was because I used to see the U.S. Treasury 6900 Series Collapse Protocol, 6903, 6904 there’ll be A, B, and so on which keyed in to the Department of Defense to be incorporated within the Department of Defense’s own World War III scenario and various types of military/ political/ social instability/ war/ pestilence, chaos, etc. scenarios.
All federal agencies had individual collapse protocols that ultimately got coordinated through the Department of Defense. Obviously, the Department of Defense would be the ultimate coordinator because it would need to have special forces available, on a stand-by basis, ready, that could quickly parachute into areas all over the country, into the cities particularly, to secure federal properties and assets.
And that’s literally how it would begin. By the end of the third day, it would be all over — a state of martial law. We’re not talking about war, now; this is just economic collapse.
There’s no military implication here, no political, no social implication or policy directive thereunto. This is strictly economic collapse.
By the end of Day Three, effectively, all banks in the world will be shut down, all paper currencies will become valueless. Martial law would be declared.
There would be no continuing transactions, at least for a period of time, of commodities. All providers of fuels and foods would be shut down automatically.
They have this planned in extremely great detail too. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense Special 117th Assault Unit would parachute in to seize control of the cattle yards in Oklahoma City. This is how well it’s planned. In other words, economic collapse would automatically involve expansive military action and control.
By the end of the third day, when you no longer have a domestic medium of exchange, you have to have secured food and fuel stocks. You’ve got to have troops that have secured distribution points where there is food and fuel stocks, warehouses, tanks, etc. Otherwise people are just going to go get them, and the people have to know that if they try to go break into that store and steal that loaf of bread, they’re going to be shot.
The scaling-circle scenarios
Protocols for environmental disasters are called ‘scaling-circle scenarios.’ ‘Scaling circles’ is a Department of Defense euphemism. It’s also used in FEMA, OEM and other emergency management services.
In environmental catastrophes, which are going to become national or global, it’s got to start someplace. It’s going to start in one very small, specific area. Therefore what happens is that the immediate force containment is the greatest in the first circle, to try to contain the spread of the disaster and keep it within that circle-not allowing it into circle 2.
The environmental problem, to whatever extent it’s possible, before it spreads, will be neutralized or mitigated, in order to keep that catastrophe within that circle, or, if it is likely that it is to escape that circle, to attack whatever it is in such a fashion as to mitigate its strength and its ability to contaminate or otherwise affect other areas.
In the case of earthquakes, for instance, affecting the west coast, beginning at Mt. Rainier and moving southward — that’s a different type of scenario. That does not include as much Department of Defense involvement. It includes separate protocols, wherein mostly FEMA and OEM act as the senior coordinating agencies between municipal, county and state disaster and containment, which is called Disaster and Containment Units. Federal troops would only be brought in for the purposes of maintaining control.
In a military or economic collapse situation, National Guard units would provide any spare help they could in combating whatever the problem is. Federal troops would be used in order to have the specific authority simply to shoot anyone.
There are plans for all sorts of scenarios. The economic-disaster scenario is the one I always found the most intriguing because it is the one that is least understood by the American people.
Military control would be necessary when lines begin to form at the banks, people trying to access their money. But that wasn’t even anticipated as a big problem. Lines would form at the banks, but it was not even envisioned until sometime on Day Three because the American people wouldn’t get it. It would be announced that the stock markets are down 2000 or 3000 points, and since we’ve always been taught they’ll come back, the people would still be buying stocks.
You could count on everybody remaining in ignorance all the way down because the American people have never been taught Economics 101. The American people wouldn’t realize the full extent of it until the markets were closed on the third day, or until the time when they went down to cash a check and the bank was closed with soldiers out in front. Then they would go down and see the gas station’s closed. They see the local supermarket has been shuttered, and there’s federal troops in front of it. Then they might begin to catch on.
And remember — it’s not just federal troops. In emergency-collapse protocols, even before the declaration of a formal state of emergency or a state of martial law, the local military authorities within any given county or jurisdiction have the ability to essentially militarize anyone, that is, any civilian. This would be more than just deputizing civilians. It’s federal. In other words, they would have the ability to militarize and give military authority to a civilian force. This would include not only police and the sheriffs and state police, but all local law enforcement that exists below the state level would be immediately militarized. They wouldn’t take just anybody like they did in Iraq. It would be like the military when they call for volunteers.
In other words, this is how it would unfold over three days, but, in fact, very few Americans would know what to do about it or how to take any precautions. They wouldn’t have a clue because they don’t understand enough about economics to know what is happening. So that’s what it is — Economic Armageddon.
Conclusion
In conclusion, since there is very little the people of the United States can do to protect themselves. We’re not going to make any suggestions of how to protect yourselves because there’s very little you can do.
We could tell you to go out and buy gold coins and bury them in the coffee can in the back yard and go to your nearest survivalist store, but, frankly, that’s useless. In the last analysis, it’s a lot of hype. There is very little the average US citizen could do.
Here’s an interesting and humorous aside. A couple of years ago, Hormel Foods, which makes Spam, announced that in the last six months there have been record sales of Spam in the United States the survivalists’ food of choice. After all, they pride themselves on the fact, as the spokesman for Hormel said, “It is the only food product you can buy with an expiration that’s 50 years.”
When everything goes to hell, when all that man has created has turned to dust again, the final legacy is going to be Spam. It will be the last surviving item — when the anthropologists of 20 thousand years from now are digging sites and they see these enormous mountains of unopened cans of Spam-still unspoiled and ready to eat. They’ll have monuments to the past, out of Spam. (-Spam is the true definition of DEAD FOOD-it never goes bad)
Furthermore, on Washington Journal they were talking about how FEMA has recommended to the Office of Homeland Security to have increased restrictions regarding citizen hoarding of long-term food and fuel supplies. That’s pretty sinister too.
What they’re talking about is the purchase of long-term so-called stores of survival food. FEMA was talking about some sort of restriction preventing people from accumulating food stores; putting it simply, that’s what it means. The second point was to increase restrictions that already exist.
FEMA was recommending even tighter restrictions on citizens building their own private property underground storage tanks for the purposes of long-term storage of fuel. The real intent of this is is threefold: a) to restrict citizens’ ability to hoard food; b) restrict citizens’ ability to hoard long-term storage of fuel; c) the forced identification of citizens to reveal food and fuel stocks they may be hoarding.
And that, in my opinion, is the real essence. The government wanted this kept secret – having the FEMA supply restrictions angle put into the equation, because they knew how people would interpret it.
They have tried to use environmental legislation to restrict people’s ability to build fuel storage facilities on their own property — to get around what the true intent of that was.
But the bigger picture is that if you start to limit citizens’ ability to hoard fuel and food and shake them up by potential forced identification of gold holdings or forced redemption.
In other words, what you don’t want is citizens who have the ability to store a lot of food and fuel and to own gold because they would be able to resist state control in the future.
The feds need to have every citizen on a rationing card to control the civilian population. You can’t have citizens out there hoarding food and fuel because then people can say to government, “I ain’t taking a rationing card, baby, with my national ID card. I don’t have to. You can’t control me through food and fuel and worthless paper currency.”
I used to make fun of these people. But now, things have come full circle on this debate. The pattern is becoming increasingly clear. So is the future.
In fact, I would believe that those of the survivalist mentality (the food, fuel, the gold coins in the coffee can in the back yard) . . . people who think that way will be ultimately vindicated.
People should quit making fun of them because they would be vindicated – even though they were all burned out, twenty-dollared to death, buying books and tapes, and discredited by mainstream media.
It may sound like a hollow victory, but it won’t be a hollow victory for them – them that’s got the Spam…
Attribution and Conclusion
The majority of this article was written long ago, in 2008, by a guy named Al Martin.It was forwarded to me by a visitor to the Hal Turner web site.
I tweaked the numbers to make them more current, and added the info about the federal reserve monetizing the debt so as to afford an answer to anyone wondering how, if this was all slated to collapse in 2009, we're still here?
It brings many frightening realities to the forefront because these days, what's taking place in matters financial with our federal government, is absolutely off the rails. They're not just spending a little more than they take in via taxes, their spending almost DOUBLE what they take in in taxes.
Let me ask you, how much is the currency of a Bankrupt nation actually worth?
The very simple takeaway from this article is this: Have Emergency Food, Water, Medicine, and other supplies to tie you over for a few months, minimum.
If/When you hear the phrase "FORCE MAJEURE" - you will have only HOURS to get to the supermarket, buy as much food as you can with whatever cash or credit you have left, and haul ass home to pack and head to your bugout location, then move out fast.
Bear in mind too, the banks will get word of this before the rest of us. They may cut off all credit cards before the public is event TOLD of a force majeure. That would mean you could only buy more food with cash. Got enough cash at home to do that?
Once it all goes to hell, and money (as we know it) is "de-monetized" everyone is fucked; except the people who put their cash into something ELSE which is not cash. No, I don't mean gold or silver because government will try to get their filthy hands on all of that. Something with intrinsic value (it has its value within itself). Things like land/real estate, precious gems, food supplies, fuel. Anything that will be useful to you and holds its value in itself.
But for God's sake, don't just sit around and do nothing. Prepare because when this hits, it will strike like a lightning bolt out of the blue.
The masses who are asses have no idea such a thing CAN EVEN HAPPEN, never mind happen to them. When stores all have to close because there is no longer any monetary means of commerce, what do you think the savages in the cities are going to do? Maybe "Yo man, gimme all yo shit, Cracka, befo I bust a cap in yo ass"
Yes, it will be that simple. So bug out before the savages figure out what's going on because the cities and urban areas will descend into violent chaos very VERY fast.
Then remember, under our system of Government, it is CONGRESS that holds the purse strings. No President can borrow or spend a single cent, unless CONGRESS authorized it. All that debt which is collapsing our country, wrecking our currency, was done to you by CONGRESS. So if you see any of those scumbags on the street, you'll know what to do.
MM’s Conclusions and opinion
It might happen. It might not happen. But as crazy as the United States government is, I am confident that they have plans on how to handle whatever events transpire. So when these plans start to unwind, don’t worry too much about it. It’s just a natural progression that the officials do when checking off the boxes on their long lists.
Don’t freak out.
Just expect it to happen sooner or later. My guess is in the next two years.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
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Americans have no idea what it would actually be like to have a real war. Most of them don’t even know that China has surpassed the US economically. Most Americans literally think a war with China would be similar to a war with Afghanistan or Iraq – something you watch on television that has no direct effect on your life, other than maybe causing gasoline prices to fluctuate.
This article is a collection of insightful articles, musings, and tidbits that most (not all) of my fellow Americans are completely unaware of occurring.
We will start with a big news item, and then approach it from the point of view of what is not being reported…
Meng Wanzhou
Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou arrives in China after more than 1,000 days under house arrest in Canada, following a deal with U.S. prosecutors to end a fraud case against her.
Love China and China will love you. Millions and millions of people all over China watching live the return to freedom from Canada of the Huawei Boss. We were watching live in the local pub here in Dongguan. More exciting than watching a corrupt European football game. Very bad news for Canada as far as the average Chinese person is concerned.
- Peter Weston
Yes. Big news in China.
Three Videos of just HOW BIG this is.
Everyone knows what happened. The United States Military Empire kidnapped a leading Chinese Industry leader on trumped up charges. Then after three years of no proof, they released her.
Why is this big news?
Imagine if China did the same thing to Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Now, imagine if the Chinese had behave like a bunch of Washington DC weak-wristed yes-men, who were only in their positions due to political graft.
Most likely, they would be uselessly fighting on the American and Canadian courts as we speak, and Meng would probably rot for at least some 15 years in prison.
Luckily, the Chinese are communists, so they don’t delve into bullshit. They saw her prison for what it really was – a political stunt – and counter-attacked accordingly, by arresting two of Canada’s ruling elite (i.e. the Canadian capitalist class) members.
The Release Of Meng Wanzhou’s Is A Small But Decisive Victory For China
The U.S. has given in to the Chinese demand to end its hostage holding of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou:
A plane believed to be carrying Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou took off from the Vancouver airport on Friday, marking a new stage in a legal saga that ensnared Canada — and two of its citizens — in a dispute between the U.S. and Chinese governments.
A B.C. court decided on Friday that the extradition case against Meng would be dropped after the Huawei chief financial officer reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government.Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, the two Canadian citizens who were detained in China just days after Meng's arrest in Vancouver, are now on their way back Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed on Friday evening.
The U.S. had accused Meng Wanzhou of misleading the opium dealer bank HSBC about Huawei’s relation with a local entity in Iran. This, the U.S. claimed, had led to breach by HSBC of its unilateral sanctions against Iran.
This was a constructed crime with the only evidence being some wording on one page of a longer power point slideshow which Meng Wanzhou surely had not edited herself.
The deferred prosecution agreement seems to admit that:
As part of her arrangement with U.S. prosecutors, Meng pleaded not guilty in a court Friday to multiple fraud charges.
The Huawei chief financial officer entered the plea during a virtual appearance in a New York courtroom. She was charged with bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracies to commit bank and wire fraud more than two and a half years ago.
...
The agreed statement of facts from Friday's U.S. court appearance said that Meng told a global financial institution that a company operating in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions was a "local partner" of Huawei when in fact it was a subsidiary of Huawei.
The whole case was constructed and the arrest arranged by John Bolton when he was National Security Advisor under then President Donald Trump:
The Trudeau adviser said Mr. Bolton and other like-minded officials in the U.S. government were well aware of the significance of the arrest they were asking Canada to make. The adviser and a senior national-security official say they are convinced the U.S. picked Canada to arrest Ms. Meng – and did so in a last-minute rush – because they believed the Justice Department and the RCMP would honor the extradition request.
Trump has linked resolution of the U.S. government’s dealings with Huawei to a potential trade agreement with China. He has said he would consider Huawei’s role in a trade deal at the final stage of negotiations, the court application says.
...
“Prejudice to the fairness of these proceedings is made out by the president’s repeated assertions that (Meng’s) liberty is effectively a bargaining chip in what he sees as the biggest trade deal ever.”
The case gave Canada a lot of headaches as China had arrested two of its spies just days after Canada had followed the U.S. request to arrest Meng Wanzhou. Canada has denied that Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were spying for its services. However, Canada’s main spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, welcomed the release of its boys:
Canadian CIA.
During a July visit to China U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman had been given two lists of issues that China demanded to be solved before it was willing to cooperate further with the U.S.:
In the List of U.S. Wrongdoings that Must Stop, China urged the United States to unconditionally revoke the visa restrictions over Communist Party of China (CPC) members and their families, revoke sanctions on Chinese leaders, officials and government agencies, and remove visa restrictions on Chinese students.
China also urged the United States to stop suppressing Chinese enterprises, stop harassing Chinese students, stop suppressing the Confucius Institutes, revoke the registration of Chinese media outlets as "foreign agents" or "foreign missions", and revoke the extradition request for Meng Wanzhou.
China sees the end of the Meng Wanzhou issue as a victory:
The high-profile case of Meng, which has become a political dilemma significantly affecting the global geopolitical landscape, has been settled through both legal channels and political wrestling, experts said, noting that China, the US and Canada have seen the best scenario with much compromise made by the Biden administration in resolving the matter. It also helped pave the way for the positive interaction between the world's largest economies in the near future amid strained China-US relations.
It was also one mistake of the US administration that has been corrected in line with the request of China, as China put forward two lists to the US during the bilateral talks in Tianjin in July, including the List of US Wrongdoings that Must Stop which urged the US to release Meng, showing that Beijing's US policies began taking effect and remaining mistakes of the US have to be corrected.
Commentator Pepe Escobar however, does not believe that the release of Meng Wanzhou will change much if anything:
Pepe Escobar @RealPepeEscobar - 11:49 UTC · Sep 25, 2021
MENG WANZHOU
- political kidnapping masked as criminal prosecution
- part of the demonization of Huawei
- near 3-year illegal detention
- fake charges
- “Justice” Dept. had to drop extradition request
- Hybrid War continues
While I agree that U.S. aggression against China will continue I do see this as a Chinese victory. China has disabled one of the weapons that U.S. had used against it.
From now on no country will risk to follow a U.S. requests to arrest a Chinese citizen:
The swiftness of the apparent deal also stands as a warning to leaders in other countries that the Chinese government can be boldly transactional with foreign nationals, said Donald C. Clarke, a law professor specializing in China at George Washington University’s Law School.
“They’re not even making a pretense of a pretense that this was anything but a straight hostage situation,” he said of the two Canadians, who stood trial on spying charges.
Mr. Spavor was sentenced last month to 11 years in prison, and Mr. Kovrig was waiting for a verdict in his case after trial in March.
“In a sense, China has strengthened its bargaining position in future negotiations like this,” Professor Clarke said. “They’re saying, if you give them what they want, they will deliver as agreed.”
The U.S. had, via Canada, taken Meng Wanzhou as a hostage.
China replicated that by taking two Canadian citizens as hostages, thereby putting the pressure on the weaker power involved.
It also stopped imports of Canadian canola and pork. No government will want to repeat the experience of the Canadian one.
The sentiment of patriotism prevailed at the scene. After the short speech, Meng waved to the crowds holding Chinese flags to welcome her at the airport, with a big smile, while singing a song for the motherland together with people at the scene.
People were still singing after Meng rode the bus to undergo epidemic prevention inspection at the request of Chinese Customs.
Groups of people, who wore protective suits, held flowers and welcome banners as they waited on the parking apron at the airport, as Chinese port cities have adopted strict epidemic prevention measures against COVID-19. Local media reports said earlier that Meng was expected to follow the 14 plus 7 days of quarantine following her arrival.
So this is indeed a victory but in a minor battle and in a war that is likely to see much bigger ones.
Other thoughts…
How did China know that the two Canadians were spies? Could it be that CIA incompetence exposed them and others? Seems very likely.
Keep in mind that China managed to roll up an entire CIA network of spies some years ago (ca. 2011), no doubt by methods such as that (and probably by using double agents like the Venezuelans did to fool the US into thinking their military would support Guido).
Eighteen ‘sources’ were reportedly neutralized in that one Chinese operation. Of course we don’t, and won’t, know the truth but it sounds like it was a pretty disastrous outcome for the CIA.
Do you think that there were other “round ups” that occurred but were not reported?
What happens to Western Spooks that go to China?
Concerning China's abilities at keeping track of Five Eyes spooks, what part of the imperial color revolution in Hong Kong was missing? What do we normally see in an American regime change operation after the US State Department's NGOs succeed in building protests that was lacking in Hong Kong?
Of course, the snipers.
So where are the snipers that the CIA trained up to spark the protests into a raging conflagration?
Obvious answer: At the bottom of Victoria Harbor wearing concrete boots.
This was unlikely to have been done by Chinese intelligence themselves but rather by the Triads after some negotiations with mainland authorities. While the Triads are not allied with the Communists, they are part of the second system in that "One country, two systems" deal and have a deep interest in maintaining the status quo. The empire's color revolution seriously jeopardized that status quo and had to be neutralized.
Posted by: William Gruff | Sep 25 2021 21:22 utc | 36
…
In other news, this is excerpt from CGTN…
French writer exposes U.S. global hegemony
Updated 22:59, 25-Sep-2021
CGTN
The number of companies and entrepreneurs that have fallen victim to the U.S. global hegemony is unknown but Marc Lassus, founder of Gemplus, a manufacturer of smart cards (including SIM cards) is one of them.
After witnessing the Frenchman’s business making waves with users in the billions, the U.S. took control of the company and drove Lassus away, Chinese newspaper the Global Times has reported. Lassus said that their goal was, through the CIA and NSA, to spy on the whole world.
Lassus has told his story in a recently published book, “The Chip Trap.” During an interview with the Global Times, he shared his thoughts on Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of the United States.
"Meng Wanzhou's detention in Canada is just a pure scandal, as well as their request for extradition to the U.S," he said.
Huawei has a very significant technological advantage in 5G infrastructure and to some extent in fiber optics, their presence in Africa is also very strong and it is too late to beat them, Lassus said. Therefore, the U.S. used brutal and “cowboy” approaches to hinder Huawei’s business expansion.
He added that Meng’s case reminded him of his own experience. He was almost arrested on similar, trumped-up “charges” during a private trip to Cuba but he miraculously escaped imprisonment in the U.S.
"The move from the Trump administration to Biden's will not change much the U.S. policies," he noted.
He also mentioned that the U.S. claim that it values free markets is “pure hypocrisy.” They use any possible means to suppress other countries’ high-tech companies from being successful in international markets, such as Huawei, ZTE and places pressure on chip manufacturers such as Samsung.
Lassus said he was optimistic about the cooperation between China and Europe, which is entering into a new era with ties becoming more strategic, more complex but more promising.
"It is very clear now China should put more effort and investment than ever to develop key technologies in the semiconductor industry such as key equipment, materials and design tools, and so on. Especially when the U.S. is trying to ban any exchange between world-leading companies and China," he said.
Yes, and so China is doing so. How are the billions in new investments in the IC / AI / IoT technology corridor HK, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou being reported in your nations?
The long arm of U.S. jurisdiction dates backs to over a decade ago when the world’s biggest power felt threatened by the rapid ascent of other economies. Now the possibility of losing technological advantage haunts Washington, which has resorted to bending the law to gain a competitive edge. Bribery, fraud, and violating sanctions are commonly used pretexts for the U.S. to strike down any individual, entity or country that it feels threatened by.
Frederic Pierucci, an executive of Alstom, a French power and transportation conglomerate, was arrested by the FBI when his plane arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 14, 2013. He was charged with bribing Indonesian officials to win a power plant contract.
Coincidentally or not, the arrest of Pierucci, then president of the French power titan’s boiler subsidiary, ran parallel to the largest business acquisition by the American General Electric (GE) of its French rival Alstom’s energy business.
Lassus said it was only after January 2019 when Frederic Pierucci published his book “Le Piege Americain,” also known as “The American Trap,” that he felt free, credible, and publicly protected to come out with his story.
“Pierucci’s book relates the U.S. aggression, through General Electric, to take control of ALSTOM, a French company. Pierucci has been put for two years in jail in the US! A real scandal,” Lassus said.
An interesting comment that I read…
The comment goes…
Two things I would like to add here.
One, this is embarrassing as a Canadian. We don't have ANY politician who saw through this. NONE.
Many internationalist Canadians saw through this within the first 3-7 days, but none were in government, and none were even (audible) in Parliament.
This is utter international relations incompetence.
As we learned from the immigration lawyers for the defense, this case was rigged from the very start - the arrest should not have happened;
The signs for a different than advertised goal by the FBI were overt;
The RCMP should not have been allowed to enter into it with the border guard;
The Prime Minister and Justice Minister should have been reachable instead of 'on their weekend';
Etc, etc...
Beyond that, if the President of the USA then makes a statement politicizing the arrest, the Prime Minister of Canada has no right to hide behind "Executive vs Justice" power, As the extradition agreement explicitly states that the PM can intervene through the Justice Minister to avert political abuses of the extradition agreement.
So this is totally on Trudeau's incompetence and cowardice.
Two, this US subversion of Huawei will not work because XXXXXXX has understated, hugely, the Chinese distance created from the stone-age USA in current day digital progress.
I was shocked as a Canadian European, coming into Chicago and Ohio in 2000 and discovering how far behind the USA was in simcard and digital technology.
It caught up, but barely.
Now, China is too far ahead and is running much faster than the US is or has the capacity to.
China has already won - this Huawei case is just a little side cake - because they have all the infrastructure and are way beyond 5G - they are building the next universe and America can't even have the data points to dream about it.
As a Canadian expat he is seeing what I have seen. But I am in technology, R&D and manufacturing. I can tell you that the USA is behind, but no one wants to listen to MM.
Do you agree with me that China is much more advanced in technology, or the Western narrative that soon, say in 2025, China will surpass the USA?
And this interesting rebuttal…
In Canada’s defense — the authorities here were dealing with John Bolton, a known a**h@le who believes in breaking eggs to make omelettes.Interviews with Canadian ultra political insider, Peter Donolo on BNN Bloomberg (just BNN back then maybe?) expressed concern about who would replace the just fired National Security Advisor.So Canada’s political class protested through the media (which is how you gotta do it with the neocons, just ask Russia) about John Bolton’s appointment.Somewhere I picked up that Canada was threatened with having US troops at the Vancouver airport if Canada refused to act in the interests of American security.The Michaels are 5th columnists.They don’t work for CSIS, Canada, the Canadian political class or any other Canadian national interest or institution.Their arrest was quite possibly arranged behind-the-scenes between China and Canada to get Bolton fired as well as the other results b mentions. And a very important piece of this is the Canadian Ambassador to China, Dominic Barton.Check out this man’s resume.His appointment could have been at the request of China, quite possibly, another Canadian concession (although Trudeau wanted him in that role previously, but he declined).
Here’s an interesting note (not by me) on how the flight route that was used to bring Meng back to China (Google Translated from Russian):
“And by the way, about the small details of today’s event, the evacuation of Meng Wangzhou from Canadian captivity.
Look how they dragged her from Vancouver to China, you can shoot an action movie (I think the Chinese will easily shoot it).
Rescue air flight.
[1] Vancouver is close to the United States, so the board briskly went along the line “as far away as possible from the main territory of the United States and from Alaska” vertically upward, aiming directly at the North Pole.
[2] Over the Arctic, he made the shortest possible route to the Russian air defense zone and went further south through Siberia and Mongolia.
[3] The standard version of the route (see the second picture), through the Pacific Ocean, where the American control points and, in general, there are enough opportunities to do something bad, was not used, although it was announced in advance that this is how Air China would fly back.
On the question of when they soberly assess the situation and understand that agreements with Canada and international law are one thing, but the Arctic region, where the Northern Sea Route is, is completely different and, somehow, under the wing of Shoigu and friends, it is calmer and safer.”
Do you think that the Chinese were being overly cautious, or rather that the over-the-pole flight path was the most economical one to take?
All this is very interesting, but let’s not forget one thing…
Naughty China citizen Meng was charged with breaking a United States law while she was inside of China.
US Justice Dept, Jan 28, 2019
Meng is charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracies to commit bank and wire fraud.
“As charged in the indictment, Huawei and its Chief Financial Officer broke U.S. law and have engaged in a fraudulent financial scheme that is detrimental to the security of the United States,” said Secretary Nielsen.
“They willfully conducted millions of dollars in transactions that were in direct violation of the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, and such behavior will not be tolerated." . . .here
The US hasn't given up trying to convince China citizens to obey US laws.
US Justice Dept, Sep 24, 2021
Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei Technologies, admitted today that she failed to tell the truth about Huawei’s operations in Iran, and as a result the financial institution continued to do business with Huawei in violation of U.S. law. Our prosecution team continues to prepare for trial against Huawei, and we look forward to proving our case against the company in court.” . . .here
United States laws only work within United States territory. Just like Chinese laws only work within China, and South African laws only work in South Africa.
Obviously the idiots in Washington DC do not respect other people’s (geographic) space.
What’s with this issue? Why don’t Americans understand that once you leave the USA, there are different laws, rules, regulations, culture and society and the USA cannot violate the national sovereignty of others in other nations?
And this interesting response…
Ms Meng ‘the Merciless’ was monstered by ‘(inter)National Interests’.
Who the fuck have the US the right to arrest people in foreign countries? For breaking the unilateral US sanction on another country??
That is not simple Exceptionalism...
...it’s is gross Overeach.
It can only be dumb superiority complex and racism to have thought that they can talk loud and carry a big stick to keep the savages subdued.
That Canadians have meekly re-elected the controlled scion of ones of the Empires CEO’s who was brought up by the Fascists of the West and the Money is pure pathetic Stockholm syndrome exhibited by voters in the west over the last 50 years.
We deserve all we get!
Canadians did to Meng what Sweden did to Assange and what the Decimate Empire is doing to the World in clueing as I say their own subjects as is happening daily now to the U.K. subjects because of BrexShit.
Chaotic scenes at petrol stations!
...In one of the richest countries in the World.
The MSM are fully controlled Mockingbird operatives. Independent journalism is muted and inprisoned, like Craig Murray is.
I’ll link to my post on the open thread that addresses why the Empire and Eva cornered rat and it’s Masters are morbidly stuck in their death throes as China changes human history on planet Earth with a competent partner in Russia and their SCO.
‘Are we getting it yet barflies?
Posted by: D.G. | Sep 23 2021 17:31 utc | 171 ‘
And another comment…
The Hauwei angst in the west is because China has ‘leapfrogged’ the Western modernity with nextgen tech and AI in their daily commercial environment.
The west having legacy ageing tech infrastructure and systems that hasn’t been squeezed of the last drop of payback/profit from it!
That’s how they have always rolled.
Capturing IP rights and shelving innovation.
They couldn’t do that with 5G and plus.
Or with AI in public services.
Which makes them natural predators of similar organizations in the west by virtue of the WTO ‘open to competition’ rules. Which were designed under the assumption they only would work in one direction.
It is that simple. Expect no mercy but be willing to accept that They will not act like we would and will not stoop to such savage western expectations.
Posted by: D.G | Sep 25 2021 20:23 utc | 27
What about the UN?
The UN Charter, in its Preamble, set an objective:
"to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained".
Ever since, the development of, and respect for international law has been a key part of the work of the Organization.
This work is carried out in many ways – by courts, tribunals, multilateral treaties – and by the Security Council, which can approve peacekeeping missions, impose sanctions, or authorize the use of force when there is a threat to international peace and security, if it deems this necessary. These powers are given to it by the UN Charter, which is considered an international treaty. As such, it is an instrument of international law, and UN Member States are bound by it. . .here
China has been clear about the US ‘rules-based international order’ i.e. US laws, which go against the UN Charter.
Mar 18, 2021
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, good afternoon, and welcome. On behalf of National Security Advisor Sullivan and myself, I want to welcome Director Yang and State Councilor Wang to Alaska, and to thank you very much for making the journey to be with us.
I just returned myself from meetings with Secretary of Defense Austin and our counterparts in Japan and the Republic of Korea, two of our nation’s closest allies. They were very interested in the discussions that we’ll have here today and tomorrow because the issues that we’ll raise are relevant not only to China and the United States, but to others across the region and indeed around the world. Our administration is committed to leading with diplomacy to advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order.
That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively, and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us. Today, we’ll have an opportunity to discuss key priorities, both domestic and global, so that China can better understand our administration’s intentions and approach.
Director Yang responded–
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called “rules-based” international order.
And the United States has its style – United States-style democracy – and China has the Chinese-style democracy.
It is not just up to the American people, but also the people of the world to evaluate how the United States has done in advancing its own democracy.
In China’s case, after decades of reform and opening up, we have come a long way in various fields.
In particular, we have engaged in tireless efforts to contribute to the peace and development of the world, and to upholding the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. . .here
So it’s a showdown between the USA and the UN. China and Russia and the rest of the world (minus the UK, and Australia) want to stand with the UN. The USA wants to be God over all. Is this an exaggeration?
And China plays down the line.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Tianjin, China July 25-26 2021 and was presented a list of US “wrongdoings that must stop”, also mentioning specifically Meng Wanzhou
In the List of U.S. Wrongdoings that Must Stop, China urged the United States to unconditionally revoke the visa restrictions over Communist Party of China (CPC) members and their families, revoke sanctions on Chinese leaders, officials and government agencies, and remove visa restrictions on Chinese students.China also urged the United States to stop suppressing Chinese enterprises, stop harassing Chinese students, stop suppressing the Confucius Institutes, revoke the registration of Chinese media outlets as "foreign agents" or "foreign missions", and revoke the extradition request for Meng Wanzhou.
Meng’s release is creating waves.
Chinese citizens are giving unprecedented support to the government.
Overseas Chinese are ever more united behind China.
Even those anti-communist and brainwashed Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere are quietly admitting the positive result – because they understand that they could be the target of arrest by America in future if this turns out the wrong way.
It is giving a tough-love lesson to the serially abused vassal states, e.g. Japan (Toshiba), France (Alstom), Germany (Siemens) and countless others. I don’t know what are their politicians and executives thinking right now: shame, regret, impotent, admiration or some combination of these?
It has delivered a bloody punch to the war-mongers and anti-China neocons, who are licking their wound.
And finally,
It is giving hope to the rest of developing countries. Countries who treasures their independence and dignity needs to grow a spine and learn to grab a stick.
But that is not the only thing going on…
Eurasia Takes Shape: How the SCO Just Flipped the World Order
The SEO. It’s going to become a really big deal in the next few years. Pay attention.
SEO = Russia + China + Iran + India
As a rudderless West watched on, the 20th anniversary meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was laser-focused on two key deliverables: shaping up Afghanistan and kicking off a full-spectrum Eurasian integration.
The two defining moments of the historic 20th anniversary Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan had to come from the keynote speeches of – who else – the leaders of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Xi Jinping:
“Today we will launch procedures to admit Iran as a full member of the SCO.”
Vladimir Putin:
“I would like to highlight the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed today between the SCO Secretariat and the Eurasian Economic Commission.
It is clearly designed to further Russia’s idea of establishing a Greater Eurasia Partnership covering the SCO, the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI).”
In short, over the weekend, Iran was enshrined in its rightful, prime Eurasian role, and all Eurasian integration paths converged toward a new global geopolitical – and geoeconomic – paradigm, with a sonic boom bound to echo for the rest of the century.
That was the killer one-two punch immediately following the Atlantic alliance’s ignominious imperial retreat from Afghanistan.
Right as the Taliban took control of Kabul on August 15, the redoubtable Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, told his Iranian colleague Admiral Ali Shamkhani that “the Islamic Republic will become a full member of the SCO.”
Dushanbe revealed itself as the ultimate diplomatic crossover. President Xi firmly rejected any “condescending lecturing” and emphasized development paths and governance models compatible with national conditions. Just like Putin, he stressed the complementary focus of BRI and the EAEU, and in fact summarized a true multilateralist Manifesto for the Global South.
Right on point, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan noted that the SCO should advance “the development of a regional macro-economy.” This is reflected in the SCO’s drive to start using local currencies for trade, bypassing the US dollar.
The SEO is an enormous geopolitical force. Not only in geography, but populaiton, and in manufacturing and technology competance. What is going in in the news in the MM readership’s nations about this subject? How is it being reported on the “news”?
Watch that quadrilateral
Dushanbe was not just a bed of roses. Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon, a staunch, secular Muslim and former member of the Communist Party of the USSR – in power for no less than 29 years, reelected for the 5th time in 2020 with 90 percent of the vote – right off the bat denounced the “medieval sharia” of Taliban 2.0 and said they had already “abandoned their previous promise to form an inclusive government.”
Rahmon, who has never been caught smiling on camera, was already in power when the Taliban conquered Kabul in 1996. He was bound to publicly support his Tajik cousins against the “expansion of extremist ideology” in Afghanistan – which in fact worries all SCO member-states when it comes to smashing dodgy jihadi outfits of the ISIS-K mold .
The meat of the matter in Dushanbe was in the bilaterals – and one quadrilateral.
Take the bilateral between Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Chinese FM Wang Yi. Jaishankar said that China should not view “its relations with India through the lens of a third country,” and took pains to stress that India “does not subscribe to any clash of civilizations theory.”
Ouch! Could the “third country” (he referenced) be the United States?
That was quite a tough sell considering that the first in-person Quad summit takes place this week in Washington, DC, hosted by that “third country” which is now knee deep in clash-of-civilizations mode against China.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was on a bilateral roll, meeting the presidents of Iran, Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The official Pakistani diplomatic position is that Afghanistan should not be abandoned, but engaged.
That position added nuance to what Russian Special Presidential Envoy for SCO Affairs Bakhtiyer Khakimov had explained about Kabul’s absence at the SCO table: “At this stage, all member states have an understanding that there are no reasons for an invitation until there is a legitimate, generally recognized government in Afghanistan.”
And that, arguably, leads us to the key SCO meeting: a quadrilateral with the Foreign Ministers of Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Qureshi affirmed: “We are monitoring whether all the groups are included in the government or not.” The heart of the matter is that, from now on, Islamabad coordinates the SCO strategy on Afghanistan, and will broker Taliban negotiations with senior Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara leaders. This will eventually lead the way towards an inclusive government regionally recognized by SCO member-nations.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was warmly received by all – especially after his forceful keynote speech, an Axis of Resistance classic. His bilateral with Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko revolved around a discussion on “sanctions confrontation.” According to Lukashenko: “If the sanctions did any harm to Belarus, Iran, other countries, it was only because we ourselves are to blame for this. We were not always negotiable, we did not always find the path we had to take under the pressure of sanctions.”
Considering Tehran is fully briefed on Islamabad’s SCO role in terms of Afghanistan, there will be no need to deploy the Fatemiyoun brigade – informally known as the Afghan Hezbollah – to defend the Hazaras. Fatemiyoun was formed in 2012 and was instrumental in Syria in the fight against Daesh, especially in Palmyra. But if ISIS-K does not go away, that’s a completely different story.
Particular important for SCO members Iran and India will be the future of Chabahar port. That remains India’s crypto-Silk Road gambit to connect it to Afghanistan and Central Asia. The geoeconomic success of Chabahar more than ever depends on a stable Afghanistan – and this is where Tehran’s interests fully converge with Russia-China’s SCO drive.
What the 2021 SCO Dushanbe Declaration spelled out about Afghanistan is quite revealing:
1. Afghanistan should be an independent, neutral, united, democratic and peaceful state, free of terrorism, war and drugs.
2. It is critical to have an inclusive government in Afghanistan, with representatives from all ethnic, religious and political groups of Afghan society.
3. SCO member states, emphasizing the significance of the many years of hospitality and effective assistance provided by regional and neighboring countries to Afghan refugees, consider it important for the international community to make active efforts to facilitate their dignified, safe and sustainable return to their homeland.
As much as it may sound like an impossible dream, this is the unified message of Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan and the Central Asian “stans.” One hopes that Pakistani PM Imran Khan is up to the task and ready for his SCO close-up.
Oh, I think that it’s going to work out. What does the MM readership think will happen?
Oh, have you noticed…
The Chinese and the Russians have been devoting all sorts of energy moving around all their ICBM’s all over the place. You never saw this in the USA, and very rarely in Russia and China, though you heard about it. But now a days, it’s very common with ICBM fleets moving all over China and Russia. Imagine that.
Song Zhonping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday that switching to Chinese engines means the J-20 is now completely domestically made, and this will significantly contribute to the mass production and the performance boost of the aircraft.
American neocon publications are calling the J-20 as a “cheap knock off “. Do you think this is so, or what are your thoughts on the J-20?
That troubled Western peninsula
The New Silk Roads were officially launched eight years ago by Xi Jinping, first in Astana – now Nur-Sultan – and then in Jakarta.
The announcement came close to a SCO summit – then in Bishkek. The SCO, widely dismissed in Washington and Brussels as a mere talk shop, was already surpassing its original mandate of fighting the “three evil forces” – terrorism, separatism and extremism – and encompassing politics and geoeconomics.In 2013, there was a Xi-Putin-Rouhani trilateral. Beijing expressed full support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear program (remember, this was two years before the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the JCPOA).Despite many experts dismissing it at the time, there was indeed a common China-Russia-Iran front on Syria (Axis of Resistance in action). Xinjiang was being promoted as the key hub for the Eurasian Land Bridge. Pipelineistan was at the heart of the Chinese strategy – from Kazakhstan oil to Turkmenistan gas. Some people may even remember when Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was waxing lyrical about an American-propelled New Silk Road.Now compare it to Xi’s Multilateralism Manifesto in Dushanbe eight years later, reminiscing on how the SCO “has proved to be an excellent example of multilateralism in the 21stcentury,” and “has played an important role in enhancing the voice of developing countries.”The strategic importance of this SCO summit taking place right after the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok cannot be overstated enough. The EEF focuses of course on the Russian Far East – and essentially advances interconnectivity between Russia and Asia. It is an absolutely key hub of Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership.A cornucopia of deals is on the horizon – expanding from the Far East to the Arctic and the development of the Northern Sea Route, and involving everything from precious metals and green energy to digital sovereignty flowing through logistics corridors between Asia and Europe via Russia.As Putin hinted in his keynote speech, this is what the Greater Eurasia Partnership is all about: the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), BRI, India’s initiative, ASEAN, and now the SCO, developing in a harmonized network, crucially operated by “sovereign decision-making centers.”So if the BRI proposes a very Taoist “community of shared future for human kind,” the Russian project, conceptually, proposes a dialogue of civilizations (already evoked by the Khatami years in Iran) and sovereign economic-political projects. They are, indeed, complementary.Glenn Diesen, Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal, is among the very few top scholars who are analyzing this process in depth. His latest book remarkably tells the whole story in its title: Europe as the Western Peninsula of Greater Eurasia: Geoeconomic Regions in a Multipolar World. It’s not clear whether Eurocrats in Brussels – slaves of Atlanticism and incapable of grasping the potential of Greater Eurasia – will end up exercising real strategic autonomy.Diesen evokes in detail the parallels between the Russian and the Chinese strategies. He notes how China “is pursuing a three-pillared geoeconomic initiative by developing technological leadership via its China 2025 plan, new transportation corridors via its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, and establishing new financial instruments such as banks, payment systems and the internationalization of the yuan. Russia is similarly pursuing technological sovereignty, both in the digital sphere and beyond, as well as new transportation corridors such as the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic, and, primarily, new financial instruments.”
The whole Global South, stunned by the accelerated collapse of the western Empire and its unilateral “rules-based order…
… now seems to be ready to embrace the new groove, fully displayed in Dushanbe: a multipolar Greater Eurasia of sovereign equals.
Interesting chat on my morning feed…
America controls both the currency (USD, the international reserve currency) and conduit (SWIFT) for international trade. This is their global imperial power.
They can print paper (out of nothing) to buy the world’s limited and precious resources while the rest of the world must earn or borrow the paper. They also decide who can or cannot trade. In addition, they control all the banks and financial institutes doing international business.
America can strangle and impose oppressive fines, indict and hijack, as well as corrupt and incite regime change, to turn any intransigent player into a whimpering idiot. They control the world’s media and the narrative. America can do no wrong and you’re all assholes living in hellholes.
Most importantly, America can print paper to build the greatest military force to control your mineral resources and trade routes, meanwhile pacifying and civilizing sundry barbaric people of defenseless countries. And guess who is paying for this monstrosity? If you think it’s the American taxpayers, you’d be wrong. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
The ruling class in America creates a ton of money from thin air which becomes debt that the rest of the enslaved world must buy. That debt becomes a debt of the American people which they can never repay, therefore they become debt slaves, quietly complying to their master’s orders.
And the money created eventually ends up in the coffers of the 1% American military industrial financial warmongering scammers. Since the rest of the enslaved world ends up being holders of American debt that pays almost no interest, of a currency that is being printed at exponential rate, and paying interest that is also printed out of thin air, you the victims are paying for the oppressive weapons of the American monstrosity.
Capische?
By the way, America did not invent this beautiful scheme. After kicking the Persians out of Greece in 479 BCE, Athens was the liberating hero beloved even by their perennial enemy, the Spartans. Then Athens formed the Delian League to fight the Persians.
Everyone must pay the League and send their sons to fight. The treasury of the League soon ended up in Athens, and used to enrich Athenians. Member cities desiring to leave the League were sacked, their men slaughtered, their women enslaved, and their sons castrated.
Athens at the head of the League became an imperial power even crueler than the Persians. In less than a generation, Athens turned from being the most admired Greek city state into the most hated. Eventually, it led to war with the Spartans, who allied with the Persians to destroy Athens. That's what happens to empires.
The question of setting up an international currency for trading is theoretically fine, and the SDR of the IMF serves that purpose to some extent, but at the end of the day, America still controls the IMF and SDR is but an accounting tool. Power and trust are what cause a promissory note to be used as a token of wealth for trading between countries.
Nixon actually defaulted and robbed the world blind. It’s a well known history which you can read up on your own (Google Nixon gold default). America and its dollar still has power, but trust is badly eroded. There is no good alternative at the moment that can challenge the USD, but China’s RMB is gaining, slowly and steadily.
The digital RMB is dangerous for the US dollar hegemony because people can pay anywhere in the world just by using a smartphone, and the transaction is done instantaneously, without the need for clearing through banks, without any bank fees, and certainly does not need clearing through any American system, completely kicking America out of the loop.
No more American clearing.
No more SWIFT.
No more waiting for days going through the international banking system.
And most importantly…
No more American unilateral sanctions.
Besides, RMBs are appreciating because of China’s growing economic power, which by the way, is based on production and innovation rather than running the printers, persistent lying, and highway robbery.
Below is an article about what happens if America defaults on its treasury bills. I suggest that China shouldn’t have to worry about its 1 trillion dollar reserve. America won’t let China buy anything valuable with it anyways. Anything of value China wants to buy is against America’s “national security”.
America will eventually have to pay up, as the T-bills in China’s reserve is only a small portion in the whole pot.
In any case, the collapse of the USD hegemony is much more valuable to China and the rest of the world than empty American paper promises, which by now should be badly discounted.
If you trust habitual liars, then it’s your problem.
The fall of the USD hegemony means that America can no longer print its way out of problems and let the rest of the world bail them out. They’ll have a hard time printing trillions for their military adventures.
Every trip to the South China Sea must be balanced against servicing their debt.
Their bases all around the world may have to figure out a way to generate an income, maybe by selling military shirts and boots, all made in China, of course.
Do you think that this is being overstated? Do you believe that somehow America will steer it’s financial ship into a safe harbor and regain control of it’s economic abilities?
As three former prime ministers in Paul Keating, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd have already pointed out, AUKUS puts Australians in greater danger, renders Australia a vassal to foreign power and antagonises our neighbours in the region.
Depending on how you count them, there are probably already four US bases in operation now:
Pine Gap near Alice Springs, Northern Territory,
Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt, north of the town of Exmouth, Western Australia,
Robertson Barracks in Darwin, Northern Territory,
Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station near Geraldton, WA.
However, the US military already has access to all major Australian Defence Force (ADF) training areas, northern Australian RAAF airfields, port facilities in Darwin and Fremantle, and probably future access too to an expanded Stirling naval base in Perth.
Under AUKUS, this may just be the beginning. It was largely ignored during the AUKUS media blitz and the dramatic cuckolding of the French but Peter Dutton had this to say at his press conference on September 16,
Unveiling plans for new facilities on Australian soil for US naval, air, and ground forces would entail “combined logistics, sustainment, and capability for maintenance to support our enhanced activities, including … for our submarines and surface combatants”. That is on top of “rotational deployments of all types of US military aircraft to Australia”.
If the plan is to shred Australia’s sovereignty and make us a target for China, he is succeeding with aplomb. We are about to be swamped by US military.
Do you think that China would invade Australia and attack the American military there? Or what do you think China would do to deal with this threat?
Oh, and worth a view…
“We made SARS. And we patented it on 19/4/2002, before there was any alleged outbreak in Asia”:
.
David E. Martin testifies at the German Corona Inquiry Committee July 9th, 2021. AV+transcript. China Rising Radio Sinoland 210907
"In Spring of 2000, I took my newly wedded mainland-Chinese wife to North America to visit the rest of the extended family.
We spent a week in Las Vegas so that my wife could experience a bit of American decadence.
One day, we walked into the Vegas Saks Department Store to browse on jewelry. An aged sales-lady immediately walked over and struck up a conversation.
My wife didn't speak a word of English, but I spoke like a native Canadian. The sales-lady asked us where we were from. I could have said we were from Hong Kong. I certainly could have said we were Canadians.
Unlike a lot of people who declared themselves Hong Konger or Taiwanese when traveling in the West, I said we were from China, and just by being confident in our own skin (I used to travel to Vegas every year for conventions and knew every nook and cranny), demonstrated that we were not ashamed to be Chinese. Aftermath: the old lady said if we were interested in anything, be sure to ask for her, as she had the authority to give Chinese tourists a discount. Nudge nudge wink wink. It was a revelation. I knew Chinese shoppers loved haggling, but I didn't know you could haggle at Saks."
Greenback’s crisis-opportunity
This article / comment is from a anti-China writer who views the e-RMB as a “pipe dream” and that the USD will regain it’s role as the leading and only global reserve currency.
Even bigger questions hang over the global financial system.The efforts by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other major economies to de-dollarize world trade is a work in progress, at best. The same goes for developing Asia, which spent the years since the region’s 1997-98 financial crisis pledging to wean economies off the dollar.Try as export-driven economies may, the dollar and US Treasuries are still the linchpin of the global trading system. Yet the political shenanigans on display in Washington could change that – and quickly.The “empire is crumbling” and the dollar is “slowly losing its sheen,” says Peter Koenig at Renmin University of China. Slowly, but surely, he says, the dollar “is losing its weight in the international financial market.”Technological change is accelerating the timeline, particularly as China outpaces the US in the race to bring a central bank-issued digital currency to market, says strategist Dante Alighieri Disparte at financial services firm Circle.“With the explosive proliferation of cryptocurrencies, including China’s introduction of a digital renminbi, it is not surprising to hear panicked warnings about the looming decline of the dollar,” Disparte says.It’s not the whole story, of course. If Biden’s Washington plays its cards right, Disparte notes, the dollar could end up being the “prime beneficiary of today’s market developments.”Yet the dollar is at the mercy of politics and politics can be highly toxic. If the current squabbling in Washington devastates trust in the core asset of the global financial system, current obsessing over China Evergrande will become a mere side show.
Do you think that he is correct, that the USD will regain it’s strength and global standing?
Oh. Jackie Ma. What have you done?
Jack Ma bought or invested in more than 30 media outlets, set up a university for the super rich (only those who owe a business worth $30m are qualify to enrolled as students, he is using such strategy to form a 1% gangster circle thinking he could one day control the media, economy, and government. But his link to Wall Street has been exposed in the process of Xi full scale anti corruption campaign.
His money laundering Alibaba Alipay is not put under control, his rich ganger University was shut down, his media empire is in the process of dismantling.
His corrupt friends who Jack up property prices, manipulated stock market is gone one by one….
No capitalist can bully a real people government serving the interest of the people.
US: We need to start a war to destroy China.
(Looks around all countries. Pause, silence… Then everyone replies at the same time)
Japan: You go first.
Korea: You go first.
India: You go first.
ASEAN: You go first.
Australia: I go first.
The U.S. would get its ass kicked in a war with China, which is precisely why I support one.
This is no longer my country. Not only is it no longer my country, its government has become my oppressor. We are now a photonegative of our former self, a Soviet Union of the 21st century.
I took not a little joy in seeing this government humiliated in Afghanistan, and my response to a war lost to China will be the same.
Cashless in China
No one uses cash any more in China. Oh we see it from time to time, but for most of us it’s a simple swipe of a QR code. That’s it. Bank visits are rare. ATM visits are unheard of. We’ve all adopted to it, and guess what? No fees to transfer money in any way shape or form.
No wonder the US Banking system is going into convulsions.
But…
Cash, cold hard cash, will never disappear. Cash will never be obsolete and we should all hope it will be with us for many years to come.
The need for payment that works with no-signal or no-electricity won’t go away no matter how digitally sophisticated we believe ourselves to be.
Anyone living in hurricane or typhoon-prone areas, where storms can send society back to the Stone Age, understand this better than most.
The passage below is from Cashless, Chapter 19, The case against CBDCs: The Illusion of Privacy
The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency went so far as to advise all residents to keep “cash in small denominations” at home in case of emergencies. The idea that a power cut, cyberattack, or major technology disruption would cripple the nation because of residents’ reliance on digital payment is a real concern. Anyone in the UK who had a credit card attached to WireCard payment systems experienced this firsthand when the company failed, and cards went offline for forty-eight hours. Saying that digital system failures can’t happen or will never happen seems foolish. So for the record, cash will be with us for some time to come. It provides a simple analog solution to payment in an increasingly digital world. To say that it has no place in our future [or has lapsed into obsolescence] is to deny the fragility of our digital systems, which, time and time again, fail spectacularly. Their failures are reminders of how new we are to this digital revolution and that cash, which has been around for millennia, will still be an integral part of our modernized financial system.
I would go as far as to say that hearing the call to completely eliminate cash should make readers, even the most “cashless,” become wary.
US Propaganda is saying that the submarines will have nuclear power and missiles with conventional payload. How nice. Chinese can relax. I did never see in my live such a retarded statement. So what is this statement? Gentleman’s agreement?
So submarines can be built with nuclear power and loaded with conventional missiles. But if submarines are built with such a space dimension that they can store nuclear missiles and loading mechanism that can handle nuclear missiles, and firing tubes that can accept nuclear missiles.
Than what is worth the US statement.
Do American think that Chinese are retarded?
By the time those submarines will be built the Chinese can built four times more powerful countermeasures.
And then there is Afghanistan
Empire of chickenhawks: Why America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan was actually perfect
We screwed up 20 years of pointless war. We didn’t win. We lost. Why wouldn’t we screw up the final exit?
The biggest fallacy about our exit from Afghanistan is that there was a “good” way for us to get out. There is no good way to lose a war. With defeat comes humiliation. We were humiliated in the way we pulled out of Kabul — and we should have been, because we believed the lies we had been told right up to the last moment.
The lies we heard at the end of our war in Afghanistan wereas the same ones we were told, and were only too happy to believe, for 20 long years: that everything was going swimmingly. Remember earlier in the summer when the headlines were about how the Taliban controlled a large percentage of the territory in Afghanistan, but the Afghan government and its supposed army still controlled the provincial capitals and Kabul, and that was where the power was.
What a total crock of shit. Everyone was shocked — shocked — when the headlines started to come. Aug. 9, from the AP: “Taliban press on, take two more provincial capitals.” That story was a doozie. “On Monday they [the Taliban] controlled five of the country’s 34 provincial capitals.” It didn’t really matter which two capitals the Taliban had taken. You had to read way down in the story to discover they were Aybak, capital of Samangan province, and Sar-e-Pul, capital of Sar-e-Pul province. Where the hell were they? Who had even heard of them?
That was Monday. By Wednesday, Aug. 11, here was the headline in Al Jazeera: “Timeline: Afghanistan provincial capitals captured by the Taliban.” How many, you might ask? In two days, the count had ballooned from five capitals to 18. Eighteen. Later that day, both Al Jazeera and Reuters were reporting that U.S. intelligence sources were saying that Kabul could “fall to Taliban within 90 days.”
Surprise! Three days later, the evacuation of Kabul began. On Sept. 1, two weeks later, CBS News headlined: “This is the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan” with an eerie night-vision video capture of Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, headed up the ramp of a C-17 cargo jet wearing full combat gear including bulletproof vest and helmet with night-vision goggles attached, carrying his M-4 automatic rifle.
How did Afghanistan collapse so quickly to Taliban control? Because “we” — the U.S. military and its NATO allies — never controlled it to begin with. Nor did our puppets in the so-called Afghan government. The idea that we ever did, that we ever “controlled” or even had our finger on the pulse of the “graveyard of empires” was a lie.
You know who told us that lie? Every government from George W. Bush on, and every general ever put in charge of that doomed mission. Every single one of them reported that all was well, that the Afghan army was 300,000 strong, that the Taliban was on the run, that the Afghan air force was taking over from the missions flown by American warplanes, that the Afghans had their own helicopters now. And that the Afghan president, whether it was Ashraf Ghani or Hamid Karzai, was firmly in charge back in Kabul.
And you know who went along with that fiction? The United States Congress, which voted for 20 years to spend the $2 trillion we pissed away over there, and each of the presidents — yes, including Barack Obama and Donald Trump — who approved every increase of troops, every troop withdrawal, every “surge” that was advertised as the solution to end all solutions, the thing that would finally put the Taliban on the run.
Remember all the Taliban commanders we were told were killed?
A drone strike took out this one!
Another drone strike took out that one!
Wow! We had to be winning if the Taliban was losing so many important leaders!
And then there were the keyboard commandos back in Washington and New York, and the neocons from the Council on Foreign Relations, and the growing chorus of retired generals — among them all of the commanders of our Afghanistan mission — who were all over the op-ed pages and cable news assuring us that All Was Well, as they racked up the megabucks sitting on the boards of defense contractors selling all the military shit that was winning the war for us.
"The eight generals who commanded American forces in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2018 have gone on to serve on more than 20 corporate boards,"
the Washington Post reported on Sept. 4, three days after we exited from Kabul with our tail between our legs.
There was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw the big “surge” of 2009 that was the answer-to-end-all-answers to every problem we were having over there. He has been “a board member or adviser for at least 10 companies since 2010, according to corporate filings and news releases,” the Post reported. There was Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., who commanded allied forces in 2013 and 2014, who went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin, the gigantic defense contractor. There was Gen. John R. Allen, commander in Afghanistan before Dunford, who is the president of the Brookings Institution, which has received $1.5 million over three years from Northrop Grumman, according to the Post. And Gen. David Petraeus, who preceded Allen and now sits on the board of KKR, a private equity firm in New York with many investments in the defense industry.
All of these gentlemen — and let’s take a moment to note they are all men, not a female commander among them — reported back to us from their command posts in Afghanistan how well things were going over there, how we were all over the Taliban, how the Afghan government was successfully “standing up” its well-equipped, well-trained army to defend the country from the Taliban. And then they went on cable TV and continued their lies when they got back to the U.S. and retired from the Army, because that’s what generals today do. They sit on corporate boards, they give incredibly well-paid speeches, they go on TV and they rake in the Big Bucks because they were so successful in Afghanistan … and in Iraq, too. Remember Petraeus and his “surge” in 2007? Boy, were we ever surging, huh? I remember Newsweek published a cover image of Petraeus in 2004 wearing in his combat fatigues, standing on a tarmac with a Blackhawk helicopter behind him, with the headline: “Can this man save Iraq?” The story, believe it or not, was about how Petraeus was taking over the training of the Iraqi army, and that was what was going to “save Iraq.” Don’t you think we should have concluded, when the “surge” became necessary in 2007, that Petraeus had utterly failed in his mission to train the Iraqi army and “save Iraq” back in 2004?
The words “crock of shit” again come to mind, but they are far, far from adequate. These presidents, and these members of Congress, and these generals, and these war-happy pundits, ran a great big gigantic con on the citizens of this country who were paying the taxes which — someday, perhaps — will pay for the $2 trillion we pissed away over in Afghanistan, and the trillions we pissed away in Iraq, too. They lied over and over and over again that with just another troop surge, or another troop withdrawal (because suddenly everything was hunky-dory) and of course just another infusion of billions and billions of dollars and the lost of a couple thousand more American lives we could “win” in Afghanistan and “win” in Iraq.
Over there, they laughed at us. The Afghans and the Iraqis who took the money, took all the equipment we gave them, took 20 years of our politics and our “prestige” as a nation, and the whole time they were laughing their heads off, because they knew what we didn’t know. None of it was working. None of it would ever work. And one day we would be headed out of both countries with our tails between our legs, because that’s what you do when you lose.
That’s why our frantic, chaotic exit from Kabul was perfect, because it perfectly capped off 20 years of lies about what was really going on over there, 20 years of frantic, chaotic thrashing around and throwing money and the bodies of young American men and women at a problem that could never be solved. It was an enormous delusion that we, the United States of America, could march into those countries thousands of miles away from our shores and — if we spent enough money and invented and fielded enough “mine resistant vehicles” and fired enough missiles from enough drones at enough “Taliban commanders” — could somehow emerge from those quagmires victorious.
We couldn’t, and we didn’t, and when that American major general, all kitted-out in the combat gear we spent 20 years dressing our soldiers in, scampered up the ramp of that cargo jet to steal away from the Kabul airport in the middle of the night, it was the absolute perfect ending to the perfect disaster the war in Afghanistan had always been. We were humiliated in front of the entire world, as we should have been. The way we left Afghanistan “did damage to our credibility and to our reputation,” the famous Gen. Petraeus told CBS when it was all over.
Yeah, it did, Dave, and it should have. Maybe now the geniuses who got us into those godforsaken disastrous wars and kept us there will think twice before they do it again.
Except, wait. That was supposed to have been the great “lesson of Vietnam.” Never mind.
American debt is looming large…
the US federal government’s rivers of borrowed money running dry and in urgent need of replenishing. The other is a major Chinese property developer which has run into financial trouble, because the company veered off the road by squandering too much on making electric cars and sponsoring a football club.
As US federal debt default looms, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is facing her biggest test in her eight-month tenure to convince reluctant Republican lawmakers to agree to raise the US’ national debt limit, which is currently set at $28.5 trillion. The stakes are high, because if Yellen’s effort fails, the US financial system will collapse.
Yellen has called Republican leaders to convey the economic danger which lays ahead, bluntly warning that the Treasury Department’s ability to stave off default is limited, and the failure to lift the debt cap by late October would be “catastrophic” for the country and the world.
Six former US treasury secretaries last week sent a letter to top US lawmakers, warning them a default would roil financial markets and blunt economic growth. According to US media reports, Yellen last week also warned the nation’s largest banks and financial institutions about the very real risk of a default. She has spoken to chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, briefing them the likely disastrous impact a federal default will produce.
To make things worse, both Democrats and Republicans in the US are at each other’s throats now over US President Joe Biden’s new $3.5 trillion spending bill, which proposes heavy tax raises on rich families and corporations, and has met fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers. Whether they will compromise on the debt limit, by making a last-minute deal with the White House to reduce Biden’s giant spending plan remains to be seen.
Market analysts say if the US government defaults on its colossal debt, a financial system crisis of a magnitude larger than the 2008-09 debacle could occur, which is estimated to lead to an evaporation of $15 trillion in wealth and loss of 6 million jobs in the US. The capital market is now on tenterhooks facing a potential financial time bomb.
Do you think that the USA will raise the debt ceiling, or will default? There is a third option, that China and Russsia would “bail out the USA”. What do you think will happen?
Consequences.
Ever since President Trump was elected it was millions of dollars in a hate-hate-hate China narrative. And this has resulted in all sorts of violence, bad will, and Congressional action. What is not being reported is how the Chinese feel about America and Japan today.
Here is a Chinese car with pro-Japan and Pro-America stickers and wording. VIDEO.
Video.
How AP, Reuters And SCMP Propagandize Their Readers Against China
A typical ‘western’ anti-China propaganda claim is that China is using its military aggressively. ‘Western’ news agencies do this on a regular base when they report of Chinese air maneuvers around Taiwan.
Oh my goodness!
Drudge report reporting this “news” to the American people.
This report by the South China Morning Post, based on AP and Reuters items, is a perfect example for that:
Taiwan’s air force scrambled again on Friday to warn away 25 Chinese aircraft that entered its air defence zone, according to the defence ministry in Taipei.Taiwan has complained for a year or more of repeated missions by China’s air force, often in the southwestern part of its air defence zone close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.
The latest PLA air force mission involved 18 J-16 and four Su-30 fighters plus two nuclear-capable H-6 bombers and an anti-submarine aircraft, the Taiwan ministry said.
It said Taiwan sent combat aircraft to warn away the PLA aircraft, while missile systems were deployed to monitor them.
The Chinese aircraft all flew in an area close to the Pratas, with the two bombers flying closest to the atoll, according to a map that the ministry issued.
I do not believe that China would fly its bombers and jets into Taiwan’s “air defense zone” because that is the geographic area where Taiwan would actually shoot to take them down.
So I checked with the news agency reports the SCMP story is based on. AP headlines:
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China sent 25 fighter jets toward self-ruled Taiwan in a large display of force on China’s National Day Friday.The People’s Liberation Army flew 18 J-16 fighter jets as well as two H-6 bombers, among other planes. Taiwan deployed air patrol forces in response and tracked the Chinese aircraft on its air defense systems, the island’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.
China has sent planes toward the island it claims as part of its territory on a near daily basis in the last couple of years, stepping up military harassment with drills.
No “air defense zone” there but one extra point for “military harassment”. Reuters is less subtle:
TAIPEI, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Taiwan’s air force scrambled again on Friday to warn away 25 Chinese aircraft that entered its air defence zone, the defence ministry in Taipei said, the same day as China marked its national day, the founding of the People’s Republic of China.Chinese-claimed Taiwan has complained for a year or more of repeated missions by China’s air force near the democratically governed island, often in the southwestern part of its air defence zone close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.
The latest Chinese mission involved 18 J-16 and four Su-30 fighters plus two nuclear-capable H-6 bombers and an anti-submarine aircraft, the Taiwan ministry said.
So the “air defense zone” claims comes from Reuters. It is however 100% fake news. Neither did the Chinese airforce fly into the “air defense zone” of Taiwan nor did Taiwan claim that it did.
Here is the original news item from the Ministry of Defense of Taiwan. The headline and first line say it all:
…There is no “air defense zone” (ADZ) in there. Instead there is Taiwan’s ADIZ, or “Air Defense Identification Zone”, into which Chinese planes ‘intruded’.
An air defense identification zone (ADIZ) is airspace over land or water in which the identification, location, and control of civil aircraft is performed in the interest of national security. They may extend beyond a country's territory to give the country more time to respond to possibly hostile aircraft. The concept of an ADIZ is not defined in any international treaty and is not regulated by any international body..
Some countries unilateral declare an ADIZ around this or that territory. They ask any plane entering it to identify itself. As ADIZ are unilateral ‘pretty please’ requests with no binding power they are regularly ignored
Taiwan has an ADIZ that covers most of the Taiwan Strait, part of the Chinese province of Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi and part of the East China Sea and adjacent airspace. Most of the ADIZ of Taiwan is built on its exclusive economic zone. Taiwan’s ADIZ was designed and created by the United States Armed Forces (USAF) after World War II.
The Taiwanese Defense Ministry Military News Updates claim that Chinese ‘violations’ of its ADIZ happen each and every day.
The Reuters fake news piece also says that the Chinese planes flew near to Pratas Island (Dongsha) which China as well as Taiwan both claim as their territory.
In fact mainland China is nearer to Pratas than Taiwan is.
The Twitter account of Taiwan’s Defense Ministry just posted this map of the alleged ‘violations’ which perfectly shows how ridiculous such claims are:
The AP report is misleading as it implies a special meaning to something that happens regularly. The Reuters piece is obviously fake news as it claims that Taiwan’s defense ministry said something which it did not say. The SCMP deserves to be criticized too as any reporter and editor covering such news should know the difference between an ADZ and an ADIZ and should have recognized that the “air defense zone” claim in the Reuters piece is obviously bollocks.
That said all three fulfill their intended purpose. They propagandize those who read them against China by depicting normal military training of China’s armed forces as aggression against its neighbors.
Posted by b on October 1, 2021 at 16:52 UTC | Permalink
It’s just another example of just how the anti-China narrative is being pushed, and pushed and pushed relentlessly. Nothing good can happen from this. I believe that the American and the Australians, and the Brits are now all worked up into a frothy fury against China and will support a war. Do you agree with me on this, or do you have other thoughts?
How things are being handled…
Curious. This next article…
Huawei CFO gets hero’s welcome; Canadians land quietly
The tallest building in Shenzhen lit up with scrolling slogan “Welcome Home, Meng Wanzhou” across its facade.
The two Canadians freed by Beijing returned to their homeland with less fanfare Huawei CFO gets hero’s welcome; Canadians land quietly | National Post
Fact Sheet: U.S. Interference in Hong Kong Affairs and Support for Anti-China, Destabilizing Forces”
As published on Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China's website. /fmprc.gov.cn
Editor’s note: Grenville Cross is a senior counsel and professor of law, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR. The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
In recent years, China’s achievements have surpassed all expectations, and the United States has become increasingly paranoid. It realizes its post-war hegemony can no longer be taken for granted, and that its star is slowly fading. Ever since the UK-based Center for Economics and Business Research reported in December 2020 that China will overtake the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast, it has been panic stations in Washington D.C.
The U.S., however, faces massive problems, and they are getting worse. It is burdened with a huge national debt, standing at $28.4 billion in August, about $1.7 billion more than a year earlier. Its foreign policy is a shambles, with the Afghanistan debacle being but the latest example, and even its closest allies are appalled by its incompetence and duplicity. Indeed, after the AUKUS deal between the U.S., Australia and the UK was sprung on an unsuspecting world on September 15, France, which was cheated out of a submarine contract, denounced it as a “stab in the back”, and, for the first time ever, withdrew its ambassador from Washington D.C.
Instead, however, of taking a long, hard look at itself, the previous and present U.S. administrations have resorted to scapegoating China, hoping to deflect attention away from their own woes. Although most of its problems are of its own making, the U.S. has sought to blame China not only for its own ills but also those of the world, thereby laying the groundwork for hostile interventions. It has decided that one of the ways of dealing with China is by fomenting internal dissent and spreading misinformation about it, just as it has done in its efforts to weaken Russia.
On June 9, 2019, when the protest movement in Hong Kong and its armed wing declared war on society, ostensibly over the SAR government’s fugitive surrender bill, the U.S. saw its chance. Although the proposals would have facilitated the return of criminal fugitives to 177 jurisdictions, subject to court oversight, and were entirely reasonable, the U.S., to inflame tensions, demonized them, and provided every encouragement to the protesters.
Indeed, on August 6, 2019, at the height of the violence in Hong Kong, the U.S. Consul General’s political counselor, Julie Eadeh, met covertly with protest leaders, including Joshua Wong Chi-fung and Nathan Law Kwun-chung, at a local hotel, presumably to share U.S. views on the insurrection and provide ongoing advice.
Again, after Brian Leung Kai-ping, one of the rioters who trashed the Legislative Council complex on July 1, 2019, causing damage estimated at HK$50 million ($6.4 million), fled the city, he was not only welcomed to the U.S., but also invited to the Congress as an honored guest.
Instead of denouncing the rioters who were bringing death and destruction to Hong Kong streets, the then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo endorsed the protest movement’s demands, supported their anti-police agenda, and sought to blame the government for the insurrection.
Even when the protest movement targeted the rule of law by firebombing the courts and threatening the judges, Pompeo and his cronies continued to lionize the protest leaders, and to whitewash their excesses. It was, by any yardstick, partisanship of the worst sort, and represented a new low in U.S. foreign policy.
Even when anti-China legislators, linked to the protest movement, sabotaged the work of the Legislative Council, preventing the passage of legislation for nearly seven months in 2019-20, the U.S. condemned the initiatives taken to get things back on track. Even though it would never have tolerated obstructionism of this type at home, it expected the authorities to allow it in Hong Kong, although the name of its game was, of course, mischief-making.
But with the exclusion of legislators bent on mayhem, and their replacement with responsible citizens committed to the well-being of Hong Kong and the national good, the city now has the prospect of effective governance.
Working through front organizations, the U.S. provided multifaceted support to the protest movement and its allies throughout the insurrection. They included various U.S.-based entities, including the National Endowment for Democracy, always generous with its cash when opponents of the Hong Kong SAR government came knocking, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
It has also now come to light that various other U.S.-backed groups were complicit in the uprising, including the Oslo Freedom Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institute and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which, despite their fancy names, all had sinister agendas. Although many of them operated in the shadows, this cannot be said of the U.S. Strategic Competition Act 2021, which allocated $10 million for the promotion of “democracy in Hong Kong”, a euphemism for stirring up trouble.
Once, however, the National Security Law was enacted, it provided the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) government with the tools it required to save the city’s way of life and capitalist system, and put an end to undercover operations by foreign powers. The U.S., however, responded by imposing sanctions on the city, revoking its favorable trade status, and suspending the agreement on surrender of fugitive offenders with the HKSAR.
Not once, however, did the U.S. explain how it thought damaging Hong Kong like this would in any way benefit its people, which was revelatory. Perhaps more than anything else, its inability to justify its actions highlighted not only its determination to undermine China by ruining Hong Kong, but also its willingness to throw a long-standing friend under the bus, just as it has now done to France, which also made the mistake of trusting it.
The U.S. attempts to destabilize Hong Kong are a disgrace, as well as a betrayal. The lengths to which it was prepared to go to hurt China beggar belief, and they have now been chronicled for all to see by the China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On September 24, it issued a Fact Sheet entitled “U.S. Interference in Hong Kong Affairs and Support for Anti-China Destabilizing Forces”, which is highly detailed and a real eye-opener. It exposes cynical, comprehensive and intensive efforts by a global bullyboy to ruin one of the world’s most successful cities, and is essential reading for anybody wishing to know the depths to which the U.S. is prepared to sink.
Quite clearly, if the evidence contained in the Fact Sheet were to be presented in a court of law responsible for trying the U.S. for willful depredations against Hong Kong and its people, the only possible verdict would be “guilty as charged.” This, alas, will never happen, but great comfort can nonetheless be derived from the city’s survival, against all the odds.
Although, at one point, China’s adversaries thought they could bring Hong Kong to its knees and destroy the “one country, two systems” policy, they have, after the nation rallied round, been decisively thwarted. Indeed, with the Central Government’s steadfast support, the city has emerged from its experiences stronger than ever, and can now face its future with renewed confidence.
Fact listing
It’s a long list. You can skim over and refer to it later…
List of facts about U.S. intervention in Hong Kong affairs and support of anti-China forces in Hong Kong
List of facts about U.S. intervention in Hong Kong affairs and support of anti-China forces in Hong Kong
2021-09-24
1. Concocting Hong Kong-related bills, discrediting China’s Hong Kong policy, interfering in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, and wantonly interfering in China’s internal affairs.
1. On November 27, 2019, the then-U.S. President Trump signed the “Hong Kong” concocted by the U.S. Congress in order to show his support for the anti-China and Hong Kong forces and obstruct the efforts of the Chinese Central Government and the Hong Kong SAR government to stop violence, curb chaos, and restore order. The Human Rights and Democracy Act” and the “Prohibition of Export of Related Ammunitions to Hong Kong Police”. The relevant bill slanders the Chinese central government for undermining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, authorizes the US President to impose sanctions against relevant Chinese officials such as denying entry and freezing assets in the US, and requires the US Secretary of State to submit an annual report on Hong Kong affairs and prohibit the US from exporting tear gas and pepper spray to Hong Kong. , Rubber bullets and stun guns and other police equipment.
2. On July 14, 2020, the then US President Trump signed the “Hong Kong Autonomy Act.” The law requires sanctions against so-called foreign individuals or entities related to China’s breach of Hong Kong-related obligations, as well as foreign financial institutions that conduct important transactions with related individuals or entities, and supports so-called “persecuted” Hong Kong residents to enter the United States. On the same day, Trump signed No. 13936 “Presidential Executive Order on the Normalization of Hong Kong”, which determined that the situation in Hong Kong constitutes a threat to the security, foreign policy and economy of the United States, and accordingly declared a national emergency, including the suspension and cancellation of special grants to Hong Kong. Preferential treatment, authorization to impose sanctions on Hong Kong entities and individuals, etc.
3. On February 18, 2021, Meeks, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives, proposed the so-called “resolution condemning China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for continuing to violate the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong people”, slandering the Chinese central government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government for upholding the rule of law. The case was approved by the House of Representatives on April 19.
4. The U.S. Congress is reviewing several negative Hong Kong bills, including: On January 25 and February 8, 2021, U.S. Republican Representative Curtis and U.S. Senator Rubio proposed “Hong Kong” in the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively. The Safe Harbor Act requires the U.S. government to provide refugee status to “Hong Kong independence” elements involved in the Hong Kong riots; on March 18, 2021, Republican Senator Rubio proposed the so-called “condemnation of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party for repressing Hong Kong. Including the arrest of democrats and repeated violations of the “Sino-British Joint Declaration” and Hong Kong Basic Law resolutions”; on June 24, 2021, Republican Senator Sass proposed the “Hong Kong Democratic Congress Gold Medal Bill”, clamoring to Li Zhiying , Luo Weiguang, Zhang Jianhong, Zhou Daquan, Chen Peimin, Zhang Zhiwei, Yang Qingqi and other Hong Kong “Apple Daily” executives and all staff members of the newspaper awarded the American Association Gold Medal; June 30, 2021, Democratic Congressman Malinowski Introduced the “Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act of 2021”, which requires the provision of asylum for anti-China chaos in Hong Kong, criminals and criminals, and provide them with convenient access to the United States; on June 30, 2021, Republican Representative Perry proposed “Hong Kong The Freedom Act requires that the US President be authorized to recognize the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as an “independent country.”
2. Flagrantly imposing sanctions in an attempt to obstruct the smooth implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law and the relevant decisions of the National People’s Congress of China in Hong Kong.
1. On May 29, 2020, the then US President Trump announced the cancellation of Hong Kong’s special status and Hong Kong’s commercial preferential measures.
2. On June 29, 2020, the then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo announced that the export of U.S. defense equipment to Hong Kong will now be banned, and the export of U.S. defense and dual-use technologies to Hong Kong will be restricted.
3. On June 29, 2020, the then US Secretary of Commerce Ross issued a statement officially abolishing the special trade treatment for Hong Kong, prohibiting the sale of dual-use high-tech equipment to Hong Kong, and will continue to evaluate the cancellation of other special treatments in Hong Kong.
4. On June 30, 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced the termination of the Hong Kong export license exception treatment and prohibits the export of defense equipment and sensitive technology to Hong Kong.
5. On August 7, 2020, the U.S. government announced sanctions against 11 officials of the Chinese Central Government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government on the grounds of enforcing the Hong Kong National Security Law and undermining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.
6. On August 11, 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that from September 25, Hong Kong exports to the United States must indicate the origin of “China” and prohibit the use of the “Made in Hong Kong” label.
7. On August 19, 2020, the US State Department announced the suspension or termination of the three bilateral agreements signed with Hong Kong, including the transfer of fugitive offenders, the transfer of sentenced persons, and the exemption of international shipping profits tax.
8. On October 14, 2020, the U.S. State Department submitted its first Hong Kong-related report to the U.S. Congress in accordance with the requirements of the “Hong Kong Autonomy Act.” The financial institutions related to the above-mentioned persons impose sanctions.
9. On November 9, 2020, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against four officials of the Chinese Central Government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government on the grounds that they threatened Hong Kong’s peace, security, and high degree of autonomy.
10. On December 7, 2020, the US State Department imposed sanctions on 14 vice-chairmen of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China on the grounds that the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China enacted the Hong Kong National Security Law and disqualified four opposition members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
11. On January 15, 2021, the then US Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement on the grounds that the Hong Kong police arrested 55 so-called democrats and imposed sanctions on 6 officials of the Chinese Central Government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government.
12. On March 16, 2021, the US State Department updated the “Hong Kong Autonomy Law” report, and announced the update of the list of Hong Kong-related sanctions and additional financial services based on the relevant decisions adopted by the National People’s Congress to improve the Hong Kong election system and the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law. Sanctions.
13. On July 7, 2021, the White House issued the so-called “Notice on the Continuing Implementation of the National Emergency Concerning Hong Kong”, announcing the extension of the so-called “national emergency declared in response to the situation in Hong Kong” and extending the US sanctions against Hong Kong for one year.
14. On July 16, 2021, the US State Department, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Treasury fabricated the so-called “Hong Kong Business Warning” and discredited Hong Kong’s business environment on the grounds that the SAR implemented the Hong Kong National Security Law and the suspension of the “Apple Daily”. , Vilified the development of Hong Kong and the prospects of “one country, two systems”, and announced sanctions on seven officials of the Liaison Office of the Central Committee of Hong Kong. US Secretary of State Blincoln also issued a so-called statement on the first anniversary of the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law, slandering the National Security Law and attacking the Chinese government’s policy towards Hong Kong.
3. Slander and slander the affairs of the Special Administrative Region, arbitrarily discuss the enforcement actions of the Hong Kong police, and undermine the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong.
1. On February 25, 2019, the then U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong, Tang Weikang, publicly expressed in an interview his concern about the SAR government’s proposed revision of the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, claiming that the amendment may affect the implementation of the bilateral agreement between the United States and Hong Kong.
2. On March 21, 2019, the U.S. State Department issued the “2019 Hong Kong Policy and Law Report”, claiming that the freedom of speech in Hong Kong has been eroded and that the Chinese government has increased its intervention in Hong Kong affairs, causing damage to Hong Kong in many ways.
3. On May 7, 2019, the US Congress “US-China Economic and Security Evaluation Committee” issued a report that slandered the SAR government’s amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance and “eroded Hong Kong’s autonomy”, which constituted a serious threat to the national security of the United States and the economic interests of the United States in Hong Kong. risk.
4. On May 16, 2019, the U.S. State Department issued a statement falsely claiming that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance threatened the rule of law in Hong Kong and was concerned about this.
5. On June 19, 2019, when Speaker of the House of Representatives Pelosi spoke at the Christian Science Monitor’s breakfast meeting, he ignored the various extreme atrocities committed by anti-China and Hong Kong elements, claiming that “2 million people took to the streets to oppose the amendment. The Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, isn’t that a beautiful landscape?”, openly condoned and encouraged anti-China chaos in Hong Kong to use illegal and violent means to confront the central government and the SAR government.
6. On July 26, 2019, Engel, then chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, falsely claimed that the Hong Kong police used violence in handling demonstrations, which damaged Hong Kong’s international reputation in governance and justice.
7. On September 17, 2019, the United States “Congress-Executive China Committee” held a hearing on the situation in Hong Kong, beautifying the anti-revision violent demonstrations, discrediting the SAR government’s handling of the Hong Kong police, falsely claiming that it undermined the “one country, two systems” and Hong Kong autonomy.
8. On September 28, 2019, the US “Congress-Executive China Committee” issued a statement on the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central”, discrediting “One Country, Two Systems” and the central government’s policy towards Hong Kong.
9. On October 7, 2019, the then-U.S. President Trump stated that he hoped that the Hong Kong protest issue would be resolved humanely. The people of Hong Kong were great. They waved the American flag and more than 2 million people participated in the protest. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
10. On October 24, 2019, the then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence delivered an anti-China speech at the Wilson Center, a think-tank in Washington. He repeatedly mentioned Hong Kong’s “regulation turmoil”, claiming that “Hong Kong is a living example, showing how China would embrace freedom. What will happen”.
11. On November 21, 2019, Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States Pelosi made a public speech after the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act” was passed and reviewed, claiming that “China’s commitment to Hong Kong’s complete autonomy has been broken” and deliberately distorting “One Country, Two Systems” , Confusion of right and wrong.
12. On December 10, 2019, the US Consul General in Hong Kong, Smith, wrote an article in Ming Pao in Hong Kong, threatening that “the United States has consistently committed to human rights in Hong Kong”, claiming that “the United States’ enactment of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act demonstrates the universal value of the United States. The commitment of the United States reflects the United States’ concern about Beijing’s erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy.”
13. On May 22, 2020, the then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement on the “Decision on Establishing and Improving the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s Legal System and Implementation Mechanism for Maintaining National Security” by the National People’s Congress of China, slandering the Hong Kong National Security Law as “ Impose” and “undermine Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.”
14. On May 27, 2020, the then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo once again issued a statement on the imminent review and approval of the Hong Kong National Security Law by the National People’s Congress of China, arguing that the United States hopes that Hong Kong, as a “fortress of freedom”, can become a model for “authoritarian” China, and to The U.S. Congress “confirmed” that Hong Kong should no longer enjoy the treatment granted to it by U.S. law before July 1997.
15. On May 28, 2020, the U.S. State Department submitted the “2020 Hong Kong Policy Law Report” to Congress, confirming that Hong Kong cannot continue to enjoy the special treatment provided by U.S. law.
16. On June 30, 2020, the then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement falsely claiming that the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law undermined “One Country, Two Systems” and violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the commitments made in Hong Kong’s Basic Law.
17. On July 1, 2020, the Speaker of the U.S. Congress, Pelosi, after passing the “Hong Kong Autonomy Act” in the U.S. House of Representatives, falsely claimed that the Hong Kong National Security Act is a “cruel and comprehensive suppression of Hong Kong, undermining Hong Kong’s freedom, and marking’one country, two systems.” ‘Death’.
18. On July 6, 2020, US Consul General Smith in Hong Kong falsely claimed that Hong Kong’s national security law erode the basic human rights and freedoms of Hong Kong people and create an atmosphere of self-censorship, which is a tragedy in Hong Kong.
19. On July 14, 2020, the then US Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement supporting the so-called “primary election” illegally held by the Hong Kong opposition.
20. On July 23, 2020, the then US Secretary of State Pompeo delivered the so-called “Communist China and the Future of the Free World” anti-China speech, maliciously attacking the leadership of the Communist Party of China and China’s political system, spreading the China threat theory, and slandering the so-called strengthening of the Communist Party of China The control of Hong Kong has beautified Luo Guancong and other anti-China chaos in Hong Kong into democracy fighters.
21. On July 31, 2020, the then White House spokesperson McNerney stated that the United States opposed the Hong Kong SAR government’s disqualification of opposition candidates.
Fact Sheet: U.S. Interference in Hong Kong Affairs and Support for Anti-China, Destabilizing Forces
2021/09/24
I. Enacting Hong Kong-related Acts, vilifying China’s policy on Hong Kong, meddling in Hong Kong affairs, and wantonly interfering in China’s internal affairs
1. On 27 November 2019, in collusion with those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong and obstruct efforts of China’s central government and the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) to stop violence and restore law and order, then U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law two bills passed by the U.S. Congress, i.e. the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 and the Act to prohibit the commercial export of covered munitions items to the Hong Kong Police Force. These bills accuse China’s central government of undermining the high degree of autonomy of Hong Kong, authorize the U.S. President to impose sanctions such as inadmissibility to the United States and asset blocking against relevant Chinese officials, require the U.S. Secretary of State to submit a report regarding Hong Kong affairs on a yearly basis, and prohibit U.S. exports of police equipment, such as tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and stun guns, to Hong Kong.
2. On 14 July 2020, then U.S. President Trump signed into law the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which requires the imposition of sanctions with respect to the foreign individuals or entities involved in the so-called erosion of certain obligations of China with respect to Hong Kong and foreign financial institutions that conduct significant transactions with those individuals or entities. It also supported permanent residents of Hong Kong who have been “persecuted” to enter the United States. On the same day, Trump signed the President’s Executive Order 13936 on Hong Kong Normalization, which determined that the situation with respect to Hong Kong constitutes a threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States. He declared a national emergency on that basis, which included measures to suspend or eliminate the different and preferential treatment for Hong Kong, and to authorize sanctions against entities and individuals with respect to Hong Kong.
3. On 18 February 2021, Gregory Meeks, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution condemning the so-called “continued violation of rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region”, which slandered the efforts made by China’s central government and the HKSAR government to uphold the rule of law, maintain order and stability and protect the life, property and safety of Hong Kong residents. The resolution was adopted by the House on 19 April.
4. The U.S. Congress is considering several other ill-intentioned bills regarding Hong Kong:
On 25 January and 8 February 2021, Republican Representative John Curtis and Republican Senator Marco Rubio introduced the Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act in the House and the Senate respectively, requiring the U.S. government to designate refugee status to individuals espousing “Hong Kong independence” and participating in the riots in Hong Kong.
On 18 March 2021, Senator Rubio introduced a resolution condemning the so-called “crackdown by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, including the arrests of pro-democracy activists and repeated violations of the obligations of that Government undertaken in the Sino-British Declaration of 1984 and the Hong Kong Basic Law”.
On 24 June 2021, Republican Senator Ben Sasse introduced the Democracy in Hong Kong Congressional Gold Medal Act on conferring the Congressional Gold Medal to Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, Ryan Law Wai-kwong, Cheung Kim-hung, Royston Chow Tat-kuen, Chan Pui-man, Cheung Chi-wai, Yeung Ching-kee and all the executives and staff of Apple Daily, a newspaper in Hong Kong.
On 30 June 2021, Republican Representative Tom Malinowski introduced the Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act of 2021, calling for providing protected status to those who oppose China and provoke instability as well as law breakers and offenders in Hong Kong and for enhancing protocols to facilitate their travels to the United States.
On 30 June 2021, Republican Representative Scott Perry introduced the Hong Kong Freedom Act, calling for authorizing the U.S. President to recognize the HKSAR as “a separate, independent country”.
II. Imposing sanctions in an attempt to obstruct the implementation in Hong Kong of the Hong Kong National Security Law and relevant decisions of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC)
1. On 29 May 2020, then U.S. President Trump announced revocation of the special status and preferential economic treatment for Hong Kong.
2. On 29 June 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the immediate end of exports of U.S. defense equipment to Hong Kong and restrictions on exports of U.S. defense and dual-use technologies to Hong Kong.
3. On 29 June 2020, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross issued a statement, officially revoking Hong Kong’s special status in trade, banning exports of dual-use high-tech products to Hong Kong, and stating that further actions to eliminate differential treatment for Hong Kong were also being evaluated.
4. On 30 June 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced the suspension of license exceptions for exports to Hong Kong, banning exports of U.S.-origin defense equipment and sensitive technologies to Hong Kong.
5. On 7 August 2020, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on 11 officials of China’s central government and the HKSAR government on the ground of enforcing the Hong Kong National Security Law and undermining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.
6. On 11 August 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that after 25 September 2020, imported goods produced in Hong Kong may no longer be marked to indicate “Hong Kong” as their origin, but must be marked to indicate “China”.
7. On 19 August 2020, the U.S. Department of State announced the suspension or termination of three bilateral agreements with Hong Kong covering the surrender of fugitive offenders, the transfer of sentenced persons, and reciprocal tax exemptions on income derived from the international operation of ships.
8. On 14 October 2020, the U.S. Department of State submitted its first report to Congress pursuant to the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, listing 10 officials of China’s central government and the HKSAR government as “persons undermining the autonomy of Hong Kong” and threatening to impose sanctions on financial institutions related to these individuals.
9. On 9 November 2020, the U.S. Department of State announced sanctions on four officials of China’s central government and the HKSAR government for “threatening the peace, security and autonomy of Hong Kong”.
10. On 7 December 2020, the U.S. Department of State imposed sanctions on 14 Vice Chairpersons of the Standing Committee of the NPC of China on the ground of the NPC Standing Committee formulating the Hong Kong National Security Law and disqualifying four opposition members of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.
11. On 15 January 2021, then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement, announcing sanctions on six officials of China’s central government and the HKSAR government for arresting 55 so-called “pro-democracy politicians and activists” by Hong Kong police.
12. On 16 March 2021, the U.S. Department of State updated its Hong Kong Autonomy Act report, announcing an updated list of sanctioned individuals and additional financial sanctions following the NPC’s decision to improve the electoral system of Hong Kong and implement the Hong Kong National Security Law.
13. On 7 July 2021, the White House issued a Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Hong Kong, announcing the continuation of the so-called national emergency declared with respect to the Hong Kong situation, and extended U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong for one year.
14. On 16 July 2021, the U.S. Department of State, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Treasury jointly issued a so-called “Hong Kong Business Advisory” on the ground of enforcing the Hong Kong National Security Law and closing of Apple Daily, in an attempt to cast doubt over Hong Kong’s business environment as well as the development of Hong Kong and the prospects of One Country, Two Systems in Hong Kong. In addition, new sanctions were announced on seven officials of the central government’s liaison office in the HKSAR. On the same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement “marking one year of Hong Kong’s national security law”, in which he made groundless attacks on the Hong Kong National Security Law and the Chinese government’s policy on Hong Kong.
III. Making unfounded charges against HKSAR affairs and law enforcement actions taken by Hong Kong police in an attempt to undermine Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability
1. On 25 February 2019, then U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong Kurt Tong expressed in an interview his concerns about the HKSAR government’s plan to introduce amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, saying that an amendment could have some impact on the implementation of the bilateral arrangements between the United States and Hong Kong.
2. On 21 March 2019, the U.S. Department of State released 2019 Hong Kong Policy Act Report alleging that freedom of expression in Hong Kong was facing setbacks, and that the increased intervention by China’s central government in Hong Kong affairs had “adversely impacted Hong Kong in multiple areas”.
3. On 7 May 2019, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission of U.S. Congress issued a report, alleging that the HKSAR government’s proposed extradition bill would “erode Hong Kong’s autonomy” and create serious risks for U.S. national security and economic interests in Hong Kong.
4. On 16 May 2019, the U.S. State Department issued a statement, alleging that the HKSAR government’s proposed amendments to the Fugitive Ordinance would threaten Hong Kong’s rule of law and expressing concerns about it.
5. On 19 June 2019, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed a breakfast meeting hosted by The Christian Science Monitor in which she turned a blind eye to the extremist and violent acts committed by those who were opposed to China and attempted to destabilize Hong Kong and claimed that “the demonstration by some two million people against the extradition bill” was “a beautiful sight to behold”. She thus openly urged rioters to take illegal and violent actions against the central government and the HKSAR government.
6. On 26 July 2019, then Chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Eliot Engel issued an unfounded statement about the so-called “police brutality in response to protests in Hong Kong”, alleging that “it has tarnished Hong Kong’s international reputation for good governance and fair administration of justice”.
7. On 17 September 2019, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on Hong Kong. At the hearing, the violent demonstrations against the extradition bill was whitewashed while the response of the HKSAR government and police was attacked as undermining One Country, Two Systems and Hong Kong’s autonomy.
8. On 28 September 2019, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China made a statement on the fifth anniversary of the so-called “Umbrella Movement protests”, in an attempt to vilify One Country, Two Systems and the central government’s policy on Hong Kong.
9. On 7 October 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump said that “we just want to see a humane solution” in Hong Kong. He talked about the “great people over there” and said “they are flying the American flag”, “I saw two million people. I’ve never seen anything like it”.
10. On 24 October 2019, then U.S. Vice President Mike Pence delivered an anti-China speech at the Wilson Center, in which he mentioned the turbulence over the amendment bill in Hong Kong several times. He alleged that “Hong Kong is a living example of what can happen when China embraces liberty”.
11. On 21 November 2019, in her remarks made after the passing of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deliberately misrepresented One Country, Two Systems, alleging that China has broken the promise of high degree of autonomy.
12. On 10 December 2019, U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong Hanscom Smith wrote an article for Ming Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper, asserting that “human rights are universal, which is why the United States stands with Hong Kong”. He claimed that the adoption of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act by the United States reflected its commitment to universal values and its concern over Beijing’s measures that erode Hong Kong’s autonomy.
13. On 22 May 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on the adoption of the NPC Decision on Establishing and Improving the Legal Systems and Enforcement Mechanisms for Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, in which he made unfounded accusations that the National Security Law was “imposed” on Hong Kong and would “undermine Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy”.
14. On 27 May 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued another statement on the Hong Kong National Security Law to be deliberated and adopted by the NPC in which he claimed that the United States once hoped that Hong Kong, “as a bastion of liberty”, would provide a model for “authoritarian” China. He also stated that he would certify to Congress that Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under U.S. law in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997.
15. On 28 May 2020, the U.S. State Department submitted to Congress the 2020 Hong Kong Policy Act Report and certified that Hong Kong did not continue to warrant differential treatment under U.S. law.
16. On 30 June 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a statement, asserting that the Hong Kong National Security Law undermines One Country, Two Systems, and violates commitments made in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law of the HKSAR.
17. On 1 July 2020, following the adoption of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act by the U.S. House of Representatives, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alleged that the Hong Kong National Security Law was “a brutal, sweeping crackdown against the people of Hong Kong, intended to destroy the freedoms they were promised” and it “signals the death of the One Country, Two Systems principle”.
18. On 6 July 2020, U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong Hanscom Smith asserted in an interview that using the Hong Kong National Security Law to erode fundamental freedoms and create an atmosphere of self-censorship is a tragedy for Hong Kong.
19. On 14 July 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement in support of the so-called “primary election” organized by the opposition in Hong Kong.
20. On 23 July 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an anti-China speech titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future”. In the speech, he attacked the leadership of the CPC and China’s political system, fabricated the so-called “China threat”, accused the CPC of “tightening its grip on Hong Kong” and called Nathan Law Kwun-chung and other individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong as fighters for democracy.
21. On 31 July 2020, then White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany stated the United States’ opposition to the HKSAR government’s decision to disqualify opposition candidates.
22. On 7 August 2020, the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong issued a statement, blatantly smearing and attacking the Hong Kong National Security Law and alleging that it was “never about security, but rather, was intended to silence democracy advocates”.
23. On 11 September 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked China in a statement on a case of illegal border crossing made by 12 Hong Kong residents in an attempt to meddle in China’s judicial sovereignty.
24. On 11 November 2020, then Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Robert O’Brien asserted that China’s actions disqualifying the opposition legislators from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration and that the United States will identify and sanction those responsible for extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom.
25. On 12 November 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on the disqualification of four opposition legislators. He accused the lawful decision of the NPC of being an “onslaught against Hong Kong’s freedoms” and clamored for “holding accountable the people responsible for eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms”.
26. On 6 January 2021, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on the Hong Kong police’s lawful arrest of 53 opposition members who were suspected of violating the Hong Kong National Security law. He called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of those people and threatened further sanctions.
27. On 14 January 2021, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China released its so-called “2020 Annual Report”, alleging that the One country, Two systems framework has been dismantled. The Commission called for providing shelters for offenders from Hong Kong based on U.S. domestic laws and blatantly exerted pressure on the HKSAR government against its law-based administration.
28. On 11 March 2021, the Spokesperson of the U.S. State Department made unwarranted charges against the passage of the NPC’s Decision on Improving the Electoral System of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, asserting that the decision was a continuing assault on democratic institutions and a direct attack on Hong Kong’s democratic processes.
29. On 11 March 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement on the passage of the NPC’s Decision on Improving the Electoral System of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in which he asserted that it was a direct attack on the autonomy, freedoms and democratic processes of Hong Kong.
30. On 30 March 2021, the U.S. State Department released a 2020 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, vilifying the Hong Kong National Security Law and attacking law-based administration by the HKSAR government and law enforcement carried out by Hong Kong police.
31. On 31 March 2021, the U.S. Department of State issued the 2021 Hong Kong Policy Act Report, accusing China of undermining the autonomy and rights and freedoms in Hong Kong and stating that Hong Kong would no longer receive the differential treatment previously accorded to it under U.S. laws.
32. On 1 April 2021, U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong Hanscom Smith, in media interviews and articles published on newspapers such as the South China Morning Post and Ming Pao, vilified the major steps China had taken to improve HKSAR’s electoral system and to formulate and implement the Hong Kong National Security Law. He alleged that changes to the electoral system would render Hong Kong’s election results meaningless, and threatened to impose U.S. sanctions in an attempt to embolden those who are opposed to China and attempted to destabilize Hong Kong.
33. On 16 April 2021, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, tweeted that the arrest of Martin Lee and others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong was “another sign of Beijing’s assault on the rule of law” and felt “saddened and disturbed”.
34. On 17 April 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that sentencing for politically-motivated charges “are unacceptable” and called for the “release” of those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
35. On 7 May 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that “the United States stands with the people of Hong Kong”. He called for rejecting the sentencing of those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong and their immediate release.
36. On 27 May 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a press statement on the State Department website, unwarrantedly accusing the Chinese government of undermining the democratic institutions of Hong Kong and calling for all individuals arrested under the Hong Kong National Security Law to be released and their charges dropped.
37. On 3 June 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a press statement on the State Department website, claiming that “the United States will stand with” the people of China who demand that their government respect “universal human rights”, and he called those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong “brave activists”.
38. On 4 June 2021, the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong lit up electric candles inside its the office window in support of the so-called candlelight vigil staged by those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
39. On 5 June 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong were inspiring and called for the immediate release of those arrested.
40. On 11 June 2021, in an interview with Reuters, U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong Hanscom Smith alleged that the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law had created an “atmosphere of coercion” threatening both Hong Kong’s freedoms and its standing as an international business hub.
41. On 21 June 2021, at a press briefing, the spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State, under the pretext of media freedom, accused the HKSAR government of using the Hong Kong National Security Law to suppress independent media and stifle freedom of expression.
42. On 24 June 2021, in a statement released on the White House website, U.S. President Joe Biden, using media freedom as a pretext, called Apple Daily’s closure “a sad day for media freedom” and a signal of “intensified repression by Beijing”.
43. On 29 June 2021, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a roundtable on the one-year anniversary of the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law, making unwarranted charges against human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong.
44. On 30 June 2021, at the one-year anniversary of the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law, the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, in disregard of facts, openly attacked the legislation, alleging that it curtails Hong Kong’s freedom of expression.
45. On 1 July 2021, the U.S. Department of State issued the so-called “2021 Trafficking in Persons Report”. In the part on China, the report denigrated Hong Kong’s successful efforts to combat human trafficking, and demonized the Hong Kong National Security Law.
46. On 13 July 2021, the spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State unwarrantedly accused China of continuing to undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy and business environment, and called for international attention.
47. On 21 July 2021, the U.S. Department of State issued the so-called Investment Climate Statements. In the part on Hong Kong, the Statements played up the so-called security risks of the Hong Kong National Security Law and defamed Hong Kong’s business environment.
48. On 2 August 2021, the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong posted “Bearing Witness” on its website, listing individuals who have been held accountable in accordance with law for opposing China and attempting to destabilize Hong Kong. The list contains such information as their names, the dates of their arrests, the dates they were charged, charges made against them, and their conviction dates.
IV. Shielding and supporting those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong, providing platforms for them to advocate “Hong Kong independence” and spread political disinformation, and justifying the acts of those lawbreakers by twisting facts and misleading the public.
1. On 17 March 2019, the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong arranged for a delegation of the U.S.-China Working Group of the U.S. House of Representatives to meet with Anson Chan Fang On-sang, Martin Lee Chu-ming and Joshua Wong Chi-fung and others. These people told the media afterwards that they discussed with the U.S. side issues such as the HKSAR government’s disqualification of opposition candidates from the Legislative Council election, the proposed amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, and Hong Kong’s political development.
2. From 19 to 26 March 2019, Anson Chan Fang On-sang, Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, Charles Mok Nai-kwong and several others visited the United States, where they met with U.S. officials including then Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, then principal policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State Miles Yu, and then Assistant Secretary for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs of the U.S. Department of Defense Randall Schriver. They also met with officials from the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Anson Chan and others urged the U.S. administration to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and pleaded for U.S. support for the anti-amendment bill movement launched by the opposition. The U.S. side arranged for them to give speeches at such institutions as the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and the Heritage Foundation. This provided a platform and support for Anson Chan and others to preach “Hong Kong independence” and spread political disinformation.
3. From 13 to 17 May 2019, six people, namely Martin Lee Chu-ming, Lee Cheuk-yan, Mak Yin-ting, Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee, James To Kun-sun and Nathan Law Kwun-chung, visited the United States and met with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then White House National Security Council Senior Director for Asian Affairs Matt Pottinger and others. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China arranged for them to attend a so-called hearing on Hong Kong and ask the HKSAR government to withdraw the draft amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance.
4. On 14 May 2019, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy held a seminar on the proposed amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance by the HKSAR government, discussing the so-called “new threats to civil society and the rule of law in Hong Kong”. The Endowment arranged for Martin Lee Chu-ming and others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize to attend the seminar. Participants of the seminar called for taking immediate action to stop what they described as the “evil law”.
5. From 7 to 11 July 2019, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, who is opposed to China and attempts to destabilize Hong Kong, visited the United States and met with then Vice President Mike Pence, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then National Security Advisor John Bolton, then Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell and others. Jimmy Lai lobbied for U.S. intervention in Hong Kong affairs, and discussed with the U.S. side developments in Hong Kong surrounding the amendment bill and the so-called “autonomous status of Hong Kong”, for which he received positive response from the U.S. side.
6. On 6 August 2019, Hong Kong media reported that Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Nathan Law Kwun-chung and other leading figures of Demosistõ, an organization for “Hong Kong independence”, met with officials of the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong and called on the U.S. side to adopt a Hong Kong human rights and democracy act as soon as possible and impose sanctions on Hong Kong.
7. On 17 September 2019, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China arranged for Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Dennis Ho Wan-see, Nathan Law Kwun-chung, Sunny Cheung Kwan-yang and others to attend a hearing under the so-called title of “Hong Kong’s Summer of Discontent and U.S. Policy Responses”. This provided a platform and support for Wong, Ho, Law and Cheung to advocate “Hong Kong independence”, spread political disinformation and smear the central government of China and the HKSAR government.
8. On 17 September 2019, U.S. Senator Todd Yang attended a press conference held on Capitol Hill to inaugurate the so-called Hong Kong Democracy Council, an organization supporting “Hong Kong independence”.
9. From 12 to 13 October 2019, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz visited Hong Kong and met with Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, Anson Chan Fang On-sang, Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, Charles Mok Nai-kwong, Bonnie Leung Wing-man and other leading figures among those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong. Cruz appeared at a protest site dressed in black and told the media that he did not see any violence. He accused the Hong Kong police, who had been enforcing the law with great restraint, of violent suppression.
10. From 22 to 26 October 2019, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, Martin Lee Chu-ming and others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong visited the United States and met with Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, then Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell, Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Jim McGovern and several members of Congress.
11. On 4 February 2020, at the invitation of U.S. senator Rick Scott, Nathan Law Kwun-chung, who is opposed to China and attempts to destabilize Hong Kong, attended the U.S. President’s State of the Union address.
12. On 5 March 2020, then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Jonathan Fritz and U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong Hanscom Smith met with Charles Mok Nai-kwong and some others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
13. On 21 March 2020, U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong Hanscom Smith met with Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Sunny Cheung Kwan-yang and Fergus Leung Fong-wai, among others, and accepted a so-called petition from Wong. Wong urged the United States to impose sanctions on HKSAR government officials and members of the Hong Kong police by invoking the U.S. Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
14. On 18 April 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement making groundless accusations against Hong Kong police’s arrest of individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
15. On 27 May 2020, U.S. Senator Joshua Hawley met with Joshua Wong Chi-fung and others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
16. On 1 July 2020, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing and arranged for Nathan Law Kwun-chung, Lee Cheuk-yan and others who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong to attend the hearing via video link, providing a platform for them to vilify the Hong Kong National Security Law and the central government’s policy on Hong Kong.
17. On 21 July 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a one-on-one meeting in London with Nathan Law Kwun-chung, a “Hong Kong independence” advocate who had fled to the UK, in a move to embolden Law. Law smeared China’s central government and the HKSAR government, and called on the United States to exert more pressure on China.
18. On 10 August 2020, then National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien issued a statement claiming that the U.S. side is “deeply troubled by the arrest of pro-democracy advocates” including Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and calling on Beijing to repeal the Hong Kong National Security Law.
19. On 16 December 2020, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary arranged for Nathan Law Kwun-chung, a “Hong Kong independence” advocate, to attend a hearing via video link. Law claimed that the Hong Kong National Security Law restricted Hong Kong people’s freedom of expression and right to protest, and urged the United States to grant asylum to more Hong Kong people.
20. On 6 January 2021, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement expressing so-called concern over the arrest of more than 50 individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
21. On 15 January 2021, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued another statement making irresponsible comments about the HKSAR government’s arrest made in accordance with the law of individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong, including an American lawyer. He called on China to immediately release individuals sanctioned under the Hong Kong National Security Law and drop charges against them.
22. On 31 January 2021, nine U.S. senators and house representatives including Jim McGovern, Marco Rubio and Jeff Merkley wrote a joint letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee nominating the so-called “pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong” for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
23. On 28 February 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted a tweet to “condemn the detention of and charges filed against pan-democratic candidates in Hong Kong’s elections” by the HKSAR government.
24. On 16 April 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement making unwarranted accusations against China over the sentencing of Martin Lee Chu-ming, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and other individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
25. On 8 July 2021, Joshua Huck, Chief of the Economic and Political Section of the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, attended as an observer an HK court trial of individuals suspected of illegally planning, organizing and carrying out the “35 +” and “10 steps to mutual destruction” plan. When interviewed by the media, he claimed that the Hong Kong National Security Law is about suppressing the freedom of Hong Kong people and sought to glorify and justify individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
V. Colluding with some countries to exert pressure, and teaming up with allies to interfere in Hong Kong affairs and make irresponsible comments by such means as joint statements.
1. On 27 May 2020, the United States Mission to the United Nations issued a statement calling for a UN Security Council meeting on Hong Kong. The statement claimed that Hong Kong is “a matter of urgent global concern that implicates international peace and security”.
2. On 28 May 2020, foreign ministers of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada issued a joint statement on Hong Kong, attacking the Hong Kong National Security Law to be adopted by China’s NPC.
3. On 17 June 2020, foreign ministers of the United States and other G7 countries and the High Representative of the European Union issued a joint statement on Hong Kong. In an attempt to put pressure on China, the statement claimed that the Hong Kong National Security Law would undermine One country, Two Systems and Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, and urged the Chinese government to reconsider the relevant decision.
4. On 9 August 2020, foreign ministers of the United States and other Five Eyes countries issued a joint statement on Hong Kong, slandering the central government’s policy on Hong Kong and urging China’s NPC to revoke the disqualification of the four opposition members of the Legislative Council.
5. On 18 November 2020, foreign ministers of the United States and other Five Eyes countries issued a joint statement on Hong Kong, attacking the decision of the Standing Committee of the NPC on the qualification of members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council and China’s policy on Hong Kong.
6. On 9 January 2021, foreign ministers of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada issued a joint statement on Hong Kong. The statement expressed so-called serious concern on the arrest of 55 individuals who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong by Hong Kong police in accordance with law, and accused the Hong Kong National Security Law of being a clear breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, undermining the One Country, Two Systems framework, and curtailing the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong.
7. On 12 March 2021, foreign ministers of the United States and other G7 countries and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy issued a joint statement on Hong Kong. The statement claimed that the changes made by the Chinese government to Hong Kong’s electoral system were aimed at eliminating dissent in Hong Kong and would undermine Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.
8. On 5 May 2021, the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting attended by the United States and other relevant countries issued a joint statement which smeared the Chinese government’s policy on Hong Kong, distorted the policy of One Country, Two Systems, made irresponsible comments on the internal affairs of the HKSAR, and supported those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong. The United States also proposed at the meeting the setting up of an international group called “friends of Hong Kong”, in an attempt to get other Western countries on board to interfere in Hong Kong affairs.
9. On 13 June 2021, the G7 Summit issued a communiqué which made groundless comments on Hong Kong and called on China to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law.
10. From 21 June to 14 July 2021, during the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council, the United States and 43 other countries signed a joint statement against China initiated by Canada, expressing “concern” over “human rights abuses” in Hong Kong.
On 1 July, the United States led a side event on the one-year anniversary of the Hong Kong National Security Law which slandered the Hong Kong National Security Law and the rule of law in Hong Kong. Twenty governments and nine non-governmental organizations were asked to attend it.
11. On 10 July 2021, the U.S. Department of State website published a joint statement made by 21 countries including the United States and some European countries, all being members of the so-called Media Freedom Coalition, expressing “strong concerns” about the closure of Apple Daily and the arrest of those who are opposed to China and attempt to destabilize Hong Kong. The statement also made groundless accusations against the law enforcement efforts of the HKSAR government, the Hong Kong National Security Law, and the central government’s policy on Hong Kong.
Where is the world heading to?
People are starting to recognize that within 18 months from now, a nuclear armed Australia will be the "tip of the speak" to militarily confrontation with China.
Thus (supposedly) sparing New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angles from nuclear destruction...
In the Middle East, dictatorial regimes and terrorist militias about to breathe a sigh of relief as the United States and its allies withdraw from Afghanistan and perhaps soon from Iraq.
There is a perception in the region that it is believed that for more than two centuries, first Britain and then the United States were a bone stuck in the throat of the region.
Throughout the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, they kept brought nothing but war, violence, and the fragmentation of nations on the map, for the Middle East. The war and conflict only achievement of the great powers, especially in the oil and energy sector in this region.
Now the table is turned.
With the first energy revolution, the United States became depleted of Middle Eastern oil by acquiring shale oil, and now, by moving to clean energy, seeks its geopolitical priorities no longer in the Middle East but in the Indo-Pacific region.
Leading oil historian Daniel Yergin delves deeply into these geopolitical changes in the post-oil world in his new book, The New Map, published September 14 2021 in New York. He says that just as the map of the world changed after the First World War at the beginning of the twentieth century, so in the twenty-first century there will be a new map of the world.
The world has been waiting for years for a strategic and geopolitical confrontation between China and the United States.
A confrontation that took place inevitably, but in any case, and for any reason, the leaders of the two countries pushed it back.
Thursday, September 16, 2021 marked another historic day for the world. On this day, the leaders of the three countries of Australia, Britain and the United States suddenly appeared on world television and announced a security defense agreement and a tripartite core.
A statement that shook the world.
China, in its first response, threatened Australia with a nuclear attack.
The Chinese do NOT bluff, and if they say something, you all had best LISTEN. Or do you think that they are liars and bluff and bluster all the time with hollow and empty threats?
The Global Times, the English-language organ of the Chinese Communist Party, immediately reacted to the statement and attacked the treaty with the most naked words. A treaty that introduced new acronyms to world political literature. AUKUS is the acronym for this new treaty, which according to Politico is the newest and ugliest acronym for America.
The three-way security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will equip Australia with eight nuclear-powered submarines over eighteen months, as well as providing Australia with many artificial intelligence technologies, costumes, defense, and security facilities.
In other words, while the United States has either withdrawn or is withdrawing from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, it is now conducting a nuclear and security camp in the Pacific against China. What Reuters has interpreted as a new Cold War that is affecting the geopolitics of the world.
The American camp in the Pacific has greatly hurt Europe, and especially France. So much so that France called it a stab in the back, and France’s foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called it a barbaric, one-sided, and unpredictable decision in an interview with Radio France, reminiscent of Trump’s actions. Le Drian, who could not hide his anger, added: “I am angry and bitter. This is not done between allies.”
But why is France so angry?
There are two reasons for France’s anger: First, France was previously set to sell submarines to Australia under a $ 40 billion deal, but has now been barred from a lucrative deal.
But another important reason is that in the first major transatlantic security treaty, not only France but also Europe was ignored. The ignorance that Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, called painful in a statement published by The Wall Street Journal.
What can be seen from what happened on Thursday in the world geopolitical scene, is that, the United States has not tolerated China’s growing progress and has finally resorted to a military alignment in its nuclear nature.
The US turning its back on this new approach is understandable to its Middle East allies; But why it ousted its European allies, especially France, in the first transatlantic treaty is a question that the future will answer.
Nope. They are not pausing to think. They are ramping up for a war against China.
Idiots.
And China is ready.
Then there’s this… .
According to former MI6 deputy director Nigel Inkster, Xi Jinping is losing patience, and China is “edging closer” to confrontation with the US over Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Taiwan declared an unprecedented US$9 billion increase in military spending the day before to meet China’s threat — a development that will not go over well in Beijing.
There is also danger that the highly controversial AUKUS defence treaty between the UK, the US, and Australia may drag Britain into a battle with China over Taiwan.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, called the AUKUS pact an example of a “obsolete cold war zero-sum thinking.”
“On a scale of one to 10, how likely is it that we’ll see a military clash between America and China over this issue?” LBC host Matt Frei questioned Inkster.
“Right now, we’re up to eight,” Inkster replied.
…
“The best-case scenario is that both China and the United States realize they are on an equal footing militarily, with neither having a significant edge.
“This acknowledgement could help to keep the peace, even if it is shattered. That is our only ray of hope.”
“We may be approaching a tipping point when the Chinese party-state believes that peaceful reunification with Taiwan is not possible,” Inkster added.
As Inkster spoke, across the pond at the Air, Space & Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark D. Kelly told attendees that China must be challenged, Air Force magazine reported.
The “cold, hard realities” are that the Air Force was superbly prepared and trained to defeat a peer adversary — Russia — 30 years ago, then achieved a highly lopsided victory in Iraq, Kelly said.
But in the last 20 years, USAF was optimized for combat in a “permissive environment” that didn’t test the force. During that same time, China was focused completely on “the high-end fight, and fighting us.”
…
China’s force structure and systems are “designed to inflict more casualties in the first 30 hours of combat than we’ve endured over the last 30 years in the Middle East,” Kelly said.
No shit. What have I been saying?
China does not believe in "surgical strikes" within strictly defined target battle zones.
they believe in all-out brutal, devistating, absolute destructive war that does not descriminate and smashes things and breaks them relentlessly.
As the United States Air Force inventory has aged and diminished, the balance with China has tilted more toward Beijing, he added.
Kelly said Russia has been able to annex Crimea and China has claimed parts of the South China Sea “without firing a shot” because contesting those situations has become harder thanks to adversary air defenses.
To regain the advantage — “to be a resolute world power ”— the US, through its Air Force, has to be able to penetrate “highly contested sovereign [airspace],” Kelly asserted.
Nigel Inkster has worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) since 2007. He is the former Director of Future Conflict and Cyber Security and currently a Special Adviser at IISS. His research portfolio at IISS has included transnational terrorism, insurgency, transnational organized crime, cyber security, intelligence and security and the evolving character of conflict.
Source: Brinkwire.com, Air Force magazine, CyberStability.org, Wikipedia
Scandal in Taiwan
I wonder how this is being reported in the United States?
Current Taiwan president has a fake PhD and fake PhD thesis. After a UK court earlier this year ruled that the university should released all documents on Tsai Ing-wen’s, we now see a press conference re the investigation.
Will she be trial for teaching in a Taiwan University with the fake PhD? And step down as president by lying to the voters?
Scholars on the island open Tsai Ing-wen’s thesis door to the final trial press conference and choke on falsified papers
Do you think that he is right? That China would respond, or that they would try to retreat a little to save face?
New Report Documents the Deadly Impact and Global Condemnation of US Sanctions
A coalition of North American human rights organizations has released a report on the impact and consequences of US sanctions. The report is based on wide-ranging research and interviews with citizens in countries which are suffering under US sanctions.
The report reveals a reality which western media rarely or never reports.
One finding is that US sanctions hurt the poor, have resulted in thousands of deaths and “humanitarian exemptions” do not work. Another finding is that more than 70% of the world nations officially condemn US sanctions as violating international law and the UN Charter.
A free PDF copy of the report can be downloaded from…
A top official at Russian natural gas producer Novatek who was arrested in the United States last week on tax charges says he is innocent and will “vigorously” fight the case.
“On Thursday I was indicted for baseless tax charges that I already settled through a voluntary program, and pleaded not guilty. I will vigorously fight these charges and will continue to discuss gas topics as normal,” Mark Gyetvay, the deputy chairman of Novatek’s management board, said in a tweet on September 26.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on September 23 that Gyetvay had been arrested on tax charges related to $93 million hidden in offshore accounts. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Gyetvay, who holds passports from both the United States and Russia, was released on a $80 million bond by a Florida judge, according to court filings.
As an American citizen, Gyetvay is required to pay U.S. taxes on his worldwide income even if he spends most of the year in Russia.
The 64-year old has been the face of Novatek to the Western investment community for more than a decade, conducting the quarterly earnings conference calls with stock and bond investors as well as speaking at industry conferences.
Novatek is Russia’s largest independent natural gas producer and analysts say its phenomenal rise from a bit player in the early 2000s to a $79 billion company today — not far behind BP’s $89 billion market value — is due in large part to the company’s connections to the Kremlin.
Gennady Timchenko, a key Novatek shareholder, is considered a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their friendship goes back to the early 1990s.
The United States has been seeking to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy over the years, including blocking the launch of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline designed to carry natural gas directly to Germany via Baltic Sea.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will reroute gas currently transiting Ukraine, depriving Kyiv of as much as $2 billion in revenue. The United States has called it a political project aimed at hurting Russia’s smaller neighbor.
The project was completed earlier this month and is now awaiting certification by German and European authorities, a process that could take several months.
In the meantime, European gas prices have surged to a record high amid a supply crunch. Washington is now accusing Russia of withholding additional natural gas supplies to Europe via Ukraine in order to pressure authorities to certify Nord Stream 2.
“Another laugher!!!” Gyetvay said in a tweet two days before his arrest after a U.S. official expressed concern that Russia was not sending enough gas to Europe. “Who tried to impose relentless sanctions while promoting [U.S. liquefied natural gas to Europe?] Reality — we need ALL gas. Period.”
What comes around goes around
Call it Karma or what have you, but when you have had centuries of taking, taking, taking… sooner or later that becomes who you are. And unless you replenish the “closed system” (Those who understand the concept of a “Prison Planet” understand.) this activity will manifest in your life; in your community, and in your people.
The United States wants all QUAD members to have nuclear weapons.
The QUAD consists of the US, Australia, India and Japan.
Up until two weeks ago, only the USA and India had nuclear weapons, then arrangements were made to place nuclear weapons systems in Australia. Now the United States is pushing for Japan to have nuclear weapons systems.
A ton-load of articles out of the United States neocons…
https://www.dailywire.com/news/chinas-nuclear...
Aug 07, 2021 · The U.S. should consider all options, including negotiations with Japan to deploy land-based nuclearmedium or intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Japaneseterritory. The offer of U.S.-controlled missiles will act to preventJapanfromdeciding to build its own nuclear weaponcapabilityin response to the Chinese threat, thuspreventing ...
-China’s Nuclear Threat Against Japan: Hybrid Warfare
“A new ‘study’ has concluded that Beijing’s huge worldwide investment programme is ‘losing momentum’ as debts mount. But a closer inspection of the facts tells a different story.
“Western mainstream media yesterday began posting in tandem a purported ‘study’ from which Reuters spun its own headline: ‘China’s Belt and Road plans losing momentum as opposition, debt mount – study’.
"The study, as noted in the report, was sponsored by the US government through the surrogate of its own international relief [and Color Revolution sponsoring] agency, USAID, and proceeded to present the usual cliches that China was maliciously saddling nations in “hidden debt,” encouraging corruption and promulgating environmental damage in participating countries, and claimed that opposition to the investment programme was mounting."
Fowdy is good at digging, but in this case he didn’t need to expend much effort:
"It is strange that large scale emphasis on that [forced labor] has disappeared, and now the agenda is being turned toward trashing the Belt and Road Initiative. But we knew this was coming. When the US Senate prepared its ‘strategic competition’ bill earlier this year, it notably earmarked $300 million in funding to deliberately spread 'negative news' regarding 'the impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative' throughout the world. To no surprise whatsoever, this is what the newly published BRI ‘study’ is doing, and it's a sign of things to come."
Fowdy then tells us some of the lies being used to discredit. He follows that with facts, a category of information Western media doesn’t appear to use in its reports anymore:
“Here’s a flavor of what they aren’t telling you. A study from Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, found that, as of 2019, over $516 billion worth of BRI projects had been completed with a cancellation rate of just 0.3%. It counted 2,631 different projects across the world, in more than 120 countries.
“To name but a few examples of BRI successes:
China finished a metro system in Lahore, Pakistan, last year,
opened a 1000MW nuclear power plant in the same country in May,
is building Africa’s largest building in Egypt,
as well as the largest building in South Asia (the Lotus Tower in Colombo, Sri Lanka),
and is on the verge of finishing the China-Laos High Speed Railway.
Multiple direct transcontinental railway routes through China to Europe have also been opened.
“The study by Refinitiv, which is headquartered in the UK, also proceeded to pour cold water over the idea of a ‘debt trap’ for participating countries, noting that a review of 40 cases of China’s external debt renegotiations painted a different picture. The BRI is not being imposed, it is not dogmatic and nor is it monolithic, and it is more flexible and pragmatic than it’s given credit for.” [My Emphasis]
In other words, the BRI is essentially the opposite of the Washington Consensus’s Structural Adjustment Programs which impose development crippling austerity and serve to enrich the global 1%. Fowdy closes by exposing the utter bankruptcy of the Outlaw US Empire’s attempts to counter the long overdue development of the Global South:
“The idea that developing countries blindly and naively accept one-sided terms, jump into self-penalizing agreements, and thus don’t know ‘what their best interests are’, is insulting. It is promoting, as usual, the idea of ‘Western saviorism’, one that has been used as a justification for colonialism and domination for centuries. There is a staggering lack of historical self-awareness and sensitivity in those who advocate such claims.”
In about 30 years, the Global South will be on par with many Western nations, while surpassing those destroyed by Neoliberalism. And ya know, there really aren’t very many Western Nations, and very few of them are actually independent.
David BK Tan chimes in on the “collapse” of China…
I am seeing a lot of inaccurate articles on the western media championing the “demise” of the Chinese economy.
Besides the erroneous comparison of Evergrande to Lehman Brothers (see my post https://bit.ly/3uyUDvq) , I am also seeing articles referring to the current debt plight of Evergrande as China’s “Heisei Bubble” moment. Heisei (平成) era is the period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Akihito from 8 Jan 1989 until his abdication on 30 Apr 2019. The Japanese would call it Heisei bubble (平成バブル & バブル (baburu) is actually a loanword from English & hence it sounds like bubble) since the burst of its asset price bubble happened during the 平成 era .
Actually you do not need to have a PhD in economics to understand that China is not having a “Heisei Bubble” moment. What you need is to look at “First Principles” of economics to understand their differences.
If you have studied mathematics/physics in school, you might remember “First Principles” which are like axioms. So if you have no economics background, you can treat the common economics principles like axioms without the need to understand them in details & use such principles for investigative purpose. Actually such “First Principles” approach is useful in general as it helps you to probe further in a new area to gain some understanding.
The First Principle that you would need in this case is :
GDP of a country =C+I+G+(X−M) where
C=Consumer spending on goods and services
I=Investment spending on business capital goods
G=Government spending on public goods and services
X=Exports
M=Imports
You also need to know some common facts on #Japan in the 80s like its exports were very strong & thus it contributed strongly to its GDP. Its strong exports in the 80s resulted in the poor sales of local products in the US & so we had the US-Japan trade wars in the 80s which affected its trade.
So if we look at trade (% of GDP) vs GDP figures for Japan since mid- 80s, you find that its trade plunged but GDP abnormally increased. Since trade was a impt contribution to its GDP, this suggests that there would be anomalies like over-consumption/over-investment or even both. So if you are interested in the cause, you might probe further. But suffice to say, you know for China to have a “Heisei Bubble” moment, its trade must plunge like Japan’s since China is also an export-oriented economy. I have attached the second image displaying China’s trade as % of GDP vs its GDP & you will realise that its plunge in trade happened after 2006 which was due to Great Financial Crisis but its trade has been decelerating since then which is in tandem with the decelerating GDP growth.
In a nutshell, #China does not have the anomaly of Japan’s Heisei moment with over-consumption/over-investment etc since the GDP was falling in accordance with the fall in trade since 2007.
The US and its allies continue beating the drums of war in regards to China, but how serious is this? Will it really lead to war, or is it merely posturing meant to give the US the most favorable position on the other side of a fully ascendant China?
A critical inflection point identified by US war planners for years is approaching, where China’s economic and military might will irreversibly surpass the US and the center of global power will likewise irreversibly shift from West to East creating a global balance of power unseen for centuries. A closing window of opportunity estimated to close between 2025 and 2030 allows the US to carry out a limited war with China, resulting in a favorable outcome for Washington. Beyond that, the US will find itself outmatched and any attempt to curb China’s rise rendered futile.
The propaganda war, and the war itself this propaganda aims to justify and rally support for, is unmistakable, particularly for those who have witnessed similar buildups ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, or US-led military interventions in nations like Libya and Syria from 2011 onward.
A recent 60 Minutes Australia segment titled, “War with China: Are we closer than we think?,” presented an amalgamation of this ongoing propaganda used to vilify the Chinese government, dehumanize the Chinese people, and create sufficient anger, fear, paranoia, distrust, and hatred in hearts and minds across the planet to justify what would be for the 21st century, an unprecedented war.
For the United States, a war with China would be the first of its kind, a war with a peer or near-peer competitor armed with nuclear weapons.
Yet US war planners are fairly confident that the conflict could be confined to East Asia, remain conventional, and see a favorable outcome for the US that would secure its primacy over Asia for decades to come.
A victory for the US would not be military in nature, but rather hinge on “nonmilitary factors,” and focus on disrupting and setting back China’s economy and thus the power propelling China past the United States at the moment.
The 2016 US War Plan Coming to Life
These conclusions were laid out in a 2016 RAND Corporation document titled, “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable,” commissioned by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and carried out by the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. The report notes that the RAND Arroyo Center is part of the RAND Corporation and is a federally-funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.
The report notes that America’s military advantage is in decline vis-a-vis China, but also lays out several current realities that would favor the US should hostilities unfold.
It states on page 9 of the PDF document:
We postulate that a war would be regional and conventional. It would be waged mainly by ships on and beneath the sea, by aircraft and missiles of many sorts, and in space (against satellites) and cyberspace (against computer systems). We assume that fighting would start and remain in East Asia, where potential Sino-USflash points and nearly all Chinese forces are located.
The RAND document admits that China’s forces are concentrated in Chinese territory and that virtually all flash points that could trigger a conflict are likewise located in the region. This implies that US forces would need to be more or less right up to China’s shores and regional claims, and insist on interfering in regional disputes or intervene in matters between Taiwan and mainland China.
The Nuclear Question
Many assume any war between China and the United States would escalate into a nuclear exchange. However, this is unlikely except under the most extreme conditions.
Regarding nuclear and conventional warfare, the RAND document makes a compelling argument, stating:
It is unlikely that nuclear weapons would be used: Even in an intensely violent conventional conflict, neither side would regard its losses as so serious, its prospects so dire, or the stakes so vital that it would run the risk of devastating nuclear retaliation by using nuclear weapons first. We also assume that China would not attack the US homeland, except via cyberspace, given its minimal capability to do so with conventional weapons. In contrast, US nonnuclear attacks against military targets in China could be extensive.
The report studies a window of opportunity that began in 2015 and stretches to 2025. Current developments seem to indicate the US may see this window extend as far as 2030, including the recent announcement of the “AUKUS” alliance where US-UK-built Australian nuclear-powered submarines would be coming online and ready to participate in such a conflict around the early 2030’s.
US May Trade Heavy Military Losses for China’s Economic Ruination
Under a section titled, “The Importance of Nonmilitary Factors,” the RAND report notes:
The prospect of a military standoff means that war could eventually be decided by nonmilitary factors. These should favor the United States now and in the future. Although war would harm both economies, damage to China’s could be catastrophic and lasting: on the order of a 25–35 percent reduction in Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) in a yearlong war, compared with a reduction in US GDP on the order of 5–10 percent. Even a mild conflict, unless ended promptly, could weaken China’s economy. A long and severe war could ravage China’s economy, stall its hard-earned development, and cause widespread hardship and dislocation.
Considering the current shape of US-Chinese relations, the emphasis on economics and trade, and the persistent, even desperate attempts by the US to not only inflict as much damage on China’s economy ahead of a potential conflict as possible, but also its attempts to “decouple” from China’s economy as fast as possible could be interpreted as tying off a limb before amputation.
Preparations Already Underway to Exploit China’s Economic Damage
The report notes the follow-on effects of the economic damage such a conflict would inflict on China. It would open the door for already on-going US machinations to undermine China’s social and political stability to expand and do tremendous damage, perhaps even threatening the cohesion of Chinese society.
It states specifically:
Such economic damage could in turn aggravate political turmoil and embolden separatists in China. Although the regime and its security forces presumably could withstand such challenges, doing so might necessitate increased oppressiveness, tax the capacity, and undermine the legitimacy of the Chinese regime in the midst of a very difficult war. In contrast, US domestic partisan skirmishing could handicap the war effort but not endanger societal stability, much less the survival of the state, no matter how long and harsh the conflict, so long as it remains conventional. Escalating cyberwarfare, while injurious to both sides, could worsen China’s economic problems and impede the government’s ability to control a restive population.
The mention of “separatists in China” is particularly important. These groups, often made up of armed extremists, are supported by an extensive international network funded by the US government itself.
Separatism in China’s Xinjiang and Tibetan regions is openly supported by the US government and has been sponsored by Washington for decades. The US National Endowment for Democracy’s official website lists its programs for Xinjiang, China as, “Xinjiang/East Turkestan,” “East Turkestan” being the separatist name for Xinjiang. The organizations listed, including the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the World Uyghur Congress openly admit on their respective websites that they view Xinjiang – contrary to international law – as “occupied” by China rather than a territory of China.
In a move that could very likely be a warning of just how close to a US-provoked conflict with China we may be, the US State Department de-listed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in 2020 claiming it had not been active for over a decade.
Yet by the US’ own admission US military forces struck ETIM targets in Afghanistan as recently as 2018, and just this year ETIM representatives gave an interview with US-based Newsweek magazine.
ETIM is still listed by a number of nations as well as the UN itself as a terrorist organization.
Economic turmoil, armed insurrection, and socio-political instability are factors the US has openly attempted to impose on China for decades and is still placing pieces on the gameboard toward this objective. If a conflict were to break out, those pieces would clearly already be in place to maximize Washington’s ability to exploit economic damage inflicted by the conflict.
Targeting China’s Trade Lanes at Sea
The RAND paper notes specifically the impact on Chinese trade a conventional conflict confined to East Asia would have. The report notes:
…while the United States has sophisticated sensors to distinguish military from nonmilitary targets, during war it will focus on finding and tracking the former; moreover, Chinese ISR is less sophisticated and discriminating, especially at a distance. This suggests very hazardous airspace and sea space, perhaps ranging from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea. Assuming that non-Chinese commercial enterprises would rather lose revenue than ships or planes, the United States would not need to use force to stop trade to and from China.16 China would lose a substantial amount of trade that would be required to transit the war zone. The United States expressly threatening commercial shipping would be provocative, hazardous, and largely unnecessary. So we posit no US blockade, as such.
Of course, the US has a variety of tools at its disposal that it regularly uses upon the international stage to impede free commerce. It is an irony since Washington often accuses Beijing of “threatening” such commerce in regions like the South China Sea while Washington is actually impeding it on a global scale.
NPR in its 2020 article, “US Seizes Iranian Fuel From 4 Tankers Bound For Venezuela,” would note:
According to The Associated Press, quoting unnamed USofficials, no military force was used in the seizure of the cargo, and none of the ships was physically impounded. Instead, US officials threatened ship owners, insurers and captains with sanctions to force them to hand over their cargo, the AP reported.
Because of America’s still formidable grip over international media, it would be extremely easy to sink vessels engaged in commerce and blame it on China or claim it was accidental. A total blockade would not be necessary to deter the majority of commerce in the region, only a few examples would be needed for the self-preservation of shipping companies to de facto cut off trade.
Another concerning warning sign was the Pentagon restructuring an entire branch of the US armed forces, the US Marine Corps, to specifically fight a single nation (China), in a very specific region (East Asia), with very specific tactics (shutting down straits used for commercial shipping).
Defense News in a 2020 article titled, “Here’s the US Marine Corps’ plan for sinking Chinese ships with drone missile launchers,” would claim:
The US Marine Corps is getting into the ship-killing business, and a new project in development is aimed at making their dreams of harrying the People’s Liberation Army Navy a reality.
The article also noted:
Marine Corps requirements and development chief Lt. Gen. Eric Smith told reporters last year during the Expeditionary Warfare Conference that the Marines want to fight on ground of their choosing and then maneuver before forces can concentrate against them.
“They are mobile and small, they are not looking to grab a piece of ground and sit on it,” Smith said of his Marine units. “I’m not looking to block a strait permanently. I’m looking to maneuver. The German concept is ‘Schwerpunkt,’ which is applying the appropriate amount of pressure and force at the time and place of your choosing to get maximum effect.”
The US Marine Corps has already decommissioned all of their main battle tanks as part of this restructuring which took less than a year – signifying the urgency of US preparations.
The US taking ships out in busy commerce straits and creating an environment that would cripple trade between China and the rest of the world would have a heavy impact on China’s economy.
On page 67 of the PDF document, RAND includes a graphic depiction of China’s projected GDP losses versus the US, giving us a compelling motive for the US to wage a war it knows it will suffer heavy military losses amidst, but emerge economically stronger than a China that will otherwise, barring such a conflict, surpass the US within this window of opportunity.
China Knows, But Can China Beat the Clock?
It is very obvious that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an attempt for China to diversify away from Asia-Pacific trade routes the US is clearly making preparations to attack and disrupt.
Pipelines running through Pakistan as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and through Myanmar to Kunming in Yunnan Province would help move hydrocarbons bound for China from the Middle East without passing through waters the US could disrupt in the conflict it is clearly preparing for.
However, these alternative routes are already under attack.
US-sponsored separatists operating in Pakistan’s southwest province of Baluchistan regularly attack and kill Chinese engineers and the infrastructure itself.
Protests organized by US-sponsored opposition groups target Gwadar Port, CPEC’s terminal.
Just this year alone, France 24 would report in April a bombing targeting a hotel the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan was staying at but who luckily wasn’t at the hotel at the time of the bombing. In July, the BBC reported that 9 Chinese engineers working on CPEC projects were killed in a targeted attack. And according to Reuters, in August, 2 children were killed during a suicide bombing targeting Chinese engineers in Baluchistan.
US-backed opposition groups have been attacking Chinese investments in Myanmar since the military ousted the US client regime headed by Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NDL). CNN would report in March, just a month after the military took over, that the opposition was lighting Chinese factories ablaze.
US government-funded Myanmar opposition media outlet, The Irrawaddy, published an article in May titled, “Deadly Attack on Pipeline Station Spotlights China’s High Stakes in Myanmar,” claiming:
The importance of the project was highlighted in February when Chinese officials held an emergency meeting with Myanmar officials, at which they urged the military regime to tighten security measures for the pipelines. They said the project is a crucial part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Myanmar and insisted that “any damage to the pipelines would cause huge losses for both countries.” The request came amid growing anti-China sentiment in Myanmar, where protesters—angered by Beijing’s blocking of the UN Security Council (UNSC)’s efforts to take action against the coup leaders—have threatened to blow up the pipelines.
The article concludes by quoting a Swedish journalist claiming:
It would come as no surprise if attacks were carried out against, for instance, the pipelines, he said. “And attitudes will not change unless the Chinese government stops its support for the Myanmar military. That should be a real concern.”
Xinjiang, China, also serves as a critical juncture for China’s BRI and we can clearly see the US promoting separatism there. The recent “Uyghur Tribunal” organized by the abovementioned US-funded World Uyghur Congress aims at further undermining Beijing’s efforts to counter US-sponsored armed separatism in Xinjiang by placing additional international pressure on China for implementing necessary security measures to prevent it.
The continued US-sponsored attacks on China’s BRI, the US-led military build-up along China’s coasts, and the propaganda war the US is waging to control the narratives surrounding both, represents a race against time for both Washington and Beijing.
For Washington, it is attempting to create the conditions in which RAND predictions of China’s economic devastation following a conventional conflict confined to East Asia can be transformed into reality.
For Beijing, it is attempting to run out the clock and assume the economic, military, and political power it needs to fully deter any such conflict, and assume its position as the largest, most powerful economy on Earth.
All things being equal, China has the world’s largest population – a population that is hardworking and well-educated. China’s educational institutions are producing millions more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates than the US per year. China’s massive trade networks ensure its economy has plenty of resources. It should become the largest economy. And only a war of aggression, chosen to be waged by Washington will stop this from coming to pass.
US foreign policy in the 21st century has demonstrated in action the true nature of its foreign policy versus what Washington’s politicians say with words from behind podiums or its media says in front of cameras about a “rules-based international order.”
The only rule we can see demonstrably upheld is “might makes right.”
Only time will tell whether or not the US “makes right” its smaller nation with its smaller economy clinging to primacy over China for decades to come before it no longer has the “might” to do so.
MM thoughts on this “article”…
There’s some pretty fucking huge assumptions being made. They are going to get people killed.
Any war with China will be nuclear.
It will not be fought against China alone. It will be forght against the SEO (Russia and all the other nations.)
The window of “opportunity” will not be in 2025 – 2030. It was in 2004 to 2009. It has long passed by.
If Chinese citizens, cities or geography is attacked, and destoyed so will be the fate of American citizens, cities and geography.
It will not be a long drawn out conventional war on or near China. It will be international, and vicious. And it will be devistating, and over in a short period of time.
Internal Chinese dissidant groups, all funded by the USA, have mostly been rooted out and eliminated if not violently crushed.
What are your thoughts after reading this particular bilge out of America and promoted in Australia?
Other thoughts…
re: A closing window of opportunity estimated to close between 2025 and 2030 allows the US to carry out a limited war with China . . .blah blah
That piece of garbage was written by Brian Berletic, “who is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.” In no way could the US “carry out” (whatever that means — it’s not a professional military term) a limited war with China.
If the US warmongers want to provoke a war with China, I would say go to it. The US will lose. And in doing it will discover their mistake. You can’t defeat China’s economic dominance by military action.
I saw the article as a (mistaken) claim that the should take advantage of a window of opportunity and attack China.
US War Plans with China Taking Shape . . .China’s massive trade networks ensure its economy has plenty of resources. It should become the largest economy. And only a war of aggression, chosen to be waged by Washington will stop this from coming to pass.
China is not waiting for economic dominance over Taiwan to push the unification envelope. China simply don’t care about taking up governance over people who are brainwashed to be hostile to them. Only that China, in principle, would not give up sovereignty over the territory called Taiwan. The present situation is fine with them.
China’s economy has exceeded USA’s long ago–IMF and World Bank said 2014, but my understanding is 2010 or earlier. Just that the way GDP is calculated, the USA’s mode of non-productive sectors are given weights that is not deserved. How does the legal sector produced 10% of what people in the USA consume? How does a business consultant’s 1 hour of free-wheeling opinion voicing produce $1,000 worth of goods and services? USA’s 21+ $T of GDP is Lucy In The Sky, a hallucination.
Taiwan people are just plain stupid, brainwashed, and clinching to what they consider as the last straw. They know it’s a straw, but they don’t know that this straw is still effective only because China doesn’t give a damn about them.
Posted by: Oriental Voice | Oct 1 2021 19:37 utc | 26
War with China;
There is a sort of conceptual mistake when talking about US “capabilities” and warmongering. It is not the Military who want a “sort of” war, but the military-industrial complex, who need credible enemies.
IT is the Oligarchic owners of defense industries who want continued hostilities. As long as they can make cash. (Or rather, relieve the sheeple of their woolly coats – “for their own good”).
Most Generals go throught the “revolving doors” of industry-think*tank-Military, sometimes Political etc. So they are on both sides at the same time, they are not separate identities.
The Industry needs to be able to produce the “ultimate military rabbit out of the hat projects”, lots of them, at an enviable cost-overrun. ….. and to get rid of most of the product rapidly afterwards, to enable “replacement”.
For this they need “threats” agogo. Built in obsolescence and fruitful and intimate connections and relations with budgetteers.
*
US defense spending $811 billion. Not including other “secret” or “war” budgets. (The Afghanistan spending was concealed as War budget, and was independent from the standard defense budget. This will need “replacing” with another “war” situation for budget purposes)
The other NATO countries => $363 billion
Total $1.2 trillion per year. (Known)
(Turkey is the ONLY NATO country which has reduced it’s defense spending by 4%)
*
So we come back to China, Russia, NKorea, Iran as “credible” threats, even if they are not. As well as the others; Venezuela, Cuba etc. as walk-on bit-players to keep the propaganda tirade on the boil.
Whether there is a war with China or not, it must be profitable. The propaganda (as per b’s post) is only marketing for pre-emptive expenditure on the whole militarized industry. Advertising exageration?
Here’s a live display of shipping activity in east Asia. The US will block this and not pay a heavy price for doing so? The two dozen US military bases in Japan and half a dozen in South Korea won’t be leveled? Plus all US Navy surface ships at sea?
I guess they’ll be inspecting every ship that goes through the Straits of Malacca. They’ll need to keep an eye on Suez and Panama too incase someone tries to sneak through.
Thank you for the link to marine traffic. My immediate thought from that first glimpse was ah! that’s why China and its neighbours are busy building terrestrial rail and road systems. Equally obvious why Reuters an other liars are forever pumping the fear china, fear debt bondage mantra.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Oct 1 2021 21:45 utc | 39
There will be war between the empire and China. It is the Thucydides trap, and there is no way out of it. In fact, the first shots of that war have already been fired with the empire using biological WMDs against China. The only questions about the war are when does the shooting start and how bad does it have to get before the empire concedes… assuming the empire is quickly convinced that defeat is inevitable and so doesn’t escalate to nuclear weapons.
There has been discussion about the empire marshaling its gimps on the front line; trying to get Japan and Australia and not-so-Great Britain to take point in the fight. I am of mixed opinion as to whether this is good or bad. On the one hand it helps legitimize the empire’s aggression and makes the forces arrayed against China seem stronger. As well, if a country like Australia is the first to take a punch from China for the empire the optics will be bad. It would look like China being a bully and kicking America’s yappy pet chihuahua. Furthermore, I am quite fond of Japan and the Japanese people and I’d rather not see them hurt again.
On the other hand, if combat operations start directly between the US and China then it is a forgone conclusion that the Chinese will pull their punches, at least in the beginning. The US, for its part, will go right for the kill from the very start. This means that China will take a terrible beating while they come to realize that the fight is serious and will not be gentlemanly. If the fight starts with Japan this will not be an issue. Japan has a karmic debt to China and the Chinese will not pull their punches in a fight with them. China will come down on Japan like an avalanche and deal Japan a very swift and decisive defeat. This decisiveness is crucial as it will help convince the empire that further aggression is futile and thereby help prevent escalation by the empire. While it would pain me to see that happen to Japan , it is one of the best outcomes that prevents things from spiraling to Armageddon.
Of course, the prefect outcome would be for Britain to take the lead in the fight and get instantly and utterly crushed, as the British also have a deep karmic debt that the Chinese wouldn’t hesitate to collect on. That would have the same benefit of interrupting the empire’s escalation, but would spare the Japanese and possibly even teach the British some humility (yeah, lots of luck with that last, right?).
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 1 2021 21:52 utc | 40
I have to agree with you on Thucydides Trap. Interesting that you consider Covid as the first salvo the Empire fired. Actually China suspected SARS was the first salvo. That’s one reason they put effort into researching corona virus and means of containing such viral spread. Unlike Russia, they won’t openly accuse the Empire of biological warfare without possession of the smoking gun, but they will be very alert to future implantation of biological kinks coming from Empire’s direction.
Meanwhile, you’re also right that the Empire has been maneuvering to goat their lackeys to serve as canon fodders against China, even with some success. India is a prominent example. They would love for Japan to go head-on against China–the more Japanese casualties, the better narrative to build global mobilization of forces against China. Interesting that you sentimentally like Japanese and abhors the idea of them getting hurt. I guess you’re not informed of the extent of evil the Japanese had done around a century ago. Have you heard of the Nanjing Massacre, the 3-totality strategy (total plunder, total burning, total killing) in sweeping villages to ensure Chinese resistances would get no refurbishments, Project 731-germ warfare??? In fact, it was Project 731’s research dossier that started Fort Detrick lab. I suppose you consider that to be 75-100 years old past, and one should forgive and forget. Well, I can’t. Especially not when today’s Japan can’t even come clean and admit to what they have done. I don’t see a reborn Japan.
Posted by: Oriental Voice | Oct 1 2021 22:45 utc | 43
Today, the Outlaw US Empire is a Neoliberal Oligarchy while China’s a Social-Democratic nation–when both are objectively examined. Geoeconomically, the Empire’s dependent on China, not the other way round. As was overtly made very clear at the Alaska meeting, the Outlaw US Empire cannot deal with China from a position of strength either geopolitically or geoeconomically.
As I wrote a few days ago to zero objections, China and the Eurasian Bloc coalescing around it when seen in relation to the Outlaw US Empire differs little than how Yamamoto saw the dynamic between Japan and the USA prior to Pearl Harbor–Japan was sure to lose no matter what it did.
And yet again, several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have publicly stated that they want no war with either Russia or China. They’re what Martyanov calls realists who understand the genuine balance of power no longer favors the Outlaw US Empire even when NATO is added.
Biden and the Ds just as Trump and the Rs desperately need his version of MAGA–Build Back Better–to become reality. But with the USA geoeconomically dependent on China, how is it ever going to accomplish that if it starts a war with its primary supplier if the funds ever get allocated?! Yes, the Merchants of Death constantly need an existential threat to justify their existence, and that’s the special interest fueling the war talk that the generals refute.
Then, IMO, this new set of polling results must be added to the equation–public sentiment for war against some other nation not named Congress doesn’t exist:
“Arguably more disturbing were the implications for the ‘other’ party if secession did not occur. A sizable majority of both Trump and Biden voters agreed with the statement that ‘if our society so wants, it is the duty of every true citizen to help eliminate the evil that poisons our country from within.'”
That ought to scare just a few Neoliberal grifters as the public agrees without knowing that it does on the very source of the problem being domestic. Soon, both sides will know they agree, and 2022 elections are going to see lots of fireworks.
"On the contrary, no-ones talking of a land invasion of China, just the blocking of the SLOC which would have a catastrophic effect on China’s economy."
Now hold on a second.
Given that the U.S. and most countries in the world are heavily dependent on China for manufactured goods (both finished and unfinished), what would be the effect of cutting off Chinese commercial shipping on the world’s economy?
Well, I’ll tell you, it would be a depression followed by mass outrage that the U.S. government could have deliberately brought such a catastrophe down upon everyone’s heads.
Are U.S. foreign and economic planners that stupid? They definitely are stupid, but I doubt that the actual owners (George Carlin’s word) of the country would stand for it.
“A closing window of opportunity estimated to close between 2025 and 2030 allows the US to carry out a limited war with China, resulting in a favorable outcome for Washington. Beyond that, the US will find itself outmatched and any attempt to curb China’s rise rendered futile.”
This is chilling.
In light of this, the current coercive and zealous covid vaccination program in the Anglosphere can also be seen as drills preparing for possible biological warfare.
If the US mainland and Australia are relatively protected in the eventuality of this conventional war with China, biological warfare (regardless of who initiates it) creates vulnerability.
It all makes sense now: why California is mandating vaccination for school children when their risk of dying from covid is 2 per million infected.
Taiwan is part of China. Both governments’ (Beijing and Taipei) Constitutions states that fact.
So, there are no issues, problems or arguments on any of these: ADZ, ADIZ or any other matters. PRC airplanes can fly or land anywhere, including Taipei, period.
This is the real news of our times, not the drivel pumped out by and then rerun by its handmaidens of deceit.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Oct 2 2021 2:03 utc | 60
This is not 1944 where you can float troop transports across the Pacific to attack an enemy. We live in an age of satellites and hyper sonic weapons. If there is a war it will be a series of short furious naval battles in which the holders of land in the area will be the victors. Will Korea and Japan join? At their great peril maybe.
While the media coverage is bullshit China is boiling the frog in water slowly with Taiwan being the frog. I am sure China has though about the suppression of enemy air defenses like the US has done effectively with the Wild Weasel. I am sure China has the capacity to take out a good portion of Taiwan’s radar and air defense system. They can systematically destroy their naval bases along with their communication infrastructure and military bases without a boot on the ground. Taiwan can do little in return.
If China decided to act it would be over rather quickly with a loss of prestige on the world stage. I am sure they have thought about that as well. The US is in no position do do anything other than bitch and moan. Taiwan will have to cut some sort of deal with China at some point or China will act I do believe. When that will happen is anyones guess.
While I fully agree to your conclusion that the US can’t sensibly do anything when China decides to forcefully reunite Taiwan with the mainland, I do not see that China is boiling the frog.
China has not tightened any tensions, neither towards Taiwan, not in the SCS or ECS. The “nine dash line” is a naval border claimed by the ROC and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang kai Shek) in 1944 at earliest, and at that time, neither of FUKUS challenged that claim. That as an aside.
As to Taiwan, China has tried since decades to go a long and patient way towards unification, by strengthening ties between the territory and the motherland. Taiwan companies are heavily invested in mainland China (and vice versa where not sabotaged by the DPP administration), between 1 and 2 million Taiwan inhabitants live permanently or for long periods in mainland China, there are some hundred thousand marriages.
China has made clear that the one country, two systems situation can go on for long as long as there is no secession attempt. In that case China will act swiftly.
Hu Xijin in the Global Times described the outlines of such a forceful unification when commenting US weapon sales to Taiwan. Once China would act, there would be powerful satiation attacks by missiles, air force, and naval firepower destroying all major airports, military targets on land, military naval installations, and naval forces of Taiwan. After that a full force landing on Taiwan and all its islands would follow.
There is no reasonibly thinkable possible outcome where the attacking side could be repelled or defeated. And there is no way how a naval attack of the US, AUKUS, Quad or whomever could succeed. And it is very doubtful that even the most radical forces in the US would wage a nuclear war over Taiwan.
As to Taiwan, it is their side who is stirring up the conflicts by buying “recognition” by some Baltic SS Shitholes like Lithuania who are living on EU pockets so don’t have much to lose. Ukraine rowed back when receiving a warning from Beijing. The DPP clowns should just stop their separatist provocations. A Chinese proverb says “the rat that gnaws the tiger’s tail invites destruction”.
karlof1 @47: "The Thucydides Trap was again debunked... The antagonists are supposed to be copycat rivals to each other, but that wasn't the case with Athens or Sparta then..."
And yet the Peloponnesian War happened anyway. The details of personality are not relevant as personality is not what causes war. A rising power inevitably displaces the existing power, and the existing power resists the loss of its dominance. This basic pattern is unavoidable.
"...the Outlaw US Empire cannot deal with China from a position of strength either geopolitically or geoeconomically..."
Absolutely correct. So what tools does that leave in the “Outlaw US Empire’s” arsenal to defend its hegemony? Or do you imagine the empire will give China a sportsman-like handshake, say “Well, it was a nice run but you win. It’s your turn to show the world direction now. I’ll just retire to tending my garden.”? Laughable balderdash!
"...relation to the Outlaw US Empire differs little than how Yamamoto saw the dynamic between Japan and the USA prior to Pearl Harbor..."
Absolutely! Many of the generals and admirals know what they are up against, but Japan ended up at war with the USA anyway. Admiral Yamamoto’s realization that war would be an enormous mistake changed exactly what?
There will be war. Xi knows it, and the Chinese people in general know it.
That is why they are investing significant chunks of their resources preparing for it. China’s military is specifically designed to defeat the empire and any of the empire’s vassals that get pushed into the fight.
The war is not “if” but “when”.
The Chinese know that they are under biological weapons attack, but as Oriental Voice @43 points out they are not squealing about it as a western nation would.
Delays to the overt war still work to China’s advantage: The empire gets weaker and China gets stronger. The greater that strength disparity the more China can control the course of the war and steer that war away from doing lasting damage to humanity.
"A sizable majority of both Trump and Biden voters agreed with the statement that 'if our society so wants, it is the duty of every true citizen to help eliminate the evil that poisons our country from within."
Precisely so. And what is the tried and true method to distract a population from internal issues? Why, external war of course.
It amazes me to see bright people who are fully aware of much of the crazy shit the empire has done over the last couple decades still trying to project the empire’s future behavior based upon the assumption that it will be rational.
The empire has not been rational and it will not become rational while it remains an empire. In fact the empire will become more irrational with every passing day as its end draws nearer.
Everything karlof1 @47 says points towards war. How can someone as bright and knowledgeable as karlof1 think these things mean peace is on the verge of breaking out?
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 2 2021 12:14 utc | 80
For those trying to dismiss the post by “Down South @8 (I’m looking at you Don Bacon @57), here is a link to the original report by the RAND Corporation that the analysis is based upon: War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.
This is from the RAND Corporation. That is the closest thing the empire has to a brain. What is notable, despite the recognition in the report that the empire’s days of uncontested dominance are waning, the report paints an overly optimistic picture for the empire.
Being chilled is entirely called for.
There will be war.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 2 2021 12:51 utc | 82
In regards to the prospect of war with china, while I am sympathetic to gruff’s perspective, I think it still simplifies the situathon. thr US side is not monolithix while MICIMATT has institutionally mobilized all the psyops effortsz, and the Pentagon has moved to ‘pivot to asia’ since Obama, there are nevertheless the Mark Milleys that understand that there is no way for the US to win in the Asia Pacific theater against china. they wouls not only lose the war but also bleed global prestige.
That said, when the institutional gears are grinding as they are, so called strategic thinking ceases to be rational or even strategic. trying to predict what an irrational institution will do makes little sense.
Secondly, the us is already at war with china, hybrid war. it’s not as if we need to wait for some trigger event — it is already ongoing! Hong Kong color revolution, whose failure is now abundantly clear. the ongoing xinjiang campaign. and let’s not forget that china depleted a staggering amount of its US reserves in 2015 in order to fight off US orchestrated capital flight so it could harvest Chinese assets in the cheap, like they did in the asian financial crisis.
That’s not much talked about at MOC, but I’ve heard Chinese analysts speak of that financial warfare as a watershed moment. watershed because its failure precipitated more desperate and maniacal measures afterwards. keep in mind that was before the hong Kong and Xinjiang psyops.
As for biological warfare, regardless of one’s view on the origins of covid, there was a spate of agricultural pests in the trump era that devastated Chinese food production. everything is being tried.
So, war js ongoing. to instead await and analyze and predict some trigger military event like Taiwan is to miss the forest for the trees. if what’s been happening doesn’t count as aggression on par with warfare, then that is already to have internalized empire propaganda that things like sanctions are not acts of war.
The Anglo’s started WW1 to maintain their global hegemony. They started WW2 for the same purpose. Yet somehow people believe it is too far fetch that they would start a war with China to maintain the same hegemony they fought 2 WWs over?
Read the RAND report. They know they will suffer heavy military casualties and their economy will collapse by 10% but all that will be worth it if they can inflict heavy damage on China’s economy in the region of a 30-35% collapse.
What do you think the purpose of all this China bashing coverage in the media is about that b highlights? It is to prepare the populace for the coming conflict with China.
mastameta @85: "trying to predict what an irrational institution will do makes little sense."
A cornered animal is irrational, but it is easy to predict what it will do.
"secondly, the us is already at war with china, hybrid war."
Yes, of course, but the war will go overt and kinetic. That is the only path available to the cornered dog of an empire. The growling and snarling threats, the urinating on the carpet, nothing else it does opens a path back to power for the empire.
"... china depleted a staggering amount of its US reserves in 2015... "
This is policy, like that in Russia, to reduce exposure to the US dollar. To the empire that in itself is an act of war.
Yes, the war is currently on already, but it remains somewhat covert. When I talk about war starting above I am referring to overt military conflict.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 2 2021 15:15 utc | 90
Any experienced warfare guy will say the same, the most important element of any war is logistics. And that is the US’s main downfall in any war with China. The US does not have the capability to supply the fighting elements with the ammunition, food, repair parts etc that they would require to conduct a war on the other side of the vast Pacific Ocean which covers about one-third of the earth’s surface.
And where would those forces be? The Marine Corps plan is to move Marines from one small island to another on small ships, and then have these Marines to place indirect fire on China targets. I don’t see anyone volunteering for that ridiculous scenario. But hey, it keeps dollars in the Pentagon budget.
Another problem for the US is that both China and Russia have fielded versions of hypersonic weapons that can travel faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5 is about 3,806 mph) and potentially hold U.S. capital and logistical ships at risk. These missiles have a range of up to a thousand miles. The US has no defense against them and aircraft-carrier launched planes don’t have sufficient range to rectify the problem.
So it would be a maritime-based war with US major warships not able to get anywhere close to the Asian mainland, which means no war at all.
"...the most important element of any war is logistics."
Absolutely so. Fancy weapons and great troop morale get you nowhere if you cannot get them to the theater of operations along with lunch. The notion that the US can land ground forces on the Chinese mainland to occupy and annex China is absurd. That’s the “Risk” board game version of geopolitics.
But the empire doesn’t need to annex China. The empire just needs to economically set China back a couple decades. There is a faction within the empire who believe this is doable in part with a naval blockade.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 2 2021 21:42 utc | 109
Gabriel Collins did a very good report for the US Naval War College Review on the practicality of a maritime oil blockade of China – even in 2018 he was not too optimistic, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China—Tactically Tempting but Strategically Flawed”. China would also have access to Russia, Central Asia, ASEAN etc. for food and other supplies, and would have inevitably created large stockpiles before any conflict.
"The scenarios also highlight the reality that, within historically realistic response parameters, China very feasibly could adapt to conflict conditions and withstand a blockade for a longer period than an outside power realistically could sustain the operation. At the most fundamental level, a blockader would find itself increasingly isolated on the world stage, which would complicate its ability politically, economically, and militarily to continue its campaign."
"The significant long-term reduction in revenue to major oil and commodity exporters as a result of decreasing oil-demand volumes and depressed prices could exert profound internal political effects and trigger new conflicts and in- flame existing ones across the Middle East and parts of Africa. Sufficiently serious regional contingencies could divert U.S. military resources from the Asian theater, particularly if the United States found itself politically and diplomatically isolated on the world stage. This could undermine the sustainability of a distant energy blockade against China."
China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan, the two entities are already close enough on everything that counts, trade, inward investments, tourism, cultural exchanges, the lot.
China’s power is anchored in making things and selling them on every world market, by the turn of the century around a third of her GDP was coupled with exports, by 2019 this ratio was down to 15%, it must have gone up during the months of covid as the Chinese economy was the only one resuming working.
For the Americans to disrupt the sea lines from the Chinese ports would be counterproductive unless they were to find a substitute for the stuff manufactured in China for the US market, some 80% of US imports from China are on behalf of US brand names, Apple is but the one most visible example.
Despite of the warmongering China still enjoys the the Permanent Normal Trade Relations Partner status (PNTR) google for what the partner status offers, China was granted it by Bush at the time of her joining WTO. If the Americans were serious about disrupting China’s trade hence the country’s economy they would withdraw the PNTR status, they haven’t, which tells you they are stuck until they figure where else to source what comes from China.
“an established power will generally try to prevent a rising power to become so powerful that it could challenge the established power.”
I think this is a good description of the Thucydides Trap. I don’t believe the theory should be taken any more literal then that and it isn’t supposed to be some deterministic scientific comment were causality is linear an absolute. It also doesn’t require a shooting war to hold true.
Given the current situation, and The Empire’s multi-pronged attempt to harm China, I think it is fair to say the Thucydides Trap has already been sprung.
…
Having said that, I don’t think a shooting war is inevitable. I also think a blockade isn’t likely as that would almost absolutely lead to a shooting war.
People forget China has a lot of oil and other resources. Enough oil and gas to last five years without imports. They are also well connected to Russia, Central Asia and South East Asia, so even a successful naval blockade could be gotten around.
I disagree China wouldn’t invade if forced into this position. They’d take Taiwan quickly and it would be impossible to prevent them from taking South Korea, which would lead to many thousand American POW’s and KIA. They’d also have total control of the areas within the first Island chain which would provide a lot of strategic avenues.
Not to mention a blockade wouldn’t slow down their industrial production, instead it would push their industry into war-time hyper production giving China unlimited missiles to strike at everything from Gaum on in.
That isn’t to say The Desperate Empire might not try a blockade or find a way to stumble into a stupid war…it is to say it would turn out very badly for The Empire and hasten their demise rather then slow down China’s rise.
Given the current situation, and The Empire's multi-pronged attempt to harm China, I think it is fair to say the Thucydides Trap has already been sprung.
This is clear to me as well.
Having said that, I don't think a shooting war is inevitable.
Agreed. But I don’t think the possibility of a shooting war is remote either.
I also think a blockade isn't likely as that would almost absolutely lead to a shooting war.
I disagree with this. Merely the threat of attack will cause shipping rates to skyrocket. That ends China’s manufacturing advantage and ME oil supply.
China can adjust … but how quickly?
I disagree China wouldn't invade if forced into this position. They'd take Taiwan quickly ...
When I said China wouldn’t invade, I was responding to Don Bacon’s comment about the importance of logistics. There wouldn’t be logistics necessary for a battle for Taiwan because China can take Taiwan before such logistics become a factor.
And I don’t think South Korea would fall quite so quickly or easily as you believe.
China provides a governance model that may inspire the Western public to demand real change. So we see propaganda attacks against China. And rising tensions help to vitiate that propaganda.
I also think a blockade isn’t likely as that would almost absolutely lead to a shooting war.
“I disagree with this. Merely the threat of attack will cause shipping rates to skyrocket. That ends China’s manufacturing advantage and ME oil supply.
China can adjust ... but how quickly?"
Yes, but isn’t that what a blockade would do? The very purpose of the blockade is to prevent China from shipping to harm their industry.
I’d argue that once a blockade is in place, China has no choice but to hit with everything they have short of nukes. They aren’t going to wait around while their economy and industrial production is stifled…they will make the USA pay the price, and then some…and that is completely within their capabilities.
It looks to me like China is prepared for war, they would be able to switch to war production mode almost immediately. It would be the West that would be slow to adjust.
In the event of war, China does not need ME oil, they have enough domestic oil to wage a multi-year war.
South Korea wouldn’t fall easily, neither would Taiwan for that matter, but they would fall, there is no way to reinforce either once the shooting starts. Tens of thousands of casualties on both sides within a short amount of time.
To continue fighting USA would need a draft. Given current social conditions in The States how do you think a draft would play out?
Thank you Roger @ 111 and Baron @ 115 for trying to inject a dose of reality into this notion of a USN or even AUKUS enforced blockade of China.
Gruff @ 109 re: "a faction within the empire who believe this is doable with a naval blockade...."
First, blockade is an act of war, and the Chinese would be well within their rights to attack and sink any ship trying to enforce any such blockade whether in their own territorial or international waters. So there’s a high probability that any attempt to actually enforce a blockade would lead to a real hot war in East Asia. And, once again, this blockade would be completely illegal since there would be absolutely no UNSC approval for any such action.
Second, with the lengthy supply chains required to support such an effort even from Pearl Harbour, the US probably will have to utilise it’s most forward military bases in the region which means both South Korea and especially Japan which is home to over a dozen major bases that are locations for key Indo-Pacific assets of the USN, USAF and USMC. If these bases or rather their units actually launch military attacks against China then the countries that house those bases would themselves be open to direct military retaliation from China.
Both S Korea and Japan rely on shipping lanes well within the range of the Chinese conventional missile arsenal. The Chinese could respond with their own form of a blockade, shutting down the Japanese and S Korean SLOCs in a week or two by sinking (or threatening to sink) tankers and container ships in the Sea of Japan. The Japanese and SK economies require vast volumes of imported energy and other raw goods resources and are just as vulnerable as China is to a maritime blockade. So if the US wants to play the blockade game then China has options and can respond in kind with similar types of action against not only two major US allies but two of the largest economies in the world.
Third, on top of the above, nobody mentions the huge, and I mean huge, amount of trade between the countries of ASEAN ie SE Asia and China. Indonesia alone has I believe almost $50-60 billions of trade with China per annum. Add in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore etc. and you’re talking at least a couple of hundred billion pa. Are these countries going to sit back and allow the US and its Anglo Saxon poodles to destroy their economies? Nope, didn’t think so.
Finally, everyone really should read the books by Andrei Martyanov to understand the new realities, that the next war in the Pacific won’t be won by some USMC “island hopping” strategy or another round of Midways and Coral Seas. It’s going to be won by the country that can launch salvo after salvo of conventional anti ship and anti air and other conventional missiles. Think about it – there’s lots of numbers thrown around on the internet re the Iranian and Hezbollah guided missile arsenals, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 etc. That’s Iran and Hezbollah working under the most stringent sanctions in the world.
So how many advanced anti-ship missiles do you think the manufacturing powerhouse that is China has stored away for a rainy day? Bear in mind, some of those missiles have been in mass production for several years now. 40,000? 50,000? More? And, yes, there’s some question re the actual operational efficacy of Chinese anti-ship missile targeting. Still, assuming they get their targeting systems right (maybe with a little help from Shoigu et al!) how long do you think the USN and its allies will last when the Chinese fire salvoes of a 100, 200, 500, or even 1000 Anti-Ship missiles per day for a week or even two?
Posted by: thermobarbaric | Oct 3 2021 1:30 utc | 125
Yes, I mentioned naval blockade as one example of the empire escalating to overt warfare against China in addition to its current covert war. Yes, realistically such efforts by the empire cannot succeed beyond a temporary and relatively brief suppression of China’s GDP. But next year it will be even harder for the empire to dent China’s economic growth, and the year after harder still.
Are you so foolish as to think the empire will give up without a fight?
It doesn’t matter that it is a bad idea. The empire is out of alternatives to war.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 3 2021 1:43 utc | 126
"In a few years, another country with a nuclear submarine fleet will appear in the world – Australia. What kind of submarines will this country receive from its allies, what kind of combat capabilities do they provide, and according to what scenario can they be used to contain China’s military power?
Everything is learned by comparison. What are the eight multi-purpose nuclear submarines that Australia will receive (not to be confused with submarines armed with ballistic missiles)? Let’s compare them with other fleets.
First, take the example of China, against which (at least, so they say) everything is being planned. Now China has only nine multi-purpose nuclear submarines, with low stealth. Three of them are Project 091; these are old and noisy vessels that have almost no combat value. The remaining six are Project 093, more modern boats, which, however, are inferior to modern American and British ones. In fact, only these six have a real combat value, and it is this number that should be taken into account.
...Here is just one of many examples. Geographically, Australia can completely block the connection between China and the Indian Ocean: there is a direct exit there and this is not controlled by China in any way. China only has the Strait of Malacca, which with its new submarines Australia will be able to block from the Indian Ocean. Or go past Australia itself, with the same submarines and its aircraft. There is no other road by which a large amount of oil can be supplied to China.
... It is worth recognizing that the world is on the verge of war. Australia’s agreement with the United States and Britain says exactly this. An ordinary world war with tens of millions of dead, as one option, or with hundreds of millions; after all, no one has canceled nuclear weapons. Such a war is almost inevitable.
Moreover, knowing what deadlines the ‘partners’ set for themselves, you can roughly understand the time for which they are preparing the ‘hot phase’. And looking at how other countries are preparing for the next world war, it’s time for us to take a critical, honest and non-biased look at how we are preparing for it.”
The increased cost of trade would spur industry in the West
Factories will just pop up everywhere? No.
As China becomes more like USA
Never happen. Chinese are what they are, and it isn’t becoming more like Americans. It has to do with 5,000 years of culture, Confucianism, Taoism etc. So Chinese have a whole different way of looking at matters, such as working together toward a better life (which they have largely accomplished) w/o the petty political combative self-aggrandisement “democracy” so dominant in the USA.
Chinese do this under a qualified up-through-the-ranks leader, and not having to accept an elected weirdo as in the US.
The fact that Chinese are different from Americans, and will never be like them, has been a deep disappointment in Washington, but that’s the way it is and the way it will be.
BEIJING, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- For years, the unspoken truth about Western media is that their veneer of objectivity has come off a long time ago. While touting themselves as the epitome of trustworthiness and honesty, some media practitioners in the West have no qualms about propagating lies against China.
As the coordinated anti-China smear campaign is gaining steam, more intrepid journalists with a conscience are calling it out despite the tremendous pressure to silence them.
In one of the most excoriating rebukes against Western media's manipulation of the public opinion against China, Javier Garcia, head of the office of the EFE News Agency of Spain in Beijing, announced earlier this week that he would soon leave journalism, as the flagrant information manipulation by Western media "has taken a good dose of my enthusiasm for this profession."
The departure of journalists like Garcia is a giant loss to the industry, which is in dire need of introspection. For those who choose to stay and disagree with the highly biased and distorted reporting on China, they are usually confronted with a monolithic propaganda structure in the West to ignore, silence and discredit them.
The past few years have seen a lot of deplorable cases where anyone who dared to maintain objective and impartial positions on China were accused of being on the payroll of the Chinese government or even worse.
While they are working arduously to suppress impartial information and hoping it to pay off, some media in the West, especially in the United States, should expect that the chickens will come home to roost, as their own political order is at risk.
Even James Murdoch, son of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch who owns FOX News, castigated U.S. media for amplifying disinformation that successfully sowed falsehoods.
"Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years," he told the Financial Times shortly after the U.S. Congress riot in early January.
For those Western media who are still slandering China's peaceful development, it is time for them to think twice.
One important note on something that is getting zero coverage in the “news”…
Big news in aerospace circles, and all over China is the great diversity of the new state-of-the-art military weapons that are being shown in my town (where I live). Zhuhai. It’s all very awesome. Some of the aircraft are real surprises, and it might take the USA decades to play catch up. VIDEO.
Video.
I am interested in hearing what the readers read in their local news about these systems being made and mass-produced in China. Can you please enlightening me.
The First Russian Strategic Assessment of the Australia-UK-US (USUKA) Submarine Pact
A serious Russian strategic assessment of the UK-USA-Australia decision to start basing nuclear armed nuclear submarines in Australia 18 months from now…
Unlike diesel-electrics, nuclear subs can contribute to the US blockade of China from the Pacific and in the Malacca
Following last week’s meeting in Washington of Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne, the Australian defence minister and their US counterparts, a strategic military and basing agreement was announced between Australia, the UK and US (AUKUS). This is being reinforced with summit meetings in Washington this week.
The declared target of their war-making preparations is China.
Australian strategy against Russia in the Pacific region follows in lockstep with the US. But for the time being the Russian enemy, and Russian submarine and surface fleet operations in the Indo-Pacific region, are not being discussed by Australian officials in public; at least not to the extent when President Vladimir Putin last visited Australia in November 2014 with a nuclear-powered, nuclear armed naval escort.
Ahead of schemes for strategic warmaking in the Pacific, the US, the UK and Australia are also engaged in proxy war operations. These have accelerated recently in Myanmar, where Russia and China are allied in support of the military government of General Min Aung Hlaing. Next, from both sides, state bribery, subversion, putsch-making, and other special operations are likely to accelerate in the Pacific islands from Fiji to Papua-New Guinea.
For the moment, the initial reaction to AUKUS from the Russian Foreign Ministry has been as close to uncritical as the ministry can be.” Spokesman Maria Zakharova said last Thursday:
“We noted the plans, announced by Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines as part of an ‘enhanced trilateral security partnership’ agreed yesterday by the United States, Great Britain and Australia. We proceed from the premise that being a non-nuclear power and fulfilling in good faith the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Australia will honour its commitments under this document, as well as the IAEA Safeguards Agreements along with its Additional Protocol. We hope that Canberra ensures the necessary level of cooperation with the IAEA in order to rule out any proliferation-related risks.”
The first detailed technical and strategic assessment of the AUKUS scheme has followed this week in Vzglyad, the leading strategy publication reflecting the Russian General Staff and GRU assessments. A translation from the Russian article by Alexander Timokhin follows.
In a few years, another country with a nuclear submarine fleet will appear in the world – Australia. What kind of submarines will this country receive from its allies, what kind of combat capabilities do they provide, and according to what scenario can they be used to contain China’s military power?
Everything is learned by comparison. What are the eight multi-purpose nuclear submarines that Australia will receive (not to be confused with submarines armed with ballistic missiles)? Let’s compare them with other fleets.
First, take the example of China, against which (at least, so they say) everything is being planned. Now China has only nine multi-purpose nuclear submarines, with low stealth. Three of them are Project 091; these are old and noisy vessels that have almost no combat value. The remaining six are Project 093, more modern boats, which, however, are inferior to modern American and British ones. In fact, only these six have a real combat value, and it is this number that should be taken into account.
I must say that the Chinese have made tremendous progress if we start from their initial level. Their submarines are already armed with good torpedoes and means of countering enemy torpedoes. But they are still very far from British ‘Astutes’ or American ‘Virginias’.
Theoretically, the ‘Virginia’ of the latest modification (the block, as the Americans say) will be able to be used when delivering a high-precision massive non-nuclear strike on Chinese territory. In this case, the Australians will be able to increase the American salvo. In the future, when the Americans finish their hypersonic missile program for the Navy, this strike may also be very fast.It will be a separate story if the Americans again trample on international norms of behaviour and deploy nuclear weapons on Australian submarines before the war. Then, using cruise or hypersonic missiles, Australia will be able to cause China (and not only it) simply monstrous damage. And just ordinary Tomahawks with their fast, surprise launch can cause considerable damage to the side attacked – and the tactical and technical characteristics of the ‘Virginia’ will allow you to secretly approach even a well-guarded shore and deliver a sudden and unexpected blow.Naturally, this is true if Australia builds ‘Virginias’ with vertical missile launch installations, and not ‘Astutes’, which can only use Tomahawks through torpedo tubes. There is no answer to this question yet.In the event of a war more or less close to a classic naval war, these submarines will create an additional threat to China, and China will be required to allocate additional forces to this threat, which it will need very much in a war with the United States and Britain, even without Australia.
The Chinese are taking care of their fleet and developing it. They have anti-submarine surface forces and anti-submarine aviation, but when performing combat tasks outside the combat radius of their base (coastal in colloquial language) aviation, the problem of combating enemy submarine forces will become quite acute for China. Chinese surface ships will be subjected to air strikes by Australian based and American carrier-based aircraft; anti-submarine aircraft will not be able to work without cover; in fact, all tasks will have to be solved by Chinese nuclear submarines. They do not reach the western (that is, the future Australian) level yet, and they will be forced to act against heterogeneous enemy forces (submarines, anti-submarine aircraft, surface ships) without support.
How will China respond?
China has hope – there are new multi-purpose nuclear submarines being created, designated in the foreign press as Type 095, and in China itself 09-V. According to visual assessment of images of the boat, it is clear that China is trying to introduce a large number of technical solutions that increase the stealth of the submarine and the range of detection for its underwater targets. It is clearly visible that the boat is being created specifically for combat.
But what success the Chinese will have is an open question, and most importantly, even these boats will not see superiority in quality; ideally there will be approximate parity. At the same time, if the current pace of updating the submarine forces in China continues, then China will be inferior to the Americans and the British in numbers even without Australia, and even more so with it. These new boats are still in the planning stage — China has not built any of them yet. And another hostile nuclear submarine fleet will definitely require the Chinese to invest very quickly and very seriously in expanding their production; that requires time, money, and resources.
Can China ignore this threat? No.
Here is just one of many examples. Geographically, Australia can completely block the connection between China and the Indian Ocean: there is a direct exit there and this is not controlled by China in any way. China only has the Strait of Malacca, which with its new submarines Australia will be able to block from the Indian Ocean. Or go past Australia itself, with the same submarines and its aircraft. There is no other road by which a large amount of oil can be supplied to China.
Australia would never have had these opportunities in this form if it had continued its work on the purchase of non-nuclear submarines from France.A non-nuclear (in fact the same diesel-electric) submarine is not capable, for example, of going under water at a high speed, as the ‘Virginias’ and ‘Astutes’ can, and secretly, without a critical increase in noise.
A non-nuclear boat needs to deliver fuel to the combat service area, an atomic one does not need to – a nuclear submarine is not tied to nearby bases or to fuel, and it can operate disproportionately more freely than a diesel-electric one, even with an air-independent power plant.
In combat, a nuclear submarine also has a lot of advantages, up to the possibility of sometimes getting away from the enemy’s torpedo by running. For a hypothetical Australian-French non-nuclear submarine, this would be impossible. The hydroacoustic complex on the ‘Virginias’ is generally difficult to compare with something, and this is the range of target detection and the range of shooting at it.
Now China, in addition to measures to counter the submarine fleet of the United States and Great Britain, will also have to take into account Australia, which wants to get a nuclear submarine more powerful than anything that China has at present.
What does the battlefield look like in numbers? If we start from how many of the ‘Virginias’ are already built and under construction to go into service by 2036, when the Australians want to get their eight submarines, then we can assume that there will be about 20 units. And they will not be able to throw everything at China; some of the submarines will be needed in case of emergency operations against Russia.
Thus, an additional eight Australian submarines will increase the number of units opposing China by at least a third, compared only with American submarines. This is even more than the British will be able to give for the war with China. China will have to increase both the submarine and other fleet forces by a comparable number.
In general, for China, these eight additional enemy submarines are a fresh handful of bones in the throat. That’s about what the Americans planned to do with the British. That’s what eight nuclear submarines are.
This is what caused the reaction of the Chinese to the news. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the transfer of nuclear submarine construction technologies to Australia harms the nuclear non-proliferation regime and ‘exacerbates the arms race’, as well as the fact that the United States and Great Britain ‘extremely irresponsibly’ apply double standards. These admonitions, of course, will not have any effect.
And what does this mean for Russia? If Australia wants to have eight multi-purpose submarines by 2036, then by that year we will ideally have four Yasen-class vessels in the Pacific Ocean – the ‘Novosibirsk’, ‘Krasnoyarsk’, ‘Vladivostok’ and, presumably, the ‘Perm’.
Is for the future boat of the project 545 with the code-name ‘Laika’, the form in which the ‘Laika’ was presented to the president in December 2019 indicates the deliberate obsolescence of the project. And most importantly – it is extremely doubtful that these boats will be in service by the mid-thirties. This is another example of how many there will turn out to be — eight nuclear submarines in one theatre of military operations.
However, the western ‘partners’ may have difficulties in implementing these wonderful plans.
Is everything so simple?
There is one aspect in all of this that can complicate everything. The production of as many as eight nuclear submarines, stuffed with high-tech systems to the brim, is not an easy matter. If we assume that the Australians will build some kind of ready-made project, for example the ‘Virginia’, then in any event they will up to 14 years for the construction of eight nuclear submarines if they start next year. This is an ultra-fast pace for eight units; the Americans themselves take five years to build one ‘Virginia’ from the popint of laying the keel to delivery to the Navy.
Is it possible for the Australians to meet the deadlines? Yes, but only in an “expansive’ way – laying more submarines a year than the Americans. And this requires, firstly, shipyards in sufficient quantity to build submarines; secondly, workers and engineers; and thirdly, the supply of components from the United States, which can become the bottleneck of the project because of the existing crisis in American shipbuilding. Does Australia have all this in the right amount? The allies will not be able to help them there; they do not have enough themselves.
And if the Australians build some kind of British project – either the ‘Astute’ or, as is now rumoured in Britain, the future project of a British multi-purpose submarine, which should replace the ‘Astutes’, then nothing will work out. Britain is barely coping with the construction of its submarines by itself, including the part played by related companies. In the case of the ‘Astutes’, some of the related parties are from France engaged by by the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, the British can in this way compensate for the losses of the French from the broken Australian contract for non-nuclear submarines. Still, the problem of timing will also arise in this case.
The Australians seem to understand this. On Sunday, September 19, the Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton said that Australia will not wait until its nuclear submarines are built, but will buy or lease British or American ones.
This is quite possible. However, not with British submarines, but more likely with American ones, although such a scheme would not lead to the desired increase in anti–Chinese forces; there would still be as many submarines against China, just some of the flags would change. But, firstly, by the time the construction of their series is completed (even if not all and with a delay), the Australians will already have experience working with nuclear submarines, and secondly, the United States now has problems with repairing its submarines (they do not pull, as they say), and renting some of their ships to Australia for the Americans will in fact mean their salvation as combat units, even under a foreign flag.
In general, it is possible to make Australia a country with a nuclear submarine fleet quickly. Moreover, the authors of this initiative have an extremely serious reason for all this. Such gigantic investments and sharp political turns are not carried out just like that. The hegemony of the Anglo-Saxons in the world is seriously shaken, both because of their own internal weakness, and because of the growth of China, and the sabotage of their system of power by Russia. It is quite obvious they will not give up their power over humanity and the benefits resulting from this in a favourable fashion.
It is worth recognizing that the world is on the verge of war. Australia’s agreement with the United States and Britain says exactly this. An ordinary world war with tens of millions of dead, as one option, or with hundreds of millions; after all, no one has canceled nuclear weapons. Such a war is almost inevitable.
Moreover, knowing what deadlines the ‘partners’ set for themselves, you can roughly understand the time for which they are preparing the ‘hot phase’. And looking at how other countries are preparing for the next world war, it’s time for us to take a critical, honest and non-biased look at how we are preparing for it.”
Big, huge changes, in the near future (a tentative list)
Truly, tectonic changes are happening before our eyes, and today I just want to list some of them but without going to deep into specific analyses, that I plan to do later in the coming weeks. But just looking at this list is impressive enough, at least for me. So, here we go:
The Anglos are circling the wagons:
The planned sale of US/UK SSNs to Australia is nothing short of a HUGE game changer. It is also just the tip of a big iceberg:
The US seems to have de-facto given up on Europe, not only because the UK left or because the EU is crashing and unmanageable anyway, but because the political grip the US had on the continent is now clearly slipping: NATO is a paper tiger, the “new Europeans” have outlived their utility and Russia has basically successfully diffused the threat from the West by her titanic effort to develop capabilities which make an attack on Russia suicidal for any country, including the USA, whether nukes are involved or not.
By screwing over France, the US has jettisoned a pretty useless ally which had a short hysterical fit, but is already going back to its usual groveling and begging (BTW – those who think that de Gaulle was the last French patriot capable of telling Uncle Shmuel to “take a hike” are wrong, Mitterrand was the last one, but that is a topic for another day).
Of course, in political/PR terms, the US will continue to declare itself committed to NATO and the EU, but the “body language” (actions) of the US directly contradicts this notion.
For all its immense progress since the 80s and 90s, China still has two major technological weak points: aircraft engines and SSNs. It just so happens that these are also two real US strong points. By deploying 8 more SSNs near China, the US is very intelligently maximizing the use of its best assets and hurting China were it will hurt the most. This does come with some very real risks, however, which I will discuss below.
Brazil is currently run by the US and Israel. South Africa is in a deep crisis. As for India, it is doing what it has been doing for decades: trying to play all sides while trying to weaken China. So it sure looks like the BRICS are becoming the “BRICS” which really leaves us with “only” the “RC” alliance which actually has a real name: the Chinese call it the “Strategic comprehensive partnership of coordination for the new era”.
Again, I don’t think that anybody will formally dissolve what was a rather informal alliance to begin with, but de-facto the BRICS seems to be loosing much of its former glamour and illusions. As for Russia and China, they are not going to “save” the former BRICS members out of some sense of sympathy especially not against their own will: let them save themselves, or at least try. Then, maybe.
Also, let’s be honest here, BRICS was an economic concept which was mostly an alliance of weak(er) countries against the big economic and military powers of the North and West.
As for the Russian-Chinese alliance (let’s call it that, even though formally that is not what this is), it is, by itself, already more powerful than BRICS and even more powerful that the united West (US+NATO+EU+etc.).
The SCO is changing (thanks to Uncle Shmuel), fast
If Biden was a secret “Putin agent” (“KGB agent” is the preferred term in the US, at least by those who do not seem to realize that the KGB was disbanded thirty years ago) he could not have done “better” than what he did in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to this galactic faceplant, the small(er) guys in the SCO (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) are now getting seriously concerned about what will happen next. Even better, the (very powerful) Iran will officially become a SCO member this month! Again, neither Russia not China “need” the SCO for their defense, but it sure makes things easier for them. Speaking of Afghanistan, Pakistan is already a SCO member, as is India.
It is important to note that the SCO will not become an “Asian NATO” or an “anti-NATO” or anything similar. Again, why would Russia, China and other want to follow a failed model? They have repeated ad nauseam that their alliances are of unions of (truly!) sovereign states and that this union will not impede on this sovereignty in any ways (besides, neither Russia not China need to limit the others SCO members sovereignty to begin with).
The EU is slowly committing economic and political suicide
Initially, France had a major hissy fit, but is probably not doing the only thing France should do after what happened: leave NATO and slam the door on it, very loudly. De Gaulle or Mitterrand would have done so immediately, but Macron? Being the ultimate spineless fake that he is, it would be miraculous if he did anything meaningful (other than brutally repressing all the riots in France).
At this time of writing the result of the elections in Germany are too close to call, but even if NS2 is allowed to function, the level of russophobic hysteria in Europe is so extreme that the following will almost certainly happen: the EU will continue with its rhetoric until the prices go even further up, at which point they will turn to the only country which the EU desperately need to survive: the much hated and feared Russia. Don’t quote me on that, but last week I remember the following prices for 1000 cubic meters of gas in Europe (just under 1000 dollars), the Ukraine (1600 dollars) and Belarus (120 dollars). I might have memorized this wrong (I was traveling), and this might have changed, but the bottom line is this: only Russia can’t give the EU the energy it needs, and she has exactly ZERO reasons to make those russophobic prostitutes any favors (other than symbolic). And even if my memory played a trick on me, what is certain that the prices for energy are soaring, the EU reserves are very low, and the temperatures falling. Welcome to the real world 🙂
I won’t even go into the “multiculturalism” “inclusivity” “positivity” and other Woke nonsense which most of the EU countries have accepted as dogmas (even Switzerland caved in).
The US is like an aircraft breaking apart in mid-air
As most of you know, I have decided to stay away from internal US politics (for many different reasons). So I will just use a metaphor: the US is like an aircraft which, due to pilot incompetence and infighting, is breaking apart in mid-air with its passengers still arguing about who should be the next pilot as that could make any difference. Some passengers will continue to argue until the hit the ground. Others are engage in “mid-air fistfights” apparently believing that if they succeed in beating the crap out of the other guy, they will somehow prevent gravity from doing what it does.
The reality is much simpler: a system that is not viable AND which cannot reform itself (too busy with self-worshiping and blaming others for everything) can only do one thing: collapse and, probably, even break-apart. Only after that can the US, or whatever the successor state(s) will be called, rebuilt itself into something totally different from the US which died chocking on its own arrogance this year (like all the other empires in history, by the way, the latest one being the Soviet one).
The Russian elections
The results are in and they are yet another galactic faceplant for the AngloZionist Empire. The main Kremlin Party took a hit, the Communists did very well, Zhirinovski’s LDPR lost a lot and a new (moderately pro-Kremlin) party made it in for the first time. Considering the many billions of dollars the West has spent on trying to create a Belarus-like crisis in Russia (Navalnyi, Petrov, Boshirov & Co.), this is yet another truly gigantic failure for the West.
If anything, the rise of the KPRF shows that a lot of people are fed up with two things: 1) what they see as a tepid, if not outright weak, Russian foreign policy towards the West and 2) with the liberal (economically speaking) policies of Putin and his entourage.
Absolutely NOBODY in Russia wants “better relations” or any kind of “dialog” with the rabidly russophobic West. And to the extend that Russia and the USA simply *have* to talk to each other (being nuclear superpowers) they, of course, will.
But the EU as such is of zero interest to Russia. And if Russia needs to get something done (like what anyway?), she will talk to the US, not its EU underlings. For all its problems, the US still matters. But the clowns of the EU?
[Sidebar: the word “Communist” usually elicits a knee-jerk reaction from brainwashed US Americans. But for the rest of them, let me just say that while I don’t think the KPRF is what Russia needs and while I have nothing good to say about Ziuganov or most of the KPRF leadership, I will say that KPRF does not mean Gulags, hammers and sickles smashing Ukie babies, Russian tanks in downtown Warsaw or any such nonsense. There are several “Communist” parties in Russia, and none of them are even remotely similar to the kind of party the bad old CPSU was. So while US politicians feel very witty to speak of the CCP-virus and that kind of nonsense (Ted Cruz is officially my “favorite idiot” in Congress now), this is so far detached from any reality that I won’t even bother explaining it here.]
The COVID pandemic
Wow, just wow. Where do I even begin??? Biden’s speech on this topic was hateful declaration of war on all those who don’t fully accept the “official” White House line. The fact that many (most?) of those who do not accept the official party line DO accept an even dumber version of events does not make it right to force them into choosing between their beliefs and, say, their job, or their right to move around.
Again, after listening to Biden I kept wondering if he was a “Putin agent” as his actions are only accelerating the breakup of the “US aircraft” I mentioned above. You can say many things about COVID-dissidents, but you can’t deny them two things: 1) a sincere belief in their ideas and 2) an equally sincere belief that their core freedoms, values and rights are trampled upon by pathological liars and crooks (aka politicians + BigPharma).
They will resist and, yes, violently if needed. Because for them it is a both a matter of personal human dignity and even survival!
At least, and so far, the US still has a powerful Constitution which will make it very hard for the current nutcases in the White House to do what they apparently want to do (force 80M US Americans to obey “or else”).
Furthermore, Federal courts cannot be simply ignored.
Also, US states still have a lot of power.
Finally, most US Americans still hold dear the ideals of freedom, liberty, small government, privacy, etc. But EU countries have no such protections from governmental abuse: true, in the US these are all rights are weakened by the day if not the hour, but at least they have not been *officially* abrogated (yet?).
If you want to see how bad things can get without such rights, just look at the pandemic freak show in Canada, Australia or New Zealand!
Finally, and irrespective of its actual origin (I am still on the fence on that), the COVID pandemic wiped all the make-up and has showed the entire world the true face of the West and its rulers: weak, ignorant, arrogant, hypocritical cowards whose only true concern is to cover their butts and “grab whatever can be grabbed” before the inevitable and final explosion (nuclear, economic or social).
Now back the the Aussie SSNs
The sale/lease of these SSNs is not only a danger for China, but also one for Russia.
Simply put, Russia cannot and will not allow the Anglos to strangle China like they did with Japan before WWII.
The good news is this: the latest Russian SSNs/SSGNs are at least as good as the latest Seawolf/Virginia class, if not better. Ditto for ASW capabilities.
What Russia does lack is the needed numbers (and Anglo submarine fleets are much lager, even “just” the USN alone) and funds, both of which China has (or can have).
From the Kremlin’s point of view, the Anglos are trying to create an “Asian NATO”, something which neither China nor Russia will allow.
The Chinese already informed the Aussies that they are now a legitimate target for nuclear strikes (apparently, Australia wants to become the “Poland of the Pacific”), while the Russians only made general comments of disapproval.
But take this to the bank: the Russian General Staff and the Chinese (who both probably saw this coming for a while) will jointly deploy the resources needed to counter this latest “brilliant idea” of the Anglos.
In purely military terms, there are many different options to deal with this threat, which ones China and Russia will chose will become apparent fairly soon because it is far better to do something prevent that delivery from actually happening than to deal with eight more advanced attack submarines.
By the way, the Russians are also semi-deploying/semi-testing an advanced SSK, the Lada-class, which has both very advanced capabilities and, apparently, still many problems. SSKs are not capable of threatening SSNs in open (blue) waters, but in shallower (green/brown) waters such as straits or littorals, they can represent a very real threat, if only by “freeing up” the SNNs to go and hunt into the deep (blue) waters. Also, the main threat for subs comes from the air, and here, again, China and Russia have some very attractive options.
Conclusion: interesting times for sure…
Like the Chinese curse says, we are living in very interesting times.
The quick collapse of the Empire and the US is, of course, inherently very dangerous for our planet.
But it is also a golden opportunity for Zone B nations to finally kick the Anglos out and regain their sovereignty.
True, the US still has a lot of momentum, just like a falling airliner would, but the fact remains that 1) they ran from Afghanistan and 2) they are circling their Anglo wagons shows that somebody somewhere does “get it” and even understood that in spite of the huge political humiliation both of these development represent for narcissistic politicians and their followers, this was a price which absolutely HAD to be paid to (try) to survive.
In my article (infamous) analysis ” Will Afghanistan turn out to be US imperialism’s “Last Gleaming”?” (it triggered even more hysterics and insults than usual, at least on the Unz review comments section) I wrote this: “the British Empire had the means of its foreign policies. The US does not.”
This is now changing.
Yes, what the Anglos (aka 5 eyes) are doing is a retreat. But it is a *smart* one. They are cutting off all the “useless imperial weights” and going for the “smaller but stronger” option.
We might not like it, I certainly don’t, but I have to admit that this is pretty smart and even probably the only option left for the AngloZionist Empire.
At the very least, it is now clear that the Anglos have no allies, and never had them.
What they had where colonial coolies who imagined themselves as part of some “community of civilized, democratic and peace-loving, nations”. These coolies are now left in limbo.
So, who will be the next one to show Uncle Shmuel to the door? My guess is the Republic of Korea. And, frankly, since the DPRK is not a country the Empire can take on, and since China will only increase its (already major) influence on both the DPRK and the ROK, the US might as well pack and leave (maybe for Australia or occupied Japan?).
Okay, end of this overview of developments.
Latest Developments in China (US Products)
Not reported in the English media is that all Chinese factories that are making products for the United States are now “power off” for much of the week. Supposedly this is part of the “Climate control agreement” that Biden and Xi Peng agreed upon.
What it functionally means is that factories (in China) that make American products must stop working for a set period of time per week depending on the percentage of American products that they export. The rule sort of goes like this…
<16% = One day no work.
30% = Two days no work.
45% = Three days no work.
60% = Four days no work.
75% = Five days no work.
100% = No work allowed.
Keep in mind that in China every factory works a six day week.
Since exports to the United States make up around 10% of the total exports out of China, there will be some discomfort with this ruling.
Oh, and by the way…
Over the weekend, a major (retired) Senior CCP member wrote a strong worded letter to XIPeng that the situation with the United States is so serious that normal military use policies must be reconsidered. In specific, he advised that the “no use of military until attacked” be scrapped in favor of a “first strike – preventative posture” against openly belligerent and hostile forces.
This has been making it’s way though the Chinese social media and the overwhelming opinion that this is something that needs to be done immediately.
The Battle at Lake Changjin
Movie screenshot.
China takes a page out of the West’s playbook in war movie production. The Battle at Lake Changjin about the Korean War (1950-53) deals with Chinese troops exploits during what’s known in China as the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.
It’s this observer’s mind-set that echoes that of the West:
"In view of the long-lasting China-US strategic rivalry, China needs more films themed on the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, which is helpful to enhance China's cohesion and confidence, said Song Luzheng, an international relations researcher at the China Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai."
Oh, the film is a huge success, smashing all Chinese box office records.
Yes, the waking of the Dragon will be seen as a huge mistake by the West that ushered in its downfall.
Looks to be an OUTSTANDING MOVIE. It’s a true story. We see personal sacrifice. Bravery. Compassion and fierce loyality to the Chinese nation.
Check out this one minute video summary clip… VIDEO
This part of the war come with a touching story.
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A few dozen PLA soldiers on the front line froze to death in a position of combat readiness. They dared not move simply becuse doing so would expose their position and alert the American forces.
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Their self sacrifice enabled the sudden strike against the well armed American forces in the middle of the night.
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The PLA foot soldiers fought the American tanks, fighter jets and other lethal weapons with strategy, self sacrifice and human will, and eventually forced the 16 most powerful and wealthy Western nation forces (at that time) back more than 500km from the Chinese border, and forced them to begin to hold peace talks.
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(An interesting note: Mao famously said in the beginning of the Korean war: we will let them decide how long to fight this war, we will fight till we win)
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This is an example of peace with the West can only be achieved by fighting back hard. This is like the Afghanistan foot soldiers taking 20 years to defeat the same group of Western barbarians and forced them to leave their holy motherland .
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Do you think that this movie will be permitted to play in the USA, the UK or Austalia or do you think that those nations will bank it for “national security”?
The global appeal for peace comes as a top Chinese diplomat warned his country to re-examine their promise to only use nukes in retaliation, in response to the new alliances forming in the region.
Beijing’s former ambassador to the UN, Sha Zukang said China must make the first nuclear strike against the US if Joe Biden continues to defend Taiwan.
He said:
"The unconditional no first use is not suitable . . . unless China-US negotiations agree that neither side would use [nuclear weapons] first, or the US will no longer take any passive measures to undermine the effectiveness of China’s strategic forces.
The strategic pressure on China is intensifying as (the US) has built new military alliances and as it increases its military presence in our neighbourhood."
The threat came ahead of a meeting between the US, India, Japan and Australia – dubbed the Quad, in Washington, host by Joe Biden.
During a meeting of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association in Beijing last week he said:
"The policy not to be the first to use nuclear weapons unconditionally has given China the moral high ground internationally. But for some time in the future, the US will see China as its main competitor and even its enemy. Can this policy be re- examined and fine-tuned?"
Final Comment
Do you all have a headache? I sure do. All of this bullshit is because a group of assholes in Washington DC have this deleterious fantasy of enslaving the world, and they are so fucking cock-sure that they can do it.
Enough of this craziness.
Time to relax.
Here’s a nice gif. It’s getting close to that time of the year.
When the weather started to get damp and cold, I would bring my kitties in and they would sit in front of the nice wood store and stare at it for hours.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well, things are coming in in isolation; in drips and dabs. But we are slowly piecing together a picture of what transpired during 2020 when President Trump and his army of neocons threw everything (minus the kitchen sink) at China. And it all failed.
In October, leading up into the November elections, was a desperate time. And President Trump was increasingly frustrated with the turn of events that he set in motion.
We know now, that in February 2020, China went DEFCON ONE and blamed the United States for unleashing a bio-weapon on China during it’s most important holiday. We also know that they stayed at military readiness throughout the year, and successfully stopped hybrid-war efforts on all fronts. The NED sponsored “Color Revolutions” in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang all collapsed.
In October, the largest flotilla of aircraft carriers ever assembled in the history of the world sailed home without incident from the South China Sea, and immediately Donald Trump fired his military leadership. Right then, and there. No explanation was given, and the mainstream media were all perplexed, and quickly forgot about the incident.
What happened after this defeat without a shot being fired is unknown, but now a general is speaking out and what he reports is horrific.
This is what happened immediately after the Naval Flotilla returned home without incident, and the top military leadership was fired…
The “news” reports
Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says
Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.
One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Donald Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Li took the chairman at his word, the authors write in the book, “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.
In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, according to the book, understood why. The chairman, 62 at the time and chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a phone call on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable, according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action. The same day, he called the admiral overseeing the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the military unit responsible for Asia and the Pacific region, and recommended postponing the military exercises, according to the book. The admiral complied.
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”
The chairman knew that he was “pulling a Schlesinger,” the authors write, resorting to measures resembling the ones taken in August 1974 by James R. Schlesinger, the defense secretary at the time. Schlesinger told military officials to check with him and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs before carrying out orders from President Richard M. Nixon, who was facing impeachment at the time.
Though Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, the authors reveal. CIA Director Gina Haspel, for instance, reportedly told Milley, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
The book’s revelations quickly made Milley a target of GOP ire.
Trump, speaking Tuesday evening on the conservative television network Newsmax, labeled the chairman’s reported actions “treason” and said, “I did not ever think of attacking China.”
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to President Biden. Urging him to dismiss the Joint Chiefs chairman, saying he had undermined the commander in chief and “contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party in advance of a potential armed conflict …”
A White House spokeswoman earlier Tuesday declined to comment on the book. Milley’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“Peril” also provides new reporting on Biden’s 2020 campaign — waged to unseat a man he told a top adviser “isn’t really an American president” — and his early struggle to govern. During a March 5 phone call to discuss Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, his first major legislative undertaking, the president reportedly told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va), “if you don’t come along, you’re really f—ing me.” The measure ultimately cleared the Senate through an elaborate sequencing of amendments designed to satisfy the centrist Democrat.
The president’s frustration with Manchin is matched only by his debt to House Majority Whip Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement before that state’s primary propelled Biden to the nomination and gave rise to promises about how he would govern.
When Clyburn offered his endorsement in February 2020, it came with conditions, according to the book. One was that Biden would commit to naming a Black woman to the Supreme Court, if given the opportunity. During a debate two days later, Clyburn went backstage during a break to urge Biden to reveal his intentions for the Supreme Court that night. Biden issued the pledge in his final answer, and the congressman endorsed him the next day.
“Peril,” the authors say, is based on interviews with more than 200 people, conducted on the condition they not be named as sources.
Exact quotations or conclusions are drawn from the participant in the described event, a colleague with direct knowledge or relevant documents, according to an author’s note. Trump and Biden declined to be interviewed.
On Afghanistan, the book examines how Biden’s experience as vice president shaped his approach to the withdrawal. Convinced that President Barack Obama had been manipulated by his own commanders, Biden vowed privately in 2009, “The military doesn’t f— around with me.”
“Peril” also documents how Biden’s top advisers spent the spring weighing, but ultimately rejecting, alternatives to a full withdrawal. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin returned from a NATO meeting in March envisioning ways to extend the mission, including through a “gated” withdrawal seeking diplomatic leverage. But they came to see that meaningful leverage would require a more expansive commitment, and instead came back around to a full exit.
Milley, for his part, took what the authors describe as a deferential approach to Biden on Afghanistan, in contrast to his earlier efforts to constrain Trump. The book reveals recent remarks the chairman delivered to the Joint Chiefs in which he said, “Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow. One is you never, ever ever box in a president of the United States. You always give him decision space.” Referring to Biden, he said, “You’re dealing with a seasoned politician here who has been in Washington, D.C., 50 years, whatever it is.”
His decision just months earlier to place himself between Trump and potential war was triggered by several important events — a phone call, a photo op and a refusal to rule out war with another adversary, Iran.
The immediate motivation, according to the book, was the Jan. 8 call from Pelosi, who demanded to know, “What precautions are available to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?” Milley assured her that there were “a lot of checks in the system.”
The call transcript obtained by the authors shows Pelosi telling Milley, referring to Trump, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. … He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.” Milley replied, “I agree with you on everything.”
Milley’s resolve was deepened by the events of June 1, 2020, when he felt Trump had used him as part of a photo op in his walk across Lafayette Square during protests that began after the killing of George Floyd. The chairman came to see his role as ensuring that, “We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas,” the authors quote him saying privately.
Trump’s posture, not just to China but also to Iran, tested that promise. In discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, Trump declined to rule out striking the country, at times even displaying curiosity about the prospect, according to the book. Haspel was so alarmed after a meeting in November that she called Milley to say, “This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?”
Trump’s fragile ego drove many decisions by the nation’s leaders, from lawmakers to the vice president, according to the book. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was so worried that a call from President-elect Biden would send Trump into a fury that the then-Majority Leader used a backchannel to fend off Biden. He asked Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, formerly the No. 2 Senate Republican, to ask Sen. Christopher A. Coons, the Democrat of Delaware and close Biden ally, to tell Biden not to call him.
So intent was Pence on being Trump’s loyal second-in-command — and potential successor — that he asked confidants if there were ways he could accede to Trump’s demands and avoid certifying the results of the election on Jan. 6. In late December, the authors reveal, Pence called Dan Quayle, a former vice president and fellow Indiana Republican, for advice.
Quayle was adamant, according to the authors. “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” he said.
But Pence pressed him, the authors write, asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges. Quayle was unmoved, and Pence ultimately agreed, according to the book.
When Pence said he planned to certify the results, the president lashed out. In the Oval Office on Jan. 5, the authors write, Pence told Trump he could not thwart the process, that his role was simply to “open the envelopes.”
“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this,” Trump replied, according to the book, later telling his vice president, “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing.”
Within days, Trump was out of office, his governing power reduced to nothing. But if stability had returned to Washington, Milley feared it would be short-lived, the authors write.
The general saw parallels between Jan. 6 and the 1905 Russian Revolution, which set off unrest throughout the Russian Empire and, though it failed, helped create the conditions for the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks executed a successful coup that set up the world’s first communist state. Vladimir Lenin, who led the revolution, called 1905 a “dress rehearsal.”
A similar logic could apply with Jan. 6, Milley thought as he wrestled with the meaning of that day, telling senior staff:
“What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”
MM Comments
Here on MM we have long documented all the events listed herein. I have a couple indexes on it all. We discussed the covert, overt, and “black sides” of a war with China. We discussed the 11 biological attacks, and the various military operations. We discussed everything from drones spraying bio-weapons to devastate livestock, to political bullshit. We also discussed the idea that the United States would conduct a first-use of nuclear weapons against China.
And people laughed at us.
And it turns out that we were correct.
President trump and his army of neocons were indeed planning first strike attacks upon China. And that, we now know, would have resulted in a retaliatory Chinese nuclear salvo against the top 40 American cities.
President trump and his cabal of neocons declared war on China in 2016. When he became president, he immediately put neocons in charge of all the strategy positions relative for war. Such as John Bolton in charge of the Bio-Weapons systems. He then waged a “hybrid-war” against China.
Aside from all the public efforts; tariffs, Huawei, 5G, QUAD, Australia, etc, he also engaged in aggressive “black operations” that included “color revolutions“, as well as trying to induce starvation through bio-weapons.
All efforts failed.
By 2019, and during the lead up towards elections, Donald Trump wanted to step up his anti-China campaign. His reelection to a second term depended on his ability to be a “war President”. So starting in mid 2019 he launched an “inoculation strain” of COVID in the USA and all of it’s allies. And then in late 2019, he released the “lethal B” strain against China, Iran and North Korea.
All of 2020 was fought with biological weapons.
Simultaneously with the Chinese people collapsing due to seizures due to the lethal B strain, an enormous “fire hose” of anti-China disinformation was unleashed. And for a while it worked.
But not as planned.
The strains mutated, and the “inoculation strain” did not protect Americans.
Then, in March 2020 he decided to go Kinetic and launched two more very serious bio-weapons against China. (For a total of three lethal bio-weapons.)
And yet again, China survived, and thrived.
So, he got together the largest Naval flotilla in the history of the world and set sail for China. But no incidents occurred, and he fired his top military leadership as a result. We now know why. Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper because he did not engage in a “hot” kinetic war with China.
And Donald Trump was COUNTING on that war to be initiated during elections. And always, historically, there are insanely positive polling results for a President during the initial weeks of a war.
So then President Trump went to his generals, and as we now know, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was afraid that Donald Trump would order him to conduct a “hot” kinetic war with China.
Now, China, after four years of “hybird-war”, and full knowledge about the bio-weapons attacks and the “color revolutions”…
After all, China shares Intel with Russia, and has all of Hong Kong wired up in audio and video... as well as all those CIA / NED "assets" on the mainland, now filled with pro-china patriotic fervor turning themselves in and working with the PLA...
Knew full well what was going on.
After all, China was at DEFCON ONE all year. (And still is, by the way.) And appreciated the candor of the American military leadership, but do not trust any Americans any longer. Which is why they are refusing to talk with Biden, or having a US Ambassador inside of China. (As of right now at the time of this article.)
And now, the Chinese leadership is very “closed” to the United States.
We know that President Biden has been inside of China and understands that a war with China would devastate the United States. And it would. Let’s not fool ourselves.
But, President Bidden is a figurehead only.
The United States is a Military Empire, and the military-industrial establishment and neocon K-street are “calling the shots”. They run things. They control budgets, and they control the Military. They control the State Department (as the entire world observed during the April 2021 Anchorage meeting), and they control the American people though advanced media manipulation.
This knowledge of what China is, and what it capable of is useless, as the people who control the reins of power think otherwise. All the war provocations seem to originate out for the bureaucracy and industrial self-interest rather than top-down directed orders.
No matter how harsh the United States might be against China today, it is nothing compared to what would happen were another neocon to become President in 2024.
Tom Cotton
Mike Pompeo
Marco Rubio
Heaven help us all.
Dangerous people.
In expectation of a bad situation going “tits up” both Russia and China have prepared first-strike (nuclear) scenarios to counter any possibility of the intentional American nightmare unleashed upon the world.
Make no mistake that they are in place and being studied for every contingency.
The Chinese plan for every contingency.
The Chinese and the Russians are not fools. And as I have said over and over and over.
China. Does. Not. Play.
Which means that they are a serious, serious, merit driven nation. And when they do decide to do something, they do it with precision and ruthlessness. You might not want to hear it, you might want to believe that democracy is on “God’s side”, or that Chinese are just “copy-cats” who cannot innovate. You can believe whatever you want.
Expect full-on Asian (China & Russia) readiness to be in place right now today.
They are ready to hurt others really, really bad. China is mass producing nuclear warheads like they used to make rubber ducky’s. The assembly lines and production lines are running hot. Much like the printing presses in America are turning red hot printing US “greenback” dollars.
Not only that, but on all levels they have mustered and created a unified Asia.
And a word to the wise. They do not believe in “surgical strikes”. They believe in pounding cities into oblivion. They have their own history as a template.
Maybe payback time for the rape of Nanjing…
Hopefully level heads will persist at the highest levels of government in Washington DC for the next decade or so. But do not count on it. We can hope, but must be realistic.
But if the world can tone down the insanity that the United States has become, then the rest of the world will be able to take a breather and the entire world can move forward in peace.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This is a massive article concerning China, and it’s military. And the point that I want to make is that China is a perfect organism wholly designed to prevent anyone from attacking it. It is like a vicious animal with spikes, poison, and large sharp teeth. Only a fool would want to attack it. It’s defensive. And I have a lot to say about this subject, as well as a ton load of videos to watch as well.
Poor countries are supposed to stay poor so that they can be exploited indefinitely for cheap labor and resources. When a poor country starts to pull itself out of poverty, that country will soon be pulled back down again through a mixture of warfare, sabotage, sanctions, and propaganda...all under the pretext of "protecting human rights." China has defied this rule by making itself wealthy. Accordingly, the propaganda directed toward it will only intensify.Posted by: Donbass Lives Matter | Sep 1 2021 22:17 utc | 50
Keep in mind that you cannot learn things by only looking at one singular aspects. you must see the big picture, and then put the focus on the little aspects as they fall within that big picture. So this large article is going to cover other tangential things that help give you a better appreciation for the much bigger picture that is omitted in modern contemporaneous dialog today.
But first, I want to relate a little story.
The tale of Frank
When I was growing up, there was this man who lived with my maternal grandmother. She was my mother’s mother, and there was this guy called “Frank” who lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
My mother called him Frank. My grandmother called him Frank. My brothers and sisters called him Frank. My aunties and my uncles called him Frank. My parents called him Frank. No one said anything else at all about his relationship with my grandmother.
I assumed that, since he went by his first name only, he wasn’t a close friend. Because in the United States, close male friends are referred to by their last name. While close girl friends are referred to their first name.
He wasn’t an uncle, as all my uncles went by the name “uncle” followed by their first name. As in “Uncle Robert”, “Uncle Ralston”, and “Uncle Sonny”. In fact, my grandmother’s brothers and sisters were still alive, and I called them “Uncle Eddie” and such.
So I figured that he was a renter who helped my grandmother pay the rent.
Long afterwards, when my grandmother had a stroke, and died, I attended her funeral. And there she was laid next to Frank, who was, after all, my maternal grandfather!
And this surprised me.
And when I mentioned it, I was hounded and ridiculed and given so much shit. I will tell you that it was horrible and ruthless, and just obnoxious. What was I supposed to know? Make assumptions, absorb the relationship by osmosis? Jeeze!
There is a reason… a REASON… why there are job titles, positions titles, business cards, name plates, and all the rest in regards to family and business relationships.
It’s important.
It adds another dimensions to the relationships that will enable us to better understand things. For once you understand the deeper relationships behind something, you can better understand the events, and items and how they all fit together as part of the unified whole.
Think about that for a minute.
As it pertains to everything.
…
Here’s some Chinese military videos. Some are recruitment videos. Some are narrative videos. Some are “fan” videos. Some are something else entirely. In any event, these videos give a person a fairly good overview impression of the kind of military that China has.
China isn’t anything like what is portrayed. China does not play “nice”. Especially when it comes to defending China from crazed manicidal psychopathic wanna-be-Rambos.
And keep in mind that China is truly playing for “keeps”. If anyone wants to fuck with them, they will fuck you right back. Smartly.
Defensive Forces
If we talk about "representative government" we have to ask what kind of representation the weakest individual in society can get. I would submit that in the US the answer is laughable. In China, which takes surveys endlessly, prolifically and as a vital part of analysis and the systematic, results-based development of policy, one can argue very well that the weakest individual is much better represented than in the US.Fact is, no one wants democracy. What anybody wants is good representative government.Posted by: Grieved | Sep 2 2021 3:47 utc | 80
China possesses “defensive forces”.
Note that they are not “expeditionary forces”. They are harsh defensive forces and have no qualms about slaughtering anyone who tries to attack China in any way.
If you attack China, and China considers Taiwan PART of China, it will go nuclear in a nano-second.
China is NOT the USA. Do not believe the neocon propaganda about Taiwan this, or Taiwan that. China will take over the island in a matter or hours, and the world will left reeling. Those that want to get involved will be slaughtered mercilessly.
Listen up Japan!
Listen up Australia!
I am talking to you. As well as your bosses on K-street in Washington DC.
So forget any fantasies about peasants with mass-produced AK-47 clones. China will fiercely decimate enemy force with tactical and theater neutronmunitions from the “get go”.
A neutron bomb, officially defined as a type of enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself.
The neutron release generated by a nuclear fusion reaction is intentionally allowed to escape the weapon, rather than being absorbed by its other components.
The neutron burst, which is used as the primarydestructive action of the warhead, is able to penetrate enemy armor more effectively than a conventional warhead, thus making it more lethal as a tactical weapon.
-Wikipedia
The mere fact that no American strategic planners are taking into account this long standing military policy (since 1977, I believe) just shows how oblivious the planners are on K-street and in the Pentagon are.
Oblivious.
As in moronically blind to reality.
Somehow these morons believe that a war with China, on Chinese soil, will be a long-drawn out conventional war, in a far away land. Sort of like a larger Afghanistan.
Effects of a Neutron Bomb
The New York Times reported that “the nuclear weaponeers have unfolded a new brainchild, the neutron bomb, which will kill people while preserving buildings, tanks, and artillery.”
-Air Force Magazine
Neutrons scattered around after the neutron bomb explodes, in soil, metals, food, etc. activates neutrons; this neutron activation is 10 times higher than that of an atom bomb.
The so-called neutron activation causes inanimate bodies to emit secondary gamma rays.
Thus, the Neutron bomb causes damage due to both neutron beams and gamma rays.
Since neutrons make the objects they hit emit gamma rays, each object becomes a mini-bomb after the neutron bomb is dropped and starts to emit gamma rays.
Lovely.
Who’d figure that your iPhone and Alexia would someday actually kill you?
Chinese DF-16 tactical surface to surface conventional and nuclear weapon.
The first effect of the neutron bomb is to scatter fast neutrons and gamma photons. The irradiation dose is up to hundreds of thousands of rad (radiation units) in open air beyond the explosion and thermal irradiation distance (150-300 m.). Let us remind that human beings die even in the face of neutron irradiation higher than 300 rad.
Fast neutrons are exposed to elastic scattering in the nuclei of light atoms, during which rebound protons are released, protons are strongly ionizing particles.
Thus, human beings are exposed to a strongly ionizing radiation.
As protons move through human tissues, they cause havoc with a very high energy per unit path. Not only that, the nuclei of some biological tissues become radioactive by capturing neutrons, as a result, countless radioactive foci appear in the human body, each of human tissues becomes a mini-bomb and begins to self-destruct with dangerous rays.
Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of neutrons; Neutrons strike living or non-living objects, making the atoms in front of them radioactive.
These atoms start to emit lethal rays and countless mini-bombs are born.
After the neutron bomb was dropped, buildings, tanks, etc. It is said that it will remain the same. In fact, both corpses and these inanimate things will become radioactive. Both the removal of the corpses, these buildings, tanks and so on. entering into it will mean receiving a high dose of lethal radiation.
Non-living things that remain intact can only be used with special protective clothing without irradiation.
One of the purposes of using neutron bombs is to instantly turn those who are exposed to the neutron into the living and dead.
The DF-10 can really turn your day into a neutron-saturated toasty BBQ.
The Neutron bomb alone can turn people into this. Other “normal” nuclear bombs cause burns and wounds with the heat of the explosion wave and glare and kill them immediately.
With the effect of radiation, neutrons will enter the brain and destroy the electrical connections of the nerve cells. Computers and electronic devices exposed to strong radiation will stop immediately.
Yeah.
That means all cars, internet, home appliances, televisions, radio, stop lights, alarm systems, electronic doors, elevators, and aircraft. It’s sort of like an EMF weapon only with the extra bonus of making everything highly radioactive.
Those exposed to a radiation of 3000 rad will remain unconscious for 3-7 minutes, then sober up…
… great. Right?
Not so fast…
…. within a week they will die of gastrointestinal bleeding; The entire digestive system from mouth to anus will become an open wound, the kidney and heart will weaken and the patient will bleed and die in fever.
Those who are exposed to 650 rad will not have an immediate effect, but the bone marrow that makes the blood cells will dry, the old blood cells will survive another 25-30 days after the irradiation, but their division will stop, the patient will die in 4-5 weeks as a result of anemia and inability to defend against germs.
That is…
…unless they have some mRNA modification that compensates for this effect.
Hum…
Anyways…
According to the British geneticist J. Edwards, the most terrible aspect of the Neutron bomb is this: The neutron bomb is such a bomb that its effect is not limited in time, after the Neutron bomb is dropped, many generations will be born as cripples and monsters, it is not up to anyone to prevent this, rays.
This painful consequence is inevitable as it destroys heredity molecules (genes).
The destruction will be the most in regions (cities) where people live densely.
All living things in an area of 8 km2 will die in 2-3 days at the latest as a result of lethal rays. In an additional area of 10 km2, 1-100 rad rays will be received. 2-3 km.
The Neutron bomb, thrown at intervals, will kill anyone caught outdoors.
Radiation at a distance of 400 meters from the explosion point of a 1 kiloton Neutron bomb is 418,000 rad. Even in a shelter reducing radiation 500 times, the dose would be 836 rad, which is twice the minimum lethal dose.
According to the American scientist A. Westing, a 1 kiloton neutron weapon will destroy 310 hectares of pine forests, 170 hectares of deciduous forest and 140 hectares of grassland, and it will take centuries to replace them.
In short…
… a neutron bomb is a far more lethal weapon than an atomic or hydrogen bomb. And the Chinese field these weapons on a tactical basis all over China. If you try to attack China, they will not scurry into a hamlet behind the donkeys and sheep (Syrian style)…
No, instead, they will start launching a barrage of neutron hyper-velocity missiles at you. And there will be NO place to hide.
The Chinese DF-12 surface to surface, short range ballistic missiles that can carry neutron warheads.
The good news is that you will have enough time to pray for a quick death.
That will be the best you can do. You wouldn’t dare pick up your rifle, pistol, or get into a vehicle. All that metal and material will be irradiating the shit out of you. That’s right. All the metal near you would be acting like one giant X-ray and microwave beaming radiation right at you.
China is an organism
In China…
Everyone works together and they are very, very patriotic. Of course no one in the West understands this. It’s dog-eat-dog, and fight to be the “lone wolf”. You don’t kick an organized hornet’s nest and not expect to get stung.
China, the Chinese people act as one singular organism together.
And, you know what, it is even MORE SO NOW TODAY.
The Chinese learn from an early age
From the time they are able to walk, all the Chinese are taught to work hard, study, and be aggressive in everything that they do.
This is not a land of coddled wealthy, or diversity overweight wooble jaumbas.It’s not a land of prep-boys, or “silver spoon in the mouth” elitist “blue bloods”. It’s a land full of the hardiest people that you ever met, who are also the smartest people who you have ever met, and who also are the most determined people who you have ever met.
And what’s more…
These people are taught to live for the community. To fight for the community. To do the best for the community, and if necessary to die for the community.
Check out what it is like for those in kindergarten… Pretty amazing for four and five year olds. Please watch the entire video.
In kindergarten.
The Chinese students can only play electronic games during certain hours
Oh, you think that China isn’t serious?
My eyes almost popped out of my head when I read "Gamers under 18 will only be allowed to play online between 8:00 pm and 9:00 pm on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays". Real leadership... in 2021... I am flabbergasted.
I am a high school science and math teacher in Australia. That single policy in itself is game over.
Posted by: Rae | Sep 1 2021 21:15 utc | 38
And…
Earlier a math teacher stopped by to praise the new time limits on video gaming for young folks in China. I add my own 'bravo' to that.
And here's another one---the Chinese crackdown on celebrity 'culture'.The Chinese National Radio and Television Administration on Thursday enhanced management on entertainment programs and related personnel, calling for boycott against individuals with illegal or immoral records, sky-high prices for stars and abnormal appreciation of niangpao, or feminine men.
How much of the West's descent into unimaginable societal degradation is due to young kids being raised, for generations now, not by attentive parents, but by TV and Hollywood?
The so-called popular 'culture' has long since imposed itself into the family home and pushed out the role of parents as guides for impressionable young folks.
Some have mentioned the west's dismal STEM graduate production. How are young people supposed to have an interest in math and science when most just want to be 'celebrities'? Or at least social media 'influencers'?
Like everything in society, from financial greed to bringing up children, things cannot be simply left to chance. That produces a garden full of weeds and thorns.
The CPC is truly a shining light in today's world!
Posted by: Gordog | Sep 2 2021 6:09 utc | 90
The Chinese exercise from an early age too
Physical health and well being is important to the Chinese. No couch-potatoes allowed. Every single school, at every single level performs strict dance, exercise and martial arts routines. All of them do this. They do this six days a week every single day.
The Chinese can build up enormous constructions from scratch
Remember all those “Ghost cities” that the BBC, CNN and FOX “news” were all making fun of? Remember them. Oh, you don’t hear much about them today do you? Why not? Why isn’t the “news” getting right in front of China’s “grill” and bad mouthing them about “Ghost Cities”?
This is why…
They aren’t ghost cities any longer. Watch the video and be amazed.
A Ghost City.
As a result of US sanctions against Chinese companies, China is developing its own technology to cater for its internal market. Low cost, not Western, no manual.
Low cost, because at the volumes of the Chinese internal market even a saving of a fraction of a cent is real money. Different from US designs, so no license fee needs to be paid. And little or no documentation in English - it's intended for the Chinese internal market.Posted by: Passerby | Sep 1 2021 22:24 utc | 52
So you really think that the United States can compete against China?
Really? Have you seen what America has become? America is very, very weak right now. Here’s what all the major cities look like. Watch the full video.
The United States today.
Watch the full video to get the full effect. This is what America is today. And it is indicative of the culture and the society. It is a reflection of the failure of the government. Not only in structure but in the leadership.
And this nation actually believes that it is better than China is?
China has a substantial sized rocket and munitions closet. All designed for mass saturation of broad swaths of terrain. These were perfected after the results of World-War II that showed how successful that the Soviet Union was in employing these weapons against the superior technological weaponry of Nazi Germany.
In the American military circles this is considered worrisome, but not terribly so. The conventional belief in the Pentagon is that America would obtain dominance very quickly using the integrated computerized electronics systems and be able to use stand off drones and munitions with “pin-point” accuracy to selectively destroy any targets of this type.
I wouldn’t be so sure of this.
In a conflict between the United States and China, the United States would have ZERO “eyes in the skies”.
The Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon” (NATO Name: Black Eagle) is a single-seat, twinjet, all-weather, stealth, fifth-generation fighter aircraft developed by China’s Chengdu Aerospace Corporation for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
Video here…
Video
The J-20 is designed to execute ground attack missions even in hostile environments. The aircraft can reach higher altitudes with its delta wings in supersonic speeds. It is larger than Sukhoi T-50 and Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. The front portion of the prototype looks similar to the F-22 Raptor and the rear section looks like a Sukhoi T-50.
According to the neocon publications out of K-street in Washington DC, the F-22 is the best thing since “sliced bread” and the Chinese is only copying it. Only doing the copying very poorly.
Conventional wisdom holds that the J-20is currently unable to face the US Air Force's F-22 in a straight-up dogfight.
- Business Insider
I wouldn’t be so sure about this.
The United States has a terrible problem in overestimating their capabilities and down-plying that of China (to the extreme). Just keep in mind that any war involving these aircraft will need to land. The chances are slim that there will be any place to land once a war breaks out near China.
You won’t ever see this in FOX “news”. This video…
Japanese sub limps home.
China is a nation of STEM NERDs
Stem graduates by country 2016
China: 4.7M
India: 2.6M
U.S: 570k
Russia:561k
Iran: 335k
Now you know why Netanyahu wants us to nuke Iran so bad to eradicate them like bugs.
So the top 3 countries that we target as enemies graduate 10 times more STEM students than we, the U.S. do and half of our graduates are foreign students. This is why Iran has a domestic arms industry that includes advanced RADAR. But we are still in denial about that as evidenced by us fretting over Iran getting their hands on Humvees and M4 rifles from the Taliban.
Our view of Iran, 'I think it is some kind of magic wand that stirs up the spirit of the truck engine, try turning it and see what happens'
---------------
Now some wise guy might note that India does not have an advanced military but that's because they suffer collective Stockholm syndrome from Britain. I have no idea why they love the Brits and west so much after all they did do them.
Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Sep 2 2021 1:13 utc | 70
But…
And last time I checked, about 15% of those STEM graduates in the USA were . . . citizens of the PRC. I'm sure a goodly number are citizens of India too.Posted by: corvo | Sep 2 2021 1:21 utc | 71
What about those TicTac’s that buzz the American naval ships?
The "Tic Tac" incident.Date: November 14, 2004; Location: Pacific Ocean
Jack Sarfatti writes, The USS Nimitz UFO incident refers to a 2004 Radar-Visual encounter of an unidentified flying object by US fighter pilots of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group. In December 2017, infrared footage of the encounter was released to the public. Prior to the December 2017 incident, early November 2004, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently for two weeks on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
And what did they see?
Well, they saw this…
US Navy buzzed by UFO.
And what does this look like?
Well, if you have been paying attention to the technical side of what China is involved in, instead of what the latest bullshit is about 5G, Huawei, the pull-out from Afghanistan, and Vaxx issues you might have noticed this…
But then again, most MM readers realize this. It’s just the rest of the West who read the “news” and get this completely false impression and idea of what China is. It’s not even a distortion. It’s a false reality. Check out the Video.
At the start of this article, I simply discussed the use of tactical nuclear “neutron” bombs. These are what the army uses to take out this hill, that city, or that carrier group. They clean out the area and then move in and occupy.
But what I am referring to here is the very dangerous, mega-large hyper-velocity ten warhead, nation crusher the MIRV ICBM the DF-41. These are strategic weapons.
They are designed to wholly crush and decimate a nation.
And thanks to Trump and Biden, China is now on a massive mass production rally regarding these horrific weapons. They are churning them out so fast that if they all were to be used, the target nation would be reduced to radioactive glass.
Thank you President Trump (and his enabler Mike Pompeo).
Thank you Joe Biden (and your enabler Tom Cotton).
You see, those fucking morons who talk about war with China over Taiwan, or the South China Sea or what ever is the “reason of the day” simply omit the fact that China will BURY the United States if it attacks them.
And the result will be global devastation, but you know, China will rebuild. China can and has that ability. America will not.
Never forget the China’s military policy is to swarm and overwhelm with tons of nuclear tipped missiles
Not simply one or two relying on precision computers.
But many, many, many.
Many.
As in A lot!
This is quite different from the American strategy of full-spectrum dominance based on computers and remote sensing. China, on the other hand, believes in overwhelming the target area and saturating it with the most deadly weapons available.
Here’s group eight (8). Lot’s of stuff here. Check out the video here.
Group 8
China flexes sea power with new foreign ship law – Asia Times
A security measure to prevent a preemptive strike.
A new Chinese legal requirement demands that multiple classes of foreign vessels traversing waters claimed by Beijing must [1] provide detailed information to state authorities and [2] take aboard Chinese pilots.
The new maritime law, which came into legal force today (September 1), threatens to inflame South China Sea disputes pitting China and Southeast Asian nations and stoke already rising tensions with the United States in the contested waters.
On August 27, China’s Maritime Safety Administration said in a statement that five categories of foreign vessels, namely …
submersibles, (as in submarines and SEAL insertion submersibles)
nuclear-powered vessels, (as in aircraft carriers, destroyers and subs)
ships carrying radioactive materials,
ships carrying bulk oil, chemicals, liquefied gas or other toxic substances,
as well as vessels that may endanger China’s maritime traffic safety…
… fall under the law.
Uh oh. There goes the American Navy! especially those pesky aircraft carriers.
Foreign vessels will be required to provide information including their ship names and numbers, recent locations, satellite telephone numbers and dangerous goods, according to the statement.
If their automatic identification systems do not work properly, they will need to report to China’s maritime authorities about their locations and speeds every two hours until they leave the country’s territorial waters, the statement said.
At face value, these are not necessarily problematic provisions – unless the definition of “Chinese territorial waters” is interpreted to include nearly all of the South China Sea, as claimed in its wide-reaching and hotly contested nine-dash line.
The new rules were first made public on April 29 this year after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amended the Maritime Traffic Safety Law (MTSL), which was established in September 1983.
A full English version of the revised law, translated by Peking University Law School, can be seen on the website of Steamship Mutual, a mutual insurance association in the maritime space that provides risk pooling, information and representation.
Oh! But Japan will act as a Proxy for the United States in a Taiwan conflict, eh?
Yeah. I read the bullshit propaganda out of Japan.
So you think that Japan can invade China, or fight China? Is that what you think?
Let me tell youse all something too. Just like the Chinese students do daily exercises, and study hard, they are also exposed to what Japan did to China, and it is burned into the soul of China. And if Japan wants to take on China, well then, China will be really ROUGH back.
Oh! You don’t believe me?
What?
You do not know what I am talking about, eh?
Watch this entire video. It’s around four minutes long. Watch it. Watch the entire thing. Now, what do you think a nuclear armed China will do to the tiny island of Japan? Watch the video.
The Japanese inside of China.
So you think that China will somehow forgive and forget with japan starts attacking the mainland?
China is ready, so is Russia.
Do you all REALLY want a war? You all want to take on China for freedom™ and democracy™? Is that what you want? Well, China just wants to be left alone, but apparently that’s not good enough is it?
I guess not.
You all want to poke the Panda. And the Panda and Russia are as one today. You poke China, and you anger the Bear. You poke the Bear and you piss off China. Washington DC will be a water-filled radioactive crater before you have the chance to say…
…”Oh. Fuck”.
Chinese Boy Scouts
Here’s what boy scouts look like in China. Are you ready to fight them? Video HERE.
Tough boy scouts.
A bunch of tough first and second grade kids. Click to download the archive of videos.
Click to download the archive.
The Neocons say that if you kill the Chinese leadership that China will crumble
It’s a fantasy with no bearing on reality what so ever.
Xi Xinping was himself molded by the CR. He was sent to live and work with the peasants in the dirt and poverty of the countryside. When he was free to return to the city, he elected to return instead to the village he had lived in, and to continue his work there. They remember him now with great love, and there are documentaries available if one wishes to search.
The national leader of China has an understanding of the supreme value of "the people over all things" ingrained into his hands with dirt and blisters and blood. He came by his understanding experientially and honestly.
~~
The Communist Party of China (CPC) has at least 90 million members. One might think that, even on the scale of China's population, joining the CPC would be a routine matter. Xi Xinping applied at least 6 times (I believe actually 10 times in all) before the Party accepted him.
He worked his way into a meritocratic organization, and has worked his way to leadership through merit.
If we wish to understand what runs China, we must know how the CPC works. Here are 3 possible introductions, from Godfree Roberts:
The Chinese Communist PartyChina’s Congresses in ActionSelling Democracy to China
Posted by: Grieved | Sep 2 2021 3:46 utc | 79
Here’s group 9
And here’s some active military videos.
I am just unleashing a true “mother load” of videos today. To talk about the Taiwan and a conflict on the South China Sea then you need to understand what the “players” are and what they are capable of. And boys and girls, the Chinese do not play. they are a serious, serious nation. Check out the videos HERE.
Group 9
To Counter U.S. Hostility China Moves Towards People Centered Policies
In December 2001 China became a member of the World Trade Organization. That opened new markets for China’s industry and attracted a lot of foreign investment.
The growth in GDP that China has achieved since is breathtaking.
This development allowed China to make enormous investments in infrastructure. It also generated the resources necessary to eliminate poverty.
It is no coincidence that this development happened while the U.S. was wasting money on wars in the Middle East. As the U.S. is now step by step retreating from those wars to confront China the country needs to prepare itself for the new environment.
The introduction of more and more capitalistic features into China’s economy over the last 20 years has created imbalances.
Business tried to ignore or to gain influence over government structures and regulations.
Companies abused their workers.
Speculation by rich people created bubbles in the housing markets.
Cultural excesses that emphasized individualism threatened national unity.
These imbalances let the description of China’s economy as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ look empty.
Over the long run they would lead to dissatisfaction of a wide range of the public with the ruling political establishment. It was high time to eliminated the excesses the ultra fast development had created.
The government had to act to avoid future internal conflicts. Since the end of last year it has done so with the same efficiency that allowed it to stop and eliminate Covid-19 outbreaks. It does this ruthlessly without regards to stock values or investor interests.
Some six weeks ago I argued against Stephen S. Roach’s take on new Chinese regulations and described why the wider public in China will not care about ‘investors’ and will support those steps.
Since then the regulation campaign has continued with astonishing speed and breath. Here is a collection of headlines, published since my last take, that detail the development and the flood of new regulations and laws designed to set things right while keeping China’s economic growth going.
The new slogan for this era is now ‘common prosperity’, a policy that will reduce large wealth gaps while keeping reasonable monetary incentives and the market economy alive to allow for further development.
A pamphlet, written by a minor Maoist figure, that justifies these measures and puts them into a larger political context was widely published by Communist Party organs:
A commentary published widely in Chinese state-run media described President Xi Jinping’s regulatory crackdown as a “profound revolution” sweeping the country and warned that anyone who resisted would face punishment.
“This is a return from the capital group to the masses of the people, and this is a transformation from capital-centered to people-centered,” the commentary said, adding that it marked a return to the original intention of the Communist Party.
“Therefore, this is a political change, and the people are becoming the main body of this change again, and all those who block this people-centered change will be discarded.”
The author then goes on to set the ‘profound transformation’ into a wider, geopolitical context:
“China is currently facing an increasingly severe and complex international environment. The US has implemented military threats, economic and technological blockades, financial strikes and political and diplomatic siege against China,” Li wrote.
“The US has also launched biological warfare, cyber warfare and public opinion against China.”
“If we still have to rely on big capitalists as the main force of anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonism, or still cooperate to the US’ ‘tittytainment’ strategy, our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse like the Soviet Union before we are attacked,” he said, claiming that the US had launched a color revolution against China through different channels.
The “profound transformation” underway in China aimed to respond to the US’ brutal and ferocious attacks as well as the current complicated international situation, he said.
The curbs on the entertainment sector were far from adequate as ordinary workers and people should become the main characters on screens.
People would benefit from the “common prosperity” goal after the education, medical and property sectors were reformed, he wrote.
While this sounds like Culture Revolution 2.0 it is assured that there will be no rampages of Maoist students through libraries or reeducation camps for party members.
Predatory capitalist George Soros claims in the Financial Times that these moves it will doom China’s economy. (See Michael Hudson’s counter here.) But people who, like Soros, argue against strong regulations forget that there are would be no markets without them.
Companies that only look at shareholder values are not sound and do not allow for a healthy society.
Just look Boeing and at the homeless camps in U.S. cities.
Aside from the ideological underpinning the new regulatory moves are populist. The masses will like them. They guarantee President Xi Jinping’s reelection at next year’s national party congress.
They will strengthen China’s unity in its competition with the United States.
China is cleaning up a few problems but I think it is also going into war mode.Posted by: Peter AU1 | Sep 1 2021 22:26 utc | 53
It is a nation of hard working, martial arts trained, studious NERDS. Most of the factories are inside of China. Not what passes for “factories” in the United States today. Which for the most part is nothing more than a nice office building in a “Industrial park” that houses cubicles staffed with accountants, diversity officers, attorneys, finance and marketing folk.
China is very capable. And if you want to to toe-to-toe, and head-to-head with them you had best be ready to accept the consequences of a harsh defeat and a life as a conquered nation. Check out this video here.
This article would have been very useful if it had stuck to its headline warning, which is more or less along the lines that Xi has made very clear that he’s not going to allow investors, above all foreign investors, to exercise more influence in Chinese business and society.
However, Soros then goes on in a vein that the article subhead accurately summarizes:
“The leader’s crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy.”
Oh, contraire, China’s success has been built on learning from the mistakes of other Asian countries that developed quickly but then fell prey to financialization, particularly Japan, and had difficulties making the transition from being export and investment led to consumption led.
In particularly, Soros is cheesed off at Xi restricting foreign investment, particularly in stocks.
First, China is a capital exporter. It doesn’t need foreign funds.
Second, despite the Anglopshere idealization of public stock markets, China doesn’t need one either, although getting rid of the one it has now would be messy and very disruptive.
As Amar Bhide pointed out in a landmark Harvard Business Review article, Efficient Markets, Deficient Governance, anonymous, freely traded shares inherently lead to poor governance.
Public companies cannot share critical business information that investors need to make informed decisions.
Transient shareholders also lack the motivation and means to improve the performance of the companies they’ve invested in.
Bhide has pointed out in other venues that while all other types of investments, such as derivatives and venture capital, existed in pre-modern times, arms length share trading did not because stock is a legally vague and weak promise.
And despite the idealization of share ownership, it’s almost entirely divorced from the funding of business. The most important source for new investment is retained earnings. Second is borrowing. Share sales are a distant third. The overwhelming majority of stock trading is shuffling paper among investors.
The most charitable interpretation of Soros’ position is that he suffers from a China version of the saying attributed to Charles Wilson, “What’s good for GM is good for America,” which here becomes, “What’s good for people like me of course is good for China.” Except as Michael Hudson explains, it isn’t.
Below are sections of the Soros article, with Hudson’s remarks in bold italics:
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise [what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income] has been a significant drag on the economy [meaning the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent]. The most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash. [That’s just what is needed.]
….One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future. [This is true of every advanced nation today. It is most extreme in the neoliberalized countries, e.g., the Baltics and Ukraine – Soros’s poster countries.]
We have skipped over Xi’s crackdown on the private tutoring industry…as if tutoring is essential to providing for security and an adequate standard of living for the next generation. How about strong public education, including remedial and advanced tracks, and vocational/technical training for those not bound to universities?
Back to Soros and Hudson:
Xi does not understand how markets operate [meaning that he rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent]. As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far [by which he means, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent; it seeks to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it]. It began to hurt China’s objectives in the world [meaning America’s neoliberal objectives for how it had hoped to make money for itself off China].
Recognising this, Chinese financial authorities have gone out of their way to reassure foreign investors and markets have responded with a powerful rally. But that is a deception. Xi regards all Chinese companies as instruments of a one-party state…
Pension fund managers allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured. [The tragedy of financializing pensions is that fund managers are rated on making money financially – in ways that hurt the industrial economy by promoting financial engineering instead of industrial engineering.]
Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions. [At least, that’s what their public relations advisors advertise. Exxon claims to be cleaning up the environment by expanding offshore oil drilling in Guyana, etc. As for “social standards,” the neoliberal mantra is trickle-down economics: by making our stock prices rise, by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts, we are helping wage-earners earn a pension, even though we are offshoring and de-industrializing the economy, de-unionizing it and “freeing” the economy from consumer and workplace protection laws.]
….The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders. [Wow. Such a bill would block Americans from investing in many American companies whose behavior is not at all aligned with stakeholders. What proportion: 50%? 75%? More?] This rule should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios.
If Congress were to enact these measures, it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies. [So Mr. Soros wants to block the US from investing in China. That is President Xi’s objective also: China doesn’t need U.S. dollars, and is in fact de-dollarizing.]
There are a lot of reasons to criticize Xi and the Chinese regimes, but combating foreign influence and a bit late in the game pushing back against high levels of inequality are not among them.
And Soros presents himself as having superior insight into China, and then acts as if an American strike on Chinese public companies would dent them. Good luck with that.
Indeed.
Great rebuttal by hudson. Soros is fuming at china,its because he cant run his usual financial schemes and assert some measure of control on sectors of their economy. Why anyone listens to this documented nazi collaborator, and destroyer of economies, and the pound sterling is beyond me. China is not in the business of allowing these types to have input or dictate their financial policy. I applaud them.
Posted by: RC213V | Sep 1 2021 21:52 utc | 46
You would think that most reasonable people would understand this. But they don’t. I have been reading the Australian “news”. Oh Lordy! These Bozo’s actually think that Australia and Japan will physically invade mainland China and be allowed to march right into the cities and take over.
I don’t believe it, but obviously the United States, though it’s enormous media is posturing towards a major conflict. And at this stage of the game, it looks like they want it to happen so badly that it probably will.
The Chinese leader tells cadres at the Central Party School that the ‘risks and challenges we face are conspicuously increasing’. Xi’s comments about the the need to fight to protect national security come amid ongoing tensions with the United States
And remember what I said at the start of this article…
"... the point that I want to make is that China is a perfect organism wholly designed to prevent anyone from attacking it. It is like a vicious animal with spikes, poison, and large sharp teeth. Only a fool would want to attack it..."
A final word.
So the United States wants to go into a HOT war with China. Don’t be so sure on what will happen.
From an anonymous commenter…
Some American and Chinese virologists are developing the new Sinoamerican virus (let's call it "Sinoamerican 200") in a laboratory in Guangzhou. The virus is a combination of a modified porcine influenza H1N1 and the previous Sinoamerican virus (SARS COV 2). The Sinoamerican 200 will be disseminated somewhere in USA in November 2021.Posted by: Kim Jong Il | Sep 2 2021 5:54 utc | 87
Let’s see what will happen in December 2021; around and just before Christmas time.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here’s another post that you simply will not find anywhere else on the Internet. And, you know, I tire of my own sluggishness in trying to understand the great failure of the American “free media”. Even I realize that there is no such thing as actual “news” in the West, but really guys it’s not too FUCKING DIFFICULT. You look for what is not being reported and stay alert for distractions.
What’s the biggest distraction this August 2021?
Why it is the fucked up, terribly botched evacuation of American military out of Kabul, Afghanistan. That’s ONE FUCK of a distraction.
Ok, then, let’s scour the “news” for oddities and pieces that might point to a major event that the United States government might want to hide, or distract others from looking into.
And, whoa…
But first a major comment from Singapore.
Turn up your speaker and listen to these wise words. And if you don’t understand them, play them over and over (on repeat) until it sinks into your fucking skull. Deprogram your mind God damn it. Click on the picture and watch the video until you tire of the simple, simple message.
A missing special operations submarine in the South China Sea
There have been substantive black operations in and around Taiwan since 2019. In all, the Untied States Navy has been doing all sorts of things in the area along the coasts of China and Taiwan. And after the April 2021 Anchorage, Alaska “meeting”, China laid down the line. They established “Red Lines” that WILL result in military conflict if they are ignored.
Of course, the brain dead people (are they actually people?) in Washington DC dismiss these threats as simple “posturing” and rhetoric.
There is every evidence to suggest that the United States has been conducting illegal and sensitive black operations inside of Chinese and Taiwan territories, and that China took aggressive military action against them. Or in other words, sank the submarines and set the hundreds of sailors and SEALs to their deaths in steel coffins in the deep dark seas.
American Submarines break cover
The U.S. Navy rarely publicizes even the routine operations of its own submarines. Stealth, both tactical and operational, is the Silent Service’s greatest strength, after all. But the Americans made a series of exceptions in June as new Chinese and Russian subs surfaced.
The Navy posted photos of the Washington-based USS Seawolf sailing alongside the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson off Hawaii on June 22, 2021 the same time a Russian naval task force was exercising near the island.
The 353-foot-long, nuclear-powered Seawolf is the lead vessel in a three-ship class that also includes USS Jimmy Carter, the U.S. fleet’s secretive special-mission submarine. Jimmy Carter also made a rare appearance when an airline-passenger photographed the boat sailing from San Diego towards Hawaii on June 8, 2021.
Seawolf and her sister USS Connecticut are bigger and faster than the newer Virginia-class attack boats are and, in many ways, represent the future of undersea warfare more than the Virginias do.
The Navy optimized the Virginias for land-attack missions with Tomahawk cruise missiles, at the expense of their anti-submarine capabilities. But with the Chinese and Russian sub fleets steadily growing more powerful—the new Type 039 and Belgorod are exhibits A and B—the Americans want their next attack boat to be fast and heavily-armed with greater numbers of torpedoes and mines.
In other words, more like a Seawolf. Not coincidentally, the Navy also released a photo of sailors in Crete loading Mark 67 mines on the Los Angeles-class attack sub USS Montpelier on June 22.
Amid a wider collapse in U.S. long-range naval planning, the administration of U.S. president Joe Biden remains committed to spending as much as half of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget—around $20 billion annually—on attack submarines, including the next-generation SSN(X).
“The recent uptick in submarine images released by the U.S. Navy is quite noticeable,” tweeted Chris Cavas, host of the CavasShips Podcast. “Remembering that submarine have pride-of-place in Department of the Navy budget calculations.”
So, we know that the US Navy is all over the South China Sea
But it is more than that.
We notice and are paying attending to what they are actually doing. Their movements are all recorded in great detail. With the most obvious being the surface ships, and the aircraft. Not so well known are the movements of the “Black Operations” submarines.
All 2021 has been stories about major Naval Operations in the South Pacific Sea.
The “excuse” has always been to protect the freedom of navigation in those waters off the Chinese coast. But that excuse is just that.
A fucking excuse.
Any person with half a brain cell and who knows what a globe looks like can easily see that the USN is up to no good. But Americans have been dumbed down so terribly that they are lucky to be able to hold a spoon, let alone calculate how to count to ten.
Think people!
Think!
And we know that ALL of the “Special Operations” submarines are in operation all around Taiwan
How do we know?
It’s by deduction. Duh!
We know that the submarines work work in covert operations and carry SEAL teams. While they perform such tasks as tapping into fiber optic undersea cables and the like, they are all equipped with landing bays that carry “miniature troop insertion submarines” designed to carry SEAL teams close to the coastlines for insertion into “enemy territory”.
And they are all rotating in and around Hawaii. Are they planning to invade Bora Bora? Performing secretive missions around Tahiti? Going to lay secret operations in Pago Pago?
Special Operations submarines showing the landing bays for the SEAL secretive assault troops.
The four converted ballistic missile submarines are so much more than Tomahawk slingers and transports for Navy SEALs.
Today, the U.S. Navy’s quartet of converted Ohio class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or SSGNs, are among America’s most powerful, in-demand, and flexible weapons. These giant and secretive submarines are known for their ability to carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and dozens of special operations frogmen into contested territory to ply their quiet trade, but really, they are much, much more than that.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Navy was testing incredible new capabilities that it would subsequently integrate into its four yet to be converted SSGNs, including one highly elaborate, but obscure proof of concept exercise that solidified the SSGN concept for the seagoing service. Here is the story of how these vessels came to be and the highly unique, if not exotic capabilities, from drone mothership to command and control center, they possess.
The Genesis of the Ohio SSGN
The decision to covert Ohio class SSBNs into SSGNs originated with the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, which determined that only 14 of the 18 Ohio class boats were necessary to meet the United States’ nuclear deterrence needs. Eight years later, the Navy began actually converting the four oldest Ohio class submarines – USS Florida, USS Georgia, USS Michigan, and USS Ohio – into the new configuration.
The Navy had considered a number of potential configuration options for the new SSGNs. The concept that the service finally settled on retained 22 of the 24 missile tubes found on Ohio SSBNs, but modified them so that they were unable to fire Trident D5 nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Instead, each one would be able to launch up to seven BGM-109 Tomahawks using a Multiple All-Up-Round Canister (MAC) adapter. The SLBM fire control systems were similarly replaced with ones for the Tomahawk.
Tubes one and two on each of the four SSGNs would be completely replaced with lockout chambers so combat divers and Navy SEALs could enter and exit the submarine underwater. Personnel could also install a Dry Deck Shelter (DDS) to the top of the hull linked to either one of these modified tubes, or both if required, which could accommodate swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) mini-submarines. As the name suggests, the DDS provides a fully enclosed, dry space to work in on the submarine’s deck, even while it is underwater.
The abortive Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) was supposed to have been able to directly dock with either one of these lockout chambers, as well. The Navy canceled the ASDS program in 2009 after cost overruns and other major setbacks, including a fire that had destroyed the original prototype the year before.
With a DDS installed, a number of additional tubes on the SSGNs would also be blocked off, so the Navy decided to make tubes three through 10 reconfigurable into storage space, if necessary. A dedicated berthing area for a typical contingent of 66 special operators, with a surge capacity of up 102 personnel, was added in the reconfigured missile compartment, as well.
More recent reporting has indicated that a typical load for these submarines is around 100 Tomahawks. This most likely represents between 14 and 16 fully loaded tubes, which would equate to between 98 and 112 missiles in total. This would leave between six and eight tubes available for storage or other purposes, something we will come back to later on in the story.
Beyond that, the SSGN configuration had an all-new a dedicated special operations mission control center and associated mission planning spaces.
It also included additional and improved sensor and communications antenna masts on the sail.
Other modifications that would allow these submarines to better operate in shallower waters closer to shore, were also likely involved with the conversion.
An intelligence nerve center
It’s hard to overstate how significant the intelligence fusion capabilities demonstrated during Silent Hammer were. For the experiment, Georgia had an embarked joint service command team onboard, who used modified spaces in the submarine to run a forward operations center that controlled other assets under the waves, riding on the surface, in the air, and on land. This was intended to reflect the capabilities that the submarine would have after going through the SSGN conversion, which would create new, more robust mission spaces for command and control elements and intelligence gathering personnel, among others.
This was the first time the Navy had ever done this as part of the development of the SSGN concept of operations and it put the operational commanders right in the thick of things in a whole new way. Unlike traditional surface command ships, such as the USS Blue Ridge, the Georgia was allowing these officers and their staff to direct forward operations while sailing concealed below the surface of the ocean. The submarine’s command center was linked to rear command centers, and their intelligence networks, via satellite. It also had direct data-link feeds from a number of other sources.
In the air, these included the Pelican, a highly modified, pilot-optional Cessna 337 propeller-driven aircraft, and a specially configured Sabreliner twin-engine business jet. The Pelican belonged to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) and was configured at the time in a way that matched the capabilities of the MQ-1 Predator drone.
The Lincoln Lab also had their heavily modified Boeing 707 airliner, nicknamed Hannah, a well-known cutting-edge communications and sensor testbed, in the air playing the role of a airborne radar with synthetic aperture and ground-moving-target indicator capabilities. This effectively made it, in part, a surrogate for a U.S. Air Force E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) battlefield management command and control aircraft.
Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes and EP-3E Aries II intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft also took part in Trident Warrior and fed information into this network of information sources.
Down below, Georgia was networked together with other vessels taking part in Trident Warrior, including two Los Angeles class fast attack submarines, the USS La Jolla and USS Pittsburgh. In addition, members of the Silent Hammer experiment team were on board the first in class amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa and the Wasp class USS Bonhomme Richard, which were also taking part in the larger exercise.
Ashore, U.S. Navy SEALs, along with other unspecified attached special operators, likely including U.S. Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTAC), were in direct contact with Georgia. They emplaced their own “unattended” sensors to monitor for potential hostile activity and otherwise fed even more data back to the submarine.
We also know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supplied unspecified payloads, as well as sensor systems for the exercise. Georgia itself demonstrated how she might launch unmanned aircraft and an unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) during the exercise to support intelligence collection efforts.
The very same intelligence collection aircraft are operating in the airspace around Taiwan RIGHT NOW
Imagine that!
Just a coincidence, don’t you know!
More than 700 patrols were conducted by US vessels and aircraft in the South China Sea region in the past year, according to a report by the National Institute for South China Sea Studies (NISCSS). As the US never ratified theUN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), itsclaims of protecting "freedom of navigation" is rather hollow.
-ChinaPlus
Of course, you will never read about this in CNN, FOX “news”, Hall Turner, or Forbes. Those just provide bullshit for a dumbed down citizenry. Real secrets are secret.
But all over Chinese media are reports of these intelligence gathering aircraft, with videos of their interactions.
Reported that Davidson, by video link, to the U.S. think tank American enterprise research institute (AEI) talks. He declared that the Indo-Pacific region is one of the most critical regions in the world and will face many challenges between now and 2026.
Davidson spent much of his time describing the Pentagon's Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which he said was one of the priorities of the Department's annual budget.
The U.S. Army India-Pacific Command has reported to Congress that it will increase the program's budget from $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $4.6 billion in fiscal year 2022 and plans to spend $27.3 billion over the next five years, the report said.
-美印太司令部宣称“助台增强防御力、持续对台军售”,网友讽刺:台湾保护费要涨了!
But there is something very interesting going on…
These aircraft are not “loitering” as part of operations so much as flying “search and rescue” scans in the deep ocean South of the Taiwan Coast.
What are they looking for?
What is going on? Check out the video.
Searching for something.
This is not a “loitering” SEAL support protocol. It’s all over the place in a limited geographical region.
Not deploying sonar buoys.
Doing something else.
Other curious events…
The timing of all these unusual intelligent gathering aircraft in “searching and recovery” flight paths occurred at the SAME TIME as the US Navy, broke all diplomatic protocol to land on Taiwan and deliver a “package” containing a “message” to the Military Representative in Taiwan.
Yes. It must have been one fuck of an important package to risk getting shot down and starting world war III in the process.
Matt Drudge, ever the neocon (or whatever neocon interns he has running his site for him these days), is perhaps the biggest offender on this type of fake news. Right now if you go to his site, just the main page (drudgereport.com) you'll see *HUGE* red emblazoned text about "Marines in China!" and a giant picture of what looks like some sort of seafaring battalion of US troooooops getting ready to storm some shore or the other. He's worse than CNN, WaPo, WSJ or the NYT (of course he often links to those sources).
Interestingly, on actual left-leaning sites, there's nothing to be seen on the non-topic, but instead moooooore stories about Trump (they just can't stop themselves), the abortion bills and COVID related stuff.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Oct 7 2021 21:41 utc | 32
Another day, same hype…
But what about proof?
Well, we all know that America is the most transparent and least secretive nation on the planet. It’s got that thing called “freedom”, and there is nothing more important than a “free press”. Right? So if they don’t report anything, that simply means that nothing is going on. Right?
Yada. Yada. Yada.
American view of themselves.
The United States is laying the foundations for a war.
That’s what is going on.
China realizes this and is getting mightily pissed. I can tell you that secret operations that go “tits up” are never recognized as an event. it is just hidden and compromised with other excuses.
When a submarine goes off the grid, the hundreds of sailors are quietly written off, and records state that they died in accidents.
The submarine itself is quietly “retired”, and nothing further is spoken of it.
Maybe one of these days the SEAL “Special Operations” submarines will sail into port without incidence.
You know like the broken and busted up Seawolf submarine that limped into Hawaii for “repairs” and urgent medical treatment for it’s crew when it had an incident in the South China Sea during “Mission 7”.
America will continue to wage a secretive war against China hidden away from public scrutiny up until nuclear weapons are detonated. Then we all won’t know what is going on, but we will know that America will be a radioactive wasteland no matter what happens in the rest of the world.
I told you all that the war would not be televised.
And it isn’t.
…
There are numerous missing submarines in the United States Navy. Not just the ones listed here, but attack submarines, and maybe even a “boomer”. All nuclear. And they are “sitting ducks” in the shallow South China Sea.
There’s a secret, silent war of stealth going on. If it goes visually kinetic, then it risks destroying the American economy “house of cards”. So this “war” must be hidden, quiet and done in stealth.
Most submarines are either sunk or “heavily damaged”. Those that are not sunk sail home “heavily damaged”. So far, we haven’t seem too many sail home damaged. But we will.
…
I would STRONGLY suggest you all watch the movie “Threads” to see the frightening similarities between this 1980’s movie and what is going on right now.
Oh…
And the mainstream press finally decides to report something….
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Here, I continue on my “bender” on taking a look at other nations in our world. In each case, so far, I have shown the reality to be something different from what you would ever read about in the Western (especially the American) press. I have looked at China, Russia, Thailand, Cambodia, the middle East, and now, Vietnam.
Vietnam is a very interesting place full of great beauty, beautiful women, delicious food, and an easy going happy-go-lucky lifestyle.
Enter Donald Trump and his neocon war-mongers
Vietnam continued their easy and laid back lifestyle since the tumultuous 1960’s when America decided to churn up and rape the countryside for freedom™ and democracy™. And it continued that way through the decades, up until Donald Trump took office and started his “War on China”.
He demanded that American companies leave China or face all sorts of consequences. In American “language” this means that “border-line legal” actions might (and probably would) be directed at the company. Such as suspicious hard-line tax audits, and review of OSHA and EPA policies and factory operation shut-downs during the “investigations” as well as mysterious fires in the warehouses, random union uprisings and personal tax audits and random arrests of key corporate executives.
Many, but not all, American companies started to relocate a number of their operations out of China. The vast bulk did not return to America, however. Instead, they went to Mexico and Vietnam.
About Factories
When America switched from manufacturing inside of America to outsourcing to China, they did NOT teach the Chinese how to make factories or build products. Instead, they went to existing factories, handed over the blueprints, and quality specifications, moved their tooling and equipment, and said “make this for us”. And that is pretty much (as harsh as it sounds) what actually happened.
Now, in the thirty to forty years that America has been devoid of solid manufacturing skill, the American companies that manufactured inside of China were in a bind. Just how do you move your factory, when you don’t own it?
Do you start from scratch? Hire new engineers? Try to reverse engineer your systems to fit a Mexican or Vietnamese work force? What do you do?
Well, I can’t say that this is what happened to all of the factories, but I can tell you that a sizable number took this action…
…the Chinese factories that supplied the American companies, set up divisions inside of Vietnam.
Thus, the Donald Trump trade war, as far as bringing manufacturing capability back to the United States failed. Instead, all that happened is the existing Chinese factories continued to supply the American companies. The only difference is that they did so out of Vietnam.
Vietnam Changed.
Of course, all of this movement of Chinese factories into Vietnam, and with it, the Chinese support structures, have made great changes to Vietnam. While it is still a sluggish and rather backward nation, it is growing and expanding. And this has created a rather unique mix of older traditional Vietnam, with modern Chinese industry and support structures. Very few American influences are present. As America is rather a nation of bankers, accountants, lawyers, and diversity experts. Very few have an kind of impact on Vietnamese society.
Here we are going to look at some videos out of Vietnam taken these last two months. It’s a quite interesting mix of color and tradition.
The Videos
Let’s go through these videos.
I suggest you watch them in order to get the full diverse effect. And I hope hope that you enjoy them and get “something out of them”. This group has around 85 (give or take) videos. So to prevent you from getting carpal tunnel syndrome (yikes!) clicking on each individual video, I have clustered the videos into small zip files that you click on, download and then browse through at your leisure.
Group A
Cooking some kind of purple Vietnamese food.
Foreigner in Vietnam trying to pick up a local butterfly girl.
Young love having some fun.
Lunch in a Chinese factory located in Vietnam.
Dressing up to go out on a date.
You ride scooters to get anywhere.
Making supper.
Loved ones going off to do their mandatory military service.
Some girls getting down at a local gathering.
Another foreigner trying to pick up some butterfly girls.
Night life in one of the bigger cities.
Two girls on the way to work (my guess is a massage or restaurant).
Bar Life.
Home made turbo-generators for local village power needs.
As the Biden administration consolidates its foreign policy, it has predictably turned its attention towards Southeast Asia in a bid to “counter China”.
Just last week, Mid-August 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore in a bid to increase military ties between Washington and the region.
Means… allow American military bases there, American war ships to sail there, and the placement of American offensive missile systems there.
You know like swallowing bile that rise up in your throat.
The vice president’s aim with this trip is to “call out” China over its maritime claims in the South China Sea.They can’t do it personally face-to-face with China. They will no longer play “that game”. So like cowards, they are trying to undermine all the relationships of all the nations that border on China.
They come with suitcases (no cross that out) pallets, (no cross that out) Shipping containers full of freshly minted US dollars.
Freshly minted.
Hot off the (over worked) printing presses.
For, you know, the leadership to do what ever they want with the nice crisp “green backs”.
This comes amid America’s attempts to militarize the region.
They’ve been really busy, don’t you know.
The anti-China QUAD; those vassal states of the UK and Japan who will be compelled to “die on their swords” at the push of a button from the American Pentagon. To Australia who has only become a vassal state for reasons not so obvious. In my mind, a treasonous Morrison government with many, many skeletons in his closet is willing to sacrifice his people for Washington DC.
As well as continuously sailing aircraft carriers through the sensitive waters in a bid to project American power.
No prizes here for guessing who he was talking about…
The US says that it’s “back” to Southeast Asian countries.
It’s just bullshit.
The reality is this: apart from all the militaristic “sabre rattling” and pushing a non-stop hate China narrative while convincing everyone (with a pulse) to oppose China, the United States actually doesn’t have a strategy for the region.
But Beijing does.
In many ways, the legacy of recent US policies in this area of the world has been self-defeating.
The “political space” (the room to maneuver and work around is) that Biden has to turn it around is really quite limited.
In other words, it’s essentially still Trump’s ‘America First’ sentiment.
And that is quite telling as the biggest gaping hole in America’s strategy towards Southeast Asian countries is failing to offer them anything in return.
There are no, absolutely zero, economic incentives to oppose China. All they have to offer is personal riches for the rulers. As well as promises to offer them “green cards” and citizenship if the whole plan goes “tits up”.
China, need I remind you, which is right next door to these nations.
On this front, America has isolated itself.
In so many ways too.
Most notably by withdrawing from the mega trade deal which Obama fashioned as an anti-China initiative known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Now rebranded CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) amongst local partners.
On the level of US domestic politics, this is toxic because the consensus is that free trade is bad, especially if it detracts from jobs at home.
Therefore, Biden faces protectionist pressure not to re-join it, thus it has not come back on the Biden agenda.
China, on the other hand, has comprehensively doubled down on its economic ties with the surrounding region and entrenched its presence. Most notably through joining the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which it quickly ratified.
This creates an obvious problem for America.
China is increasingly integrating itself with the region on an economic level.
In which local parties (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, etc.) welcome with open arms gleefully.
But, you know, the United States is not happy with in the least.
No longer is trade being conducted in the “almighty” US Dollar. It’s local currency to the e-yuan. And as time moves forward, more and more nations are following this lead.
The US doesn’t have an answer to any of this.
Recently, it was reported that Washington wanted to try and propose a ‘digital trade deal’ among the economies of the Asia-Pacific. This “digital trade deal” is intended to lock China out of trade with any nations that sign that agreement. This is by regulation.
A favorite technique, mind you, well established and mature to crush nations that do not “toe the line” with American Geo-political policy.
This is intended to be done by setting strict rules and regulations on the ‘digital economy’ of the region.
Because it’s absolutely untenable for these countries to lock China out, and it’s not hard to see why.
Yesterday (Mid-August 2021) Huawei announced it would be investing $100 million into over 1,000 software start-ups throughout Southeast Asia. And that’s just one of the many initiatives in bringing manufacturing, development, growth and prosperity to all the nations that surround China.
With a high degree of integration and economic benefits, it is impossible for the US to now shape the region’s initiative while keeping China excluded.
There’s nothing left.
This leaves the military.
And this is where China is increasingly powerful, but the US remains competitive and relevant.
Many countries in the region accept the presence of the United States and its allies militarily, because it gives them strategic space to prevent them from being completely dominated by China.
For a small city state like Singapore, this inclination makes obvious sense, but this is not so much ‘siding’ with America as it is a geopolitical balancing act between both powers.
Walking the “tight rope”; the “fine line” of neutrality.
Here lies the problem: America wants countries to align with it against China in a binary way, but the nations themselves want neutrality.
And ASEAN (The association of South East Asian nations) as an institution officially seeks such.
Some of these states of course are formally allied with America, such as the Philippines. Yet, you know, for all intents and purposes they utilize a strategy of ‘hedging’ between both sides.
And for certain, they do not seek confrontation with Beijing.
If Washington pushes too hard on anti-China initiatives, these countries become uncomfortable, and this may have the ‘opposite’ result.
This aims to ease tensions, and brands the US a ‘troublemaker’.
Duh!
Again, Washington doesn’t have the ability to conduct close diplomacy with these countries as a neighbor, only as a ‘visitor’.
America is an outsider.
China is local.
China is right there.
All in all, geography works against America. China is the neighbor of Southeast Asia, not the US.
Beijing is the largest economy in the region and is irreversibly integrated in terms of trade, technology, and finance.
America is not.
Yet, the US foreign policy strategy seems to pursue the bizarre premise that they can somehow dominate this region…
… push back China…
…and match its growing power…
… despite the fact they physically cannot, simply because they are not based there.
This means that whilst these countries are not necessarily rejecting an American presence, they are never going to adopt any serious anti-China policies or the militarization of the region that Biden hopes for.
Would you start a fight with your much bigger next-door neighbor?
Biden has no economic incentives to offer either.
China is, in many ways, continuing to lead and shape the regional agenda through its own initiatives, and as its own military presence in this area also grows, it has plenty of options to counter US posturing.
And the United States is impotent in the region, no matter what the American media says to the contrary.
Conclusion
Most of the world is still being influenced by the American media in one form or the other. And on subjects that everyone seems to have adjusted to what ever narrative that the American government made, the belief is that what ever Washington DC says is the truth. Nope. It is not.
Vietnam is many things, but an American proxy nation, whether military, commercial or economic, is simply not true.
This article broaches the true and actual state of affairs, and I do hope that it was interesting and meaningful at the same time. I have tried to present a diverse collection of videos showing the great breadth and width of the colorful Vietnamese society, and I hope that I put it in a positive light.
I have many friends how go to Vietnam, as it’s not too far from where I live, and they pretty much confirm what I have listed here. I hope that you all can see that it has a bright future ahead, and some deep and wonderful culture and traditions. I sincerely hope that they hold on to them and not allow them to disappear.
And when the pandemic ends, perhaps a nice visit to Vietnam would be a wonderful trip, and I am sure that you would make some wonderful, maybe even lifelong friends. And isn’t that what we all want out of life?
I dedicate this article to "Nick" who asked what will the Middle East look like when China replaces the United States as the dominant nation.
I want to take a moment and acknowledge that there is a lot of historical events going on right now. (Sigh.) They have been covered through the various “news” outlets over and over all with various “spins” and opinions. I am sure that you are all getting tired of this. Especially for youse Americans who are (probably) just exhausted by it all.
Yes, the pre-planned Clusterfuck in Kabul, or Bay of Pigs 2.0, or whatever shook the world as victims of 20 years of lies and death reasserted a modicum of control over their situation. The outrage and howling from the CIA-controlled media and the Establishment over Biden's correct decision is hilarious.Posted by: gottlieb | Aug 22 2021 14:11 utc | 1
It’s been a very crazy week.
Personally, I’ve been a tad busy, but then you have the US failure in Afghanistan. But… is it really a failure, or just a regrouping?
The long-term optimism of China is great but the US does not care about that. The US has not been number one at anything for a long time; not education, literacy, healthcare, internet speed, and all the things called "human development". At the turn of the century the U.S. ranked about 18 on the UN Human Development Index adjusted for equality. Today it is 28.
Yet if you ask the average American what country is the best in the world, he will say the US. The people do not even realize how far they have fallen compared to the rest of the world. That shows how good the US propaganda system is. The US is #1 at propaganda. #1 in military spending too, although the technology of the weapons is declining. #1 in obesity. #1 in junk culture. Yes, bread and circus to keep the masses happy works.
The U.S. does not care about the development of the people. It does not care about cooperation.
The U.S. does not care about winning wars. Wars are the end in itself. It is how the wealth of the people is transferred upwards. That is why during the "War OF Terror" the U.S. has been steadily declining "when adjusted for equality" from 18 to 28.
The U.S. has not "lost" in Afghanistan, because it had nothing to lose. Nor has the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan.
It has just been a pivot.
CIA special activities, special forces and mercenaries are "stay behinds". They will now regroup the mujahideen and create a civil war that will last for another 20 years. They will also intensify direction of the mujahideen to former Russian republics, Chechnya, Xinjiang, Myanmar, Thailand, and anywhere else they can get a foothold for regime change and to attack the BRI.
The US takes China and Russia's kindness as weakness. It will take what kindness is offered and then stab the giver in the back. The US will use whatever sabotage it can against the BRI.
America is not interested in cooperation.
The battlefield of propaganda has been well prepared for the American people. They believe the US has many aggressive enemies, and all (illegal) US wars (of aggression) are defensive. The vast majority believe anything from the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer.
Regards,
[name withheld]
This (mid-August 2021) was a week where the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan overshadowed everything else. That is okay as huge consequences will flow from these events. The future history books (or what ever they will use) will record these events as one of the most significant dates and contributing events that will eventually lead up to the start of the “New Beginning” of the new global order.
And it will, as this comment foreshadows…
When will other occupied suzerainties ask Imperialist forces to leave? The Taliban has been fighting the Imperial forces since their occupation started. However, people in Germany, Japan, South Korea,… that have been occupied by the Imperialists over many decades do nothing. Aren’t they democracy? What does it tell about these SUZERAINTIES? What percentage of their transactions are in Imperialist’s currencies? Are you okay with imperialism? Imperialists go back!Name a democracy that isn’t a suzerainty.Will Afghanistan’s fiasco create any wave of change?Posted by: Max | Aug 22 2021 14:23 utc | 3
Hey! What the heck is a “suzerainty”? That’s a new word for me.
"apositionofcontrolby a sovereign or stateoveranotherstate that is internally autonomous."
So, a nation can be under the control of another nation, while still having it’s own domestic laws, rules and culture. So Japan, would be under the control of the United States as a vassal state, but is still allowed to keep Japanese culture, society, laws and rules domestically. However, internationally, it must obey and do what ever the United States says.
The USA tells Japan to join the QUAD. They join the QUAD. The USA tells them to buy USA debt. They buy USA debt. But if the girls want to wear kimonos, watch strange television, and have a giant penis festival, that’s just fine.
So Japan is a suzerainty of the United States.
Hey! You learn something every day.
So it has got me to thinking. You know. I start to ponder things, and wonder about things. So, I wonder what the difference between a suzerainty and a “vassal state” is?
Vassal stateState
A vassalstate is any state that has a mutual obligation to a superior state or empire, in a status similar to that of a vassal in the feudal system in medieval Europe.
Vassal states were common among the Empires of the Near East, dating back to the era of the Egyptian, Hittite and Mitanni conflict, as well as Ancient China.
The use of vassal states continued through the middle ages, with the last Empire to use such states being the Ottoman Empire.
The relationships between vassal rulers and empires was dependent on the policies and agreements of each empire.
While payment of tribute and military service is common amongst vassal states, the degree of independence and benefits given to vassal states varied. Today, more common terms are puppet state, protectorate, client state, associated state or satellite state.
-Wikipedia
So, to me it appears that as a Vassal State, the controlling Empire can also dictate domestic behaviors, society and laws as it deems necessary. While a suzerainty is permitted domestic autonomy.
We can thus think that a “suzerainty” is a subset of a “vassal state”.
A suzerainty.
Interesting stuff.
It puts the entire perspective of what the world really looks like and operates into a much greater perspective. And most certainly what the United States actually is in the greater scheme of things.
To the world at large, the United States is a big massive, bad bully. That if not “tamed” by the rest of the world, it will end up consuming it and destroying it. As stated in this video. Funny how this section was never shown on American media…
The USA is out of control.
Some haggling seems to continue today but the outcome is assured.
Trump has something to say…
Yada, yada, yada.
Trump gives his two cents worth.
Now for the “meat”…
Big warning; long read.
And as my articles tend to be long, expect this one to be encyclopedic. To fully understand what is transpiring in this far-away mountainous area you need to know some history. And Jeeze! There’s a lot of history.
By the time you are 25% done reading, you should be moe informed than a full 90% of the people around you. At 50%, that number jumps to 95%, and at the end of this article, you will be more informed than 99.99999% of those around you.
Such a responsibility!
Do you want this level of understanding?
We will avoid all the great pilliages of the Genghis Khan and the Persions and all the rest, and we will start when the UK British Empire decided to annex the region as a Vassal State.
Then we will explore how the Soviet Union Empire decided to annex the region as a Vassal State.
And finally, we will explore how the United States Military Empire decided to annes the region as a Vassal State.
Long read. As I said.
So first, some history…
The usual disclaimers apply. Content edited for this venue all credit to the original authors, etc.
Britain’s first war in Afghanistan: what happened and why?
Britain’s first war in Afghanistan took place in the Victorian era, beginning in 1839. Historian William Dalrymple explores the conflict in conversation with Rob Attar, in a piece first published in 2013, and discusses what parallels can be drawn with the fighting in recent years
The First Anglo-Afghan War: what happened?
Concerned that Russia was expanding its influence in the region, Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, ousting ruler Dost Mohammad and replacing him with Shah Shuja, who had been king from 1803–10.
Insurrections later broke out, compelling the British garrison to flee Kabul. Believing they had been promised safe passage, a large contingent of British and Indian forces attempted a retreat in January 1842, but were ambushed by Afghan troops, leading to the deaths of around 18,000 soldiers. Abandoned in Kabul, Shah Shuja was killed.
British forces managed to recapture Kabul later that year and elsewhere laid waste to the countryside but eventually decided to pull out of the country altogether. Dost Mohammad returned to Kabul in 1843 and his dynasty would remain in power until the 1970s.
William Dalrymple, author of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, discusses the First Anglo-Afghan War in conversation with Rob Attar
How does your book change our understanding of the First Anglo-Afghan War?
It is one of those old chestnuts that’s already got a shelf-and-a-half of books written about it. So it seemed the only point of dedicating four years to this was to try to completely rewrite the story, obviously with a view to seeing it in the light of what is going on now, but more specifically trying to cover both sides of the story, which has never been done before. To date, not one book on the war has used a single Afghan source. Everything we have is entirely from the British side.
The British Experience.
I did several trips to Afghanistan to search out more sources and by the end I had nine full-length Afghan accounts of the war. What emerged from them was that the war had a completely different dramatis personae and a more fractured regional make-up than the British seemed to be aware of. They saw an undifferentiated wall of bigoted bearded Afghans coming towards them but in reality the resistance was divided by tribe, ethnic group and language.
My most exciting find was the autobiography of Shah Shuja. He had been written off by the British and Afghan nationalists as a weak and hopeless guy, but I think he was wonderful. He was a poet, civilised and immensely likeable. He just didn’t have military luck ever in his career.
The British Experience.
Astonishingly he was from the same sub-tribe, the Popalzai, as current Afghan president Hamid Karzai. We’ve put the same guy in twice! And he was brought down by the Ghilzai who today make up the foot soldiers of the Taliban. This is the same tribal war, continuing under slightly different flags, 170 years later.
Has your research changed your view of the First Anglo-Afghan War’s origins?
The account I give is subtly, but not completely, changed from previous versions. The basic reason for the British invasion was a blown-up fear of Russian intervention and here there are parallels, oddly enough, with the war in Iraq, with a ‘dodgy dossier’. A group of hawks manipulated intelligence to exaggerate a threat that didn’t exist in reality as substantially as they thought it did.
There was this episode when a young great gamer, Sir Henry Rawlinson, was riding through Persia to join the Shah of Persia’s camp in the north-west of the country. One night Rawlinson found himself in the very dodgy borderlands between Persia and Afghanistan and, just as dawn was breaking, he witnessed a party of horsemen coming down the valley towards him. He saw that they were Russian Cossacks heading in the direction of the Afghan border. He headed them off at the top of the pass and found them eating their breakfast.
There was a young Russian officer who refused to talk to him in Russian, Persian or French but agreed to chat in Jagatai Turkish. He told Rawlinson he was on his way to the Persian camp so Rawlinson rode straight there to see the Shah. The Shah said that the Russians were nothing to do with him but were going to open diplomatic relations with Dost Mohammad in Kabul.
This was the yellowcake of its day [in 2002, it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellowcake uranium to develop weapons of mass destruction]. For 30 years hawks had been worrying about Russia moving towards Afghanistan and there was this whole literature already in London about Russia taking Afghanistan then sweeping down the Khyber and expelling the British from India. There was no evidence for this at all until this chance discovery.
There was this new governor general, Lord Auckland, who had inherited a group of belligerently hawkish and Russophobic advisors, led by the hopeless William Macnaghten. They ignored the advice of the one British official in India who really knew Afghanistan, Alexander Burnes. He was sending despatches saying that Dost Mohammad wanted to ally with the British rather than the Russians, but they didn’t listen and advised Auckland to oust Dost Mohammad and bring in what they described as the ‘ousted legitimate ruler’ Shah Shuja.
How did the British fare in the early military operations?
The war followed the same trajectory as the current conflict. Everyone warned that it would be catastrophically difficult, but in fact they conquered the country almost instantly with minimal casualties. Then you had, as happened in 2001, the government crowing that they’d seen off the naysayers and it was going to be easy.
For the first year it did seem to be so.
The Afghans were very friendly and their noblemen went hunting, did amateur theatricals and played cricket with the British. But slowly it began to unravel, from Helmand, working northwards. There was more and more resistance until the British found themselves surrounded in Kabul without any control of the countryside around it. Again, it was exactly the same as the situation today.
The British Experience.
Where did this resistance come from?
Here my interpretation is different from that of the British. They assumed that the Afghans were rising up against Shah Shuja as much as themselves but it’s quite clear that a lot of the resistance was from irritated royalists who wanted Shah Shuja to shed his allegiance to the British. They thought the British were abusing agreements he’d made with them, which was indeed the case.
The initial idea had been that Shah Shuja would be given rule and the British would just help him enforce it, but, rather like with the tensions between Karzai and the British and Americans, increasingly the British got irritated with their own puppet and tried to bully him or take unilateral action. Macnaghten and Burnes gradually despaired of ever running Shah Shuja effectively and just took control of Afghanistan themselves.
What we get very clearly from Afghan sources is the motivations of individual leaders, which were all quite different. Abdullah Khan Achakzai was a young aristocrat whose girlfriend was seduced by Burnes, so for him it was a personal slight. He made a wonderful speech the night before the rebellion saying: “We have to put a stop right here and now, otherwise these English will ride the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity, to the point of having us all arrested and deported into foreign imprisonment.”
Aminullah Khan Logari was a self-made man who had worked his way up for over 60 years of service. He was treated very peremptorily by a young British official who threw him off his lands. It was people such as Logari and Achakzai who kicked the whole thing off. They called everyone to arms and, within a few days, 50,000 had gathered in Kabul to fight the British.
The British Experience.
Did the British just retreat then?
There were two quite substantial battles that they lost through their incompetence and then they retreated. It was during the retreat under the promise of safekeeping that they got shot down. The East India Company at the time still used the Brown Bess musket, which was great in a flat European field like Waterloo but couldn’t fire long distances or uphill. The Afghans had these clumsy big jezails that took an hour to load but nonetheless could fire a mile downhill and were perfect for mountain warfare.
How did the British allow this catastrophe to happen?
It was quite fantastically incompetent British leadership. As well as Burnes and Macnaghten, who were always at each other’s necks, there was this gout-ridden old general called William Elphinstone who hadn’t seen action since the battle of Waterloo and was an invalid. On the first morning of the revolt he tried to get on his horse, which fell on top of him and he was more or less out of the action from there. By their own indecision and hopelessness the British lost the war very quickly. They lost all their food and ammunition within about 48 hours and it was only a matter of time before they had to retreat.
Was it a political or military decision to pull out of the country altogether?
Retreat was inevitable once they’d lost their food and ammunition, so that was a military decision. The Kabul garrison was wiped out but there were others surviving in Jalalabad and Kandahar. They were reinforced and the following spring they returned and laid waste to southern Afghanistan.
This army of retribution committed war crimes on a grand scale, raping and murdering women and children.
The British Experience.
After that, the decision to pull out was an economic one and this is also true of the later conflicts. Resistance can be defeated but only at huge cost, because the country is so diffused and the geography makes it so difficult. Plus there is no way of defraying the cost of the occupation. If you invade Iraq you can take the oil, or in the Punjab you can tax the rich, fertile land, but the entire tax revenue of Afghanistan never paid then and doesn’t pay now even a fraction of the cost of occupation.
How might your book inform policy makers today?
I do think there’s a huge amount to be learned from the Afghan version of events. It gives a precision into understanding the resistance, which has been lacking to date.
The story of the First Anglo-Afghan War provides clear warnings about the dangers of being trapped in Kabul, surrounded and with no allies, having fallen out with the people you put into power.
The problem is that each generation fails to learn these lessons.
George Lawrence was one of the troops taken hostage during the retreat and so survived to write his memoirs. He saw history repeating itself in the 1870s with the Second Anglo-Afghan War and he roused himself to write a letter to The Times. He said:
“A new generation has arisen, which instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country… The disaster of the retreat from Kabul should stand forever as a warning to the statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such butter fruit in 1839–42.”
He wasn’t listened to in 1870, and this is now the fourth lost Afghan war.
William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer and historian based in India. His books include The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (Bloomsbury, 2019), Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, co-authored with Anita Anand (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2014) This article was first published in the February 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
After Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988-89, the regime it was defending there fell. This experience contributes to present fears that, if America withdraws from Afghanistan, the regime it is defending will also fall. A closer look at Soviet and Russian actions between 1988 and 1992, though, suggests that this need not have been the result then — and that it need not be the result of an American withdrawal now either.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to prop up the Marxist regime that had come to power the previous year but which appeared to be on the verge of collapse.
Unlike the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, Soviet forces encountered prolonged resistance that they were unable to defeat.
In order to promote his goals of domestic reform and improving Moscow’s relations with the West, Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (which he had termed a “bleeding wound”) between May 1988 and February 1989.
Russians in Afghanistan.
At the time, it was widely predicted that the Marxist regime Moscow had been supporting in Afghanistan would fall within a few months — or even weeks — of the final departure of Soviet forces.
The regime of President Najibullah, however, survived until April 1992, over three years after the Soviet withdrawal.
Several factors contributed to the regime’s longevity, including the continuation of Soviet military and economic assistance, the mistakes made by some of the mujahideen (the Afghan forces that had fought against the Soviet occupation) as well as their Pakistani supporters, divisions among the various mujahideen groups, and the Najibullah regime’s successful exploitation of these problems.
After the downfall of Gorbachev and of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991, though, Moscow’s assistance to Najibullah ended.
Without this assistance, Najibullah was unable to continue effectively exploiting the weaknesses of his adversaries. Instead, they were able to exploit his, and so his regime fell. This paper will examine how Moscow’s actions helped Najibullah survive but then contributed to his downfall, as well as how Moscow’s actions affected the other factors influencing the fortunes of the Afghan Marxist regime.
Russians in Afghanistan.
1989-91: Soviet Support for Kabul Continues
Although the Soviet troop presence in Afghanistan ended in February 1989, large-scale Soviet military and economic assistance to its Marxist protégés there continued.
As Soviet troops withdrew, they left behind literally all their matériel except for the vehicles needed to transport them back over the border. In addition, as Soviet forces withdrew from Eastern Europe following the downfall of communist regimes there in late 1989, some of this weaponry was transferred to Afghanistan.
From early 1989 to late 1991, Soviet assistance to Kabul reportedly amounted to $300 million per month. Perhaps this is not a large figure by today’s standards, but it was a much greater amount than the mujahideen were receiving after the Soviet withdrawal, and was a considerable financial burden on the economically beleaguered USSR.
Weaponry that Moscow supplied to Kabul included MiG- 27 fighter jets (the Afghan Marxist regime had an air force with some 200 aircraft plus helicopters). In addition, as Zalmay Khalilzad (whom President George W. Bush appointed as special presidential envoy for Afghanistan and then U.S. ambassador to Kabul) noted in 1991,
Moscow has provided more than thirteen hundred Scud-B missiles, hundreds of shorter range Frogs, several hundred tanks, and sixteen hundred five-ton trucks. To keep Kabul supplied, the Soviets launched the biggest air supply effort in its history, sending some twenty-five or more IL-76 transport planes to Kabul each day for much of 1989 (Khalilzad 1991, 82-83).
Indeed, all this was reportedly more than the Marxist regime could effectively use. To help them, though, Moscow left behind about 300 advisers, some of whom reportedly participated in the firing of the Scud missiles at mujahideen targets. (In addition to a regular army of 55,000 men, the Kabul regime also had the support of a 10,000-strong presidential guard and various militias, including an especially effective one raised and led by the ethnic Uzbek leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum.)
When the Soviets withdrew, much of the anti-foreign-presence motivation for many Afghans to fight with the mujahideen disappeared.
A mujahideen group.
Indeed, some mujahideen groups themselves appeared tainted for being so very close to Pakistan. Soviet assistance also allowed Kabul to effectively compete with Pakistan and the various mujahideen groups based there in paying off local commanders and tribal leaders inside Afghanistan.
While Pakistan tied its support to various mujahideen groups not only to whether or not they fought against Kabul but whether they did so in the manner specified by the ISI, Kabul gave support to various groups just in exchange for not fighting against it. As Khalilzad noted at the time, “Najib’s offer is more attractive than ISI’s; while ISI wants it clients to fight and risk their lives, Najib is willing to pay if the commanders agree not to fight” (Khalilzad 1991, 81).
Russians in Afghanistan.
Further, the groups Pakistan supported were not always effective. In March 1989, some 15,000 Pakistani-backed mujahideen forces attacked the town of Jalalabad. Their unwillingness to accept prisoners, though, meant that the defending government forces had strong motivation to fight on. Although the mujahideen laid siege to the town, the Kabul government was able to resupply and reinforce its garrison by air, launch a counterattack, and break the siege by mid-May 1989. This was a major humiliation for Pakistan and its allies.
In addition to military assistance, though, Moscow provided Kabul with key economic assistance. As mujahideen forces approached Kabul and interrupted the supply of food and other consumer goods into the city, the Soviets airlifted these commodities to the Afghan capital.
At Moscow’s urging, the Kabul regime attempted to broaden the basis of its support by downplaying its Marxist nature, appointing non-Marxists to visible positions and trying to appeal to nationalism.
According to contemporary accounts, though, these efforts were not particularly successful, as the Marxist regime — especially President Najibullah — was extremely unpopular with the Afghan population. Indeed, while outwardly broadening the base of the regime, it appears that Najibullah actually narrowed it by increasing reliance on his hard-core supporters.
But while Najibullah and his regime lacked popular support, the mujahideen themselves frequently provided Afghans with strong incentive either to support the Marxist regime or to see it as the lesser of two evils. The mujahideen’s efforts to impose an economic blockade on Kabul as well as their periodically shelling it did nothing to endear them to the citizens of the capital.
Even worse, when the mujahideen captured the town of Khost in March 1991, they not only looted it but killed all the government forces they had captured instead of holding them prisoner. This action not only created fear in other towns; it also made clear to irresolute government forces that defecting to the mujahideen was probably not an option for them.
A mujahideen group.
Mujahideen groups also fought among themselves, and this was something that the Marxist government was able to exploit. As was noted in the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Strategic Survey 1989-1990,
…by early 1990, although the mujahideen continued to control the bulk of the countryside, most of them had in effect ceased being mujahideen, in the sense that they were no longer fighting against the central government, but were instead attempting to work out compromises with Kabul which would ensure their local power, particularly against their former fellow comrades in arms.
Most local commanders had reverted to the traditional relationship between local powers and a weak central state that has shaped Afghan history since the eighteenth century.
The central state is seen less as an enemy than as a referee which can help to promote the interests of the local group.
This development was expected to play a decisive role after the collapse of the Najibullah regime, not before.
That it has come into play so soon is a result of the unexpected adroitness of the regime, aided by the ineffectiveness of US-Pakistan policies (IISS 1990, 160).
At the time, Khalilzad seemed to suggest that the Afghan Marxist regime might even come out on top in the ongoing conflict, when he noted that the Kabul regime “…is likely to increase its efforts to reach out to make deals with commanders and the supporters of the former king at the expense of the majority of the Peshawar-based leadership. Should it succeed, it can reduce the fighting in the country” (Khalilzad 1991, 84).
1992: Russian Support Ends
But, of course, the Afghan Marxist regime did fall in April 1992. Once again, Russian actions appear to have played a key role in bringing this about.
Shortly after the failed August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow and under very different political circumstances, Moscow and Washington agreed to stop aiding their respective Afghan allies as of January 1, 1992.
Not only did Moscow end its arms supply to Kabul, but it also stopped providing it with food and fuel. By contrast, although Pakistan had agreed to stop aiding the mujahideen, Saudi aid to them via Pakistan continued.
Shortly after this in February 1992, Najibullah (a Pushtun) apparently tried to bolster his authority over the Uzbek militia chieftain Dostum by appointing a fellow Pushtun as a commander in the northwestern Uzbek heartland.
But if this was his intention, it backfired in April 1992, when Dostum defected from the government and joined forces with long-time anti-Soviet Tajik mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (whose relationship with both Pakistan and the Pushtun mujahideen groups it supported was adversarial). Non-Pushtun forces from the north and Pushtun forces from the south then rushed to capture Kabul, with the Marxist regime splitting along ethnic lines and either joining forces or making deals with their ethnic kin.
Najibullah resigned and sought sanctuary inside the UN compound in Kabul after his attempt to reach the airport was blocked (by his erstwhile ally Dostum, according to some).
The Islamic State of Afghanistan was declared, but the mujahideen remained divided.
After a short, sharp battle for control of Kabul, the Dostum-Massoud alliance prevailed over their Pushtun opponents, for the time being. Russia appeared to play no role in these events.
Conclusions from the Russian Experience
Six observations can be made about the events described here:
First, even after the withdrawal of Soviet forces was completed in February 1989, Soviet military and economic assistance enabled an unpopular regime to remain in power in Afghanistan — at least, in the major population centers — for over three years.
Second, despite continuing to receive significant aid from Pakistan and other nations, the mujahideen were unable to overthrow the Afghan Marxist regime so long as that regime was receiving significant aid from the Soviet Union.
Third, opposition to the Afghan Marxist regime appeared to decline after Soviet troops withdrew. Further, while they had not performed effectively during the period of Soviet occupation, the effectiveness of Afghan government forces increased significantly after the Soviet withdrawal.
Fourth, after Soviet assistance to Kabul ended at the beginning of 1992, the Afghan Marxist regime’s strength declined rapidly.
Fifth, the collapse of the regime in April 1992, though, was not due just (or perhaps even mainly) to the actions of the Pakistani-backed Pushtun mujahideen. Indeed, the immediate downfall of the regime was precipitated by the defection of the previously pro-regime Uzbek militia leader, Dostum, to the side of the non-Pushtun opposition to the regime.
Sixth, as the collapse of the regime approached, the most salient division in Afghanistan was not Marxist vs. Islamist, but Pushtun vs. non-Pushtun.
History, of course, is not destined to repeat itself. These six observations from the 1989-92 period, however, may have salience for the present as well as the short- and medium-term future. They suggest the following:
First, even after the withdrawal of ISAF forces is completed by the end of 2014, American and allied military and economic assistance to the current less-than-popular Karzai government may enable it to remain in power in the major population centers.
Second, the Taliban are not destined to return to power, despite the likelihood that they will continue to receive Pakistani assistance so long as the Kabul government continues to receive significant aid from America and its coalition partners.
Third, opposition to the Karzai government may actually decline after the American and coalition withdrawal. Once they are responsible for their own survival, the effectiveness of Afghan government forces may quickly increase.
Fourth, if American and allied support for it ends, the Kabul government’s strength is highly likely to decline rapidly.
Fifth, under these circumstances, ethnic divisions within the Kabul government leadership are likely to become exacerbated. It is highly likely that the non-Pushtun officer corps would seek to oust the Pushtun president, Hamid Karzai, and his entourage.
Sixth, even if (indeed, especially if) the Taliban manage to seize control of Kabul once again, the most salient division within Afghanistan is once again likely to be Pushtun vs. non-Pushtun.
Well that was pretty dry and scholarly…
And yeah. That’s what it was.
Real events are colorful, painful, full of joy and sadness. They are visceral. Here’s a far better explanation…
When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan in December 1979, it set the stage for a decade-long quagmire, similar to the American War in Vietnam.
By William Stroock
In late 1979, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was torn apart by a civil war pitting the weak Communist government of Hafizullah Amin against several moderate and fundamentalist Muslim rebel armies.
The war had been brought about by Amin’s incompetence and corruption, his vicious program of political repression, the massacre of entire village populations, and a ham-handed agrarian “reform” program that disenfranchised tribal leaders.
He followed the very exactly same mistakes as the Americans and the South Vietnamese did back in the 1960's.
Fearing that Amin would be defeated and replaced by a government of Muslim fundamentalists or—even worse—pro-American intellectuals, the Soviet Union launched an invasion on Christmas Eve aimed at removing Amin and replacing him with a more reliable strongman.
To pave the way for the invasion, Soviet advisers with the Afghan Army tricked their clients into incapacitating themselves.
In one case, the Soviets told an Afghan armored unit that new tanks were about to be delivered but that, due to shortages, the gas in the old tanks would have to be siphoned out. The Afghans obligingly siphoned gas out of their tanks, rendering them useless.
In another instance, Soviet advisers told an Afghan unit to turn over all their ammunition for inspection, something that likewise was done without question.
Sneaky. Very sneaky.
A Former Prime Minister Declares Himself President
By the time the first Soviet transport planes landed at Kabul airport carrying elements of the 103rd Guards Airborne Division, the Afghan Army was largely incapable of fighting back.
On December 27, the Soviet 5th Motorized Rifle Division rolled across the borders toward Herat, Shindahd, and Kandahar, while the 108th Motorized Rifle Division drove on Kabul.
The 201st Motorized Rifle Division advanced toward Kunduz.
That same day, Soviet troops captured the Kabul radio station and attacked the presidential palace, killing Amin.
December 27, 2019
By Frud Bezhan
KABUL — Afghanistan’s communist President Hafizullah Amin was lying unconscious in his bed.
A KGB agent who had infiltrated Amin’s staff as a cook had poisoned the president and his ministers during lunch at the Tajbeg presidential palace in Kabul.
It was December 27, 1979.
Two Soviet doctors, unaware of the KGB plot, worked desperately to revive Amin at the palace. His ministers were rushed to a military hospital.
“The doctors put tubes through his nose and mouth to pump his stomach,” Faqir Mohammad Faqir, the interior minister, who had rushed to the palace, tells RFE/RL. “When his stomach was cleaned out, the doctors took him to the bathroom. For 30 minutes they poured cold water over him.”
After four long hours, Amin gradually regained consciousness. Still groggy, he muttered to Faqir, one of his most trusted men, to go to the nearby Defense Ministry building.
A few hours later, the Afghan president was lying in bed in his underpants when scores of KGB special forces stormed the presidential palace, killing Amin and his family members amid fierce clashes. Soviet forces also seized key government buildings and military installations in Kabul in a coordinated attack.
Moscow considered Amin, who had studied in the United States, an unpredictable ally. Some in the Kremlin suspected he had attempted to forge links with Washington. Meanwhile, his penchant for using brutal methods to crush his rivals fueled growing opposition to communist rule in Afghanistan.
Moscow installed Babrak Karmal, a rival communist leader, as president the next day. Thousands of Soviet troops and hundreds of planes and tanks crossed into Afghanistan in the following days.
The invasion was the start of a devastating, decade-long Soviet occupation that would set Afghanistan on a path for decades of conflict.
“The Soviet invasion was the worst day for Afghans,” says the 86-year-old Faqir as he trudges through the empty halls of the Tajbeg Palace, which is now being reconstructed. “It was the darkest day,” he adds. “The most miserable day for Afghans. The misery that started that day continues until today.”
‘So Much Firing’
When Faqir arrived at the Defense Ministry, army chief Yaqub Khan was at a meeting with several Soviet military advisers in his office.
After greeting the guests, Faqir turned to sit down on a couch, when there was a burst of gunfire. He dashed to an adjacent room to take cover.
“After a few moments, Yaqub Khan entered the room and fell on the bed,” Faqir says. “He had been shot twice and seriously wounded.”
Minutes later, Khan died.
Drenched in Khan’s blood, Faqir grabbed his handgun and aimed it at the door.
“There was so much firing that you couldn’t hear anything,” Faqir says, retelling the story as he slowly trudges through the National Museum, which back then housed the Defense Ministry. “The [Soviets] were throwing hand grenades, firing rockets, and using Kalashnikovs.”
‘They Look Like Russians’
Khan’s secretary, Dawlat Waziri, was sitting at his desk at the Defense Ministry building when the shooting erupted.
“I got up, grabbed my Kalashnikov, and I opened the window,” says Waziri, who was then 26 years old. “I saw that there was gunfire coming from down there, so I fired a few rounds.”
Waziri says the attackers were wearing “yellow uniforms and woolen hats.” “I thought to myself, ‘They look like Russians,'” he says.
He then stormed into Khan’s office where, he says, he saw a Soviet translator shoot his boss.
Waziri rushed out the door and into the hallway. He spotted a Soviet soldier and dashed to take cover. “Before I could fire, he fired at me,” he says. “A bullet struck my wrist. I dropped my Kalashnikov. Then another bullet struck me in the stomach and one in my right leg.”
Waziri stumbled into a nearby room. A grenade landed nearby, smashing the door and setting it on fire.
He was cornered.
“I thought for a second, ‘Why did the Russians fire at me?'” Waziri recalls. “Just then, they were about to throw a second grenade. So, I opened the window and jumped out.”
Waziri broke his legs and shattered his hip in the jump from the second floor.
He passed out.
‘Shots Were Fired’
Before the attack, hundreds of Soviet paratroopers — members of the Soviet Army’s Muslim Battalion — and KGB special forces had surrounded the palace, taking cover in the heavy snow.
The KGB forces stormed the palace while the Soviet troops provided a ring of security around the building.
“Our job was to neutralize any reinforcements that came to Amin’s aid,” Vytas Luksys, a former Soviet paratrooper from Lithuania, tells RFE/RL.
“It was dark,” recalls Luksys in the capital, Vilnius. “There wasn’t much time to think about what was happening where. We had to focus on carrying out our orders. We heard that shots were fired, but we couldn’t pay much attention to it.”
The KGB special forces, most of them in sportswear or plainclothes, went floor to floor battling the Presidential Guard and members of Amin’s family.
No reinforcements came to Amin’s help, much to Luksys’s relief. “I don’t know how I would have fared,” he says. “We had very little experience with night-vision devices, guns, and machine guns.”
Within hours, the battle was over. Over 200 Afghans were killed and over 1,000 surrendered. Declassified KGB files said over 100 Soviet personnel were also killed in the fierce clashes.
Amin is believed to have died of gunshot wounds.
All his male relatives at the Tajbeg Palace were either killed in the clashes or executed. His wife, daughter, and grandchildren were sent to prison.
‘It Was Better To Die’
Faqir had been holed up inside one of Khan’s personal rooms for seven hours when he heard a colleague’s voice. “He said, ‘If anyone is in the room he should put down his weapon and come out,'” he says. “He was my friend, so I decided to come out.”
When Faqir came out he was handcuffed by Soviet troops. “That was when I realized that the Soviets had attacked us,” he says. “I shouldn’t have left the room. I didn’t want to surrender. It would have been better to die.”
Soviet forces whisked Faqir away to their military headquarters. He was sentenced to death and transferred to Pul-e Charkhi, the notorious prison outside Kabul where Amin was alleged to have sent thousands to their deaths.
Waziri, meanwhile, woke up in an operating room in the hospital the day after the invasion.
“I was piled up along with the dead bodies,” Waziri says. “When they realized I was still alive, they took me to the operating room in the hospital.” He would be in the hospital for 13 months recovering from his wounds.
Afterward, Waziri served as an officer in the Soviet-backed Afghan army.
Luksys visited the Tajbeg Palace the next morning to find scenes of destruction. “It was a big beautiful palace that had been turned into a mess,” he says. “There were beautiful carpets. Furniture, tables, intricate stucco, very pretty chandeliers.”
“There was blood, but no dead bodies by that time,” Luksys recalls.
After the storming of the palace, Soviet forces wrapped the bodies of Amin and his family members in carpets and buried them in unmarked graves.
Their bodies have never been found.
‘Biggest Betrayal’
The element of surprise was key to the Soviet Union’s lightning seizure of Kabul.
The Soviet decision to topple Amin was a shock, including to the Kabul regime, which had forged close ties with Moscow since communists seized power after a bloody coup in 1978.
“The Soviets committed the biggest betrayal,” Faqir says. “We had a brotherly relationship. We had no idea that the Russians would attack us.”
Faqir was released from prison in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, having served 10 years and three months.
Luksys served two years in the Soviet Army before leaving in 1981.
Military Quagmire
The events of December 27, 1979 would have a lasting effect, unleashing a four-decade war that has yet to end.
The Soviet Army soon got bogged down in a costly military quagmire against the mujahedin, the U.S.-backed Islamist rebels.
The Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan in 1989 after an estimated 2 million Afghans and at least 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed. Millions of other Afghans were displaced, living mainly as refugees in Pakistan and Iran.
The mujahedin toppled the communist regime from power in 1992. But within months, a devastating civil war erupted among the warring mujahedin factions, paving the way for the rise of the Taliban.
By then, the Soviet Union no longer existed.
In a radio address broadcast from the Soviet Union, former prime minister Babrak Karmal, who had been handpicked by Soviet authorities, declared himself president.
Russian map of attack.
The DRA army had an impressive strength on paper, numbering 13 infantry divisions and 22 independent brigades.
There were also 40 separate regiments.
This force was composed of at least 70 percent conscripts, including thousands of men who had been rounded up by government press-gangs and forced to serve in the army.
What few volunteers there were usually became junior and noncommissioned officers. Despite the press gangs and financial incentives to volunteer, DRA army units were badly under strength, sometimes by as much as 40 percent.
The army was decimated by desertions and riddled with mujahideen spies. Supplementing the army was the KHAD, or secret police, numbering 100,000 men.
Hope for Stabilizing the Region Was Failing
Soviet planners had hoped that the invasion and coup would stabilize the situation enough for the DRA army to take control.
In fact, their strong-armed tactics devastated morale in the Afghan Army and led to further desertions and defections.
Even worse, enraged mujahideen took to the field and engaged Soviet forces in open battle outside Kandahar, in Jalalabad, and along the Salang highway.
After the Soviets’ massive firepower overwhelmed them, the mujahideen retreated into the mountains along the Afghan border and switched to guerrilla-style tactics.
The Soviets followed.
The Red Army deliberately waged war on Afghan civilians and drove them over the border into Pakistan. By doing so, they hoped to deny the mujahideen local support and a native population to hide among.
In 1980, the Soviets mounted a large-scale offensive into the Kunar Valley that resulted in the expulsion of nearly all of the valley’s 150,000 residents.
A similar offensive was undertaken to the south in the Sultani Valley. Supporting these Soviet attacks were clearing operations south of Kabul and around Kandahar that destroyed dozens of villages. Similar operations were launched throughout the country in 1981, but with little long-term success.
Guerrilla Attacks and Civilian Casualties
In the face of the Soviet onslaught, mujahideen forces retreated into the mountains or melted into a population made friendly by repeated Soviet and Afghan Army atrocities.
When the mujahideen did come out and fight, they subjected Soviet forces to a constant stream of guerrilla attacks.
DRA troops were no match for the mujahideen. In daring assaults in April and September of 1981, the mujahideen temporarily seized Kandahar from DRA forces and left only after the Soviet Air Force bombed them.
Compounding anti-Soviet sentiment brought about by the Red Army’s complete disregard for Afghan civilian casualties was the brutality of the common Soviet soldiers, who regularly took out their frustration on the Afghan populace.
An Afghan farmer passing through a Soviet roadblock could count upon his valuables being stolen and his wife being raped. Mounted Soviet troops seemed to take great joy in shooting at Afghans along the road. Soviet advisers, officers, and NCOs treated their Afghan proxies with contempt.
The frustration of the Soviet fighting man was easy to understand.
Soviet soldiers were conscripts who often received only three weeks of basic training before being sent to savage Afghanistan.
Once there, a new recruit was bullied by veteran soldiers and brutal NCOs. Soldiers were badly paid, ill fed and clothed, and lived in tents.
Many soldiers found relief from their situation in the form of the opium or locally produced alcohol. Hungry conscripts sometimes traded their weapons to the Afghans for food. Fevers and infections caused by unsanitary camp conditions decimated thousands of Soviet recruits.
Hills Swarming With Mujahideen
Despite the Soviets’ various campaigns of annihilation, the hills outside the major Afghan cities were swarming with mujahideen.
Soviet army units were confined to their bases and traveled only on the main roads.
Traveling at night in anything other than a large convoy was suicidal.
The Soviets, like their American counterparts in Vietnam, were heavily reliant on helicopters for movement through the hostile countryside. Also mirroring the American approach in Southeast Asia, the Soviets used only a bare fraction of their military might, refusing to delegate more men and material than were absolutely necessary.
They even went so far as to call the 40th Army in Afghanistan a “limited contingent of forces.”
By 1981, the mujahideen numbered as many as 150,000 fighters organized into seven main Sunni Islam parties.
Three Islamic fundamentalist organizations had roots reaching back to the 1960s, and a fourth group formed in 1982 to serve as an umbrella organization and raise money for the cause throughout the Islamic world. There were also three “moderate” parties.
These were formed after the 1978 coup, and although not as radical as the other four groups, they were still Muslim organizations. There were also three smaller Shiite groups with ties to Iran.
Excellent Fighters, but Poor Soldiers
The average mujahideen fighter was an illiterate farmer or herder. Although they were excellent fighters, mujahideen tended to be poor soldiers.
They disliked field craft, were reluctant to crawl even when under fire, and were often unwilling to conduct sabotage missions, as these were not seen as glorious and honorable.
They were terrified of Soviet land mines, which often maimed rather than killed—the former being considered a fate worse than death.
Mujahideen saw firearms as a status symbol, and most were excellent shots. They took great pride in their centuries of tribal warfare and raiding, and consequently they believed that they had little to learn from Pakistani and Western advisers about how to fight a modern superpower.
In 1982, the closest thing the mujahideen had to a central command was the Afghan Bureau of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.
Led by General Mohammed Yousaf, the Afghan Bureau operated numerous training camps in the border area, provided advisers from the Pakistani Army, and funneled supplies to the mujahideen.
These were provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency, which bought weapons from sellers all over the world, including China, Egypt, and, ironically, Israel, which sold equipment it had captured during the various Arab-Israeli wars.
The Afghan Bureau also tried to coordinate mujahideen attacks. This inevitably led to conflicts.
Afghan leaders were interested in disrupting Soviet supply lines and sabotaging infrastructure, while mujahideen commanders wanted to engage Soviet troops in open combat.
Still, some highly valuable and successful attacks were carried out. In one bold raid, mujahideen fighters loyal to Ahmad Shah Massoud fought their way onto Bagram Air Base, attacked Soviet barracks packed with sleeping troops, and hit the airstrip, destroying 23 aircraft.
They then retreated to their bases in the nearby Panjshir Valley.
Ahmad Shah Massoud
In the aftermath of the airport raid, the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive against the Panjshir Valley designed to destroy mujahideen forces and install permanent DRA army garrisons there.
The Panjshir Valley juts out from the Hindu Kush, pointing like a dagger at Kabul and Bagram Air Base.
The Salang highway, the road over which 90 percent of the Soviets’ supplies were carried, went right past the valley entrance.
Running through the valley is the Panjshir River. The banks were dotted with villages, farms, and vineyards. Dozens of canyons were home to small, isolated villages. At the beginning of the war, some 100,000 people of Tadjik origin resided there.
The valley was also home to the mujahideen’s most feared commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Born in 1953 in Herat, Massoud was part of Afghanistan’s minuscule educated class, having attended the French-run Lycee Istaqlal and the Russian Polytechnique Institute (both located in Kabul) where he studied engineering.
Massoud was an accomplished athlete, voracious reader, and spoke French, Pashto, and Dari.
During his time in Kabul, he became politically active, joining the Jamiat-e Islami party.
When Mohammad Daoud seized power in 1974, Massoud fled to Pakistan, where he underwent military training and studied the art of war, particularly the campaigns of Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap.
He returned to Afghanistan in 1978 and began operations in the Panjshir Valley, quickly gaining a cadre of tough, loyal followers who waged a guerrilla war against DRA forces.By 1980, Massoud controlled the entire valley.
The Ambitious “Panjshir V”
Massoud’s rebel army was a pan-Afghan force numbering more than 3,000 Tadjiks, Pashtuns, Turkmen, and Uzbek fighters.
He divided the valley into 25 field commands, each defended by a small unit called a sabbet.
These were supplemented by a number of moutariks, or mobile companies. Each moutarik numbered about 75 men and was subdivided into platoons of three.
Moutarik fighters received extra rations and a welfare benefit for their families back home. Each unit had in its arsenal three machine guns, three RPG-7 grenade launchers, one mortar, and a ZPU-2 antiaircraft gun.
Panjshir V, as the Soviet operation was called, was ambitious.
At the valley entrance, the Soviets deployed the 103rd Guards Airborne Division, the 66th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, one regiment from the 108th Division, one regiment from 201st Division, the 345th Parachute regiment, and elements of the 866th and 181st Separate Motorized Rifle Regiments.
There were also significant DRA forces, four infantry regiments, and parts of the 37th Commando Brigade.
Under the Soviet plan, heliborne troops from the 103rd Guards Airborne Division would seize villages and hilltops throughout the valley and pin down mujahideen fighters.
At the same time, Soviet/Afghan motorized forces would advance along both banks of the Panjshir River. In this way, the Soviets hoped to bring Massoud’s army to battle and destroy it in detail.
To mislead Massoud as to the actual target, a diversionary attack would be launched against the Ghorband district to the north.
The Panjshir V campaign began on May 15, 1982. The diversionary attack against Ghorband succeeded in fooling Massoud, who sent significant reinforcements to the Ghorband district in Parwan Province.
The next night, several Soviet reconnaissance companies advanced to the valley’s entrance; lead elements of 108th Division advanced a short way into the valley.
On the morning of May 17, the Soviets unleashed a massive aerial and artillery strike up and down the Panjshir Valley.
Then Soviet heliborne troops landed at key high points.
Even though Massoud was surprised by the move, his forces, armed with numerous ZPU-2 antiaircraft guns, managed to shoot down two helicopters and damage several others.
There was also severe fighting for control of the landing zones, but the Soviets had put dozens of gunships in the air, and the mujahideen were outgunned and had to withdraw.
In all, the six Soviet battalions were inserted.
In the meantime, elements of the 108th Division slowly advanced up the valley along a battalion-wide front.
The vanguard encountered a never-ending stream of man-made obstacles and land mines that had to be cleared by engineers and sappers deployed up front.
The mujahideen engaged the lead forces, sparking fierce and lopsided clashes as Soviet firepower and close air support were brought to bear.
There were dozens of small engagements as well, as Soviet forces cleared out the numerous canyons running out from the valley. In contrast to the pounding they were giving Soviet troops, the mujahideen left DRA troops largely alone.
This encouraged defections, so many that the Soviets had to pull several DRA units out of the valley.
In an effort to trap mujahideen forces engaging elements of the 108th Division on the second day of the advance, one Soviet and one Afghan battalion landed at the village of Mata, halfway up the valley.
Mujahideen forces there were quickly overcome, allowing the combined Soviet/DRA force to occupy the heights above the village.
The next day, a similar force landed at Astana, and on the 22nd two Soviet and two Afghan battalions landed at Evim, 60 miles inside the valley at an important crossroad through which the mujahideen received supplies and reinforcements.
The Evim operation was the scene of particularly heavy fighting as Massoud did not want a large enemy force on the ground so far up the valley. After sundown, several moutariksconverged on the landing zone and launched a determined assault on Soviet/DRA forces there.
The assaults were repelled with heavy losses.
Although impressive on paper, the landings did not prevent mujahideen forces from continuing to move at will throughout the valley. They knew the terrain too well and could move at night.
Nor did the heliborne insertions keep the mujahideen from withdrawing before a Soviet advance.
Massoud’s moutarikshad ample warning, as any Soviet attack was preceded by an artillery barrage lasting up to half an hour.
After the barrage, the moutarikswould pull back to a prepared position farther up the valley while a small rear guard sniped at the advancing column. Such tactics resulted in a steady trickle of Soviet casualties and vehicle losses and ensured that the moutarikssurvived to repeat the process.
The battle for Evim marked the end of Panjshir V. On May 25, Soviet forces began a gradual withdrawal to Bagram, completing it three days later.
Control of the valley was handed over to DRA units, but their bases were gradually overrun by the mujahideen. The Soviets returned to the valley in September and, after another impressive show of force, once again left DRA forces in control.
By the end of the year, however, Massoud’s forces regained effective control of the valley. In all, Panjshir V cost the Soviets 2,000 casualties, 17 tanks, and a dozen aircraft. DRA losses totaled 1,200, including numerous defectors. The mujahideen lost 180 fighters.
The civilian toll was much greater.
In 1983, Massoud signed a truce with the Soviets. By agreeing to a cease-fire, Massoud allowed his forces a chance to rest and re-arm. Other mujahideen commanders were furious, since the unilateral truce freed up Soviet forces for operations against them.
The Soviets returned to the Panjshir Valley in 1984. Informers in Kabul tipped the ISI, who informed Massoud and sent emergency supplies to him.
The Soviet offensive began on April 20 with a massive high-altitude bombardment by TU-16 bombers.
This was supported by SU-24 medium bombers that struck individual targets. After the air strikes, which did little more than bounce the rubble and announce the coming attack, the 108th Motor Rifle Division, along with the 8th and 20th Afghan Infantry Divisions, moved into the valley.
They advanced in typical Soviet fashion, with a long artillery barrage preceding every movement.
As the divisions made their way up the valley, airborne battalions landed behind villages and other suspected mujahideen strongpoints. The raids netted few prisoners—Massoud’s fighters simply avoided the valley floor and sniped at the ponderous Soviet column from surrounding hilltops.
Under such conditions, it took the 108th MRD eight days to advance 50 miles to the village of Khenj.
In the second part of the operation, several Soviet airborne battalions helicoptered into the valley’s side canyons in an attempt to cut off the mujahideen line of retreat.
In one instance, a Soviet battalion landed at the village of Dash-i-Ravat, 13 miles beyond the main advance. On a hilltop deep inside mujahideen territory, the battalion was badly exposed. Several moutariks converged on the landing area and inflicted heavy casualties on the isolated paratroopers.
By May 7, the Soviets felt that they had accomplished all of their objectives and gradually began withdrawing, again leaving DRA garrisons at various spots along the valley. These were highly vulnerable, and troops had to be resupplied by air.
In June 1985, Massoud’s forces attacked the DRA base at Peshghor. In a dawn attack, they penetrated the base’s minefield and stormed the defenses under cover of a rocket and mortar barrage. Afghan resistance collapsed. Massoud captured more than 400 prisoners, including five DRA colonels from Kabul.
When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union in 1986, he announced plans for a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he famously called “a bleeding wound.” Such a withdrawal required the DRA army to take the lead against the mujahideen.
The Ministry of Defense decided to launch an operation aimed at destroying the massive mujahideen facility at Zhawar Kili. Although planned by the Soviets, the assault would be a largely DRA operation, with the 7th, 8th, 14th, and 25th Infantry Divisions, the 38th Commando Brigade, and the Soviet 666th Air Assault Regiment in support. The attack was commanded by Afghan General Mohammed Delavar.
Zhawar was the center of mujahideen activity in Paktika Province; through it flowed 20 percent of the mujahideen supplies.
It was the site of an 11-cave storage facility housing a barracks, hospital, mosque, and electrical power plant. Zhawar fell under the purview of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a mujahideen commander loyal to the fundamentalist Hezb-Islami party.
Haqqani was regarded as a competent and brave leader, a favorite of the ISI and the United States.
As such, he received millions of dollars in military aid, including the much-vaunted Stinger missiles. Haqqani had stationed at Zhawar a permanent regiment of 500 fighters supported by nine ZSU-1 and ZSU-2 antiaircraft guns, a dozen M-12 multiple rocket launchers and two T-55 tanks.
Stationed north and east of Zhawar was a quartet of mujahideen units belonging to other parties. The complex lay south of Khost at the end of a canyon, a few miles from the Pakistani border.
The main route to Zhawar was through the Manay Kandow Pass, whose entrance was dominated by the mountainous Dharwi Ghar.
Atop Dhawri Ghar was a cave protected by a large overhang.
The DRA assault began on April 2. After a massive artillery barrage, a half dozen MI-8 helicopters landed a battalion of the 38th Commando Brigade east of Zhawar, unknowingly inside Pakistan.
The battalion quickly came under heavy attack by the mujahideen, and Delavar decided to insert the rest of the brigade into the fight.
Dozens of helicopters flew over the battlefield and landed Afghan commands on the heights east of Zhawar.
The mujahideen shot down three helicopters and destroyed several more on the ground. Haqqani’s fighters attacked the landing zones, over-running four. He also brought in reinforcements from Pakistan.
The combined force enveloped and pounded the trapped commandos, killing dozens and capturing nearly 600.
In the meantime, Soviet bombers pounded the cave complexes, collapsing the entrances to a pair and trapping more than 150 mujahideen, including Haqqani who, although badly wounded, managed to escape.
For three days DRA forces, the 7th Infantry Division in the west and the 8th Infantry Division in the east, tried and failed to blast their way through the mujahideen positions.
After suffering heavy casualties and exhausting their ammunition, the two divisions pulled back. In their place, the 14th and 25th Infantry Divisions moved up and attacked mujahideen fighters holding Manay Kandow Pass.
This attack, too, went nowhere as mujahideen inside the caves were invulnerable to air and artillery strikes.
After 10 days of fruitless efforts, Delavar called off the attack.
While artillery and aircraft pounded the region, the DRA resupplied and reinforced its exhausted units. Delavar was sacked.
The offensive was restarted on April 17 with a two-pronged assault; the 25th Infantry Division advanced on the east while the 14th Infantry Division moved on the west.
Like its predecessor, the 25th Infantry Division encountered heavy resistance. DRA commanders finally decided to forgo the standard massive artillery preparation in favor of a snap attack that took the mujahideen by surprise and swept them from the mountain. DRA forces pushed out to the east and outflanked the remaining mujahideen facing them. Haqqani was wounded again, and rumors that he had been killed demoralized the mujahideen.
With no one to rally the mujahideen forces, Zhawar fell later that day. DRA troops and Soviet advisers rigged the complex with explosives and destroyed the extensive stores.
That night, the head of the Hezb-Islami party, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, launched a counterattack, but patrols approaching Zhawar found the base abandoned. The battle had cost the mujahideen 100 dead, as well as the vast stores at Zhawar.
The DRA lost 1,500 dead or wounded, 500 prisoners, and 13 aircraft.
The base at Zhawar was back in mujahideen hands 48 hours after the DRA abandoned it.
By the beginning of 1989, the situation in Afghanistan had changed radically. The influx of American-supplied Stinger missiles had given the mujahideen a powerful weapon with which to counter Soviet/Afghan airpower.
In Pakistan, President Zia ul-Haq and the head of the ISI had been killed in a plane crash.
That February, the last Soviet forces withdrew from the country.
The seven mujahideen parties formed an interim government in waiting. The alliance was eager to go on the offensive; its leadership felt that a large show of force would bring about the final collapse of the Communist regime.
Their target was Jalalabad, at the foot of the Hindu Kush. Connecting it to the Khyber Pass to the east and Kabul 33 miles to the west, Highway 1 ran right through the city. A few miles east was the Kunar River; the Samarkel Ridge commanded the highway.
By taking the city, the mujahideen alliance hoped to demoralize the DRA and grab a swath of the country that they would declare “Free Afghanistan.” From there, they planned to go for the jugular and attack Kabul. The operation was carried out with the full approval of the new head of the ISI, General Hamid Gul. The DRA had plenty of time to prepare for the attack.
Stationed in Jalalabad were the 11th Infantry Division and the 1st Border Brigade. The government had filled the ranks with replacements and stockpiled supplies in the city. The DRA units manned a formidable ring of defenses including concrete bunkers, minefields, and barbed wire.
Some 7,000 mujahideen gathered for the assault, with contributions from all seven of the major parties and an eighth group of well-equipped Arab jihadi led by a rich Saudi calling himself Abu Abdullah.
His real name was Osama bin Laden.
Other important contingents were personally led by Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Like Massoud, Hekmatyar had attended school in Kabul, where he studied engineering.
In the mid-1970s, he founded the Hezb-Islami party, which sought to establish an Islamic caliphate in Afghanistan in the mold of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he greatly admired. Hekmatyar was virulently anti-Soviet, but also anti-American. Seeking to consolidate power, he had also waged war on other mujahideen parties. He was a bitter rival of Massoud.
The campaign began in early March 1989 with a mujahideen assault on Samarkel Ridge. Supported by a massive rocket and mortar barrage, the mujahideen took the ridge after three days of fighting.
The mujahideen then fought their way into the village of Samarkel on the ridge’s western slope. The next target was Jalalabad airfield, which they attacked on March 8.
There, the mujahideen went up against a battalion of crack DRA troops who held their ground in the face of several determined assaults. Advancing behind a line of T-55 tanks captured at Samarkel, the mujahideen finally managed to take the airport, but the DRA counterattacked later that day and retook it.
Four days into the battle for the airport, a battalion of DRA Special Guards was flown in from Kabul. The frontal assaults continued until late March, with the mujahideen suffering more than 1,400 casualties. DRA forces lost 1,000.
Tired of seeing their fighters impaled on the defenses of Jalalabad, mujahideen commanders decided to starve the city into submission. Unfortunately for them, the siege was not airtight.
Some commanders along the highway allowed convoys to slip through in exchange for a portion of the supplies. And since the DRA still held the airport, the Soviets were able to resupply government forces from the air.
Mujahideen commanders also had difficulty coordinating attacks, with many unwilling to make the first move for fear their men would bear the brunt of the fighting. What attacks were carried out were badly exposed to Soviet high-level bombing and Scud missile attacks.
By July, the mujahideen siege had collapsed. On July 6, the DRA launched a counterattack aimed of Samarkel Ridge, which they took two days later. In defeat, the rivalry between Massoud and Hekmatyar slipped into outright war, with the two parties fighting each other throughout the rest of the year.
The Communist regime in Kabul managed to stay in power until 1992, falling only after the Soviet Union itself broke up.
A fractious mujahideen coalition led by the Jamaat-i-Islami failed to bring peace and was ousted by the Taliban in 1996. For the next five years, the Afghan resistance called the Northern Alliance was led by Massoud.
He was assassinated on September 9, 2001—two days before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Haqqani became a minister in the Taliban government and, on September 29 he was appointed commander of Taliban forces.
He fights on today out of Waziristan, having survived several American attempts to kill him. Hekmatyar still leads the Hezb-Islami party, which is closely allied with the exiled Taliban. He too has survived numerous assassination attempts.
Despite losing nearly 15,000 troops in a decade-long incursion, Soviet commanders never grasped the concept that, in order to defeat an insurgency, they first must win the loyalty of the civilian population. Their oafish tactics had the opposite effect.
By forcing millions into refugee camps in Pakistan, they created a limitless pool of angry youth from which the mujahideen could recruit more troops. The war could never have been won so long as Pakistan remained a mujahideen safe haven. American and NATO forces in Afghanistan today confront exactly the same problem, and like their Soviet predecessors two decades ago, they have to date devised no workable solutions.
The ravaged nation remains a bleeding wound in the seemingly endless war on terror.
Lessons for Leaders: What Afghanistan Taught Russian and Soviet Strategists
Thirty years ago this month, Gen. Boris Gromov became the last serviceman of the Soviet 40th Army to cross the Friendship bridge from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan, heralding the end of a Soviet military intervention that had lasted nearly a decade.
That intervention, which began in December 1979 (with 30 military advisors and some guards remaining beyond February 1989), did not only fail to firmly anchor Afghanistan to the so-called socialist camp, as the Soviet Politburo had hoped, but contributed to the demise of the USSR by imposing formidable human, financial, economic, political and reputational costs on the already declining empire; needless to say, it caused numerous casualties and widespread grievances among Afghans as well.
Debates continue to this day about the full array of national-level, organizational-level and personal-level factors that led the Communist Party leadership—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and a handful of other Politburo members—to adopt a resolution on Dec. 12, 1979, authorizing the deployment of a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” to Afghanistan.
However, even with that debate unfinished, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan offers plenty of lessons to explore—some of which can, perhaps, be applied by the U.S. and its allies as Washington leans toward ending its own military campaign in this war-plagued Central Asian country.
The following is a selection of military-political lessons gleaned mostly from the recollections of Soviet strategists who were involved in making and executing the fateful decision to send troops to Afghanistan, as well as from writings by some of post-Soviet Russia’s prominent military analysts.
Where possible, the author made an effort to relay these strategists’ analysis of the failures and successes of the intervention because he felt that such assessments, based on first-hand experience, are not always given their due in English-language literature on the subject.
The lessons listed below, which are discussed in greater detail in subsequent sections of this research paper, are lined up in the order in which they would have come up—starting with the Soviet leadership’s decision to consider sending a large contingent of troops into Afghanistan, moving onto its management of the actual intervention and, finally, onto its decision to withdraw the troops and beyond. All of these lessons are meant for consideration by nations’ military-political leadership.
Lesson 1:
Before making final decisions on issues of fundamental importance, such as military intervention, determine what national interests are at stake, what options exist for advancing or defending those interests and what costs and benefits each of these options would generate, both direct and indirect; and do not let leaders’ personal ambitions impact the ultimate decision.
Lesson 2:
Ensure a sufficiently broad and comprehensive inter-agency process of reviewing potential decisions to use force, factoring in the views of all key stakeholders in general and those to be tasked with implementing the decisions in particular.
Lesson 3:
Examine aspects of a country’s history relevant to your planned undertaking.
Lesson 4:
Once the decision to send troops has been made, formulate the goals of the intervention and communicate them clearly to the agencies involved in implementation; also, shape your messaging to other key stakeholders likely to influence the outcome of the intervention.
Lesson 5:
If you do decide to go in, develop an exit plan in advance.
Lesson 6:
Once in, ensure effective inter-agency coordination and cooperation.
Lesson 7:
Rather than try to mold your local allies in your own image, empower them, encouraging self-reliance, and pay attention to indigenous traditions.
Lesson 8:
You cannot succeed in a military intervention unless the side on whose behalf you intervene is willing to fight for your joint cause.
Lesson 9:
Talk to moderates on the opposite side.
Lesson 10:
When leaving, leave…
Lesson 11:
…but before you leave, secure enforceable guarantees that POWs and MIAs are found and brought home, and give the returning soldiers proper welcome and care.
Lesson 12:
…also before you leave, secure firm and enforceable agreements that would not only meet your own minimum requirements for a negotiated settlement, but also those of your local allies, because the end of an intervention by itself cannot end hostilities.
Lesson 13:
Even after you leave, prevent mission creep.
Lesson 14:
Last but not least: Be willing to learn the lessons.
Only some of these lessons were inferred as the intervention unfolded, while most were drawn years after the withdrawal of the Soviet 40th Army—which made up the bulk of the so-called limited contingent of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, or OKSVA—on Feb. 15, 1989.
Of course, such hindsight could not have changed anything in the intervention.
We should also bear in mind that “where you stand depends on where you sit”: As some of the passages below demonstrate, some of the “lesson learners” tend to cast their own and their comrades-in-arms’ actions in a favorable light while criticizing the conduct of their peers from other agencies.
Despite the occasional bias, these lessons could still prove useful to policymakers faced with the stark dilemmas of a possible military intervention.
In particular, some of the entries at the end of the list could, perhaps, prove instructive for the U.S. leadership as it contemplates whether or how to end its own intervention in Afghanistan.
Finally, those in charge of applying these lessons should keep in mind historian Ernest May’s procedure for ensuring against amateurism in drawing historical analogies, as described by Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson in their Applied History Manifesto: “Put the analogy as the headline on a sheet of paper; draw a straight line down the middle of the page; write ‘similar’ at the top of one column and ‘different’ at the top of the other; and then set to work.
If you are unable to list at least three points of similarity and three of difference, then you should consult a historian.”
And here is yet another group of lessons...
The Lessons (in far greater detail…)
Lesson 1:
Before making final decisions on issues of fundamental importance, such as military intervention, determine what national interests are at stake, what options exist for advancing or defending those interests and what costs and benefits each of these options would generate, both direct and indirect; and do not let leaders’ personal ambitions impact the ultimate decision.
Winston Churchill once famously observed that the key to Soviet decision-making is “national interest.”
If Churchill was right, then anyone with access to transcripts of Politburo meetings from 1979 should expect to find some kind of discussion on the Soviet national interests at stake in Afghanistan, as well as opportunities for advancing these interests with an intervention.
In reality, the author’s review of transcripts of the Soviet leadership’s deliberations on Afghanistan revealed that while Politburo members did discuss some of the Soviet national interests that were at stake, they failed to take stock of potential, direct and indirect, costs and benefits that their country would encounter if they decided to advance those interests by means of a full-fledged military intervention in Afghanistan.
A failure to grasp that the costs of such an intervention would significantly outweigh the benefits led the Soviet leadership to make an erroneous decision on Dec. 12, 1979, in favor of sending troops en masse into Afghanistan. In addition to horrendous human costs on all sides of the conflict, that decision cost the Soviet Union’s stagnating economy dearly through a combination of such factors as Western sanctions and expenditures needed to sustain the intervention. Moreover, in the decade after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Afghanistan turned into a hotbed of instability.
This did not only spill over to affect post-Soviet Russia’s Central Asian allies, but also gave a home base to al-Qaeda, which in turn supported the insurgency in Russia’s own North Caucasus. In the end, therefore, the intervention undermined rather than advanced such Soviet interests as having neutral or friendly neighbors and sustainable development of the Soviet economy.
The author’s review of Soviet deliberations on Afghanistan prior to Dec. 12, 1979, reveals a variety of justifications for intervention put forward by different members of the country’s leadership—including ones that concern Soviet national interests such as ensuring the survival of Moscow’s allies and having friendly neighbors. Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov and some other Politburo members, for instance, pointed out the need to bolster the rule of the pro-Moscow People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)—which had come to power in an April 1978 coup—and save it from being overthrown by opposition forces.
The coup, which the Soviets preferred to call the “April Revolution,” had resulted in the ouster of Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan and his eventual succession by PDPA General Secretary Nur Muhammad Taraki; by the fall of 1979, however, Taraki had been assassinated at the behest of his rival and party colleague Hafizullah Amin, who took over as PDPA leader and president of what became the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).
This power grab gave Politburo members new cause for concern: One of the arguments they considered in favor of intervention was the perceived need to prevent Amin from initiating a rapprochement with the West, which they saw as a possibility, according to a secret Central Committee memo signed by several Politburo members—including Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Ustinov, the defense minister—as well as Boris Ponomaryov, chief of the Central Committee’s International Department.
In his 1995 book about the intervention, “The Tragedy and Valor of Afghanistan,” Gen. Alexander Lyakhovsky wrote that Andropov and Ustinov told a meeting of select Politburo members in Brezhnev’s study on Dec. 8, 1979, that they feared Amin’s interest in mending fences with Washington could eventually allow the U.S. to deploy medium-range nuclear-armed missiles in Afghanistan to target the Soviets’ Baikonur cosmodrome, among other facilities. (More generally, Lyakhovsky, who served in Afghanistan in 1987-1989, blamed the decision to intervene on what he saw as a strategic disinformation campaign pursued by the U.S. and its allies, among other things.)
The Soviet leadership also feared that, if allowed to establish a presence in Afghanistan, the U.S. would be able to collect telemetry during launches of newly designed Russian missiles, since most of the main testing ranges were located in southern parts of the Soviet Union, according to a 1999 article by Gen. Valentin Varennikov, who was not a Politburo member but was intimately involved in planning and carrying out the intervention as deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff.
Some of the post-factum analysis of the intervention also made references to the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interest in keeping Afghanistan anchored to the Cold War-era “socialist camp” of countries. For instance, Gen. Ivan Pavlovsky, who had commanded Soviet ground troops as deputy defense minister in 1967-1980, believed that several key factors played a role in the decision to send in troops, including the possible strengthening of American positions on the Eurasian continent, the deterioration of Soviet relations with China, China’s rapprochement with the U.S. and a dramatic increase in the influence of Islamic fundamentalism within Afghanistan. Varennikov wrote in his memoirs, entitled “The Unrepeatable,” that the Soviet leadership’s decision hinged on “the calculation that the presence of our troops in Afghanistan would cool the hot heads of Amin’s supporters, and even those of the opposition forces, and … would prevent possible encroachments by the Americans and stabilize the situation.”
General of the Army1 Makhmut Gareyev, the chief Soviet military advisor to the Afghan army after the withdrawal, wrote in a 1994 article called “Why and How We Went Into Afghanistan” that he saw the USSR’s “geopolitical interests” in general as the main driver of the decision to intervene. Among those interests he singled out the Soviet Union’s need to have loyal or at least neutral neighbors to ensure the security of the country’s frontier regions, particularly in the south.
It should be noted that in addition to the need to defend the aforementioned interests, various other justifications for the intervention were offered in the course of discussions by the Politburo.
Not all of them look plausible. For instance, one rationale cited during the Dec. 8 meeting of five Politburo members in Brezhnev’s study was the need to prevent Iraq from getting access to Afghanistan’s uranium deposits, which Baghdad could have then used to build nuclear weapons.
That concern was raised by Ustinov and Andropov, according to Lyakhovsky’s aforementioned book.
Another justification cited by the duo was the need to disrupt what they saw as U.S.-supported efforts by Turkey to build a new Ottoman empire that would incorporate the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics, according to the book.
The top Soviet decision makers in the Central Committee’s Politburo did see some downsides to an intervention too, including the reversal of Soviet-U.S. détente and the inevitable damage to the USSR’s reputation in the world as a whole. Less than nine months before the intervention, when the Afghan government had asked Moscow for help against an uprising in Herat, Gromyko, the foreign minister, allegedly told fellow Politburo members that the Soviet army would be branded “an aggressor” if it were sent into Afghanistan and that it would have to “first and foremost fight the Afghan people,” according to a transcript of the March 18, 1979, deliberations by Politburo members cited in Lyakhovsky’s book. Gromyko warned that Brezhnev’s summits with American and French leaders would have to be cancelled.
According to the same source, Andropov agreed it would be wrong to send troops. “We can only prop up the [April 27, 1978] revolution in Afghanistan with our bayonets, but this is completely unacceptable for us” and “we cannot run such a risk,” Andropov said as almost 9,000 DRA soldiers mutinied against Taraki’s regime.
The Politburo meeting concluded with the consensus that troops should not be sent, but that the Soviet Union will expand military aid to Taraki’s regime.
However, the issues raised at this and other Politburo meetings represented just a fraction of the costs that the Soviet Union could incur. In the end, in its decision-making process, the Politburo neither took full stock of the exact interests at stake nor produced a comprehensive review of all the potential, direct and indirect, costs and benefits of sending troops into Afghanistan.
This flew in the face of warnings from some of the Soviet Union’s top military strategists—warnings that the Politburo ultimately ignored. One senior Soviet military officer said to have comprehensively assessed the costs of a campaign before it began was the commander of Soviet Ground Forces, Ivan Pavlovsky. Pavlovsky inspected the state of affairs in Afghanistan in August-November 1979 and concluded that Soviet troops should not be sent there.
In a 1999 article for the aforementioned Rodina journal Pavlovsky recalled citing seven reasons not to intervene militarily in a report he sent to Ustinov upon his return from the 1979 trip to Afghanistan.
These included: his perception that the April 27, 1978, socialist “revolution” did not enjoy significant popular support; the lack of a working class and mass belief in Islam; widespread possession of arms; porous, ill-guarded borders that would allow the U.S. and its allies to ship in arms; an inevitable popular backlash against such an intervention; and the resulting deterioration in relations with the U.S. and NATO.
Anatoly Chernyaev, who was a senior international affairs analyst at the Central Committee when the decision to intervene was made, was quick to point out that it could not have possibly generated a net benefit for the Soviet Union. “Have we really acted only for the sake of revolutionary philanthropy? The argument that we had to do so to secure the border is ridiculous,” he wrote on Dec. 30, 1979, three days after Soviet commandos stormed Amin’s residence outside Kabul in an operation code-named Storm-333 to kill him and bring Babrak Karmal to power, as Moscow’s troops poured across the Soviet-Afghan border. In Chernyaev’s view, the Soviet Union could have reaped “political and prestige dividends” if only it had chosen to prop up socialist factions in Afghanistan without a large-scale military intervention. Beyond seeing no benefits from the intervention, Chernyaev—who went on to become assistant for international affairs to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary who ended the intervention—saw serious costs too.
In a diary entry dated Nov. 1, 1980, he lamented that the intervention cost “several million [in cash] every day, and … the blood of our soldiers also every day.” The head of the Moscow-based Institute of the Economy of the Global Socialist System, Oleg Bogomolov, made similar points in a memo sent to the Central Committee at about the same time as Chernyaev recorded his thoughts.
“With the sending of troops to Afghanistan our policy … has crossed the permissible boundaries of confrontation in the third world,” Bogomolov wrote in the 1980 memo. “The benefits of this action turned out to be insignificant in comparison with the damage that was inflicted on our interests.” The costs, as seen by the authors, included: the emergence of a hotbed of instability on the “southern flank of the USSR”; generating dissent among the Soviet Union’s allies regarding the intervention; burying any prospects for normalizing Soviet-Chinese relations; facilitating consolidation within the anti-Soviet coalition of states that “girded the USSR from West to East”; stalling Soviet-U.S. detente; and strengthening the West’s technological and economic sanctions against Moscow (something Russian President Vladimir Putin may find all too familiar in the wake of his intervention in Ukraine).
The author of the 1980 memo and other informed sources have also pointed out the “economic burden” the invasion placed on the Soviet economy—and it was no small burden, indeed. As of the late 1970s, Soviet aid accounted for half of all foreign aid to the DRA, according to Vladimir Toporkov, a KGB officer who advised Afghanistan’s security establishment in the 1980s and went on to become a general in post-Soviet Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
By his calculations, the overall costs, including both aid and funding for Soviet military operations in Afghanistan, totaled the equivalent of $50 billion in 1979-1989.
That sum by itself was “neither catastrophic nor painful” for the Soviet economy, according to Toporkov.2 However, if one were to count not only direct but also indirect costs, such as Western sanctions imposed on the USSR over its Afghanistan campaign, these were a significant destabilizing factor, for the Soviet Union, according to Toporkov’s study, “The Influence of the Afghan Factor on Economic Processes in the Soviet Union in 1989-1992,” published by the Russian Defense Ministry’s Military-Historical Journal in 2004.
Like Toporkov, generals Gareyev and Lyakhovsky also waited for the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan to end before publicly weighing its pros and cons, with both of them concluding that its costs had outweighed the benefits.
Gareyev, who retired shortly after his time as chief Soviet military advisor to the DRA army, wrote in his 1994 article that the primary cost of the campaign was that “the Soviet Union found itself in international isolation,” its relations with the U.S., NATO and China deteriorating.
He also wrote in a 1996 book called “My Last War” that “the protracted war in Afghanistan and the need for continued support of the regime in Kabul generated huge financial and material costs, undermining the already limping economy” of the USSR and sapping its military strength. “The decision of the Soviet leadership to stage an armed intervention into Afghan affairs ended up generating more minuses than pluses,” he wrote in the 1994 article, published in the Russian Defense Ministry’s Oriyentir journal.
Lyakhovsky, for his part, believed that one of the costs vastly underestimated by the Soviet leadership was how strong local resistance to the intervention would be: “Scant regard toward the Afghans played an important role too. Ustinov, for example, thought that some of the rebels would instantly lay down arms, while the rest would flee as soon as the Soviet troops appeared in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a 1999 Rodina article called “How the Decision to Send Troops to Afghanistan Was Made.”
“In practice, however, underestimating the adversary cost the USSR dearly. The same thing happened in Chechnya in 1994,” Lyakhovsky wrote, referring to Russia’s first war with separatist Chechnya.
In addition to failing to fully anticipate the costs and benefits that the Soviet Union would encounter if it were to try advancing its interests in Afghanistan by means of military intervention, some Soviet leaders let their personal ambitions influence the fateful decisions they made on their country’s behalf. For instance, Varennikov wrote of “our leaders’ ambitions” in his 1999 article, headlined “Those on Top Wanted Glory, the Military Opposed the War.”
When listing reasons for the intervention, he referred specifically to Ustinov’s personal ambitions: “It was difficult to call Dmitry Fyodorovich an outstanding political leader. However, at one point I sensed how he began to want to try on the laurels of a strategist and a victor.” While Ustinov’s personal feelings may indeed have been a contributing factor, they were not as decisive as Brezhnev’s. In his diary Chernyaev bluntly blamed the intervention on Brezhnev’s desire to take revenge on Amin. Chernyaev wrote in his dairy on Feb. 5, 1980, that some of Brezhnev’s confidants must have managed to “play on” the Soviet leader’s “demential indignation” over Amin’s decision to have Taraki ousted and then killed. That Brezhnev was agitated by Taraki’s murder is also confirmed by his personal physician, Yevgeny Chazov. “In spite of the decline of his ability for critical perception, he took that event much to heart,” Chazov recalled in his book, “Health and Power: Memoirs of a Kremlin Doctor.” According to him, Brezhnev was most infuriated with the way Amin undermined the Soviet leader’s personal credibility by killing Taraki whom Brezhnev had hosted and publicly promised support to a month earlier. “What will they say in other countries? How can one trust Brezhnev’s word if his assurances of support and protection remain just words,” Chazov quoted Brezhnev as saying. Gareyev, in his post-factum analysis, also wrote that Taraki’s murder on Oct. 9, 1979, had “pushed Brezhnev toward that step” of sending in troops.
After the killing “there was no longer any carefully considered analysis of the situation” by Soviet decision makers and “much was being done in haste,” according to Gareyev’s 1994 article. Lyakhovsky, in his 1999 article in the Russian government’s Rodina journal, also said that Brezhnev’s view on military intervention in Afghanistan changed after Taraki’s murder.
Lesson 2:
Ensure a sufficiently broad and comprehensive inter-agency process of reviewing potential decisions to use force, factoring in the views of all key stakeholders in general and those to be tasked with implementing the decisions in particular.
One reason the Soviet leadership erred in its decision to send a military contingent to Afghanistan was that the decision-making circle was very narrow. Had the political leaders included the country’s top military strategists, the decision could have been the opposite. According to one authoritative account by then First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Kornienko, “a narrow group” that consisted of only five of more than a dozen Politburo members at the time “made the final political decision” to send troops. Those were Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov, Gromyko and Mikhail Suslov. Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, also a Politburo member, was absent from the meeting, according to Kornienko’s recollection of the events, which he published as part of his memoirs, “Cold War: Testimony of a Participant.”3
According to Kornienko’s account, the hand-written, two-paragraph resolution passed by this small group on Dec. 12, 1979, was “formalized retroactively” with signatures from the remaining Politburo members. “Thus, not even all the members of the Politburo made the fateful decision,” according to Kornienko, whose recollection is corroborated in Lyakhovsky’s book.
Notably, even though the decision was adopted only by a handful of Politburo members, its signatories framed it as a resolution of the entire Central Committee, even though most of its members had not been consulted before it was made; other high-level officials were likewise kept out of the loop.
Chernyaev was equally dismayed by the narrowness of the decision-making: “I think that in the history of Russia, even under Stalin, there has not yet been such a period when such important actions were undertaken without a hint of the slightest coordination with anyone, [without any] advice, discussion, careful consideration, even if only in a very narrow circle,” he wrote in his diary in December 1979. It is notable that despite their key positions, both Chernyaev and other senior officials in the Central Committee staff were kept in the dark not only about the exact reasons for the decision to send in troops but also about who actually initiated that decision. It was only in 1985 that one of Chernyaev’s colleagues told him Kornienko had claimed in a casual chat that it was, in Kornienko’s view, his boss, Foreign Minister Gromyko, who had convinced Brezhnev to send in troops.
In addition to being too narrow, the circle of decision makers also suffered from a lack of reliable information.
The fact “that the information was distorted did not allow the country’s top leadership to understand the processes taking place in Afghanistan and prevent fatal mistakes,” Gareyev wrote in his book.
As Col. Nikolai Vasilyev, a military historian, explained in his own 2014 article on the lessons of the Soviet military intervention: “Many leaders, including members of the Politburo, adapted themselves to the opinion of L. I. Brezhnev. The intelligence and other agencies were required to confirm the ‘sagacity of the leader,’ and the information and recommendations of analysts and experts that did not fit into the pre-planned framework were thrown away.” The quality of information fed to the Politburo’s top brass did not improve even after Soviet troops were deployed and learning about the situation in Afghanistan first-hand. “Most likely, the General [Secretary] doesn’t even know what is happening around us.
Briefings from Afghanistan are prepped for him so that they’re full of ‘complete normalization.’ As for information from the West, it’s probably ‘at the level of Pravda’ [the Central Committee newspaper], since he’s long been kept in ‘spare-him mode.’ So he’s not even aware of what he’s done,” Chernyaev wrote in his dairy on Feb. 9, 1980. As important, Chernyaev believes the ageing Brezhnev could not have drawn sound conclusions from the information even if it had not been distorted to please him because of the extent to which his mental capabilities had deteriorated. In a Sept. 29, 1982, diary entry Chernyaev describes how Brezhnev, in Baku to laud the performance of Soviet Azerbaijan, had become so senile by the third year of the Soviet campaign that, 10 minutes into a televised speech, he did not realize he was reading the wrong text even after it explicitly referred to “Afghanistan” instead of “Azerbaijan.”
Even when accurate information on Afghanistan did make it to the top decision makers, they often rejected it as they suffered from cognitive bias, dismissing dissenting views even when they were presented by key stakeholders who would be tasked with executing the decisions.
Top Soviet military commanders felt particularly slighted by their exclusion from the decision-making process. As Vasilyev, the military historian, lamented in his article, published by the Defense Ministry’s Military-Historical Journal, “The Special Commission of the Politburo for Afghanistan, headed by Foreign Minister A. A. Gromyko, in effect replaced the Council of Defense of the USSR and, in part, its working body, the General Staff.
… Among them [the commission members] there were no professionals of military strategy.” Chief of the Soviet General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov, his first deputy Sergei Akhromeyev and Varennikov, a deputy of Ogarkov’s, had been asked to present their thoughts about sending troops sometime before the pared-down Politburo meeting Dec. 12. The trio argued that a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan would be “impossible and inconceivable, first and foremost from the political standpoint,” according to Chernyaev’s diary. Rather than heed their advice, Ustinov, the Soviet defense minister and a Politburo member, dismissed their arguments, telling them “not to discuss [orders]” and to present a detailed plan of the operation.
Ogarkov, it should be noted, objected to the intervention on more than one occasion. When summoned to the Politburo on Dec. 8, 1979, Ogarkov called on its members to reject Gromyko and Andropov’s arguments in favor of reversing the Soviet leadership’s previous position, which had been to refrain from sending troops. He repeated his calls again the following day in Brezhnev’s presence, warning that “we will turn all of eastern Islamism against ourselves and lose politically across the world,” only to be shut down by Andropov: “You were invited not to have your opinion heard, but to write down the Politburo’s directives and organize their implementation.”
That conflict, according to Varennikov, led to a dramatic deterioration in Ogarkov’s relations with Andropov; Ogarkov lost his post after Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary. One senior Soviet commander who lost his post even before the campaign had begun, possibly over his opposition to the intervention, was the aforementioned commander of Soviet Ground Forces, Pavlovsky. As described above, after his travels in Afghanistan in summer-fall of 1979, Pavlovsky claims he pleaded with the Soviet military-political leadership not to send a contingent, but his advice was not heeded; shortly afterwards he was relieved from his post.
In his 1994 article Gareyev criticized the Soviet political leadership for ignoring Ogarkov’s views and telling him to stick to military planning. “As life has repeatedly proved, political decisions prove viable and grounded only when they take into account all aspects, including foreign policy, economic, ideological and military-strategic considerations,” he wrote, adding: “The General Staff cannot determine policies, but they must actively participate in crafting military aspects of this policy and ignoring these aspects can lead to major political failures.”
Interestingly, while telling the General Staff to stick to military planning, the Politburo would not even heed the staff’s advice on such a key element of that planning as the personnel strength of the intervening force. Ogarkov had responded to the political leadership’s order to develop an intervention plan with a proposal for deploying 30-35 divisions, but his request was shot down, according to Gareyev’s recollections of the events, which he shared with University of Kansas history professor Jacob Kipp in 1996 and also put on paper for his other book on the subject, entitled “Afghan Suffering.”4 However, the Politburo authorized only 75,000-80,000 servicemen, according to Lyakhovsky’s book (at the time, a typical Soviet infantry division had 13,000 servicemen).5
Lesson 3:
Examine aspects of a country’s history relevant to your planned undertaking.
There’s a joke that says Americans learn about the history of other countries by invading them. The Soviets, you could say, merely recalled what they had already learned about Afghanistan’s history by invading it. Had the Soviet leadership factored in the way that Afghan tribes’ intense and enduring dislike for outside powers and their local clients had foiled previous empires’ attempts to anchor the country, that may have influenced Moscow’s final analysis about sending in troops and helped to save them from a costly mistake.
None of the transcripts of Politburo discussions about intervening in Afghanistan contains any significant discussion of Afghan history. Analyzing how Afghans had fought off various past encroachments, by the British Empire among others, would have perhaps made Soviet leaders more averse to using force to accomplish anything there. The absence of such discussions is especially ironic given that one of Soviet ideology’s most revered figures warned how “unruly” Afghans could be: None other than Friedrich Engels observed between the first and second of the three Anglo-Afghan wars that Afghans’ “indomitable hatred of rule, and their love of individual independence, … prevents their becoming a powerful nation; but this very irregularity and uncertainty of action makes them dangerous neighbors … [for whom] war is an excitement.” The Politburo members could have also examined how Joseph Stalin staged an abortive military intervention in Afghanistan in an effort to prop up Amanulla Khan, the sovereign from 1919 to 1929 who signed the 1921 Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty, but then had to abdicate his throne in a revolt. In 1929 Stalin sent 1,000 Red Army soldiers into Afghanistan disguised as Afghan soldiers to operate jointly with some of Khan’s loyalists, according to Lyakhovsky’s book and a 1999 article in Rodina by Pavel Aptekar. The joint Soviet-Afghan unit took Mazar-i-Sharif in April 1929, but Stalin then had to recall his troops after learning that Khan had fled to India.
Some Soviet officers came to the same conclusions as Engels, but only after being sent to Afghanistan to take part in the 1979-1989 intervention. “It was impossible to defeat those Afghan bearded men and their sons, with whom we then had to fight. They were ready to fight their whole lives, and they had nothing to lose from it because they had nothing to their name, just like now. This is a proud, freedom-loving people. They have nothing but their faith and the desire to live the way they want and consider to be right,” KGB officer Vladimir Garkavy, who completed multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in 1979-1984, wrote in his book. Gromov also cited history in his 1999 Rodina article on Afghanistan. “Any interference from the outside is deemed to fail in a country where tribes have struggled against each other for centuries and where nationalism is extremely developed,” he wrote in his book, which contains more useful insights on the intervention than a New York Times op-ed he co-wrote with Dmitry Rogozin; entitled “Russian Advice on Afghanistan,” that January 2010 piece is essentially a wish list Moscow had at the time for U.S. conduct in Afghanistan.
Lesson 4:
Once the decision to send troops has been made, formulate the goals of the intervention and communicate them clearly to the agencies involved in implementation; also, shape your messaging to other key stakeholders likely to influence the outcome of the intervention.
The Soviet leadership’s marching orders for its military contingent, OKSVA, were anything but clear—with the exception of the secret order to immediately replace Amin with Karmal. The fact that the Soviet leadership failed to define what would constitute the ultimate long-term success once the initial goal of regime change had been achieved made it difficult for both that leadership and commanders on the ground to understand, once Amin was removed, whether the Soviet intervention was succeeding, failing or stagnating, other than by measuring how much territory the DRA regime controlled at any time. In the absence of a well-defined mission, Soviet commanders oscillated between merely providing support to DRA forces and actually leading combat engagements, while some of the military advisors pressed for a troop surge that could expand the mission to sealing Afghanistan’s borders. In addition to failing to clearly communicate their goals to their own troops, Soviet leaders also failed to communicate their goals in Afghanistan to the international community as a whole, making it easier for the U.S. to win support in its efforts to isolate and punish the USSR over the intervention.
The lack of a clear long-term mission was evident in the key documents kicking off the Soviet intervention, both on the political and the military side. The two-paragraph Politburo resolution initiating the troop deployment, entitled “Concerning the Situation in ‘A,’” stated neither the reasons for the campaign nor its goals. The military directive to execute the Politburo’s decision, issued jointly by the Defense Ministry and the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Force on Dec. 24, 1979, gave only a vague idea of why troops were being sent into Afghanistan, proclaiming it was to “give international aid to the friendly Afghan people and also to create favorable conditions to interdict possible anti-Afghan actions from neighboring countries.” (Defense Ministry newspapers such as Red Star didn’t provide “any sensible explanation” either, according to Gareyev’s 1994 article.) In his book, Gareyev recalled that Directive 312/12/001, signed by Ustinov and Ogarkov, stated that Soviet troops were being sent into Afghanistan for “fulfillment of international duty.” “What that duty constituted was to be decided by each commander and soldier themselves,” Gareyev wrote. According to one website maintained by Soviet veterans of the Afghan war, the directive did not provide for Soviet troops’ participation in combat. That created ambiguity in its interpretation, even though the 40th Army did get involved in fighting almost immediately. For instance, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the deputy defense minister in charge of the ministry’s Operational Group in Afghanistan in 1980, told Soviet military advisors there in January of that year that “special attention should be paid to the inadmissibility of Soviet troops’ involvement in the armed struggle against the rebels; their [the troops’] functions are completely different.” Several days later, however, the same commander, under pressure from Afghan allies, sanctioned the use of “one or two units of Soviet troops” to oust the mujahedeen from an artillery depot, according to Gareyev’s 1994 article. In addition, while Sokolov’s boss, Ustinov, also under pressure from the Afghan leadership, “demanded that Soviet troops engage in active combat operations,” General Staff chief Ogarkov, opposed to the intervention from the outset, tried to restrain the troops’ involvement in large-scale military operations, according to Gareyev. Gromov, commander of the 40th Army, which made up the bulk of OKSVA, described in his book how he prioritized minimizing Soviet casualties and criticized Kabul for constantly pleading with Moscow to have his troops step up operations while trying to find ways to prevent using its own troops. Gareyev—who commanded no units in Afghanistan and, therefore, bore no personal responsibility for casualties—appears to have criticized what he saw as the 40th Army commanders’ passiveness, writing in his book that some of their most important combat operations “were undertaken only at the request of the Afghan leadership and under pressure from the Soviet leadership.”
(In the end, a decision to limit involvement in combat operations appears to have prevailed among the Soviet top brass: At some point as many as 70 percent of the 40th Army’s forces were tasked with ensuring transportation of humanitarian supplies and 60 percent of its activities were geared toward peacekeeping and nation-building, such as helping to build infrastructure and training the DRA army, according to Gromov’s estimates.)
The Soviet military’s top brass also appears not to have spelled out rules of engagement when sending in the troops. “The inadmissibility of the use of weapons against the civilian population is stipulated by international legal norms, but what about the ‘civilian’ armed with an automatic rifle or a grenade launcher? Wait till he shoots?” asked Gareyev in his book. He also recalled: “As strange as it may sound, from the very beginning of the introduction of troops and until the end of their stay in Afghanistan there was no clear line on whether our troops in this country should fight or not.”
As a result, some Soviet commanders displayed “covert resistance to attempts to force the troops to fight,” Gareyev wrote. The Soviet political leadership’s lack of a “clear goal” and a “definite plan of action” had a direct impact on military operations. In fact, in Gareyev’s view, the Soviet leadership continued to have neither “a definite political, strategic plan nor an integral concept of the use of troops in Afghanistan from the very beginning and in essence until the end” of the campaign.
Lyakhovsky concurred in his book that Soviet leaders had failed to spell out to the troops what they would be doing in Afghanistan, lamenting in his book that “the political leadership of the USSR formulated the strategic goals of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan in a vague and unclear way,” except, again, for the goal of replacing Amin with Karmal, which was not made public. According to Gromov, however, the 40th Army did at least have clear initial goals. The first was to keep the “April Revolution from dying,” he wrote in reference to the April 1979 coup d’état that had brought the Moscow-friendly PDPA to power. The second goal was to prevent external aggression. The 40th Army “handled that [first] task brilliantly,” but then the PDPA’s leadership managed “craftily to drag the 40th Army into a large-scale guerilla war,” Gromov wrote.
While criticizing the Soviet political leadership for failing to formulate and communicate clear goals for the campaign in Afghanistan, Gareyev and other officers involved in the campaign had their own ideas on what these goals should be. In Gareyev’s view, which he shared with Ogarkov in December 1979, the Soviet military contingent should have been tasked with sealing Afghanistan’s borders and establishing control over all major settlements, communications and other infrastructure, arguing that the Soviet command should send 40 rather than four divisions to accomplish these goals.
Lev Rokhlin, who commanded infantry regiments in Afghanistan and then fought in Chechnya, concurred with Gareyev’s view that the Afghan borders had to be sealed, but also thought OKSVA should have refrained from siding with any of the warring parties in the country, according to a 1999 article of his in Rodina, “I Was Not Afraid to Fight.” It should also be noted that the Soviet command did task 50,000 soldiers with securing Afghanistan’s borders as of 1986, according to Akhromeyev, Ogarkov’s first deputy at the General Staff, but that number was insufficient to stop the inflow of arms and rebels. In general, it is doubtful that such a goal would have been achievable. If the experience of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and Russia’s own experience in Chechnya during the two campaigns there are any guide, a complete sealing of borders would have proved problematic, at best.
That’s why, perhaps, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who served as deputy chairman of the KGB during most of the intervention before heading up the agency in 1988, believed the mission should have been limited to a special operation to replace Amin with Karmal. “I remain convinced that a short special operation” to effect regime change “would have been the best outcome,” Kryuchkov was quoted as saying in a 1999 issue of Rodina.
In addition to failing to clearly communicate their goals to their own troops, Soviet leaders also failed in their communications with allies, foes and the international community on the issue. For instance, while official Soviet statements cited the Soviet-Afghan Friendship treaties of 1921 and 1978 as giving legal grounds for the intervention, portrayed by the Soviet propaganda machine as “international aid to the friendly Afghan people,” the Politburo decision makers did not even bother to have their Dec. 12, 1979, resolution approved by the Soviet parliament, though such a move may have somewhat increased the “official” credibility of their decision in the eyes of their allies. Lyakhovsky noted this problem in his 2005 book: “The then leadership of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] did not consider it necessary to submit this question for discussion by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. It was simply announced as ‘international assistance’—end of story.”
Lyakhovsky’s boss, Varennikov, thought it was wrong not to reach out to the international community on the decision to send troops into Afghanistan. “What was the main mistake that our leadership made after making a decision to deploy troops? That we did not announce it.
We should have preempted the Americans and others by announcing it to the whole world: The leadership of Afghanistan repeatedly asked us for military assistance,” Vasilyev quotes Varennikov as saying. Moreover, the propaganda dimension of the Soviets’ efforts vis-à-vis the Afghan public did not become a priority until the sixth year of the campaign. It was in 1985 that the Soviet military-political leadership made the decision to “organize special propaganda in relation to the population and opposition of Afghanistan” and that was done in response to an increase in Western “information influence” there, according to a 2003 article on the “informational and psychological struggle” in Afghanistan by Col. Yuri Serooky in the Russian General Staff journal Military Thought.
To be fair, it is unclear whether such propaganda could have made much of a difference in the battle for Afghan hearts and minds even if launched on Day 1 of the intervention. After all, it would have been very difficult to make Afghans forget whose troops had poured into the president’s palace and killed Amin in the Storm-333 operation—no matter that Afghan leaders, including both Taraki and Amin himself, had asked the Soviets some 20 times to send in troops, according to Gareyev’s 1994 article and Lyakhovsky’s 1999 article.
Lesson 5:
If you do decide to go in, develop an exit plan in advance.
It should also be noted that the Soviet military had no exit plan when going in. The first draft of such a plan was developed only in 1980, according to Gareyev’s book, which cites Yuri Drozdov, the former chief of the KGB’s so-called “Illegals Program.” According to Varennikov’s 1999 article, however, it was not until 1983 that Soviet commanders submitted a proposal for withdrawing troops for consideration by the country’s political leadership. Of course, the development of an exit plan in advance could not have influenced the outcome of the intervention. In the end, Gromov, the last commander of the 40th Army, had many months to plan the withdrawal and executed it both leaving months’ worth of supplies for the remaining DRA forces and minimizing losses among OKSVA personnel during the withdrawal itself. However, had the intervention gone wrong in the early stages of the campaign (e.g., if Afghan rebels had inflicted massive losses on the advancing troops or a significant unexpected event had emerged, such as a major military conflict elsewhere), then a hasty, unplanned withdrawal could have cost a lot of lives.
Also, while the military component of the exit was well planned and executed, the diplomatic component fell short. As discussed further down, the Soviets failed to secure either assurances for the return of their own POWs and MIAs or the effective enforcement of other signatories’ obligations on ending aid to the rebels. The latter accelerated the fall of the PDPA regime, bringing instability to the disintegrating Soviet empire’s southern frontiers.
Lesson 6:
Once in, ensure effective inter-agency coordination and cooperation.
Both the preparation and the execution of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan revealed that inter-agency coordination and cooperation was inadequate. That by itself could not have decided the outcome of the campaign, but inter-agency rivalry did limit the OKSVA command’s situational awareness, causing a range of problems, including the diminished effectiveness of combat planning and operations.
Initial coordination was so ineffective that key figures were kept in the dark about their colleagues’ plans even within a single agency. For instance, the chief Soviet military advisor in Afghanistan, Gen. Saltan Magomedov, had no idea that commandoes of the General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate would storm Amin’s palace, in cooperation with KGB commandos and other forces, to replace him with Karmal. When Ustinov called this star-studded advisor in December 1979 sometime prior to the attack and asked to be briefed on “readiness for Operation Storm-333,” Magomedov did not know what his superior was talking about, according to Gareyev’s book. When Magomedov admitted this, Ustinov suggested he contact the KGB representative in Kabul. When Magomedov did that, he got “hints, not … the necessary information,” Gareyev wrote.
Moreover, according to Gareyev’s 1994 article, Soviet military advisors in Afghanistan learned that Soviet troops had entered the country from foreign radio broadcasts.
Cooperation across agencies was equally if not more problematic. Both Gromov and Gareyev listed multiple instances when Defense Ministry and KGB personnel would fail to coordinate their actions in Afghanistan. Being army generals, both blamed the lack of cooperation on the KGB, particularly when it came to interactions with the General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU. KGB agents in Afghanistan would sometimes refuse to share intelligence they had collected directly with the Soviet armed forces’ commanders there, sending it to superiors at KGB headquarters in Moscow instead. “As a result, we [40th Army Command] would learn about actions supposedly planned by the mujahedeen from Moscow,” Gromov wrote.
“Such situations arose with depressing consistency and created certain tensions between military intelligence [GRU] officers and their colleagues from the State Security Committee [KGB],” Gromov wrote.
It was only in 1985, six years after the campaign began, that inter-agency intelligence coordination meetings began to take place at 40th Army headquarters so that representatives of the GRU, KGB, Interior Ministry and Foreign Ministry could jointly examine and analyze intelligence, according to Gromov.
Lesson 7:
Rather than try to mold your local allies in your own image, empower them, encouraging self-reliance, and pay attention to indigenous traditions.
As stated above, the Soviet Union spent the equivalent of billions of dollars arming and training DRA forces, including Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and security troops.
The results proved to be far from either lasting or sufficient, however. DRA troops proved unable either to hold on to territorial gains made by the Soviet 40th Army or to withstand rebel offensives after Moscow withdrew the army and then discontinued aid.
The implosion of the DRA forces—which proved to be no match for the rebels in skills, tactics or morale—brought instability to the southern frontiers of the Soviet empire.
One of the senior Soviet officials to criticize the quality of DRA forces’ training by their Soviet advisors was Leonid Shebarshin, then a general in the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch.
While some Soviet military commanders sought to portray their efforts to train the Afghans as adequate, blaming poor results on the Afghans’ ineptitude, Shebarshin offered searing criticism of the trainers themselves in his memoirs. “What was the source of the [Soviet commanders’] distrust of the [Afghan] ally? How did it happen that two thousand advisers, including colonels and generals, failed to create a single fully combat-capable and reliable unit in the Afghan army?
How did it happen that the tactics of the Afghan army’s actions are not based on modern realities but on the hopelessly outdated experience of war in the open spaces of Russia?” wrote Shebarshin, who spent more than a decade in the region, conducting more than 20 trips to Afghanistan and eventually becoming chief of KGB operations in the Middle East.
In Shebarshin’s view, one reason the training of Afghan troops proved to be ineffective was that the Soviet commanders never learned how to delegate powers to their trainees: “We did teach something to Afghans, no doubt.
But mainly we ordered them around and commanded them, ‘stitching them on’ to our operations, imposing our decisions, while loudly shouting about the weak fighting capacity of the ally.”
Gareyev agreed with Shebarshin’s assessment on the lack of Soviet commanders’ trust in their Afghan allies, but blamed it in his book on KGB operatives.
Whether it was the lack of trust that adversely affected soldiers’ conduct, or the other way around, is unclear. What is clear, however, from all the Soviet commanders whose writings and statements were reviewed for this article, is that this conduct was subpar.
Rather than try to press their Afghan allies into some Marxist-Leninist mold, the Soviets should have encouraged the PDPA leadership to revert to indigenous traditions of power sharing to ensure national reconciliation and subsequent self-reliance. As Gromov wrote in his book, “A puppet-string mentality grew so strong among Afghans that they could no longer act independently, without the help of the Soviets.”
Chernyaev was even starker in his assessment of the Afghan leadership’s overdependence on the Soviets for making crucial decisions: “Karmalism is the dogmatism of Marxism-Leninism plus parasitism in relation to the USSR,” he wrote on Aug. 28, 1987, in his diary.
As Gareyev wrote: “In the early 1980s, in relation to Afghanistan, the most realistic thing was [for Soviet-policymakers] to avoid striving for the creation of a similar, obedient and unconditionally socialist state, but to support more moderate forces that enjoyed the support of the majority of the population and to push for reconciliation of the parties from the very beginning.” Gromov struck a similar note. “It is impossible to make country like Afghanistan, with its completely different way of life, with different religion, low level of development, a country that lives in its fourteenth century according to its calendar, similar to the Soviet Union. It would be a real absurdity,” Gromov wrote.
Lesson 8:
You cannot succeed in a military intervention unless the side on whose behalf you intervene is willing to fight for your joint cause.
No amount of training and empowering your local allies will help an intervention succeed unless those allies are actually willing to fight for your joint cause. The Soviets intervened to bring Karmal’s PDPA faction to power, going as far as assassinating a president to make way for their protégé. But the PDPA lacked a sufficient number of loyalists willing to fight for that cause, and many of the tens of thousands of men conscripted into the Moscow-aligned Afghan forces preferred to either avoid battle or outright desert when given orders to fight opposition forces.
Gromov vented repeatedly in his book about Afghan civil and military authorities’ failure to hold on to territorial gains made by Soviet forces, implying that differing priorities played a part. “The local Afghan leadership, despite its pro-Soviet sentiment, was not interested in having us conduct combat operations with maximum efficiency. Only a few of them [Afghan officials] tried to consolidate their power and govern in the provinces that we had ‘cleared.’ Obviously, they understood that sooner or later the war would end and there would be no one to face the music but them,” Gromov wrote of his first tour of duty, which ended in 1982 with him commanding an infantry division. His second tour of duty, which he began in 1985 as the General Staff’s representative in Afghanistan, was not marked by significant changes. Gromov called the situation he returned to that year “a dead end”: “One and a half months after our battalions returned to [their] military camps, we were again forced to conduct operations” in the same areas, he wrote in his book. “Our experience has shown that the results we achieved during our combat operations are not then utilized by the Afghans.
About one and a half to two months after completion of an operation everything would go back to square one: Mujahedeen would again take the districts from which we had knocked them out; they would restore their old bases with weapons and ammunition, coming very close to our sites again and resume shelling and attacks.
The question is: What did we fight for so long, sacrificing our guys in the mountains? It was necessary to stop,” Gromov wrote in 1985. Akhromeyev, first deputy chief of the General Staff, lamented the same problem at around the same time: “There is not a single piece of land left in this country that a Soviet soldier has not taken, yet most of the territory is in the hands of the rebels,” he told a Politburo meeting chaired by Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, on Nov. 13, 1986. “We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but we cannot establish authority in the conquered territory. We lost the fight for the Afghan people,” Akhromeyev said. Indeed, as of 1986, only 8,000 of some 31,000-35,000 villages were under Afghan government control, according to estimates by Mohammad Najibullah, who succeeded Karmal as PDPA head in May 1986, which he shared with Soviet diplomat Yuly Vorontsov in October of that year, according to Gromov’s book. As of 1989, the authorities’ controlled only 18 percent of the country’s territory, according to Gromov.
Gromov confirmed his impressions of Afghan soldiers’ and administrators’ conduct during his third and final tour of duty in 1987-1989 when he was commanding the 40th Army. “A time will soon come when revolutionary leaders will be left alone with their problems. They will be left one on one with the opposition. Only in this way can I explain the numerous instances of treason and betrayal by the Afghan military, which we encountered wherever we went,” he wrote in his 1994 book “Limited Contingent.”
Some of the officers from Afghanistan’s Ministry of State Security were no more enthusiastic about standing up to the mujahedeen than their Soviet Defense Ministry counterparts or civilian administrators, according to Gromov.
In his book he described how Soviet forces would “mop up” areas, detaining suspected mujahedeen and passing them on to the Afghans, only to encounter the same suspects again during the next mopping-up operation three or four months later. It was most likely that Afghan security agents would simply let these suspects go without investigating them or prosecuting them in court, Gromov surmised.
Not only were Afghan authorities and troops far from committed to the Soviet cause, they sometimes actively sabotaged it. Gromov complained that opposition field commanders like Ahmad Shah Massoud had “broad networks of informants in the Afghan army and government,” making it difficult to keep combat plans secret. Moreover, Afghan soldiers kept deserting to the opposition forces, taking their arms with them, including even howitzers and heavy armored vehicles. Equipment transfers by government troops “constituted a formidable source of arms and ammunition for the rebels,” Gromov wrote. Thousands would desert from the Afghan ministries of defense, security and internal affairs. According to one Russian account, a 1993 memoir called “Pursuing the Lion of Panjshir,” the number of deserters totaled 34,000 in 1983 alone. Even some DRA Air Force pilots would desert, reportedly flying their Soviet warplanes and helicopters to Pakistan, while some of those who stayed on would deliberately drop their bombs away from the designated targets, according to Gromov, who claims to have “documented a multiplicity of such instances.” He also wrote that some of the DRA servicemen tasked with observing enemy positions and providing targeting data would supply coordinates of locations where their personal enemies lived rather than mujahedeen.
Desertion from DRA forces became particularly widespread in the late 1980s as it became clear that OKSVA would be leaving. Of the 370 Afghan tank crewmembers trained in the city of Termez in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989 and used to form a new tank brigade, only 127 made it to Kabul, according to Gareyev; the rest deserted, with several trainees fleeing during every night-time stopover en route.
Even when faced with an existential threat to the regime, some DRA commanders could not stop theft of military stocks or prevent desertions among their soldiers. When departing Soviet troops left three months’ worth of supplies for the DRA army, including almost 1,000 armored vehicles, 3,000 other vehicles and 14,400 assault rifles, many of these supplies did not reach the designated recipient because they were either stolen and sold to insurgents or seized by insurgents by force, according to Gareyev.
Gromov described how entire military camps that his withdrawing army had outfitted with everything from security perimeters to slippers next to beds would be looted by corrupt DRA commanders and their subordinates within days of being handed over and the goods then sold in local private shops.
Lesson 9:
Talk to moderates on the opposite side.
In theory, the Soviets were bound by their ideological dogmas to offer unconditional support for the PDPA only. In reality, while supporting Afghanistan’s ruling socialist regime, Soviet commanders did not refrain from reaching out to some of the moderate leaders among the mujahedeen, even though they espoused such “hostile ideologies” as political Islam and Pashtun nationalism. Such outreach proved to be important not only in reducing combat losses, but also in creating opportunities for reconciliation, which ultimately remained unused.
The Soviets likewise managed to establish direct contacts between commanders and chiefs of staff of Soviet units and “a multiplicity of [rebel] field commanders,” using Soviet military intelligence agents as liaisons, according to Gromov.
Gromov dedicated quite a few pages in his book to describing his contacts with such leaders, including Massoud, whose stronghold was in the Panjshir valley. “We were particularly interested in individual gangs’ attitudes toward the Afghan state authorities and the Soviet troops,” he wrote. Gromov noted that some of the field commanders would deal with OKSVA top brass, but would refuse to deal with official Afghan authorities. “Apparently, the mujahedeen believed they would benefit more from dealing with the Russians.
In addition, constant cooperation with the command of the Soviet troops gave them certain guarantees that this or that grouping would not be destroyed in the near future,” he wrote.
Those field commanders who cooperated with OKSVA would even sometimes receive medicines and food from the Soviet contingent, according to Gromov.
Overall, however, this cooptation fell short, mostly due to ideological dogmas. “Having bet on PDPA members and ignoring the Afghan elites established over the centuries, the Soviet leaders made themselves hostage to all these Tarakis, Amins, Karmals, Najibs [short for Najibullahs] and the like. This they understood much later, however,” Vasilyev, the military historian, wrote.
However, not all of this outreach was a waste. The contacts between Gromov and Massoud may have contributed to the latter’s desire to take a cooperative stance toward post-Soviet Russia.
Once the DRA regime fell apart and the Taliban rose to power, Massoud became one of the leaders of the so-called Northern Alliance, which post-Soviet Moscow supported in its effort to prevent an expansion of the Taliban’s influence into Central Asia in the 1990s.
Lesson 10:
When leaving, leave…
When describing how he engineered the withdrawal of the 40th Army in his book, Gromov does not cite the popular Russian adage “when leaving, leave,” sometimes attributed to Cicero.
However, the description itself proves that he persistently tried to do just that despite pressure from DRA rulers.
Had Gromov not been so persistent, Najibullah may have succeeded in persuading Moscow to keep the troops in-country, and the result of that “success” would have been only delaying the fall of his regime at the cost of more OKSVA casualties.
Moreover, had the Soviet soldiers stayed for three more years, they would have found the state they had sworn to defend vanish in December 1991.
Even as it was, the subsequent process of dividing Soviet units among the 15 newly independent republics proved to be chaotic and antagonistic at times, which would have seriously affected both the supplies and the morale of OKSVA had the contingent still been deployed.
Come 1992, and even the largest of the ex-Soviet republics, Russia, would have lacked the resources possessed by the USSR in 1989 to smoothly and securely withdraw the 40th army had post-Soviet Moscow claimed it for its own. In reality, when 1992 came, there were only seven “Soviet” military advisors left in Afghanistan and they all left the country in April of that year.
In his book Gromov describes multiple instances when Najibullah and some of the Soviet leaders kept coming up with options that would commit Soviet troops to stay in Afghanistan even after the announcement about withdrawal.
In 1988 “the government of Afghanistan made truly ‘heroic’ efforts to stop the 40th Army from leaving at any cost,” Gromov recalled in his book.
To do so, the Afghan Defense Ministry made repeated attempts to draw OKSVA into “large-scale combat,” while DRA diplomats argued that the withdrawal should be suspended because Pakistan was failing to fulfill its commitments under the 1988 Geneva Accords.
In one instance, also in 1988, Najibullah said that he would agree to the withdrawal of the 40th Army, but asked that Soviet volunteers guard Kabul’s airport and the Hairatan-Kabul highway, which would have required a 12,000-strong division, according to Gromov’s book.
A secret Central Committee memo of Jan. 23, 1989, described several options for providing military support to the DRA after the withdrawal, including one similar to what Najibullah asked for—to leave a 12,000-man division to guard the highway so that the Soviets could continue shipping aid. Another option was to ask the U.N. to deploy peacekeepers and keep Soviet troops in until they arrive.
A third option was to withdraw OKSVA, but have Soviet military units guard convoys with aid. The fourth option was to “withdraw almost all Soviet troops,” but leave some units behind so they could guard key parts of the Hairatan-Kabul highway. The fifth and final option was to withdraw all troops, but have the Soviet military send in ammunition and other supplies to fully equip and maintain Afghan government units guarding the highway.
Ultimately, the Soviet leadership rightly concluded that keeping in regular troops was not an option and withdrew all personnel except advisors, who at one point totaled 2,000, according to an interview Gareyev gave the Rodina journal in 1999.
The Soviet departure did not suffice to end the civil war, as some may have hoped based on the mujahedeen’s stated goal of driving out the Soviets; however, subsequent events proved that the Soviets’ Afghan allies could hold onto power even without Soviet soldiers and, therefore, without significant Soviet casualties, as long as Moscow continued to materially support the government.
Lesson 11:
…but before you leave, secure enforceable guarantees that POWs and MIAs are found and brought home, and give the returning soldiers proper welcome and care.
Describing how the last battalion of the 40th Army crossed into Termez under his command on Feb. 15, 1989, Gromov wrote how ordinary people embraced the returning soldiers heartily, but how also “not a single commander in Moscow even thought about how to organize greeting” them. “Were we supposed to greet ourselves? The attempt to overlook the withdrawal of the 40th Army from Afghanistan became another instance of tactlessness by those who worked in the Kremlin… They could have at least sent someone from the huge government staff or the Defense Ministry to meet us in Termez. It’s not every day we complete the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan,” Gromov wrote. He also wrote that some of the Soviet citizens welcoming home his last battalion were relatives of Soviet soldiers who had been killed in Afghanistan.
“Some of them, having received official notices and even having buried their loved ones, still hoped: What if he was alive, what if he would come out now?” Gromov wrote. Overall, 15,051 Soviet servicemen were killed in Afghanistan, according to a 2001 study edited by Col. Gen. Grigory Krivosheyev. As for Afghans, some 800,000-1,500,000 of them died during the intervention, according to one scholarly estimate.
Of those who did return, many suffered from post-traumatic disorders that often went untreated, while also encountering public disapproval from those with anti-war sentiments, much as Vietnam veterans initially did in the U.S.
The author of this paper encountered one such veteran in 1999. The former sniper, broad-shouldered, had served in a Soviet commando unit in Afghanistan and said the only means of relaxation his commanders had provided was an aquarium.
He also said his complaints about what he later realized to be a post-traumatic stress disorder were dismissed by commanders with phrases like: “What psychological stress?
Have you seen the size of your arms?” (meaning, presumably, that his physical fitness precluded any medical conditions).
According to a book by KGB officer Vladimir Garkavy, who completed multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan, “despondency, apathy and despair have become the companions of many veterans.” Garkavy wrote that some 500 veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan committed suicide in 2007 alone.
In addition to failing to organize a proper welcome to the returning troops or ensure adequate treatment of their war-induced disorders, the Soviet authorities also did not bother to include a clause on the return of Soviet MIAs in any of the so-called Geneva Accords,6 which were signed in 1988 and included three Afghan-Pakistan bilateral agreements on ending the war and a declaration on international guarantees signed by the U.S. and Soviet Union and meant to cut off U.S. and Soviet aid to the warring sides.
At the time, Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, “who concluded these treaties, seemed to be concerned only about convincing the public that they were not personally involved in the deployment of Soviet troops to Afghanistan and to disclaim responsibility for it.
Soviet soldiers and officers who were in captivity … were of little interest to them,” Lyakhovsky wrote in his book. According to Varennikov’s 1999 article, he and other Soviet commanders pleaded with Shevardnadze during a 1987 meeting to include clauses on reciprocal closure of rebel bases in Afghanistan and he agreed to push for them, but none made it into the accords.
Gromov also wrote in his book that the leadership of the 40th Army and Soviet Defense Ministry “insisted” the Soviet government insert a clause on the return of Soviet POWs and MIAs into the accords because “we had no moral right to leave Afghanistan until we liberated our soldiers or at least ascertained their fates.”
However, these demands were disregarded. According to the Krivosheyev study, 417 Soviet soldiers went missing or were taken captive in Afghanistan during the intervention, with 130 of them later found and returned home, leaving 287 MIAs and POWs as of Jan. 1, 1999; by 2013 the list had been whittled down to 263 people, according to a Moscow-based veterans’ organization.
Lesson 12:
…also before you leave, secure firm and enforceable agreements that would not only meet your own minimum requirements for a negotiated settlement, but also those of your local allies, because the end of an intervention by itself cannot end hostilities.
Had the Soviet Union managed to secure enforceable commitments from other external powers involved in the conflict to discontinue aid to the Afghan rebels in exchange for doing so itself, it might have at the very least delayed the fall of the friendly regime in Kabul. Moreover, that could have created a stalemate that would have made some of the warring factions more inclined to achieve national reconciliation. This, in turn, could have led to the emergence of a regime that would have been neutral toward Moscow rather than hostile like the Taliban. The latter ultimately gained the upper hand in Afghanistan in the 1990s before being ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition and, at the time of this writing, was negotiating a power-sharing agreement with Washington.
Gareyev, Gromov and Kryuchkov all pointed out in their books and interviews that the Soviet withdrawal may have robbed the mujahedeen of one of their rhetorical casus belli, but it did not and could not have ended hostilities, as the rebels strove to finish off Najibullah’s regime. Yet the new Soviet leadership (Gorbachev and his team) was so keen to withdraw from Afghanistan that a POW/MIA clause was not the only one they forgot to insert into the Geneva Accords: While the U.S.-Soviet declaration obliged both countries to cut aid to warring factions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other sponsors of the Afghan mujahedeen either were not bound by the accords or ignored them, continuing to supply aid and rightly calculating that the Soviets were in no mood to enforce agreements as their country grew weaker.
Gromov wrote that Pakistan was failing to abide by the accords even as the Soviets honored their obligations: “We knew that the government of Pakistan did not really fulfill most of the clauses of the signed agreements. As before, insurgent bases operated on the territory of that country, [and] weapons were continuously flowing from there,” he wrote in his book. Gromov refrained from evaluating Pakistan’s failure to honor its commitments, but Gareyev was blunt in his criticism of the Soviet leadership’s failure to make Islamabad comply: “Neither the Soviet nor the Russian foreign ministries did anything to achieve the implementation of the Geneva Accords by the United States and Pakistan…
[While] the Soviet troops left, all the military bases and training centers of the mujahedeen in Pakistan remained. Soviet military aid to the Republic of Afghanistan was stopped, but the supply of weapons and ammunition to the mujahedeen continued,” he wrote.
“Why did we need long and expensive negotiations with the Americans and Pakistanis and the Geneva Accords if only one side abided by them and the other was not going to do anything? It would have been easier to withdraw the Soviet troops unilaterally and resolve the issue without any diplomatic games,” Gareyev wrote. Former KGB officer Garkavy struck a similar note in his book. He criticizes the Soviet leadership for committing to end assistance to Afghanistan in exchange for a U.S. commitment to end assistance to the mujahedeen because such reciprocity did nothing to stop aid that the Afghan rebels were getting from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and Kuwait.
In addition to trying to obtain enforceable guarantees from external stakeholders, the Soviets could have also done more to press their own client into reconciliation when still providing the DRA with substantial aid because such aid could be used as leverage. As Gareyev wrote, “there were no tangible results in the implementation of the policy of national reconciliation. The concept of political settlement in Afghanistan put forward by the Afghan leadership was perceived by many [PDPA] party leaders as a loss of its current leading role in governing the country and, for many members of the leadership, as having to leave the government positions they held.”
Lesson 13:
Even after you leave, prevent mission creep.
Even when the bulk of the troops have been withdrawn and only a small contingent of military advisors are left behind to help the ally retain positions, it is important to continue avoiding mission creep. Otherwise, leaders of the (no longer) intervening power may find themselves in the same predicament as Al Pacino’s character in “Godfather III” when he exclaimed: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” According to Gareyev, such mission creep nearly occurred again after the 40th Army was withdrawn with only 30 Soviet advisors and some guards left behind. The general recalled in his book how Dmitry Yazov, the-then defense minister, told him—when dispatching him to Afghanistan in 1989 to act as the chief Soviet military advisor after the 40th Army’s withdrawal—that his task was to make sure Najibullah’s regime survives for at least three or four months; if it did, Yazov argued, then maybe a political resolution of the conflict could be attained in that time.
But, seeing Najibullah’s regime last for a year after the OKSVA withdrawal, some top officials in the KGB and Foreign Ministry began to assert that Najibullah’s troops and their Soviet advisors had been on the defensive long enough and should now initiate “decisive, offensive actions in all directions,” Gareyev wrote. He also wrote that he had had a hard time convincing some leaders in Moscow to refrain from such “adventurist aspirations” that “could only lead to the most negative consequences.” It is easy to see how, if DRA forces would have gone on a major offensive, they could have suffered a disastrous defeat, strengthening the case made by Najibullah and some of his supporters in Moscow – who tried to prevent withdrawal of OKSVA – from brining the troops back in.
Lesson 14:
Last but not least: Be willing to learn the lessons.
Last but not least, strategists of an intervening power need to be willing to infer and internalize lessons that the intervention has generated. Otherwise, they will be more likely to repeat mistakes and less likely to replicate some of the intervention’s successes.
An estimated 620,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were rotated in and out of Afghanistan during the 10-year campaign. (The author of this paper still remembers, as an adolescent, the sinking feeling upon seeing his father, Soviet Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Saradzhyan, pack for another komandirovka to Afghanistan at the time.)
However, while the rank-and-file learned to fight in the country’s rugged mountains because it was a matter of survival, not all of their commanders did. Members of the military-political leadership need to be willing to learn the lessons that present themselves during a campaign—that is the final lesson inferred for this paper from Soviet commanders’ and officials’ recollections of the country’s intervention in Afghanistan.
According to Gromov, in the summer of 1981, with the intervention well into its second year, the Soviet Defense Ministry decided to send the commanders of several military districts to Afghanistan for several days to learn the lessons learned there by the OKSVA. Many of the dispatched high commanders and their staff officers showed no real interest, however, thinking the lessons would be of little use to them because the local war was local whereas they had been preparing for a major international conflict with NATO. Ironically, though his book came out in 1994 when Russians troops were fighting an anti-insurgency campaign in the mountains of Chechnya, which was in some ways similar to Afghanistan, Gromov did not draw such a parallel. Rather than focus on lessons, some of the commanders spent much of their time in Afghanistan examining whether barracks were tidy, “whether the soldiers’ beds were made and there were slippers next to the nightstands,” Gromov wrote.
When these visiting commanders did venture out to combat areas, they were asking why there is no loudspeaker communication between the commander and his artillery unit. “By and large, no one got interested in the experience we acquired. It was simply ignored and it was not integrated into education. Apparently, they believed it was better to keep silent about the war in Afghanistan.
I think the reason the war was initiated should not affect whether the invaluable combat experience [accumulated over its course] is studied or not,” Gromov wrote. Soviet advisors likewise did not apply the inferable lessons when shaping the Afghan military they were advising. “How did it happen that the structure of the Afghan armed forces was created exactly according to our model and the experience of a nine-year war did not yield any changes in that structure,” KGB general Shebarshin wrote in his book after more than 20 tours of duty in Afghanistan.
Finally, a year and a half after ascending to the post of general secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev too faulted the Soviet military top brass for failing to infer and learn some lessons from the Afghan war. “In Afghanistan, we have been fighting for six years,” Gorbachev told a Nov. 13, 1986, meeting of the Politburo. “If you do not change the approaches, then we will be fighting there for another 20-30 years.
This would cast a shadow on our ability to influence the development of events. I must also tell our military that they are learning poorly from this war. … In general, we have not found the keys to solving this problem. Are we going to fight endlessly, as testimony that our troops are not able to deal with the situation? We need this process completed soon,” he said.
Thoughts and summy of the 14 lessons.
As demonstrated above, the Soviet leadership made a number of mistakes, first [1] when contemplating whether to intervene in Afghanistan, then [2] during the intervention and, finally, [3] when withdrawing the troops.
Some of these mistakes were particularly costly, such as the failure to take full stock either of the hierarchy of vital national interests at stake in Afghanistan or of the costs and benefits of intervention. Had the leaders in Moscow paid attention to the full array of potential costs presented to them, they may have avoided the fateful error of sending troops en masse across the Soviet-Afghan border.
The Soviet leadership also erred in failing to clearly formulate the troops’ mission beyond regime change, creating confusion and debates among top commanders about what it is they were supposed to achieve in Afghanistan once Amin was replaced with Karmal and how.
Whatever the mission, the Soviet military operations would have probably dealt greater setbacks to the armed Afghan opposition at lower costs to the Soviet troops if the various Soviet government agencies had fostered effective coordination of their activities from the very beginning—including, first and foremost, the sharing of intelligence on the ground.
The Soviets eventually learned the importance of such sharing and corrected the mistake.
However, even such coordination, or better training of DRA forces by their mentors, could not have led to a decisive defeat of the opposition forces as long as many of the DRA forces remained unwilling to fight.
Therefore, it was a matter of time before the Soviets realized that their only option was to leave. That was the right decision, which was made in spite of pressure from the DRA ruling elite. However, while leaving was the right move and its military component (the actual withdrawal of troops) was executed well, the diplomatic and political aspects of that maneuver were not without flaw. Not only did the Soviet government fail to secure guarantees for the return of POWs and MIAs, but it also failed to secure enforceable commitments from other external powers involved in the conflict to discontinue aid to the Afghan rebels in what could have at the very least delayed the fall of Najibullah’s regime.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was not what bankrupted the Soviet Union or led to its collapse, contrary to U.S. President Donald Trump’s January 2019 take on Soviet Russia’s experiences in Afghanistan, which he offered as he argued in favor of a U.S. troop withdrawal from the country. Rather, as Yegor Gaidar convincingly demonstrated, a combination of structural economic and other factors played the lead role in the demise of the Soviet empire. However, that intervention, which caused horrendous hardship for many Afghans, did contribute to the demise by imposing formidable human, financial, economic, political and reputational costs on the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Soviet leaders did eventually realize some of the mistakes they had made in Afghanistan and sought to correct them.
Not all erroneous decisions can be reversed and some of them can have disastrous consequences.
Therefore, if faced with a situation that passes May’s test for historical analogies to the Soviet predicament vis-à-vis Afghanistan, Western leaders would do well to learn from those mistakes, rather than make their own, even if some senior Russian legislators are now planning to convince their compatriots that the Soviet intervention was the right thing to do.
And so… now we have the American debacle…
And this here it kind of sums things up from the point of view of American “allies” and other neocons throughout the American military empire. They are not happy…
…and emotion is clouding their judgement.
Debacle.
Yeah. It’s a mess.
What is HELL is America and the UK doing there in the first place?
Well, here’s some clear and true points well stated…
The USA should stay?
And let’s not forget what he said in his younger days as the President of Singapore. This next video has to be one of the very best video clips that I have ever seen in my life. Check it out…
And now, since you all know a little bit of history, and a little bit about the UK and RUssian experience, you should be well equipped to read this great article…
Nasrallah: Afghanistan is worst debacle in US history, Biden hopes for civil war
Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, on August 17, 2021, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 9th night of Ashura, two days before the martyrdom of Imam Hussein.
Transcript:
[…] My last point is Afghanistan, which I quickly mentioned before. What is happening in Afghanistan right now is an emergency situation that is grabbing the attention of the whole world. Inside the United States, this is the main event all are talking about, and of course everyone blames each other, just like in Lebanon, people are all the same: the Republican Party blames the Democrat Party, blames Biden, and describes the scene as a humiliation for the United States, (a proof of) weakness, helplessness, failure, historic defeat, shame, disgrace, etc. If we want to faithfully describe (the political situation in the United States), we can say that they are tearing each other apart. The same goes for the position of European countries, of the leaders of certain European countries [United Kingdom, France, Germany…], who speak with very strong and very negative words to assess the situation in Afghanistan.
Suppressed crocodile tears: that’s all British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has to offer all his Afghan allies that the Royal Army won’t evacuate.#Afghanistanhttps://t.co/HbIh7DR9ay
— Le Cri des Peuples (@cridespeuples2) August 21, 2021
It is indeed a striking and vitally important spectacle, filled with lessons to be learned, and we all must…
It is not something that one or two speeches is enough to describe, for the situation continues to develop, and deserves everyone to watch it carefully and think about it seriously, very seriously.
This should not simply be of interest to (pseudo-)experts (in) strategic (issues), who are very numerous today, ma sha Allah, experts, analysts, no: all men and women (must feel) that what is currently happening in Afghanistan (is their concern), and all that has been said so far remains little in the face of the importance and consequences of what is happening in Afghanistan, at the historical, strategic, ideological, cultural, political, psychological and moral levels.
And those who must be the most assiduous in the reading (and the interpretation) of this (considerable) event to draw the strategic and historical consequences from it are the peoples of this region. Yes, the people of the Middle East must be the first to care about what is happening. Because what is happening in Afghanistan is a very big and even masterful lesson.
The images that you see and have all seen on TV screens speak for themselves… and all the media around the world (follow and broadcast what is happening), because however strong the censorship system of the United States may be, (it is powerless to prevent the mass distribution of these images).
On the subject of social networks and the Internet, which the United States has opened up and spread around the world to instrumentalize them in color revolutions here and there, they find themselves caught in their own trap, because even inside of the United States, the government of Biden can certainly influence such newspapers or such television channels (to dissuade them from broadcasting these humiliating images), but how could it prevent millions and tens of millions of users of social networks who disseminate and share these images?
And glory to God, these are exactly the same images as in Vietnam!
As in Saigon, the (American nationals) climbed stairs to access a helicopter on a roof (and escape), we see exactly the same thing happening at Kabul airport! It’s extraordinary ! A real photocopy! Can we believe that this is just a coincidence?
PHOTO 1: US diplomat evacuate US from embassy via helicopter as the #Taliban enter #Kabul from all sides. #Afghanistan (2021)
PHOTO 2: US diplomat evacuate US from embassy via helicopter as the PAVN & Viet Cong capture of Saigon, Vietnam (1975) pic.twitter.com/YamWmzjOay
— Stefan Simanowitz (@StefSimanowitz) August 15, 2021
History repeats.
Either way, the images of Afghanistan and the fall of Afghanistan into the hands of the very movement that the United States fought for 20 years and expelled (from power), before handing the country over to them on a silver platter…
The Taliban flag flies over Kabul airport.
I have already mentioned Afghanistan in my previous speech [cf. below], and today Biden took the floor to try to defend himself…
I said before that instead of rushing to achieve the withdrawal of his troops, as long as the American forces were present , and since the Afghan forces (formed by the USA) have 300,000 to 400,000 members —between soldiers and police forces— he should have cut a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban, in favor of the formation of a transitional government, which would have avoided everything that happened, allowing the United States to withdraw with dignity.
Why didn’t he do this?
Because he couldn’t bear to stay any longer (in Afghanistan). Honestly! It was not out of respect that Biden did not do this.
And don’t take my word for it, listen to what Biden himself said! Listen to Biden, listen to his Secretary of State and his National Security Advisor… Because now they are forced to explain themselves to the American people…
They do not explain themselves to the peoples of the world, but to the American people who is amazed at these humiliating images of defeat and failure.
Listen to his explanations, and you will understand the American point of view.
I’m not going to make you a (full) TV report, but I hope everyone will listen carefully to what Biden said yesterday, today, and what American (authorities) will say in the days to come.
Give seriously some time to their statements, as this will give a good understanding of the historical and strategic consequences of the (humiliating) defeat and (monumental) failure of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan. It is a matter of concern to us as peoples of the region, and gives us lessons that we can use for our present and our future.
I’m going to stop on two points (of Biden’s speech).
In his speech today, he said
“We have spent over a trillion dollars, that is over a thousand billion dollars! They spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan! And they left crestfallen, empty-handed, with Honaïn’s shoes as the saying goes, humiliated, defeated, ashamed, in disgrace. And this according to the admission of their own media, and Western media. What does this prove?
That they have failed (miserably), that they have been routed, that they are helpless, ignorant and stupid.
Biden himself said that the US did not foresee that the Afghan government and forces would collapse so quickly, and was surprised that they neither fought nor resisted. The Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor said the same thing. What does this indicate?
People imagine the United States to be a demigod, omniscient, analyzing and mastering everything at their fingertips, knowledgeable about everything, able to plan everything through its state-of-the-art study and planning centers with top notch skill and technology, with huge & infaillible plans, etc.
But the reality is far from all that!
In our region, the United States is ignorant, unable to understand anything!
For decades, they have been repeating the same mistakes, deploying the same experiments and the same calculations doomed to failure!
This is one of the lessons to be learned!
Biden says it is not the fault of the United States, but the fault of the Afghan forces who did not fight. But my dear, these Afghan forces, you left them without air force, because the air force is in your hands, (and you did not allow them to develop it), while claiming that you spent a trillion dollars .
This is the first point.
Second, these Afghan forces were led by your generals, who prepared doomed (war) plans for them! What (war) plans did you concoct, what (military) advice did you provide to these Afghan forces?
Third, what did Biden want (ultimately)? What does his confession reveal? Because he did not know how to hold his tongue, too entangled in his defense (awkward, and he unmasked himself).
He wanted a civil war!
He wanted the Afghan forces to wage war on the Taliban, a war between hundreds of thousands (of fighters) against hundreds of thousands (of fighters), and he would just have to sit down and enjoy the spectacle. bloody in Afghanistan.
Whereas if he had humanity, and cared (for the well-being) of people as he claims, he would have presided over an agreement and a settlement of the conflict before withdrawing from Afghanistan.
(This contempt for the lives of Afghans) is an ethical and moral downfall of the American administration!
This moral degradation is emphasized even by leading politicians and commentators in the United States and elsewhere.
This is why Biden says today that he wanted a political solution (between the Afghan government and the Taliban), but that Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan President, did not want it. You see? Biden pins the blame on him, and claims to be faultless!
These words reminded me of those verses of the Qur’an which speak of the devil:
“[And Satan will say when the matter is decided: “It was God Who gave you a promise of truth: I too promised but I failed in my promise to you. I had no authority over you except to call you but ye listened to me.] Then reproach not me but reproach your own souls. » [Quran, 14, 22]
(The damned) are invited not to impute to the devil (their bad actions which will lead them to Hell), but to only blame themselves!
What were the American administrations doing with all the those tax dollars in Afghanistan? pic.twitter.com/winabg5GEn
— Syrian Girl (@Partisangirl) August 16, 2021
It was you (pro-US Afghans) who put yourselves at the service of the Americans, who listened to them and obeyed them, who placed your hopes in them and bet on them, but they got to the point where they told you (quite simply) fare well, « Bye-bye » [Nasrallah says it in English].
And what kind of « Bye-bye » are we talking about?
What is happening at Kabul airport is incredible, it is heartbreaking and sad. Because in the end (these Afghans who want to flee) are human beings. We have all seen this (American military) plane advance with dozens of people around it, without worrying about them, without the pilot stopping, while he could have run over them!
And he saw that people had clung to the plane, but took off anyway! Whether they fall and crash (horribly to the ground) or not, that’s not his problem!
Desperate Afghans trying to flee the Taliban hanging on to US military plane to get out of Kabul and fall to their deaths. Low flying US Apache helicopters chasing Afghan civilians off the runway with their rotor blades. But Julian Assange is the criminal? pic.twitter.com/RPT1o48MqL
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 16, 2021
This is the United States! What I’m telling you is all over the media, I’m not inventing anything! They embarked police dogs, but did not embark the Afghans who collaborated with them!
They embarked equipment which costs only money, but did not embark human beings, who are human beings, men, with human rights! Such is the United States, (this is their true face)!
Everything that is happening in Afghanistan, even if in Lebanon we are absorbed by our daily problems, I hope that we will pay attention to it and will consider it as the pivotal moment that it is, because for 50 or 60 years, there was nothing like it.
And this will have a great impact on international policies, international relations, international alliances. And today, those who observe and comment on these events most attentively are the Israelis!
If the US stopped supporting Israel tomorrow, Tel Aviv would fall faster that Kabul.
— Syrian Girl (@Partisangirl) August 16, 2021
Because when Biden said, and this is a message to all of America’s allies in the region (including Israel), when Biden was defending himself, he said something very, very, very, very, very, very, very… (repeat it until you lose your breath) important, and I hope America’s “friends” in Lebanon and the region will read this very carefully.
Biden said
“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war in the place of anyone else.“
If anyone expects the Americans to come and fight for them, this is what Biden says!
Listen up Taiwan.
Listen up Australia.
Listen up South Korea.
Listen up Europe.
And in order not to fight for anyone else, he is ready to endure a historic and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan! When we talk about Lebanon or whatever, in comparison, it is only an (insignificant) detail (in the eyes of the Americans).
At least 40 people have died since Monday in a stampede and shooting in Kabul International Airport, TOLOnews TV channel reported – citing a Taliban commander who is inside the airport.
According to him, the people died after “foreign troops opened fire” as well as a stampede
— ASB News / MILITARY (@ASBMilitary) August 17, 2021
In conclusion, in what is happening in Afghanistan, are very big and very important lessons, and we must take advantage of them and act accordingly, at the cultural, ideological & emotional levels, at the level of our choices, of our hopes, of our our reading (of events), of our alliances, of our infrastructure, at the economic, political, military, security levels, etc.
This was my conclusion during my last speech, when I said that we must only rely on God and on ourselves!
We must not wait for the United States, nor their training, nor their advice, nor their support, nor their false promises, nor their plots! We do not want their good nor their evil.
Of course no good can come from them. The good resides in our people, in our (Arab-Muslim) Community, in our region, in the Arab-Muslim peoples. It is on them that we must rely. Because we have all these possibilities and capacities.
This is so sweet.
The Iranian interpreter got emotional when Sayyed Nasrullah said Iran never abandones its allies, biggest evidence being the dismembered hand of martyr Qassem Soleimani in Iraq where he was assassinated beside his ally and friend Abu Mahdi Al Muhandishttps://t.co/m1nRrXbkkA
— Marwa Osman || د. مروة عثمان (@Marwa__Osman) August 20, 2021
I am done on this subject.
I will meet you tomorrow, for the 10th night (of the month of Muharram, the eve of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein), the night of the last meeting, and of the big fare well.
Peace be upon you, O my master Aba ‘Abdillah al-Hussein, and on the souls who dwell in your court! On you, from me, the Peace of God, forever, as long as I exist and as long as night and day last! May God not make this the last time I am visiting you! Peace be upon Hussein, upon ‘Ali son of Hussein, upon the children of Hussein and upon the companions of Hussein!
Peace be upon you, as well as the Mercy of God and His blessings.
I’ve never seen the American people so inconsolable before. If their mothers had died tragically, it wouldn’t be that much grief. Didn’t imagine a defeat in godforsaken Afghanistan would be so devastating.
Has the Dollar Empire given up the dream of a global empire?
Haven’t seen strong signals to conclude “yes.”
What is the national hierarchy in the Financial Empire?
The Financial Empire is a global debt based financial system administered by the City of London and Wall Street, and enabled by NATO & Six Eyes (Five Eyes [USA+UK+Aus+Can+NZ] + Israel)?
The Global Financial Empire’s hierarchical structure looks like the following:
Core: SIX Eyes – English Union, huge debt generators, negative trade balance (U$A, UK)
Conquered: EU/Germany,.., Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea – Debt distributors, positive trade balance (supporting the US$)
Capital Rich: Russia, China, Brazil, Africa, Iran, ME – (Resource/Asset rich)
Circumference countries: ROW
The U$A is the top management layer, CEO/CFO. It has a board seat. Why is it creating lots of IOUs?
The Financial Titanic (Dollar Empire) is taking water (Debt) at an exponential rate. This is UNSUSTAINABLE. Are Americans sleeping or having fun while music is playing?
The average age of a global reserve currency is 94 years (80-110). It is said the US$ started on its reserve trajectory in 1921.
When will this Financial Titanic break?
Something to ponder about while you read over the next article.
Here's another article.
Despair in the Empire of Graveyards
Or Gilbert and Sullivan Come to Afghanistan, Depending on Your Perspective
Forty-six years ago in a previous comedy I was in Saigon, recently having been evacuated from Phnom Penh in an Air America—CIA—Caribou carrying, in addition to me, several ARVN junior officers and perhaps a dozen BUFEs (Big Ugly Fucking Elephants, the ceramic pachyderms much beloved of GIs).
America had already embarked on its currently standard policy of forcing small countries into wars and then leaving them in the lurch.
Caribou aircraft.
In Cambodia this led to the reign of Pol Pot, the ghastly torture operation at Toul Sleng, and a million or so dead. In the unending fight for democracy, casualties are inevitable.
At the time Saigon was tense because Ban Me Thuot had fallen and the NVA roared down Route One toward Saigon.
To anyone with the brains of a doorknob, the American adventure in Vietnam was coming to an end, but the embassy was studiedly unconcerned.
Embassies do not have the brains of a doorknob, but are keenly aware of public relations. Acknowledging the inescapable is not their way.
As usual, Washington would rather lie than breathe, and did.
As in Cambodia, so in Nam, and so later in Afghanistan.
Apparently a genius at State realized that a lot of gringo expats lived in Nam—the number six thousand comes to mind, but may be wrong—and that six thousand hostages taken when Saigon fell would be bad PR.
So the embassy in Kabul—Saigon, I meant to say, Saigon—quietly announced that expats could fly out on military aircraft from Ton Son Nhut.
They didn’t, or at least many didn’t. The NVA continued its rush toward Saigon.
The expats didn’t fly out because they had Vietnamese wives and families and were not going to leave them, period. These wives may not have had the trappings of pieces of paper and stamps and maybe snippets of ribbon. These things do not seem important in Asian war zones. But the expats regarded them as wives. Period. The family went, or nobody did. Period.
The embassy didn’t understand this because embassies are staffed by people from Princeton with names like Derek who wear pink shirts and don’t know where they are. The ambassador is usually a political appointee being rewarded for campaign contributions and probably doesn’t speak the language as few gringos spikka da Pushto or Vietnamese or Farsi or Khmer. For example, nobody at all in the embassy in Cambodia spoke Khmer.
The rank and file of State are better suited to a high-end Rotarian barbecue than a Third World city teeming with strange people in funny clothes eating God knows what horrible things in winding frightening alleys.
And so the State people could not understand why an American would marry one “of them,” as in the embassy I once heard a gringa put it. It was a good question. Why would a man marry a pretty, sleek, smart, self-reliant woman who wanted family and children? It was a great mystery.
The Taliban—NVA, I mean–NVA kept coming closer. A PR disaster loomed.
Meanwhile the PR apparatus insisted that the sky wasn’t really falling even as it did and no, no, no the US had not gotten its sit-down royally kicked by a ratpack of rice-propelled paddy maggots, as GIs described the opposition.
Many in government seemed to believe this. This was an early instance, to be repeated in another part of Asia, of inventing a fairyland world and then trying to move into it.
Finally State faced reality, a novel concept. It allowed quietly that expats and their families could fly out, military. It was getting late, but better than nothing.
The comedic value of this goat rope grew, becoming more amusing by the hour. I was trying to get a young Vietnamese woman out as she had worked for the embassy and we suspected things might not go well with her under the NVA.
Call her Linda. Linda and I took the bus to Tan Son Nhut. The Viet gate guards gave her a hard time, envying her for getting out while they could not, but we got in.
I was going to tell the State people that we were married but that while I was in Can Tho, by then in VC hands, see, the marriage papers had slipped from my carrying case.
This was obvious bullshit, but I guessed that if I made a huge issue of it they would bend rather than get in a megillah with a reporter, no matter how unimportant.
We found ourselves in a long line of expats with their families leading to the door of a Quonset hut, inside of which a State official was checking papers. Some of the expats had around them what appeared to be small villages of in-laws, brothers of wives, sisters, everything but the family dog.
An official with a bull horn told us to write down all their names and the relationships on clipboards being passed around. Tran Thi Tuyet Lan, sister, for example.
Then a genius at the embassy or Foggy Bottom realized that something resembling a third of Viet Nam was about to come out, listed as in-laws.
Policy changed, at least in Washington which was as usual blankly ignorant of reality on the ground. At Tan Son Nhut this meant telling men that they had to leave parts of their families behind, which they weren’t going to do.
This would not look good above the fold in the Washington Post. Dozens of Americans taken captive because the State Department would not let their families out.” All was confusion because the US had spent years telling itself that the disaster couldn’t happen. What to do?
American ingenuity kicked in. At the Quonset hut the guy with the bullhorn announced, “From now on, all mothers-in-law are mothers, all brothers-in-law are brothers. Change your forms.” All along the line, magic markers went through “in-law.”
This meant that some women had two mothers, but this under the circumstances seemed a minor biological quibble.
The guy with the bull horn was at most three feet from the guy in the Quonset hut who was certifying papers as valid. He solemnly looked at the papers with their strike-through’s, , certified them as correct, and that was that. A field expedient.
Hours and hours went by. Night came. Tempers frayed. Nobody seemed to have planned how actually to get these people out. Nobody seemed to have planned anything. Finally a 130 howled in.
This was the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a four-engine turboprop cargo bird and a magnificent plane. It taxied over. The engines did not shut down. The prop wash was strong and hot.
The tail ramp dropped.
The waiting mob were rushed aboard without ceremony. There were no seats in the dark cavern of the fuselage. That would have required planning, which no one in Washington had thought of. The air reeked of burned aviation kerosene. We squatted on the cargo deck while an Air Force guy with a bullhorn warned, “Keep the kids’ hands out of the expansion slots, you’ll lose them.”
The real-world Air Force didn’t have people named Derek in pink shirts and if you told it all rules off, get the job done, it did. Ramp up, fast taxi, takeoff run, tight corkscrewing climb with the engines running at power I didn’t know they had.
The NVA and VC were now very close due to incompetent planning (have I mentioned incompetent planning?) and might have SAM-7s so it wasn’t a good idea to fly over territory they now controlled. Cutting and running from a stupid war run by generals as clueless as they were careerist, with Saigon spinning below, seen through open doors amid tightly packed peasants going they had little idea where.
Days later when we got to San Fran on a chartered airliner, hundreds of refugees were dumped into the main concourse, no immigrations, customs, or paperwork.
And now we have done it all over again in Kabul, complete with helicopters over the embassy and a panicked evacuation undertaken way too late and sudden concern for turncoat Afghans who made the mistake of working for the US. There is talk of importing 20,000 Afghan refugees to America. I find it amusing that many conservatives, who thought the war was peaches because it was about democracy and niceness and American values, now object to importing people their dimwitted enthusiasms put in line to be killed. Use and discard. Countries and people.
There was the now-traditional underestimation of the speed of the insurgent advance, the predictable deprecation of the “good” Afghans for not fighting with sufficient enthusiasm for the Empire: If they didn’t care enough to defend their country, Biden would say with earnest cluelessness, what could we do?”
So why did this happen? Why another rush to the exit as the world laughs? Which the world is doing. In a sentence, because if you do something stupid and it doesn’t work, it probably won’t work when you do it again.
The psychological explanation is slightly more complex. Vietnam is a good example. America invaded a country of another race, utterly different culture, practicing religions GIs had never heard of, speaking a language virtually no Americans spoke, a country exceedingly sick of being invaded by foreigners, most of them white. in Afghanistan the designated evil was terrorism, in in Viet Nam communism, but the choice of evils doesn’t matter. You have to tell the rubes at home something noble sounding.
Then the Americans did as they always do, training the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, to fight the communists to impose democracy, which the Viets had not asked them to do. But when you ask some Viets (Bodes, Laos, Iraqis, Afghans) to fight other Viets (Bodes, etc.) to kill their own people for the benefit of the invaders, they are not greatly charmed.
With a predictability that makes sunrise seem chancy, they desert, fight lackadaisically, with officers charging the US pay for soldiers who do not exist, and probably go over to the other side en masse when the collapse comes. Which latter the Afghan army just did. Duh, as the kids say.
The speed of the Taliban advance took Americans by surprise because officers are liars and had been hiding the deplorable state of the “Afghan” army, its numbers, morale, degree of training, and phenomenal rates of desertion.
Often the American officer corps thinks that if it can just have a little more time, they can win, so lying is a part of the war effort.
Biden bought into this, announcing that the Afghan army vastly outnumbered the Taliban and was better armed and trained and the insurgents couldn’t possibly do what they proceeded to do.
Another reason is that the American style of war recruits its enemies. Soldiers are not the Boy Scout defenders of civilization that so many like to imagine. They kill a lot of civilians, many tens of thousands in the bombing of cities such as Baghdad and Hanoi.
Ground troops come to detest the natives whom they designate gooks, zipperheads, sand niggers, camel jockeys, and the like.
They commit war crimes that, when discovered, are called “isolated incidents,” when in fact they are common.
Fragmentation bombs produce such things as a little girl crying with her belly torn open and intestines falling out while her mother goes stark raving bugfuck mad watching her daughter bleed to death and she can do nothing about it.
But it is for democracy and American values, and anyway the ragheads breed like flies, and besides, CNN won’t air it.
Today drone strikes hit weddings and other gatherings.
When you kill people in a village, the young men join the insurgents, wanting revenge. When a few thousands were killed in Nine-Eleven, Americans exploded in rage. Three thousand is a small fraction of the numbers killed in, say, the attack on Baghdad.
The Iraqi soldiers killed in a hopeless attempt to defeat the Americans were sons, fathers, husbands, brothers of other Iraqis. How much love do we think it engendered in Iraqis? This seems not to occur to Washington.
Militaries at bottom are amoral. Afghans know of the torture operations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Americans seem to dismiss such things as minor. They are not. Afghans seeing Moslems lying in pools of blood at Abu Ghraib, or being paraded around naked in hoods, are going to want to kill someone. Guess who.
American wars last a long time because no one has an incentive to end them. American casualties are low, especially now with the killing mostly done from the air against peasants with no defenses.
No important American ever gets killed. American wars are all class wars, with the dying being done by blue-collar suckers from Kansas or the deep South, not by Bush II, Hillary, the other Clinton, Bolton, Bannon, Obama, Blinken, Biden, Cheney, Kamala, Trump, and the rest of those not required to fight.
The US public has little idea of what goes on in its wars because the corporate media hide them. the Pentagon having learned that the media are their worst enemy, not the Taliban.
It would not surprise me if one unfettered camera crew, filming the corpses and mutilated children and devastation, could force an end to such a war.
Americans are not heartless but calculatedly uninformed. Wars are also extremely profitable for those who provide the bombs, fuel, vehicles, and so on. If the US loses a war, the contracts stop, and equally if it wins.
Keeping it going for decades provides a steady revenue stream.
What’s not to like?
Finally, or as much as I am going to worry about, there is the 1955 Syndrome, the engrained belief that America is all powerful.
This is arrogance and self-delusion. In the Pentagon you encounter a mandatory can-do attitude a belief that the US military is indomitable, the best trained, armed, and led force in this or any nearby galaxy.
In one sense this is necessary: You can’t tell the Marines that they are mediocre light infantry or sailors that their aircraft are rapidly obsolescing, their ships sitting ducks in a changing military world, and that the whole military enterprise is rotted by social engineering, profiteering, and careerism.
But look around: The US has failed to intimidate North Korea, chase the Chinese out of its islands in the South China Sea, retrieve the Crimea from Russia, can’t intimidate Iran, just got run out of Afghanistan, remains mired in Iraq and Syria, failed to block Nordstream II despite a desperate effort, and couldn’t keep Turkey from buying the S-400.
The Pentagon plans for the wars it wants to fight, not the wars it does fight. The most dangerous weapons of the modern world are not nukes, but the Ak-47, the RPG, and the IED. Figure it out.
And now the US comes home, leaving Afghanistan in ruins for decades. Use and discard.
Here's another note, collected over the week...
Dear [redacted]
” China will not initiate trouble but is not afraid of trouble “
” Willing to talk ? The door is wide open !
Want to fight ? We will entertain you ! “
Absolutely, Chua !
In a nutshell, that’s my life philosophy !
Or as President Xi Jinping said
准 备 打 仗 打 胜 仗
Zhun3 Bei4 Da3 Zhang4 Da3 Sheng4 Zhang4
Be ready to fight victoriously !
And then we have this little blub that also came to the MM mailbox...
From [redacted]
Peace can sometimes only be achieved via well armed and the readiness in hit back.
The reason US and NATO dare not attack Russia is because they are well armed with nuclear weapons, and putin has made it clear that “don’t F with a nation with nuclear weapons.” putin also warn US, “if there is any missile fly toward Russia, Russia will regard it as nuclear attack, and will immediately response with nuclear missiles. ” this is why no one dare to bomb the Russian (including their military bases in Syria.)
When trump visited Beijing before starting the trade war, China offer trump $235b worth of deal. Guest what happen next?
Trump think that China is afraid of US, and thinking he can demand more from China. He has instead begin his first stage of trade war and announce to move on to the 2nd stage within months. He then claim that trade war is easy to win.
What trump didn’t expect is that China hit back.
China never stab on anyone on the back. China has made it clear all the times, “China will not initiate trouble and are not afraid of trouble”
China also make it clear: ” willing to talk? The door is wide open! Want to fight? We will entertain you.”
So, China simply respond to a situation initiated by the crusaders Nd not stabbing on people back. We should not expect China simply stood there fir people to bomb.
In Australia, China has issue numerous warning before hitting back.
China outline a 14 grievance created by Australia.
In Chinese history, they rather build wall, marrying princess, and initial a tribute system to keep peace, but if someone push too hard thinking they are in the position of strength, they will eventually be crushed .
This is not back stabbing. This is a last resort to keep peace.
The defeat of the crusaders in the Korean war allow China to enjoy the next 50 years of relative peace with the crusaders.
Today, the armed with AK47 Taliban successfully chase away the crusaders simply because they fight back.
Only when the crusaders are defeated, the Afghanistan people can then rebuilt their nation and looking forward to a better future with China belt and road.
Asia will again become the world most peaceful and wealthy region before the end of 21st century when China successfully chase away the trouble maker from the region.
The crusaders can also enjoy peace and prosperity if they change their mindset and get rid of their corrupt, low quality fake democratic political system. They need to control property price, nationalised industry that provide basic needs to the people like water, electricity, mining, health, pension fund, education, public transport etc like what China do.
Wealth redistribution from Wall Street to allow the 99% also doing well. This will automatically make a nation strong, a society in harmony.
Cheers
[redacted]
.
I have to tell you that there has been a lot of messages, articles, comments and thoughts flowing back and forth all week. Here's another...
Whether you supported the 20-year war in Afghanistan or not, if you are American, you paid for it. Two Trillion Dollars. Your personal tax tab is 7 thousand dollars.
If you sent a relative or friend into this horror in South Asia, you paid an emotional price also.
If your relative or friend lost his or her life, you paid again, most grievously.
If you are one who returned, PTSD is taking a toll on your life. You pay every night and day, psychologically.
If you came back with traumatic wounds, you pay each moment as you try to rehabilitate and recover.
And with all these payments and losses you sit in front of a TV or monitor and watch the most feckless, incompetent leadership on the face of the Earth. You see total disorder, amateur thinking, and disgraceful performance of State Dept. and US Military. The top command and elected officials, the top counselors and advisers, each and every one clueless, ignorant, flummoxed by reality. They know nothing and can do nothing. Yet, they lead the country.
If you are fond of NATO, the alliance just took a huge hit.
So, the 75 years of unity and the 20 years of joint operations in Afghan are tossed away unilaterally. NATO is fracturing.
They know Biden is a fraud and the US is aimless.
You finally hear from the President of the United States, the reasoning that was the policy and follow through. It makes no sense. The old man is irrational.
Day after day this continuing catastrophe you see the same imbeciles prove over and over that they don’t know how to think, organize, lead or inspire.
Admiral John Kirby spokesman for the Defense Dept., Ned Price spokesman for State Dept., Jan Psaki spokeswoman for the WH, all of them know nothing, have no facts to report, seem bewildered by simple questions.
Listening to Jake Sullivan, NSC explains, is more naïveté and kindergarten-level thinking.
Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin are a quiniela of incompetence, both are lost in Critical Race Theory and too busy to win a war, command an evacuation, secure billions of dollars in lethal weaponry or answer a simple question with believable facts. Two Four-Star Dumb and Dumbers.
These dolts cut off the US government pipeline for the citizens caught inside Afghanistan, their lifeline to the State Dept. and consular staff has gone just when they need them.
These jackasses sent off all the resources their citizens needed for evacuation.
They inadvertently point blame to the Clown-in-Chief Biden, who reflexively blames Trump for the policy Biden created.
Then the inept US military took six days to bring in 7000 troops to work security at the airport. These troops, they told us, were pre-positioned and ready to go. Another massive failure of military logistical performance.
There are more days of this until the artificial deadline on the 31st. The odds are there will be 20-30,000 Americans and Afghanis who worked for and with our military left behind. This is totally unacceptable. They will become hostages to Taliban authorities.
The only good result of this debacle is it hurts Biden politically and makes a change in the Congress much more likely in 2022.
Biden’s Kabul is worse than Ford’s Saigon and Carter’s Tehran. And it is far from over.
As a citizen, you are embarrassed, ashamed, insulted, depressed, left helpless, enraged, and damn angry at the juvenile operational disaster in plain sight at Kabul airport.
Biden and Harris should be impeached. The entire NSC staff should be fired. The JCS chief and the JCS staff and the SOD should be fired. The State Dept. from top-down to consular staff should be fired.
It is their turn to pay for this national embarrassment, geopolitical disaster, and human tragedy.
August 12, 2021. History will register it as the day the Taliban, nearly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent toppling of their 1996-2001 reign by American bombing, struck the decisive blow against the central government in Kabul.
In a coordinated blitzkrieg, the Taliban all but captured three crucial hubs: Ghazni and Kandahar in the center, and Herat in the west. They had already captured most of the north. As it stands, the Taliban control 14 (italics mine) provincial capitals and counting.
First thing in the morning, they took Ghazni, which is situated around 140 kilometers from Kabul. The repaved highway is in good condition. Not only are the Taliban moving closer and closer to Kabul: for all practical purposes they now control the nation’s top artery, Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar via Ghazni.
That in itself is a strategic game-changer. It will allow the Taliban to encircle and besiege Kabul simultaneously from north and south, in a pincer movement.
Kandahar fell by nightfall after the Taliban managed to breach the security belt around the city, attacking from several directions.
In Ghazni, provincial governor Daoud Laghmani cut a deal, fled and then was arrested. In Kandahar, provincial governor Rohullah Khanzada – who belongs to the powerful Popolzai tribe – left with only a few bodyguards.
He opted to engage in an elaborate deal, convincing the Taliban to allow the remaining military to retreat to Kandahar airport and be evacuated by helicopter. All their equipment, heavy weapons and ammunition should be transferred to the Taliban.
Afghan Special Forces represented the cream of the crop in Kandahar. Yet they were only protecting a few select locations. Now their next mission may be to protect Kabul. The final deal between the governor and the Taliban should be struck soon. Kandahar has indeed fallen.
In Herat, the Taliban attacked from the east while notorious former warlord Ismail Khan, leading his militia, put up a tremendous fight from the west. The Taliban progressively conquered the police HQ, “liberated” prison inmates and laid siege to the governor’s office.
Game over: Herat has also fallen with the Taliban now controlling the whole of Western Afghanistan, all the way to the borders with Iran.
Tet Offensive, remixed
Military analysts will have a ball deconstructing this Taliban equivalent to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Satellite intel may have been instrumental: it’s as if the whole battlefield progress had been coordinated from above.
Yet there are some quite prosaic reasons for the success of the onslaught apart from strategic acumen: corruption in the Afghan National Army (ANA); total disconnect between Kabul and battlefield commanders; lack of American air support; the deep political divide in Kabul itself.
In parallel, the Taliban had been secretly reaching out for months, through tribal connections and family ties, offering a deal: don’t fight us and you will be spared.
Add to it a deep sense of betrayal by the West felt by those connected with the Kabul government, mixed with fear of Taliban revenge against collaborationists.
A very sad subplot, from now on, concerns civilian helplessness – felt by those who consider themselves trapped in cities that are now controlled by the Taliban. Those that made it before the onslaught are the new Afghan IDPs, such as the ones who set up a refugee camp in the Sara-e-Shamali park in Kabul.
A new generation of IDPs in Afghanistan.
Rumors were swirling in Kabul that Washington had suggested to President Ashraf Ghani to resign, clearing the way for a ceasefire and the establishment of a transitional government.
On the record, what’s established is that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin promised Ghani to “remain invested” in Afghan security.
Reports indicate the Pentagon plans to redeploy 3,000 troops and Marines to Afghanistan and another 4,000 to the region to evacuate the US Embassy and US citizens in Kabul.
The alleged offer to Ghani actually originated in Doha – and came from Ghani’s people, as I confirmed with diplomatic sources.
The Kabul delegation, led by Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of something called the High Council for National Reconciliation, via Qatar mediation, offered the Taliban a power-sharing deal as long as they stop the onslaught. There’s been no mention of Ghani resigning, which is the Taliban’s number one condition for any negotiation.
The extended troika in Doha is working overtime. The US lines up immovable object Zalmay Khalilzad, widely mocked in the 2000s as “Bush’s Afghan.” The Pakistanis have special envoy Muhammad Sadiq and ambassador to Kabul Mansoor Khan.
The Russians have the Kremlin’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov. And the Chinese have a new Afghan envoy, Xiao Yong.
Russia-China-Pakistan are negotiating with a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) frame of mind: all three are permanent members. They emphasize a transition government, power-sharing, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political force.
Diplomats are already hinting that if the Taliban topple Ghani in Kabul, by whatever means, they will be recognized by Beijing as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan – something that will set up yet another incendiary geopolitical front in the confrontation against Washington.
As it stands, Beijing is just encouraging the Taliban to strike a peace agreement with Kabul.
The Pashtunistan riddle
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has minced no words as he stepped into the fray. He confirmed the Taliban leadership told him there’s no negotiation with Ghani in power – even as he tried to persuade them to reach for a peace deal.
Khan accused Washington of regarding Pakistan as “useful” only when it comes to pressing Islamabad to use its influence over the Taliban to broker a deal – without considering the “mess” the Americans left behind.
Khan once again said he “made it very clear” there will be no US military bases in Pakistan.
This is a very good analysis of how hard it is for Khan and Islamabad to explain Pakistan’s complex involvement with Afghanistan to the West and also the Global South.
The key issues are quite clear:
1. Pakistan wants a power-sharing deal and is doing what it can in Doha, along the extended troika, to reach it.
2. A Taliban takeover will lead to a new influx of refugees and may encourage jihadis of the al-Qaeda, TTP and ISIS-Khorasan kind to destabilize Pakistan.
3. It was the US that legitimized the Taliban by striking an agreement with them during the Donald Trump administration.
4. And because of the messy withdrawal, the Americans reduced their leverage – and Pakistan’s – over the Taliban.
The problem is Islamabad simply does not manage to get these messages across.
And then there are some bewildering decisions. Take the AfPak border between Chaman (in Pakistan’s Balochistan) and Spin Boldak (in Afghanistan).
The Pakistanis closed their side of the border. Every day tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly Pashtun and Baloch, from both sides cross back and forth alongside a mega-convoy of trucks transporting merchandise from the port of Karachi to landlocked Afghanistan. To shut down such a vital commercial border is an unsustainable proposition.
All of the above leads to arguably the ultimate problem: what to do about Pashtunistan?
The absolute heart of the matter when it comes to Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan and Afghan interference in the Pakistani tribal areas is the completely artificial, British Empire-designed Durand Line.
Islamabad’s definitive nightmare is another partition. Pashtuns are the largest tribe in the world and they live on both sides of the (artificial) border. Islamabad simply cannot admit a nationalist entity ruling Afghanistan because that will eventually foment a Pashtun insurrection in Pakistan.
And that explains why Islamabad prefers the Taliban compared to an Afghan nationalist government. Ideologically, conservative Pakistan is not that dissimilar from the Taliban positioning. And in foreign policy terms, the Taliban in power perfectly fit the unmovable “strategic depth” doctrine that opposes Pakistan to India.
In contrast, Afghanistan’s position is clear-cut. The Durand Line divides Pashtuns on both sides of an artificial border. So any nationalist government in Kabul will never abandon its desire for a larger, united Pashtunistan.
As the Taliban are de facto a collection of warlord militias, Islamabad has learned by experience how to deal with them. Virtually every warlord – and militia – in Afghanistan is Islamic.
Even the current Kabul arrangement is based on Islamic law and seeks advice from an Ulema council. Very few in the West know that Sharia law is the predominant trend in the current Afghan constitution.
Closing the circle, ultimately all members of the Kabul government, the military, as well as a great deal of civil society come from the same conservative tribal framework that gave birth to the Taliban.
Apart from the military onslaught, the Taliban seem to be winning the domestic PR battle because of a simple equation: they portray Ghani as a NATO and US puppet, the lackey of foreign invaders.
And to make that distinction in the graveyard of empires has always been a winning proposition.
A nation is made of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity. Ernst Renan called it a “daily plebiscite.” He said a nation needs a “common will in the present,” and the wish to perform great deeds in the future. Identity is a feeling, but feelings, emotions, personalitiesandbeliefs come from the blood. We don’t create ourselves, and we can’t be other than what we are. Polities are temporary, but peoples endure.
I remember September 11, 2001. I never knew what people meant by “blood running cold” until I looked at New York City from my favorite hill and saw the smoking ruin where the Trade Center had been. I felt a deeply personal insult.
An abstraction called “America” hadn’t been attacked. This was something real. “Freedom” wasn’t under attack. It was my city, my people, my country that these savages had assaulted. American unity was awesome. President George W. Bush could have asked for anything from the country. The grief and righteous anger could have changed the world.
Now these feelings seem absurd and embarrassing. Patriotism is at a record low, even among conservatives. It’s hard to define what “America” means, or if it even exists.
Part of this is because the response to the attacks had nothing to do with defending America. President Bush could have stopped immigration, worked to defend the Christian faith he supposedly holds, and renewed patriotism. He did none of these things. Multiculturalism and anti-white preferences are far stronger today. Rather than seizing the moment to push assimilation and patriotism in schools, they teach Critical Race Theory and other anti-white ideas. Islam, once a marginal force in American life, has joined homosexuality and black identity as one of our national totems.
In 2001, the attackers entered the country legally through holes in our immigration laws. The holes are still there and immigration is worse than ever. The Muslim population of the United States has grown continuously, despite support for a total ban on Muslim immigration. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, was a black nationalist who once argued for ending the Union — and no black congressmen ever said that was wrong. We fought in Afghanistan and Iraq to bring “democracy” to foreigners, who rightly hated us for trying to turn them into something they were not. The Iraq War’s most lasting consequence, and the greatest impact of the so-called Christian Right, may have been to destroy what was left of Christianity in Iraq. A SEAL team eventually killed Osama bin Laden. Crowds cheered, but that seems hollow now.
What was the purpose of the wars? If they were to “spread democracy,” they failed. If they were to defend the “American way of life,” they failed. The America of 2021 is a nightmare to a patriot from 2001. It’s bad enough that today’s “American way of life” is imposed on us, let alone on foreigners. If the War on Terror was supposed to keep us “safe,” that also failed. America seems far more besieged than before 2001, despite trillions spent and intrusive surveillance. America even faces the possibility of real defeat in a conventional war against great powers. If our government took foreign terrorism seriously, we would not have a porous border.
What happened over the last 20 years is something deeper. Thousands of Americans are still in Afghanistan, and the defense secretary said the world’s sole superpower has “no capability” to go outside the Kabul airport to get them out. “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this [Afghan proxy] army and this government in 11 days,” said General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Incredibly, he didn’t resign. President Biden bizarrely defended himself by saying that the scenes of desperate people fleeing the country and falling off airplanes were from “four, five days ago.”
We had to leave Afghanistan, but it’s astonishing that we had no plan to protect Americans, secure weapons, or even protect the airport. Those in charge pay no price for failure.
After September 11, Americans thought American power had been roused and we would smite our enemies. Instead, we sacrificed thousands of young men to bring “democracy” to foreigners. Iraqi and Afghani cooperation (or collaboration) went no farther than a paycheck. Many Americans even died at the hands of their supposed “allies” in “green on blue” attacks, which killed more than 150 coalition troops by 2020.
Now we have a supposed “obligation” to bring in Afghans. How many “green on blue” attacks will we get in the homeland? President George W. Bush (in)famously defended the wars by saying that “we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Now, it appears we fought Afghans “there” so we could bring Afghans “here.” If an estimated 99 percent of Afghans want to make Sharia the basis of law, it’s hard to claim we are bringing “pro-American” Afghans here. The ones who come will learn in no time to complain about “white supremacy.”
The United States could have pulled out of Afghanistan in late 2001 after removing the Taliban and still continued the hunt for Bin Laden, who was in Pakistan. The US could have declared victory after it killed Bin Laden. Instead, the country spent trillions trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. This included propping up a miserably corrupt government, promoting female politicians who never visited their constituencies, spending more than $780 million on “gender programs,” celebrating “Pride Month,” and, most infamously, punishing American soldiers who tried to stop child abuse by Afghan allies. And we were supposed to be fighting for the “good guys?”
There isn’t even an “Afghanistan.” It is a patchwork of tribes. Rather than working with the tribes, the United States tried to impose an artificial “national” government. The United States rejected the idea of re-establishing the Afghan monarchy, which had the support of most tribes. Instead, America imposed Hamid Karzai. The ungrateful stooge now blames the USA and NATO for his country’s collapse. Old ethnic and tribal patterns have re-emerged.
The Taliban is mostly Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group. Just as in 2001, the old “Northern Alliance” is coming together in Panjshir, led by the son of the legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik. Afghanistan’s tribal society may make it almost impossible for foreigners to conquer, but it also makes it almost impossible to unify. Turning tribal groups into Afghans is hard enough. America should never have tried to turn them into proto-Americans.
Indeed, we can’t even turn refugees into Americans. And they certainly won’t be grateful. The most prominent “refugee” in American life is Rep. Ilhan Omar. She said September 11 was nothing more than “some people did something,” and brags, “This is not going to be the country of white people.” Tucker Carlson says she’s proof our country is “not very good at resettling refugees.” The Hmong, another group of American “allies” imported after Vietnam, have been a disaster for America and a burden on social services.
America itself is turning into a tribal society. Pat Buchanan explains:
The more diverse we have become, it seems, the less united we have become, even about public manifestations of patriotism — the American flag, the national anthem, the pledge of allegiance. Nor do our history, holidays and heroes unite us as once they did.
Is the system that rules us worth defending? No. If that makes me a “traitor,” I would say only that there is nothing to betray. Our rulers have already betrayed us.
The Afghan and Iraqi wars did nothing to protect this country. They made things worse. Every servicemen sent was sacrificed by a government that doesn’t deserve them. Soldiers deserve respect, but their commanders and politicians deserve scorn. I have yet to hear one veteran say the wars were worth it. Even the legendary Pat Tillman came to oppose the Afghanistan War — before he was accidentally killed by his own comrades. “Were all our sacrifices wasted?” heartbroken veterans ask. Yes.
Reportersbragaboutgetting the military to purge white soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who had a racial consciousness. Perhaps we should thank them. Eighty-five percent of those who died in Afghanistan were white. Their government clearly doesn’t appreciate them. Afghanistan was not worth one life, nor are the interests of politicians and financiers.
The military teaches Critical Race Theory. General Mark Milley was telling Congress less than two months ago why we had to study “white rage.” He should have been studying intelligence reports on the Taliban.
Patriots must not die for the interests of those who despise them. If China moves on Taiwan, let journalists, defense contractors, and affirmative action pets do the fighting. The Global American Empire’s interests are not ours.
After September 11, it was common for liberals to mock the idea of a “War on Terror,” How do you fight an idea? No one is mocking the fight against “hate.” If those in power want to wage war, it may be against us.
President Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” is designed to spy on white advocates and censor us. The Patriot Act and other national security laws pushed through after September 11, 2001 are now used against American citizens. If the FBI decides you are under investigation, it can seize your assets, and there is nothing you can do. The United States government has lost all moral authority to call Russia or China authoritarian. Even the Taliban is mocking Facebook (whichis underincreasing pressureby the federal government to censor content) for hypocrisy on free speech.
Even liberal news outlets are now doubting the supposed “militia” plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. It appears the FBI wasencouragingtheplot, not thwarting it. (An FBI agent involved in the investigation was just arrested for assault.) Shun anyone who ever talks about violence. He’s probably a government employee looking to justify his paycheck.
PayPal and the ADL are teaming up to investigate the financial transactions of users to fight “racism.” When a system mouthpiece, Jimmy Fallon, mentioned that whites were a declining share of the population, the audience applauded, which even Mr. Fallon found bizarre. And there was the widespread celebration at the death of Ashli Babbitt, who was a misguided victim.
When I see the scenes of retreat and shame in Afghanistan, I feel humiliation, but also schadenfreude. This strips naked the fools who have been sending soldiers to die. I long for the America that was, and mourn for the brave men who died for a government that doesn’t deserve them. And yet there is a certain satisfaction in the ruling class’s humiliating defeat.
The Jewish publication Tablet, marveling at the desire of the American elite to destroy its own country, says:
[T]here are no institutional elites left to ask whether it’s a good idea to purge the combat ranks of the U.S. military by targeting “white supremacism.” America’s all-volunteer military is 43% minority, but the majority of its combat units are made up of white males. So why purge them? To make America vulnerable to foreign adversaries? Maybe the elites are more fearful of the domestic cohort still armed with a powerful group solidarity — i.e., patriotism — and most likely to defend what the elites are determined to destroy.It’s frightening to see American leadership pulling America apart at the seams. And it’s shocking to see our constitutional order ripped to shreds as the establishment undercuts property rights, imposes capricious public health regulations, mandates experimental medical treatments, and holds political prisoners.
This author is right. The elite wants to unmake the middle class and sees patriotic white men as the real threat. This leaves us with a tragic choice between our people and “our” government. On September 12, 2001, I’d have attacked someone who even suggested there was a distinction. Today, I find myself a man without a country. I don’t discount the possibility of a solution within the system. We must obey the law, pay our taxes, and fight to reclaim our rights. But there may be no electoral solution. Our future may be South Africa.
We should talk openly of secession That is how this country began. Those who rule us don’t value the Founders, but we do.
Two decades after September 11, America’s rulers are disgraced, humiliated, and unaccountable. What legitimacy do they have besides their courts and their guns? We must build alternative institutions that can win the loyalty of our people. We must provide for them in the dark times that are coming.
As we turn our backs on the Regime, we do not turn our backs on America. America can survive the degenerate ruling class on the Potomac. If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that a strong tribe can outlast a failing empire.
We are the nation. America is ours and always will be. Renan had an “abridged hymn of every fatherland” that quoted from a Spartan song: “We are what you were, we will be what you are.” If we can get enough whites to believe that, anything is possible. The empire is dying; let the nation be reborn.
The years ahead will be dark, but we should rejoice. We live at arguably the most important time in our people’s history. America, Western Civilization, and the white race can survive only as one. It’s up to us.
Had, enough? Here's another...
Oh, did you see this?
Biden forfeits his Afghan victory by defending his Deep State advisors
By Michael Hudson, first posted at Unz Review and Expanded for The Saker Blog
President Biden put a popular flag-waving wrapping for at America’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan in his 4 PM speech on Monday. It was as if all this was following Biden’s own intentions, not a demonstration of the totally incompetent assurances by the CIA and State Department as recently as last Friday that the Taliban was over a month away from being able to enter Kabul. Instead of saying that the massive public support for the Taliban replacing the United States showed the incompetent hubris of U.S. intelligence agencies – which itself would have justified Biden’s agreement to complete the withdrawal with all haste – he doubled down on his defense of the Deep State and its mythology.
The effect was to show how drastic his own misconceptions are, and how he will continue to defend neocon adventurism. What seemed for an hour or so as a public relations recovery is turning into a denouement of how U.S. fantasy is still trying to threaten Asia and the Near East.
By throwing all his weight behind the propaganda that has guided U.S. policy since George W. Bush decided to invade after 9/11, Biden blew his greatest chance to burst the myths that led to his own bad decisions to trust U.S. military and state officials (and their campaign contributors).
His first pretense was that we invaded Afghanistan to retaliate against “its” attack on America on 9/11. This is the founding lie of U.S. presence in the Near East. Afghanistan did not attack us. Saudi Arabia did.
Biden tried to confuse the issue by saying that “we” went into Afghanistan to deal with (assassinate) Osama Bin Laden – and after this “victory,” we then then decided to stay on and “build democracy,” a euphemism for creating a U.S. client state. (Any such state is called a “democracy,” which means simply pro-American in today’s diplomatic vocabulary.)
Hardly anyone asks how the U.S. ever got in. Jimmy Carter was suckered by the Polish Russia-hater Brzezinski and created Al Qaeda to act as America’s foreign legion, subsequently expanded to include ISIS and other terrorist armies against countries where U.S. diplomacy seeks regime change. Carter’s alternative to Soviet Communism was Wahabi fanaticism, solidifying America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia. Carter memorably said that at least these Muslims believed in God, just like Christians. But the Wahabi fundamentalism army was sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which paid for arming Al Qaeda to fight against Sunni Moslems and, early on, the Russian-backed Afghan government.
What is so typical of America’s aggressive Cold War mindset is that it could have much more easily (and at much lower cost) won Afghanistan by honey, by having so much more to offer economically than did Russia. Documents released from Soviet archives show that:
None of the Soviet documents list terrorists going into the USSR as a concern in 1979. The Soviet worry was the incompetence and worse of their Afghan Communist clients, the declining Soviet influence (much less control) in the country, and the possibility of Afghanistan going over to the Americans.
Soviet Politburo documents that first became available in the 1990s show the real Soviet fear was that the head of the Afghan Communist regime, Hafizullah Amin, was about to go over to the Americans. (Egyptian president Anwar Sadat famously flipped in 1972, ejected thousands of Soviet advisers, and became the second largest recipient, after Israel, of U.S. foreign aid.)[1]
This policy predates President Carter, of course.
It was endemic in America’s Cold War force-oriented strategy since the 1950s.
Over 60 years ago, for instance, I sat in on a meeting with Fidel Castro’s representatives trying to get support from the Democratic Party and Kennedy for their overthrow of the Batista regime.
Imagining that it was the Republicans and the Dulles brothers that were the hardliners, they expected that the incoming Democratic Party diplomacy would find their self-interest in giving economic support to help Cuba’s economy recover from the corrupt dictatorship.
My father warned them that the Democrats would be just as force-oriented.
On my visits to Cuba, it was obvious that the population and even many government officials would have welcomed a deal whereby the loosened their Castroite economic policy in exchange for U.S. aid.
The United States has never tried to use this tactic in the Caribbean or Latin America, any more than it has done in Afghanistan.
That is the neocon mentality:
“Do it by force, don’t give any other country a choice.”
A “market-based” tradeoff of aid for economic policy acquiescence is not U.S. policy. Offering a carrot still leaves the choice to America’s designated adversary.
The only way to make sure that a country will obey is to confront it with brute force.
That is the mentality behind U.S. support for Maidan and the neo-Nazi Bandaristas opposing Russia instead of simply trying to help reform Ukraine.
And so it has gone in Afghanistan. After Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama funded Al Qaeda (largely with the gold looted from destroying Libya) to fight for U.S. geopolitical aims and oil in Iraq and Syria.
The Taliban for its part fought against Al Quaeda.
The real U.S. fear therefore is not that they may back America’s Wahabi foreign legion, but that they will make a deal with Russia, China and Syria to serve as a trade link from Iran westward.
Biden’s second myth was to blame the victim by claiming that the Afghan army would not fight for “their country,” despite his assurances by the proxies whom the U.S. installed that they would use U.S. money to build the economy.
He also said that the army did not fight, which became obvious over the weekend.
The police force also did not fight. Nobody fought the Taliban to “defend their country,” because the U.S. occupation regime was not “their country.” Again and again, Biden repeated that the United States could not save a country that would not “defend itself.” But the “itself” was the corrupt regime that was simply pocketing U.S. “aid” money.
The situation was much like what was expressed in the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto finding themselves surrounded by Indians. “What are we going to do, Tonto,” asked the Lone Ranger.
“What do you mean, ‘We,’ white man?” Tonto replied.
That was the reply of the Afghan army to U.S. demands that they fight for the corrupt occupation force that they had installed.
Their aim is to survive in a new country, while in Doha the Taliban leadership negotiates with China, Russia and even the United States to achieve a modus vivendi.
So all that Biden’s message meant to most Americans was that we would not waste any more lives and money fighting wars for an ungrateful population that wanted the U.S. to do all the fighting for it.
President Biden could have come out and washed away the blame by saying: “Just before the weekend, I was told by my army generals and national security advisors that it would take months for the Taliban to conquer Afghanistan, and certainly to take control of Kabul, which supposedly would be a bloody fight.”
He could have announced that he is removing the incompetent leadership engrained for many years, and creating a more reality-based group.
But of course, he could not do that, because the group is the unreality-based neocon Deep State.
He was not about to explain how
“It’s obvious that I and Congress have been misinformed, and that the intelligence agencies had no clue about the country that they were reporting on for the last two decades.”
He could have acknowledged that the Afghans welcomed the Taliban into Kabul without a fight.
The army stood aside, and the police stood aside.
There seemed to be a party celebrating the American withdrawal.
Restaurants and markets were open, and Kabul seemed to be enjoying normal life – except for the turmoil at the airport.
Suppose that Biden had said the following:
“Given this acquiescence in support for the Taliban, I was obviously correct in withdrawing the American occupation forces.
Contrary to what Congress and the Executive Branch was told, there was no support by the Afghans for the Americans.
I now realize that to the Afghan population, the government officials that America installed simply took the money we gave them...
... and put it into their own bank accounts...
... instead of paying the army, police and other parts of civic society.”
Instead, President Biden spoke about having made four trips to Afghanistan and how much he knew and trusted the proxies that U.S. agencies had installed.
That made him seem gullible.
Even Donald Trump said publicly that he didn’t trust the briefings that he was given, and wanted to spend money at home, into the hands of his own campaign contributors instead of abroad.
Biden could have picked up on this point by saying,
“At least there’s a silver lining: We won’t be spending any more than the $3 trillion that we’ve already sunk over there.
We can now afford to use the money to build up domestic U.S. infrastructure instead.”
But instead President Biden doubled down on what his neocon advisors had told him, and what they were repeating on the TV news channels all day: The Afghan army had refused to fight “for their country,” meaning the U.S.-supported occupation force, as if this was really Afghan self-government.
The media are showing pictures of the Afghan palace and one of the warlord’s office.
I did a double-take, because the plush, wretched-excess furnishings looked just like Obama’s $12 million McMansion furnishings in Martha’s Vineyard.
Obama officials are being trotted out by the news spinners.
On MSNBC, John Brennan warned Andrea Mitchell at noon that the Taliban might now back Al Qaeda in new destabilization and even use Afghanistan to mount new attacks on the United States.
The message was almost word for word what Americans were told in 1964:
“If we don’t fight the Vietcong in their country, we’ll have to fight them over here.”
As if any country has an armed force large enough to conquer any industrial nation in today’s world.
The whole cast of America’s “humanitarian bombing” squad was there, including its harridan arm, the Democratic Party’s front organizations created to co-opt feminists to urging that Afghanistan be bombed until it treats women better.
One can only imagine how the image of Samantha Power, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Susan and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention Indira Gandhi and Golda Maier, will make the Taliban want to create its own generation of ambitious educated women like these.
President Biden might have protected himself from Republican criticism by reminding his TV audience that Donald Trump had urged withdrawal from Afghanistan already last spring –and now, in retrospect, that the Deep State was wrong to advise against this but that Donald was right.
That is what his order for withdrawal was acknowledging, after all. This might have detoothed at least some Trumpian criticism.
Instead, Mr. Brennan and the generals trotted in front of the TV cameras criticized Biden for not prolonging the occupation until the fall, when cold weather would deter the Taliban from fighting.
Brennan stated on Andrea Mitchell’s newscast that Biden should have taken a ploy out of his “The Art of Breaking the Deal” by breaking the former president’s promise to withdraw last spring.
Delay, delay, delay.
That is always the stance of grabitizers refusing to see the resistance building up, hoping to take what they can get for as long as they can – with the “they” being the military-industrial complex, the suppliers of mercenary forces and other recipients of the money that Mr. Biden curiously says that we spent “in Afghanistan.”
The reality is that not much of the notorious $3 trillion actually was spent in Afghanistan.
It was spent on Raytheon, Boeing and other military hardware suppliers, on the mercenary forces, and placed in the accounts of the Afghan proxies for the U.S….
…maneuvering to use Afghanistan…
…to destabilize Central Asia on Russia’s southern flank and western China.
It looks like most of the world will quickly recognize the Afghan government, leaving the U.S., Israel, Britain, India and perhaps Samoa isolated as a recalcitrant block living like the post-World War I royal families still clinging to their titles of dukes, princes and other vestiges of a world that had passed.
Biden’s political mistake was to blame the victim and depict the Taliban victory as a defeat of a cowardly army not willing to fight for its paymasters.
He seems to imagine that the army actually had been paid, provided with food, clothing and weapons in recent months simply because U.S. officials gave their local proconsuls and supporters cash for this purpose.
I understand that there is no real accounting of just what the $3 trillion U.S. cost was actually spent on, who got it the shrink-wrapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills passed down through America’s occupation bureaucracy.
(I bet the serial numbers were not recorded. Imagine if that were done and the U.S. could announce these C-notes demonetized!)
The U.S. is now (20 years after the time it should have begun) trying to formulate a Plan B.
Its strategists probably hope to achieve in Afghanistan what occurred after the Americans left Saigon: An economic free-for-all that U.S. companies can co-opt by offering business opportunities.
On the other hand, there are reports that Afghanistan may sue the United States for reparations for the illegal occupation and destruction still going on as the country is being bombed in Biden’s flurry of B-52 anger.
Such a claim, of course, would open the floodgates for similar suits by Iraq and Syria – and the Hague in Holland has shown itself to be a NATO kangaroo court.
But I would expect Afghanistan’s new friends in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to back such a suit in a new international court, if only to block any hopes by U.S. companies of achieving by financial leverage what the State Department, CIA and Pentagon could not achieve militarily.
In any case, Biden’s parting shot of nasty bombing of Taliban centers can only convince the new leadership to solidify its negotiations with its nearest regional neighbors with their promise to help save Afghanistan from any American, British or NATO attempt to try and come back in and “restore democracy.”
The world has seen enough of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “rules based order”.
And President Biden’s pretended history on whose mythology U.S. policy will continue to be based.
Add: It is not an accident that the politicians backed by the United States are so corrupt, ruling corrupt bureaucracies that increasingly alienate local populations.
There is a deliberate thought-out reason why American diplomats choose to work with such opportunistic grabitizers as clients whom they place in control.
It is precisely such people whom the U.S. sponsors can trust.
Suppose that you have some truly democratic idealists whose aim is to develop their country.
The problem is that such individuals cannot be trusted to follow U.S. diplomatic aims.
They may act on their own – and go their own way, independently of U.S. direction.
That is a risk that U.S. diplomats never choose to take.
The result is much like corporate bureaucracy, where opportunistic CEOs choose yes-men (or yes-women if they seek protective coloration by posturing as more woke). Such subordinates will support the boss in his own maneuvering, not serve the welfare of the firm.
That is why Boeing preferred financial managers to engineers, whose logic might not be that of the increasingly financialized company.
The aim of U.S. “aid” is not to help the country – or even to help “America” – but to help U.S. arms exporters, contractors, big engineering firms, and neocon ideologues in the CIA and State Department, along with ambitious generals in the military seeking a path to promotion and retirement on the board of directors of the military-industrial complex.
All this was expressed crisply by Zbigniew Brzezinski in famous advice for U.S. hegemonic strategy on the Eurasian continent:
Its aim should be…
“to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together.”
What kind of local leader indeed could one expect to implement such policy?
Here's yet another. Man! I am intentionally whipping a dead horse. But by the time this is all over, you all won't want to hear anything else about this section of the world...
When Ichiro played in the Major Leagues, he was always hounded by a mob of Japanese journalists and photographers, starting with the first day of Spring Training.
Sick of this, he told an interviewer he wished they would just disappear.“From your life?”“No, from this earth.”
The USA, though, is not being pestered but deformed, debilitated and, well, frankly destroyed by a host of people, many of whom you may not have heard of, so let’s us:
Imagine there’s no George Soros,
No Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Klaus Schwab, too.
No Jeff Zucker, Mark Zuckerberg, Arthur Sulzberger,
Jonathan Greenblatt, Larry Fink, David Solomon,
Robert Iger, Charles Scharf, Jamie Dimon,
Steve Schwarzman, Jeremy Zimmer, Len Blavatnik,
Andy Slavitt, Jeffrey Zients, Anthony Fauci,
Jessica Rosenworcel, Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler,
Betsy Berns Korn, Mort Fridman or, what the hell,
Nancy Pelosi also, mostly because she’s so icky.
Even more than most lists, it’s highly incomplete, but you get the idea.
Or maybe not. It’s too eclectic, you say, if not confusing.
What do they have in common?
They are all social engineers, out to remake America in ways that have nothing to do, at least initially, with the wishes of its majority…
… so there goes your democracy.
And that's the way it is, Jack!
As new norms are relentlessly propagandized, legalized then imposed, most Americans will learn to embrace their newly cowed, castrated selves.
Many clearly have.
When I tried to indict a cynical and sinister Uncle Sam in my last article, one who has wrecked not just dozens of foreign countries, but America itself, several readers took offense, not at Sammy, the Jew-jerked puppet, but me!
Clearly, they identify with the steel boots that are pinned on their faces, so fine, let them embrace their increasingly wretched fate, but what about others? What about their children?
Due to their parents’ nauseating cowardice, American kids are inheriting hell.
Notice I didn’t bother to list Biden, not because he’s already dead, but because American politicians are merely cabana boys and girls for their social engineering paymasters.
From president on down, they decide absolutely nothing.
Truly moronic…
… Americans keep waiting for the next election to vote in their savior…
… or they vote for an “independent” candidate as a symbolic gesture.
By merely voting, however, they endorse a system that’s openly destroying them.
With voting machines that can’t be audited, American presidential elections are designed to be rigged, with one of two vetted candidates allowed to win to keep the intramural bickering and catfight lurching along, to distract the dummies from seeing what’s going on.
(The last American politician with any integrity was Cynthia McKinney, and they’ve chased her all the way to Bangladesh. Once disappeared, she’s never mentioned by any former colleague, such is their collective cowardice.)
In any case, you don’t want to turn a clown like Obama or Trump, say, into a martyr or, God forbid, national hero, to be worshipped for centuries.
Not that America is likely to last another decade, especially since most of its “patriots” are curled up, with their eyes shut tight, as waves of degeneracy, idiocy and infamy lap over them.
As their family graves are routinely crapped on by their ruling wardens, these pant-soiling patriots keep muttering, “Please don’t fire, deplatform or cancel me, massa! I’ll do whatever you say. I’ve never whispered one bad word about you, not even online. I’ve only used my internet privilege to spit at Afghan refugees and Mexican dishwashers, but no, no, no, I’m no racist! Black lives matter! Please give me the blackest flip-flop to french kiss!”
Conditioned by Hollywood to enjoy others being chopped or blown up, many Americans are getting a kick out of the current terror and panic in Afghanistan.
Some justify this sick schadenfreude by saying these Afghans are collaborators who fully deserve their punishment or even death, but guess which country has provided the most collaborators, by far, to the evil empire?
America, of course.
To the millions who have fought for war profiteers and Jews, you must add all the employees of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon, etc., as well as all the academics who go along with the perverted, mostly Jewish-led social engineering agenda, and the journalists who spew nonsense and lies daily, on and on, so that, really, about the only innocent Americans are the little kids, those who will inherit a hellish, denatured reality as constructed by their clueless or spineless parents, not to mention an astronomical mountain of debts, as brought into being by a Jewish-dominated banking system.
Many Americans are also laughing at the quick collapse of the Afghan Army, but 66,000 of them did die fighting the Taliban and other opposition groups (who themselves suffered 51,191 deaths). 117,191 Afghan men, then, laid down their lives over conflicting versions of Afghanistan.
Do prove me wrong, but the only country that’s going down without any fight whatsoever is the United States of America.
But, but, but America has just created the largest military budget in history to "counter" China. Obviously a grand World War III is planned. What then? Can America destroy China?
China, Russia conclude joint military exercise
Updated 12:54, 14-Aug-2021
CGTN
A five-day joint military exercise between China and Russia, named ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021, concluded Friday in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
A four-phase exercise was held on Friday morning and attended by more than 10,000 service personnel and main battle armaments, including aircraft, artillery and armored vehicles of various models.
Chinese Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe and his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu observed the exercise and held talks later in the day.
Wei said that the Chinese and Russian armed forces have supported each other in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the high-level development of relations between the two militaries.
The two militaries should enhance strategic coordination and comprehensive and practical cooperation, so as to make greater contributions to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, and safeguarding world peace and stability, Wei said.
Russia is willing to enhance strategic communication with China, deepen cooperation in areas such as counterterrorism and work together to safeguard regional peace and stability, Shoigu said.
The two ministers also observed the signing of cooperation documents.
They announced the conclusion of the exercise in the afternoon of the day.
The exercise was the first joint military exercise held in China since the COVID-19 outbreak.
By Pepe Escobar: The Saker Blog and cross-posted at the Unz Review.
The first Taliban press conference after this weekend’s Saigon moment geopolitical earthquake, conducted by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, was in itself a game-changer.
The contrast could not be starker with those rambling pressers at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad after 9/11 and before the start of the American bombing – proving this is an entirely new political animal.
Yet some things never change. English translations remain atrocious.
Here is a good summary of the key Taliban statements, and
– No problem for women to get education all the way to college, and to continue to work. They just need to wear the hijab (like in Qatar or Iran). No need to wear a burqa. The Taliban insists, “all women’s rights will be guaranteed within the limits of Islamic law.”
– The Islamic Emirate “does not threaten anyone” and will not treat anyone as enemies. Crucially, revenge – an essential plank of the Pashtunwali code – will be abandoned, and that’s unprecedented. There will be a general amnesty – including people who worked for the former NATO-aligned system. Translators, for instance, won’t be harassed, and don’t need to leave the country.
– Security of foreign embassies and international organizations “is a priority.” Taliban special security forces will protect both those leaving Afghanistan and those who remain.
– A strong inclusive Islamic government will be formed. “Inclusive” is code for the participation of women and Shi’ites.
– Foreign media will continue to work undisturbed. The Taliban government will allow public criticism and debate. But “freedom of speech in Afghanistan must be in line with Islamic values.”
– The Islamic Emirate of Taliban wants recognition from the “international community” – code for NATO. The overwhelming majority of Eurasia and the Global South will recognize it anyway. It’s essential to note, for example, the closer integration of the expanding SCO – Iran is about to become a full member, Afghanistan is an observer – with ASEAN: the absolute majority of Asia will not shun the Taliban.
For the record, they also stated that the Taliban took all of Afghanistan in only 11 days: that’s pretty accurate. They stressed “very good relations with Pakistan, Russia and China.” Yet the Taliban don’t have formal allies and are not part of any military-political bloc. They definitely “won’t allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for international terrorists”. That’s code for ISIS/Daesh.
On the key issue of opium/heroin: the Taliban will ban their production. So, for all practical purposes, the CIA heroin rat line is dead.
As eyebrow raising as these statements may be, the Taliban did not even get into detail on economic/infrastructure development deals – as they will need a lot of new industries, new jobs and improved Eurasian-wide trade relations. That will be announced later.
The go-to Russian guy
Sharp US observers are remarking, half in jest, that the Taliban in only one sitting answered more real questions from US media than POTUS since January.
What this first press conference reveals is how the Taliban are fast absorbing essential P.R. and media lessons from Moscow and Beijing, emphasizing ethnic harmony, the role of women, the role of diplomacy, and deftly defusing in a single move all the hysteria raging across NATOstan.
The next bombshell step in the P.R. wars will be to cut off the lethal, evidence-free Taliban-9/11 connection; afterwards the “terrorist organization” label will disappear, and the Taliban as a political movement will be fully legitimized.
Moscow and Beijing are meticulously stage-managing the Taliban reinsertion in regional and global geopolitics. This means that ultimately the SCO is stage-managing the whole process, applying a consensus reached after a series of ministerial and leaders meetings, leading to a very important summit next month in Dushanbe.
The key player the Taliban are talking to is Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special presidential envoy for Afghanistan. In yet another debunking of NATOstan narrative, Kabulov confirmed, for instance, “we see no direct threat to our allies in Central Asia. There are no facts proving otherwise.”
The Beltway will be stunned to learn that Zabulov has also revealed, “we have long been in talks with the Taliban on the prospects for development after their capture of power and they have repeatedly confirmed that they have no extraterritorial ambition, they learned the lessons of 2000.” These contacts were established “over the past 7 years.”
Zabulov reveals plenty of nuggets when it comes to Taliban diplomacy: “If we compare the negotiability of colleagues and partners, the Taliban have long seemed to me much more negotiable than the puppet Kabul government. We proceed from the premise that the agreements must be implemented. So far, with regard to the security of the embassy and the security of our allies in Central Asia, the Taliban have respected the agreements.”
Faithful to its adherence to international law, and not the “rules-based international order”, Moscow is always keen to emphasize the responsibility of the UN Security Council: “We must make sure that the new government is ready to behave conditionally, as we say, in a civilized manner. That’s when this point of view becomes common to all, then the procedure [of removing the qualification of the Taliban as a terrorist organization] will begin.”
So while the US/EU/NATO flee Kabul in spasms of self-inflicted panic, Moscow practices – what else – diplomacy. Zabulov: “That we have prepared the ground for a conversation with the new government in Afghanistan in advance is an asset of Russian foreign policy.”
Dmitry Zhirnov, Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, is working overtime with the Taliban. He met a senior Taliban security official yesterday. The meeting was “positive, constructive…The Taliban movement has the most friendly; the best policy towards Russia… He arrived alone in one vehicle, with no guards.”
Both Moscow and Beijing have no illusions that the West is already deploying Hybrid War tactics to discredit and destabilize a government that isn’t even formed and hasn’t even started working. No wonder Chinese media is describing Washington as a “strategic rogue.”
What matters is that Russia-China are way ahead of the curve, cultivating parallel inside tracks of diplomatic dialogue with the Taliban. It’s always crucial to remember that Russia harbors 20 million Muslims, and China at least 35 million. These will be called to support the immense project of Afghan reconstruction – and full Eurasia reintegration.
The Chinese saw it coming
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi saw it coming weeks ago. And that explains the meeting in Tianjin in late July, when he hosted a high-level Taliban delegation, led by Mullah Baradar, de facto conferring them total political legitimacy. Beijing already knew the Saigon moment was inevitable. Thus the statement stressing China expected to “play an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan”.
What this means in practice is China will be a partner of Afghanistan on infrastructure investment, via Pakistan, incorporating it into an expanded China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) bound to diversify connectivity channels with Central Asia. The New Silk Road corridor from Xinjiang to the port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea will branch out: the first graphic illustration is Chinese construction of the ultra-strategic Peshawar-Kabul highway.
The Chinese are also building a major road across the geologically spectacular, deserted Wakhan corridor from western Xinjiang all the way to Badakhshan province, which incidentally, is now under total Taliban control.
The trade off is quite straightforward: the Taliban should allow no safe haven for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), and no interference in Xinjiang.
The overall trade/security combo looks like a certified win-win. And we’re not even talking about future deals allowing China to exploit Afghanistan’s immense mineral wealth.
Once again, the Big Picture reads like the Russia-China double helix, connected to all the “stans” as well as Pakistan, drawing a comprehensive game plan/road map for Afghanistan. In their multiple contacts with both Russians and Chinese, the Taliban seem to have totally understood how to profit from their role in the New Great Game.
The extended New Axis of Evil
Imperial Hybrid War tactics to counteract the scenario are inevitable. Take the first proclamation of a Northern Alliance “resistance”, in theory led by Ahmad Masoud, the son of the legendary Lion of the Panjshir killed by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11.
I met Masoud father – an icon. Afghan insider info on Masoud son is not exactly flattering. Yet he’s already a darling of woke Europeans, complete with a glamour pose for AFP, an impromptu visit in the Panjshir by professional philosopher swindler Bernard-Henri Levy, and the release of a manifesto of sorts published in several European newspapers, exhibiting all the catchphrases: “tyranny”, “slavery”, “vendetta”, “martyred nation”, “Kabul screams”, “nation in chains”, etc.
The whole set up smells like a “son of Shah” [of Iran] gambit. Masoud son and his mini-militia are completely surrounded in the Panjshir mountains and can’t be de facto effective even when it comes to regimenting the under 25s, two-thirds of the Afghan population, whose main worry is to find real jobs in a nascent real economy.
Woke NATOstan “analyses” of Taliban Afghanistan don’t even qualify as irrelevant, insisting that Afghanistan is not strategic and even lost its tactical importance for NATO. It’s a sorry spectacle illustrating how Europe is hopelessly behind the curve, drenched in trademark neo-colonialism of the White Man’s Burden variety as it dismisses a land dominated by clans and tribes.
Expect China to be one of the first powers to formally recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, alongside Turkey and, later on, Russia. I have already alluded to the coming of a New Axis of Evil: Pakistan-Taliban-China. The axis will inevitably be extended to Russia-Iran. So what? Ask Mullah Baradar: he couldn’t care less.
Now, let's focus on China, as China will play a major role in this region.
Sitrep : Here comes China : Military Drills, Extortion, the ‘Religious Freedom Balkanization’ Plan for China
The main news of the day is the Biden administration’s effort to sell 40 155mm M109A6 Medium Self-Propelled Howitzer artillery systems, 1,698 precision guidance kits for munitions, spares, training, ground stations and upgrades for previous generation of howitzers, to the island of Taiwan in a deal worth up to $750 million. China is, to say the least, livid.
US ‘large-scale’ military exercises cannot scare China, Russia
The US has begun two “large-scale” military exercises. The first is a joint Indo-Pacific military exercise led by the US Indo-Pacific Command with the participation of Japan, Australia and the UK. The other is the “Large-Scale Exercise 2021” held by US Navy around the world and is reportedly the largest naval exercise since 1981. A US military scholar told media that it is intended to demonstrate to China and Russia that US naval forces can simultaneously meet challenges in the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, South China Sea and East China Sea.
Chinese, Russian militaries to hold joint drill in NW China
YINCHUAN — A joint military exercise by the Chinese and Russian armies will be held from Aug. 9 to 13 at a training base of the People’s Liberation Army in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
The exercise, named ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021, is the first joint military exercise held inside China since the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the exercise’s leading group.
While we are right at the end of the Tokyo Olympics, the force is strong for canceling or otherwise interfering with the upcoming Beijing 2022 Games.
This is what Radio Free Asia (and people should recognize that for what it is), reports, and this is clearly within the human rights wars.
2021-07-27 — The International Olympic Committee on Tuesday said it had to “remain neutral” on global political issues in response to a request from the U.S. Congressional commission that asked it to postpone and relocate the 2022 Beijing Winter Games if China does not end its human rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs in its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The reply came in response to a letter that the bipartisan U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) sent to IOC president Thomas Bach. The commission made the letter public on July 23.”
Despite these efforts to do something to China, anything, before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese are keeping cool: “Off the field, observers noted that the success of the Tokyo Olympics under huge pressure is a desperately needed inspiration for the world. Tokyo’s experience in carrying out a major international event under such circumstances sets an example for next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics, experts said. ”
United States blackmail.
And then during the time of writing, the news broke. Part of the Xinjiang story, is pure hard blackmail: the US-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) blackmailed, bribed, and extorted a Chinese company and its US cooperative partner for $300,000 by threatening to hype up fabricated “forced labor” issues related to China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The complete Xinjian story of forced labor, a genocide (with no dead people), prison camps et al is falling apart like an overripe watermelon that just smashed itself falling off the watermelon buggy and is not fit for eating any longer.
A MUST READ report…
While we are on the topic of extortion, Alex Rubinstein did some undercover work.
He says:
“Using a friend’s company on my application and adopting a fake persona, I attended a three-day summit on religious freedom where leading figures in the Democratic Party including Nancy Pelosi, USAID Director Samantha Power and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ...
...joined up with anti-gay Evangelicals,
...a slew of shady NGOs and
...multiple bonafide cults to ratchet up pressure against China.”:
From this ‘Davos of Religious Freedom’, we see top democrats, top republicans, the Christian far right, some clear cults, NGO’s with no history, and just about every anti-China organization in the world right across the spectrum.
The objective? Balkanization under the guise of religious freedom as the new front in the new China cold war.
This report is incredibly detailed and would need some time to read through.
It is however recommended to understand the vast array of forces aligned in the new cold war against China.
The recent visit of US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, despite the usual initial nice and welcoming words apparently did not go down well. “A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that the talks were in-depth, frank, and beneficial to the relationship between the two countries.”
Days later the story changed materially. “We will no longer make unilateral efforts to maintain the public opinion atmosphere in China-US relations. Using illegal sanctions as a pretext, the US, aided by Canada, has effectively kidnapped a high-ranking Chinese corporate official, Meng Wanzhou, and is still threatening her with possible imprisonment. No other nation behaves so brazenly in defiance of international norms.
“The basis for such changes is that Chinese society has become fed up with the bossy US and we hold no more illusion that China and the US would substantially improve ties in the foreseeable future.
The Chinese public strongly supports the government to safeguard national dignity in its ties with the US and firmly push back the various provocations from the US.
In the face of the malicious China containment and confrontational policy adopted by the two recent US administrations, the Chinese people are willing to form a united front, together bear the consequences of not yielding to the US, and win for the country’s future through struggles.
In other words, Chinese society would unconditionally support whatever tough counterattacks the Chinese government would launch in the face of US-initiated conflicts in all directions toward China.
The US should abandon forever the idea of changing China’s system and policies through sanctions, containment, and intimidation.
We hope US allies in the Asia-Pacific, especially Japan and Australia, can weigh the situation.
They should not act as accomplices of the US’ China containment policy and place themselves at the forefront of confronting China, or they are betting their own future.”
And this is the message that is still prevailing in China and internal to her people.
Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou was in the dock in a Canadian court this last week but at the time of writing, I have not seen any reports.
Chinese Technology is amazing…
Check out this video…
Amazing!
Further details:
Far more world leaders visit China than America: “If leadership diplomacy was an Olympic sport, Beijing beats Washington to the gold medal.”
In 2019, 79 foreign leaders visited China, while only 27 called on the United States.
More world leaders have visited China than the United States in every year since 2013. Many US allies visited China more often than the United States, including those of South Korea, Germany, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and New Zealand.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi said ties with Southeast Asia are a priority for China and called for “multilateralism with Asian characteristics”, as the country seeks to counter US moves in the region.
“China has always made Asean its priority for diplomacy in the region … and firmly supports Asean’s central role in regional cooperation,” Wang said, according to the Chinese foreign ministry readout on Thursday.
“Both sides should conduct frequent communication on all levels, and continue with mutual understanding and support for each other’s core interests.”
Judges had already dismissed parts of two cases after it was revealed FBI agents hadn’t properly informed them of their rights against self-incrimination.
U.S.-listed Chinese firms must disclose Chinese government interference risks.The Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday that Chinese companies listed on U.S. markets must disclose the risks of the Chinese government interfering in their business as part of their reporting obligations.
Selections from Godfree Roberts’ extensive weekly newsletter: Here Comes China. You can get it here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe
Further selections and editorial and geopolitical commentary by Amarynth.
Geopolitical moves:
Most of the geopolitical space was taken up by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Soon Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, moved in, boots ‘n all, with SCO.
A geopolitical story of note is the confirmed friendship between Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un pledging to strengthen their friendly relations as they exchanged messages on the 60th anniversary of a bilateral landmark defense treaty.
Under the 1961 agreement, China and North Korea must automatically defend each other when one of them is attacked. Xi said he is ready to work with Kim to “take bilateral friendly cooperation to a new level and deliver more benefits to the two countries and two peoples.”
Meng Wanzhou’s extradition case suffered a major blow.
A Canadian judge ruled that HSBC documents showing that US authorities had made selective, misleading and “outright false” claims about the Huawei CFO could play no part in the case.
[Ed: Under Hong Kong’s controversial extradition law one had to commit a crime. Under Canadian law one can be extradited if they “may” have committed a crime].
On Taiwan, the Chinese have put down their red lines and a warning: “We advise the US and the island of Taiwan not to misjudge the situation and not to underestimate our determination and will to punish their provocation. They must be prepared to face a sudden blow.”
Well, I heard that President Biden is going to throw some more billions of dollars for more High Speed Train development in the United States. I am sure that the lawyers, the accountants, and the bankers are all very excited about the money. But look at what is going up in Africa…
Made by America? Nope. Made by China.
Two good-feel-good stories:
Pandas
Wild Giant pandas are no longer endangered, but they are still vulnerable with a population outside captivity of 1,800.
Authorities have expanded their habitats and replanted bamboo forests to feed them.
The number of Siberian tigers, Amur leopards, Asian elephants, and crested ibis has also “visibly increased” as a result of conservation efforts.
And those wandering elephants are still wandering. Excepting western reporting considers this story as: “Cuddly elephants are the latest propaganda weapon in President Xi Jinping’s propaganda offensive to present a more ‘lovable’ global image of China.
The elephants are just one manifestation of Beijing’s decade-long obsession with boosting what it calls its ‘discourse power.’” Sydney Morning Herald.
I’ve seen western reporting say things like: Marauding and destructive elephant herd in China demolishes the countryside. So, now we know, even good-feel-good stories out of China are weaponized.
(Could we imminently expect a headline saying .. marauding Chinese elephants EAT pandas in JinJiang? Xi Jingping personally responsible for giving the order. For those who find themselves temporarily without a sense of humor, this is meant as humor although it illustrates the media from the west that will use anything and everything to continue the media war).
It is hard to choose what to put first from this growing Chinese juggernaut. Let’s start with banks:
The world’s top banks are Chinese: ICBC, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of China hold the top four positions for the fourth year in a row. ICBC has been at the top of the table for nine consecutive years.
Its Tier 1 capital has grown to $439.9bn, the highest individual bank total on record and a $59.7bn increase YoY.
Capital levels continue to grow significantly, up 18.6% YoY compared to the global average of 12.7%. They now account for 30% of global aggregate Tier 1 capital in the Top 1000 compared with 11% in 2011 and 5% in 2001.
GDP grew 18.3% in Q1 and 12.7% in H1 YoY. Urban unemployment is 5%, and 6.98 million new urban jobs, 63.5 percent of the annual target, were created in the first half. Per capita disposable income increased 12.6% YoY.
Exports up 32.2% in June, from 27.9% in May, YoY. Imports increased by 36.7% y/y last month, down from 51.1% y/y growth in May. The trade surplus was $51.5 billion in June, and to $45.5 billion in May.
January – May, Chinese trade with Germany, $92.8 billion, grew 36% YoY and France $32.9 billion rose 44%. China has proposed cooperating with Germany and France for Africa’s development and aims to reopen investment deal with EU.
Six new projects broke ground at Gwadar Port, a flagship of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): a fertilizer factory, an animal vaccine factory, a lubricant factory and an exhibition center.
A 300MW imported coal power plant has been in construction since 2019 and the Power Purchase Agreement was signed earlier this year.
Beijing’s investigation of Didi jolted global markets and tech startups canceled overseas IPOs. Keep, backed by SoftBank, Alibaba-backed medical data solutions provider, and Ximalaya, the podcast app, all canceled IPOs, admitting that regulators had discouraged them from listing overseas.
The Financial Times says the “debacle signals [the] end of [a] steady stream of New York listings for Chinese companies.”
China’s Tech Crackdown Hits Wall Street’s Wallet. U.S. listings of Chinese companies have accounted for nearly 8 percent of Goldman Sachs’s underwriting fees so far this year, and over 12% of underwriting revenue over the previous five years. Didi Chuxing is just the tip of the iceberg.
Remember, the Chinese work together as one singular organism
You try to hurt it, and all Hell will break loose, the people in the United States and the West have absolutely no concept or idea of what they are going up against. It’s like those cocky Space Marines in Aliens II (the movie) and then were FUCKING slaughtered in three minutes.
The Chinese are not what everyone thinks.
The Chinese work together.
Compliance in China
A Global Times op-ed explains that Chinese tech companies are moving from an era of “barbaric growth” to an “era of compliance,” in which internet companies learn to observe domestic laws and regulations. China has long held restrictions on foreign investment but a loophole, called a VIE, allowed companies to bypass those rules. Chinese internet companies “should now step out of the gray area and move toward normalized corporate governance.
How Chinese clampdown targets offshore listings: China’s securities regulator is setting up a team to review plans by Chinese companies for initial public offerings (IPOs) abroad, including those using a corporate structure that Beijing says has led to abuse.
In a separate act of decoupling, the U.S. Commerce Department today added 14 Chinese entities to its growing economic blacklist over their participation in “China’s campaign of repression, mass detention, and high technology surveillance” in Xinjiang. The companies include AI and other tech firms based in Xinjiang, Beijing, and Chengdu.
Couriers delivered 49 billion pieces in H1, up 46% YoY, and added an average of 2 billion pieces of express delivery per month, with business volume approaching 10 billion in a single month, constantly hitting new record highs.
TikTok will stop requiring employees to work an extra day every two weeks, following a similar move by its local rival Kuaishou. Under the arrangement, workers were paid double their regular daily rate when working on weekends and triple during legal holidays, a bonus that some young professionals preferred to better work-life balance.
Two of China’s three best-selling electric vehicles in June were Shanghai-built Tesla models, shining a light on the U.S. automaker’s popularity in the world’s largest auto market despite recent setbacks there like a regulatory probe into the safety of its autopilot system.”
China is embarking on a building spree for battery swapping centers, as the nation’s network of swapping centers numbered 716 at the end of June, nearly three times the amount at the end of last year.
Shanghai Microelectronics sells its 600/20 flagship lithography machine for 90 nm chips. By Q4, it will offer machines for 28 nm, replacements for ASML’s 1980Di machine and next year will offer 14 nm. machines. “China has world-class EDA(Electronic design automation) startups–companies with worldwide customers.”
For the SpaceONauts – China’s space sector is getting too big and too busy to report on in this Sitrep and magazine format and I’m sure there are media focused on the sector. Just a little while ago, we have this reusable suborbital spacecraft with its successful first launch. It leaves earth horizontally, and returns vertically, like an airplane.
China and Syria signs rebuilding and BRI investments
Until a little while ago, at the time of writing, this was a rumor. Now it is fact.
Chinese FM arrives in Syria, meets officials and signs agreements
There is another similar type of rumor, very small in the press as yet, that China is now active in the Ukraine in terms of rebuilding and perhaps farming contracts. This is very small currently but keep your eyes open.
On these two items, one has to remember the ‘double helix’ of China and Russia.
This is but a fraction of what I gleaned from the Here Comes China newsletter. Godfree has some delicious longer reads in his newsletter: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe
And if all this isn't enough, then let's start talking about America and how it fits with the changing global situation...
A new American president is presenting a program for renewal of human values in the marketplace unheard of since the 1930s but still projecting American military domination and environmental destruction far beyond the awareness of most Americans.
Continued insistence that Russia and China are major global threats to everyone and not just American monopoly capitalists resonate not only in the cosmic void between the ears of our mentally disabled foreign policy experts but echo in the minds of innocent Americans since that’s all they get from major, and all too often minor media.
The charge that China is conducting genocide on its Islamic people coming from the butchers of hundreds of thousands of Islamic people in the middle east would be a dreadful sick joke if not so incredibly evil, but poor souls condemned to network media remain stuck in a misinformation chamber amplifying our ruling power’s message day in and day out.
The fact that growing majorities have little or no faith in government or media is a hopeful sign but until we totally clean out the sewage system much of corporate news has become, the stench that wafts up remains a carrier of the information pandemic.
While alleged economic threats from China actually do offer market competition to the empire ( and market competition is supposed to be good, according to the theology preached by the priest-rabbi-therapists of the church of capital ) and China is under the control of communists who at least try, not always with success, to force it to work for the common good and not just the minority of Chinese capitalists, why and how and to whom is that a threat?
Only to America where majorities exist in numbers of those in debt but never those who vote nationally.
This is called “our” democracy by many wishful thinkers still unaware that the political process is owned and operated by the wealthiest minority, which spends billions to maintain political control by purchase and rental of candidates and office holders.
Citizens innocently proclaiming this hustle as “our” democracy are like past slaves referring to “our” plantation.
If they were the minority house negroes of the time they could afford such fantasy but the overwhelming majority who toiled in the fields and suffered the most brutal treatment had no such luxury.
And as if the treatment of these two powerful nations didn’t show enough imperial idiocy, that of a nearly helpless tiny nation currently, as usual, under assault, is greater indication of lunacy bordering on stark raving insanity.
After 60 years of a murderous attempted strangulation of the Cuban political economy, that tiny nation survives with the support of the overwhelming majority of governments on earth.
Recently at the United Nations 184 countries voted to end the filthy American embargo with only Murder Inc. headquartered in the USA and Israel still, as always out of step with the overwhelming majority while spouting humanitarian rhetoric and practicing murderous brutality.
This still finds well meaning people waving flags and quoting bibles and constitutions as though these fabled symbols clean up the reality of degenerate social practice as hypocritical as a rapist claiming victims only to assure they do not suffer sexual frustration.
The anti-Cuban lobby, second only to that of Israel in its control of American foreign policy, was originally a creature of the Cuban upper classes who escaped to Miami from the revolution that was working to spread education, jobs, health care and other necessities of life to the greatest number of people who had long been denied by American partnership with Cuban ruling power.
They loom large in the current scenario of an alleged uprising against the terror and horror of millions of people eating, going to school and getting health care despite the ugly embargo and other violent attempts to smother the island of 11 million so that capital might again profit from gambling and drugs, as it did before 1960.
Meanwhile, another bloody lie in Afghanistan has ended with the Taliban, the group we were allegedly protecting poor afghans from, has taken over the government of their own country.
This after billions have been spent and hundreds of thousands murdered in pursuit of profits while good people here have been fed stories about emancipating women and educating afghans to the joys of democracy like ours, where hundreds of thousands of Americans live in the street while we spend trillions to kill people and billions to care for pets.
And far beyond wretched national policies looms the global curse of what private profit industrial and war marketing are doing to the environment shared by humanity and not just one or anther national identity group often claiming super status with a special connection to deities ranging from Santa Claus to the Easter bunny for all they are worth in the material world.
Words about democracy are not balanced by deeds of mass murder, oppression and absolute support for rich minority rule that assures continued profit making from exploitation of workers whether they clean toilets, drive buses, pilot airplanes or walk dogs.
Like the sex workers who use their private parts to create private profits for their entrepreneurial pimps, those who create, package and deliver the consumer goods that are the foundation of the economy are doing it for the benefit of owners and investors rather than their own which would be far better served if they owned and ran the businesses they form the foundation for while others get rich on their labor.
Facing horrible news at what the future of humanity looks like under the environmental stress called climate change, more people than ever are working to end foul methods of economics that assure disaster for humanity but trying to do so while maintaining market rules of private profit assures further destruction or worse, simply throwing people out of work they do only to survive and thus destroy hope of survival.
The future must be to keep people alive by assuring the public good before any pursuit of private profit. We do not need professional economists to explain that capitalism is the only answer to social problems all the while collecting fat salaries and investment opportunities while society fails more quickly under their rule.
In truth, if workers are doing dirty work that affords them salaries so they can pay their rent, mortgages and other life supports, but it costs society billions to have to clean up the mess they create, we would all best be served by paying them to not go to work.
We’d be saving the billions we’d have to spend to clean up the mess they created in service to private profiteers and assure their survival by using those mammoth savings to help them learn and get better jobs for them and everyone else, that serve all of us and not simply minority investors.
As the world grows more threatened and conditions become more dangerous with the USA holding several hundred military bases in foreign countries and surrounding Russia and China with troops and war ships, immediate action must be taken to both confront environmental conditions that threaten us all and war like preparations that are profitable to a criminal minority while threatening the planet and all its people.
In short, we need global democratic communism before anti-social capitalism destroys us all.
Let’s not forget the Amazing HST that has revolutionized China, and is now changing all of Asia…
Video of Chinese HST. Good watch.
Now, let’s move on to the biggest project of the century; the BRI…
The Belt and Road Initative
From my mail box by [redacted].
Here we focus on making people understand that the Belt & Road Initiative is the Endeavor of the Century.
And it’s not a small task with the pervasive anti-China propaganda.
Why ? because the BRI will decrease poverty, will open perspectives, will connect lands & seas, will create bonds between nations, will provoke many occasions to work together and learn from each other personally, will boost education (technical & philosophical).
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Yes, capitalists & upper class people (Americans, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Europeans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Koreans, Africans, Latin Americans, Down Under-ians etc.) will profit more, so what ?! They got the money and the organization ! Let’s be realistic !
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A bit of Real Politik, please, as Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin said to Angela Merkel at the occasion of her valedictory visit to him. If this project, which is supposed to be finished in 2049, (for the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China) can achieve only 50 % of its potential, the World will not be a paradise but it will be a much much better place because true, physical development will be possible for so many people on Earth. Imagine it as a Marshall Plan to the square.
True development means first and foremost public utilities and infrastructures (clean water, power grids, roads & bridges, schools buildings etc.). I think it was Lenin who said that the Bolshevik Revolution is the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of Russia.
According to an article by MK Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat, the total amount of money injected in the BRI projects to now is in the order of 4 trillions, with a “t” !
Imagine the 2.2 trillions wasted in Afghanistan and the 5.7 trillions lost in Irak channeled to infrastructural, health & educational (all levels) improvements in the USA !
China became Europe’s first commercial partner this year with exchanges worth almost one trillion, with a “t”.
Speaking of Europe, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Finance minister can testify to the unexpected and respectful Chinese interventions in the so-called Greek crisis within the framework of the Belt & Road Initiative.
It is obvious that we need to be aware of the ecological dimension and many industrial projects were utterly careless for our natural environment but the Climate Change narrative and Green narrative are fabrications to brainwash in order not to allow true and respectful of nature development. Watch Professor William Happer’s video or for those speaking French, François Gervais’s videos.
As Vijay Prashad said rightly, in the mind of the Crusaders, most of the Planet are pools of slaves and microscopic pockets of house niggers/ching-chongs/wogs/snow white house niggers (if you want a nicer, politically correct ,acceptable & respectful expression:compradore bourgeoisie) for them to use & abuse so they can live the high life. Of course, a global project for true and solid development like the Belt & Road Initiative
(development of the mind & true industrialization)
is absolutely anathema to them.
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What is happening now in the West is the slow ( maybe not so slow) motion of the plutocrats to crush the offspring of the middle class created post 1945 because even the crumbs they “gave” your parents cannot be “given” to you anymore since new poles of power re-emerged, depriving them (relatively for now but the tendency will increase with time) of guaranteed long term slave laborers and cheap natural resources so they want to “give” even less here because in THEIR SYSTEM, the profits are less.
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In technical words, that’s the system of empire or the British system (aka closed paradigm) the eternal foe of the open paradigm or the American System of Physical Economy (and true development) by Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879) who was also the economic adviser to President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
I want to remind everyone of Jeff’s 6 E s describing the PBC’s (Psychopathic Barbarian Crusaders) usual modus operandi : Extortion, Extraction, Expropriation, Enslavement, Evangelization & Extermination.
I would like to remind everyone a conversation between Roman historian Tacitus (56-c.120) and his father-in-law, the general Agricola (40-93). Agricola was at the time of the chat governor of the province of Britain, he was looking in the direction of Ireland and confided to his son-in-law his wish to conquer it.
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Tacitus replied it would be a loss for the empire since those barbarians are not even fit to be trained as slaves. Agricola said that Tacitus was naive because to leave a pocket of freedom is a danger for Rome, it would give a small hope to the subjugated people. The English oligarchy learned from the “right” people !
Exploitation & Intimidation form an eternal pair.
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But in an open paradigm, that mentality of false scarcity for justifying oligarchical control will not be accepted.
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For those who can’t stand Lyndon Larouche (1922-2019), be informed that he was a genius and a philosopher king, without a crown like Confucius (551 BCE-479 BCE) and Plato (427 BCE- 347 BCE). The mere fact that the oligarchy felt the need to fabricate a sordid story of stolen documents to convict him to years of hard labor speaks volumes.
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He also predicted the 2008 crisis years in advance, not a small feat since most of the garden variety economists were clueless, I don’t even think they were bought off, I would grant them too much brain by adhering to such a hypothesis… Larouche might sound a little bit granddiloquent in certain speeches but it was the natural expression of a man confident in the quality of his mind because he truly developed it.
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Last but not least, he insisted on exposing the epistemological warfare, denouncing the dionysian sex, drug and rock’nd roll “culture”, skillfully and surreptitiously downgrading the possibilities of the human mind, making people easier to corral.
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The Frankfurt school, the ‘societal’ changes, the ‘ecological’ battles were all used as red herrings to the true socio-economic struggles. Mai 68 in France was a color revolution to get rid of Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), try to explain that to a Parigot bobo completely brainwashed by the contemporary doxa !
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His analysis of Universal History is outstanding. Webster Tarpley, a brilliant historian having writtten ” 9-11, terror made in USA ” has been part of his organization.
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For those having difficulties to watch “The Revival of the American System with Chinese Characteristics”, I suggest 12 sessions of 5 minutes. I’m not being sarcastic, sometimes simplistic means can give great results…
To recapitulate, if you are not filthily rich or do not wield formidable power (meaning you don’t have money to give or positions to offer) but are willing to devote some time in order to be useful for the cause of an advanced & refined mankind :
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FOCUS ON PROMOTING THE BELT & ROAD INITIATIVE AND TRY TO EDUCATE AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE ON EPISTEMOLOGICAL WARFARE
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Which is (the worst form of slavery is the mental form, please remember Plato’s allegory of the Cave and don’t forget one of the six E s is Evangelization) because both are powerful multi-generational (not only do we need to understand Real Politik but also that a great Endeavor will take the efforts of many people over more than one generation) tools to escape the clutch of the imperial aka British system.
And a message for all thos neocons who wants World War III with China & Russia…
Things are not going to happen as you think.
Never forget that the Chinese are super patriotic
If you try to hurt the Chinese now, they will SLIT YOUR FUCKING THROAT.
Of course, there is no one at the helm in the United States these days. What ever professional diplomatic corps that used to exist has been sacked and replaced with toadies who are just political donors. And they have no concept of the shit-load of trouble that they are walking into.
It absolutely reminds me of the Hungarian and Polish leadership that tried to take on Genghis Khan and his hordes of blood-thirsty killers.
Here’s a Chinese preschool.
Do not mess with the Chinese.
Now, a few years older. Here’s a video of Chinese “cub scouts” (Optional in Elementary School)…
Elementary School.
Next a video of Chinese Middle School Students (Mandatory. Everyone in China get’s this training.). When a kid is in middle school, they must attend Summer training at different levels. They make up the basis for the conscript army.
Chinese mandatory Middle School Training.
Next a video of some Chinese Para-Military. There are all sorts of para-military forces embedded within China. This group is a regulatory arm of the Corruption Police. Of course, they are all trained in the warrior arts.
Chinese Paramilitary.
Next video shows some of what China’s professional warrior class can do. China is hardly a “peasant army fielding old AK-47 clones”.
China’s professional warriors.
And of course, everyone knows that China is no match for America’s professional military with it’s “Warrior Culture”, massive numbers of high-technology weapons, and the “never-give-up-Rambo spirit!
sayed salahuddin @sayedsalahuddin - 11:59 UTC · 22 Aug 2021
Almost all parts of Afghanistan enjoying peace for a week now after over 42 years of war, but Kabul airport has become the most violent part.
We went from the history behind Afghanistan and the various military empires that tried to conquer it, to the gnashing of the teeth and wailing of the American cheerleaders who are in shock and pain.
Then, we started to review how this obscure nation fit in with the global power play and that means the “collective West” and Asia. Where “Asia” is China, Iran and China together.
Then, if that isn’t enough…
…we see that China continues to grow.
And even though the “news” about China is all doom and gloom…
… no one in the “West” has any idea of what a force China is right now, and how insurmountable a united Asia is against the fat, weak, corrupt United States and it’s vassals.
There is no question that for the twenty years that the United States has been in Afghanistan not one American leader read any history…
… not one American diplomat or military general or expert had any idea about what was actually going on in that section of the globe.
And since Afghanistan was such an enormous drain in money, resources, and “news”, once can only imagine the poverty of United States ability in other Geo-political arenas.
The best thing for the United States to do right now is to die quietly in a hole somewhere and allow the rest of the world to carry on.
Provocative?
Yes, I suppose, but it is accurate.
Proud transgender American military.
We know that with the enormous outlay of military funding that the United States fully plans to engage China in a serious war. And they plan to do it not only in the South China Sea, but on Chinese soil. This will not work out the way that everyone plans.
As I have said before, China is a serious, serious nation, that does not play.
Video of the future of Africa with Chinese help.
China is a serious serious nation that does not play.
Read my Deagel reports, if you don’t know what I am talking about. Right there is everything that you need to know about the future of the world. And what you can do about your little part of it.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This article is going for a kind of minimalist look where I present some “meaty” videos for you all to watch and ponder. And of course, it’s going to include China, because (well, you know) it’s the dominant force in the world today.
My intention is to provide a broad swath of videos that give the reader a fuller, and better understanding of China in all the many aspects of it. From personal to Geo-political, to social to governing, to people. By watching all these videos (and some are from myself) you will see exactly what China is today, free of the bullshit that you would find elsewhere on the internet.
I try to describe what is going on in the videos, but you can come to your own conclusions. Each video is from 15 seconds to five minutes long. Not really prohibitively large, but long enough to make the necessary points. Most videos presented are either banned, censored, or otherwise prohibited in the United States, Australia and the UK today.
I strongly suggest you watch each video one by one, in the order presented. I tried hard to put them in a balanced order to make a more reasonable impression to you, the reader.
This is what China is today..
Bridge Building in China
It makes America look like the corrupt, un-Godly moronic group of misfit nincompoops that it is. Here’s what the rest of the world thinks of America. Soak it up, and this video was made in 2017, and it’s only gotten much, much worse since then. HERE.
Night Life in China.
Here’s an expat walking around China at night. To those of you who are unaware, when the sun sets, China comes alive with activity. Kids, retired folk, workers and everyone come out to play and enjoy. No, it’s not a holiday. It’s just a typical night on a typical day in a typical part of China. HERE.
Give Credit Where Credit is due
In America it’s Communism is evil and bad, so says the person who knows nothing at all about Chinese communism, and who ASSUMES that it “must be horrible” because, after all Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, FOX “news”, Rush Limbaugh and CNN say so. You can trust them, right? Here’s who gets the credit for the amazing transformation of China. HERE.
Pretty Chinese girl in her house
For the last five years, the American (and Western) “news” media has cultivated the idea that the Chinese are poor, downtrodden, and helpless under a repressive communist regime. Don’t believe me? Google “repressive Chinese communist regime“. There are millions of articles with this them. And you know what? It’s all fucking LIES! Here’s a typical girl, in her typical house, in a typical small town, in a typical part of China. HERE.
End of the Year bonuses
Unlike the United States, China has end-of-the-year bonuses, monthly bonuses, and year-around award programs. And no, this isn’t a coupon for a cup of coffee, or a $10 gift card at Walmart. These are substantial bonuses equal to one to more months of salary. And on top of that, with the one to two month annual vacation, the companies offer generous dinner meals for the staff, and often they play these bonus award games. Like this one. You drink the alcohol, and you keep the money that it sits upon. HERE.
Facial Recognition is everywhere
Not only has QR replaced dollar bills and coins, but facial recognition is replacing key fobs, which (of course) replaced keys. China is advancing in leaps and bounds. Seriously. HERE.
American attacks against China has no plan or goal
One of the first things that any student in the STEM fields recognize is that you MUST have a goal. Then you construct a plan to achieve that goal. But people who haven’t had that training, such as people who inherited their positions through wealth, relatives, or “connections” have no idea or concepts of plans, goals and objectives. And these are exactly the kind of people running the United States today. HERE.
A visit to the local clinic down the street
This is an MM video. here I narrative what my (old) clinic is like. I walk in and about. I show the traditional medicine offices, the Western medicine offices, the lab, and the pharmacy as well as the unhurried, easy going lifestyle that is so common throughout China today. HERE.
Some more Scouts
Here’s another video of the scouts. In general the scouts are a voluntary organization, while the middle School military train is compulsory. Never the less, the core ideas of community, society, achievement, merit are all strong Chinese characteristics. HERE.
Living next to a factory has it’s advantages
The bulk of the world’s goods are manufactured in China. The direct close proximity of these factories and the resulting personal and business relationships makes it very easy for wanna-be young designers and clothing manufactures to make limited runs of clothing and then sell them on social media. Such as this gal. HERE.
America is a Military Empire
In the last nearly 250 years of it’s existence, it has been involved in wars every single year since when it was founded in 1776. Only five years out of that time was peace, and only while the military-industrial establishment was retooling for the next war. Up until this week, America is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars with over 500 military bases all over the world. China isn’t like that at all. Listen to what Xi Peng has to say. HERE.
Africa is a rising star
With China’s help, both Africa, and the Middle East will experience exceptional growth and measurable, and tangible increases in their quality of living. China has set forth to make this a reality, and are busy building rail lines, hospitals, roads and much needed infrastructure to the people in these often (American instigated) war-torn nations. HERE.
A pretty girl.
I do like pretty girls. Here’s a nice pretty Chinese girl. There’s a softness, and a pleasantness that comes with life inside of China that I haven’t felt in the United States for decades. HERE.
An American comic tells it like it is
This one is classic. It’s funny because it’s true. There’s only one error in the video. He said that California is spending $6 billion dollars to build the high-speed rail line in California. The actual number is $77 billion plus an additional $6 billion to finish it by making the train to ride on the rails. HERE.
Chinese High Speed Train
These are commonplace all over China. They are cheap, fast, clean, and comfortable. They are far better than taking a plane. And the Chinese are all very used to them. HERE.
No one should underestimate China
This following speech snippet was twisted and distorted by the New York Times, and the standard neocon publications out of the North East of the United States. Who used this speech to declare that China was going to invade the world and displace the Untied States. This speech said no such thing. Instead, Xi Peng made it very clear that they will only be pushed so for before they bite back, and believe you me, you do not want to be on their bad side. HERE.
In America we salute the flag and say the “Pledge of allegiance”…
Here’s what they do in China. This is in a pre-kindergarden school. You must take note that the Chinese are very relentless patriots and since they serve their community and society, they think nothing of dying for it either. Any bull-shit ideas that China will run into the arms of “American liberators” for freedom™ and democracy™ is a pure fantasy. Check this video out! HERE.
Old Grandmother gives a wedding present
Even those on tiny incomes want to participate in good, happy and joyous occasions. Here we have an old little old lady grandmother giving a “red envelope” full of cash to the bride as her way of welcoming her to marry her grandson. Cute. Precious. HERE.
In a society where everyone participates…
The difference between the USA and China couldn’t be starker. In China, everyone participates and helps and works together for the greater good. In America it’s the “lone wolf” being the biggest and the baddest hoarding up all the money, and vacuuming up all the change so that they can sit on top of the pile of money. Here is what happens in China when you break the law. HERE.
China growth compared to America’s growth
Ai! It’s stark. China has grown, and no (it’s not like the USA) where only the rich become filthy rich and the rest suffers. Everyone inside of China has experienced enormous, and amazing increases in their standards of living. It is profound, noticeable and stunning. HERE.
MM posts a video
I made this video as I walked near my house. It’s just a bunch of first and second grade students hanging out together and playing near one of the family shops. It’s a young biker gang. LOL. HERE.
Africa is modernizing.
Soft power from China. America has decades (if not centuries) of proving pallet loads of money to local war-lords to buy American guns and weapons, so that those on K-street in Washington DC get rich. China has a better idea. They are surrounding themselves with prosperity. Those nations that have a growing middle class, that shun war, and want to be productive will become great friends of China. And that is what we are seeing in Africa today. HERE.
Chinese space station I
Congress and successive American presidents have forbidden China to have any access to American technology. This includes all rocket and space and avionics technology. So China had to build everything from scratch and just like the United States did in the early 1960’s, so did China, and now China has met, and surpassed the United States technology markers in space exploration. HERE.
A sexy video
Here is a Chinese woman making her family a fine delicious and healthy meal in the kitchen. Not only are women far better cooks than men (well, maybe not all the time, but in my case they are certainly much better than me) but they are expert financiers. No one can budget a household, AND provide daily tasty delicious meals like a woman can. And that’s my strong opinion in this matter. If you want to be healthy in body and mind, and you want to be free of financial worries, put the woman of the house in charge of fiances and domestic issues. Your life would be so much better. And besides, it’s so sexy! HERE.
Chinese and Russia Space Station II
There is also another video that also shows just how much larger the joint Chinese and Russian space station will be when it is completed. Of course, this is nothing that you will find on any of the Western media outlets. HERE.
Pretty Chinese girl
I am constantly amazed that Americans believe that all the women in China look like pre-adolsescent children. In fact, this was the argument that was used against me by the DA in Little Rock, Arkansas who actually made the point that the sole reason that I lived, worked and traveled to China was to indulge my fantasies of having sex with little children, and the Chinese women would naturally, by their child-like bodies would satisfy me. Disgusting. HERE.
Everyone Participates
When someone gets unruly, and rude, the rest of China will take action. This is their nation; their country. And it’s up to them to police it. And people must behave. There are far too many people, to not take an active role in society. HERE.
Hong Kong official discusses the HK Riots
It is no secret that the United States funded, armed, taught, organized and pushed for the (so called) “pro-democracy” riots. These riots killed dozens, caused massive hardship, interrupted the flow of life inside of China and caused millions of dollars in damages. Who is the ultimate culprit? Why, it is clearly the United States. HERE.
Chinese Scouts
In America we have “Boy Scouts” and “Girl Scouts”. But in China there is just “The Scouts”. And they learn discipline, culture, working together, and some basics of para-military training. I am always amazed and glad that China trains their children to be parts of the community, than a bunch of couch-potatoes that demand “me, me, me”. HERE.
Be the Rufus
In a society that has people caring for each other you will start seeing Rufus activities. Not because of some kind of reward, but that it is what you do when you are about others in your society. Such as this quick video illustrates. HERE.
America speak with a forked tongue
Here’s an interesting side by side comparison of (then) Vice President Biden telling the Chinese that America is committed to a “rising China”. And then next to it we see President Biden announcing to the White house press corps that America must stop China from rising at all costs. Sheech! HERE.
Nice Chinese girl
Here’s a nice Chinese girl. According to Arkansas she looks young. They told me that “everyone” in China looks like children. That’s the ONLY reason why anyone would ever want to visit that slimy, filthy, oozing, cesspool of pollution, crime and corruption. Look at her ooze childish filth! HERE.
Rural Africa now has factories
The Chinese have spent the time building factories, and training workers to make basic items in the very remote villages and settlements of Africa. These areas used to be poverty ridden, and controlled by war-lords who lived on United States funds and corruption. But with the investments of infrastructure and a market for manufactured goods, the money now flows to these workers who make these products inside of Africa. HERE.
This vblogger was attacked horrifically by the BBC
They claimed that he was only saying good things about China because the communist regime paid him to do so. And then they took frames from his video, used photoshop to darken them, turn the lush green trees grey, turn the blue sky grey and then produced it to their audience of millions. Never a retraction. HERE.
The BBC tries to attack China on Global Warming
It’s unsuccessful. Anyone who knows anything about China will now defend China and no longer take the bullshit narrative at face value. That game is over. And here’s a nice video that illustrates this spectacularly. HERE.
BBC Journalist admits his directives
Pretty ballsy. After all, his future as a “journalist” in the West is now over. He pretty much admits that the primary directives in most (heck, all) Western media is to malign China, and to provide a very false image and picture for the viewers of the BCC of what China is and what is going on. HERE.
Chinese cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is real and it is present today inside of China. The rest of the world, hidden behind agendas and fear-mongering has lied itself into a box, and the rising China, and all of Asia makes the rest of the world look like ignorant psychopathic used car salesmen in comparison, with collapsing infrastructure, a lack of morals, and no accomplishments except the theft of money from others. HERE.
This fellow tells you why the USA was in Afghanistan…
And also explains why the neocons on K-street in Washington DC are all “up in arms” and enraged over the American troop withdrawal. But don’t worry, the UK “news” media is already spinning how unstable that region is and the Biden made a “power move”, and yada, yada, yada. HERE.
Comparison in starting a business
Here’s an American telling you how it is when you try to start a digital business int he United States compared to one in China. The difference is striking and he is right. America is the land with a million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet all taking a million little bites of your money. And why no one in America is doing well today (unless they are a super wealthy oligarch). HERE.
Look at all those volunteers
First day of school. All those in red are not all teachers, but actually many are volunteers for their community. A mother brings her handicapped child to the school. Being a little kid, scared, and frightened on top of having a handicap, must be really difficult. Not so, if the school welcomes you as one of their own. HERE.
China is showing the way forward…
…And the United States leadership are petrified of it. Their cushy lifestyle, the belief that they are the “kings” sitting all on the top of the money pile, only works as long as the downtrodden slave-serfs are happy in their lot. But increasingly they are not happy, and they want change. And China is showing them the answer out. HERE.
A show of kindness
In a “dog eat dog” kind of society, everyone is living in fear, and hiding from others. They never stick their neck out for anyone else other than themselves. But in a society where the well being of the community is important, then everyone has a role, as this little girl clearly shows. HERE.
The duty of government is for it’s people
And if the government stops doing that, and / or doesn’t care or is unable to help the citizenry of that nation, then it must be replaced. We have seen this in China with the events of the “cultural revolution”, and then the efforts of Mr. Deng. Now, we see with great surprise how well China prospers when it’s government cares for it’s people. But we see the opposite in the United States. What went wrong? HERE.
Will you marry me?
This just happened at the Olympics. I guess that you all weren’t aware of it because it showed China in a good light, and that (of course) goes against American (and UK) “news” guidelines. HERE.
A five minute overview of what the Chinese Communist Party is
Here it is in a “nutshell”. In five minutes you get a very good, thick and comprehensive overview of what the Chinese communist party is, and why it has been so successful inside of China. It’s really quite well stated, and tell you as it is. Like it or not. HERE.
Inner Mongolia
Well, when was the last time you have seen a picture of Inner Mongolia? Don’t remember? Well, that’s understandable. There’s hardly anything on this subject in the Western press. Here’s an absolutely great video that covers so many subject areas, from infrastructure, to beauty, to planning, to nature. HERE.
Trade Tariffs
Well, what about those 20% trade tariffs that President Trump put on American products, and that Biden decided to keep in place. You know, “to keep the pressure on China”. What is going on? I have to tell you guys, the American leadership is so moronic it defies description. HERE.
Built like a fish
In the United States, when we see a well-built woman, we say that she is “built like a battleship”. Another term is that she is “built like a brick house”. African-American men, who almost uniformly prefer huge asses on women like to say “she has a big caboose”, or “she has some fine booty”. In China, an attractive woman is one that has the lines and shape of a fish. And so people say that she “has a nice fish shape” as this woman HERE.
Chinese Military
I’ve got tons of videos on the Chinese military. But let me just say that the Chinese believe in using enormous quantities of AI guided robotic missiles to destroy everything in it’s path before unleashing hordes of tactically trained professional troops to take over a given area. China does not play. HERE.
Oh, but China cannot innovate
They can only copy. Right? That’s the narrative. Isn’t it? Who are they copying with their bridge building machines? Who are they copying with their nuclear systems? Who are they copying with their 6G? Or their HarmonyOS, or their QR codes, or their High Speed Rail. The lies are so outrageous that when I hear someone repeat them, I no longer get angry. Instead I look at the person as being one of the most out-of-touch and ill-informed ignoramuses on the planet. HERE.
Playing with fire
In the United States, we have an idiom called “playing with fire”. It means to do something dangerous or risky. These provocations that the United States Navy is doing in the South China Sea could end up getting people killed. It’s not so much that I worry about China. They have time and time again, proven themselves to be intimately capable. But I would hate to see the seventh fleet destroyed with all those lives lost. HERE.
Dancing at night
I have discussed this numerous times. It all started with the “dancing grandmothers”, and now with the government’s help and direction, it has become a national pastime. Everyone loves to dance in China, and if you want to go and dance, you just go and do it. Woo woo! HERE.
Senator Mikulski warns that going against China would be very, very dangerous
I normally don’t care for her (personally). but she is actually quite right here. Pushing China like the USA is currently doing is very, very dangerous. And the morons in the control of the nation of America haven’t a clue as to how dangerous it can actually get. HERE.
Who are the CPC Members?
Another very good, and short video that tells you exactly what is going on and just how absolutely insane the Neocon United Sates radical military-lovers are when they make such outrageous pronouncements and demands upon China. Crazy! HERE.
Going to help others
A scooter gets in an accident in the middle of an intersection of two six lane highways. What happens? Everyone gets out of their cars and runs over to help the poor guy in his overturned vehicle. This is what communities do. They don’t drive slowly by and gawk or take pictures like an American does. HERE.
Conclusion
In the $4 trillion dollar budget passed by President Biden are billions of dollars to “suppress” China, further censor media so that China is villainized and made out to be an evil “thing” to be destroyed. It is my hope that this little article helps put things in perspective.
Do you want more?
This particular article is going into my China Summer Videos Index here…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
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It’s pretty obvious. Don’t you know. The propaganda onslaught. The “classified” documents, the full spread of dis-info plummeting the American citizenry to hate China as the great evil. Yeah. You have to be a blind moron not to see what is coming.
Now, I have repeatedly argued that the American government is a wreck, that it’s leadership are “brain dead”, and somehow the entire crooked mess is running on auto-pilot straight towards the abyss. Since I have been making these accusations, not one single person has been able to come forward and prove to me otherwise.
What we do know is that America is following a well documented historical progressing that leads towards a major war.
Massive propaganda campaign.
Hybrid warfare at all levels.
A setting up of where the fields of conflict will occur.
A manipulation of “allies” to engage conflict as proxies.
And finally…
A trigger event or “incident” that will set everything in motion.
I argue that this trigger event is the Coronavirus pandemic. With a secondary excuse for a “fall back” contingency to be Taiwan.
There is a full wide “shotgun approach” to provide a wide selection of potential incident vectors from with the Untied States can capitalize upon to use as an excuse to generate a war.
But, it’s proven that the Coronavirus was in the USA months before China…
Yes. That is very true.
But it does not matter.
The lies and the narrative is being driven top down in favor of a war, and it “ain’t stopping for shit”. Never the less, the “safe” inoculation strain was released in the United States a full six months before the deadly lethal version COVID-19B was released on CNY in China. As this video clearly states…
Yup, released in the USA months before the bio-weapons attack on China.
Lies, Lies, and then more lies…
If is functionally the case that every single article in the “West” must contain negative things about China. But this is wrong and it is really rather counter-productive. As China is spending it’s resources to make Asia successful, and to help everyone associated with it.
The only things that America can point to as accomplishments are wars and things that happened fifty years ago. There has been ZERO positive, good, supporting efforts in any ways, shape of form originating out of the Untied States for a long, long, LONG time.
If China buys a steel factory, the American media is all aghast and in hysterics!
Who or what is driving all the things that I have listed above? China, Iran? Russia? Nope every single one has a direct budget path that is directly traced to the United States Federal Budget out of the Untied States Congress.
This looming fiasco is being driven by the United States Congress.
Now, I have gone into great detail about the bio-weapons carpet bombing of China by the (then) head of the Bio-Weapons office, John Bolton.
I have also covered, also in great detail the failure of the Hong Kong “Color Revolution”.
As well as the Uighur Muslim insurgency in XinJiang.
Not to mention the collapse of the United States NGO-backed Tibet movement.
I have also spent time discussing what happened when the Trump assault flotilla / armada entered the South Pacific Sea in late 2020, and sailed home “with it’s tail between it’s legs”.
As well as the realities of what is going on in Taiwan.
Well, you know that these idiots in the United States Congress don’t read MM. Have no concept of anything other than their echo chambers, have never fought in a real war, and have no concept of who the fuck they are threatening.
A quick and dirty summary of some of the major elements…
Here’s a simple map of what has been going on regarding China. There are many more efforts involved, but if I put them all on the map it would be unreadable. So I greatly simplified it to this simple diagram.
A look at the results so far…
And now, here is the state of affairs. The United States was able to install “puppet military regimes” in both Myanmar, and Thailand, but was unsuccessful with Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. All the NGO and “color revolutions” inside of China failed. All of the bio-weapons attacks inside of China failed. All of the insurgency efforts inside of China failed.
It’s like a sickness
There is nothing that can stop this massive anti-China effort from coming to it’s natural conclusion. America will find an excuse. An “incident” will be triggered, and then Congress will declare war, and then all Hell is going to break out.
Though, in truth all the preparations will be in place long before Congress “rubber stamps” the war. Congressional approval will only be a formality.
But China is not run by morons, and idiots. It is meritocracy. You can we well assured that China will not wait to be attacked before making it’s own very substantial moves.
And it can really get you down.
All this negatively, the hopelessness of it, and your singular ability to do anything about it is frustrating and so very stressful.
America is so frustrating right now.
War is like a board-game I
So while (in the game of chess) the United States side is moving it’s rooks, pawns, knights and bishops in play for a check-mate…
America is playing Chess.
…the Chinese see this, and are playing Go. And they are moving their pieces in a very complex and intricate manner.
The Chinese play Go.
You know…
…there are so many interesting facets to this entire Geo-political arena right now, that we really need to sit down and look at things in a far simpler way. Like the games mentioned above, they cut away all those details and just look at the kinds of people who are pushing for war, and those who are pushing back.
Thus we have this substantially simplified narrative.
Never the less, if you really want to get down into the dirt and details, references abound. No, I am not talking about the flood of anti-China bullshit cascading out of the government mouthpieces in America. That is all just bullshit.
Instead, I am talking about writings from third party, supposedly (mainly) “disinterested parties” look at the entire thing askance from a distance. Like this article, for instance…
COVID-19, Hillary Clinton’s “mission” and neo-Lysenkoism. Column by Gennady Onishchenko
The main political outcome of the anthrax controversy story after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack was more than serious. The well-known Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, then Secretary of State and candidate for President of the United States, came to Geneva after the events of September 2001 to attend a meeting of the working group on the development of a mechanism for monitoring compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention. She came not just like that, but with a very specific “mission”.
Let me remind you that the origins of this convention, which was adopted in 1972 and then ratified by almost all UN countries, were the USSR, the United States and the United Kingdom. It was the first international disarmament treaty to prohibit the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxin weapons, as well as their destruction.
But after the ratification of this document, an important issue remained unresolved — a mechanism for monitoring compliance with the convention was needed. At that time, this mechanism was being developed by extremely reputable experts, including from Russia. And so Hillary Clinton, under the pretext that her country was the target of an attack using biological weapons, said that the United States is withdrawing from work on a control mechanism. And without their participation, this document could not be adopted. At the same time, Hillary knew perfectly well that it was in the United States that biological weapons were used against her people, even a congressional commission came to this conclusion, although their conclusions were half-truths.
And the truth was that in the United States, which considers itself a beacon of democracy and freedom, the first terrorist act using biological weapons in the third millennium was committed. And with a high degree of probability, the US military and, possibly, some politicians were behind this terrorist attack. And this was done solely to address political issues, including to justify US military operations abroad.
An investigation conducted in the United States itself proved conclusively that the anthrax strain used in mailings was developed back in the 1950s as a combat formulation. The research was conducted in the same military laboratory at Fort Detrick, from where, as the investigation found out, the most dangerous strain was leaked. Although Washington claimed that Fort Detrick had not been engaged in offensive biological weapons programs since the mid-1960s, from what we know, there is great doubt that this secret military laboratory has switched to flower breeding.
In addition, it was simply impossible to carry out an operation to distribute combat anthrax spores alone: the pathogen had to be not only isolated, but also cultivated, accumulated a sufficient amount of it, packaged, and so on. All of this was even theoretically impossible to do without anyone noticing.
Realizing that in the event of any international investigation, all this will come out, the United States decided to torpedo the creation of a mechanism for monitoring compliance with the convention. It was with this “mission” that Hillary Clinton came to Geneva. The Americans were very afraid that everything would come out: if there was a mechanism, they would have to host an international working group, which would not have representatives of the United States and which would have full authority to request any documents, question all witnesses, and so on. This is what the Americans were so afraid of. It was important for them to hide the fact that sending out spores was not the act of a lone terrorist, but the result of a conspiracy.
And now, in 2021, the United States is trying to get out of the situation in which it drove itself and the whole world in 2001. Everyone understands that today there is a danger not of biological warfare (this is still unlikely), but of what is much more terrible — biological terrorism. But in the absence of a legitimate internationally recognized control mechanism, which was never developed due to the fault of the United States, today this area is completely uncontrolled.
When a World Health Organization (WHO) commission arrived in China earlier this year to investigate where the COVID-19 pandemic started, it had no real authority. WHO tried to simulate the control mechanism, but they did not succeed. Well, there were market experts in Wuhan, interviewed someone, but they were not allowed in any laboratories, and China had every right to do so. As a result, the WHO published a helpless four-page report, on the basis of which no serious conclusions about the origin of the pandemic are simply impossible.
Russia sees all these dangers, so back in 2006 at the G8 summit, which was held in St. Petersburg, at the initiative of our country, a document was adopted concerning the spread of infectious diseases. The document emphasized that we are aware of all the risks in this area, including those associated with possible man-made cases of the spread of dangerous infections.
So all the accusations against China from the United States about the origin of COVID-19 are attempts by the Americans to regain priority in research in the field of the use of the most uncontrolled weapons of mass destruction to date — biological weapons. Two decades after the events of September 2001, the United States is trying to take revenge, which is why it is so actively “hitting” China.
At the same time, let’s not forget that the United States deliberately delayed the development of science in this area for two decades in order to conceal its crimes, which in its consequences is comparable to the famous Lysenkoism.
In fact, we are dealing with the phenomenon when the American civilization, which considers itself the greatest and most powerful, actually demonstrates a primitive conceit.
For no reason at all, the United States has assumed the right to decide everything for everyone, interfering in the affairs of other countries.
At the same time, for two decades now, they have been demonstrating their helplessness in terms of their willingness to bear responsibility even to their own people.
(Lysenkoism is a recognized anti-scientific concept, the founder of which is considered an academician Trofim Lysenko, which existed in the USSR in the 1930s-1960s. The consequence of this concept was the persecution of scientists, as well as the denial of the science of genetics, which had a detrimental effect on Soviet agriculture. In a figurative sense, the persecution of scientists for their "politically incorrect" scientific views is now called Lysenkoism or neo-Lysenkoism. — Approx. FAN).
Complex eh?
Yes, it is always so easy to get all caught up in the interesting details. When none of them really matter at all.
They do not matter.
What is actually going on is really quite simple. The American leadership is panicking. They have run the nation into the ground, and the people are very, very restless. The entire nation is coming apart at the seams, and the leadership must find some way to place blame. Because if they accept the blame, they will be hanging from nooses on light posts.
They chose China.
America is falling apart at the seams, and today the police must ride around in tanks and armored cars, as America is ripe for an explosion of anger as this video plainly shows…
America is falling apart at the seams.
America is a mess….
It is undeniable. America is a fucking mess. It really is. The people are brain dead either on drugs or electronic manipulation feeding a steady diet of hate, fear, and addiction. The oligarchy live inside well guarded and protected enclaves like the castles of yore. And when you see the reality it slaps you right in the face.
As in this reality video… go ahead watch it. I double-dare you.
America is a mess.
Blame it all on China…
The Chinese leadership is not having any of this, and knows full well where this is all leading towards.
They have had centuries of strife, hunger, starvation, looting and war. If you think that they will not fight for their place on the earth, you are sadly mistaken.
What China had to go through for the past 100 years is beyond imagination.
For a big part of it, China had to suffer shameless looting from Western imperialists, had land and resources stolen, and saw millions of its people massacred by Japanese invaders. All these atrocities left the China obliterated and the repercussions rung on for decades and set China into years of poverty and famine.
For a big part of the past 100 years China had been working their arse off to repair the damage and get their people out of poverty, increase the literacy rate and restore prosperity to the country.
And for 90 of the past 100 years you hardly hear the West talk about “human rights”, but all of a sudden when China’s economy seem to be threatening Western dominance of the world, the Western countries started to gang up on them with fabricated claims of human rights violation.
Only those countries who have been in the same boat as China, those who have been bullied, looted and taken advantage of by the shameless Western powers understand all the BS that China is getting.
-Jong Mun Goh
Distill everything
So really, if you want to distill everything into it’s simplest components, its really American Leaders want a war where the Chinese leaders die.
Sounds harsh. But it's accurate.
Trump era policy papers list specifics about targeting the Chinese leadership to institute a USA favorable "regime change".
It’s difficult to see any hope…
It certainly seems that way, doesn’t it?
No hope in America these days.
And now we have to cope with the reality…
These millions of dollars that is pouring towards Hate-hate-hate-china will manifest into something one way or the other. You simply do not irradiate the minds of 330 million people and not have something happen as a result of it.
Such as shown in this video.
Hate-hate-hate-China
And this hate is manifesting…
Black on Asian crime is up in triple digits, and it is horrible. And what is the American government doing? Why it is funding more and more hate. Well, sure it’s going to result in people getting hurt, but it’s going to also result in other things as well. Be careful what you wish for.
Check out this video…
This is the Internet MEME about the United States (out of China)…
A mere four years ago, everyone in China had a good opinion of America. That started to change under Trump, and Biden has just kicked that opinion to the ground and stomped on it. To most Americans it doesn’t matter. But the truth is that it DOES matter.
If America is ever going to catch up to the rest of the world it just cannot isolate and threaten. It just looks like some kind of sick mentally retarded psychopath prison escapee. Check out this video meme.
Video Meme
But you know…
Life, real life is nothing like the brain-dead, zombies that are trying to cope in America today. The reality is that the rest of the world is actually doing pretty well, and China is doing great. Precisely because they concentrate on the needs of the people and not grabbing everything for personal profit and fighting wars to make money. Which is the USA model.
I want to ram this idea home with a “bitch slap” of reality. Here’s a sexy “everyday” video of a typical Chinese girl, in her house, making delicious typical healthy Chinese food for her Chinese family.
You wonder why the Chinese are happy, and healthy? Well it is because they eat well, live a stress free life, and are not taxed and regulated into oblivion. To either die, want to die or quiver in nervous exhaustion on some street corner. That’s why!
Check out this great sexy video! There’s few things sexier than a happy woman and food, glorious food!
Typical Chinese housewife.
And in Russia
It’s not like the “entire world is going down the tubes”. the rest of the world is doing well. None of those “new” “progressive” ideas where everyone can be a slob and do “their own thing” as a sign of “freedom”. People elsewhere, outside of the “bastions of freedom” are living quite well.
Check out this article, translated from Russian HERE.
“Still then go to bed” Why an American is surprised how a Russian woman makes a bed (says an American)
In everyday moments, residents of Russia often surprise me, probably because they are more demanding of cleanliness in the house. Still, for an American, some habits that are unacceptable for a Russian at all are quite normal, for example, walking around the house in shoes or collecting dirty dishes. Yes, a lot depends on the person, but the mentality is also very influenced. Therefore, in this publication I want to write about a rather curious difference in such a simple action as making a bed.
To be honest, every time I was surprised that my girlfriend, even living alone, kept the bed made. But I attributed it to the fact that she does not want to look in front of me inappropriately, women 🙂 However, the other day I realized that making a bed is a routine thing. In the morning, the girl insistently asked me to get out of bed, because it was time to bring me to a “decent look”.
With this process, I helped, but in my head I wondered: “Why complicate it so much?” Before that, I did not even notice that many Russians have a bed made quite difficult. That is, it is not enough just to carefully lay the blanket on top and throw a few pillows on top. Russians are serious about this matter, so you need to perfectly lay the blanket evenly, use a blanket or blanket on top, decorate it with pillows.
Again, I wonder how picky the Russians are sometimes, especially when compared to the Americans. The fact is that most People in America do not fill the bed at all, because the bedroom is a personal space. If the owner does not want to carefully bring the bed in perfect order every day, then he will not do this. And overall, I also don’t see anything wrong with not making the bed, especially if there is a bedroom. But before you go to bed, you do not need to prepare a place for bed.
But I was much more amazed when the girl told how in childhood Russians were taught to make beds. In kindergarten, time was necessarily allocated after an hour of sleep, when children had to independently bring the beds to the desired appearance. It’s funny that the beloved shared the story with some discontent. Because even in kindergarten there were certain requirements, the blanket was folded in a certain way, the blanket was flat, and the pillow had to stand, while a little at an angle.
I listened, and I felt sorry and funny at the same time. So that’s where all this desire to perfectly make a bed before you have breakfast comes from. When, if not from an early age to accustom the child to order? Probably, there would be a similar practice in America, then maybe I would also not be able to safely leave the bed “as it happens”. Although there is an interesting observation about Americans, the older, the more likely the bed is to be made.
…
And in the Middle East…
Isn’t this just wonderful?
Life in the Middle East.
And back in China…
Han traditional period clothing has really become a fashion statement. China, being traditional and conservative in culture has embraced these styles. You cannot go a day without seeing someone wear these clothes, and the little girls love to wear them. Not only are they cool appearing, but they are super comfortable, and very elegant.
Chinese little girls.
Why is the rest of the world doing far better, being far happier while (on a GDP level) making far less money, and obeying social rules of “normal” behaviors and roles? What is going on?
The Western Financial Empire is collapsing
The financial empire that the “West” has created is a “house of cards”.
Aplan, organization, or other entity that is destined to fail due to a weak structure or foundation (likened to a literal house of cards, which is built by balancing playing cards against one another, and is very easily toppled).
-House of Cards Idiom
To keep it running, there must be inflation. As long as the inflation isn’t too bad (read: too noticeable; Keeping up with yearly employee raises of 2%) it is tolerated, and the entire corrupt system runs.
But when the leadership is incompetent, or crazy, or a disaster hits, and they make gargantuan sized budgets with no oversight, then inflation expands past this 2% marker. And it becomes noticeable.
Congress has authorized nearly $4 trillion in spending over the past year to help address the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but only about $3 trillion of it has been spent.Roughly a third of that money went directly to struggling families through stimulus checks, expanded unemployment payments and food stamps.-Congress has already approved $4trillion
Initially, the way to control the “rabble” is to lie. The media would report that inflation is under control and not that bad. Such as this Forbes Article (always a mouth piece for the Federal Government).
Aug 11, 2021 · Is Inflation Under Control? The price of a number of products has been on the rise since the first wave ofthe pandemic in April 2020. However, despite the 500% increase in the cost of freight from China, the consumer price index for the 12 months ending June 2021 stood at 2.2% compared to 1.8% for the 12 months ending June 2020.
-Is Inflation Under Control?
Ah.
But it’s all just another puzzle piece in this large playing-board.
War is like a board-game II…
Well, Perhaps to better illustrate what is going on, we should consider that the Chinese are actually playing a layered strategy game such as Mahjong. Instead of Go (as I suggested earlier).
So maybe it’s better to visualize the Chinese playing Mahjong. Both Go and Mahjong are very simple games, that get very complex, very quickly with layers upon layers of strategic moves.
The Chinese play Mahjong.
And that while the United States have many very capable people, those in positions of power are actually simpletons drunk on power.
So by all observation, America is actually just playing checkers…
America is actually playing checkers.
And China is playing it expertly.
China has allied with China with the tightest relationship ever, and the agreements and the joint efforts are simply astounding. Right now units are being cross trained in use of each other’s equipment. So that Russian military can use Chinese equipment and the Chinese can use Russian equipment. Not to mention that the leaders of both nations are in the supreme military headquarters of each nation.
As is illustrated in this video. Not that any American would ever see it. These videos are banned in America. Well, they are, but luckily MM is a “small potatoes” operation.
China has allied with China with the tightest relationship ever, and the agreements and the joint efforts are simply astounding.
In this clamorous kaleidoscope of United States centered insanity…
We can see elements of reason from those who lie outside of irradiated, and bombarded nation. We can see that calm heads, and minds exist. We can see that thoughtful intentions are being manifested. We can see that there is a changing and a turning of the world towards something better. And over time, seriously, the USA looks more an more like a real cesspool.
Don’t believe me? Look at this video from the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana…
New Orleans
And this video of New York City. This is the largest and most prized American cities. It is “the shining city on the hill”.
New York City
And this video from Boston, Massachusetts. Even in the safe “bedroom communities” guns are being fired. Robberies are being committed and no one is safe.
Boston, Massachusetts
And this video. I believe that it is Chicago, Illinois. Mob rule. Very little support of the government. Hatred abounds. Crime is normal.
Chicago, Il.
And this video from New York City. The police must go out in mass, as the people, all unemployed, mostly on drugs, are always in danger. It is mob or crime rule and those that desire safety and security have moved out of the city.
New York City
As you all can see, the United States is a mess. The government has very little control over the nation. It is falling apart at the seams, and the smart people are fleeing to safer areas where they can have some degree of control over their personal lives.
Meanwhile the government is demanding the rest of the world be like the Untied States because it is the “shining city on the hill”. It cannot get any more bizzaro than this!
War is like a board-game III
Yet, you know, judging from the just insane actions that we observe happening in the United States today, perhaps the game of checkers is really giving the Washington DC leadership more credit than what is due. By all accounts and purposes, it looks like America is playing a different kind of game. No, it’s not chess. No, it’s not checkers. It’s Tic-tac-toe.
Game of Tik-tac-toe.
And China, well they are far more sophisticated. No, they are not playing Go. Nor are they playing Mahjong. They are engaged in a competitive Sudoku puzzle.
When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend.
One thing hasn’t changed, though: Many Western politicians and business executives still don’t get China. Believing, for example, that political freedom would follow the new economic freedoms, they wrongly assumed that China’s internet would be similar to the freewheeling and often politically disruptive version developed in the West. And believing that China’s economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as those in the West, many failed to envisage the Chinese state’s continuing role as investor, regulator, and intellectual property owner.
Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong? In our work we have come to see that people in both business and politics often cling to three widely shared but essentially false assumptions about modern China. As we’ll argue in the following pages, these assumptions reflect gaps in their knowledge about China’s history, culture, and language that encourage them to draw persuasive but deeply flawed analogies between China and other countries.
[ Myth 1 ]
Economics and Democracy Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Many Westerners assume that China is on the same development trajectory that Japan, Britain, Germany, and France embarked on in the immediate aftermath of World War II—the only difference being that the Chinese started much later than other Asian economies, such as South Korea and Malaysia, after a 40-year Maoist detour. According to this view, economic growth and increasing prosperity will cause China to move toward a more liberal model for both its economy and its politics, as did those countries.
It’s a plausible narrative. As the author Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, liberalism has had few competitors since the end of the Cold War, when both fascism and communism appeared defeated. And the narrative has had some powerful supporters. In a speech in 2000 former U.S. President Bill Clinton declared, “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. When individuals have the power…to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
But this argument overlooks some fundamental differences between China and the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, and France. Those countries have since 1945 been pluralist democracies with independent judiciaries. As a result, economic growth came in tandem with social progress (through, for example, legislation protecting individual choice and minority rights), which made it easy to imagine that they were two sides of a coin. The collapse of the USSR appeared to validate that belief, given that the Soviet regime’s inability to deliver meaningful economic growth for its citizens contributed to its collapse: Russia’s eventual integration into the global economy (perestroika) followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s political reforms (glasnost).
In China, however, growth has come in the context of stable communist rule, suggesting that democracy and growth are not inevitably mutually dependent. In fact, many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements—large-scale poverty reduction, huge infrastructure investment, and development as a world-class tech innovator—have come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government. Its aggressive handling of Covid-19—in sharp contrast to that of many Western countries with higher death rates and later, less-stringent lockdowns—has, if anything, reinforced that view.
China has also defied predictions that its authoritarianism would inhibit its capacity to innovate. It is a global leader in AI, biotech, and space exploration. Some of its technological successes have been driven by market forces: People wanted to buy goods or communicate more easily, and the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have helped them do just that.
But much of the technological progress has come from a highly innovative and well-funded military that has invested heavily in China’s burgeoning new industries. This, of course, mirrors the role of U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the development of Silicon Valley.
But in China the consumer applications have come faster, making more obvious the link between government investment and products and services that benefit individuals. That’s why ordinary Chinese people see Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, and TikTok as sources of national pride—international vanguards of Chinese success—rather than simply sources of jobs or GDP, as they might be viewed in the West.
Thus July 2020 polling data from the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government revealed 95% satisfaction with the Beijing government among Chinese citizens. Our own experiences on the ground in China confirm this.
Most ordinary people we meet don’t feel that the authoritarian state is solely oppressive, although it can be that; for them it also provides opportunity. A cleaner in Chongqing now owns several apartments because the CCP reformed property laws. A Shanghai journalist is paid by her state-controlled magazine to fly around the world for stories on global lifestyle trends. A young student in Nanjing can study propulsion physics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University thanks to social mobility and the party’s significant investment in scientific research.
Many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements have actually come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government.
The past decade has, if anything, strengthened Chinese leaders’ view that economic reform is possible without liberalizing politics. A major turning point was the financial crisis of 2008, which in Chinese eyes revealed the hollowness of the “Washington consensus” that democratization and economic success were linked. In the years since, China has become an economic titan, a global leader in technology innovation, and a military superpower, all while tightening its authoritarian system of government—and reinforcing a belief that the liberal narrative does not apply to China.
That, perhaps, is why its current president and (more crucially) party general secretary, Xi Jinping, has let it be known that he considers Gorbachev a traitor to the cause for liberalizing as he did, thereby destroying the Communist Party’s hold on the USSR. And when Xi announced, in 2017, that the “three critical battles” for China’s development would fall in the areas of reducing financial risk, addressing pollution, and alleviating poverty, he also made it clear that the objective of these reforms was to solidify the system rather than to change it. The truth, then, is that China is not an authoritarian state seeking to become more liberal but an authoritarian state seeking to become more successful—politically as well as economically.
In much Western analysis the verb most commonly attached to China’s reforms is “stalled.” The truth is that political reform in China hasn’t stalled. It continues apace. It’s just not liberal reform. One example is the reinvention in the late 2010s of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Empowered by Xi to deal with the corruption that had become so prevalent early in that decade, the commission can arrest and hold suspects for several months; its decisions cannot be overturned by any other entity in China, not even the supreme court.
The commission has succeeded in reducing corruption in large part because it is essentially above the law—something unimaginable in a liberal democracy. These are the reforms China is making—and they need to be understood on their own terms, not simply as a distorted or deficient version of a liberal model.
One reason that many people misread China’s trajectory may be that—particularly in the English-language promotional materials the Chinese use overseas—the country tends to portray itself as a variation on a liberal state, and therefore more trustworthy. It often compares itself to brands with which Westerners are familiar. For example, in making the case for why it should be involved in the UK’s 5G infrastructure rollout, Huawei styled itself the “John Lewis of China,” in reference to the well-known British department store that is regularly ranked as one of the UK’s most trusted brands.
China is also often at pains to suggest to foreign governments or investors that it is similar to the West in many aspects—consumer lifestyles, leisure travel, and a high demand for tertiary education. These similarities are real, but they are manifestations of the wealth and personal aspirations of China’s newly affluent middle class, and they in no way negate the very real differences between the political systems of China and the West.
Which brings us to the next myth.
[ Myth 2 ]
Authoritarian Political Systems Can’t Be Legitimate
Many Chinese not only don’t believe that democracy is necessary for economic success but do believe that their form of government is legitimate and effective. Westerners’ failure to appreciate this explains why many still expect China to reduce its role as investor, regulator, and, especially, intellectual property owner when that role is in fact seen as essential by the Chinese government.
Part of the system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese is, again, rooted in history: China has often had to fight off invaders and, as is rarely acknowledged in the West, fought essentially alone against Japan from 1937 until 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II. The resulting victory, which for decades the CCP spun as its solo vanquishing of an external enemy, was reinforced by defeat of an internal one (Chiang Kai-shek in 1949), establishing the legitimacy of the party and its authoritarian system.
Seventy years on, many Chinese believe that their political system is now actually more legitimate and effective than the West’s. This is a belief alien to many Western business executives, especially if they’ve had experience with other authoritarian regimes. The critical distinction is that the Chinese system is not only Marxist, it’s Marxist-Leninist. In our experience, many Westerners don’t understand what that means or why it matters. A Marxist system is concerned primarily with economic outcomes.
That has political implications, of course—for example, that the public ownership of assets is necessary to ensure an equal distribution of wealth—but the economic outcomes are the focus. Leninism, however, is essentially a political doctrine; its primary aim is control. So a Marxist-Leninist system is concerned not only with economic outcomes but also with gaining and maintaining control over the system itself.
That has huge implications for people seeking to do business in China. If China were concerned only with economic outcomes, it would welcome foreign businesses and investors and, provided they helped deliver economic growth, would treat them as equal partners, agnostic as to who owned the IP or the majority stake in a joint venture. But because this is also a Leninist system, those issues are of critical importance to Chinese leaders, who won’t change their minds about them, however effective or helpful their foreign partners are economically.
This plays out every time a Western company negotiates access to the Chinese market. We have both sat in meetings where business executives, particularly in the technology and pharmaceutical sectors, expressed surprise at China’s insistence that they transfer ownership of their IP to a Chinese company. Some have expressed optimism that China’s need for control will lessen after they’ve proved their worth as partners. Our response? That’s not likely, precisely because in China’s particular brand of authoritarianism, control is key.
A Leninist approach to selecting future leaders is also a way the CCP has maintained its legitimacy, because to many ordinary Chinese, this approach produces relatively competent leaders: They are chosen by the CCP and progress through the system by successfully running first a town and then a province; only after that do they serve on the Politburo.
You can’t become a senior leader in China without having proved your worth as a manager.
China’s leaders argue that its essentially Leninist rule book makes Chinese politics far less arbitrary or nepotistic than those of many other, notably Western, countries (even though the system has its share of back-scratching and opaque decision-making).
Familiarity with Leninist doctrine is still important for getting ahead. Entry to the CCP and to a university involves compulsory courses in Marxist-Leninist thought, which has also become part of popular culture, as evidenced by the 2018 TV talk show Marx Got It Right. And with handy apps such as Xuexi Qiangguo (“Study the powerful nation” and a pun on “Study Xi”) to teach the basics of thinkers including Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Xi Jinping, political education is now a 21st-century business.
The Leninist nature of politics is also evidenced by the language used to discuss it. Political discourse in China remains anchored in Marxist-Leninist ideas of “struggle” (douzheng) and “contradiction” (maodun)—both seen as attributes that force a necessary and even healthy confrontation that can help achieve a victorious outcome. In fact, the Chinese word for the resolution of a conflict (jiejue) can imply a result in which one side overcomes the other, rather than one in which both sides are content. Hence the old joke that China’s definition of a win-win scenario is one in which China wins twice.
China uses its particular authoritarian model—and its presumed legitimacy—to build trust with its population in ways that would be considered highly intrusive in a liberal democracy. The city of Rongcheng, for example, uses big data (available to the government through surveillance and other data-capturing infrastructure) to give people individualized “social credit scores.” These are used to reward or punish citizens according to their political and financial virtues or vices.
The benefits are both financial (for example, access to mortgage loans) and social (permission to buy a ticket on one of the new high-speed trains). Those with low social-credit scores may find themselves prevented from buying an airline ticket or getting a date on an app. For liberals (in China and elsewhere), this is an appalling prospect; but for many ordinary people in China, it’s a perfectly reasonable part of the social contract between the individual and the state.
Such ideas may appear very different from the outward-facing, Confucian concepts of “benevolence” and “harmony” that China presents to its international, English-speaking audience. But even those concepts lead to considerable misunderstanding on the part of Westerners, who often reduce Confucianism to cloying ideas about peace and cooperation. For the Chinese, the key to those outcomes is respect for an appropriate hierarchy, itself a means of control. While hierarchy and equality may appear to the post-Enlightenment West to be antithetical concepts, in China they remain inherently complementary.
Recognizing that the authoritarian Marxist-Leninist system is accepted in China as not only legitimate but also effective is crucially important if Westerners are to make more-realistic long-term decisions about how to deal with or invest in the country. But the third assumption can also mislead those seeking to engage with China.
[ Myth 3 ]
The Chinese Live, Work, and Invest Like Westerners
China’s recent history means that Chinese people and the state approach decisions very differently from Westerners—in both the time frames they use and the risks they worry about most. But because human beings tend to believe that other humans make decisions as they do, this may be the most difficult assumption for Westerners to overcome.
Let’s imagine the personal history of a Chinese woman who is 65 today. Born in 1955, she experienced as a child the terrible Great Leap Forward famine in which 20 million Chinese starved to death. She was a Red Guard as a teenager, screaming adoration for Chairman Mao while her parents were being re-educated for being educated. By the 1980s she was in the first generation to go back to university, and even took part in the Tiananmen Square demonstration.
Then, in the 1990s, she took advantage of the new economic freedoms, becoming a 30-something entrepreneur in one of the new Special Economic Zones. She bought a flat—the first time anyone in her family’s history had owned property. Eager for experience, she took a job as an investment analyst with a Shanghai-based foreign asset manager, but despite a long-term career plan mapped out by her employer, she left that company for a small short-term pay raise from a competitor.
By 2008 she was making the most of the rise in disposable incomes by buying new consumer goods that her parents could only have dreamt about. In the early 2010s she started moderating her previously outspoken political comments on Weibo as censorship tightened up. By 2020 she was intent on seeing her seven-year-old grandson and infant granddaughter (a second child had only recently become legal) do well.
Had she been born in 1955 in almost any other major economy in the world, her life would have been much, much more predictable. But looking back over her life story, one can see why even many young Chinese today may feel a reduced sense of predictability or trust in what the future holds—or in what their government might do next.
When life is (or has been within living memory) unpredictable, people tend to apply a higher discount rate to potential long-term outcomes than to short-term ones—and a rate materially higher than the one applied by people living in more-stable societies. That means not that these people are unconcerned with long-term outcomes but, rather, that their risk aversion increases significantly as the time frame lengthens. This shapes the way they make long-term commitments, especially those that entail short-term trade-offs or losses.
Thus many Chinese consumers prefer the short-term gains of the stock market to locking their money away in long-term savings vehicles. As market research consistently tells us, the majority of individual Chinese investors behave more like traders. For example, a 2015 survey found that 81% of them trade at least once a month, even though frequent trading is invariably a way to destroy rather than create long-term fund value.
That figure is higher than in all Western countries (for example, only 53% of U.S. individual investors trade this frequently); it’s also even higher than in neighboring Hong Kong—another Han Chinese society with a predilection for gambling and a similar, capital-gains-tax-free regime. This suggests that something distinctive to mainland China influences this behavior: long-term unpredictability that’s sufficiently recent to have been experienced by or passed on to those now buying stocks.
That focus on securing short-term gain is why the young asset manager in Shanghai left a good long-term job for a relatively small but immediate pay raise—behavior that still plagues many businesses trying to retain talent and manage succession pipelines in China. People who do take long-term career risks often do so only after fulfilling their primary need for short-term security. For example, we’ve interviewed couples in which the wife “jumps into the sea” of starting her own business—becoming one of China’s many female entrepreneurs—because her husband’s stable but lower-paid state-sector job will provide the family with security.
The one long-term asset class in which increasing numbers of Chinese are invested—that is, residential property, ownership of which grew from 14% of 25-to-69-year-olds in 1988 to 93% by 2008—is driven also by the need for security: Unlike all other assets, property ensures a roof over one’s head if things go wrong, in a system with limited social welfare and a history of sudden policy changes.
China’s rulers see foreign engagement as a source less of opportunity than of threat, uncertainty, and even humiliation.
In contrast, the government’s discount rate on the future is lower—in part because of its Leninist emphasis on control—and explicitly focused on long-term returns.
The vehicles for much of this investment are still the CCP’s Soviet-style five-year plans, which include the development of what Xi has termed an “eco-civilization” built around solar energy technology, “smart cities,” and high-density, energy-efficient housing. Ambition like that can’t be realized without state intervention—relatively fast and easy but often brutal in China. By comparison, progress on these issues is for Western economies extremely slow.
Decisions—by both individuals and the state—about how to invest all serve one purpose: to provide security and stability in an unpredictable world. Although many in the West may believe that China sees only opportunity in its 21st-century global plans, its motivation is very different. For much of its turbulent modern history, China has been under threat from foreign powers, both within Asia (notably Japan) and outside it (the UK and France in the mid 19th century). China’s rulers, therefore, see foreign engagement as a source less of opportunity than of threat, uncertainty, and even humiliation.
They still blame foreign interference for many of their misfortunes, even if it occurred more than a century ago. For example, the British role in the Opium Wars of the 1840s kicked off a 100-year period that the Chinese still refer to as the Century of Humiliation. China’s history continues to color its view of international relations—and in large part explains its current obsession with the inviolability of its sovereignty.
That history also explains the paradox that the rulers and the ruled in China operate on very different time frames. For individuals, who’ve lived through harsh times they could not control, the reaction is to make some key choices in a much more short-term way than Westerners do. Policy makers, in contrast, looking for ways to gain more control and sovereignty over the future, now play a much longer game than the West does. This shared quest for predictability explains the continuing attractiveness of an authoritarian system in which control is the central tenet.
. . .
Many in the West accept the version of China that it has presented to the world: The period of “reform and opening” begun in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, which stressed the need to avoid the radical and often violent politics of the Cultural Revolution, means that ideology in China no longer matters. The reality is quite different. At every point since 1949 the Chinese Communist Party has been central to the institutions, society, and daily experiences that shape the Chinese people. And the party has always believed in and emphasized the importance of Chinese history and of Marxist-Leninist thought, with all they imply. Until Western companies and politicians accept this reality, they will continue to get China wrong.
Maybe, so says the Harvard Elite…
Here’s an article out of China. Commenting on Bloomberg saying that China WILL BE ISOLATED from the rest of the world. Yeah.As if you can isolate the world’s factory. Sure….
Dynamic zero-case route won’t get China ‘isolated’: Global Times editorial
Bloomberg reported that China’s zero-tolerance strategy of COVID-19 “risks leaving it isolated for years.” But on Tuesday, statistics published by China’s Ministry of Commerce showed that China’s foreign trade in the first seven months of this year reached a high compared with the same period last year, and last year saw a surge in China’s foreign trade. This is a slap on the face of the “China isolation” theory.
China did not close its door due to the pandemic. Economic exchanges are the core of the current international exchanges, which is proven by the growth in China’s foreign trade. As for people-to-people exchanges, there has been a major decline at the global level. China has done a good job in controlling its borders and explored a set of methods to achieve safe international exchanges during the pandemic. This set of methods is worth being improved and is expected to be valued by other countries.
China will host the Winter Olympic Games six months from now. It could be another peak of the infections of coronavirus. Beijing is determined to host the Games well – it will not allow large-scale infections in Chinese society, and ensure the pandemic does not spread among delegates from all the participating countries. We believe given China’s tight prevention and control, athletes for the Games will not fear coming to China.
US media outlets, represented by Bloomberg, have been holding a twisted mentality toward China’s anti-virus achievements. China has avoided serious losses of life, and its economic recovery is leading the world. They pretend not seeing these and are reluctant to admit them. Not long ago, Bloomberg released a wired COVID Resilience Ranking that put the US on top of the list, which has become the laughing stock of the international community.
China is capable of carrying on the dynamic zero-case route. With the development of vaccines, strong mobilization and organization ability has turned into welfare for the Chinese people. Many Western countries also want to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – zero-case is better. The US once suspended flights with all European countries, and Australia has recently deployed defense force to help enforce lockdown. But they cannot reach the status of zero-case. Thus, it was a forced choice of them to downplay the pandemic.
Although the US has registered over 617,000 coronavirus deaths so far, the country still undertook a recent rebound in daily new cases – a daily average of over 124,000 new cases were reported in the past week. If Washington has the opportunity to put the number of new case down to zero, it will inject all efforts to tout about it.
We can hardly rule out the possibility that some American elites are jealous of China’s capability of having dynamic zero cases. They’d rather see China toppled by the COVID-19 epidemic just like the US. Then they would get a chance to clamor that China’s vaccines are not effective. Anyway, they don’t want to see any good from China. And when China does good, they will spare no efforts to mislead the international community to neutralize the influence of China’s success in fighting the virus.
China is a country that seeks truth from facts. The success of its dynamic zero-case policy has laid a solid foundation for China’s fight against the epidemic in the future. With the high rate of vaccination and a better preparation of the medical service system, China will have the ability to adjust its defensive strategy based on future needs. Many people have taken for granted that China fears getting back in touch with the rest of world because Chinese society has been accustomed to zero cases.
What China will do is to adapt to the world’s new normal due to an increase of global interactions while ensuring its domestic line of defense is robust enough against imported infections. The US has done nothing on this. But China has accumulated abundant experiences in the past year and beyond. Chinese people have managed what seemed impossible for Americans, and Chinese people will continue doing so.
Instead, it is hard to predict if the US – a super spreader of the pandemic – will face up to external pressure to hinder it from opening to the world. If the same number of Chinese and American people are traveling in a third country where the epidemic is mild, which group is more concerning to local people? Fortunately, the recent summer and winter Olympic games are not held in the US, or else how many countries dare to send delegations?
As China and the US follow their respective paths – taking into account their respective adjustment capabilities – time will tell which country will open up to the world more smoothly with better overall results. Time is neutral and its answer will be unbiased.
Meanwhile, while the United States screams and hollers and threatens…
Three Chinese think tanks published a joint research report on Monday criticizing the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University, the Taihe Institute and Intellisia gathered dozens of former politicians, intellectuals, scholars, policy- and decision-makers and practitioners to contribute to the report.
According to the report titled “‘America Ranked First’?! The Truth about America’s Fight against COVID-19,” the United States deserves to be the world’s No. 1 anti-pandemic failure, the world’s No. 1 political-blaming country, the world’s No. 1 pandemic spreader, the world’s No. 1 politically-divisive country, the world’s No. 1 currency-abusing country, the world’s No. 1 turbulent country during the pandemic, the world’s No. 1 disinforming country, and the world’s No. 1 country advocating origin tracing terrorism.
The report said the U.S. failed to contain the virus and had the most COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world. As of August 7, 2021, the United States had reported 35,530,951 cumulative confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 613,658 deaths while some U.S. media still rated the country number one in the world for its pandemic response.
“The latest absurd example is the Bloomberg reporting on a ranking, COVID resilience ranking, the United States comes No. 1, this can’t be taken seriously,” Martin Jacques, a senior fellow from Cambridge University, said at a presser about the report via video link.
Jacques also argued if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t happen amid fraying China-U.S. relations, the story could’ve been much different, adding, “COVID-19 is probably the greatest test of governance the world has seen since the Second World War, the United States and the West failed miserably.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen U.S. business closures and waves of unemployment occurring faster and on a larger scale than expected. The lower class and other vulnerable groups are facing higher risks of unemployment. The gap between rich and poor further widened as wealth flowed into the hands of a few more quickly, said the report.
It also noticed that social unrest is a “chronic disease” in the United States as the pandemic is acting as an “amplifier” to further exacerbate social tensions. This year, the U.S. topped the list of crime rates in developed countries, much higher than countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain, as well as many developing countries. Social unrest manifests itself in three main ways: guns out of control, hate crimes and political chaos.
The report found that lack of common sense and scientific knowledge were direct causes for the U.S. failing to constrain the pandemic’s impact, and pointed the finger at former U.S. President Donald Trump for spreading fake news about the virus.
“Donald Trump might be the strongest driving force on creating fake COVID-19 information,” it said.
The report blamed the pandemic for tearing up U.S. society, with conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus exacerbating bully attitudes and discrimination towards Asian Americans.
Democrats and Republicans were divided on virus containment measures, especially mask mandates and America’s laissez-faire on containing the virus had also had a ripple effect on other countries. “After the outbreak of the pandemic, over 20 million U.S. citizens went abroad, accelerating the spread of the virus,” the report said.
Wang Wen, executive dean from Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University, said: “When it comes to issues like vaccination, social distancing, and almost any policies regarding COVID-19 containment, U.S. politicians have barely reached a consensus. This is the tragedy of America’s political and social system.”
It also identified a lack of responsibility from the U.S. in terms of providing COVID-19 vaccines to other countries. Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center estimated that by the summer of 2021, the United States may have a surplus of 300 million or more doses of COVID-19 vaccine. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 17 that the United States had exported only 3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine
“Exported vaccines from the U.S. take up less than one percent of its total vaccine production,” said the report.
Do you all know what this reminds me of?
Seriously. It reminds me of this…
Appearing on The Moment podcast, Tarantino shared a childhood story about how his mother used to side with his teachers after they called him out for writing screenplays in school.
According to Tarantino: "In the middle of her little tirade, she said, 'Oh, and by the way, this little 'writing career,' with the finger quotes and everything. This little 'writing career' that you're doing? That shit is over."
"When she said that to me in that sarcastic way, I go, 'OK, lady, when I become a successful writer, you will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There's no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing. Because you said that.'"
As for a true emergency? "Yeah. I helped her out with a jam with the IRS," Tarantino admitted. "But no house. No Cadillac, no house."
He added, "There are consequences for your words as you deal with your children. Remember, there are consequences for your sarcastic tone about what's meaningful to them."
Tarantino is absolutely right about that.
Negative comments parents make can have a lifelong impact on their children's lives — no matter how small they may seem to those hurling them. Consider this another reminder that you should always support your kids' dreams, no matter how far-fetched they may seem.
And that’s the USA today. It was a cocky arrogant, bullshit nation, ruled by psychopathic personalities that have done everything in it’s power to put the rest of the world down. Now it is collapsing and still being a jack-ass.
Here’s a golden gem from the old Seinfield television show…
No soup for you!
“No Soup For You” or “NO SOUP 4 U” is a catchphrase that was initially uttered in a 1995 episode of the American comedic sitcom Seinfeld. Online, the phrase is often used in the context of message boards and forums in reply to other users who have made requests or demands that are denied or cannot be fulfilled.
The USA is a mess. The UK is a mess. The South Africa is a mess. Israel is a mess. And the degree of how much of a mess it is is directly tied to how closely that nation is connected to the Untied States.
So Australia wants to be connect to the United States hip to hip, then you can expect Australia to collapse just like America is collapsing. Iceland, which isn’t, is not collapsing. Sweden which is following the EU led American directives, is a mixed bag. Like I said. The closer the nation is tied to America, the more of a fucked up mess it is today.
So what?
Well, to see what is actually going on, you have to take a couple of steps back and look at the Big BIG picture.
And how can you deal with this?
Well, you really don’t need to get into the details. You just need to concentrate on your life, and your family life selfishly. The only things that you have any control over is your immediate reality.
Guys, guys, guys. It seems like the world is coming apart at the seams. So what can you do?
You turn off the “news”. You walk outside. You listen to the birds. You go into a restaurant and have a delicious meal. You smell the air. You hop on a bicycle and ride. You play with your kitties, or romp with your dog.
After a few days of this, then you take in MEASURED “news”.
If you live in Idaho, what the Hell is going on in New York should be of no concern to you. If you read anything about China, but haven’t been there in the last two years, then discard it as noise. Who gives a fuck of Mr. XXXXX says YYYYY that will do ZZZZZ? It’s all just a blimp on the big picture.
People! The ONLY way for you all to get through this period of strife is to be a Rufus.
That’s the ONLY way.
How do you control your reality?
You be a Rufus.
Listen to me.
You center your mind. You shut down the “news”. You kick away all the negative influences in your life. You stop eating processed food and replace it with good delicious home cooked fresh foods. You perform meditations. You operate your affirmation campaigns. You spend time with loved ones and pets. You smile. You help people in your community. You make friends and associations in your community and you cultivate them. Be the best you can be. And you be a Rufus.
Or in an easier to read format…
You center your mind.
You shut down the “news”.
You kick away all the negative influences in your life.
You stop eating processed food and replace it with good delicious home cooked fresh foods.
You perform meditations.
You operate your affirmation campaigns.
You spend time with loved ones and pets.
You smile.
You help people in your community.
You make friends and associations in your community and you cultivate them.
Be the best that you can be.
And you be a Rufus.
Be the Rufus?
Be the Rufus. This is what I mean when I say that you must be part of something larger; be part of your community. Be a giver. Not a taker. Lord knows there are far too many money-grubbing taker in this world. Contribute. Help. Make the day of someone just a little bit better. Buy a coffee for a coworker. Smile.
Be the Rufus.
Yes. We must be the Rufus. Sure this guy would probably get in trouble for being late. Maybe his boss will dock his pay. If it was America, he might even lose his job. But not here. Not now. He’s a Rufus, and he “felt” that something was amiss. He did not wait. he did not call the police. He took action.
He selflessly helped others in need.
Be the Rufus.
In a world that is seemingly “off the rails”, with a terribly inefficient, corrupt and moronic government, where everything is going wrong and you are being pinched by all sides with a crazy media shouting at you “it’s China’s fault!”…
Be the Rufus.
A Rufus saves others.
That’s it really.
You must be the Rufus.
Be part of something bigger than yourself. Be the Rufus.
It doesn’t take much. All it takes is to be aware and contribute to the general well being of your community. If there is trash on the road in front of your house, you clean it up. You don’t wait for the government to do so. If your grass needs cut, you cut it. If your neighbor needs a hand you give it to him. If your mailbox is an eyesore, then spruce it up.
When an emergency happens, you as the Rufus, spring into action. Be the Rufus.
A Rufus is helpful.
Be the Rufus!
When an emergency happens, you take part and be helpful.
Be the Rufus.
Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard. Like preventing an infant from having seizures. But a Rufus does what ever is necessary. Be that Rufus. Be the best you can be.
A Rufus does what ever it takes.
So yeah, the United States is collapsing. The leadership are a group of self-centered ignoramuses. And you might be stuck, trapped and inside this massive cesspool on fire. What can you do?
Again.
Focus on you. Be part of your community. Smile. Make other feel good about themselves and want to see you. Be helpful. Devote good efforts to make your house good, calm, strong and cohesive. Spend time with pets and loved ones. Eat healthy food. Do your affirmation campaigns. Be the Rufus.
Just being helpful is all it takes.
Just be helpful.
Sometimes you have to take extraordinary measures.
Here’s a military soldier abandoning his post to rescue a three year old from getting squashed by an income horde or cars and trucks. Yikes!
Save the baby!
A Rufus is there to help others.
A Rufus is part of the community. They are appreciated. They are loved. They are the organized person that everyone know that they can count on. They are the guiding light that everyone in need turns to.
A Rufus is there.
You see, once you change your mind and decide to participate within a community, and be helpful to others you change. Your mind; and then your entire being, becomes a service to others sentience. STO.
The madness in the United States today is mostly and primarily affecting three other sentience’s;
Service to self (STS).
Service for another (SFA).
Disjointed Sentience (DJS).
By changing your being, and by doing your prayer affirmation campaigns you are able to create a kind of “non-physical” zone around you and your family and community. It’s not ironclad, though. But it is certainly strong enough to take most of the hits and pings from the society that surrounds yours.
Certainly brute force assaults, and intentional disruptive attacks can damage what ever you can throw up, but if you just follow the basic format that I have provided, you all will be fine. You all will be just fine. You will be just fine.
The False Flag Event
The American “leadership” (whatever it leads is another question) seems to be intent in generating a false flag event to trigger a war with China. We all can prevent that within our affirmation campaigns, and we can isolate our communities from any successful chaos that might result as an effect of it.
Do not fear the insanity.
Just focus on you, your family and friends, and your community. Stick to the basics, and play the “long game”. Everything will be quite different one decade from now. All you all want to do is “ride it out” unscathed. To do this, just follow MM advice and Be The Rufus.
You don’t have to rescue anyone. You just need to be extra considerate. You need to be more humane and understanding. You need to be sensitive to the needs of those around you and be helpful to them.
Be the helpful Rufus.
A Rufus makes it his job to help others. To keep his community clean, and patrolled and away from crime. A Rufus holds his society responsible for what ever happens to it, and works to correct wrongs, and punish those who are selfish or corrupt at all levels. A Rufus participates…
A Rufus contributes.
A Rufus lends a hand to those in need.
A Rufus goes and visits a dying friend, no matter what the law says, and comforts him as only a meat-pie lady could A Rufus cares about the feeling of others. A Rufus helps the children; the animals; the cats; and the dogs. A Rufus is always there to make the community a better place to live in.
A Rufus helps others.
A Rufus doesn’t drive past an gawk at a car accident. They get out of their car and help. They do what ever they can. They are the people that make the community and their actions are attractive and contagious. All it takes is a few Rufus’s in the community and soon, others will start acting that way too.
Be the Rufus.
Make the world a better place.
Help others. Be the Rufus.
A Rufus volunteers.
When there is a need in the community, the Rufus doesn’t complain. They don’t bitch and moan, they go out and work. They volunteer, and if there isn’t any kind of organization to correct the problems, they set one up themselves.
A Rufus makes a difference.
Even if it is hot, and you are suffering from heat exhaustion. A Rufus “takes it on the chin”. A Rufus makes a difference in their community.
A Rufus is the person that you can count on.
A Rufus is not perfect, and is jut a human. But the Rufus strives to be more than just a user; a complainer, a parasite on society. A Rufus contributes.
A Rufus contributes.
Here’s some unpaid volunteers in China. They are working long, long days, and then collapse in the public areas to get some sleep before they begin again. A Rufus makes the world a better place.
Be the Rufus.
You can make the world a better place.
..
Be the Rufus.
Final words
You are never alone if you are part of a community. You might be weak in some areas, but the community will compensate. And your strengths can be used to make the community strong. Remember the rule of three. Three people make a community. Be part of your community. And the bigger; the better.
You WILL BE appreciated. As this video clearly shows.
Be part of your community.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Oh man! I was hoping that the fantasy that “America will regain it’s power and strength and continue to rule the world” will dissipate.
Not so.
Over the weekend, I have been bombarded with articles talking about how America is ready to fight for democracy™ and freedom™ again! This time against China.
And that, all that is needed is a few billions of dollars, and some pluck from “Allies”, and then China would “be toast“.
Bombarded. Non-stop cascade of news “articles” (disguised propaganda pieces) and comments (often with a sizable portion of ‘bots – there just can’t be that many brain-dead people in the United States, can there?)
As in what the fuck?
Can’t I just get a break.
I guess not. Sigh.
And then you have these gung-ho “patriots” who think that everyone else outside of America are rats that need to be stepped on and killed, like some kind of vermin.
Generational warrior culture, eh?
Ever hear of Genghis Khan?
Dude, I just and to enjoy my day. I want to walk, and relax. I want to eat fine delicious food. I want to drink some nice wine. I want to play with the pets, smell the lush moist air, and cavort with pretty girls.
But noooo…
I have to endue a flood of anti-China bullshit and endure comments on how America is going to kick-some -Chinese-ass. Sheech!
I know. I know. I KNOW.
You fund half a billion dollars in anti-China propaganda, of course it’s going to materialize. The only thing that I am surprised about is that there’s no Hollywood movies depicting Rambo-like American soldiers gloriously bayoneting the evil Chinese in a war picture.
Maybe. Soon.
Proud American soldiers to fight communism for liberty, freedom and democracy!
First off, let’s recognize the fact that the United States Military Empire believes that it can use nuclear weapons while avoiding a MAD all-out nuclear response.
Yup! That’s true.
These fucking moron “geniuses” in Washington DC actually believe that they can use nuclear weapons against either Russia or China, and that they will NOT shoot nuclear weapons back.
Can you fucking believe it?
Let’s look at this article to flush out this curious fantasy…
Dr. Strangelove’s Spoon Benders: How the U.S. Military Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and a writer at Strategic Culture Foundation, consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page for free.
“MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role. In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe…
...through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth…
State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.
Like the sword of Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and integrity to enhance civilization with it.
If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality.
If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”
– “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” by Col. Paul Vallely and Maj. Michael Aquino, a document written to increase the influence of the “spoon-benders” in the U.S. military.
About one year ago, the U.S. military conducted a simulation of a “limited” nuclear exchange with…
…Russia.
This was strange news on several accounts.
For one, this sort of thing is not typically announced in the candid detail U.S. defense secretary Mark Esper described to journalists, giddy that he got to “play himself” in this war game scenario.
It was as if he were preparing for a Hollywood movie doing his best John Wayne impression:
“If you got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”
However, the most concerning revelation of this simulated exercise was the announcement to the American people that;
“it might be very possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict.”
In other words, throw your cares to the wind, that is, the “spirit wind” known as kamikaze, because…
They explained that their confident calculation on being “victorious” in this exercise completely relied on the supposition that such a confrontation would remain “limited” in its nuclear exchange.
“It’s a very reasonable response to what we saw was a Russian nuclear doctrine and nuclear capability that suggested to us that they might use nuclear weapons in a limited way,”
It seems what senior Pentagon officials are really saying here about the predictability of the Russians, is that there seems to be a line the Russians won’t cross in the case of a nuclear conflict…
…but the Americans sure will.
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists tried to play down the “rodeo circus” and reduce the high profile announcement of the U.S. military exercise.
Instead Hans stated it was simply a marketing gimmick to “justify” the new nuclear weapons since we are entering the new budget phase. “So all of this has been played up to serve that process.” stated Kristensen.
I don’t know about you but I am getting some serious déjà vu.
Didn’t we already go through all of this with the disastrous JIC-502 spookery?
JIC-502 intelligence report titled “Implications of Soviet Possession of Atomic Weapons” drafted in Jan 20th 1950, turned out not to be an intelligence report at all but rather a sales pitch.
It began in a dangerous manner, claiming that a nuclear-armed Soviet Union had introduced the notion that;
“a tremendous military advantage would be gained by the power that struck first and succeeded in carrying through an effective surprise attack.”
It was JIC-502 which would be the first to put forward [1] a justification for the preventive first strike concept, supported by [2] a massive military buildup under the pretense of pre-emptive war.
NSC-68 would be drafted the same year and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S.
But the Soviets never did launch such a war, and all claims of their capabilities let alone their intentions turned out to be entirely fraudulent…
…so what was it all for?
Did the U.S. have to put everything into expanding their military, turning away from the concept of a nation at peace made up of citizen soldiers and instead towards a nation in perpetual war?
Isn’t this a made up of the Nietzschean fantasy of Übermensch (Beyond-Man) super soldiers, the very thing that Eisenhower warned against?
Did this all have to happen in defense of “peace and security” of the free world?
Why were the predictions of the JIC-502 completely unfounded?
Were the predictions based off of corrupted data?
Did the Soviets simply change their mind?
…Or was it never about a pre-emptive war but rather was always about global dominance.
What would the American people think if they knew the truth, that their entire military industrial complex was never built for the protection of the “free world” in opposition to dictators and despots but rather the very opposite? That it simply thought its ideology the superior one, the only lawful dictatorship that had the right to rule, even if it meant by force.
In the words of Vallely/Aquino:
“If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”
This may look like just a “rodeo circus” but it is far far worst.
What do Jedi Warriors, Spoon-benders, the First Earth Battalion and Men Who Stare at Goats Have in Common?
For those who need a refresher of the film Dr. Strangelove’s synopsis, it is about what could happen if a lunatic had the authority to bypass the U.S. president and cause a nuclear escalation between the U.S. and USSR.
In the movie, it is U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper who initiates a nuclear attack to destroy the USSR under the premise that once the U.S. government is briefed on the situation, they would have no choice but to commit 100% towards a hostile attack against the USSR, in order to prevent nuclear retaliation.
Air Force General Jack Ripper
The reason why General Jack Ripper is fully convinced that it is absolutely necessary to destroy the USSR is because he believes that the communists are conspiring to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people.
Fluoridation is the most monstrouslyconceived and dangerouscommunist plot we have ever had to face.
-GeneralJack D. Ripper
Gen. Jack Ripper
Gen. Jack Ripper goes on to describe how he first discovered this Soviet ploy, after sexual relations with a woman and how he felt empty inside but that luckily he was astute enough to be able to accurately deduce the cause of this feeling of emptiness as due to being drained of his “life essence”, all part of the communist conspiracy for sure.
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: [very nervous] Lord, Jack.General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen... tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?General Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.-- General Jack D. Ripper
In other words, Gen. Jack Ripper is unequivocally insane.
Gen. Jack Ripper is absolutely insane. Much like Washington DC is today.
Unfortunately, this type of thinking in the U.S. military is not reserved to pure fiction.
Sometime in the late 1980s then Col. Paul Vallely, Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group and then Maj. Michael Aquino, PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader authored a paper titled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”, which discusses the necessity to wage perpetual psychological warfare against friend and enemy populations alike, and even against the American people.
As stated in the paper:
“MindWar must target all participants to be effective.
It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States.
It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war…
There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves.”
Of course the terms “enemy” and “national interest” are not elaborated on, nor is the matter of free will even considered but rather that mind control is not only “natural”, it is essential.
Besides the overtly fascist and occultist content in the paper, the proposal had a disturbing similarity to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program launched by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon.
TIA was a global propaganda and mega-data-mining plan that was supposedly scraped after a series of negative news stories.
On Aug 17th, 2005 The New York Times published an article that discussed how “a military intelligence team repeatedly tried to contact the FBI in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ring leader of the Sept. 11 attacks” as reported by veteran Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.
The information came from the highly classified intelligence program “Able Danger”, which had successfully identified the terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers of the 9/11 terrorist attack in mid-2000, well over a year before the actual 9/11 attack.
According to New York Times article, Shaffer learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the FBI meetings “because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.” (Able Danger was linked in its function to the TIA program)
However, this is only part of the truth, the by far uglier truth is that they were already fully aware of the 9/11 terrorist ring and didn’t want a wrench thrown into the gears so to speak.
In addition, Gen. Stubblebine III, Gen. Schoomaker, Gen. Downing and Gen. Boykin are the four names most often cited as promoters of programs like the “Goat Lab,” “Jedi Warriors,” “Grill Flame,” “Task Force Delta,” (aka the spoon-benders) and the “First Earth Battalion,” and have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands.
Gen. Stubblebine III, Gen. Schoomaker, Gen. Downing and Gen. Boykin are the four names most often cited as promoters of programs like the “Goat Lab,” “Jedi Warriors,” “Grill Flame,” “Task Force Delta,” (aka the spoon-benders) and the “First Earth Battalion,” and have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands.
These were the programs that promoted the idea that one could learn to bend a metal spoon, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats with the use of “mind over matter” techniques.
In 1979, Lt. Col. Channon presented a 125 page document called “The First Earth Battalion,” which outlined “non-lethal” techniques that would soon be adopted by the military.
These techniques were many and included the use of atonal noises as a form of combat psychological warfare and widespread experimentation with psychoelectronics and other means of debilitation.
On March 10th, 1991, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while serving as chief policy advisor to then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, wrote the memo “Do We Need a Non-Lethal Defense Initiative?” in which he wrote, “A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world.”
American military are strongly influenced by Washington DC politics.
Though no mention was made of Col. Alexander, who spear-headed the non-lethal weaponry campaign, Alexander at the time of the memo had retired from active duty and was heading the Non-Lethal Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In 1990, Col. Alexander published “The Warrior’s Edge” and states its goal as to:
“unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality.
We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system – the power to manipulate reality.
We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future.” (emphasis added)
Investigative journalist Jon Ronson, in his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, goes through how ‘psychic warriors’ such as Uri Geller and Jim Channon were called back into government service after 9/11, and that a series of meetings in 2004 were held between Gen. Schoomaker and Jim Channon to start a think tank which would utilize “First Earth Battalion” techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Non-Lethal Techniques of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and al-Qa’im
According to a 1998 International Committee of the Red Cross presentation before the European parliament intended on evaluating how “non-lethal” the non-lethal technologies promoted by Alexander, Channon et al. actually are in reality, it was found that non-lethal weapons are simply defined as weapons with a less-than 25% fatality rate.
Perhaps this is what the senior Pentagon officials were referring to in their “limited” nuclear exchange scenarios.
Perhaps this is what the senior Pentagon officials were referring to in their “limited” nuclear exchange scenarios.
Included in the list of non-lethal weapons now widely used in the U.S. military are lasers, extremely low frequency (ELF) weapons, and various chemical, biological and audio stun weapons that can cause permanent damage such as blindness, deafness and destruction of the gastrointestinal system.
…
…
Sigh.
…
According to Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the less-well-known al-Qa’im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander’s non-lethal conceptions.
Jim Channon actually confirmed this in an email correspondence with Ronson.
At one point in his investigation, Ronson asks Stuart Heller, friend of Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was “the living embodiment” of the First Earth Battalion, to which Heller responds unhesitatingly “Bert Rodriguez.”
Ronson continues in his book, “In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah.”
Rodriguez taught Jarrah “the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire.” Rodriguez added, “Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s there…
Yeah, Ziad believed it.
He was like Luke Skywalker.”
Rodriguez trained Ziad Jarrah for six months.
On Sept 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of the United Airlines flight 93 as part of the orchestrated 9/11 terrorist attack.
On Sept 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of the United Airlines flight 93 as part of the orchestrated 9/11 terrorist attack. Trained by the United States military.
Meet Dr. Strangelove
At the end of the film Dr. Strangelove we are finally confronted with the “top lunatic” so to speak who was really in charge this whole time.
For all the “top brass” in the war room, nobody was really in control of the situation this entire time since the entire “war scenario” was set-up as a positive feedback loop within the doomsday plan of a lunatic.
Dr. Strangeglove.
You see, the belief that one can bend spoons, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats is not the problem.
It is the belief held by top officials within the U.S. military industrial complex that their ideology of appropriate morality is to prevail.
Therefore, one must use these mind-over-matter techniques to achieve the ultimate goal, “the power to manipulate reality”, that global dominance can be achieved without wiping out the world.
Therefore, one must use these mind-over-matter techniques to achieve the ultimate goal, “the power to manipulate reality”, that global dominance can be achieved without wiping out the world.
That somehow “it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict,” and if not…
…we may all die for a lunatic’s dream in the process.
Sweet Jesus!
Oh, but that’s only an appetizer. You see, not only is the entire city of Washington DC bat-shit crazy but they have corrupted the military rank and file. These once-brave soldiers now have become psychopathic “yes men” to mad-men.
And they are playing with dangerously power weapons.
Weapons that could launch a global pandemic (been there – done that.)
Weapons that could destroy and collapse trade (been there – done that.)
Weapons that could alter the reality of America (been there – done that.)
Weapons that could devastate entire nations …
…pending..
Here is an uber lucid article by Christopher Black on what the PBCs (Psychopathic Barbarian Crusaders) truly want.
.
I like that. Psychopathic Barbarian Crusaders. Sounds so apt.
I’m aware that I might be unfair because the vast majority of Western people don’t qualify to be PBCs (Psychopathic Barbarian Crusaders)…
.
…but unhappily, most of the western movers & shakers (either in a leadership position or being cowardly and ignorant sidekicks) qualify for such an inglorious denomination.
.
We are at a crossroad. Everyone reading this should be perfectly aware of the geopolitical Damocles’ sword hanging on us all.
.
It’s impossible for anyone to be fully disconnected from geopolitics, the one guided by philosophy and ethics but also the Real Politik one because living in a fantasy world (un monde de bisounours, as they say in France or un monde de câlinours as said in Quebec) never helped anybody living on Earth.
.
But having principles and at the same time being aware of the ruts of the world is maybe the Middle Way.
.
At least it might help us deal with the events that unfold due to the madness of men.
.
The madness of men.
General Jack D. Ripper: Your Commie has no regard for human life, not even his own. And for this reason, men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. The enemy may come individually, or he may come in strength. He may even come in the uniform of our own troops. But however he comes, we must stop him. We must not allow him to gain entrance to this base. Now, I'm going to give you THREE SIMPLE rules: First, trust NO one, whatever his uniform or rank, unless he is known to you personally; Second, anyone or anything that approaches within 200 yards of the perimeter is to be FIRED UPON; Third, if in doubt, shoot first then ask questions afterward. I would sooner accept a few casualties through accidents rather losing the entire base and its personnel through carelessness. Any variation of these rules must come from me personally. Any variation on these rules must come from me personally. Now, men, in conclusion, I would like to say that, in the two years it has been my privilege to be your commanding officer, I have always expected the best from you, and you have never given me anything less than that. Today, the nation is counting on us. We're not going to let them down. Good luck to you all.-- General Jack D. Ripper
The US-Japanese Alliance Against China Risks World War
In 2003, when several lawyers, including myself, visited North Korea to learn more about socialism there, we were shown US Army documents captured in 1950 by the communist forces.
In 1950, the communist forces seized control of Seoul and overran the American Army headquarters.There, they secured all the documents, cypher’s, and data that they found.
The documents confirmed that it was the US and its puppets in South Korea that invaded the north, not the other way round.
Their objective was to crush the local communist forces. Set up strongly fortified launching zones, and then attacking China.
Their plan failed and ended in an American rout.
Battle for Seoul.
But what did surprise me was the evidence in the documents that the Americans also had the help and advice of Japanese Army officers who had remained in Korea at the end of the war between the US and Japan that ended in 1945.
Two growing empires went to war in the Pacific against each other but in the end the defeated and occupied Japanese soon joined the growing American empire.
And it was its drive for world domination and Korea was the first proof of their fealty to the US.
A fealty tolerated not only because of their defeat but also because American capital and Japanese capital have the same interest; the subjugation and exploitation of China.
The Japanese worked with the American military to take over Korea and launch towards China for eventual capture and domination.
On July 6, 2021 the Japanese Deputy Prime Minister stated at a Liberal Democratic Party function, that if China acted to take control of Taiwan…
… as is its right to do since it is an integral part of China…
… then Japan would defend Taiwan.
Why?
Well, because because such an action by China would represent an “existential threat to Japan.”
“If a major incident happened, it’s safe to say it would be related to a situation threatening the survival of Japan.
If that is the case, Japan and the US must defend Taiwan together.”
Why it would be an “existential threat to Japan” ?
He did not explain.
…
The Chinese will never forget what the Japanese did to China. They have never forgiven.
That he spoke for the leadership of Japan is clear.
Now keep in mind…
That any interference (by anyone) in China’s actions regarding the Chinese Provence of Taiwan…
…would be an aggression against China…
…and would be in absolute violation of the Japanese Constitution.
For this constitution prohibits Japanese Self-Defense Forces from taking any offensive actions.
And this is a quite clear violation of the UN Charter.
…
In response China has stated time and again that it is prepared to defeat both the US and Japan…
…if they try to interfere when China retakes control of Taiwan.
Which (unfortunately) every action by the Americans and Taiwanese is provoking them to do.
…
Of course…
The Americans recognize that they do not have enough strength in the region to interfere alone.
And so they have lured Britain, France, and Germany, as well as the ever-eager Australians, to send in naval forces to the South China Sea to support the American and Japanese assault plans.
It is more than ironic to see four nations that were bitter enemies of Imperial Japan in World War II, now colluding with Japan.
Not only that, but to once again attack China and that Germany, an ally of Japan in the Second World War, once again is attempting to throw its weight around in the world.
What is the matter with these people?
The Chinese have a long and bitter memory of the Japanese invasion and occupation of their lands in the 1930s and 40’s just as the Koreans have the same bitter memories of Japanese occupation.
The Chinese have a long and bitter memory of the Japanese invasion.
The Chinese have a long and bitter memory of the Japanese invasion.
But we realize now that the defeat of the fascists and militarists in Germany and Japan in 1945 was not their final defeat.
The governments who fought those two nations also had fascist elements within them.
These elements, these people, hoped that the Nazis would crush communism in the USSR and the Japanese would do the same in China.
…
Instead, the elements of world capital that supported or tolerated fascism and relied on imperialism to increase their profits.
And they quickly reorganized.
And, led by the far right in Washington, created the NATO military alliance to continue the assault on the USSR and now on Russia, China and other independent nations.
They wear different clothes now.
American neocons pushing for war.
But they use the same lies and techniques of propaganda as the Nazis and Japanese militarists as they prepare for another war against China and Russia.
…
On July 30, 2021 the Chinese government had to warn the British government and its naval task force, led by the new British aircraft carrier, Queen Elizabeth, to keep away from its territorial waters or face the consequences.
British aircraft carrier, Queen Elizabeth.
Yet, at the same time the US and France conducted military exercise with dozens of US F22s and French Rafale aircraft near Hawaii.
All this while the French beef up their forces in Tahiti.
And while the Americans have dispersed their fleet of bombers and fighters including F35s from their big base on Guam, which the Chinese can destroy quickly, to smaller bases, making it more difficult for China to destroy those aircraft.
This type of dispersal is usually seen in war settings, when war is on going or imminent.
At the same time the Germans announced that they will be sending a frigate to the South China Sea in support of the Americans and Japanese.
While the Americans sent more ships into the Taiwan Strait this week. Some may see all this as sabre rattling.
But that is a lot of sabres, and they are doing a lot more than just rattling them.
As Hans Rudiger Minow stated in German Foreign Policy,
“The intensification of western manoeuvres and their growing focus on combat missions, which are highly realistic under current circumstances, coincide with prognoses by high-ranking US military officials, predicting that a war between the United States and China is probable in the near future.
For example, recently NATO’s former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Ret. Adm. James G. Stavridis, was quoted with the prognosis that “our technology, network of allies and bases in the region, still overmatch China” – for now.
However, “by the end of the decade – if not sooner” the People’s Republic “will be in a position” to “challenge the US” at least “in the South China Sea.”
Recently Stavridis published a novel in which he depicted a fictional war erupting between the USA and China in 2034.
In the meantime, he considers “we may not have until 2034 to prepare for this battle – it may come much sooner.”
Some of his colleagues in the military are predicting that “it is not about 2034,” the Big War could come earlier – possibly even “2024 or 2026.”
But it is not China that is seeking a war.
So who is pushing this insanity?
American neocons.
Who is pushing for war…?
The propaganda machines in the west, all part of the military-industrial complex, are legion.
But one of the worst is the Hudson Institute.
Founded in 1961 by Herman Khan, formerly of the Rand Institute, who was famous for playing nuclear war games and theorizing on the possibilities of using nuclear weapons in war.
Its current leadership and membership include fascists like Mike Pompeo, Seth Cropsey and many others who served in various US government regimes or the US military establishment.
Seth Cropsey’s bio states,
“Cropsey began his career in government at the US Department of Defense as assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and subsequently served as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, where he was responsible for the Navy’s position on efforts to reorganize DoD, development of the maritime strategy, the Navy’s academic institutions, naval special operations, and burden-sharing with NATO allies.
In the Bush administration, Cropsey moved to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to become acting assistant secretary, and then principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Cropsey served as a naval officer from 1985 to 2004.
“From 1982 to 1984, Cropsey directed the editorial policy of the Voice of America (VOA) on the solidarity movement in Poland, Soviet treatment of dissidents, and other issues. Returning to public diplomacy in 2002 as director of the US government’s International Broadcasting Bureau, Cropsey supervised the agency as successful efforts were undertaken to increase radio and television broadcasting to the Muslim world.”
In other words…
…
Cropsey penned a recent article published in The Hill, a US right wing journal covering events in Washington entitled ,“Japan Signals An Opening for US in Countering China”.
In it he praised the statement by Taro Aso that Japan will support Taiwan (in case of China acting to take control of its island).
The justification being [1] that China seeks “world dominance” and [2] that there will be a war with the USA in the near future (and Japan wants to be on the winning side).
LOL.
He further states that the Japanese have now made a “decisive shift” in foreign and military policy.
Is Japan an independent nation, or a proxy vassal of the United States?
He dismisses the Japanese constitutional prohibition on Japanese offensive actions and calls for Japan to increase it military forces and support to “counter” China.
He wrote:
“Defending Taiwan is a difficult proposition. The PLA is at its strongest within the First Island Chain, particularly around Taiwan, given Beijing’s concentration of naval, air, and missile forces.
To defend the island, the US and its allies would have to operate squarely within China’s missile range, jeopardizing the high-value capital assets upon which American combat power depends.“However, Japan and the US both field significant submarine fleets — Japan’s small but quiet battery-powered boats are an effective counterpart to America’s larger nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Submarines are immune to the missiles upon which the PLA would rely to gain sea and air control over Taiwan.
If supported by a sufficient fast-boat mining effort, and a robust enough network of mobile ground-launched anti-ship and anti-air missiles, a Japanese-American submarine surge could defeat a PLA invasion of Taiwan, or at minimum prevent the fait accompli for which China hopes.Given this strategic reality.”
He calls for more military exercises with the US and Japan, France, and Britain and their other allies to “prepare for war.”
He then adds the lie that “preparing for war is essential to deterring it” when what he really means is that America is preparing for war in order to wage war.
Come on!
Everyone knows that America is planning to attack China. Destroy it. Invade it, Conquer it, and then convert it into a vassal state. Let's be real. Please!
The forces of peace and reason in the world must denounce these war preparations as a danger to the entire world for a war on China…
….will bring in Russia…
…and others (nations that no one is thinking about)…
… it will lead to world war…
…then to nuclear war…
… and (possibly) the end of humanity.
…
And the author goes on to say…
We must denounce these criminals and demand the International Criminal Court prosecutor take action to warn the Americans, and indict the leaders of the US allies over which it has jurisdiction, their propagandists like Seth Cropsey, and all the rest who are conspiring to commit aggression, the supreme war crime, the final act of insanity, because it seems to me that is what war with China will be, the final act in the human drama.
We wont have to wait for abrupt climate change to finish us off.
But the ICC says nothing about all this and the UN Security Council is rendered impotent.
So who then is left to object, to say enough is enough, to hell with the criminals and their wars, except us, the people, But what can we the people do?
Yes, protest, petition, write, shout, cry, join peace groups like the one I belong to, the Canadian Peace Congress, do anything you can but get up, stand up, as Bob Marley called for us to do, and as John Lennon demanded, Give Peace A Chance.
…
Give peace a chance.
…
Noble thoughts, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Obviously he has been sleeping under a rock for the last 75 years. You cannot write letter or petition anyone. They are above all this. They are a run-away locomotive and it is fast approaching a rickety old bridge that is long in need of repair.
It will not go well.
What about Russia?
All the time all this “saber rattling” is going on by the United States Military Empire, and the hate-hate-hate narratives are flooding the “news” media, what else is going on that isn’t being reported?
Remember boys and girls. To know what is really going on, look for what IS NOT being reported.
Well, Russian and Chinese troops and military have been practicing and coordinating their military strategies ALL YEAR.
Of course you would NEVER hear about this on FOX “news”, CNN, BBC, or any other mainstream “news” website. Check out some of these videos…
Russian troops training in XinJiang and then eating fine Uighur food.
And then here’s another.
Russian and Chinese commanders address their troops.
Here’s a great movie showing how Russian soldiers are being trained to use Chinese weapon systems, while the Chinese are also being trained to use the Russian weapons systems.
Here’s a great movie showing how Russian soldiers are being trained to use Chinese weapon systems, while the Chinese are also being trained to use the Russian weapons systems.
Let’s dig a little deeper. Shall we?
This next article is from a pro-Japan, pro-American author that tries to rationalize Japan going to war with China over Taiwan. He comes to the conclusion that ABSOLUTELY Japan would go fight the Chinese…
…and with help from the USA, probably would win.
How Far Would Japan Really Go to Defend Taiwan?
Japan defense report says Taiwan's 'stability' is integral to its 'security', putting Tokyo's pacifist forces on a new collision course with Beijing
When Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said on July 5, 2021 that Tokyo would come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion, Beijing’s sharp response was predictable.
“We will never allow anyone to meddle in the Taiwan question in any way,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the day after Aso made his surprise remark.
“No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
But Aso’s statement was no slip of the tongue. A week later, on July 13, Japan released its annual defense report, which for the first time mentioned the importance of maintaining “stability” around Taiwan because it “is important for Japan’s security.”
China’s response, again, was sharp and immediate.
The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times ran an op-ed stating that “Japan will ‘lose badly’ if it defends Taiwan secessionists.”
…
…
China does not play. Do not take the warning lightly.
…
Chinese DF-41 armed with ten (x10) nuclear warheads well within the range of Japan. One missile launch of these independently directed, AI controlled, hypervelocity MIRV’s will completely destroy ten of Japan’s largest cities, and if not send Japan into the Iron age, will thrash it’s economy to zero.
The piece quoted an anonymous Beijing-based military analyst as saying, “Even the US could not defeat China militarily in the West Pacific region now, so what makes Japan believe it’s able to challenge China with force?”
Good question.
While the motivations behind Tokyo’s recent statements are unclear, Japan and Taiwan are openly on the same side.
In Asia’s intensifying new Cold War, where an increasingly assertive and militarily powerful China is the obvious but usually unspoken adversary.
Japan and Taiwan do not share official diplomatic relations — Tokyo recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.
However, the two sides are known to share intelligence through back channels.
In May last year, as Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen began her second term in office, then-chief Cabinet secretary, now prime minister, Yoshihide Suga said that Japan is eager to develop its ties with Taiwan.
Eager.
(I wonder if American money played a role? Hum.)
…
…
Japan’s annual foreign policy report, known as the Diplomatic Bluebook, describes Taiwan in its latest edition released on April 27 this year as an “important partner and friend.”
It also said Japan backs Taiwan’s campaign to attend the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Bluebook stated diplomatically that Taiwan had been successful in fighting the Covid-19 virus and “there should be no blank spaces on the world map.” China, which considers Taiwan a renegade province that should be “reunited” with the mainland, strongly opposes Taiwan’s participation in any international bodies.
The Bluebook also said that Japan would cooperate with “more countries” to promote freedom of navigation and the rule of law in the Asia-Pacific region.
In matters of geostrategic importance, Japan already works closely with the US, India and Australia under the so-called “Quad.”
Yup. This is the Pacific "NATO" that was set up by neocon Mike Pompeo.
Taiwan could be seen as a silent partner, or at least an ally, to the strategic grouping because it is a vital link in the China-focused island chain of defense which stretches from Japan’s main islands to Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Malaysian part of Borneo.
America Is Betting Big on the Second Island Chain | RANDSep 08, 2020 · The United States has deep and abiding interests in the Second Island Chain. But China's growing influence in the region could complicate U.S. plans. Washington will almost certainly seek to strengthen security cooperation with Pacific Island states in the Second Island Chain and bolster defensive positions on U.S. territories in the region.
However, the bigger question remains: what exactly would Japan be prepared to do if China did try to invade Taiwan?
What would Japan do?
Whatever the anonymous military analyst quoted in the Global Times might think, Japan certainly has the means to challenge China militarily.
On December 21, 2020, the Japanese government approved the ninth consecutive rise in military spending, marking a historic record of 5.34 trillion yen (US$51.7 billion.)
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), as they are formally known, are comprised of nearly 250,000 active personnel and another 50,000 in reserve, and are equipped with the latest weaponry and technology procured mainly from the US.
Hum. China has the world’s largest army, with more than 2 million active personnel
The Japanese Navy is believed by military analysts to be the strongest in the region after America’s…
…and thus superior to China’s still underdeveloped but steadily growing naval forces.
LOL. Don't be so sure.
China’s underdeveloped military forces…
Um. Sure. What ever you want to believe.
…
Some history
Do not negotiate with the United States.
I want to remind you all that when it seems like America is “losing”, then “the gloves come off”, and real nasty things will take place.
Like in Korea when the Chinese Army routed the American forces…
In late 1950 American forces suffered a series of disastrous defeats in Korea at the hands of Chinese troops, and the report from a Pentagon committee in early December emphasized the importance of accelerating the development of bioweapons such as Q Fever, plague, and anthrax together with the necessary delivery mechanisms for covert use, while especially praising the CIA for its effectiveness in that regard. This secret report was eventually declassified by a FOIA request in 1996.Around the same time that report was being written, a British sergeant retreating through a deserted North Korean village before advancing Chinese troops observed American military personnel, masked and gloved, carefully removing large quantities of feathers from special containers and flinging them into the empty houses before he was warned away by American MPs. He later stated that he had obviously witnessed “a clandestine operation” of some sort and mentioned that a few days afterward he was required to take an unspecified vaccine. This curious vignette appears in Unit 731, a 1989 historical account of Japan’s biowarfare program written by two BBC journalists, but oddly enough the incident was removed from the American edition of that same book.Months later, the North Korean foreign minister issued a formal complaint to the United Nations that America had used illegal biological warfare, attacking his own troops and those of China with smallpox. These mysterious outbreaks had occurred a few months earlier, but only in areas recently occupied by retreating American forces. The accusations briefly appeared in the Western media, but were ridiculed and hotly denied by American government spokesmen.Around the same time that Communist troops were sickening and dying, around two hundred American soldiers in the same theater had also been suddenly stricken by a mysterious outbreak of Songo fever, never before seen in Korea but with symptoms quite similar to smallpox and a specialty of America’s Japanese biowarfare mentors. Strict censorship prevented these stories from reaching the American media until many months later, at which point our government claimed that the illnesses had been spread by Chinese troops. But the disease seemed entirely absent from the hundreds of miles of Korean territory the enemy forces had traversed, and only appeared in a narrow belt along the front lines, with our stricken servicemen believing that they seemed to be spread by infected field mice or voles. Voles had long been regarded by American researchers as an excellent vector for their bioweapons, and when interviewed years later for a history of the Korean War, one of the leaders of our local CIA efforts explained that his covert operations had created a defensive belt along the front lines.
The use of bio-weapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons will be the direct result if the United States is unable to achieve it’s objectives.
Thus, we see WHY after eight (8x) bio-weapons targeting livestock in China, John Bolton, the head of the Bio-Warfare office under President Trump) launched COVID-19B against the Chinese. As well as the two follow up bio-weapons in July and late August.
So now…
The “drums of war” are beating again. And they are louder than ever. They are so loud that it is giving me a headache.
What’s China (and Russia) to do?
According to the Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Beijing has made substantial progress in the construction of a third aircraft carrier as Type 003, which is …
“slated to become the largest surface combatant in the Chinese People’s Army Navy (PLAN) and significantly upgrade China’s naval capabilities.”
Type-003.
But the crux of the strategic matter is that Article 9 of Japan’s supposedly pacifist, post-World War II constitution.
it specifically outlaws war as a means to settle international disputes.
And the Japanese Self Defense Force (JSDF) are therefore legally only allowed to defend the country if it comes under attack.
Only if it comes under attack.
But Mr. Aso has argued that Taiwan is situated only 112 kilometers from some islands that are part of Okinawa prefecture and therefore a Chinese invasion could represent an “existential threat” to Japan’s security.
You know. Too close for comfort.
It's like having a restaurant next to a gas station. The gas station is robbed, so the restaurant owner gets his gun and goes over to the gas station to shoot everyone. You know. Just in case.
In that direction, the Japanese navy’s first aircraft carrier since World War II is nearly ready to deploy. It is designed to carry up to 28 light or 14 larger aircraft.
Woo woo.
Jeffrey Hornung, a political scientist at the US-based Rand Corporation, wrote in a May 10 paper that Japan would not need to get directly involved in a military conflict over Taiwan.
But, he suggests, if Washington sought to defend the democratic, self-ruled island, “at a minimum, the United States would require access to its bases in Japan, which would execute combat operations in, over and around Taiwan.”
Yada. Yada. Yada.
The JSDF would in that way “act as a force multiplier for any US-led operation. That means US requests for Japanese involvement would be almost certain.” In other words, Japan’s involvement would be limited to “non-combatant, rear-area support roles” in fields such as “supply, maintenance, transportation, engineering and medical services,” Hornung writes.
Okinawa is proximal to Taiwan and the US base there would be at the front of any military action against China.
…
….
If Japan wanted to get involved.
…
If China decided to attack Okinawa, or for argument’s sake any base on Japanese territory, such an attack could be interpreted as an act of aggression and Japan would have the right to act in self-defense.
But that scenario also raises another important question: would the US be prepared to intervene and defend Taiwan? The US and Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, shared a defense treaty before Washington established diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979.
..
On that day, the US withdrew its recognition of the Republic of China and terminated the 1955 “Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of China.” Because either party had to notify the other about the termination a year in advance, the treaty remained in place – at least nominally – until January 1, 1980.
Then it ENDED.
The now null-and-void 1955 treaty, which stipulated that if one country came under attack the other would provide military support, was in certain aspects replaced by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.
…
Under the Act, the US was no longer be obliged to defend Taiwan, the US embassy in Taiwan was closed and relations were maintained through a non-profit corporation registered in the District of Columbia known as the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which functions as a de facto embassy.
…
The ambiguity of the relationship is evident in a Taiwan Relations Act clause that says that “the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defense capabilities.”
…
The Act’s intention appears to be to dissuade Taiwan from declaring independence from China, while at the same time discouraging China from invading Taiwan. But that all came into force when Jimmy Carter was America’s president and China was still a fairly poor country, not the regional superpower it has become today.
As Beijing celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1, President Xi Jinping reiterated his pledge to incorporate Taiwan into the mainland.
“Solving the Taiwan question and realizing the complete reunification of the motherland are the unswerving historical tasks of the Chinese Communist Party and the common aspiration of all Chinese people,” Xi said in a speech.
Every Chinese must work together, “resolutely smashing any ‘Taiwan independence plots,’” the Chinese leader added. China has recently flexed its muscles in that direction with air force jets and bombers making frequent incursions into Taiwan’s airspace.
…
In this new geopolitical environment, it would be impossible for the US to stay idle if Xi turned his tough rhetoric into military action and actually sent forces to invade Taiwan.
In that scenario, Japan could and would not stay neutral.
To be sure, Deputy Defense Minister Aso is known for his public gaffes, which are often corrected or denied by the government after being uttered.
But as Corey Wallace, a foreign policy expert at Kanagawa University in Yokohama was quoted saying in the July 12 issue of Foreign Policy, the slip this time may have been deliberate and reflect what Japanese officials have long believed privately.
Either way, Xi is playing with certain fire by talking about Taiwan’s “reunification” with the mainland.
LOL. Taiwan is PART of China. Xi Peng can say anything he wants about his nation. And the rest of the world can howl. He's not playing with fire. Just like Joe Biden is not playing with fire when he announces a new road project in West Virginia.
Even with China’s recent military and naval build-up, Beijing still faces formidable odds in invading Taiwan, which would almost inevitably result in a wider conflict – one Japan could inevitably play a crucial, military role.
…
Do not be so sure…
Don’t be so sure. Seriously. There are MANY things in play here. Keep in mind that a war with China, in such close proximity would devastate that nation to a point that it might turn into such a churned up mass of radioactive rubble that it would need to be renamed “Commode”.
…
Let’s keep in mind WHO we are talking about…
China is not some nation filled with bicycle riding peasants who were issued a cheap SKS clone. China is a fierce strong proud, and patriotic nation. Their children speak both English and Chinese by the time they are in middle school. Everyone attends scouts, and gets full-military training in elementary school. It is a nation that promotes STEM graduates by demonstrated merit, punishes those who violate the rules with extreme harshness, and never bluffs.
Chinese boy scouts… Check out the videos.
Chinese boy scouts 1
And, here’s another…
Chinese boy scouts 2
Still not convinced…
Scot training focuses on group communication, working together as a team, and mastery of fighting skills.
How about this one…
Chinese scouts are coed.
It is so easy to forget who the Chinese actually are…
With a non-stop anti-China barrage hitting everyone 24-7, all year it is so easy to villainize people who you only know by the two dimensional cardboard cut out that Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Tom Collins created. It’s not even remotely true.
Do not lulled into believing that the Chinese are backwards, and ill-prepared. Or that they are starving and cannot wait to be “liberated” for democracy™.
Not only are the Chinese skilled, work as a team (automatically) but there are BILLIONS of them, all working together for the common good. Anyone who wants to tangle with this dragon is seriously in need of a lobotomy.
There’s billions of Chinese. Don’t piss them off!
China is not a third-world military. They are peer-capable with the best that America has. What’s more they outnumber everything that the United States can compile against it. And never forget, they WILL USE nuclear weapons if attacked.
Count on it.
You are a fucking idiot if you don’t realize this.
China is a serious, serious nation that does not play.
It’s so easy to think that China would be an “easy kill”, if all you see and read in within your own bubble of isolation. Much like those kings who “pooh-pooh” the offers by Genghis Khan for trade. But then they found out that their large army of 20,000 knights on white horses were no match for 5,000,000 angry, pissed off, huns riding in at dawn.
Chinese soldiers.
And let’s not forget that the vast bulk of technology comes from China. China posses the vast number of factories, and consists of thousands of design centers. No, not the “technology centers” that you see in the USA which is really a nice building, and staffed with one or two engineers that outsource to China, the rest being marketing, finance, attorneys and IT folk. No, China is the place where the real things are designed and made.
Stuff that isn’t advertised. Like robotic “hand grenades”. How would you like your base or complex over-run with these little guys each one a bomb?
Cute robot hand-grenades.
.
Trying to avoid war…
Let’s look at how China is trying to avoid war. Let’s look at what they are doing to make any war with China a very, very costly mistake….
While China has not publicly released a new nuclear posture statement that supersedes the 2006 White Paper, the construction of new missile silos configured to hold solid-fuel ICBMs possessing multiple warheads changes the nuclear posture options for China.
The most likely change is to transition from a pure retaliatory strike capability (“counterattack in self-defense”) to a launch-on-warning posture.
This posture means the Chinese missiles would leave their silos when an attack was detected.
This differs from the previous posture, where the missiles would be waiting for a nuclear attack to actually occur.
Given China’s declared nuclear policy, a launch-on-warning posture allows China to retain its no-first-use policy while simultaneously ensuring the survivability of its nuclear forces.
A US-Sino nuclear arms race is already underway – and we know who the winner will be
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
Since the 1960’s, China has maintained a no-first-use nuclear policy and pledged never to engage in an arms race. However, thanks to the destabilizing impact of US nuclear policy, it has begun an arms race – and it plans on winning.
A quick history lesson: China detonated its first atomic weapon on October 16, 1964. In doing so, it became the fifth country – after the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France – to possess nuclear weapons. Since then, China has developed and deployed a modest arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems, with the goal of maintaining a minimum nuclear deterrent against other nuclear-armed powers, with a particular focus on the US.
The 2006 Defense White Paper, issued by China’s State Council Information Office, provides the most authoritative description of the country’s nuclear strategy.
China’s fundamental goal, the White Paper states,
“is to deter other countries from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against China.”
This deterrence comes from
“principles of counterattack in self-defense” (i.e., “assured retaliation”.) China “remains firmly committed to the policy of no first use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances.”
Moreover, it
“unconditionally undertakes not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones.”
The White Paper goes on to declare that China
“stands for the comprehensive prohibition and complete elimination of nuclear weapons,” and that it believes in the “limited development of nuclear weapons” while aiming “at building a lean and effective nuclear force capable of meeting national security needs.” In conclusion, the White Paper notes, “China exercises great restraint in developing its nuclear force,” and “it has never entered into and will never enter into a nuclear arms race with any other country.”
From its inception in 1966, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force has relied upon a single missile – the DF-5 – as its primary strategic nuclear delivery system.
A massive, two-stage liquid-fuel rocket which, depending on what variant one is talking about, can deliver a single warhead (DF-5A), three warheads (DF-5B) or 10 warheads (DF-5C) to targets 12,000 km (7,456 miles) from the point of launch.
Chinese silo-based, liquid fueled, MIRV, ICBM’s the DF-5B and DF-5C.
The DF-5, based in hardened concrete silos, was designed to be able to survive a nuclear attack in sufficient numbers to enable China to deliver a country-killing nuclear counter-strike.
The DF-5, however, had several operational drawbacks which, as the strategic nuclear capabilities of potential adversaries (i.e., the United States) improved, made its survivability in a nuclear conflict more problematic.
First and foremost, as a liquid-fuel rocket, it is loaded into its silo with empty fuel tanks (the fuel and oxidizer used are highly corrosive, and if stored in the missile, would make it unusable in a matter of months.) Before it can be launched, therefore, the DF-5 must be fueled, a process that can take several hours.
The Chinese also stored the DF-5 without its warheads. As such, while the missile is being refueled, special teams would be bringing the nuclear warheads from nearby storage shelters and mounting them on the missile body.
The DF-5 is extremely vulnerable during this time, and as the accuracy and time of flight capabilities of US nuclear forces (in particular the Trident D5 system) improved, the Chinese assessed that their DF-5 nuclear deterrent was vulnerable to being taken out by a first strike.
Beginning in the 1970’s, China began developing solid-fuel rockets for use as mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
The first of these, the DF-31, was deployed in 2006, as a road-mobile system.
DF-31 mobile solid fueled ICBM.
By 2013, the Chinese produced and fielded an improved version, the DF-31A. The DF-31 is armed with a single nuclear warhead.
In 2016, China completed testing for a more modern solid-fuel ICBM, the DF-41, which has begun to enter service as a mobile missile. The DF-41 carries 10 independently targeted nuclear warheads.
DF-41 MIRV ICBM. This is the mainstay of the Chinese ICBM fleet. All have ten nuclear warheads, can reach anywhere in the globe, and can be launched in minutes.
Between the DF-5, DF-31, and DF-41 missile systems, China was assessed, as of 2019, of possessing around 218 nuclear warheads (It has an additional 68 nuclear warheads carried on submarines and manned bombers.)
But even with this mix of silo-based DF-5s and mobile DF-31/41 missiles, China believed its forces remained vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike by American nuclear and, increasingly, conventional forces.
After all, that is what all the military policy planners in Washington DC are discussing right now. A first strike attack against China prior to an invasion.
This concern appeared to be magnified in the aftermath of the American withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019, and the emerging threat of intermediate-range missiles appearing on the periphery of China’s borders.
The first sign that China was adapting to this new reality came in the form of significant improvements and additions to its massive Jilantai training area, located near the city of Jilantai in China’s Inner Mongolia province.
Constructed in 2013, the Jilantai training area was the premier training grounds for the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, with specialized training constructed for both silo- and mobile-missile operations.
Around 2016, however, China began constructing new silos that appeared to be too small to hold the massive DF-5, leading Western analysts to assess that the Chinese were preparing to house their solid-fuel ICBMs, either the DF-31, DF-41 or both, in a silo configuration.
The importance of this distinction is that, while mobility provides for an element of survivability in a classic nuclear exchange scenario, the mobile missiles are vulnerable to loiter weapons.
Loiter weapons are in great use by the United States, such as armed drones, or precision stand-off weapons, such as the kind of ground-launched cruise missiles being developed by the US in the post-INF treaty era.
By placing some of its solid fuel ICBMs in silos, China virtually eliminates the threat from drones and cruise missiles, and because these missiles don’t have to be fueled, reduces the vulnerability to US strategic nuclear weapons such as the Trident D5.
The scope and scale of the silo construction led some analysts to conclude that perhaps the Jilantai training area was going to assume a limited operational posture, based upon the number of silos under construction.
This assessment was made moot, however, by the discovery of what many analysts believe is a massive missile base, containing 120 silos, under construction near Yumen in Gansu province, and another, containing a potential 110 additional silos, near the city of Hami in Eastern Xinjiang province.
Gansu province in China.
These silos appear to be similar to the new ones seen at the Jilantai training area, leading analysts to assess that the Chinese intend to load them with either the DF-31, DF-41 or both.
Many analysts believe that China may opt only to load a few of these silos with missiles, creating the potential for a “shell game” defense that would complicate nuclear targeting by the US.
But even if only 80 of these silos were loaded with DF-41 ICBMs, China’s warhead total would expand considerably, adding up to 800 new warheads to their arsenal.
Chinese nuclear weapons as understood by the West.
While China has not publicly released a new nuclear posture statement that supersedes the 2006 White Paper, the construction of new missile silos configured to hold solid-fuel ICBMs possessing multiple warheads changes the nuclear posture options for China.
The most likely change is to transition from a pure retaliatory strike capability (“counterattack in self-defense”) to a launch-on-warning posture.
This means the Chinese missiles would leave their silos when an attack was detected instead of waiting for a nuclear attack to actually occur.
Given China’s declared nuclear policy, a launch-on-warning posture allows China to retain its no-first-use policy while simultaneously ensuring the survivability of its nuclear forces.
However, if one is an American strategic nuclear planner, one cannot ignore the reality that China is edging close to having a legitimate first-strike capability, especially if it places missiles in every one of the silos under construction.
Faced with a potential first-strike capability from both Russia and China…
… and in light of the growing cooperation between Russia and China on defense issues…
…regarding what both nations view as the growing threat from the United States…
… the US may be compelled to look at increasing its nuclear arsenal, or dramatically altering its own nuclear force posture and composition, in order to match this emerging threat.
This, however, would be a prohibitively expensive proposition.
Which leaves arms control.
The Biden administration is currently trying to tie US arms control talks about reducing the strategic nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia to China.
Russia has rejected this out of hand, noting that it has nothing to do with the Chinese nuclear arsenal, and therefore the US should be approaching China directly on this matter.
US-China nuclear reduction talks, however, are impractical when one compares the relative threat posed by 200-plus Chinese ground-based ICBMs.
While the US arsenal of several thousand strategic warheads housed in a nuclear triad consisting of silo-based ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and air-delivered nuclear weapons.
The level of reductions in the US arsenal that would make any strategic nuclear forces reduction talks viable for China could not be matched by China, and as such would be politically impossible for the US to agree to.
If, however, the Chinese were to complete the two new silo bases and fill them with DF-41s, each of which armed with 10 warheads, then the US and China could negotiate mutually acceptable reductions based on strategic parity.
Such negotiations would be complicated by the need to factor in not only Russia, but also the nuclear arsenals of France and the UK (as American NATO allies), as well as the nuclear arsenals of lesser powers such as Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.
The bottom line, however, is that China appears to have breached its commitment “never to engage in a nuclear arms race of any kind.”
The facts show that China entered this new phase of nuclear weapons development and deployment as a reaction to developments by potential adversaries (i.e., the US).
However, let there be no doubt – this is an arms race.
The placement of the Chinese silo bases appears, by intent, to be outside the range of anticipated US intermediate-range weapons, such as cruise missiles.
This means that there will be increased pressure placed on the States to field a new generation of silo-based ICBMs to replace the aging Minuteman III missiles.
As well as a new generation of submarine-launched missiles…
And missile-carrying submarines…
And a new generation of manned bomber…
… all in numbers greater than current forecasts call for.
The US cannot afford to enter this kind of arms race with China. Simply put, China has out Ronald Reagan-ed the US, flipping the Cold War theory that the US outspent the Soviet Union, bankrupting it, and accelerating its collapse on its head…
… so that it’s the US that’s being outspent, bankrupting itself, and pushing itself closer to collapse.
Hopefully, the US leadership is wiser than their Soviet counterparts before them. But, if history has shown us anything, the US is addicted to the power it believes it accrues by possessing a large nuclear weapons arsenal, and like any addict, liberating oneself from its drug of choice is difficult, if not impossible.
And keep in mind that the Chinese and the Russians possess hyper-velocity missile technology
Why Hypersonic Missiles Are Real Game Changers – by Gordog
A Technical Look at the Science Behind the Headlines
by Gordog
The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:
"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing and pose significant risks to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.
At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’ between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but, notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.
But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?
We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian ‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now. Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal, now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.
The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed. More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7 km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere. [Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also higher.]
But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.
This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times, sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.
Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima! But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of the North Korean rockets!
The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It is a very hard thing to do.
Consider that a modern combat rifle with a high-velocity cartridge can fire a bullet at a speed of about 1,200 meters per second [1.2 km/s]. That is barely one fifth the speed of an ICBM warhead, and only about half the speed of a short or intermediate-range ballistic missile. Clearly, intercepting anything that flies double or even five times the speed of a rifle bullet is going to be a daunting task. [Note from our previous discussion on the space race and the technicalities of orbital flight, that the ICBM does not reach orbital velocity, but flies on a suborbital trajectory—although it does exit the atmosphere].
Between the two, speed and maneuvering, the latter is much more effective in evading defensive interception.
We know this from many actual battlefield results. When the US launched large salvoes of subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria in 2017 and again in 2018, a number of them were intercepted by Syrian air defenses. But not nearly all. Many did get through despite the T-Hawk’s relatively slow speed of about 500 mph, which is only about M 0.7. But the cruise missile’s ability to fly low to the ground and maneuver in flight, changing direction constantly, make it a tough target to hit. Likewise in the Falklands War, the Argentines used subsonic and fairly short-range, French-made Exocet sea-skimming cruise missiles to sink several large British warships, including a then-state-of-the-art Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Sheffield.
Even bird hunters know this, and will use a shotgun that scatters many pellets over a wide area rather than a bullet-firing rifle to take down slow-flying, but maneuvering, land and waterfowl! Obviously, if you combine high speed WITH maneuvering, you will have a missile that is going to be very difficult to stop. [If not impossible, with something like the Avangard, which reaches ICBM speeds of up to M 25!].
But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows just how difficult missile interception really is:
At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency vehicles streamed onto the runway.Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.
The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!
Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five times at the incoming missile.
‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss? That’s shocking,’ she said. ‘That’s shocking because this system is supposed to work.’
Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th Quartermaster Detachment.A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!
Shooting down Scud missiles is difficult, and governments have wrongly claimed success against them in the past.Governments have overstated the effectiveness of missile defenses in the past, including against Scuds. During the first Gulf War, the United States claimed a near-perfect record in shooting down Iraqi variants of the Scud.Subsequent analyses found that nearly all the interceptions had failed.
Why is shooting down Scuds so difficult? Because this was arguably the world’s first hypersonic missile [it flies at M 5 and does MANEUVER]!
If we take a closer look at this missile, we see that it is propelled nearly throughout its entire flight. This is the key. The warhead only separates from the missile body a few miles [mere seconds], before reaching its target. That missile body contains a means for maneuvering the missile, by means of thrust vector—using graphite paddles that move into and out of the rocket engine exhaust stream, as seen here. So it will be jinking and jibing as it enters the terminal phase of flight—making it a very hard target to radar track and shoot down!
Once the warhead separates, the spent missile body falls harmlessly to the ground, as it did just outside the Riyadh airport, landing on a nearby street. It is this now uselessly falling body that could be locked onto by air defense radars and hit by interceptor missiles—while the warhead itself sails unobstructed overhead.
The only real problem with those ancient Scuds was their accuracy. They could be off by hundreds of meters. But of course, accuracy and missile guidance systems have come a long way since then. The modern successor to the Scud, the Russian truck-launched Iskander, has an accuracy of about 5 meters! It too, is really a hypersonic missile that reaches M 7, but has a range of only 500 km—which was dictated by the now-defunct INF treaty, from which the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew.
The Russian Iskander-M cruises at hypersonic speed of 2,100–2,600 m/s [Mach 6–7] at a height of 50 km. The Iskander-M weighs 4,615 kg carries a warhead of 710–800 kg, has a range of 480 km and achieves a CEP [circular error probable] of 5–7 meters. During flight it can maneuver at different altitudes and trajectories to evade anti-ballistic missiles.
Iskander is generally described, at least in the west, as a ‘quasi-ballistic’ missile. But ‘quasi’ or not, the US considers the Iskander a very dangerous weapon, and a type of weapon which it does not yet possess. In fact, the US’ attempts to develop its very first hypersonic missile have been rather slow out of the blocks. Its first flight test attempt with the proposed Lockheed-Martin AGM183 [aka ARRW] in April of this year, did not even manage to release the rocket from the wing of the B52 carrier! The second attempt, on July 29, managed to get the rocket to release, but the engine failed to fire!
Clearly the US is many years away from fielding a working hypersonic missile. These early tests were only supposed to test the rocket, and carried a dummy ‘glide vehicle’ which is supposed to separate from the rocket once it reaches a speed of about M 6 or so, and then glide to its target while maneuvering.
The prototype missile would carry a frangible surrogate for that [glide] vehicle that would disintegrate after release.
However, it is unclear how an unpowered gliding body is going to accomplish aerodynamic maneuvering INSIDE the atmosphere. The concept of boost-glide, which is used by Avangard, works by hoisting the glide vehicle up above the atmosphere, at ICBM speed, where the ‘glider’ can then skip off the upper layers of the atmosphere like a flat pebble skipping over the surface of a still pond.
The overall flight range of AGM183 is a claimed 1,000 miles [1,600 km]. Clearly such a short-range missile, and reaching a speed of only about M 8 at most [based on statements of reaching its target in a flight time of 10 to 12 minutes] is not going to be able to use the boost-glide means of maneuvering, which requires exiting the atmosphere.
The Technical Deep Dive (If you are not inclined to follow technical details jump to the conclusions.)
So let’s look at Russian hypersonic technology in a little more detail, so that we may understand more than just what the technically-challenged media are telling us. From what the Russian military has already fielded, we can see that hypersonic missiles come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like Avangard, are launched by powerful ICBM rockets and have ICBM-like striking range. Others, like Zircon, are more like a Tomahawk or Kalibr cruise missile, powered by an air-breathing engine, and able to aerodynamically maneuver throughout their flight to the target—but flying about ten times faster.
Others, like Kinzhal, which appears to be an evolution of the Iskander [itself an evolution of the Scud] are powered by relatively small rockets and are designed to maneuver gas-dynamically [thrust vectoring], again, during all phases of flight, right up to the target.
These are the three primary types for purposes of basic classification. They all fly very fast [up to M 25 for Avangard], but they use different propulsion systems, and different means of maneuvering. Let’s begin with the Kinzhal, since we already understand the basics of how a Scud or Iskander works. In the case of Kinzhal, it is launched from a very high speed and height by a MiG31 interceptor aircraft, which is designed to fly up to 1,500 km at a cruising speed of M 2.4, at a height of about 20 km.
By carrying even an unmodified Iskander up to this speed and height, its range could easily double, to about 1,000 km—since the rocket chemical energy required to reach that height and speed would be saved, and could be expended on increasing its flight range.
The range given for Kinzhal is 2,000 km, but it is not clear if that includes the flight range of the MiG31 carrier aircraft. My guess would be that it does. The MiG has a combat radius of over 700 km at its M 2.4 cruise speed. That means that after release, the Kinzhal would need to fly for about 1,300 km before hitting its target—for an overall system range of 2,000 km. In fact, the MiG could fly a significant portion of its flight subsonically, saving fuel, and accelerate up to supersonic cruise speed, or even its top speed of M 2.8, only in the last couple of hundred km, before launching Kinzhal. It would then circle back and return to base subsonically again. This would increase range even more.
Either way, it is a safe bet that the overall range to a target, say a US aircraft carrier, from the takeoff point of the MiG [now deployed in Syria], is realistically going to be no less than the stated 2,000 km, if not more. This is certainly a game-changer for US naval dominance! Carrier-based aircraft would have no chance to fly far enough from their floating airfield to intercept a MiG31 launching a Kinzhal at 1,000 km or more distance from the ship. The F/A-18 has a combat radius for air-to-air missions of only 740 km. Obviously, it is not going to be able to reach the MiG launching from outside of 1,000 km.
Now let us look at the Zircon cruise missile that Nato is complaining about. So far, this missile has been successfully test-flown at target distances of up to about 450 km. The Russian MoD says its range is actually in excess of 1,000 km, and that flight tests to maximum range will be forthcoming.
This too is a game-changer. The Zircon will be carried by Russia’s new class of surface warships in the frigate or ‘small destroyer’ size, as well as on the new Yasen-class cruise missile nuclear subs that are now coming into service. These state-of-the-art subs will also carry subsonic Kalibr cruise missiles with a maximum range of 4,500 km! Combined with the air-launched Kinzhal, the US Navy will face some very stiff challenges—from the air, from the sea, and even from under the sea. It should be noted that both the Zircon and Kinzhal are not exclusively anti-ship missiles. They can just as readily target land objects, including Nato command and control centers—which Putin has said Russia will do, in the event of any kind of western aggression!
But Zircon is also a technological tour de force. The unique feature of the Zircon is its scramjet engine. This is the first time that the world has a production engine of this type—something which has long been a goal for both the US and Russia.
Not surprisingly, the Russians flew the world’s first scramjet prototype back in 1991—the Kholod, which means ‘cold’ in Russian. Remarkably, in the Yeltsin détente atmosphere of the early nineties, the Russian developers of the world’s first functional scramjet engine, the Central Institute of Aviation Motors [CIAM] invited Nasa to participate in the flight tests at the Sary Shagan test range in Kazakhstan. The results were published in the US professional literature, here, and here.
But despite this technology boost from Russia, the US has not been able to keep up. Its experiments with scramjet engines, although wildly hyped in the media, have been dormant for several years. It appears that the US has given up on the idea of building a working scramjet engine for the time being—much as they gave up, decades ago, on the idea of building a closed-cycle rocket engine, having deemed the technology ‘impossible.’
So what is a scramjet engine anyway? To fully understand this, let’s first look at how a turbojet engine works. Here is a picture that is worth a thousand words. Air enters the front of the engine and is then compressed by a number of rotating blades on a series of wheels, similar to a fan or propeller. The compressed air is then passed into the burner, or combustion chamber, where fuel is squirted in and the result is a high temperature and high-pressure gas that then drives the turbine wheels—which are bladed in a way similar to the compressor wheels up front.
The turbine wheels and compressor are on a single shaft and rotate at the same speed—so it is the energy of the gas driving the turbines, that drives the compressors. The remaining energy in the gas is squeezed out through a nozzle, which accelerates the gas flow, which, in turn, creates thrust—on the principle of Newton’s Third Law, action-reaction. The force of the fast-moving mass flow of gas out the nozzle, must be compensated by a REACTION force in the opposite direction [forward thrust], as per the conservation of momentum principle. Hence all jet engines, whether air-breathing or rocket, are called reaction engines.
[Incidentally, the heart of any liquid-fuel rocket engine is a turbopump, which is basically a gas turbine engine. It has a burner, where some amount of the fuel and oxidizer are burned, supplying gas to drive a turbine wheel or wheels, which then drive two ‘compressor’ pumps [also wheels], that pressurize the oxidizer and fuel, which is then delivered to the main combustion chamber under great pressure.]
Now what happens when you want to go very fast with a turbojet engine? Well, you basically hit a wall, due to the physics of airflow]. The faster you go, the greater the ram pressure on the front of the engine. This ram pressure [technically called dynamic pressure, or ‘Q’] is like kinetic energy—it increases by the square of speed. [KE = M x V^2 / 2; Q = rho x V^2 / 2; they are the same except mass is replaced by density, rho, since we are dealing with a flowing fluid instead of a solid particle!]
In simple terms, dynamic pressure [aka ram pressure] is what you feel on your hand when you stick your hand out the window of your car while driving on the highway.
The results of this quadratic pressure rise with speed are profound! At a typical passenger jet cruise speed of 450 knots, or M 0.8, the pressure increase from ram effect, at the front of the engine fan, is about 1.5. Also, the engine inlet must SLOW the airflow down to about M 0.5, so that the rotating blades can work efficiently.
If you increase flight speed to M 2, the pressure rise at the engine face due to ram effect is seven-fold! At this speed, you don’t even need a compressor or turbines.
This is the idea of the ramjet engine—you need no moving parts, just an air inlet that is designed to slow down the airflow to below sonic velocity, turning kinetic energy into pressure energy. The combustion chamber is simply a pipe with fuel squirters, where that compressed air is burned with fuel, and then expelled through a nozzle, exactly as on the turbojet. In fact the afterburner on supersonic fighter jets works exactly like a ramjet engine—fuel is squirted in and combusts with air that was used for cooling the combustion chamber walls upstream [only a small amount of air is burned in a turbojet engine, with air to fuel ratios of over 50, compared to about 15 for a car engine.] An illustration of an afterburner shows the simple basic geometry.
But the ramjet hits a speed limit too, just like the turbojet. In both cases it has to do with the falling efficiency of the engine inlet at higher speeds: more of the kinetic energy of the high-speed airflow is converted into heat, rather than usable pressure. In a turbojet, the heat limit is reached by about Mach 3, when the heat of that incoming air exceeds the materials limit of the compressor blades. In the ramjet, eliminating those unneeded blades and all the other moving parts raises the temperature limit to a much higher value—so flight up to about Mach 5 is possible.
Above those speeds, the Ramjet faces a different kind of problem. As flight speeds continue to increase, the efficiency of turning that kinetic energy into pressure continues to decrease steeply. This pressure loss is due to a series of shockwaves generated by slowing down the airflow in the engine inlet passage, upstream of the combustion chamber. The biggest shockwave and biggest pressure loss happens when the flow finally transitions to below sonic velocity. This is called the normal shockwave, because it is perpendicular [normal] to the inlet wall, as seen in this illustration of a supersonic inlet and its shockwaves.
So the speed limit comes because most of that ram pressure is not recoverable—it is simply dissipated into heat by the inlet shockwaves.
Enter the scramjet. Here, the flow is never actually slowed to below sonic velocity. That’s why it’s called a SCramjet, for supersonic combustion—the airflow through the combustion chamber is well above Mach 1, perhaps closer to Mach 2. By comparison, the flow in a turbojet enters the burner at just M 0.2, ten times slower—and in the afterburner and ramjet, it is about M 0.5.
This solves the speed limit issue of not having any more pressure energy available. But it comes with HUGE challenges. At a flight speed of M 6 or 7, the craft is moving at a speed of about 2,000 m/s. The main challenge is the flame front speed of combustion. Even if it took only one hundredth of a second to combust the air-fuel mixture, it would require a combustion chamber 20 meters long! That is hardly practical of course, but is in line with the flame propagation speed of aviation kerosene. That is why the afterburner jetpipes on supersonic aircraft are several meters long.
So we see that each type of airbreathing engine, turbojet, ramjet and scramjet, has its own speed limit, as shown graphically here. Even the scramjet will run into a wall at some point. The vertical measure is specific impulse [ISP], which is engine efficiency, per mass of fuel burned. We see that ISP decreases the faster we go, in any type of engine—it simply means that fuel use rises much faster than flight speed!
But back to the main challenge of the scramjet, which is flame speed. This is strictly a limit of the chemical physics of fuel combustion. Hydrogen burns ten times as fast as kerosene, but is not a practical fuel—it must be cooled to near absolute zero to be liquid, and so is not storable, and cannot be launched at will without time-consuming fueling. All of the previous scramjet experimental prototypes, both US and Russian, used cryogenic liquid hydrogen fuel. But the Zircon uses a kerosene-based fuel innovation that the Russians call Detsilin-M.
The exact means by which the Russians have achieved this fuel chemistry is of course a tightly held secret, but it is clearly a remarkable breakthrough in chemical engineering—comparable to the breakthrough in materials science that led to the closed-cycle, oxygen-rich staged combustion rocket engine in the 1960s [which the US still has not demonstrated].
In a previous discussion here, the technically-inclined commenter and longtime gyroplane pilot PeterAU1, dug up some interesting material about ‘doping’ kerosene with certain additives to enhance flame front speed. But the technicalities of that subject are beyond the scope of this relatively brief introductory discussion. [Although I’m sure we may hear more in the comments section!]
Conclusions:
The bottom line is that the Zircon represents not only a formidable and very deadly weapon—but it is indicative of the engineering capabilities of the Russian aerospace industry. It is an impressive achievement that is in fact groundbreaking. As mentioned already, Zircon is only the beginning of scramjet engine use by the Russian military. The next generation of such missiles, like the already mentioned Gremlin, will be even smaller and more capable in range and speed. At some point in the future, we may even see scramjet engines on superfast civil aircraft—but that is probably a long way off yet.
An even bigger engineering accomplishment is the astonishing Avangard boost-glide vehicle. But I will leave that remarkable story for another discussion.
The bottom line is that these new Russian technologies are in fact tilting the global military balance going forward. They are game-changing because they are UNSTOPPABLE with today’s air defense technology. Just like the Plains Indians couldn’t hope to stop, with their bows and arrows, the US cavalry with their repeating rifles.
Even more profound may be the psychological effect that Russia’s engineering accomplishments must be exerting on the American psyche, which is used to assuming that they have the smartest engineers and make the best military hardware.
That is demonstrably NOT the case anymore.
And that may be the biggest game-changer of all!
China’s hyper-velocity missile.
The smart thing…
Knowing the Chinese, it’s just a simple matter of treating the Taiwanese as brothers and sisters. Inviting them over to China (as they can travel easily back and forth now) and let the Taiwanese decide for themselves if they want to reunify with China or not.
Face it.
China is doing so much better than Taiwan is.
Oh, sure, Taiwan is wealthy. But it is Western wealth. All the money is concentrated in the hands of a few greedy oligarchs. It’s not spread out among the people. And when the Taiwanese come into China they see the life that they SHOULD be living in Taiwan. They see what COULD happen in Taiwan, if the nation unified together.
Like in this amazing video here… A Taiwanese girl comes to China for the first time and here’s her impressions…
Taiwanese girl comes to China for the first time. These are her impressions.
Conclusion
If America “jumps the gun” and initiates hostilities before 2023, it will quickly escalate and go nuclear and Russia and China together would level America. The QUAD allies might talk big, but one the nuclear detonations start to happen, you can pretty much expect them to sit “the game” out.
If the United States holds off on hostilities past into 2023, what we would see is an economic contraction in the United States and the Western client states. A decline in the value of the US dollar and rampant inflation. Depending on American actions, the military budget will be seen as bankrupting the country, and meanwhile China is prospering and looking like some kind of space-age utopia. This comparison between the two would be strikingly obvious, and exacerbated with the 2022 Olympic games. This would be a very dangerous time indeed. This is the time where it is difficult to predict.
If the hostilities delay to 2025 or later, then there won’t be much that America can do. It has shot it’s last wad, and spent up all it’s fuel. The nation is running on vapors right now, and whatever advantages it once had, it has been squandered away by the greedy and evil.
Now matter how you look at it, China is clearly the superior governance model…
This is America in 2021. This is it. Look closely at the video…
America in 2021.
And this is China in 2021. Watch the video…
Quick Summary
Technology has completely changed the balance of forces globally. Yet the evil, corrupt and powerful somehow believe that they can prevent this new reality, and capitalize upon it for personal profit. By all accounts, they are about two decades too late, and they understanding of reality is inaccurate.
How the world adjusts to this new reality is open to conjecture, as it could go very bad to just a minor discomfort. It all depends on a number of variables that are in play right now. Stay tuned.
And keep in mind…
Next time you read some gung-ho neocon advocating war because America is strong, and has perfected small unit warfare…
… remember this video of Chinese boy and girl scouts…
Chinese boy and girl scouts.
And this one too…
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Somehow, everyone is assuming that those nations that “signed up to support the United States in the “containment” of China, would actually do so. And, I have argued “don’t be so sure”.
And while there might be a few “hanger’s on” such as Australia (only if the Morrison government remains in power), the chances are slim that the QUAD would exist and remain viable.
…Were there to be a conflict between the USA and China.
To Americans, it seems that America is still strong and powerful and has a trio of “toadies” (nations that it can “push around”) and who will “stand by the United States” and do what ever it wants.
This is not true.
It’s not 1980.
No matter what the American mainstream and alternative media wants to say. The truth is that the rest of the world really doesn’t give a shit about America. They don’t care about Americans. They want America bullshit out of their lives, and are only going along with America now, out of survival. Once America shows signs that it can no longer punish these people, they will abandon America faster than you can shake a leg.
Asia has united into one enormous and powerful group. And all the nations bordering on this entity either wants to be part of it, or be independently respected by it. They most certainly do not want to piss off this massive, enormous united Asia.
The rest of the world is not at all like it is portrayed in the American media.
It’s an exciting period full of CHANGE.
The United States Military Empire is collapsing in upon itself. And this is creating voids where the rest of the world can rejoice and start living “normal” lives again. This is not just some nice phrases. It’s the absolute truth. The United States has become the world’s captor, torturer and all-around bully. Americans call this “policing the world for democracy”.
As shown in this micro-video…
In this article, we look at the probable alignments with the United States Military Empire construction known as “The QUAD”. And we put it in context with the great global realignments that are taking place.
How the USA views China
But this narrative is for American consumption. It is a fantasy. It is a lie. And it will end up getting a lot of Americans killed.
This isn’t your standard BBC or CNN, or FOX “news” fare.
This is the real deal and what is actually going on.
The following is from Fred Reed, and judging from the comments in the comments section, about 75% of the American commenters are indigent and aghast that Fred would write something other than “American Rambo can kick anyone’s ass”. It’s a great read. Check it out…
How Taiwan Will Fall Into Beijing’s Lap, Like an Overripe Mango
I will now explain war, or some of it. If you wonder how some mutt in Mexico with a computer thinks he knows about strategy, well, look at what we have in Washington. How could I be worse?
In geopolitical circles, blather swirls over whether the United States can defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion in a regional war. Sez I, it doesn’t matter whether it can if it won’t, and China will likely get the island without invading. The key is to think about how things look from Taiwan.
Washington is vague about whether it would militarily defend Taiwan. Taiwan presumably has noticed. Further, America does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country. More waffling. The implication is that Washington might, or might not, do something, or something else, depending on unspecified things, probably or at least possibly.
This sounds like hedging, a disguised American recognition that this isn’t 1955, and China is no longer a bamboo republic that makes pencils and cheap plastic buckets for Walmart. As China’s military power grows, and thus the cost of a war, America’s equivocation will likely become more equivocal. Throw in that America does $550 billion in commerce annually with the Middle Kingdom, including countless things America doesn’t make but can’t do without, and war with China doesn’t look real feasible. This too has probably occurred to Taipei.
The fashion in naval circles is to talk about the First Island Chain, which is a sort of barrier along the coast of China, the Kuriles, Japan, Okinawa in the Ryukyus, Taiwan, the Philippines, and even Borneo. The idea, apart from some fairly silly notions about “containing China,” is that these islands will want to join with Washington, which is somewhere else, to fight China, which is right there, to defend Taiwan, which also is right there.
Now, who would actually defend Taiwan—that is, go to war with China? Japan? Note that Japan is within missile range of China, and probably does not want missiles of large warhead raining down on Tokyo. Japan gets ninety percent of its petroleum from the Persian Gulf and, If Tokyo’s reserves of oil run out, Japan stops. All of it. China has pretty good submarines these days. The beltway Hawklets might say, “Don’t worry. We have magic anti-submarine stuff, no prob.” Given America’s military record, would you buy a used car from these people?
Do you suppose the Japanese have thought of this?
Washington might say, not to worry, we have antimissile gadgets, THAAD, and Patriot, and Aegis, and we can escort your tankers. But none of these weapons has much of a track record, and neither does America.
Further energizing Japan’s likely unenthusiasm for fighting Washington’s wars is that trade with China is crucial to the Japanese economy, and that Taiwan isn’t all that valuable to Tokyo. Today Japan trades with Taiwan, and with China. If Taiwan became part of China, this trade would probably continue with nothing changing but the letterhead.
Lastly, Japan may have noticed America’s propensity for getting its vassals (or allies, clients, or poodles, take your choice) into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. Think Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan and, soon, Syria and Iraq. This would leave Japan in a shooting war with China, all by itself. If the gringos lose a war, they can just go home. Japan is not mobile.
The Japanese might whisper into American ears, “All cool, Round Eye. But it’s just your empire on the line. It’s our ass. we’ll sit this one out.”
South Korea might think similar thoughts regarding use of its air bases, especially given that the Korean peninsula has a land border with China. Washington doesn’t. Seoul needs a war with the Middle Kingdom like it needs smallpox. “Tell you what, Round Eye, bugger off….”
Taiwan would get wind of this through back channels if not by sheer deduction.
How would a regional war over the Taiwan Strait look to an adult commander of an aircraft carrier? He might think, “Hmmm. Squinty-eyed rascals good engineers. Make’m Mars probe, worke’m. Train go three hundred sixty miles hour. Work’em. Maybe make’m missiles work’em good too. Hmmmm. Bad juju.”
The Navy’s PR operation will say that Chinese missiles don’t really amount to anything, this to protect the budget for its favorite bathtub toys and the only surface ship that justifies the existence of the Navy. But of course China can build swarms of missiles to arrive simultaneously.
Further, realists in Washington might ask themselves what would happen if the war didn’t go as planned, as wars usually don’t, and a carrier and three destroyers became marine barbecues before sinking. War games and Pentagon studies suggest that this is quite likely. To save face, the hawks would have to turn a regional war into a world war, which America would win. “Win.” Millions would die and the world economy stop. Never underestimate the influence of vanity in world affairs.
Taiwan could divine all of this. It could also divine that the Navy had divined it.
In recent years China has shown itself to be very good at engineering all manner of things, and has emphasized antiship missiles, including but not limited to terminally guided ballistic missiles of range far greater than that of carrier aviation. Do they work as advertised? We don’t know. A carrier captain would probably want someone else to find out.
Despite growly aphasic pronunciamientos from the White House, and chirpy assurance from Navy PR, grownups in the Pentagon might think, “You know…maybe a war with China isn’t a great idea. How about lunch instead at a really good rib joint on the Hill?”
Taiwan would know of these doubts. This would further undermine hope of American defense.
Now, suppose that China keeps on doing what to all appearances it is doing: increasing its amphibious- assault assets, improving and enlarging its already highly non-negligible air force, building missiles and increasing its number of marines. Meanwhile the Chinese navy grows like kudzu on a Georgia road cut. China can increase its forces across the Strait virtually without limit. The US cannot. At some point, past or future, Taiwan will face assault forces it has no chance whatever of repelling by itself. Taipei would notice this.
Further suppose that China keeps doing what else it has been doing for some time: practicing amphibious assaults that could at any moment become real assaults. Thus no one—read, America—would know whether the attack would come in two months, five years, or never. This would require keeping defensive forces, such as carriers, on station constantly and at a high state of readiness. Militaries do not do this well, and it is expensive. Moreover, after long periods of peace militaries do not mobilize quickly as it is discovered that there aren’t many of things there ought to be lots of because of some budget cut, or something, and the whole enterprise turns into a gargantuan goat-rope.
What kind of attack might Taiwan expect? I haven’t talked to the Chinese General Staff for weeks now, and so am making this up. But the goal would probably be to get the war over before America had time to react. Keeping invaders out is one thing, getting them out another. So, maybe a sudden attack with ballistic missiles to crater runways with simultaneous mass missile attack on air defenses with amphib ships simultaneously setting sail. At fifteen knots it would take about eight hours to reach the island. With heavy air support from China’s highly non-negligible air force, Chinese troops might well get ashore and into cities before America’s hypergalactic indomitable military could get its thumb out of…well, never mind. The Americans would be caught flatfooted by a fait accompli. Washington would face the joyful choice of bombing Chinese soldiers inside Taiwanese cities, or—this is Saturday Night Live territory—undertaking a land war in Asia against China.
It may be that Taiwan has thought of this.
Finally, there is TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. While little known in America, TSMC makes most of the world’s high-end chips, including those of Apple and…the Pentagon. America currently is not able to make its own.
This throws a fascinating wild card into things. If in an attack, TSMC were destroyed, by either side, or captured and held hostage, the effects would be no end entertaining. Today’s world, perhaps more than most people know, depends on chips. An astonishing proportion of advanced chips come from the island. Replacing its fab lines somewhere else would take years. The other, though lesser, source of chips is Samsung in South Korea, also in Chinese missile range. Washington is trying to cripple China’s tech by not allowing it access to advanced chips. Presumably this increases Beijing’s incentive to annex Taiwan.
Anyway, Biden couldn’t risk losing Taiwan as it would affect the midterms. But what it comes to is that with China being the largest trading partner of something like 165 countries, war isn’t real practical. The Taiwanese have probably figured this out.
So what does Taiwan do, seeing an overwhelming invasion force looming and not believing that Washington is really going to go to war to defend it? The choice would be to fight, be devastated as it lost, and face harsh conditions after—or to come to the best agreement it could and surrender without fighting. Anyone want to make bets?
Correction: Last week, in a moment of brainlock, I said that Pompeo was in the Navy. No, the Army. Mea culpa.
Some selected comments…
I’ve a hunch that, that is a key factor in China’s desire in getting its “lost province” back?. Taiwan integrated into China proper would then have a huge share, even a near monopoly on certain high capacity chips.
Since we’ve allowed a great bulk of our industrial/infrastructure base to be outsourced, we’ve become dangerously dependent on others to maintain this menagerie.
We could eventually (maybe) rebuild our capacity but is the skill set even here anymore to do that or sustain it?.
We may go berserk & launch a war against China but if China does indeed have those hypersonic missiles available then they could send much of the pacific fleet to Davy Jones’ locker. And since it takes years to build those naval vessels we, out of desperation may go nuclear?. Then it’s Adios Muchachos..
So, me thinks that we’re rapidly approaching a scenario that there is very little we can do about it. Accept that we screwed the pooch big time in allowing so much our productivity base to be so gutted & in doing so, hamstrung our very future (we’ll never admit that!).
We can swallow our pride & acknowledge what we’ve done to ourselves? (fat chance!).
Gracefully accept we’re a waning power? (fat chance!).
Or, freak out & go berserk that we’re no longer the top dog & launch a conflagration that’ll turn this world into a charnel house? (Most likely).
I really don’t think most Americans realize how completely batsh*t insane & evil their leaders & the psychos in the Pentagon truly are?. Maybe sanity will prevail, but looking at the zio-America lunatic asylum, it doesn’t bode well..
-BluEidDvl
The ‘junk’ sold in Walmart and Target, most of which are now being sourced OUTSIDE of China, are ‘AMERICAN’ goods, albeit made in foreign countries such as Vietnam.
Chinese companies hardly sell to the US market which has become marginal to the Chinese economy, as ‘Chinese’ exports now account for less than a few percent of China’s GDP.
Those so-called ‘Chinese’ exports to the USA consist mostly of ‘AMERICAN’ goods such as Apple’s iPhones, manufactured in China by Asian contract manufacturers like Foxconn. But those contract factories are now being relocated to lower-cost countries such as Vietnam.
The rest of ‘Chinese’ exports which consist of industrial commodities such as LED panels are now being routed to Mexico where OEMs assemble them into final products such as TVs.
In a few more years, ‘Chinese’ exports to the USA, while still large, in total volume will nevertheless decline further to less than 1% of China’s GDP which will be driven more by domestic consumption and internal demand over the next few decades.
The days when China was the ‘factory of the world’ is over.
-antibeast
What this author misses is that many Chinese-based manufacturers have their plants in Taiwan. The companies are headquartered in Beijing or Shanghai, and use Taiwan for manufacturing because labor is actually cheaper and more skilled than many places in China.
So, would China bomb the crap out of Taiwan, knowing they’re destroying their own factories?
How about another thought – would China bomb the crap out of Taiwan in an effort to control it’s government – only to then turn around and rebuild it?
Look at what happened in Hong Kong; China assimilated the former colony almost without a fight.
As much as I hate to do this – I sort of agree with Alfred Thayer Fred, I think. Once the real pressure is on, Taiwan will come to an “agreement” with the PRC and allow itself to be subsumed into greater China. Thereby ending the “Two-China” position that’s lasted since the early 1950s.
-RonCharest
Let someone in one of the QUAD nations explain…
The issue is whether or not the QUAD nations will stick with the USA and go against China. It’s so easy to find armchair strategists. Especially in America where they have been fed a steady diet of “American exceptionalism” and “military might”.
Let’s see what some of the more influential people (who speak English) in these QUAD nations have to say…
And then there’s Russia
Of course, the Ignorant Americans are all thinking that Russia and China are somehow enemies…
Russia has no love for China so don’t be so sure about them coming to China’s aid.
-MarkinLA
Hardly.
The Russian-China Alliance
Merry Christmas and Happy new Year, from China and Russia with love! This analysis by “Larchmonter” in 2014. Written seven years ago. He’s a contributor of the site, “The Vineyard of the Saker”, a describes what may be a game-changer in terms of the geopolitical status quo. In short, The American Empire dying a fast death, and Russia and China may be able to pick up the pieces and create a system not based on cold, brutal, myopic psychopathy.
Article HERE. All credit to him, and realize that it is very dated. China and Russia have make considerable joint progress since this was written.
Vladimir Putin said it clearly: “Russia and China will have a significant effect on the entire system of international relations. The relationship will be a significant factor in world politics and will affect the contemporary architecture of international relations . . .” And to state precisely what this relationship means in geopolitical sea change, President Putin continued: “Russia and China have never had such trusting relations in the military field as they do now. Military exercises have been in joint war games at sea and ground both in Russia and China.” (1)
Update: Russia and China have vastly increased the strength of their relationship.
Russia and China are celebrating their “strategic partnership”, and have beenvastly expanding their cooperation since 2014. Their closealliance is based oneconomic and geopolitical considerations. While it is mutually beneficial, it alsohas its limitations. However, in the mid-term, both China and Russia appear tobewilling to overlook potential fields of tension, for instance in Central Asia.
-Russia and China: The Potential of Their Partnership
The mega trade deals we have seen this year and military exercises are more than normal cross-border trade or cooperative events between neighbors or partners. (2) The ‘relationship’ is affecting the global order. The two nations are forming a resistance front against destabilization and the weapons of chaos of a unipolar system.
Update: China and Russia has vastly increased military cooperation; to include military liaison in each military headquarter, trade in the latest military weapons systems, and avionics, and engines.
The closeness of ChinaandRussia’s cybersecurity relationship is not dependent on their ties with each other, but is defined in relation to the US. Just as China and Russiaadvocate for multipolarity to challenge the perceived US’s unipolarworld view and values, their cooperation in cyberspacedemonstratesthe same focus on the US.
-China-RussiaCybersecurityCooperation
Russia and China are working together to stabilize international trade, diplomacy and military balances; yet, ironically, this is disruptive.
Russia and China are sovereign nation resistance fighters against the Hegemon. The Hegemon is the unipolar Empire of the United States.
Hegemon = United States Military Empire
This context of geopolitical strategies is paramount to bear in mind. The Hegemon is threatening to contain both Russia and China economically with exclusionary trade agreements (TPP and TTIP) that leave China and Russia out or marginalized as second tier members, while each is bordered militarily with nuclear weapons on missiles of the trade partners, Hegemon’s allies and vassals. (This is the so-called missile defense shield of the West.)
Update: This United States effort has failed and collapsed.
These hegemonic trade agreements will shut out China and Russia from further integration with the two groups. Limits for growth, suppression of development due to monopoly of intellectual properties, oppressive clean energy and pollution control regimes, limits on construction and sale or purchase and use of certain commodities will slow infrastructure projects, not only within both nations, but constrict each nation from contracting for projects in other nations (their own partners that are emerging or developing nations).
Update: The Trump efforts to conduct these suppressive actions have all collapsed completely.
Thus, the Hegemon has the strategic intention to limit the elimination of poverty in the world, and control trade everywhere on the globe. The unipolar world will be finalized and secured by the Hegemon. There will be Elites and there will be poverty forever for most of the remaining nations.
Update: This was written during President Obama's term in office, and before President's Trump and Biden. Today in August 2021, it is clear that the attempt to create a unipolar world has utterly and completely failed.
Of course, the resistance and evolutionary partnering by Russia and China has made this hegemonic outcome impossible, unless one or both Russia and China are destabilized and/or regime change ensues. Therefore, what both nations face is an economic and military challenge that clearly is existential in threat level. Russia is first, and China is next on the hegemonic hit list.
Update: The United States Military Empire has attacked both Russia and China using every weapon at it's disposal, short of direct military engagement. Including bio-weapons authorized by John Bolton, who tried to induce starvation in China, and then the three lethal viruses unleashed in China in 2020. All efforts have so far, failed dramatically.
Full Spectrum Battlefield
The threat against China and Russia is a full spectrum battlefield: they are facing potential AirSeaSpaceCyberElectromagnetic warfare, not exempting chemical, biological and nuclear; soon to include laser and hypersonic weapons; economic warfare; and war by proxy armies, NGO organizations, covert operators and agents, with global media demonization and propaganda in psyops mode.
Update: China has perfected shutting down all these expensive systems. I have written extensively on it. And it is the primary reason why the Trump 8-carrier battle armada went home in 2020 in defeat.
Each nation in the resistance partnership had to permit the other to look, touch and feel deeply into one another’s most treasured defense secrets, once armed against the other, now united with a new partner.
Update: This is true, and partially the reason why Russia and China are so close right now.
They knew they were in the same ‘foxhole’ facing the same enemy. And they both understood, that in time, neither would survive without the other. There had never been a hegemon so desperate or so fundamentally weak, yet so powerfully equipped to destroy all normalcy, perhaps, most of humanity, if need be, for it to survive. China-Russia had to protect one another and then try to save humanity and world order.
The initial United States attack was economic, not military. It hit Russia.
Background of the Resistance to the United States Military Empire
Neither Russia nor China presented themselves as rivals to the Hegemon, and both considered they had trade partnerships, geopolitical cooperative relationships and multitudinous common interests with the Hegemon. There were some irritations at the edges, but nothing was truly confrontational, except that which was instigated, paid for, planned and managed by the Hegemon with its vassals.
Update: This was the case in 2014. From 2016 to present, it's been a full-spectrum hybrid-war against both China and Russia. With China taking the brunt of the assaults.
So, economy, military and terrorism are the main battlefields in this full spectrum containment and destabilization against the Hegemon’s two greatest resistors. (This resistance is to unipolar domination in all its manifestations.)
Thus, we came to 2014. Because of the Sochi Olympics, the year 2014 became the focus of the color revolution rebirth in Ukraine. The ‘planners’ in the State Department and CIA had eight years to aim a two-prolonged destabilization that turned the failed Orange Revolution in Kiev into the Maidan. We all are very aware that this transformation was evil at its core, illegal, murderous, unconstitutional and had only one aim – to present Russia with an armed, psychologically-tuned, xenophobic Ukrainian force that would, first sweep away the Russian language, then the Russian speakers, i.e., Ukrainian citizens, in East Ukraine, next to Rostov and along a virtual open border, with nominally few defenses, merely, formal ‘crossings’ with no vestige of militarization on either side.
This violent upheaval was timed perfectly while President Putin presided over a $50 Billion investment in developing Sochi, hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, eight years of stewardship identifiable as his greatest public project and intended to lift the internal spirits of his people, while demonstrating, as the Chinese had in 2008 with a Summer Olympics, that Russia, too, was back to greatness, accomplished and peaceful, a tourist attraction year-round in Sochi, and all troubles were in the past.
President Xi had announced he would attend the opening ceremonies. China and Russia were coming of age and were proud to show support in all matters of interest to both. They had voted as one to stop the American air attack on Syria, vetoing the resolution in the Security Council, and demanding resolution of the conflict by diplomatic means. So, in peace and war, sports and commerce, the two leaders scheduled six meetings for 2014. Some would be bi-lateral, some within the context of multi-lateral groups in which both held membership.
Update: Over the last seven years since this article was written both Russia and China operated as a singular block to oppose any United States Military Empire moves against each other. This block has been largely successful.
But Ukraine and the Maidan coup also attacked China in its pocketbook and its plans for East Ukraine and Crimea. China has a long history of interaction with Ukraine. Not just the modern ‘state’ of Ukraine, peeled off from the Russian Federation, in 1991, by Yeltsin in the Belovezha Accords. They were linked by technology and science study in the days before the Soviet Union threatened China and the two had hot shooting border wars, 1960-1989.
In December 2013, the Chinese and Ukraine had signed a strategic partnership agreement that was inclusive of guarantees of a shield against nukes because Ukraine has signed the non-proliferation treaty. China was guaranteeing Ukraine protection from any aggressor, quite unusual in China’s foreign policy actions. This was signed on December 5, 2013.
Update: Contrary to what the American "news" media says, President Putin says Russians and the Ukraine are "brothers". Here.
Chinese scientists and technicians trained in Ukraine, studied in Ukraine, and purchased from Ukraine when it was the home base of rockets, missiles, aircraft engines, and other software and metallurgically-supported systems.
Ukraine was where Russia (Soviet Union) had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in institutes and industries for computation, mathematics and weapons development. Ukraine was from whom the Chinese bought the incomplete aircraft carrier that China has since finished and called the Liaoning.
The Chinese recently were coming back to Ukraine and the Black Sea wealthier than ever, and desiring to help Ukraine with infrastructure while getting food from the fertile fields, grains, vegetables and fruits.
In Crimea, the Chinese were interested in the Kerch Bridge project and possible tunnel from Russia to Crimea.
These are China’s strengths today – infrastructure, roads, rail, fibre optic, ports, bridges, and building what they saw as the western depot for the Eurasian Economic Belt, and New Silk Road.
China understood Ukraine was Russian, at least the east and south were Russian. They had the contracts with Ukraine in Russian and Chinese. These contracts and diplomatic partnerships were part and parcel the Chinese connecting the dream of President Xi’s Eurasian Silk Road with the Putin Eurasian Union dream.
Ukraine was crucial because both dreams had merged into one gigantic Eurasia Development concept to be powered with Russian energy sources and Chinese wealth.
Update: This week.Aug 05, 2021 · OnJune 30, ChinaandtheUkraine signed a major agreement regarding the financing and construction of transport infrastructure. China-Ukrainerelations have improved considerably since the blocking by Kyiv of a Chinese takeover of the Motor Sich company in March 2021.
-AnewChina-Ukrainepartnership - OBOReurope
Ukraine was to function as the turntable to Europe, north, west, east and south. Ukraine benefited from the gas pipeline to Europe. It could have become a very rich transit point. Instead, Kiev chose suicide and began to kill its own citizens, going into virtual bankruptcy, losing its sovereignty, and festering into freakish and zombified ghoulery. Ukraine embraced fascism and Nazism, as it waged a war of attrition upon its entire nation. So far, Ukraine is losing the war against Ukraine, predictably, logically and tragically. However, it did stop China’s investments, forestalled the Ukrainian development projects, and does not permit itself to trade with anyone the Hegemon does not approve. (We all remember ‘Czech apples’, a sad consequence of similar vassal behaviour by the Czechs.)
Update: Substantial changes in the Ukraine has made most of this ancient history.
As events developed in late winter, two things happened on Feb. 23, 2014: Kiev fell to the junta’s snipers and the Olympics ended. The Sochi Olympics were a huge, resplendent success, despite the unprecedented West’s media campaign to disparage and nullify the actuality. The media might as well have declared the sun gone from the sky and all the oceans had dried.
Sochi and Putin had triumphed, no disaster, no terrorism, just a brilliant project with a superb display of Russian culture and expertise. The Russians also dominated the winter sports and competitively defeated American athletes in most venues. Sochi has since hosted the Formula 1 race in August.
The facility has been declared by the racers and the industry as the best racetrack facility in the world. Again, you can’t make this stuff up. Putin was on a roll. The more the West demonized him the greater Russia looked, the higher his approval ratings and the more China wanted him as a partner, a unique partner.
China’s Unique Partnership
China has 58 or so partnership agreements with various nations. There are many categories. They created a new definition for its supreme category with Russia: Comprehensive Strategic Collaborative Partnership.
Since there is this unique partnership that sets it apart, we should look closer at what is going on since 2014.
This should be seen an evolutionary event, not merely a resistance movement against the United States Military Empire.
Update: Call it what you may, the Russia and China alliance is much stronger than other other treaty and relationship in the history of the world.
Nature provides what it needs for a species to survive. Humanity is seeing this within the relationship of China and Russia.
I call it the Double Helix, merely because it is apt as a metaphor, not because every biologic or chemical fact in DNA is represented in the relationship. But similarities exist and Double Helix depicts this evolution nicely.
Update: President Putin has referred to the relationship between Russia and China as "symbiotic". A symbiosis is an evolved interaction or close living relationship between organisms from different species, usually with benefits to one or both of the individuals involved.
To decode the DNA of the relationship in this Double Helix of Bear and Dragon, we can look closer at the ‘base pair molecules’ of each strand.
First, there are the ‘helices’ that each strand comprises. These are the complimentary characteristics that make this new genetic partnership work. They are what we would normally evaluate to decode any single nation’s ‘DNA’.
Some nations have similar, some less.
But none have as much as or as profoundly essential to sustain continued growth and development and separation from the United State Military Empire.
Helices
Geography that spans thousands of miles of common borders (2,607 mi.), natural resources and multi-ethnic masses of peoples, large defensive militaries, recent emergence as developing economies, self-reliant market capitalist systems with state-managed controls, millionaires and billionaires and relatively modest middle class tiers, deep distrust of Communism as an economic solution, and massive state-owned enterprises in the key industries.
What one nation lacks, the other has.
What one nation excels in, the other aspires.
What one nation needs immediately, the other is ready to deliver.
What one nation needs over time, the other is prepared to supply or access for the duration.
And most clearly, both nations have the same existential threat from the same source, using the same means to threaten both. Ergo, the unique partnership.
A quote from Lu Shiwei, a senior research fellow with the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University: “The close relationship between China and Russia is not only out of economic concerns, as the two complement each other’s economy. These active efforts are also a reflection of political necessity and desire.” (emphasis mine)
Wealth, energy, military, finance, banking, Space, satellites, education, IT, chemicals, microelectronics, water, agriculture, transportation, infrastructure, and a common dream, while confronting a common enemy are the significant molecules. Upon these markers, the Double Helix was formed. It was a process, not a sudden event. But it was evident in 2014 as a repeated event. It was to geopolitics as Sochi was to sport. It was unique and it happened.
Let’s visit these ‘molecules’ and look at what has transpired just in this momentous year of 2014.
Molecules
We’ll turn on the lights with energy molecules. Oil, gas and coal, nuclear and LNG acquisition, provisioning, transport, pipelines, storage, exploration, resource development, innovation and technological development, and, probably, reverse engineering of Western tools, as well as investment, loans, advanced payments, equity purchases, and job creation. The following ‘deals’ are ‘base paired’, not merely supply-purchase deals. This is far beyond vendor-customer in nature.
Gas: Two gigantic projects, the Power of Siberia and the Altai Pipeline.
The first is in Eastern Siberia. It will is delivering gas from terminal in Vladivostok to China, and at Blagoveshchensk across Amur River. It was signed May 21, 2014 between Gazprom and CNPC. It is a 30-year deal, later extended 5 years by agreement in October.
The second project is in Western Siberia and will bring is bringing gas to North-western China. Gazprom and CNPC signed the deal originally in 2006, it was put on hold, restarted in 2014 at APEC by Putin, November 9th.
What is key to these are the establishment of infrastructure, manufacture and supply of pipe, construction crews, job creation in support of two of the largest projects in mankind’s history, simultaneously. This along a border that historically has been a hotspot, where wars have been fought between the two nations.
Presidents Putin and Xi said do it.
And, it is done.
September, it began with Russian shovels and Chinese advance payments, $25 Billion. Once connected, the two nations will are receiving ‘marrow’ transfers each requires to continue growth. Siberia and the Far East come alive as viable sectors of the Russian economy; China receives clean energy and moves people into its Northwest and North, and some into Far East Russia.
Its foreign investments in Russia pay dividends, and Chinese capital grows. The plans go deeper, and involve more than finance, acquisition of commodities and exploitation of natural resources. More, later, in this energy section.
Update: It appears that Russia will be supplying all the gas needs of China.
The Russian energy project, "Power of Siberia", one of the largest gas pipeline projects on the planet, will begin by the end of 2019, expected to not only meet China’s heavy demand for gas but also benefit both sides as a large amount of jobs will be created.
-China-Russia energy cooperation deepens - CGTN
Someone had best tell this ill-informed commenter;
You are perhaps forgetting that China imports nearly all of its oil, and about 40% of its food (mostly from the U.S.) It also imports a great deal of coal from the U.S. for its coal-fired generators. And most of its alfalfa hay for feeding livestock. (Yes, really.)
Cut off China’s oil imports, and stop exporting food, hay, and coal to China (and freeze its U.S. assets, like Smithfield pork) and suddenly China is no longer in a position to wage war against anyone.
-The Scarlet Pimpernel
Oil: Rosneft has access to Chinese ‘advance payments’ and is accessing them to pay its off-shored loans coming due in December and first quarter 2015.
This mechanism is a product of deals signed in early 2014. The loans were to buy TNK-BP for $31 Billion and are not a result of falling prices.
The acquisition deal was encouraged by China, and China indicated at the time it would buy equity in Rosneft so the liquidity to complete the deal was in Rosneft’s hands in timely fashion. These agreements now seem prescient as the economic war ensues using oil price collapse, off-shore credit denial and rubble shorting in Forex trading.
China has now received much greater supplies of Russian oil and an increased involvement with Rosneft shares and has an alliance to develop technologies in exploration, drilling, extraction and transport. Rosneft and CNPC, likewise, are seen to be less rivals for oil and more partners. This has been indicated in the works for Arctic exploration and development and off-shore Crimea for oil and gas.
Update: Oil and Gas are flowing from Russia into China.
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China, Japan and South Korea are major buyers of Russian oil, various long pipelines, then, are built to transport the oil from Europe to East Asia.
With more than 4,800 kilometers, the ESPO pipeline, also known as the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline, starts from Tayshet central-south Russia to northeast China's oil city of Daqing, able to supply about 15 million tons of oil every year.
The Yamal LNG is China's first large-scale energy cooperation project with Russia under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China also built tankers to ship LNG through sea routes thanks to China-Russia cooperation on Arctic exploration.
China and Russia are poised to further deepen their energy cooperation as their top leaders both pledged provide policy support during a bilateral energy business forum in June.
As comprehensive strategic partners of coordination, China and Russia enjoy deepening cooperation in all spheres, which has forcefully promoted the two nations' common development and revitalization, Chinese President Xi Jinping said.
Describing energy cooperation as the "most significant, most fruitful and most wide-ranging" area of bilateral cooperation, Xi said the two sides' close coordination has played a positive role in safeguarding the fair, just, reasonable and orderly international energy order.
To consolidate and deepen their energy cooperation, Xi made four proposals.
Firstly, business entities should lead the cooperation and stick to the principles of mutual benefits, win-win results and being commercially viable. Financial insurance and energy cooperation should be enhanced for mutual support and mutual promotion.
Secondly, new potentials should be tapped to upgrade the cooperation. Cooperation in energy technical standard should be strengthened for mutual recognition and synergy. Technological innovation, the integration of information technology with the energy sector, and cooperation in energy research and development (R&D) should all be deepened. Experience sharing, capacity building and think tank exchanges should be enhanced for mutual learning.
Thirdly, the cooperation should promote the integration of interests, and aim for a more comprehensive and integrated cooperation along the whole industrial chain. The two sides should focus on the present while looking into the future, stick to complementary advantages and win-win results to expand and deepen their cooperation.
Fourthly, cooperation in global energy governance should be stepped up for the sustainable development of energy. The two sides should work together to firmly safeguard multilateralism and actively conduct multilateral cooperation to play a constructive role in the global energy governance system.
Xi said China and Russia enjoy broad prospects and tremendous potentials in energy cooperation. "I would like to work with President Putin to lead and promote our governments in creating an even better business environment for our enterprises and provide more comprehensive policy support."
He expressed belief that companies of the two countries, under the shield of the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era, will work together to further promote their cooperation to benefit the two peoples.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the energy business forum was jointly initiated by him and Xi last year as a platform for the two sides to explore expanding cooperation in oil and gas, electric power and renewable energy.
Energy cooperation has become an important and integral part of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination, and the fastest growing area of bilateral cooperation, and it is mutually beneficial, Putin said.
The two countries have made positive progress in energy cooperation in infrastructure construction, trade, and technological R&D, Putin said, adding that important oil and gas pipelines and large-scale cooperation projects are making headway as scheduled.
"The Russian government will improve related laws, regulations and policies to create a favorable market environment for foreign companies to invest and operate in Russia," he said.
-China-Russia energy cooperation deepens
Coal: Siberian and Far East coal development, Rostech and Shenhua Group agreed to are exploring and develop coal deposits in Siberia and Far East. They will are constructing coal-fired plants that will sell electricity in Russia, China and other Asian countries.
The two companies will also build has built a marine coal terminal at Port Vera in the Primorsky Territory, Far East. That project begins 2015, operational 2018-2019.
Update: Russia helps China when the Australian Morrison government stops coal exports.
Mar 11, 2021 · In December, Elgaugol, the company behind the Elga coal project in the Russian Far East, agreed to launch a joint venture with China’s Fujian Guohang Ocean Shipping Group that will export metallurgical coal to China. The Elga project aims to ship 30 million tons of coal to China in 2023, almost doubling Russia’s total coal exports to China, which stood at around 33 million tons in 2019.
-Russia looks to replace banned Australian coal exports to China.
They will build are building high voltage transmission lines to China. Social and transport infrastructure will be are being developed concurrently.
So, this coal ‘deal’ is not a typical commodity deal. It is long-term, and builds the Far East and North China. It brings a permanent electrical utility produced in Russia to the people and industries of China. It expands a port; it uses trucks, rail, and GPS systems that are co-developed.
Update: More agreements and treaties between Russia and China on coal.
In December 2020, Russia’s Elgar Coal Company and China’s Fujian Air China Ocean Shipping (Group) Co., Ltd. signed an agreement to establish a joint venture to export coking coal to China. The related project is expected to supply 30 million tons of coal to China from 2023-this will nearly double Russia's total coal exports to China from about 33 million tons in 2019.
-Russia wants to increase coal exports to China and replace ...
Nuclear: Rosatom will is building the Tianwan NPP (nuclear power plant), 7th and 8th power blocks. They are already building have completed the 3rd and 4th power blocks.
They will build have built in Harbin two power units.
Rosatom may will participate in VVER reactors (pressurized water) with two fast breeder reactors, floating nuclear power plants.
Presently, China has deals with Westinghouse for 26 nuclear units. Clearly, the Chinese would prefer to have their inland reactors Russian-design and supplied than locked into Westinghouse technology. (The two are different and fuel sources are particularly mutually exclusive, as Ukraine is finding out as it turns to the U.S. for refueling.)
Update: China and Russia are increasing their nuclear technology exchanges.
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May 20, 2021 · The Tianwan plant in Jiangsu Province is the biggest such project between China and Russia, which is a joint venture by Jiangsu Nuclear Power Corporation and Atomstroy, a subsidiary of Russia's nuclear power giant Rosatom. The Xudapu plant in Liaoning Province is a new joint project between the two countries.
-China-Russia cooperation: A new type of major-country ...
LNG: Construction of a plant in Northern Russia. Yamal LNG and CNPC and development of South Tambeiskoye field. Equity stake for China in Vladivostok LNG is part of the deal.
Update: Ever since Trump and Biden initiated a hybrid-war against China, Russia has stepped in and forged strong relationships with China all across the board.
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Jun 02, 2021 · Russian energy giant Novatek and China's Zhejiang Energy signed an agreement on long-term liquified natural gas (LNG) supplies from the Arctic LNG 2 project at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Wednesday.
-Russia’s Novatek agrees long-term Arctic LNG supplies to China
Things That Fly
Some military, some dual use, some civilian.
But we’ll begin with GPS and see how the ‘Double Helix’ is working in Space.
Satellites: Both China and Russia have GPS satellite systems. GLONASS is the Russia system. Beidou is the Chinese system. The Russian system is larger, more mature and covers the entire globe. The Chinese system is new, limited in coverage and not mature nor densely accurate and improving every month.
The Chinese often do things in measured, metric, stages. An agreement to place ground stations inside China by Russia will gives China a global GPS capability for its defense and second strike weapons, as well as for its commercial use for the world’s soon to be largest navy and the world’s largest most diverse ocean and fishing fleet. (Two teens swapping kisses couldn’t get closer.)
Update: Russia and China will explore space together.
With their agreement, the partners are signaling an alternative to a U.S.-led order in space. On March 9, 2021, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the joint construction of an autonomous lunar permanent research base.
-The Strategic Implications of the China-Russia Lunar Base
Russia will has put GLONASS stations in one of China’s airfields and on a navigable river as pilot projects to develop cooperation in the field of navigation.
The airport project will currently aids landing and signal monitoring systems using zonal-navigation methods that will be working on GLONASS and Beidou constellations. (It should be noted that most airfields in China are dual-use military-civilian and the PLA controls most traffic in the air.)
Russia’s advanced systems and experience will enable provide training for Chinese air traffic controllers and aero navigation teams to learn modern satellite technologies. The river navigation project will currently monitors and correct and track boats on internal water routes.
Auspiciously, Beidou was named for the Great Bear constellation.
Space: Roscosmos Federal Space agency. China is interested engaged in building Russian rocket engines and joining manned space exploration, navigation satellite and remote sensing projects.
Production of electronic component parts, materials science, construction of spacecraft and rocket engines are in the works in process.
Exchange of manned spacecraft visits to Russian and Chinese orbiting stations and joint expeditions to deep space are beginning talks mature. Space is a battlefield according to the U.S. defense doctrine.
The Double Helix sees dual use potential.
Update: China and Russia are both going to be part of the Chinese space station, and the Lunar Moon Base.
Aircraft: Nov. 11, 2014, Aviation Industry Corp China and Rostec signed an agreement. Russia and China are forming possess a working group to carry out a project to distribute products, and prepare and implement projects in Russia, China, and 3rd countries, and to provision for warranty servicing and ensuring post-warranty service of equipment.
Update: China and Russia are forming a massive joint aerospace industry. It is trans-borders, and will have the strengths of both nations participating.
The China-Russia International Aircraft Cooperation, or CRAIC, wants to begin constructing the first CR929 before the end of the year. The collaboration has already shortlisted several subcontractors, most of whom are reportedly subsidiaries of China’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation (AVIC).
-China And Russia Want To Start Building The 1st CR929
This creates strategic cooperation in development of aircraft, helicopters, engines, aircraft materials, avionics and radar equipment. This brings a new phase and transition to comprehensive cooperation between two state-owned corporations.
Long haul aircraft: Joint venture, similar to Russian-Italian JV for Sukhoi SuperJet 100. $10 Billion project to compete with Boeing and Airbus.
Update: In process. Mature.
May 30, 2016 · The project is part of a reported $13 billion aviation cooperation deal signed in 2014 during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to China. The long-haul plane will be developed inRussia and assembled in China.A special engineering center will be created inRussiatoundertake technical and electronics production.
-Russian-Chinese passenger jet to take on Boeing & Airbus
Dual use aircraft heavy helicopter: Russia and China will build is building a heavy helicopter probably based on the Mi-26 from Russian Helicopoter-Rostvertol. It will be for China and third parties, initially.
Update: Mature and in process.
Aug 30, 2019 · China and Russia have fully agreed upon and signed a commercial contract on a joint heavy helicopter development project, said Miao Wei, China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, on Wednesday. "For the next step, the Chinese government will accelerate the progress for a project approval and finish it as…
-China, Russia Sign Heavy Helicopter Deal | DefenceTalk
S400: Triumf air defense missile systems; six battalions. Delivery will be started in 2016, $3 Billion. Rosboronexport and Chinese Defense Ministry signed on 11-26-14.
China gets state of the art missile defense. This nullifies Japan’s air power, U.S. air power, and protects the Double Helix’s Asian Pacific flank. Nothing in the missile defense arsenal of any nation is as important as this system, and now, China will get it.
Russia is was building the S500 for itself. That is the nature of technology capacity intrinsic to Russia. It has marched for forty years with derivations, updates, refinements and new systems that have protected the Motherland and the territories of its allies. Russian defense is the world standard.
Update: Forget about the S400. Already these systems have been delivered to China and are in operation. It seems that the production of the S400 has stopped, and it looks like the most advanced S500 systems are now being supplied to China. Especially since the United State Military Empire is Hell-bent on a war.
Apr 08, 2021 · Pondering whether China should consider the S-500 for its own air and space defense arsenal, Lin recalled the long history of Russian-Chinese cooperation …
- Chinese Media Impressed by Russia’s S-500
Now, from the Arctic to Vietnam, Russia and China will have has a defense system facing the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force missile command. Similarly, these systems will proliferate along the New Silk Road as Eurasia infrastructure develops. Force multiplication for Russia’s southern underbelly on China’s investment means a safer more secure Russia.
Submarines: AIP technology, propulsion acoustic stealth and long duration submergence technology transfer with the sale of an Amur 1650.
Update: Amazing developments in submarine technology and massive shipbuilding events have placed substantially modernized and capable submarines in both the Russia and Chinese fleets.
According to RIA Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, Russia and China are collaborating on a new submarine design (in Russian). The project is being coordinated by Russia's Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation.
-China And Russia In Mysterious New Submarine Project
Air-independent propulsion using electrochemical generators and new combat systems for electronic warfare, a passive antenna sonar to detect silent targets at long range make this a submarine platform for defensive second strike (MAD).
Update: Amazing developments in submarine systems age going on in response to the belligerence of the United States Military Empires desire for war.
Aug 25, 2020 · On Tuesday, Russia's Sputnik news agency quoted an official as saying Russia was designing a 'non-nuclear' submarine with China. Viktor Kladov, Director for International Cooperation and Regional Policy of the state arms export corporation
-Russia working with China to design submarine, missile ...
Russia is pursuing this sea-based deterrence and China also is expanding its extensive submarine fleet for a second deterrence platform system.
Tests of Russian Bulava ICBM from submerged sub, the Vladimir Monomakh, signaled this capability for Russia back in 2013.
Update: Amazing developments in submarine systems age going on in response to the belligerence of the United States Military Empires desire for war.
Aug 27, 2020 · According to RIA Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, Russia and China are collaborating on a new submarine design (in Russian). The project is being coordinated by Russia's …
- China And Russia In Mysterious New Submarine Project
This transfer of technology assures that China will have it also.
An Amur 1650 would be equipped with 18 missiles. China has been testing MIRV-ed warheads for its missiles since 2010.
Update: Amazing developments in submarine systems age going on in response to the belligerence of the United States Military Empires desire for war.
Aug 26, 2020 · "We are currently cooperating with the Chinese side on a joint project of a new generation non-nuclear submarine," Viktor Kladov, a director of Russian state-owned defense corporation Rostec, told...
-Russia and China Working Together on Advanced Weaponry ...
This deal calls for 4 submarines, joint development and construction, to begin 2015, 2 built in Russia, 2 built in China.
Update: Amazing developments in submarine systems age going on in response to the belligerence of the United States Military Empires desire for war.
Aug 20, 2020 · That cooperation in air and missile defense could also support the submarine component of Russia-China strategic cooperation in the Arctic is reasonably clear, but the analyst then makes the most...
-China and Russia Might Be Headed Towards Naval Supremacy …
IT and Microelectronics: Russian rocket, space and defense enterprises will buy electronic components from China worth $1 Billion.
Update: Russia and Chinese trade, agreements and research in the high-technology fields are astounding in their scope and breadth.
While Russia and China are signing joint agreements to develop high-tech research centers and initiatives, the outlook is more complex beneath the surface. These trends reflect the result of mutual interests and alignment of technological imperatives, which have contributed to the expansion of high-tech efforts between the two countries.
- The Resilience of Sino-Russian High-Tech Cooperation ...
Working with China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp for dozens of items as alternatives to U.S.-sourced parts.
Update: Russia and Chinese trade, agreements and research in the high-technology fields are astounding in their scope and breadth.
In our new report, A new Sino-Russian high-tech partnership: authoritarian innovation in an era of great-power rivalry, published today by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, we map out the unique ecosystem underpinning expanding technology cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. China and Russia have not only expanded their military cooperation but are also undertaking more extensive technological cooperation, including in 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, new media and the digital economy -A new Sino-Russian high-tech partnership emerges as US tensions mou…
Russia will need to purchase these alternative items for 2-2.5 years until their own industry can manufacture electronic components that are radiation-resistant for Space and match military standards for mil systems. This has been a $2 billion American supply in the past.
No Longer.
China is now supplying those parts.
Update: Russia and Chinese trade, agreements and research in the high-technology fields are astounding in their scope and breadth.
May 25, 2021 · Russia is developing an array of autonomous weapons platforms utilizing artificial intelligence as part of an ambitious push supported by high-tech cooperation with neighboring China. - Russia Is Building an Army of Robot Weapons, and China's ...
Technology Parks: October 14, 2014 a memorandum to jointly build high-tech parks in each country to further innovation in science and technology. In Shaanxi, China, in the town of Xixian Fendong, a technology park of four square kilometers, and in Moscow, at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, 200,000 sq. meters of buildings will be built.
China and Russia are deepening and expanding their ties — economic, military, technological — as external pressures limit their access to overseas markets and technology. Both countries hope the collaboration will help to compensate for domestic deficiencies and to compete successfully with the United States in today’s critical technologies. This bilateral relationship, currently celebrating its 70th anniversary, has ebbed and flowed in the decades since the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China opened diplomatic relations. This relationship, now upgraded to and characterized as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” is continuing to evolve amid today’s great power rivalry. For Moscow, certain Chinese products, services and experience may be the lifeline for its industry, government, and military need to wean themselves from high-tech Western imports. For Beijing, Russia’s skilled engineers and mathematicians are a valuable resource for tech and defense industry giants that are hungry for talent and faced with increasingly unfavorable conditions in the United States and Europe. And its military hopes to draw on Russian proficiency in designing advanced weapons and experience using emerging capabilities on today’s battlefields.Consequently, the Sino-Russian strategic partnership has increasingly concentrated on technology and innovation. In the wake of Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow in May 2015, the Chinese and Russian governments have signed a series of agreements to develop new realms of cooperation. In June 2016, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development signed the “Memorandum of Understanding on Launching Cooperation in the Domain of Innovation.” The notion of these nations as linked in a “science and technology cooperation partnership for shared innovation” has been elevated as a major pillars of this relationship.-Defense One
Satellite offices for the Chinese park in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Heilongjiang will follow on.
In Russia, offices in Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and the Russian republic of Tatarstan. Two sovereign wealth funds, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and the Chinese Investment Corporation are leading the investments.
Cyber Security: International cyber security agreement is set for was set up during the first half 2015. Prevention of cyber incidents developing into full-scale conflict, collaboration in the operation of nation Internet segments, closer interaction on international platforms dedicated to cyber security issues.
It is going to be broader than a cyber non-aggression pact.
The Russians and Chinese are discussing a new Internet to break the monopoly and intrusion by the U.S. and NSA, CIA, etc.
Update: Russia and China are both working together to fight the United States Military Empire's control of cyber-warfare and blaming it on them. Remarkable progress is being made to this end.
Dec 16, 2020 · Russia and China concluded a bilateral cybersecurity agreement in May 2015, described by some media as a „non-aggression pact.“ While the framework of the pact was largely borrowed from its previous agreement under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the effectiveness of implementing its „commitment not to hack fighting each other“ remains in question.
- Russia China Cybersecurity Agreement
Education: 100,000 student exchange program. Already 25,000 Chinese in Russian higher education, 15,000 Russians in Chinese education and internships.
Far Eastern Federal University will teach Russian to Chinese students.
Joint University in China will have Moscow State University curriculum as core. Already Moscow State and Beijing University of Technology opened a university in the city of Shenzhen. It opened in Sept. 2016.
Update: The centers for education, research, technology and development are located inside of both Russia and China.
Jun 20, 2019 · The agreement between Tsinghua and Saint Petersburg will lead to the creation of a Russian Research Institute at the Beijing university, which will conduct research on Russia-China relations in areas such as industrial development, education, science and technology.
-Academic ties grow between Russia and China
China as Russia’s Bank
It is evident from the nature and size of interactions between China and Russia, China has determined to construct a floor for the Russian economy. Just as the Federal Reserve secretly saved the EU banking systems by QE and passage of funds to select banks in the EU, China is doing similarly with Russia during the sanctions regime.
Update; Apr 09, 2021 · China and Russia each scaled back their U.S. Treasury holdings, with Russia channeling cash into renminbi holdings. And China has ramped up the digital currency drive it began in 2014, with the ...
-Analysis | China and Russia announced a joint pledge to ...
Instead of creating debt, it is swapping currencies and keeping corporations liquid, taking equity positions in state-owned enterprises, making loans and advances on deals both within Russia and between Russia and China.
Update: China, Russia move to unseat the dollar as the No.1 currency. China is not slackening its pace in mounting Beijing’s challenge to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Now that the International Monetary Fund has included the yuan (renminbi) in the Special Drawing Rights (the currency basket that provides additional support to ...
-China, Russia move to unseat the dollar as the No.1 currency
There were three wounds to the Russian economy.
First, prior to United States sanctions there was heavy flight of foreign investment out of Russia.
Second, United States sanctions brought on more of that loss of capital investment and a credit crunch.
Third, the drop in the price of oil affected the ruble. So, credit loss, liquidity loss, tax revenue loss and a battered currency has slowed growth and caused inflation inside Russia.
Not so today.
Update: Jul 14, 2021 · China cheers Russia’s move away from US dollar in favor of yuan. Beijing has welcomed Russia’s decision to cut the US currency from its National Wealth Fund and give the yuan a bigger role, China’s Foreign Ministry has announced. Last week, Russia fully eliminated the US dollar from its National Wealth Fund, reducing its share from 35% to ...
-China cheers Russia’s move away from US dollar in favor of ...
Both Russia and China have invested heavily in gold, manufacturing capability, and discharging the American debt that they have acquired over the last few decades. The end result has not only make their economies stronger, but enabled them to implement electronic currency, and in China this is a mature technology that 99.5% of the people use.
China’s Capacity
China has the wealth to manage these issues in the short term. Russia’s reserves and gold cache, natural resources and intellectual property are collateral for any contingency.
Russia’s economic size (GDP) is comparable to the sum of 3 provinces in China – Guangdong, Jiangsu and Shanghai taken as one economy. The Chinese have 31 provinces and autonomous regions. So, managing a floor for Russia economically as a reserve force is easy for the Chinese.
Premier Li indicated that, “China may be able to help reduce the damage (of sanctions) as Russia looks east for business and financing, but it is far from a total offset.” Oct. 13, 2014
The intention is clear. China needs Russia, not just Russian gas and oil.
Update: Mar 27, 2020 · China and Russia have used the new coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to lead efforts at the United Nations to lift American and European sanctions against a number of countries, including Syria. They have sized on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ recent call for a nationwide ceasefire in Syria to demand sanctions relief.
-Exclusive - China, Russia Lead Campaign to Avoid ...
Currency: Currency swap agreement signed by Premier Li Oct.13, 2014, duration 3 years, extendable.Yuans and rubbles will be used as settlements of trade. This deal is empowering for the yuan as an international currency, likewise Russia’s rubble. It also empowers the BRICS nations to have more input in international finance as it diminishes the dollar’s use for settlements.
Update: Jun 06, 2019 · Russia and China sign deals worth US$20 billion as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s growing friendship bears fruit ... security and trade. After six years' working overseas in Brussels and ...-Russia and China sign deals worth US$20 billion as Xi ...
Sberbank financing letters of credit in yuans with Russian companies. Provides safety through diversification of currencies. Pairing on the Moscow and Shanghai stock exchanges since Dec. 2010. Russian firms have been using HKD and yuan.
Banking: Agreement between Russian VTB Bank and Bank of China.
Another deal is VTB, VEB and Russian Agriculture Bank, all hit by sanctions, signed framework agreement with Export-Import Bank of China to open credit lines.
Update: Jun 17, 2019 · Another alternative is China’s CIPS (China International Payments System), which several Russian banks have also connected to, especially to ease banking operations between the two countries, according to Vladimir Shapvalov, also of the CBR, who said at last week’s SPIEF conference: “As for the cooperation on payment systems, a range of banks are already connected to CIPS, …
-Russian & Chinese Alternatives For SWIFT Global Banking ...
Credit Card: Union Pay of China has replaced Visa and Mastercard, while Russia develops its own national brand credit card system. The Russian credit card system UEC (universal electronic card) was implemented in 2017. Both Russia and China “leapfrogged” the credit card system with QR based electronic e-payments.
Update: The China National Advanced Payment Systems (CNAPS) 中国人民银行现代化支付系统 is the primary domestic electronic payment system in China. Unlike the separation of ACH and wire payment systems in the United States., CNAPS encompasses both ACH-type (low-value) payments and wire-type (Real Time Gross Settlement “RTGS”) payments.
-Treasurer’s Guide to China Payments | PNC Insights
Finance: China Development Bank (CDB) agreed to financing $500 million for Russian mobile phone operator MegaFon. CDB also agreed on annual financing of $1 Billion to the Russian Grid.
FDI Equity stakes: A stake in Gazprom’s Vladivostok liquid natural gas terminal, and shares purchased by CNPC in oil producer Rosneft. New privatization of part of Rosneft, maybe up to 9%. Already China holds 0.6% since 2006. Not only state-owned enterprises, but large private corporations and entrepreneurs are poised with capital investment in Russia.
Russia is rated one of the top economies (despite sanctions, ruble drop, threats and vodka weaknesses) by leading analysts and investment gurus. Russia should begin to show GDP growth rates that seem unthinkable today (5-6%) in 4-5-6 years. China will pump-prime large sectors of this, and get excellent returns on its investments. Further out, 10-15 years, Russia will be robust and stable with a growth outlook and diversified line-up of products and services and a nearby Eurasian market easy to service.
Motor Vehicles: Great Wall Motors plant in central Russian Tula Region to build 150,000 Haval four-wheel drive vehicles/yr. $522 million per year investment, 2500 jobs.
Petrochemical Technologies: Joint venture construction of a rubber production plant between petrochemical companies Sibur and Sinopec, oil company, to be based on Russian technologies located in Shanghai. Rus-China split 25.1-74.9. Technology transfer. The two have previously worked together in Rasnoyarsk for rubber production in Siberia. Split is reversed in Russia’s favour there. Rubber produced will be supplied to China.
Construction: Bridges and transport links across Russian-Chinese border. Rail companies Russian Railways and China Railway Corp. have agreed on logistics centres, development of passenger traffic and reduction of tariffs.
Update: Apr 28, 2021 · Three of the six ‘economic corridors’ of the BRI pursue this goal: the New Eurasia Land Bridge aims to connect China to Poland by rail links through Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus, the China, Mongolia, Russia Economic Corridor aims to build rail and road links through Russia to Estonia and Finland, and the China, Central Asia, West Asia Economic Corridor would link Central Asia to Turkey, …
-Ambivalent partners: The complex Russia-China relationship
Infrastructure: High Speed Rail project: Moscow to Kazan 770 kilometers. It will ultimately link to Beijing. The China side is Beijing to Urumqi, Xinjiang.
Moscow subway extensions to be built by Chinese investors, New Moscow district. Total deal for $10 Billion, signed May 19, 2014; 93 miles, 70 stations.
This is a key foreign investment partnership project. Deal between Mosinzhproekt and China Railway and Construction and China International Fund.
Housing: 460,000 housing units (25 million sq. meters of housing) to be built for Russian Family Housing program of the Construction, Housing and Utilities Ministry, June 25, 2014. Talks began in China in May 2014.
Kostroma Region: China’s interest in jewellery industry, agriculture and wood processing. Investors and manufacturers form Shandong and Guangdong provinces have made tours. Work on organizing modern agriculture enterprises, developing agritourism and logistics.
Thus, there was organic necessity for the evolutionary change in the relationship of China and Russia. The commodities and energy deals between the two are annual at $40 Billion, but now will go to $200 Billion/yr. Trade between the two is at $90 Billion. Comparatively, the EU trade is $413 Billion. China is in danger with EU dependency. China’s own economic slowdown is completely the result of the EU being generally in recession.
As Russia develops and trade expands, China will have an economy it can influence and, partially, remotely manage, especially in its growth sectors and technological innovations. These sectors and innovations will spur China’s internal growth, and that follows its five-year plan to substitute export dependence with internal development.
It helps stabilize China’s economy.
SCO Eurasian Security
Barely known to most people, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will become the key Eurasian organization through which the diverse national interests of India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, and Vietnam are served in a cooperative environment.
United in their economic development through the reality of Eurasia Economic Belt, all their security issues versus terrorism, separatism and criminal drug and human trafficking are handled within SCO. Though it is not a military alliance, it uses joint military and policing activities in an interesting array.
Ultimately, SCO is a defensive layer against destabilization proxies (think ISIS, Taliban, AQ, East Turkistan Islamic Movement, PKK, PUK Kurds) that may be mounted against any one or more member states. Should Turkey finally come into the fold of SCO, along with Iran, NATO will be neutralized against member states. These SCO developments are in the cards. It takes time, but India and Pakistan are in line to full membership in 2015, and then Iran and Turkey will complete a powerhouse of SCO members, all with the same interests, no matter how diverse the cultures and ideologies.
There is a generally unspoken tool of destabilization – Islamic terror in the form of direct Wahhabi-driven conflict (AQ, ISIS, Taliban, etc.) and the more covert separatist programs that affect both nations (and in Russia’s case, its Middle East allies and customers, who just happen to be investment partners with China for oil and infrastructure projects).
China was susceptible to destabilization in Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and, perhaps, Inner Mongolia, though unlikely in any to be remotely eventful while China is a vibrant economy. Full bellies and fat wallets don’t arm rebellions.
Xinjiang. China has won the hearts and minds of the Uighur Muslims there. And have located enormous military presence there designed to counter any United States Military Empire NGO / CIA efforts there.
Tibet. China has crushed the Untied States backed insurgency and terrorist cells, and have increased trade and travel to that once isolated region with high speed trains, and generous investments to the local indigenous peoples there.
Taiwan. Still in play, but it is unlikely that the desire for independence will survive in the next decades.
Hong Kong. China completely suppressed the United States Military Empire backed NGO’s and terror cells. IN 2020, Donald Trump threw up his hands and announced “We lost Hong Kong”.
It was so generally peaceful in Xinjiang, that up until 2012, unarmed police were the rule for security forces in the Province (Autonomous Region). Until several unarmed policewomen and men were stabbed to death by terrorists-separatists trained by AQ and Taliban in Pakistan, the Chinese never used repression or harsh tactics. Now that the terrorists get Syria-based training by off-shoot Wahhabi fanatics, the PLA military is being used, specially trained police teams and a regime of control is being brought to parts of Xinjiang.
China is using Chechnyan Republic President Kadyrov’s tactics with terrorists. They are killing them on sight in large numbers whenever possible. Those who go to trial, if violent or plotters of violence, get the death penalty.
Actually, three years of organ harvesting while doing hard labor and then killed with a single bullet to the back of the head after you eat a McDonald's Happy Meal.
Eurasia development faces embedded potential ethnic, tribal, Islamic and criminal forces that will have to be dealt with as China pushes into Central Asia and works with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rubbing their “hands together”, the U.S. and NATO remnants and paid allies in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have been planning to stir security problems.
Update. All this has failed. The United States Military Empire has pulled out of Afghanistan, and all the neighboring nations are enthusiastically embracing the BRI.
Not Global Military Alliance
Most profoundly, the Double Helix is not a global military alliance. Both nations eschew military alliances beyond regional.
However, the test of the double helix bonding had to work out the military affinities, or the existential threat would not be blunted and turned away. Both militaries had to be able to imagine a force structure and force protection that conjoined their defenses, systems, intelligence, communication and command integration if needed.
This unity might take years, but they had no time to waste. This could not be superficial, so they had to permit intrusive sharing. This might be difficult because their languages were so different. They overcame all obstacles because of necessity and leadership. President Putin and President Xi had identical needs. Their nations were subjects of containment by the United States Military Empire with its allies who surrounded their nations with an array of full spectrum platforms and systems that challenged them 24/7, any weather, any phase of the moon.
China and Russia were growing rich while the United States Military Empire was growing poor, and China and Russia were growing, while the United States Military Empire was shriveling its once-great economy with endless wars, debt, waste and corrupt practices.
Surprise
The great expanse of Russia from the Baltic and Black and Caspian seas to the Pacific, Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan as an east-west territory now had an East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia adjunct – China.
Russia could be seen as even larger than largest geographically. Her pipelines, highways, airports, seaports and weapons systems would be connecting and protecting nations from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, as well as from the Eastern Europe borders to the Kurill Islands and Vladivostok, touching China for border crossings at Zabikalsk-Manzhouli and Pogranichy-Suifenhe in Heilongjiang Province along the Black Dragon/Amur River.
This unity is about much more than Harbin’s massive ice sculptures or Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves buried deep below snow, ice and frozen rock. This Double Helix was going to be about strategic surprise.
China had surprised the United States Military Empire twice before with weapons.
One was its satellite killer (kinetic hit-to-kill vehicle) that took out one of its own old satellites in 2007. Another more advanced test was launched in 2013. What made this tough for the Intel agencies to know in advance was the missile carrying the ASAT weapon was launched from a road mobile launcher.
The other surprise was China’s carrier killer missile, land based, that could take out a carrier from one thousand miles away. The Mach 10 DF-21D is indefensible except by electronic countermeasures and luck.
Both weapons were exactly what China needed to shock the U.S. Space command and the U.S. Navy. They are still stunned and worried by the Chinese capacity and their own Intel failure. Both weapons are land-based and mobile, making the Chinese defenses agile and elusive.
While threats abound, the Double Helix grows
On the Chinese side are people, masses of people, one third of whom have been raised from serfdom to middle class in just 30-plus years. The Chinese have also mastered ‘opening up’ their economy to venture capital, industrialization and service sector organizations, without losing control to foreign interests.
They have kept a central bank separated from IMF and from the Federal Reserve and western central bank systems.
They have kept state management control of all strategic industries.
They have used foreign direct investment to spectacular advantage, forcing joint ventures to ultimately share intellectual property, patents and design copyrights.
The Chinese have forced technology transfers wherever they needed to have state-of-the-art and could not reverse engineer it.
They learned every capitalist trick from studiously analyzing the American rise from frontier agricultural nation to the greatest global economic power. The Chinese admire America’s rise into an economic behemoth while fearing its government and global hegemony.
Most importantly, the Chinese protected the RMB, the yuan, from manipulation.
They carefully introduced the yuan to trading partners, but never allowed their currency to fully trade as a Forex currency. China pegs its yuan to the U.S. dollar, thus restricting manipulation and speculation. There is no float rate and interest rates are state-controlled. The yuan gradually became convertible from dollars, yens, Swiss francs, Euros, Hong Kong dollars and rubbles. The Chinese use RMB for bilateral settlement, case by case.
The China-Russia plan for international reserved currency is to propose a bundle of currencies, not one, as the dollar serves today. If the IMF does not act favorably, there may be turmoil coming to that system.
China has many allies for such a move. This clearly signals, though they are the largest economy, they do not desire or plan for dominance or to expose themselves to the concept of being the unipolar nation by replacing the United States. They want influence and cooperative leadership positions in new international institutions, and the Chinese signal that policy in every way. The Dragon prefers to be the Panda, most of the time.
Rise of Shanghai
The Chinese shrewdly used the Hong Kong dollar and Hong Kong stock exchange and the former royal colony’s banks for their own flexibility until they were ready to dwarf what once was thought to be Asia’s financial heart.
Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong, had been selected by Deng Xiaoping for the initial showcase of ‘opening up’ for a good reason. Hong Kong was the enormous port for imports and exports, and Hong Kong was the last ‘western’ banking centre that capitalists trusted doing business with Beijing.
Now that center of finance and banking would be Shanghai; a Shanghai stock market and the RMB that would soon rule Asia because Beijing had the scale to do it. One of the unmentioned realities of the recent Occupy Central and the ‘yellow umbrella’ circus in Hong Kong is the city will be second to Shanghai soon, and it will be at the economic mercy of Beijing. Shanghai will be the new world center of banking and finance in a decade or two. This is now assured with Eurasia development, New Silk Road, Maritime Silk Road and the Double Helix.
London, desperately grasped a piece of the Chinese currency action just in time. It will be a RMB clearing house, an offshore RMB center. New York’s financial industry may not yet understand that it, too, will succumb to the Dragon’s wealth creation sometime in the coming decades.
These are reasons for containment and destabilization by the United States Military Empire and the Elites who do understand this inevitability. But, Eurasia tips the globe to the East. And the ‘Double Helix’ is one centrifugal force spinning the power toward Asia and Eurasia.
Scale–Size Matters
Scale matters if a nation knows how to use it (for example, China does, India doesn’t). Scale in factory output, cheap labor, high savings rate, massive infrastructure development, and logistics were things never seen on earth until China.
Even the U.S. during WWII could not match what China was now doing.
And all the while, the earnings were piling up by the trillions in the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the People’s Bank of China (Central Bank of PRC).
In terms of cash on hand, China’s horde of cash and U.S. Treasury Bills and purchases of gold was unprecedented.
The dynamics has changed the Dragon not only into ‘the factory of the world’. China became one of the shrewdest bankers of the world.
China’s state-managed economy enables it to do things other countries don’t do. China can direct its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to invest in projects domestically or in foreign projects.
This is actually another form of geopolitical financial power.
The treasuries of those SOEs are like bank accounts at the disposal of the Central Government. The Premier, presently, Li Keqiang, is the economic Czar, so to speak. The seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo execute the five-year plans, with President Xi Jinping setting the targets philosophically and Premier Li directing the government bureaucracy, banks and SOEs to achieve the goals.
Growth Matters
Growth is everything to Chinese new-born capitalists. Growth is a word and event that is not happening in the Empire of the United States Military Empire .
EU is in reverse and the U.S. is a phantom economy, sucking assets from the middle class and expanding a dependent base in a highly vertical reformation of the economy.
Elites have it all.
The good jobs and careers are gone. Social conflict is rising. America has lost its way. No five-year plan for growth, no one-year plan, not even a plan for the next quarter.
The U.S. economy has been built to serve the Elites and their need for greed.
All processes serve that need well.
The markets are rigged in dark pools, derivatives and criminality that goes unchecked, save a few ‘insider trading prosecutions’ and ‘big bank fines’ that feed the government with ‘revenues’ or transfers of wealth from stockholders (middle class) that are not direct taxes.
Wealth Matters
In China, the wealth is in the control and management of the state. Savings are used for the wealth development of the nation and its people.
Yes, one million millionaires and hundreds of billionaires have done well in the rapid growth of China.
However, they do not have elite control of the economy.
They play their role in the public and private sectors, and in foreign investments and tourism, but they don’t alter the public plans or manipulate the public markets (though they try, as it is human nature to be greedy or criminal or irresponsible).
The revenues in the coffers of capitalist China enable President Xi to make any project in any country happen.
He is bankrolling the BRICS development bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Eurasian Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road development.
These are like multiple Marshall Plans without the military conquest.
They are meant to transform other trading partners from dirt poor into middle class economies capable of buying Chinese products, using Chinese expertise, and ultimately, purchasing services from China.
It is elementary economics. Invest in a nation, build its infrastructure, expand trade with it, educate their young; then that nation emerges from poverty, develops its own production capacity, and matures.
All the while, the trade partner climbs the value chain of products and services China offers.
China can do this on a scale unlike any nation ever.
It does it in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East (except the U.S. has pushed back with ISIS to destroy Iraq and Syria, and with AQ in Libya where China has massive infrastructure and oil investments. Likewise, China has previously agreed upon Ukraine and Crimea development investments pre-the junta coup.)
So, with Russia so close and in need of what China can do on such large scales, the gigantic natural resources exploitation and infrastructure needs of Russia have met the gigantic financial capacity and commodity needs of China. The resolution of the hegemonic threat through peaceful means was logical and a product of the minds of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Thus, the Double Helix.
The Result facing the United States Military Empire
The U.S. and NATO would need Michael the Archangel to defeat China-Russia, and from all signs, he’s aligned with the Bear and its Orthodox culture.
There is no weapon, no strategy, no tactic conceivable in the near future (which is all the Double Helix needs) to damage either of these rising economies now that they are ‘base pairs’.
China will get stronger and bigger.
Russia will get stronger and bigger.
And within the next three to five years, the international systems of finance and banking and trade settlement, currencies and credit ratings and development loans will be thoroughly changed.
It is tantamount to disarmament of the United States Military Empire ‘s most dangerous weapons.
Ironically, only the United States Military Empire ‘s military will remain.
The United States Military Empire will lose its most devastating weapons that enslave, subject, humiliate, ruin and change regimes – its economic weapons.
Future
The better part of the world’s nations will have moved on to solving problems. Nations will think in different terms and relationships. Sovereignty and regions will matter again. Cooperation will regulate competition.
Win-win will replace domination.
What was once ‘honorable and necessary’ will be looked at as criminal, if war and chaos is the only solution a former United States Military Empire or alliance can offer.
Perhaps, some form of NATO and its Islamic Wahhabi terror forces it has been cultivating with the Saudis, Qataris and other devils with billions of dollars will persist. But they will ultimately grow cold and brittle and not be viable unless they become pirate marauders. There will be no economic sustenance available for such forces.
China acting in its own interests?
Of course, China is acting in its own interests.
But any organism – and a nation is not an edifice, it is an organism – has life-sustaining needs. And the China organism needs blood.
That blood is oil and gas.
The China organism needs a nervous system that can’t be shut down by shock wave or sabotage. IT security and radars, satellites and on-ground defense systems are imperative components of such a nervous system.
And the organism of China, huge as it is, packed densely with people, needs stability for sleep, for rest, for meditation.
Russia, as powerful a nuclear force in the world, has China’s enormous back, adds to its blue water defenses, mans the digital and electronic turrets, and changes and hardens the geographic, economic and financial targets that the United States Military Empire could use to contain, destabilize and cause regime change in Beijing, thereby, toppling the state governance by the Communist Party of China.
There are no substitutes for the decades ahead of such a vital molecular bonding as the Double Helix.
Equality of Effect
So, the double helix metaphor works for both in equanimous ways.
Russia receives its blood through yuans, loans, use of Union Pay credit card system, joint ventures, advance payments, dependable contracts and logistical solutions.
China provides a territorial shield and additional force multiplication for Russia’s nervous system.
Finally, stability, too, is necessary for Russia to breathe and get forward momentum in critical areas of development.
There will always be housing for Russians in Russia now that China is close.
China can put up tens of thousands of housing units in a few months, if not days.
There will be alternate sources of food.
The most basic needs of Russian people are secured with the double helix pairing. China bought the largest pork producer in America and is already shipping pork to Russia.
China is so efficient in some food processes that American scallops are shipped to China for cleaning, then come back to U.S.
Foreign Policies and Societies
Metaphor or not, the Double Helix is real.
It serves as the new DNA structure but does not change the external policies or internal societies of either nation. It merely is the new organism architecture against which the United States Military Empire will flail.
Now the two sovereign nations will be presenting themselves as one double helix.
This ‘one’ is not a merger, not an alliance, not even a commonality of interests.
Those are represented through SCO, APEC, etc.
This ‘one’ is force multiplication and projection of power within a fourth dimension of geopolitics. It multiplies all the molecules or magnifies them. To attack or target the IT or satellites of either is to strike both.
Destabilize either, and both are struck.
Contain one, both are contained. Demonize one, both are vilified.
Custer found that it was not just Lakota Sioux he faced. He faced Arapaho, Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, Santee and seven bands of Lakota (Blackfeet, Brule, Hunkpapa, Oglala, Minniconju, Sans Arc and Two Kettle).
This was an object lesson.
Historically, on the plains of America, Native Americans had done the same as China and Russia. Their error was not to do it much sooner and everywhere long before they were overwhelmed by the invading immigrants.
China and Russia have acted in timely fashion.
Dragon-Bear
China-Russia have become impossible to defeat militarily, impregnable to sanctions and economic destabilization, and have created a unique partnership.
China and Russia are co-ventures into a new international architecture built on sovereign states’ responsiveness to each nation’s own people.
Looking across the Black Sea from Romania or across Ukraine from Poland, Lithuania or Germany, or from across the Atlantic like Canada or the United States, you see the Bear-Dragon.
Likewise, looking across the Pacific or the East China Sea or South China Sea at China you will see the Dragon-Bear.
The United States Military Empire and its vassals will understand that attacking one is an attack on both.
The Double Helix cannot be undone. Russia and China are the founders of the Eurasian Economic Marketplace of 3.5 billion (half the world). It has a thirty-year initial mission.
And during those thirty years they will have built the New Silk Road, the Maritime Silk Road, the Eurasian Economic Belt, and lifted Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Stans of Central Asia, Mongolia, the Southeast Asian nations and probably, fixed parts of Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Europe, some southern European nations and, maybe, some North African nations in the meanwhile.
China and Russia are unified as one.
Geopolitical Surprise
Now, let’s return to the Shoigu in Zhongnanhai mystery. And let’s think of geopolitical surprise. Imagine if General Shoigu and Premier Li Keqiang were discussing North Korea. Background: Putin has been reaching out to Glorious Leader Kim’s regime, and we know the deal Putin would want to get done with Pyongyang’s regime: Give up the nukes, and the Double Helix will protect you.
Give up the nukes and we’ll force the U.S. to leave the Korean peninsular.
Give up the nukes and China and Russia will develop your infrastructure.
Give up the nukes and begin integration with the South economically and that process will include Russia and China.
Give up the nukes and you will never walk alone.
North Korea could look at Iran and see that Russia and China have shielded Iran. And if Iran moves away from nukes, the Double Helix protects her. Syria has given up chemical weapons and Syria, for all the ISIS and NATO chaos, stands because of Russia and China.
Let us take a look again at General Shoigu’s itinerary. Who did Shoigu go to after Beijing? Pakistan. Who aids North Korean nuke program? Pakistan. Shoigu was not traveling this route in this sequence by happenstance.
China is drawing Pakistan away from the U.S. and wants to coordinate anti-terror operations with Islamabad. There also is the withdrawal of NATO and the U.S. from Afghanistan. Russia, China and Pakistan will take on this burden in order to get development of the Eurasian Silk Road and Economic Belt established. Everything is changing in South Asia. China and Russia will fill the vacuum.
It is quite the nature of China to encourage Russia to send symbolic messages to those who might need another tap on the head. Iran and North Korea are regional and global threats that the Double Helix wants to turn into partners and markets.
Tough Cop?
Shoigu went forward with that “portfolio”. He represented ‘the base-paired one’. The Chinese know their limits and their weaknesses. They might bully the Southeast neighboring fishermen and even cut off an American naval ship. But they are not the tough cop Russia is.
The Chinese are the soft interlocutor, the mollifier. The only time China gets tough is in business negotiations or if you insult the Party or the People.
However, this nuclear disarming or chemical weapons disarming small regimes is the rough and tumble of the street and alleys, something Russia knows and China does not aspire to.
It takes a 8th Dan martial arts President who destroys opponents with his armed forces in real world combat to get the focused attention of Pyongyang and Islamabad. He did in Syria and is doing it in Iran. He generally uses military protective shield with economic development deals.
North Korea is desperately trying to weaponize their atomic devices. Pakistan would be the bearer of this technology. It is conceivable Pakistan’s military assistance deal with Russia, signed by Shoigu, would have ‘rewards’ for staying out of North Korea’s nuclear program.
The meeting in Beijing just may have been to assure Shoigu that all the financing needed to stabilize the Korean peninsula will be available if and when Putin gets Kim to join with the sovereignists and force the Hegemon off the Korean Peninsula.
Regional Effect
What this would mean for China and Russia beyond safety and security is a new market, more easily exploited mineral resources, a fast developing economy that can use what both nations have.
North Korea can add additional military as regional reserve forces should the Hegemon linger in Asian Pacific.
Nuclear disarmament automatically means South Korea is actively drawn into the Eurasian Economic Belt. It leaves the region with no threat against the Hegemon’s allies, Japan and Philippines. America’s Pacific Century ends when the nukes go away in North Korea.
Vladimir Putin might think this way. For what is North Korean’s regime but a criminal gang (oligarchs wrapped in dead communist rhetoric and delusional arrogance)? Putin knows this species and how to deal with it. Only the Double Helix could make this transformation happen. Neither nation alone has been able to influence the Kim dynasty by itself.
The Chinese have been insulted by Pyongyang and frustrated by Kim. The Chinese public laughs at the buffoonery of the North Korean regime. Beijing only wants him around so the U.S. does not move closer up the Peninsula. But the new reality of Eurasia emerging changes the outlook for Kim. Opportunity and advantage turn his way. A mortal threat to his regime can be removed, and he can still have sovereign security. Win-win-win in a deft surprise move.
Such a cataclysmic geopolitical event of Pyongyang surrendering its nukes would force the U.S. to concede its raison d’etre for a presence on the landmass in the Asia Pacific region. South Korean public pressure for U.S. forces to leave would be rising. Okinawa would want the U.S. out. Eventually, the U.S. would be merely ‘one of several’ using the blue waters of the Western Pacific and Asian coastal seas. The U.S. would logically have to return to Hawaii as its most western outpost. After all, it would be protecting no one from any threat any longer.
Russia and China would be the regional defenders of peace and stability, and further south, India and Vietnam would join, not the U.S. Navy.
The U.S. may be an Asian Pacific nation, but no more so than Chile or Mexico. What the U.S is not is an Asian nation, nor a Eurasian nation. What the U.S. would become is what it always should have constrained itself to – a North American nation.
Japan
Everything becomes harmonized economics after such an event. Japan needs Eurasian assistance. The West has used up two generations of young people in Japan, manipulating its economy and government. Its dynamic innovation and growth is moribund. They cannot even manufacture a safe vehicle airbag or run a nuclear power plant safely.
It’s all manufactured, designed, and packaged in China.
Philippines
Perhaps, the Philippines would remain close to the U.S., but it will be a singular Asian vassal in the South China Sea.
Manila may align with Australia, but eventually the Maritime Silk Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will entice them to choose progress with Asia or perpetual colonization by the United States Military Empire.
Update: Jul 27, 2021 · In her brief remarks, Philippine Ambassador to China Erlinda Basilio expressed to the Chinese guests the Filipino people’s commitment to their centuries-old friendship with the Chinese people, and she explained that, inspired by a popular Filipino song, the Embassy chose the theme “Hawak Kamay” to convey how Filipinos will not abandon their Chinese friends in their time of need.
-Philippines - China Friendship Day: A Day of Smiles in Beijing
What happens in Taiwan?
Taiwan will remain the last Chinese choke bone if China is foolish enough to open wide the Dragon’s mouth and take the bait. The latest local Taiwan city elections which damaged the KMT powerbase heightens the U.S. ‘Free China’ agitators. It certainly sets back Cross-Straits progress. However, if that means Xi will have to play rough, he has the economic leverage as the tool to use, not his military.
Taiwan is in perpetual recession. The once great ‘grey box’ and pirate copyist economy of the 80’s and 90’s has been eclipsed by South Korean semi-conductor, device and chip manufacturing and soon will feel the rise of Vietnam, Malaysia and other South-east and South Asia players in Taiwan’s national electronic sport. Most Taiwanese investment capital seems to be heading to the Mainland, Brazil or Taiwan’s nearby competitors. Foxconn is everywhere but Taiwan, including Brazil.
This leaves angry Taiwanese students for the U.S. to manipulate. And perhaps there will be strident resistance groups against Cross-Straits unification, but hunger and despondency will change the dynamics once the U.S. retreats and all those young minds see Eurasia develop as China has on the other side of the narrow straits. They can Skype and Tweet for revolution, even hold coloured umbrellas, but that does not bring in foreign investment to rebuild their own economy.
The Dragon typically has endless patience. Taiwan will test President Xi’s patience for certain. He hoped to see Taiwan in a Hong Kong-like arrangement of ‘One China-Two systems’. That is not going to happen before the U.S. retreats to Hawaii.
The U.S. has infinite capacity to inflict pain and suffering on its most loyal vassals. No one in America, except Taiwanese-Americans, will even know of the pain suffered in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung and Tainan until the U.S lets go.
North Korea changes everything.
The Far East and Siberia, the North of China, Mongolia, the Arctic, the Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan become a zone of trade, tourism and growth when North Korea steps down from the precipice. If Iran with nukes is unacceptable to Russia and China, certainly North Korea is worse. Both nations, Russia and China, have worked assiduously to prevent proliferation. And they have immediately rewarded nations that give up WMDs.
The Sony False Flag
Sony is hacked! It has to be the North Koreans! Demonization of North Korea is predictable. The FBI says so. However, nearly all independent hacking experts, those with vast experience in government security of IT and anti-hacking work, agree the Sony hack is not North Korean.
First, understand the Internet connections in Asia. North Korea has one ISP. Just as China has second tier status on the Internet and all connections go through only Shanghai, North Korea can get on and off the Internet only through one route. Easy for NSA to monitor. Easy to prove. But we get no hard proof, easy to provide. We get a short form handout white paper-like slice of FBI baloney. So, unless the hack came from a 3G phone network, it had one port of entry to the Internet, namely Star Joint Venture Co.
The U.S. must make certain North Korea remains nuclear. And it is swiftly moving to put ‘terror status’ back on Pyongyang. The hope within the Hegemon’s brain trust, to use the term lightly, is that this will stop Russia and China from offering economic help in return for the nukes. But the result will be whatever the double helix can arrange if they can arrange it with Kim.
What would follow?
With North Korea emptied of its arsenal, the Double Helix may move next to expose the secret program the Japanese have for nukes. Fukishima melt down was a double disaster, because like Dimona in Israel, the nuclear secrets leaked out for the world to know that what Japan, like Israel, was desperate to cover up was a weapons program abetted by the U.S. and France.
Whatever comes from the Double Helix of China-Russia, it will be a surprise that stuns the Hegemon, for certain. That is the style of both nations. The world has gotten closer to ‘better’ in 2014, while it has gotten ‘worse’. That is because, though bad things will always happen, better things will always happen, also. Flames and death in Ukraine and the Middle East are terrible, but the emergence of Eurasia is a budding flower, and it is poison only to the Hegemon.
Civilizations Win
Most of us will live to see a new international, global dynamic. Some of us will feel its nourishment. Some of us will be stuck in the cavern of Elites who have run the world for centuries. Just as the North Pole shifts, geopolitical poles shift. Economic poles shift, also. A containment policy or exclusionary trade treaty or covert destabilization program cannot stop 3.5 billion people inspired by two enlightened leaders who have the same metaphorical DNA. The tectonic shift is too much for mere mortals of the West who have run out of ideas, lies, bullets, bombs, false flags and proxies to win and control mankind. The Hegemon has bad DNA that cannot adapt to the fresh air and sunlight of the truth. Humanity will win its freedom and civilizations will prosper.
Russians and Chinese Win
Russians and Chinese citizens will look within their own civilizations for solutions to the challenges and threats cast at them by the United States Military Empire. The motivations exist to create wise solutions that are not martial, nor dominant, nor exploitative nor unjust.
Relying on experts and NGOs of the West will be understood as opening the doors to the enemy and housing the terrorists and saboteurs sent by the United States Military Empire.
The resistance to United States Military Empire is an historic lesson to the civilizations of Russia and China. The allure of the West is stripped off once-empowering words, models and ideals like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘friendship’, ‘allies’, ‘partners’, ‘success’, and ‘security’. The patina of ‘exceptional’ and ‘greatness’ has worn away.
The peoples of Russia and China are heirs to great civilizations. They have cultures and institutions that are grounded in sage principles and centuries of profound accomplishments in art, science, technology and human endeavors. They need not emulate any other nation or culture or educational system.
Sovereignty, like individuality, is the unique identity that must be cherished. Then, international cooperation and partnership is grounded on strengths of those choosing to join with others out of free choice not coercion.
What to look forward to…
The events to look forward to in Russia-China relations in 2021 include the continued growth of Russian-Chinese trade, the signing of a docking agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union and China, Chinese investments in the Russian Far East, and the strengthening of cooperation between the two countries in the process of solving international problems.
Strategic partnership
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the most accurate commentary on the relations between the two countries at his annual press conference in December.
There is a national consensus in Russia on the development of relations with China and that regardless of the election results, Russia and China will be strategic partners in the long historical period ahead. The logic of a comprehensive strategic partnership between Russia and China has been formed, and relations between the two countries are moving forward in all spheres.
Common challenges and threats in the international arena
In 2021, Russia and China will maintain the same position on major global issues, including the resolution of the Korean crisis and the Syrian conflict. 2020 saw the joint initiative of Russia and China on the ‘double pause’. This position is constructive and is the only initiative that so far promises to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Korean crisis.
Cooperation between the two countries on the situation on the Korean Peninsula is the most successful example of foreign policy coordination between independent and sovereign powers in the world today. The two countries can use this experience to develop a consistent policy on Syria and focus on the settlement of the situation in that country after the conflict.”
The U.S. Factor
Foreign policy factors will also help strengthen Russian-Chinese relations, while both countries will have to encounter tough challenges.
In the U.S. National Security Strategy announced by Biden, Russia and China are described as countries that issue serious challenges to Washington. This means that the U.S. will develop a corresponding strategy for our two countries and those regions in which we are interested.”
The U.S. will try to prevent China and Russia from consolidating their positions in these regions. However, that factor will only contribute to the strengthening of Russian-Chinese relations.
Investment in the Far East
The trend of steady growth in the volume of trade between the two countries is seen as one of the achievements of Russian-Chinese relations in 2017. According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, in the first 11 months of 2017, the trade volume between Russia and China grew by 21.8% compared to last year, reaching $76.06 billion.
It should be noted that our trade volume is less significant today and more attention should be paid to the structure of trade. At the moment that structure has not changed and is dominated by energy.”
Trade volume may grow in 2021 due to an increase in Russian exports of non-raw materials to China, including electronic platforms.
There is demand in the Chinese market for Russian sunflower oil, as well as for expanded trade in flour and flour products. There is a need for dialogue with China on the issue of expanding quotas for Russian producers.” Cooperation in the Far East could also be a driver for the development of Russian-Chinese trade and economic relations in 2021.
Chinese investments currently amount to $4 billion, accounting for 7% of total investments in the region and 85% of total foreign investments.
The increase in Chinese investments in the region is likely to come from the development of LNG projects, cross-border infrastructure development, the development of over-development zones, and the active participation of Chinese companies in housing construction.”
Eurasian Economic Union agreement with China
The Eurasian Economic Union’s economic partnership agreement with China is almost ready to be signed, probably in early 2022.
One of the most anticipated events is the agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union and China. However, the agreement still needs to be improved in terms of its practical content. For a long time, the significance of the docking has remained only at the political level and should involve specific economic projects.”
This is a non-preferential agreement, i.e. it does not provide for reduction of tariffs. But it is very important for the Eurasian Economic Union, because the integration union needs to be legitimized, including for the World Trade Organization and the integration process in the Asia-Pacific region. This is politically important.
Increased tourist traffic
The Russian tourism industry is very much looking forward to the 2018 group travel visa-free agreement being modified due to current conditions. Under the new agreement, the minimum group size will be reduced to three people and the possible in-country stay was extended to 21 days, and no Russian invitation is required.
With the introduction of electronic document delivery methods, the work of tour companies will be simplified. Russian tourists will be able to travel to China in small groups without individual visas, and Chinese tourists will be able to recuperate and treat in sanatoriums in Russia that offer a 21-day course of treatment.
Much of the growth of Chinese tourists is being pinned on electronic visas. The system was introduced within the Vladivostok Free Port in 2020. It is expected that the system will be extended to eight regions from 2021. The system is most popular among Chinese citizens: 2,300 Chinese tourists have already used it to travel to Vladivostok.
E-visa is an important initiative to attract individual tourists to Russia. It is expected that the electronic visa system will be introduced in Kaliningrad, the westernmost point of Russia, and in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, which are popular with Chinese tourists.
Finally, let’s summarize…
Asia has united. America is not the “bright and shining city on the hill” that stands for freedom and “democracy”, but rather a corrupt military empire that is thrashing about as it collapses.
The entire world can see this.
And while the United States Military Empire has been trying to set up the QUAD, and a list of vassal states to fight it’s wars for them, the leaders who agree to do so, can kiss their sweet nations good-by. A unified Russia-china alliance would render their entire nations into radioactive rubble.
Thus my argument that (for the most part) the QUAD would collapse, and what ever military effort that the United States Military Empire would cobble together would be lost in quick flashes of light and enormous causalities.
Finally, the state of decay of the US state might already be so advanced that we can consider it as profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed.
The first option (soft landing) is unlikely, yet highly desirable.
The second option (chaos-induced retreat) is more likely, but much less desirable as it is only a single step back to then make several steps forward again.
The last option (profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed) is, alas, the most likely, and it is also, by far, the most perilous one.
For one thing, options #2 and #3 will make US actions very unpredictable and, therefore, potentially extremely dangerous. Unpredictable chaos can also quickly morph into a major war, or even several major ones, so the potential danger here is very real (even if totally unreported in Zone A).
This, in turn, means that Russia, China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela or Cuba all have to keep their guard up and be ready for anything, even the unthinkable (which is often what total chaos generates).
What do you think?
Of course, the Ignorant Americans are all thinking that Russia and China are somehow enemies…
Russia has no love for China so don’t be so sure about them coming to China’s aid.
-MarkinLA
Hardly.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Every now and then, you come across an article that resonates. Not from some unknown blogger who writes about his opinions after reading the “news”, but a thoughtful article by an experienced professional discussing a subject that he knows well. And so when I came across this work, I just had to reproduce it here on MM..Granted, his title sucks. But the content is gold. All credit to him and the source found HERE..
By Byron King
“It Failed Miserably” – What If the US Lost a War and Nobody Noticed?
I have a friend who teaches at the university level — at a U.S. service academy, no less.
The other day he was running a class and posed a short (but profound) question to a group of students. Namely, what was the most recent strategic disaster suffered by the U.S. military?
“Blank expressions,” noted my friend.
After a period of time, one student offered an answer… “Afghanistan?” (And yes, the student’s answer was in the form of a question.)
Dutifully, my professor-friend led the students in a discussion of what happened in a war that began before they were born and whose outcomes will affect them for the rest of their lives.
There’s a Whiskey tale to tell just based on this anecdote alone.
But wait, there’s more!
Because America’s loss in Afghanistan has already been overshadowed.
Indeed, the U.S. military has suffered an even greater strategic disaster than Afghanistan: an epic military defeat that already occurred, and you likely don’t know a thing about it.
I’ll skip to the takeaway here.
The U.S. should refrain from fighting the next war because we’ve already lost, long before even one shot has been fired.
The source for this ultra-defeatist news is not just a teacher at a sailor’s college, sited on a salty bay. No, the source is no less than a serving, 4-star general whose job title is Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Let’s dig in…
Here’s the long and short. The U.S. military conducted a major wargame last fall and “it failed miserably,” said U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten earlier this week.
Hyten spoke at a conference sponsored by the Emerging Technologies Institute. It’s a think tank run by the National Defense Industrial Association, an industry group focused on military modernization. (You can watch it on YouTube here, about an hour and 18 minutes.)
“An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us,” he said. “They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.”
According to a Pentagon spokesperson, one key scenario of this wargame involved U.S. forces battling with China over Taiwan. From Hyten’s summary, U.S. forces became sitting ducks and were destroyed piecemeal and systematically.
The overarching problem was, basically, everything.
It’s all fucked
That is, the problem for the U.S. was far beyond the shortcomings of any particular piece of equipment, or ship or airplane, let alone the willingness of U.S. and allied troops to fight. No, the issue was the very essence of how the U.S. military forms strategic concepts and conducts operations.
In other words, the problem was the entire belief system, architecture and construction of the Pentagon way of doing things — and certainly of waging war. By extension, it’s a political problem too, as we’ll address below.
“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive,” said Hyten.
That is, the U.S. military is built around massing people, equipment and munitions. Build up a huge complex of firepower. Then add massive levels of intelligence information, command and control, and targeting data to, as the saying goes, “take it downrange.”
This has been the U.S. approach to warfighting since World War II, with many of the roots extending back to the Civil War.
The war game fiasco
Per Hyten, in last fall’s war game, “We basically attempted an information-dominance structure, where information was ubiquitous to our forces. Just like it was in the first Gulf War, just like it has been for the last 20 years, just like everybody in the world, including China and Russia, have watched us do for the last 30 years.”
But the so-called “blue team” (meaning U.S. and allied forces) lost access to communications and data networks almost immediately. Satellites went away. Seafloor cables were cut. Bandwidth died. In general, it was impossible to utilize the electromagnetic environment, and within moments nobody could talk with anybody.
And “what happens if right from the beginning that information is not available?” asked Hyten, rhetorically. “That’s the big problem that we faced.”
According to Hyten, “in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable.”
And with an entire concept of operations poked in the proverbial eyes, red team easily defeated the blue side.
Not just a yearly exercise. It’s the planning run-on for something BIG…
Based on Hyten’s description, this wargame was not just another table-top exercise. No, this was a test of the all-up game plan for the “next” conflict, largely based on concepts of operations that have guided the American military process for three decades or more. And the outcome was a total disaster.
U.S. doctrine focuses on creating what is called a “kill box” for the opponent. But in this particular expedition, from the outset U.S. and allied forces walked into their own zones of destruction. They laid down in their own coffins, so to speak.
Opposing forces wrecked the entire complex of U.S. logistics. Rear bases came under fire, while aircraft and ships at sea were targeted by long-range missiles. There’s just no hiding anymore from people with sufficient technology to find you.
Even worse, most U.S. weapons were outranged by new systems recently deployed by China, much of it based on advanced Russian designs. It’s a long-term U.S. failure in research, development and procurement.
When the balloon went up, most U.S. forces near-immediately lost the ability to coordinate attacks and/or return fire. Much of the targeting data was worthless in any event, while systems used for aiming and guiding munitions also failed.
To the extent that communications worked at all, much of the data were corrupted or hacked.
It’s not overstating to say that, in this one wargame, far from home the U.S. lost vast numbers of people and equipment. In real world terms, think of casualty numbers in the tens of thousands. Of entire bases obliterated. Of hundreds of airplanes lost. Of dozens of ships sunk. And that’s just in the first few days.
The wargame ended with American forces defeated and devastated. U.S. allies were similarly shredded. And U.S. interests in the Western Pacific and Asia were annihilated.
Analysis
To mix a couple of metaphors, the U.S. suffered defeats in a nature that mirror a modern version of Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore and a saltwater Stalingrad.
And it gets worse. Because the devil is in the details, many of which have little or nothing to do with purely military matters. The downfall of American power begins at home, not far overseas.
Return to Gen. Hyten’s comment that potential adversaries have spent 30 years watching and learning from U.S. operations. Well, yes. Obviously.
Any reasonably intelligent counterparty — anyone, any country, anywhere on the face of this planet — would pay attention to what the U.S. has been doing and then figure out what to expect and how to deal with it.
Over three decades, people everywhere watched, learned, and totally went to school on the U.S. military. And it’s all because the America made a foolish political and economic choice, namely, to engage in so-called “long wars.”
And that has never been a good idea, going back to the days of Sun Tzu and before.
“Wars cost much silver,” wrote Sun Tzu in his classic book, “On War.” And of course, he meant money. But the subtleties of Sun Tzu’s writing also delve into how war affects both people and culture. Wars drive a certain negative ethic within a political system, and the longer any war lasts, the more negative is the tendency.
Meanwhile, it’s not as if America’s 30 years of war were battles of necessity. Certainly, it’s not as if the country was being invaded and overrun.
No, the three decades of war (Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden) were an era of forward presence coupled with routine military belligerence, oft to the ring of political trumpets at home.
The named wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) speak for themselves. Then there are other levels of warfare, like with Serbia, Libya and Syria, where the gunslinging showed up in a different manner, but still as destructive to entire societies.
In this sense — that sense of reaching out to bomb people far from U.S. shores — America’s long wars are not just a military issue, easily dismissed by civilians as some sort of niche problem for the Pentagon.
No, because closer to home, the long wars reveal seismic flaws in the very nature and character of U.S. governance. The long wars reveal a deep weakness in the American form of government itself.
Indeed, we’re a long way from the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.”
And look at it this way. It’s not as if the U.S. ever had a series of national referenda on 30 years of continuous warfare. In fact, the past three decades of war overseas were based on the geopolitical ideas of a relatively small, self-perpetuating cabal of elite elected players and policy wonks, in Washington and various brain-tanks. Many familiar names, to be sure.
Abysmal strategic ignorance and lack of conscience.
Through it all, as well, Congress (and the courts too) showed abysmal strategic ignorance and lack of conscience. Because evidently, the country’s voters place many truly wrong people into important positions.
Consider one key episode, the 9/11 attacks and attendant national outrage.
No doubt, for America 9/11 was the source of a widespread, limbic-level sense of wanting to go somewhere and totally smash things up. That’s entirely understandable. And in that sense, America’s attacks on Afghanistan in late 2001 should have been, at most, a punitive expedition concerning Osama bin Laden.
Instead, Afghanistan alone morphed and mission-crept into a foolish effort of so-called “nation building.” And not even the Chinese method of Belt-and-Road nation-building, with highways and power lines, etc.
No, America in Afghanistan was more of a Vietnam-redux. The idea was somehow to pacify people who didn’t want us to be there, and if that didn’t work then destroy the place in order to rebuild it. Meanwhile, one can almost hear the echoes of at least one old bromide from the 1960s, that, “If we don’t fight ‘em over there, we’ll have to fight ‘em here.”
Through it all, and again in a Vietnam-like manner, Afghanistan was not so much a 20-year war for America, as a one-year war fought 20 times by a corps of officers, senior non-commissioned officers and civilian government personnel and contractors who made careers out of it.
At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that smart, well-resourced adversaries paid attention and came up with an entire spectrum of methods to confront U.S. warfighting?
The Next War…
Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy, let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment.
Apparently though, it took an internal wargame in the Department of Defense to drive home the point.
Or at least, to illustrate the problem such that no less than one of the most senior generals in the military came out of the closet to admit that America’s super-expensive military complex can’t win the next big war.
On the bright side, perhaps it’s a true wakeup call that translates to progress.
On that note, I rest my case.
That’s all for now… Thank you for subscribing and reading.
This article is saying what I have been saying for years now. America is not going to just lose a battle here, or a battle there. The entire military excursion will be a Waterloo event.
It will be the Stalingrad of all Pacific military forces.
And then, it will move to America.
China will not act alone. Russia will assist.
Then with total dominance of the air by the victorious Asian combined forces will turn all of America into a modern-day Syria. While I do not expect that China will give any mercy, they however, will realistically set up conditions where starving, armed Americans, will kill each other for moldy turnip rinds.
DF-41
And that’s only with conventional weapons.
Right now we are watching as the Pentagon experts and generals are telling the evil neocons in Washington DC to shut up.
Now, I don’t know if they will be successful…
…after all those evil psychopaths in Washington are crafty, deluded, and living in some kind of insanity (possibly drug induced) that gives this illusion of unaccountability.
Xu Guangyu, a retired major general and now a strategy researcher, said that DF-16 has a strike range of more than 1,000 kilometers, filling the gap that previously existed with the absence of a medium-range ballistic missile in the PLA’s arsenal. He said the missile also is able to reach Okinawa, a Japanese island about 400 km from China’s Diaoyu Islands. Shi Hong, executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, said the DF-16 was developed by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp based on the DF-11 short-range ballistic missile and can carry a warhead of at least 500 kg. The missile has a strike accuracy as good as that of a cruise missile, Shi said. It is also able to maneuver in its final stage to penetrate enemy defensive firepower, he said.
Regardless to what those evil psychopathic war-monsters want, I can well imagine that a repeat of what happened last year in 2020.
This was when Trump ordered the Naval Armada to the South China Sea. Eight assault carrier steamed to China. They were intended to seize some outlying Chinese held islands in the inner island defensive chain.
But you know, nothing happened.
The commanders refused. They steamed home, and President Trump fired the leadership.
Again, we can expect, that reasonable leadership will refuse to engage either China or Russia or both.
They will refuse.
Just like late Summer 2020. And the sitting American President will fire his military staff for refusing to die.
The Chinese are subtle.
They speak softly and kindly and carefully.
During the “heat” of the anti Uighur Muslim “issue”, China responded with a video. It is below. Pay attention to the array of messages that are subtly embedded within it.
The video below is an Army unit located in Xingjiang to defend against insurgency movements by the United States to block the BRI.
If you note, those are not SCUD missiles. Aside from a host of Medium Range ballistic missiles (DF-21 and DF-26), and if you look carefully, the DF-5C, additionally there are also DF-31A and DF-41 weapons presented as part of the defensive force.
What is China trying to say?
Along with the destruction of nearby military bases, will be the simultaneous destruction of major American cities. These missiles are long range city-flatteners.
Look at the MESSAGE that China is telegraphing.
Those are nuclear (and neutron bomb) MIRV, hyper-velocity, (with artificial intelligence), long-range, ICBMs. the DF-31A is capable of hitting every major American city on the West Coast. These are latest generation, decades ahead of America, nuclear missiles that America has no defense against.
If you start moving military against China, China will devastate the American heartland. Any surviving leadership will have to hide in the impoverished American ghettos to avoid the nuclear carpet bombing that will result.
The Chinese do not play.
A final comment
Chinese media has announced (last month), ever since the US pulled that aircraft landing stunt in Taiwan, that not only are military units fully armed with real munitions, and everything (EVERYTHING!) is out of storage, but they fly and run “HOT”.
There’s a high probably the next US / UK provocation will result in “accidental” deaths.
Nothing quite ruins your day like global thermonuclear war. Especially when you are on the losing side.
In America, it’s no longer an issue of “one day the common many will rise up against the evil leadership”.
Ai! It has become something else.
It has become “we need to hang these Washington DC bastards before they get everyone killed.”
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Go to the sewer pit of zerohedge and check the comments on any China article, or to Unz and its China article comments, or for that matter to Kunstler where antiChina accusations seem to be mandatory once per article.
You could also try any YouTube video on China's space agency's stunning successes and check the comments.
The oozing racism, ignorance and hatred shown by some - in the case of zerohedge most - replies is a signal lesson on why their regimes think the way they do.
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Jul 20 2021 22:37 utc | 54
We will start our little exploration in China “stuff” with…
Chinese Robots
All of this is “flying under the radar screen”. No one is interested in it. But China is leading in robotic technology. Sorry Boston Dynamics. But it is true. I have a small zipped up file that has a few videos of some of the more personable robots being developed in China these days.
While I was writing this post, my daughter went to my computer and published it. Before, I could flush it out 68 people read the article. Sigh. I guess that I am committed. It’s like bacon and eggs. The chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
“Chinese astronauts floated into the country’s new Tiangong space station Thursday, becoming the first people to board China’s outpost in orbit after a successful launch from a military base in the Gobi Desert to start a three-month mission.”
Chinese Astronauts Enter Space Station.
When the International Space Station was being fomented, the Chinese wanted to take part. The US blocked them. So they built their own. The ISS is to be decommissioned in a few years, presumably leaving China as having the only functioning space station. It is notable that all of these off-earth efforts, to include the placing of a lander on the dark side of the moon, have worked.
Some Chinese Girls
Some technology, huh?
You can see a nice little collection of a cross section in this zip file HERE. I think that if a woman is “built like a battleship” that they deserve to be placed in the technology section. Don’t you?
I have been in the Shanghai Maglev train - it's elevated and banked and is very smooth and quiet, taking under 10mins to go 50km. The digital readout in the carriage got up to 432 kmh on my journey.
Posted by: anonymous | Jul 21 2021 2:54 utc | 77
China begins construction of its fifth rocket launch site
“BEIJING (Reuters) – A port city in eastern China has launched an ambitious plan to build the country’s fifth rocket launch site, under a longer-term goal to ramp up space infrastructure to meet the demands of an expected boom in commercial missions.”
Why can the Chinese do all of these things at once? Because they have money and many smart engineers.
Why do they have money? Because they make stuff and sell it.
America doesn’t have money because it spends it all on aircraft carriers, and doesn’t make stuff because it sent its factories to…
…China.
Why doesn’t America have more and better engineers? Because it has a far smaller base of STEM-capable young and because it is dumbing down its schools and universities for the gratification of unproductive minorities.
Whose fault is all of this?
Why…
China’s. Who could doubt it?
On GDP, the Outlaw US Empire's is grossly overstated by trillions such that GDP has actually shrunk over the last 30 years. So doing any sort of comparative analysis using GDP as a metric will yield a false result. Trillions of dollars that amount to the Fraudulent Financial Free Lunch are actually negatives that must be subtracted from overall GDP, which we've discussed here rather often. Again, the closest depiction is Shadowstats GDP chart whose blue line would look even worse if all the Enron Accounting was eliminated.
As I wrote @59, China has the Outlaw US/Anglo Empire by the balls--dependent upon China--geoeconomically as Trump's failed Trade War proved beyond doubt. There is a solution, but it will never be implemented by the Neoliberal Duopoly, which will never be overcome by the popular vote.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 20 2021 23:36 utc | 60
“Linglong One is a pressurized water reactor with a capacity of 125 MW – the first small commercial onshore modular reactor or SMR to be constructed in the world. After being launched, the SMR will be able to generate enough power to meet the energy demands of approximately 526,000 households annually.”
Dutch Boy says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:53 pm GMT • 5.3 days ago • 100 Words ↑
Not only were the lower-paying assembly-type scutwork jobs sent to China but also the technical design and engineering that goes with the manufacturing (at the insistence of the Chinese and with the cooperation of the American corporations).
There are plenty of clever young people who could do those jobs here (most STEM grads here must find work in other fields) but the jobs are in China.
Physics.org: Chinese achieve new milestone with 56 qubit computer
“A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China, working at the University of Science and Technology of China, has achieved another milestone in the development of a usable quantum computer.”
The world’s first 100,000-ton deep-sea semi-submersible oil production and storage platform, China’s self-developed “Deep Sea No 1” energy station, has successfully completed installation of all equipment and is expected to start production at the end of June, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) said on Saturday.
China maintains ‘artificial sun’ at 120 million Celsius for over 100 seconds, setting new world record
Another step in the quest for fusion power. Other countries, inclusing America, are working on this, but there was a time when the US would have been the clear leader. Times change.
Geez people,
China has had maglev trains connecting shanghai to its airport, its been running for years and cuts the usual 1.5hr road travel to 30 our so minutes. I've been on it numerous times.
This 600kph model is just a further development.
I don't know if you've all noticed, the recent Chinese tech development model has been rapid iterations instead of spending years or decades to design the perfect mouse trap. It plays well into their strengths and it's the only to find out if there's some gating tech they haven't figured out yet. They've learnt that hard lesson with semiconductors and jet engines.
For example with the aircraft carrier, everyone was pissing on China for relaunching an old soviet hull, before the laughter died out they've already built a second, improved one with what they've learnt. Then the same people laughed at the ski jump deck, and soon an EM catapult flattop will be launched.
Same with civil projects, space flight, aviation, submarines etc etc.
Keep on laughing.
Posted by: A.L. | Jul 20 2021 21:45 utc | 47
Lunar Return Mission
BBC: China’s Chang-e Five Mission returns lunar samples
This was a sophisticated, automated endeavor involving a lunar orbiter, a lander that collected samples, a unit that took the samples back to the orbiter, and a return vehicle that parachuted into Mongolia. It was nontrivial engineering. And: It worked. Note how quickly this and the achievements mentioned in the following have come.
Tunneling Machine in a Panda outfit
China Launches Largest Self-Built Shield tunneling machine with adorable ‘panda’ outfit
The machine has a diameter of 12.79 meters and weighs 3,000 tons. It will be used in the construction of Jinxiu Tunnel, an essential component of the highspeed railway from Chengdu to Zigong in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, which is known for being a home to pandas.”
Roving Mars
Chinese Mars Rover Begins Roaming the Red Planet
“China’s Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.”
Very impressive, like beating Murphy’s Law in straight sets. First, it was an orbiter, circling Mars and doing orbiter things. Second, a lander. Third, a rover. Americans are ahead still in some respexts, but not by much. The riveting thing is how fast the Chinese are catching up.
Meanwhile in America…
Death throes…
“City Journal: “Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences.
"The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness”
”Such an effort would involve faculty holding well-performing students back, even while pushing their less intellectual peers forward (as if they were all indeed equal in abilities). Potentially stranding a group of gifted individuals in a situation where they are held back by a single child who simply can’t get a problem right and needs endless special instruction is hardly something to be proud of….”
Stupidity beyond a certain point becomes entertaining.
Bayviking says:July 15, 2021 at 11:34 pm GMT • 5.3 days ago↑
Holy crap, this does not look good for the arrogant Americans. I understand that 5G in the US will never operate up to specs because the US defense department refuses to surrender the bandwidth it controls necessary to function properly.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
If you read any of the Western press (most UK or American) you will get a really distorted view about Hong Kong, and China. You will read things, so many things, that you will just “take in” as truth, and without a secondary source of information, you will start to believe it. And that’s how the “West” works. You keep people stupid and ignorant, and manipulate them in such a way that they “dance” to whatever tune you play.
I have been (by chance) reading some articles out of Hong Kong ( I mean, after all, I live next door to it.) and they (the articles) are very interesting in how illustrative they are to the amazing levels of disinformation pumped out of America and Britain over the last few decades.
All lies. All disinformation. All manipulation.
All the time.
We start with Billionaire Tycoon Jimmy Lai. And if you read the American (and British press) you might picture him as a freedom lover for democracy, and a fighter for justice and the “American way of life”.
Not even remotely true. He’s actually sort of like a Chinese version of Larry Flint, with the behavior of Harvey Weinstein , and the scruples of Hillary Clinton.
Here is a great article. Found HERE. It discusses Jimmy Lai’s “operation” in Hong Kong…
Fun fact:
For a newspaper with only 86,000 subscribers. He was mysteriously making HK$95 million every month (12.23 million US Dollars).
Every time the HK government tried to audit him, a massive onslaught of anti-HK government protests, media, and assaults from both the USA and the UK stopped the effort. On numerous occasions, the UK and US government "stepped in" and put pressure on HK to free him and stop the investigations.
But when HK passed the insurrection law in 2020, his "operations" were investigated and it turns out that he was laundering enormous sums of cash directly out of the United States government for undisclosed purposes.
FIRST, LET’S LOOK AT the numbers which are being omitted in reports about the closure of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper.
NOT BREAKFAST READING
1) Apple Daily printed 86,000 copies a day, which meant that 98.5 PER CENT of Hong Kong’s 6,500,000 adults did NOT buy it with their breakfast noodles.
SIMPLE DECEPTION
2) The Western media is reporting that it was “Hong Kong’s biggest newspaper”. No. Not remotely true. Hong Kong’s most popular newspaper is free tabloid Headline Daily (1,012,000 a day, or more than ten times Apple’s circulation), and in the paid broadsheet category, leaders include Oriental Daily News (530,000 a day), and Sing Tao Daily (253,000 a day).
Hong Kong has always had a hunger for newspapers, and the mainstream voice has always been far, far more popular than Jimmy Lai’s one. That was true in the British era, and is true today, with the same newspaper groups at the top of the pile.
THE BIG STORY IN MEDIA
3) Maybe Jimmy Lai’s paper was top of the web charts? No. Alexa rankings for Hong Kong show HK01.com, Bastillepost and other online media far ahead of Apple Daily (and the fact that Hong Kongers visit mainland China shopping site Taobao significantly more than any local media site should tell us something).
HK01, in particular, has come from nowhere to dominate the local media scene. Lively, up-to-the-minute and often critical of the government, its existence and popularity gives the lie to the “press freedom is dead” trope of the Western media, and is the big story in media that foreign correspondents have all missed.
WHO CLOSED APPLE?
4) Apple Daily was not closed down by the Hong Kong government, but by its own board, comprising local people hostile to China, plus Americans.
The HK$18 million that the government froze was a small sum for a paper for a company with HK$95 million in revenues every month, financial analysts say. The paper itself boasted of having cash accounts of HK$531 million, enough to last 18 months.
In fact, the entire financial picture of the media group is an under-reported, under-studied mystery.
THE INFAMOUS NARRATIVE
5) So why did they close their own paper? As a PR coup, because they were absolutely confident that the international media, which means the Western media, would not tell the real story, but one which fits their anti-China narrative.
Oh, and also, it saves them money.
Apple Daily’s stunning lack of popularity among the good, honest, people of Hong Kong, was only eclipsed by its stunning lack of popularity among advertisers. The group has been losing more than HK$1 million a day, yes, A DAY, (which is more than US$1 million a week), amounting to several billion Hong Kong dollars over the past few years.
The paper clearly did not function commercially as a media company, so any healthily skeptical person would ask themselves: what was it for?
PRO-DEMOCRACY?
Oh, and another thing. Apple Daily wasn’t “pro-democracy” either.
But more about that later. Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start, as the great poet Oscar Hammerstein II said.
This headline from a UK newspaper called ‘i’ (for “Independent”) shows the typically false reporting characteristic of coverage of this story
CHAPTER 1) BRUNCH AND PORNOGRAPHY
I FIRST MET Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, founder of Apple Daily, at a politician-packed brunch party in 1995. It was at the luxurious Hong Kong apartment of L. Gordon Crovitz, a senior executive for the Wall Street Journal group. His wife Minky was the perfect hostess.
Garment tycoon Lai wasn’t how I expected him to be, but I liked him. Behind his sad puppy eyes was toughness. He was in the process of launching an oppositional, China-baiting newspaper.
We all congratulated him for taking a step that was clearly brave and very likely foolhardy: he would inevitably get into trouble.
It was only after I had left that brunch party that something occurred to me: the hosts were all right wing United States people, and the invited politicians were all from the Hong Kong opposition. It was like a convention of people who didn’t like China.
MISOGYNY RULES
Over the next few years, Apple Daily carved its place in the city’s media scene over the next few years, and this reporter, like most Hong Kong people, were shocked and horrified.
Lai’s publications made a niche for themselves by taking the lowest of the low paths. There was sex and sensationalism, outrage and scandal, allegations and celebrity gossip of the tawdriest kind, and worse, pornographic stories and reviews/ critiques of sex workers and massage parlours.
This headline from a UK newspaper called ‘i’ (for “Independent”) shows the typically false reporting characteristic of coverage of this story
The Hong Kong community is a rather gentle, low-crime, conservative, majority female society, and the present portrayal of Apple Daily as the natural voice of the community was and is deeply misleading.
The paper, crude, brutal and sexist, was for men. Jimmy Lai, in a 1995 interview with the South China Morning Post, said: “Our porn page is not very well done, but we have to have it because man has basic needs.”
LOWERED STANDARDS
Other publications lowered their standards to compete, and the Hong Kong newsstands became embarrassing to walk past. Remember the “downblouse” photo of schoolgirl Alice Patten on the front page with the headline: “The peaches are ripening”?
The misogyny and cruelty to women and children were shocking, with people being hurt constantly – and discovering that the newspaper simply didn’t care.
After a few years, it felt like most people knew individuals who had been hurt by Apple Daily. The Hong Kong public preferred its traditional newspaper voice, and Jimmy Lai’s newspaper could never rise above being a minority interest, thank God.
Another Western media group gets it wrong: the information above was distributed by AFP, one of the biggest news agencies in the world.
One 1998 story, sadly typical of the paper, stuck in my mind: Apple Daily published a feature about an unbelievably crass man who apparently sought out prostitutes soon after his wife had thrown their children out of a window to their deaths before jumping after them.
The paper later admitted paying the man to pose in bed with the sex workers for the photographs, knowing that it would be the most talked-about story of the week.
The paper was in trouble with the law, usually because of contravening the rules against obscene publications, every two or three months.
FLOUTED ETHICS
It also flouted basic journalistic ethics. Chequebook journalism was the norm. In 2000, an Apple reporter received a 10-month jail sentence for bribing police officers to reveal information. In 2019, the paper was widely reported to have given HK$1.5 million to a taxi driver for video footage of a married celebrity canoodling with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
Next Digital’s Taiwan operation has been a financial disaster: picture by Solomon203/ Wikicommons
Yes, it also did some positive work, like attacking civil servants for doing their jobs badly, but those few tales became over-politicized to an extent that they were not journalism, but political campaigning for its endless pro-America, anti-China message.
Then one day, I got a call. Apple Daily senior executive Mark Simon wanted to meet me and would like to me to give them some help.
CHAPTER TWO) THE MONEY PIT
MARK SIMON, now there’s an interesting character. People were already wondering if Jimmy Lai’s right-hand man was a CIA agent, given the newspaper’s anti-China stance.
I found the notion unlikely, and not just because we were friends. He was enormous and unhealthy looking, and would be unlikely to pass the most basic fitness tests. Also, he liked the limelight too much to be an agent, although there is a sub-group of agents who do their work in the spotlight.
In a discussion on that topic, someone asked me a related question: If not an agent, was Mark Simon a CIA asset, witting or unwitting?
I gave her a reply that my father’s experiences taught me: “Sweetheart, almost every journalist in the world is a CIA asset, witting or unwitting. That’s how the Western press works.”
Another Western media group gets it wrong: the information above was distributed by AFP, one of the biggest news agencies in the world.
ANIMATED NEWS
I met Mark at a coffee shop in Kowloon’s Ho Man Tin district where he introduced me to Marina Shifrin, an American woman who had been hired to write scripts for a new “3D animated news” venture for Next Digital, the parent company of the newspaper. The operation was based in Taiwan, where the group was doing very badly.
The animations were unfunny, getting few hits and were not being widely shared. Mark wanted me to give her the key storytelling points to creating viral media. It was hard to boil down decades of experience into a short lecture, but to sum up, I told her to be authentic, funny, detached and offbeat. We swapped contact details.
I left the meeting pondering how long a principled American woman could stay at such an unprincipled company.
BIGOTRY
For Hong Kong’s majority population a significant problem was Apple Daily’s undisguised bigotry. Apple popularized the term “locusts” for people from mainland China coming to Hong Kong.
This was a horrific mistake in the eyes of this community, where many people had mainland cousins, and recognized that the city’s businesses were reliant on mainland Chinese customers.
But here was the puzzle. Despite the repulsive content, there was a rock-solid partnership between the Apple Daily crowd and American media people—and on particular, the most hawkish and right wing of people in that country.
Gordon Crovitz remained closely in the loop. Crovitz’s wife, Minky Worden, was “media advisor” to the Hong Kong opposition for several years. Mark Simon had a US Naval Intelligence background and became president of Republicans Abroad in Hong Kong.
Other media highlighted the fact that Apple-style muckraking made ordinary people feel unsafe
Other media highlighted the fact that Apple-style muckraking made ordinary people feel unsafe
HK PEOPLE GENEROUS
To combat its bad reputation for bigotry, Apple sometimes accused others of the same thing. In 2013, it ran a front-page anti-government “scoop” reporting that Executive Council member Franklin Lam, said: “I utterly discriminate against new immigrants.”
Unfortunately for the reporters, the meeting had been recorded and the tape showed that what he actually said was: “I utterly do not discriminate against new immigrants. On arrival in Hong Kong, they are legally Hong Kong citizens. They are also first-class citizens.”
The truth is that Hong Kong people are generous, and the city has an extensive program to help mainland immigrants settle in.
Jimmy Lai meets Mike Pence: picture from Mike Pence’s office
Jimmy Lai meets Mike Pence: picture from Mike Pence’s office
CHAPTER 3) UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE
The world is being told that Apple Daily is a pro-democracy paper. Let’s talk about that. In 2013 and 2014, Hong Kong civil servants announced the results of a years-long process to introduce a one-person-one-vote system to this city.
A Chinese University survey of the public showed that some 55 percent of people were in favor of proceeding with the government’s universal suffrage plan, providing that satisfaction could be achieved on the composition of the “broadly representative nominating committee”.
But Apple Daily and the more strident members of the opposition called for the whole universal suffrage package to be jettisoned, as not being sufficiently close to Western liberal democracy. (In fact, the Hong Kong system allowed direct voting for the leader, unlike UK and US systems, where you vote for parties, and the party or the electoral college appoint a leader.)
FAUX OUTRAGE
The Western media, including this reporter, who was writing op-eds for the New York Times at the time, got caught up in the faux outrage, and the path to democratic self-government that Hong Kong civil servants had taken literally years to build was demolished in a single day.
Many academics and journalists (including the present writer), later realized that we’d made a huge error, denying Hong Kong people an important chance to take the first steps towards a more democratic system.
GETTING IT RIGHT AT LAST
In Taiwan, Marina Shifrin worked until 3 o’clock in the morning and then made a video of herself holding an “I quit” sign and dancing at multiple locations in the Next Media offices.
It went viral on the internet, winning her 19 million views, plus a job offer of working in televison in the United States. She left Taiwan as fast as she could.
REVOLUTION CONSULTANTS
In late 2014, Western “revolution consultants” revealed that they had been working with Hong Kong anti-China campaigners for almost two years before the “Occupy Central” campaign shut down much of the business center.
Leaked documents revealed that Jimmy Lai was secretly handling the finances for those protests: more than HK$40 million (US$5.2 million) came from unknown sources and went to hostile groups in Hong Kong.
In one of the emails, Lai spoke scathingly about the protest leaders, saying they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Hong Kong was swept by rumors, later confirmed, that the US State Department had a budget of millions to destabilize China by poisoning minds against the country in its outlying areas – Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia.
Piece by piece, stories of unexplained payments popped up. It became clear that the cash coming through the National Endowment for Democracy was peanuts compared to money from other American sources. But it was hard to find the links between the odd bits of news that popped up.
For example, in May 2016 the Independent Commission Against Corruption highlighted an undeclared payment of HK$250,000 from Mark Simon to an opposition politician. It was not clear where the cash originated.
But by that time, observers of the Hong Kong scene noted that we very often saw the same factors coming together: Americans, mystery money, Jimmy Lai, and anti-China politicians.
AIMLESS VIOLENCE
In 2019, civil unrest again broke out and Apple Daily strongly backed the pro-independence protesters calling for Hong Kong to be “freed” from China, despite the fact that between 80 and 93 percent of Hong Kong people strongly oppose independence.
The protesters wanted Donald Trump to take Hong Kong from China, possibly the worst idea in history.
Bizarrely, Apple Daily gave the biggest encouragement to the aimlessly violent people who had no plan other than to destroy Hong Kong’s economy, close the airport, and generally cause mayhem. There was no conceivable way that the endless destruction of public facilities would lead to more democracy, as Hong Kong people pointed out repeatedly in talk shows and on social media.
Indeed, it was obvious that the process Apple Daily was encouraging could have no possible outcome except to cause Beijing to intervene – which was, of course, the whole point. Accusations that this city was just a pawn in a bigger game in which Jimmy Lai was serving the United States became impossible to dismiss.
THE US RIGHT WING
Also clear was that Jimmy Lai strongly favored the right wing of the United States, since they were more actively anti-China. In May, 2020, Jimmy Lai launched a #TrumpSavesHK campaign on its front page. “Trump is a statesman,” Lai wrote in the newspaper in October.
Throughout this period, the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong, even though the city was being hammered for reasons mired in disinformation. I don’t think anyone taking a genuinely detached look at the paper’s actions over the past few years could possibly call it pro-democracy, or even pro-Hong Kong. It worked instead to actively harm this community.
Behind the scenes, Apple Daily dug into its coffers to commission a fake report “revealing” that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had secret dealings with China. Managed by Mark Simon, the project was a direct bid to interfere in the US elections, and ensure a Trump win.
Again, we saw creative, out-of-the-box thinking, but also an appetite for deliberate deception of the public – the journalist credited with writing the dossier didn’t exist, but was a fake name with a computer-generated face.
Throughout this period, the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong, even though the city was being hammered for reasons mired in disinformation. I don’t think anyone taking a genuinely detached look at the paper’s actions over the past few years could possibly call it pro-democracy, or even pro-Hong Kong. It worked instead to actively harm this community.
Oh, and the misogynistic harm to women and children has continued. Earlier this month, Hong Kong saw the end of a court case involving Apple Daily staff pretending to be related to a female celebrity in order to get a birth certificate for her child, which they then published.
ON BOARD
This month, the board of Apple Daily, not the Hong Kong government, closed the newspaper.
Who is on the board? There’s American journalist Mark Clifford. There’s L. Gordon Crovitz, the charming but staunchly right wing former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who invited me to that brunch party at his home 26 years ago.
His wife Minky Worden has become a key voice in the US campaign against the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.
Ms Worden is a senior staff member at Human Rights Watch, a group which has been criticized by more than 100 cultural figures, including Nobel Peace Laureates, for its “close ties to the government of the United States”.
Since Olympic activities in mainland China always involve Hong Kong city too, the success of her campaign would further harm the long-suffering people of this city.
LEFT SUDDENLY
Meanwhile, Mark Simon, who told journalists he was in Hong Kong to stay, left the city suddenly to move to Taiwan shortly before the promulgation of a US-style security law, which among other things, targets people who take overseas money to interfere in local politics.
But of course none of this will be covered in the international media. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
The Western media will repeatedly report that Beijing is to blame for Apple Daily’s problems in Hong Kong, hoping and praying that no one will point out the key fact that demolishes the argument: The newspaper group has been even more of a disaster in Taiwan, where it has stopped all its print publications, despite the island allegedly having glorious USA-Style True Democracy. USA! USA!
TALK TO HONG KONG PEOPLE
If you want the real story of this newspaper, perhaps speak to the 98.5 per cent of Hong Kong adults who did not buy a copy of Apple Daily with their breakfast every day.
And perhaps spend a moment reflecting on Jimmy Lai’s connections with the right wing of the United States, and what the jailed publisher thinks of Hong Kong’s anti-China movement – that they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.
[2] And now to Cuba
Here’s what the Hong Kong folk feel about Cuba. After all, America now has it’s sights on invading it, or starting a war there… oh, you know… for the usual reasons.
Destabilization process is now farcically predictable
THE WORLD’S WEALTHIEST, most militaristic country (The United States) wants to deliver “freedom” to Cuba, a tiny community which has committed the unforgivable sin of doing things in a more socialist way. But whatever your politics, the extraordinary re-purposing of the word “freedom” as a tool to amplify unrest and distort discussions should concern us all.
Hong Kong people, in particular, have seen this entire process before. In fact, we could pretty much write the script for what’s happening in Cuba ourselves. Ten things to consider:
1.) Turn on the anti-Cuba social media
Yes, there are social and economic problems in Cuba. That’s how it works. The destabilization process ALWAYS piggybacks itself on genuine grievances. These are amplified with a disinformation campaign.
At least 1,500 of the social media accounts that participated in the #SOSCuba operation were created in a 48-hour period: July 10 and 11, said Julian Macias Tovar, social media analyst.
2.) Turn on the fake tweets.
Cuban internet investigators found the majority of the fake tweets came from the United States.
The tweets focused on the narrative key word “freedom” and pointedly instructed readers to dismiss any suggestion that the US embargo had any relevance to what was happening.
One of the main pro-US social media voices talking to Cubans was a notorious anti-government source called Yusnaby.
Yusnaby, Cubans wryly noted, is pronounced like “U.S. Navy” said with an accent.
3.) Engage the ‘Bots.
Many of the messages came from random “pretty” faces and were bot-signed up so quickly that they didn’t have time to delete the automatically generated numbers after their fake names.
So “Rachel” (see below), who looks like a supermodel, apparently likes to be known as Rachel76039947.
4.) Fire-hose of messages floods the internet.
The entire, huge torrent of messages took a pro-US and anti-government stance, and many said the exact same thing in the exact same words. They were clearly fake but Twitter did not delete them.
Many of the pro-US, anti-government voices on social media joined recently, have no friends or followers, and somewhat unusual names!
5.) Heavy coverage of tiny protests.
The early Cuban protests were small (a few hundred people) but received far more coverage than much, much larger events elsewhere. Independent media outlet BT News noted that more than 100,000 people marched for Palestine, such as in the demonstration pictured below, at the same time, but got far less coverage.
6.) Freedom™ and democracy™
When Hong Kongers see something like this happening, we wait. We wait for the mainstream media to give the protesters/ pro-US side full ownership of words like “freedom” and “democracy”. At the same time, they will unfairly label the home team/ government as the enemies of freedom and democracy.
Here’s the New York Times doing precisely that in a hilariously blatant manner: “Shouting ‘freedom’ and other anti-government slogans. . . ”!
7.) Lie using fake photos
The small size of many of the Cuba demonstrations was a problem for the pro-NATO narrative.
CNN misleading people into thinking the picture it is using comes from Cuba when it’s actually from Miami, as the street sign shows. TYT repeatedly did the same thing.
8.) American President reads THE script.
By Sunday night, some Hong Kongers watching the process were already waiting for US President Joseph Biden to perform his part in the script, saying something that associates one side with “freedom” and the other with the words “authoritarian regime.”
On Monday, he did just that.
9.) Switch and confuse the videos and images
Below is a widely reprinted NYT report which misled countless millions of readers into thinking this AP picture of a reasonably well-attended gathering was of a pro-US, anti-govt protest, when it was actually a pro-government rally.
Fox News and the Financial Times did the same thing with the same picture. This picture actually showed a pro-government rally. (Spotter: Alan MacLeod)
10.) Amnesty International performs their role
By Tuesday, newswatchers in Hong Kong were waiting for the next standard element in the destabilization script — which would be for the comically biased Amnesty International to do its normal trick.
Amnesty works hard to produce reports making the home team look like faceless killing machines, and the pro-US, anti-govt side look like young, cool human beings with glorious US flags calling for, yes, “freedom” (libertad).
On Wednesday Amnesty International did precisely that, as you can see from the lead elements on the front page of the UK organization’s Cuba report, below.
Amnesty International is “comically biased”
NEXT IN THE SCRIPT
In fact, the Cuba protests have been so predictable that Hong Kong people can even tell you the next steps coming up.
There will be demands for US troops to come and “solve” the problem.
There will be complaints of police brutality.
The UK and the US will say they “stand with” one side, as if they know for a fact that group of protesters represents everyone.
And we’ll all see the same words repeated over and over again — “freedom” on the pro-US side and “authoritarian regime” on the other.
IGNORING THE WORLD
By claiming “freedom” as a sacred principle it owns, the United States has given itself license to ignore the global community.
Just last month, the United Nations overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row.
The United States ignored it, as did the media.
NO SELF-AWARENESS
This week, a US politician used the word “freedom” four times in a single tweet about Cuba. “America stands for freedom,” said the unintentionally hilarious declamation by Val Demings of Florida.
I’m assuming that staff at the New York Times have enough self-awareness to know that the word “freedom” used in the American way is seen by people outside the US as a joke – but I may be wrong.
Perhaps some US citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of the situation than journalists: the humorous meme at the top of this post is widely shared in various forms and appears to originate in the United States. Here’s another version:
But some journalists don’t get the joke. One of the New York Times write-ups about the Cuba protests included a starry-eye quote from a protester: “What I saw today was people seeing freedom for the first time.”
HOWEVER VIOLENT
For more than 40 years, the world has watched the CIA travelling the globe to rebrand pro-US groups, however violent they are, as the voices of “freedom”, and home teams as the enemies of freedom, however well they feed and serve their populace.
Few people know this better than the Hong Kong people. During the US-backed riots of 2019, a Hong Kong friend posted terrifying images of black-clad thugs, radicalized by endless Apple Daily reports, storming into a spotless train station and using iron rods to terrorize staff and smash everything in sight.
His caption: “Freedom is coming.”
And the reason why I started to read some of the HK news…
yeah. I wanted to do a follow up on who these jackasses were who was attacking my videos of bus rides, sizzling Hunan beer, and cheap wine. I wanted to know!
[3] Rich outlet tries to savage citizen journalists
IN A HILARIOUS BOTCH-UP, the BBC yesterday inserted numerous links to anti-China features into an article defending itself from claims that it was anti-China.Here’s what happened.BBC journalists wrote an article attacking China-based “citizen journalists”. The bloggers defended themselves by saying the BBC and other Western media had a clearly biased, negative attitude to the Asian developing nation.The BBC’s editors yesterday printed the article (above) — but sprinkled it with links (see picture below) which powerfully proved the critics’ point that the BBC is biased against China.In effect, the BBC said “we’re not anti-China — by the way, here’s a link to an article showing how China is a dystopian hellscape! And another one. And another one. And another one. And . . “.It’s hard not to laugh.
It gets better. In fact, yesterday’s BBC article should go down in history as a textbook example of self-defeating journalism for at least four reasons.
First, you cannot argue against the allegation that you present a strongly one-sided view by including a list of article links that prove conclusively that you present a one-sided view.
Lee and Oli Barrett, residents of China, have become popular bloggers
SENSE OF IRONY
Second, the article attacks ordinary individual bloggers in China (like those in the picture above) by implying, with no hard evidence, that they receive government cash to do what they do, which is to show China in a positive light.
Yet we all know for a fact that the BBC journalists making the accusation receive government cash month after month to do what they do, which is to present China in a negative light.
(The BBC’s annual budget is GBP3.5 billion.)
Staff in the BBC newsroom appear to have had their senses of irony surgically removed.
Outrageous! A government sponsored media outlet in China offers money to stringers, the BBC said
THEY PAY STRINGERS
Third, the BBC report reveals, shock horror, that CGTN, a government-financed news outlet, now offers CASH PAYMENTS to STRINGERS!
OMG!
The BBC writers mysteriously forgot to mention that the BBC, also a government-financed news outlet, also offers cash payments to stringers (much larger sums). They’ve been doing this for decades.
I know this for a fact because I was a stringer for the BBC for years.
At this point, I became seriously worried about the toddler-level lack of self-awareness in the BBC newsroom.
Jason Lightfoot is another independent blogger attacked for giving another side of the story
MOTIVATION MYSTERY
Fourth, the BBC writers say: “It’s unclear what drives the foreign vloggers – whether they believe in China’s messaging or are motivated by the lure of local fame and fortune instead.”
It’s only unclear what motivates them if you haven’t watched a single one of their videos. If you do, you can see they are ordinary people doing their best to provide desperately needed balance to the reports put out by dedicated Sinophobes like, well, BBC Newsroom staff, to pick a random example out of the air.
LET’S TALK ABOUT MONEY
Actually, let’s talk about money, something BBC journalists HATE to discuss.
The BBC’s hatchet job presents no evidence whatsoever that the Barretts, Barrie Jones, or Jason Lightfoot are paid a single yuan for having the opinions they have, or for choosing to show the positive side of life in China.
In contrast, BBC journalists have very good salaries for showing the negative side of life in China. I hope the bloggers attacked by BBC journalists Kerrie Allen and Sophie Williams realize they have the moral right to ask them how much the BBC pays them.
OVERPAID JOURNALISTS
I’ve worked at the BBC on and off for decades and I can tell you that some BBC journalists get paid A LOT. When BBC newsroom head James Harding left in 2018, his salary was GBP340,000 a year. Election specialist Jeremy Vine gets more than GBP600,000 a year.
Of course most people in the newsrooms get less than that, but at least 40 BBC journalists are paid more than the British Prime Minister’s GBP150,000 salary, a Press Gazette study showed in 2017. Political editor Laura Kuenssberg gets GBP200,000 to GBP250,000 a year, for example.
Barrie Jones upsets Western journalists by refusing the parrot the US State Department narrative.
FACTUAL INACCURACIES
The ultimate irony is that the unpaid amateurs in China regularly do a better job of covering China than the salaried professionals.
The same BBC article gives a good example of how history changes when that all-important nuance goes missing.
The BBC reporters say “Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was jailed for four years after making a number of vlogs during Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak.”
That’s not what really happened. Zhang Zhan was an anti-lockdown campaigner jailed for repeatedly trying to disrupt anti-covid measures. She herself said that she was not a journalist. Her own videos show clearly that she was the Chinese equivalent of the US anti-vaxxer brigade, refusing to follow health guidelines and creating deliberate public confrontations with people trying to follow the rules.
But that’s a nuanced version of her case, which you can only get if you live in this country and talk to people here — rather than attack from the other side of the planet.
THE 50-CENT ARMY
The BBC reporters also dredge up the old chestnut about the “50-cent army”, apparently unaware that most Chinese government clickers have been retired, simply because they are no longer needed. They’ve been replaced by real voices who speak out without pay.
An SCMP report about the rise of young people in China defending their community by commenting on social media, making the civil service pro-China “wumao” unnecessary
The so-called “wumao” are no longer necessary now that young people who are sick and tired of their community being misrepresented (groups like the Diba and the fangirls) are providing a robust defense of the country, far more creatively and without the need for payment.
They even create quite stylish memes (see below).
Above is a Diba meme from Weibo
The BBC report also omits the fact that it’s actually US intelligence groups such as the SR (military intelligence) and the CIA which flood social media columns with politically charged fake comments, often easy to spot.
There’s something creepy in the article too.
The “expert” quoted at length in the BBC report is Robert Potter, described as a “cybersecurity researcher”. The BBC omits a key fact that commentator Daniel Dumbrill yesterday highlighted. The top two names on Potter’s organization’s funding list are the State Department of the United States and the United States Department of Defence.
Yes. Exactly.
Think Mike Pompeo, CIA, Anthony Blinken.
The US State Department
So, to sum it up, honest, ordinary people who spend their own time and money offering useful additional views of life in China, from within China, are accused of receiving government cash by distant people who actually ARE receiving government salaries working for a government news outlet and showcasing the views of people paid by the US government.
NEED FOR INTEGRITY
This is why we need UNBIASED journalists covering China and it doesn’t matter if you have qualifications or not — what matters is that you have enough moral integrity to tell the truth: which is that the community we call China is really not that different from the other major communities around the world.
One last thing: From a professional journalistic point of view, there’s another issue with the BBC article.
Very similar articles have already appeared in other British news outlets. Here is an example below from the Times of London.
Same victims, same news angle, similar headlines, similar allegations, similar quotes.
Copying? Or co-ordination? Journalists don’t normally regurgitate their rivals’ old stories in this way.
There’s something very wrong going on here.
This reporter’s father was one of the first investigative journalists in Asia. He had a saying: “Everything is about something else.”
[4]Switching China for the US is a huge mistake
Australia has put itself at a stark disadvantage by casting its lot with the US instead of the trading partner that has underwritten its growth over decadesUS WRITER AND FORMER military analyst Daniel Ellsberg recently revealed that the Pentagon Papers, most of which were released in 1971, also confirmed that the United States contemplated using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland in 1958, to “defend” Jinmen, also known as Kinmen, an island about 10 kilometers from the mainland city of Xiamen, on behalf of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.We need to recall that China had no nuclear weapons at that time-only the US and the Soviet Union did.Ellsberg also said the administration of former US president Lyndon B. Johnson had covertly engaged in a range of extremely destructive attacks against the North Vietnamese forces and their supporters during the Vietnam War.‘NUKING’ A DEVELOPING COUNTRYSo the US, at least from a planning point of view, saw nothing fundamentally immoral about launching a nuclear attack on a huge developing country that possessed no such arms.This was a little over 10 years after seeing the horrific nuclear devastation in Japan. Fortunately, the plan was not implemented.
Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia: picture by Simon Rae/ Unsplash
AUSTRALIA AS COURIER
Even more startling, from an Australian point of view, is the recent disclosure that Australia, was, in 1964, given an extraordinary US-courier task.
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, has just revealed that in that year, Australian foreign minister Paul Hasluck demanded that the Australian Embassy in Moscow (where Clark worked) arrange a meeting with the new Soviet leadership.
In a meeting with premier Alexei Kosygin at which Clark was present, Hasluck carried a message from Washington, requesting that the USSR join the US in Vietnam to stop the “bad communists” in Beijing and North Vietnam to expand southwards.
Kosygin’s response was blunt. Moscow would do all it could to support the Vietnamese people in their struggle against US imperialism – and he wished the Chinese would do more to help.
After the commencement of China’s reform and opening-up policy in 1978, however, the US generally welcomed the rise of China.
‘a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country’
The US relationship with China has gone through a striking transformation over the past century.
Once, compassion was dominant. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck wrote The Good Earth over 90 years ago while living in Nanjing. The book helped shape a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country with a remarkable history.
TRADE BOOMED
During the period when the US welcomed the rise of China, immense business opportunities were recognized and trade boomed, generating academic, intellectual and general interest in China.
Now that China’s economy is around 70 percent of the size of the US economy in raw US dollar GDP terms, the US has made clear its huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China strikingly reduced and contained.
Thus the US mood has gone from being sorry for China, then helpful to China, to being stridently hostile to China.
‘China does not purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way’
Examined rationally, the strategic position for Australia is clear. It has a huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China maintained and enhanced.
China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. Before the recent intense downturn in the Australia-China relationship, trade figures show that Australia’s annual trade surplus with China had topped A$50 billion (US$36.9 billion).
From 1991 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Australia maintained the longest period of sustained economic growth ever seen within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. China, above all, has underwritten this outcome.
China does not (viewed outside of hawklike think tanks) purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way.
GUSTO AND NAIVETE
The US, on the other hand, does threaten Australia at a more menacing level: first, by encouraging intensified antipathy toward the trading partner who has done more to remake Australia in the last several decades than any other; and second, due to the serious hazard of being drawn into yet more US military adventures-possibly involving certain levels of forceful confrontation with China.
Australia’s relationship with China is very different from that of the US. The acute difficulty for Australia, however, is that Washington has been highly insistent that Australia join in the US-led Sino-containment project. Australia has taken up this damaging new brief with uncommon gusto and naivete.
Collaboration has been beneficial to both sides: Picture by Mimi Thian/ Unsplash
DEEP, LONG-TERM COST
Research by the Perth US-Asia Centre recently listed major income drops in trade with China, to Australia’s stark disadvantage, in areas including travel, education, coal, beef, wine, cotton and barley. In a number of cases, US exports to China have replaced those from Australia.
In 1964, Australia carried messages, like a tributary State, for the US. Then the dark clouds lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades and Australia prospered, independently, like never before.
The dark clouds had lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades, and Australia prospered, independently, like never before. Now those angry clouds are back, and Australia is once again being told, by its best geopolitical friend, what it must do. It must stand up for US interests, which are called shared values, and never mind the deep, long-term cost to Australia’s national interest.
It is an extraordinary state of affairs that calls for deep reflection and review.
MY DAUGHTER ONCE asked me if we were “pro-China”.“Sweetheart,” I replied. “We’re pro-everyone. We’re pro-China, pro-Hong Kong, pro-West, pro-East, pro-South and pro-space aliens, especially the latter.”Why would you be not pro any community or nationality? This is the age of diversity.My immediate family includes Americans, Chinese, Brits, and South Asians, and I have several friends whose bizarre behaviour strongly suggests off-planet origins—and the same surely goes for you too, dear reader.This is the age of diversity; picture by Naassom Azevedo/ UnsplashAt this point, someone will always lean into this type of conversation and say: “Ah, but are you pro-Beijing?”To realize how ridiculous this is, look a Swede in the eye and ask: “Are you pro-Stockholm?” Ask a Honduran: “What do you think of Tegucigalpa?” Or grab a passing Bolivian and ask: “Are youin favor of La Paz?”People around the world don’t generally ask that question.
What the pro-Beijing question really means is: “Do you support the Western media’s demonization of China?”
Now THAT I can instantly answer. Actually, no, I don’t. Criticising others can be okay, if done sensitively and with positive intentions. Demonizing people is not.
Many Hong Kong people are stunned at how so much of the world’s media has ended up like US Republican lawyer Gordon C. Chang, following a Western-penned hyper-critical narrative of China, and blithely dismissing any criticism of his constant de-humanizing of Chinese people. “Demons just hate being demonized,” he explains.
(Chang authored the 2001 book “The Coming Collapse of China”, possibly the worst-timed publication in literary history, coming on the eve of China’s steepest rise into accelerated development and increased community pride.)
But Chang’s hostile angle permeates too much of the international coverage of Hong Kong and mainland China today.
I’ve lost count of the number of Hong Kong people who have looked at the ultra-hostile BBC coverage of Hong Kong and said to me: “What happened to the BBC?” (I usually reply: “Maybe Gordon C. Chang is now chief news editor” and they sadly nod, finding it totally believable.)
Journalists shape their stories to reinforce a narrative: picture by Jorge Maya/ UnsplashMaybe it’s not the journalists’ fault. Andrew Cline, a professor who studies this subject, once said: “Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.”
Cline is right. We need to break free from that the narrow groupthink and let a little diversity into discussions.
People are thinking for themselves; picture by Jimmy Chan/ Pexels
What if. . . China wasn’t a giant gulag at all, but a low-crime society which is thriving at astonishing rates?
What if. . . Hong Kong’s security laws were demonstrably less draconian than those of the countries criticizing them?
What if. . . the hundreds of millions of dollars that America spends to try to impose its system of governance on Asia is actually money that would be better spent on other things?
What if. . . China was communist in name, but actually demonstrated a really interesting mixture of good bits of capitalism and socialism in practice?
I have discovered, to my delight, that the vast majority of ordinary people are completely open to such notions. But Western journalists less so. How can a tiny group of Hong Kong people battle global media behemoths?
Clearly we can’t. But I’m not sure we have to fight them. Journalists are not bad people. There are many good ones among us. I expect. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. Surely!
And those of us who live in China can gently, perhaps, encourage them to see the other side of the story, by sharing stories of Chinese culture, Chinese business and just personal stories of Chinese people being human.
…
In directly related news, the Friday project has been running for a couple of weeks and response has been fantastic. More than a million people tuned into our conference, and the vast majority of people who responded to our articles have been positive. Only a small portion made a response which can be summed up in four words: “Run! Get the Labels!”
To people who throw the label “pro-China” at us as if it was an accusation, I’ll simply give the same answer I gave my daughter.
Yes, we are pro-China. We are pro-humans, sweetheart. And the people of China are humans too, whatever Gordon C. Chang says.
* * *
Conclusion
Just five stories out of Hong Kong. While you might not be getting any daily news reports about this regions except for the “evil communists of China”, the tone of the articles and the over all attitude of their views of America, the UK and Australia should tell you volumes. Please keep this in mind was the next six months advance and “play out”.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Traffic on Interstate 95 is diverted in the area of an hours long standoff with a group of armed men that partially shut down the highway, Saturday, July 3, 2021, in Wakefield, Mass. Massachusetts state police say nine suspects have been taken into custody. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
It’s one day after the fourth of July, 2021.
I woke up this morning and scanned my news feeds. I often just look at the titles. Taking the time to read the content is useless, as most have zero content of worth.
And when I read the content, it was clear that they were avoiding the fact that these were all urban African-american militants who are traipsing in the Massachusetts countryside far from their homes. In fact, they were “practicing maneuvers” around white-dominated communities and villages.
I wonder why?
Why would they do that?
When interviewed and interrogated by the police, they claimed that they were “Moors”.
At least some of the suspects were clad in military-style gear with long guns and pistols, Mass State Police Col. Christopher Mason said. He added that they were headed to Maine from Rhode Island for “training.”
“You can imagine 11 armed individuals standing with long guns slung on an interstate highway at 2 in the morning certainly raises concerns and is not consistent with the firearms laws that we have in Massachusetts,” Mason said.
In a video posted to social media Saturday morning, a man who did not give his name, but said he was from a group called Rise of the Moors, broadcast from Interstate 95 in Wakefield near exit 57.
“We are not anti-government. We are not anti-police, we are not sovereign citizens, we’re not Black identity extremists,” said the man who appeared to be wearing military-style equipment. “As specified multiple times to the police that we are abiding by the peaceful journey laws of the United States.”
The website for the group says they are “Moorish Americans dedicated to educating new Moors and influencing our Elders.”
Police work on in the area of an hours long standoff with a group of armed men that partially shut down interstate 95, Saturday, July 3, 2021, in Wakefield, Mass. Massachusetts state police say nine suspects have been taken into custody. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
The interesting aspects about this entire event are what is not well reported…
These ethnic individuals are not from the region that they were found.
The region where they targeted was disarmed by very strict anti-gun and anti-weapon legislation, thus leaving most residents unable to defend themselves.
The “long arms” were (what would otherwise be reported as) “assault weapons”.
Everyone wore either camouflage clothing, military attire, or black colored garb.
Curious.
I wonder what this means…
…hum?
What were these people doing outside of the quiet rural community of Wakefield, Massachusetts?
Well,
We know that this is not a “new” event.
Coming to rural America.
Meanwhile, let’s see what some of the more learned people on the planet has to say about the current state of American politics and the changes going on in America. And this is a pretty good write up…
Silicon Valley has a monopoly of social capital now. Every call, every text message, and every email is theirs to use as they see fit. This allows them to derive information about the public and use it for financial and political advantage. Tucker Carlson worries about the NSA when he volunteers to carry around a tracking device that records his every movement for the benefit of the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
The great class struggle among white people has also stopped making sense. The old left-right conflict of the prior era manifested itself as a battle between the working and upper classes. The white middle class in America, for example, operated as a ballast and referee. Both sides of the political class courted them in elections, while making promises to their base in the other classes.
The great divide in this age is demographics. America is increasingly nonwhite and headed for majority-minority status. The politics reflected the old demographics, which was 80% white. Fretting over minority rights, for example, makes no sense in a world where everyone is a minority. It makes even less sense when a unique minority is the ruling elite and has total control of the institutions.
The ruling elite has evolved a colonial mentality in response to the crisis, but white people are increasingly embracing demographic reality. The uproar over critical race theory is an omen of what is to come. This intermediate conflict is between a ruling class that thinks it can keep feeding the alligator, hoping to be eaten last, and a public that has no desire to be erased from the book of life. Demographic reality is the new class struggle.
This July 4th, America finds itself in the middle of a great interregnum, a transition period between the old order and the new order. The reason the buildings that symbolize the political institutions of America remain behind layers of razor-wire fencing and armed guards is not a fear of insurrectionist soccer moms. Those barriers exist as a bulwark against the inevitable, protecting an ossified and obsolete political elite along with the political system that maintains them.
Predicting the future is always a mug’s game. Just as our frozen lefty would be stunned to see how history unfolded, we will be shocked to see what comes after this great interregnum. Therein lies the reason to celebrate. The current crisis environment is a transitory state. It cannot last and everything that cannot last eventually comes to an end, usually sooner than anyone expects.
Well everyone is trying to understand
The USA is in a mess, and everyone is trying to grasp aspects of it in handfuls that they can understand. All the time they failure to see the big picture. Things do not happen in isolation. An event here, or an event there, are aspects of a much larger plan. Whether intended or not.
Intellectuals try to intellectualize it. Patriots try to look at it from a revolutionary angle, and socialists try to analysis the functional vectors of group behaviors.
Hey!
Wake up folks. The dinner is almost ready. The bridge is wobbling and the cables are about to snap. The cattle are restless and the fence is about to go down.
An easily ignored aspect of the Tucker Carlson spying story is just how ham-fisted this caper was executed, regardless of the reason. Carlson is a relentless critic of the regime, but his audience is relative tiny. His average total audience is roughly 3 million people per night. Even if every night is a new crowd, that is an audience of 15 million in a country of 330 million people. He may be the biggest name in cable news, but the reality is, cable news is a low impact medium.
This was always the lesson of the Trump phenomenon. The entirety of the mass media, including the so-called conservatives, aligned against Trump but he was able to win the nomination and the general election. These are people who were sure they were the king makers in national politics. This TV carny comes along and walks right through their lines as if they were not there. Then he turned them into objects of ridicule and mockery by calling them childish names.
If the intelligence agencies were what they imagine themselves to be, they would see that Tucker is never going to be much of a problem. They could just ignore him, like most everyone does, or they could use him. Carlson is one of the few serious people on television, but he is still on TV. He wants ratings, so a shrewd intel operative could feed him some juicy tidbits that serve the interests of the regime. Instead, they are in a petty spat and making him the sympathetic victim.
These sorts of thumbless capers raise an important issue. Our managerial elite is rapidly getting dumber. This is plainly obvious in the military side. Sure, rural peasants armed with Russian surplus were able to defeat the US army in the 1960’s, but that theater negated the primary American advantage at the time. Armor and advanced transport are useless in a jungle. Air dominance is not terribly effective against guerilla tactics in urban and jungle conditions.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military could exploit every technological advantage against a poorly equipped and trained opponent. In Afghanistan, the US faced off against a Bronze Age opponent. After two decades the white flag has gone up and the Taliban will take over this autumn. In Iraq, a ragtag force of insurgents led by a cleric came close to defeating the US army. The final peace looked more like a concession by the US, as Iraq is now an Iranian client.
The gross incompetency of the military is not unique. The entire managerial class is suffering from a rapid decline in intelligence. The truth is the system evolved for an adult population of the last century. It reflected the demographics of the population as a whole, but also the demographics of the ruling class. Over the last couple of generations, the people taking up positions in the system are significantly dumber, reflecting the changing demographics of the country.
This IQ decline will only become more acute in the next decade. The great Baby Boomer retirement will hit the civil service harder than the dreaded private sector, because the civil service is much older. The average age of the private workforce is roughly 35, depending upon who is doing the measuring. Similarly, the average age of the government workforce is 50. The leadership class is even older. In other words, the people running the system are geezers, not long for the world.
This is most stark in politics. Joe Biden is so old he has been in office longer than most people have been alive. The leadership of both parties is close behind. Pelosi, Schumer, McCarthy, Hoyer and McConnel reflect the sensibilities and the mating decisions of the disappearing past. Their replacements, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Tim Scott, and so on, reflect the rapidly approaching future. Repeat this throughout the civil service and you can see the problem. The kakistocracy is real.
This decline in IQ is evident in the current upheaval. The great Progressive awakening of the 1950’s and 1960’s was driven by idealism. They really thought they were going to create a better world. It was also driven by the big change in the ruling class. Jews had taken up positions in the post-war ruling elite. They were making their mark by leading many of the cultural revolutions, like civil rights. Self-interest played a role, but social justice has always been a part of the Jewish cultural outlook.
Today, the revolts we see look like a cargo cult. They are reenactors playing parts they heard about in school. They think if they can replay the events of the past, the past will come alive and the great do-over begins. They are led by a carnival of simpletons and lunatics who mostly like smashing things and making noise. Antifa and BLM are the short bus passengers in the story of street activism. None of what we are seeing makes any sense or has any point. It is just mayhem for the sake of it.
The institutions of a society are the tools of the people running the society, designed for their use over the course of time. The institutions of America were made for people a full standard deviation smarter than today’s rulers. Those tools were also created with certain cultural assumptions missing from the current class. The next generation of rulers are the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey compared to the men who created the tools used to run the empire.
It will not end well.
Conclusion
Obviously some “Moors” are emboldened to reconnoiter the defenselessness communities of wealthy Massachusetts, while the intellectual class are busy trying to intellectualize the turmoil inside of the United States fiasco.
Why?
What gave them the idea that they could do this?
What the FUCK is going on?
I can tell you all ONE THING. This kind of activity would NEVER be tolerated in China, and it would be taken cared of immediately and absolutely. The fact that the United States is unable to do anything… shows exactly what a huge, colossal, and absolute failure the nation it; the leadership is; and the system is. There is only one solution remaining…
Allow it to collapse.
Let the rot fester, then purge it completely.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The Russians are an interesting people. They are hardy, tough, rough-around-the-edges, and a hoot! to be around.
The Chinese consider them to be similar to Chinese, only a bit rough-and-tumble. You know, like your drunk crazy uncle, when he was caught having sex with the milk-maid inside the outhouse.
Russians are a tough hardy folk.
Here’s an interesting article that I pulled from a Russian resource.
On the internet is a lot of bullshit. many of State sponsored, and much of it just biases and opinions that you read and either agree to, or are repelled by.
What I want to do is throw this article out to the MM readership. And knowing that the likelihood of the article being false, or misleading is high, let’s consider instead the audience reactions to the article. Because this article is very, very anti-American.
Yet, this is a very popular article in both Russia and (apparently now) in China. Remember and keep in mind that Russia is a land of hardy and tough people. They do not tolerate weakness.
Russian women are a force to be reckoned with.
Perhaps we can learn something from the audience reactions to it.
Key points
Congress would never permit American government agencies outside of the State Department to collaborate with China in any way. This is codified into law. Not just one law, but a host of laws, and executive orders. So this article is just wishful thinking from our Russian friends.
Bilateralcooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations is currently restrictedbytheso-called Wolf Amendment, a provision first added to a NASAspendingbillin 2011 by then-U. S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to seek congressional approval for any bilateral collaboration with Chineseentities.NASA’s China exclusion could mean missed opportunity for Mars InSight
Well, that being said, there is a chance.
So maybe, just maybe, there is some truth to this article.
Interested American scientists and State Department officials might want to be able to get up front and close to the Chinese to observe what they are doing first hand. What better way to do this then to participate jointly in scientific activities.
While collaboration with China is not entirely prohibited, NASA would need to notify Congress in advance and provide certification that there are no risks for a specific engagement. NASA and China were able to discuss the potential for the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to monitor the landing of China’s Chang’e-4on the lunar far side in early 2019. The two sides also occasionally meet for the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue. A third and most recent such meeting washeld in Beijing in 2017 while a fourth was delayed partly by the COVID-19 outbreak. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is involved in Tianwen-1 science payloads and spacecraft integration, had not responded by press time to a request for comment on the possibility of coordination or release of information.
The effective ban of bilateral activities applies only to NASA, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Space Council. Scientists at other U.S. institutions can, for example, request access to China’s newly acquired lunar samples by following procedures announced in January by the China National Space Administration, a month after Chang’e-5 delivered the goods to Earth. There is no platform yet for sharing Tianwen-1 mission data, but conversations between Chinese and non-NASA scientists could take place, though passing along sensitive information relating to missions may not be straightforward.
NASA’s China exclusion could mean missed opportunity for Mars InSight
Do these Russians look like they are open to new trans-gender policies?
Found here, and all credit to the author, and the same usual disclaimers. Translated from Russian. If you can read Cyrillicscriptyou might be best served to read the article in it’s original form.
If it is true…
.
The Chinese didn’t let the Yankees into their space station? Not a fact. But-the truth
The Chinese have declared Americans undesirable elements on board their orbiting space station. But this news is too … juicy to give her complete confidence. What’s the real deal?
Now, if only you could also read it, so to speak, in the original source…
Unfortunately, my mother did not say to me as a child: “Learn Chinese, my son.” And that’s why I can’t check out the great news that ran all over the Internet today.
But the news is worth posting without checking it.
A hieroglyphic print on a yankee’s ass
Here’s the news. An American application to participate in scientific work on board the new Chinese Tiangong space station was rejected by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA).
The core module.
A special flavor of this information is given by the addition that
"invitations to scientific cooperation on the Chinese orbital station were received by 17 countries, including Russia," and "an official request from the United States was refused due to non-compliance with standards in terms of scientific value and technology."
If there is not enough color, then the kind authors of the message added more:
"[Russia] has been granted the right to occupy a separate compartment or attach its own module to the Chinese station."
Cool, classic work!
If everything is not so in life, then it is still the same in the current information war as launching an Iskander missile at an enemy military airfield. You can still see the classic caricature of a Yankee, wiry as a crane, falling screaming out of the open hatch of the Tiangong station. And on the most elongated part of his uniform trousers of olive color – a print of the sole with the inscription开开开.
Why do you doubt that the news is consistent with the facts? First of all, it’s too pretty to be true. The truth is usually angular and unfriendly, like a subway passenger at 6 am. So you always have to fight for it. And here it appears in this form, even if you cancel the war – you will not force anyone to go to a military trick.
The Chinese Space Station.
Secondly, the Chinese resource Baijiahao published this information. And this is not some traditional media with traditional ideas about the limits of what is allowed in the handling of information, but just a free Internet platform. Something like the Chinese Yandex.Zen. Because we know that our Yandex.Zen is charming for its variety of topics and their freedom, but at the same time for the freedom of their interpretation by the authors, and in the Chinese version it would be worth going deeper into the links.
But my mother sent me to a German school…
No confirmations…
Life is usually more cruel than our mothers, so at her behest, the minted perfection of German had to be supplemented with the sour porridge of English. And the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) just have a website in English.
But even here, an ambush was waiting: the last message mentioning the American aerospace agency NASA was dated there on November 14, 2014. And it said only that Director Wang Zhaoyao had a conversation with NASA Chief Charles Bolden.
A search for the word USA gave generally mocking results: the second space power of the planet was last mentioned in 2011, and the latest news, where these three letters would stand, fell on January 2020. And then there it was said about the thousand-year dream of the Chinese people about flying into space – thousand-year, etc.
The US agency NASA also did not post anything fresh about its Chinese colleagues on its website. Well, they’re shy, maybe…
I went through the websites of news agencies around the world. The most reliable – TASS-about the described demarche of the Chinese was silent. RIA Novosti published the news that China plans to launch a probe in 2030 to collect samples from Mars. That’s all.
Omniscient English Reuters as top news issues a howl that
Russian forces reportedly fire warning shots at British destroyer in Black Sea.
Well, of course: a peaceful British destroyer (aka fighter, aka, politely, destroyer) entered Russian waters in the Black Sea, and then it was preemptively fired at by evil Russians from a warship, and the plane dropped four high-explosive fragmentation bombs as a warning on the path of the British Royal Navy destroyer. And what right did they have? – after all, the West still insists that the Crimean Peninsula is Ukrainian territory.
The Americans are also silent about their fiasco with the Chinese, as if it’s not written on their trousers in fiery letters: 离开开.
The Chinese really don’t need Americans
So what? Let’s assume that nothing happened? Someone posted unverified information, or even joked at all, threw a fake on the Network-and the province went to write! Our province. Because it’s nice?
It’s not that simple.
The Chinese really don’t expect Americans as partners in space exploration. First, because the Yankees are too much for them, and the Han Chinese can’t give them anything more than what Russia has already given them. Secondly, because the Americans still do not know how to build space stations, and the entire ISS, including the American segment, is still a cast of Russian modules. The ISS, we recall, began with the Russian module, which was bought by the Americans and called its own.
The competencies of manned cosmonautics are much more complex than the technologies of automatic cosmonautics. And if in the latter the Americans still have no equal (although the same Chinese are catching up with them at a gallop), then in the first only three countries were able to achieve something on their own equipment-Russia (in the incarnation of the USSR and in the current one), the United States (orbital ships) and China. Which builds its space technology on the platform of Russian space technology. Sometimes on a platform so close that tears of emotion drop by themselves.
The Chinese Space Station.
And third, the Chinese don’t need the Americans in space because China (thank Confucius) has enough money for its own space programs.
And they don’t need to” give ” the Yankees their modules and their technologies, their medical developments and even bathrooms to finance their projects and their research.
They don’t even need to take Americans to the ISS to use this two-kopeck cab to pay for a place on the station for their cosmonaut.
So the Chinese can afford to leave the тав开开 brand on the American ass. But the Russian letters WENT OVER there do not have to wait…
A typical Russian party.
Some thoughts
The worst kind of propaganda, or the worst kind of echo chamber, are those that reference what we want to believe. Certainly America is hated all over the world, and if you thought that the nation was despised after eight years under the Bush Military Campaigns, you haven’t seen anything yet. Obama started to change that perception, and then Trump drove the perception right into the ground.
Pretty much, the rest of the world considers the United States to be a “laughing stock”.
So, I don’t want anyone reading this to believe it. I don’t. I think that it is a “wet dream” by some folk in Russia.
The Russians have ZERO respect for Americans, and most certainly what American culture is. Maybe I’ll go as far to say that they consider it to be evil. And you can see this disrespect in their responses to news articles. Much like this one.
Yet, both China and Russia have similar cultures.
Both China and Russia have a “bride price” if you want to marry a girl. Bride price, also known as bride wealth, bride token, is an amount of money or property or wealth paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. This tradition is followed by many cultures.
This is a very interesting subject.
Though I must admit that “Bride Price” varies from region to region in China. In Wenzhou, where I met my wife, the bride price was to buy a house for her parents. Most others throw in a high-end luxury automobile, and a full set of furniture as well. But since I am a foreigner, they pretty much accepted the fact that I was an outsider that did not understand the rules. (Phew!)
There are regions, such as Guangzhou that has no bride price at all. Lucky them. But there are also other tradeoffs that you have to contend with.
Russian “Bride Prices” are much more reasonable. As this lady here suggests…
Gilyana Bugurova, 23 years old. Presently a student of the Academy of Law, Ketchenery village, Kalmykia. She comes from a rural village, and a modest family.Bride wealth: six boxes of vodka, one box of cognac, two pieces of chintz, a set of headscarves, a box of sweets, a box of cookies, a box of sweet pastry, a boiled sheep, a living sheep with a ribbon.
Comparisons
Both Russia and China are very similar to each other. America and the West seem to be the outliers.
Just by looking at the most basic and crude comparison above, you can see the Resentment and disgust that the Russians must have for the new progressive America. China, on the other hand, is like the little boy (or girl) who discovers that the Easter Bunny was a made up fantasy.
Russia is a tough land. A cold land. A rugged land, and the people show it.
Russians having fun.
China is a land full of hard working folk that study hard. They, work hard, play hard and strive, and strive to become better and better.
The Chinese work insanely hard, but when it is all done and finished, they party like it’s 1999!
America is a land, that has grown fat and dumb. The leaders have become so isolated from the “rabble” that they no longer resemble humans, but have become something else entirely.
America is an affluent nation. Most Americans do not need to work. So they can pursue what ever lifestyle they desire.
And so the Russians tend to make fun of Americans.
But back to the Space Station…
Even if the American government gave the “A-Ok” to work with the Chinese Space Exploration Agencies, it’s unlikely that China would consider it. They consider America to be a very bad, spoiled child, very unreliable, dangerous, and simply not within the core desires, or needs for the Chinese people.
Keep in mind what I stated earlier…
Congress would never permit American government agencies outside of the State Department to collaborate with China in any way. This is codified into law. Not just one law, but a host of laws, and executive orders. So this article is just wishful thinking from our Russian friends.
I love space, and space exploration, and all sorts of things related to extraterrestrials and so on and so forth. But the entire United States today is just a massive, colossal fuck-up that’s it’s really not worth bothering commenting on.
Consider this…
NASA shifts goal from space exploration to space diversity
NASA has been a driving force of scientific innovation and advancement ever since its creation in the 1950s.
After more than six decades of space exploration, you’d think NASA would be an organization free of petty politics and idiotic logic.
As an agency dedicated to the future, for example, one might imagine that NASA’s top priority would be hiring the brightest, most talented people they can find, irrespective of irrelevant characteristics like skin color, gender, or sexual orientation.
Sadly this is not the case.
Science is once again taking a back seat with the agency’s “Artemis Project,” whose goal is “to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.”
Again, it seems like NASA wouldn’t notice or care what’s swinging (or not swinging) between someone’s legs.
If the entire crew of the next voyage happens to consist exclusively of people who identify as seedless watermelons, because those are the most qualified individuals for the mission, then it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t even make the news.
But instead they’re going to spend $86 billion of taxpayer money to show the world how woke they are.
Click here to read the full story.
And somehow, I am supposed to believe that America is serious about space, technology and space exploration?
Now, couple that with the on-going “any day now the American government is going to release the truth about UFO’s”. Oh, brother!
Well…
The narrative began, and then got hijacked by the neocon military-industrial mafia and got twisted to “the Chinese have advanced military technology! We need billions of dollars to catch up!”.
Well, let’s just kind of sit back and turn off the “news”. Both from the USA, and from Russia.
America is Bat-Shit Crazy!
I am absolutely convinced that the United States today is bat-shit crazy and I really don’t need any further confirmation of it. They are, and while there are many, many, MANY good and decent folk in the United States, the entire system si so broken and such a mess that it’s just a useless pursuit trying to sort it all out. It’s like trying to clean an apartment occupied by a slob.
Notice the lack of ashtrays, the amazing dependence on soda pop, and the poor computer monitor discipline.
Messy Apartment 3
Yuuuuck! This bathroom is horrid.
But at least they have a cat.
But the poor thing doesn’t have a place to go when it needs to take a litter-box break. Ugh!
Living room.
A tenant in a north Houston apartment complex has an overdue payment for more than a month.
No one can get in touch with her.
Eventually the bookkeeper goes inside to leave a note. And finds . . .
Mistreatment of the computer.
The photographer wrote:
We cannot get ahold of her, there is still 20% of the residents out from the hurricane. My manager is FREAKING out.
The pictures don’t show the amount of FLEAS inside I’m STILL scratching
Terrible keyboard discipline.
The tenant’s two cats have been found, safe with a neighbor.
Living room sofa. Why no ashtrays?
Is it just a horrible mess?
Or something . . . more?
Lou Minatti decides:
I am so proud that a Houstonian has created such a masterpiece! The way the cigarette butts are arranged… it’s almost like performance art.
Hey! Well at least the gal used one of my products. Yup! MM designed that clothes iron. Right there on the ironing board. Designed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and manufactured in the tiny Town of Coushatta – Louisiana.
Anyways…
You get the idea.
In my mind, I think that this person who lives in this apartment, or who did. I would imagine that they were evicted, were representative of the kinds of people (citizens) that the United States government nurtures.
And thus…
…they are the true and real face of the United States today.
And boy, oh, boy. In my mind this snapshot of a Houston, Texas apartment is what the United States government has honestly become. I just wish that Americans can see what I see, and what the rest of the world sees. I almost wish that there was a set of eyeglasses that you could put on and where you could see the American oligarchy for what it actually is.
They Live.
And while they might appear on the surface to resemble polished, handsome and attractive people, with sensible demeanor, polite mannerisms, and a calm wisdom, they are truthfully, anything but that.
They are not what they appear to be.
The real leadership behind the smiles and masks; they are humans who have evolved into something else. And their actual appearance is recognizable to anyone WHO IS NOT READING THE AMERICAN MEDIA.
I need a drink.
Do you want proof?
This just came on my desk.
Congressman: Can we alter the moon’s orbit for climate change?
In a recent webcam Congressional hearing, Texas Rep Louie Gohmert asked an associate deputy chief of the Forest Service if her agency could alter the moon’s orbit to address climate change.
Gohmert said:
"I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they've found that the moon's orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth's orbit around the sun... [I]s there anything that the National Forest Service or [Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the sun?"
She smiled and politely said, “I would have to follow up with you on that one Mr. Gohmert.”
She was holding back laughter, but Gohmert was dead serious. He responded, “Well, if you figure out a way that you in the Forest Service could make that change, I'd like to know.”
Click here to see the video.
Like I said.
“Bat-shit crazy”.
Here he is.
Texas Rep Louie Gohmert.
Conclusion
The future of the world will not be determined by America, the West, or the G7 nations. They are “has beens”, and are incapable of reason. It will be determined by Asia.
The only way that American can alter this vector is to engage in a full-scale nuclear war against Asia, and perhaps that’s exactly what they are trying to do. But it will not succeed.
So do not worry about it.
The future is becoming more and more clear with each passing day. Continue to protect your personal life. Make sure that you run your affirmation prayers, and make sure that they protect you and your loved ones from any strange behaviors on the part of the out of control American empire.
There’s a future ahead. By being aware of what’s going on the the rest of the world we can determine what our part in that world will be.
Keep focused.
Be the Rufus.
Our relationships with others will make our affirmations manifest. Nurture them. Protect them. become a meaningful person in your small group of friends and family.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
One of the things that I have been musing about lately is blueberry muffins. You see, muffins just aren’t all that common in China, and when you find them, they are really over priced and part of a dessert menu that is part of a Starbucks franchise, or similar venue. I miss them. I miss the hot piping interior, the explosion of blueberry flavor when you bit into them, and that nice pad of salted butter that melts on the top of them.
They used to be quite common in diners. Almost as common as pies.
Blueberry muffins in automats
But my best memories about muffins come from those automats that my family used to frequent when I was a boy. (Of course in those world-lines automats were much more common than what you find here. Apparently, on this world-line path, automats died out in the 1940’s.) Anyways, my father would give me a quarter and I would get up from the table and go to the little window with a muffin in it. I’d plop the quarter in the slot, and the door would spring open, and out I would take the muffin on the heavy white ceramic plate.
My memories of this are all very clear. And I well remember us eating as a family at the tables. Of course my father would be having a coffee and reading a newspaper. My mother was always fussing over us kids, and generally attending to my younger brother and sisters. I, being the oldest, was supposed to be more mature and more responsible.
Meh.
Blueberry muffins in Salem, Massachusetts
And while those memories are true treasures for me, they are a little dated in that my best muffin experience that I ever had did not occur in an automat. It occurred in a wharf coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts. It was a dark and stormy night and I was riding my motorcycle with a girl, and we pulled into the complex. It was the late 1970’s, and I was still in university.
The world outside was but sheets of rain, dull blues and greys, a howling wind and drops of rain that stung when they hit you.
But through the windows of the coffee house was inviting warmth, a pleasant and cozy atmosphere, and a calming shelter against the storm. When the waitress brought out the blueberry muffin, it was fresh, hot and toasty, and had two pads of butter on the plate that I dutifully added on top. You could see the whiffs of steam rising up off the muffin, and they formed strings next to the the hot steamy fragrant coffee that sat besides it.
A blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee.
Personally, I don’t think that many people appreciate blueberry muffins. It’s sort of the “bad boy” of the muffin family, and is great overshadowed by it’s more popular cousins; the chocolate and the cranberry muffins.
But the point behind this is the little coffee house was a unique moment, a unique place, in a unique time, while a raging storm crashed and banged outside. And while we, my girlfriend and myself, were grateful for the shelter from the storm, the workers were oblivious to it. They had spent all day inside. Sure they knew that there was a storm outside, but they were detached from it. It was remote from their direct and personal experience. They knew about it, but they didn’t appreciate the environment like we outsiders did.
It was almost like they were in their own little protective bubble; a safe world, where they could live, work and exist free of the tumult outside.
Like a hot house.
Hot Houses
A hot house is a conservatory where flowers and plants are grown under controlled conditions. The plants live their entire lives inside that environment. They are comfortable there and there is no reason to be concerned about what happens outside of the walls of the conservatory.
I once visited the oldest conservatory in Connecticut, and it was awesome. It was over 200 years old and had many common plants that we consider to be weeds and plants of no consequence in it. But those “weeds” once they turn 200 years old become these amazing tangled plants with thick and interesting trunks, cool branches, and amazing clusters of leaves.
It was awesome. Absolutely awesome.
There’s a conservatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that is enormous and beautiful as well. But it isn’t nearly as old. And so while it is a pleasure to go from room to room and experience the different kinds of plants and flowers, it’s really the very ancient hot houses that are amazing. It’s really something else to see what happens when plants live within these stable and sheltered environments for really long periods of time.
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens …
What I remember the most about my trip to the conservatory in Connecticut, was not simply the cool plants, and the nooks and crannies filled with the most curious of antiquated Bric-a-brac. But it was the very cool diner that we visited on the trip back home.
A very cool diner
Long time MM readers will appreciate my love of diners and local regional stories.
I will never forget that diner. Though I have forgotten it’s name, and location. They had a “blue plate special”. And you know, I am always one for a good “blue plate special”. You know, is it just me, or I’ve never had a “blue plate special” on a blue plate. It’s one of those head scratchers.
Anyways, I had a “blue plate special”. It was a hot pastrami sandwich with cheese, fully “dressed” with a side of coleslaw and a side of “longhorn” fires covered (smothered) in beef gravy. Now, I don’t know why they called the fries “longhorn fries. Basically, they were huge thick french fries. Perhaps three times the width of a regular french fry. Oh, with a iced tea or Coke.
And I, of course enjoyed every morsel of it.
It looked a little bit like this…
A thickly piled sandwich of meat (whether beef or pastrami) with fries all slathered in gravy.
I do believe that one of the lest appreciated characteristics of America is it’s diners. A diner is the lunch counter for the American work force. And in the days when American worked in factories, often they would get a “home cooked” (style) of meal at a diner. This was always preferable to the latest in fast food fare.
Diners are great.
A typical diner interior.
And while I was a munching on my meal, I contemplated the conservatory; the “hot house” that I had just visited. For the plants were unlike anything outside. These plants were not only gorgeous, but huge.
Without the need to deal with weather changes, the encroachment of man, pesticides, and strip mining, they were able to thrive and grow in ways that was impossible in the real, actual environment.
Echo Chambers
We often talk about people being in an “echo chamber”. That is that they surround themselves with like-minded people who echo each other’s points of view. And then, over time, without getting any new ideas, their points of view become stale and more outlandish over time. To a person outside that “echo chamber” they seem crazy, odd, distorted, and mentally deranged.
Indiscussions of news media, an echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.
By participating in an echo chamber, people are able to seek out information that reinforces their existing views without encountering opposing views, potentially resulting in an unintended exercise in confirmation bias.
Echo chambers may increase social and political polarization and extremism.
The term is a metaphor based on an acoustic echo chamber, in which sounds reverberate in a hollow enclosure.
Another emerging term for this echoing and homogenizing effect within social media communities on the Internet is cultural tribalism.
Many scholars note the effects that echo chambers can have on citizens' stances and viewpoints, and specifically implications has for politics.
-Echo Chamber Wikipedia
I would imagine that were the plants to chat with each other inside the “Hot House”, that they would be unaware that they were within an “echo chamber”. And as long as the walls of the conservatory were solid and maintained, they were safe, secure, and could live their lives and prosper. They would grow to become huge, beautiful and magnificent.
The following is a reasonably decent article.
Of course all credit to the author, note that it was reprinted as found, but with slight editing to fit this venue.
While you are reading it, maybe you might want to fix yourself a “Dagwood sandwich” and munch while absorbing the content.
The sales pitch for the American political system is that it is a robust debate between two distinct political parties. The Republicans and Democrats are coalitions of interests opposed to one another. The groups that make up each party are held together by a shared ideological outlook. The Republicans are the conservative party, and the Democrats are the liberal party. The political process adjudicates the disputes between the parties over public policy and the result is a compromise.
In reality, America is a one party system.
It has been since Gettysburg.
The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes.
The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.
As for those two ideologies, they are just two faces of a single ruling class ideology that is something like a religion now.
There is left-liberalism and there is right-liberalism held together by a common moral framework.
Like the old Bolsheviks, the left side of the American ideology is maximalist and radical. It wants to usher in the promises of the revolution right now.
The right side is more cautious, preferring an evolutionary approach to ushering in the promised utopia.
Unlike the old communists, the American ideology has always existed in a popular political system, so it is built to sell itself to the public.
The main role of the right-liberals is to protect the left-liberals from themselves. They function as barrier between the tenets of the one true faith and any questioning of the faith. The left side is the heart of the beast, driving the agenda and pushing society along from one fad to the next, always chasing the avatar of egalitarian paradise.
This arrangement has worked amazingly well.
Perhaps too well.
It has been over a century since there has been a threat to the system. Anarchists and communists at the start of the last century started to get some traction, but they were never really a threat to the basic arrangements. Otherwise, it has been smooth sailing for the uniparty system for generations.
The left-liberals are free to dream up new social innovations without being disturbed and the right stands quietly at guard.
The trouble is the party is looking like a freak show inside a hot house.
For example, the Air Force now has drag shows to boost morale. To normal people, this is completely nuts (pun intended), but to the people in charge it is perfectly normal. In fact, they think it is bizarre that anyone would question it. They are not entirely wrong, as the people who arranged it will never be pressed on it. The politicians all agree that drag queens are who we are now, and the press echoes the sentiment.
Where the ruling orthodoxy finds itself is in a place where there is never a need to explain themselves and defend their positions.
The right-liberals never challenge the left-liberals on orthodoxy.
Both sides just put on shows where they pretend to disagree, but then kick back together after the show to laugh about it. The right-liberals have insulated themselves from defending their position. They tell themselves that they are simply too good to discuss these things with their critics.
The folks at the Daily Wire are supposed to be the smart kids of conservatism, but they spend their days making sure the hothouse is airtight.
Ben Shapiro’s one venture outside the tightly controlled environment of his life ended in disaster. Ever since that public relations debacle his people have made sure that no one can utter a discouraging word in his presence. In fact, that whole scene has become a closed shop, never interacting with anyone outside their hive.
It is not just the pundits who have become hot house flowers.
Look at what happens to the military leaders when they go before Congress. This guy went before Congress and told one whopper after another. To outsiders, he looks like a complete fool, but inside that room he is just par for the course. Anyone reading this could have wrecked him with a few simple questions, but no one in the room has the intelligence or the temperament to question anything.
This is the motivation behind the mass censorship and de-platforming.
The people inside the political system are incapable of defending or even discussing their positions and they live in fear of having to do it. It is not so much that the critics have great arguments or have superior debating skills. That is a silly conceit. It is simply that the people outside the system, the dissidents, are comfortable defending their positions and discussing them in public. They can take a punch.
This underlying sense of weakness is probably what lies behind the persecution of the January protestors. January 6th, from the perspective of the ruling class, was an emperor has no clothes moment. The torture and torment of the protestors is as much about reassuring themselves that they are tough and in charge as it is about sending a message to the Dirt People. The ruling class revealed themselves to be cowards and now they are lashing out in a fit of petty spite.
All ruling elites have an abundance of sissies and ridiculous people.
They are the entertainment and decoration for the serious men who run things. Those serious men are made serious by regular contact with reality. Remove that contact and those serious men become as silly and ridiculous as their retainers.
That is where the empire finds itself now, ruled by fops and popinjays living in a hothouse. They live in fear of someone opening the door and letting in reality.
Conclusion
And it was well stated.
The American Empire is being ruled by people who have been in the “hot house” for way too long. They have grown large, powerful, and (even) beautiful in a way. We look at them in amazement. We watch their brazen actions, and their odd statements like we would a monkey in a zoo. Curious. Mischievous. Maybe even a little dangerous.
But not one of us.
They, like their ilk in Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, in the Soviet Union, in the Palace of Versailles, the leadership behind their tall walls are slowly losing their collective minds. They are no longer part of society. And some may even question if they are part of the human race.
Such as MM here.
All empires fall, but the rot crumbles from within the top tiers of the leadership.
We are watching this today, in real time. And it’s slow. Really slow. Like a sloooow motion train wreck.
We need not worry too much about their madness, that is unless they start making crazed laws, rules, pronouncements or engage in wars that can affect you. Because that is the great concern.
Truthfully, most Americans realize that everything in America today is a farce. Elections are a farce. Political parties are a farce. American “greatness” is a farce, and “freedom, liberty, and justice for all” is a sad, sad farce.
That instead, America is a out-of-control military empire, and the the much touted “democracy” model is a complete and abject failure.
But you know, that shouldn’t, and needn’t be your concern.
What should be your concern is how you, and your community will be able to weather out their madness.
And yes. It is frustrating, angering, and frightening.
But it is beyond your control. You can either leave the United States of Insanity, or you an stay. Both choices have their good and bad points. I left. But my situation was intolerable and I manufactured a ratty-old tattered “parachute”. No “golden parachute” for MM.
You make the best with what you have.
You make the best with what you have available.
So, guys and gals, enjoy the ride.
It will eventually settle out and over. One way or the other.
In the meantime, make sure that [1] your larder is well stocked, and that [2] you are surrounded by a community that appreciates and likes you. [3] Perform your prayer affirmations. This is the MOST important thing that you can do. By FAR.
Make sure that you are [4] healthy; mentally, emotionally, socially, physically, and in every other way possible. These times are taking it’s toll. Focus on your well being.
Lay out a “spread”. Invite some friends. If you have no friends, then invite some strangers. Just start.
With the basics taken cared for, then enjoy some time in quiet relaxation. That means companionship (whether it is the opposite sex, friends, family or pets) and enjoy some food.
Everyone loves food.
Well, almost everyone. I once met a fellow in a mental institution that hated food. But then again, he hated everything.
This is June moving towards July.
That could very well mean watermelon, corn on the cob, hotdogs, hamburgers, and all manner of fruits and vegetables.
All that calls for a major smunch!
A delicious Cuban sandwich.
Have a beer.
Call a friend.
Share a beer with a friend.
Make up a spread of cold cuts, vegetables, some potato salad, chips, and plan on some chatting. Even if you have nothing to talk about. Come up with an excuse. Have fun.
You make the best with what you have available.
You are never too old for fun.
Make up a sandwich, Or two. Or heck, a whole bunch of them. Put some beer in a chest full of ice. Or, make up some sangria. Or heck! Just have a bar and everyone can make their own cocktails.
Don’t let life pass your by simply because your government is run by idiots.
Make a sandwich. You make the best with what you have available.
Make it fun.
Maybe use some sweet grandmother pickles. Or, use turkey, ham, pickle loaf, and all sorts of deli cheeses on your “spread”. Allow everyone to experiment.
Like this…
Sorry about the “activate windows 10” overlay in the lower right corner. Windows crowbar opened up and updated without permission and now demands that I activate it by providing my personal information on their servers. Not going to happen. So I will need to endure this overlaid message until HarmonyOS is available.
Ah.
Life is too short not to eat good food. Drink good beverages. Spend good time with friends. Whether they are family, animals, associates, or members of the opposite sex.
Just have a good time.
Maybe take a trip to explore a museum, a state park, a pool, a historical society, a small town restaurant, an animal shelter, a fishing hole, or a walk on a trail. Dust off your old bicycle sitting in the garage and give it a spin.
Do something fun.
Ignore the madness in the hothouse.
You make the best with what you have available.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
I have long argued that the reason why the West; and yeah that means America, wants the fierce anti-China propaganda campaign about the poor Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang is to prevent the BRI.
.
You see, the BRI originates in Xinjiang, and this fact, and the completion of the BRI offers a land trade route to Europe and Africa that completely bypasses the threat of American naval blockade.
.
As shown in this map…
The BRI passes right through XinJiang, and it is the home of the Uighur Muslims who are ready to enjoy the fruits of their association with China. And the USA does not like this one bit.
.
I have argued that once the BRI is fully operational, those in XinJiang would become wealthy. Simply because they sit on the major trade route between the Chinese manufacturing sites, and Europe. Just like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and other similar cities do.
.
I further argue that they would all become filthy rich in the process. Not just Singapore rich, but Dubai rich.
Big News Everyone!
Guess what?
It turns out the Xinjiang is just loaded with huge and vast deposits of oil. It’s of a quality, and a quantity that makes the Middle East look small in comparison. And what’s more, it’s easy to extract. No need to get involved an the use of any fracking technologies.
Of course you won’t hear about this in the MSM (Western Main Stream Media). Americans are to be kept stupid, ignorant, and ready to go to war at any moment!
Check out the video.
Pretty cool huh?
China in Space….
China is doing a lot right now, and it’s really worthy to take note.
One of my favorite websites is MoA and it’s run by a singular guy who has a passion like myself. I have to admit that many of the articles tend to be boring to me personally. They deal with obscure issues that I am not interested in, but when one comes across my desk that I am interested it, it shines like a beacon.
Such as this one.
This is a full reprint. All credit to the MoA, edited to fit this venue, and disseminated as found. Also I am including a host of comments as they really flush out the subjects in an interesting manner.
Since the U.S. Excluded China From International Space Projects – It Built Its Own
There was a time when the U.S. was open to international cooperation in space. It gained prestige and influence from these projects. But fear of competition from China and Russia have led to attempts to exclude these countries from international projects.
A two-sentence clause included in the U.S. spending bill approved by Congress a few weeks ago threatens to reverse more than three decades of constructive U.S. engagement with the People's Republic of China.
...
Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), a long-time critic of the Chinese government who chairs a House spending committee that oversees several science agencies, inserted the language into the spending legislation to prevent NASA or the Office of Science and Technology Policy from using federal funds "to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company."
The European Space Agency as well as NASA were at that time favoring future cooperation with China on the International Space Station and on a planned Mars mission.
Since then other laws and sanctions have made the continuing cooperation with Russia on the International Space Station more difficult.
Banned from international space projects in which the U.S. is involved China went its own way. Ten years later it put a lander on the far side of the moon where the rover Yutu, the jade rabbit, is now pounding moon stones in his mortar to look for the elixir of life.
Last year China sent Tianwen, Heavenly Questions, and another rover named Zhurong, a god of fire, to Mars. It landed there in February:
"Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter," mission managers wrote before launch in the journal Nature Astronomy. "No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough."
A week ago Zhurong, the fire god, took a selfie and sent it back to earth:
The camera, originally fitted to the rover bottom, was released by the rover at 10 meters south of the platform and captured the video footage of the rover returning to the platform and took the selfie. The camera then used a wireless signal to transmit the pictures and videos to the rover, which beamed them back to Earth via the orbiter.
“China will publish the related scientific data in a timely manner to let humankind share in the fruits of the country’s space exploration development,” said Zhang Kejian, head of the CNSA.
.
That is the best FU selfie I have seen. I showed it to a 15 year old and was told at first glance that it was China saying FU to the USA. Plus they pointed out the three China flags.
I like the virtual grin on the camera head.
Well done China. This has dramatically liberated the space exploration science and simultaneously stated the east's equivalence with all nations.
Posted by: uncle tungsten
Yesterday China’s space agency announced another success as three astronauts arrived at Tianhe, the Harmony of Heavens, which is the first module of Tiangong, the Heavenly Palace space station:
Three Chinese astronauts have entered the core module of China's permanent space station to embark on their three-month mission, becoming the module's first occupants and pioneers in one of the nation's grandest space endeavors.
...
Tianhe, the biggest and heaviest spacecraft China has constructed, is 16.6 meters long and has a diameter of 4.2 meters. The craft's weight, at 22.5 tons, is equal to the combined weight of 15 standard size automobiles. It has three parts-a connecting section, a life-support and control section and a resources section.
Meanwhile the International Space Station develops more and more technical problems and is becoming obsolete. Russia is now thinking of building its own one. It may alternatively add its own modules to the Chinese station.
Russia and China will also cooperate to build a permanent station on the moon:
China and Russia have agreed to jointly construct a lunar space station that will be "open to all countries," the China National Space Administration said in a statement on Tuesday.
...
A statement from Russian space agency Roscosmos said the two organizations planned to "promote cooperation on the creation of an open-access ILRS for all interested countries and international partners, with the goal of strengthening research cooperation and promoting the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes in the interests of all mankind."
The attempts to keep China and increasingly also Russia away from international space projects have only led to them starting competing projects. These are likely to gain more countries to cooperate with them.
The exclusionary policy of the U.S. has not been successful. In the end it resulted in a loss of influence over future projects for which China and Russia are inviting everyone but the U.S.
Humanity would be better off if we avoided such splits.
American nationalists hate this rise of China
It is a purely racist reaction to the rise of China. Even now, go to sites like zerohedge and you'll find foaming mouthed rants against China, belittlement of Chinese achievements, and openly racist desires to eradicate the Chinese.
Given the relative competence of China and America, China is much better off with Amerikastani sanctions that forced it to develop its own capabilities.
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast
Criticism from America really hurts the feelings of the Chinese people. They used to really look up to America. It is not so much that they take America's malicious criticism to heart, but more that it pains them to see their hero turn into a petty and whiny little bitch.
At least that is the way it seemed to me last time I was there.
Posted by: William Gruff
But America went to the moon!
Big deal! So what if China is doing this. America mastered that a half a century ago.
A common comment I see over and over again on UToob and other such fora is "Yeah? Well we went to the Moon in... well, a long time ago!"
What these slack-faced, degenerate, devolved, chest-beating baboons in America ignore is that nobody like them has ever gone to the Moon, and none ever will.
The people who went to the Moon were scientists and engineers.
And real ones at that.
It has been mentioned many times, and I suspect the seriousness of the issue eludes many people, but China is producing nearly 5 million STEM graduates each year! Before the pandemic the United States was producing little more than half a million STEM grads per year, and if the scale of this workforce disaster for the US isn't already apparent to you then just remember that MORE than half of all graduate students in the STEM fields in the US are international students. The US would be lucky to be producing a quarter million domestic STEM grads per year... around one twentieth of what China is producing.
China produces 20 times the number of STEM graduates than America does.
If that hasn't given exceptional American readers a chill yet, then you need to pay closer attention to efforts being made by so-called "liberals" in the US to improve "diversity" in American STEM studies.
Are they addressing the harsh economic realities that lumpenize and discourage large sections of America's youth so that they might aspire to be more than a street thug? Of course not! They are dumbing down STEM studies so that a lumpenized street thug with no real academic foundations can "succeed" in those programs!
"You're racist!" exclaims the woke liberal.
"You don't have to know Calculus to be an engineer! That's what calculators are for!"
Let me tell you a little story.
I once taught a bridge program at a state feeder college for the big universities. The objective of this program was to shepherd students with "weak" (as in none) math backgrounds through freshman Calc so that they could go on to enter a STEM field at one of the big state universities. Obviously that ambitious project failed. The gulf between what the students needed to succeed even just in first year Calculus and what knowledge and skills they came to class on day one equipped with was just too great.
Taking a step back, the calculation aid from little over half a century ago would be the slide rule. It's useless for addition and subtraction. The student had to master arithmetic before a slide rule even became useful to them, and then using the slide rule would help build, at a gut level, an understanding of logarithmic, trigonometric, and other relationships. Students then would develop an ever more complex intellectual ability that math teachers refer to as "number sense". The student with "number sense" would be able to look at a mathematical expression and see meaning in it. At the lowest level they can tell that one number is larger or smaller than another number, and at a slightly higher level they can visualize curves from a polynomial, and at a slightly higher level again they can visualize things like the rate of change of a curve and so on. More importantly, they could visualize what these polynomials and curves and such represented back in the real world.
But to get to this level the student has to internalize arithmetic. All of the higher levels of number sense have as their foundations all of the lower levels. You cannot skip the basics and jump straight to "the good stuff" like Calculus. Or rather, you can memorize formulas and also memorize a number of different situations in which certain numbers get plugged into certain locations in the formula, and then be trained to know how to punch that into a calculator, but without the acquired number sense it is all just meaningless busy work.
Sadly, few of the disadvantaged students in the STEM bridge program that I worked in for a while had even the most basic of number sense. Teachers all through their primary and secondary educations had developed countless clever little tricks to get the students through the current math lesson plan without having to require the student know any arithmetic. The students become good at punching keys on a keypad in accordance with instructions on a worksheet, but then promptly forget the procedure after the lesson because all they were doing was hitting keys in a certain sequence and writing down whatever appeared on the screen. If they hit a wrong key or the calculator malfunctioned and gave them an answer of 2 million instead of 2, they lacked the number sense to suspect that the calculator is wrong and would just write whatever was on the screen no matter what.
You simply cannot make up for twelve years of lost learning time in a few hours in a college classroom. I eventually gave up and went to teach at one of the big universities where supposedly the incoming students would not have blown off their previous twelve years of education. Few of my students there were domestic students.
The point that I am making here is that not only is there no talent in the academic pipeline to fix things in America, but that pipeline itself is broken. There is all of this talk about a new space race, but America is like the obese couch potato in this race, and the Chinese have been training for running space race marathons for a generation. There is not going to be any race. There cannot be. When the US did its "space race" against the Soviet Union that happened at a very unique time when the American labor market was flooded with a wave of demobilized service personnel who eagerly took advantage of the GI Bill to get themselves educated, and that in a period of US history when scientists and engineers had something like rockstar status, motivating students in their STEM studies. None of these conditions exist today.
All of the carping you hear from Americans about China's space program successes is nothing more than the bitter bitching of the fat kid hurling abuse at athletes as they pass him by. It is impotent and cannot amount to anything.
Posted by: William Gruff
When the US did its "space race" against the Soviet Union that happened at a very unique time when the American labor market was flooded with a wave of demobilized service personnel who eagerly took advantage of the GI Bill to get themselves educated, and that in a period of US history when scientists and engineers had something like rockstar status, motivating students in their STEM studies. None of these conditions exist today.
Posted by: William Gruff | Jun 18 2021 20:06 utc | 20
I was lucky enough to graduate from the school of mechanical and aerospace engineering that produced the founder of the company, the project manager and all the engineering team leaders that created the Apollo Lunar Lander (LEM).
Which if you think about it was the most amazing part of landing man on the moon.
It is the part that has not been replicated by the U.S. or anyone else in the last 50 years.
It could not be tested in actual conditions, and had to work perfectly the first time.
The tiniest flaw, bad gasket, bent landing leg or hose leak and two astronauts would have crashed in to the surface or been left on the surface of the moon to die a slow agonizing death.
It worked perfectly the first time, and every time after that.
Musk blows every third rocket he tries out despite radically better control technology, computers and knowledge from the past.
That is what makes this achievement so improbable, and leads some to believe it was faked.
But what it took was dedication, a quest for perfection, and 650 of the best engineers the world has ever produced. I had many of the same profs these pioneers did ( several years later) and can attest to the mastery and perfection they demanded.
ziu`Current US stem students would go crying to their Mama if they had to face the hair shirt rigor these Apollo era engineers did.
Our time has passed as we now turn out financial husksters, shoe designers and people who write code to post cat videos instead of first rate engineers.
Good luck to the Chinese as perhaps they have the dedication we did back in the day.
Posted by: Seneca’s Cliff
But America leads in Intellectual property
'If you take IPs literally, the USA still is light-years ahead of China and Russia.'
Not all ‘technology’ carries the same weight. ‘IP’ applies only to commercial products. Consumer electronics like smartphones, chips, software etc is all well and fine but has nothing to do with national strength, which is strictly a function of two technology domains: aerospace and nuclear.
Capabilities in these two areas are what separates the handful of major powers from the rest. Those are also the two most challenging technologies, and in both of them the US is losing ground quickly, without any direction from the top, while China is making big strides [with plenty of direction from the top], and Russia has got back into its Soviet-era stride.
Things like the physics-defying Avangard intercontinental boost-glide vehicle that skips along the top of the atmosphere at Mach 25 are not going to be found in any published IP. Nor is the scramjet engine in the Tsirkon hypersonic missile. Nor any of SpaceX’s secrets.
We still live in a world where force is the ultimate decider. Making lots of smartphones like Korea does, may mean a good standard of living. But if you are a major power, with major rivals [aka sworn enemies], you first have to LIVE, before you can think about living well.
It all comes down to the higher educational output like Mr Gruff mentioned above. China is graduating a lot of engineers and scientists. Only a few out of any group will do anything notable, so the bigger your pool, the more game-changing people you will produce.
I cried when Skylab was abandoned to just crash into Australia, but that period was still far more optimistic than today, even with all of the backsliding that America was doing after the Apollo program. American kids have no brightness in the future that they can see today.
On the other hand, Chinese kids today are on fire. Their optimism and enthusiasm for the future is palpable and pours out of them like a kind of psychic Cherenkov radiation. It is difficult not to develop sympathetic excitement when working with them. A year teaching there, or even just a single term, is highly recommended if one can spare the time. It refreshes the hope for humanity even of cynics like me.
Posted by: William Gruff
Some people still keep up the belief that China is backwards.
Both China and Russia are significantly behind overall. However, both are gaining with critical technologies which will help both leapfrog in the coming years. And, for the Lunar Missions, China and Russia are coordinating their major Lunar Base project.
Posted by: Red Ryder
Where are China and Russia “significantly behind overall”?
Does the Outlaw US Empire or ESA have a heavy lift rocket?
If not, how will it return to the moon?
Then we have the realm of Atomics–fission and fusion–where the Empire lags very far behind as my recent commentary and discussion of that topic have shown.
Most significantly, where will NASA find the funds to return to the moon or build another space station–the privateers are mere glory hounds that aren’t really going anywhere.
Perhaps the biggest constraint on the Outlaw US Empire is its Neoliberal ideology. This ideology doesn’t do any long term planning. And long term planning is precisely what must be done with a space program.
Thus the issue of funding for NASA were trashed with Neoliberalism’s ascendency over industrial capitalism. And that began the downward slide of its political-economy that’s resulted in the ongoing crisis that began in 2007.
As b’s article shows, the main problem resides within the Outlaw US Empire’s Congress.
Where very damaging language can be slipped into massive budget legislation that’s never completely read and goes unpurged. The same is true with illegal sanctions on Iran that must be removed if the JCPOA is ever to be revived.
Congressional zealots like Frank Wolf do more damage to the nation in their fanatical attempts they believe are made in its defense. And thanks to the Anti-Communist and Anti-Iranian Crusades, it’s extremely difficult politically to attempt to get such idiocy removed from the books where they’ll remain and damage the domestic economy as well as international relations.
A Red Ryder #1 who says: 'Both China and Russia are significantly behind overall.'
This is exactly opposite of the facts. It is the US that is far behind Russia in crucial space technologies like engines and space station tech. China has now surpassed the US in engines [more on that in a moment] and space stations.
It is easy to understand why the layman would draw the conclusion you have done---due to massive hype in the US media about SpaceX. But consider this: the current US mars mission with the impressive Perseverance Rover got there with Russian engines on the Atlas V rocket. So did the previous US mars mission in 2011 which carried the Curiosity rover, and also the mars mission before that, plus ALL of the high-profile Nasa missions in the last couple of decades.
Despite all of Musk's lip-flapping about Mars, his spacecraft have never been chosen by Nasa for any mars mission.
The same is true for the US Space Force, which includes the National Security Space Launch program. The Russian-powered Atlas V has flown nearly all of these critical missions, which include the X37 spaceplane, high tech spysats, and even missile early warning sats. Nearly 90 successful flights in all.
SpaceX has been given just three NSSL launches, for only the fairly pedestrian GPS sats. It also launched one out of the six X37 missions. That's it.
Quite clearly the advanced Russian rocket engine technology is the workhorse for both Nasa and the Space Force, with SpaceX nothing more than a sideshow!
And let's not forget that the US was unable to fly humans into space for nearly an entire decade! A big Nasa technology contribution finally resulted in the SpaceX Crew Dragon, which has now made three flights---but Nasa is still booking seats on Soyuz, just in case!
And as for the ISS, that is in actuality a Russian space station. From the wikipedia entry on the Russian Orbital Segment ROS:
'The ROS handles Guidance, Navigation, and Control for the entire Station.'
That is the space station. The American and ESA modules are completely superfluous add-ons. The ROS is in fact MIR2, which was built already by the time the US abandoned its own effort to build a MIR knockoff, called the Freedom space station---which was killed on the drawing board due to serious technical shortcomings.
The US simply bought its way into MIR2 at the time that Russia was in dire straits in the 1990s. China also benefited greatly from the Russian space tech fire sale. Look up the Shenzhou program: they Chinese bought their entire manned program from Russia, lock stock and barrel---including the Soyuz spacecraft, life support systems, astronaut training, even space suits.
The Chinese also bought an advanced Russian rocket engine at that time, the RD120, which they developed into their own YF100. It first flew in 2015 and is an advanced, staged combustion cycle engine that the Russians invented and have been perfecting since the 1960s.
The US has yet to fly a staged-combustion engine, despite getting ten key technologies, plus a license to manufacture their own RD180s. Supposedly, the SpaceX Raptor engine is a staged design, also known as closed-cycle due to its high efficiency. But this engine has yet to fly into space. It is also a much smaller engine, about half the thrust of the RD180. And btw, the RD180 is one half the thrust of its bigger brother the RD170/171, which has been flying for decades, and puts out a monstrous 1.8 million pounds of thrust---the most powerful [and most advanced] engine ever built.
Engines are the heart of space technology, just as they are in aviation or even automobiles. The US is nowhere in this game. A lot of hype, but nothing to show yet. The SpaceX workhorse is the Merlin engine which is only 200,000 pounds of thrust, not even one quarter the RD180, and one-eighth the RD170.
And what about the reusability factor, which is supposed to be a game-changer? Well, nothing in engineering is free. It takes lots of propellant to land that rocket back down---propellant which could have been used to launch a much bigger payload. Go to wikipedia and look up Falcon 9. The expendable payload is 22.8 tons for the latest version, versus just 15.5 tons when landed back. That's a 46 percent increase in payload for the non-reusable version. And that's when the booster is landed downrange on a sea barge. If it has to come back to the launch site, the penalty is much higher yet.
Plus those engines must be torn down and rebuilt anyway, so there is little to be gained, except in certain situations where you don't need the full payload. But this is wasteful in other ways. It does result in lower costs, which is a real advantage---but if you have very valuable payloads that are worth several hundred million dollars, like advanced sats, then your main priority is reliability, not saving a little on launch cost. The Russian engines have an unbelievable 100 percent reliability record in 87 launches.
The bottom line is that the US capability, when examined from a professional perspective, has huge gaps in core technologies. That's not to write off SpaceX---they have a decent small, old-technology [gas generator cycle] engine in the Merlin and the Falcon 9 has made 121 flights, with only a few failures. It's a pretty good step up from where the US was after those two Shuttle disasters.
But it's still a long way from the technology that Russia has. And yes, even China has built on the Russian tech to now surpass the US in both engines and space stations.
Posted by: Gordog
A video showing the new Chinese spacestation
Nice. It doesn’t look like the ISS. Maybe China should have copied the USA ISS Space station so that the MSM (main stream media) can say that China is copying space technology.
Perhaps one of those alumni was Thomas J. Kelly, who wrote a great little book called 'Moon Lander' about the Grumman team that built the LEM.
My favourite bit:
A story about the challenges of building space technology in the Jim Crow-Era South. Once the LEM program advanced to the testing stage it was necessary for Grumman to assemble a staff at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The problem?
Grumman was based in Bethpage, NY, and a sizeable chunk of their engineering and technical workforce was Black.
Hotels in Florida were very enthusiastic about helping to stick it to the Ruskies in space until this fact was mentioned. After being turned down everywhere, they had to fall back on NASA's political connections to secure rooms in Florida's 'Whites Only' hotels.
Westerners usually take such a condescending attitude to Russian and Chinese space technology: "I guess it's quite impressive what they achieved in their totalitarian hell-hole" etc.
I like to remember that story every time I hear sentiments like that.
Posted by: S.P. Korolev
Here’s another video…
And yet another…
And still another. Why with so many videos of the Chinese space station, why is the Western Media (MSM) not providing anything?
Why China is building it’s own systems…
The U$A wants to protect its technological comparative advantage. However, where there is a will there’s a way! Necessity is the mother of innovation. China is determined to develop its technological competencies. BeiDou’s launch marked China’s rise to ‘major space power’ and military independence.
“In 1996, during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, China fired three missiles to locations on the Taiwan Strait as a warning signal against Taiwan’s moves for independence and full internationally recognized statehood. While the first missile hit about 18.5 kilometers from Taiwan’s Keelung military base as a warning, China lost track of the other two missiles. China asserts that the United States had cut off the GPS signal to the Pacific, on which China was dependent at that time for missile tracking. Consequently, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) woke up to the strategic vulnerability of having such critical military space infrastructure in the hands of a foreign power.
On June 23, 2020, China completed construction of its BeiDou Positioning and Navigation System (BDS) by launching the 55th and final satellite for its BDS3 navigation constellation. With this launch, China now enjoys a fully independent self-reliant global navigation satellite system (GNSS) as an alternative to the U.S. Space Force-maintained Global Positioning System (GPS). An independent BeiDou offers China augmented precision navigation and timing (PNT) for its military space forces.”
BeiDou’s completion does signal a new phase for China’s space capabilities. Also, it is a declaration of technical independence. Having a sovereign GNSS eliminates the problem of relying on the U$A or Europe for satellite navigation. China has incorporated state of the art anti-jamming and anti-spoofing capabilities in it. It gains a technological edge by developing its platforms.
Posted by: Max
Robotic AI automation to ferry supplies to and from the space station
Also not being reported in that China has mastered the full automation process of ferrying supplies to and from the space station. Here is a video. Also not being shown in the MSM.
The videos of the Chinese space station are really nice. It’s pretty big, and resembles the interior of the ISS in many ways. But it’s completely different, and the Chinese took different developmental paths in the design and it shows.
America must stop China at all costs!!!!
Thanks for articulating what is assumed in my analysis of the situation--there must be money and minds, as neither goes far solo. And that's present in most other areas related to a MAGA-type policy proposal.
I don't know if you viewed any of the video related to the construction of the Amur Gas facility I posted, but the entire process was the results of billions of engineering calculations given the project's immensity.
What new innovation is being built within the Outlaw US Empire? Can you think of any cause I can't?
Oh wait, I completely forgot the wave energy project that just started being implemented @ 10 miles up the highway from me based on technologies designed 15+ years ago but never allowed to leave the lab. And yes, the chief engineer/scientist in charge is a female immigrant from Eastern Europe.
After 1970, NASA lacked a vision that would keep the budget flush and the public--particularly youth--curious and eager about the next phase. You'll recall those years and the resulting clusterfuck that was Skylab, although the drama of its salvage into something useful was a bright spot for awhile.
Maybe it's all for the best; if the Outlaw US Empire had established a lunar base, we'd certainly have space-based weapons now and a host of related problems--we might not even have made it this far given the Empire's First Strike mindset.
Posted by: karlof1
Well, that is what the neocon narrative is. And they are so ignorant and deluded that it’s a joke. Here is an American movie; a comedy that makes fun of this belief. Check it out…
The problem with the USA is that it can't put those designs to work anymore. It simply doesn't have the industrial capacity to put all those designs into practice.
There's an interview with a retired Chinese PLAAF general for Dangdai, from 2009, which I linked in this blog last year, in which he explains why China would easily win a war against the USA over the retake of Taiwan. His explanation is exactly that. Grandiose plans and designs are worthless in warfare if you can't mass produce them.
Now you would think: but then let's just restore Trump's "bring manufacture back"/"Made in America" policy and all is well.
That's not the case: the USA is a capitalist country, and capitalism only decides to put something for mass production if its profitable.
But thanks to Karl Marx, we know that, the more advanced the technology, the less profitable it is (Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall). Capitalism has a historical period of ascension where technology marries perfectly with profitability, but, after that, a deleterious period commences (financialization period).
And profit rates in the USA have been falling for well over 100 years: in fact, if it wasn't for the money injected by the Fed, profit rates in the USA would've fallen by 35% during the first year of the pandemic (2020).
Manufacturing is never coming back to America, with or without the threat of communism.
Posted by: vk
Debunking A ‘Chinese Defector’ Story
It is sad to see how much Col. Pat Lang’s intelligence judgment has deteriorated.
Here he goes crazy over a story of an alleged Chinese high level defector who allegedly brought all kinds of materials with him:
This man, as Chinese counter-intelligence boss looked around the IC and decided that he was most likely to survive an internal leak if he defected to DIA. That means that in spite of the fact that DIA had an internal Chinese mole (recently arrested at DIA request by the FBI), the rest of the agencies are worse in the level in Chinese intelligence penetration not only of their analytic people but also of their operations staff. How do I know that? Material from the defector (Dong) would not normally be shared with analysts if it had his name in it. His identity would be held in operational channels.
Clearly, this man believes that; CIA. army intelligence, naval intelligence, USAF intelligence and all the rest are heavily penetrated. pl.
Lang took the defector story from Zerohedge.com which took it from Redstate.com where managing editor Jennifer Van Laar made it up by mixing her fantasies, a Freebacon report about Chinese students returning to The U.S. and a rumor about a defection reported by Spytalk:
Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.
Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
The rumor is false.
How do I know?
I copied “vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei” into Google Translate with the output language set to Chinese (simplified). That results in this string: “国家安全部副部长董经纬”. The big Chinese search engine is Baidu.com. After pasting the string into Baidu it delivered these results:
The first search result is from September 2020 but the second on is from yesterday. As is the third.
The second result goes to a Baidu news report. I copied the story from there and back into Google Translate – this time from Chinese to English. Here is the outcome:
Ministry of National Security: It is necessary to catch spies as well as "traitors" and "behind the scenes."
China Changan Net
Release time: 06-1815:29 China Changan Net
On the morning of June 18, 2021, Vice Minister Dong Jingwei of the Ministry of National Security presided over a symposium to study and implement the "Regulations on Anti-espionage Security Work" that came into effect on April 26 this year, and make arrangements for anti-rape and anti-espionage work.
The symposium pointed out that the Party Central Committee attaches great importance to national security work and has made a series of important decisions and arrangements for counter-espionage work. As the competent authority for counter-espionage work, the Ministry of National Security has formulated and promulgated regulations that are a realistic need to prevent, stop, and crack down on illegal and criminal activities that endanger national security in accordance with the law, which are conducive to further consolidating the responsibility of counter-espionage security prevention and better organizing and mobilizing all social forces. Fight the "People's War" against espionage. ...
The expression “anti-rape” seems to be a machine translation artifact and probably means “anti-infiltration”.
The third Baidu result has the same report from a different news outlet though the video attached to it is not of Dong Jingwei. A Chinese government site also carries the same story.
So the guy who allegedly defected to the Defense Intelligence Agency apparently just talked about counterespionage at a symposium in presumably Beijing.
On December 14, 2020, the China-Belarus Intergovernmental Cooperation Committee met in Beijing. Dong Jingwei (middle), the Vice Minister of the Ministry of National Security and the Chinese Chairman of the Security Cooperation Sub-Committee, also participated in the meeting. The Minister and the Chinese Chairman of the Cultural Cooperation Sub-Committee Zhang Xu sat together. (Image source: Internet)
The Dong Jingwei and his public activities are regular news. Still some will claim that the Chinese report about the symposium is false and was only launched to divert from the defection which therefore must be real.
Well, consider all the stuff the defector, according to Redstate ‘sources’, allegedly brought with him:
In addition, Dong has provided DIA with the following information:
Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the US and the world
Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
Names of US citizens who provide intel to China
Names of Chinese spies working in the US or attending US universities
Financial records showing US businessmen and public officials who’ve received money from the Chinese government
Details of meetings US government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies and members of Russia’s SVR
How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA
Dong also has provided DIA with copies of the contents of the hard drive on Hunter Biden’s laptop, showing the information the Chinese government has about Hunter’s pornography problem and about his (and Joe’s) business dealings with Chinese entities.
That sounds as much like a wet dream for Republicans as the pee-tape Steele Dossier was a wet dream for Democrats.
How would a Chinese counter-espionage guy, who’s job it is to catch U.S. spies in China, have access to all those claimed materials, especially to the names of Chinese spies in the U.S.? What would be his need to know those? Spying and counter spying are always compartmentalized from each other. They don’t know each others secrets.
How could Pat Lang fall for this nonsense?
Think People! Think!
I read this story somewhere, too, and I had the same thoughts. A super secret Chinese defector to the USA who knows everything. In fact so super secret that not even the CIA knew his name. Hmm. Sure.
But what`s even more amazing than people taking such claims at face value is how easy it is possible to fact-check them in the age of internet. Good job!
Posted by: m
What we're witnessing is a slow motion picture of the demise of an empire. No worries.
Posted by: Steve
Anything will do at this point, these boomers are desperate for any news at all to sink China.
Posted by: Smith
The thing that immediately jumped out at me when I read the zerohedge story was the idea that a Chinese counter-intelligence official had access to the names of Chinese spies in the USA.
Say Whaaaaaaaat?
Does the Director of the FBI have access to the names of all CIA assets inside China?
I.Think.Not.
Posted by: Yeah, Right
I knew immediately something was amiss when I read the reports on different sites and it used the word "defector".
That is old Cold War language that reeks of McCarthyism.
Then in a report was this quote:
"Again, according to sources, Dong told DIA debriefers that at least a third of Chinese students attending US universities are PLA assets or part of the Thousand Talents Plan and that many of the students are here under pseudonyms. One reason for using pseudonyms is that many of these students are the children of high-ranking military and party leaders."
First, that seems unlikely to me. One third of Chinese students being spies sounds absurdly high, yet right inline with accusations thrown about on far-right conspiracy websites.
Second, so many spies being children of high ranking CCP leaders also sounds unlikely. Why put their own children at risk overseas?
I attended a world class engineering school with many Chinese students. They are a force to be reckoned with academically. They were all, as a rule, quiet introverts. They always studied together and made straight A's.
They were there to learn and that is all they did. They never seemed to assimilate or ingratiate themselves with authorities or do anything other than study. They were fantastic students and would certainly make outstanding professors at home. Why waste all that time and effort becoming spies when they could legitimately serve China better as engineers and scientists?
Maybe a few were CCP intelligence, but one third of them? Doubtful.
In short, only consorting with each other, never being overly friendly and never asking questions, I think they would have made terrible spies.
Posted by: Mar man
Lots of supposition all the way around. But what a story! So inscrutable! So many wet dreams! I certainly hope when I pick-up at the local Chinese, and they give such a generous portion of WonTon they are grooming me for recruitment into the "communist" way of life. Because frankly, for years I tried to get on Putin's payroll, dutifully offering the best counter-narrative to Empire I could muster, but nada, zilch.
Qualifications? I love Chinese Food, and admire the accomplishment of the Great Wall. Another wet dream of so many. And Bruce Lee. What's not to love? Call me maybe.
Posted by: gottlieb
I think the success of China's space station blastoff made another fake story attacking China necessary.
You know, to kill the buzz.
Posted by: Bemildred
This is one more for the "I don't know how to read Chinese, therefore China is a totalitarian State with a history of complete secrecy and brutal censorship" Western collection.
China (PRC) is one of the most transparent and open-minded States that have ever existed. I know what the CPC will do for the next five, ten, twenty and even fifty years in advance because they publish everything. I also know the reason why they want to do everything, because they open the debate in their due channels (many of which are translated to English directly from the source).
The PRC is transparent because their predecessor - the RKP (B) (Bolsheviks) - were also very transparent. The history of the RSFSR/USSR from 1917-1929 is one of the most well-documented periods we have because the Bolsheviks were very honest and very open about their policy. We could fill an entire book just telling three months of Soviet History. It was just after the consolidation of Stalin to power and the Cold War that documentation ceased to reach the West.
Communist parties are very transparent because they need to be. Their power, by definition, rests on the supremacy of the proletariat or the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, therefore every policy - no matter if it was decided from the top, by the Politburo - must be put to the discussion in some kind of conference and put to ratification by some kind of congress (even if just to be approved by acclamation). Both processes presuppose the publication of the policy in at least one official communication vehicle, which then reaches the historian.
China's history - old and contemporary - and Chinese daily politics are mysterious to the West simply because Westerners don't know how to read and write in Chinese (and the few ones who do are paid to ignore and distort them). This is sold by the Western MSM as evidence China is totalitarian, but the reality is the polar opposite: China is the democratic State, the West is the totalitarian State. In History we call this evidence/archaeology bias (e.g. Roman History that survived to us essentially portrays the point of view of the Senate).
Posted by: vk
vk @16: "This is one more for the "I don't know how to read Chinese, therefore China is a totalitarian State with a history of complete secrecy and brutal censorship" Western collection."
I laughed hard at that because it is so true.
Remember early in the pandemic last year all of the news reports based upon satellite imagery of Wuhan? I was stunned by the ignorance, incompetence, and provincialism that displayed. These "journalists" need satellite imagery to guess what is going on in a major first-tier city of 11 million people? Can't these impostor syndrome victim media people just pick up a phone and call someone there? You'd think from the way these "journalists" handled the stories that Wuhan was a city on Mars, or secluded in the heart of the Dark Continent or something similarly silly. Could anyone imagine using satellite imagery to concoct sensationalist speculative stories about happenings in London or Paris? It is pure lunacy.
Posted by: William Gruff
Strange kind of morons you are. Beneath that none of you speaks much less reads the language, I bet you never were in China. I felt less harrassed by the government there, and orders less scared of the police in your "democratic states". The Chinese police don't shoot dead over 1000 compatriots every year, in fact, deadly incidents inflicting police are in the low double digits per year, with their 1.4b pppl.
And during the pandemic, ppl were quarantined for weeks, no more. The authoritharian "health" regime here goes into the second year, with doctor's clinics searched, even a judge's house and office because he ruled against the government. Democrazy, my ass.
Posted by: aquadraht
I had the same impression as you, B. This is the same nonsense, just as delusional and impossible, as the Russiagate / Steelde dossier was for Trump. In both cases, it's people unable to understand why their Chosen One managed to lose the election.
The Dong bogus affair makes no sense because the "China made Covid on purpose as a biological weapon against the US" is just ridiculous on its face: had the Chinese be crazy enough to launch a pandemic on their own country first (for plausible deniability reasons), then there's no fucking way they would've done it in Wuhan; having the pandemic starting in the city the virus had been designed is supremely idiotic if you want plausible deniability that you definitely didn't engineer it - people were going to make a link, imagined or real. If China really wanted to launch a self-engineered virus from China, they would've picked Chongqing, Chengdu or some other major city that would be far closer to the bat reservoir of coronavirus, a major city without a biolab that would raise suspicions.
What's also funny is the alleged list of Wuhan scientists who got "covid" back in 2019: if they became ill with covid, then it's definitely proof the leak was accidental and not deliberate, not some kind of bio-economic warfare but just shitty management of lab security. Though even then odds would still greatly favor an accidental release of a naturally-evolved virus, and not a human-designed one. In fact, iff these few scientists genuinely got our SARS-2 back in late 2019, odds would be that some guy working in bat caves to find new viruses accidentally got infected with a version that could hit humans, and then spread it to his lab buddies back in Wuhan. Though at the end of the day, odds are even higher that some random Chinese dude caught it near Yunnan and a couple of infected people later, it found its way in Wuhan...
Posted by: Clueless Joe
I hear ya, but logic and reason is not what this is about.
This wishlist is just a forward staging of their fake news ammo chest. The contents will be metered out in due course to bury and trump any bad news domestically like record inflation or good news from China like the recent space launch.
If this defection was true, which it is not by the looks of things, do you think the largest intelligence coup of the century will not be hushed away and used for leverage and counter intelligence purposes? D notices have been issued on much, much less.
Its all just diversionary BS and consensus manufacturing by a bunch of delusional wannabe hacks having a circle jerk over their collective wet dream of a resurgent US.
Posted by: A.L.
Despite their hysterical "partisan politics," the Republicans and Democrats are mirror images of each other and share a lot more in common than they want to admit.
Democrats: Russia, Russia, Russia!
Republicans: China, China, China!
Or as Prof. Richard Wolff recently stated,
"Hillary Clinton focused blame on Russia as the external enemy. Trump chose China instead. Biden blames them both.Blame games serve to distract us from a declining US capitalism, its problems and tensions. Blaming others is now a truly bi-partisan effort."https://twitter.com/profwolff/status/1405709097064935431
The mighty American super-duper power and self-styled Indispensable Nation and "Leader of the Free World" is now reduced to the moral equivalent of a guy babbling to himself on a street corner carrying "The End is Nigh" sign.
America is truly a lunatic asylum.
Or as Donald Trump might say, sad.
Posted by: ak74
This may be nothing more than a trivial affair, but I'll tell it anyway: I have been visiting China often (up until the pandemic broke out) for a number of years on the heels of academic conferences.
Following a Shanghai conference around August 20th in 2014, I took a tour of the typical Chinese tourist sites in a number of cities.
During our Beijing excursion, I noticed that our guide (a youngish fellow) had engaged a few tourists about political matters.
From his conversation I derived that he was sympathetic to the Tiananmen square protests.
I drew closer and listened to him speak glowingly of the United States, while parroting all the propaganda one would expect he might get from something like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
I joined the conversation which soon turned towards the recent armed conflict in the Donbas region.
Sure enough, he voiced antipathy towards the Russians and had bought the propaganda that Russian troops had invaded Ukraine, hook, line and sinker.
I had been following those developments on my lap-top, particularly from Pat Lang's blog since it miraculously was one of the few sites which wasn't blocked in China.
I had read Lang's documented rebuttal of the propaganda concerning the Russian "invasion" of Ukraine. So... I became irritated at our Chinese guide's parroting of the "NED propaganda" about Russia so I countered him: I said that Russia had not invaded Ukraine, which of course intrigued him.
Incredulous, he asked me where I got my information.
You can imagine his surprise when I said I got it from a United States colonel, who held high-level posts in military US intelligence.
He asked to see the source and I gave him Lang's URL.
Now this is where it gets interesting: At that time, Lang had added a neat little feature (an app.) to his blog site. It was one of those world maps which registers a "dot" from the location of anyone who accesses it.
Since my entry to China more than a week earlier, there were no "dots" on mainland China. Hence one could conclude that despite the availability of his blog in China, nobody was accessing it.
That changed the afternoon I gave the URL to my inquisitive tour guide.
Dots started appearing all over the place, and not only in Beijing. Maybe the guy passed it on to friends he had in other cities. Maybe he was being surveilled by the government (which at some level was undoubtedly following developments in the Donbas).
Just an intriguing story of mine.
Posted by: Maracatu
My guess is that it is neither of the above. You might be well surprised at the AI controlled monitoring of the intranet in China. And the training these “guides” get and what their real purposes are.
Is America capable?
Well, America has changed substantially over the years. So many things that are a common sight would be repugnant and disgusting a mere two or three decades ago. This is America today…
A treasured, and valuable member of the community.
Many Americans have become slothful and lazy. They just pretty much have given up. And they live their lives as the winds blow. There was a time when you would rarely come across a slovenly person. But today in America you can find these individuals everywhere. What happened?
I don't get the impression that they (the Chinese) spend nearly as much time thinking about the US as Americans spend thinking...
... and griping,
... and spitting about China.
Posted by: Billb
A mobile garbage car.
I used to liken AmeriKKKa's PTB to spiteful 10 year-old schoolgirls. But that modus operandi has been superceded by devotion to acting like tantrum-throwing 2 1/2 year-olds in a supermarket.
Smart Mums just keep walking to the end of the isle, turn right, and wait for the kid to re-connect with reality and Humble Pie.
Keep it up, Yankees! Nobody cares!
-Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer
America is out of control in every area, and by every measure. And you can see it. Even if you are too stupid to read the signs right in front of your face…
An irresponsible non-representative government that is totally focused on making money for the oligarchy and waging wars is a dangerous government.
China is showing everyone that there is an alternative.
And the American oligarchy trembles in fear over this.
Still don’t get it? Think! People. Think!
It took 200 years, but finally America used up it’s natural resources and was forced to steal from the rest of the world. The last fifty years America has been a very bad Military Empire seizing resources from the rest of the world to exist.
The oligarchy created a system of debt serfs from which to fund the Empire, but when it outsourced all manufacturing and abused the few STEM graduates by treating them to “Office Space” environments and abusing them, eventually the “house of cards” would have to collapse.
They do not understand that they changed the American people. No longer are Americans the rough and sturdy folk that forged America from the wilderness. Americans are now a new kind of person.
China surpassed "the USSR-level" long ago.
In regards to alleviating poverty, China has surpassed all nations that have ever existed.
Yes.
Exactly. The next decades and hopefully centuries belong to those that have the civility and maturity to follow that path.
Posted by: uncle tungsten
America is a real mess.
It really is, and the entire rest of the globe can see this. Though most Americans cannot.
I think Americans care about other countries when their Government tells them they must care about them, e.g. the Invasion of Iraq, Invasion of Afghanistan, Destruction of Libya, Invasion of Syria, Destruction of the Ukraine.
In all of those cases, the factor in common is imperialism: Americans tend to believe and rally behind their Central Government against other nations (Federal Government) when they associate the need of subjugation of said nations with the maintenance of their way of life (American Dream, American Way of Life). For example, the direct association between destroying Iraq with vengeance against 9/11 AND ("while we're at it...") lowering the price of the gallon of gas to less than USD 0.90 (therefore, restoring American purchase power). That those adventures ended up fueling anti-Muslim hate and fundamentalist Christianism is just the inevitable collateral effects of such kind of operations, the small price to pay to keep the vibrancy of the Empire.
A clear parallel of this phenomenon can be observed through Bernie Sanders' last tweet on China: in just one paragraph, he associated the need 1) to effectively destroy China through economic sanctions because of the fake Xinjiang Uighur genocide, 2) fight slave/forced labor worldwide and 3) the promotion of the typical trade-unionist/social-democratic agenda within the USA. He went from your bread-and-butter labor rights activism to an outright imperialist agenda against China (and every other nation that dares to get into the way of the Empire). No mention, of course, of slave children labor in cocoa extraction in Ivory Coast - one of the oldest worst kept secret of post-war capitalism.
Now, it's true that the degeneration of the Empire resulted has started to manifest itself into the fragmentation of that method. Americans are now polarized between liberal leftists (Democrats) and fascist rightists (GOP), and each side is using this same method of association to advance not the interests of the Empire per se, but of their own faction - each of which claim to embody the true essence of the Empire as a whole. That means that, in the name of the whole Empire, each of the two factions are using their own carefully crafted imperialist narrative to advance their own factional interests, and not the Empire's. Examples of this are Russiagate and, during Trump, Anti-China hysteria.
So, my take is this: Americans don't see - and can't see - any distinction between foreign and domestic policy. To them, domestic policy is foreign policy, and foreign policy is domestic policy. They're an empire after all, and to a hammer everything smaller is a nail.
Posted by: vk
I think at this juncture Americans are having a hard time distinguishing much of anything, a condition symptomatic of detachment and ignorance.
I can no longer tell how resourceful they are.
Posted by: john
The Strength of China
If you have been following MM you will be aware that on numerous occasions that China has intercepted American advanced aircraft in Chinese airspace and completely rendered them inoperable. As was described in many articles. This comment here on MM is typical. (from Bo Chen)
In the early morning of June 4, Japan’s TBS TV station suddenly interrupted the broadcast situation, saying: “Yesterday (3rd) early morning, an RC-135U electronic reconnaissance plane of the U.S. Air Force took off from Kadena Base in Okinawa, Japan, and proceeded to the southeast coast of China.
Before dawn, near the northern mouth of the Taiwan Strait, in the airspace less than 55 nautical miles from Fujian Xiapu Air Force Base in the Eastern Theater of China, he was suddenly intercepted and rounded up by three electronic counter-reconnaissance aircraft “Falcon 1” of the Chinese Air Force. This is the Chinese Air Force’s first appearance in the war.
The Japanese media were really dedicated, as if they were on the scene, reporting the whole process as eye-catching and clear as their own military exercises: “The situation was very urgent at the time. The U.S. Air Force’s RC-135U reconnaissance plane was in China. Under the pursuit and interception of the Air Force “Falcon 1”, a very real aerial “cat and mouse game” was staged.
The RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft was “throated” time and time again.
All reconnaissance equipment on the aircraft failed; several times The aircraft was unable to control and fell into the sea out of control; several times it fell into a state of collapse of the navigation system.
Japanese media exclaimed: “If the Taiwan Strait really does, the US military’s RC-135U reconnaissance plane has only two options, either to be captured or shot down to the sea.”
In this regard, the only official source of our “South China Sea Strategic Situational Awareness” think tank stated: “In the early morning of June 3, there was indeed a U.S. Air Force RC-135U electronic reconnaissance plane that took off from Kadena Base in Okinawa, Japan, and secretly entered Fujian. The electronic reconnaissance in the East China Sea airspace near Xiapu Air Force Base was promptly and resolutely expelled by our Air Force fighters. As for what type of fighter planes the People’s Liberation Army dispatched to expel them, I officially kept silent.”
At the same time, China’s official media has been very low-key, with almost no reports about the US RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft invading the airspace of the air defense identification zone near the military sensitive area of Fujian. It’s just that the World Wide Web reprinted the “South China Sea Strategic Situation Awareness” news:
However, overseas media have responded strongly to this. In the past few days, media in Japan, the United States, South Korea, and the French and German media in Europe have all reported and commented on it.
Especially for the first time that the Chinese Air Force deployed the mysterious anti-electronic reconnaissance aircraft “Falcon 1”, and the sword was used for the first time, it severely frustrated the most advanced U.S. military RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft, which caused a shock from the Western media.
On the morning of the 4th, the US military’s Global Air Defense media platform stated: “RC-135U is the most advanced reconnaissance aircraft currently in service in the US military. The biggest weapon and “housekeeper” to seize air supremacy.
However, when facing China’s “Falcon 1″ yesterday, it was suddenly completely electronically suppressed. The entire aircraft was completely out of control, but the Kadena base camp, which was close at hand, did not know it.”
On the evening of the 3rd, Major Rodriguez, a spokesman for the US military at Kadena Base, reluctantly said to the media, “Before, we had almost no knowledge of China’s Falcon 1.
Our intelligence agency was actually the best in China. In front of advanced weapons, he became blind and deaf.
This time it was only when it flew in front of us that he suddenly knew its existence.” He added: “Even the name’Falcon 1′, our intelligence department It also took a huge price to find out. As for its specific aviation technical information, we know very little.”
Major Rodriguez said at the briefing: “According to the specific introduction of the pilot flying the RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft, we learned what happened in the early hours of yesterday.
Our RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft, as usual, was at 3 Taking off in the early morning of the day, from Kadena Base to the high seas airspace near Xiapu Air Force Base in Fujian, China, for routine electronic reconnaissance flights. Their main task on this trip is still to detect the deployment of the Chinese military in the coastal areas of Fujian and Zhejiang and to detect them The deployment situation and combat performance of weapons and equipment, the frequency of collecting their electronic communication signals, and so on.
“After about an hour of flying, our RC-135U reconnaissance plane arrived in the established airspace and was preparing to carry out reconnaissance work.
At this time, the pilot suddenly perceived with his naked eyes that there were three moving flying objects in the air from the top, front, and back directions. Outflank it.
But what is surprising is the advent of such a serious air strike, the eyes can see, and the RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft’s own anti-electronic jamming system and reconnaissance system did not respond. Everything is too late, because the other party The RC-135U has been surrounded and locked, the reconnaissance equipment has failed, the communication system has failed, the aircraft is out of control, can’t move at all, the communication system has failed, the aircraft has lost control of navigation, and can’t move at all. It feels like being stifled by the throat.
This way. In the next flight, the situation of danger was continuously staged and appeared three times. In desperation, we followed international practice and repeatedly expressed goodwill to the Chinese military aircraft several times before the other party finally allowed our aircraft to fly out of the dangerous airspace quickly. “.
Major Rodriguez finally emphasized: “I feel like we are being teased by the other side again and again in the air like mice. At the same time, it also shows that the Chinese Air Force’s Falcon 1 is very terrible. We ate a complete one. Lost in the air. This is an extremely rare humiliation and humiliation that the U.S. Air Force has suffered since World War II.”
Major Rodriguez’s briefing was quickly spread to many media around the world, and aroused international public opinion in exclamation and shock. According to the comment from the web client of South Korea’s “Seoul Arms”:
“In the past 20 years, China’s weapons and equipment have seen rapid development, just like its national strength. Especially this time, the mysterious weapon “Falcon 1″ has been revealed, which is low-key. There will certainly be many weapons like the Chinese military.”
The South Korean intelligence agency also issued a statement on the same day: “According to what we know, the Chinese Air Force “Falcon 1″ is the world’s newest and most advanced anti-electronic reconnaissance aircraft. Its main task is to target the US military’s frequent attacks on China’s coastal areas and Taiwan Electronic reconnaissance in the sea and the South China Sea is used for aerial countermeasures.
In addition to electronic countermeasures and intelligence collection, it also has powerful anti-electronic reconnaissance functions. The most frightening thing is that it not only has the most advanced stealth and protection It also has powerful electronic coverage, electronic blocking, and electronic destruction capabilities.
This is the most advanced electronic countermeasure technology in the world that has surpassed the United States and the West. This technology will directly destroy all electronic communication systems of the target aircraft. The opponent’s high-altitude aircraft completely turned into a headless fly out of control.”
In the afternoon of the same day, Professor Kudur Riffert from the Munich Army Military Academy, Germany, commented through the media: “According to the current technical assessment of China’s air force, the flight range and combat radius of the Falcon 1 are expected to reach 3800-4500. Kilometers. If air refueling is implemented, the farthest may exceed 8000 to 12000 kilometers. It can easily fly over the US military base in Hawaii, and even directly reach Los Angeles or San Francisco on the west coast of the US, and the US military’s existing radar cannot detect it at all. It can be said to be A stealthy and proud intercontinental aircraft.”
“What a terrible weapon. China has mastered this weapon manufacturing technology before the United States and put it into combat before the United States. The United States and the United States Air Force have become the targets of China’s advanced weapons testing. And the proving ground.” Finally, Professor Liffeyt pointed out: “The United States and the West must admit that China will soon be strong if it blocks China; if it challenges China, China will quickly defeat what; and if it suppresses China, China Soon to surpass something; China’s strength and rise, the United States and the West can no longer stop it.
But you know what. It’s pretty much well understood throughout China. Though inside America and “The West” no one knows “Jack Shit”. Because the MSA (American main stream media) won’t report anything good about China. Never the less the Chinese joke about this.
Have you ever watched the Tom Cruse movie “Top Gun”? In it is this iconic scene where Tom Cruse the fighter pilot Ace does an inverted flyover a Russian MIG and takes a picture of the cockpit.
Well, if you do, and you also been following MM, then you will find this Chinese short video hilarious!
What’s next for America?
Well, it seems that America wants to provoke and engage in a full scale war with the rest of the world. In an earlier post HERE, I argue that this war would have the reverse effect than what the elites plan. Instead of unifying Americans against a common enemy, it will accelerate the fragmentation of America and the results would be a Second American Civil War. It would be horrific. As this short video clip illustrates…
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Lately, there has been all this talk and speculation about how the USA is going to “counter” China. All made with the best of intentions by nationalists with little experience, poor or fraudulent Intel, and a lack of awareness at how incompetent the United States actually is today. Yet they own the MSM; the media mouthpiece and everyone desires to go ahead and pick a fight for “freedom™” and “democracy™”.
I have argued over and over and over again that America is very, very fragile. It is more than balkanized, it is tottering on the edge of chaos. And all it would take to send it over the side is China or Russia doing what the US Military is vocally planning to do.
One strike on a city.
It doesn’t even need to be a nuclear strike.
This strike completely collapse “the house of cards”, and all the people in the city will be forced to deal with a very bad situation. Will they come together? Will they work together? Will they [1] obey the advisement’s on the Emergency Broadcast System? Or will they [2] all go their own way, do their own thing, and take advantage of the situation for their own personal benefit?
The answer should be obvious to all Americans.
But somehow, and it’s unfathomable to me, that Americans separate a “war with China over Taiwan”, from “America urban enclaves erupting in an orgy of hate, rapes and killings”.
Because both will happen simultaneously.
China and Russia will make sure that it occurs.
Fifteen years ago we were able to watch what happens when a local disaster hits a city. And it isn’t pretty. I argue that this will become commonplace throughout the United States once the tipping point has been reached.
Are you ready?
The following is titled “Africa in our midst“. It reports on what happened in an American city New Orleans when a natural disaster struck. It is absolutely horrifying. All credit to the MM influencer that turned me on to it. Reprinted as found, all credit to the author, edited to fit this venue.
Africa in our Midst
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which blasted the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005 the entire world saw images that left no doubt that what is repeatedly called the sole remaining superpower can be reduced to squalor and chaos nearly as gruesome as anything found in the Third World. The weather — a Category 4 hurricane — certainly had something to do with it, but the most serious damage was done not by nature but by man.
Much has been and will be written about why the levees that are supposed to keep the water out of below-sea-level New Orleans failed. There will be bitter recrimination about whether the federal rescue effort could have been launched sooner. Commissions will ask questions and lessons will be learned. But there was another human failing that was far more ominous. No commission will study it, and official America will refuse to learn from it. In the orgy of finger-pointing it will be all but forgotten. That human failing — vastly more significant than the ones the commissions will investigate — is the barbaric behavior of the people of New Orleans.
New Orleans is 67 percent black, and about half the blacks are poor. Of the city’s 480,000 people, all but an estimated 80 to 100 thousand left before the hurricane struck. This meant that aside from patients in hospitals and eccentrics in the French Quarter, most of the people who stayed behind were not just blacks, but lower-class blacks without the means or foresight to leave.
Katrina hit on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29. The levees broke on Tuesday and the city began to flood. Before long, 80 percent of New Orleans was under as much as 20 feet of water.
The city’s 70,000-seat football stadium, known as the Superdome, had been officially designated as a public shelter before the hurricane, and several thousand people were already there the night before the storm. It had some food and medical supplies, but when the waters began to rise, people poured in from all directions, swelling its numbers to an estimated 25,000.
People came because their houses were under water, but also because New Orleans very quickly collapsed into banditry. Looting began even while the storm was still blowing. At first there was sympathetic clucking about the need for food and medicine, but news clips of blacks wading happily through waist-deep water with television sets over their heads dispelled that view.
The day after the hurricane, a reporter caught the atmosphere of high-spirited chaos at a Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. People were grabbing things as quickly as they could, smashing open jewelry cabinets and scooping up double-handfuls. One man packed his van so full of electronic equipment he could not close the rear doors. A teenage girl passed out, face down, and people stepped on her. A man stopped to roll her onto her back, and she vomited pink liquid. “This is f***ed up,” he said, and rolled her back on her stomach. An NBC correspondent filmed black, uniformed police officers strolling through the aisles, filling shopping carts.
At one store, a policeman broke the glass on the DVD case so civilians would not cut themselves trying to break it, but one man was ungrateful. “The police got all the best stuff,” he said. “They’re crookeder than us.” One woman stocking up on makeup was glad to see the officers. “It must be legal,” she said. “The police are here taking stuff, too.”
Violence of all kinds quickly spread through the paralyzed city, where robbery, rape, and even murder became routine. There were still thousands of people trapped on rooftops and in attics, but on Sept. 1, Mayor Ray Nagin called the entire police force off of rescue work and ordered it to secure the city. The response from the force? An estimated 200 officers just walked off the job. “They indicated that they had lost everything and didn’t feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,” explained Henry Whitehorn, chief of the Louisiana State Police. Many disappeared without a word. Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans also said his men were deserting. “They want to be with their families,” he said. “Well, I want to be with my family too, but you don’t quit in the middle of a crisis.”
Two police officers, including the department’s official spokesman Paul Accardo, committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head. The London Times estimated that one in five officers refused to work, and some of those who stayed on the job were useless. When Debbie Durso, a tourist from Washington, Michigan, asked a policeman for help he told her, “Go to hell — it’s every man for himself.”
Ged Scott, 36, of Liverpool, told BBC News what happened when a group of stranded British women shouted to police for help from the rooftop of a flooded hotel: “They [the officers] said to them, ‘Well, show us what you’ve got’ — doing signs for them to lift their T-shirts up. The girls said no, and they said ‘well fine,’ and motored off down the road in their motorboat. That’s the sort of help we had from the authorities.”
“No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans,” explained Lieutenant General Steven Blum of the National Guard. He said the city was operating on only one third of its pre-storm strength of 1,500 officers, and that the guard suddenly had to switch from rescue to law enforcement: “And that’s when we started flowing military police into the theater.”
New Orleans has had only black mayors since 1978, and has spent decades making the police force as black as possible. It established a city-residency requirement for officers to keep suburban whites from applying for jobs, and lowered recruitment standards so blacks could pass them. Katrina blew away any pretence that the force was competent.
(On September 5, exactly a week after the hurricane, Mayor Ray Nagin offered to pay for the entire police force, firefighters, and city emergency workers to go on five-day vacations — with their families — to Las Vegas or some other destination. He said there were enough National Guard in the city to maintain order, and that his men “have been through a lot.” He brushed off suggestions that this was dereliction of duty. He even asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay for the vacations, but FEMA refused. “We haven’t turned over control of the city,” a city spokesman explained. “We’re going to leave a skeleton force — about 20 percent of the department — for leadership and liaison with the troops while we get some rest.”)
New Orleans has a high crime rate at the best of times — it is usually in top contention for the American city with the highest murder rate — and looted firearms spilled into the street. Some blacks fired on any symbol of authority, blazing away at rescue helicopters and Coast Guard vessels. Several days after the hurricane, with desperate people still huddled on rooftops, FEMA said it was too dangerous to attempt rescues.
On Wednesday, along one stretch of Highway 10, hundreds of volunteer firefighters, auxiliary coastguardmsmen and citizens with small boats were eager to reach people, but could not set out because of sniper fire. “We are trying to do our job here but we can’t if they are shooting at us,” explained Major Joey Broussard of the Louisiana State Fisheries and Wildlife Division. “We don’t know who and we don’t know why, but we don’t want to get in a situation of having to return fire out there,” he said.
Perhaps the most chilling accounts were from hospitals, where staff desperately tried to move patients up stairs as the water rose, while blacks looted the floors below. Most hospitals had emergency generators, but these began to give out. Two days after the hurricane, the city had no running water, and as food ran out, doctors and nurses gave themselves intravenous feedings to keep going.
Just outside New Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food, water, and medical supplies that were on their way to a 203-bed hospital. Patients all across the city eventually had to be taken out, but rescuers met resistance. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan told reporters at an emergency headquarters: “Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them, saying, ‘You better come get my family.’” An effort to evacuate patients and staff from Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans was stopped by sniper fire. Other hospitals reported gangs of looters attacking and overturning ambulances.
Chris Lawrence, a reporter with CNN, filed a report from the roof of a police station: “Right now it’s the only safe place to be in the city. We were on the street earlier but the police said under no circumstances would you be safe on the street. They said anybody walking in the streets of New Orleans is basically taking their life in their hands. . . . They directed some of the young women to get off the street immediately.”
What may have been the most shocking headline of the entire crisis was in the September 2 issue of Army Times: “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans.” The article was about the Louisiana National Guard massing near the Superdome in preparation for a citywide security mission. “This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones explained. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” The amphibious assault ship Bataan was in the area, but kept its helicopters on board after pilots reported sniper fire.
Many soldiers came under gunfire from civilians. “I never thought that as a National Guardsman I would be shot at by other Americans,” said Philip Baccus of the 527th Engineer Battalion. “And I never thought I’d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission. This is a disgrace.” Cliff Ferguson of the same battalion added: “You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”
Michael Brown, head of FEMA, said: “We are working under conditions of urban warfare.” General Blum of the National Guard said half of the 7,000 guardsmen under his command had just returned from overseas assignments and were “highly proficient in the use of lethal force.” He promised to deal with thugs “in a quick and efficient manner.”
Shoot-to-kill orders were supposed to have gone out, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco boasted that battle-hardened veterans would put down the violence in no time. However, there were few accounts of soldiers firing their weapons. The London Times reported that a New Orleans policeman explained through tears that he had seen bodies riddled with bullets, and one man with the top of his head shot off. He said looters were armed with stolen AK-47 rifles, and that the police were outgunned just like in Somalia. “It’s a war-zone, and they’re [the federal government] not treating it like one,” he said.
We will never know the full extent of the mayhem blacks loosed on their own city. Many victims will not be found for weeks or even months, rotted beyond recognition, their killers never found. Drowned or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn up by the hundreds will look much the same. In their haste to get cadavers off the streets, the authorities may not worry much about cause of death.
From Hurricane to Jungle
In the two main refugee centers, however — the Superdome and the Convention Center — too many people witnessed the degeneracy for it to be ignored. The first refugees had arrived at the Superdome the day before the hurricane, on Sunday, August 28. The last finally left the stadium on Saturday, Sept, 3, so some people may have spent nearly a week in what, after the toilets began to overflow, became known as the “Sewerdome.”
Preparation for refugees was pitifully inadequate. By day, as many as 25,000 people sweltered in temperatures that rose into the 100s. Whatever order had been established soon melted away, and the stadium reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped with impunity. Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man committed suicide by throwing himself off a high deck and splattering onto the playing field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died of heat exhaustion began to accumulate. Six babies were born in the stadium. Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death, and was, himself beaten with a pipe. Crack addicts — who had brought their most valuable possession with them — smoked openly and fought over drugs.
A group of about 30 British students were among the very small number of whites in the stadium, where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote that the scene “was like something out of Lord of the Flies,” with “people shouting racial abuse about us being white.” One night, word came that the power was failing, and that there was only ten minutes’ worth of gas for the generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their lives: “All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as protection,” she said. “We were absolutely terrified, the situation had descended into chaos, people were very hostile and the living conditions were horrendous.” She said that even during the day, “when we offered to help with the cleaning, the locals gave us abuse.”
Mr. Trout said the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the threat was from blacks, and moved the British under guard to the basketball area, which was safer. “The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight,” he said, as they were escorted out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one man in particular, Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. “He went against a lot of rules to get us moved,” she said.
Australian tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience. Bud Hopes, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took control and may have saved many lives. As the stadium reverted to anarchy, he realized whites were in danger, and gathered tourists together for safety. “There were 65 of us altogether so we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened,” said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for women who had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to stand guard while others slept. “We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,” Mr. Hopes said. “Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good,” he said; “in that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.”
John McNeil of Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened when their group, too, heard the lights were about to go out: “I looked at Bud [Hopes] and said, ‘That will be the end of us.’ The gangs had already eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the lights stayed on.” Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical center past seething crowds of blacks.
Peter McNeil of Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was one of the 65 who managed to get out. The blacks were reportedly so hostile “they would stab you as soon as look at you.” “He’s never been so scared in his life,” explained Mr. McNeil. “He just said they had to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he said, they would have been gone.” No American newspaper wrote about what these white tourists went through.
When guardsmen began to show up in force on Sept. 1 and take control, some blacks met them with cheers, but others shouted obscenities. Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when the evacuation began, but thousands more appeared from surrounding areas when word got out that there were buses leaving town. Soldiers held their M-16s and grenade-launchers at the ready, and kept a sharp eye out for snipers.
That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades soldiers put up to control the flow. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever a patrol went by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood. The Army Times reported that Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon of the Oklahoma National Guard, who had recently come home from Afghanistan, said he was struck by the fact Afghanis wanted to help themselves, but that the people of New Orleans only wanted others to help them.
By the evening of Sept. 3, the Superdome was finally evacuated, but the state-of-the-art stadium was a reeking cavern of filth, human waste, and an unknown number of corpses. It, too, had been looted of everything not bolted down. Janice Singleton was working at the stadium when the storm hit. She said she was robbed of everything, even her shoes. As for the building: “They tore that dome apart,” she said sadly. “They tore it down. They taking everything out of there they can take.”
Only afterwards did the public learn there were 50 police officers assigned to the Superdome, but they appear to have been completely ineffectual. Toni Blanco, a 24-year veteran, said police could not arrest anyone because there was no place to hold suspects, and they were afraid to use their guns for fear of the crowd. “You felt helpless in the sense there was absolutely nothing we could do for the city,” she said. What did she do at night, when conditions were worst? She and another officer, Alecia Wright, would slip out to a patrol car and have a good cry. “Many times we laid in the car and tears just rolled,” said Miss Blanco. Some officers simply abandoned their posts and fled the Superdome.
Conditions were even worse at the Convention Center. Although on high ground not far from the stadium, it had not been designated as a shelter. It was, however, beyond reach of the high water, and soon some 20,000 people were huddled in its cavernous halls. There were no supplies or staff, and for several days neither FEMA nor the National Guard seems to have known anyone was there.
Armed gangs took control, and occasional gunshots caused panic. There was no power, and at night the center was plunged into complete darkness. Degeneracy struck almost immediately, with rapes, robbery, and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through the night, but no one could see, or dared to move. When Police Chief Eddie Compass heard what was happening, he sent a squad of 88 officers to investigate. They were overwhelmed by superior forces and retreated, leaving thousands to the mercy of criminals.
It was not until Sept. 2 — four days after the hurricane — that a force of 1,000 National Guardsmen finally took over from the armed gangs. “Had we gone in with a lesser force we may have been challenged, [and] innocents may have been caught in a fight,” explained Gen. Blum.
Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, told a reporter that men had wandered the center at night raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the girl went missing. “She was raped for four hours until she was dead,” Miss Joseph said through tears. “Another child, a seven-year old boy, was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.”
Africa Brumfield, 32, explained that women were in particular fear: “There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats.” Donald Anderson, 43, was at the convention center with his wife, who was six months pregnant: “We circled the chairs like wagons because at night there are stampedes,” he said. “We had to survive.”
The very few whites in the crowd were terrified. Eighty-year-old Selma Valenti, who was with her husband, said blacks threatened to kill them on Thursday, Sept. 1. “They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us,” she said, sobbing. Presumably, the blacks wanted to take their places on the buses.
The center was not entirely without a form of rough justice. A National Guardsman reported that a man who had raped and killed a young girl in the bathroom was caught by the crowd — which beat him to death.
At one time there were as many as seven or eight corpses in front of the center, some of them with blood streaming from bullet wounds. Inside, there was an emergency morgue, but a National Guardsman refused to let a Reuters photographer take pictures. “We’re not letting anyone in there anymore,” he said. “If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.” By Saturday, Sept. 3, the center was mostly cleared of the living. Refugees pulled shirts over their noses trying to block out the smell as they walked past rotting bodies.
Later it would be learned there were 30 to 40 bodies piled into the convention center’s freezer, almost all of them murder victims. Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks showed a reporter the charnel house: “I ain’t got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq. In Iraq, it’s one-on-one. It’s war. It’s fair. Here, it’s just crazy. It’s anarchy. . . . And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live.”
For the city as a whole, not even 50,000 soldiers and federal rescue workers could bring calm. On Sunday, Sept. 4, contractors working for the US Army Corps of Engineers came under fire. Their police escort returned fire and killed four attackers.
On Monday, Sept, 5, a week after the hurricane and after virtually everyone who wanted to get out was gone, there was still widespread banditry. “We’re having some pretty intense gun battles breaking out around the city,” said Capt. Jeff Winn of the New Orleans SWAT team. “Armed gangs of from eight to 15 young men are riding around in pickup trucks, looting and raping.”
Brian McKay was one of 300 Arkansas guardsmen just back from Iraq. He was in full battle gear, including body armor, putting down insurgents. “It’s like Baghdad on a bad day,” he said. Another Arkansan veteran under fire agreed: “It’s just so much like Iraq, it’s not funny, except for all the water, and they speak English.”
Since the old jail was flooded, police set up a holding pen at the Greyhound bus terminal. State Attorney General Charles Foti said there were plans for a temporary court system, but no one knew how they were going to assemble juries or call witnesses. The grim business began of combing the drowning city for corpses and the remaining survivors.
Reactions
The world reacted with astonishment to sights it never expected to see in America. “Anarchy in the USA,” read the headline in Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun. “Apocalypse Now,” said Handelsblatt in Germany. Mario de Carvalho, a veteran Portuguese cameraman, who covers the world’s trouble spots, said he saw the bodies of babies and old people along the highways leading out of New Orleans. “It’s a chaotic situation. It’s terrible. It’s a situation we generally see in other countries, in the Third World,” he said.
Some Third-Worlders would have been insulted. “I am absolutely disgusted,” said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, of the looters. The Sri Lanka native added: “After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world’s population is.”
In the United States, the stark contrast between endless scenes of appalling behavior by blacks and rescue personnel who were almost all white was greeted with the standard foolishness. Some people accused the “biased” media of suppressing footage of rampaging whites and heroic black helicopter pilots.
Many blacks made excuses for looters. “Desperate people do desperate things,” said US Rep. Diane Watson of California. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. from Illinois, said we must not judge harshly: “Who are we to say what law and order should be in this unspeakable environment?” Rep. Melvin Watt, North Carolina Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, was perhaps the greatest ass of all: “Whatever is being taken could not be used by anyone else anyway,” he said.
Many blacks took it for granted that federal relief was slow because the victims were black. Rep. Elijah Cummings said “poverty, age and skin color” determined who lived and who died. Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, blasted “disparate treatment” of Katrina victims. “Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response,” explained Jesse Jackson, Sr. He said the rubbish outside the Convention Center made the place look “like the hull of a slave ship.” Black activist and reparations-booster Randall Robinson said the relief effort was the “defining watershed moment in America’s racial history.” He said he had “finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.”
Democratic Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick of Michigan said she was “ashamed of America and . . . of our government.” The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin — the man who gave city workers a vacation when the feds arrived — shouted and wept on local radio, demanding of federal officials: “Get off your asses, and let’s do something.” There was an undercurrent of fury at a meeting of black leaders in Detroit. One audience member wanted to know whether the slow federal response was “black genocide.” Another shouted, “African Americans built this nation. Descendants of slaves are being allowed to die.”
One black man, observing the chaos from abroad, took a different view. Leighton Levy wrote in the Sept. 2 Jamaica Star: “I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.” He wanted to know why there was no footage of white looters: “Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks?”
Most blacks and many whites fell into the usual assumptions about omnipotent white government and helpless Negroes. If black people were suffering it was because whites had not done enough for them. It did not occur to them that it was the responsibility of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana — not the federal government — to prepare for hurricanes. Before the storm, Mayor Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation only under pressure from the Bush administration. The mayor then did nothing to enforce the order, leaving hundreds of city buses and school buses to drown, rather than use them to offer transportation to people without cars.
Something of the mood of black New Orleans was caught by Fox News film crews as late as Sunday, Sept. 4. White volunteers were trying to persuade a black woman and her small children to leave her flooded house. “You’ve got to get out,” they explained. “The water isn’t going away.” A black man at the top of a multi-story building told a helicopter crew he didn’t need to leave. All he needed was some supplies.
These people could not understand something that was obvious to the whole world: New Orleans had no electricity, no plumbing, no transport, and no food. Blacks refused to leave their flooded homes, even though to stay meant near-certain death.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff noted how crazy it was to stay in the wreckage. “That is not a reasonable alternative,” he said. “We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city.”
FEMA reported that it had pulled three Carnival Cruise Lines ships from commercial duty to shelter the blacks of New Orleans. Maybe the chance of berth on the Ecstasy, the Sensation or the Holiday would be enough to drag them out of the muck.
Lessons
Ninety-nine percent of the white people left New Orleans when the evacuation order went out. Some 80,000 blacks could not or would not leave. Whites did not “leave them behind,” as the editorial writers keep telling us. No one could have gotten some of them to leave — a number of men cheerfully admitted they stayed in town to loot — but if it was anyone’s job to give them the option, it was that of the black-run city government. Of the blacks who stayed, probably only a minority committed crimes, but they were enough to turn the city into a hell hole. Some did unspeakable things: loot hospitals, fire on rescue teams, destroy ambulances. No amount of excuse-making and finger-pointing can paper over degeneracy like that. Black people — and only black people — did these things.
The Superdome and the Convention Center were certainly unpleasant places to spend three or four days, but 50,000 whites would have behaved completely differently. They would have established rules, organized supplies, cared for the sick and dying. They would have organized games for children. The papers would be full of stories of selflessness and community spirit.
Natural disasters usually bring out the best in people, who help neighbors and strangers alike. For blacks — at least the lower-class blacks of New Orleans — disaster was an excuse to loot, rob, rape and kill.
Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites, but pandering of this kind fools fewer and fewer people.
Many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on these shores.
To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.
And in a crisis, Western Civilization disappears overnight.
Conclusion
America is fragile.
What happens when an EMP wipes out all communication, vehicular traffic, internet, and batteries? Who will come out of the balkanized enclaves? And what will they do?
The writing has been on the wall for some time, and now hate has been institutionalized, and the social structure is gone. It is in tatters. America is a wreck, and the ruling oligarchy really isn’t aware at the actual fragility of America.
If they were (aware) they would be conducting emergency domestic rebuilding, and hiring.
They would NOT be constructing trillion-dollar spending campaigns on the military “to counter” anyone.
And they most certainly wouldn’t be giving away trillion-dollars to any other nations for a counter program for the BRI.
Instead, they would be spending money and time dealing with the festering problems that exists right now. That means all sorts of restructuring of local and state and federal governments, wholesale readjustments of federal agencies, and many, many rebuilding programs at the LOCAL LEVEL. Not throwing away money at the FEDERAL LEVEL.
But they are not.
Instead we see the nation gearing up for a major war with either China or Russia. And trust me, it will be against both simultaneously.
What will happen after the missiles fly is anyone’s guess. But I am leaning strongly on a short-war, with both Russia and China being victorious. And America absolutely, completely and utterly, devastated; broken and destroyed in every single conceivable way.
Are you all ready for a devastated America?
Do you have any idea what that means? Do you have any idea what it will be like for the people inside of America? A balkanized racist America?
Guess.
Coming to your neighborhood soon.
Now, a word about whether this might come about…
I wrote this back over a year ago. And the events of the last few months put everything in a stunning new light…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
A lot of interesting articles out lately concerning Geo-Politics. Most of which are unavailable on Google or in the states. As they are “shadow banned”. I want to chat about some of the stuff that’s “out there”. And in this post I am going to throw a lot of the banned stuff out for you all to absorb.
But first, let me take a sip of tea.
You know, I have come to enjoy Earl Grey Tea. It’s got this lovely aroma, a nice soothing feel, and is wholly enjoyable to drink. But I do not drink it every day. Sometimes I drink roasted Oolong tea. And I have become a fan of green tea. It’s healthier for you, don’t you know.
Earl Grey Tea.
With the Earl Grey Tea, I like to drink it UK / Australian style. Nicely seeped in a pot, poured into a a nice cup sitting on a saucer, and I add some sugar and milk. Though it’s not all that proper. I do enjoy it that way.
This is how a “real” (an authentic) British person (man, or woman, or “thing”) makes a cup of tea.
How to Make a “Proper” Cup of Tea (British Tea, that is)
Tea is an institution in the UK. Its fibers are woven into the British culture in such a way that it is difficult to describe to a “non-Brit.” I came across this video a while ago and was so awed by the impact a beverage can have on a country.
FYI to Americans, Eastenders is a popular soap-opera type show in the UK. When the show finishes, most viewers turn the kettle on for a cup of tea resulting in a huge surge for electricity! Who’d figure?
The British love their tea. I wonder if people in Singapore drink tea properly like the British do?
I put “proper” in quotation marks because this is my version of how to make a proper cup of tea. It’s not the “proper-proper” tea made with loose leaf tea, of course. That’s more for a leisurely afternoon tea, but this is an everyday process with tea bags which is less time consuming.
In the UK they say to put one teabag per person and “one for the pot.” However, in my opinion that’s too strong for most people in the US and Canada who are used to a weaker tea.
If you are using a British brand of tea, which is already much stronger and has a lot more flavor than most US tea brands, you might just want to use a teabag per person.
Three teabags for a 32 ounce pot, not completely filled to the rim (about 4 cups of tea) is perfect for a fine British family, but you can just adjust accordingly.
First of all, a proper-proper cup of tea is made with loose leaf tea, but most of us don’t have time for that on a daily basis, two or three times a day.
So this is mostly aimed at US households who are used to a Lipton teabag in hot water in a mug. This will be a big change in flavor for those of you.
1.Boil the water.
First, bring water to a boil, but do not let it keep boiling. Remove it as soon as it comes to a boil. This is critical. This is important.
As soon as the tea comes to a boil, remove it from the stove.
Hot water will not do.
We want the tea leaves to infuse the flavor of the tea into the water, and tepid or hot water will not do this nearly as well as boiling water. I use an electric kettle because we use it all the time.
You will also need a good teapot, preferably one made in the UK (they know their tea there).
2.Warm the teapot for the perfect cup of tea.
So, when the kettle is almost boiling, put some water in the pot, just to warm up the teapot. Return the kettle to its base (or stovetop) to make it come to a full boil. Swirl the hot water around the teapot and then drain it out. Make sure to have your teabags ready.
A proper teapot.
3.Add the teabags and water to the pot.
When the water just comes to a boil, put the teabags in the teapot and immediately pour the water into the pot.
You do not place them in the cup.
You place the teabags in the kettle. That is it’s purpose.
4.Use a tea cosy (if you have one).
Next, if you have a tea cosy, cover the pot. If not, use a heavy tea towel or something to keep the pot warm. You’ll discover that this also makes a big difference in the outcome of the flavor of the tea.
A tea cosy.
5.Steep the tea.
Let the tea steep for about 3 to 5 minutes; the longer you leave it, the stronger it will be. (Three minutes in a tea pot is pretty weak.)
6.Pour the tea and add the milk (and sugar, if desired).
Now it’s time to pour the perfectly steeped tea.
If you’re going to add sugar, add it before the milk so that it has a chance to start melting before adding the cold milk. Regarding the whole “milk, or tea first” debate, it used to be that milk went in first to protect the china from cracking, so that’s no longer a reason.
I think it’s a personal preference. I like to add the milk after so I can better control the ratio of milk to tea, and you may think I’m crazy, but I say it tastes better, too. I also prefer whole milk. 2% milk is passable, but don’t offer me 1% or even talk to me about skim milk. Although you should NEVER add cream to a cup of tea, the natural cream that’s in whole milk adds a lot to the flavor of a proper cup of tea.
Now enjoy with a crumpet or a biscuit.
British (or Hong Kong) style crumpet. Toasted with well-salted butter.
Now…
With a cup of tea in one hand, and a fine hot buttered crumpet nearby. Let’s adjust our monocle to look at the editorial sections of the paper. Shall we?
Ah. A fine Rugby match. It’s all Crickets, don’t you know.
Oh, here’s something from the colonies…
It seems that President Biden is trying to incentivize Russia to stop dealing with China. It’s what he has been doing with the G7 folk in Europe. But, you know, Russia is “not biting”.
MOSCOW (Xinhua): Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced actions aimed at driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, stressing that China is a strategic partner, not a threat.
"We can see attempts to destroy the relationship between Russia and China. We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies,"
Putin said in an interview with US television network NBC published on Monday (June 14).
"We are pleased with the unprecedentedly high level of our relationship as it has evolved over the last few decades. We cherish it just like our Chinese friends do, which we can see,"
He said.
Putin praised…
"a high level of trust and cooperation in all areas"
…between the two countries, from politics and economy to technology and military.
"We do not believe that China is a threat to us. China is a friendly nation. It has not declared us an enemy as the United States has done,"
He said.
A huge and powerful country, China has been developing with its great economy and a tremendous volume of foreign trade,
He added.
"We have been working and will continue to work with China, which applies to all kinds of programs, including exploring deep space,"
The Russian leader concluded.
Meanwhile, exactly what’s up with the Western G7 nations?
Popular WhatsApp forwarded message:
I never saw this until now. But that’s probably because I don’t have WhatsApp. I don’t want it, and there’s a bunch of chicks that want to hook up with me because they see my LinkedIN account and mistakenly believe that I have lots of money that they can somehow extract via their sultry means…
LOL.
Anyways I got this jammed in my proton mail account from a reliable source, and it makes for a great read. I enjoyed it. Maybe you will too.
*A Lesson In History…*
1. Which countries invaded and occupied Indonesia?
*Netherlands for 350 years and Japan for 3.5 years*.
2. Which country was once the colony master of Malaya & India?
*Britain*.
3. Which countries invaded and occupied Vietnam?
*France 1857-1940 & 1946-1954, Japan 1940-1945 and USA (in Southern Vietnam) 1955-1975*.
4. Which countries were responsible for colonization of the African continent?
*Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy*.
5. Which 8 countries were responsible for the occupation of China in early 20th century?
*Britain, US, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy & Austria-Hungary*.
6. Which countries are responsible for colonizing and almost annihilating the Red Indians in northern America?
*France & Britain*.
7. Which country colonized and almost annihilated Aborigines in Australia and New Zealand?
*Britain* .
8. Which are the member countries of G7?
*United Kingdom/Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan & USA*.
And now the million dollar question…
9. Why are the G7 members see China as a threat even though China is the only major nation on earth that has never invaded or occupied another country?
*Ego or fear of retribution* ?
America today is so many ways from being Right, that it’s easy to pick it’s imperfections. Here’s another article by a Pentagon worker who is alarmed at what is going on inside of the Washington DC beltway for war (with either or Russia and / or China)…
Horrified by the actual discussions going on inside of the Pentagon today.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word "othering" as an act wherein a race or culture is made to appear as "a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals… treating people from another group as less human than one's own group."
Historically, "othering" has served as a conditioning mechanism to dehumanize US adversaries, preparing normally empathetic men and women to act with less discrimination and greater brutality in war.
During WWII, US othering of the Japanese involved weaponizing disinformation and propagating racist stereotypes. It was considered as effective at setting the necessary psychological conditions for the controversial internment of Japanese Americans, firebombing of Tokyo, and dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities merely to deter the Soviet Union. Conceivably, left unmodified, a soldier's empathy for non-combatant human beings otherwise could have placed those ruthless American operations and their objectives at risk.
Othering of the Chinese people is evident in recent US news media in the form of a mix of unverified rumors, disinformation, and selective exclusion of contradictory facts. It has been reported that China-averse special interests have even paid US journalists to publish stories biased against China's policies, to include encouraging a US-China confrontation. Meanwhile, the island of Taiwan's secession champions in the US Congress have nurtured the absurd public perception that the US-emulating people aboard the island of Taiwan are "non-Chinese" in ethnic identity.
The apparent sophistication and coordination of Chinese othering are indications that some in the US are working to desensitize Americans to the certain horrors of a war with China over Taiwan. Its effects are already being witnessed in American society. Despite a presidential-level denouncement, racially motivated assaults on Chinese and Asians generally are sharply increasing. The dehumanization of our future foe is in full swing to the delight of China-averse special interests.
Some argue that a US war with China over Taiwan would be a just war, claiming the "non-Chinese" island citizenry deserves our protection, not just ideological support. Others will go further and assert that the US nuclear umbrella needs to be extended to encompass the island. They try to make the desperate case that the island of Taiwan is the last bastion of American values in Southeast Asia, and the final barricade that contains China.
The nuclear weapons theme deserves a closer look. Senior US military leaders at different times in the 20th century glibly suggested the employment of nuclear weapons to regain initiative in conventional conflicts with non-nuclear Asian nations. In addition to the island of Taiwan, these included conflicts in and with Vietnam, Korea, and China. Similarly, the employment of firebombing and nuclear weapons against a densely populated Japan was rationalized without significant opposition.
This was not so in the European theater. The firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and elsewhere were emotionally contested even at the time of their planning, although the fanaticism and atrocious behavior of Imperial Japan was on a par with that of Nazi Germany. In fact, Winston Churchill went so far as to write: the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not benefit from such a distinguished Western advocate, and evidently neither does China.
Today hawkish members of Congress, most of whom have not served their country in uniform, casually resurrect such options as it pertains to supporting the island of Taiwan's split from China. It is easy for them to talk tough on the matter as most don't know the sacrifices of Service, and perhaps because of lacking ethnic identification with Chinese and other Asian races and cultures. This thoughtless devaluation of Asian casualties to mere nuclear attrition statistics results from the same sort of American othering seen in the 20th century.
In a war, the small island of Taiwan would erupt into a battleground with an intensity unknown since the world wars. All parties have known that the island's citizenry would be devastated far beyond the value of attempting to secede from China. Since this is known by the US Congress in advance, it illuminates the reality that the Chinese aboard the island of Taiwan are expendable. The issue of the island province is not and never was about protecting its people. Instead, it is all about the US striving to maintain its hegemonic reach during a period of decline in global influence.
This difference in the US perspectives on Asian and European lives is nothing new to any overseas or indigenous Asian citizen. To contort the present American devaluation and othering into a dubious justification for violating China's internal affairs and sovereignty is futile and transparent. It also portends that a fight over the island of Taiwan will rapidly devolve into a primitive, brutal, unrestricted war that has every appearance of, and is at its core an imperial US expedition.
As an American, my priority is US national interest. Attempting to support the renegade island of Taiwan's secession is directly contrary to the US national interest as we know in advance we will lose. Even in defeat many politicians, conservative ideologues, financially incentivized journalists, and special interests such as the US defense industry would benefit, just as a similar cabal did after Vietnam. But Taiwan secession is a transparently shallow cause with no path to victory. In fact, historical precedent shows that the US will lose primarily because the American public will see through the fraudulent deadly farce, but only after the unspeakable tragedy unfolds.
In the end, China' Province of Taiwan will always mean more to the physically proximate, ethnically identical, and nationalistically fueled China of over 1.4 billion, than it will to the distant, over-extended, and above all falsely incentivized US of 350 million. The heaviest burden of the tragedy of war will fall on the young, patriotic men and women who volunteered to serve in the US military in the faith that an assigned cause is legitimate and worthy of their sacrifice. Unfortunately, a war between the US and China over the island of Taiwan would be a complete betrayal of their good faith.
The author is a retired Marine Corps infantry officer who now serves as a US civil servant in the Pentagon. Opinions are of the author and do not represent the US government obviously.
So when a Pentagon insider is seeing things starting to turn in one direction and is willing to risk his life and his career over it, maybe we all should shit up and take notice.
This all makes me hungry because it reminds me of Po-Boy sandwiches
Well it does.
You see, this near religious fervor towards war reminds me of the “Bible thumping” ministers of the deep, deep American South. Like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. As much as I love Louisiana, and I do love it in so many, many ways, the “Bible Thumpers” are just plain obnoxious.
They really are.
Louisiana and Mississippi are just beautiful, and I consider my days in Hattiesburgh and Pervis to be very special ones.
This picture reminds me of my home in Hattiesburgh Mississippi. This is sort of what the front yard looked like. I can tell you that my cats just loved the place. Behind my house was a wooded bog / swamp and they would spend all the time exploring it and doing cat things.
Anyways…
This reminds me of Louisiana because of the assholes pushing for war. They are of the same type; a belief that they have been issued by GOD to be the “cleansers of the world” to remove all impurities that does not embrace the righteous nature of “democracy’!
Now getting to my point.
They remind me of food.
Why?
I do not know.
Girls remind me of food too. But I know why. I always picture myself eating with them and chatting with them, and telling stories, and drinking wine over delicious food. So it’s really understandable that I would associate women with food.
But sicko egomaniacs?
Let me continue….
…and try to explain. First, let’s discuss what a “Po’boy” is…
A Po-Boy is a traditional sandwich from Louisiana. It almost always consists of meat, which is usually roast beef or fried seafood, often shrimp, crawfish, fish, oysters or crab. The meat is served on New Orleans French bread, known for its crisp crust and fluffy center.
Fried catfish po’boy sandwich.
When I read about how America is going to “save the Taiwanese” for “democracy” and “freedom” I am reminded of the Southern Baptist minister in the deep South of Louisiana. The local folk were all pretty darn decent, and I served some time with them in prison, but the local government was so very corrupt, and the Baptist Ministers were the worst kind of “fire and brimstone” evangelicals.
You know like Tom Cotton is. Yeah, I know he’s from Arkansas. But it’s not that far away from Louisiana. Maybe one or two inches.
One inch.
Tom Cotton.
What a fella.
He’s (you know) one of the jack-asses pushing for World War III.
I associate him with his environment. As we should all associate people so that we can best understand them, their motivations, and why they do the crazy things that they do.
So it makes me think of what it was like, and how can I omit the wonderful Po’boy sandwiches and fine CajunCooking?
Cajun Cooking. Um um good em’ yah. You betya.
Well…
There are no easy answers.
Corrupt people in America push to become leaders and live in the enclave of the psychopaths; Washington DC. And he is one of them.
Personally, I cannot imagine him eating delicious food.
Instead, I picture him (somehow) eating food like this…
Here’s a pretty decent article by another ex-military working inside the Pentagon who is, justifiably horrified at all the talk about war, war, war! He wrote this and subsequently had his secret clearances revoked. He was then fired.
It would seem to some that a US war with China over the island of Taiwan appears imminent.
Considering the congestion of hostile forces in, above, and below the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea, conflict could explode by accident or design. Once blood is drawn, the US will have few options. If the US elects to fight China over the island of Taiwan, then it will lose.
Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) independence hubris is fueled by US cabinet-level China hawks and Congress' bipartisan, bicameral Taiwan Caucus. The DPP has rejected political reunification in one China and dismissed the "one country, two systems" model under which both Taiwan and Hong Kong have gotten rich. Encouraged by US trivialization of the three joint communiqués, the DPP parades a sense of entitlement, taking for granted an umbrella of protection with full knowledge of the dire consequences for the US
The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) may not have been intended to give birth to Taiwan's renegade secessionists, but it has done exactly that.
The DPP's champions in the US Congress dismiss omens of fanatical China grit on the topic of Taiwan. China-bashing and Taiwan-coveting rhetoric forms an echo chamber reminiscent of the groupthink-led American Friends of Vietnam (AFV) lobby that pressured the US to commit to the Vietnam War killing 60,000 American patriots before the US disgracefully abandoned its ally.
But the Chinese are different.
China's history of the whole-of-society commitment to core national security priorities is legendary. The rebellions and unrests in the 19th century cost millions of Chinese lives. Twentieth century Chinese civil war losses ranged between 5 and 8 million, and 360,000 Chinese died in Korea, while routing and humiliating US and UN forces. In each case, the dynasties emerged stronger.
The US Congress' interests in Taiwan are deeply conflicted, better said corrupt.
The reciprocal relationship between defense lobbyists, industry contributions, and a Caucus Member's reelectability is well documented. The bipartisan support for increasing arms sales to Taiwan and even larger defense expenditures on the US Indo-Pacific Command are logical and transparent as all parties profit from the tension and war.
Many Americans assume China's citizenry longs for a liberal democracy like that on the island of Taiwan, and that war will trigger popular revolt.
But the Taiwan question is not an ideological dispute.
Rather it is a raw and painful open wound in China's civilizational identity. Today, US othering of Chinese only fuels a fierce nationalism in its 1.4 billion citizens. China has a traditional self-narrative wherein the preservation of face and enforcement of sovereignty are inseparable.
All the while the balance of power has shifted fundamentally. The US would be wise to regard China as a peer superpower, if only due to her casualty-tolerance - China's decisive advantage in any fight with the US. China also shares a binding mutual defense treaty with North Korea, and the depths of its friendship and security bonds with Russia should never be underestimated.
The US can think whatever it wants about China's ideology, culture, Xinjiang and Hong Kong policies, and sovereign claims to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and surrounding seas. But, whether the US likes it or not, those are ultimately China's internal affairs.
As for DPP claims of the Province of Taiwan's non-Chinese identity, they are historical fiction.
Fate made them Chinese just as fate made us Americans. We also know that the free will choice to carve out a territory and people from an existing nation incurs a steep price, one the Confederacy paid not long ago.
The US has never paid an existential price for violating another nation's sovereignty, leading to our smug sense of military invincibility.
However, with Taiwan being a core Chinese priority, that would be a fatal miscalculation.
Still, the US counts on regional allies to share the pain. Yet some will have blood debts to pay if they engage in China's civil war. For example, India was bloodied badly in the 1960s for testing China's territorial resolve. Japan's humiliating 50-year occupation of Taiwan and the Rape of Nanjing also remain fresh, unforgettable wounds for China. The US allies will definitely think twice before militarily intervening in China's unresolved civil war and internal affairs.
The US could advise Taiwan's secessionists to peaceably accept "one country, two systems" and cease its "independence" ambitions. If they don't stop their rhetoric, the US president could rescind the TRA, as baiting China to force reunification is of the DPP's own choosing. If Congress obstructs TRA recension, the US president could order all national security agencies to stand down in cross-Straits conflicts, keeping our powder dry for actual existential threats in the future.
In the end, the prosperous Taiwan people will make every effort to wag the American dog. But Taiwan's fate poses no existential threat to the US, and the US should not fall into the trap of paying for their hubris with American blood. However, in view of the violent political polarization of the US at home, an ill-advised foreign war with no path to victory would only serve to accelerate America's decline.
But he’s right. Don’t you know.
But the United States is absolutely out-of-control right now and no one wants to hear that “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes”.
About as important as any band playing Jazz Fest is a bowl of Crawfish Monica, best enjoyed while festin’. Creamy, rich pasta (usually corkscrew rotini) is blended with lump crawfish meat and plenty of butter, heavy cream and spices. It’s kind of like mac and cheese took a wrong turn and ended up in Cajun country. The creators of Crawfish Monica, the folks at Kajun Kettle Foods, have crazy lines each year at Jazz Fest, and unfortunately they aren’t restaurateurs, so they don’t have a location you can visit. Could there be a better excuse to book your Jazz Fest tickets today?
The story “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes”
Is everyone, or anyone, aware of this children’s story written by Hans Christian Anderson. You know the one. It was first published in April of 1873?
Well, then, here is a short summary.
The story is about a vain emperor whose favorite thing was buying and wearing the latest style of clothes. The story points out how the emperor cared nothing about reviewing his troops, going to the theater or going for carriage rides (Unless the rides were to show off his newest clothes). “He had a different coat for every hour of the day,” the story continues. When the emperor was late for a meeting or other event the excuse was usually, “The emperor is in his dressing room.”
The kingdom is described as a festive place with many visitors.
The story continues that on one day two “swindlers” came to the emperor’s town. The swindlers claimed to be weavers and bragged to anyone who would listen how they, “Could weave the most magnificent of clothes.” The swindler’s story continued that, “Not only were the colors uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.”
Word of the “weavers” reached the emperor and he thought this was great, he felt it would be the ideal product for him so he could determine who was not worthy of their position!
“He paid a large sum of money to the swindlers to start at once.” “They set up two looms and pretended to weave, though there was nothing on the looms. All the finest silk and purest old thread which they demanded went into their travel bags, while they worked the empty looms well into the night.”
The emperor was anxious to check on the progress and, while he was a very confident person, he was concerned that he might not see the material and asked a trusted old minister to check on the progress.
The swindlers, pretending to be weaving the material, greeted the minister when he arrived and said, “Don’t hesitate a moment to tell us what you think.” The minister was embarrassed and did not want anyone to suspect he was not worthy of his post, or stupid. “It’s beautiful.” was his reply.
The swindlers thanked him and then recited a list of all the colors and explained the intricacies of the weave. The minister listened intently as he feared everyone else would see the clothes. The swindlers then asked the emperor for more money, silk and thread.
The Emperor asked another trusted advisor to check on the progress. That advisor looked at the empty looms and said to himself, “Well I know that I am not stupid, so I must be unfit for my position. I can’t let anyone know.” He reported that the material was coming along splendidly.
When the emperor then viewed his new clothes, with all of his noblemen present, the swindlers pretended to hold up the finished product. The emperor did not see anything, but pretended he did because all of the noblemen said they saw it, and he did not want them to think that he was not fit for his position. The noblemen suggested the emperor wear his new clothes to the procession later that day. All in attendance agreed, afraid to be the only one to admit they could not see the clothes.
The swindlers then “dressed” the emperor in his new outfit and the entourage went off to the procession.
At the procession the townspeople, all aware of the special quality of the material, pretended the emperor was dressed magnificently until a child said, “He has no clothes!” The crowd started to repeat what had been said and finally cried out as one, “He has no clothes on.”
The story ends saying, “The emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”
Another French word picked up by the Cajuns, étouffée means “smothered,” and it’s the smothering technique that gives this stewlike dish its thick, near-gravy texture. For locals, etouffee is one of those dishes where there’s no definitive recipe. Some folks make it with a dark roux, and others with a lighter roux; some use tomato, and others don’t. Sometimes crawfish is used, and sometimes shrimp is: It all depends on what’s in season. Bon Ton Cafe in New Orleans serves a solid plate of both crawfish and shrimp etouffee, to suit both tastes.
That’s America today
And isn’t it though?
It’s pretty bat-shit crazy. Like the UK is.
When I was growing up as a boy, we had this magazine called “MAD Magazine” that we all used to read. We would read it cover to cover. It was filled with just off-the-wall interpretations of life, and we all loved it.
Today, it seems, America is just one big old MAD Magazine.
I'm sure everyone remembers their first issue of Mad Magazine. It was odd, uproariously funny, and immature enough for everyone. My first issue was when I was about twelves, when my mom bought me an issue to read at the orthopedic surgeon's office (I had broken my arm about a week prior). However, I'm no kid anymore (or so the judge tells me). I'm a college student, looking to become a professional teacher, and I'm a respected reviewer for this website. How can I like something as immature as Mad?
Simply put, Mad is the most dead-on entertainment magazine available. Through a combination of peurile humor, self-deprication, excellent art, and witty writing, Mad has seperated itself from the pack of low-end satire mags (like Cracked) and made itself a true piece of American culture. Stop groaning out there.
First, Mad brings itself to attention primarily for its spoofs of popular movies and television shows. I think this results in the "Weird Al" syndrome - you pay more attention to the obvious mockeries than the subtle ones. As time has gone on, Mad's style has cleaned up considerably - which means that now, you can catch marginal jokes even better than before, and the magazine fits more in. While occasionally lewd, Mad also recognizes that sometimes, humor is best left suggested, and many jokes are subtle innuendos, much beyond what people would initially give the mag credit for.
Mad's jokes work so well because they first did what Mystery Science Theater 3000 became famous for - finding what everyone makes fun of about in a given piece of entertainment and finding the perfect gag to make about it. For a classic example, in their parody of "Big Daddy," "Big Bladder," they have someone go up to the kid and complain about his wooden delivery. Who would be such an expert on bad childhood acting? The block of wood that played Anakin in "Phantom Menace."
I couldn't have come up with a better gag myself, and generally, Mad gives this kind of performance consistently. While it does occasionally foul up - I found some of their Pokemon parodies lacking the punch of other shots - Mad creates gags much better than, say, your average night of NBC's "Must See TV."
However, Mad also has a rabid following because of their regular gags that appear often. Of course, despite the passing of its creator, "Spy vs. Spy" is going on as strong as ever, with a new airbrushed style that doesn't detract from "the famous duo of double-cross and deceit." Dave Berg still puts in regular duty with his clever "The Lighter Side Of..." which has modern lampoonings of everyday situations. Newer additions to this mix are sure to become classics - "Jenkins and Melvin," an answer to Highlight's "Goofus and Gallant," brings me to tears laughing every time. While Jenkins is even more of a proper gentleman than Gallant, Melvin is sure to provide a situation even more ridiculous than Goofus ever could. Almost frighteningly educational.
However, nothing showcases Mad's continued tradition of excellence like one new feature and one classic. Al Jaffee is still around, and he still makes a new, highly entertaining "Mad Fold-In" for the back cover of every issue. There is sure to be an off-beat answer to the fold-in, and the art is rather cleverly done - I still wish I knew how Jaffee does it. On the opposite page from the fold-in is a new regular feature which has quickly become a favorite of mine - the Celebrity Odds of Death listing. When I first saw it, it listed the various odds of the Spice Girls dying in various ways - "Terminal Giggling" had a 1:1 chance, while "Choking on a chicken bone during a dinner celebrating their 5th year in the music business" had over a billion to one shot. I enjoy this feature so much, I start with it first whenever I pick up a new issue.
One thing about Mad, though, is that the humor is aimed for all levels - I wonder if the writers had a steady diet of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" when they were younger.
While there are plenty of obvious jokes for all ages, there is plenty of subtle humor, especially political humor, in each issue. Looking back on older issues I have, I'm surprised at how many jokes I didn't get because I didn't know much about politics then. If Mad felt like trying a bit harder, they could probably make a sister magazine that concentrated on politics. Of course, that would just scare people afraid of the magazine multiplying.
Mad isn't totally perfect. There are still occasional rough spots in the art, and sometimes, a whole section will just lack laughs, such as the first parody of Pokemon that Mad put together. Also, a new feature, "Monroe," usually lacks the punch and humor of the other segments - you can generally skip it. Also, Mad sometimes skimps over parts you wish were mocked, due to the limited amount of space the magazine has. I sometimes wish the magazine would expand and maybe carry a few ads (from Archie McPhee and other such companies) to pack in more sufficiently wickedly barbed jokes.
But in all honesty, this doesn't detract from the magazine as a whole. It consistently gives you more laughs than anything since Monty Python. Moreover, unlike most topical humor, it ages like wine, getting better with the passing years. And with the new humorous monthly features, the magazine is insuring that it will have a healthy continued existence. From 61 Man Squamish to Superduperman, from Spy vs. Spy to the Fold-In, Mad has helped define itself as a prominent piece of our culture. Find out why - while America may be going somewhere in a handbasket, Mad is here to save our sanity.
-MAGSConnect
I like that. “…while America may be going somewhere in a handbasket, Mad is here to save our sanity.”
But is America really going bat-shit crazy? Does it really resemble the movie “Idiocracity”?
A well-informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny,” noted Thomas Jefferson. It follows from this that if you want to visit tyranny upon a people, you can start by dumbing them down.
Ergo, 21st-century America.
So laments commentator Andrea Widburg. Writing Monday in a piece titled “There is no bottom to the ignorance of supposedly educated Americans,” she reminds us that the American system, “going all the way back to the Founding Fathers,” was predicated on having an educated population. “People weren’t expected to be scholars,” she pointed out, but the Founders did emphasize that their government couldn’t work without “a literate and moral population.”
“And that is what they got: most Americans were literate before public schooling,” Widburg continued. “Colonial Americans could also read at a very sophisticated level. The colonists would not have known what to make of the abysmally educated people this scary, funny video shows.”
They wouldn’t have known what to make of much that’s going on today. But the video in question, posted Sunday on YouTube, and showing supposedly average Americans trying to answer simple questions, and failing, is striking.
The question: “Who was the first person to land on the sun?” was taken seriously by the interviewees shown. Another highlight (lowlight) was when the questioner asked, “What country is Venice, Italy, located in?” The young woman queried responded, “Gosh, I’m gonna’ be a teacher, so I should know this.”
You can just see what is going on in the USA by the opinions of Americans on the outside looking in. Here's an article written by a Washington DC insider back on 2019 right before Coronavirus hit, and Donald Trump was getting ready for reelection...
One commenter under the video remarked “This can’t be legit” or “we are doomed.” But not only does it seem authentic, it simply reflects a multitude of “man on the street” interviews conducted over the years by comedian Jay Leno, shock jock Howard Stern, and others.
Knowing this, it’s not surprising to me that the referenced young woman would be a prospective teacher. It’s not just that studies have shown how little many educators know; it’s also that the people educating the educators — the pseudo-elites — are in their own way no better.
Shocked by her experiences at “prestigious” Columbia University, North Korean defector Yeonmi Park recently remarked about the state of America that even “North Korea is not this nuts.” Park was referring to the anti-Western sentiment and intense political correctness prevalent today, and she wasn’t joking.
Yet while our “wokeness” is called many things, nuts and dangerous among them, it’s also something else: profoundly stupid.
It can be said without exaggeration that America has become “Idiocracy.” This term is the title of a 2006 film portraying a dystopian, future United States in which IQs have dropped precipitously. People are obsessed with sex (sound familiar?), the president is a former professional wrestler and porn star who still dresses as befitting his former vocation (the one requiring clothes), vulgarity is everywhere, and entertainment has become über-simplistic and crude.
Of course, IQs are still high enough in the United States today, though some studies do show that they’ve been dropping for decades now. But the real issue is a moral corruption which infects everything else.
While real threats (e.g., China, the aforementioned moral crisis) are largely ignored, our pseudo-elites concern themselves with stupid things. Wholly contrary to science/evidence, they claim a boy can be a girl by willing it, we should be concerned about new “pronouns,” “diversity” is a strength, children should be vaccinated against a disease that doesn’t imperil them, a nation that has allowed 85 to 90 percent of its post-1967 immigrants to be from the Third World is “white supremacist,” and more.
It’s no wonder, either, that pseudo-elites want to “cancel” people who dispute the above. Their assertions are literally too stupid to be debated successfully; all they can do is make sure the debates never happen.
Then consider whom we now elevate to prominence. Curricula nationwide have been influenced by the 1619 Project, a deceit-filled, propagandistic portrayal of American history created by one Nikole Hannah-Jones. With red-dyed hair, Jones wouldn’t be out of place in Idiocracy, and she’s not out of place in ours: She was given a professorship by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Also fitting in is New York City-based psychoanalyst Dr. Donald Moss, who penned a recent paper in which he called “whiteness” a “malignant, parasitic like condition” that lacks a “permanent cure.”
His work was published in a medical journal.
And Jones and Moss are just two of a multitude of idiocrats.
The skids for their nonsensical thinking have long been well greased with philoso-babble. Years ago, the idiocrats labeled logic “white, male, and linear,” as if it’s a cultural oddity. Then there’s Critical Race Theory, whose proponents have claimed that “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success” reflect “white male culture” and that planning for the future and punctuality are “white norms.”
The idiocrats have also bemoaned the teaching of “facts” — even though facts, as little snippets of Truth, are how we piece together life’s jigsaw puzzle. But it’s no surprise pseudo-elites deemphasize facts: They want to replace them with fiction.
They’ve succeeded, too, which is why “the most recent generations of school graduates will bore you to tears talking about gender, racism, class victimization, America’s wrongdoing over the centuries, etc.,” writes Widburg. As Ronald Reagan put it, they “know so much that isn’t so.”
The solution to this, of course and as I’m wont to emphasize, is a return to virtue (objectively good moral habits). Virtue neutralizes moral corruption. In this regard, one entity doing good work, and helping to mold children’s minds properly, is the Freedom Project Academy, a fully accredited, online school offering classical education to students in kindergarten through high school.
But lacking this, it’s unsurprising that a senile man was elevated to the presidency. Joe Biden is the perfect leader and metaphor for a nation that’s forgotten its history, its virtue, its faith, and its reason for being.
OK. So America is senile.
But when did this all happen? Last year? What was going on and what turned America to the shit-storm that it is today?
“At first we thought they were just another snake cult, but now their towers are everywhere.” —Conan the Barbarian 1982
At the dawn of my congressional career, after some of us staffers endured a particularly egregious dose of idiocy, one of my colleagues was moved to compare our office to Saint Elizabeth’s, then still functioning as a mental hospital in DC (and now, fittingly, as headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security). “Not quite,” I responded. “Here the lunatics are in charge.”
That exchange, alas, has become a prophecy for the nation at large. It begins, as we are made aware by each daily tweet-storm, at the very top, but this insanity could not persist without broad and intense public support. It has become commonplace to characterize such supporters as haters, but while it would be dangerous to underestimate the role of sheer malice, Trumpism could only sustain itself with tens of millions of people who might not fit the profile of a hater, but are assuredly either borderline imbeciles or not-quite-certifiably insane. Examples there are in profusion; but rather than ringing the changes on every single winner of the Darwin Awards, let us examine three cases that have wider policy implications.
Item. Measles, an infectious disease that each year once killed several hundred people and caused about a thousand cases of encephalitis in America, was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000. But thanks to a kind of misbegotten Hitler-Stalin alliance between right-wing religious nuts and New Age-Hollywood Hills types, the disease has come roaring back.
What other topic could unite such a disparate gaggle of characters as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., trading on his father’s martyr credibility to whisk us back to pre-Enlightenment times, and Texas Republican State Rep. Jonathan Stickland, (apparently such an extreme Neanderthal that even Texas’ own hardline Freedom Caucus was too liberal for him) who has called vaccinations “sorcery?”
Mimicking the measles that their evangelism spreads, American anti-vaxxers are also some of the most industrious Internet pests known to science, even if their trolling is supplemented by bots from a certain foreign country.
Item. One of the “noble lies” undergirding modern society is the myth of the rational actor. So-called enlightened self-interest suffuses economics (although corporations know better, which explains their lavish expenditures on advertising); as well as game theory, which supposedly prevents nuclear war from breaking out; and politics.
Political scientists (and some psychologists) are fond of proving that people “vote their interests” by the simple, circular expedient of defining a subject’s true interests as whatever they opt for. It is time for a sweeping reevaluation of this canard.
In 2016, American farmers voted by a margin of between 3 and 4 to 1 in favor of Donald Trump over the Democrat. This happened in spite of the fact that he told them in clear and unmistakable terms that he would, if elected, ignite a trade war with their most lucrative export market. Further, he would cut off their supply of the low cost, often undocumented labor needed for fruit and vegetable picking as well as beef, pork, and poultry processing.
As a result, farm income is down, even though the income calculation includes the Market Facilitation Program, money extorted from the rest of us to reward Trump’s political base. Farm bankruptcies have soared. There is alleged evidence (not quantified by polling) that “farmers are losing their patience” amid mealy-mouthed equivocating from farm belt, GOP-elected officials over Trump’s latest tariff threats.
For now, though, it appears that farmers are sticking with Trump. If his electoral margin among them should even fall to 2½ to 1 in 2020, Democrats will think of it as a miraculous breakthrough. The bulk of farmers would likely prefer to go down in whatever fate decides will be America’s functional equivalent of the rubble of Berlin.
Item. For decades, American religious fundamentalists have ceaselessly worked to poison whole departments of knowledge – from geology to history to herpetology – with ignorance and disinformation. All of this in the service of a project to turn the country into a living tableau of The Handmaid’s Tale.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Apocalypse. They seem to have dropped Jesus altogether as the ostensible object of their adoration and instead became a cult of the Antichrist. Every single sin they claimed to revile—adultery, fornication, false witness, the Mephistophelean sin of overweening pride—is now embodied in their new god incarnate, Donald Trump.
Like Lucifer, he led them to the mountaintop and offered them the world if they would but bow down to him. And they obediently dropped like ninepins.
Ecclesiastical dervishes like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress seem to be working out the theology to replace Jesus in the holy trinity with Donald Trump. And the faithful lap it all up like bulimics at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
* * *
How in the world did we get here? Journalist Kurt Andersen, writing in his abundantly detailed Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, believes craziness was baked into the American cake from the moment the Mayflower hove to at Plymouth Rock. Whether the holy man was Cotton Mather, P.T. Barnum, or Deepak Chopra, Americans have been primed to believe with the faith of a five-year-old in Santa Claus. That said, he posits that there were cycles of remission, when rationality was apparently on top, and then outbreaks of fever, when the passion burned with naked flame. The latter applies to an age like this.
My own pet theory is that American craziness, while always abundant, was relatively contained until 9/11, which opened a Pandora’s Box of hysterical fear, one of the basic ingredients of irrationality. It was quickly followed by the invasion of Iraq, which unloosed an avalanche of vaunting that we were endowed with special powers to remake the world. Note an essential component of stupidity: we retaliated for 9/11 by invading a country which had nothing to do with it.
On the heels of the mournful realization that remaking the Middle East wasn’t all it was cracked up to be came the financial crash of 2008, a folly of such greed and wishful thinking that it pushed a sizable portion of the public, already emotionally labile from the previous two shocks, right over the edge. Everything that followed, like the birther mania, was a signal flare that the Republican Party and its assorted hangers-on had devolved from merely being a pack of cynical crooks to full-dress nihilistic cultists.
All of this was supercharged by the Internet, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News – media nonexistent during previous bouts of mania. They acted as an electronic petri dish to purify and amplify the craziness.
We are now seeing the infection of lunacy on full display, like the alien monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing bursting out of its human hosts. Where exactly it will all end is anyone’s guess, but the odds are not good that it will end well.
Geopolitics
America is not a lone region full of “special” people like the American Nationalists want to believe. It is part of the mechanism that is humanity. And when the cog in the machine breaks, the machine stops working.
Geopolitics revolves around national economic might and during the historical era of Modernity economic might was always procured by capital and the products and services that it offers. These products and services generate the national income which allow a nation to spend on bettering its peoples’ lives and/or on military means to submit other nations or to defend from such submission.
One thing is clear. The West, over the last 200 years, has been selling the most advanced products and this gained it the largest national incomes.
But, you do know, that the West decided not to share the wealth with its citizens.
Instead, it decided to invest in military means to submit other nations.
Yah. And it worked.
The West was hegemonic for all this time.
America was the leader and the rest of the world bowed on bended knee to America. Most did not like it. Most did not care for it. Most actually despised it. But they were powerless to do anything about it.
But things have suddenly turned lately.
China is now at the core of the factory of the world. It is at the core of the East-Asian supply-chain. And no East-Asian country would dare detach itself from this chain because its national economy would immediately collapse.
I mean, at the exception of ideological bull-dogs like Australia’s Morrison, everyone recognizes the hard reality that dominates the Geopolitical scene of this 1st half of the 21th century.
Morrison and Trump; ideological brothers.
After it had lost the Yeltsin opportunity…
…of a near infinite supply of energy and resources…
…the West abruptly awoke to the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world from its shores to East-Asia.
The Geo-Political world got enraged as Trump so well demonstrated for the whole world to see.
But the fact is that the American empire has lost its clothes :
American GDP
By all accounts America's GDP is largely inflated and the reality is that it could easily be half the size of what is announced officially (see hedonic adjustments)
Finance vs. Manufacturing
American production is no longer its core activity. Financial shenanigans are now what accounts for the bulk of its GDP.
Technology
Technologically the US has fallen from its pedestal and has now to reckon with the emergence of China as a technological leader. This explains why the US is now panicking and literally copying Chinese political economics while drafting new legislation ordering the state to invest 150 billion in the technological development of its national champions…
GDP Growth is an illusion
American GDP growth over the last 40 years was generated exclusively by the injection of new money in the form of new debts. During the last year US total debt increased by one third the size of GDP ! . This is not just unsustainable it is pushing the can down the road until a reckoning is imposed by the facts…
Destruction of the American workforce
The incomes of the 99% have been stagnating and even sinking for at least 50% of them and this explains the sheer social misery that litters the land of the free.
Balkanization
In the meantime the cohesion of the USA has been tanking and today US society is completely atomized as was so well demonstrated during its handling of Covid-19. Societal atomization means that the country is now unable to act as one unity. Each time it wants to undertake something the country shreds itself into multiple pieces going their own directions all at once. This is the best recipe to lose a war… the military knows that darn well and it wants to avoid that price !
So what we observe today is much noise and theater but very little really consequent actions.
But observers of the Geopolitical scene make a whole lot of this theater…
It will, without any doubt, take some time for the dust to settle but the outcome is now unavoidable for the following reasons :
1. Economic Shifts are in process. They cannot be stopped. By all accounts the shift of the economy world is irreversible and will further amplify going forward
2. The current global supply chain is fixed. The West does no longer have what it takes financially, nor societally, to set up an independent supply-chain. In other words it is forced to compose with East-Asia and more particularly with China.
3. China is gargantuan. By all accounts China’s economy is soon going to pass the size of the US economy in dollar terms and it will pass the combined West soon thereafter.
4. The world will continue without America. The internationalist wing, among Western big capital holders, wants to share in the profits generated by the Juggernaut China and by East-Asia. It is thus no longer going to sit passively when a Western political servant has a mental breakdown. Diplomacy will thus be forced to make a come-back soon.
In the meantime a last ditch propaganda effort is being made by the nationalist wing among big capital holders to try to cover China under a thick layer of dirt. But facts are necessarily going to emerge that will soon turn the tables on them.
5. China will grow to megalithic size and power. If it were not for “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” in the near future China’s economy should reach multiple times the size of the combined Western economies.
6. Convergences. The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity is the convergence of the following series of complex factors :
The multiple side-effects of Modernity are converging toward each other and starting to unleash all kinds of feed-back loops that are accelerating the die-off of life on earth. Many biologists, and complex-systems analysts, are warning that humanity’s activities are approaching a threshold after which the world natural systems will shift one after another outside of the bandwidth of life. Climate change is but one among this multitude of side-effects…
The present shift of the economy-world outside, of the realm of the Western civilization, is unleashing a mental breakdown on the West. And it will be extremely difficult for it to regain its composure and face the facts that are responsible for what is transforming into a real predicament for humanity.
The predicament of humanity is that to survive it has to abandon its present societal paradigm (the reason that is at work within capital) and adopt a new one (the reason that is at work within life).
. Grillades, pronounced “gree-ahds,” are little medallions of pounded-thin steak smothered in a tomato gravy. Typically served over a bed of grits, grillades are a popular brunch dish, but there are no rules saying you can’t eat them for dinner, too. Though Louisiana natives tend to make them at home, there’s a great version on the brunch menu at Café Adelaide in New Orleans.
Selections from Godfree Roberts’ extensive weekly newsletter: Here Comes China.
The expectation expressed by Russia and China is…
…that the US is no longer stable…
…and is becoming dysfunctional…
…and a bigger problem than what is worth to prop up.
A retreat, a crash, or a type of retrenchment from the world is imminent.
Russia and China. Top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi and Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev co-chaired the 16th round of strategic security consultations. This is a high-level meeting focusing on strategic cooperation in confronting both regional and global security and geopolitical threats. Or, in other words, “what to do about America and it’s war-loving-neocons”.
Quote:
China and Russia held a new round of strategic security consultations on Tuesday in Moscow, and during the frequent interactions between the two major powers in recent months.
The world has showed a dangerous trend of disorder or tensions in some regions, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Western Pacific.
All, and everyone, due to global strategic shifts made by the US,
Quote:
So Beijing and Moscow must keep close coordination to handle the upcoming situation.
Including how to establish a new order.
This new order will replace the US-dominated one.
This will occur once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
Quote:
Chinese analysts said that the recent change has been generally caused by the decline of US hegemony.
Not only will the US pressure and hostility push China and Russia to stand closer...
... but the decline in Washington’s strength and influence (in some regions)...
... will also make Beijing and Moscow consider how (to figure out new regional order) to stabilize the situation and protect their interests after the US pullout.
The similar remarks made by China and Russia toward the US is a clear signal to the world that the US hegemony will no longer be tolerated.
The world order dominated by the US and its allies is unable to keep stability in many regions.
This failure of American order is causing more tensions and conflicts.
Weapons and nukes
We understand at the Saker Blog, that Russia has the weapons complexes and the ability to defend itself even in this climate of withdrawal from the many weapons treaties.
We also know that the US tried to force China to attend Nuclear Proliferation or Reduction talks with the US, up to the point of staging a meeting to pretend that China did not turn up.
The world has accepted that China had not done a major weapons build-out up to now, and if they did, it was muted. For decades, China only maintained the smallest nuclear weapons array.
This may be changing in front of our eyes.
After both Trump and Biden running all sorts of openly hostile efforts full-spectrum against China, a wise China, would ramp up production of MAD (Mutually Assured destruction) armories to counter any American aggressive action.
My post published on Chinese social media: As the US is crazily implementing containment strategy toward China, China must intensify building its nuclear deterrence. Here is the translation. pic.twitter.com/shJHXUJ5FX
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) May 28, 2021
Those that follow China and its news closely understand that if Hu Xijin says something like this, or writes a column such as this, the build-out of a Chinese nuclear deterrence is in full swing.
In the midst of these happenings, Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers leaked another top secret document. One that he had worked on, and kept secret for 50 years. Parts of it were obtainable but not the full document.
He drops a powerful warning of the present threat of nuclear war with Russia and China.
Here’s his thoughts…
Daniel Ellsberg: This Month We Must Discuss If We Should Go to Nuclear War Over Taiwan, Ukraine or Syria
The 1958 nuke China over Taiwan project was really quite amazing. The Pentagon wasn’t even ‘defending’ Taiwan, they wanted to do it over small islands held by the Chiang Kai-shek regime just 5 miles from mainland China. A classic bully move, ‘I have the right to punch you because you let your shadow touch me!’
——————————————————————————————————————
“Celebrated whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, … now age 90…
… used the occasion of the April 30-May 1 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his release of the Pentagon Papers…
…in an event organized by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst…
… to reveal that John Foster Dulles had proposed in 1958 that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend to the President of the USA…
…that a nuclear exchange with China be launched in the Taiwan Straits.
Even though that would mean that Taiwan and its people would be wiped out completely.
The reason being for the sole geopolitical purpose of maintaining the United States “position” in the world.
I’m getting hungry
Right now I am drinking my favorite Shiraz wine from Australia and eating nuts, but still my stomach is a grumbling. I know that I can get some noodles, some rice, some dumplings, but really I am “hankering” (desiring) some delicious chicken. Whether it is BBQ or fully cooked.
You know, people in different areas cook chicken differently.
I grew up on Polish Hill in Pittsburgh that cooked the chicken in the oven with bacon on the top until the chicken was well done. A comparative cooking method in China is to cook it in mud, and the the chicken some out all moist and tender but well cooked. But here in the Southern section of China in the Guangzhou corridor, they like he chicken nearly raw with lots of exposed fat and grizzle. Not really to my liking.
I once had a Polish engineer visiting one of my factories and once he tasted the mud baked chicken, he devoured the entire bird. He sore that it reminded him of how his grandmother cooked chicken.
BBQ chicken.
Why have another world war?
“The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis, A Documented History,” Ellsberg quoted Dulles’s message to the meeting:
“Nothing seems worth a world war … until you looked at the effect of not standing up to its challenge.”
The RAND study explained that
“the issue then was, would we, as the joint chiefs, recommend the use of nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy, and Matsu, and Taiwan.
And possibly use seven- to ten-kiloton weapons with the expectation that … the Soviets would respond and would hit Taiwan.”
Why have a war?
Finally:
“Let them try to jail me for disclosing this still-top secret fact today,”
Ellsberg declared, adding that he was revealing the secret because,
“I have no doubt whatever, that that discussion is going on in the Pentagon right now…. This is the month we have to be discussing the issue, in public, of whether we should go to nuclear war over Taiwan, or Ukraine, or Syria.”
“Although the circumstances surrounding the U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan have changed dramatically since that stage of the Cold War, the 1958 Taiwan crisis provides a sobering lesson as the US military gears up for a new military confrontation with China.”
Of course the western and specifically the US provocative and unintelligent statements via their media containment complex continue. It is what Andrei Martyanov calls “a very acute case of a bipolar disorder .
When driving through Acadiana (aka Cajun country), you likely won’t be able to miss highway billboards advertising boudin at the next butcher shop or gas station — and you’d be foolish not to pull over. Handed to you still steamy, boudin is made from all those good, unctuous spare pork parts, which get mixed with rice and spices and stuffed into a casing. A local obsession, it’s best tried at Best Stop market in Scott, La. The casing can be thick and chewy, so you’re better off squeezing out the filling. While you’re at Best Stop, be sure to order a boudin ball — its fried-orb cousin — too.
Pentagon Special Forces nominee says US should ‘strongly consider’ training Taiwanese guerillas against ‘Chinese invasion’
Whether it is Taiwan, or Xinjiang or Hong Kong or any other area where propaganda can be manufactured, the US mighty Wurlitzer continues.
This is then the summary of the situation today:
Ellsberg warns that the same talks that happened 50 years ago to possibly strike China with nuclear weapons is no doubt happening in the Pentagon today.
Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev states that Russia and China must coordinate in order to establish a new order to replace the US-domination, once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
China is mass producing hyper-velocity MIRV ICBM’s armed with massive warheads in a frantic pace.
Pentagon Insiders are horrified by the discussions and all warn that not only would America lose a war, but that could be destroyed and subjugated to an unfathomable degree.
Given the stature of Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev, I would consider the above some of the most significant moves in the world today. There are those who reason that as the US-dominated world order gets more dysfunctional, the urge for them to use nuclear weapons will become stronger. I will leave this here for you to make up your own mind and comment on what you see.
Moves around SARS–CoV-2 and its progeny Covid-19 and more leaks
There is also the major US accusation that Covid-19 was a lab leak and China is responsible. Yet China has no history of creating these kinds of bioweapons (if indeed it was created as such) but the US has a rich history of creating and using such weapons.
The acceleration of blaming China with respect to the virus is proportional to the financial and economic collapse of the west.
What west fails to understand is demonising China won't prevent its own collapse.
— The Sirius Report (@thesiriusreport) May 29, 2021
So why do we always say that Americans are effectively the most brainwashed people in the world?
Take a look at what happened to information similar to the Daniel Elsberg Pentagon Papers Leak…
…and his current leak of nuclear planning against China even to the point of demolishing and sacrificing Taiwan.
Godfree Roberts took a specific document and updated and annotated it for clarity. This is called The ISC (Needham) Report.
Published at the height of the Korean War, it validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of several months in 1952.
The cleaned up, updated and annotated version is available for Kindle on Amazon for a small amount here. , And a free copy (not very readable) is available here
If you wonder why the Americans have not seen this, or have not known about it, this will give you all the information…
The traditional Monday night meal of red (kidney) beans dates back to the 19th century, when the ladies of the house did laundry every Monday while the beans slow-cooked in a pot all day. It’s still a popular Monday night tradition, even if we stopped doing our laundry quite so regularly. The beans are served on a bed of rice and with the almost mandatory bottle of hot sauce. The best place to eat some is right at home, but the Creole Lunch House in Lafayette — open only for lunch — is also worth the trip.
Jeffrey Kaye says:
If you ask anyone in Cajun country, cochon de lait is French for “a pig still sucking on his mama.” (Outsiders know this creature as a suckling pig.) When cooked over a raging wood-fueled fire for hours, this pig becomes juicy, tender pulled pork. Many people have their first cochon de lait experience at Jazz Fest from Walker’s Southern Style BBQ, where the lines never die down. Thankfully, you can go to their smokehouse at any time of year for their Cochon de Lait Po’ Boy (and you should).
Secular vs. Traditional Values
An more than interesting visual for thoughts and reflection : the 2020 Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world by political scientists Ronald Inglehart (April, 2021) and Christian Welzel.
Some current geopolitical tensions can be seen through the distances on this map. One can imagine that this survey visual is significantly subject to change these days, through among others economic developments, political and media-psychological movements. Some triggered to find more distance towards corners while others moving towards centers and clusters.
My thought would be a map how much do different countries learn from each other in terms of values, followed by communication, society and governance. Might it not be that self-expression, traditional values have a harder time accepting other ways, even if it would be to the advantage of the actual practice and policy ??
It is noteworthy that today’s tensions are caused by differences in values, not by models such as capitalism or communism, not by economies.
Cross cultural awareness and mutual learnings with psycho-political projections/reflections is what counts for 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 towards a better and fairer future.
Everything is going crazy in America today
Consider the collapse of the remaining American companies. A this article clearly demonstrates.
The world is in flux. If that sounds like another virus, it certainly feels like it on some days. Most of us have been pivoting so fast to adjust we are simply falling over from dizziness. Are we still resilient if we refuse to get back on a twirling carousel? Sometimes it feels like we are moving too fast to even see the brass ring, let alone grab it. Rubbing a Buddha belly is a calmer alternative. No pivoting needed. A friendly little rub, smile and breathe…
Peace is not a commodity for politicians. Despite past and current events, it’s not an item up for sale. Media rushes us from one regurgitated opinion to the next, parading it as news. Things to “like” or “follow” directed by Google algorithms and data mining. Our worlds narrowed through complex AI that doesn’t yet understand the randomness of human thought. The internet that previously opened the world, has become a political and marketing tool making our personal worlds smaller and smaller. The informational windows to other worlds, ideas, and ways of living get lost in advert hit scores.
Believing “our” world is the whole world is a slippery slide into the mud of bigotry and intolerance. And, rudeness! I for one, am missing Miss Manners. Poor thing crashed off stage faster than she could run out with her walker. Slander and Libel grabbed their wigs running for the exit without waiting for Justice to keep up. Nobody was holding the door open for anyone.
Maybe being our “true and transparent” selves needs a few hard check stops. A different kind of “wokeness” that embraces the idea of getting along for the benefit of everyone in society. Why do manners matter in our changing world? Nobody cares if the fork is different for salad or meat, when you’re hungry, it’s just a damn fork getting food in your mouth.
Manners and civility need a comeback. For all our sakes. If someone holds the door open, it doesn’t matter whether the door-holder is a man or, woman. I don’t feel my ability to open a door is in question. It’s just a nice gesture. Manners are a code of actions for consideration, respect and, grace. An acknowledgment of another, human. It is the foundation for a functioning society, of being -humane.
Why is the American leadership so against people living their lives and being happy ? It seems like they have a mental disorder and re surrounded by sycophants who also share the same disorder.
No need to spout false positive “thank-you’s” or to pretend you like something you don’t. We can still be transparent and true to ourselves while respecting the space and ideas of others.
Corporate America, is having a hard time in the pandemic as workers are quitting their jobs in droves. Walking resolutely away from environments that are now recognized as “toxic”. Previously “normal” work environments that lacked basic respect for employees. This attitude caused historical business losses of over $250 billion dollars per year. Which begs the question, how much can companies afford to lose, before it hurts enough to change? Giants like Amazon and TJX have been churning people for years without regard for basic human dignity or, respect. Dudes have no manners.
25 states have officially cut the extra $300 of Federal unemployment aid. In a sad display of very bad manners and name-calling, they claim a mere $300 is stopping people from working. With a Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, people can’t afford to work. Not only is this 100% below what is needed today for a living wage, but in addition, employees are treated like disposable trash as companies rake in billions of dollars in clear profit.
Yes, corporate America, backed by an embedded political system, is screaming. They are furious that the pandemic has shown them with their pants down. The “you can’t live without us” myth has been broken. The truth is, corporate America can’t work without employees. And, workers are now “woke” and demanding what they deserve. Respect, a living wage, and more importantly, as 3 in 5 refuse to return to the “office”, an environment that is not toxic. Where humanity is not just displayed as a pretty mission statement but transparently practiced with good manners.
My Mexican mocha coffee at Kaflex Roasters came with heart layered in. This small business survived the 2020 pandemic devastation. Why? Customers and employees agreed; it’s a pleasure to be here. It feels “real”. Kindness and respect mix with the smell of ground coffee beans, people smile at each other. “Good morning” and “thank-you” are genuine, not HR-directed practices. Good manners spread, a virus of consideration and kindness toward the stranger next to you in line. Everything seems to work better and the day is a little brighter.
It’s time for corporate and political America to wake up and “smell the coffee”. We, The People want a Better America.
One based in good manners. Humane, inclusive and transparent practices for the good of everyone in our society. We want a clear agenda of change that includes workers’ rights and protections. A legal system that has equality and justice-directed enforcements. Affordable education. Respect.
America is barely 246 years old. Our version of democracy is an evolving experiment. It’s time for the system to pivot again. Time for both politicians and corporations to say “thank you” and hold the door open for their workers. It’s time. Make America Better.
But when and while the USA collapses, the rest of the world continues and are all ready to fill the vacuum that the USA leaves behind.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducted an exercise near the island of Taiwan on Monday with the largest number of warplanes ever recorded, which could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation, again sending a clear warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US that have been making provocative moves to escalate tensions in the region, Chinese mainland experts said on Tuesday.
A US aircraft carrier exited the South China Sea via waters south of the island of Taiwan also on Monday, a region close to the PLA warplane exercise. And analysts said the PLA displayed the capability of driving away foreign forces interfering in the Taiwan question.
Twenty-five PLA aircraft, namely two Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, one KJ-500 early warning aircraft, four J-10 and 14 J-16 fighter jets, and four H-6K bombers, entered Taiwan's self-proclaimed southwest air defense identification zone on Monday, the island's defense authorities said late that day.
The number of PLA warplanes featured in the exercise was a record since Taiwan's defense authorities began to release information about PLA aircraft activities in the region on September 17, 2020, surpassing the previous record of 20 on March 26. The number of J-16s, a powerful fighter jet, was also the biggest of all exercises, media on the island said on Monday.
The exercise conducted by the PLA served as a warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US after the two had made a series of provocative moves, mainland analysts said.
On Saturday, the US Department of State announced new guidelines to encourage US government engagement with the island that reflects their "deepening unofficial relationship." Officials on the island recently also claimed that the island is drawing a line 30 nautical miles away from the island, attempting to deny PLA aircraft approaches.
Monday's exercise was characterized by the large number of aircraft, and as the PLA deepens its regular, combat-scenario drills near the island of Taiwan, the scale could continue to expand in the future. As this is normal, related parties should get used to it if they insist on provoking, Fu Qianshao, a Chinese mainland military aviation expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Taiwan's secessionist forces and the US must stop making provocations unless they hope to see further escalations in the region, mainland experts warned, noting that the PLA is taking pragmatic steps to make sure it can effectively reunify the island of Taiwan if it comes to that.
The exercise could be a rehearsal of its combat plan over the Taiwan island, and it could feature air superiority seizure, and attack on land and maritime targets, including warships of interfering foreign countries, Song Zhongping, a Chinese mainland military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
PLA's Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft target foreign submarines, the KJ-500 commands the battlefield, the H-6Ks attack maritime and land targets, the J-10s seize air superiority, while the J-16s plays a multirole of both aerial combat and attack, Song said.
Coinciding with the PLA's warplane exercise, the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, which held a series of drills in the South China Sea in the past week, left the South China Sea via south of the Taiwan island on the same day, according to the monitoring of the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a Beijing-based think tank, on Monday.
Overlying the flight paths of PLA warplanes released by Taiwan's defense authorities and the movement of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier released by SCSPI, observers said they were not far away from each other.
Citing analysts on the island of Taiwan, Taipei-based Central News Agency reported on Monday that the PLA warplanes likely simulated attacks on the US aircraft carrier.
Fu said that the PLA has been conducting daily exercises in the region, and it is the US warships' presence that is irregular. "If they pose potential threats to China's national security, we will surely take countermeasures, including monitoring," he said.
The PLA is rightfully responsible to safeguard peace and stability in the region when foreign warships and warplanes stir up tensions and make provocations, Fu said.
Similar exercises demonstrated that the PLA is capable of cutting off foreign interventions in the Taiwan region if the situation arises, as it has a powerful aerial combat system to drive away foreign maritime forces, including aircraft carrier strike groups, a Beijing-based military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Tuesday.
China’s Artificial Sun Just Smashed a Fusion World Record
China’s “artificial sun” tokamak has sustained a plasma reaction for a whopping 101 seconds at 120 million degrees Celsius, setting new records in the field of nuclear fusion. The breakthrough could pave the way for a carbon-neutral energy future.
EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), or HT-7U, is a custom-built fusion reactor that has operated in different phases since 2006. Like many of the world’s tokamak experiments, EAST has reached fusion before. As a refresher, inside the donut-shaped (or, sometimes, more spherical) containment of a tokamak, sun-hot plasma swirls in a circle that’s held in place by supercooled electromagnets.
This magnetic field is the only thing floating between 360-million-degree plasma and a bunch of human-made materials that obviously can’t sustain that temperature. The plasma results from smashing different nuclei together, fusing them rather than splitting them.
This requires a huge energy investment, which critics say means fusion will never really get off the ground. And so far, all tokamaks work for just a scant few seconds at lower temperatures before something goes wrong.
This is why EAST—which just properly “turned on” last December—running for 101 seconds at 120 million Celsius is such a huge deal. It’s a double whammy: a very long runtime at an extraordinarily high temperature. In 2018, the tokamak reached 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, or about 82 million degrees Celsius. But back then, EAST could only sustain the plasma for around 10 seconds.
That’s not hot enough or long enough, but 120 million degrees Celsius and 101 seconds, which EAST achieved in late May, certainly are. So, this is a record for both the required power-generating temperature and the duration for keeping the temperature at a stable level.
As for other high-profile reactors around the world, the U.K.’s MAST reactor recently made headlines with a new exhaust system that reduces heat 10 times better than its predecessor. In the meantime, the global International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is on track to build the hugest tokamak ever, with first plasma projected in 2030. Each experimental reactor has goals to help push technology forward to help all the others.
The future of EAST could involve lessons learned by ITER, Korea’s KSTAR reactor (which held the previous fusion record), MAST, and even private tokamak researchers that are chipping away at the major obstacles to fusion energy. All have the same goal: to sustain an extremely hot reaction and keep their equipment safely running for as long as possible.
Gosh! All of this stuff about society, and culture really makes me hunger for some fine Louisianian cooking!
Do you all have any idea what I am in the mood for? I am yearning for something like this…
Some fine Southern American food.
I’ll bet you that you don’t. I’ll bet that you are thinking something like steak, a find hamburger, or some pizza or lasagna. Nope. That’s not what I am yearning for.
I know that many Americans in the audience don’t “get it”. But that’s because everyone can get mashed potatoes, corn, and cheesy elbows. But not here. they are special treats. Not to mention deep fried catfish and chicken.
If you have the ability to eat this fine, but basic food, then do so. I think that it’s wonderful. It’s delicious and wonderful and the smells and the taste are wonderful.
Do you wonder why China is asking serious questions?
Beijing called on the US to explain a respiratory disease outbreak in northern Virginia in July, 2019 and a large-scale outbreak of e-cigarette disease in Wisconsin.
“When will the US release detailed data and information on relevant cases to the international community? The United States owes an explanation to the international community.”
Can you imagine what will happen if China is kinetically attacked?
A big part of the US industrial base is now in China.
The US would be attacking its own sources of food, commodities, and its own supply chain.
Looking at Elsberg’s ‘warning’ is this not a spectacular example of insane short-term thinking?
To end this section, taking the previous summary and adding one point, it looks like this:
Ellsberg warns that the same talks that happened 50 years ago to possibly strike China with nuclear weapons is no doubt happening in the Pentagon today. Is the Ellsberg warning more serious than what we think?
Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev states that Russia and China must coordinate in order to establish a new order to replace the US-dominated one, once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
China is mass producing hyper-velocity MIRV ICBM’s armed with massive warheads in a frantic pace.
Pentagon Insiders are horrified by the discussions and all warn that not only would America lose a war, but that could be destroyed and subjugated to an unfathomable degree.
The US has clearly and unequivocally used bioweapons (even excluding Vietnam), in the past, and hidden this.
Conclusion: Unfortunately the mindset has not changed and the actions have not changed since the time described in both the Ellsberg report, or the reveals of the Needham report. This is currently the danger and is what we mean by doubling-down.
But I’m not done about Louisiana food…
Throughout the deep American South people eat this kind of food called BBQ. But you know, it must be the most misunderstood BBQ in America. In Boston, for instance a BBQ sandwich was nothing more than cold sliced ham and BBQ sauce. Ugh!
When in actuality, it’s really slow cooked brisket served on a hot toasty bun just dripping and oozing with delicious and tasty sauce.
I could use one right now.
Mississippi style BBQ.
Maybe with an icy beer.
Or two.
Another Cajun roadside specialty, cracklins, are Louisiana’s version of pork rinds. Fatty pork bits that puff up into something special, these savory morsels provide some crunchy bites, some chewy bites and some melty edges. It’s an altogether beautiful experience, especially when it happens at Don’s Specialty Meats in Scott, La. These are the ultimate road-trip snack.
I remember going on work related travel to different factories throughout the Southern American states. AN we would make a point to stop at the various BBQ place sand sample their food. The BBQ varied regionally from place to place. All were just great! Just simply great!
Following on from the last China Sitrep, we have banking news, a cute helicopter and drone soccer.
E-Hang’s electric VT-30 travels 300km in 100 minutes. With eight propellers, two fixed wings, and a propeller at the rear, it achieves a balance of hybrid lift and push, so needs no runway. Its tri-redundant, fly-by-wire controls can be flexibly altered for multiple modes, implying a much higher safety level for the aircraft. Read full article →
Chinese scientists set a new world record of achieving a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in the latest experiment on Friday, a key step toward the test running of a fusion reactor. Read full article →
China dominates consumer and commercial drones globally, and 369 exhibitors showcased 2,000 drone products in Shenzen this week. Mini drones the size of a wristwatch hovered next to cargo drones like four-seater planes. Kids played 3v3 drone soccer before a crowd of adoring parents. Read full article →
(They also say they need a million drone pilots!)
The Maglev trains are just running faster: A groundbreaking ceremony launched a 620 mph maglev test line. The train uses superconducting magnetic levitation to disengage from the ground to eliminate frictional drag and a near-vacuum internal duct lines to dramatically reduce air resistance to achieve its speed. Read full article →
European BRI Rail Freight rose 100% in 2020. Austria’s Rail Cargo Group (RCG) transported 70,000 TEUs across BRI routes and, compared to 2019, doubled its Eurasian volumes and reached an all-time high of 700 trains running on these routes, This year, the company aims to run 1,000 freight trains. Read full article →
Oh, gumbo. Served from a big ol’ pot, it’s the kind of food that warms your heart, your soul and your belly, all at the same time. It starts with a roux, the flavorful base of fat and flour, which gets added to the holy trinity (onions, bell peppers and celery). From there, gumbo can go in many directions, most popularly chicken and sausage or a seafood medley. Around Easter, there’s a special bowl of Gumbo Z’Herbes served at Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, made with bright, verdant greens. The rest of the year, you can’t go wrong with the seafood rendition from Li’l Dizzy’s (also in New Orleans), which makes a regular appearance on the lunch buffet (along with killer fried chicken and mac and cheese).
But the USA has signed agreements with the G7 nations to construct an American BRI to go “head to head” with the Chinese BRI.
Show me the money, the G7’s B3W will have a hard time replacing China’s BRI.
Biden and the G7s Build Back Better for the World (B3W) program is going to have a hard time without money and so far no one will say where it will come from.
Finding the massive $40+ tn needed for infrastructure needed in the developing world won’t be easy. The US can’t agree on its own domestic infrastructure spending and how much money can it print for B3?
Comments that the private sector will pay are utter nonsense.
Say what you will China have already funded $4tn in projects. Most importantly, China saw the need in the developing world long before the West.
The real question is where was the G7 for the past decade?
Another major issue is that B3W funds will come with strings attached on democratic values, human rights, climate change, corruption, and the rule of law. Good luck.
In the end it comes down to “Show me the money.”
Cats and Louisiana BBQ.
I used to have cats when I lived in Mississippi and Louisiana, and Texas. But you know, they were always happy to nibble on a piece of sliced brisket or chicken. But over all, my cats were just as happy to eat fish or whatever I had on hand. For them, eating a slice of brisket or a McDonald’s creamer when I brought home a couple of cups of coffee were a real treat. I would drink my coffee, and they would have their creamers. Special times.
Cat eating a hamburger. I used to share my subway sandwiches with my cats. They loved the chicken and the meatball subs.
And this warning is being ignored in the Pentagon. Which is why there are people speaking out warning that the neocons inside of Washington are fucking bat-shit crazy nuts, and America will not survive their arrogance and idiocy.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said China will never allow the island of Taiwan to go independent as Beijing hit back at a US-Japan joint statement which for the first time in half a century mentioned China's Taiwan.
"National reunification of the island of Taiwan and China is a historical process. It will not be stopped by anyone or any force. We will never let Taiwan go independent," Le made the remarks on Friday in an interview with the Associated Press.
Asked if there was any timeline for the reunification and if the current situation could continue to exist for many years, Le stressed that "it's a process of history."
Le said China is firmly committed to safeguarding national sovereignty, security and promoting national reunification. "We are prepared to do everything we can for a peaceful reunification. That said, we don't pledge to give up other options. No option is excluded."
Le's remarks comes amidst the recent provocation from the US and Japan's joint statement.
The direct mentioning of Taiwan was regarded as a severe interference in China's domestic affairs and sends a signal that Japan and the US are attempting to challenge China's possible moves to reunification.
Chinese analysts said the US and Japan's move will only send the wrong signal to the Taiwan separatists and allow the DPP to go further down the wrong path.
Le stressed the one-China principle is China's red line and no one should try to cross it, whether low-level or high-level, official engagement is what China firmly opposes.
"The Taiwan question bears on China's core interests. There is simply no room for compromise," the Chinese vice foreign minister noted.
CIPS is proceeding without delay
Maybe SWIFT will collapse upon itself.
China ramped up its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and set up clearing banks at all major offshore yuan trading hubs, like Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and Frankfurt. The CIPS clearing system operates during work hours of financial markets in every time zone.
Russia does not expect impossible outcomes from the upcoming summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden in Geneva, and the two sides are unlikely to resolve important issues at the meeting, Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov told the Global Times in an exclusive interview.
The ambassador noted that if the two leaders talk about issues related to China during their meeting, Russia will discuss them with the Chinese side. He stressed that Russia-China relations will not change no matter what attitude the US takes toward Russia.
Putin and Biden are set to meet in Geneva on June 16, the first meeting between the two leaders since Biden took office.
Some analysts believed that during their first bilateral meeting, Biden and Putin will discuss topics including strategic stability, disarmament, ecology, COVID-19 and conflicts in hot spots.
Denisov told the Global Times that Russia welcomes any measures that reduce tensions and competition, but they are also very cautious about what they can expect from Russian-American relations, especially in the context of the very tense relationship between the two countries.
He said Russia is a "realist" and does not expect impossible outcomes, and the summit is not likely to resolve important issues between the two countries. A better outcome is one that sets conditions for resolving problems in the future, said the diplomat.
Media reports showed that while the upcoming summit is seen by some analysts as an "ice-breaking" opportunity to reshape US-Russia relations, the two sides have been talking tough to each other and sending signals to lower external expectations ahead of the summit. Biden vowed to be tough with Russia and press it on human rights, while Putin has said he does not expect any breakthroughs from his meeting with US counterpart.
Some analysts pointed out that while it would be hard to break the ice in US-Russia relations, the US should stabilize relations and ease tensions with Russia so as to concentrate on dealing with China. As a result, the Geneva meeting may become an opportunity to lobby Russia.
In response to this view, Denisov told the Global Times that the idea that Russia would alienate China over the possibility of the US temporarily easing tensions with Russia is "very short-sighted."
"Russia is smarter than Americans think," he said.
The diplomat said that during the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to China and the visit of Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, to Russia, both sides discussed US topics. If the US and Russia talk about issues related to China during the upcoming summit, the Russian side will also communicate and discuss it with China.
Idiocracy: Flawed comedy or terrifyingly prescient science fiction?
It should be no surprise to anyone that our culture is rapidly drowning in lowbrow media. The perception that as a race we are being worryingly dumbed-down is not something new. Is this gradual intellectual decline something we can stop? Or is it the inevitable trajectory of our current society? One film that has managed to stay relevant seven years after release is Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s satirical take on our dumbed-down future. But for a comedy that was a little low on laughs for my liking, why has it caused such controversy and managed to stay in the public consciousness so long? And should we be worried that this film is accurately predicting our future?
The funny side of idiocy
Idiocracy manages to have a sense of humour about the potential bleakness of our shared stupidity-induced future. Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy Idiocracy did just that, though was sadly overlooked at the time of its release. The film isn’t Judge’s best, with the comedy often falling a little flat. Idiocracy couldn’t possibly hold a torch to Judge’s Office Space (1999). The core idea behind Idiocracy is what makes it worthy of remembering: a satirical view of Earth’s future where everyone is incredibly stupid. Sounds simple enough, and not too hard to imagine (wait, there’s another reality TV show starting?!). All these years later, this small film is still causing a stir.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this now cult film, the premise is fairly simple. Joe (Luke Wilson) is an average guy, put into stasis as part of a scientific experiment. When the experiment is cancelled, he is forgotten and left in stasis, waking up accidentally 500 years in the future. The future is a bleak one, where the average IQ of the world is worryingly low.
A misunderstood sentiment
According to Matt Novak on Gizmodo’s Paleofuture, the film is an affront for suggesting eugenics is the answer to this potentially dire future, and anyone who enjoys the film should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Does anyone else think he’s missing the point a little bit? Sorry to disagree with you Matt, but I actually always thought Judge was being satirical. I don’t believe that he ever wanted to argue for eugenics. The rich vs poor set-up is again a deliberate choice, highlighting the prejudiced views of both ends of the economical spectrum. Not, as Novak argues, a simple boiling down of the situation to ‘the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor.’ I would say that cheating husbands with a dozen kids is just as stereotypical as a frigid, unpleasant, career-driven, rich couple.
Novak claims that the film makes an unhealthy link between wealth and intelligence, but like many satirical films, it uses stereotypes to highlight the issues with that kind of thinking. In other words, Judge is using those precise stereotypes to make a point. Novak’s disgust at the stereotypes being used is entirely missing the point.
Nature vs nurture
The real premise of the film, in my opinion, is an argument for respecting nurture over and above nature. As such, it is in direct opposition to an argument of eugenics. The ‘stupidity’ that has taken hold of the country results in a great wealth of knowledge being lost. It is not the genius scientists, but the more menial labourers and their work that is missed most. Judge’s futuristic world needs mechanics to fix their robotic helpers, bin men and janitors to clean the country, gardeners, builders, etc. Is Judge really bemoaning the loss of the highly intelligent or asking us to look back at the basic pillars that keep our society going?
If you look at the main character’s story arc, the argument for nurture over nature is overtly apparent: you see an average man who was looked down on and not treated with much respect in his own time. When he is re-awakened in the future and found to be more intelligent, the nurturing atmosphere helps him to rise up and do more than he ever could have in the negative environment he was in before. The film is asking us to remember that everyone has potential, and that we need to be supportive of that no matter what their economic circumstances, who their families were, where they came form, etc.
While Idiocracy had a tiny limited release at the cinema back in 2006. Since then, it has found its place as a cultural yardstick for the dumbing down of society. When people bemoan the intellectual lows to which our society has sunk, referencing Idiocracy, I don’t believe that anyone is implying we should employ the use of the discredited science of eugenics. If anything, the film encourages us to always nurture potential, both intellectual and artistic.
A Historical piece from the 2nd World War
The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war
During the second world war, Chinese merchant seamen helped keep Britain fed, fuelled and safe – and many gave their lives doing so. But from late 1945, hundreds of them who had settled in Liverpool suddenly disappeared. Now their children are piecing together the truth
I like to believe that every problem in the world can be resolved with generous quantities of alcohol, fine delicious food, smiling and happy people, and dogs and cats scurrying about.
Taste of New Orleans : Creole Food.
The world decoupling from the horrible U.S. economy
Well, just how does the world break its dollar habit?
The most clear explanation I ever heard as to why the dollar maintains its global status is really quite straightforward, the U.S. trade deficit. USD’s are constantly filling everyone’s foreign exchange reserve, so almost everyone has these extra dollars to use for trading between themselves.
Sow how does one get rid of this gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe?
Buying treasuries – no, that is investing directly in the USD.
Buying assets in the U.S. – no, same problem as 1, you have assets valued in USD and something the U.S. govt can seize from you.
Buying assets in other countries – dang, you just gave them a boatload of dollars, that stuff is like dark matter.
Buy hard assets in the U.S. and ship it back to China – this is your best bet, buy gold, silver, platinum, or any hard asset and ship it to your vaults, now does the U.S. let you do that?
An article published by Foreign Policy on Tuesday, entitled "China and Russia Turn Deeper Ties into a Military Challenge for Biden," quoted an former US politician as saying the US faces "a two-front war where we don't have a two-front military." This seems to be an emerging possible scenario that is puzzling some American analysts.
On April 14, Reuters published a similar commentary headlined "US faces test on Taiwan, Ukraine," which articulated the concern.
Yet the test is caused by the US itself, thanks to its recklessness in handling major global issues. It is Washington itself which has been stirring up troubles worldwide, rather than resolving crises. Now the tactic is backfiring - Western media are becoming concerned that "rising tension over both Ukraine and Taiwan is putting the Biden administration in a bind," or worse, lead to "a two-front war."
The Taiwan question is China's domestic affair, where the US is not supposed to interfere at all. The Ukraine crisis involves the issue that should be decided by the Ukrainian people. But the US won't cease creating tensions over it.
US political elites have shown little interest in self reflection. More importantly, they attach too much significance to major power geopolitical games. In their eyes, if the US makes concessions over the Ukraine issue, it could result in Russia returning to Europe. In that case, everything Washington has been struggling for over the past 30 years since the end of the Cold War will crumble to dust.
When it comes to Taiwan, the US regards the island, from the military perspective, as a crucial link in its first island chain to contain China. Diplomatically, the US is utilizing the island as leverage to boost secessionist forces in China, in an attempt to split the latter, or launch a "peaceful revolution."
Suppressing Russia and China has been a long tradition in US politics. Apart from former US president Donald Trump, who once attempted to cozy up to Russia, yet failed due to opposition from the Democratic Party, most US presidents tend to pile pressure on both countries. Yet the problem is that the US has found it increasingly difficult to do so.
The US' biggest challenge is at home, not so-called threats from China or Russia. If the US hastily engages in, or creates more external geopolitical tests, while not having resolved its own domestic problems, it will only have its nose rubbed in the dust both at home and abroad, not to mention winning the "battle" on either side.
The US has its own calculations. It is hoping to push the EU to the forefront of the Ukraine crisis, letting the EU invest in more resources while the US could just play a commanding role. In addition, although the US reiterated its support for Ukraine, the latter's top diplomat has been stressing that Ukraine "is looking for more than words," Politico reported on April 13. It means the US' capability is very limited. It is just like the way Washington is dealing with Beijing - trying to establish an anti-China camp with as many allies as possible. If the US believes it can handle the Taiwan question and Ukraine crisis as it wishes, or in other words, China and Russia, at the same time, it has overestimated its strength and wisdom.
The truth is, the US is not confronting two tests, but three. The biggest crisis is from its home affairs. The biggest battlefield for US policymakers is on US soil. The best solution for elites in Washington is to put more energy in focusing on their country's domestic puzzles and stop creating troubles abroad.
Why is the American leadership so out of touch? Are the suck?
And Taiwan…
American neocons are pushing, pushing, pushing for a war regarding Taiwan.
... China remained the top issue on her mind, and on the minds of her fellow Republicans in the room. Haley hammered home that China remained an existential threat to the U.S. and democracies around the world and that government officials there should never be trusted.
Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, building bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure projects in dozens of nations, is nothing more than a ploy to gain influence and power around the world, Haley said.
"What they're doing is they're running out the deck for such a time as this and then waiting for times like COVID. And they say, 'You can't pay it? Now give me your power grid. Now give me your military installation. We want your port.' Now you look at that map - it will send a chill up your spine at what they're trying to do."
Haley also painted a haunting portrait of the war China is waging in cyberspace. Beijing, she said, just adopted a data-security measure that states that all private data is now a national asset.
"Think about the health data they have. Think about the financial data they have. Think about the surveillance actions they have on all of us," Haley said. "Now think that that's in the hands of the Chinese military. The way President Xi sees it is, whoever owns the data rules the world."
Haley was asked by one GOP lawmaker how the U.S. could respond to China when it sells pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and so many cheap goods to America.
"Don't lead with fear. Don't be scared of China. Go after them strong. Go after them aggressively," the former ambassador said.
-Nikki Haley warns Republicans on China: 'If they take Taiwan, it's all over'
American generals say otherwise…
While acknowledging that uniting with Taiwan is a "core interest" for China, Milley signaled that he thought Beijing will pursue such ambitions through peaceful means.
"The internal politics of China are up to China, as long as whatever is done is done peacefully and doesn't destabilize the region nor the world," Milley said.
Milley appeared in front of the committee to discuss the Pentagon's Fiscal 2022 budget request, alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Rachel Esplin Odell, a research fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, said Milley's comments "basically reaffirmed the longstanding U.S. One China Policy, which includes the understanding that the United States supports any peaceful, uncoerced resolution of cross-Strait differences."
"However, a somewhat more accurate statement of longstanding policy would have been that cross-Strait differences are up to both China and Taiwan to resolve peacefully through mutual agreement,"
"Nonetheless, Gen. Milley's comments are, on the whole, a welcome corrective to dangerous rhetoric from some analysts and politicians in Washington that portrays Taiwan as a strategic asset for the United States that must be kept separate from China. It is encouraging that Gen. Milley recognizes that danger," she said.
-Nikkei
What is the USA doing?
All of this isn’t secret information. It’s obvious and only the most deluded sheeple can’t see the build up towards war that the United States is marching towards. Knowing what is spread out before you all, as above. And noting that China and Russia are not fools.
What do you think they are going to do? Wait until the USA does something stupid? Or are they going to take proactive steps to castrate the “mad dog” before it infects the entire world with it’s madness?
I tire of this insanity.
It makes me want to gather up all the lunatics, lock them up in cages and bury them deep deep down in a place that they cannot harm themselves, or anyone around them.
But on the bright side there is China.
And China is doing well, they know what is going on. They are strong and formidable. And no matter what crazy-assed plans the Idiocracity world of America might think up, China is there to deal with them promptly.
American leadership in Washington DC as depicted in the movie Idiocracity.
I hope you enjoyed this visit in news that is unavailable to Americans. I’m tired and hungry. You probably didn’t notice. So I am going to go and eat some food. Have a great day you all!
I’ll leave you with this…
Why do people want to believe in lies about China when they know those lies come from their machinery of lies (politicians and MSM) which people already know do nothing but lie? Answer: They’re racist hypocrites. Turns out it’s not just a hunch.
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
With all the flood, and I do mean flood, of war-war-war narratives being pumped out of both Washington DC, Australia, and even India no one is even contemplating what the result would be. Somehow it is being “painted” in large brushes as some way to “suppress” China, and “prevent it’s rise”. All the time absolutely ignoring the facts of the matter.
The benefits of war with China? Well we’ll finally be done with carrier-based task forces. You’ll find said task forces at the bottom of the South China Sea. Sorry about the boys, girls, gays, trannies sent to the seabeds but that’s what they get, too. Fuckem.
Now, unlike other articles and other posts, where time is painstakingly devoted as to WHY I come up with the conclusions that I have, I am going to do something radical. I am going to spew out what the fuck is going to happen, with near total certainty, if the dreams and wishes of these moronic idiots who want war come to pass.
People! Listen up!
World War III with China will NOT be a long drawn-out series of skirmishes off in distant lands. It will be fast, dirty, nasty, full of betrayals, and up front and personal in YOUR home town. It will not be “news” reports of fighting in far-off bum-fuck-astan. It will be on your front lawn, while you will be busy trying to deal with things you don’t understand under conditions that you have no hope of controlling.
A war with China? Laughable shitstorm. An invitation to get our dumb asses kicked, our ineffective air wings and carriers sunk exposing the MIL as a grifting operation designed solely to extract profit from the goyim. For decades. Man, when you talk about torches and pitchforks, that’s the crew you get after.
But first, some really basic ideas and concepts…
Basic Concepts
I am not going to waste my time going into the details. I have covered them elsewhere in exhausting detail. But for those of you who are new here, I will outline the basic points.
America has been engaged in a war with China since 2017.
America tried to start a famine using eight (x8) strains of bio-weapons targeting food and livestock. Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
America tried to cause a color revolution in Hong Kong using NGO assets. It failed.
America tried to stop the BRI in XinJiang by making up a fantasy about Uighur Muslims. It’s still in process, but it has pretty much failed.
America launched three (x3) “novel” bio-weapons against the Chinese people on CNY in 2020. (COVID-19 B-strain, Dabieshan tick virus / SFTSV, Swine G4) Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
America modified drones to spray bio-weapon particles in a mist over livestock and people. Not only did it fail, but the CIA assets turned themselves into the PLA.
America tried to destroy the largest and newest VTOL carrier by China. China retaliated by destroying the largest American Navy VTOL carrier. It was a “wash”.
America launched an eight (x8) carrier naval flotilla against China in the South China Sea in late 2020 before the American Presidential Election. It steamed home with no conflict. Trump fired his senior Chief of Staff as a result. The entire fiasco was a big failure.
Now that is what can be found on the “news”. Everything that is listed above is well documented, though only a small fraction actually was published in American or Western “news” outlets. To read what actually happened regarding the above, you just have to read foreign reports. Often in Chinese, Russian, Hindu, Pakistani, Japanese and Korean.
It is called threat escalation. John mearsheimer puts it very well. It is basically demonizing the target in the eyes of your own population. And it works on a minimum of 80% of the stupid public. How dare China not kneel!!!
All you would read and hear is Wuhan lab leak, not an American bioweapon attack.
We do know that America is acting like a big bully. Has threatened both China and Russia and laid out their terms for the rest of the world to surrender or face extinction in March 2021 during the Anchorage Alaska US-China summit.
This caused China and Russia (along with Iran) to join forces. Today, Russian headquarters, and strategic military planning is completely integrated with Chinese military, and vice versa. As a defensive force, Russia and China can now act as one singular entity.
That is true, since Russia will step in. Russia won’t certainly lose her biggest ally in face of more economic sanctions and possible exclusion from SWIFT. Also, Russia knows that China is not responsible from this outbreak as they spoke with them as early as February 2020.
We also know that America has decided that the future battlefield for World War III will not be on American soil, but has established Australia to be the land that is targeted for war. And it is earmarked to become ruins like Syria is today. Like Yemen is today. Like Afghanistan is today. Like Iraq is today. And Australians are quite fine with this. Many are very willing to sacrifice their families, their children, their homes, their businesses for people like Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton and Donald Trump.
Many Australians are ready to die for the United States.
What we don’t know is the myriad of “black operations” against China. Most of which are not reported. We only hear a precious few things here and there that are oddities; suspicious oddities. A fire here, a missing plane there, the death of a key researcher, some missing American special force troops on “a training exercise”, and a software glitch.
Which is the way it works, don’t you know. Real secrets are actually secret. And if there is an inkling of what actually happened somehow hits the internet, immediate a flood of contrary narratives moves to bury the releases. Such as what happened with the “Wuhan bio-weapon accidental release” narrative to cover up the actual three-pronged bio-weapon attack by John Bolton.
I am beginning to consider the possibility that our guys created Corona and then released into China in some dip-shit scheme to weaken China.
Anyways, both China and Russia have established “red lines” that the unilateral aggression’s by America and it’s allies dare not cross. If they do, an decide to cross those lines, then both Russia and China have warned that a MAD level response will occur.
This is what Ron Unz has been saying from the beginning. If you look at it geostrategically, this is most plausible conclusion.
They released the virus in China but those who created it suffered a massive blow-back and even worse China came out of it even stronger than ever before.
They were hoping China would crumble but instead got stronger while they weakened. That’s why they are fanning out a major Anti-China propaganda campaign to contain her now openly with an overwhelming support of western citizens.
This frenziness displayed by western politicians is the reflection that China is on the verge an unstoppable economic powerhouse within a few years and they need to put the brakes right now. It is an implicit admission of desperation. The tussle between China and the US is going to dramatically intensify.
What is a MAD level response?
Mutually Assured Destruction, or mutually assured deterrence (MAD), is a military theory that was developed to deter the use of nuclear weapons. The theory is based on the fact that nuclear weaponry is so devastating that no government wants to use them. Neither side will attack the other with their nuclear weapons because both sides are guaranteed to be totally destroyed in the conflict. No one will go to all-out nuclear war because no side can win and no side can survive.
I idea behind MAD is that those that try to push the boundaries and cross the “red lines” would have a devastating war of the likes that their nations would never be able to recover from.
To many, mutually assured destruction helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot; to others, it is the most ludicrous theory humanity ever put into full-scale practice. The name and acronym of MAD come from physicist and polymath John von Neumann, a key member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a man who helped the US develop nuclear devices. A game theorist, von Neumann is credited with developing the equilibrium strategy and named it as he saw fit.
Proponents argue that the fear of MAD is the best way to secure peace.
One alternative to MAD, adopted by the Trump administration, and continued with the Biden administration, is fielding small sized nuclear weapons for “controlled” and target tactical strikes. This is an attempt to limiting the risk of MAD to “acceptable” levels and scope.
Life after a MAD level conflict would be unlike anything you would expect.
Mutually Assured Destruction is based on fear and cynicism and is one of the most brutally and horribly pragmatic ideas ever put into practice.
The idea that it is in place now, today, is a sign of how dangerous the United States is at this moment and point in time. Anyone who mistakenly believes that…
You can attack China, and Russia would do nothing.
You can attack Russia and China would do nothing.
That you can define a time, and a place, and a people to fight your war for you (e.g. Australia)
And that a “red line” is just “posturing” and is actually meaningless.
Are insane crazy.
American Advantage
All in all, taken as a whole, while America does enjoy a significant advantage in the size of it’s military, it’s enormous deployment capability, and it’s association with regional allies, it’s leadership are completely incompetent. Even if they were, somehow, to regain a level of maturity and sensibility, it might be too late to stop the “locomotive that they have set down on the tracks”.
Neocons Are Back With a Big War Budget and Big War Plans
On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush. The image of leading congressional Democrats Pelosi and Schumer grinning and gloating over getting everything they wanted—and then some—will likely come back to haunt Republicans at the midterm elections. If so, they will deserve it.
Even President Trump admitted the bill was horrible. As he said in the signing ceremony, “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced—if we want to build our military. . . .”
This is why I often say: Forget about needing a third political party—we need a second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare state.
But no one “forced” President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost.
And about the militarism funded by the bill? Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference that, “As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding.”
He’s right and wrong at the same time. Yes, it is another big increase in military spending. In fact, the U.S. continues to spend more than at least the next seven or so largest countries combined. But his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we weren’t looking?
Of course not.
On militarism, the Obama administration was just an extension of the Bush administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton administration. And so on. The military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. Enemies must be created to keep Washington rich, even as the rest of the country suffers from the destruction of the dollar. That is why the neocons continue to do very well in this Administration.
Thus we have the following most probable forecasts…
Things that no one is talking about.
If the “news” media are all talking about war, why isn’t anyone talking about how THEIR lives will be impacted. People (!) this is not going to be a “low intensity” conflict or “police action” in a far away place. It will be right there, at home, in your kitchen.
The Discussion
We will discuss, briefly, in an overview outline the highest probability outcomes for the following nations / locations were “red lines” be crossed.
Australia
The United Kingdom
Canada
Guam
Diego Garcia
America
Korea
Japan
Australia
Gosh, if you read the Australian “news” media the entire nation is gearing up to go off marching to China and fight for “freedom!™”, “Liberty!™” and “democracy!™”. All they need to do is hand each solder a jar of vegimite and a Fosters, and off he would go to die for Mike Pompeo!
It’s not going to happen that way.
Australia has agreed to be “ground zero” for a ground conflict. And America, and the Australian leadership are just fine with that. It’s (as they say in the land down under) it’s all “fair dinkum'”.
But China does not play.
Oh, maybe you didn’t hear me… let me tell you in words that you all can understand…
China . does . NOT . play !
Anyone who thinks that the Chinese leadership is going to be just fine and dandy engaging into a long, multi decade war on Australian soil is an idiot. Further, anyone who thinks that America will come to the rescue is also dreaming. America does what is good for the American leadership. No one else matters. they would easily throw Australia into the rubbish bin, if it gave America a slight edge in the international global standing.
The facts are that Australia is strong, but vulnerable.
Australia is self-sufficient in food and exports 7.3% to other nations.
Australia is 42% self sufficient in crude oil / gasoline.
Australia is more than self-sufficient in LPG.
Australia only produces two thirds of the amount of manufactured goods it consumes while most developed nations produce excess.
Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has fallen from almost 30 per cent in the 1950s and 60s to just under 6 per cent in 2020.
Were there to be a war, and after all that is what the “news” is talking about, we can expect the following…
Russia and China would team up together.
All shipping in and out of Australia to end. Australia would end up ringed with hunter-killer Russian and Chinese submarines.
All Australian military bases would be devastated by Russian Kh-47M2Kinzhal and Chinese DF-3, DF-4, DF-31 and their submarine launched cousins the CSS-2, CSS-3 missiles. This is not a singular strike at the HQ building. This is a major flattening of the entire region by the cleansing of a nuclear warhead.
At this point in time, the Chinese leadership would see how the situation evolves. If Australia does not immediately surrender, then China would cleans the nation of people by eviscerating each and every major city by the cleansing effect of high yield nuclear weapons.
Which wouldn’t take much. Look at where all the Australian people reside…
By strategic nuclear warheads targeting the major population centers of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane, China could effectively decimate the entire population of the nation due to the debilitating effects of radiation, and the complete collapse of the support services within Australia.
Yes. There would be survivors. And I am sure that they would be mightily pissed off too. Do you suppose that they would vent their anger at China and Russia, or would they vent it against their government to sleepwalking Australia into a war for America? I don’t know.
So in summary…
Australia would survive a blockade. But exports and internal industry would take hits, and the economy would collapse to a point where many of the services and benefits currently offered by the government will no longer be feasible. How will this affect the nation? Will the people roll up their sleeves and with a “can do” attitude, survive and grow as a people, and as a nation? Or will everyone break off into little groups squabbling amongst themselves, and how will this affect the government?
Australia could survive a military strike against it. Sure there would be causalities, massive ruin, billions of dollars in damages, and turmoil. At this point, what happens is up to the leadership of Australia.
If they [1] sue for peace. Australia will probably be permitted to keep it’s government, and systems intact, maybe even get rebuilding support, but will no longer to act as part of the QUAD. If [2] they get angry and cling on to America for protection, then a full war footing can be expected as promised. And thus, what is next is what China promised…
Australia could NOT survive a MAD level nuclear salvo. I don’t care how proud and mighty the Australians are, when you have no electricity, no potable water, no gasoline, no food, no medical care and you turn to America for help, you all will end up as the worst form of beggars. You all will be like Calcutta style poverty in the radioactive ruins of something that looks like Yemen, or Iraq.
The ONLY way to prevent any of these very plausible events from occurring is for the Australian people to oust their moronic and crazy insane leadership before everyone in the nation dies.
And no, it will not be anything like what the movies portray.
Mad Max.
The United Kingdom
The UK and Russia are trading partners, big ones at that. Additionally, the UK trades with China rather substantially. While the UK is part of the “five eyes” an pretty much follows the United States lead in everything that it does, if push comes to shove and a hot war is imminent, we can expect the following likelihood of things to occur…
By following the United States, you can expect that your life would be completely changed. You would need to adapt, and to strive in ways that you can’t even dream of today.
Betrayal. The UK would sit out of any global conflict with Russia or China. While they will say the right things and offer a minimum of assistance to the United States, actual participation in a hot war is very risky for them. They will sail their ships to the South China Sea, participate in war games, and say all the right things, when the shit goes down, Britain will play it safe.
But if Britain agrees to join the United States in any substantive way, then we can expect nuclear salvos to decimate all strategic cities, bases and facilities within the UK.
Having just purchased this on DVD I was eager to watch it after waiting years to see it after it was unofficially banned from ever being shown on the BBC again. I was four when it was first shown and my parents switched it off, too frightened to watch it themselves never mind let me see it.
I have to say it is absolutely terrifying and utterly terrifying in the extreme. This could have actually happened! I was impressed by the way the film conveyed what it would be like if thousands of megatons of atomic bomb was dropped on the U.K. Normal life comes to an abrupt stop. One minute people are shopping in their local supermarket, going to the pub and wallpapering their new flat and suddenly they are plunged into Hell. Civilisation is blown back into the stone age.
The most scary part was the way the authorities were shown unable to cope with the scale of the attack (perhaps why the BBC never aired it again). We always think that it could never be that bad because someone would come to our rescue, someone would maintain control. But no, the bombs / missiles keep raining down and down prompting one traumatised emergency committee member to scream, "not another one!" They just did not expect so devastation and are completely helpless. Later soldiers shoot people for food, people wish for death and the emergency committee, those meant to be running things, die in the supposed protective bunker, trapped by rubble.
Ten years later, nothing is back to normal. What young people there are behave like wild animals, raping and fighting and speaking in a bizarre caveman manner.
Since the Cold War ended people have stopped being frightened of nuclear weapons. Everybody in every country should watch this film and realise that if there ever was a nuclear war, still possible with growing tensions between a superpower and its rivals, those left alive would wish they had been caught in the blasts and killed outright.
I don't recommend this for sensitive viewers.
From the movie “Threads”.
About the movie “Threads”
Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.
I still remember back in the early eighties having vivid nightmares about mushroom clouds above my street. Probably I was aged around nine or ten, hearing rumors that the city of Hull was a target for a warhead due to our city once being a major shipping port, etcetera, so as a child it does play on you. It was on the radio, the TV, in magazines and people in the street talked about the crisis.
Then along came Threads — a BBC production so chilling, so merciless, that viewed today it still leaves an impression. The Day After was good, but retained some mellowness. When the Wind Blows is a very strong touching message, but the bad dog of nuclear holocaust movies has to be Threads.
Scene from the movie “The Road”.
The BBC I assume put it together just to inject sheer terror into the hearts of everyone watching. When I introduced my Horror Soulmate to this a few years ago, her face fell, literally fell. Threads pulls no punches about the aftermath of a nuclear bomb on any country remaining.
As a spider weaves its web, a narrated introduction explains just how society is a mass of threads connected and how this can basically make society weak.
Welcome to Sheffield, UK, 1984. News reports have begun to tell of building tensions in Iran between the United States and Russia. The first mention is captured briefly as a teen, Jimmy, spins his car radio dial as he sits overlooking the city with his girlfriend, Ruth. Life continues, day by day, regardless of the news. People sip in their local pub, a papergirl does her rounds, meanwhile the tabloids lap up the tension.
Jimmy discovers Ruth is pregnant so their parents all meet up, and they discuss how Jimmy wants to marry Ruth and have a place of their own.
A typed heading tells us that Sheffield is England’s third largest city with over 54,000 people living there. So as the United States hint at sending troops to Iran, the Soviet Union see that as a direct threat. Life still continues, everyone goes shopping, people go to work. We’re introduced to Clive Sutton, a man who, if war breaks out, is handed governmental powers in the city. He’s making phone calls. Nothing critical, just in case.
“The United States have accused the Soviet Union of moving warheads into their new base in Iran.” Jimmy sits in the pub watching this report and discusses it with his friend. “Don’t it scare you what it might lead to?” Jimmy says. Meanwhile Britain commits itself to the Middle East tension. Anti-War demonstrations march throughout the streets. “You cannot win a nuclear war!” shouts a woman.
One day in Iran, B-52’s attack and the Russians strike back. In Sheffield citizens are in the throes of panic buying tinned food and other items, emptying stores who are upping their prices.
American buying up toilet paper.
Then a new fight begins, Soviets versus United States all out attacks on ships. Violence erupts in the streets and many families decide to evacuate their homes. Jimmy’s father watches, “Won’t be safe anywhere.”
A neighbor states, “Nothing will happen.”
Hospitals are cleared for any possible casualties. Many able patients are returned home. Panic evacuations creates chaos on the roads. Sutton goes underground with a small team beneath the town hall to form an emergency HQ.
Radios and TVs hand out ‘helpful’ messages in case of an attack. “You are better off in your own home. Stay in there!”
Americans are told to “shelter in place”.
At 8:30, one morning, the streets are busy with shoppers on their search for supplies. Sutton’s team are discussing things when the attack warning suddenly comes.
Sirens echo across the city and hundreds of screaming people run in every direction. Jimmy and his friend hide under a truck. At 8:35 a warhead explodes above the city, power goes out and the blinding mushroom takes the area apart, as blasting winds tear around. Jimmy sees the cloud, he tries to reach Ruth. His mum and dad hide behind doors and a mattress, Ruth and her family close up their basement.
All HELL will break lose under a MAD scenario. Why are the “leaders” so Hell-bent on engaging in such a war?
Then comes the heat wave.
In total silence we see streets burn (some stock footage included), milk bottles melt, buildings crashing down, and a lot of burning corpses. 210 megatons hits the UK altogether, amassing approximately two to nine million casualties.
Unlike The Day After, when each character seemed to have some kind of knowledge of fallout, radiation, whatever and repeats it like a government issued health scare, in Threads, nobody knows a thing.
There are scared, not ready, just bewildered and terrified.
These are real neighbors, real shoppers, real families thrown head first into a nightmare. I suppose the closest comparison would have to be Jim and Hilda from the aforementioned When the Wind Blows.
The holocaust itself, I could easily bring up the last moments of The Divide as Eva leaves the apartment building basement and sees the remains of the city. Take that brief section and then continue it on-wards. You get the idea.
Survivors find themselves either trapped without air like Sutton’s team buried under the town hall, or burnt like Jimmy’s mother, or traumatized by the bodies of loved ones.
Then along comes the ashes and the radioactive fallout bringing blisters and sickness.
Scene from the movie “The Road”.
Food supplies fall under government control which causes violence in the streets and looting. As the days go by people become more desperate.
Ruth leaves the basement and walks the streets seeing what is left of her city. A woman cradling the charred corpse of a baby, hands playing with burnt Star Wars figures, a bandage-faced traffic warden (who incidentally became a sort of poster boy for the production, featured on the cover of the Radio Times) and overcrowded hospitals.
It’s all kind of downhill for the survivors from then on unfortunately.
There is an impressive gallery of burn and blister make-up effects (by John Humphreys who also worked on TV series like Doctor Who and The Young Ones, as well as Rawhead Rex and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory), along with some blood here and there that makes Threads special.
Like I stated earlier, it’s not out to be kind, or make friends, it wants to wave a dead child in your face, it wants you to almost taste the ash in the air.
Scene from the movie “The Road”.
Oh things can get really bad.
Here’s another movie review. This one is about the movie “The Road”, from HERE…
The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared.
This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world.
No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country.
Scene from “The Road”.
The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food.
We’ve always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.
Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down.
The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets.
He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey…
…yes. And that is the way it will be.
There will be a long period, maybe decades, where the world will try to rebuild. Some nations will do better than others. Some will not.
I would guess that Australia wouldn’t fare too well, because they want to be the “tip of the sword” for the United States. But you know, Canada might survive all right. It just depends on whether they decide to sit things out or not.
Canada
Canadians like to think of themselves as independent of the United States, but the fact remains that the Canadian government is just a puppet government under the control of the American oligarchy.
From the movie “Threads”.
What might happen?
Anything, actually.
Interspersed throughout the movie are still shots that are all the more disturbing because they are beautifully done.
They make me want to hammer Brian Williams in the face with a brick, for ever saying anything as stupid as “guided by the beauty of our weapons.” [wp]
Fawning media totalitarian proto-fascists like Williams, who accept and glorify the necessity of nationalized violence, are the facilitators that are going to bring about this sort of disaster, if or (more likely) when humanity finally decides to pull the toilet-lever and flush all of everyone’s hopes and dreams away.
Jackson sets us up for exactly that scenario.
We meet a typical pair of English kids from the 60’s: they go to the pub, they drink, they make out in the back of his Cortina, parked on a pretty bluff with an idyllic view of the city of Sheffield.
Well, it doesn’t seem idyllic, at first – it looks like a typical industrial town full of people hanging on the edge of working too hard, drinking their desperation away.
The movie gets rolling slowly, and – did I mention? – it gets worse.
Naturally, the girl gets pregnant, and there are some poignant “meet the parents” and “set up an apartment” scenes.
Brilliantly interwoven in the ordinary dreariness of their lives are flashes of news: the USSR has invaded Afghanistan.
The US issues an ultimatum and deploys B-52 bombers and troops.
There are reports of skirmishes. Life in Sheffield stumbles on, gut-shot, but not knowing it yet.
Since 1945, the world has had a nagging question in the back of its collective mind—what would it take for a nuclear war to start?
After the Cold War, it seemed nuclear fever had died down in North America—sure, India and Pakistan both got the bomb, but that was really far away.
Those fears have escalated again recently as the United States has begun signalling that it’s willing to take unilateral action against China.
While China is well known to have a sizable and formidable nuclear force with both ICBMs, and hyper-velocity MIRV vehicles, these new developments come as international institutions go through a period of intense instability.
The good news is, a nuclear war might not be the world-ending cataclysm you would think it is.
The bad news is it would still be very, very bad.
The worse news is that there hasn’t been any kind of plan for how to deal with such an attack on Canada since the 1980s. Worst of all? Canadian experts think a nuclear exchange in our lifetime is just a matter of time.
Canada stands to get out of this relatively unscathed. But Vancouver, grab a seat. We need to talk.
How it starts
No matter how unhinged you think Washington DC might be and how terrifying it is that anyone in Washington is handling nuclear codes, none of the experts I read about, thought it particularly likely that America, as provocative as it is, is likely to be the one to shoot first.
While several experts pointed to a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan as something that could conceivably happen at some point, it’s doubtful that would end up with any North American cities becoming targets. Of the other nuclear powers, it’s hard to think of a scenario that sees England, France, or Israel (whose nuclear arsenal has never been confirmed) striking out at the USA.
The consensus was that both Russia and China would have far too much to lose by hitting directly at North America (proxy nuclear wars in parts of Europe or Taiwan, respectively, remain on the table).
However, as I have repeatedly stated, both Russian and China has made it absolutely clear that any provocation or military action that crosses a RED LINEwould result in the unleashing of a MAD level retaliatory response.
When the bomb hits
According to NUKEMAP, an algorithm that combines data from Google Maps and available information on nuclear weapon capabilities, the initial devastation of a strike on downtown Vancouver would be considerable—a fireball with a radius of 200 meters would appear over the city as the bomb explodes in midair. Every building within a two-kilometre radius would be virtually destroyed. Almost everyone within 16 kilometres of the explosion who survives the initial blast immediately suffers third degree burns.
The tally: almost 30,000 dead and over 100,000 injured almost immediately.
While NORAD radar would detect any ICBM or submarine launch, the warning time would be roughly 25 minutes—nowhere near enough to even begin evacuating a metro area with a population of over two million.
What would make matters worse is that currently there are absolutely no governmental plans for minimizing the death toll should a nuke hit a Canadian city.
“There isn’t [a plan],” John Clearwater, author of Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal, told VICE. “We’re all going to die.”
During the Cold War, Canada did have plans in the event of a nuclear strike. In 1961, an underground hideaway was completed outside of Ottawa. Located 40 kilometers away from Parliament Hill, it was meant to house hundreds of government officials and military officers in case of a nuclear attack (it now functions as Canada’s Cold War museum). Dubbed a “Diefenbunker” after then-prime minister John Diefenbaker, it was one of over 50 such multi-story units built across the country.
Fred Armbruster, the executive director and founder of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association, said parts of Canada are still home to the rotting and overgrown remnants of nuclear bunkers—a surprising amount of buildings in western Canada, in particular, are home to long-forgotten shelters.
Canada still has nuclear bunkers.
People don’t realize the amount of bunkers that were constructed in Canada,” he said. “It’s phenomenal. For example, every single municipality around Edmonton has a bunker.”
Today, almost none of those facilities remain operational, mothballed after Canada got rid of its nuclear weapons in 1984.
“There was no more plan because there was no more expectation that strategic nuclear weapons would fall on Canada,” said Clearwater.
Crawl out of the fallout
In the immediate aftermath, thousands would die due to untreated injuries, dehydration, exposure, collapsing structures, and general unpreparedness in the face of such a disaster.
Armbruster pointed to the Fort McMurray fire as an example—just as nobody expects a nuclear attack, nobody was prepared for a blaze of that size. During the peak years of nuclear panic during the Cold War, information was regularly distributed on how to prepare for a strike—blueprints for bomb shelters, what supplies to have on hand, what to do if an air raid siren went off. In Fort McMurray, few had the emergency supplies or knowledge necessary to get through the ordeal.
“People didn’t have bottled water, they weren’t able to react. Many people ran out of fuel because they let their fuel tank go past half full,” he said of the lack of preparedness that preceded the worst wildfire in Canadian history. “Back in (the Cold War), they were sending out pamphlets to every single household educating people on how to be prepared for a manmade or natural disaster.”
When a largely unprepared population is faced with a disaster of this magnitude, it puts even more strain on governmental institutions like Public Safety Canada, who would have to improvise ways to decontaminate, shelter, feed, medically treat and house hundreds of thousands of refugees.
If you've ever stayed up late in bed worrying what a nuclear bomb would do to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or Ottawa, now you can find out.
Nukemap3D, an extension to Google Earth written by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institute of Physics in Mayland, allows you to model what nuclear blasts of different sizes would do to literally any location on the planet. (There have been server issues with the site, but you can also access it here).
The website allows you to select the size of the bomb, from the 15-kiloton weapon dropped on Hiroshima to the 50-megaton behemoth Tsar Bomba tested by the Russians in 1961. You can also watch an animation of the mushroom cloud, see an overlay of the blast effects and fallout and get an estimate of causalities.
The results can be terrifying. A bomb as small as the "Little Boy" weapon used on Hiroshima would cause nearly 400,000 casualties if dropped near the CN tower in Toronto, according to the program. A Tsar Bomba would cause more than 3 million.
Those downwind from the blast would be affected by fallout, but even then, according to Schofield, it wouldn’t be apocalyptic. Airbursts, where a bomb detonates several hundred meters over its target rather than on the ground, cause a larger shockwave but also result in less radioactive debris.
Of course, there would be no cars, the automotive ECM’s would all be fried into slag by EMP bursts, nor would there be electricity, and internet.
“The general rule of nuclear weapons is, the radiation effect which is lethal is well within the lethal zone of the shockwave,” he said. “Radiation is not going to kill you.”
Still, he warned, leukemia rates would likely spike in affected areas for several years.
On the ground, Canada’s third largest city would probably rebound fairly quickly. While fiction would have you believe that nuclear weapons leave nothing but a scarred, uninhabitable landscape in their wake, Schofield said he wouldn’t be surprised if Vancouver was rebuilt in a decade or less.
The bomb that struck Hiroshima in 1945 was 20 kilotonnes—not that much smaller than the largest tested North Korean bomb. But that city’s population had returned to pre-war levels by 1958.
“Hiroshima … was built out of wood, [so] the whole place burned down,” said Schofield. “There were a couple of buildings that were 200 meters from the Hiroshima bomb that were still standing.”
Of course, China and Russia field nuclear weapons thousands of times more powerful.
Canada gets mad
Canadians would go through a pretty intense period of mourning and shock after the detonation. Then they’d get really ticked off.
“If a bomb goes off in Vancouver, most people’s initial reaction is: we need to get a bomb so we can threaten other people so they don’t bomb us,” said Schofield. “For Canada, I think we’d say we need a nuke and then we’ll probably revert to the Americans and have a much tighter security cooperation.”
In 2005, then-prime minister Jean Chretien refused to let Canada participate in the construction of a continental anti-ICBM defense shield.
Still, it needs to be stressed: the likelihood of Canada being involved is very, very, very low. Our lack of a plan isn’t necessarily a bad thing—as Clearwater points out, it just means resources are being used on things that actually matter, like diplomacy.
“We should not be wasting taxpayers’ money on a plan for something that results in our deaths,” he said. “We should be using a fraction of that money working towards a global zero [amount of nuclear weapons]. You can get a lot more working towards zero than you can distributing survival packs, shovels, doors, water purification tablets and blueprints for backyard shelters.”
So take heart, Canadians. Yes, your government isn’t doing much to prepare for a nuclear strike, but that’s because no one thinks they really have to.
Guam
Would the Chinese, or the Russians conduct Naval assaults on that tiny island? Would they saturation bomb it, and then invade using landing craft?
No.
They would erase it.
Depending on the detonation altitude and the mega-tonnage of destructive power, the remains could vary from a radioactive flat glassed mound protruding above sea level to a underwater crater. It all depends on the “message” that the Chinese wants to make.
Scene from the movie “The Road”.
Diego Garcia
This island will also go the way of the Dodo bird.
The idea that it would be eviscerated by the cleansing effects of a nuclear blast is so high that I would put it at a 90% probability.
If, somehow, it would survive I would say that anything trying to reach it would be destroyed long before they reached the island.
As the tension between the USSR and US, dimly glimpsed in flashes, ratchets up, the viewer begins to feel a very real and inescapable dread.
I’ve seen scary movies that build tension but nothing like this, before.
Perhaps the worst part is that the fragments of news could so easily match what is coming from Korea:
Both sides rushing troops to the area, chest-puffing, threats.
Jackson’s decision to set the film in Sheffield, which is mostly uninvolved in the war, was doubtless because of the practical exigencies of movie-making and his target audience – but the sense that all of this war stuff is going on somewhere else, is brilliantly rendered in the half-heard snatches of news.
I spend a lot of time trying to hear those fragments about Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Korea, Nigeria – and reading between the lines in Threads is so well done there were times that my hair literally stood up on my neck.
It’s all “somewhere else”, until – wham!
We see a bit of the “preparedness” efforts of the government – the town administrator is told to begin storing medical supplies, water, gasoline, and so forth – he’s a well-meaning civil servant with no idea what is looming over him.
But, then, nobody does.
That’s why Watkins made the movie, after all.
In the last few months the US has seen images of hundreds of thousands fleeing by car, of the traffic jams and shortages: now, imagine people trying to flee from something from which there is no place to hide.
There is another movie in this vein, Miracle Mile [imdb] but somehow it becomes a disaster movie with a bit of action flick hidden in it.
Threads has this methodical rhythm that somehow makes it clear that nobody is getting out of anywhere – I think a lot of that is a result of positioning the film in Sheffield, far from where anyone would expect war to come, and probably far from where anyone expected to do anything about it.
America would suffer the worst effects of MAD. This is non-debatable. I have covered this in the past. I have many many articles regarding this. You might as well go to my supreme master index to read about this.
.
That’s one of the most powerful messages I took away from the movie (other than “the living will envy the dead”) ...
...the vast mass of us sit in the shadow of this horrible thing our leaders have planned for us, and we feel that there is nothing we can do.
Or perhaps there is nothing we should do because it’s all so far away.
But they built this for us – they planned this for us – they used our money and our work to fund it, and the very worst of them talk about it as though it’s a casual game of golf.
No halfway decent human being should countenance this thing for anyone.
We, the people of the world, should rise and rip our political leaders to bits for preparing this bath of fire for us.
Naturally, our political leaders have bolt-holes, where they expect they can hide and weather out the worst effects of their utter failure.
Jackson doesn’t address that directly, but obliquely and powerfully shows us how that works, as well: the mostly well-meaning political leaders of Sheffield take shelter in their command center under the town’s office building, and are trapped when the building collapses over them.
Both are allies of the United States. Both hold military bases that station American troops, and both do not want to get involved in a war with China. Were there to be a military conflict, I am near positive that both would prefer to sit out and be as neutral as possible.
However, if any nation, or both decides to actively participate alongside the United States in attacking China, the consequences will be horrific for those nations.
My guess is that World War II would be short lived and over quickly. As a result the events would unfold before these nations would be drawn into a conflict and would sort out their relationships with America after the smoke clears and the radioactive radiation does down. Whatever leadership remains of the United States, I am confident that these nations would dictate the terms, and would side with their Asian neighbors irregardless to what events happened in the distant past.
Aside from it’s terrifying military, America has no friends in the world except for a handful of nationalists in Australia and Israel.
The story follows its little cast of characters that eventually dwindle to one, the young pregnant woman. Then, the documentary aspects begin to pop in, with freeze-screens that blandly state facts that are so scary your mind wants to crawl someplace safe instead of reading them.
I imagined I had a pretty good handle on nuclear war, but there are things I hadn’t thought of, which Jackson’s researchers did.
We’ve all heard of nuclear winter, but I’d never thought of the plagues of rats and flies that would follow having 20 million unburied corpses (never mind the sheep, cows, etc) or the side effect on agriculture.
There was a report yesterday about an intensive care unit in a hospital in Puerto Rico that suffered a power failure and all the patients are now dead.
In Threads we see doctors throwing up their hands in despair at the uselessness of trying to help patients who will die from radiation exposure.
The medical infrastructure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki collapsed, similarly.
What Watkins makes us see is that it’s not a partial collapse, like “no power or water” but a total collapse. “No nothing.” Our modern civilization is tightly integrated and god damn it we depend on each other – it’s like a Jenga tower – politicians imagine that they can just destroy part of the world without affecting the rest.
Fucking morons.
Morison and Trump both believe that a nuclear war is winnable.
Jackson’s projections are that, after radiation and secondary die off, nuclear winter and the destruction of agriculture and supply, England would be back to medieval-level population again, 30 years after the war – about 1.2 million people.
England, frankly, isn’t much of a target, so their suffering would be long-term collapse.
That saying about “bombing someone back to the stone age”? It’s not funny or accurate: it’d be early iron age.
I have more in common with a typical North Korean peasant than I do with Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump or any congressman. So, do you.
We are all living under the threat of this thing, built by power-loving politicians and their Renfields, in order to make themselves more important.
They are the same people who talk casually about “axis of evil” when they’re actually founding members of the axis, themselves.
We need to finally acknowledge that the nuclear powers (in spite of what they said in the Non Proliferation Treaty [npt] they shoved down everyone else’s throat) never intended to do anything but achieve and maintain a monopoly.
Non-nuclear states are obliged not to make or develop nuclear weapons, but the nuclear powers will continue to maintain and upgrade their arsenals. And when was the last time that the citizens of the USA or Russia had any say in whether more nuclear weapons would be developed?
When it comes to nuclear war, nobody is isolated.
Compared to the hostile powers our own leaders have arranged against us, any disagreement any of us might have with a citizen from another country is piffle.
ISIS?
They are nowhere near the threat to anyone that the commander of the US, North Korean, Russian, (on down the list) is.
Sure, they are repugnant, cruel, murderers – but they are rank amateurs compared to our leaders, who are prepared to murder on a vaster scale and who, in fact, have pretty much murdered ISIS (and 50,000-100,000 noncombatants along with them)
I can negotiate with ISIS – probably it wouldn’t go well, but I can try – militant nationalism doesn’t permit negotiation at all: they make us pawns in their game and they’ll throw us in the fire at any moment without feeling particularly bad about it (unless it’s bad for business).
Why can’t we rise up and put these motherfuckers up against a wall and shoot them all?
June 7, 2021 at 4:53 pm GMT Trump is now demanding reparation from China. Full time China hate is his only schtick left, no one is listening to him on anything else. China hate is the only thing that could still get a few of his mindless minions riled up.
But you know…
…it’s a dangerous game these morons are playing.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
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This is going to be the “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of post. I wander. I spew out videos and pictures. I discuss things like girls and hot dogs. I even spend some time on Russia and then throw in some stuff about unhappy Americans. So I guess you can actually call it a true garbage bag of stuff. A “sack” of stuff.
There is NO set theme, for those of you who like everything nice and orderly. But rather this is like a messy mechanics work bench, a chef’s kitchen during the preparation for a large and elaborate meal, the living room after three two years olds entered it, or what happens when you give a dog a laxative and lock him in the house. The shit is everywhere.
And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media, and what I myself recorded, as well as some interesting articles that are banned or not being presented inside of America these days.
I took a bunch of videos over the last few weeks. I am going to post some of them here so that you all can get an appreciation for what it is like here. And that’s really good.
I also have collected some more pretty girls videos. And I am going to post some of them here too. I mean, why not?
Pretty Chinese girl.
While I am at it, I have collected some Chinese military themed videos which are interesting if you follow that sort of stuff. And who in America doesn’t these days? After all America is a big enormous military empire. Even the multi-trillian dollar budget was just throwing billions of dollars to ramp up the already enormous military to fight world war III.
And some pork and beans.
Oh, and some other themes too. I guess you could call this the “kitchen sink” of Chinese videos.
As an aside, we have all been having mass testing for COVID. Really, really efficient. They announce it, then three days later, it’s all completed. In a city five times the size of Seattle.
Today I made myself some hotdogs. I suppose that I am getting homesick a tad bit. I do miss those days where (as a boy scout) I would gather around a fire and cook up hotdogs and marshmallows. It’s that time of the year, and if you have the means I would suggest you all go out and explore and have some fun in the countryside.
Cooking hotdogs the American way.
You all should go out and do this.
It’s cheap. As I recall, a package of twelve hotdogs was under a dollar. If you buy a loaf of bread, and some ketchup, you can end up feeding a family for under $5 USD. Just don’t forget the beer. Add a bag of ice for a $1, and there, for around ten dollars you’ve got the great makings for an outing.
Well, things might be a little bit more expense today. But still, the point is that it’s a very inexpensive way to have fun. And just doesn’t the memories evoke stirrings in your soul?
There’s nothing quite like watching the hot fiery embers while roasting a hotdog and drinking beer. It’s a special treasure. One that seems to be over-looked in today’s society.
But before we get into the videos, let’s see what Mr. Putin has to say. Like Xi Peng, he is a calm and stable leader. When he speaks the world listens. Unfortunately the Western press refuses to to report on it. Thus leaving Americans and their allies unaware of the events going on in the world that America is part of.
Of course Putin has things to say. America is one BIG mess, and it is angry, belligerent, cocky and arrogant.
Sometimes, it just seems to me that there a only a precious few “adults” in the room remaining. Us “normal’s” are like rambunctious high school students, and the American and European leadership are like spoiled three year old children.
Encino Man
Excerpts of Putin’s Meeting with heads of international news agencies, St Petersburg, June 4, 2021
Allow me to refrain from speaking about the causes of the pandemicbecause so much has already been said about it that I think it makes no sense speaking on this topic, and I am unlikely to say anything new or intriguing.
Keep in mind that in 2020, both China and Russia filed formal complaints about the Coronavirus and the United State's role in it.
But I suggest we proceed from the fact that we have faced this pandemic and we are living with it now. The world has yet to overcome these challenges and restrictions and we must continue our joint fight as an effective outcome cannot be achieved unless we work together on combating the pandemic.
VLADIMIR PUTIN
B. RUSSIA-CHINA TIES (IMPACT ON INDIA) & RUSSIAN STANCE ON QUAD:
Mr. Putin discusses the American led "QUAD", the "Asian NATO" that is designed to counter, contain, and suppress China.
We do (not) participate in this initiative, so I do not think I should give any assessments on the participation of other countries in it. Each country makes its sovereign decision about with whom, how and in what capacity, and to what extent it builds its relations.
Let me state, though, that any partnership between countries should not be aimed at being friends simply to align against someone else. We need to be friends with each other so as to achieve common goals, to solve the tasks that states face.
I will repeat once again that we do not see ourselves in this configuration.
However, this does not prevent us from working both with India and China. I do not see any contradictions here. Moreover, we have created conditions for India, China and Russia to be able to work within the same organizations and they are well known: we collaborate in BRICS, and the SCO, and we work together in the United Nations.
Yes, I know, of course, there are certain issues related to India-China relations.
But you see, there are always a plethora of issues arising between neighbors. But I know the attitude of both the Prime Minister of India and the President of the PRC, these are very responsible people and in their interactions they treat each other with great respect.
And I think that they will always find a way to resolve the problems and issues they face. The main thing is that extra-regional powers should not standing their way.
Mr. Putin wants the two nations of India and China to continue to work on their differences together, and he doesn't want "outsiders" (you know, like America) to interfere and cause problems.
As for Russia-India relations, I repeat, they are unfolding very successfully and in a trustful and traditional manner. We really appreciate this level of relations with our Indian friends.
These are relations of a truly strategic nature, as they cover a whole range of areas for interaction. They include economic issues, energy, and high technologies.
They also include the military-industrial complex, and here we are not only talking about the sale and purchase of Russian weapons.
I have already spoken about this more than once, that we have very deep and trusting relations with India, which manifested in the fact that we and India (probably the only such partner of ours) take up joint efforts to design and produce, including on Indian territory, cutting-edge and advanced weapons systems, including missile equipment.
Russia and India are working together to design cutting-edge military technology, and systems. This is R&D and NPD for brand new weapons systems.
But these are just a few; there are other areas in which we cooperate.
This is why I have no doubt that Russia-India relations will continue to develop consistently to the benefit of the peoples of India and the Russian Federation.
The outlook for India to work with Russia on strategic developments is highly positive.
C. RUSSIA-CHINA RELATIONS:
You mentioned the [2011] Treaty, which undoubtedly played a vital role in the development of Russian-Chinese relations.
They are truly unprecedented in terms of the quality and level of interaction.
But we both understand that it is not just about the Treaty, although it really is a very important thing, an important document, and an important milestone.
The point is that Russia and China have many overlapping interests. This is what underlies the development of our interaction.
In this regard, one of the key fields of cooperation is the one you already mentioned at the start, and that is economic cooperation.
Quite so, several years ago now, President Xi Jinping and I worked out a plan to reach the $100 billion mark in our mutual trade.
Now I should tell you (you know about this) that we did actually reach this milestone, and more than this, even despite the challenges of the pandemic in 2020, we kept to that level. Despite the slight decrease, it amounted to 104 billion.
China and Russian foreign trade and cooperation is proceeding splendidly.
And I think that over a period of the next few years, as we agreed, as we wanted, we can reach 200 billion even by 2024, despite that slight decline. We have also discussed this with President Xi Jinping. The pace we have gained and the growth rate we have achieved in the first quarter of this year also confirm this.
It is of upmost importance that we cooperate across a wide variety of areas.
We are following global trends and we are increasingly focusing on the most important fields of high-tech.
I have repeatedly mentioned that we continue to work together in aircraft manufacturing, we are more and more expanding our cooperation in space, including the joint lunar program; there are very interesting prospects here.
Quite recently, you are aware, President Xi Jinping and I broke ground for four new nuclear reactors in China. This is very important high-tech collaboration.
Work continues in other segments in the energy industry too. On the other hand, I believe our cooperation in nature conservation and in the humanitarian field is no less important.
From year to year, we hold a variety of forums, all kinds of cross year projects.
This brings people ever closer together. All this requires good support in terms of infrastructure, so we are developing it as well. Quite recently, you know we have opened a bridge in one of the most important regions of the Russian-Chinese border.
Roads and rail between Russia and China are opening up, being forged and trade is increasing at an astounding level.
Russia and China are jointly working on major projects that have an international dimension.
As you are aware, China is promoting the New Silk Road idea, including in the economy. This is quite consistent with what we are doing within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union.
The BRI benefits not only China but Russia as well.
We have many overlapping interests and fields of activity. I simply do not doubt for a second that we will continue to be as active as possible, keeping in mind both Russia’s and China’s interest in maintaining collaboration on the international arena…
… and this interaction is undoubtedly one of the most important factors of stability in international affairs.
The stability of the world depends on Russia and China working jointly and together in unity.
D. SUMMIT WITH BIDEN:
You know, I am not expecting any breakthroughs following this meeting.
Now, what does that tell you all about how America is viewed by the rest of the world?
But I believe that (you are absolutely right) that, despite the disagreements, which were not created by the Russian side, we, nevertheless, have coinciding interests.
You have now mentioned some of the subjects that would be of interest to the United States and the Russian Federation.
This includes the solution of environmental problems, strategic stability and joint work to resolve a number of regional crises.
All this is highly important because this is linked with our countries’ security matters, considering intra-regional crises, such as in the Middle East. What do these unresolved crises lead to?
They cause an upsurge in terrorism, and this is extremely dangerous for everyone, including the United States, Russia, Europe and other regions.
These unresolved matters are the cause, and terrorism is the direct consequence of what is happening in these regions.
Strategic stability is extremely important.
Strategic military power is extremely important to maintain global balance and stability.
We don’t want to scare anyone with our new weapons systems.
Yes, we are developing them, and we have achieved certain results and successes here.
But all leading countries and leading military powers are doing this, and we are just one step ahead.
We realize that other high-tech countries, such as the United States and other states, will achieve similar results sooner or later.
Therefore I believe that it is better to reach agreement in advance on how we will live together in a changing world.
We are ready for this.
I assume that President Biden is a very experienced politician who has been dealing with politics all his life, he is well-versed in many of the problems I have mentioned because he was time and again involved in assessing similar matters, in different capacities.
This is why I hope that our meeting will be constructive.
E. RELATIONS WITH GERMANY:
Germany is one of our priority partners in the economy; on a global scale, it is one of our largest trade and economic partners, our largest partner in Europe and one of the biggest in the world after China.
We have a large number of friends in Germany and we have a strong interest in developing our trade and economic links.
Thousands of German companies operate in Russia, with our mutual investment amounting to $29 billion.
These are significant resources, and our business partners invest not in financial operations but in the real economy and real production.
We very much appreciate this and try to provide our help and support, which we intend to continue
In the political sphere, I really hope that, considering the special nature of our relations and our people’s particular interest in continuing cooperation, Germany’s future leadership will build its political relationships with Russia accordingly.
We are ready to fully cooperate to overcome all the difficulties you mentioned.
It is true that Angela [Merkel] and I have a businesslike relationship, and I appreciate her a lot.
She is a very experienced politician and a straight-forward but reliable person.
If we have agreed on something, then I see – which is frankly surprising to me, but it is true – that she is consistent and knows how to defend her position.
We feel it too; we feel it in our joint affairs.
Some things we may like, some things we may not, but she is a reliable, stable partner.
I would like stability and reliability to remain in the activities of the German government to come, too…
Let me say this once again: Germany is an important partner for Russia, both in Europe and in the world, and we very much hope that the situation will consistently improve.
F. RUSSIA-US RELATIONS:
The main thing that needs to be done is to treat each other with respect and take into account each other’s interests in the broadest sense of the word.
But this is not a general phrase, it is a meaningful matter.
It's not a platitude, or a saying. It's a very serious issue.
President Biden belongs, in my opinion, to the most experienced class of international politicians, as I mentioned earlier, because in different capacities and at various times over the course of many years, he has personally participated in the discussion and preparation of the decisions on all issues that matter today for the entire world and bilateral relations.
But it was not us who drove Russia-US relations into the state they’re in today.
We didn’t do this.
After all, we have never taken a single first step in matters that are detrimental to Russia-US relations.
Did we impose sanctions on the United States?
No, it was the United States that imposed sanctions on us and continues to impose them for every reason or for no reason at all, just because we exist.
But they will have to live with this, because Russia was, is and will be here.
Just as there is and will be the United States, which plays a very important role in the world.
I would very much like it to play a stabilizing role.
But in this context, in my opinion, Russia-US relations are also important.
To reiterate, I would very much like our meeting to be held in a constructive manner.
G. BELARUS:
President Lukashenko explained to me, he did not order the plane to land.
There was a bomb alert and, as far as I remember, the captain, who could have landed in Vilnius, since the plane was closer to Vilnius than to Minsk, decided to land in Minsk.
Nobody forced him to land – at least this is President Lukashenko’s account of the events. That is it.
****
And I would like to strike the ball back to you: what do you think about President of Bolivia Evo Morales’ plane being forced to land in Vienna, escorting him off the plane and searching the presidential aircraft?
So, the same thing happened in Vienna; in Vienna they grounded the head of state’s airplane…
If you can ground the plane of the president of an independent country in Vienna, why can’t they land a plane in Minsk, especially if there was a signal that a bomb had been planted on board?
We just need to measure similar situations with the same yardstick, and not only in this case, but in general.
We need to get rid of double standards; you can’t always say that one person can do this, and another cannot.
Not with the United States. The USA is all about "double standards".
Let’s work out common approaches and come up with common assessments.
Using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse demonstrations in Europe, and knocking out eyes with rubber bullets, is okay, but when there is an arrest in Belarus, maybe, done in a harsh manner, it is unacceptable.
Why?
Because European countries are democratic and they can do this in Europe.
Let’s then come up with acceptable ways of handling street protests and define what exactly is unacceptable.
Let’s develop common criteria and approaches, at least develop common definitions that will be understood by everyone the same way.
Then it will be easier for us to give assessments to the events that are taking place in various regions around the world, including Europe.
H. RUSSIAN VACCINE FOR EUROPE:
The vaccine market is estimated at about $100 billion a year, probably even more…
…the delays in registering the Russian vaccine in Europe are due to the commercial interests of those who are doing so…
…since they are thus gaining time for the competitors of Russian producers of the vaccine to take over the European market…
… since long-term contracts are being concluded for the supply of vaccines.
When the relevant European agency issues a permit to use the Russian vaccine in Europe, it will become clear that the market is already 100 percent full, and long-term contracts have already been concluded.
That’s it; the ship will have sailed for our companies.
We are the only country in the world that is ready to pass on technology.
We are doing so and starting production at foreign facilities.
We are ready to do this in European countries as well; we can see no obstacles here.
In fact, this is just another myth about the use of the vaccine.
Before this, we had not produced vaccines at such a large volume, and primarily only for Russia.
I think that in July we will reach a production level of 20 million per month. We have enough for domestic consumption now.
I.RELATIONS WITH UK:
The United Kingdom is one of few countries in Europe, and even the world, where economic relations continue to be on the up side.
Even last year – the pandemic year, when our trade with many countries slumped, trade with the UK grew by 54 percent.
This is record high.
So, if nobody interferes, everything will be good and mutual trade might help Russia turn from a withering country into a prosperous one.
If the USA doesn't interfere...
We strongly hope that Russian-British relations will contribute to this process…
The most important thing is that we have respect for each other, trust each other and hope that nothing occurs in the UK…
…that would allow us to come up with assessments like those given by the new head of your country’s intelligence service [MI6]…
…with respect to Russia [namely, that it is a declining power and behaves irresponsibly.]
J. PALESTINE PROBLEM:
We welcome the normalisation of relations between different states of the region, including between Arab countries and Israel.
When ties between states are restored, it always benefits the peoples of these states.
At the same time, and we are now clearly seeing this, it is hardly possible to achieve a stable peace and a stable situation in the region without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here, we need to restore multilateral formats of cooperation and multilateral formats for discussing the problems at hand.
There are issues that require special attention from the international community.
Of course, overcoming inter-Palestinian differences is among the essential elements.
I think that this entire range (I am not talking now about Israel’s settlement policy etc., but many questions accumulated in that area), the entire range of issues, of course, needs to be studied very carefully.
And Palestinian settlement must not be pushed back to the periphery of international politics given the pressing nature of this issue and the importance of this problem not only for the Arab world but, I think, the entire world as well.
We very much hope that the issues of fundamental importance, namely, the creation of two states, including the Palestinian state, will be resolved on the basis of mutual interests of the peoples living in this region, and taking into account the future.
It is very important to look into the future, it is very important not to be guided by fleeting political opportunistic considerations, but to create conditions for a lasting long-term settlement.
K. DOLLAR AS WORLD CURRENCY:
As for the dollar, I have already said that we are not trying to get rid of the dollar…
It’s not that we do not like the dollar because the United States is bad and it imposes sanctions on us, which forces us to get rid of it; of course not.
The question has a practical dimension. Let’s assume we are unable to make payments in dollars with our partners in defense cooperation.
Such as with Iran. -MM
You see?
We have a problem.
What should we do?
We switch to paying in national currencies or currencies of other countries.
Our US partners force us to do this.
We are not moving away from the dollar purposefully, we are compelled to do so.
When we do this, a system of financial relations with our partners is formed outside dollar transactions.
But why are the US political authorities doing this?
They are cutting off the branch they are sitting on and will crash to the ground in the end.
Everyone in the world can see this, you know?
Everyone can see it, hence the question about the reliability of dollar transactions.
This is leading to the decline of gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars, and not just in our country, but almost all over the world, including US allies.
The volume of settlements in dollars is on the decline…
You will see that the volume of dollar transactions is decreasing every year, and gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars are also going down, and not just in our country.
All of that is being done as part of some internal political processes in the United States.
The people who are doing this seem to operate on the premise that the economic power of the United States, its military and political power is so strong that it does not scare them – “we will get through this,” is what they are thinking.
America is about printing money endlessly without consideration of the mountain of debt that it is creating.
You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem with an empire?
And so he answers.
They think they are so mighty they can afford minor faults and mistakes. It is okay, we will buy these people and scare other people; we will reach an agreement with still others, give beads to those and threaten others with our warships – problem solved.
But he notes...
But problems are piling up, and there comes a time when it is no longer possible to cope with them all. And the United States is firmly and steadily following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union.
You don't say...
I will say it again: this is not our initiative. Some of our companies, for example, in the oil sector, are reluctant to leave the dollar, mindful of the volatility of national currencies. But if the United States continues to force them into this, eventually, they will find a way to de-dollarise their settlements and convert to national currencies or currencies of third countries. They will just find a solution, end of story. And this will be a severe blow to the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Multiple reserve currencies and units of account are a good thing for the global economy if we want to achieve a more stable situation in international finance and the global economy in general.
…
Nothing that you will find in the American “news”. Though you will find this understatement of the year…
Now that Mr. Putin said his piece, let’s get on with the videos…
Videos of pretty girls
"Chinese women look like pre-adolsecent girls. that is why all the child predators flock to China. So that they can have uncontrolled violent sex with these child-appearing women."
Long duration readers of MM know my love of the female form.
Chinese woman with a robust Chest.
Here’s just some more videos of Chinese girls being cute and attractive. I have other dedicated posts elsewhere, but I just wanted to throw some out right now and get them off my hard drive. Pretty girls, yeah, but I only have so much room. Don’t you know.
Chinese Hunan girl wearing her ethnic attire. (I just love Hunan food. You betya!)
Aside from girl after girl, I threw in two special videos.
One is a Tictok girl (just like these here) who died. And the hospital staff honoring her death.
A CGI showing the Chinese ideal.
Ugh. It’s a pretty big collection and it might take a little long to download. You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 345MB.
Typical Chinese girl displaying her “fish shaped” body for the world to admire.
What is going on in America today?
I just read this most interesting article. It says…
Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.
But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.
In order to stop fascism, the American people had yet another people’s uprising against the corrupt status quo and… elected Obama’s vice president. Lifelong corporate crony and empire lackey Joe Biden now sits in the White House, advancing all the same murderous, oppressive, exploitative, authoritarian policies as his predecessors, as a result of the latest fake, decoy revolution against tyranny.
And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.
Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.
And it is accurate, I believe.
As Gore Vidal once said:
“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”
That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied.
It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.
From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire.
Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.
Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression.
You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.
For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire.
The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare.
Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire...
...A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.
The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel.
The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, general strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.
The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions.
There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.
All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws.
Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.
What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.
Please read the entire article at the Greenville Post HERE.
Videos of Chinese Military Aviation
"The Chinese air force is a joke. The best that they have are 1980's old-Soviet Union hand me downs. All cobbled together with that shoddy Chinese workmanship and piloted by CCP members that would defect to the Untied States in a heartbeat."
It’s a narrative that has been pumped into the American heartland for decades. The truth is something all together different. Especially since 90% of the American military aviation, and parts are currently made inside of China. If China can design and manufacture for the United States Aviation companies, they can do so for themselves. Which is why we see all sorts of interesting home-grown and home-designed, and home-manufactured aircraft in China these days.
You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 41MB.
Oh, I almost forgot about Pepe…
You know the drill. From HERE. All credit to the author and edited to fit this venue.
The upcoming G7 in Cornwall at first might be seen as the quirky encounter of “America is Back” with “Global Britain”.
The Big Picture though is way more sensitive. Three Summits in a Row – G7, NATO and US-EU – will be paving the way for a much expected cliffhanger: the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva – which certainly won’t be a reset.
The controlling interests behind the hologram that goes by the name of “Joe Biden” have a clear overarching agenda: to regiment industrialized democracies – especially those in Europe – and keep them in lockstep to combat those “authoritarian” threats to US national security, “malignant” Russia and China.
It’s like a throwback to those oh so stable 1970s Cold War days, complete with James Bond fighting foreign devils and Deep Purple subverting communism. Well, the times they are-a-changin’. China is very much aware that now the Global South “accounts for almost two-thirds of the global economy compared to one-third by the West: in the 1970s, it was exactly the opposite.”
For the Global South – that is, the overwhelming majority of the planet – the G7 is largely irrelevant. What matters is the G20.
China, the rising economic superpower, hails from the Global South, and is a leader in the G20. For all their internal troubles, EU players in the G7 – Germany, France and Italy – cannot afford to antagonize Beijing in economic, trade and investment terms.
A G7 rebooted as a Sinophobic crusade will have no takers. Including Japan and special guests at Cornwall: tech powerhouse South Korea, and India and South Africa (both BRICS members), offered the dangling carrot of a possible extended membership.
Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits.
Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.
Facts on the ground tell the story. China and ASEAN are about to strike a “comprehensive strategic partnership” deal. Trade between China and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CCEC), also known as the 17+1 group, including 12 EU nations, continues to increase. The Digital Silk Road, the Health Silk Road and the Polar Silk Road keep advancing.
So what’s left is loud Western rumbling about vague investments in digital technology – perhaps financed by the European Investment Bank, based in Luxembourg – to cut off China’s “authoritarian reach” across the Global South.
The EU-US summit may be launching a “Trade and Technology Council” to coordinate policies on 5G, semiconductors, supply chains, export controls and technology rules and standards. A gentle reminder: the EU-US simply do not control this complex environment. They badly need South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
Wait a minute, Mr. Taxman
To be fair, the G7 may have rendered a public service to the whole world when their Finance Ministers struck an alleged “historic” deal last Saturday in London on a global, minimal 15% tax on multinational companies (MNCs).
Triumphalism was in order – with endless praise lavished on “justice” and “fiscal solidarity” coupled with really bad news for assorted fiscal paradises.
Well, that’s slightly more complicated.
This tax has been discussed at the highest levels of the OECD in Paris for over a decade now – especially because nation-states are losing at least $427 billion a year in tax-dodging by MNCs and assorted multi-billionaires. In terms of the European scenario that does not even account for the loss of V.A.T. by fraud – something gleefully practiced by Amazon, among others.
So it’s no wonder G7 Finance Ministers had $1.6 trillion-worth Amazon pretty much on their sights. Amazon’s cloud computing division should be treated as a separate entity. In this case the mega-tech group will have to pay more corporate tax in some of its largest European markets – Germany, France, Italy, UK – if the global 15% tax is ratified.
So yes, this is mostly about Big Tech – master experts on fiscal fraud and profiting from tax paradises located even inside Europe, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. The way the EU was built, it allowed fiscal competition between nation-states to fester. To discuss this openly in Brussels remains a virtual taboo. In the official EU list of fiscal paradises, one won’t find Luxembourg, the Netherlands or Malta.
So could this all be just a P.R. coup? It’s possible. The major problem is that at the European Council – where governments of EU member-states discuss their issues – they have been dragging their feet for a long time, and sort of delegated the whole thing to the OECD.
As it stands, details on the 15% tax are still vague – even as the US government stands to become the largest winner, because its MNCs have shifted massive profits all across the planet to avoid US corporate taxes.
Not to mention that nobody knows if, when and how the deal will be globally accepted and implemented: that will be a Sisyphean task. At least it will be discussed, again, at the G20 in Venice in July.
What Germany wants
Without Germany there would not have been real advance on the EU-China Investment Agreement late last year. With a new US administration, the deal is stalled again. Outgoing chancellor Merkel is against China-EU economic decoupling – and so are German industrialists. It will be quite a treat to watch this subplot at the G7.
In a nutshell: Germany wants to keep expanding as a global trading power by using its large industrial base, while the Anglo-Saxons have completely ditched their industrial base to embrace non-productive financialization. And China for its part wants to trade with the whole planet. Guess who’s the odd player out.
Considering the G7 as a de facto gathering of the Hegemon with its hyenas, jackals and chihuahuas, it will also be quite a treat to watch the semantics. What degree of “existential threat” will be ascribed to Beijing – especially because for the interests behind the hologram “Biden” the real priority is the Indo-Pacific?
These interests could not give a damn about a EU yearning for more strategic autonomy. Washington always announces its diktats without even bothering to previously consult Brussels.
So this is what this Triple X of summits – G7, NATO and EU-US – will be all about: the Hegemon pulling all stops to contain/harass the emergence of a rising power by enlisting its satrapies to “fight” and thus preserve the “rules-based international order” it designed over seven decades ago.
History tells uss it won’t work. Just two examples: the British and French empires could not stop the rise of the US in the 19th century; and even better, the Anglo-American axis only stopped the simultaneous rise of Germany and Japan by paying the price of two world wars, with the British empire destroyed and Germany back again as the leading power in Europe.
That should give the meeting of “America is Back” and “Global Britain” in Cornwall the status of a mere, quirky historical footnote.
Oh, and let’s talk about some food.
It’s near supper time, and it is early Summer. To me, that means buttered corn on the cob, watermelon, baked beans, hamburgers, fried chicken, tomato-onion-salad, cole slaw, and potato salad. Most of which you simply cannot get here in China.
Hamburger with a side of baked beans.
Well, you can get mashed potatoes at KFC, and potato salad at a Japanese restaurant. All of the others you can get, but they will all be cooked Chinese-style, which for the most part doesn’t resemble what I think about as hot Summer American food.
I’m not really complaining.
It’s that you adjust to your situation. You appreciate what you have when you have it. You realize that it is fleeting and the idea that you just “can always go out and get a hamburger” isn’t really true outside of the United States. Just like you just cannot go out in America and get some Hunan fish when ever you feel like it.
Now, it’s kind of “cheating” to take frozen fries, some left over chili and cheese and wrap it all up in aluminum foil to throw onto a campfire, but I don’t care. This is the year 2021, not 1854. You learn, you adapt, you strive, and you accept.
Some may call this cheating.
Once, I am fed…
… I have some videos about the Chinese military forces. Well worth a look.
You see, China must build up it’s forces. America is eyeing it for invasion. And it is not going to go away, back down, or moderate it’s position. Conflict is inevitable.
And the world spins around and around…
Meanwhile from HERE, we have this jewel from UNZ …
China Notes That the Same Journalist Pushing Wuhan Lab Hoax Pushed Iraq WMD Hoax
The people who hypes up the #Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is the same people who fabricated the fake information about #Iraq's "attempt to acquire nuclear weapons" 19 years ago. pic.twitter.com/5tfbRioB2D
China’s Foreign Ministry blasted the resurgent interest in the Covid-19 lab-origin theory, noting that the journalist behind a report about Wuhan scientists falling ill is the same one who peddled lies that led to the Iraq War.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin took aim at Michael R. Gordon, a national security correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and one of the authors of the report that added fuel to speculation about Covid-19’s lab origin.
“Not long ago, Michael R. Gordon, an American journalist, by quoting a so-called ‘previously undisclosed US intelligence report,’ hinted [at] a far-fetched connection between the ‘three sick staff’ at the Wuhan lab and the Covid-19 outbreak,” Wang said at a briefing on Friday.
“Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing unsubstantiated sources about Iraq’s ‘attempt to acquire nuclear weapons,’ which directly led to the Iraq War,” he charged, referring to the 2003 US invasion.
The WSJ piece, published on May 23, cites “a previously undisclosed US intelligence report” as saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill in November 2019 with symptoms “consistent” with Covid-19 as well as a seasonal flu.
The report got picked up by other mainstream media, which recently began shifting their coverage on Covid-19’s origins from outright dismissing theories that the virus was man-made to admitting that a lab leak remains a possibility.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t personally point to Gordon as the source for the “Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis” – I would point to the Jewish neocon Josh Rogin.
Rogin, like Gordon, spent years promoting various atrocity hoaxes in the Middle East and pushing wars for Israel, and is the original source for the version of the “Wuhan Lab theory,” that is currently circulating, writing a Washington Post column promoting the hoax on April 14, 2020.
The point of course is that everywhere you look, there are neocons – most of them Jewish – promoting this Wuhan Lab stuff. They are the absolute source of the claim – they and a Falun Gong Hong Kong CIA feminist woman, Li-Meng Yan.
She is claiming to be a “whistleblower,” despite the fact that she in no way meets the definition of that term. The term necessarily implies insider knowledge – usually, a whistleblower is an employee or former employee of the organization they are blowing the whistle on.
Though none of the media promoting her says it outright, there is an implication that she worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She did not. She worked at a university in Hong Kong when she was funded by Steve Bannon to write a paper making the claim that the supposed coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.
Bannon has recently been associated with Guo Wengui, a billionaire who was exiled from China for fraud and various crimes. In June of last year, Bannon declared that Guo is now the real ruler of China in a bizarre video on a boat.
While they were on the boat in front of the Statue of Liberty saying they were going to “overthrow the government of China,” they flew planes around with signs announcing their new government.
What does it mean? The sign in English says “Congratulations to the Federal State of New China” at least 5 planes flying over the Hudson in circles pic.twitter.com/4Kugqfwa5A
No one understood what was going on, and even Fox News reported on “confusion” regarding the banners and the livestream on the boat. The livestream has since been deleted, and there is no news from the Federal State of New China. But there is a Wikipedia page documenting this incredibly strange event.
Guo also runs a fake news website (I use that term in the most literal sense) where he published the Hunter Biden footjob videos.
The point is: this is a very weird operation, and it is absurd to take a person funded by these people seriously, as Tucker Carlson shamefully has.
(I’m not attacking Tucker over this, he’s overall great and is sometimes just really slow on the uptake, unfortunately – but it is shameful to get involved with a Hong Kong woman who was literally given money by Steve Bannon and his “Federation of New China” group to write a fake science paper.)
To pretend that she is a whistleblower, to pretend that political organizations funding papers with a predetermined outcome is serious science, is non-serious behavior.
The first time I heard the Wuhan lab leak theory it was being promoted by neocon extremist Tom Cotton. It was then promoted by neocon extremist Mike Pompeo, who was then in the process of trying to start a war with China. Now, it is being promoted by the Jews of CNN.
There is no one involved in claiming that the supposed coronavirus came from a Chinese lab who doesn’t have vested interests in starting a war with the Chinese. This goes for all of these Jews, as well as Steve Bannon, who has actually declared “overthrowing the government of China” (his words) to be his goal.
It’s very obvious to see how people who want a war with China would use this hoax, and it is great that China is making the link to the Iraqi WMD hoax. It truly is the same thing.
The United States is a country with a lot of problems. None of those problems are the fault of China. China is not promoting gay sex to children, they are not flooding us with millions of brown people, they did not steal our election, they did not take all of our freedoms and collapse the economy.
Our enemies are domestic and they are Jewish. Any attempt to fear-monger and attack China is intended as a distraction from what is going on in this country, and intended to stoke a war.
Furthermore, this “lab leak” nonsense is designed to get people to continue to believe in this coronavirus hoax.
I need a beer…
I swear, the United States is seventeen degrees shy of the loony-bin.
Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else, and all of them are just shear nut-cases. I swear.
I’ll tell you… the world cannot take much more of this insanity. Something is going to break. Sooner or later
.
Videos of Chinese Military Forces
"The Chinese military are nothing more than a bunch of uneducated conscripts that has been handed a cheapo AK-47 clone, and told to fight. They are a cake-walk and nothing to worry about."
Um. Don’t test them. The Chinese are a serious-serious people. And if they fight, they will be defending their homes and their families.
I’ve got some great videos showing the Chinese forces using some of their weapons. The one with their unique flame-thrower / plasma projectile weapon blaster is really interesting.
Some of the videos are propaganda with a rah-rah-rah feel. Others are just illustrative of the techniques and the means that the Chinese military train to use. And some are just interesting.
You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 377MB.
Videos related to Technology
"Just some videos related to technology".
And here they are.
You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one.
Videos related to America
"America is the bight and shining house on the hill that everyone wants to emulate, copy and be part of."
Um. Sure.
Here’s a collection of videos that show how America is viewed upon by the rest of the world. Some of the videos are just scenes from things like the televisions show “cops”, while others are international scholars discussing the Role of America on the global stage, and it’s relationships with China. It’s good stuff. This is how America is viewed by the rest of the world.
You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. It’s 73MB.
Conclusion
I could use a beer. The world seems to be fucked seven ways past Sunday, and all I want to do is chill out, hang out with pretty girls, drink a few brews and munch.
These times we’re living in are absolutely surreal. Not surprised though, we’ve been doing this for a long time now. Alas, a great many of my fellow White Americans will fall for it completely & be all in for a war with China.
None of them ever even contemplating what that would mean for us & the world. But, these are the same people who boast “we’re number one” when we rank at or near the bottom in positive stats for all developed nations, beset with crippling societal ills.
The same people who think we can vote ourselves out of this mess & Trump will win in ‘24 & somehow save the day. The same people who think our best days are ahead when our productivity base has been utterly gutted, our infrastructure is collapsing & our ability to maintain it & the skill set needed to sustain that productivity/infrastructure is slipping away. The same people who boast of “muh freedoms” when their freedoms & their children’s future is being pulled from right under their feet. The same people who think we’ll always be on top even when every example of history shows that every empire in history has collapsed.
We’re racing toward a cliff but they still think “god” is on their side & won’t let it happen or we’ll stay on top because, well, “we’re America”..
Utter denial & abject delusion seem to be a central aspect of our people..
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
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Well, aside from being thrown into a Thai jail for a couple of weeks, that is.
Anyways, here is a piece that I found on the UNZ site. It’s worth a read, not so much for the content (which is good) but for the comments that it attracted. You end up seeing a nice group of American society in the disparagement column, and some thoughtful analysis in the Brit and Aussie columns.
I like to read what other expats have to say about their experiences. As, well you should all know, everyone has a story and often those of expats tend to be the most colorful. This particular story revolves around a fellow in Thailand who made the mistake of fighting back when he was being scammed by locals. That’s a big no-no.
We have a saying in America. It goes like this… “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
The phrase ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ means that ‘when you are living in, or visiting, a community of people, you should follow the laws and customs of that community’. Literally, the proverb means that when you are in Rome, you should act like the Romans.
-'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'
Well, he didn’t follow this very simple advice, and ended up paying for that mistake. This is his story. And the comments are really interesting.
As with all reprints, the usual disclaimer apply.
For young guys, yes… rise up and abandon the creeping meatball. I don’t care if it’s the UK meatball, the US meatball…. just get out while you can. There is serious talk of raising exit fees!
-Franz
As an expat myself, I am both charmed and repelled by the experiences of other Americans as the peek outside of the gulag that the inhabit.
Some comments are gold. Some remind me of bad experience I have had with Jerk-offs, and others remind me of just why I left. I really enjoy the more thoughtful and productive comments, and dialogs. they point to some interesting trends.
The ‘least developed’ European countries have the most interesting long-term prospects, at least as places I like to live."
Yeah, and they know it.
I worked steel, plus allied fabrications. These countries are buying up razor wire faster than anyone can make it! Trust me, in a few years, countries that are not yet holes will be off limits to wanderers.
-Franz
While you are reading it, please keep in mind that one person’s happiness is meaningless to another. We all live within our very own realities.
One person’s happiness is meaningless to another. We all live within our very own realities.
Here is the article with comments embedded within.
gotmituns says:
The only ones “escaping” from our wonderful and proud American nation are the cowards and shirkers who wouldn’t do either side any good when the shit hits the fan in this country. Nobody needs such people in their midst.
With my Escape from America series, I’ve interviewed American ex-pats who have settled in Mexico, the Philippines, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil or England, etc., but you’re constantly escaping from one country to the next, with the goal of experiencing all 180 of them! What made you choose such an unusual lifestyle, and how did you prepare yourself for it?
No preparation whatsoever and, in fact, no plan.
I’d had what’s called a ‘liquidity event’ back in NYC. Two, actually: a startup sale and then an IPO. Which just means I don’t have to work again if I don’t want to.
I was burnt out. 15 years of 10 hour days, grinding towards some pointless goal of accumulation. When I cashed-out I wasn’t sure what to do next.
I looked around and decided it was time to leave NYC and the US in general.
The path the country was heading down was pretty obvious to anyone willing to look.
So I threw a bunch of stuff in storage. Locked up the apartment. And left.
That was 2017 and I’ve only returned now and then: for weddings or near-deaths.
I hope to never have to return permanently.
Radicalcenter says:
... mere permanent residency in another country never requires giving up US citizenship, so why renounce US citizenship if mere permanent residency in the other country suits one’s purposes?
(Permanent residents often have the right to use the public healthcare system the same as citizens. Some countries, like Russia, give them the right to vote in local elections.)
US citizens who reside abroad full-time do indeed have to file a US income tax return even on income earned abroad.
But in 2021, a married couple can exclude the first $217,400 per year from US federal taxation:
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figuring-the-foreign-earned-income-exclusion
In 2022 the exclusion rises with inflation, probably to $224-225,000.
The system is unfair, grasping, and should be abolished.
But American worldwide taxation shouldn’t be a deterrent for most Americans who would seriously consider residing abroad. Seriously, what percentage of older American couples moving abroad will have more than $225,000 in income per year while they are retired?
Not many.
In Tirana, I ran into a folk singer who performed in Turkish, but was actually an American! In his early 40’s, “Dandelion Lakewood” left the States nearly 6 years ago, and has been in Europe ever since, mostly in the Balkans. Busking, he needs just $12 a day to survive.
In Tirana, Dandy was paying $8 daily to share a room with another American. Dandy has slept outside, it’s not a problem.
Different people have different requirements. You’re obviously in a different category, but most Americans with cash would not have made your choice. You told me you once drove from Atlanta to Juarez to sample an interesting Chinese buffet. Do you think you’ll ever get tired of traveling? If so, where might you settle down, and why?
Right.
And I don’t make the money point to brag or anything. I just got lucky. Right place, right time.
The bigger point I wanted to make is that guys like me are leaving the US in droves. Even before the pandemic.
We are not better or smarter than those that didn’t get lucky.
But I think some of us realized that the “juice wasn’t worth the squeeze”. So we bailed.
I feel a kinship with anyone that has left America, regardless of their situation.
PJ London says:
You sound like 99.9% of Americans, totally anal and caring only about their bank balance.
The rest of the world (and yes I have lived in 8 countries) have a far better life, as they do not rank existence on the thickness of their wallet.
Given a free choice and some income I would live in a Muslim country or eastern European. I would move to Abkhazia tomorrow if I could. Unfortunately, in my 70s, my travel and choices have become limited.
In terms of traveling and settling down.
I don’t know.
I have a reckless streak. I always have. Going to Juarez to eat Chinese food, or moving a bunch of gold over the Burmese border, or spending weeks in a Thai jail, or designing the interior of some Chechen billionaire’s yacht. I just can’t stop collecting experiences.
That, to me, is real wealth.
I’ve been to around 90 countries at this point.
There are a handful of places I could see myself staying long-term. For me, they have the right combination of cost of living/quality of life. Decent infrastructure. Nice people. Low-ish inequality coefficient.
They’re usually Muslim/Asian countries.
I think that was the biggest surprise.
I want to avoid the forced degeneracy of the West.
This is weird as, in my youth, I was the biggest champion of orgies and drugs and personal freedom and all that faux-liberal youth-culture decadent bullshit.
Alfred says:The issuance of a second valid passport should therefore be considered an exception to the one passport policy and will be issued at the discretion of the Consular Officer. If issued it will be valid for a maximum of two years.
U.S. Embassy and Consulate in the Netherlands – Second Passports
I like being around happy, multi-generational families.
People eating together as a family or flying kites in a park or a group of old-timers nursing a 3-hour conversation over a cup of coffee.
They still do that!
I am not ready to stop.
Perhaps that is the recklessness I was referring to earlier.
In German, real estate is ‘Immobilen’. It’s ‘immobiliere’ in French. Even without knowing Kraut or French, I bet you can deduce the meaning… purchasing a home renders one immobile.
A lease is a landlock.
You’re stuck in one place, one culture, one point of view.
To stay in the same place still seems like death to me.
Or perhaps a series of small compromises, small deaths, that add up to a more prolonged expiation.
Disclaimer says:
The introduction of Nassim Talebs book “Black Swan” has a interesting paragraph about growing up in Lebanon in the 1960s. It is worth revisiting...
"Increasingly, Celebrities and the upper 10% of US society have been getting second passports for themselves and their families for quite some time. After the financial crisis of 2007-08 it seems this trend accelerated. Its also illuminating how many of the upper 10% also have real estate overseas. These people are not doing these measures for fun. And they sure as heck keep their Plan B quiet."
The goal of travel is to court and embrace discomfort.
Otherwise, you’re just a fat Boomer on a cruise!
What did you do to spend weeks in a Thai jail?! And how were you treated by the other inmates?
To many white nationalists, Muslims are just low IQ losers, and Orientals are just conformists with disgusting culinary habits, yet both groups have managed to maintain their heritage, and hence dignity, better than the degenerate West. Is there any hope for white people, or are they condemned to rage impotently online as their societies unravel? Is Europe better off than America? And which European countries do you think have the best prospects?
The Thailand story is sad–and typical.
I’ll tell it here as a warning to anyone reading.
This stuff happens and, in retrospect, you should not handle the situation in the way I did. Linh, you can chop this if you don’t think it’s relevant.
I was in one of those seedy beach resort towns filled with decaying, SPAM-tinted Anglo men and their 21-year-old Isaan wives.
I was talking to as many of the men as I could, as they figure fairly prominently in a book I am working on.
A few of the blokes had warned me of a scam going on in that particular town.
The locals would wait until you rented a scooter and had a few beers at some local bar. Then, when you scooted off home, they’d put three teenagers on a shittier scooter than yours and drive full speed into you. The cops would conveniently be nearby to handle the proceedings.
I ignored this warning as typical ‘falang’ fearmongering.
But sure enough, a week into my stay this happened to me.
I’d had a big Chang beer and puttered off home.
Three kids on a crappy Vespa (motor scooter) hit me out of nowhere. Cops come out. from behind a nearby building: ‘You drunk Mister! You come to station and make right!’ They sounded like some Hollywood-stereotype from the 80s. But they were real and extremely angry.
I was terrified.
I had had a beer and driven my scooter (like everyone else in that town) but I had no idea what my ‘rights’ were.
Ha!
We went to the station and the officer demanded 40,000 baht to make it go away, plus some money for each of the three teenagers that were on the scooter.
In the meantime, they had already gone to the hospital after the accident and returned, bandaged up, with hospital bills ready to go.
They’d done this under an hour.
All three presented the hospital bills to me meekly.
I think they were another 60,000 baht.
Conveniently, 100,000 baht is the maximum you can withdraw from a Thai bank branch in one day.
Around $3k.
I told them this was absurd.
I ‘knew my rights’. Typical American arrogance.
After two hours of yelling at each other via Google Translate in their sweaty little station, they made me go back to my apartment and give them my passport, told me they’d be in touch and that I was not to leave Thailand.
Jeff Stryker says:
Michigan Native & Long-term South East Asia (SEA) Expat Here
I cannot say I would prefer a Thai jail but I would live on Thai beach in a fishing hut & let lizards crawl up my anus before I would return to the low-cost housing of Greater Detroit Washtenaw county.
I spent 30 K building my estate here & the irony is that my grandmother’s condo in Washtenaw County was worth $400 K in 1986 & after it was sold 20 years later it was worth 50 K-and my brother told me that whoever bought it was a fool. That is property value in Michigan for you.
Not long ago on FB I got ahold of a Polish kid who shared my dorm room at Central. The poor fool is still stuck in Flint. His formerly tidy if modest Polish-Catholic neighborhood is one great big crack house.
So that is one expat’s response.
As for Canukistan, well, they may export our leaders but try immigrating there. They don’t want us.
Americans that travel a lot can legally have two passports.
Not a lot of people know this.
It’s the same passport number but you can usually bank on the fact that if you get into trouble somewhere, it will take time for the various government departments to communicate with each other, and you have a window to clear the country.
I’d talked with a nice local lawyer girl after this happened and her advice was to get the hell out of Thailand. So that’s what I did.
I was gone within 48 hours, this time via a land border, which I assumed was insecure.
I crossed into Cambodia, made my way to Phnom Penh, and then flew to Bali for a few weeks.
Stupidly, I returned to Thailand a month later.
I thought somehow the problem would have ‘gone away’, as it was all a scam.
Ha!
They grabbed me at the airport, after clearing customs. That’s always the shitty part. They let you clear customs and grab your bag, thinking you are free. And then they grab you.
My passport number had been communicated to Border Police.
They were as surprised as I was that I had returned!
The charges were now serious.
In addition to injuring others on a scooter, I had tried to flee the country.
A few other minor charges.
Worst case: I was facing up to 3 years in a Thai prison.
I would now be remanded until I had a chance to appear before a judge. There were a series of holidays going on, related to the new King’s ascension, so the whole country was closed for at least a week. Bad timing on my part.
I spent around two weeks in a Thai jail back in the town where the crime had been committed.
Mulga Mumblebrain says:
It is very hard to contemplate leaving your homeland. Just leaving Sydney, that I knew like the back of my hand, but was unaffordable, was a dreadful break.
Unfortunately, Australia, that from c.1970 to 1990 was making good progress in creating a decent society, has since fallen into the Pit of Hell, led by the Right, monsters like Howard, Abbott, Morrison et al, and the complicity of the zombie remnants of the ALP, now the Another Liberal Party.
All driven by the Murdoch cancer.
Now the place is locked in a suicidal frenzy of treacherous and deeply racist Sinophobia, after decades when China did us NOTHING but good. Such duplicity is bound to get its just desserts-and soon.
The Thai jail is not a place I’d want to return to.
I was new so I had to sleep with my head directly next to the open toilet in the corner, my head getting kicked every time someone went to shit in the middle of the night.
I did meet a lot of nice Burmese guys in there, who insisted on sharing every single meal they had with me.
They taught me how to sleep with a water bottle under your neck, as it helps your posture on the concrete floor.
There was a Dutch man who’d killed his Thai wife.
A few Americans and Australians recently nabbed on drug charges. Lots of Iranian guys. They were the most aggressive towards Americans.
The common theme from everyone was, ‘I was set up’. I began to doubt my own story.
Fast forward a few weeks later.
I am out on some sort of conditional release.
They have both passports this time. I have to check in every week to a ‘parole’ office and wait for my official trial date which is set 4 or 5 months in the future.
I can’t leave Thailand.
Radicalcenter says:
Sweet numbers, brah. But that works only if you can avoid spending all the profit on the next, also wildly appreciated house, right?
One can do this by moving to a house that is smaller, older, or in a less desirable climate or location, of course. That isn’t a good option for everyone, though, especially families. We have a number of children, so we need to move someplace bigger, not smaller.
Once past that stage of life, yeah, it’s usually feasible to downsize and come out ahead that way on housing costs and equity: i.e., sell a big house and buy a smaller house. That way you come ahead even if you stay in the same locale, saving/investing some of the proceeds and/or having a lower monthly mortgage payment.
Also, those inland “flight” / retirement areas aren’t so cheap anymore.
One used to profit from expensive coastal and/or big-city home sales and buy really cheap inland. But this is changing fast. Primarily due to the acceleration of decent people fleeing even mid-sized cities (not just NY, LA, Chicago, Houston), and millions working mostly online for the first time.
Home prices continue to rise far faster than our salaries/wages in booming country & exurban counties across Utah, Nevada, Texas, Florida, eastern OR and WA, Montana, Wyoming, etc.
My mother is selling her house in a fairly expensive part of NJ and buying out West. The prices for the newer houses far from any city in Utah or Nevada, are shockingly higher than when we started looking in earnest less than two hears ago. We thought we were savvy and sufficiently apprised of costs in these boom-towns, but nope.
In the two inland flight areas we’re looking at, newer-home prices are going up maybe 4x faster than my Mom’s house. Houses we thought might cost $300,000 are surging to $400,000 and $500,000. If we thought she might pick up a house with a certain amount of property for $400,000, it’s now $600,000 to $800,000.
As for California real estate, man, you killed it!
I’m happy for you. I too would have bought when you did if we had lived in Cali then. We’d try to buy in SoCal even now, as overpriced and overcrowded as it is, if we weren’t raising children. But we won’t subject our kids to the California curriculum much longer — it’s getting more extreme by the month. Nor will we live in a jurisdiction with “vaccine” “passports”, which may be on their way here. In the new lockdown America, even the prospect of real estate profits isn’t enough to keep families in certain places long-term, like California.
Also, how are young Americans to buy real estate to raise their own families? The artificially low interest rates won’t last. And even rock-bottom rates don’t help if you can’t come up with a down-payment. A 20% down-payment could easily be $70-80,000 or more in many areas with good jobs. Many, probably most, Americans don’t inherit a house. Given the number of children we have, ours won’t each inherit a house either. How do they ever get on this absurd merry-go-round?
When home prices consistently riser faster than salaries and wages, this cannot serve most people well in the long run. You made out very well, and we may do alright, but this system already hurts more people than it helps, and it cannot go on forever.
And before you ask, no, the embassy does nothing.
You’ve watched too many television dramas. They only intervene in capital crimes or a crime that makes the US look bad.
While I was in the jail, they told me to hang tight and let them know if I was being mistreated.
When I got out they gave me a list of lawyers.
I picked the one who bragged to me that ‘Her husband was a high up police officer’. In any other country, this would have been a warning sign, but I figured in Thailand, it was a golden ticket.
I hang out in Thailand for a while.
Avoiding scooters and bars. freaking out, obviously, but pretty powerless.
No amount of American money could help me at that point. The government didn’t care.
The “trial” was bizarre.
No visitors are allowed. The courtroom I was in was underground. You’re brought to a jail before the trial where you have to take off your shoes and belt and then stand in a cage inside the trial room.
I was with three other guys in the cage.
There’s no one in the courtroom aside from some grim-looking guard with a rifle.
Jeff Stryker says:
An Expert Speaks
[1] You can stagger around drunk & be puking on yourself in Siam & nobody will care a whit.
[2] However, you can stone cold sober & drive & if you get into an accident…you are in trouble.
[3] Generally, you can buy yourself out of any reasonable situation for a few grand. You really should not be traveling in SEA if you don’t have $3000 spare cash in the event of a serious situation.
[4] It would be typical of an American new comer to believe that Americans are not detested overseas & that being American will mean jack in SEA. Canadian? Maybe a little respect. British? Okay. American? Zero. The USA is regarded as the worst Superpower that ever existed & the average white American is regarded as a loudmouthed hick & ignorant too boot. However, in Siam, generally Thais don’t care.
[5] If you get locked in jail its the other American-hating nationals like Iranians, of whom there are a considerable number, or even Pakistanis who will threaten you for political reasons. Thais do not care. For that matter, even some Aussies or Brits are anti-American to come at you in an Immigration jail.
[6] Doing drugs is a tricky business. If you have to do drugs, score from ladyboys or from hotel staff of a younger hipper variety who themselves smoke weed. You can buy your way out of a weed bust, but Ya Ba & Meth are going to get you time. If you deal drugs or try to smuggle them in Pattaya or Bangkok, you are so stupid you should commit suicide when you get busted. Which you will be. Scoring drugs randomly on the street will always be a set up. With Tuk Tuk drivers or taxi drivers who ask you if you want to purchase drugs it will be a set up. You can score in Sukhumivit around Soi 4 from the Africans but they are periodically hit for raids.
[7] Many bar girls or hookers are meth addicts.
[8] An American married to Issan girl who does not know these ropes is not very bright.
[9] Make one or two semi-important friends.
[10] Remember the property laws. They are not in your favor. Property belongs to your wife.
Many posters here are naive hicks who have no business being outside the small city or town they were born. Some hicks are scammed in SEA.
After an hour of waiting, a prim little woman walks in, sits down at a table facing the cage.
She calls out your name and you walk to the front of the cage.
She reads your file out loud: the charges, I guess. It’s all in Thai.
My lawyer is then allowed to enter the room.
They talk quietly for a few minutes in Thai.
She’s very deferential, not making eye contact with the judge.
The lawyer then approaches the cage and asks if I am sorry.
I’m ready: I know this is my cue to turn on the histrionics.
I bow and wai repeatedly at the judge, the guards, the other Thais in the cage.
My lawyer had prepared me.
I repeat the Thai phrase I had prepared, over and over again and again. “I am so sorry and ashamed. I am so sorry and ashamed.” Likely mangling the pronunciation.
I cry. I plead.
The judge looks at the lawyer. Laughs.
Scribbles something on the file and then proclaims something in Thai. Before the lawyer has a chance to translate, I’m taken by a guard from the cage back to the primary jail in the courthouse.
I sit there for two hours.
Eventually, they call my name and my lawyer is at the jail door.
She’s smiling.
If you’re interested, my total penalty was…wait for it…a 100,000 baht fine paid to the court and an agreement to ‘not do anything bad in Thailand’ for one full year.
Emslander says:
Your experience with the Thai legal system is fairly typical of experiences with any legal system anywhere. I have drilled it into my sons’ heads from birth to NEVER get involved with the police other than to say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” I told them that, if they wanted bad attention or to be punished, to just come home and I’d accommodate. They mostly complied. The deeper you get into any sort of trouble, the more it will cost you in time, money and degradation.
I pay my lawyer another 100,000 baht, wait to get my 100,000 baht bond back from the courthouse (which has to be fronted by a Thai…in this case, my lawyer), and I am on my way.
I fly to KL that night.
I bear no ill will towards the Thai people.
I made a stupid mistake and, in retrospect, should have paid the fine upfront. Scam or no scam.
The normal Thai people live in a shitty, corrupt system. They’re just trying to get by. At least they have the comforts of family, community, culture, and tradition to return to after a long day of sentencing Americans to prison.
Disclaimer says:
In response to a comment by @obwandiyag who said
“…Wait till he needs a doctor…”
The medical care in most of the world is far better than in the US. Its not even close. US is ranked 37th (and dropping) on quality of medical care which is basically dead last in the first world.
US medical care was the best in the world until around 1975 or so since then its been steadily downhill.
To answer your earlier question, I think most of the white nationalists are the disgusting pigs. Potato-shaped genetic-mutt trash dropping rancor and CheezeIt crumbs all over their cum-stained keyboards.
There is no hope for the United States if these guys are the vanguards of “our” future. I’ll take the “Orientals” or the Muslims any day of the week.
Europe is a weird case.
As a political or economic union it’s toast, but the individual states will still have a lot of interesting possibilities. In many ways, Europe’s inevitable dissolution is good for guys like me.
It will be easier to get in and purchase citizenship, or property, or whatever. The fragmentation of Europe will be a boon for those fleeing the West.
The ‘least developed’ European countries have the most interesting long-term prospects, at least as places I like to live. I’d look for those that are food-secure and have good access to clean water.
john cronk says:
I find the guy’s life as described to be mis-spent, randomly purposeless and morally bankrupt. He may as well have been an ant or a fly. However, the subject of escaping the deteriorating West is a salient one and I’m interested in how it can be done in a sensible, considered, and productive way.
There are some nice towns in Bulgaria (mostly in the Rhodope foothills) and Albania that I’d consider long-term. Portugal was great until the Golden Visa, and will now be flooded with Brits heading back to Spain or Chinese opportunists.
I’ve always been a fan of Poland, of Polish cities and people. Georgia and Abkhazia are gorgeous and ripe for sustainable development–whatever that means.
Northern Spain, west of Basque country, towards Galacia, is gorgeous and peaceful. There are some great small towns in Slovakia but you have to be ready to handle Gypsies. Northwestern Greece, in the mountains, has a great climate and food culture. No one will bug you there.
There’s also East Asia, but that’s a whole other article.
Reading about your adventures everywhere, some readers might think you’re just an anchorless hedonist, but you’re actually happily married, and your wife does travel with you. Since it’s nearly impossible to synchronize wishes or demands on the road, this is very rare. You’re very lucky. To wrap up, do you have advice for Americans who might want to get out?
Yes, for much of the past 5 years of non-stop travel my wife has been by my side. It’s been pretty amazing and I am incredibly fortunate to have someone so willing to be ‘unsettled’ throughout the world.
It’s always fun to travel alone but having someone to wake up and make breakfast for–no matter the weird city we’re in–is pure pleasure.
For those looking to escape, my advice would be to have a plan but not to commit to it too firmly.
Too many people over-utilize the Internet to the detriment of on-the-ground intelligence.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who’ve ‘sold everything’ back in the States and then bought a one-way ticket to Fethiye or Chiang Mai without ever visiting these places once! All based on some Youtuber’s drone videos.
It’s ridiculous.
These are, unsurprisingly, the people that go back to Michigan in a few years.
Once travel opens back up, get your money right in the US first. Don’t burn bridges.
Then, pick a region.
Pack minimally.
I recommend warmer countries first simply because there’s less to pack. Don’t worry about booking an apartment for a month. Book a few days on Airbnb. Move around to a different neighborhood. In a city like Jakarta or Yangon or even Milan, you can have a dramatically different experience based on your neighborhood.
Keep in mind, no matter where you travel, you’ll always bring yourself along. If you aren’t happy in your own head, in your own body, then no amount of wandering will change that.
Jonathan (41-years-old)
cohen says:
Linh
You are doing a good job to some degree in telling the audience the real interesting and historical stuff about counties you travel to.. unlike you, when I travel I don't talk to “intellectuals”.
I to go to small cafes and talk to locals who don't speak a word of English but somehow there is always a one eyed men among blinds, one who wants to speak and brush up his English with in the crowd. To me that is fun.
The most common bonding is the sense of humor and bonding through jokes. That is something so common among people of various background. Try that experience next time.
Your stories about Serbia, and Lebanon did lack information. For instance, in Belgrade the American bombing or missiles attack were incredibly precise and ironically US got away bombing the Chinese Embassy by claiming an error. No way Jose. The defense ministry building destroyed were among big building and in front of each. There was no damage to any neighboring buildings.
Philip Morris bought the Serbian Cigarette company for one dollar? and the Yugo (bad or good beside the point) car company was sold to an American car company for 1 dollar. There are three KPMG offices in Belgrade. Why an American company needs 3 offices in the same city. Privatization my man.
You are hung up on Albania. Did you see the digging of an old gladiator arena by the sea? Or their political parties. People like me care less about the nice pictures of food from a restaurant menu. At least I for one.
Go to Jakarta, or Casablanca and see Muslim women with their Hijab driving taxi without fear of any physical harm. You can not imagine that happening in America, This is information and not pictures of food which is very subjective. Try to go to Tangier in Morocco and get a taste of Europe and Africa in one place. And the weather one has to experience it oneself. Daniel Craig has a house in Tangier on the Atlantic side (lot of French artists, mostly fags).
Talk to a native Jews of Casablanca and learn why on earth they don't want to go to their “promised homeland”. The answer would surprise you. I was amused when one of them in a synagogue said “Then what the hell we will be doing there once we get to Israel”.
Try some volcanic islands in Indonesia where Comodo dragons still roam. Or Lake Biakal. Very different than the food information with prices.
Put some information in your writing that would be worth reading. Food? Who gives a sh… We have the tendency to talk about foreign foods and feel cultured and well informed.
Or at least that HIS opinion.
I liked the story. Seems like this fellow was in the right place, at the right time, and husbanded his money well. Good for him. My life has been one scramble after the other, with no time to take a breather.
Americans have a lot of issues they need to sort out before they go elsewhere. One of which is the hooks and claws that “Uncle Sam” has in just about everything you do. And another thing is the bad Intel that you have. You are better off living under a mattress for the last forty years than listen to anything available off the internet.
The Ugly American
All of this reminds me of an old movie titled “The Ugly American”.
An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan. Sarkan is a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace.
Despite his knowledge, once he’s there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism.
He can’t accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism.
Imagine that!
This 1963 MARLON BRANDO film ' The UGLY AMERICAN ' is an all too often overlooked effort from such a truly talented actor as was Mr. Brando. Relevant upon release 53 years ago, it is relevant today. The AIRPORT ARRIVAL scenes as Ambassador MacWhite speeds off in his 1957 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine are a CINEMATIC TRIUMPH alone !
-Robert D.
Over the years, the term “the ugly American” has come to describe a pompus know-it all attitude that is dismissive of others, and that basks in the tattered remains of American patriotism.
The big problem with expatriation is the IRS. If you renounce your citizenship you are treated as though you have sold all your assets at fair market value, and must pay tax accordingly. If you don’t do that, you can simply live abroad and keep your US citizenship (and hopefully your new country allows dual citizenship). You will still have to file US tax returns and pay US taxes, although you will get a credit against it for any foreign taxes paid.
-Hapalong Cassidy
I found this review of the movie enlightening.
Viet Nam 1963
I was in Viet Nam from June 1963 to March 1964. We saw “The Ugly American” at the American movie theatre in Saigon, the Capitol Kinh Do.
There were many Americans and their dependents in Saigon and in Viet Nam at this time–most were isolated with cocktail parties, teas, and American activities. Most American children went to the American Community School outside of Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Their parents belonged to the exclusive Cercle Sportiff, hobnobbing with the Vietnamese elite who monetarily benefited from the war. There were opportunities for American civilians to teach the Vietnamese English, but I never knew of any opportunities for Americans to learn Vietnamese or national customs.
Many of the children of the diplomatic corps were instructed that if their shirt tails hung out or if they ate with their fingers when eating implements were available, they would be considered “ugly Americans.” Nothing was said about the teenage boys drinking, whoring, and racing their motorcycles through the darkened Saigon streets in the early morning hours. Nothing was said about how we knew the way to “win” the war against the popular nationalist freedom fighter known as Ho Chi Minh who organized the successful campaigns against the Japanese and French occupiers.
Perhaps if we had listened a little more, learned the language and customs, and understood that the desire for national freedom is not communism, we wouldn’t still be trying to “win” the Vietnam War.
…
I’m an American myself. So what is the deal?
Hum.
Not nearly good enough.
What is “it” with Americans?
I’m an American. So what’s the deal, eh?
America soon.
Why do we want to leave the “home of the free”, and “the shining house on the hill”, where the entire world wants to move to? Are we stupid? Are we too full of ourselves?
The U.S. government doesn’t formally track how many Americans leave the U.S. but the most recent estimate puts the figure at nearly nine million. This figure represents a doubling of the 1999 figure, placed at 4.1 million. The number of expats has more than doubled in the last fifteen years — a number growing faster than the rate of the U.S. population itself.
Juan jwayne says:
I live in Nicaragua/ Costa Rica. My $ goes much farther. The people are poor but happy,happier than Americans.You must have an income, me, union pension. My Atm card works here,so no worries.Takes a lil while to get used to it, different culture, but you’re easy going about things, it’ll work out. Good Luck
steinbergfeldwitzcohen says:
I would think that a smart guy would have learned something about the culture of THAILAND before he went there! You can go to jail for being disrespectful to their Royals.
Never, ever show anger.
Never: it is disrespectful and shows weakness (an inability to control emotions or to be properly afraid of those with the power of life and death, ie. 3rd world cops).
In fact, treat every cop and govt official as a long missed uncle you deeply love and respect. If you do that you cannot lose in the game.
You could have walked out of that station in 1 hr or less by being respectful and calm, wishing to pay while indicating a recent family hardship of a medical nature or, even better, allude to a recent family death that you had to cover the funeral costs for as you are the eldest.
The cops and robbers would have settled for 50% and you would have left happy.
After fifteen months of travel, I returned to the United States ready to give American life another try. After a few months at home with my family, I moved back to San Francisco, the city I lived and worked in before traveling. I started looking for a job, looking for apartments, looking for new friends. I felt eager to re-enter American society, and pick up somewhat where I left off.
Within four months, I had changed my mind.
After struggling with so many aspects of United States society and culture, I ended up finding a pretty great life in Cape Town, South Africa (along with a pretty great American boyfriend who had moved here years ago and found the same). I spent much of last year, hopping back and forth between the two countries, allowing me to distinctly see the differences between them. I moved here officially this past July.
A new survey shows I’m not alone: according to a TransferWise national survey of over 2000 adults, around one in three Americans say they’d consider leaving the United States for another country.
For us millennials, it’s even worse: 55% of Americans between the ages of 18-34 say they’d consider it.
What scares me most is that I won’t be able to enjoy life as I do here if I were to move back to the United States. Though life in South Africa comes with its own unique set of struggles, my life here in many ways became far easier than what I experienced in the States.
Here’s how:
1. I don’t have to worry about getting sick.
In the Transferwise Survey, “more affordable healthcare” was the number one improvement respondents said would make living in the US more appealing.
For years, the US has had the most expensive yet least effective healthcare system in the world. The recent drug price-hike scandal reminded us that unlike Canada, Australia, and many countries in Europe, our country does not regulate drug prices in the same way we regulate other basic needs, like water and electricity. Instead, we are the only developed nation that allows drug makers to set their own prices, regardless of whether average Americans can afford it.
America today.
As a freelancer, healthcare became one of my top priorities when deciding where to live. Individual plans in New York city can go up to a grand a month. And in my homestate of Florida, the limited access to affordable women’s health needs like pap smears, yearly gynocologist visits, and affordable birth control became a large part of why I left. Planned Parenthood was few and far between in Florida, and charged comparatively high rates after losing funding from the state government. The St. Petersburg Times reported that in 2001, presidential candidate Jeb Bush cut over $300,000 for family planning services through Planned Parenthood. The result? In 2014, an evaluation of health data found that Florida was tied with Oklahoma and Arkansas for the worst state for women’s health.
2. “Work-life balance” actually seems possible.
In the Transferwise survey, “a better quality of life” was the most popular reason people chose to consider leaving the country. It was top on my list too.
I enjoy living in places that prioritize joy instead of only productivity.
In South Africa, I saw people both engaging in meaningful work, and enjoying their weekends. I saw workers consider their loved ones and their overall well-being in their work decisions, without feeling guilty or selfish.
And, I’ve seen people with the most opportunity for financial gain simply choose not to capitalize on it. My boyfriend once asked the owner of a coffee shop we often visited why she closed on Saturdays and Sundays, and so early during the week. He explained to her she could make a killing with brunches on Saturday.
She shrugged her shoulders and told him she already knew that.
But she said she’d rather be with her family on Saturdays than have to worry about work. Similarly, I’ve seen some wine bars close Friday at 10pm, at the time they’d perhaps be most profitable.
I prefer this kind of prioritizing.
3. As a person of color, being an “expat” instead of a “minority” is kind of relieving.
Many articles have discussed how a person of color from the US can often receive more privileges abroad than in the United States.
In his New York Times article “The Next Great Migration” Thomas Chatterton Williams describes the story of his friend who moved from New York to London:
“He confessed, ‘The race situation back home occupies so much space in your mind, even just safety-wise, I actually never fully understood what it meant to be American, and all the advantages that come with it, until now…
You immediately remove that affirmative action target from your back.
A work visa gives you the validation that you’re good at what you do.”
In South Africa, I’ve had similar experiences. Instead of being the “affirmative action kid” I was often labeled at college, here my achievements are never tied to my racial background. People care far more about my US college degree and work experience than how I racially identify.
And because my racial background doesn’t matter nearly as much, race no longer has to matter as much in my life.
My primary identity in South Africa is “American” in a way it never was back in the States. After years of trying to figure out my how my Latino identity fits among my life, it’s kind of relieving for once to live in a place where frankly, no one gives a shit.
4. My values as a global citizen are affirmed.
Life in the United States is generally only about the United States. This is reflected in everything from American travel habits to American media to American curriculum in schools.
But life in other countries is about the world.
For example, Business Insider ran a story that illustrated the differences between US media and media internationally. They put side-to-side the cover stories for Time magazine’s US edition versus its editions abroad.
One month, the cover in the US had the headline “Chore Wars”, while the rest of the world got “Travels Through Islam.” Another month, while the rest of the world had a front page story on rebellion in the Middle East, the US got “Why Anxiety is Good For You.”
Statistics back up this apparent lack of interest in the rest of the world: a State of the Media survey found that in 2008, news agencies in the US devoted only 10.3% to foreign coverage.
While watching the news in South Africa, I also noticed that how we present international coverage also makes a difference. When watching coverage of developments in Iraq and Syria, newscasters actually interviewed Iraqis and Syrians.
I realized that this was perhaps the first time I had ever seen an Iraqi or Syrian civilian given substantial time on television to tell their story. In the US, though civilians from these areas were covered briefly in video footage, I never saw them personally asked for their opinion.
In some ways you could argue that our media is just catering to what Americans truly want to know– which unfortunately, seems to be only about ourselves. People from the US generally don’t have an interest in what happens internationally.
In 2013, The Daily Mail reported that in a survey of over 2,000 Americans, almost half of respondents who had never been abroad said that the only things worth seeing were in our own country. Almost a third answered that even if they had the money, they’d prefer to travel to local areas.
I know I want to live in a place where citizens and institutions care about the world around them and have a natural curiosity for learning about others. Unfortunately, it seems more difficult to find that in the States.
I’m not sure if I’ll live abroad forever, or if these four priorities will be my same priorities in the future. But for now, the US will have to put up a far better show to convince me it’s worth going “home.”
The Alarmist says:
When I was still military, in a so-called “friendly” country, one of my buddies decided our cab fare to town was too much … it was about $1 too much … BFD or Biloxi Fire Department, as we used to say … anyway, buddy decides to pay what he thinks is fair and walk away, so cabbie says, “No good… we go to police!” So buddy says, “Ok, we go to police.” I say, “You know the police beat people in this country, right?” and hand the cabbie the rest of the fare, figuring I was feeding one of his rugrats. When you are an American abroad, you have far fewer friends than you think, and they certainly don’t include the authorities … their and ours.
America soon.
So I am going to kind of throw some shit to America right now…
6 Uncomfortable truths about life in the United States
1. The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the U.S. is North Korea.
The International Centre for Prison Studies estimates that we have more than 2.2 million people behind bars, or around 716 people per 100,000 citizens, which is far higher than Russia, China, and Iran. To put this in even more perspective, the number per 100,000 citizens in European countries: 78 in Germany, 103 in France, and 99 in Italy. Even worse, 60% of U.S. prisoners are non-violent offenders. The numbers demonstrate how the United States contributes a completely disproportional amount of prisoners to the global environment: we are responsible for around 22% of the total amount of inmates in the world, even though we only account for 4.4% of the world population.
2. Though we spend more money on health care than any other country in the world, our life expectancy in some areas of the South is lower than the life expectancy in Nicaragua, Algeria and Bangladesh.
Though our life expectancy overall has improved (Americans live around eight years longer now than they did in 1970), our rate of improvement is far slower than other countries, and in some counties is on-par with countries far less developed than we are. We also rank last among rich countries in overall health performance, according to a 2014 survey by the Commonwealth Fund that looked at measures like equity of care and efficiency.
This suggests that Americans overspend on technology, without achieving higher results. For example, Americans have the highest rate of MRI exams. And yet in Austria, where the MRI exam rate is around half of ours, the life expectancy is still two years longer than ours.
We also rank low among developed nations for the amount of doctors we have: only 2.5 per 1,000 people (in 2005). In most of Europe, that number is far above three. In Cuba it was 6.7 in 2010. A 2015 report suggested that by 2025 our country would need between 46,000 and 90,000 more physicians than we have today.
3. Out of all developed nations, we have the highest teen pregnancy rate.
The Guttmacher Institute found that the pregnancy rate for American girls is 57 out of every 1,000 girls, far higher than most developed countries. Many argue that this derives from the failure of our abstinence-only education programs. The majority of European countries use comprehensive sex-ed. The result? A teen pregnancy rate of 5.3 per 1,000 in the Netherlands, 4.3 per 1,000 in Switzerland and 9.8 per 1,000 in Germany.
…one-third of the world’s paper and around a quarter of the world’s oil, coal and aluminum.
5. We are the only developed country that still executes prisoners.
111 UN member nations have expressed their agreement with a moratorium on the death penalty. And yet the US stands alone among developing countries in continuing the practice.
We can’t argue that we’ve kept the death penalty because it works: several articles have shown how capital punishment in the U.S. has been significantly racist, economically costly, and ultimately inefffective in deterring future crime.
6. We are one of only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave.
Though 70 percent of children live in families where both adults work, the United States still has made little effort to provide paid maternal leave for American families.
The small company we keep? Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
A 2010 survey found that 76 of registered voters supported some form of paid leave.
Other studies also show that when maternity leaves are short and unpaid, immunization and health visit rates go down and infant mortality rates go up. An OECD study on nineteen countries from 1979 to 2003 also found that paid parental led to significantly greater productivity.
So what is the point in all of this?
Life is what you make of it.
Do not live your life in fear.
Just because you were born in the United States, and was raised as an American with all the baggage and advantages that comes with it, you can change the script.
Forest Gump says that “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”. I argue that you can change the box.
And who cares why?
Really!
If you want to be a hedonistic slime-ball or, a forever-back-packer, or settle down with a family somewhere else. It is no one else’s business. It’s only yours.
So when I read the comments here, I see the arrogance of self-righteous American calling others out for doing things that they themselves are far too afraid to do.
It is really quite simple, really.
You migrate to where your happiness can manifest and become reality. That chick that I mentioned above was far happier in South Africa than in the States. And I am not doubting her. the things that matter to her are important. You just don’t brush them off to the side and call her a “coward” or a “traitor”. Do you?
If you are happy were you are now, then stay there.
I do miss many things about the United States, but for me personally it is literally a prison as a third-rate citizen.No matter what aspects that I miss, that I long for, and what fond memories that I have, I know that they are just that; memories.
We have to look at what is important to us all, and use faith, prayer and affirmation campaigns to make it manifest.
With a plan, backed up with action, understanding and wisdom, you will be able to manifest your desires
May your life become the source for your greatest happiness.
May your life become the source for your greatest happiness.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my index about Escape! (from America)
All through our lives we have been told that “news” provides us with a “window to the world”, and that we need to keep abreast of the events of the day. The argument is that this is how we grow, learn and understand our place in society.
This, now more than ever, is absolutely false.
And as I have repeatedly tried to explain this to you all, you all still don’t FUCKING GET IT!
(Sorry for being so brash and in your face, but Jeeze! Louise!)
All, yes all and every, item of “news” that comes out of the United States is manipulative propaganda. That’s what it is, that’s all it is, and if you respond that you have something that you read from this alternative news source… I will have to shake my head in sadness and disbelief.
There is no longer any free, independent “news” out of the United States today. It is all a very well-honed network of manipulation and deceit.
This means ALL OF IT.
Key Points
Point One. All “news” manipulates.
If you want to get a full perspective on something then you need to get a wide selection of information from many sources. And NO I DO NOT MEAN AMERICAN SOURCES. I mean international sources.
This is key point Two.
Oh, Mr. So-and-so wrote a "well researched" book on China. Great.
Did he write on his experiences inside of China?
No.
Why not?
He used many well documented sources.
Well, what were his sources?
Oh! All American publications, written in English, by people who have never been to China regurgitating what they have read.
And how is the opinion, of a person, who forms his opinions, by other opinionated people who know absolutely nothing about China going to improve your life?
It isn’t.
Instead, you should use that money and you buy a plane ticket and you look around yourself.
That’s key point Three. See what is important with your own two eyes, using your ears, on the ground and touching things with your hands. Books and periodicals and articles are so deceptive these days that they are more of a hindrance to the truth than information.
Now, the world has many many, MANY people pretending to be journalists.
Thus, you have to take each and every “report” and “news article” cautiously (in America we call this “with a grain of salt“). You can read it as most articles are really nothing more than opinions, NOT reporting, and some of those opinions have some value.
I think the most important key point is four. There is no longer any actual reporting inside of America today.
Zero.
Reporting of events in America has been replaced by carefully constructed narratives used to manipulate American citizens to follow herd behaviors.
One of the most important things that we must understand is that America has constructed the most powerful and elaborate propaganda network in history.
The American (levers of government) owns, through proxy, all of the major media, and all of the alternative media.
Yes, please read that again.
The American government owned Rush Limbaugh. The American government owns Free Republic. The American government supports GAB, the American government promotes Salon, the American government is the voice of the Huffington Post. The American government injects Zero Hedge. The American government controls the narratives on LinkedIN.
Those beloved Conservatives, and those funny progressives are all tools for the government. ALL OF THEM.
Thus key point five; actual events (and truths) are hidden from Americans.
So what is the purpose of “news” manipulation?
The actual purpose brings us to key Six. It is more than just a distraction. It’s a “snipe hunt”. The purpose of American news is to keep the American people ignorant.
It is to keep Americans away from the truths.
It is to keep Americans ignorant of the real situations.
This is because if they realized what they were, they would be extremely angry; angry to a point of killing everyone on sight in rolling fits of rage.
That’s why.
SNIPE HUNT
A snipe huntisa type of practical joke or fool's errand, in existence in North America as early as the 1840s, in which an unsuspecting newcomeris duped into trying to catch a nonexistent animal called a snipe. Although snipe are an actual family of birds, a snipehunt is a quest for an imaginarycreaturewhosedescriptionvaries.
-Wikipedia
Those of us “in the know” only have clarity on small tidbits of Intel. However, when we start linking up with others (such as through MM, here) who also have their information and we start putting the information together a very… very… VERY disturbing picture comes to light.
Which is point Seven. The actual reality of how Americans are, the lives they live, and the operation of the government is so far distanced from that which is promoted by the media that it resembles something completely different.
Indeed, the true reality of what America is really resembles the movie the Matrix where young Neo is exposed to the truth of what the world actually looks like.
Central to the philosophical edge of The Matrix is the red and blue pill scene. Morpheus, a human awakened to mankind’s reality, offers the same enlightenment to Neo, who is still plugged into an illusion. Alas, the choice must be Neo’s alone and to this end, Morpheus presents him with a metaphorical choice between two brightly colored pills. Take the red variety, and Neo will be unplugged, finally capable of seeing the world for what it really is. Swallow the blue pill, however, and Neo will not only go back to his digital, make-believe existence, but he’ll also forget ever having questioned what is real and what could be a lie.
Thus point eight. America is not a “shining city on the hill” with “democracy” and “freedom”, with a nation ruled by “justice”.
America is instead, an [1] oligarchy-owned Corporatocracy.
It is one that [2] operates as a military empire, and budgets it appropriately.
America [3] treats it’s people as disposable debit-serfs for profit, with a million tiny “hands in the wallet” with thousands (no longer hundreds) of taxes, fees, rules, and requirements that siphon money away from the citizenry in every shape, and in every form.
And America [4] engages on the international scene as a war-mongering bully, and is [5] presently a serious threat to the future of mankind.
Like a cancer the sicknesses that the leadership has permitted to grow has festered until now, the cancer has metastasized. America has become a dangerous monster that is thrashing around angerly, and trying to maintain it’s respect, it’s authority, and it’s world position. It cannot do that, and of which, it is quite dangerous.
But we are not going to talk about that.
Instead we are going to get back to the point that American “news” is a SNIPE HUNT of misdirection to keep Americans going around and around, and around, and around in circles.
American “news” as a “snipe hunt”
To illustrate how Americans are manipulated to go after “snipes” on a “snipe hunt” we will use the 2009 movie “Push” to illustrate this point.
What is real and what is an illusion when someone else controls your eyes and your memories?
Really.
What if everything that you know is an artificial construct that you now believe and that the truth was erased and false memories were implanted in your brain? Could you tell the difference?
I argue you cannot.
And just like many Americans “had a bad experience with Huawei”, who never owned a Huawei phone…
Who swear that they are never going “to use 5G”…
And now “will not get their RNA vaccination”…
… is no different than you remembering a brother that never existed.
The movie “Push” 2009
As that was one of the scenes in this movie. I am going to use this movie as the basis of discussion on the idea that other forces are so powerful that they can change what you think, what you believe, what you remember, and thus control how you act.
Push 2009.
This movie is sort of a “sleeper” movie about people with super-powers. But unlike that same-old nonsense about being bitten by radioactive spiders and the like, this one discusses …
These days you can't throw a half-brick in the air without it landing on someone who can fly, or was bitten by a radioactive spider (and that's assuming that the 'half-brick' in question doesn't GIVE the person it lands on the power to fly or climb walls!).
However, back in 2009, superhero movies (or those generally showing young, good-looking people with superpowers) weren't quite always guaranteed to make as much money as today's average Marvel Cinematic Universe film.
Therefore, 'Push' sort of flew below radar at the time.
I'd like to say that it's achieved a 'cult following' over time and it's a bit more of a 'sleeper hit,' however, it seems to have been completely forgotten. And, in my opinion, that's a shame - I really enjoyed it!
-bowmanblue
The movie start out with a narrator describing how those with “abilities” have been involved with the US government since 1945.
These abilities are various flavors of telekinetic powers. Some can push thoughts into other people’s brains, others can see into the future, and some can kill others by thoughts alone.
Two of the people with these special “abilities” or “powers”, are known as “movers”.
Movers
Movers are powerful telekinetics who are trained to identify the specific atomic frequency of a given material and alter the gravitational field around it, usually causing the nearby air to appear warped.
This allows them to move both animate and inanimate objects.
Advanced Movers can work at the molecular level, creating protective force fields in the air around them or to reinforce punches and other strikes to make them stronger.
A “mover” can move things with their mind.
Two “Movers”, Nick Gant and his father, are on the run from the “Division”. Which is a waved, unacknowledged special access program in the United States government W(U)-SAP.
Realizing that escape is impossible, Nick’s father tells him of a vision he received from a “Watcher”.
Watchers
Watchers have the ability to foresee the future to varying degrees.
As knowledge of the future invariably causes that future to change, Watchers' visions of the future in their direct sphere of influence are subject to frequent shifting.
This is another type of person who's telekinetic powers involve the power to see the future.
This, in this case, a girl will give him a flower and he is to do whatever she says in order to "save us all."
A “watcher” can see into the future.
Nick’s father throws Nick into an air vent as Agent Henry Carver of the Division arrives. Nick sees his father get killed before escaping.
A decade later, the American Division tests an augmentation drug on a “Pusher”, named Kira.
Pushers
Pushers have the ability to implant memories, thoughts and emotions into the minds of other people in order to manipulate them.
The skill level of the Pusher determines how many people the Pusher is able to control at one time, and how vivid the implanted memories are.
A powerful Pusher can push a large group of people at the same time, basically creating a personal army.
A Pusher is able to make a person do anything the Pusher desires, even commit suicide.
A Pusher's eyes indicate how powerful they are: their pupils will dilate to certain degrees depending on how powerful the push is (for example, Henry Carver's eyes are rendered completely black, signifying that he is an extremely able and effective Pusher).
A “pusher” can put thoughts in your head, and change your memories.
This drug either kills the host or greatly increases their powers exponentially.
The test works after many tries.
Rendering the doctor unconscious, Kira steals his security clearance card and an augmentation drug-filled syringe and escapes.
In Hong Kong, Nick (now older as a young man) is hiding from the Division as an expatriate.
He attempts to use his ability to make a living, but his poor skills at “moving” at a dice game leave him indebted to a local Triad. Which for you all who do not know, is the name of a Chinese criminal organization.
This particular Triad is controlled by “Bleeders”, bred by the now-defunct Chinese Division.
In the movie, the Chinese tried to make their own version of the American “division” but failed. The remnants were either absorbed by the American organization or went “underground” and became criminal syndicates.
Bleeder
Bleeders have the ability to emit high-pitched sonic vibrations that cause ruptures in a target's blood vessels.
While using this ability, their eyes turn into slits because of synthetic materials implanted in them to protect the blood vessels from the effects of their own ability.
They are also sometimes known as Joe Mama.
Bleeders can kill you.
A young girl named Cassie Holmes arrives at Nick’s apartment.
She explains to him that she is a “Watcher”.
Watchers
Watchers have the ability to foresee the future to varying degrees.
As knowledge of the future invariably causes that future to change, Watchers' visions of the future in their direct sphere of influence are subject to frequent shifting.
She further explains that they are going to find a case containing 6 million dollars. But shortly afterwards, they are attacked by Triad Bleeders but escape.
All of the reviews I've read of this movie have savaged it and, personally, I didn't think it was nearly bad as bad as all that.
There were some interesting characters (the guy they enlist to help them hide themselves from the bad guys comes to mind here), and it put a new and interesting spin on the whole "people with super powers" genre.
BUT...what really makes me love this film is the depictions of Hong Kong.
See, I have been living in Hong Kong for almost 5 years now and I've told all my friends and family that if they want to get a good look at the many sides of the city (other than the touristy facade is typically presented), watch this movie.
The film makers really did a great job of capturing what it's like to wander around Hong Kong, and the cinematography is like eye candy.
-srvblooze
Problems arise.
And Nick is nearly killed by the Triads. To recover, Cassie uses the help of a “stitch” to heal him.
Stitch
Stitches are psychic surgeons trained to quickly reconstruct cells to their previous or healthy state.
Using only their hands, they can heal and even "unheal" whatever they have done. For more detailed work, Stitches use a silver based cream on their hands which acts as a conductor for their ability.
Once healed up, Nick and Cassie go to a nightclub on a hint from Cassie’s predictions.
Nick sees an old friend, “Hook” Waters, who happens to be a “Shifter”.
Shifters
Shifters can temporarily alter the appearance of an object by manipulating the patterns of light interacting with it.
Once the illusion is established, it remains with the object for a short period of time.
For example, a Shifter could touch a one dollar bill and alter it to appear as a one hundred dollar bill until the effect expires.
The object shifted must have roughly the same dimensions as the object it is shifted into. The length of time that the effect will last is based on the Shifter's experience and ability.
Shifters can temporarily alter the appearance of an object by manipulating the patterns of light interacting with it.
The shifter uses his abilities to make a replica of the clue in Cassie’s drawing and tells them to go to Emily Hu, a highly skilled “Sniffer” who can help them find Kira.
Sniffer
Sniffs are highly developed psychometrics who can track the location of people or objects over varying distances.
Like bloodhounds, their ability is increased if they have tactile access to an object that has been in direct contact with the subject.
Sniffs receive information in the form of images, which is why identifiable landmarks help increase their effectiveness.
Nick and Cassie find Kira, who once had a romantic relationship with Nick.
They recruit a “Shadow” named “Pinky” Stein to hide Kira from the “Sniffers”.
Shadows
Shadows are trained to block the vision of other clairvoyants such as Sniffs, making any subject within their target radius appear "dark".
Experience will enhance the size of the area they can shadow and the intensity of their shielding effect.
Shadows need to be awake to manifest their ability, so it is common for a detail of two Shadows to operate in shifts while protecting a person or object for extended periods.
Most Shadows are effective only against Sniffs, but some extremely powerful Shadows are able to block even Watchers.
Cassie finds the key to a locker in which Kira hid a valuable case.
With the aid of Cassie’s visions, they piece together the events that led them to meet; Cassie’s mother used her visions to set a complex plan in motion that will destroy Division.
The plan to thwart the American Government
Nick comes up with a plan that involves seven envelopes in which he places instructions; each person in the group is entrusted with one red envelope, and none are to be opened until the right time.
Thus no one knows the content in the envelopes. That way, no one knows the plan except the person who made the envelopes.
While Kira and Pinky leave in a taxi, Nick and Cassie share a goodbye. Cassie tells him to “take an umbrella, it’s going to rain”, he replies with “you be careful too”.
Nick uses a “Wiper” to erase his memories of the plan, ensuring that Watchers from both Division and the Triads will no longer be able to interfere.
Wiper
Wipers are skilled at either temporarily or permanently erasing memory, an invaluable asset in espionage.
Experience will dictate the accuracy of their wipes, though there is always the danger that they will eliminate a desired memory.
Wipers are skilled at either temporarily or permanently erasing memory, an invaluable asset in espionage.
Hook retrieves the case (which does not have 6 million dollars, but instead has the syringe Kira stole) and brings it back to Cassie.
He shifts another case to match the case with the syringe.
Cassie takes the shifted case to Nick’s apartment and waits.
Nick regains consciousness: he has no memory of the envelopes or his plan.
He opens his envelope, which tells him to return home.
He finds the case in his room but Carver introduces himself to Kira as a friend, stating that her memories are false; she is a Division agent who volunteered to take the augmentation injection and suffered amnesia as a side-effect.
Agent Carver is the All-Powerful, all-controlling United States government.
Carver shows Kira her badge.
She believes him, because (after all) her memories and all the events confirm this narrative.
Nick goes to retrieve the augmentation drug and confronts Carver and Kira.
Carver tells Kira and Nick that the relationship they believe they had never happened and a special evening together at Coney Island was a “push” memory.
Kira reveals she has been using Nick the entire time and Nick takes the three to the building which contain the lockers and the case.
They are ambushed by the Triads.
In the midst of the fight, Carver injures Nick.
Nick grabs the case and jams the syringe into his arm, which “kills” him. This is because, after all, the injection is fatal to over 90% of the people so injected.
After the fights ends, Nick wakes up. He wasn’t killed.
Cassie appears with an umbrella and smiles at him, “I told you it was going to rain” she tells him, revealing that it was part of the plan.
Cassie retrieves the true case, revealing that Nick injected himself with soy sauce, as they planned.
Asked whether they will see Kira again, Cassie tells Nick that they will see “little miss trouble-maker soon enough”.
“Little miss trouble-maker”, a watcher for the Triad.
Flying back to America with a sleeping Agent Carver, Kira opens her purse, finding her red envelope.
She remembers Nick telling her to open it when “she started doubting the truth” and opens it.
She finds a photograph of herself and Nick, obviously in a relationship, at Coney Island and a message that says “Kill him, See you soon!”.
Kira “pushes” Carver, commanding him to put his gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.
The screen fades to black, followed by the sound of a gun shot.
…
Push is also, as I said, greatly artistical.
It has a lot of fantastic colors and utilizes lighting very well, it's set in very beautiful environments, and there are a lot of other great cinematic techniques being used.
I especially like the choice of soundtrack in this movie.
It reminds me a lot of the way they choose to use music in The Dark Knight. Instead of some really catchy, noticeable soundtrack there's been a very diligent work done with a subtle yet powerful soundtrack that emerges only when necessary and gives an indescribable force to the movie.
All in all, Push is a quite non-mainstream, entertaining, good movie worth watching.
-that-wierd-guy
Conclusion
For you to really understand what is going on in this reality, that you inhabit, you need to understand that (just like in the movie “Push”) that there are very powerful forces that want to control your mind. If they cannot have you, control you or profit from you, then they will kill you.
Just like in the movie.
They have unlimited resources, buckets of money, skilled and talented assistants, and experts in abilities equal or better than the best you can cobble together.
Just like in the movie.
They control what everyone around you does, plans, thinks, behaves and acts upon.
Just like in the movie.
And they are convinced at how everything will work out. They believe that they will be successful stamping out what tiny inconsequential opposition that still remains to their idea of a global utopia.
Just like in the movie.
But, like the movie, you need to realize that there are ways for you to counter their efforts and avoid becoming one of the mindless zombies that they control. And all of these techniques are spelled out in the movie.
[1] Look at what is NOT being presented as “news”.
For the origin of the Coronavirus, all the discussions boil down to two narratives, and only two narratives.
The Coronavirus is either a natural pandemic or a Chinese bio-weapon. Nothing else.
There is absolutely ZERO coverage on the idea that it was all part of the Donald Trump "hybrid war" against China and that John Bolton was the man in charge of the United States Bio-weapon program.
Which is amazing as that theory is the only one where ALL of the puzzle pieces come together.
[2] If the subject is being presented in a thousand different ways and details, then you are GUARANTEED that it is a United States government narrative. It is not independent and unique. It’s just another color of “Soylant Green”.
Notice that the same narrative is not present in other international publications. Of those, only the ones associated with the "five eyes" intelligence organizations will have similar articles. With some "bleed over" into the EU.
[3] You have to control your memories, as to what is real and what is not, to be fully independent.
We have all be preconditioned to act like Pavlov's Dog. We instinctively behave in certain ways reactively without thinking.
All the time we believe what was taught to us as being correct.
But that is false. Very few things that you accept as truth are really factual. They are all erroneous programming.
So you all are concerned about vaccinations. You are worried about the implications of “passports” and RNA, and unproven issues, and all this against a virus that is promoted as being nothing special nor dangerous. And I am telling you that all the “news” is bullshit. All of it.
The truth is hidden from you.
The dangers to you and your family are real, but NOT what is being described. The American RNA vaccinations are adaptable. They have abilities to adapt to a wide spectrum of viruses and biological weapons.
…a wide spectrum of biological weapons.
And it is critical that people be vaccinated right NOW.
So please ignore all the noise. Be careful and judicious in the selection of the vaccine that you take, and realize that the West has opted for a very unlikely candidate to fight an apparently “harmless” virus.
That makes my, and all of my hidden friends*, hair stand on end.
"Hidden friends" and idiom that refers to non-public MM members who have prior experience in American Black Programs and who understandably do not want any public association with MM, but communicate with me through back channels.
I do not trust anything out of America. But that is just me.
The Sinopham vaccine is based on long-duration, tried and proven technology, but is limited to the Coronavirus.
The American vaccines seem to have a for-profit motive, does involve unproven technology, and is adaptable (with some other injection boosters) to be able to combat a spectrum of other viruses. All this points to the construction of a new type of vaccination market that would require boosters from everything from the common cold to smallpox.
…with some additional boosters (at a price)…
…with annual or semi-annual inoculations (also at a price)…
…can enable the human host to combat new viruses…
…that can vary from the common cold to Smallpox.
The evil American empire has some nefarious plans ahead. I do not know what they are. But I do know that discussion of this, and what the plans could be are functionally being omitted or steered away from the public dialog.
If you read about it in the “news”…
…then you are being misdirected.
Any questions, please query in the comments.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Of course, I have covered the insane level of disinformation, lies, and distortions that are spewed from the American media. I have discussed why and how this has come about, and have provided quite an excessive number of examples. But what this article is about is what is NOT being reported.
If you would tell an American that they are ignorant of the “news” they would laugh in your face. They would respond that that idea is absurd. With the millions of articles being pumped out hourly from the vast American media, in all of it’s forms, of course Americans are “well informed”.
But nope. Americans are not.
Americans are subject to a fire-hose of outright lies, intentional distortions, eye-catching gossip, nonessential tidbits, and fear mongering. It is amazing in it’s size, scope, intensity and diversity.
If you exist within the by now almost hermetically sealed-off mindscape of Western mainstream media, and if you also happen to like knowing the truth, then life must seem increasingly unfair to you—because you can’t win.For decades now the modus operandi has been as follows. Regardless of which party has the majority in Congress or controls the presidency, the same unchanging national (and increasingly transnational) elite ensconced in Washington sets the agenda and pushes it through using any means necessary, whether legal, illegal or blatantly criminal (increasingly the latter as national bankruptcy looms and desperation sets in).Their operatives make sure that there is no real investigation of what happened. All Western media reports that contradict the official mendacious narrative are quashed. Any independent efforts to investigate and to find out the truth are denigrated as “conspiracy theories”—a derogatory term coined by the CIA for exactly this purpose.Any non-Western media sources that dare to contradict the official mendacious narrative are ignored, subjected to ad hominem attacks and all manner of false allegations and, if all else fails, banned outright (as is currently happening with the satellite TV channel Russia Today).
But do not be under the impression and “real and actual news” is somehow caught up in this flood of articles. The good stuff are all culled away before Americans ever get near the truth. Americans never see the REAL news.
Some recent examples of “withheld news” include…
The use of drones to spray swine flu over Chinese pig farms.
The content of John Bolton’s meetings when he was the head of the American military bio-weapons office.
The Chinese complaint about American involvement of COVID-19 to the UN.
And those are just right at the top of my head.
If you read foreign news, you will be well aware of these events, but Americans… nope. they would rather read other things.
This particular article is going to concentrate on the public messages that both Putin and Xi Peng have been making to the United States. They are not being (accurately) reported at all.
Any reports are of the content style of “Foreign clownish national leader says something insulting to America. They are just jealous.” And the same yada, yada, yada that you can expect from the Alt-Right and the American mainstream press.
If we swallow the official lies we are being told, knowing full well that they are lies, then we feel like fools.
If we refuse to swallow them, then we either have to accept some alternative interpretation...
... or narrative as real in spite of lacking all the facts we need to prove the case...
...because nobody is going to give them to us—and risk ostracism and marginalization...
... or we have to take an agnostic stance and declare that while we are not privy to the truth.
We know enough to declare that the official story is a tissue of lies.
The first two of these are both clearly losing moves while the last is a refusal to play and therefore a forfeit; thus, all three are defeats.There are no winning moves here.But it’s even worse than that; not only do we lack a winning strategy, but we also happen to be on a losing team that doesn’t know how to play and loves to be played.
If Americans would read what I am presenting here, maybe they would start placing calls to their Congressmen representatives urging them to tone-down the belligerent aggressive war-drums.
Ai.
Take the example of the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq: 4,801 servicemen dead, 1,455,590 dead Iraqis, a once prosperous country destroyed and turned into a terrorist playground with a weak central government that is aligned with Iran, buying weapons from Russia and increasingly hostile toward the US.The war was sold to the public in the US using a technique called “proof by juxtaposition” which works like this: keep showing a picture of Bob next to a giant pile of corpses and eventually everyone comes to believe that Bob is a mass murderer, never mind the fact that Bob only killed maybe half a dozen people, and all but one in self-defense or by accident.This is what was done with Saddam Hussein (who, by the way, was Osama bin Laden’s arch-enemy, who, in turn, had worked for the CIA). By 2003 70% of Americans had been made to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center.“Proof by juxtaposition” works well for the TV-addled zombies in the US, but for the rest of the world, as represented by the UN Security Council, a stronger tissue of lies had to be woven—using forged “intelligence” of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” The world blinked and either voted for or failed to veto the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.The putative weapons were never found and the intelligence that was used to convince the world of their existence turned out to have been fabricated.
But since the American people (the “sheeple”) are so dumbed down and are unaware of what is going on, no one is sending up messages to Washington, and so they all believe what they want to believe.
“Foreign clownish national leader says something insulting to America. They are just jealous.”
First up is an article about what Putin had to say to America and it’s “allies”…
Putin to Western Elites: Playtime is Over
An excellent blogger about Russia distills Putin’s Sochi speech into 10 simple points
Dmitry Orlov Thu, Mar 17 2016 .A longer version of this article originally appeared at the ClubOrlov blog. All credit to the author.
Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin’s speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few years ago, and, chances are, those who have heard of the speech didn’t get a chance to read it, and missed its importance.
Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don’t think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946.
In this speech, Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out.
Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.
Here’s what he said…
1. The games are OVER.
Russia will no longer play games and engage in back-room negotiations over trifles. But Russia is prepared for serious conversations and agreements, if these are conducive to collective security, are based on fairness and take into account the interests of each side.
2. America cannot guarantee anything.
All systems of global collective security now lie in ruins. There are no longer any international security guarantees at all. And the entity that destroyed them has a name: The United States of America.
3. There is no New World Order as envisioned by America.
The builders of the New World Order have failed, having built a sand castle. Whether or not a new world order of any sort is to be built is not just Russia's decision, but it is a decision that will not be made without Russia.
The UN failed.
The NWO failed.
And so America launched the “Rules Based Order”, and it is…
…failing.
4. Russia prefers cautious and careful diplomacy.
Russia favors a conservative approach to introducing innovations into the social order, but is not opposed to investigating and discussing such innovations, to see if introducing any of them might be justified.
5. Russia will not play any games that America has created.
Russia has no intention of going fishing in the murky waters created by America's ever-expanding “empire of chaos,” and has no interest in building a new empire of her own (this is unnecessary; Russia's challenges lie in developing her already vast territory). Neither is Russia willing to act as a savior of the world, as she had in the past.
6. Russia does not want to lead the world.
Russia will not attempt to reformat the world in her own image, but neither will she allow anyone to reformat her in their image. Russia will not close herself off from the world, but anyone who tries to close her off from the world will be sure to reap a whirlwind.
And neither does China.
Which, of course, runs contrary to the K-street narrative out of Washington DC.
7. Russia does not want war, but sees America eyeing it as the next world war.
Russia does not wish for the chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of global war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it. Russia does not war—nor does she fear it.
8. Russia will not interfere in the goals and objectives of other nations, just leave it alone.
Russia does not intend to take an active role in thwarting those who are still attempting to construct their New World Order—until their efforts start to impinge on Russia's key interests. Russia would prefer to stand by and watch them give themselves as many lumps as their poor heads can take. But those who manage to drag Russia into this process, through disregard for her interests, will be taught the true meaning of pain.
This is what China is doing as well. It’s a big night and day comparison to what the Untied Sates and it’s “allies” are doing.
9. Russia is about Russians. Nothing else.
In her external, and, even more so, internal politics, Russia's power will rely not on the elites and their back-room dealing, but on the will of the people.
Yes., And China is for the Chinese.
To these nine points I would like to add a tenth:
10. There can be no unilateral action.
There is still a chance to construct a new world order that will avoid a world war. This new world order must of necessity include the United States—but can only do so on the same terms as everyone else: subject to international law and international agreements; refraining from all unilateral action; in full respect of the sovereignty of other nations.
To sum it all up: play-time is over. Children, put away your toys. Now is the time for the adults to make decisions. Russia is ready for this; is the world?
But Americans just don’t “get it”
They are living in some kind of stupid haze, or just morons, or perhaps they have never seen the pain and suffering and despair that war brings. Maybe they view war as something that is done far away and that doesn’t affect them. they don’t see that when Putin and Xi Peng are making these statements that they are not talking about Russians and Chinese dying. They are talking about American dying in mass.
They just don’t “get it”.
So here is another article. This one is about the absolute frustration that Putin has with the fucking morons that run the West.
Putin LOSES IT, Warns Journalists of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’
‘How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction?’
Enrico Braun Wed, Jul 6 2016 | 320 words 238,361 Comments This post first appeared on Russia Insider.
Vladimir Putin has finally taken the kid gloves off.
The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, 2016 when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war.
This was in 2016, right before Trump was elected President of the United States.
Putin railed against the journalists for their “tall tales” in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie.
The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km. At that point, Russia’s nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy.
Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda.
He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line:
We know year by year what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries.
You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger - this is what worries me.
How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction?
While they pretend that nothing is going on.
I don't know how to get through to you anymore.
Does anyone in the reeking garbage heap that is the Western mainstream western media have a conscience? Do they even have enough intellect to get what Putin is saying – that they are helping to push the planet towards World War III?
That all was five years ago.
What about today?
Quite a bit has happened since Putin laid the line down with the West, and they repeatedly ignored his warnings. But you see trump started to focus on China instead, and that gave Russia a “breather” .
Of course the world has been turned upside down and no there is not a person alive who thinks that 2016 was an unstable time compared to the Biden / Trump years.
What has happened since then is a sequence of war events that were not reported in the Western press. And taken as a whole we can easily see what actually has transpired. And knowing this, and the results of the March 2021 Anchorage Alaska meeting, we know that after that meeting a significant shift occurred in Geo-political relations.
America told the world to accept it as their overlord or expect to be destroyed.
Russia, China and Iran formed a massive joint defense and economic block. Then laid out precise lines; “Red Lines” that will trigger World War III.
And sure, most certainly, the ambassadors have been quite clear on this.
And while I can well relate the various warnings over and over, and over to the moronic idiots who run Washington DC, let’s just keep things simple.
The stage has been set. Both China, and Russia are not going to pretend that America (and it’s cronies) are anything other than despotic-ruled military empire desirous of world conquest, and they WILL retaliate against the United States in a very substantive and spectacular way.
You all might as well ignore the “news”. None of this is being reported, and if you rely on the “news” for Intel, one day you will wake up in a reality that might not be to your liking.
No one is buying the mainstream media, or the same-old dialog any longer. It’s a new day. it’s a new beginning, and the old is sinking into the waters aflame. The only ones unable to see this are the rats scrambling on the deck of the collapsing ship.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
I am not in America. I live in China, and I am getting these occasional “feelings” that indeed something was wrong. Something inside of America is seriously wrong.
Not “wrong” as in… The Fourth Turning is in process.
Not wrong as in “get your SHTF” preps in order.
Not wrong as in “Uh oh, the USA wants to start World War III”.
Wrong as in “why are my cats hiding, and where is my dog? Hey! Where are the birds?” And why is the sky so dark? Wrong.
Of course, I know all about the Fourth Turning. I know about the collapse of empires, and I am aware of the social upheavals that can occur when empires collapse.
I’ve written about them extensively, and I have suggested that others get on a “lifeboat” and sail off away from the United States to safety. It’s just that I never…
…in my wildest dreams…
…thought that the idea that you need to abandon the USA would become a meme, or a widespread theme that many others, not just preppers, would embrace.
And so, yeah. I knew all about the changes and the collapse and I have written about it extensively. It’s just that the full extent of what must be going on RIGHT NOW inside of the USA, just surprises me.
…
It’s not just for preppers any longer…
I suppose it all began when Nomen Nescio said this in a comment…
“Yes, they still believe Democrats are the worst, Biden sucks, Pelosi is the devil, etc, but they still feel pretty burned right about now.
They went from FNC to Bongino to Infowars to Rush to Breitbart, back to FNC, over to NewsMax, on to QAN, and...
...finally, now, many have just found some new hobbies.”
Does that mean that Americans have pretty much “given up” and succumbed? That they no longer believe in the “news” or in a political “savior”, or hope in change from the Washington DC establishment?
What happened to the America that I grew up in?
Yes, boys and girls, change is upon us all. But there has to be some kind of baseline of hope. Even if it is far away off in a far away land. There is always hope.
When I was in my darkest days in Prison, I still had hope.
Hope is what keeps us going on. Hope is what anchors us down and in place while the hurricane rages, and hope is what energizes us to calm down, accept things as a fleeting passage of time.
Hope.
In the America that I grew up in, it was a very calm and relaxed pace of life. The worries that seem to permeate modern society were absent.
All my SHTF writings relate to a handful of survivalists who are paying attention to what is going on, and are thus taking the necessary steps to assure survival in a contentious and changing environment.
But something unexpected is also going on.
Mr Joe and Suzy Average seems to be accepting the prepper meme. Many want to “get out of Dodge”. And that is shocking (to me) and illustrative of the late stage of societal collapse that is in process.
So it’s no longer “just” a small minority of Americans that want to bail (out of the insanity), but it is an ever growing proportion.
And as this proportion grows and increase in size, very bad people; very crazy people, very silly ideological-minded people can use the fright and fear that these people hold, and manipulate it to bad ends.
...I thought of these curious examples because, recently, a 31-year-old wanted my guidance. Not the best idea, but sure, why not, so we chattered via Skype.A Vietnamese-American married to a Filipina, he was pondering moving to Vietnam.“How many times have you been there?” I asked.“Actually, none.”“Wow! Why not?”“I never had the opportunity.”“Have you traveled much?”“No. I’ve only been to Canada.”“Man, you’re in for a real culture shock. You might hate it! Just go there, and see how you feel. Who knows? Has your wife been to the Philippines?”“A couple times.”“Hey, why don’t you move to the Philippines? Your wife will fit in better, and you can get by with English. Many Filipinos speak English. They’re all over Asia, singing American music!” I laughed. “First, though, you must go there and see how you feel. Do you have money saved up to last a while?”“Yeah.”“You’re probably ten times richer than me, so just go there and see how you feel. Don’t overthink it. Just do it!”Why would someone with a decent job in the federal government consider moving to a country he knows almost nothing about? Because there’s no sanity or security left in America, and no meaningful resistance.
Constantly cowed, everybody is hiding and, hunched over, guarding his cans of baked beans, with the only boldness unleashed pseudonymously online, nearly always against the wrong targets. Unlike Hamas or Hezbollah, Americans don’t even know who they must fight!
Why indeed?
Why would an American with a good job want to leave it for a nation where he has never been to?
As in…
"Hey! You know my mail is late again. Where is that pesky post-person? I'm sick of this. It's time for me to move to Greenland!"
Maybe for something like this…
I mean, I understand why I left the States. But I was different. I had no other options. No friends. No family. No money. No ties. No job. No job prospects, and forced to live as a third class slave. So I left.
It made sense for me.
Living in flop-houses, eating at soup kitchens, and living alone with no job, no job prospects, and shunned from society is not a life.
And, of course, if I rode in a car …
…and the driver owned a gun, or a cell phone…
…or even had an outstanding warrant for jay walking…
… I would immediately violate the law, just by being in close proximity of that person. And then…
…boom!
I would go back to prison as a two-time offender and looking at forever-prison as a consequence. I did not want to go back to the ADC. I did not enjoy working on the chain gangs, and I most certainly hated hoe-squad and picking cotton. And don’t even get me started on the institutionalized gruel that was “Global” that they fed us.
Nope. I did not like it.
The threat of a return to the ADC was part of the reason why I bailed out onto my lifeboat.
But…
But what of the rest of you all in the “bright and shining castle on the hill”? You still have work. You still have jobs. You have family, friends, clubs, associations and roots. You don’t have that same kind of Damocles‘ swordhangingoveryourhead. As I did. You all don’t need to leave. It’s just a tad bit uncomfortable for you. Not really lifestyle-threatening.
Is it worth chucking it all away?
What would your ancestors think?
America was founded by hard-scrabble pioneers. Not prissy-boys who flee the first moment when someone says a mean word or two.
Then he adds…
“Something very evil is coming,” I wrote to a Pennsylvania acquaintance, “but it won’t just be in the US.
In Albania, there won’t be race riots, at least, as stoked by the Jews. I don’t know what your work or family situation is, but it would be wise to at least think about leaving the country, just in case life there becomes too dangerous or just unbearable.“You should also consider what to do should they shut down all airports and close all land borders.
You can also escape to a safer and saner place inside the country, of course, but you must think ahead about the possibilities. This is not paranoia.
All the ominous signs are there.
Yes. I know all about the social re-engineering efforts.
But, if people have jobs, a career, and a chance to build a life, it all fades into the background. You just go to your job. You put food on the table. You invest your money and you plan for your family and their future. You spend time with loved ones, and you don’t worry about life or “what might happen”.
I just cannot imagine that the “woke” reality has saturated American culture to such an extent that people want to flee the USA.
Why flee the USA when you have an entire life ahead of you?
Seriously is all this “woke” culture all that bad? It’s not like you are being forced to wear golden stars of David on your lapels, or being chased down the streets by mobs with clubs. Is it?
It’s not like you will lose your job for not having the right political viewpoint, or not getting a promotion because of the color of your skin. Is it?
So what is actually going on?
Yes, flee the USA for better opportunities. Flee the USA to avoid insurrection, riots, and discord. Flee the United States police state.
But to flee it because a minority of vocal woke activists are spouting nonsense is absurd.
So what is going on?
Woke folk.
What is really going on?
Is the “woke” culture far more invasive than it appears to me (sitting outside the USA), or has Americans become just too sensitive to handle a diversity of opinion?
You just don’t leave a comfortable life with loved ones simply because of an expression that you read about on social media. You just do not.
Chances are you might read about it, and maybe ponder it, but you won’t take action on it aside from a trivial Google search, or an article or two. You won’t be traipsing down to get a visa for the nation you want to go, and you won’t start emptying out your bank accounts. Will you?
A worry free life with a big cat.
So what is really going on?
You are too busy making a life than to worry about chucking it all away and fleeing to a “third world cesspool” to quote Mike Pompeo about the rest of the world.
Certainly the people that are “running” the United States today are bat-shit crazy, dysfunctional and insane. Their toadies might be more capable, but hardly, and the ship that they set in motion is far too difficult to steer, to navigate and to dock.
All the “noise” in the daily media barrages cannot compete to the reality that you are working, that you have a paycheck and a chance at the “American pie”.
President Biden says that “America is Back” and industry is roaring back to life.
He continues…
“In early March of 1975, I was still going to school and taking judo lessons.
(then...)
By the end of April, I was on a military transport plane to fly to Guam, where I would live in a tent as a refugee. Normality can disappear in a flash.”His response, “I have thought long about where this is all headed. It is pretty obvious that the US is fucked five ways to Sunday. The masses just haven’t figured it out and are slowly cottoning on.“You asked about my family and work situation. I work in the construction field doing semi-skilled labor and maintenance and have started learning HVAC over the last couple years.“I’ve been with the same woman for about 13 years. We aren’t legally married but own a house together. I love her and her family very much. Her mother is widowed and in her 70’s. She has an aunt and uncle that live up the road from us. We look out for them a bit too.“At this point it’s hard seeing a way out. I’ve known a lot of people over the years that have had to flee. I’m old enough to have met Polish and Ukrainians that got out during or right after the War to Save Stalin. Same with people such as yourself. While traveling through Vietnam, I met old ARVN guys who stayed and were ‘reeducated.’ Certainly do not envy them.“Lancaster is a great town. However we did not escape the peace riots of this past summer. This area has been overrun by New York ‘creatives’ and their pets, the various lumpen proles that have moved down because the welfare benefits are good and the Section 8 voucher goes further.“The city council mayor and head of police are all avowed BLM and Antifa supporters. In essence I am behind enemy lines.“My lady is pretty level-headed and no dummy as far as certain non-PC topics are concerned. Working in health care and moving from small town PA to Baltimore will do that, I guess.“However she is reticent to leave the familiarity of family and friends for more rural, less populated areas. Ironic because most of her family and social circle are essentially on board with the whole raft of neo-Bolshevik BS that is being churned out by the multinationals and Zionist Occupied Government…“At the end of the day, I don’t see any real way to get out from under the falling limbs of this dying empire. If I were single, I would be holed up somewhere in the mountains of Appalachia. Possibly west Texas. Maybe overseas.”Although fleeing abroad entails its own complicated and drawn-out set of problems, just about every nationality, save Americans, have had to do so during the last 100-odd years. I’ve fled twice, and am still drifting.
Why does everyone want to leave? What are they afraid of?
Getting yelled at?
Somehow I do not, or cannot, believe that people are terrified of hurt feelings.
Why do Americans feel this way? It seems uncharacteristic.
Perhaps it a general feeling of discomfort; a generalized anxiety disorder that has entangled vast swaths of the American population. And I do not make this statement lightly. Aspects of this is something that I have learned to live with ever since I was implanted.
Since I moved to China, all my worry (for the most part) ended. The only time that I start worrying is when ever some jackass in the United States tries to lob bio-weapons at my home, discusses firing ICBM's in my front yard, or making arbitrary rules concerning my passport.
Perhaps, living under the thumb of out-of-control psychopaths inside a military empire…
…and see the entire nation decay and collapse as the entire nations is geared, not for serving the citizenry…
…but rather to destroy the rest of the world at the pleasure of the oligarchy…
…is the source of this discomfort.
And like frightened rabbits, the citizenry are trying to run and hide from the voracious wolves that are running all over the fields untamed and unchecked.
For American preppers there’s only one solution: move to a red state.
Most red states are in the South. So the best place to ride out America’s collapse is a region with a history of racial tension and antagonism towards the Federal government, a region with a Ford F-150 lifestyle totally dependent on cheap petroleum and cheap imports.
Hmm, but guns right?Call me crazy but my native California doesn’t sound so bad in comparison: https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2015/04/postcard-from-end-of-america-silicon.html. At least there’s some anti-anti-White Asians and Hispanics around.
Maybe I’ll go teach English in Asia or live in Europe for a while.
Call me a commie traitor but I have no ability/desire to become an Idaho potato farmer / small arms instructor.
Others have different ideas.
Americans from different backgrounds and parts of the country are saying the same things.
Americans in the Bubble are the 21st century equivalents of the British Colonel Blimp. It’s good to snicker and make snotty remarks at them because they’ll be the last ones to see it coming and even then they STILL WON’T BELIEVE IT.I’ve seen well-off almost rich dudes go homeless. It happens because they can’t believe this sort of thing happens to them, only “losers”.A loser is any one of us whose luck runs out. Hope your luck holds, and don’t let the bastards get you down.
Those who have never experienced the hospitality and happiness of ‘poor’ foreigners have absolutely no idea of life. Those with no experience of Albania, or Bulgaria, or Romania, Lesotho, Botswana, Chile etc. don’t have a clue.
Mix with the working class (as well as the bankers) if you want to know what life is about.
The hospitality of all Arab people is beyond belief.
Ignore the USA-USA-USA mob, they are brainless and take their limited horizon as being the whole planet. Thank you for bringing light to those of us who have not the opportunity to visit the east and parts of Europe.
What about those that have already left the USA. What are their thoughts?
What about those that left the United States, what are their thoughts?
That is a key reason why I moved out of the US.
I see no hope for at least a few generations.
Whites are very uncomfortable addressing the blatantly anti White hate that is permeating nearly all institutions.
The JQ is completely off the table for 90 percent of whites.
Asians see what is happening so they increasingly mimic Jewish hatred of whites even though most don’t actually hate whites.Whites spring from one simplistic solution to another.
The most recent is Secession.
Thinking that Secession can happen requires not dealing with the reality of the country. Even if the country did break into two, that would just mean that the Jews had two countries to rule and spread anti white hate and degeneracy.I just can’t see being associated with a country that flies the BLM flag at its embassies and publically worships a repeat felon who died of a drug overdose. Sometimes societies are just too stupid to survive.It is a big world out there and there are pockets where things are much saner than the US and not under a Jewish stranglehold
But according to the news media everything is just fine.
Don’t believe for a second that the majority of Norteamericanos believe the claptrap that is being promoted by the digital minesweeping social media or the coastal newspapers. That’s the mistake.Election results don’t mean much in the scheme of things, except in 2020. I live in a county that voted 75-25 for Trump. All of the counties in this region have similar numbers. I’ve obtained this information from NYT election data, so it’s not my wishful thinking. Every county in America outside of those where open blatant ballot box stuffing took place have similar results.Since Trump accomplished nothing governmentally important and even advanced policies I find disgusting, he has to be seen merely as an indicator of discontent with the Ruling Class.
The Ruling Class has corrupted the entire education system, has made economic progress meaningless and has insulted anyone with a modicum of traditional morality. A Trump vote was a protest vote, both in 2016 and in 2020.
The article itself soon fell apart with the “Jews, Jews, Jews” narrative. Jeeze and I stopped reading. But I am still wondering (pondering) about these various comments. It seems like these “proud” American are very unhappy. And so, I wonder how can that be?
The mutterings that I am hearing just don’t match the “news” that is being reported.
Why is that?
Fundamentally, the media must reflect the opinions and feelings of it's readership, or else the people reading it will leave. So eventually, "news" becomes an echo chamber for the readership.
Yet, what I am apparently seeing is that all flavors of the "news"; Alt-Right, mainstream to Alt-left are out of touch with what the vast majority of Americans feel.
The speed of the collapse
I admit that I am a little stunned that the collapse has moved ahead so quickly in what seems like a matter of months. For it has been less than six months that the general American population has suddenly embraced fundamental prepper beliefs, and most regard America falling into a SHTF situation.
This is FAST.
And while I have announced that I believe that the year 2020 was the climax of the Fourth Turning, I have never the less been stunned by the rapid conversion of most Americans to “abandon ship”.
What is going on?
Well, here are the four signposts of American Collapse that the Soviet Union experienced when it collapsed.
Article from HERE. All credit, etc. This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in June 2018. You guys all know the drill.
"Having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best."
In thinking through the (for now) gradually unfolding collapse of the American empire, the collapse of the USSR, which occurred close through three decades ago, continues to perform as a goldmine of useful examples and analogies.
Certain events that occurred during the Soviet collapse can serve as useful signposts in the American one.
Thus, allowing us to formulate better guesses about the timing of events that can suddenly turn a gradual collapse into a precipitous one.
When the Soviet collapse occurred, the universal reaction was “Who could have known?”
Well, I knew.
I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a surgeon in the summer of 1990, right as I was going under the knife to get my appendix excised, waiting for the anesthesia to kick in.
He asked me about what will happen to the Soviet republics, Armenia in particular.
I told him that they will be independent in less than a year.
He looked positively shocked.
I was off by a couple of months.
I hope to be able to call the American collapse with the same degree of precision.
So what to expect?
It is difficult to concentrate on things that matter to you when your government is acting like an out of control lunatic.
I suppose I was well positioned to know, and I am tempted to venture a guess at how I achieved that.
My area of expertise at the time was measurement and data acquisition electronics for high energy physics experiments, not Sovietology.
But I spent the previous summer in Leningrad, where I grew up, and had a fair idea of what was up in the USSR.
Meanwhile, the entire gaggle of actual paid, professional Russia “experts”…
…that was ensconced in various government agencies in Washington or consuming oxygen at various foundations and universities in the US…
…had absolutely no idea what to expect.
I suspect that there is a principle involved:
[1] If your career depends on the continued existence of X, and if X is about to cease to exist, then you are not going to be highly motivated to accurately predict that event.
Conversely, [2] if you could manage to accurately predict the spontaneous existence failure of X, then you would also be clever enough to switch careers ahead of time. Thus, you would no longer be an expert on X and your opinion on the matter would be disregarded.
People would think that you screwed yourself out of a perfectly good job and are now embittered.
What he is seeing…
Some people say that it is time to pack up and leave.
Right now I am observing the same phenomenon at work among Russian experts on the United States: they can’t imagine that the various things they spent their lives studying are fast fading into irrelevance.
Or perhaps they can, but keep this realization to themselves, for fear of no longer being invited on talk shows.
I suppose that since expertise is a matter of knowing a whole lot about very little, knowing everything about nothing—a thing that doesn’t exist—is its logical endpoint.
Be that as it may.
But I feel that we non-experts, armed with the 20/20 hindsight afforded to us by the example of the Soviet collapse, can avoid being similarly blindsided and dumbfounded by the American one.
This is not an academic question: those who gauge it accurately may be able to get the hell out ahead of time.
While the lights are mostly still on, while not everybody is walking around in a drug-induced mental haze, and mass shootings and other types of mayhem are still considered newsworthy.
This hindsight makes it possible for us to spot certain markers that showed up then.
And are showing up now.
The four that I want to discuss now are the following:
1. Allies are being alienated
2. Enmities dissipate
3. Ideology becomes irrelevant
4. Military posture turns flaccid
All of these are plain to see already in the American collapse.
As with the Soviet collapse, there is a certain incubation period for each of these trends.
Each incubation period ended up lasting perhaps a year or two.
And during this incubation period, not much seems to be happening.
But…
… but when it is over everything comes unstuck all at once.
1. Alliances
As the Soviet collapse unfolded, former friendships deteriorated, first into irrelevance, then into outright enmity.
Prior to the collapse, the Iron Curtain ran between Eastern and Western Europe.
After the collapse; three decades later, it runs between Russia and the Baltic countries, Poland and the Ukraine.
Whereas in the post-war period the Warsaw Pact countries derived many benefits from its association with Russia and its industrial might.
But as the end neared their membership in the Soviet camp became more and more of a hinderance to progress.
In effect, hampering their integration with the more prosperous, less troubled countries further west and with the rest of the world.
Similarly with the US and the EU now, this partnership is also showing major signs of strain as Washington tries to prevent the Europe from integrating with the rest of Eurasia.
The particular threat of unilateral economic sanctions as part of a vain effort to block additional Russian natural gas pipelines into Europe.
As well as to force the Europeans to buy an uncertain and overpriced American liquefied natural gas scheme.
Other issues include Huawei, 5G technology, and the BRI.
All of this has laid bare the fact that the relationship between the USA and Europe is no longer mutually beneficial.
And as Britain splits from Europe and clings closer to the US, a new Iron Curtain is gradually emerging, but this time it will run through the English Channel, separating the Anglophone world from Eurasia.
Similar developments are afoot in the east, affecting South Korea and Japan.
Trump’s flip-flopping between tempestuous tweeting and conciliatory rhetoric vis-à-vis North Korea have laid bare the emptiness of American security guarantees.
Both of these countries now see the need to make their own security arrangements and to start reasserting their sovereignty in military matters.
Meanwhile, for the US, being incoherent is but a pit stop on the way to becoming irrelevant.
2. Enmities
Enmity | Definition of Enmity by Merriam-Websterhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enmityEnmity (which derives from an Anglo-French word meaning "enemy") suggests true hatred, either overt or concealed. Hostility implies strong, open enmity that shows itself in attacks or aggression. Animosity carries the sense of anger, vindictiveness, and sometimes the desire to destroy what one hates.
During the entire period of the Cold War the United States was the Soviet Union’s arch-enemy.
Any effort by Washington to give advice or to dictate terms was met with loud, synchronized, ideologically fortified barking from Moscow:
"The imperialist aggressor is at it again; pay no heed."
This self-righteous noise worked quite well for a surprisingly long time, and continued to work while the Soviet Union was making impressive new conquests.
The Soviet Union continued to advance, in space, in technology, science and medicine, in international humanitarian projects and so on, but as stagnation set in it started to ring hollow.
After the Soviet collapse, this immunity against American contagion disappeared.
Western “experts” and “advisors” flooded in, and proposed “reforms”.
Reforms such as…
The dismemberment of the USSR into 15 separate countries (trapping millions of people on the wrong side of some newly thought-up border.
Shock therapy (which impoverished almost the entirety of the Russian population),
Privatization (which put major public assets in the hands of a few politically connected, mostly Jewish oligarchs)
As well as various other schemes designed to destroy Russia and drive its population into extinction.
They would probably have succeeded had they not been stopped in time.
Symmetrically, the Washingtonians considered the USSR as their arch-enemy.
After it went away, there was a bit of confusion.
The Pentagon tried talking up “Russian mafia” as a major threat to world peace, but that seemed laughable.
Then, by dint of demolishing a couple of New York skyscrapers…
…perhaps by placing small nuclear charges in the bedrock beneath their foundations (those were the demolition plans that were on file)…
…they happily embraced the concept of “war on terror”…
…and went about bombing various countries that didn’t have a terrorism problem before then but certainly do now.
Then, once that stupid plan ran its course, the Washingtonians went back to reviling and harassing Russia.
But now a strange smell is in the wind in Washington: the smell of failure.
Air is leaking out of the campaign to vilify Russia, and it is putrid.
Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to make noises to the effect that a rapprochement with Russia is desirable and that a summit between the leaders should be held.
Trump is also borrowing some pages from the Russian rulebook: just as Russia responded to Western sanctions with countersanctions, Trump is starting to respond to Western tariffs with countertariffs.
We should expect American enmity against Russia to dissipate some time before American attitudes toward Russia (and much else) become irrelevant.
We should also expect that, once the fracking bubble pops, the US will become dependent on Russian oil and liquefied natural gas…
… which it will be forced to pay for with gold.
(Fracking involves a two-phase combustion process: the first phase burns borrowed money to produce oil and gas; the second burns the oil and the gas.)
Other enmities are on the wane as well.
Trump has just signed an interesting piece of paper with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The deal (if we call it that) is a tacit act of surrender. It was orchestrated by Russia and China. It affirms what North and South Korea had already agreed to: eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Just as Gorbachev acquiesced to the reunification of Germany and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany, Trump is getting ready to acquiesce to the reunification of Korea and the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea.
Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the end of the Soviet imperium, the dismantlement of the Korean Demilitarized Zone will spell the end of the American one.
3. Ideology
While the US never had anything as rigorous as the Soviet Union’s communist dogma, its hodgepodge of pro-democracy propaganda, laissez-faire capitalism, free trade and military domination was potent for a time.
Once the US stopped being the world’s largest industrial powerhouse, ceding ground first to Germany and Japan…
… then to China…
… it went along accumulating prodigious levels of debt…
… essentially confiscating and spending the world’s savings…
… while defending the US dollar with the threat of violence.
It was, for a time, understood that the exorbitant privilege of endless money printing needs to be defended with the blood of American soldiers.
The US saw itself, and positioned itself, as the indispensable country.
A country able to control and to dictate terms to the entire planet.
As such, terrorizing or blockading various other countries as needed.
Now all of these ideological shibboleths are in shambles.
The pro-democracy rhetoric is still dutifully spouted by politicians mass media mouthpieces, but in practice the US is no longer a democracy.
It has been turned into a lobbyist’s paradise in which the lobbyists are no longer confined to the lobby but have installed themselves in congressional offices and are drafting prodigious quantities of legislation to suit the private interests of corporations and oligarchs.
Nor is the American penchant for democracy traceable in the support the US lavishes on dictatorships around the world or in its increasing tendency to enact and enforce extraterritorial laws without international consent.
Laissez-fair capitalism is also very much dead, supplanted by crony capitalism nurtured by a thorough melding of Washington and Wall Street elites.
Private enterprise is no longer free but concentrated in a handful of giant corporations while about a third of the employed population in the US works in the public sector.
The US Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the country as well as in the whole world.
About 100 million of working-age able-bodied Americans do not work.
Most of the rest work in service jobs, producing nothing durable.
An increasing number of people is holding onto a precarious livelihood by working sporadic gigs.
The whole system is fueled—including parts of it that actually produce the fuel, such as the fracking industry—by debt.
No sane person, if asked to provide a workable description of capitalism, would come up with such a derelict scheme.
Free trade was talked up until very recently, if not actually implemented.
Unimpeded trade over great distances is the sine qua non of all empires, the US empire included.
In the past, warships and the threat of occupation were used to force countries, such as Japan, to open themselves up to international trade.
Quite recently, the Obama administration was quite active in its attempts to push through various transoceanic partnerships, but none of them succeeded. And now Trump has set about wrecking what free trade there was by a combination of sanctions and tariffs, in a misguided attempt to rekindle America’s lost greatness by turning inward.
Along the way, sanctions on the use of the US dollar in international trade, especially with key energy exporting nations such as Iran and Venezuela, are accelerating the process by which the US dollar is being dethroned as the world’s reserve currency, demolishing America’s exorbitant privilege of endless money-printing.
4. Militarism
The Soviet collapse was to some extent presaged by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Prior to that point, it was still possible to talk up the “international duty” of the Red Army to make the world (or at least the liberated parts of it) safe for socialism.
After that point the very concept of military domination was lost, and interventions that were possible before, such as in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, were no longer even thinkable.
When Eastern Europe rose in rebellion in 1989, the Soviet military empire simply folded, abandoning its bases and military hardware and pulling out.
In the case of the US, for now it remains capable of quite a lot of mischief, but it has become clear that military domination of the whole planet is no longer possible for it.
The US military is still huge, but it is quite flaccid.
It is no longer able to field a ground force of any size and confines itself to aerial bombardment, training and arming of “moderate terrorists” and mercenaries, and pointless steaming about the oceans.
None of the recent military adventures have resulted in anything resembling peace on terms that the American planners originally envisioned or have ever considered desirable:
Afghanistan has been turned into a terrorist incubator and a heroin factory;
Iraq has been absorbed into a continuous Shia crescent that now runs from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.
US military bases are still found throughout the world.
They were meant to project American power over both hemispheres of the globe, but they have been largely neutralized by the advent of new long-range precision weapons, potent air defense technology and electronic warfare wizardry.
These numerous “lily pads,” as they are sometimes called, are the opposite of military assets: they are useless but expensive targets located in places that are hard to defend but easy for potential adversaries to attack.
They can only be used for pretend-combat, and the endless series of military training exercises.
Such as the ones in the Baltic statelets, right on the Russian border…
… or the ones in South Korea, are meant to be provocative, but they are paragons of pointlessness…
… since attacking either Russia or North Korea would be a suicidal move.
They are basically confidence-building exercises, and their increasing intensity testifies to a pronounced and growing deficit of confidence.
People never tire of pointing out the huge size of the US military budget, but they almost always neglect to mention that what the US gets per unit money is ten times less than, for example Russia.
It is a bloated and ineffectual extortion scheme that produces large quantities of boondoggles—an endlessly thirsty public money sponge.
No matter how much money it soaks up, it will never solve the fundamental problem of being incapable to go to war against any adequately armed opponent without suffering unacceptable levels of damage.
Around the world, the US is still loathed, but it is feared less and less: a fatal trend for an empire.
But America has done quite well in militarizing its local police departments, so that when the time comes it will be ready to go to war… against itself.
…
This analysis may read like a historical survey detached from practical, everyday considerations. But I believe that it has practical merit.
If the citizens of the USSR were informed, prior to the events of 1990, of what was about to happen to them, they would have behaved quite differently, and quite a lot of personal tragedy might have been avoided.
A very useful distinction
A very useful distinction can be made between collapse avoidance (which is futile; all empires collapse)…
… and worst-case scenario avoidance…
… which will become, as collapse picks up speed, your most important concern.
Your approach may involve fleeing to safer ground, or preparing to survive it where you are.
You may choose your own collapse markers and make your own predictions about their timing instead of relying on mine.
But, having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best.
Humanity
No matter what happens, or what crazy shit is going down in the United States, never forget your humanity. It’s not what happens that matter. It’s how you deal with them that does.
Remember your humanity.
Others might not understand
Do not try to convince others to understand why you are doing what you do. It’s not their business; it’s not their reality. You are doign what feels best to you, for the good or the bad. And sure, they might think you crazy, strange or a little bit “off your rocker”, but so what.
It’s your life.
Do what you want and live your life as you see fit and let the rest of the world howl.
Do what you want and live your life as you see fit and let the rest of the world howl.
Everything follows cycles
Empires come and go, and during the sunset period it is a time of harvesting what you can and then move on to the New Beginning. But some hate change, and they have made a nice cushy life for themself and they don’t want the change, and they fight it “tooth and nail”. But MM readers realize that when you see things go cyclic, you hop on the train and ride it out of town.
Cycles are natural.
Cycles are natural.
What about war?
Well, there is a lot of provocations being made by the United States on the international front. The aggression is spellbinding in breadth and with as well as intensity. And no one can predict the future, but maybe we can take a look at what happened with the former Soviet Union for some guidance.
From HERE. It's titled "Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete". With a sub-heading of "Times have changed and America can no longer project its military power like it did in Iraq. Those days are over.". All credit to the author and note it was formatted to fit this venue.
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas.
Since much of the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able to put local populations at their mercy.
The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient, and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the scope of their naval empires.
This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium.
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world.
Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
Russian battle tanks.
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its protection.
Nevertheless, by using its naval power to dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil be traded in US dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the world to invest in them.
It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of people across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either absolute or relative terms.
When this debt bomb finally explodes, it will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And it will explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world through American naval and air superiority, stops working.
Chinese hyper-velocity nuclear missiles.
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat. Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada.
More recently, this meant that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily. But this has now changed: Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier.
The American armada can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more aircraft carriers.
Russian aircraft.
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems, which can essentially seal off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range.
With its naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also the nuclear option, and while its nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents.
Their special value is in preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point, but that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance.
Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it would be a suicidal move. What the US now faces is essentially a financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump, and it should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is going broke.
Chinese ICBM with MIRV nuclear hyper-velocity warheads with swarm targeting ability.
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation.
Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin.
Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the point.
More Russian food.
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated.
Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors, for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well. It is also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is politically capable.
Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate, which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate.
There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation for more US sanctions). In short, take away the defense stimulus, and the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually diminishing hissing noise.
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and defense establishments have now been neutralized.
My prediction is that America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations due to lack of funds.
There may still be a few loud bangs before it gives up, but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering. That’s how the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.
Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:
Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
Rampant money printing.
A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).
One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.
What’s next, a $50 ribeye?
When they film a post-apocalypse movie in Detroit, they have to use CGI to repair buildings.
I didn’t use Texas, because I like Texas and Texans, so I picked Minneapolis because I think it’s on its way to becoming a quaint “Detroit on the Mississippi” where the primary source of amusement is Thunderdome Friday nights. Large Marge, a frequent commenter, called me on this quip (edits only in formatting):
A) Military recruits from prison
I am a former Corrections Officer.
I worked at three penitentiaries . . . including a max.
Some of the most intelligent individuals are prisoners. The most intelligent of them are organized and exceptionally efficient in the use of violence and intimidation.
Although better people than me might question their primary loyalties — gang/club? or Constitution? — I would expect them to continue to hone their adaptive skills in a military setting.
In fact, I would anticipate them quickly establishing a hierarchy and running the joint in no time… while eliminating slackers. Anybody they cannot eliminate, they recruit. No middle ground, no spectators.
Two of my ‘adopted’ sons are also Corrections Officers. Both are Marines, one was a SEAL. Intelligent, competitive, dedicated, observant.
Ask around, you may discover your assumptions to be the opposite of reality.
And assumptions can get somebody hurt.
B) Military recruits from inner-city slums
Happens daily. Pigment is no guarantee of inbred stupidity or ineffectiveness, however, it is a guarantee of tribal acceptance.
Anybody not in the tribe is prey:
If you are alone, they are five.
If you are five, they are a faceless two hundred in a spontaneous leaderless non-thinking swarm . . . they act, then disperse into nothingness.
Similar to recruits from prison, these folks are effective at violence and intimidation.
Just do not expect complex thought processes resulting in traditional long-term ‘White Collar’ crimes.
Complex planning is not required for crimes of opportunity.
C) These A and B elements are not exclusive.
Expect cross-overs.
Flyers can ruin your afternoon.
Large Marge is, of course, right in every respect.
The first point is that the general attitude is that all of the Left is represented by the soy-boy weakness we see from the Left’s poster children.
It is not.
A final thought
If any alarm bells were ringing earlier, it should be considered to be foreplay.
Right now, the Civil Defense sirens are blaring, and everyone should be running for their underground bunkers.
There might be world War III any day now, or not.
There might be riots in the streets, or maybe not.
There might be a complete collapse of the US Dollar, or maybe not.
Do not be lulled into complacency. There was a nice Memorial Day holiday. I hope that you enjoyed yourself, and worked on prudent measures to adapt to a changing environment. To quote from the above article…
If the citizens of the USSR were informed, prior to the events of 1990, of what was about to happen to them, they would have behaved quite differently, and quite a lot of personal tragedy might have been avoided.
And this one…
But, having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best.
Of course, my opinion is well understood.
From the movie “Aliens”…
And my Video
I am not in America. I am in China.
It is my “lifeboat” while the USS Titanic American sinks under the waves.
And for me, sitting in my lifeboat, I am watching the rats scurry all over the deck. A few are starting to jump into the cold, cold ocean. But most are still on the deck and starting to fight against each other.
Yeah.
That is the way it is, and to end up this article, let me provide a final glimpse of what my lifeboat looks like.
Here is an end of article video for your enjoyment. It shows a little about what China is like where I live. HERE. 127MB.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my New Beginnings Index…
Well China has unveiled a new operating system, and it is a BIG DEAL. And I am going to tell you why.
Why this is a big deal.
Presently America controls 99% of all operating systems in the world. America controls the vast number of computer operating systems (Microsoft, and Apple), and the vast number of cell phone operating systems (Microsoft, Google, and Android). The few remaining systems such and Linux and other odd-balls are hit and miss in regards to this control.
Now, I am not talking about American companies being in control of these operating systems.
Instead, I am discussing the American government controlling the operating systems themselves.
It is no secret that the United States government has offices in the development offices of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. And it is more than just “back doors” to operation access.
The Utah Data Collection Center.
To use any of these systems is to give the United States absolute control over your electronics,
As I can PERSONALLY affirm when the government burst into my home in 2006, seized my computer, plugged it into a machine and had full access effectively bypassing all of my passwords, biomedical fingerprint scanning mechanisms and folder locks. They (passwords, biometrics, etc.) are there to give you the illusion of security. The fact is, the US Government owns your computer and they can access it at will.
They can do it at any time. At any place, and there isn’t a fucking thing that you can do about it.
Enter China
This situation, where America has it’s fingers and hands on all communication and electronic communication, is dangerous. Not just for you as an individual who no longer has privacy in any form, but for governments who are exposed to electronic blackmail at the touch of a button.
Which pretty much explains the Morrison government in Australia.
Whether this is economic, such as what the Trump Administration was trying to do with Huawei, or domestically, such as the control of dams, pipelines, and military, the risk of a malevolent foreign actor… especially an out of control military empire such as the United States to have this ability is very, very dangerous.
And now China has it’s own OS.
And the entire “ballgame” has changed.
America must stop this from happening!
Thus we have an on-going war with everything Huawei.
After four years of anti-China disinformation, and anti-Huawei disinformation, most Americans will regurgitate the propaganda that they have been programmed.
All the sheeple feel “bad” about Huawei and have “bad experiences”. Not that they have any experiences, mind you, but they just regurgitate the narratives. And it’s like listening to a robot. Seriously.
I met a fellow who was like this just last week. We were in a Shaomi store, and we started chatting. He said that he didn’t like Huawei products. And so I naturally asked him why.
He said that he had a “bad experience” with it.
So, I wanted to know. What was it? Was it breaking down? Was it too expensive, did it remind him of a bad girl friend? What? Was he swindled? Did the screen fall off? Were there connection problems? What was it?
I asked him over and over.
All he would say for the umpteen time was that he had a “bad experience”. I was just about to give up when he admitted that he never really and actually owned a Huawei phone. It’s just that he read a lot of bad stuff about it.
Sheeple.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Harmony OS
After years of speculation and rumor, Chinese tech giant Huawei formally unveiled its Harmony OS operating system in 2019. It’s fair to say that more questions have been raised than answered. How does it work? What problems does it solve? And is it a product of the current feud between Huawei and the U.S. government?
Is Harmony OS Based on Linux?
No. Although both are free software products (or, more accurately, Huawei has pledged to release Harmony OS with an open-source license), Harmony OS is its own distinct product. Moreover, it uses a different design architecture to Linux, preferring a microkernel design over monolithic kernel.
But wait. Microkernel? Monolithic kernel? I’ve lost you.
Let’s try again. At the heart of every operating system is something called a kernel. Like the name implies, kernels are at the heart of every operating system, effectively serving as a foundation. They handle interactions with the underlying hardware, allocate resources, and define how programs are executed and operated.
All kernels have these fundamental responsibilities. However, they differ in how they work.
Let’s talk about memory. Modern operating systems try to segregate user applications (like Steam or Google Chrome) from the more sensitive parts of the operating system. Imagine an impenetrable line dividing the memory used by system-level services from your applications. There are two main good reasons for this: security and stability.
Microkernels, like the one used by Harmony OS, are extremely discerning about what runs in kernel mode, effectively limiting it to the basics.
Bluntly, monolithic kernels aren’t discerning. Linux, for example, allows many OS-level utilities and processes to run within this privileged space in memory.
At the time Linus Torvalds started work on the Linux kernel, microkernels were still something of an unknown quantity, with few real-world commercial uses. Microkernels also proved harder to develop, and tended to be slower.
Nearly 30 years later, things have changed. Computers are faster and cheaper. Microkernels have made the leap from academia into production.
The XNU kernel, which sits at the heart of macOS and iOS, lends much inspiration from earlier microkernel designs, namely the Mach kernel developed by Carnegie Mellon University. Meanwhile QNX, which forms the basis of the Blackberry 10 operating system, as well as many vehicular infotainment systems, uses a microkernel design.
It’s All About the Extensibility, Man
Because Microkernel designs are intentionally limited, they’re easy to extend. Adding a new system service, like a device driver, doesn’t require the developer to fundamentally alter or interfere with the kernel.
And that hints towards why Huawei chose this approach with Harmony OS. Although Huawei is perhaps best known for its phones, it’s a company involved in most sectors of the consumer technology market. Its lineup includes things like fitness wearables, routers, and televisions.
And let’s not even get into AI, robotics, infrastructure such as roads, trains and intelligent mining and farming initiatives.
And Huawei is an incredibly ambitious company. Taking a leaf from rival Xiaomi’s book, the firm has started selling IoT products through its youth-focused subsidiary Honor, including intelligent toothbrushes and smart desk lamps.
And while it’s not clear whether Harmony OS will run on every bit of consumer technology it ultimately sells, Huawei aspires to have an operating system that will run on as many devices as possible.
Part of the reason is compatibility. If you disregard hardware requirements, any application written for Harmony OS should work on any device running it. That’s an attractive proposition for developers. But it should also have benefits for consumers, too. As more and more devices become computerized, it makes sense for them to be able to easily work as part of a broader ecosystem.
But What About Phones?
It’s been nearly three years since the Trump administration’s Treasury Department placed Huawei on an “entity list,” thereby preventing American firms from trading with the company. While this has exerted pressure on all levels of Huawei’s business, the biggest pain has been felt in the company’s mobile division, preventing it from releasing new devices with Google Mobile Services (GMS) included.
Google Mobile Services is effectively the entire Google ecosystem for Android, including mundane apps like Google Maps and Gmail, as well as the Google Play Store. With Huawei’s latest phones lacking access to most apps, many have wondered whether the Chinese giant will abandon Android, instead moving to a homegrown operating system.
This seems unlikely. At least, in the short term.
For starters, Huawei’s leadership has reiterated its commitment to the Android platform. Instead, it’s focused on developing its own alternative to GMS called Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
At the heart of this is the company’s app ecosystem, the Huawei AppGallery. Huawei states it’s spending $1 billion to close the “app gap” with the Google Play Store and has 3,000 software engineers working on it.
A new mobile operating system would be forced to start from scratch. Huawei would have to attract developers to port or redevelop their apps for Harmony OS. And, as we’ve learned from Windows Mobile, BlackBerry 10, and Samsung’s Tizen (and previously Bada), that’s not an easy proposition.
That said, Huawei is one of the most well-resourced tech firms in the world. And thus, it would be unwise to completely dismiss the prospect of a Harmony OS-powered phone.
Made in China 2025
There’s an interesting political angle to discuss here. For decades, China has acted as the world’s factory, building products designed overseas. But in recent years, China’s government and its own private sector has invested heavily in research and development. Increasingly, Chinese-designed products are making their way onto the international stage, offering new competition for Silicon Valley’s tech elite.
Amidst this, the Beijing government has an ambition it calls “Made in China 2025.” Effectively, it wants to end its reliance on imported high-tech products, such as semiconductors and airplanes, replacing them with their own homegrown alternatives. The motivation from this stems from economic and political security, as well as national prestige.
Harmony OS fits into this ambition perfectly. If it takes off, it’ll be the first globally successful operating system to emerge from China—with the exception of those used in niche markets, like cellular base stations. These homegrown credentials will come in particularly handy should the cold war between China and the United States continue to rage.
And as a result, I wouldn’t be surprised for Harmony OS to have some very enthusiastic supporters in the central government, as well as within the wider Chinese private sector. And it’s these supporters who will ultimately determine its success.
China Manufactures hardware for the world
99% of all hardware is made in China. What happens when China decides not to preload Windows 10, Apple OS, or Linux and only allows Harmony OS installed?
Sure you can write over the OS when you get the hardware. And that is probably what will happen. Certainly in the USA, American will be FORCED to use American OS.
It will begin as coercion. Where Americans will be warned about the dangers of Harmony OS.
Then it will be mandated by law.
Americans will be FORCED to use American computer operating systems. Just like they are forced to do other things, like pay taxes, buy health insurance, register guns, show identification to buy alcohol, and buy car insurance, etc.
Americans will be forced to use systems to allow their monitoring by the US government.
But that’s not the real concern. Actually. Americans lost their freedoms back hundreds of years ago.
What the real concern is that Microsoft will lose it’s substantial market share, as will google, and Apple. And without this dominance int he market will come a slowly eroding Intel collection ability for the American government.
And the folk at Langley are all in arms about it.
Keep in mind why the United States government wants you to hate Huawei.
Conclusion
The United States dominance on access to privacy, control of information, control of the media, and manipulation of thought are all being challenged by China. And the oligarchy inside of Washington DC do not like this one single bit.
They are flooding the media with warnings, fears and hype and doing everything within their power to assure complete dominance in the intelligence, and communication technologies.
The sheeple believe this.
That is because they have nothing else to compare it against. So they believe the one thousandth article on why Huawei is dangerous and how China is stealing from YOU!
Do not believe it.
If you all could only see things from my point of view, from me…
…standing outside…
…and looking in at the absolutely insanity inside of America today, you too would see what is going on and why.
And a nice little video that I took. I want all you you readers in MM land to start seeing what it is like living outside of America. So that you can see how God-awful America has become. You can watch it HERE. 180MB.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Can you believe that the morons in the American “news” media, the assholes in Washington DC, and the “talking heads” all still refer to America as a “democracy”. Really! Seriously!
It’s a De Facto Military Empire.
It’s the largest Military Empire in history. And it lives for war. The vast budget of America is devoted to…
…wait for it…
…war!
Ah…
Which goes to show you just how stupid and idiotic America is today. It’s no longer a matter of being delusional. It’s a matter of pure and utter insanity and stupidity.
The American government would look quite different if it was focused on serving the needs of it’s people. It would look something like this…
But you know, people are slowly waking up. It only took them all until the nation is teetering at the edge of the cliff to notice, but well, better late than never. Don’t you know.
I initially found this on MoA in the comment section. It’s pretty good and I expounded upon it. It was originally found on Zero Hedge alongside the rest of the COVID nonsense that is day-to-day fodder in the “alternative” media.
Ah. You know what I am talking about; that Coronavius is just an excuse for more government powers.
Yup. It’s a comfortable narrative.
Far easier to digest than the truth; that the Coronavirus was a part of a multi-stage bio-weapons attack against China on CNY that went “tits up”.
go tits up[1] rude slang To break or malfunction; to die, fall apart, or cease to work. (A play on the phrase "go belly up." "Tits up" is sometimes hyphenated.)
[2] rude slang By extension, to have a poor, undesired, or ruinous outcome; to fail completely or not come together at all.
Never the less, the obvious points that he had made are worthy of consideration, and at that, I have expounded upon that comment and added my very own “two cents”.
Here are Ten Things We Have Learned …. about American (and United States) government, democracy and the superiority of “the American way of life”, “freedom” and “liberty”…
1. The American political system is hopelessly corrupt.
It is irredeemably corrupt. Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought. They serve themselves, pretend to work in the interests of the nation while all the time acting as the "bag men" for the oligarchy.
2. Democracy is a sham.
It has been a sham for a very long time.
There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.
The Founding Fathers who wrote the Federalist Papers were absolutely correct. A Republic tends to turn into a Democracy. A Democracy tends to turn into an Oligarchy, and an Oligarchy tends to devolve into a Military Empire if left unchecked.
America is an oligarchy ruled military empire. It hasn't been a democracy for centuries.
3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation.
It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.
Those in power are psychopaths, surrounded by psychopathic toadies, and empowered by a corrupt well-established "good old boys" network.
4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort.
From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so.
These "radical movements" are just useful tools of the oligarchy, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.
5. Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake.
The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.
The entire media machine is owned, run, funded (either directly or indirectly) by the government, or it's controlling interests; the oligarchy.
Real and actually dissident voices are silenced through technological means, or barring that, killed outright.
6. Most people in our society are cowards.
They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.
Additionally, most American people have a price, and they will sell their soul, their businesses, their families and their futures for financial gain.
7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system…
...and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.
There are no longer any true dissident voices, or real journalism.
Those that try to practice it must rely on social networks to get their messages heard, and the government, in one way or the other, controls all social media.
8. Police are not servants of the public…
...but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.
9. Scientists cannot be trusted.
They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. And they all live for government funding. Either direct, or though an NGO that is supervised through the government.
10. Progress is a misleading illusion.
The “progress” of increasing automation and industrialization does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life.
Rather, it is becoming increasingly evident, that it will tend to “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction unless managed expertly and adroitly.
So… is “black”, actually “white”?
There is a percentage of the population in America that is waking up to the fact that the American government is corrupt. That it controls all media, not just the mainstream media, and that “alternative” media outlets are all corrupted. And the beloved alternatives are now, themselves part of the government narrative.
To check who is who…
See which of your favorite “alternative media” sources are parroting the government line. Let’s use this one; “China is the source of Coronavirus, and they are covering it up.”
Any “alternative media” that repeats some form of this narrative, is a de facto arm of the American government.
When they should really be talking about how neocon John Bolton (psychopathic neocon) was put in charge of the bio-weapons office in 2017.
When anyone is talking about Coronavirus being a bio-weapon but omits this most critical piece of information should tell you reams about what your source of information is. That’s like buying a new automobile without wheels, an engine, and a steering wheel.
If you cannot see that your beloved “alternative media” are simply parroting one of three key media talking directions, then you too… must be… a sheeple.
And while I am at it…
How all that “dangers of 5G” working out now?
Why, all the news articles about it all suddenly came to an end when American companies were able to compete against the Chinese lead in 5G technology. Imagine that! What a coincidence!
Who was promoting the “don’t use 5G” narrative?
Rush Limbaugh
Hall Turner
FOX News
The ones who promoted the government narrative, are themselves agents of the government.
Remember, boys and girls, your most beloved “alternative media” are just mouthpieces of the government. That way they control your actions and your behaviors by controlling your favorite news outlets. They construct one of three narratives and you end up following the narrative that appeals to what you want to believe.
Meanwhile, what is actually going on is hidden from sight.
Alt-Right
“It’s the evil Chinese. They mishandled a bio-weapon that they stole and are covering it up.”
Mainstream
“Everything is just fine, and America will recover soon.”
Alt-Left
“Don’t be afraid. Everything is under control and the Coronavirus is being tracked.”
Conclusion
I need a beer.
Is there any American out there in MM land that disagrees with this appraisal? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Personally, I found it “on point” and accurate. But then again, I have a “bone to pick” with the USA, so I am biased.
And with that in mind, let me close with a short video that I made of my life here in China. It’s all of a few minutes long and worth the while for you all to have some perspective what things are like…
…for me on the outside looking into the house of madness that the USA is today. The video is HERE. 150MB.
To understand what is going on inside of the forest, you need to step out of it, climb a nearby hill and look at the bigger picture. There, from that vantage point, you will be able to see a much clearer and bigger picture of what is going on.
Forest Fire.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
There was a song that I used to listen to by Triumph called “It’s Just a Game”. Their theme, at the time, was that life was just one game after the other. Ah. It was a nice theme, but you know, maybe they were right? Humans follow the rules of society, and when you have rules, you are actually playing a game.
Such as described in a particular song “Lay it on the line” where they decry the apparent game-play in relationships. It’s all just a game. Work. Relationships. Career. Family.
It’s all just a game.
And sure things have changed since the late 1970’s when I listened to this music and used the album covers to clean my nickel bags of twigs and seeds. And when I would have parties at my parent’s house with beer, whiskey, and (then illegal) marijuana.
Yes, sure things have changed since the late 1970’s.
But just because you are not wearing earth shoes, elephant bell-bottom trousers, and a fringe leather vest, doesn’t mean that the ideas and concepts of that time …
…were just short-lived conceptional fads. Perhaps what we thought at that time was actually correct. Maybe life was actually a game.
And whether you were downing Rolling Rock beer, or Coors, or an imported Beck’s beer you were too distracted to take note on the “rules of the game”. You just accepted your role. Whether it was a pawn, a rook, or a knight.
Maybe life was actually a game.
And maybe…
…just maybe…
…we all have been taking it far too seriously.
Life is a game and we have been taking it far too seriously.
And thus, maybe we should sit back, and stop being so anal about life. So what if you want to drive home and have lunch with your family during lunch break? So what if you want to go have a smoke outside? So what if you need to stretch your legs and walk around the building to give yourself a chance to think. So what if you want to have a icy cold beer at lunch with your hamburger?
In England you can get a beer with your whopper. It’s all very English, don’t you know.
Imagine that! Well, why not get a bottle from the quickie-mart, get some takeout burgers and drink the beer, eat the burger in a park?
That’s always a good idea. I used to do that. I would hop in my car, go through the drive through and order a combo meal, and then drive to a shady glade and sit there listening to El’ Rush Bo. I wouldn’t dare buy a beer. That would have gotten me fired. Not that they needed the excuse, mind you. In those days, they treated employees like toilet paper. Use and discard. Use and discard. Use and discard. There was always plenty more where they came from.
Of course, I do not advise sitting in the car listening to Rush Limbaugh right now. Since, he’s dead, and the narrative is still the alt-right US government propaganda. They are still following the script, set forth by John Bolton back in 2016, and drinking coke-cola daily is not good for you, and it’s lonely to boot.
But heck…
Go ahead, get a taco salad, and get a beer from the quickie mart, and go to a park.
What?
No park?
Well, how about driving your car to the never-visited cemetery at the end of the lane. Pulling over and either sitting in your car under the shade of a mighty oak tree, or getting out and enjoying the beer on a granite tombstone?
Lunch in a car is a typical way that American corporate clones get some private time.
What?
The grounds-keeper might call the police for observing your flagrant display of enjoying lunch with a beer in a quiet park setting!
Sacrilege!
Go to a cemetery and enjoy a beer.
Like I am saying. We are playing the game too seriously, and we are way too caught up in it.
If you are a corporate drone, and you sit back. Watch how you are participating inside a big elaborate game. And …
It's just a game, you're in it all the way
It's just a game, don't let yourself slip away
It's such a shame, I heard somebody say
It's just a game, and all I can do...is play
And it is a game.
And the rules of the game are constantly changing, and we are all adapting to the changing rules instead of defining our own rules.
Did you realize that they made a female version of Sherlock Holmes? Yup. I am not shitting you. It’s a bonafied version of Sherlock Holmes with his sister taking all the credit. Jeeze! It’s called Enola Holmes(2020).
When Enola Holmes-Sherlock's teen sister-discovers her mother missing, she sets off to find her, becoming a super-sleuth in her own right as she outwits her famous brother and unravels a dangerous conspiracy around a mysterious young Lord.
It’s all just a game.
Don’t get too caught up in it.
I dug up this interesting article on Strategic Culture, and it’s worth a study. Now, before we get into the subject matter too deeply, let’s consider life as a human has evolved (devolved?) into some kind of game with rules. All of which were created by other humans a long, long time ago. And we are all stuck “playing the game”, when we really don’t have to…
The Curse of Game Theory: Why It’s in Your Self-Interest to Exit the Rules of the Game
Game theory, the mathematical theory of games of strategy, was developed by John von Neumann. It was created in several successive stages from 1928 and into 1940-41. It was published in his book “Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour” which he co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern.
The crux of the theory is that an individuals’ behavior will always be motivated towards achieving an optimal outcome, which is determined by self-interest.
An assumption made is that the players in such a game are rational, which translates to, “will strive to maximize their payoffs in the game”.
In other words, it is assumed they are motivated by selfish self-interests.
Over the years, other contributors such as John Nash (Nash equilibrium) and John Maynard Smith (evolutionary stable strategy) have added to the theory.
Today, we are now at a point where it is considered by many to be an essential tool when modelling economic, political, sociological or military behaviors and outcomes.
As such, it is taught as such in many prestigious universities as something pretty much set in stone.
But what if we have made a terrible mistake?
After all, it is acknowledged by the theorists themselves that the entire functioning of their model relies upon the assumption that we are governed by rational selfish behavior.
People feel confident about this assumption since reality has apparently confirmed this fact to them.
But what if this game is not objectively mirroring a truthful depiction of us?
What if this game has rather, been used as a conditioning tool, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a positive feedback loop?
How can we know what is true?
How can we know what kind of a person we truly are and not what we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as?
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
Before we can answer such a question, we need to look at the forms of simplification and assumptions that were used.
This may be counter-intuitive to some, but the “philosophy” or “hypothesis” must always precede the actual model.
The [1] variables you choose to use, [2] the variables you discount for, [3] how you define the variables, [4] how you define the relationship between the variables are not being defined by the model, but rather the creator of the model.
Once the model is created it can now, theoretically, add to that beginning structure and mimic a simplified version of reality.
However, we should keep in mind that a model that has been created on a false hypothesis could still “function.”
That is, of course, if the variables are not too much in contradiction to the other variables’ operations.
Such a model is not “aware” that it is not a representation of “reality,” and cannot indicate so to its creator.
Thus, a model can be a representation of a simplified reality or it can represent a completely artificial reality.
The Disclaimers
At the beginning of von Neumann’s book, he goes through several disclaimers which are highly problematic towards the relevance of his theory.
One of them being the acknowledgement that “there exists, at present, no satisfactory treatment of the question of rational behavior.
There may, for example, exist several ways by which to reach the optimum position.
They may depend upon the knowledge and understanding which the individual has and upon the paths of action open to them, because they imply, as must be evident, quantitative relationships.”
As becomes rapidly evident, von Neumann makes endless assertions such as these.
As if they were obvious and thus need not be examined at all.
The assumption that an under-defined “rational” selfish behavior is merely quantifiable and nothing more…
… and does not account for qualitative change (a mathematician’s worst nightmare)…
… is taking great liberty in over-simplifying human behavior to conveniently fit the limited parameters of his model.
In other words, it is cheating.
You are manipulating the definitions and interactions of your variables to fit an artificial reality of your model.
An Example of how this model fails
Let me give you an example.
In Euclid’s fifth postulate, it is considered a “rule” that two parallel lines will never intersect. Euclid was alive around the time of the mid-4th century BCE, before Eratosthenes (276-194 BCE) made his beautifully elegant discovery that the Earth was indeed curved and also made a pretty accurate first measurement of the size of Earth.
That is, Euclid assumed a linear geometric space upon which the real universe was expected to “fit”. While it is true that two parallel lines will never meet on a two-dimensional plane, they can meet on a three-dimensional plane.
As is now understood, line A and line G, can be measured as 90 degrees from the equator line and thus are parallel lines, and yet they can eventually interface with each other if the surface is curved.
The problem with assumptions such Euclid’s is that they are ultimately only true in an artificial situation and are not reflective of how such things will interact in reality. Also, there is no way to predict from Euclid’s fifth law, how two parallel lines would interact in a three dimensional space, let alone in n dimensional space as described by the physicist Bernard Riemann.
Ironically, in his book, von Neumann likens his “pioneering” work in the field of game theory to that of what physicists have been doing for centuries, that is, mathematical formulations that represent, albeit simplified, the “laws of nature,” concerning matter and energy. However, von Neumann again showcases that he has no comprehension as to what constitutes the foundation for such “laws of nature.”
…but rather dimensions defined by an ever growing array of discovered physical principles such as magnetism, light, heat, gravity, sound, etc….
… each organizing principle being ironically characterized by both a finiteness and unboundedness with quantized least-action pathways discoverable therein.
According to Euclid’s logic, you never “see” two parallel lines intersecting and thus it is unfathomable that they ever could intersect.
His “rule” was based off of shared assumptions of what we “think” we are observing in such phenomena, however, this is not necessarily reality and it certainly does not translate to a “rule” that governs all.
By von Neumann acknowledging that he himself is heavily relying on his so-called “self-evident” truths in simplifying human behavior…
… he is asserting an outcome…
… he is not proving the outcome’s natural occurrence.
The Robinson Crusoe example in Monetarist Economic Theory
According to von Neumann, the Robinson Crusoe example was used by the Austrian economic school to model an individual’s behavior towards maximizing pay-off in an environment (in this case an island) where the resources available to you are set and limited.
There are many problems with this…
… but the most unforgivable one is the assumption of a set, limited and unchanging reserve of resources available to the individual.
In other words, the Austrian school of economy and von Neumann with them, consider Crusoe’s deserted island as the perfect case study for a limited resource, zero-sum game scenario.
Ironically, this assertion is entirely missing the point of what actually occurs in Daniel Defoe’s story of “Robinson Crusoe,”…
…and it causes one to wonder whether these theorists ever read the book or rather read a two line cliff’s notes synopsis.
Henry C. Carey, Lincoln’s economic advisor, would say in his book “Unity of Law” (1872):
“Crusoe having made a bow, had thus acquired wealth; that wealth exhibiting itself in the power obtained over certain natural properties of wood and muscular fibre, thereby enabling him to secure increased supplies of food with greatly diminished expenditure of labor.
Having made a canoe, he found his wealth much increased, his new machine enabling him to obtain still further increase of food, and of the raw materials of clothing, at still decreased cost of personal effort.
Erecting a pole on his canoe, he now commands the services of wind, and with each and every step in this direction finds himself advancing, with constantly accelerated rapidity, toward becoming master of nature, and a being of real wealth and power.”
Does that sound like the description of a “limited resource,” “zero-sum game” scenario?
In other words, where is the “set” limit?
The limit is constantly being readjusted to what the individual creates which changes his/her relationship to the “utility” of the resource.
For example, the resource wood, depending on the individual’s innovation can be used to keep one warm and dry, cook food, create weapons, create shelter, create a ship for travel etc. etc.
The existence of yet-to-be-created potential thus offsets the entire system of von Neumann because his system has no way of predicting potential, i.e. qualitative transformations, nor how it will affect behavior.
If you cannot predict future qualitative change, which is ongoing, such as the discovery of electricity or the creation of man-made Plutonium and other transuranic elements…
… or the potential waiting to be unlocked by the very feasible fusion plasma torch that can turn landfills into resource mines…
… how can you assume a defined set limit or even a defined zero-sum game as a “self-evident” truth when you cannot even predict what is the limit?
The Supposed Paradox of “The Greatest Good for the Greatest Possible Number”
In von Neumann’s book he refers to “the greatest good for the greatest possible number” as a contradiction, because according to von Neumann you cannot maximize two or more functions at once, that in a social economy, all maxima are desired at once by various players.
That is, there is no concept that it is possible to cooperate and share an optimal outcome, without it coming out of “your” share so to speak, that comes at a cost of having less instead of more.
This is a very basic understanding of economy, and again does not account for how cooperation and creative potential can work to transform the “goods” of an outcome.
For instance, country A is militarily stronger than country B, which is rich in many raw resources.
Country A is also stronger politically than country B in that, there are no other countries that will likely intervene against country A’s actions if it chooses to invade country B.
What course of action will yield the greatest return to country A?
Well, there is a very obvious answer to that question; however, contrary to popular thought it will not yield the greatest optimal outcome.
The greatest optimal outcome is rather to cooperate.
It is in both country A and country B’s best interest to share knowledge, even if country A has much more knowledge, such that country B develops the capability to refine its raw resources.
By doing so, country B will yield a greater return in trade over the long-term to country A, and country A does not have to worry about a future retaliation from country B.
By developing a more advanced economy the wealth of trade is increased for both countries.
By cooperation, the optimal outcome is transformed and offers a greater return.
This is exactly the model that is being used by China presently in their philosophy of “win-win cooperation,” and it has proven itself most effective despite all attempts to villainize it as something nefarious.
Rather than fight over resources, there is a cooperation to share technology, increase resource yield and share a greater boon than originally existed.
John von Neumann goes on to state in his book, that the more players in the model, the easier it is to predict the outcome, since the use of statistics and probability are increasingly better indicators of behavior and performance. As he states:
“When the number of participants becomes really great, some hope emerges that the influence of every particular participant will become negligible and that the above difficulties may recede and a more conventional theory become possible. These are, of course, the classical conditions of ‘free competition’.”
He goes on to use the example of our solar system, with its nine major bodies, as being much harder to model than 10^25 freely moving gas particles, as per gas theory, simply due to the sheer number of objects you are dealing with.
This is truly a remarkably absurd statement, where von Neumann is asserting that if the solar system had more major bodies orbiting within it, it would thus be easier to model based off of probability.
Every planet in our solar system is a different size and weight, with a different number of moons. Every planet revolves around the sun in imperfect elliptical orbits that change slowly overtime, the planets travel along these orbits in a non-uniform way that is observable through planetary retrograde motions.
The fact is that our solar system is not some perfectly closed system that is uniform and consistent in its actions, there are cyclical changes but there are also non-cyclical changes that are occurring.
This is due to our solar system orbiting around a galactic center of the Milky Way which is itself moving in yet-to-be discovered ways within a larger cluster of galaxies.
Therefore, you cannot use any theory of probability because the system is in a state of ongoing non-linear change. The more bodies you add to such a system the more complex it becomes, not the more negligible.
For example, there exists no straightforward formula to identify all prime numbers, though there are an infinite number of prime numbers.
Prime numbers are a reflection of a non-linear process of change.
Such an oversimplification of nature shows the audacity behind the assumptions that make up such formulations like game theory.
You are nothing more than a virtual avatar in their synthetic world with programmed limits to what you can and cannot do in the game they have created for you.
Game theory does not represent the motivations behind human nature, but rather imposes such limitations since, as they acknowledge themselves, it is easier to predict and control your chosen selfish behaviors which are encouraged and rewarded with “incentives.”
It is a system of enslavement that encourages its slaves to fight each other for “table scraps” and never question the hand that withholds, the system that creates false scarcity and promotes antagonism over artificial stressors.
We are taught never to question the rules given to us in these game theory scenarios, but to react accordingly to what has been defined to us as a limited set of options in an artificial scenario.
Perhaps the best indicator to this is, ironically, the very creator of the prisoner’s dilemma, John Nash. Nash had won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 for his “landmark” work beginning in the 1950s on game theory.
Although it is not clear whether he was suffering with paranoid schizophrenia when he developed the Nash Equilibrium, starting in 1959, Nash would go in and out of mental hospitals for over nine years.
In 2007, he was interviewed while still working at Princeton. Here is his very unselfish offering of his “enlightenment” (his words) on game theory after over 50 years of work in the field. Keep in mind he is using the definition of rational behavior according to game theory, which is defined as a selfish self-interest:
“I have had some trouble myself on the psychological level; I’ve been in mental hospitals…
I realize that what I had said at some time may have overemphasized rationality…
And I don’t want to overemphasize rational thinking on the part of humans…
Human beings are much more complicated, the human being as a businessman….
Human behavior is not entirely motivated by self-interest of each human…
...game theory works in terms of self-interest, but…
...some game theory concepts could be unsound. There is over-dependence on rationality. That is my enlightenment.”
The entire West are basing all their plans, their strategies, their efforts, and their predictions upon “Game Theory”. But this theory is faulted,; tremendously faulted, and those that follow it against a society that has a better understanding of how the world works, will lose.
And the entire world is waking up to this realization.
There’s one easy prediction, though. The US is just about done as a world power, society, economy, concept or even joke.
- One night in Amerika
Inside America you have people that are watching their world crumble around them… and it’s not a game, and they want out.
On the global stage, we see nations in competition and those that follow the “Game theory” model fail, time and time again.
The world belongs to those societies that embrace things as they are, and not as they want them to be. And that means getting off the game board, and changing out the game pieces for real, tangible and accurate measures of society.
Daily Video Report
I am going to add a semi-daily video report on what is going on in China. This is going to be my first one. I took it about 45 minutes ago. I guess you can say it’s my pissed off opinions to counter the wide-spread of lies and disinformation that bombards my morning feeds day-in and day-out.
You can view it HERE. 137MB. I talk a bit about cameras and why the “color revolution” sponsored by the NED (the CIA) failed in Hong Kong. Of course, you will never read what I am talking about in the Western press.
They have more important things to talk about, don’t you know…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
For the longest time, I had believed that the Strauss and Howe predictions for the Fourth Turning was correct but that the timing was slightly off. Instead of a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020. I argued that the Crisis Catalyst occurred three years later in 2008. Which would launch a Climax in 2023.
Now I am not so sure.
What Strauss and Howe stated
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That was three years later.
But does that mean that the Climax would also be delayed by three years?
I am now thinking “no”.
What is the Forth Turning Crisis?
This is what Strauss and Howe wrote;
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival.
Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity.
Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough.
But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future.
Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
As you can see, the essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe confirmed that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
But no one knows exactly WHEN the actual Crisis will occur.
It could be as early as 2020, or as late as 2025. And as I look at what is going on around the world, most especially with the belligerent activities of the American military empire, I see elements of a Hot War everywhere.
A “hot war” is a hallmark of this Crisis.
The Hot War
America has been involved in all sorts of operations against China since 2017 when Trump become President and John Bolton was put in charge of the Bio-Weapons office.
John Bolton was in charge of the American military bio-weapons operation.
Most notably was the attempt(s) at trying to generate famine and starvation inside China. This all was attempted by the selective destruction of food, grains, and livestock via drone-propagated bio-weapons.
But…
…it is when PEOPLE are targeted for death and destruction is when a “hot war” occurs.
I am convinced that the Hot War started in 2020 with the carpet bombing of China by the three strains of bio-weapons designed to target the Chinese people.
COVID-19 strain B against China, Iran. (Death by seizure virus) February 2020
No longer was the COVID-19 A-strain (light sniffle virus) going to provide herd immunity. The lethal B-strain was starting to rampage. And Americans started to “drop like flies” just like they did inside of China on CNY2020.
Oh, well, that was not to the liking of President Trump.
Washington still did not accept the message…
So that is when he unleashed the (Death by diarrhea virus) in July 2020 in China. This is a very, very nasty tick based virus. In Beijing. You do realize that there are no ticks in Beijing, don’t you?
Ah, the American media...
...keeping Americans stupefied since 1980.
And as soon as the CIA courtiers handed the vials to their local assets inside of China…
…these “assets”, in a strong action suggesting of Chinese patriotism, and perhaps some Geo-political understanding…
… dutifully handed over the vials to the PLA immediately.
And Washington DC was stunned.
So. Round Two. Or is it three, or four…
So then round two, the two-double punch, was unleashed. H1N1 flu G4 strain (Death by diarrhea virus) July 2020. It’s an extremely dangerous, lethal and contagious swine flu that was adapted to kill humans.
And yet again…
… the CIA assets dutifully handed over the vials to the PLA.
And China took action. China started to perform the “famous” anal swabs for testing for the three viral agents, and the American press is aghast as to why would China dare do this for a simple “flu like” virus.
Ah. The ignorance of the manipulated American sheeple.
But China handling three bio-weapons strains and interrogating the CIA assets inside of China did not go down well in Washington. As soon as it was discovered that the Chinese (and Russian) leadership were aware of what was going on…
But nothing happened, and three days later, in October 2020 he exited. With a remarkable “cure”. In which case he was miraculously cured in three days. And the media was all aghast at how amazing the President was to get cured so quickly.
Ah. American sheeple. Kept as clueless as ever.
Now, of course, none of this is reported in the “news”. At least not in context. It’s just random noise with no contextual meaning or connections.
So a Carrier Battle Group set sail for China
But you know, the morons in Washington DC, and Jesus H. Christ, they must be morons…
…decided to go ahead with that eight carrier flotilla to the South China Sea.
And the result of it has not been reported in the Western press. Still giving the idea of the American invincibility on the high seas.
Ah. American media is the "window to the world" as described by Washington DC.
Such a pity.
As well as the absolute fiasco that occurred with the Trump eight carrier invasion force that steamed home with it’s tail between it’s legs after confronting China in the South China Sea. Read about it HERE.
This is only the tip of the iceberg
As well as a number of other events that I will not go into detail about. Anyways, all of this pretty much tells me that a hot “shooting” war between China and the USA started in 2020.
Both American and Chinese people have died as a result of it.
The showdown.
And the policy positions of the two belligerents were put on the table for the entire world to see in the meeting on March 2021 in Anchorage, Alaska. And that meeting told the world that war was on-going.
Sure, there were other elements of conflict.
We have the eight viral strains designed to cause starvation inside of China that were propagated by drones. We had the color revolutions in Hong Kong. We had the positioning and build up for action “to save the Uighur Muslims” in Xinjiang, and the efforts to make Taiwan a United States protectorate.
But none of those events involved military forces.
American military were used to hurt China on Chinese soil
The American military forces started using their skills to kill, destroy and create havoc in 2020. In fact, it was precisely American military “boots on the ground” in China, at Wuhan that kicked off the first wave of biological warfare.
And the only reason that it did not erupt into World War III is because of the calm composure of China in the face of the moronic instability of the United States leadership.
But don’t relax yet.
Let’s not forget these words…
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly.
So with that being said, let’s look at the timing.
The date of 2020 is the Strauss and Howe initial target date for the Climax of the Fourth Turning. But the Crisis Catalyst was supposed to occur in 2005 to have a Climax in 2020.
I have previously argued that since the Crisis Catalyst occurred three years later in 2008, it would launch a Climax in 2023. Now I am not so sure.
I am starting to believe that the Climax hit as planned on 2020. And as a result we are seeing the Strauss and Howe “textbook” results of that Climax.
The only difference is that it is not being reported at all in the American media. Which is surreal, in all the previous Fourth Turning events, the issues were always reported. But the United States is so absolutely fucked up today, that no one really knows anything, and the amount of crime, corruption and sheer incompetence is mind boggling.
So, with all that being said, let’s make it official…
The Fourth Turning Climax hit in 2020
And the next three years to five years will determine the followup events that the crisis started.
Historically, the Crisis would always set the pace of the resulting changes that would follow in the subsequent decades. And there are so many aspects and issues going on that it is difficult to anticipate what to expect.
What can we look forward to?
[1] It could go really, really, REALLY bad…
And when I mean BAD, I mean Baaaaaaaad!
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man.
It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly.
But this end, while possible, is not likely.
Human life is not so easily extinguishable.
One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species.
Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that.
For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck.
Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
[2] It could change the way the world works.
And if the United States keeps on bearing down and pushing the combined nations of Russia/China/Iran you can well expect to see this…
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity.
The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last.
This too could come from total war, terrible but not final.
There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society.
The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw.
A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins.
The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress.
As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet.
But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
[3] It could end the USA, but spare the rest of the world.
Which seems to be what the entire globe is hoping for. Few people outside of Washington DC wants America to continue being what it is. That includes most Americans. America is not “balkanized” for nothing. Most people want this “nightmare” to end.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.
It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify.
This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one.
Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival.
Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger:
In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle.
In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history.
In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed.
In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
...
The new saeculum could find America a worse place.
As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.”
Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals.
Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring.
Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear.
Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place.
Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are.
All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
The items highlighted in BROWNhave already happened.
[4] Or, it could just be a “place holder” in the grand scheme of things.
The aggressive elements inside of Washington DC might retreat, and the same-old would continue in the same-old “well worn” pathways.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum.
Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere.
Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
[5] Or,alternatively, things could end up being very, very good.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place.
Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization.
Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired.
Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction.
People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment.
America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community.
Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting.
All this is achievable as well.
But I strongly doubt that such a positive outcome is possible.
Conclusion
As I sit here in a hot May 2021, it appears that scenario number [3] (above) is the most likely scenario.
With the option scenario number [2] (above) still possible.
We can only wait and see.
And these are my thoughts on this matter. If you feel otherwise, you are welcome to posit which of the five scenarios that you believe is possible. But for now, I am strongly placing my bets on scenario number [3].
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
About eight weeks ago, I got a contact request from one of my literary connections. He said that there was this guy who was pestering him to get in contact with me. This guy apparently runs hundreds of You-Tube video channels and wanted to interview me. So I connected to him and wanted to find out more about what he wanted.
He said that he had a “big network” of You-tube channels and he wanted to get me on because exposure would bring a lot of visitors to my MM site, and would help me become famous…
Obviously, he wasn’t a regular or even a cursory reader to the site. Fame, or a lot of traffic is low on my agenda.
But, I went along with him. I actually like having interviews. And if the subject is a good one, I do love to prepare for it, and say my piece. So I said, “OK. Please send me a list of questions so that I can organize up a script, and then we can establish a time and place for the interview.”
A few weeks passed. Nothing.
Then out of the blue he sends a very brief email. He said that he was sorry, but that he was so busy.
But he still wanted to interview me.
He said that he didn’t have any questions to ask me. That we would just “wing it”, and I should be prepared. He wanted to talk about the origins of the Coronavirus.
Hum.
No questions.
No time to prep.
No narrative, nor dialog.
Sounds squirmy.
OK. So I told him, lets talk face to face over Zoom or SkyPE before hand to get a flavor of what to expect. Let’s talk before hand and see what he has in mind and what I could do to facilitate it.
Two more weeks passed.
He sends me an e-mail. “Oh”, he says “no need for a pre-interview meeting. Let’s do it during his operation hours New York time, between 9am and 3pm.”
Which is my 9 at night, a time for me to drink, rest and relax. And there is no fucking way that I am going to provide him free “cannon fodder” at my 3 am without a pre-screening.
Yet another two weeks pass.
He sends me another e-mail. He said he was really busy. Jesus! He thinks he’s busy? But wants to just call me at HIS convenience, and have the interview on the spot when HE is ready.
What nerve!
What’s the matter with Americans these days? Is this what goes for a business connection, a dialog, or a discussion?
Anyways. Fuck him. He blew it. I really have many more things on my plate, and I really do not need the DISRESPECT, and amateurish behaviors, no matter what this beta-cluck intends.
Let’s talk about what is going on in America to create such losers. Because if he is typical…
…and I think he is…
… China will eat his lunch. And that’s a fact, Jack.
Dmitry Orlov
Dmitry Orlov is an immigrant from Russia who moved to the United States. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and has written a host of articles about the United States based on his experiences, his knowledge of history, and what he sees around him. Aside from being well-written, easy to read, they are “spot on” and tend to pre-date events that the rest of us are only starting to notice.
He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed ‘The Dystopians’ in an excellent 2009 profile, along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.
Personally I think Biden Administration was stunned at almost having instigated WW3 within 100 days of taking office. They looked fairly like amateur idiots even to the unwashed such as myself. Then they realized that it would be difficult and given their evident ineptness they chose the well proven political tactic of taking the loss and making it a win. Voila they are genious - why didnt Trump think of that?We in the US must accept that our government is craven incompetents and have to hope that they might accidentally do something good by virtue of being so incompetent.Posted by: jared | May 20 2021 17:10 utc | 8
He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse and in it, he thinks America’s collapse will be much worse. He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon.
This article is a collection of his most recent musings, and I find most of them to be valuable. You can access his archive HERE. Of course, all credit to him, his hosting organization, Articles were edited to fit this venue, and the usual disclaimers apply.
We will start with this article which was written two years into the Donald Trump Presidency, which was about three years ago. And unlike most Americans he had no hopes or belief that Donald Trump would turn the massive ship of America around. Instead he viewed it as a continuation of a nation’s death throes…
The Suicidal American Empire Is Collapsing Fast, But Its Death Now Would Cause Unacceptable Collateral Damage
Which is why its vassals and even rivals are forced, for now, to try and keep it afloat
There are a lot of behaviors being exhibited by those in positions of power in the US that seem disparate and odd.
We watch Trump who is imposing sanctions on country after country, dreaming of eradicating his country’s structural trade deficit with the rest of the world.
We watch pretty much all of US Congress falling over each other in their attempt to impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia.
People in Turkey, a key NATO country, are literally burning US dollars and smashing iPhones in a fit of pique.
Confronted with a new suite of Russian and Chinese weapons systems that largely neutralize the ability of the US to dominate the world militarily, the US is setting new records in the size of its already outrageously bloated yet manifestly ineffectual defense spending.
As a backdrop to this military contractor feeding frenzy, the Taliban are making steady gains in Afghanistan, now control over half the territory, and are getting ready to stamp “null and void,” in a repeat of Vietnam, on America’s longest war.
A lengthening list of countries are set to ignore or compensate for US sanctions, especially sanctions against Iranian oil exports.
In a signal moment, Russia’s finance minister has recently pronounced the US dollar “unreliable.”
Meanwhile, US debt keeps galloping upwards, with its largest buyer being reported as a mysterious, possibly entirely nonexistent “Other.”
Although these may seem like manifestations of many different trends in the world, I believe that a case can be made that these are all one thing:
The US—the world’s imperial overlord—standing on a ledge and threatening to jump, while its imperial vassals—too many to mention—are standing down below and shouting “Please, don’t jump!”
To be sure, most of them would be perfectly happy to watch the overlord plummet and jelly up the sidewalk.
But here is the key point: if this were to happen today, it would cause unacceptable levels of political and economic collateral damage around the world.
Does this mean that the US is indispensable?
No, of course not, nobody is.
But dispensing with it will take time and energy, and while that process runs its course the rest of the world is forced to keep it on life support no matter how counterproductive, stupid and demeaning that feels.
What the world needs to do, as quickly as possible, is to dismantle the imperial center.
Which is in Washington politically and militarily and in New York and London financially, while somehow salvaging the principle of empire.
“What?!” you might exclaim, “Isn’t imperialism evil.”
Well, sure it is, whatever, but empires make possible efficient, specialized production and efficient, unhindered trade over large distances.
Empires do all sorts of evil things—up to and including genocide—but they also provide a level playing field and a method for preventing petty grievances from escalating into tribal conflicts.
The Roman Empire, then Byzantium, then the Tatar/Mongol Golden Horde, then the Ottoman Sublime Porte all provided these two essential services…
…unhindered trade and security…
…in exchange for some amount of constant rapine and plunder and a few memorable incidents of genocide.
The Tatar/Mongol Empire was by far the most streamlined: it simply demanded “yarlyk”—tribute—and smashed anyone who attempted to rise above a level at which they were easy to smash.
The American empire is a bit more nuanced: it uses the US dollar as a weapon for periodically expropriating savings from around the world by exporting inflation while annihilating anyone who tries to wiggle out from under the US dollar system.
All empires follow a certain trajectory.
Over time they become corrupt, decadent and enfeebled, and then they collapse.
When they collapse, there are two (possibly three) ways to go.
One is to slog through a millennium-long dark age—as Western Europe did after the Western Roman Empire collapsed.
Another is for a different empire, or a cooperating set of empires, to take over, as happened after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
You may think that a third way exists: of small nations cooperating sweetly and collaborating successfully on international infrastructure projects that serve the common good. Such a scheme may be possible, but I tend to take a jaundiced view of our simian natures.
We come equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0, which has some very useful built-in functions for imperialism, along with some ancillary support for nationalism and organized religion.
These we can rely on; everything else would be either a repeat of a failed experiment or an untested innovation.
Sure, let’s innovate, but innovation takes time and resources, and those are the exact two things that are currently lacking.
What we have in permanent surplus is revolutionaries: if they have their way, look out for a Reign of Terror, followed by the rise of a Bonaparte. That’s what happens every time.
Lest you think that the US isn’t an empire—a collapsing one—consider the following.
The US defense budget is larger than that of the next ten countries combined, yet the US can’t prevail even in militarily puny Afghanistan. (That’s because much of its defense budget is trivially stolen.)
The US has something like a thousand military bases, essentially garrisoning the entire planet, but to unknown effect.
It claims the entire planet as its dominion: no matter where you go, you still have to pay US income taxes and are still subject to US laws.
It controls and manipulates governments in numerous countries around the world, always aiming to turn them into satrapies governed from the US embassy compound, but with results that range from unprofitable to embarrassing to lethal.
It is now failing at virtually all of these things, threatening the entire planet with its untimely demise.
What we are observing, at every level, is a sort of blackmail:
“Do as we say, or no more empire for you!” The US dollar will vanish, international trade will stop and a dark age will descend, forcing everyone to toil in the dirt for a millennium while mired in futile, interminable conflicts with neighboring tribes.
MM comment. This was written three years before the March 2021 Alaska summit with the "obey our rules-based order" or suffer the consequences meeting.
None of the old methods of maintaining imperial dominance are working; all that remains is the threat of falling down and leaving a huge mess for the rest of the world to deal with.
The rest of the world is now tasked with rapidly creating a situation where the US empire can be dealt a coup de grâce safely, without causing any collateral damage—and that’s a huge task, so everyone is forced to play for time.
MM comment. And this is exactly the case, and why Russia, China and Iran have all teamed up. The EU is trying to sit on the fence. And the Asian nations are paying "lip service".
There is a lot of military posturing and there are political provocations happening all the time, but these are sideshows that are becoming an unaffordable luxury: there is nothing to be won through these methods and plenty to be lost.
Essentially, all the arguments are over money.
There is a lot of money to be lost.
The total trade surplus of the BRICS countries with the West (US+EU, essentially) is over a trillion dollars a year.
SCO—another grouping of non-Western countries—comes up with almost the same numbers.
That’s the amount of products these countries produce for which they currently have no internal market.
Should the West evaporate overnight, nobody will buy these products.
Russia alone had a 2017 trade surplus of $116 billion, and in 2018 so far it grew by 28.5%.
China alone, in its trade just with the US, generated $275 billion in surplus. Throw in another $16 billion for its trade with the EU.
Those are big numbers, but they are nowhere near enough if the project is to build a turnkey global empire to replace US+EU in a timely manner.
Also, there are no takers.
Russia is rather happy to have shed its former Soviet dependents and is currently invested in building a multilateral, international system of governance based on international institutions such as SCO, BRICS and EAEU.
Numerous other countries are very interested in joining together in such organizations: most recently, Turkey has expressed interest in turning BRICS into BRICTS.
Essentially, all of the post-colonial nations around the world are now forced to trade away some measure of their recently won independence, essentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The job vacancy of Supreme Global Overlord is unlikely to attract any qualified candidates.
What everyone seems to want is a humble, low-budget, cooperative global empire, without all of the corruption and with a lot less life-threatening militarism.
MM comment. Sounds good to me, and the world is turning to China for this.
It will take time to build, and the resources to build it can only come from one place: from gradually bleeding US+EU dry.
In order to do this, the wheels of international commerce must continue to spin.
But this is exactly what all of the new tariffs and sanctions, the saber-rattling and the political provocations, are attempting to prevent: a ship laden with soya is now doing circles in the Pacific off the coast of China; steel I-beams are rusting at the dock in Turkey…
But it is doubtful that these attempts will work.
The EU has been too slow in recognizing just how pernicious its dependence on Washington has become, and will take even more time to find ways to free itself, but the process has clearly started.
For its part, Washington runs on money, and since its current antics will tend to make money grow scarce even faster than it otherwise would, those who stand to lose the most will make the Washingtonians feel their pain and will force a change of course.
As a result, everyone will be pushing in the same direction: toward a slow, steady, controllable imperial collapse.
All we can hope for is that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement in time to avoid collapsing into a new post-imperial dark age.
MM Comment; This article is "spot on" and was written three years ago, pre-pandemic, and pre-USA collapse.
Since then, China has shown superiority in just about every arena, and the USA reactions to that has been hysterical.
You will not see Dmitry Orlov write about China because he has no direct experience with China, and what he sees and hears comes from the USA government microphone.
Here’s another article…
Killing for the Sake of It: The Grisly Reality of the Failing US Empire
Mired in financial collapse, moral decay, and lack of leadership & direction, the last sole superpower is lashing out in every direction, spreading brutal destruction throughout the world for nothing more than its own depraved sake
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2015. Dmitry Orlov(Club Orlov)Fri, Apr 30 2021|1230 words 29,386Comments
The story is the same every time: some nation, due to a confluence of lucky circumstances, becomes powerful — much more powerful than the rest — and, for a time, is dominant.
But the lucky circumstances, which often amount to no more than a few advantageous quirks of geology, be it Welsh coal or West Texas oil, in due course come to an end.
In the meantime, the erstwhile superpower becomes corrupted by its own power.
As the endgame approaches, those still nominally in charge of the collapsing empire resort to all sorts of desperate measures.
All, that is, except one:
They will refuse to ever consider the fact that their imperial superpower is at an end and that they should change their ways accordingly.
George Orwell once offered an excellent explanation for this phenomenon: as the imperial end-game approaches, it becomes a matter of imperial self-preservation to breed a special-purpose ruling class — one that is incapable of understanding that the end-game is approaching.
Because, you see, if they had an inkling of what’s going on, they wouldn’t take their jobs seriously enough to keep the game going for as long as possible.
The approaching imperial collapse can be seen in the ever-worsening results the empire gets for its imperial efforts.
After World War II, the U.S. was able to do a respectable job helping to rebuild Germany, along with the rest of Western Europe.
Japan also did rather well under U.S. tutelage, as did South Korea after the end of fighting on the Korean peninsula.
With Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, all of which were badly damaged by the U.S., the results were significantly worse: Vietnam was an outright defeat, Cambodia lived through a period of genocide, while amazingly resilient Laos — the most heavily bombed country on the planet — recovered on its own.
The first Gulf War went even more badly: fearful of undertaking a ground offensive in Iraq, the U.S. stopped short of its regular practice of toppling the government and installing a puppet regime there and left it in limbo for a decade.
When the U.S. did eventually invade, it succeeded — after killing countless civilians and destroying much of the infrastructure — in leaving behind a dismembered corpse of a country.
Similar results have been achieved in other places where the U.S. saw fit to get involved: Somalia, Libya and, most recently, Yemen.
Let’s not even mention Afghanistan, since all empires have failed to achieve good results there.
So the trend is unmistakable: whereas at its height the empire destroyed in order to rebuild the world in its own image, as it nears its end it destroys simply for the sake of destruction, leaving piles of corpses and smoldering ruins in its wake.
Another unmistakable trend has to do with the efficacy of spending money on “defense” (which, in the case of the U.S., should be redefined as “offense”).
Having a lavishly endowed military can sometimes lead to success, but here too something has shifted over time.
The famous American can-do spirit that was evident to all during World War II, when the U.S. dwarfed the rest of the world with its industrial might, is no more.
Now, more and more, military spending itself is the goal — never mind what it achieves.
And what it achieves is …
The latest F-35 jet fighter that can’t fly;
The latest aircraft carrier that can’t launch planes without destroying them if they are fitted with the auxiliary tanks they need to fly combat missions;
The most technologically advanced AEGIS destroyer that can be taken out of commission by a single unarmed Russian jet carrying a basket of electronic warfare equipment;
And another aircraft carrier that can be frightened out of deep water and forced to anchor by a few Russian submarines out on routine patrol.
But the Americans like their weapons, and they like handing them out as a show of support.
But more often than not these weapons end up in the wrong hands:
The ones they gave to Iraq are now in the hands of ISIS;
The ones they gave to the Ukrainian nationalists have been sold to the Syrian government;
The ones they gave to the government in Yemen is now in the hands of the Houthis who recently overthrew it.
And so the efficacy of lavish military spending has dwindled too.
At some point it may become more efficient to modify the U.S. Treasury printing presses to blast bundles of U.S. dollars in the general direction of the enemy.
With the strategy of “destroying in order to create” no longer viable, but with the blind ambition to still try to prevail everywhere in the world somehow still part of the political culture, all that remains is murder.
The main tool of foreign policy becomes political assassination: be it Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Qaddafi, or Slobodan Milošević, or Osama bin Laden, or any number of lesser targets, the idea is to simply kill them.
MM Comment. This was written before the USA assassinated an Iranian general in his car, and was involved in other take-downs in Russia. As well as the pronounced desire to decapitate the entire leadership of China.
While aiming for the head of an organization is a favorite technique, the general populace gets its share of murder too.
How many funerals and wedding parties have been taken out by drone strikes?
I don’t know that anyone in the U.S. really knows, but I am sure that those whose relatives were killed do remember, and will remember for the next few centuries at least.
This tactic is generally not conducive to creating a durable peace, but it is a good tactic for perpetuating and escalating conflict.
But that’s now an acceptable goal, because it creates the rationale for increased military spending, making it possible to breed more chaos.
Recently a retired U.S. general went on television to declare that what’s needed to turn around the situation in the Ukraine is to simply “start killing Russians.”
The Russians listened to that, marveled at his idiocy, and then went ahead and opened a criminal case against him.
Now this general will be unable to travel to an ever-increasing number of countries around the world for fear of getting arrested and deported to Russia to stand trial.
MM Comment. As what happened to those war-mongering anti-China neocons that wanted to attack China. Try stepping out of the USA, you Jackasses.
This is largely a symbolic gesture, but non-symbolic non-gestures of a preventive nature are sure to follow.
You see, my fellow space travelers, murder happens to be illegal.
In most jurisdictions, inciting others to murder also happens to be illegal.
Americans have granted themselves the license to kill without checking to see whether perhaps they might be exceeding their authority.
We should expect, then, that as their power trickles away, their license to kill will be revoked, and they will find themselves reclassified from global hegemons to mere murderers.
As empires collapse, they turn inward, and subject their own populations to the same ill treatment to which they subjected others.
Here, America is unexceptional: the number of Americans being murdered by their own police, with minimal repercussions for those doing the killing, is quite stunning.
When Americans wonder who their enemy really is, they need look no further.
But that is only the beginning: the precedent has already been set for deploying U.S. troops on U.S. soil.
As law and order break down in more and more places, we will see more and more U.S. troops on the streets of cities in the U.S., spreading death and destruction just like they did in Iraq or in Afghanistan.
The last license to kill to be revoked will be the license to kill ourselves.
The West Resembles a Decapitated Rooster, Wings Still Flapping, Barely Flying
“Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one. For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather …”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2018. Dmitry OrlovTue, Apr 13 2021|1900 words 9,773Comments
When I was five and spending the summer in a small village a couple of time zones east of Moscow I witnessed the execution of a rooster.
My brother and I walked over to a neighbor’s house to pick up some eggs.
Just as we arrived the neighbor finally caught the rooster and chopped his head of.
The now headless rooster then put on quite an aerobatic performance that was quite amazing.
After doing an unlimited takeoff he repeatedly soared and plummeted, executed several touch-and-gos (more like crash-and-goes, actually) and was undeterred by what previously would have been head-on collisions.
I was by then quite familiar with the poor aerodynamic qualities of barnyard fowl and was duly impressed with the energetic and breathtakingly erratic behavior of a bird liberated from the mental straitjacket of its brain.
Unfortunately, the performance only lasted for a minute or so.
A word to the wise: I later learned that it is possible to prolong the show, should the need ever arise, by heating up the hatchet so as to cauterize the severed neck. More recently, I have learned that such sans-têteaerobatics are not restricted to chickens.
Figurative birds, of the mechanical variety, can exhibit something similar.
A prime example is the greatest boondoggle in the history of military aviation, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
It too is liable to losing its head, in the sense of the pilot blacking out.
In addition to being ridiculously expensive (over $1.5 trillion in projected project costs)…
…and plagued with problems, only half of the built planes are considered ready for any sort of mission…
… there are over a thousand known defects that haven’t been fixed.
Including ones that make it useless for air-to-air combat or ground support F-35 pilots often report feeling sick and there have been many incidents where they lost consciousness, probably due to oxygen starvation and circulation problems.
In response, the fatally flawed jet’s maker Lockheed Martin, whose motto seems to be “One boondoggle deserves another,” has decided to add a subsystem.
Called Auto-GCAS (for Ground Collision Avoidance System), it takes over automatically if it detects the danger of ground collision and the pilot fails to respond to the alarm and take corrective action.
Auto-GCAS then throttles up and directs the plane upward, pulling a maximum of five g’s.
What does that do to a pilot who is already feeling sick or is unconscious?
Once a safe altitude is reached, the plane levels out and Auto-GCAS shuts off.
If the pilot happens to be offline for good, the process repeats until the plane runs out of fuel and crashes.
I hope that you are impressed with the sheer brilliance of the plan.
A show designed to impress was recently staged at an airfield in Utah, where 35 F-35s took off, one right after the other.
It has not been independently verified how many of them landed.
Auto-GCAS is slated to be ready for use by 2024, but Pentagon’s planners are hoping to accelerate the process.
All of this made me wonder about the general behavior to be expected of hierarchically organized, centrally controlled systems once they are deprived of their control module.
Auto-GCAS is by no means the worst case.
For instance, there is the Russian Perimetr system, a.k.a. Dead Hand.
If it detects that the Russian military leadership has been incapacitated by a nuclear strike, it will launch an all-out nuclear attack, obliterating the aggressor.
This may seem like a really bad plan, but then attacking Russia is a really bad plan too, and one bad plan deserves another.
What makes this plan bad is that it doesn’t elicit the right response.
The right response is: “Oh, we see, attacking Russia is sheer suicide, so let’s not do that.”
But where’s the money in not planning to attack Russia?
And so instead the “One boondoggle deserves another” crew sets forth to build anti-ballistic missile systems (which don’t work) and deep underground bomb shelters stocked with years’ worth of supplies (which is gold-plating; a large shallow grave to jump into when the time comes would work just as well).
And yet as far as planning for decapitation goes, Dead Hand is state of the art.
Most other large-scale centrally controlled systems are woefully unprepared for the loss of their command modules.
For instance, look at finance.
After the financial collapse of 2008 it quickly became obvious that nobody competent or responsible was in charge.
The “solution” was for central banks to start blowing financial bubbles by zeroing out interest rates and flooding the world with new debt.
Debt that expands much faster than the economy is garbage debt, and it gave rise to various other kinds of garbage:
Garbage energy from shale and tar sands,
Garbage money in the form of cryptocurrencies,
Garbage real estate investment schemes,
Garbage corporate balance sheets bloated with debt used up in stock buybacks,
A large crop of garbage oligarchs gorging themselves on all of this garbage “wealth” and much else.
Things look good while all this garbage is packaged up in financial bubbles, but once they pop…
…and as all children know all bubbles pop eventually…
… everyone will end up wearing the garbage.
There are plenty of examples of political auto-decapitation as well.
In the US, Trump realized that he can become president simply by insulting all of his competitors (who richly deserved such treatment) and so he did.
But now the hive mind of Washington is deeply at odds with the bumblebee-mind of Trump, and neither qualifies as any sort of a head, except perhaps in a strictly symbolic sense.
Things are no better in Europe.
In the UK, an anti-Brexit team is in charge of negotiating Brexit, struggling to make it as anti-Brexit a Brexit as possible.
That doesn’t seem like any sort of “headedness.”
In Germany, Merkel is on her way out, and her replacement has the unenviable task of hammering together a governing coalition out of parties that are too busy knocking heads with each other.
The multi-headed bureaucratic hydra in Brussels is not exactly popular with anyone.
What is the recourse?
Emperor Macron of France, perhaps?
Is Europe ready to be headed by a diacritical character? (A macron is a horizontal line you place over vowel letters to represent a long vowel: Mācron.)
There are systems that are properly headless: flocks of birds, schools of fish, communes of anarchists, etc.
They are anarchically structured and individuals within them take on temporary, task-based leadership roles as the situation demands and can only expect to be obeyed in accordance with their competence in executing the tasks.
But most of the human systems we have are hierarchically structured and require to be headed by someone.
Democratic elections are but a recent innovation, and a most uncertain one.
For instance, during the 2016 election in the US, the establishment trotted out an entire array of craven, feckless, corrupt opportunists, and Trump knocked them all out with a feather, not because he is any sort of proper leader, but because it was so easy.
For an even more amazing example of democratic failure, look at today’s Ukraine—the most recent experiment in Western democracy.
There, a constitutionally elected, though remarkably corrupt and indecisive president was violently overthrown in 2014 in a US-managed coup.
And replaced with an American puppet.
A puppet so unpopular that yesterday he was forced to introduce martial law.
Just in order to be able to cancel the elections scheduled in three months and to remain in office de facto.
To produce a rationale for declaring martial law he sent some small boats on a truly idiotic mission.
The boats sailed into a Russian-controlled high traffic zone in the Black Sea, refused to respond when hailed and then pointed weapons at Russian border patrol.
For this they were duly arrested and hauled off to jail, and their boats confiscated.
Previously, an ongoing civil war instigated by this same president resulted in some fifty thousand casualties, but no martial law was ever deemed necessary.
What’s different now?
Oh, the elections, of course!
If these are the fruits of democracy, perhaps the Ukrainians should consider going back to a monarchy.
Dynastic succession has worked much better and for much longer periods of time.
For instance, at the time of its annexation by Russia in 1783, Crimea was ruled by Shahin Girei, a descendant of Genghis Khan who was born around 1155.
That one dynasty, spanning 628 years, ruled the largest empire that ever was.
At one point it included all of China, most of Russia, Korea, Persia and India, plus many lands in between.
Genghis had decreed that no part of the Mongol Empire could be ruled by anyone who wasn’t a direct descendant of his, and so it was.
The Mongol Empire ended peacefully, with Shahin Girei abdicating his throne and accepting protection from Catherine the Great.
Maybe that’s the plan, then: install a Ukrainian Emperor and immediately have him abdicate his throne and accept protection from Putin the Great.
Then Putin will turn the heat and the hot water back on, the armed thugs will be marched off to someplace safe for disarming and de-thugging, and the nuke plants will stop breaking down.
Since we seem to be headed (no pun intended) for unstable and disrupted times, it bears pointing out that while democracy may be very nice when everything is going along according to plan…
… it is not particularly resilient in the face of severe disruption.
And what is the plan now—in the US, or in the EU (or what will be left of it)?
We have some truly ghastly examples of the fruits of democracy in the form of the Weimar Republic in Germany or the Interim Government between February and October of 1917 in Russia.
If you don’t fancy being ruled by headless chickens, consider picking a leader using whatever ad hoc procedure that works.
The idea is to avoid any more Robespierrian Reigns of Terror, Reichstag fires or October Revolutions—because we already know what those are like.
Russia’s New Nukes Check-Mate a War-Happy US, and Make the World Safer
Now that its aircraft carrier fleet, global ABM systems, and NATO has been rendered useless, the US can get on with dismantling its entire bloated, over-stretched, global network of military bases.
This article from our archives was first published on RI in March 2018 . Dmitry Orlov(Club Orlov)Sun, Apr 11 2021|3400 words 14,816Comments
A lot of people seem to have lost the thread when it comes to nuclear weapons.
They think that nuclear weapons are like other weapons, and are designed to be used in war.
But this is pure mental inertia.
According to all the evidence available, nuclear weapons are anti-weapons, designed to prevent weapons, nuclear or otherwise, from being used.
In essence, if used correctly, nuclear weapons are war suppression devices.
Of course, if used incorrectly, they pose a grave risk to all life on Earth.
There are other risks to all life on Earth as well, such as runaway global warming from unconstrained burning of hydrocarbons; perhaps we need to invent a weapon or two to prevent that as well.
Some people feel that the mere existence of nuclear weapons guarantees that they will be used as various nuclear-armed countries find themselves financially, economically and politically in extremis.
As “proof” of this, they trot out the dramaturgical principle of Chekhov’s Gun.
Anton Chekhov wrote:
“Если вы говорите в первой главе, что на стене висит ружье, во второй или третьей главе оно должно непременно выстрелить. А если не будет стрелять, не должно и висеть.»”
[“If you say in Act I that there is a gun hanging on the wall, then it is a must that in Act II or III it be fired. And if it won’t be fired, it shouldn’t have been hung there in the first place.”]
And if you point out that we are talking about military strategy and geopolitics, not theater, they then quote Shakespeare’s
“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances…”
and believe that it is QED.
Now, I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Chekhov, when it comes to dramaturgy, and I agree with the Bard as well, provided we define “the world” as “the world of theater,” from which the worlds of geopolitics and nuclear physics are both dramatically different.
Let me explain it in terms that a drama major would understand.
If there is a nuclear bomb hanging on the wall in Act I, then, chances are, it will still be hanging on that wall during the final curtain call.
In the meantime, no matter how many other weapons are present on stage during the play, you can be sure that none of them would be used.
Or maybe they will be, but then the entire audience would be dead, in which case you should definitely ask for your money back because this was billed as a family-friendly show.
Back in the real world, it is hard to argue that nukes haven’t been useful as deterrents against both conventional and nuclear war.
When the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they only did this because they could do so with complete impunity.
Had Japan, or an ally of Japan, possessed nuclear weapons at the time, these attacks would not have taken place.
There is a considerable body of opinion that the Americans didn’t nuke Japan in order to secure a victory (the Japanese would have surrendered regardless) but to send a message to Joseph Stalin.
Stalin got the message, and Soviet scientists and engineers got cracking.
There was an uncomfortable period, before the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb…
… when the Americans were seriously planning to destroy all major Soviet cities using a nuclear strike…
… but they set these plans aside…
…because they calculated that they didn’t have enough nukes at the time to keep the Red Army from conquering all of Western Europe in retaliation.
But in August 29, 1949, when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, these plans were set aside…
…not quite permanently, it would later turn out…
…because even a singular nuclear detonation as a result of a Soviet response to an American first strike…
…. wiping out, say, New York or Washington, would have been too high a price to pay for destroying Russia.
Since then—continuously except for a period between 2002 and two days ago—the ability of nuclear weapons to deter military aggression has remained unquestioned.
There were some challenges along the way, but they were dealt with.
The Americans saw it fit to threaten the USSR by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey; in response, the USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.
The Americans didn’t think that was fair, and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Eventually the Americans were prevailed upon to stand down in Turkey, and the Soviets stood down in Cuba.
Another threat to the deterrent power of nuclear weapons was the development of anti-ballistic weapons that could shoot down nuclear-tipped missiles (just the ballistic ones; more on that later).
But this was widely recognized to be a bad thing, and a major breakthrough came in 1972, when the USA and the USSR signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Over this entire period, the principle that kept the peace was Mutual Assured Destruction: neither side would provoke the other to the point of launching a nuclear strike, because such a move was guaranteed to be suicidal.
The two sides were reduced to fighting a series of proxy wars in various countries around the world…
… which were so much the worse for it…
… but there was no danger of these proxy conflicts erupting into a full-scale nuclear conflagration.
In the meantime, everybody tried to oppose nuclear proliferation, preventing more countries from obtaining access to nuclear weapons technology—with limited success.
The cases where these efforts failed testify to the effective deterrent value of nuclear weapons.
Saddam Hussein of Iraq didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction” and ended up hung.
Muammar Qaddafi of Libya voluntarily gave up his nuclear program, and ended up tortured to death.
But Pakistan managed to acquire nuclear weapons, and as a result its relations with its traditional nemesis India have become much more polite and cooperative.
To the point that in June of 2017 both became full members of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with China, Russia and other Eurasian nations.
And then North Korea has made some breakthroughs with regard to nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles.
As a result of that the US has been reduced to posturing and futile threats against it while South Korea has expressed some newfound respect for its northern neighbor and is now seeking rapprochement.
In 2002 the prospect of continued nuclear deterrence was set a major setback when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty.
Russia protested this move, and promised an asymmetrical response.
American officials ignored this protest, incorrectly thinking that Russia was finished as a nuclear power.
Since then, the Americans spent prodigious amounts of money—well into the trillions of dollars—building a ballistic missile defense system.
Their goal was simple: make it possible to launch a first strike on Russia, destroying much of its nuclear arsenal; then use the new American ABM systems to destroy whatever Russia does manage to launch in response.
On February 2, 2018 the Americans decided that they were ready, and issued a Nuclear Posture Review in which they explicitly reserved the right to use nuclear weapons to prevent Russia from using its nuclear deterrent.
And then, two days ago, all of that came to a happy end when Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he unveiled several new weapons systems that completely negate the value of US missile defense shield.
…among other things.
That was the response the Russians promised to deliver when the US pulled out of the ABM treaty in 2002.
Now, 16 years later, they are done.
Russia has rearmed with new weapons that have rendered the ABM treaty entirely irrelevant.
The ABM treaty was about ballistic missiles—once that are propelled by rockets that boost the missile to close to escape velocity.
After that the missile follows a ballistic trajectory—just like an artillery shell or a bullet.
That makes its path easy to calculate and the missile easy to intercept.
The US missile defense systems rely on the ability to see the missile on radar, calculate its position, direction and velocity, and to launch a missile in response in such a way that the two trajectories intersect.
When they cross, the interceptor missile is detonated, knocking out the attacking missile.
None of the new Russian weapons follow ballistic trajectories.
The new Sarmat is an ICBM minus the “B”—it maneuvers throughout its flight path and can fly through the atmosphere rather than popping up above it.
It has a short boost phase, making it difficult to intercept after launch.
It has the range to fly arbitrary paths around the planet—over the south pole, for instance—to reach any point on Earth.
And it carries multiple maneuverable hypersonic nuclear-armed reentry vehicles which no existing or planned missile defense system can intercept.
Among other new weapons unveiled two days ago was a nuclear-powered cruise missile which has virtually unlimited range and goes faster than Mach 10.
And a nuclear-powered drone submarine which can descend to much larger depths than any existing submarine and moves faster than any existing vessel.
There was also a mobile laser cannon in the show, of which very little is known, but they are likely to come in handy when it comes to frying military satellites.
All of these are based on physical principles that have never been used before.
All of these have passed testing and are going into production; one of them is already being used on active combat duty in the Russian armed forces.
The Russians are now duly proud of their scientists, engineers and soldiers.
Their country is safe again; Americans have been stopped in their tracks, their new Nuclear Posture now looking like a severe case of lordosis.
This sort of pride is more important than it would seem.
Advanced nuclear weapons systems are a bit like secondary sexual characteristics of animals: like the peacock’s tail or the deer’s antlers or the lion’s mane, they are indicative of the health and vigor of a specimen that has plenty of spare energy to expend on showy accessories.
In order to be able to field a hypersonic nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range, a country has to have a healthy scientific community.
This means lots of high-powered engineers, a highly trained professional military and a competent security establishment that can keep the whole thing secret, along with an industrial economy powerful and diverse enough to supply all of the necessary materials, processes and components with zero reliance on imports. Now that the arms race is over, this new confidence and competence can be turned to civilian purposes.
So far, the Western reaction to Putin’s speech has closely followed the illogic of dreams which Sigmund Freud explained using the following joke:
1. I never borrowed a kettle from you
2. I returned it to you unbroken
3. It was already broken when I borrowed it from you.
A more common example is a child’s excuse for not having done her homework: I lost it; my dog ate it; I didn’t know it was assigned.
In this case, Western commentators have offered us the following:
1. There are no such weapons; Putin is bluffing
2. These weapons exist but they don’t really work
3. These weapons work and this is the beginning of a new nuclear arms race
Taking these one at a time:
1. Putin is not known to bluff; he is known for doing exactly what he says he will do. He announced that Russia will deliver an asymmetric response to the US pulling out of the ABM treaty; and now it has.
2. “They don’t work”. These weapons are a continuation of developments that already existed in the USSR 30 years ago but had been mothballed until 2002. What has changed since then was the development of new materials, which make it possible to build vehicles that fly at above Mach 10, with their skin heating up to 2000ºC, and, of course, dramatic improvements in microelectronics, communications and artificial intelligence. Putin’s statement that the new weapons systems are going into production is an order: they are going into production.
3. “It’s all political talk”. Most of Putin’s speech wasn’t about military matters at all. It was about such things as pay increases, roads, hospitals and clinics, kindergartens, nurseries, boosting retirements, providing housing to young families, streamlining the regulation of small businesses, etc. That is the focus of the Russian government for the next six years: dramatically improving the standard of living of the population. The military problem has already been resolved, the arms race has been won, and Russia’s defense budget is being reduced, not increased.
Another line of thought in the West was that Putin unveiled these new weapons, which have been in development for 16 years at least, as part of his reelection campaign (the vote is on March 18).
This is absurd.
Putin is assured of victory because the vast majority of Russians approve of his leadership.
The elections have been about jockeying for a second place position between the Liberal Democrats, led by the old war horse Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communists.
The Communists have nominated a non-communist oligarch businessman Pavel Grudinin, who has promptly disqualified himself by failing to disclose foreign bank accounts and other improprieties and now appears to have gone into hiding.
Thus, the Communists, who were previously slated for second place, have burned themselves down and Zhirinovsky will probably come in second.
If Americans don’t like Putin, then they definitely wouldn’t like Zhirinovsky.
Putin is practical and ambivalent about “our Western partners,” as he likes to call them.
Zhirinovsky, on the other hand, is rather revenge-minded, and seems to want to inflict pain on them.
At the same time, there is now a committee, composed of very serious-looking men and women, who are charged with monitoring and thwarting American meddling in Russian politics.
It seems unlikely that the CIA, the US State Department and the usual culprits will be able to get away with much in Russia.
The age of color revolutions is over, and the regime change train has sailed… all the way back to Washington, where Trump stands a chance of getting dethroned Ukrainian-style.
Another way to look at the Western reaction to Russia’s new weapons is using Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief.
We already saw denial (Putin is bluffing; weapons don’t work) and the start of anger (new arms race).
We should expect a bit more anger before moving on to bargaining (you can have the Ukraine if you stop building Sarmat).
Once the response comes back (“You broke the Ukraine; you pay to get it fixed”) we move on to depression (“The Russians just don’t love us any more!”) and, finally, acceptance.
Once the stage of acceptance is reached, here is what the Americans can usefully do in response to Russia’s new weapons systems.
First of all, Americans can scrap their ABM systems because they are now useless.
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had this to say about it:
«То, что сегодня создаётся в Польше и Румынии, создаётся на Аляске и предполагается к созданию в Южной Корее и Японии — этот "зонтик" противоракетной обороны, получается, "дырявый". И не знаю, зачем за такие деньги теперь этот "зонтик" им приобретать.»
[“What is being built in Poland and Romania, and in Alaska, and is planned in South Korea and Japan—this missile defense ‘umbrella’—turns out to be riddled with holes. I don’t know why they should now buy this ‘umbrella’ for so much money.”]
Secondly, Americans can scrap their aircraft carrier fleet.
All it’s useful now for now is threatening defenseless nations, but there are much cheaper ways to threaten defenseless nations.
If Americans are still planning to use them to dominate sea lanes and control world trade…
…then the existence of hypersonic cruise missiles with unlimited range and drone submarines that can lurk at great ocean depths for years…
…make the world’s oceans off-limits for American navy’s battle groups…
…in the event of any major (non-nuclear) escalation…
…because now Russia can destroy them from an arbitrary distance without putting any of their assets or personnel at risk.
Lastly, Americans can pull out of NATO, which has now been shown to be completely useless, dismantle their thousand military bases around the world, and repatriate the troops stationed there.
It’s not as if, in light of these new developments, American security guarantees are going to be worth much to anyone, and America’s “allies” will be quick to realize that.
As far as Russian security guarantees, there is a lot on offer:
…unlike the US, which is increasingly seen as a rogue state…
…and an ineffectual and blundering one at that…
…Russia has been scrupulous in adhering to its international agreements and international law.
In developing and deploying its new weapons systems, Russia has not violated any international agreements, treaties or laws.
And Russia has no aggressive plans towards anyone except terrorists.
As Putin put it during his speech,
«Мы ни на кого не собираемся нападать и что-то отнимать. У нас у самих всё есть.»
[“We are not planning to attack anyone or take over anywhere. We have everything we need.”]
I hope that the US doesn’t plan to attack anyone either, because, given its recent history, this won’t work.
Threatening the whole planet and forcing it to use the US dollar in international trade …
…and destroying countries, such as Iraq and Libya, when they refuse…
… running huge trade deficits with virtually the entire world…
…and forcing reserve banks around the world to buy up US government debt…
… leveraging that debt to run up colossal budget deficits…
…now around a trillion dollars a year…
… and robbing the entire planet by printing money…
…and spending it on various corrupt schemes…
…that, my friends, has been America’s business plan since around the 1970s.
And it is unraveling before our eyes.
I have the audacity to hope that the dismantling of the American Empire will proceed as copacetically as the dismantling of the Soviet Empire did.
(This is not to say that it won’t be humiliating or impoverishing, or that it won’t be accompanied by a huge increase in morbidity and mortality.)
One of my greatest fears over the past decade was that Russia wouldn’t take the US and NATO seriously enough and just try to wait them out.
After all, what is there to really to fear from a nation that has over a 100 trillion dollars in unfunded entitlements…
… that’s full of opioid addicts…
… with 100 million working-age people permanently out of work…
… with decrepit infrastructure and poisoned national politics?
And as far as NATO, there is, of course, Germany, which is busy rewriting “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles” to be gender-neutral.
What are they supposed to do next?
March on Moscow under a rainbow banner and hope that the Russians die laughing?
Oh, and there’s also NATO’s largest Eurasian asset, Turkey, which is currently busy slaughtering America’s Kurdish assets in Northern Syria.
But simply waiting them out would have been a gamble, because in its death throes the American Empire could lashout in unpredictable ways.
I am glad that Russia chose not to gamble with its national security.
Now that the US has been safely checkmated using the new Russian weapons systems, I feel that the world is in a much better place.
If you like peace, then it seems like your best option is to also like nukes—the best ones possible, ones against which no deterrent exists, and wielded by peaceful, law-abiding nations that have no evil designs on the rest of the planet.
The USA is Cracking Up Just Like the USSR Did – In Fact, They Are Related
“You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, … We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality.”
“And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017. Dmitry OrlovSat, Mar 27 2021|1440 words 27,999Comments
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It caused a lot of death and destruction, which I won’t go into because you can read all about it elsewhere. It also caused a great outpouring of new art, literature, architecture and culture in general, putting the previously somewhat stodgy Russia securely in the world’s avant-garde.
It also resulted in a tremendous surge of industrialization, rapidly transforming a previously mostly agrarian, though gradually industrializing nation into a global industrial powerhouse (at great human cost).
But perhaps most importantly, the revolution destroyed all of the previously dominant institutions of privilege based on heredity, class and wealth and replaced them with an egalitarian social model centered on the working class.
And it demonstrated (as much through propaganda as by actual example) how this new model was more competitive: while the West wallowed in the Great Depression, the USSR surged ahead both economically and socially.
For all of its many failings, the USSR did serve as a shining city on the hill to the downtrodden millions around the world, including in the USA, fermenting rebellion, so that even there the one-percent ownership class eventually had to stop and think.
Reluctantly, they decided to stop trying to destroy organized labor movements, introduced state old-age pensions (misnamed “Social Security”) and declared a euphemistic “war on poverty.”
And with that a “middle class” was created—so called because it was literally in the middle, having risen out of poverty but still safely walled off from the one-percent ownership class.
But as we shall see this effect was temporary.
Eventually the USSR evaporated, as artificial, synthetic political entities often do.
The reasons for this disappearing act are too numerous to mention, but one of the main ones was that the Soviet political elite turned itself into a much-hated, privileged caste, and then failed to reproduce, turning into a moribund gerontocracy.
MM Comment. Sounds like the USA today, eh?
When the old cadres finally started dying out, the new generation that came in included plenty of traitors who did their best to destroy the system and grab a piece for themselves.
This effect was plain to see, but was it the root cause?
When a complex system collapses, every part of it is touched to one extent or another, and it becomes impossible to say which one played the key role in precipitating the collapse.
With the USSR gone, the owners of the USA had no one to compete against and were no longer under any sort of pressure to maintain the illusion of an equitable and egalitarian society.
Instead, they concentrated on two projects, one [1] ideological, the other [2] economic.
[1] The ideological project involved wrecking what was left of the USSR to the greatest extent possible. And to do so in order to paint a convincing picture of the horrible consequences of communism or socialism. It’s intention was to herd everyone toward wholeheartedly embracing unfettered capitalism.
[2] The economic project involved eviscerating the American middle class—a process that by now has largely run its course.
Since the creation of the middle class was a multigenerational project, so is its destruction.
But the effects of this process on society are already plain to see: there is an overhang of still relatively well-off retirees while their children and grandchildren have greatly diminished economic and social prospects.
Meanwhile, the hastily erected scaffolding that created the appearance of egalitarianism has been knocked out.
Organized labor is all but finished.
Borders have been thrown open to foreign labor and cheap imports.
Entry into the middle class has been blocked through a variety of measures.
These measures include [1] the relentless dumbing down of public education, [2] the equally relentless overpricing of higher education, [3] the health care extortion scheme, [4] the rationing of justice based on wealth and privilege, [5] wealth confiscation using a succession of artificial real estate market bubbles and so on.
Overall, the former middle class is being whittled down to nothing the same way that the Chinese “coolies” were dealt with once the railroads had been built…
…don’t feed them much but give them plenty of opium (now being grown in Afghanistan under the watchful eye of Western troops).
To sum it up: if you aren’t happy with the way things are going in the US, you have a choice.
You can of course blame Russia and / or China.
Or you can blame your owners—your one percent—who have owned you ever since the King of England appointed the Lords Proprietors.
Within Russia itself the commemoration of the October Revolution is no longer a public holiday.
But there was a sort of commemoration held on the vast Palace Square in St. Petersburg, which I attended with my five-year-old son on my shoulders.
It was his first time in a crowd of 35,000, and he was duly impressed.
It was a light-and-sound extravaganza consisting of two shows which played in alternation.
On the vast semicircular facade of the General Staff building was broadcast a multimedia retrospective of the October Revolution that included the reading of historical documents (such as the abdication of Nicholas II) and works of poetry.
It ended on an upbeat note—yes, many horrible events took place, but Russia is now reborn—with the General Staff’s façade painted in the Russian tricolor.
A different show was presented on the façade of the Winter Palace across the square.
Here, multimedia artists from across Europe (including France, Italy, Spain and Poland) used projected light to decorate and transform the palace to music that sung praises to the beauty of St. Petersburg.
The audience was invited to use their phones to vote for the best one.
After the show, as we filtered out of the Palace Square and walked home along the Palace Embankment, my five-year-old son asked some good questions that he had formulated while watching the show.
“Did a lot of people die?” (Yes.)
“But Russia was then and is now?” (Yes, Russia has been around for a 1000 years and will probably be around for 1000 years more.)
“Why do people have to die?” (Because otherwise we we would be full-up with useless old people and there wouldn’t be enough room for young people.)
And then the obvious follow-up: “Why are we full-up with useless old people anyway?” (???)
And finally: “Why do we bury dead people?” (Because they smell really bad.) “Ah…”
A rather unsentimental youth, wouldn’t you say?
But he was only one of the thousands of quite similar-minded ones who were in attendance that day, riding on their fathers’ shoulders or marching along.
Welcome to Russia…
One of the reasons why the USSR failed was because the idiocy of the ideology of Soviet communism became too painful to tolerate.
In a sense, this was inevitable.
You see, ideology is a product of intellectuals, and intellectuals tend to be idiots, making “intellectual idiocy” something of an oxymoron.
We are born equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0 that can handle abstraction only too well but always fails when attempting to reconcile it with messy physical reality.
And so it would be a grave error to think that, just because communist ideology is idiotic, capitalist ideology is any less so.
By now most thinking people realize that capitalism has failed just has communism had.
We can only hope that one day the US will do with its capitalist legacy what Russia has done with its communist one: turn it into a festive art installation that both children and adults can enjoy.
Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake
Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions – “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.”
“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”
This article from our archives was first published on RI in November 2017. Dmitry OrlovMon, Mar 22 2021|1610 words 46,492Comments
Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.
I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible.
I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble.
It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right.
It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.
American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase: “That’s not gonna work.”
Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yadda-yadda, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says…
“That’s not gonna work.”
And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to…
… that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option…
… he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.”
And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.
I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.”
And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it.
Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.
America seems to be blissfully unaware of how it comes across to the rest of the world
It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.
Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers.
However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics.
Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.
It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse.
While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves.
The larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.
The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters.
The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout.
And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.
Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs.
This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.
It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.
I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.
But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.”
However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.
Internationally, for example:
• Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.
• Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.
• Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.
• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.
All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.
In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.
The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar.
As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.
Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.
The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.
The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable.
It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.
MM Conclusion
Of course, these articles were written by a Russian inside the USA, and his observations at times seem dated. Things have certainly advanced in the last year or so. All of the articles here pre-dates the Coronavirus, the Biden Presidency, and the March 2021 meeting in Anchorage. they are also Russian centric.
Taken as a whole, we can see other elements in the global struggle that is is bracing for the collapse of America. And in hindsight it looks like the world is trying to let the United States suffer slowly and calmly. Some, like Dmitry here, argue that it is best to put the thrashing wounded old animal to bed with a short quick bullet to the head, but I remain guarded in regards to that.
There could well be a considerable amount of collateral damage.
Keep in mind that things are now moving into place and alliances and black operations forming. The USA is doing it’s best to entangle the rest of the world with it’s madness, like a schizophrenic lunatic who cannot see the absurdity of their actions, and the rest of the would holding a “clothespin to their noses” and trying to say out of arm’s reach. With the sole exception of Australia for reasons that are not disclosed publicly lest the government leaderships be hung from the rafters.
In any event this is pretty good stuff, and I do hope that you all enjoyed it.
Let this stuff sit a spell in the back of your mind. I have a follow up article that I will release later on this week concerning exactly where we are, precisely, in regards to the Fourth Turning.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
This article / post is going to be all over the place. The theme behind it is that the largest and most powerful nation of the planet is thrashing about and imploding, and we all are watching it happen in real time.
We will cover various aspects through some other articles that I have dredged up from the internet. The first article discusses how China and Russia now view the Untied States and it is not flattering. In fact, both are accusing the United States fro waging wars, assassinations, and attacks against them. From the NGO “color revolutions”, to the bio-weapons carpet bombing of China, to the black operations in Russia, both nations are starting to get really irritated.
Diplomacy is a way that nations work and interact with each other. To fail in diplomacy is to risk war.
With this understood, just how capable is the United States in dealing with other nations on a diplomatic level?
American Diplomats Are Outclassed
“Butting Heads with China and Russia” with a sub heading of “American Diplomats Are Outclassed” written by Philip Giraldi on May 13, 2021. Edited to fit this venue, all credit to the author, and the usual disclaimers retain.
With the exception of the impending departure of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse.
The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack.
Blinken initiated the acrimonious exchange when he cited…
“deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”
He then threatened …
“I said that the United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be”
“I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re reengaged with our allies and partners. I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government is taking.”
The Chinese Foreign Minister responded sharply, rejecting U.S. suggestions that it has a right to interfere in another country’s domestic policies,
“I think we thought too well of the United States, we thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols.
The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.
We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image, and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.”
In another more recent interview Blinken has accused the Chinese of acting “more aggressively abroad” while President Biden has claimed that Beijing has a plan to replace America as the world’s leading economic and military power.
U.S. United Nations envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield has also delivered the same message that Washington is preparing to take no prisoners, pledging to push back against what she called China’s “authoritarian agenda” through the various agencies that make up the UN bureaucracy.
Indeed, the United States seems trapped in its own rhetoric, finding itself in the middle of a situation with China and Taiwan where warnings that Beijing is preparing to use force to recover its former province leave Washington with few options to support a de facto ally.
Peter Beinart in a recent op-ed observes how the White House has been incrementally increasing its diplomatic ties with Taiwan even as it both declares itself “rock solid” on defending while also maintaining “strategic ambiguity.”
China understands its interests while the U.S. continues to be bewildered by Beijing’s successful building of trade alliances worldwide.
Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, reputedly an excellent chess player, is able to think about genuine issues in three dimensions and is always at least four moves ahead of where Biden and his advisers are at any time.
Biden public and video appearances frequently seem to be improvisations as he goes along guided by his teleprompter while Putin is able to explain issues clearly, apparently even in English.
A large part of Biden’s problem vis-à-vis both China and Russia is that he has inherited a U.S. Establishment view of foreign and national security policy options.
It is based on three basic principles.
First, that America is the only superpower and can either ignore or comfortably overcome the objections of other nations to what it is doing.
Second, an all-powerful and fully resourced United States can apply “extreme pressure” to recalcitrant foreign governments and those regimes will eventually submit and comply with Washington’s wishes.
And third, America has a widely accepted leadership role of the so-called “free world” which will mean that any decision made in Washington will immediately be endorsed by a large number of other nations, giving legitimacy to U.S. actions worldwide.
What Joe Biden actually thinks is, of course, unknown though he has a history of reflexively supporting an assertive and even belligerent foreign policy during his many years in Congress.
Kamala Harris, who many believe will be succeeding Biden before too long, appears to have no definitive views at all beyond the usual Democratic Party cant of spreading “democracy” and being strong on Israel.
That suggests that the real shaping of policy is coming from the apparatchik and donor levels in the party.
These include the neocon-lite Zionist triumvirate at the State Department consisting of Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Kagan.
As well as the upper-level bureaucracies at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
All of which all support an assertive and also interventionist foreign policy to keep Americans “safe” while also increasing their budgets annually.
Such thinking leaves little room for genuine national interests to surface.
Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken is, for example, the perfect conformist bureaucrat, shaping his own views around established thinking and creating caveats to provide the Democratic Party leadership with some, though limited, options.
Witness for example the current White House attitude towards Iran, which is regarded, along with Russia, as a permanent enemy of the United States.
President Biden has expressed his interest in renegotiating a non-nuclear proliferation treaty with the Iranians, now being discussed by diplomats without direct contact in Austria.
But Blinken undercuts that intention by wrapping the talks in with other issues that are intended to satisfy the Israelis and their friends in Congress that will make progress unlikely if not impossible.
They include eliminating Iran’s alleged role as a regional trouble maker and also ending the ballistic missile development programs currently engaged in by the regime.
The downside to all of this is that having a multilateral agreement to limit Iranian enhancement of uranium up to a bomb-making level is very much in the U.S. interest, but it appears to be secondary to other politically motivated side discussions which will derail the process.
A foreign and national security policy based on political dogma rather than genuine interests can obviously generate some disconnects.
Which is unlike either Russia or China, where red-lines and national interests are clearly understood and acted upon.
To cite yet another dangerous example of playing with fire that one is witnessing in Eastern Europe, the simple understanding that for Russia Belarus and Ukraine are front-line states.
States that could pose existential threats to Moscow if they were to move closer to the west and join NATO appears to be lacking.
The U.S. prefers to stand the question on its head and claims that the real issue is “spreading democracy,” which it is not.
Policy makers in Washington might consider what Washington would likely do if Mexico and Canada were to be threatened with foreign interference that might bring about their joining a military alliance hostile to the United States.
The American Establishment-driven foreign policy thinking clearly has trouble in accommodating the obvious understanding that the U.S. actually becomes more vulnerable…
…every time it interferes in China’s trade practices …
…or gives the green light for alliances like NATO to expand.
Expansion of the national security policy components often brings in another client state. And it is a client state that rarely has anything whatsoever to contribute and which, on the contrary, becomes a burden.
This client state ends up relying for their own security on overstretched American military resources.
In return, the expansion itself guarantees that a hostile and genuinely threatened Russia will take steps of its own to counter what it sees as a potential grave threat to its own security and national identity.
Quite simply, America’s national security should dictate that the United States treat China as a competitor rather than an enemy…
…while also disengaging from support and encouragement of Ukraine’s irredentist ambitions as quickly as possible.
A recent shipment of offensive weapons to Kiev should become the last such initiative and speeches by American politicians pledging “unwavering support” for Ukraine should be considered unacceptable.
Washington should meanwhile reject any clandestine attempts to overthrow Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and make clear to Vladimir Putin that it will not support any NATO expansion into Eastern Europe…
… which admittedly was a pledge already made when the Soviet Union collapsed that was subsequently ignored by President Bill Clinton.
Thanks to Bill, America is now obligated to defend not only Western Europe but also Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, the Baltic States and tiny little Montenegro.
In short, United State engagement in complicated overseas quarrels should be limited to areas where genuine vital interests are at stake.
In fact, by that standard one should begin to emphasize the security impact of the crisis on America’s southern border, which has a completely different genesis and is being driven by politics.
As British statesman Lord Palmerston said in 1848 …
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
The United States government would be very wise to be guided by that advice.
And Russia and China are taking notice and standing up to the US Bully
This article goes on, and on as many do. But please pay attention to the interesting dynamic here.
America, the United States, is out of control. There is a deeply embedded oligarchy group that is running amok and pushing all the buttons that are saying “WE DEMAND WAR!” And there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can stop them, control them, or mitigate them. They are out of control.
And the rest of the world are taking notice and deciding to work together, far away outside the clutches of the American military empire.
So in order to reason with these psychopathic entities, both the Soviet Union and China have established “red-lines” that will result in ferocious military action.
All in all, I think that both Russia and China have been very tolerant so far. But they cannot keep this situation stable for long. The United States is flailing about wildly with no control. It’s only a matter of time when things will go from dangerous to…
…death.
Consider this article, and when you do, keep in mind how the rest of the world view the insanity that is now the United States.
Only indirectly, or via a delightful metaphor, Kipling’s Jungle Book. Foreign policy was addressed only at the end, almost as an afterthought.
For the best part of an hour and a half, Putin concentrated on domestic issues, detailing a series of policies that amount to the Russian state helping those in need – low income families, children, single mothers, young professionals, the underprivileged – with, for instance, free health checks all the way to the possibility of an universal income in the near future.
Of course he would also need to address the current, highly volatile state of international relations.
The concise manner he chose to do it, counter-acting the prevailing Russophobia in the Atlanticist sphere, was quite striking.
First, the essentials.
Russia’s policy…
“is to ensure peace and security for the well-being of our citizens and for the stable development of our country.”
Yet if …
“someone does not want to ...
...engage in dialogue...
... but chooses an egoistic and arrogant tone, Russia will always find a way to stand up for its position.”
He singled out …
“the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions”
…to connect it to…
“something much more dangerous”,
…and actually rendered invisible in the Western narrative:
“the recent attempt to organize a coup d’etat in Belarus and the assassination of that country’s president.”
Putin made sure to stress,
“all boundaries have been crossed”.
The plot to kill Lukashenko was unveiled by Russian and Belarusian intel – which detained several bad actors…
…who were backed, by who else, yes, the US intel.
The US State Department predictably denied any involvement.
Putin:
“It is worth pointing to the confessions of the detained participants in the conspiracy...
...that a blockade of Minsk was being prepared...
... including its city infrastructure and communications, the complete shutdown of the entire power grid of the Belarusian capital.
This, incidentally means preparations for a massive cyber-attack.”
And that leads to a very uncomfortable truth:
“Apparently, it’s not for no reason that our Western colleagues have stubbornly rejected numerous proposals by the Russian side to establish an international dialogue in the field of information and cyber-security.”
“Asymmetric, swift and harsh”
Putin remarked how to…
“attack Russia”
…has become…
“a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements.”
And then he went full Kipling:
“Russia is attacked here and there for no reason.
And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger]
– everything is like in Kipling’s book –
...howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer”.
The – layered – metaphor is even more startling as it echoes the late 19th century geopolitical Great Game between the British and Russian empires, of which Kipling was a protagonist.
Once again Putin had to stress that…
"we really don’t want to burn any bridges.
But if someone perceives our good intentions as indifference or weakness and intends to burn those bridges completely or even blow them up, he should know that Russia’s response will be asymmetric, swift and harsh”.
So here’s the new law of the geopolitical jungle – backed by Mr. Iskander, Mr. Kalibr, Mr. Avangard, Mr. Peresvet, Mr. Khinzal, Mr. Sarmat, Mr. Zircon and other well-respected gentlemen, hypersonic and otherwise, later complimented on the record.
Those who poke the Bear to the point of threatening …
“the fundamental interests of our security will regret what has been done, as they have regretted nothing for a very long time.”
All now… now coalesce into a stark new reality: the era of a unilateral Leviathan imposing its iron will is over.
The era of the Powerful Leviathan United States imposing it’s will is over.
For those Russophobes who still haven’t got the message, a cool, calm and collected Putin was compelled to add…
"clearly, we have enough patience, responsibility, professionalism, self-confidence, self-assurance in the correctness of our position...
... and common sense when it comes to making any decisions.
But I hope that no one will think about crossing Russia’s so-called red lines.
And where they run, we determine ourselves in each specific case.”
Back to realpolitik, Putin once again had to stress the…
“special responsibility”
of the
“five nuclear states”
to seriously discuss
“issues related to strategic armament”.
It’s an open question whether the Biden-Harris administration…
… behind which stand a toxic cocktail of neo-cons and humanitarian imperialists…
… will agree.
Putin:
“The goal of such negotiations could be to create an environment of conflict-free coexistence...
... based on equal security, covering not only strategic weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bombers and submarines, but also...
... I would like to emphasize...
... all offensive and defensive systems capable of solving strategic tasks, regardless of their equipment.”
As much as Xi’s address to the Boao forum was mostly directed to the Global South, Putin highlighted how
“we are expanding contacts with our closest partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the allies of the Collective Security Treaty Organization”,
and extolled
“joint projects in the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union”,
billed as
“practical tools for solving the problems of national development.”
In a nutshell: integration in effect, following the Russian concept of a
… actually the combo telling him what to do, complete with earpiece and teleprompter…
… promising Ukraine’s President Zelensky that Washington would …
“take measures”
…to support Kiev’s wishful thinking of retaking Donbass and Crimea.
There are several eyebrow-raising issues with this EO.
It denies, de facto, to any Russian national the full rights to their US property.
Any US resident may be accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security.
A sub-sub paragraph (C), detailing “actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad”, is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.
Purchases of Russian OFZ bonds have been sanctioned.
As well as one of the companies involved in the production of the Sputnik V vaccine.
Yet the icing on this sanction cake may well be that from now on all Russian citizens, including dual citizens, may be barred from entering US territory except via a rare special authorization on top of the ordinary visa.
Which is very similar to the EO that made the same demands on Chinese citizenry that have toes to the Chinese government.
The Russian paper Vedomosti has noted that in such paranoid atmosphere the risks for large companies such as Yandex or Kaspersky Lab are significantly increasing.
Still, these sanctions have not been met with surprise in Moscow.
The worst is yet to come, according to Beltway insiders: two packages of sanctions against Nord Stream 2 already approved by the US Department of Justice.
The crucial point is that this EO de facto places anyone reporting on Russia’s political positions as potentially threatening
“American democracy”.
As top political analyst Alastair Crooke has remarked, this is a
“procedure usually reserved for citizens of enemy states during times of war”.
Crooke adds,
“US hawks are upping the ante fiercely against Moscow. Tensions and rhetoric are skirting wartime levels.”
It’s an open question whether Putin’s State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the toxic lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously harassing Russia and China.
But the fact is something extraordinary has already started to happen: a “de-escalation” of sorts.
Even before Putin’s address, Kiev, NATO and the Pentagon apparently got the message implicit in Russia moving two armies, massive artillery batteries and airborne divisions to the borders of Donbass and to Crimea…
… not to mention top naval assets moved from the Caspian to the Black Sea.
NATO could not even dream of matching that.
Facts on different grounds speak volumes.
Both Paris and Berlin were terrified of a possible Kiev clash directly against Russia, and lobbied furiously against it, bypassing the EU and NATO.
Then someone – it might have been Jake Sullivan – must have whispered on Crash Test Dummy’s earpiece that you don’t go around insulting the head of a nuclear state and expect to keep your global “credibility”.
So after that by now famous “Biden” phone call to Putin came the invitation to the climate change summit, in which any lofty promises are largely rhetorical, as the Pentagon will continue to be the largest polluting entity on planet Earth.
So Washington may have found a way to keep at least one avenue of dialogue open with Moscow.
At the same time Moscow has no illusions whatsoever that the Ukraine/Donbass/Crimea drama is over.
Even if Putin did not mention it in the State of the Nation.
And even if Defense Minister Shoigu has ordered a de-escalation.
The always inestimable Andrei Martyanov has gleefully noted the
“cultural shock when Brussels and D.C. started to suspect that Russia doesn’t ‘want’ Ukraine.
What Russia wants is for this country (Ukraine) to rot and implode without excrement from this implosion hitting Russia.
West’s paying for the clean up of this clusterf**k is also in Russian plans for Ukrainian Bantustan.”
The fact that Putin did not even mention Bantustan in his speech corroborates this analysis.
As far as “red lines” are concerned, Putin’s implicit message remains the same: a NATO base on Russia’s western flank simply won’t be tolerated.
Paris and Berlin know it.
The EU is in denial.
NATO will always refuse to admit it.
We always come back to the same crucial issue: whether Putin will be able, against all odds, to pull a combined Bismarck-Sun Tzu move and build a lasting German-Russian entente cordiale (and that’s quite far from an “alliance’).
Nord Stream 2 is an essential cog in the wheel – and that’s what’s driving Washington hawks crazy.
Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply won’t go away.
There will be more sanctions.
Everything was thrown at the Bear short of a hot war.
It will be immensely entertaining to watch how, and via which steps, Washington will engage on a “de-escalation and diplomatic process” with Russia.
The Hegemon may always find a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a diplomatic success in “dissolving” the impasse.
Well, that certainly beats a hot war.
Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny and be ready to meet “asymmetric, swift and harsh”.
What about American allies?
What do the American allies think? Here we look at the new rabid anti-China neocon Oz-land; a new American territory filled with people who are willing to die for “freedom”, “democracy”, and Washington DC!
I know, I know.
But apparently the Morrison government believes that having a war with China will be great for the people. Which surprises me. I always thought that Australians were hard-scrabble folk, with good heads on their shoulders and a easy-going fair-dink um’ attitude.
I guess that I need to readjust my thinking.
Like I said, I am often wrong about things. A good 50% of the time.
Once was a hegemon: Australia and the decline of the US
All credit to the author, and the usual disclaimers.
Australia’s Indo-Pacific obsession hides a radical global geopolitical shift. Australian policymakers will persist in making poor choices unless they accept that the US hegemony has passed a tipping point, and America has already become just one great power among others.
Australia’s policy community has become comfortable with the familiar, distinctive, and acceptable pattern of world order the Americans established. The universalist claims of the US’s order are now internalised and any alternative seems unthinkable.
Unthinkable!
Ah. Many things in Australia are unthinkable!
Ian Clark maintains “that hegemons are much more than dominant powers”. Denis Florig writes hegemony
“requires not only the hard military and economic power to enforce dominance when necessary, but also the ideological, political, and institutional power to persuade others to accept the rules and norms of a system largely designed and operated by the hegemon and its allies.”
This is the rules-based order over which Australia is nostalgic.
Hegemony is deep and pervasive.
Michael Mazarr refers to indirect power, which “involves influencing how people think—how they conceive their interests and very identities—rather than trying to coerce or bribe them into making a specific choice. It shapes what others believe they want, and why”.
This has been the flavour of American hegemony since the middle of last century.
A very typical Australian Summer.
America has shaped a weltanschauung and embed norms and values among other political cultures, and its hegemony has come to be seen as a legitimate, and an appropriate and rightful, use of its power. Any other organising framework for politics, society, or international relations other than the US promoted market-based capitalism and its evangelising democracy has become unimaginable. Life in the American hegemony has seemed natural and ordained, especially for Australians.
However, the democracy and capitalism America promoted have lost their lustre and Americans themselves have lost the passion for promoting democracy abroad. Now majorities or very substantial minorities in the US, France, Germany, and the UK believe their political systems need a major overhaul. In addition, half of all Americans, Germans, and British believe their economic system requires major reform. That figure is 70% in France. The ideological engine of the hegemony is spluttering.
America now displays a seemingly irredeemable racism and growing anti-democratic illiberalism, in a violent and divided nation where wealth is over-concentrated and poverty entrenched. Externally America has established a record of military overreach and failed adventures, and is increasingly reduced to using the coercive power of the dollar and sanctions where once it could have persuaded and relied on shared views. However, whether consciously or not, the slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Build Back Better” are admissions of loss.
Europeans doubts have grown about the US’s willingness and capacity to come to their aid in a crisis following the Trump interregnum and the American obsession with the Indo-Pacific. The US cannot commit to the security of Europe and confront China at the same time, this will necessitate a significant reshaping of the strategic environment. This unease is pronounced among both experts and the public; as seen in the recent increase in publications on European strategic autonomy (see here, here, here, here, and here for example) and opinion polls. These concerns haven’t been alleviated by Joe Biden’s election.
That the US is no longer the hegemon doesn’t mean it won’t be an important actor for a long time to come, although history shows economic and military prominence can collapse relatively quickly. However, America remains rich and powerful with enormous economic, military, and social capital. But its loss of capacity to shape world events, deliver security and democracy, and determine the global order is on show on Ukraine’s borders, and in the Black and Azov Seas, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Yemen, and Tigray, where its influence is marginal.
Most tellingly has been the inability of the US to take a multilateral leadership role over the illegal Israeli actions against Gaza, which will set back Middle East politics a generation, or to resolve the egregious human rights abuses and destruction of democracy in Myanmar, a part of the ASEAN purported to be at the centre of the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Multilateralism, democracy, and human rights are the banners of the Biden Administration.
The understanding of hegemony put forward by Clark, Florig, and Mazarr effectively excludes a succession of hegemony to China.
Certainly China aims for international pre-eminence and seeks the diminution of America’s dominant role in world affairs. Many of the norms, values and institutions America has spread will outlast its hegemony. Even where China’s ambition to succeed it, which it’s not, the US would be capable of stifling its prospects.
The waning of a hegemony is an unpredictably complex matter and it presents new and difficult foreign policy challenges.
There is a cognitive dissonance about the power shift in the current US Administration, and a sense that replicating past actions and behaviors will restore the former situation.
A mistaken belief that the hegemony can be rehabilitated and that legitimacy can be regained.
Cleaving too close to America will find Australia in awkward or irretrievable positions.
The state capitalist model might out compete, or at least match, the US in technology, trade, and investment across the globe. Not only the Europeans, but nations generally will act in the interests of their own populations and seek benefits from great powers opportunistically in the absence of a hegemon.
Increasingly Australia will have to navigate a world where there are multiple versions of events and differences over right and wrong, and where states will line up in accord with their interests as they interpret them. The decisive great power actor(s) in any situation will be context specific. The delineation of spheres of influence and shifting balance of power arrangements among powers will require Australia to be nimble, smart, and independent.
A hegemon free environment will be more fluid and offer more chances for middle powers to play-off great powers and engage in temporary alliances to advantage.
It’s about time Australia lifted it’s vision and saw the bigger picture.
What’s the worst that could happen?
And there is the effort to “contain” China using Australia and NGO efforts…
And so we have this article. Written on May 9, 2021, Found HERE, and all the regular disclaimers apply.
Tensions between Washington and Beijing are not merely the recent results of former US President Donald Trump’s time in office – but rather just the latest chapter in US efforts to contain China that stretch back decades.
Indeed, US foreign policy has for decades admittedly aimed at encircling and containing China’s rise and maintaining primacy over the Indo-Pacific region.
The “Pentagon Papers” leaked in 1969 would admit in regards to the ongoing US war against Vietnam that:
…the February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China.
The papers also admitted that China, “looms as a major power threatening to undercut [American] importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against [America].
The papers also made it clear that there were (and still are), “three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China: (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.”
Since then, it is clear that from the continued US military presence in both Japan and South Korea, the now two decades-long US occupation of Afghanistan on both Pakistan’s and China’s borders, and the emergence of the so-called “Milk Tea Alliance” aimed at overthrowing Southeast Asian governments friendly with China and replacing them with US-backed client regimes – this policy to contain China endures up to today.
Assessing US activity along these three fronts reveals the progress and setbacks Washington faces – and various dangers to global peace and stability Washington’s continued belligerence pose.
The Japan-Korea Front
Military.com in their article, “Here’s What It Costs to Keep US Troops in Japan and South Korea,” reports:
In all, more than 80,000 U.S. troops are deployed to Japan and South Korea. In Japan alone, the U.S. maintains more than 55,000 deployed troops — the largest forward-deployed U.S. force anywhere in the world.
The article notes that according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the US spent “$34 billion to maintain military presences in Japan and South Korea between 2016 and 2019.”
The article cites the GAO providing an explanation as to why this massive US military presence is maintained in East Asia:
“…U.S. forces help strengthen alliances, promote a free and open Indo-Pacific region, provide quick response to emergencies and are essential for U.S. national security.”
“Alliances” that are “strengthened” by the physical presence of what are essentially occupying US forces suggests the “alliance” is hardly voluntary and claims of promoting a “free and open Indo-Pacific region” is highly subjective – begging the question of to whom the Indo-Pacific is “free and open” to.
And as US power wanes both regionally in the Indo-Pacific as well as globally, Washington has placed increasing pressure on both Japan and South Korea to not only help shoulder this financial burden, but to also become more proactive within Washington’s containment strategy toward China.
Japan is one of three other nations (the US itself, Australia, and India) drafted into the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – also know as the “Quad.”
Rather than the US solely depending on its own military forces based within Japanese territory or supported by its Japan-based forces, Japan’s military along with India’s and Australia’s are also being recruited to take part in military exercises and operations in and around the South China Sea.
India’s inclusion in the Quad also fits well into the US 3-front strategy that made up Washington’s containment policy toward China as early as the 1960s.
The India-Pakistan Front
In addition to recruiting India into the Quad alliance, the US helps encourage escalation through political support and media campaigning of India’s various territorial disputes with China.
The US also targets Pakistan’s close and ongoing relationship with China – including the support of armed insurgents in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Recently, a bombing at a hotel in Quetta, Baluchistan appears to have targeted China’s ambassador to Pakistan, Ambassador Nong Rong.
The BBC in its article, “Pakistan hotel bomb: Deadly blast hits luxury venue in Quetta,” would claim:
Initial reports had suggested the target was China’s ambassador. Ambassador Nong Rong is understood to be in Quetta but was not present at the hotel at the time of the attack on Wednesday.
The article also noted:
Balochistan province, near the Afghan border, is home to several armed groups, including separatists. Separatists in the region want independence from the rest of Pakistan and accuse the government and China of exploiting Balochistan, one of Pakistan’s poorest provinces, for its gas and mineral wealth.
Absent from the BBC’s reporting is the extensive and open support the US government has provided these separatists over the years and how – clearly – this is more than just a local uprising against perceived injustice, but yet another example of armed conflict-by-proxy waged by Washington against China.
As far back as 2011 publications like The National Interest in articles like, “Free Baluchistan” would openly advocate expanding US support for separatism in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
The article was written by the late Selig Harrison – who was a senior fellow at the US-based corporate-financier funded Center for International Policy – and would claim:
Pakistan has given China a base at Gwadar in the heart of Baluch territory. So an independent Baluchistan would serve U.S. strategic interests in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamist forces.
Of course, “Islamist forces” is a euphemism for US-Persian Gulf state sponsored militants used to both fight Western proxy wars as well as serve as a pretext for Western intervention. Citing “Islamist forces” in Baluchistan, Pakistan clearly serves as an example of the latter.
In addition to op-eds published by influential policy think tanks, US legislators like US Representative Dana Rohrabacher had proposed resolutions such as (emphasis added), “US House of Representatives Concurrent Resolution 104 (112th): Expressing the sense of Congress that the people of Baluchistan, currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country.”
There is also funding provided to adjacent, political groups supporting separatism in Baluchistan, Pakistan as listed by the US government’s own National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website under “Pakistan.” Organizations like the “Association for Integrated Development Balochistan” are funded by the US government and used to mobilize people politically, constituting clear interference by the US in Pakistan’s internal political affairs.
The Gwadar Port project is a key juncture within China’s growing global network of infrastructure projects as part of its One Belt, One Road initiative. The US clearly opposes China’s rise and has articulated robust strategies to counter it; everything up to and including open war as seen in the Pentagon Papers regarding the Vietnam War.
The recent bombing in Baluchistan, Pakistan demonstrates that this strategy continues in regards to utilizing local militants to target Chinese-Pakistani cooperation and is one part of the much wider, region-wide strategy of encircling and containing China.
The Southeast Asia Front
Of course the US war against Vietnam was part of a wider effort to reassert Western primacy over Southeast Asia and deny the region from fueling China’s inevitable rise.
The US having lost the war and almost completely retreating from the Southeast Asia region saw Southeast Asia itself repair relations amongst themselves and with China.
Today, the nations of Southeast Asia count China as their largest trade partner, investor, a key partner in infrastructure development, a key supplier for the region’s armed forces, as well as providing the majority of tourism arrivals throughout the region. For countries like Thailand, more tourists arrive from China than from all Western nations combined.
Because existing governments in Southeast Asia have nothing to benefit from by participating in American belligerence toward China, the US has found it necessary to cultivate and attempt to install into power various client regimes. This has been an ongoing process since the Vietnam War.
The US has targeted each nation individually for years. In 2009 and 2010, US-backed opposition leader-in-exile Thaksin Shinawatra deployed his “red shirt” protesters in back-to-back riots – the latter of which included some 300 armed militants and culminated in city-wide arson across Bangkok and the death of over 90 police, soldiers, protesters, and bystanders.
In 2018, US-backed opposition groups took power in Malaysia after the US poured millions of dollars for over a decade in building up the opposition.
Daniel Twining of the US National Endowment for Democracy subsidiary – the International Republican Institute – admitted during a talk (starting at 56 minutes) by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that same year that:
… for 15 years working with NED resources, we worked to strengthen Malaysian opposition parties and guess what happened two months ago after 61 years? They won.
He would elaborate on how the NED’s network played a direct role in placing US-backed opposition figures into power within the Malaysian government, stating:
I visited and I was sitting there with many of the leaders the new leaders of this government, many of whom were just our partners we had been working with for 15 years and one of the most senior of them who’s now one of the people running the government said to me, ‘gosh IRI you never gave up on us even when we were ready to give up on ourselves.’
Far from “promoting freedom” in Malaysia – Twining would make clear the ultimate objective of interfering in Malaysia’s internal political affairs was to serve US interests not only in regards to Malaysia, but in regards to the entire region and specifically toward encircling and containing China.
Twining would boast:
…guess what one of the first steps the new government took? It froze Chinese infrastructure investments.
And that:
[Malaysia] is not a hugely pro-American country. It’s probably never going to be an actual US ally, but this is going to redound to our benefit, and and that’s an example of the long game.
It is a pattern that has repeated itself in Myanmar over the decades with NED money building a parallel political system within the nation and eventually leading to Aung San Suu Kyi and her US-backed National League for Democracy (NLD) party taking power in 2016.
For Myanmar, so deep and extensive is US backing for opposition groups there that elections virtually guarantee US-backed candidates win every single time. The US National Endowment for Democracy’s own website alone lists over 80 programs and organizations receiving US government money for everything from election polling and building up political parties, to funding media networks and “environmental” groups used to block Chinese-initiated infrastructure projects
The move by Myanmar’s military in February this year, ousting Aung Sang Suu Kyi and the NLD was meant to correct this.
However, in addition to backing political groups protesting in the streets, the US has – for many decades – backed and armed ethnic rebels across the country. These rebels have now linked up with the US-backed NLD and are repeating US-backed regime change tactics used against the Arab World in 2011 in nations like Libya, Yemen, and Syria – including explicit calls for “international intervention.”
Watch the following clip from CSIS panel discussion where DC policy operatives admit how the US use ‘democracy promotion’ front organizations like the NED and USAID in order to meddle and gain covert influence over politics in key strategic countries like Malaysia:
A US-Engineered “Asia Spring”
Just as the US did during the 2011 “Arab Spring” – the US State Department, in a bid to create synergies across various regime change campaigns in Asia, has introduced the “Milk Tea Alliance” to transform individual US-backed regime change efforts in Asia into a region-wide crisis.
The BBC itself admits in articles like, “Milk Tea Alliance: Twitter creates emoji for pro-democracy activists,” that:
The alliance has brought together anti-Beijing protesters in Hong Kong and Taiwan with pro-democracy campaigners in Thailand and Myanmar.
Omitted from the BBC’s coverage of the “Milk Tea Alliance” (intentionally) is the actual common denominators that unite it – US funding through fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy and a unifying hatred of China based exclusively on talking points pushed by the US State Department itself.
Circling back to the Pentagon Papers and recalling the coordinated, regional campaign the US sought to encircle China with – we can then look at more recent US government policy papers like the “Indo-Pacific Framework” published in the White House archives from the Trump administration.
The policy paper’s first bullet point asks:
How to maintain US strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific region and promote a liberal economic order while preventing China from establishing new, illiberal spheres of influence, and cultivating areas of cooperation to promote regional peace and prosperity?
The paper also discusses information campaigns designed to “educate” the world about “China’s coercive behaviour and influence operations around the globe.” These campaigns have materialized in a propaganda war fabricating accusations of “Chinese genocide” in Xinjiang, China, claims that Chinese telecom company Huawei is a global security threat, and that China – not the US – is the single largest threat to global peace and stability today.
In reality US policy aimed at encircling China is predicated upon Washington’s desire to continue its own decades-long impunity upon the global stage and the continuation of all the wars, humanitarian crises, and abuses that have stemmed from it.
Understanding the full scope of Washington’s “competition” with China helps unlock the confusion surrounding unfolding individual crises like the trade war, the ongoing violence and turmoil in Myanmar, bombings in southwest Pakistan, students mobs in Thailand, riots in Hong Kong, and attempts by the US to transform the South China Sea into an international conflict.
Understanding that these events are all connected – then assessing the success or failure of US efforts gives us a clearer picture of the overall success Washington in encircling China. It also gives governments and regional blocs a clearer picture of how to manage policy in protecting against US subversion that threatens national, regional, and global peace and stability.
And inside of the United States what do the sheeple think?
Indeed, the rest of the world is starting to put it’s collective feet down, and they are turning to the combined might of Russia and China which now together is a massive and formidable force to put America in it’s place.
But the dumb-asses don’t quite get it.
They are that fucking stupid.
Of course, Joe and Suzy average in the United States know none of this. They are all lost in some kind of Twilight Zone adventure that they are living. But as the United States thrashes about, certainly the people; the citizenry must be aware of what is going on. Right?
It’s difficult to tell from what constitutes “news” these days…
They keep telling us that economic conditions are improving, but if that is true why are the shortages worse than ever?
For a moment, I would like to take you all the way back to 2019.
Before the pandemic came along, we didn’t have any shortages.
If you wanted something, you just went to the store and got it or you ordered it online. Prices were low, global supply chains were functioning smoothly, and to most people it seemed like it would stay that way for the foreseeable future.
But then the pandemic hit, and “panic buying” caused short-term shortages of certain items such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
It was understandable that people would want to hoard those things, because there was a lot of fear in the air. But we also knew that those shortages were only going to be temporary.
Now here we are in 2021, and we were told that things would be getting back to normal by now.
But instead, there are severe shortages everywhere around us.
In fact, the shortages are far worse than anything that we experienced in 2020.
For example, did you know that dozens of important drugs are in short supply?
According to the official FDA website, there are shortages of more than 100 drugs in the United States right now…
Right now there are currently about 120 drugs listed as having a shortage.
On the website, if you type in a drug name in the database search field you can see if and why it’s in short supply. You can also see whether it is scheduled to be discontinued, and when the supply may start flowing again.
“Builders are delaying starting new construction because of the marked increase in costs for lumber and other inputs,” said Mike Fratantoni, senior vice president and chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, in a report Tuesday.
He added that supply shortages for appliances are also putting a damper on new home building activity.
Just over our northern border, the shortages have gotten really severe. In some cases, the construction of homes “is months behind schedule” because the shortages have gotten so bad…
Home builders across Canada are getting hit by a string of supply-chain disruptions, resulting in widespread product shortages and explosive costs for the industry.
In some cases, home construction is months behind schedule as developers struggle to source everything from lumber to PVC pipes, insulation to windows. Builders are also holding back on presales, unable to accurately price their homes too far in advance, given that material costs can fluctuate wildly on a daily basis.
“The whole supply chain is out of whack,” said Matt McCurrach, president of Homex Development Corp. in Kamloops, B.C.
“It’s getting worse and worse every day,” added Sue Wastell, president of Wastell Homes in London, Ont. “Literally every day, we’re finding out something else is not arriving when it was scheduled to. … We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Of even greater concern is the global shortage of computer chips.
Just about every industry that you can name is extremely dependent on equipment that uses computer chips, and CNN is telling us that this shortage “is going from bad to worse”…
The shortage is going from bad to worse, spreading from cars to consumer electronics. With the bulk of chip production concentrated in a handful of suppliers, analysts warn that the crunch is likely to last through 2021.
According to Goldman Sachs, 169 US industries embed semiconductors in their products. The bank is forecasting a 20% average shortfall of computer chips among affected industries, with some of the components used to make chips in short supply until at least this fall and possibly into 2022.
Actually, as I pointed out the other day, many executives now expect the computer chip shortage to extend into 2023.
For automakers, this is rapidly becoming a complete and total nightmare.
During the first quarter, global auto production was down by about 10 percent due to the chip shortage, but Ford has announced that production in the second quarter will be down by about 50 percent…
Investors have heard plenty about the current state of capacity problems for months. Roughly 2 million cars—or about 10% of quarterly global automotive production—weren’t built in the first quarter because of no chips. Ford Motor (ticker: F), one of the auto makers feeling the shortage most acutely, said in late April that it expects to lose about 50% of planned second-quarter production.
A 50 percent decline in production?
That is nuts!
If automakers can’t make vehicles, then they will have to start laying off workers.
Unfortunately, that is precisely what just happened at one factory in northern Illinois…
Some 1,600 jobs are being cut at a Jeep Cherokee factory in northern Illinois as automakers continue being plagued by the global shortage of semiconductors.
The U.S. arm of Stellantis, formerly known as Fiat Chrysler, said Friday it was cutting one of the two work shifts at its Belvidere Assembly Plant as of July 26. That could result in the layoffs of 1,641 workers, company spokeswoman Jodi Tinson said.
The economic optimists keep telling us that better days are right around the corner, but those better days never seem to materialize.
Instead, employment is still way below pre-pandemic levels, global supply chains are in a state of complete and utter chaos, and we are facing severe shortages of just about everything…
Copper, iron ore and steel. Corn, coffee, wheat and soybeans. Lumber, semiconductors, plastic and cardboard for packaging. The world is seemingly low on all of it. “You name it, and we have a shortage on it,” Tom Linebarger, chairman and chief executive of engine and generator manufacturer Cummins Inc., said on a call this month. Clients are “trying to get everything they can because they see high demand,” Jennifer Rumsey, the Columbus, Indiana-based company’s president, said. “They think it’s going to extend into next year.”
The difference between the big crunch of 2021 and past supply disruptions is the sheer magnitude of it, and the fact that there is — as far as anyone can tell — no clear end in sight. Big or small, few businesses are spared. Europe’s largest fleet of trucks, Girteka Logistics, says there’s been a struggle to find enough capacity. Monster Beverage Corp. of Corona, California, is dealing with an aluminum can scarcity. Hong Kong’s MOMAX Technology Ltd. is delaying production of a new product because of a dearth of semiconductors.
In my entire lifetime, I have never seen such widespread shortages.
Those that are running things keep insisting that they have everything totally under control and that things will eventually get back to normal.
You can believe them if you want, but millions of others are preparing for a future in which their optimistic assessments of the future turn out to be very, very wrong.
Do You Get The Feeling That Events Happening Now Are Leading Us Into An Endless Global Nightmare?
2021 was supposed to be the year that life went back to normal.
Obviously that is not happening, and so a lot of prominent voices out there are going to be forced to update their narratives.
Global events have really started to accelerate, and so many of the things that the “doom and gloomers” have been warning about are starting to happen right in front of our eyes.
For example, on my websites I have been talking about Israel a lot in recent months, and now it appears that the region is on the brink of war.
So far, more than 700 rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza, but by the time you read this article that number will probably be even higher. In response, the IDF has conducted a series of dramatic strikes inside Gaza, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising “to attack harder and increase the pace of attacks”…
‘Hamas will be hit in ways that it does not expect,’ Netanyahu said. ‘We have eliminated commanders, hit many important targets and we have decided to attack harder and increase the pace of attacks.’
Joe Biden and other world leaders are begging for peace, but neither side appears to be inclined to back down.
Every time Israel retaliates, Hamas just launches even more rockets at Israeli cities, and they are insisting that this is their “right”…
“We have the right to respond to the Israeli offensive and protect the interests of our people as long as the Israeli occupation continues the escalation,” Hamas said in a statement.
So here we go.
As I discussed yesterday, this situation has the potential to get wildly out of control very rapidly.
If that was happening in this country, millions of Americans would be screaming for Biden to nuke somebody.
Meanwhile, the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack has caused massive gasoline shortages up and down the east coast of the United States. On Tuesday evening, the Drudge Report breathlessly declared that more than 1,000 gas stations had run out of gasoline, and Zero Hedge was reporting that some people were waiting in line for up to five hours in a desperate attempt to fill up their vehicles.
Up until recently, just about the only thing that we were missing from the economy of the 1970s was the long gas lines, but now here we are.
North America’s largest petroleum pipeline has been shut down for just a few days, and now much of the southeastern quadrant of the country is absolutely paralyzed.
Do you think that there is a lesson to be learned here?
Of course there is. Once again we see how incredibly vulnerable we are to any sort of a major disruption. If the unprecedented power grid failure in Texas a few months ago was not enough of a wake up call for you, this definitely should be.
At this point, we are being told it is uncertain whether or not the Colonial Pipeline will be able to restore operations by this weekend…
If the Colonial Pipeline is not back in business by the weekend, prices could continue to rise at the pump and there will be broader localized fuel shortages across the southeast and mid-Atlantic regions.
Eventually, the flow of gasoline will be restored and everyone along the east coast will be able to fill up their vehicles again.
But the crazy inflation that we are witnessing right is not going to go away.
For years, economic “doom and gloomers” have been warning that if we kept recklessly creating, borrowing and spending money that really bad things would happen.
How many times have we heard about “the death of the dollar” and the dangers of wildly inflating our currency?
Well, it turns out that the “doom and gloomers” were dead on accurate. Inflation is one of the biggest stories of 2021 so far, and we just got another confirmation of how bad things are getting out there…
The median price for a single-family home in the U.S. rose the most on record in the first quarter, as buyers fought over a dearth of inventory, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Prices jumped 16.2% from a year earlier to a record high of $319,200. The growth eclipsed the 14.8% rate in the fourth quarter, which was the highest in data going back to 1989, the group said in a report Tuesday.
But at least home prices are not rising as fast as the price of cotton is.
If you can believe it, the price of cotton is up more than 50 percent over the past year.
Of course the price of corn is rising even more rapidly. As I discussed the other day, the price of corn is up about 50 percent just since the turn of the year.
Needless to say, lumber still has everyone else beat. The price of lumber has actually risen more than 200 percent over the past 12 months.
A lot of comparisons have been made to the horrible inflation that the U.S. experienced during the 1970s, but really I think that we need to go all the way back to the 1930s for a more accurate parallel to our current situation.
At this point, we are becoming more like the Weimar Republic with each passing day.
Everywhere you look, systems are failing, society is crumbling and evil is growing. Even the Secret Service, who are supposed to be the best of the best, are now plagued by endless scandals and widespread incompetence.
This is not a drill. A widespread societal collapse is now underway, and it is going to get progressively worse.
This is the time of our endless nightmare, but nobody is going to ever be allowed to wake up from it.
It Took Just A Couple Of Days For Madness To Descend Upon America Once Gas Shortages Began
Did you react calmly when you learned that a cyberattack against one of our most important pipelines was causing thousands of gas stations to run out of gasoline?
Sadly, lots of Americans didn’t.
There was yelling, there was screaming, there was lots of hoarding, vehicles were waiting in line for hours at stations that still had gas, and there were reports that brawls were even breaking out between frustrated motorists.
Even though we knew that the shortages were just going to be temporary, people were “panic buying” gasoline as if the apocalypse had arrived.
“This is the worst panic buying for gasoline since the Carter Administration,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service.
Kloza said outages at more than 10,000 gas stations are spreading “like a bad rash” on the East Coast. Much of the problem is people are buying gasoline at twice the normal rate in the Florida peninsula, as well as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
For some individuals, just filling up their tanks with gasoline was not enough. Motorists began to fill up any containers that they had on hand with gasoline, and some of the things we witnessed were incredibly stupid. For example, you should never, ever try to fill up plastic bags with gasoline.
I know that sounds obvious, but apparently so many people were doing this that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission felt that it had to send out a tweet telling people to stop.
The more gas stations that ran dry, the worse the panic buying frenzy became.
In certain major cities, nearly all of the gas stations have run dry. Just check out these numbers…
The supply crunch appears to be much worse in some major metro areas. GasBuddy reported outages Wednesday morning impacting 71% of the stations in metro Charlotte, nearly 60% in Atlanta, 72% in Raleigh and 73% in Pensacola.
All of this happened because a single pipeline got shut down by a cyberattack.
The Colonial Pipeline is 5,500 miles long, and it supples approximately half of the gasoline for the east coast. On Wednesday evening, the company finally announced that operations were restarting, but they warned that it is going to take several days for things to “return to normal”…
Colonial Pipeline initiated the restart of pipeline operations today at approximately 5 p.m. ET.
Following this restart, it will take several days for the product delivery supply chain to return to normal. Some markets served by Colonial Pipeline may experience, or continue to experience, intermittent service interruptions during the start-up period. Colonial will move as much gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel as is safely possible and will continue to do so until markets return to normal.
But something doesn’t add up here. The pipeline is being restarted, but the company has announced that it has absolutely no plans to pay the ransom to the hackers…
Colonial Pipeline reportedly has no plans to pay rumored $5 million-plus ransom to Russian hackers who have paralyzed the key gas pipeline, as President Joe Biden vows to get the fuel crisis ‘under control’ with pressure mounting on his administration to do more.
Do the hackers no longer pose a threat to the pipeline?
I don’t understand.
Either the pipeline never needed to be shut down in the first place, or the hackers are still in a position to cause major damage if they carry through on their threats.
Someone needs to explain which of those alternatives is true.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer says Enbridge Inc. has until Wednesday to shut a huge crude pipeline that crosses the Great Lakes. The Canadian company says it’s got the law on its side, and the oil will keep flowing.
The standoff is the latest milepost in the increasingly tense dispute over Line 5, a 540,000 barrel-a-day line that supplies half of the oil and propane used by parts of the U.S. Midwest and Ontario.
Is she crazy?
Needless to say, we have had the answer to that question for quite some time.
But what she is trying to do now is beyond insane. Why in the world would anyone try to shut down a pipeline when there are gas shortages happening all over the country?
Whitmer argues the pipeline, built in 1953, is too exposed to potential accidents where it crosses at the Straits of Mackinac in the northern part of the state. But the two sides are in a court-ordered mediation, and Enbridge plans to keep the line running while that plays out — prompting Whitmer to threaten to sue to take any profits it makes.
Are you kidding me?
She could have waited until this current crisis has passed, but Whitmer has decided that action must be taken immediately before any “potential accidents” are allowed to happen.
Is Whitmer really this incompetent, or is another agenda at work?
We really don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. We are told that a “ransomware gang” attacked the Colonial Pipeline, but it actually could have been anyone.
It could have been terrorists, it could have been another county, it could have been an attack from inside our own country, or it could have been the work of some smelly overweight guy chomping down Oreo cookies in his mother’s basement.
We just don’t know.
But this just shows us how deeply vulnerable we are.
If disrupting a single pipeline for just a few days can cause this much chaos, what in the world is going to happen when we are facing multiple long-term national emergencies?
To me, this is another major league wake up call.
Global events are starting to spiral out of control, our enemies know where our weak spots are, and this crisis has once again shown how easy it is to push American citizens into a state of utter madness.
What does all this mean?
Here’s my MM executive summary.
The United States is a corrupt oligarchy-ruled military empire.
Those at the functional leadership level are impotent at a number of levels.
The entire government mechanism is careening out of control.
Other nations are observing this.
The USA solution to domestic unrest is to engage in a major war.
Russia, and China have established “red lines” that are fixed and which will result in terrible consequences if crossed.
America is prepping for a major war anyways.
If you were Russia or China, what would you do? I argue that much of what they are doing is not being publicized, and are hidden from most people. And common sense dictates that proper thought and careful measures be taken.
Work at a frenzied pace to fortify all defensive measures. Militarily, socially, electronically, technologically, and politically.
Put military leadership in both command centers, and work together.
Test your offensive and defensive capabilities.
But what else?
Strengthen and enlarge intel collection operations.
Enlarge and expand black operations targeting regional threats.
Prepare a “first strike” doomsday plan.
And as far as the sheeple inside of America, what is going on?
Keep them ignorant.
Have them “chasing their tail” regarding vaccinations, politics, and social re-engineering.
Create a frenzy of hate towards both China and Russia so that many Americans want to go to war.
Make life difficult for Americans so that they will get very angry.
Provide a scapegoat of China / Russia to blame all the discomfort upon.
Meanwhile inflation is starting to eat everything, and prices are rising.
The trade war has been a fiasco for American industry and the American consumer.
Unemployment levels already high are going to increase.
Now, with all that being stated on the global politics side of things, let’s take a look at this article…
…because there is a “wild card” at play here that is not being reported.
Several years ago, one thing became clear — that if Keshe technology was real, the world would change, and hydrocarbons would be a thing of the past as fuel, and that our world economy, an energy slave economy, was dead. It goes further.
What Is Keshe Plasma Technology?
Keshe plasma technology gives us access to the uncontrollable open source technology that builds our universe, and is transforming our lives.
Click to download KESHE_TECH_SUMMARY_v10.pdf
Governments, the US, Israel and Britain, have been contacted about “sharing” technology that would, if Keshe is right, make the planes, missiles and even the billion dollar cradle to grave surveillance nightmare useless.
Now we can share what we do know, the basis for Keshe theory.
For the Keshe machines…
… for Keshe’s irritating language of “magravs” and “plasma” is very real.
His “crap” actually makes electricity “out of thin air” just like he said and, if that is true…
… and it is…
… then the whole thing is going to burn to the ground, the whole sick mess.
As of today, we can categorically state that Keshe tech is very real, that physics we are taught in school, physics the US publicly espouses as valid, is not.
We had known that several major aerospace companies were involved in projects, not only outside conventional science but much further, including time travel, thought inducement and deep space exploration, all using capabilities beyond conventional reality.
We now know that though it all may not be true, much of it is now “probably” true and some of the “impossible” is certainly true.
We begin:
Iranian nuclear physicist and peace activist, Mehran Keshe, has officially announced that it was his technology that brought down an American RQ170 Sentinel drone over Iran and disabled the AEGIS destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, in the Black Sea.
The US has given no plausible explanation for the downing of the RQ 170:
We have, during the past few weeks, been able to verify that Keshe energy units do actually work. We had test results from other sources, but we did our own:
Veterans Today began investigating Mehran Keshe several years ago.
Some of this story we have told before, so please be patient.
Keeping it short as possible, I assigned Colonel Hanke, who works with DARPA on energy projects, along with Mike Harris, to work with the Keshe group.
Then I sent Dr. Riccardo Maggiore of MIT to visit Keshe in Italy.
We then went further and there was a good reason.
Iran had captured an American RQ170 stealth drone, something impossible.
Moreover, Keshe had two groups of painfully inept detractors, a pair of cabals from the “free energy community,” a group that makes the new “truther” groups seem impressive. For those unaware, there is a huge online community of fraudsters who haunt the anti-vacc and natural medicine websites.
To learn about these folks, simply google “keshe” and you can list them.
One in Morocco was picked up and questioned last week about missing children and another, in Belgium (and Netherlands, depending on day of the week) showed up on an INTERPOL notice tied to a “trafficking and slavery” complaint.
Our partnerships with ECIPS, DESI and Center for Counter Terrorism have been very useful. They have given us full access to agencies across Europe. This has been a nasty business with some very nasty people and, quite frankly, dealing with this kind of thing is child’s play for the VT gang.
Where my notice was tweaked was when MI 6 started to trip over themselves in their usual delightfully “oh so British” fashion, as Michael Shrimpton puts it.
We knew this…
Keshe had worked in Iran with a massive budget on projects unrelated to anything arms inspectors have looked at.
Keshe doesn’t do missiles or bombs.
We also know that China has taken a strong interest in Keshe.
Our concern is how China is volunteering to throw endless funding to move Keshe medical and “other” tech from the “imaginary physics” stage to operation.
Either we all trust China, something I am not totally averse to doing, or begin playing with governments we long ago discovered can’t be trusted.
There is no easy way out of this.
Trust China/Iran/Russia or Trust America
Let’s move on to something less dark, something more fun to talk about, and I will turn this over to Ian Greenhalgh:
We suspect that the Keshe technology is…
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[1] The result of reverse-engineering Alien hardware;
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We further suspect that…
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[2] The Iranians found this hardware during archaeological exploration and it is millenia old.
Sharing this technology with Russia may have been a case of Iran lacking the resources to reverse-engineer whatever they found and the Russians are the acknowledged experts at reverse-engineering.
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Sources indicate that Gordon Duff had been briefed on ancient “technology dumps” in both Iran and Ukraine but he is unwilling to discuss this.
A little over two years ago, Preston James wrote an article that seems almost prescient in light of recent intelligence:
Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be walking with a prideful swagger in his step lately.
“Unsubstantiated rumors have been seeping out of deep contacts inside Russian Space Command the last few weeks that, not only does the new Putin’s Russia have a well developed Secret Space war Program, but that this Program provides substantial ultra-high-tech back-engineered offensive and defensive weaponry.
And that such advanced weaponry can and will be deployed if Israel is able to once again deploy their hijacked American War Machine to start another Proxy War, this time in the Ukraine against Putin’s New Russia.”
This advanced weaponry appears to have been deployed against the USS Sitting Duck in the Black Sea, an event that sent very real shivers down the spines of American and Israeli military and political leaders (if they possess spines, that is). Preston goes on to ask:
“Do Russians now have access to Space War Weapons based on back-engineered Alien ET technology gained through a new treaty negotiated between Putin and a certain group of Alien ETs who are enemies of the group controlling the World Zionists (WZs) and the International Zionist Crime Syndicate (IZCS)?”
The answer to this appears to be a definite ‘maybe’;
It would certainly explain why Russia has stood firm against the Zionists and the criminal operations in Ukraine and Syria, despite wide-ranging sanctions that, despite denials, have undoubtedly damaged their economy and the ruble and an ever-growing belligerence on the part of certain figures in NATO such as Gen. Breedlove. In short, maybe Putin is standing up to the criminals because someone does have his back.
Preston also made a good guess at what some of the offensive weapons that have resulted from back-engineering might be:
The actual state of back-engineered Alien ET technology for Russian weapons systems is not known by American Intel at this time.
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But estimates are constructed using advanced algorithms on advanced computers to make estimates.
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And the latest version of the Russian Sunburn Missile System is a good example of an advanced weapons system that can be used to project what could be considered a fairly good estimate of the current state of Russian Secret Space war weaponry that has been deployed.
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Some military technology experts believe that the Sunburn is based on Alien ET back-engineered technology.
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Why would they think this?
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Because the latest versions of the Sunburn are believed to have hiving capability and the ability to travel at speeds up to 7,000 to 9,000 miles per hour.
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That is a lot more than the officially released figures of Mach 2.1.
“Hiving” is the ability of these missiles when launched in mass to remain in constant communication with one another on special scrambled frequencies which constantly change.
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If one or more Sunburn missile is shot down or interfered with, the rest adjust in response to the threat, re-target, and resort to random defensive maneuvers to make sure every target is still covered and attacked by priority of importance. .
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Some of these maneuvers are so gravity-defying, it is suspected that anti-gravity technology has been utilized in the latest model of the Sunburn missiles.
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It is also suspected that new anti-matter light and time warping technologies are used to provide advanced “cloaking” for these Sunburns.
If these rumors are even close to accurate it means that any USN ships within range of these Sunburns (which may be substantially greater than the claimed 1200 miles), could be sunk within mere minutes.
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Some experts believe that the USAF (or the USN) has nothing that can adequately respond to the Sunburn.
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Even the Rail guns and high-powered particle beams which have been secretly deployed on some carriers and destroyers and kept under wraps until needed, or on special Space war orbital platforms, cannot respond fast or accurately enough to stop all of a hive of Sunburns that are launched.
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“Now here is the grim truth. No matter how good American Intel has been about the Russian’s Secret Space War Program and the level of advanced back-engineered Alien ET technology, which now has been deployed, it is limited.
And it is unlikely that the full story has been gained by American Intel, due to the various levels of secrecy and “need to know” installed around the Russian’s secret Space War Program.
Of course this kind of layered secrecy has been installed around America’s Secret Space War Program. America’s secret Space War program is unfortunately now run by foreign offshore-controlled, private defense Contractors, most of whom are deeply infiltrated by Israeli Intel, some of whom are actually deep cover spies who report directly to Russian Intel, unbeknownst to the Israelis who are cocky and getting quite careless lately.”
Part Two
Hi, this is Gordon back again. Figure it is spring here, half a foot of snow on the ground, and we are trying to find a way to lead where this will go, where it must go. I have friends in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere without electricity half the time, often without water, and we now know we can produce electricity not quite out of nothing but genuinely free energy.
What is unique about Keshe’s program is its direction.
When he talks about peace, he means it.
You know, what has irritated so many about Iran and China is their unwillingness to, despite their burgeoning military spending, threaten neighbors or build offensive capabilities.
Yes, Iran has missiles but Israel and Saudi Arabia, not the best neighbors for anyone, have nuclear weapons and a reputation for bad behavior.
If Keshe tech can take down an RQ170, what would it do with an F18 or even an F35 as Keshe reminds us in Video 2?
(Video was taken down on you-tube and is no longer available. Which is why I always tell people, set up your own website and install your own videos there, or similar systems.)
The key is going to be, based on the assumption that we are dealing with something real, how we can make this something more than a military game or, worse still and a scenario we are prepared to deal with as best possible, how long do we wait until defense contracting firms and the secret society types move from “trolling” to poisoning or let’s say shooting at Keshe and his wife Carolyn while they are in their car.
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No, wait…
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…that’s already been done.
I am not “at home” around Keshe people but what are “Keshe people?” There is an article out there accusing me and the CIA (funny?) of running the upcoming Keshe “event” later this month. I did, however, review applicants to attend, a list that was carefully screened based on the requirement of the hosting country, one that has very strong policies on things like terrorism and crime.
I found lots of engineers, world experts on nanotechnology, more than a couple, but curiously, oil and chemical company execs who seem to really want to be there.
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What this can be, and maybe what it is, above all things is a way for people to find each other and, without government handouts and permission from the Wizard of Oz, take control of their lives, their future and their way of life.
I don’t see room for what we have learned to recognize as “government” in this scenario. I will cry when the last one is shut down.
So what is the “wild card” and how does it play out?
Well, whether it is this technology or something else, or whether it is reverse engineered or home-gown, or whether it is an invention by a mad scientist does not matter.
What does matter is that there is a very high likelihood that the Chinese / Russians and Iranians are in possession of technologies that the United States / UK, and Israel do not have. This gives them advantage.
As we have seen during the 2020 Naval flotilla fiasco in the South China Sea.
Those that run the United States oligarchy and it’s minions are not technology, nor military people. They are of a different disposition. And they are flailing wildly about. The American people are caught up in a vice and they will be the ones who will pay the prices that these maniac oligarchy generate.
While times are certainly testy, they are never the less, still following the fourth turning predictions.
…
If you can believe this; we are just building up to the event. There is still a couple of years to go yet.
The danger period is approaching; 2023 through 2026, centered around 2025.
Hold on to your britches boys and girls. Dicy times are a coming.
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that they predicted a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020.
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That is three years later.
What does Mr. Howe say?
Below is a brief essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe discussing the typical progression of each “Turning”. It remains more relevant than ever amidst our current zeitgeist. It was written nearly a year before 2020 showed it’s ugly, ugly face.
NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.
The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.
The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”
Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.
Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.
In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.
At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.
The First Turning is called a High.
This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity.
America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.
The Second Turningis an Awakening.
This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.
America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.
The Third Turning is an Unravelling.
The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.
America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.
Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
Exerpts from the book The Fourth Turning
In 1860-1861 southern states took the Lincoln victory as a de-facto proof that the North would increasingly seek to impose its will upon the south (they were right, but losing the war actually made it happen faster and more completely).
What people generally forget is that all states had large militias that were beholden ONLY to the states, and people had much more belief and legal adherence to the individual states, than now.
Terrorist actions do not start a war, because you cannot really go to war conventionally against terrorism. What happened in the 1860's is that state governments formed a new nation in rebellion.
Personally I don't think the Left or the Right, as a whole, have the balls to do this today. But I guess we'll see. Eventually the threats become real enough that it's hard to ignore them and just hope everything goes back to normal.
-Aerindel, SoJ_51 and Observer
This is straight from the book …
“Something happened to America at that time,” recalled U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye on V-J Day in 1995, the last of the 50-year commemoratives of World War II. “I’m not wise enough to know what it was. But it was the strange, strange power that our founding fathers experienced in those early, uncertain days. Let’s call it the spirit of America, a spirit that united and galvanized our people.” Inouye went on to reflect wistfully on an era when the nation considered no obstacle too big, no challenge too great, no goal too distant, no sacrifice too deep. A half-century later, that old spirit had long since dissipated, and nobody under age 70 remembered what it felt like. When Joe Dawson reenacted his D-Day parachute drop over Normandy, he said he did it “to show our country that there was a time when our nation moved forward as one unit.”
The Eternal Return
On the earthen floors of their rounded hogans, Navajo artists sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time. Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They draw these sand circles in a counter-clockwise progression, one quadrant at a time, with decorative icons for the challenges of each age and season. When they near the end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a small gap just to the right of its top. This signifies the moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenics called ekpyrosis. By Navajo custom, this moment can be provided (and the circle closed) only by God, never by mortal man. All the artist can do is rub out the painting, in reverse seasonal order, after which a new circle can be begun. Thus, in the Navajo tradition, does seasonal time stage its eternal return.
Like most traditional peoples, the Navaho accept not just the circularity of life, but also its perpetuity. Each generation knows its ancestors have drawn similar circles in the sand—and each expects its heirs to keep drawing them. The Navaho ritually reenact the past while anticipating the future. Thus do they transcend time.
Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history’s last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V.J.-Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.
An end of what?
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. But this end, while possible, is not likely. Human life is not so easily extinguishable. One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species. Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that. For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck. Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw. A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins. The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress. As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
The new saeculum could find America a worse place. As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.” Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals. Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring. Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear. Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place. Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are. All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place. Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization. Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired. Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction. People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment. America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community. Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting. All this is achievable as well.
Conclusion
2020 was not the Climax; the Crisis of the Forth Turning in America. That still lies ahead of us.
I hope it never comes to this. In lieu, I can see the Balkinization of the country take place, sides would move to designated areas and set up permanent camp. There may be 2, 3 or more countries within the US before the dust settles.
-Survivalist Boards
A climax is a major event. It is typically marked by full-scale discord and absolute totality of full-scale war. That did not occur in 2020. That is not occurring now.
2020 was marked by a “pandemic”.
It was actually an intentionally released bio-weapon on China to “suppress it”, while unleashing a mild strain on Americans to inoculate them.
Most Americans (through their media) believe that either [1] it is a hoax, or [2] it is a new strain of flu that is sweeping the globe.
It is neither.
It is a bio-weapon attack on China by the neocon Trump administration, lead by John Bolton, gone terribly wrong.
Xi Peng and Putin do not get their intel from Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and CNN. They get it from their Intel divisions. And both nations have a full picture of what is going on, has gone on and will go on further.
Both nations (China and Russia) filed a formal complaint against the United States for launching this bio-weapon (and all the others that it launched in late 2020). And while Americans ignored this complaint, pretending that it is meaningless, it did do something.
It marked the start of Russia and China teaming up militarily against the United States.
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United States. (With the UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.) Today there is isolated America. Confused. Arrogant. Thrashing and moaning. Demanding all sorts of things.
The Rest of the World. And the rest of the world, lead by Russia, and China, that are very carefully and very precisely planning to stop all this nonsense once and for all.
Adjusting the dates
“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system.”
-The Burning Platform
Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit.
There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…
“Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
Climax in 2023.
Resolution in 2029.
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Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
And America, well, it’s somewhere else. I mean. Really. It’s off somewhere in La-La-Land.
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You know, today I want to talk about discoveries.
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Discoveries like this note that was found taped to the back of a heating duct that the homeowner removed so that he could paint the grill…
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It’s beautiful outside.
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It used to be that I was always looked inside on beautiful days. It would be a beautiful day at elementary school, and sure as shit, I found myself locked inside. I would only look out the windows in wonder and day dream.
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Same was true in High school. Only it just seemed that I spent a lot of time in Study Hall, and there I just sat doodling on paper and looking out the windows.
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Then at work. Sure enough. it would be a beautiful day and I would be stuck inside.
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Here’s a view from my office right now.
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I don’t have to stay inside. I can get up and go out and walk about.
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But I am not.
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My oomph hasn’t got the push.
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I cannot express how tired I am right now. I just don’t feel like doing anything. At most, all I want to do is go sit on a chair and veg-out. I’ve gotten to this state where I could just use a beer, a bowl of chili and some crackers.
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I mean, don’t you know, like what I used to do when I worked in the steel mills. When the lunch whistle blew, we would all gather ourselves together and troop off to the bars across the street and get a fine bowl of chili, a couple of slices of Italian bread, and a beer or two. We all did that.
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A fine bowl of chili.
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Or, maybe a nice creamy bowl of cream of asparagus soup, and a club sandwich. And with a nice tall iced tea… and a beer.
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And what’s wrong with that? Did you know that when I worked at Delco Electronics (It’s who we are), which was a division of General Motors, that they had all sorts of rules on behaviors. And one of which was zero alcohol on your free time. If someone “snitched” on you for drinking a beer after work, or anything like that, you could lose your job.
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Yeah. I really did live “The Office Space” experience.
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A club sandwich…
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Now, reminiscing about beer… crackers… soups, and sandwiches sounds so trivial. But I can assure you that it is not trivial at all. If you take away these elements that make our lives important, and makes our lives precious, then what remains?
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Seriously. What remains if you take away all the small pleasures in your life? What if you cannot drink alcohol, smoke, walk around barefoot? What if you cannot take your dog with you when you go out for a stroll, and want to stop in at a diner for a cup of coffee and a monte cristo sandwich? What then?
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You start to miss out discovering the few precious things about life. That’s what.
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Monte Cristo sandwich.
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As I get older, I am starting to come to the realization that the most important things to me are the very simple little things that I have always taken for granted.
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It’s the free newspaper at the end of the counter in the diner.
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It’s the way that a well balanced screwdriver feels in your hand.
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It’s a cloth handkerchief in your pocket, and your favorite shirt that fits you like a well worn glove.
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And it’s those little discoveries that make your day.
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When I was younger, I was always in a rush. To go here, to go there. To do this, and to do that. And so I ate fast. I drank fast. I walked fast. I drove fast. It was always go, go, go.
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I didn’t savor anything.
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I consumed.
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For I was an American consumer….
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Now I wish to savor life. Live it in big gulps. Take it in. Splash it all over, and relish in it’s glory. I want to sing, and dance, eat, and cavort. And I mean to do so with gusto!.
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I am talking about serious cavorting, you all.
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Oh, were I to still have my orange GTO, I would pop some Boston in the 8-track player, and go out cruising. The trunk would be filled with Bud, Miller (pony bottles), Michelob, and Iron City beer. Two bags of ice to chill it all out, and a well used frisbee in the back with a library card to sort the wheat from the chaff.
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I miss my orange “goat”.
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But those days are gone.
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And they just evaporated. And in the rush (at the time) to build a life, make a career, and dream the big dreams it all sort of passed on like some kind of hazy dream. We were all living this weird state of mind. Life was some kind of Peter Frampton song “Do you feel like we do”, and we were all there. Living it.
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We didn’t savor.
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We didn’t appreciate.
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And life did move on.
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I do like my life now, but there are things that are gone and I probably will never experience them again. Like piling into a van at a keg-party when it started to rain at night. About thirty of us all jammed in the back. Led Zepplin cranked up loud and Alice Cooper singing that “School’s Out for Summer”.
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Party like it’s 1976!
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Our life is precious.
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Living it is important.
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Relishing in what we have… AT THAT VERY MOMENT… is of extreme importance. And if you see an opportunity to make your life better, or someone else’s life better, the go for it. Don’t be a “wall flower”.
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Note handed to a woman.
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Live life.
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Live it well.
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And discover what lies around you.
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And relish in the uniqueness of the moments presented to you. Like this…
Whassup?
Let’s face it: Budweiser was absolutely on fire when it came to advertising in the 90s. I still think about those three delightfully laconic frogs “Bud”, “Weis,” and “Er,” and even their less-popular frenemy the chameleons.
Then in 1999, Anheuser-Busch rolled out the “Whassup?” ad, which took their advertising dominance to new levels. The commercial won a Clio, the Oscars of advertising, and was even inducted into the Clio hall of fame. And everyone saw this commercial.
You know they did because everyone started saying whassup constantly, always making it raspier, longer, and more unintelligible.
I was a preteen at the time, and this meant that every person in my school said “whassup” every day—in the hallway, in the cafeteria, at recess. Then I would come home and my dad’s friends would be saying it.
It was the type of cultural wildfire that forced news anchors to learn the word ‘memetic’—a decade before they learned the word ‘meme.’
-Listverse
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Here, I discovered a precious comment. And I want to place it here. It’s… well… precious. It’s something you will never find in the United States media, but it ACCURATELY reflects how the rest of the world views China.
Comment by Ahino Wolf Sushanti
I’m from Malaysia.
China has traded with Malaysia for 2000 years. In those years, they had been the world’s biggest powers many times. Never once they sent troops to take our land. Admiral Zhenghe came to Malacca five times, in gigantic fleets, and a flagship eight times the size of Christopher Columbus’ flagship, Santa Maria. He could have seized Malacca easily, but he did not. In 1511, the Portuguese came. In 1642, the Dutch came. In the 18th century the British came. We were colonized by each, one after another.
When China wanted spices from India, they traded with the Indians. When they wanted gems, they traded with the Persian. They didn’t take lands.
The only time China expanded beyond their current borders was in Yuan Dynasty, when Genghis and his descendants Ogedei Khan, Guyuk Khan & Kublai Khan concurred China, Mid Asia and Eastern Europe. But Yuan Dynasty, although being based in China, was a part of the Mongolian Empire.
Then came the Century of Humiliation. Britain smuggled opium into China to dope the population, a strategy to turn the trade deficit around, after the British could not find enough silver to pay the Qing Dynasty in their tea and porcelain trades. After the opium warehouses were burned down and ports were closed by the Chinese in ordered to curb opium, the British started the Opium War I, which China lost. Hong Kong was forced to be surrendered to the British in a peace talk (Nanjing Treaty). The British owned 90% of the opium market in China, during that time, Queen Victoria was the world’s biggest drug baron. The remaining 10% was owned by American merchants from Boston. Many of Boston’s institutions were built with profit from opium.
After 12 years of Nanjing Treaty, the West started getting really really greedy. The British wanted the Qing government:
To open the borders of China to allow goods coming in and out freely, and tax free.
Make opium legal in China.
Insane requests, Qing government said no.
The British and French, with supports from the US and Russia from behind, started Opium War II with China, which again, China lost.
The Anglo-French military raided the Summer Palace, and threatened to burn down the Imperial Palace, the Qing government was forced to pay with ports, free business zones, 300,000 kilograms of silver and Kowloon was taken.
Since then, China’s resources flew out freely through these business zones and ports. In the subsequent amendment to the treaties, Chinese people were sold overseas to serve as labor.
In 1900, China suffered attacks by the 8-National Alliance (Japan, Russia, Britain, France, USA, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary). Innocent Chinese civilians in Peking (Beijing now) were murdered, buildings were destroyed & women were raped. The Imperial Palace was raided, and treasures ended up in museums like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris.
In late 1930’s China was occupied by the Japanese in WWII. Millions of Chinese died during the occupancy. 300,000 Chinese died in Nanjing Massacre alone.
Mao brought China together again from the shambles. There were peace and unity for some time. But Mao’s later reign saw sufferings and deaths from famine and power struggles.
Then came Deng Xiao Ping and his infamous “black-cat and white-cat” story. His preference in pragmatism than ideologies has transformed China. This thinking allowed China to evolve all the time to adapt to the actual needs in the country, instead of rigidly bounded to ideologies. It also signified the death of Communism in actually practice in China. The current Socialism+Meritocracy+Market Economy model fits the Chinese like gloves, and it propels the uprise of China. Singapore has a similar model, and has been arguably more successful than Hong Kong, because Hong Kong being gateway to China, was riding on the economic boom in China, while Singapore had no one to gain from.
In just 30 years, the CPC have moved 800 millions of people out from poverty. The rate of growth is unprecedented in human history. They have built the biggest mobile network, by far the biggest high speed rail network in the world, and they have become a behemoth in infrastructure.
They made a fishing village called Shenzhen into the world’s second largest technological center after the Silicon Valley. They are growing into a technological power house. It has the most elaborate e-commerce and cashless payment system in the world.
They have launched exploration to Mars. The Chinese are living a good life and China has become one of the safest countries in the world. The level of patriotism in the country has reached an unprecedented height.
For all of the achievements, the West has nothing good to say about it. China suffers from intense anti-China propaganda from the West. Western Media used the keyword “Communist” to instill fear and hatred towards China.
Everything China does is negatively reported.
They claimed China used slave labor in making iPhones. The truth was, Apple was the most profitable company in the world, it took most of the profit, leave some to Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) and little to the labor.
They claimed China was inhuman with one-child policy. By the way absolutely recommended by the UN-Health-Organization at that time. At the same time, they accused China of polluting the earth with its huge population. The fact is the Chinese consume just 30% of energy per capita compared to the US.
They claimed China underwent ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. The fact is China has a policy which priorities ethnic minorities. For a long time, the ethnic minorities were allowed to have two children and the majority Han only allowed one. The minorities are allowed a lower score for university intakes. There are 39,000 mosques in China, and 2100 in the US.
China has about 3 times more mosque per Muslim than the US.
When terrorist attacks happened in Xinjiang, China had two choices:
Re-educate the Uighur extremists before they turned terrorists.
Let them be, after they launch attacks and killed innocent people, bomb their homes.
China chose option 1 to solve problem from the root and not to do killing. How the US solve terrorism? Fire missiles from battleships, drop bombs from the sky.
During the pandemic, when China took extreme measures to lock-down the people, they were accused of being inhuman.
When China recovered swiftly because of the extreme measures, they were accused of lying about the actual numbers.
When China’s cases became so low that they could provide medical support to other countries, they were accused of politically motivated.
Western Media always have reasons to bash China.
Just like any country, there are irresponsible individuals from China which do bad and dirty things, but the China government overall has done very well. But I hear this comment over and over by people from the West: I like Chinese people, but the CPC is “evil”\’. What they really want is the Chinese to change the government, because the current one is too good.
Fortunately China is not a multi-party democratic country, otherwise the opposition party in China will be supported by notorious NGOs (Non-Government Organization) of the USA, like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), to topple the ruling party.
The US and the British couldn’t crack Mainland China, so they focus on Hong Kong.
Of all the ex-British colonial countries, only the Hong Kongers were offered BNOs by the British.
Because the UK would like the Hong Kongers to think they are British citizens, not Chinese.
It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy, which they often used in their “Color Revolutions” around the world.
They resort to low dirty tricks like detaining Huawei’s CFO & banning Huawei.
They raised a silly trade war which benefits no one.
Trade deficit always exist between a developing and a developed country.
The USA is like a luxury car seller who ask a farmer: why am I always buying your vegetables and you haven’t bought any of my cars?
When the Chinese were making socks for the world 30 years ago, the world let it be. But when Chinese started to make high technology products, like Huawei and DJI, it caused a red-alert.
Because when Western and Japanese products are equal to Chinese in technologies, they could never match the Chinese in prices. First world countries want China to continue in making socks.
Instead of stepping up themselves, they want to pull China down.
The recent movement by the US against China has a very important background story.
When Libya, Iran, and China decided to ditch the US dollar in oil trades, Gaddafi’s was killed by the US, Iran was being sanctioned by the US, and now it’s China’s turn.
The US has been printing money out of nothing.
The only reason why the US Dollar is still widely accepted, is because it’s the only currency which oil is allowed to be traded with.
The US has an agreement with Saudi that oil must be traded in US dollar ONLY.
Without the petrol-dollar status, the US dollars will sink, and America will fall.
Therefore anyone trying to disobey this order will be eliminated.
China will soon use a gold-backed crypto-currency, and the alarms in the White House are going off like mad.
China’s achievement has been by hard work. Not buy looting the world.
I have deep sympathy for China for all the suffering, but now I feel happy for them.
China is not rising, they are going back to where they belong.
Good luck China.
Conclusion
My life today is quite different than it was fifty years ago, but there are charms all around us. You just need to take the time to appreciate them. Maybe I’m not jammin’ to Roy Buchanan, or Listening to the Alan Parson’s Project, Genesis, Peter Gabriel or quaffing GeneseeCreamAle (in the green cans), but I am loving what I have right now.
I’m going out.
I’m gonna eat some delicious Chinese food, and have some TsingtaoBeer.
And it might not sound exciting, but it will fill my belly, put a smile on my face, and make the day right.
This comment that I read was precious. And it’s unique for this moment in time. I just wanted to share it with you all, and remember that everyone contributes to make the world what it is today.
Be good you all.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
I mean absolutely, and positively surreal. China has decided to move at “warp speed”, and the insane level of advancement and building all throughout China has been stepped up to near frantic pace. It’s no longer just “fast”, it’s gone “hyper velocity”. Factories are all expanding, and international investors, flush with cash, and pouring into China to invest and get a “piece of the action” while the opportunity to do so exists.
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None of this is being reported in the Western media. It’s all “just the same song and dance”, and “dog and pony show”.
A songanddance.Alongandelaborate explanation or presentation. PrimarilyheardinUS.
Dog And Pony ShowMeaning of Idiom ‘Dog and Pony Show’ A dog and pony show is a presentation, marketing event, or any other event which has a lot of style and seems very polished and professional, but which has no real content. In a dog and pony show, no real information is presented, and nothing much is accomplished.
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And you can SEE the changes. You really can.
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And for me, who is used to the enormous tidal-waves of change within China, I find it nearly incomprehensible.
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I had a discussion with a friend of mine this afternoon. We shared a few smokes and talked about business over tea. He told me that one of our mutual friends is married to a woman who is now living in America.
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As is the case with many business owners. Once their business gets "off the ground", they send their families off to other nations "for a better life". I guess she thought that the USA would somehow be better. - I don't. I attribute this belief to be an emotional reaction due to a massively funded pro-America propaganda campaign that has been in place for decades.
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Anyways, she said that monthly checks are being cut by the US government every month, and handfuls of money are being handed out by the Biden administration to anyone who owns or runs a factory.
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I find that hard to believe. America is many things, but generous with money is not one of them. If any American MM readers can confirm or deny this impression, I would be very grateful.
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Never the less, there’s this belief that American companies are being given nearly “blank checks” for expansion, innovation and for hiring people. And since America is the same size as China, it means (in the minds of the Chinese) that “finally” America has decided to gear-up, and start trying to be really competitive on the global stage. And thus, here in China, the factory bosses, and owners are taking this very seriously.
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Their attitude is “OK, so America wants to compete. We will COMPETE.”.
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And everyone seems to be doing this.
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At least it just seems that way. And maybe there are other reasons for the expansion, for after all there are all sorts of directives regarding technology development, green energy, and domestic expansion that is going on right now.
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And as I mentioned earlier; you can see the growth, the changes, and all the many, many improvements.
Pollution
China as described by Western media.
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For instance. I have ranted on about pollution in my other posts. Most it is about how China is depicted as this smoggy filthy cesspool, and then I show pictures of what it is actually like. The narrative is not even remotely close.
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Did you know that the Chinese have the cleanest Coal-fired power plants in the world? Here’s a comparison between American coil-fired power-plants and Chinese ones.
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To better understand where China’s coal fleet is going, CAP compared the top 100 most efficient coal-fired power units in the United States with the top 100 in China. The difference is astounding.
Compared with the Chinese coal fleet, even the best U.S. plants are running older, less efficient technologies. Coal-fired power plants can generally be broken down into three categories:
Subcritical: In these conventional power plants, coal is ignited to boil water, the water creates steam, and the steam rotates a turbine to generate electricity. The term “subcritical” indicates that internal steam pressure and temperature do not exceed the critical point of water—705 degrees Fahrenheit and 3,208 pounds per square inch.
Supercritical: These plants use high-tech materials to achieve internal steam temperatures in the 1,000–1,050 degrees Fahrenheit range and internal pressure levels that are higher than the critical point of water, thus spinning the turbines much faster and generating more electricity with less coal.
Ultra-supercritical: These plants use additional technology innovations to bring temperatures to more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and pressure levels to more than 5,000 pounds per square inch, thus further improving efficiency.
The U.S. coal fleet is much older than China’s: The average age of operating U.S. coal plants is 39 years, with 88 percent built between 1950 and 1990. Among the top 100 most efficient plants in the United States, the initial operating years range from 1967 to 2012. In China, the oldest plant on the top 100 list was commissioned in 2006, and the youngest was commissioned in 2015.
The United States only has one ultra-supercritical power plant. Everything else is subcritical or, at best, supercritical.
In contrast, China is retiring its older plants and replacing them with ultra-supercritical facilities that produce more energy with less coal and generate less emissions as well. Out of China’s top 100 units, 90 are ultra-supercritical plants.
Coal is one of my passions. I used to work in the mines in my youth, and I have numerous projects involving this most interesting of ores.
Anyways…
Here, I discovered another precious comment. And I want to place it here. It’s… well… precious.
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It’s something you will never find in the United States media, but it ACCURATELY reflects how the rest of the world views China.
Comment by FromSerbia
Thank you for clearly explaining the parallels between Euromaidan and the current upheaval in the USA.
Since very few Americans paid attention to what their government did across the globe, they cannot recognize the whole “what goes around comes around” now happening to them.
Donald Trump will not suffer from any of this.
He is obscenely rich, and the worst thing that can happen to him is that he won’t be president anymore. All this anti-Trump talk will disappear the moment he is gone. Who truly suffers from this new American helscape?
From the looks of it, small business owners and low paid employees. Poor and middle class folk. Their business and places of employment are getting looted and torched.
Not Mar-a-Lago (or w/e the spelling of it may be) nor Microsoft, nor Facebook or Twitter HQ. Not Ford plants or Boeing and Lockheed assembly lines.
Here’s an observation from my years in the USA.
I lived there long enough to gain a clear understand of the depth of depravity of its power structures.
I moved to Chicago circa 2007 and made many friends. I lived in a suburb, surrounded almost exclusively by white people.
Before learning how to drive over poor people’s heads by using the highway to get downtown, I drove from the suburb to downtown in a straight line almost, through the city.
The scenes along the way and the neighborhoods were surreal.
I started in a rich neighborhood, eventually entering a middle class neighborhood.
I can tell because houses get smaller along the way.
They still looked fancy and well kept.
Then into a neighborhood where poor white people live.
The state of their infrastructure made it clear that this is such a place. The faces I saw where mostly white.
Then comes the Mexican neighborhood. The state of their infrastructure was even worse, but they seemed to make the best of it. They decorated everything with colorful lights, there were street vendors and other people all over the street. Kids were playing everywhere and the atmosphere was generally positive. I had no qualms about stopping, parking the car and grabbing a bite to eat at local mom & pop restaurant.
Then come the black neighborhoods. I could not believe my eyes that people live like that in the USA. Their infrastructure looked worse than 1995 Bosnia. Most of you probably do not understand what that means, and I hope you never have to learn from personal experience. I believe that the correct term for their state of infrastructure is dilapidated. As in, all of it. Falling apart. There were no valuable businesses in these neighborhoods, save for an occasional McDonalds or Taco Bell, and a post office, free clinic and other such absolutely necessary establishments.
There were liquor stores *everywhere* and crowds in front of every one of them.
I’m not exactly sure what is the point of concealing a bottle of liquor in a paper bag anymore, but that tragically classic scene was on display throughout these neighborhoods. People, sitting on the curb, wasted, or getting there before nightfall.
The only word that can accurately summarize the state of Chicago’s black neighborhoods is “depression.” Total, permanent, and seemingly irreversible depression.
The solution to this catastrophe?
If we are to believe the current news cycle, the solution is to make the rest of USA look like those parts of Chicago.
I can’t tell you how many times I heard…
”Obama is in charge now, he’ll fix everything. My president is black, my lambo is blue, if you say anything against Obama, you’re not cool.”
This was before cancel culture swept across USA and I could still speak my mind freely.
I suppose the results are in and Obama didn’t fix anything.
I still read about Chicago war zones, 20 dead, 50 wounded every other weekend. This was common news in the years preceding the current upheaval.
There is something a friend of mine said back then that stayed with me to this day.
We were driving back home from a bar one evening and all of us were legally drunk. He was very careful to drive the speed limit. He was complaining about cops.
He said how even a few years ago, if cops caught you drunk driving, they wouldn’t make an arrest. They would drive you home, or, at least, have you call someone to come get you.
In a worst case scenario, you sober up in a local precinct and then you can go.
Sure, your car might get taken to a pound lot, but that was a low price to pay (about $150 to get your car back) for committing a felony.
I don’t know if this same treatment was afforded to minorities, but I can’t imagine that most cops wanted to cause a situation like what happened at that Wendy’s in Atlanta recently.
What happened Americans?
How did you get to the point where even rich white people now dislike cops? Well, I lived in Illinois long enough to gain some insights.
Simple answer – “politics”.
Democrats rule Illinois, and they have total control of Chicago.
For decades, they maintained this rule through sheer bribery. Of course, not in a classic sense.
They enacted laws and agreements where every state employee has privileges and benefits that most common folk can only dream to have.
High salaries, early and very generous retirements, top notch healthcare, and the works.
That whole mantra, repeated on every Hollywood cop show and movie, how it’s tough living on a cop salary – it is a massive load of bullshit.
Maybe, just maybe, grunts who just joined the force don’t have it that good. They will, eventually.
This was promised to everybody across the board.
Cops, firefighters, post office employees, clerks, politicians and their mistresses, etc.
Massive spending of monies they did not have.
By year 2000, USA was more or less completely de-industrialized.
Northern Illinois, once a prime target for a Soviet nuclear strike due to its high industrial production capacity, resembled scenes from apocalyptic movies and video games by the time I saw it.
The situation is the following: politicians made promises to gain power.
In order to maintain power, they kept those promises, spending money they don’t have.
So, they issued bonds and borrowed senseless amounts of cash.
Borrowed more than they needed to pay off all those promises.
Because, why wouldn’t they take some of that sweet sweet cash?
Sure, they didn’t pay it directly into their bank accounts. They took it by giving public and city contracts, totaling large sums of money, to their buddies and family business.
Some of these companies were formed, what, a day before they got the city contract?
My family left Serbia only to find the *exact same* method of political corruption permeating the USA.
Don’t take this as an indictment of Democrats only. I have no doubt that this is how Republicans also work. At least, most of them.
Eventually, the debts built up to the point where they could not service them with tax revenue.
So, they raised taxes on everything and invented new taxes.
However, that didn’t work.
What’s left to tax?
Walmart and McDonalds employees making $7 an hour? They certainly were not going to tax WalMart and McDonalds corporate profits.
The situation was growing dire.
So, the solution was to sic the police on the people. To squeeze every $ they could from poor folks.
$100 ticket for not wearing a seat belt.
Why?
If I want to risk my own life, what business is it of yours?
I say this as a person who needs no convincing to wear a belt. But why must you force me to do it?
DUI became a nightmare.
Instead of friendly neighborhood officer who wants to help you get home safe, we now have stalkers who want to ruin your life.
DUI arrest, jail, lawyer, court, trial, plea deal, maybe more jail.
All in all, a nightmare, a criminal record, lots of $$ spent on nothing.
I understand the dangers of drunk driving, but I also understood that the politicians were not thinking about the safety and well being of their communities when they enacted such laws.
I can only guess that there are many more such laws that flay the poor while the rich simply do not care.
It’s not like extra police patrols will be deployed to rich neighborhoods to catch drunk drivers or those not wearing seat belts.
So, what you have in the end is a mess made by corrupt and absolutely incompetent politicians, where the police force was used akin to how mafia bosses use enforcers to collect “protection” rackets.
Except, with the mafia, at least you can point the finger and say “that’s the bad guy.”
Of course, the police went along with it.
(It’s) Not like they were threatened.
And its not like they are wiling to risk their salaries, health benefits, and large retirement funds (either).
If people had to be flayed for $100 every time they didn’t put on a seat belt for a cop to guarantee his salary, so be it.
Why, I was even told by my peers that cops had quotas to keep!
As in, each of them had to issue at least $2000 worth of tickets and citations per month, or week, or whatever.
Now, when the situation reached a boiling point (with no small help from Soros & Co.) the politicians do what they do best. Lie, cheat, and steal.
They just blame the cops and story finished.
Media says it is so and the idiots on the streets eat it up.
They literally cannot see past that which is right in front of them.
Cop writes ticket = cop bad.
No matter the fact that cops enforce laws made by elected politicians.
The paid mercenaries revel in this orgy of stupidity as they lead those idiots into looting, burning, fighting, and generally destroying their own infrastructure and job opportunities.
I apologize for cursing again.
The system in the state of Illinois is such a tangled clusterfuck that there is no untangling it without changing the system.
The politicians in power will never allow this.
They will sooner disband the police and enact law of the jungle.
The survival of the fittest.
After all, Darwin’s teachings are now gospel in the USA. Why not live like that? Disbanding the police will also (possibly?) wipe off all of those enormous salaries, pensions, healthcare, and other obligations.
It’s a good thing American forefathers had the foresight to enshrine the 2nd amendment in the bill of rights.
One more observation, about the police.
I had interacted with police on numerous occasions. Most cops are decent folk, working a tough job in a terrible system.
The jerks among them are of all colors, not just white. There is one very common theme among cops, though.
Most are not well-educated.
I watched and worked with a lot of high-schoolers in the USA.
Also younger kids at times. I noticed a pattern.
Simply put, there are kids at these schools (I worked at public schools only) who are just bullies.
Violent for the sake of violent gratification.
I suspect that this is a result of decades-long indoctrination.
Back in 50s and 60s, kids watched as cowboys slaughtered “Indians” a word which makes me feel dirty every time I use it.
Then they watched war movies.
Then came the violence of 80s television and movies.
As the society went into 90s, violent video games were added to the mix, alongside increasingly violent depictions of fighting on TV and in movies. The tech allowed for portrayal of incredibly graphic violence. Guts and brains and alike.
I am not claiming that movies and video games incite violence.
I am claiming that such graphic depictions of violence make a bad situation worse.
Bullies became ever more violent.
I also noticed that these bullies were generally not intelligent. After free high school education, there was nothing left for them. What are they to do?
Three choices: work $7 an hour job; join the army; become a cop.
Joining the army is out of question. Them A-rabs shoot back. Hell, sometimes you don’t even see them coming. A bomb just blows up near you.
So, it’s either $7 an hour at WalMart or become a cop.
So, they join the police forces.
It is a job tailor made for a bully.
You can dish out abuse all you want, and if somebody dares fight back, shoot them dead.
No consequences.
If not shot dead, ruin someone’s life through arrest, criminal record, constant harassment.
Why not?
The politicians gave such power to them. Add to this mix the fact that they have to meet quotas for issuing tickets and a bully is in paradise.
Derek Chauvin certainly seems like a textbook example of this. I generally reserve my judgment. Not in this case. I can’t tell you how many Derek Chauvin’s passed before my eyes in USA high schools, planning to become cops.
I would also add racists to this mix. Being a cop in the USA is a perfect job for a creature scraping the barrel of human intellect.
A racist is given a free reign to do as he/she pleases.
I have no solution to offer to Americans. I am no genius. However, I do not wish to see the country disintegrate.
The worst case scenario is nukes falling into hands of green-haired, 16 piercings on face, gender-less lunatics. They will have no qualms about nuking those “like terrible racist privileged” people all across the USA, before they threaten the rest of humanity.
American people were pious folk once long ago, both blacks and whites and just about every color in between. The weight of our sins can never be greater than Father’s love and willingness to forgive.
Remember that before it is too late.
Conclusion
He had a lot to say. Perhaps the one thing that snagged my attention was this statement;
"Since very few Americans paid attention to what their government did across the globe, they cannot recognize the whole “what goes around comes around” now happening to them."
Well, it hasn’t even started yet.
America has been VERY, VERY BAD. And for things and karma to be just and fair, the real pain has yet to be felt.
I don’t know what is going on in the USA. Not really. I just get bit’s and pieces. Like this.
Would you believe that I actually used to stay glued to the “news” to absorb all this garbage. How many beers could I have drank? How many dates could I have shared with an attractive lady? How many pizza could I have eaten? How many parks and hiking trails could I have walked on? How many adventures could I have had? How many fish could I have caught? And how many new and exciting friends could I have made?
But…no.
I was seduced by the “dark side” and instead I was addicted to the “news” that colored the life that I would lead. And that “news” was always saying the same thing; America is great. the rest of the world is evil.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
I remember when I used fffound, before I discovered Tumblr.
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And then, abandoned it when Yahoo! bought it out, promising never to change it.
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Yeah. Right. Like that happened! Yeah NOT!
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And still reading the “news” on the Free Republic feeds. As if they were full of precious information that mattered in my life.
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Nope.
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It didn’t matter at all.
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It’s tough knowing one thing, and knowing how things really work, and then reading what passes for “news” out of the West. Especially the nonsense spewing forth out of America. Jeeze!
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Louise!
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Honestly, the American “news” is like a dog chasing it’s tail. And those that follow it seem dumber with each passing day. I will tell you all the truth, the longer that I am out of the United States and away, the more idiotic the American public appears to me. I am so sorry guys, and especially for many of the American MM readers, but I am just getting floored at the level of ignorance that exists inside of America today.
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You have John Bolton… hard-core neocon… known for his quote where he compared the Chinese to cockroaches that needed to be repeatedly stepped on to show them the superiority of “the American way”…
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…being put in charge of the US Military strategic bio-weapon agency in 2016.
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It’s just a coincidence!
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And then from 2016 through 2019 China experienced eight crop and livestock viruses, with the swine flu propagated by drones with parts manufactured using American tooling.
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Why, it’s just a coincidence!
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Ah, and then in 2020, the COVID20 appears on CNY eve (what a coincidence!), in the most populous area in China (what a coincidence!) that hit all of the nations living in the same dorm as the American troops at the Wuhan Olympic games (what a coincidence!)…
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…and all of the “enemies” of the United States getting hit with the COVID-19B, the super deadly R0=20%, while America and it’s allies getting the (cold and sniffle) version R0=0.01%…
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…and we’re expected to believe that it’s China’s fault? That they were clumsy to steal an American bio-weapon and mishandle it, at a facility that is open to the public on a major thoroughfare and unguarded too boot. Why, it’s just a coincidence!
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Ugh. Only a FUCKING MORON would believe anything promoted out of Washington DC these days. But you know, most American believe. And I must tell you all, MAJestic leadership was absolutely correct.
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Most Americans are corralled sheep with the brains of a potato.
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So imagine my pleasant surprise when I read this article by Fred Reed. He’s become one of my favorite writers, don’t you know, and this one had me waving my hands, spilling my precious alcohol on the desktop, and banging on the keyboard! Shouting Yes!
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Right!, That’s right!
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Over and over.
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You all have to understand. Here in China… you can actually SEE the changes… and if you have any association at all with industry, robotics, aircraft design, AI, or international finance you will see…
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…irregardless of what the American “news” prints, the rest of the world is turning towards China. It’s where the future of the human species resides.
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Here’s a reprint, shared using the regular disclaimers.
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A Dolorous Imbalance
America Makes Aircraft Carriers, China Makes Money
First, America increasingly relies on strong-arm tactics instead of competence.
For example, in the de facto 5G competition, Washington cannot offer Europe a better product at a better price, so it forbids European countries to buy from China.
The US cannot compete with China in manufacturing, so it resorts to a trade war.
The US cannot make the crucial EUV lithography equipment to make advanced semiconductors, as neither can China, but it can forbid ASML, the Dutch company, from selling to China.
Similarly, the US cannot compete with Russia in the price of natural gas to Europe, so by means of sanctions it seeks to keep Europe from buying from Russia.
This is not reassuring.
Second, the Chinese are a commercial people, agile, fast to market, cutthroat, known for this throughout Asia.
America is a bureaucratized military empire, torpid by comparison.
America has legacy control over a few important technologies, most notably the crucial semiconductor field and the international financial system.
Washington is using these to try to cripple China’s advance.
A consequence has been a realization by the Chinese that America is not a competitor but an enemy, and (this realization has resulted in) a subsequent explosion of investment and R&D aimed at reducing dependence on American technology.
There is the well-known 1.4 trillion-dollar five-year plan to this end.
One now encounters a flood of stories about advances in tech “to which China has intellectual-property rights” or similar wording.
They seem deadly serious about this.
Given that Biden couldn’t tell a transistor from an ox cart, I wonder whether he realizes that every time the US pushes China to become independent in x, American firms lose the Chinese market for X, and later get to compete with Chinese X in the international market.
The above beast, developed entirely in China, is the first to use high-temperature superconducting magnets to keep the train floating just above the rails.
HTSC magnets are a Big Deal because they can achieve superconductivity using liquid nitrogen as coolant instead of liquid helium for classic superconductivity, this costing, say the Chinese, a fiftieth of the price of using helium.
The use of HTSC is very, very slick.
The train will extensively use carbon-fiber materials to keep weight down, suggesting that the Chinese cannot distinguish between a train and an airplane.
Asia Times “China’s Hydrogen Dream is taking Shape in Shandong”
“A detailed pilot plan being worked out to transform Shandong, a regional industrial powerhouse, into a “hydrogen society” holds out much hope of delivering on the green promise.”
The article, hard to summarize in a sentence, is worth reading.
As so often, the Chinese do things, try things, while the US talks, riots, imposes sanctions, sucks its thumb, and spends grimly on intercontinental nuclear bombers.
The American budget. After all, America is a Military Empire.
“Huawei is Developing Smart Roads Instead of Smart Cars”
Keep that in mind when the American news reports on Huawei phones. The phone business is but a small part of the Huawei industrial segment.
“Multiple sensors, cameras, and radars embedded in the road, traffic lights, and street signs help the bus to drive safely, while it in turn transmits information back to this network-“
China read Ed Snowden’s book on NSA’s snooping, realized it had a problem, and set out to correct it. If this spreads to other countries—see below—much of the world could go black to American intel agencies.
Ed Snowden
The Chinese may have thought of this.
“…colleagues will further expand the network by working with partners in Austria, Italy, Russia and Canada. The team is also developing low-cost satellites and ground stations for QKD.”
The last sentence is interesting. If China begins selling genuinely secure commo gear abroad, it is going to make a lot of Western intel agencies very unhappy.
Did I mention that the Chinese are a commercial people?
Further:
“Chinese scientists achieve quantum information masking, paving way for encrypted communication application.”
My knowledge of this might rise to the level of blank ignorance after a good night’s sleep and three cups of coffee. However, the achievement made the American technical press, and suggests Chinese seriousness about gaining privacy.
The video below shows how China constructs high-speed rail lines as if painting a stripe on a highway. <sarcasm>Since they can’t innovate, they have to get by with inventing things. </sarcasm>
“Over 10,000 trains and 927,000 containers were forwarded via the China-EU-China route in 2020, China Railways has announced. The current volume of traffic has grown by 98.3% year-to-year, covering 21 countries and 92 cities in Europe.”
America makes aircraft carriers. China sells stuff.
NikkeiAsia: “What China’s Rapidly Expanding Nuclear Industry Means for the West”
One Chinese reactor in Pakistan just went live, with another expected in a few months.
Says Nikkei,
“The Karachi reactor is just the latest of these to come onstream, with the World Nuclear Organization listing a dozen different projects at the development or planning stage across a dozen countries from Argentina to Egypt in its recent survey. Many more are under discussion.”
In addition, says Nikkei, China intends to have the whole industry from technology to materials indigenous to China and outside of American sanctions.
See above, about forcing China to make things themselves.
“Summary. China is quickly closing the once formidable lead the U.S. maintained on AI research.
Chinese researchers now publish more papers on AI and secure more patents than U.S. researchers do.
The country seems poised to become a leader in AI-empowered…”
Some argue that Chinese patents are of low quality.
Maybe so…
But don’t bet the college funds on it.
“China begins construction of world’s longest superconducting cable project”
“China’s first 35 kV high-temperature superconducting cable demonstration project has started construction by State Grid in Shanghai and it is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
This is the world’s largest transmission capacity, the longest distance, 2000A current the highest commercial 35 kV superconducting cable project.”
Regarding the 5G War;
Trump could have bought 5G from Huawei, gotten a sweetheart deal, great prices, factories in America, and so on.
Instead he banned Huawei from the US and then twisted arms of the vassal states of Europe.
Thus neither America or Europe has the service, but China is rolling it out fast.
Brilliant, Don.
This gives China a running start on smart factories, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and the like. As well as the rest of the world, while American allies are stuck with rapidly aging technology and substandard service.
“An almost entirely automated port in China, during unload of a container ship. “
“The port is an example of how operator China Merchants Group has been working to automate and mechanize more operations using ultrafast fifth-generation wireless technology.
By developing innovative ways to run the port as efficiently as possible, the company aims to accelerate overseas expansion.”
Aviation Week “Face It: The J-20 is a Fifth Generation Fighter”
Says AvWeek:
“Clearly, Chengdu’s engineers understand the foundation of fifth-generation design: the ability to attain situational awareness through advanced fused sensors while denying situational awareness to the adversary through stealth and electronic warfare.
The J-20 features an ambitious integrated avionics suite consisting of multispectral sensors that provide 360-deg. coverage.
This includes a large active, electronically scanned array radar designed by the 14th Research Institute, electro-optical distributed aperture system, electro-optical targeting system, electronic support measures system and possibly side-array radars.
“In a 2017 CNTV interview, J-20 pilot Zhang Hao said: “Thanks to the multiple sensors onboard the aircraft and the very advanced data fusion, the level of automation of J-20 is very high. . . . The battlefield has become more and more transparent for us.”
Most of the story is visible only if you have a subscription to AvWeek.
Asia Times: Tesla loses lead to local upstart in China’s EV market
The headline is kidding.
The car that is outselling Tesla is a $4,200 el cheapo for short-haul shopping and picking up the kids in the city.
Sexy as a truss ad, but…rather useful.
I’m telling you, put the college funds in this company, not truss ads. Made by an SAIC-GM partnership, majority owned by China, where it was designed and made.
It will be sold internationally.
“Unlike Tesla, which requires purpose-built charging stations, the Mini can be plugged into a home power system to charge, which takes about nine hours. It has a range of about 120 kilometers and a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour, according to the carmaker’s promotional materials.”
Designed and put into production in one year. (Did I mention that the Chinese are a commercial people?)
Reports Chinese design. How close it is to being ready for prime time is not clear, but it is flying. An inability to make high-end engines has been a problem for China.
China’s Y-20 strategic transport aircraft.
The WS’20 is a high-bypass turbofan of Chinese design.
Finally,
Global Times”, Beijing’s news site: “China’s trade volume increases 37% y-o-y in April, marking 11 consecutive months of positive growth”
Nuff said.
Conclusion
It’s difficult being an American in China. I see what is going on, and then I read the “news” out of America and its like some kind of parody of “Captain Hook”. It’s La-La-Land where everyone is in this real God-forsaken reality that just doesn’t exist.
People, the future belongs to China.
Do you know how easy it would be for me to make my children American citizens? Yup, I fill out a bunch of forms, show proof that I lived int eh USA for five years, provide documentation that my kids are genetically mine and then wait for Washington to approve after I pay the application fee. And Boom!
My kids are American citizens. All now subject to taxation no matter where they live, what they do, and tied to the the American government.
In twenty years…
…which nation will be healthier, stronger, and provide more opportunities in a safer environment?
The USA? Or China?
Do you really think so?
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Most people have never heard of the term “Rules Based Order” until the March 2021 meeting in Alaska between the United States and China. It was at that meeting where the United States demanded that China abide to American led, “Rules Based Order”, or suffer the consequences.
Well, up until that point in time, it was well understood that the world should follow the United Nations in global disputes. Every nation in the world would have their say at this one-world government body, and avoid conflicts, trade disputes and cultural errors.
The single outlier to this system has been the United States which has, since the 1970’s violated the UN charter at will. It has done so in the following manner;
If the UN agrees with American actions, then the USA will observe UN protocols.
If the UN disagrees with American actions, then America will ignore the UN.
This is known as “rubber stamping” in the United States. After a while it becomes the expected way of conducting business.
Rubber Stamp
A person or organizationthatautomaticallyapproves or endorses a policywithoutassessingitsmerit;also,such an approval or endorsement.Forexample,Thenominatingcommittee is merely a rubberstamp;theyapproveanyonethechairmannames , or Thedeangavehisrubberstamp to therecommendations of thetenurecommittee. Thismetaphorictermalludes to therubberprintingdeviceused to imprintthesamewordsoverandover.[Early1900s]
-The Free Dictionary
Which has been increasingly the case over the last few decades, accumulating to the Donald Trump administration which pretty much said that the UN was worthless and America will do what it it feels like, and the UN be damned.
The brash harshness of this reality was codified in American policy and made public at the March 2021 Alaska summit. Where as a “Rules Based Order” was demanded of China.
A Rules Based Order states…
America makes the rules.
You will follow and obey American rules.
You will not listen to the United Nations.
If you fail to obey American demands, America reserves the right to obliterate you.
…
Yikes!
It sounds so harsh.
Well… that’s because it is.
It is harsh.
But that’s EXACTLY what is going on, and thus it is no wonder why China, and Russia and the rest of the global community reacted so harshly to the fiasco that was the Alaska meeting.
A few weeks have passed, and people around the world are “getting their heads” around this situation. They have pretty much determined that the United States has decides to act on it’s own, and not follow the United Nations. This is known as “unilateralism“, and is very very dangerous. It is the thing that started World War I, World War II, and all genocides that has ever occurred in history.
Unilateralism
Unilateralism is any doctrine or agenda that supports one-sided action.
Such action may be in disregard for other parties, or as an expression of a commitment toward a direction which otherparties may find disagreeable.
As a word, unilateralism is attested from 1926, specifically relating to unilateral disarmament.
Thecurrent, broader meaning emerges in 1964. It stands in contrast with multilateralism, the pursuit of foreign policy goals alongside allies.
-Wikipedia
The following are three articles that describe what the rest of the world thinks of this posture by the Biden Administration in America today.
First Article.
This is a very timely and well written editorial that is “spot on” and demands reprinting. It’s one of those clear-as-day, and simple-as-shit, articles that takes a complex issue and spells it out in black and white as plain as day.
I enjoyed reading this, and couldn’t wait to post on MM. It was forwarded to me by a dear friend and it is truly worth every consideration. Of course, it comes from here, all credit to the author and please take note that it was modified to fit this venue for editing purposes. So without much fanfare, here’s the article…
Rules-Based Order’ Is Cover for Destructive Western Hegemonic Ambitions
Hegemony
...ascendancy or domination of one power or state within a league, confederation, etc., or of one social class over others
Editorial
The future of world peace and security depends on the vast majority of nations succeeding in upholding the UN against Western malign efforts.
Since Joe Biden became U.S. president, the new administration in Washington has made repeated references to “rules-based order” in international relations, accusing Russia and China of undermining this putative order.
This is as audacious as a poacher appointing himself to be the gamekeeper. For there is no power as rogue and reckless as the United States and its Western minions when it comes to eviscerating international law. The litany of illegal wars, destroyed nations, and inhumane economic sanctions is testimony to that.
However, what is going on here is a daring cosmetic facelift for the same old ugly conduct. The Biden administration’s lofty rhetoric is meant to distinguish the new administration from the previous Trump White House and its “America First” mantra.
President Biden and his aides are trying to project a seeming return to multilateralism as opposed to Trump’s in-your-face nationalism. And so we hear a lot about the U.S. vowing to uphold the rules-based order.
The difference is merely rhetorical.
The consistent reality is that the United States and its Western allies are seeking to pursue a unilateral approach to international relations. The Biden administration is just a little more adept compared with Team Trump at public relations and media spin to cover this reality of American hegemonic ambitions.
Lest we forget, hegemonic ambitions are anathema to a democratic world order based on equality among nations and universal respect for international law.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov nailed the charade this week in public comments following a meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Moscow.
“We noted that Russia sees some Western countries’ attempts to promote unilateral approaches in circumvention of the established collective mechanisms for developing international law-based solutions as one of today’s key challenges. We consider developing certain rules behind the back of the greater part of the international community and then imposing them on others as universal norms unacceptable and dangerous practice.”
Lavrov went on with more biting comments:
“We are witnessing situational coalitions and partnerships being created outside the UN, which arrogate to themselves the right to speak and act on behalf of everyone else”.
This was a veiled reference to the United States trying to deploy the G7, NATO, the Quad, Five Eyes, and so on, as hostile geopolitical instruments to hamper Russia and China.
What is happening at an accelerated rate under the Biden administration is highly corrosive to international law and threatening global security.
The United Nations and the global architecture of international relations established after the Second World War are being substituted by Western ad hoc definition of rules.
The so-called “rules-based order” is in reality rules defined by the U.S. and its allies which make others conform to their desired order.
As Lavrov points out, this is tantamount to usurping the United Nations, the UN Charter and the already existing body of international law by a wholly new Western-defined regimen which is then imposed on others.
Such an outcome would be a complete negation of the postwar order that has existed.
Far from “order”, it is a dive into disorder and confrontation, the like of which preceded the UN in the 1930s leading to world war.
Russia, China and other nations are well aware of the deception being perpetrated by the United States and its European and other Western allies.
Last week in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Lavrov elucidated further the bankrupt rationale of the Western powers.
It is worth quoting him at length. He said:
“Realizing that it is impossible to impose their unilateral or bloc priorities on other states within the framework of the UN, the leading Western countries have tried to reverse the process of forming a polycentric world and slow down the course of history…
“Toward this end, the concept of the rules-based order is advanced as a substitute for international law. It should be noted that international law already is a body of rules, but rules agreed at universal platforms and reflecting consensus or broad agreement. The West’s goal is to oppose the collective efforts of all members of the world community with other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else. We only see harm in such actions that bypass the UN and seek to usurp the only decision-making process that can claim global relevance.”
The supreme irony is that virtue-signaling Western powers are accusing Russia and China of undermining international “order” when they are the ones who are wielding an axe at the only truly universal system of multilateralism – the United Nations and the UN Charter.
The Charter, established after the war in 1945, mandates all nations to respect equal sovereignty, to repudiate illegal military force without the authorization of the UN Security Council, and to desist from interfering in the internal affairs of other states.
The unilateral use of military force and imposition of economic sanctions against other nations has become a routine, egregious violation of the UN Charter by the United States and its Western allies.
If the United States and others really did believe in upholding rules and order then they would abide by the only universally recognized rules of international law that already exist as enshrined in the UN Charter.
It is because Russia and China are strong enough to insist on the UN Charter and international law…
…that the rogue states of the U.S. and its Western accomplices are compelled to make up other rules in order to satisfy their dictatorial hegemonic desires.
In attempting such a de facto coup against the United Nations, the Western powers are endangering global security. They are trying to turn the clock back to a law of the jungle era akin to the 1930s.
The future of world peace and security depends on Russia, China and the vast majority of nations succeeding in upholding the UN against Western malign efforts.
How paradoxical is arrogant Western propaganda.
Second Article
There’s a lot of nonsense on Zero Hedge, with a lot of “doom porn”, but many of the contributors have very good things to say. Many were refugees from the Free Republic platform that kicked them off for not touting a pro-America-always line in their articles.
The rapidly shifting international distribution of power creates problems that can only be resolved with real diplomacy. The great powers must recognize competing national interests, followed by efforts to reach compromises and find common solutions.
Over the past week the Biden administration has intensively reached out to Europe to revitalize the transatlantic alliance.
In the following on-topic interview, Professor Glenn Diesen explains how the United States is opposed to the emerging reality of a multipolar world because of its winner-takes-all ideology. In doing so, Washington is predisposed to antagonize and militarize relations, primarily with Russia and China.
The confrontational policy is aimed at driving a wedge between Europe on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other.
The problem for Washington is that such a confrontational policy is unfeasible in a multipolar world.
European allies are pressured to align with the U.S., but geoeconomic realities inevitably mean there is a practical limit to the American strategy.
Using rhetoric about “values” and “human rights” is just a ploy to gain a false moral authority over rivals.
The West’s unilateral use of sanctions is the corollary.
But such a strategy is only further forging multipolar reality which is leading to weakness and self-isolation for the United States – and the European Union if the latter chooses to go down that futile route.
Professor Diesen contends that without compromise and mutual respect among world powers, the ultimate risk could be catastrophic war.
And he says the onus is on the United States and Europe to recognize competing national interests beyond their own, followed by efforts to reach compromises and find common solutions.
Glenn Diesen is a professor at University of South-Eastern Norway. He is also editor of ‘Russia in Global Affairs’ and is a contributing expert at the Valdai Discussion Club. His research focus is the geoeconomics of Greater Eurasia and the crisis of liberalism. He specializes in Russia’s approach to European and Eurasian integration, as well as West-China dynamics. He is the author of several books: ‘The Decay of Western Civilisation and Resurgence of Russia: Between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft’ (2018); ‘Russia’s Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia’ (2017); and ‘EU and NATO relations with Russia: After the collapse of the Soviet Union’ (2015).
His latest two books are ‘Russian Conservatism’ (January 2021, see this link); and ‘Great Power Politics in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (March 2021, see this link).
* * *
Interview
Question: The Biden administration is making strenuous efforts at rallying Europe and NATO to take a more adversarial position toward Russia and China: what are Washington’s geopolitical objectives?
Glenn Diesen: Biden’s “America is back” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” both aim to reverse the relative decline of the United States in the international system. While Trump believed that providing collective goods to its allies as the cost of a hegemon was making the U.S. lose its competitiveness, Biden believes the U.S. must rally its allies against rising adversaries. The geopolitical objectives remain constant: preserving a dominant position for the U.S. in the international system.
The main challenge to U.S. leadership position is geoeconomic as its rivals are developing alternative technologies, strategic industries, transportation corridors and financial instruments.
However, the U.S. has not been successful in converting the security dependence of allies into geoeconomic loyalty.
This is evident as the European Union uses Chinese technologies and capital, and Germany is working with Russia to construct the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
There are strong incentives for the U.S. to militarize a geoeconomic rivalry as it strengthens solidarity and loyalty among allies.
NATO is therefore a good instrument even though Russian tanks are not heading towards Warsaw and Chinese troops are not about to invade Paris.
Question: Will Washington succeed in pushing what appears to be a new Cold War drive?
Glenn Diesen: Washington is certainly worsening relations with both Moscow and Beijing, although it is not clear that they will get the Europeans to follow their lead.
The Europeans share many of America’s concerns, although they do not wish to retreat under U.S. protection in a new U.S.-China bipolar system.
The EU has defined its interest as pursuing “strategic autonomy” to develop “European sovereignty”.
U.S. efforts to rally the Europeans against Russia and China rely on rhetoric over security challenges or human rights issues, although it is meant to translate into reducing economic connectivity with the two Eurasian giants.
However, the interests of the Europeans and the U.S. diverge over China, and the Europeans are also growing more concerned over pushing Russia towards China.
Question: You’ve mentioned before how the United States’ goals are: a) to prevent Europe from partnering with Russia for energy trade; and b) to prevent Europe partnering with China for new technology, trade and investment. Is such a divisive U.S. aim possible to achieve in a multipolar, integrated global economy?
Glenn Diesen: U.S. policies aim to prevent the emergence of a multipolar order.
In my opinion, this is a misguided objective as Washington must adjust to the changing international distribution of power.
I have argued that the U.S. is confronted with a dilemma – it can either facilitate and shape a multipolar system where the U.S. is the “first among equals”, or it can aim to contain rising powers to extend its hegemonic position although then a multipolar system will emerge in direct opposition to the U.S.
By containing the rise of both Russia and China, the U.S. encourages Moscow and Beijing to define their partnership often in opposition to the U.S.
The global economy is subsequently fragmenting.
The geoeconomic dominance of the U.S. has rested on [1] its leading technologies that buttress its strategic industries, [2] control over the maritime corridors of the world, and [3] control over the main development banks and the world’s trade/reserve currency.
Russia and China have therefore developed a strategic partnership [1] to develop their own technological ecosystems, [2] new Eurasian transportation corridors by land and sea, and [3] new financial instruments such as banks, payment systems and de-dollarizing their trade.
The U.S. will therefore discover that the effort to isolate China and Russia will result in the U.S. isolating itself.
Question: You’ve also mentioned that the United States may be trying a re-run of the Nixon-era policy from the 1970s of forcing a division between China and Russia. Is such a U.S. objective possible today?
Glenn Diesen: It seems highly unlikely. Nixon was able to split the Soviet Union and China by reaching out to the weaker part, China, based on mutual misgivings towards the power of the Soviet Union. The U.S. therefore accommodated the weaker adversary to balance the stronger adversary.
Today, the stronger adversary is China and the U.S. would therefore have to reach out to Russia. Beijing has no reason to turn against Moscow as Russia does not pose a threat to the Chinese, and Russia’s partnership is vital for China’s geoeconomic rise.
Much can be gained from reaching out to Moscow, although it will be very difficult, and Russia will not turn against China.
The U.S. leading role in Europe is reliant on excluding Russia from the continent, and the anti-Russian sentiments in the U.S. make it impossible to find common ground. Also, it is hard to overstate the resentment in Moscow over relentless NATO expansionism towards its borders.
Future historians will likely recognize the historical blunder of not accommodating Russia in Europe. After the Cold War, Russia’s principal foreign policy objective was to be included in a Greater Europe. The remaining hopes for incremental integration with Europe ended in 2014, when the West supported the coup in Ukraine.
Russia is now pursuing the Greater Eurasia Initiative and its leading partner toward that end is China.
Reaching out to Moscow will enable Russia to diversify its economic relations and avoid excessive reliance on China, although Russia will not join any partnership aimed against China.
Question: The Biden administration’s overtures for a stronger transatlantic alliance and a more unified NATO appear to be lapped up by various European leaders. For example at the NATO summit of foreign ministers in Brussels on March 23-24, the French top diplomat Jean-Yves Le Drian gushed about a renewed alliance under Biden, declaring that NATO had “rediscovered” itself. Why are European politicians seemingly so ready to appease Washington even when it is at the cost of undermining their own relations with Russia and China?
Glenn Diesen: The Europeans only developed unity after the Second World War under U.S. leadership.
Europe has thus only existed as a cohesive sub-region within the larger transatlantic region.
During the Cold War this partnership was directed towards balancing the Soviet Union, and after the Cold War the trans-Atlantic partnership enabled collective hegemony. The Europeans have prospered under U.S. leadership and been able to develop regional European autonomy.
The multipolar system challenges the foundation for the internal cohesion of both Europe and the trans-Atlantic region.
On one hand, the Europeans want to align their policies with the U.S. to preserve solidarity within Europe and the West.
On the other hand, the Europeans desire “strategic autonomy” as they recognize that U.S. and EU interests diverge in a multipolar world.
Confronting Russia and China weakens the economic competitiveness of Europe and increases its dependence on the U.S.
Question: Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking during a visit to China this week, remarked that the European Union had unilaterally destroyed relations with Russia due to recent actions, presumably imposing sanctions. Would you agree that the EU has taken unprecedented harmful steps against Russia?
Glenn Diesen: Yes. The sanctions do not provide a solution, rather they undermine the possibility for a partnership to find common solutions. Sanctions are designed to force Russia to make unilateral concessions as opposed to finding mutually acceptable solutions through compromise.
It must be recognized that every conflict has two sides, yet Brussels tends to treat all conflicts as transgressions by Russia that must be punished and corrected by the EU.
I often make the argument that Russia is largely a status-quo power in Europe that reacts to Western revisionism.
Russia intervened in Crimea in response to the West’s support for the coup, and Russia intervened in Syria in response to Western efforts to topple the government.
The problem behind these conflicts is that Russian security interests were never included, and the sanctions are a mere extension of this hegemonic mentality.
The sanctions are condemning Europe to reduced relevance in the multipolar world. A divided Europe creates systemic pressures for the EU to retreat under U.S. protection, and Russia must similarly diversify its economy away from Europe and instead align itself closer with China.
Question: Do you see any prospect of the European Union waking up to the realization that the bloc needs to repair relations with Russia, and China for that matter? Presumably that would require the EU asserting geopolitical independence from the United States, and the question is: has Europe’s political class got the will or even the imagination for this?
Glenn Diesen: How can relations be repaired?
The source of all problems with Russia was the failure to reach a mutually acceptable post-Cold War settlement. Efforts to create a Europe-without-Russia inevitably became a Europe-against-Russia.
Initially, Russian apprehensions could be ignored as Russia was weak and did not have anywhere else to go. This is no longer the case.
The EU can either treat the underlying problem of excluding the largest state in Europe from Europe, or it can aim to treat the symptoms that include Russia’s pivot to the east – primarily China.
Both France and Germany have become more vocal about the folly of continuing to push Russia towards China. France has been more ambitious in terms of rethinking relations with Russia to resolve the underlying problems, while Germany has been more focused on treating the symptoms by maintaining economic connectivity with Russia.
What can the EU do?
Suspending NATO expansion towards Russian borders or ending anti-Russian sanctions would undermine both EU and NATO solidarity as it is opposed by the U.S. and certain Central and Eastern European countries. The EU and the West were not designed for a multipolar world and so risk its internal cohesion no matter what is done.
The EU is not demonstrating any intentions of altering its subject-object relationship with Russia, and seeking solutions through mutual compromise. When the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell went to Moscow last month, the effort to improve relations with Russia was therefore limited to lecturing Russia about its domestic affairs and transgressions in international affairs, which, it was inferred, Russia should correct in order to earn the EU’s forgiveness and improve relations.
Question: Finally, are you concerned that deteriorating international tensions could lead to war?
Glenn Diesen: Yes, we should all be concerned.
Tensions keep escalating and there are increasing conflicts that could spark a major war. A war could break out over Syria, Ukraine, the Black Sea, the Arctic, the South China Sea and other regions.
What makes all of these conflicts dangerous is that they are informed by a winner-takes-all logic.
Wishful thinking or active push towards a collapse of Russia, China, the EU or the U.S. is also an indication of the winner-takes-all mentality.
Under these conditions, the large powers are more prepared to accept greater risks at a time when the international system is transforming.
The rhetoric of upholding liberal democratic values also has clear zero-sum undertones as it implies that Russia and China must accept the moral authority of the West and commit to unilateral concessions.
The rapidly shifting international distribution of power creates problems that can only be resolved with real diplomacy. The great powers must recognize competing national interests, followed by efforts to reach compromises and find common solutions.
The only solution for this coming fiasco is for the rest of the world to come together and isolate the dangerous elements; the unilateral American nationalists from destroying the world.
Thus, now for this gem…
Centuries-old Washington’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ is COVER for Deceptive, Destructive, & Hypocritical Hegemonic Ambitions
SCFon
The future of world peace and security depends on the vast majority of nations succeeding in upholding the UN against Western malign efforts.
Since Joe Biden became U.S. president, the new administration in Washington has made repeated references to “rules-based order” in international relations, accusing Russia and China of undermining this putative order.
This is as audacious as a poacher appointing himself to be the gamekeeper.
For there is no power as rogue and reckless as the United States and its Western minions when it comes to eviscerating international law.
The litany of illegal wars, destroyed nations, and inhumane economic sanctions is testimony to that.
However, what is going on here is a daring cosmetic facelift for the same old ugly conduct.
The Biden administration’s lofty rhetoric is meant to distinguish the new administration from the previous Trump White House and its “America First” mantra.
President Biden and his aides are trying to project a seeming return to multilateralism as opposed to Trump’s in-your-face nationalism.
And so we hear a lot about the U.S. vowing to uphold the rules-based order.
The difference is merely rhetorical.
The consistent reality is that the United States and its Western allies are seeking to pursue a unilateral approach to international relations.
The Biden administration is just a little more adept compared with Team Trump at public relations and media spin to cover this reality of American hegemonic ambitions.
Lest we forget, hegemonic ambitions are anathema to a democratic world order based on equality among nations and universal respect for international law.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov nailed the charade this week in public comments following a meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Moscow.
“We noted that Russia sees some Western countries’ attempts to promote unilateral approaches in circumvention of the established collective mechanisms for developing international law-based solutions as one of today’s key challenges. We consider developing certain rules behind the back of the greater part of the international community and then imposing them on others as universal norms unacceptable and dangerous practice.”
Lavrov went on with more biting comments:
“We are witnessing situational coalitions and partnerships being created outside the UN, which arrogate to themselves the right to speak and act on behalf of everyone else”.
This was a veiled reference to the United States trying to deploy the G7, NATO, the Quad, Five Eyes, and so on, as hostile geopolitical instruments to hamper Russia and China.
What is happening at an accelerated rate under the Biden administration is highly corrosive to international law and threatening global security.
The United Nations and the global architecture of international relations established after the Second World War are being substituted by Western ad hoc definition of rules.
The so-called “rules-based order” is in reality rules defined by the U.S. and its allies which make others conform to their desired order.
As Lavrov points out, this is tantamount to usurping the United Nations, the UN Charter and the already existing body of international law by a wholly new Western-defined regimen which is then imposed on others.
Such an outcome would be a complete negation of the postwar order that has existed.
Far from “order”, it is a dive into disorder and confrontation, the like of which preceded the UN in the 1930s leading to world war.
Russia, China and other nations are well aware of the deception being perpetrated by the United States and its European and other Western allies.
Last week in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Lavrov elucidated further the bankrupt rationale of the Western powers.
It is worth quoting him at length.
He said:
“Realizing that it is impossible to impose their unilateral or bloc priorities on other states within the framework of the UN, the leading Western countries have tried to reverse the process of forming a polycentric world and slow down the course of history…”
“Toward this end, the concept of the rules-based order is advanced as a substitute for international law. It should be noted that international law already is a body of rules, but rules agreed at universal platforms and reflecting consensus or broad agreement. The West’s goal is to oppose the collective efforts of all members of the world community with other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else. We only see harm in such actions that bypass the UN and seek to usurp the only decision-making process that can claim global relevance.”
The supreme irony is that virtue-signaling Western powers are accusing Russia and China of undermining international “order” when they are the ones who are wielding an axe at the only truly universal system of multilateralism – the United Nations and the UN Charter.
The Charter, established after the war in 1945, mandates all nations to respect equal sovereignty, to repudiate illegal military force without the authorization of the UN Security Council, and to desist from interfering in the internal affairs of other states.
The unilateral use of military force and imposition of economic sanctions against other nations has become a routine, egregious violation of the UN Charter by the United States and its Western allies.
If the United States and others really did believe in upholding rules and order then they would abide by the only universally recognized rules of international law that already exist as enshrined in the UN Charter.
It is because Russia and China are strong enough to insist on the UN Charter and international law that the rogue states of the U.S. and its Western accomplices are compelled to make up other rules in order to satisfy their dictatorial hegemonic desires. In attempting such a de facto coup against the United Nations, the Western powers are endangering global security.
They are trying to turn the clock back to a law of the jungle era akin to the 1930s.
The future of world peace and security depends on Russia, China and the vast majority of nations succeeding in upholding the UN against Western malign efforts.
How paradoxical is arrogant Western propaganda.
***
Conclusion
And there you have it. The United States has decided to act aggressively as the sole remaining Military Empire. It demands that the rest of the world do as it demands or it will devastate the targeted nation with it’s large and enormous military.
The rest of the world are rightly afraid.
They are waiting, apparently for some sanity to return to Washington DC, or barring that internal discord that will force the American government to focus on domestic matters at home.
But, the major governments are not taking any chances. You can rest assured that if the “mad dog” of the neighborhood breaks from it’s chain and starts biting the neighborhood children that the local “dog catcher” will be called in to put the rabid dog down. (Kill him completely.)
It’s a testy time for certain.
Do you want more?
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Fearless, as Jet Li's Fearless in the United Kingdom and in the United States, is a 2006 Chinese-Hong Kong martial arts film. It is loosely based on the life of Huo Yuanjia, a Chinese martial artist who challenged foreign fighters in highly publicised events, restoring pride and nationalism to China at a time when Western imperialism and Japanese manipulation were eroding the country in the final years of the Qing Dynasty before the birth of the Republic of China.
Lesson One.
This is one of the most important points that Robert Greene has taught us. Once a student, always a student until the day your mentor leaves. For a true master is a great ally, but an even worst foe. Be constantly on guard for your actions, and beware of your environment, least you damage something that has developed to be part of your very being.
LAW 1
NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER
JUDGMENT
Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s finance minister in the first years of his reign, was a generous man who loved lavish parties, pretty women, and poetry. He also loved money, for he led an extravagant lifestyle.
Fouquet was clever and very much indispensable to the king, so when the prime minister, Jules Mazarin, died, in 1661, the finance minister expected to be named the successor. Instead, the king decided to abolish the position.
This and other signs made Fouquet suspect that he was falling out of favor, and so he decided to ingratiate himself with the king by staging the most spectacular party the world had ever seen. The party’s ostensible purpose would be to commemorate the completion of Fouquet’s château, Vaux-le- Vicomte, but its real function was to pay tribute to the king, the guest of honor.
The most brilliant nobility of Europe and some of the greatest minds of the time—La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné attended the party. Molière wrote a play for the occasion, in which he himself was to perform at the evening’s conclusion. The party began with a lavish seven- course dinner, featuring foods from the Orient never before tasted in France, as well as new dishes created especially for the night. The meal was accompanied with music commissioned by Fouquet to honor the king.
After dinner there was a promenade through the château’s gardens. The grounds and fountains of Vaux-le-Vicomte were to be the inspiration for Versailles.
Fouquet personally accompanied the young king through the geometrically aligned arrangements of shrubbery and flower beds.
Arriving at the gardens’ canals, they witnessed a fireworks display, which was followed by the performance of Molière’s play.
The party ran well into the night and everyone agreed it was the most amazing affair they had ever attended.
The next day, Fouquet was arrested by the king’s head musketeer, D’Artagnan. Three months later he went on trial for stealing from the country’s treasury. (Actually, most of the stealing he was accused of he had done on the king’s behalf and with the king’s permission.)
Fouquet was found guilty and sent to the most isolated prison in France, high in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he spent the last twenty years of his life in solitary confinement.
Interpretation
Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a proud and arrogant man who wanted to be the center of attention at all times; he could not countenance being outdone in lavishness by anyone, and certainly not his finance minister.
To succeed Fouquet, Louis chose Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a man famous for his parsimony and for giving the dullest parties in Paris. Colbert made sure that any money liberated from the treasury went straight into Louis’s hands.
With the money, Louis built a palace even more magnificent than Fouquet’s —the glorious palace of Versailles. He used the same architects, decorators, and garden designer. And at Versailles, Louis hosted parties even more extravagant than the one that cost Fouquet his freedom.
Let us examine the situation.
The evening of the party, as Fouquet presented spectacle on spectacle to Louis, each more magnificent than the one before, he imagined the affair as demonstrating his loyalty and devotion to the king.
Not only did he think the party would put him back in the king’s favor, he thought it would show his good taste, his connections, and his popularity, making him indispensable to the king and demonstrating that he would make an excellent prime minister.
Instead, however, each new spectacle, each appreciative smile bestowed by the guests on Fouquet, made it seem to Louis that his own friends and subjects were more charmed by the finance minister than by the king himself, and that Fouquet was actually flaunting his wealth and power.
Rather than flattering Louis XIV, Fouquet’s elaborate party offended the king’s vanity.
Louis would not admit this to anyone, of course—instead, he found a convenient excuse to rid himself of a man who had inadvertently made him feel insecure.
Such is the fate, in some form or other, of all those who unbalance the master’s sense of self, poke holes in his vanity, or make him doubt his pre- eminence.
When the evening began, Fouquet was at the top of the world.
By the time it had ended, he was at the bottom.
Voltaire, 1694-1778
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In the early 1600s, the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo found himself in a precarious position.
He depended on the generosity of great rulers to support his research, and so, like all Renaissance scientists, he would sometimes make gifts of his inventions and discoveries to the leading patrons of the time.
Once, for instance, he presented a military compass he had invented to the Duke of Gonzaga.
Then he dedicated a book explaining the use of the compass to the Medicis.
Both rulers were grateful, and through them Galileo was able to find more students to teach.
No matter how great the discovery, however, his patrons usually paid him with gifts, not cash.
This made for a life of constant insecurity and dependence. There must be an easier way, he thought.
Galileo hit on a new strategy in 1610, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter. Instead of dividing the discovery among his patrons—giving one the telescope he had used, dedicating a book to another, and so on—as he had done in the past, he decided to focus exclusively on the Medicis.
He chose the Medicis for one reason: Shortly after Cosimo I had established the Medici dynasty, in 1540, he had made Jupiter, the mightiest of the gods, the Medici symbol—a symbol of a power that went beyond politics and banking, one linked to ancient Rome and its divinities.
Galileo turned his discovery of Jupiter’s moons into a cosmic event honoring the Medicis’ greatness.
Shortly after the discovery, he announced that “the bright stars [the moons of Jupiter] offered themselves in the heavens” to his telescope at the same time as Cosimo II’s enthronement.
He said that the number of the moons—four—harmonized with the number of the Medicis (Cosimo II had three brothers) and that the moons orbited Jupiter as these four sons revolved around Cosimo I, the dynasty’s founder.
More than coincidence, this showed that the heavens themselves reflected the ascendancy of the Medici family.
After he dedicated the discovery to the Medicis, Galileo commissioned an emblem representing Jupiter sitting on a cloud with the four stars circling about him, and presented this to Cosimo II as a symbol of his link to the stars.
In 1610 Cosimo II made Galileo his official court philosopher and mathematician, with a full salary. For a scientist this was the coup of a lifetime.
The days of begging for patronage were over.
Interpretation
In one stroke, Galileo gained more with his new strategy than he had in years of begging.
The reason is simple: All masters want to appear more brilliant than other people.
They do not care about science or empirical truth or the latest invention ; they care about their name and their glory.
Galileo gave the Medicis infinitely more glory by linking their name with cosmic forces than he had by making them the patrons of some new scientific gadget or discovery.
Scientists are not spared the vagaries of court life and patronage.
They too must serve masters who hold the purse strings. And their great intellectual powers can make the master feel insecure, as if he were only there to supply the funds—an ugly, ignoble job.
The producer of a great work wants to feel he is more than just the provider of the financing. He wants to appear creative and powerful, and also more important than the work produced in his name.
Instead of insecurity you must give him glory. Galileo did not challenge the intellectual authority of the Medicis with his discovery, or make them feel inferior in any way; by literally aligning them with the stars, he made them shine brilliantly among the courts of Italy.
He did not outshine the master, he made the master outshine all others.
KEYS TO POWER
Everyone has insecurities.
When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity. This is to be expected.
You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others.
With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that life has changed much since the days of Louis XIV and the Medicis.
Those who attain high standing in life are like kings and queens: They want to feel secure in their positions, and superior to those around them in intelligence, wit, and charm.
It is a deadly but common misperception to believe that by displaying and vaunting your gifts and talents, you are winning the master’s affection.
He may feign appreciation, but at his first opportunity he will replace you with someone less intelligent, less attractive, less threatening, just as Louis XIV replaced the sparkling Fouquet with the bland Colbert. And as with Louis, he will not admit the truth, but will find an excuse to rid himself of your presence.
This Law involves two rules that you must realize. First, you can inadvertently outshine a master simply by being yourself. There are masters who are more insecure than others, monstrously insecure; you may naturally outshine them by your charm and grace.
No one had more natural talents than Astorre Manfredi, prince of Faenza.
The most handsome of all the young princes of Italy, he captivated his subjects with his generosity and open spirit.
In the year 1500, Cesare Borgia laid siege to Faenza.
When the city surrendered, the citizens expected the worst from the cruel Borgia, who, however, decided to spare the town: He simply occupied its fortress, executed none of its citizens, and allowed Prince Manfredi, eighteen at the time, to remain with his court, in complete freedom.
A few weeks later, though, soldiers hauled Astorre Manfredi away to a Roman prison.
A year after that, his body was fished out of the River Tiber, a stone tied around his neck.
Borgia justified the horrible deed with some sort of trumped-up charge of treason and conspiracy, but the real problem was that he was notoriously vain and insecure.
The young man was outshining him without even trying.
Given Manfredi’s natural talents, the prince’s mere presence made Borgia seem less attractive and charismatic.
The lesson is simple: If you cannot help being charming and superior, you must learn to avoid such monsters of vanity.
Either that, or find a way to mute your good qualities when in the company of a Cesare Borgia.
Second, never imagine that because the master loves you, you can do anything you want.
Entire books could be written about favorites who fell out of favor by taking their status for granted, for daring to outshine.
In late- sixteenth-century Japan, the favorite of Emperor Hideyoshi was a man called Sen no Rikyu.
The premier artist of the tea ceremony, which had become an obsession with the nobility, he was one of Hideyoshi’s most trusted advisers, had his own apartment in the palace, and was honored throughout Japan.
Yet in 1591, Hideyoshi had him arrested and sentenced to death.
Rikyu took his own life, instead.
The cause for his sudden change of fortune was discovered later: It seems that Rikyu, former peasant and later court favorite, had had a wooden statue made of himself wearing sandals (a sign of nobility) and posing loftily. He had had this statue placed in the most important temple inside the palace gates, in clear sight of the royalty who often would pass by.
To Hideyoshi this signified that Rikyu had no sense of limits. Presuming that he had the same rights as those of the highest nobility, he had forgotten that his position depended on the emperor, and had come to believe that he had earned it on his own.
This was an unforgivable miscalculation of his own importance and he paid for it with his life.
Remember the following: Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.
Knowing the dangers of outshining your master, you can turn this Law to your advantage.
First you must flatter and puff up your master.
Overt flattery can be effective but has its limits; it is too direct and obvious, and looks bad to other courtiers.
Discreet flattery is much more powerful. If you are more intelligent than your master, for example, seem the opposite: Make him appear more intelligent than you. Act naive. Make it seem that you need his expertise. Commit harmless mistakes that will not hurt you in the long run but will give you the chance to ask for his help. Masters adore such requests. A master who cannot bestow on you the gifts of his experience may direct rancor and ill will at you instead.
If your ideas are more creative than your master’s, ascribe them to him, in as public a manner as possible.
Make it clear that your advice is merely an echo of his advice.
If you surpass your master in wit, it is okay to play the role of the court jester, but do not make him appear cold and surly by comparison.
Tone down your humor if necessary, and find ways to make him seem the dispenser of amusement and good cheer.
If you are naturally more sociable and generous than your master, be careful not to be the cloud that blocks his radiance from others.
He must appear as the sun around which everyone revolves, radiating power and brilliance, the center of attention.
If you are thrust into the position of entertaining him, a display of your limited means may win you his sympathy. Any attempt to impress him with your grace and generosity can prove fatal: Learn from Fouquet or pay the price.
In all of these cases it is not a weakness to disguise your strengths if in the end they lead to power.
By letting others outshine you, you remain in control, instead of being a victim of their insecurity.
This will all come in handy the day you decide to rise above your inferior status.
If, like Galileo, you can make your master shine even more in the eyes of others, then you are a godsend and you will be instantly promoted.
Image:
The Stars in the Sky. There can be only one sun at a time. Never obscure the sunlight, or rival the sun’s brilliance; rather, fade into the sky and find ways to heighten the master star’s intensity.
Authority:
Avoid outshining the master. All superiority is odious, but the superiority of a subject over his prince is not only stupid, it is fatal. This is a lesson that the stars in the sky teach us—they may be related to the sun, and just as brilliant, but they never appear in her company.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
You cannot worry about upsetting every person you come across, but you must be selectively cruel.
If your superior is a falling star, there is nothing to fear from outshining him.
Do not be merciful—your master had no such scruples in his own cold-blooded climb to the top.
Gauge his strength.
If he is weak, discreetly hasten his downfall: Outdo, outcharm, outsmart him at key moments.
If he is very weak and ready to fall, let nature take its course.
Do not risk outshining a feeble superior—it might appear cruel or spiteful. But if your master is firm in his position, yet you know yourself to be the more capable, bide your time and be patient.
It is the natural course of things that power eventually fades and weakens. Your master will fall someday, and if you play it right, you will outlive and someday outshine him.
Conclusion
We are often nothing if we act alone, but we can achieve greatness if we form a bond with a group of people.
Within those people are those of great skill, knowledge, experience and ability. You can use their talents for the greater good of the group. You can also learn from them and then in tern become proficient as they.
However, when you are in a group, you must never outshine anyone. You must fit within the group and all praises o to the group, not to the individual stars. Once a group of hard-working individuals are ignored by a singular member, the negative emotions of human greet, envy, lust and others start to corrupt the group. It can harm everyone.
Be careful of what you do, and be humble in your assigned position in life.
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Undoubtedly the woman who had come to epitomize what we recognize today as "celebrity", Zsa Zsa Gabor, is better known for her many marriages, personal appearances, her "dahlink" catchphrase, her actions, life gossip, and quotations on men, rather than her film career.
Perhaps you know her better as “Lisa” on the 1960’s television sit-com “Green Acres”.
Ah. Lisa darlink…
“Lisa” on the 1960’s television sit-com “Green Acres”.
Anyways, for her, and just about everyone that you read about in the “news” today obey this law listed herein. It’s important, and it gave Donald Trump the Presidency of the United States.
LAW 6
COURT ATTENTION AT ALL COST
JUDGMENT
Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.
PART I: SURROUND YOUR NAME WITH THE SENSATIONAL AND SCANDALOUS
Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial image. Court scandal. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention—notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
P. T. Barnum, America’s premier nineteenth-century showman, started his career as an assistant to the owner of a circus, Aaron Turner.
In 1836 the circus stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, for a series of performances.
On the morning of opening day, Barnum took a stroll through town, wearing a new black suit.
People started to follow him.
Someone in the gathering crowd shouted out that he was the Reverend Ephraim K. Avery, infamous as a man acquitted of the charge of murder but still believed guilty by most Americans.
The angry mob tore off Barnum’s suit and was ready to lynch him.
After desperate appeals, Barnum finally convinced them to follow him to the circus, where he could verify his identity.
THE WASP AND THE PRINCE
A wasp named Pin Tail was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous.
So one day he entered the kirrg’s palace and stung the little prince, who was in bed.
The prince awoke with loud cries.
The king and his courtiers rushed in to see what had happened.
The prince was yelling as the wasp stung him again and again.
The courtiers tried to catchthe wasp, and each in turn was stung.
The whole royal household rushed in,the news soon spread, and people flocked to the palace.
The city was in an uproar, all business suspended.
Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, “A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost.”
INDIAN FABLE
Once there, old Turner confirmed that this was all a practical joke—he himself had spread the rumor that Barnum was Avery.
The crowd dispersed, but Barnum, who had nearly been killed, was not amused.
He wanted to know what could have induced his boss to play such a trick. “My dear Mr. Barnum,” Turner replied, “it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to ensure success is notoriety.”
And indeed everyone in town was talking about the joke, and the circus was packed that night and every night it stayed in Annapolis.
Barnum had learned a lesson he would never forget.
Barnum’s first big venture of his own was the American Museum—a collection of curiosities, located in New York.
One day a beggar approached Barnum in the street.
Instead of giving him money, Barnum decided to employ him.
Taking him back to the museum, he gave the man five bricks and told him to make a slow circuit of several blocks.
At certain points he was to lay down a brick on the sidewalk, always keeping one brick in hand.
On the return journey he was to replace each brick on the street with the one he held.
Meanwhile he was to remain serious of countenance and to answer no questions.
Once back at the museum, he was to enter, walk around inside, then leave through the back door and make the same bricklaying circuit again.
On the man’s first walk through the streets, several hundred people watched his mysterious movements.
By his fourth circuit, onlookers swarmed around him, debating what he was doing.
Every time he entered the museum he was followed by people who bought tickets to keep watching him.
Many of them were distracted by the museum’s collections, and stayed inside.
By the end of the first day, the brick man had drawn over a thousand people into the museum.
A few days later the police ordered him to cease and desist from his walks—the crowds were blocking traffic.
The bricklaying stopped but thousands of New Yorkers had entered the museum, and many of those had become P. T. Barnum converts.
Even when I’m railed at, I get my quota of renown.
PIETRO ARETINO, 1492-1556
Barnum would put a band of musicians on a balcony overlooking the street, beneath a huge banner proclaiming FREE MUSIC FOR THE MILLIONS.
What generosity, New Yorkers thought, and they flocked to hear the free concerts.
But Barnum took pains to hire the worst musicians he could find, and soon after the band struck up, people would hurry to buy tickets to the museum, where they would be out of earshot of the band’s noise, and of the booing of the crowd.
THE COURT ARTIST
A work that was voluntarily presented to a prince was bound to seem in some way special.
The artist himself might also try to attract the attention of the court through his behaviour.
In Vasari’s judgment Sodoma was “well known both for his personal eccentricities and for his reputation as a good painter.”
Because Pope Leo X “found pleasure in such strange, hare- brained individuals,” he made Sodoma a knight, causing the artist to go completely out of his mind.
Van Mander found it odd that the products of Cornelis Ketel’s experiments in mouth and foot painting were bought by notable persons “because of their oddity,” yet Ketel was only adding a variation to similar experiments by Titian, Ugo da Carpi and Palma Giovane, who, according to Boschini painted with their fingers “because they wished to imitate the method used by the Supreme Creator. ”
Van Mander reports that Gossaert attracted the attention of Emperor Charles V by wearing a fantastic paper costume.
In doing so he was adopting the tactics used by Dinocrates, who, in order to gain access to Alexander the Great, is said to have appeared disguised as the naked Hercules when the monarch was sitting in judgment.
THE COURT ARTIST, MARTIN WARNKE, 1993
One of the first oddities Barnum toured around the country was Joice Heth, a woman he claimed was 161 years old, and whom he advertised as a slave who had once been George Washington’s nurse.
After several months the crowds began to dwindle, so Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the papers, claiming that Heth was a clever fraud.
“Joice Heth,” he wrote, “is not a human being but an automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs.”
Those who had not bothered to see her before were immediately curious, and those who had already seen her paid to see her again, to find out whether the rumor that she was a robot was true.
In 1842, Barnum purchased the carcass of what was purported to be a mermaid.
This creature resembled a monkey with the body of a fish, but the head and body were perfectly joined—it was truly a wonder.
After some research Barnum discovered that the creature had been expertly put together in Japan, where the hoax had caused quite a stir.
He nevertheless planted articles in newspapers around the country claiming the capture of a mermaid in the Fiji Islands.
He also sent the papers woodcut prints of paintings showing mermaids.
By the time he showed the specimen in his museum, a national debate had been sparked over the existence of these mythical creatures.
A few months before Barnum’s campaign, no one had cared or even known about mermaids; now everyone was talking about them as if they were real.
Crowds flocked in record numbers to see the Fiji Mermaid, and to hear debates on the subject.
A few years later, Barnum toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, a five-year-old dwarf from Connecticut whom Barnum claimed was an eleven-year-old English boy, and whom he had trained to do many remarkable acts.
During this tour Barnum’s name attracted such attention that Queen Victoria, that paragon of sobriety, requested a private audience with him and his talented dwarf at Buckingham Palace.
The English press may have ridiculed Barnum, but Victoria was royally entertained by him, and respected him ever after.
Interpretation
Barnum understood the fundamental truth about attracting attention: Once people’s eyes are on you, you have a special legitimacy.
For Barnum, creating interest meant creating a crowd; as he later wrote, “Every crowd has a silver lining.”
And crowds tend to act in conjunction.
If one person stops to see your beggarman laying bricks in the street, more will do the same.
They will gather like dust bunnies.
Then, given a gentle push, they will enter your museum or watch your show.
To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd.
Any kind of curiosity will serve the purpose, for crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable.
And once you have their attention, never let it go.
If it veers toward other people, it does so at your expense.
Barnum would ruthlessly suck attention from his competitors, knowing what a valuable commodity it is.
At the beginning of your rise to the top, then, spend all your energy on attracting attention.
Most important: The quality of the attention is irrelevant.
No matter how badly his shows were reviewed, or how slanderously personal were the attacks on his hoaxes, Barnum would never complain.
If a newspaper critic reviled him particularly badly, in fact, he made sure to invite the man to an opening and to give him the best seat in the house.
He would even write anonymous attacks on his own work, just to keep his name in the papers.
From Barnum’s vantage, attention—whether negative or positive—was the main ingredient of his success.
The worst fate in the world for a man who yearns fame, glory, and, of course, power is to be ignored.
Donald Trump
If the courtier happens to engage in arms in some public spectacle such as jousting ... he will ensure that the horse he has is beautifully caparisoned, that he himself is suitably attired, with appropriate mottoes and ingenious devices to attract the eyes of the onlookers in his direction as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.
Baldassare Castighone, 1478-1529
KEYS TO POWER
Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no one is born with.
You have to learn to attract attention, “as surely as the lodestone attracts iron.”
At the start of your career, you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people.
This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about.
Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star.
It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by another, you must not discriminate between different types of attention; in the end, every kind will work in your favor.
Barnum, we have seen, welcomed personal attacks and felt no need to defend himself. He deliberately courted the image of being a humbug.
The court of Louis XIV contained many talented writers, artists, great beauties, and men and women of impeccable virtue, but no one was more talked about than the singular Duc de Lauzun.
The duke was short, almost dwarfish, and he was prone to the most insolent kinds of behavior—he slept with the king’s mistress, and openly insulted not only other courtiers but the king himself.
Louis, however, was so beguiled by the duke’s eccentricities that he could not bear his absences from the court.
It was simple: The strangeness of the duke’s character attracted attention.
Once people were enthralled by him, they wanted him around at any cost.
Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity.
Never be afraid, then, of the qualities that set you apart and draw attention to you.
Court controversy, even scandal.
It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored.
All professions are ruled by this law, and all professionals must have a bit of the showman about them.
The great scientist Thomas Edison knew that to raise money he had to remain in the public eye at any cost.
Almost as important as the inventions themselves was how he presented them to the public and courted attention.
Edison would design visually dazzling experiments to display his discoveries with electricity.
He would talk of future inventions that seemed fantastic at the time—robots, and machines that could photograph thought —and that he had no intention of wasting his energy on, but that made the public talk about him.
He did everything he could to make sure that he received more attention than his great rival Nikola Tesla, who may actually have been more brilliant than he was but whose name was far less known.
In 1915, it was rumored that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of that year’s Nobel Prize in physics.
The prize was eventually given to a pair of English physicists; only later was it discovered that the prize committee had actually approached Edison, but he had turned them down, refusing to share the prize with Tesla.
By that time his fame was more secure than Tesla’s, and he thought it better to refuse the honor than to allow his rival the attention that would have come even from sharing the prize.
If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers little opportunity for you to draw attention, an effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find.
When Pietro Aretino, a young Roman servant boy of the early sixteenth century, wanted to get attention as a writer of verses, he decided to publish a series of satirical poems ridiculing the pope and his affection for a pet elephant.
The attack put Aretino in the public eye immediately.
A slanderous attack on a person in a position of power would have a similar effect.
Remember, however, to use such tactics sparingly after you have the public’s attention, when the act can wear thin.
Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention.
If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move on to a newer star.
The game requires constant vigilance and creativity.
Pablo Picasso never allowed himself to fade into the background; if his name became too attached to a particular style, he would deliberately upset the public with a new series of paintings that went against all expectations.
Better to create something ugly and disturbing, he believed, than to let viewers grow too familiar with his work.
Understand: People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.
Image:
The Limelight. The actor who steps into this brilliant light attains a heightened presence. All eyes are on him. There is room for only one actor at a time in the limelight’s narrow beam; do what ever it takes to make yourself its focus.
Make your gestures so large, amusing, and scandalous that the light stays on you while the other actors are left in the shadows.
Authority:
Be ostentatious and be seen.... What is not seen is as though it did not exist.... It was light that first caused all creation to shine forth. Display fills up many blanks, covers up deficiencies, and gives everything a second life, especially when it is backed by genuine merit.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
PART II: CREATE AN AIR OF MYSTERY
In a world growing increasingly banal and familiar, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention.
Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence; it also creates anticipation—everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, even frighten.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Beginning in 1905, rumors started to spread throughout Paris of a young Oriental girl who danced in a private home, wrapped in veils that she gradually discarded.
A local journalist who had seen her dancing reported that “a woman from the Far East had come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some of the richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities.”
Soon everyone knew the dancer’s name: Mata Hari.
Early that year, in the winter, small and select audiences would gather in a salon filled with Indian statues and other relics while an orchestra played music inspired by Hindu and Javanese melodies.
After keeping the audience waiting and wondering, Mata Hari would suddenly appear, in a startling costume: a white cotton brassiere covered with Indian-type jewels; jeweled bands at the waist supporting a sarong that revealed as much as it concealed; bracelets up the arms.
Then Mata Hari would dance, in a style no one in France had seen before, her whole body swaying as if she were in a trance.
She told her excited and curious audience that her dances told stories from Indian mythology and Javanese folktales.
Soon the cream of Paris, and ambassadors from far-off lands, were competing for invitations to the salon, where it was rumored that Mata Hari was actually performing sacred dances in the nude.
The public wanted to know more about her.
She told journalists that she was actually Dutch in origin, but had grown up on the island of Java.
She would also talk about time spent in India, how she had learned sacred Hindu dances there, and how Indian women “can shoot straight, ride horseback, and are capable of doing logarithms and talk philosophy.”
By the summer of 1905, although few Parisians had actually seen Mata Hari dance, her name was on everyone’s lips.
As Mata Hari gave more interviews, the story of her origins kept changing: She had grown up in India, her grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese princess, she had lived on the island of Sumatra where she had spent her time “horseback riding, gun in hand, and risking her life.”
No one knew anything certain about her, but journalists did not mind these changes in her biography.
They compared her to an Indian goddess, a creature from the pages of Baudelaire—whatever their imagination wanted to see in this mysterious woman from the East.
In August of 1905, Mata Hari performed for the first time in public.
Crowds thronging to see her on opening night caused a riot.
She had now become a cult figure, spawning many imitations.
One reviewer wrote, “Mata Hari personifies all the poetry of India, its mysticism, its voluptuousness, its hypnotizing charm.”
Another noted, “If India possesses such unexpected treasures, then all Frenchmen will emigrate to the shores of the Ganges.”
Soon the fame of Mata Hari and her sacred Indian dances spread beyond Paris.
She was invited to Berlin, Vienna, Milan.
Over the next few years she performed throughout Europe, mixed with the highest social circles, and earned an income that gave her an independence rarely enjoyed by a woman of the period.
Then, near the end of World War I, she was arrested in France, tried, convicted, and finally executed as a German spy.
Only during the trial did the truth come out: Mata Hari was not from Java or India, had not grown up in the Orient, did not have a drop of Eastern blood in her body.
Her real name was Margaretha Zelle, and she came from the stolid northern province of Friesland, Holland.
Interpretation
When Margaretha Zelle arrived in Paris, in 1904, she had half a franc in her pocket.
She was one of the thousands of beautiful young girls who flocked to Paris every year, taking work as artists’ models, nightclub dancers, or vaudeville performers at the Folies Bergère.
After a few years they would inevitably be replaced by younger girls, and would often end up on the streets, turning to prostitution, or else returning to the town they came from, older and chastened.
Zelle had higher ambitions. She had no dance experience and had never performed in the theater, but as a young girl she had traveled with her family and had witnessed local dances in Java and Sumatra.
Zelle clearly understood that what was important in her act was not the dance itself, or even her face or figure, but her ability to create an air of mystery about herself.
The mystery she created lay not just in her dancing, or her costumes, or the stories she would tell, or her endless lies about her origins; it lay in an atmosphere enveloping everything she did.
There was nothing you could say for sure about her—she was always changing, always surprising her audience with new costumes, new dances, new stories.
This air of mystery left the public always wanting to know more, always wondering about her next move.
Mata Hari was no more beautiful than many of the other young girls who came to Paris, and she was not a particularly good dancer.
What separated her from the mass, what attracted and held the public’s attention and made her famous and wealthy, was her mystery.
People are enthralled by mystery; because it invites constant interpretation, they never tire of it.
The mysterious cannot be grasped. And what cannot be seized and consumed creates power.
KEYS TO POWER
In the past, the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable— diseases, disasters, capricious despots, the mystery of death itself.
What we could not understand we reimagined as myths and spirits.
Over the centuries, though, we have managed, through science and reason, to illuminate the darkness; what was mysterious and forbidding has grown familiar and comfortable.
Yet this light has a price: in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.
That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvelous.
The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.
Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring.
Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanor, and is subtle, has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention.
Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable.
By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery.
The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.
Both artists and con artists understand the vital link between being mysterious and attracting interest. Count Victor Lustig, the aristocrat of swindlers, played the game to perfection.
He was always doing things that were different, or seemed to make no sense.
He would show up at the best hotels in a limo driven by a Japanese chauffeur; no one had ever seen a Japanese chauffeur before, so this seemed exotic and strange.
Lustig would dress in the most expensive clothing, but always with something—a medal, a flower, an armband—out of place, at least in conventional terms. This was seen not as tasteless but as odd and intriguing.
In hotels he would be seen receiving telegrams at all hours, one after the other, brought to him by his Japanese chauffeur—telegrams he would tear up with utter nonchalance. (In fact they were fakes, completely blank.)
He would sit alone in the dining room, reading a large and impressive-looking book, smiling at people yet remaining aloof.
Within a few days, of course, the entire hotel would be abuzz with interest in this strange man.
All this attention allowed Lustig to lure suckers in with ease. They would beg for his confidence and his company. Everyone wanted to be seen with this mysterious aristocrat. And in the presence of this distracting enigma, they wouldn’t even notice that they were being robbed blind.
An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound.
It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, seem like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired.
An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork immediately more intriguing, a trick Marcel Duchamp played to great effect.
It is all very easy to do—say little about your work, tease and titillate with alluring, even contradictory comments, then stand back and let others try to make sense of it all.
Mysterious people put others in a kind of inferior position—that of trying to figure them out.
To degrees that they can control, they also elicit the fear surrounding anything uncertain or unknown.
All great leaders know that an aura of mystery draws attention to them and creates an intimidating presence.
Mao Tse-tung, for example, cleverly cultivated an enigmatic image; he had no worries about seeming inconsistent or contradicting himself—the very contradictoriness of his actions and words meant that he always had the upper hand.
No one, not even his own wife, ever felt they understood him, and he therefore seemed larger than life.
This also meant that the public paid constant attention to him, ever anxious to witness his next move.
If your social position prevents you from completely wrapping your actions in mystery, you must at least learn to make yourself less obvious.
Every now and then, act in a way that does not mesh with other people’s perception of you.
This way you keep those around you on the defensive, eliciting the kind of attention that makes you powerful.
Done right, the creation of enigma can also draw the kind of attention that strikes terror into your enemy.
During the Second Punic War (219-202 B.C.), the great Carthaginian general Hannibal was wreaking havoc in his march on Rome.
Hannibal was known for his cleverness and duplicity.
Under his leadership Carthage’s army, though smaller than those of the Romans, had constantly outmaneuvered them.
On one occasion, though, Hannibal’s scouts made a horrible blunder, leading his troops into a marshy terrain with the sea at their back.
The Roman army blocked the mountain passes that led inland, and its general, Fabius, was ecstatic—at last he had Hannibal trapped.
Posting his best sentries on the passes, he worked on a plan to destroy Hannibal’s forces.
But in the middle of the night, the sentries looked down to see a mysterious sight: A huge procession of lights was heading up the mountain.
Thousands and thousands of lights. If this was Hannibal’s army, it had suddenly grown a hundredfold.
The sentries argued heatedly about what this could mean: Reinforcements from the sea? Troops that had been hidden in the area? Ghosts? No explanation made sense.
As they watched, fires broke out all over the mountain, and a horrible noise drifted up to them from below, like the blowing of a million horns.
Demons, they thought.
The sentries, the bravest and most sensible in the Roman army, fled their posts in a panic.
By the next day, Hannibal had escaped from the marshland. What was his trick? Had he really conjured up demons?
Actually what he had done was order bundles of twigs to be fastened to the horns of the thousands of oxen that traveled with his troops as beasts of burden.
The twigs were then lit, giving the impression of the torches of a vast army heading up the mountain. When the flames burned down to the oxen’s skin, they stampeded in all directions, bellowing like mad and setting fires all over the mountainside.
The key to this device’s success was not the torches, the fires, or the noises in themselves, however, but the fact that Hannibal had created a puzzle that captivated the sentries’ attention and gradually terrified them.
From the mountaintop there was no way to explain this bizarre sight.
If the sentries could have explained it they would have stayed at their posts.
If you find yourself trapped, cornered, and on the defensive in some situation, try a simple experiment: Do something that cannot be easily explained or interpreted.
Choose a simple action, but carry it out in a way that unsettles your opponent, a way with many possible interpretations, making your intentions obscure.
Don’t just be unpredictable (although this tactic too can be successful—see Law 17); like Hannibal, create a scene that cannot be read.
There will seem to be no method to your madness, no rhyme or reason, no single explanation.
If you do this right, you will inspire fear and trembling and the sentries will abandon their posts.
Call it the “feigned madness of Hamlet” tactic, for Hamlet uses it to great effect in Shakespeare’s play, frightening his stepfather Claudius through the mystery of his behavior. The mysterious makes your forces seem larger, your power more terrifying.
Image: The Dance of the Veils—the veils envelop the dancer. What they reveal causes excitement. What they conceal heightens interest. The essence of mystery.
Authority:
If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation.... Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit.... In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
In the beginning of your rise to the top, you must attract attention at all cost, but as you rise higher you must constantly adapt.
Never wear the public out with the same tactic.
An air of mystery works wonders for those who need to develop an aura of power and get themselves noticed, but it must seem measured and under control.
Mata Hari went too far with her fabrications; although the accusation that she was a spy was false, at the time it was a reasonable presumption because all her lies made her seem suspicious and nefarious.
Do not let your air of mystery be slowly transformed into a reputation for deceit. The mystery you create must seem a game, playful and unthreatening.
Recognize when it goes too far, and pull back.
There are times when the need for attention must be deferred, and when scandal and notoriety are the last things you want to create.
The attention you attract must never offend or challenge the reputation of those above you—not, at any rate, if they are secure. You will seem not only paltry but desperate by comparison. There is an art to knowing when to draw notice and when to withdraw.
Lola Montez was one of the great practitioners of the art of attracting attention. She managed to rise from a middle-class Irish background to being the lover of Franz Liszt and then the mistress and political adviser of King Ludwig of Bavaria. In her later years, though, she lost her sense of proportion.
In London in 1850 there was to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring the greatest actor of the time, Charles John Kean.
Everyone of consequence in English society was to be there; it was rumored that even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were to make a public appearance.
The custom of the period demanded that everyone be seated before the queen arrived.
So the audience got there a little early, and when the queen entered her royal box, they observed the convention of standing up and applauding her.
The royal couple waited, then bowed.
Everyone sat down and the lights were dimmed.
Then, suddenly, all eyes turned to a box opposite Queen Victoria’s: A woman appeared from the shadows, taking her seat later than the queen.
It was Lola Montez.
She wore a diamond tiara on her dark hair and a long fur coat over her shoulders.
People whispered in amazement as the ermine cloak was dropped to reveal a low-necked gown of crimson velvet.
By turning their heads, the audience could see that the royal couple deliberately avoided looking at Lola’s box.
They followed Victoria’s example, and for the rest of the evening Lola Montez was ignored.
After that evening no one in fashionable society dared to be seen with her.
All her magnetic powers were reversed. People would flee her sight. Her future in England was finished.
Never appear overly greedy for attention, then, for it signals insecurity, and insecurity drives power away.
Understand that there are times when it is not in your interest to be the center of attention. When in the presence of a king or queen, for instance, or the equivalent thereof, bow and retreat to the shadows; never compete.
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The ten rules of war propaganda were set forth by the historian Anne Morelli in her book The Principles of War Propaganda. Well, let’s look at these rules.
In doing so, we will see that our mainstream media follow them exactly.
Anyone who follows the media reports in the West must realize that our German media, free, objective, and critical, are engaged in war propaganda.
There are 10 fundamental well-known rules of American war propaganda that are easy to verify.
Rule 1: We don’t want war
Fun fact: Every war that American has been in for the last seventy five years involved a discussion with the (eventual) enemy where the United States made the statement (word for word) exactly stated "We don't want war".
It's so obvious that it has become the "Calling Card of America".
The West supposedly never wants wars. Even so, the West wages more wars than all other states put together. Germany is fighting in Mali to supply the French nuclear power plants with uranium (officially against terrorists, of course). Germany fought in Afghanistan for 20 years, so long that most have already forgotten what it was all about. Germany has been militarily active in Kosovo for over 20 years to build democracy, but the Albanian mafia still rules there under the protection of the Bundeswehr. And so on.
All of these – and also the other – wars of the US-dominated West in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and on, all have one thing in common: Of course, the West did not want them at all, but was forced to war by the evil rulers. This is the official reading every time, and none of the “rulers” has ever attacked a country in the West.
It was always the other way around, the West attacked.
“We don’t want war”
If you want a fun activity, read the transcript of the March 2021 meeting in Anchorage Alaska between the United States and China. Look for the announcement statement “We don’t want war” coming from the American side.
That is how the rest of the world knows that American has decided to wage a hot war, soon to become world war III, nuclear style with China.
Look for the specific wording.
That’s exactly how you know that America plans to attack China under some kind of excuse and that a propaganda barrage to justify that attack is being conducted.
Rule 2: The opposing camp is solely responsible for the war
It's all their fault.
See point one.
Assad is allegedly responsible for the war in Syria, although the media in the West consistently keep silent about the CIA operation “Timber Sycamore” with which the CIA started the war. If this is new to you, it’s no wonder. Der Spiegel, for example, has never reported on how you can find the term “Timber Sycamore” when you search the Spiegel archive. The relevant documents of the CIA were published in Washington years ago. If this is new to you, check it out.
It is always done that way. So it was with Iraq, Libya and all other wars in which the West is fighting. The blame was placed on the other side, concealing that the West started the wars itself.
Rule 3: The leader of the opposing camp has the face of the devil
This is the classic. The choice of words is crucial. Putin, Assad and whoever are “potentates”, “autocrats”, “dictators” who commit all the deadly sins of the world. When a war is imminent, the media bring – in order to make the population ready for war – the inevitable formulations of the “Second Hitler”, from whom the world must be saved.
Of course, the enemies do not have “governments”, they are “regimes”. With all these formulations the “enemy” is dehumanized, the public should feel hatred and be ready to overthrow such an evil person, even at the cost of thousands of lives.
Anti-China bullshit from the American media.
This is what is called “hatespeech” in modern German and what the same media, that use this hate propaganda against unloved heads of government, always find very bad.
.
"America doesn't hate the Chinese people, just the Chinese government."
Rule 4: We defend a good cause and not special interests
Of course, the US wanted to bring human rights, democracy and prosperity to Iraq. Of course, it wasn’t about the oil wells that US corporations have secured for themselves. Not even in Libya, where France (one of the driving forces in the war) has secured many oil wells. And Mali is about the fight against terrorism, not the uranium on which the French nuclear industry depends. And of course Syria is not about oil or the only Russian naval base in the Mediterranean, it is only about democracy, human rights and prosperity.
Wherever a government is critical of the West and where there are also natural resources (or where one of the main enemies China and Russia can be harmed), the West finds democracy and human rights very important. But if a government is pro-Western and allows the West access to natural resources, such as the absolutist Saudi dictatorship, then democracy and human rights are not so important.
Regime change in China The last major policy shift in China caught many off guard; we are at another such turning point. For the past ten years or so, bad newsin China was usually good news. Growth shocks triggered sizable stimuli, leading to asset price rebounds in China, emerging markets and the world more broadly.-Chinaregimechange
Incidentally, this is the key to understanding why Russia, which was a political friend under Yeltsin, has become enemy number one again under Putin: Under Yeltsin, Western corporations had secured control of Russian oil and gas. Putin ended that by 2003, and suddenly he was the number one villain. It doesn’t say that in the “quality media”, but it was actually so banal.
Rule 5: The enemy commits atrocities deliberately; on the other hand, when we cross the line, it is unintentional
We experience this one all the time. If the US is undoubtedly bombing a hospital in Afghanistan, then that is “collateral damage” and it was an accident. Nobody is punished, the “quality media” quickly forget it and do not ask for clarification.
On the other hand, it is enough if someone claims without evidence that Russia or Syria bombed a hospital and the media in the West are reporting not only for days, but also afterwards, so that the public does not forget who it must hate.
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Rule 6: The enemy uses illegal weapons
That is also a classic.
We have all heard many times that Assad uses “barrel bombs”. Nobody really knows what that actually is, but it sounds pretty nasty. The USA constantly uses barrel bombs, except they are called “cluster bombs” and the “quality media” are almost always shyly silent about them, because these weapons are internationally banned.
Whether Assad uses this weapon has not been proven at all, but as a precaution the media have come up with a separate word for it so that the readers don’t even get the idea that the West could also use such weapons. ‘But he does that all the time.
Rule 7: We suffer only slight losses; the enemy’s losses are enormous
This rule only applies when the war has entered its critical phase. Before the war it was the other way around. Before the war it was reported that the enemy was aggressive and, for example, had killed so many of “our” soldiers again when violating a ceasefire. This is to prepare the public for a war.
We have been seeing this in Ukraine for years. The “quality media” always report when it gets “hotter” there that the rebels have killed so many Ukrainian soldiers. In doing so, they keep silent about the fact that the mostly Ukrainian shelling of residential areas preceded them, in which civilians were killed.
But you don’t find out about that from the “quality media”, you have to read the reports of the OSCE. The “quality media” did not consider the fact that the OSCE presented a report in November 2020 in which it stated that almost 75 percent of civilian casualties in Donbass were due to the Ukrainian armed forces.
Rule 8: The artists and intellectuals support our cause
Notice how often celebrities have their say in the media who think the Western wars are good for moral reasons. Celebs have spoken out against Assad, Gaddafi, and Saddam in recent years. This is particularly evident in the American media.
John Wayne fights the demon heathen communists in Vietnam in the movie The Green Berets.
In 2019 a prominent “benefit concert” for Venezuela took place in the Colombian border town of Cucuta. Famous artists appeared in the middle of the jungle to sing against Maduro. Conveniently right next to the US military base there.
And for Navalny, for example, Western celebrities wrote an open letter to Putin in April 2021. It did not contain any truths and probably hardly anyone has read it. It was just important to be able to name the celebrities in the headlines of the media who are against Putin.
There are innumerable examples of this method of war propaganda.
But none of this has anything to do with politics, after all, what politician is interested in a singer’s opinion? These reports only have the purpose of giving the public the feeling that the position of the West is morally correct and thus the fans of the stars are to be influenced accordingly and to follow their idol. It’s all about emotions, not the actuality.
Rule 9: Our concern is something sacred
Of course, after all, it is supposedly about the “holy” values of the West, that is to say about democracy and human rights. You can also kill people for this.
This is probably the oldest means of war propaganda in world history. In ancient Rome one had to bring civilization to the barbarians, of course it was not about the enrichment of the generals. Caesar moved to Gaul as a practically bankrupt man and came back very rich.
Later the Spaniards had to bring the “savages” in America the right faith so that they would not burn in the hell to which the Spaniards sent them on the occasion. It wasn’t about the gold, of course. And the British Empire wanted to bring civilization back to the “backward” colonies, because the poor, backward people in the colonies couldn’t rule themselves.
What I am writing here so ironically is true. You can read it in the documents from the corresponding periods. There was always a “sacred” reason for urgently going to war.
And today the “holy” concerns are democracy, human rights, women’s rights and so on. It’s still the same principle as in antiquity, only the “sacred” concern changes every now and then.
Rule 10: Anyone who questions our propaganda is a traitor
Today the word “traitor” is out of date.
Today you can choose to say “Putin understanders”, “Kremlin trolls”, “conspiracy theorists”, “anti-Americans” and whatever other names are currently circulating.
Anyone who disagrees is demonized and marginalized.
But all of these terms have one thing in common: They identify the named person as an opponent of “Western values” or democracy.
Ergo: it’s a traitor.
It’s shocking, but the German media is actually doing war propaganda like in the darkest times in history. And not just since yesterday, it happened in 1991 in the First Gulf War with the incubator lie and has not been less since then, on the contrary, it has become more, and the techniques have been refined more and more.
Do you think it is a coincidence that the media works exactly according to the propaganda textbook?
The Conclusion
The United States has already decided to wage war with China.
The initial attempts, have all failed, resulting in (as best as I can determine) five HOT-level Assaults…
Carpet bombing using 8 bio-weapons to destroy livestock 2016 through 2020.
A hard attack using the COVID19 B-strain “death by brain seizure” during CNY 2020, with herd immunity for US allies using the inoculation A-strain . The “three day sniffles” variant.
A follow up (two punch) “desperation” (vindictive) bio-weapon attack(s) targeted on Beijing using the “death by vomiting” virus known as the Jingmen tick virus (JMTV), and the “death by diarrhea” virus. Which is itself being a human version of (ASF version of the H1N1) people transmittable Swine-flu 2020 virus. Also (curiously) disseminated by “criminal elements” using drones to spray the virus all over China. Good thing for China that the CIA assets turned themselves into the authorities.
The “tit-for-tat” minor assault carrier fires. China’s first big-deck amphibious assault ship, a type 075; a huge vessel that was built in a miraculously short amount of time, mysteriously caught fire on Saturday, April 11th, 2020. And then the gutting of the U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard.
And the enormous late Summer US Navy armada that sailed to the South China Sea in 2020. And the return back to the USA with their “tail between their legs”. The USA was unprepared to to deal with the kinds of defensive capabilities that the Chinese had arrayed in the South China Sea.
Additionally, there are failures in collapse of particular cities, and Chinese efforts…
Color Revolution in Hong Kong.
Color Revolution in Tibet.
Turn XinJIang and the Uighur Muslims into a Syria-like battlefield.
The attempts to destabilize Chinese allies are a mixed bag…
Myanmar “regime change” to a pro-American anti-China nation.
Thailand “regime change” to a pro-American anti-China nation.
Chinese BRI construction in the Beirut port (destroyed by missiles).
And so on and so forth.
It’s a big effort, with the blocking the Suez canal, and mysterious fires in IC factories, and the like…
The propaganda is still in full active attack mode.
Which pretty much means that more, and worse events are scheduled to occur.
I think that the United States should realize that China is NOT a nation that is an easy target and that it would be in the best interests for America to work with China rather than try to destroy it. But what else can I say? America is run by idiots.
That’s the only thing that you can conclude.
They are all maniacs you see. Maniacs. Pure maniacs.
Do you want more?
This article is going into a new sub-index that I am creating for it titled VLOG. You can access it here.
Well, it is, at least it is not something that I myself would want to do. But that is just me. But I can tell you all something that is important; there are many crafty, clever, and evil people who follow this rule to the letter.
I can include an ex-business partner who only wanted to get into my wife’s pants (or skirt), a couple of work colleagues who would perform run-arounds to disparage me in their pursuit for career growth, and a couple of family members that have an unsavory two-faced attitude about life.
So to best prepare you for these individuals, you must understand how they think and how their ModusOperandi works.
Thus this article…
LAW 14
POSE AS A FRIEND, WORK AS A SPY
JUDGMENT
Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Joseph Duveen was undoubtedly the greatest art dealer of his time—from 1904 to 1940 he almost single-handedly monopolized America’s millionaire art-collecting market. But one prize plum eluded him: the industrialist Andrew Mellon. Before he died, Duveen was determined to make Mellon a client.
Duveen’s friends said this was an impossible dream.
Mellon was a stiff, taciturn man.
The stories he had heard about the congenial, talkative Duveen rubbed him the wrong way—he had made it clear he had no desire to meet the man.
Yet Duveen told his doubting friends, “Not only will Mellon buy from me but he will buy only from me.”
For several years he tracked his prey, learning the man’s habits, tastes, phobias.
To do this, he secretly put several of Mellon’s staff on his own payroll, worming valuable information out of them.
By the time he moved into action, he knew Mellon about as well as Mellon’s wife did.
In 1921 Mellon was visiting London, and staying in a palatial suite on the third floor of Claridge’s Hotel.
Duveen booked himself into the suite just below Mellon’s, on the second floor.
He had arranged for his valet to befriend Mellon’s valet, and on the fateful day he had chosen to make his move, Mellon’s valet told Duveen’s valet, who told Duveen, that he had just helped Mellon on with his overcoat, and that the industrialist was making his way down the corridor to ring for the lift.
Duveen’s valet hurriedly helped Duveen with his own overcoat.
Seconds later, Duveen entered the lift, and lo and behold, there was Mellon.
“How do you do, Mr. Mellon?” said Duveen, introducing himself. “I am on my way to the National Gallery to look at some pictures.”
How uncanny—that was precisely where Mellon was headed.
And so Duveen was able to accompany his prey to the one location that would ensure his success.
He knew Mellon’s taste inside and out, and while the two men wandered through the museum, he dazzled the magnate with his knowledge.
Once again quite uncannily, they seemed to have remarkably similar tastes.
Mellon was pleasantly surprised: This was not the Duveen he had expected.
The man was charming and agreeable, and clearly had exquisite taste.
When they returned to New York, Mellon visited Duveen’s exclusive gallery and fell in love with the collection.
Everything, surprisingly enough, seemed to be precisely the kind of work he wanted to collect.
For the rest of his life he was Duveen’s best and most generous client.
Interpretation
A man as ambitious and competitive as Joseph Duveen left nothing to chance.
What’s the point of winging it, of just hoping you may be able to charm this or that client?
It’s like shooting ducks blindfolded.
Arm yourself with a little knowledge and your aim improves.
Mellon was the most spectacular of Duveen’s catches, but he spied on many a millionaire.
By secretly putting members of his clients’ household staffs on his own payroll, he would gain constant access to valuable information about their masters’ comings and goings, changes in taste, and other such tidbits of information that would put him a step ahead.
A rival of Duveen’s who wanted to make Henry Frick a client noticed that whenever he visited this wealthy New Yorker, Duveen was there before him, as if he had a sixth sense.
To other dealers Duveen seemed to be everywhere, and to know everything before they did.
His powers discouraged and disheartened them, until many simply gave up going after the wealthy clients who could make a dealer rich.
Such is the power of artful spying: It makes you seem all-powerful, clairvoyant.
Your knowledge of your mark can also make you seem charming, so well can you anticipate his desires.
No one sees the source of your power, and what they cannot see they cannot fight.
Rulers see through spies, as cows through smell, Brahmins through scriptures and the rest of the people through their normal eyes.
Kautilya, Indian philosopher third century B. C.
KEYS TO POWER
In the realm of power, your goal is a degree of control over future events. Part of the problem you face, then, is that people won’t tell you all their thoughts, emotions, and plans.
Controlling what they say, they often keep the most critical parts of their character hidden—their weaknesses, ulterior motives, obsessions.
The result is that you cannot predict their moves, and are constantly in the dark.
The trick is to find a way to probe them, to find out their secrets and hidden intentions, without letting them know what you are up to.
This is not as difficult as you might think.
A friendly front will let you secretly gather information on friends and enemies alike.
Let others consult the horoscope, or read tarot cards: You have more concrete means of seeing into the future.
The most common way of spying is to use other people, as Duveen did. The method is simple, powerful, but risky: You will certainly gather information, but you have little control over the people who are doing the work.
Perhaps they will ineptly reveal your spying, or even secretly turn against you.
It is far better to be the spy yourself, to pose as a friend while secretly gathering information.
The French politician Talleyrand was one of the greatest practitioners of this art.
He had an uncanny ability to worm secrets out of people in polite conversation.
A contemporary of his, Baron de Vitrolles, wrote,
“Wit and grace marked his conversation. He possessed the art of concealing his thoughts or his malice beneath a transparent veil of insinuations, words that imply something more than they express. Only when necessary did he inject his own personality.”
The key here is Talleyrand’s ability to suppress himself in the conversation, to make others talk endlessly about themselves and inadvertently reveal their intentions and plans.
Throughout Talleyrand’s life, people said he was a superb conversationalist—yet he actually said very little.
He never talked about his own ideas; he got others to reveal theirs.
He would organize friendly games of charades for foreign diplomats, social gatherings where, however, he would carefully weigh their words, cajole confidences out of them, and gather information invaluable to his work as France’s foreign minister.
At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) he did his spying in other ways: He would blurt out what seemed to be a secret (actually something he had made up), then watch his listeners’ reactions.
He might tell a gathering of diplomats, for instance, that a reliable source had revealed to him that the czar of Russia was planning to arrest his top general for treason.
By watching the diplomats’ reactions to this made-up story, he would know which ones were most excited by the weakening of the Russian army—perhaps their governments had designs on Russia?
As Baron von Stetten said, “Monsieur Talleyrand fires a pistol into the air to see who will jump out the window.”
If you have reason to suspect that a person is telling you a lie, look as though you believed every word he said. This will give him courage to go on; he will become more vehement in his assertions, and in the end betray himself. Again, if you perceive that a person is trying to conceal something from you, but with only partial success, look as though you did not believe him. The opposition on your part will provoke him into leading out his reserve of truth and bringing the whole force of it to bear upon your incredulity.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
During social gatherings and innocuous encounters, pay attention.
This is when people’s guards are down.
By suppressing your own personality, you can make them reveal things.
The brilliance of the maneuver is that they will mistake your interest in them for friendship, so that you not only learn, you make allies.
Nevertheless, you should practice this tactic with caution and care.
If people begin to suspect you are worming secrets out of them under the cover of conversation, they will strictly avoid you.
Emphasize friendly chatter, not valuable information.
Your search for gems of information cannot be too obvious, or your probing questions will reveal more about yourself and your intentions than about the information you hope to find.
A trick to try in spying comes from La Rochefoucauld, who wrote,
“Sincerity is found in very few men, and is often the cleverest of ruses— one is sincere in order to draw out the confidence and secrets of the other.”
By pretending to bare your heart to another person, in other words, you make them more likely to reveal their own secrets.
Give them a false confession and they will give you a real one.
Another trick was identified by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who suggested vehemently contradicting people you’re in conversation with as a way of irritating them, stirring them up so that they lose some of the control over their words.
In their emotional reaction they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves, truths you can later use against them.
Another method of indirect spying is to test people, to lay little traps that make them reveal things about themselves.
Chosroes II, a notoriously clever seventh-century king of the Persians, had many ways of seeing through his subjects without raising suspicion.
If he noticed, for instance, that two of his courtiers had become particularly friendly, he would call one of them aside and say he had information that the other was a traitor, and would soon be killed.
The king would tell the courtier he trusted him more than anyone, and that he must keep this information secret.
Then he would watch the two men carefully.
If he saw that the second courtier had not changed in his behavior toward the king, he would conclude that the first courtier had kept the secret, and he would quickly promote the man, later taking him aside to confess,
“I meant to kill your friend because of certain information that had reached me, but, when I investigated the matter, I found it was untrue.”
If, on the other hand, the second courtier started to avoid the king, acting aloof and tense, Chosroes would know that the secret had been revealed.
He would ban the second courtier from his court, letting him know that the whole business had only been a test, but that even though the man had done nothing wrong, he could no longer trust him.
The first courtier, however, had revealed a secret, and him Chosroes would ban from his entire kingdom.
It may seem an odd form of spying that reveals not empirical information but a person’s character.
Often, however, it is the best way of solving problems before they arise.
By tempting people into certain acts, you learn about their loyalty, their honesty, and so on.
And this kind of knowledge is often the most valuable of all: Armed with it, you can predict their actions in the future.
Image:
The Third Eye of the Spy. In the land of
the two-eyed, the third eye gives you the omniscience
of a god. You see further than others, and you see deeper into them. Nobody is
safe from the eye but you.
Authority:
Now, the reason a brilliant sovereign and a wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move, and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men, is their foreknowledge of the enemy situation. This “foreknowledge” cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor by astrologic calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation—from spies.
(Sun-tzu, The Art of War, fourth century B.C.)
REVERSAL
Information is critical to power, but just as you spy on other people, you must be prepared for them to spy on you.
One of the most potent weapons in the battle for information, then, is giving out false information.
As Winston Churchill said,
“Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
You must surround yourself with such a bodyguard, so that your truth cannot be penetrated.
By planting the information of your choice, you control the game.
…
In 1944 the Nazis’ rocket-bomb attacks on London suddenly escalated.
Over two thousand V-1 flying bombs fell on the city, killing more than five thousand people and wounding many more.
Somehow, however, the Germans consistently missed their targets.
Bombs that were intended for Tower Bridge, or Piccadilly, would fall well short of the city, landing in the less populated suburbs.
This was because, in fixing their targets, the Germans relied on secret agents they had planted in England.
They did not know that these agents had been discovered, and that in their place, English-controlled agents were feeding them subtly deceptive information.
The bombs would hit farther and farther from their targets every time they fell.
By the end of the campaign they were landing on cows in the country.
By feeding people wrong information, then, you gain a potent advantage.
While spying gives you a third eye, disinformation puts out one of your enemy’s eyes.
A cyclops, he always misses his target.
Conclusion
Do not be a fake friend. What ever advantage that it might provide to you, will be offset by an equal degradation in your other relationships.
Don’t do it.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my “48 Laws of Power” Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Life is better in a third world “shit hole” than in the fabled land of the free and home of the brave…
-stevennonemaker88
I argue that America has become a totalitarian, oligarchy-run, military empire, that pretends to be a “democracy”.
Meanwhile, China has become a traditionalist, merit-driven, single-party, socialist republic.
Both nations have their benefits and liabilities. But the bottom line is always a simple one. How “free” do the people feel who live inside these nations?
Let’s look at the often overlooked nation of Albania, and see what kinds of “freedoms” that they enjoy.
Where it is located…
What it’s geography is like…
Physical map of Albania, shaded relief outside.
Here's a reprint of an article from UNZ, it's titled "The Freest and Most Open Country". It's written by Linh Dinh • April 28, 2021. All credit to the author, and please note that it was formatted to fit this venue.
The Freest and Most Open Country
People don’t have to pay extortionate taxes, or interest rates, to cater for their basic needs such as housing, farmland ownership, education or health. People earn little, but their relative purchasing power is higher and their lives certainly more secure and pleasant than ours in the West.
-Iris
Girl walking past a billboard in Albania.
Is Albania, believe it or not, for here, you can walk around, sit inside cafes, bars or restaurants, worship at a packed church or mosque, and travel by crowded buses between cities, etc.
Though you’re supposed to wear a mask in public, most folks do so with their nose sticking out, because it’s hard to breathe otherwise, and unhealthy, too. That’s good enough for the easy-going cops.
All these people can enter Albania without a visa, vaccine passport or even a negative Covid test, and stay up to a year: European Union citizens, North Americans, most South and Central Americans, Turks, Kuwaitis, Israelis, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, South Koreans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Australians and New Zealanders, plus a few more.
After decades of Communist isolation, Albanians are happy to reclaim their Western heritage. A bookcase is painted on a downtown high-rise. Among the authors featured are Homer, Aeschylus, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Twains, Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Kafka and the Brothers Grim. Albanian giants such as Kadare, Agolli, Fishta, Arapi and Poradeci are also honored. Unlike elsewhere, the Western canon is not assailed or canceled, but upheld and extolled.
Sidewalk book vendors are common, so Albanians are obviously reading, and not just junk either. I’ve seen volumes by Camus, Dostoevsky, Orwell and Hitler, etc. Albanian minds can still stay open.
Old man’s bar in Albania.
In an old man’s bar with plenty of character, there are five wine bottles with labels showing a portrait of Mussolini, JFK, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Sharing the same shelf are skull and penis shaped liquor containers, and a laughing buddha.
In a more Jew-screwed nation, this goofy display would undoubtedly trigger complaints, protests and maybe even a riot that burns up half the street, if not much of downtown. Luckily, I’m in Albania.
There’s a Frederic Chopin monument here. Born in Poland, Chopin spent nearly all of his adulthood in France, and had nothing to do with Albania. As an important cultural figure, however, and not just in the West, but globally, why shouldn’t Chopin be celebrated in Tirana?
Those who reject even the best of their heritage are lobotomizing themselves. Go for it!
In my building, I’m friendly with a man roughly my age. Introducing himself, he said, “Just remember me as the guy with the hat,” and sure enough, he always wears the same baseball cap.
Like many Albanians, he has emigrated, but returned after only a few years in Greece. Vaguely dreaming of America, he entered the immigration lottery, and actually won, but by then, he has changed his mind.
“I have a cousin in Illinois,” he said. “He told me Albania is better.”
“I agree,” I laughed.
“Really? I should tell people you said that.”
“In every American city, there are homeless people all over. If you go to San Francisco, for example, you’ll see homeless people all around City Hall, right in the center! Many of them have gone crazy. Many are on drugs. They shit in the streets!”
“Hmmm.”
“There are almost no homeless in Tirana.”
“We have family. We take care of each other.”
“There are beggars here, but not too many.”
“Most of them are Gypsies.”
“Is your cousin in Chicago?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe just Illinois. Every year, he comes to Albania and stays for six months. He wants to retire here.”
“Does he have children?”
“Three. Two boys, one girl. They are big.”
“Have they been back here?”
“No, they work, all the time. They have good jobs, but they can’t get married,” he chuckled.
Near us, there were half a dozen boys playing. Hearing English, they decided to join in, but their vocabulary was limited to just “hello!” and “hi!”
Walking down a side street, I heard “hello” repeatedly, but there was no one in front or behind me. Perplexed, I finally looked up to see two small boys inside a sixth-floor window. “Hello! Hello!” I returned their greetings, waves and smiles.
My North Macedonian friend, Alex, has a peculiar habit. As we wandered through the back streets of rarely visited towns like Veles and Shtip, little kids would sometimes get very excited to see me, so Alex had to answer their questions. When they asked Alex where he was from, however, he’d also say, “Америка!”
“Why did you say that?” I asked.
“It’s more exciting for them! If I told them I was North Macedonian, they’d think, Who cares? Now, they can go home and brag about seeing two Americans today!”
Inside a Chinese restaurant in Albania.
Though Albania is wide open, there are very few tourists here. In 2 ½ months, I’ve only seen eight Orientals on the streets, plus two Chinese cooks inside restaurants. I’ve chanced upon American English maybe ten times, but Italian just twice. Once, I ran into a group of Turks. I’ve never gone this long without seeing a single black.
It has been raining too much, but with more reliable sunshine, visitors will come. Ali, a taxi driver, certainly hopes so.
Impulsively one morning, I paid Ali $24 to take me to Durres, 24 miles away. It’s a pretty good deal, and Ali could surely use my business. Too often, I see him just standing around near the Swiss Embassy, his usual spot. This also gave us a chance to chatter.
Like the man with the hat, Ali has also gone abroad. He spent six years in Australia.
“Wow! How did you get a visa for that?”
“I paid,” meaning to the right people.
After sweating his ass off at various menial jobs, and saving almost nothing, Ali returned to Tirana, his hometown.
Here, Ali got a job driving trucks, then buses, before becoming a cabbie 15 years ago. Until the Covid mess, everything was going fine.
Ali also got married then, so his son is almost 14, and his daughter, 10. He showed me their photos.
“Nice kids! Are they good students?”
“No,” Ali laughed.
As his name indicates, Ali is Muslim, but only nominally.
“It’s Ramadan,” I noted, “but all the restaurants are busy. Nobody is fasting!”
“Some people are. My kids are fasting. I’m not.”
“They’re better Muslims than you are!”
Ali just shrugged.
After the collapse of Communism in 1991, thousands of Albanian boat people fled to Italy from Durres. This ugly, chaotic exodus lasted until the end of that decade.
Now, Durres is a very pleasant city with an elegant seaside promenade. Before Covid, ferries departed often for Bari, Ancona and even Trieste (where James Joyce spent nearly a decade). Soon, buses will resume their daily routes to Athens.
Normal family life in Albania with children on swing-sets, and normal shops in the background.
Basking in sea breeze-tempered sunshine, I watched parents pushing strollers, a stern boy bouncing a ball and three tots on swings. Busking, a beer bellied, middle-aged man tooted his clarinet. A stand briskly sold “Petulla te Gjyshi” [“Grandpa’s Fried Dough”].
As you’re tucked into your novel nightmare, Albanians have quite impressively exited theirs. How bad was it?
An escapee risked being shot or jailed for years, and if he manages to get out, a family member would be arrested instead. For trying to flee, poet Uran Kostreci was locked up for two decades.
Just getting into Albania was very difficult. Defining the border as “a checkpoint against foreign ideology,” Enver Hoxha declared that “The People’s Republic of Albania is closed to enemies, spies, hippie tourists and other vagabonds.”
First of, Albania was not a republic, much less a “people’s republic,” and there’s no ideology more foreign to Albania than Jewish Marxism, in any permutation. A fanatical us-against-them mindset is the Jewish core. A dictator, Hoxha ruled Albania for 40 years, until his death.
Of the hundreds of Hoxha statues that once dotted this poor land, only one remains that’s not damaged. A ten-foot bronze, it lies in the basement of the former museum in Labinot, a Communist stronghold.
In 1975, the Albanian government posted this guideline:
The border authorities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs do not allow the entrance into the People’s Republic of Albania of all those foreigners who, with their appearance go against the norms of the socialist aesthetics, such as men with long hair like women, with exaggerated sideburns, with irregular beards and with inappropriate clothing, and women with mini and maxi skirts.
Persons with extravagant clothing and irregular appearance […] may enter into the People’s Republic of Albania only if they choose to be adjusted (to cut their hair, to dress normally) […]
To facilitate such adjustments, a barbershop and a store with socialist-approved clothing were available at Albanian borders.
Even eight years ago, Albania was still a wreck, apparently, at least according to an unsolicited account I just received.
Reading about me being sick in Tirana, a reader emailed to say that he had come here in 2013, to be somewhere “as ugly as [he] felt”!
An American living in France, he had spent a year in “herpes hell,” which he had gotten from “an attractive empty vessel who worked in the Paris fashion scene.”
Bald, loveless, with “a ruined penis” and nearly broke, he thought about killing himself, then “had a better idea”:
I would identify the most miserable country on Earth and I would go there. Anything but suicide. I wanted to be somewhere as ugly as I felt. I wanted to see bleak, closed, hard faces. I wanted to see mute wifebeaters and battered women caked in whore makeup. So I went to Albania. I wandered around Tirana with sores on my dick for a few days, considering suicide. One day I found this weird field next to the train station, just a big garbage-strewn negative space at the heart of the city. There were fetid ponds, plastic bags everywhere, and little paths through the half-dead grass. An old Balkan crone squatted next to one of the paths with a few carrots and onions spread out on a scarf in front of her. Men in tracksuits with brutal pimp faces came and went. I went to the center of the field, squatted down, and dug through the trash a little. I found a broken teacup, an old domino, and a playing card. It was Christmas Day. I felt like I was at the negative center of the universe. Here I was, at ground zero of our ruined Jew world with pus coming out of sores on my dick surrounded by the most ugly and corrupted goyim on Earth, the despised and despicable Albanian race.
That’s some beautiful writing about an ugly situation. Today’s Tirana, though, is nothing like that.
Albanian kiosk.
Though many of the buildings are drab, each Tirana street is lively with cafes, bars, restaurants and shops, and the people are very pleasant, mellow and lovely.
Most are slim and not misshapen. Children are well behaved and not agitated. Young men don’t sneer or bluster. Many women are confidently beautiful. The old are dignified.
Though Albania is one of Europe’s poorest countries, with an extremely high emigration rate, its social fabric is more intact than in more advanced nations. Its great men are justly revered. It’s also freer and more open, and as safe as any, with no mugging or riot around any corner.
Unlike in Philadelphia, I don’t wake up each morning to news of another murder or two. There were 499 in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020!
The United States will never catch up to Albania.
This is most interesting. Albania always seemed like a pit of drabness, repression, and despair during the Cold War. Not that I actually read anything about it, of course. Now here it is quite relaxed about life while the US slips ever deeper into unreason, minority hatred of whites, wars that are beyond stupid, open borders, multicultural delusion, corrupt courts, a lunatic legislature, contemptible corporate whores, a rotten FBI, a worthless press, malevolent central bank, Jewish control, feminist malevolence, and leftist thuggery. Did I leave anything out?
-Ace
Conclusion
It is difficult for Americans to understand, and grasp this fact, but most of the world outside the United States is MUCH freer.
This is a fair and philosophical point, which contains a much large-ranging truth:– Traditional societies favour the collective and protect the weakest among them but at the expense of some of the individuals’ freedoms. This is why there are less junkies and homeless in the streets of poorer countries, as they remain within the family fold, but individuals sometimes feel suffocated by social pressure.– Modern Western societies, especially with the ascent of Anglo-Saxon “liberal” values, purport to favour the individual and individual freedoms. This should normally give great opportunities to the brightest and smartest to achieve and accomplish their professional and economic potential, at the expense of the less gifted who are let down. This is how it was supposed to work anyway, and maybe it did work like that up to the 80’s or 90’s.But since globalisation took off, the individualist dream hyped in the West has remained just a dream. No matter how hard one works, it is obvious that the middle classes are disappearing to the benefit of an ever-more powerful plutocracy.So Western working people are actually only getting the anxiety and precarity, without the economic security, the worst of two worlds. I can very well understand why the Albanians described by Mr Dinh have returned to Albania after initially emigrating to the West.
-Iris
Americans have 24-7 narratives about “American Exceptionalism” rammed into their mushy brains for decades. So much so that they believe it. And then, coupled with the non-stop fear-mongering about the rest of the world being a very dark and gloomy place, it’s no wonder that Americans hide inside their homes and huddle in front of the flickering blue monitors for their entertainment.
Freedom is not a nice road, a fancy mall, a impressive government building, or being able to own guns. It’s nothing of the sort.
A large proportion of Americans today, think freedom is the right shop at Walmart, eat at Burger King and to get a quick Covid shot. How things have changed
-Joe Paluka
Freedom is the ability to live your life, as you see fit, without interference by anyone for any reason.
Freedom
Never having to report any income, or financial information to the government.
Never having to ask your government for permission to do something.
Being allowed to eat, smoke, ingest anything your want to your own body.
Never worrying about the police.
Being able to redress your grievances with the government locally and get results in a timely manner.
Not Freedom
Asking permission to buy bullets, and then once granted, having to pay taxes on them, and enter onto a watch list.
Being forced to buy something simply because you are a citizen.
Having your ability to leave the nation prevented and subject to a tax audit.
Your taxes are used for other things that do not directly impact your quality of life.
When I say that my life in China is far freer than what it was in the United States, it’s not hyperbole. It’s truth. It’s on a very personal, and direct, visceral level.
And I have experiences that back this up. So it’s non-debatable.
People, if you are miserable with your life…
…instead of blaming yourselves, maybe you need to start looking at where you are living and what you put up with. Most Americans will discover an exceptional amount of personal freedom the moment they step outside the monstrous United States Military Empire.
And that’s a fact Jack.
The best case in point would be in New York City.
Take the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy, for instance. Aside from the fact that the policy has proven to be vehemently racist, what kind of free society allows their police officers to search people without just cause?
Imagine casually walking home from work only to have a police officer stop you, ask for ID, question you and frisk you. All you’re guilty of is walking home. How is this any different than the Gestapo asking you to see your papers?
-The rise of the American Police State
You all won’t see that anywhere else in the world.
Only in America.
America is more and more like a contagious disease. It would be fine if the US contained their toxic culture and influence to their own border and left the rest of the world alone. But no… They want to make the whole world like them. Enough.
-Dumbo
It's true, and as time goes on it appears that America is just the big bad neighborhood bully that everyone is afraid of, and that no one ever stands up to. That is until one day...
This is a pretty damning and frightening title, don’t you think? Well, it’s true and it’s accurate. But you won’t ever see anyone be so absolutely blunt as MM here. This isn’t salacious and eye catching as some kind of “click bait” for “doom porn”. Never the less, it’s a real and serous issue. And we are talking about it here, simply because the “drums of war” are beating loudly inside of America.
American war drums are beating loudly.
#7 ·
It's a shame that everyone is China bashing these days, and all of that is based on the USA government controlled press.
If anyone were to do some research on the subject of China's claim to sovereignty over these South China Sea Islands, then they would quickly agree with China's stance.
However, almost all are like "LindaLou" who watched "some" of a morning program "Inside China" and immediately made up his/her mind that China was bad and should be condemned for standing up for their rights.
If this were the USA, making these claims, then ALL of the pandering USA citizens would be following the government press and saying "YES, YES, YES".
The citizens of the USA should be very mindful of the fact that you're being manipulated to believe whatever the government wants you to believe.
Ever watched "1984" ?
Listen to me.
.
Please.
.
America is not able, and is not capable, of fighting either Russia, or China on their territory. And would suffer catastrophic losses at a horrific level. Probably one that would result in the absolute collapse of the country (the entire United States as a nation) to a point where it is completely unrecognizable afterwards.
And you know, many, many people are starting to wake up to this fact. Even the most deluded sheeple. Some Americans. Maybe in numbers as high as 1% are scratching their heads and asking… what? You want to fight?
Why?
You're not suggesting that taking out China would be as easy, are you?
I guarantee you that the US cannot defeat China. We are no longer the world's leading super power and, in fact, we're on the verge of becoming #3.
China is #1 and we're close to coming in behind Russia.
#18 ·
Any of the following areas of American provocation would result in the nuclear detonation upon American cities…
China over Taiwan.
China over Tibet.
China over Hong Kong.
China over Xinjiang.
China over the South China Sea.
Russia over the Ukraine.
The American military planners are aware of this fact. And so they have been conducting all sorts of studies, and war games, to find solutions where America would win a war again either Russia, China or both simultaneously.
They can’t find ANY.
Many in the know, believe America has two options when it comes to winning a world war against China and Russia. Also, what most agree on is the fact that America cannot win a conventional war against either power, or both.
- Can America Win World War III? A Critical Analysis
Of course, because everyone is “dancing around it” and refuses to look at the issue “face to face” the actual study results (studies… many) are coded in euphemisms. Instead of saying that the United States military was wiped off the face of the globe, the studies say…
"...there were challenges and difficulties that were encountered..."
Instead of saying that all the United States carriers were non-functional after three days, the reports read…
"...the Navy needs to invest money to improve defensive capabilities in a new and contentious environment...".
Instead of saying that half of the expensive and elaborate high cost weapons and equipment were no longer operable, the reports stated…
"...challenges in training must be addressed..."
These euphemisms have become the “New Speak” of American Imperial Policy. As this quote outlays…
"Question: So you think that the United States can no longer be called a democracy?"Answer: Democratic countries do not engage in blackmail and threats against other sovereign states, do not interfere in their internal affairs. They do not violate international law, do not use military force and economic sanctions bypassing the UN. They do not trample on human rights or restrict freedom of speech on their territory and abroad. They do not try to use racism of all stripes to solve internal problems, nor do they lure extremists and terrorists to their side for geopolitical purposes. They do not allow transnational corporations to interfere in the work of the government, imposing their own interests on the country and society, much less block the legitimate head of state in social networks and mass media. In democratic countries, the administration that came to power does not disavow the decisions of its predecessors simply because there has been a personal antagonism between them."
But a "democratic country" is whatever America defines it as--at any given moment!
America is just like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
Torture is Enhanced Interrogation.
Coup D'etats are Regime Change.
Kill Lists are a Disposition Threat Matrix.
Wars of Aggression are Wars of Choice (or Pre-emptive kinetic military action).
Ignorance is Strength....
As a former high-level Bush Regime official boasted, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Welcome to the American Rules-Based Order.
-Posted by: ak74 | May 4 2021 23:21 utc | 30
And this use of euphemisms has been seriously misinterpreted by the American leadership elite who mistakenly believe that they can fight either or both Russia and China simultaneously and win in any conflict. And here you have Metallicman saying that this is simply not true.
Fifty years of fighting small, lightly armed military, in under-developed nations that rely on obsolete technology and who, at best engage in GuerillaWarfareshould not be considered the same thing as fighting a determined, skilled, peer capable military in Asia.
Well, this is well understood.
But whether or not American military is able to fight a war is not a concern to the bureaucracy in Washington DC. Whether they are able to profit from the threat of war is. And thus we have this curious article…
Warships sink. Bases burn. F-35s die on the runway. Can $24 billion a year — 3.3 % of the Pentagon budget — fix the problem?
WASHINGTON: The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. Bases burn. Warships sink. But we could fix the problem for about $24 billion a year, one well-connected expert said, less than four percent of the Pentagon budget.
“In our games, when we fight Russia and China,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek said this afternoon, “blue gets its ass handed to it.”
In other words, in RAND’s wargames, which are often sponsored by the Pentagon, the US forces — colored blue on wargame maps — suffer heavy losses in one scenario after another and still can’t stop Russia or China — red — from achieving their objectives, like overrunning US allies.
No, it’s not a Red Dawn nightmare scenario where the Commies conquer Colorado.
But losing the Baltics or Taiwan would shatter American alliances, shock the global economy, and topple the world order the US has led since World War II.
Hey! Boys and Girls! I've got news for you all. The US no longer leads the world. It just thinks it does. The American Leadership shill haven't read the reports yet. -MM
Body Blows & Head Hits
How could this happen, when we spend over $700 billion a year on everything from thousand-foot-long nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to supersonic stealth fighters?
Well, it turns out US superweapons have a little too much Achilles in their heels.
“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with decades of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”
Even the hottest jet has to land somewhere.
But big airbases on land and big aircraft carriers on the water turn out to be big targets for long-range precision-guided missiles.
Once an American monopoly, such smart weapons are now a rapidly growing part of Russian and Chinese arsenals — as are the long-range sensors, communications networks, and command systems required to aim them.
So, as potential adversaries improve their technology, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructure like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”
That’s why the 2020 budget retires the carrier USS Truman decades early and cuts two amphibious landing ships, as we’ve reported.
It’s also why the Marine Corps is buying the jump-jet version of the F-35, which can take off and land from tiny, ad hoc airstrips, but how well they can maintain a high-tech aircraft in low-tech surroundings is an open question.
While the Air Force and Navy took most of the flak today at this afternoon’s Center for a New American Security panel on the need for “A New American Way of War.” the Army doesn’t look too great, either.
Its huge supply bases go up in smoke as well, Work and Ochmanek said. Its tank brigades get shot up by cruise missiles, drones, and helicopters because the Army largely got rid of its mobile anti-aircraft troops, a shortfall it’s now hastening to correct.
And its missile defense units get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming fire.
“I think it’s unanimous from all the soldiers involved that we got this one right,” said the Army’s project manager for the Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System. Manned aircraft, FARA and FLRAA, are also moving out sharply.
- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“If we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein. And that’s it,” Work growled. “We have 58 Brigade Combat Teams, but we don’t have anything to protect our bases, so what different does it make?”
Worst of all, Work and Ochmanek said, the US doesn’t just take body blows, it takes a hard hit to the head as well.
Its communications satellites, wireless networks, and other command-and-control systems suffer such heavy hacking and jamming that they are, in Ochmanek’s words, “suppressed, if not completely shattered.”
The US has wargamed cyber and electronic warfare in field exercises, Work said, but the simulated enemy forces tend to shut down US networks so effectively that nothing works and nobody else gets any training done.
“Whenever we have an exercise and the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise,” Work said, instead of trying to figure out how to keep fighting when your command post gives you nothing but blank screens and radio static.
The Chinese call this “system destruction warfare,” Work said: They plan to “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time.”
In short, if Biden rashly sends the military to Taiwan’s defense, he could be sending us to our greatest naval defeat in our history.
If the president’s military advisers convince him to attack military targets on the mainland, the results would be mushroom clouds over U.S. cities.
-1945
The $24 Billion Fix — And Cuts
So how do you fix such glaring problems?
The Air Force asked RAND to come up with a plan two years ago, and, surprisingly, Ochmanek said, “we found it impossible to spend more than $8 billion a year.”
That’s $8 billion for the Air Force. Triple that to cover for the Army and the Navy Department (which includes the US Marines), Ochmanek said, and you get $24 billion.
Yes, these are very broad strokes, but that’s only 3.3 percent of the $750 billion defense budget President Trump will propose for the 2020 fiscal year.
Work was less worried about the near-term risk — he thinks China and Russia aren’t eager to try anything right now — and more about what happens 10 to 20 years from now. But, he said, “sure, $24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure.
So what does that $24 billion buy?
To start with, missiles. Lots and lots of missiles. The US and its allies notoriously keep underestimating how many smart weapons they’ll need for a shooting war, then start to run out against enemies as weak as the Serbs or Libyans. Against a Russia or China, which can match not only our technology but our mass, you run out of munitions fast.
Specifically, you want lots of long-range offensive missiles. Ochmanek mentioned Army artillery brigades, which use MLRS missile launchers, and the Air Force’s JAGM-ER smart bomb, while Work touted the Navy’s LRASM ship-killer. You also want lots of defensive missiles to shoot down the enemy‘s offensive missiles, aircraft, and drones. One short-term fix there is the Army’s new Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (MSHORAD) batteries, Stinger missiles mounted on 8×8 Stryker armored vehicles. In the longer term, lasers, railguns, and high-powered microwaves could shoot down incoming missiles much less expensively.
The other big fix: toughening up our command, control, and communications networks. That includes everything from jam-proof datalinks to electronic warfare gear on combat aircraft and warships. The services are fond of cutting corners on electronics to get as many planes in the air and hulls in the water as possible, Ochmanek said, but a multi-billion dollar ship that dies for lack of a million-dollar decoy is a lousy return on investment.
In the longer run, Work added, you want to invest heavily in artificial intelligence: not killer robots, he said, but “loyal wingmen” drones to support manned aircraft and big-data crunchers to help humans analyze intelligence and plan. Of course, you have to find the money for new stuff somewhere, which means either raising the defense budget even further — unlikely — or cutting existing programs. Ochmanek was unsurprisingly shy about specifics, saying only that the services could certainly squeeze out $8 billion each for new technologies.
Work was a little harder-edged. He said cutting a carrier and two amphibious ships over the forthcoming 2020-2024 budget “seems right to me.” He argued the US Army has way too many brigade combat teams — tanks and infantry — and way too little missile defense to protect them. And he bemoaned reports the US Air Force will retire the B-1 bomber, one of its few long-range strike aircraft: If the Air Force doesn’t want them, he said, give them to the Navy, revive the old VPB “Patrol Bomber” squadrons, and load them with Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles to sink the Chinese navy. Pentagon leaders should challenge the armed services to solve very hard, very specific problems.
Work said: Sink 350 Chinese navy and coast guard vessels in the first 72 hours of a war, or destroy 2,400 Russian armored vehicles. Whoever has the best solution gets the most money. Those are hardly easy goals, Work said, but they’re also doable with technology now in development.
Easy Solution. The immediate problems could be fixed with technology already in production, Ochmanek said. For $24 billion, “I can buy the whole kit,” he said. “It’s all mature technologies and it would scare the crap out of adversaries, in a good way.”
It’s all about the money…
According to Washington DC K-Street neocons, the solution is more money. Not, instead, to rethink the value of conducting war against a peer-capable enemy. Especially one that has no intention on invading America. And they should think about the consequences…
No matter how one calculates it, fighting China over Taiwan would harm American interests and security without even holding the potential for benefit.
We must resist the temptation to act on the presumption that we can always choose to fight because we will always win.
The future of our country might hinge on getting this right.
-1945
The only threat to America these days is domestic. Internally, America is collapsing and the rest of the world isn’t. But… Let’s suppose that the money-grabbing Washington “think tanks” have made the necessary Power Point PPT presentations and convinced, actually convinced, those that control the utilization of the military that it is indeed possible to win a war. What then? Well let’s look at the situation from this point of view…
Biden Can’t Assume America Beats China in a Taiwan War
Joe Biden will face a host of difficulties and challenges when he assumes office on January 20, but perhaps none more consequential than deteriorating China-U.S. relations.
It is the potential flashpoint of Taiwan that will have the greatest urgency. Many in Washington are advocating a shedding of the decades’ old policy of “strategic ambiguity,” in favor of an overt declaration that we would come to the defense of Taiwan if China ever seeks to reunify the island by force.
Well. According to the UN, and both China and Taiwan, Taiwan is Han Chinese and part of China. It operates independently like Hong Kong does. But in no way is it an American territory. Which is something that the United States media and the neocons in Washington DC wants everyone to believe.
Assumed in such advocacy is the presumption the U.S. Armed Forces would be able to successfully accomplish that mission. For at least three major reasons, those assumptions are badly misplaced.
First, the risk is high that on purely military fundamentals, the United States would fail to successfully prevent a resolute and committed Chinese assault. As the most recent Department of Defense annual report to Congress on China details, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – remains on a multi-decade modernization push that has seen them develop a substantial defensive capability, known as anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD).
China’s A2/AD strategy, the Pentagon report explains, is designed to “dissuade, deter, or, if ordered, defeat third-party intervention during a large-scale, theater campaign such as a Taiwan contingency.”
Their strategy includes the use of modern weaponry including warships, new fighters, increasingly lethal missile forces, heavy armor, and cyberattack capability.
When comparing the armed forces of the United States and China, we are still substantially more capable than China. Our ability to project power, for example, remains ahead of China.
Critically, however, the balance of power near China’s shores would give them virtually EVERY military advantage.
Repeated wargames conducted in the United States pitting the U.S. against China in a Taiwan scenario reveal the ugly truth.
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense and current RAND analyst David A. Ochmanek revealed earlier this year that simulation exercises have exposed troubling results when the U.S. intervenes in war between China and Taiwan.
The American side, Ochmanek admitted, has “had its ass handed to it for years.”
The reasons for the simulated combat losses aren’t hard to understand.
Over the past few decades, the Chinese have developed modern weapons of war and have improved the quality of their fighting force substantially above where they were when the U.S. dismantled Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army in 1991.
Though our military is globally superior any fight within the so-called “first island chain” near China’s coast would play to Beijing’s tactical advantage.
As if 2020, this is now obsolete. According to the United States military, and the Trump White House the "first island chain" delimitation line is no longer an American advantage.
It is an area of Chinese military advantage.
Our conventional and nuclear power deter China from ever attacking the U.S. mainland or Armed Forces – but if we choose to intervene in their back yard, they would have the advantage.
Second, in the event of war, Taiwan may defend itself not merely by targeting the attacking Chinese forces, but by hitting military bases on the Chinese mainland.
If the U.S. joins the fight against China, it is unlikely China would differentiate whether an attack against its mainland came from a Taiwanese or American source and may well prompt a Chinese retaliation against U.S. targets either in the region (such as in Japan, South Korea, Guam, or Hawaii) or directly on our continental homeland. The risk would then rise precipitously of a nuclear response against American Cities on American soil.
Third, even if we overcame all the difficulties and imposed an outright defeat on the Chinese, there’s no guarantee China wouldn’t try again and we would be saddled with permanently garrisoning Taiwan, indefinitely making its security our responsibility. It would also all but guarantee a new war with China, as an American military presence across the Strait would entice Beijing to prepare for the next round. Taiwan is a core interest of China and they would never quit fighting.
As China has repeatedly warned the brain-dead American leadership, that Taiwan is Chinese territory.
Any American killing of Chinese people on Chinese soil would result in American deaths on American soil.
Of course, the idea that China would stick to a conventional strategy and isolate Taiwan and allow it to work with the United States unencumbered is another major illusion.
There is a much higher chance of San Fransisco turned to a flat, glassed over radioactive plain than this scenario coming into being. The Chinese leadership does not think like an American oligarch.
We would have to spend scores of billions annually to perpetually defend Taiwan, placing severe strain on our economy, diverting military forces and resources from everywhere else in the world, and require a major increase in the size of our military and thus base defense budget.
Undertaking such a burden as the “prize” for successfully preventing China from taking Taiwan could literally bankrupt our country and leave us more vulnerable than we’ve been since before World War I.
If you thought that Afghanistan's trillions of dollars was a waste, you ain't seen nothing yet.
China would make that look like play-money.
China could turn Taiwan into Verdun if it wanted to. And America would be trapped in throwing trillions of dollars into that sink hole, all to the glee of the neocons on K-street.
It should be beyond clear that it is not in America’s interests to take such an enormous risk. Naturally, the United States is a genuine advocate for freedom and self-determination across the globe.
It is not, however, our responsibility to be the global guarantor of every land and peoples’ freedom on the planet.
It would be a tragedy beyond compare if in trying to defend one country’s freedom, we put at risk our ability to guarantee our own.
Why are we even talking about this?
Well? Why?
Like him or hate him. Bernie Sanders made a great point thirty years ago (30 years!) that is even more pointed now. And it describes exactly what is going on right now. It describes the WHY everyone in Washington DC is talking about war with China, or War with Russia…
This video was made exactly 30 years ago.
Now, China at that time was truly third world. Over 90% of it’s people lived in poverty. But the government did exactly what Bernie Sanders proposes in this video, and now look at China today.
Now we have America looking to start a major war.
Idiots!
The next war will reduce all of America to slag. All of it. And the nations… nations… fractured remains that rise up, will be fourth world nations working hard to become more than just a radioactive banana republic.
How a War Against China Could Cripple the United States
Once China has decided to use military force to reunify Taiwan, their first actions will be covert actions designed to quietly set the stage for the assault of their main combat forces.
The assumption is...
The first action that will signal a full-on war has begun will be an initial, major barrage of ballistic missiles screaming across the strait at multiple civilian and military targets.
Once that happens, everything happens at warp speed.
The first barrage of missiles will target critical infrastructure and seek to destroy Taiwan’s ability to respond to the Chinese onslaught.
They will target military airfields to make them unusable, seek to destroy aircraft on the ground, especially those with the ability to conduct command and control and to direct other weapons (like AWACs-type craft); missile boats and Aegis-type destroyers in their births; anti-air and missile batteries on the ground.
“We warn those ‘Taiwan independence’ elements – those who play with fire will burn themselves, and Taiwan independence means war.”
— Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian
In the early hours of the battle, Taiwanese troops are shocked, confused, lack clear communications, and are fighting in the rear and from the front at the beaches.
Also an assumption.
China’s initial objectives will be to secure at least one of the three airfields and capture one or more beach landing sites by the end of the first day of fighting.
If they do, they will have a chance to open an airbridge and beach landing site through which they can pour more and more material with limited opposition. Like at the Normandy beach landings in 1944, once the invading force breaks through at the beach, it is almost impossible for the defenders to win.
The defenders’ primary objective is to identify and destroy all Chinese efforts on the island as quickly as possible, retain control of all airfields, and keep the beaches impregnable.
If China is not successful in landing the knock-out blow within the first 48 hours, it will likely have to switch its efforts to dramatically increasing its use of ballistic and cruise missiles, fighter and bomber sorties, and ship-to-shore missiles to try and force an opening at one or more beach landing zones.
They will try to overwhelm the island through brute force. If Taiwan is successful at preventing any large scale incursions either on the beach or via airborne or air-assault operations, their chances of thwarting the invasion increase dramatically. But they still won’t be out of the woods.
If China cannot penetrate the beach after two weeks of fighting, they may shift to a siege mentality, in which they will continue sustained bombing of the island, but at a reduced rate while putting into effect a naval blockade.
If things broke well for Taiwan, it is entirely possible that they could prevent China from opening any beachheads against their defenses. A naval blockade, however, will be more difficult to overcome.
Without any ability to replace the missiles and other ammunition they expend, no way to medically evacuate their wounded, or to import oil to power their warships, fuel their armored vehicles, and generate electricity – not to mention feed the population.
Though Taiwan can inflict serious damage to the PLA military, China’s capacity to absorb the damage and replace losses – while maintaining a blockade – is unlikely to be enough to stave off eventual defeat.
Taipei’s hope that by holding out long enough the U.S. will come riding to a the rescue will, one way or another, be dashed.
Constraints on U.S. Response
As Admiral Philip Davidson said in recent Congressional testimony, it would take American ships based in Alaska 17 days to reach Taiwan; 21 days from the U.S. West Coast.
Which is the entire idea behind the QUAD. To have massive military forces within close proximity of China. And thus American military would stream from Australia into the South Pacific Sea.
Beijing’s attack will require a no-notice launch to minimize the Taiwanese defender’s ability to man their positions, but possibly the greater purpose will be to ensure the U.S. Navy and Air Force are caught flat-footed and unable to mount an effective response.
To even have a chance at success, U.S. Forces in the Pacific region would have to have months to prepare.
They would have to bring personnel strength up near 100%, make all their ships and aircraft combat ready and fully supplied with wartime ammunition and fuel stocks.
That will never happen. At best American equipment is at 35% readiness, with a goal of some day reaching 50% readiness.
Any shortfalls in personnel, ships, and planes would have to be redeployed from other theaters to bring the Pacific naval and air fleets up to full capacity. None of those will be possible with a no-notice surprise attack by Beijing – and that vulnerability will put the U.S. president in a real bind.
Crisis in the White House Situation Room
The instant the first report reaches the Situation Room, the White House will assemble a crisis response team of senior advisors to begin analyzing the situation and debating potential responses.
Some will suggest the president order immediate long-range missile attacks against Chinese invasion air and naval forces in an attempt to aid the defenders.
Others may advocate hitting the Chinese bases supporting the invasion.
China will likely warn Biden that any attack on China-proper will result in missile strikes on American cities with conventional warheads* (still very lethal).
Word is that America HAS been warned. And the type of weapon used has not be specified.
*One of the biggest problems that Americans make is assuming that everyone else thinks like them.
As Mike Sweeny recently wrote for Defense Priorities, such attacks against targets on the Chinese mainland will inflame the Chinese domestic audience against the United States in increase the pressure for a nuclear response.
Again. There is a serious fundamental difference between China and America. In China, day to day public option does not matter. Decisions are not made by mob rule. They are made by merit-appointed true experts and the decisions are always sound. If China believes that the advantage would be to eviscerate New York City with a cluster of six nuclear war heads, then it will do so, and what the newspaper reader on the street thinks will not factor into the equation.
The risk of a war between Washington and Beijing escalating to nuclear is higher than many understand.
Duh!
But the president will face enormous pressures to act militarily in the face of Chinese aggression.
Taiwanese officials will certainly be pleading for the U.S. to intervene. Those in the United States who are already China hawks will almost certainly advocate “limited” military retaliation.
They will argue that Washington cannot stand passively by while China swallows a leading democratic country in Asia.
To refuse to act would be tantamount to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement at Munich and encourage China to try and conquer other nations militarily. In all fairness, such concerns would not be without merit.
But Biden’s ability to respond militarily would be far more limited than would be commonly understood.
If Congress declared war on China or gave Biden authority to launch a military strike, the best he could do would be to unleash a relatively few cruise missiles and order some long-range bombing sorties from regional bases.
Those would have some impact but be insufficient to stop China’s invasion.
“China’s navy is viewed as posing a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s ability to achieve and maintain wartime control of blue-water ocean areas in the Western Pacific.”
—Congressional Research Service analysis
To engage in sustained operations in support of Taiwan’s defenses, it would take the U.S. Navy and Air Force months to properly enter the war theater.
Trying to rush our military into a fight as soon as it can reach Taiwan would be near suicidal, as we would be arriving to the fight in sub-optimal condition, not fully resourced – and would face the full brunt of the Chinese air and naval forces (which are about double the size of the U.S. Pacific fleets). As importantly, PRC air and naval forces have long had existing plans to fight a U.S. force sent to aid Taiwan and have conducted countless computer simulations and field exercises.
We would be outnumbered, out-prepared, and out-gunned while fighting a motivated enemy engaged in what it considers an existential battle.
Duh! If Texas was Attacked how would American react? The same kind of visceral reaction should be expected of China.
All of the recent U.S.-based computer simulations reach similar conclusions.
In short, if Biden rashly sends the military to Taiwan’s defense, he could be sending us to our greatest naval defeat in our history.
If the president’s military advisers convince him to attack military targets on the mainland, the results could be mushroom clouds over U.S. cities.
The leaders in Washington DC believe that the loss of a city like Los Angles would be acceptable “collateral losses” in the quest to maintain Democracy off the coast of China.
Fortunately, however, there are superior options for Biden to choose that don’t involve dead Americans.
Preserving U.S. Military Power, Maintaining Security and Freedom
If China bull-headedly turns to violence to take Taiwan by force, the U.S. Government’s overriding priority will be to safeguard American security, freedom, and prosperity.
America's "freedom", and "prosperity"? Americans are so used to repeating the narrative that they no longer know what the words mean.
If Biden resists the temptation to respond immediately, he can dramatically shift the balance of power back in America’s favor by adopting realistic and attainable diplomatic and military strategy that features isolating, resisting, and containing China.
LOL. As if that is going to happen. Did you see any reasoning or strategy in the Alaskan meeting in April 2021 between Washington and China?
If China is foolish enough to gamble its future by attacking Taiwan – and America is smart enough to stay out of the war – the PRC will be severely weakened from its current status.
I disagree.
The entire world relies on Chinese manufacturing. And factories do not grow on trees. There are no quality alternatives for precision manufacturing, high technology products or innovation. Everything has been outsourced to China, and that includes Japanese products and design, German products and design, Korean products and design and all the rest.
The United States has, for some time, championed Taipei building a defensive fortress that would make any Chinese attempt to invade prohibitively expensive.
If anything, (America) should encourage Taiwan to expand further their defenses.
Even if China were successful in catching Taiwan unprepared, the surprise would not be complete, and Taipei would still have the ability to launch retaliatory strikes against the Chinese.
Unlike the United States, Taiwan would have no incentive to resist attacking mainland targets and would attack mainland airfields, naval bases, rocket and missile launch sites, and Chinese defense industry targets.
It would be very difficult seeing that the Chinese can render all missiles inactive by energy beam weapons.
They would also successfully sink some Chinese warships, knock out some fighter jets, and destroy thousands of their troops.
Maybe.
But China does not think like that.
Let me tell you what is more probable.
Nothing happens. Then one day the news says that Taiwan has embraced China as a co-family member. And has decided to get closer to the mainland.
That is the kind of level of strategy that we are dealing with here. Not the crude "blow 'em up" Rambo style of neocon warfare.
The net result of even a successful attack would gouge the PLA, severely weakening their ability to wage war; if Taiwan somehow held out and prevented an island takeover, the PLA would be set back decades and the PRC itself at risk of falling internally.
Um. Not even remotely realistic.
Any nation that can build two (x2) 4000 bed hospitals in ten days, or a 80 story skyscraper in a week, would have no problem replenishing military forces.
In either event, America’s advantage over China would be significantly increased, our ability to protect U.S. interests global continue to be unmatched, and our people continue in complete freedom.
Americans living in "freedom"? Obviously he was doing drugs when he wrote this. I think that he is just rolling off some trite sayings without thinking, rather than adding constructive dialog to make his points with.
Moreover, we would then have decades to increase our defenses from Guam to Hawaii to the West Coast – should that be deemed necessary – to ensure China could never, even decades into the future, successfully mount a cross-Pacific attack.
With what money? When it would take a wheel-barrel full of $100 bills to buy a hamburger?
What Americans think China’s military is like…
This is exactly what Americans think that the Chinese military is today. It’s what most people think. It’s a group of peasant, illiterate, with little training using 1980’s era hand-me-down old Soviet Union weapons. Where, their only strength is in their enormous numbers of people.
What China’s military is actually like…
This has rapidly become my favorite video. This is what the Chinese military is actually like.
This is a singular unit in XinJiang, you know the place; where the gateway to the BRI is, and where America must stop at nothing to disrupt it.
You probably know of it though the propaganda campaign about Uighur Muslims in Concentration Camps and other bullshit. You know. That America “must do something to help those poor oppressed Muslims”. As if the American oligarchy ever cared about Muslims at all, ever.
And some of the technologies that China has. Their quads operate and behave quite differently than what the American units do. And it’s very interesting. You have to keep in mind that all, and every Chinese person is a member of the irregulars. They all have military training, and the enormous size of the Chinese military is only the active “professional” warrior class. Not the irregulars.
And every squad has one of these curious weapons. They also have this other “neato” gun which is sort of a pocket howitzer that is the size of a rifle.
Chinese knives are sure cool, eh?
A personal mortar. Also standard with all squads…
The jeep howitzers are pretty cool too…
And aside from the regular training, and the mandatory of all military train for every single 14 year old boy and girl in China, you have elements of training that is simply not present in the United States, such as being able to shoot, and load a weapon with one hand. As in this movie…
And of course, since all the parts and engines, and subsystems of all the latest military hardware is contracted out to China, it should be no surprise that their home-gown, home-design, and home-manufactured weapons systems would be equal or better than the American ones that spawned them…
All the videos
If you cannot access all or some of the videos you can get them all HERE. Some good stuff, especially if you are a military buff.
Conclusion
In sum, by staying out of a China vs. Taiwan war, not only would America maintain our current strength, our national security would be stronger.
Conversely, if we foolishly insert ourselves into their fight, we will suffer severe damage to our Armed Forces at a minimum, placing our national security around the world at higher risk; in a worst-case, American cities could smolder in radioactive waste for years to come.
No matter how one calculates it, fighting China over Taiwan would harm American interests and security without even holding the potential for benefit.
We must resist the temptation to act on the presumption that we can always choose to fight because we will always win.
The future of our country might hinge on getting this right.
MM Comments
Ah. Perhaps. I can parse though many of his comments and poke holes through them.
(Taiwan) "...would attack mainland airfields, naval bases, rocket and missile launch sites, and Chinese defense industry targets."
Perhaps if he looked at a map he would see how ridiculous this statement is.
Taiwan would try.
And the planes wouldn’t be able to fly with directed energy beam weapons causing them to fall out of the sky.
And even if they could make it back, where would they land.
All the airfields would be cratered.
Ok. You can never predict the outcome of a military operation.
Certainly [1] the failure of the Trump administration to cause starvation in China by using drone launched bio-weapons against livestock didn’t work. The [2] aggressive “color revolution” in Hong Kong didn’t work. The [3] attempt at destabilizing Xinjiang didn’t work, and most certainly [4] the COVID bio-weapon attack against China on CNY with the lethal B-strain did not work.
Any military action in defense of Taiwan… … has a very small likelihood of working.
Chances are that it would not be successful.
And the participation of the American military against China WILL LAUNCH a hot war against America. Which would have at least a few of the following characteristics.
Destruction of Guam
Destruction of Diego Garcia
End of all trade with China… resulting in a collapse of many American industries as they still rely on Chinese trade to operate.
Probable war with Australia and the destruction of Australian Cities.
Russian involvement for certain as an ally of China.
Destruction of the cities in Hawaii.
And a high chance of nuclear destruction of American cities.
I would suggest the destruction of every city over a population of 750,000 in America. That would include all the “big names”. Perhaps the capital of the United States could relocate to Salina , Kansas.
All of these potential issues have an over 65% chance of happening if the USA gets involved and tries to provoke a war regarding China.
So the question really is… …just how out of touch, insane and crazy is the United States leadership? Would they be that foolish to tangle with Russia and China over some South China Sea incident?
Well…
Maybe this next article will provide the answer…
CIA Wokeness
Michael Tracey writes about a weird CIA video that is making the rounds (emphasis added):
In a mind-blowing marketing video first published on March 25, but which had escaped widespread notice until recent days, the CIA enthusiastically endorsed several key tenets of what has now indisputably become a hegemonic left/liberal ideological and rhetorical construct:
“I am a woman of color,” the video’s protagonist, an unnamed CIA officer, triumphantly proclaims. “I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.”
She continues, “I used to struggle with imposter syndrome. But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I’m supposed to apologize for the space I occupy.”
I have to admit that I do not know what the words are supposed to mean. (Nor does my Firefox spellchecker. It flags them.) I also do not understand the phrases. To me they sounds like utter bullshit. But if the CIA wants to hire more such people I am all for it. Folks who can not leave their personal issues at the door typically muck up their workplace and create productivity problems. A less effective CIA will be a plus for the rest of the world.
But it will certainly enable the already insane leadership to go blindly towards a very dangerous path.
And that path looks, more and more everyday, like a high-speed rail straight to Hell.
It’s all over the chat rooms. America has the best training, the most capable leaders, the strongest military, and the best manufacturing in the world. While China is what? “A third world, has been nation, that has stolen more than it contributes”, right? That’s the narrative. This is typical…
(This article is) Complete BS. You don't understand how military power and capability works.
China doesn't have any Carrier groups, not one. That is a BIG deal.
They can't project any significant sea / air power.
They also don't have any significant amphibious assault capabilities such as the USMC.
Their air-force isn't close in capability.
The majority of their service members have very rudimentary training at best. There is much more to "staff" a military than just hand a rifle to a 16 year old peasant. A 155mm artillery shell or 1000 lb air delivered bomb takes care of numbers.
#34 ·
But the interesting retort is here…
I completely understand how military power and capability works. I didn’t say they could or would invade the US. I said we couldn’t defeat them in a context of their island building in the South Pacific. They’ve been testing and demonstrating anti-satellite weapons for over a decade. They don’t have a lot of carriers but they have a lot of submarines to take out carriers. They don’t have the capability to deliver an invasion force on the US but they definitely have that capacity throughout the South Pacific.They have massive manufacturing capacity and we have dwindled ours to virtual non-existence. In WWII, our fleet was decimated in short order but we had massive manufacturing capacity and we cranked out ships and carriers in droves. Where are we going to do that today? Where are we going to make the electronic components to drive a modern fleet?
Read that carefully. We get our legitimate Mil-Spec electronic parts from China and we get fake parts from China. Where are we going to get them when we go to war with China and have to rebuild a fleet?What about training? We’re training them on how to defeat us:
If you think of China as a backwards country where the soldiers would be 16-year-old peasants, I think you’re wrong.Then you have to consider the likelihood of China using a tactical nuke. Are they crazy enough? They don’t have to be; they need only convince our President that they might be.
But it doesn’t matter. Decades of anti-China propaganda and an onslaught in the belief that America is a nation of Rambo’s has created a situation where everyone is living in this fantasy world…
They would not stand a chance vs the US today.
China has never won a war. They are defensive by nature, they are not an offensive power. historically they build walls. Their "islands" are an example of that. They don't plan on projecting force, they plan on defending what they see as their's.
China can't build a jet engine worth a poop. China can't come up with their own ideas and relies on stealing to make their military products - so how do you conclude they can figure out how to out-think the west?
China has virtually NO access to oil/gas/coal should a war happen. Sounds like a short war.
Their navy would have a fair fight with japan.
If I recall correctly, Japan was beaten without any foot troops...
Ah. A bunch of “arm chair” warriors debating some war that is on the other side of the world. A place where they never visited, and a society and culture that they know nothing about. It’s 2021. China has been very clear about what would happen;
Taiwan, and the SCS islands are all Chinese territory.
Kill one Chinese person on Chinese land, and China will retaliate in an equal measured manner.
They have already demonstrated this…
April 2020 China’s first Type-075 amphibious assault carrier, designed for launching helicopters, caught fire. It was mysterious how it happened. The Chinese Navy put out the fire, and repaired the damage and launched the ship as scheduled.
Then…
July 2020 The Navy’s USS Bonhomme Richard burned for days at its pier in San Diego. After the fire was put out, the Navy registered the destruction as “total” and wrote off the vessel as a total loss.
The Chinese Do Not Play.
A fine reminder…
Here’s a fine reminder for all the jack-asses that believe that American could shoot and kill Chinese people, on Chinese land, and somehow go unscathed…
And let’s continue…
We need to look at the full scope about what it going on…
The full scope
American leadership are clueless psychopaths.
Their toadies are sociopaths that run the levels of government.
The bureaucracy that serves them has been politically and socially corrupted beyond usefulness.
Never the less, all studies point to catastrophic consequences if the United States tries to get involved in a war with either Russia or China.
And Russia and China have signed mutual military treaties so that they will work together if the USA tries to instigate a war.
The public is not aware of this. And because of that, we have a situation where American and their leadership wants a war. And this was made obvious in the April 2021 meeting in Anchorage Alaska.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are not FOOLS. They know exactly what the stakes are, and they will absolutely not permit any “wars of democracy” to land anywhere near them. And if they do… oh, Lordy. God help the American citizenry. There will not be any mercy.
Why?
Because the Chinese know history…
.
Make no mistake.
The Chinese will fight to the death to guarantee that they will not be exterminated like vermin by the psychopaths in Washington DC. They will guarantee it.
Like it or not, but Trump has a real chance of winning the 2024 elections. This in fact will be the best thing ever because the whole world will immediately turn their backs on USA the way they did.
Personally I can't wait for him to f*ck USA up and try to start a war with either China or/and Iran. About time USA get its ass whipped.
Do not worry, the “new and improved” military forces are more than ready to deal with 16 year old goat-herders with malfunctioning cheapo Chinese AK-47 clones…
Check out what the fuck happened to the enormous Armada that steamed to China in 2020. Nope, it did not go as planned. It was a fiasco, and President Trump sacked the top military brass for not following through on his wishes.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
'Murikans are just natural born retards. And arrogant ones at that.
Posted by: Et Tu | Apr 17 2021 18:06 utc | 1
As I have repeatedly stated, the most dangerous propaganda is the propaganda that you want to believe. And it is so very easy to control the narrative when you control all media, and suppress any alternative voices. Which is exactly how the American (and Western) press operates these days.
While I have mentioned these absurd articles in the past, I pretty much assumed that the reader would realize their sheer insanity. But later, when we watched Donald Trump and his cabal of neocon advisors actually believe the echo chamber that they created, it runs shivers down my spine. Just how stupid can people be?
Ai!
They can be pretty darn stupid. Ya!
Well, if all you know is what is presented to you, then you have nothing else to go by. And this is what is presented to you. The following is from BING Image Search.
It’s anti-China article after anti-China article focusing on XinJiang…
Well, if you have no other source of news, and the ONLY news you get is the absurd, then you tend to believe it.
No matter how bat-shit crazy it actually is.
You believe it simply because you have no other source of information.
Why the anti-China propaganda about the Uighur Muslims…
Xinjiang is a major logistics center for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is the gateway to Central and West Asia, as well as to European markets.
The Southern Xinjiang Railway runs to the city of Kashgar in China’s far west where it is now connected to Pakistan’s rail network under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project of the BRI.
The U.S. government is deeply hostile to this vast economic development project and is doing all it can to sabotage China’s plans. This campaign is part of the U.S. military’s “Pivot to Asia,” along with naval threats in the South China Sea and support for separatist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet.
The BRI must be stopped at all costs!
It connects Russia, Iran to China, and thus opens up a direct trade route to Europe that bypasses all naval shipping.
It bypasses all shipping by water.
Shipping that has had the sword ofdamocles on it ever since the USA placed assault carrier battle groups, and hunter-killer submarines there. All as a threat that China must do as America demands; the “rules based order”, or America will destroy all shipping.
The "swordofDamocles" is a modern expression, which to us means a senseofimpendingdoom, thefeeling that there is some catastrophic threat loomingover you.
That's not exactly its original meaning, however. The expression comes to us from the writings of the Roman politician, orator, and philosopherCicero (106-43 BC).
-What Did Cicero MeanbytheSword of Damocles?
So what is this “rules based order”? Why doesn’t China obey?
Well, the “rules based order” is very simple. America makes the rules. You obey them, and the UN is completely ignored.
No U.N. report on Xinjiang
The U.S. and its corporate media charge that the Chinese government has rounded up 1 million people, mainly Uyghurs, into concentration camps. News reports cite the United Nations as their source.
This was disputed in a detailed investigative report by Ben Norton and Ajit Singh titled, “No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims.” (The Grayzone.com, Aug. 23, 2018) They expose how this widely publicized claim is based entirely on unsourced allegations by a single U.S. member, Gay McDougall, on an “independent committee” with an official sounding name: U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that no U.N. body or official has made such a charge against China.
CIA/NED-funded ‘human rights’
After this fraudulent news story received wide coverage, it was followed by “reports” from the Washington-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. This group receives most of its funds from U.S. government grants, primarily from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy, a major source of funding for U.S. “regime change” operations around the world.
Here’s a fellow in Washington DC “rubber stamping” the use of a local proxy force to attack China with…
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders shares the same Washington address as Human Rights Watch. The HRW has been a major source of attacks on governments targeted by the U.S., such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria and China. The network has long called for sanctions against China.
The CHRD’s sources include Radio Free Asia, a news agency funded for decades by the U.S. government. The World Uighur Congress, another source of sensationalized reports, is also funded by NED. The same U.S. government funding is behind the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association.
The authors of the Grayzone article cite years of detailed IRS filing forms to back up their claim. They list millions of dollars in generous government funding — to generate false reports.
This whole network of supposedly impartial civil society groups, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and news sources operates under the cover of “human rights” to promote sanctions and war.
CIA-funded terror
Central Asia has experienced the worst forms of U.S. military power.
Beginning in 1979, the CIA, operating with the ISI Pakistani Intelligence Service and Saudi money, funded and equipped reactionary Mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan to bring down a revolutionary government there. The U.S. cultivated and promoted extreme religious fanaticism, based in Saudi Arabia, against progressive secular regimes in the region. This reactionary force was also weaponized against the Soviet Union and an anti-imperialist Islamic current represented by the Iranian Revolution.
For four decades, the CIA and secret Pakistan ISI forces in Afghanistan sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning to use them as a future terror force in China. Chechnyans from Russia’s Caucasus region were recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into Syria in the U.S. regime-change operation there. These fanatical religious forces, along with other small ethnic groups, formed the backbone of the Islamic State group (IS) and Al-Qaida.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret operations had helped to create became the enemy.
Uyghurs from Xinjiang were among the Al-Qaida prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo for years without charges. Legal appeals exposed that the Uyghur prisoners were being held there under some of the worst conditions in solitary confinement.
U.S. wars dislocate region
The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 created shockwaves of dislocation. Social progress, education, health care and infrastructure were destroyed. Sectarian and ethnic division was encouraged to divide opposition to U.S. occupations. Despite promises of great progress, the U.S. occupations sowed only destruction.
In this long war, U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were notorious. The CIA used “enhanced interrogation” techniques — torture — and secret rendition to Guantanamo, Bagram and the Salt Pit in Afghanistan. These secret prisons have since been the source of many legal suits.
According to U.N. investigations, by 2010 the U.S. held more than 27,000 prisoners in over 100 secret facilities around the world. Searing images and reports of systematic torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan surfaced.
Exposing coverup of war crimes
In July 2010 WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 classified U.S./NATO reports on the war in Afghanistan.
In October of that year, a massive leak of 400,000 military videos, photos and documents exposed, in harrowing detail, torture, summary executions and other war crimes. Army intelligence analyst former Private Chelsea Manning released this damning material to WikiLeaks.
Based on the leaked documents, the U.N. chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, called on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of these crimes, including abuse, torture, rape and murder committed against the Iraqi people following the U.S. invasion and occupation.
The leaked reports provided documentary proof of 109,000 deaths — including 66,000 civilians. This is seldom mentioned in the media, in contrast to the highly publicized and unsourced charges now raised against China.
Prosecuting whistle blowers
The CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy pays handsomely for unsourced documents making claims of torture against China, while those who provided documentary proof of U.S. torture have been treated as criminals.
John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA between 1990 and 2004 and confirmed widespread use of systematic torture, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for revealing classified information and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Chelsea Manning’s release of tens of thousands of government documents confirming torture and abuse, in addition to horrific photos of mass killings, have led to her continued incarceration. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is imprisoned in Britain and faces deportation to the U.S. for his role in disseminating these documents.
Rewriting history
How much of the coverage of Xinjiang is intended to deflect world attention from the continuing crimes of U.S. wars — from Afghanistan to Syria?
In 2014 a Senate CIA Torture Report confirmed that a torture program, called “Detention and Interrogation Program,” had been approved by top U.S. officials. Only a 525-page Executive Summary of its 6,000 pages was released, but it was enough to confirm that the CIA program was far more brutal and extensive than had previously been released.
Mercenaries flood into Syria
The U.S. regime-change effort to overturn the government of Syria funneled more than 100,000 foreign mercenaries and fanatical religious forces into the war. They were well-equipped with advanced weapons, military gear, provisions and paychecks.
One-third of the Syrian population was uprooted in the war. Millions of refugees flooded into Europe and neighboring countries.
Beginning in 2013, thousands of Uyghur fighters were smuggled into Syria to train with the extremist Uyghur group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party. Fighting alongside Al-Qaida and Al-Nusra terror units, these forces played key roles in several battles.
Reuters, Associated Press and Newsweek all reported that up to 5,000 Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs from Xinjiang were fighting in various “militant” groups in Syria.
According to Syrian media, a transplanted Uyghur colony transformed the city of al Zanbaka (on the Turkish border) into an entrenched camp of 18,000 people. Many of the Uyghur fighters were smuggled to the Turkish-Syrian border area with their families. Speaking Turkish, rather than Chinese, they relied on the support of the Turkish secret services.
China follows a different path
China is determined to follow a different path in dealing with fanatical groups that are weaponized by religious extremism. China’s action comes after terror attacks and explosives have killed hundreds of civilians in busy shopping areas and crowded train and bus stations since the 1990s.
China has dealt with the problem of religious extremism by setting up large-scale vocational education and training centers. Rather than creating worse underdevelopment through bombing campaigns, it is seeking to engage the population in education, skill development and rapid economic and infrastructure development.
Terrorist attacks in Xinjiang have stopped since the reeducation campaigns began in 2017.
Two worldviews of Xinjiang
In July of 2020, 22 countries, most in Europe plus Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing China for mass arbitrary detentions and other violations against Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. The statement did not include a single signature from a Muslim-majority state.
Days later, a far larger group of 34 countries — now expanded to 54 from Asia, Africa and Latin America — submitted a letter in defense of China’s policies. These countries expressed their firm support of China’s counterterrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang.
More than a dozen member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. signed the statement.
A further statement on Oct. 31 to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly explained that a number of diplomats, international organizations, officials and journalists had traveled to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counterterrorism and deradicalization.
“What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the [Western] media,” said the statement.
The Head Scratchers…
Of course, no one is talking about the real “head scratchers”; why [1] American war machine is currently fighting eight wars against Muslims presently, would be wanting to help the Muslims inside of China. Or, [2] that the BRI, which connects Russia, Iran and China together goes right though Xinjiang. Or that [3] all the articles are all aligned with the Western five-eyes dissemination mills.
It’s an onslaught of the ridiculous for the idiotic to believe.
Here’s a work of “science fiction” which is being promoted as a true reality within China.
This is a great read… argumentum ad absurdum on a plate.
There are now so few Uyghurs left in Xinjiang now that they are dressing up Han Chinese to do dance performances for tourists.
Summary of the nonsense article…
Oh what amazing nonsense!
The CCP has run out of money to maintain its concentration camps and is now resorting to other means.
China has now moved on to the final solution.
The aim is to kill ⅔ of the population. About 10 Million people.
The number of Uyghurs detained and presumed dead now already exceeds the number of Jews killed in the holocaust.
In one county 80% of the population has disappeared.
Only 1/3rd of the Uyghur population is being kept alive for proof of life, forced labour, vaccine testing, organ harvesting and biological weapons testing.
Uyghurs in detention are divided for organ harvesting, biological experimentation and other purposes including simple extermination.
The government has gone to great pains to conceal the actual Uyghur population, downplaying the numbers and then gradually adjusting it upwards to conceal the fact that between 6-11 million people are unaccounted for.
They are using chemicals to dispose of the bodies rather than mass graves and destroying all evidence of previous identities.
Uyghur women are subjected to forced sterilizations, forced contraception and forced abortions.
(We already know that…) Females in detention are being routinely gang raped by guards as form of torture.
They are also using school children for vaccine testing.
All Uyghur language, religion and culture in the region is now gone.
The region has become like a deranged Disneyland, with paid actors performing the roles of genuine Uyghurs.
The government initially billeted Han Chinese to learn Uyghurs skills and then sent the Uyghurs themselves to concentration camps
The people you see in Xinjiang tourist attractions, the people you see singing and dancing and playing instruments, are Han Chinese but dressed up like Uyghurs.
Well, it seems that some sanity is returning….
From my email…
Read this….
Why is the West suddenly concerned about Uyghur Muslim ‘genocide’?
A motion by Senator Rex Patrick to label China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority as genocide failed to pass Australia’s Senate on 17 March.
Unusually, this leaves Australia slightly out of step with its main ally, the United States, and fellow “Five Eyes” country Canada, which have both labelled China’s policy in the Xinjiang region as genocide, starting with a declaration by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and reiterated by his successor Antony Blinken.
The drumbeat in Australia against China’s policy continues.
However, as seen in the discussion on the ABC’s 15 April QandA program, when a questioner demanded Australia cut off trade with China over the issue, and a panelist compared China’s policy to Nazi Germany.
So why the sudden prominence of this issue?
The Citizens Party has had more than 30 years of experience in analyzing foreign policy and geopolitical issues.
We have opposed the dangerous lurch towards confrontation with Russia and China, including through proxy regime-change interventions, by the USA and UK and their allies, including Australia.
Elements of the Xinjiang allegations immediately raised suspicions.
Including the sudden concern being expressed for Uyghur Muslims by extreme right-wing US and UK neoconservatives who have spent decades demonising Muslims in their countries.
As well as championing wars that have killed millions of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa.
Another cause for suspicion was the overlap between the “human rights” narrative about Xinjiang, and the similar human rights narratives against Syria and Libya starting in 2011.
Too similar for comfort.
Both of which were accused of atrocities against their own people.
Of course, omitting that the “rebel” groups opposed to those “regimes” were extremist jihadists either aligned with al-Qaeda or actual members of al-Qaeda.
The very terrorist organization blamed for 9/11 that our soldiers are supposedly fighting in Afghanistan.
The Office of the Legal Advisor at the US State Department has recently fueled more suspicion.
In effect, contradicting the current and former Secretaries of State by finding there’s insufficient evidence to call China’s Xinjiang policy genocide after all.
Original research
The Citizens Party has therefore conducted its own research into the Xinjiang issue, to situate the claims in their fullest historical and geopolitical context.
This research led to an eight-article series in the Citizens Party’s weekly magazine the Australian Alert Service in November 2020–March 2021.
The Citizens Party urges everyone who is concerned about this issue to download and read the whole package.
As the USA, UK and European Union…
—with applause from the Australian government—
…slap sanctions on China for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang…
… and the weighty term “genocide” is thrown around without evidence…
… our series demystifies what is going on in and around Xinjiang, and why.
We expose the Anglo-American sponsorship of “East Turkistan” separatism.
As well as the Anglo-American fostering of radical Islamist terrorism, which hit China hard from the 1990s up to 2014 and prompted tough anti-terror programs.
We detail how al-Qaeda and its successors grew out of US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s program to strike at the Soviet Union’s “soft underbelly” in Central Asia.
He did this, even at the risk of nuclear war, by backing the Afghanistan mujaheddin against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in 1979.
Young ethnic Uyghurs from Xinjiang fought in Afghanistan and received US- and Saudi-funded training in Pakistan;
Some went back home to “destabilise China”.
Which is the exact the words of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), chief of staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
We also recount the history of “Pan-Turkism” and its activation against Russia and then China after the breakup of the USSR.
The final two articles deal with the decades-long manipulation of the Uyghur diaspora by Anglo-American intelligence agencies.
This also includes those operating under the banner of “human rights”, like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
As with the so-called Captive Nations groups during the Cold War, the diaspora is exploited as a propaganda base.
Not only to destabilize or even fragment the targeted country, but also to set “thought rules” for public opinion and political circles elsewhere.
For example, in the USA or Australia.
Uyghur émigré groups uniformly oppose China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
They do so, even as it raises living standards in Xinjiang, all China and abroad.
Since China has recently been practically the sole engine of world economic growth…
… while cultivating scientific optimism in its education policies and a commitment to promoting classical culture…
… a strategic posture that exploits the Uyghurs of Xinjiang to attack China is insane.
Here are the chapter titles from our report. The first two pages of the Special Report PDF are a full, annotated table of contents.
Part 1. East-West gateway on the Silk Road
Part 2. The Arc of Crisis
Part 3. Xinjiang becomes a target
Part 4. Pan-Turkism
Part 5. The Anglo-American-Saudi promotion of violent jihad
Part 6. ‘Afghan’ jihadist terrorism come to Xinjiang
Parts 7 and 8. The ‘East Turkistan’ narrative
China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing
Reprinted as found. All credit to the original author, and please kindly note that it was edited to fit within this venue.
Claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims are based largely on two studies. A closer look at these papers reveals US government backing, absurdly shoddy methodologies, and a rapture-ready evangelical researcher named Adrian Zenz.
It is legislation which calls for the Donald Trump administration to impose sanctions against China over allegations.
Allegations that Beijing has detained millions of Muslim-majority Uyghurs in the western region of Xinjiang.
To drum up support for the sanctions bill, Western governments and media outlets have portrayed the People’s Republic as a human rights violator on par with Nazi Germany.
Republican Rep. Chris Smith, for instance, denounced the Chinese government for what he called the “mass internment of millions on a scale not seen since the Holocaust,” in “modern-day concentration camps.”
The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region is repeated with increasing frequency.
However, little scrutiny is ever applied.
Yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.
The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation.
It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports “scriptural spanking” of children, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China.
As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of obscurity and transformed almost overnight into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang.
He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now!
As well as delivering expert quotes in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent “China Cables” report.
His Twitter bio notes that he is “moving across the Atlantic” from his native Germany.
Before Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal questioned Zenz about his religious “mission,” at a recent event about Xinjiang inside the US Capitol, he had received almost entirely uncritical promotion from Western media.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which first popularized the “millions detained” figure, has also been able to operate without a hint of media scrutiny.
Washington-backed NGO claims millions detained after interviewing eight people
The “millions detained” figure was first popularized by a Washington, DC-based NGO that is backed by the US government, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
In a 2018 report submitted to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination…
… often misrepresented in Western media as a UN-authored report…
… CHRD “estimate[d] that roughly one million members of ethnic Uyghurs have been sent to ‘re-education’ detention camps.
As well as roughly two million have been forced to attend ‘re-education’ programs in Xinjiang.”
According to CHRD, this figure was “[b]ased on interviews and limited data.”
While CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals.
This is all based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million.
The CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that
“at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.”
Applying these estimated rates to the entirety of Xinjiang, CHRD arrived at the figures submitted to the UN claiming that one million ethnic Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education detention camps” and two million more have been “forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions”.
“arbitrarily detain[ing] 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities.”
“there [are] no so-called ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang at all. The vocational education and training centers legally operated in Xinjiang aim to help a small number of people affected by terrorist and extremist ideologies and equip them with skills, so that they can be self-reliant and re-integrate into society.”
In its mounting pressure campaign against China, the US is not only relying on CHRD for data; it is directly funding its operations.
Together, the two helped found the World Anti-Communist League that was described by journalist Joe Conason as “the organizational haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries.”
Lev Dobriansky, pictured below with Eisenhower & Reagan, invented Captive Nations Week in 1959, and got Yaroslav Stetsko his first visa to the United States in 1958 against the wishes of the CIA & the State Department. Reagan appointed Dobriansky to be Ambassador to the Bahamas. pic.twitter.com/NmOvsnvNmg
— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) July 19, 2019
Today, Dobriansky’s daughter, Paula, sits on the board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
A former Reagan and George HW Bush official and signatory of the original Project for a New American Century document, Paula Dobriansky has become a fixture in neoconservative circles on Capitol Hill.
From its office in Washington, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation agitates for regime change from Venezuela to the periphery of China.
Zenz’s politicized research on Xinjiang and Tibet has proven one of this right-wing group’s most effective weapons.
In September of 2018, Zenz wrote an article published in the Central Asian Survey journal concluding that
“Xinjiang’s total re-education internment figure may be estimated at just over one million.”
(A condensed version of the article was initially published by the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank founded during the height of the Cold War by Reagan administration personnel with the support of then-CIA Director William J. Casey).
Like the CHRD, Zenz arrived at his estimate “over 1 million” in a dubious manner.
He based it on a single report by Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur exile media organization based in Turkey, which was republished by Newsweek Japan.
Far from an impartial journalistic organization, Istiqlal TV advances the separatist cause while playing host to an assortment of extremist figures.
One such character who often appears on Istiqlal TV is Abdulkadir Yapuquan.
He is a reported leader of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a separatist group that aims to establish an independent homeland in Xinjiang called East Turkestan.
“2013, thousands of Uighurs… have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida,” with “several hundred join[ing] the Islamic State.”
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) has been among the most recalcitrant forces operating in the Al Qaeda-controlled Idlib province, rejecting all ceasefire efforts while indoctrinating children into militancy.
TIP leadership has called on foreign Muslims to wage jihad in Syria, publishing an online recruitment video in 2018 that celebrated the 9/11 attacks as holy retaliation against a decadent United States awash in homosexuality and sin.
“called for armed jihad not only in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region but all over the world and described China as a nation of savages, worse than the Jews.”
The Istiqlal TV report relied on by Zenz published an unverified table of “re-education detainee figures” allegedly “leaked” by Chinese authorities, totaling 892,000 individuals in 68 Xinjiang counties as of Spring 2018.
(The Uyghur Human Rights Act recently passed by Congress mandates the US Agency for Global Media – the governmental parent of Radio Free Asia – to report on Xinjiang, including “assessments of Chinese propaganda strategies.”)
With his cobbling of questionable sources, Zenz extrapolates an extremely broad estimate
“at anywhere between several hundred thousand and just over one million.”
While admitting that “there is no certainty” to his estimate, he has concluded that it is nevertheless “reasonable to speculate.”
He attempted to evade personal responsibility for the figure’s questionable reliability, however, by stating
“[t]he accuracy of this estimate is of course predicated on the supposed validity of the stated sources.”
As time goes on, Zenz continues to inflate his speculative estimate of Uyghur detainees.
Speaking at an event organized by the US mission in Geneva in March 2019, Zenz stated,
“Although it is speculative it seems appropriate to estimate that up to 1.5 million ethnic minorities [have been detained by China in Xinjiang].”
Zenz bumped up his estimate again in a November 2019 interview with Radio Free Asia, claiming China was detaining 1.8 million people.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, Zenz claimed that China has effectively outlawed the practice of Islam in Xinjiang.
“Anyone in Xinjiang who engages in any type of religious practice, anyone who even has a single Koran verse saved on their mobile phone, will be subjected to a brutal process of reeducation without trial,”
He maintained.
These incendiary claims have vaulted Zenz to the status of international “expert” on Xinjiang, earned him invites to testify before US Congress and Canadian Parliament, and to deliver commentary in major US media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Democracy Now!
“[l]inguists, document and Xinjiang experts, including Zenz, who reviewed the documents have expressed confidence in their authenticity.”
Given Zenz’s habit of speculation and the questionable reliability of the lone Istiqlal TV media report he relies on for his estimates, it is troubling that Western governments and media have accepted and promoted his claims without a trace of skepticism.
A closer look at Zenz’s own biases should magnify these concerns, as he is a full-blown evangelical End Timer who appears to be believe that God has sent him on a holy crusade against the People’s Republic of China.
Fundamentalist Christian ‘led by God’ in mission against China, homosexuality, and gender equality
This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the
Which makes you wonder WHY he would be so concerned about the plight of Muslims. Because according to his own religious belief only “born again” Christians will enter Heaven during the rapture.
“I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation.
In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.
Zenz predicted that the future fall of capitalism will bring to power the Antichrist within a “few decades.”
He identified the force that “will usher the Antichrist into power” as “the economic and financial fall of ‘Babylon,’ with ‘Babylon’ symbolically representing the world’s global economic system (capitalism).”
Along with the fall of capitalism, Zenz also views “postmodern relativism and tolerance thinking” and their apparent promotion of homosexuality, gender equality, and non-violent parenting to be threats to Christianity and “[t]he deceptive, leopard-like power behind the Antichrist.”
“It is very likely that the global persecution of true believers will center on the charge that they promote ‘intolerant views,’” Zenz wrote, “especially related to preaching against homosexuality.”
Zenz argued that “[h]ate crime and anti-discrimination laws will likely play a major role in the suppression of biblical Christianity” and formed part of an “anti-Christian ‘tolerance’ campaign” because they “forbid employers to discriminate based on gender or sexual orientations.”
“The outcome of this process is open rebellion against both God and God-given human authority structures”,
Zenz stated, decrying that
“[r]ising numbers of countries are banning all forms of physical punishment of children, the primary scriptural method for instilling respect for authority in the young generation and protecting them from rebellious tendencies.”
Zenz assures readers that
“true scriptural spanking is loving discipline and not violence.”
“Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures”,
Zenz continued.
“Through notions of gender equality […] the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.”
Given these obscurantist right-wing views, it is not surprising that Zenz’s proclaimed concern for the condition of Muslims in China does not seem to extend to Muslims elsewhere.
A search of Zenz’s Twitter profile returns no tweets concerning the rise of Islamophobia in the West, nor US wars and drone strikes against Muslim-majority countries.
The only Tweet by Zenz concerning Muslims that is unrelated to China is a denial that there is a double standard in how violence is judged when committed by white people compared to Muslims.
‘The End Times is a very fascinating topic’
In his December 10, 2019 testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Adrian Zenz took a victory lap of sorts for Congress’ passage of the Uyghur Human Rights Act the week before which placed new sanctions on the Chinese government.
Citing the bill’s success, he called for opening a new front against China with a US investigation into “involuntary labor in relation to Xinjiang.”
That same day, Zenz also appeared on a panel dedicated to Xinjiang that was hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the US Capitol Visitor Center.
On hand were Republican heavyweights like Sam Brownback, the ferociously anti-LGBT, anti-abortion former governor of Kansas.
Who is now the current US ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, as well as top staffers of Sen. Marco Rubio, the sponsor of virtually every China sanctions bill to be rubber-stamped by Congress in recent weeks.
During a question-and-answer session, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal asked Zenz about his fundamentalist religious views and far-right politics.
Zenz did not distance himself from his past statements denouncing gender equality and “tolerance thinking,” or his advocacy for the “scriptural spanking” of children.
Instead, he asserted that there was no inconsistency between those views and the quality of his research on China’s Xinjiang region.
“I do have a diverse background and I have personal connections which I do not believe are inconsistent with my research,”
Zenz responded to Blumenthal.
“I do not support China’s authoritarian methods in any way, and I do believe there’s a God who is bringing judgment in different forms. The End Times is a very fascinating topic, a very complex topic, and I think, very relevant. And I think it’s good to live aware of that.”
Adrian Zenz is considered an expert in DC. His research influenced the Uyghur Human Rights Act that sanctioned China.
But he’s also a Rapture-ready evangelical who says he’s “led by God” against Beijing.
I challenged him on Capitol Hill.
More here: https://t.co/HPJUcHddlepic.twitter.com/czZtxxvXxO
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 22, 2019
Moments later, a visibly upset young man rose from his seat to “condemn the tankie Max Blumenthal.”
Unleashing a torrent of insults at Blumenthal, he made no attempt to refute the journalist’s line of questioning.
The rigorously enforced conviction on display in the politically hermetic chambers of the US Capitol also encompasses the whole of Western media, where even purportedly progressive outlets have provided Zenz with an uncritical platform.
From Washington’s halls of power to major newsrooms, few are willing to let inconvenient facts get in the way of a new, undeniably faith-based Cold War crusade.
More…
The Australia Citizens Party produced 8 original fact-based articles (with a lot of useful hyperlinks for researchers) on Xinjiang issues “Xinjiang: China’s Western frontier in the heart of Eurasia”: https://twitter.com/OcastJournalist/status/1383221132560531456
Oh, that first bullshit article… what a fun read. It’s nice to leave reality every now and then and smell the lollypop trees, pet the golden unicorns, and swim in the streams of icy-fresh beer.
But then, there are two more serious, well researched articles that crush the American anti-China narrative. I hope that you all found them enlightening.
It seems that the talks in Alaska were a turning point for china and Russia is also taking its cues from actions verses words moving forward here... the USA is like a runaway train, gone off the rails.... an accident in the process of happening... no one appears in command.... will be interesting to see where this ends up.. the fact china is giving the USA the cold shoulder is long overdue... same deal with Russia giving a similar response... at what point do they say enough is enough?? it looks like we are at, or close to that spot now..
Posted by: james | Apr 17 2021 18:38 utc | 4
What is truly frightening about all this is that there are many people who actually believe this nonsense.
I may be wrong but imho 99% of the work done in China is by Forced Labor!
Prove me wrong!
-13 posted on 10/24/2020, 10:16:25 AM by prophetic
Jeeze! Louise!
Just keep in mind that this noise is all just that…noise as the United States tries to gear up for efforts to destroy the gateway to the BRI; Xinjiang. China knows this.
It’s all the same “song and dance”. Get American all upset about some “evil” and then launch the American military into the region to “save it”.
Yes. Everyone knows. The United States are training terrorists to absolutely create destruction and mayhem in Xinjiang. And they are proud to fund it, and proud to be doing it. And they believe that it will be successful.
Ah.
Not THIS time, bucco.
Because…
China knows that the USA wants to inject military forces into Xinjiang to destabilize it. And this is why they have military forces in place for the American attempts to do so. And whatever proxy forces they establish to do the fighting.
The Chinese Do Not Play.
What do I mean?
Watch this little demonstration of the military in Xinjiang protecting the Uighur’s from the American proxy terrorists…
Check out this most interesting and telling video HERE, if it doesn’t load properly.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Uyghurs sub-index under my China index.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is a wonderful rant by a girl currently in the United States. She is absolutely “fed up” with the anti-China news, attitude, and general opinions of American regarding China. And she want’s it all to end. She is shouting loud and clear “Shut Up!”
The Chinese people are getting fed up with the lies that come out of the American, and Western “news”. They are tired of it. They are starting to get angry about it. And it must stop.
I've got a bunch of small and short embedded videos in this article. You really need to watch them to get the full impact of this article. -MM
Again, here is a dialog rant by a Chinese-America who lives inside of America, but well knows the reality of her home nation; China. And so, being sick and tired of the endless lies, and bullshit from the American “news”, she lashes out…
I Want To Talk About China
China is nothing like the fake version that exists only in imagination, that is painted in the media and absorbed into the minds of the people who gape at me when I tell them, "You know, life in China wasn't really all that different."
By Lily Chang
“Where are you from?”
“China,” my mom says, with audible pride.
“Oh,” said the lady at the thrift store, her eyebrows disappearing into her thick brown hair. “Was it scary over there? Were you not allowed to say things or use the internet?”
…
“China is a repressive dictatorship where the government exercises total control over people’s lives. The citizens have very few human rights compared to in the US.”
“That’s not true,” my sister blurts out. “I lived there and it wasn’t like that at all.”
“Don’t talk out of turn,” said her fourth grade teacher.
…
“You know, life in China wasn’t really all that different,” I say.
I watch the shock in my friends’ eyes. Feeling awkward, I continue on.
“I went to school in the morning and came home at night. I had a lot of homework. On the weekend, I would go out with my friends, and we would go to the park, or go window shopping, and gossip about our teachers and classmates.”
They gape at me, and I change the subject.
…
I want to talk about China.
I want to talk about my country and the many years I lived there, the laughter and the tears and everything in between. I want to share the experiences that shaped me and the people that changed me and the places where it happened.
But I can’t.
I cannot because the China in their eyes, in their minds, is not the China I come from, where I lived for most of my life.
It’s a sick, distorted version.
It is like what you see through a funhouse mirror, except there’s no fun in this house, only propaganda and racism and lies.
From those materials they built this diabolical interpretation of China that exists only in fantasy, and put me in it like a doll in a dollhouse.
And thus I was expected to play my part…
…as (some kind of) liberated victim of horrific oppression, grateful for my salvation, for my new life in the “enlightened” west.
I refused.
I’m going off script.
…
We, the Chinese people, are spoken of like birds in locked cages…
(Being) afraid to sing, the keys held by a brutal totalitarian government that cares nothing for our welfare.
We are huddled together, suffering, waiting for civilized countries to swoop in and rescue us…
To rescue us from our awful plights, to unlock our cages and heal our wounds and set us free.
We are dehumanized, reduced to objects of pity and victims in need of deliverance.
And thus they cry, “I love the Chinese people! I only hate the Chinese government!”
…
But they cannot love us, because to them, we are NOT human.
We are things.
The citizens are not humans, but caged birds desperate for a fairy tale hero to save them.
The government and those who compose it, are not humans, but blood-sucking demons.
Yes. demons. Demons who are bent on surveilling, controlling, destroying the citizens for their own gain.
But all this is just a fantasy; a lie. It’s a make-believe world that doesn’t exist, and one that never existed.
The people of China are not caged birds, and the government of China is not a group of cartoonishly evil demons.
…
But, this is the China they built in their minds, that they project onto me when I stand in front of them with my yellow skin, black hair, brown eyes.
And I want to tell them, that’s not the real China.
The real China is neither a paradise, but nor is it a hell.
The people of China are not helpless caged birds, but human beings.
Human beings with hopes and dreams and interests and opinions and stories. And yes, human rights.
We can travel, and many do.
More than 100 million Chinese go abroad every year, for school, work, tourism, and other reasons.
We can practice religion.
Religion is not allowed to influence politics.
And it is especially not allowed to promote separatism, terrorism, or other types of extremist thought.
We can criticize the government.
We can even hold protests.
But we cannot humiliate or slander our leaders, we cannot spread lies, and again, we cannot promote separatism or incite mass unrest.
Maybe that seems like a lot of conditions.
But swearing at our leaders isn't productive engagement. It doesn't lead to problems being fixed.
We can vote.
There are elections in China, but not for the president.
The people directly elect district representatives to the People's Congress, who then elect representatives at the city and province level.
These representatives, just like Congresspeople in the US, are responsible for expressing their constituents' suggestions and grievances.
They provide oversight for politicians. And if they don't do their job, they can be fired via petition from the people.
All citizens of China are entitled to these rights. All fifty-six ethnicities.
The people of China are not caged birds, and the government of China is not a group of cartoonishly evil demons.
In fact, China enjoys high levels of support among the people – not because there are no other options, as often claimed, and not because we are brainwashed. To say so takes away our agency, puts us back in the cage. We are supportive because the government serves the people.
…they lifted 850 million people out of absolute poverty in 40 years (100 million just since 2013),
…built them free homes,
…provided them with jobs and healthcare and education.
(The government) invested into infrastructure to ensure people in the most distant areas can live a better and more convenient life.
(And they) traversed deep into dangerous mountains to find those in need of help.
Chinese people respect their government…
…because they made enormous financial sacrifices made to combat the COVID-19 pandemic…
… from the initial lock-down of Wuhan…
… to implementing the massive contact tracing infrastructure, to free treatment for all patients.
They built hospitals in ten days, then mobilized of doctors and medical equipment from all over the country to the center of the epidemic.
It’s been stunning.
Increased life expectancy.
Increased quality of life.
Unparalleled safety.
Absolute happiness.
That is what the Chinese government does for the people.
That is not to say things are perfect.
Corruption exists.
Incompetence exists.
Dissatisfaction with the government exists. And the people express it. They make their voices heard.
The government is constantly monitoring public opinion on social media. Vocal criticism, of which there is much, is noted and taken into account.
Government agencies have open comment boards online where people can leave complaints.
Responses are then published online.
Unpopular policies get changed.
Unpopular politicians get replaced.
Whether you believe this is because they want the best for the people, or because they’re afraid of being violently overthrown by angry mobs, the result is the same.
They want to know what’s working and what’s not working. The needs and desires of the population are heard.
In the end, the Chinese people and the Chinese government are one, and cannot be separated.
Together, they are not oppressors and the oppressed, or even the rulers and the ruled, but two sides of the same coin, working together for a better China and better lives for all her citizens.
China is like a “bee hive”…
And America and the rest of the West, govern like “herding kittens”. The only solution is to divide up everyone so that everyone is fighting and the wealthy get wealthier…
China is not a paradise.
There are problems and unhappy people and bad decisions and things that fall through the cracks.
But it’s nothing like “that” China; The fake version of China that exists only in imagination, that is painted in the media and absorbed into the minds of the people who gape at me when I tell them…
… “You know, life in China wasn’t really all that different.”
And no one believes.
Because everyone is living within this fake world image that does not exist.
I want to talk to them about China, but I can’t.
Not until they tear down that twisted caricature in their minds; that fake world that they have been taught to believe.
Not until they see China for how she really is, good and bad.
I don’t wish for everyone to love China, or worship China. I want them to know China, understand China. The real China.
And when they do, then we can work together, learn from each other. Become better. That is what I hope to see.
…
Conclusion
It’s a great impassioned rant. And the thing is, that it could be written by just about any of the 120 million Chinese people who visit the the United States and return back to China. To put this number in perspective…
Population figures;
Some perspectives on WHY this is going on…
…it’s to create an evil villain. One that the people can point their fingers at and say [1] It’s another Nazi Germany!, and [2] We must do something to free the poor people! It tends to unite people against a common cause so they don’t get their torches, and pitchforks on the way to lynch the assholes in Washington DC.
It’s called “atrocity propaganda”…
Atrocity propaganda
Atrocity propaganda is the spreading of information about the crimes committed by an enemy, which can be factual, but often includes or features deliberate fabrications or exaggerations. This can involve photographs, videos, illustrations, interviews, and other forms of information presentation or reporting.
Why this demonization is going on; it’s because the USA must be the biggest, largest and most powerful nation in the world. If it isn’t, then all of it’s faults, it’s history of evil deeds, and the massive flaws within it’s system, and the economic crimes will come to light… to an angry world that is just now waking up to the reality of what the Hell the United States has been doing for much of the last century….
Indeed, for certain…
A time has come…
But that is not what is happening,
What is happening.
The United States is a terribly corrupt and flailing military empire and it is sinking, going down the drain in so many ways that everyone can watch and understand what is going on. The only people that do not understand this fact are those who are so absolutely blinded by the American propaganda of “exceptional greatness”, and intentional censorship of the reality outside of America.
We call them “sheeple”.
They are people that are emotionally entangled about things that they have NEVER physical experienced first hand. Only by what they read or watched on the internet.
Comedians joke about it, but it is a real problem.
And here…
The Bottom Line
As the United States collapses there are a host of options available to prevent the collapse.
America could…
Convene an emergency Constitutional Convention. And though it, seriously reorganize the government to be more efficient and more focused on serving the needs of the people.
Redirect spending. Control the terrible fiscal irresponsibility. And set up policing organizations for fraud and waste.
Work on Win-win solutions. Work with other nations to improve positive international relations on the basis of a win-win philosophy.
Shut down the Military Empire. Seriously reduce the global military empire and redirect it’s task to domestic needs.
But that is not what it is doing. Instead it is picking fights with both Russia and China. In both cases trying to provoke an “incident” so that America has an excuse to unify America against a common enemy. It doesn’t matter who, at this point in time, and stage in the game. It just needs some kind of big, fierce enemy.
Note what is actually happening…
The Military Empire is expanding.
Provocative actions are proceeding and it’s only a matter of time when one will trigger a serious war.
The debt is getting larger, not smaller.
And an enormous budget (by Biden) to correct infrastructure problems has been proposed with zero changes to the already corrupted and inefficient system that is supposed to support it.
America is trying to provoke military engagements.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
As a technology geek I cannot help but admire the work that goes into all these weapons systems. Especially those that are novel or new. And thus, with this framework in mind, I present the Russian efforts to defend their space station and operations from American military activities.
And you know, this kind of thing has only gone into hyper-drive when President Trump announced the formation of a new branch of the military known as the “Space Force”.
And so here is our first look at a Russian anti-weapon platform for space use…
Of course, as I say with all reprints, all credit to the authors. I reprint exactly as found and the credit to go to the person writing the article, and note that some things were changed to fit within the MM venue.
The Shchit-2 was a missile-like system designed to protect Soviet military space stations from attack.
he Russian Ministry of Defense’s official television station, TV Zvezda, has given the world the first-ever public look at the Shchit-2, or at least a mockup thereof. This was a Soviet-era missile-like space weapon primarily intended to protect Almaz military space stations from incoming threats. The Shchit-2 was a follow-on project to the Shchit-1 self-defense system, which featured a 23mm cannon and is the only gun to have been fired in space, at least that we know about.
The most recent episode of TV Zvezda‘s “Military Acceptance” program was focused on the Almaz series and associated developments, including both the Shchit-1 and the Shchit-2. Examples of both systems, among other things, were on display in a restricted area at NPO Mashinostroyenia when TV Zvezda‘s reporter visited recently. NPO Mashinostroyenia is a Russian state-run space development firm, which evolved from a Soviet entity, known simply as OKB-52, that was responsible for, among other things, the development of the Almaz space stations.
A televised visit by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to NPO Mashinostroyenia earlier this year had already yielded the best and most complete view of the Shchit-1 system to date. You can read more about that gun, as well as the Almaz program, here. Anatoly Zak, a Russian author who also manages the website RussianSpaceWeb.com, had been among the first to notice that new look at the Shchit-1 system, as well as this public debut of the Shchit-2.
The Almaz program was a covert effort to develop military space stations, primarily outfitted to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, hidden within the Saylut civilian space station project. The Almaz effort, which began in the 1960s, was only officially declassified in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets had planned to arm the Almaz stations from the very beginning, fearing attacks by American anti-satellite weapons, including small, but highly maneuverable “killer satellites” and more traditional interceptors. An example of the Shchit-1 system actually made it into space attached to the Almaz OPS-2 satellite. The Soviets conducted a live-fire test of that gun remotely on January 24, 1975, the station’s last day in orbit.
The outcome of that test remains classified and the next Almaz space station, OPS-3, launched without any weapons installed. OPS-4, which never made it to space, was supposed to carry the Shchit-2 system. There’s no indication Shchit-2, the general existence of which has been known before know, ever went into space, either, though details about the system remain extremely limited.
As to the weapon itself, Leonard Smirichevsky, the current head of NPO Mashinostroyenia, described it to TV Zvezda‘s reporter as having four major components. The base of the system is a solid-fuel rocket motor, which is then attached to a spin-stabilization system consisting of a rotating wheel with blade-like fins. There there is a hybrid propulsion-warhead section, which we will come back to in a moment, followed by a proboscis-like radar seeker at the front.
By far, the propulsion-warhead section is the most interesting part. Outwardly, it has what appears to be a circular array of small, grenade-like charges, which one would imagine would unleash a cloud of shrapnel that would particularly dangerous to other objects in the vacuum of space. However, these projectiles are actually solid and are designed to act as hard-kill interceptors, destroying whatever they hit through the sheer force of the impact, according to Anatoly Zak. More interestingly, Smirichevsky made clear to TV Zvezda that this portion of the weapon was also used to propel it in some fashion, though he did not elaborate.
“Upon their ignition, the chambers/grenades might have fed hot propulsive gas into a single or multiple combustion chambers at the center of the contraption, producing either the main thrust and/or steering the vehicle,” Anatoly Zak wrote on RussianSpaceWeb.com. “When the missile reached the proximity of the target, according to its guiding radar, the entire vehicle would explode and the small solid chambers would eject under their own propulsive force in every direction acting as shrapnel.”
How Shchit-2, which is said to have had an expected maximum effective range in space of just over 62 miles, was supposed to be launched is also not entirely clear. “The weapon was stored in the coffin-like container, which appeared to a [sic] have a remote control for the activation by the crew aboard the Almaz and a spin-up mechanism, which could be activated at the release of the weapon in orbit,” Zak noted. The reported plan was for the Almaz OPS-4 station to carry two of these missile-like weapons.
What happened to Shchit-2 after the end of the Almaz program in 1978 is entirely unknown. It’s also not clear why the Russians have decided to offer a look at the system now.
It does come amid renewed discussion about on-orbit anti-satellite weapons, including interceptors and directed energy weapons, as well as killer satellites, and the development of these systems, both in Russia and the United States, among other countries. Last year, Chief of Space Operations General John “Jay” Raymond, U.S. Space Force’s top uniformed officer, publicly accused the Russian government of carrying out an on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test wherein one of its very maneuverable and small “inspector” satellites fired an unspecified projectile. The U.S. government has already expressed concern that these orbital inspectors, ostensibly designed to check up on other Russian satellites in space, could have an offensive capability.
There is no indication one way or another that the projectile launched from this Russian satellite was in any way related to the Shchit-2 weapon, a design that is now more than four decades old, at the very least. At the same time, it certainly underscores the potentially significant knowledge base in Russia with regards to the development of such systems.
Whatever the reasons the Russian government has for disclosing the Shchit-2 design publicly now, and no matter what the current state of on-orbit anti-satellite weapons in Russia might be, it is absolutely fascinating to get our first glimpse of this previous top-secret Soviet space missile.
Conclusion
Pretty cool huh? Yeah. Let’s hope that they never get used.
The reader should realize by now that Russia and China are not lazy “slouches”, and the over-whelming military superiority that the United States enjoys has many cracks and fault-lines. It is in the best interests of the world to avoid conflict at all costs. And not play to the childish dreams of massive superiority in the field of battle.
My guess is that things will not come out as planned.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Uh oh. Yup. As if the last four years of “the fire hose of disinformation” wasn’t bad enough, It appears that the neocons on K-street in Washington DC are gearing up for “round two”. Ugh!
This model for propaganda is known as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “...propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
A Senate committee has overwhelmingly passed the draft Strategic Competition Act in April 2021, which takes aims at China on multiple fronts, including military, economy and technology.
Of course, China will “take it on the chin“.
To "take it on the chin"
Meaning; this is a boxing metaphor meaning don't shy away from difficulty stand up for yourself don't complain get on with it be a man; be strong accept the challenge admit your mistakes andacceptcriticism
-Totake it on the chinmeaning
The United States is now the world’s most important powerhouse in technology, military might, and innovation. For China, being taken as a competitor by the U.S. is like to be chosen as a competitor by Mike Tyson, says Liu Baocheng.
The act is calling for over $1 billion to increase Washington’s already extensive global influence.
This includes over $650 million to fund foreign militaries in the Indo-Pacific region. The money would go to QUAD members to increase their size, train them to use American military equipment, and expand the size of their military bases so that American troops can use them.
It also includes some $450 million (in a separate budget element) for the Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative. Which sounds really good. But is really funding to support US Navy operations in the South China Sea off the coast of China. Bases and facilities are being expanded to allow for American troops and equipment to be put in place prior to military excursions. This is what happened with Saudi Arabia prior to the Invasion of Iraq by America.
And yet another $300 million to counter Chinese influence around the world. Which is on all fronts, from direct bribes to various national oligarchies, to anti-China “message campaigns” to terrorist efforts, and of course the NGO’s that conduct “color revolutions”. In other words, to give money to terrorists, and instigators so that they would directly fight with Chinese as proxies instead of American CIA, and military troops.
Funding also covers investments to expand American exports to developing markets. Which means that since the primary export of America is military technology, this money would be used to get nations all over the globe to buy American weapons systems and locate”advisors” to help train, use and maintain the systems.
There’s a huge program to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Which of course includes generous propaganda efforts about “Uighur Muslims”, and efforts to create strife and war in that entire region.
And finally there are techniques (not so much in funding) to convince American companies leave the Chinese market. Such as telling McDonalds that it is more profitable to stop selling burgers in China, but instead sell them in Angola. Or telling Starbucks that the Chinese market isn’t going to grow and that they should invest in Iceland instead.
Liu says this type of ideological confrontation is really on the escalation, both [1] domestically in the U.S. (get American to hate China more), and that the U.S. is also trying to [2] persuade its allies to be against China (have the rest of the world hate China as well).
He said this act would hit China for a time being.
China relies very heavily on imports and exports, although it has the most self-sufficient industrial chains, and also is on its rapid transformation to be more self-reliant. As China plays a very important role in the international supply chain, this act will also hurt the world; particularly the U.S.
Now all this comes on top of the massive anti-efforts by Trump and his neocon friends from 2016 to present. What propaganda you might ask?
The fact that Western public opinion on China is marching in lockstep with the State Department’s call for Cold War aggression reflects the convergence of state, military, and corporate media interests which monopolize our media ecosystem. Behind the State Department’s bluster and the military “Pivot to Asia” exists a quiet, well-oiled machine that is busy manufacturing consent for war on China. Too often, the hawkish policy stances it enshrines are taken as objective ‘truth’ rather than as pro-war propaganda working in the interests of weapons corporations and political elites.
We call it Sinophobia, Inc.—an information industrial complex where Western state funding, billion dollar weapons manufacturers, and right-wing think tanks coalesce and operate in sync to flood the media with messages that China is public enemy number one. Armed with state funding and weapons industry sponsors, this handful of influential think tanks are setting the terms of the New Cold War on China. The same media ecosystem that greased the wheels of perpetual war towards disastrous intervention in the Middle East is now busy manufacturing consent for conflict with China.
By saturating our news and newsfeeds with anti-China messages, this media machine is convincing average people that a New Cold War is in their interests. In reality, the hype of an imagined ‘China threat’ only serves the interests of the political elites and defense industry CEOs who stand to profit from this disastrous geopolitical escalation.
-Manufacturing consent for Sinophobia
The cynical hypocrisy of the world’s No1 propagandist: US pledges $300mn to fund massive global anti-China media machine
Here's an article by Tom Fowdy, who is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia. this was written on 26 Apr, 2021 15:2, and reprinted here with editing to fit this venue. Of course, all credit to the author.
Chinese- and Russian-funded journalism is ‘disinformation,’ but when Washington spends millions on ‘independent’ news outlets and buying journalists to get favorable coverage of its policies, it’s called ‘spreading information.’
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The US Senate last week passed a bumper anti-China bill titled the “Strategic Competition Act”.
Backed by Chuck Schumer (Dem – New York) as one of his biggest priorities since becoming the Majority leader, the 270+ page document contains scores of recommendations and provisions on formalizing America’s “geopolitical competition” against Beijing.
This is a very comprehensive bill including in the fields of military, diplomacy, technology, trade and more.
There’s little question it will be passed into law, having already cleared the Senate and with the anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington being routinely bipartisan.
The bill also notably pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in various capacities for media focused initiatives against China.
This includes up to $300 million in an openly described effort to spread information on the “negative impact” of China’s $1 trillion-plus Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in participating countries.
A complete network of “anti-Chinese influence” programs.
A scheme to “train journalists” with the goal of countering Beijing.
And of course, millions more in funding for Radio Free Asia. So that it can expand its coverage in the specified languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and Uighur.
In short, it’s a mammoth propaganda push.
Watch out!
All the time, we hear so much about “Chinese/Russian propaganda,” “disinformation,” etc, and often its impact is depicted in highly threatening or sensational ways. Yet rarely, if ever, is it reported how the west actively and openly engages in psychological warfare with the goal of changing politics and governments in targeted countries. Of course, all the while playing the perpetual victim.
Here it is in the new US bill in black and white.
It is as clear as crystal.
Yet very few will balk or take notice at the explicitly ambitious effort to attempt to attack China…
…to destabilize various regions of China…
…to promote unrest and…
…ideally, to “balkanize” the country.
This, of course, is not new; it’s what America has always done.
Western political thought is built on the assumption that it owns a monopoly over what is conceived as ‘political truth,’
That it is the source of all enlightenment and, in wielding that ‘monopoly,’ has a divine mandate to evangelize that ‘truth’ to others.
This draws up a binary logical distinction that everything the west advocates is always motivated by good faith, as opposed to self-interest.
And of course, and that everyone who opposes this agenda is always motivated by bad faith and evil motivations.
My main question is this: will we be able to determine which journalists have received State Department training? If so, will there be disclaimers added to the articles that were written by such journalists? 🤔
— bob742omb (@bob742omb) April 26, 2021
This underlines the mentality of western journalism, that it is the only impartial and verifiable source of the ‘truth’.
And that everyone who questions it is advocating ‘propaganda’ – a term which usually only emotionally resonates with “enemy states.”
This mindset distorts the more nuanced reality that all states engage in such behavior.
…And that the staple assumption of ‘western truth’ is subsequently used to shape the global narrative against designated targets.
…And to justify aggressive, self-interest-driven policies under the guise of “moral concern”.
…And to make people unable to question them.
The US has a long history of such psychological warfare, both explicit and implicit.
One of the most famous instances is what was revealed as Operation Mockingbird.
This operation was where the CIA secretly infiltrated the mainstream media at home and abroad, collaborating with journalists to push US foreign-policy interests.
Many journalists – including Pulitzer Prize winners – joined the CIA’s payroll.
They ended up intentionally writing fake stories to disseminate the agency’s agitprop.
And many were given falsified or fabricated information in support of the CIA’s mission.
This was during the Cold War.
But the program has never been officially discontinued, and why would it stop today in the wake of a new Cold War with China?
A “global discourse”
The Strategic Competition bill clearly illustrates that Washington places primary importance on dominating the “global discourse” in accordance with its interests, and it is arguably very good at doing this through a multitude of methods.
In addition to its efforts with journalists, America also has an army of think tanks funded by various interests.
Usually defense industries, who are designated to create studies in order to legitimize and market Washington’s foreign-policy goals.
Then they coordinate with the press which gives them favorable coverage.
They are capable of feeding terms, ideas and concepts to shape coverage in their favor.
Such as creating “talking points” such as “wolf warrior diplomacy,” “economic coercion,” “Indo-Pacific” and so on.
All of which don’t make arguments as much as they create “assumptions” to shape public thinking accordingly.
Then, of course, there’s the actual state media.
Instruments like “Radio Free Asia” (RFA) are never earmarked by social media as “state affiliated media”.
When it should be.
In the way the likes of CGTN and RT are described.
All this, despite the fact that RFA is a US government-funded tool directly spreading propaganda on behalf of Washington.
The bill’s text makes its purpose explicit: RFA will be utilized to promote unrest and resistance in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and even within China itself, something which would be deemed a malign form of foreign interference if done towards the west.
Yet the shocking part about it is, this is not all for China itself.
The US wants to interfere and manipulate the politics (and minds) of the citizens of hundreds of countries against Beijing.
It is planning to do so by spreading deliberate “negative” information concerning the BRI, with, of course, no consideration of its upsides whatsoever.
This means the American propaganda effort will span Latin America, South-East and Central Asia, as well as Africa.
Yet many in the west are happy to pass this behavior off as normal or acceptable, because the west is deemed the source of “truth” and “enlightenment” with the responsibility to “save” the backwards non-west.
In this case, we definitely need to talk more about organized, American-led disinformation and pure, geopolitically motivated propaganda.
Notwithstanding the onslaught of daily negative coverage as it is, Beijing needs to be ready to combat this effort and desperately improve the efficiency and credibility of its own media, especially in pointing out this kind of agenda and helping people think more about what they are consuming.
The ten rules of war propaganda were set forth by the historian Anne Morelli in her book The Principles of War Propaganda.
Well, let’s look at these rules.
In doing so, we will see that our mainstream media follow them exactly.
Anyone who follows the media reports in the West must realize that our Western media, free, objective, and critical, are engaged in war propaganda.
There are 10 well-known rules of war propaganda that are easy to check.
Rule 1: We don’t want war
The West supposedly never wants wars.
Even so, the West wages more wars than all other nation states put together.
Germany is fighting in Mali to supply the French nuclear power plants with uranium (officially against terrorists, of course).
Germany fought in Afghanistan for 20 years, so long that most have already forgotten what it was all about.
Germany has been militarily active in Kosovo for over 20 years to build democracy, but the Albanian mafia still rules there under the protection of the Bundeswehr. And so on.
All of these – and also the other – wars of the US-dominated West in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and on, all have one thing in common: Of course, the West did not want them at all, but was forced to war by the evil rulers.
This is the official reading every time, and none of the “rulers” has ever attacked a country in the West.
It was always the other way around, the West attacked.
But: “We don’t want the war”
Rule 2: The opposing camp is solely responsible for the war
See point one. Assad is allegedly responsible for the war in Syria, although the media in the West consistently keep silent about the CIA operation “Timber Sycamore” with which the CIA started the war.
If this is new to you, it’s no wonder.
Der Spiegel, for example, has never reported on how you can find the term “Timber Sycamore” when you search the Spiegel archive.
The relevant documents of the CIA were published in Washington years ago. If this is new to you, check it out.
It is always done that way. So it was with Iraq, Libya and all other wars in which the West is fighting.
The blame was placed on the other side, concealing that the West started the wars itself.
Rule 3: The leader of the opposing camp has the face of the devil
This is the classic.
The choice of words is crucial.
Putin, Assad and whoever are “potentates”, “autocrats”, “dictators” who commit all the deadly sins of the world.
When a war is imminent, the media bring – in order to make the population ready for war – the inevitable formulations of the “Second Hitler”, from whom the world must be saved.
Of course, the enemies do not have “governments”, they are “regimes”.
With all these formulations the “enemy” is dehumanized, the public should feel hatred and be ready to overthrow such an evil person, even at the cost of thousands of lives.
This is what is called “hatespeech” in modern German and what the same media, that use this hate propaganda against unloved heads of government, always find very bad.
Rule 4: We defend a good cause and not special interests
Of course, the US wanted to bring human rights, democracy and prosperity to Iraq.
Of course, it wasn’t about the oil wells that US corporations have secured for themselves.
Not even in Libya, where France (one of the driving forces in the war) has secured many oil wells.
And Mali is about the fight against terrorism, not the uranium on which the French nuclear industry depends.
And of course Syria is not about oil or the only Russian naval base in the Mediterranean, it is only about democracy, human rights and prosperity.
Wherever a government is critical of the West and where there are also natural resources (or where one of the main enemies China and Russia can be harmed), the West finds democracy and human rights very important.
But if a government is pro-Western and allows the West access to natural resources, such as the absolutist Saudi dictatorship, then democracy and human rights are not so important.
Incidentally, this is the key to understanding why Russia, which was a political friend under Yeltsin, has become enemy number one again under Putin:
Under Yeltsin, Western corporations had secured control of Russian oil and gas.
Putin ended that by 2003, and suddenly he was the number one villain.
It doesn’t say that in the “quality media”, but it was actually so banal.
Rule 5: The enemy commits atrocities deliberately; on the other hand, when we cross the line, it is unintentional
We experience this one all the time.
If the US is undoubtedly bombing a hospital in Afghanistan, then that is “collateral damage” and it was an accident.
Nobody is punished, the “quality media” quickly forget it and do not ask for clarification.
On the other hand, it is enough if someone claims without evidence that Russia or Syria bombed a hospital and the media in the West are reporting not only for days, but also afterwards, so that the public does not forget who it must hate.
Rule 6: The enemy uses illegal weapons
That is also a classic.
We have all heard many times that Assad uses “barrel bombs”.
Nobody really knows what that actually is, but it sounds pretty nasty.
The USA constantly uses barrel bombs, except they are called “cluster bombs” and the “quality media” are almost always shyly silent about them.
Why? Well, because these weapons are internationally banned.
Whether Assad uses this weapon has not been proven at all, but as a precaution the media have come up with a separate word for it so that the readers don’t even get the idea that the West could also use such weapons.
“…But he does that all the time.”
Rule 7: We suffer only slight losses; the enemy’s losses are enormous
This rule only applies when the war has entered its critical phase.
Before the war it was the other way around.
Before the war it was reported that the enemy was aggressive and, for example, had killed so many of “our” soldiers again when violating a ceasefire.
This is to prepare the public for a war.
We have been seeing this in Ukraine for years.
The “quality media” always report when it gets “hotter” there that the rebels have killed so many Ukrainian soldiers.
In doing so, they keep silent about the fact that the mostly Ukrainian shelling of residential areas preceded them, in which civilians were killed.
But you don’t find out about that from the “quality media”, you have to read the reports of the OSCE.
The “quality media” did not consider the fact that the OSCE presented a report in November 2020 in which it stated that almost 75 percent of civilian casualties in Donbass were due to the Ukrainian armed forces.
Rule 8: The artists and intellectuals support our cause
Notice how often celebrities have their say in the media who think the Western wars are good for moral reasons.
Celebs have spoken out against Assad, Gaddafi, and Saddam in recent years.
This is particularly evident in the American media.
In 2019 a prominent “benefit concert” for Venezuela took place in the Colombian border town of Cucuta.
Famous artists appeared in the middle of the jungle to sing against Maduro. Conveniently right next to the US military base there.
And for Navalny, for example, Western celebrities wrote an open letter to Putin in April 2021.
It did not contain any truths and probably hardly anyone has read it.
It was just important to be able to name the celebrities in the headlines of the media who are against Putin.
There are innumerable examples of this method of war propaganda.
But none of this has anything to do with politics, after all, what politician is interested in a singer’s opinion?
These reports only have the purpose of giving the public the feeling that the position of the West is morally correct.
And thus the fans of the stars are to be influenced accordingly and to follow their idol.
It’s all about emotions, not the actuality.
Rule 9: Our concern is something sacred
Of course, after all, it is supposedly about the “holy” values of the West, that is to say about democracy and human rights.
You can also kill people for this.
This is probably the oldest means of war propaganda in world history.
In ancient Rome one had to bring civilization to the barbarians, of course it was not about the enrichment of the generals.
Caesar moved to Gaul as a practically bankrupt man and came back very rich.
Later the Spaniards had to bring the “savages” in America the right faith so that they would not burn in the hell to which the Spaniards sent them on the occasion.
It wasn’t about the gold, of course.
And the British Empire wanted to bring civilization back to the “backward” colonies, because the poor, backward people in the colonies couldn’t rule themselves.
What I am writing here so ironically is true.
You can read it in the documents from the corresponding periods.
There was always a “sacred” reason for urgently going to war.
And today the “holy” concerns are democracy, human rights, women’s rights and so on.
It’s still the same principle as in antiquity, only the “sacred” concern changes every now and then.
Rule 10: Anyone who questions our propaganda is a traitor
Today the word “traitor” is out of date.
Today you can choose to say “Putin understanders”, “Kremlin trolls”, “conspiracy theorists”, “Chicom”, “fifty center”, “anti-Americans” and whatever other names are currently circulating.
Anyone who disagrees is demonized and marginalized.
But all of these terms have one thing in common: They identify the named person as an opponent of “Western values” or democracy. Ergo: it’s a traitor.
It’s shocking, but the German media is actually doing war propaganda like in the darkest times in history.
And not just since yesterday, it happened in 1991 in the First Gulf War with the incubator lie and has not been less since then, on the contrary, it has become more, and the techniques have been refined more and more.
Do you think it is a coincidence that the media works exactly according to the propaganda textbook?
Since many good people have found themselves susceptible to the narrative that China is the global supervillain…
…conspiring to overthrow western Christian values by any means necessary…
… I believe some lessons should be brought to bear.
Anti-Nation state fanatic George Soros stated at the 2020 Davos Summit that China has become the greatest threat to his vision for Open Society (right behind Trump’s USA). This was echoed by Lord Malloch Brown’s 2020 Global Government Speeches.
China’s deep alliance with Russia and the increased integration of the Eurasian Economic Union with the 135 nation strong Belt and Road Initiative form the basis of an alternative multipolar paradigm has kept imperialists up at night for the past several years.
The prospect of a US-China-Russia alliance has been one of the greatest threats to empire which peeked in the weeks before COVID-19 arose onto the scene as the US-China Trade Pact successfully entered its first phase (and has since fallen into shambles) as well as Trump’s repeated calls for “good relations with Russia.”
Amidst the surge of anti-China media psy ops published across Five Eyes nations, countless patriots of a conservative bent have found themselves absorbed into a red-scare manic hysteria.
Understanding the nature of the current psy ops, and new red scare deflection underway…
… it is necessary to review some seriously underappreciated facts of recent history…
… and since former secretary of State Sir Henry Kissinger (a genuine Knight of the British Empire), figures prominently in this story, it is wise to start with his relationship with China.
Although he is celebrated for being an “enlightened” liberal politician who helped China open up to the west after the dark days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution by extending western markets to China…
… the truth is very different.
A devout proponent of world government and population control, Kissinger had been the tool selected during a particularly important period of human history to advance a new ordering of world affairs.
The Division of the World Into Producers and Consumers
Since the world was taken off the gold reserve system way back in 1971, a new age of “post-industrialism” was unleashed onto a globalized world.
Humanity was given a new type of system which presumed that both our nature and the cause of value itself were located in the act of consuming.
The old idea that our nature was creative, and that our wealth was tied to producing, was assumed to be an obsolete thing of the past… a relic of a dirty old industrial age.
Under the new post-1971 operating system, we were told that the world would now be divided among producers and consumers.
The “have-not producers” would provide the cheap labor which first world consumers would increasingly rely on for the creation of goods they used to make for themselves.
“First world” nations were told…
…that according to the new post-industrial rules of de-regulation and market economics…
… that they should export their heavy industry, machine tools and other productive sectors abroad…
…as they transitioned into “white collar” post-industrial consumer societies.
The longer this outsourcing of industries went on, the less western nations found themselves capable of sustaining their own citizenries…
… building their own infrastructure…
…or determining their own economic destinies.
In place of full spectrum economies that once saw over 40% of North America’s labor force employed in manufacturing, a new addiction to “buying cheap stuff” began, and a “service economies” took over like a cancer.
To make matters worse, the many newly independent nations struggling to liberate themselves from colonialism…
…were told that they would have to abandon their dreams of development…
…since those goals would render the formula of a producer-consumer stratified society impossible to create.
Those leaders resisting this edict would face assassination or CIA overthrow.
Those leaders who adapted to the new rules would become peons of the new age of “Economic Hitmen”.
China and the West: The Real Story
By the time Deng Xiaoping announced the “opening up” of China in 1978, Kissinger had already managed the economic paradigm shift of 1971…
…which transformed U.S. Foreign Policy from a pro-development orientation towards a new policy of depopulation.
One that ended up targeting the poor nations of the global south under the logic that the resources under their soil were the lawful possession of the USA.
The NSSM 200 (titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests”) outlined its objective “Assistance for population moderation should give emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is a special US and strategic interest”.
… which was begun in full with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes to 20% …
…that ensured a vast destruction of small and medium businesses across the board.
Believing China (then still largely an impoverished third world country) to be desperate enough to accept money and short-term salvation…
…after years of trauma induced by the Cultural Revolution.
Under Kissinger’s logic, China would receive just enough money to sustain a static existence but would never be able to stand on its own two feet.
Unbeknownst to Kissinger, China’s leaders under the direction of Zhou Enlai, and his disciple Deng Xiaoping had a much longer-term strategic perspective than their western partners ever imagined.
While receiving much needed revenue from foreign exports, China began to slowly create the foundations for a genuine renaissance which would be made possible by…
…slowly learning the skills…
… leapfrogging technologies…
…and acquiring means of production which the west had once pioneered.
Zhou Enlai had first enunciated this visionary program as early as 1963 under his Four Modernizations mandate (Industrial, agricultural, national defense and science and technology).
And then restated this program in January 1976 weeks before his death.
This program manifested itself in the July 6, 1978 State Council Forum on the “Principles to Guide the Four Modernizations”.
Informed by the findings of international exploratory missions conducted by economist Gu Mu’s delegations around various advanced world economies (Japan, Hong Kong, Western Europe).
The findings of Gu Mu’s reports laid out the concrete pathways for full spectrum economic sovereignty.
A sovereignty with a focus on cultivating the cognitive creative powers of a new generation of scientists.
Scientists that would drive the non linear breakthroughs needed for China to ultimately break free of the rules of closed-system economics which technocrats like Kissinger wished the world adhere to.
Deng Xiaoping broke from the radical Marxism prevalent among the intelligentsia by redefining “labor” from purely material constraints and elevating the concept rightfully to the higher domain of mind saying:
“We should select several thousand of our most qualified personnel within the scientific and technological establishment and create conditions that will allow them to devote their undivided attention to research.
Those who have financial difficulties should be given allowances and subsidies…
We must create within the party an atmosphere of respect for knowledge and respect for trained personnel.
The erroneous attitude of not respecting intellectuals must be opposed. All work. Be it mental or manual, is labor.”
Over the course of the coming decades, China learned, and like any student, copied, reverse engineered and reconstructed western techniques as it slowly generated capacities that ultimately allowed them press on the limits of human knowledge outpacing all western models.
Project 863 focused on areas of space, lasers, energy, biotechnology, new materials, automation and information technology.
This project became the driver for creative innovation guided by the National Science Foundation and was upgraded to the 973 Basic Research Program in 2009 to: “1).
Project 973 supported [1] multidisciplinary and fundamental research of relevance to national development; [2] Promote frontline basic research; [3] Support the cultivation of scientific talent capable of original research; and [4] Build high-quality interdisciplinary research centers.”
The fruits of these long term programs was beginning to be felt and by 1996, discussion for a New Silk Road reviving the ancient trade routes connecting China to Europe and Africa through the Middle East and Caucasus was beginning with conferences hosted by Beijing under President Jiang Zemin.
One of the few western participants at these Chinese events was the Schiller Institute, whose founders delivered a full day seminar in 1997 describing the program that would finally come back to life in 2013 when Xi Jinping made it the focus of China’s foreign policy outlook under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Why did this program wait until 2013 to blossom onto the world stage when obvious momentum was already in motion in 1997?
George Soros and the Attack on the Asian Markets
From May 1997, George Soros’ targeting of the Southeast Asian “Tigers economies” of Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Laos, and Malaysia with…
…speculative short sales of their local currencies…
…and which resulted in months of vast anarchy across all of Asia and the world more broadly.
Currencies collapsed from 10-80% over the next 8 months and took many years to begin to recover.
Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed was brave enough to call out Soros’ economic warfare.
He did much to help his nation weather the storm by imposing capital controls to maintain some semblance of stability.
He ended up calling out the speculator saying:
“as much as people who produce and distribute drugs are criminals, because they destroy nations, the people who undermine the economies of poor nations are too.”
Chinese President Jiang Zemin followed suit calling Soros “a financial sniper” and stated he would not let the speculator enter Chinese markets.
“The ultimate target is China.
The British are particularly worried about the increasingly close collaboration between China and the ASEAN nations, which are being integrated into the massive regional and continental development projects initiated by China under the umbrella of the Eurasian Continental Land-Bridge program.
Such real development policies offer the alternative to the cheap-labor, colonial-style export industries of the “globalization” model
- the model that has led to the financial bubbles now bursting worldwide.”
The Tumultuous Years of 1997-2013
With the advent of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management…
(whose meltdown nearly took down the world economy in 1999 if not bailed out by central banks),
…followed by the Y2K/tech bubble explosion of 2000, the world markets nearly collapsed on several occasions.
9-11 unleashed a new era of warfare which deflected attention from the rot of the financial system while derivatives were deregulated.
And ‘Too Big To Fail’ banking formed in short order growing far beyond the powers of any nation state to rein in.
Under this period of destabilization, wars, terrorism and easy money speculation, China and its Eurasian allies moved slower to rebuild the physical basis of their existence…
…with the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization…
… long term planning…
… and a slow but steady focus on real (vs speculative) economic activity.
The fact that China was among the only nations of the world to keep national controls over their central bank and maintain Glass-Steagall bank separation were not lost on the enemies of humanity…
…all of whom are still yearning for a world-wide bankers’ dictatorship.
This process continued until it became evident that the western unipolar agenda would stop at nothing…
…including nuclear war…
…in order to assure the total subservience of all nation states.
With Obama unveiling his Asia Pivot (air-sea battle) plans against China along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) economic attack on China.
The veil was now lifted to the true ugly face behind the liberal fascist smiles and it became clear that the full spectrum dominance military encirclement of Russia’s perimeter was being fully extended to China’s perimeter as well.
The Revival of the New Silk Road
It was in the face of this existential threat that Xi Jinping emerged as the new leader of China.
And a historic crackdown of party corruption on all levels Federal, Provincial and Municipal was begun in force.
Although China is often accused of intellectual theft, the reality is that it has begun to clearly outpace western nations becoming a pioneer on every level of science and technology.
… since it is very well understood that it would become the basis for a new world system…
…as the old globalized paradigm comes crashing down faster than the Hindenburg.
The Real Perpetrators Laugh as a New Cold War Hysteria is Orchestrated
It is perhaps an irony that those figures who have been caught time and again attempting to destroy the foundations of both the USA, China and Russia have deflected attention from their own actions by promoting the idea that China is the USA’s natural enemy.
The reality is China is currently not only reviving the ancient silk road paradigm that focused on a harmony of interests and mutual self interest through economic and cultural exchange…
In this 1920 document China’s first President outlined the superiority of the American system of political economy which he studied deeply beginning in his early student days in the USA.
And upon which he explicitly modelled his new republican China and his three Principles of the People (premised on Lincoln’s principle of a nation for, by and of the people).
Sun Yat-sen (a Christian Confucian revolutionary) is not only the beloved founding father of the republic of China celebrated to this day, but stated his views pro-American views in the following terms
“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation.
So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense.
The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages.
Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”
Both mainstream and alternative media outlets that tend to be sympathetic to conservative values have bit the bait…
…and are now blind to the fact that those oligarchical social engineers managing the World Economic Forum…
…and drooling over a new era of World Government…
… population reduction and technocratic feudalism…
…are laughing at all of those fish in their nets whose ignorance to history and other cultures are leading them to their own self-destruction.
…
Upon this backdrop we have this little interesting take on events…
U.S. Four Star Generals Ask DNI To Stop Lying
These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:
Dear Director of National Intelligence,we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgmentsUnfortunately, we have none that we could provide.You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden, that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress.Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things. They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments.*Sincerely
The Generals
----PS: *Either that or shut the fuck up.
The above may well have been a draft for the letter behind this report:
America’s top spies say they are looking for ways to declassify and release more intelligence about adversaries’ bad behavior, after a group of four-star military commanders sent a rare and urgent plea asking for help in the information war against Russia and China.The internal memo from nine regional military commanders last year, which was reviewed by POLITICO and not made public, implored spy agencies to provide more evidence to combat "pernicious conduct."
Only by "waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers” can Washington shore up support from American allies, they said. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.
“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders who oversee U.S. military forces in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, as well as special operations troops, wrote to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last January.
“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference," they added.
The generals must have been seriously miffed to write such a letter.
There have been a number of published intelligence judgments where the NSA had expressed low confidence in conclusions made mainly by the CIA.
The NSA is part of the military.
Between two bureaucracies such an accusing letter or internal memo is the equivalent of a declaration of war.
It is doubtful that the intelligence folks would win that fight.
That gives some hope that the Office of the DNI and the agencies below it will now lessen their production of nonsensical claims.
….
The CIA/FBI/17+ known/unknown agencies are clearly a security apparatus that’s gone out of control when even the USA’s “nine regional [four-star general] military commanders” are out of the loop and pleading to be better informed.
Worryingly, though, they ask for “ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives,” which they apparently are ready to go right along with.
Western news media, of course, has become but a compliant weaponized appendage of that security apparatus, and democracy, which depends on informed voters, is nowhere in control of any of this.
Down this slippery slope, lies fascism.
US needs a correct mindset to compete with China: Global Times editorial
It must be emphasized that it's the sacred right of all 1.4 billion Chinese people to have a better living standard through the country's development. The US elites fear and try to contain China's development, and turn the normal competition between the two countries into a zero-sum game. This is immoral and runs counter to human rights that they trumpet. Washington cannot say one thing but do another. Blocking the economic and technological progress of developing countries is the biggest sin of the 21st century. They need to bear in mind that it's not the privilege of the Americans and Westerners to live a decent life.
Around and around the water goes down the drain. Those in the water are desperately trying to throw out anchors and shoot flare into the night skies above. But no one is aware.
The warning alarms are ringing loudly
While the United States might believe that it represents the entirety of the “free world” and thus ALL nations that “matter”. This is a complete falsehood. The rest of the world is really, seriously getting fed up, and angry.
Since Joe Biden took over the White House on January 20, the US has been pushing for what it calls an allied approach against China on trade and other issues. So far, that approach appears to be gaining some traction, as the US and some of its allies, including the EU and Japan, are reportedly mulling harsher trading rules targeting China.
Chinese officials have repeatedly registered their displeasure with such an approach of forming small circles or clans among so-called democratic economies to harm other countries’ interests.
However, China’s legitimate concerns have been largely overshadowed by what appears to be a coordinated smearing campaign against China by the West and their media. Not many countries, including developing economies that may also be targeted by the West’s “tougher” rules against China, spoke up. Even if some did, their voices are often ignored.
But at the EU’s trade policy day this week, where EU officials repeated long-standing grievances against China’s industrial policies and the state-owned companies, the new head of the WTO offered a very powerful and pragmatic repudiation of the group’s approach to gang up on China.
“I’ll just be very open,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who made history in March when she became the first woman and first African to head the WTO, as she warned against targeting China. “When China feels it’s being targeted and it’s only about China, then you get a lot of resistance.”
In the speech, Okonjo-Iweala went further to warn countries not to “use the WTO or trade as kind of a weapon to solve” political issues. She did not name names, but that is a reference to the plan pushed by the US, the EU and Japan to try to “weaponize the WTO” and international trading rules to serve their ill-willed, selfish political interests in containing China’s economic rise.
The WTO chief was eloquent and understandably diplomatic in issuing a dire warning against such a dangerous trend in global multilateral trading system. But in case some in the West might need a more straightforward reminder, here is the bottom line: The era when a small group of powers can decide others’ fate is long gone. The global multilateral system is no longer a tool that they can deploy at will.
Moreover, today’s China is no longer the same country that was easily invaded by the so-called Eight-Nation Alliance over a century ago. It is now the world’s second-largest economy, the world’s largest trading nation, and the biggest contributor to global economic growth. China will not be intimidated and pushed around by a few so-called advanced countries.
To put the WTO chief’s warning into more blunt terms, China will not sit idle and allow the US and its allies to use the WTO as a weapon against itself. Any such attempt should and will be met with forceful resistance.
And that resistance won’t just come from China.
The US and its allies might being targeting China directly, but whatever reform plans they push forward at the WTO will also hit other developing countries, which have similar economic policies and development plans as China. In fact, while the US and its allies may have put China on the spotlight, their true intention is to pull the WTO and global trading rules further into their favor and away from the developing economies.
The WTO, whose operations and authority have been seriously undermined by the US, is in dire need of reform. But any reform plan should be discussed and decided by all of its 150 or so members, not just by the US and its allies. The reforms should make the WTO more balanced to serve not only advanced economies – as it is in many cases – but also developing economies – which make up two-thirds of its membership.
Conclusion
Ok, so it’s really clear. Billions of dollars are pouring out of the United States towards the demonization of China, and towards instigation of internal strife and NGO-backed revolutions.
This will not happen quietly.
American readers will get the brunt of the propaganda. Most Americans, Brits, and Australians (as well as other member of the “Western Alliance”) will start seeing their news feeds clogged up with very healthy does of anti-China “news”.
Some of it will be subtle; existing real news with injections of anti-China phrases and content interspersed.
Some of it will be direct, in your face. It might consist of lies, or half-truths. All will be distortions.
Some of it will be directed at any nations that support China. If Cambodia does something in favor of the BRI, you can well expect a healthy dose of anti-Cambodia articles to start appearing as well.
But that’s not all.
The new funding is specifically directed at fomenting military operations inside of China itself.
There will be more attempts at “color revolutions”, “pro-democracy” actions, and covert insurgency operations.
There will be an increase in Social Justice Warrior interruptions; all designed to tear apart the strong Chinese social and familial value system.
There will be training to these ends, and clandestine efforts to stop China at all casts so that it collapses from the outer edges, and internally from the middle.
Every time you read an anti-China “news” article, realize that it is part of a triad of articles across different platforms all sending the same messages, and with that they interlock with your reading habits to interject, at key points, other anti-China screeds. All with the ultimate desire to have you (the reader) “foaming at the mouth” ready for war with China.
Here’s what they want the sheeple to turn into… (from my inbox)
Filthy Scumbag Communist Traitors are constantly trying to convince you that it’s normal to go through life living off handouts and dependent on the government for survival.
Communists want you to believe you are a victim and that others are to blame for your circumstances.
Communists employ censorship and violence to force their beliefs on you because they are incapable of forming valid arguments. Because there is no valid argument to convince you to accept that your prosperity must depend on the degree of your worship of the state.
You can not be convinced by logic or reason that you’re better off poor and powerless than rich and in control of your destiny.
Real Americans believe in and practice self-reliance. Real Americans accept responsibility for their circumstances and make the necessary sacrifices of their time and attention to improve the quality of their lives.
Real Americans Are Entrepreneurs. Real Americans create opportunity and prosperity. Real Americans are not victims because Real Americans Are Champions.My Fellow Americans Please Help To Make America Greater Than We Already Are And To Help Keep America Great By Starting Your Own Business Or Expanding Your Existing Business.Capital Funding And Comprehensive Training And Mentoring Are Available to All American Patriots Regardless Of Your Current Credit Score Or Current Or Past Circumstances.
This comes from a reader who admitted that they never visited China, never obtained a passport, but knows what China is because…
…well they said it’s “obvious”.
Sheeple. The United States Congress has decided to militarize the sheeple to ready them for war.
Last Minute additions
Video: US President Biden administration will provide US$300 million per year to promote fake news against China. 美國總統拜登政府將每年提供3億美元,以宣傳針對中國的虛假新聞.
Expect more hate crimes targeting Asian American in the coming months and years. 預計在未來數年內,將有更多針對亞裔美國人的仇恨犯罪。
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is the complete full text of law #33 titled “Discover each man’s thumbscrew” which is found in the book by Robert Greene titled “The 48 Laws of Power”.
LAW 33
DISCOVER EACH MAN’S THUMBSCREW
JUDGMENT
Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.
FINDING THE THUMBSCREW: A Strategic Plan of Action
We all have resistances. We live with a perpetual armor around ourselves to defend against change and the intrusive actions of friends and rivals. We would like nothing more than to be left to do things our own way. Constantly butting up against these resistances will cost you a lot of energy. One of the most important things to realize about people, though, is that they all have a weakness, some part of their psychological armor that will not resist, that will bend to your will if you find it and push on it. Some people wear their weaknesses openly, others disguise them. Those who disguise them are often the ones most effectively undone through that one chink in their armor.
THE LION. THE CHAMOIS. AND THE FOX
A lion was chasing a chamois along a valley.
He had all but caught it, and with longing eyes was anticipating a certain and a satisfying repast.
It seemed as if it were utterly impossible for the victim to escape; for a deep ravine appeared to bar the way for both the hunter and the hunted.
But the nimble chamois, gathering together all its strength, shot like an arrow from a bow across the chasm, and stood still on the rocky cliff on the other side.
Our lion pulled up short.
But at that moment a friend of his happened to be near at hand. That friend was the fox. “What!” said he, “with your strength and agility, is it possible that you will yield to a feeble chamois?
You have only to will, and you will be able to work wonders.
Though the abyss be deep, yet, if you are only in earnest, I am certain you will clear it.
Surely you can confide in my disinterested friendship.
I would not expose your life to danger if I were not so well aware of your strength and dexterity. ”
The lion’s blood waxed hot, and began to boil in his veins.
He flung himself with all his might into space.
But he could not clear the chasm; so down he tumbled headlong, and was killed by the fall.
Then what did his dear friend do?
He cautiously made his way down to the bottom of the ravine. and there, out in the open space and the free air, seeing that the lion wanted neither flattery nor obedience now, he set to work to pay the last sad rites to his dead friend, and in a month picked his bones clean.
FABLES, IVAN KRILOFF, 1768-1844
In planning your assault, keep these principles in mind:
Pay Attention to Gestures and Unconscious Signals. As Sigmund Freud remarked, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” This is a critical concept in the search for a person’s weakness—it is revealed by seemingly unimportant gestures and passing words.
The key is not only what you look for but where and how you look. Everyday conversation supplies the richest mine of weaknesses, so train yourself to listen. Start by always seeming interested—the appearance of a sympathetic ear will spur anyone to talk. A clever trick, often used by the nineteenth-century French statesman Talleyrand, is to appear to open up to the other person, to share a secret with them. It can be completely made up, or it can be real but of no great importance to you—the important thing is that it should seem to come from the heart. This will usually elicit a response that is not only as frank as yours but more genuine—a response that reveals a weakness.
If you suspect that someone has a particular soft spot, probe for it indirectly. If, for instance, you sense that a man has a need to be loved, openly flatter him. If he laps up your compliments, no matter how obvious, you are on the right track. Train your eye for details—how someone tips a waiter, what delights a person, the hidden messages in clothes. Find people’s idols, the things they worship and will do anything to get—perhaps you can be the supplier of their fantasies. Remember: Since we all try to hide our weaknesses, there is little to be learned from our conscious behavior. What oozes out in the little things outside our conscious control is what you want to know.
Find the Helpless Child. Most weaknesses begin in childhood, before the self builds up compensatory defenses. Perhaps the child was pampered or indulged in a particular area, or perhaps a certain emotional need went unfulfilled; as he or she grows older, the indulgence or the deficiency may be buried but never disappears. Knowing about a childhood need gives you a powerful key to a person’s weakness.
One sign of this weakness is that when you touch on it the person will often act like a child. Be on the lookout, then, for any behavior that should have been outgrown. If your victims or rivals went without something important, such as parental support, when they were children, supply it, or its facsimile. If they reveal a secret taste, a hidden indulgence, indulge it. In either case they will be unable to resist you.
Look for Contrasts. An overt trait often conceals its opposite. People who thump their chests are often big cowards; a prudish exterior may hide a lascivious soul; the uptight are often screaming for adventure; the shy are dying for attention. By probing beyond appearances, you will often find people’s weaknesses in the opposite of the qualities they reveal to you.
Find the Weak Link. Sometimes in your search for weaknesses it is not what but who that matters. In today’s versions of the court, there is often someone behind the scenes who has a great deal of power, a tremendous influence over the person superficially on top. These behind-the-scenes powerbrokers are the group’s weak link: Win their favor and you indirectly influence the king. Alternatively, even in a group of people acting with the appearance of one will—as when a group under attack closes ranks to resist an outsider—there is always a weak link in the chain. Find the one person who will bend under pressure.
Fill the Void. The two main emotional voids to fill are insecurity and unhappiness. The insecure are suckers for any kind of social validation; as for the chronically unhappy, look for the roots of their unhappiness. The insecure and the unhappy are the people least able to disguise their weaknesses. The ability to fill their emotional voids is a great source of power, and an indefinitely prolongable one.
Feed on Uncontrollable Emotions. The uncontrollable emotion can be a paranoid fear—a fear disproportionate to the situation—or any base motive such as lust, greed, vanity, or hatred. People in the grip of these emotions often cannot control themselves, and you can do the controlling for them.
IRING IZAR
[Hollywood super-agent] Irving Paul Lazar was once anxious to sell [studio mogul] Jack L. Warner a play.
“I had a long meeting with him today,” Lazar explained [to screenwriter Garson Kanin], “but I didn’t mention it, I didn’t even bring it up.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I’m going to wait until the weekend after next, when I go to Palm Springs.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t? I go to Palm Springs every weekend, but Warner isn’t going this weekend. He’s got a preview or something. So he’s not coming down till the next weekend, so that’s when I’m going to bring it up. ”
“Irving, I’m more and more confused.”
“Look,” said Irving impatiently, ”I know what I’m doing. I know how to sell Warner. This is a type of material that he’s uneasy with, so I have to hit him with it hard and suddenly to get an okay.”
”But why Palm Springs?”
”Because in Palm Springs, every day he goes to the baths at The Spa. And that’s where I’m going to be when he’s there. Now there’s a thing about Jack: He’s eighty and he’s very vain, and he doesn’t like people to see him naked. So when I walk up to him naked at The Spa—I mean he’s naked—well, I’m naked too, but I don’t care who sees me. He does. And I walk up to him naked, and I start to talk to him about this thing, he’ll be very embarrassed.And he’ll want to get away from me, and the easiest way is to say ‘Yes,’ because he knows if he says ‘No,’ then I’m going to stick with him, and stay right on it, and not give up. So to get rid of me, he’ll probably say, ‘Yes.’”
Two weeks later, I read of the acquisition of this particular property by Warner Brothers. I phoned Lazar and asked how it had been accomplished.
”How do you think?” he asked.
”In the buff, that’s how... just the way I told you it was going to work.”
HOLLYWOOD, GARSON KANIN, 1974
OBSERVANCES OF THE LAW
Observance I
In 1615 the thirty-year-old bishop of Luçon, later known as Cardinal Richelieu, gave a speech before representatives of the three estates of France—clergy, nobility, and commoners.
Richelieu had been chosen to serve as the mouthpiece for the clergy—an immense responsibility for a man still young and not particularly well known.
On all of the important issues of the day, the speech followed the Church line.
But near the end of it Richelieu did something that had nothing to do with the Church and everything to do with his career.
He turned to the throne of the fifteen-year-old King Louis XIII, and to the Queen Mother Marie de’ Médicis, who sat beside Louis, as the regent ruling France until her son reached his majority.
Everyone expected Richelieu to say the usual kind words to the young king.
Instead, however, he looked directly at and only at the queen mother.
Indeed his speech ended in long and fulsome praise of her, praise so glowing that it actually offended some in the Church.
But the smile on the queen’s face as she lapped up Richelieu’s compliments was unforgettable.
A year later the queen mother appointed Richelieu secretary of state for foreign affairs, an incredible coup for the young bishop.
He had now entered the inner circle of power, and he studied the workings of the court as if it were the machinery of a watch.
An Italian, Concino Concini, was the queen mother’s favorite, or rather her lover, a role that made him perhaps the most powerful man in France.
Concini was vain and foppish, and Richelieu played him perfectly—attending to him as if he were the king.
Within months Richelieu had become one of Concini’s favorites.
But something happened in 1617 that turned everything upside down: the young king, who up until then had shown every sign of being an idiot, had Concini murdered and his most important associates imprisoned.
In so doing Louis took command of the country with one blow, sweeping the queen mother aside.
Had Richelieu played it wrong?
He had been close to both Concini and Marie de Médicis, whose advisers and ministers were now all out of favor, some even arrested.
The queen mother herself was shut up in the Louvre, a virtual prisoner.
Richelieu wasted no time.
If everyone was deserting Marie de Médicis, he would stand by her.
He knew Louis could not get rid of her, for the king was still very young, and had in any case always been inordinately attached to her.
As Marie’s only remaining powerful friend, Richelieu filled the valuable function of liaison between the king and his mother.
In return he received her protection, and was able to survive the palace coup, even to thrive.
Over the next few years the queen mother grew still more dependent on him, and in 1622 she repaid him for his loyalty: Through the intercession of her allies in Rome, Richelieu was elevated to the powerful rank of cardinal.
By 1623 King Louis was in trouble.
He had no one he could trust to advise him, and although he was now a young man instead of a boy, he remained childish in spirit, and affairs of state came hard to him.
Now that he had taken the throne, Marie was no longer the regent and theoretically had no power, but she still had her son’s ear, and she kept telling him that Richelieu was his only possible savior.
At first Louis would have none of it—he hated the cardinal with a passion, only tolerating him out of love for Marie.
In the end, however, isolated in the court and crippled by his own indecisiveness, he yielded to his mother and made Richelieu first his chief councilor and later prime minister.
Now Richelieu no longer needed Marie de Médicis.
He stopped visiting and courting her, stopped listening to her opinions, even argued with her and opposed her wishes.
Instead he concentrated on the king, making himself indispensable to his new master.
All the previous premiers, understanding the king’s childishness, had tried to keep him out of trouble; the shrewd Richelieu played him differently, deliberately pushing him into one ambitious project after another, such as a crusade against the Huguenots and finally an extended war with Spain.
The immensity of these projects only made the king more dependent on his powerful premier, the only man able to keep order in the realm.
And so, for the next eighteen years, Richelieu, exploiting the king’s weaknesses, governed and molded France according to his own vision, unifying the country and making it a strong European power for centuries to come.
Interpretation
Richelieu saw everything as a military campaign, and no strategic move was more important to him than discovering his enemy’s weaknesses and applying pressure to them.
As early as his speech in 1615, he was looking for the weak link in the chain of power, and he saw that it was the queen mother.
Not that Marie was obviously weak—she governed both France and her son; but Richelieu saw that she was really an insecure woman who needed constant masculine attention.
He showered her with affection and respect, even toadying up to her favorite, Concini.
He knew the day would come when the king would take over, but he also recognized that Louis loved his mother dearly and would always remain a child in relation to her.
The way to control Louis, then, was not by gaining his favor, which could change overnight, but by gaining sway over his mother, for whom his affection would never change.
Once Richelieu had the position he desired—prime minister—he discarded the queen mother, moving on to the next weak link in the chain: the king’s own character.
There was a part of him that would always be a helpless child in need of higher authority.
It was on the foundation of the king’s weakness that Richelieu established his own power and fame.
Remember: When entering the court, find the weak link. The person in control is often not the king or queen; it is someone behind the scenes—the favorite, the husband or wife, even the court fool. This person may have more weaknesses than the king himself, because his power depends on all kinds of capricious factors outside his control.
Finally, when dealing with helpless children who cannot make decisions, play on their weakness and push them into bold ventures. They will have to depend on you even more, for you will become the adult figure whom they rely on to get them out of scrapes and to safety.
THE THINGS ON
As time went on I came to look for the little weaknesses....
It’s the little things that count.
On one occasion, I worked on the president of a large bank in Omaha. The [phony] deal involved the purchase of the street railway system of Omaha, including a bridge across the Mississippi River.
My principals were supposedly German and I had to negotiate with Berlin.
While awaiting word from them I introduced my fake mining-stock proposition.
Since this man was rich, I decided to play for high stakes....
Meanwhile, I played golf with the banker, visited his home, and went to the theater with him and his wife.
Though he showed some interest in my stock deal, he still wasn’t convinced.
I had built it up to the point that an investment of $1,250,000 was required.
Of this I was to put up $900,000, the banker $350,000.
But still he hesitated.
One evening when I was at his home for dinner I wore some perfume-Coty’s “April Violets.”
It was not then considered effeminate for a man to use a dash of perfume.
The banker’s wife thought it very lovely.
“Where did you get it?”
“It is a rare blend,” I told her, “especially made for me by a French perfumer. Do you like it?”
”l love it,” she replied.
The following day I went through my effects and found two empty bottles.
Both had come from France, but were empty.
I went to a downtown department store and purchased ten ounces of Coty’s ”April Violets.”
I poured this into the two French bottles, carefully sealed them, wrapped them in tissue paper.
That evening I dropped by the banker’s home and presented the two bottles to his wife.
”They were especially put up for me in Cologne,” I told her.
The next day the banker called at my hotel.
His wife was enraptured by the perfume.
She considered it the most wonderful, the most exotic fragrance she had ever used.
I did not tell the banker he could get all he wanted right in Omaha.
”She said,” the banker added, ”that I was fortunate to be associated with a man like you.”
From then on his attitude was changed, for he had complete faith in his wife’s judgment .... He parted with $350,000.
This, incidentally was my biggest [con] score.
-“YELLOW KID” WEIL, 1875-1976
Observance II
In December of 1925, guests at the swankiest hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, watched with interest as a mysterious man arrived in a Rolls-Royce driven by a Japanese chauffeur.
Over the next few days they studied this handsome man, who walked with an elegant cane, received telegrams at all hours, and only engaged in the briefest of conversations.
He was a count, they heard, Count Victor Lustig, and he came from one of the wealthiest families in Europe—but this was all they could find out.
Imagine their amazement, then, when Lustig one day walked up to one of the least distinguished guests in the hotel, a Mr. Herman Loller, head of an engineering company, and entered into conversation with him.
Loller had made his fortune only recently, and forging social connections was very important to him.
He felt honored and somewhat intimidated by this sophisticated man, who spoke perfect English with a hint of a foreign accent.
Over the days to come, the two became friends.
Loller of course did most of the talking, and one night he confessed that his business was doing poorly, with more troubles ahead.
In return, Lustig confided in his new friend that he too had serious money problems—Communists had seized his family estate and all its assets.
He was too old to learn a trade and go to work.
Luckily he had found an answer—“ a money-making machine.”
“You counterfeit?”
Loller whispered in half-shock.
No, Lustig replied, explaining that through a secret chemical process, his machine could duplicate any paper currency with complete accuracy.
Put in a dollar bill and six hours later you had two, both perfect.
He proceeded to explain how the machine had been smuggled out of Europe, how the Germans had developed it to undermine the British, how it had supported the count for several years, and on and on.
When Loller insisted on a demonstration, the two men went to Lustig’s room, where the count produced a magnificent mahogany box fitted with slots, cranks, and dials.
Loller watched as Lustig inserted a dollar bill in the box. Sure enough, early the following morning Lustig pulled out two bills, still wet from the chemicals.
Lustig gave the notes to Loller, who immediately took the bills to a local bank—which accepted them as genuine.
Now the businessman feverishly begged Lustig to sell him a machine.
The count explained that there was only one in existence, so Loller made him a high offer: $25,000, then a considerable amount (more than $400,000 in today’s terms).
Even so, Lustig seemed reluctant: He did not feel right about making his friend pay so much.
Yet finally he agreed to the sale.
After all, he said,
“I suppose it matters little what you pay me. You are, after all, going to recover the amount within a few days by duplicating your own bills.”
Making Loller swear never to reveal the machine’s existence to other people, Lustig accepted the money.
Later the same day he checked out of the hotel.
A year later, after many futile attempts at duplicating bills, Loller finally went to the police with the story of how Count Lustig had conned him with a pair of dollar bills, some chemicals, and a worthless mahogany box.
Interpretation
Count Lustig had an eagle eye for other people’s weaknesses.
He saw them in the smallest gesture.
Loller, for instance, overtipped waiters, seemed nervous in conversation with the concierge, talked loudly about his business.
His weakness, Lustig knew, was his need for social validation and for the respect that he thought his wealth had earned him.
He was also chronically insecure.
Lustig had come to the hotel to hunt for prey.
In Loller he homed in on the perfect sucker—a man hungering for someone to fill his psychic voids.
In offering Loller his friendship, then, Lustig knew he was offering him the immediate respect of the other guests.
As a count, Lustig was also offering the newly rich businessman access to the glittering world of old wealth.
And for the coup de grace, he apparently owned a machine that would rescue Loller from his worries.
It would even put him on a par with Lustig himself, who had also used the machine to maintain his status.
No wonder Loller took the bait.
Remember: When searching for suckers, always look for the dissatisfied, the unhappy, the insecure. Such people are riddled with weaknesses and have needs that you can fill. Their neediness is the groove in which you place your thumbnail and turn them at will.
Observance III
In the year 1559, the French king Henri II died in a jousting exhibition.
His son assumed the throne, becoming Francis II, but in the background stood Henri’s wife and queen, Catherine de’ Médicis, a woman who had long ago proven her skill in affairs of state.
When Francis died the next year, Catherine took control of the country as regent to her next son in line of succession, the future Charles IX, a mere ten years old at the time.
The main threats to the queen’s power were Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, and his brother, Louis, the powerful prince of Condé, both of whom could claim the right to serve as regent instead of Catherine, who, after all, was Italian—a foreigner.
Catherine quickly appointed Antoine lieutenant general of the kingdom, a title that seemed to satisfy his ambition.
It also meant that he had to remain in court, where Catherine could keep an eye on him.
Her next move proved smarter still: Antoine had a notorious weakness for young women, so she assigned one of her most attractive maids of honor, Louise de Rouet, to seduce him.
Now Antoine’s intimate, Louise reported all of his actions to Catherine.
The move worked so brilliantly that Catherine assigned another of her maids to Prince Condé, and thus was formed her escadron volant—“flying squadron”—of young girls whom she used to keep the unsuspecting males in the court under her control.
In 1572 Catherine married off her daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to Henri, the son of Antoine and the new king of Navarre.
To put a family that had always struggled against her so close to power was a dangerous move, so to make sure of Henri’s loyalty she unleashed on him the loveliest member of her “flying squadron,” Charlotte de Beaune Semblançay, baroness of Sauves.
Catherine did this even though Henri was married to her daughter.
Within weeks, Marguerite de Valois wrote in her memoirs,
“Mme. de Sauves so completely ensnared my husband that we no longer slept together, nor even conversed.”
And while I am on the subject, there is another fact that deserves mention. It is this. A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles-for then he is off his guard.
This will often afford a good opportunity of observing the boundless egoism of a man’s nature, and his total lack of consideration for others; and if these defects show themselves in small things, or merely in his general demeanor, you will find that they also underlie his action in matters of importance, although he may disguise the fact.
This is an opportunity which should not be missed.
If in the little affairs of every day—the trifles of life...—a man is inconsiderate and seeks only what is advantageous or convenient to himself, to the prejudice of others’ rights; if he appropriates to himself that which belongs to all alike, you may be sure there is no justice in his heart, and that he would be a scoundrel on a wholesale scale, only that law and compulsion bind his hands.
-Arthur SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
The baroness was an excellent spy and helped to keep Henri under Catherine’s thumb.
When the queen’s youngest son, the Duke of Alençon, grew so close to Henri that she feared the two might plot against her, she assigned the baroness to him as well.
This most infamous member of the flying squadron quickly seduced Alençon, and soon the two young men fought over her and their friendship quickly ended, along with any danger of a conspiracy.
Interpretation
Catherine had seen very early on the sway that a mistress has over a man of power: Her own husband, Henri II, had kept one of the most infamous mistresses of them all, Diane de Poitiers.
What Catherine learned from the experience was that a man like her husband wanted to feel he could win a woman over without having to rely on his status, which he had inherited rather than earned.
And such a need contained a huge blind spot: As long as the woman began the affair by acting as if she had been conquered, the man would fail to notice that as time passed the mistress had come to hold power over him, as Diane de Poitiers did over Henri.
It was Catherine’s strategy to turn this weakness to her advantage, using it as a way to conquer and control men.
All she had to do was unleash the loveliest women in the court, her “flying squadron,” on men whom she knew shared her husband’s vulnerability.
Remember: Always look for passions and obsessions that cannot be controlled. The stronger the passion, the more vulnerable the person.
This may seem surprising, for passionate people look strong.
In fact, however, they are simply filling the stage with their theatricality, distracting people from how weak and helpless they really are.
A man’s need to conquer women actually reveals a tremendous helplessness that has made suckers out of them for thousands of years.
Look at the part of a person that is most visible—their greed, their lust, their intense fear.
These are the emotions they cannot conceal, and over which they have the least control.
And what people cannot control, you can control for them.
THE BATTLE AT PHARSALIA
When the two armies [Julius Caesar’s and Pompey‘s] were come into Pharsalia, and both encamped there, Pompey’s thoughts ran the same way as they had done before, against fighting....
But those who were about him were greatly confident of success ...
...as if they had already conquered....
The cavalry especially were obstinate for fighting, being splendidly armed and bravely mounted, and valuing themselves upon the fine horses they kept, and upon their own handsome persons; as also upon the advantage of their numbers, for they were five thousand against one thousand of Caesar’s.
Nor were the numbers of the infantry less disproportionate, there being forty-five thousand of Pompey’s against twenty-two thousand of the enemy.
[The next day] whilst the infantry was thus sharply engaged in the main battle, on the flank Pompey’s horse rode up confidently, and opened [his cavalry’s] ranks very wide, that they might surround the right wing of Caesar.
But before they engaged, Caesar’s cohorts rushed out and attacked them, and did not dart their javelins at a distance, nor strike at the thighs and legs, as they usually did in close battle, but aimed at their faces.
For thus Caesar had instructed them, in hopes that young gentlemen, who had not known much of battles and wounds, but came wearing their hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would be more apprehensive of such blows, and not care for hazarding both a danger at present and a blemish for the future.
And so it proved, for they were so far from bearing the stroke of the javelins, that they could not stand the sight of them, but turned about, and covered their faces to secure them.
Once in disorder, presently they turned about to fly; and so most shamefully ruined all.
For those who had beat them back at once outflanked the infantry, and falling on their rear, cut them to pieces.
Pompey, who commanded the other wing of the army, when he saw his cavalry thus broken and flying, was no longer himself, nor did he now remember that he was Pompey the Great, but, like one whom some god had deprived of his senses, retired to his tent without speaking a word, and there sat to expect the event, till the whole army was routed.
-THE LIFE OF JULIUS CAESAR. PLUIARCH, c. A.D. 46-120
Observance IV
Arabella Huntington, wife of the great late-nineteenth-century railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, came from humble origins and always struggled for social recognition among her wealthy peers.
When she gave a party in her San Francisco mansion, few of the social elite would show up; most of them took her for a gold digger, not their kind.
Because of her husband’s fabulous wealth, art dealers courted her, but with such condescension they obviously saw her as an upstart.
Only one man of consequence treated her differently: the dealer Joseph Duveen.
For the first few years of Duveen’s relationship with Arabella, he made no effort to sell expensive art to her.
Instead he accompanied her to fine stores, chatted endlessly about queens and princesses he knew, on and on.
At last, she thought, a man who treated her as an equal, even a superior, in high society.
Meanwhile, if Duveen did not try to sell art to her, he did subtly educate her in his aesthetic ideas—namely, that the best art was the most expensive art.
And after Arabella had soaked up his way of seeing things, Duveen would act as if she always had exquisite taste, even though before she met him her aesthetics had been abysmal.
When Collis Huntington died, in 1900, Arabella came into a fortune.
She suddenly started to buy expensive paintings, by Rembrandt and Velázquez, for example—and only from Duveen.
Years later Duveen sold her Gainsborough’s Blue Boy for the highest price ever paid for a work of art at the time, an astounding purchase for a family that previously had shown little interest in collecting.
Interpretation
Joseph Duveen instantly understood Arabella Huntington and what made her tick: She wanted to feel important, at home in society.
Intensely insecure about her lower-class background, she needed confirmation of her new social status.
Duveen waited. Instead of rushing into trying to persuade her to collect art, he subtly went to work on her weaknesses.
He made her feel that she deserved his attention not because she was the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world but because of her own special character—and this completely melted her.
Duveen never condescended to Arabella; rather than lecturing to her, he instilled his ideas in her indirectly.
The result was one of his best and most devoted clients, and also the sale of The Blue Boy.
People’s need for validation and recognition, their need to feel important, is the best kind of weakness to exploit.
First, it is almost universal; second, exploiting it is so very easy.
All you have to do is find ways to make people feel better about their taste, their social standing, their intelligence.
Once the fish are hooked, you can reel them in again and again, for years—you are filling a positive role, giving them what they cannot get on their own.
They may never suspect that you are turning them like a thumbscrew, and if they do they may not care, because you are making them feel better about themselves, and that is worth any price.
Observance V
In 1862 King William of Prussia named Otto von Bismarck premier and minister for foreign affairs.
Bismarck was known for his boldness, his ambition—and his interest in strengthening the military.
Since William was surrounded by liberals in his government and cabinet, politicians who already wanted to limit his powers, it was quite dangerous for him to put Bismarck in this sensitive position.
His wife, Queen Augusta, had tried to dissuade him, but although she usually got her way with him, this time William stuck to his guns.
Only a week after becoming prime minister, Bismarck made an impromptu speech to a few dozen ministers to convince them of the need to enlarge the army.
He ended by saying, “The great questions of the time will be decided, not by speeches and resolutions of majorities, but by iron and blood.”
His speech was immediately disseminated throughout Germany.
The queen screamed at her husband that Bismarck was a barbaric militarist who was out to usurp control of Prussia, and that William had to fire him.
The liberals in the government agreed with her.
The outcry was so vehement that William began to be afraid he would end up on a scaffold, like Louis XVI of France, if he kept Bismarck on as prime minister.
Bismarck knew he had to get to the king before it was too late.
He also knew he had blundered, and should have tempered his fiery words.
Yet as he contemplated his strategy, he decided not to apologize but to do the exact opposite.
Bismarck knew the king well.
When the two men met, William, predictably, had been worked into a tizzy by the queen.
He reiterated his fear of being guillotined.
But Bismarck only replied,
“Yes, then we shall be dead! We must die sooner or later, and could there be a more respectable way of dying? I should die fighting for the cause of my king and master. Your Majesty would die sealing with your own blood your royal rights granted by God’s grace. Whether upon the scaffold or upon the battlefield makes no difference to the glorious staking of body and life on behalf of rights granted by God’s grace!”
On he went, appealing to William’s sense of honor and the majesty of his position as head of the army.
How could the king allow people to push him around?
Wasn’t the honor of Germany more important than quibbling over words?
Not only did the prime minister convince the king to stand up to both his wife and his parliament, he persuaded him to build up the army—Bismarck’s goal all along.
Interpretation
Bismarck knew the king felt bullied by those around him.
He knew that William had a military background and a deep sense of honor, and that he felt ashamed at his cravenness before his wife and his government.
William secretly yearned to be a great and mighty king, but he dared not express this ambition because he was afraid of ending up like Louis XVI.
Where a show of courage often conceals a man’s timidity, William’s timidity concealed his need to show courage and thump his chest.
Bismarck sensed the longing for glory beneath William’s pacifist front, so he played to the king’s insecurity about his manhood, finally pushing him into three wars and the creation of a German empire.
Timidity is a potent weakness to exploit. Timid souls often yearn to be their opposite—to be Napoleons. Yet they lack the inner strength.
You, in essence, can become their Napoleon, pushing them into bold actions that serve your needs while also making them dependent on you.
Remember: Look to the opposites and never take appearances at face value.
Image: The Thumbscrew. Your enemy has secrets that he guards, thinks thoughts he will not reveal. But they come out in ways he cannot help. It is there some where, a groove of weakness on his head, at his heart, over his belly. Once you find the groove, put your thumb in it and turn him at will.
Authority: Find out each man’s thumbscrew.
’Tis the art of setting their wills in action. It needs more skill than resolution. You must know where to get at anyone. Every volition has a special motive which varies according to taste. All men are idolaters, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure. Skill consists in knowing these idols in order to bring them into play. Knowing any man’s mainspring of motive you have as it were the key to his will.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
Playing on people’s weakness has one significant danger: You may stir up an action you cannot control.
In your games of power you always look several steps ahead and plan accordingly. And you exploit the fact that other people are more emotional and incapable of such foresight.
But when you play on their vulnerabilities, the areas over which they have least control, you can unleash emotions that will upset your plans. Push timid people into bold action and they may go too far; answer their need for attention or recognition and they may need more than you want to give them.
The helpless, childish element you are playing on can turn against you.
The more emotional the weakness, the greater the potential danger. Know the limits to this game, then, and never get carried away by your control over your victims. You are after power, not the thrill of control.
Conclusion
I just cannot help but wonder if the American neocons are playing President Biden using this Thumbscrew technique to force Biden to approve of outlandish military actions that run counter to his decades of behavior within the Untied States government. It’s something to ponder.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my “48 Laws of Power” Index here…
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
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I have a premise that you can gauge the relative health of a nation by looking at what it is being promoted as “news” day in, and day out. While there are elements of information, promotion, propaganda, and scandal, over all by comparing the two sources you can get a general idea of the “social climate” in each individual nation. And from this, you can gauge it’s overall health and the direction of the society.
For starters, in the articles about the “other” nation, it is very interesting.
American “news” warns about the bad things about China.
Chinese news reports on the given situations inside of America.
Most of the other news discusses the events that “buy papers”, or in other words, that are of interest to the readership.
Today, a huge segment of media has been taken over by video. While article about certain subjects continue to sell, a huge percentage of media rely on videos to get their messages across. In fact, all “news” organizations have video elements as part of their articles.
I’d post some from America, but almost all of the videos come from organizations that are banned in China because they are associated with American “alphabet” agencies.
Here’s some from China…
Videos.
In regards to videos, China is all about the latest technologies, the new space station and well, you get the idea…
This is very cool. 5G, AI controlled location and positioning overlay upon the arm…
Here, we have the new space station…
Here’s a pretty girl. She has this “fish shape” that is considered to be very beautiful within China.
Here’s another gal. This is another girl that is selling her light and easy pants. I like her. She has good appeal.
Of course the news about what is going on in India with the COVID-19 and the new “India Strain” is heartbreaking. Judging from the pictures it seems to be almost as bad as the “B” strain that was unleashed on China on CNY 2020. I wonder why you aren’t seeing these images in America?
And here’s one thing that you see pretty irregularly. It’s applications of technology that are in use. In this case we see a guy using a hand sensor to map out an old village that is being torn down for new homes.
And finally a comparison of cities for fun.
Conclusions
If left alone, with no major “fire-hose of disinformation” drenching everyone with the propaganda of the day, Most media are the same. They concentrate on the things that interest their readership.
Obviously, the hate-China narrative from 2016 through 2020 had an impact.
Chinese readership want to know about technology, good things, and what’s going on in the world. More or less presented in a “neutral” fashion and manner. American readership seems to want (whether they want it or not) things that are alarming, salacious, interesting, fearful or worrisome.
America…
The “news” from America tend to fall into these kinds of categories…
I believe that these trends are indicative of the way that the people think. As well as how the entire society thinks.
Perhaps instead of thinking about controlling people to do this, or to do that via fear (the American way), maybe you should give them hope instead. Provide hope, provide help and throw in a dash of compassion.
Its the Chinese way.
And a direction, that I must add, that President Biden is attempting to do in his most recent speech. It’s a nice change of pace from what most Americans have seen or been exposed to.
Maybe there is some hope for Western society after all.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
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Well, in 2020 Trump decided to go to a “hot” war with China. he sent 7 – 8 assault battle carrier groups to the South China Sea, and an undisclosed number of submarines. I’ve discussed this issue before HERE. And we now know that no “disclosed” fighting actually occurred. The flotilla steamed back to the United States “empty handed”, and the Admiral and his staff were fired immediately when they arrived back in Washington DC.
No word or information is provided as to why the Admiral(s) refused to engaged the Chinese, or attempt the take-over of some “minor” outlying islands. We all, in the Western readership” are all oblivious to it. But the fact is that something actually “spooked” the Naval brass (leadership) in charge of the operation. What was it?
We will never know.
But what we do know is that China is decades ahead of the West in certain technologies such as directed energy weapons and electronic suppression systems. Indeed it would be a sorry day for an entire submarine with 100 – 200 crew and all sorts of multi-million dollar munitions to sink softly to the bottom of the South China Sea when nothing works. It would be a scene out of the Foundation Trilogy.
During the story, there was this group of technologists that controlled the manufacturing and science related to all technology. It had become a religion to them. They were dedicated to technology like religious fanatics.
Meanwhile the various empires and governments were using this technology to conduct wars and achieve their very own petty objectives.
So the leader of the technologists decides to shut everything down, and as a result the Empire space fleet of enormous weapons systems and space-dreadnoughts all shut down and came to a complete stop.
That being said, let’s be real.
Ever since the middle 1990’s the United States has invested billions of dollars in the creation of very expensive and very unique submarine warfare systems. These are not to attack Yemen, or Zaire with. They are to attack China, and maybe… Russia with. For the vast bulk of territory that is valuable to China are the shipping lanes in the South China Sea.
So for nearly three decades the United States has invested billions of dollars in these systems, but no one knows about them.
Here we are going to discuss them, and indeed they are IMPRESSIVE. But keep in mind, no matter how impressive they are, and their capabilities are, they can be rendered absolutely and completely inert…
…and sink to the bottom of the South China Sea with one blast of a direct energy weapon. Weapons that completely and absolutely ring the entire Pacific basin near China.
You can have the best trained SEALs, and the most impressive weaponry, and the most excellent leadership, but it means nothing when you are trapped inside a steel tomb three miles beneath the ocean and your nuclear reactor is going into meltdown. Word to the wise.
So while I have no proof that this is what was going on, there is every reason to believe that it is this kind of thing that “spooked” the admirals to call off the invasion and “instigation” force and return home.
Never the less, the American capability is substantive, and for a military-technology geek, this stuff is superbly interesting.
Here’s a great article, and it is amazing. I want to give full and absolute credit to the source and the article author. Please take note. And also remember, like all reprints, they were edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author.
Today, the U.S. Navy’s quartet of converted Ohio class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or SSGNs, are among America’s most powerful, in-demand, and flexible weapons. These giant and secretive submarines are known for their ability to carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and dozens of special operations frogmen into contested territory to ply their quiet trade, but really, they are much, much more than that.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Navy was testing incredible new capabilities that it would subsequently integrate into its four yet to be converted SSGNs, including one highly elaborate, but obscure proof of concept exercise that solidified the SSGN concept for the seagoing service. Here is the story of how these vessels came to be and the highly unique, if not exotic capabilities, from drone mothership to command and control center, they possess.
The Genesis of the Ohio SSGN
The decision to covert Ohio class SSBNs into SSGNs originated with the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, which determined that only 14 of the 18 Ohio class boats were necessary to meet the United States’ nuclear deterrence needs. Eight years later, the Navy began actually converting the four oldest Ohio class submarines – USS Florida, USS Georgia, USS Michigan, and USS Ohio – into the new configuration.
The Navy had considered a number of potential configuration options for the new SSGNs. The concept that the service finally settled on retained 22 of the 24 missile tubes found on Ohio SSBNs, but modified them so that they were unable to fire Trident D5 nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Instead, each one would be able to launch up to seven BGM-109 Tomahawks using a Multiple All-Up-Round Canister (MAC) adapter. The SLBM fire control systems were similarly replaced with ones for the Tomahawk.
Tubes one and two on each of the four SSGNs would be completely replaced with lockout chambers so combat divers and Navy SEALs could enter and exit the submarine underwater. Personnel could also install a Dry Deck Shelter (DDS) to the top of the hull linked to either one of these modified tubes, or both if required, which could accommodate swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) mini-submarines. As the name suggests, the DDS provides a fully enclosed, dry space to work in on the submarine’s deck, even while it is underwater.
The abortive Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) was supposed to have been able to directly dock with either one of these lockout chambers, as well. The Navy canceled the ASDS program in 2009 after cost overruns and other major setbacks, including a fire that had destroyed the original prototype the year before.
With a DDS installed, a number of additional tubes on the SSGNs would also be blocked off, so the Navy decided to make tubes three through 10 reconfigurable into storage space, if necessary. A dedicated berthing area for a typical contingent of 66 special operators, with a surge capacity of up 102 personnel, was added in the reconfigured missile compartment, as well.
More recent reporting has indicated that a typical load for these submarines is around 100 Tomahawks. This most likely represents between 14 and 16 fully loaded tubes, which would equate to between 98 and 112 missiles in total. This would leave between six and eight tubes available for storage or other purposes, something we will come back to later on in the story.
Beyond that, the SSGN configuration had an all-new a dedicated special operations mission control center and associated mission planning spaces. It also included additional and improved sensor and communications antenna masts on the sail. Other modifications that would allow these submarines to better operate in shallower waters closer to shore, were also likely involved with the conversion.
A rich history of special mission submarines
The Navy had substantial past experience with employing submarines as special operations motherships and in the tactical strike role, to say nothing of using them as specialized covert intelligence gathering platforms, when it had crafted the requirements for the Ohio SSGNs. The ability of a submarine, in general, to transport personnel and materiel, as well as launch raiding parties ashore, while using its inherent capabilities to help avoid detection, was well established by the end of World War II.
Between the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the Navy, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Air Force, had even used submarines to secretly launch radar-reflecting balloons to probe hostile air defense capabilities. You can read more about these operations in this past War Zone story.
By the Vietnam War, the Navy was using specially configured submarines to support special operations. These included Gato class USS Tunny and the first-in-class USS Grayback, both of which were diesel-electric submarines that had previously been configured to fire the Regulus nuclear-armed cruise missile.
The “hangars” on the decks of these submarines for the airplane-sized Regulus were well suited to modification into lockout chambers for swimmers and shelters for mini-submarines, just like the Ohio’s Trident tubes. In 1968, the Navy went so far as to designate them LPSSs, or amphibious transport submarines.
These boats supported special operations along the coast of North Vietnam and also helped gather intelligence. Grayback was notably involved in Operation Thunderhead in 1972, an attempt to rescue American aviators that the U.S. military believed had escaped from North Vietnam’s infamous Hanoi Hilton prison. Bad weather and other factors eventually led the Navy to abort the mission and SEALs and Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) members never made contact with any escapees.
One SEAL, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Melvin Spence Dry, died during the mission. The U.S. military only acknowledged the operation in 2008, at which time Dry received a posthumous Bronze Star.
In the decades after Vietnam, a number of Sturgeon class nuclear-powered attack submarines also served in similar special operations support roles. In something of prelude to the Ohio SSGNs, as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1981, the Navy disabled the SLBM capabilities on a number of SSBNs, reclassifying them officially as attack submarines.
USS Sam Houston, USS John Marshall, USS Kamehameha, and USS James K. Polk – the first two belonging to the Ethan Allen class and the latter pair being from the Benjamin Franklin class – received further modifications that added DDSs to the top of the hull and dedicated spaces to carry embarked SEAL teams. These submarines continued sailing into the 1990s and Kamehameha was the last to leave service, with the Navy only decommissioning her in 2002.
A new kind of submarine mothership
Still, while the Navy had decades of experience with using submarines to support tactical operations, including special operations, at sea and onshore, the Ohio SSGNs aimed to be far more robust and flexible multi-mission platforms than any of these previous conversions.
As of 2004, the service was still very much fleshing out the specifics of the SSGN conversion and “writing the manual” on how to then employ these submarines. Georgia had become the main testbed for what was still very much an evolving concept, receiving a number of interim modifications including reconfigured internal mission spaces and additional data links and communications equipment. At that time, none of the four chosen Ohios had gone through the full conversion process and they were still years away from actually entering service in their new configuration.
“Two years from now, when we open the wrapping paper to see USS Georgia, a brand-spanking-new SSGN, we are going to need an instruction manual,” U.S. Navy Commodore Robert Shuetz, then-commander of Submarine Squadron 17, said at a change-of-command ceremony for the submarine in December 2004. “A manual that hasn’t been written yet; a manual that will describe in excruciating detail how this new ‘toy’ will be operated.”
“This is where the crew of Georgia has excelled,” Shuetz continued. “They have written the first instruction manual for how this ship and her three sisters, the ‘toys’ in demand by every combat commander, will be operated.”
Silent Hammer
Two months earlier, off the coast of San Diego, California, Georgia, even without anything near the full suite of capabilities outlined in the conversion plan, had demonstrated just what the SSGN configuration might be capable of as part of an experiment nicknamed Silent Hammer. To enhance the realism of the scenario, the Navy inserted this test into a larger exercise, called Trident Warrior, that involved an array of other submarines, ships, aircraft, drones, and special operations forces (SOF).
The Silent Hammer scenario, which lasted a little over a week, involved a joint task force with Georgia in the lead locating and neutralizing mock terrorists on land and at sea. The “red team” occupied various sites on San Clemente Island, situated some 80 miles west of San Diego, which the U.S. military routinely uses for exercise and other test purposes. The contractor-operated offshore support vessel, the R/V Acoustic Explorer, also served as a simulated maritime threat.
The overall objective of the exercise for the “blue team” was to find and fix these faux militants using a variety of intelligence sources and then neutralize them with simulated Tomahawk strikes.
During the experiment, at least publicly, the focus was far more on the submarine’s ability to act as an intelligence-collection platform, as well as a broader “clandestine sea-base” that would provide a “headquarters node from which command and control operations and logistic support were conducted,” including for special operators ashore.
“Our converted Tridents will generate their own intelligence, which allows onboard commanders to make decisions about what’s needed and determine what additional organic sensors should be deployed in virtually any scenario,” by-then-retired U.S. Navy Admiral Frank “Skip” Bowman wrote, referring to the Ohios collectively by the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles that the SSBN versions carry, said in the Winter 2005 edition of Undersea Warfare magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Force. Bowman’s last position in the service had been as Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion.
“Silent Hammer demonstrated how a networked force, including sea-based SOF from an SSGN, can fill joint gaps – Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) and Time Sensitive Strike – by conducting large-scale clandestine operations, supported by advanced unmanned systems, to reduce risk and increase capability,” U.S. Navy Captain J.S. Davidson, who headed up the Silent Hammer experiment, had explained in another interview for another story in that same issue of Undersea Warfare.
An intelligence nerve center
It’s hard to overstate how significant the intelligence fusion capabilities demonstrated during Silent Hammer were. For the experiment, Georgia had an embarked joint service command team onboard, who used modified spaces in the submarine to run a forward operations center that controlled other assets under the waves, riding on the surface, in the air, and on land. This was intended to reflect the capabilities that the submarine would have after going through the SSGN conversion, which would create new, more robust mission spaces for command and control elements and intelligence gathering personnel, among others.
This was the first time the Navy had ever done this as part of the development of the SSGN concept of operations and it put the operational commanders right in the thick of things in a whole new way. Unlike traditional surface command ships, such as the USS Blue Ridge, the Georgia was allowing these officers and their staff to direct forward operations while sailing concealed below the surface of the ocean. The submarine’s command center was linked to rear command centers, and their intelligence networks, via satellite. It also had direct data-link feeds from a number of other sources.
In the air, these included the Pelican, a highly modified, pilot-optional Cessna 337 propeller-driven aircraft, and a specially configured Sabreliner twin-engine business jet. The Pelican belonged to the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) and was configured at the time in a way that matched the capabilities of the MQ-1 Predator drone. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory operated the Sabreliner as a surrogate for smaller, lower-altitude unmanned aircraft.
The Lincoln Lab also had their heavily modified Boeing 707 airliner, nicknamed Hannah, a well-known cutting-edge communications and sensor testbed, in the air playing the role of a airborne radar with synthetic aperture and ground-moving-target indicator capabilities. This effectively made it, in part, a surrogate for a U.S. Air Force E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) battlefield management command and control aircraft.
Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes and EP-3E Aries II intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft also took part in Trident Warrior and fed information into this network of information sources.
Down below, Georgia was networked together with other vessels taking part in Trident Warrior, including two Los Angeles class fast attack submarines, the USS La Jolla and USS Pittsburgh. In addition, members of the Silent Hammer experiment team were on board the first in class amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa and the Wasp class USS Bonhomme Richard, which were also taking part in the larger exercise.
Ashore, U.S. Navy SEALs, along with other unspecified attached special operators, likely including U.S. Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTAC), were in direct contact with Georgia. They emplaced their own “unattended” sensors to monitor for potential hostile activity and otherwise fed even more data back to the submarine.
We also know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) supplied unspecified payloads, as well as sensor systems for the exercise. Georgia itself demonstrated how she might launch unmanned aircraft and an unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) during the exercise to support intelligence collection efforts. We will talk more about these shadowy developments later on.
Data fusion pioneers
The amount of intelligence information collected during the exercise was staggering. The supporting aircraft, ground sensors, and other offboard sensors collected more than 21,000 individual images during the exercise. In total, the task force created nearly 11 gigabytes of data, including thousands of textual alerts and nearly 3,000 actual intelligence “products,” such as PowerPoint presentations distilling various pieces of information, according to an article in a 2007 edition of the Lincoln Laboratory Journal.
Unfortunately, this wealth of information also risked being overwhelming. So, the Navy and the Lincoln Lab had also developed a computerized and heavily automated network system, state-of-the-art for the time, that allowed the command center onboard Georgia to rapidly parse through the mountains of available information for the most relevant data and only download what they needed in full. Being able to avoid downloading unnecessary information was particularly important given the bandwidth limitations in the data links available between the submarine and its various offboard information sources, especially 15 years ago.
Silent Hammer planners, as well as the Lincoln Lab, had been acutely aware of data sharing issues based on lessons learned from a smaller SSGN developmental experiment in 2003, nicknamed Giant Shadow, which involved the USS Florida and took place in and around the secretive Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, or AUTEC, off the coast of Andros Island in the Bahamas. Similar to the Silent Hammer scenario, Giant Shadow centered on an operation to destroy a chemical weapons plant that mock terrorists were operating on shore.
“We can get this [imagery] real-time down to the submarine,” U.S. Navy Captain William Toti, then commander of the Florida, said in an interview at the time with “60 Minutes” on CBS News. “The SEALs can look at it real-time as they’re planning their missions, and have a better sense of what’s going on.”
The problem in that exercise, as it turned out, had been that there quickly became too much information for personnel on the submarine to sift through and process in real-time. “The providers, not the consumers, decided what information to transmit and when, which created a situation whereby analysts were overloaded with processing extraneous information, yet still had insufficient information for decision support,” according to the 2017 Lincoln Laboratory Journal article.
The flow of information during Silent Hammer was better, but still showed room for improvement. The vast quantities of data meant that it was still easy for intelligence officers to miss important new developments as they did their best to prioritize the efforts. Of the more than 21,000 images that various platforms collected during the exercise, less than 7,000 made their way into the networked database and “blue team” personnel only ever looked at 361 of them at any resolution, downloading just 45 of them in full for more extensive analysis. Still, the task force that Georgia led was ultimately able to find all of the simulated threats and successfully carry out the mock strikes to neutralize them.
Secretive payloads
For how much is known about Georgia’s participation in Silent Hammer, as well as the overall scope and scale of the intelligence gathering and networking systems employed during the exercise, there is little information about the testing of the submarine’s capabilities to launch underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aircraft.
It’s not clear what type or types of UUVs participated in Silent Hammer, or if Georgia deployed any of them herself. However, during the earlier Giant Shadow exercise, Florida had become the first Navy submarine to launch and recover the Seahorse Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) via a modified missile tube. It is very possible that this undersea drone took part in Silent Hammer, as well.
The Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at the Pennsylvania State University had begun development of Seahorse in 1999 under contract to the Naval Oceanographic Office, or NAVOCEANO. At 28 and a half feet long and weighing 10,800 pounds, this underwater drone was more than 10 feet longer than a Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo and just over 7,100 pounds heavier.
Its main job was undersea mapping using a variety of sensors, including multi-beam bathymetric and synthetic aperture sonars, an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) sensor. Those same sensors could be used to scout out mines and other potential underwater hazards and, in the decades since the Navy took delivery of Seahorse, the service has acquired and fielded a large number of increasingly more capable torpedo-shaped UUVs of various sizes for mapping and mine clearance missions, among others.
The Flexible Payload Module
Georgia didn’t actually launch any unmanned aircraft during Silent Hammer, according to the Navy, but did release two Stealthy Affordable Capsule System (SACS) canisters, each containing an “inert test shape simulating a UAV,” from a Flexible Payload Module (FPM) installed in one of the submarine’s missile tubes.
Since the 1990s, the Navy had been very interested in the idea of pairing unmanned aircraft with submarines to expand the ability of the boats to scout ahead and collect intelligence. Drones working with subs could also act as communications and data relays, probe and collect information on enemy defenses, and potentially even strike targets themselves. For example, in March 1996, the Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Chicago took part in a demonstration in which it tested its ability to both communicate with and actively control an early example of what was then known as the RQ-1 Predator.
Development of the FPM dates back to at least 2000, when the Navy tasked two separate industry consortiums with crafting concepts for future submarines designs, as well as payloads and sensors for them, with an eye toward technologies that could be operational in the years to come. The Navy and DARPA managed this project, aptly named Submarine Payloads and Sensors, cooperatively.
Northrop Grumman, a member of Team 2020, one of the consortiums, which Lockheed Martin headed up, developed the FPM. General Dynamics Electric Boat, the United States’ premier submarine builder, which had built the Ohios, among others, and was involved in the development of the Virginia class attack submarine at the time, was also part of Team 2020.
The FPM was effectively an insert that would slot into a large diameter ballistic missile tube on a submarine, but could be adapted to hold multiple payloads, including numerous unmanned aircraft, that the crew could then launch independently. General Dynamics Electric Boat described it as a “plug and fight” system.
Northrop Grumman designed the first iteration, which had 10 14-inch tubes and a pair of larger 20-inch ones, specifically around the dimensions of the Ohio’s missile tubes. The second FPM prototype, which Georgia carried during Silent Hammer, had only three tubes of an unknown diameter. Each one of those could accommodate a payload inside a SACS, another Northrop Grumman development.
“The FPM and SACS comprise an encapsulation system that facilitates the launch of non-marinized payloads and weapons from a submarine,” according to the article on Silent Hammer from the Winter 2005 issue of Undersea Warfare. “This allows the use of Navy air- or surface-launched payloads – plus those from other services – without the need to redesign them for launching in an undersea environment.”
SACS was “adaptable for long-term storage, variable release depths, launching under broaching or surface-loitering conditions, and the ability to encapsulate small or large payloads,” according that same article.
“In the case of the SUAV [submarine-launched unmanned air vehicle], SACS rises buoyantly to the surface, a sensor in the capsule detects broach, the SACS end-cap is blown away, and the SUAV booster ignites to clear the water and build vertical speed,” notes from a presentation that Steve Weinstein and William McGannon gave at the National Defense Industry Association’s (NDIA) 2002 Joint Undersea Warfare Technology Spring Conference explains. “At the proper moment, the SUAV wings are extended from alongside its long slender body to the horizontal position, the flight control software tilts the SUAV over to the horizontal flight position and once in stable flight, the SUAV turns and climbs to the pre-planned altitude to begin its mission.”
At the time, Weinstein and McGannon were employed with the Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) Submarine Sensor Systems division.
The other industry collective that had taken part in the Submarine Payloads and Sensors program, called Forward Payloads And Sensors for Submarines (Forward PASS), had developed a similar system, known as the Broaching Universal Buoyant Launcher (BUBL), that worked in much the same manner. However, BUBL’s design was meant to work with a variety of existing launcher options on submarines, including torpedo tubes and countermeasures launchers, or even be carried externally. Of course, the external carriage option could have created performance problems or increased the sub’s acoustic signature, making it more vulnerable.
Raytheon was the team leader for Forward PASS, which also included Boeing and Pennsylvania State’s Applied Research Laboratory, among others. General Dynamics Electric Boat was part of both teams in order to provide its extensive knowledge base to help with submarine development and integration questions. There is no mention of Georgia employing BUBL during Silent Hammer.
Submarine-launched drones
While we don’t know what drones Georgia was supposed to have been simulating the launch of from the FPM specifically, Northrop Grumman had also already developed at least one submarine-launched drone known as Sea Ferret in the 1990s. This was an evolution of Ferret, which the company had originally developed for the U.S. Army.
The Sundstrand TJ50 turbojet-powered Ferrets and Sea Ferrets are what we would call loitering munitions today. The approximately 145-pound drones carried both electro-optical sensor packages and 20-pound warheads and could fly out to a maximum range of around 370 nautical miles and a top speed of 300 knots and still be able to orbit around a target area for around two hours.
In December 1996, the USS Asheville, another Los Angeles class attack submarine, simulated launching the Sea Ferret during a technology demonstration. A Cessna 206 light aircraft carried one of the drones under its wing to then simulate the unmanned aircraft in flight. Northrop Grumman had intended the final system, which the Navy did not ultimately adopt, to be torpedo tube-launched using a modified canister for a UGM-84 submarine-launched Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile.
Still, the 1996 test “successfully simulated organic and inorganic UAV operations & SOF support,” according to Weinstein and McGannon 2002 NDIA presentation. It is certainly possible that Northrop Grumman could have developed a follow-on of some sort to Sea Ferret at the time of Silent Hammer.
We also know that the Navy had been holding workshops and other defense industry engagement events to gauge options for submarine-launched unmanned aircraft starting in 2000, around the same time as the Submarine Payloads and Sensors initiative. A slide from a General Dynamics Electric Boat briefing at the 2006 NDIA Systems Engineer Conference, which also touches on the Flexible Payload Module (FPM) development, shows concept art for at least five different potential submarine-launched drone designs.
By 2002, a team that included General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, AeroVironment, and Kollmorgen, had also demonstrated a modified Universal Modular Mast that could shoot small unmanned aircraft into the sky from periscope depth. An artist’s conception of the system shows a drone design virtually identical to the Blackwing, which AeroVironment officially began developing four years later for the Navy as a submarine-launched system.
In his guidance for 2005, then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark had also called for a follow-on Silent Hammer II exercise that “should employ aerial sensors (UAVs) in addition to ground sensors and exercise full range connectivity links.” It’s not clear if Clark had wanted to demonstrate a true submarine-launched drone capability or if that exercise ever ultimately occurred.
Lockheed Martin’s mysterious Cormorant
Of all the submarine-launched unmanned aircraft in development around the time of Silent Hammer, by far, the most interesting was Lockheed Martin’s shadowy Cormorant, a product of the company’s Skunk Works advanced design division. DARPA managed this program, also known as the Multi-Purpose Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MPUAV), which sought to develop a relatively large, stealthy, jet-powered drone that a submarine could both launch and recover.
Patent documents show that Cormorant was in development at least as early as 2004. A subsequent official Lockheed Martin video presentation on the Cormorant makes clear that, while DAPRA was officially in charge of the project, it was informed, at least in part, by Navy requirements relating to the Ohio SSGNs.
“The Navy came to us for our concepts for a wide range of unmanned aircraft that could operate from aircraft carriers or surface ships or even submarines,” Bob Ruszkowski, then-Lockheed Martin’s MPUAV Team Project Manager and Technical Lead, said in the video. “This idea was unique in that it was the first time someone had thought about the idea of launching and recovering the vehicle while the submarine was still submerged.”
The Cormorant, in concept, would be launched from a modified missile tube on an Ohio class SSGN at a depth of up to 150 feet and then float the surface “like a cork,” according to Ruszkowski. Rocket boosters would then propel the four-ton, titanium-skinned craft into the air, a traditional turbofan jet engine would take over. During launch, as well as recovery, the intakes and exhausts for the engine would be sealed off from the water.
“The aircraft uses its stealth and mission planning to penetrate hostile airspace,” Ruszkowski continued. “Once it’s in there, it can do a variety of missions, that could be collecting intelligence and reconnaissance on weapons of mass destruction sites, it could be supporting special operations forces. But whatever it’s doing, it’s using its stealth and its mission planning to avoid detection.”
One patent that Lockheed Martin filed in 2004 regarding Cormorant included artwork depicting the drone releasing weapons, suggesting that Lockheed Martin, DARPA, and the Navy may have been considering a strike role from the drone, as well. A Lockheed Martin briefing from 2005 describes the unmanned aircraft as being capable of carrying a 1,000-pound payload in a modular bay, which could include sensors, communications relay systems, and even supplies that it could drop to personnel at a designated drop zone.
After completing its mission, it would return to a rendezvous point and deploy a parachute, landing safely in the water. The submarine would then send out its own tethered remotely operated vehicle to attach a cable to the drone and reel it back in.
It’s unclear how far the program progressed, but we do know that Lockheed Martin conducted a number of disclosed tests, including releasing a test article from a simulated launch tube underwater, dropping that test article into the water, and evaluating the recovery concept that Ruszkowski had described in the video.
Theoretically, Cormorant could have worked using a launcher mounted on a surface ship, as well. The 2004 patent shows an artist’s conception of a surface ship releasing a Cormorant off the side.
Publicly, DARPA canceled development of Cormorant, ostensibly due to budget cuts, in 2008. It’s not clear whether development of the system continued on afterward, possibly in the classified realm, under a different program. Discussions about the unmanned aircraft, or its underlying concepts, virtually evaporated, even from Skunk Works, which had been promoting the project heavily up until then.
In 2009, Lockheed Martin didfile another patent relating to an unmanned aircraft that could be launched and recovered in the water. This application described a system that used an electric ducted fan both for self-propelled operation in the water, as well as in the air. The concept art curious shows an aircraft shaped like an early Cold War Soviet MiG-15, which was reportedly because Lockheed Martin had utilized a modified radio-controlled model of one of these aircraft to test the electric fan propulsion system.
The Ohio class SSGNs enter service
For as open as the Navy was in the early 2000s about the book it was writing on how to employ the Ohio SSGNs, and what capabilities they might have as a result of their refits and in the future, since they actually entered service toward the end of that decade there has been relatively little information about how they have been putting that doctrine into action. Ohio was the first to rejoin the fleet, with General Dynamics Electric Boat delivering the converted submarine on Dec. 17, 2005. A ceremony to mark its return to service occurred nearly two months later.
Florida and Michigan followed on Apr. 8 and Nov. 22, 2006, respectively. For unclear reasons, Michigan did not have her official return to service ceremony until June 2007. Georgia was the last to arrive on Dec. 18, 2007.
The bulk of the official news reporting about these four boats has been primarily concerned with deployments, returns to home port, port visits, and general announcements about their participation in exercises. “The missions that we do are very exciting and challenging,” U.S. Navy Captain Murray Gero, then the commanding officer of the Ohio’s Blue crew, said in one typical pre-deployment story in 2009.
“We typically go to sea with over 100 tomahawk missiles, and that basically replaces a tomahawk missile inventory of three surface warships,” he continued, focusing on the time-sensitive strike mission. “This increases the flexibility of the surface fleet, because we basically allow them to reassign those three ships as soon as we get into our operating theater.”
The Captain did add that the boat was capable of other missions, including intelligence gathering and special operations support, and that “they are very complex, and they involve very close coordination with several outside agencies, including SEALS.” He didn’t offer any more specific details, though.
Conventional deterrence and actual combat
We do know that the boats have flexed their strike muscles both for deterrent purposes and during actual operations. In 2010, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio nearly simultaneously made port visits at Diego Garcia in the India Ocean, in Busan in South Korea, and in Subic Bay in the Philippines, respectively, in what some observers took to be a show of force aimed at China.
“This demonstrated that these platforms offer signaling capabilities that other conventional missile systems lack,” Forrest E. Morgan, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation think tank wrote about these events in a study in 2013. “Yet, one might doubt whether U.S. leaders would even allow SSGNs to surface while on patrol in an engagement zone during a crisis when doing so might put them at risk of attack.”
In 2011, Florida also notably took part in the open stages of Operation Odyssey Dawn, the NATO-led intervention into Libya that led to the ouster and death of long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi. The submarine fired 93 Tomahawks over the course of the operation, 90 of which hit their targets.
“By virtue of their concealment and endurance, the SSGN platform forces our adversaries to consider that they could be operating almost anywhere at any time,” then-Vice Admiral John Richardson, Commander of Naval Submarine Forces at the time, said upon Florida’s return to its homeport at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia on Apr. 29, 2011. “The sensor suite on the boat allows the captain to gather information and intelligence in situ, passing that back to the commander and responding on the spot. When you combine all that with the tremendous combat capability the boat brings – land attack missiles, special forces, torpedoes – that’s a lot of bets the enemy has to cover down on.”
Richardson subsequently became Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion and then Chief of Naval Operations, the service’s top uniformed officer. He retired in August 2019.
In 2017, Michigan had appeared again in Busan at a time of heightened tensions with North Korea, which was also seen as a signal to the regime in Pyongyang. U.S. President Trump had also revealed and highlighted the submarine’s presence in the region as a counter to North Korean aggression in a telephone conversion with his counterpart in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, which subsequently leaked out into the press. Michigan did go on to conduct exercises with the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and her associated Carrier Strike Group, which had also deployed the region.
Earlier in November 2019, ABC News‘ “Nightline” aired a segment in which David Muir got to spend a day aboard Florida, which is presently operating in the Mediterranean Sea on what was described as a “classified mission.” Muirs interviews with U.S. Navy Rear Admiral William Houston and Captain Seth Burton offered some additional insights into the SSGN operations. Houston is presently tripled-hatted as Director of Plans and Operations for U.S. Naval Forces Europe/U.S. Sixth Fleet, the Deputy Commander of Sixth Fleet, and the Commander of Submarine Group Eight. Burton is the current commander of the Florida.
“We’ve put this submarine right in this area of the eastern portion of the Mediterranean to counterbalance the Russian buildup in Syria,” Houston told Muir. “We’re watching them [the Russians] very very closely. There’s really not a day where we’re not watching them, every single day.”
“If you just look at the region and you’ve got ISIS in Northern Africa, you’ve got what’s going on on the Turkey Syria border right now, the fact that you’re here in the Mediterranean, does that give you a set of silent eyes for the U.S.?” Muir asked Burton. “Absolutely. It gives them eyes where no one knows that they’re being looked at,” he replied.
#USNavy silent service in action! Rare look at the Ohio-class fleet guided-missile submarine #USSFlorida operating in @USNavyEurope AOR. Florida, is capable of conducting clandestine strike operations, carrier and expeditionary strike group operations, and more. #NavyLethalitypic.twitter.com/uiRgUpQSsw
We also know that the Ohio SSGNs regularly conduct intelligence gathering missions during their patrols and work together with SEAL teams and other special operations forces on a routine basis around the world. As Captain Murray Gero noted back in 2009, these boats offer their crews unique experiences and they are among the hottest boats to get on in the fleet.
New capabilities?
If operational information about the Ohio class SSGNs is limited, then details about upgrades and new technologies for these boats have been even scarcer. This stands in stark contrast to how open the Navy had been about the capabilities of these converted submarines early on and how willing it had been to discuss what it might have in store for them in the future, including the drones and UUVs, both of which have seen quantum leaps in the expansion of their capabilities over the last decade and a half.
We do know that by the late 2000s, the Navy was integrating a signals intelligence collection system, called Radiant Gemstone, onto at least some Los Angeles class attack submarines, which you can read about more in this past War Zone piece. This came along with the necessary data links and software backend, known as Radiant Mercury, to rapidly exchange that information with the National Security Agency.
“The RADMERC [Radiant Mercury] program facilitates sharing of critical information across security domains and among allied, coalition and inter-agency partners,” an official list of the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s (SPAWAR) programs as of 2017 explained. “The Radiant Mercury product provides cross-domain information sharing capabilities from Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) to General Service (GENSER) and GENSER to Unclassified.”
This sounds very much like an evolution of the data sharing systems and concepts of operation that Georgia pioneered during Silent Hammer. It also seems like an ideal addition to the SSGNs that would align well with their known intelligence gathering and fusion capabilities, if they didn’t have it already, and may well be an extension of developments that first appeared on the converted Ohios.
The Universal Launch and Recovery Module
We also know that the Flexible Payload Module (FPM) evolved, at least in part, into the Universal Launch and Recovery Module (ULRM), also known as the Universal Launch and Retrieval Module. General Dynamics Electric Boat has described this system as primarily being intended to launch and recover various types of UUVs, including Seahorse, Seaglider, and the Bluefin 21.
The Bluefin 21 became well known world-wide after taking part in the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014. The U.S. Navy subsequently adopted a derivative of this UUV, the Knifefish, primarily for mine hunting missions.
The modified Trident missile tubes would be able to accommodate racks that could launch and recover a number of these relatively small UUVs at once. General Dynamics Electric Boat envisioned the possibility of an SSGN deploying entire swarms of networked underwater drones to conduct persistent surveillance missions across a broad area as one possible application. There were also plans to eventually integrate larger underwater drones into the system.
General Dynamics Electric Boat did not specifically say that this system could launch unmanned aircraft from submarines, but it is possible that it could have been adapted to deploy encapsulated drones. The same system might similarly be able to deploy other payloads, as well, such as mines or decoy balloons.
As it was working on the ULRM, the company also said that it was developing an improved storage module that would be more readily transportable and installable. This, in principle, would have allowed more tailored special operations force packages to rapidly deploy to a forward port to rendezvous with one of the submarines for a specific mission.
There was also talk about another module that could contain additional masts with sensors or potentially for deploying additional payloads, such as drones. The modular nature of these systems combined with the large number of missile tubes on the SSGNs offered the potential to readily mix and match capabilities that would be best suited to the boat’s operational needs.
In 2013, the Navy said that it would test a prototype ULRM onboard one of the Ohio class SSGNs the following year. The goal at that time was to have examples available for actual operational use by 2019, but it’s unclear if this has occurred or not.
Upward Falling Payloads And Hydra
In 2013, DARPA itself initiated a new program to explore the possibility of launch small unmanned aircraft from capsules that could lie on the seabed, dormant and potentially unknown to potential opponents, for years at a time. A submarine could potentially deploy them covertly, as well, a mission that seems well suited to the SSGN concept of operation.
Known as Upward Falling Payloads (UFP), this project envisioned a system that American forces could activate remotely, or that might be triggered automatically in some fashion, and then release its payload. “Such a system of pre-positioned, deep-sea nodes could enable a full range of maritime mission sets that are more cost-effective than existing manned or long-range unmanned naval assets,” DARPA’s archived page for the project explains. UFP is also reminiscent of the Broaching Universal Buoyant Launcher (BUBL) system from a decade earlier, but it’s not clear if there is any actual direct relationship between the two projects.
At the same time, DARPA was working on this seabed payload launcher concept, it was also exploring a modular, standardized payload module that could work with submarines, as well as aircraft and surface ships, called Hydra. This could deploy either unmanned aircraft or UUVs and sounds similar in some respects to the Stealthy Affordable Capsule System (SACS). Again, it is unclear if there was any direct relationship between these two efforts.
Both UFP and Hydra appear to have come to an end sometime between 2016 and 2017. As with Cormorant, it’s not immediately clear if these continued on in some other form, including in the classified realm.
In 2013, the Navy itself had successfully demonstrated the ability to launch an encapsulated unmanned aircraft via a submarine’s torpedo tube. The Los Angeles class USS Providence (SSN-719) deployed the Naval Research Laboratory’s eXperimental Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial System, or XFC UAS, using a launch system known as Sea Robin, which used a modified Tomahawk missile launch canister. That same year, the service said it was also actively testing AeroVironment’s Blackwing using the standard three-inch countermeasures launchers on its submarines.
More capable than we know
All told, it seems very possible, if not probable, that the capabilities of the Ohio class SSGNs have significantly expanded since Silent Hammer in 2004, even if the specifics are limited. Even without new systems, such as the Universal Launch and Recovery Module, the Ohio SSGNs have already been using their modified Trident launch tubes to deploy unmanned systems and for other novel purposes, including just acting as valuable storage space within the confines of the submarines.
The intelligence collection and fusion systems that Georgia had in 2004, even before its full conversion into the SSGN configuration, were state-of-the-art. More than a decade of improvements in basic computing technology and processing power, as well as new developments in data links and communications systems, including new ways for submarines to transmit and receive information, can only have drastically expanded those already impressive capabilities.
UUV and drone technology has also come a long way, both in general and within the Navy specifically. The service, by itself, has made significant progress in submarine-launched drones, drone swarm technology, and autonomous capabilities that apply to unmanned platforms in the air, at sea, and underneath the waves. Just this year, the Navy hired Boeing to build a new fleet of large displacement UUVs as part of a program called Orca, which you can read about in more detail in this past War Zone piece. All of this aligns well with the SSGN’s capabilities, and the Navy’s long-standing plans to expand them, as we understand it.
The Navy has also been quietly working on a new and revolutionary electronic warfare architecture, known as the Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS, since at least 2013. The service has described this effort, which you can read about in-depth in this past War Zone feature, as involving swarms of unmanned platforms, various systems on ships and submarines, countermeasures and electronic warfare suites, and more that could combine to project signatures mimicking large groups of aircraft, surface ships, and subs.
The Ohio SSGNs present an ideal platform for deploying elements of and supporting this cutting-edge and critical initiative. Most notably, they could launch swarms of small electronic-warfare payload-carrying drones deep in enemy territory that can project false fleets and aerial armadas on enemy sensors and act as decoys during a time of war or probe and gather intelligence on enemy air defense networks during a time of peace. Launching radar-reflector carrying balloons, a 60-year-old proven tactic, could also be part of this capability. In fact, we know of no better platform to carry out such a task.
The Ohio SSGNs could also see the integration of new conventional weapons to support their time-sensitive strike mission, and otherwise expand their offensive capabilities, in the future, as well. The Navy is already working on a number of new and upgraded missiles that could have submarine-launched applications, such as the multi-purpose SM-6 Block IB, a highly classified supersonic anti-ship missile known as Sea Dragon, and the future Next Generation Strike Weapon. The Navy has also already test-fired prototype submarine-launched hypersonic boost-glide vehicles from Ohio class submarines under the Conventional Prompt Strike program, though it’s unclear if it may choose to deploy those only on those submarines configured as SSBNs.
Smaller weapons could dramatically increase the boats’ already impressive magazine depth. The extra capacity could give the submarines more diversity in their arsenals, allowing them to engage broader target sets, as well. European missile consortium MBDA’s SPEAR 3 mini-cruise missile and its SPEAR-EW variant, which carries an electronic warfare payload instead of a warhead, are good examples of the kind of miniaturized missiles that could be extremely valuable additions to the Ohio SSGNs.
The Navy has also been putting these converted Ohios through major refits, which serve as an opportunity to integrate even more new capabilities. Georgia left the dry dock at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in March 2019 and Ohiofinished her stint at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Washington State in August. Michigan is set to return to the fleet in 2020. It is not clear when Florida, which is presently deployed in the Mediterranean, will go through the process. These overhauled SSGNs likely represent a whole new level of capability derived from lessons learned over the last decade and a half of operations.
Successors to the Ohio SSGNs
Unfortunately, the Ohios SSGNs won’t be able to serve forever, they are already the oldest Ohio class submarines in existence, and the Navy is already exploring concepts for what comes next. The experience with these four boats has directly informed the development of the Virginia Payload Module (VPM) for the future Block V Virginia class attack submarines.
The VPM has four large multi-purpose tubes that can accept various modules just like the modified Trident missile tubes on the Ohio SSGNs, including the same seven-round Tomahawk launchers. The designs of the existing Block III and future Block IV Virginia class boats also already feature two similarly-sized Virginia Payload Tubes (VPT) in the bow of the submarine.
As such, the VPTs already bring some of the multi-mission capability found on the SSGNs to the Block III Virginias and this will only be more pronounced on the Block IV boats. The Navy has already set aside at least four Block II and III Virginia class submarines for special operations support missions, with two more available as alternates, if required.
These six Virginias – USS Hawaii, USS Mississppi, USS New Hampshire, USS New Mexico, USS North Carolina, and USS North Dakota – can also carry the same types of Dry Deck Shelters (DDS) as the Ohio SSGNs. All of these submarines actually share a common pool of DDSs that Navy personnel can install on any of the boats, as necessary.
The Navy’s present plan is to fully replace the Ohio SSGNs with Block IV Virginias by 2026, though, especially given the recent refits, its possible that the former boats could end up remaining in service longer. It’s not clear whether older Virginias would continue to serve int he special operations support role, as well.
Beyond that, the Navy is already exploring options for what it presently refers to as Large Payload Submarines, which will be a future class of multi-purpose, multi-mission boats derived from the Columbia class SSBN design that will be capable of, as the name implies, deploying a wide variety of large payloads. This could include both UUVs and submarine-launched drones. The submarines could also have the ability to deploy networked swarms of these unmanned platforms above or below the waves.
At present, the Navy plans to buy a minimum of five Large Payload Submarines, but it’s not clear when they might actually enter service. The current schedule would be to buy one every three years starting in 2036, after the initial Columbia class production run, totaling 12 boats, ends.
However, there are already concerns about how expensive and complex the Columbias are, each of which will cost more than $7 billion, and whether General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding will be able to keep to the schedule. This, in turn, could push plans for the Large Payload Submarines further into the future. You can read more about all this in-depth in this past War Zone story.
More than 15 years after Georgia wrote the first few chapters in the book on Ohio class SSGN concepts of operations, the U.S. Navy’s four SSGNs remain some of the most unique and capable platforms within the Pentagon’s portfolio, and that is just based on what we know about their abilities. By every indication, these submarines have and continue to serve as testbeds for even more impressive developments that still have yet to become public.
Just think, if the ability to launch various drones, both air and sea types, and especially higher-end ones like the Skunk Works’ Cormorant, was very much in development on multiple fronts 15 years ago, just imagine what is deployed today or on the drawing board. If an SSGN can carry up to 154 Tomahawk missiles, how many small weaponized drones can it carry and how could an enemy ever defend against such an overwhelming onslaught crossing their shores? It is this type of imagination and the room to realize such dreams that have made these submarines so valuable and, for lack of a better term, revolutionary.
It’s safe to say that the Navy’s SSGNs are a case of “more than meets the eye,” as they are much more than the stealthy Tomahawk slingers and SEAL delivery platforms that the public perceives them to be. While their arsenal of cruise missiles and frogmen is certainly formidable, their ability to adapt, spy on the enemy, control the battle from under the waves, and above all else, accommodate new ideas, makes them uniquely ferocious to any enemy nation they may be sitting off of at any given moment.
Conclusion
What an article! Ok. Please keep in mind that the best made weapons and technology is meaningless when the environment that you expect to use it in has altered and changed. Which is China. They DO NOT PLAY.
You might amass all your forces on a plain. Everyone wearing the best and strongest armor. Your men might have the best training and the horse might be the most loyal and robust in the world. But that means nothing when a wall of water comes crashing down and wipes out your forces.
China is a nation that is not only four to five time larger in population, but it is merit driven. And not just merit in the ability to dispute diversity issues, or numbers on a tabulated spreadsheet, but real hard and fast (hard scrabble) abilities.
They are formidable, and especially now that China and Russia and Iran are all linked together militarily as one. The USA had best stop playing with the boyhood toys and grow up. It’s a new game, and a new way of doing things. The best thing that the USA can do is “get with the program” and adapt, or die though extinction.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please note that this article has a large number of videos. It is important for you to watch them to get the full impact of the message. None of the videos are longer than four minutes, but they might take some time to download depending on your service provider.
There’s a bunch of dunder-head idiots inside the United States that wants to get involved in a war. Whether it is with Russia, or Iran, or China. They want a war. And they are justifying war like they are some middle-school boys planning on a swing set in the playground. It’s dangerous, but it’s all there in black and white.
Right up front in our faces….
Rep Ted Yoho had a PR nightmare this week after reportedly calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez some ungentlemanly terms. Though this is the controversy du jour, we should not lose sight that actual policy is more important than sound bites. Yoho recently announced plans to submit legislation this week for the “Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act” that would commit the United States to war against China if Beijing attacks Taiwan. Such a proposition has long been popular in the Beltway. Before tying the United States to Taipei’s fate, however, a closer analysis is warranted.
-Should the United States Go to War with China if Taiwan is Attacked?
But, you know, this time is really different. Oh, now. The “boys” won’t be a marching off to war. It will pretty much be “game over” for the Old US of A.
They don’t seem to understand just how meager and vulnerable the United States actually is.
The truth is that America is so weak and disorganized right now, that the slightest “event” could have everyone fighting each other like a scene out of a Hollywood movie.
And to make this point, just how absolutely RIPE America is ready for social upheaval and tearing other Americans apart, I have to show a clip from a movie. It’s one that most non-Americans are confused by. But here, now that you understand the real context behind the deeper meaning of the scene, you can well appreciate it.
America is ripe and ready for this…
Exactly… THIS…
Sorry that the quality is on the poor side. But the point is there. Listen to it, and embrace it.
American against American. Black against white. Urban against rural. Rich against poor. Spanish against Anglos.
Notice how the wealthy oligarchy observes and knows what is going on, but they either [1] divert their eyes because they don't want to see, or [2] watch the events with glee. Others also watching look up it with horror, disgust, and a state of trying to monitor the situation reasonably. This piece of video art is a masterpiece.
And I'm not saying that solely because they use Lynyrd Skynyrd music as the backdrop.
I am not the only one saying this. It’s pretty much well-established inside of America today.
The church fight scene in Kingsman: The Secret Service is hands down one of the most memorable action sequences in recent history. But there are actually layers to what makes it so great – layers beyond the primal gratification we collectively derive from seeing someone (rightfully) get the shit kicked out of them.
-Bosshunting
People are angry. They’re angry about the Covid lockdowns. They’re angry because they are losing their jobs and can’t pay the rent and feed their families. They’re angry because the stores are all out of the food and supplies they need to survive.
They are angry because they get beaten up by the cops if they don’t keep a certain distance from each other in public. They’re angry at the politicians who pretend to be helping but in truth are making things worse with partisan, self-serving bullshit. And African-Americans are angry because they find themselves — yet again — in the crosshairs of deadly racism.
In short, Americans are as mad as hell.
America is on the verge of an explosion. I can feel its rumblings already. My guess is it’s already started happening in a small way, and within the next year or two it is going to spread like wildfire.
…
Right now, virtually the entire country is in a really bad mood, and unfortunately some people will choose to resort to violence.And it can happen in places that you might not expect. For instance, an argument over social distancing rules at a McDonald’s in Oklahoma resulted in three people getting shot…But as our world gets even crazier, more people than ever are going to be going off the deep end.Our nation is so deeply divided, and explosions of anger and hatred are becoming increasingly common. So many Americans are willing to “shoot first and ask questions later”, and the shooting of a 25-year-old African-American man in Georgia is causing a national uproar…
-End of the American Dream
Rage
Take this…
People are screaming at each other a lot these days. The most recent example is a viral video, seen by millions of people since last week, of a woman who went ballistic because a service dog was sitting near her in a Delaware restaurant.The dog in question belonged to a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. But that didn't stop the woman from unleashing a three-minute, profanity-laced tirade. I'm sure all the diners at Kathy's Crab House lost their appetite that evening."It is disgusting to have an animal in a public restaurant ... I think it's gross!" the woman screams. (This is a family-friendly publication, so I can't print much more of what she said.)It seems everybody is furious today. We've created a culture of outrage. People are offended, and if you aren't offended by what offends them, they are offended by your lack of offense.We are addicts. We crave a daily fix of rage. We rant on Facebook and Twitter because we need a regular dose of vitriol to fuel our habit. Then we turn on a newscast to watch agitated political commentators throw more gasoline on the flames.The rage burns on both sides of our political divide. White supremacists march with tiki torches to spread hate. Black Lives Matter activists loot stores and smash windows. Former NFL fans burn football jerseys on barbecue grills. Campus lectures require police protection because leftists have threatened right-wing speakers. Madonna drops expletives and threatens to blow up the White House because she's so mad President Trump won the election.Is there anything we don't get angry about these days? Depending on which side of an issue Americans stand, we are offended by Starbucks coffee, Chick-fil-A sandwiches, Target restrooms, CNN, Fox, Nike shoes, the real cause of hurricanes or whatever the actress Jennifer Lawrence said yesterday.Our rage has become so absurd that a shopper at a Hobby Lobby craft store was offended by cotton stalks (yes, cotton stalks!) in the fall décor aisle. She took her protest online and demanded that the store stop selling dried cotton bouquets for $12.99 because slaves were used in the 1800s to harvest the plants.Honestly, it makes me wonder if the real cause of global warming is the alarming increase in human anger. We're going to burn up this planet with our rage if we aren't careful.
- Is America About to Explode?
Ok, to America isn’t just being led by psychopathic madmen with an IQ of a sixth grader, but that the American people are all worked up in a lather; in a frenzy. And the pressure is ON.
Now, couple this environment with the wealthy aristocratic and oligarchy inside the Washington Beltway that want to start a war with China. You know for “democracy”, and “freedom”!…
Back to China
But back to the subject at hand…
… if the fucking morons in Washington DC really want to engage in a Hot War with China…
… they will be doing it with Russia as well.
As they both; Russia and China, share self-defense interests.
Here’s how a neocon journal characterizes going to a hot war with china. Here’s one of the precious few “con” points of view. As most view points are “we can fight the world and win! Rah! Rah!” So I was greatly relieved to read this contrary article from the K-street in Washington DC.
Well…
…sort of at least.
There would likely be no dispute from any American that we affirm and endorse the prospect that the people of Taiwan ought to be free, deserve to determine their own form of government, and above all to decide whether it is in their interests to unify with China. But what price should America be asked to pay to underwrite the freedom aspirations of another country?Any conflict against China over Taiwan would result in American service men and women being killed, likely in large numbers. China’s military has been built over the past two decades specifically to deter the U.S. from attacking them–via anti-access, area denial (A2/AD)–but if deterrence fails, to build a defense force that would be able to sink our ships, knock out our satellites, and shoot down our fighters from great distances; if it ever came to a ground war, they have more than 375 million military-aged males from which to draw for their Army.
And keep in mind that the TOTAL population of the USA is less than that. That’s right. There are more Chinese military males than Americans in total.
United States Population (2021) - Worldometerhttps://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-populationThe current population of the United States of America is 332,526,757 as of Thursday, April 15, 2021, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. the United States 2020 population is estimated at 331,002,651 people at mid year according to UN data.
And they are not some idiotic, uneducated simpletons either. They are not “cannon fodder”.
But even he “get’s it” and understands the risks. Well, some of them at least…
Though Yoho was initially hailed as a more libertarian member of Congress, and even introduced a resolution in 2015 that would have reined in the president’s warmaking powers, the proposal to use U.S. troops for Taiwan’s defense is not characteristic of outside-the-box thinking championed by political renegades, but instead comes from the worst pages of the establishment’s playbook.
Instead, the best way for America to help Taiwan would be to enable them to build an A2/AD defensive bubble of their own to deter China.
But we must ensure our security first and foremost. Committing ourselves to a war against China for the benefit of another government would be a tremendous mistake because the cost to us could be a lost war, or a victory so expensive it bankrupts us and puts our own security in peril.
However you look at it, extending security guarantees to Taiwan is not in America’s interests.
-Daniel L. Davis
But he really doesn’t fully understand the risks. In his mind, and you read it for yourself, he has identified two possible outcomes of a war with China. Which are;
America could lose the war, and have to return home. (Vietnam, Afghanistan)
A victory so expensive it bankrupts the nation.
To which I must posit the most OBVIOUS outcome that for some reason the fucking idiots on K-street in Washington DC are somehow missing…
That World War III could erupt, all cities in America are destroyed, and the rest of the work sacks what remains, and America becomes a footnote in the history books. While a united-Asia administers a radioactive North America as a “backwater: for slave labor.
Here’s some video clips from various history/war movies. Let them serve as a reminder that any conflict with China, Russia, Iran or any combination will be up-front, personal, and on American soil.
Sierra Leon
This is about Sierra Leon. Rich oligarchy in the UK used the people of Sierra Leon to create a war of distraction so that they could mine diamonds. Here we see the one faction, the “rebels” enter a town and create havoc.
Shooting an RPG during the Sierra Leon civil war.
Do not be under the impression that this cannot happen inside of America. America is terribly balkanized, and this is EXACTLY what the oligarchy needs to further their plans.
In Blood Diamond, the sinner ripe for enlightenment is Danny Archer (DiCaprio), a native of Zimbabwe who makes a point of referring to the country by its old colonial name, Rhodesia. A former Angolan mercenary, Danny now (the film is set in the late nineties) smuggles Sierra Leone diamonds into Liberia in return for guns and rocket-launchers, which go to the rebel army (the RUF)—the army we’ve seen mowing down women and children, training young boys to be rapists and mass murderers, and conscripting hardier men to work in the diamond fields.
-NYMag
The difficulties in the country were compounded in March 1991 when conflict in neighbouring Liberia spilled over the border into Sierra Leone. Momoh responded by deploying troops to the border region to repel the incursion of Liberian rebels known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by Charles Taylor. Sierra Leone’s army came under attack not only from the NPFL but also from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by former Sierra Leone army corporal Foday Sankoh, who was collaborating with the Liberian rebels; this was the beginning of what would be a long and brutal civil war.
In April 1992 Momoh was deposed in a coup led by Capt. Valentine E.M. Strasser, who cited the poor conditions endured by the troops engaged in fighting the rebels as one of the reasons for ousting Momoh. A National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) was established with Strasser as the head of state. During Strasser’s administration the civil war escalated, with the RUF increasing the amount of territory under its control, including lucrative diamond mines—the source of the “blood” or “conflict” diamonds used to fund its activities. There were disturbing reports of atrocities committed against the civilian population not only by rebel forces but also by some government troops. Civilians were subject to horrific acts of mutilation, including having their limbs, ears, and lips cut off. Incidents of rape and forced labour were widespread, and many civilians were used as unwilling human shields or held in captivity and subjected to repeated acts of sexual violence by the combatants. Forced conscription was pervasive and made many civilians, including children, unwilling participants in the conflict.
And here’s the most important statement;
Still, in the years after the war, Sierra Leone was consistently rated as one of the world’s poorest countries.
Any civil war in America will not be one that can be easily mended. A war will have long-term damage to what America is, and the fantasies that it stands upon.
Wealthy oligarchs treat the world as their property and use people and citizens as pawns to do their bidding.
And make no mistake, a Civil War is result during any global internal war. this time, the nation will not be unified against a common enemy. It will remain balkanized where every “man for himself” will carve out their existence.
Of course, the scene is not from Blood Diamond, but it could be. The situation in Sierra Leon was very awful.
As I watched the senseless brutality, the shooting of mothers and children as they fled, I was torn up, divided. I thought, Why do I need to see this? Then I thought, This happened in Sierra Leone and is still happening in parts of Africa—I need to see it. Then I thought, If I need to see it, I need to see more than a sneering villain with an eye patch. I need to understand how this man—and the people under him—become the monsters they are.
-NYMag
But enough of the fiction.
.
TheSierra Leone Civil War was an armed conflict in theWest African country of Sierra Leone from 1991 t0 2002. The war began on March 23, 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under Foday Sankoh, with support of Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor andhis group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL), attempted to overthrow the government of Sierra Leonean President JosephMomah.TheSierraLeone Civil War (1991-2002)
Or, anywhere in Africa or South America
The story line is identical. It’s just the climate, the societies, and the people that are different. Do you think that because America considers itself a First-Class nation that it is somehow immune to these kinds of conflicts?
Do you believe that this would NEVER happen in the United States, simply because the wealthy people in the Untied States are kind, caring, compassionate and religious?
This is what happens when the government of a country becomes big, bloated and terribly corrupt…
The situation was further complicated when Siaka Stevens, the third prime minister, took office in 1968. He served for 17 years and during his term, created a one-party political system which led to the further dismantling of public administrative offices and extreme levels of corruption. In 1985, the fourth prime minister, Joseph Momoh, proved to be one and the same. Under his watch, Sierra Leone suffered an absolute economic crisis. Public officials were left unpaid and, in retaliation, many looted and destroyed government property and offices. This included public school teachers which led to the complete collapse of the public educational system. By 1991, Sierra Leone was one of the most impoverished countries in the world, and its citizens were dissatisfied with their living conditions.
-World Atlas
A very important review. Does it sound somewhat familiar; like it might actually happen in America…
In 1982, as Sierra Leone’s government and economy worsened, a group of Sierra Leone University, Fourah Bay College students set up a paramilitary organization.
They were led by their group leader Alie Kabbah.
They fled to eastern Sierra Leone to form a political organization to rebel against the Temne tribe's All People’s Congress (APC). This was the governing party of the time.
Their organization became the RUF.
Its objectives were to [1] overthrow of the Sierra Leonean government, [2] oust corrupt officials, and [3] re-allocate Sierra Leone’s wealth to benefit the general population
And you do not think that it could happen in the United States?
America is RIPE for war. But on in a far away land, but rather back on US soil, up front and personal.
Wealthy oligarchs have plans for America.
Meanwhile oligarchs (working behind the scenes) tried to recruit people to do their bidding.
In Sierra Leon, throughout the 1980s, neighboring Libyans infiltrated into Sierra Leone with the intention of recruiting rebels.
This was part of Libyan President, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s Pan-African initiatives to recruit dissidents against western influence in Africa. He wanted to create a "new Africa" where American influences would be removed completely.
Now, while training in Libya, Foday Sankoh from Sierra Leone met Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.
The two decided to form a pact, or an agreement. After establishing a relationship, Sankoh and Taylor agreed to support guerilla wars in their respective countries.
Both had hopes of overthrowing their country’s governments and creating political change.
And so it started.
In 1989, the Civil War in Liberia began.
Under the leadership of Charles Taylor, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) launched a guerilla war against the Liberian government. This led to Liberia’s civil war.
He won the war, and came to power.
Once Taylor was in power in Liberia, he supported Sankoh’s invasion and guerilla war in Sierra Leone. For after all, they were close buddies and shared the same vision and objectives.
Or maybe you don’t think that these kinds of political alignments cannot happen. Like the Antifa, or the BLM, or the Marxists, or the Far-Right.
Civil war broke out in Sierra Leon in 1990 under the command of former Sierra Leonean army corporal Foday Sankoh.
He launched his first attack in villages in Kailahun District in eastern Sierra Leone on March 23, 1991.
This small band of men who called themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
After that he began to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone on the Liberian border.
The government of Sierra Leone, overwhelmed by a crumbling economy and corruption, was unable to put up significant resistance.
Within a month of entering Sierra Leone the RUF controlled much of the Eastern Province.
And so it begins…
Fighting continued in the ensuing months, with the RUF gaining control of the diamond mines in the Kono district.
Then, they were successful in pushing the Sierra Leone army back towards Freetown.
On April 29, 1992, a group of young soldiers led by Capt. Valentine Strasser, apparently frustrated by the Sierra Leon government's failure to deal with rebels, launched a military coup.
This ended up sending President Momoh into exile in Guinea.
They established the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) with Yahya Kanu as its chairman.
But Kanu was assassinated by fellow NPRC members, who accused him of trying to negotiate with the toppled APC administration.
And so after a period of bloodletting, on May 4, 1992,Captain Valentine Strasser took over as chairman of the NPRC.
As well as thend Head of State of Sierra Leone.
And did it change anything?
No.
The NPRC proved to be nearly as ineffectual as the Momoh government in repelling the RUF.
More and more of the country fell to RUF fighters.
By 1995 the RUF held much of the countryside.
They were also near the major populated cities, and were on the doorstep of Freetown.
To retrieve the situation, the NPRC hired several hundred mercenaries from the private firm Executive Outcomes.
Within a month they had driven RUF fighters back to enclaves along Sierra Leone’s borders.
So now that the new “reformed” government was able to suppress the RUF rebels, is that the end of the story?
No.
In January 1996, after nearly four years in power, Strasser was ousted in a coup by fellow NPRC members.
This was led by his trusted deputy Maada Bio.
The new(est) government took immediate actions to change the course of Sierra Leon.
As a result of popular demand and mounting international pressure, the NPRC agreed to hand over power to a civilian government.
Bio reinstated the Constitution and called for presidential and parliamentary elections. A a "democracy" was reconstituted.
Elections were held in April 1996.
In the second round of presidential elections in early 1996, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, candidate of the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) defeated John Karefa-Smart of the United National People's Party (UNPP). Kabbah was a diplomat who had worked at the UN for more than 20 years.
So an internationalist took power of the democratic Sierra Leon.
And eventually, after nearly a solid six years of bloody fighting, parliamentary elections were conducted. And this time, under the system of proportional representation.
South Vietnam
Let’s look at Vietnam.
Ah, most MM readers won’t even remember the daily newscasts about the “proud American soldiers who died”.
But let’s not look at the American side of the involvement. Instead, let’s look at the actions of the American puppet government set up in South Vietnam…
Corruption played a signficant role in thwarting American objectives in Vietnam by contributing to the South Vietnam government’s lack of legitimacy. The heavy handed and corrupt government of South Vietnam actually made the countryside fertile for the insurgency of the Viet Cong and the communist. Successive governments left much to be desired and too readily turned a blind eye to corruption and incompetence.
An important cause for dissension among the ARVN soldiers was the widespread corruption and war profiteering that prevailed, not only among the civilian population but also among military officers. Corruption, of course, had long been common in South Vietnam. However, as infiation increased in the 1970’s and military pay failed to keep pace, corrupt practices drove wedges between the troops and their officers. Corruption had another adverse effect; it siphoned funds that could have been used to buy critically short supplies and ammunition. It has been estimated that as much as 25 percent of ARVN’s military payroll was in the name of dead or deserted soldiers who were kept on the roll so that corrupt officers could collect their salaries.
ARVN soldiers of South Vietnam.
The Republic of Vietnam, headed from 1954 to 1963 by Ngo Dinh Diem, was venal, reactionary, inefficient, and corrupt. Although Diem inherited a functional administration from the French, he failed to pursue judicial, economic, and administrative reforms, empower subordinates to exercise government authority, or create a system of oversight to curb corruption. Consequently, corruption abounded in all forms. In spite of Diem’s personal revulsion of corruption, the Ngo family was the biggest practitioner of nepotism. His close relatives filled the top ambassadorial, cabinet, and civil service posts.
In 1960, the Groupe Caravelliste, comprising 18 senior Vietnamese politicians, publicly condemned regime oppression and corruption in detail. Weeks later, a poorly planned military coup provided the regime withthe opportunity to crack down even more, including the imprisonment of the Groupe Caravelliste. At this point, Diem began to withdraw into himself, reducing his circle of confidants, and isolating himself even further from the public view. Nhu began to step up his persecution of “subversives,” as well as factionalizing the officer corps through corruption, extortion, and espionage.
The United States attempted to “fix” the incompetence, corruption, and oppression of the Diem administration by having him removed from office by a military coup. However, the problem remained. Like the Catholic Diem, who failed to connect with the predominantly Buddhist population, the military leaders who took control after the coup complicated matters by perpetuating corruption and failing to take the war to the Viet Cong insurgents.
The effectiveness of the gradually professionalizing South Vietnamese Army deteriorated rapidly as soldiers in the field lost confidence in their leaders and the government. In a matter of months, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost credibility with the population it was supposed to defend and with its American advisors.
Within the government of South Vietnam corruption, nepotism, extortion, and incompetence remained the norm afterwards with various leaders all the way through to President Thieu in the 1970s. A province chief might be removed here or there and replaced with a more competent and honest leader; however, the same problems would continue.
ARVN soldiers at rest.
The top leadership of the government and army remained as dependent as ever on the United States. The Saigon government remained a network of cliques, held together by American subsidies, a group of people without a coherent political orientation, bent on their own survival. Free-flowing aid lined the pockets of South Vietnamese generals and bureaucrats, deepening the corruption problem, not solving it.
Corruption was (and is) endemic throughout the developing world and even, at times, in much of the developed world. To have expected South Vietnam to be an exception was perhaps unrealistic. In fact, corruption was widespread in North Vietnam as well as in the South, giving lie to a common assumption that there was something morally pristine about the highly disciplined North. In fact, the problem of corruption had become so acute in the North that, in 1967, Ho Chi Minh himself felt compelled to go on the radio and inveigh against this troublesome plague.
More ARVN soldiers.
In the 1970s widespread corruption and war profiteering prevailed, not only among the civilian population but also among military officers. Corruption, of course, had long been common in South Vietnam. However, as infiation increased in the 1970’s and military pay failed to keep pace, corrupt practices drove wedges between the troops and their officers. For example, there were reports that the wounded had to pay helicopter pilots to fly medical evacuation missions.
President Thieu did make efforts to remove some of the more corrupt senior officials from office, but his actions proved to be a mere drop in the bucket. Corruption had another adverse effect; it siphoned funds that could have been used to buy critically short supplies and ammunition.
It has been estimated that as much as 25 percent of ARVN’s military payroll was in the name of dead or deserted soldiers who were kept on the roll so that corrupt officers could collect their salaries.
United States supplied tank used by the ARVN military in South Vietnam.
Syria
And of course, we could look at Syria.
Do you all think that it is any different? Aside from the new vehicles, the different weapons and drone systems, and the kinds of “news” reporting, do you actually think that somehow the United States is immune from all this boomeranging back?
All you need to so is read some history.
And China…
…well China has a long and horrible history of invasions and abuse. They KNOW what it is like to be hurt, destroyed and sacked. They know.
And if you all think that they are going to allow some pot-bellied neocon from the state of Kansas or Arkansas cheer on a war against them without consequence, then you are very, very, VERY mistaken.
China – Nanjing
Most Americans have absolutely no idea what the Chinese went through and why they are the way they are today.
A person who goes though a divorce is far more understanding of someone in the throes of marital troubles than say an unmarried 20-year old. And this is true about nations as well. Perhaps the American leadership would be very hesitant on poking Russia or China if they knew what it was like to see your beloved homeland reduced to rubble.
The Nanjing Massacre refers to the 40-day slaughter committed by the Japanese army in the early stages of their invasion of China, which cruelly claimed the lives of more than 300,000 civilians and captured soldiers. One third of the city was razed and property losses were beyond count.Some believe that the Nanjing Massacre, along with Auschwitz Concentration Camp and bombing of Hiroshima (the first use of atomic weapons in combat) were the three greatest tragedies of WWII. Some refer to the massacre as the “Asian Auschwitz.”
-ChinaToday
Nah…
It would never happen in America. You see, America is “exceptional“.
On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. As stated in the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, "Estimates indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000....
These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, or by being thrown into the Yangtze River, or were otherwise disposed of by the Japanese Army." The Chinese Military Tribunal for War Crimes in Nanjing stated in a verdict that "during the period from December 12 to 21, 1937, it was estimated that more than 190,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians were shot with machine guns in large groups by the Japanese Army and their bodies were incinerated…
In addition, more than 150,000 people were killed in small or scattered groups, and their bodies were collected and buried by charity organizations. Altogether, more than 300,000 people were murdered." After capturing the city, Japanese troops employed all kinds of brutal methods in their killing, such as decapitation, skull splitting, slicing open the stomach, pulling out the heart, drowning, burning, cutting off reproductive organs, dismemberment, and piercing the vulva or anus. Equally unthinkable, there was a killing contest between two second lieutenants, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, to see who could win by being the first to kill 100 Chinese. When they met on December 12, Mukai had killed 106 and Noda 105. John Rabe, Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin, and John Magee recorded the incidents of rape carried out by Japanese soldiers after the fall of Nanjing in their diaries, photographs, and films. It is roughly estimated that more than 80,000 women were violated in Nanjing, of whom more than 65,000 were killed. The Japanese army also committed frenzied acts of arson and looting. According to incomplete statistics calculated after the war, Japanese soldiers looted 2,406 sets and more than 309,000 pieces of appliances or utensils, 5,920 boxes and more than 5.9 million articles of clothing, 710 kilograms of gold and silver, plus 6,345 pieces of jewelry, 1,815 boxes, 2,859 sets, and 148,600 volumes of books, more than 28,400 ancient calligraphy scrolls and paintings, more than 7,300 antiques, more than 6,200 animals bred as livestock, and more than 720 million kilograms of grain.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Chinese Military Tribunal for War Crimes in Nanjing, after collecting a large amount of evidence and confirming all the findings, pronounced death sentences for the principal culprits of the massacre, Iwane Matsui, Akira Muto, and Tadayuki Furumi.
The crimes of the Japanese aggressors will forever be recorded in the history of the Chinese war of resistance against Japan.
-CRI
Or Germany…
Germany
Let’s not forget what happens to “scapegoats” when they are targeted for their “privilege”…
And not just in Germany. all the rest of Europe had to deal with the actions of a handful of crazed fanatics in Germany…
Europe
I suppose that I could go on and on.
And you all would turn off my MM and go watch cute and funny kitty videos, check out the latest vehicles out of Detroit, or look up TenderPotRoastRecipe.
But all that you are reading…right now… in real time sounds AWFULLY familiar. Throw away the details and the names. Look at what is going on. It sounds like the kind of nonsense out of Sierra Leon in the 1980’s, or the bullshit in Saigon in the 1960’s in South Vietnam. It sounds like the bullshit leading up to “the war on terror” in the Middle East, or the crap nonsense made by Hitler as he demonized the Jews, or the Japanese demonized the Chinese.
Yet somehow…
Somehow, America can have another war with China, or Russia, or Iran or all three, and you know that magically it will happen in far away lands that Americans never herd of before.
China wants to fight the USA? It’s a nation of leadership by merit. They are not a military Empire like the USA. They just want for Chinese people to live in China free of foreign (namely USA) interference.
This idea that China wants war is ludicrous. It’s just political posturing.
Political Posturing
When someone pretends to have a particular opinion or attitude. This is done so that they can achieve their objectives without discussing the real reasons behind them.
It’s clear as day that the people who are running this (supposedly) Progressive Liberal Democrat administration, are actually war-mongering neocons.
If you don’t think this is really happening, then you probably need to rethink that:
StratCom just issued a warning to Americans that we might be nuked as a result of the Biden Regime escalating tensions with these two nuclear powers.
#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable.
We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.
pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L
— US Strategic Command (@US_Stratcom) April 20, 2021
Yes, they are that crazy.
But is there anyone, anyone at all inside the Pentagon that is really aware of what the stakes are today? Well, read this great article by Pepe…
Yes, and the regular disclaimers abound. All credit to the author. Formatted to fit this venue, etc.
What you are about to read is part of an internal report by one of my top business/intel sources in the Beltway for the past decade and a half. Readers who received it include JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Evelyn de Rothschild and wife Lynn, Blackrock’s Larry Fink, Michael Bloomberg – who would never hire me as a Bloomberg columnist… – Blackstone’s Stephen Schwartzman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other assorted Masters of the Universe. I received a copy with all their addresses – which for obvious reasons I cannot make public.
This is a MAJOR bombshell – in the sense that the financial Masters of the Universe are now fully aware of sensitive intel not shared with non-military players. The question is what they’re gonna do about it.
The section of the reports starts HERE:
“While Rome burns which I use as an extended metaphor about the hundreds of US cities that burned last summer, and the US faces internal disintegration, the Pentagon admits that the US cannot face a two front war.
The US cannot face a one front war in Europe alone and would be defeated in five to ten minutes. It is not widely known that the key means that the US has chosen conventionally to defend Europe was by its superior airpower which outguns the Russians. However, what also is not widely known is that the US will be defeated in Europe by the Russians in five to ten minutes by the Russian hypersonic missiles destroying all NATO and European commercial airfields including those in England as it merrily sends its warships towards the Kerch Peninsula.
Whether all of our F-35 trillion dollar aircraft will be blown up too in five minutes depends on how fast the US can fly them out of harm’s way to some foreign shore. The remaining key question then is whether the US can evacuate Europe fast enough via a Dunkirk exit to escape to England or whether all the US forces will join their NATO comrades in a Russian prisoners of war camp.
The answer is that it cannot escape as it would take more than the two weeks time to evacuate. This has been confirmed to me by the highest US military authorities.
The US use of recent sanctions on Russia was to send the message that the nation killer that they call SWIFT-CHIPS is in the US toolkit as the US reply to an invasion of the Ukraine. (It goes without saying that Nord Stream Two would be over and the pipeline presently in operation from Russia to Europe would be shut down.) The US thus is sitting back in this poker game in smug self-confidence that the Russians would not dare to invade the Ukraine, causing the US to pull the trigger on throwing Russia out of SWIFT-CHIPS payment system to their Iranian-style doom.
But the US has not seen the Russian cards in their hand yet, which would be to exercise their super financial weapon of closing the Strait of Hormuz with their ally Iran which is willing to cooperate, according to our best intelligence sources.
We have discussed this scenario with the Goldman Sachs derivative specialists in oil who predict the oil price would rise to $500.00 to a $1,000.00 a barrel on such a closing. This would result in a triggering and the implosion of the 600 trillion to 2.5 quadrillion derivative market. In effect, it would end up destroying the entire world financial system.
The cataclysm that would hit the US would lead (as in Germany did in 1933) to a 50% unemployment rate or more. This would automatically begin the instigation of the complete overthrow of the US government. A government right now. which is barely hanging on by a thread (after last summer’s riots when the US military refused to intervene out of fear that its forces, as in Russia in 1918, would disintegrate along racial lines).
The defeat of the US in Europe would constitute the death knell of the US Empire as when Rome was sacked by Alaric. And make no mistake, there would be cheering all over the world.
[Now comes the killer part, which left me, well, speechless]
The myth of fissures between Russia and China should be dispelled by the following article in the Asia Times. There, where is sitting on Putin’s desk a major offer by a major company to finance the redirection of all oil and natural gas now going to Europe. Instead it would be redirected to China via pipeline.
It would constitute the largest commercial transaction in world history.
China could then depend on receiving from Russia the natural resources that presently come by sea. And Russia can replace all European imports to Russia by substitution and where that is not possible from China.
This very deep article should be read very carefully. The hundreds of billions of dollars for this project are available today according to the highest intelligence sources.
Here is an important quote from the article:
“A closely guarded secret in Moscow is that right after German sanctions imposed in relation to Ukraine, a major global energy operator approached Russia with an offer to divert to China no less than 7 million barrels a day of oil plus natural gas. Whatever happens, the stunning proposal is still sitting on the table of Shmal Gannadiy, a top oil/gas advisor to President Putin.”
[And then the report links to my story]:
Definitive Eurasian alliance is closer than you think. And things are proceeding well in advance than anyone actually realizes. And America is in no state to take on any major global power as it currently stands. It’s a foolish exercise in futility, and a death sentence for the participants.
Modern America 2021.
So what is going to happen?
I hold no “magic crystal ball”. No one does.
If I could characterize the state of affairs inside the Untied States government today, numerous examples come to mind…
A Train Wreck
A bunch a crazed maniacalmegalomaniacs are all crammed in the tiny engine of a locomotive, and everyone is trying to grab the controls to wheel and right this big, long enormous train back onto the tracks safely. Some are just there to stop the others. Some are earnestly trying to put the brakes on. Some are trying to increase the speed. Some are fighting among themselves, and some are lighting firecrackers at everyone's feet to see what will happen next. All are evil, out of control and running amok.
An Alien Monster trying to get out
The United States today is like the Alien monster that has incubated inside the host human (from the Alien movie). It is starting to get out, and the poor host is in a state of panic and fear.
I wrote an article on this theme. It is HERE.
Evil psychopath child playing with live dynamite
This is what it looks like. Especially after the "Long Telegram", and the Alaska meeting between China and the USA.
A suicidal man trying to get killed intentionally
It's almost that the people inside of Washington DC have no scruples, no idea of what reality is, and believe that they are somehow sitting on thrones in the clouds somewhere in their magical city of Olympus. Do they have a "death wish"? It most certainly seems that way, doesn't it?
What will happen, I don’t know. But keep your eyes open. Realize that the only idiots are in Washington DC and their colonies in the UK, and Australia. The rest of the world are watching from the spectator stands with popcorn in their right hand, and a Civil-Defense helmet in their left hand.
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“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
— Ayn Rand
Rule by brute force.
That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our nation.
SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Homeowners finding their homes under siege by police out to confiscate lawfully-owned guns. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.
The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly.
We are approaching critical mass.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
In effect, you will disappear.
American Citizens are just “things” that the elites use
President Biden’s long list of executive orders, executive actions, proclamations and directives is just more of the same: rule by fiat.
Now the Biden Administration is setting its sights on gun control.
Mark my words: gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will become yet another means by which to subvert the Constitution and sabotage the rights of the people.
In Radley Balko's study of police raids of the homes of civilians for the CATO Institute, he described the mayhem currently taking place at the hands of federal and state governments in the United States in the name of law enforcement:
"Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
"These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects."
- from the Executive Summary of a research paper titled, Overkill: he Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America by Radley Balko, CATO Institute.
…
But you have already heard this spiel…
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
These “red flag” laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals. They are an excuse. The excuse sounds so reasonable. People who are viewed as a danger to themselves or others, have their guns removed. Yes, this is yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Nineteen states and Washington DC have red flag laws on their books.
That number is growing.
As The Washington Post reports, these laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
Sound familiar?
Someone in the neighborhood doesn’t like you…
… they claim that you are a witch…
…or you are a communist…
…or a child sex offender…
…or are a danger to yourself.
In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings (the statistics suggest otherwise), these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
It’s just an excuse
SWAT team raids "The Garden of Eden" The beast is gaining more and more unbridled power to lash out as he did this week at "The Garden of Eden" - a small organic farm in Texas reported by a RT News. This is but one of many raids that take place on a daily basis throughout the U.S. In this case they held 6 adults at gunpoint and handcuffed them for 10 hours saying they were looking for marijuana. Throughout the day the police conducted their search, destroying parts of the farm in the process. However, the property owner Shelley Smith told the media, "They came here under the guise that we were doing a drug trafficking, marijuana growing operation. They destroyed everything.”
The residents believe the raid was only an excuse to allow them to change the farm's "unconventional appearance." Code enforcement cops came along with the SWAT team and Smith said that they had been issued a number of code violations recently including, “grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house and generally unclean premises,” The cops found no drugs or criminal activity but arrested one of the members of the group for an unpaid parking ticket.
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Any excuse serves a tyrant
It took place in August, 2005 when a SWAT team killed an innocent man in his home while his wife and 4 year old son hid in a bedroom closet in Sunrise Florida. After killing the man, the police claimed they knocked on his door and announced they were police. But according to neighbors who watched the scene unfold from their window, the police in black masks did not identify themselves before smashing down his door and using a flash grenade expecting to find drugs and guns. The neighbors said that if the police had yelled, "POLICE!" - they would have heard it. The police claimed that 23 year old Anthony Diotaiuto (a two-time Iraq war veteran) fled from his bed into another room and "armed himself." Radley Balko (quoted above) reported that the police initially claimed that he fled to the bedroom for a handgun and pointed the gun at them. Later, the story changed with a spokesperson for the police saying that the "found the weapon next to his body" after they killed him.
Diotaiuto returned from his night shift at one of the two jobs he had to provide for his family. According to his friends, he had a shotgun and handgun which he kept for protection with a valid concealed weapons permit. Balko surmised that he rose from a deep sleep, disoriented by the crashing of his door and flash grenade and ran terrified into another room. After they killed him, the police claimed that they found 2 ounces of marijuana, some plastic baggies and a scale. But by the time the case went to a jury trial, that amount of marijuana was determined to be 16 grams, a little more than half an ounce. The Broward County medical examiner reported 10 bullet wounds in his head, chest, torso, and limbs.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
We’ve been down this road before.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution ...
(namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign),
Radley Balko’s White Paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America:
Balko said that botched raids such as this one are not 'isolated incidents.' Other examples of SWAT teams misused are the hundreds of raids conducted each year at a wrong address. Often the people targeted are completely innocent, unlike in the Diotaiuto tragedy. Further, the 'no-knock' and 'quick-knock' raids often rely on anonymous tips and 'dubious informants to obtain the search warrants.'
The raids are intended to terrify. The police generally break down the doors with a battering ram or blow them off with explosives. Sometimes police use a flash bang grenade. Once inside, police force the occupants to lie prone, generally at gunpoint...
Balko wrote in Overkill, 'The idea of sending battalions of men dressed, trained, and armed like soldiers to do civilian police work should give us great discomfort'.”
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority: to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.
It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.
Duncan Lemp
Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.
So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?
According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”
Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.
In May, 2010 Joseph Weekley, a Detroit cop shot and killed Aiyana Stanley Jones, a seven-year-old girl when they raided a home during the early morning hours as she lay sleeping on a sofa in her home on Lillibridge Street in Detroit. Aiyana was shot in the head and neck. Assistant Police Chief Ralph Godbee said the heavily armed "Special Response Team" was executing a "no-knock" search warrant for a homicide suspect and they threw a flash grenade through an unopened window around 12:45 a.m. before charging in with guns drawn but they got the wrong house. It may have never gained international attention except that it was recorded by a reality TV crew, which was filming an episode of “The First 48,” a program like "Cops" and other racist TV shows that feed off the misery of victims in praise of the work of US police.
In June, 2013 Weekley went on trial for involuntary manslaughter with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison. The cop claimed that he had "physical contact" with the little girl's grandmother, Mertilla Jones, after entering the home. On June 18, the trial ended in a hung jury and he is now to be retried. In the trial, Grandmother Mertilla testified,
"I saw the light leave out of her eyes, and blood gushed out of her mouth. I knew she was dead.” After the first trial, Mertilla stated, "He admitted he shot and killed her. He's a dirty cop because he said I touched him. I never touched that man. ... I was never anywhere near Joseph Weekley. He's a lying [expletive] cop."
The Military patrol America today
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
This is what you get when you live inside a Military Empire.
This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.
This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.
Red Flag Laws
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
The American Police State
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.
All you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates)…
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
It’s a Nightmare America
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata. Finally, add in the local police agencies and SWAT teams that are being “gifted” military-grade weaponry and equipment designed for the battlefield and trained in the tactics of war.
It all adds up to a terrifying package of brute force coupled with invasive technology and totalitarian tactics.
This brings me back to those red flag gun laws.
It’s the nail in the American Coffin
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
In the short term, these gun confiscation laws may serve to temporarily delay or discourage those wishing to inflict violence on others, but it will not resolve whatever madness or hate or instability therein that causes someone to pull a trigger or launch a bomb or unleash violence on another.
Indeed, those same individuals sick enough to walk into an elementary school or a movie theater and open fire using a gun can and do wreak just as much havoc with homemade bombs made out of pressure cookers and a handful of knives.
Nor will these laws save us from government-instigated and directed violence at the hands of the militarized police state or the blowback from the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which remain largely overlooked and underestimated pieces of the discussion on gun violence in America.
No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. In this way, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
And what is next…
.
Well, it’s when the elites declare that they are a class that is up and above that of the American citizenry.
.
The following article is reprinted as found with limited editing to fit in this venue, and all credit to the original author. by Baruch Pletner,PhD,MBA
The Hi-Tech Traditionalist: A Revolution In Reverse: The Uprising Of The American Elites Against The American People
The great Bolshevik revolutions of the last century in Russia, in China, and in Cuba all followed a familiar pattern: a group of young, energetic, endlessly corruptible, but not yet corrupt outsiders take on, in the name of the people, a tired corrupt establishment.
A civil war ensues in which the people side with the revolutionaries because they (mistakenly) think that things can never be worse.
Revolutionaries win, slaughter the establishment elites, and proceed to rob and enslave the people in even more outrageous fashion.
In May, 2008, a SWAT team raided a home in Norwalk, Connecticut after a prostitute called the police telling them that the home contained drugs and weapons. She gave the police a false name and after the killing no weapons were found but the police killed Gonzalo Guizan and dragged the home owner, Ronald Terebesi out in handcuffs. In February, 2013 taxpayers from 5 Fairfield County towns were ordered to pay $3,500,000.00 resulting from the raid on the residence in Norwalk that left Guizan dead, Terebesi traumatized and heavy damage done to his house. Reporter Jonathan Turley expressed his view of the $3.5 million settlement:
"Now, Easton First Selectman Thomas Herrmann insists that the settlement does not reflect any negligence by his officers or those of the other towns: 'While the defendants, police departments and officers from Darien, Easton, Trumbull, Monroe and Wilton maintain they were not responsible for the unfortunate death of Mr. Guizan, the insurers for the defendants, who will bear the full cost of the settlement, believed that it was best to resolve the matter rather than incur further attorneys’ fees, which were anticipated to be significant. The defendants concurred, further believing it was important to facilitate the Guizan family being relieved of the combined burden of litigation.'
"That seems a rather belated concern for the Guizan family since you first launched a virtual military assault on a drug allegation, then killed the unarmed Guizan, and then fought their claim for damages until you had little practical alternative but to settle."
The only thing the police found were two smoking pipes and a tin with a minuscule amount of drugs. Jonathan Turley described the raid and this part of his original story has since been redacted,
"One would have thought this was the alleged bin Laden raid, as it looked like a military operation in a war zone. Heavily armed police and SWAT teams raided a home owned by Ronald Terebesi based on a tip from a local stripper that she had a “dispute” with Terebesi. This sounds pretty harmless so far, but SWAT team members dressed in armor bore down on this home with flash grenades, snipers surrounding the house, and a virtual tank supplied to this police department after the cover up of 9/11 by DHS.
"When all was said and done, one man, Gonzalo Guizan, was killed and Terebesi was dragged from his home. Both of these men were unarmed, and had done nothing to warrant this raid, and in fact were cowering in a corner when the spray of bullets were fired."
Soon enough the old guard revolutionaries become every bit as corrupt as the ones they have replaced if not more so and the cycle repeats itself.
In America, the situation is rather farcically backwards.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
In America, the corrupt establishment elites have decided to stage a Bolshevik coup against the American people rather than the other way around.
A Tsar fully in command of his own kingdom staging a coup against his own people is a bizarre development to say the least, and yet, here we are in 2021 America.
Like always, there are reasons.
First and foremost among them is the sheer scope of the nepotism and corruption of the American elites in business, government, technology, and the intelligence services.
This scope has very likely far exceeded anything previously known in human history.
Had the dimensions of the robbery perpetrated by the American ruling classes against the American people become widely known earlier, America could well have experienced a more typical revolution, one by the people against the elites.
Well aware of the possibility if not probability of such an outcome, the people who run America put in place a plan to make it all but impossible.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
The plan involved the gradually escalating erosion of the limits on government powers put in place by the Constitution with a parallel erosion in the God-given rights guaranteed every American by the same document.
This was a fully bipartisan effort, put in place immediately after president Reagan departed office.
It is sufficient to observe the exponential increase in government versus private sector employment in America from 1988 to 2019 to fully grasp this point.
Stopping immigration from countries that have (or at least used to have) a tradition of personal freedom and limited government while throwing open the spigots for immigration from countries that have neither was the second part of the same plan.
The destruction of family values and Christianity in America was the third.
On the whole, the plan was a spectacular success.
Americans proved easy targets for propaganda on pro-gay rights and every other kind of moral depravity and have learned to bite their tongues and bow low whenever they heard the phrase: “diversity is our strength”.
White Americans learned to internalize guilt for something they had no control over – the very color of their skin.
Americans allowed themselves to become squeezed out of well-paying jobs by the elites-induced trifecta of low and high-skilled immigration and automation, with nary a whisper in protest.
All was going well for the elites until they had a panic attack, a freakout of unheard of proportions when a non-establishment person, Donald Trump managed to get himself elected president.
The problem for the elites inherent in Trump’s election was simple: they have not done much, if anything, to cover the tracks of their massive robbery of the American people.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
That meant that when Trump assumed office even their best efforts would likely not be good enough to stop him from perceiving at least a glimpse of the true scale of their crimes.
There is a certain irony in the fact that being criminals themselves, the American establishment has found, in Trump, the one true nemesis.
For he is a New York developer who cut his teeth dealing with the New York building trades, which are, of course, a criminal element in and of themselves.
Trying to pin on Trump their own sins of sexual corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, etc. has not been a well-thought out strategy on the part of the American power elites.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
This is simply because it enabled him to begin educating the American public as to the breathtaking scope of their own criminality.
And that pretty much explains what happened during the election of 2020; a coup d’etat against the American people, the American Constitution, and the American Republic itself.
Since the elites still very much permeate every hall of power in America, this is a one-off deal in which the rulers of a country set out to violently overthrow the very political structure of the country they are ruling, but, as they say, it is what it is.
The cover may be different, but the playbook is the same, so we are already being exposed to the oldies but goodies of…
escalating agitprop (weaponized lies and propaganda),
suppression of unwanted elements (cancel culture),
and paid snitching (whistleblowing).
Now we are entering into a new phase, that of secret trials with a predetermined outcome.
Apparently congressional Democrats are going to hold impeachment hearings (read Bolshevik tribunal) at a secret location with no rights whatsoever being afforded to the accused.
America is a military empire, it’s police are military soldiers.
Unfortunately for all of us, however, the scope of their criminal acts is such that they cannot contemplate any due process without committing political and even non-political suicide.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said federal government programs that armed police “with the weapons and tactics of war” had led forces across the United States to become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized.
“The use of hyper-aggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property and undermines individual liberties,” the ACLU said in a report.
It said police forces set up special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units initially to face emergencies such as hostage situations and active-shooter scenarios.
But after studying more than 800 SWAT deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies between 2011-2012, it said the specialized teams had moved away from that original role and were increasingly used to search people’s homes for drugs.
It said the raids were often violent, involving 20 or more officers armed with assault rifles and stun grenades, breaking down doors and windows, and screaming at occupants to get on the floor. It said children were present on numerous occasions.
The ACLU said the militarization of policing was also evident in police training that it said encouraged officers to adopt a “warrior” mentality – something it said was reinforced by the use of equipment such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and armored personnel carriers.
It said the shift in culture was partly driven by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that gave police increased authority to force their way into homes, often in narcotics probes.
All things are on the table right now, including things that now sound crazy like setting up a parallel Supreme Court having declared the Constitution illegitimate because it was written by white males some of whom supported slavery and ratified without African American and other minority votes.
Needless to say, such actions may well precipitate an armed conflict we know of as civil war, but that would not be an unexpected outcome for the elites.
We know now that the American intelligence services all work for the elites and not for the people.
They will fight on their side in the coming war. What we don’t know is to what degree the armed forces have been infiltrated, especially the mid-level officer corps.
The outcomes of such cataclysms are never possible to predict, but we know what we know.
American ruling classes have long since betrayed her and her people to make themselves fabulously, generationally rich and powerful.
They could have cut a power-sharing deal with the American people as represented by president Trump; his hand has always been open to them.
They didn’t take him up on it.
Massive anger is building up in America now and the battle lines are drawn: either the American republic overthrows her own criminal elites or they overthrow her.
Which shall it be? To quote the Commander in Chief of the forces of light: “we’ll see what happens.”
The MM Opinion
Nothing is going to happen domestically. People are getting ready, ready, ready but there isn’t any “trigger” that will enable the unleashing of holy terror internally.
If something is going to happen, then it will happen externally.
Which brings up all these “waltzes” and “dances” that the Biden administration is involved in regarding other nations. It’s very blatant and “in your face”. Here’s my terms, you lowly Chink.. you lowly scum Russki… you evil Iranian… accept them or we will squelch you like the vermin you are.
Is it intentional? Or is the leadership complete morons? It’s difficult to tell these days. So I must ask…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Lately I have been really driven to throw things out. It’s almost like a real crush. I feel that I must send out as much as I possibly can, for some strange compulsion. It’s darn strange and tiring me out.
Seriously.
You all would be surprised at the rate my fingers are typing and the pace that these darn articles are coming out.
It’s a good thing that I have to go to a couple of factories and give my typing fingers a rest. It’s wearing me out. I’m set up for some fun in my near future. Some great friends, some fantastic food. A goodly amount of booze, and some friendly environments from where I can make some new friends in. I’m trembling in anticipation, I’ll tell you what.
I think that it’s a fair time to go play with some dice, make some new friends, and sing a song or two.
Anyways, I would suggest that all of you all also take the time to spend with some friends and play some games. Talk a little bit, chat some and have a good time. Don’t forget the food. And don’t buy cheap booze. Life is too short to waste on cheap booze.
And if you have the means, go ahead and make some new friends. There’s an entire world of interesting and colorful people to meet.
The world is filled with all kinds of interesting and colorful people. Everyone has a story, and everyone likes food. So what is stopping you?
Anyways…
The thing that I have been trying to underline all week is a very simple point.
Which is…
Make no mistake. A war with a major military power will result in the complete annihilation of America.
I’ve really been somewhat fixated in driving this point home. I don’t understand why. I don’t think that I have tapped into any kind of non-physical data stream or anything like that. But never the less, I am driven. Who’d figure.
So…
Don’t poke the Panda, or kick the bear.
Not that anyone will listen to me. It seems that either the United States leadership has a death wish, or that they are seriously retarded morons without a lick of sense.
…
Consider just how dangerous the “deep state” has become.
Now… imagine that a serious REAL war takes place. Missiles are flying back and forth. Entire cites are blasted out of existence, and evil people at the local level take up arms to defend their little patches of land and territory. Here and there.
What do you think the “deep state” would do?
You just cannot assume that they would all disappear, or slink under a rock, or go a hiding in the bushes. they will still exist, and given their (former) levers of power… what do you think they would be capable of? And how far do you think that they would go to exert full regional control in a nation that is in the process of going absolutely mad?
…
It’s bad enough that they are poking the bear and panda…
…but they will utilize what ever happens to their own personal benefit.
Military, Deep State and the American Naivety
While only 11% of Americans trust Congress, a whopping 74% have a “great deal or quite a lot of” trust in the military, which also vastly outperforms newspapers (23%) and even the US Supreme Court (37%).
Similarly, the CIA and the FBI get an “excellent” rating from 58% of Americans.
While reverence to military is quite common all over the world — perhaps related to evolutionary fear — it behooves us to be a bit more critical and objective.
Like the Old Testament characters who never asked Moses for evidence regarding the burning bush, Americans blindly accept all verdicts from the intelligence agencies.
The rise of the colossal military and the “Deep State” are new phenomenons in American history, and a dispassionate scrutiny underscores the need for more vigilance on our part.
Military-Industrial Complex – Eisenhower
While many Americans consider it heretical to question the US military, none other than a five-star military general and US president did just that.
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Such a speech would now be derided as a conspiracy theory and even labeled as treasonous.
CIA – Truman
Guess who thought that the CIA had turned into an American Gestapo?
Harry Truman, the US president who created the CIA.
“Those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars, they go out and make their own (wars), and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble. The CIA has become a government all of its own.”
Former Director of the CIA, William Colby, described CIA’s culture in his memoir as follows:
“cult of intelligence … that held itself to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution …”
Election Meddling and Coups by the CIA
Since World War II, the CIA has meddled in more than 80 foreign elections around the world (doesn’t include coups and regime changes!).
And the RAND corp has the nerve to refer to Russia as a "rogue state". I discussed this HERE.
The US Senate’s Church Committee in 1975 documented several instances of US meddling in other nations.
The operations included suitcases of cash to bribe politicians and voters, manuals for psychological warfare, sensational fake news, organized mass protests, armed violent oppositions etc.
Starting in the 1980’s, the Deep State refined its plans for regime changes, resorting to the use of sophisticated NGO’s such as the USAID, NED and Open Society Foundations of George Soros, which all specialize in mass propaganda and color revolutions.
When asked a few months ago, if we still meddle in other countries’ elections, CIA director James Woolsey grinned and responded, “myum, myum, myum.”
There are incontrovertible proofs for some of the coups, thanks to declassified CIA documents – for example, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
Assassinations
Recently released “JFK Files” from the CIA archives show detailed plans to assassinate Fidel Castro that included exploding cigars and tuberculosis-laced diving suit.
Other leaders targeted in these documents include General Trujillo of Dominican Republic and Patrice Lumumba of Congo.
William Blum has done extensive research and documented numerous foreign assassinations – successful and attempted – by the CIA and/or the US military.
Theoretically, nothing stops the killing machine in operating within the US.
Even intellectuals like David Talbot — founder of Salon magazine and editor of Time magazine — are convinced that some from the top echelons of the CIA assassinated JFK.
President Truman also seemed to suggest the same when he wrote an extraordinary op-ed in Washington Post one month after JFK’s assassination saying that CIA’s covert operations must be terminated.
By the way, the phrase “conspiracy theorist” was invented by the CIA in 1967 to discredit anyone challenging the official narratives!
The US has supported and installed numerous brutal tyrants and authoritarians all over the world in the last century.
Suharto in Indonesia, for example, killed two million people, but was loved by the West, since he let western corporations exploit his people and plunder his country.
Nazis and Jihadists
After the defeat of Hitler, the US recruited more than 1000 Nazis, including high-ranking officials, to work against the Soviet Union.
Under Operation Paperclip, the CIA brought numerous Nazi scientists into the US.
As I explain in my book, Deconstructing the Syrian War, the US has trained, armed and funded Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya, Syria etc. to wage proxy wars.
Drug Trafficking
From 1950 to 1975, the CIA — using a fleet of planes and helicopters known as Air America — was involved in massive heroin trafficking from the Golden Triangle area in Myanmar, Thailand and Laos.
After the Vietnam War, the Deep State in the 1980s used heroin in Afghanistan to fight the USSR and cocaine in Central America to fight leftist leaders. According to Gary Webb, the CIA also imported cocaine into the US.
In 1998, a Congressman entered into official records a shocking document called “A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking” that summarizes CIA’s nefarious drug activities from 1947 to 1996.
Since the US invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, opium cultivation there has exploded. Correlation or causation? As a NY Times investigation revealed in 2009, the biggest Afghan drug dealer was on the CIA payroll.
Propaganda & Psy Ops
America did this for “democracy”. What do you think that a leader would do to you and your family for his own personal power.
CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was an extensive operation to infiltrate and control all the major news organizations.
Over the decades, the CIA and the Pentagon have actively participated in over 800 major movies and 1000 TV shows to make sure that the right (propaganda) message reaches the audience!
Declassified documents on MK-Ultra and other mind-control and brainwashing programs and experiments –LSD and numerous other drugs, hypnosis, electric shock etc. – are right out of a sci-fi horror movie.
Wars and Lies
Remember all the deceit and fearmongering that convinced us to go to Iraq war after 9/11?
He could launch chemical weapons against Israel and British soldiers (in Cyprus) in just 45 minutes
Through innuendos and bold lies, the Establishment convinced 70% of Americans that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and even the Anthrax attack that followed.
Go back in history, there are many such lies, including the Gulf of Tonkin claim that helped the US launch the Vietnam War.
Wars and Corporatism
America did this for “democracy”. What do you think that a leader would do to you and your family for his own personal power.
Every American should read General Smedley Butler’s amazing testimony titled, “War is a Racket.”
John Perkins’ book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” is another must read to understand how banks and corporations drive geopolitics, coups, regime changes and wars in the 21st century.
False Flag Attacks
Somehow, it’s psychologically hard for people to think that their government might stage false flag attacks.
However, as recently declassified documents show, the CIA had many such ideas – killing boatloads of Cuban refugees or blowing up ships and then blaming Fidel Castro;
…carrying out “terror campaigns” – their own words – with bombs in Miami and Washington D.C. to frame Castro;
…and buying Russian planes to attack US soldiers to start a war with the Soviet Union.
Shockingly, these plans got approved all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and only got stopped by JFK or his brother.
There are convincing evidence to prove the CIA carried out similar false flag attacks — Operation Gladio — in Europe in the 1950’s through the 1970’s to blame the communists and shift the political landscape to the right.
In recent years in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, false flag attacks were used to launch the regime change operations.
Wild accusations such as the Novichok poisoning in the UK by Russia also bear all the hallmarks of fake or false flag attacks.
Torture and Human Experiments
America did this for “democracy”. What do you think that a leader would do to you and your family for his own personal power.
While our politicians are skilled at crying crocodile tears over human rights abuses by our geopolitical adversaries, the CIA runs secret torture prisons in many countries to avoid scrutiny.
Sometimes we do it ourselves, like in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
According to a 1994 government report, hundreds of thousands of Americans were subjected to unethical radiological, chemical, biological and medical experiments between 1940 and 1974.
The US military even conducted biological warfare testing on the entire city of San Francisco!
Nuking 1200 Cities
Another deeply held American belief is that our elites always hold high moral standards, value lives and are compassionate.
In September 1945, merely one month after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the US military drew up plans to drop 204 atomic bombs on 66 cities in the USSR, who was our ally during World War II and still an ally at that time!
Then a decade later, in 1956, the US military had detailed plans to drop 2,000+ atom and hydrogen bombs on 1,200 cities in Russia, China and Eastern Europe.
This would have immediately killed 500 million people, 99% innocent civilians.
Think about what kind of evil monsters and sociopaths would come up with such genocidal ideas.
Also, if they had carried out their psychopathic plan, the nuclear fallout might have ended the entire human race.
Perpetual Wars
Since 9/11, the US/NATO wars have already cost $5.6 trillion and killed 5 to 7 million people, but clever propaganda hide or justify such atrocities.
In the 1990s, half a million Iraqi children died from US sanctions, which Sec. of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it.”
Wars and conflicts are extremely profitable for the military-banking-intelligence complex, which uses the soldiers as pawns. 2.7 million Americans have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11; and more than 400,000 of them suffer from PTSD.
If diplomacy, free trade and fair wages become the norm, we wouldn’t need 800 military bases in 140 countries to prop up friendly dictators, bully competitors, and enforce the Ponzi scheme of the Petrodollar regime.
The unsustainable Empire thrives because we cannot question or challenge it.
Mass Surveillance
America did this for “democracy”. What do you think that a leader would do to you and your family for his own personal power.
In the land of the free, Americans don’t mind NSA spying on them.
While many assume that it’s to protect us from terrorists, Edward Snowden revealed that the mass collection of phone calls has been going on since 1985.
If the spooks have dirt on every single American, it’s no wonder that no politician speaks out against the Orwellian nightmare.
The attacks on Wikileaks and Julian Assange also reveal how much the Deep State hates transparency and accountability.
Conclusion
The zeitgeist in America demands blind support for military, defense industry and the intelligence community.
Like fish in the water, Americans have lost the ability to notice the pervasive and omnipresent propaganda.
However, we owe it ourselves to be more knowledgeable and objective in processing and reacting to information.
We also need to be more cynical about our government and the mass media.
Freedom, liberty and prosperity are not achieved and maintained through willful ignorance, blind allegiance and naïve faith.
Now, when a full SHTF event occurs, these very same people will capitalize on the situation and turn it into their own personal benefit. You all need to be ready and aware of that. For this is what always happens after the dust settles and the war subsides.
Where will you be when that happens, and will you be ready to handle the new leaders that rise up out of the ashes? Are you ready?
I’m getting ready. I’m spending my time getting drunk and making all sorts of new friends. Because, as I have stated over and over again, it is your friends that will be able to help you when you need it the most. Nothing else.
I’m spending my time getting drunk and making all sorts of new friends.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
The soaring contempt and smug exceptionalism made me almost gag on my weetbix as I read this. I've never met an empire more in dire need of a slap down...
-Posted by: Patroklos | Apr 14 2021 19:50 utc | 6
For shits and giggle, I often read some of the policy papers that are generated out of Washington DC. They are fantastical and outlandish and shows that either [1] America is a nation run by herd-mentality idiots, or [2] that they are so enraptured in their own echo chamber that they don’t realize what fresh-air is. Here is one such policy paper.
It is from RAND.
Which is a big “Think Tank” out in Washington DC that loves war, like I love sex, pizza and wine.
I love sex, pizza and wine.
It’s a hoot. I’ll tell you what.
Here’s access to the document yourself, and a nice summary with my MM comments thrown in for some points of stability.
Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue
How do Russia and China challenge U.S. national security and global influence?
How can the United States meet those challenges?
Russia and China represent distinct challenges to U.S. national security.
Russia is not a peer or near-peer competitor but rather a well-armed rogue state that seeks to subvert an international order it can never hope to dominate.
So Russia; enormous Russia with a population larger than the United States is a "well armed" rogue state.I can agree that it is well-armed. But, a rogue state?Arogue state otherwise known as an outlaw state, is a term appliedby some international theorists to states that they consider threatening to "the world's peace".
This means being seen to meet certain criteria, such as [1] being ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian governments. [2] That severely restrict human rights. That [3] sponsors terrorism and [4] seeking to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.
By these criteria, it is America that is a rogue state.
Yet, the term is used most by the United States, and in his speech at the United Nations in 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated this phrase.
In contrast, China is a peer competitor that wants to shape an international order that it can aspire to dominate.
Yes. China is a peer competitor with the Untied States, and in many areas it has surpassed the Untied States.
But this idea that it wants to "shape an international order" that it can dominate is flat-out false.
It wants to follow confucianism values in cooperation and harmony so that all can benefit. Of course China wants to put the Chinese people first. This is the function of all governments. But to call a peaceful nation that hasn't been involve din a war for over 50 years desirous of dominating others is really outlandish.
4 Confucian principles that are integral to a moral life and a moral society[1] Development of the self. The development of the self and the cultivation of virtue and morality are crucial to Confucius’ vision of a harmonised world.[2] Filial Piety. Filial piety is a love and respect for one’s parents. ...[3] Theimportanceof tradition. ...[4] We must behumane. ...
No wonder that RAND and those psychopathic personalities in Washington DC are confused with China. these values are completely alien to them.
Both countries seek to alter the status quo.
But only Russia has attacked neighboring states, annexed conquered territory, and supported insurgent forces seeking to detach yet more territory.
Russia assassinates its opponents at home and abroad.
Russia interferes in foreign elections.
Russia subverts foreign democracies.
Russia works to undermine European and Atlantic institutions.
And so does the United States. Historically this is known as spy-craft, international politics, and intrigue. It's not a reason to go to war over.
In contrast, China’s growing influence is based largely on more-positive measures: trade, investment, and development assistance. These attributes make China a less immediate threat but a much greater long-term challenge.
True. China is not an immediate military threat.
But the only challenge here is whether the Untied States is able to compete with it. After throwing away it's scientists and engineers, it's going to be a hard slog trying to compete with "diversity directors" and "accountants".
In the military realm, Russia can be contained, but China cannot.
Its military predominance in east Asia will grow over time, compelling the United States to accept greater costs and risks just to secure existing commitments.
But it is geoeconomics, rather than geopolitics, in which the contest for world leadership will play out.
It is in the domain of geoeconomics that the balance of global influence between the United States and China has begun shifting in China’s favor.
Key Findings
China presents a greater geoeconomic challenge to the United States than Russia does
China’s per capita GDP approaches Russia’s; its population is eight times Russia’s, and its growth rate three times.
As of 2017, China’s economy was the second largest in the world, behind only that of the United States. Russia’s was 11th.
Russia’s military expenditure is lower than China’s, and that gap is likely to grow.
Russia is far smaller, has poorer economic prospects, and is less likely to dramatically increase its military power in the long term.
You can tell just how out of sync this entire paper is when they start using GDP instead of PPP for comparison values. I argue, rather convincingly I must add, that if you remove the top 0.1% of the super-billionaires out of America in your GDP calculations, the GDP slides way down to a value that is half of China's GDP.
Also the level of crime and corruption is far lower than what you see in America. Thus you can make and create things with far, far less effort and money.
Thus you really cannot make the comparisons that are being made here.
It truly is like comparing apples with bananas.
Russia is a more immediate and more proximate military threat to U.S. national security than China is but can be countered
Russia will probably remain militarily superior to all its immediate neighbors other than China.
Russia is vulnerable to a range of nonmilitary deterrents, such as sanctions on the Russian economy and limiting Russian income from exports of fossil fuels; multilateral efforts would be more effective than U.S.-only operations, however.
China presents a regional military challenge and a global economic one
Militarily, China can be contained for a while longer; economically, it has already broken free of regional constraints.
Russia backs far-right and far-left political movements with a view to disrupting the politics of adversarial societies and, if possible, installing friendlier regimes. China, in contrast, seems basically indifferent to the types of government of the states with which it interacts, increasing its attractiveness as an economic partner.
Recommendations
In the security sphere, the United States should continue to hold the line in east and southeast Asia, accepting the larger costs and risks involved in counterbalancing growing Chinese military capabilities. Meanwhile, Washington should help its regional allies and partners to field their own antiaccess and area denial systems. Finally, the United States should take advantage of any opportunities to resolve issues and remove points of Sino-American tension, recognizing that its bargaining position will gradually deteriorate over time.
In the economic realm, the United States needs to compete more effectively in foreign markets, persevere and strengthen international norms for trade and investment, and incentivize China to operate within those norms. Given China’s efforts to take technological leadership in the long term and the potential advantages that such leadership brings, the United States also needs to improve its innovation environment. Measures could include greater funding for research, retention of U.S.-educated foreign scientists and technologists, and regulatory reforms that ease the introduction of product and process improvements into businesses and the market.
In responding to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the United States should move to secure its own preferential access to the world’s largest markets, the industrialized countries of Europe and Asia; assist nations in increasing connectivity with the world economy; work with partners to ensure more transparency in China’s Belt and Road projects; and increase support to U.S. exporters and investors.
In all these challenges, the United States will be more successful coordinating action with allies and trading partners.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation perspective series. RAND perspectives present informed perspective on a timely topic that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND perspectives undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.
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"... if they (the psychopaths) keep playing "chicken" with Russia & China, they'll get it-sooner, rather than later"
This is going to be a pretty harsh article. We are not going to “dance around” any of the issues. Instead we are going to spell (or spit) it out directly. If you aren’t ready for it you can leave.
First of all, the Untied States has spent a good portion of the last twelve years building up a narrative towards a major global-wide war with China. The last four years (2016 through 2020) has really placed the TargetingReticule on China, and you have to be delusional not to notice it.
And let’s be real about it, as well.
You can pretend that it’s a “cold war”, or it’s a “hybrid war”, or perhaps a simple “trade war”. But that’s just dancing around the raw and harsh facts. It’s a build up to a “hot shooting war” and you just simply cannot avoid that reality.
Most people avoid the harsh reality because [1] they don’t want to believe it, and [2] they are not given all the information of what if going on.
How many Americans know about the American drones spraying swine flu to devastate the pig industry in 2018? How many Americans know about the tit-for-tat attacks on the VTOL aircraft carriers in 2020? How many Americans are aware of the differences between the COVID-19A and the COVID-19B strains.
Very, very few.
It’s been exceptionally hot. And the only way that you can keep abreast of the latest run of attacks is to read the neocon publications out of the K-street military-industrial network in Washington DC.
Propaganda campaigns, and hybrid wars ALWAYS end up in a hot shooting war. There is not one single instance where it did not. Not once.
And people (!) all hot wars that America initiates requires an ignition event to launch. And if one cannot be found, then a fake event is created. These events are called “false flags”.
What is a “False Flag”?
Afalse flag operation is an act committedwith the intent of disguising the actualsource of responsibility and pinning blame onanother party. The term is popular amongst conspiracy theory promotersinreferring to covert operations of various governments and cabals.
-Wikipedia
The following is from History.com, All credit to the author.
On the night of the 31st of August 1939, several covert Nazi operatives dressed as Polish soldiers stormed the Gleiwitz radio tower on the Germany-Poland border. They broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish before leaving. The soldiers left behind the bodies of a pro-Polish German farmer and several unidentifiable Dachau concentration camp prisoners. The farmer and the prisoners had been murdered and dressed up in German uniforms.
The attack was part of a series of covert actions along the Polish border that the Nazis would use to justify Germany’s attack on Poland the following day. Gleiwitz was a classic ‘false flag’ operation.
So, what is meant by the term ‘false flag’? Originally, the phrase was coined for the practice of pirate ships flying the colors of other nations to deceive merchant ships into thinking they were dealing with a friendly vessel. While the pirates would usually unfurl their true colors just before attacking, the wrong flag would sometimes continue to be flown throughout an attack, hence the term ‘attacking under a false flag’. Over time, the term ‘false flag’ came to be applied to any covert operation that sought to shift the responsibility on to a different party from the one carrying it out, as was the case with the Nazis at Gleiwitz.
One of the most famous incidents considered by many to be a false flag operation is the Reichstag fire, which took place on the night of the 27th of February 1933. A lone communist sympathizer called Marinus van de Lubbe was arrested and charged with setting fire to the German parliament building. This gave Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the excuse they needed to purge Germany of opposition, especially the communists. The sweeping emergency powers Hitler and the Nazi Party grabbed for themselves after the fire are the reason many people think the Reichstag was burned not by a lone communist protesting Germany’s treatment of the working classes (as van de Lubbe himself claimed while in custody), but by the Nazis themselves.
Of course, it isn’t just the Americans and the Europeans who have been accused of participating in false flag operations over the years. Between 1979 and 1983, the Israeli secret services stand accused of instigating a series of car bomb attacks in Lebanon that killed hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians. Though the bombings were claimed by the terrorist organization, the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, many believe the bombs were set off by the Israelis to sew dissent throughout the region and justify an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Though an Israeli general has admitted the attacks were carried out by his country, the official line is still that Israel was not involved.
In the modern era, things become a little murkier. Whether a modern-day false flag operation is real or not is now a matter to be bitterly fought over on the Internet.
To many online conspiracy theorists, the biggest false flag operation of all time was the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many believe that these attacks were deliberately carried out by the US government as a way to justify the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, which they believe were carried out to install a gas pipeline across Afghanistan and to seize the oil wealth of Iraq.
Many ‘9/11 Truthers’ point out discrepancies in the official report into the destruction of the World Trade Center, focusing primarily on the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center. They argue that the towers could not have been brought down by plane strike and fire alone, be must instead have been brought down by another means, such as by controlled demolition. The claims that 9/11 was an inside job have been vigorously disputed both by the US government and various experts many times, but it is highly unlikely the myriad of conspiracy theories swirling around 9/11 will ever go away.
Accusations of false flag operations have continued right up to the present day. One of the most widely-disputed and discussed is the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings of 2012, which has been laid at the door of the US Government.
People who refuse to believe the shootings were the act of a lone gunman allege twenty students and six staff were deliberately murdered so stricter gun controls could be imposed on the US population. Skeptics point to the attack coinciding with President Barack Obama’s announcement that he would sign restrictive small arms legislation. The convenient timing of the attack could then be used by the president as the excuse he needed to impose new restrictions, hence why it must have been a false flag operation. Again, like 9/11, it is highly unlikely that the theories surrounding the tragic attack will ever die down.
We now live in an age where, to some at least, nothing is as it seems, everything can be labelled a conspiracy and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change people’s minds.
There have been several documented false flag operations throughout history, and the existence of them goes some way to explaining why thousands upon thousands of people all around the world believe many more covert operations have been carried out regardless of government claims to the contrary.
Why does the United States want to start a war with China?
The following is from Global Research. Reprinted as found, all credit to the author and edited to fit this venue. The original title of the article is: "China-US Relations and Biden’s “Global Death Trap”: The World Is Facing Another Cold War Which May Become Hot, Even Very Hot" by Prof. Joseph H. Chung Global Research, April 09, 2021.
In Anchorage, Alaska, on 18-19 March 2021, top diplomats of China and the U.S. met and declared the new Cold War. The U.S. side was represented by Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, while China was represented, by Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister and Yang Jiechi, top diplomat of China.
Anthony Blinken said ” China’s actions pose a threat to a rule-based order designed to maintain global stability:”
Translation: “You unthankful China, listen carefully! Do not dare challenge the world in which Washington feels comfortable. Otherwise!” This is the declaration of the cold war.
On his part, Wang Yi said: “Beijing is firmly against US interference in domestic affairs. We will take firm actions in our response.” “Most countries in the world do not recognize US values as global values.”
Translation: “Listen You Washington,. China has done a lot for you. China has something to tell you! China has had enough of your bullying. If Washington wants to fight, well, China is ready!
Two days later…
On March 22, Wang Yi, foreign minister of China and Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister of Russia met to protest against Washington’s sanction imposed on Russia and China.
The very next day, on March 23, Xi Jinping, president of China and Kim Jong-un, president of North Korea exchanged letters for mutual cooperation. This is the beginning of China’s recruiting of cold war alliances.
All these events mean one thing. The Global Cold War has begun and the world will be divided once again between the West and the East and the Cold War is likely to become Global Hot War and we will be all dead.
Before I begin, I would like tell this to Beijing and Washington!
In 2020, the combined GDP of China and the U.S. was 35 trillion USD, or 42% of the global GDP of 84 trillion USD.
You China and the U.S. listen! You have become rich and powerful, because the world has worked hard for you. The world has provided low-cost labor, high quality raw materials and people’s precious savings; the world has bought your products.
Remember! The world belongs to every human being and every country.
Please behave like responsible global super powers. You have no right to ruin the world with your hegemonic fight.
So, China and the U.S. please stop the dreadful cold war and take responsibility of assuring global peace, safety and prosperity.
*
In this paper, I am asking these questions.
Why does Washington declare the new cold war now?
What are the American objectives of the cold war?
What are the cold war Strategies of the U.S. and China?
Can Washington win the cold war?
Can the hot war happen?
What will be the impact of the Sino-American war on the humanity?
Why does Washington declare the New Cold War Now?
When it comes to the economy, the language betrays the reality all too clearly. The Trump administration’s economic struggle with China is regularly described, openly and without qualification, as a “war.” And there’s no doubt that senior White House officials, beginning with the president and his chief trade representative, Robert Lighthizer (image on the right), see it just that way: as a means of pulverizing the Chinese economy and so curtailing that country’s ability to compete with the United States in all other measures of power.
-Global Research
There are two possible reasons for Washington’s decision to declare the Cold war against China, a war which actually began since Barack Obama’s Asia Pivot.
The first reason is that Joe Biden needs an enemy dangerous enough to unify the American people and to deal with [1] the impossible task of restoring the economy and [2] justify the raison d’être of the existence of the government.
The Pearl Harbor attack was devastating enough to wake up the sleeping Americans to unite and follow the Washington’s leadership. But I wonder if the Chinese challenge is grave enough to unify the Americans and trust Washington and cooperate for the policy of restoring the economy.
The second reason is more convincing. It is matter of coping with the Chinese economic threat when China’s military challenge is still manageable. The Chinese economy is catching up with the U.S. economy at a threatening rate, while the Chinese military capability is still far weaker than American military capacity. In other words, Washington has decided to hit hard Beijing when it is still a weak attacker and get rid of the economic threat.
I have done some calculations to see the evolution of economic and military power of the two super powers. I have assumed that the Chinese GDP will increase per year, at a compound growth rate of 5 %, from US$ 15.42 trillion in 2020 to $ 24.98 trillion in 2031, or a accumulated increase of 62%. As for the United States, it is assumed that its GDP will increase by 2% a year from $20.93 trillion in 2020 to $25.32 trillion in 2031, or accumulated increase of 21%.
This means that, in 2020, the Chinese GDP was 73.6% of the U.S. GDP to reach 98.7% in 2031. This is surely threatening to Washington.
Thus, the Chinese GDP is expected to catch up with the U.S. economy in ten years. But, we have a different picture as far as military strength is concerned.
We have examined the 10-year evolution of national defense budget of the two countries. It is assumed that the share of the defense budget in the GDP will remain the same throughout the 10 year period. The Chinese 2020 national defense share was 1.15% of GDP yielding $ 178 billion. In 2031.The Chinese defense budget will be $287 billion. Now, for the U.S. in 2020, the national defense budget was $730 billion, or 3.6% of GDP, this rate is applied for 2031 to get $911 billion.
This means that despite rapid rise, the Chinese catching up for the defense budget is much slower than the case of GDP. In fact, in 2020, the amount of Chinese national defense expenditures was 24.5% of that of the American national defense budget to increase only to 30.2% in 2031. This may allow Washington to feel safe as far as the Chinese military threat is concerned.
So, Washington’s strategy is to strike China before the Chinese economy catches up with the U.S. economy while Beijing’s is still “militarily weak”.
What are the Objectives of the U.S. initiated Cold War?
An examination of the demands submitted to Chinese negotiators by the U.S. trade delegation last May suggests, however, that Washington’s primary intent hasn’t been to rectify that trade imbalance but to impede China’s economic growth. Among the stipulations Beijing must acquiesce to before receiving tariff relief, according to leaked documents from U.S. negotiators that were spread on Chinese social media:
[1] halting all government subsidies to advanced manufacturing industries in its Made in China 2025 program, an endeavor that covers 10 key economic sectors, including aircraft manufacturing, electric cars, robotics, computer microchips, and artificial intelligence;
[2] accepting American restrictions on investments in sensitive technologies without retaliating;
[3] opening up its service and agricultural sectors — areas where Chinese firms have an inherent advantage — to full American competition.
In fact, this should be considered a straightforward declaration of economic war. Acquiescing to such demands would mean accepting a permanent subordinate status vis-à-vis the United States in hopes of continuing a profitable trade relationship with this country.
“The list reads like the terms for a surrender rather than a basis for negotiation,” was the way Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University, accurately described these developments.
The principal objectives of the Cold War is to prevent China from becoming a Global Power threatening the accumulated interests of the U.S. and its allies.
-Global Resource
What are the Cold War Strategies of the U.S. and China?
The weapons of the New Cold War are likely to include the following:
Security Alliance War
Ideological War
Economic War
Security War
Security Alliance War
The security alliance is designed to maximize the “friendly supports” for the country’s war efforts. On this ground, the U.S. has a definite upper hand. Actually, China has only a few alliances; its potential alliances would include North Korea, Russia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Pakistan. But, there is no guarantee that these potential alliances will help China in a Sino-American war. On the other hand, Washington has a lot of alliances.
The U.S. has many security alliances in the East Asian region: the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, the U.S.-South Korea Security Alliance, the U.S.-Australia Security Alliance, the U.S.-the Philippines Security Alliance. The U.S. has security partnership with Singapore and Taiwan.
The U.S. has the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) composed of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.
Moreover, there was the TPP (Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership) led by Washington. It had 12 member countries. Since Trump withdrew, it has become CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership) with 11 member countries. But, Biden might rejoin it, because it is supposed to be a free-trade alliance, but, in reality, it is a part of China-containment alliance. It includes five East Asian countries: Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. In addition, most of the East Asian countries have some sorts of security cooperation with Washington. Thus, the U.S. has a lot of countries with which it has security related relations.
But, the question is whether these security alliances will join the U.S.-initiated anti-China war. They may cooperate with Washington as long as the cold war remains cold. However, what they should do is to persuade Washington to end the cold war, for it is the best way to keep their economy going in peace.
This is suggested by Graham Allison, the author of his famous book, “Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides Trap?” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston-New York, 2017)
Ideological War
The purpose of the ideological war is to demonize the rival country in order to justify the country’s war on the one hand, and on the other, to maximize global support for the war.
The ideological war relies on the following weapons:
Human Right Violations
Freedom of the Press
Violation of law-Based Rules
Authoritarianism
Assertiveness
Violation of the UNCLOS
Human Right Violations:
The U.S. accuses China for violating minority groups’ rights to maintain autonomous values and political system. But, Beijing argues that it upholds the rights of minority groups. China would say that it has to intervene in order to prevent minority regions from becoming independent, thus threatening the sovereignty of China.
China may ask Washington how it would react, if the State of Alaska fights for its separation from the United States. Moreover, China openly criticises widespread human right violations in the U.S. against minority groups including the Black Africans, Native Indians and other minority groups.
The Canadian Human Right Commission defines human rights as the fundamental right of all human beings for a life of dignity, respect and equality. Hence, all human beings have rights to enjoy public goods such as health, education, housing, racial equality, physical safety on the street. These rights may be violated not only by the government but also by individuals and institutions. Any government which fails to protect these rights is violator of human rights.
In the mainstream media, the perception of human rights violation is limited to the harsh measures taken by the government. The human rights issue has become a political tool in international relations. The debate on human rights issue should, on the contrary, focus on a solution to human rights violations rather than political gain.
In regards to Washington’s policy of China’s human rights violations, I am quite puzzled by its lack of consistency. In fact, for decades since the time of Richard Nixon to the era of Barack Obama, human rights violations in China was not a major issue.
Joe Biden makes human right the key issues in Sino-American relations. Why? Is it because he considers China as a threat to U.S. hegemony?
Freedom of the Press:
The American media criticizes China for lack of the freedom of press. It is true that the press in China is closely managed by the State in order to minimize criticism of government policies. China may react by asking if there is freedom of press in the U.S. China may ask if the American press is free to criticize large corporations which finance the media.
Here, I may ask one question which may interest both China and the U.S.
Is the freedom of the press the raison d’être of the press? What happens, if the free press is biased and behaves in such a way that it is harmful to the welfare of the ordinary people? The Korean press is the freest press in the world, owing to the liberal policies of the government of Moon Jae-in.
Unfortunately 98% of the press present biased report, fabricate stories, publish lies in order to protect the corrupted vested interests of the conservatives accumulated for 70 years; the press is the integral part of the corruption; its sole purpose is to destroy the liberal government and retake the power so that it could enjoy the privileges and wealth provided by the corruption culture. The freedom of press is important, but without political neutrality, it can hurt the nation.
In fact, in the context of the Sino-U.S. cold war, one of the most dangerous weapons is the press. Unfortunately, the press gives itself the mission of demonizing the enemy through lies, biased reports, presenting prepared horror pictures. In a way, the outcome of the New Cold War depends largely on the “press war”. So, my humble wish is that the press in the U.S. and China give itself the mission of stopping the Sino-American cold war and not intensifying it.
Law-Based Rules:
If there is any universal consensus in the West, it is the belief that China does not respect law-based rules. But, we seldom find any concrete incidences where China violates such rules.
The trouble is that rules cannot cover all things and all behaviors. Besides, rules must evolve in function of the need of the time. There are hundreds of reports and research papers which give the impression that China does not respect the international rules. But seldom do they point out which laws are violated. If China is such a violator of international laws, how could it trade with other countries and how could it realize the economic miracle without respecting international laws? Have any international institutions including IMF, WTO, WHO and other international institutions complained about China’s not respecting international laws?
China would react. First, it may ask Washington to provide the actual cases of China’s rule violation. In addition, China may add that most of the international rules being conceived and imposed by the U.S., they may not be suitable for countries of different cultures and judicial traditions. Therefore, China might suggest a reform of the international laws more flexible and inclusive.
Authoritarianism:
Another favorite pass time topic in Washington elite circle and media is the sins of China’s authoritarian regime. This is rather amazing, because the U.S. is a lover of authoritarian regimes in numerous countries, provided these regimes are good boys obeying Washington’s command.
Washington loved General Park Chung-hee and General Jun Doo-hwan for their oppressive authoritarian regime, because they were obedient to Washington.
Chiang Kai-sek was a more than an authoritarian dictator in Taiwan, but he was an asset for America’s China policy.
China may tell the U.S. not to worry about the authoritarian character of the Chinese political regime. China may tell Americans that the authoritarianism has been the core of Chinese values and culture. Besides, as a country of 1.5 billion people with more than a hundred dialects and constant threats of [US supported] independence of minority regions, China needs a strong top-down authoritarian decision-making process.
China’s Assertiveness:
China is accused also for its being assertive with its BRI project, its relations with ASEAN countries and, especially, its militarization of the South China Sea.
China is accused for its assertiveness in connection with its Belt-Road Initiative (BRI). The often quoted incident of such assertiveness is the China’s debt-trap applied to Sri Lanka. However, according to studies by Sri Lankans, the story of debt trap is a lie or misunderstanding by so-called China haters. The project of the Hambantato Port was initiated by current prime minister (former president) in the early 2000s.
It was a purely commercial project and managed by a Chinese government-owned enterprise (GOE). Sri Lanka excessively borrowed money from Western financial institutions including the IMF. Sri Lanka’s debt was so high that the cost of servicing the debts represents 44% of government revenue; this is the debt trap which has nothing to do with the BRI. In fact, Chinese loans represent mere 9% of Sri Lankan government debt. The Hambantato Port is leased for 99 years managed by a Chinese enterprise, CMPort. Sri Lanka has to pay the debt to China for the loans. By the way, the port cannot be used by Chinese navy.
China is accused also for bullying South East Asian countries. This is contentious, according to several studies, these countries do not experience Chinese political assertiveness. On the contrary, Chinese soft business diplomacy is greatly appreciated.
Moreover, China’s productive participation in the activities of ASEAN, APT (ASEAN plus Three), ARF (Asia Regional Forum), EAS (East Asia Summits), RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) Shangri-La Dialogue, and numerous FTAs is highly valued. Even those countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam which have security cooperation with Washington do not feel the pressure of apparent Chinese assertiveness.
Chinese assertiveness which is the most criticized is its alleged military assertiveness. To see more clearly the nature of China’s military assertiveness, we need to study its evolution, which shows that China’s assertiveness was the reaction to American assertiveness.
In 2008, The U.S. joined the TPSEP (Trans-pacific Strategic Economic Partnership) which became later the TPP (Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership) which was more a security alliances than FTA (Free Trade Agreement).
In March 2009, China was under surveillance by an American vessel’s surveillance activities near Hainan Island, the key Chinese navy port.
In September, 2009, the U.S. adopted the Air and Sea Battle (ASB) which was another threat to Chinese A2/AD (Anti-Air/Area-Denied) strategy.
In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the U.S. had interests in the South China Sea, meaning the strong military presence in Asia.
In 2012, Barack Obama announced the Asia-Pivot or “Rebalancing” of American military might in favour of the Asia-Pacific region. It is important to point out here that this series of Washington’s assertive activities hostile to China inevitably invited China’s assertive actions.
In fact, in the period, 2013-2014, China extended its ADIZ (Air-Defence Identification Zone) to as far as the region of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island.
In September 2013, China started its Island-Building operations in the South China Sea.
In 2013, a Chinese navy vessel dangerously approached USS Cowpens, U.S. navy guided-missile destroyer.
Thus, Chinese assertiveness was, largely, the counter defensive actions to the American assertiveness. In short, so called, Chinese assertiveness, cannot not be used for China denunciation.
The building of the South China Sea islands and the militarization of these islands have been the principal object of China demonization. In fact, this operation started in 2013 and completed in 2016. Several reefs including the Mischief Reef, the Subi Reef and the Fiery Reef all became islands armed with missile launch facilities and airstrips for jet fighters. The reason behind this operation may be the fear of blockade of the South China Sea by the U.S. and its allies, a military operation which will make China to starve to death.
Unfortunately, the American assertive actions followed by Chinese counter actions have inevitably led to the deterioration of the Washington-Beijing relations.
In 2014, Barack Obama visited Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore in order to strengthen the China containment operations. What is disturbing is the fact that Barack Obama promised Shinzo Abe, Japanese prime minister, that the U.S. would be ready to intervene, if a Japan-China conflict took the form of military confrontation. Obama did not, however, commit himself to US military intervention. In contrast, Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, promised, during his recent visit to Japan, US military intervention in case of China-Japan confrontation involving the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island. This is indeed a dangerous decision on the part of the U.S.
Violation of UNCCLOS:
Another item on the China demonization menu is the theory that China does not respect the UNCLOS (UN Convention of the Law of Sea) and that China prevents free maritime traffic in the South China Sea. But, there is no actual evidence of China’s violation of free maritime traffic in the South China Sea.
To sum up, the Sino-U.S. ideological war has failed to make China’s regime to deserve global suspicion and denunciation.
Washington has no assurance that the region’s neighbouring countries would rally behind the U.S. because of China’s regime and ideology. This does not mean, however, that China is the winner. .
Economic War
As suggested by America’s trade demands, Washington’s intent is not only to hobble China’s economy today and tomorrow but for decades to come. This has led to an intense, far-ranging campaign to deprive it of access to advanced technologies and to cripple its leading technology firms.
Chinese leaders have long realized that, for their country to achieve economic and military parity with the United States, they must master the cutting-edge technologies that will dominate the twenty-first-century global economy,
-Global Research
As I pointed out above, in ten years, Chinese economy will catch up with the U.S. economy assuming that the American GDP will increase by 2% per year, while the Chinese GDP will rise by 5% per year. My assumptions may be wrong, but one thing which is certain is that China’s GDP will soon catch up with that of the US.
There are several reasons:
First, the Chinese per capita is about $11,000 meaning that there is a lot of room for further growth, while in the U.S. where the per capita GDP is $63,000 the potential growth is approaching its limit.
Second, under the intensification of the trade war, the diversification of trade partners becomes strategic. The American trade partners being highly developed countries, the diversification of trade partners will not be a great help, whereas, China’s trade partners being Asian countries with high growth rate, its trade partner diversification will be an advantage.
Third, the U.S., the economy being dependent on high technology, economic growth is unable to create jobs and it creates unequal income distribution at the expense of ordinary Americans, which in the long run, it will slow down the growth of the American economy.
Fourth, the U.S. economy is excessively dependent on the domestic market, the strength of which is the consumer demand. Remember that, in the U.S., the consumer demand accounts for as much as 70% of GDP as against 50% in China. The consumer demand requires strong middle-income class. Unfortunately, in the U.S. the rising inequality of income distribution has almost destroyed the middle class, which will make it difficult to sustain the domestic market.
The COVID-19 crisis has worsened the problem. In short, it will be difficult to stop the Chinese economy from catching up with the American economy.
Security War
As we saw above, it is more than possible that by 2031, Chinese GDP will have caught up with the U.S. GDP. Moreover, if China allocates 3% of its GDP, instead of the present 1.15 %, its military spending will be $ 749 billion, or 82% of Washington’s military expenditures.
The U.S. may beef up its striking force by deploying its 3rd fleet to strengthen the power of its Sea Air Battle (ASB). China will be able to improve its 2A/AD strategy. So, there will be no clear cut winner.
Under such circumstance, God knows what will happen, if China and the U.S. start to “shoot one another”. The message is clear. The shooting war will bring the dooms day for us all. The dooms day will come, if bloody cold war continues.
Can Washington win the Cold War?
The answer is: “it cannot.”
There are several reasons for this.
First, it seems clear that none of the anti-China strategies will give clear upper hand to Washington. In fact, none of the China demonization tactics, the economic war and the military confrontation promises Washington’s victory.
Second, since the fall of the Berlin Wall of 1989, the ideological difference has been much diluted. Hence, the anti-China antagonism is much weaker than it was during the Soviet-U.S. cold war. The implication is that Washington will have difficulties in ganging up its supporters, which will make American offensive uncertain victory.
Third, China being the world’s factory and the world’s consumer market, most of the U.S. allies will be reluctant to support the cold war.
Fourth, the decadence of the U.S.-led neo-liberal economic system and the world wide corruption of the American version of democracy will make it difficult to attract U.S. sympathizers.
In short, neither the U.S. nor China can be the winner. In their cold war, there will be no winner. If there is one, it will be the suffering of all humanity.
If the U.S. cannot win the cold war, that is, if it cannot prevent China from catching up the U.S. economy and the U.S. power, it means that Washington has failed to attain its objectives.
Then, Washington might decide to declare a hot war.
But, American generals and admirals know very well that China is not the (former) Soviet Union and that China is much stronger and richer than the Soviet Union. Moreover, there will be few allies including the UK which will join Washington’s shooting war fight.
However, misguided political leaders might make dangerous decisions to venture into a “shooting war with China” to save the honor and the glory of the U.S. At any rate, we must all try to stop the shooting war, because it will destroy what the humanity has built so far.
Thus, neither the U.S. nor China can win the cold war.
The hot war will kill us all.
So, the only way out for Washington is to admit China as co-leader of the world and cooperate for the global security, safety, peace and prosperity.
There are so many areas where they should cooperate and lead including public health, climate change, natural disasters and terrorism. There are so many global enemies that we need the U.S. and China to deal with these enemies.
Can the Hot War happen?
As Admiral Davidson suggests, one possible outcome of the ongoing cold war with China could be armed conflict of the traditional sort. Such an encounter, in turn, could escalate to the nuclear level, resulting in mutual annihilation. A war involving only “conventional” forces would itself undoubtedly be devastating and lead to widespread suffering, not to mention the collapse of the global economy.
-Global Research
The hot war should not happen, but it can.
The possible flash points of shooting war are the South China Sea, the East China Sea, Taiwan, North Korea especially the Dioayu/Senkaku Island. But, none of these flashpoint countries is likely to lead to shooting war with one exception, namely the Dioayu/Senkaku Island.
Major wars are often sparked by allies of major powers. Graham Allison in his Book (pp 34-38) tells us that the Peloponnesian war between Athena and Sparta, started because of the conflict between Corinth, alley of Sparta and Megara, alley of Athena. In fact, for this reason, Allison is saying that Washington’s plan of expanding security alliances is a very risky game.
If there is any Washington’s ally which might ignite war with China, it will be Japan. (Graham Allison, pp.178-179) There are many reasons. But, I may point out two of them. First, Japan is a military might; its Self Defence Force (SDF) is the third most powerful military force in Asia and it will be much more strengthened by Washington, if the Cold War continues. Incidentally, despite the Peace Constitution, the SDF can go to war and assist the U.S. forces. That is, Japan can participate in the Sino-American war.
The second reason is Japan’s ambition to rule the world. For last 70 years, Japan has been ruled by far-right imperial nationalist conservatives who dream of reviving the Japan of the pre-WWII era.
This extreme right-wing of Japanese politics is inspired by the Japan Conference, led by imperialist symbolized by Shinzo Abe and encouraged by Washington, The Sino-American war provides a golden opportunity for Japan to rearm and realize its dream.
There are four psychic elements which might induce Japan to get into a war against China. These elements are the Hak-Ko-Ichi-U, the Tanaka Memorial of 1929, Shintoism and Bushido.
The Hak-ko-Ichi-U means that the single roof (Japan) should rule the eight corners (the world). This psychic was well represented by the Tanaka Memorial which argued that it was Japan’s sacred destiny to conquer Manchuria for raw materials using Korea as the royal high way to Manchuria, then conquer China for slave labour, then the rest of Asia, and then the U.S.(Pearl Harbour).
Shintoism is back and the Japanese accept the Emperor as God. Bushido has returned and the Japanese people seek redemption by dying for the Emperor. True, many of ordinary Japanese are free from such psychic, but they have no power to participate in Japan’s national policy.
What could happen is Japan’s provocation of military confrontation in the Dioayu/Senkaku Island. Japan could be tempted to provoke war against China just like it did in Manchuria in 1930 and Nanking in 1937.
Moreover, Washington might welcome the Sino-Japan war, not only because it can ruin China and but also the fight between Asian powers would weaken Asia facilitating Washington’s control of Asia. This is something the world should be concerned with. To avoid this, the U.S. should dissolve its security alliance with Japan. For that matter, to avoid shooting war, the U.S. should dissolve all its security alliances.
What we need is huge anti-war alliances including Japan, South Korea and other Washington’s alliances. The same goes for Chinese alliances, although it has few alliances. The ultimate mission of the anti-war alliances is to prevent the super powers from getting into war so that humanity can be saved from total annihilation.
What would be the Impact of the Sino-American War on humanity?
There is no point of talking about the consequences of a hot war, because it is bound to lead to nuclear war and the end of human civilization.
So we will not talk about it…
If Nuclear War is avoided…
Even if a shooting war doesn’t erupt, however, a long-term geopolitical war of attrition between the U.S. and China will, in the end, have debilitating and possibly catastrophic consequences for both sides. Take the trade war, for example. If that’s not resolved soon in a positive manner, continuing high U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will severely curb Chinese economic growth and so weaken the world economy as a whole, punishing every nation on Earth, including this one. High tariffs will also increase costs for American consumers and endanger the prosperity and survival of manyfirms that rely on Chinese raw materials and components.
This new brand of war will also ensure that already sky-high defense expenditures will continue to rise, diverting funds from vital needs like education, health, infrastructure, and the environment. Meanwhile, preparations for a future war with China have already become the number one priority at the Pentagon, crowding out all other considerations. “While we’re focused on ongoing operations,” acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan reportedly told his senior staff on his first day in office this January, “remember China, China, China.”
Perhaps the greatest victim of this ongoing conflict will be planet Earth itself and all the creatures, humans included, who inhabit it. As the world’s top two emitters of climate-altering greenhouse gases, the U.S. and China must work together to halt global warming or all of us are doomed to a hellish future. With a war under way, even a non-shooting one, the chance for such collaboration is essentially zero. The only way to save civilization is for the U.S. and China to declare peace and focus together on human salvation.
-Global Research
What interests us is the consequence of the cold war. One thing sure is that the longer it lasts, greater become its negative impact. The cold war is likely to have the following impacts.
Globalization impact
Political and ideological Impact
Economic Impact
Globalization impact: the world will be de-globalized and decoupled. There will be Washington-led bloc and China-led bloc. There will be regional globalization led by Washington and Beijing.
Political and Ideological Impact: there will be emergence of two political and ideological blocs. The China bloc will have varying types of political regimes including hybrid regimes, while the U.S. bloc will maintain liberal democracy. Washington’s ambition of evangelical propagation of its democracy will be compromised.
Economic Impact: there will be China-led free trade bloc in which member countries’ sovereignty is respected and trade negotiations will allow accommodations for member countries specific needs. On the other hand, there will be Washington-led free trade bloc in which member countries sovereignty is minimized and the trade negotiations are likely to be controlled by large corporations.
It is difficult to estimate the cost of the cold war. The Rand Corporation is reported to suggest that the American GDP will fall by 30% because of the cold war. It could be more than that because of the pronounced interdependence of national economies. One thing sure is that the longer the cold war lasts, the greater will become the cost.
To conclude, we have to stop, at all costs, the Sino-American Cold War which will surely throw humanity into the deep and dark bottom of the Thucydides Trap.
It is not too late for academics, research centers, thin-tanks, social movements, decent media and, above all, people’s organizations at the grassroots to launch anti-cold war movements throughout the world.
So what is the ignition going to be?
Well, I do disagree with the author above. I believe that we NEED to discuss the very real and very strong possibility of a hot war between the USA and China / Russia. After all, that is what the neocon publications and the military-industrial think tanks on “K-street” and Washington DC beltway have all been chattering about these last few years.
We just cannot ignore it.
Pretend that it will go away if we don’t mention it. Like in the article above.
So, seriously, what kinds of “false flags” can we expect to get the American population all hot and bothered and ready to march off and attack China?
Nuclear Detonation on American soil.
No. China is not going to randomly launch a nuclear weapon on a “sacrificial” city in America. They are not idiots. But the American population might believe the narrative, and thus it is a real possibility of a pending false flag. All it takes is an American made nuke detonated on American soil, and then unleash the dogs of propaganda blaming China, then immediately gear-up Congress into a war footing.
Japan
This is the kind of thing that launched World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Middle East War on Terror
As well as the eight wars in the Middle East against terror by the plane attacks on the World Trade Center on 9-11.
Syria
Reasons forWar "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger." –George W. Bush,
Blaming China for the Global Pandemic and having a “smoking gun”.
You get Americans all upset about some aspect of their life, then you “prove” that it was caused by the Chinese. For instance the inconvenience of the Coronavirus pandemic, is a good target to direct anger towards.
Bosnia
This is one of the more complex reasons to start a war. An event, often beyond anyone's control sparks a breakup of society, and the changes are often uncomfortable. Such as the pandemic. Certain forces use this period of societal upset to initiate war. Such is the case with Bosnia.
In 1990, as Yugoslavia collapsed, the first multiparty elections were held. These elections created nationalist parties intent on perpetuating ethno-national identities and causes. By 1992, war was being imposed through Serbian and Croatian nationalists seeking to expanded into “greater”national territory.
In the coming years the perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing,”displacement, mass atrocity, and genocide, were rewarded by the international community at the Dayton Accords in 1995. Dayton ended the war, but then imposed an ethno-nationalistic portioned Bosnia. A “tycoon class”of nationalist leaders continues to enrich themselves through corruption supported by poverty, fear, insecurity, and the promotion of divisive ethnic identities.
"The hate didn’t exist before; it was artificially installed. It was all so unbelievable that at first, it seemed funny...The emphasis on ethnicity and exclusion was so strong that ethnic hatred became normalized...There is also the ideology of religion and nationality...Never has there been more religion and less faith...National and religious identities are openly used as weapons in the political arsenal.
–Vedran Grahovac, Prijedor"
An assassination of an American Politician inside Washington DC.
This is a very common technique, and there have been numerous Hollywood movies based on this theme.
World War I
This was the kind of event that started World War I. World War 1 started when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated on June 28, 1914. This was the immediate cause but there were a series of events which triggered the war.
Rwanda
It's also the kind of thing that started the civil war in Rwanda. Thegenocidewassparkedbythedeath of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airporton 6 April 1994.
The need to rescue or save people
Maybe the people in Xinjiang, those “poor Muslims”, or Tibet, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong. So many areas that the United States has been prepping for actionable “color revolution”.
Panama
TheUnited States invades Panama in an attempt to overthrow military dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted intheUnited States on drug trafficking charges and was accused of suppressing democracyinPanamaandendangering U.S. nationals. Noriegas Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) were promptly crushed, forcing the dictator to seek asylum with the Vatican anuncio in Panama City, where he surrendered on January 3, 1990.
When American is attacked by military forces
As unlikely as it appears, there is nothing to prevent the US government to stage a “false flag” to make it look like some military attacked America. That’s what it did to pull America into the war in Vietnam.
The American Civil War
The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”
Vietnam WarThe false flag that started the Vietnam War There was notorpedo attack in the Gulf of TonkinHowLyndon Johnsonlied us into a catastrophe On this day in 1964, Congress passed the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” which began massive escalationof the US war and occupation of Viet Nam.Thefalseflagthatstarted the Vietnam War |
Conclusion
America has decided to wage a war against Asia. There are aspects of both China, Russia and Iran involved. Right now, it is considered to be “trade”, “Hybrid”, “ideological”, “propaganda”, and …
…it’s intended to go hot.
Whether or not it will be limited to conventional weapons is a silly argument. Of course it will go nuclear.
This article looks at the kinds of false flags that are being set in place for the ignition for the war. And while the planners in K-street and the Washington DC beltway are looking towards a very long generational war, I don’t see that their planning will come to fruition. Instead I picture an unholy terror unleashed upon the USA if any action is attempted. And the result will be a very, very bad and nasty war. And no matter what damage that America wrecks China with, the end result will be the complete and utter devastation of America by the combined forces of Russia and China acting in unison.
To pretend otherwise is foolish.
It’s and entirely uncomfortable subject, but fits exactly with the predictions for the Fiuth Turning generational theory.
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There’s a lot of talk in the United States these days. It’s all about how “evil” the Chinese are, and how “evil” the Russians are, and how “evil” the Iranians are. And along with this well publicized narrative is the flood of articles about “how strong” and “how invincible” the American military is. It’s almost like, well it’s exactly like, America is on a war-footing and is readying the population for a long drawn out, multi-generational war, with Asia.
It’s a big mistake.
I guess that the American “leadership” wasn’t paying attention in history class. Perhaps they should ask the ghosts of NapoleonBonaparte and Hitler how that all worked out.
But one of the unspoken realities is the illusion that Asia won’t fight back. That it is inconceivable. And that any far in far-away Russia, or far-away China, or far-away Iran will stay far away.
Far… far… away.
And that, even if it did somehow manage to “throw a few punches” back at the United States, that the (good ol’) USA will manage to absorb them, quickly recover, and continue living a great and exceptional life as the “leader of the free world”, and that “brilliant city on the hill”. America is “exceptional” don’t you know…
And I for one am going to tell you that this is delirious wishful thinking.
Back in the day
This attitude that “we are strong and invincible” and that “we can tell the world what to do, or else” is thuggish bullying. And it’s more than just irritating, it’s disgusting. But for historians (well, I am an amateur, but you all know what I mean) it’s frightening.
History is full of stores of the proud rulers of nations. They would live inside their huge stone forts. they would have these huge banners fluttering in the azure blue skies, and they would have gaggles of beautiful maidens attending to them. And they would have large armies of “Heavy Cavalry” and “Knights in singing armor” . They would have thousands of these armed knights.
And they would sit inside their castles, on their thrones, and eat their lamb, drink their mead, and cavort with their wenches. They would make proclamations. They would be delirious and drunk with power, and totally and completely unaware of true and real dangers elsewhere in the world.
I feel a lecture coming on…
Genghis Khan and the “Brilliant Cities on the hill”
Genghis Khan was the Emperor of the Mongol Empire. He must have been one of the most ferocious people ever to live on the planet Earth. Genghis marked his reign with blood, feasts, and love of different women. People like Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin look like amateurs when we compare them to Genghis Khan.
This fierce Mongol knew how to rule, and he successfully did it for many years in the 13th century. There wasn’t a person back in the day, who would not be scared of Genghis Khan’s power.
But before he came to power, he was not all that well known. And, as such he was dismissed as a “uncouth”, “uncultured” barbarian. Which he pretty much was…
The knights at their tournaments, in their finery, armor and emblems of ancestry, believed they were the foremost warriors in the world, while Mongol warriors thought otherwise.
Mongol horses were small, but their riders were lightly clad and they moved with greater speed. These were hardy men who grew up on horses and hunting, making them better warriors than those who grew up in agricultural societies and cities.
Their main weapon was the bow and arrow. And the Mongols of the early 1200s were highly disciplined, superbly coordinated and brilliant in tactics.
The Mongols were illiterate, religiously shamanistic and perhaps no more than 700,000 in number. Their language today is described as Altaic, a language unrelated to Chinese, derived from inhabitants in the Altay mountain range in western Mongolia.
They were herdsmen on the grassy plains north of the Gobi Desert, south of Siberia's forests. Before the year 1200, the Mongols were fragmented, moving about in small bands headed by a chief, or khan, and living in portable felt dwellings.
The Mongols endured frequent deprivations and sparse areas for grazing their animals. They frequently fought over turf, and during hard times they occasionally raided, interested in goods rather than bloodshed. They did not collect heads or scalps as trophies.
-Genghis Khan
…but that is besides the point.
The Mongol Empire conquered all Asia, and no enemy could withstand Genghis Khan and his bloodthirsty army. Oh yes, even though Mongols loved to compromise, they were known for their brutal physical power.
But they were much more than that. The Mongols under Genghis Khan were fair, just and orderly. You just don’t get on their bad side.
Genghis Khan created a body of law that he was to work on throughout his life. This included outlawing the tradition of kidnapping women. The kidnapping of women had caused feuds among the Mongols, and, as a teenager he had suffered from the kidnapping of his young wife, Borte, and he had devoted himself to rescuing her.
In addition, Genghis Khan declared all children legitimate, whomever the mother. He made it law that no woman would be sold into marriage. The stealing of animals had caused dissension among the Mongols, and Temujin made it a capital offense. A lost animal was to be returned to its owner, and taking lost property as one's own was to be considered thievery and a capital offense. Temujin regulated hunting – a winter activity – improving the availability of meat for everyone. He introduced record keeping, taking advantage of his move years before to have his native language put into writing. He created official seals. He created a supreme officer of the law who was to collect and preserve all judicial decisions, to oversee the trials of all those charged with wrongdoing and to have the power to issue death sentences. He created order that strengthened his realm and improved his ability to expand its territory.
-Genghis Khan
People believed that one Mongolian man could defeat ten or more warriors of other culture. And that was true. Genghis Khan proved many times how strong his army was, defeating his enemies against all the odds.
Nowadays, the only news we can hear about Mongolia is that Russians are trying out their nuclear weapons in the steppes of this ancient empire. Or that the Chinese are placing farming robots to herd cattle in inner Mongolia.
We forget that modern Chinese, and modern Russians are the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan.
What about this “uncouth barbarian”…
Genghis Khan was one of the most deeply feared historical figures in the world for a good reason. Historians estimate that Genghis Khan is responsible for over 40 million deaths, and at that time it was equal to 11 percent of the world’s population. For comparison, we can look at World War II, which has put “only” around three percent of the world’s population, 60-80 million people, to the graveyard. What Genghis Khan did is downright scary when we put it in perspective, right?
Not bad for an “evil” uncouth barbarian.
Genghis Khan was the most feared human of the 13th century, who could destroy dynasties just by moving his little finger. He created the Mongol Empire all by himself and earned his eternal spot in the history books. However, a lot of people had to suffer for Genghis Khan to succeed.
In cities the Mongols were forced to conquer, Genghis Khan divided the civilians by profession. He drafted the few who were literate and those he could use as translators. Those who had been the city's most rich and powerful he wasted no time in killing, remembering that the rulers he had left behind after conquering the Tangut and the Jurchens had betrayed him soon after his army had withdrawn.
It is said that the Genghis Khan's military did not torture, mutilate or maim. But his enemies are reported as having done so. Captured Mongols were dragged through streets and killed for sport and to entertain city residents. Gruesome displays of stretching, emasculation, belly cutting and hacking to pieces were something European rulers were using to discourage potential enemies – as was soon to happen to William Wallace on orders from England's King Edward I. The Mongols merely slaughtered, and preferred doing so from a distance.
The city of Nishapur revolted against Mongol rule. The husband of Genghis Khan's daughter was killed, and, it is said, she asked that everyone in the city be put to death, and, according to the story, they were.
-Genghis Khan
Oh yes, the Mongolians were known for their horrendous torturing techniques. One of the most popular was pouring molten silver down the throat and ears of a victim.
Genghis Khan also liked bending his enemy’s back until the backbone snapped. If that sounds barbaric, skip this next part. So, the Mongols once celebrated victory over Russians in a very bizarre way. They picked all the Russian survivors, dropped them on the ground and put a heavy wooden gate on top of them. Then, Genghis Khan and the entire Mongol army had a huge banquet on that wooden gate. They ate, drank, and watched how Russians were dying one by one from the suffocation, pressure, and wounds.
Genghis Khan had so much power that he could do whatever he wanted. For instance, when Genghis occupied some new area, he would kill or enslave all the men and share all the women amongst his tribe.
Genghis Khan would even make beauty contests of captured women to decide which woman is the most beautiful one. Yeah, he was having his Miss Universe competition before it was cool. So, the queen of those beauty competitions would win the privilege to become one of many Genghis Khan’s women.
The rest of the Mongolian army would share all the other contestants. It shows us once again how cruel and barbaric Mongols were. I suppose that it was a different time and a different place, but the fact remains that when you have lost, your cities destroyed, and sacked, the victor can do whatever they want. And they wanted sex.
Lots and lost of sex.
Genghis Khan was able to destroy entire “impenetrable” cities easily.
When we look at what Genghis Khan achieved with the Mongol Empire, we cannot help but appreciate his mastermind as a warlord. It surely looks like Genghis Khan had three dragons with him just like Khaleesi.
I cannot find any other explanation of Genghis Khan’s success.
I mean, he defeated Jin Dynasty’s one million troops with only 90,000 Mongolians by his side. Yes, Genghis Khan managed to win a war with ten times fewer troops than his opponent’s army.
Jin Dynasty.
On top of that, he was invading China, so he had to overcome all the “little” problems such as the Great Wall of China.
Genghis Khan with his army had destroyed over 500,000 of Chinese troop before getting control of Northern China and Beijing. The rest of the Chinese army had to surrender to the power of Genghis Khan.
Destroying Jin Dynasty is only one of many examples of how great of a warlord Genghis Khan was. Also, he had some brutal and loyal men by his side, so let’s not rule out the dragon theory.
Physical force is not enough to achieve something as great as Genghis Khan did.
Yes, there is no doubt that he is the greatest and most brutal warlord in history, but he was also a very wise man. In 1201, during a battle, Genghis Khan was shot by an enemy archer. Needless to say, he was not happy about it.
So, after the Mongolian army won the battle, Genghis Khan spent some time looking for the man that shot him. He even pretended that it was not him who got shot, but his horse, so the enemy archer would have the courage to confront Genghis.
An unbelievable thing happened when the archer finally stepped out of the crowd and confessed shooting Genghis Khan.
Instead of killing his enemy, Genghis Khan recognized his talent and asked him to join the Mongolian army. The archer became a great general and loyally served Genghis for many years. That is one of the reasons why Mongol Empire was such a success back in the 13th century.
It is not a secret that Genghis Khan loved to have some bedroom time with all the different women. Whenever Genghis would conquer new land (he did it more frequent than people scroll Facebook nowadays), he would also get himself a couple of new wives.
As well as a gaggle of some “playthings”.
Genghis did that because he liked beautiful women, but it was also a very convenient way to demonstrate his power. Spreading his blood line all over Asia ensured peace in the entire Mongol Empire.
So, how many children did Genghis Khan have? It is pretty much impossible to tell the number, but historians estimate that today, around eight percent of men from Asia are his descendants. I cannot even start to process this number, but apparently, Genghis Khan was a great lover. No one in the history is even close to having such a wide family tree. So, next time when you talk about Genghis Khan, remember that it is a great chance that he is your ancestor.
Torture time.
Genghis Khan was a man of reason. He let the people in the Mongol Empire live a happy life as long as they followed his rules.
However, Genghis Khan cruelly punished everyone who tried to break those rules.
In Hungary and Poland the Mongols were outnumbered but tactically superior. They defeated several Hungarian armies. In early April, 1241, at the Battle of Lenica (Liegnitz) in Poland, they defeated an army that is said to have included heavily armored Teutonic knights. Dying in the battle was the most powerful of Polish dukes, Henryk II (Henry II).
-Genghis Khan
For example, when the governor of one of the cities in the Khwarazmian Empire took over Genghis Khan’s trade caravan and killed all the traders, Genghis Khan went berserker.
He sent 100,000 Mongols to the Khwarazmian Empire and killed thousands of people, including the governor.
Genghis Khan poured molten silver into the governor’s eyes and mouth until the poor guy roasted from the inside. That was a clear sign that anyone, stupid enough to harm the Mongol Empire, would have to face devastating consequences.
While Genghis Khan was consolidating his conquests in what had been the Khwarezmian Empire, a force of 40,000 Mongol horsemen pushed through Azerbaijan and Armenia. Without Genghis Khan they defeated Georgia's Christian crusaders, captured a Genoese trade-fortress in the Crimea and spent the winter along the coast of the Black Sea. In 1223, as they were headed back home, they met 80,000 warriors led by Prince Mstislav of Kiev. The Battle of Kalka River (map location) commenced. Staying out of range of the crude weapons of peasant infantry, and with better bows than opposing archers, they devastated the prince's standing army. Facing the prince's cavalry, they faked a retreat and drew the prince's armored cavalry forward, taking advantage of the over-confidence of the mounted aristocrats. Lighter and more mobile, the Mongols strung out and tired the pursuers and then attacked, killed and routed them.
-Genghis Khan
History shows that spreading fear worked perfectly in Genghis Khan’s favor. He still needed to invade some rebellious places from time to time, but for the most of the time, people in The Mongol Empire behaved really well.
Genghis Khan could be as powerful and respected as he wanted, but he still had to surrender to the laws of nature. Genghis Khan died in 1227, at the age of 65.
And why is all this important?
History tells us that psychopathic personalities in charge of nations that possess science, technology, and modern works tend to be blinded to the realities of the world. They become drunk with power, and forget that there are “bigger fish in the sea” and that you should not discount them because they are different…
…or they look different…
…or that they are “book worms”…
…or are drunk on vodka all the time…
…or whatever bullshit reinforcements that you want to believe. Genghis Khan serves as a stark and frightening reminder that there is always someone bigger, and better, and stronger than you are. And you should mistake their polite actions, their calm words, their soft tone of voice for a sign of weakness.
The result could be lethal.
"Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs"
- Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
Consider the reality
I could type until my fingers fall off, and no one is going to believe the statistics that pretty much show that a FIRE based economy isn’t capable of rebuilding, creating, or structuring anything. I can show you historical examples, you you all would ignore them. I can show you charts and graphs, but they will remain oblivious.
A FIRE economy is any economy based primarily on the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. Finance, insurance, and real estate are United States Census Bureau classifications. Barry Popik describes some early uses as far back as 1982. Since 2008, the term has been commonly used by Michael Hudson and Eric Janszen. It is New York City's largest industryand a prominent part of the service industry in the United States overall economy and other Western developed countries.
-Wikipedia
I argue that strategically, a nation that makes, creates and builds things is far superior to that that talks about things, writes about things, and tabulates numbers on spreadsheets. And this superiority manifests in numerous ways.
The historical displacement of America’s industry for replacement by lawyers, economists, bankers and real estate tycoons.
But rather than get into all the charts and the graphs, it get’s tiresome don’t you know, instead we are going to greatly simplify things and look at the far simpler model.
So what we are going to so is simplify the equations.
An exercise in simplification
We are going to create an imaginary nation, roughly the the same size and structural organization of the United States. We are going to call it “Freedom United!”.
And…
We are also going to create another nation, this is going to be a unified Asia that includes Russia, China and Iran. We will call it “Asia First!”
And…
Does this map remind you of anything?
How about this…
Genghis Khans empire.
Comparisons
What we are going to do is compare the two collective communities. For each one is comprised of a group of separate states or independent nations, all brought together under a common banner.
And when we do compare them, we see this…
Ah…
And the first thing that should strike the reader is that there is a major “real estate difference” involved.
Asia First! is much larger, geographically, than Freedom United! is.
But it’s more than that…
"Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."
- George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War, Chapter 4
The second thing that you must note it it is not only bigger, but it has more people, more factories, and more resources.
But let’s simplify things and note that while Freedom United! and Asia First! both have factories and R&D centers, the nature of them, and the location of them within the geographical territories are quite different.
Freedom United! has pretty much “offshored” it’s manufacturing capability to other nations and places, and what remains are “think tanks”, “conceptional Research” and “study centers”. They are staffed by bankers, accountants and highly paid diversity directors. Further, their location tends to be centralized to the major cities within the nation body.
Cities like Yorker City, San Chicago, and New Angles have their “industry” very close to the densely packed urban centers. And while there are certainly scattered factories and manufacturing center peppered throughout the nation, the vast bulk of them at located at the urban city centers.
Something like this…
Meanwhile, Asia First! not only has more factories, but they are scattered throughout the entire nation. Furthermore, they tend to make real physical things. Not spreadsheets, Power Point Presentations, and accounting evaluations. The owners and the executives are all merit driven as it is their culture. All the leadership can, if needed, go onto the factory floor and make the parts and equipment products themselves.
Like Freedom United!, they also tend to cluster, but instead of clustering with the major population centers, they cluster inside manufacturing communities that are widely separated and located in the vast tracks of the countryside.
Here’s a map of Guangdong. It is a collection of many, many, many smaller towns that host many, many, many factories. This area is a designated Tier 1 city in China and it is north of the principal city of Shenzhen. For your shit’s and giggles, MM used to live in one of these cities here in this region. It’s all factories, and hills. Factories and hills. Factories and hills.
Dongguang
.
The Human bridge is really a hassle I will tell you what. That’s the icon at the far lower left of the picture. I go over it maybe once ever few months. It’s traffic as far as the eye can see!
Now for our purposes, we will consider ASIA FIRST! to be much like this. Which regions of scattered communities and factories all spread out over wide expansive terrain.
It looks something like this…
Now…
Let’s compare the two nation states
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."
- Malcolm X
When you compare the two nations you notice something very important to our calculus here. No matter how smart, how prosperous, how beautiful or how exceptional one nation is compared to the other… a nation with a bigger population, and more factories, and resource will be able to out-produce and out-survive a lesser nation.
It’s the “Risk” strategy.
IntheRiskgame, the goal is simple: playersaimto conquer their enemies’ territories by building an army, moving their troops in, andengaginginbattle. Depending on therollofthedice, a player will either defeat the enemy or be defeated. This exciting game isfilledwithbetrayal, alliances, and surprise attacks.
We saw that during World War II with the Nazi Germans. While their military weapons industry was top rate, and the quality of their equipment was the best in the world, it was the ill-trained, masses and hordes of soldiers from Russia that was able to overwhelm Germany.
This idea that huge quantities of “average” soldiers, and mediocre equipment can compensate for very specialized, and efficient, and expensive weapons systems is not new. It’s just not well reported as the Freedom United! military-industrial lobby is desirous of keeping this issue quiet and “under wraps”.
Let’s compare the two nations side by side…
All this is very interesting, but let’s get to the point.
A comparison with the events of the last few years leading up to today.
America takes on Asia…
Freedom United! is just getting “clobbered” on the international scene. It is a military empire that has few remaining exports of value. It exports aircraft, and wheat, and some very specialized machines, but that’s about it. It’s primary revenue generating venue is in the banking, finance and real estate venues.
This nation has been fighting numerous wars all over the globe, and it’s leadership are drunk with power, and oblivious to the true realities of the world.
So, where they got this idea is unknown, they get this idea that they can take on and fight with Asia First! And that they would win!
What’s more, they seriously believe that they could draw out the battle and fighting for a long, long time.
Not just years and decades, but generations…
Mike Pompeo in India working on the QUAD to fight against China.
.
Now they know that it would be very difficult to fight on the geographical territory of Asia First! as it would result in a complete nuclear retaliation.
Asia First! combined has an enormous nuclear arsenal. It is far bigger, more technologically advanced, and with a larger military than what Freedom United! has.
Thus, they need to be able to fight Asia First! is such a way that Nuclear MAD doctrine is avoided.
They also know that they need to “bleed out” Asia First! in such a way as to give them time to overtake the nation through attrition. So they have established other areas by which the fighting can take place.
Create a MAJOR “false flag” event to ignite a war-footing.
Keep the fighting conventional. Avoid nuclear weapons.
Fight by proxies on predetermined proxy nation locations.
Bleed Asia First! through dominance on the oceans, and in Space.
Isolate Asia First! in all ways and means.
Prevent war from hitting the mainland Freedom United!
The battles are designed to occur on proxy locations.
The idea is to have wars and battles taking place in far-away lands, so that no one in Freedom United! is harmed, and a direct nuclear strike with Asia First! can be avoided. These proxy war locations (already decided upon by FREEDOM UNITED!) are shown in gold.
And of course, the idea is that Freedom United! would fight Asia First on these designated battlefields. These areas are known as the QUAD.
It’s a brilliant plan.
Except one thing.
Some of those QUAD areas are considered to be Asian First! territory. And pretending that they are not is a egregious mistake. And Asia First! has said so explicitly. These are “RED LINES” that one dare not cross.
But the leadership of Freedom United! just chucked, and pretended that they didn’t hear the statements.
A Battle Rages
So let’s go through the logical progression of things.
Logical.
Progression.
Of events as we know them.
Freedom United! creates a series of “false flags” to justify a war with Asia First!. There are a number of events stacked up that are ready to go. The question is which one will Freedom First! use to “get the ball rolling”?
And within a short period of time there are global military actions globally.
Initially, it looks like everything is going to plan. One or two QUAD members decide to “sit the conflict out”, but the rest support the effort in varying degrees.
Trade slows to a trickle and even stops.
The people of Freedom United! are all in gleeful patriotism, and conventional fighting is occurring all along the “doorsteps” of Asia First!. As planned! Off in far-away lands!
American media constantly pushes for war because they have no idea what real war is. To them, going to war is like spanking a child: possibly backfiring socially, but no real danger to their own lives. Most of the time, they just send bombers and take cool videos. When guys have to be sent on the ground, their deaths can be used to fuel the national hard-on America has for its military. I call it the "thank you for your service culture.
America has waged war on minor nations for so long that they can't even imagine that fighting another nation might result in aunt Nancy meeting her creator early. To them, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Russia, it's all the same.
Also, the infantile thinking in terms of good and bad doesn't help.
Posted by: Eeny | Apr 12 2021 18:32 utc | 12
They can sit down in front of their televisions set, and social media feeds and feel so proud and patriotic about how strong and powerful their military is, and finally doing something about all those evil dirty filthy Asia First! people.
But then something happens.
Those “neutral” QUAD nations are not all independent. Some of them are actually geographically part of Asia First! They are not considered to be “protectorates of Freedom United!” instead they are recognized by the UN as actual sovereign territory of Asia First!, and…
…when the military operations in support of the False Flag events start to occur, action starts to unfold very rapidly.
Asia First! decides that enough is enough, and that this bullshit must end. So it unleashes a combined military horror upon Freedom United!.
All Hell breaks loose.
The event was is brief and is over quickly. All in all an equal exchange of nuclear conflagration occurs to both nation states. No one is spared.
But…
The nuclear strike has been planned for decades. It’s not spontaneous.
And one nation decides to end it, and it remains the victor who lays the terms of surrender of the other nation.
Which nation would be the winner, and which would be the loser, do you suppose?
It looks like this…
Global Devastation
We can see what happens.
Not only are the designated battlefields (pre-established by Freedom United!) hit with crippling nuclear salvos, but the “untouchable” cities of Freedom United! are also targeted. In fact, ALL of the major urban ares of Freedom United! are erased from the globe.
All of the major cites of Freedom United are erased from the map. All of the military bases in support of the military empire of Freedom United! are turned into slag and glass. The capital, and all the leadership locations are craters surrounded by radioactive wasteland.
Freedom United! ceases to be a nation.
The world is in big trouble.
It did come at a price.
Asia First! also took some hits and they did not survive unscathed. But we can clearly see that even though there was an equal exchange of hostilities, the nation that suffered the worst was Freedom United! by the simple geography of it’s cities and manufacturing base.
The Aftermath
Now consider the years following this nuclear exchange.
How was the globe able to recover, and which nations recovered the best?
And…
Which nations are best able to recover?
Which nations would be able to recover within a decade?
Which nations would be able to recover within 50 years?
Let’s take a look at that…
Recovery Suggestions
Well, there are far too many variables at play to make any kind of reasonable determine what could happen. All we have are the numbers and the proportions. Asia First! could lose 75% of it’s population and still be better off than Freedom United! And then there is the destruction of factories and cities, and the ability to rebuild. In all aspects, Asia First! would be far better equipped to rebuild, stabilize the situation, and begin all over.
Not so with Freedom United!
Because of this, and the fact that Freedom United! is already balkanized, it seems logical that whatever the condition of Freedom United! would be after a major nuclear exchange, it would fracture into many different singular, independent cities, and independent nations. Some would be healthier than others. Some would be absolutely horrible and horrid places to live, while others might be generally unscathed.
We can also say that there would probably be some serious internal domestic conflict as a nation of “independence” (and high levels of gun ownership and decades of “race bating”) and government actions that pit one group against another…
… that there would be a relatively long period of adjustment to the new normal.
There might be efforts to maintain the original constitution, while there might be efforts to maintain the independence of the individual states. There might be efforts to carve out new states and new territories, as well as neighboring nations deciding to annex some of the lands that are now “up for grabs”.
No matter, how contentious, how difficult, how problematic, and how confused, one thing is certain, the Federal Government will no longer exist, and it would take a herculean effort to keep the Freedom United! national unity intact after a global nuclear exchange.
Conclusion
Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. Nuclear war has become a multi-billion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”. Massive amounts of money have been allocated by the Joe Biden Administration to feed the weapons industry including the Pentagons’ 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program first launched under Obama, is ongoing under the Biden administration.Michel Chossudovsky, April 12, 2021
This post looks at the world like the simplified game of “Risk”. The nation with the bigger population and armies will be able to offset what ever technical advantage you might possess. This is not always true, of course. (Consider the Incas when they met the Spanish in search of gold.) But it is often true enough to say that perhaps 80% of modern conflict follows this rule.
We can wish that advantage can be mitigated by brilliant generals (Carl von Clausewitz, and Rommel), or exciting cutting edge technology (radar, sonar, stealth, cruse missile, hyper-glide technology, drones, nuclear weapons), and elite and specialized training (Seals, Green Berets) but for the most part these advantages are on the Tactical level, not on the Strategic level.
Avalon Hill’s game “Squad Leader” simulates tactical level military warfare on the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia during World War II.
But we have to take into account something else. This is something that is rarely if ever addressed…
… incompetence at the leadership level.
The public faces change, but the stupidity remains because, like Rome, you can change the leadership… but the system is faulted and humans will abuse it.
When Germany ran over France in 1941 the French generals were ill prepared to deal with the Germans. When World War II broke out, Stalin was so incompetent, that he locked himself in the room and got drunk waiting for people to haul him away and arrest him.
When Genghis Khan attacked Europe, and the Silk Road, many nations and city state had an unrealistic understanding of the threat that was facing them, and they had an artificially inflated idea of what they were capable of.
Like the 20,000 armored knights that rode into battle to take on 4 million angry Huns... none survived.
In this overly simplified scenario we discount advantages on the tactical level.
Instead we compare geography and leadership (only). In this set of goggles it is quite obvious that Asia First! has a decided advantage over Freedom United!. Yet, as much fun as this very frightening scenario plays out, we do not know what to expect, and our guesses can be wildly inaccurate.
But, and yet, given the little what we know, and what we have learned from history, there is a case that the scenario presented here has a 60% likelihood of occurring. The Freedom Forever! nation will not easily recover at any pre-confligation level, and it is ridiculous to assume that it would. No matter what “secret weapon” the neocons in control of the nation might think.
We need only review the catastrophic mistakes of the Hungarians when they encountered the Huns of Genghis Khan to underline this point.
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i don't know that the usa has any type of long range strategy... and i don't think they care who dies, or what mess they make of other places on the planet either... it seems the usa is intent on serving the god of mammon only.. this certainly works for wall st and the military industrial complex... i really don't think concern for the welfare of other nations, or the planet for that matter, are any considerations washington gives at this point... and to have the same brand of neo cons in bidens gov't as the previous bunch, is not a positive sign either.. it is hard to appreciate the constant hate towards russia these people have.. i find it impossible to understand in fact..
It’s a nice day out. And maybe too nice to complain about the mess the United States is today. But that’s life, don’t you know. Human constructions, nations and people, come and go. But the weather, society, the birds and the bees continue oblivious to whatever the United States does.
Too nice a day to worry about the collapse of whatever the heck it is. But it’s happening whether we want to watch or not. Meanwhile it’s not only the “rank and file” citizenry; the “Joe Sixpack” in the “flyover states” discussing this, but also the “elites” in the posh enclaves inside the elite residential areas of the North east. And they so banter about…
Here we have a couple of elites chatting about what’s going on.
While (initially) laws might say that everyone is equal, what actually happens is that certain types of people (psychopaths) tend to gobble up all the “power” over time. Thus resulting in a society of “elites” who rule over the nation.
These elites are talking.
I found it interesting, not only for the way that they are approaching the current situation; all, but also for what they know, and what they are oblivious to. As people used to say in the hills “He might be smart, but he has shit for brains”…
These people talk about life inside of the Washington DC “beltway”, and the various “alphabet” agencies while they live in their nice plush estates, inside their gated communities. You cannot blame them. They are not oblivious to what is going on in America, and in the rest of the world on the international scene, instead, they view it from a set of “eyeglasses” that is alien to the rest of us. thus their discourse, and bantering about has value and is valuable to us.
It’s worth taking the time to absorb…
Here's a pretty good read about what America is, and who the "leaders" are. It came from Culture News, and I edited to fit this venue. the author wrote long expansive paragraph-long run-on sentences that was difficult to read. But aside from that, and my own artistic flourishes in this particular article, the content remains intact. It's a good read. All credit to the author.
Please note that I interjected quotes and comments from the “Joe Six-pack” audience at the start of each section, just to keep everyone grounded. They are in dialog boxes.
The Codevilla Tapes
The historian of American statecraft and spycraft and conservative political philosopher Angelo Codevilla talks about the ruling elite, Jonathan Pollard, and the rise of the techno-surveillance state—and the consequent demise of the American Empire.
That’s the terror and the beauty of American life in a nutshell.
It is the answer to the secret of how 300 million people from many different places can live together between two oceans, sharing a future-oriented outlook that methodically obliterates any ties to the past.
All prior lived experience is transformed into science fiction…
…or else into self-serving evidence of …
…the present-day moral, intellectual, and technological superiority of the brave imagineers…
…those who are fortunate enough to live here, in the “Now”, while all who came before them are cursed.
It’s out of control
Yes it is.
Thanks for pointing out the planning of US aggression. One hopes this is all brinksmanship on all sides.
If the plan is to take Crimea, then the USA has completely lost its mind and is hellbent on extinction rather than face collapse of 'the greatest country in the history of the world.'
It's understandable that those wanting to see the USA get its ears boxed are frustrated by Putin/Russia's strategy of repeatedly 'turning the other cheek.'
Rather than weakness, we can see now how Russia has consolidated its alliances, developed advanced weaponry, and consistently worked within International Law and not the Rules Based International Order of Might Makes Right.
The United States and its equally bankrupt allies/vassals face a three-front battlefield - Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Obviously the supply chain is a problem.
So, dear friends, the question is: How batshit crazy are the folks pulling the strings?
No one can or does control such fantasy-driven machinery…
… which seems incapable of operating in any other way than it does, i.e., in a space with no beginning and no end…
… but trending always toward utopia perfection.
Learning to accept imperfection and failure may be an emotionally healthy way for adults to negotiate the terrors and absurdities of human existence, but it is not the highway to the perfectibility of man or woman-kind.
Because the large-scale explanations that Americans offer each other about how their country works, or doesn’t work, arise from working backwards from the expectation of some future storybook perfection…
…Americans tend to be either childishly conspiratorial or cartoonishly stupid…
…because those are the types of explanation that tend to win out…
…once you stipulate an ever-more-perfect-and-glorious future…
…as the inevitable outcome of whatever snake oil it is that you are pitching to the suckers.
The Snake Oil Addiction
To my mind, the most chilling sentence uttered in this whole affair was by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He said "that any attempts to start a new military conflict in Ukraine’s war-torn east could end up destroying Ukraine".
Lavrov never speaks like this and the Russians do not bluff.
Zelensky signed a decree recently stating Ukraine's intent to take back the Donbass AND Crimea! This means if Ukraine attacks, Russia WILL intervene and destroy Ukraine as we know it. I think it means Russian tanks will roll on Kiev to stop this war forever.
Moves like recalling the US Ambassador are very ominous and usually prelude all out war between nations. Combined with Lavrov's warning, Russia is giving all possible signals it is ready for war with Ukraine AND the US.
In today’s America, these explanations come in the form of shallow and sweeping identitarian polemics (“white people” or “globalists” run “everything”)…
… indecipherable academese backed by graphed coefficients (people are motivated by “rational self-interest,” as calculated by academics)…
… or as appeals to a glorified and abstracted historical past (“the Founding Fathers,” “the melting pot”)…
…whose promises of future perfection may have seemed real enough to past generations, but must now grow ever more distant with every new iteration of Moore’s law.
Who is in control?
Martyanov is correct in the sense that the USA can only claim to be "universal" (empire) as long as it keeps the European Peninsula in its hold.
psychohistorian @ 4 states that the USA would still be the world empire even if it loses Europe because it has the financial system. But this financial system, including the dollar standard, would mean jack shit without Eurasia. The Americans would lose, by definition of the term, the petrodollar if it were to lose Eurasia, plus most of the world trade. The USD would have nothing to back it up as the world standard fiat currency; at most it would still be a strong, well-respected fiat currency (a la Swiss Franc, Pound Sterling, Euro, Yen and now the Renminbi) which would probably still be the currency used in Latin America and the Pacific region - but the power to enforce economic sanctions the USA has today would be instantly over.
Without its great foothold in the European Peninsula, the USA would certainly lose any serious claim to be a world empire. Maybe if it somehow would be able to keep the Middle East (through Israel and Saudi Arabia) - but that would probably be a Justinian version of the American Empire, not the Good Ol' American Empire of the times of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
If it were to lose the European Peninsula, the USA would just have Japan, South Korea, Australia and other Western Pacific islands as its last serious footholds in Eurasia. It would be what I called here sometimes a "Byzantine" USA - essentially a Western Empire, with some footholds in the Western Pacific, memories of a glorious long gone past. It would not mean the end of the American Empire by any stretch of the imagination (the true end of the American Empire can only be achieved by internal conflicts/contradictions, not external), but it would certainly mean the beginning of another era (a much less glorious one) of its history, for sure.
Which is not to say that America isn’t governed by an elite class, just like China, or Japan, or France is—only that the ability of that class to actually rule anything is even more constrained by the native culture.
The idea that an advanced technologically driven capitalist or socialist society of several hundred million people can be run by something other than an elite is silly or scary…
…the most obvious present-day alternative being a society run by ever-advancing forms of AI, which will no doubt have only the best interests of their flesh-and-blood creators at heart.
Yet it is possible to accept all of this, and to posit that the reason that the American ruling class seems so indisputably impotent and unmoored in the present…
…is that there is no such thing as America anymore.
In place of the America that is described in history books…
…, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth…
… has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American.
That for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire.
Which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial.
The American Empire
I guess the Russians made clear they mean business:
"What happened and how this could be, that mighty Ukraine and her US handlers suddenly want to prioritize "political and diplomatic way". Well, here is some snippet of suddenly a much more peaceful mindset with a bit of explanation of this sudden (not really) change:
The United States on Thursday said it was discussing Russia’s military build-up near the Ukrainian border with Nato allies as fresh reports showed Russia deploying ballistic missiles to the area. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that Washington was “increasingly concerned” about what has been described as Russia’s largest military manoeuvres in the area since the break-out of hostilities in eastern Ukraine in 2014. “Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs,” Ms Psaki told reporters on Thursday."
And suddenly the Ukrainians become angels of peace: ""Liberation" of Donbass by power means will lead to mass loss of life among civilians and military personnel--this is unacceptable for Kiev, stated the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Ruslan Khomchak. "Being dedicated to universal human values and norms of humanitarian law (I am under the table trying to get up....), our state places the life of its citizens on the first place (I tried to get up, fell again...)",
While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was…
…starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans.
Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not…
… but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered.
To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought…
… a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure.
Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals…
….of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today…
…and Kurds tomorrow…
…in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare.
Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids…
… who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended…
… whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history….
…but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together…
…and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore.
America is run by a class of people
A quick consideration on the MIC question.
It is patent that the USA, at this stage of its development, depends almost entirely on its defense industry - which is backed up and insulated from the law of capitalism by the State - on keeping its technological prowess.
We already know that, as the world's financial superpower, the USA is destined to deindustrialize (because that's the price of keeping the USD as the standard fiat currency without incurring the danger of hyperinflation). As it deindustrializes, another part of the world must industrialize - in this case, Asia (China in particular). That's the conditio sine qua non for the financial hegemony to exist without quickly self-destructing, i.e. another part of the world has to industrialize, you can't have a financial superpower without an industrial superpower, as the commodities are what back up money (as Marx once said, the use value is the Träger des Tauschwerts, the surface over which the house of cards can be erected).
By exclusion, the USA can only keep its status as the financial superpower as long as it keeps absolute control over the Seven Seas (most of trade still happens through the sea), which means a strong defense industry must be kept at the behest of the financial sector (Wall Street). The Defense industry is, therefore, the exception to the rule - alongside the electronics-communications system (which gives material form to the financial system, to the USD and the stock market) - over which the USA cannot escape. If it can keep recycling USDs through multi-billionaire defense contracts with other countries, the better, as it gives another life extension to the USD. This is what happen in the famous Petrodollar scheme, where Saudi Arabia denominates its oil in USDs by buying American T-bonds, but also American military weapons and systems, which keeps Saudi Arabia sovereign and intact to keep its oil reserves denominated in USDs, in a virtuous cycle.
That's why arms sales are so important to the USA: it keeps, at the same time, its domination of the Seven Seas and therefore of world trade thus keeping its financial system the dominant one, and decelerate its inevitable deindustrialization process.
The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone.
Under whatever professional job titles…
… the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats…
…university bureaucrats,
…corporate bureaucrats,
…local, state and federal bureaucrats,
…law enforcement bureaucrats,
…health bureaucrats,
…knowledge bureaucrats,
… spy agency bureaucrats.
At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices…
…with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers.
They do so in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders.
Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances.
All those people together comprise a class.
For themselves, and only for themselves.
I’ve never commented before. I’m in South Africa, with family members in Palestine and family members who’ve lived through WWII.
I truly hope that Russia has a strategy to make the US Mainland (I also have many American friends I dearly love) carry some of the consequences of anglozionist adventures abroad.
The world is imploding/exploding under the weight of Western hegemony.
None of the people I love (including my dearest family and friends or myself) will probably survive consequences a conflagration of this type could unleash. But what option is there to responding to ongoing geopolitical abuse by the US-ZIO-EU? How sad! Five billion years of evolution and this is what it comes to?
Another thing that residents of the broad North American expanse between Canada and Mexico have noticed is…
…that the programs and remedies that this class has promoted, both at home and abroad…
… have greatly enriched and empowered a small number of people, namely themselves.
While the broader American population continues to decline in wealth, health, and education.
Meanwhile, the American Empire that the ruling elite administers is collapsing.
The popularity of such observations on both the left and the right is what accounts for the rise of Donald Trump, on one hand, and of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other hand…
… among an electorate that has not been historically distinguished by its embrace of radicalism.
Add those voter bases together, and perhaps 75% of Americans would seem to agree that their country, however you think of it, is in big trouble.
And that the fault lies with the country’s self-infatuated and apparently not-so-brilliant elite.
Why Empires Fall
Xerxes, Russia (or any other country) is unlikely to “make the US Mainland carry some of the consequences of anglozionist adventures abroad”. This could only happen in a “post-war/Nurenburg” type scenario, once the US has already been defeated. What they will do, and have been doing, is to separate from the US monetary system, work together with other resistance countries, and let the US isolate itself and fade as a result of this.
Fortunately the US empire has been weakening, and other countries developing and strengthening and working together under an ostensibly fairer paradigm. The worm has been turning against the empire. This is something to be happy and hopeful about.
Every student of history has their own theory about how and why empires fall.
My theory is this:
The wealth of any empire flows disproportionately to the capital, where it nourishes the growth, wealth, and power of the ruling elite.
As the elite grows richer and more powerful, the gulf between the rulers and the ruled widens…
… until the beliefs and manners of the elite bear little connection to those of their countrymen…
… whom they increasingly think of as their clients or subjects.
That distance creates resentment and friction.
In response to which the elite takes measures to protect itself.
The more wealth and power the elite controls, the more insulation it must purchase.
Disastrous mistakes are hailed as victories or are made to appear to have no consequences at all.
This is done in order to protect the aura of collective infallibility that protects ruling class power and privilege.
What happens next…
the US sociopaths want to do in Europe much the same as what they did in Iraq - but using different means/proxies:
Create a situation of much chaos in a chosen country, as a relatively modern state dissolves, and use that as a pretext both to inject themselves even more into that region's affairs, and also to spread the 'contagion' of 'chaos' to other surrounding states..... where the US sociopaths who run the Empire will try (again) for regime changes in the surrounding nations (from Serbia to Georgia to the other Black Sea states) and beyond.
that the puppet Zelensky has been off to Qatar and next Turkey is a sure sign that these mindless people in the US national security state are going to try once again using the psychopathic jihadists as one of their means to inject instability, terror and chaos into the region.
on top of all that, as many commentators have already pointed out, as soon as Russia intervenes in a big way (if it does go that route), the Nord-Stream project is over with, Germany is without its gas and gas hub plans - plus there's now no gas/oil going to Europe via the Ukraine.
So two birds with one stone: northern/central Europe is then even more dependent on the US for energy, as well as 'protection' from the big bad bear.
What happens next is pretty much inevitable in every time and place…
…Spain, France, Great Britain, Moghul India, you name it…
… Freed from the laws of gravity, the elite turns from the hard work of correct strategizing and wise policymaking…
…to the much less time-consuming and much more pleasant work of perpetuating its own privileges forever.
In the course of which endeavor the ruling elite is revealed to be a bunch of idiots and perverts who spend their time prancing around half naked while setting the territories they rule on fire.
The few remaining decent and competent people flee this revolting spectacle, while the elite compounds its mistakes in an orgy of failure.
The empire then collapses.
Sanity Check
Interesting to see the sudden back-peddling by the Kiev mouthpieces. I see a few different things going on here. First, and the biggest, is that I have come to believe that Russia (and China) has finally had enough, what with the constant pinpricks of the Trump years and now the absolute vitriol and diplomacy-killing antics of O'Biden, and have decided that everything else has been tried, the only way the US will listen is if it gets its nose bloodied, and bloodied good. Too many years of no consequences. So with this in mind, I believe Russia (and perhaps China) are actually looking for a good opportunity to inflict pain.
In the hopes of confirming or disproving my theory, I recently traveled out to a vineyard in Plymouth, Northern California. There I found Angelo Codevilla.
He, who along with Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is one of the few American political philosophers who combines a deep sense of the Western moral and philosophical traditions with a hard-nosed sense of how the American political system actually works.
While I am naturally more inclined toward Walzer-ism, I thought it would be fair minded to give Codevilla a hearing, despite the fact that he identifies as a conservative Catholic rather than as a liberal Northeastern Jew.
As a sometime student of intelligence work, I will also admit to being an attentive reader of Codevilla’s book Informing Statecraft.
Which together with Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost offers a fair guide to the karmic evolution of the U.S. intelligence community.
Codevilla’s former boss in the U.S. Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had this to say about his protégé’s book:
Woodrow Wilson once spoke of the demands that would be made on Presidents in the age to come; demands of a kind that could only be met by “wise and prudent athletes, a small class.” Such is Angelo Codevilla; one of the small class of intelligence analysts who has actually been there. Read him; although I plead: Do not invariably agree!
What follows is an edited record of our conversation, which began when I arrived at the Codevilla vineyard in the evening and then continued the next morning, after the Codevillas invited me to spend the night at their house and then served me a delicious breakfast.
***
The Ruling Elite
David Samuels: In 2010, you wrote an article, which then became a book, in which you predicted the rise of someone like Donald Trump as well as the political chaos and stripping away of institutional authority that we’ve lived through since. Did you think your prediction would come true so quickly?
Angelo Codevilla: I didn’t predict anything. I described a situation which had already come into existence. Namely, that the United States has developed a ruling class that sees itself as distinct from the raw masses of the rest of America. That the distinction that they saw, and which had come to exist, between these classes, comprised tastes and habits as well as ideas. Above all, that it had to do with the relative attachment, or lack thereof, of each of these classes to government.
David Samuels: One of the things that struck me about your original piece was your portrait of the American elite as a single class that seamlessly spans both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Angelo Codevilla: Of course, yes. Not in exactly the same way, though; what I said was that the Democrats were the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.
The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.
The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.
David Samuels: As a young person moving through American elite institutions, I was always struck by the marginal status of those other people you mention, Republicans. Clearly, they were not as bright as me and my friends were, which is why they were marginal, even if they had an easier path to some kind of dubious status as pseudo-intellectuals in their second- or third-rate party organs. That hardly mattered, though. The New York Times was the important newspaper, and it was a liberal newspaper. The New Yorker was an important magazine, and so it was a liberal magazine. Right-wing types might look instead to the Conservative Review of Books, published out of Mobile, Alabama, or the Jesuit review of something or another. But nobody was quaking in their boots about how such places might review your work. All the cultural capital was on the Democratic side of the ledger.
Angelo Codevilla: What a marvelous recitation of ruling class prejudice.
Of course, you would not have judged them to be nearly as intelligent as you folks were. And you probably didn’t imagine that others would think you less intelligent.
David Samuels: Let them rant and rave about their conspiracy theories and whatnot. They didn’t matter.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, they didn’t matter. Because of the power that you wielded, because of the institutions that you controlled.
Now let me give you an alternative. In France, with which you tell me you are acquainted, you have meritocracy in government and institutions. Meritocracy ensured by competitive exams. I, and a bunch of nonliberal democrats as myself, would be absolutely delighted if institutions like TheNew York Times, TheAtlantic, were to open their pages to people who bested others in competitive exams. But of course, they’re not thinking at all of doing that. As a matter of fact, the institutions of liberal America have been moving away from competitive exams as fast as they know how.
In living memory, and I’m an example of that, it was for a time possible for nonliberal Democrats to get into the American foreign service, and if they did as I did, and scored number one in their class, they would have their choice of assignments. But now, you have all sorts of new criteria for admission into the foreign service, which have supposedly ensured greater diversity. In fact, what they had done was to eliminate the possibility that the joint might be invaded by lesser beings of superior intelligence.
David Samuels: There is a curious mélange of dispensations under which people are escorted into the grand ballroom of the good and the great, right? Category one were with high test scores. Then there were the children of people who had gone to these institutions in previous generations, whose parents have money and might be named Cabot or Lowell. Then there were the admissions categories that cover you in the opposite direction—4.8% African Americans plus at least one white person who grew up without shoes in the mountains of West Virginia. These covering cases were useful because they could be trumpeted as proof of how far and wide the net was cast. All of which went to show that the most meritorious people were all gathered together in this place, and were therefore fit to rule everyone else.
Angelo Codevilla: Merit as defined by what?
David Samuels: I have no idea.
Angelo Codevilla: Merit as defined by the capacity to be attractive to those at the top of the heap. In other words what you have is rightly called not meritocracy, but co-option.
Now it is one of the fundamental truths of our co-option that it results in a negative selection of elites. That each group selects people who are just a smacking below themselves, so that generation after generation, the quality of those at the top deteriorates.
David Samuels: Are you suggesting that the all-white Christian male elites, who largely inherited their status from their parents, were more deserving of their elevated status than their more diverse counterparts, like the people who ran American foreign policy under President Barack Obama?
Angelo Codevilla: I don’t know that the statesmen of the 1920s and ’30s were any more meritorious than the folks under Barack Obama, because they themselves were not selected by any meritocratic criteria, as you suggest. However, I do know, having taught college for many years, that the amount of work that was done by college students 50 years ago or more was considerably greater than the amount of work that is done by college graduates today.
David Samuels: As a graduate of two elite American universities, I am entirely willing to grant that point.
Angelo Codevilla: Them that don’t work so much don’t learn so much, usually.
David Samuels: There is something funny to me about your description of these people as the “elite” or a “ruling class,” though. I picture grand country homes like in the Masterpiece Theatre production of Brideshead Revisited. But if you look at your American elite, you find earnest bureaucratic types living in collegiate apartments with Ikea furniture.
Angelo Codevilla: No. Not Ikea furniture.
David Samuels: You’re talking about a class of people who are academics or lawyer-bureaucrats living on federal government and NGO salaries.
Angelo Codevilla: They have far more money than people who don’t have similar government attachments. The fact is that proximity to government power has meant, and does mean, more money and greater possibility.
David Samuels: I think about the tech oligarchs who park their multibillion-dollar fortunes offshore.
Angelo Codevilla: I would dispute that.
David Samuels: Really? How many tens of billions of dollars has Apple parked offshore? How much money do Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg pay in taxes?
Angelo Codevilla: Apple and Bill Gates have secured their money, not so much by relocating, but by having become the biggest lobbyists in the country. That is the source of their financial security.
The point of the ruling class is precisely the confusion of public and private power. This is, in fact, this is becoming in fact a corporate state. Which by the way was pioneered by one of my former countrymen by the name of Benito.
David Samuels: So, when you’re talking about the ruling class, you’re positing a continuum between the Silicon Valley oligarchs with their hundred-billion-dollar fortunes and these public employee and NGO types.
Angelo Codevilla: I am indeed. That is the meaning of the word party. The Democratic Party is in fact composed of the very people that you are talking about.
Parties are by nature coalitions, each part of which benefits from the other. But they share certain things in common. One of them is contempt for Americans who are outside of their ranks.
David Samuels: You call those contemptible people the “country party.”
Angelo Codevilla: Precisely. Here, I’m borrowing an 18th-century British term.
David Samuels: I thought it was a good term because it brings to mind country music.
Angelo Codevilla: That too. Have you ever been to Branson, Missouri? Do you even know what it is?
David Samuels: I gather it’s neither Aspen nor Hollywood.
Angelo Codevilla: Branson, Missouri, is an entertainment center, larger in every way than Hollywood. It is located in Branson, Missouri, in the Ozarks. It is one of the homes of country music stars and starlets. It’s a huge complex of every kind of family entertainment, from bass fishing to theater, music, museums, anything you can imagine. Now the fact that you have never heard of it typifies the limitations of the ruling class.
David Samuels: My oligarchical snobbery.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no. You haven’t even risen to that.
David Samuels: I’m a piker. I bet $5 on the trifecta at the dog track.
Angelo Codevilla: It typifies the limitations of the ruling class mind, not even to understand that over which you are lording it.
David Samuels: So, what role do the poor and disadvantaged people of America play in your scheme? As I’m sure you understand, the reason we members of the elite class accumulate so much money and power is to be good allies for those who are less fortunate than we are. At least that’s what they teach my children in these schools that cost $35,000 a year.
Angelo Codevilla: You certainly do teach them that. It is a youthful pretense. It is a pretense to which the Roman patricians did not stoop.
David Samuels: But eventually they did, right? Constantine got them. The nobles all made public displays of their Christian charity.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, go back. The Roman patricians call these unfortunates clients. Their relationship with their clients is precisely your relationship with the unfortunate and the poor. They are your pawns, the people whose votes you take.
David Samuels: So, when I express my sincere concern about transgender rights, you would presumably accuse me of manufacturing a new category of clients—and at the same time, a new class of bigots for me to self-righteously oppose.
Angelo Codevilla: You are not manufacturing a class, or rather you are exploiting that class’ weakness to turn that class into clients.
Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.
David Samuels: What an ungenerous way to describe my noble instinct to help the less fortunate. Do the less fortunate truly have nothing to be aggrieved about, here in America?
Angelo Codevilla: Whatever they have to be aggrieved about, that grievance serves your instrumental purpose. Their grievance is your happiness. If they didn’t have a grievance, you’d try to manufacture it. Their having a grievance is an occasion for you to, to sharpen it, to scratch it, and to make it more relevant to them than it otherwise would be.
David Samuels: So, what exactly does the authority of the beneficent class I am supposedly part of, and which you seem to abhor, rest upon? There is the inherent rightness of my views, of course, which is proven by science—
Angelo Codevilla: Well, no. It is founded upon your will to power.
David Samuels: But look at all the wonderful benefits we elitists have to offer, like Davos in the wintertime. Why shiver out in the cold, Angelo?
Angelo Codevilla: Let me crib my response to you. Verily, verily I say unto thee, they have their reward. Do people in your class know where that comes from?
David Samuels: I’m a Jew, so I get a mulligan on quotations from the New Testament.
Angelo Codevilla: I read the first part of the Bible as well as the second, so you ought to read the second as well as the first.
David Samuels: So people have insisted to the Jews throughout our history.
Now tell me: How does your eccentric description of the American elites square with what we know to be the American democratic system? Congress makes the laws. The president of the United States is in charge of the executive functions of government. And then there’s the Supreme Court, which makes sure everything’s constitutionally kosher.
What you are describing is a kind of semiconspiratorial extraconstitutional elite superstructure whose actions do not accord with American civics textbooks or what I read in the newspaper.
Angelo Codevilla: Thank you! Right over the plate.
You are describing, and the textbooks describe, what used to be the American system of government, which has not existed since the late 1930s. The last attempt to revive that system, to make it rise up out of the overlay of administrative agencies that the New Deal built, was the Supreme Court of Schechter Poultry vs. the United States, 1935, the essence of which decision was to say that a legislative power cannot be delegated. Were that maxim to be enforced, the FAA, the FCC, and on and on, all of these agencies would cease to exist because they are, quite literally, unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court has held them to be constitutional under the fiction that they are in fact merely filling in the interstices of laws. However, your average law passed by Congress these days consists almost exclusively of grants to these agencies to do whatever it is they wish.
Which is why, when Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare that we would only know what it contained after it was passed, she was entirely correct. She was describing the way the American government works, which is in fact, to use your words, a vast conspiracy between the best lawyers on the outside and the best lawyers on the inside of government. They call each other, both on the inside and the outside, stakeholders. And the rest of us are what, scumbags?
David Samuels: Deplorables.
Angelo Codevilla: Deplorables, yes. But we’re not stakeholders, we who are neither regulators nor regulated entities, but rather ordinary people. We are not parties to this covenant.
There’s a lecture given by James Wilson, the signer of the Declaration of Independence and the head of the first American law school, about the difference between American law and law everywhere else in the Western world. Elsewhere, law came from power. In America, positive law will be valid only if it was in accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s god.
David Samuels: But that’s not the basis of the revolt of the deplorables, or the country party, as you call it.
Angelo Codevilla: The basis of the revolt is simple. We realize that you hate us and therefore we hate you back. And we will take anybody, not that we found this man who fits our description, because Donald Trump didn’t fit anybody’s description of what they wanted. But we will take anybody who’ll take a swing at you.
Which is why I originally wrote at the back of that essay, that this revolution would be for the better or the worse. Because of the urgency that the country class felt. For getting out of all of this.
David Samuels: You seem to have had a marvelous life, though.
Angelo Codevilla: Fraught with all manner of difficulties. I had several job offers just as I was finishing my comps, and then I got drafted. By the time I came out of the service, there were no jobs to be had. And so first I worked at a jerkwater college in Pennsylvania. Too awful for words, I got out of there, but I couldn’t find anything else. So I did the only thing that I could do, which is to pass exams. I got into the foreign service. And then from there to the Hill and then to Stanford to the Hoover Institution and then to Boston. While I was on the Hill, I also taught ancient and modern political thought in Georgetown.
I probably would have done better for myself and my family if I stayed in the foreign service. Or, in the depths of my depression I got admitted to Berkeley Law school. But hey, you’re right. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
David Samuels: You got to write. You got to think. You got to see the kinds of things that were going to feed your writing.
Angelo Codevilla: I got to teach a lot of students, several of them are teaching right now. And they’re doing good work. Books, we’ll see. I don’t think I’m going to write another book because the last one I wrote, hell of a good book, didn’t sell very much. But who knows. If I get some time off of the vineyard here, and I don’t get too many irrigation systems going wrong or things like that, I’ll write some more.
***
The Rise of the Surveillance State
David Samuels: You have some real knowledge of how the American intelligence community thinks and operates, from your days as a staffer working for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Angelo Codevilla: Senate staffer in control of the intelligence budget. My senator was the chairman of the Budget Subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee. Which means that the budgets came through him and therefore through me. And back then we had markups and we could punish those who were not forthright with us, and we did.
David Samuels: How do you understand the seemingly unchecked growth of this globe-spanning American surveillance apparatus, and how do you understand the danger of that apparatus being turned to domestic political purposes?
Angelo Codevilla: There’s always danger inherent in secrecy. And you know secrecy of course is central to intelligence operations. Secrecy most often is used not for the good of the operation, but to safeguard the reputations of those who are running the operations.
The agencies, like all bureaucracies, have always tried to aggrandize themselves, build their reputations, in order to make and spend more money. Get more high-ranking positions. Get more post-retirement positions for their people in the industries that support them. They’ve done exactly what bureaucrats in other agencies have done, neither more nor less.
But the business they’re in, which involves surveillance, is uniquely dangerous, because surveillance is inherently a political weapon. Inherently so. And there is never any lack of appetite for increasing the power of surveillance, and for increasing the reach of surveillance.
Fortunately, especially in my time on the Hill, we had pretty good resistance against bureaucratic attempts to increase the reach of government surveillance over the rest of the country.
Then along came 9/11, and congressmen, senators, who didn’t know any better, were rather easily persuaded, and for that matter Presidents—George W. Bush being exhibit number one—were very easily persuaded, that giving the agencies something close to carte blanche for electronic surveillance would help to keep the country safe. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 2008 to accommodate the practices which had evolved extralegally under George Bush, which essentially allowed the agencies to wiretap at will, so long as they claimed that this was for foreign intelligence purposes. In this regard, they claimed that what they were doing was within the spirit, if not the letter, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which stated that any warrantless collection of electronic intelligence, bugging and other means of collection in finding intelligence, could capture the communications of U.S. persons, only incidentally in the course of capturing the communications of foreign targets.
The 2008 amendments legalized this practice, and added the capacity of the agencies to compel communications companies to help upstream collection of emails etcetera, which would then be recorded. The act, rather the amendment, contains an even longer list of apparent restrictions on how these intercepts of Americans may be used. But these restrictions are basically for show because, essentially, once the foreign intelligence surveillance court authorized a particular operation the practical means of judicial review of what has happened, of how it is being carried out, are so complicated as to be unworkable. And besides, what the hell do judges know about the substance of these things?
Therefore, to get to the point of your question, this increased power and lax attitude conserving it posed a temptation to use these tools for the convenience of the administration in power, which was made much more likely by the increasing identification of the senior ranks of the intelligence community with your ruling class. To the point that these people, being ordinary sentient human beings, believe what the people at the top of their class are saying about the opposition.
David Samuels: We are good, and they are bad.
Angelo Codevilla: We are good and these opponents of ours, which mean to take over our positions, are bad people, they are dangerous to the country, and therefore why not look for every possible means of keeping them out of office?
David Samuels: You were directly involved in the drafting of the original FISA law in 1978.
Angelo Codevilla: That’s correct.
David Samuels: In the aftermath of the Church Committee revelations, yes?
Angelo Codevilla: Right. Now you use that term “the Church Committee” in the context that it was something that was antagonistic to the intelligence business. It was not. The Church Committee was a joint operation between, let’s call it “the left” inside the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, and their friends on the Hill. The result of it was that the left component of that bureaucracy has control of the CIA now.
The drafting of FISA was a cooperative enterprise between the Democratic majority, at that point, of Congress, the staffers being all Church Committee staffers, every one of them. And the ACLU. What I’m calling the establishment left. They were the drafters.
But the impetus of the drafting came from the FBI, primarily, and secondarily from the CIA, the NSA. The reason for their pressure was that the left had sued individual members of the FBI for having wiretapped them during the Vietnam War, in their communications with North Vietnam, communist Czechoslovakia, the KGB, and so on. Now they didn’t like that, and they wanted to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again.
So the point of FISA from the standpoint of the left was to keep that from happening again. The point of FISA from the standpoint of the FBI etcetera was never to be in a position to be sued again.
David Samuels: Right. A judge signed it. So now it’s legal.
Angelo Codevilla: Right. What the FBI etcetera demanded was preauthorization. We will not do any wiretapping unless it is preauthorized. Unless we are ipso facto clean.
Now the objections to FISA were primarily of a constitutional kind, mainly that wiretapping for national security was an inherent part of presidential power. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. And that was a true objection.
I however made a different objection, although I agreed with the constitutional objection. I said that pre-authorization, pre-clearance of wiretapping, would be an unendurable temptation for people in the agencies to do whatever the hell they wanted. They would be exempt from the prudence that the fear of being sued would impose.
My objection caught the eye of the American Bar Association at the time, which organized a debate on that subject at the University of Chicago Law School, with me on one side, and a local law professor by the name of Antonin Scalia on the other.
Scalia took the position that the danger, which I described, which he found real, was minor compared to the need to get the agencies doing their job vigorously. We see how the future turned out.
I must note that Scalia is a southern Italian. And I am a northerner.
David Samuels: When you saw the Snowden revelations about Stellar Wind and these other collection programs which then were retroactively legalized—what was your response?
Angelo Codevilla: “What else is new?”
David Samuels: Along with the impetus of 9/11, do you feel that the technology itself fundamentally—
Angelo Codevilla: Sure. Technology itself increased the possibilities. And it would have taken real self-restraint for people to say, “No. We could do this, but we won’t.”
David Samuels: We fear the future threat to the constitutional order.
Angelo Codevilla: We ought not to have such powers.
David Samuels: Please remove me from temptation, said no one, ever.
Angelo Codevilla: Well as a matter of fact, Christians do “lead us not into temptation” all the time.
David Samuels: You do say “lead us not into temptation,” but I am not aware of the Christian prayer that says “please take away the chocolate cake while I’m in the middle of eating it.”
Angelo Codevilla: Well, St. Augustine said exactly that, you know, “Lord make me pure, but not yet.”
***
Are Assange and Snowden heroes or villains?
David Samuels: I was an early and avid supporter of Julian Assange, who is now the devil for both the Democratic and Republican elite factions and appears to have vanished into a dark hole. But I have always defended him, because I felt that at the heart of his project, and no one else’s project, was a fundamental insight into how information was controlled and moves in the modern surveillance state, and how to confront it using the actual tools that are now in play.
When people said, that’s not journalism, I have always looked at them and said, “Yeah, it is. Or at least, it’s more like journalism than most of what passes now for journalism. It is a method for making public the fundaments of how the country is actually being governed.” I don’t know how you’re supposed to have a democratic society without that kind of transparency into the bureaucracies that spy on us and lie about it—and have turned a supine press into these pathetic hand puppets.
If you look at the universe of government bureaucrats and contractors and all the rest, there are now well more than a million Americans with some form of top secret or higher security clearance. Now I can accept that something is properly a secret if only five people know it, or if 40 people know it, or even 400 people. But there is no such thing as a secret that is shared by 1 million people. That is an anti-democratic exercise of power by a bureaucracy.
Angelo Codevilla:I agree with everything you said, up until the time you got to numbers. Because military operations involve a lot of people. Some intelligence operations are essentially military operations which put people’s lives at risk. The line must be drawn where the military is involved.
However, every word you said concerning Julian Assange, I agree with. Every last word.
David Samuels: Did you understand Edward Snowden to be a knowing Russian agent? As someone who was used and manipulated by the Russians?
Angelo Codevilla: I do not know. What is fairly clear is that Snowden entered government service with the idea of doing something like what he did, which certainly removes him from the category of whistleblower. He is certainly no innocent.
But regardless of his motivation, I am glad that he existed. And I’m glad that he did what he did.
The United States does not suffer, and has never suffered, from a lack of knowledge about the rest of the world on the basis of which to make foreign and defense policy. OK? And that is a fundamental fact. And because of that, all the fancy arguments that you must sacrifice this and that for the sake of intelligence, I think are false.
David Samuels: One of the minor scandals that startled me in the late Obama/early Trump interregnum was the unmasking scandal, which struck me as much more significant than people seemed willing to credit at the time. I mean, the fact that someone leaked an intercept to David Ignatius may be a crime, but it was hardly news to me. I mean, people leak stuff all the time. That’s how Washington works.
What struck me as much more significant was the defense that “oh, actually most of these unmasking requests came from Samantha Power, in her job as U.N. ambassador.” And then it turned out it wasn’t her sitting at her desk all day long unmasking hundreds of names of U.S. citizens. It was someone she deputized in her office. She didn’t even know about these requests, or most of them, or so she claimed.
It was news to me that ordinary low-level bureaucrats and political appointees now sit at their desks all day reading raw intercepts targeting American civilians, collected under the pretext of gathering foreign intelligence. A 26-year-old assistant can sit there all day long reading your email, based on the three-hop rule. I don’t think that’s what—
Angelo Codevilla: What the authors of the FISA had in mind.
David Samuels: Authors of FISA, authors of the U.S. Constitution, you can pick your authors. Yet that has became normative reality, right?
Angelo Codevilla: Look. Most people who have a title in Washington don’t do their work. There’s always the chief assistant to the assistant chief, they’re the ones who do the work. And so yeah, they get deputized.
David Samuels: So now we have this surveillance apparatus that Snowden, James Risen, and others have detailed, which provides daytime reading material for bored 26-year-old assistants, which means that material can easily be repurposed for—
Angelo Codevilla: Any purpose under the sun.
David Samuels: That is a very powerful weapon for this bureaucracy to have.
Angelo Codevilla: That’s the point.
***
When Jeff Bezos Has Dinner With the CIA
David Samuels: The guys working in the White House whether under Obama or Trump aren’t writing the code for their surveillance systems. Neither are the nice people at the CIA. They’re all writing checks to Silicon Valley.
I saw the other day that Jeff Bezos, who’s one of the most dedicated champions of democracy and the free press in America, the guy who says that democracy dies in darkness, I saw that his company, Amazon, provides all the data storage for the CIA. Now as a reporter and as a citizen, that makes me confident—
Angelo Codevilla: Ha, ha.
David Samuels: —that Jeff Bezos’ newspaper, The Washington Post, is reporting without fear or favor every day on Jeff Bezos and all these CIA and DoD contracts with Amazon, because they have such a strong incentive to make sure that everything’s on the up and up. And by the way, Amazon is definitely not listening in on your private conversations through the listening devices—in the form of digital assistants like Alexa, Echo speakers, and doorbells with spy cameras in them—that it is installing by the millions in American homes.
Angelo Codevilla: May I give you a quick answer to your larger question?
David Samuels: Yes.
Angelo Codevilla: It depends on who goes to dinner with whom. That’s how Washington works.
David Samuels: That can’t be your answer, so let’s take it from the top. There is a company called Amazon, which now has monopolistic position A, in the field of books and all printed material distributed in America, and B, in a whole host of other industries ranging from diapers to blow-up pool toys. It looks like a classic monopoly trust. You have Google, which has a near-monopoly over the search function, the leading portal to most information on the internet, and holds a monopoly on search advertising. You have Facebook, which controls 78% of entries onto the internet now through their platform. So, you have these three monopolistic companies, right, one of which also owns the only major newspaper in Washington, D.C., and which control the movement of information throughout the entire society.
Now, another arm of Silicon Valley controls storage and access to the information that the government agencies gather on the society. And all of the money earned from both these pursuits flows back to these people, who are richer than any class of people in America since the robber barons. They got so rich by sucking out the life’s blood from five dozen different industries that employ people and destroying the 20th-century press, which played a key role in maintaining our democracy.
Now I look at that, and I say the power is out there. You look at it and you say no, my lad. It’s about who has dinner with who in Washington.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no, no, no. You misunderstand me. The ruling class transcends Washington. Part of it is in Silicon Valley, it’s in every major university town in America. It’s in Sacramento. And then you ask, what is it that ties it together?
David Samuels: Right, the poor associate professor of gender studies with his or her little espresso machine.
Angelo Codevilla: The poor associate professor of gender studies, number one is not so poor. Number two, she gets her living from the same partisan connection that Jeff Bezos does. She is part of the same party as Jeff Bezos, who has God knows how many billions.
David Samuels: A large fortune.
Angelo Codevilla: But his power as you have pointed out substantially consists of his connection with government. Although I must say one thing contrary to an absolutist view of the ruling class. That the four major trusts that you mentioned are in large part—have in large part grown naturally, organically. They’re securing themselves by government power. But the government did not force anybody to shop with Amazon.
David Samuels: Ah! As a matter of fact, Google and Facebook secured their monopolies and their ability to commit massive and ongoing copyright violations thanks to a little-known provision of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed by Congress in 1996 in response to a series of moral panics that engulfed America at around that time. Those included the McMartin nursery school witchcraft case—
Angelo Codevilla: Oh ho ho ho ho. I remember that.
David Samuels: There was a generalized hysteria about pedophiles running nursery schools and satanic rituals involving small children. And this became part of a hysteria so significant that Congress had to pass a law. And the law specifically targeted this phenomenon which was almost entirely imaginary, even if in a few specific instances it might have also been real, as is always the case. Except for the Jews baking matzo with the blood of Christian children, of course. We didn’t actually do that.
Angelo Codevilla: You didn’t?
David Samuels: No. Matzo tastes bad enough as it is.
So the Communications Decency Act was set up to prevent pedophiles from sharing pictures of child sexual abuse over the newfangled internet. In response to which, two farsighted members of congress, Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox, who fancied themselves experts on the digital frontier, wrote into the Communications Decency Act a section stating that internet providers shall not be considered to be publishers and that if you provide internet service or platforms or hosting you are not subject to any of the liabilities that traditionally attach to publishing information.
Now, all of a sudden, thanks to the wisdom of the U.S. Congress, two classes of publishers were created. One class, traditional publishers, had to spend a lot of money on fact checkers, editors, lawyers, and other people because they could be held legally responsible for the information that they published in their newspapers. Another class of publishers, internet publishers, like Google at the time and Facebook as it emerged, were free from all of these potential torts. So Facebook or Google could put up any damn thing they wanted—
Angelo Codevilla: Yeah, except the fact that Google and Facebook supposedly exercise no control.
David Samuels: That’s clearly a lie, especially now. They are obviously not the telephone company.
Angelo Codevilla: Very interesting. At which point, one can challenge that exemption.
David Samuels: Except it’s now too late. They ate the 20th-century American press.
Angelo Codevilla: Let me give you the tiniest, tiniest glimmer from the margins, the very, very remote margins, of all of this, so you can understand my perspective. Q: There is a dream that unites progressives and bureaucrats and wealthy technologists. And where does that dream come from?
A: It’s a dream peculiar to this class. Other classes have been united by different dreams.
Q: Is it a substitute for religion? A: Yes.
When I started working for the Senate, some folks at the agency figured out that I wasn’t a run-of-the-mill staffer. So I was visited by one of the old boys who took me up to the director’s office—the director wasn’t there at the time. He took me up via the director’s elevator, he had a key. And showed me all around and was very, very clubby with me. Then they took me to his house, which is overlooking the Potomac, with these large wolfhounds sitting about. And essentially, he said the equivalent of “all this could be yours.”
David Samuels: My son, if you play the game.
Angelo Codevilla: If you play the game. I said to myself, “Hmmmm, what did the Lord say to all this?”
But it really is a matter of who has dinner with whom. I have worked in Washington long enough to know that people would sell their souls for invitations to be at certain tables. To be allowed to speak with this person or that. In the end, it’s all social.
And how do you become social? You express the same thoughts, you have the same tastes. You vacation in the same places. You love the same loves, you hate the same hates.
David Samuels: This is a very Italianate explanation.
Angelo Codevilla: No, it’s not. You have the wrong idea about Italy. I’m from Northern Italy. I believe this is a hardheaded explanation of a soft but powerful reality.
David Samuels: These are all people who are connected to the power of government.
Angelo Codevilla: Either physically, i.e. economically, or emotionally—power. The dream of sharing power. The gender studies professor not only gets her money eventually from government, but she dreams of being part of a world-transforming enterprise.
David Samuels: Here, I agree with you. There is a dream that unites progressives and bureaucrats and wealthy technologists. And where does that dream come from?
Angelo Codevilla: It’s a dream peculiar to this class. Other classes have been united by different dreams.
David Samuels: Is it a substitute for religion?
Angelo Codevilla: Yes.
David Samuels: Is that its primary emotional charge?
Angelo Codevilla: Well, I don’t know about primary. Look, the primary element is, as we Christians were taught, pride. That is the sin of sins. There is nothing that moves human beings quite so much as the desire to be on top of other human beings.
David Samuels: It’s interesting. I’m a Jew. But there are things that are lacking in our tradition, just as there are things that are very well developed in our tradition. You know, decent food can be lacking in our traditions.
Angelo Codevilla: However, not in Italy.
David Samuels: Oh, my God. The Jewish food in Italy is fantastic.
Angelo Codevilla: The Jewish food in Italy is fabulous.
David Samuels: I see that more as a reflection on Italy than the Jews.
***
Henry Kissinger Meets the Demon Emperor
David Samuels: Judaism as it has existed for the last 2,000 years is an exilic tradition. The religion took the place of both the rituals in the Temple and the state itself. It was all ritualized. So for a 2,000-year-old tradition that’s remarkably elaborated and rich and subtle in so many areas, you have remarkably little discussion of political power—including the sins related to power, the proper ways to exercise power, all that was outside the experience of these people because they were politically powerless. Religion took the place of statecraft.
Israel hasn’t necessarily helped. Why do Jews want political power? To keep themselves from being exterminated. Why does a Jewish state want a strong army? Because if you don’t have one, people are going to wipe you out. In the Middle East, that’s a pretty ironclad rule. These are not very subtle or complicated ideas.
Angelo Codevilla: But there are plenty of Jews in Europe who are very well acquainted with the theory and practice of exercising power.
David Samuels: Of course, but—
Angelo Codevilla: But these Jews were not real Jews. I mean, they were not religious Jews. They happened to be Jewish but they were primarily socialists or whatever.
David Samuels: Or Henry Kissinger.
Angelo Codevilla: What a fraud.
David Samuels: He is an egomaniac and he is highly manipulative and he is a flatterer and a courtier. But Henry Kissinger sure ain’t dumb.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no. He’s very smart. Very smart.
David Samuels: And one has the sense, that if he had really spent the time working on a biography of Metternich, that it would have been fantastic, too.
Angelo Codevilla: Yes! Look, the man never had time to be a scholar. He was taken up immediately into the world of conferences and power. And he navigated it masterfully.
David Samuels: Plus, he had the emotional capacity to get down on his knees and pray to Jesus with Richard Nixon after five whiskeys. And you look at Trump and you’re like, that’s what’s needed here too. Right?
Angelo Codevilla: What would Kissinger do with Trump? Who knows. This man Trump is something else.
David Samuels: I have a name for Trump: The demon emperor. Because I feel like he’s like a figure that you’d find in some Chinese chronicle, right? There was a time of terrible chaos, social disintegration, and then a Mongol invasion. They breeched the Great Wall and did this and that. And in those moments, the Demon Emperor would arise and take power. He had the head of a pig and the body of man, and he was known for his vile excesses and the terrible rampages that he’d go on, and his desecrations of ancient scrolls. Everyone bemoaned him.
But there was a certain virtue, at times, in certain moments, to having the demon emperor around. Yes, he raped 150 virgins in surrounding villages and all their families were very upset and there’s no reason he should have done that, and he defiles the very ground he stands on, and indeed, no one of noble birth would consent to marry his daughter. At the same time, he defeated the Mongols.
So, the real question isn’t whether Trump is vile, but rather what has he actually done, aside from being vile?
Angelo Codevilla: Putting a parenthesis in the conversation, talking about Chinese epics. Are you familiar with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?
David Samuels: No.
Angelo Codevilla: You should be. This is a book that describes the tradition between—or rather I should say the end of the Han Dynasty around 200 A.D. The book was written over maybe 200 years. And it is partly prose, partly poetry. And it’s considered one of the great classics of Chinese literature. The Chinese government a couple years ago did a—condensed it into 95, 45-minute TV episodes. Beautifully acted, with gorgeous costume. With English translations that read something between Shakespeare and Thucydides.
Captivating.
I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. I mean my poor wife was left alone. And it conveyed as deep an insight into Chinese character as I’ve ever seen. To get Westerners to empathize with Chinese characters takes some doing. And you can download it, it’s free. The Chinese government has made sure you can download it for free.
***
The Progressive High Church Mass
David Samuels: Where does the ethos of a class come from?
Angelo Codevilla: Here I speak with the prejudices of an academician. Because the ethos of the academy changed, evolved. And what drove the change was the growing contempt of professors for our civilization. And you Jews ought not to feel that you are any less the enemy of these people than we Christians.
I should say the defining feature of the ruling class is a certain attitude. And that attitude developed in the academy, and that attitude became uniform throughout the country because of the uniform academy. The uniformity of the academy transformed itself into the uniformity of the ruling class.
David Samuels: Because that was the institution that credentialed the otherwise uncultured American masses?
Angelo Codevilla: It credentialed the mind and the habits. The habits of the heart. It credentialed the habits of the heart. The habits of conversation. The habits of work. The habits of logic. The habits period.
Can you imagine a bright kid coming in contact with that kind of intellectual fraud? The smartest ones will say, “hey, I don’t want to be part of this.” He’ll do something else. He won’t be taken in. Which means that this class will continue to degrade itself.
David Samuels: Just as it would be wrong to understate the importance of who has dinner with whom in Washington, it would be wrong to understate the extent to which the class you dislike is moved by an idea: The rational scientific functioning of the bureaucratic state. That’s their God. I may find this attachment emotionally bizarre, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Angelo Codevilla: You’re saying the same thing in two different ways. Why is it that they have dinner together? It is that they believe that they share something terribly important. And that is precisely what they believe to be their stewardship of all things good.
Once upon a time, thus moved, they believed that they were holier than thou. Now they simply believe that they’re trendier than thou. In other words, they share the most valuable thing, which is not devotion to God but devotion to their own corporate mission. Their own corporate status. Status and mission. Status being the priests of the salvific religion of science and progress.
David Samuels: Yeah, that’s right. There is a monkish sense of devotion.
Angelo Codevilla: You’re going far too far with using the word “monkish.”
David Samuels: They exist! These people exist.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no, no, no. They exist but they’re very few.
I taught in Boston for many years. And believe it or not, I put my kids in the highest-ranking schools in Boston, and I had to go to a parent meetings and school celebrations. And these were, in fact, secular masses. With, including, believe it or not, the breaking of bread.
Bread! Simple bread, passing it around. There’s a kind of faux simplicity. You have fake Puritans too.
David Samuels: Now the idea of the worship of the corporate bureaucratic state, right? You have a religion that is capable of attracting, if not the adherence of the majority of the country, then maybe 40% of them.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no, no, no. Not 40%. This is an elite attraction. Which attracts people who naturally, very naturally, want to rise above others.
Again, as a kind of professor, I came across hundreds of young people who very naturally ask the question, how can I rise in life?
David Samuels: That is my job. I am young, I am supposed to rise.
Angelo Codevilla: I am supposed to rise in my life, how can I do that? And I in good conscience explain to them that the paths are there and the ladders are being provided. And they will take you to these places. You will, however, have to adapt yourself to the mindset of these folks.
Now, if you insist on being independent minded, don’t bother. But if you do insist on being independent minded, also realize that these ladders will not be available to you.
A lot of kids will come and tell me how much they enjoy my classes and how much they like the ancients, the way I taught the ancients. And I said to them: “Look. There is no future for you in following the likes of me. I cannot give you the kinds of internships and prospects for employment and writing that others can.”
David Samuels: But they also were successful it seems to me, in inculcating parts of their faith in what you would describe as their client base. Right?
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no, no, no. Clients, certainly not.
David Samuels: They win elections in some places.
Angelo Codevilla: Sure, they win elections. Not through faith but through pure clientelism. And don’t forget, especially nowadays, more and more nowadays, by fostering hate, by fostering resentment against others. If you are on our side, you’re on the side of the good. But more important than that, on the other side are people who hate you.
This is especially true with regard to blacks. They want to put you back in chains! What utter nonsense.
David Samuels: Jews are subjected to the same kinds of disciplinary activity. Don’t you understand that the right wingers are all secret neo-Nazis who are planning to pack you off to the gas chambers? I’m an FDR-type liberal, but I find those attempts to trigger some fearful reflex to be incredibly demeaning and offensive.
Angelo Codevilla: People believe mistakenly that Jews are especially smart. American Jews have proven to be dumb, politically. What is political stupidity? Political stupidity means not knowing which side your bread is buttered on.
Jews have taken to believing the leftist propaganda that the Christians are somehow their enemies. Where in fact, there is no group that is friendlier to Jews in America.
The more Christian you are, the more let us say pro-Jewish we tend to be. And why? Well for this very simple reason. That if you read the Bible, you don’t grow up rooting for the Philistines.
David Samuels: American Jews come primarily from Poland and from Russia, where the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches often played a very nasty political role and also preached a pretty harsh supersessionist doctrine. They were not friendly to Jews. Now that’s very different from American Protestantism, and also American Catholicism.
Angelo Codevilla: The Christian faith has always been an outgrowth of Judaism. That’s not contention, that is a fact.
David Samuels: Any group that has a scar, you can press on the scar and profit.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, yeah. But Jews are supposed to be smart.
David Samuels: It’s embarrassing to be the object of this kind of primitive manipulation. And both sides do it. You know how they really talk about you, you know what they say behind your back. They’re gonna make your kids bow down to Jesus! Now vote for me.
Angelo Codevilla: Working on the Hill, I would see these Jewish lobbyists breaking their heads against the left. Whereas if they’d gone to conservatives, they would have been greeted with open arms and gotten exactly what they wanted.
***
The Cruxification of Jonathan Pollard
David Samuels: You were working on the Hill when Jonathan Pollard was thrown in jail for life to cover up the crimes of Aldrich Ames and others.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh, that’s a really big subject.
David Samuels: Would you say that the treatment of Pollard happened independently of the fact that he was a Jew?
Angelo Codevilla: Oh heavens, no. No, no, no. Since you’re asking this question to me, you obviously have read that I did what I could to champion his release. Having nothing to do with the fact that he was a Jew, and everything with the obvious falsehood of the accusations on the basis of which he was sentenced.
David Samuels: Right.
Angelo Codevilla: He certainly committed espionage. And rightly merited prison for a couple of years. Instead he got a life sentence. Which ended up to be 30-something years. Why? Certainly not on the basis of the indictment. I mean, he was accused and pleaded guilty to precisely what he did.
What I know, which a lot of other people did not know, is that given his clearances, he could not possibly have done the things on the basis of which he was sentenced. It was simply impossible for him to do that. And every time I pointed that out to people in intelligence, they would make an argument which was untenable. Mainly that the revelation of facts in reports is tantamount or can easily lead to the revelation of sources and methods.
Nonsense! The compartmentation of American intelligence is premised precisely on the notion that this is not possible. Or extremely difficult. And although it is theoretically possible, one would have to show precisely how it did happen. And nobody even tried to do that.
Furthermore, Pollard was sentenced on the basis of a memorandum, which is yet secret. For our judicial system, to sentence anyone on the basis of any secret proceeding is about as un-American as anything yet.
David Samuels: Have you read that memorandum?
Angelo Codevilla: Hell no!
David Samuels: Did anyone ever offer you a summary of its contents?
Angelo Codevilla: Well, sure! But it had been only in the most general terms, to which I would say, oh? Show me how that’s possible.
You know, if somebody says, well and by the way, the snowballs in hell were not melting. I’d say, what? How is that happening?
David Samuels: How do you understand his treatment?
Angelo Codevilla: Oh horrible, horrible.
David Samuels: No, I’m asking why.
Angelo Codevilla: Why? Well, OK. The CIA has all kinds of social-political prejudices. The first thing I learned that I did not expect to learn when I went to my job on the Hill was just how controlled and defined by certain social norms the CIA is. That it is a kind of club that secures itself through co-option. And that co-option involves the furtherance of a whole bunch of prejudices.
So, the straightforward political prejudices are, in no particular order: liberalism, prejudice in favor of the Arabs. You probably are not aware of the corporate prejudices that existed in the favor of the Soviet Union. And they were very, very powerful at CIA, as opposed to DIA or NSA.
To give you an example of these political, pro-Arab prejudices and how they work, when specifically relevant to the Pollard case: When Israel bombed Iraq, the CIA came to us and they formed this committee, and railed at the Israelis for having spoiled this wonderful relationship we had with this wonderful man, Saddam Hussein. I remember at the time sitting next to Pat Moynihan who gave me the elbow and chuckle.
I would say that the majority, by far, of the intelligence committee, laughed at—this is Bobby Ray Inman. And they were cheering on Israel. Hey, bomb more!
But CIA was coming to notify us that in fact they were cutting off the flow of certain intelligence to Israel. And they were doing so in great anger. Now these items of intelligence which were being cut off were precisely the items of intelligence that Jonathan Pollard supplied to them.
David Samuels: They were hurt!
Angelo Codevilla: They were hurt! They were hurt and they took it out on Pollard. How far did this attitude which I just described blend over into anti-Semitism? I don’t know.
David Samuels: Right.
Angelo Codevilla: But if I were a Jew, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to think that it did. And even though I’m not, I sure would have my suspicions.
So that’s the essence of my attitude, attitude and subsequent involvement, such as it was, in the Pollard case. I mean I saw number one, that the reason for the CIA’s anger was wrong. And in fact, the United States had every reason to cheer what the Israelis did. And most Americans did, as a matter of fact. And later on, the subsequent administration thanked the Israelis for having done precisely what they did.
So the CIA was wrong in that regard. And they were doubly wrong in convincing that imbecile, Caspar Weinberger, to write that un-American memorandum. And that judge should be damned by his profession for having paid attention to it. You don’t sentence people on the basis of a secret memorandum. You just don’t do that in America.
David Samuels: The basis for his sentencing is still classified. So who can say for sure if his sentence was unjust.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, no. We can say. It doesn’t matter that it’s classified, because it alleges something that couldn’t possibly have happened. You can classify it, but that doesn’t make it any truer or any likelier to be true. In fact, it makes it less likely to be so.
***
Secrecy and the Rule of Law
David Samuels: Now this opens up the last subject that I wanted to talk about at some length. Which is, what happens when secret intelligence becomes the basis for actions within the domestic sphere. This seems to me like a gathering storm cloud over this country and the freedoms that most of us still believe are ours.
Angelo Codevilla: Right, quite so. Two things happen. The first bad, the second worse.
The first is that policy or action made on the basis of information that is not generally available tends to be bad policy. Secret policy doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that ordinary policy does. And the people who make it do not themselves feel the necessity to be as careful at all that they do as they otherwise would be. So you get sloppy policymaking. You get people riding hobby horses. Not thinking through what they’re doing. And you end up with unintended consequences.
The second is that policymaking on the basis of information not generally available allows one to cut out one’s opponent, allows one to make policy partisan. More partisan than it would otherwise be.
David Samuels: Would you say that the Iraq War was an example of that?
Angelo Codevilla: Yes, in the following way. And we’re talking of course about two Iraq wars and then the criticism applies to both in a different way.
The first Iraq War, that is the original invasion of Iraq, happened because the president was under entirely reasonable pressure to do something serious, something definitive, about terrorism. And he concluded in his heart of hearts that overthrowing the regime would have been most vocal in its advocacy of anti-Americanism, and anti-American terrorism, would eliminate one of the major sources of terrorism, and also send a healthy message to other regimes that were in their own ways fostering terrorism.
But, when the subject was moving about inside the highest levels of government, great resistance was encountered to this. And the Bush administration found itself searching for a rationale for that invasion that would minimize opposition from within the government and the ruling class in general. And they sent up a whole bunch of trial balloons in that regard, and the trial balloon that got the least resistance was the trope about the weapons of mass destruction. About which the evidence was always terribly sketchy. But they found that to be the most bureaucratically tenable explanation, and so they went ahead with it. That was a mistake made intramurally, which compromised the eventual support of the larger population.
So much for the first Iraq War. The second one, being the occupation, that was decided in an even less transparent manner. We know that there was intense lobbying on the part of CIA and State for the occupation. And lobbying by the Saudis for that same course. How all that interacted and how George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and friends soldiered all of that out and came to that particular decision, we still do not know. And they ain’t about to tell us.
And so, we ended up with an occupation which would ostensibly be for the purpose of democratization, but which number one, shied away from democracy because everyone involved realized that democracy meant that the Shia ruled. So as a fact, the day-to-day effort of the occupation, the one that cost so many American lives, had nothing to do with democratization. It had everything to do with preserving a role for the Sunnis.
The U.S. government never fought that war with the intention of crushing the Sunni opposition. They never fought that war with the intention of crushing the people who were shooting at Americans. And then ended up, in fact giving up on that war and paying those very people, in what was otherwise known as the Surge.
A whole bunch of idiots, Fox News conservatives count the Surge, the so-called Surge, as a great success. Great success in what?
Again here, this is as good an example as you will find of the wages of making policy in a nontransparent manner.
David Samuels: There was one quote, I forget who it came from, but it came out of an interaction of one of the reasonably high-up war planners in the Defense Department and a journalist for, I think it was, The Atlantic. And the quote was that power creates its own reality. So it doesn’t matter what we say, because even if it’s not true now, by the time we’re finished we will make it true. And therefore there is no real difference between statements that are true or false, as long as we make them.
Do you have the sense that a similar attempt to manufacture reality was at play in what at this point are the still-unknown interactions between the CIA, the FBI, and the Obama White House with regard to the surveillance of Donald Trump’s associates, and the attempt to suggest some vast Putin-Trump conspiracy to game American elections, and whatnot?
Angelo Codevilla: I don’t think that it went that far. Or I should say, I don’t think the people involved thought about it that deeply.
David Samuels: I would agree.
Angelo Codevilla:I think what you had was a small pooling of resources to tweak the news cycle with regard to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, which then turned into something very major.
David Samuels: After the election.
Angelo Codevilla: After the election. It was, like Watergate, a minor attempt to gain marginal advantage. Which then, unintended by the people involved at the time, became something very big, which escaped everyone’s control.
I believe that there are a whole bunch of people in Washington right now who are quaking in their boots because the House Intelligence Committee has shaken loose some of the documents involved. Because in the long run there are no secrets in Washington. And one can then wonder about the quality of the people who imagined that the things they did could remain secret.
It really was a marvel. The idea was that if we all say it together long enough and we shout it loud so nothing else can be heard, then it will become the effective truth, Machiavelli’s verita effettuale. But I mean, there is a limit to this. I have some close personal friends who are more on the left, and I said to them: OK. Where’s the evidence? Who did what when to whom? Where are the quids and where are the quos? What’s going on here? And all they could say is, “Well, the investigation is going on.”
What is not clear is just how much of the reality will come into the public’s consciousness.
David Samuels: Whose fault is this?
Angelo Codevilla: The fault here is not of Democrats on the left. The fault here is of Donald Trump and his friends who have refused to enforce the most basic laws here. The most obvious one is Section 798, (18 U.S. Code), the simple comment statute. Now anybody in the intelligence business knows that this is the live wire of security law. It is a strict liability statute. It states that any revelation, regardless of circumstance or intent, any revelation period, of anything having to do with U.S. communications intelligence is punishable by the 10 and 10. Ten years in the slammer, and $10,000 fine. Per count.
Now the folks who went to The Washington Post and The New York Times in November and December of 2016 and peddled this story of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Trump and the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, these people ipso facto violated §798.
Considering these matters are highly classified, and that the number of the people involved is necessarily very small, identifying them is child’s play. But no effort to do that has been made.
David Samuels: But doesn’t that failure in turn point to what is, to some extent, the root of this entire drama, which is that Donald Trump seems unfamiliar with and temperamentally at odds with the executive function that he has now assumed?
Angelo Codevilla: That’s certainly true. But you have to go beyond Donald Trump, to Republican power holders in general. These people far more than Donald Trump would be inclined to forbear for the sake of comity with the ruling class. And what kind of comity are we talking about? We’re talking about social comity. Because if you follow the law in this case, you end up putting former directors of CIA, FBI etcetera behind bars. They, and a whole bunch of their subordinates. Maybe a dozen people here would end up behind bars.
David Samuels: We’ve come to accept that certain classes of people are in fact above the law.
Angelo Codevilla: We have come to accept that.
The election of 2016 was precisely about whether anyone in America is above the law. The reason why so many people did not vote for Hillary Clinton is the feeling that she and her ilk were above the law, were acting as if they were above the law, which happened to be entirely true. Now the fact that the Trump administration is acting according to the same premise, i.e., that some people are above the law, is evidence that the revolution that the voters wanted in 2016 has only just begun.
***
Conclusion
It’s interesting to read the opinions of others. Especial if they come from the Washington “beltway”. It’s almost like they are a completely different “animal” than what the rest of us are. I suppose it goes along with my belief that the super elite have evolved into something other than what the rest of us are. They are another creature entirely. It’s not that they are clueless. For they indeed have intelligence. I just wonder if they have scruples and understanding. That’s all.
But that’s just me.
One thing is for certain, they think that they are better than you and I. They are driving the United States into a massive war that does not have an exit. It’s crazy, it’s dangerous, and while they might be intelligent, they sure are out of touch with man’s humanity.
And his humility.
That frightens me.
But they seem oblivious to it all. It’s like people coloring a coloring-book with crayons inside a large RV that is being driven by a drunk madman. These fools haven’t a clue as to what dangers are being toyed with. Sheech!
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Russians are chess masters and the Chinese have Go, while the U.S.of A has Monopoly. Simple really.Posted by: Michael McPherson | Apr 6 2021 20:46 utc | 25
This is perhaps the best article that I have read in a while…
I really liked this:
"Socialism versus capitalism? No, it is a long time since the U.S. was a capitalist economy; it’s hardly even a market economy today. It has become, more and more, a rentier economy ..."
Looking at the stock markets and asset prices in general, they are completely disconnected from fundamentals – so much for “market efficiency” and “price discovery” under US-led “capitalism”.
The U.S. “democracy” is also not much of a democracy, but more of a corporatocracy and corrupt plutocracy.
You know, the world doesn’t have to be an either or between socialism/capitalism, and that we can take the key ingredients from both – perhaps what Professor Hudson means by a mixed economy, perhaps something along the lines of what China is trying.
"the U.S.of A has Monopoly" - like that, very apt! That simple analogy encompasses the American plutocracy's mindset of non-productive rent extraction, seeking to control every part of the world, and goal of winner-takes-all hegemony.
Posted by: Canadian Cents | Apr 6 2021 21:11 utc | 27
There can be other flavors and variations.
Delicious Chinese flavors and food.
Alastair Crooke
April 5, 2021
The U.S. will ignore the message from Anchorage. It is already testing China over Taiwan, and is preparing an escalation in Ukraine, to test Russia.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c. 500 BCE) advises that:
“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands; yet the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself … Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will; and does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”.
This is the essence of the Chinese resistance economy – a strategy which has been fully unveiled in the wake of the Anchorage talks; talks that silenced any lingering thoughts in Beijing that America might somehow find some modus vivendi with Beijing in its headlong pursuit of primacy over China.
Although earlier there had been tantalising glimpses of déshabillé, the full reveal to China’s tough stance and rhetoric has only been permitted now – post-Anchorage – and the talks’ confirmation that the U.S. intends to block China’s ascent.
If it is assumed that this ‘resistance’ initiative constitutes some tit-for-tat ‘jab’ at Washington – through sinking Biden’s Iran ambitions, as revenge for America loudly crying ‘war crimes’ (‘genocide’ in Xingjian) – then we miss wholly its full import.
The new great Eurasian partnership.
The scope of the Iran pact by far transcends trade and investment, as one commentator in the Chinese state media made plain:
“As it stands, this deal (the Iran pact) will totally upend the prevailing geopolitical landscape in the West Asian region that has for so long been subject to U.S. hegemony”.
So here is the essence to ‘a clever combatant moving to impose his will’ – there is no need for China or Russia or Iran to go to war to do this; they just implement ‘it’.
They can do ‘it’ – quite simply. They don’t need a revolution to do it, because they have no vested interest in fighting America.
What is ‘it’?
It is not just a trade and investment pact with Tehran; neither is it simply allies helping each other. The ‘resistance’ lies precisely with the way they’re trying to help each other.
It is a mode of economic development.
It represents the notion that any rent-yielding resource – banking, land, natural resources and natural infrastructure monopolies – should be in the public domain to provide basic needs to everybody – freely.
This new way of governance is one where any rent-yielding resource should be public domain, and given to the people for free.
The alternative way simply is to privatise these ‘public goods’ (as in the West), where they are provided at a financialized maximum cost – including interest rates, dividends, management fees, and corporate manipulations for financial gain.
‘It’ is then a truly different economic approach.
To give one example:
New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension cost $6 billion, or $2 billion per mile – the most expensive urban mass transit ever built.
The average cost of underground subway lines outside the U.S. is $350 million a mile, or a sixth of New York’s cost.
How does this ‘it’ change everything?
Well, just imagine for a moment: the biggest element in anyone’s budget today is housing at 40%, which simply reflects high house prices, based on a debt-fuelled market.
Instead, imagine that proportion at 10% (as in China).
Suppose too, you have low-cost public education.
Well then, you are rid of education-led debt, and its interest cost.
Suppose you have public healthcare, and low priced transport infrastructure.
Then you would have the capacity to spend – It becomes a low-cost economy, and consequently it would grow.
Another example:
The cost of hiring R&D staff in China is a third to half the comparable cost in the U.S., so China’s tech spend is closer to $1 trillion a year (in terms of purchasing power parity), whereas the U.S. spends just 0.6% of GDP, or about $130 billion, on federal R&D.
At one level therefore, this ‘it’ is a strategic challenge to the western eco-system.
In one corner, the debt-driven, hyper-financialised, yet stagnant economies of Europe and the EU – in which strategic direction and economic ‘winners and losers’ are set by the Big Oligarchs, and in which the 60% struggle, and 0.1% thrive.
And, in the far corner, a very mixed economy in which the Party sets a strategic course for state enterprises, whilst others are encouraged to innovate, and to be entrepreneurial in the mold of a state-directed economy (albeit, with Taoist and Confucian characteristics).
Socialism versus capitalism?
No, it is a long time since the U.S. was a capitalist economy; it’s hardly even a market economy today.
It has become, more and more, a rentier economy since leaving the gold standard (in 1971).
This forced U.S. exit from the ‘gold window’ facilitated the U.S. via the resultant global demand for U.S. debt instruments, (Treasury bonds), to finance itself for free (from out of the entire world’s economic surplus).
To all my sisters and brothers I say drastic change is in the air as Nature is informing us on many levels of our standing on the precipice of annihilation (not in 30 years but currently), and the only hope for humanity is a quantum leap in consciousness. There is no time to waste. On the world stage, “Us versus Them” is becoming obsolete while “united we stand, divided we fall” increasingly will be forced upon us by momentous forces infinitely more powerful than our illusive technology and weapons that only threaten self destruction while delaying action to save us from our follies and foibles. If we are to survive as a species, we must all strive to develop a cooperative and holistic view of life encompassing all other beings and species, the ecosystem and its vulnerabilities, and the stability of the climate system. We must refrain from conflict resolved through violence, otherwise we are finished. Any discussion of geopolitics must be framed by that awareness.Posted by: norecovery | Apr 7 2021 4:36 utc | 67
The Washington Consensus ensured additionally that the inflows of dollars to Wall Street from around the globe would never be subject capital controls, nor would states be able to create their own currency, but would have to borrow in dollars from the World Bank and the IMF.
And that essentially meant borrowing from the Pentagon and the State Department in U.S. dollars, who ultimately were the system ‘enforcers’, as Professor Hudson notes.
The shift in the U.S. financial system to being an entity that that prioritises ‘real’ assets, such as mortgages and real estate that offer a certain ‘rent’, rather than to invest directly in speculative business ventures, also means that debt jubilees are verboten. (The Greeks can recount the experience of what that entails, in grim detail).
The point is that – at the economic plane – the U.S., hyper-financialised sphere is fast shrinking, as China, Russia and much of the ‘World Island’ turn to trading in their own currencies (and do not buy U.S. Treasuries).
In a ‘war’ of economic systems, America therefore starts on the back foot.
Halford Mackinder argued a century ago that control of the ‘Heartland’, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the ‘World Island’, which was his term for all Europe, Asia and Africa.
Over a century later, Mackinder’s theory resonates as the two leading nations behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) transform this into a system of inter-relations from one Eurasian end to another.
It is not so new, of course.
It is simply the revival of the ancient trade-based economy of the Eurasian heartland, which finally was collapsed in the 17th century.
Alastair Macleod notes that commentators usually fail to understand ‘why’ this flourishing in West Asia is happening:
“It is not due to military superiority, but down to simple economics.
While the U.S. economy suffers a post-lockdown inflationary outcome and an existential crisis for the dollar – China’s economy will boom on the back of increasing domestic consumption … and increasing exports, the consequence of America’s stimulation of consumer demand and a soaring budget deficit”.
There, explicitly said, is Sun Tzu’s point!
“Opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself”.
There is in Washington (and to an extent in Europe too), a faction entertaining a pathological emotional desire for war with Russia, largely stemming from a conviction that the Tzars (and later Stalin), were anti-Semitic.
Their emotion is one of hatred and anger, yet it is they who largely are responsible for bringing Russia and China together.
This, and America’s proclivity to sanction the world, has given China and Russia their opportunity.
The underlying point however, is that – even for the EU – the Rimland periphery is less important than Mackinder’s World Island.
There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance – but this may no longer be true.
What is actualizing here is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power and technological supremacy.
Yet this economic Realpolitik is but half the story to China and Russia’s launch of a ‘global resistance economy’. It has a parallel geo-political frame, too.
It is to this latter aspect, most probably, that the Chinese official referred when he said that the Iran deal would…
“totally upend the prevailing geopolitical landscape in the West Asian region that has for so long been subject to U.S. hegemony”.
Note that he did not say that it would upend Iran’s relations with U.S. or Europe – he said the whole region. He implied too, that China’s initiatives would free West Asia from American hegemony.
“The Middle East was a highland of brilliant civilizations in human history. Yet, due to protracted conflicts and turmoil in the more recent history, the region descended into a security lowland … For the region to emerge from chaos and enjoy stability, it must break free from the shadows of big-power geopolitical rivalry, and independently explore development paths suited to its regional realities.
It must stay impervious to external pressure and interference, and follow an inclusive and reconciliatory approach to build a security architecture that accommodates the legitimate concerns of all sides …
Against this backdrop, China wishes to propose a five-point initiative on achieving security and stability in the Middle East:“Firstly, advocating mutual respect …
Both sides should uphold the international norm of non-interference in others’ internal affairs.
… it is particularly important for China and Arab states to stand together against slandering, defamation, interference and pressurizing in the name of human rights … [the EU should take note]
“Second, upholding equity and justice, opposing unilateralism, and defending international justice …
China will encourage the Security Council to fully deliberate on the question of Palestine to reaffirm the two-state solution …
We should uphold the UN-centred international system, as well as the international order underpinned by international law – and jointly promote a new type of international relations. We should share governance experience … and oppose arrogance and prejudice.“Third, achieving non-proliferation …
Parties need to … discuss and formulate the roadmap and timeframe for the United States and Iran to resume compliance with the JCPOA.
The pressing task is for the U.S. to take substantive measures to lift its unilateral sanctions on Iran, and long-arm jurisdiction on third parties, and for Iran to resume reciprocal compliance with its nuclear commitments.
At the same time, the international community should support efforts by regional countries in establishing a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.“Fourth, jointly fostering collective security …
We propose holding in China a multilateral dialogue conference for regional security in the Gulf (Persian Gulf) …“And fifthly, accelerating development cooperation …”.
Well, China has spectacularly made its entrance in the Middle East, and is challenging the U.S. with a resistance agenda.
FM Wang, when he met with Ali Larijani, special adviser to the Supreme Leader Khamenei, framed it all in a single sentence:
“Iran decides independently on its relations with other countries, and is not like some countries that change their position with one phone call”.
This single comment encapsulates the new ‘wolf warrior’ ethos: states should stick with their autonomy and sovereignty.
China is advocating a sovereigntist multilateralism to shake off “the western yoke”.
Wang did not confine this political message to Iran.
He had just said the same in Saudi Arabia, before arriving in Tehran.
It was well received in Riyadh.
In economic development terms, China earlier had linked Turkey and Pakistan into the ‘corridor’ plan – and now Iran.
How will the U.S. react?
Will There Be A Global Resistance Economy?
Wrong question, imo.
If China is nattering about it then it's a fact on the ground.
The question now is "What will the Totalitarian Capitalist do to nip it in the bud?"
One of the reasons advanced for the Iraq Fake War was that Saddam had declared his intention to side-step the US$ in conducting Iraq's oil transactions.
The trouble with China is that it plans ahead in 5-year & 10-year chunks so the idea of a GRE isn't something Xi dreamt up yesterday afternoon.
If he's nattering about it; it means that all the physical and bureaucratic infrastructure is in place, and is probably already processing transactions.
I wondered why Scum Mo panicked by chopping CGTN off at the socks after hearing about China's 13th People's Congress in early March and assumed it was because his idea of a long-range plan is "Who are we going to screw tomorrow?" or "No, sorry, we're discussing the future and the meeting is Top Secret so you voters/shitkickers aren't invited!"
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 6 2021 20:33 utc | 23
How will the USA react?
It will ignore the message from Anchorage.
It will likely press on.
It is already testing China over Taiwan, and is preparing an escalation in Ukraine, to test Russia.
For the EU, the Chinese entry into global politics is more problematic.
It was trying to leverage its own ‘strategic autonomy’ by erecting European values as the gateway to inclusion into its market and trade partnership.
China effectively is telling the world to reject any such hegemonic imposition of alien values and rights.
The EU is stranded in the midst.
Unlike the U.S., it is precluded from printing the money with which to resurrect its virus-blighted economy.
It desperately needs trade and investment.
Its biggest trading partner, and its tech well-spring, however, has just told the EU (as the U.S.), to give up on its moralising discourse.
At the same time, Europe’s ‘security partner’ has just demanded the opposite – that the EU strengthens it.
What’s to be done?
Sit back, and watch … (with fingers crossed that no one does something extremely stupid).
China, in turn, was definitely 3rd world when the Qing dynasty fell. 40 years of "capitalism" did nothing whatsoever to improve China's economy. And even at the beginning of Deng's "market" reforms, China was a very different place - economically and infrastructurally - than it was in 1949.What Crooke writes about is exactly what Hudson has repeatedly spoken to: the original goal for economists was reform. Reform of economies away from the stranglehold of feudal/aristocratic rentiers towards economic goals that benefit everyone. The feudal/aristocratic interests have only been replaced by banksters - and thus the Russia/China/Iran response is as much defensive as it is reform. They're being attacked politically and economically by the bankster classes because all 3 of those nations have, in the recent past, booted out their oligarchs.Russia booted out its aristocrats in 1917 then Putin brought the "privatization" oligarchs to heel 2000-2006.China booted out its capitalist/warlord oligarchs in 1949, then booted out the socialist bureaucrats in the 1980s.Iran booted out both its king and British American oil interests in 1979.Is it any wonder these nations are hated and feared by the banksters worldwide? And their existence gleefully used to justify outrageous sums spent on "defense" by the MIC profiteers?Posted by: c1ue | Apr 7 2021 16:56 utc | 91
Conclusions and some thoughts
What is going on now is historic. It’s not a matter of one nation fighting another. Instead an entire way of doing things is being up-ended. China has shown the way, and it is no wonder that the United States is blocking videos out of China, and news out of China, and whenever it discusses anything about China it is so darn negative.
Look at America today.
EVERYTHING is for profit. Everything. From drinking water, to getting arrested for having too much money inside your wallet. Even Adobe has changed from…
"Save PDF as..."
to
"Save PDF as long as you have a "membership" just pay this monthly fee...
For a fee, don’t you know.
People! This is all FUCKED UP!
China’s way of doing things is WORKING.
America is nearly 30 trillion dollars in debt. That’s an impossible number. If you mined all the gold on the entire planet, you would never have this kind of money.
How can this situation arise?
But creating debt out of “thin air”; out of nothing. And that has been the pyramid scheme for all these many, many decades. People who make nothing, and provides no services end up being fantastically engorged with wealth, while those who make and create things, and provide tangible services end up in poverty or as debt slaves.
It’s not a sustainable model.
In the mean time we must re-organize our societies and get rid of the parasites that try to end our world even before the next big asteroid. What China and Russia is doing is clearly the way forward.I think however "capitalism" and "socialism" is 20th century vocabulary of limited relevance in the present situation. It is not "left" vs. "right" anymore (if it ever was).Posted by: Norwegian | Apr 6 2021 20:43 utc | 24
China, a nation of meritocracy understands this.
And so you are seeing the result…
The wealthy oligarchy, sitting on top of their big imaginary fortunes are demanding that the world engage in a hot (probably nuclear) war rather than they succumb to the ultimate reality that is approaching “on the tracks”. Indeed it’s going to be one fuck of a “train wreck”.
Is the greater public ever going to get a clear view of the difference behind the "rules based order" of the West (we own the money system and make the rules) and the negotiated International law based order?Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 20 2021 17:05 utc | 4
And the rest of the world is starting to jump on the “bandwagon” and trade in their own currencies backed in solid tangible items. Those nations that will refuse to do so will see their piles of money evaporate in value. And thus a great economic explosion is looming in the future, and the ONLY means to prevent it is for the Untied States to nuke the fuck out of Asia.
We will see what will happen.
That is my take as well. Plus the message that China possesses an incredible sense of social solidarity and flexibility. The switches in production to meet emergency pandemic components from masks to complex ventilators to food distribution chains - that is an extraordinary tale of a great civilisation facing an immense stress test and emerging wiser and stronger.Most interesting is the synchronicity between the small and large capitalist sector with the public sector. THAT is the economy that the west was deluded into abandoning and still detests and undermines with every ounce of its effort.Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 7 2021 5:40 utc | 72
I for one welcome a world without all those psychopathic leeches charging fees and taxes and regulations on everything that you do. It was totally refreshing when I moved to China, and those who have never had this experience is in for an amazing ride!
Good for Iran; and China, Russia, and Asia will benefit as well.
My main fear is a wounded USA over reacting itself into a war...
A bully usually needs a good whupping to stop bullying; in the case of the US, it may bring out the worst, to avoid losing face on the world's stage....and yes; they're that sick, IMHO...
The positive in all this is that, I believe, both Russia and China know the US better than the US knows them...Posted by: V | Apr 7 2021 6:06 utc | 76
Picture Time
For all of you don’t have a clue as to what I am talking about, and instead drink the “electric Kool Aide” from the American media, and who are fearful of living like those “dirty, filthy Chinese” here’s some pictures that I took with my Metallic-Camera.
The main objective of China’s Government is the rejuvenation of China.
In part demonstrably evidenced by the determined efforts made for the betterment and the well-being of its population.
Which is reflected in the credibility and high level of trust the Chinese people place in their government.
These concepts don’t exist in the west.
In the US, the “world’s model for everything”, a virus epidemic is seen through lenses of profiteering by large corporations.
With sick people not being humans in need of assistance but merely a new lucrative “market” – for those with money to pay.
An American hospital is not a place for healing the sick but a kind of barnyard filled with cash cows to milk.
This is one fundamental reason underlying America’s chaotic and hopeless approach to dealing with the epidemic.
Zhuhai. A view from my front yard.
But don’t you all worry. According to this article written in 2016, China is going to collapse any day now (LOL)!
And we can clearly see this from a MM point of view, like here…
A pretty typical Chinese factory. This is a brake operation. Note the slave and child labor that you hear so much about in the American and UK media. Oh, and don’t forget the nets that are used to prevent people from jumping off the tops of the buildings! LOL!
But…
For some years now I've been looking for a decent currency to live my life with. We seem much closer now with the Digital Yuan. And as you say, if somehow it were banned by the world and refused exchange in other currencies (which seems impossible even to imagine), I'd be happy to cash it all in within China.Bitcoin never became a currency - it may or may not end up highly priced at a collector's value but it seems improbable that it could settle enough to become a usable mainstream currency. It could be a wealthy person's trading counter, perhaps. But like all such tokens, it remains vulnerable to fads.But I don't want to leave my last word with bitcoin. The last word, quite possibly for the entire world, may well rest with the Yuan.Posted by: Grieved | Apr 7 2021 1:57 utc | 55
Let’s take a look at just what is actually going on in China today. You know when the cost of housing is less than 10% of your income, and the TOTAL taxes and fees for being a citizen is less than 3%, you have the ability to save and live a stress free life.
It manifests like this…
When your rent or housing cost is less than 10% of your income, it’s easy to save money; and as a result life isn’t all that stressful.
AH.
Socialism does not mean the government owns everything.
It means the government owns the things that everybody NEEDS to have work well. Those things you don't want some needy jerk exploiting to make themselves rich or powerful with.
And those socialized things should be at nominal cost or free, to enable EVERYBODY to do their best in life.
If you want your culture and society (as a whole) to do well, you have to enable them with all the necessities.
You can have either "unproductive parasites" or you can have "a healthy body politic", not both.
Posted by: Bemildred | Apr 6 2021 20:32 utc | 22
But there’s more than what meets the eye. Instead of a “live your life as you see fit as a lone wolf” in America, the Chinese look hard and expect their children to grow up to be useful productive members of society. Here’s a pre-Kindergarden where infants are learning social interaction, basic spelling and language skills and proper social manners.
This is quite different from what American Public Education provides.
This is a Chinese pre-Kindergarden. Here’ the kids learn to socialize and learn their language skills early on.
There’s change in the air.
You can feel it.
To all the others who have read or are interested in the summation by Larry Romanoff over at the Saker called, Dealing With Demons.It's a lengthy review of the coronavirus as it hit China and the world. It's basically a forensic report on 2020, with about 160 footnotes to media and authority sources - the piece itself is a reference to bookmark, and the stories linked are probably a world of fascination.For those of us intensely following the situation, many of the facts and summaries presented are not new, but everyone will find something previously unknown in Romanoff's magisterial story.And it is a story, immensely readable, merely long - so make coffee or pour a drink and find a quiet hour, and there in that mere one hour you will have the real story of 2020, and the true picture of China.~~One thing - I had originally heard the translation of Xi's rallying call to action as the virus being a "Devil", not a Demon. The obvious connection seemed compelling with the "foreign devils" that plundered China of old and that still at every opportunity now attempt to exploit it. Maybe it's a nothing, maybe it's everything, in China's response of total mobilization, as if under attack. Romanoff doesn't go there, although he may have in earlier reports of this pandemic that he has dealt with so well (he's had great articles on the pandemic at Unz).~~For me, the venality and mean-spiritedness of the US establishment becomes so clear that I have to correct a previous speculation I made recently. I wondered - here in these threads, I think - if the hardening of Chinese diplomatic language was somewhat calculated and aimed at preparing its own nation for military conflict with the US.But I see now from Romanoff's report the extraordinary effort made by the Chinese people to help the US, in the spirit of goodness, even as the US media was being fed the lies to demonize China, and to turn the US populace into a majority population that hates China.And the Chinese people are well aware of this. And now that the dust has settled for them, it is a clear picture for them to reflect on regarding the US and say, "fuck 'em - never again will we help those people."So the real change came first, as the Chinese nation opened its heart to the US, and was trashed and slandered in return.
And the Chinese diplomatic language is simply reflecting the overall feeling of 1.4 billion citizens of this planet who now understand with great finality that the US is beyond the pale.Posted by: Grieved | Apr 7 2021 4:38 utc | 68
And you know, nothing says it’s time to close out this article than a movie. Here’s one that I took while I was on a trip to a factory the other week.
The movie…
Do you want more?
Ok, then.
Here’s a MV in Cantonese.
I have more posts in my International America Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Hows’ that for a mouthful? Yeah, it’s a long title, but it has to be. You know with what “news” has actually become over the last few decades, most Americans are the most ignorant and uninformed people on the planet. Sure they have tons and tons of media outlets… but all the outlets originate from one or two main sources. And those are all controlled by the United States government.
Sad to say.
Anyways…
Grab a glass of wine and some delicious pizza and listen to a little story that I want to tell…
Pizza and wine go together nicely.
Firstly, for those of you that are unaware of the background, here’s a brief overview…
The Trump Administration was engaged in a hybrid war with China that included carpet-bombing of Chinese food and livestock with bio-weapons (8 strains). HERE.
It was planned to be a minimum of 8 years in duration, and 2020 was the year that was to “kick off” the “hot” (shooting) portion of the war. HERE.
The Coronavirus was a really devilish plot using and A-strain to inoculate four “friendly” nations, and the B-strain to attack four “enemy” nations. HERE.
Tin foil hat stuff, eh?
Nah.
Let me tell you all a nice little story…
When Donald Trump was elected there were some high hopes that a “businessman” would be able to conduct global and international trade and relationships from a business point of view with China. That is, as opposed to a political viewpoint as was displayed by the Obama administration when it was in Washington. Many nations, specifically China, believed that America would (finally) join the rest of the world in being a reasonable partner in trade and a steward for the planet.
That did not happen.
Instead, he staffed his administration with “hard Right” neocons and went on a ‘war footing” regarding China. Publicly, it was a series of “failed negotiations” and an increase in tariffs on Chinese made goods. Privately it was a complete “hybrid-war” gearing up for a “hot war” event that was to be “kicked off” in late 2019.
The idea was to to create all kind of stresses on the Chinese people, and then when the nation was at it’s weakest, America could invade under the pretext of saving “democracy” all “for the people”.
The public actions are well known. that included tariffs, censorship, attacks on Huawei, etc. This includes the “pro democracy” (NGO-sponsored) “color revolutions” in Hong Kong, and the military incursions to destabilize the Uighur population in Xinjiang.
The non-public actions are not that well known. These included carpet bombing of Chinese livestock with bio-weapons agents, the use of drones to hit remote villages, the destruction and suppression of chip-making equipment to China, interruption of precious mining operations, behind-the-scenes manipulations and black-mailing of “friendly” national leaders, and military probes into Chinese territory and systems.
Now, around 2019 China received word that a “big event” was planned to occur on or during CNY (Chinese New Year), and whether they knew exactly what it was, or how it would manifest, they knew something was up somehow. So once they received word, they immediate began reconnaissance efforts.
These reconnaissance efforts are just now coming to light…
The following article is from The Drive. Reprinted as found, and all credit to the author. Edited to fit this venue.
Mysterious Drone Incursions Have Occurred Over U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery In Guam
It's yet another reminder of just how vulnerable highly strategic assets, even air defense systems, are to low-end drones.
Earlier this year, it came to The War Zone‘s attention that a series of bizarre and highly concerning events took place in the late Winter of 2019 at Andersen Air Force Base on the Island of Guam.
Map of Guam.
As we understand it, between late February and early March of last year, the massive installation experienced repeated incursions by unmanned aircraft. The aircraft that appeared to be extremely interested in one highly sensitive area of the highly strategic base. This area of interest is the U.S. Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery that is tasked with defending the island from ballistic missile attacks.
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The incursions, which were said to have occurred in late March and early April 2019, had been observed by personnel manning the guard towers that loom over the highly secure THAAD area. This area, situated towards the northern end of the air base, is often referred to as “North West Field.” Andersen itself takes up the northern and western reaches of the entire island.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery, showing the deployment of the radar module and the launcher tubes.
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The intruding craft were described as “quadcopter-like” vehicles with bright spotlights that flew from over the water and then across the North West Base area. They flew at not much higher than treetop level, about 20 to 30 feet above the ground. On a number of nights, the craft would make multiple incursions in the very early morning hours. They would show up, disappear, then come back a few hours later.
Quad rotor drone with camera.
The spotlight that shone down from the craft made it hard for personnel to make out a detailed description of the craft, although estimates range from being three to five feet in diameter largely based on the size of the spotlight.
The craft would maneuver dynamically, appearing with the spotlight on, then disappearing, just to reappear moments later over to one side or another with the spotlight on, which was unsettling to those that witnessed it.
Supposedly, there was a concerted effort to identify, track, and down the mysterious craft, but it doesn’t seem that those efforts were successful based on our understanding of events.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
This information was highly interesting if not downright alarming, but we had to find hard evidence that at least something similar did indeed happen during this timeframe.
We got just that straight from the U.S. Air Force.
The United States will compete, deter, and win in the #IndoPacific.
The #THAAD system I visited on Friday, is one of our most advanced missile defense systems. It enables the defense of #Guam against short, medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
#TaskForceTalonpic.twitter.com/g8C2b602aT
— Archive: Dr. Mark T. Esper (@EsperDoD) August 31, 2020
The War Zone was able to confirm that at least one of the incidents described above did occur through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), by which we obtained a copy of the relevant entry from the Air Force’s 36th Security Forces Squadron’s internal crime blotter. The is unit is part of the 36th Wing at Andersen Air Force Base.
The entry describes the “possible drone” as being of an
"unknown color and size, [with a] bright white light."
Army personnel at “THAAD Tower #2” had radioed in at
"2315," or 11:15 PM to report "a bright white light was seen from [their] LOCATION hovering over a field and quickly disappeared."
"Tower #2 personnel were unable to provide any further description,"
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U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery. Showing the missiles in the pre-launch configuration.
The “JET PATROLS” that are referenced in the document are not aircraft, but are Jungle Enforcement Teams of the 36th Security Forces Squadron.
…the blotter entry continues.
"At 2318, JET PATROLS were in the vicinity conducting covert operations. None of the JET PATROLS were able to locate the suspicious white light."
The Air Force describes the teams as being
"tasked with preventing security breaches, apprehending poachers, and securing the perimeter around the jungle."
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery showing a launch.
The team’s personnel move silently through the jungle that permeates much of the base at night and have unique human tracking skills. You can read all about this specialized security force in this official media release.
Interestingly, the 36th Security Force Squadron’s blotter lists this incident as
which implied that there was at least one other similarly classified drone incident at Andersen Air Force Base before this one by that point in the early 2019 calendar or fiscal year.
Radar for a U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
Another FOIA request confirmed that there was a “2019-1” blotter entry, but the Air Force withheld information about that event citing privacy and law enforcement exemptions.
Agencies typically withhold records for law enforcement reasons because of a potential risk of exposing sensitive tactics, techniques, or procedures, or because of an ongoing investigation.
It is then doubly interesting that the March 2019 incident near the Army’s THAAD battery at North West Field was not also subject to the exemptions.
U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) forwarded a separate FOIA request regarding this incident, any other similar occurrences around the same timeframe, to the U.S. Army. The War Zone is still awaiting a response to that request, as well as another one to the Guam Police Department. We inquired directly to the 36th Wing and INDOPACOM, but never got a response.
A general diagram showing how a U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery operates.
We found this information to be highly troubling for a number of reasons.
The most important is that this craft was able to penetrate its way over an air defense system that is tasked with defending the highly strategic island from ballistic missile attacks.
In other words, that THAAD battery is largely what stands in the way of a country like North Korea from holding the island at imminent risk.
The system is even capable of shielding against a lower volume barrage from a peer state competitor, such as China.
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Guam would be near the top of Beijing’s targeting list during a conflict with the United States and its growing ballistic missile arsenal has been developed largely to deny the U.S. the utility of its regional bases during the open stages of a conflict.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
The thing is that destruction of enemy air defenses (DEAD) is not defined by a platform, it is a mission.
Traditionally we associate the objective of destroying enemy air defenses with standoff cruise missile attacks and ‘wild weasel’ fighter jet operations, but DEAD can be carried out by a team of special operators with some well-placed explosives or via a barrage of naval gunfire.
Even carefully deployed malware that targets the software that an air defense system and its mechanical component run on could potentially be destructive enough to be considered a DEAD method.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery showing the inception stage.
With that said, America’s preeminent adversaries in the entire region would make taking out the THAAD battery on Guam a top priority during a conflict or even as part of a limited demonstration of force.
Why barrage it with ballistic missiles or attempt a cruise missile launch from a forward-deployed submarine or even a clandestine commando raid when you can just fly a drone loaded with explosives into it?
A diagram of an ICBM showing and indicating interception stages.
And no, you don’t need some high-end drone system to do this as real-world events have highlighted many times over.
Somewhat more sophisticated types can be launched from longer distances and can even home in on radar or other RF emissions sources, like THAAD’s powerful AN/TPY-2 Radar and data-links, autonomously, beyond just striking a certain point on a map.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
Simply put, ‘shooting the archer,’ in this case an advanced anti-ballistic missile system that protects America’s most strategic base in the entire region, via a relatively cheap drone is both an absurdly obvious and terrifyingly ironic tactic—the U.S. can shoot down ballistic missiles, but the critical systems used to do so remain extremely vulnerable to the lowliest of airborne threats—cheap drones.
For those that follow our work, this is not news. The U.S. military was dangerously aloof when it came to the threat posed by low-end drones.
We spent years highlighting this threat while seeing the U.S. military do very little to actually counter it, that is until ISIS was constantly dropping bomblets from drones or just flying explosive-laden drones into allied positions during the Battle of Mosul, Iraq.
U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery showing the three points and opportunities for interception.
The radar unit of a U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
In the meantime, it’s abundantly clear that even America’s most capable air defenses are vulnerable to the most meager of aerial capabilities—commercially available drones.
If anything else, this is yet another, but possibly the biggest example of just how misplaced the U.S. military’s priorities had become when it comes to investments in air defense over the last two decades or so.
The components of a U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery minus the launcher truck module.
You can read how the Pentagon let its short-range air defense (SHORAD) capabilities wither on the vine to an appalling degree while concentrating on higher-profile, ‘sexier,’ and drastically more lucrative weapon systems in this past feature of ours.
The Pentagon’s appalling lack of vision regarding the emergence of this threat has made quickly ramping-up efforts to counter it that much more of a scramble, which is ongoing now.
The radar and command and power modules for a U.S. THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Battery.
Still, America’s potential enemies are already a step ahead, working on swarming low-end drone concepts that will overwhelm most countermeasures currently in the works.
A comparison of three anti-ballistic missile batteries deployed by the United States; the Patriot, Thaad, and Ages.
In the meantime, the events on Guam in 2019 serve as maybe the most outstanding reminder of how the Pentagon’s fixation on high-end threats, and the huge gold plated weapons programs that are put into play to counter them, have left even those very capabilities remarkably vulnerable to far less advanced attacks.
As to quote the character from “Laugh In”… “Very Interesting…”
So what does this mean?
Well, strangely…
…immediately before the bio-weapons attack on CNY 2020 there were incursions of a reconnaissance nature on Guam investigating the THAAD missile batteries. These incursions were visible. They intentionally turned on flood and spot lights and were not secretive. Which is a very UNUSUAL way to conduct reconnaissance operations.
One must wonder what was actually going on.
Who operated the drones? Was it the Chinese? Or an American operation that was testing the defenses? Was it someone else?
Where were the drones controlled from? Was it from a civilian located on the South end of the island, or was it from a submarine or some other vehicle?
Why did the drones turn on the lights? Was it to be noticed, or was it to take quick photographs?
Why isn’t the American military concerned? Perhaps this event is really nothing to worry about. You can trust the United States government, right?
The thing is, however, this is not the only event leading up to the 2020 CNY bio-weapon attack on China. Throughout 2019, American bases, and Naval ships were being probed.
Such as described in this article. Reprinted as found. All credit to the writer, and edited to fit this venue.
Navy’s Top Officer Says ‘Drones’ That Swarmed Destroyers Remain Unidentified
A series of bizarre events off Southern California in 2019 remain unexplained according to the Chief of Naval Operations.
At a roundtable with reporters today, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday, the U.S. Navy’s top officer, was asked about a series of bizarre incidents that took place in July 2019 and involved what only have been described as ‘drones’ swarming American destroyers off the coast of Southern California.
American destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill
The War Zone was the first to report in detail on this series of mysterious events after the incident was originally uncovered by filmmaker Dave Beaty.
Asked by Jeff Schogol of Task & Purposeif the Navy had positively identified any of the aircraft involved, Gilday responded by saying:
“No, we have not. I am aware of those sightings and as it’s been reported there have been other sightings by aviators in the air and by other ships not only of the United States, but other nations – and of course other elements within the U.S. joint force.”“Those findings have been collected and they still are being analyzed," Gilday added. "I don’t have anything new to report, Jeff, on what those findings have revealed thus far. But I will tell you we do have a well-established process in place across the joint force to collect that data and to get it to a separate repository for analysis.”
At the time of writing, it is unclear if Admiral Gilday was referring to the Department of Defense’s Navy-led Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), created last August to examine “incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace.”
A Senate-requested report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is expected later this year. Representatives from the UAPTF could not be reached for comment.
Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell (DDG 85)
A preliminary response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries indicates that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) possesses documents about the incident and that they are intermingled with records from several other agencies. This would make sense as the UAPTF was established within ONI, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Schogol also asked if there was any suspicion that the aircraft described as drones were “extraterrestrial.” Gilday responded,
“No, I can’t speak to that - I have no indications at all of that.”
American destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill
The War Zone has reached out to the Navy, Coast Guard, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for further details regarding the drones flying near Navy destroyers in 2019. Members of the intelligence and armed services committees in both the Senate and the House were asked for comment, as well. While at least some elected officials indicated they were aware of the issue, none were able to make a statement at this time regarding the encounters off the coast of Southern California two years ago.
So What is going on?
Well, you know that throughout the Pacific in 2019, drones were “buzzing” and observing United States military operations. They studied defense operations, ship capabilities, and base operations.
This all occurred simultaneously while the Trump Administration was ramping up a “war stance” towards China.
2010 – 2016 Obama setting up bases that surrounded China.
2017 – 2019 Trump media march for war, color revolutions, tariffs, and induce famine inside of China.
2020 was to be the year for actual military operations, kicked off by a full-scale bio-weapon attack with R0=20% lethal COVID-19B strain. (Not the “safe” American R0=0.01% COVID-19A strain.)
Also simultaneously during this time period was a complete restructuring of the American military…
Combined we see a picture that is quite disturbing.
A Washington DC establishment desirous of a “Hot War” with China. Not only one of the largest nations on the planet, but the home of most of the factories, technology, and and military on the planet.
A realization that China has Intel that indicates activities that might happen in the future. Somehow they found out about the CNY plans a year earlier.
Scanning and recon of American Naval forces, bases and defenses in the South Pacific right before the CNY 2020 Bio-weapon attack.
A politically focused restructuring of the military.
An over emphasis in American technical superiority, and a discounting of the basic physical standards of the military.
One cannot help to remember stories about similar events in the past and how they all turned out.
I am reminded of Babylon. Not the city written about in the Bible, but the much later incarnation. The Babylon of the Islamic Empire. It was the center of all society, technology, and manufacturing in the ancient world.
But it was ruled by self-absorbed fools.
And out from the East came a “rough and tumble” people that DID.NOT.PLAY. They wanted to align with the Islamic nation, they wanted to expand but incorporate the nation and peoples in with their society.
Nope!
Says the self-absorbed Babylon ruler drinking his wines. Singing his songs, dancing with his friends…
The following is from HERE. All credit to the author, and reprinted as found and edited to fit within this venue.
The Mongol conquest of the Abbasid Caliphate culminated in the horrific sack of Baghdad that effectively ended the Islamic Golden Age.
The Islamic Golden Age—from the 8th to the mid-13th century—was one of the greatest periods of human flourishment in knowledge and progress, with Baghdad as its focal point.
A truly global repository of human knowledge, this Arab-Muslim imperial capital also welcomed—indeed encouraged—scholars from across the known world. As its wealth and fame grew, more and more scholars and engineers were drawn to the city from all over civilization.
But in January 1258, a vast Mongol army reached the city’s perimeter and demanded that the caliph—al-Musta’sim, the nominal spiritual authority of the Islamic world—surrender.
History of Baghdad: The Greatest City in the World
If you can imagine the shock waves, were London razed to the ground tomorrow, you’d be getting close to the horror that was about to accompany the Sack of Baghdad in 1258.
Founded 500 years earlier, Baghdad’s population had reached one million within a century, making it the world’s largest, most prosperous, and celebrated city. If one thinks of London in 1897—the year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee—the English city on the Thames was by then the largest and most important city on earth. In 1897, London was peerless in the world, with nowhere else coming close to matching its power and influence. It was the capital, and the fulcrum, of the British Empire.
A Devastating Moment in History for Muslims in the Middle East
For many historians, the arrival of the Mongols into the heart of the Muslim faith and empire is the single most devastating moment in the history of the Muslim Middle East. It’s easy to see why—and hard to argue otherwise—because the Sack of Baghdad would mark the end of the Islamic Golden Age.
Rather than submit, the Abbasid caliph challenged the Mongols to attempt to storm his city, if they dared. The nomadic army from Asia—led by Hulagu Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons—did indeed dare. Doing what they are most famous for, the Mongols thrashed Baghdad. In 10 days of unremitting violence and destruction, Baghdad and its inhabitants were completely and utterly vanquished. Almost without exception, the population was either put to the sword or sold into slavery. The River Tigris ran red—to cite one of the most over-quoted, and overwrought phrases in history—with the blood of slaughtered men, women, and children.
After this, every building of note in Baghdad—including mosques, palaces, and markets—was utterly destroyed, among them the world-famous House of Wisdom. Hundreds of thousands of priceless manuscripts and books were tossed into the river, clogging the arterial waterway with so many texts, according to eyewitnesses, that soldiers could ride on horseback from one side to the other. Of course, the river turned from red to black with ink.
Who Were the Mongols?
The Sack of Baghdad fits, like a hinge, almost exactly in the middle of two defining dates in the history of Islam, from the founding of the faith in the year 622 to the end of the last caliphate in 1924. Even by the standards of the day, the destruction was shocking, and the results long-lasting, if not permanent. The Mongols’ name during this period in history was a byword for destruction. Who were they and where did they come from? Is there any reason to think that they were any more destructive than other peoples at the time?
The Mongols, an ethnic group, originating in north and central Asia, were typically pastoral peoples, whose nomadic lifestyle inevitably brought them into conflict with more settled populations. Probably the best example of how settled peoples tried to restrict their otherwise free movement is the Great Wall of China. The wall was essentially built to hold back incursions of their Mongolian neighbors to the north.
This preference for nomadism over a settled existence is central to the view of the Mongols as especially destructive. As one writer put it, while Muslims built cities—Baghdad and Cairo, for example—Mongols destroyed them. Does this mean that the Mongols were inherently more ruthless or violent than Muslims or crusading Christians? Not necessarily. Rather, it shows that their priority, in terms of conquest, was for land, for grazing—for space even—rather than for cities and confinement.
As one writer put it, while Muslims built cities—Baghdad and Cairo, for example—Mongols destroyed them.
One thing that came out of the Mongols’ lack of interest in seizing cities was their enhanced mobility. Often living on a diet of mare’s milk—or blood, if the mares were not lactating—Mongol custom meant that they never washed their clothes. This, along with a heavy fat diet—both milk and meat—no doubt accounted for the Mongols’ reputation as a very smelly, as well as scary, foe.
The Fierce Mongol Warriors
Contemporary chroniclers tell us that Mongol warriors were most comfortable in the saddle, literally, it seems. If they had to move more than a hundred yards, or so, they’d jump on a horse and ride. Also, all warriors owned numerous mounts, allowing them to cover larger distances than more traditional cavalry found in the Near East and Europe. While they rode light into battle, the Mongols used harnessed oxen to pull their heavier and more cumbersome possessions from place to place.
An important facet of the Mongol way of war and conquest was their use of terror as a tactic. The banging of metal pots and the rattling of bells was the usual way of announcing the start of a battle. This created such a din that defenders of a city under siege would find it almost impossible to hear their officers’ commands.
Whenever they entered new territory, the Mongols would offer the local rulers an opportunity to surrender. But in the language of many a salesman, this was a one-time offer. For those foolish enough not to surrender immediately, conquest and destruction without quarter would be their lot, and the people of Baghdad knew this.
Setting the Scene for Catastrophe Before the Sack of Baghdad
In 1206, just 52 years before the Sack of Baghdad, the Mongol Empire was formed and led by the legendary Genghis Khan. Khan is originally a Mongolian word that means military leader, or sovereign, a king, in English. Being accepted as the Great Khan effectively elevated Genghis to the status of an emperor. His grandsons now ruled the Mongolian Empire. In addition to Hulagu Khan, who led the attack against Baghdad, there was Kublai Khan, conqueror of China, and Mongke Khan, who became the Great Khan and sent his brother Hulagu to Baghdad.
Hulagu marched at the head of perhaps the largest Mongolian army ever assembled, consisting of as many as 150,000 troops, with Baghdad one of several goals for this mission. First, Hulagu was told to subdue southern Iran, which he did. Next, he was to destroy the infamous Assassins.
A breakaway Nizari-Ismaili-Shia sect, founded in the 11th century, the Assassins had achieved infamy for the political assassinations—hence, the term we use today—carried out by certain of their number. Although it was known that the Assassins were based at the castle of Alamut in northwestern Iran, many of their adversaries thought they were somehow invincible because of the stealth they typically employed. Hulagu Khan proved this was not the case. After destroying the Assassins and their castle fortress at Alamut, Baghdad was the next stop on his list.
The majority of Hulagu Khan’s men were Mongolian warriors, but the force also contained Christians, including soldiers led by the king of Armenia, Frankish Crusaders from the Principality of Antioch, and Georgians.
The majority of Hulagu Khan’s men were Mongolian warriors, but the force also contained Christians, including soldiers led by the king of Armenia, Frankish Crusaders from the Principality of Antioch, and Georgians. There were also Muslim soldiers from various Turkic and Persian tribes, and 1,000 Chinese engineers—artillery specialists, who were always in demand when the need arose to reduce walls to rubble.
The Abbasid Caliphate
The Abbasids—the third Islamic caliphate to rule the Muslim Middle East since the death of Muhammad—had risen to power in 750, after overthrowing their rivals, the Damascus-based Umayyads. Taking their name from one of Muhammad’s uncles, Abbas, the Abbasids quickly took control of almost all Umayyad lands, and so found themselves ruling over an enormous empire that covered the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Persia and beyond to modern Afghanistan.
A new Abbasid caliphate deserved a new capital, which they established in Baghdad, in 762, and immediately built it into an imperial city worthy of their greatness.
A new Abbasid caliphate deserved a new capital, which they established in Baghdad, in 762, and immediately built it into an imperial city worthy of their greatness. Within a couple of generations, Baghdad had attracted some of the world’s greatest scholars. Alongside Persian scholarship and cultural traditions—and Arab authority—one saw people from other parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Numerous Jews and Christians also pursued studies there.
Baghdad: A City of Learning
Among the greatest of them all was founded by the early Abbasid caliphs. Called the Bayt al-Hikma—or House of Wisdom—this was the place that the best scholars and professors aspired to reach—not just Muslims from the Islamic world. Imagine if you will, all of America’s Ivy League Colleges rolled into one; add to those the science and technological power of Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, and Berkley, then add Oxford and Cambridge to the mix, and the world’s great non-English-speaking universities. It comes close to what the House of Wisdom was like—except it was even more influential.
Imagine if you will all of America’s Ivy League Colleges rolled into one; add to those the science and technological power of Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, and Berkley, then add Oxford and Cambridge to the mix, and the world’s great non-English-speaking universities. It comes close to what the House of Wisdom was like—except it was even more influential.
There were two distinct sides to scholarship in Baghdad. One was translation work, with texts from India, Persia, and Greece gathered in huge numbers. Texts originally composed in Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, and Chinese were all eagerly rendered into Arabic. Combined with this extensive translation work, however, was a wealth of original scholarship, funded and encouraged by the caliphs. The arts and sciences alike were covered, so that advances were made in almost every imaginable subject, including mathematics, medicine, astronomy, physics, cartography, zoology, and poetry.
A Weak-Willed Caliph in Thirteenth-Century Baghdad
In the year 1242, al-Musta’sim became the 37th caliph in the Abbasid line. Baghdad’s glory days were behind it. By this stage, the Abbasid caliphs were largely figureheads, propped up by outside forces. If they were important at all, it was as the inheritors of Islamic orthodoxy and as beacons of cultural greatness, but not as a political power to be obeyed nor a military force to be feared. Indeed, the Abbasids already were in the habit of paying an annual tribute to the Mongols. Despite this, the city was still large and prosperous.
A weak-willed, even dissolute character, al-Musta’sim was happier hanging out with musicians and drinking wine than he was ruling…
Alas for Baghdad, the court of history doesn’t rate the caliph as the greatest of his line. A weak-willed, even dissolute character, al-Musta’sim was happier hanging out with musicians and drinking wine than he was ruling an already weakened empire. In 1251, the Abbasids sent a delegation to pay homage on the coronation of Hulagu’s brother, Mongke, when he became the Great Khan, but this was no longer considered enough.
Mongols Demand Submission by Abbasid Caliph al-Mustasim
Mongke insisted that the Abbasid Caliph al-Musta’sim come in person to Karakorum, the 13th century capital of the Mongol Empire, in the north of modern Mongolia, to fully submit to Mongol rule. The Caliph al-Musta’sim refused to do so. The final showdown between the Mongols and the Abbasids was set. With the Mongol horde marching on Baghdad, a clash was inevitable, although this wouldn’t be the first encounter between the Abbasids and the Mongols.
In the recent past, the Abbasids had managed a couple of small-scale military victories against Mongol forces; however, these were soon overturned and weren’t part of any trend of a militarily resurgent Abbasid Empire. Their days of martial glory were long gone. Adding fuel to the fire, al-Musta’sim is said to have slighted Shia Muslims by various acts and decrees. He should have known better, as his grand vizier, or senior advisor, was himself a Shia Muslim. This vizier is said to have sided with the Mongols, encouraging their takeover of the city, perhaps imagining that he’d be given control of Baghdad by a grateful Hulagu. If this is what he thought, he didn’t know anything about Hulagu.
A Difficult Decision for the Caliph to Surrender to the Mongols
The caliph was faced with a choice between surrendering to the Mongol leader and presumably saving his city, or building up his army, and riding out to meet the invading warriors in combat. It likely never crossed the caliph’s mind that he should probably surrender rather than send threats to Hulagu. Al-Musta’sim discovered a third option: Doing nothing.
Baghdad was surrounded, and al-Musta’sim realized too late that the Mongol army was far larger and stronger than he’d been told. The rest of the Muslim world wasn’t about to rush to his rescue either. The siege of Baghdad began on January 29, 1258. The Mongols quickly built a palisade and ditch and brought siege engines, such as covered battering rams that protected their men from the defenders’ arrows and other missiles, and catapults to attack the city’s walls. At this stage, al-Musta’sim made a last-ditch attempt to negotiate with Hulagu and was rebuffed. Al-Musta’sim surrendered Baghdad to Hulagu five days later, on February 10. Adding to the distress of those inside the city, Hulagu and his horde didn’t make any attempt to enter the city for three days.
A Glimmer of Compassion for Baghdad Christians
Late in life, Hulagu became a Buddhist. At this moment, however, the only sign of compassion he showed was towards Baghdad’s Nestorian Christian community. Nestorianism was a form of Christianity that church authorities had declared heretical in the 5th century. It stressed that the divine and human aspects of Jesus’s nature were separate. Many Nestorians had moved to Persia, where they’d lived ever since. Hulagu, upon entering Baghdad, told the Nestorians to lock themselves in their church and ordered his men not to touch them. What was the reason for this act of kindness before the bloodbath that was to follow? Simply that Hulagu’s mother and his favorite wife were both Nestorian Christians.
Mongols Execute Baghdad Notables
About 3,000 of Baghdad’s notables—including officials, members of the Abbasid family, and the caliph himself—pleaded for clemency. But all 3,000 were put to death without compunction…
With the Nestorians secure, Hulagu allowed his army an unfettered week of rape, pillage, and murder to celebrate their victory. About 3,000 of Baghdad’s notables—including officials, members of the Abbasid family, and the caliph himself—pleaded for clemency. But all 3,000 were put to death without compunction; all, that is, except for the caliph. He was held prisoner for a little while longer, perhaps in part so that he could see the full extent of what befell his capital.
Estimates of the death toll range from 90,000 at the lowest end to one million at the other. Apart from being a conveniently round number, the population of Baghdad was around a million, and the historical record tells us not everyone was killed. Whatever the actual number, it included the army that had dared resist Hulagu’s advance, and the civilians, who had no choice either way. Men, women, and children down to babes in arms were put to the sword or clubbed to death. Little mercy was shown unless it was of a quick rather than a lingering death.
Death of a Caliph
The Caliph al-Musta’sim was forced to watch these murders and the plundering of his treasury and palaces. Hulagu taunted him that, with so much gold and so many jewels, he’d have been better off spending some of these riches on building up a bigger army. As for how the caliph met his end, one account says he was locked in his treasury, surrounded by his wealth, and left alone to starve to death. As colorful as this account is, it doesn’t sound likely, given the widespread looting that took place, nor is it corroborated by any sources.
A more plausible account, as reported by several chroniclers, goes like this: Hulagu had been warned by his astronomers that royal blood shouldn’t be spilled onto the earth. If it were, the earth would reject it, and earthquakes and natural destruction would follow. If we consider his record, one might not think Hulagu an especially cautious man. However, in this case, he plotted the safer course. The caliph was rolled in carpets, which would catch any blood spilled, and then he was trampled to death by his cavalry. For the first time since the death of Muhammad, 636 years earlier, Islam had no Caliph whose name could be quoted in Friday prayers.
Destruction of the City of Baghdad
If you’re looking for an example of a city razed to the ground, Baghdad in 1258 would be a good choice.
Apart from the human casualties, there was the destruction of the 500-year old city itself. Fires were set so that the fragrant scent of sandalwood and other aromatics was smelled up to 30 miles away. If you’re looking for an example of a city razed to the ground, Baghdad in 1258 would be a good choice. After a week, Hulagu ordered his camp out of the city, and moved upwind, away from the stench of rotting corpses.
Hulagu left Baghdad a broken and depopulated city. Even if those left alive had wanted to rebuild, they lacked the numbers, the resources, and the skills to do so. The death and destruction were such that it would be more than a decade before anyone from Baghdad performed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In attacking Baghdad, Hulagu also destroyed the network of canals that irrigated the arable land thereabouts. Famine and plague followed the Mongol horde to Baghdad as elsewhere. Their scorched-earth tactics make it easy to see why they’re often tagged with a reputation as the most destructive of all the great empires.
Conclusion
All things taken into account, and the knowledge that history tends to repeat itself…
…it seems that the entire United States is Hell-bent on duplicating the fall of the “Golden Age of Islam” and the destruction of Baghdad.
Which is a bitter-sweet thing. After all, there are many great people in the United States, and it is a beautiful land, with some wonderful cities, some great food, and basically decent culture. Taken a a whole.
But…
On the other hand…
Can you imagine what happens if the United States does NOT correct it’s posture. That it does not correct it’s desire to rule over the world. That it does not change it’s social structure, it’s ownership by corporations, and it’s basic inequalities. What if it implements “The Long Telegram” and it is successful in doing so; where the entire world becomes like Detroit or Baltimore and ruled by a 0.001% of psychopathic individuals under a global plutocracy?? Can you just imagine it?
Burrrr!
I get shivers just thinking about it.
Ugh!
It’s time to think about something else. If any one asks. I’ll be jammin’.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
So the big questions are:
Can Russia deter the US by reacting below the threshold of an open military clash? My personal reply is that it is still possible but, sadly, this is becoming less and less likely with every passing day.
Does that mean that this conflict can turn into WWIII with nukes and all? My personal reply is that that this scenario is becoming more and more likely with every passing day.
Bottom line: thank you again, “Biden” -voting Dem doubleplusgoodthinkers! Thanks to you only 100+ days into the new admin we are back on the edge of a nuclear precipice! In the words of Putin “you did not listen to us then, listen to us now!”. But, of course you won’t. Nothing short of a nuclear mushroom will wake you up from your delusions… If that happens, only blame yourselves!
So these are my thoughts for the day.
Now I invite you to share yours!
Kind regards
The Saker
I once encountered a homeless man in California, near Stockton. He tried to sell me a discarded plastic model that he obviously found in a trash bin. He was scruffy, dirty, and unkempt. His hair was long and matted, and his clothes were unwashed and tattered.
We, my wife and I, were walking down the side of the road, and we were going to go under a road near this sort of walk-way viaduct. He was to our right, sitting on the raised pavement. He shouted at us, but not irritatingly so. He just wanted to get our attention. And he did just that.
Now this plastic model was (in it’s self interesting), it was a discarded model of an American world war II half-track personnel carrier. I would guess that about half the pieces were gone and missing. The rest were still attached to the sprues that held them.
He was very adamant about selling it to me. He said that he would give me a good price. Only $20 he said.Keep in mind that this was in the late 1980’s when plastic models could be bought for under $5.
He told me that it was going to become valuable. His reasoning was that it represented the fundamental makeup of God before Satan took over people’s mind through computer modems. Damn! Those pesky demon signals sent via telephone modem…
…!
After that encounter, I became convinced that everyone inside of California were about five bottles short of a six pack of beer. I actually wondered whether there was something in the water…
And while I continued to do business, work and live in California, I made it a point to get the heck out of there as soon as I could. I reasoned that if I could encounter such a fruit case, that there must be many others, and as such, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them, and the area.
This little event, that happened so very long ago, reminds me of America today.
Every now and then you come across these little glimmers of clarity. You are exposed to these little events, or encounters. They make you pause and think. And as such, they pretty much “spell it all out” to you “as plain as day”, that things are more than just a little amiss.
These events cause you to stop. To think. To make reappraisals.
The best analogy I’ve seen is they’re like a monkey with a hand grenade. You can’t reason with it and it’s dangerous.
One such “red flag” moment is “The Longer Telegram”.
Which brings me to this next article. Completely reprinted, and all credit to the author. It was edited to fit this venue.
By Martin Sieff. Written on April 1, 2021.
The Longer Telegram reflects the intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy of what passes for “thought” inside the Washington Beltway, Martin Sieff writes.
The now famous – and ludicrous – Atlantic Council “Longer Telegram” on China, unintentionally has made a global laughing stock of the Atlantic Council.
But it still deserves careful consideration as an example.
An example of the pathetic (and infantile) intellectual pretensions of Washington’s geo-political supposed “elite.”
And their ever-fresh infantile wonk need to be “tougher”, “bigger” and “better” than their childhood heroes such as George Kennan and George Marshall.
Francois-Marie Arouet – Voltaire – shredded the remaining pretensions of the thousand-year-obsolete Holy Roman Empire in his day (the 18th century Enlightenment) by pointing out that it was not Holy, nor Roman nor even an Empire.
Similarly, the “Longer Telegram” that purported to lay out a new US National Strategy towards China is not a telegram at all.
The title of course comes from George Kennan’s now revered (as secular American Scripture) “Long Telegram” of 1946 to Secretary of State James Byrnes. And as such, it was eagerly seized upon as the blueprint for the containment of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.
Kennan in fact condemned US global policies of confrontation, militarization and destruction of democracies around the world from the 1950s on as a travesty of what he had advocated. He lived long enough to condemn the US expansion of NATO throughout Central Europe in the 1990s as the greatest catastrophic US policy decision of the post Cold War world, as I heard him say in person.
But no matter.
The Atlantic Council…
…part of the heart and soul of the US neoconservative/neoliberal think tank foreign policy establishment in its age of infantile regression…
… must have its Pacifier or Baby Comforter to reassure itself that it will still Run the World (at least in its own imagination) half a century from now: And that is the purpose of the “Longer Telegram.”
For the Longer Telegram of course is not a telegram at all.
Telegrams are ludicrously obsolete in our modern high tech world of the 21st century. We Veteran Foreign Correspondents have never bothered to use them for 30 or 40 years or so.
The very Executive Summary of the Longer Telegram gives that aspect of the game away.
Since when has anyone ever heard of any telegram having an “Executive Summary”?
The entire point of telegrams for the 150 years of their practical existence from around 1840 to 1990 was that they were terse and succinct to save money on the cost and speed of transmission.
The Longer Telegram is not only not a Telegram: It is not terse or succinct at all.
It ponderously, pompously and slowly lays out a policy for a [1] generations-long [2] global-wide [3] confrontation with China.
With eventual aim of imploding China.
As well as destroying China’s unity, prosperity and industrial power.
Its ultimate aim in fact is to do what the British and French Empires…
That war unleashed a nightmare century of slavery, drug addiction enslavement, humiliation, misery, massacre and death on the Chinese people.
Chinese leaders are understandably enraged at “The Longer Telegram”.
Whose neocon/neolib authors coyly elected to remain anonymous.
Again childishly trying to echo Kennan’s initial anonymity as “X”.
A reminder of his later 1947 article on Soviet foreign policy published in “Foreign Affairs” magazine.
In fact, the 2021 Longer Telegram bears all the marks of a misshapen monster designed by committee.
However, Beijing should not fear the Longer Telegram for its most crucial and salient characteristic is that is delusional, worthless nonsense.
The global unified alliance of the United States and the nations of Europe and Asia against Big Bad China is never going to happen.
The United States in the Golden Age of Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris) is too chaotic, too confused, too divided and its leaders too ludicrous to ever bring it about.
The Longer Telegram is a misshaped Frankenstein baby born of the inbred Washington Deep State Establishment.
America’s insane 18 main (of course there are hundreds of others) so-called “intelligence ” agencies (an obvious oxymoron but let that pass) are embracing it.
So are the bipartisan performing baboons of Congress…
…and their multiple thousands of staffers…
…and so of course are the enormous defense contractor corporations from whom all greenback blessings ultimately flow.
Most revealing of all, the Longer Telegram reflects the intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy of what passes for “thought” inside the Washington Beltway.
The Beltway Establishment can no longer even manufacture any plausible new justifications, myths or downright lies…
Lies to con the American people into pouring out the remains of their rapidly disappearing and stolen wealth…
…and sending their precious children off for more to die and have their limbs blown off …
…in yet more decades of needless, meaningless global wars.
Instead, the rotting skeletons of arguments made in a different place…
… for a different world…
… three quarters of a century ago must be dusted off and pulled off their dust-covered shelves to be recycled …
Yes. recycled for the totally different circumstances of the 21st century world.
Since Washington, as I have previously pointed out, is now run by Liberal Zombies whose ideas really died 50 years ago.
Thererfore, it should be no surprise that the apologies for “ideas” and “strategies” they frantically reach out for should be pacifiers for babies and zombie ideas exhumed from their long-forgotten graves as well.
Ouch!
Is the greater public ever going to get a clear view of the difference behind the "rules based order" of the West (we own the money system and make the rules) and the negotiated International law based order?Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 20 2021 17:05 utc | 4
So yeah. Washington DC has embraced a make lots-and-lots of war mentality. The entire Washington bureaucratic machine is gearing up for a nice long… generations long… conflict. And they are “chomping at the bit” to make it happen. They want it to happen to China. But they will accept a war with Russia. And they want it to happen soon.
Are they crazy or what?
The globe is changing, and what does America want to do?
They want to press the “reset button”, throw the world into chaos, and then use the enormous American military to “straighten things out” so that America will emerge from a global conflict as the sole remaining super-power.
This belief that it is possible is borne out of ignorance, wishful thinking, and decades of echo-chamber activities. It WILL NOT end up well.
Check out this article. All credit to the author. Reprinted as found and edited to fit this venue.
US diplomat George F. Kennan wrote a “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946, which was the basis for the US containment strategy toward the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now in 2021, the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council released “The Longer Telegram” to suggest a “new American China strategy” which is full of Cold War mentality and smearing of China.
“The Longer Telegram” was written by “Anonymous,” or “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China.”
The report can be regarded as the remnants of the Trump administration trying to seek confrontation with China. The core ideas of the report are in line with the Trump administration’s China policy.
However, it is very inappropriate to release it anonymously.
Chinese people, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese leaders share common interests.
The US attempt to separate Chinese people from the CPC is doomed to fail.
If the US wants to justify itself by attacking Chinese leaders, it would be harming Chinese people’s interests as well. In the end, the US’ overall interests will be harmed.
The anonymous report’s core ideology and methods are seriously misleading.
The author, whoever he or she is, lacks a deep understanding of China’s current situation. Such people claim to be “China experts,” but they lack an understanding of China’s national conditions.
They can only talk about China through imagination.
The report’s policy recommendations are obviously distorted.
US anti-China forces are still instigating a new Cold War and ideological confrontation, trying their best to contain China as well as to engage in a “color revolution” against China.
Is the US trying to take external intervention measures to shake the CPC’s rule and change China’s political system? This would be exactly “self-defeating.” A “color revolution” against China would never succeed.
The Atlantic Council is an establishment think tank, but it has proposed an outdated cliché.
Some of the US elites have realized the previous US policy toward China was not successful, and they may want to make some adjustments.
However, they are like a drowning man desperately clutching at a straw.
They have completely misunderstood the current major interests of the US.
They also failed to learn from the failure of the US’ China policy in history.
This is a tragedy.
What is surprising is that there is a market even for such a “new American China strategy.”
This shows the extent to which the US policy circle has been poisoned.
The report is a collection of lies.
It is against the times.
The fact is that Chinese people share common interests with the CPC and Chinese leaders.
From a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society to the second largest economy today, which achievement was not reached under the leadership of the CPC?
Can the US achieve poverty alleviation the way China did?
Without the decision of the CPC and Chinese leaders as well as Chinese people’s support, how can China perform outstandingly in the COVID-19 fight?
The improvement of Chinese people’s lives and the promotion of China’s international status are due to the CPC’s leadership.
This is generally accepted by the Chinese people, but is also exactly what Westerners cannot understand.
For another example, during the financial crisis, China’s 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package was also due to Chinese leaders’ decision. The US cannot understand why China has the ability to make such a bold move. Neither can the US understand the unity between Chinese people, the CPC and Chinese leaders.
If these American political elites can make an objective comparison between China and the US with a rational and balanced mind-set, they would understand that ordinary Chinese people share common interests with the CPC and the country’s leaders.
In the US, however, this is not the case.
The interests of American leaders and people are not always consistent. We hope the Biden administration can formulate a relatively healthy overall foreign policy, instead of being led by the distortion and misjudgement of the report’s anonymous author.
The report attacked the CPC, but it has no right to do so.
Just take a look at Trump during the COVID-19 fight – where did he lead the US to?
Thus, many US political elites have a malicious starting point and intent.
They hope China will eventually be thrown into chaos.
And this is exactly what the Chinese people will never agree to.
Many American political elites’ mentality is still stuck in the so-called threat of Communism.
This is very unhealthy.
The world has long entered the 21st century and they should not stay in ideological opposition as it is a stupid, dangerous and short-sighted behavior.
These people have completely misread the times and China.
Opinions like “The Longer Telegram” will completely ruin the positive and constructive hopes of the new US administration’s China policy and overall global policies.
Yet, the “Longer Telegram” is the American policy paper.
Yes. It is the De Facto policy of the Untied States against China today. And as such it is provocative and dangerous. For it establishes the ideas that…
The Chinese province of 台湾 is an American protectorate.
That China has no authority over it’s city of 香港城市.
That America can send military troops, NGO’s and “humanitarian aid” to the Chinese province of 新疆.
That sponsoring a “color revolution” in the Chinese province of 西藏 will not have consequences.
American military warships, battle carriers, and nuclear armed aircraft can travel freely along the Chinese coast, and it will not be provocative.
Like I have said before…
What kind of Kool Aide are these morons in Washington DC drinking? Do they actually think that the rest of the world would ACCEPT this nasty, disgusting and belligerent attitude?
The Biden Administration is committed to accelerating the worst elements of the “hard imperial” practices of military encirclement of China while also advancing the “soft imperial” practices, Matt Ehret writes.
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Going into the March 18 diplomatic talks between U.S. and Chinese delegates to discuss the long-term strategic interests of the two nations, China projected a largely positive hope …
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…that the days of military aggression, trade wars, sanctions and interference into China’s affairs which characterized much of the past 8 years…
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…might finally be coming to an end.
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They had some reason to make their hopeful assumptions.
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After all, the U.S. State Department press releases announced that the meetings would …
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“highlight cooperation that promotes peace, security and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.”
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And so, the Chinese certainly hoped that the sanctions imposed under Trump’s watch might be rolled back by the new administration.
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And that the new team might respect China’s sovereign right to pursue its economic interests.
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All without being seen as an opponent to the decaying western empire.
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They have understandably gotten quite tired of dealing with the constant unipolar intimidation…
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…as has been so common since Obama’s Asia Pivot was first announced in 2012.
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In response to the pressure of a dying empire attempting to insecurely impose its will on a growing nation which will soon find itself as the economic leader of the world…
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China has responded consistently with class and restraint calling for cooperation and dialogue.
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At various times over recent years, China has offered the USA and other western nations (desperately in need of real economic development), opportunities to cooperate…
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…on the Belt and Road Initiative,
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…space research
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… and other sectors of win-win cooperation citing these domains as being inclusive of all and beneficial to all participants.
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The fact that the Chinese have made these offers isn’t surprising.
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The USA is economically bankrupt.
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It is sitting upon a derivatives-fueled hyperinflationary bubble ripe to blow.
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America is devoid of any significant manufacturing capacities it once enjoyed.
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And it is militarily over-extended beyond belief.
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So it isn’t as if cooperating on the BRI isn’t in the interests of the USA… as a sovereign nation.
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But the USA isn’t really a sovereign nation state these days.
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It’s something else.
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This sad fact slapped the Chinese delegation across the face.
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The moment U.S. representatives Anthony Blinken and Andrew Sullivan opened their mouths during the keynote remarks and spewed nothing but belligerent poison at their Asian counterparts.
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Blinken began his condescending chastisements of China’s disruptive influence to “international rules-based order”.
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He condemned China for its alleged cyber-attacks.
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Read about how the CIA is able to fake the origin of malware and cyber attacks in the Snowden Vault 7 Release. HERE.
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As well as the apparently vicious treatment of Uyghurs…
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… Hong Kong…
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… Tibetans….
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…and Taiwan.
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Sullivan followed suit promoting the importance of the anti-Chinese “Quad” (often dubbed the “NATO of the Pacific) …
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… and then virtue signaled “American ingenuity” and leadership.
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Virtue signaling is the conspicuous communication of moral values and gooddeeds. The term has negative connotations as it is commonly used to denote virtuousactions and statements are motivated by a desire for social status and self-satisfaction. Virtual signaling is often used as a form of persuasion.-12 Examples of Virtue Signaling - Simplicable
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Using the best newspeak available to an American diplomat these days, Blinken condemned the “might makes right” outlook which has caused so much injustice over the years and which apparently guides China thinking, saying:
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“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”
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Of course, one might be confused by this claim since China has only one foreign military base in Djibouti.
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And has started no new wars in generations…
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As well as has lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty…
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… but that’s only because you don’t receive quality CIA briefings like Blinken and Sullivan do.
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Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi’s responses provided a sobering sledgehammer of reality…
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…as both statesmen took the opportunity to spend 42 minutes laying out in stark terms the scale of hypocritical poison in extolling democracy abroad while not being able to win the support of its own population citing BLM.
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Jiechi also contrasted the USA’s obsessive use of regime changes and wars across the world in defense of the Washington-run “rules based order” …
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…with China’s track record in [1] ending extreme poverty, [2] winning the support of its citizens and [3] building great infrastructure projects abroad.
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Calling out the disingenuous intention behind the U.S. delegation’s organization of the talks, Jiechi stated:
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“isn’t this the intention of the United States – judging from what, or the way that you have made your opening remarks – that it wants to speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength?
So was this carefully all planned and was it carefully orchestrated with all the preparations in place?
Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue?
Well, I think we thought too well of the United States.
We thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols.”
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Jiechi continued:
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“So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.
The U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people.
If the United States wants to deal properly with the Chinese side, then let’s follow the necessary protocols and do things the right way.”
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In the ensuing days of meetings, it should not come as a surprise that very little in the way of serious conflict resolution occurred.
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In fact, the only solid points of agreement which the U.S. side would permit involved two joint protocols.
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Protocols that fall perfectly into alignment with the Malthusian closed system objectives of the Great Reset agenda attempting to reign in a post-nation state world order in the wake of the oncoming economic meltdown.
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These included 1) a joint program to coordinate more closely on fighting global warming via green finance and green energy grids and 2) coordinating on COVID-19 vaccination programs.
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Nothing which China is doing that relates to [1] actual scientific and [2] technological growth, [3] long term conditionality-free banking or [4] poverty extermination was permitted by the U.S.-side for reasons which should be obvious to the informed reader by now.
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While Blinken did announce in the post-conference press release that space cooperation between the two powers was discussed…
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… it is a fact as true as gravity that the imperial technocrats running the Biden White House are so ideologically opposed to the sort of open-system programs which space cooperation creates that Blinken’s remarks are sure to remain dead words.
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What is clear coming out of the Alaska meeting is that the Biden Administration is committed to accelerating the worst elements of the “hard imperial” practices of military encirclement of China…
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…while building up the QUAD military alliance on the one hand…
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…while also advancing the “soft imperial” practices of pulling China into unbreakable de-carbonization treaties and medical health regimes controlled by supranational technocrats on behalf of the Anglo-American oligarchy.
Shortly after Mr.Biden characterizing Mr.Putin as a killer and more, Mr.Putin invited Biden for a public and live online discussion, saying that it would be beneficial for both the N.American as well as the Russian people.
This morning we find this bluntly devastating shot across the bows from the Russian Foreign Affairs ministry.
The final sentence, not included in the image, reads as follows: “Responsibility for this lies entirely with the United States.”
Setting this in context, the contrast between Mr.Lavov’s ongoing visit to China, and the so-called ‘strategic’ meeting between the United States and China at the end of last week, cannot be more stark.
At the very same time, Mr.Putin and Mr Shoigu are taking the air on the Taiga in Siberia. I wonder if the western governments have figured out why now?
“ Vladimir #Putin is spending the weekend in #Siberia. The President together with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu enjoys walking in the #taiga forest and riding an all-terrain vehicle. Also, Sergei Shoigu showed the President his workshop.”
In the next few hours we will receive Mr.Lavrov’s translated speeches from his China visit. Some of it is already published.
Take a look at what Mr.Lavrov described as ‘dynamic cooperation“:
“We regard the new era of Russian-Chinese relations, which you have mentioned, primarily in the context of the broader situation on the international stage.
It is undergoing a very deep transformation and the strengthening of the new centres of economic growth, financial might and political influence.
Regrettably, the objective trend for a rise of a truly multipolar democratic world is being hindered by some Western countries led by the United States...
... which would like to preserve their domination of the global economy and international politics at all costs and to force their will and their demands on each and all.
In response to this, Russia and China are promoting a constructive unification agenda.
We want the architecture of international relations to be fair, democratic, capable of ensuring stability and based on broad interaction of states and their integration associations, just as we are doing together with our Chinese friends by promoting integration in Eurasia.China is a truly strategic partner and a like-minded country for us.
Our cooperation on the international stage is having a stabilizing effect on the global and regional situation.
Russia believes that our dialogue with China based on trust and mutual respect should provide an example for other countries, including those that are trying to develop ties with Russia and China on different principles that are not based on equality.
This is not acceptable to us or our Chinese friends.
We will continue developing our foreign policy constructively and flexibly, showing readiness for compromise but exclusively on the basis of mutual respect and a balance of interests.”
There is however a twist in this lovely tale and it is the one of economic influence and we know now which direction both Russia and China (and a host of other countries) will take in the short term.
They will remove the sanctions weapon from the hands of the United States including Europe.
Let’s take a look at a few more of Mr.Lavrov’s comments.
“The US sanctions risks need to be alleviated by switching to alternative currencies and moving away from using the dollar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.”
“The minister said the US is aiming to limit the technological development of Russia and China, so the two countries need to strengthen their independence.”
“According to the Russian Foreign Minister, the US and other western countries are no longer capable of using classical diplomacy and only resort to one tool on the international arena: sanctions.”“We must form the widest possible coalition of countries that will fundamentally oppose this illegal practice,” the Russian Foreign Minister concluded.”
As geopolitical watchers and analysts, we’re always looking for the signals that frequently just go up in smoke. This time however the signals from Russia and China are not going up in smoke but being presented in pictures in photo essays, and in clear language.
From the last few days we can learn a few things:
China and Russia are friends and will remain friends and will work together where their interests coalesce. Their interests coalesce right here in Lavrov’s words: “….. architecture of international relations to be fair, democratic, capable of ensuring stability and based on broad interaction of states.” If that statement confuses you, in short, it means right across our world.
Sanctions will be removed as a weapon.
The petrodollar is on its last legs.
The clock for the final battle is ringing. The only weapons remaining that will be allowed to the failing hegemon will be NATO (which, according to many of our serious analysts, is a paper tiger) and the ability to use nuclear and conventional weapons. I will not comment on that as I am not qualified in the field.
The ability of the current and failing hegemon to do damage economically, is being curtailed. We can look forward to a different economic reset, with countries taking their power back using their own currencies and other alternatives. (This is not the reset from the WEF). Then we will see what happens to the sphere of weapons because they may become a last resort.
On a humorous note, it looks like the Russian Foreign Affairs ministry has resorted to photos with captions, hoping they can reach the failing hegemon with pictures, because there is such a great problem to reach them with diplomatic words. The growth of the adult coloring book industry in the West may have been the deciding factor lol.
It is fascinating to compare the recent Biden comments to President Putin and Putin’s response, to what is happening in Alaska between the US and China.
It cannot be a coincidence that the messaging from both Russia and China, is the same. And it is clearly, deal with us on fair terms or Go Pound Sand.
There is a seeming coordination of messaging.
If you consider President Putin’s comments translated in this video, you will hear Putin say with nuance of course, that the US was founded first in an experience of direct genocide on Indian tribes and then they continued with a cruel period of slavery.
He says that to this day these early formative experiences accompany the zeitgeist, both internal and external, of the United States.
Mr.Putin goes further to say that the US is the only country that ever attacked another with nuclear weapons, citing Japan being a non-nuclear state.
He calls it clearly an extermination of a local population that had no military sense.
Mr Putin ends with saying that the US will have to deal with Russia and Russia will only deal in those aspects that have benefit for Russia herself, and the US will have to reckon with it.
Subtext:
You have no moral standing in the world any longer.
Your history is brutal.
You are still operating in this brutal historical context.
Go pound sand as this will not be allowed any longer.
From the Chinese side, after Blinken tried the usual litany of US complaints against China (cyber attacks, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and China is threatening global stability), Yang Jiechi for a whole 15 minutes called the US racists at home and warmongers abroad.
He said in front of the Chinese side, the US side is not qualified to speak to China from a position of strength.
He told in no uncertain terms that the US actions harm the interests of the peoples of the two countries as well as world stability and development and “should not be continued.”
The U.S. side made unreasonable accusations, which was not in line with diplomatic protocol, therefore China made the required response.
There is no acceptance of the newly minted ‘rules-based international order’ among the Chinese diplomats.
Subtext:
You should not be allowed to continue with your meddling.
This is because you have no more moral standing.
This is in the eyes of anyone.
Your purported ‘strength’ is dissipating in your hypocrisy.
An interesting issue of course, that went mainly under the radar, is that at the moment that the Chinese/US so-called ‘strategic’ discussion started in Alaska, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Mr Lavrov will be visiting China, specifically their delegates to the Alaska meeting, the Chinese diplomats Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, a day or two after conclusion of the meetings.
This short sitrep should convince you that the AngloZionist empire is being told in no uncertain terms to get on with pounding sand to dig the imperial grave with evidence that this message is being coordinated.
It is a message from Russia and from China simultaneously.
Shortly after penning this short piece, some commentators are already noticing that the empire is now going to have to deal with ‘sledgehammer diplomacy’.
They have established a firm foundation for an alternative system which is open for anyone to join and which respects all participating nations.
China and Russia have made it absolutely clear that they recognize the sad fact that…
…the oligarchy in firm control of the western alliance…
…is adamantly intent on burning all possible diplomatic avenues of cooperation and dialogue…
…as the Hindenburg of the western financial system continues to careen towards a fiery oblivion.
It didn’t take long for the behaviorist zombies and NATO-philes managing the recent U.S. color revolution to undo any remnant of hope that some form of sane foreign policy might emerge from the U.S. establishment.
All hope is gone.
Nothing could be worse than the neocons running much of Trump’s foreign policy thought many of the leading members of both Chinese and Russian intelligentsias in recent months.
However, with the recent barrage of sanctions launched upon both Russia and China this week…
…in coordinated fashion by Canada, the USA and EU…
… preceded by accusations by America’s leading geriatric hologram that Putin is a soulless killer…
… it has become clear that unless a great systemic change occurs in the west, there is no hope for dialogue or cooperation.
This was made absolutely clear in the malicious ambush set up by the U.S. State Department which attempted to publicly attack and shame the Chinese in Alaska on March 18.
The fact that the results of the March 23 meeting between Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov and Wang Yi in the South China Guanxi Zhuang Autonomous Region resulted in a renewed joint statement on Global Governance should come as no surprise.
Calling for a tightened bond of brotherhood between the two nations, Yi stated that Russia and China must
“act as guarantors of justice in international affairs”
and stated that
“China is ready to promote the international system established by the United Nations, protect the world order based on international law and abide by universal values such as peace, development, justice, democracy, equality and freedom.”
While the Five Eyes and other NATO-phile lap dogs of war sing the praises of the “rules-based order”…
… China and Russia have made the point repeatedly this week that the only international order they will adhere to…
…is the one that involves all nations and not merely the handful of imperial hypocrites among the Trans Atlantic pushing for a unilateral world government.
While these same self-righteous unipolarists self-adulate each other in their echo chambers…
… the victims of IMF-World Bank debt slavery…
… humanitarian bombings…
… drone assassinations…
… CIA-MI6 run regime changes…
… and color revolutionary conspiracies directed ultimately at Russia and China look hopefully towards the multipolar alliance as the only pathway to a future worth living in.
While praise for the UN Charter has confused some who naively believe the world body itself to have been the product of the unipolar world government agenda 76 years ago…
… there is a more nuanced reality to be discovered.
When one actually takes the time to read the charter and study the battles waged during the time of the UN’s creation, it becomes clear that the leaders of Russia and China know exactly what they are doing.
The UN charter which they defend firmly establishes respect for the sovereign of each nation state as a primary objective of the world organization…
…and grants members of the Security Council on whose body both Russia and China sit, power to veto any military decision.
Additionally, the charter mandates economic justice for all and mutual interest as primary goals of the organization.
All of these things stand in direct opposition to the sort of thinking coming out of the dystopic minds of Davos luminaries and “rules-based orderists” trying to manage the new world order today like gods of Olympus.
This during the meeting, Lavrov and Yi added the important component of economic liberation from the U.S. dollar hegemony…
…to the discussion…
…and made scientific and technological cooperation the driving force…
…of the new economic/security system that needs to be brought online in short order.
On these points Lavrov stated:
“In addition to strengthening cooperation under the UN framework on the immediate end to unilateral coercive measures, China and Russia should also take the opportunity to enhance their scientific and technological innovation and improve their national strength in response to the sanction.”
Lavrov alluded to the necessary new financial architecture that needs to arise out of the multipolar alliance by
“promoting settlement by local and other international currencies that can replace the U.S. dollar so as to gradually move away from the western controlled payment system”.
This last point reflects a process that has already been well underway for some years…
…implicitly as both Russia and China have begun managing their payment systems increasingly outside of the U.S.-controlled SWIFT system…
In his speech, Lavrov made the point that today China has become Russia’s largest trading partner, and after the Power of Siberia is completed, Russia will become the #1 supplier of energy to China.
As of 2020, $107 billion of trade occurred between the two nations with 25% of that total occurring in local currencies.
This is a huge step up from the mere 2% in 2014-16.
While the western governments are locked under the control of a Malthusian-minded priesthood ideologically committed to the deconstruction of civilization under a green financial dictatorship, the China-Russian alliance is founded upon sturdier stuff.
Premising their self-interest not upon the projection of power, and intimidation of the weak…
… China and Russia have recognized that the only pathway to a viable future is located in the power of creation (aka: breaking free of zero-sum thinking).
The leaders of these nations know that if resource scarcity press upon the potential to sustain the lives of people…
… it is better to inspire creative ideas, and unleash new discoveries under a dynamic of scientific progress…
…rather than cut down the population to adapt to those limits which computer models attest is our carrying capacity.
Already both Russia and China have established a firm foundation for an alternative system which is open for anyone to join…
…and which respects the developmental pathways, political systems and cultures of all diverse participating nations.
This harmony of the parts with the greater good of the whole is possible because the practice is founded upon a discoverable principle of Natural Law.
A law which has found the human species in a living universe where both freedom, law and duty all co-exist.
This coherence of the whole and the parts once animated the minds of statesmen of the west who authored such foundational documents as the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), Declaration of Independence (1776), the U.S. Constitution (1787) and UN Charter (1945).
This principle of statecraft was invoked by such great men as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Charles DeGaulle and John Kennedy (to name a few) who each in their own way defended the General Welfare…
…while simultaneously upholding the unalienable rights of the individual to the chagrin of the financier oligarchy.
These men did this via the use of strong federal power to [1] build great projects, [2] regulate private finance all while [3] amplifying the power of private enterprise and [4] individual rights of each citizen.
Before the bipolar days of the Cold War brainwashed the majority of citizens into believing they had to plug themselves into either a “communist” or “free market capitalist” cage, this system was known around the world as “The American System of Political Economy”.
Sadly, this pre-condition for human survival has long been forgotten in the west.
It is now Russia and China who are leading the “guarantors of justice in world affairs”…
…as both nations have united in co-constructing the first lunar base together,
…advance asteroid defense systems (which deal with an actual threat to our planet unlike those fake crises advocated by fear mongers at Davos and London),
…and are working on overtime to extend the New Silk Road across Africa, Asia, Latin America …
…as well as the Arctic in the form of the Polar Silk Road.
Whether or not the west is capable of rediscoveries its lost better traditions at this late date remains to be seen.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
There is a lot of changes that are set in motion. Many long-overdue changes are coming to America, and those that have been doing quite well do not want change. They want to fight change, and they will go as far as to start a nuclear World War III to guarantee that their lives never change.
Here we are going to chat a little bit about the root, and the source of much of the problems in America today…
… the American system that permits people, and companies to become fantastically wealthy while all the time making everyone around them much poorer.
…
The American Promise
In America, the media narrative is that this is a good thing. A “lone wolf”, “hard working” person can “pull himself up by his bootstraps” and become successful. Look at Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. See! Normal people. Everyone can do it.
Ah. The American promise…
The American Reality
Nope.
That’s not how it works. Maybe it used to be that way some two hundred years ago, and maybe as recent as seventy five years ago. But today, it’s a hopeless proposition. There are too many layers of government regulation. Too many powerful companies. The “little guy” has too many hurtles to overcome.
Leaving only the existing wealth structures in control and in power.
It’s the American reality.
The problem with America
This situation where only the wealthy have the vast bulk of the money has created far too many problems. And if left unchecked will generate many more to come. Including, eventually, the potential end of the world as we know it today.
For instance, to keep the people from rising up in revolution, you need [1] propaganda and [2] control of the media, you need [3] armed and strong militarized domestic police forces, you need [4] distractions which tend to mean [5] wars and chaos, and you need to [6] constantly decrease the standard of life of the rabble so that you can maintain your own power.
And isn’t that what we have been observing?
American income distribution
The chart of the income distribution for America today greatly resembles what it must have been in France before the French revolution, and in Russia before the Russian revolution.
The poor got much poorer.
The middle class disappeared.
The super-duper wealthy become stratospheric wealthy.
Which brings me to an article. It was written back in 2014, and back then the alarms were a ringing and the sirens were screaming, and the lights were flashing, but few paid attention…
In a new Pew poll, more than three quarters of self-described conservatives believe…
“poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything.”
In reality, most of America’s poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.
The real non-workers are the wealthy who inherit their fortunes. And their ranks are growing.
In fact, we’re on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history.
MM Comment
This was written in 2014. The cusp has passed and now America is at this state, firmly entrenched within this condition; firmly put in place. Rock solid and immovable.
The wealth is coming from those who over the last three decades earned huge amounts on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms, or as high-tech entrepreneurs.
It’s going to their children, who did nothing except be born into the right family.
The “self-made” man or woman, the symbol of American meritocracy, is disappearing. Six of today’s ten wealthiest Americans are heirs to prominent fortunes. Just six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined (up from 30 percent in 2007).
The U.S. Trust bank just released a poll of Americans with more than $3 million of investable assets.
Nearly three-quarters of those over age 69, and 61 per cent of boomers (between the ages of 50 and 68), were the first in their generation to accumulate significant wealth.
But the bank found inherited wealth far more common among rich millennials under age 35.
This is the dynastic form of wealth French economist Thomas Piketty warns about. It’s been the major source of wealth in Europe for centuries. It’s about to become the major source in America – unless, that is, we do something about it.
As income from work has become more concentrated in America, the super rich have invested in businesses, real estate, art, and other assets. The income from these assets is now concentrating even faster than income from work.
In 1979, the richest 1 percent of households accounted for 17 percent of business income. By 2007 they were getting 43 percent. They were also taking in 75 percent of capital gains. Today, with the stock market significantly higher than where it was before the crash, the top is raking even more from their investments.
Both political parties have encouraged this great wealth transfer, as beneficiaries provide a growing share of campaign contributions.
MM Comment
The reader is asked to put a clothespin to their noses as some politics is bantered about. It's the same nauseatingly "Wonderful Democrats", and "terrible Republicans". Ugh.
Both are members of the Uni-party. They are identical.
But Republicans have been even more ardent than Democrats.
For example, family trusts used to be limited to about 90 years. Legal changes implemented under Ronald Reagan extended them in perpetuity. So-called “dynasty trusts” now allow super-rich families to pass on to their heirs money and property largely free from taxes, and to do so for generations.
George W. Bush’s biggest tax breaks helped high earners but they provided even more help to people living off accumulated wealth. While the top tax rate on income from work dropped from 39.6% to 35 percent, the top rate on dividends went from 39.6% (taxed as ordinary income) to 15 percent, and the estate tax was completely eliminated. (Conservatives called it the “death tax” even though it only applied to the richest two-tenths of one percent.)
Barack Obama rolled back some of these cuts, but many remain.
Before George W. Bush, the estate tax kicked in at $2 million of assets per couple, and then applied a 55 percent rate. Now it kicks in at $10 million per couple, with a 40 percent rate.
House Republicans want to go even further than Bush did.
Rep. Paul Ryan’s “road map,” which continues to be the bible of Republican economic policy, eliminates all taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains, and estates.
Yet the specter of an entire generation who do nothing for their money other than speed-dial their wealth management advisors isn’t particularly attractive.
It’s also dangerous to our democracy, as dynastic wealth inevitably accumulates political influence.
MM Comment
America is not a democracy. It is a military empire that is run by a global oligarchy.
What to do? First, restore the estate tax in full.
MM Comment
His solution; the same-old, same-old. More taxes. More regulation. Bigger government.
Not what is needed; a complete structural overhaul on the entire American government-society system.
Second, eliminate the “stepped-up-basis on death” rule. This obscure tax provision allows heirs to avoid paying capital gains taxes on the increased value of assets accumulated during the life of the deceased. Such untaxed gains account for more than half of the value of estates worth more than $100 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Third, institute a wealth tax. We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class. It’s called the property tax. Why not a small annual tax on the value of stocks and bonds, the major assets of the wealthy?
MM Comment
All the solutions are the same-old, same-old. More taxes to go to government. Not any systematic changes to the entire way the system operates.
We don’t have to sit by and watch our “meritocracy” be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth. We can and must take action – before it’s too late.
MM Comment
It is too late. America has a permanent aristocracy where the vast wealth is either concocted out of thin air, or by dynastic wealth.
But you know…
China is taking notes…
Let’s open up the dialog with this comment that I found in my e-mailbox…
In China, the CCP draw from the experience of the first 30 years of opening up, and [has] concluded that:
1) China endorsed the part of the free market logic that encourage individual innovation and that rewards hardwork.
2) However, China will not allow the ultimate outcome of a free market economy. As it is one where a handful of billionaires will eventually take control of the market, killing competition, and dictate the price and distribution chain of supply and demand.
The world has been controlled by the Western set of rules for far too long. These rules were set up at the time they are working towards Western advantages.
The collapse of the USSR and the drop in standard of living and life expectancy in Russia is widely studied in China and experienced is learned.
Now, China will open up further to counter US strategy to form a war alliance against China.
Instead, China is strategically beginning a dual circle economy build on food security, financial security, economic security, and national security. As well as a discussion on the evil doing of privatized capital and western capital across the world.
The CCP armed with Mao theories of how to run a country with serving the people as the party motto is far more down to earth than the capitalists who control western politicians.
When Xi came to power, he openly pledged that the SOEs sector has to become larger, and stronger.
In contemporaneous China, any large scale businesses are require to sell to the government 1% of their share. Now with this 1%, the government representatives will sit in a broad of director meeting, and have the power to stop any plan that threaten the security of any sector of the Chinese economy or society.
Therefore, if it only involved expanding product ranges, improve services, opening a few more outlets, they are totally free to do so.
...
Cheers
<redacted>
And perhaps that will give you all some perspective why America must DESTROY China, and why there is no-room for co-habitation. It’s all or nothing with America. For once the rest of the world sees that the American emperor has “no clothes”, the fall of the empire will only be minutes away.
And it’s all pretty depressing. Anyways, I’m tossing this idea out to you all. That the idea of “what America stands for” is wealth accumulation by the super-rich, for themselves, and everyone else is just a herd animal to service them. Being so fantastically wealthy they not only own most of what you eat, use, and read, but they also control your government, and as a result you have zero influence on what your government is doing.
Pot-holes need fixing? No problem, your government is going to bomb the shit out of Yemen! Now, don’t you feel better?
Taxes too high? No problem, the government is going to reclassify the taxes in a fee, and then make it mandatory for you to pay that fee or else you will go to prison. There! Don’t you feel better?
Can’t find work? No problem. You can enlist in the military, get on welfare, or donate blood. The news says that the economy is roaring and that everything is just “hunky-dory”. So you must be lazy. Don’t you know!
Conclusion
This exhausts me. This situation is not sustainable. The question and the big unknown is when will it all fall down?
I have no answers.
I think that I need to go out, eat some fine delicious food, quaff some brews, and go a whoring. Life is too short not to have fun.
And that is my definitive opinion on this subject.
Do you want more?
I have more posts elsewhere. I don’t know what this will file under. But you can probably find others like it here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
America has been conducting warfare with military forces dressed in civilian attire for decades now. These forces use military tactics, training, and utilize military support structures to accomplish their objectives. They do everything that a normal and regular military does, except that they are not easily identified as combat forces. As they operate in secret and disguise.
Most well known of these assault troops are NGO’s.
What Is an NGO?
A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a non-profit group that functions independently of any government.
Meaning that it operates as a separate entity where there are no obvious direct connections between the NGO and the parent government.
NGOs, sometimes called civil societies, are organized on community, national and international levels to serve a social or political goal such as humanitarian causes or the environment.
The largest and best funded NGO’s out of the United States are dedicated to “spreading democracy”, “advocating liberty”, and “promoting American values”.
But all NGOs are different and some are met with intense criticism for lack of transparency in budgeting or effectual action. When donating money or looking for work in the NGO world, it is always important to do your research about how much of the group’s budget goes to administrative costs and how much goes directly to the cause you care about. The website Charity Navigator is a useful resource for this.Another important critique of NGOs is that all too often organizations staffed with Americans and Europeans come into developing nations with action plans that don’t fit the local context and end up adversely affecting their target populations. This, however, is not an inherent flaw of NGOs but rather a symptom of failing to acknowledge the importance of local expertise within the NGO framework.Because NGO funding commonly comes from developed nations, a particularly effective model for NGOs includes using local in-country staff to plan and implement programs on the ground while working with an international board focused on fundraising, outreach, and strategic group planning.It would be untrue to claim that NGOs are immune to political influence simply because they are not directly connected to governments; NGOs’ funding and even daily operations are subject to political approval.For example, NGOs working to bring amnesty to political refugees will often face intense political adversity, and even violence during their in-country work. But unlike government organizations, NGOs typically have more flexibility to defy a political status quo to pursue what they believe to be important social change.– Shelly Grimaldi
Key Takeaways
NGOs, is an abbreviation for Non-Governmental Organizations.
NGO’s tend play a major role in international development, aid and philanthropy.
NGOs are non-profit by definition, but may run budgets of millions or up to billions of dollars each year. They are classified this way for tax reduction strategies.
NGOs rely on a variety of funding sources. This varies from private donations and membership dues to direct government contribution and training.
Many NGO’s, especially American ones, are almost entirely funded directly by the United States government. Either directly or though proxy in a “pass through” arrangement.
About NGOs
While “NGO” has various interpretations, the term is generally accepted to include non-profit, private organizations that operate outside of government control. Some NGOs rely primarily on volunteers, while others support a paid staff. The World Bank identifies two broad groups of NGOs:
Operational NGOs, which focus on the design and implementation of development projects.
Advocacy NGOs, which defend or promote a specific cause and seek to influence public policy.
Some NGOs may fall under both categories simultaneously. Examples of NGOs include those that support human rights, advocate for improved health or encourage political participation. The ones funded though by the United States all are involved in political participation at some level or the other.
How NGOs are Funded
As non-profits, NGOs rely on a variety of sources for funding, including:
Membership dues
Private donations
The sale of goods and services
Grants
Direct government grants
Hidden government funding though “pass through” arrangements
Despite their supposed independence from governments, many NGOs rely heavily on government funding. Large NGOs may have budgets in the millions or billions of dollars.
Types of NGOs
A number of variations of the NGO acronym exist, including:
INGO: An international NGO. For example, the Conference of INGOs of the Council of Europe is comprised of more than 300 participating INGOs.
GONGO: This means government-organized NGO, often derogatory. Foreign Policy describes GONGOs as a government-backed NGOs set up to advocate on the behalf of a repressive regime in the international arena.
QUANGO: Chiefly a British term, often derogatory. A quango is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization that relies on public funding. Its senior officials are appointed by the government. A Financial Times opinion piece writes that quangos are seen as useless and are often staffed by quangocrats.
ENGO: An environmental NGO, for example, Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund. Both groups operate internationally in addition to advocating for the environment. They are often simply referred to as NGOs.
NGO’s in China
The United States government uses NGO’s as the primary method to inject military personnel inside enemy nations. This injection of assault troops and CIA associated military forces for point-of-force disruption of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet primarily come from one singular NGO’s. Which is the NED.
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.
https://www.ned.org
Here is a very interesting work. It’s a complete book, reproduced here in in PDF format. It is titled “SOF Civil Affairs in Great Power Competition” and comes from the United States military; specifically the “Joint Special Operations University and the Department of Strategic Studies”.
The work describes how the United States uses military personnel to control civilian populations for military objectives. It discusses NGO’s and how to foment revolutions and turmoil, as well as how to control unruly populations such as within America.
It discusses among other things…
How the United States military is engaged in harming and causing turmoil within China. All without wearing military uniforms, or firing guns and automatic weapons.
Journalist, NGO, or CIA operative?
As well as the very interesting segment(s) on…
How the United States military is engaged in controlling the American population to prevent uprisings, armed resurrection and “torches and pitchfork” moments.
It’s an interesting read, though many of us within MM know about much of the techniques used. We watched them in “real time” as all of Hong Kong is on video camera, wired and recorded.
It is useful to keep in mind that these techniques are being employed inside of America against Americans today. Which pretty much explains the idea why the sheeple haven’t risen up against the oligarchy class yet…
…yet.
Rather than reproduce the work in HTML, it is reproduced in the PDF format. Just click on the link below and download it and read at your convenience.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Things are maturing and advancing steadily on plan. And like I have repeatedly stated, the events will not be reported. Or, if they are, they will not be well reported, or reported in context. Well, here at MM you are going to get a real situation report, a “Sit Rep”. No need to panic. Just be aware.
“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood.
Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate.
Political and economic trust will implode.
Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire.
The very survival of the nation will feel at stake.
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
The Fourth Turning
I read The Fourth Turning a while ago. I was astounded in their uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life.
Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.
Strauss & Howe identified the core elements of this Crisis as debt, civic decay, and global disorder. No one can argue the severe distress engulfing the nation and the world traces its origins to these core elements, with the catalyst for this Crisis being the 2008 central banker manufactured financial collapse.
Nothing has been normal since 2008.
And 2008’s epic implosion was driven by the disastrous financial, political and military decisions implemented by the puppets of the Deep State from 2000 onward, with the Federal Reserve obligingly creating bubble after bubble as the “solution” to the previous bubble.
And now we are here again, in the midst of the greatest bubble in the history of mankind.
A bubble of willful ignorance.
The obliviousness of most Americans to the danger awaiting them is akin to the day before Fort Sumpter was bombed…
… the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked…
… or the dinosaurs unaware of a giant meteor rushing towards the planet and about to transform their future in a challenging way.
Real hardship has beset the land.
With the notable exception of the 0.1% who rule…
…or Deep State lackeys and toadies who are being rewarded for propagating mistruths, outright lies, fear, and propaganda on behalf of their oligarch benefactors.
These apparatchiks mainly consist of corrupt politicians, central bank lackeys, mainstream media hacks, neocon warmongers, surveillance state traitors, and big pharma captured health “experts”.
All of whom are driving the world towards the “great reset”.
The severe distress does involve class, race, nation and empire, but most of the distress has been artificially created by those pulling the strings – Bernays’ invisible government manipulating the masses.
The four years of the Trump administration set the stage for the rumblings that we hear today.
All over the world, the death shudders of a dying empire can be heard.
It advances towards us, like that of a deadly avalanche crashing down a mountainside towards an unsuspecting village below.
America is in deep trouble
Harvard professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been a lone voice telling the truth about the true level of unfunded promises hidden in the CBO numbers.
The unfunded social welfare liabilities in excess of $200 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are nothing but a massive future tax increase on younger and unborn generations. Kotlikoff explains what would be required to pay these obligations:
“To honor these obligations we could (a) raise all federal taxes, immediately and permanently, by 57%, (b) cut all federal spending, apart from interest on the debt, by 37%, immediately and permanently, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b).”
Zero spending on health and social services?
Zero spending on the military?
It’s simply not going to happen.
The level of taxation and/or Federal Reserve created inflation necessary to honor these politician promises is too large to be considered feasible.
Therefore, these promises, made to get corrupt political hacks elected to public office, will be defaulted upon.
It’s all not going to happen.
Every legitimate valuation method used to assess stock market valuations for the last 100 years confirm the stock market being at least 100% overvalued.
There could not be a worse time for margin debt to also reach all-time highs.
The previous peaks in 2000 and 2007 preceded 50% collapses in stocks.
Consumer credit outstanding, despite the false media story-line of austerity, stands at $14.27 trillion in Q2 of 2020.1. I don’t know what it is today, one year later and after three “stimulus packages”, but it’s just got to be awful.
Feb 05, 2021 · Average consumer debt per capita is approximately $12,596 (total consumer debt as of September 2020/total US population as of September 30, 2020).
-2021 ConsumerDebtStatistics | LexingtonLaw
Indeed, it’s at an all-time high, as the Federal government took monopoly control of the student loan market in 2009.
(And proceeded to issue $600 billion of subprime loans to University of Phoenix wannabe graduates seeking degrees in Gender Studies.)
The Feds also used their five year control of Ally Financial (after their taxpayer bailout) to rejuvenate the subprime auto loan market…
…by doling out $35,000 seven year car loans to unemployed SNAP recipients.
After all everyone deserves to drive a brand new Cadillac Escalade.
The $250 billion increase in auto loan debt since 2009 has “created” the auto recovery. Loan delinquencies approaching 2009 levels will surely not cause a problem.
Right?
The level of local and state pension and healthcare unfunded liabilities to government workers exceeds $4 trillion.
State and local politicians would have to double real estate, sales, and income taxes in order to fund the gold plated benefits for state and local workers.
As government workers in Stockton, San Bernardino, Jefferson County and Detroit have experienced, these promises will be not be honored.
(Sigh.)
It’s all going down the drain
If you don’t feel the very survival of the nation hangs in the balance, then you are either delusional, willfully ignorant, or unwilling to recognize your own cognitive dissonance.
The next five to ten years will alter the course of history in a profound way.
Whether or not the outcome will be positive for average American citizens is very much in doubt.
At all levels, domestic and international, America is flailing about and it’s tremors, spasms and vomiting are noticed by all but the intentionally and willful blind.
I wish it were not so, but most human beings seem incapable of critical thought regarding how history follows a cyclical path due to human nature retaining its flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities and fortes throughout history.
We believe we have advanced because our inventions, discoveries, and technology, but the desire for wealth, power and control over others still consumes a sociopathic portion of mankind who tend to rise to the top through any means necessary.
As Huxley lamented in the 1950’s, technological progress has actually propelled mankind backwards in terms of its humanity and relationship with nature and other human beings.
The very technology we glorify as an example of our advancement is now being used by the totalitarians to imprison us Americans.
We're just victims of the telephone.
-Tin Lead Hat lyrics
And if that’s not bad enough…
…they demand the rest of the world to accept the chains and shackles that they have enslaved Americans with.
Accept or die!
This is unacceptable to the rest of the world
A "rule based" agreement is one that no longer follows the UN, and recognizes independence of nations with inherent sovereignty. No. Instead it demands that the United States is the leader of the world and that all other regions must bow to it in subservience.
It has happened slowly and methodically over decades as generation after generation have entered the government indoctrination centers (public schools) to be taught ignorance and obedience to the state.
This indoctrination has been reinforced by ceaseless propaganda injected into their brains by media conglomerates doing the bidding of the state.
The dystopian use of disinformation, false narratives, blatant lies and propaganda by the totalitarians constituting the Deep State, has aggravated the crisis situation that America finds itself in today.
An honest truth-seeking press with unbiased journalists would have uncovered this conspiracy and revealed the truthful facts to a concerned public.
Instead, a completely captured corporate media has turned a blind eye to the truth as they have acted as accomplices of the coup culprits.
Just as evil is the suppression of truth through censorship and keeping silent regarding the truth.
Huxley understood how totalitarian propagandists operated decades before the current batch of Silicon Valley authoritarians initiated their national truth repression scheme.
I’m amazed by the extreme level of ignorance exhibited by a vast swath of our population, as they glory in believing comforting mistruths which confirm their preordained belief structure.
They don’t know because they don’t want to know.
They are intoxicated by the endless stream of idiocy emanating from their iGadgets, as they willfully choose [1] ignorance over awareness, [2] servitude over freedom, and [3] captivity over liberty.
As Huxley predicted, the controlling oligarchy has used technology to convince people to love their servitude.
Meanwhile, the sheeple unthinkingly believe what they are told by their government and media mouthpieces.
5G causes cancer.
China is evil.
GMO’s are good.
The SPA killer was not a racist.
Trump is going to build a wall.
Hillary is going to jail.
Jeff Sessions is playing 54D chess.
Elections are not rigged.
Taxes are good for the economy.
Peeing in a cup to get a job is modern and useful.
Everyone must pay taxes, and American taxes are the lowest in the world.
Meanwhile, the sheeple blind to their manipulation , go on doing the bidding of the government and oligarchs who control the government.
The goal of the ruling class is to keep people from thinking,.
And therefore most Americans willingly oblige because thinking is hard and the uncomfortable truths are too much to bear for the satiated masses.
But there is a minority who want the truth and are willing and able to deal with the consequences. They realize facts don’t cease to exist because we ignore them. Facts don’t care about your beliefs or feelings.
Facts lead you to the truth.
And the immense coverup of facts boggles the mind of every critical thinking person on the planet.
So let’s look at the “facts” and the truths regarding the Fourth Turning.
“The Grey Champion”
Based on the Fourth Turning generational theory, there is no doubt Donald Trump was the prophet-generation Grey-Champion.
The term Grey Champion does not mean they are a great, noble, humane person. Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not nice guys. They did whatever they thought necessary to achieve their means during our previous three Fourth Turnings. Millions of Americans hated Lincoln and Roosevelt, just as tens of millions hate Trump.
The Grey Champion’s appearance marks the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” as the violent turmoil climax of the Fourth Turning approaches.
Trump and Pence are from the Prophet (Boomer) Generation, while Biden is from the Silent Generation and Harris is Generation X.
Trump is the lightning rod for a clash that must take place to sweep away the existing corrupted social order and replace it with something new.
And he was swept away…
Every four years we hear the same pablum about this being the most important election of our lifetime. It didn’t matter who won the election, the Deep State, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Media, Silicon Valley Titans, and Billionaires like Soros, Bloomberg and Gates are still running the show.
One man has extraordinarily little chance of confronting these wealthy power-hungry sociopaths and winning.
And thus we see Biden and his cronies follow Trump and his cronies road-map for America.
Sorry to say.
The PTB has successfully convinced a willfully ignorant populace to love their servitude and acquiesce to allowing them unfettered control over their lives.
However, the tyrannical lockdowns, martial law like mandates from bureaucrats, compulsory masking as a requirement to be accepted in society, and the dehumanizing of our daily lives has created a Resistance, peaceful thus far, who are enraged by what is happening.
Domestic turmoil and dangerous International actions
If you read the Alt-Right or the Alt-Left there is little mention about the international chaos that America has created. It’s mostly a regurgitation of the anti-China, or anti-Russia, or anti-Iran narratives.
It’s not a balanced and accurate appraisal of the shit-storm that America has created.
Here’s a typical example from an Alt-Right website. Obviously the author has never visited China. Because his statements are simple regurgitation of the PTB narratives about China and so outlandish that real Chinese expats do more than shake our heads in disbelief, we actually laugh at him!
Check out this nonsense…
China, which has been the driving world economic force for the last decade, is in a precarious position.
They have been the slave labor manufacturer to the world as the worldwide debt fueled consumption orgy reached its 2008 climax.
Their level of Keynesian mal-investment since 2008 makes Obama, Bernanke, and Yellen look like pikers.
The level of corruption, deception, wealth inequality, pollution, censorship and phony economic data has been done on a majestic scale.
It is now unraveling in a slow motion crash as the global recession has crushed their industrial output and is rapidly deflating their real estate bubble. The 52 million unoccupied housing units in China may not turn out to be great investments after all.
The absurdity of Chinese economic reports makes the BLS look highly accurate and upstanding.
Their reported GDP of 7.4% was their slowest in 24 years, but the real figure is closer to 4%.
The proof of the dramatic slowing in Chinese growth is the collapse in oil prices, copper prices, iron ore prices, and the Baltic Dry Index.
The index measures world trade and has crashed to its lowest level ever. The potential for social unrest when their mal-investment debt bubbles implode will be great.
-Conspiracy Analysist
Like I said, it’s a regurgitation of the American PTB narrative.
And all FALSE.
And all LIES.
And sheeple believe it, because it makes their pathetic lives seem better.
They aren’t.
And you know Americans believe this, and since they believe everything the PTB tells them to believe, they will also go along with this John Bolton statement…
“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion;
Sure…
We can just tell how successful that interference has been right? How many Americans believe that China is doing better than the United States, eh?
Or check out this line that sheeple can repeat in their sleep…
"...and genocide against Uyghurs"
Gosh, the Chinese must be so fucking incompetent. After all the Uyghur population has grown by a factor of ten times plus over the last few years. Pretty hard to have a genocide where the population increases…
All the Chinese just can’t do anything right!
</sarcasm>
Just sheeple repeating what they have read. Not what they have experienced first hand. Just what they have read about fourth-hand.
Remember boys and girls, the definition of what a sheeple is.
Sheeple is a person who is very emotional about something they read about, not by something that they have personally experienced first-hand, up front, and personal.
Yuppur. Any day now… China is going to collapse. It’s just like the USA only far, far worse…
Sure….
I read all about it on FOX, Rush Limbaugh, the NYPost, CNN, and Alex Jones. So it must be the truth!
Look at China crumble before our very eyes!
Just Look!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
It’s falling apart. People are starving, and they are rising up demanding “democracy” and Pepe the frog! And singing the Star Bangled Banner and American flags. They so desperately yearn for the American way of life!
Look at them!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
Look at all those impoverished and miserable people!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
China is terribly polluted, dirty, grimy, full of disease and germs. Terrible, terrible germs! Only a moron would want to live in that shit-hole!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
America needs to put some “boots on the ground” and liberate the poor misguided and brainwashed Chinese. The government must be destroyed because after all, America loves the Chinese, it’s the government that it hates!
Right?
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
</sarcasm>
Ugh!
This is true in what ever form that the PTB controlled government is pushing at the moment. Whether it is COVID, or 5G, or Huawei, or Tiktok, it’s all a echo of what the government wants the sheeple to repeat.
And the sheeple does repeat it, with the worst offenders being those who read the alt-right outlets.
But it doesn’t really matter.
What we do know is Fourth Turnings always accelerate and intensify towards a bloody finale, with clear winners and losers.
There will be clear winners.
There will be clear losers.
Unconditional surrender will be demanded by those maintaining the upper hand. As was clearly articulated in the March 2021 Alaska meeting between the USA and China.
Whether this coming conflict remains domestic or spreads internationally, the “advancements” in the technology of destruction will endanger every human being on the planet.
You cannot escape the impact of Fourth Turnings, only survive and/or do your part in helping achieve a positive outcome.
There is no predetermined ending.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.
If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war.
Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
When pondering the possible outcomes of this Fourth Turning, we tend to be drawn towards the negative, because a positive outcome seems so unlikely given the current animosity roiling the country.
If you step back and realize all the hate and conflict is being engineered and coordinated by a ruling class of powerful rich men, then average Americans could organize a new paradigm that honors the original intent of the U.S. Constitution, allowing citizens the liberty and freedom to create voluntary associations based upon common interests at a local level.
The ruling oligarchs find this unacceptable, so this freedom must be wrested away from them by any means necessary.
There is a civil war already underway, but only one side is fighting…
… the billionaire class who not only don’t want to relinquish some power, but want total control over every aspect of our lives. It appears that this action will turn this one-sided silent war into a hot war on both the domestic and international fronts.
The Enemy.
Everyone is fighting
The American Empire is clearly in rapid decline and may not survive the trials and tribulations over the coming decade.
The Fourth Turning is not a prophecy, but should be taken as a warning and call to action. Sitting this out and hoping for the best will not help achieve a positive outcome.
Tragedy or triumph – the choices we make will matter.
The climax of this Fourth Turning may be a few years off, but the battle for the soul of America has already engaged.
“History offers no guarantees.
Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship.
We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin.
Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse.
It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
Internationally speaking…
We have yet to see how long it will be before the Biden administration realizes its few victories will be unaffordably Pyrrhic.
Indeed, as simple as merely not responding to American provocation the Chinese/Russian partnership will emerge as the victors.
America is truly fucked.
Halford Mackinder’s century-old vision of a Eurasian superstate, based between the Volga and the Yangtse, is becoming reality.
Deal with it.
Embrace it.
Commentators usually fail to understand why; it is not due to military superiority, but down to simple economics.
While the US economy suffers a post-lockdown inflationary outcome and an existential crisis for the dollar, China’s economy will boom on the back of increasing domestic consumption.
This is an official Chinese government objective.
Meanwhile it is increasing exports, the consequence of America’s stimulation of consumer demand and a soaring budget deficit.
For America, it’s a lose – lose.
The Chinese-Russian partnership already dominates or controls Mackinder’s World Island, defined as Eurasia and all Africa.
South-east Asian nations notionally in the US’s sphere of influence are firmly tied to the partnership’s economy.
And the overland and sea silk roads similarly bind the EU and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans’ states respectively.
Combined, it amounts to over half the world’s population no longer sharing the economic and currency interests of 328 million Americans.
Imagine that!
We are now equipped to ask an important question: the US status quo, with its dollar hegemony is seen by the new Biden administration as an unchallengeable right, and its position as the world’s hegemon is vital for… .
…what?
What it is “vital” for?
The benefit of the world, or the benefit of the US at the world’s expense?
Hum?
To answer this, we must consider it from the point of view of the US military and intelligence complex.
The problem facing us is that the Pentagon became fully institutionalised in managing America’s external security following the second world war.
When the Soviets extended their sphere of influence into the three great undeveloped continents, Asia, Africa and South America, there was a case for defending capitalism and freedom — or at least freedom in an American sense by keeping minor nations on side.
This was done by fair means and often foul for expediency’s sake.
But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Mao Zedong made the American military and intelligence functions largely superfluous, other than matters more directly related to national defense.
But it is in the nature of government departments and their private sector contractors to do everything in their power to retain both influence and budgets, and the argument that new threats will arise is always hard for politicians to resist….
…especially for a military empire.
And what do the statists in a government department do when they have secured their survival?
Their retention of power without real purpose descends into alternative military objectives. And from the first Bush president, they were all firmly on-message.
As we see today with the American military empire.
President Trump was the first president for some time not to start military engagements abroad. His attempts to wind down foreign operations were strongly resisted by defense and intelligence services.
And his efforts to obtain a détente with North Korea were met with disdain — even horror at Langley.
But war-monger he did.
And he left a legacy of the most comprehensive non-hot-war attacks in history.
From the hybrid-wars, to carpet bombing livestock to produce famines inside of China, he was relentless.
And while no one WANTS to talk about the sorry truth, COVID-19 is an American bio-weapons attack upon China.
No.
Not the “inoculation strain” COVID-19A that all the “news” is hyping about. But the strain that was unleashed on China, Iran, North Korea and Russia; the lethal strain, the COVID-19B.
Whatever the truth in these matters, it is highly unlikely that the power conferred by the ability to initiate unchallengeable cover-ups, information management, subversion of foreign states and secret intelligence operations is not abused.
They are.
That’s a fact jack.
And we can see this through the proliferation and traction of “conspiracy theories”. Now, mostly and falsely attributed in their origin to Russian cyber-attacks and disinformation.
It’s all a consequence of one’s own government continually bending the truth to the point where large sections of the population begin to believe it is its own government’s propaganda.
We call them “sheeple.”
And no one is immune. Event the most vehement Alt-Right or alt-left media, who believes that they are independent thinkers, regurgitate the narratives pumped out for them to consume.
This brings us to the change in administration.
As a senator, Biden had interests in foreign affairs dating back to the late 1970s and was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1997 and subsequently became its chairman.
As such a long-standing politician in this field it is almost certain that the Pentagon establishment regards Biden as a safe pair of hands; in other words, a president who is likely to support Langley’s role in setting geopolitical and defence priorities.
Surely, for them this is a welcome change from the off-message President Trump.
Policies to contain the Russian threat
Despite the Navalny affair, Putin is still unchallengeable as Russian leader, having emerged from the post-Soviet turmoil where chaos and organized crime were the order of the day.
No western leader has had such a tough political background and Putin is a survivor, a strongman firmly in control.
Vladimir Putin
This matters for America and NATO with respect to policies in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iran and Turkey.
Any attempt by America to complete unfinished business in Ukraine (a triparty scrap involving Russia, Germany/EU and the US over the Nord Stream pipelines depriving Ukraine of transition revenues is already brewing) is likely to lead to confrontations with Russia on the ground.
And Russia signed a military cooperation pact with Iran in 2015.
Like a cat with a mouse, Putin is playing with Turkey, interested in laying pipelines to southern Europe, and getting it to drift out of NATO. Russia’s interest in Syria is to keep it out of America’s sphere of influence, which with Turkey’s help it has managed to do.
For some time, military analysts have been telling us that we are now in a cyber war with Russia, accusing it of interfering in elections and promoting conspiracy theories …
… with the US presidential election last November being the most recent assertion.
As with all these allegations there is no proof offered, just statements from government sources which have a track record of being economical with the truth.
Erp. They lie.
Whatever the truth may be, cyber wars are closely intertwined with propaganda.
Attacks on Russia since the millennium have been by disrupting dollar payments, and less importantly, by sanctioning individuals close to Putin.
The monetary threat was originally justified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, leading to the collapse of the rouble and a hike in interest rates.
The new cold war had taken a financial turn. Russia’s response was to reduce the economy’s dependence on dollars as much as possible, with the central bank selling dollar reserves and adding gold in their place.
It also set up a new payments system to reduce its dependence on the SWIFT interbank payments system.
Russia has survived all financial attacks and is now better insulated against them for the future.
One-zero for the Russians.
But the cost has been hidden, with western investment restricted to being mainly from the EU (particularly directed at the oil and gas industries).
For these and other reasons being pushed by the United States, Russia has turned to China as both a partner and an economic protector. In return, Russia is resource-rich, an energy provider, and therefore of great value to China.
Not to mention militarily, as the demands made by the United States in Alaska clearly pointed to.
The Russian and Chinese geopolitical partnership
One of the first persons to identify the geopolitical importance of Russia’s resources was Halford Mackinder in a paper for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. He later developed it into his Heartland theory.
Mackinder argued that control of the Heartland, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the “World-Island”, which was his term for all Europe, Asia and Africa. Over a century later, Mackinder’s theory resonates with the two leading nations behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation, the creation of which was announced on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan, and theRepublic of Uzbekistan.
-About SCO | SCO
The underlying point is that North and South America, Britain, Japan and Australasia in the final analysis are peripheral and less important than Mackinder’s World-Island.
And he was correct.
There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance, but this may no longer be true.
If Mackinder’s vision is valid about the overriding importance of undeveloped resources, Russia is positioned to become with China the most powerful national partnership on earth.
It has happened.
And the BRI is facilitating this.
Which is why there is such a stink about the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Which is the gateway to the Belt and Road Initiative.
The SCO is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power and technological supremacy.
And Russia and China are clearly determined to ditch the dollar. We don’t yet know what will replace it – officially. Though, the e-yuan has been implemented throughout China, and is taking over Asia as we speak.
However, the fact that the Russian central bank and nearly all the other central banks and governments in the SCO have been increasing their gold reserves for some time could be an important clue as to how the representatives of three billion Euro-Asians — almost half the world’s population — see the future of trans-Asian money.
In terms of GDP per capita the United States is a long way ahead of the field.
But…
GDP is an artificial measure of national wealth. When there becomes a stratification of society, and the riches 0.001% of the population have a stratospheric control of the finances, they skew the measurement beyond useful utility.
As well as the United States is also the most indebted at the national level.
The difference with the SCO is at the purchasing power parity level, making market prices of secondary importance.
While prices regionally vary considerably the costs of goods in the SCO are as an average considerably less than in the US and EU, so that on a PPP basis the SCO’s GDP is significantly greater than that of the US or the EU.
The inclusion of the EU is a post-Brexit nod to the fact that the EU can no longer be automatically regarded as being within the US sphere of influence.And certainly the United States leadership does not like this one bit.
The commercial ties to the SCO, with both energy reliance from Russia and silk road (BRI) rail terminals in various EU states are clearly the trade future for the EU.
The EU is advanced in its plans to bring national forces under its combined flag, which by giving them an EU identity can only loosen NATO ties with America.
While not an active threat to America’s power, one can envisage the EU sitting on the fence in an intensifying cold war.
The SCO started life in 2001 as a security partnership between Russia and China, incorporating the ‘stans to the east of the Caspian Sea. Born out an earlier organization, the Shanghai Five Group, it was set up to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism.
It is still a platform for joint military exercises, but none have taken place since 2007 and it has morphed into a loose economic partnership instead.
Since the founding Shanghai Five, the SCO now includes India and Pakistan.
Observer status includes Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia. These nations can attend SCO conferences, but their participation is very limited.
Dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey. These nations can participate actively in SCO conferences, and this status is seen as a preliminary to full membership.
Egypt and Syria have applied for observer status and Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have applied to be dialog partners.
Apart from South East Asian nations, which are dominated by a Chinese diaspora anyway, SCO members and their influence covers almost all of Halford Mackinder’s World Island, with the exception of the European Union.
This is the reality that faces American hegemony; there are twenty-one nations across Asia in a non-American alliance, or on the cusp of joining it.
All the other European and Asian nations are within the SCO’s sphere of influence through trade, even if not politically affiliated.
It is getting more difficult to define the nations definitely in the US pocket, other than its five-eyes partners (Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand). This simple fact places severe limitations on US action against China, and to a lesser extent Russia.
…
Bet you didn’t know that.
It is an exaggeration to suggest that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all. Their cooperation is fundamentally economic rather than military; except…
… as stated above, the SCO’s original function remains to eliminate terrorism, separatism and extremism.
Indeed, India and Pakistan are at loggerheads over Kashmir, and China and India have border disputes in the Himalayas.
But attempts, by, say, the US to prize India away from the SCO is bound to generate wider issues, and perhaps a response, from the other members.
Who do you go with?
Other Nations around the world have a choice.
Broadly, it is to go with America, to go with China/Russia, or sit on the fence.
We have already concluded that the EU’s economic interests in the wake of Brexit are turning it into being a fence-sitter instead of continuing to be in the US sphere of influence. American cannot count on the WU to join in any partnership that opposes the unified Russian-Chinese-Iranian nexus.
Other nations all seem to have a seemingly insatiable demand for commodities and energy and infrastructure building. America is unable to provide this. Which means that local politicians have been bought through local prosperity and will stay bought. But if America offers more money in bales like in the past, these nations’ politicians will undoubtedly take it. As they have always done in the past.
But that is unlikely to lead to their political allegiance changing from being with China.
This form of American diplomacy was at its height in the fifties and sixties, and the US was able to outgun the Soviets and Chinese in providing “aid”, much of which was trousered by politicians.
This was particularly true of the oil money recycled by American banks into loans to South American governments in the late seventies.
The Chinese are not so careless with money: when they build a bridge on a Caribbean island, they are firmly hands-on providing money, management and some of the labor and local politicians are only rewarded with electoral kudos.
There are, therefore, fundamental differences between attempts to keep a country within a particular sphere of influence sixty years ago and today.
And there can be no doubt that the Chinese are winning the game.
America has no skills, no resources, and no abilities any longer. All America has are buckets of paper money that is rapidly losing value, and an enormous military war machine. It’s guns and money. Guns and money. Guns and money.
Guns and money.
Overland, across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the silk roads and associated projects are having a substantial impact on emerging nations in a way not seen before.
China has advanced Mackinder’s World Island concept by embracing most of Africa into its sphere of influence.
As well as the SCO’s control over Asia from Vladivostok to the Mediterranean, as the largest oil consumer China’s influence over the Middle East — which supplies little or no oil to the US — binds nations in that region into the SCO.
The contrast with America’s foreign policy under Trump could not have been greater.
America became autarkic, determined to repatriate production from abroad.
AutarkyAutarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states and their economic systems.
Autarky as an ideal or method has been embraced by a wide range of political ideologies and movements, especially left-wing ideologies like African socialism, mutualism, war communism, council communism, Communalism, Swadeshi, syndicalism and leftist populism, generally in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures a particular movement views as hostile.
Conservative, centrist and nationalist movements have also adopted autarky in an attempt to preserve part of an existing social order or to develop a particular industry.
Some fascist and far-right movements occasionally espoused autarky as a goal.-Wikipedia
It lacked a strategy to counter China’s rapidly growing spheres of influence.
Even the EU integrated major elements of its economy with China and Russia, and now that the US’s only five-eyes representative in the EU has left it, we can expect this integration to increase more rapidly.
Instead, Trump concentrated on attacking China, its technology and Hong Kong.
China faced tariffs, prompting her to respond partly in kind.
Meng Wanzhou, finance officer for Huawei, was detained in Vancouver on a US extradition request, on the pretext of payments involving Iran.
Her arrest was the start of a US campaign to exclude Huawei from G5 mobile contracts in the west, pressure that eventually led the UK to downgrade Huawei’s contracts.
It ended up uniting the five-eyes security partnership against China’s technology on a reds-under-the-bed argument: “Chinese technology embedded in western communications systems gives them the ability to spy on us.”
The UK’s GCHQ changed its position from there being no evidence of embedded spyware in Huawei equipment to it being vulnerable to being used for spying by the Chinese government.
Hong Kong
The build-up of riots against Hong Kong’s proposed extradition treaty with the Mainland started in 2019, supported and driven by anti-Chinese propaganda.
America finally emerged as China’s adversary, no longer just a trading partner worried by the trade imbalances.
And Hong Kong was the pressure point.
This had happened before, in 2014.
The Chinese leadership was certain the riots in Hong Kong at that time reflected the work of American intelligence agencies.
The following is an extract translated from a speech by Major-General Qiao Liang, a leading strategist for the Peoples’ Liberation Army, addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in 2015:
“Since the Diaoyu Islands conflict and the Huang-yan Island conflict, incidents have kept popping up around China, including the confrontation over China’s 981 oil rigs with Vietnam and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” event.
"Can they still be viewed as simply accidental?“I accompanied General Liu Yazhou, the Political Commissar of the National Defence University, to visit Hong Kong in May 2014. At that time, we heard that the “Occupy Central” movement was being planned and could take place by end of the month. However, it didn’t happen in May, June, July, or August.“What happened? What were they waiting for?“Let’s look at another timetable: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s exit from the Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. The U.S. said it would stop QE at the beginning of 2014. But it stayed with the QE policy in April, May, June, July, and August. As long as it was in QE, it kept overprinting dollars, and the dollar‘s price couldn’t go up. Thus, Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” should not happen either.“At the end of September, the Federal Reserve announced the U.S. would exit from QE. The dollar started going up. Then Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” broke out in early October.“Actually, the Diaoyu Islands, Huang-yan Island, the 981 rigs, and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” movement were all bombs. The successful explosion of any one of them would lead to a regional crisis or a worsened investment environment around China. That would force the withdrawal of a large amount of investment from this region, which would then return to the U.S.”
That America organized discontent anew in Hong Kong is still China’s view today.
It’s hard to dispute, as all of Hong Kong is wired with 5G and video. And the videos of American diplomats, and UK NGOS’ training the rioters, and supervising the destruction, and making agreements with the key leaders have been well publicized throughout Asia.
Not in America.
Of course.
Clearly, the Chinese believe America covertly managed “Occupy Central” and therefore were at it again.
Apart from what their spies told them, the protests were too well organized and planned to be spontaneous. This time, the attack appeared to have a better chance of success. The plan was coordinated with American pressure on Hong Kong’s dollar peg in an attempt to destabilize it, principally through the threat to extend tariffs against China to Hong Kong.
This second attempt to collapse Hong Kong was therefore more serious.
Hong Kong is critical, because it is the channel for foreign investment portfolio flows into China.
This was important to the Americans, because the US Treasury could not afford to see global portfolio flows attracted into China at a time when they were needed to invest in increasing quantities of US Treasury stock.
Understand that, and you will have grasped a large part of the urgency behind America’s attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
Qiao Liang makes this point elsewhere in his aforementioned speech, claiming American tactics are the consequence of the ending of Bretton Woods:
“Without the restriction of gold, the US can print dollars at will.
If they keep a large amount of dollars inside the US, it will certainly create inflation.
If they export dollars to the world, the whole world is helping the US deal with its inflation.
That’s why inflation is not high in the US.”
While one can take some minor issues with his simplistic analysis, that is not the point.
What matters is what the Chinese believe.
It was after that second attempt by America to destabilize Hong Kong that the Chinese concluded they must take direct control of the region, isolate and remove the NGO’s and CIA agents involved in this effort, and secure the region to prevent any future disruptions.
China makes mistakes too
China’s strategy in dealing with America has generally been to be slow to respond, and never to provoke. This accords with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on tactical dispositions:
“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
Generally, China’s strategy has been to refuse to be provoked.
A possible exception has been Hong Kong, where it was decided it was more important to secure the island against further attack, overriding the terms of the treaty with the UK.
But its greatest mistake was in imposing trade tariffs in a tit-for-tat response to US tariffs.
Economic factors
Before the pandemic and with America targeting Chinese exports, China’s leadership introduced policies to encourage domestic consumption.
For this to work required a drop in the savings rate.
In fact, it has been falling since 2010, when according to the World Bank it peaked at 51% of GDP, to just under 44% in 2019.
It was the difference between Chinese and American savings rates which was the driving factor behind their mutual trade imbalance.
China recognizes that it must move on from an export-driven economic model.
But while the American and other welfare-driven economies are running mounting budget deficits, China will continue to have a growing trade surplus.
While this will continue to be a problem for the Americans, without imported goods from China product shortages would simply fuel higher prices on top of unprecedented monetary expansion.
This is the reality behind the cold war for the next few years.
Unfortunately, being highly Keynesian the new Biden administration is unlikely to accept the twin deficits argument and will think that it can still call the shots on trade without cutting its own spending. But the above showed US government debt to GDP is already over $28 trillion and on Biden’s infrastructure and greening plans alone will likely rise significantly further by this fiscal year.
The combination of increasing consumer demand while exports to America boom gives China a window of economic expansion only enjoyed by its Asian neighbors.
The contrast between China’s prospects can hardly be greater than those for America.
The economics alone militate strongly against the US pursuing a geopolitical objective other than quietly backing off.
But senior US personnel are still acting as if the Chinese should kowtow to America, as evidenced in the proceedings in Alaska in March 2021.
The Chinese were robust and will have calculated their position as strong.
Sun Tzu again:
“Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”.
What we are facing
The Biden presidency faces significant challenges in the ongoing cold war and America is unlikely to retain its hegemonic status.
During Trump’s presidency, attempts to curtail China’s trade and technological development did not succeed.
Instead it has brought China, Russia and Iran together, as well as emboldened both China and Russia to stand firm and as much as possible to do without America and its dollar.
The American senior advisors are, or should be, acutely aware of the debt and inflation traps facing the US and also the EU.
Following the Fed’s policies of accelerated monetary expansion announced last March, China increased her purchases of commodities and raw materials, in effect signalling she prefers them to dollar liquidity.
As a policy, it is likely to be extended further, given China’s existing stockpile of dollars and dollar-denominated debt.
Her dilemma is not just the fragile state of the US economy, but that of the EU which on any dispassionate analysis is a state failing economically and politically as well.
China will not want to be blamed for triggering a series of events which will get everyone reaching out for their forgotten copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a true classic on political philosophy. Anyone keen on this field and in the practice of policy will be remiss to by-pass this magnum opus.Hayek is characteristically brilliant in his rendition of an Idea: he can easily walk you through the intricacies of logical and theoretical argument for a case yet combine it masterfully with practical examples in economics and history. He is balanced, impartial and frank.For classical liberals, this is a timeless jewel worthy of Locke, Acton, Tocqueville et al.Simply a masterpiece.
-Amazon
As events take their course, the risk of a dollar collapse and a matching crisis in the euro, though for different reasons, increases.
For Mackinder’s heartland theory to be proved and for the Russian and Chinese partnership to be in control of it, a mega-crisis facing the profligate money-printers must happen.
All history and a priori economic theory confirm it will happen.
The SCO’s Plan B will be a continuance of Plan A, hatched out of the Shanghai Five Group, making the World Island a self-contained unit not dependent on the peripherals — principally, the five eyes.
The Five EyesThe Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and theUnited States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
-Wikipedia
For money, China, Russia and the rest of Asia must give up western ways with unbacked state currencies.
Between them they have enough state-owned declared and undeclared gold to back the yuan, and the rouble.
Give these two currencies free convertibility into gold, and they will be accepted everywhere, so their old cold war enemies can trade their way back to prosperity.
The US has, or says it has, enough gold to put a failing dollar back on a gold standard, but for it to be credible it must [1] radically cut spending, [2] cut back its geopolitical ambitions, and [3] return its budget into balance.
All highly unlikely.
With luck, that is how the new cold war ends.
But don’t hold your breath.
America, and the rest of the nations that it is dragging along with it, are barrelling down towards a great and grand catastrophe.
Situation Report
The election of 2020 did nothing to change the leadership in Washington DC. They are just puppets for their handlers the oligarchy. While Biden is calmer and has swave, compared to Donald Trump, he is continuing all the polices that his predecessor implemented.
The election made no functional difference in anything.
You can read what ever you want in this realization, but I read it as exactly what it is. “Democracy” is dead. Voting whether actual, or corrupted, makes absolutely no difference in how the nation is run, governed or managed.
This knowledge, by itself is significant. It is one of those check boxes that you have on a sheet of paper when you get ready for a big event, gala or preparation for disaster.
I could go down the long list of alarm bells, flashing lights, elements of growing discontent all of which every single American is viewing in real time. These clamorous alarms have been banging away for decades, but their loudness has become so commonplace that most Americans just accept them as the “new reality”, and assume that things will just worsen in a gradual series of stages…
…not a big thunderous crash.
I beg to differ.
For there are things that most Americans have zero understanding of. And is the state of affairs outside the shores of the Untied States. And what passes for “American news” is anything but actual intel. Americans haven’t a clue as to what is going on “outside”.
Things are building up.
America, the large thrashing out of control elephant, is rampaging about and the rest of the world has armed themselves with tranquilizer guns, large nets, and heavy cages.
Russia, China and Iran are one solid block. They are now a close national entity. Surrounding these nations are allied nations. All working in their best interests, but will align with their large neighbors the sino-block.
Europe wants to sit on the fence, but the USA (through the five eyes) wants them to be pulled into the “us vs. them” USA against the world “rules based order”. They are not budging. Just trying to be as neutral as possible.
What is apparently happening is the isolation of the United States from the rest of the globe internationally.
USA/Canada plus the islands of UK, Australia, and NZ.
What we are watching (on the international scene) is the Asian block… the Sino-block … are holding off as long as possible in putting the thrashing elephant down. But they realize that doing so is a last resort. They do not want to do so, as there will be a backlash on the world.
America, the thrashing elephant has no idea how little it knows, is capable of, and what danger it is in. It is delusional.
…
I could get into the specific details like the strange blockage of all shipping in the Suez Canal, the Beirut explosion, the propaganda narratives, the Coronavirus, etc, etc…
These are just elements of a large game of chess that America is playing…
The timeline that they set up is still in play, though the attacks on China (that were planned) did not happen.
No starvation via bio-weapon carpet bombing of livestock.
No suppression of trade via propaganda and sanctions.
No incited revolutions in Hong Kong.
No unrest in Tibet, Xingjiang.
No “incident” in the South China Sea
None of that happened, and the attempt at war in the 2019 – 2020 time frame failed.
But we knew that that was would would happen.
Firstly, because China is not what the American (and Western media) thinks it is, and secondly because the date fro the crisis event has not yet hit.
If you can believe this; we are just building up to the event. There is still a couple of years to go yet.
The danger period is approaching; 2023 through 2026, centered around 2025.
Hold on to your britches boys and girls. Dicy times are a coming.
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that they predicted a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020.
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That is three years later.
What does Mr. Howe say?
Below is a brief essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe discussing the typical progression of each “Turning”. It remains more relevant than ever amidst our current zeitgeist. It was written nearly a year before 2020 showed it’s ugly, ugly face.
NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.
The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.
The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”
Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.
Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.
In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.
At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.
The First Turning is called a High.
This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity.
America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.
The Second Turningis an Awakening.
This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.
America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.
The Third Turning is an Unravelling.
The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.
America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.
Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
Exerpts from the book The Fourth Turning
In 1860-1861 southern states took the Lincoln victory as a de-facto proof that the North would increasingly seek to impose its will upon the south (they were right, but losing the war actually made it happen faster and more completely).
What people generally forget is that all states had large militias that were beholden ONLY to the states, and people had much more belief and legal adherence to the individual states, than now.
Terrorist actions do not start a war, because you cannot really go to war conventionally against terrorism. What happened in the 1860's is that state governments formed a new nation in rebellion.
Personally I don't think the Left or the Right, as a whole, have the balls to do this today. But I guess we'll see. Eventually the threats become real enough that it's hard to ignore them and just hope everything goes back to normal.
-Aerindel, SoJ_51 and Observer
This is straight from the book …
“Something happened to America at that time,” recalled U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye on V-J Day in 1995, the last of the 50-year commemoratives of World War II. “I’m not wise enough to know what it was. But it was the strange, strange power that our founding fathers experienced in those early, uncertain days. Let’s call it the spirit of America, a spirit that united and galvanized our people.” Inouye went on to reflect wistfully on an era when the nation considered no obstacle too big, no challenge too great, no goal too distant, no sacrifice too deep. A half-century later, that old spirit had long since dissipated, and nobody under age 70 remembered what it felt like. When Joe Dawson reenacted his D-Day parachute drop over Normandy, he said he did it “to show our country that there was a time when our nation moved forward as one unit.”
The Eternal Return
On the earthen floors of their rounded hogans, Navajo artists sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time. Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They draw these sand circles in a counter-clockwise progression, one quadrant at a time, with decorative icons for the challenges of each age and season. When they near the end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a small gap just to the right of its top. This signifies the moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenics called ekpyrosis. By Navajo custom, this moment can be provided (and the circle closed) only by God, never by mortal man. All the artist can do is rub out the painting, in reverse seasonal order, after which a new circle can be begun. Thus, in the Navajo tradition, does seasonal time stage its eternal return.
Like most traditional peoples, the Navaho accept not just the circularity of life, but also its perpetuity. Each generation knows its ancestors have drawn similar circles in the sand—and each expects its heirs to keep drawing them. The Navaho ritually reenact the past while anticipating the future. Thus do they transcend time.
Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history’s last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V.J.-Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.
An end of what?
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. But this end, while possible, is not likely. Human life is not so easily extinguishable. One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species. Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that. For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck. Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw. A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins. The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress. As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
The new saeculum could find America a worse place. As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.” Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals. Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring. Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear. Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place. Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are. All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place. Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization. Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired. Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction. People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment. America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community. Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting. All this is achievable as well.
Conclusion
2020 was not the Climax; the Crisis of the Forth Turning in America. That still lies ahead of us.
I hope it never comes to this. In lieu, I can see the Balkinization of the country take place, sides would move to designated areas and set up permanent camp. There may be 2, 3 or more countries within the US before the dust settles.
-Survivalist Boards
A climax is a major event. It is typically marked by full-scale discord and absolute totality of full-scale war. That did not occur in 2020. That is not occurring now. 2020 was marked by a “pandemic”. Most Americans (through their media) believe that either [1] it is a hoax, or [2] it is a new strain of flu that is sweeping the globe. It is neither. It is a bio-weapon attack on China by the neocon Trump administration gone terribly wrong.
Xi Peng and Putin do not get their intel from Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and CNN. They get it from their Intel divisions. And both nations have a full picture of what is going on, has gone on and will go on further.
Both nations (China and Russia) filed a formal complaint against the United States for launching this bio-weapon (and all the others that it launched in late 2020). And while Americans ignored this complaint, pretending that it is meaningless, it did do something. It marked the start of Russia and China teaming up militarily against the United States.
…
United States. (With the UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.) Today there is isolated America. Confused. Arrogant. Thrashing and moaning. Demanding all sorts of things.
The Rest of the World. And the rest of the world, lead by Russia, and China, that are very carefully and very precisely planning to stop all this nonsense once and for all.
Adjusting the dates
“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system.”
-The Burning Platform
Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…
There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…
“Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
Climax in 2023.
Resolution in 2029.
.
Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.
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In the first 100 days of the Biden Presidency, the international world awaited to see how the new administration would handle itself. Many remained hopeful. Certainly Mr. Biden, a seasoned diplomat, and a member of the “dove” (political) party would soften the anti-China attacks, and reach-out to China and the world. The Alaska meeting, would thus lay out a foundation of what the international community would be able to expect in United States and China affairs in the next few years.
This is what China was expecting…
"We hope that through the dialogue, the two sides can focus on cooperation, manage differences and promote the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations in accordance with the spirit of the conversation between the two heads of state."
And the actual meeting was stunning.
It really was.
When the meeting opened up, the American “negotiation” team came out with fists slinging making all sorts of demands. No time for pleasantries. The American team immediately began telling China how to handle it’s internal domestic matters, manage it’s territories, and govern it’s cities. It told them that it must obey the “US-Led rule of law” instead of UN conventions. It did not offer help, assistance, or propose ideas of joint cooperation. The opening statements made by the American delegation were a long list of demands, complaints, and accusations.
Then after that first volley was fired, A delegation member added…
“Of course, we only want peace, no one wants war”.
Which in "bully speak" is actually translated as...
"Obey our demands or we will plummet you into a bloody pulp".
Then when it was time for the Chinese to respond, they politely told the American delegation to go to Hell.
When the Chinese delegation arrived in Alaska, their hearts were chilled by the biting cold, but even more by the reception from their American hosts. Blinken and his State Department may felt quite proud of their efforts to isolate and embarrass China ahead of the meeting in Anchorage.
But after facing insult after insult, the Chinese delegation stood up and said "No!" to Western condescension and bullying.
The U.S. had better get used to it.
-CGTN
American reporting
Of course, the United States media is a little confused by this. The Conservative Hard-Right and neocon websites are all so proud that “America is staying tough on China”, and the mainstream media is reporting that the meeting did not go well, but that is expected as the Chinese were so demanding…
Here’s a pro-America article that is accusing China of being arrogant. When the obvious arrogance comes from the United States.
No lunch. Cold instant noodles for lunch.
Demanding China allow American NGO’s in Xinjiang.
Demanding that the US dictate how Hong Kong be governed.
Demanding how China handles it’s state of Taiwan.
Demanding how China handles it’s state of Tibet.
Demanding how, who, and what China does on the international scene.
While the title is spot-on, the content must have been written before the meeting. It seemed like some kind of “boiler plate” text, and did not match up with the title nor the actual events which transpired.
The article is certainly pro-America with statements such as…
“They (the Chinese) came to dictate.
China’s arrogant and insecure leaders are at their most dangerous.
Deterrence is failing.
Biden’s most urgent task is to reestablish it.”
Which is nonsense.
China told them to FUCK OFF and mind their own business. China follows the International rule of law as determined by the UN, not the biggest thug on the block. And that they were aghast at the rudeness, the arrogance, and the sheer demanding tone set forth by the American delegation.
This article was so brief and devoid of facts, I have more characters on my mail box address than the content of this “article“.
Here’s some links to more American based articles all parroting the idea that the negotiations were “contentious and rocky”. All the articles in the American media parrot this predetermined narrative…
It’s not just this, but this same week Biden directly insulted the President of Russia a “Killer”. And thus, within the span of one week, the United States has collectively and intentionally insulted the two other major nations. This does not bode well.
I can tell you that the rest of the world is actually horrified, and if you read what they have to say, you will get a better idea about what is actually going on. Lord help us.
Comments from the rest of the world
These comments are very insightful.
They provide a vision of how America is viewed in the world today, and what people (outside of the American media echo chamber) think. If for anything else, it will give you, the MM reader, and idea of the size and scope of the monster that America has turned into.
Here’s the comments…
The Chinese emphasis on most of the world rejecting a US-directed 'rules-based order' ...
...instead of honoring the UN Charter and settled international law ...
...is of supreme importance and must be re-emphasized ad nauseum.
What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots.
It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium.
The Chinese's confident offensive resulted in a rapid emotional dive from a state of megalomaniac bravado to shaky self-confidence.
In comparison they made even Trump look like a cultivated gentleman.
To translate from Orwellian Western Newspeak to English:
'Rules-based order' means
'Our rules for you,
that we don't have to follow,
and can change anytime we like.'
'International order' means
'Western-ruled-world order.'
'International community' means
the US-led Western community and vassal states.
(The Western media spouts this all the time.)
'Rules-based' is the modern day incarnation of Americans/British throwing around the phrase 'treaty', 'treaty-based' in colonial days.
Different words, same con.
And of course the Chinese have a few things to say…
Such as
From surrendering to Western powers in 1901, to telling the US in 2021 it doesn't have the qualification to speak to China “from a position of strength”
China needs to convey in a language that US understands.
Straight Forward, Up to the Point, Right at their Faces.
The construct of their brains cannot understand any other ways, Least Not the Diplomatic 'Soft' & Amicable Styles of Communications.
They perceive those to be Weak.
And then we have more Western comments…
USA provided a transcript of both US Govt & China Govt speakers.
I thought this a little unusual, as foreign miminstries like to publish their own transcripts so that they control the authentic translation of their words, free from the opposing parties editing or mis-translation.
"cutthroat competition" may be an arguably alternative translation of "strangle" in the China readout "those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end."
I was waiting for the China verbatim translation to check the fidelity of the USA translation.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862641.shtmlhttps://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862643.shtml
But there is only an unquoted report, which is the meeting, but without quotation marks to distinguish between the authors voice and the Officials voice.
Verbatim would be better.
Maybe the USA had reciprocal concerns about the verbatim accuracy of the China transcript.
But its on video anyway, so???
Posted by: powerandpeople | Mar 19 2021 19:37 utc | 7
Toothless sabre rattling is about all the USA has left.
A bunch of old men with a world view from the 1950s whose own virility is long gone is not going to come to an epiphany about their encroaching impotence. The Establishment has no other choice, absent common sense and critical thinking, but to double-down on arrogant self-righteousness bred by sophomoric jingoism that defines 'shallow.'
Empire is crumbling before our eyes. The question is will it take the rest of the world with it as it falls into its own footprint.
Footage of China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi lashing out at U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage, Alaska, was played repeatedly by China’s state-backed media at home.
“China has Chinese-style democracy,” Yang said, not mincing words in his first encounter with the U.S. President Joe Biden’s team.
“Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States.”
The Communist Party Politburo member assailed the U.S., feeding fiery words to the news corps of both countries.
And I really love this next comment. It pretty much sums up my thinking…
Perhaps one of the more predictable mistakes the US will commit next, is misinterpret the stern warnings of the past few days by Russia, China and even NK, as evidence the new Biden/Blinken regime is less feared or respected than the Trump/Pompeo one.
I suspect a more accurate interpretation would be...
"ok, you had the crazy guy for 4 years and we cut you some slack, hoping once the grown ups were back we could reason as adults, but if you're gonna carry on with the same attitude, basically, Democrat or Republican, you can all summarily go fuck yourselves".
Particularly at the end of the term, the Obama regime was already being met by a very hostile China and Russia, well before Trump took over with his less than diplomatic style (or lack thereof). Anyone recall the airport security debacle with China during Obama's last weeks?
Which compares the Alaskan meeting of 2021 with the meeting of 1901 which allowed the Western nations to rape, pillage, and destroy China for decades. Perhaps this picture might be a better illustration…
And FOX news reported on the event
It was of course very pro-America. Leading to this comment…
How our interaction w/China was reported FOX did a full throated, fake narrative just to suit their pro-Trump agenda. When they quoted, 'you cannot talk to us from a position of strength' they made is sound like the Chinese were scoffing at Blinken's weakness rather than his moral turpitude. They made it sound like Blinken surrendering to his Chinese overlords, squandering the strong hand the Trump gave him.
In FOX land, all that matters is that you come up with a great sounding argument. The truthfulness of that arguments is not relevant.
Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Mar 19 2021 19:55 utc | 14
This is how things look to the rest of the world…
The USA's situation is very dire indeed. The Americans are resorting more and more to "Hail Mary" moves to keep their hegemonic position.
And even then they're blundering.
I would not be surprised at all if they start to straight out have to falsify diplomatic transcripts in order to try to create something favorable to them.
Related to US-China tensions, if anyone likes documentary shows, CNA (Channel News Asia, a broadcaster out of Singapore) has a good four-part documentary released in January 2021 called "When Titans Clash", about the US-China trade/tech tensions, that I would recommend. (I watched the first two yesterday and will watch the other two this weekend.)
Each of the 4 parts is about 48 minutes long and available for watching on YouTube and CNA's website too.
When Titans Clash - part 1 of 4 - Pride & Shame - The Roots of US-China Tensions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2gBUxblO8
When Titans Clash - part 2 of 4 - The Real Losers of the US-China Trade War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYrWYSTW28
When Titans Clash - part 3 of 4 - A US-China Tech War - The True Costs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8XnLW26bmg
When Titans Clash - part 4 of 4 - US or China - Will Southeast Asia Have to Pick a Side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8A5jiGICM
Touches on some of the things ak74 mentioned in his comment on the other thread: outsourcing, deindustrialization, the US dollar as reserve currency, etc.
It's from Pearl Forss who was also involved in CNA's 2015-2019 series "The New Silk Road", about China's BRI, that I can recommend as well.
Posted by: Canadian Cents | Mar 19 2021 20:07 utc | 19
And Scott Addams has a thing to say…
And from Northern Europe…
The world appreciates that Russia and China give the US Regime a sublime verbal spanking.
Blinken is Secretary of State for USA, head of the US State Department.
He mentioned in his nomination hearing, & makes allusion in this meeting with China, to a genocide in Xinjiang.
Foreign Affairs magazine article reports US State Department legal office saying they have no evidence for a genocide in Xinjiang.
Is Blinken in touch with his department?
Posted by: dave constable | Mar 19 2021 20:22 utc | 27
same deal as @ 26 dave constable notes too... accusing others of genocide when you have been the main merchant of death on the planet the past 40 or more years doesn't stand.. if anyone is the killer here it is the usa, so the irony isn't lost on everyone..
In my opinion, the Chinese representatives gave a good answer to the American side, although this answer will obviously not be heard.
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?
A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.
b Posted:
“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.
The 'rules based order' means 'do what we say' and is of course unacceptable. Here is how the Chinese replied:
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called “rules-based” international order.
Say it to uncle Sam. Say it every time they meet. The bankruptcy of the "rules based order" gang of five or six is a failure.
For all its appalling faults the UN and established international courts are the place to go. Suck it up uncle Sam.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 19 2021 20:59 utc | 35
And from my email
I am so happy 😊 China tell the oppressor to piss off.
Attached short video with English translation: China tell US you are not qualify to tell us you want to talk to us with strength. 20 to 30 years ago, you already not qualify…
“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.
LOL.
You really have to wonder if the Americans believe their own bullshit about their hollowed "Rules Based International Order"?
The violent and unstable world is ALREADY here thanks to ... this very same American "Rules" Based Order.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Somalia--these are just a few of the countries America has either invaded, bombed, or supported moderate jihadi Head-Choppers against to destabilize in the past generation.
Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html?view=print
This is interesting.
Apparently both the Russians and the Chinese have concluded that Biden intends to use "CornPop" faux-macho posturing as his foreign policy, and they have both decided that "fuck that, let's nip this in the bud".
Because it looks like they have decided they have had a gut-full of US "exceptionalism" and are quite determined to say so.
To anyone, but especially to the Americans.
Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced this degree of contempt before.
Posted by: Yeah, Right | Mar 19 2021 22:08 utc | 46
I about fell on the floor when I read Blinken's words, my first thought being "this klutz has zero knowledge of history since 1588 and just admitted as much.
In China, Blinken would never achieve any position of power.
The decadence of the Outlaw US Empire's government is like so many prions turning brain tissue into a swiss-cheese-like mass and then boasting about how finely tuned are its cognitive abilities. And when Harris is installed, we'll have a genuine novice in charge--The Blind leading the Blind.
It's no wonder the Chinese sought an audience with Lavrov ASAP.
Yes. The meeting went so bad that the already tight China-Russia relationship was strengthened. I am sure that certain actions, policies and activities were on hold pending he result of these “talks”. But the American actions were so appalling that China and Russia have decided that more forceful means of persuasion are necessary.
Contrived moulded whatever the case I leave this excerpt. I feel it hits the head.
Here's what journalist Joe Bageant wrote in 2007:
Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle.
It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom."
Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire.
("American Empire! I like the sound of that!" they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.)
"The people" doing our hardest work and fighting our wars are not altruistic and probably never were.
They don't give a rat's bunghole about the world's poor or the planet or animals or anything else. Not really.
"The people" like cheap gas.
They like chasing post-Thanksgiving Day Christmas sales.
And if fascism comes, they will like that too if the cost of gas isn't too high and Comcast comes through with a twenty-four-hour NFL channel.
That is the American hologram.
That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique.
And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads.
Working people do not deny reality.
They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction.
Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns.
That's what they voted for—an armed and moral republic.
And that's what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.
Genuine moral values have jack to do with politics.
But in an obsessively religious nation, values remain the most effective smoke screen for larceny by the rich and hatred and fear by the rest.
What Christians and so many quiet, ordinary Americans were voting for in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 was fear of human beings culturally unlike themselves, particularly gays and lesbians and Muslims and other non-Christians.
That's why in eleven states Republicans got constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage on the ballot.
In nine of them the bill passed easily.
It was always about fearing and, in the worst cases, hating "the other."
Being a southerner, I have hated in my lifetime.
I can remember schoolyard discussions of supposed "nigger knifing" of white boys at night and such.
And like most people over fifty, it shows in my face, because by that age we have the faces we deserve.
Likewise I have seen hate in others and know it when I see it.
I am seeing more of it now than ever before in my lifetime, which is saying something considering that I grew up down here during the Jim Crow era.
Fanned and nurtured by neoconservative elements, the hate is every bit equal to the kind I saw in my people during those violent years.
Irrational. Deeply rooted. Based on inchoate fears.
The fear is particularly prevalent in the middle and upper-middle classes here, the very ones most openly vehement about being against using the words nigger and fuck.
They are what passes for educated people in a place like Winchester.
You can smell their fear.
Fear of losing their advantages and money.
Fear there won't be enough time to grab and stash enough geet to keep themselves and their offspring in Chardonnay and farting through silk for the next fifty years.
So they keep the lie machinery and the smoke generators cranking full blast as long as possible, hoping to elect another one of their own kind to the White House—Democratic or Republican, it doesn't matter so long as they keep the scam going.
The Laurita Barrs speak in knowing, authoritative tones, and the inwardly fearful house painter and single-mom forklift driver listen and nod.
Why take a chance on voting for a party that would let homos be scout masters?
(Dear Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, chapter 2)
Well, the US is obviously in a deep crisis: riots all over the place, the southern border is a mess, and the government even needs the national guard to protect itself from the people.
Under the circumstances, one should expect the establishment to act hysterically. It's just a symptom.
Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Mar 19 2021 22:32 utc | 53
The madness of the Outlaw Empire is not about to shrink from bringing down the curtain on the human race, if that's what it takes to see their power of command obeyed.
The US, as it is today, doesn't respect any nation's sovereignty and is mostly indifferent to allies and foes alike.
The regime considers itself the only sovereign worthy of such title on earth; and expects to be allowed to run the table at its pleasure, or else it will supervise the burning down of the house.
Biden meanders about, not even possessed of his right mind, holding on to the delusions and lies of several presidents who lately came before him; and he is just the man to keep all the fires of destruction burning, while the torture of innocence is unceasing, and as the arrogant demands made against other countries become more absurd. What else is more obvious?
These are the things we have seen foreshadowed before and after 9/11.
As long ago as the 80s Reagan was told about the reality of nuclear winter.
In A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut described how scientists explained to G.W. Bush that a nuclear exchange of even a moderate duration and size, could still depopulate the earth of most of its people.
The Bush Administration, toying with the idea of deploying baby nukes, for strategic exigency, short of total war, went with "guesswork" rather than prudent scientific advice.
It was their best guess that the circumspect, abbreviated use of nukes wouldn't destroy humanity itself, or cause ice age conditions, or bring about global starvation.
Re Sadde @3 "What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium."
Seems like just the other day I was reading the same description about Pompeo lol. And yet somehow this is much worse, as we have a clearly demented, recently installed "president" who can't make it up a flight of stairs or give a press conference, who has the nuclear football following him around 24/.7.
Been nice knowing y'all.
Well Russia has been very seriously preparing for total war for some years now, and China too has caught that drift and begun to do the same.
By comparison, the US is ready for aggravation, but nothing beyond that.
The US has no capability for war.
How then, for the free nations of the world to defeat the US?
One could surmise that the best way would be to force the US to accept defeat.
Iran already showed the way.
The lesson is not that hard to understand, although the tactics are obviously more complex.
Who will punch the bully?
Because we all know that this is what causes the bully to slink away, and to behave a little better.
It begins with words, because that's what the US likes to fight with, treating then merely as weapons, treating them with contempt.
And now words of contempt itself, as Yeah Right @45 points out, are being driven forward like a moving wall against the US.
First come the words. Next will come...
...whatever will come, but it is a certainty that the Russia/China team has every contingency war-gamed.
As Piotr Berman points out in the previous thread, the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control.
This is the dynamic that must be defeated.
Obviously, this will involve situations in which the US has nothing left to escalate with (situations that don't allow the nuke specter)...
...at which point, the US has to slink away - under cover of words of bluster, to be sure, to salve the ego, but slink away even so.
And a few more of these lessons of defeat will re-train that ego, over time, lessons carefully administered, and all watched over by armies of loving grace.
Blenkin and co just got thoroughly washed in a Chinese laundry, washed clean dried and starched, ready to put on their fully cleaned washed self's for taste of some Russian pastries.
Soon after on the coming Iranian 13th day of the new year (thirteenth out) they can go for an Iranian picnic for taste of gourmet delicious Persian soup (Ash).
I really enjoyed the Chinese exchange with shining city on hill guys, Happy Iranian new year and New century (1400) to you all, MOA and b.
Suffice it to say, I love the Chinese (and they highly cultured ways etc) when they talk and act like this to the barbarians aka the Americans.
Everything the Chinese FM said was correct, and spot on.
Blinken and Bush are as boorish and rude, perhaps even more condescending than Pompeo and Trump - But it is hard to choose between the lesser of two American evils
Posted by: michaelj72 | Mar 19 2021 23:14 utc | 60
The editors at Strategic-Culturesee it this way:
"In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe, Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive measures.
Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
"It’s a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America’s historic enfeeblement rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans make fools of themselves."
It seems Russia's doing just that--attending to the vital business of developing its nation and peoples. Russia's geared for numerous patriotic celebrations throughout the year, and Biden's comments were made on the eve of Crimean reunification with Russia, which only served to cement Russians closer and hold Putin in even greater esteem. Talk about an Own Goal!
Outlaw US Empire Nord Stream policy is close to being the same as literally torpedoing it, making it an act of war against the EU and Russia. Somehow, I don't think Blinken understands that fundamental fact.
The fact that Blinken has to read what he supposedly thinks, compared with the Chinese representatives and diplomats like Lavrov, Zakarov, and even Putin who know their thoughts without someone else writing their script.
Same as all the MSM. They all appear to get their news sent to them in writing and maybe a few fluff up the news but they know what the agenda is.
So in just a matter of weeks, the US just antagonized both Russia and China.
This seems a surprise to me, US is getting very bold, I thought they would be more active but subversive, but this is just straight up insulting your opponents.
I'm in the middle of Armstrong's essay and am at the first reference to Kagan's vision:
"What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,' the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.'
It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire; for aside from "advancing its interests," the Parasites have zero motivation to do any of that.
As their sole ambition/goal is to vacuum up all the wealth they can and leave a shell just as they planned and failed with Russia, but have succeeded elsewhere.
And as for principles, the reality is it has none, nor does it have any friends, just vassals and victims.
This analogy by Armstrong's excellent:
"The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren’t get off or the dragon will kill it. But because it can’t kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon’s eggs are hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC; think how bigger they’ll be in another....
"But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune."
And tying it all up is this excellent summation:
"Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia? How many times have they said Putin’s finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S. general is in Ukraine and Kiev’s heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it’s Putin who, for ego reasons – and his “failing” economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing it? Well, it’s easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand Russia and rule forever; therefore, he’s about to invade somebody. He doesn’t, no problem, our timely warning scared him off; we’ll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there’s the difficulty of admitting you’re wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser back then, admit that it’s all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his advice? Much better to press on – it’s not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection: because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and fearfully weak at the same time."The Walking Dead is finally becoming a metaphor for the Outlaw US Empire, its policies, and what it terms values--which aren't values but vices. But TWD was fiction and was thus capable of reforming itself. The Empire's goals and polices are essentially the same as in 1940 and even further back to 1913, and haven't changed very much, being just as illegal and immoral then as now. What's different are the "Dragons" which didn't exist in 1918 or 1944, and the Parasites have almost total control that's finally seeing domestic pushback.
Here's Sputnik's initial report on the Alaska meet. Not much reference to commerce. Here's an excerpt:
"Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who accompanied Yang to the talks, told CGTN that their side had made clear to the Americans that China takes its sovereignty very seriously and warned them not to 'underestimate China's determination to defend its territory, to defend its people, and maintain its righteous interests.'
"Washington has criticized China's security policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, where Western-backed separatist forces have created chronic unrest, as well as its longstanding claim to rule Taiwan, an autonomous island ruled by the Republic of China that lost the civil war in mainland China in 1949, when the socialist People's Republic of China was formed.
The US technically recognizes Beijing's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of China, but in reality is the primary backer of the Taiwanese government.
Beijing says all of these are internal matters and not of Washington's concern."
Very little's reported of the Outlaw US Empire's response. This little bit doesn't bode well:
"US State Department officials noted they did not see the Alaska summit as the beginning of a new mechanism or dialogue."
I see that as a confession that they aren't agreement capable since they can't even continue a dialogue.
i've been a reader of moa for quite a few years now, but never contributed to the forum. mostly because after a while i found what i wanted to say anyway, and why pile on?
i really enjoy the civility of the forum, and it's internationality.
And of course b's insights. as a german myself I share many points of view with him in matters i have knowledge in, or think that i do. for example i think that trump sure might be seen as a desaster by many, but it was a gift to europe, and germany in particular, because he openend the eyes of many, many people here who for decades thought murrica is our friend, our big brother, who will always protect us from the evil of the world - namely communism, russia and lately china.
a majority of the people here, as well as in the rest of the so called "western world" have been brainwashed for about 7 decades to think that way, even when america committed the most obvious, heinous, horrible crimes against humanity and our civilization as a whole. there was always a spin, "human rights", "democracy", "free trade" and so on, values that had to be "defended" - when in reality it was always an offensive aggression or even a "pre-emptive strike".
people just swallowed what the media fed them and went on with their daily chores.
trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible, and i will always be grateful for that. because now it cannot be hidden anymore.
it wasn't just the unruly behaviour of a "new rich" and uneducated bully who accidentally became president. politically, the general attitude was always the same, trump only worded it much more obvious, making it harder for politicians and media to spin.
that's why our politicians and media (for the most part fed by trans-atlantic "think tanks") hated him almost more than americans themselves - he made their lies obvious and transparent.
if it wasn't so sad, it sometimes was almost funny to see them squirm, having to explain why our friend and protector suddenly became so selfish and hostile.
All of them welcomed of course the new harris administration, being so progressive, just and friendly again - only to witness a change of paradigm they probably didn't even think trump was capable of, or willing to: i think in later years, this week will mark the "official" beginning of the new cold war era.
This behaviour against Russia and China was not a slap, but a punch in the face and will NEVER be forgiven nor forgotten.
The only question for europe is: does it finally have the balls to emancipate and stand up against the bully? or will it submit and become a collateral damage of it's downfall?
in form of a nuclear wasteland maybe? i think that nord stream II is a turning point.
if Germany caves in here, there's little hope to get rid of the leash for it and the whole of Europe. if it stands tall, Europe might become a buffer instead of a frontline. knowing and seeing our politicians, i'd say it doesn't look good.
@Posted by: Grieved | Mar 19 2021 23:05 utc | 55:
...., the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control. This is the dynamic that must be defeated.
Yes that's problem all right, but can you ever defeat that dynamic given that the gorilla owns 10,000 nukes and has no moral qualms whatsoever of using them? Until a near perfect anti-nuke defense system is developed I surmise the world would just have to live with, and get used to, the juvenile antics of King Kong because it has stated time and again it would escalate all the way up to using its nukes, because that's what they are for according to a former Sec. of State.
I'm a pessimist on this issue. I'm afraid we'll just have to endure and live with a wild beast for a while to come.
Posted by: Oriental Voice | Mar 20 2021 0:35 utc | 76
The Alaska talks have ended and the Global Times Editor writes:
"China and the US are two major world powers. No matter how many disputes they have, the two countries should not impulsively break their relations. Coexistence and cooperation are the only options for China and the US. Whether we like it or not, the two countries should learn to patiently explore mutual compromises and pursue strategic win-win cooperation." [My Emphasis]
The big question: Does the Outlaw US Empire possess enough wisdom to act in that manner.
Russia is a classical construct with more than 1000 years of history and culture. These are part and parcel of what Russia is and who her people are....
The USA on the other hand, has never coalesced into a cultural entity.... Most of US culture was created by advertizers during the post WWII period..... The rock & roll generation... hippies.... etc.
A state based upon a covenant between itself and God... mediated by orthodox christianity... is totally foreign to Steve and most US denizens...
But it exists.... Ditto for China... now 5000 years young.... the embodiment of confucianism... meritocracy...
All foreign to Steve and Blinken and Biden....
INDY
so here is the white house press briefing for today on this thread topic - Department Press Briefing – March 19, 2021
here is the segment on china-usa meeting.. interestingly our prime minister trudeau mention the issue of the 2 michaels held in china and the phrase something to the effect "china must adhere to the 'rule based law' b.s. was at the top of his words in the radio when i was in the car earlier..
"QUESTION: (Inaudible) Alaska, if you’re able to talk about that. Obviously, there’s been a lot of reporting since yesterday about how sort of tense the initial encounter was. And there’s been discussions of – I think both sides have accused the other of breaking protocol in those initial exchanges. But I wonder if – does the State Department – based on the tone of that first meeting, does that give you any concern for the future of the relationship with China and the possibility of reaching some agreements or getting some achievables out of these meetings? Thank you.
MS PORTER: Thank you for your question, Simon, and just as a response to that, of course, as you know, Secretary Blinken and NSA Sullivan had their first meetings with Director Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi, and of course, are in sessions this morning. And these were serious discussions. Again, I’ll just reiterate something that NSA Sullivan said. And of course, to your point about it, the – being contentious or not, again, we – he said we don’t see conflict, but of course, welcome stiff competition.
Again, this was a single meeting, and again, we know that sometimes these diplomatic presentations can be exaggerated or maybe even aimed at a domestic audience, but we’re not letting the theatrics from the other side stop us from doing what we were intending to do in Alaska, which is lay out our principles as well as our expectations and have these tough conversations early that we need to have with the PRC.
Let’s go to the line of Edward Keenan.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) of the Alaska meetings, the two Michaels, Kovrig and – the two Canadian Michaels who are being held as political prisoners in China, widely perceived as leverage against the United States, who are going to trial now as these meetings take place. Secretary Blinken and President Biden expressed their desire to see those two Michaels released when they met with the Canadian prime minister recently. I wonder to what extent those cases are up for discussion in Alaska right now, and if so, like, to what extent and how?
MS PORTER: Well, let me start off by saying that the United States continues to publicly call on the PRC to end the arbitrary and unacceptable detentions of the Canadians citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. And again, the United States is deeply concerned by the PRC’s decision to hold a closed-court hearing with the Canadian citizens. Obviously, no one from – no diplomat from Canada or the U.S. were involved in that. And we’re also deeply alarmed by a report that the PRC will commence the trial of Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig on March 22nd and we renew our call for PRC authorities to attend this trial.
We’ll always just reiterate that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Canada in calling for their immediate release, and we also continue to condemn their lack of minimum procedural protections during their two-year arbitrary detention."
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about? A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.
alaff | Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 32:
And Bio-weapons.
I suspect Blinken/Sullivan/Biden need to show that they are "tough" to the Chinese in public because otherwise, they will be roasted by the 78 millions Trump supporters for being "weak" to China compared with Trump. Behind the close door, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi characterized the talks to be NOT "very tense." I believe Biden actually is quite keen to get some "achievements" from the Chinese side, probably not realistically in this meeting, but hopefully in the near future.
Ha, but the weather is cold, the hotel is shoddy, and the Chinese delegate had to have instant noodle for lunch - that sounds like a very low budget “Hongmen Banquet” by the Americans. Maybe they are still waiting for their 1.9 trillion stimulus check?
trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible
I've heard this about Trump a lot, but I've always wondered why Trump was the ultimate catalyst for this epiphany. You would think that the Iraq War should have been that watershed moment, or even Libya (and perhaps they were for many, like me). I suppose from the perspective of inter-imperialist relations in the first world, a lack of decorum of the level of Trump's is more anomalous and egregious than the imposition of death and destruction of people in the global south.
Mr. Id
Truly dreadful but very likely true portrait of America and not only the South; of which not much has remained after the mass migrations from the North in these past 40 years.
My personal observations have been consistent with your in the interior of the United States, the Judeo-Christians have become meaner and more bigoted and more racist. They are aggressive with an in-your-face attitude. They hate, and they hate Catholics, Muslims, and especially Iranians.
A wealthy preacher was recently asked why always flew in a private jet. He answered that he saw so much hatred on the face of fellow passengers that he could no longer endure it. Others laughed at him, but I believed him.
The late Carl Gustav Jung once observed that he knew World War II was coming because he could see Wotan in every German.
As I wrote to Mr. Kooshy, America could have been the Love of all nations of the world, their second home. But the leaders of Judeo-Christian, such as the late John Hay or the late Theodore Roosvelt, went after Imperial America chimera and their folksy plebs after Second Coming and Palestine. This project of 150 years has now failed.
I think that the presidency of Mr. Trump revealed the ugly side of the United States; suddenly the gilded papier marche of America, carefully created by the best propaganda techniques over 70 years, was shredded and USA was revealed to be a country just like so many others.
It is up to American people, Judeo-Christians as well as others, to address the deep deep social problems of the United States.
Rape camps in Yugo, rape camps in Libya, rape camps in Xinjiang.....Somebody sure have certain fetishism for sex and violence.
One from the archive,
That 'humanitarian intervention in Sudan'
Indeed, the Darfur crisis is following a pattern which is so well-worn now that it has almost become routine. Saturation reporting from a crisis region; emergency calls for help broadcast on the electronic media (such as the one recently on the BBC Radio 4 flagship ‘Today’ programme); televised pictures of refugees; lurid stories of “mass rapes”, which are surely designed to titillate as much to provoke outrage; reproachful evocations of the Rwandan genocide; demands that something must be done (”How can we stand idly by?”, etc.); editorials in the Daily Telegraph calling for a return to the days of Rudyard Kipling's benevolent imperialism[6]; and, finally, the announcement that plans are indeed being drawn up for an intervention.
……………..
Intervention will allow Western forces to control an oil rich region, and perhaps to expel the present holders of concessions. The fact that the biggest of these is China, and that America’s other foreign adventures also seem to have as their goal the control of energy supplies to that strategic rival, only adds further piquancy to what is, otherwise, an all too banal case of modern imperialistic meddling.
Many great observations tonight, but all, beg the question; How do we change a nation state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and abetted by so many deluded morons?
I don’t know if the title will match up with the content. I cannot access the content here. But the truth remains everyone should have humility when entering in diplomatic negotiations. Arrogance has no place there.
.
And this…
All this nonsense about Xinjiang is being exposed for what it actually is… a convenient fiction.
.
And this…
Of course, the USA “media” will translate this as arrogance. But what is China supposed to do after a seven minute tirade demanding China to do certain things or else experience a hot war…
.
And he is correct.
On the global scene, America is the weak nation.
And this…
Yeah, after the terrible behavior of the United States “diplomats” we have a major “pile on” against America…
…the American narrative is that the BRI is bad and will result in a “debt trap”. So says the 20 trillion dollar debt nation.
.
Roderrick
Here’s a post from Roderick…
US took to Alaska the same attitude as it has had for 250 years.
That must change.
We imposed democracy and capitalism on other nations, only to learn that many cultures simply could not find those a successful replacement for what they had for centuries. Even following the USSR, people wanted the old ways back, feeling their safety net had been taken from them and billionaire oligarchs had looted state assets.
We have corrupted democracy and capitalism, both have become ugly in the rebellion and corruption that have permeated our nation like cancer. Consequently we no longer have anything worthwhile to ‘sell’ or impose.
But more importantly, our self-assigned charter as the world policeman, only creating more problems by every war since WWII, has created a world that reviles us, indeed more and more nations view us as their enemy, even as they are getting stronger by the day.
Humility rather than hubris. That is the only means for America to survive long-term. Get along, stop invading, stop threatening, stop harming other nations economically. If we cannot change, a global coalition will finally have had enough of their increasingly common enemy.
And within China…
Well the response to the Alaskan negotiations and the arrogance of the American delegation was quick. Already there are tee-shirts, and iPhone cases being made.
And here’s some more pictures. It’s all over China, now.
Was asked by Maria Siow at #scmp for his take on the Alaska meetings. His responses:
Genuine frustration and posturing by both sides... both countries have compelling reasons to improve relations... We won’t see a lot of movement on more contentious issues in in the next few weeks, but the groundwork will be laid in this meeting, quietly, for resolving the trade war, drawing clearer lines on tech competition, and a mutual understanding if not respect for each others redlines... Don’t be too distracted by the tough talk. China’s two top foreign policy officials wouldn’t be in Alaska if positive prospects were unlikely. They don’t walk into traps.
Biden appears to have confirmed what many already suspected: that Allies have some key concerns with China, all hope the US can help resolve these and provide security guarantees, but none want to see relations worsen or follow Washington into an aggressive containment strategy. I’m optimistic that we’ll see tensions relax on multiple fronts, but it will depend in part on whether Washington will better discipline itself on Taiwan and likewise better discipline Taiwan, as was often the case before Trump, and whether Beijing will find an acceptable way forward through this as well. Taiwan is really the stickiest issue to work through.
China pretty much stated that the USA has no say what so ever on how China deals with it’s domestic issues, and to FUCK OFF regarding them. If the USA pushes on these issues they will cross a “red line” which is very dangerous…
China will not change it’s government structure.
The U.S. brags about its democracy, even though its policy is most frequently dictated by the bureaucrats and the bureaucratic system. Congress struggles with basic tasks such as keeping the government funded and running. The U.S. is in a new gilded age, where selling digital kittens for millions of dollars is mistaken for innovation. Its politics are stalemated, its institutions are brittle, and its wealth is funneled to a small circle of elites.
-CGTN
Stop demanding that China adopt the American way of governance. American government, and leadership is an abject failure. It is insanity to expect a prosperous, growing, and successful nation to adopt the failed policies that characterize America.
In the statement, the Chinese side emphasized that the ruling position of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a choice of history and the people's choice, and the development of China is inseparable from CPC's leadership.
The ruling position of the CPC and the security of the system is "an intangible red line" and "must not be compromised," the statement highlighted.
It added that the socialist system with Chinese characteristics is the system most in line with China's national conditions and the "code" for China's development, and stated that China's development goal is to achieve the "two centenary" goals and the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation through hard work.
And this translation from the Chinese is most certainly a “bitch slap”…
China's reply to US at Alaska meeting:
You have your type of democracy. we have our type of democracy.
We lifted millions if not all of our population out of poverty. You created millions of unemployed and homeless.
We controlled and eradicated Covid. You let Covid devastate you.
Your infrastructures are at least 30 to 40 years old.
We build and provide cheap and affordable housing for the people. You build houses but the economic situation that you are in now resulted in more foreclosures (people giving up) than people buying.
We don't have homeless people sleeping in the street. You have plenty sleeping all over the place.
Our people have sufficient good food to eat. You too have food but the people have no money to buy food and have to rely on Govt Food stamps to pay for their food.
We have very little crime rate. You have one of the highest crime rate in the world which keeps your police very busy.
We have affordable health insurance and health care. Your health care is so out of reach such that the average household could not afford to fall sick.
Our people are united behind us. Your people are divided behind you.
Our democratic systems are quite different. Ours can deliver the goods. Yours make you indebted.
Why must you make us follow your way of running the country?
China’s human rights, not an excuse for interference
Using the excuse of “human rights” has long been the methodology for interference in the affairs of other nations. China will not allow it, nor tolerate it.
"China will not impose its democratic system and values on other countries, while firmly safeguarding its own political system and values, and opposes accusing and discrediting China and interfering in China's internal affairs under the guise of human rights issues," according to the statement.
China also pointed out that it has no intention to interfere in America's political system or to challenge and replace U.S. position and its influence. It called on the U.S. side to properly view China's political system, its development path, national strategies as well as its influence worldwide.
Commitment to independent foreign policy of peace
Both America and China said that they were committed to “peace”. But how and when they said it differed.
The American delegation produced a long line of demands on China’s internal affairs, and followed up with the demand that China obey “the US-Led rule-of-law” instead of the UN charter. Then immediately afterwards, said “of course the US is committed to peace and wants to avoid war”.
China stated…
In the statement, the Chinese side reiterated that its commitment to an independent foreign policy of peace, insist on independence, uphold peaceful development, uphold win-win cooperation, uphold multilateralism, uphold fairness and justice, and continue to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind
"We firmly defend national sovereignty and national dignity, and we firmly oppose other countries' accusations on China's internal affairs," it claimed, reiterating that China adheres to the path of peaceful development.
Support for ‘true multilateralism’
America wants to ignore the UN. Instead it has a “US-Led Rule-of-law” that they expect China to obey.
China and the world follows the dictates of the UN. America wants to have a US-Led “rules-based” order upon the rules that the United States make. This is not acceptable to China, (and Russia).
China also highlighted multilateralism in the statement by regarding it as an "important cornerstone of the current international system."
According to China, true multilateralism should adhere to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, respect the basic norms of international relations, respect the sovereignty of all countries in the world, respect the diversity of civilizations, and work for the democratization of international relations.
"We are willing to work with the United States to maintain true multilateralism in the multilateral mechanism such as the United Nations and provide the international community with more and better international public products," said the statement.
China, U.S. need cooperation not confrontation
America came into the negotiations on a strategy of “zero sum”, meaning do things as I dictate, or face the consequences. While China was looking forward to a “win – win” outcome.
Regarding relationship between China and the U.S., the Chinese side stated that the essence of Sino-U.S. relations is mutual benefit and win-win, rather than a zero-sum game.
"Neither China nor the United States can bear the consequences of conflict and confrontation," the statement warned, calling on the two sides to "trust each other instead of suspicion, understand each other instead of accusing each other, and cooperate with each other instead of dismantling, so as to ensure that both sides focus on handling their domestic priorities and achieving their respective development goals."
The statement stressed that China's policy on U.S., with a high degree of stability and continuity, is committed to "achieving non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation with the U.S."
It called on the two sides to keep communication channels open, resume normal dialogue and exchange mechanisms, carry out mutually beneficial cooperation, so as to properly manage differences, and avoid misunderstandings and misjudgments.
No compromise on Taiwan question
This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
Calling the Taiwan question core to China's interests and a matter of China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, China reiterated that there is no compromise in this regard.
No rights to interfere in China’s Hong Kong affairs
How can one engage in cooperation for example, if America is obsessed with interfering in China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity?
Sure the U.S. has its "principles" - but this must be done in a fair, pragmatic and reconciliatory way as opposed to, for example, whipping up unrest in Hong Kong, clinging onto the "genocide" rhetoric on Xinjiang, or promoting tensions in the Taiwan Straits.
How China conducts its internal policies is its business, nobody else's.
-CGTN
This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
Regarding the recent decisions made by China's top legislature, the National People's Congress, on the improvement of electoral system in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the Chinese delegation said the U.S. should respect the decision and follow the international law and basic norms of international relations.
"It is the central government's task to improve the electoral system of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. How to design, develop and improve the electoral system is China's internal affairs. No foreign government, organization or individual has the right to interfere," read the statement.
‘Xinjiang genocide’ claim: ‘Biggest lie of the century’
America needs to interrupt the BRI. And key to that is Xinjiang. China says that this lie of “concentration camps” and ‘Genocide” is simply not true and must end. But it will not. America is planning on military intervention into the Chinese territory and are moving forces in Afghanistan concurrently.
China also dismissed the claim that there is genocide in China's Xinjiang, calling it "the biggest lie of the century."
The delegation said the door of Xinjiang is wide open to the world. It welcomed exchanges with the U.S. side on the basis of mutual respect while stressed that China will not accept any investigation in Xinjiang based on the presumption of guilt by those who are biased, condescending and want to lecture China.
It is hoped that the U.S. side can respect facts, call off attacks against and smearing of China's Xinjiang policy, and abandon double standards on anti-terrorism, it added.
Tibet ‘part of China,’ ‘Dalai Lama has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities’
Again. This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
China also pointed out that the 14th Dalai Lama is a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion.
"It is hoped that the U.S. will abide by its commitment to recognize Tibet as part of China and not support 'Tibet independence,' handle Tibet-related issues carefully and properly, lift sanctions on relevant Chinese officials, and stop using Tibet-related issues to interfere in China's internal affairs," it stated.
It's a strange truth that during the two-day sit-down, the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi did just that. They wasted no time in highlighting the importance of "mutual respect" and the avoidance of harmful extremes in addressing bilateral relations and structural disparities.
Perhaps the Chinese diplomats did not want to be disrespected and misunderstood. But they soon found out their U.S. counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, were from another universe with their own brands of isolation. They seemed out of touch with reality to acknowledge the existence of differences, and to find the safety of the middle ground to resolve them amicably, rather than go for the imbalance of the extremes in the hope to validate America's shell games in East Asia and the Western Pacific.
The senior American diplomats walked into the meeting ostensibly from a position of self-righteousness and strength, absolutely unprepared and reluctant to drop the interventionist claims and instincts, to discuss the delicate process of resetting the pivotal relationship, and to compartmentalize and contain the structural differences.
From this perspective, the downfall of their hopeless quest to enforce their interventionist worldview in the testy exchange is found in this...
...in the wrong message that China ought to be confronted and contained, and that accommodation, mutual coexistence, or even extensive cooperation on matters of mutual interest must be ruled out...
... (that is) until China respects "the U.S.-led rules-based international order."
The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.
After the four-year interregnum of Donald Trump’s “Cirque du Stupide,” America’s foreign diplomacy should be undergoing a total facelift.
Returning to the stodgy “business as usual” foreign policy of the past is not the answer.
As the Biden administration began to nestle into office, there was a familiar refrain in press releases from the Department of State, otherwise known as “Foggy Bottom.”
These included such old ditties as “The Secretary and the Foreign Minister discussed ways to strengthen cooperation with allies and partners to address the [blah . . . blah . . . blah].”
…
The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.
It should be remembered that Biden’s Senate career began when Mao Zedong was still in charge in China, a war with the U.S. as a main participant continued to rage in Southeast Asia, a country called the United Arab Republic was the center of political activity in the Middle East, white rule and apartheid was the name of the game in southern Africa, and right-wing dictatorships ruled throughout Latin America.
Those who live in the past will never be prepared to face the future.
“Very frank. It was the first high-level meeting between members of the Biden administration and their Chinese counterparts. To say that it was a public relations disaster for the US is to understate the case.”
“Blinken and his sidekick, Jake Sullivan, a Hillary Clinton factotum who is now national security adviser, sat down to read China the riot act. It was not a success.”
“The United States, said Yang, in one of the most dismissive diplomatic rejoinders I have ever heard, does not have the ‘qualifications’ to address China ‘from a position of strength’. F, my dear Blinken, you.”
“Joe Biden has been in office for just two months. Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.”
We learnt two things from the China-US high-level dialogue held in Alaska last week.
The first was from the session at the beginning when the media were present. This would normally be conducted in a polite and somewhat anodyne fashion dressed up in diplomatic nicety. It could not have been more different. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan commenced the proceedings and made some sharp criticisms of China. In response, Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Foreign Affairs, gave a bravura performance. Far from pulling his punches or couching his words in diplomatic language, he let his American counterparts have it with both barrels, challenging not just the US position but its very legitimacy. And all this before the world's media.
Let me quote some of his choice barbs: "When I entered this room, I should have reminded the US side of paying attention to its tone." "The US is not qualified to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength." "China and the international community…uphold the UN-centered international order…not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called 'rules-based' international order." "On human rights, we do hope the US will do better on human rights. The challenges facing the US in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter." "On cyber-attacks, let me say that whether it's the ability to launch cyber-attacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the US is the champion." "The US does not represent international opinion and neither does the Western world."
While delivering these shots, Yang spoke with passion but never raised his voice. There were no cheap jibes. He occupied the high ground in the argument and left the Americans bewildered and belittled.
This is not normally the Chinese manner on such occasions. It is a sign that something has changed. There is a new sense of confidence on the part of the Chinese. That they are - or can - win the argument. That they are at least the equals of America. That they speak from a position of strength and America from a position of weakness. That history is on their side. It feels like the diplomatic equivalent of moving from "keeping a low profile" to "striving for achievement," or from being a relative spectator in the global system to becoming a major architect. The Americans have hitherto always thought of themselves as running the show; the shock visible in the body language of Blinken and Sullivan was the realization, conscious or unconscious, that this was no longer the case. The same was apparent in the Western media. The BBC, for example, invariably critical of China, reported it with an unfamiliar neutrality, as if stunned by the role reversal.
The second thing we found out from the dialogue (albeit already evident from the signals emanating from the White House), was that there will be no return to the status quo ante. That Biden is desperately anxious to appear as hostile to China as Trump was before him. The underlying forces at work here are very deep. America is in the process of coming to the painful realization that China is now its equal. But it cannot bring itself to accept or acquiesce in what is already an historical reality. That is why there can be no return to 1972 (Mao-Nixon Accord) or 1979 (US recognition of China). The relationship that prevailed then between China and the US was entirely different: the US was the giant, China a minnow. That was the basis of the US-China relationship for 45 years from 1972 until Trump torpedoed it in 2017, even though, of course, by the end China's rise was already undermining America's assumptions about the relationship. The realization that China was on the verge of overtaking the US economically, that China enjoyed a huge global presence, that it was already in effect its equal, came as an enormous shock to the American psyche and body politic.
Addicted to its hubris, it failed to see the blatantly obvious coming. As there can be no return to the past, the China-US relationship, so crucial to both and to the whole world, will have to be rethought on an entirely new basis, namely one of mutuality and equality. The problem is that the US is very far from thinking like this. How America needs for these times a giant like Henry Kissinger: someone who understands - and admires - China in a very profound way.
For the time being we must think in more mundane ways. Cooperation will be confined to the foothills, it will be a case of issue by issue, a bit here and a bit there, rebuilding contacts and communications between the two countries, ending as best can be done the toxicity and wanton destruction wrought by Donald Trump. Even this will not be easy but it ought, at a pinch, to be possible, with climate change offering the most important challenge and opportunity. For without cooperation between the two countries, climate change will imperil the very future of the planet and humanity.
China's representatives easily demolish the mountains of lies built by the US and its vassals, as part of their hybrid war on all independent nations, but now chiefly aimed at China and Russia, designated by the US hegemon, behind the pretext of "national security", as America's chief global "rivals". Truth weakens and eventually destroys imperialism, that's why it is now completely banned throughout the Western establishment media. Observe the barely repressed tone of exasperation in China's spokesperson. It's clear Beijing and Moscow have had just about enough of Western harassment, imperialist hostility, bad faith and hypocrisy. March 2021 clearly marks a turning point in international relations.
...
"China's position on the Meng Wanzhou case is very clear. This is nothing short of a political incident in which Canada played a very disgraceful role as an accomplice. We urge the Canadian side to immediately release Ms. Meng Wanzhou, who has been arbitrarily and unreasonably detained by the Canadian side, and ensure her early and safe return to China..."
Leaders, politicians and diplomats that have wisdom and serve their people will not pursue the so-called “alliance of democracies”. Many countries in the region want to see a sound and steady China-US relationship. Working together for a better life is democracy in real sense.
According to #US media, in 2016, a #Uyghur couple went to Italy with 3 children, leaving another 4 in #Xinjiang. If there's "forced sterilization" and "genocide" in Xinjiang as some in the west claim, how come this Uyghur couple have 7 children?
The #US, #UK and #Canada together account for only 5.7% of the world's population. Even if #EU is added, that will be about 11%. They cannot represent the international community.
#Democracy comes about when power belongs to people. There is no unified model for democracy. Sovereign states should be respected in their independent choose of development path. No one has the right to meddle in their internal affairs under the guise of "democracy".
I wonder in what way the west's democracy is superior. Amid #COVID19, the world's richest nations watch hundreds of thousands of their people die. Is this #democracy? While western politicians are busy wooing their party voters, the Chinese government serves all wholeheartedly.
In Guilin, FM Wang Yi & FM #Lavrov issued a joint statement that shed light on what is real human rights, democracy, international order & multilateralism. #China & #Russia will jointly and resolutely defend international justice & fairness.
China & Russia, with great sense of commitment & responsibility as major countries in the world & permanent members of the #UNSC, will give strong backing to each other on issues of core interests as important partners & play an underpinning role in international affairs.
In 40 years, the #Uyghur population has grown from 5.5 million to 12.8 million. The fact that #Xinjiang residents of various ethnic groups enjoy stability, security, development and progress, makes it one of the most successful human rights stories.
Some in the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU clearly don't want to acknowledge the real facts about #Xinjiang & don't care about the truth, but hold on to accusations based on lies & false information. They just do not want to see #China's success, development and better livelihood.
What the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU have done is utter denigration and offense to the reputation and dignity of the #Chinese people, blatant interference of China's internal affairs, and grave violation of China's sovereignty and security interests.
The #US and #UK used some test tube of washing powder and a staged video as evidence to launch wars against sovereign countries such as #Iraq and #Syria, leaving numerous death and displacement. Shouldn't they be sanctioned?
#France, #UK and #EU launched a war in #Libya, leading to regional turbulence & grave migrant and refugee issues. Shouldn't they be held accountable?
Tens of hundreds of people died of #COVID19 because these most developed countries are indifferent to their people's rights to life and health. They hoard #vaccines far in excess of their population's needs, leaving developing countries struggling with insufficient vaccines.
How can people enjoy rights if they lost their lives? Some in the west talk a lot about #humanrights, but who and what right on earth are they protecting? In what way are they respecting and protecting human rights.
#China is not what it was 120 years ago, when foreign powers could force open its door with guns. Certain colluding individuals in politics, academics and media should think twice if they think they could make wanton smears with impunity.
The west shall entertain no illusion as regards #China's firm determination to defend national interests and dignity. It's a courtesy to reciprocate what we receive. They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance.
Chinese Government Statement
#China deplores and rejects the unilateral sanctions by #EU citing so-called #HumanRights issues in #Xinjiang.
This move is based on nothing but lies and disinformation, and will inevitably undermine China-EU relations.
To safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest, #China will sanction #EU individuals and entities that have been spreading lies and disinformation at the cost of China's interests...
The #EU must drop its hypocritical double standards, and stop going further down the wrong path. Otherwise, it will be met with further resolute reactions.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/.../s2510_665401/t1863106.shtml
MM Comments
I had high hopes for the meeting. I was wrong.
Rather than improve relationships between the United States and China, the Alaskan meeting pretty much depicted America as an out of control bully that stated that it did not need to follow the UN and global governance standards. Instead it was the biggest, meanest and baddest thug on the block and laid out it’d demands on China.
It told China that “you will obey what we say or risk a hot war with us and our very powerful allies”.
While I am sure that most Americans would welcome this attitude, I found this arrogant, and very upsetting.
Reports are that immediately afterwards, China and Russia set up and held meetings.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
If you take a casual glance at the American media you will be exposed to the ideas of “genocide”, “concentration camps”, “slave labor”, and other abuses by China in the Xinjiang province. And, if you are an American, you will believe them. After all, the “news” never lies … right? Well, in this post we are going to look at the reason WHY there is such an uproar in the USA over this patch of land in Western China. And the reasons behind it is NOT anything presented to the American citizenry. It’s something else entirely.
Where is Xingjiang?
Xinjiang is in China. It is a State / province of China. It’s a kind of “China’s version of America’s New Mexico”.
First of all, let’s look at where Xinjiang is. Because a picture will tell you more than any write up that I can compile will. So check out this map of China showing the Xinjiang region…
So, those of you all in the MM audience that somehow believe that American neocon narrative that US military troops can tromp into the region and “liberate” the Chinese people there. (For “democracy”® and “freedom”®.) Had best think long and hard if you want to deal with half of the Untied States rendered into radioactive waste.
China does not play.
This area is owned, controlled, and a fundamental part of China, and has been so for many… many years.
China will treat any “forces of liberation” with the same level of violence as Washington DC would do to defend Texas from invasion. If you all think that a “color revolution” is possible there, or that “American troops can liberate it” you had best get back on your medicines. Those fantasies are for ignorant children and the feeble-minded.
Now, let’s take a look at the BRI, shall we?
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
China ’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (一带一路) is a strategy initiated by the People’s Republic of China that seeks to connect Asia with Africa and Europe via land and maritime networks with the aim of improving regional integration, increasing trade and stimulating economic growth.
The BRI is a very involved trade route into the heart of Asia that is designed to replace or supplement the sea-lane shipping routes out of China. (And subject to American Naval Blockades.)
There are many aspects of it, and it is very comprehensive.
In short, it leverages all of the neighbors to China, and builds upon robust lines of communication, trade and investment. And thus maps depicting such efforts tend to be rather convoluted and messy, such as this map from France…
The belt and road initiative.
Now, let’s simplify all this.
Let’s [1] concentrate on the land routes only, and [2] paint the canvas in broad brush strokes showing the areas of development, and influence in the BRI. And [3] lets do so taking note of the locations of China, Russia and Iran.
And when we do so, we end up with this (greatly simplified) map…
BRI simplified, showing only the land routes.
Now what can you see, when you simplify everything down and distill it into it’s simplest components?
You see the BRI as a unification of the nations of China, Russia and Iran. And internally upon the vast landmasses. Well… well, out of the reach of the “long arms” of the United States Navy.
Now, with the BRI the entire trade situation changes.
Now, Aside from trading with the Americas, China can trade with the rest of the world by land routes only. Not only is [1] logistic costs via rail cheaper than by sea, but [2] they are protected from piracy, ship damage and loss, and naval blockades by rogue nations (read; The United States and Britain.)
Sep 20, 2020 · Ifanavalblockadeisa feasible strategy, it strengthens the American system of deterrenceand dilutes any potential attempts by ChinatocoercetheUnitedStatesoritsallies.
-CouldTheU.S. NavyBlockadeChinaIntoSubmission?
Apr 06, 2019 · If a naval blockade is a feasible strategy, it strengthens the American system of deterrence and dilutes any potentialattemptsbyChinatocoercetheUnitedStatesoritsallies.
- HowaMassiveNavalBlockadeCouldBringChinaToIts Knees...
The National Interest is THE publication that you read if you desire to feel the “pulse” of the war-mongering neocons in Washington DC. Some of their typical reads are;
Now, let’s take a look at the American neocon plans to isolate and suppress China. Let’s look at what their plans have been…
Why do I feel like the planners in Washington DC like to play with little toy soldiers, fancy electronics and high technology, and fail to see the human side of their insanity? Interesting isn’t it?
Now, let’s take a look at the above map showing the BRI…
I am sure that most MM readers can read maps. And when you do, you can clearly see that the BRI renders the complete American military; Air, Land, and sea impotent.
It removes the threat of naval blockades on China.
It lowers the prices in trade goods. It enriches and uplifts the lives of millions of people in the most poverty stricken areas of the world, and connects China with it’s biggest customers for the next decade.
…
So since the BRI puts American military might at a disadvantage, it becomes critically important that the BRI be stopped at all costs.
And…
Now, boys and girls, look at where the “gateway” to the BRI is located at. Yup. That’s right.
It’s located in Xinjiang.
A map of the BRI showing the location of the “gateway” at Xinjiang.
Are the puzzle-pieces falling in place for ya? Are things getting a little clearer for you all to understand?
All this propaganda onslaught against China and Uighur Muslims isn’t about what they say it is. It’s about stopping China from building the BRI at all costs, and set in place a narrative to justify military action there.
Of course, not directly.
By proxy.
Well that is the plan at least.
And when you look at the bigger scope of things then you can understand why the military is suddenly pouring more money, more equipment and more manpower into both Afghanistan and Syria.
You just look at the map.
So what’s all this narrative all about?
Well, let’s look at another article titled “Is China committing genocide?” Reprinted as found, and all credit to the author.
XINJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA — Up is down. War is peace. And the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands have accused China of genocide.
“This is forced labor, this is forced sterilization, this is forced abortions, …the kind of thing we haven’t seen in an awfully long time in this world,” declared then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
To be fair, the accusers are experts in genocide: the U.S. and its junior imperial partner, Canada, wiped out their indigenous populations. Today the U.S. is responsible for the three biggest human rights catastrophes in the world in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. And the Netherlands is just coming to terms with its massacres in Indonesia.
Mike Pompeo’s successor at the State Department, Antony Blinken, is sticking with the genocide claim. That’s despite the State Department’s top lawyers stating that whatever might be happening in Xinjiang, it’s not genocide. That’s right. Chinese Communist Party genocide denialists have infiltrated the U.S. State Department to impurify our precious bodily fluids.
My goodness!
Dr Strangelove Precious Bodily Fluids Quote
Aug 12, 2020 · Everyone loves to quote famous lines from movies so having a good knowledge of good movie quotes. Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made stanley kubrick s cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual and certainly without any choice.
Pure Zenz
So what did Pompeo and Blinken base their accusations of genocide on? There must have been a pretty strong body of on-the-ground reporting and research. Or not. It turns out that one guy is pretty much responsible for the whole narrative. His name is Adrian Zenz.
“Adrian’s research, as many of you know, has been key in establishing the existence of the camps in the first place, and in documenting the buildup of the PRC police state,” explained Hudson Institute fellow Eric Brown.
Zenz appeared almost overnight as a go-to expert on Xinjiang and Uighurs. Now he’s a regular on mainstream outlets and even on supposedly progressive news show Democracy Now. In fact, in Mike Pompeo’s official statement accusing China of genocide, he directly credited Zenz.
But most of his so-called research has been discredited, and he’s been revealed to be a straight-up fabulist. A Grayzone Newsinvestigation showed that Zenz’s claims of 1 million Uighur detained in camps were based “on a single report by Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur exile media organization based in Turkey, which was republished by Newsweek Japan.” In other words, no evidence, and not even an attempt.
Meanwhile, Zenz’s study accusing China of forced sterilizations didn’t contain any proof of coercion. The Grayzone showed how “Zenz consistently framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as evidence of a genocide in the making.”
Characterizing expanded access to birth control as genocide is what the Christian Right does.
So it makes perfect sense that Zenz – an evangelical fundamentalist himself – holds this view.
Jesus will cleanse the world of the infidels, and the righteous will go to Heavenly paradise.
Zenz’s first book is a psychedelic trip through the mind of a Rapture-ready Christer.
The tome is entitled “Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation.”
In it, the book claims that in the end times, “God’s refining process will wipe out all unbelieving Jews who refuse to come to Christ.”
So Zenz writes racist fantasies about Jews, like me. Who knows what he thinks will happen to Uighur Muslims! Yikes!
Jesus will cleanse the world of the infidels, and the righteous will go to Heavenly paradise.
He also says that Satan is using postmodernism to attack gender-authority structures and undermine what he believes are God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.
Clearly, he is against women’s rights.
So does he support criminalizing birth control in his native Germany and here in the U.S. where he now resides?
Even more deranged, Zenz’s big genocide study claimed that women in Xinjiang receive 800 to 1600 IUD insertions per capita. That means every Uighur woman is surgically implanted with 4 to 8 IUDs every single day of the year.
It’s not even possible.
Evidently, none of the outlets that feverishly published his claims bothered to give even a cursory examination to the evidence, or lack thereof, that he presents.
Other reasons (besides genocide) for having fewer kids
In reality, the decrease in birth rate is a normal, predictable outcome of economic development. When people are more financially secure, they choose to have fewer kids and do it later in life.
In fact, China is pouring money into Xinjiang to develop its economy.
According to a 2015 U.S. government study, “To decrease ethnic instability in Xinjiang, the Chinese government’s plan is to economically develop the region.”
That’s right. Chinese Communist Party agents have also time-traveled to 2015 to infiltrate the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and write a study trying to justifying genocide. Damn you Xi!!!
As a result of this economic development, China’s birth rate is falling at rapid rates in all regions, which comes with its own set of problems, like an aging population – similar to what the U.S. is dealing with. So Chinese lawmakers are now pushing for the universal two-child policy to be changed to three.
But this rapture-ready fanatic Adrian Zenz isn’t the only source for these claims of genocide, right?
How about CNN: the self-described most trusted name in news? CNN says its reporting found that some Uyghur women were being forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization… There it is. Can’t argue with that.
…The article was “based on a report by Adrian Zenz.”
Uh oh.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum accuses China of crimes against humanity and genocide against Uighurs. They reference “leaked government documents” and “researchers,” …
Of course, referring to Zenz.
Zenz and the Genocide Choir
With Zenz at the center, a cast of shady characters have promoted this disinformation to support the phony genocide claim:
Rushan Abbas — former Pentagon contractor who worked for Radio Free Asia, a U.S. propaganda mouthpiece started by the CIA.
Darren Byler — a fellow at the Wilson Center, which is funded by the U.S. government and a host of other NATO governments, big banks and corporations. His resume shows he has also been funded to the tune of 100,000 dollars through the U.S. Department of Education.
He does panels with Louise Greve — the former vice president of the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, who now runs the NED-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project.
There’s Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson — this cold-warrior wrote an op-ed in the liberal interventionist Foreign Affairs magazine calling for Biden to confront China over human rights. What the hell are the people at Human Rights Watch smoking to believe the guy who just bombed Syria and sponsors Israel’s project of apartheid has a shred of crediblity on human rights?
Then there’s the Australian Strategic Policy Institute – the self-declared independent, non-partisan think tank, which is totally dependent on funding from the Australian and American departments of defense, NATO, weapons makers, the Embassy of Japan, and the Embassy of Israel, among others.
All with the blessings of Jesus.
2018 and the sudden “genocide” drumbeat
The Uighur genocide claim was virtually unheard of before 2018. Up until that point, Western media coverage of the issue was dramatically different.
Take The New York Times. In the 1980s, it published a series of articles about how Uighur Muslims were actually prospering and Islam was flourishing under Chinese rule.
By the 1980s, this separatist movement was becoming violent. In one 1997 incident, the Times reported on, about a thousand Muslim separatists of the Uighur ethnic minority rampaged through the town Yining on Wednesday, smashing cars, burning shops and beating up ethnic Chinese to protest Beijing’s rule.
In 1994, the Times reported that Uighur extremists were returning from Afghanistan, where the CIA spent a billion dollars arming what it called a “University of Jihad.” The Times noted that “Afghan veterans have fought in two western provinces, Uighur and Xinjiang, where they have armed and trained Chinese Muslim rebels.”
In the wake of the U.S. destruction of Yugoslavia, the Times noted the separatists fantasized about a NATO bombing campaign
This Uighur separatist movement, its violent anti-Han rampages, or the militants returning from Afghanistan are barely mentioned in any of the contemporary Times reports claiming genocide.
In 1981, The Washington Postwrote about growing ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, noting that “Peking has taken pains to ensure ethnic rights and elevate minority group members to leadership positions. In Xinjiang, a kind of affirmative action program has been started at the provincial university to guarantee that 60 percent of new students are from ethnic backgrounds.” Today, none of this gets mentioned in the Post’s coverage.
How about Newsweek? Back in 2000, it reported that Xinjiang was a weak point that threatened to fragment China along ethnic lines, that Uighur separatists threatened the security of Beijing, and some might even join forces with Islamic “holy warriors.” Now it’s all genocide, all the time.
With these misleading or outright false claims based on manipulated statistics, the only evidence for a Uighur genocide is anecdotal, which is hard to prove or disprove. But the testimony in Western media is often full of contradictions.
Take the case of Sayragul Sauytbay. In 2019, she told the UK tabloid The Daily Mail that she witnessed concentration camp “inmates being flayed, raped by guards in front of other prisoners, given injections that made them infertile and force-fed pork.” Keep in mind this is the same tabloid that has spent years peddling Islamophobic hysteria and once warned about Muslim fanatics hijacking the royal wedding. Sauytbay has told similar stories in more respectable newspapers like Foreign Policy,Haaretz and Deutsche Welle.
But back in 2018, Sauytbay told the Globe and Mail that “She did not personally see violence.” For some reason, she completely changed her story. Maybe she was fearful and traumatized, or maybe she falsified it. Apparently, none of the outlets that published her testimony bothered to check into that discrepancy.
Then there’s Tursunay Ziyawundun. She’s the central character in the forced-sterilization narrative cooked up by Adrian Zenz. She’s delivered teary testimonies for the BBC, CNN and Democracy Now. A few months before those reports, however, she told Buzzfeed News, “I wasn’t beaten or abused.” Again, why did she change her story? And why did all of these media outlets fail to do a basic check into her past statements?
Older rumblings
In my research, the first mention of Uighur genocide took place back in 1997, when several so-called “Chinese dissidents” testified to Congress. One woman named Rizvangul Uighur claimed that China’s birth control policy involved murdering babies as soon as they were born. She said the one-child policy was so strictly enforced that “babies are being killed in [the] delivery room without seeing the mother’s face and world.”
Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) – a homophobic bigot from the Christian right – claimed that Uighur women “are often taken physically to the abortion mill. Forced abortions can be performed very late in pregnancy, even in the ninth month. Sometimes the baby’s skull is crushed with forceps as it emerges from the birth canal. Either the woman or her husband may then be forcibly sterilized.”
That’s the same Chris Smith who several months before was railing against abortion rights at the so-called March For Life rally and accusing Bill Clinton of murdering unborn children:
You are and your legacy will be abortion president. You know, mister president, that the scriptures admonish us to pray for those in authority. And we will be faithful to that. As believers we will pray and fast, and sincerely hope, that you reject the culture of death.”
Neither Rizvangul Uighur nor Smith bothered to mention that in 1997 Uighurs and other ethnic minorities were not subject to the one-child policy. So the birthrate in Xinjiang province was 19.66 – meaning there were nearly 20 births per 1,000 people. Meanwhile, in Beijing, the birthrate was 7.91.
Of course, there was a clear political goal in the bogus testimony delivered in Congress. It was coordinated to be released on the day that Bill Clinton met with President of China Jiang Zemin.
Members of Congress were demanding Clinton take a hardline approach to China, some even using racist epithets to warn of a Chinese invasion. “The White House will not wise up until there’s a full blown rice paddy on the east lawn,” warned Democratic Ohio Congressman James Traficant, whose career ultimately ended in a bribery conviction and expulsion from Congress.
After that, save for a couple of Voice of America articles, there was no mention in Western media about the Uighur genocide — until 2018…
…And the Donald Trump “War on China”.
The contemporary hypocritical propaganda barrage
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of American politicians taking up the supposed Uighur genocide cause are totally supportive of U.S.-sponsored genocides around the world. Like Chris Smith (yup, he’s still there).
The same Chris Smith who welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu with a statement of “unequivocal support for Israel” just a few months after it killed 551 Palestinian children in Gaza.
Or Florida Senator Rick Scott – also a bestie of the butcher of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The neocon Michael Pillsbury – the same Michael Pillsbury who in the 1980s, as a state department official, oversaw the CIA’s arming of the Afghanistan mujahideen with Stinger missiles, the same mujahideen who would train Uighur jihadists.
The Uighur genocide is almost perfectly tailored for right-wing agitators who want to portray socialism as a totalitarian system akin to Nazism. “When people say ‘never again’ they were (sic) full of crap. They’re just full of crap. This is one area where the United States should be taking a leading role… shaving people’s heads, shipping them on trains and to concentration camps where you force them into labor and/or sterilize them,” declared Ben Shapiro.
“Many of them women who, of their own volition, had the Chinese government paramilitary forcefully end those pregnancies. Forcefully sterilize,” said Tim Pool. “They’re trying to sterilize the Uighur population but force the Han population genetic code into other Uighur women,” his fellow podcaster claimed.
Should I mention here that the U.S. government forcibly sterilized 1,400 Black women in a California prison? Haven’t seen any U.S. government officials or news media talk about that!
This propaganda deluge is having a powerful impact on U.S. public opinion. In 2017, just before the Uighur genocide narrative kicked into high gear, 53% of Americans had a favorable view of China – the highest in three decades. Now, a new poll shows it’s down to 20% – a historic low. That was accompanied by a 150% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in U.S. cities.
It’s the “sheeple effect“. It’s when zombie population mindlessly regurgitate the media narratives about things that they themselves have NEVER personally experienced. They just repeat without thinking. They regurgitate without consideration. They have no personal experiences to justify their beliefs.
"Oh, China is terrible."
How do you know this?"Everyone knows this. What a silly question."
Did you experience something bad while you were in China?"I've never been to China, but I have a friend of a friend who has. And he says it's terrible".
How do you know that the third hand information is correct, and accurate?"I know. I feel it in my bones, besides everyone knows that China is terrible."
Sheeple drink Brawndo. It has electrolytes.
Trillions of dollars worth of “caring”
So what is this all about?
Why did corporate media and militaristic right wing politicians, along with a surprising number of progressive dupes, suddenly start freaking out about a supposed genocide in China?
Why?
Xinjiang is the heart of China’s Belt and Road initiative, the economic plan that connects Asia to Europe and the Middle East. It’s an alternative model to the dictatorship of the U.S. dollar, where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund turn countries into neo-colonies for American corporations – a system backed up with the constant threat of military invasion.
The U.S. can’t deal with legitimate competition, so it’s resorting to smears in an attempt to isolate China diplomatically and slow its economic growth.
It’s either that, or the government and military that forcibly sterilized minority women in prisons, tortured in Abu Ghraib, relies on prison labor, and is waging genocidal wars against multiple Muslim-majority countries, just simply cares a whole lot about the Uighurs.
Sure…
But you know, China is starting to fight back
While they have been passively building, and negotiating, studying, researching, and making, other things are a-foot…
Companies, individuals in Xinjiang to sue rumormongering Adrian Zenz for causing reputation damage, economic losses
By Global Times Published: Mar 09, 2021 10:23 AM
A number of enterprises and individuals in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have directed lawyers to sue German national Adrian Zenz (who calls himself Zheng Guoen in Chinese), Xinjiang local news outlet ts.cn reported.
Local people said that Zenz spread "forced labor" and other rumors related to Xinjiang, which damaged their reputation and caused them to suffer economic losses.
They have filed a civil lawsuit with a local court in Xinjiang, demanding that Zenz apologize, restore their reputation and compensate them for their losses.
Adrian Zenz, born in 1974, is an infamous anti-China pseudo-scholar. He is a German far-right fundamentalist Christian who believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China, member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right organization established by the US government in 1993, and senior fellow in a research group set up by the US intelligence community against the vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang.
In 2018 when he was still a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University, Korntal, he has gone almost overnight from an unknown researcher into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang, as the US steps up its disinformation campaign against China.
In recent years, Zenz has produced multiple sensational "reports" on Xinjiang on social media platforms like Twitter, and fabricated false academic research on Xinjiang, in which he spread rumors such as large-scale monitoring of local ethnic minorities and forced labor of the Uygurs.
These false claims have been pursued by Western media. Misled by such rumors on Xinjiang, some countries and companies have reduced or even halted imports of cotton and cotton products from Xinjiang, causing some cotton farmers and cotton processing enterprises in Xinjiang to suffer great economic losses.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
One the most profound realizations that one MUST arrive at is that the American (and Western) “news” is a massive propaganda organ. It’s not that they twist and distort the news. Oh, I wish it was that simple. No. Rather, they lie, and make up fanciful stories towards manipulation. That’s it, and nothing more can be said.
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Now, of course, you can categorize the the lies.
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You can say that the lies fall under categories. And of these, purposes for the manipulation of large groups of people.
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I really don’t think that this is all that difficult to understand.
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All these different organizations are vying for your mind. They want you to think certain ways, and in doing so it gives them advantage. Depending on who is involved, you can then map out the funding, and the then compare with the depth and breadth of the articles that the media bombards you with.
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I’ve posted a lot of articles about the anti-China narrative, and discussed the people behind this screed. Pretty much it’s a mix of religious fundamentalists, neocons, and hard-Right players. And when Donald Trump became President in 2016, the opened the funding floodgates, as well as staffed his administration with neocons, and the result was a “firehose” of anti-China disinformation.
They all are looking forward to getting involved in a hot war with “juicy and wealthy” China. They just want an EXCUSE.
You will find these articles all over the internet. Such as this one (below) that I pulled off of Free Republic right now…
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China's military is poised to outgun the West after HUGE growth
3/15/2021, 9:34:39 AM · by RomanSoldier19 · 12 repliesDaily Mail via msn ^ | 3/14/2021 | Marco Giannangeli
It follows an ominous warning last week by the commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific that China may launch a military operation against Taiwan "in the next six years". This would likely lead to military reprisals from the US Navy and allies including Britain, which is sending its new carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to lead a multinational strike force to the Far East in May. China commands the world's largest military, with 2.18 million soldiers, sailors and aviators on active duty. And after a recent 6.8 percent rise it will command a £200billion military budget this year. But it...
Oh, Ah.
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Read the text, of “ominous warning” and “military reprisals”. War in that far-away land is being jinned up, don’t you think? Any day now, some proud American Rambo’s are gonna “kick some slant eyed butt”, don’t you know.
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Not gonna happen.
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Why?
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Well, in the first case the American and UK military excursion into the South China Sea in late Summer 2020 was a disaster, and the seven aircraft carriers steamed back to American (and the UK) with their “tail between their legs”. Trump incensed that his orders were not carried out, fired his military brass as soon as then returned. It was a “Waterloo moment“, and scared the living shit out of the military brass.
And in the Second Case, please just keep in mind that Taiwan is part of China. No matter how much this is omitted in the neocon publications and articles. No matter how many times the American “news” talks about the USA “doing something”, nothing is going to happen. You can yell, scream and stamp your feet but that will not change the fact that Taiwan agreed to become part of China, and this union is recognized by the United Nations.
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Taiwan stopped being an independent nation, and became a Chinese client state in 1972 by [1] The Shanghai Communiqué and the 1982 [2] Joint Communiqué and [3] the August 17 Communiqué. It's the 23rd province of China.
All of this his was codified and made permanent on October 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which recognized the government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the United Nations and established the One-China Principle.
American “news” is a big lie, and people are following it because just about everything in America has been corrupted beyond recognition. No one trusts the government, yet somehow they believe the media. They turn to alternative media in the belief that they have not been corrupted.
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Ah. But they have.
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But anyways,
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Aside from all that “noise” out of the “news”, China is moving on. It is on all fronts. So the USA doesn’t want to partner with China on anything. OK. No problem. But watch out. As I have said before; China does not play.
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Meanwhile check out what is going on with China and Taiwan right now…
China’s railway operator echoes netizens’ call for a high-speed rail route to Taiwan
By Global Times Published: Mar 14, 2021 03:03 PM
Reprinted as found. All credit to the author, and edited to fit this venue.
An aerial photo shows the Pingtan Strait Road-rail Bridge in East China’s Fujian Province. The first of its kind in China, the bridge opened on Saturday, shortening travel time between the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the island county of Pingtan to 35 minutes from around two hours. The bridge will make it more convenient for compatriots in the island of Taiwan to travel to the Chinese mainland. Photo: cnsphoto
China’s top railway operator said on Sunday that it has “taken seriously the building of a railway to the island of Taiwan,” echoing Chinese netizens’ calls as well as the Russian Ambassador to China’s wish to visit the island by train.
China Railways, the country’s top railway construction company, discussed the technical issues and routes of building the high-speed railway from East China’s Fujian Province to the island of Taiwan in an article published in its official WeChat account on Sunday.
No wonder Donald Trump wanted to ban WeChat, you cannot have the anti-China narrative polluted by facts.
In the article, it mentioned China’s National Comprehensive Transportation Network Plan, which was rolled out in late February and set the construction goals from 2021 to 2035 with a long-term plan extended. A route from Fuzhou to Taipei, in the island of Taiwan, was also listed in the plan.
China’s HST (High Speed Train) rail network as of 2020.
The plan soon drew heated discussions on Chinese social media platforms. Netizens also expressed a strong wish to “visit Taiwan by train.”
Close up showing the HST bridge between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.
Denisov said he is looking forward to taking a high-speed train to visit the island some day in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV in early March. “If I could have a chance to visit Taiwan Province, of course I prefer to do it by train.”
Responding to such calls, the railway operator giant noted, “The dream that countless Chinese people have dreamt is finally drawing closer,” as the Beijing-Taipei high-speed rail has only “the last part” between the Straits left to be completed.
It further went on to explain that with the completion of the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway last December, all of the construction work on the Beijing-Taipei high-speed rail has been completed except for the last section, which will link the mainland across the Straits, referring to “the last part” from Pingtan to Taipei.
The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, the nearest one on the mainland from Taiwan, was put into operation on December 26. Pingtan is only 68 nautical miles away from Taiwan’s Hsinchu, the closest point across the straits.
The Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, a key project of the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, has a total length of 16.34 kilometers. It is the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge and the first road-rail bridge in China.
Is this even possible, or is this a “pipe dream”?
Oh yes. It is absolutely possible. Consider that all of the neighboring nations are enthusiastically participating with China in establishing communication and trade routes and upgrading their infrastructure. And consider the a fore mentioned “Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge” which was just completed last year. Which followed the HK – Macao – Zhuhai bridge effort (outside my front door)…
The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway in east China’s Fujian Province went into operation Saturday morning after seven years of construction, allowing visitors from the Chinese mainland and China’s Taiwan to travel more conveniently across the Taiwan Straits.
The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway in east China’s Fujian Province went into operation Saturday morning after seven years of construction, allowing visitors from the Chinese mainland and China’s Taiwan to travel more conveniently across the Taiwan Straits.
The 88-kilometer railway, designed to support high-speed trains running at a speed of up to 200 km per hour, connects the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the largest island in the province, which is the nearest place in the Chinese mainland to Taiwan Island, only 68 nautical miles (about 126 km) away from Hsinchu City.
The 88-kilometer railway, designed to support high-speed trains running at a speed of up to 200 km per hour, connects the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the largest island in the province.
Noting that they have been taking the “Strait” ship to travel between Pingtan and Taiwan, Yang Binghao, who is from Taiwan and runs a cultural and creative center in Pingtan, said that with the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, “Taiwan compatriots can now transfer via railway after arriving in Pingtan by sea, and then we can easily travel to Beijing, Shanghai and other parts of the mainland.”
Yang believes that the railway will further promote the opening-up and development of Pingtan and facilitate cross-strait travel and communication, benefiting local residents and people from both sides.
Thanks to bullet trains running on the Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, it now only takes around half an hour for residents and visitors to commute between both places.
Thanks to bullet trains running on the Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, it now only takes around half an hour for residents and visitors to commute between both places. The 16.3-kilometer-long bridge, with a six-lane highway on top and a high-speed railway at bottom, is China’s first and the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge.
The 16.3-km-long Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge is China’s first and the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge. /CFP
The new railway will link the island county with major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen through the transportation hub in Fuzhou, according to Li Fei, an official with the China Railway Nanchang Group Co., Ltd.
In 2009, the Pingtan Comprehensive Pilot Zone was launched in the county to facilitate cross-strait exchange and cooperation, aiming to become a “common home for compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits,” which currently houses more than 1,000 Taiwan-invested enterprises.
A young child ride the HST on the way to Taiwan.
Comprised of 126 islands, Pingtan is home to marvelous natural wonders and a number of tourist attractions such as Haitan Island, Tannan Bay, Pingtan Island National Forest Park, and Haitan Ancient City, and has become increasingly popular among visitors from home and abroad in recent years.
From January 20, up to 17 sets of bullet trains will run on the line every day, up from 9.5 sets plying currently, further boosting the development of local tourism.
So what is China doing to quench the anti-unification efforts?
Sure all this is fine and good. China is building bridges, and tunnels and aiding in economic development. However the United States is funding the Taiwan separatist movement. (As well as funding NGO’s such as the NED, and NID for insurgency efforts.) But what is China doing to quench those who want to fight a “hot war” for “American Democracy”?
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday stressed the importance of the one-China principle and 1992 Consensus in addressing the development of cross-strait relations.
The premier made the remarks during a virtual press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing after the closing of the fourth session of the 13th National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
The Chinese mainland welcomes dialogue with different parties regarding cross-strait relations to achieve the unification of China, Li said, before stressing opposition to any form of separatist activities or foreign interference in cross-strait affairs.
The central government will continue to enable Taiwan compatriots to share in opportunities on the mainland, he added.
So yeah. Who, as you well know, already have Chinese passports, is still able to buy property and set up businesses but will now be granted easy loans and smooth sailing in new businesses and ventures. China is “pulling out all the stops” to help integrate the Taiwanese with the mainland Chinese.
Some thoughts
When I was a young boy, the “news” was all about the “War in Vietnam”. Every day were reports on how our “brave young men were saving the world from communism”. And the media was all over it. From Walter Cronkite on television to magazines such as “Popular Mechanics (illustrated)” and “Vanity Fair”. In those days we were all afraid of “The Red Menace”, and the “Domino Effect”, and were terrified of the “loss of our freedoms”.
Domino theory, also called Domino Effect, theory in U.S. foreign policy after WorldWar II stating that the “fall” of a noncommunist state to communismwould precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighbouring states. Thetheorywas first proposed by President Harry S.Truman.domino theory | internationalrelations | Britannica.com
In those days, as a young boy, I would watch Hollywood movies glorify war. I would envision myself flying in TheB-24Liberator bombing the shit out the of the evil Nazi’s (12 O’Clock High), or fighting on the front lines with John Wayne in the movie TheGreenBerets (1968).
John Wayne in the movie The Green Berets (1968).
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It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that were I to follow my boyhood dreams, I would probably have been shipped off to die in some distant land. I would have died a virgin, and forgotten by the rest of the world. But no one else realizes this, and America is still playing the same old games that ended up killing thousands of Americans, and millions of civilians over the last fifty years.
This is just a typical example of how absolutely “off the wall” American media is when it comes to reporting what is going on in China.
It omits facts.
it omits history.
It omits contemporaneous news.
It fabricates news.
It distorts events.
It produces emotion laden articles full of fear.
It is, after all, a reflection of what America stands for.
I will generate more articles along these lines in the future. For now they will all fall under the heading… “America is having a hissy fit.”
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When I lived in Massachusetts I used to drive about and explore the beautiful, beautiful countryside. It was always glorious. New England, and most especially Massachusetts is just breathtakingly beautiful. I, and my wife at the time, would visit the tiny quaint towns, the historical buildings and walk the thousands of quaint trails in the meticulously preserved wooded areas. And as we drove we would encounter the strangest things in the middle of the road. These things called “round a bouts” were a continuously and vexing feature of Massachusetts that I never really got accustomed to.
RoundaboutA roundabout is a type of circular intersection or junction in which road traffic is permitted to flow in one direction around a central island, and priority is typically given to traffic already in the junction.-Wikipedia
Now, the point of this is that I would go and get on these things, and it would be a “free for all”. You wouldn’t really know when to get off, and instead your would go around, and around until you found your exit. For the locals, it’s no big deal. But for a new person entering these things, it tended to get really messy and confusing.
Some areas you stop and wait for traffic. Some areas you yield to traffic, and some areas you wonder what is going on. We (when I lived in Mass) said that it was often a “free for all” during “rush hour”.
Now roundabouts are inherited from the British who really seemed to like them. Why, I’ll never know. But they kept them on and enhanced them to a point where they are just a royal mess and point of confusion.
Check out this roundabout in England. It’s called The Magic Roundabout. Magic Roundabout was voted the worst roundabout in 2005.
The Magic Roundabout
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Now, do you see those little points with arrows going around, and around? Those are mini-roundabouts. There are five of them in this particular roundabout. When a car reaches that point, they are to go around and around until a point opens up for them to pass into the right (or is it the left) lane.
Ah.
Modern life. We try to make things simple and orderly and end up making a very stressful, confusing and bewildering situation for everyone.
It’s really no wonder that many people in the United States are completely stressed out…
Stressing Americans
I guess the days of Mayberry RFD are long gone.
And you know, you really need to ask yourself “what happened”?
What happened to that great and glorious quality of life that we used to enjoy and were oh so very proud of being part of. What happened to it?
People, I have to ask, is the quality of life in America getting better, or is it getting worse?
Americans certainly have a lot more “money” than they did when I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean much because the U.S. dollar has only a fraction of the value that it did back then.
1971 – Burger King Meal – $0.55
2021 – Burger King Meal – $5.00
And without a doubt our electronic devices have become much more advanced, but that doesn’t mean that we are happier.
Happiness. In fact, everywhere I look, American people seem to be deeply unhappy.
It is rare to see someone actually smiling in public, but of course there is a good reason for that. If you smile too much, someone might accuse you of being creepy.
As Americans, we are being trained to not express emotions and to keep to ourselves. Being friendly is considered to be “suspicious”, if you tell a joke there is a very good chance that you will deeply offend someone, and if you express strong opinions you might just get “canceled”.
Even though we are far more “wealthy” than they were, I imagine that our culture is not too different from what East Germans experienced before the Berlin Wall came down.
East Germany before the unification in the early 1980’s greatly resembles modern America today.
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Hate and Division. There is so much hate and division in our society, and everyone seems ready to rat out those around them at the drop of a hat. So most people are careful to keep to themselves, but at the same time most people are desperately lonely.
Lonely.
Isolated.
Alone.
Zombies. These days, most Americans walk around like a bunch of zombies. In fact, as a result of mental health problems and stress, a majority of Americans are exhibiting at least one of the symptoms of post-concussion syndrome…
A survey of more than 31,000 people shows that insufficient sleep, mental health problems, and stress were the causes of a whole host of symptoms doctors are used to seeing in head injury patients. Symptoms of what doctors call post-concussion syndrome (PCS) range from persistent headaches, dizziness and anxiety, to insomnia and loss of concentration and memory.
While 27 percent of people report having several of these symptoms, between one-half and three-quarters say they experience at least one. The most common symptoms are fatigue, low energy and drowsiness. Yet despite their findings, researchers believe the number in the general population could be much higher.
Of course one of the primary reasons why so many people are acting like zombies is because we have been drugged out of our minds. Americans take more legal drugs than anyone ever has in the entire history of the world, and each year the pharmaceutical companies come up with even more drugs for us to try.
Drug Abuse. In particular, because we are so deeply unhappy Americans take boatloads of anti-depressants. More than 50 million Americans are on anti-depressants right now, and it gets worse with each passing year.
But even though we are taking so many “happy pills”, Americans continue to kill themselves at a staggering pace, and this is particularly true for our young people.
In North Carolina, one school superintendent recently shared the fact that “the suicide rate among teens is higher than the COVID rate of death in their county”…
The debate to reopen schools for in-person learning has highlighted an alarming idea – that students are not just falling behind academically, but at a heightened risk of death by suicide.
“One of our local superintendents recently shared with me that the suicide rate among teens is higher than the COVID rate of death in their county,” Sen. Deanna Ballard, a Republican from the 45th district, recently told CBS 17, though she declined to name the superintendent or county. Ballard did not respond to NC Health News’ requests for comment.
Isn’t that insane?
Teen Suicide. You can’t just blame the pandemic for the rise in suicide either. In fact, the national suicide rate for teens was skyrocketing before the pandemic ever began…
The national rate of suicide in young people increased 57 percent between 2007 and 2018, according to the CDC.
“Even before the pandemic, we’ve been seeing an increase in youth suicides,” said Virginia Hamlet Rodillas, hotline manager for National Alliance on Mental Illness NC, which operates a statewide helpline.
If our society is so wonderful, then why are so many kids killing themselves?
The truth is that our society has become so sick and so twisted that life seems completely empty to so many of these youths. Life is such a wonderful gift, and every day should be enjoyed to the fullest, but our society has become so evil that many teens are killing themselves rather than live in it one more day.
There is hope even for those that are facing the darkest circumstances, but most people don’t realize that because our society certainly doesn’t offer any hope.
Life Expectancy. Overall life expectancy has been dropping in the U.S. as well. In fact, during the first half of 2020 life expectancy in the United States declined by a full year…
It’s already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in US history, with deaths topping 3MM for the first time. But the latest batch of morbid data is in, and they suggest things are about to get worse on average as life expectancy in the US dropped a full year during the first half of the year.
Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time a baby born today is expected to live. From January through June of last year, that was 77.8 years for the entire U.S. population, down from 78.8 years in 2019. It’s the lowest level since 2006, the report said.
Healthcare. Our healthcare system has become a complete and utter nightmare, and it is not going to get any better any time soon.
Education. Speaking of nightmares, our system of public education has become a sick joke. Just look at what has been going on in Baltimore…
A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.
Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.
Millions upon millions of young people graduate from high school each year, but many of them can barely read, write or speak in public.
I could go on and on.
Life Satisfaction. Just about every system that you could possibly name is in the process of failing, and that is probably why American satisfaction with the way our country is functioning is at the lowest level ever measured.
Americans’ satisfaction with seven broad aspects of the way the country functions is collectively at its lowest in two decades of Gallup measurement. This includes satisfaction with the overall quality of life in the U.S., assessments of government, corporate and religious influence, and perceptions of the economic and moral climates.
The average percentage satisfied with these seven dimensions has plunged to 39% at the start of 2021. That compares with 53% a year ago, the highest average in more than a decade amid strong economic confidence and before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S.
So what do you do when your entire population is unhappy, drugged up and facing a bleak future?
You blame it on someone else.
Some comments on the “blame game”
You can look at the American “news” and listen to the groundless, lying and nonsense and come to the conclusion that China is so enormously evil that it must be eradicated from the surface of the earth.
But is it really?
I argue (and so do others) that the A-number one American government answer to stopping the “pitchforks and torches” is to blame some other nation for all the ills that Americans experience.
Sort to like this…
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Ai!
Playing the “blame game” has been pretty effective so far.
It has. It really has.
You blame another group of people, and then you lob bombs and a propaganda campaign against them. The American flag is raised and patriotic movies flood the airwaves.
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Americans might be sad, lonely and unhappy, but at least ‘Merica “kicks ass”.
But 75 years of fighting wars in far-off and distant lands is really wearing thin. People are not getting happier, and the patriotism can only last so long.
Not to mention that you must be judicious on who you decide to pick a fight with.
Caitlin Comments
Here’s some thoughts by Caitlin Johnson…
Caitlin Johnson has been one of the most prolific tellers of truth over the last several years. This is not empty praise. She churns out solid, relevant, and hard hitting insight and analysis on a near daily basis and from my perspective, she has been on the correct side of every issue she has engaged with. She recently wrote:
“In a time of great need the US government is letting its citizens freeze, go broke, get evicted, and die of preventable illnesses so obviously it’s of paramount importance right now that Americans rise up with one voice and direct their righteous anger at China. I’m developing a special disdain for people who mindlessly regurgitate US anti-China narratives, especially people who are normally skeptical of US government claims. There’s just no excuse for this nonsense. The geostrategic agendas are so obvious, the barefaced liars so familiar, and the facts so readily available for anyone intellectually honest enough to look”.
It is with this same mindset that Mr. Billy Bob penned the article below. Reprinted from an earlier version that has since been expanded upon and elaborated. I edited it to fit this venue, from the raw, emotion-laden brilliance that Billy Bob has been famous for.
He (and myself) share Caity’s frustration with those that want to claim the mantle of the left but whose words are seemingly written by State Department apparatchiks…
…and the comments (on my side of the ocean in “Sinoland”) is a flying in crazed abandon! Check it all out.
Rant-a-thon Numero Uno
We’ve all read the laundry list of Western propaganda that is designed to falsely depict China as a brutal dystopic, authoritarian shithole, where everyone hates their government and are totally miserable.
It’s interesting that with regards to Western propaganda targeted at China, the lies are simultaneously proportionate but the exact opposite of truth.
So, Mao who did more good for more people than anyone else in the history of the known universe, is known as “the greatest mass murderer of all time”. Or the Chinese government that according to a 2016 Harvard study has a satisfaction rating of 96% (compared to the 38% enjoyed by the US) is casually described by the Western press as “authoritarian, corrupt, unjust, and one of the biggest human rights violators on the planet”.
For people that fail to recognize the chasm of incongruence here, and are incapable of coming to the only possible conclusion, please ensure that your fork is properly corked before continuing so you don’t injure yourself.
The false indoctrination that has taken hold of far too many self identified “leftists” goes something like this:
"...the CCP is entirely opaque, forbids a free press and completely censors free information... that a few hundred members of a single ruling party dictates policy and is unelected... that political opposition is all but illegal and completely suppressed... that no workers own the means of their own production... that China has the largest increase and concentration of new billionaires while income and wealth inequality is also at its largest, due to rampant exploitative and equally destructive capitalist practices in the past decades... that China engages in imperialism via debt and increased militarism to its Asian neighbors... that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang... that China oppresses, exploits, and impoverishes it’s citizens."
The Most Necessary and Fundamental Context: Class War
There are several mitigating factors that need to be kept in mind when analyzing the issues brought up above.
First and foremost is the reality that our planet is in the midst of a class war . It is a war where an infinitesimally small group of obscenely rich plutocrats, industrialists, and oligarchs, seek to maintain their power. They seek to maintain their wealth, power, and privilege by enforcing a global system of political and economic control. Yet doing so without any moral restraint whatsoever.
The Western ruling class consensus sees China as the enemy and is looking for any possible way to subvert, weaken, divide, and destroy their society.
These gangsters of capitalism are masters at their craft. They have successfully dismantled the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria among others. They have regime changed scores of countries, most recently, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and Bolivia.
They will not hesitate to exploit any weakness or to kill millions of people to defeat China and maintain their global supremacy.
To ignore the fact that China must defend against this very real threat. It is a valid threat posed by Western imperialism. Thus to simply analyze China’s system in a vacuum, detached from the fundamental context of class war, is to demonstrate a cluelessness about the most important aspect of the big picture.
Cluelessness.
Keep the citizens in the West ignorant, and bombard them with lies. That way, they will acting like robots, and automatons and are easily manipulated to do your bidding.
Keep them clueless.
Cherry-picking what you want to believe while ignoring the facts staring you straight in the face.
This (the desire and threat of Western imperialism to kill and destroy without restraint in the maintenance of their global supremacy) is everything.
This is the entire ballgame.
Nothing else comes anywhere close to this fundamental reality in terms of importance or relevance for humanity and the planet we inhabit.
A Propaganda Battle Over Perception:
Does China censor speech? Of course they do as it would be naïve and reckless to allow subversive Western lies and divisive capitalist propaganda, free reign over the airwaves.
A class war is taking place and the propaganda battle is an integral front.
China censors divisive lies while the West censors truth. It’s really that simple.
The Chinese people aren’t starved for truth. Truth is not censored in China.
China censors lies that are intended to destroy their society. The West censors truth which threatens their hegemony.
There is a tremendous difference here and failing to recognize this fundamental difference results in a misguided analysis that is detached from reality.
The Farcical and Self-Defeating Arrogance of Promotors of Liberal Governance:
The Chinese working class correctly rejects the Western governance by “democracy”. As they should. It’s a farce, and a full half of the American population recognizes this. Face it; putting the entire enterprise to a vote every four years…
…or engaging in some bourgeois parliamentarian democracy…
…with all the gridlock that entails and which is sure to be far less effective in furthering working class interests.
Westerners arrogantly perceive this lack of liberal democracy in China as an indictment because their liberal minds have been deluded by nonsense and are detached from political reality.
Democracy is the best.
Democracy means FREEDOM!
Democracy give the “little guy” power over the government.
The Chinese see the lack of Western liberal democracy as a great thing. It’s really rather simple. This is because they prefer stability and the rapid advancement in living standards to gridlock, political chaos, and turmoil every four years.
The Chinese working class collectively says “HELL NO” to Western pleas for liberal democracy and I for one agree with them.
Hell no indeed. Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat. May they continue to work just as hard advancing working class interests over the next 70 years, as they have over the past 70 years.
Judging China Using Unreasonable Metrics:
China is condemned by pseudo leftists because no workers own the means of their own production, but this is an entirely illegitimate bar.
Where exactly on this planet does anyone own the means of their own production? One may as well condemn China for still utilizing money, for maintaining borders, or for not eradicating scarcity.
This is not legitimate criticism.
China’s banks are [1] nationalized, their biggest industries [2] are publicly owned, [3] the private sector is often owned by party members and it is [4] subservient to party diktats and their five year economic plans which are designed [5] to achieve specific social goals.
The pseudo left also attacks China for having classes.
This too is no more legitimate than blaming China for not yet eradicating scarcity or for not abolishing private property. The nature of economic growth is to allocate growth disproportionately.
It’s entirely true, China is not a classless society.
So what?
China has not eliminated class and…?
Well…
And…?
Classless societies simply do not exist at this point in time. But in China, it is the working class that has the monopoly on power. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat that tolerates the capitalist class but only as long as they obey the law and are advantageous to the economy, exactly as Mao explained.
China is indeed far from perfect.
Room for improvement exists and this is acknowledged by the CPC. They have had tremendous success in their public battle against corruption and inequality. They have a police force that is devoted to exactly this., problems which have resulted from unprecedented economic growth. and the CPC is actively and successfully attempting to curtail these negative externalities while at the same time, trying to maintain growth, increase productive forces, and continue to raise living standards.
Oppressed, Angry and Scared?
I’ve seen Westerners point to China’s “conviction rate” and claim that such a rate proves “innocence has nothing to do with the justice system”.
I’m curious how such a conclusion is deduced from the data.
What conviction rate is optimal? At what conviction rate would we believe that justice is being served in a fair manner?
Is the 90+% conviction rate in the US optimal and proof of a fair justice system?
What about 93% for Israel?
What about the 99.9% conviction rate in Japan?
Is the Japanese justice system even less fair than China’s?
Or, are Westerners just being bamboozled into drawing bullshit conclusions from the dishonest presentation of decontextualized statistics? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.
It is claimed that the Chinese are throwing themselves off of buildings into “suicide nets”...
...though China’s suicide rate is 40% lower than that of the US.
Western propagandists claim Chinese are miserable and simply too scared to speak out against their government...
...though professional Western scientific polling companies claim China is one of the happiest places on earth.
The “narrative” being pushed through the Western “news” is fantastical and has entered the realm of fantasy.
In China, Poverty is GONE.
Extreme poverty was eradicated this year and now every Chinese has “a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care.
Meanwhile there… [are] …more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.
500,000,000 urban Chinese… have more net worth and disposable income than the average American.
Chinese mothers and infants… [are] less likely to die in childbirth than Americans are.
Chinese children graduate from high school three years ahead of Americans.
Chinese children will all outlive our American children.
Ninety-eight percent of Chinese listed as ‘poor’ already own their homes (paid for completely with no mortgages and taxes EVER on it) and what’s more…
…President Xi has scheduled 2021-2035 to bringing GINI below Finland’s.”
“Imperialism” of Peace-Through-Mutual-Prosperity?
And what about imperialism?
Is China just as imperialist as the Western ruling class which the pseudo left seems to only condemn after they are called out for their hypocritical attacks on anti-imperialist nations?
Please, Western imperialism is the only imperialism that actually exists.
People! Keep in mind this important fact. Defending oneself from imperialism is not the same as engaging in imperialism.
China has not sandwiched the US with military bases just off it’s northern and Southern borders. China has not been arming, training, and funding US separatists for years. China has not been working with Narco terrorist death squads, intolerant radical jihadists, or neo-nazi militias in order to perpetrate politically motivated acts of violence and murder. China hasn’t regime changed nearly a country a year for the past 70 years. China doesn’t have embargoes and economic sanctions against nearly 40 countries in order to force their political capitulation.
Seriously, the pseudo left needs to just stop with the “China is imperialist” bullshit. It’s not even close to true.
Genocide or Winning Hearts and Minds?
Hands down, the crown Jewel of the West’s dishonest propaganda offensive and the one which they are investing all their capital in and pinning all of their political hopes on is the claim of “Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang province”.
Much needs to be said about this particular strategy to destabilize, weaken, and subvert Chinese society but for the sake of brevity I will confine myself to explaining China’s perspective on the issue.
Here are some highlights regarding the terrorism problem faced by China:
“In February 1997 the CIA-instigated bombing of public buses in Urumqi that killed nine people died and injured more than 70.
In 2007-08, Uyghur separatists exploited the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to internationalize their cause. An attempted suicide bombing on a China Southern Airlines flight was thwarted but a terrorist attack in Kashgar in Xinjiang killed 16 police officers four days before the start of the Games.
In July 2009, Uyghur extremists in the provincial capital Urumqi killed 200 people, mostly Han Chinese. True to the imperial double standard, Washington refuses to characterize such deadly attacks as acts of terrorism.
Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkestan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.
The violence continued through 2014. There were two more failed hijackings of commercial planes as well as scores of bombings, killing tens of civilians each time.
The knife attack at the southwestern China city of Kunming railway station in March 2014 was a watershed, resulting in 33 dead and 141 injured. NATO member Turkey subsequently gave passports to four of the fugitives involved in the railroad station massacre.
In 2015 Uyghur-linked terrorists staged a Bangkok bombing which targeted mainly Chinese tourists and left 20 dead. Thailand offered to send Uyghur terror suspects back to China to face justice and defied the US demands that the suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey.”
Genocide in China?
There is a new report on Xinjiang that's been hailed by CNN, Guardian, Vox etc as the "first independent/non-governmental report" that confirms the genocide narrative.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-birthrate-sterilization-genocidehttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/09/chinas-treatment-of-uighurs-breaches-un-genocide-convention-finds-landmark-report
But the report is from Newline Institute, a previously unheard (?) of think tank. Moreover, it's funded by a university (Fairfax University of America) that has just 150 students and in many ways looks like a diploma mill. From Wikipedia: "In March 2019, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia threatened to revoke VIU's license to operate in the Commonwealth of Virginia after an audit found rampant grade inflation and severe deficiencies in the academic rigor of VIU's online courses.".
-MoA
And then this interesting comment comes up…
LOL ur right, that looks like a dodgy think tank founded in 2019 by a certain Ahmed Alwani, who also happened to have served on the advisory board of US AFRICOM.https://newlinesinstitute.org/people/ahmed-alwani/The report contains contributions by the questionable Dr Adrian Zenz, i think MoA has also mentioned him beforehttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/chinese-firms-sue-german-researcher-at-center-of-xinjiang-claimsThat "university" had 181 students in 2019, it is literally 1 building... conveniently near Washington... i'm guessing this Alwani guy is a CIA asset or gets paid by one of their other million agencies?
-Posted by: #ashtag | Mar 10 2021 22:11 utc | 36
More propaganda operating out of propaganda mills. But not to worry, the internet is gonna shake some trees for “apples of truth”…
The report contains contributions by the questionable Dr Adrian Zenz, i think MoA has also mentioned him before
Not only that, the bugger is listed as a member of the "Newlines Team".https://newlinesinstitute.org/people/adrian-zenz/
Posted by: farm ecologist | Mar 10 2021 23:29 utc | 46
And then we cut to the chase and find this…
This 'Think Tank' is in fact a front for the International Institute of Islamic Thought an islamist neo-conservative organization in the US, linked to Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood, who’s members have pleaded guilty to sponsoring terrorism.The director of the Newlines institute, Ahmed Alwani just happens to be the Vice President of this organization. He also served as an advisor to the U.S Africa command.In 2006, a scholar of this group, Sami Al-Arian, pleaded guilty to “aiding terrorism” and was given a five year prison sentence.The Washington Post at that time described the group as “the nation’s largest terrorism-financing investigation,” and stated it was linked to a number of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates.Yet now, the mainstream media seem to be absolutely content for Newlines, which is a effectively front for IIIT, to spread propaganda on Xinjiang ...Posted by: Arch Bungle | Mar 10 2021 23:34 utc | 48
So, China faces a serious threat from Western sponsored terrorist separatists, but did they really respond to this threat by initiating Genocide?
Give me a fucking break! Will you guys.
Think people. T.H.I.N.K.
Does genocide truly sound like the go-to for a government who’s top priority has been raising living standards and eradicating poverty?
What a ridiculous farce to suggest that China would believe it’s best interest would be served by secretly committing genocide. As always, nothing could be further from the truth and the truth is exactly the opposite:
“Some 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, and another 312,000 in 2017. More than 400,000 have been relocated from remote villages to places where they are gainfully employed.
Neighborhood religious institutes have been set up to educate citizens on the perils of religious extremism.
These community centers where classes are held to detoxify radical Wahhabism were labelled “re-education camps” or concentration camps by the western press, and those attending the classes termed “incarcerated”.
Programs to eradicate poverty are implemented to train and prepare Uyghurs for jobs in towns and cities.
The Chinese government, through various programs, has been winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Uyghurs. This is very bad news for the US and Uyghur separatists who are making a desperate, all-out bid to unravel the work done by Beijing to eradicate religious extremism and poverty in Xinjiang.
The deluge of fake news from Western corporate media since the beginning of this year seeks to demonize the Chinese government, painting it as a gross violator of human rights, when the truth is the exact opposite.”
"Xinjiang’s GDP grew 8% last year and is expected to accelerate since it is a gateway for the Belt and Road Initiative. Its future is bright and we can expect its recent problems, like Tibet’s, to fade into memory within three years."
The Only Rational Conclusion:
In summary, each and every one of the anti-China talking points pushed by the Western propaganda apparatus and which are dutifully parroted by Western pseudo leftists, are easily demonstrated to be false and dishonest.
The China described by the pseudo left agents of imperialism simply does not exist. In actual China the people are very happy and they appreciate their government to a degree that is simply unheard of by Western standards. This appreciation is understandable as the CPC has been tremendously successful in developing a happy, healthy, and prosperous society.
So called leftists that *honestly* bash China are confused and are totally upside down regarding political reality. Their support for Western imperialism through the regurgitation of anti-China talking points needs to stop.”
Some Comments (Not from MM)
Hi friends, always happy to see the lively discussion on anti-China nonsense. Billy Bob sure wrote up a great piece and I will definitely share it somewhere in coming days. Meanwhile I’ve had a couple more pieces recently published all along the same lines hope you’ll enjoy…
Ah. The “mainstream fodder” for a very gullible and manipulated American populace. We call them sheeple, because that is exactly what they are. They are lied to so egregiously, and so fantastically that they believe the narratives that their owners, the PTB tell them.
Such fantasies such as…
"We don't hate the Chinese people, just the Chinese government."
Show such a profound level of ignorance, that it is incomprehensible. That’s like saying “I don’t hate pizza, I just hate eating pizza“. Duh! China is not like the United States. It’s not “lip service”. China is the Chinese people. The government of China is composed of the Chinese people. It’s a flat hierarchy that is “grass roots” from the very smallest hamlets on up.
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And the inability to understand this most basic attribute of China is to display a profound and stunning lack of knowledge, insight, and understanding of China.
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That includes not just an understanding of China, but of America as well. The notion that Americans are “free“, and that they stand for the “principles of liberty though democracy” is so profoundly ignorant, and an absolute insult to the founders who established America int he first place.
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As I have repeatedly stated, the founders not only warned against democracy, but they wrote in the Federalist papers that democracies always turn into oligarchies. And if the oligarchies do not collapse from internal revolt by the citizenry, then they turn into military empires. Empires that historically are destroyed and erased from the surface of the earth.
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The stupidly is thick in America these days. And trying to talk with an average American is a cross between “The Stepford Wives” and “A Wal-mart shopper”. No matter what side of the political spectrum that they come from. They all parrot what they read…
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…not what they experience.
The Stepford wives.
But back to my point…
New technologies, and new ways of doing things, can lead to real horrors.
On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.
The Gestapo was tasked with stamping out all opposition to Germany’s new Chancellor and the party he brought to power one year earlier.
It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.
Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble.
According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”
For example in one case, a grocery store clerk reported a customer who insisted on receiving the wrong change. The customer was accused of tax fraud.
Another man lent a banned book to his friend, and was quickly denounced by his friend’s wife.
The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”
That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.
The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.
Obviously Germany in the 1930s is an extreme case, and I’m not saying that the West today is in the same boat. Not even close.
The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed.
In Nazi Germany, the entire culture changed literally within a few months. In early Spring of 1933, people were still civil to one another. By the summer, they were ratting out their friends and neighbors to the secret police.
Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that people in the west felt free to speak their minds and state an opinion.
Today saying the wrong words can get you fired, cancelled, and your life turned upside down.
For example, lately there’s been a number of so-called “fact checkers,” i.e. self-appointed censors, who are upset about a new app called Clubhouse.
If you haven’t heard of it, Clubhouse allows people to discuss different topics in audio-only chat rooms.
The audio-based content does not allow recording. And that means there is no record of conversations.
As one fact-checker laments:
“...there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations—meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. . . Users on Clubhouse know, or at least believe, that they can openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.”
The horror!
This drives the ‘fact checkers’ bananas. They want people to be afraid to speak their minds. They want people to fear being denounced if they do not adhere to the doctrine of wokeness.
-Simon Black
Our society, no matter where you live, has been growing and expanding. new technologies confront us every day, and as we run head-first into the utilization of technology, and to the adaptation of our lives to fit that monster we create, people become profoundly unhappy.
Unhappy people tend to topple governments.
Unhappy people tend to topple governments.
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Which is why there is the American idiom about “torches and pitchforks”. And it’s a real thing. The ruling class, no matter where they live, do not want to hang from ropes on scaffolding.
But America has a solution!
It’s called distraction.
Find someone, anyone, and vilify them. Make it so that they are hated and despised to the extent that they are no longer considered to be human, but rather instead some kind of illness or disease that must be eradicated. And that is the game that the monied elite in Washington DC has been playing with China these last four years.
All prep for a hot “kinetic” war.
American war machine meme about China.
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It’s the same old, game, and the same old playbook. Same old fun & games. But here I am telling you all on MM…
China. Does. Not. Play.
Asia is unifying, or perhaps best stated, they have already unified.
Any attack anywhere on Asia risks a devastating nuclear salvo that will eliminate America from the face of the earth, and turn the North American continent into a radioactive wasteland where the rest of the world dare not tread. Do not be lulled into the false belief that America is invincible, or that it is blessed by God, or that America has the best, and most modern equipment. None of these lies, and illusions are true.
But it need not be that way.
America can focus on providing for it’s people. Not on blowing up “mud huts”, slaughtering defenseless fields of sheep and donkeys, or picking fights with people who are very, very dangerous.
The biggest failing of the USA is its massive disregard for human life and human wellbeing, a tragedy we inherited from our British forbearers and have yet to cast-off. And to our great misfortune, that anti-life sentiment is deeply rooted in the Federal Government. Ehret exposes some of it; Max Blumenthal's article on the genocidal sadist and Biden admin member Richard Nephew documents such behavior; couple it with Native American policy; mass killing of civilians in WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Central and South America, Southwest Asia, The Balkans, Ukraine, etc., and your damn right we ought to suspect the very worst from that government. Monsters do exist.Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 10 2021 21:51 utc | 35
America needs to focus on Americans.
America should focus on its people.
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Not “lip service”. Not “token efforts”. Not “Blue Ribbon Panels”. But actual programs, spending actual money to raise the standard of living for Americans from the class-feudal lifestyle that it has devolved into, to a modern and healthy society that embraces culture, and differences. Where America will move away from the blue-grey nightmare into a colorful and vivacious active society…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
There’s this belief (in the West) that China is so God-darn awful that it “need’s to be put in it’s place”, and that a hot war with it is justified. American ships can sail freely in the South China Sea, and defend “democracy” in Taiwan, and Hong Kong. You know to stop the evil Chinese! It must happen soon! It must happen Now! Freedom is at stake! Now. Now! NOWWW!
It’s all bullshit.
It’s what you can expect for over four years of massively funded anti-China propaganda barraging the “news” with this nonsense. By now, most sheeple are “foaming at the mouth” ready to “kick some slant-eyed butt”. And the neocons are already planning how they will seize and then cart away the loot from a “ripe for the pickings” China.
Um.
MM readers know better.
A war against China over some nameless islands in the South China Sea to defend for “democracy” and “freedom” will result in nuclear destruction of the United States by the combined forces of Russia, China, and Iran. What ever remains standing will be subjugated in the most horrific manner. As in sacked. As in destroyed, enslaved, and subjugated so that English becomes a forgotten language that no one dares utter.
You would think that people would be aware of this. I mean, where does everyone think their electronics comes from? Silicon valley? Nope. It’s all made in China. Not just your iPhone (outsourced now to India, but the key components are still made in China and shipped to India), but all those fancy electronics in the top end military aircraft and missiles that America uses. F-22 key components. Made in China. iPhone internals. Made in China. Tesla car batteries. Made in China.
You would think that Americans would be aware. But they are not. And the neocons are just ready for a fight.
It will be their last.
I can say “watch out“, and the uneducated will respond “oh, let China try“. But all that bravado becomes meaningless when you haven’t eaten in weeks, your body is covered with pustules and sores, and all the water is radioactive. And you are engaged in a street battle between roving bands of urban youths riding brand new Toyota pickups with M134GAU-17GatlingGuns. All over some moldy turnips that rumor says that you hoarded before the war.
These neocons are insane and they believe what they tell each other.
The Rapture, in Christianity, the eschatological (concerned with the last things and Endtime) belief that both living and dead believers will ascend into heaven to meet Jesus Christ at the Second Coming (Parousia).
The belief in the Rapture emerged from the anticipation that Jesus would return to redeem all members of the church. The term rapture, however, appears nowhere in the New Testament. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Lord will come down from heaven and that a trumpet call will precede the rise of “the dead in Christ” (4:16). Thereafter, “we who are still alive and are left will be caught up” (in Latin, rapio, the standard translation of Paul’s original Koine Greek) “together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) mention Jesus’ return to earth from heaven; e.g., The Gospel According to Mark cites Jesus as foretelling a “ ‘coming in clouds’ with great power and glory” (13:26).
Belief in the Rapture is often connected with a belief in the literal coming of the millennium, the 1,000-year rule of Jesus Christ after his return, as mentioned in chapter 20 of The Revelation to John (also known as The Book of Revelation), although there are also amillennial interpretations of the belief that reject that notion. There is also a divide among pre-tribulationists, who believe that the Rapture will occur before a period of tribulation on earth mentioned in Daniel (12:1) and Matthew (24:21) and preceding the End, and post-tribulationists, those who believe that it will come after that period. Finally, dispensationalism, the notion that God periodically enters into a new covenant with his people, has had some influence on the belief, insofar as some believers in the Rapture consider themselves to be dispensationalists.
Along with the epistles of Paul and the Revelation to John, apocalyptic literature and millennialist thinking have long maintained a hold on the Christian imagination, even when they have been variously interpreted or—in the case of millennialism—even rejected by some of the major figures in the history of Christian theology. The 16th-century movement called Futurism, expounded by the Jesuit Francisco Ribera, stressed the future fulfillment of the prophecy of the End as mentioned in scripture with both the rise of the Antichrist and the return of Christ. Another historical event whose ideas may have had some influence on the later evolution of the idea was the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by Puritans seeking to build a “City upon a Hill” in anticipation of the Second Coming. The evangelical fervour of the Great Awakening (early 18th century) and Second Great Awakening (late 18th to early 19th century) in the United States widely promoted ideas about the millennium, about a new dispensation, and about the imminence of Christ’s return. The most famous of such thinkers was William Miller, whose prediction that the Second Coming would occur in 1843 inspired the subsequent formation of Adventist churches.
The idea of the Rapture persisted through the remainder of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, gaining popularity among some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as well as among some other Christian and even non-Christian new religious movements. During the Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly as the threat of nuclear war grew, prophecies about the Rapture gained currency. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the idea was prominent in popular culture, in part because of the millennialist fervour that arose as the year 2000 approached. The so-called “Chick Pamphlets” (illustrated tracts authored by the evangelist Jack Chick) and the Left Behind (1995–2007) novel and movie franchise were two examples of that phenomenon. Meanwhile, Endtime prophecies promoting a specific date for the Rapture—most notably the two dates in 2011 predicted by the American evangelist Harold Camping—proliferated.
-The Rapture
You see, in their mind, world War III is a win-win.
[1] If they push and successfully create strife in the South China Sea, and it is limited to that region, they can capitalize upon it. Make money off it. And it can turn into a long-drawn out quagmire. Or fine money pipeline into their coffers.
[2] If the strife leaves the predetermined area of conflict, no problem. What’s China gonna do? Eh? They are no match for the Great and Powerful US! They USA could “just sit off the coast and launch cruse missiles and plink at the pitiful Chinese as they run from hidy-hole to hidy-hole”.
[3] Even if the worst came about; No problem, either. God has blessed the United States, and then Jesus will come down from heaven and save all the American believers, and let the rest of the earth cook into a poisonous stew of radioactivity and destruction. Good!
With Trump in office, and the appointment of key neocon radical fanatics, Their anti-China crusade went mainstream and has most of the Western allied world’s population hating the Chinese. Yeah, it’s destined to dissipate, but right now the PTB are using everything in their power to keep the hate alive. They are keeping this monster, this nightmare illusion, ALIVE!
Oh, baby! This is extremely dangerous.
This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights.
It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism.
The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it — its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government — and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
-The Radical Christian Right
I cannot stress it enough. This kind of thinking is dangerous. And there are some very important people, in key positions in the American government which believes these insane narratives. They believe. They are real believers.
Yikes!
Now, from time to time, I come across something other than one of the major neocon articles that announce plans for the suppression of China, and how America will remain the dominant superpower in the world. They are few and far between. Seriously. But when you find one, it’s not only refreshing but discusses the reality.
Here is one such rare article. Read it slowly. Absorb it carefully. They are not trying to manipulate sheeple. They are not trying to justify anything. They are telling and stating things AS THEY ARE today. Not what they might be, or what they wish to become.
And while they urge you to participate to “spread the word”, they do so out of concern that America is leading the world towards a new “Dark Ages”; one here the world might never recover from.
And they spell it out clearly…
The U.S. is Set on a Path to War with China. What Is to be Done?
In this meticulously researched exposé, KJ Noh traces the genealogy of U.S. geopolitical strategy in Asia and the Pacific, giving us an inside view of both the realpolitik of U.S. imperial expansion and the architects behind it. Concluding with an analysis of 21st century U.S. total informational warfare, Noh argues that the path to a kinetic war against China has been decades in the making. Once triggered, it could rapidly turn nuclear.
It was a gripping, stunning testimony. Before Congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.
Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way. [1] All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and Congress were in a total uproar.
There was only one problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts, designed to manufacture consent for a U.S. war on Iraq.
At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurd—Kuwait had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its birth rate, would have had a few hundred premature babies a year. It’s inconceivable that over 300 of them could have been clustered in a single hospital on a single day.
Nevertheless, this was the story that was sold to the U.S. people. Representative John Porter stated,
“We have never heard…[such] a record of inhumanity and brutality and sadism…I don’t know how the people of the civilized countries of this world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this scourge from the face of the earth.”
Not long afterward, the U.S. went to war with Iraq. It would wage war again, 12 years later, doubling down with even more monstrous lies about weapons of mass destruction.
Today, we are facing a similar situation: the U.S. is escalating rapidly towards a shooting war with China, and similar absurd, astonishing, and monstrous lies are being spread. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement.
On the ground this involves:
Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary & secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Financial’s IPO.
Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive
Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change.
Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of air bases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery. [2]
Civil Subversion: color revolution, urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization & training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.
Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the U.S. (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors” and “spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.
Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare.
The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information warfare.
He left out biological warfare. But we'll give this author a pass on this glaring omission.
This mass propaganda incites people to hate China irrationally and unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The U.S. military calls this information warfare, “the firehose of falsehoods” and we are all being drenched with these lies. This is necessary to justify war against an enemy and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.
Some of the questions that the public are kept from asking are:
Are these allegations supported by any facts?
Has China threatened us?
Is the U.S. at risk from China?
Is this war justifiable by any means?
Is it legal?
Do the citizens of the U.S. want to go to war?
Could the U.S. even fight, let alone win a war with China?
A careful, reasoned approach to these questions, would lead one to say, No.
Before we try to play whack-a-mole with the blatant war propaganda, a more useful and clarifying approach is to ask, why is the U.S. telling these lies to go to war?
For this, we have to look at history.
Why The U.S. Is At War: Culture shock and the challenge to supremacy
The earliest European travelers were astonished to discover in China a country, in many ways, far more advanced than the West: a rich, diverse, multi-cultural civilization with sophisticated systems of governance, and vibrant cities built with complex systems of planning and management.
Above all, they marveled at a harmonious multi-religious, multi-ethnic society, free of sectarian strife, and an inclusive merit-based [3] system of political power that selected the most competent people to govern and rule, regardless of creed, color, background, or religion.
[4] This contrasted the Western system of hereditary aristocratic rule within a society torn apart regularly with religious strife.
These ideas of diversity, tolerance, inclusion, and earned—not inherited–privilege, would strongly influence the leaders of the Enlightenment, so much so that Western philosophers such as Voltaire and Leibnitz believed that the Chinese had “perfected moral science,” and that Chinese statecraft was the model for the West to emulate if it wanted to develop into an enlightened civilization.
These discoveries struck a hard blow at Christian and Western supremacy.
Western colonization was built on a foundational belief that the West was more advanced, more evolved—closer to God—than the “barbarous” countries it was invading, subjugating, exploiting, and destroying.
It needed at least the pretense of being more “advanced” to justify its colonial “civilizing mission.”
Reactionary thinkers like Herder—who had never visited China—lashed back rapidly by propagating a theory of the depravity of Chinese: that China was an “immoral land with no honor,” an “embalmed mummy” characterized by stagnation, in contrast with Western “dynamism.”
In addition, the Chinese system of meritocratic government was deeply troubling to a West built on stratified class privilege.
A civilization without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the Western ruling class.
Montesquieu, (borrowing from Giovanni Botero) thus concocted the trope that China’s more egalitarian system had to be “despotic”—despotic for him because it threatened the “liberties” (aristocratic privileges) of his class.
Hegel chiseled this canard into the Western consciousness with an armchair theory of “Oriental Despotism,” whereby the Chinese had failed to evolve due to inherent, characterological flaws in its people and its political culture.
Marx chimed in with the “Asiatic mode of production,” and Weber and Wittfogel also reinforced it. These allegations of “despotism”—despite being total distortions of Chinese governance–have infused all Western discourses about China since.
A civilization without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the Western ruling class. Montesquieu, (borrowing from Giovanni Botero) thus concocted the trope that China’s more egalitarian system had to be “despotic”—despotic for him because it threatened the “liberties” (aristocratic privileges) of his class. These allegations of “despotism”—despite being total distortions of Chinese governance–have infused all Western discourses about China since.
Enter the Bandits
At the same time, “embalmed” Chinese “inferiority” notwithstanding, the West craved the exquisite consumer goods of China—tea, silk, porcelain—and this created huge trade imbalances.
The Western response to balance the books was narco-trafficking: smuggling in industrial amounts of opium—at its peak, up to 9 million pounds a year.
When China objected and opposed this on sovereign and moral grounds and confiscated the drugs, war was declared.
Reparations were forced, concessions extracted, and the country plundered, looted, and destroyed.
In one show of force to the Chinese, the Summer Palace of the Emperor was sacked by Lord Elgin, which Victor Hugo described thus:
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world…. All that can be begotten of the imagination…was there…. Build a dream, a dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace…. This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries…. This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned.
All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry…. One of the two victors filled his pockets...the other…filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits [England & France].
This violence, banditry, and racism, justified by the belief in the subhuman nature of the Chinese, became normalized practice against the Chinese over two centuries, and great American fortunes—Perkins, Astor, Forbes, Cabot, Delano (Roosevelt)—and Ivy league institutions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia were built on this extraction and narco-trafficking.
Hewing to the belief that the Chinese were less than human, enterprising Euro-American drug barons pushed opium that addicted 10% of the population, essentially “roofie-ing” an entire nation and stealing its wealth.
Just as U.S. Southern wealth had been built on the decimation of black bodies through the slave trade, U.S. East Coast wealth was built on the destruction of Chinese bodies through the drug trade, in what historian John K. Fairbank described as
“the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times.”
Dehumanization, humiliation, assault, theft, rape, colonization, appropriation–these became the standard Western approach towards China and the Chinese; the Chinese people were “filthy yellow hordes,” an inferior, subhuman race, lacking agency, fit only to be colonized, exploited, enslaved, lynched, erased, and wherever possible, extinguished through race war.
It would get worse.
Cold and Hot war: A Chinaman’s Chance
Inside U.S. territory itself, the mythology of “yellow peril”—originally a German colonial war trope—became pervasive.
Newspaper editor Horace Greeley, argued that the Chinese were “uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.”
Greeley, a progressive (who employed a young Marx as a reporter), was simply mouthing the platitudes of his day; much worse than rhetoric was the routine violence.
Prefiguring similar present-day fears that Chinese were stealing jobs, wealth, or threatening America, thousands of Chinese were massacred, lynched, set on fire, expelled from their communities in the late 19th Century:
In 1871, the LA Chinatown massacre,
In 1880, the Denver Yellow Peril pogrom,
In 1885 Wyoming Rock Springs massacre,
The Issaquah Valley attack,
The Arson of Seattle’s Chinatown,
The Tacoma riot,
In 1886 the Seattle Riot of 1886,
The Oregon Hell’s Canyon massacre.
“A Chinaman’s chance” became a common term: to be Chinese was to be subject to sudden death at any time at the whim of white people.
In response, the Chinese hid themselves inside ghettos where they could, fled pogroms, arson, and mass lynchings, and kept their heads down, “eating bitter” and trying to stay alive.
Where they managed to settle down without being killed, they were subjected to cultural erasure, economic blockade, social isolation, a ban on owning property and businesses, and a proscription on marrying and having children, in short, planned elimination.
A minor respite during WWII, when the U.S. allied itself with the Chinese KMT (Kuomintang) against the Japanese gave a small glimmer of reprieve, as local leaders tried to establish breathing space, and the Japanese took on the role of the “bad Asians.”
This lasted until the Chinese communists liberated themselves in 1949, and wrested back their own country.
“China has stood up,” Mao declared, igniting jubilation throughout the third world and sending shockwaves of horror through the colonial west.
This arrant act of self-liberation and self-determination—along with the U.S.’s astonishment that the monstrous KMT fascists they had courted and funded had been trounced–unleashed a hysterical new wave of Sinophobia during the McCarthy era.
High-ranking Congressional committees demanded “Who lost China?”—as if it had been theirs—and purged the State Department of the moderate “China-hands,” who had been sympathetic or informed about China and its political institutions.
A paroxysm of anti-China and anti-Asian hatred would shiver and fester throughout the cold war, burning, stoking and consuming itself through…
Ttwo hot wars (the Korean war and the Vietnam war),
Counterinsurgencies (Malaya),
Politicide (Indonesia), and…
…smoldering on through the Nixon era, and crackling back alive to the flushed, red hot heat of the current moment.
In a country built on settler-colonial racism, this violent, racist, anti-China hatred—one of the most enduring legacies and traditions of the West—is the noxious Petri dish in which this propaganda for war is being cultured and vectored.
To this day, these stereotypes—ideological templates–are readily applied, for example, as regards Covid-19. In the Sinophobic Western press, Covid-19 is allegedly caused by dirty Chinese eating habits, dishonest cover-up, depraved indifference to life, despotic suppression of information, and dangerous intent towards the West.
In a word, the Chinese are dirty, dishonest, depraved, despotic, and dangerous.
Every day, these racist slanders are plastered and repeated, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, in Western outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, or TheNew York Times, and then catapulted into orbit by Twitter and Facebook.
White supremacy and its attendant anti-Asian fear and hatred are some of the oldest, most enduring, most deep-rooted hatreds in the Western mind.
Underneath the shallow topsoil of civility and liberal tolerance, it festers and simmers in angry, molten layers of the subconscious, quick to flare up in white-hot violence at any perceived slight or challenge to white superiority, and rapidly weaponized as political expediency requires.
Realpolitik: Opening And Closure
Miraculously, during the 70’s, a battered and bruised U.S., humbled from defeats in the Vietnam war, and seeking a realpolitik to untangle the quagmire, decided to open relations with China to counterbalance the Soviet Union.
Despite over a century of hatred, and the containment of the Russians for being an “Asiatic Race,” the U.S. normalized relations with Chinese, and thus began a short, temporary, realist honeymoon, a brief respite from this race-baiting and race hatred.
This idyll was not to last.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, two things became readily apparent: 1) there was no further political need to engage with China, since the primary reason (the threat of the Soviet Union) had gone away, and 2) it was clear for anyone understanding history and geography that China could become a challenger to the United States itself, due to its size, capacity, and dynamism.
Thus the long, unabated, and persistent thread of anti-China hatred—red-scare-yellow-peril-thinking, reinvigorated again with the persistent white fragility about new challenges to supremacy—came back with a vengeance.
Despite continued engagement with China from the Nixon to the Clinton era, Sinophobia remained a silent, underground political force with a tremendous gravitational pull.
Two groups were important in giving these forces concrete shape and form.
He was the Pentagon’s Oracle, directing its secretive internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, for 42 years, and was top advisor to 12 Secretaries of Defense.
Originally part of an elite group of econometric thinkers at RAND (Herman “Strangelove” Kahn, James Schlesinger, Daniel Ellsberg, Albert Wohlstetter), they worked on game theoretic & stochastic modeling of complex phenomena, and on how to strategize the unthinkable and the insane: how to win at nuclear Armageddon.
Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Marshall had two key obsessions: U.S. military supremacy, first against the Soviet Union, then after the fall of the USSR, against China.
Post-1991, he became singularly obsessed with preventing China’s rise to power.
Using a deft mixture of threat inflation (through recondite “net” assessments & heterodox “team B” reviews), classified white papers, cryptic pronouncements to the power elite, and the incessant cultivation of a cult of loyalists, Marshall kept the Pentagon’s gravy train running on time, while instilling in his followers a paranoid, “long durée” mindset of endless and moving threat inflation.
Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Marshall had two key obsessions: U.S. Military supremacy, first against the Soviet Union, then after the fall of the USSR, against China. Post-1991, he became singularly obsessed with preventing China’s rise to power.
Marshall’s proteges, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cohen, Krepinevich, Pillsbury, Herman Kahn, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Michael O’Hanlon, and countless other neocon heavyweights were graduates of “St. Andrew’s Prep School” or the “Church of St. Andrew,” and mentored into Marshall’s world view and strategies.
These ideologues had suckled at the woozy philosophical teat of Leo Strauss (imagining they were imbibing Plato, Hegel, or Kojeve) and graduated from Ivy institutions funded from Chinese opium smuggling.
Marshall fed them solid food, C-rations, and the bloody red meat that cut and sharpened their fangs for ideological and political battle.
In 1992, a fully teethed group of Marshall’s neocon protegés penned the Defense Guidance Planning (DPG) document that came to be known as the “Wolfowitz Doctrine.”
A preposterous, overweening document, embarrassing upon leakage for its hubris, irrationality, and illegality, it was immediately disavowed but not discarded.
A few years later, it was redacted and upgraded into the PNAC (“The Project for a New American Century”)’s Mein Kampf-like document, “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.”
This was, in essence, an unhinged plan for total world domination (“unipolar global dominance”) in all domains of war (“full spectrum dominance”), unfettered by international law or any sense of proportion, rationality, or morality.
Borrowing from the DPG its call for the unencumbered use of aggressive, pre-emptive war, including the use of nuclear and biological warfare, it postulated a “Pearl Harbor-like” incident to operationalize.
Not long after, this doctrine became realized under Rumsfeld and Cheney, bringing us the chaos, murder, tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless catastrophic wars of the post-Bush years.
Contemporaneously, with the Soviet Union dissolved, and the U.S. pressing NATO right up against the flank of Russia, the U.S. also began to cross-hatch the contours of a containment strategy against an emerging China, the next potential challenger to U.S. global domination.
Marshall and his Jedis began explicit, long term countermoves.
Even as the Middle East continued to spiral into chaos, yet more wide-ranging and ambitious plans were hatched against the Middle Kingdom.
A strategy to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was initially floated (and later, with the blessing of the CFR, circulated, and eventually implemented).
Aggressive forward bases were planned in the early 2000’s, then built in East Asia along the first island chain, placing deadly and destabilizing strategic weaponry right up against China’s throat and belly.
New alliances and strategies were drawn up, and old alliances reinforced and rekindled, and a dangerously empire-nostalgic Japan was enabled in erasing history and remilitarizing to the hilt as the spear tip against China.
Eventually, as all these pieces fell into place, Hillary Clinton would stage the coming out party: the declaration in 2011, of the “Pacific Pivot/Pivot to Asia” in Foreign Policy Magazine.
Clinton’s debutante declaration was a dog-whistle marvel of cant and obfuscation.
A plan to move 60% of U.S. firepower to encircle and contain China through bases, weaponry, and alliances, while engaging in multi-domain hybrid warfare, was sold as a “historical rebalancing.”
With the blessing of Obama’s cabinet, Marshall’s China threat was finally getting policy primetime.
During this time, another of Marshall’s busy, brainy proteges, military officer Andrew Krepinevich, started to work out the nuts and bolts of actual war with China.
At the CSBA (Center for Strategic Budgetary Assessment), Krepinevich, under Marshall’s guidance and funding, wrote out the details of the war doctrine against China, “AirSea Battle”—a China-directed counterpart to the Soviet-era “AirLand Battle”—involving decapitating and blinding strikes deep into Chinese territory, and instantiating Marshall’s “revolution in military affairs” for U.S. supremacy in the Western Pacific theater of war.
RAND and the CFR chimed in, rendering into granular and global detail the strategies and order of battle.
Another of Andrew’s powerful proteges was Michael Pillsbury.
A serious operator, Pillsbury had assisted in the creation of the regime change “governmental” NGO known as the NED, the weaponization of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the implementation of politicide in Latin America (known as the Reagan Doctrine), but most importantly, he was credited with initiating the idea of the “China card” in 1973.
Under the good offices of Marshall, Pillsbury published a book called “The Hundred Year Marathon,” scripting a fact-free document of paranoid threat inflation, racist scare-mongering, and orientalist slander that is now standard China doctrine.
In an alphabetic royal flush of Sinophobes (Lighthizer-Mnuchin-Navarro-O’Brien-Pillsbury-Pompeo-Pence-Ross), Pillsbury was the most important “China authority” of Everything Under the Heavens in the Trump Kingdom of Sinophobia.
China Syndrome: Blue team, Red Peril
As the original U.S. reason for allying with Beijing—to counterbalance Moscow—became moot, another group of China-bashers, far-right ideologues with sharp axes to grind from the Cold War also began to crawl out of the cracks.
Calling themselves the “blue team” or “panda sluggers,” they derided the U.S. “panda-hugging” business class who wanted continued engagement with China, seeing China only as a mortal and irreconcilable communist threat.
During the Clinton administration, they formed a loose coalition, coming together with funding under PNAC, using the Washington Times and Weekly Standard as their platforms.
Although the “Blue Team” had no official members, published no formal policy statements, and had no offices—initially meeting in a garage, then at the Tabard Inn on N Street—they included key Congress members and staff, think tankers, journalists, and lobbyists.
Among them, former CIA analyst William C. Triplet and congressional staffer Edward Timperlake went on to write a lurid series of conspiracy books alleging quid-pro-quo between Clinton and China (Year of the Rat; Red Dragon Rising).
This was a bizarro world where Taiwanese lobbyists with Chinese Mafia connections were acting as agents for the PRC government and manipulating the White House.
They also alleged Chinese theft of military secrets, slave labor, the proliferation of WMD to Iran and other “rogue” states, and insinuated that Clinton’s “constructive engagement” was knowingly undermining the U.S. for the benefit of the Chinese.
These allegations put into ink a conspiratorial mythology about a dangerous, corrupt, and belligerent China, echoes that fed into an existing subterranean current of paranoid lies about China.
These “blue team” members, cross-pollinating with Marshall’s proteges, were a rogues gallery of high-powered political operators: Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Michael Pillsbury, Bill Gertz, Gary Bauer, Peter Navarro, Elliot Abrams, Richard Scaiffe, John Bolton were among those listed as “members.” Dana Rohrabacher, Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd were also considered to be fellow travelers.
The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act was also written during this time.
In particular, the CECC appointed itself watchdog of Chinese trade, technology, labor and human rights, saturating Congress with an unending “blue team” litany of Chinese “abuses.”
The most virulent and extreme of all these China hawks was Frank Gaffney, who recycled the alarmist Cold War group, “Committee on the Present Danger,” into the current “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” contending that “there is no hope of coexistence with China.”
Gaffney’s ideology and guiding principles coincide with official positions on China and key U.S. foreign policy; moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech and actions on China reflect his close affiliation and affinity with Gaffney.
What the Pivot is: the Geostrategy of China-bashing
Much of the “blue team’s” ideology and theorizing followed pre-existing currents of ideological posturing and hate-speech but have incorporated sharper geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions.
Western history can be seen as having several inflection points: one was 1492, the advent of the “Columbian Era.”
The Columbian era is the era of sea-faring, sea-power-based Western colonial and imperial empires.
The demise of the Columbian era was foreshadowed by an Oxford geographer in 1904 who put forth what is now known as the “Heartland Theory.”
In a nutshell, it is a land-based theory of power that predicts the end of sea-based powers:
“Who rules East Europe (Eurasia) commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.”
It also concluded that
“Were the Chinese [to] conquer its territory [of the Russian Empire], they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom.”
This maxim and the anxiety it provoked was red-lined in Brezinski’s “Grand Chess game”: “No Eurasian challenger should emerge that can dominate Eurasia and thus also challenge U.S. global pre-eminence.”
In 1992, Marshall’s protégé, Paul Wolfowitz formulated the above strands into a formal doctrine, in the above mentioned DPG (Defense Planning guidance) document:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region to generate global power…. The U.S. must…protect a new order that [convinces] potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must…discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
This can be better understood by looking at a map:
This is a map of the world, drawn from a topologist’s eye. It shows relationships, not distances or area. From this map you can note the following things:
China has more borders than any other country in the world. This also gives it the possibility of connecting with more countries than any other.
Blue lines/corridors are oceans: The top two thirds is the “world island” or “pivot state”–it contains most of the world’s population, resources, and wealth, and it can be connected as a single entity through overland routes or short ocean hops.
The bottom is the Americas. It is topologically isolated from the world island. As sea lane control becomes less important, it will also lose prominence and relative power if the world island unifies. It’s clear that unifying power will probably arise in China, whose overland paths using high-speed rail, roads, pipelines, and ports can be easily built and connected, in a “new silk road.”
The U.S. needs to fracture the world island to maintain its global power. If you color in the places where China is encircled, or where the US is waging war/fracturing societies/creating chaos, this is exactly where the fault lines of the global conflict are, and reveal what U.S. strategy is.
Here is a second map:
CSBA: Shipping Lanes through the South China Sea.
The U.S. has actually surrounded China with 400 military bases, bristling with strategic and tactical weaponry. It also has war-gamed out China’s key vulnerability: the chokepoint of the South China Sea. War in the South China Sea would disrupt $5.3 Trillion of China’s external trade and 77% of China’s oil imports. In this scenario, the U.S. does not have to win a shooting war with China in the South China Sea. The war just has to happen, and the disruption to trade could crash China’s economy.
The U.S. has actually surrounded China with 400 military bases, bristling with strategic and tactical weaponry.
It also has war-gamed out China’s key vulnerability: the chokepoint of the South China Sea.
War in the South China Sea would disrupt $5.3 Trillion of China’s external trade and 77% of China’s oil imports. [5]
In this scenario, the U.S. does not have to win a shooting war with China in the South China Sea.
The war just has to happen, and the disruption to trade could crash China’s economy.
The map shows the shipping lanes that would be disrupted.
China’s first response to the U.S. pivot and encirclement, especially in the South China Sea—its key choke point—was to build defensive military facilities along some of the islands, to deter U..S incursion and to raise the cost of interference.
Its other, much more ambitious response was the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), which constitutes a long overland escape from the encirclement, similar to its “long march” during its encirclement by the fascist KMT.
The BRI travels through Southeast Asia, then overland through Central Asia, to the Mediterranean, and then Europe and Africa. In particular:
CMEC (China-Myanmar Economic Corridor) travels through Rakhine State and exits to the Indian Ocean at Kyaukphyu port (bypassing the Strait of Malacca).
CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) to Gwadar port transits directly to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Xinjiang is the key overland route for BRI to exit China to Central Asia, with Iran also a key node.
Djibouti at the horn of Africa is the entry node to Africa (the Sahel, and the South)
As it does this, BRI becomes the physical realization of Mackinder’s “heartland” in Eurasia—the “pivot state” connecting the “world island” into a single economic bloc and raising China to the status of the key regional power, accomplishing exactly what Brezinski and Wolfowitz sought to prevent.
Mercator Institute for China Studies: Belt and Road Initiative.
Mindful of this development, and aware of the rapidly ticking biological clock on U.S. power, the U.S. is currently rapidly escalating hostilities in the South China Sea (SCS), most recently with…
War games,
U2 incursions,
Belligerent passages of aircraft carriers,
Belligerent guided missile destroyers,
Hunter-killer submarines.
China’s response has been to launch “carrier killer” missiles into the region.
Until recently, the U.S. claimed that it was not an interested party to the SCS, just that it was concerned about “Freedom of Navigation.”
It has also recently conducted drone war exercises for assaulting islands in the South China Sea, with down-to-the-smallest detail precision and preparation.
The U.S. is also going directly after the BRI.
It is sanctioning the Chinese companies alleged to have done construction in the SCS (all the claimants have done construction, including building airfields; China is not unique).
These companies are also involved in construction of the BRI; for example, China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) alone is reportedly involved in 923 projects in 157 countries.
Likewise, the “Five Eyes” have made moves to block other “road” of the BRI, its accompanying “digital silk road” (communications-5G-blockchain infrastructure).
This is yet another of the reasons why Huawei has been targeted for destruction.
The U.S. is also in the process of stationing intermediate range missiles all across the South China Sea, and around the first island chain surrounding China, as well as attempting to press gang South Korea into hosting them.
This is yet another layer of dangerous escalation, and it will prove to be very, very destabilizing.
Twilight of Capitalism
The final dimension to the U.S.-China competition is economic: this is the uncanny fact that China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” works and outclasses Western neoliberal capitalism by leaps and bounds.
In terms of developing an economy, raising living standards, creating public wealth, serving and meeting its people’s needs, and dealing with crises, China beats the capitalist West hands down.
Even as they claimed that such a state-led economy could never compete against the superior free-market economy of the U.S., the Trump administration has insistently demanded that China dismantle their planned economy in trade negotiations, because of its superior advantages over capitalism.
This was not supposed to be: Clintonite “Panda Huggers” had always justified, hubristically, that their engagement with China would result in China’s liberalization and total transformation—the inevitable, inexorable result of engaging with a superior Western political ideology and economic system.
They also insisted that if China continued as it had with its planned economy and ”autocratic“ ways in a modern era, it would simply fail: it would end up like the Soviet Union or North Korea—it had no choice but to become more Western, more neoliberal, more capitalist.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the market.
China built a system that has brought more than 850 million people out of poverty in a few short decades, ended domestic extreme poverty in 2020, and has already surpassed the U.S. in PPP economy size and healthy life expectancy.
China’s thriving, effective Central government—with a 93.1% approval rate—breaks all Western conceptions of development, governance, legitimacy, and of course, superiority.
With 80% of its top leadership scientists or engineers, China also outranks the U.S. in patents filed, top scientific papers published, and is a world leader in fields such as AI, robotics, quantum computing, 5G, highspeed rail, advanced industrial production, next generation IT, materials science, and sustainable energy development, low-carbon eco-cities, and reforestation.
It has also pledged to go carbon neutral by 2060, essentially giving the world an outside chance to still beat global warming—despite being a historical carbon creditor.
With its scientific leadership, whole-of-society public health strategies, and its valuing of every human life, it has also shown that it can organize to defeat a mass pandemic in weeks—and by overriding capitalist markets whenever and wherever it sees fit.
Meanwhile the U.S. still struggles with the largest number of cases and deaths from Covid-19—a death rate 200 times that of China’s—and is incapable of preventing Covid-19 among its own top leadership.
To boot, first in 2008, and then in 2020, the U.S. neoliberal capitalist economy was shown up to be a jacked-up deck of cards, rescued only by massive Chinese debt-purchasing and endless printing of fiat money.
In contrast, China has demonstrated that it has developed an alternative, non-Western, non-capitalist model of development—without war, invasion, colonization, slavery, regime change, primitive accumulation—that the world can emulate and follow.
Once you realize that, you understand why the U.S. ruling classes are so desperate to erase China and its example:
China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial.
As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment, subservience, and expropriation.
It also offers a model of state-led ecological development.
All this signals new possibilities of hope and transformation for the world.
The ruling classes in the West will go to war to prevent this.
China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial. As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment, subservience, and expropriation.
Where Does This All End?
Despite China’s assurances that it does not want war, hot or cold, that it seeks win-win cooperation and co-existence with all countries, and that it disdains hegemony, the U.S. continually escalates, provokes, and threatens China, all the while dismantling off-ramps channels of communication and global institutions for cooperation and de-escalation.
The conclusion to draw is hard, but obvious: if things continue as they have, this can only lead to direct military confrontation and kinetic war.
Doubling down on racism, sexism, capitalism, and militarism, the Democratic regime not only silences demands for viable reform and abolition by the Sandernistas, BLM, and Me Too, but also ignores the non-interventionist, peace-demanding wishes of the majority of voters, dismissing their demands for a better system and less violent foreign policy.
Biden’s doctrine toward China will be a continuation of the noxious arc of history and planning begun by Marshall in the late 1970s. The think tank advising Biden on foreign policy, CNAS, a near-rhyming clone to PNAC, has grandfathered in most of existing anti-China doctrine, and has mapped out in obsessive detail, the next steps of a highly destructive and dangerous strategy of confrontation with China.
The key difference is that Biden’s regime will “unite” countries more skillfully against China, pivot away from Trump’s neomercantilism towards a more “globalist” approach, and likely implement some revised version of the TPP, the 12 nation economic bloc against China.
Here are some key points to understand:
Escalation to war is bipartisan: there is no lesser evil here. The racist, capitalist, imperial ruling classes cannot and will not tolerate a rising or equal China in a multi-polar world. They would rather see the end of the world than an end to capitalism or white supremacy.
One subset of this group believes that they can actually win a war against China, or at the very least force its subjugation to the U.S. This submission will not happen, given the actual balance of forces and Chinese determination to resist.
The U.S. wants global supremacy but if the ruling class can’t have ordered supremacy, they are not averse to global disintegration and chaos. Proteges of Hayek and Leo Strauss, they thrive on “revolutionary disorder.” One fallback model of U.S. supremacy is to plunge the rest of the world back into the dark ages through hybrid warfare—while the U.S. controls the key systems of communication, information, surveillance, finance, rent extraction, along with the corridors of maritime transport.
There is a third group of elite hawks who are millenarian Christians. Although a minority, they hold powerful positions. These believe in the salvation and rapture of the faithful as existing “contradictions” are heightened into Armageddon. These are religious zealots with no brakes or constraints on their appetite for war.
War, if it happens, would rapidly turn nuclear. The U.S. no longer has “overmatch” in conventional weapons, and no longer subscribes to deterrence. Instead, its declaratory policy allows nuclear weapons to be used against “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” [6] Since the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China, and threatens “intolerable damage” in response to “non-nuclear or nuclear aggression.” [7] The Chinese have disavowed nuclear first strike—their nuclear capacity is currently minimal and purely defensive—but in case of war the US military could easily resort to the use of low-yield nuclear weapons[iii] or even decapitating nuclear first strikes [8] to overcome its conventional weaknesses. China’s deterrence would then have to shift to “hair trigger,” “launch on warning.” This means that war could rapidly escalate to large scale nuclear strikes, which many scientists predict would result in nuclear winter, dooming most forms of organic life on the planet.
Modern “democracies” require constant media manipulation and propaganda, to manufacture consent for war. As a result, we are living in time of total deceit, as Orwell put it: “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…. Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” William Casey, CIA director summarized this succinctly: “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” [9]
War, if it happens, could rapidly turn nuclear. Since the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China, and threatens “intolerable damage” in response to “non-nuclear or nuclear aggression.”
What Then, Is To Be Done?
Our work is cut out for us: “In war, the first casualty is truth.”
Our task is to prevent the first casualty, challenge the lies; the second, to organize and work for peace.
As we approach elections, the possibility of an October surprise increases. Remember:
Information war precedes, justifies, and enables kinetic war, therefore you must think critically and defensively; do not take anything attacking China at face value.
Evaluate everything for a) source b) logic, sense, rationality c) bracket & evaluate emotional triggers or trigger words d) look at counter-evidence/arguments
Make your own judgments, draw your own conclusions: seek truth from facts
Don’t be fooled by the engineering of “truthiness”:
Stories and lies seem credible when they are 1) repeated incessantly 2) resemble pre-existing stories (especially ones that are projected from our own disowned flaws), 3) have some tiny grain of plausibility mixed in 4) seem coherent or manufacture coherence through multiple sources, and 5) tug at your heartstrings.
This means that we have to:
Watch out for memes and repetition: watch out for stories that seem self-replicating, self-distributing, repetitive, and create an echo chamber—qualities that make them seem real and convincing even when they are lies. Even debunked stories serve as compost for more lies. Remember also that U.S. social media is handmaiden to the war machine—the worst is Twitter [10]—it promotes war propaganda and routinely purges counter-narratives.
Distinguish the coherence and validation of a story that has multiple sources of verification from planted-and-echo-chambered-stories (for example, anything about China connected to WUC (World Uyghur Congress)-Adrian Zenz–ASPI-Nathan Ruser-nexus; the Lausan-Jacobin-Nation-DemocracyNow-tendency; or The Guardian-NYTimes-Washington Post-CFR-cabal or other combinations thereof). Outlets like these are not channels of independent verification; they are often a set of single sourced memes skillfully distributed out and repeated through different channels, part of the fire hose [11] strategy of war propaganda.
Watch out for emotional trigger words: “genocide,” “slavery,” “concentration camp,” “trafficking,” “sterilization,” “theft/IP theft,” “espionage,” “cyber warfare,” attributed without any proof. These are trigger words designed to bypass critical evaluation, appealing to your emotions: fear, pity, and outrage.
Watch out for projection and gaslighting: the U.S. has a long history of slave and prison slave labor [12], of Third World debt-traps, of mistreating/torturing/killing Muslims, of genociding Indigenous peoples, of mass incarceration, of police brutality, of cultural genocide, mass sterilization, medical testing without consent [13]. If you see these words or allegations alleged against China, especially in a context where it makes no sense, evaluate [14] whether it seems real because there is actual proof, or because it is a convenient projection of the U.S./West’s own disowned violence, criminality, and brutality.
Speak up and simply call out the propaganda for what it is: lies to enable war and war-profiteering. But don’t get trapped in the weeds of debunking—they will spread a 1000 new lies before you’ve refuted a single one: “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth”—cut it off at the root.
Do not allow yourself to be silenced. Be prepared to be criticized as a “human rights denier.” Not having truth on their side, this is what the worst human rights abusers will always resort to: shut the f*ck up [or else]. Don’t be intimated, and don’t let them silence you. Make your voice heard!
Last but not least, organize! Despair is not an option! The following are good places to start:
[10] As news of horrific assaults by HK rioters on journalists spread through the mediasphere on June 12th, within hours, Twitter shut down 170,000 accounts on the ground that they were “promoting narratives favorable to the CPC”: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/information-operations-june-2020.html. According to the Guardian, “The major themes of the tweets were that that Hong Kong protesters were violent, and the US was interfering with the protests; accusations about Guo; the Taiwan election; and praise of China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic”—which turned out to be true. Twitter coordinates with ASPI, a key source of anti-China propaganda.
[12] For example, ASPI makes unfounded allegations of Chinese slave labor while being funded by US corporations that are confirmed to use US prison slave labor
[13] For example, the NY Times concocted an article on “non-consensual” Chinese vaccine testing, which doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny. Among other things, it confounds the risk profiles of Western m-RNA & ADV-vectored vaccines that have never been approved for human use, with the time-tested inactivated vaccines that the Chinese are using.
[14] Some good resources are available at Qiao Collective:
When I passed this on to some friend to review, they had some interesting things to say. Such as this…
This is a good article, but an important part is missing. China is not the same China, and the world is not the same world anyone. The United States and the West can no longer do what they please anymore. The price they have to pay for a war with China would be more than they or the world can afford. If it is not for that reason, China would have ceased to exist long ago.
-Han Dongping
Well, maybe if if the United States was lead with reason, was led by knowledge and skills, and was led by those with the best interests of the American people in their minds.
But that is not the case, America is lead by different kinds of people. And man, oh man, do they think differently…
To be sure, the world as we know it will have its end (2 Peter 3:10; Revelation 21:1). But when it ends it will be replaced by a new heaven and new earth. The Noahic covenant seems to rule out universal devastation short of Christ’s coming.
Thus, nuclear war is the opening salvo to enable the return of Jesus Christ our savior and Lord.
But, let us beware of presuming that the day of the Lord will come with a shower of nuclear warheads only. My own feeling is that the crack at Christ’s coming will make our weapons seem like maypops and firecrackers.
Woe to us if we fornicate and proselytize prior to invoking his return!
Even if we succeed, we will be found on the wrong side at his appearing: only the peacemakers are sons of God (Matthew 5:9). There is but one way, and only one way, to “hasten” his appearing: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).
We must pledge to use nuclear weapons only to hasten the arrival of Heaven on Earth. Not to use it for any other purpose. We must engage in war under the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savor. For according to 1 Timothy 2:1-4, the peace after war makes the best pathway for evangelism, not the war itself.
And they view things quite differently.
And I shake my head in disbelief.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Trump Trade War Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here is another post from the Robert Greene book “The 48 Laws of Power”. It suggests that you say as little as possible, and use this technique to gain control over the thoughts and actions of others. It advises laconic and taciturn speech mechanisms.
LAW 4
ALWAYS SAY LESS THAN NECESSARY
JUDGMENT
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.
Video
Here’s Robert Greene when interviewed about this law. VIDEO.
Video.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Gnaeus Marcius, also known as Coriolanus, was a great military hero of ancient Rome. In the first half of the fifth century B.C. he won many important battles, saving the city from calamity time and time again. Because he spent most of his time on the battlefield, few Romans knew him personally, making him something of a legendary figure.
In 454 B.C., Coriolanus decided it was time to exploit his reputation and enter politics. He stood for election to the high rank of consul. Candidates for this position traditionally made a public address early in the race, and when Coriolanus came before the people, he began by displaying the dozens of scars he had accumulated over seventeen years of fighting for Rome. Few in the crowd really heard the lengthy speech that followed; those scars, proof of his valor and patriotism, moved the people to tears. Coriolanus’s election seemed certain.
When the polling day arrived, however, Coriolanus made an entry into the forum escorted by the entire senate and by the city’s patricians, the aristocracy. The common people who saw this were disturbed by such a blustering show of confidence on election day.
And then Coriolanus spoke again, mostly addressing the wealthy citizens who had accompanied him. His words were arrogant and insolent. Claiming certain victory in the vote, he boasted of his battlefield exploits, made sour jokes that appealed only to the patricians, voiced angry accusations against his opponents, and speculated on the riches he would bring to Rome. This time the people listened: They had not realized that this legendary soldier was also a common braggart.
Down on his luck, [the screenwriter] Michael Arlen went to New York in 1944. To drown his sorrows he paid a visit to the famous restaurant “21.”
In the lobby, he ran into Sam Goldwyn, who offered the somewhat impractical advice that he should buy racehorses.
At the bar Arlen met Louis B. Mayer, an old acquaintance, who asked him what were his plans for the future. “
I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn ...” began Arlen.
“How much did he offer you? ”interrupted Mayer.
“Not enough,” he replied evasively.
“Would you take fifteen thousand for thirty weeks?” asked Mayer.
No hesitation this time. “Yes,” said Arlen.
-THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES, CLIFTON FADIMAN, ED., 1985
News of Coriolanus’s second speech spread quickly through Rome, and the people turned out in great numbers to make sure he was not elected. Defeated, Coriolanus returned to the battlefield, bitter and vowing revenge on the common folk who had voted against him. Some weeks later a large shipment of grain arrived in Rome. The senate was ready to distribute this food to the people, for free, but just as they were preparing to vote on the question Coriolanus appeared on the scene and took the senate floor. The distribution, he argued, would have a harmful effect on the city as a whole. Several senators appeared won over, and the vote on the distribution fell into doubt. Coriolanus did not stop there: He went on to condemn the concept of democracy itself. He advocated getting rid of the people’s representatives—the tribunes—and turning over the governing of the city to the patricians.
One oft-told tale about Kissinger... involved a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days.
After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation, “Is this the best you can do?”
Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question.
After redrafting it one more time—and once again getting the same question from Kissinger-Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do. ”
To which Kissinger replied: “Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time. ”
-KISSINGER. WALTER ISAACSON, 1992
When word of Coriolanus’s latest speech reached the people, their anger knew no bounds. The tribunes were sent to the senate to demand that Coriolanus appear before them. He refused. Riots broke out all over the city. The senate, fearing the people’s wrath, finally voted in favor of the grain distribution. The tribunes were appeased, but the people still demanded that Coriolanus speak to them and apologize. If he repented, and agreed to keep his opinions to himself, he would be allowed to return to the battlefield.
Coriolanus did appear one last time before the people, who listened to him in rapt silence. He started slowly and softly, but as the speech went on, he became more and more blunt. Yet again he hurled insults! His tone was arrogant, his expression disdainful. The more he spoke, the angrier the people became. Finally they shouted him down and silenced him.
The tribunes conferred, condemned Coriolanus to death, and ordered the magistrates to take him at once to the top of the Tarpeian rock and throw him over. The delighted crowd seconded the decision. The patricians, however, managed to intervene, and the sentence was commuted to a lifelong banishment. When the people found out that Rome’s great military hero would never return to the city, they celebrated in the streets. In fact no one had ever seen such a celebration, not even after the defeat of a foreign enemy.
Interpretation
Before his entrance into politics, the name of Coriolanus evoked awe.
His battlefield accomplishments showed him as a man of great bravery. Since the citizens knew little about him, all kinds of legends became attached to his name. The moment he appeared before the Roman citizens, however, and spoke his mind, all that grandeur and mystery vanished. He bragged and blustered like a common soldier. He insulted and slandered people, as if he felt threatened and insecure.
Suddenly he was not at all what the people had imagined.
The discrepancy between the legend and the reality proved immensely disappointing to those who wanted to believe in their hero. The more Coriolanus said, the less powerful he appeared—a person who cannot control his words shows that he cannot control himself, and is unworthy of respect.
The King [Louis XIV] maintains the most impenetrable secrecy about affairs of State. The ministers attend council meetings, but he confides his plans to them only when he has reflected at length upon them and has come to a definite decision.
I wish you might see the King.
His expression is inscrutable; his eyes like those of a fox. He never discusses State affairs except with his ministers in Council. When he speaks to courtiers he refers only to their respective prerogatives or duties.
Even the most frivolous of his utterances has the air of being the pronouncement of an oracle.
-PRIMI VISCONTI, QUOTED IN LOUIS XIV, LOUIS BERTRAND, 1928
Had Coriolanus said less, the people would never have had cause to be offended by him, would never have known his true feelings. He would have maintained his powerful aura, would certainly have been elected consul, and would have been able to accomplish his antidemocratic goals.
But the human tongue is a beast that few can master.
It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words.
Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.
=Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In the court of Louis XIV, nobles and ministers would spend days and nights debating issues of state. They would confer, argue, make and break alliances, and argue again, until finally the critical moment arrived: Two of them would be chosen to represent the different sides to Louis himself, who would decide what should be done. After these persons were chosen, everyone would argue some more: How should the issues be phrased? What would appeal to Louis, what would annoy him? At what time of day should the representatives approach him, and in what part of the Versailles palace? What expression should they have on their faces?
Finally, after all this was settled, the fateful moment would finally arrive. The two men would approach Louis—always a delicate matter—and when they finally had his ear, they would talk about the issue at hand, spelling out the options in detail.
Louis would listen in silence, a most enigmatic look on his face. Finally, when each had finished his presentation and had asked for the king’s opinion, he would look at them both and say, “I shall see.” Then he would walk away.
The ministers and courtiers would never hear another word on this subject from the king—they would simply see the result, weeks later, when he would come to a decision and act. He would never bother to consult them on the matter again.
Undutiful words of a subject do often take deeper root than the memory of ill deeds....
The late Earl of Essex told Queen Elizabeth that her conditions were as crooked as her carcass; but it cost him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him but for that speech.
-SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 1554-1618
Interpretation
Louis XIV was a man of very few words. His most famous remark is “L‘état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”); nothing could be more pithy yet more eloquent.
His infamous “I shall see” was one of several extremely short phrases that he would apply to all manner of requests.
Louis was not always this way; as a young man he was known for talking at length, delighting in his own eloquence. His later taciturnity was self-imposed, an act, a mask he used to keep everybody below him off-balance.
No one knew exactly where he stood, or could predict his reactions.
No one could try to deceive him by saying what they thought he wanted to hear, because no one knew what he wanted to hear.
As they talked on and on to the silent Louis, they revealed more and more about themselves, information he would later use against them to great effect.
In the end, Louis’s silence kept those around him terrified and under his thumb. It was one of the foundations of his power. As Saint-Simon wrote, “No one knew as well as he how to sell his words, his smile, even his glances. Everything in him was valuable because he created differences, and his majesty was enhanced by the sparseness of his words.”
It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them.
-Cardinal de Retz, 1613-1679
KEYS TO POWER
Power is in many ways a game of appearances, and when you say less than necessary, you inevitably appear greater and more powerful than you are. Your silence will make other people uncomfortable.
Humans are machines of interpretation and explanation; they have to know what you are thinking. When you carefully control what you reveal, they cannot pierce your intentions or your meaning.
Your short answers and silences will put them on the defensive, and they will jump in, nervously filling the silence with all kinds of comments that will reveal valuable information about them and their weaknesses.
They will leave a meeting with you feeling as if they had been robbed, and they will go home and ponder your every word. This extra attention to your brief comments will only add to your power.
Saying less than necessary is not for kings and statesmen only.
In most areas of life, the less you say, the more profound and mysterious you appear.
As a young man, the artist Andy Warhol had the revelation that it was generally impossible to get people to do what you wanted them to do by talking to them. They would turn against you, subvert your wishes, disobey you out of sheer perversity. He once told a friend, “I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up.”
In his later life Warhol employed this strategy with great success.
His interviews were exercises in oracular speech: He would say something vague and ambiguous, and the interviewer would twist in circles trying to figure it out, imagining there was something profound behind his often meaningless phrases.
Warhol rarely talked about his work; he let others do the interpreting.
He claimed to have learned this technique from that master of enigma Marcel Duchamp, another twentieth-century artist who realized early on that the less he said about his work, the more people talked about it. And the more they talked, the more valuable his work became.
By saying less than necessary you create the appearance of meaning and power.
Also, the less you say, the less risk you run of saying something foolish, even dangerous. In 1825 a new czar, Nicholas I, ascended the throne of Russia. A rebellion immediately broke out, led by liberals demanding that the country modernize—that its industries and civil structures catch up with the rest of Europe.
Brutally crushing this rebellion (the Decembrist Uprising), Nicholas I sentenced one of its leaders, Kondraty Ryleyev, to death.
On the day of the execution Ryleyev stood on the gallows, the noose around his neck. The trapdoor opened—but as Ryleyev dangled, the rope broke, dashing him to the ground.
At the time, events like this were considered signs of providence or heavenly will, and a man saved from execution this way was usually pardoned. As Ryleyev got to his feet, bruised and dirtied but believing his neck had been saved, he called out to the crowd, “You see, in Russia they don’t know how to do anything properly, not even how to make rope!”
A messenger immediately went to the Winter Palace with news of the failed hanging. Vexed by this disappointing turnabout, Nicholas I nevertheless began to sign the pardon.
But then: “Did Ryleyev say anything after this miracle?” the czar asked the messenger.
“Sire,” the messenger replied, “he said that in Russia they don’t even know how to make rope.”
“In that case,” said the Czar, “let us prove the contrary,” and he tore up the pardon.
The next day Ryleyev was hanged again. This time the rope did not break.
Learn the lesson: Once the words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control. Be particularly careful with sarcasm: The momentary satisfaction you gain with your biting words will be outweighed by the price you pay.
Image: The Oracle at Delphi. When visitors consulted the Oracle, the priestess would utter a few enigmatic words that seemed full of meaning and import. No one disobeyed the words of the Oracle— they held power over life and death.
Authority: Never start moving your own lips and teeth before the subordinates do. The longer I keep quiet, the sooner others move their lips and teeth. As they move their lips and teeth, I can thereby understand their real intentions…. If the sovereign is not mysterious, the ministers will find opportunity to take and take. (Han-fei-tzu, Chinese philosopher, third century B.C.)
REVERSAL
There are times when it is unwise to be silent.
Silence can arouse suspicion and even insecurity, especially in your superiors; a vague or ambiguous comment can open you up to interpretations you had not bargained for.
Silence and saying less than necessary must be practiced with caution, then, and in the right situations. It is occasionally wiser to imitate the court jester, who plays the fool but knows he is smarter than the king. He talks and talks and entertains, and no one suspects that he is more than just a fool.
Also, words can sometimes act as a kind of smoke screen for any deception you might practice. By bending your listener’s ear with talk, you can distract and mesmerize them; the more you talk, in fact, the less suspicious of you they become. The verbose are not perceived as sly and manipulative but as helpless and unsophisticated. This is the reverse of the silent policy employed by the powerful: By talking more, and making yourself appear weaker and less intelligent than your mark, you can practice deception with greater ease.
Thoughts and Conclusions
Offer no speech. Respond laconically if at all.
And that is all that I need to say about this.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my “48 Laws of Power” Index, here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Two of my staff are at the hospital for severe chronic diarrhea. A close friend and his entire family are also in a different hospital, for the same god-damn thing. A friend just called me and told me that he cannot meet with me as planned because of…
Guess what?
ChronicDiarrhea
.
The American news is such a pile of horse-manure it boggles my mind that I still pay it any attention. But there you are, once an American, it’s hard as Hell to break out of long-standing habits. Here, I am going to straighten up some misconceptions that the American “news” still promote. As well as say that “it’s all not over”. Trump does not take losing easily… he’s a sore, sore loser. And actions… his unreported actions… indicate this.
One of the things is that once the COVID-19B failed to devastate China, and China thwarted his efforts in HK, Xinjiang, and Taiwan, the USA threw two additional biological weapons at China. The first [1] was in mid-Summer when China started arresting all the CIA agents and NED / NID agents in Hong Kong. And the second [2] was in October, after the enormous US Navy flotilla returned back to the United States with it’s tail between it’s legs in defeat.
This post is going to discuss these two subsequent biological weapons attacks. For purposes of simplification, we will give them the following names;
COVID-20 The June 2020 biological attack.
COVID-21 The October 2020 biological attack.
The Big Lie
There is one pandemic. It’s a variant of the flu. Now it is evolving. It only kills the old and the sick. Once you get it, you are inoculated. And you don’t even need to wear any masks, or take any protections. You are now “forever” safe.
That is false.
The Truth
President Trump waged biological warfare on China starting in 2017. This was a four year campaign of intensive and constant bio-warfare attacks. It began with viruses designed to destroy grains, and poultry. Then advanced to include meats. To attack the pork industry, the CIA used drones to spray remote farms. And when China was still not starving and “begging for mercy”, he unleashed COVID-19 against the world.
Against the world…
Why the world?
Of course the entire world knows about how COVID-19 ravished the world. What no one has been paying attention to is the timing and distribution of the COVID-19.
There are different strains of COVID-19. They go by the indicators of A, B, C, D…etc.
The first COVID-19 strain to hit the world was the COVID-19A. This strain was discovered throughout America. And it seemed to appear “out of nowhere” in a very short period of time, with clusters originating out of all of the major American cities. This strain is a very light strain. It has an R0=0.1%. In most cases it doesn’t even cause a sniffle, let alone a cough. It is no wonder that Donald Trump wanted everyone to get this stain. As it was his belief that once you get sick with this “harmless” strain that you get immunity to all further strains.
That is FALSE.
The Second COVID-19 strain to hit the world was COVID-19B. This is a lethal strain. Not only does it cause seizures and death, but it’s got a horrific R0=15-20%. This strain was identified and traced directly to the Wuhan “wet” market where American servicemen and women were filed touching and fondling the produce, and the fish tanks there. While this strain was first detected inside of China, it was also found in Russia, Iran, and North Korea. It began to propagate at the exact moment of the major Chinese holiday CNY and forced the Chinese government to go into a complete lock down or else a sizable percentage of the nation would be dead or dying.
If this sounds suspicious, you are correct. It is suspicious.
It appears that someone unleashed a mild COVID-19A to immunize the United States and it’s allies, while unleashing a horrific and lethal COVID-19B against the “enemies” of the United States. China. Russia. Iran. North Korea.
If this sounds suspicious, you are correct. It is suspicious.
While there are some minor mysteries surrounding this. You need only listen to the studies that China presented to the United Nations in August 2020 when they (and Russia) accused the United States of launching a biological weapon attack against them. For instance, the mystery of how Italy become infected with COVID-19B is easily explained that the Italian soldiers shared the same hotel as the American solders did in Wuhan in December 2019.
If this sounds suspicious, you are correct. It is suspicious.
Anyways, I’ve covered this entire subject in great detail elsewhere. If you want to go spelunking through the data, there’s some great tools available. The WHO and the Chinese have mapped the various strains of COVID-19. And it is all pretty damning for the United States.
Of course none of this is reported inside of America. It’s all a HATE-CHINA-fest.
"It's not fair to say that Americans are silent about everything. Americans are very vocal about China stealing and China having no freedom and China having the largest concentration camp for Muslims and China having no human rights for Tibetans.
All these must be true because our politicians and free press say so.
Americans are right to stand up against China imperialism of Belt and Road. Americans will never be silent about China trying to take over the world's islands and oceans.
As for the Capitol insurrection, we blame China for poisoning the minds of Americans with their Hong Kong revolution footage.
We also blame Hong Kong freedom fighters for taking American money and then messing it up.
In fact, China gave Trump the royal treatment and then suckered him into a trade war which damages America.
China is to blame for Trump and his trade wars.
China is to blame for discovering the Covid virus.
We now know that it's been all over the world with no one the wiser, but China had to make a big stink and shut down the country.
China has few Covid deaths but China also has no freedom and no human rights. What do you prefer?
Don't forget some spokesmen for some secret American agency said that China may have corrupted American elections.
China is to blame for destroying American democracy. Who can we believe if we don't believe in patriotic American elected officials, the free press, and American agencies?
Don't worry Jay, Americans will be very vocal about China. They will support more patriotic wars by any means and sanctions against the great evil China with their democratic elections and tax dollars. God bless America!
-Jay Janson's Blog
If this sounds suspicious, you are correct. It is suspicious.
COVID-20
Well, a pissed of Trump, furious that the enormous flotilla he sent off to China returned back with it’s tail between it’s legs, unleashed a very nasty virus aimed directly at China.
From the date of the initial outbreak in Wuhan I watched carefully on a daily basis the dispersion and progression of the coronavirus in China and then abroad, collecting as much data as were available on each location. By late May of 2020, China had been infection-free for many weeks, the concern turning to the identification and quarantine of imported cases. At the same time, the US became once again ‘the leader of the world’, this time in virus infections and deaths, producing 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and around 1,000 deaths per day.
At the time, American hostility toward China’s success in stopping the virus was palpable, with many nasty media articles and White House accusations about China’s false statistics and blaming China for “spreading the virus” to the US. CNN stated, “Chinese state media has repeatedly touted China’s effective measures in containing the virus as the number of infections and deaths surged abroad, contrasting its success with the failures of Western governments, especially the United States.”[1] Clearly there was much surprise and bitterness at China’s success and America’s failure, this coated in a sticky layer of resentment based partly on a justified suspicion that the Chinese were not overly distressed at the Americans enjoying the fruits of their own labor.
But even then I had a sense of an apparition, a version of Dickens’ ‘ghost of coronavirus past’, accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling the Americans were sufficiently bitter (and vicious) to deny the Chinese their apparently easy victory.
My fear was that the Americans would try to reseed China as they did Russia, and it would seem my fears were not unjustified. The new virus that broke out at the Xinfadi market in Beijing was a different strain than any previously existing in China, one that existed only in the US and Europe and could only have been brought in from the outside. And once again at a seafood market with no identifiable patient zero, no clear epidemiology (source and distribution) of a virus that did not exist in China. It almost had to be deliberately seeded, the odds against being infinitesimally small.
In terms of what I am calling COVID-20 (to differentiate it from the initial outbreak), China may have been fortunate to detect and corral this new pathogen before it could spread. The outbreak did expand to three other provinces but in single digits and the medical authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety – which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country, appears to be much more contagious than the original COVID-19.[2]
In response, Beijing has locked down everything and sent a group of experts to guide the fight against this new potential epidemic, so far with good success. Nucleic acid testing has been initiated on a massive scale, already many millions of people tested, and all those in contact with the Xinfadi market being in quarantine. Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or leaving, with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and their food and daily necessities delivered.[3]
Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export). On June 19, China’s CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market, announced what they termed “a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery”, which was that the strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much older than those in Europe, and “had been around for quite some time” – and that can mean only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many months ago.[4]
The investigators said they obtained so many positive samples that the entire market was “severely contaminated by the virus”, but also that no one should form the conclusion that the market was the origin merely because the outbreak took place there. More importantly, they also said “Beijing’s outbreak gives us the opportunity to re-examine our previous speculation that the virus originated from wildlife”, because unlike Wuhan, “the possibility of wildlife causing Beijing’s latest outbreak is slim.” Their conclusion was that “an infected individual or object contaminated with the virus entered the wet market, and the market only gave it an environment to multiply”.[3]
The authorities have already produced the genome sequence and are now establishing when and how the virus was likely imported into China, and how long was the transmission chain. There is no question this pathogen was brought into China “by people”, the question being the identity of those people and their purpose.[5] And, what better way to “teach those smug Chinese a lesson” and attempt to derail China’s rapid economic recovery.
The use of open, public areas with produce and food is the preferred environment from which to launch a bio-weapons attack. Not just in Wuhan with COVID-19, but in America at a Salad Bar.
Russia Re-seeded
There is something equally strange about the virus in Russia. For a long time, Russia had only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded, rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don’t normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks, as happened with all other countries.
But with Russia, the infections were minor for a long time, steady at very low numbers, with all the indications of an unsuccessful epidemic, and the Russian government took strict measures to control the spread. The US government was clearly resentful at the failure of the virus to devastate Russia and the US media bemoaned the fact that Russia’s death rate was so low. I would be very interested to see the genome sequences from the first infections in January and February, and for those happening in April and May. I haven’t any definitive proof, but I am certain Russia, as China, was seeded again with another variety for a second attempt.
Virus Distribution
But to return to our main point, it isn’t necessary for us to determine the physical origin of the virus. We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed, but the more important issue is the epidemiology, particularly the incidence and distribution.
First of all, for China and most other nations originally infected, there were so many multiple and simultaneous sources that locating a patient zero was a hopeless task. Virus outbreaks, left to their own natural devices, do not behave in this fashion, but begin with one person in a tightly localised situation and provably spreading from that point. Equally distressing is that we have the truly unprecedented “two waves” of worldwide infections. For this, let’s review my observations from an earlier article[6] and take a quick look at those two waves of infections that circled the globe.
The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations within a few days centered on January 25.
One month later, the Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered on February 25.
A natural virus hasn’t the ability to simultaneously (within three days) infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world. More peculiar is that these countries were not all infected with the same variety of the virus, and that most reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations.
Considering the above information in light of the basics of virus transmission, the only theory that fits all the known facts is that these waves resulted from many people leaving Fort Detrick on the same day carrying a pail of different live viruses, because those multiple varieties at the time existed only in the US. It could not possibly have resulted from air travel because that timing would have been scattered. When 85 countries experience a virus outbreak on virtually the same day, this can happen only with human assistance. The Americans have steadfastly refused to address this point.
Experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released.
Since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. But with COVID-19 (or COVID-20), not one country out of 200 has been able to do this.
It should be firmly noted that this new infection in Beijing is not a “second wave” as termed by the Western media. This is an entirely new and different infection by a new virus and totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new and different virus that was deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi Market.
This infection is not related to COVID-19 but is the seeding of yet another biological pathogen in China, making that now seven different biological attacks on China in two years. And China has suffered others similar.
One of the most notable was the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic – and which was extinct for decades – but which suddenly appeared in 1977 in both China and Russia causing a global pandemic, prompting immediate claims by the Americans that it “escaped from a Chinese lab”.
But the only sensible explanation is that the H1N1 virus ‘escaped’ from the Americans because there were persistent reports that the US military had found or saved samples of the original ‘Spanish Flu’ virus and were attempting to re-activate it. There was never a shred of evidence that either China or Russia had anything to do with this, and both were taken entirely by surprise.
It is my view that the world needs to stop pretending that COVID-19 was an accident of nature.
Consider China’s recent experience. In addition to SARS – which was indisputably man-made, China has suffered repeated viral pandemics in the past two years.
February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu.
June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu.
August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu.
May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms.
December, 2019: COVID-19.
January, 2020: A “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu.
June, 2020: China is hit with COVID-20.
Are we to tell ourselves it was merely a run of bad luck that China was the only nation in the world to be hit repeatedly with so many different biological pathogens in such a short time? And merely more ‘bad luck’ that China became the only country in the world that was domestically virus-free and was suddenly hit again with a foreign strain in another wet market? This assumption is too ridiculous to bother refuting.
It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive receptance from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine information critically and use our minds to assess the presentation.
As an example, it was very clever for the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and for the media to give this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such markets with at least a possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the claims as true without the necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as intended. Our assessment of wet markets as unsanitary may be correct, but common germs and bacteria are a very different thing from a coronavirus that makes its home in bats and has no business being in a vegetable market.
It isn’t important for our purposes to decide if COVID-19 was created in a lab; the important point is that a coronavirus [1] has no means of transportation from bat caves in Sichuan to a market in Wuhan, nor [2] the ability to mutate itself in such a way as to be energetically contagious to humans, and much less [3] the conscious intelligence to choose China’s largest passenger transportation hub as the distribution point and [4] the Eve of the Chinese New Year as the best time to attack. For these, the coronavirus required a helping ‘black hand’.
The Noose Tightens on the US
There is almost daily an increase in the volume of evidence that COVID-19 was circulating in the US far earlier than admitted, and serving as incriminating proof that the CDC’s deliberate (and threatening) forbidding of testing was to bury this evidence.
The most recent example is headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, “Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19” in the US.[7] The LA Times reported on “a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths” beginning in December of 2019. The local news website www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California “way earlier than we knew”. And let’s not forget too quickly that Japanese tourists were infected in Hawaii in September of 2019.
And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019. The results were confirmed by two separate labs that used two entirely different testing methods, and also showed that environmental wastewater from Milan, Turin and Bologna returned positive traces of the virus dating back to December if not earlier. Apparently, the RNA from COVID-19 does not readily dissolve or disintegrate in water and polymerase chain reaction testing allows scientists to identify the RNA after many months.[8][9]
And it wasn’t only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected “high concentrations” of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris first recorded any deaths. Sputnik News reported in May that a Paris hospital confirmed it had treated Amirouche Hammar, the country’s first COVID-19 patient, on December 27, 2019 – one month before France’s first announcement of infections and four days before the WHO China bureau was informed of a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” on December 31.[10]
The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that “many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease”, scientists claiming these detections were “consistent with evidence emerging in other countries” that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases, all of which would of necessity have had to have originated in the US and transported around the world.
It is now beginning to appear that many countries were seeded at approximately the same time, perhaps in their water distribution systems. Following these discoveries, the ISS told Reuters it intends to launch a new study of the wastewater of Italian tourist resorts. I suspect other nations will follow.
And it would seem the NYT, WSJ, WP, CNN, ABC, NBC, National Post, Globe & Mail, have no knowledge of this. The Chinese and Europeans know, but the Americans and Canadians don’t know because the owners of their major newspapers and TV networks don’t want them to know.
A Brief Update
If you look at the graph (courtesy of CNN), you can see the European infection pattern (in pink) and the American (in green). The Europeans followed China’s protocols in varying degrees, and thus with varying degrees of success. Europe’s infections peaked at around 30,000 per day then descended to around 2,000 near the end of June, while the Americans, led by a man who is living proof that democracy is the worst possible form of government, saw their infections peak at the same level, slightly decrease, then revert to 30,000 infections and around 1,000 deaths per day where they will now remain until the virus surges through the entire population. Twenty-six states are already experiencing dramatic spikes reaching new records each day, so Trump ordered the CDC to “stop testing” because it makes him look bad.
.
The next graphic is a list of the top ten nations for COVID-19 infections. Missing from this picture is a comparison I want to make about leadership and competence, to say nothing of intelligence.
Shanghai is a city only two hours from Wuhan and, when the infections exploded, had no warning and almost no time to prepare, but acted so quickly and decisively that the city had only 26 infections and 7 deaths. Missing from the graphic is Canada, with a population very similar to Shanghai, and who, with months to plan and prepare, had 101,000 infections and 8,400 deaths. Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is also living proof of democracy’s vast failings.
.
The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space, while the Canadians elected a bullied child so painfully unintelligent and indecisive his wife would have to tell him to call the fire department if his house were burning down. I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, “It’s not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?”
In all three countries the leaderless pandemic results are the same, with infections and deaths likely increasing until at least the end of the year. China, with a population of more than 1.4 billion people, had about 80,000 infections and little more than 4,000 deaths, and stopped the virus cold in about three months. But according to the NYT, WSJ, WP, and Canada’s terminally-obnoxious National Post, the “free-market capitalist” countries are God’s first choice while “socialist authoritarian” China should incur yet more sanctions for all its mistakes.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Trump goes into hiding
When China discovered the COVID-20 President Trump suddenly was whisked off to a military base, the Nation goes into DEFCON ONE, and on full-alert status. Then when China does nothing, President Trump is miraculously “cured” of the COVID-19 coronavirus illness and he returns to the White House.
If this sounds suspicious, you are correct. It is suspicious.
I do not know how everything will work out. But I can tell you my opinion on this matter. And I will.
My opinion;
Trump and his little army of Neocons attacked China with unconventional warfare. It was the first massive use of biological weapons in a full-spectrum spread. China survived it, but the world is now infected with but one of the viral agents.
Other viral agents lie dormant and are winding through society. How and when they will hit is unknown. One is the "death by shitting" virus. Which is just now getting noticed within China. This is the case, even though China has implemented very strict controls to control this particular and spectacularly nasty virus.
And that means that…
… all human transmitted viruses will always circle the globe. national borders are meaningless. And you cannot isolate a nation and pretend that the virus will not escape.
I would advise everyone to maintain very strict isolation and anti-virus protocols. Wear a mask, even if no one else is. Make sure that you always wash your hands, and if you touch something, make sure that you use hand sanitizer afterwards.
Sure, it seems like over-kill. And maybe it is. If nothing further happens, at least your exposure to the common cold will be greatly reduced. But if something does actually happen, you will be well protected against it.
Do. Not. Follow. The. Herd.
Johns Hopkins Doctor Predicts Covid ‘Will Be Mostly Gone By April’ – Mediaite
There is more than one virus out there. And the nasty strains have yet to hit the USA. You heard it here first. Let’s pray that I am WRONG.
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It’s 2021. The Trump neocon war-loving administration has been run out of Washington DC in a most spectacular fashion. And the new Bideon administration is left picking up the pieces left by the “wrecking balls” of Trump, Pompeo, Tom Cotton, and John Bolton. We are truly lucky the world is not engulfed in nuclear flames. Never the less the international damage they have created has been substantial, critical, long-lasting, and visceral.
The diplomats have returned to the negotiating tables, and have found them all broken, smashed, on fire, and in many cases damaged beyond repair. In some cases the entire rooms have been demolished, and a wrecking ball has dissembled the entire structure. All that remains is bare earth, with broken shards of pottery, a few tangled branches, and a heavily salted surface. No life can grow there ever again.
Here is a diplomat, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.), the new incoming ambassador to China discussing the new world of China-USA relationships. He does so after the horrific damage of the Trump administration from 2017 through 2020.
It’s a great read.
It’s nice to see articulate diplomats talking instead of bullies, thugs, and religious ideological zealots trying to invoke the “second coming of Christ” through provoking global thermonuclear warfare.
In the belief mind you, that any war with China will be on American terms, American defined battle field, with the weapons that America would choose, and that everyone in the world would side with America. Because America is "exceptional", has "freedom" and "liberty" because of it's wonderful "democracy".
Now the ambassador is a diplomat, and he is talking to a group of policy planners in Washington DC. This is an important speech as it gives the policy planners direction. It is their “marching orders” (so to speak) telling them what areas that need to be worked on and how to go about it.
So, obviously, he can not talk about the “black” side of the Trump administration’s attacks upon China. Such as…
Bio-weapon, COVID-19 the plan to suppress China while keeping America intact.
“Tit for tat” destruction of aircraft carriers. First China then it’s retaliation on US soil.
Hong Kong riots, death, destruction and mayhem. “I want to see HK burn.“
Drones to spray biological weapons to kill all Chinese livestock.
Biological viruses to kill off grains and induce famine.
Assassinations and “Black operations” in Taiwan.
MIA of elite forces who attempted landings on Chinese territorial islands.
Destruction and rerouting of IC chip manufacturing equipment destined for China.
…For starters.
But this is a public forum, and the comments are not intended to be a complete review of all the actions by the Trump Administration to attack China. It is to present the publicly observed efforts, and put them into perspective relative to the new direction that the Biden Administration has undertaken.
This is necessary. After all, the American, UK, Australia, and Indian press has been swamped with a “fire-hose of disinformation” that basically stated that Biden will continue the same actions, paths, and behaviors regarding China as the Trump Administration…
But as I have repeatedly stated, this disinformation is all bullshit. That is the way democracies work. If you don’t like the policies of one President, you elect a different on, and the policies will change appropriately.
So ignore the idea that the Biden administration is going to continue the Trump / Pompeo / Cotton and John Bolton “hybrid-war” with China. This formal and public announcement says otherwise.
Remarks to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. By video link, Washington, D.C. 11 February 2021
Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon decided to ignore Napoleon’s advice to “let [China] sleep, for when it wakes it will astonish the world.”[1] I was there when China opened its eyes. And I have watched it transform the various orders of the world and become an American obsession.
Every generation of Americans feels obliged to reinvent the China policies it inherits from its predecessor. We can be sure our country will eventually get its policies right – after we’ve exhausted all the alternatives. But we have not yet done so. And, for many reasons, our latest policies toward China are almost certain to prove self-defeating.
We have just exited the most bizarre presidency in our history. One of its distinguishing characteristics was the substitution in our foreign relations of unrestricted economic warfare for diplomacy. Bluster and bullying replaced dialogue and reason aimed at convincing the recalcitrant to see that it could be in their interest as well as ours for them to do things our way.
In the last half of the last century, we Americans made the rules. Others got into the habit of following us. To some extent, that habit – though fading – has outlasted our adherence to the principles we once stood for. So military posturing, economic intimidation, diatribe, and attempted regime change are becoming the norm in international relations. China is a case in point. Sino-American relations now exemplify Freeman’s third law of strategic dynamics: for every hostile act there is an even more hostile reaction.
Americans have an inbuilt missionary impulse. We enjoy protecting, tutoring, lecturing, and hectoring other peoples on how to correct their character to approximate our idealized image of ourselves. We are offended when others insist on independence from us and on preserving their own political culture. China has never wavered in its determination to do both, wishful thinking by American politicians and pundits notwithstanding.
In America’s pas de deux with China, we have consistently been the initiator of the dance and taken the lead. We developed some well-founded complaints about Chinese economic behavior, so we launched a trade war with it. We were alarmed about China’s potential to outcompete us internationally, so we decided to try to cripple it with an escalating campaign of “maximum pressure.” We saw China as a threat to our continued military primacy, so we sought to contain and encircle it. Cumulatively, we have:
declared China to be an adversary and called for regime change in Beijing;
launched an invective-filled global propaganda campaign against China, its ruling Communist Party, and its fumbled initial response to COVID-19;
sanctioned allies and partners for failing to curtail their own dealings with China;
replaced market-driven trade with China with government management of economic exchanges based on tariffs, quotas, sanctions, and export bans;
abandoned or attempted to sabotage international organizations in which we deemed Chinese influence to be greater than ours;
kneecapped the WTO, trashing the rule-bound order for international economic relations we had taken seven decades to elaborate;
attempted to block Chinese investment and lending in third countries;
blacklisted Chinese companies and delisted them on our stock markets;
curtailed visas, criminalized scientific exchanges, and banned technology exports to China;
closed a Chinese consulate (losing one of our own as a result) and initiated tit-for-tat reductions in reporting by journalists;
sought to terminate Chinese sponsorship of language teaching in our country, and discouraged in-country study by potential federal employees;
reidentified the United States with Beijing’s civil war adversary in Taipei and violated the Taiwan-related terms of U.S. normalization with Beijing;
stepped up provocative air and sea patrols along China’s borders; and
begun to reconfigure both our conventional and nuclear forces to fight a war with China in its near seas or on its claimed and established territory.
These actions have gotten China’s attention, much as they got Japan’s when we applied a range of considerably less hostile measures to it in 1941. Japan reacted by attacking Pearl Harbor. China has not yet lost its cool. But it has:
reciprocated U.S. tariffs and sanctions;
begun to diversify its sources of essential agricultural and industrial products to end dependence on the United States, which it now regards as its supplier of last resort;
broadened and accelerated its effort to become scientifically and technologically self-reliant and independently innovative;
courted countries and international organizations alienated by U.S. unilateralism;
created new international institutions to complement existing bodies, in which it is now increasingly assertive;
refocused its foreign policy toward the development of cooperative relationships with Europe, Southeast and West Asia, Africa, and Latin America;
joined other countries aggravated by unilateral U.S. sanctions based on dollar hegemony in seeking a new world monetary order in which the dollar is no longer the dominant medium of trade settlement;
adopted an obnoxiously uncivilized demeanor in its foreign relations while remaining risk averse on issues like Taiwan and U.S. naval harassment of its presence in the South China Sea; and
continued to modernize its military to fend off and defeat an American attack on its homeland or near seas.
If this were a game of chess, we’d be easy to spot. We’re the player with no plan beyond an aggressive opening move. That is not just not a winning strategy. It’s no strategy at all. The failure to think several moves ahead matters. The protracted struggle we have launched with China is not a board game, but something vastly more serious. It is not in any respect a repeat of our victorious competition with the sclerotic USSR. And the days when we could act internationally without incurring consequences are past.
So far in the contest with China, not so good.
Our farmers have lost most of their $24 billion market in China, perhaps permanently. Our companies have had “to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S. workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies.”[2] Our tariff increases and turn to government-managed trade have cost an estimated 245,000 American jobs,[3] while shaving something like $320 billion off our GDP.[4] On average, American families are paying as much as $1,277 more each year for everything from apparel and shoes to toys, electronic goods, and household appliances.[5]
In 2017, when we launched the first of our wave of economic attacks on China, our trade deficit with it was $375 billion. Last year, it appears to have fallen to about $295 billion. Over the same period, however, our global trade deficit rose from $566 billion to an estimated $916 billion. This reflects a shift of Chinese production to Taiwan, the EU, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and elsewhere. There has been almost no “reshoring” of the industrial jobs American companies originally outsourced to China. According to an Oxford Economics study, if the Biden administration leaves current policies in place, the United States can expect cumulative job losses of 320,000 by 2025, and our GDP will be $1.6 trillion less than it would otherwise be.[6]
As is normal in wars, whether economic or military, the other side has also taken some casualties, but they appear to have been considerably lighter than ours. China’s overall trade surplus last year rose to a new high of $535 billion. Beijing improved its international position by lowering tariff barriers to imports from sources other than the United States, striking free trade deals with other Asian countries and the EU, and helping to sponsor a trade dispute-settlement mechanism to replace the US-sabotaged WTO. China is expected to contribute one-third of global growth this year. It is becoming an innovation powerhouse. Forty percent of global venture capital investments are now Chinese – on a par with our own.
The U.S. focus has been on tripping up China rather than improving our own international competitiveness. This is an expression of complacent hubris rather than a plan. It is a sure way to lose ground, not gain it. The United States continues to disinvest in education, infrastructure, and science. We are making no effort to curtail the anti-competitive impact of domestic oligopolies or reform the corporate culture that drives companies to offshore work instead of retaining and retraining American workers to use more efficient technologies. Our country is more closed to foreign talent and ideas than ever before. The United States is still among the most innovative societies on the planet, but others are overtaking us. It does not help that we have come to value financial engineering more than the real thing.
Recent polling shows that most of the world now sees our political system as broken, our governance as incompetent, our economic and racial inequalities as perniciously debilitating, our policies as domineering, and our word as unreliable. Ranting and raving about China’s initial mishandling of the outbreak in Wuhan a bit over a year ago of a previously unknown coronavirus has not made the world less impressed by Beijing’s amazing ability to recover from a bungled start and counter and control the pandemic on its territory.[7] Nor has it obscured the contrast between China’s performance and the catastrophically incompetent U.S. response to the virus. Even our closest allies, partners, and friends now expect China to surpass us in wealth and power within the decade. Last year, in the culmination of a trend that preceded the pandemic, China passed the United States to become the world’s largest recipient of foreign companies’ investments. If we do not fix our domestic embarrassments, other countries may come to see us as a problem to be avoided rather than a partner to be courted.
Meanwhile, China has not broken stride. Its students’ performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is already among the best in the world. It is investing 8 percent more each year in education. China already accounts for one-fourth of the world’s STEM workforce and is widening its lead. Measured in purchasing power, its investment in science is now almost on a par with our own and rising at an annual rate of 10 percent, as ours continues to fall. China’s infrastructure is universally envied. It already accounts for 30 percent of the world’s manufactures, versus our 16 percent, and the gap is growing. Last year it became the world’s largest consumer market. Its economy is, for the most part, not dominated by monopolies or oligopolies, but fragmented and ferociously competitive.
In short, China has many problems, but it has its act together and appears, by and large, to be on top of them.
China’s principal challenge to us is not military but economic and technological. But our country is geared up to deal only with military threats. So, China has become both the antidote to our post-Cold War enemy deprivation syndrome and a gratifying driver of U.S. defense spending. If you think you’re St. George, everything looks like a dragon. We have been unable to tame China, so we now dream of slaying it. The dragon is alert to this. We are in China’s face. It is not in ours. Not yet anyway. But if you go abroad in search of dragons to arouse, they may eventually follow you home.
There are American aircraft and ships aggressively patrolling China’s borders, but no Chinese aircraft and ships off ours. American bases ring China. There are no Chinese bases near us. Still, we are upping our defense budget to make our ability to overwhelm China’s defenses more credible. We do so in the name of deterring Chinese aggression against China’s Asian neighbors. But military assault is not the threat from China that agitates its neighbors.
The countries of the Indo-Pacific are universally apprehensive about China’s increasingly bullying demands for deference, but none fears Chinese conquest. We are distraught that we can no longer breeze through China’s increasingly effective defenses to strike it. We have counted on being able to do so if the unfinished civil war with the newly democratized descendant of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan resumes. We seem to think that a war with China over Taiwan could be limited like Korea and Vietnam. But such a war would begin on Chinese territory and be fought directly with Chinese forces, not in third countries or by allies or proxies of either China or the United States.
It’s comforting to assume that we are so powerful that, if we strike another people’s homeland, they will refrain from retaliating against ours. We prefer not to think about China’s capacity to reach out and hurt us, including with nuclear weapons, if we hurt it. But this is delusional and it misses the point. We cannot hope to deal with China’s politico-economic, diplomatic, and technological challenge by engaging it in armed combat or threatening to do so. We cannot outspend it militarily. And we can no longer hope to beat it on its home ground.
Rivalry, in which each side competes to outdo another, can raise the competence of those engaged in it. So, it is potentially beneficial. But adversarial antagonism, in which competitors seek to win by hamstringing each other, is not. It entrenches hostility, justifies hatred, injures, and threatens to weaken both sides.
If we are to compete effectively with China and other rising and resurgent powers, we must upgrade many aspects of our performance. This will require a serious effort at domestic reform and self-strengthening. And it will take time. Trying to bring down foreign countries to prevent them from surpassing us is more likely to backfire than to succeed. We need to take a hard look at where we are falling behind and make the changes necessary to power ahead.
The United States is endowed with unexampled geopolitical, human, ideological, and physical advantages. With the right policies, we can outcompete any challenger, however formidable. But, if we seek to hamstring our competitors, we should expect them to respond in kind. If we treat China as our Nemesis, China has the capacity to become Her.
In the third decade of the 21st century, Americans can no longer reliably command international support for our preferred approaches to international issues. Others have come to doubt the wisdom, propriety, and constancy of our policies and suspect they are formulated without taking their interests into account.
Many countries are apprehensive about the growth of China’s wealth and power. But – without exception — they want multilateral or plurilateral backing to balance and cope with this challenge, not unilateral, confrontational American activism. They seek to expand trade with China, not contract it. They want to accommodate China on terms that maximize their own independent sovereignties, not make China an enemy or reinstate America as their overlord.
If the United States persists in defining our contest with China in confrontational bilateral terms, we will find ourselves increasingly isolated. Given the unconvincing state of our democracy at present, if we misdefine our China policy as an effort to combat authoritarianism, we will alienate, not attract most other nations. Only if we are willing to be a team player and can credibly claim to be serving the interests of partner powers as well as our own will they stand behind us in support of perceived common interests.
China is an increasingly formidable world power with interests that range from some that parallel ours to others that are antithetical, and still others that are of no consequence to us. We should treat China as the disparate bundle of challenges it is. There are many issues of concern to us that cannot be effectively addressed without Chinese participation. We need to leverage Chinese capacities that serve our interests and counter or immobilize those that don’t. Specifically, we should:
stop pushing China and Russia together in opposition to us;
let market forces – rather than paranoid plutocrats, xenophobic politicians, and ideological crackpots – play the major part in governing trade and investment;
create a predictable framework for trade with China in strategically sensitive sectors, like semiconductors, that safeguards U.S. defense interests while taking advantage of China’s contributions to global supply chains;
compete with China and other countries for influence in international organizations, rather than withdrawing from them because we can no longer dominate them;
seek to cooperate with China to address planetwide problems of common concern like:
the mitigation of climate and environmental degradation;
the reinforcement of global capacity to respond to pandemics and other public health challenges;
the inhibition and, if possible, reversal of nuclear proliferation;
the reconstruction of a globally agreed framework to manage the international transfer of goods, services, and capital;
the maintenance of global economic growth amid financial stability;
the healthy development of the world’s poorer countries;
the setting of standards for new technologies and competition in new strategic domains; and
the reform of global governance.
We should:
work with China and others to ease the now inevitable transition from dollar hegemony to a multilateral monetary order in ways that preserve maximum American influence and independence;
leverage, not boycott, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” to ensure that we benefit from the business opportunities and connectivities it creates;
promote cross-Strait negotiations and mutual accommodation rather than military confrontation between Beijing and Taipei;
expand consular relations, restore journalistic exchanges, and promote Chinese language and area studies to enhance both our presence and our understanding of China.
China and the United States began 2021 in different moods. This year, China will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its ruling Communist Party. Chinese associate the Party with the astonishingly rapid transformation of their country from a poor and beleaguered nation to a relatively well off and strong one. Most Chinese have set aside their traditional pessimism and are optimistic that the enormous progress they have experienced in their lifetimes will continue. China’s decisive handling of the pandemic has bolstered its citizens faith in its system. Morale is high. China is focused on the future.
By contrast, the United States entered this year in an unprecedented state of domestic disarray and demoralization. A plurality of Americans disputes the legitimacy of the newly installed Biden administration, which faces an uphill battle with a Congress well-practiced at gridlock and evading its constitutional responsibilities. Despite a booming stock market supported by cheap money and chronic deficit spending, we are in an economic depression. So far, our answer to this has been limited to subsidizing consumption rather than investing in the rejuvenation of our political economy through attention to infrastructure, education, and reindustrialization. We have our eyes fixed firmly on the immediate, rather than the long term. But, without serious repairs to restore a sound American political economy, our future is in jeopardy, and we will be in no condition to compete with the world’s rising and resurgent great powers, especially China.
Doubling down on military competition with Beijing just gives its military-industrial complex a reason to up the ante and call our bluff. An arms race with China leads not to victory but to mutual impoverishment. As President Eisenhower reminded us sixty years ago, “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And stoking China’s neighbors’ dependency on us rather than helping them become more self-reliant implicates them in our conflicts of interest with China without addressing their own. They need our diplomatic support even more than our military backing to work out a stable modus vivendi with China, which is not going away.
Our China policy should be part of a new and broader Asia strategy, not the main determinant of our relations with other Asian nations or the sole driver of our policies in the region. And to be able to hold our own with China, we must renew our competitive capacity and build a society that is demonstrably better governed, better educated, more egalitarian, more open, more innovative, and healthier as well as freer than all others.
To paraphrase Napoleon, let China take its own path while we take our own. We need to fix our own problems before we try to fix China’s. If we Americans get our priorities right, we can once again be the nation to rise and astonish the world
This fellow is a diplomat, and so his words must be of careful construction. However you can clearly see the angst that he has to deal with after the “wrecking ball” that was Trump / Pompeo.
One of the things that was carefully worded was the idea that any hot war with China WOULD NOT be confined to the South China Sea. That it would open up a Pandora’s Box that the USA is ill-equipped to deal with. What?
Yes. The war-hawks left the room. And a deep understanding is beginning to hit. If the USA attacks China, China would retaliate with nuclear detonations on American soil, and all the largest American cities would be destroyed.
Try to initiate a “brush war”, “police action”, or “drone event” upon China, and most of America will lie in rubble minutes afterwards. China. Does. Not. Play.
Not only that, but they would do so in partnership with Russia, and America would be lucky to withstand the resulting “double tap”, “triple taps” and subsequent bitch-slap into the stone-age.
Look.
It’s 2021. There is a new American administration. They are going to try to work with other nations, and hopefully (in some way) make the world a better place to live. This gives me hope.
But…
Don’t “count your chickens before your eggs hatch”. There are still many challenges that await all of us, and a large number of undefined futures that can still materialize. While it is possible that 2020 under Trump was the Fourth Turning crisis that we all feared, my guess is that this reckoning still lies ahead and we all must be guarded, cautious and open to the realistic possibilities that the future might still hold.
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Well, America is in a process of change. And it is happening, though it is not being reported. Both the alt-Left and the alt-Right are silent on what is actually going on. The American people are being kept ignorant. But you can rest assured that changes are in process. Pieces are moving into place, and not a peep is being reported to anyone.
Things are occurring.
They are not being reported.
Do not be under the impression that it’s all part of [1] the COVID-19 vaccination issue, [2] the round-up of the participants in the White House Riots, or [3] the moves towards diversity, reparations, or [4] any such quasi-political posturing. Those are nice distractions that the “news” likes to take issue about.
Nothing is being reported. Secrets and orders are being carried out in isolation, by trusted operatives, and done in absolute secrecy. You can guarantee that.
Instead, other things are being “reported” in the American “news”. It’s just one distraction after the other. Hey! How’s all that 5G “brain damage” working out, or those dangerous giant zombie killer hornets (from China)? How has the “news” about this improved our life?
Watch out for the dangerous giant zombie killer hornets (from China – don’t you know!).
…
The New Chinese Year of the Bull starts this evening.
And all of China is subdued.
Part of it is because after last year (2020) most people are cautiously guarded. (Which I think is pretty much the same all over the world). But also because of the risk of war (from the United States and the Quad). The USA, even though Biden is President, is still sending military weapons, equipment and a presence to sit off the coast of China and threaten. And that is what it is. Don’t you know.
They sit there and threaten.
Not for “democracy”.
But to appease the wealthy oligarchy cluster (inside the American military Empire) that Biden will not stop the anti-China narrative. You know, a target; a scapegoat, a “evil” must be identified so that the military war machine can gear into action!
Whoosh!
But really the silence is deafening. Why? Well, for the first time in all of Chinese history, fireworks have been banned. Which makes a very quiet holiday, I’ll tell you what.
We put up our yearly door decorations, and bought some food for the holiday. We’ve got a lot of booze, fine delicious food, and plenty of snacks. But, unlike other years, this year we won’t be off going to a ton load of parties.
Unfortunately.
MM’s yearly door decorations are up for the new year.
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There’s a heightened sense of awareness regarding biological weapons (after what happened last year) has got the inspectors running overtime. They are on a ruthless search and destroy mission to catch the (still officially unnamed) COVID-20 and COVID-21 bio-weapons. The ones released in the fall of last year by a very vindictive President Trump. And the Chinese government has taken action in Beijing and Hong Kong regarding the strange appearances of these bio-weapons.
The virus kit now has throat testing for COVID-19 and anal swabs for COVID-20 and COVID-21. Which is making it rather uncomfortable and unpleasant. But (after all) no one really wants to die by vomiting or diarrhea. So you take the exam lying down. Well, actually, on your side. And you allow the masked and garbed medical professional to shove a long cotton swab in your anus and swirl it around about ten times. They do this twice, you know.
Any ways, it’s really making this CNY feel awfully strange and odd.
Just a reminder.COVID-20 Unusually huge sized virus. Swine-based. Human-transmission. Lethal. Causes death by vomiting. Discovered in a Beijing "wet market" within weeks of the Huge Trump-led US Navy Armada sailing home without a military confrontation. When the PLA discovered the virus, President Trump went into a three day "retreat" causing the USA military to go DEFCON ONE. The cover story was that he had the Coronavirus.
COVID-21 Unusually huge sized virus. Tick-based. Human-transmission. Lethal. Causes death by diarrhea. Discovered in Beijing in October right before the US Presidential Election.
The military are out.
Not as a show of force or intimidation. Not for “riots” or any such nonsense, but because China is back at DEFCON ONE. And you can see the military manning their stations. Here’s a picture at the local mall about a fifteen minute walk from my house.
Nothing of concern, mind you. They are just manning their stations.
The Chinese military are all at DEFCON ONE. To translate to the Alt-Right in the audience; “The ChiCom PLA is in full force oppressing the people again.”
.
Usually, it’s a time of “the great migration”, or when everyone goes back home for a month long orgy of eating, drinking, and drinking, and drinking and more eating.
Not this year though.
Everyone is asked to stay home. The local villages have gone door to door asking everyone to tell their relatives to stay put. And bigger cities, like mine, is giving people money to spend at the stores and restaurants to help with the unexpected deviance from tradition.
Now, people ARE having parties, dinners and going out. Just not in their home-towns, and in much smaller and subdued groups.
Chinese New Year is when you go out and drink, and drink, and socialize and eat and eat and eat.
What is all this delicious "democracy" that I keep hearing about? It must be something wonderful and great. It has to be, don't you know, for America to spend trillions of dollars destroying a third of the world for it's survival.
I guess that none of you all realized that this was going on, eh?
Meanwhile, most “normal” and regular folk are having meals with their families. They are all happy affairs, and look sort of like this…
Typical CNY meal in China.
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Not what you would see in an American “Chinese Restaurant” eh?… That’s because what most food in an American-Chinese restaurant are Americanized versions of Chinese food. And it’s sort of the “fast food” version of actual Chinese food.
It’s equivalent to thinking that a McDonald’s “hamburger” is “authentic” American dinner food.
Thinking that a “Chinese Restaurant” in America serves “real and authentic” Chinese food is to think that a McDonald’s hamburger is what a “real” American dinner looks like. While I am sure that (judging from photos of Walt-mart shoppers) that this might be the case, you and I sure as heck knows that it’s not a “real” hamburger.
.
But back to my rant…
Oh, yeah.
Sorry about the food digression. I’m talking about the digression of CNY, and how it is muted because of the Coronavirus, the vomiting-to-death virus, and the Beijing tick virus.
BTW... Did you know that there were ticks in Beijing? I didn't. It's too cold and dry, and dusty for them to live. So the ticks must be a hardy species indeed. Wouldn't you think. That is why they have to use remote-controlled drones to spray human-transmissible tick viruses over the populated Northern cities of China.
(Forehead slap!)
I wonder how America would do if some nation decides to conduct this exact same activity on New York, Chicago or Houston? At the rate America is playing with "fire", it might be a good idea to maintain strong bio-weapon discipline and preventative measures as a matter of habit.
Have you ever watched a magician perform a magic trick? One hand is doing the secret activity, while the other hand is involved in the big deception.
All by the American “news”. Hey! What’s in the “news” today, eh?
You all shouldn’t get too riled up about all this. The big build-up is gearing towards Russia. After all, America needs China to keep supplying the parts, materials and electronics for it’s fighter planes and expensive weapons systems.
The hate-narrative is building up against Russia…
What else is new? Eh?
Just like Ancient Rome that HAD to continually right on the outskirts of the empire and "defeat the barbarians at the gates", America must constantly fight against, terror, hunger, obesity, poverty, communism, and everything else it can find...
...for "democracy!"
…now those dirty commies are putting bounties on killing Americans. How dare they! Stinkin’ dirty commies!
But it’s a new year; the year of the Bull, and it’s gonna be real exciting.
Hunan style fish.
.
But it’s the world we live in.
Right now. Anyways.
The people running the levels of control of America (and Britain) are a tad crazy. And I need to remind everyone of this, because you aren’t watching how the rest of the world are reacting to the craziness that America is today.
I have to show it to you all in a very elementary form.
You know. Something like this…
Yep. Read and learn.
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Now, if I were in the USA I would lie low and make sure that I knew my neighbors really, really well. You all need a true and real sense of unity during times of high stress and upheaval.
I am not advocating armed rebellion.
But rather a way of connecting with friends and family, and a serious decline in the social networks and communication screed that passes for modern American communication these days. Get back to your roots and help each other. If you try to be the “lone wolf” you will end up…
…being alone.
Work together with friends and family.
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And while President Biden is trying to put a “adult in the room ” aura don’t let that fool you. There are elements in government that are working hand-in-hand, and behind the curtain, to force some changes that many people will be very uncomfortable with.
Only this time…
…well…
…those in government are smarter and better prepared to implement the changes that they desire.
Whether you are a drug dealer, a sexual deviant, a LGBT hater, a member of a “hate” group, a tax cheat, or any other of the millions of titles that they use to justify… they can seize everything you own, destroy your life, and send you to the lowest social classes from whence you will die.
.
You know, as someone who actually lives inside a communist country, I can tell you first hand that the rap it gets has little in common with the actual reality. Don’t fear what you do not understand, and please be more understanding of those who hold different views from you.
Now…
That being said, do not turn a blind eye to history. There are some very evil people out there. many of whom prefer to dwell around large urban areas. You know the places, like Washington DC, New York City and Chicago. And they are capable of really taking a wrecking ball to your life. So you need to be alert.
And speaking about changes…
…maybe a review of some history might be in order.
The following is an article titled “46 things I learned from being gulaged Varlam Shalamov spent much of the period from 1937 to 1951 gulaged in the arctic cold of Kolyma. These are the 46 things he learned from the experience”. It was written on January 15, 2020, and described the life inside a Gulag camp in the former Soviet Union. Reprinted as found with notations as shown. All credit to the source and the author.
46 things I learned from being gulaged – Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Shalamov after his first arrest, 1929.
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Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (June 18, 1907 – January 17, 1982) was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent 15 years enslaved in Soviet gulags — six of them in the gold mines in the bitter arctic cold of Kolyma — due in part to having supported Leon Trotsky and praised the anti-Soviet writer Ivan Bunin.
One of Shalamov’s surviving writings is a 1961 list of 46 things he learned from his gulag experience.
You will benefit the most from it by already knowing the basics about these slave camps which worked many inmates to death (and in some cases even forced the slaves to eat each other).
The essay was translated by Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis, and editorial additions are marked in bracketed italics.
What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps
1. The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings. [People can easily turn feral. Do not be under the illusion that we (as humans) are beyond our base natures.]
2. The cold was the principal means of corrupting the soul; in the Central Asian camps people must have held out longer — it was warmer there. [Humans can survive in warmer weather, but colder weather will absolutely kill you.]
3. Friendship and solidarity never arise in difficult, truly severe conditions — when life is at stake. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not in the mine).
[ed: u/LevantineJR had an interesting comment on this: “That this is less than a universal, profound truth, has been demonstrated in the labour camps of Imperial Japan during WW2, as recorded by company commander Ernest Gordon in “Miracle on the River Kwai” a.k.a. “In the Valley of the Kwai” (1963). It’d be very interesting and important to understand why widespread solidarity appeared in the WW2 labour camps in Indochina after a period of ~10 months, while in the GULAG it failed to appear for years, or even decades. Harshness of conditions? The death rates in the Japanese war labour camps were several times higher than in the GULAG. So, the general harshness of conditions is ruled out. Nor could it be simply culture or genes, because those very same inhabitants of Kolyma created resistant collectives of solidarity in the Moscow prisons. Now, what of a particular factor: cold? Plausible, I think. Shalamov may be right that cold was an exceptionally strong, and a sort of a key factor.”]
4. Spite is the last human emotion to survive. A starving man has only enough flesh to feel spite — he is indifferent to everything else.
5. The difference between prison and work camps. Prison strengthens character, and work camps, corrupt the human soul.
In America you can see the difference.
In Pennsylvania, the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate. So Prisons are designed to help people correct their behaviors.
In Arkansas, the purpose of prison is to punish. So all prisons are hard-labor work-camps. It is to make people fear the government and incarceration.
6. Organization is important in survival against an oppressive government. I learned that Stalin’s «triumphs» were possible because he slew innocent people: had there been an organized movement, even one-tenth in number, but organized, it would have swept Stalin away in two days.
7. Humans are resilient. I learned that humans became human because they are physically stronger, tougher than any animal — no horse endures work in the Far North.
8. You need faith, and belief in a higher purpose. I saw that the only group that retained a bit of their humanity, despite the starvation and abuse, were the religious, the sectarians, almost all of them — and the majority of the priests.
9. The easiest to corrupt are those in government. The first ones to be corrupted, the most susceptible, are the party members and military men.
10. People who have never been exposed to raw force, and who expected to debate were often surprised how serious, and how quickly events can go from “neutral” to “hot”. I saw what a forcible argument a simple slap could be for an intellectual.
11. You start to rate people by their ability to be brutal. That people distinguish between camp chiefs according to the power of their punches, to their enthusiasm for beatings.
12. A beating is almost irresistible as an argument («Method number three»).
13. Show Trials was how everything was actually run in the DOJ. I learned the truth about the preparations for the cryptic trials [ed: the show trials of the Great Terror of 1937] from masters of the craft.
14. The “grapevine” is real. I learned why in prison you get political news (arrests, etc.) sooner than on the outside.
15. Rumors always had a basis on reality. That prison (and camp) rumours [ed: known in Russian prison slang as parasha — “the slop bucket”] always turn out to be anything but slop.
16. I learned that one can live on spite alone.
17. I learned that one can live on indifference.
18. Hope is bleached from your life. I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.
19. Don’t stick out. You become a target. I’m proud that at the very beginning, back in 1937, I decided to never become a foreman if my decision could lead to another man’s death, if my will would be forced to serve the authorities oppressing other people, prisoners like myself.
20. My body and spirit proved to be stronger in this great trial than I thought, and I am proud to have betrayed no one, to have sent no one to death nor to the camp, to have denounced no one.
21. It’s easy to give in and sign “the papers” showing your guilt. I’m proud to have made no requests until 1955.
[ed: In 1955 Shalamov made a request for rehabilitation].
22. Bad people are terrible and awesome in their evil. I saw the so called «Beria amnesty» there and then — it was something to see.
[ed: Lavrentiy Beria was one of Stalin’s henchmenHe was a serial rapist and mass murderer who was responsible for, among other things, coming up with the idea for and then carrying out the execution of all of the Soviet Union’s 22,000 Polish prisoners (the Katyn massacre). Shalamov’s “Beria amnesty” is a reference to when Beria released a large number of criminal class gulag prisoners as a political play that backfired on him.]
23. I saw that women are more honest and selfless than men — there was not a single husband at Kolyma who came after his wife. But wives did come; many did (Faina Rabinovitch, Krivoshey’s wife) [ed: See Shalamov’s Green attorney].
24. People still held on to their roles within families. I saw the amazing northerner families (civilians, former prisoners) with their letters to their «lawful husbands and wives» etc.
25. The Wealthy did terrible things to become rich. I saw «the first Soviet Rockefellers», underground millionaires, and heard their confessions.
26. Political prisoners suffered the harshest punishments. If your ideology did not match that of the people running the government, then run for your lives. I saw the hard laborers, and also the large E and B contingents, the Berlag camp.
[ed: Berlag, or Beregovoy Camp Directorate, Special Camp No. 5, was an MVD special camp. These were camps established exclusively for political prisoners convicted according to the more severe sub-articles of Article 58 (enemies of the people). Wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: “There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.”]
27. There are tradeoffs to everything you do. I learned that one can achieve a lot (a hospital, a work transfer), but at the risk of life — at the cost of a beating and the isolation cell cold.
28. Cells some in different shapes and sizes. All are unpleasant. I saw an isolation cell carved out in rock, and spent one night in it myself.
29. Power is seductive, and entraps everyone. The lust for power, for unpunished murder is great — from big shots down to regular police operatives with rifles (Seroshapka [ed: See Shalamov’s Berries] and his ilk).
30. To protect yourself, you learn to rat-out others, anyone else, just to survive. I learned the unrestrained Russian lust to denounce, to complain.
31. There are no “good” and “bad” people. I learned that world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. 95% of cowards are capable of any meanness, lethal meanness, after light threatening.
32. Prison and work camps do not improve anyone. It’s all a corrupt system of suppression. I am convinced: the camp is a negative experience — entirely. If one spent but an hour there — it would be an hour of moral corruption. The camp has never given anything to anyone — and never could. Everyone, both prisoners and civilians, are corrupted by the camp.
33. Work and “rehabilitation” camps were everywhere, just not advertised to the public. In every region there was a work camp, there was one at every major construction site. Millions, tens of millions of prisoners.
[ed: Estimations of gulag slaves between 1928/9 and 1953 (earlier gulag stats much harder to analyze) range from 14 to 25 million. This number excludes the millions who were “internally exiled” to the wilds or just outright murdered.]
34. A corrupt government leadership corrupts everything. Repressions touched not only the ruling elite but all levels of society — in every village, at every plant, in every family either relatives or friends were repressed.
35. Being helpful to others provides inner peace. I consider the best time of my life to be the months spent in the cell of Butyrki prison, where I managed to strengthen the spirit of those who were weak and where everyone spoke freely.
36. Live day to day, in the “now”. I learned to «plan» one day ahead, no further.
37. Bosses become a different kind of animal. I learned that kingpins are not human.
38. Everyone becomes equal in a work camp. That there are no criminals at the camp, there are your present (and future) neighbors caught behind the line of the law and not those who crossed it.
39. Being a thief is a survival skill. I learned how terrible the ego of a boy, of a youth is: better steal than ask. This and their boasting throws youth to the bottom.
40. When you are isolated away from women, you don’t enjoy their pleasures. Women didn’t play a big role in my life — camp is the reason.
41. Character discernment is useless. The discernment of character is a useless ability — I am unable to change my ways for any scum that comes along.
42. Avoid being the last. The last in the row, which are hated by everyone — by guards and inmates alike — are those dropping behind, the sick, the weak, those incapable of running in the cold.
43. Power comes from a gun. I learned what power is and what a man with a gun means.
44. The balance of justice shifts in a work camp. That the scale is shifted, and this is what is most typical in a work camp.
45. Returning to civilian life is difficult. That passing from a prisoner condition to civilian is very hard, and nearly impossible without a long adaptation period. [It took me about three weeks to get used to soft chairs, commodes with seats, electrical wall outlets, and being able to go outside at will. Not to mention being able to taste salt and sugar, and seasonings. Cheese, butter, and fruit are all glorious.]
Conclusions
Yeah. It’s an interesting piece of history. I think that it gives us an insight into our human nature. Now, let’s all pray that the conditions for mass enslavement of citizens is never replicated ever again. But, let’s be real. OK?
It can.
All it takes is a national leadership that wants to do this (for their own purposes) and an ineffectual department of Justice, and a complete lack (or omission) of leadership policing organizations.
Meanwhile…
Here in China it’s a new year. It’s 2021 and it’s the year of the Bull. Most people are optimistic, even though they are cautiously guarded.
For a while I used to get a new coffee mug at every New Year. It was my little pleasure; to have a new coffee mug to drink out of each year. Unfortunately I feel out of the habit. But that is neither good nor bad. It’s just a sign of change… and a sign of change tends to indicate growth.
Here’s some pictures from my friends. Taken as a whole it might give you all a “flavor” as to what this very strange and odd year of the Bull is starting out as…
Typical. Wine to drink. The Chinese do not daintily sip wine slowly. They drink entire glasses in one singular gulp. Like this gal is doing. She announces “Geng Bei” and empties the entire glass. This picture is a sign of respect to the new in-coming year. It means “I salute your arrival”.
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Seems strange? Yeah. But it’s a different culture. They aren’t afraid of losing their jobs for drinking wine on their holidays (like I was threatened at General Motors, Delco Electronic, and Poulan Weed-Eater.) And so, living without fear of “consequences” enables people to live life freely.
It’s called “freedom”. You all should try it some time.
Red envelopes. In the Chinese New Year, everyone gives each other “Red Envelopes” full of money. This is instead of presents. There are all sorts of rules regarding it. And they differ from region to region. In general, families pass money back and forth easily, and the kids make out like bandits. Young boys buy toy guns, and games. Young girls buy dolls, APPs and some trinkets.
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This shows what it is like to get a “red envelope” from a brother or sister. Or perhaps a friend, or an uncle. It’s all very typical.
While I have discussed the enormous red envelopes that companies would give to their employees (in prior articles), this article is on a more personal basis. It’s about celebrating holidays with friends and family.
Red envelopes can come with notes and messages, or just be a thank you for business or friendship. We used to give out red envelopes to our mail mean (actually the UPS equivalent), the local BaoAn(s) which are the security guards to the complex, the management, and the janitorial staff.
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Again. All this is very typical, and very normal. And isn’t at all being reported by the “informed news” out of America. Have you ever heard of FOX “news” reporting on the red envelopes in China? Have you ever heard Rush Limbaugh discuss it? What about Ellen DeGeneres?
Silence.
Crickets.
And yet some people have the nerve to think that they are well “informed” on the Geo-political issues of the day by listening to “American news”. Give me a break.
Chinese companies process wads of cash to give out to their employees during CNY. All untaxed. All in hard cold cash. How about American and British companies? What do your end-of-year bonuses look like? Tell me about it.
.
yes.
Anyways, money is great, and we could all use more of it, don’t you know. But What I really like about the Chinese new year is all the eating and drinking. I just love food. Yes. It is true, I am a “foodie”, and who can blame me?
Shots of BaiJiu are the norm.
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And here’s some more pictures of what is going on in China right now, today. Tell me about how CNN is reporting on it. Tell me about what Twitter, and Facebook has to say about it. Please give me insight in how you all can understand China by listening to MSNBC. I’d like to know.
A typical family gathering.
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Almost like what you would see in the United States. Almost. Only here in China, the adults drink alcohol alongside with the children who drink whatever they want. Since there are no prohibitions (read LAWS) banning things, most children have the opportunity to drink with their parents, and can get exposed to alcohol very early age.
But…
They don’t drink because it is meaningless to them. it is something that ‘adults do”, and you all know that adults are ‘square” and not “hip” and “groovy”. So they tend not to become addicts.
Another typical meal.
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All this is what is happening right now. People are celebrating the end of 2020, the year of the rat, and welcoming in 2021, the year of the Bull. I pretty much assume that this is what was going on in America as well, though to different extent. And in a different manner.
As well as on a different date.
Typical CNY and CNY eve meals.
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It’s different and even shocking for most Americans. I think that this is because they don’t know what “freedom” is. They have been repeating the mantras for decades with no understanding, and when they see how other nations live, they become horrified.
“This can’t possibly be true!” They retort.
Everyone knows that….
Yeah.
“Everyone knows…”
Who told them?
Guess which nation this photograph was taken? American LGBT advertising for a “roommate” in Wal-Mart.
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Sometimes the strange image out of America are just the “tip of the iceberg”, and are but distractions from the master hand-movements of the master deceptions made by the oligarchy? And if so…
…then…
Maybe Americans are already living in a nice Gulag already, but they don’t yet realize it.
That maybe it’s all just a matter of degree. Why construct work camps here and there? Why not turn the entire nation into one gigantic labor camp? Why not? When you can print unlimited money? Control the media, and have a forever-lock on the government, and can make rules and laws with no opposition,and not even follow “guidelines” let alone the “guaranteed” Rights…
…what’s stopping you?
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Long time MM readers will have no problem with this. By looking at all the evidence regarding what has been going on with America, every single indicator has pointed to the need to identify an external threat and then use that threat to unify America against. The problem has been, and continues to be, that the United States is in no state to fight anyone, let alone throw spit balls at it.
So it has to resort to non-obvious means to attack it.
The best image that I can give is imagine a very old, febble, sickly man in a wheelchair. He doesn’t like the other people in the cafeteria. So when no one is watching he puts some of his blood pressure medicine in their soup.
That’s America today.
America today.
All of this is tiring.
To prevent anyone from noticing that the old geezer was putting his medicine in the other people’s food, he starts yelling and pointing at the others at the table. He screams at them! Claims that they are dirty, ugly, corrupt, sinister, and everything that he can think of. And when they try to say anything. He throws used tissue at them, tosses his flip-flops at them, and then starts spitting at everyone.
Of course he is allowed to do this.
For he is a respected old man, and he has friends. He also has a large group of “enforcers” that do his bidding. No one at the table is unaware of this. They jsut want to keep out of his way, and don’t get on his bad side.
The old man has a nice army of protectors that do his bidding.
.
Never the less, he really is out of control. And after a while with soup splashed everywhere, and yelling and screaming, and some of the other retired patients being wheeled away to their own rooms, a growing silence emerges.
The hospital orderlies move forward to get him under control.
That’s where we are today.
Introduction
Other people are still investigating the myrid of issues and events that the Trump administration set in motion. They need to. Whether or not you like Turmp or hate his, for four years the White House was staffed with war-mongering neocons. If you think that all they did was provike the world into war, then you are fully mistaken. All anyone sees is just “the tip of the iceberg”.
The ramifications of the Trump Administration will continue to unravel for decades to come. Some can be undone, while others might manifest as some very nasty events that will “pop up out of the blue”. Stay frosty.
The following is a great article. It is reprinted in it’s entirety.
Phew!
It is terribly TECHNICAL, and it is not an easy read. It is archived here on MM for those with more than just a casual understanding of bio-weapon design. Also for those of you that still hold on to the [1] American public narrative that it is a natural pandemic, or the CIA narrative [2] that it is an escaped bio-weapon out of China. This is for you.
For the rest of us, well… we know what the Hell is going on.
It is titled “Tracking Israeli Involvement: University of North Carolina generated COVID-19 (censored/suppressed)” By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor written on February 9, 2021. It can be found HERE if you like Facebook, or directly HERE on VT. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the author.
Tracking Israeli Involvement: University of North Carolina generated COVID-19 (censored/suppressed)
Update: VT has been tracking COVID stats and disinformation/censorship since day one. Now, in light of the Beirut attack (Trump backs us up), we now view the release of a hybridized version of COVID 19 on the New York metropolitan area as a terror attack.
Stats on hospitalization and deaths there have been altered/censored which proves this was a biological attack. Death rates were many times higher than elsewhere and even target specifically the Jewish population, something Israel has done before.
We have watched Google Corporation’s manipulation of the internet, we have tracked them and find clear and absolute evidence that ties those who executed the Beirut attack to those who released COVID 19 on the US and the world.
We have also watched Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Twitter censored Beirut videos and coordinate with MSM to sell a fake narrative involving unexplorable fertilizer while evidence mounts of a massive not only attack by Israel but a brilliant set of feints also, drones, planes, and even a missile.
Who knows, a nuke could have been loaded there with ease right off a truck and no one would notice.
Now with Beirut in shambles, the UAE joining Greater Israel, and the Qanon monstrosity selling a police state to the rabble, the inexplicable becomes clear.
Below, we [1] prove the creation of COVID, which was [2] a CIA project done through a cover program at a private university using bioweapons experts. Now [3] we see it released, the target? [4] Looting the US economy, [5] bringing America to civil war, and [6] allowing power to centralize under Kosher Nostra control without the subterfuge, now unnecessary.
This article contains hard proof that cannot be questioned or denied, which you may submit to any government agency or healthcare professional.
What is not yet proven but coming into focus is that the US biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, equipment and certainly key staff, certainly migrated to secret labs at large state universities in order to “hide in plain sight.”
Follow the careers, all links are included, of those who worked on the Wuhan-COVID project in 2017.
Also, note that the exact same personnel and equipment is used for fake “prevention” research and testing as weaponization and actual production.
Since this article was written, we have begun to look at worldwide operations of US nuclear/bio/chem contractor, Kushner-Trump’s favorite, Battelle, and their secret labs around the world.
When we began, our people started to be threatened. That was a serious mistake.
Submit this paper to any physician or other qualified bio-sciences specialist. See what they say.
Documents below will show that research to create COVID 19 began in the United States in 2006 and culminated in a successful bio-weapon in 2015, with work done at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard and at the Food and Drug Administration’s lab in Arkansas.
Their work was titled:
“A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence“
They did this and more, so much more as you will read below.
As Trump said, over and over and over, the Chinese were involved.
Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China supplied the Wuhan Bat Virus which was used in the American study.
Their name was included for that reason only.
COVID 19 was a US Army bio-weapons project to manufacture a pneumonia-causing disease that would be nearly impossible to vaccinate for in patients over 40 years old.
The proof is here, simply scroll down. The study was run by the University of North Carolina and funded by USAID/CIA. It chose a Chinese bat virus and chose to include a medical facility in Wuhan as well.
Now we know why, a smokescreen of the blame for a program China had little or nothing to do with, something satanically evil and purely American.
In November 2015, a study was published outlining the capability of producing the virus we are dealing with now. Among the many involved was a lab in Wuhan, China. It was listed from the beginning as one of the dozens, mostly American, working on this project.
However, one key participant was left out, USAID. It is suspected, deeply so, that USAID is a front for American bio-warfare research such as that done in Tbilisi, Georgia, and elsewhere, much documented. This is the citation that adds USAID to the research funding group.
Change history
20 November 2015
In the version of this article initially published online, the authors omitted to acknowledge a funding source, USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance, to Z.-L.S. The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.
[ Editor’s Note: We will now present Pravda’s biased article and, below that, the actual study proving the capability of producing COVID 19, proving it is not a naturally occurring virus once and for all.
As to who did what, this is not our job but we are proving, categorically, that when a Chinese lab is mentioned, it is a minor player in an American effort, as outlined exhaustively below.
This makes discussing the Wuhan lab possibly complicit in bio-warfare.
Similarly, when Forbes Magazine and others stated they could prove COVID 19 was made naturally, and of course they had the same access we have, we suspect that they are part of a disinformation effort tied to USAID and bio-warfare.
Suspicion is not proof. The proof is proof and there is proof enough to drown in. Our thanks to the American medical professionals who pimped themselves out to the US Army and CIA and who helped bring us where we are now, a nation broken to pieces…VeteransToday ]
Pravda.Ru: Such material appeared in 2015 on the website of the scientific journal Natura in 2015. Then the authors claimed that after the advent of the SARS virus (2002-2003) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), scientists were aware of the risk of interspecific transmission that would lead to an epidemic among people.
Successful lab experiment
Among other things, the research team studied bats, which are the largest incubators of coronaviruses. Nevertheless, bats could not transmit the coronavirus to humans because they could not interact with human cells with ACE2 receptors.
The material also stated that horseshoe bats carry a strain of SARS coronavirus that can be transmitted to humans. It has been named the SHC014-CoV virus.
To better study this virus, scientists copied the coronavirus and infected it with laboratory mice. The results showed that the virus is really able to bind to human cells with ACE2 receptors and multiply in the cells of the respiratory system.
In the research work, it is noted that laboratory materials, samples and equipment that were used in the research were obtained from the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Although it is not yet possible to say for sure that the virus that was tested in laboratory mice is the same as the SARS-Cove-2 coronavirus.
NATO policy
However, interesting things can be found in earlier documents.
For example:
The 2019 Alliance’s activity report says that in 2019, the Alliance’s first place in research and development was occupied by the topic of radiochemical and biological protection (29%), shifting the seemingly most pressing problem of Europe – counterterrorism (it turned out to be 4- m priority).
A year earlier, in 2018, the situation was exactly the opposite: terrorism, as it should be, was in the first place (28%), and radiochemical and biological protection in the fourth (13%).
As the Brussels snitch writes in the telegram channel, “given the absence of visible reasons for such a sharp change in scientific interests, there are two options and both are unpleasant:
or NATO now wags the fifth point, falsifying the data to show “and we always prepared for viruses, we are modern”,
or even in 2019 in the alliance, God forgive me, they knew where the trouble would come from.
Yes, the first option is much more real, but, you see, the facts are surprising.
Published: 09 November 2015A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence by Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Sudhakar Agnihothram, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Xing-Yi Ge, Eric F Donaldson, Scott H Randell, Antonio Lanzavecchia, Wayne A Marasco, Zhengli-Li Shi, Ralph S Baric
-Nature Medicine volume 21, pages 1508–1513 (2015)
A Corrigendum to this article was published on 06 April 2016
This article has been updated
Abstract
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin-converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.
Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approach failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.
On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.
Main
The emergence of SARS-CoV heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalization leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact3,4. Since then, several strains—including influenza A strains H5N1, H1N1 and H7N9, and MERS-CoV—have emerged from animal populations, causing considerable disease, mortality and economic hardship for the afflicted regions5. Although public health measures were able to stop the SARS-CoV outbreak4, recent metagenomics studies have identified sequences of closely related SARS-like viruses circulating in Chinese bat populations that may pose a future threat1,6.
However, sequence data alone provides minimal insights to identify and prepare for future pre-pandemic viruses. Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone.
Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.
The sequences of SHC014 and the related RsWIV1-CoV show that these CoVs are the closest relatives to the epidemic SARS-CoV strains (Fig. 1a,b); however, there are important differences in the 14 residues that bind human ACE2, the receptor for SARS-CoV, including the five that are critical for host range: Y442, L472, N479, T487 and Y491 (ref. 7).
In WIV1, three of these residues vary from the epidemic SARS-CoV Urbani strain, but they were not expected to alter binding to ACE2 (Supplementary Fig. 1a,b and Supplementary Table 1). This fact is confirmed by both pseudotyping experiments that measured the ability of lentiviruses encoding WIV1 spike proteins to enter cells expressing human ACE2 (Supplementary Fig. 1) and by in vitro replication assays of WIV1-CoV (ref. 1). In contrast, 7 of 14 ACE2-interaction residues in SHC014 are different from those in SARS-CoV, including all five residues critical for host range (Supplementary Fig. 1c and Supplementary Table 1).
These changes, coupled with the failure of pseudotyped lentiviruses expressing the SHC014 spike to enter cells (Supplementary Fig. 1d), suggested that the SHC014 spike is unable to bind human ACE2. However, similar changes in related SARS-CoV strains had been reported to allow ACE2 binding7,8, suggesting that additional functional testing was required for verification.
Therefore, we synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the replication-competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone (we hereafter refer to the chimeric CoV as SHC014-MA15) to maximize the opportunity for pathogenesis and vaccine studies in mice (Supplementary Fig. 2a). Despite predictions from both structure-based modeling and pseudotyping experiments, SHC014-MA15 was viable and replicated to high titers in Vero cells (Supplementary Fig. 2b). Similar to SARS, SHC014-MA15 also required a functional ACE2 molecule for entry and could use human, civet and bat ACE2 orthologs (Supplementary Fig. 2c,d).
To test the ability of the SHC014 spike to mediate infection of the human airway, we examined the sensitivity of the human epithelial airway cell line Calu-3 2B4 (ref. 9) to infection and found robust SHC014-MA15 replication, comparable to that of SARS-CoV Urbani (Fig. 1c).
To extend these findings, primary human airway epithelial (HAE) cultures were infected and showed robust replication of both viruses (Fig. 1d). Together, the data confirm the ability of viruses with the SHC014 spike to infect human airway cells and underscore the potential threat of cross-species transmission of SHC014-CoV.
Figure 1: SARS-like viruses replicate in human airway cells and produce in vivo pathogenesis.
(a) The full-length genome sequences of representative CoVs were aligned and phylogenetically mapped as described in the Online Methods. The scale bar represents nucleotide substitutions, with only bootstrap support above 70% being labeled. The tree shows CoVs divided into three distinct phylogenetic groups, defined as α-CoVs, β-CoVs and γ-CoVs. Classical subgroup clusters are marked as 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d for the β-CoVs and as 1a and 1b for the α-CoVs.
(b) Amino acid sequences of the S1 domains of the spikes of representative β-CoVs of the 2b group, including SARS-CoV, were aligned and phylogenetically mapped. The scale bar represents the amino acid substitutions.
(c,d) Viral replication of SARS-CoV Urbani (black) and SHC014-MA15 (green) after infection of Calu-3 2B4 cells (c) or well-differentiated, primary air-liquid interface HAE cell cultures (d) at a multiplicity of infection (MOI) of 0.01 for both cell types. Samples were collected at individual time points with biological replicates (n = 3) for both Calu-3 and HAE experiments.
(e,f) Weight loss (n = 9 for SARS-CoV MA15; n = 16 for SHC014-MA15) (e) and viral replication in the lungs (n = 3 for SARS-CoV MA15; n = 4 for SHC014-MA15) (f) of 10-week-old BALB/c mice infected with 1 × 104 p.f.u. of mouse-adapted SARS-CoV MA15 (black) or SHC014-MA15 (green) via the intranasal (i.n.) route.
(g,h) Representative images of lung sections stained for SARS-CoV N antigen from mice infected with SARS-CoV MA15 (n = 3 mice) (g) or SHC014-MA15 (n = 4 mice) (h) are shown. For each graph, the center value represents the group mean, and the error bars define the s.e.m. Scale bars, 1 mm.
To evaluate the role of the SHC014 spike in mediating infection in vivo, we infected 10-week-old BALB/c mice with 104 plaque-forming units (p.f.u.) of either SARS-MA15 or SHC014-MA15 (Fig. 1e–h). Animals infected with SARS-MA15 experienced rapid weight loss and lethality by 4 d post-infection (d.p.i.); in contrast, SHC014-MA15 infection produced substantial weight loss (10%) but no lethality in mice (Fig. 1e). Examination of viral replication revealed nearly equivalent viral titers from the lungs of mice infected with SARS-MA15 or SHC014-MA15 (Fig. 1f). Whereas lungs from the SARS-MA15–infected mice showed robust staining in both the terminal bronchioles and the lung parenchyma 2 d.p.i. (Fig. 1g), those of SHC014-MA15–infected mice showed reduced airway antigen staining (Fig. 1h); in contrast, no deficit in antigen staining was observed in the parenchyma or in the overall histology scoring, suggesting differential infection of lung tissue for SHC014-MA15 (Supplementary Table 2).
We next analyzed infection in more susceptible, aged (12-month-old) animals. SARS-MA15–infected animals rapidly lost weight and succumbed to infection (Supplementary Fig. 3a,b). SHC014-MA15 infection-induced robust and sustained weight loss, but had minimal lethality. Trends in the histology and antigen staining patterns that we observed in young mice were conserved in the older animals (Supplementary Table 3). We excluded the possibility that SHC014-MA15 was mediating infection through an alternative receptor on the basis of experiments using Ace2−/− mice, which did not show weight loss or antigen staining after SHC014-MA15 infection (Supplementary Fig. 4a,b and Supplementary Table 2). Together, the data indicate that viruses with the SHC014 spike are capable of inducing weight loss in mice in the context of a virulent CoV backbone.
Given the preclinical efficacy of Ebola monoclonal antibody therapies, such as ZMApp10, we next sought to determine the efficacy of SARS-CoV monoclonal antibodies against infection with SHC014-MA15. Four broadly neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies targeting SARS-CoV spike protein had been previously reported and are probable reagents for immunotherapy11,12,13. We examined the effect of these antibodies on viral replication (expressed as percentage inhibition of viral replication) and found that whereas wild-type SARS-CoV Urbani was strongly neutralized by all four antibodies at relatively low antibody concentrations (Fig. 2a–d), neutralization varied for SHC014-MA15. Fm6, an antibody generated by phage display and escape mutants11,12, achieved only background levels of inhibition of SHC014-MA15 replication (Fig. 2a). Similarly, antibodies 230.15 and 227.14, which were derived from memory B cells of SARS-CoV–infected patients13, also failed to block SHC014-MA15 replication (Fig. 2b,c). For all three antibodies, differences between the SARS and SHC014 spike amino acid sequences corresponded to direct or adjacent residue changes found in SARS-CoV escape mutants (fm6 N479R; 230.15 L443V; 227.14 K390Q/E), which probably explains the absence of the antibodies’ neutralizing activity against SHC014. Finally, monoclonal antibody 109.8 was able to achieve 50% neutralization of SHC014-MA15, but only at high concentrations (10 μg/ml) (Fig. 2d). Together, the results demonstrate that broadly neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV may only have marginal efficacy against emergent SARS-like CoV strains such as SHC014.
Figure 2: SARS-CoV monoclonal antibodies have marginal efficacy against SARS-like CoVs.
(a–d) Neutralization assays evaluating efficacy (measured as a reduction in the number of plaques) of a panel of monoclonal antibodies, which were all originally generated against epidemic SARS-CoV, against infection of Vero cells with SARS-CoV Urbani (black) or SHC014-MA15 (green). The antibodies tested were fm6 (n = 3 for Urbani; n = 5 for SHC014-MA15)11,12
(a), 230.15 (n = 3 for Urbani; n = 2 for SHC014-MA15)
(b), 227.15 (n = 3 for Urbani; n = 5 for SHC014-MA15)
(c) and 109.8 (n = 3 for Urbani; n = 2 for SHC014-MA15)13
(d). Each data point represents the group mean and error bars define the s.e.m. Note that the error bars in SARS-CoV Urbani–infected Vero cells in b,c are overlapped by the symbols and are not visible.
To evaluate the efficacy of existing vaccines against infection with SHC014-MA15, we vaccinated aged mice with double-inactivated whole SARS-CoV (DIV). Previous work showed that DIV could neutralize and protect young mice from challenge with a homologous virus14; however, the vaccine failed to protect aged animals in which augmented immune pathology was also observed, indicating the possibility of the animals being harmed because of the vaccination15. Here we found that DIV did not provide protection from challenge with SHC014-MA15 with regards to weight loss or viral titer (Supplementary Fig. 5a,b). Consistent with a previous report with other heterologous groups 2b CoVs15, serum from DIV-vaccinated, aged mice also failed to neutralize SHC014-MA15 (Supplementary Fig. 5c).
Notably, DIV vaccination resulted in robust immune pathology (Supplementary Table 4) and eosinophilia (Supplementary Fig. 5d–f). Together, these results confirm that the DIV vaccine would not be protective against infection with SHC014 and could possibly augment disease in the aged vaccinated group.
In contrast to the vaccination of mice with DIV, the use of SHC014-MA15 as a live, attenuated vaccine showed potential cross-protection against challenge with SARS-CoV, but the results have important caveats. We infected young mice with 104 p.f.u. of SHC014-MA15 and observed them for 28 d. We then challenged the mice with SARS-MA15 at day 29 (Supplementary Fig. 6a). The prior infection of the mice with the high dose of SHC014-MA15 conferred protection against challenge with a lethal dose of SARS-MA15, although there was only a minimal SARS-CoV neutralization response from the antisera elicited 28 d after SHC014-MA15 infection (Supplementary Fig. 6b, 1:200). In the absence of a secondary antigen boost, 28 d.p.i. represents the expected peak of antibody titers and implies that there will be diminished protection against SARS-CoV over time16,17. Similar results showing protection against challenge with a lethal dose of SARS-CoV were observed in aged BALB/c mice with respect to weight loss and viral replication (Supplementary Fig. 6c,d). However, the SHC014-MA15 infection dose of 104 p.f.u. induced >10% weight loss and lethality in some aged animals (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 3). We found that vaccination with a lower dose of SHC014-MA15 (100 p.f.u.), did not induce weight loss, but it also failed to protect aged animals from a SARS-MA15 lethal dose challenge (Supplementary Fig. 6e,f). Together, the data suggest that the SHC014-MA15 challenge may confer cross-protection against SARS-CoV through conserved epitopes, but the required dose induces pathogenesis and precludes use as an attenuated vaccine.
Having established that the SHC014 spike has the ability to mediate infection of human cells and cause disease in mice, we next synthesized a full-length SHC014-CoV infectious clone based on the approach used for SARS-CoV (Fig. 3a)2. Replication in Vero cells revealed no deficit for SHC014-CoV relative to that for SARS-CoV (Fig. 3b); however, SHC014-CoV was significantly (P < 0.01) attenuated in primary HAE cultures at both 24 and 48 h after infection (Fig. 3c). In vivo infection of mice demonstrated no significant weight loss but showed reduced viral replication in lungs of full-length SHC014-CoV infection, as compared to SARS-CoV Urbani (Fig. 3d,e). Together, the results establish the viability of full-length SHC014-CoV but suggest that further adaptation is required for its replication to be equivalent to that of epidemic SARS-CoV in human respiratory cells and in mice.
Figure 3: Full-length SHC014-CoV replicates in human airways but lacks the virulence of epidemic SARS-CoV.
(a) Schematic of the SHC014-CoV molecular clone, which was synthesized as six contiguous cDNAs (designated SHC014A, SHC014B, SHC014C, SHC014D, SHC014E and SHC014F) flanked by unique BglI sites that allowed for directed assembly of the full-length cDNA expressing open reading frames (for 1a, 1b, spike, 3, envelope, matrix, 6–8 and nucleocapsid). Underlined nucleotides represent the overhang sequences formed after restriction enzyme cleavage.
(b,c) Viral replication of SARS-CoV Urbani (black) or SHC014-CoV (green) after infection of Vero cells
(b) or well-differentiated, primary air-liquid interface HAE cell cultures
(c) at an MOI of 0.01. Samples were collected at individual time points with biological replicates (n = 3) for each group. Data represent one experiment for both Vero and HAE cells.
(d,e) Weight loss (n = 3 for SARS-CoV MA15, n = 7 for SHC014-CoV; n = 6 for SARS-Urbani)
(d) and viral replication in the lungs (n = 3 for SARS-Urbani and SHC014-CoV)
(e) of 10-week-old BALB/c mice infected with 1 × 105 p.f.u. of SARS-CoV MA15 (gray), SHC014-CoV (green) or SARS-CoV Urbani (black) via the i.n. route. Each data point represents the group mean, and error bars define the s.e.m. **P < 0.01 and ***P < 0.001 using two-tailed Student’s t-test of individual time points.
During the SARS-CoV epidemic, links were quickly established between palm civets and the CoV strains that were detected in humans4.
Building on this finding, the common emergence paradigm argues that epidemic SARS-CoV originated as a bat virus, jumped to civets, and incorporated changes within the receptor-binding domain (RBD) to improve binding to civet Ace2 (ref. 18).
Subsequent exposure to people in live-animal markets permitted human infection with the civet strain, which, in turn, adapted to become the epidemic strain (Fig. 4a).
However, phylogenetic analysis suggests that early human SARS strains appear more closely related to bat strains than to civet strains18.
Therefore, a second paradigm argues that direct bat-human transmission initiated SARS-CoV emergence and that palm civets served as a secondary host and reservoir for continued infection (Fig. 4b)19. For both paradigms, spike adaptation in a secondary host is seen as a necessity, with most mutations expected to occur within the RBD, thereby facilitating improved infection. Both theories imply that pools of bat CoVs are limited and that host-range mutations are both random and rare, reducing the likelihood of future emergence events in humans.
Figure 4: Emergence paradigms for coronaviruses.
Coronavirus strains are maintained in quasi-species pools circulating in bat populations.
(a,b) Traditional SARS-CoV emergence theories posit that host-range mutants (red circle) represent random and rare occurrences that permit infection of alternative hosts. The secondary-host paradigm
(a) argues that a nonhuman host is infected by a bat progenitor virus and, through adaptation, facilitates transmission to humans; subsequent replication in humans leads to the epidemic viral strain. The direct paradigm
(b) suggests that transmission occurs between bats and humans without the requirement of an intermediate host; selection then occurs in the human population with closely related viruses replicating in a secondary host, permitting continued viral persistence and adaptation in both.
(c) The data from chimeric SARS-like viruses argue that the quasi-species pools maintain multiple viruses capable of infecting human cells without the need for mutations (red circles). Although adaptations in secondary or human hosts may be required for epidemic emergence, if SHC014 spike–containing viruses recombined with virulent CoV backbones (circles with green outlines), then epidemic disease may be the result in humans. Existing data support elements of all three paradigms.
Although our study does not invalidate the other emergence routes, it does argue for a third paradigm in which circulating bat CoV pools maintain ‘poised’ spike proteins that are capable of infecting humans without mutation or adaptation (Fig. 4c). This hypothesis is illustrated by the ability of a chimeric virus containing the SHC014 spike in a SARS-CoV backbone to cause robust infection in both human airway cultures and in mice without RBD adaptation.
Coupled with the observation of previously identified pathogenic CoV backbones3,20, our results suggest that the starting materials required for SARS-like emergent strains are currently circulating in animal reservoirs. Notably, although full-length SHC014-CoV probably requires additional backbone adaption to mediate human disease, the documented high-frequency recombination events in CoV families underscores the possibility of future emergence and the need for further preparation.
To date, genomics screens of animal populations have primarily been used to identify novel viruses in outbreak settings21. The approach here extends these data sets to examine questions of viral emergence and therapeutic efficacy. We consider viruses with the SHC014 spike a potential threat owing to their ability to replicate in primary human airway cultures, the best available model for human disease. In addition, the observed pathogenesis in mice indicates a capacity for SHC014-containing viruses to cause disease in mammalian models, without RBD adaptation.
Notably, differential tropism in the lung as compared to that with SARS-MA15 and attenuation of full-length SHC014-CoV in HAE cultures relative to SARS-CoV Urbani suggest that factors beyond ACE2 binding—including spike processivity, receptor bio-availability or antagonism of the host immune responses—may contribute to the emergence. However, further testing in nonhuman primates is required to translate these findings into the pathogenic potential in humans.
Importantly, the failure of available therapeutics defines a critical need for further study and for the development of treatments. With this knowledge, surveillance programs, diagnostic reagents, and effective treatments can be produced that are protective against the emergence of group 2b–specific CoVs, such as SHC014, and these can be applied to other CoV branches that maintain similarly heterogeneous pools.
In addition to offering preparation against future emerging viruses, this approach must be considered in the context of the US government-mandated pause on gain-of-function (GOF) studies22.
On the basis of previous models of emergence (Fig. 4a,b), the creation of chimeric viruses such as SHC014-MA15 was not expected to increase pathogenicity. Although SHC014-MA15 is attenuated relative to its parental mouse-adapted SARS-CoV, similar studies examining the pathogenicity of CoVs with the wild-type Urbani spike within the MA15 backbone showed no weight loss in mice and reduced viral replication23. Thus, relative to the Urbani spike–MA15 CoV, SHC014-MA15 shows again in pathogenesis (Fig. 1).
On the basis of these findings, scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue, as increased pathogenicity in mammalian models cannot be excluded.
Coupled with restrictions on mouse-adapted strains and the development of monoclonal antibodies using escape mutants, research into CoV emergence and therapeutic efficacy may be severely limited moving forward. Together, these data and restrictions represent a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.
Overall, our approach has used metagenomics data to identify a potential threat posed by the circulating bat SARS-like CoV SHC014. Because of the ability of chimeric SHC014 viruses to replicate in human airway cultures, cause pathogenesis in vivo and escape current therapeutics, there is a need for both surveillance and improved therapeutics against circulating SARS-like viruses. Our approach also unlocks the use of metagenomics data to predict viral emergence and to apply this knowledge in preparing to treat future emerging virus infections.
Methods
Viruses, cells, in vitro infection and plaque assays
Wild-type SARS-CoV (Urbani), mouse-adapted SARS-CoV (MA15) and chimeric SARS-like CoVs were cultured on Vero E6 cells (obtained from United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), grown in Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium (DMEM) (Gibco, CA) and 5% fetal clone serum (FCS) (Hyclone, South Logan, UT) along with antibiotic/antimycotic (Gibco, Carlsbad, CA). DBT cells (Baric laboratory, source unknown) expressing ACE2 orthologs have been previously described for both human and civet; bat Ace2 sequence was based on that from Rhinolophus leschenaulti, and DBT cells expressing bat Ace2 were established as described previously8.
Pseudotyping experiments were similar to those using an HIV-based pseudovirus, prepared as previously described10, and examined on HeLa cells (Wuhan Institute of Virology) that expressed ACE2 orthologs. HeLa cells were grown in minimal essential medium (MEM) (Gibco, CA) supplemented with 10% FCS (Gibco, CA) as previously described24.
Growth curves in Vero E6, DBT, Calu-3 2B4, and primary human airway epithelial cells were performed as previously described8,25. None of the working cell line stocks were authenticated or tested for mycoplasma recently, although the original seed stocks used to create the working stocks are free from contamination. Human lungs for HAE cultures were procured under the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Institutional Review Board–approved protocols. HAE cultures represent highly differentiated human airway epithelium containing ciliated and non-ciliated epithelial cells as well as goblet cells. The cultures are also grown on an air-liquid interface for several weeks before use, as previously described26.
Briefly, cells were washed with PBS and inoculated with the virus or mock-diluted in PBS for 40 min at 37 °C. After inoculation, cells were washed three times and a fresh medium was added to signify time ‘0’. Three or more biological replicates were harvested at each described time point. No blinding was used in any sample collections nor was samples randomized. All virus cultivation was performed in a biosafety level (BSL) 3 laboratory with redundant fans in the biosafety cabinets, as described previously by our group2. All personnel wore powered air-purifying respirators (Breathe Easy, 3M) with Tyvek suits, aprons, and booties and were double-gloved.
Sequence clustering and structural modeling.
The full-length genomic sequences and the amino acid sequences of the S1 domains of the spike of representative CoVs were downloaded from Genbank or Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC), aligned with ClustalX and phylogenetically compared by using maximum likelihood estimation using 100 bootstraps or by using the PhyML package, respectively. The tree was generated using maximum likelihood with the PhyML package. The scale bar represents nucleotide substitutions. Only nodes with bootstrap support above 70% are labeled.
The tree shows that CoVs are divided into three distinct phylogenetic groups defined as α-CoVs, β-CoVs, and γ-CoVs. Classical subgroup clusters are marked as 2a, 2b, 2c, and 2d for β-CoVs, and 1a and 1b for the α-CoVs. Structural models were generated using Modeller (Max Planck Institute Bioinformatics Toolkit) to generate homology models for SHC014 and Rs3367 of the SARS RBD in complex with ACE2 based on crystal structure 2AJF (Protein Data Bank). Homology models were visualized and manipulated in MacPyMol (version 1.3).
Construction of SARS-like chimeric viruses.
Both wild-type and chimeric viruses were derived from either SARS-CoV Urbani or the corresponding mouse-adapted (SARS-CoV MA15) infectious clone (ic) as previously described27.
Plasmids containing spike sequences for SHC014 were extracted by restriction digest and ligated into the E and F plasmid of the MA15 infectious clone. The clone was designed and purchased from Bio Basic as six contiguous cDNAs using published sequences flanked by unique class II restriction endonuclease sites (BglI). Thereafter, plasmids containing wild-type, chimeric SARS-CoV, and SHC014-CoV genome fragments were amplified, excised, ligated, and purified.
In vitro transcription reactions were then performed to synthesize full-length genomic RNA, which was transfected into Vero E6 cells as previously described2. The medium from transfected cells was harvested and served as seed stocks for subsequent experiments. Chimeric and full-length viruses were confirmed by sequence analysis before use in these studies. Synthetic construction of chimeric mutant and full-length SHC014-CoV was approved by the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee and the Dual Use Research of Concern committee.
Ethics statement
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations for the care and use of animals by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW), NIH. The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, Permit Number A-3410-01) approved the animal study protocol (IACUC #13-033) used in these studies.
Mice and in vivo infection
Female, 10-week-old, and 12-month-old BALB/cAnNHsD mice were ordered from Harlan Laboratories. Mouse infections were done as previously described20. Briefly, animals were brought into a BSL3 laboratory and allowed to acclimate for 1 week before infection. For infection and live-attenuated virus vaccination, mice were anesthetized with a mixture of ketamine and xylazine and infected intranasally, when challenged, with 50 μl of phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or diluted virus with three or four mice per time point, per infection group per dose as described in the figure legends.
For individual mice, notations for infection including failure to inhale the entire dose, bubbling of inoculum from the nose, or infection through the mouth may have led to exclusion of mouse data at the discretion of the researcher; post-infection, no other pre-established exclusion or inclusion criteria are defined. No blinding was used in any animal experiments, and animals were not randomized. For vaccination, young and aged mice were vaccinated by footpad injection with a 20-μl volume of either 0.2 μg of double-inactivated SARS-CoV vaccine with alum or mock PBS; mice were then boosted with the same regimen 22 d later and challenged 21 d thereafter.
For all groups, as per protocol, animals were monitored daily for clinical signs of disease (hunching, ruffled fur, and reduced activity) for the duration of the experiment. Weight loss was monitored daily for the first 7 d, after which weight monitoring continued until the animals recovered to their initial starting weight or displayed weight gain continuously for 3 d.
All mice that lost greater than 20% of their starting body weight were ground-fed and further monitored multiple times per day as long as they were under the 20% cutoff. Mice that lost greater than 30% of their starting body weight were immediately sacrificed as per protocol. Any mouse deemed to be moribund or unlikely to recover was also humanely sacrificed at the discretion of the researcher. Euthanasia was performed using an isoflurane overdose and death was confirmed by cervical dislocation. All mouse studies were performed at the University of North Carolina (Animal Welfare Assurance #A3410-01) using protocols approved by the UNC Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).
Histological analysis.
The left lung was removed and submerged in 10% buffered formalin (Fisher) without inflation for 1 week. Tissues were embedded in paraffin and 5-μm sections were prepared by the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center histopathology core facility. To determine the extent of antigen staining, sections were stained for viral antigen using a commercially available polyclonal SARS-CoV anti-nucleocapsid antibody (Imgenex) and scored in a blinded manner by for staining of the airway and parenchyma as previously described20. Images were captured using an Olympus BX41 microscope with an Olympus DP71 camera.
Virus neutralization assays.
Plaque reduction neutralization titer assays were performed with previously characterized antibodies against SARS-CoV, as previously described11,
12,13
. Briefly, neutralizing antibodies or serum was serially diluted twofold and incubated with 100 p.f.u. of the different infectious clone, SARS-CoV strains for 1 h at 37 °C. The virus and antibodies were then added to a 6-well plate with 5 × 105 Vero E6 cells/well with multiple replicates (n ≥ 2). After a 1-h incubation at 37 °C, cells were overlaid with 3 ml of 0.8% agarose in a medium. Plates were incubated for 2 d at 37 °C, stained with neutral red for 3 h, and plaques were counted. The percentage of plaque reduction was calculated as (1 − (no. of plaques with an antibody/no. of plaques without antibody)) × 100.
Statistical analysis
All experiments were conducted contrasting two experimental groups (either two viruses, or vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts). Therefore, significant differences in viral titer and histology scoring were determined by a two-tailed Student’s t-test at individual time points. Data were normally distributed in each group being compared and had similar variance.
Biosafety and biosecurity
Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279).
SARS-CoV is a select agent. All work for these studies was performed with approved standard operating procedures (SOPs) and safety conditions for SARS-CoV, MERs-CoV, and other related CoVs. Our institutional CoV BSL3 facilities have been designed to conform to the safety requirements that are recommended in the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL), the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the NIH. Laboratory safety plans were submitted to, and the facility has been approved for use by, the UNC Department of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) and the CDC. Electronic card access is required for entry into the facility.
All workers have been trained by EHS to safely use powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs), and appropriate work habits in a BSL3 facility and active medical surveillance plans are in place. Our CoV BSL3 facilities contain redundant fans, emergency power to fans and biological safety cabinets and freezers, and our facilities can accommodate SealSafe mouse racks. Materials classified as BSL3 agents consist of SARS-CoV, bat CoV precursor strains, MERS-CoV and mutants derived from these pathogens. Within the BSL3 facilities, experimentation with an infectious virus is performed in a certified Class II Biosafety Cabinet (BSC).
All members of the staff wear scrubs, Tyvek suits and aprons, PAPRs and shoe covers, and their hands are double-gloved. BSL3 users are subject to a medical surveillance plan monitored by the University Employee Occupational Health Clinic (UEOHC), which includes a yearly physical, annual influenza vaccination and mandatory reporting of any symptoms associated with CoV infection during periods when working in the BSL3. All BSL3 users are trained in exposure management and reporting protocols, are prepared to self-quarantine and have been trained for safe delivery to a local infectious disease management department in an emergency situation. All potential exposure events are reported and investigated by EHS and UEOHC, with reports filed to both the CDC and the NIH.
Accession codes
Accessions
Protein Data Bank
2AJF
Change history
20 November 2015
In the version of this article initially published online, the authors omitted to acknowledge a funding source, USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance, to Z.-L.S. The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.
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Research in this manuscript was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease and the National Institute of Aging of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) under awards U19AI109761 (R.S.B.), U19AI107810 (R.S.B.), AI085524 (W.A.M.), F32AI102561 (V.D.M.) and K99AG049092 (V.D.M.), and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China awards 81290341 (Z.-L.S.) and 31470260 (X.-Y.G.), and by USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance (Z.-L.S.). Human airway epithelial cultures were supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease of the NIH under award NIH DK065988 (S.H.R.). We also thank M.T. Ferris (Dept. of Genetics, University of North Carolina) for the reviewing of statistical approaches and C.T. Tseng (Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Texas Medical Branch) for providing Calu-3 cells. Experiments with the full-length and chimeric SHC014 recombinant viruses were initiated and performed before the GOF research funding pause and have since been reviewed and approved for continued study by the NIH. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
Author information
Affiliations
Department of Epidemiology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Vineet D Menachery
, Boyd L Yount Jr
, Kari Debbink
, Lisa E Gralinski
, Jessica A Plante
, Rachel L Graham
, Trevor Scobey
, Eric F Donaldson
& Ralph S Baric
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Kari Debbink
& Ralph S Baric
National Center for Toxicological Research, Food and Drug Administration, Jefferson, Arkansas, USA
Sudhakar Agnihothram
Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China
Xing-Yi Ge
& Zhengli-Li Shi
Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Scott H Randell
Cystic Fibrosis Center, Marsico Lung Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Scott H Randell
Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology, Zurich, Switzerland
Antonio Lanzavecchia
Department of Cancer Immunology and AIDS, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Wayne A Marasco
Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Wayne A Marasco
Contributions
V.D.M. designed, coordinated and performed experiments, completed the analysis and wrote the manuscript. B.L.Y. designed the infectious clone and recovered chimeric viruses; S.A. completed neutralization assays; L.E.G. helped perform mouse experiments; T.S. and J.A.P. completed mouse experiments and plaque assays; X.-Y.G. performed pseudotyping experiments; K.D. generated structural figures and predictions; E.F.D. generated phylogenetic analysis; R.L.G. completed RNA analysis; S.H.R. provided primary HAE cultures; A.L. and W.A.M. provided critical monoclonal antibody reagents; and Z.-L.S. provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids. R.S.B. designed experiments and wrote the manuscript.
Corresponding authors
Correspondence to Vineet D Menachery or Ralph S Baric.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary Figures 1–6 and Supplementary Tables 1–4 (PDF 4747 kb)
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Cite this article
Menachery, V., Yount, B., Debbink, K. et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat Med21, 1508–1513 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985
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It is easy to get distracted by the daily gyrations, ceaseless media propaganda, political theater, false narratives, and delusional beliefs of both the left and right, as this military empire built on debt and deceit spirals towards its fiery cataclysmic climax.
Opposing forces have gathered themselves into position focusing on defeating their domestic enemies, with the left seeming to have strategic advantage but led by hubristic dullards, while numerous foreign adversaries circle like hungry vultures ready to pounce on the dying beast of an empire.
-The Burning Platform
The Fourth Turning is when (the American) society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. This idea of cycles and change where society rises and falls upon generational maturity was developed by two authors; Strauss and Howe. They postulated that there are four turnings in society. Together, the four turnings comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth.
This is a prediction of the future based upon the generational and social cycles of the past history. It is fundamentally an American observation, though the system and predictions can be applied to other cultures and other societies.
According to the predictions…
Even if the nation stays together, its geography could be fundamentally changed, its party structure altered, its Constitution and Bill of Rights amended beyond recognition. History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war—class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil—its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured. And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed.
After the Crisis event…
With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers' visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.
This post asks if the predictions made by the authors [1] actually manifested as predicted, or are [2] yet still to manifest.
Prediction
.
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that they predicted a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020.
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That is three years later.
Adjusting the dates
“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system.”
-The Burning Platform
Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…
There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…
“Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
Climax in 2023.
Resolution in 2029.
.
Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.
Am I right or am I wrong?
I'd say that America is inching closer to 476 - 1000 era (the Dark Ages). Free thought and speech is dying. Common sense is gasping its last breath. Freedom will be a pleasant memory if we remain on our current path. A handful of evil despots are grasping for world domination and they aim to take their wrath out on all us peasants and serfs.
-Action Jackson
The way I see things is in a very simplistic manner.
I view the entire event cycle as if one would clear out the dead-wood and brush that accumulates in a field gone wild. There, the weeds and undergrowth are permitted to grow and clutter up and starve the field in such a ways that no productive crops can grow. Instead of having a field full of tomato plants, you end up with a plot full of weeds, long woody undergrowth, and difficult to remove tenacious shrubbery and young trees.
Overgrown field.
Obviously you need to tend to the field to prevent this from ever getting so bad, but as the farmer gets old, and his children move to other pursuits in the cities, he just cannot tend to the weeds and growth. They start to overtake the farm. Pretty soon eventually all that remains are but one or two well tended productive fields and the rest are permitted to go fallow.
The thing is about fallow fields is that the farmer can light a periodic fire and burn away all the problematic undergrowth. But if the farmer fails to do this, the undergrowth just piles up and accumulates.
Eventually it reaches a point of spontaneous combustion. Whether the spark that ignite it is a heat wave, lightening, or an errant cigarette butt, eventually the field will catch fire and burn up.
Brush fire.
The amount of damage that occurs is directly proportional to the amount of debris that is present. Thus if the field has been permitted to grow fallow for a decade or more, it will go up in a braze of fire that will burn uncontrollably, perhaps even extending well past the borders of the farmer’s field.
Thus I contribute this thought…
The United States is a field that has been permitted to go fallow. It has been untended for a long, long time. Other farmers have predicted that any day now that it would start to burn up. But…
… those dates seemed to come and go.
Now the debris is piled up really high. And it is bone dry. No rain for a couple of years. There seems to be things that are smoldering. You see some smoke here and some smoke there. But no real fire has yet to ignite.
Smoldering brush.
Thus we enter 2021…
Nothing caught fire yet.
I believe there are smoldering embers just waiting to be stirred into a conflagration which will engulf the entire world in a fiery purging of the existing social order, which has exhausted itself and needs to be cleansed. Jefferson understood the nature of Fourth Turnings two hundred years before Strauss & Howe put it to paper.
-The Burning Platform
Sure 2020 was a shit year, and the United States handled it terribly. The smoke is wafting up from the brush piles in the fields. But nothing has yet ignited. It hasn’t.
Wall Street is still cheating. And they getting away with blatant crimes and raking in billions of dollars. Sure there was the Game Stop and Robinhood scandals. But nothing has changed.
Race relations are at the lowest point. And laws, protests, and social re-engineering are not achieving anything other than pissing people off from both sides of the isle.
The Coronavirus showed how incompetent the United States government actually is. And yet aside from a few shuttered businesses, and having to wear masks, everything else seems to be a continuation of the status quo. The only difference is that the poor are poorer, the rich are richer, and the middle class are turning into the lower-middle class.
Donald Trump had an opportunity to make a difference. But in hindsight he talked a big game but pretty much wrecked not only the economy, but the global standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. He left office in disgrace. The GOP is in shambles, leaving the DNC as the only party of worth standing. Radical elements stand in the wings waiting to take over.
The Washington DC riots were a joke. This was not a revolution. It was a party by drunk frat boys. Yet there is evidence that it will result in laws that are going to turn up the Police State from idle to aggressive.
Armed rebellion is all talk with no substance. Sure gun stores are out of stock of everything from guns to bullets to flack vests. But aside from one or two well reported incidents, no “hot” fighting has occurred.
All this tells me that the “Crisis” has yet to occur.
Having studied the Civil War exensively when I was a history major years ago, I would say there are many very clear parallels with the 1850's right now. The level of division and hate is comparable.
What many seem to forget is the war didn't just start out of the blue nor did most people in the 1850's believe war was going to happen. War became entirely unavoidable in 1859 with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. That was a tipping point.
The southerners began arming themselves to the teeth and preparing for war.
That raid was itself more or less inevitable after the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857, which so angered abolitionists that they became far more aggressive.
In 1860 of course the South realized they had no ability to sway the outcome of the election and they could not block anything the north wanted.
To compare this to current events I would say the SCOTUS refusal to address the second amendment violations ongoing, particularly with multiple cases denied cert this summer, can be compared with Dred Scott in terms of effects.
The various one person-one vote rulings in the 60's which held that states could not model their legislatures after the federal Congress (i.e., towns or counties equally represented in one house, representation by population in another) handed total power to the big cities, stripping rural areas of any power to prevent trampling of their rights.
So we have the legal/political situation that existed in the 1850's/60's with a large swath of the population, a minority in terms of numbers but still substantial, essentially having no real voice in the government.
We also have the hate and division over various issues. Gun control, notably. A Biden presidency implementing his gun control plans could trigger a modern-day John Brown moment.
But it's important to also remember that as civil wars go, ours in the 1860's was quite unusual. We had a relatively clean dividing line. State governments versus a federal government. And leaders who were honorable enough people they more or less accepted defeat in the case of the south, and didn't mass incarcerate the defeated enemy afterwards as criminals in the case of the north.
Most civil wars particularly in more recent times are not this clean.
They tend to be messy with less clear geographical boundaries to delineate the opposing sides. Armed groups rise and fall, violence tends to be random and sporadic, and you don't necessarily have two opposing government-controlled armies more or less following the rules of conventional warfare.
If we have another civil war this is how I would expect it to go. Neighbor versus neighbor, city versus country, far left vs far right. Very violent, bloody, disorganized, highly desperate as one side will criminalize the other for participating, and hard to stop once it starts. And of course foreign governments would be involved if indirectly.
I would say toss a coin for the answer on if it happens. I think the risk is high. The only way to avoid it is for the politicians to back off of the divisive issues to attempt to bring back some national unity. But neither side is showing any such signs of doing so. The SCOTUS could single handedly prevent the gun control plans of the democrats with some well written rulings on pending cases but I doubt it will.
-Vermont Mountain Man
2020 was NOT the Crisis.
I could be wrong
The historical target dates are approximate. Which is something at I believe. And that there are elements that will cause variances on the target dates.
In my mind the Crisis catalyst was targeted for 2005 +/- 3 years. And we have pretty much identified 2008 as this Fourth turnings Crisis Catalyst. It is three years later. Which means that if the time from the catalyst remains stable, then the Climax has yet to occur.
With this knowledge, we can say that the Climax is targeted for 2023.
Or, any day now with the range of 2023 +/- 3 years. Means 2020 though 2026.
Any. Day. Now.
What does Mr. Howe say?
Below is a brief essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe discussing the typical progression of each “Turning”. It remains more relevant than ever amidst our current zeitgeist. It was written nearly a year before 2020 showed it’s ugly, ugly face.
NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.
The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.
The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”
Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.
Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.
In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.
At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.
The First Turning is called a High.
This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity.
America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.
The Second Turningis an Awakening.
This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.
America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.
The Third Turning is an Unravelling.
The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.
America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.
Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
Exerpts from the book The Fourth Turning
In 1860-1861 southern states took the Lincoln victory as a de-facto proof that the North would increasingly seek to impose its will upon the south (they were right, but losing the war actually made it happen faster and more completely).
What people generally forget is that all states had large militias that were beholden ONLY to the states, and people had much more belief and legal adherence to the individual states, than now.
Terrorist actions do not start a war, because you cannot really go to war conventionally against terrorism. What happened in the 1860's is that state governments formed a new nation in rebellion.
Personally I don't think the Left or the Right, as a whole, have the balls to do this today. But I guess we'll see. Eventually the threats become real enough that it's hard to ignore them and just hope everything goes back to normal.
-Aerindel, SoJ_51 and Observer
This is straight from the book …
“Something happened to America at that time,” recalled U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye on V-J Day in 1995, the last of the 50-year commemoratives of World War II. “I’m not wise enough to know what it was. But it was the strange, strange power that our founding fathers experienced in those early, uncertain days. Let’s call it the spirit of America, a spirit that united and galvanized our people.” Inouye went on to reflect wistfully on an era when the nation considered no obstacle too big, no challenge too great, no goal too distant, no sacrifice too deep. A half-century later, that old spirit had long since dissipated, and nobody under age 70 remembered what it felt like. When Joe Dawson reenacted his D-Day parachute drop over Normandy, he said he did it “to show our country that there was a time when our nation moved forward as one unit.”
The Eternal Return
On the earthen floors of their rounded hogans, Navajo artists sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time. Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They draw these sand circles in a counter-clockwise progression, one quadrant at a time, with decorative icons for the challenges of each age and season. When they near the end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a small gap just to the right of its top. This signifies the moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenics called ekpyrosis. By Navajo custom, this moment can be provided (and the circle closed) only by God, never by mortal man. All the artist can do is rub out the painting, in reverse seasonal order, after which a new circle can be begun. Thus, in the Navajo tradition, does seasonal time stage its eternal return.
Like most traditional peoples, the Navaho accept not just the circularity of life, but also its perpetuity. Each generation knows its ancestors have drawn similar circles in the sand—and each expects its heirs to keep drawing them. The Navaho ritually reenact the past while anticipating the future. Thus do they transcend time.
Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history’s last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V.J.-Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.
An end of what?
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. But this end, while possible, is not likely. Human life is not so easily extinguishable. One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species. Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that. For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck. Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw. A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins. The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress. As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
The new saeculum could find America a worse place. As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.” Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals. Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring. Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear. Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place. Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are. All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place. Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization. Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired. Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction. People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment. America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community. Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting. All this is achievable as well.
Conclusion
2020 was not the Climax; the Crisis of the Forth Turning in America. That still lies ahead of us.
I hope it never comes to this. In lieu, I can see the Balkinization of the country take place, sides would move to designated areas and set up permanent camp. There may be 2, 3 or more countries within the US before the dust settles.
-Survivalist Boards
A climax is a major event. It is typically marked by full-scale discord and absolute totality of full-scale war. That did not occur in 2020. That is not occurring now. 2020 was marked by a “pandemic”. Most Americans (through their media) believe that either [1] it is a hoax, or [2] it is a new strain of flu that is sweeping the globe. It is neither. It is a bio-weapon attack on China by the neocon Trump administration gone terribly wrong.
Xi Peng and Putin do not get their intel from Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and CNN. They get it from their Intel divisions. And both nations have a full picture of what is going on, has gone on and will go on further.
Both nations (China and Russia) filed a formal complaint against the United States for launching this bio-weapon (and all the others that it launched in late 2020). And while Americans ignored this complaint, pretending that it is meaningless, it did do something. It marked the start of Russia and China teaming up militarily against the United States.
…
United States. (With the UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.) Today there is isolated America. Confused. Arrogant. Thrashing and moaning. Demanding all sorts of things.
The Rest of the World. And the rest of the world, lead by Russia, and China, that are very carefully and very precisely planning to stop all this nonsense once and for all.
…
…
And America learned nothing.
Keep in mind that the last pandemic of 1918 was not a climax event, though it certainly was a contributor that lead to events that shaped the actual Climax. A climax is full-scale-war. It’s terrible discord at home domestically, and engagement with a major “hot” war. Both at the same time.
The “Fourth Turning” is a crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval — the old order is toppled and a new one put in its place. As America’s most recent “Third Turning” began in the mid-1980s, it was due to expire in the first decade of the 21st century. If we accept Howe and Strauss’ thesis, America has already entered its next “Fourth Turning”.
-What exactly is the “Fourth Turning” envisioned by William ...
It’s a combination of events that will shatter all norms, and make people settle down and just be happy to drink some simple tea under the shade of a tree.
No.
It hasn’t yet arrived.
Many world leaders feel that we are approaching a major war. Countries are preparing for war, with Russia and China at the forefront, and Japan starting its own re-militarization program.
According to the Strauss-Howe theory, 2017 is equivalent to 1933 (when Hitler got in charge and started rebuilding Germany’s army), 1854 (when the prospect of an American Civil War felt more and more imminent), and 1779 (the middle of the American Revolutionary War against Britain, and the year of the French Revolution).
Needless to say, right now we are living in very interesting times.
-Charting the Strauss Howe Fourth Turning
The piles of brush and fallow fields are all smouldering. A bunch of kids are playing with matches at the edge of the field, a lighting storm is gathering in the skies, a dog knocked over the logs that held the fire pit and the ashes are smoldering in the dry grass, and a tanker truck full of gasoline crashed and tipped over and all the gasoline is spilling into the dry, dry field.
All the signs are there.
No one is calling the fire department to start engaging in preventative measures. Instead every one is standing by watching it smolder, chewing on crud and going moo.
…
The nearest practical equivalent that I can illustrate is a Civil Defense officer wearing a helmet and telling everyone to get into the bomb shelter. Meanwhile you can hear the bombs drop and explode in the far distance, as they are getting closer and closer to you.
Civil Defense Warden
A “Crisis” will be an actual “Crisis”. All you need to do is compare it to previous fourth turnings.
The last crisis was a five year war, with nuclear, and chemical weapons. It consisted of a complete meltdown in the American economy, and the loss of the lives of millions of people. It changed America and resulted in the formation of outsourcing Congressional power to alphabet organizations, turning America into a military empire, and a multi-decade “cold war”.
The crisis before that was also a five year war, using the most modern weapons available at the time. The entire society was torn apart and rebuilt. American state economies were shattered and the resulting reconstruction period lasted a full decade. It changed America and resulted in not only a ban on alcohol, but also the income tax system.
No.
The Crisis hasn’t yet arrived.
Check out this most interesting graphic. It’s a close up view of a much larger graphic that puts all the Strauss and Howe Fourth Turning writings into a really nice pictorial. Amazing.
Plotting when wars occurred during the Fourth Turning. This very interesting graphic clearly shows when the expected Climax will occur, and it is pointing straight towards a “hot war”. America will not win that “Hot war”. And America will be forever changed afterwards.
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This chart is just one quadrant of a much larger graphic. It shows the seasonality of Anglo-American history since the end of the Middle Ages, according to the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory (as described in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning). Click here to download an enlarged version of the entire chart..
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Listen, and understand.
That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
You all have watched the 1980’s movie “Terminator”, eh?
Well, it’s nearing the end of the Chinese Year. We exit the year of the rat, and say hello to the year of the bull. It’s a busy time in China as factories are trying to speed up production to send orders out before the one month shut down. Of course, this is still a strange time, and most people are staying home. Few are going to travel back to their families. It’s too dangerous with the two brand new viral strains floating around.
Two brand new viruses?
Yes. There are two brand-spanking-new, never before seen, “novel” viruses that hit China at the end of 2019.
No I’m not talking about the seizure inducing respiratory COVID-19B. Not the mild stain; the immunization strain in American the COVID-19A. That pathway and history has been substantially mapped out in great detail. https://lnkd.in/gBM2Fur.
I particularly like how the mild strains the COVID-19A (the immunization strain) was moving through America and Britain all Summer 2019. While the deadly strains, COVID-19B and COVID-19C hit China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia at the same time in January 2020. All traced back to the Military Games in Wuhan, and the hotel where the 300 military soldiers were housed.
But I am not talking about this.
I’m talking about the (yet to be named, but I’m naming it) COVID-20. A death by vomiting virus. New. Novel. Hit China right after Trump “gave up on Hong Kong”.
Seems that some the "cat's paw" Chinese drone operators who dispensed the 2018 - 2019 swine flu, "spilled the beans" to the PLA and the government. You see, the Chinese fellows that the CIA hired (to spray the swine flu to the pigs using drones), well they immediately went to the Chinese authorities when given these new viral containers by their CIA handlers.
Uh oh!
When Trump told the NED that “Let it (HK) all burn”, I guess that he didn’t count that everything in Hong Kong was under complete audio and video surveillance. And this pretty much upset Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Tom Cotton. And one or more of them gave the ok to release this very, very nasty virus in China.
American and British passport holders, arrested and deported for training “color revolution” techniques, bomb-making, insurgency techniques, and how to provoke the government so that they would violently respond to the provocations.
It’s funny. It broke out in Beijing. Where did everyone get this tick-borne virus? Inside of Starbucks?
Everyone know that Beijing is full of ticks and other critters because it is so filthy and polluted.
.
The people in the United States, and Britain nod their heads. “Yup. China is dirty and filthy. Of course it’s full of germs and bad stuff”. LOL.
Hardly.
If you are an American you probably think that the pandemic is either fake, or a singular virus. Not realizing that China has been hit with a massive carpet-bombing of viral agents.
Anyways, to make a long story short, I went off to go to the local clinic to get my free swabs and measurements. You can never be too careful.
A visit to the local clinic
To get an idea of what it’s like in China, you have to understand that pretty much if you want to go to any public area or a mall (or anything like that) you need to have your QR code approval.
There’s different applications for this but basically you use your cell phone to scan a QR code and then they’ll tell you if you have traveled into a “hot” area where one of the viruses are active.
Scan to see if you have traveled to a “hot” area. You need to do this and pass before the security guard will allow you in the building.
.
The QR scan is immediate. And it will tell you whether you’re good to go or not. This morning, I’m dealing with some medical issues on top of our periodic evaluation and so of course we had to scan the QR code and this is what it looks like…
A “clean” QR scan that says that you are “good to go”.
.
I don’t know what they’re doing in the states, but I can’t imagine they’re doing anything like this. Pretty much China’s is all QR codes, drones, IR scans, barcodes and scanning.
Really, nobody uses money anymore.
And everybody, of course is taking precautions or wearing mask especially this time of season. Oh sure, you’ll see a couple that aren’t but for the most part people take things very seriously, given all the events that happened this time last year.
I guess it’s kind of a crazy time to live, and I you know I suppose that this is going to go down in history books of course. And we’re living through it so that’s gotta be worth something right? They always say that you don’t realize how bad things were until you actually read about it in the history books.
Of course, the person (or people) who controls and writes the history books are the ones that control the narrative. Don’t you know.
Anyways…
An Oreo and Spam burger in China!
Lordy!
I read on my news feeds and Yahoo news, as well as the MSN and drudge report and all those other kinds of “News media” the stunning news! Apparently FOX News first reported that China has a new burger at McDonald’s.
It’s called an Oreo spam burger and everybody’s commenting how disgusting it is and how horrible the Chinese sense of tastes are. And just how crazy that the Chinese would eat (dare they!), eat such a thing. There’s a considerable amount of internet space on this…
… so it’s pretty shocking to me. As I live in China, and there’s nothing at all about this monstrosity. And since it is near CNY, there are McDonald’s advertisements everywhere showing their new CNY holiday menus.
McDonald’s holiday menu advertisements are up and are all over the place. Like this one at the corner of a busy intersection.
.
Here’s a close up of that picture. I had a zoom feature on my cell phone and snapped this picture. I think that it is clearer and show just what the McDonald’s holiday menu advertisement looks like.
Guess what?
No Oreo-spam burger. Anywhere!
Closer view showing the McDonald’s advertisement for the CNY 2021 holiday menu. Showing a “KFC bucket style” offering and a ton load of sides and desserts. All for 75 yuan (roughly $10 USD).
.
Well that’s a big mystery.
So what do I do…
I go to McDonald’s here in China and I ask him about it. Never heard of the thing they don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.
So I went over to the website and tried to find their attachment links the Fox news article, the Yahoo article has ton load of links and all the links point back to MSN and Yahoo. None of them point to an advertisement for this mysteriously terrible horrific burger. And, yes, I went to Fox news which is always anti-China and the same thing there they can’t show me a picture of this stupid burger.
Finally I found one.
But not on any McDonald’s website, or part of a McDonald’s advertisement or promotional campaign. I found it on the Hormel Foods website; the company that makes Spam. As best that I can figure out, there is some kind of “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine”, between Hormel and one of the local independent McDonald’s franchises in Beijing. It’s not, NOT, a McDonald’s product.
It is a local franchise owner’s local product.
The Hormel / McDonald’s Frankenstein burger.
.
Anyways, now you know the entire story. You’ll never figure out this kind of background on your own by reading the American “news”. Sometimes you all just have to go off yourself and see things with your own two eyes.
For 99.9999% of the McDonald’s in China, it’s a completely different story.
This is what the front door to McDonald’s looks like, and THIS is the burger that they are actually promoting this 2021 CNY. It’s the year of the Bull. Why in Pete’s name would they promote a pork spam burger on a beef year?
Think people think!!!!!!
The door to the front of McDonald’s showing the new promoted breakfast burger. It is a beef sloppy-Joe with Chinese spices and flavorings on an extra large English Muffin. It should be pretty delicious. Price is around a $1.20 for a burger and a coffee.
.
Disappointing because I really wanted to see this thing up close and personal.
I was finally able to do a search for this burger. All of the pictures were in English. None was in Chinese. And none originated out of China. All the picture originated out of America, and had English text. I wonder who’s great idea this was? To market an unsavory burger to Americans in English and say that China is selling it?
Fox news?
CNN?
Sometimes I think that. American news. Is in another complete time track, in reality of their own making, it’s just something that’s completely off the wall.
However, McDonald’s does have a new holiday burger that’s out. It looks pretty good, it’s a beef patty with chicken-fried bacon toppings. And a kind of a mustard sauce that they’re happening all on this new kind of Sesame bun looks like. Looks pretty good price is pretty reasonable. Here’s the advertisement marquee poster on another window…
Sorry for the glare. Note that in China, no one advertises in English. And all Chinese advertisements tend to have characters from history, in one form or the other, within the advertisement.
.
Of course, you’ll never hear about that, nope, not at all, not in the American news.
At the medical clinic
So anyways, I trooped out to the local clinic. The local clinic is giving away free Coronavirus packages to everybody.
It’s a nice thing to do. You get scanned, you get swabbed, and you get a nice free check up. It’s on going and there just isn’t any really long lines. You go in, and get checked.
Here’s the banner showing the “care package” that you can get with the QR scan to apply for it.
Banner to apply for the COVID care package at the clinic. Note the fire extinguisher box to the left of the the picture. This is how fire extinguishers are stored all over China.
.
Anyways, the packages come with a bunch of free masks disposable masks. Some hand sanitizer. Seventy five percent alcohol for swapping things. Some herbal medicines that (you know Chinese herbal medicines) are helpful when you have distress and discomfort. As well as some medicines to handle harsh distress, western medicines, well (actually) made in China but western medicines and of course a sticker with a magnetic back that you can put on your refrigerator. That has a scanning barcode (A QR code). You just scan and it immediately contacts the clinic.
It’s a direct line to the clinics and hospitals in the direct and immediate area.
I would imagine that there’s probably something along these lines in the states too. Maybe at the local clinics and hospitals, there’s probably something similar, I’m sure that you’ll probably will have to pay for it. It’s the American way, don’t you know. Everything for a buck. But the USA just has to be doing this. This is what all the responsible nations are doing. Whether they are in Europe, or Russia, of Africa. Nations are trying to meet the needs of their people.
It’s how reasonable and responsible nations behave.
But you know, China has this because after all, it has been a very difficult period to go though.
The end of the year. Woo woo!
Well, it’s almost the end of the Year of the Rat; 2020. Soon it will be the year of the Bull. 2021 was one Hell of a year. I think everyone can well agree with me on that. It really sucked.
You can tell just how much it sucked, by the kinds of jokes that floated around then…
My best friend got mad at me because he caught me sniffing his sister's panties
It didn't help that she was still wearing them.
Or that his whole family was there.
That made the rest of his sister's funeral kind of awkward.
And who thought you could make the funeral for such a small child more awkward than it already was..
Indeed, if a normal year would be a large Christmas banquet, 2020 would be discarded peanut shells inside an elephant cage.
.
Indeed, 2020 was a hard year.
If 2020 was a drink, what kind of beverage would it be?
Colonoscopy prep.
As nasty as the year was, America has it easy.
At least the rest of the world wasn’t carpet bombed with biological weapons, a non-stop anti-China propaganda campaign, and CIA-sponsored “pro-democracy” color-revolutions in their cities.
I know everything happens for a reason, but 2020? What the actual fuck!
Ah, but in China…
They. Do. Not. Play. They operate on another level entirely.
When the government went DEFCON ONE, and the militia and reserves were called up everything went harsh lock-down. And you can’t blame them actually. With an onslaught of biological weapons thrown at China from every angle they had to do something.
Do you remember hula hoops? Well if 2020 was a hula hoop you would probably need to visit the hospital after playing with it.
And so they did.
Six biological weapons aimed at grains and produce. Three targeting livestock, and even using drones to spray the viruses over the remote farms and ranches. And then finally, the grand finale, the Coronavirus COVID-19B released when China was most vulnerable on CNY. With two even worse viral agents COVID-20, and COVID-21 in an effort that really just appears to be spiteful, vengeful and (yes) desperate.
No wonder the 2020 meme’s rang true…
.
All things taken together most American and those outside of China know nothing of all this. To them, there is one unified pandemic. It is natural, and all nations are dealing with it the best that they can.
Though truthfully, America has handled this year the worst.
I suspect that it has to do with the leadership.
Xi Peng felt his nation was under biological weapons attack and went DEFCON ONE. Everything that could be done was done. No chances were taken.
Donald Trump felt that his nations was fine and that everything was going as planned. Let people get a minor sniffle and they would be forever immunized from the nasty lethal strain that attacked China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.
Psychologically, I believe that people act and behave differently during an emergency.
Have you ever been in a car crash when you were drinking. man, oh man, you sure sober up quick. I think that this is the same phenomenon here. Donald Trump didn’t treat this coronavirus; the COVID-19A as anything to be concerned about. he wanted everyone to get it. And he never thought that it would become a dangerous strain.
And so Americans had to suffer.
Some 2020 memes
It’s not just Americans mind you. But everyone.
Here’s from Australia…
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The 2020 rat year hit and affected everyone. Absolutely and positively every one.
Is it safe to say that babies born in the year 2020 will be called....
...doomers?
And…
The year 2020 began with Australia on fire and over a billion animals dead.
Little did we know then that it would be the feel good story of the year.
And…
Back in time
Stop me if you heard this joke:
Jimmy magically traveled back in time hundreds and hundreds of years.
He walked around the village feeling very superior to these uneducated and backward people. Saw them practicing with bows and arrows, riding horses, etc.
He walked up to the men practicing with bow and arrows.
“You guys are so simple. I come from the year 2020. Where I come from, we have guns.”
*Guns?*
“Yes, we use gun powder, which explodes. The gun powder is in a small bullet and when it gets hit hard it explodes and sends the bullet out the end of a tube so fast it can kill instantly.”
*That’s amazing, can you make us this gun powder?*
“Uh, no. I don’t know how. Someone smarter than me figured it out.”
They shook their heads and went back to practicing.
Then he walked by a girl riding a horse.
He shook his head in sympathy, “Where I come from we ride around in cars.”
*Cars?*
“Yes, they were like your wagons, but they didn’t need horses. We poured gasoline into them, which gave it power when it burned and made the care move way faster than any horse.
*Can you make me this gasoline?*
“Uh, no. I don’t know how. Someone smarter than me figured it out.”
*Well, how could it go so fast over the bumpy ground?*
“We had long streets made of concrete which made it very smooth for miles and miles.”
*Wow, can you make us this concrete?*
“Uh, no. I don’t know how. Someone smarter than me figured it out.”
As night fell, he walked over to a small house, lit only by candles.
“Where I come from, there is light in every room, every street, we even carry light in our pocket if we need it.”
*How is that possible?*
“Electricity. It’s like the energy from lightning but we make it and then we store it in a battery and it powers everything in the world. “
*That’s amazing. Can you make us this electricity?*
“Uh, no. I don’t know how. Someone smarter than me figured it out.”
In the morning, he walked by a doctor taking care of a boy coughing.
“You should cover his mouth and nose with a cloth, so you and his family don’t get sick.”
*How do you know this?*
“Uh, I don’t know. But someone smarter than me figured it out.”
Not really a joke. Just wear a mask. Because someone smarter than you figured out it was the right thing to do.
There’s a ton load of memes about this most crappy of years. And you can search the internet for many more examples of how everyone else thought about this year. I can say that I have good news and bad news.
I don't know what animal the year 2020 is in the Chinese calendar...
...but I'm pretty sure it has rabies
Well, 2020 was the year of the RAT.
Firstly the good news. 2020 is over, and in two weeks the Year of the Rat will end. Yay!
In the year 2020, the Lord came unto Noah, Who was now living in America and said:
“Once again, the earth has become wicked and over-populated, and I see the end of all flesh before me."
"Build another Ark and save 2 of every living thing along with a few good humans."
He gave Noah the blueprints, saying:
"You have 6 months to build the Ark before I will start the unending rain for 40 days and 40 nights."
Six months later, the Lord looked down and saw Noah weeping in his yard - but no Ark."Noah!," He roared, "I'm about to start the rain! Where is the Ark?"
"Forgive me, Lord," begged Noah, "but things have changed."
"I needed a Building Permit."
"I've been arguing with the Boat Inspector about the need for a sprinkler system."
"My homeowners association claim that I've violated the Neighborhood by-laws by building the Ark in my back yard and exceeding the height limitations. We had to go to the local Planning Committee for a decision."
"Then the City Council and the Electricity Company demanded a shed load of money for the future costs of moving power lines and other overhead obstructions, to clear the passage for the Ark's move to the sea. I told them that the sea would be coming to us, but they would hear none of it."
"Getting the wood was another problem. There's a ban on cutting local trees in order to save the Greater Spotted Barn Owl."
"I tried to convince the environmentalists that I needed the wood to save the owls - but no go!"
"When I started gathering the animals, PETA took me to court. They insisted that I was confining wild animals against their will. They argued the accommodations were too restrictive and it was cruel and inhumane to put so many animals in a confined space."
"Then the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that I couldn't build the Ark until they'd conducted an environmental impact study on Your proposed flood."
"I'm still trying to resolve a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on how many minorities I'm supposed to hire for my building crew."
"The Immigration Dept. Is checking the visa status of most of the people who want to work."
"The labor unions say I can't use my sons. They insist I have to hire only union workers with ark-building experience."
"To make matters worse, the IRS seized all my assets, claiming I'm trying to leave the country illegally with endangered species."
"So, forgive me, Lord, but it would take at least 10 years for me to finish this ark."
"Suddenly the skies cleared, the sun began to shine and a rainbow stretched across the sky."
Noah looked up in wonder and asked, "You mean you're not going to destroy the world?"
"No," said the Lord. " The Government beat me to it.
That was an American joke.
…
Now the bad news.
Certain (unnamed) nations have handled this what-ever-you-want-to-call-it outrageously poorly, and this will make containment much more difficult and harder. I anticipate that things will not get back to normal for some time. Years probably. So if you are thinking that everything is going back to normal in four to six months you can dream on. I really doubt that.
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Ok, ok. I know that you just don’t want to be reminded of that nasty, nasty year.
But you all have to appreciate that the memes were on fire. I mean really. You can take a meme from America and show it to someone from South Africa or Brazil and they would end up on the floor laughing. Of course, there will be some minor cultural differences. Like no one else in the world were stupidly hoarding toilet-paper. That was just a uniquely American thing.
But for many, the American memes are quite relatable.
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Or, perhaps just consider the strange and crazy things that were going on. I wonder what the history books will write. I mean, it’s been an unusually long year. Well at least it seems like it was. In fact, it seems like the year was maybe three times longer than a “regular” year.
It makes you wonder what our collective karma must have been. Right?
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And of course, with everyone being locked inside their residences, the normal ways of doing things, the normal activities and the normal relationships all were turned on their heads.
Fathers who normally would be away at work “earning the money” now had to contend with six pre-school boys rampaging inside the house. And the mothers, who would enjoy a nice night out occasionally found out all about the romances that one can have at home.
Yup.
2020 upended a lot of lives. That’s for certain.
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The new year; 2021.
In two weeks will by CNY 2021. Already everyone is making plans for the holidays, and the directives from the local governments is “nope, stay put.” So, that’s what most of us are doing. If we did decide to travel then we would need to allocated 7+14 +7 days on top of our holiday. And all the hotel quarantine expenses will be out of our personal pockets.
Yikes!
So guess what?
Yup. We are staying home.
Doing homework. Yah, and all the Chinese kids will spend their holidays continuing to study and strive to be the best that they can be. Here’s two kids outside of a local corner grocery store. This is typical China.
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Anyways, being shut in and isolated from all the parties, KTV’s and the huge banquets is a bummer, but it at least gives me some time to read. And I do have a list don’t you know. And so, without further ado, let’s take a glimpse of some history.
We are going to find a cozy nook, and curl up with a nice book. Well, at least in our mind we will. And as we settle down with a nice tea, or mug of coffee, or glass of wine, let’s put another log on the fire and snuggle under a throw as we read about other bad years at other times.
If you’ve got a favorite pet, a cat or a dog, bring them in. Nothing is finer than spending reading time with a loved one.
Cozy reading nook.
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I’m going to put this in my “Tales of the Little Guy” sub-Index of the SHTF Index. And yeah, it is a tale of the little guy. And while he was part of an Army that fought in the American Civil War, I cannot help but believe that his actions were very personal to him.
The following is a reprint of an article titled “Jack Hinson: A Civil War Sniper Hell Bent on Revenge” written on Apr 16, 2018 by Shahan Russell. It was found HERE, and reprinted as found with editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Jack Hinson: A Civil War Sniper Hell Bent on Revenge
John W. “Jack” Hinson, better known as “Old Jack” to his family,
was a prosperous farmer in Stewart County, Tennessee. A non-political
man, he opposed secession from the Union even though he owned slaves.
Friends and neighbors described him as a peaceable man, yet despite all
this, he would end up going on a one-man killing spree.
Jack’s plantation was called Bubbling Springs, where he lived with
his wife and ten children. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was
fiercely determined to remain neutral.
When Union Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant arrived in the area in February 1862, the Hinsons hosted the man at their home. The general was so pleased with the plantation that he even turned it into his temporary headquarters.
Even when one of their sons joined the Confederate Army, while another joined a militia group, Jack remained strictly neutral. They were content to manage their plantation despite the ongoing conflict.
Grant had stayed at the Hinson estate after capturing Fort Henry and
Fort Donelson. In taking the last, he secured a vital gateway to the
rest of the Confederacy. The Union’s victory at the Battle of Fort
Donelson was also its first major one since the start of the Civil War.
Battle of Fort Donelson.
His victory also meant that Union troops became a permanent fixture
in the Kentucky-Tennessee border where the Hinsons lived. While the
family had no problem with that, others did – and the Hinsons would pay
dearly for it. In the end, so would many Union soldiers.
Since many in the region were sympathetic to the Confederacy, some
turned to guerrilla tactics to deal with the better armed and trained
Union soldiers. These were called bushwhackers, because they hid in the
woods where they could attack Union troops before fading back into the
wild.
The only known image of Jack Hinson
It wasn’t just soldiers they went after, however.
There were many cases where they’d target Unionist farmers and sympathizers, as well. Still others were not so politically motivated. Some bushwhackers were bandits who took advantage of the deteriorating law-and-order situation to prey on isolated homesteads. In some cases, they even attacked entire communities.
After the fall of Fort Donelson to Union troops, guerrilla attacks on
Union soldiers and their supporters increased. As a result, it became
policy to torture and execute any suspected bushwhackers without a
trial.
In the fall of 1862, Jack’s 22-year-old son George Hinson, and his
17-year-old brother, Jack, went deer hunting about a mile from their
home as they always did. Unfortunately, they came across a Union patrol
who suspected them of being bushwhackers.
The boys were tied to a tree then shot, after which their bodies were dragged back to town. There the corpses were paraded around the Dover courthouse square as an example of the Union’s zero-tolerance policy toward resistance.
The remains were then decapitated and left there, while the heads were brought to the Hinson plantation.
Ulysses
Grant went on to become the 18th president. This picture of him taken
between 1870 to 1880 is his official presidential portrait
Before the entire family, the heads were stuck on two gate posts as an example of Union justice.
The lieutenant in charge wanted to arrest the Hinsons for their relationship to the two alleged bushwhackers but was informed about Grant’s stay on the property. He was also told that the major general would not take kindly to any mistreatment of the surviving Hinsons, so they were left alone.
That was the lieutenant’s second mistake of the day.
Of Scottish-Irish descent, Jack could not let the murders of his sons
go unpunished. He buried his children’s remains, then sent the rest of
his family and slaves to West Tennessee to stay with relatives.
He then commissioned a special 0.50 caliber rifle with a
percussion-cap muzzle-loader. Besides its lack of decorative brass
ornamentation, this rifle was also unique because it had a 41” long
octagonal barrel that weighed 17 pounds. The length of the barrel
ensured that he could accurately hit targets from half a mile away.
As to the octagonal shape, it was based on the Whitworth Rifle. With
its hexagonal barrel, it could shoot farther (2,000 yards) and more
accurately than the Pattern 1853 Enfield (1,400 yards) with its
traditional round rifled barrel.
Moving into a cave above the Tennessee River, Jack became a bushwhacker at the age of 57.
Jack became a bushwhacker at the age of 57.
His first target was the lieutenant who ordered his sons shot and beheaded. The man was killed as he rode in front of his column.
The second target was the soldier who placed the heads on the gateposts.
It didn’t take the Union long to connect the dots, so they burned down the abandoned Hinson plantation.
The British Whitworth sharpshooting rifle which served as the basis for Jack’s own
The
Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were major transport hubs, so he
frequented both. From his higher vantage points, he targeted Union
boats, picking off captains and officers, as well as disrupting the flow
of river traffic.
The most spectacular story of his sniping career was when an entire boat of Union soldiers surrendered to him.
After Jack fired on the boat, the captain thought he was being attacked by Confederate soldiers. To avoid further bloodshed, the captain beached his boat, raised a white tablecloth, and waited to be captured. But Jack couldn’t possibly handle them all, so he retreated and let them wait.
With help from the locals and by constantly staying on the move, he avoided capture despite the massive manhunt for him.
Though he remained apolitical, he began helping the Confederate Army.
In November 1864, for example, he guided Lieutenant General Nathan
Bedford Forrest to Johnsonville to attack its Union supply center.
Jack died on 28 April 1874 and lies buried in the family plot in Cane Creek Cemetery.
With help from the locals and by constantly staying on the move, he
avoided capture despite the massive manhunt for him. His family was not
so lucky, however. Two of his younger children had died of disease,
while the son who joined the army also died, as did another during a
guerrilla raid.
Jack survived the war and cut 36 circles in the barrel of his rifle to mark the number of Union officers he killed. Union records, however, blame him for over 130 kills – though it’s believed that he may have killed “only” a little more than 100.
Kyle Reese:
Listen. Understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop.Ever. Until you are dead.
Some thoughts on this.
He tried to stay neutral. He tried to stay out of the fight. He tried to make peace. But trying to pretend that the political changes that whirl around you doesn’t affect you is a losing proposition. You are just as likely as not to be caught up in the whirlwind.
And you don’t want that.
You need to be completely aware of everything that is going on around you.
150 years ago Americans fought bloody battles against each other.
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And you need to realize that during difficult time you must act and behave differently than you did during peaceful times.
2020 was a crap year. But was it any different in stress than what occurred 150 years ago? Maybe you aren’t watching long columns of men march down the dirt streets, or cheer on your brave men folk… but during times of upheaval it’s difficult to recognize exactly what is going on.
Who’s to say that America, or the rest of the world, isn’t going though the beginnings of stark and drastic societal change? Who’s to say?
No two wars are alike. Stop pretending that they are.
Everything, absolutely everything is personal. It is visceral and affects our own, our own reality. And just as society has advanced with bar codes, cell phones, internet, High Speed Trains, and ranch dressing in single-use packs, so has war and conflict advanced.
What you see today could very well be the start of a long, long period of long-drawn-out change.
What ever you do, learn as best as you can from the past. No matter how far away and seemingly distant to you.
Make the best with what you have.
Enjoy life.
Take care.
A woman’s bathroom in a mall in China. Tomorrow will be better.
And about the end of 2020 and into 2021
The meme’s just keep a rolling along.
Things that I have learned.
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And let’s not forget how everyone else celebrated the end of 2020. Does this remind you of yourself?
All of us after the year 2020.
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Ah, but you know that the government really cares about you. Why most other nations gave monthly and by-weekly stimulus checks to their citizenry all year. From January through December of 2020. For most people in Europe, Australia and some nations in South America it was as if there wasn’t a pandemic at all. You still got your checks and you still kept your house.
But “exceptional” America, of course, did the same. Well, sort of…
Americans got a “stimulus” check roughly equal to about one half of a month’s rent.
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Ah, but we really can’t get too down on America. The government needs that money, don’t you know. If that multi-trillion dollar amount was divided equally by the number of Americans, each and every American (including children) would get hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that would (of course) take away from the real purpose of government…
…to protect it’s people and make sure that they are living life and the “pursuit of happiness.”
America needs the money to protect Americans.
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Now, if you are a fine MM reader, then you know that you can alter your reality and make your life better. Or at least certainly better than your peers.
Reality.
MetallicMan Bonus
For those of you that are conducting Affirmation Prayer campaigns, I would suggest you incorporate this affirmation…
The year 2021 is a very lucky, prosperous, and wonderful year for me, and my family, as well as my business, career and income stream.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my “Tales of the Little Guy” sub-Index of the SHTF Index.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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Have you ever suddenly came to “an understanding”, or a”realization” that what you have thought, what you have known, and what you have “felt” was all wrong?
Wrong.
This happens to all of us, at one time or the other.
We realize that what we thought at one time, was entirely wrong, or false or not at all the entire picture. Do you know what I am talking about? A realization of the way you think the world works, or how things work, or a relationship works, is not what is really going on? It’s usually a shock. Right?
You can say that about anything really.
You can say that you thought America was one thing, when it was really something else.
Or you could say that you thought China was one thing, when it was something else.
Or you could say that you thought Boston was one place, when it was something else…
But you could say that about relationships as well.
You thought he was one thing when he was really something else.
Or your friends were one thing when they were really something else.
Or your company was one way, when it was really something else entirely different.
It’s a sudden realization that what you thought existed was all a big lie.
And no. I’m not going to start delving into secret government programs, the lifestyles of the rich oligarchy, the casting couches in Hollywood, or the secrets of the Lincoln Bedroom. I’m not going to discuss how your high school text books “got it wrong” or whether or not your best friend is sleeping with your spouse. We are going to go in a different direction here…
We are going to talk about a state of mind where there are NO preconceptions of what reality is. Things are as you see them, or not. And what you might want to happen, could or could not occur.
We are going to talk about your little universe.
The picture above.
The picture at the top of this post above is pretty amazing, eh? It depicts a gladiator over his dying opponent asking the audience for guidance as to whether to kill him or not. It’s stunning. Actually. Not only in the subject matter, but also in the artistic technique.
Now. I want to conduct a thought exercise with you. Let’s go from character to character in the painting. Try to imagine their thoughts, feelings and life that day prior to that snapshot in time.
The Audience that is giving a “thumbs down”. What do you think their life was like on that day? Maybe ate a boiled egg, and some bread and looked forward to “The Games” at “The Circus”. And after the bloody gore, will probably go home and hand out with their friends. maybe enjoy the day, and perhaps do a little shopping in the market.
The Emperor. He sits there watching on. IS this what he wants? And if so why? What does the loss of this life mean to him? After the “Games” he will have a nice big meal, cavort with women, and drink enough wine until he falls asleep.
The Losing Gladiator. He struggles for his life and asks the audience for pity. What do you think is going through his head right now? What do you think he thought about the day as he was getting ready to fight? What was his morning like?
The Winning Gladiator. He’s panting. he fought hard. He is over another person like himself. But he must do what is asked of him. Does he want to do it? Is there any emotion or any compassion? What is he feeling?
In this example, you can see that there are a host of different people in this painting. All with different stories, different histories, different ideals families, passions and futures. Some experience pain. Some experience emotions – such as elation, adoration, fear, terror, and agony.
But there is one person in that painting that doesn’t seem to be showing any emotion, or any care. It is the Emperor. He sits there in numb isolation. Those people are nothing to him. Kill them. Not kill them. It doesn’t matter. Not to him now. Not to him in the future. He just doesn’t care.
He cannot feel. He cannot emote. He is typical. He is a psychopath.
Now…
…Consider this. Almost every single person in the American Government today, no matter how they appear to you in public, or though the media are psychopaths. They have no feelings, no cares, and no desires. They do what they need to do to stay within their roles, but that is it.
They put on a show, of course…
Donald Trump hugging the flag.
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Consider Hillary Clinton…
Hillary Clinton showing that she loves and respects farmers.
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Al Gore showing that he is relatable to the folk in the “rust belt” states…
Al Gore, he’s one of us, don’t you know?
.
The truth is that they are all just playing a “song and dance”; a “puppet show” for all of us to watch because it’s all just a big “game” to them. To them, well they don’t think like we do. They don’t act like we do. They don’t live like we do.
And all this “stuff” is what they do (naturally) to convince us to do things for them, to give them money, power, respect, and anything else they desire. This is what they are. Their desires, and actions are not that of the humans that you see around you.
Instead they are something else…
They have evolved.
These “politicians” might look like humans, dress like humans, and talk like humans, but they are different. They are a different type of creature entirely. They have a different sentience.
They have a different sentience that the rest of us.
If you were to look at their non-physical body with the kinds of eyes that <redacted> then you would see that their appearance is very superficial. They are something else.
No they are not reptilians, or some other kind of obscene joke, they are a kind of distorted humanoid shape. And yes, you could say that their non-physical form greatly resembles a galactic quantum archetype.
Have you ever wondered why so many people BELIEVE the fantasy that Reptilian extraterrestrials, that can shape form, have taken over control of the United States?
Could it be that these people, who are in control of the levers of power, are not acting and behaving like the "normal" people that surrounds you and I?
There are several paintings that had a particularly strong impact on me and remain memorable. First is John William Waterhouse's painting of Saint Eulalia.
The painting depicts, in a startling manner, the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Eulalia, who was martyred because she refused, as a Christian, to worship the imperial Roman gods.
The 4th century Spanish poet, Prudentius, places her death in 313 AD, and tells of the miracle, signaling her martyrdom, that occurred after her death-it began to snow and doves flew out of her mouth.
He further describes her torture as being brutal, with hooks tearing her flesh and her body being burnt with torches.
Waterhouse has been inspired by this poem as is explained in the exhibit's text.
Waterhouse does something remarkable in this painting. He eliminates the gory signs of her extreme torture, and yet impresses upon the viewer the horror of what has happened.
She is partly undressed, her upper torso bare, but her lower body is covered in her torn brown-red and dirty garment. Waterhouse has taken poetic license in order to give the child dignity and yet convey the suffering and indignities she endured.
He makes a masterful use of perspective by placing Eulalia in the foreground. He uses extreme foreshortening which he accomplishes with masterful skill, a very difficult feat. Eulalia, in this foreshortened pose, is lying headfirst on her back and her image takes up one third of the large canvas.
The viewer is looking up the length of her body to her legs that are turned slightly askew to the viewer's left. Her blood red hair (a red with dark burnt umber and sepia) is reminiscent of spilt blood beginning to age. The hair flows toward the viewer almost to the edge of the canvas.
The thin layer of snow on the ground accentuates the sense of drying blood, as does her garment, which gives, at second viewing, the look of flayed skin. The snow is of course also a symbol of her virginity. The doves that have issued from her mouth are now just ordinary doves and flit about her indifferently.
This adds to the dead child's sense of abandonment.
On her left wrist remains a piece of tied rope, symbol of her torture. As your eyes move up the canvas you are met with the shaft of the makeshift cross she was roped and nailed to on your right, not far from where the she lies. Moving further away from Eulalia, the remainder of the upper canvas depicts Roman guards and a cluster of people on steps that lead to the square where Eulalia lies dead.
The backdrop is of Roman columns.
The crowd seems only to be there out of curiosity.
One figure, a woman in white robes, kneeling, head down, at the top of the steps, grieves. One wonders if it is a sister or maybe the girl's mother, forbidden to go to Eulalia by the foremost guard who holds a spear.
There is absolutely nothing sexually titillating about this painting. It takes an overwhelming stretch in a critic's mind, in order to fit this image into a predetermined aesthetic agenda, to see otherwise. The all-over coloration of the painting is in hues of white, gray, brown, gray-blue and the dark drenched reds.
This powerful image will stay with me.
-Art Renewal center
In this painting we see how a young innocent girl is hurt, tortured and killed by the uncaring machine that government has become. People do their jobs. They follow their orders. They obey their commands.
We all know about how uncaring, methodical and ritualized our governments have become. You enter the “system” and you become “processed” by it.
But you know, there are two mechanisms at play. There is a mechanism of government that favors the wealthy oligarchy in power, and one that is used on everyone else. Needless to say, it is the one used on “Joe and Suzy Average” that is harsh and brutal. But that system used against the oligarchy is trivial. Those in power live a different kind of life than you and I do.
It’s not just that they are surrounded by wealth and opulence. It’s that they, their friends and all their associations are with those of one singular sentience.
America is segregated by sentience. Not class.
Voluntary sentience segregation
Nothing that I have so far mentioned should come as a surprise. We all know how “well heeled” the oligarchy that runs America is. And we all know that they seem “off” or a little different from you and I and the rest of the people around us. But would you accept the notion that this kind of sentience segregation fits an approved galactic archetype?
The powers-that-be censoring books.
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I guess that the big shocker that I have to announce to the MM readership is that things have advanced for the human species. And while the past have always had a wealthy class and a poor class, advances in technology has moved the human species to a point of inflection. It’s a “tip over event”. It’s a point where sentience becomes established within a society, and in our cases, within a species.
Throughout the Metallicman writings I have pushed the idea that our human species has been striving to weed out the confused sentience’s, and establish a unified sentience.
What ever it might be.
And to this end, I have stated that it would take years, if not centuries to do so. In this regards, I have suggest (if not stated out right) that humans must choose between either a [1] Service-to-self sentience, or [2] a Service-to-others sentience.
However, what appears to be happening is something quite different, and my personal biases are hereby notified to stop being so “black and white” about everything.
You see, all that matters to our benefactors is that Humans get their collective acts together and work out a unified sentience. They don’t really care what it would be, just that it is unified, and that it fits (or can fit with some RNA changes) into a galactic archetype.
It has nothing to do whether they like or hate humans as a species. It has to do with the generation of the thoughts that we have, their power and our ability to entangle with other species. If our sentience does not develop into an approved archetype, then our thoughts and actions can be ruinous for the rest of the galaxy (as well as the rest of the universe).
But…
But…
But you know, there is every evidence that the oligarchy that runs the United States and much of the world are already within a galactic archetype. It’s a Service-for-self archetype.
They are no longer evolving.
They ARE evolved.
And for the world to fit within the matching schedule made by our benefactors, that means that the rest of the earth must fit within one of two (remaining) complementary sentience’s.
Service-for-self. (Where 100% of the human species has the same sentience.)
Service-for-another. (Where a caste system forms, and the rest of us serve the oligarchy.)
Or, perhaps a picture would explain it better. Consider the HG Wells science fiction class “The Time Machine“.
On January 5, 1900, a disheveled looking H.G. Wells - George to his friends - arrives late to his own dinner party. He tells his guests of his travels in his time machine, the work about which his friends knew.
They were also unbelieving, and skeptical of any practical use if it did indeed work. George knew that his machine was stationary in geographic position, but he did not account for changes in what happens over time to that location.
He also learns that the machine is not impervious and he is not immune to those who do not understand him or the machine's purpose.
George tells his friends that he did not find the Utopian society he so wished had developed.
He mentions specifically a civilization several thousand years into the future which consists of the subterranean morlocks and the surface dwelling eloi, who on first glance lead a carefree life.
In the movie, the wealthy, the smart, the powerful move underground. They evolve in that environment. They become a new kind of human; The Morlock.
The evolved oligarchy. A sub-species of humans that has fully adopted a service-for-self sentience. Scene is from the 1960 movie “The Time Machine.”
.
The rest of the people stay above ground. They live in the abandoned cities, and live a pastoral life. They are the people that serve the Morloks. They are the Eloi.
The evolved human species. This is the other sub-species. This species is full of service-for-another humans. Scene is from the 1960 movie “The Time Machine”.
.
Is that the direction that the world is heading towards right now? That the human species is segregating into two separate sentience’s intentionally? Or in other words, two completely different sub-species of humans?
Spelling things out...
If the human species is already at a point where a portion of the human species has decided to branch off into their own species - A service-to-self species.
Then...
That leaves the rest of us to become either [1] Like them. We too become a service-for-self species. Or [2] we take on the role of a sub-servant species of human. The service-for-another species.
And understanding this fact, will help to explain a lot of the strange and freaky (deaky) things that are going on contemporaneously.
What things?
Well…
Let’s look at this. Ok?
You know, Trump tried to suppress China. He conducted a “hybrid war”, declared himself a “War President”, he festooned his office with war-themed objects and flags, posted his “campaign coins” prominently on display and did everything possible short of nuclear war.
And one aspect of this “hybrid” war was the release of six viral bio-weapons to collapse the Chinese agricultural and livestock industries (2017 through 2018), followed up with three strains (2019 and 2020) to take out the Chinese people themselves.
I have to admit that it really bums me out. (Sigh.)
.
The first assault was on CNY 2020 with the COVID-19B.
Subsequent assaults (after the six attempts of the destruction of grains and livestock) were the COVID-19. This came in numerous strains. A, B, C... and mutated into many others...
Bu the USA launched other biological weapons against the Chinese people as well.
There is the (yet unofficially named) completely new virus COVID-20. This is not a strain of the COVID-19, but yet another "novel" virus, and yes it is unusually enormous in size. This nasty virus was unleashed about a month after Trump "gave up" the "color revolution in Hong Kong. Super nasty. This was super lethal and caused death by vomiting. It lies in the gut and in the anus. It was discovered by the PLA by monitoring one of the Chinese CIA "assets" (that was involved in drone spraying of the swine flu in 2019.) This was the reason why Trump went into hiding for three days, and America went DEFCON ONE. He feared military retaliation. Not the "Trump caught coronavirus" nonsense that the "news" reported.
Drat! Trump snarled and twisted his evil long mustache. "I'll show them who's boss!"
What followed was the worst virus of all. Yet another (unofficially un-named) novel new, and enormous in size COVID-21 new virus. This nasty, nasty, horrible virus was unleashed about a month after the seven battle carrier Naval fleet left the South China Sea. Also very deadly, and with a very high R0. Also found in hyper vigilant sweeps of all imported food and visitors to China. It lies within the gut and anus and results in death by diarrhea.
Today 28JAN21, the Western media is finally reporting on the Chinese "new" swab testing regime that was implemented right after the new year during the first week in January. The new technique uses swabs of the anus to detect for viral infections. Of course, the media are perplexed. Why do this with a COVID-19 with is a virus that affects the nasal passages and throat? Why test in the gut and anus?
That is because the new test not just tests for COVID-19, but also the two new lethal viruses COVID-20 and COVID-21. Both of which affect the gut and the anus.
And part of this plan was to protect Americans from “blow back”. Meaning that he didn’t want any of the bio-weapon released upon the Chinese to end up hurting America. Which was why trump insisted that COVID-19A be spread to all Americans and that no one is to wear a mask. He wanted everyone to be immunized.
blowback
...unintended adverse results of a political action or situation.
He wanted the light strain COVID-19A to spread to all Americans and the “West” to get this virus. Why? So that they would be immune to “blow back”. This was through giving everyone “herd immunity”.
… the COVID-19A ran unchecked through America and the nations of “The West”. As it did so, it gave everyone “herd immunity” to the nasty virus; the COVID-19B, the Chinese, Russian and Iranian strain.
And don’t give me the Alex Jones / Rush Limbaugh / Sean Hannity / CIA narrative that the Coronavirus was a Chinese bio-weapon gone wrong. Sheech!
𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱-𝟭𝟵 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗮. The Covid virus genome was found in waste water samples in Barcelona in March 2019, almost a year before it was first reported in Wuhan China. A USA mayor said he tested to have COVID antibody as early as November 2019, meaning he was infected much earlier. Scientists at University of Milan confirmed the virus was present in Italy since November 2019.
https://lnkd.in/e4rH_eY
But…
But, suddenly the entire “news” dialog has changed.
Now everyone MUST take this new vaccination. It is very important or you will die! You must do it now! Hurry up take it NOW! Now. Now. Nowwwwww!
It seems like things have changed. The news media leads one to believe that things are different, and that things have changed.
Oh sure, there’s all sorts of warnings and alerts about new strains popping out of nowhere inside of America…
No one wants to be a casualty in a pandemic. It’s heart-rendering.
.
Now, pay attention.
China, Russia and their allies are using the viral inoculation for the very nasty COVID-19B. This is a unique vaccination and is quite unlike what has been bantered about in America. This is necessary, and the Chinese version, the COVID-19B has a R0 or 15% to 20%. Much more dangerous than the “lite” American strain COVID-19A with a R0=0.1%.
But suddenly, America has a vaccination and everyone MUST take it!
This viral inoculation is very, very different from the Chinese solution, and involves changing the RNA of the person so inoculated.
.
I find it very curious that there is this urgency to inoculate every America, and every citizen of a nation allied with America, with a RNA altering vaccination for COVID-19A with a very low R0. It’s very odd.
And I am not the only one questioning this either…
Now, the “news” is all filled with bullshit. So it’s pretty hard to make heads or tails out of what is going on. I can tell you the following are as clear as day…
President Trump declared war on China. And launched biological warfare attacks to that end.
The COVID-19B is real. People die from it. China locked the entire down over it, and went DEFCON ONE with armed nuclear weapons over it. This is the deadly strain.
The COVID-19A is real, and this strain was exposed to Americans almost six months prior to the release of the lethal strain in China. This is the inoculation strain.
For the Trump / Bolton / Pompeo / Tom Cotton plan to work, it is important that herd immunity be obtained using COVID-19A inside of America.
So what is going on with this sudden frantic “need” to inject everyone with a RNA changing vaccine against a mild strain of COVID-19A?
What indeed?
Right now inside America everything is a big mess. Certainly no one can disagree. The “news” or what constitutes it’s modern replacement is all over the place and fear-mongering is the norm. It’s hard to figure out what is going on.
Don’t allow MM here to be yet another tale of fear and woe.
I really don’t know what is going on in America and the West. To me, it really seems to be in a state of turmoil, where everything is upside down and there are a lot of crazy atmospheric conditions that point to dangerously dark storm clouds a brewing. And in and among all this turmoil is a sudden “change in direction” regarding the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Recall that in January 2020 the narrative was DO NOT WEAR MASKS. It’s not as bad as the flu, and “herd immunity”.
And now, one complete year later…
In January 2021, the narrative is WEAR MASKS. It’s much worse than the flu. Take the vaccination or die!!!!
Now…
Is this just because there is a new President…? Or is it because of a bigger plan? Or is it that the United States is so confused that it is like a thrashing elephant out of control and in a rage?
I. Do. Not. Know.
What I do know is the following…
This change in direction, it’s suddenness and crazed haphazard implementation is not a comforting sign. It points to an out-of-control government and leadership system.
From the point of view of DNA / RNA, any use of a vaccination that alter genetic structure should be of concern. (Look what happened to the tomato). It doesn’t matter if the intentions are good or bad. New technologies require vetting and careful controlled trials and experimentation.
What ever eventually does happen, the benefactors are just fine with it.
And if you get the inoculation…
And the RNA does it’s work. What then? You will look human, but what changes with the RNA alter?
Could it be like the 1956 movie “Invasion of the body snatchers”…
He looks like my uncle. He sounds like my uncle. He dresses like my uncle, he acts and walks and talks like my uncle.
...but he's NOT my uncle.
The 1956 movie “Invasion of the body snatchers”.
America seems to be going the way of the former Soviet Union
Unknown to most Americans, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Soviet Union break-up created a host of changes and discomfort for the people there. Many lost their incomes, their places of employment, food supplies dwindled and everything was very “iffy” for a while. Angered youth took over a ballistic nuclear submarine, for Pete’s sake. It was a trying time.
But now things have settled out and calmed down.
All that remains of the “glory days” of the former Soviet Union are abandoned buildings…
An abandoned medical research hospital.
.
And this, an abandoned space complex….
An abandoned space complex inside Russia.
.
And this telecommunications station left to rot…
An abandoned Russian Telecommunications station.
.
Or all these planes and aircraft in an abandoned Russian “skunk works”…
Abandoned Russian “Skunk works”.
.
Um, yeah it’s all sad.
If you liked these photos, you can find a ton lot more at this great site; https://rusue.com/. It's got urban explorers going through the bones of the old former Soviet Union. It's a great site to explore.
Anyways,
It seems like the changes inside of America are starting to manifest, and guess what? It’s not like anyone thought that they would be like. Nope. It’s not an American Civil War II – thought that is still on the table, or a scene from “The Walking Dead” and a Zombie apocalypse. It’s bio-weapons, invisible dangers, government authority, and massive control, with pockets of balkanized folk all over the place that are angry, pissed off, confused and out of their minds in blood-lust anger.
Conclusion
So we enter a state of understanding.
The war for sentience domination has begun in the United States. It is following the Former Soviet Union model, and involves all kinds of new and novel characteristics that places “common citizens” at a great disadvantage, and the ruling oligarchy at a great advantage. The only people who seemingly will survive during the culling process are those that will fit within the niche’s provided for them.
I suggest the MM readership to be aware, cautious and accommodating. But not to be in agreement. Just keep your thoughts to your selves. Do not place a big “bulls eye” on your chest. Do not flaunt disgust or anger. Be as publicly neutral as possible you need to survive thought this stressful time by keeping your wits about your and controlling your emotions.
Clan up with friends and family. Know who your neighbors are and be helpful and a participant within your own closed society. Be good. Be the kind ear to listen and the strong shoulder for other to cry upon. Remember this time WILL PASS. What it important that you pass through it unscathed.
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Today Trump is vacating the office of President of the United States.
Here’s some great commentary that I would like to post. There are so many good people trying to get their “arms around the current American political situation” that it would take days to list them all. Here, I have take a few precious ones and compiled them to generate a picture of confusion and understanding. Like a bunch of folk riding a rickety old roller coaster and worried if the next bend will collapse or not.
Right off the top – MoA
The following is the “pulse of the nation” taken from the Moon Over Alabama…
Of course, the internet, is of course, filled with comments by Americans about America.
Comments by Americans
In general, few Americans view America as a healthy nation embracing good and well-deserved improvements with a new Administration. While most are happy to see Mr. Trump leave, most view America as a complete “cluster fuck”…
A half century of downward mobility — crippling of the real economy in which productivity was rewarded — and neglect causing deterioration of infrastructure (including meeting basic human needs like health care), have brought the U.S. to a state of collapse.
Almost everyone seems to sense this and we feel powerless to rectify the situation through accepted channels, thus some people believe they have a ‘patriotic’ duty to use other means.
The combination of disenfranchised minorities and disgruntled middle class becomes dangerous (to the established order) as soon as both groups realize they can’t win by blaming and fighting each other.
We haven’t reached that stage yet, judging from the comments I’ve read in the mainstream media, however it’s just a matter of time until they do.
The divide-and-rule political game keeps people attached to ideology of left vs right until it becomes clear that we all lose by adhering to this mode of thinking.
The war racket and a whole range of other exploitative financial policies are driven by the top echelon of elites, who also control the narratives through media propaganda.
Their game is failing and they’re resorting to draconian control measures to prop it up, but this can’t continue much longer.
As I see it, the collapse of the Western financial system could happen suddenly or gradually, or it could bring the ultimate destruction of human civilization.
In any case, I believe our degradation of the natural world will be the real catalyst leading either to human extinction; or else if we’re lucky and smart enough, will induce us to massively downsize our population and industrial activity in order to let the ecosystem heal itself.
-Posted by: norecovery | Jan 14 2021 19:05 utc | 9
and
Whether or not the Trump voters will be surpressed doesn't matter (anymore).
The fact is and remains that A LOT OF US citizens are unhappy. And that will create more and more unrest in the (near) future. Both the Democratic and the Republican party have become establishment parties who don't care about the petite bourgeoisie and/or the average Joe Sixpack.
-Posted by: Willy2 | Jan 14 2021 19:33 utc | 11
and
The only thing they (RINO's, the non Trumpers) are afraid of loosing is their seat on the gravy train express.
They are afraid of loosing their seat at the sleaziest brothel in the world, totally bought and controlled by powerful interest groups and foreign governments with Israel being by far the biggest one that controls that chamber.
-Posted by: Tom | Jan 14 2021 20:06 utc | 18
and
The Democrats have proven themselves complete idiots for years and years and years. The Republicans are batshit crazy.
The last election from the Democratic POV was to remove what they perceive as an existential threat to 'democracy' which is another word for 'deep state.' It is no wonder the rush to judgment to confirm what they already believe about DJT. Critical thinking and common sense are not attributes the elite political class possess. They are all vainglorious grifters.
The USA is FUBAR and none of the king's horses and none of the king's men etc. etc. etc.
-Posted by: gottlieb | Jan 14 2021 20:17 utc | 21
and
Russiagate, Ukrainegate and now Insurrectiongate convinced a lot of Americans - and not just Trump supporters - that the system is broken.
If they keep up with this lunacy, people will conclude that the system is - not just broken but - irrevocably broken.
At that point, even police state suppression won't help them.
-Posted by: Mike from Jersey | Jan 14 2021 21:20 utc | 28
and
The Trump supporters do not care that he is a murderer and a scoundrel as well as yet another US President that started yet another war against a Muslim country.
They think that US can survive a centuries-long war against Islam.
That is a major flaw in their estimation of US power and fragility of what they have in the United States.
1.2 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Chinese, and a 130 million Russians believing that the United States is their enemy.
No amount of domestic political change in the United States can address this.
In 1976, a 17-year old American boy could travel alone in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. without any fear; he would be welcome because of the correct foreign policy of the United States.
Americans have lost that and are discussing the deck arrangements on Titanic.
-Posted by: fyi | Jan 14 2021 21:24 utc | 30
and
There are many, like me, who supported Trump only because he was the only one who actually did anything that might benefit regular Americans.
And while some have clearly eaten the worm with Trump - I personally still don't consider him a saint or a savior.
If he were to pardon Snowden or Assange, it would be exclusively as a f*** you to the intelligence community.
However, in the grand scheme of Trump things, that is very low on his list of things to do. Said list being headed mostly by ways to make money...
The really sad part is not that Trump became President - that is actually a plus for the American system.
The really sad part is that Trump was a better President for regular Americans than any of his 3 immediate predecessors and will have been better than his successor even despite the pettiness, the bull-in-china-shop, the ego, etc etc.
That is the real indictment of the United State of America at this point in time.
-Posted by: c1ue | Jan 20 2021 9:59 utc | 99
and
I think this is the overarching view of what's happening in the US and the world today. Oligarchic power and riches are now so great and so globally mobile that nation-states are simply getting in the way of the plunder.
~~
In my opinion, the very rich of this world actually do have a solution to climate change and resource depletion, and they didn't have to think very hard to see what to them is obvious. As they break up societies to make the plunder easier, they also imperil millions and ultimately billions of people, who will quickly die and relieve the burden on planetary resources.
This is why chaos is success for them. There is no plan to save anything except their own riches. Everything and everyone else can fade away. We spoke of steady-state economies the other day, and the very rich are now prepared to live in one - their own. New world order is a red herring anymore. They don't want to rule anything. They just want it all to go away.
They, the rich, have come up with the obvious, brilliant solution to all recent problems of this world. We the people are the largest ingredient of these planetary problems. Obviously, we'll have to go. And as this happens, the rich will exuberantly - with great zest - increase their own wealth from the very crumbling of former societies.
-Posted by: Grieved | Jan 20 2021 1:04 utc | 64
and
For the Trump-phenomenon to continue, the duopoly must not be allowed to carry on casting an illusory shadow of balance which the two-party tyranny employs and which many in America prefer to believe is our noble, default modus operandi.
The rush to restore civility to the GOP will be the overarching goal of the next four years by msm and BigTech. Democrats view of Rinos will soften as an atmosphere of cooperation will seemingly return. It will be Joe Biden's inaugural address on repeat for FOUR YEARS!!! Get your barf bags ready! Can we reuse them like our cloth masks?
...
But that doesn't mean that Deplorables will fall back in line. On the contrary, I believe that DJT will be the last GOP President, unless the establishment gets so desperate that they engineer a Rino win for Presidency in four years. I'm thinking Pence.
But the Deplorables will not vote another GOP Rino in.
By sowing now, Deplorables are happy to let the Democrat party reveal themselves completely as parasites by further destroying our nation. A true-Nationalist party will then emerge naturally and the Deplorables will reap the benefits of their patience. As of right now, I do not see the progressive (socialist) side of the left willing to get their hands dirty by invoking the name of Nationalism. In their own elitism, they too share disdain for the common conservative which will restrict them from forming any kind of coalition.
As a result, the splitting of the Dems into factions seems inevitable down the road, although this will lag behind the Deplorables' ability to consolidate into their own party to upset the hold of the GOP. The America-First Party will be coming up just as the neoliberal establishment is coming down due to factionalism.
A hard road ahead. But rejoice! The gears of history are spinning again and you can see the hands of time advancing in its dialectical form.
-Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jan 20 2021 7:21 utc | 94
and
I am one of the outlier heathens. We will not so easily conform, reform or deform into the highly suppressed shapes and tiny spaces TPTB insist we all must passively retreat into. We are more than their obedient, mindless consumer droids or random points of collected data, to be unceremoniously herded, harvested and then, casually discarded when they are satisfied that there is little to nothing left of 'value' for them to wring out of our collectively ransacked consumer carcasses.
Yet...We Are Legion!
-Posted by: Dee Plora Belle | Jan 14 2021 20:19 utc | 22
Comments by Communists
And so now, let me add some comments by Mr. Billy Bob, who (I guess) is a self-proclaimed “communist”. I think that he isn’t. But that’s just me. What ever he wants to call himself, his comments are golden…
I have not been a very active participant here but I try and keep up with most of the discussion and truly appreciate the honor of being invited to join the group.
I was recently awarded a perhaps well deserved 30 day facebook ban for calling someone a "stupid c u next tuesday". They kept insisting on the existence of millions interred in "concentration camps" and after hundreds of comments their bad faith engagement brought out the worst in me.
So I've been working on an early encapsulation of the Trump era and since I can't currently share it on facebook, I thought I would share it here. Any feedback would be appreciated.
- Billy Bob
Trump: A Communist Perspective for the Politically Ignorant
Trump was the timely beneficiary of overwhelming disgust with the two party system and its inability to further working class interests. The existing system provides a facade of democracy while promoting capitalist class interests and shielding the actual policy makers from any accountability for their lack of furthering working class interests. If managed properly, the capitalist class can play both sides against each other in perpetuity without having to offer any concessions to the working class.
Instead of engaging in the slippery slope of concession granting, the billionaire owned mass media stokes racial and cultural divisions resulting in the desired fragmentation of the working class. With the working class bifurcated into two broad groups, the mass media manipulates these groups through the propaganda technique Bernays called “continuous interpretation” in which daily events are explained through the red or blue partisan lens with the intent of rendering public opinion compatible with establishment interests while keeping the electorate divided.
With red and blue falsely depicted as opposite ends of the political spectrum, blue achievement is seen as red loss and vice versa. This tug of war is stage-managed by class conscious establishmentarians who’s prime directive is to ensure that neither side “wins” thereby maintaining the system’s viability and perpetuity. Though differences exist between the two parties, they amount to little more than strategic disagreements over how to best consolidate capitalist class power and maintain their system. Their respective platforms are in a continuous state of flux and not adhered to in any event if contradiction and hypocrisy can result in partisan gain.
Such a system would not exist if not for the overwhelming political ignorance of the American public–an ignorance which is facilitated and encouraged by the ruling capitalist establishment that has every incentive not to develop an informed and politically astute citizenry.
While extreme political ignorance was necessary for Trump’s ascendancy, even more so was the crisis of legitimacy which culminated following eight years of Barack Obama’s non-existent “Hope and Change” presidency. Trump exploited this crisis as fully as he possibly could by loudly denouncing the status quo as a swamp which needed to be drained. It was his anti-establishment rhetoric which appealed to voters and which enabled him victory over his establishment rival.
Trump’s populous demagoguery and his willingness to tarnish the sanctity of ruling class institutions of power and control like the rigged electoral system, or the fake-news mass media, ensured his popularity among a broad segment of the electorate but it also ensured that he would not be tolerated by the class conscious establishment consensus.
For four years they struggled to control and contain the demagogic outsider while they worked to harness his popularity (and unpopularity) in furtherance of their own partisan interests. Team blue took the gloves off and immediately attempted to depict Trump as evil and incompetence personified.
Team red on the other hand was far more nuanced in their approach as they had much more to gain and much more to lose. While a few on team red opposed Trump outright from the very beginning, most attempted to managing the situation in a way which harnessed Trump’s popularity while engaging in damage control over his destructive rhetoric.
Trump’s greatest supporters and defenders were indeed among the worst right wing sycophants that our society has produced. Folks like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin, hitched their wagon to Trump’s popularity in an effort to use their platform to keep Trump’s demagoguery within the velvet ropes of traditional republican discourse and polite partisan behavior. They defended him from the outrageous and dishonest attacks of team blue and became the voice of reason during the Russiagate, and Ukrainegate hoaxes. Nevertheless, Trump’s minuscule base of establishment support never stood a chance of forcing any significant institutional change.
Trump correctly perceived the crisis of legitimacy that had been growing among the citizenry and he appeared to honestly believed that he could do a better job of running the country and furthering the interests of the American people but he maintained this narcissistic belief despite lacking the most basic understanding of how things work or why things are as they are.
He seemed truly clueless regarding the capitalist class consensus and their view of the working class as a threat that must be pacified through the liberal application of divisive propaganda via the mass media. Trump seemed clueless regarding their need to project global power through perpetual war, sanctions, trade agreements, and the military encirclement of noncompliant states.
He discovered early on that the status quo which he railed against resulted from an entrenched perspective of the capitalist class best interest and although “being friends with Russia”, making peace with North Korea, or ending the forever wars in the mid-East or Afghanistan could easily win over a majority of the population, there was no way the ruling class would allow Trump to damage and weaken their imperial grip through the implementation of such policies.
So although Trump was in many ways an instinctive and gifted politician who managed to navigate his way through the political jungle by opportunistically capitalizing on the widespread disgust of the status quo, and despite the fact that he truly believed he could do better for the prosperity of the country (including the working class) than what had been wrought by the status quo, he failed to recognize the basic reality that presidents are figureheads and exist for no other reason than to represent the interest of the ruling capitalist class consensus. He naively and indeed foolishly believed that the ruling class would permit him to pursue an agenda that was even mildly at odds with their own.
Honest intelligent folks can agree to disagree on precisely what Trump’s deeply held convictions were, whether he had any at all, and what changes he would have made had he been allowed a free hand to do as he saw fit. But proclaiming Trump to be principle-less and solely interested in his own political and economic success, fails to satisfactorily explain many of Trump’s actions.
All that can be said with certainty is that Trump had a poor grasp of the Marxian political reality grounded in oppositional *class* interests and the changes which he advocated for and which were rejected by the ruling capitalist class consensus, amounted to little more than a strategic shift away from the existing globalist order and towards a new nationalist order where Trump himself would be the arbiter of what policies and agreements were in the nation’s best interest.
Additionally, honest folks can disagree over the origins of the COVID virus and the extent to which it was exploited in furtherance of ruling class interests. Honest folks can disagree regarding the extent to which the 2020 election were rigged against Trump. Both are open questions and it is misguided to pretend to have certainty regarding either. But neither of these things is that important or relevant with regards to the political reality which we all ought to recognize and embrace. Embracing truth necessitates the rejection and dismissal of the contrived narratives designed to obfuscate reality and benefit capitalist class interests.
Democracy in this country has never existed. It has always been a tyranny of wealth. Free speech, free press, free trade, and other liberal aspirations are truly non-existent in this country. Trump was not hated because he was Hitler reincarnate nor was he hated because of his principled pursuit of working class interests. He was hated because he was not a figurehead that would play the game according to their rules and within the bounds of their democratic facade. He was happy to denounce their corrupt system for his own political benefit but he did so while lacking the knowledge, wisdom, or ability to improve the situation.
Americans ought to be more politically savvy and recognize that the propagandistic tactics being used against right wing demagoguery, will be the exact same tactics used against authentic and principled folks committed to social progress. The four year long dishonest demonization of Trump culminating with the farcically apoplectic response to the protests at the capital will be used to justify the curtailing of civil liberties and a bipartisan assault on the legacy of DJT. His burning effigy will be raised high as an example to all that dare to threaten the status quo.
Conclusions
I cannot predict the future, and I am just as confused with what is going on in America as everyone else. So my comments on this contemporary train of events are going to be necessarily simplistic.
The United States is not acting like a healthy nation.
No one is happy in the United States except the Wall Street Bankers, the Sycophantic leeches in Washington DC, and the global oligarchy. Other satisfied individuals include long-duration federal workers, special interest groups that cater to the Democrat Party, and the ignorant.
I would hazard a guess that huge segments of the United States population is unhappy. This remains true whether or not they voted for Biden or not.
Thus, anything that President Biden tries to do will not generate any kind of satisfaction. People will look upon the efforts in a pessimistic manner. Which means, boys and girls, that the unhappiness will need to run it’s course…
…I see nothing good in the future of America.
This is true regardless of whether or not I agree with the new polices of Mr. Biden and Congress or not.
And while I am happy to see the neocon, war-mongering assholes that ran the United States as some kind of high-technology mafia / military empire leave “packing”, I am not rejoicing. Instead I tremble in fear. Because none of the underlying problems that are systemic to America are being addressed, and this always leads up to catastrophe.
It's one thing cheering on about "freedom" and "democracy" when your only interaction is with the glowing blue computer screen. It's another thing entirely when you are sitting on "ground zero" and Mike Pompeo is announcing that your city must be destroyed.
Historically.
Absolutely.
Catastrophic.
A small toddler that is a bully, becomes a small town hood, that becomes a career criminal, that is eventually “put down” when his actions are deemed too dangerous by the community.
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This post talks about the world going to shit fast, and our frustrations and fears that it is beyond our control. That is not true at all. In fact, we are in control of it, it just looks like we are powerless.
Back in 2016, grassroots white Americans voted anti-establishment Trump into the Oval Office. For the first time, long-held ideals of American democracy have been challenged. Pledging to “Make America Great Again”, Trump's solution was straightforward – waging trade wars on friends and foes alike; withdrawing the country from global pacts, and avoiding responsibilities for international affairs.
The consequences have been catastrophic. Populist policies originally introduced to woo American voters were ironically implemented at the sacrifice of blue-collar workers – the same group of people who supported Trump in 2016. Establishment forces are also fed up with Trump's "madness."
The 2020 election was more a fight between Biden-represented American institutions and anti-establishment forces with Trump being the spokesperson than a partisan battle. Biden, although a Democrat, has high hopes pinned on him by establishment politicians of both parties to bring the United States back to the right track. This requires the new president to restore multilateralism, intensify cooperation with allies, and mend ties with China.
-When will U.S. anti-China hysteria come to an end?
It all began with a comment;
“…our consciousness.”
It appears that my consciousness is being overwhelmed (or over-ruled) by the 99.99% who believe that shit on “TV” or “News”.
Again:
Other than your prayers to nowhere, is there simply a method to say “I’ve had enough of this charade”? Like “Help Mr. Wizard… I don’t wanna be a peon human anymore.” Suicide, is that it? Seriously, what the fuck am I learning these days (in the “sentience nursery”) that I had not known years and years ago?
And I responded with…
In reply to DSKlausler.
I want to take more time to answering your question. Unfortunately I was busy with personal things and all I could do was throw off a quick response. But I have been thinking about you and your last few emails. I can sense a great deal of frustration and angst. And I do understand it.
Do not be under the impression that the reality that you see is ruled and controlled by the masses…the manipulated masses. That point was made very clearly by the base commander when I joined MAJestic. Most of the world is populated by sheeple. Or just folk that haven’t a clue, and who graze upon the lands in a reactive way. Only a handful of people are actually really in control. these are the cowboys, the unappreciated and the under-deserved. You never hear about them, because they are not attracted to fame and fortune.
Look at 2020. Was a fucking year, right?
During the entire year, just about every other article in the United States, mainstream Alt-Right and Alt-left was all HATE CHINA! and it was non-stop. By the end of the year, the 330 million American either totally despised China, (and wanted to go to war) or were guardedly neutral. No one put up any kind of a fight when Trump started kicking the Chinese out of America, banning things, and launched a huge flotilla to attack China.
330 million people HATING China. COVID-19B launched as part of a 8-strain biological attack, a military flotilla…
…but no war happened. Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo were kicked out of office.
The American economy is in shambles. And China is bigger and stronger than ever. Not only that, but it has grown and the world is now turning it’s back on the broken promises of Trump and look at the ruins of the United States… with incredulity and disgust.
Do you actually believe that this is the result of the combined HATRED of 330 million people? Or, maybe that a MAJestic operator that happened to live inside China had a Prayer Affirmation Campaign that said…
[1] Donald Trump will not be able to harm China.
[2] All American military ventures to China will fail.
[3] The harder that Donald Trump tries to break or destroy China, the same and equal effect will hit him and his family personally.
[4] Any WMD’s implemented by America to hurt China will boomerang to the USA a hundred-fold and more.
And yeah. It doesn’t make sense. Except it does if you read everything that I am saying.
COVID-19B deaths China = 4634
COVID-19A deaths USA = 397,600
As far as you and other MM readers. I will not allow any harm to come to you all. Not if I can help it. You all are true believers. So relish in that.
[5] Followers of MM are protected with the same kind of protections that I utilize for my family provided that it is their desire.
If the shadow people thoughts have an equal power as a single person, and there at 330,000,000 of them then it is logical to say (just what you stated) that the tyranny of the majority will define the reality that we all inhabit. After all, that is the primary theory behind propaganda. But I argue quite differently. It is the strength of the thoughts of an individual consciousness that controls the reality that maintains the power to shape and shift the reality that surrounds us.
If you do not understand, I will provide more information.
After the response above, I have received some positive responses.
First from ULTan
I get it, Mr Man. Couldnt be clearer. If folks read your Maj and MWI sections thoroughly, all these concerns are addressed.
I should add again, though, if I may and IMHO: Stop watching MMMedia whatever ya’ll do. And don’t fight the masses head on. Lie low and observe their madness. Learn from it. Is it something that’s happened to them? Or does it just reveal what they really were all along. (Quantum shadows? Existing only to teach u personally? Or is that too far out for ya?) Do not get dragged into arguments with zombified and terrified normies over masks, rules, etc. Work out a method of avoidance. They’ve been driven crazy by Wizards at the top of the pile. Their pile, that is. Avoid this at all costs. Surf that wave, look after your loved ones and especially pets, other critters nearby, too. They need you at this time of year.
Trust in the Plan. And I don’t mean the Qtard one.
How is that working out for ya’ll by the way? Sealed indictments opened yet? Mass paedophilia arrests? America great again, yet?
Trump the saviour avatar?
Ehhh, not really.
Be more careful what you read and follow next time.
And if you were a Qfan and are still sane: please read about how cults work. Start with Jim Jones or the Moonies. Pentacostals, too.
Scary stuff. I assure you.
And thanks again, Mr Man. My cats– each and every one of ’em– say a bigggg hi!
Stay safe,
U.
And again from the original poster, Mr. DSKlausler…
In reply to congjing yu.Thanks for that… and I DO read everything you publish.
It just doesn’t seem right… can’t the simple folks just be left alone to live and grow at their own pace without a bunch of twits ruining the world?
I will give the affirmation deal another go.
Just switch me to the world line where people aren’t so stupid.
Let’s look at the situation
The world seems to be going to Hell. The “news”, the media, the people in Charge and everyone around you are seemingly idiots. “What is their malfunction”, you ask. And you are in fear for your life, your livelihood, and your family. Not to mention your community and your nation.
It doesn’t matter what side of the American Political Spectrum you reside on, everything is seemingly going to Hell straight away. You yearn for stability, a return to quieter and more peaceful times, and management by reason and reasonable people. And when you read the “news” it only amplifies your concerns…
That last link reflects the concerns of many, many Americans (and perhaps many people around the world). “Give me something. Give me hope. Give me Xanax.” Seemingly the population is ready for change…
…and this is a dangerous time. Eh?
Because Change is always uncomfortable, and can usher is a wonderful life, or an indescribably worse on. As we used to say in the United States “jump from the frying pan into the fire”.
Can’t quite put my finger on why. Oh yes, I just flipped on ‘MSDNC’ and opened my Failing New York Times, and now I remember: because I’ve been watching my country set ablaze, and Donald Trump and his faithful Trumpsters are holding the flamethrower.
By now, we’ve all sat rapt and horrified, watching the highlights: the MAGA-bots following the Dear Leader’s call to riot, invading the Capitol building, smashing windows, battering down doors, stealing the Speaker’s lectern and literally covering the floors in shit, for fans of too-on-the-nose metaphors. They accosted police, threatened to hang the traitor Mike Pence and trotted through the legislative chamber in full tactical gear holding flex cuffs in the hope of taking hostages. (Possibly before executing them: someone did erect a gallows on the grounds.) Five people died. Four of them Trump supporters, one of them a Capitol Police officer, hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
I doubt Mr Trump wanted anybody to die. He just wanted to put a good scare into Congress, while trying to overturn a free and fair election, the very bedrock without which the whole system collapses. So nothing to see here, folks. Let’s talk about what really matters, Trump getting banned from Twitter!
If you haven’t gathered by now, I’ve had it. Plenty of us have always been Trump skeptical; my skepticism dates all the way back to 1999. But it’s time for his acolytes to reckon with the cancer that they’ve let metastasize. I haven’t been terribly subtle, so let’s just go ahead and lay it out: Donald Trump is a sociopathic cult leader, a moral black hole with a weird tan and a combover. Yes, I know it’s old hat to make fun of his hair, but his confidantes have told me it wounds him. And I just want him to hurt like he’s hurt America.
So now that we’re coming to the conclusion of DJT’s first and only term — which has ended in impeachment and could include imprisonment — it’s time to legacy-assess the effects of Trumpism. As several have already noted, after everything from Trump’s social-media meltdowns to him falling asleep at the wheel during the deadliest pandemic in a century, Americans are now poorer, angrier, dumber, meaner, more divided, sicker (both physically and mentally) and deader than they were four years ago. But how ’bout that wall?! (The one that’s one-fourth of the way built, that Mexico didn’t pay for.)
I wasn’t a big fan of The Establishment, either. But we threw them over for this?
I don’t detest Trumpsters: that would leave me hating roughly 60 percent of my friends and 80 percent of my family. But I would like to know how so many good people of my acquaintance could be so blind to the glaringly obvious. You edit American Greatness, one of the house organs of the movement. But by my lights, America isn’t looking so great right now. Feels more like American Mediocrity. Or America Needs Improvement. Lots of it. Give me something. Give me hope. Give me Xanax. Give me shelter from the storm. Or I might do something truly unthinkable, like quote Dylan lyrics in print. Nobody wants to see that.
Ah…
Pointing a nice big finger on a figurehead. Ah. It’s all Trump’s fault, and it’s his followers fault…
No it’s not.
It’s the way that governments crumble. They start young and youthful, they go through a “middle age”, they get old, and senile, and then they die. We are watching America die, and no singular person is at fault. So stop blaming the person at the helm. A doomed ship is going to hit that iceberg, and while the captain might be able to steer the ship somewhat, if he doesn’t hit THAT particular iceberg, he will hit the next one instead, or the one after that. A doomed ship is a doomed ship.
The one thing I’ve noticed over the past five years is that the only people more consumed by the person of Donald Trump — from his psychology to his physiognomy — than the most diehard, plan-trusting, steal-stopping, Trump super-fans are his obsessive detractors. However large the number of actual Trump cultists is, the anti-Trump cult is orders of magnitude larger, more intense and more powerful. That’s not surprising, because Trump’s rise to power is less a direct threat to the established order and the ruling class it serves than it is an indictment of their failure. Of course they react with visceral hatred. Perhaps we can stipulate that a country with a healthy culture and competent, trusted (and trustworthy) institutions would not have elected Donald Trump as president. Yet, Donald Trump has received more votes than any other Republican ever. Twice.
That suggests two possibilities. Either half the country is comprised of Deplorables, reprobates, morons or sociopaths (I’d love to see the Venn Diagram). Or something has gone quite wrong and America isn’t working very well for a lot of Americans.
Option one is the default answer of the ruling class and its aspirants and retainers. But in fact something has gone wrong. Late-stage liberalism isn’t able to keep its promises. That’s why both Trump and Bernie Sanders were so popular. That’s why there is so much social and political conflict. And Trump-obsession of any kind is a distraction and a coping mechanism.
Over the past 50 years median real wages have barely budged. Worse, the growth that has occurred has all happened at the top. The top 10 percent did OK, the top 1 percent did very well and the top 0.1 percent blasted way ahead of everyone else. Everyone except the very top fell a little behind the group ahead of them, but the group below the top 10 percent fell further and faster. This made it harder to get married, buy a house and raise a family. The cost of being middle class kept rising faster than middle class wages. That created — and continues to create — a lot of people who are socially and economically precarious.
You say ‘I wasn’t a big fan of The Establishment, either. But we threw them over for this?’ Yes. Why? Because there wasn’t a better option. Look at the group of Republicans running in 2016 and Democrats in 2020. All of them are standard-bearers for a shattered consensus. And there are a lot of mediocrities and has-beens. Biden himself is a retread of a retread. The ‘uniparty’ that runs the country either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that for a lot of people the American Dream is dead. In the cohort of people born in 1940, about 95 percent did better economically than their parents. For the cohort born in 1980 (border line millennials), only about 40 percent of those raised in middle-class families are better off than their parents at the same stage of life. These are people who were raised mostly by boomer parents to follow the program that worked so well for them: go to college, maybe grad school, trust the plan and you’ll have a life filled with grilling and long weekends. But it hasn’t worked out that way. It’s been tough. And for those that didn’t go to college, it’s even worse.
What do we do about it? That’s a big subject. But Trump offered answers in 2016 that made some intuitive sense and resonated with a lot of people. We sent our factories and their high-paying jobs to China? Let’s bring them back. Mass immigration undercuts wages? Let’s slow it down. The ruling class is corrupt, self-serving and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else? Let’s take the country back from them.
Trump accomplished some of the good things he was talking about back then, though not as many as I would have liked. But he was often stymied by a combination of internal incoherence and external opposition. In 2017, Trump had both unified government and the most political capital to spend. The fact that the Republican party’s primary goal and signature achievement was a reduction in corporate tax rates says something about the depth of institutional decay that Trump had taken advantage of when he sought the nomination.
Yes. There’s all sorts of things wrong with America right now. It’s a fucking mess. It really is. And the people want out of this mess. And the people in control aren’t really up to taking on that job. They really aren’t.
The uniparty is in control and they are not what the nation needs. It needs leadership, understanding, and merit-based managers who know how systems work and how to clean out the entire clogged up and gutted system.
I'm going to use a Chinese reference, that most Americans are unaware of...
America needs a Mr. Deng-style revolution.
In the 1980's Mr. Deng single-handedly implemented American-style Reaganomics to China. He got rid of hard-core Marxism. He tossed much of the state-mandated industries and implemented private controls. He built cities, disposed political corruptions and changed China from a hard-core Marxist Communist nation to something else.
He changed it to a single-party, traditional values, merit-based system that serves the people, and that is policed by harsh systems to makes sure that the ruling class does not move away from these values.
Ok. Let’s not get too bogged down here.
China changed, and it was hard-core Marxist. America too can change. In fact, if America is what everyone says it is, whether a “democracy” or a “republic”, it should be rather easy to change. But it’s not. You know it. I know it. And it has corrupted well past the point of band-aides and minor surgery. One half of the nation wants to burn it down, and the other half wants to restructure it into something really different.
And thus the fear.
Elements on both the LEFT and the RIGHT are scaring the living daylights out of everyone. And those in charge of the United States government today are not reassuring anyone.
Thus the feeling of helplessness.
Proactive actions
But, if you read the MM writings you realize that your reality is not what it appears to be.
We “share” an apparent reality, but we are not part of what we observe.
We are consciousness. And we are moving world-line to world-line based on our thoughts. And it is important that we NOT get too hung up on what we observe around us. For that too will alter our thoughts. What we are observing is the world-line template. Not our individual world-line.
Do not get too caught up about that looming iceberg ahead of you. Navigate round it. And then when you see another iceberg behind it, navigate around it as well. In fact, maybe you all need to start sailing South as fast as you can to get out of the looming ice pack that is up ahead. You see the warning signs, start the navigation.
Make sure that you have lookouts posted everywhere and that they are rested and alert. Make sure that the engineers and the folk loading coal into the furnaces are up to the job and in control. Make sure that you go to the map room and navigate a path out of the ice floes. Make sure that you radio your concerns and telegraph your direction changes.
Take proactive steps.
You have control
In my real world example that I gave at the top of the post, I referenced my personal affirmation campaign that I implemented back at the start of the year when the COVID-19 outbreak hit.
Up until that time, I kept on believing that Trump wanted to work with China on trade for the mutual benefit of all. I intentionally ignored the hard facts, the neocons in his administrations and his other actions. I wanted to believe. I really wanted to believe. I wanted what I hoped to happen to actually happen and I ignored the facts.
But when people all around me started having seizures, my family became locked inside the house, and the Chinese military went DEFCON ONE, I no longer could live the lie. Donald Trump declared full-spectrum war against China and I was sitting smack dab on the bullseye at ground zero.
Ground zero.
And all the neocon publications were talking about how the USA was going to win a “hot war” against China and invade the South China Sea…
…my home.
I had to do something.
Affirmation Prayer Campaigns
Normally my prayer affirmations are associated with myself. I rarely refer to others and certainly not to Geo-political, or national politics. Those things are like oil and water in regards to my affirmations. I just don’t put affirmations where a preferential presidential candidate wins over another. Instead, my affirmations are about me.
But this WAS about me.
It Was about my FAMILY, and my FRIENDS.
And unlike most Americans, this was not some faraway place that lies at the other end of the world. It is up front and close sitting smack dab in my front yard. i had to so something.
And it seemed like an up-hill battle.
The Fire Hose of Disinformation
Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo turned on the “fire hose of disinformation” against China and it was ridiculous. China could have saved a baby from a burning building and the “news” would report that the Chinese were burning babies.
Anyways, after a full year of this, most Americans consider China evil and are willing and ready to go to war for all the same old reasons and excuses.
330 million people.
And I am but one lone singular person.
What can I do?
You run a Affirmation / Prayer Campaign and you address your fears. You do it to the exclusion of everything else. That’s what you do.
And that is what I did.
My Prayer Affirmation Campaign
Well, I did indeed include personal things, and it was a long slug-fest, I’ll tell you what. But it did work. When I started the campaign, Trump was at the top of his game. He successfully launched numerous events, wars and attacks upon China. six biological weapons designed to destroy crops and livestock. Some with drones carrying vials of toxic bio-weapons to far distant farms. A “color revolution” in Hong Kong, and insurgents flowing into Xinjiang to create another Syria war there. Not to mention the COVID-19B which targeted MYSELF AND MY FAMILY.
Fuck him!
So I launched my own prayer campaign. So if he wanted to be “top dog”, let’s see who’s boss, eh?
At the time I began, everything was pro-Trump and his plans were working out more or less. He was on the verge of creating strife, conflict, starvation, a bio-weapon war, and a future of decades of warfare on the other end of the globe.
So, here’s my relevant affirmations.
[1] Donald Trump will not be able to harm China.
[2] All American military ventures to China will fail.
[3] The harder that Donald Trump tries to break or destroy China, the same and equal effect will hit him and his family personally.
[4] Any WMD’s implemented by America to hurt China will boomerang to the USA a hundred-fold and more.
While he tried to implement policies that would harm me and my family personally, my affirmation campaign was not personal. It was defensive and proactive. He and his minions will be unable to harm me, my family, my friends or China. If he tried, it would all come back to hit him.
Some quick terms on how the MWI operates.
And what?
With 330 million people seething at rage at China, and all those thoughts, anger and emotion, it was my affirmation campaign that turned things around. At least in my neck of the woods, things have become quite the opposite of what was intended.
The point here is that I was able to stop a war in China. And, by extension, world war III … nuclear war on American soil.
One person has the power to change their life. That is you. Do your prayer affirmation campaign religiously. You, it’s up to you, to make the world surrounding you a better place to live. Do not let the “world-line template” alter the fears you generate while in a world-line that lies upon that template.
If you are filled with dread or fear, that can act as a “signpost” to push you to action. You need to hop onto your affirmation campaigns STAT! and perform corrective measures. Concentrate on your personal life, our family and friends. Do not… DO NOT… put anything that you read about in the “news” in your affirmations. That’s alike a dog chasing it’s tail. You’ll go around and around in circles . You will go no where. Focus on you and your family.
.
What ever you do, run your campaign on a PERSONAL note.
Do not implement things that you read about in the “news”, or your favorite political leanings or anything like that. Those are distractions and they WILL take away from your core desires as specified within your affirmation campaign.
Trust me on this.
The ONLY reason why I included Mr. Trump in my affirmations was because he had targeted me with his war machine. Other than that, he was no where to be seen anywhere in my campaigns.
But how does it work?
The world that you observe is not real. What you are observing is the highest likely probability at any given moment on a world-line.
You are viewing the “world-line template surface”.
You are not viewing your particular, individual, world-line.
That shrub over there looks that way because that is the highest probability of it’s appearance at that moment of time…
…as VIEWED by your consciousness within that particular world-line.
That person over there is stopping to tie their shoe because that is that highest probability of occurrence at that moment in time…
…as VIEWED by your consciousness within that particular world-line.
The President on television is making a speech raising taxes because that is the highest probability of occurrence at that moment of time…
…as VIEWED by your consciousness within that particular world-line.
You CANNOT change them.
All you can change is your navigation to other world-lines.
So do not worry about what the world-line template looks like, or appears to be. That is, unless there is a guy lunging at you with a knife or some other dangerous event. And that is a special event, just like I am describing herein.
What I did…
I conducted a slide.
I slid the world-line, and carried a lot of people with me, to a new world-line template where I am, and my family, are safe. It is a world-line that avoids a Trump / Pompeo created nuclear war, and one where the human species can continue to develop their individual sentience’s while avoiding some truly horrific consequences.
No. I’m not perfect.
Trump did launch the COVID-19 bio-weapons genie and it is out of the bottle. The Chinese stopped the two successive subsequent follow-up bio-weapons attacks (more on them later), but we all still will need to deal with this mess that he got us all involved in.
I’m good. But, I’m not God.
Conclusions
At a time when an entire nation of 330 million people were ready to go to war with China, and attack my front yard, I adjusted my affirmation campaign for a different result.
I was successful.
And all the thoughts of 330 million people had zero effect on my life.
Frankly obnoxious headlines like “Trump wasn’t wrong about China. But here’s how Biden can do a better job” and “Biden must not fall into China’s smooth relations trap” suggest that Washington’s political class is single-minded: maintain an aggressive, hostile stance toward China.
Trump was wrong about China. In 2016, as a presidential contender and he launched a rhetorical tirade against China accusing that country of “raping” the U.S. economy. In 2018, he added that in addition to rape, it had caused the opioid crisis. These accusations depended on racist stereotypes about China and worked to hide the ineptness of the profit-driven U.S. health system and poor innovation record of the economy.
Trump launched his racist hysteria against China in 2018 with deceitful claims about opioids, trade, technology, and continued in 2020 with demonstrably false allegations about COVID-19’s origins. (Notably, recent media accounts, including the U.K.-based Independent and the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, have reported that COVID-19 cases appeared in Europe far earlier than initially believed.) Trump’s racially-driven rhetoric exposed the U.S. ruling class’s deepening leadership incapacity in a crisis and its frightening inability to offer and implement rational solutions to complex problems.
.
[1] Donald trump will not be able to hurt or harm China.
Happened. Donald Trump’s anti-China policies were a complete failure. Oh, it’s much worse than that. It was a “train wreck”. The USA ended up getting harmed in so many ways. From domestically, to internationally, to scientifically, to socially. The United States has paid the price for these actions.
It’s not that I wanted to hurt the USA, but I just didn’t want myself or my family to die. And that meant that I had to take on the President and his well-paid army of war-mongering neocons with a lust for war, and desire to kill. I was successful. The complete and utter failure of the Trump policies against China were astounding and will be recorded in the history books as something that you want to avoid at all costs.
[2] All American military ventures against China will fail.
This anti-China line of thought provides no real insight into Trump’s demented psychology or the validity of the establishment’s China views. Instead, it only further exposes the persistent void in policy ideas on economic development and the ruling class’s helplessness in leading innovation. Blaming China replaces reasonable interrogation of this failure of economic and social innovation.
One egregious example of the general incapacity for efficient leadership can be seen in the bloated military sector. According to a Government Accounting Office report published this month, of “46 types of aircraft [examined by inspectors] … only three met their annual mission capable goals in a majority of the years for fiscal years 2011 through 2019.” Less than 3% of military aircraft types are consistently service-ready, in other words. Meanwhile, the military budget approaches $800 billion annually.
Massive waste that ties government contracts to political donations (to both major parties), reflects the failure across all sectors to produce sustainability, innovative technology, and necessary infrastructure for a high-level quality of life. If comparisons to the 1970s are permissible, the U.S. is approaching levels of stagnation that required the ruling class to craft neoliberalism as a class strategy for renewing its power and restoring capital accumulation. This time, neoliberalism is in crisis.
And fail they did. From HK, to Xinjigng, to Taiwan, to the South China Sea. They all failed, and failed spectacularly. You can go one by one, but there are no successes in any of them; not one.
It was hardly a secret throughout the Trump administration. Now, dying embers within sight, and with minimum fanfare, comes the declassification – virtually the whole document, minus a few redactions – of the US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific.
Why now, no less than 30 years before the usual, standard US declassification/public record protocols apply? Don’t expect an answer from Trump or from his National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.
-UNZ
[3] The harder Donald Trump tries to take on China and hurt it, the effects will boomerang back to hurt Trump and his family personally.
And isn’t that what is happening? Isn’t his family and him personally getting “hits” by the American public and legal system?
[4] Any WMD’s implemented by America to hurt China will boomerang to the USA a hundred-fold and more
Evidence for this botched leadership can be seen in the incapacity to adequately meet the COVID-19 danger. The U.S. government proved unable to deliver necessary medical equipment or to define a scientifically-sound national public health policy. It wasted time and resources and still seems incapable of controlling a contagion that has cost more than 263,000 lives.
And look at how America is handling the COVID-19 coronavirus issue, eh? This singular issue is toppling the entire nation, and government alone. It’s more than just mismanagement, it’s a fiasco of historic proportions.
In fact, this mishandling (whether it is a bio-weapon or a pandemic) will go down in the history books as a massive blunder and mistakes and Trump and his administration will be labeled as clowns and buffoons for all of eternity as a result.
The bottom line is this.
You can control the events that affect your personal life and the lives of your family. You just need to control your personal affirmations. You cannot control the entire nations, you are not MM. But you have the ability to control that realm that you inhabit. So do NOT get all hung up and hot and bothered with what you read in the “news”. It’s nonsense. Concentrate on you and your family.
And keep in mind, that here, yes I Mr. MM himself, have you all in my affirmation prayers. I’m watching your backs. So don’t get too fearful.
It’s all good.
Keep in mind that what you think might be bad, if you read the “news” might end up being the best thing that could ever happen to you and your family. So do not let the “news” affect you. Again… for the third time… concentrate on you and your family. Concentrate on happiness and safety. You will be fine.
I love this story:
"One evening, my mother made dinner after she had completed a hard day's work.
She put a plate of eggs, salad and burnt toast in front of my father and me.
I immediately noticed.
The burnt toast and I were waiting to see if my father was going to complain about it.
But he started to eat everything.
Then smiling, he asked me how was my day at school.
My mum apologized to my father for the burnt toast.
I will never forget his response to her:
'Honey, I love burnt toast!'
Later, when I went to bed and my father came over to kiss me goodnight, I asked him if he really liked the burnt toast.
He hugged me and said,
'Your mother has had a difficult and hard day and she is really tired. She went out of her way to prepare the meal for us. Why blame her and hurt her!
Burnt toast never hurt anyone; but words can be very painful!'
We have to know how to appreciate what others do for us, even if it's not perfect, because it's the intention to do well that counts, and no one is perfect."
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Affirmation Campaign Index here…
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If your expecting the American or British press to say anything good about China, you’ve got a long wait. It’s reached a point that they would rather cut off their arms and legs rather than diverge from their anti-China, negative “boogieman” agenda.
"It's not fair to say that Americans are silent about everything. Americans are very vocal about China stealing and China having no freedom and China having the largest concentration camp for Muslims and China having no human rights for Tibetans.
All these must be true because our politicians and free press say so.
Americans are right to stand up against China imperialism of Belt and Road. Americans will never be silent about China trying to take over the world's islands and oceans.
As for the Capitol insurrection, we blame China for poisoning the minds of Americans with their Hong Kong revolution footage. We also blame Hong Kong freedom fighters for taking American money and then messing it up.
In fact, China gave Trump the royal treatment and then suckered him into a trade war which damages America. China is to blame for Trump and his trade wars. China is to blame for discovering the Covid virus.
We now know that it's been all over the world with no one the wiser, but China had to make a big stink and shut down the country. China has few Covid deaths but China also has no freedom and no human rights. What do you prefer?
Don't forget some spokesmen for some secret American agency said that China may have corrupted American elections.
China is to blame for destroying American democracy. Who can we believe if we don't believe in patriotic American elected officials, the free press, and American agencies? Don't worry Jay, Americans will be very vocal about China.
They will support more patriotic wars by any means and sanctions against the great evil China with their democratic elections and tax dollars. God bless America!
-Jay Janson's Blog
Never the less, China is moving forward. Step by step. Pace by pace. Slowly, cautiously, silently.
Just because it is not being reported on does not mean that it is not going on. It’s just that most people in the West (that means you Americans) are kept ignorant of the true and real state of affairs. And this ignorance will, mark my words, come back to bite you.
I (personally) have long held the belief that the COVID-19 was a biological attack on China by the Trump Administration. That it was number 8, of 9 such attacks, all of which were part of the “Annihilate China” strategy by John Bolton / Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump.
This view is not shared with the American media. Who not only ignore it, but also craft highly unlikely articles countering it.
However this belief of mine is actually shared by the governments of Russia, China, India, Iran, and their allies. This view is what China believes, and what they formally announced to the United Nations in a formal complaint. This view is what Russia believes as well, and it was this narrative that brought the two nations together in a joint defense posture. And while Americans might continue to live under their delusions, the rest of the world is pretty much is watching, taking notes, and looking at the USA for what it really and actually is.
Obviously his four years would be topped by a major military engagement with the “evil communist regime” (his words, not mine).
Which was to “provoke” the American military to justify a military excursion into Chinese claimed water. It did not go as planned and Trump fired his military brass as a result of that.
After all, how can you be a “War President” without a war to fight?
Prior to this, the American media had been whipped up into a anti-China frenzy. They were ready to “do what ever it takes” for “the American way of lifeTM“, “democracyTM” and “freedomTM“!
All this is very interesting, but none of the background information is actually covered in the West. Instead it’s the same “song and dance” and a slow slog though the standard “China Narratives” of crowding, poor, downtrodden, polluted underlings under an impressive tyrannical regime.
It’s purpose is to make people hate, loathe, despise and distrust China. It’s also a well-funded narrative, with billions of United States Federal Dollars going towards the creation of this narrative; this image.
Here, in this post we are going to cover another thing that is intentionally omitted from the American “news” and the UK tabloids.
We are going to cover how China dealt with the biological attack, while at the same time, following through with their plans for a new nation built upon social infrastructure, a suppression of crime and poverty and the fruits of a merit-led leadership.
Powerful stuff. But is nothing that you will read about on CNN, MSNBC, the Rush Limbaugh show, and Alex Jones.
This post is about what China has become.
This post is about what China was doing while the rest of the world (namely America, the UK and Australia) were dancing around, kicking it, spitting on it, pissing on it, and screaming insults at it.
America, the UK and Australia “piled on” China relentlessly with a massive anti-China propaganda assault in 2020.
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It is the story of a beautiful butterfly that is finally flapping its’ bright-colored wings, after a long time being the harassed and despised caterpillar.
The following is an astoundingly excellent article titled “From Terrified to Triumphant — How China Flipped 2020“. It was found on the World Affairs Blog, and all credit to the author. I edited it to fit this venue and for simplification so that the widgets and HTML won’t crash non-compliant systems. Aside from that it is exactly as found.
I urge the readership to visit that blog for more excellent articles, insight and data that is free of my opinions, and hubris. Aside from that, my editing or notes can be found and identified by italics.
From Terrified to Triumphant — How China Flipped 2020
It was the worst way to start a year for China. On the New Year’s eve of 2020, Chinese social media were full of rumors about re-emergence of SARS virus from 2003. Chinese New Year was about to begin in three weeks, which would involve hundreds of millions of people traveling all over the country.
Xi Jinping had already warned officials a month earlier that the US-China trade war and sanctions would make 2020 a very challenging year. Now an unknown virus was about to decimate the economy and shred the “China dream” into pieces.
Worse, as time went on, China was not only left alone to fend for itself, but the anti-China forces piled on with Psy-ops.
Social media attacked the Chinese people and blamed them for “eating bats” — a popular video of a Chinese blogger drinking bat soup went viral, although it turned out that she had the soup three years earlier in an island (Palau) thousands of miles away from China.
US media, filled with Shadenfreude, kept saying “deadly coronavirus” (until it spread to Europe and the US) and shouted out malevolent things to mock and frighten China:
In a highly cynical move, American media and politicians tried to turn a Wuhan eye doctor, Li Wenliang, into a whistleblower and an anti-CCP martyr — he was neither. And Chinese people living in the West were being physically assaulted by xenophobic and ignorant idiots.
It was a lonely, heart-wrenching, and an incredibly frightening moment for China. But the country ignored the judgmental, cruel world and came together as a family. That’s what Confucianism and collectivism (a core principle of socialism / communism) are all about.
The Chinese came together. The Coronavirus emergency brought the Chinese people closer than ever before.
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China’s Incredible Response
China did the only rational and scientific thing possible: completely shut down Wuhan and even Hubei province (with 57 million people).
California
39,512,223
Texas
28,995,881
Roughly the population size of both California and Texas together.
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Tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, volunteers, and even PLA soldiers were sent to Wuhan. People were restricted from leaving their homes; and communist party members volunteered to deliver food for millions of people.
Doctors wore diapers and worked 14 hours a day, while sweating inside the suffocating PPE; nurses cut their hair to reduce cross-infection; and healthcare workers stayed in hotels for many weeks to protect their families.
Hi-tech corporations came to the rescue with drones to deliver food, robots to deliver medicines, big data to detect clusters, and AI to read CAT scans.
The inimitable construction workers of China built two new hospitals in two weeks.
People with mild symptoms were quarantined in stadiums and college dormitories to stop the spread of the virus.
People with mild symptoms were quarantined in stadiums and college dormitories to stop the spread of the virus.
Chinese hospital staff inside the rapidly constructed emergency hospital in Wuhan.
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Hospital beds in the emergency hospital constructed in Wuhan.
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China mobilized the military to tackle the biological attack / pandemic. During the entire year of 2021, the China military was on a DEFCON ONE alert.
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Another view from inside one of the two emergency hospitals in Wuhan.
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MRI machine in one of the emergency hospitals.
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All hospitals throughout China worked together as one single entity to fight the Coronavirus.
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Stadiums, and gyms were converted to quarantine areas for the population to be screened within.
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Medial staff worked long days, under difficult conditions, all wearing full biological protection.
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The hospitals were not just new, but were modern, equipped with AI and 5G infrastructure, and completely sterile.
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A tired medial staffer rests upon a mattress in a quarantine holding area.
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Exercise is a fundamental part of the Chinese daily routine. Both in the morning and in the evening.
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Taking swabs with the children.
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Fighting the virus by spraying chemicals in a water fog.
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Fighting the virus by teams using hand foggers.
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Exhausted staff.
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Taking measurements. In the early months everyone used hand temperature scanners. then in mid-year thermal video scanners became available and protected all public places.
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Hospital staff.
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Hospital staff cut their hair off to prevent the spread of coronavirus and to avoid cross contamination.
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Auto-delivery robots were designed and mass-produced to service the Chinese in China.
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Hotel robots with AI and 5G technology delivered food to the hotel quarantine areas.
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Drones provided food delivery as well as monitored the streets and neighborhoods for isolation compliance.
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Everyone in China did their part. Corporations built mask and PPE factories in a week; and workers slept in those factories for weeks to ramp up production.
Doctors worked meticulously, exploring different drugs — including Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) — to treat the new virus; and scientists were racing to develop vaccines.
When big cities like Shanghai and Beijing had to shut down for 2-3 weeks, everybody cooperated and followed the guidelines.
Later, when there were mini-outbreaks — like in Qingdao and Xinjiang — China set up mobile, inflatable labs to fo PCR tests for 1-2 millions of people per day.
Test, trace, treat — China diligently followed the principles of science.
Unlike America, when China goes lock-down, it really does quiet. Nothing moves. Everyone complies. In a nation that has six times the population of America, it is a most unified and cohesive collection of citizenry.
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Beijing during the Coronavirus lock-down.
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Shanghai during the Coronavirus lock down.
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Shenzhen during the Coronavirus lock down.
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When China would shut down and lock down a region, everyone would comply and there were no exceptions.
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The subways were all quiet during a lock-down.
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During the lock down, nothing moved, and no one was demanding that it was their “Right” to not wear a mask.
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After 76 days of incredible human drama, Wuhan came out of lockdown. Thanks to China’s “authoritarian”, “draconian” and “human rights-violating” measures, China had contained the pandemic and was ready to roar.
After the lock-down normal life returned to China.
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A return to normal life and public gatherings.
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While most of China returned to normal, there still remained pockets of quarantine areas.
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President Xi Peng worked tirelessly to address this emergency and spend much of his time going town to town working with the people directly. As opposed to the American Donald Trump method of EO decree from the golf course.
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Throughout China were posters, and banners encouraging people to work together as a one unified family-nation. And it worked. People did come together. People did work as one.
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Drone fireworks over Shanghai.
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Meanwhile, the world was just coming out of its delusion.
Having wasted precious three months gloating about China’s suffering, America started plunging into COVID19 lock-downs in April.
The rest is history. By the end of the year, the USA had 20 million confirmed cases and 350,000 deaths.
Looking at COVID-19 deaths per million population, China was 3 and the U.S. was more than 1,000.
This is how China ended 2020 — with celebrations and large parties of Merry Christmas and Happy New Year:
The Chinese celebrate Christmas and the end of 2020.
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The Chinese saying “good bye” to 2021.
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All over China, people celebrated 2020 ending.
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In the local town squares and the mall open spaces, people gathered to say good-bye to 2020.
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Chinese people went out and celebrated the end of 2020 together.
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Rather than the flashy neon color light shows, cities celebrated the end of 2020 with reflection.
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In Shanghai.
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People celebrated all over China.
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The end of 2020 was a milestone event for many Chinese people.
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China’s other impressive achievements in 2020
Xi Jinping and Beijing officials must have spines made of steel.
In spite of the horrifying events of the year, Chinese officials kept working on their individual objectives. Here are some commendable and unbelievable achievements of China in other areas:
In 2020, China’s international trade (exports + imports) was eye-popping $4.8 trillion; and the trade surplus was $500 billion. (link)
China opened up the financial services industry to Wall Street’s delight.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BlackRock, you-name-it all eagerly opened up numerous ventures in China.
China signed two landmark trade deals — RCEP and CAI.
RCEP is the world’s largest free trade agreement (FTA) — with 15 Asian countries accounting for 30% of world’s GDP. It’s also the first time that Japan and South Korea have signed FTA with China.
CAI (“Comprehensive Agreement on Investment”) is a China-EU investment deal that was under negotiations for six years. While the incoming Biden team tried to stop the deal, Germany quickly wrapped it up just before the year-end.
The United States no longer is part of many of the trade agreements in the Asian Pacific Rim.
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In both these treaties, notice that the U.S. is left out.
Now, China is even ready to join TPP, which Trump quit.
China managed 39 space launches, probably making China #1 three years in a row
Had the most number of vaccines in Phase 3 trial; successfully tested in many countries like Brazil, Turkey, UAE etc.
Approved Sinopharm vaccine for use; and promised cheap vaccines for developing nations (while the US and Europe have refused to do the same). This will save billions of lives in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
TikTok became the #1 app in the world
Quantum supremacy: China’s system was 10 billion times faster than Google’s
Nuclear fusion: China turned on its “artificial sun” — HL-2M Tokamak. Still a long way to go for sustained and large scale power generation, but a major breakthrough nonetheless.
Semiconductor: Chinese companies like SMIC and Yangtze Memory made significant progress, in spite of vicious American sanctions. This is the last frontier that China needs to conquer.
Deep-sea submersible (“Fendouzhe”) went 10,000 meters below the ocean to study the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on earth! It ranks second in the world for the deepest dives.
Announced that China will reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
Tested digital Yuan/RMB (DCEP) in many cities. This lays the groundwork for internationalization of Yuan in 2022.
Digital e-yuan.
Environment
China made significant progress in sustainability and climate action.
Beijing had 276 days of “good air quality.” Why? Use of natural gas (instead of coal), more green energy, and proliferation of electric cars. And one didn’t need scientific instruments to measure pollution. Just look at the sky!
China made significant progress in sustainability and climate action.
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China’s total renewable energy (installed capacity) reached more than 840 GW. (This is 3.5x the US). The breakdown is as follows:
hydropower = 360 GW;
solar energy = 240 GW;
wind power = 220 GW;
and biomass = 20 GW.
China installed more than 40GW of solar capacity in 2020.
Between 2016 and 2020, China planted billions of trees that covered a total area of 350,000 sq km — that’s twice the size of California!
Now more than 23% of China is covered by forests. Such afforestation/reforestation efforts take a lot of money and efforts, but China is serious.
China has been reforesting for decades.
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Infrastructure
Controlled the massive floods that ravaged vast regions of China for many weeks. (Predictably, western media and many social media citizens drooled about the possibility of the Three Gorges Dam crumbling and destroying China).
Inspite of this, China increased the high-speed rail (HSR) network to about 39,000 Km.
China's High Speed Train network = 39,000 Km / 24233.4 miles
America's High Speed train network = 0km / 0 miles
China’s High Speed Rail is the fastest, most extensive, and the cheapest to ride upon in all the entire world.
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Xiongan Smart City made tremendous progress, including a new bullet train station
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) kept advancing.
Turkey is now linked to Xian, China.
More than 1,200 freight trains per month link 92 European cities to China.
Here are are some photos of driverless (a.k.a self-driving or autonomous) subway trains, new metro stations/lines, battery-powered trams, highways, and bridges that China built in 2020.
Even Wuhan added a new line and some artistic metro stations — check out the last two photos. (Ask yourself why America can’t afford such luxuries anymore).
Chinese High Speed Rail stations are beautiful, aesthetically pleasing to the eye, functional and also looks like something out of the televisions show “Star Trek”.
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In the Chinese smart cities the commuter buses and trams are driver-less and rely on 5G and AI technology.
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Throughout China are new AI controlled transports, quiet electric buses, beautiful stations and well-maintained infrastructure. 5G is everywhere.
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The interiors of the new transport lines are unique to the cities where they reside and special care and attention has been devoted to ease of maintenance, cleaning and beauty.
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And least you get the incorrect impression that this is but one singular city within China, you are very wrong. It’s common throughout China with substantial numbers of cities being updated in mass.
Chinese smart cities of 2020.
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AI controlled public transportation.
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Station interiors are just beautiful. They are airy, clean and roomy.
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High Speed Trains all connect to the individual subway lines and other modes of public transportation.
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Chinese road works are in a class by themselves. They are beyond compare and impressive in every way.
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Chinese build bridges to an extent that astounds.
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Another Chinese bridge.
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The interior of the stations are beautiful.
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These are public works where the public meets and conjugates.
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Geopolitics
China quietly stopped Hong Kong’s insurgents and put an end to U.S. shenanigans.
Beijing called out Washington’s bluff about sanctions and passed the National Security Law, which also kicked out American spies and fake NGO’s like NED, which specialize in brainwashing and color revolutions.
In the midst of all these problems, America’s vassal states — India and Australia — saber rattled in ominous ways.
However, the border conflict with India was de-escalated, while letting both sides save face.
Australia was spanked very hard as a warning to other vassals.
If Australia slips into a recession, the next Prime Minister will be a lot less racist and uncouth. And perhaps Australia will be more careful about committing war crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The world view of Australia today.
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China also made a momentous and long-term deal with Iran, cementing China’s influence in the Middle East.
China’s new extradition treaty with Turkey in 2020 should help capture some Uyghur terrorists who are fighting in Syria alongside of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Trade deals RCEP and CAI have strengthened China’s inclusion and ties with Europe and Asia, thus diminishing America’s chances for proxy wars.
The vision of Eurasia became much clearer in 2020.
Military drills and more strategic alliance with Russia in 2020 should improve china’s security posture.
Russia and China share a common defense against all military threats. They share intelligence data, technologies, and military bases.
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Conclusion
If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you should help them. In Jan/Feb, the U.S. gleefully watched China burn and bragged about American exceptionalism.
While China was busy fighting the Coronavirus, America was berating it for everything. Anything that China did was bad, wrong or a “threat to democracy”.
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That’s when the US and the EU should have given generous aid to China to contain the pandemic.
Then, from April on, western societies refused to learn anything from China.
Filled with hubris and undeserved overconfidence, the West kept fumbling for months.
Incompetent governments and irrational public couldn’t agree upon simple things like wearing masks or even if COVID-19 is real.
As the West imploded, China soared to the skies.
To put it succinctly, China had a stellar year.
And with Trump’s loss, the U.S. is more polarized than ever before.
By the time Biden’s administration gets its geopolitical strategy together, everyone from Asia to Europe would see the writing on the wall — that China will inevitably be the #1 economy soon.
2020 started out as a terrifying year, but ended up as the most pivotal year that sealed China’s unique status in the 21st century.
Metallicman comments
Many people who have their eyes open can see the stark differences between China and the United States today. And they are stark. Frighteningly stark. A smart, and intelligent person, would learn from China. A caring person would do what they can to embraces the techniques and lessons that China has successfully implemented.
But that is not going to happen. Is it?
Instead, America and it’s allies are still playing the same-old, same-old game of political Ponzi-schemes, lies and the threats of military backed “color revolutions” if other nations refuse to “toe the line”.
It’s all a big “song and dance” for the sheeple to believe in.
Even intelligent articles written by knowledgeable people don’t get the full extent of the social, societal, generational, and political upset that is going on…
China’s rise reflects a bourgeoning global movement away from U.S. imperialism and toward self-determination.
“China has already closed the gap in many economic sectors and has surpassed the U.S. in others.”
Much of the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was spent bashing China. Trump repeatedly called Biden “soft” on China while Biden claimed the same about Trump. In the last debate before votes were cast, Biden stated that Trump “cozies up to thugs” such as China’s president Xi Jinping. Although U.S.-China relations have sunk to their lowest point since normalization under Trump, Biden has made no indication that he wants to reverse course. American exceptionalism will be the ruling ideology of the U.S. state and the preservation of U.S. dominance the primary goal of the ruling class no matter who is elected president in November.
American exceptionalism, however, cannot save the U.S. empire from itself. Hurling slander at China does not change the existing reality of U.S. imperial decline.For one, neither Biden nor Trump can rescue the U.S.’ battered capitalist economy. Negative growth, mass unemployment, and the eventual expiration of moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures are likely to keep U.S. capitalism on a path of slow to no growth for years to come.
China, on the other hand, has no such problem. After mobilizing for three months to contain COVID-19, China’s economy grew at a rate of nearly five percent from July to September despite the decrepit condition of its largest trading partner and the world economy at large.
Many economists have predicted that China will overtake the U.S. in economic scale by 2030 in GDP terms. The pandemic is likely to accelerate this trend. China has already closed the gap in many economic sectors and has surpassed the U.S. in others. Market analysts predict that China’s leadership in electric vehicle production and consumption will dominate the global market in the coming years.
China is already a global leader in renewable energy production. Furthermore, in the much-heralded arena of 5G technology, China is also well ahead of the United States. China possesses twelve times more 5G base stations than the U.S. and the gap grows wider in sectors such as high-speed rail.
"Hurling slander at China does not change the existing reality of U.S. imperial decline.”
The key factor that separates the U.S. and China is austerity.
China’s planned economy and socialist governance system allows for the subsidization of the needs of the people to exist simultaneously with investments in high-tech industries. Upgrades in telecommunications technology and e-commerce, for example, have played important roles in the rising incomes of rural families and therefore have contributed to the overall policy of poverty alleviation in China.
Technology under late stage U.S. capitalism serves as a weapon against the broad masses of people by raising their rate of exploitation as contending tech corporations battle over which can dominate the market faster. Technological development receives no assistance from the state unless in the form of military contracts for the production of weapons, bases, and other installations of war.
U.S. attempts to isolate Chinese technology and trade across the world have failed time and time again, from Trump’s trade war midway through his first term to the more current policy of sanctions against corporations such as Huawei. The U.S. has thus needed to rely upon military aggression to enforce its containment policy toward China.
Nearly half of all U.S. military assets and over sixty percent of naval forces reside in the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. is not satisfied with its influence in the region, however, and has attempted to create an “Asian NATO” comprised of India, Japan, and Australia. Enhanced military aggression fits with the larger U.S. military strategy of “Great Power Competition” which targets Russia and China as the primary threats to U.S. hegemony abroad.
“Nearly half of all U.S. military assets and over sixty percent of naval forces reside in the Asia-Pacific.”
American exceptionalism is the ideological framework for the United States’ anti-China policy. Donald Trump used his first term to increase hostilities with China on the basis that its biggest economic competitor was unfairly undercutting U.S. supremacy in all areas of international relations. China has been singled out as the principle threat to American “greatness” and “exceptionalism. The War on Terror utilized racist imagery of a white civilization under siege from Arab and Muslim savages. “Great Power Competition” depicts the United States as a white civilization under siege by a modern form of Yellow Peril.
However, American exceptionalism and the imperialist ambitions behind the ideology have been a staple of U.S. relations with China since the Chinese Revolution of 1949. U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic strangulation of the People’s Republic in the first two-plus following the Chinese Revolution was justified on the basis that China was a “lost” possession in need of recovery. As Qiao Collective noted, normalization did not necessarily change the U.S. attitude that China’s social system must be overthrown in favor of U.S.-style “democracy.” Debates over China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status within Congress and the White House consistently focused on utilizing the U.S. capitalist economy as an engine of privatization in China that would force its social system to adopt a Western-style model of government.
The case of China bursts asunder the illusion that the U.S. can force nations into political submission simply by exposing the people to the U.S. capitalist economy. China’s political and economic trajectory should be clear to anyone paying attention. Capitalist mechanisms in China act as a springboard for the achievement of poverty alleviation and an elevation of the standard of living of the Chinese people.
China’s adherence to an international governance system based in the U.N. Charter is popular both with capitalist countries seeking to do business in China and Global South nations in need of breathing room from imperialist treachery. China’s economic and political development model is especially popular in China. The Chinese government sports an approval rating of 80-90 percent depending on the poll.
“China has been singled out as the principle threat to American “greatness” and “exceptionalism.”
Too often Western and American eyes are fixated on their isolated hatred of non-white peoples to consider the global implications of China’s rise.
China’s rise reflects a bourgeoning global movement away from U.S. imperialism and toward self-determination. The more that the U.S. attempts to impose its so-called exceptionalist values on the world, the more that the world’s nations harden their struggle for self-determination out of necessity and survival.
The re-election of MAS in Bolivia, the continued struggle of the Syrian governmentagainst U.S. sanctions and war, and the DPRK’s commitment to the reunification and sovereignty of the Korean Peninsula despite constant U.S. threats all fall within a larger resistance movement to U.S. empire. And it should not surprise anyone that these countries also happen to be China’s closest allies in their respective regions.
U.S. imperialism is a social order coming apart at the seams.
For nearly half of the 20th century, economic stability and growth allowed the U.S. political establishment to boast about the exceptionalism of its society even as it used every means at the disposal of the state to repress liberation movements at home and abroad.
The War on Terror soiled the U.S.’ image in the world and further sent capitalism into a tailspin of decline. A New Cold War has been launched against China and its strongest ally, Russia, to reinvent the political terrain of 20th century U.S. dominance.
It won’t work. American exceptionalism cannot save the U.S. empire from itself, nor can the ideology find sufficient traction to thwart China’s rise.
What the U.S. empire will accomplish in the coming months and years is the further spread of mass death and economic misery all over the world.
The Left’s task is not to fear or challenge China’s rise but to stop the U.S. empire from bringing the world to the precipice of a humanity-defeating World War in a ceaseless bid to preserve global hegemony.
-Black Agenda Report
Indeed. America is at a dangerous time. Like a compulsive gambler that now is facing the loan-sharks for his indiscretions, America too must “face the music”. The game is over. The clock has struck twelve, and the time is up.
It’s time for reckoning.
The future belongs to the nations that provide for their citizenry, protect them and invest in THEM and their families. Like China. Exactly like China; nations that make things with factories, and nations that provide good solid educational opportunities for their people and place of employment will do far better…
…than nations (like America) that rely on artificial number games on spreadsheets to support a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy people in their pursuit of greed and military conquest.
The old way of doing things will no longer work. Like an old car that is burning gasoline but is going nowhere, so is the United States beginning to collapse upon itself….
The old world is on the way out. Being lead by America it is kicking and screeching towards the hole dug in the cemetery of ancient empires. The only danger ahead is the crazed extent that a desperate and nuclear armed nation might go to in it’s quest to maintain it’s global dominance. We can only hope that President Biden will keep calm, follow the path laid before him and search for terms of co-existence with other nations, societies and cultures.
Meanwhile…
China is there. It is the shining city on the hill that all nations can look to for guidance and support. They are willing to offer a helping hand. But the real question is this; is the West ready to accept it?
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It’s been one Hell of a year, eh? 2020 sucked big time. And I am sure that I am not the only person to feel this way either. My personal trials and issues were just one headache after the other.
For instance, my little dog is now 13 years old. Which is old for a dog, but not ancient. He’s maybe in his doggie 70’s. He’s an old dog. Well, he’s acting old. And this year it’s gotten really bad. First he lost his teeth, and now his eyesight is on the way out. Which pretty much sucks.
Why?
Well, he just cannot find anything. So he doesn’t know how to get around. And he figured out a work-around. You see, he’s figured out that if he pee’s everywhere that he can smell his way and orient himself in the house
So he’s been peeing everywhere.
Everywhere.
But then he figured out that I’ll pretty much mop up his messes when I discover them. So he’s been getting sneaky about where he pees. He now stealth-pees. He sniffs around and tried to find hard to find, and difficult to reach areas to pee.
But I’ve been finding them out also.
So he’s got a new technique. He has started peeing on things that’s really difficult to clean up. You know, like seat cushions, pillows, blankets, comforters, clothing (especially freshly cleaned clothes), and boxed up food that he can jump on top of.
Ugh!
Yessur! It’s been one fuck of a year.
The last straw was when he liberally saturated my baby’s Coronavirus plushie toy with dog pee. Jeeze! Can I get a break?
.
Any ways, trying to deal with shortfalls in income, raising taxes that Trump has levied on all expats (especially those in China – BTW, what is his fucking problem?), and the other issues that are magnified during a pandemic is just a real headache. And the answer is to start looking for alternative ways to earn a few extra dollars.
So the wife looks on the internet and low and behold are these other chicks. Perfect mothers all. Living in McMansions. Their children all perfectly behaved, and experts playing on the living room grand pianos and other bull shit. I tell her that it’s really obscene and ill-advised to flaunt your wealth, good fortune, or advantage when the entire fucking rest of the world is trying to pull through difficult times.
But she doesn’t care. She looks at me and say’s “why can’t we live like that?“
Sigh.
2020 really sucked.
Anyways. It got me to thinking. Why is everything so fake? Why is there this driving force that says that you MUST climb up to the top of the pile of money and then flaunt it to the rest of your peers? It really pisses me off.
Why is everything so difficult?
Why is it so hard just to make a “getting by” income?
Why did out parents, and our grandparents get by with a single breadwinner, a stay-at-home wife, a mortgage paid off in ten years, with only a high school diploma? What happened?
What the Hell happened?
…
Greed happened.
You too can be RICH!
It’s all over America. “You too can become a Bill Gates, or a Steve Jobs, or start Amazon, or use Kickstarter to become a multi-millionaire.
But it’s just bullshit.
Having patents won’t make you rich. Nor will blogging. Writing books, or being an artist won’t make you rich. Having a pretty set of boobs won’t make you rich, bitcoin won’t make your rich, and having a great APP won’t make you rich either.
Well I am here to pop your bubble and tell you the truth.
You see, the United States today (not what it was founded as) relies on a myriad of lies to exist. These lies are promoted through a government / oligarchy controlled propaganda organization. This organization has three main branches. All of which are controlled, and construct the narratives, that Americans are exposed to. They are…
Alt-Left
Mainstream
Alt-Right
It’s an enormous subject, and understanding it will help to explain why Americans are they way they are and the actions of the American government. But that is not really our focus at this time. Instead, we will discuss a MAJOR lie or theme that is propagated over and over inside of America which is…
“You can become rich all by yourself, alone. It just takes a little bit of work, some effort, and a pinch of luck.“
Now…
Well, we have all heard the stories, haven’t we?
How Steve Jobs started his “shoe string” business in a garage. We hear about Steve Jobs, about Google, about Amazon. We hear all these stories about the small guy, the little guy, who through hard work and scrimping and saving that he (or she) was able to make it BIG!
And I am going to bust your bubble.
Our Society, not our Government, is the driving force behind this kind of action…
If you look at all the lone individuals who became a success, you will notice that they have one thing in common.
They grew during a time of very little government oversight and regulation.
When the computer moguls (Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates) started, the local, state and federal governments didn’t even know what computers were. Let alone regulate them. And in the period of time, their small business enterprises grew…
…and as they grew, so did the need for the government to grow. And to make laws and regulations to control those new enterprises.
Look at how the “Railroad Barons” came into being in the last century. Or look at how the early investors in Fast Food franchises became rich.
Look at the software moguls (Google, Amazon), the same is true for them as well. They became large before the government had time to regulate them and stymie their growth (inadvertently, of course).
Then as soon as the slow sluggish government regulatory agencies, and the slow moving bureaucratic arm of the government got moving, they had all ready established a “home” for themselves in the business world. And the resulting regulations and laws served to keep their franchises alive, while making it extraordinarily difficult for any different new-comers to create competitive alternatives.
…
Ok, well this dynamic is also well understood.
It’s difficult, but not impossible, to create new software alternatives. And the same is true with other industries as well. It’s not not impossible, just difficult.
But the difficulty that one experiences today, in setting up their own business, is quite different than one of the “early pioneers” setting up a new business. And that is the BIG LIE that is functionally omitted by the government propaganda outlets. Instead, they constantly promote the idea that you too can become a mega wealthy oligarch.
You too, can be another Steve Jobs.
It’s not true.
The fundamental structure of the USA government is the culprit
I think the main problem are the two different approaches taken by the US or Chinese, which are diametrically different. The Chinese seem to use a "Cumulative" approach, while the US is based on what I call "Winnowing" as a state. Take their respective attitudes towards the poor.
First the Chinese; Cumulative, we are all in this together. If everyone has a "job" be it ever-so lowly, selling food on a street corner for example, then for the Chinese this is a "plus". The person is more or less responsible for his own well being, is not a burden on the State for handouts, and could be (potentially) taxable etc. The object being that ALL Chinese then become positive factors in the society. They are also more motivated because they have a "place" in society. The recent case of Jack Ma and an IPO is not the opposite, but he was trying to get ahead by means that would have led to more unemployment - on the back of the Chinese Government. He was not adding to the cumulative good of the country. Only his own riches. (The Chinese do have billionaires and riches - but are constrained by Corporate credit ratings as explained on a previous - very interesting - thread. Thanks to: psychohistorian | Jan 5 2021 2:08 utc | 162. The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-001)
The US. The attitude is to beat out the chaff leaving only the "kernel". To "Winnow" the population leaving only the top. ie the poor are sidelined, they become a problem for the Government (needing support, food etc.). A net negative value to US society. (The Rich also get handouts from the Fed. as free money has become an habitude, but that is an another way of winnowing out the chaff - as others do NOT get the trillion dollar handouts) The poor have no "place" in a society that has rejected them and so are less motivated. They must fend for themselves and are expected to obey. If they do not there are always the police to enforce obedience.
"Cumulative = win-win", and "Winnowing = Only the top win".
Posted by: Stonebird | Jan 5 2021 20:26 utc | 11
I argue that the United States has become something else other than what it was intended to be, and like a the big monstrosity that it is has created all sorts of safeguards to keep the people separate. The super wealthy lives a life of protected ease, and the rest, live below in a caste system where everything has a price.
From having to pay for water, to taxes and regulations on your abode, to what you do when you are off work and in the privacy of your home, to even what you think about and read. To watch television to listen to music, there is always a price.
In the 1960’s, and 1970’s watching television, listening to music, and making tapes of what you listen to and watch, were all FREE!
Water fountains might be free, but are typically not filtered. But neither is the bottled water that you buy at the local convenience store either.
.
In the 1970’s water fountains were everywhere. Now if you want a drink of water, you have to buy a bottle of water. In the 1980’s if you wanted to send out a message to a friend you sent out a letter in the mail, and it’s privacy was protected by law. Today, if you want to do the same thing, you use either a “free” email service that collects all your personal information and tracks you, or you pay a yearly fee for that service. A fee mind you, many, many times larger than the cost of a postage stamp. And none of the aforementioned protections of privacy are provided.
This is not “freedom” by any stretch of the imagination. Nor, is it an “improvement”.
It’s the worst form of slavery.
I would add that Chinese Communist Party was great mostly because Mao Zedong and his comrades created a new culture not only for China in the past, but most probably will be for future humanity.
That new culture empowered the ordinary people and created a new social climate in which the officials were supposed to live and work with common people, which is what real democracy should be.
People would eventually realize what has enabled China to develop better is democracy rather than what the western press and politicians called authoritarianism.
-Mr Pan
…
Anyways, we are going to discuss my argument that…
The idea that anyone can become a rich and wealthy person through “hard work” and a little bit of luck, is a fantasy inside of America today.
The basics of this post is what is known as “the bell curve”. And we are going to overlay upon that curve a concept that I like to call “the big lie”.
The Bell Curve.
.
Essentially, people and their abilities (when plotted on a graph) form a nice bell-shaped curve, and you and your friends are somewhere on that curve. This curve is very well known and it is an important indicator on where individuals lie within a group setting.
The “big lie” is that the top 0.1% position on that curve is attainable by everyone. And it is simply not true. Particularly in the United States where there are nine levels of social strata or classes of people.
The “big lie” is the believe that you can duplicate the luck, conditions, skills, and environment of another to achieve their same results.
Here we are going to discuss some stories about all those “rich and wealthy” people that we read about in the internet, the social media and on television.
Confessions Of An Instagram Model
Reprinted as found. Originally titled “Confessions Of An Instagram Model” and written on November 24, 2020. All credit to the authors. Edited to fit this venue.
I am a fitness model with a big Instagram following (no I will not be sharing my IG or other accounts here, please don’t ask). Most people think we make most of our money from sponsorships and affiliate posts – we do make some money that way – but you’d still need a 9 to 5 to make ends meet unless you’re one of the top accounts. The open secret in the industry is that we get hired to spend time with really wealthy men overseas.
A typical Instagram girl. This one has a big chest and extra big pouty lips.
This happens almost entirely with rich men in Dubai, although I’ve been all over the world. Bali is another hot spot for meet ups. Basically they contact you directly offering a price and make sure you agree to what they want ahead of time. You always check their accounts to make sure they’re legit and lots of times they have other models who have already met them verify in case you have any doubts, but I’ve never had an issue.
They want all kinds off different things. The first ones I agreed too were just casual vanilla sex. But once I got comfortable with it and saw how much the money went up, I started doing crazier stuff and soon after that there were no more limits for me, the money was always worth it. I struggled with it at first but the money was so good and there is something liberating about being totally disgusting for someone. I went from an everyday promiscuous but mostly standard sex life to living a life that rivals porn stars. It’s easier to list things I haven’t tried at this point than what I have!
Dubai Rich.
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How old are you and how long have you been doing this?
I’m in my 20s been doing this about 4 years
Are you one of those big booty instagram models, or the workout in yoga pants one?
I have a booty but I do all around fitness modeling
How much money are we talking?
I made 5k my first time. I made 20k my most recent. I’ve made up to 35k for a week
How much do the men generally pay for different acts? Does the donation matter with the attractiveness/popularity of the model?
It depends on how popular you are and what you do.
What is the craziest thing you’ve done, sexually, that you wouldn’t have even considered before escorting?
Group sex and orgy type of stuff. I’m glad I was exposed to it because it’s beautifully intense and hot, but I was closed minded to it before. There are more extreme things that would be considered crazy too that I liked like BDSM, so it’s hard to pick one. But the one I’m most grateful for being exposed to is the group.
Most guys at once?
Most guys at once was 6
Most surprising interaction (whatever that means to you)?
Most surprising was a young, very short, very skinny guy – when he dropped his pants he was packing a horse dick LOL.
Who are these men?
Some are very wealthy businessmen, some are from wealthy families. Some are related to royalty and occasionally even a well known celebrity
Who was the celebrity?
An American actor staying in Dubai. I can’t share his name but I was totally starstruck!
Was he one of the vanilla ones or one of the disguisting ones?
Not disgusting but he was not vanilla either. He liked being a little rough and kinky
Are you picky with your clientele?
I was at first but not so much now unless what they want is totally off limits to me or if they come across as super weird.
Is there anything that is off limits for your clients no matter the price tag?
Anything that would involve blood, defecation, or being seriously hurt. Other than that I would probably negotiate most things
How do you find the interaction is with most of your clients? By this I mean do then tend to take you out and treat you like there girlfriend showing you off as arm candy or are you generally kept away at a house or resort and used more for sex?
It’s rarely being taken out. You kind of do that on your own time but on their dime
What was your most (positive) exciting experience on these adventures so far?
The overall experience is the most positive. I travel the world getting spoiled making tons of money and having wild sex while enjoying some internet fame. I did get to go skydiving in Dubai for the first time which was crazy exciting
Worst situation you ever found yourself in (in regards to being an escort) and how you handled it?
I was never in a truly bad situation, but some kind of were terrible in other ways. For example, I was booked at the same time as another girl for the same two guys. When I get there, it’s another model I know and we hated each other. It sucked and I wanted to bail because she’s such a bitch. But that would’ve caused issues so I stayed. The funny thing is though, these guys were brutally rough with us, and at one point we were holding each other’s hands as we grit our teeth through some painful rough anal and even cuddled each other for a little bit after. So we aren’t friends now but we kind of bonded.
What causes beef between Instagram models/escorts?
It’s not because of that it’s just because she has a terrible personality and attitude and makes rude comments about people that are supposed to be friends
Where you ever put in a situation where you didn’t feel safe?
It always feels a bit unsafe to tell you the truth, there’s no way to know you’re safe unless it’s someone you’ve been with a bunch of times. Even then, if they’re rough or into really kinky stuff you get nervous. But that makes it exciting too.
Besides talking to other models, how is a potential client vetted?
Honestly the person I pay to run my IG account verifies them for me so idk what goes into it exactly but I know that in some cases it’s an online presence or proof that they are who they say they are.
You’re going to want to contact via email or their managers email or something similar. DMs are rarely even checked when you have a huge account. And we won’t answer directly from our accounts either becuse a single screenshot can ruin our reputation.
How do you funnel the money? Isn’t it suspicious to receive 35k just for a weekend or is it deemed a “shoot” as a model even if nothing takes place?
My manager handles everything
How much do you pay your manager?
He gets 10 percent
How much were you making in your day job?
I was making like 30k a year before I started doing this with my day job.
What do you tell your family?
I just tell my friends and family it’s from my Instagram business
Sounds like you make loads of cash….. the gig wont last for ever, are you investing?
I definitely invest and take care of my money! Remember too that I don’t really pay for anything myself on these trips
Do you have simpler plans, like marrying and stuff?
I would love to get married and have a family one day but I don’t feel ready to settle down yet.
My Metallicman comments on this dialog.
So, here’s a young girl in her 20’s, making wads of cash. Is it really from just posting nice pictures on social media?
No.
She uses social media to advertise her body for sexual liaisons. In other words, she’s a courtesan. And throughout history, courtesans have been known to make good money.
CourtesanCourtesan, in modern usage, is a euphemism meaning a sugar baby, escort, concubine, mistress or a prostitute, for whom the art of dignified etiquette is the means of attracting wealthy, powerful, or influential clients. The term originally meant a courtier, a person who attends the court of a monarch or other powerful person.Wikipedia
She’s no different than this…
Blake
.
I am not judging her.
If you are beautiful and you have the ability and skills necessary to become a courtesan, I say go for it. But realize that the amount of money that they get is from sexual activity, and not from pictures on Instagram.
Which is the point in all of this.
For us to grow and live, we need to realize the reality of the world that we live in. Because inside of America is is one lie on top of the other, on top of another, and another… and yet another.
And this all cause people to behave very strangely compared to the rest of the world.
Not quite. You are not going to have people throw money at you because they like your personal stories. Oh, you might make a few dollars, but from your articles alone. No. The money comes from other sources that you advertise from your blog.
These other sources can be…
The sales of books.
Sales of vitamin or herbal supplements (Alex Jones)
Speaking engagements
Paid subscriptions
Videos
Anyways, blogging or having a website as MM can be used as PART of a mechanism for a for-profit venture. Must like the Instagram chick above, the internet is used as a tool to derive profits from.
Hey! You guys, do you see me using MM to sell books, videos, or products? Eh?
Well, truthfully I have been asked to write some books. And truthfully I am considering it. But the books will have to provide more than what I offer for free here. Otherwise I will feel like I am taking advantage of my readership. This is complicated by the fact that there are some things that I am simply not permitted to discuss. Anyways, I am considering it. Maybe something about Prayer and Affirmation Campaigns. Or maybe about one of our benefactor species. Something unique and very different.
Which brings me up to the next subject.
Writing a book
Yes you can make a handful of change; a few dollars writing a book. It’s not much, and it is not going to be something that you can rely upon for a steady source of income.
.
So, unless you are big and famous, and can use it as a method to “launder money”, the odds of you getting wealthy are very slim. Oh, sure there are exceptions. Like the author of the Harry Potter series. But again, the exceptions do not describe the norm.
Oh Vey! What a big lie this one is. You will never get rich on having a patent. Oh sure there are all sort of stories about people who had this patent and became filthy rich. And there might just be one or two guys, but in general forget it.
Heck, I have 11 design patents to my name, and I haven’t even got the mandatory $1 transfer fee from the company. So forgetaboutit.
.
It’s one of those bullshit stories about a friend who knows a guys who… or an article that you once read about a guy who invented…
Just forget about this entire route. It’s a dead-end.
Painting or creating art
Oh, art is a great way to “launder money” because there are no restrictions on the amount and the value of art is subjective. But if you want to become rich doing it, then dream on. It’s a long tall mountain to climb. You must…
…guess what?
Paint because you love painting, and if someone pays you money for it, then that is a big plus. But expect to starve and live at the poverty level while you do so.
How do I know? It’s also one of my loves. And yes, I can paint, in oils. I paint figurines using the Flemish technique. And no. I haven’t made any money of significance out of this love of mine. At best, I broke even. Meaning the cost of the materials equaled the selling price. Labor costs were a loss.
Art is how the oligarchy moves enormous amount of money about legally.
Check out these following examples of using art to launder money. Obviously the oligarchy has been ridiculing the rest of us folk for decades if not much longer. It’s, well, insulting.
Some examples of using art to launder money
So how much money is transferred in this money laundering technique? Let’s start at the low end. You know, “pocket change” for the oligarchy…
Blood Red Mirror by Gerhard Richter – $1.1 Million
Concetto spaziale, Attese by Lucio Fontana – $1.5 Million
Green White by Ellsworth Kelly – $1.6 Million
.
Now, let’s go into the mid-range transactions. Say $2 million to $80 million pop.
Untitled (1961) by Mark Rothko – $28 Million
Untiled (Stoffbild) by Blinky Palermo – $1.7 Million
Peinture (Le Chien) by Joan Miro – $2.2 Million
Untitled (1970) by Cy Twombly – $69.6 Million
Cowboy by Ellsworth Kelly – $1.7 Million
Blue Fool by Christopher Wool – $5 Million
.
All in all, it’s a very common way for the oligarchy to move money around.
Riot (1990) by Christopher Wool – $29.9 Million
Onement Vi By Barnett Newman – $43.8 million
Black Fire 1 by Barnett Newman – $84.2 Million
Orange, Red, Yellow by Mark Rothko – $86.9 Million
Anna’s Light by Barnett Newman – $105.7 Million
.
Disgusted?
Well, you should be.
Well, unless you are a super wealthy oligarchy, painting and selling paintings for hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t in your future.
Well, what is?
Get rich with bitcoin!
Um. Sure.
.
Ugh. maybe if you bought bitcoin in the first couple of months when it was young and just being developed. Today… it is a potential, but highly risky venture. I would mark it as unlikely.
Like anything. There are potentials and avenues of success.
.
Is that part of your pre-birth world-line template? Are you destined to become filthy wealthy?
Only you know.
Selling Snake-oil
In a nation where a person’s value is determined by the size of their bank account, and success is measured in dollar signs and spreadsheet, it’s very difficult for good and stable people to make a difference.
Only those who are adept at making money, manipulating money, stealing money, or getting money become powerful and are considered meaningful.
And in this environment, ONLY those people will obtain positions of power and importance.
I need three hands to count the number of times myself and my design teams were let go from American companies simply because the company wanted to sell a division, down-size to make the value of a company attractive to investors, or discarded good robust designs in favor or low cost, disposable “improvements”. All for money. None for the great breakthroughs and technical innovations that we were working on.
That is the reality.
And it sucks.
There is something fundamentally wrong with exchanging tokens to represent labor, and then using that system to generate debt. I know it’s a difficult thing to consider. It will change your entire world-view upside down.
The United States is currently $25 trillion dollars in debt.
In the American culture, you must be the “lone wolf” and climb up that mountain of success alone. “You can do it” we are told. It’s just a matter of hard work, perseverance and maybe a little luck.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But you know, in the American society (and the other societies in the West who have adopted this kind of culture) it’s difficult to break out and through the class barriers that surround your social class. It’s true and YOU KNOW IT. So let’s forget about the government’s propaganda narrative.
Instead let’s focus on looking at things from a completely different perspective. It’s a perspective that can be found in both China, Japan and Russia, as well as Brazil and parts of Europe. Which is…
…find your niche and become the best at it as you can.
Maybe you will get rich. Maybe you won’t.
But the issue about making money never enters the equation of the value of what you provide to your community or your society. And this is what is important.
Conclusion
The world needs, yes NEEDS, to move away from the primitive model of money for labor, and rather embrace the concept of participation within a society for the good of all. Instead of the selfish “me, me, me” of previous traditions.
Which is curiously…
…exactly the world as described by “time traveler” John Titor.
For he described a world (at least in America) where everyone was part of a community, and you needed to apply to become part of that community. Where no one was automatically a member, and once in a community, you needed to contribute to the good of all. No slackers, no welfare queens, and no lazy bums were permitted.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
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This is a detailed response to a question that was asked of my on 1JAN20. It is not the only person who has asked this. Many people, most especially those in America are very concerned. The Trump supporters see a looming civil war, and the Biden supporters see a fractional America being town by extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. Everyone is concerned, and the news media are running just as amok as the American government. Not to mention that a sizable portion of the American population are just hopeful for a major war with either China or Russia. Naturally, people are worried, concerned and upset.
Let me try to provide insight.
This is the question…
You said in a few posts that you still have an active connection with them (Our extraterrestrial benefactors). Could you ‘ask’ or ’emote’ our problem with the elites having been gifted this technology and what their opinion of it is? Was it a mistake? Could they resolve that mistake if so ?
It’s a straight-forward question. Using what communication skills that I maintain, can I query the “other side” of the PTB about the current terrifying condition in the world? Can I ask them if the believe that they made a mistake in gifting technology to the global elite?
My Answer
Yes, I still have contact. Yes, I am still connected via the EBP. Yes. They still monitor me. I am on a list of contacts. We (all MAJestic members in my cell) still have activity that we are all involved in.
While MAJestic retired me. Our benefactors did not.
But it is not like everyone thinks.
Now there are many things that I simply CANNOT TALK ABOUT. It’s not like I took an oath or something like that. When I try to type sentences, my fingers top working, my words get all jumbled, I get “foggy brain”, and personal emergencies” crop up. Like the dog shitting on my pillow, or the water heater blowing up, or the window on the porch suddenly fractures and collapses in a heap.
And talking about the future in detail is one such trigger. Which is strange as I really don’t know much in the way of specifics.
But I can answer this question in a round-about manner. Please bear with me.
A Farm.
Imagine a farm.
And on the big farm is a wide open spaces for the cattle to run around in. It’s a massive pasture. One with many hills and low areas and ponds for the cattle to drink from. This pasture is further subdivided into smaller regions. All separated by electric fences. The farmer, and his dogs, use these fences to isolate the herd into groups.
But as big and as open it seems, it is actually all a specifically fenced in area. For around the entire farm is this massive heavy steel bar fence. It’s not like the electric fences on the inside. It is sturdy and heavy. It is made out of both steel pipe and bricks and cement.
And guess what, there are only one or two gates, and the cattle are not able to open them. Additionally there’s a small troop of barn dogs. These dogs monitor the cattle and do tasks for the farmers.
The farmers spend most of the time in their house. They rarely go out. When they do it is to check on the cattle, examine them, and see that they are healthy. The barn dogs, however, are periodically permitted inside the farm house but only when called for by the farmer.
But they are never permitted in the kitchen. The dogs can smell the food cooking, and watch the farmer and his wife and kids do things, but most of it is really incomprehensible.
Yet, when the farmer calls the dogs in, the dog automatically and instinctively knows what the farmer wants. It’s really amazing. There is this connection. No words need to be spoken. The dog is happy, and the farmer sees the dog wag his tail. The farmer is upset, and the dog put his tail between his legs.
The farmer summons the dog.
He arrives and the farmer dispatches him out to do a specific task. The dog of course, brings in the newspaper, the mail, and snaps at the mailman. But has no concept of what mail, and news is all about.
The dog sees a little what is going on inside the farmhouse, and watches the cattle. The dog dances and runs around with the cattle, but they really do not care about what the dog has to say. They know that he goes into the farmhouse. They understand that occasionally he gets the newspaper, but all that is uninteresting to them. The cattle don’t care, and couldn’t comprehend the relationship between the dog and the farmer and family.
The farmer has tracking chips on everything in the farm. The most advanced chips are on the dog collars. But all the cattle also has tracking chips. These are rudimentary GPS systems, showing ownership and location.
Now, lately, the largest bulls in the pen of cattle are starting to use their identity collars to rub up against the electric fences that border the inner fields.
This is normally not a problem. But in doing so, there is a chance that the electrical fence wire will come undone. And there, lying on the ground it could be dangerous. The wire could start shocking groups of cattle. Obviously this is not desirable. Some cattle might die, others might get damaged and become useless.
Now the dogs see this and watch this. So they start barking at the bulls. They tell them to stop. But those pesky bulls are fucking idiots. They see but don’t understand. Or maybe they think that they are invincible.
They haven’t a clue to anything, really.
The bulls, and the cattle, have no idea what they are doing or how their actions will manifest. They have at their fingertips a great power. And they think that THEY are in control. They are not.
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Now the farmer hears the barking dogs. He knows what is going on. And he has even gone out to inspect the damage.
On numerous occasions.
In fact, the farmer knows of other farms where entire herds of cattle died off for just this kind of thing. So the farmer must go out and inspect. He sees that many of the fence posts are damaged, and are weak.
He also sees that the bulls are getting really out of control. He is concerned, maybe even alarmed. However he knows things that the dogs don’t know.
The farmer knows that after a hurricane, or big storm that the farm land is refreshed and super fertile afterwards. He also knows, from prior experience and from other farmers that when the herds are culled by this kind of electrical wire fence damage, that eventually the herd is better culled.
It is much easier to manage the herds and the cattle. The big bad bulls tend to be gone, and the rest of the cattle end up (after a long spell) stronger, more adaptable, and better. So while the dog might panic and worry, the farmer sees everything as following a path that other farms have experienced. And so he takes the necessary actions and precautions.
He starts to move the herds into certain groups. Some he keeps safe away from the wire. While others, he just lets them bang against the shabby electrical fence. All the time knowing full well and good that no matter what happens none of the cattle will ever leave the corral and the farm fields.
The dogs don’t know what the farmer knows. But they see the confidence and understanding on the faces of the farmer and the family. Especially after they have observed the damage up close. The dogs see that everything is going according to plan, and they watch the farmer take special care to groups of cattle, and to specific fields on the farm.
It is almost like the farmer has selected certain groups of cattle to be safe and tended to, while others he allows to get unruly and get into trouble. He is obviously doing this intentionally. So that most, almost all of the bad bulls, are now in a certain penned in area on the vast farm pasture. And the farmer is permitting them to run amok.
…
Of course, not all cattle are the same. There are smart ones, alert ones and the exact opposite. Many cattle follow the more popular cows. They follow behind them not paying attending where the popular cows are going. Many are just heading straight towards the downed electrical lines. And their herd of following-cows are as happy as can be. They moo loudly “Make our grass green again!”. Other cows follow other noteworthy cows. These other cows moo such things as “cow milk matters!” while they tear up the grass and shrubby.
The dogs watch this with a degree of curiosity.
Certainly, it’s a good thing for the grass to be green and healthy. And yes, it is also true that cow milk is important. But is that all going to be the result of the stampeding herd? Or is it just a mechanism for the more popular cows to obtain bull-level grass and pleasures?
Right now, the farmer and the family are not panicking at all. All is good. In fact, it is almost like they have expected this event to occur for a long, ling time. They are not buying new cattle, sending teams out to fix the fence, or doing anything like that. They are just behaving normally without any kind of concern or panic.
Just because the bulk of the herd is happily munching on grass and following the well-promoted cows-of-importance, does not mean that the MM cattle are destined for the same fate.
I like to think of MM readership NOT as the cattle on the pasture, but actually as the protected puppies of the guard dogs. I mean this in a good way and not as an insult.
The farm guard dogs have an idea what is going on and the puppies can sense this. They know not to leave their kennel and stray too far. They know to avoid the big bulls that are all a snorting and roaring. They know not to follow the popular cows to the downed electrical fence. And why they do agree that the grass needs to be greener and that cow milk is excellent, they are not willing to follow the herd in that regards.
So…
Do not worry.
Yes, [1] there will be some SHTF events in America in the future. But [2] the events will not be homogenized. They will not be uniformly distributed. [3] There will be pockets of calm, and [4] even in the areas of danger, there will be areas of peace.
Avoid large clusters and groups of people. Become known within your community. Be beneficial and significant.
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MM readers will know by now to avoid any large collections of people or big urban areas in the USA.
Find your niche inside of the community that you live within.
[1] Know who your neighbors are, [2] obtain skills. Not just what you do for a living, but other skills that might benefit your community. Be conservative in what you do meaning [3] have a nice well-stocked larder (just in case), and [4] have a nice small garden if you can.
If you all followed this advice that I gave back in 2018 and 2019, you would have been best prepared for the 2020 “pandemic”. Wouldn’t you have? Yes?
My advice has not changed.
The situation described above still holds true. There will be good areas, and dangerous areas. There will be spewed nonsense out of the news media, and the real facts will be denied to you. The ruling oligarchy is running amok, and since there are no brakes on their behaviors, they are only going to get worse.
While it appears that there will be a SHTF, and I most certainly strongly think this will happen, it is NOT CERTAIN.
I have been musing with the thought that it will more likely resemble a very controlled implosion with some violent elements thrown in.
When the dust settles, Americans will be better, stronger for all of it. Though the resultant America might not resemble anything that we know about today. It might not even be called “America” or the “United States”. It will continue to be isolated from the rest of the world. This is a good thing – for the world as a whole, and up until the USA gets it’s collective shit back together.
…
Back to the farm analogy…
From the farmer’s point of view, the identification tags that the bulls are using to tear up the farm isn’t really all that advanced. It might be “high tech” for the bulls, but from the point of the view of the farmer, it’s just old mechanical things that they buy in bulk, apply with a tool, and forget about it. The technology is not going to permit the cattle from breaking out of the farm, or go through the outer perimeter fence. At worst it might take down some of the internal wire electrical fences, but that’s about it.
And they won’t certainly have any influence on access to the farmhouse, and the farmer and his family.
Still…
The farm guard dogs are getting nervous. The bulls are huge! They are a roaring and carrying on with crazy abandon, and with each day they seem to get stronger, more embolden, and the damage that they are making is getting really noticeable. They are doing what they have always done, only larger, nosier, and more aggressively.
So the guard dogs sit on the farmhouse porch, or even the better trained “house dogs” who actually allowed outside the kitchen (like myself) are all whimpering and shivering. And to tell you all the truth the farmer’s family has noticed, and the farmer has come out and petted the “house dogs”. He offered soothing calm, kind words, and a tasty nugget. But then he was gone. He was busy on other things that the guard dogs haven’t any concept of.
The bulls are still out there. They are really unruly, and the guard dogs are wondering how to deal with the problem. As the bulls are not afraid of any barking or really anything at all.
But now, the puppies are all worried.
As are the cats, the sheep, the horses, and the chickens on the farm. Everyone seems afraid and very concerned.
The guard dog has an idea of where the bulls are, and where the damage of the fences will be the worst. They cannot predict the future, of course, but they have a pretty good idea of the relatively “safe” areas on the farm, and where the really potentially dangerous areas are.
They are slowly telling their puppies, who are just beginning to walk, to avoid the dangerous areas, and stick to the safer areas. They tell the puppies not to drink the anti-freeze that the bulls knocked on the garage floor, and not to go snap at the legs of any of the gathering herd cows or their leadership. They tell the puppies to keep to themselves, lie low, keep a safe distance and be on their best behavior, and they tell them that everything will be all right.
The farm dogs do not have the power nor the ability to “speak directly” to the farmer or anyone in the household. But they are trained, they are special. They do have access to things and understandings that the general cattle does not have.
They have insight.
They have understanding.
The dogs have insight and understanding.
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They might not know how the electronic devices and ID tags that the farmer puts on the cattle work. But they do know the general reason why they are there. They also have an understanding of the limitations of the farmer. They know that the farmer, if he wanted to, could walk out onto the farm pasture and shoot the troublesome bulls dead. And what’s more, the bulls wouldn’t even see it coming. The farmer would just sit on his porch, drinking his cup of coffee and shoot his Winchester .303.
The dogs know just how powerful the farmer is. The cattle do not.
Heck! The farmer could just as easily instruct the dogs to herd the troublesome cattle into a certain part of the pasture, and then load them all into trucks and cart them off to the rendering plant.
But no. The farmer is not doing this.
The farmer WANTS the upcoming turmoil to happen. And the dogs and the puppies are a little surprised at this. Doesn’t he value his cattle? Doesn’t he care for the other barnyard critters? It’s almost like the turmoil will yield a far better grade of beef, and higher quality milk. It’s almost like permitting the upcoming turmoil as a kind of passage of growth that it very important.
Like an IPO stock going public, or when the percolator pot of coffee starts to perk in the morning.
All this being said…
The dogs have some bones that they can throw out to their puppies…
Throwing out a bone
Most rural states, in the United States, those known as “Red States” are safe areas. Never the less, within those areas are military bases. Stay away from the bases that store, launch, or maintain nuclear delivery systems.
If you have a military base near you, and it is not devoted to the strategic delivery of nuclear or biological weapons, then that is a plus in your favor. It’s of great advantage to you. When (and if) the SHTF, these areas will provide a strong degree of safety when the rest of the nation goes to shit.
Make the most of your time NOW. The future is very uncertain. There are certainly dangerous trends, but you have the power to thwart the worst elements yourself.
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Just living near a large metropolitan city is not to be considered a problem either. It really depends on the primary constellation of threats that are presently developing in the United States;
Intentional domestic civil strife or war.
The US poking either the Russian Bear, or the Panda Bear.
In other words, you do not need to live off in a cabin in the woods of Alaska to avoid any potential future chaos. You can live in a suburb of Chattanooga, Syracuse, State College, even a large city like Atlanta, Tampa, or Pittsburgh…
…provided that the local city and state governments are not pushing domestic discord like Portland, Detroit or Baltimore are, and you and your families will end up safe.
I strongly believe were any civil discord to evolve…
…avoid the areas infected. Like stay fucking away. Do NOT get involved. It does not matter which side that you agree with. Stay out of it. All of it.
I strongly believe that if the USA tries to provoke a major Asian nation…
…a flood of nuclear tipped missiles will strike the USA.
Of course, you all don’t have to agree with my assessment. The National Review, Rush Limbaugh, Hall Turner and Alex Jones most certainly don’t. They believe that the USA can go anywhere in the world and instigate a regional conflict far away, and the only impact that it will have on Americans will be a positive one; one that will help corral the citizenry towards one objective or the other.
But…
…I am telling you that the louder they promote this fantasy, the greater the likelihood of nuclear conflagration.
For Pete’s sakes, The USA has been involved in a full-scale biological warfare against China for the last four years, and you all think that the PTB aren’t going to stop; to give up now?
Some considerations
Is it really a bad thing if all the big bad bulls are blown to smithereens?
Is it a bad thing if the big fenced in pen where the big bad bulls live becomes a big crater?
Is it a bad thing if the herd of cows follow the attractive cows into an electric fence?
Is any farmer bad for culling his herd?
Conclusion
The dogs want their puppies to play, learn and be safe. Don’t get all caught up in the bullshit made by the crazed bulls. The day of reckoning is fast approaching. It’s only a precious few years away. If you are a puppy, then listen. Stay away from dangerous areas in the pasture. Ignore the Bulls, and don’t follow the attractive herds.
Play and enjoy life now.
You will thank me later.
Being happy and being active in your prayer affirmation campaigns will be your best guards against what is brewing on the horizon. Happy thoughts. Happy memories. Friendships. Productive community activities, and a feeling of belonging will do WONDERS for your personal protections against what might happen in the future.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
If you believe this narrative, and it is a narrative, then you fit into an entirely new classification for “stupid”.
Elections are how “democracies” get to change direction, policies, laws and rules. There are no other formal ways aside from a Constitutional Convention. And every four years, the citizens of America look at their lives, and their leadership and vote to either continue on the current path or divert from it and go into new directions.
That’s how democracies work.
Yet, the media is flowing with all sorts of articles that says that Biden is going to be a real “war hawk” and that he is not only going to continue with his neocon polices, but become more aggressive with them (as if that is even possible). And this narrative is cropping up here and there, and it is really irritating to me.
Hell.
It makes me want to dust off the old turntable, and put some Lobo on and dream of what might have been. Let me off. This world has gone ape-shit.
Lobo from Big Tree Records
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For those of you who don't know, Lobo was an American music group from the early 1970's. The singer / songwriter was a Florida folk rocker kind of guy. His songs become rather well known with "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". (travelin' and ah livin' off the land, how I love being a free man.)
Me and you and a Dog Named Boo.
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Ever since it appeared that Biden might overtake Trump in the election, the entire propaganda machine inside of America (and England) has been spewing forth this narrative…
Of course, this is the narrative that is being fed to the mindless masses; the “Joe Sixpack” in “Flyover country”.
Meanwhile, all the neocon war-loving publications inside of America are horrified that Biden might ease up on the war-stance and instead embrace the idea of co-existence…
Ah yes… not going to war with China is “hysterical”. It is horrific, dangerous and inattentive.
Sure.
What ever you say.
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Now we are going to talk about Trump
Ugh!
Hey! You just cannot avoid talking about this fellow, he has been President for the last four years, and has been very active in many areas. There are people who love him and who hate him. In fact, I will go as far as to say that he is the most polarizing figure since Hillary Clinton.
And she is VERY polarizing.
So, all you Trump supporters, don’t get all hot and bothered about bad things being said, and that goes double for the Biden supporters. Keep in mind that both Presidents, and all of their minions are but actors. Nothing more. The purpose of this post herein is to take a look at media manipulation of Americans. Just like we did in the earlier post of media manipulation of American views on China.
Just what is this particular neocon publication anyways?
TheNationalReviewis a right-leaning, semi-monthly magazine founded by author William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955. Buckleystartedthemagazinewiththegoalofmakingconservativeideasrespectableatatimeinwhichhebelieved “literateAmerica [had] rejectedconservatisminfavorofradicalsocialexperimentation.”
-National Review Media Bias | AllSides
Yeah. They are neocons. These are the folk that cheer on the eight simultaneous wars the USA is fighting today, and who push for mega-expensive military hardware. Fun fact, one “Hellfire” missile is the cost of a hospital. These guys think that having a hundreds of thousands of them…
…isn’t enough.
But boy, oh boy, do they HATE being referred to war-loving neocons…
I think I need a beer. If you, the reader were here with me, I’d buy you all a beer. That’s the truth, and that’s a fact Jack.
It’s time for a beer, you all.
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I am getting off the subject. Oh yes. So what is all this about? What is going on, why is the American media so geared up to convince Americans that Biden is going to be just like Trump on international matters?
Why?
Hold that thought.
Why do I (and others) defend China?
Yeah. I am swimming up river. It’s just a lone lonely voice out in the wilderness while hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-China articles are being cranked out of the American media machine daily. What the fuck is going on?
Here is a quote from Bill Brodenblock…
…concerning whether he was going to waste his time retorting to some bullshit from the Wall Street Journal.
Right. A well-argued rebuttal will take you much more than a day. There’s a lie, a half-truth or impeachment in every sentence.
No, it is not worth the effort. They have the resources to produce every day another “article” or “report” on China, again bursting with lies and fabrications.
They are stronger than we, they have almost unlimited resources and much more experience in making up lies than anyone else.
Their readership is thousands of times more than ours.
A new Global Times poll in China has shown that over 70 percent of respondents believe that the "wolf warrior diplomacy" is the diplomatic attitude that China should take, with 78 percent of interviewees believing that China's global image has improved in recent years.
The outspoken example of the new Chinese wolf Warrior diplomacy is 赵立坚 (Zhào Lìjiān) the one of the cartoon, showing the Australian hypocrisy on its war crimes in Afghanistan (Brereton report).
I became a “Wolf Warrior”, not in the first place because I was living in China, also not because I feel I should defend China’s legitimate viewpoints
but because I can’t stand lies.
I can’t stand it to see politicians, journalists, teachers or whoever with some power lying to people, often people who’re helpless and unable to defend themselves.
Both my grandfathers were in politics; they knew and used all the famous tricks as so common today in politics. I, as a little boy have seen them developing their strategies at our kitchen table. My father was a teacher and a deacon. He strongly disapproved the hypocrisy of his father and father-in-law. My father taught me that lying is a sin. I feel lying it is more than just a sin, it is a crime.
My pro-China stances are motivated by my disgust for lies.
That’s why I am doing it, not in the first place to help China.
Nevertheless, I feel that China, the Chinese government or whoever with some political power in China, should at least take the effort to send me a “thank you” or to show some recognition for my efforts. That’s the least they can do.
Every day at the local social media, I get the full load of shit over me. In my meetings at business associations and service-clubs (now often on-line), there are people who start scolding, some even yelling at me, just because they know my China viewpoints. Last year, during a speech/presentation, someone was trying to prevent me from finishing my presentation.
It’s not just Bill, don’t you know.
I hate being lied to as well.
And when I think about all the lies, and the deceptions, and the tricks, and “the rug getting pulled out from under my feet” I get really angry. I just want, no NEED, to go out and get a beer.
Office party before the fleet of lies out of Washington DC suppressed drinking at work-related events via insurance restrictions.
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And I hate it even more when others actually believe the lies. Hey! Have you died from “Mad Cow Disease” yet? What about Y2K? What about “Back Masking” on Rock and Roll music? How has that “Domino Theory” panned out?
Domino TheoryThe domino theory was a theory prominent in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s that posited that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The domino theory was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War to justify the need for American intervention around the world.Wikipedia
I hate it when the government is lying so obviously and so blatantly. It just riles up my skivvies.
It makes me want to go to the fridge, pop open a beer and watch some Golden Girls. Anything to get my mind off this bullshit.
The Golden Girls
NBC was already a monster by 1985 thanks to programs like "The Cosby Show", "Cheers" and "L.A. Law" (all part of that unbeatable Thursday lineup). In 1985 it appeared that Beatrice Arthur (who struck gold with "Maude", a spin-off of "All in the Family") was going back to television in a new show called "The Golden Girls".
Along with Arthur (a smart-mouthed Brooklyn native) was her old-world Sicilian mother (Estelle Getty), a bubble-headed Minnesota native (Betty White) and a sex-crazed belle from Georgia (Rue McClanahan). This quartet of actresses would create the finest core of performers to ever star in a television series.
"The Golden Girls", unlike "Cheers", was a hit from its first episode.
It dominated with vigor and spunk on Saturday nights. NBC was worried that the show would never find an audience big enough to make a dent in the ratings, but for a time "The Golden Girls" was as excellent as anything else the networks had to offer.
The four women, all obviously over 50, lived, laughed and cried together in Miami for nearly a decade from 1985 to 1992.
The series pushed the envelope on everything that dominated headlines during its run (AIDS, homosexuality, sexism, ageism, political unrest, abortion and an endless list of other topics too long to go into at length). The episodes went for comedy, but usually almost always had a deep meaning to them about love and friendship.
All four actresses shared the spotlight equally for the most part.
Arthur and McClanahan had hit gold with "Maude" and White had been along seemingly at the advent of television programming. Getty was relatively unknown, but fit in well with more-established performers immediately (her character got away with more than the others as she was written as a lady who had suffered a major stroke which affected the relationship between what she said and thought).
Herb Edelman (who made a name for himself in "The Odd Couple") was always a consistent element as Arthur's two-timing ex-husband and Harold Gould (who was a key player in "The Sting") also became a fixture during the series' latter episodes as White's love interest.
The great thing about this show is that it took a chance by starring four actresses in their mid 50s to 60s and showed that just because you're old, it doesn't mean that life is over and you can't have fun anymore. The humor reaches to all age demographics and the characters each have such distinct, hilarious traits that watching them try to get along is a hoot.
If you're a boy or adult man that feels embarrassed to watch this show, DON'T. It's a pure classic that will never be forgotten in my life and will always be one of my favorite shows! This show proves that hilarity doesn't just come from younger folks, but that it can come from older people just as much!!! Long live The Golden Girls!!! 10 out of 10 EASILY!!!
The Golden Girls learn how things were done in “the old country”.
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Yeah. I get it. I’m too old a fogy to appreciate the new understandings about how Mr. Trump ran things. For he was brilliant.
He brought factories back to America… …almost.
He built a wall… almost.
He put Hillary Clinton in jail … almost.
He lowered taxes … not quite, he actually raised them.
He balanced the budget … nope. He sent the debit into orbit.
He protected the USA… we see how well that is panning out with COVID-19.
He made America respected around the world … absolutely NOT.
Not.
Not. Not. Not.
Jeeze Man!
I need a beer.
You need a beer to slug through all the bullshit that exists int he USA today.
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America today is terribly disrespected around the world. And I attribute it to Donald Trump and his inability to master the prerequisite laws of power necessary for his position as President of the United States.
What do I mean?
I mean this…
The 48 Laws of Power
To best understand my point of view as to why his international policies stank you need to learn the basics of the laws of power. This is especially true in global politics. Consider the following laws that Trump routinely violated.
For starters, he violated Law #3.
3. Conceal your intentions.Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.
I: Use decoyed objects of desire and red herrings to throw people off the scent:
If at any point in the deception you practice people have the slightest suspicions to your intentions, all is lost. Do not give them the chance to sense what you are up to: Throw them off the scent by dragging red herrings across the path. Use false sincerity, send ambiguous signals, set up misleading objects of desire. Unable to distinguish the genuine from the false, they cannot pick out your real goal.
Hide your intentions not by closing up, but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals - just false ones.
II: Use smoke screens to disguise your actions:
Deception is always the best strategy, but the best deceptions require a screen of smoke to distract people attention from your real purpose. The bland exterior—like the unreadable poker face—is often the perfect smoke screen, hiding your intentions behind the comfortable and familiar. If you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you lead him into a trap.
A helpful or honest gesture can divert from a deception.
Patterns will also help mask a deception.
Often the key to deception is being bland and acting with humility.
When you conceal your intentions, you can allow others to drop down their guard. They don’t groan and say “oh, it’s that Donald Trump again”. You don’t say “I demand that you do this or I will bloody well blow the shit out of you”.
Geeze!
I really do need a beer.
Times have changed, but humans haven’t.
He violated Law #4.
4. Always say less than necessary. When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.
Silence generally makes people uncomfortable - they will jump in and nervously fill the silence.
Generally saying less makes you appear more profound and mysterious.
Be particularly careful with sarcasm - rarely is it valuable.
Be careful with arousing suspicion or insecurity by being silent. At times it is easier to blend by playing the jester.
Donald Trump was never the one to keep his mouth shut. I think that many Americans grew weary (though obviously not everyone) and tired of the 70 tweets per night, and the horror of waking up to find yet another contract torn up and more discord and chaos.
Christmas Party at the office, 1970’s style.
He violated law #18.
18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself - isolation is dangerous.The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it Protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.
Retreat to a fortress and you lose contact with your sources of power, and your knowledge of what is going on.
If you need time to think, then choose isolation as a last resort, and only in small doses.
That was the sole primary element in the MAGA plan; to Make America Great Again; it was to isolate America from all foreign trade, build a wall around it, and then just attack all non-Americans everywhere. In addition, kick all Chinese out of the country, ban all Chinese applications, and if possible sink all Chinese ships.
I mean when you are on a roll… you are on a roll.
When you are on a roll, you are on a roll.
He violated Law #19.
19. Know who you’re dealing with - do not offend the wrong person.There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. Choose your victims and opponents carefully, then—never of fend or deceive the wrong person.
Being able to recognize the type of person you’re dealing with is critical. Here are the five most dangerous:
The Arrogant and Proud Man: any perceived slight will invite vengeance. Flee these people.
The Hopelessly Insecure Man: similar to the proud man, but will take revenge in smaller bites over time. Do not stay around him if you have harmed or deceived him.
Mr. Suspicion: sees the worst in others and imagines that everyone is after him. Easy to deceive - get him to turn on others.
The Serpent with a Long Memory: if hurt, he will show no anger, but will calculate and wait. Recognize by his calculation and cunning in other areas of life - he is usually cold and unaffectionate. Crush him completely or flee.
The Plain, Unassuming, and Often Unintelligent Man: this man will not take the bait because he does not recognize it. Do not waste your resources trying to deceive him. Have a test ready for a mark - a joke, a story. If reaction is literal, this is the type you are dealing with.
Never rely on instincts when judging someone; instead gather concrete knowledge. Also never trust appearances.
Perhaps if Trump drank alcohol, he would be more open and sensitive to how his actions affected others. But he seems to be completely and totally oblivious to it.
.
He violated law #24.
24. Play the perfect courtier.The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.The Laws of Court PoliticsAvoid Ostentation: modesty is always preferable.
Practice Nonchalance: never appear to be working too hard; your talent must appear to flow naturally, with ease. Showing your blood and toil is a form of ostentation.
Be Frugal with Flattery: flatter indirectly by being modest.
Arrange to be Noticed: pay attention to your appearance, and find a way to create a subtly distinctive style and image.
Alter Your Style and Language According to the Person You’re Dealing With: acting the same with all will be seen as condescension by those below you, and offend those above you.
Never Be the Bearer of Bad News: the messenger is always killed. Bring only glad news.
Never Affect Friendliness and Intimacy with Your Master: he does not want a friend for a subordinate.
Never Criticize Those Above You Directly: err on the side of subtlety and gentleness.
Be Frugal in Asking Those Above You for Favours: it is always better to earn your favours. Do not ask for favours on another person’s behalf.
Never Joke About Appearances or TasteDo Not Be the Court Cynic: express admiration for the good work of others.
Be Self-Observant: you must train yourself to evaluate your own actions.
Master Your EmotionsFit the Spirit of the Times: your spirit and way of thinking must keep up with the times, even if the times offend your sensibilities.
Be a Source of Pleasure: if you cannot be the life of the party, at least obscure your less desirable qualities.
Yes. Like him, love him or hate him, Mr. Trump was certainly unique. Most Americans, trapped within the media and informational bubble there, were never given insight to his faults. Only endless praises and glory. He, in a way, had a following that rivaled both Bill Clinton, and Barrack Obama, and at that you MUST give him credit.
You just MUST.
He, like Bill Clinton, is a master manipulator.
But those of us who sit outside of the American echo-chamber tend to have a different point of view.
.
He violated law #43.
43. Work on the hearts and minds of others.Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.
Remember: The key to persuasion is softening people up and breaking them down, gently. Seduce them with a two-pronged approach: Work on their emotions and play on their intellectual weaknesses. Be alert to both what separates them from everyone else (their individual psychology) and what they share with everyone else (their basic emotional responses). Aim at the primary emotions—love, hate, jealousy. Once you move their emotions you have reduced their control, making them more vulnerable to persuasion.
Play on contrasts: push people to despair, then give them relief. If they expect pain and you give them pleasure, you win their hearts.
Symbolic gestures of self-sacrifice can win sympathy and goodwill.
The quickest way to secure people’s minds is by demonstrating, as simply as possible, how an action will benefit them.
All this talk about politics, manipulation and likes makes me want to drink. And drinking makes me hungry.
Some New York style pizza would really hit the spot.
And the laws that he actually used…
To be fair, President Trump DID actually follow certain rules of power. And he does deserve full credit for that. Don’t you know.
His entire presidency was Law #17.
17. Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
Unsettle those around you and keep the initiative by being unpredictable.
Predictability and patterns can be used as a tool when deceiving.
As well as… Law #27.
27. Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult like following.People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise ; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.How to create a cult in 5 easy steps:Keep It Vague, Keep it Simple: use words to attract attention, with great enthusiasm. Fancy titles for simple things are helpful, as are the use of numbers and the creation of new words for vague concepts. All of these create the impression of specialized knowledge. People want to hear there is a simple solution to their problems.
Emphasize the Visual and the Sensual over the Intellectual: Boredom and skepticism are two dangers you must counter. The best way to do this is through theatre, creating a spectacle. Appeal to all the senses, and use the exotic.
Borrow the Forms of Organized Religion to Structure the Group: create rituals, organize followers into hierarchy, rank them in grades of sanctity, give them names and titles, ask them for sacrifices that fill your coffers and increase your power. Talk and act like a prophet.
Disguise Your Source of Income: make your wealth seem to come from the truth of your methods.
Set Up an Us-Versus-Them Dynamic: first make sure your followers believe they are part of an exclusive club, unified by common goals. Then, manufacture the notion of a devious enemy out to ruin you.
People are not interested in the truth about change - that it requires hard work - but rather they are dying to believe something romantic, otherworldly.
The most effective cults mix religion with science.
I’m out of beer, and I need to drain the lizard.
Hold on.
Doesn’t all this make you hungry? It does me. That’s for certain.
A hamburger might be nice.
Where he has indeed… Law #32.
32. Play to people’s fantasies.The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold.
The key to fantasy is distance - the distance has allure and promise, seems simple and problem free. What you are offering, then, should be ungraspable. Never let it become oppressively familiar.
I think that this is more my speed. Seriously.
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And who can forget his amazing MAGA rallies? Law #32.
37. Create compelling spectacles.Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power—everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then, full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.
Words often go astray, but symbols and the visual strike with emotional power and immediacy.
Find an associate yourself with powerful images and symbols to gain power.
Most effective of all is a new combination - a fusion of images and symbols that have not been seen together before, but that clearly demonstrate your new idea, message, religion.
Um…
Brilliant?
Hardly.
Like I said. I need a beer.
I say that it is time for a beer.
.
Let’s pause on the “why is the news media so focused on Biden continuing Trumps policies”, and take a look at what I mean when I say that his international polices stink.
For after all NO ONE in the USA thinks that his international policies were bad.
Americans gleefully accepted a 25% increase in the price of almost all manufactured products. Not a peep from the serfs. And of course, FOX and El’ Rushbo were absolutely gleeful in every action that he took.
But functionally… yeah. His international policies stank.
Trumps international policies
Yes his international policies stunk. No, I take that back, they were an unmitigated disaster. But you all don’t need to believe me. Check out this opinion…
He has cozied up to right-wing nationalist dictators and autocrats at a moment when citizens of faltering democracies and the many peoples around the world aspiring to freedom most need an advocate on the international stage.
He has rejected the honorable American presidential tradition of seeking unity and instead has indulged in the politics of division, willfully alienating a large segment of the American electorate while among his own supporters drumming up hatred for and suspicion of others.
He has transformed the White House, which should promote policies based on reality, into the world capital of ignorance, dishonesty and misinformation by reciting verifiable falsehoods, from the size of his inauguration crowd to the direction of a hurricane to the (disproven) prevalence of election fraud.
He has been a particular antagonist to California, seeking to undermine this state’s forward-looking policies on auto emissions and environmental preservation, spreading falsehoods about the causes of its deadly wildfires, disparaging its rational and humane approach to immigration challenges, demeaning it for its struggles to deal with homelessness, and offering instead purported solutions that are unworkable, nonsensical or cruel.
He has denied the existential challenge of climate change and has promulgated policies that weaken the nation’s role in fighting it and scuttle the nation’s ability to take economic leadership in low-emission and carbon-capturing technology.
He has made the United States unreliable, erratic and foolish in international affairs by disparaging its diplomatic corps, engaging in frequent and jarring changes in foreign affairs and defense advisors and repudiating international allies and partners.
Trump has cheapened his office, instilled distrust in essential institutions of justice and democracy and replaced knowledge and professionalism with ignorance and amateurism.
He has made light of verified Russian assaults on U.S. elections, and at his notorious and shameful Helsinki news conference last year said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own nation’s intelligence agencies.
He failed to elicit from the Russian leader an apology for past intervention or a promise not to intervene in other elections. In so doing, he invited further, more comprehensive attacks — and failed in the most basic duty of any U.S. president, which is to protect and defend the United States.
He has reduced or eliminated independent science advisory panels in a quest to remove fact from policymaking when it collides with damaging policies he wishes to pursue.
He has demeaned the presidency with foul, angry language hurled at his political adversaries, replacing fireside chats and presidential addresses with cable-TV-fueled, stream-of-consciousness tweets that attack his critics and stoke fear and outrage in his supporters.
He has undercut the nation’s moral standing by his shrugging response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi operatives.
He has sullied the office of the presidency by using it to express his personal contempt for people he does not like or who do not support him. The most egregious example may be his treatment of Sen. John McCain, a much-decorated former Vietnam War prisoner whose honor Trump questioned even after McCain’s passing.
He has appealed to the basest part of our culture, lifting into the mainstream chords and currents of racism that had long been left to fester in only our darkest corners. He commented on the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., with an equivocating speech that shrank from condemning violent racism and promoted false equivalency among demonstrators for and against white supremacy. He put in place a program to deny visas to visitors from majority Muslim nations. He disparaged Latinos; called Haiti, El Salvador and African nations “shithole countries”; and expressed his preference for immigrants from Norway. He promoted the notion that one’s American-ness is a function of descent and not birth or naturalization, by saying U.S.-born members of Congress should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” He has issued statements that in the aggregate define an America united not by law, the Constitution, liberty or justice but by racial heritage.
More than any president in living memory, Trump has cheapened his office, instilled distrust in essential institutions of justice and democracy and replaced knowledge and professionalism with ignorance and amateurism. This partial list represents a mere slice of what makes Donald Trump unacceptable as president of the United States and what makes it of utmost importance that Americans of all political parties and positions reject and replace him.
-LA Times
Of course, that is just someone’s opinion.
I like to think that he meant well. That he tried, he really tried.
It’s just that his ideas are from another time, an outdated time, when nations ruled by paper and separated by cultural differences fought over swatches of rock and desert. But that age is long gone. This is a new age, and for the human species to propagate and grow we need to discard those childish ideas behind and accept that we are all biologically the same. That we are not different. And that fighting over territory, or advantage is a undesirable pursuit.
Times have changed.
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For one thing, I was fighting for Trump. I really wanted him to stop that Obama trademark of non-stop progressive social re-engineering. I was tired of all the bullshit, and the people being forced to bake cakes against their beliefs, and other such nonsense. I wanted it to STOP. And you know what?
It did.
What’s more, I wanted factories to return to America, and people to start working again, and all that nonsense about HR Diversity officers to go away, and cheaper affordable health care to return (yes, return to pre-1980 levels).
They didn’t.
But you know, I wasn’t inside of America when he was the reigning head honcho. I was outside of America. I was sitting on the front row watching him represent the United States to the rest of the world. And precious little of what he did was covered by the American domestic press.
He was a God-damn train wreck.
In hindsight, it is no wonder that Trump was gloating that 2020 would be a “banner year” for America, and that there would be victories abound. His plans, were they to manifest would have put America back on top, and the rest of the world opposition crippled for decades to come. Even though…
People! 2020 was the year that the USA was to destroy China, first by starvation and internal revolution, then by biological weapons, and finally by military confrontation on the Chinese shores. The only reason why American cites are not radioactive ruins right now is because the Chief of Staff of the Defense department disobeyed his orders to attack China in the Summer of 2020 with the mega-flotilla of aircraft carriers.
Ah, but no one is talking about that.
Nor are they talking about his plan to destroy China through starvation with eight (x8) types of selective biological weapons targeting crops and livestock, some of which (in the more remote areas) were deployed by drones, and then a full-on assault on the Chinese people (a nation four times larger than the United States) by COVID-19B, and having Americans get “herd Immunity” though COVID-19A. With a follow up with the far more lethal vomit-to-death virus unleashed in October 2020. No wonder Trump pretended to get sick while scurrying to the airborne command post when the Chinese PLA discovered and isolated the virus..
How’s that all working out you-all?
No one is talking about that.
Of course not.
Americans know (after four years of propaganda) that China is vile and evil, and that 5G technology is bad, and that the world would be a better place if China were completely and utterly destroyed due to the superiority of American “democracy”.
American NEEDS the rest of the world to adopt the “great American way of life“. So that everyone can enjoy that great delicious, lip-smacking “democracy” and American “way of life” like this lithe young lass does.
American NEEDS the rest of the world to adopt the “great American way of life“.
But, seriously, how has President Trump’s international policies been?
Well, if you read the conservative websites, Trump has been almost God-like. He has single-handedly made America strong (again), stopped terrorism in it’s tracks, built walls around America to keep out bad guys, and almost put Hillary Clinton in Jail. To some, his tenure as President has been a resounding success.
Most conservatives do not believe in “climate change” or that humans have a responsibility to shepherd and manage our natural resources. Instead, they believe that while there are limits, they are near infinite in practicality, and thus all the issues about care for the earth is yet another way to skim money out of the pockets of Americans.
Well, both sides are right and both sides are wrong. But that doesn’t matter. What we are talking about here is the Trump policies concerning climate regarding international treaties.
Since the Trump administration took office, it has been fighting what they call an “anti-growth” agenda put in place by the Obama administration. Regulations that required businesses to spend time and money to meet the former administration’s environmental standards were swiftly reviewed and, in many cases, rolled back.
States, municipalities, and NGOs have responded to these changes by filing lawsuits to block the administration. Some, like lawsuits against the Keystone XL pipeline, have successfully kept public land closed to additional development.
This aspect of his policies has been covered substantially by National Geographic Magazine.
Clean air
1. U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement
This is perhaps the decision that set the tone for the Trump administration’s approach to the environment: when he moved to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in June of 2017. To many, it signaled less U.S. leadership in international climate change agreements. (Read more about this decision.)
2. Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan
The Clean Power Plan was one of the Obama’s signature environmental policies. It required the energy sector to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, but in October 2017 it was rolled back by Trump’s EPA. Among the reasons cited were unfair burdens on the power sector and a “war on coal.” (Read more on why Trump can’t make coal great again.)
3. EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution
This regulation revolved around a complicated rule referred to as “once in, always in” or OIAI. Essentially, OIAI said that if a company polluted over the legal limit, they would have to match the lowest levels set by their industry peers and they would have to match them indefinitely. By dropping OIAI, the Trump EPA forces companies to innovate ways to decrease their emissions, but once those lower targets are met, they’re no longer required to keep using those innovations. (Read more about air pollution.)
4. Rescinding methane-flaring rules
Under the Affordable Clean Energy rule issued in August 2018, states were given more power over regulating emissions. In states like California, that means regulations would likely be stricter, whereas states that produce fossil fuels are likely to weaken regulations. The following month, the EPA announced they would relax rules around releasing methane flares, inspecting equipment, and repairing leaks. (Read more about methane.)
5. Trump announces plan to weaken Obama-era fuel economy rules
Under the Obama administration’s fuel economy targets, cars made after 2012 would, on average, have to get 54 miles per gallon by 2025. In August 2018, the Trump Department of Transportation and EPA capped that target at 34 miles per gallon by 2021. The decision created legal conflict with states like California that have higher emission caps. (Read more about speed bumps in the way of super-efficient cars.)
Water
6. Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise
In August 2017, President Trump revoked an Obama-era executive order that required federally funded projects to factor rising sea levels into construction. However, in 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development required buildings constructed with disaster relief grants do just that. (Read more about how rising sea levels may imperil the internet.)
7. Waters of the U.S. Rule revocation
What are the “waters of the U.S.?” President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 ordering the EPA to formally review what waters fell under the jurisdiction of the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. The proposed change narrowed the definition of what’s considered a federally protected river or wetland. (Read more about Trump’s plans to roll back the Clean Water Act.)
Wildlife
8. NOAA green lights seismic airgun blasts for oil and gas drilling
Five companies were approved to use seismic air gun blasts to search for underwater oil and gas deposits. Debate over the deafening blasts stem from concerns that they disorient marine mammals that use sonar to communicate and kill plankton. The blasts were shot down by the Bureau of Energy Management in 2017 but approved after NOAA found they would not violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. (Read more about how scientists think seismic air guns will harm marine life.)
9. Interior Department relaxes sage grouse protection
The uniquely American sage grouse, a bird resembling a turkey with spiked feathers, has become the face of the debate between land developers and conservationists. In both 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration Department of Interior eased restrictions on activities like mining and drilling that had been restricted to protect the endangered bird. (Read more about how the sage grouse become caught in the fight over who owns America’s west.)
10. Trump officials propose changes to handling the Endangered Species Act
In July of 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to change the way the Endangered Species Act is administered, saying more weight would be put on economic considerations when designating an endangered animal’s habitat. (Read more about the rollbacks facing endangered animals.)
11. Migratory Bird Treaty Act reinterpretation
Companies installing large wind turbines, constructing power lines, or leaving oil exposed are no longer violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act if their activities kill birds. This controversial change was declared by the Trump administration in December of 2017. (Read more about why legally protecting birds is important.)
Opening public lands for business
12. Trump unveils plan to dramatically downsize two national monuments
Unlike national parks, which have to be approved by Congress, national monuments can be created by an executive order, which the president said means they can be dismantled just as easily. Such was the case for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, which President Trump reduced and opened for mining and drilling companies in 2017. Tribes and environmental groups are challenging that interpretation in court. (Read more about the impacts of downsizing these two monuments.)
13. Executive order calls for sharp logging increase on public lands
Just a day before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Trump issued an executive order that called for a 30 percent increase in logging on public lands. The decision was billed as wildfire prevention, though environmental groups say it ignores the role climate change plays in starting wildfires. (Read more about California’s historic wildfires.)
Security & Enforcement
14. Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats
The Trump administration’s decision to delist climate change from national security threats in December of 2017 meant less Department of Defense research funding and a nationalistic viewpoint on the potential impacts of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. (Read more about how climate change is forcing migration in Guatemala.)
15. EPA criminal enforcement hits 30-year low
The size and influence of the EPA has shrunk under the Trump administration, and it’s illustrated by their diminished prosecuting power. Criminal prosecutions are at a 30-year low, and many violations that would have been prosecuted in the past are now being negotiated with companies. The administration says this is streamlining its work, but environmentalists have warned it could lead to more pollution. (Read more about the scientists pushing back against President Trump’s environment agenda.)
But it’s more than that…
Donald Trump does not have a foreign policy; he has moods regarding international affairs. Underneath the volatility of his moods, however, are some convictions:
That other countries are robbing the U.S. through trade;
U.S. allies are at best incapable of defending themselves.
Our allies are unwilling to spend resources in order to do so;
multilateralism is for the weak.
In many respects, these convictions are fundamentally wrong: over the long term, the U.S. has benefited enormously from …
A commitment to open trade,
From alliances beyond immediate transactional quid-pro-quo,
A multilateral international order,
U.S. global power projection.
The real tragedy of Trump’s inability to recognize these facts is the negative consequences that his failed foreign affairs beliefs and choices frequently have for those affected by them.
It makes me want to eat, and drink…
It makes me want to go away, far away from all this nonsense.
.
Trump simply makes a lot of bad foreign policy decisions that hurt everyone from U.S. domestic consumers to businesses with international supply chains to leaders of U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
And for some foreign policy decisions—such as the abrogation of the Iran deal, or engagement with North Korea—the jury is still out. We still do not know how those decisions will pan out, and whether or not they are good or bad.
Nonetheless, occasionally, Trump’s convictions feed instincts leading him to decisions that are fundamentally right. Ironically, however, even when Trump makes ostensibly good foreign policy choices, he executes them so badly, or approaches them from such a chaotic and skewed vantage point, that even those who normally would support the policy in question end up obliged to reject it.
A cursory examination of three of Trump’s major international priorities— [1] relationships with allies, [2] the war in Syria, and [3] U.S.-China trade relations—is indicative of this incongruous dynamic.
[1] Trump’s Treatment of Allies
Arguably, the most enduring of Trump’s foreign policy blunders will be his alienation of U.S. allies, particularly in Europe. He has alienated everyone.
Trump is not viewed with favor on the international scene.
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It’s one thing to raise some long-overdue points about the commitment of allies, but it is another thing to be insulting to them, to cause them to lose face, and to create havoc . His rhetorical antagonism and extortionate attempts to compel their increased defense spending (both on burden-sharing and purchases of U.S. technology) portend a change to less cohesion and more conflict between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
This behavior is pushing forward a new normal in which the U.S. and its allies consider themselves to have different approaches to international affairs and fewer overlapping interests.
This is dangerous for U.S. security, as the U.S. National Defense Strategy identifies the U.S. alliance network as an asymmetric strategic advantage vis-à-vis competitors such as China or Russia.
If abandonment fears on the part of the U.S.’s European and Indo-Pacific allies could be leveraged for greater alliance investment and strengthening in the long run, then some pressure would make sense.
But Trump has undermined this potential outcome by going too far:
By stoking right-wing, illiberal nationalism in European states’ domestic politics;
Fundamentally calling into question NATO,
And questioning the EU, and U.S. commitment to Indo-Pacific hub-and-spoke allies;
Browbeating and humiliating European and Asian allies.
And failing to acknowledge the strategic advantages that U.S. basing rights overseas represent for U.S. global power projection.
Moreover, Trump seems to misunderstand basic facts about alliance burden-sharing (both multilateral and bilateral) and couples his distaste for alliances with a general destabilization of the internationalorder.
Yet, for all that, his instinct that U.S. allies—particularly in NATO—should meet their defense funding obligations (such as the 2% of GDP threshold for NATO countries) is a good one…
The open hostility of his rhetoric and the malformed reasoning behind extortionate demands (such as the recently unveiled “Cost plus 50” concept) weaken the persuasiveness of the serious voices who have pushed (and continue to push) for greater commitment from U.S. allies.
At the very least, it makes allied advocates for greater defense spending seem aligned with a U.S. president who apparently does not care about the interests of allied states.
This dynamic hurts their public credibility.
At worst, it undermines these voices’ ability to broker political deals necessary to overcome headwinds on an issue that is sensitive throughout Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
[2] Trump’s Withdrawal Decision
If you want to withdraw from the world stage, then do it. And initially it looked like that was exactly what Trump was doing. And then he started to expand the global military presence. It was confusing and confounding.
There are many good arguments for why the U.S. should not have an armed forces presence in Syria, and thus why Trump should withdraw U.S. troops from that war-ravaged land. To begin with, Trump campaigned on the promise to leave Syria, and a (small) majority of the U.S. population supports the withdrawal policy.
There is also little evidence that the U.S. military role in the country has led to better security outcomes for Syria.
American military in Syria.
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As many have argued from the political right, left, and center (as well as from both realist and institutionalist perspectives), U.S. military participation in the Syrian conflict [1] arguably violates international law, [2] is unconstitutional under U.S. law, [3] remains hampered by undefined goals, and [4] has not successfully advanced core U.S. strategic interests (indeed there are legitimate arguments that it undermines U.S. security).
A cynic might even argue that the best strategy for the U.S. in Syria would simply be to let U.S.’s enemies—Iran, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, Islamic State and sundry terrorist organizations, Russia, etc.—kill each other. And yet, despite there being a relatively sizable group against the U.S. presence in Syria, Trump botched the withdrawal decision.
Nor was the decision supported by sound strategic or political reasoning; rather, it was sold on the basis of patent lies about the status of defeat of the Islamic State. Indeed, ISIS carried out a lethal attack shortly after Trump’s announcement of the organization’s defeat.
As if these self-inflicted wounds to Washington’s reliability and credibility weren’t bad enough, Trump apparently reached the decision after being dubiously convinced by discussions over the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A man whose ulterior motive is clearly not to finish off elements of remaining terrorist groups in the region (thereby aiding the U.S. in the war on terror)…
… and much less to provide for regional stability…
… but rather to weaken, and, if possible, destroy the U.S.’s Kurdish allies.
To boot, Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria cost him his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, for whom the policy changes were the last straw.
Given their deteriorated relationship, Trump probably considered Mattis’s resignation a blessing.
But for most experts and allied governments, it was unsettling to see him leave, not only because of his reputation as the last, preeminent “adult at the table” in Trump’s cabinet, but also because, of all things, Mattis left in protest of a failed policy, thus slightly tarnishing his sterling image as the wise warrior-monk.
In the end, this group even undermined partially the withdrawal decision, as both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo walked back parts of the withdrawal commitment during their visits to the Middle East in early 2019.
Regarding Syria, rather than a well thought-out planned withdraw, the decision was conducted on a whim and implemented without any foresight. This kind of decision is what has historically caused nations to collapse, invasions to occur, and people to riot.
[3] The Trade War fiasco
I have written about this in great depth.
As for China, Trump’s instinct to confront it as a strategic competitor is an overdue corrective to the West’s negligence in realizing that China is a rising power.
But how he has dealt with this matter has been catastrophic.
Yet, a trade war, which Trump imagines will solve the U.S.-China trade imbalance, is not the right answer to these issues.
The fact that many economists do not believe the U.S. trade deficit with China is a problem in the first place.
In fact, trade wars to repair trade deficits do not lead to progress on structural issues.
The tariff-based trade war with China only acts as a tax on U.S. businesses and consumers.
It has also caused disruption in global supply and production chains.
It has caused instability in global markets.
It has fundamentally created a weakening of the free trade norm that underpinned U.S. economic strength.
And so far, China has hardly budged on “structural reform“, as U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer recently conceded. But they don’t need to implement any changes to their government, their society or their inherent way of life. China is not what the neocons think it is, much to America’s chagrin. China is doing splendidly.
Why throw away your cut of prime steak and eat dog food instead?
.
It’s not a popular view point, but that is because 99% of Americans haven’t a clue as to how backwards, and repressed that they have become. Further that they have absolutely no idea of what China is, how it works, or what the Chinese people think.
Americans think that the Chinese are poor, downtrodden and living in a repressive / suppressive horrible dark and gloomy place. And that America represents the best place in the world.
But…
The Chinese are happy with their government, their way of life, and view America as a crazy place that is fat, unhealthy and rather dumbed down.
Anyone who counters with the crazy (well, insane) idea that China NEEDS to make substantive changes to their government; “structural reform“, a very successful one at that, seriously needs their fucking head fixed.
If you are driving a Porsche 911, you aren’t going to trade it in for forty year old Pacer.
American policy makers often draw a sharp distinction between what the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom has termed “big bad China and the good Chinese people,” stressing that today’s more hawkish China policy is directed against the CCP and not the ordinary people who “dream of freedom.”
Yet China contains multitudes — not just dissidents, democrats, and human rights defenders — and many Chinese are vocal supporters of their government.
Indeed, various multinational opinion surveys consistently find a “high level of regime support” in China, even after factoring in the possibility that some people hide their dissatisfaction for fear of political repercussions. In 2014, Pew Global Research found that a staggering 92% of respondents had “confidence” in their country’s leader, Xi Jinping.
In addition, Trump is a poor, untrustworthy messenger, the optics of the trade war rollout—such as using dubious national security grounds to justify tariffs—have allowed China to plausibly appear a victim of U.S. economic aggression in general and Trump’s bad faith in particular.
Ironically, remaining locked into a trade war with negative spillover effects to other countries, especially allies, potentially pushes them away from the U.S.’s position. Indeed, the U.S. is having difficulty convincing allies—including France and Germany—not to purchase Huawei’s 5G technology, despite the unproved security risks that Washington says they have.
In the end, the consequences of Trump’s poor foreign policy choices go beyond the irony that analysts, pundits, and policymakers are compelled to abjure policy directions that they otherwise support.
Good policy choices need solid execution and messaging to have their intended effects.
Unfortunately, even Trump’s good ideas—increased allied financial commitment to security and defense burden-sharing, extricating the U.S. from some of the messiest and most hopeless aspects of Middle East conflict, and pushing back against Beijing’s violations of trade norms—are undermined by his approach to concretizing policy.
Trump is the anti-Midas—even the gold he accidentally touches turns to dirt. This warps debate about future policy choices and will restrict future options because we will have “tried that before.”
Global nuclear conflict was avoided in 2020 just narrowly. There is no doubt in the halls of MM that that would have been the result of the planned “hot war” in the South China Sea by Trump.
How can you believe anything out of the American media?
So why all this propaganda directed towards Americans that Biden will be “tough on China”?
I have identified numerous reasons.
Keep in mind that the "President" has limited powers and range of abilities. That they are all playing a role and are puppets controlled by higher forces hiding behind the scenes.
To convince the donors who funded the Trump campaign, that their investments will not be wasted.
To convince the American citizenry to keep on hating China, until a new villain can be established, and the anger and disgust siphoned away and redirected towards it.
To keep Wall Street positive and in the black.
And my thoughts on the media narrative…
While limited war, using nuclear weapons, was avoided. The (8 +1) bio-weapon assaults were not, and the globe is now dealing with the spillover from the bio-weapons attacks on China by the Trump administration.
Well, I’m still glad that we gave Trump a chance.
.
That being said, MM anticipates a Biden Presidency to right some wrongs and correct some of the damage that the Trump administration inflicted on the global stage. But it will not be complete. There is much that remains raw and that will boil and fester into other issues down the road in the future.
Trump has completed his role. He has successfully isolated America from the global stage, and much of the internal discord and turmoil that will occur in the next five years will be geographically limited to the North American continent.
Biden can do anything, but I anticipate a redirection of hostilities towards Russia. This is a very dangerous turn of events. But if you know the whole and real story it makes sense.
Were Trump to actually successfully enact a “hot war” with China, it would have been a Waterloo moment (for America) with a minimum of three aircraft carrier groups sinking in internal Chernobyl fires, and uncountable submarines as well.
At that, you can pretty much expect a limited nuclear response and all of the top 20 largest American cities would be in radioactive ruins today. New York, Washington, LA, Chicago, Houston, Boston, San Francisco… all would be gone.
But this world-line did not run this way, did it?
Now…
You can say “phew” and wipe your forehead. Yay!
But…
…like I have stated in regards to [1] start, [2] end and [3] signposts on a person’s lifeline, the same is true for groups of people and societies. The end of the USA was not prevented.
It was only postponed.
Things were only postponed.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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Now that Trump and his cabal of war-mongering neocons have packed their bags and are being ridden on a rail out of Washington, their “machinery of war” is all winding down. In the still quiet, the sheeple blink their eyes and crawl out of the fog. “What?” they ask? Suddenly all the clamorous, 24-7, non-stop noise about the evil Chinese is all ending. It’s just a few trailing articles here and there. The onslaught has stopped, and …
…people notice.
Well, at least the more alert do.
The few remaining articles still exist. You’ve got [1] the “Uighur issue” which is still on “life support” (and will probably be a staple of the “news” for decades to come), and the mainlined China=Bad articles. Usually [2] something about Christian church prosecution (to grab the attention of the Religious Right), and [3] China “covering up” Coronavirus anything (a staple of Mike Pompeo’s CIA).
Like these that were posted on Drudge today (31DEC20) …
And numerous bloggers outside of the alternative media are picking up on this insane anti-china narrative. It doesn’t take much, you know, just a memory greater than a few months, and a remembrance of what life was like prior to Donald Trump.
Remember, boys and girls, all American media is controlled or financed by the US government. And that includes your most beloved "alternative" "news" sites.
None of the government controlled “news” sites are reporting on the idea that the anti-China narrative is an intentional fabrication as a prelude to a world war…
Mainstream (FOX, MSNBC, ABC, Yahoo!)
Alt-Left (Politico, The Huffington Post)
Alt-Right (Hall Turner, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh)
For this brief period of time, before the narrative changes to Russia! Russia! Russia! the political machinery is busy “changing gears”, and it’s a quiet dwell. News about the covid-19 fiasco in the United States dominates, with a distraction about more money being dished out to the sheeple. And, of course, the higher debt load.
Oh, sure…
The sheeple still walk around in a daze. Chanting “China Bad”, “Democracy Good”, “Need to protect American way of life”… yada, yada, yada. But soon that will be redirected to new mantras, followed up with new assaults in the news, and new villains to distract their attention from the terribly corrupt and evil military empire that they inhabit.
In this relatively quiet period, a period where the “fire hose” of disinformation has been turned off for a spell…
… we can notice that others are also paying attention. And they are writing about what they see.
Here’s one such site, and one such article.
MoA is much like MM in that they really are not connected to the “big money” out of Washington DC. Just a few guys writing about what they see, and maintaining a following of like-minded folk. MoA has done a pretty good job on a number of areas, and they are one of the sites that I visit pretty regularly. Some of their articles are timely and the organization of them are pretty sweet. Personally, I like their website design better than MM’s, but that’s all just a matter of aesthetics.
Check it out…
The following is an article titled “The ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ – How U.S. Financed ‘Human Rights’ Organizations Create Anti-Chinese Headlines” it can be found HERE on Moon Over Alabama. Reprinted as found. The only editing is to fit this venue. All credit to the authors.
The ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ – How U.S. Financed ‘Human Rights’ Organizations Create Anti-Chinese Headlines
During my daily skimming of the main stream media I at times detect news items that seem of little public interest but are widely published. These pieces are often suspiciously similar to each other and seem to come from the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’:
In 1967 the magazine "Ramparts" ran an expose revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world.
...
CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune.
Today’s ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ song is played simultaneously by all major outlets:
A Chinese citizen journalist who covered Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak has been jailed for four years. Zhang Zhan was found guilty of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a frequent charge against activists.
The 37-year-old former lawyer was detained in May, and has been on hunger strike for several months. Her lawyers say she is in poor health.
Ms Zhang is one of several citizen journalists who have run into trouble for reporting on Wuhan.
...
In a video interview with an independent filmmaker before her arrest, Ms Zhang said she decided to travel to Wuhan in February after reading an online post by a resident about life in the city during the outbreak.
Once there, she began documenting what she saw on the streets and hospitals in livestreams and essays, despite threats by authorities, and her reports were widely shared on social media.
The rights group Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders said her reports also covered the detention of other independent journalists and the harassment of families of victims who were seeking accountability.
"Maybe I have a rebellious soul... I'm just documenting the truth. Why can't I show the truth?" she said in a clip of the interview obtained by the BBC.
"I won't stop what I'm doing because this country can't go backwards."
The “Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders” seems to be the source of much of this reporting.
Who are these people?
The About page of the CHRD’s website does not reveal the people behind the organization nor who is financing it. Curious.
Two years ago a Grayzone report took a deeper look into the organization:
Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Conveniently left out of the story is that this organization is headquartered in Washington, DC and funded by the US government’s regime-change arm.CHRD advocates full-time against the Chinese government, and has spent years campaigning on behalf of extreme right-wing opposition figures.
...
CHRD has used its generous funding to provide grants to opposition activists inside China, bankrolling dozens upon dozens of projects in the country.
On its tax forms, CHRD lists its address as the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch. HRW has long been criticized for its revolving door with the US government and its excessively disproportionate focus on designated enemies of Washington like China, Venezuela, Syria, and Russia.
Human Rights Watch did not respond to an email from The Grayzone inquiring about its relationship with CHRD.
Human Rights Watch’s overpaid permanent leader is of course part of the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’:
Kenneth Roth @KenRoth - 8:22 UTC · Dec 28, 2020
Beijing's selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year's suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. https://nytimes.com/2020/12/25/wor...
The U.S. government funded CHRD lists Zhang Zhan on its ‘Rights defenders’ page. Its portrait of her includes some interesting details:
A former lawyer, Zhang Zhan, born in the 1980s, has long been active in speaking out about politics and the human rights situation in China. She has been repeatedly harassed and threatened by the authorities. In 2019, she spoke out on the Hong Kong protests by posting comments, writing articles and holding up placards to support the protesters. In September 2019, she was summoned by Shanghai police and was later criminally detained and arrested on suspicion of “picking quarrels” for her support for Hong Kong. Police released her on November 26, 2019.
...
Zhang Zhan had travelled to Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early February. She reported numerous stories including the detentions of other independent reporters and harassment of families of victims seeking accountability from the epicenter via her Wechat, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. Pudong procuratorate indicted Zhang Zhan on September 15 and transfered her case to Pudong New District Court. The indictment accused Zhang Zhan of traveling to Wuhan on February 3, 2020 and that she “sent a large amount of false information” on WeChat, Twitter, and YouTube and “accepted interviews with overseas media Radio Free Asia and Epoch Times and maliciously stirred up the Wuhan epidemic situation.”
(Note: I have found no hint why Zhang Zhan is called a ‘former lawyer’. Was she disbarred? Why?)
ChinaAid, an anti-Chinese Evangelical lobby group which is also financed and awarded prices by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, identifies Zhang Zhan as a ‘Christian lawyer’. That is of interest because Chinese authorities are concerned about U.S. financed underground Evangelical groups which defy the requirement to register as social organizations.
ChinaChange, which is another ‘human rights’ outlet in Washington DC, also took note of Zhang Zhan:
Zhang Zhan (张展), a lawyer who practiced in Shanghai, went to Wuhan in early February, determined to document the coronavirus outbreak in the city that was the epicenter of what would soon become a pandemic around the world. In the three months she stayed in the city, she made 122 posts on YouTube. It was not a coincidence that her first post was “My Claim for the Right of Free Speech.” Zhang Zhan was arrested in May, brought back to Shanghai, indicted in September on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” China’s all-in-one charge for suppressing dissent. She is being tried on Monday, December 28, in Shanghai.
Wuhan, where the first large outbreak of Covid-19 occurred, was put under lockdown on January 23. One wonders why a ‘former lawyer’ and ‘citizen journalist’ would go there despite official advice to not enter or leave the city.
Dissident Protests ‘Animal-Like’ Treatment of Chinese Citizens
Zhang Zhan, a female dissident living in Shanghai, put herself in harm’s way to go to Wuhan after the city was locked down. Her plan was to investigate and broadcast the local situation as a citizen journalist. She is outraged that the Chinese government casually deprives the basic rights and freedom of Wuhan residents in the name of epidemic control.
In the video Zhang Zhan is standing at a light traffic barrier that blocks access to a quarantined housing block. She is ranting in a weepy voice at white clad guards and passerby. The Epoch Times translated the dialog:
Woman:
Let me ask you,
Do you think the government can treat citizens like animals?
Lock them when the regime is willing to,
Send them out to work when they need these people to work.
Aren’t you treating them like you treat cattle and horses?
When animals need to graze you let them out
And take them back when they are done eating.
Is that for real?
And if they do not obey, whip them.
Is that how it should be?
Is it justified to treat civilians like this?
Man: What are you doing?
Woman: I want to express my protest against the government, persistent protest.
Shortly before the man asked Zhang Zhan what she was doing she had knocked over the traffic barrier.
Holding libertarian rants against pandemic measures and knocking over quarantine barrier while providing videos for anti-Chinese outlets is presumably ‘citizen journalism’.
Wuhan had soon defeated the pandemic. But a few new infections in early May again raised alarm. The U.S. government financed Radio Free Asiareported hearsay of it:
Wuhan Locks Down Residential Compounds Amid Citywide Test Rollout
Wuhan, where the virus that causes COVID-19 first emerged, is also in the process of implementing a city-wide order to carry out free nucleic acid tests on the entire eleven million population. Wuhan-based citizen journalist Zhang Zhan said six new cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in the city's Sanmin residential compound, home to some 5,000 people.
"I went there to find out more about the situation, but it has been placed under quarantine," Zhang told RFA on Thursday, adding that local news reports said six new cases had been confirmed, with 180 contacts now in isolation.
"There are police outside on the street now guarding the place, and no vehicles are being allowed through," Zhang said. "I asked a nearby resident how many people were taken away in ambulances, and he told me that 180 people were taken away for isolation."
Sanmin residents stranded outside the compound when lockdown was imposed are not being allowed to return.
A similar lockdown was being imposed at the Sanyanqiao residential compound, also in Wuhan, Zhang said.
"The barriers have been put back and the place is under lockdown," Zhang said. "There is also an online announcement saying that delivery drivers aren't being allowed to enter certain compounds."
"There are signs of a resurgence of the epidemic in Wuhan."
There was no resurgence of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Just a few, mostly asymptomatic cases were found during the city-wide testing.
Shortly after her ‘reporting’ for Radio Free Asia the notorious grumbler Zhang Zhan was arrested. As this was not the first time she got herself into trouble she did not receive any clemency.
China did manage the news about the Covid-19 pandemic. It suppressed false reports. That is, according to the World Health Organization, what any government should do. A recent WHO Call to Action explains why:
An infodemic is defined as a tsunami of information—some accurate, some not—that spreads alongside an epidemic. If it is not managed accordingly, an infodemic can have direct negative impacts on the health of populations and the public health response by undermining the trust in science and interventions. We are also seeing that infodemics hinder the cohesiveness of societies by increasing existing social inequities, stigma, gender disparity and generational rift.
...
As outlined in the Resolution on COVID-19 adopted by consensus at the 73rd World Health Assembly and the G20 Health Ministers’ Declaration at the Riyadh Summit, we need to provide populations with reliable and comprehensive information on COVID-19 and take measures to counter misinformation and disinformation. The response to this infodemic demands the support, development, and application of efficient solutions that equip individuals and their communities with the knowledge and tools to promote accurate health information (upstream) and mitigate the harm that misinformation and disinformation causes (downstream).
Zhang Zhan did her best to feed the infodemic with rumors and false outrage. The Chinese government took appropriate measures against the ‘rebellious soul’. It also took the right measures to completely defeat the pandemic.
But the CIA’s congregation of Washington based anti-Chinese ‘human rights’ organizations disagrees with those measures and it is jealous about China’s success.
Thus the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ springs into action and the ‘western’ media dutifully follow its lead by lamenting about the fate of a ‘citizen journalist’ provocateur in China.
While this article is quite interesting, the comments are also full of insight and curiosity.
1
A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will be reproduced around the globe and taken as ‘fact’ by most of the newspapers’ readers.
The media’s incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events.
The rise of the now often used insult “conspiracy theorist”, which is really code for “dissenting opinion”, is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going totalitarian in real time as the window of “acceptable” opinion continues to shrink and the establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.
Kenneth Roth @KenRoth - 8:22 UTC · Dec 28, 2020
Beijing's selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year's suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
This information is false. China doesn’t celebrate Christmas because it isn’t a Christian country, and its New Year is celebrated according to the lunar calendar, not the solar calendar. As a result, the “Chinese New Year” is celebrate somewhere between the end of January and the first half of February (depending on the year).
In other words, the period between Christmas and (solar) New Year is not a “sleepy period” in China.
—
About the subject in general:
The first thing we should notice is that this Zhang Zhan is not a journalist. Therefore she’s not press. Therefore she’s not free press.
The second thing we should noticed is that, even if she was a journalist, we would have to discover if she’s a journalist or a “journalist”, i.e. a propagandist disguised as a journalist. Propagandists are not journalists in the spirit of the word: they are propagandists. Otherwise, having a Journalism degree would give one license to lie at will. Adding a ridiculous epithet (“citizen”) to the term doesn’t free you from real world consequences.
The third thing is that she’s a lawyer. Her rant is typical of a petit-bourgeois/middle class ideologue: freedom of the individual above the collective good; moral values above social values. The CIA is good in finding those wackos even in nations we don’t think they exist.
Zhang Zhan’s venture into Wuhan, defying lock-down orders for which she should have been punished, reminds me of the stunt pulled by Navalny’s eye doctor groupie Dr Anastasia Vasilyeva in April this year attempting to transport PPE from Moscow region to Novgorod region in a convoy of three cars during lock-downs in those regions.
Vasilyeva, self-styled head of a doctors’ union (which curiously has very few members and no branch offices in other parts of Russia, as far as I could tell from a TV report broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on its channels), disobeyed lock-down orders in both Moscow and Novgorod regions and was arrested and imprisoned in sensational style as recorded by her camera crew and lawyers travelling in the convoy. Curiously there seem to have been no other medically qualified people in the cars and there was a total of 12 people in the convoy so each car was carrying four people. (There goes the social distancing!)
I later saw an article on RT.com that the PPE Vasilyeva attempted to carry to Novgorod region did reach the intended recipient hospitals but they could not use the masks and gloves because … there was no certification in the boxes … so the hospitals had no way of knowing if the equipment had been legally obtained or met required medical standards. I do not know what the hospitals did with the equipment.
I would not be surprised if Zhang Zhan turns out to be a “lawyer” in the same sense that Sergei Magnitsky was a “lawyer” (he was an accountant chef hired by Bill Browder to cook his accounts) and Alexei Navalny is a “lawyer” (he initially qualified in real estate law but does not seem to have practised). No need then to wonder if Zhang had to give up a licence to practise law, if she was a “lawyer” in the loopy stretched-out cartoon definition the US State Department, the CIA and Hollywood would have us believe.
“Human rights” agitprop has long been a staple of US imperialist propaganda. As the Grayzone website pointed out earlier this year, “HRW was founded during the height of the Cold War as Helsinki Watch, an anti-Soviet lobby group closely linked to the US government and funded by the Ford Foundation, which served as a CIA passthrough.”
The hysterical propaganda against communist nations and fighters goes hand in hand with the bombs, torture and assassination that are US/British/French/NATO specialties. The modern version of “human rights” campaigning was born out of the US defeat in Vietnam, and the spate of revelations that came out of that period about US crimes (Pentagon Papers, Church Senate investigations, Winter Soldier, etc.) in an attempt to rebrand the Vietnam war criminals as some sort of humanitarians. The Helsinki Accords were a US propaganda program that the misguided leaders of the USSR, along with Tito, etc. approved with the vain hope of detente and peaceful cooperation between nations. In reality, the US never wanted such peaceful coexistence.
Thanks, b, for bucking the anti-China propaganda campaign. The Pentagon and CIA still lick their wounds from the last time they faced Chinese forces in battle. Their dream of anti-Communist conquest of China and North Korea (assisted by their supposedly docile Japanese assistants) is as dangerous as their dream of dismembering Russia and turning all of the Eurasian landmass into a colony for US (and Japanese) exploitation. There lies the fuse for WW3, and the end deaths of hundreds of millions.
Now is the time for every person of clear mind to oppose these mad dreams of conquest! The lies that have and are being told about Russia and China (only occasionally rooted in some actual injustice) are being churned out daily by the CIA and Pentagon propaganda machine. Their purpose is to rally the population for war. Soon the hammer will drop harder on the US and West Europe/Australian population, as the persecution of Julian Assange suggests, as the ruling elite tighten up the repression needed to pull off their genocidal war.
It’s a great article on a great site. I would suggest you all visit it when you get a chance and go through the comments there. They have a higher-order of commenter that frequents the site.
The “fire hose” of disinformation has been drenching everyone with vile hatred towards of China. Now the spigot has been turned off, and the alert sheeple are wondering what is going on. Soon a new flood will begin. It will be against Russia. It will start slowly and after two years it will reach the same kind of crescendo that the Chinese experienced.
I anticipate a balkanized American civil war in the interim period, with scant reporting. Followed by American attempts to start a war for “freedomTM“, “democracyTM“, and all that similar nonsense. The children of the American serf/slave sheeple will march off with gusto to be slaughtered in mass.
And with all of Asia retaliating.
In nuclear fashion.
And I pretty much expect it to be along the lines of what John Titor predicted.
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Call it a “dump” if you like…
Wikileaks just dumped all of their files online. Everything from Hillary Clinton’s emails, McCain’s being guilty, Vegas shooting done by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs HIV letter, PedoPodesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Bilderberg, CIA agents arrested for rape, WHO pandemic. Happy Digging!
No doubt about it: 2020—a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom—was the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for freedom.
Government corruption, tyranny, and abuse coupled with a Big Brother-knows-best mindset and the COVID-19 pandemic propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which nationwide lockdowns, egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians were accepted as the norm.
Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades and in the past year, in particular.
The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers that have been amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.
Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces continued to be a menace to the citizenry and the rule of law. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies acquired even more weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. Police officers were also given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons and subject them to forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.
The courts failed to uphold justice. With every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts more concerned with protecting government agents than upholding the rights of “we the people.” This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. A review of critical court rulings over the past two decades, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
COVID-19 allowed the Emergency State to expand its powers. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) could expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. While COVID-19 took a significant toll on the nation emotionally, physically, and economically, it also allowed the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, with talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, forced vaccinations, snitch tip lines and onerous lockdowns.
The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans have become sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
America became a red flag nation. Red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws generally push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States. Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
The cost of policing the globe drove the nation deeper into debt.America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense. The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Yet America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world. This is how a military empire occupies the globe. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is falling apart.
Free speech was dealt one knock-out punch after another.Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, shadow banning on the Internet, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good. On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow. The reasons for such censorship varied widely from political correctness, so-called safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of free speech.
The Deep State took over. The American system of representative government has been overthrown by the Deep State—a.k.a. the police state a.k.a. the military/corporate industrial complex—a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad. The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished. In its place is a shadow government, a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House. Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. This shadow government, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.
The takeaway: Everything the founders of this country feared has come to dominate in modern America. “We the people” have been saddled with a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
So how do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs, and then locked down and stripped of any semblance of personal freedom?
No matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.
For that matter, protests and populist movements also haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.
So how do you not only push back against the government’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means?
You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics.
Take your cue from the Tenth Amendment and nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government.
What really needs to happen
The folk running the government are all really blatant with their criminal actions. They perform the crimes and do it openly and brazenly, while the rest of us do hard time for the slightest offense. This needs to end.
A Saudi execution.
Other opinions
Most websites that have the term “opin” in the title, like “Opinion watcher”, and “Opinion tracker”, and Opinseach says it NOT TRUE, or overly hyped and questionable …
Pah! At most, there will be some token legislation that will be directed at innocent civilians, and none of the oligarchy or upper class will be affected.
America today. You are fucked.
And the sheeple yawn.
The signs are all there.
An out of control oligarchy class, a nation of mind-numbed serf/slave sheeple, high technology weapons and 70 years without fighting a peer-capable nation. What the fuck do you think is gonna happen?
I’m just an old tired, pissed off grouch. So hear me out…
Random thoughts of a pissed-off citizen
Let me start with this…
America today.
.
Today, Americas are the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. And the frog is truly cooked.
But that really doesn’t do America justice. I think the Norma Desmond does…
America today.
.
America is truly at that uncomfortable stage when [1] it’s past the time when any realistic solutions to the problems of America can be remedied, and [2] too early to shoot and hang the bastards.
Come on!
Just look at your life now, compared to what it was just a few years ago. It is different because your matured and got older? Or is it because of society? Or is it because of the government making laws, and rules, one after another like a “tommygun”…?
Remember when?
Why is this important?
Because there just isn’t any “free press” left in America.
There simply isn’t anyone doing anything to police the crooks that run the nation.
Zilch.
And as a result the nation is wholly out of control, and careening wildly down the tracks.
The “news” is a for-profit mechanism. It is owned by the government. Alternatives to the “news” are also bought out and owned by the government. Trying to find “news” on the internet is like trying to go to the desert to find a pool to swim in. You might be lucky, but most of the time you will not.
You tell ’em George.
So.
So what is going to happen? Do you seriously think that this Wikileak is going to make a difference?
Metallicman Comments
It’s like the scene from the movie “Aliens”, when they discover this little girl named Newt. And they tell her not to worry. The Imperial Space marines are there to protect her and save the say. And she looks up at Ripley and replies “it won’t make any difference”.
Ripley: These people are here to protect you. They're soldiers.
Newt: It won't make any difference.
Newt.
.
I think that the scene is very apt.
Personally, my take on this is that it’s all too late, and at this stage in the game, it’s all just theater. It’s just spin and “bread and circuses” for the sheeple. So what if the rich and famous get caught with “their hand in the cookie jar“, or their “dirty linen is aired“, or that the “skeletons in the closet” are brought out into the open. Ain’t nothing gonna happen.
So what?
So what if everyone sees all the dirty laundry of the people who run the government. Nothing is going to happen to them.
There won’t be any big uprisings. There won’t be any outcries or public shows of remorse or hearings. There won’t even be any “blue panel” investigative committees. Nothing is going to happen. And nothing is going to change. The vector; the trajectory that the USA is on right now is not going to slow down, alter course or change direction. No brakes will be applied.
The USA is fucked.
The USA today is like an old commode that is just full of shit.
It is a thick stew of brown shit that should have been flushed away centuries ago, and not, the weight of that shit is starting to go down the pipe. You know, you can only hold just so much water before the commode just automatically flushes.
America today.
.
And it’s starting to move. With a shudder…
But it’s gonna be a long drawn out flush.
Maybe, and probably, take years….
And then the fat pig-like crapper is going to sit on it one last time, and lay a big fat load directed at some external villain or threat, and the entire commode is going to crack and explode.
Yah. That’s what’s going to happen.
There are no citizen-soldiers or patriots in the USA any longer. Just sheeple, and pretend wanna-be Rambos.
Soon. Very soon.
.
How do we know?
Just look at what Americans have become. Google “People of walmart“.
Perhaps a renaming is in order…
Maybe the United States should be renamed. I suggest “commode” might be the most appropriate. Because that is what it resembles today. One giant, filthy, full of shit, old, broken down commode.
People! Do you actually believe that this kind of news represents a healthy nation? Do you believe that the news in the rest of the world looks like this, but only in a different language? No.
No.
Hell… NO!
People, the oligarchy that runs the USA are all playing you for fools. And you are all standing around and taking it.
Grumblings continue but nothing ever happens.
The grumblings have been going on for a long, long time. It certainly pre-dates Metallicman, and everything it looked like people were going to rise up and overthrow the bastards, suddenly a war would crop up.
…
The deep-state murdered John F. Kennedy…
People started to grumble and get concerned, and stockpiles of weapons were purchased…
…and the Vietnam war happened.
You know.
For “democracy”.
…
When Bill Clinton started to break every law in the book and get away with it, numerous prepping sites discussed using code on beepers to communicate their plans. In those days it was believed that the people would rise up against a tyrannical government.
In fact, Bill Clinton clamped down on many freedoms and liberties that the conservatives held dearly. The ban on “assault guns” really upset many conservatives. So when Bush came to office…
… a war in the Middle East against Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc…
…
Wars are the big distraction that the oligarchy class uses to control the mob. And as time moves on, and their crimes get larger, more “in your face”, more obvious and outrageous, then the larger the war of distraction must be…
…before the grumblings become overt and dangerous.
Oh such short memories
There was a time when “preppers” readied for the “big uprising” by contemplating communicating using pagers to send messages back and forth. Of course nothing came of this, but the point is, that maybe it should have.
…
.
When you look at the bigger picture, one that spans decades, you can see that the parallels between slave and owner, between serf and overseer, and between king and subjects all exist in America today.
Of course nothing ever came of this potential revolt, but the disgust and upset runs long and deep in certain elements of American social strata. I’ve lived long enough to know that if you let the roast in the oven too long that it gets burnt to a crisp and becomes uneatable.
Let’s see just what the flash point will be.
Right now it looks like America has the flash point of water instead of kerosene.
But, you know, most Americans are too dumbed down to know or care what lies ahead…
Yah! If you think it is bad now, just keep in mind that this is just the beginning.
There is no telling what evil plans the oligarchy in Washington has planned for their slave / serf minions.
So many times, when I devote posts like this, I feel that my fellow Americans believe that I really should be talking in a language that they can understand. You know, like Dr. Lexus here…
Dr. Lexus.
The USA cannot continue like this for much longer.
Not for much longer. No it cannot.
It has gotten this far by being the sole world reserve currency, and as such, it has been printing money like crazy. Just look at the American debt today.
Meanwhile the rest of the world sees this debt with a look of horror and are taking steps to avoid the trap of the looming USD collapse…
Do you actually believe that you are insulated and won’t feel the effects of this?
Ah. Lisa.
She makes some good points.
Here’s another one of hers…
She’s good, but think about this all.
The whole, entire picture.
There is a reason why that big invasion fleet that Trump sent to China in the Summer of 2020 steamed home. And no, it wasn’t because of it completed it’s mission of intimidation” either. You have three enormous, expensive carriers with nuclear power supplies and suddenly all the electronics goes hay-wire and the nuclear systems start to SCRAM. And they just cannot. Three expensive carriers and the nuclear piles start to go into meltdown.
Not one shot being fired.
All three carriers were heading towards a Chernobyl moment.
CHINA. DOES. NOT. PLAY.
Well. Do you think that the Oligarchy learned anything…?
Not likely.
Soon it will be Russia! Russia! Russia!. .
My bet is that it’s going to get really ugly at about that time.
An observant reader…
The following is from an observant reader…
I just looked in to some of the wiki leaks on MM website. At first, I was looking as fast as I could thinking the pages would be erased. Then, it got me wondering.... if they ARE leaking top secret hush hush info, surely the US would know and act accordingly.
The more I look at them I see something off. They are all archived on the same date. The year they are archived sticks out only because it’s the year I was born, 1984. My first thought was, maybe this is how delicate info is stores and coded. But, why 1984? Then it hit me.... George Orwell’s 1984. Is this Just another political agenda-ed pawn movement?
Trump is exclaiming this was apart of his plan to expose our corrupt government. He wanted to make sure it was done while he’s still in office. If this was his shadiwork, at this point idk if he did it for the American people or he’s salty he lost. (Funny but true, Geminis are sore losers)
Observation and discernment are the keys to understanding MM. Not everything is permitted to be said, and not everything is understood.
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Spoiler alert; America is the most pathetic of the bunch. But you all need not worry. Businessmen in Washington DC can now deduct their three-martini lunches from federal taxes. Dictators in Africa get billions of dollars, and there are decreased taxes for the super-wealthy. Aren’t you so very proud to be an American?
While the world is reeling from the pandemic, the oligarchy toiling away in Washington DC have been using this pandemic to push for structural changes to the tax code. Many of the changes are stealth changes. Changes that have been been implemented silently over the last four decades or so. All of which is tax the poorer, working level citizenry, while providing benefits and tax relief to the wealthier people.
Greater taxes on the vast bulk of citizenry.
Less taxes on the higher social-economic citizens.
This is pretty well understood, if not at all reported.
And now, in the midst of a serious emergency; a global pandemic that America has completely bungled (politely stated, America has truly FUCKED UP on this issue), the oligarchy have been focused on making taxpayers subsidize lavish lunches for wealthy executives.
And their work has paid off in the latest Covid relief deal. Buried in the details of this modest aid plan is a provision to give executives unlimited tax deductions for their business meals for two years.
No. Not enough money to pay rent. (The last time my rent was under $600 was in the 1980’s.)
No. There isn’t any free treatments or hospital services if you get the coronavirus illness, like the FUCKING REST OF THE WORLD. You have to pay for the medical service out of your own pocket.
But this idea of giving extra benefits is pretty much the “old normal”. A normal that pre-dated the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
That’s how it worked back in the 1970s, when Presidential candidate George McGovern had this to say about it: “There’s something fundamentally wrong with the tax system,” he said, “when it allows a corporate executive to deduct his $20 martini lunch while a workingman cannot deduct the price of his bologna sandwich.”
"There’s something fundamentally wrong with the tax system when it allows a corporate executive to deduct his $20 martini lunch while a workingman cannot deduct the price of his bologna sandwich."
-George Mcgovern
President Ronald Reagan, of all people, actually agreed with McGovern. His 1986 tax-code overhaul, best remembered today for lowering overall rates, reduced the deductibility of business meals from 100 to 80 percent. In 1993, the Clinton administration pushed that deductibility rate down to 50 percent, where it has stayed ever since.
Now corporate lobbyists have managed to restore that 1970s-era perk – claiming, of course, that bigger tax write-offs for business meals would help struggling restaurants and the people they employ. It’s a real stretch. But those in Washington DC live in their own bubble of reality.
This argument that giving deductions to the activities of the upper-class would “trickle down” to the working-level folk has been proven to be a fallacy. Yet, it was used in the opposition to the Clinton-era tax reform. It was flawed then and it’s even more preposterous now.
Hey! Do you want to help the people working in the restaurants? Really? Then how about stop taxing tips.
Duh!
Which solution would best serve waiters and waitresses?
[1] Allowing the patrons to have tax deductions for their business lunches and alcoholic beverages.
[2] Stop taxing the tips that the waiters and waitresses get.
Today, when the real problem is a public health crisis that’s keeping people at home. The justification that lowering taxes on business meals will do anything to help struggling restaurant owners and employees is just bullshit.
This is not a true relief package. Relief would mirror the economic response of other western industrialized nations, where working people either receive regular monthly payments or are guaranteed up to 80% of their pre-Covid income.
A real relief bill would have canceled mortgage and rental debt.
Real relief would have included the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid to cover all medical debt resulting from the crisis.
Congress knows that the bill won’t solve the problems of a household facing upwards of $6,000 in unpaid rent.
They just hope it’s enough to distract from the utter lack of care and compassion that they have shown to people.
In this time of crisis, any support for corporations should encourage executives to treat their workers well, trim their own fat paychecks, and pay for their own lunches.
It’s never going to happen though. No one ever listens to me.
Why are we not surprised that the peons will get a one time check for $600, but a billionaire CEO will get to write off his $600 “business lunch” each and every day, all year long. You know, I can’t help but figure that this was thrown in for one reason, and one reason only. A giant middle finger to the working class. A quick brutal reminder that they indeed own the political class, and they are in charge.
That the stratification of America into a caste system, along the lines of India, is in process and there is nothing that Americans can do about it.
How do we know?
That’s a pretty damning statement. How do we know that is this the case?
Well, if you compare how citizens are treated around the world by their governments during this global pandemic, you can see this all quite clearly.
In nations that have governments that care for their citizens and take on the role of protectors and actuators, you can see that there are very large outlays given to the citizenry. But in nations that have either a very repressive government, or that possess one that is socially stratified (either officially or unofficially) they pretty much resemble America.
A comparison between different coronavirus stimulus packages.
.
The U.S. has passed a third stimulus bill Monday night and an international comparison shows that it has been high time. According to an analysis by think tank Bruegel, the U.S. is the country currently offering a much lower level of coronavirus financial aid and stimulus than other developed nations. The bill's $900 billion in aid will up the level of stimulus from previously 14 percent (of 2019 GDP) to approximately 18 percent.
While that will still leave the U.S. at the lower end of the comparison, the country's share of immediate fiscal impulse is higher than elsewhere. Since cash checks for citizens are once again included in the new bill, the high level of immediate spending will likely remain the same after the new bill is entered into the Bruegel calculation, which has last been update on Nov 24, 2020.
April's checks for $1,200 to all Americans in a certain income bracket came to US$600 billion, the biggest single item in the entire stimulus package, which consisted of almost $2 trillion in direct stimulus and $560 billion each in deferrals (of payroll tax and student loans) and in liquidity/guarantee measures.
All the details
Yeah. All the details are available on the internet. Though you would be hard-pressed to find them in any American “news”. If you want to check out the details, you can find a pretty comprehensive listing at the (American based) Tax Foundation.
For the most part, except for the United States and India, most (but not all) nations follow the following guidelines…
Tax relief should be broad-based.
Tax relief should be in keeping with good long-term policy.
Using refundable tax credits designed for future credits.
Repair distortive tax policies that could impede recovery efforts.
Compared to America, most other nations are very generous. Even if they are tiny, or are short in resources.
Consider Australia as an example…
Australia Coronavirus Tax Relief
Australia has announced federal relief proposals that total around $320 billion (AUD). State governments have also announced relief packages and in some cases deferrals of payroll tax payments (Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia).
The federal relief package includes direct payments to citizens. For job seekers impacted by the downturn, there will be payments of $550 every two weeks in addition to current income support payments. The government expects these payments to cost $14.1 billion. There is also a broad-based, $750 one-time payment to eligible recipients—this is expected to cost $4 billion. Individuals will also be able to temporarily access up to $10,000 from certain retirement accounts.
Through a new wage-subsidy scheme, employers will be able to receive a $1,500 payment per retained worker every two weeks. Businesses qualify for the subsidy if their revenues have fallen by 30 percent (50 percent for businesses with revenues greater than $1 billion) in the relevant time period relative to a year earlier. The subsidy will be in place for six months.
The aid packages provide relief to businesses through subsidized loans and central bank lending, and temporary relief from insolvency laws, immediate expensing (instant asset write-off), and accelerated depreciation.
Immediate expensing will now be available for assets costing less than $150,000 on a per-asset class basis. Eligibility is expanded to include businesses with annual revenues of less than $500 million (the current cap is $50 million). This measure applies until the end of June.
Accelerated depreciation will be provided temporarily for businesses with less than $500 million in revenues. In addition to current depreciation deductions, the policy allows an additional 50 percent deduction but only applies to assets purchased after March 12, 2020 and put into service by June 30, 2021.
Businesses subject to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) can apply for deferred payments if they are facing cash-flow challenges. Also, businesses that receive credits or refunds under the GST can switch from quarterly to monthly filings to speed up their refunds. Importers may also apply for the deferred GST scheme.
Two states—South Australia and Western Australia—announced land tax relief for landlords who have provided rent relief to tenants in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Australia makes America look really, really bad.
It really does.
But you know what? It’s not just Australia. It’s just about every nation on the planet. And while there are certain differences between each and every plan, most nations are putting relief efforts for the day-to-day working-citizens of their nations FIRST, with consideration for the wealthy LAST, if at all. Not so in the United States.
A comparison between different coronavirus stimulus packages.
.
For I have been saying that the American “benefit package” is along the lines of what India has. It is a stratified system of benefits where the wealthiest get the most support, and the rest of the citizenry get token relief.
Wealthy get the greatest benefit from the “Coronavirus relief legislation”.
Average people get little relief, or token benefits.
So…
You don’t believe my narrative, eh? That this is a fundamental principle of stratified communities. Well…
Let’s look at India…
India Coronavirus Tax Relief
India has provided a fiscal support package of 150 billion rupees focused on the health system’s response to the outbreak. State-level fiscal support has also been announced. Tax filing has been postponed from March 31 to June 30 for income tax returns and goods and services tax returns. There is also a reduced interest rate for tax payments made by June 30, and late filing penalties are waived. Goods and services tax (GST) deadlines for March, April, and May are extended to the end of June.
India is also working on a relief package for the airline industry including deferring aviation fuel tax. Refunds for Goods and Services Tax and customs duties will be accelerated. Companies’ income tax refunds up to INR 500,000 will be accelerated. Deadline extended for FATCA and CRS returns from May 31 to June 30. The deadline for March’s provident fund contributions has been extended from April 16 to May 15.
But what does this matter?
You know, you all can slice and dice the data any which way that you want. You can make a pile of dog shit smell like roses if you want, and I am sure that there are many people in the MM audience that might think that I am too “salty” on this matter. That “America is number one and the best”, and yada, yada, yada…
My argument is rather simple.
Nothing shows how absolutely stratified the United States has become, than the comparisons in Coronavirus relief measures globally.
The only nations that share in the same type of American-style relief programs are those representative of severe social stratification. Like India.
And if you don’t want to believe it, that’s just fine.
Americans know this
You might not want to believe this, but most Americans (today) realize that the nation is a private club and they ain’t in it. There are two sets of laws, two sets, of rules, two sets of living areas, and two sets of people.
It’s just that most do not want to face the ugly truth.
So they fight back. You know, like sheep baa-ing in their pen, or monkeys howling in their cages. Modern Americans protest using meme’s. Most are far too timid to do anything more aggressive than that.
American protest memes
Here’s some “protest” meme’s regarding the grandiose coronavirus relief plan…
Seems strange – right?
Yes. Non-Americans won’t really understand the meme’s. So let me put this in perspective…
Those that do not rent, have a mortgage that has typically much larger monthly payments.
Combined means that the data is damning.
Why?
Because Congress has this information, and already knows this.
Knows what?
This…
Typical monthly rent for Americans all over the United States.
.
Which pretty much means that, for a nation where…
Most citizens live paycheck to paycheck.
Most citizens have no savings.
Will result in most citizens at a point of eviction from their homes, with little compensation, no savings, no cushion, and ZERO support from the American government.
This is setting up a “perfect storm”.
A perfect storm
It appears that the long-awaited “fork in the road” has arrived. Americans can either accept the role as destitute indentured-serfs or they can revolt against an uncaring, inefficient, and criminal government.
You have [1] a “clueless”, psychopathic American leadership, supported by [2] selfish minions that have [3] become blatant in their treatment of the 99% of the rest of America. You have [4] an oligarchy that is trying to create strife and discord for the sole purpose in obtaining personal advantage. [5] You have a completely disillusioned serf-citizenry that is [6] waking up to their reality, while [7] the government controls all the media that is fed to them, and [8] a government desirous of sparking a violent “hot” war in a “distant land” to unify the [9] balkanized Americans for a common goal.
And no one wants to do the “hard stuff”.
“Hard stuff” ?
Yeah. The “hard stuff” as described in this lengthy article (shown below) and pointed out at the end…
Across the political spectrum, there is widespread agreement that America must get serious about the threat posed by China. As the Trump administration comes to a close, the State Department has just released a document called ‘The Elements of the China Challenge’. A distillation of conventional wisdom among national security experts and government officials, it argues that the U.S. needs a concerted effort to push back against Beijing. On its first page, the document tells us that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition.” If there was a major intellectual thread running through Trump’s foreign policy, or at least that of the people he appointed, it was that confronting China was the national security issue of our time. America during the Trump era was single-minded in its focus on turning up the pressure on Beijing, including unprecedented support for Taiwan, sending ships more often through the South China Sea, and attempting to stop the spread of the telecom giant Huawei.
The idea of the China threat will not end with the Trump administration. Michèle Flournoy, once thought to be the frontrunner to become Biden’s Secretary of Defense, argued in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. has not been steadfast enough in its military commitments in East Asia. Sometimes, great power competition is presented as an imperative of history; in the formulation of Graham Allison, a former Pentagon official and the current professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the two powers are involved in a “Thucydides Trap.” Looking at the last 500 years of world history, Allison believes that when the ambitions of a rising power conflict with those of an established power, war becomes likely.
But what are we afraid of China actually doing? Reading foreign policy analysis can often be frustrating to those who believe arguments should proceed in a straight line, with clearly defined terms, and logical connections between ends being sought and the means being recommended. Once can read op-eds and government reports on “great power competition” or the “China challenge” and never understand clearly what the U.S. and China are actually competing for. ‘The Elements of the China Challenge’ from the State Department adopts a strategy of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, accusing China of everything from being too successful in trade, to trying to dominate the world, and being racist against African migrants.
This kind of ambiguity about what a conflict is actually about has not existed throughout most of history. The two world wars nominally centered around rivalries between Germany and its neighbors over specific territories one could locate on a map, such as Alsace-Lorraine. The Cold War was a struggle between the capitalist and communist systems. But why, exactly, are the U.S. and China rivals? Beneath the comparisons to any number of classical or modern conflicts, the reality is very different. China is not a threat in the way traditionally understood. There is nothing vital to American security or prosperity that China threatens. While the U.S. will be less powerful in the coming decades in relative global terms, that is inevitable with the rise of the developing world more generally, a trend Washington has encouraged.
China’s true menace is neither military nor geopolitical, but rather ideological. Its continuing success, even if it in no way harms the prosperity or security of most Americans, poses a major threat to the American political establishment, how it justifies its own power, and its understanding of the U.S. role in the world.
What is the China Threat?
In the last three decades, China has experienced a rate of economic growth unprecedented in modern history. Between 1990 and 2019, GDP per capita increased 32 times. In terms of total GDP, China may become wealthier than the U.S. in the next two decades—and by some measures, already is. For the sake of comparison, in 1980 the Soviet Union had a GDP that was about 40% that of the U.S., with the trendlines actually favoring the West. Recently, when the economist Branko Milanovic suggested that the Nobel Prize in his field should go to scholars who study the most important questions out there, he pointed to Chinese growth as an example, calling it “40 years of the most extraordinary increase in income for the largest number of people ever.”
This would be frightening if the U.S. and China coveted territory from one another. Azerbaijan’s recent military victory over Armenia in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh can be attributed to the former growing economically, and therefore militarily, stronger than the latter over the last two decades. Yet the two modern superpowers are on opposite sides of the world and have no similar dispute between them. It is true that the U.S. seeks to preserve the territorial integrity of allies and partners, such as Taiwan and Japan, that may be threatened by Beijing. The incoming Biden administration will likely have a policy of willingness to defend the Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited five rocks and three reefs that the U.S. considers part of Japan. But why America should risk nuclear war over this issue is rarely explained. To the extent such objections are addressed, they are buried under appeals to morality that forgo any kind of cost-benefit analysis, and buzzwords such as preserving an undefined sense of American credibility or the broad goal of reinforcing deterrence.
Another idea, popular among pundits and the general public, is that Chinese growth is necessarily bad for the U.S. But in reality, Chinese growth has so far directly benefited U.S. consumers: it is undisputed among economists that trade with China made America better off by lowering the price of goods. Despite the temptation to political amnesia, the fact is that U.S. policy privileged these economic gains for many years, and its relationship with China was explicitly informed by these political decisions.
While this has undermined U.S. economic capacity in important ways, the cause wasn’t cheating, trickery, or even growth on the part of China. Instead, the cause was the success of American policy priorities. If there is a problem, it is most immediately that those priorities were misguided. The U.S. has the right to conduct trade on its own terms. It can choose what kind of strategy it wants in trade negotiations, and is free to deal with the downsides of neglecting domestic industry and increased competition for jobs through whatever means it considers appropriate. To see China as a civilizational enemy over such issues, however, is bizarre.
The same is true regarding IP theft. While the practice has been estimated to cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars a year, it is nonetheless normal for developing economies, with South Korea and Taiwan having had similarly bad records as their economies began to grow. No other state was considered a fundamental threat to the U.S. over the issue, with a mix of external pressure and internal incentives leading them to ultimately develop more rigorous patent laws and enforcement. Many corporations, the parties most directly affected, treat the problem as the price of doing business.
Perhaps, then, the threat is that China seeks to remake the world in its own image? This is a popular trope among the national security establishment. H.R. McMaster, perhaps the quintessential representative of this class, says China is “leading the development of new rules and a new international order that would make the world less free and less safe.” When one scratches the surface of these arguments, it is clear that most of the indictment against China involves things that every country does, but only looks frightening if you completely ignore American behavior. Chinese loans to poor countries are said to trap them in debt, but the evidence doesn’t bear this out. The same criticisms don’t often extend to the sorts of loan programs offered by the International Monetary Fund, even though these have often been as controversial as, and much more comprehensive than, any Chinese financial aid.
But despite the growth of this position among the American establishment, still others accuse it of strategically respecting the sovereignty of other states. In March, Daniel Tobin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies testified to Congress that China continues to promote the normative principles of “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.” Ted Piccione of the Brookings Institution writes of China under Xi putting forth “orthodox interpretations of national sovereignty and noninterference in internal affairs…”
While China is not blameless, one could reasonably make the argument that, from an international perspective, it has had easily the most peaceful rise to great power status of any nation of the last several hundred years. While China has carried out the re-annexation of Tibet, blockaded Taiwan diplomatically, and launched internal colonization of territories like Xinjiang, such actions always occur under the ideologically important claim that they are internal to China. The U.S., conversely, undertook external colonial ventures during its rise and still regularly sanctions unquestionably sovereign nations. China’s territorial claims are naturally controversial internationally, but are modest compared to those sought by other powers—not least the U.S. itself, which early in its history declared the entire Western Hemisphere as off limits to the nations of Europe. Its interventionist policies since then have led to the overthrow of governments, the killing of leaders, and the economic sanctioning of entire nations.
Perhaps, as the McMasters of the world claim, this is all because Beijing is biding its time in hopes of world domination. Alternatively, China may be an inwardly focused civilization that, while it may have disputes with its neighbors, is not on a mission to fundamentally remake the world. While it would naturally prefer rules that favor it and resists any principles that would legitimize regime change supported from abroad, Beijing does not seek to fundamentally replace the U.N. or rewrite international law. Its strategy has mostly sought stability and growth within the rules of the system developed by Western democracies in the aftermath of the Second World War. While its current position of strength is recent, it has not yet broken from this precedent.
This interpretation is most consistent with past behavior and, given the costs of American militarism abroad, with common sense about how a rational actor should be expected to act. It is also consistent with the arguments of the most honest kind of “China hawk,” who argues that the real problem with Beijing is not that it wants to dominate the world, but that it might stop the U.S. from doing so in a unipolar manner.
The Threat to the National Security Elite
Given the incoherence of these arguments, one must look below the surface to see what motivates political hysteria towards China. To understand the motivations of analysts, think tank fellows, and generals, one must comprehend how they see themselves and the American role in the world. For decades, the ideology of the American government in its dealings abroad has been based on the necessity of creating a liberal democratic world—a necessity which, as the Soviet model proved an ineffective threat and the Cold War ultimately ended, became seen as ever more natural. The assumptions supporting this view have, in various ways, driven American leaders since the post-WWII era.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall increased this confidence. While the possibility of nuclear war had to be managed, and it was assumed that communists might hold on to their captive populations indefinitely, the spread had been contained. During the entire Cold War, the trend was towards more democratic governance and the opening of markets.
The 1990s saw the U.S. engage in what can be described as mop-up operations against the few holdouts against the trend towards democratic capitalism like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Academics even before Francis Fukuyama saw democratization as a natural consequence of people demanding more of a voice in their governments, as incomes rose, and as they became more educated. Countries like Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan seemed to validate this view.
None of this meant that the U.S. was to stand back and let history unfold. An expansive military presence abroad was necessary for all these projects, and even after the Cold War to address WMD proliferation and protect civilians abroad from human rights violations, and to stop Islamic terrorism after 9/11. The assumption was that, while the move towards democratic capitalism was natural and maybe even inevitable, it could be delayed by communists, terrorists, or Baathists if the U.S. did not lead.
The result was a paradox. The greater the inevitability of this grand historical arc, the more urgently it had to be backed up by force, and the more unreasonable and deviant all resistance seemed. Even the language of a “clash of civilizations” as the War on Terror commenced did not radically depart from the larger story. This justified a large military establishment with costs that dwarfed those of every other potential rival combined. American global leadership was pushing on an open door.
China Versus Western Political Science
China is something completely new. The Soviet Union had military power and appealed to Western intellectuals, but was clearly an economic basket case that could not deliver on its promise of rising standards of living. Islamic terrorists could kill Westerners and destabilize countries, but had little overall effect on American security, and did not threaten either U.S. hegemony or its justifications. Modern day Russia can seek to have an influence on our culture and politics, but nobody looks to it as a model, and it nominally accepts the legitimacy of competitive elections.
China, however, rejects liberal democracy—the idea that leaders should be chosen on a one-person, one-vote basis—even as an ideal or ultimate destination. As Daniel Bell explains in The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Chinese leaders have implemented a system in which government officials are selected and promoted based on examinations, performance reviews, and the meeting of objective criteria at lower levels. Its political qualification is not electoral support, but party membership and loyalty. This system is not justified on the grounds simply that the Chinese people or their institutions are “not ready for democracy,” a line sometimes taken even by Middle Eastern dictators like Bashar al-Assad. Critiques of democracy certainly are not foreign to the West; Plato is possibly the most famous anti-democratic thinker in history, and today modern skeptics use the language of economics when they talk about concepts like the influence of interest groups and the “rational irrationality” of voters. Yet opposition to the principle of democracy as such is unthinkable for an American leader, and even for most prominent intellectuals.
What went wrong with political science models that generalized from a moderately large number of cases in which economic growth led to democratization? To see how they erred, one could imagine a social scientist at the end of the first millennium arguing that the whole globe would become Christian because princes across Europe had all adopted that religion. If statistical models existed then, one could have done a regression and “proved” this hypothesis. The most common statistical models used today rely on the assumed independence of observations. The logic of regression analysis and hypothesis testing as applied to political development says that if we see the same patterns across time and space, then we may be able to infer a causal chain of events.
But the spread of economic and social systems operates in the realm of path dependence and network dynamics. Under this view, the move towards democratization after the Second World War depended on the power and missionary zeal of the U.S. more than the laws of history. If American power declines, its focus on world affairs wanes, or democracy loses its luster due its perceived shortcomings, the connection between economic growth and democratization can break down.
China is not simply passing the U.S. in overall GDP. Other measures one might use to measure the health of society also indicate that leaders in Beijing have been doing a better job than those in Washington in recent years. Are dictatorships more conflict prone at home? China’s murder rate is a fraction of that of the U.S., and the country has practically none of the rioting and political violence Americans have gotten used to. Are dictatorships more likely to menace countries abroad? China has not been to war since 1979, while the U.S. has been at war almost every year since that date. Are dictatorships less innovative? In 2020, China passed the U.S. in publications in the natural sciences, and its children score higher than American students on IQ tests and international standardized exams. While in 2008, the U.S. recorded over 16 times as many international patents as China, already by 2018 the gap had shrunk to 2.4 times as many, with trend lines indicating that China could surpass the U.S. before long.
With the American post-war liberal consensus having staked much of its legitimacy on providing better results, China’s development is an ideological threat regardless of how benevolent its rulers might theoretically be. American elites can tolerate a more successful system on a smaller scale. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and long-time leader of Singapore, was explicitly anti-democratic, and horrified American elites with stances like his belief in eugenics. Yet his nation’s population has never even approached that of the largest American cities, and Lee was happy to geopolitically align his country with the U.S.
China’s ideology, and the success it is achieving, is ultimately threatening because of its size. Of course, as a country moves from Third World status to the most powerful nation in the world, it should be expected to become more geopolitically confident. Recently, China has begun asserting its will in a century-old border dispute with Bhutan, a country of 800,000 people, after 24 rounds of previous talks. Such results in this dispute and others like it are inevitable.
So, what question should American leaders be asking? It is not whether China will become more powerful, which it certainly will, or whether it will democratize, which is out of American hands and not relevant to its security anyway. Rather, it’s whether China has ambitions beyond what the U.S. can live with. All else equal, a few rocks in the South China Sea are not worth the possibility of war, or even worth forgoing the benefits of trade and potential collaboration on issues of global importance like climate change and containing pandemics.
In that case, what about Chinese financing? What about IP theft? What about Taiwan? Rather than invoking concerns about ethereal leadership or precedent, it would behoove American leaders well to explicitly set out their red lines, and tie their arguments for action to why crossing them threatens America’s fundamental interests. This also requires honesty about why certain actions are provoking concern. If the real worry is ideological, it should not be cloaked in rumors about predatory debt.
The answer to the China question would therefore be easier if American leaders were simply looking after the economic or security interests of the nation, or even the concrete concerns of a formalized alliance. Unfortunately, they also have financial, bureaucratic, and ideological reasons for being opposed to China’s rise. If universal democratization is not the ultimate endpoint of history—or even an imperative for development, peace, and prosperity—how can the American role in the world be justified? What will it say about the American system if the U.S. is no longer the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, having been surpassed by a country that became the dominant power in East Asia without even paying lip service to democratic ideals?
Ultimately, Americans themselves might begin asking themselves difficult questions about how well they have been served by their own system, including the sacrifices in blood and treasure they are regularly asked to make abroad.
How Will the U.S. Manage Its Decline?
The rise of China is based on long-term economic trends. Washington can no more stop or contain it than European powers in the mid-twentieth century could hope to hold on to their colonies in the midst of population growth in Asia and Africa, the rise of mass media, and their national declines relative to the U.S. and the Soviet Union. American leaders debate questions such as whether to reduce trade with China, call Beijing out on human rights violations, ban apps like TikTok, or undertake more naval missions through the South China Sea. Even if the hawks get their way on each of these issues—like they did under Trump and are unlikely to under Biden—none of these policies are going to significantly impede the rise of China.
At present, Beijing has demonstrated no desire for territory far from its borders; nor does it seem to want veto power over what governments do in distant lands, as the U.S. has exercised over large swaths of the world. Chinese leaders have always reasonably acted as if such entanglements are not worth the cost. While we cannot predict what future opportunists may attempt, it would be a mistake to craft our approach to the Chinese relationship as if this was not the case.
Understanding this, perhaps the most important question becomes the extent to which the U.S. is to play a game of chicken in the South China Sea. This is the real Thucydides Trap, though the concept only applies if both sides consider hegemony in an area important. China has built an impressive collection of fortified artificial islands in the South China Sea that will be useful in any dispute in Taiwan. Nonetheless, an all-out invasion is unlikely. Rather, Chinese economic strength should be enough to make most countries of the region take its side in any disputes and isolate Taiwan. At that point, various scenarios are imaginable, from an indefinite continuation of the status quo, to overwhelming economic pressure and attempts to force the island nation into submission, to a blockade or invasion. Only the very last of these risks war with the U.S. Assuming we avoid such a scenario, American leaders can be expected to easily forget about Taiwanese independence and democracy and move on.
Recent events in Hong Kong and Belarus demonstrate the limited nature of U.S. commitments to faraway nations most Americans know little about. Over the last two years, both of these places have seen pro-democracy protests that were given rhetorical support by the United States. In both situations, authoritarian governments were able to reassert authority and hold on to power. In the aftermath, the U.S. puts sanctions on the guilty parties, but the issue recedes from the headlines, and things go back to normal. Just as America lost interest in Tibet, it will eventually lose interest in Hong Kong and the Uighurs.
This quiet decline in the Asia-Pacific influence is the most likely scenario, even if the same military commitments remain. The U.S. can keep troops in Japan and South Korea as long as those two countries agree to host them, especially since China is unlikely to force this issue in the near future. Despite relying on the U.S. for defense, South Korea already aligns with China over the U.S. on a host of important geopolitical issues, from welcoming Huawei as a 5G provider to accepting the view of Hong Kong as an internal manner. Should political winds change direction in Japan, U.S. bases will not do anything to prevent better relations between Tokyo and Beijing. Just last month, China and Japan joined 13 other nations to sign the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement that will expand trade and cooperation throughout the Asia-Pacific. Nothing about the American military presence prevents the region from resisting any attempts to isolate China.
Ultimately, the danger for American elites is not that the U.S. may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is that more Americans might begin to question the logic of U.S. global hegemony. Perhaps not every state is destined to become a liberal democracy, and nations with very different political systems can coexist peacefully, as many countries in East Asia do. Maybe the U.S. will not always be at the frontier of military and economic power, and the country that overtakes it may have completely different attitudes about the nature of the relationship between government and its citizens.
While most Americans will never experience a ride on a Chinese bullet train and remain oblivious in differences in areas like infrastructure quality, major accomplishments in highly visible frontiers like space travel or cancer treatment could drive home the extent to which the U.S. has fallen behind. Under such conditions, the best case scenario for most Americans would be a nightmare for many national security and bureaucratic elites: for the U.S. to give up on policing the world and instead turn inward and focus on finding out where exactly our institutions have gone wrong.
-Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a research fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a PhD in political science from UCLA and JD from the University of Chicago. He tweets @RichardHanania.
Yes.
The article is comparative. And that comparison is damning.
America has long, long past the time needed to restructure it’s failing and corrupt institutions. It has long past the time when the “policing elements” of “democracy” (such as the media) have become corrupted to the point where they are no longer functional. It has long past the time when the American Military Empire needs to be scaled back…
…firstly wind back 20 years to just an oligarchy…
…then wind back 40 years to just a “federal democracy”…
…then wind back 100 years to a “democracy”
…then wind back 100 years again to go back to a republic…
…then on to individual fully autonomous States…
…but you know…
…that isn’t going to happen. At least not peacefully. Abrupt change is required at this late stage “in the game”. The cancer has metastasized. It’s eating the host and it is on life-support.
Someone needs to pull the plug…
…press the reset button…
…perform a CTRL – ALT – DEL…
…and reboot.
You all know this, right? You know that the roller coaster has no brakes, and that it is careening out of control on a shoddy track, rotten by termites, broken in places, and run by drunk madmen.
Keep calm and press ctrl-alt-del.
Conclusion
I would be very surprised if any of this is new to you the reader.
What I am just doing here is something that you will not see in the American news. NO alternative media, mainstream media or anyone else is comparing the American ‘stimulus” packages with the rest of the world. Only here. And the comparisons are damning.
Just horrific.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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because I just don’t care to.
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And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media. I have highlighted certain parts of the videos for your attention and I comment on it. It’s not really a complete investigation into Chinese society, but rather snapshots of what exists today. And if you look carefully you will be far better served to see it for what it is, instead of the heavily promoted narrative that China is bad.
I like to think that these videos are fun. They are not made by the Chinese Government as part of a pro-propaganda campaign as the folk on Alex Jones claim. It’s just average folk posting videos. Much like average folk in America have been using Tiktok. Same thing, more or less.
Please click on the picture to watch the movie. It will open up in a separate tab.
Small Business Opportunities
When I was a young boy in Bridgeport, CT I had a “girlfriend: all of 5 years old. She was much older than the 4.5 years old boy-of-the-world that I was growing up to become. Anyways, in our neighborhood, it tended to be lower middle class and the time frame was the early 1960’s.
Everyone had a side business that they were running out of their basements. Our neighbor had rabbits in cages that they performed experiments upon for the United States government. And there were others who operated small stores out of their living rooms. My “girl friend” had a father that made rock sugar candy and other elements out of big 55 gallon drums in their basement.
We used to sneak down and get a string or two out of the big barrels and chew on them as we went off adventuring as part of our childhood.
You really don’t see that much any more. Few people try to operate their own businesses out of their residences for money. It is too expensive, not just in the regulations and OSHA requirements, but the IRS, the DHS, and just about everyone else will have a say at to what you are doing. And if you break one of the millions of unspecified laws, you can be guaranteed a trip to jail, if not prison.
Americans tend to no longer have self-employed businesses out of their homes any more.
But this is not the case in China.
For the ladies trying to get started in their own clothing line…
.
To the guys who want to make things out of steel, and bars…
Most Westerners will probably relate to this story…
But the Chinese think small and then work their way up. Westerners like to think big and try to sustain it no matter what.
Here’s an interesting story about the “high life” that Westerners have become accustomed to within China, while the rest of the Chinese nation toils on a mere few dollars a day.
From Frans… (and NOTHING having to do with Metallicman)…
This is a story I have to share, it is sitting in my mind for too long.
In this story, I do not mention the real names of the people involved. Instead, I use either initials or an alias. People, familiar with this story will obviously easily recognize who's who. Please don’t share this story with others.
From 2009 to 2012 I worked for a small WOFE, owned by a Canadian businessman; let's call him "Bill G."
We had a manufacturing plant in the Southern suburbs of Shanghai and a luxurious headquarter in Jingan district.
Bill and I were the only foreigners, working in that company, making medical devices for clients in various European countries. We didn't had Chinese or American clients.
Bill had earned some money in Saudi Arabia and moved to China in 2005 to establish the new company.
Bill had the appearance, but not at all the personality of Leonard Cohen. Bill was by all means a special guy. He was irascible and very short-tempered. Several times per week, he was loudly scolding Vivien, his private secretary or other Chinese people of the middle-management: the purchase manager, finance manager, quality manager, production manager and very often the HR manager. (She was loudly crying, each time he scolded her)
I was the Engineering Manager, and to be honest, Bill paid me very well. I was also often acting as the General Manager when Bill "disappeared". That happened quite often and nobody, not even his ex-wife or his son in Canada knew where he was or why he was away.
One day, after I submitted my expense note from a business trip to Hong Kong, he blustered to my office and started an abuse tirade to me. I shouldn't have booked a business class ticket and stayed in 5 star hotels. "do you think you're working for MNC here ?" he shouted. (Yes, I have worked 15 years for MNC before and I was used to business class flight tickets and 5 star hotels). During his tirade, I packed my laptop and other belongings and called a taxi to leave. When he noted that, he asked what I was doing. I explained him that I no longer wanted to work for him. He returned to his office but when the taxi was there, he came to me to excuse him. He promised never to do that again and I stayed.
That was only 3 weeks after I worked for Bill G. We later had many other collisions.
One day, when we were traveling in the company car (both with our private secretary) to potential new suppliers in Ningbo, we got another explosion. He wanted to buy an old fashioned, yet solid, cheap, but highly unsafe cutting press, while I wanted a much more automatic, modern machine with all kinds of safety protection screens and devices. I threatened him, saying that in case he would buy the unsafe machine, I would write an email to him with cc to the local police station, explaining that he, not me, will go to jail in case of a work accident. After another abuse tirade, he agreed to buy the machine I proposed.
He was terribly envious on me because I could speak Chinese with everybody in the company and he, in spite of all his efforts, couldn't. He rented a private teacher to learn Chinese, but he didn't had the perseverance to learn to speak some sentences. Every day, at the back seat of the company car, he used his carton cards with Chinese characters and their meaning. I told him he shouldn't learn hànzì characters but instead learn pinyin and speak Chinese. But he didn't accepted my recommendation because his Chinese private teacher was full of the beauty and cultural significance of hànzì characters.
One day, he said to me (probably out of envy) that I shouldn't "lower myself" by speaking Chinese to the people in the factory ! He also once said to Mr. Zhao, the production manager: "I'm the company president, I expect everybody to speak proper English with me".
From time to time, he blustered to the workshop, climbed on a pedestal (a couple of palettes) and started shouting to the poor assembly workers, almost all very young Chinese girls who came from the countryside to Shanghai and who didn't understand one single word of his tirade in English.
One day, he came to my office and sat down in a corner, silently. When I asked him what was wrong, he explained that he finally realized that there was something wrong with his attitude. He had decided to go to Tibet for 3 weeks and convert to Buddhism there. When he came back, he was indeed much calmer and controlled, but after a while, his tantrums returned, albeit less often. So then he registered for yoga classes. With a private teacher, every evening one hour. It indeed helped a bit.
At the end of 2011, his daughter came over to Shanghai to study Chinese language at Shanghai Normal University. She went back to Canada one year later.
At the Chinese New Year dinner (and the KTV afterwards), Bill didn't knew well how to behave. Sometimes, I or Lina (the HR Manager) had to take the lead. It was an act, not a spontaneous party.
One day, Bill invited a potential new customer from the USA for a factory visit. They came over with 3 people; none of them had ever been to China before. During the dinner in a famous, very Chinese restaurant, one of the three pushed his chair away from the table and refused to touch the food. He was "afraid to be poisoned". Really !
Bill was living in a big luxury apartment in Huangpu district. With an attached small apartment for his Ayi. When I told him that opposite to his compound, there was the biggest escort service company of the globe, he acted as if he didn't knew. There indeed were several thousands of girls (and boys) working there and luxury cars were driving in and out the basement day and night. But he didn’t knew it.
He didn't trust people, he was unable to build a stable relationship with Chinese people. "All Chinese are cheaters" he often said. No wonder he was in constant conflict with staff, suppliers and our European customers. Vivien, his Chinese private secretary, acted to the outside world as if she supported Bill unconditionally.
One day, when he once again messed up the whole factory, the workers threatened to strike. I called his brother (let's call him Rob G.) back in Canada in an attempt to persuade Bill to be more reasonable. Some days later, Rob came over and stayed in China for a while. He finally gave up his job as policeman to act as a handyman and go-between between Bill and the production staff. By the way: Rob was very different from Bill. He was a man of the world, although he had a very particular language with a lot of spicy words. He was living in a house in the famous Thames town in Songjiang, far away from his brother.
One day, we got an official letter from the local government, announcing that, because of the hot weather (and everybody in Shanghai switching on their air conditioners), the whole industrial park would be switched off from the electricity grid for two weeks. When Bill was in utter panic, preparing an email for our clients to announce the shut down, I was able to calm him down. And went to the other factory owners in the industrial area. In a meeting that afternoon, we decided to send a Chinese factory boss to someone of the local government to persuade them to not switch us off. The hongbao (small fee) that we collected from each of the 12 owners was very convincing for the guy from the government. We were not switched off from the grid.
To release his stress, Bill decided to go to a Jazz club every Saturday night. He paid for a private table, right in front of the Jazz orchestra and invited Vivien, his Chinese private secretary (she was happily married to a chief constable) and his daughter (when she was in Shanghai). He didn't had real friends. I, as a Jazz music addict, went to that same club for years, usually sitting in a more dark corner in the back. Every time, he invited me enthusiastically at his table but I often declined as I didn't wanted to expose my friends to his behaviour.
Because of a new EU commission regulation, we got in trouble with the sales one of our core products in Europe. And consequently Bill's company came in financial trouble. Before, I had tirelessly tried to convince Bill to increase the sales price of our products. As I had, much more than him, excellent contacts with our clients, I knew that they would be prepared to pay a bit more for our services. But he didn't listen to me. Instead, he started to cheat both our suppliers and customers. He didn't pay suppliers, some of them entirely dependent on our products. He borrowed money from our main customer and never paid it back.
I told him that he should fire me because the company could no longer bear the cost of my salary. But he didn't.
Sometime later, when I returned from a trip home (and to one of the customers), he asked for a private meeting in a restaurant near to my home in Shanghai. There, the high word came out. Right before, I told him I knew why we were there. During my trip to Europe, the day before I returned, he had secretly fired my tooling manager, quality engineer and my private secretary.
I still today have excellent contacts with all the former people of that company. Back in 2017, Mr. Zhao, the production manager, who also had taken over my tasks, called me to inform me that Bill once again disappeared. Two days later, when the salaries to the (remaining) workers had to be paid, Bill had blocked all bank accounts. I recommended Mr. Zhao to close the factory.
Today, Bill is still without a trace. Even his ex-wife, his son, daughter or his brother don't know where he is. He's certainly not in China anymore. Some people suspect that he is living in hiding in Venezuela.
When I was living in Suzhou and went to that Jazz club in Shanghai, I met there by big coincidence Vivien, Bill's ex private secretary. She was drunk and hooking up with an older American guy, something I haven’t seen her doing before.
When I said to her "Hi Vivien, how are you doing ?" she replied: "Hi Frans, you're looking well, but I'm no longer Vivien, I’m Christine now". I was speechless.
Last year, Mr Zhao started a brand new company in Songjiang from scratch. He has gradually taken over the manufacturing of some of the products we made before. He has the full confidence of our former clients and suppliers. When I was there last year, he had only five people working for him but the future of his new company looks bright.
-BillBrockenblock
Ah.
But enough of that. China has changed. It’s a new world out there and the high powered days of living well inside of China are merging to a new reality.
Relationships
This world is filled with all sorts of people. But humans are humans, men are men and women are women. It’s how we interact with each other that is important.
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That’s the ol’ softie in me. Don’t you know.
Incidentally, the restaurant that they are both working in is a “Hot pot” restaurant. Basically it is a big pot of soup that you dip meats and vegetables into. Much like a Fondue. However, you also then dip it into sauces after you eat it, and you get to make your own sauces. It’s all very delicious. In the background we see a guy spinning what looks like pizza dough. Nope, that is how you make noodles in China. You make it by hand and that is what he is doing.
Now, you all might be confused, but this is taking place in a restaurant where they both apparently work, which is something that you can see by the aprons that they are wearing. My guess is that this is the very famous restaurant chain; Hai De Lao.
haidilao
https://www.haidilao.com/en/index/index.html
The Haidilao brand was founded in 1994 in Jianyang, Sichuan. Since 1999, it has gradually opened up markets in Xi'an, Zhengzhou and Beijing. In 2015, our restaurant opened up in Taiwan was, and 10 stores have been opened in Taiwan by now. In 2017, our restaurant opened up in Hong Kong and opened two stores by now.
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Yeah.
Hotpot. Great in the colder weather. As it tends to steam up my glasses. LOL.
Hai De Lao Hot Pot. The meats are a selection of beef, chicken, mutton, and pork. Note the meatballs and the various vegetables that you can add as well. Not shown are the noodles, fish, shrimp, and all the other things that you can fry inside the vats of tasty oils in front of you.
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A “Brick House”
In America we refer to a strong stout woman as being built well. Or as we say “built like a brick house”. You can find these women all over the world. Not just in the United States, but in China as well. Here is a woman that I would consider a “Brick House”.
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Speaking of relationships, here’s some more girls.
Girls that resemble friends of mine
Here are some girls that resemble some of my friends that I have inside of China. As you can well guess they are nice and really sweet. They are smart too, and really interesting. Each one is like a book… full of stories and adventures.
Many I have met in the KTV’s, but also others that I have met in my day-to-day activities. All are really nice, and they are absolutely great conversationalists.
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This next girl reminds me a lot of a friend that I met at my last KTV trip. She was a lot of fun, but unfortunately I was drinking fake VSOP and that really took away from the full enjoyment of the evening. Word to the wise, when the alcohol is in question, don’t drink it. Buy your own. Bring your own, or stick to beer.
Contemporary versions of Chinese pop
Here’s a couple of contemporaneous renditions of a very popular Chinese pop song by Jay Chou. The song itself is around ten years old, but the singers breathe new life into it, and it’s all very lovely. This is the kind of music that people sing when they go to KTV’s and get drunk and belt out a song or two.
The name of the song is 千里之外.
But the new versions will not make any sense, or give you an appreciation for what is going on unless you watch the original music video. And that is why I have embedded it here…
千里之外 the original MV
Please click and watch this cute four minute mini-drama.
It’s in *.mkv format.
MKV files are actually multimedia container formats. An MKV container can incorporate audio, video, and subtitles into a single file—even if those elements use different types of encoding. For example, you could have a MKV file that contains H.264 video and something like MP3 or AAC for audio.
-What Is an MKVFile and How Do You Play Them?
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The video is in the MKV format, which should be read by both windows and Microsoft systems. However, if you are unable to view the video, you can access it here…
The song is about life, relationships, and taking opportunity even at the cost of love. Ouch!
Oh. You have to let those your love move on with their lives…
Screen shot from the original MV.
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In the video is a story about a young boy and girl.
The boy is just a handyman, but the girl is a singer and she is destined for great things. She gets an opportunity to become a great singer, but she won’t leave the boy. She loves him, don’t you know. And she wants to day with him. No matter what.
Screen shot from the original MV.
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And then one day, her big break happens. A big important man comes to her and offer her an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s an opportunity that you just do not turn down. It is something you just don’t say no to.
And she says no.
But the boy loves her.
He can’t allow her to waste her life with him.
So he tells her to go. He forces her to go. He grabs the contract and says “yes” before she even knows what’s happening.
An opportunity of a lifetime.
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Yes, and she leaves. Three years later, she returns. Rich and famous. But the boy is there. Just the same old job, making ends meet. And the song has a refrain about your loved ones moving on to bigger and better things, while you are left behind…
Beyond A Thousand Miles (Faraway)
The roof is like a cliff ,the wind chimes are like the blue sea I wait for the swallow to return
The time has been arranged to act out an accident you quietly leave
The story is outside the city,the heavy fog won't disperse,can't see the dialogue clearly
You cannot tell by listening the sound of the wind doesn't exist,it is me who is sighing with regret
I waken from the dream ,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and white
The silent era perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
I send you away Beyond the end of the sky,are you still there?
Where is the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I use all my life To wait
I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands, I'm grey at the temples
I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods,searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands I wait for you to come
Glazed white all over you,transparent like dust your flawless love
From the rain you come,the poem becomes sorrowful I'm drenched now
Pick up the lotus from the water surface,it's as if the shadows of the boat sailing are still there,yet you don't come back
Covered by the years,the flower you spoke of blossomed,the past becomes blank
I waken from the dream,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings,
cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
I send you away beyond the end of the sky,are you still there? Where is the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I use all my life
I send you away,beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
I send you away,beyond the end of the sky
Are you still there?
Where is the sound of the piano coming from?
It's hard to predict life and death
I use all my life To wait
https://lyricstranslate.com
The remakes of 千里之外 (Far Away)
The first “remake”…
In this, we have a British talent show. Very similar to “America’s Got Talent”. And it takes place in the UK as you can tell by the judges and the musicians. Of course, it is being judged by both British folk and by Chinese folk.
I think that this young Chinese lass has great potential and an outstanding voice. And when she hits those high notes, I just get goosebumps. It’s pretty exceptional, and a real surprise to the song. A real twist. I’ll tell you what.
The first remake… sung by a lady named 阿兰.
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And the “classic version”…
And the classic version that everyone and their grandmother sings to in the KTV. When you watch the other “judges” and the audience look up to the ceiling, open palm their hands, and have that “far away” look in their eyes, it is this guy that they are emulating…
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And it is indeed grand.
The song sung in Hong Kong
Here’s another fellow in Hong Kong. This guy really belts this song out. Check it out. It’s pretty much an attention grabber. It’s two singers 林峯、and 王祖蓝 and they both sing 千里之外.
Now for the BEST version
This is the BEST version, and I just love it. In fact, I think that I like it better than the original, or the KTV versions. It just stands on it’s own. I think that female singer just really makes this version so very, very special.
She is BREATHTAKING.
If you want to download the next file directly click on this button. It is one of my most favorite renditions.
If you don’t, then no problem. Just click on the picture below.
You will also notice the show and the audience. This is all China. And as stupid and crazy as the show appears, this is the normal kind of thing inside of China. With those strange cartoon sounds, the text bubbles that float in the air, and the really strange dressed television hosts. Yup. It’s all China.
Hey!
This gal is a stunner!
Yes. She is breathtaking. I rarely say this about a woman, but in this case, her beauty, her confidence, and her stance is just… well, astounding… and breathtaking.
I just love her strong confidence, and womanly charm.
As I have said, it’s my favorite version.
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Are you tired of this song yet?
I think that I have beaten this dead horse long enough. LOL. I guess that none of the neocons in the Military-Industrial Beltway in Washington DC has ever heard of this song, could care less about the Chinese people and their society, and just want to destroy things so that they can get a new addition to their third mansion.
But that is just my opinion.
Comparisons
We need to compare China with America for some real educational benefit. Let’s take a glimpse at some American Country and Western music…
…and some urban music.
One of my personal favorites… (*.mkv format) is Tim McGraw singing about his plans to get out of the rat-race and get down to a more stable and slower pace of life. I really enjoy this song and what it represents to me. (On a personal basis.)
Music of the American Countryside…
Jen, this video is for you.
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Music of the American Urban Areas…
This is pretty typical. If not threatening to steal, kill, rape or murder, the gals sing about how tough and strong they are and how invincible their “booty” is.
“It’s a very sassy song, very kind of woman empowerment,” Lopez said in a behind-the-scenes video posted to her YouTube page. “[It’s] kind of giving you taste of what you give out, letting guys know that we’re not going to take any junk."
-Jennifer Lopez flashes her butt in risqué new music video
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I have my own opinions about all this. I guess that music represents the society that it originates from. But I am the outlier.
I am a minority opinion.
The Internet rages on and on about this last video…
Sometimes, a song is so steamy, the only logical next step is a super-sexy music video. For that, we can thank trailblazers like Prince and Madonna, who established the right to show a little skin in music videos like "Kiss" and "Express Yourself."
MTV deserves its share of credit—can anybody ever forget their first time watching t.A.T.u.'s music video for "All The Things She Said"?—but then YouTube blew up, and suddenly you could watch any steamy music video any time you wanted.
It became a sort of guilty pleasure, listening to a great song while watching a hot person do hot-person things like make out with someone equally good-looking, move their hips like no one was watching, and wear an outfit so tight you wonder how they got it on in the first place.
You could spend hours watching gorgeous celebrities pour suspiciously watery milk on their Spandex-bound bodies (we still love you, Fergie!). And, if we're being honest, we have spent hours watching that (and we still love you, Fergie).
If I had a choice between the strong woman singing the Chinese song, or J-Lo singing about her empowered butt, I would choose the Chinese Lady (金志文 and 白雪). Not the American gutter trash.
But that is just me.
Chinese Gals
Now, after watching J-Lo promote her booty I have to ask myself if this is what America has become?
And maybe I’m a “little out of it” being inside of China.
Maybe the comment that I have become too distant from what America stands for. Maybe I am not “with it”. That I need to get more in tune with what America represents…
…”democracy”…
Just ask the “Doctor of Democracy” himself, El Bush-Bo’ Limbaugh.
But I don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the evil psychopaths in Washington DC. I stand with the founders of the United States who believed that the United States must stay a Republic. And that once a “democracy” it will turn into an oligarchy, and in short order, a military empire.
They were right, by the way.
But to be honest, if America stand for people like Mike Pompeo and big booty, I don’t know if I really want to be part of that reality. It’s uh…”yucky” don’t you know.
Actually.
So anyways, here’s a sampling of the chicks that surround me in China. And no, they are not all big, black and stacked with enormous “booty”. They are just average and come in different sizes and shapes, just like they are supposed to. And I am just fine with that. Short, plump, big, thin, robust, or petite. I love them all.
For instance, here’s a tall thin skinny girl…
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I like her, she’s a cutie.
Next up is a “village girl”. We would call her “corn fed” back in rural Pennsylvania. We see her dancing about with her hat, and her arm protectors. Ah. It’s so China.
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Common Chicks
Moving on, let’s check out this chick. She is really a rather common archetype and is the kind of girl that you would meet time and time again in all the adult venues and establishments. She’s cheerful, fun and playful.
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I know, I know, you all want to see more than just pretty girls. Well, I’m going to get on to it. I promise.
This next girl is dancing in a restaurant.
Most restaurants in China have private dining rooms. You just book the room, and you close the door and you eat in peace. It’s everywhere, and depending on the establishment, you can have a bathroom, a television, a tea set up, and a Majong table. You just have to go to the right restaurant, and the cost for the room isn’t all that expensive either. So most people tend to use the rooms than to sit in a big open eating area like you have to endure in the United States.
Check it out…
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Now, I would like to continue with (yet) another girl.
I would say that she is pretty typical. And she really is. I can go to just about any public area and point out tens of girls that look just like her. And see, not all girls in China are all that busty. So don’t get confused. I think she is cute and having fun, and it is that sunny disposition that I just love and can eat up.
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Maybe I should have called this post learning about China by looking at pretty girls part 75, eh?
Parking Garages
I’ve covered this before, but the parking garages in China are beautiful, clean, well-lit, and attractive. And I have mentioned it before, it sure is a drastic contrast to the dungeon-like dark, dingy, dirty, cesspools that Americans use to part their cars in.
Here we have a typical chick dancing inside one of the parking garages that are everywhere.
At a train station
Have any of you guys gone to what constitutes American trains lately? Yeah. I’m talking about Amtrak. And yeah, it’s pretty awful. All the train-stations combine the worst elements of Detroit and the US Post Office. Well… not all of them are like this. Some are nice. Especially the ones near the large Urban Areas.
Well, I think that American rail is under utilized because of the cultural differences between the USA and China. I have to ask the reader, just how often do you and your friends and family ride American rail?
Well, with the massive network of High Speed Trains in China, The rail is used extensively. It is cheap, clean, well taken cared for, and is often preferable to flying in aircraft. The Chinese rail network is vast.
Here is a cute chick inside a Chinese rail terminal. Yeah, they all (stations that is) kind of look like this, more or less…
In a grocery Store
Here we have a chick dancing inside a small town supermarket. I do like these places and the prices are truly affordable. But don’t expect to get high grade Western food there.
Road Construction
When I lived in PA, that’s Pennsylvania for all you’se guys who aren’t aware of the Pennsylvania slang, the local department of transportation was constantly “fixing” the roads. You would think that the roads would last more than a few months, but then again, the very next season, more millions of dollars needed to be dished out to pay for road construction.
The potholes in PA are a big long-time, on-going, joke.
They’ll never get fixed. It’s just a big ol’ slush fund for the wealthy to siphon money from Pennsylvania taxpayers. But, anyways, I well remember one summer when it too two entire seasons lay down a new bridge. That’s five to six months. A real slow pace, and the disruption of our lives in the local community was horrific.
That’s what happens when you have a nation run by corrupt bankers.
China is a nation of engineers, builders and designers. And it shows. It’s not just two complete 6000 bed, and 10,000 bed hospitals going up in two weeks like what happened in March 2020. It’s everything.
Here’s a bridge going up in one day.
China DOES NOT PLAY.
Chinese Idea of Beauty
It all has to do with the shape of the face. Sure there are numerous characteristics that might mitigate the value of a person’s beauty. However, for the most part, if you are clean, have a good complexion, are pleasant, and have an oval face with strong thick black hair, you will pretty much be considered attractive.
I would say that this next chick has a face that well-represents the Chinese idea of beauty.
Average Life
Here’s just two girls going for a walk in the city.
It’s very common, and this is what it is like. It shouldn’t matter one way or the other, but the Mike Pompeo narrative is that the XinJiang Muslims are terribly repressed within China. That the Chinese people are starving, and hungering for “freedomTM” and “democracyTM” and they can’t wait for the great American military to invade and rescue them!
And the lonely Muslim women are forced to sleep with government officials…!
China forces Uyghur Muslim women to sleep with govt …
https://www.opindia.com/2019/11/china-uyghur...
Nov 08, 2019 · Han Males are sleeping on the same bed as Uyghur Muslim women in China whose male family members, often husbands, are locked up in ‘reeducation camps’ in conformity with a diktat by the Chinese regime, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported last week. The information comes from government officials who spoke to them on the condition of anonymity.
Really?
You must be brain dead to believe this propagandized bullshit.
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Oh, by the way. These videos are from Tiktok and WeChat. Both of which was banned by Trump / Pompeo. So if you watch them you are risking a life in prison for …
…I don’t know.
The official reason is “national security”, but when the DOJ asked to prove it the administration came up empty handed. Never the less, if you are an American, you’d better slam your computer shut, and erase everything before a NSA or DHS SWAT team breaks down your door and takes you off for questioning….
Speaking of an average life, here’s two chicks running in Chinese park in the dead of winter.
Improvements to selfies
Many Chinese women like to improve their pictures by adding special effect and other colorful enhancements. I don’t really like them, but then again, I am from the “old school”. I guess to “each their own”…
They say that the Chinese ideal is thin with big eyes. Yet they don’s provide any pictures of this ideal, and I can tell you that it is not something found in China. But you can read their opinions yourself here…
Nowhere is this difference more obvious than on Chinese social media, where you won’t find any of the contouring, lip-lining or thighbrows that fill Instagram feeds in the United States. In China, it’s all pale skin, big eyes and rosebud lips.
The fair-skinned standard: There are overlaps in how each nationality shoots its self-portraits: Chinese girls take photos at an angle to slim their faces, just like selfie queen Kim Kardashian West recommends. Chinese women are also influenced not only by their own country’s ideals but also those of neighboring East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, all of which favor slim figures and youthful, innocent-looking beauty.
Combined with imported Western beauty ideals like large breasts, these influences have fused to create a very definite Chinese physical ideal with little wiggle room for women who fail to meet the standard.
“Chinese beauty ideals basically come from the media: TV shows, celebrities. A lot of Chinese beauty ideals are quite Western,” Chinese culture expert Janny Chyn, who provides cultural immersion tours through her company Shanghai Pathways, told Mic. “The main difference is that we like white skin.”
Many women in China strive to be baifumei: pale, rich and beautiful (with a heavy emphasis on pale). The ultimate baifumei is actress Fan Bingbing, adored and emulated for her translucent white skin, large eyes and “melon seed” (oval-shaped) face.
“There is a strong standard of beauty in China, and it requires you to be as white as possible, with big eyes,” Thibaud André, consultant at Daxue Consulting in Beijing, told Mic.
Cute wins out over sexy: Flick through Instagram in the U.S. and you’ll likely see a lot of flesh, especially in the summer. Everybody from Kardashian West to Drake has been known to get a little thirsty on social media. Not so on Chinese social networks like Weibo, where big eyes, bunny ears and cute slogans abound. And it’s not just among teenagers.
“The big difference is that we want to be cute. You will see women pretending to be teenagers when they are grown-ups,” said Shanghai Pathways' Chyn.
“Pretending to be cute is never offensive. It’s more controversial to be sexy. If you’re cute, no one can disapprove.”
One Chinese guide to taking selfies says “innocent and cute” photos will always prove the most popular and are also easy to take. That means less vamping and less makeup aimed at overt sexiness. While girls all over the Western world might have been sucking on bottle caps last year to get Kylie Jenner’s lips, women in China are more likely to underplay this feature, using lighter or coral lipsticks.
This desire to be cute also manifests itself in big, puffed-out hamster cheeks, a sweeter alternative to the more overtly seductive “duckface.”
When skinny trumps curves: There’s no denying that Americans feel huge pressure to be skinny, what with 20 million American women experiencing a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their lives. Social media plays its part in promoting skinniness, glorifying thigh gaps and spreading "fitspo“ slogans. But the recent movement to embrace plus sizes, along with the popularity of curvier celebrities like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian crew, has brought a bit more variety to social media that makes space for curves. (See: ”belfies.“)
Chinese social media, on the other hand, sees the glorification of skinniness above all else. This has led to a number of selfie trends, including one challenge to twist your arm behind your back to touch your belly button and another to stack coins on your collarbone to demonstrate thinness.
”[Actress] Angelababy represents the beauty standard right now, super slim,“ said Daxue Consulting’s André. "All over Weibo, Chinese women are posting pictures showing how slim and how white they are. That’s definitely a trend.”
And while America isn’t perfect — a curvy body is still more celebrated when it includes a slim waist — there is at least some diversity in the types of bodies deemed attractive.
“Americans prefer a fit body, a fit figure. It doesn’t need to be skinny, it doesn’t need to be chubby but it needs to be fit and healthy looking… In China I only hear, ‘Girls should have really thin bodies,’” said one participant in an Asian Beauty Secrets video about American vs. Chinese beauty standards.
Who needs makeup when you can digitally edit your selfies? Selfie trends like contouring and strobing have changed what products many American women have in their makeup bags, as we prioritize looking “camera ready.”
Not so in China. Although the cosmetics market is growing, women there still wear far less makeup than girls in the states, according to André. There’s little need for special selfie-ready makeup when you can use apps to change what you look like instead.
“Our selfies are very high-tech,” Chyn said. The functions on Photoshop-like apps lay users’ beauty desires bare: The most popular Chinese beauty app, Meitu Xiuxiu, allows you to whiten your skin, slim your face and make your eyes impossibly huge. By contrast, Facetune, an app used by Tyra Banks, focuses on whitening your teeth, smoothing out skin and applying more makeup.
Understanding the pressures women elsewhere face might be just the thing to make us examine where our own beauty ideals come from. Maybe we’ll even put down the bronzer, delete the Photoshop app and face the world as we really are. Just maybe.
Ahhhh
The “news” out of America is about 80% bullshit, 10% truth, and 10% out of the “outer limits”.
This reminds me of an event while I was in university. Friday was designated as “wear jeans if you agree with LGBT rights” day. Well, since I and about 90% of everyone else in the university ONLY had jeans, we were left with two options; [1] wear the jeans or [2] stay home and miss class. Most, like myself, came to class wearing jeans.
It had nothing to do with anything else.
I think that most Chinese Goth folk are taking selfies because they are human, and it’s a thing that everyone is doing. Not that they are trying to “protest” the “evil communist tyrants”. Or whatever the Mike Pompeo narrative is today.
Gyms in China
Yup. China has gyms and the rates are pretty reasonable. The only thing that I do not like is that they tend not to be air conditioned. That is because the Chinese believe that you need to sweat to get rid of the bad chi (energy) inside of you.
While people are realizing the importance of sport for health and better appearance, fitness industry is also booming in China in recent years. More and more people become members of fitness studios and the fitness apps are being used everywhere.
With the technology development and the changing lifestyle of consumers, the fitness industry also needs to work on new concepts to adjust people’s needs for fitness in the future. Fitness industry in China was facing transformation.
Instead of working out in gyms and fitness studios, nowadays fitness can take place everywhere. Due to the high penetration rate of smartphones in China, fitness apps are well used by fitness enthusiasts. People can easily get fitness tips, find fitness studios and get connected with other fitness enthusiasts and professional trainers with apps in their smartphones.
According to rough estimation, there were nearly 100,000 fitness studios in China. Most of them were opened in bigger cities. Beijing and Shanghai are the Chinese cities with the biggest market for fitness studios.
Fitness studios with innovated concepts are also first introduced to these two metropolises.
To be noticed is that the numbers of fitness studios in second-tier cities are growing faster. Considering the brands and types of fitness studios, the Chinese market has showed a great variety.
While the big chains owning hundreds of studios are still expanding, the smaller boutique studios which focus on more individual personal training for certain groups are becoming increasingly popular. And people are apparently willing to spend more in these boutique studios.
With the growth of the fitness market, the consumption of high-tech sportwear and wearable devices are also expected to grow.
Fitness studios with high-tech apparatus might also be more competitive in the market, while the less qualified trainers are facing the pressure from their customers who can get professional information from various channels. The future of fitness industry should be a cooperative competition of various industries and sectors with more highly personalized and individual offers.
- Fitness industry in China - statistics & facts | Statista
Chinese Beaches.
If you perform a google search about beaches, or swimming in China you will see these images of hordes of people all crammed together. It’s actually funny. that’s not the way it is at all. It is the narrative that the American government wants people to think. But not the way it really is.
The American view of Chinese Beaches. Pretty crowded and impossible right?
.
So what is it really like?
Well, I have a house on the beach. And every day I see it, watch the sun rise and the sun set on it and watch the people come and go on it. And NOT ONCE did it ever resemble what you might find on the American websites, search engines or “news” articles.
Here’s some images of what Chinese beaches look like. It’s the real deal, you-all.
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And here is another young lass… She’s a bit on the thin leggy side, but you know, isn’t she attractive though? Look at that smile. I love her confidence. Smile (check). Confidence (check). Beach (check). Small bikini (check, check, check).
Dance Class
Dancing is very popular in China. Perhaps the biggest “craze(s)” lies in the styles related to “Spanish Samba” and K-Pop. In my office building on my floor (were) two K-pop dance troops and one Samba studio. Making my floor about 50% devoted to dancing with pretty girls of all ages.
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The girls above seem to be middle school age. My guess.
Forward Thinking
Global Times editorial celebrates moon mission and poverty elimination, a tandem neither the Outlaw US Empire nor any other nation has achieved. The key as ever is balance:
"For a long time, some people believe China has not done enough to balance these developments. Voices have existed that China invested excessive resources to fields such as aerospace. Despite difficulties, compared to other countries, China has tried its best to reach a balance and has achieved positive results.
"Since China implemented the reform and opening-up policy, the most prominent and well-known national goal has been achieving a moderately prosperous society. People's livelihood and fairness and justice have always been the focus of attention in Chinese society. A technology-centered national strategy and people-oriented economic development have highly integrated.
"In the past few decades, the Chinese people have been developing the aerospace field, but their livelihood has also been improving. The lunar exploration project is not a political vanity project - it is well within the ability of Chinese society.
"The progress in high-tech areas such as aerospace has pushed up China's strategic competitiveness overall. At the same time, people are living better lives. Without the advancement in high-tech areas, China's prosperity would lack the backbone and long-term guarantee....
"China has long implemented a market economy, but has maintained the guiding role of the government. This prevents our market economy from repeating and hovering at a low level, and also prevents us from being satisfied with the low-end prosperity of the global value chain. The Chinese nation's self-motivated spirit continues to release momentum, successfully supported by the country's system. Thus, we can move forward in a balanced manner and with a clear sense of direction." [My Emphasis]
This same methodology can be seen in Putin's governance and also glaringly absent from all Neoliberal driven nations, which partially explains their problems. I'm going to single-out this one sentence from the concluding paragraph for it admits a truth no Neoliberal nation has even acknowledged:
"There are unlimited possibilities in space, and most resources that support the human being's future development must be outside the Earth." [My Emphasis]
I know of no major nation that has admitted directly or through its main media voice that the earth is finite with a limited amount of resources that will govern the overall degree of potential development. For me, that means China has admitted to itself that at some future point there'll be a requirement to shift to a steady-state type of political-economy for all nations and thus the world.
That's a far more advanced view of economics from the Neoliberal model that doesn't admit to scarce resources or that there's a limit--a Junk, unrealistic model to be sure.
Classrooms
School is much more intense in China than it is in America. For starters, all the children must learn English AND Chinese. Their classes are very regimented, and success is mandated by culture. If they want to be an individual and “go their own way”, it is not permitted. they must work as a team, be a team player and do their best. Failure is not an option.
Final comments
What the American (and British) media presents as “China” has very little resemblance to what it actually is.
Pompeo unloads on US universities for China ties
https://apnews.com/article/technology-mike-pompeo...
Dec 09, 2020 · Pompeo took aim at universities across the U.S., claiming they refused to address the Trump administration’s concerns about China’s attempts to influence students and academics. He specifically called out the president of MIT, alleging he refused to host Pompeo’s speech, and a senior official at the University of Washington over a case ...
And…
Exclusive -- Mike Pompeo: China Infiltrating Our ...
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/12/14/mike...
Dec 14, 2020 · In September, Pompeo said he was “hopeful” that branches of the Confucius Institute — an organization run by the Chinese government — across America’s colleges and universities would be closed by the end of 2020. The Trump administration designated the Confucius Institute’s programs as foreign missions of the Chinese Communist Party.. China is a greater threat than Russia in the ...
And…
Pompeo vows tough U.S. stance on China but is open to talks
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/pompeo-vows-to...
Aug 21, 2020 · Pompeo said the Trump administration is open to talks with Beijing but the U.S. would maintain its tough stance. “President Trump is serious about protecting our information, our networks and ...
China is depicted as an evil, dirty, corrupt, tyrannical “regime”. When in reality it is a single-party, social democracy based on Confucian values and traditional culture. Over the last four decades the nation has worked hard to make China what it is today, and what it is…
…is really astounding. It is a middle class neighborhood populated with hard-working, intelligent people. They are fiercely patriotic, almost hysterically so, and all the nonsense from (former) President Trump and his side kick Mike Pompeo are all lies.
Pompeo blasts China for suppressing coronavirus ...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pompeo-blasts...
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid harsh blame on China on Sunday for engaging in what he called a “classic Communist disinformation effort” and for working “to make …
As a sanity check, here is a video of the the events in China during 2020.
As you watch the three minute video can you identify which items that you are aware of from the Western news media?
Go ahead, watch and count the number of events that the American and British “news” media reported on…
Do you want more?
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Here’s some articles that you just will not find in any American media. But they are very descriptive and pretty accurate regarding what the rest of the world thinks about America today. No, you won’t find Rush Limbaugh quoting from these articles, nor will you find a reference to them in Politco or MSNBC. These are the type of articles that the oligarchy; the rulers of the American government do not want the tax-serfs to read.
It’s not so hard to find articles in the American media. They run the gambit from “America is great and the best”, to fear-mongering “the world outside of America looks like a save the children commercial”. But you won’t find anything really critical or persuasive about what America is going through right now. That is the kind of information that Americans MUST NOT SEE.
Well, surprise! You are going to read some of these articles right here and right now, and they are (for the most part) not very flattering.
It’s not that America or Americans are bad. They are not. It is that the entire nation is run by evil psychopaths.
These leaders possess behaviors are dangerous and will will end up destroying the entire world if they are not suppressed. It’s like the drunk friend who is trying to pick a fight with everyone in the bar, and you and your friends just roll your eyes, and after a spell, you all need to leave early before some “shit goes down”. Damn!
Have any of you been in that situation?
Well, that is America today. And it’s pretty bad, and very dangerous.
That’s why the articles outside of the USA are not finding their way into the “approved” American media.
Yes. The reason why these negative articles about America are not cropping up inside of any of the “approved” American media outlets is because they are more than just unflattering. The psychopaths that run America do not want the serf-slaves to revolt against them. So they deliberately suppress any contrary news related to them or their true personalities.
Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative. Nevertheless, psychopathy is among the most difficult disorders to spot.
Psychopaths can appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack any semblance of conscience. Their antisocial nature inclines them often (but by no means always) to criminality.
Psychopaths spark popular fascination and clinical anguish: Adult psychopathy is largely resistant to treatment, though programs exist to treat callous, unemotional youth in hopes of preventing them from maturing into psychopaths.
Brain anatomy, genetics, and a person’s environment may all contribute to the development of psychopathic traits. For more on causes, symptoms, and treatments of the related condition called antisocial personality disorder, see our Diagnosis Dictionary.
Ol’ Busted Knucke’s said it best when he said that Russia and the USA have a lot to offer each other. Why not work together and concentrate on our similarities, instead of threatening each other about some imaginary differences. And he’s right, but you and I know that that is not going to happen as the USA is run by a bunch of maniacal evil villains.
What are we dealing with here…
Well, what are we dealing with? Am I being glib concerning who is actually running the American nations, or am I being painfully accurate?
President Donald Trump.
The term “con artist” or “conman” comes from one of American history’s earliest scammers, a man by the name of William Thompson. In 1849, Thompson was arrested in New York City for a slew of successful scams during which he duped unassuming passersby on the street into lending him their valuables before vanishing with them.
Thompson was consequently known among local authorities as “the confidence man,” which was eventually shortened to “con man.” But Thompson was hardly alone in his clever grifts. According to historian Karen Halttunen, approximately 10 percent of all criminals in New York City in the 1860s were con artists.
Nearly all “confidence men” or scam artists are charming. Take Victor Lustig, for example. This conman managed to “sell” the Eiffel Tower and allegedly even swindled notorious mobster Al Capone. He was fittingly dubbed “the Count” by authorities because he was so debonair.
Beyond the smooth talkers, there are also those conmen who play on people’s biases like Anna Sorokin, who cheated her way into the ranks of New York City’s elite by pretending to be a rich heiress named Anna Delvey. The scam artist’s former friends, nearly all of them wealthy socialites, alleged that she had convinced them to loan her cash for lavish vacations abroad only to never be repaid.
Today, the term “Ponzi scheme” is used to describe an illegitimate operation. But the term actually came from the real-life Charles Ponzi, whose $15 million investment scheme claimed to turn the average American working man into a multimillionaire overnight.
-All that's interesting
Psychopathy is a spectrum disorder and can be diagnosed using the 20-item Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which features traits such as lack of empathy, pathological lying, and impulsivity, each scored on a three-point scale based on whether the item does not apply (0), applies to a certain extent (1), or fully applies (2) to the individual. The bar for clinical psychopathy is a score of 30 or higher; serial killer Ted Bundy scored 39.
The checklist was developed in the 1970s by the Canadian researcher Robert Hare. A true assessment should be conducted by a mental health professional.
The revised version of the checklist includes the following characteristics:
The first group really describes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Mike Pompeo and Barrack Obama, don’t you all think?
The sexual exploits of Bill Clinton are legendary. And do you really think that being a member of the Senate for 60 years isn’t a “parasitic lifestyle”? What about banning coal and sending the citizenry of five states into poverty? Doesn’t that count as a “lack of empathy”?
failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions
And what about Donald Trump. It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it? And those 70+ tweets per night, isn’t that a sign of impulsivity?
many short-term marital relationships
juvenile delinquency
revocation of conditional release (from prison)
criminal versatility (i.e., commits diverse types of crimes)
If this does not describe American leadership, Congressmen and Senators, then I don't know what does.
What percentage of people are psychopaths?
Psychopaths exist across cultures and ethnic groups. It has been estimated that approximately 1 percent of males and 0.3–0.7 percent of females could be classified as psychopaths. An individual may show elevated levels of multiple traits associated with psychopathy without qualifying as a psychopath according to a measure such as the Hare checklist.
When we refer to the oligarchy or the PTB, we often refer to them as the 1%. I find it curious that this is also the same percentage of psychopaths in society. Could it be the natural inclination of psychopaths to rise over others and seize the levers of control of a society, and if so, isn’t that a very, very dangerous situation?
Psychopaths are incapable of feeling guilt, remorse, or empathy for their actions or the objects of their actions. They are generally cunning and manipulative. They know the difference between right and wrong but don't believe the rules apply to them.
First Encounter With a Psychopath
On first impression, psychopaths generally appear charming, engaged, caring, friendly, logical, and reasonable, with well thought-out goals. They give the impression that they can reason, that they know the consequences for antisocial and unlawful behavior and will react appropriately. They appear capable of self-examination and will criticize themselves for mistakes.
Under clinical evaluation, psychopaths don't show common symptoms associated with neurotic behavior: nervousness, high anxiety, hysteria, mood swings, extreme fatigue, and headaches. In situations that most normal people would find upsetting, psychopaths appear calm and void of fear and anxiety.
An About-Face
Initially, psychopaths appear reliable, devoted, and trustworthy, but, suddenly and without provocation, become unreliable, with no regard for how their actions affect the situation, regardless of its importance. Once viewed as honest and sincere, they do a sudden about-face and begin lying without concern, even in small matters when there is no benefit in lying.
Because psychopaths have mastered the art of deception, those around them are slow to accept the abrupt change. When psychopaths are confronted with their lack of responsibility, honesty or loyalty, it generally has no impact on their attitude or future performance. They are unable to perceive that other people value truthfulness and integrity.
Can't Accept Responsibility for Failure
Psychopaths turn into performers who can mimic normal human emotions that they have never felt. This holds true when they're faced with failure. If they appear to be humble and own up to their mistakes, their true goal is to be perceived as the martyr or sacrificial lamb willing to accept blame so others don't have to.
If the ploy fails and they are blamed, they will emphatically deny any responsibility and, without feeling shame, turn to lies, manipulation, and finger-pointing. When psychopaths can't convince others that they are innocent, they fume and obsess over it, often murmuring sarcastic comments and plotting revenge.
Risky Behavior With No Gain
Antisocial behavior—cheating, lying, robbing, stealing, agitating, fighting, committing adultery, killing—appeals to psychopaths, whether or not they reap any rewards. They appear drawn to high-risk antisocial behavior that has no apparent goal. Some experts theorize that psychopaths like to put themselves into dangerous situations because of the adrenaline rush they experience. Because psychopaths generally don't feel many emotions that normal people do, any extreme sensation feels good. Others believe that they do it to reinforce their sense of superiority and to prove that they are smarter than everyone, including the police.
Horrible Judgment
Although psychopaths are logical thinkers and view themselves as highly intelligent, they consistently exhibit bad judgment. Faced with two paths, one to gold and the other to ashes, the psychopath will take the latter. Because psychopaths can't learn from their experiences, they are prone to taking the same path again and again.
Egocentric and Unable to Love
Psychopaths are highly egomaniacal, to the point that a normal person has difficulty comprehending it. Their self-centeredness is so deeply rooted that it renders them incapable of loving others, including parents, spouses, and their own children.
The only time psychopaths show an ordinary response to kindness or special treatment by others is when it can be used to their advantage. For example, a psychopathic father still loved by his children despite the deep suffering he has caused them may put on a show of appreciation so that they continue to put money into his prison account or pay his legal fees.
Conventional Treatment Empowers Psychopaths
Most studies indicate that there are no conventional methods to cure psychopathic behavior. When conventional methods have been used, psychopaths become empowered and react by improving their cunning, manipulative methods and their ability to conceal their true personality, even from trained eyes.
Difference Between Psychopaths and Sociopaths
Psychopaths and sociopaths share a diagnosis as having antisocial personality disorder and similar traits, but there are significant differences. Psychopaths are more deceptive and manipulative and maintain more control over their outward personas. They are able to lead what appear to be normal lives, sometimes throughout their lifetime. When psychopaths become criminals they believe they are smarter than the average person and invincible.
Sociopaths often let their inner rage surface with violent episodes, verbally and physically. They become reckless and spontaneous and have little control over what they say or how they act. Because they are impulse driven, they rarely consider the consequences of their actions. It is difficult for sociopaths to live normal lives, and because of their imprudence many of them drop out of school, can't hold jobs, turn to crime, and end up in prison.
Which Is More Dangerous?
Sociopaths have a difficult time hiding their disorder, while psychopaths pride themselves on their manipulative abilities. Psychopaths are masters of disassociation and less likely to feel guilt or remorse for their actions or for the pain that they cause others. Because of this, psychopaths are considered to be more dangerous than sociopaths.
Well, we know that the USA is run by a bunch of crazed lunatics with some severely dangerous tendencies…
What now? Americans, for the most part are unaware of this. And they follow them in the belief that the leaders represent them and their beliefs. But the rest of the world does not see this, and are frankly aghast at the United States for “electing” these people to the levers of power.
And they write articles about this.
The more “mainstream” articles tend to be rather sanitized. But the alternative articles tend to be very spot-on and even vicious. Here we are going to look at some of the articles. It’s a venting of what the world thinks of what America has become and exists as it sits today, in the closing months of 2020.
The US Has Lost Global Power, and Is Now Just Faking It
This article from the Russian Insider archives was first published on RI in April 2018 by Dmitry Orlov . It was republished on Sun, Dec 13 2020 | 1510 words 26,694 Comments
Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things. He moved to the US as a child, and lives in the Boston area.He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile, along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse (he thinks America's will be worse). He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon.He has a large following on the web, and on Patreon, and we urge you to support him there, as Russia Insider does.If you haven't discovered his work yet, please take a look at his archive of articles on RI. They are a real treasure, full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related.
The US Has Lost Global Power, and Is Now Just Faking It
"If the US manages to convince enough people, at home and around the world, that it is still dangerous, then it will be able to hide its increasing enfeeblement for a while longer."
It’s a hard job being a global hegemon and the world’s sole superpower.
You have to keep the entire planet in line. Every country needs to be taught its place, and kept there, by force if need be. Now and again a country or two has to be conquered or destroyed, just to teach others a lesson. Plus you have to relentlessly meddle in other countries’ politics, rigging elections so that only US-friendly candidates can win, run regime change operations and organize colored revolutions. Stop doing this, and some countries will start ignoring you. And then the rest will quickly realize that you are losing control and go their separate ways while ignoring you.
Is the United States still the world’s greatest power, in control of the entire planet, or has that moment in history already come and gone? We are constantly hearing how the situation is becoming dire: relations between the US and NATO countries and Russia are going from bad to worse; there is a trade war going on with China; North Korea remains an intractable problem and an embarrassment.
Many people maintain that we are very close to a world war. But does “very close” actually mean anything? It is quite possible to stand for hours with your toes hanging over the edge of a cliff and never jump. Suicide is a big decision: big even for a person, much bigger for a large country.
On March 1, 2018 president Putin unveiled Russia’s new weapons systems against which the United States is defenseless and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Previously, the plan was to surround Russia with military bases and missile batteries, then launch a preemptive first strike, destroying its ability to retaliate and forcing it to capitulate.
This plan has now conclusively failed, and a US/NATO attack on Russia is once again assured to be an act of suicide. Worse than that, even limited military confrontations are now mostly unthinkable, because Russia can now inflict unacceptable damage on US/NATO forces from a safe distance and without putting any of its own assets at risk. If Russia won’t attack and the US/NATO can’t attack, then how likely is a war?
The new weapons systems have made it possible to start ignoring the US. It is still important to maintain a credible military posture, but politically the US is no longer in control, and neither are the global institutions on which it has relied. Instead, what we are seeing is the reemergence of nation states, and even of empires.
The political future of Syria is being decided by Russia, Turkey and Iran, with no useful input from the United States at all.
Significantly, whereas Russia and Iran are in categories of their own as far as the US is concerned, Turkey has been a US ally and the second-largest armed force in NATO. The fact that Turkey is no longer eager to please the Americans is quite telling.
Except during the strange and tumultuous twentieth century during which the US briefly flashed across the world stage, these three countries went by different names, which all ended in “empire”: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. Of these three, the Russian and the Ottoman empires were heirs to the Holy Roman Empire, whose eastern half, with its capital Constantinople, went on for centuries after Rome had turned into a depopulated ruin and a dark age had descended on Europe.
After Constantinople fell to the Turks and Islam took over the region, the center of Orthodox Christianity migrated north to Moscow. Now add China, or the Chinese Empire if you like, which is now aligned with Russia, and complete the picture: all of the greatest and most ancient Eurasian empires have come back and are talking and cooperating, while the has-been upstart on the other side of the planet isn’t even invited.
Given this situation, what is the US to do?
It has three choices.
The first is to start a major war, thus committing national suicide (while taking other countries with it). It lacks the political will to make this decision, although it could blunder into a major war by accident.
The second choice is to basically just fold: give up trying to project power around the world, retreat into its own borders and lick its wounds. It lacks the political will to do this as well; all that remains in the realm of possibility is to pretend that everything is still fine for as long as possible.
But how is it possible to pretend that everything is still fine even as everything is falling apart? The answer is to start faking it.
If the US manages to convince enough people, at home and around the world, that it is still dangerous, then it will be able to hide its increasing enfeeblement for a while longer. It may no longer be capable of achieving any of its aims, but it is still very much capable of mass murder, as was recently demonstrated by the US “coalition” bombings of Mosul and Raqqa, which now lay in ruins. Similar wanton acts of mass murder have been committed America’s Saudi-Arabian proxy in Yemen, and by their Ukrainian proxies in the Donbass.
But even the opportunities to commit mindless mass murder with impunity are now becoming fewer and farther between, forcing the US to resort to more boutique acts of violence. To justify these acts, the US (and much of Europe) curtains itself off from the rest of the world using an elaborately constructed wall of complete nonsense.
A favorite trope has to do with dreamed-up chemical weapons as the main frightener. Take a look at the recent Israeli rocket attack on Syria. It was justified using obviously fake video footage produced by the White Helmets—a group known for staging fake terror events. At this point, they don’t even care how fake their product looks: this time around, they didn’t bother editing out the clapper (used to sync up video with sound). The setting was obviously a movie set, but production values were rather missing. Instead, we had actors, some wearing white helmets, but no protective gear whatsoever, dumping buckets of water over shivering children. How is that even supposed to make any sense?
And then note that the rockets (five which got shot down by the Syrians, with only three making it through) came from Israel. Why Israel? Because the Russians had warned the US that they knew the fake chemical weapons provocation was being organized as a pretext to launch a rocket attack, and that they were going to shoot not just at the rockets but also at those who launch them. Therefore, Americans decided that it would be too risky to launch the attack from navy ships, and instead asked the Israelis to do the honor of lobbing a few missiles at a remote airbase in Syria, correctly thinking that the Russians wouldn’t immediately retaliate against Israel if no Russians would hurt, and knowing that there would be no Russians at that airbase during their attack. This is, on the one hand, quite pathetic, but on the other it shows that the Americans are still capable of a modicum of rational thought.
This, then is the strange period of history we are going through. The US is lying nonstop (since truth is not on its side) while pretending to still be dangerous by committing wanton acts of mass murder (small-scale ones, which it can be sure to carry out with impunity).
Meanwhile, both national suicide (via large-scale war) and the decision to shut down the whole imperial project both remain politically impossible. How long this strange, unstable period of murderous nonsense can persist isn’t known—your guess is as good as mine—but it obviously can’t go on for ages.
Give it a few years, or less.
Perhaps you can understand why Rush Limbaugh is not talking about this kind of analysis, or why Alex Jones isn’t. Or why Politico or the Huffington Post isn’t. Or why MSNBC isn’t.
Their calculus uses examples of news articles that are not well-promoted in the USA.
Their conclusions are based on unflattering narratives.
The key players involved in the decision making process are not glorified.
Thus this kind of opinion will not be promoted in any of the “approved” American media. Neither the mainstream, the Alt-Right or the Alt-Left.
Times have changed all across the board. America is nothing like it was intended to be. Instead it is a prison-nation that enslaves citizens under a service-for-self oligarchy run by psychopaths. And us “Joe Averages” haven’t any say in the matter.
America Has Traded God for Empire, Narcissism, Militarism, Usury, Sodomy
Fr. Joseph Gleason, is editor of the website titled “Russian Faith” . In this article he explains America’s current predicament. This article comes from the Russian Insider archives and was first published on RI in February 2019. It is written by Mark Dankof on Wed, Oct 21 2020 | 1120 words 8,438 Comments . All credit to the author.
America Has Traded God for Empire, Narcissism, Militarism, Usury, Sodomy
It goes without saying that Father Joseph Gleason of Russian Faith is making his mark in the world for the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. His theological journey has finally taken him into the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church. Geographically, the journey he and his family have embarked upon has taken them from the United States to Russia and a place called Rostov-The-Great. His is a story worth following on an ongoing basis. I sense his personal odyssey may prove larger in history than he or anyone else imagines right now.
His most recent entry on the Russian Faith website is entitled, “Homosexuals Persecuting Christians in America: Do You Feel The Walls Closing In?”
This marvelous piece is 5,050 words long. My succinct initial response to his labors before even reading the essay itself was–and is–a simple “Yes.”
I do not come to this conclusion quickly or without study and engagement. Since 9-11, I have set aside most of the rest of my life to attempt to bring the people of America to an awareness of how late the hour is, and the perilous state of both individual souls and a collective people that has turned its back on God in favor of an Empire built on narcissism, militarism, usury, and sodomy.
But the painful truth is that I have failed.
I have lost 17 years of my life in the process. I admitted as much some years ago in a well publicized essay entitled, “Why We’re Finished.” Later, I found myself being pilloried by the Jerusalem Post and the international Jewish press for telling Press TV Iran the truth after the infamous Obergefell Supreme Court decision of 2015 about who played a pivotally disproportionate role in bringing this latest advance of Cultural Marxism to pass in the United States, as was the case in the Roe v Wade decision of January of 1973.
Joseph Biden said the same thing I did, only he hailed the development as a new dawning in America.
I didn’t.
Thus, I was in the cross-hairs of the usual suspects. Not one of my Lutheran colleagues in the United States came to my public defense. I was on my own and I knew it, just as I have been for years in these circles for discussing 9-11, Empire foreign and military policy, the Kennedy Assassination, and the abortion and LGBTQ issues among many others.
Nothing in the last 4 years has changed the equation.
I said as much in an essay entitled, “A ‘Communist’s’ Thoughts on the 4th of July,” appropriately retitled, “Russia is a Beacon of Promise for a Christian Future” for Russia Faith and Russian Insider readers.
The thousands of hits on those sites revealed I had struck a chord or a raw nerve depending on the perspective of the reader, which is why editors like Charles Bausman and Father Joseph Gleason have increasingly come under attack by MSM rags in the United States like The Daily Beast as agents of the Kremlin, which assaulted me well before it did these fine people. I wore that as a badge of honor. I still do.
Which brings me back to Father Gleason’s latest post. His conclusions about what the LGBTQ movement and the power elite’s goals are in both the United States and globally in regard to authentic Christianity and its adherents are no different than what Rod Dreher wrote in Time Magazine after the Obergefell decision, only sharper in focus in the implications. This sharpening of focus leads the American Christian who prayerfully contemplates the reality of the homeland advances of the New World Order to examine his or her position very carefully as the Holy Spirit of God leads and directs.
For the record, after examination over time, I humbly conclude personally that:
1) Father Joseph Gleason has made the right decision for himself and his family in moving to Russia;
2) Recent developments in that country and elsewhere make it clear to me that Orthodoxy is especially being used of God in the proclamation of the Gospel in an age of advancing heresy and apostasy–not declining Lutheranism, Catholicism, or a Protestant Evangelical movement overcome with worship of Zionism and increasing pop accommodation to cancerous American and European cultures headed for absolute shipwreck;
3) For young believers around the world including a couple I have recently read about in Brazil, and young American Christians feeling bewildered and embattled as they Feel the Walls Closing In, examine the Lord’s will very closely in regard to the beckoning of Father Gleason and his migrating minions to the place that the Triune God is restoring at this eschatological hour in history to counter the evil plans of a Western Globalist and Zionist movement bent on using moral and sexual perversion, mass media manipulation, consumerism, economic sanctions, and overt military aggression to achieve Satan’s final victory in this present realm;
4) The latest actions of the United States in the Ukraine in sewing discord in the Orthodox Church only underscore the depths to which the political leadership in America will go on behalf the objectives of the New World Order, along with the entire spectrum of moves being made by The Empire against Iran, Syria, Russia, and Venezuela;
5) When all of this is understood in discernment by the Christian believer in the West in terms of prophetic developments, those of us whose circumstances mandate remaining in our earthly homeland in exile must do so only in the clear understanding that the outcome is not merely an exilic experience of alienation and marginalization, but one which promises martyrdom itself.
My last public address to a Lutheran group discussed this.
I’m still not sure those in the lecture hall in upstate Wisconsin last year really had the foggiest notion of what I was trying to say in the Lord to them. But Father Joseph Gleason knows of what I speak, and so do most of his readers at Russian Faith.
There are a few Christian homeschoolers in Texas who certainly understand. For those in the United States and the West in a position to make choices for themselves and their families on the basis of their individual circumstances and Christian witness for the truth in history, follow him to higher ground.
Get out of Dodge while you can.
I believe God has truly raised this man up at this most critical and final hour in world and redemptive history. Consider his witness and his words carefully. That is my best advice to you. The clock is ticking to midnight.
Wholesome tradition or degenerate empire, take your pick
His opinion is dire and gloomy. He does not feel that he is free to practice his religious freedom, nor raise his family safely or properly in the United States. There was a time, don’t you know, where this was the measurement by which the “freedom” and “liberty” offered by the United States was measured. But it no longer exists.
You will note that none of the American government controlled media; the mainstream, the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right will cover this subject it’s all the same nonsense. Over and over.
Ugh! When I think about the United States government, I get a headache. I just want to chill out and be left alone.
American Collapse – Great Podcast About How and When – with James Howard Kunstler
Now, we go to James Howard Kunstler.
“Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s … and to express itself first in the financial markets …”
This article from our archives was first published on Russian Insider in April 2018. Written by Mr James Howard Kunstler on Mon, Dec 14 2020 | 1000 words 11,640 Comments . All credit to the author.
American Collapse - Great Podcast About How and When - with James Howard Kunstler
I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago.
Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station so something more dire.
Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower.
The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.)
Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep our networks of dynamic systems running.
A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the unraveling of these systems might be.
When civilizations crumble, it tends to fast-track.
The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work.
In any case, the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 AD).
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin.
Our financialized economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91.
Of course, it happened against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence.
At least for now.
The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too.
If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness.
Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over.
Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.
It’s heavy dose of “doom and gloom”, but you know, I am much more optimistic about the future.
There will be an American collapse, and systems are in place to keep it localized to the North American hemisphere. There will be economic global ramifications of course, and no nation will really remain unscathed, but the vast amount of damage and hurt will be in America. And of that, it will be localized. If you are prudent and a member of a local community, you should be able to weather “the storm”, and you and yours will survive to carry on through the 2030’s and 2040’s.
Perhaps is best if Americans believe that the rest of the world is a “shit hole”.
The rest of the world is actually quite beautiful.
AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch
And another article from James Howard Kunstler. This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in September 2017, with a reprint on Sunday, Dec 13 2020 | 900 words 18,995 Comments.
“This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.”
AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch
Poor old Karl Marx, tortured by boils and phantoms, was right about one thing: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Thus, I give you the Roman Empire and now the United States of America. Rome surrendered to time and entropy. Our method is to drive a gigantic clown car into a ditch.
Is anyone out there interested in redemption?
I have an idea for the political party out of power, the Democrats, sunk in its special Okefenokee Swamp of identity politics and Russia paranoia: make an effort to legislate the Citizens United calamity out of existence.
Who knows, a handful of Republicans may be shamed into going along with it.
For those of you who have been mentally vacationing on Mars with Elon Musk, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010) — which determined that corporations had the right, as hypothetical “persons,” to give as much money as they liked to political candidates.
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We've made important contributions to world culture
This “right” devolved from the First Amendment of the constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said — giving money to political candidates and causes amounts to “freedom of speech.” The Citizens United ruling opened the door for unlimited election spending by corporations and enormous mischief in our national life. Then-President Obama — a constitutional law professor before his career in politics — complained bitterly about the opinion days later in his State of the Union address, saying that the court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”
And for the next seven years he did absolutely nothing about it, nor did the Democratic Party majority in congress. Rather, they vacuumed in as much corporate campaign money as possible from every hokey political action committee (PAC) from sea to shining sea, especially in the 2016 presidential election starring Hillary “It’s My Turn” Clinton. It turned out to not be her turn in large part because the voters noticed the stench of corruption wafting off this toxic flow of corporate money, which Hillary was using to vastly outspend her billionaire opponent, troll that he was.
It's been a heck of a ride, and it's coming to an end ...
Of course, corporations have not always been what they are deemed to be today. They evolved with the increasingly complex activities of industrial economies. Along the way — in Great Britain first, actually — they were deemed to exist as the equivalent of legal persons, to establish that the liabilities of the company were separate and distinct from those of its owners. In the USA, forming a corporation usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century. After that, they merely had to register with the states. Then congress had to sort out the additional problems of giant “trusts” and holding companies (hence, anti-trust laws, now generally ignored).
In short, the definition of what a corporation is and what it has a right to do is in a pretty constant state of change as economies evolve. And insofar as the current economy is sinking like the USS Titanic — and our republic as a mode of governance with it — surely the time has come to redefine in legislation the role and existential nature of a corporation in this polity. This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.
The crux of the argument is that corporations cannot be said to be entirely and altogether the equivalent of persons for all legal purposes. In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the public interest. And insofar as elections are fundamentally matters of the public interest, corporations must be prohibited from efforts to influence the outcome of elections.
That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative. Do something useful. Draw up some legislation. Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country.
Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.
Politics are a pin in the ass, but even those outside of the USA can see that the United State is wholly out of control. “What planet do they live on” is a common phrase that I am starting to hear in day to day conversation.
For the rest of us, the craziness of Washington DC doesn’t resemble anything in our normal day-to-day lives…
Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake
Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions – “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.”
“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”
This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in November 2017. Written by Dmitry Orlov Fri, Dec 11 2020 | 1610 words 43,193 Comments .
Dear America - You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake
Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.
I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.
American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase:
“That’s not gonna work.”
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The end is near ...
Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yada-yada, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not gonna work.”
And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.
I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.
America seems to be blissfully unaware of how it comes across to the rest of the world
It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.
Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.
It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.
The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.
Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.
It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.
But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.
Internationally, for example:
• Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.
• Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.
• Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.
• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.
All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.
In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.
The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.
Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.
The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.
The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.
Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.
And time has proven him to be correct.
Remember that the American government controls all mainstream, and Alt-Left and Alt-Right media inside of America.
Now that it is official, and Biden is President, I scan the “news”…
Suddenly all the anti-China narrative has collapsed. the only anti-China article (15DEC20) that I can find is this one…
And this is just “only” a lite narrative with some segmented Chinese political infighting. Nothing about how horrible and awful China is. Not like before. But compared to the average of five to twelve articles per day about how terrible China is, this is really nothing.
Russian Missile Tech has Made America’s Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete
“Times have changed and America can no longer project its military power like it did in Iraq. Those days are over. ”
This article from the archives was first published on RI in April 2018. Written by Dmitry Orlov Fri, Dec 11 2020 | 1400 words 52,084 Comments
Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas. Since much of the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able to put local populations at their mercy.
A financially crippling military brontosaurus
The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient, and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the scope of their naval empires. This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium.
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world. Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its protection. Nevertheless, by using its naval power to dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil be traded in US dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the world to invest in them.
It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of people across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either absolute or relative terms. When this debt bomb finally explodes, it will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And it will explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world through American naval and air superiority, stops working.
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat. Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada. More recently, this meant that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily.
But this has now changed:
Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier. The American armada can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more aircraft carriers.
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems. These systems can essentially seal off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range.
With its naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is also the nuclear option.
And while its nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents. Their special value is in preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point. But that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance.
Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it would be a suicidal move.
What the US now faces is essentially a financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump.
It should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is going broke.
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation.
Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing. Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape.
And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria.
Where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria. The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the point.
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen (in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated).
Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors, for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well.
It is also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is politically capable.
Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate, which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate. There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation for more US sanctions).
In short, take away the defense stimulus, and the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually diminishing hissing noise.
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and defense establishments have now been neutralized.
My prediction is that America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations due to lack of funds.
There may still be a few loud bangs before it gives up, but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering.
That’s how the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.
Things are in the process of change. It is my hope that the changes will be calm and peaceful, but those that live off the old systems will fight “tooth and nail” against change.
The United States fields some very impressive and advanced military systems. But [1] are they sustainable against a large and peer-capable, aggressive nations? And if they are, [2] is it worth the risk of mutual global annihilation for the egos of the psychopathic American leadership?
The United States fields some very impressive and advanced military systems.
.
But you know, I fear that I am not making my point clear. War is not something that you read about in your daily feed. It is something that you endure with heartache and sadness. It is something that destroys relationships, cultures and societies. It destroys civilizations. But the psychopaths don’t care. But you and I should…
War is horrible. It is nothing that should be taken lightly.
.
War is a horror.
Things are dire.
From my email feed…
We are in a situation bleaker than during the last Cold War, and similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And US media is not reporting on any of it. Most of you know this. But I'm posting it because it points out things that most people don't know, because it's suppressed.
This interview with Ray McGovern, who advised US presidents and briefed them daily for many years talks about the very precarious state of US Russia relations. Frankly this dwarfs controversy about the election.
Please watch this. And share with friends and family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHaBjdRI-DU
Many people who live outside the United States think that the USA is a corrupt nation that is bound to collapse any day now.
EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s
“Two reasons: complexity, and too much money .”
This article from the Russia Insider archives was first published on RI in April 2018. It was written by Jacob Dreizin Wed, Dec 9 2020 | 2300 words 52,407 Comments
EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia's
The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring - and it's worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less
Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.
So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America — I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)
First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.
We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.
(America's latest fighter which has turned into a spectacular technical failure and massive ($1.5 trillion!) expense - see our super-popular article about how this plane stacks up against the Russian competition- edit)
Just consider the most basic item, the M-16.
The M-16 Assault Rifle
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission. In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment.
And why?
Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.
Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped. Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can-openers to spray lead under any conditions. In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn't work well.
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)
The M-1 Abrams tank
Another great example - this can be a real dog. The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance. (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?) Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue. But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar "power packs" had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.
Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field. All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense. At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.
Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.
The Basic Problem : Excessive Complexity
I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance. This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces. After all, every military reflects its own society.
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.
But so much for American equipment per se. Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices - edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale
It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.) Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations. Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.
Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped. That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!
Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes? Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?
My brain cannot even wrap around this. Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?
However, even that pales before the Army's cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of "Roomba" vacuum cleaner fame. In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)
As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.
US intelligence agencies have the same problem
This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…” In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.
As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass. (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)
Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings? Apparently not!
Bureaucratic bloat
On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing.
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract. (I have seen this many times in Washington.)
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved
So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole. We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it.
Really? How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.
Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)
How did they do it?
Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) - had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce. Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist. Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.
Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.
No hope for change going forward
So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.
Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.
And you know what? Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse.
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don't have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.
Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony. Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.
But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China's little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country's imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures.
In fact, I would say we are at that point already. Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable. (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)
So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach. That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can.
The threshold has been reached and it's all downhill from here.
This is all pretty much standard knowledge within the defense industry. The MIL-STD-810 (whatever revision it is now) is all about this particular issue. But the things is that the money is NOT in making better weapons systems for use, but rather as a system to make a lot of money to the owners of the military-industrial industry.
And that is already very well known.
Many people who live outside the United States think that the USA is a corrupt nation that is bound to collapse any day now.
Russia’s Airborne Forces Differ Greatly from NATO’s (Cool Video)
Many analysts consider them the best in the world and totally unique. Why?
They are much bigger (50,000 troops fully combat ready)
They are mechanized (they parachute heavy equipment in with troops)
They are constantly innovating and have legendary esprit de corps
Interesting: They include a saint among their veterans
-This article from our archives was first published on RI in August 2015
Russia's Airborne Forces Differ Greatly from NATO's (Cool Video)
What I want to share with you today is a promo movie by Zvezda TV, the semi-official TV channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense, at the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the Russian Airborne Forces. So don’t expect a hard-hitting documentary asking the tough questions and making critical comments.
However, this is nonetheless a very interesting video and when I saw it, I begged Alena Scarecrow and Tatzhit to translate and subtitle it, which they very kindly did. Before letting you watch the video, I would like to share with you a few thoughts about the Russian Airborne Forces (called ‘VDV’ in Russian) and about their military, social, political and even spiritual role in modern Russia.
The Russian Airborne Forces
The Russian VDV are truly an absolutely unique phenomenon and they should not be confused with any other airborne force.
For one thing, the VDV are fully mechanized.
Firstly. So while they are ‘paratroopers’, these paratroopers are not just light infantry (like, say, the US 82nd AB), but a very mobile force, fully mechanized and with a *lot* of firepower. In the movie you are about to watch, you will see some of their armored vehicles and artillery pieces which, uniquely, can also be delivered by parachute. What the movie does not show is the artillery of the VDV which includes such systems as the 2S9 Nona, the D-30 howitzer or the 2S25 self-propelled tank destroyer.
Second, the VDV are a numerically huge force which currently totals 50’000 men and includes 5 Airborne Divisions and 6 Airborne Brigades (including the 45th Special Forces of the VDV Brigade). All of them air-deployable and on a top-level or readiness.
Thirdly, the VDV truly are the embodiment of military valor and tactical skills and they have played an absolutely crucial role in many Soviet and Russian battles, but probably never more so than during the worst tragedy in their long history: the battle for Ulus-Kert in which the entire 6th Airborne company perished.
I don’t have the space and time to recount in detail what happened on that day of early 2000 but to those interested by this amazing event I would recommend the article “ULUS-KERT: An Airborne Company’s Last Stand” by Sergeant Michael D. Wilmoth, US Army Reserve, and Lieutenant Colonel Peter G. Tsouras, US Army Reserve, Retired, in the Military Review of July-August 1991, pp 91-96 (click here for this article reposted on this blog). Keep in mind that this article was not written by the promotions department of Zvezda TV, but by two US military experts who are very critical of many aspects of what took place that day (and rightly so).
What is absolutely crucial for the understanding of the importance of this battle for Hill 776 in Ulus-Kert is that the year 2000 marked the absolute rock-bottom of the “democratic experiment” (aka the American colonization) of Russia.
Yes, Putin has just come to power, but the country was absolutely devastated by a decade of Soviet stagnation followed by another decade of “democratic reforms” and Putin was just making his very first steps as a new head of state.
What the 6th company achieved on Hill 776 was an immense wake-up call to the entire Russian nation saying “enough is enough” and “not one single step back”.
The article by Wilmoth and Tsouras accurately describes all the failures in command and execution which resulted in the tragedy of the 6th company, but it is precisely these failures which made the sacrifice of these men so amazing: the country had essentially abandoned its own military, but the young men of the VDV did not hesitate to die, all of them, to resist the face of evil (and, in those days, nothing embodied absolute evil as much as the Chechen Wahabis and their reign of terror and medieval atrocities).
It is hard to over-estimate the contribution which the Russian Airborne Forces have made to the rebirth of Russia. But this goes even further.
I strongly believe that it is not a coincidence that the Russian Airborne Forces have even produced an Orthodox martyr and saint: Evgenii Aleksandrovich Rodionov. You can read a short summary of the life and death of Rodionov in the Wikipedia article under his name.
Evgenii Rodionov, photo and icon
Evgenii Rodionov, photo and icon
What is so important about the case of Rodionov is that died as a martyr because he refused to abandon his Orthodox faith and that his podvig (spiritual feat) happened away from everybody at a time when, as the sad expression went, “every boy wanted to become a criminal thug and every girl a prostitute” as people used to say in 1996, in the midst of the “democratic hell” Russia had become.
Though I cannot prove it, I am personally deeply convinced that the fact that Rodionov was a solider of the Airborne Forces is not a coincidence. I have met enough Airborne officers and soldiers myself and I know that their level of patriotism and spiritual awareness is exceptionally high because they live by an honor code, an ideal, which has it roots in the most ancient Russian military traditions which have always been immersed in spiritual and moral values far beyond just winning a battle.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that all the soldiers of the VDV are some kind of invincible saints or anything like that. Far from it. It is enough to see the footage of the kind of silly drunken nonsense these guys display each August 2nd (the day of the Holy Prophet Elijah, Patron of the Russian Airborne Forces) to lose any such illusions:
And one reality should not overshadow the other one: they are both equally Russian and equally typical of the VDV.
What I am trying to illustrate by all of the above is that the Russian Airborne Forces are an absolutely unique, and uniquely Russian, phenomenon and that they are a truly formidable force by any measure. Now for a more US-style promo movie, with lot’s of high-tech hardware and “cool” shots, please see the following video.
It will show you that the Russian VDV are also very modern and forward looking military forces with over 85 years of development behind their back. And, having watched that video, ask yourself this simple question: how impressed to you think these guys are with the new multi-national NATO “spearhead” and “rapid reaction” forces?
The day of the Holy Prophet Elijah, Patron of the Russian Airborne Forces.
You know…
Yeah, you know, that it’s a really cold day in Hell when the American news would say anything good about any other military force, whether it is Russian on Chinese. But here, on MM we try to provide insight.
As I have tried to state elsewhere, if you want to hear about what other narrative is being promoted in the American echo chambers (election fraud, political bribes, mind control, etc) you need not come to MM. This is a completely different type of site. We are not a “me too” of the preferred NSA narrative venue cabal.
Here’s a taste of what the echo chambers in the USA report on Chinese and Russian military forces… America is the best! America is the largest, strongest and best trained. China and Russia military are “push overs”. We are undefeated, and the most powerful military in the history of the world!
American military in the eyes of American media.
.
The experts have spoken and Americans are ready to die for “their” country…
Russia
NotSoScary: ThisIsWhy Russia's Military IsaPaperTiger.CertainlyMoscow’s military forceswillcontinuetomodernize, but Russian military might—otherthanitsnuclearforces—isan ...
-National Interest
Russia banned from using its name, flag at next two Olympics
Russia will not be able to use its name, flag and anthem at the next two Olympics or at any world championships for the next two years after a ruling Thursday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
In other words: this doping scandal never existed; but it was never about sports: it is all - and always was - about propaganda. Russian athletes will continue to compete normally - only without the Russian symbols.
This is a clear attack against Russia.
China
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Wednesday that while China has more ships, it'll be a while before it can match the power of the US Navy.
"I want to make clear that China cannot match the United States when it comes to naval power," Esper explained at a RAND Corporation event.
"Even if we stopped building new ships, it would take the [People's Republic of China] years to close the gap when it comes to our capability on the high seas," he said. "Ship numbers are important, but they don't tell the whole story."
And of course, there is the obligatory bullshit reporting on how strange China is. Uh. Sure….
Is this a thing? Only inside American newspapers.
.
Meanwhile…
What does all this mean?
Well, I have been promoting the idea that America as it stands today is not sustainable. But I am NOT a “lone voice in the wilderness”. Many others have also made these observations. For instance…
Other opinions.
.
But you all don’t need to be a reader to follow this. All you need to do is take a casual look around you. Just look.
Fight Club.
.
The stench of decay permeates America at all levels…
Women offer sex for McDonald’s food.
.
Not yet convinced?
I guess that sex comes cheaply in the United States.
.
I guess that if the American leadership are all psychopaths, and that they rigged the elections in their favor so that the serf-slaves serve them, then everything is pretty much following the natural progression of order. It ‘s a stratification of society into a ruler class and a servant class, and that’s just the way it is. If this keeps up, castes will form, and America will resemble the caste system within India.
Any your boys and girls who read this will be in the lower, servant, classes.
If not, then the United States will collapse upon itself. Which is why everyone is writing about this issue, no one wants to face the idea that the USA can continue and be permitted to set up a stratified society. One of the Haves, and the other a “disposable class”.
So, as uncomfortable as it is, let’s all hope for the collapse of the USA.
It’s very difficult to argue otherwise.
.
Let’s trust that the global oligarchy have successfully managed to isolate the USA on the global stage to the extent that any damage during the American meltdown will be limited to the North American region. I sincerely hope that this remains the case.
That is my “gut” feeling. And that is what I am betting on.
But others seem to think that if America collapses, then the entire world will collapse as well. In their minds the USA …IS THE WORLD. And thus it’s collapse will destroy the world (more or less). Nope.
Nope.
Not true.
But you can read for yourself and come to your own conclusions…
That Collapse You Ordered…?
I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep our networks of dynamic systems running.
A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the unraveling of these systems might be. When civilizations crumble, it tends to fast-track. The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. In any case, the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 AD).
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin. Our financialized economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Of course, it happened against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. At least for now. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.
Conclusion
I need a beer.
…
[Result 1] So all evidence points to a massive collapse with the inclusion of civil strife, civil war, and global war set up as distractions that quickly get out of hand.
If this does not happen…
[Restult 2] Then evidence points to a fully enslaved nation of dumbed-down slaves that service the wealthy in a forced stratification system that would resemble the caste system in India.
You will not hear any of this in the American “news” because you are not to know of it. Your rulers are all psychopaths that indeed want either of the two outcomes to manifest. They want either result one or two. Nothing else is acceptable to them.
Some John Titor Stuff…
John Titor visits to our primary world line template, showing the deviation values.
A final Thought
And my thoughts…
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Well, I just received a comment that I have been living in China too long. That I have lost my understanding about what America is, what it stands for, and yada, yada, yada. Yeah, I get it. I am not promoting any of the narratives out of the American government. So therefore, I must be a traitor!
A quick recap for anyone who doesn’t understand what I am talking about;
The United States government controls ALL American for-profit media.
The mainstream media was acquired in the 1980’s.
The Alt-Left was acquired around 2000.
The Alt-Right was acquired in the second decade of 2000.
If you listen or read anything out of any of those media sources, then you are feeding at the trough of the American Government. And as such, you are believing everything Washington DC wants you to believe.
MSNBC = USA Government.
Huffington Post = USA Government.
Rush Limbaugh = USA Government.
Polico = USA Government.
Alex Jones = USA Government.
Yeah. Do you “get it”?
Take note that Rush Limbaugh is functionally a mouth-piece for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. At NO time has he ever said anything in disagreement with him, his actions, or his activities. While it might have "questioned" them, they would always turn that questioning into something favorable.
They are not “independent” and represent an alternate view. They are snares that trap people of similar mindsets into an environment where the government can intentionally manipulate…and control.
If you enjoy the “alternative media”, then you are caught up in the government propaganda snare.
The only non-influenced sources of information on the Internet are “independent bloggers”. And of that, it’s a mixed bag. With many simply placing their opinions and observations based upon the (government controlled) Alternative narratives instead of their own first-hand experiences.
Regarding the derogatory comments. It’s what happens when the uninformed stumble upon Metallicman. They read an article or two, come to some snap and quick opinions before going through the voluminous stacks of information and come to conclusions.
They cannot see what this venue is, what it represents, and how it is different. They are searching for articles that they believe or that they want to believe. And NO ONE in American want’s to see the truth. They want to live the lies that they are being spoon-fed. Which are…
America is the best,the greatest, the most powerful nation on the Earth.
The USA is blessed by God, and give domination over all else.
Americans are better, kinder, and more understanding than the rest of the world.
And if you mostly follow the Alt-left sites…
America is growing in diversity, allowing for differences in individuality.
America is historically corrupt and is in the process of correction.
Russia is behind all the problems in America today.
But if you mostly follow the Alt-Right sites…
A Marxist takeover is imminent.
The Progressives are going to disarm you, and probably do nasty things.
China is behind all the evil in America today.
It’s all nice to read. If a bit terrifying. Over all, it tends to make you feel good about yourself and help you reach out to others of a similar mind-set. That’s why it is called an echo chamber. But, a lot of it is not really true. Not by a long shot.
Yes. There are going to be some dicey times ahead for America.
Yes. Some Progressive Marxists are going to secure areas near urban areas using historically successful methods.
Yes. Changes are going to be implemented that not everyone will agree with.
Yes, there will be some conflict and confrontations, and maybe a very nasty global war as a result of the American idiocy.
But it’s going to be in fits and starts. It’s going to be confined to certain regions, and might not affect everyone.
Probably not.
But what is going to actually happen will not be what is being presented in any of the government controlled media. They do not want the citizens to know what is going on. Instead, they have set the media on “auto pilot” and they are leading their readership towards blind alleys and dangerous objectives. All for the government to capitalize upon.
Within the first year of the Biden Presidency; 2021 will be a horrific gun-related event. The media will launch into a hysterical anti-gun campaign. And this will kick off a serious escalation of the ongoing American Civil War.
…
What follows are just glimpses into the “mixed bag” of what the world is today. In short, it is just a bunch a stuff about America, good and bad. It doesn’t necessarily mean that America is horrible, but rather that the alarm bells have been going off for decades now. The USA is in a shit-load of hurt, and unless people start taking active and proactive steps to correct things, a big fiery catastrophe is sure to follow.
Just because you live in a nice home, drive a nice car, and eat nice food does not mean that you are successful. It just means that you are thriving in an environment AT THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT IN TIME. Unless you are able to determine the duration of this environment, you are just living on “borrowed time” and your future can change in unsavory ways unless you take adequate precautions.
So first, an opinion…
Even if the American people wake up, it will not help because they'll have to first look in the mirror.
The American people are not pawns. They elect the war-mongers and give them impunity. They pay taxes to feed the beasts of war. They send their sons and daughters to perform the atrocities for their ruling class masters. As long as the American people continue to live in the lie of their hypocrisy, they cannot be saved.
Ask yourself how is it possible for 99% to be ruled and fooled by the 1% in a democratic and free society if the people don't allow it?
It won't even happen in an authoritarian society.
Don't blame it on the ruling class and the war-mongers because the American people empower them.
Don't blame it on the freedom-to-lie free press because the people want the freedom to lie and slander. Why else would Americans accept 250,000 deaths and blame everything on China?
In fact, if this happened in China, such egregious liars and perpetrators of atrocities would be festooned on trees. China does have a long and rich history of peasant rebellions. Don't blame it on that nebulous "they." Blame it on ourselves. We have met the enemy and he is us.
By the way, globalization is an American idea. America has the dollar hegemony. It buys everything with money it prints. Others must earn that US dollar in order to pay for things that they need for development and trade.
America is the wealthiest, most powerful, and freest country in the world, why would the people want shit jobs mining or making shoes at minimum wage? In American politics, everyone wants jobs. Have the American people turned to brainless zombies? Do people want the freedom to be ignorant? Why would they need 80-hour a week shit jobs that pay two dollars an hour so their children can grow up without a family?
China sacrificed a generation of its people to working in shit jobs for Americans so China's children can get educated and be more competitive in the global market dominated by America and the West. Americans don't need jobs. They need the basic guarantee of a home, healthcare, education, food, and the means to communicate. They can use their spare time to stop raping and bombing other countries, sanctioning whoever whenever for whatever reasons, and travel the world to learn about how to live and let live.
The American people are not pawns. They are America. Wake up indeed and look in the mirror. Change yourself and then go out and change America. That is the only hope for America and the only possibility of peace for the rest of the world.
Peter Man
Toronto
Let’s take a look at things from my point of view. Here’s what America is…
Politics
The worst, absolutely worst thing in America today is the political scene. Lordy, it is awful. I try to avoid it, but no matter what I do, it sort of creeps up on me and throws me to the ground. Screeching in agony and writhing in pain.
Here’s a twitter about the election of 2020, and an opinion about the election loss by Donald Trump…
Ouch!
Look guys, part of the problem with America today isn’t just one singular person, or their behaviors. It is the accumulation of decades if not centuries of selfish, intentional mismanagement. So don’t get too down on Mr. Trump, there’s lots of blame to go around.
Yes, it is so easy to point to a figurehead, a media celebrity or anyone else who is well-known and famous, we really do need to get to take a full “360 degree review” audit…
And, you know, it’s not all bad…
Of course it’s not all bad.
Here are some positive things that show the general resourcefulness of Americans during the entire horrible COVID-19 pandemic…
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And no it isn’t. But you know we need to look at the good along with the bad to see the bigger picture. Instead of showing all doom and gloom, we have to look at the positive elements of life in the USA, don’t you know.
Here is what I call innovation…
Real Innovation.
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Now this is something that I wholeheartedly support.
Messed up?
But the fact is that the United States is terribly messed up. It really is, and even though we look at the good inside America, it’s usually on a small level – a interpersonal level where it manifests. Anything on a large scale is corrupted beyond functionality.
In an attempt to change what is wrong with the United States, those in power want the citizens to change. And to change their history, their cultures and their society. Not change the ruling class. That is fucked up.
Medicine
We’ve all heard a thing or two about the American healthcare system. To put it simply—it’s probably not the best system in the world. Well, as a person who has used medical systems in other parts of the world, I can pretty much say that the American system is perhaps one of the worst.
People who get ill are often left with huge debts, it costs hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars to call an ambulance. It’s an out-of-control for-profit mechanism, and it is running amok. Heck, hospitals in America even charge you for “skin to skin” contact when you give birth to your child.
That is not a “great” system. Rather it is a wholly corrupt one.
When it comes to medicine, the situation seems even direr. Recently, Emily Porter, a doctor based in Austin, Texas, shared an infuriating Twitter thread about the cost of drugs and ridiculous markups on medicine.
The thread shared by an Austin-based MD has caused quite a stir and received more than 56k likes and over 18k retweets. A lot of people on Twitter found the thread infuriating. “Why aren’t Americans smashing [things] up over this and demanding a better system?” someone tweeted. “The worst thing is that American healthcare ideology is bleeding over the pond. There needs to be some direct action ASAP.”
Uh. Well DUH! But you know, if you are an American, that nothing is going to change. Those in power are far too powerful. You just cannot do anything about it.
I can tell you that this medicine is actually very cheap in the rest of the world, and inside of China, not only do you NOT need a doctors’ prescription (and the costs for a visit), but a bottle of 50 pills of Ondansetron OD is under $2.
CARE ACT
Well… Trump promised to change things and make America great again. And he went about changing the Healthcare system. He scrapped the “Affordable Care Act” and implemented the CARE Act to help people who had COVID-19 related illnesses.
The idea is that America is a nation run for the people and by the people. And this narrative is heavily promoted. But is it really true?
Let’s look at the CARE Act. In 2020, President trump pushed through, with great fanfare and loud posturing, the CARE act.
The government says (and people believe)…
The CARES Act Works for All Americans The CARES Act provides fast and direct economic assistance for American workers and families, small businesses, and preserves jobs for American industries. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was passed by Congress with overwhelming, bipartisan support and signed into law by President Trump on March 27th, 2020.
-The CARESAct Works for All Americans
And how it manifests…
How the average American benefits from the CARE Act.
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Analysis…
In the example above, the cost for the medical treatments were $41,649.50. The big, and heavily promoted “help” from the government was $371. So the measured impact of this assistance was 0.89%. Functionally equal to ZERO. Thus pretty much the American citizen must pay full price minus an insignificant amount if they catch COVID-19 and need hospitalization to any degree.
In comparison…
And I will use China in this example because that is where I live, and that is where I have data that I can use to make a comparison with. Thus, using this as a baseline. If you are in China, and you get COVID-19, all treatment is free including all associated hospital costs.
Hospital treatment for COVID-19 in America
$41,650
Hospital treatment for COVID-19 in China
Free
Conclusion…
Americans roar with glee! We are the best! America is number one! Hurray for us! Woo Woo. Freedom! Democracy! Yay!
Proud to be an American.
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But what about the costs, and the minuscule “help” that the government promised? Well, when you point out the facts, and the figures and the numbers the reactions are…
In America the “health care system” is a for-profit mechanism that the oligarchy uses to fleece the American citizenry. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
American health care truths.
But why is everything about money in the USA today?
Well, maybe this chart will put things into perspective.
Perspective on why.
And how it affects most people like you and I.
This chart pretty much sums up the life of a serf-sheeple, work-slave, for the Federal Government racket.
American reality.
Yeah. Let’s review…
So let’s review. On the small interpersonal level, Americans are pretty good folk. And it doesn’t matter if you are politically left or right, most are pretty decent folk. The problem comes when you start talking about larger organizations, government, programs, and money. then it’s completely “off the rails” and a complete “cluster fuck”.
And the people, independent of where they lie politically, hate this. They want to change it. They want America to survive and become something better than the fucked up mess that it is today…
… and the leadership of America know this. They have spent decades preparing for the backlash and they have systems in place to mitigate the effects of this populist revolt. The biggest and primary mechanism, the tried and true device to redirect American anger, is to identify an external threat. You identify it as evil and use it as the scapegoat from which to vilify and attack. And since the problems in America today are so horrible and out of control, the villain must be a large nation. But you all know, those large nations do not like that villainization.
So as a recap.
In 2016, under President Obama, China retained the “Most Favored Trading nation Status” as sent in place two decades earlier by Presidents Bush and Clinton. Then Donald Trump came to office. Suddenly the name of China became equated with evil, disgust and horror. Most certainly the Alt-Right promoted this narrative ruthlessly. With it all coming to a head in 2020 with China being named as “enemy”. The unleashing of biological warfare to destroy food, livestock and people, and an enormous naval armada to the South China Sea to wage war against China.
It didn’t happen.
The American military was sufficiently told to back down, and they did. The armada steamed home and Trump Fires Mark Esper, Defense Secretary as a direct result of his inability to create a war.
Well, good thing though.
I really don’t want to see Boston, New York, San Francisco, Houston, or Chicago reduced to huge craters of ruin. You see I do know a few things about China. A war with China would be fought on American soil. NOT in the far-away South China Sea.
So now…
Biden is in office, and now the narrative is going to change to Russia is the enemy.
Uh oh!
God Loves Cowboys
You all don’t know what I am talking about do you?
Aaron Watson – That’s Why God Loves Cowboys
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When America is spiraling out of control. And all the institutions, the leadership, and all the famous people are shown to be evil or incompetent or both, that is when us individuals must “step up to the plate”. And do what needs to be done.
Which is why we need to be part of a community.
We all will need to “carry our weight” to get though this time. We will all need to be strong, compassionate and helpful. Instead of embracing the hate-hate-hate narrative out of Washington DC that are using the media to pit us all one against the other, we need to unify and throw those bastards in the slammer; French Revolution style.
But they are never going to allow that.
Sanity Check
It’s so very easy to get all caught up in the nightmare that America has become. But the truth is that if you aren’t listening to the internet, and have no dealings with banks, or any government institutions, your life is pretty tranquil. The “news” floods our consciousness with dangerous and toxic shit…
It is only when the Federal Government gets into your life that you start having problems. And to this I argue that not only is the Federal Government dangerous, but that it is toxic and is a major contributor to all the ailments going on inside of America today.
The Federal Government has problems. They need to be diagnosed and corrected.
If you turn off, and tune out from anything that involves the Federal Government, your life would tend to be quieter and gentler.
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And that is pretty much the way it is.
There are a host of good things going on in the United States. You just need to appreciate them. You really need to stop all the fear-mongering. And as I have said earlier, yes there are radical elements, and their fears are being inflamed by interested Federal Government entities. Please do not fall for the fear.
Yes. Bad people are going to try to “improve” America in some way over the next few years. And, Yes, you probably won’t agree to the “improvements”. But you must realize that this roller-coaster will eventually end, and it is up to you to survive it. Do not get too caught up either way in what you read in the news. It’s mostly bullshit.
Look at the good things around you…
America is full of decent people doing good things. Do not be manipulated into thinking otherwise. Wouldn’t you enjoy a delicious icy cold beer with this delicious BBQ?
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But you do know that the rest of the world is watching America right now. They have observed Trump and the mess his neocons made, and they are watching with increased worry what the Biden Administration might do. Everyone pretty much agrees that the United States needs to identify a villain from which they can wage war upon. And if it isn’t going to be China, then it’s going to be Russia.
And Russia does not play…
As I have said before…
To repeat…
Oh, the narrative about “us vs. them” is going to continue all right. America needs an outside enemy to direct it’s frustration and anger towards. Perhaps you know what I am talking about. If you don’t read George Orwell’s book “1984” and refer to the Geo-political issues as described in that masterpiece.
The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian states (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia).
Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thought and promote the Party’s doctrines. Its words include doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), which is reflected in the Party’s slogans: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.” The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continual surveillance.
-Nineteen Eighty-four | Summary, Characters, Analysis ...
You all can consider the following Geo-Political alignments…
USA = Oceania
Russia = Eurasia
China = Eastasia
There are three major powers in the world right now.
USA = (Oceania) Oligarchy controlled military empire running amok. Populated by an intentionally dumbed down, weakened society, of work serfs. Military operations are the norm, and America is military empire with over 800+ military bases all over the globe, and currently fighting 8 hot wars. Americans view it as a normal occurrence, being in a state of war. Military is geared towards offensive conventional weapon operations outside the USA in far away lands.
Russia = (Eurasia) Fierce, pissed off people, who do not want another War where they are positioned within a defensive posture. They will NEVER allow that situation, a replay of World War II to reoccur. Russia suffered horribly during it, and Russians have never forgotten. Military is geared to preventative operations at a large and harsh scale.
China = (Eastasia) Old, smart, intelligent, and diligent. Does not want war, but will respond in a measured manner. On their terms. Using their timing. Planed for their advantage. Any attack on China will have an equal measured response within the continental United States. Military is geared towards responsive operations.
You will see the anti-China propaganda to decrease substantially and sharply, as it is already doing. And you will see a rise of anti-Russia propaganda. And I watch all this as an educated observer, and it horrifies me.
Firstly, because the lead up for war with China was so effective. Most Americans now hate China and support the idea of a (far off) war in the distant South China Sea. They actually believe that China would take the hits and not retaliate. They actually believe that it can be “contained” in a far away land. And now, soon it will change to Russia with a (supposedly) far-off war in Eastern Europe.
Secondly, that the ignorance of what China is, and what it is truly capable of is ignored, as it is discounted by most of the West. Which pretty much is the general American attitude of all other nations. And that is magnified by a factor of ten with Russia.
Thirdly, that the lead up for a war with China pretty much parallels what happened in the lead up to World War II. And we can expect it to be duplicated with Russia. So buckle up. Yeah. It’s not over yet.
Now, from my point of view, the activities will be directed towards Russia instead of China.
Yikes!
Russia? Seriously?
Russia knows whats next.
And so do the readers of MM.
The Defense Ministry said that the Vladimir Monomakh submarine of the Pacific Fleet launched four Bulava missiles in quick succession from an underwater position in the Sea of Okhotsk. Their dummy warheads hit their designated targets on the Chiza shooting range in the Arkhangelsk region in northwestern Russia more than 5,500 kilometers (over 3,400 miles) away, the ministry said in a statement.
The Vladimir Monomakh is one of the new Borei-class nuclear submarines that carry 16 Bulava missiles each and are intended to serve as the core of the naval component of the nation’s nuclear forces for decades to come. Another submarine of the same type performed a similar launch of four Bulava missiles in 2018 — a costly demonstration of the efficiency of the country’s nuclear deterrent mimicking the conditions of a major nuclear conflict.
Yikes!
In a report to President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that Saturday’s launch wrapped up large-scale drills of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces that began Wednesday. As part of those maneuvers, another Russian nuclear submarine also performed a practice launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from the Barents Sea, a ground-based ICBM was launched from the Plesetsk facility in northwestern Russia and Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic bombers fired cruise missiles at test targets at an Arctic range.
And no one in the American media are taking notes?
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So if no one is paying attention, then what are they reporting on?
Seriously. This is not note worthy, or “news” worthy?
Russia has expanded its military drills in recent years amid tensions with the West as relations have sunk to post-Cold War lows after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
The series of missile launches comes less than two months before the New START U.S.-Russian arms control treaty expires in early February. Moscow and Washington have discussed the possibility of its extension, but so far have failed to overcome their differences.
New START was signed in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. It limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.
After both Moscow and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty last year, New START is the only remaining nuclear arms control deal between the two countries still standing.
Arms control advocates have warned that its expiration would remove any checks on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, in a blow to global stability.
Ah. But Russia is not what everyone thinks.
Just like China did IN NO WAY reflects the narrative as promoted by the Alt-Right, Russia does not resemble anything that the Alt-Left is promoting either.
Russia, like China, is different from the United States, but an evil empire desirous of taking over the United States through invasion is absurd. Actually their view of America is one full of weak-wristed wimps that are living the high life because their inherited their wealth though their hard-working relatives. Now Americans are squandering what they have, and they deserve to be put back into their place…
Nah.
This is an opinion that you will not read anywhere in American media. But them again, all the sheeple must believe in their strength and ability. Even if it is a lie.
Contemporaneous Russia.
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Yeah. There’s a lot of pretty Russian girls out there in them hills. And speaking about Russian hills…
Contemporaneous Russia.
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Yeah. It looks a lot like Modern America, at least in the countryside.
And yeah. This is also modern Russia. At least there their rights to own weapons is NOT INFRINGED like in America.
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Sure, there are some cultural differences you know.
Russian wedding party.
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But that is no reason to point at them and say loudly “They are trying to steal our democracy”. Seriously that is so fucking absurd.
Absurd.
But the fact remains that facts do not matter. The USA government NEEDS to redirect attention outside of America and eight “brush wars” are no longer capable of that feat. A major serious war is necessary. And it cannot be China. Because China has clearly demonstrated that the USA will lost it’s entire Navy in the process and anger the rest of the world.
Both of which would result in unintended consequences for the American people.
Look guys…
America must stop. Just stop and get on fuck of a new type of government. If no one can think of anything, then just dissolve the federal government and resort to State Governments. Right now the Federal government is a real mess and it is going to destroy the USA in the process. The rest of the world realize this and put Trump in place to minimize the destruction to the shores of the Untied States.
Washington DC and the surrounding area will resort to a radioactive swamp / bog with ruins and with numerous and massive fresh-water craters.
Please try to avoid the red areas on the map.
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Personally, I do wish it can all be avoided, but looking at the current crop of “elected” officials, I see little hope in that happening.
So at which point I need to post this following image. You know to make it perfectly clear to the slower folk in the MM audience….
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Now what?
God, I truly hope that the crescendo rises and then falls before anything peaks. I hope that you all can say MM was full of it. I will never read his writings ever again. I hope that this is as bad as it gets and sensible people take the levers of government inside of America and steers it away, far away from the shit storm of disaster that it is barrelling towards.
I hope.
But our leadership in America doesn’t think like that. They have another view of themselves, and this view is nothing that us serf-sheeple can understand. It is alien to us.
They think of themselves as something wonderful and great.
American leadership today.
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Yikes!
So whats next?
I am predicting an American civil war from 2020 though to 2025. It will not be well reported. It will be regional and it will involve the extreme elements of both the Left and the Right, with both sides being financed by shadowy oligarchy figures and organizations. They will commit atrocities.
Atrocities will be committed..
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The Federal government will use the DHS to keep the peace. It will be hit and miss. Nothing will be reported.
Meanwhile the Federal Government would unleash a “fire hose of disinformation” an anti-Russia barrage that will make it clear that war is imminent.
Only that Russia will strike in the USA preemptively.
Russia will strike in the USA preemptively.
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The USA will suffer immense causalities. And it will end up a ruined nation, and will resemble the nations that the USA has “liberated” for “democracy” already. Like Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Liberia.
The spiritual picture
Folk, you have to realize that we think about, and what we do eventually creates OUR reality. And if America has been spending the last fifty years destroying all sorts of nations using the excuse of “democracy” then the connection between wars and democracy will strike the USA. It’s a point that I have been hammering down for just about forever.
Trust in America reaches the lowest levels in history. In one year it went from “trust” to “distrust”.
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You can call it karma or something else, but the fact is the USA is in the cross-hairs of a violent reset, of the same nature and permanency of the damage that it has set upon the rest of the world. And that’s the way it is.
Oh, perhaps you all don’t know what I am talking about when I say “karma is a bitch”…
American Improvements to Syria for “democracy”
The main reason for US intervention in Syria was the apparent use of chemical weapons by Assad outside the Syrian capital Damascus on August 21, 2013. The US has blamed the Syrian government forces for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in the attack, an accusation vehemently denied by Syria.
-Reasons for US intervention in Syria
American Improvements to Syria for “democracy”
American Improvements to Libya for “democracy”
U.S. bombs terrorist and military targets in Libya On April 14, 1986, the United States launches air strikes against Libya in retaliation for the Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.
-U.S. bombs terrorist and military targets in Libya - HISTORY
American Improvements to Libya for “democracy”
American Improvements to Afghanistan for “democracy”
The Bush administration then commenced a bombing campaign and invasion of Afghanistan, asserting the need to capture or kill bin Laden and crush his terrorist organization so that they could not launch another deadly attack on the American homeland.
-Why Did the United States Invade Afghanistan?
American Improvements to Afghanistan for “democracy”
American Improvements to Yemen for “democracy”
The United States has, for more than a year now, been quietly participating in a Saudi-led war against the Houthis, providing valuable logistical support for Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes. So this missile exchange isn’t something out of the blue. It’s an escalation of current US policy, moving from indirect to direct participation in the Saudi offensive.
-Why the hell is the US helping Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen?
American Improvements to Yemen for “democracy”
American Improvements to Iraq for “democracy”
The chief reason for U.S. involvement in the Iraq-Kuwait conflict was concern over Iraq’s antagonism to Saudi Arabia, a key Western ally. Iraq’s presence in Kuwait gave them strategic positioning in relation to Saudi Arabia.
-WhyDid the U.S. Get Involved With Iraq
American Improvements to Iraq for “democracy”
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You can call it karma or something else, but the fact is the USA is in the cross-hairs of a violent reset, of the same nature and permanency of the damage that it has set upon the rest of the world. And that’s the way it is.
You just don’t spend every day kicking dogs, and not expect to have a pack of dogs attack you. You just don’t expect to gorge yourself on food, over and over again, and not throw up. You just cannot expect to devote so much time and thought to hurting other societies and not expect it all to “come to roost” in your own backyard.
Things need to change.
Yes. Things do need to change. But the good thing is that change is how we grow as individuals. The United States is set for a massive reset, and that is going to create all sorts of opportunities for positive and constructive change. Opportunities that you can take advantage of.
Wrapping it up
Let’s try to summarize this rant-a-thon that I have been locked into today.
On a personal level, Americans are pretty decent folk. But everyone pretty much recognizes that the Federal government is a big mess.
They have poisoned everything inside the nation with their toxic ideas, and their horrible sadistic behaviors.
There are elements within this evil governance that are conspiring to “further improve” America by forcing a Civil War to “purge” it of opposition forces. It will not go as they plan.
To distract attention, a world war is necessary, and both China and Russia do not play. American leadership isn’t really aware of this disconnect, as we have seen with the Trump and Pompeo misadventures with China. We can only imagine what might happen with Russia…
And, Biden isn’t even in office yet, and already the anti-Russia narrative is in full swing…
Russia will launch a preemptive attack. America will respond with a much weaker military. Russia will get dinged. And to a lesser extent, so will China. But, for the most part, most of the remaining world will be spared. America will be in shambles.
Again, with the John Titor stuff…
Add ten years to his dates, and take notes.
Part 1 – 25:00 A message for the world leaders in government. “Revel in your confidence today, because you will not win tomorrow.”Part 2 – 1:45 “There was an armed resistance (from the cities). We killed most of them by 2020.”
Part 2 – 3:10 Question: “Why do you think that our future will be like your future?” Answer: “Because our world-lines are so similar.”
Part 2 – 12:11 “There were no Olympics after 2004.”
Part 2 – 17:40 Most people blamed the “government organizations” for the nuclear war.
Part 2 – 20:50 “When the civil war broke out most decided to stay in the cities and lose most of their civil rights in the guise of security…”
Ah. It’s crazy times that we live in, but you know, it’s NOT really as bad as the news media makes out. And I want to describe why…
Imagine
Imagine that you are a tiny small flea riding on the back of a old, crazed thrashing angry elephant. Some of your flea-friends see the jumping and the thrashing as something bad and they really want to do something about it. Every flea has an idea about what is going on and how to control it. But no one knows for sure.
The fleas are fighting among themselves and that is just fine with the elephant. As long as the fleas aren’t biting the elephant he is just fine. He doesn’t want to get bit. Not at all. He, the elephant, knows that too many flea bite can cause him to get sick and even die. So it is important that the elephant keeps all the fleas busy fighting each other, and not him.
But he is one uncomfortable elephant. He has done some bad stuff over the years and it is all starting to catch up with him.
The Western financial system is basically in a coma and kept alive only by generous IV injections of central bank liquidity. We are living the end of Western hegemony.
Today we are observing the transition from a so called unipolar world, one in which a single nation (or group of allied nations) dictates the terms of life for all global citizens, to a more balanced and natural multipolar world.
The current dominating group, the “western” bloc of nations, is led by the United States along with numerous vassal states; this order has persisted since the end of the WW2. This construct is held together using a combination of supranational organizations (UN, WTO, World Bank, IMF etc.), propaganda (mainstream media complex), armed might (MIC,NATO, private mercenary forces) & chiefly economics (central banks, corporations).
The true “rulers” of this bloc are a cabal of very wealthy & powerful oligarchs that work in the background (shadow banking, dark pool finance, shadow governments, think tanks, NGO’s) to subvert the various sovereignties to their advantage. These oligarchs are the principal owners of, not just the industries and corporations that front for them, but the governments that rule over the masses.
Most importantly this Western cabal owns the means by which real wealth extraction is carried out: fiat currency, chiefly the “worlds reserve currency”- the United States dollar and it’s derivatives.
These currencies are backed not by equitable assets; such as natural resources, precious metals or productive capacities; instead they are backed by the CREATION OF DEBT.
Debt that represents a claim on real assets that virtually all participants in global commerce must pay.
A new bloc of nations has been pushed toward an alliance.
This bloc of nations consists of principally China, Russia and Iran (“eastern bloc”). These nations are led by various actors who seem to comprehend the likely nature of the end game inherent to the current financial construction. They are out of necessity seeking a path toward a different and more balanced and hopefully sustainable economic and global governance paradigm.
-Comment by Lisa Yuen on the article titled Analyzing the Emerging World Order
He (the elephant) is now caged, loaded inside a plane and is being sent to another place. A place where he will no longer be the top-elephant. And he does not like this. Not one bit. So he is thrashing about, howling and screeching with anger at everything around him.
And you, as a lone flea, are seeing all this with worry and concern.
You also see your fellow fleas gear up towards fighting each other. That is worrisome as well. You don’t want to have any part of that. That’s for certain.
So what can we say about this moment in time?
There’s the makings of a civil war. But you don’t want to participate in it.
The Federal Elephant Beast is dangerous and is unpredictable and causing all sorts of disruptions.
This Federal Elephant beast might create a situation that is far worse than what it seems to be heading towards right now.
And that is pretty much it, isn’t it? Left on it’s own, the plane will take the elephant to a destination that it will not like, and that unhappy elephant will make life for the fleas very unhappy. As we used to say in the States “shit flows downhill”. And so now the elephant is trying to burst forth from it’s chains and attack the rest of the crew and creatures on the plane. As such it’s one fuck of a bumpy ride.
United States Foreign Policy
2020 was not random, or bad luck, it was the direct result of Donald Trump trying to suppress global trade and suppress China. It didn’t work out as planned, and instead the entire world was suppressed, and China is doing well.
And so what is next…
Will the elephant calm down, and resign to it’s fate, or will it rebound it’s efforts to “rock the plane” break loose from it’s shackles and do something drastic? Which would mean taking the plane down and crashing it, and in the process killing the rest of the people on the plane.
And will the rest of the plane need to shoot the elephant dead so that the plane can at least land safely?
If you were on the plane, what would you do to the elephant?
If you were the flea what would you do?
Analyzing the Emerging World Order
This is a reprint in full of the referenced article by Lisa Yuen above. It can be found HERE, and is reprinted in full with only minor editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
The global community today is clearly in a state of flux. This is not an aberration – we are in the midst of a normal and periodic global reordering. We shall briefly take a “big picture” look at this phenomenon and attempt to glean an understanding as to the direction that we are heading as citizens of a global society.
It is my hope that these observations can foster a more in depth discussion between reasonable people; leading to the development of ideas which can then be implemented to improve the human condition.
Current Paradigm
We live in a world subdivided by societies: nations and their respective subdivisions. As a matter of fact, there are over 200 nations recognized by the United Nations (UN). We are taught that a society must conform to a binary label such as “free” or “unfree”, “democratic” or “non-democratic” and so on. This is done principally for two reasons – to provide a tautological definition, also for easier control of the masses via manipulation.
The current overarching narrative provides that we are divided between the “western” and “eastern” worlds. What does this really mean? We can distill this down to one principal root: economics. What do we mean by economics? We can say that in it’s purest form, it is simply the structured allocation of finite resources.
Today we are observing the transition from a so called unipolar world, one in which a single nation (or group of allied nations) dictates the terms of life for all global citizens, to a more balanced and natural multipolar world.
The current dominating group, the “western” bloc of nations, is led by the United States along with numerous vassal states; this order has persisted since the end of the Second World War. This construct is held together using a combination of supranational organizations (UN,WTO,World Bank, IMF, et cetera), propaganda (mainstream media complex), armed might (MIC,NATO, private mercenary forces) and chiefly economics (central banks, corporations).
The true “rulers” of this bloc are a cabal of very wealthy and powerful oligarchs that work in the background (shadow banking, dark pool finance, shadow governments, think tanks, NGO’s) to subvert the various sovereignties to their advantage. These oligarchs are the principal owners of, not just the industries and corporations that front for them, but the governments that rule over the masses.
Most importantly this cabal owns the means by which real wealth extraction is carried out: fiat currency, chiefly the “worlds reserve currency”- the United States dollar and it’s derivatives. These currencies are backed not by equitable assets; such as natural resources, precious metals or productive capacities; instead they are backed by the creation of debt. Debt that represents a claim on real assets that virtually all participants in global commerce must pay.
How did this cabal come into power? This is a complex question that is subject to many possible answers and interpretations. Briefly, we know from historical fact that a global empire is a central part of this construct, today the United States empire holds that role (previously British, French so on…). This provides the controlling force behind such a cabal. The privately owned quasi-governmental western central banks are at the heart of this operation. They form the crucial nexus between sovereign governments and the financial world in which they derive their revenue stream, and by extension, their power.
The current seat of this construct (United States) was founded as a Constitutional Republic. Unfortunately, the United States Constitution is quite amorphous. Using many acts of legislative, executive and even judicial fiat, this cabal has been able to effectively take over the reigns of the nation. With that feat accomplished, near world domination was made possible.
A complex web of regulations, laws, and rules; coupled with a financial system few fully comprehend has been put into place across the west. This became the mechanism by which this “new world order” has been enforced.
The unsolvable problem here is that this debt based system is really just an elaborate pyramid scheme predicated on ever increasing amounts of debt in a world where sources of real wealth are finite. At present, the growth rate and the total amount of debt issuance, is outpacing the extraction rate and amount of available reserves of resources on the planet.
A Path Forward?…..
A new bloc of nations has been pushed toward an alliance. This bloc of nations consists of principally China, Russia and Iran (“eastern bloc”). These nations are led by various actors who seem to comprehend the likely nature of the end game inherent to the current financial construction. They are out of necessity seeking a path toward a different and more balanced and hopefully sustainable economic and global governance paradigm.
Not individually formidable, these nations collectively are quite powerful.
Lets take a look at the derivation of that power. Firstly we examine a crucial metric: energy, it is well documented that these nations collectively possess enough energy resources to adequately power their economies for a long time. They also possess much of the worlds’ known stores of natural commercial use resources (metals, minerals, rare earth elements).
Additionally, owing in part to technological advances and also to long term changes in the earth’s climate, they possess the means to adequately feed their populations. They are also taking advantage of the fact that scientific knowledge and technological innovation (the key to a sustainable and competitive economy) are geographical location independent, as scientific axioms are immutable and provable anywhere on the planet.
Lastly, the differences between these nations is paradoxically what makes them a powerful bloc. As example: China has become the world’s workshop and an innovation leader whilst Russia proper contains large deposits of natural resources, carries very low external debt levels and possesses a very technologically advanced war machine.
Initiatives led by China such as the OBOR (One Belt One Road) infrastructure project, the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) are aimed at providing distinct alternatives to western backed organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, UN, et cetera. The key piece of this strategy seems to be the use of the fiat system itself to fund the accumulation of tangible assets (businesses, technologies, resources, PM’s).
These assets can be then be utilized as a hedge against probable future turbulence with the current western based fiat regime. Why are these nations not publicly clamoring for this system to be dismantled sooner rather then later? First of all, this is a dangerous proposition, as they would likely be economically punished (Greece, Brazil) or worse, suffer an armed attack/invasion (Iraq, Libya).
One just needs to observe the large amount of vitriol directed toward these nations in the western mainstream press to connect theses dots – these nations surely get the message. Secondly, they are slowly dissolving this system on their own terms (direct bilateral trade agreements via own currencies, accumulation of PM’s as a potential partial backing to their respective currencies).
As of now, these nations are taking advantage of the current system to build up their economies and national infrastructures for the long term. As an example, Russia and China have begun co-developing a wide body passenger aircraft using their respective indigenous technologies and knowledge bases. These activities are made possible by their embedment into the current monetary system.
Conclusion
For the human condition to improve, the following possible actions should be taken under serious consideration.
The western fiat currency regime should be dissolved, most outstanding debts should be extinguished (debt jubilee, massive write offs, large scale revaluations), and national sovereignty must regain prominence across the entire globe.
Load the elephant on the plane and ship it elsewhere.
A balanced financial system based principally on equitable assets must take the place of the current debt based system. Sovereign governments should look to take on the crucial role as their own primary issuer of currency; this of course would require much more honest and transparent governments’ than we currently have in place.
The workers must use currency based on tangible items. Not promises.
A new system of loose decentralized global governance should be constructed to act as an impartial arbiter in geopolitical and economic affairs. These are but a few of the possible reforms that could be made to affect a more intelligent paradigm of globalism. Whether the alternative system(s) being pursued by the emergent eastern bloc will fulfill these objectives still remains to be seen, as big challenges remain, e.g. environmental degradation.
Centralized government control has created the elephant that exists today. It is not sustainable and not desirable.
The best outcome for the world at large is a general reset of sorts. A new paradigm in which malinvestments are discouraged and cleared away, success and effort are rewarded, and opportunity for all is sought as a societal virtue, should be pursued. Worse case is a long term continuation of the current system. This outcome is likely to lead to increasing levels of civil and political unrest, and possible widespread conflict as the planet’s capacity to support the growth rates demanded by a debt based system is diminished by a declining real ROI.
The elephant must be taken away before it can do more damage.
Priorities
Yes it appears that the United States is fucked. But it doesn’t mean that you and your family are as well. It’s all a matter of [1] planning and [2] thought control.
You need to gather your priorities together and then plan accordingly. I have written about affirmation prayer campaigns, and if you really are concerned, then start breaking out your affirmation campaigns and work your life from that angle. It does work. Please believe me, and remember that things are not all or nothing. It’s all going to be periods of highs and lows, and you want to be in the most tranquil area as possible.
Your priorities might be something like this…
A man’s priorities.
.
Or perhaps, as a woman you might have different priorities…
Life goals.
.
I really cannot write an article where I can provide a “one size fits all” solution to the myriad of needs that people have, or their many, many desires. All that I can do is provide ideas, suggestions and some general direction vectors, and maybe some hope.
If you all are going to do something about this “crazy elephant” that the United States has become, and you are trapped riding this crazed elephant as it bounces and carries on so, then please find what your priorities are personally. Sit down. Think hard. Discuss hings with loved ones.
Then figure out what you want, and what you need. Then work the plan.
Some people have simple dreams.
.
Some people have simple dreams. While others are more complex.
What are yours?
2021 is the time to plan, and implement that plan. Truth.
Work your plan.
A final note
Since it’s a few weeks before Christmas, let me recommend one of my favorite Christmas movies to all the viewers to MM might enjoy.
Can you guess what movie that I am recommending?
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Phew! My titles are getting longer and longer, but then again, my subjects are getting more and more involved. Who’d figure, eh?
This post is going to cover a lot of material. It is going to be banging off the walls every which way from the crazed American politics, to the history of the start of the second world war, to what to expect when wars go badly for you, and a bunch of stuff from John Titor, the alleged time traveler.
Please do NOT be offended by my personal opinions of either Trump or Biden. They BOTH have a role, and important one. And both are fulfilling a serious need and space on the "food chain".
There are no absolutes. Just influences that infringe on our own individual lives, and liberties.
So, do not throw your computer against the wall in anger because I said something bad about Trump. Nor should you stomp off and spam-bot me because I said something bad about Biden. I have an equal-opportunity disgust for all American politics.
So...
When reading this meandering maze of opinionated discourse please keep in mind that the over all direction that a nation takes is encoded in our biological sentience. Remember that it would be a truly rare event for the cycles of change not to manifest. It has no bearing on who is the President of the United States, what is going on with Bretexit, or the international trade situation.
Do not fall into the trap of belief that we can control the sentience of others. We cannot. All that we can do is accept who we are, and ride out the changes while everyone else figures out their roles.
So grab a beverage of your choice and sit down and enjoy the journey. It's all about the human condition; a condition that you are all part of. Like it or not.
There are many students of World War II. There are many students of Hitler and how he came to power. There are many students of the battles and the technology of the time. There are also many students of the Geo-political conditions at that time. What few people are doing is comparing the actions that Hitler took leading up to World War II.
They never do this, or if they do, they keep the analysis secret. It never reaches the masses. It just floats away like the ash of a a burning pile of newspapers.
It horrifies me.
Yet, as a student of history, I was slow to catch on. I read the news about Donald Trump and his staffing decisions. I read about his election, and the “Never Trumpers”, and all the political in-fighting in Washington. For a while I too cheering his tweets, and his brash “in your face” attitude. I cheered when he responded and fought back. I enjoyed his attacks and it was a welcome change to all the fawning bullshit that we have become accustomed to.
… I also watched the “Trump Trade Wars” unfold. And I did so as as a man inside the technical-trade-logistics industry.
Yikes!
So, no. I wasn’t just some smuck checking my daily feed and cheering for this fucking jack-ass. Like most Americans were. I was a guy on the “front lines”.
And when he said that “China is stealing our jobs”, he was saying “Metallicman is stealing your jobs”. And when he would go traipse off to Germany to tell Merkel “stop trading with China”, I would find all my business with my German customers put on hold. Yeah.
Every time the news mentions China, they were talking about me, or at least things that would affect my life, personally. “You had better stop trading or doing business with Metallicman” Mike Pompeo would demand, “or, else you might have some color revolutions inside your country next year”.
So, yeah. I am biased. No shit.
I watched Trump paint a big red bulls-eye over my city, my house, my family, and my friends. I watched him start making crazy and arbitrary decisions, bans, and arrests… all in the name of “national security“.
You know, like banning “cat videos” and “lip singing to 10 second music excerpts”.
All for “national security“.
And I watched him, through his proxy; Mike Pompeo try to begin World War III. And try, and try he did. The thing was, no one had a taste for war.
I watched as it became impossible for me to communicate with my friends and family in the United States. I watched as applications out of the United States such as Zoom either stopped business with people in China or started charging outrageous fees to use their products. I did this in real time, and it fucking hurt.
Yeah. I could live in Timbuktu, and get Paypal payments, but Shanghai…forgetaboutit!
And I watched the American population, like the cattle they are, start foaming at the mouth.; believing that they are the best, and that they are invincible, and that small “surgical” nuclear weapons can be used, with no consequence what so ever.
Trump and Mike Pompeo would announce “I am banning all Chinese social media applications“, and the crowd would cheer with outrageous abandon.
American sheeple align with both political parties, and they always tout the narrative promoted by their preferred alternative Media networks.
.
And I was here, on ground zero, when he unleashed the biggest biological weapon assault in history during the busiest, and most crowded holiday in China.
Overall, it was horrific. It was a slaughter.
COVID-19B, the strain unleashed upon China, is the nasty shit. This is the bad mama-jamba. Extreme contagiousness, and outrageous effects. Videos were everywhere showing people having seizures and collapsing. The COVID-19A, the mild strain, is what Trump gave to America and it’s allies.
Nation
Strain
R0
Effects
Deaths
China
COVID-19B
15%
Seizures
4,749
USA
COVID-19A
0.1%
Chest cold
291,403
Can you imagine what America would be like if the lethal strain were to be released inside of America by a REALLY pissed-off China?
The Trump cabal of neocons single-handily suppressed global trade to such an extent that a global recession occurred. And I, my family, my friends, my business, and just about every aspect of my connections to my home-nation was under attack by this jack-ass.
Yet, I still believed. I still had hope.
Maybe Trump would do some of the things he professed.
But he didn’t. It was all a big “con game” from the start.
No wall was built.
Hillary Clinton remained free.
Wall Street bankers became outrageously wealthy.
No industry came back to America.
America became the despised pariah globally.
American are not back to work. Most are unemployed, sheltering inside their homes.
It was exactly what it seemed.
He was a popular clown, or puppet, acting on a stage entertaining millions of Americans with his non-stop antics. It was, for Trump, better than having his own television show. He was entertaining the world. And Shit! No one could shut him off.
We were all, a captive audience.
But it wasn’t until I started to notice that the “fire hose of disinformation”; the anti-China propaganda campaign had reached a Fever Pitch. And there it became clear to me, the eight unusual biological virus attacks on livestock, the COVID-19, the “color revolutions” in HK, and the largest armada in all of recorded history steaming towards China. Yeah! It was unmistakable.
No. This was not a “hybrid war”. This the the early stages of a global war with a major nuclear armed nation.
For FreedomTM and DemocracyTM!
.
Trump was launching World War III upon China on the illusion that it could be “contained” within the South China Sea, and “managed” properly. And the accumulation of all this anti-China activities resulted in the largest Naval armada in the history of the world plopping themselves off the Chinese coast and threatening China, Chinese trade, and Chinese lives. It included a vast flotilla of hunter-killer subs threatening all the shipping traffic, and daily flights of B-1 bombers and stealth aircraft with nuclear weapons probing Chinese air space.
…
Luckily a hot war didn’t happen.
The armada steamed home, and Trump sacked his Secretary of Defense for…
…<no one knows>…
… but WE know. Don’t we?
What’s up next.
This entire affair is not over by a long-shot.
But at least the crazy psychopath and his small army of neoconservatives are being displaced by better and more sensible professionals. And still, we at MM are the outliers. My opinion of this matter does not agree with the American media narrative.
Which pretty much means that it is correct.
The American media narrative is that Biden will be "tougher" on China than Trumps war-loving, killing-frenzy, neocons were. That's right! Biden is going to be tougher on China.
How is that even possible?
Nope.
The true situation is something that the American citizen-serf- cattle are never let in on. The real truth is that the Biden administration will consider…
China as an economic competitor to the USA.
Russia as a military threat to the USA.
Biden and Xi Peng have known each other for decades.
.
Of course, the hawkish neocons who still control the mainstream and alternative media are doing everything that they can to portray Biden as harder and harsher on China than trump. I’m not personally clear on the reasoning. Maybe it’s hope, or maybe it’s desperation in trying to secure or maintain some kind of control.
What ever, here’s a pretty good write-up on MoA about the actual Biden Presidency and what to expect in regards to China. And no, you won’t find this narrative in any of the three main American “news” outlets…
.
Oh, the narrative about “us vs. them” is going to continue all right. America needs an outside enemy to direct it’s frustration and anger towards. Perhaps you know what I am talking about. If you don’t read George Orwell’s book “1984” and refer to the Geo-political issues as described in that masterpiece.
The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian states (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia).
Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thought and promote the Party’s doctrines. Its words include doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), which is reflected in the Party’s slogans: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.” The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continual surveillance.
-Nineteen Eighty-four | Summary, Characters, Analysis ...
You all can consider the following Geo-Political alignments…
USA = Oceania
Russia = Eurasia
China = Eastasia
There are three major powers in the world right now.
USA = (Oceania) Oligarchy controlled military empire running amok. Populated by an intentionally dumbed down, weakened society, of work serfs. Military operations are the norm, and America is military empire with over 800+ military bases all over the globe, and currently fighting 8 hot wars. Americans view it as a normal occurrence, being in a state of war. Military is geared towards offensive conventional weapon operations outside the USA in far away lands.
Russia = (Eurasia) Fierce, pissed off people, who do not want another War where they are positioned within a defensive posture. They will NEVER allow that situation, a replay of World War II to reoccur. Russia suffered horribly during it, and Russians have never forgotten. Military is geared to preventative operations at a large and harsh scale.
China = (Eastasia) Old, smart, intelligent, and diligent. Does not want war, but will respond in a measured manner. On their terms. Using their timing. Planed for their advantage. Any attack on China will have an equal measured response within the continental United States. Military is geared towards responsive operations.
.
You will see the anti-China propaganda to decrease substantially and sharply, as it is already doing. And you will see a rise of anti-Russia propaganda. And I watch all this as an educated observer, and it horrifies me.
Firstly, because the lead up for war with China was so effective. Most Americans now hate China and support the idea of a (far off) war in the distant South China Sea. They actually believe that China would take the hits and not retaliate. They actually believe that it can be “contained” in a far away land. And now, soon it will change to Russia with a (supposedly) far-off war in Eastern Europe.
Secondly, that the ignorance of what China is, and what it is truly capable of is ignored, as it is discounted by most of the West. Which pretty much is the general American attitude of all other nations. And that is magnified by a factor of ten with Russia.
Thirdly, that the lead up for a war with China pretty much parallels what happened in the lead up to World War II. And we can expect it to be duplicated with Russia. So buckle up. Yeah. It’s not over yet.
Now, from my point of view, the activities will be directed towards Russia instead of China.
Yikes!
Russia? Seriously?
Russia is hard core.
Because while both China and Russia are serious, nuclear armed, nations run on merit and ability, they are also students of history and DO NOT PLAY.
China conducts Geo-Political actions using a "defensive policy". Meaning "tit for tat" responses.
So, if the USA military tries to destroy their latest VTOL carrier...
...two months later the US VTOL carrier USS Bonhomme Richard catches fire and is completely destroyed.
China always (so far, at least) responds to American aggression in a similar, and measured, manner.
But Russia is different. Russia conducts Geo-Political actions using a "preemptive offensive policy". Meaning that if a build up towards war becomes evident, they will unleash unholy nuclear armageddon upon the United States.
And why is this? Why is Russia like this, and why won’t they respond to American aggression like China has?
The answer lies in the differences in culture and society.
Krútost
During the last two decades, the notion of krutói (“tough”, “hard nut”, “smart”) became very central for the Russian definition of success. But even though the meaning is new (krutói means originally “steep” or “hard-boiled”), the concept is centuries-long. In it, you can find something in common with the religious search for purity, or the American obsession with self-help and self-improvement. But the starting point is different.
It’s the eternal Russian admiration of power. Our universe is choke full with predators—some benign, but many not—cruising and looking for prey in competition with each other. It’s about where in the food chain you want to place yourself.Topping from bottom
No one insists on depredation. But this world is not for the fragile. Even if your meek predisposition or your charitable ethics command you to linger on the very bottom, it pays to be krutói. You can duck, you can run, you can hide, you can talk your way out of trouble—the better you do it, the longer you last.
As a Russian, this is a quest nothing can exonerate you from. Ever wondered why spoken Russian sounds so tough, our ladies look so gorgeous, and the men act so macho in online forums? Here’s your answer.
No one knows what kind of riches waits for us at the end of this quest. Yet, if you one day find yourself reincarnated somewhere in Russia, expect everyone telling you in a zillion ways to pull up your britches and beating your ego into shape.
So, not only is China a serious, studious, thoughtful measured nation, but Russia is a nation of hard-core chomping at the bit, leather clad, biker types. I really don’t think that America is ready to tangle with them.
America is not ready to take on Russia. They, like China, DOES NOT PLAY.
.
To this, I will add…
As soon as the USA ramps up the “fever” of war for the American populations, you can well expect Russia (and possibly China) to preemptively strike America with a double-tap nuclear salvo.
And why do I believe this?
Because I, like the leaders of both Russia and China, read history.
China compared to America.
Pre-war preparations for World War II by Adolf Hitler and his cabal of Nazi-cons.
To really get an appreciation about what is going on…
And this is really what is going on, the United States is a bloated, sick, wounded, and terrified monstrous military empire in it's death throes, and tamping and threatening everyone around it.
And the global oligarchy is doing it's darnedest to limit the future carnage to the geographic United States least the entire world is destroyed in the process.
… we need to simply reread history. And I am not talking about boring stuff like names, dates and times, but rather the entire picture and the entire scope of the issues at hand. Let’s see how World War II started from the point of view of Hitler and his small collection of Nazi-cons sitting in Berlin.
Everyone who tried to fuck with Russia failed, and their nations were forever vanquished afterwards.
Napoleon and France.
Germany and Hitler.
America with Biden.
The following is a reprint of an Article on the warfare history network. All credit to the authors and the site. It was not edited except to fit this venue.
The decision to invade Poland was one in a series of risky moves that led to World War II.
By Christopher Miskimon
Historians often compare Adolf Hitler to a gambler. He kept making risky bets that paid off time and again—until they didn’t. Poland was one example because it led to general war. What brought Hitler to take this risk? With the benefit of hindsight it is seen as enormous, but what did the situation look like to the German Führer and his closest advisers at the time? The popular modern view of Hitler is that of a raving lunatic, screaming at subordinates while pushing phantom armies around a map in his bunker. While he deserves every negative epithet given him, he did not decide all his strategic and operational decisions from mad, angry rants. In the years leading to World War II there were numerous events that took him down the road from a promise to rebuild the nation to inevitable conflict. However skewed, there was method to his madness, which came close to paying off in the early years of the fighting. The war officially began with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but numerous factors led to this attack.
Logic, Planning, Revenge: Why Hitler Targeted Poland
While many of the calculations for war were based on some modicum of logic and reasoned planning, revenge, the basest of human emotions, played its part. German humiliation over the conditions placed upon the nation at the end of World War I had not abated in the two decades since the conflict ended. Over time the mass emotional reaction to the treaty stipulations became a festering sore among the population. This wound was ripe for exploitation by the Nazi propaganda machine during the party’s rise to power.
The Treaty of Versailles imposed severe restrictions on the German military. The ground forces were limited in size to 100,000 troops in 10 divisions, including 4,000 officers. The Army could be used only for the “internal maintenance of order” and defense. Also prohibited were staples of the German military system, such as a general staff, most officer training schools, and any sort of reserves or paramilitary groups. Additionally, tanks and heavy weapons were denied. Chemical weapons were expressly forbidden. Defensive positions along the east bank of the Rhine River had to be demolished for a distance of 50 kilometers from the riverbank. The west bank was similarly denuded of defenses. This left the country defenseless against attack.
The humiliation of Versailles went beyond just military limitations. Germany lost land to Poland and France. The French received Alsace-Lorraine, lost decades before during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The “Polish Corridor,” a strip of land given to Poland granting it access to the Baltic Sea, meant East Prussia was now physically separate from the rest of the country. The formerly German city of Danzig was made a “Free City,” controlled by the Poles despite its largely German population. All of Germany’s overseas colonies and territories were transferred to other nations. Last was a crushing debt of reparations, equivalent to billions of dollars today. (Read more about the conflicts and events that led to the Second World War inside the pages of WWII History magazine.)
The cumulative effect of the treaty requirements created a sense of injustice among the German populace, which the Nazis were all too willing to use in their grab for power. The party came into power on a promise to right the wrongs of Versailles and make Germany strong again. Germany suffered many internal troubles throughout the 1920s and early 30s, something the German people remembered. Once national power was restored in the late 1930s, it became a natural, brutal progression to use that power against nations that had taken German lands. The Polish Corridor stood out in particular; regaining it meant reconnecting East Prussia to Germany proper.
During the 1930s, the German armed forces undertook an extensive and mostly clandestine rearmament program. In this photo of the period, German soldiers ride in a wagon which is towing a wooden antitank gun.
With revenge in mind, the next step for Hitler was rearmament. This was the key prerequisite for any resurgence of Germany as a major power. Even before Hitler began rearmament in late 1933, the military had been secretly preparing for a fast expansion through a combination of training, liberal interpretation of the treaty restrictions, and secret weapons development projects. This allowed the Nazis to quickly create a massive military machine, faster than Germany’s opponents thought possible.
Initial steps included rebuilding the German arms industry so it could produce the necessary weapons. The plans for fast wartime expansion of the Army were instead applied to peacetime growth. The first increase was to 300,000 troops in 21 divisions. This program was to be finished by 1937, but Hitler advanced this timetable to the fall of 1934, barely a year later. During this period Hitler began to consolidate his power, moving against men like Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary arm, the Sturmabteilung (SA). He also absorbed the powers of the military commander in chief when the German President Paul von Hindenburg died in August 1934. Afterward German soldiers and sailors were required to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler personally, a throwback to the oath given the kaiser during the imperial period. By the end of 1934, German Army strength reached 240,000.
On March 16, 1935, Hitler publicly rejected the Versailles Treaty and ordered a further expansion of the army to 36 divisions under a new defense law. Conscription was also reintroduced. Within two months another law created the Luftwaffe. The conscription program created a large pool of trained manpower, something the Germans lacked due to Versailles. Changes at the command level also made the German military more effective. The Reichswehr was renamed the Wehrmacht, with the three branches called the Heer (army), Kriegsmarine (navy), and Luftwaffe (air force). The general staff was rebuilt, and Hitler was solidly placed as the military’s supreme commander. Generals who disagreed with Hitler were retired or removed through scandal or accusations of misconduct. The Führer created a modern, powerful force completely under his control.
While this buildup was touted as smooth and organized with Teutonic efficiency, the process was difficult. German industry needed time to create modern weapons, most of which were only designs on a drawing board. Raw materials, trained labor, and factory capacity were insufficient to provide for all three services’ needs. The navy took a back seat to the Army and air force. This decision made sense because Germany’s primary opponents bordered the nation, rendering a powerful fleet unnecessary in the short term.
Making it Up as they Go: The Rapid Expansion of the Nazi German Army
Building on its secret experiments, the Army started an ambitious program for armored vehicles, but they were learning as they went. The first models were lightly armed and armored vehicles, which would later prove inferior to enemy tanks, though the Germans usually handled theirs better. Without making sacrifices elsewhere, it was impossible to build as many vehicles and artillery pieces as were needed. Hitler was unwilling to strain the peacetime German economy, so production rates were kept low.
The rapid expansion also placed a strain on personnel. There were not enough qualified officers and NCOs to fill all the required billets. Fast promotions and the recall of World War I veterans alleviated these problems, but only to a limited extent. Many of the veterans were getting too old for field service and needed refresher training. Many officers were lost to the newly formed Luftwaffe, and many staff officers for air units were ground forces men untrained and inexperienced in air operations. Another quick solution was to militarize entire police units to capitalize on the training and discipline of their NCOs and officers.
In a bold and risky maneuver, Hitler ordered German troops into the Rhineland in the spring of 1936. Hitler’s generals feared the aggressive move would spark French military intervention.
Despite these difficulties, rearmament did produce results. By October 1937, the army reached an active strength of 39 divisions in 14 corps, including three panzer and four motorized divisions. There were 29 divisions in reserve with more of their soldiers having recent training through the conscription program. In 1938, a dozen more divisions, including two panzer and four motorized, were also formed along with 22 more reserve divisions. Some of these units came from the absorption of the Austrian Army, which occurred that year. Further expansion occurred in 1939.
Possessing a powerful army gave Hitler options in the expansionist risks he took. Like many Germans, he sought revenge for perceived injustices. For the Führer the scales could only be balanced through war, and a strong military made war feasible, even desirable, as it would prove Germany was again formidable and to be respected. By 1939, the Army had 102 divisions, half of them active. Total strength was around 1.8 million troops. While there were still shortages in certain types of weapons and equipment, the Nazi propaganda machine had done its work, and these shortcomings were not apparent. Foreign observers saw a formidable modern force, and Hitler was happy to let them believe that image.
Prior to the Polish Crisis, Germany had gotten extensive practice in territorial acquisition, though without war. Instead, political maneuvering and bluff achieved Nazi goals up to that point. There was tension; war clouds loomed over Europe for several years before September 1939. However, until then each crisis had been resolved in Germany’s favor, a winning streak that increased confidence within the Reich in its own ability and the moral cowardice of its opponents. Hitler was susceptible to a gambler’s faith in a winning streak, and this was a factor in the Nazi invasion of Poland.
The Saar, 1935: Nazi Aggression Takes its First Steps
The Third Reich’s first success came in the Saar in 1935. This region of Germany was placed under Anglo-French occupation and control in 1920 for a period of 15 years. The Saar was an industrial center and contained coal fields that were given to France. A commission oversaw the territory until 1935, when a plebiscite was held to determine what would happen to the area. The situation was a reminder of German defeat in World War I and another territory stripped from the nation despite the ethnically German citizens in residence.
Jubilant young Austrian citizens cheer the news that their country has been annexed by Nazi Germany and is now a part of the Third Reich. Hitler coerced Austrian leaders into accepting the union, which was completed in March 1938.
Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, large numbers of Germans who opposed their rule moved to the Saar precisely to escape them. Over the next two years, as the plebiscite grew near, these opponents of Hitler’s regime campaigned to have the region remain under French occupation. The Führer had other plans, as regaining the Saar would be a propaganda victory for his government. He directed Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to conduct a media campaign aimed at swaying the populace to vote for return to the Reich. When the vote came in January 1935, over 90 percent of the voters chose to return to Germany. On March 1 the Saar became German again. With German reoccupation came the arrest of those considered to have collaborated with the French government and Nazi opponents who had fled there previously. Regaining the Saar was a first step for Nazi aggression.
The following year Hitler went further and reoccupied the Rhineland. The demilitarization of the area was stipulated in the Versailles Treaty and made permanent in the Locarno Treaty of 1925, which sought to normalize relations between various European powers. The Rhineland was occupied by Allied troops until 1935 under the terms of the treaty. In actuality these troops were withdrawn by 1930. Over the next five years, as the Nazis came to power and more openly disregarded the Versailles Treaty, German reoccupation of the Rhineland became an expected development, calculated to cause a crisis.
Hitler’s Annexation Gambles in the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland
In early 1936 Hitler gambled and sent a small force into the demilitarized zone. Hitler knew there was a possibility of war but deemed it minimal; when War Minister Field Marshal Werner Von Blomberg expressed his fears, Hitler told him German troops would be withdrawn if French forces entered the Rhineland. The Reich went ahead with the move on March 7, 1936, sending a handful of infantry battalions into the Rhineland, where they joined local police and prepared for a French counterattack, planning a fighting withdrawal if necessary. When French troops stayed on their side of the border, Hitler’s confidence was bolstered, and he ordered the troops to stay.
Two years later Hitler made more moves that consolidated his nation’s position even further and reinforced his belief in the moral cowardice of the Western powers. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, incorporating its military into the Reich. There was a small pro-Nazi movement within Austria that was agitating for integration with Germany. This movement was suppressed by the Austrian government, which believed most Austrians wanted nothing to do with Hitler. On March 9, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite to allow voters to state their preference about integration with Germany.
30th September 1938: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) making his ‘peace in our time’ address at Heston Airport on his return from Munich. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)
The Nazi propaganda machine went into full swing, announcing riots in Austria and unfair rules for the vote to sway the decision against integration. It claimed the uproar was a plea by Austrians for Germany to enter Austria and restore order. On March 12, Wehrmacht troops crossed the border, meeting no opposition. Hitler himself entered Austria that evening. Within days the union of Germany and Austria, known as the Anschluss, was announced. Hitler had once again increased German power without a war.
The second Nazi move of 1938 was the annexation of the Sudetenland. This event, the result of an agreement meant to maintain peace, was a major step toward the conflict to come. After obtaining Austria with such relative ease, Hitler turned his gaze toward the north-northwestern area of Czechoslovakia, a region known as the Sudetenland. Many ethnic Germans lived in this area, making it a good target for expansion. The usual propaganda claims were made, stating the Czech government was abusing ethnic Germans within its borders.
The Czechs prepared for war, but no one else did. Hitler met with representatives of Britain, France, and Italy in Munich during late September. There, he obtained an agreement from those powers to give the Sudetenland to Germany. Without support, Czechoslovakia had little choice but to acquiesce. German troops entered the Sudetenland to the applause of its Germanic populace.
Following the annexation of the Sudetenland, German troops eventually occupied all of neighboring Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, German forces rolled through the streets of the Czech capital of Prague. Some Czech citizens offered the Nazi salute; others were determined to resist.
Supposedly this was Germany’s last territorial demand; returning from Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his now infamous statement of having achieved “peace with honour” and “peace in our time.” That peace lasted less than six months; on March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia. Appeasement had failed, and Hitler had Poland in his sights. With Czech territory in German hands, a Nazi invasion of Poland could proceed from both the west and south, making that nation’s defense more difficult.
Planning the Nazi Invasion of Poland
The Polish Crisis began 10 days after the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando Der Wehrmacht, OKW) to prepare a military campaign against Poland. He tried obtaining concessions from the Poles regarding Danzig and the Polish Corridor, including threats of military action. The efforts proved futile as the Poles refused to give in. Both sides began aggressive propaganda campaigns, with the Nazis claiming Polish atrocities against Germans in the corridor area.
Given his string of successes, Hitler was willing to gamble on Poland, although the situation in 1939 was worse than in earlier years. Unlike at Munich, there was no agreement with France and Great Britain for a resolution, and previous German actions had destroyed trust in Hitler’s word. The Third Reich’s racist policies and actions were also turning world opinion against it. Other members of Hitler’s civilian and military hierarchy were unwilling to express resistance to his plans. The Nazi leader had decided on another risky gamble, and with his absolute control there was no one to stop him.
With the decision made, a plan had to be created. During April 1939, OKW issued its annual directive to the armed forces. Within it was Fall Weiss (Case White). The plan was introduced with a statement from Hitler himself describing current relations with Poland. It required the German military to be prepared to attack by September 1. The plan stressed surprise. Mobilization would not take place until just before the actual invasion. Only regular Army units would be used at first, since calling up reserves would alert the Poles.
These active units would be secretly moved into assembly areas along the frontier before being ordered into their jumping-off points. The Army could also attack from Czech territory. There were also arrangements for defending the border with France, the Baltic Sea area, and German airspace. All this would effectively isolate Poland from her Western supporters until it was too late.
On April 28, Hitler nullified the German non-aggression treaty with Poland and demanded resolution on the Danzig issue. German operatives were sent into Danzig, where they attacked a customs house and tore down Polish flags. Polish actions against ethnic Germans were given wide press coverage. There was a Nazi faction in Danzig, and it clamored for return to Germany. This was the beginning of a months-long campaign to pave the way for German goals, with or without war.
Diplomatic Machinations and Nazi Propaganda
Over the following months further diplomatic machinations took place. On May 22, a pact was signed with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, taking pressure off Germany’s southern flank. However, Hitler assured Mussolini there would be no war, and the Italians made no promise of military support. This kept Italy from the Allied camp and threatened France’s and Britain’s Mediterranean holdings. Hitler also received visits from the leaders of Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. These affairs were accompanied by extravagant displays of German military power, with scores of aircraft roaring overhead or hundreds of tanks clanking past.
Fully equipped for aggressive action, German troops, who appear to be fresh and not yet bloodied by fighting, march along a road in Poland. Although German and Soviet troops had completed their seizure of Polish territory in a matter of weeks, the campaign was more costly than some senior commanders had envisioned.
A major victory for the Nazis was the rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The British and French were seeking a tacit alliance with the Soviets as a counterbalance to Germany, but this new development quashed that hope. Russia and Germany secretly negotiated an agreement for respective spheres of influence. The Soviets would have a free hand in Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia along with eastern Poland. In exchange, Germany would regain Danzig, the Polish Corridor, and western Poland.
Openly, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression treaty between the nations. This was a surprise development as the Nazis were staunchly anti-communist. Both Hitler and Stalin still expected eventual war; the Soviets expected conflict as early as 1944. While war would come much sooner with the German invasion on June 22, 1941, in August 1939 the issue seemed settled.
The Polish Crisis came to a head in August. The Germans placed more pressure on Poland over Danzig and the corridor, with civil disturbances taking place. The Poles stood firm, bolstered by assurances of support from France and Britain. On August 12-13, Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano met with Hitler to discuss a diplomatic solution. Italy did not want its ally going to war; the nation was still recovering from its campaigns in Albania, Ethiopia, and Spain and was not ready to fight the French and British. The Italian military needed time to modernize its forces and did not expect to be ready until 1942. Hitler, confident in his course, would not be swayed. Ciano felt the Germans had breached their agreement, but there was little to be done.
On August 17, the Nazis enacted their scheme to justify invasion. The Wehrmacht supplied Polish Army uniforms to operatives commanded by senior SS officer Reinhard Heydrich to create incidents of Polish attacks on German soil. Hitler addressed his military leaders about the issue on August 22, admitting an incident would be “arranged.” The morality of such an act was irrelevant; only victory mattered. He thought it unlikely the British and French would intervene, and if they did they could not reinforce Poland directly. If war came, Germany would win. Hitler also mentioned the impending treaty with the Soviets, which was signed the next day. The speech ended with a statement of belief that the Wehrmacht could carry out any order successfully.
When the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact became public on August 23, it seemed war was inevitable. Hitler ordered the attack to begin on August 26. The next day the British sent Poland a written guarantee that Britain and France would come to its aid if Germany invaded. When he learned of the move, Hitler rescinded his attack order and engaged in a last-minute move to forestall the involvement of the Western Allies. He promised to respect the current borders with France and to support the British. This offer did not impress either nation, which had no reason to trust such promises. Negotiations were essentially broken off.
Nazi Germany Declares War on Poland
On August 31, Hitler signed the order for the Nazi invasion of Poland, to begin the next morning at 4:45. At 8 pm on the night before the invasion, Germans in Polish uniforms “captured” a German radio station in Silesia. A broadcast in Polish announced an attack on Germany. Soon German police subdued the “attackers.” Casualties were found dressed in Polish uniforms, but they were actually condemned German criminals. Within hours the full might of the Wehrmacht was thrown against the Poles.
German armored forces in PzKpfw. I and PzKpfw. II tanks pause momentarily along a muddy road somewhere in Poland.
When the invasion of Poland came, the Wehrmacht pursued a plan to envelop and destroy the Polish Army west of the Vistula and Narew Rivers. The main blow came from Army Group South under Generaloberst Gerd Von Rundstedt, striking northeast out of Silesia toward Warsaw. A secondary thrust would come from occupied Czechoslovakia to handle Polish troops in Galicia. Generaloberst Fedor von Bock’s Army Group North would strike east through the Polish Corridor to link with East Prussia. That done, Bock would then advance on Warsaw from the north.
Polish plans were for a forward defense in western Poland. This was required; much of the Polish Army was made up of ethnic Poles who lived in the western part of the nation. They would need time to mobilize. A quick defense would hopefully also draw Britain and France into the war sooner. It was an imperfect plan, as it allowed the Poles to be decisively engaged early in the fighting. Polish units would also have to cover more territory than was prudent. Combined with Allied underestimation of Germany’s new army and tactics, it was a recipe for defeat, though in fairness the Poles were in a bad position no matter what plans they enacted.
Despite all the mobilizations and signs, the attack was a tactical surprise for the Poles. The Luftwaffe commenced bombing while the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began shelling the Polish fortress at Westerplatte. The Polish Navy was attacked and would be effectively destroyed within a few days. The advancing ground troops swept aside a few Polish patrols and border guards and moved into Poland itself. Paramilitary troops from both sides engaged in a vicious struggle for Danzig.
German armored spearheads raced across Poland, trapping large numbers of Polish troops. Simultaneously, Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed many planes of the Polish Air Force on the ground.
The Polish Corridor was defended by two infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade. The German 4th Army attacked, and the Polish cavalry fought a series of delaying actions, including a raid that resulted in a cavalry charge against a surprised German infantry battalion. They were only beaten off with the arrival of a few armored cars. The next day Italian war correspondents were brought to the scene. They reported being told the Polish cavalrymen had been killed while charging German panzers. The story took hold of the popular imagination until it became an accepted reality, but the tale is just a myth.
As 4th Army hit the Polish Corridor, 3rd Army advanced out of East Prussia toward Warsaw. Two corps attacked but ran into the Mlawa Line, a fortified zone guarding the obvious route of attack. The Germans tried to outflank the position, but swamps secured both flanks, bogging down the effort after several assaults failed. The Polish Mazowiecka Cavalry Brigade met the German 1st Cavalry Brigade along the Ulatkowka River. Engagements between mounted patrols soon led to heavy dismounted combat. By sunset of the first day of the war, 3rd Army was stopped cold.
POLISH ARMY MANOEUVRES NEAR FRONTIER. DANZIG COUP EXPECTED. 18.4.39. Polish army manoeuvres are now being carried out near the German frontier, and cavalry regiments are being called up. – Polish circles in Berlin state that Poland is ready to fire her guns if spontaneous actions occur in Danzig. O.P.S. A long column of Polish tanks during manoeuvres near the frontier. Anm. Nazityskland invaderade Polen 1 september 1939. Manöver Förberedelser Tanks Kolonn På rad Larvfötter CD520 sites: POLEN
Making the main effort, Army Group South saw extensive action, particularly with its 8th and 10th Armies in Silesia. They intended to strike against the Polish Armies Lodz and Krakow, get over the Warta River, and cut off enemy forces in western Poland. Afterward they would advance on Warsaw. These two Wehrmacht formations contained many of the German armored and mechanized divisions.
Initially fighting was light since the Polish defenses were 20 miles behind the border. The worst fighting took place when the 4th Panzer Division attacked the Wolynska Cavalry Brigade at the village of Mokra. The horsemen were assisted by an armored train, while the Germans had trouble coordinating their tanks and infantry. A Stuka raid succeeded in destroying Polish supplies and killing many of their horses, but the cavalrymen held firm. High casualties forced them to finally retreat at sunset, with German tanks hounding them. Meanwhile, Army Krakow suffered badly, its 7th Infantry Division being cut off and overwhelmed by several German divisions. The fortified city of Katowice fared better, however, limiting German success. The rear areas were threatened by guerrilla units of ethnic Germans formed by German intelligence before the war.
Advancing from Slovakia, the 22nd Panzer Corps got around the Polish border units manning the Dunajec Line, forcing Army Krakow to deploy its 10th Mechanized Brigade. The attack was stopped only when the Polish 6th Infantry Division was also committed. Two German mountain divisions attacked across the Carpathian Mountains against Army Karpaty, but the terrain kept them from making any gains.
Heroic Polish cavalrymen ride toward the sounds of battle. Some stories of Polish lancers attacking German tanks emerged after the campaign ended. These remain a topic of debate.
The Luftwaffe tried to destroy the Polish Air Force on the ground, but most of it was already dispersed to auxiliary fields. Despite more myths, only 24 Polish combat aircraft were destroyed on the ground during the entire campaign, though many trainers and unserviceable planes were destroyed. The Luftwaffe also hit railways and important roads in preplanned attacks. Also contrary to legend, the Germans were not yet capable of hasty close air support missions. In the days to come more planned targets were hit, and Polish troop movements were successfully interdicted, hampering the mobilization of reserves. A few close air support missions were attempted late in the campaign.
This photo has been reproduced countless times during the decades since World War II but has lost none of its poignancy. A 10-year-old girl weeps over the body of her older sister, who has just been killed during a German air raid near Warsaw.
A bombing attack on Warsaw took heavy losses to the fighters of the Polish Pursuit Brigade on the first day of the war, but Luftwaffe numerical superiority enabled repeated strikes and by September 6 the Polish unit had lost 70 percent of its fighters, forcing its withdrawal. The rest of the Polish fighter strength was used up in the skies over the main fighting, inflicting at least 126 losses on the Germans. Polish bomber crews flew bravely against the advancing German armies but likewise suffered terribly for little effect.
Back in the north, the Wehrmacht continued advancing along the corridor while Polish forces withdrew southward, leaving the Westerplatte garrison cut off. In the Tuchola Forest, the 3rd Panzer Division managed to cross the Brda River. Two German divisions also advanced west down the corridor from East Prussia, nearly trapping the Polish units between them. Only one Polish division was able to escape the encirclement on September 3. The Germans kept up pressure on the Mlawa Line, finally starting to outflank it. The beleaguered Polish cavalry was reinforced with the 8th Infantry Division but could not hold the line any longer. By the next day the Mlawa defenders and the remaining Poles not encircled in Pomerania were ordered to withdraw to the Vistula Line.
During the night of September 2, the Polish Podlaska Cavalry Brigade conducted a raid into East Prussia, the only Polish attack on German territory. It withdrew after some skirmishes with German militia. The Polish 20th Infantry continued manning the Mlawa Line to allow their comrades to withdraw. It was soon surrounded but continued to resist. Army Modlin tried to hold at the town of the same name, but German river crossing operations threatened the Polish position. After a failed counterattack, the Poles withdrew again across the San River. Another Polish garrison tried to delay the Germans at Modlin but was also surrounded by the advancing Nazis.
German Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers fly in formation above the Polish countryside. During the blitzkrieg, these planes acted as flying artillery, striking deep behind enemy lines to disrupt supply and communications, inflict casualties on troop concentrations, and spread terror among Polish civilians.
The German army groups now began their encirclement of Army Poznan in western Poland. Army Poznan’s commander, General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, asked to attack the German 8th Army, the northern formation of Army Group South. He was refused permission by Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, supreme Polish commander, who feared the unit would be destroyed; he wanted to avoid a decisive battle west of the Vistula. Sadly, the Germans were vulnerable on this flank and feared just such an attack.
The Polish 7th Division, decimated earlier, was mauled again by the 1st Panzer Division and several infantry units as the Germans exploited the gap between the Polish Armies Lodz and Krakow. This fighting enabled the German 10th Army, with its heavy armored contingent, to move toward Warsaw. The tanks struck out across flat farmland through the heart of Poland. The Polish units south of this exploitation withdrew skillfully, delaying the 2nd Panzer Division and maintaining their cohesion.
Polish infantrymen execute field maneuvers during peacetime exercises in April 1939, just five months before World War II erupted in Europe. The Poles fought back on two fronts but were conquered by the Germans from the west and the Soviets from the east.
The panzer divisions made for Warsaw directly toward the Polish Army Prusy, which had been placed there in expectation that the Germans would advance from that direction. Containing three infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade, this army also had a small force of tanks to defend against the panzers bearing down on them. The 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions quickly made for Piotrkow, where they were met by Polish infantry and the 2nd Tank Battalion with its 7TP light tanks. The Polish tankers fought well, knocking out 33 German armored vehicles, but since they were not concentrated their efforts had no lasting effect.
Meanwhile, the German 10th Army pushed back Army Krakow to Kielce by September 5, further opening the path to Warsaw. General Kutrzeba again asked to attack the German flank but was refused. That evening Marshal Rydz-Smigly ordered all four engaged Polish armies—Poznan, Prusy, Lodz and Krakow—to withdraw to the Vistula.
The Germans noticed the Polish moves; Rundstedt and other field commanders realized what was happening and asked to penetrate deeper to encircle the Poles. OKW still worried about a French attack in the west, however, and delayed. It took until September 9, when it was becoming obvious the French were not moving quickly, for the high command to change its mind. Meanwhile, the Poles continued retreating to the Vistula. Rydz-Smigly became worried that the fast-moving Germans would cut off his forces and decided to move his headquarters forward to Brzesc. This location was not able to handle the level of communications needed, and the move proved a major error as the high command could not effectively communicate with units in the field.
The fast-moving German units were easily outdistancing the Polish forces now; time and again Polish troops reached a position only to find German tanks behind them. The gap between Army Prusy and Army Lodz was the worst, with the 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions pushing ever deeper toward Warsaw. Other German forces were moving through the Polish Corridor for another offensive. General Bock was allowed to push his troops down the east bank of the Vistula to endanger the Poles defending along that line.
Captured Polish soldiers are marched toward temporary camps after surrendering to the advancing Germans. Many Polish troops were cut off and forced to capitulate as the German armored spearheads moved rapidly toward their objectives.
With the Germans closing on Warsaw, Marshal Rydz-Smigly finally began to consider the counterattack General Kutrzeba was suggesting, hoping to relieve pressure on Army Lodz and allow the Poles time to reorganize around Warsaw and the Vistula River. The counterattack came along the Bzura River on September 9; the Germans were still aware of the vulnerability of their flank but were lulled by bad intelligence reports and the lack of Polish movement up to this point. Three Polish infantry divisions (14th, 17th, and 25th) attacked the German 24th and 30th Infantry Divisions. A pair of Polish cavalry brigades guarded the flanks of the advance. The initial fighting was heavy, but the Poles threw in their reserves supported by armor and turned the tide. Both German divisions fell back; the 30th lost more than 1,500 as prisoners by September 10. The Poles were finally striking back.
Rundstedt remained calm and ordered the 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions to turn west from the outskirts of Warsaw and begin encircling Army Poznan. He hoped to cut off and destroy this large concentration of enemy troops. Other units were also rushed to the area, establishing numerical superiority. Within two days the Polish offensive was done, and Kutrzeba was ordered to break through to the south toward the Romanian border. However, his command was now badly outnumbered, nine Polish divisions with two cavalry brigades against 19 German divisions, of which five were armored or mechanized.
Kutrzeba understood his predicament and instead moved eastward. The Germans attacked, but the fighting proved difficult until air support arrived. On September 16, some 820 Luftwaffe planes attacked along with the 16th Panzer Corps on the ground. By that evening Kutrzeba ordered his troops to try and escape the pocket through a gap at Sochaczew. Elements of two divisions and two cavalry brigades made it out, but 120,000 Poles were taken prisoner when the Bzura Pocket capitulated on September 18. Both Army Poznan and Army Pomorze were destroyed. Their sacrifice had delayed the German advance on Warsaw and allowed their comrades to prepare better defenses, but the price was staggering.
The Polish command was operating in confusion as stragglers and partially mobilized units began arriving, not knowing where to go. The Polish leadership within Warsaw decided to make a stand and defend the city. Since Rundstedt’s Army Group South was still fighting at Bzura, Army Group North attacked the city on September 15. It was led by the German 3rd Army, which had troops on both banks of the Vistula. The Germans entered the suburbs of the city and engaged in heavy fighting, but since Warsaw was not yet surrounded some Polish troops were still filtering in. After September 21, the Germans finished mopping up the Bzura Pocket and redistributed divisions to surround Warsaw. Army Group South spread out along the south and west sides of the city.
German and Soviet troops met near the city of Brest-Litovsk and celebrated their successful military victory in Poland. Hitler and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin had secretly agreed to partition Poland once their conquest was complete.
The Soviet Union Moves in, Sealing Poland’s Fate
On September 17, Polish fortunes reached a new low when the Soviet Union moved into Poland with 41 divisions and 12 tank brigades totaling over 466,000 troops. Some Poles expected the Soviets might be coming to assist them, but those hopes were quickly dashed. Most of the Polish Army was fighting to the west, leaving only token border troops on the eastern frontier. On average, there was one Polish battalion against a Soviet corps. There was some fighting, mostly skirmishing, but all real hope was now lost. Marshal Rydz-Smigly ordered all Polish units to make for the Romanian border.
On September 23, the Germans began their first attempt to take Warsaw, supported by 1,000 field guns, but few gains were made. The Poles were resisting fiercely. On September 25, another attack came with both artillery and air bombardment. Known as “Black Monday,” the city was pelted with bombs and shells. Even German Junkers Ju-52 transport planes were pressed into service, dropping many incendiary bombs. There was so much smoke that target identification was almost impossible, and many Luftwaffe aircraft dropped their payloads on German troops.
The Nazi campaign to eradicate European Jewry continued as German forces occupied Poland. The day after Poland surrendered, SS personnel were engaged in rounding up Polish Jews and other undesirable elements of the population for resettlement or execution.
The next day the Germans seized three old forts on the south side of Warsaw. To increase the suffering within the city and hopefully speed the surrender, Hitler ordered that no civilians were allowed to leave, trapping them inside the shattered capital. During the evening of September 26, Army Warsaw’s commander, General Juliusz Rommel, sent word to the Germans that he was prepared to discuss surrender. The fighting ended the next day, and more than 140,000 Polish troops became prisoners. A separate Polish force at Modlin held out for another two days, and then it too gave up, 24,000 soldiers marching into captivity.
A small Polish force, east of Warsaw and out of communication, was unaware of the city’s surrender and tried to get there to join the fighting. It ran into the German 13th Infantry Division, a motorized unit, and fought until October 6. Since by this point the Soviets had invaded eastern Poland, there was no longer anywhere for Polish troops to go, and the campaign was effectively over.
Hitler’s great gamble for a Nazi invasion of Poland had succeeded at the cost of 48,000 casualties and a nation now at war. Further gambles would bring France, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Norway under his control by the end of 1940. It would be to the east, on the vast unending plains of the Soviet Union, where the gambles would begin to fail, leading to the ruin of the Reich Hitler had claimed would last a millennium.
And now for a review…
So now you know about how Hitler’s Germany started World War II, and how the Poles were not ready for the event. Even though they knew of the non-stop anti-Polish propaganda, they erroneously believe that they were stronger, better equipped and ready to handle anything that Hitler might unleash.
Expert tip
Do not ever fall for the belief that you are “better” than someone else, or some other society. This belief has failed time and time again. Just ask all those dead leaders of all those cities that Genghis Khan vanquished. Just ask the Spartans. Just ask the Athenians. Just ask the American Indians.
They thought that, at worst, they would be fighting Germany alone. Not a betrayal of Russia, and the slicing up of their nation within a month.
And the people paid the price.
When one nation conquers your nation bad things will happen.
As in what happened to all the intelligent, trained, educated, and influential people in Poland, once the nation is conquered, it will be the people who will suffer. For once stripped of their ability to fight, and organization, the threat-vectors will be identified, collected, and killed in mass.
1940 Katyn Forest Massacre
The Russian eagerness to slaughter Poland's military leadership was not simply born out of savagery. Many believe that Stalin reckoned that such ruthless tactics would permanently weaken the Poles, and make them a much easier people to subdue. -Dailymail
Know your history. It is going to be repeated. It is going to happen in the United States. It is going to happen.
Do not let it happen to you.
The
progressive liberal communists collected anyone who could possibly be a
threat to them. They loaded them into trucks and trains, and carted
them off to an isolated forest. There, they tied their hands behind
their backs and systematically killed each one.
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So let’s talk about what happened to the conquered people after the war ended. Let’s talk a little about the people in Poland…
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. They came
from both sides, and within weeks, Poland was captured. The Western half
of Poland became occupied by Germany. The Eastern side of Poland became
occupied by the Soviets.
Once
the Germans and the Soviets took over Poland, it was divided up. The
Poles in the West had to deal with the German Nazi’s. The Poles on the
East had to deal with the Soviets.
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In 1940, once Russia took over a huge portion of Poland, they collected people. They collected anyone who was smart. They collected anyone who had skills. They collected anyone who had an education. They considered these people threats to the “new progressive reality” that they planned to impose on Poland. They collected them.
And, then they massacred them.
Anyone with a college education.
Anyone who was an educator.
Anyone in politics.
Anyone who owned or supervised in a factory.
Anyone who was related to anyone who was famous.
Anyone who held an officer rank in the military.
Anyone who was a small business owner.
Anyone who was a land owner (owned a house).
Anyone who was singled out by someone else as non-progressive.
Expert tip
When your nation is conquered and vanquished, your chances of survival drop considerably. In order to survive you need to stop listening to all “authorities”. No one has your best interests at heart.
In November 1939, the Russians arrested over 15,000 Polish officers and deported them to western Russia.
Among them were civilians, professors, doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, judges,an Olympic athlete, priests, and the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army.
The prisoners sat there for months, afraid of what was going to happen, but few guessing their true fate. As Peszkowski said: ‘We did not think it possible that the Russians would kill us without mercy.’
Desc: Katyn massacre (Polish army officers killed by Soviet troops in Katyn forest, near Smolensk, western Russia,1943), Nazi propaganda poster, Central Europe • Credit: [ The Art Archive / Private Collection / Marc Charmet ] • Ref: AA399882
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The military leaders were sent to three prison camps, at Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostashkov.
In April of the following year, the Polish prisoners were told that they would be repatriated to Poland. It was a lie, of course. When progressive liberal democrats (whether they call themselves Marxists or Communists is of not matter) say anything, it is ALWAYS a lie.
Progressive Liberal Socialists always lie.
Multiple
locations were used to kill all of the intellectual class of Poland.
The workers, ignorant, and women were singled out, and segregated. The
men were taken to remote locations and shot.
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The first group boarded a train, but oddly it was not traveling east, but rather westward. It came to a stop outside Katyn Forest, situated near Smolensk.
Executions normally take place hurriedly, but in this case the killers were in no rush.
The victims were taken from their prison camp and put on a train for two days without food and water. When they arrived at their final destination, they were bundled onto coaches with windows smeared with cement to obscure their view. After a short drive, the men were directed one by one to the rear door of the vehicle. As each man stepped into the gloomy light of the Russian forest, he would have had no doubt as to his fate.
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From there the Polish officers were herded into black vans which drove them to a clearing in the woods.
When they stepped out, they were simply led to the edge of what would imminently be their grave. The Russians took them to a large pit inside the forest, and forced them to kneel at its edge.
Led to the edge of the pit. Held and bound, then forced to your knees. The progressive liberal socialists will put the pistol to the back of your head and kill you dead with it.
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Their hands were tied behind their backs, and a choke knot tied around their neck and hands so that if they struggled they would have strangled themselves.
Held on either side, the victims were approached from behind by an NKVD man equipped with a German Walther 7.65mm pistol.
The relatively small recoil, compared to that of heavier Russian pistols, made the task far easier on the executioner’s wrist, an essential requisite for a killer with so many men to dispatch.
The shot
was fired at the base of the man’s skull, and if the job was done
correctly, the bullet would have exited through the forehead. Death was
instantaneous, as one by one the Polish officers filled the mass grave.
They were surrounded by dozens of armed NKVD agents who made sure that everyone was killed. No one escaped.
Polish officer shot in the back of the head by progressive liberal socialists from the Soviet Union. These people are dangerous.
.
Their bodies were thrown into mass graves.
This convoy of death went on for several weeks. By mid-May almost 4,500 Polish officers were murdered and buried in eight mass graves – the largest grave contained 12 layers of corpses.
Polish aviator shot in the back of the head. This is what the progressive liberal socialists have in store for anyone that does not agree with them on any of their crazed ideology.
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Among the dead were more than 200 pilots including friends and classmates of the Kosciuszko Air Squadron.
Is is a photo of a memorial ceremony in Poland for the absolute slaughter of the Polish leadership, intellectuals, and workers of Poland, by progressive liberal socialist democrats from the Soviet Union. They called themselves “Communists”.
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One of its’ victims was the brother-in-law of Witold Lokociewski. The sole survivor of Katyn was Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz.
He was on board the train headed to Katyn Forest, and was standing in the line ready to board the van, but an NKVD colonel had pulled him out of the line.
The Germans invaded Russia in July 1942, but it wasn’t until the next spring that they discovered the mass graves in Katyn.
The bodies were exhumed and examined by a team of experts, and they accused the Russians of having committed the atrocity. The Russians denied all responsibility and countered by saying that the Germans had committed the massacre.
Nazi Germans said the Communist Russians did it.
Communist Russians said that the Nazi Germans did it.
But, you know, they both were complicit. As both nations invaded Poland, both nations captured the people, and both nations took over Poland. Who pulled the actual trigger is meaningless. They died because both Russia and Germany promoted the idea of war against Poland.
Fact.
When Polish Prime Minister Sikorski called for an investigation by the International Red Cross, the Russian government abruptly severed all diplomatic ties with Poland. Sir Owen O’Malley, the British Ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, described the grisly scene:
” In the broad deep pit their comrades lay, packed closely around the edge, head to feet, like sardines in a tin….up and down on the bodies the executioners tramped, hauling [the corpses] about and treading in the blood like butchers in a stockyard. “
Sir Owen O’Malley conducted an investigation and produced a detailed report that proved that the Soviets were guilty. But Churchill hastily absconded with the report and warned everyone not to ever speak a word about it.
They rounded them up. They loaded them into trucks. They tied their hands behind their backs, and they killed them.
-Katyn Massacre
They politely told them to turn around. They asked them to put their hands behind their backs. Then they shot them FUCKING dead.
Dead.
Dead as a fish. Dead. D-E-A-D.
The
progressive liberal communists rounded up anyone who could possibly be a
threat to them. They loaded them into trucks. They tied their hands
behind their backs, and they killed them.
.
When the atrocity was reported, the governments all, ordered it to be kept quiet and for no one to say a word about it.
Know your history.
You see, the progressive liberals; the communists wanted a complete extinction of all opposition in Poland. They destroyed anyone with knowledge. They eviscerated anyone with skills, ability or talent. They erased anyone who could organize against them.
You know…
People like YOU.
In the spring of 1940, Stalin and Lavrenty Beria planned to liquidate this potential source of opposition to Soviet control and gave orders to murder over 20,000 Polish officers.
The murders were carried out at several sites. The most famous was the NKVD burial ground at Katyn, near Minsk (today in Belarus), but killings were also carried out at Piatikhatki (near Kharkiv in Ukraine) and at Mednoye in Russia.
Other killing sites were never identified, although it is believed that another group of officers was placed on old barges towed out into the White Sea near the Arctic Circle and used for target practice by the Soviet Navy.
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees.
One female air force officer was among the dead. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots.
-Learning History
We know about this because, while Stalin ordered everyone to be
killed, their bodies were discovered by the Nazi’s that invaded Russia
the subsequent year. They heard about the bodies and they investigated.
Expert tip
Do not board any trains, trucks, buses, or transport vehicles with others that appear to be leaving in a massive group. Do not believe the excuses that they give you, or what the destination will ultimately be. It is all a lie to trick you to go to a very bad place, and stay there.
They used the information and pictures of what they found as anti-Soviet propaganda.
The remains of Brigadier General Smorawinski ( Mieczysław Smorawiński
) found in one of the many graves in the Katyn forest. He had his hands
tied behind his back and shot in the back of the head. After a short
stay in various Soviet prisons and POW camps, at the end of 1939 he was
transferred to the NKVD Special Camp in Kozelsk. Smorawiński left the
camp on 7 April 1940. Together with most of the Polish officers
imprisoned there he was executed by the NKVD at Katyn, in the spring of
1940, aged forty-six, in what became known as the Katyn massacre.
During the exhumation of 1943 his body was exhumed and identified, as
one of the Polish generals to be identified. Katyn
Memorial in Jersey City. The progressive liberal democrats in power
want it removed, or put in an isolated area so that “mothers don’t have
to explain what happened in history”.
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There are memorials to this horrible massacre in the United States. Though the local politicians in power wants the statues to be removed.
In Jersey City, a park official proposed relocating a monument of the massacre to a less-traveled locale. He argued this because he found it “a little gruesome”, adding that “I can’t imagine how many mothers go by and have to explain it to their children.”
This happened in Katyn, but also in Cambodia. As well as in China. It also happened in Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam. Know your history. All of the ground-work is being laid down today for a near by future.
The
Cambodian Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where
collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the
Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979,
immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War. The mass killings
are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide.
Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and
Yale University indicate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution.
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There will not be any leniency in this matter. If you are a threat, maybe you wrote something, or maybe you said an off-hand comment at work, you will be singled out. The “Diversity Officers” in your company have a firm lock-grip on who is not “with the program”. Take heed.
You will be taken to the edge of a dug hole in the ground and you will be shot dead.
Dead.
Please kindly be advised that all of this will happen before you are aware that the SHTF.
You will wake up in the morning and dress like normal. You will drive in your car like normal, and get a coffee at a fast food restaurant like normal. The only thing out of the normal might be a friendly police officer that might pull you aside to "have a small chat with you".
Then, it is all downhill from there.
We see pictures in history books and say, “nah that could never happen here”. The roads are dirt. The people are wearing military clothing. There isn’t anything that looks like a part of America in the pictures.
But the truth is that yes it can happen here, and if you read ANYTHING at all about genocide, know the [1] it is always government sponsored, and [2] it is rare for a nation to escape a period of genocide longer than 100 year period between genocidal events. [3] It is always preceded by disarming of the citizenry.
America is long overdue for one.
Then you will turn around nicely while they put handcuffs on you. You will be entrapped long before you have any idea that things are going down. IT WILL NOT BE REPORTED, and you will be unaware.
Do you think that all those people killed in Katyn had any idea what awaited them? Do you think that those factory workers in Serbia had any idea how their day would end? Do you think that those teachers in Cambodia had any idea what would happen when they "worked the fields".
Be ready to be SURPRISED.
If you are handcuffed, you will stand there while they go through your house.
Betrayal is as old as man, but the pace and severity seems to be accelerating. It hasn’t touched you or me yet, but someday soon we will be told to “be patient, as we restore your account balance,” or “the FBI will not allow this to happen again,” or “we’ve made some mistakes in the past but we (the same people) will do better going forward.” Ya, thanks.
- Karl Ushanka
Yes, war is ugly.
Yes it is, but the reason why I am carrying on about it is really simple. Washington DC is under the impression that they can conduct another “war” and it will be one where the American Military wages war over decades, from distant areas of safety to hurt people who DO NOT FIGHT BACK.
Nope.
Those days are over.
Every time you read or hear, or watch someone talking about Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Uighur Muslims, the Ukraine, or Russian spying realize that you are being prepped for agreeing to World War III.
Remember also that wars NEVER go as planned, and the idea that a war with a major nuclear armed nation will be limited to conventional small arms on distant shores is a big fucking lie.
And shame on you for believing it.
The truth is that you are being set up for a war; a BIG NUCLEAR WAR.
Expert tip
Every article about Taiwan, the Uighur Muslims, Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, the Ukraine, or any contrary article about Russia or China are all propaganda setting you all up to agree to massive nuclear conflagration. Do not fall for it. As the intensity of these article increase, so does the changes of your death. Take note on what the “talking heads” and political commentators are saying. If they are devoting significant time to either of the other two global powers, then “head for the hills”.
A nuclear nightmare.
There is a very strong likelihood that this anti-Russia or Anti-China propaganda campaign will result in large-scale nuclear weapon detonations on American soil.
Yes.
You read that correctly.
There is a strong likelihood that large-scale nuclear weapon(s) will be detonated on American soil within the next few years.
There are numerous reasons why I hold this belief. But the biggest, I suppose, is the pro-war faction in the United States government.
You see, the United States now believes that we should improve our nuclear warfare fighting capability so that we can use it.
After all, with all those proxy wars the United States is fighting now, (eight in total as of 2019) that we should be able to field and use nuclear weapons freely without worry of retaliation. (After all, what’s all this nonsense about going to battle against Turkey and “our allies” the Kurds?)
John Bolton, openly advocates a first-strike policy against nuclear-armed enemies, and the Pentagon, after decades of careful disarmament, wants to spend $1.2 trillion to upgrade its nuclear arsenal.
If you’ve felt a new shiver of nuclear fear over the past year, you’re not alone: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its “Doomsday Clock” to within two minutes of midnight — closer than it has been since the height of the Cold War.
- This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
You see, according to the military and political planned deep within the bowels of Washington, America can use “low yield” tactical nuclear weapons on a sovereign foreign nation, and aside from some “political squawk”, nothing bad will come of it.
No one ever fights back. Right?
In December 2016, the US Defense Science Board – a semi-independent group that advises the Secretary of Defense – warned that “the nuclear threshold may be decreasing owing to the stated doctrines and weapons developments of some states.”
Therefore, the DSB recommended DOD should “provide many more options in stemming proliferation or escalation; and a more flexible nuclear enterprise that could produce, if needed, a rapid, tailored nuclear option for limited use should existing non-nuclear or nuclear options prove insufficient.” This would involve “lower yield, primary only options” for strategic warheads on long-range ballistic missiles.
- The Terrifying Nuclear War Game the US Shouldn't Play
Now along with this attitude, is the strong belief that if America fields “low yield” nuclear devices that it will NOT result in devastating nuclear retaliatory strikes. That is considered inconceivable, as “everyone knows” that the United States is the strongest and most powerful nation in the world.
There wouldn’t ever be any repercussions.
It’s inconceivable.
America still thinks that it is the only dog in the barn-yard. But, you know, the rest of the farm animals are getting mightily tired of the dog bullying everyone around. Especially as the dog is getting old, has arthritis, and other problems. One day, another animal might just say that enough is enough.
America spent millions of dollars on NED, which actively went into China, into Hong Kong, on Chinese soil. They taught and trained the anti-government forces there. They taught them how to perform "soft violence" to provoke the mainland Chinese. They paid protestors, and gave them the skills to build bombs, and target maps and a strategy.
All of which was caught on video. With Trumps advisors caught on film (with a clear audio track) in the HK Marriot hotel explaining how to conduct the riots and how to destroy the subway stations. The Chinese have videos of the teaching and training classes for the insurgents, and the NED even has the gall to have their members on LinkedIN boasting about their involvement in HK.
China did nothing.
Though, if the roles were reversed, it would be a different story. If China sent advisors to train the BLM and Antifa on how to bomb bus stations, trains, airports and destroy all public transportation. And they were caught on film and broadcast on all the Conservative networks, with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talking about it 24-7. It would be a catastrophic error in judgement. Don't you agree?
But China did nothing.
So America believes that it can go about launching all sorts of military, quasi and semi-para military operations all over the globe and no one will ever raise a finger to stop the empire expansionism.
(Limited Yield) Snow ball strike from the movie “A Christmas Story”.
It can be Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, the Ukraine. It can be anywhere from Venezuela to Turkey. No one will or can stop us. Right?
China will do nothing. Right?
Russia will do nothing. Right?
No one will fight back. Russia and China won’t ever work together against the USA. Right?
Right?
Ralph fights back against the schoolyard bully. The scene is from the 1980’s movie “A Christmas Story”.
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The belief is that the US can launch a few “low yield” nuclear weapons and no nation would dare strike back. The USA can deploy Marines in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and China won’t do anything.
It’s inconceivable. Don’t you know.
I am not the only person that believes this. Read John Paul Roberts excellent article on the pre-nuclear holocaust preparations that America is currently engaged in.
Are You Ready To Die?
And since it would be inconceivable, the military and the United States government officials are today, far more likely and prone to using “safe”, “tactical” nuclear weapons to further their agendas.
And these are dangerous agendas.
These are agendas that are BLIND to the idea that the rest of the world might put it’s collective foot down and say “ENOUGH!”. And launch a retaliatory strike in full force, not only against the military forces on their territory, but rather at the American homeland, the American cities, and the American people who allowed these morons to get anywhere near nuclear launch codes.
This map should scare the living Dejesus out of you. It shows how Washington DC and the political establishment views the use of low-yield nuclear weapons against Asia in the assumption that no one would strike back.
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I argue that if the United States, for what ever reason, launches and detonates any kind of nuclear weapon (low-yield, small backpack, tactical strike, or strategic nuclear), that there will be a FULL SCALE retaliatory response aimed at the United States.
Any use of nuclear weapons anywhere in Asia will result in the complete destruction of the United States.
And when American military planners contemplate the use of nuclear weapons it is along the lines of tailored tactical responses for set specific objectives. It’s always with “surgical” precision and “contained” destruction. Never taking into account the strong possibility of “unleashing the dogs of war” against us.
They never take into account that the rest of the world thinks of America as a big loud-mouth bully that one day will get it's comeuppance.
Here we consider a “slap back” response up to an all-out MAD-level (Mutually Assured Destruction) response to the United States.
Expert tip
Any use of American “surgical” nuclear weapons anywhere in Asia will result in the complete destruction of the United States.
It assumes that we initiate the actions though our military use of “low yield” nuclear weapons in Asia. As such, we look at a large super-power unleashing modern large-capacity nuclear munitions, using hyper-glide technology against an unsuspecting America.
Though, at that, many basement computer nerds think that a nuclear war is winnable and not all that bad...
"Anukeisabigbomb, butnotthatbig. Mostof DC wouldsurvive, alotofradiationpoisoningthough, andasyoucanseefromtheoccasionalfloorshot, mostofourcongressisoutofthebuildingatleastandmostofthetime... "
We consider them releasing this onslaught within minutes after the USA detonates a”low yield” device in Asia. Which means, that nuclear detonations over coastal cities by SLBM MIRVs will detonate within minutes of launch.
Minutes.
Two minutes after the SLBM launches off the USA coast, the red lights will light up at NORAD and they will scramble to contact the American leadership. Five minutes later Washington will be erased from the surface of the globe.
Thus obliterating the leadership of America in one fell swoop.
These scenarios assume that the leadership in both Russia and China are not idiots. That they have anticipated the use by America of a tactical "low yield" nuclear weapon, and have positioned submarines and other systems for an immediate kill-level response that would detonate on American soil within minutes.
Perhaps, you the reader disagree. Maybe you think that the rest of the world are idiots, and only Americans are smart. Good for you. Then.
A quick reminder.
While the United States has been very busy funding conventional military operations around the globe, strategic nuclear missile forces have taken a back seat to the realities of global proxy wars without nuclear strike-back.
Once a missile launch is detected, I am comfortable knowing that it will be detected via satellite and the knowledge relayed to SAC HQ. That is…
…unless the Chinese and the Russian hunter-killer satellites don’t take them out.
Missile Combat Crew Commander, Capt. Kenny Gibaldo, (left) and 2nd Lt. John Butler, Deputy Crew Commander of the 320th Missile Squadron, simulate the launch of a Minuteman III using the REACT console in a Launch Control Capsule at Missile Alert Facility Hotel-1.
People!
People!
Five minutes is not enough time to react to nuclear destruction. Whether or not the United States strategic forces are aware of a launch means nothing when hyper-speed technology and delivery weapons are used.
Fundamentals
According to the “Fourth Turning”, we can expect a major critical event to take place sometime from 2023 to 2025. This critical event historically involves mass deaths, the destruction of cities using the most advanced weapons of the time, and a complete over-haul of society.
As shown in the following illustration…
Here are the next few years before the Fourth Turning is expected to reach a crisis point.
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I am betting on 2023, but it can be any time from 2023 to 2027.
And you all might ask why. And to this I just look at the cycles of turning; the “Fourth Turning” cycles. Which pretty much seems to be repeating the same old bullshit that led to World War II, and the American Civil War.
Expert tip
John Titor claimed to be a time traveler. He discussed the “future” of America in 1998. All of his predictions came true, the only thing is that his dates were off by ten years. If you follow the events that hey laid out, and add ten years, you will see a contemporaneous civil war brewing in unreported balkanized areas where it is rural vs urban Americans. That the rich oligarchy is pulling the strings and making events happen, and that military overtures towards Russia will be significant and will result in Russia launching a devastating preemptive nuclear strike… not a retaliatory one against the United States.
Can things get worse? Oh, you betya. If you think that 2021 was shit, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Things are sizing up for a really bad event…
Thieves Loot Russia’s Top Secret Doomsday Plane… That’s pretty bad, when someone (probably CIA) breaks into the Russian “Command Post” aircraft and takes off with their valuable cypher equipment. Why? It is only used when there is World War III? It is serious business; Kremlin Sounds Alarm…
Well, maybe you, I and the rest of the sheeple are not told what is going on, but the rest of the world’s leadership isn’t so ill-informed. Russia is most certainly taking all this seriously. Moscow conducts drills of nuke forces…
And of course, Asia is uniting against the out-of-control American military empire…
Do you remember earlier in this article how Germany and Russia teamed up together to destroy Poland? Do be so sure that Russia and China haven’t had enough of the USA bullshit.
But not to worry, America has something called “diversity” and “democracy” and that no matter what happens, American troops will save us…
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Not just that, but the nature of the American military is changing. It is getting rid of “basic training” and focusing on a softer and gentler military. Not one that responds to a harsh crisis, but one ready to handle the advanced high technology systems that the military uses within a fine well ordered environment. They are readying the military to become office and cubicle workers, able to push buttons, and rapidly respond to blinking lights on computer consoles.
I know that President Biden will have a different style that President Trump had, and a totally different mind-set. But that will only result in rearranging the passenger seats on the train, NOT the direction that the train is going in.
America Today
How do you think people in Russia would act? What about people in China? I’ll tell you one thing, they wouldn’t be running into their cars in fear. That’s for certain. They would probably chase after them and kill it with their bar hands.
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The United States leadership has an over-inflated perception of who they are and what capabilities that they possess.
I am not saying that Global Nuclear War is going to happen, but what I am saying is that the leadership in the rest of the world are being threatened by the United States and are teaming up together to prevent the USA from destroying the rest of the world.
The Russian – China alliance is a very formidable block that Americans are unaware of.
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This is not a popular opinion. But it is the reality. And showing people the reality, and that is the true and actual reality is often quite shocking to cattle that have been feeding from the trough for too long.
People!
You don’t fuck around with Russia!
It’s tough to grow up in Russia.
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And of course, you all should well realize, by now at least, that you don’t fuck with China either.
John Titor
Believe him or not, if you add ten years on to his dates then EVERYTHING that he predicted would happen, actually happened. Keep note that he made these predictions back in 1998. And according to him…
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And knowing that he said…
Part 2 – 3:10 Question: “Why do you think that our future will be like your future?” Answer: “Because our world-lines are so similar.”
Part 2 – 3:43 “This world-line and my own are almost exactly alike.”
He talked about what his “past” in his world-line had to say…
Part 2 – 17:40 Most people blamed the “government organizations” for the war. Fast forward to 2017, where one the largest obstacles to meaningful change is the entrenched federal bureaucracy. Curious that John Titor would say “government organizations” and not “the government”. He actually predicted this problem.
Part 2 – 20:50 “When the civil war broke out most decided to stay in the cities and lose most of their civil rights in the guise of security…”
And…
Part 2 – 21:20 “avoiding conflict with the federal police” (The Department of Homeland Security the DHS = the “federal Police”. Which was established by George Bush after 9-11. John Titor PREDICTED the Department of Homeland Security.)
Part 2 – 22:30 “The US cities were attacked by Russia who was our enemy.” In other words, the cities had become the de facto home of the enemies of the United States, and Russia attacked them.
With…
Part 2 – 47:00 Hawaii will probably avoid much of the conflict, but it is dependent on the mainland for food. Therefore, there would be strife on any small island. Interesting that he should make this statement. Most people, by far, would assume that an island would be the best place to “ride out” world war III. But John Titor says differently. He says that the number one cause of death was starvation, and since most food to the island is imported, it would seem that it would not be a desirable location to hide.
With significant notes that say…
Part 3 – 3:14 “There is a civil war in the United States that starts in 2005.”
Part 3 – 3:30 “A nuclear war against the federal empire and the cities occurred in 2015, and thus we (in the countryside) won.”
Here, John Titor discusses “taking out the cities” by Russia and nuclear weapons. Which is what is currently being discussed in contemporaneous American Conservative media…
RUSH: So during the obscene profit time-out mere moments ago, Mr. Snerdley, the Official Program Observer, peppered me with a question. The question was… what exactly was the question? Are we ever gonna win the — (interruption) Are you talking about win elections or just… (interruption) Okay. All right. Mr. Snerdley is asking if we’re ever going to be able to win. And he’s talking about elections. Votes.
Are we ever gonna be able to win without taking back some of these cities? He’s talking about blue cities like New York, Philadelphia. I assume you mean Detroit? (interruption) Do you include Milwaukee in this? (Interruption) Definitely. All right. What about Oakland, California? (interruption) Too far gone. San Francisco? (interruption) You think we can get San Francisco? Look, we won election after election after election without winning these cities or the states they’re in. (interruption)
I thought you were asking me something else when you said, “Can we win?” I thought you meant can we win the culture, can we dominate the culture. I actually think — and I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times cause I’ve seen others allude to this. I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York, especially if you’re talking about votes.
-Rush Limbaugh
Adding ten years, we get…
Civil War that starts during the Obama Presidency in 2015.
Nuclear War with Russia that starts in 2025; the Biden Presidency.
Additionally he said this about Florida…
Part 3 – 9:00 Jacksonville, Florida was vaporized by a nuclear weapon. He worked out of a military base in Tampa. That assumes that Tampa must not have been hit by a nuclear strike.
Very curious. If these “minor” facilities were attacked, then you can guarantee that all the other larger bases were obliterated.
Military bases in Florida.
.
He said this about Nebraska…
Part 2 – 7:30 He tells his parents in the 2000 world-line to move to Omaha Nebraska because that is where the new capital will be, and it is a safe rural farming community.
And he said this about Canada…
Part 2 – 40:10 Canada is full of very dangerous and ruthless people.
And his opinion about us at this point in time…
Part 3 – 11:45 Imagine that you are a Jew and could travel back in time to Germany at the time of the rise of Hitler in the early 1930’s. You know what the future would be. Yet, you see all around you, the ignorant masses of people who continue their behaviors in complete ignorance in what it will eventually lead towards.
Part 3 – 13:25 Question: Which parts of the United States are safe from the conflict of Civil war, and Nuclear war? Answer: Take a close look at the county by county voting maps of the last election.
Part 3 - 16:15 “Russia’s enemy is not you the people. Russia’s enemy is the United States government.”
Part 3 – 16:45 Statements hint at the deterioration of the Middle East as a negative influence on global stability.
American global relationships.
.
And if you add ten years to every date that John Titor gave, this statement should bring “goose bump pimples” to your arms…
Part 3 – 24:54 “The year 2008 was a general time when everyone realized that the world they thought they lived in was over.”
2018.
Part 3 – 34:13 When the war comes it will be blatantly obvious to everyone in the nation that it will occur. The shocking thing was that so many people decided to stay in the very cities where they knew the bombs would be dropped.
Part 3 – 37:30 The president at the time of the Civil War tried to be another Lincoln and hold the country together, but many of the government policies drove a wedge in the civil rights of Americans and created divisions that were irreconcilable. The President in 2009 was concerned ONLY in keeping his power base. (Stated with eerily accuracy in 2000.)
Part 3 – 38:10 One of the things that John Titor alluded to was that the United States president elected in 2008 might be a man or a woman. Yet, back in the year 2000 it was inconceivable that a woman would even consider running for President. Yet, we know now that Hillary Clinton did do exactly that and ran for President in 2008. It seems strange today, after the Hollywood blitz of Madam President Movies all in support of a Hillary Clinton Presidency. But at that time it was unknown.
And this most accurate description…
Part 3 – 9:45 “Let me let you in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked upon as a lazy, self-centered, civilly ignorant sheep.”
Americans in COVID-19 isolation pens, 2020.
.
And about the American Civil War as a buildup toward the total destruction of America by nuclear weapons…
Part 3 – 47:15 Most people will starve, the rest will die of disease, followed by bullet wounds and radiation. In that order.
Part 3 – 52:48 “The conflict was not about taking and holding ground, it was about order and rights… …they were betting that people wanted security over freedom and they were wrong.”
Part 3 – 54:38 “The cities were not isolated because of them, they were isolated because of us (the people in the “red states” or countryside.)”
The mix of American civil war and global nuclear war is interesting. Keep in mind that neither Russia or China are communist. They retain the historical terms and phrases, but functionally they do not resemble anything like what is being portrayed in American media.
Russia…
Russia is not Communist.
Part 5 – 3:31 The police actually got away with harming an American citizen, filming it, and getting off with no negative consequences. Perhaps John Titor was right, because these are exactly the kinds of things that he stated would lead up to the American civil war.
Part 5 – 4:50 Our enemy was the global banking elite which were all centered in the cities.
Part 5 – 7:30 It is now Russia that is stopping the globalists, the New World Order people and the global Banking Elite.
Part 5 – 11:05 When Russia nukes our cities, they are killing off our citizen’s enemies. Our enemies are internal, not external. (According to John Titor, the nukes were accurate and relatively “clean” and used in clusters of three.)
Part 5 – 15:00 John Titor said that he would prefer to have lived the live after World War III than a peaceful solution. The only way to fix the issues is to start fresh.
Interesting stuff these John Titor predictions. And remember…
Part 3 – 42:30 The people with the most to lose would be the most untrustworthy when the world changes.
Part 3 – 43:10 “We have a saying here. Safe is anywhere a hungry person cannot walk in three days.”
So knowing this, and knowing that, and knowing history, we NEED to observe how the people of Poland managed to survive during those Hellish years from 1939 through 1945…
…and emulate them.
Which will be on another post. Please stand by.
A final Metallicman word and some final thoughts.
All this is stressful. It is stressful because there is nothing you all can do about it. So you make do with what you have. You appreciate your life and the loved ones that surround you, and you reach out to your neighbors and your community.
Take pleasure in the little things.
Take pleasure in the little things.
.
Appreciate the loved ones that care for you, and give them your time and affections. Seriously too little of our precious time is being spent like this…
Appreciate the loved ones that care for you, and give them your time and affections.
.
MM is a free website. It’s not a for-profit enterprise. I am doing this because I do understand how the universe works, I do understand the mediums of exchange, and the consequences of actions, and I do understand what is going on. As do our benefactors.
Stop being so profit-oriented. Start being more people-oriented. Stop thinking of money and things. Start considering people and relationships.
Expert tip
Remember, if some “expert” on the extraterrestrial issue asks you for money or to pay, they actually have ZERO experience with extraterrestrials, and ZERO knowledge of how the universe works. Exchanging knowledge for profit creates a very undesirable situation for us who know what the fuck is going on. We accept donations. We accept meals, friendships and kind words and deeds. But we do not demand financial gain.
Everything is falling into place. But do not allow the fear of what might occur change who you are internally. Things are following a specific path, and all is being actuated wihtin those vectors. Keep with the program. Be a Rufus. Appreciate the world around you. Be helpful and kind. Not hurt, trick or try to profit unneedlessly.
Be a “good guy”.
Metallicman gives some most excellent advice.
.
Please look around you and take pleasure in what you see. The world is big and beautiful and there are people who are worthy of your time, your love, your consideration. Do what you can to shut out the evil and corrupted from your life, and appreciate the world that lies around you in abundance.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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What is “welfare”? It is “free stuff” from the government, as long as you meet their criteria. And since it is important to “them” to maintain their budgets, the natural inclination for the welfare system is to grow. To grow larger, and larger, and even larger. All the while, those on welfare are becoming dependent upon the government.
Fun Fact: China doesn't have "welfare". You either work or die.
Their system is free work for anyone. You join the work collective, and you are given free food, free housing, free clothes, and a modest stipend to live off of. If you cannot do the bare minimum work requirements, the collective will kick you out, and you will either beg or starve.
And the end result of decades of this behavior, and this system, is to create a class of people that act as pawns for those that dish out the benefits.
Let’s look at the techniques that criminal masterminds use to keep people dependent upon them, and have them doing things that they naturally would be abhorrent towards.
LAW 11
LEARN TO KEEP PEOPLE DEPENDENT ON YOU
JUDGMENT
To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Sometime in the Middle Ages, a mercenary soldier (a condottiere), whose name has not been recorded, saved the town of Siena from a foreign aggressor. How could the good citizens of Siena reward him? No amount of money or honor could possibly compare in value to the preservation of a city’s liberty. The citizens thought of making the mercenary the lord of the city, but even that, they decided, wasn’t recompense enough. At last one of them stood before the assembly called to debate this matter and said, “Let us kill him and then worship him as our patron saint.” And so they did.
The Count of Carmagnola was one of the bravest and most successful of all the condottieri. In 1442, late in his life, he was in the employ of the city of Venice, which was in the midst of a long war with Florence. The count was suddenly recalled to Venice. A favorite of the people, he was received there with all kinds of honor and splendor. That evening he was to dine with the doge himself, in the doge’s palace. On the way into the palace, however, he noticed that the guard was leading him in a different direction from usual. Crossing the famous Bridge of Sighs, he suddenly realized where they were taking him—to the dungeon. He was convicted on a trumped-up charge and the next day in the Piazza San Marco, before a horrified crowd who could not understand how his fate had changed so drastically, he was beheaded.
THE TWO HORSES
Two horses were carrying two loads. The front Horse went well, but the rear Horse was lazy. The men began to pile the rear Horse’s load on the front Horse; when they had transferred it all, the rear Horse found it easy going, and he said to the front Horse: “Toil and sraeat! The more you try,the more you have to suffer.” When they reached the tavern, the owner said; “Why should I fodder two horses when I carry all on one? I had better give the one all the food it wants, and cut the throat of the other; at least I shall have the hide.” And so he did.
FABLES. LEO TOLSIOY, 1828-1910
Interpretation
Many of the great condottieri of Renaissance Italy suffered the same fate as the patron saint of Siena and the Count of Carmagnola: They won battle after battle for their employers only to find themselves banished, imprisoned, or executed. The problem was not ingratitude; it was that there were so many other condottieri as able and valiant as they were.
They were replaceable.
Nothing was lost by killing them. Meanwhile, the older among them had grown powerful themselves, and wanted more and more money for their services. How much better, then, to do away with them and hire a younger, cheaper mercenary. That was the fate of the Count of Carmagnola, who had started to act impudently and independently. He had taken his power for granted without making sure that he was truly indispensable.
Such is the fate (to a less violent degree, one hopes) of those who do not make others dependent on them. Sooner or later someone comes along who can do the job as well as they can—someone younger, fresher, less expensive, less threatening.
Be the only one who can do what you do, and make the fate of those who hire you so entwined with yours that they cannot possibly get rid of you. Otherwise you will someday be forced to cross your own Bridge of Sighs.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
When Otto von Bismarck became a deputy in the Prussian parliament in 1847, he was thirty-two years old and without an ally or friend. Looking around him, he decided that the side to ally himself with was not the parliament’s liberals or conservatives, not any particular minister, and certainly not the people. It was with the king, Frederick William IV. This was an odd choice to say the least, for Frederick was at a low point of his power. A weak, indecisive man, he consistently gave in to the liberals in parliament; in fact he was spineless, and stood for much that Bismarck disliked, personally and politically. Yet Bismarck courted Frederick night and day. When other deputies attacked the king for his many inept moves, only Bismarck stood by him.
THE CAT THAT WALKED BY HIMSELF
Then the Woman laughed and set the Cat a bowl of the warm white milk and said, “0 Cat, you are as clever as a man, but remember that your bargain was not made with the Man or the Dog, and I do not know whatthey will do when they come home.” “What is that to me?” said the Cat. “If I have my place in the Cave by the fire and my warm white milk three times a day, I do not care what the Man or the Dog can do.”
... And from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree. But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice, and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and the night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet WildWoods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.
-JUST SO STORIES, RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-1936
Finally, it all paid off: In 1851 Bismarck was made a minister in the king’s cabinet. Now he went to work. Time and again he forced the king’s hand, getting him to build up the military, to stand up to the liberals, to do exactly as Bismarck wished. He worked on Frederick’s insecurity about his manliness, challenging him to be firm and to rule with pride. And he slowly restored the king’s powers until the monarchy was once again the most powerful force in Prussia.
When Frederick died, in 1861, his brother William assumed the throne. William disliked Bismarck intensely and had no intention of keeping him around. But he also inherited the same situation his brother had: enemies galore, who wanted to nibble his power away. He actually considered abdicating, feeling he lacked the strength to deal with this dangerous and precarious position. But Bismarck insinuated himself once again. He stood by the new king, gave him strength, and urged him into firm and decisive action. The king grew dependent on Bismarck’s strong-arm tactics to keep his enemies at bay, and despite his antipathy toward the man, he soon made him his prime minister. The two quarreled often over policy—Bismarck was much more conservative—but the king understood his own dependency. Whenever the prime minister threatened to resign, the king gave in to him, time after time. It was in fact Bismarck who set state policy.
Years later, Bismarck’s actions as Prussia’s prime minister led the various German states to be united into one country. Now Bismarck finagled the king into letting himself be crowned emperor of Germany. Yet it was really Bismarck who had reached the heights of power. As right-hand man to the emperor, and as imperial chancellor and knighted prince, he pulled all the levers.
Interpretation
Most young and ambitious politicians looking out on the political landscape of 1840s Germany would have tried to build a power base among those with the most power. Bismarck saw different. Joining forces with the powerful can be foolish: They will swallow you up, just as the doge of Venice swallowed up the Count of Carmagnola. No one will come to depend on you if they are already strong. If you are ambitious, it is much wiser to seek out weak rulers or masters with whom you can create a relationship of dependency. You become their strength, their intelligence, their spine. What power you hold! If they got rid of you the whole edifice would collapse.
Necessity rules the world. People rarely act unless compelled to. If you create no need for yourself, then you will be done away with at first opportunity. If, on the other hand, you understand the Laws of Power and make others depend on you for their welfare, if you can counteract their weakness with your own “iron and blood,” in Bismarck’s phrase, then you will survive your masters as Bismarck did. You will have all the benefits of power without the thorns that come from being a master.
Thus a wise prince will think of ways to keep his citizens of every sort and under every circumstance dependent on the state and on him; and then they will always be trustworthy.
-Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527
THE I I.M-IRI I AND THE AND
An extravagant young Vine, vainly ambitious of independence, and fond of rambling at large, despised the alliance of a slately elm that grew near, and courted her embraces. Having risen to some small height without any kind of support, she shot forth her flimsy branches to a very uncommon and superfluous length; calling on her neighbor to take notice how little she wanted his assistance. “Poor infatuated shrub,” replied the elm, “how inconsistent is thy conduct! Wouldst thou be truly independent, thou shouldst carefully apply those juices to the enlargement of thy stem. which thou lavishest in vain upon unnecessary foliage. I shortly shall behold thee grovelling on the ground; yet countenanced, indeed, by many of the human race, who, intoxicated with vanity, have despised economy; and who, to support for a moment their empty boast of independence, have exhausted the very source of it in frivolous expenses.”
-FABLES, ROBERT DODSLFY, 1703-1764
KEYS TO POWER
The ultimate power is the power to get people to do as you wish. When you can do this without having to force people or hurt them, when they willingly grant you what you desire, then your power is untouchable. The best way to achieve this position is to create a relationship of dependence.
The master requires your services; he is weak, or unable to function without you; you have enmeshed yourself in his work so deeply that doing away with you would bring him great difficulty, or at least would mean valuable time lost in training another to replace you. Once such a relationship is established you have the upper hand, the leverage to make the master do as you wish. It is the classic case of the man behind the throne, the servant of the king who actually controls the king. Bismarck did not have to bully either Frederick or William into doing his bidding. He simply made it clear that unless he got what he wanted he would walk away, leaving the king to twist in the wind. Both kings soon danced to Bismarck’s tune.
Do not be one of the many who mistakenly believe that the ultimate form of power is independence. Power involves a relationship between people; you will always need others as allies, pawns, or even as weak masters who serve as your front. The completely independent man would live in a cabin in the woods—he would have the freedom to come and go as he pleased, but he would have no power. The best you can hope for is that others will grow so dependent on you that you enjoy a kind of reverse independence: Their need for you frees you.
Louis XI (1423-1483), the great Spider King of France, had a weakness for astrology. He kept a court astrologer whom he admired, until one day the man predicted that a lady of the court would die within eight days. When the prophecy came true, Louis was terrified, thinking that either the man had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy or that he was so versed in his science that his powers threatened Louis himself. In either case he had to be killed.
One evening Louis summoned the astrologer to his room, high in the castle. Before the man arrived, the king told his servants that when he gave the signal they were to pick the astrologer up, carry him to the window, and hurl him to the ground, hundreds of feet below.
The astrologer soon arrived, but before giving the signal, Louis decided to ask him one last question: “You claim to understand astrology and to know the fate of others, so tell me what your fate will be and how long you have to live.”
“I shall die just three days before Your Majesty,” the astrologer replied.
The king’s signal was never given. The man’s life was spared. The Spider King not only protected his astrologer for as long as he was alive, he lavished him with gifts and had him tended by the finest court doctors.
The astrologer survived Louis by several years, disproving his power of prophecy but proving his mastery of power.
This is the model: Make others dependent on you. To get rid of you might spell disaster, even death, and your master dares not tempt fate by finding out. There are many ways to obtain such a position. Foremost among them is to possess a talent and creative skill that simply cannot be replaced.
During the Renaissance, the major obstacle to a painter’s success was finding the right patron. Michelangelo did this better than anyone else: His patron was Pope Julius II. But he and the pope quarreled over the building of the pope’s marble tomb, and Michelangelo left Rome in disgust. To the amazement of those in the pope’s circle, not only did the pope not fire him, he sought him out and in his own haughty way begged the artist to stay. Michelangelo, he knew, could find another patron, but he could never find another Michelangelo.
You do not have to have the talent of a Michelangelo; you do have to have a skill that sets you apart from the crowd. You should create a situation in which you can always latch on to another master or patron but your master cannot easily ,find another servant with your particular talent. And if, in reality, you are not actually indispensable, you must find a way to make it look as if you are. Having the appearance of specialized knowledge and skill gives you leeway in your ability to deceive those above you into thinking they cannot do without you. Real dependence on your master’s part, however, leaves him more vulnerable to you than the faked variety, and it is always within your power to make your skill indispensable.
This is what is meant by the intertwining of fates: Like creeping ivy, you have wrapped yourself around the source of power, so that it would cause great trauma to cut you away. And you do not necessarily have to entwine yourself around the master; another person will do, as long as he or she too is indispensable in the chain.
One day Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, was visited in his office by a gloomy group of his executives. It was 1951, when the witch- hunt against Communists in Hollywood, carried on by the U.S. Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee, was at its height. The executives had bad news: One of their employees, the screenwriter John Howard Lawson, had been singled out as a Communist. They had to get rid of him right away or suffer the wrath of the committee.
Harry Cohn was no bleeding-heart liberal; in fact, he had always been a die-hard Republican.
His favorite politician was Benito Mussolini, whom he had once visited, and whose framed photo hung on his wall. If there was someone he hated Cohn would call him a “Communist bastard.” But to the executives’ amazement Cohn told them he would not fire Lawson. He did not keep the screenwriter on because he was a good writer—there were many good writers in Hollywood. He kept him because of a chain of dependence: Lawson was Humphrey Bogart’s writer and Bogart was Columbia’s star. If Cohn messed with Lawson he would ruin an immensely profitable relationship. That was worth more than the terrible publicity brought to him by his defiance of the committee.
Henry Kissinger managed to survive the many bloodlettings that went on in the Nixon White House not because he was the best diplomat Nixon could find—there were other fine negotiators—and not because the two men got along so well: They did not. Nor did they share their beliefs and politics. Kissinger survived because he entrenched himself in so many areas of the political structure that to do away with him would lead to chaos. Michelangelo’s power was intensive, depending on one skill, his ability as an artist; Kissinger’s was extensive.
He got himself involved in so many aspects and departments of the administration that his involvement became a card in his hand. It also made him many allies. If you can arrange such a position for yourself, getting rid of you becomes dangerous—all sorts of interdependencies will unravel. Still, the intensive form of power provides more freedom than the extensive, because those who have it depend on no particular master, or particular position of power, for their security.
To make others dependent on you, one route to take is the secret- intelligence tactic. By knowing other people’s secrets, by holding information that they wouldn’t want broadcast, you seal your fate with theirs. You are untouchable. Ministers of secret police have held this position throughout the ages: They can make or break a king, or, as in the case of J. Edgar Hoover, a president. But the role is so full of insecurities and paranoia that the power it provides almost cancels itself out. You cannot rest at ease, and what good is power if it brings you no peace?
One last warning: Do not imagine that your master’s dependence on you will make him love you. In fact, he may resent and fear you. But, as Machiavelli said, it is better to be feared than loved. Fear you can control; love, never. Depending on an emotion as subtle and changeable as love or friendship will only make you insecure. Better to have others depend on you out of fear of the consequences of losing you than out of love of your company.
Image: Vines with Many Thorns. Below, the roots grow deep and wide. Above, the vines push through bushes, entwine themselves around trees and poles and window ledges. To get rid of them would cost such toil and blood, it is easier to let them climb.
Authority: Make people depend on you. More is to be gained from such dependence than courtesy. He who has slaked his thirst, immediately turns his back on the well, no longer needing it. When dependence disappears, so does civility and decency, and then respect. The first lesson which experience should teach you is to keep hope alive but never satisfied, keeping even a royal patron ever in need of you. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601- 1658)
REVERSAL
The weakness of making others depend on you is that you are in some measure dependent on them. But trying to move beyond that point means getting rid of those above you—it means standing alone, depending on no one. Such is the monopolistic drive of a J. P. Morgan or a John D.
Rockefeller—to drive out all competition, to be in complete control. If you can corner the market, so much the better.
No such independence comes without a price. You are forced to isolate yourself. Monopolies often turn inward and destroy themselves from the internal pressure. They also stir up powerful resentment, making their enemies bond together to fight them. The drive for complete control is often ruinous and fruitless. Interdependence remains the law, independence a rare and often fatal exception. Better to place yourself in a position of mutual dependence, then, and to follow this critical law rather than look for its reversal. You will not have the unbearable pressure of being on top, and the master above you will in essence be your slave, for he will depend on you.
Conclusion
Powerful people; those with near limitless pools of money, can easily make others dependent upon them. By using this dependence, they can use them as an army; or as a resource to achieve far greater deeds than what thy can attempt alone. We must realize that EVERYONE who has money in America uses this technique.
Whether it is Progressive Marxists that have the welfare of the poor in their hands, or whether it is the Conservative Republicans that have the Social Security incomes of the elderly. All the wealthy use this technique.
How manipulated are you?
What are you willing to do to maintain the status quo? That is the truest measure of your enslavement.
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I just cannot help but see this as the primary driver behind the Donald Trump Presidency from 2017 through 2020. Indeed, I think that (aside from his hard-core, die-hard, followers) most people want a (much desired) break from the endless series of unpredictable tweets, policy directions, and just general leadership pronouncements. It doesn’t matter if it is banning cat videos on Tiktok, or firing the National Defense council, Donald Trump has been a one-man wrecking-ball. Just look at the shambles of international global trade in his wake.
Indeed. You can see this technique in use all the time, but typically by the truly crafty and truly evil.
First, to understand the 48 laws of power, you must know two key ideas
1. you CAN NOT escape the power game. thinking you can "not participate" is as foolish as thinking that you could somehow escape gravity or make the sun stand still. Robert Greene explains why in the intro with some excellent examples
2. the 48 laws of power are neither good nor evil; they are just LAWS. If someone pushed a man off a cliff would you blame gravity for for his demise? This is the mindset you must adopt in order to learn a lot from this book.
Things I Liked
-NEW PARADIGM
after reading the 48 laws, you will never see the world the same way again. once you understand some of these laws you will see many underlying currents and motives you did not see before.
-INCREASES POWER
one of the main reasons to buy the book. you wil become exponentially more powerful by knowing and understanding these laws
-CRYSTAL CLEAR
every law is clearly outlined with "transgression" of the law, "observance" of the law, keys to power, and a "reversal"
-GREAT STORIES
the 48 laws are packed with mind-blowing and sometimes humorous stories of people in history practicing these laws. this is helpful as some of the concepts are quite abstract.
What I didn't like
-RISKY
an old proverb says " A man who plays with snakes will eventually be bitten". If you begin to use the 48 Laws improperly, you could get yourself in some dangerous situations, lose friends, piss off a lot a people, and destroy relationships
-REQUIRES DISCERNMENT
if you you are looking for a highly concrete book that the says "do xyz and you will accomplish vyx" look elsewhere. the Laws require good judgement and and and prospecting nature to practice and apply
-NOT FOR EVERYONE
If you are aghast at the idea of manipulation and deceit then read with caution.
OVERALL: If you want to have more power or a better understanding of why different situations turn out the the way they do, you should definitely read the 48 laws of power by Robert Greene. If you want to be naive, easily manipulated, weak, you should ignore this book and go watch some netfilx.
-J.S. Bach
LAW 17
KEEP OTHERS IN SUSPENDED TERROR: CULTIVATE AN AIR OF UNPREDICTABILITY
JUDGMENT
Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In May of 1972, chess champion Boris Spassky anxiously awaited his rival Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two men had been scheduled to meet for the World Championship of Chess, but Fischer had not arrived on time and the match was on hold. Fischer had problems with the size of the prize money, problems with the way the money was to be distributed, problems with the logistics of holding the match in Iceland. He might back out at any moment.
Spassky tried to be patient. His Russian bosses felt that Fischer was humiliating him and told him to walk away, but Spassky wanted this match. He knew he could destroy Fischer, and nothing was going to spoil the greatest victory of his career. “So it seems that all our work may come to nothing,” Spassky told a comrade. “But what can we do? It is Bobby’s move. If he comes, we play. If he does not come, we do not play. A man who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.”
Fischer finally arrived in Reykjavik, but the problems, and the threat of cancellation, continued. He disliked the hall where the match was to be fought, he criticized the lighting, he complained about the noise of the cameras, he even hated the chairs in which he and Spassky were to sit. Now the Soviet Union took the initiative and threatened to withdraw their man.
The bluff apparently worked: After all the weeks of waiting, the endless and infuriating negotiations, Fischer agreed to play. Everyone was relieved, no one more than Spassky. But on the day of the official introductions, Fischer arrived very late, and on the day when the “Match of the Century” was to begin, he was late again. This time, however, the consequences would be dire: If he showed up too late he would forfeit the first game. What was going on? Was he playing some sort of mind game? Or was Bobby Fischer perhaps afraid of Boris Spassky? It seemed to the assembled grand masters, and to Spassky, that this young kid from Brooklyn had a terrible case of the jitters. At 5:09 Fischer showed up, exactly one minute before the match was to be canceled.
The first game of a chess tournament is critical, since it sets the tone for the months to come. It is often a slow and quiet struggle, with the two players preparing themselves for the war and trying to read each other’s strategies. This game was different. Fischer made a terrible move early on, perhaps the worst of his career, and when Spassky had him on the ropes, he seemed to give up. Yet Spassky knew that Fischer never gave up. Even when facing checkmate, he fought to the bitter end, wearing the opponent down. This time, though, he seemed resigned. Then suddenly he broke out a bold move that put the room in a buzz. The move shocked Spassky, but he recovered and managed to win the game. But no one could figure out what Fischer was up to. Had he lost deliberately? Or was he rattled? Unsettled? Even, as some thought, insane?
After his defeat in the first game, Fischer complained all the more loudly about the room, the cameras, and everything else. He also failed to show up on time for the second game. This time the organizers had had enough: He was given a forfeit. Now he was down two games to none, a position from which no one had ever come back to win a chess championship. Fischer was clearly unhinged. Yet in the third game, as all those who witnessed it remember, he had a ferocious look in his eye, a look that clearly bothered Spassky. And despite the hole he had dug for himself, he seemed supremely confident. He did make what appeared to be another blunder, as he had in the first game—but his cocky air made Spassky smell a trap. Yet despite the Russian’s suspicions, he could not figure out the trap, and before he knew it Fischer had checkmated him. In fact Fischer’s unorthodox tactics had completely unnerved his opponent. At the end of the game, Fischer leaped up and rushed out, yelling to his confederates as he smashed a fist into his palm, “I’m crushing him with brute force!”
In the next games Fischer pulled moves that no one had seen from him before, moves that were not his style. Now Spassky started to make blunders. After losing the sixth game, he started to cry. One grand master said, “After this, Spassky’s got to ask himself if it’s safe to go back to Russia.” After the eighth game Spassky decided he knew what was happening: Bobby Fischer was hypnotizing him. He decided not to look Fischer in the eye; he lost anyway.
After the fourteenth game he called a staff conference and announced, “An attempt is being made to control my mind.” He wondered whether the orange juice they drank at the chess table could have been drugged. Maybe chemicals were being blown into the air. Finally Spassky went public, accusing the Fischer team of putting something in the chairs that was altering Spassky’s mind. The KGB went on alert: Boris Spassky was embarrassing the Soviet Union!
The chairs were taken apart and X-rayed. A chemist found nothing unusual in them. The only things anyone found anywhere, in fact, were two dead flies in a lighting fixture. Spassky began to complain of hallucinations. He tried to keep playing, but his mind was unraveling. He could not go on. On September 2, he resigned. Although still relatively young, he never recovered from this defeat.
Interpretation
In previous games between Fischer and Spassky, Fischer had not fared well. Spassky had an uncanny ability to read his opponent’s strategy and use it against him. Adaptable and patient, he would build attacks that would defeat not in seven moves but in seventy. He defeated Fischer every time they played because he saw much further ahead, and because he was a brilliant psychologist who never lost control. One master said, “He doesn’t just look for the best move. He looks for the move that will disturb the man he is playing.”
Fischer, however, finally understood that this was one of the keys to Spassky’s success: He played on your predictability, defeated you at your own game. Everything Fischer did for the championship match was an attempt to put the initiative on his side and to keep Spassky off-balance. Clearly the endless waiting had an effect on Spassky’s psyche. Most powerful of all, though, were Fischer’s deliberate blunders and his appearance of having no clear strategy. In fact, he was doing everything he could to scramble his old patterns, even if it meant losing the first match and forfeiting the second.
Spassky was known for his sangfroid and levelheadedness, but for the first time in his life he could not figure out his opponent. He slowly melted down, until at the end he was the one who seemed insane.
Chess contains the concentrated essence of life: First, because to win you have to be supremely patient and farseeing; and second, because the game
is built on patterns, whole sequences of moves that have been played before and will be played again, with slight alterations, in any one match. Your opponent analyzes the patterns you are playing and uses them to try to foresee your moves. Allowing him nothing predictable to base his strategy on gives you a big advantage. In chess as in life, when people cannot figure out what you are doing, they are kept in a state of terror—waiting, uncertain, confused.
Life at court is a serious, melancholy game of chess, which requires us to drawup our pieces and batteries, form a plan, pursue it, parry that of our adversary. Sometimes, however, it is better to take risksand play the most capricious, unpredictable move.
-Jean de La Bruyère, 1645-1696
KEYS TO POWER
Nothing is more terrifying than the sudden and unpredictable. That is why we are so frightened by earthquakes and tornadoes: We do not know when they will strike. After one has occurred, we wait in terror for the next one. To a lesser degree, this is the effect that unpredictable human behavior has on us.
Animals behave in set patterns, which is why we are able to hunt and kill them. Only man has the capacity to consciously alter his behavior, to improvise and overcome the weight of routine and habit. Yet most men do not realize this power. They prefer the comforts of routine, of giving in to the animal nature that has them repeating the same compulsive actions time and time again.
They do this because it requires no effort, and because they mistakenly believé that if they do not unsettle others, they will be left alone.
Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initiative on his side. You sometimes need to strike without warning, to make others tremble when they least expect it. It is a device that the powerful have used for centuries.
Filippo Maria, the last of the Visconti dukes of Milan in fifteenth-century Italy, consciously did the opposite of what everyone expected of him. For instance, he might suddenly shower a courtier with attention, and then, once the man had come to expect a promotion to higher office, would suddenly start treating him with the utmost disdain. Confused, the man might leave the court, when the duke would suddenly recall him and start treating him well again. Doubly confused, the courtier would wonder whether his assumption that he would be promoted had become obvious, and offensive, to the duke, and would start to behave as if he no longer expected such honor. The duke would rebuke him for his lack of ambition and would send him away.
The secret of dealing with Filippo was simple: Do not presume to know what he wants. Do not try to guess what will please him. Never inject your will; just surrender to his will. Then wait to see what happens. Amidst the confusion and uncertainty he created, the duke ruled supreme, unchallenged and at peace.
Unpredictability is most often the tactic of the master, but the underdog too can use it to great effect. If you find yourself outnumbered or cornered, throw in a series of unpredictable moves. Your enemies will be so confused that they will pull back or make a tactical blunder.
In the spring of 1862, during the American Civil War, General Stonewall Jackson and a force of 4,600 Confederate soldiers were tormenting the larger Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Meanwhile, not far away, General George Brinton McClellan, heading a force of 90,000 Union soldiers, was marching south from Washington, D.C., to lay siege to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. As the weeks of the campaign went by, Jackson repeatedly led his soldiers out of the Shenandoah Valley, then back to it.
His movements made no sense. Was he preparing to help defend Richmond? Was he marching on Washington, now that McClellan’s absence had left it unprotected? Was he heading north to wreak havoc up there? Why was his small force moving in circles?
Jackson’s inexplicable moves made the Union generals delay the march on Richmond as they waited to figure out what he was up to. Meanwhile, the South was able to pour reinforcements into the town. A battle that could have crushed the Confederacy turned into a stalemate. Jackson used this tactic time and again when facing numerically superior forces. “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible,” he said, “… such tactics will win every time and a small army may thus destroy a large one.”
This law applies not only to war but to everyday situations. People are always trying to read the motives behind your actions and to use your predictability against you. Throw in a completely inexplicable move and you put them on the defensive. Because they do not understand you, they are unnerved, and in such a state you can easily intimidate them.
Pablo Picasso once remarked,
“The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it’s for an intelligent reason. So it’s really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You’re better off acting capriciously.”
For a while, Picasso worked with the art dealer Paul Rosenberg. At first he allowed him a fair amount of latitude in handling his paintings, then one day, for no apparent reason, he told the man he would no longer give him any work to sell. As Picasso explained, “Rosenberg would spend the next forty-eight hours trying to figure out why. Was I reserving things for some other dealer? I’d go on working and sleeping and Rosenberg would spend his time figuring. In two days he’d come back, nerves jangled, anxious, saying, ‘After all, dear friend, you wouldn’t turn me down if I offered you this much [naming a substantially higher figure] for those paintings rather than the price I’ve been accustomed to paying you, would you?”’
Unpredictability is not only a weapon of terror: Scrambling your patterns on a day-to-day basis will cause a stir around you and stimulate interest. People will talk about you, ascribe motives and explanations that have nothing to do with the truth, but that keep you constantly in their minds. In the end, the more capricious you appear, the more respect you will garner. Only the terminally subordinate act in a predictable manner.
Image: The Cyclone. A wind that cannot be fore seen. Sudden shifts in the barometer, in explicable changes in direction and velocity. There is no defense: A cyclone sows terror and confusion.
Authority: The enlightened ruler is so mysterious that he seems to dwell nowhere, so inexplicable that no one can seek him. He reposes in nonaction above, and his ministers tremble below. (Han-fei-tzu, Chinese philosopher, third century B.C.)
REVERSAL
Sometimes predictability can work in your favor: By creating a pattern for people to be familiar and comfortable with, you can lull them to sleep. They have prepared everything according to their preconceived notions about you. You can use this in several ways:
First, it sets up a smoke screen, a comfortable front behind which you can carry on deceptive actions.
Second, it allows you on rare occasions to do something completely against the pattern, unsettling your opponent so deeply he will fall to the ground without being pushed.
In 1974 Muhammad Ali and George Foreman were scheduled to fight for the world heavyweight boxing championship. Everyone knew what would happen: Big George Foreman would try to land a knockout punch while Ali would dance around him, wearing him out. That was Ali’s way of fighting, his pattern, and he had not changed it in more than ten years.
But in this case it seemed to give Foreman the advantage: He had a devastating punch, and if he waited, sooner or later Ali would have to come to him. Ali, the master strategist, had other plans: In press conferences before the big fight, he said he was going to change his style and punch it out with Foreman.
No one, least of all Foreman, believed this for a second. That plan would be suicide on Ali’s part; he was playing the comedian, as usual. Then, before the fight, Ali’s trainer loosened the ropes around the ring, something a trainer would do if his boxer were intending to slug it out. But no one believed this ploy; it had to be a setup.
To everyone’s amazement, Ali did exactly what he had said he would do. As Foreman waited for him to dance around, Ali went right up to him and slugged it out. He completely upset his opponent’s strategy. At a loss, Foreman ended up wearing himself out, not by chasing Ali but by throwing punches wildly, and taking more and more counterpunches. Finally, Ali landed a dramatic right cross that knocked out Foreman.
The habit of assuming that a person’s behavior will fit its previous patterns is so strong that not even Ali’s announcement of a strategy change was enough to upset it. Foreman walked into a trap—the trap he had been told to expect.
A warning: Unpredictability can work against you sometimes, especially if you are in a subordinate position. There are times when it is better to let people feel comfortable and settled around you than to disturb them. Too much unpredictability will be seen as a sign of indecisiveness, or even of some more serious psychic problem. Patterns are powerful, and you can terrify people by disrupting them. Such power should only be used judiciously.
Conclusion
I can offer all kinds of examples on the unpredictability of President Trump. Is this strategic or the actions of a mad man. Only you can decide.
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This post is exactly what the title says. It discusses ways and techniques for a single person to disable an armed technical using only a hunting rifle. It requires the use of stealth so that the shooter can extract a clip of ammo and then egress out of the area immediately afterwards. This is part of my SHTF series, and discusses techniques and means that a person can survive when their entire world is turned upside-down.
Again, this is a post by request. I want to get off the SHTF nonsense, but I find that one of my posts hit the American prepper blog-a-sphere and went exceptional. Since then, I have been getting some requests. So I'm dusting off a few misc post that I need to push out there. I guess that now is the time. I guess.
People!
Keep in mind that most Americans are good. It is an illusion that those at the other side of the political spectrum are evil, or that Chinese are evil, or that Russians are evil. Most people are not. Those that are pushing for a war...
...they are the evil ones.
You all should stop contemplating fighting each other, and both gang up against the wealthy oligarchy playing you all as fools. They are the ones driving this entire nightmare and pushing it to it's ultimate conclusion.
The world turning upside-down is in process right now. Some areas are worse than others, but the United States is pretty much a “basket case”.
We need to look at other places, other times, other events from the lens of history. And much of what we must read is from sources outside the United States. For the United States media has created insulated “echo chambers” fully intending to keep Americans like mushrooms; in the dark.
Learn from the events outside of the USA, and discard that very popular saying that “America is special, it is exceptional, it is different”. It’s a lie. America is not immune to change. And it is long overdue. Change is coming and you all had best gather all your strength to deal with it.
Learn from other nations and what they have experienced.
Businessman shot and killed by gunfire in the early days of the Bosnian conflict.
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You need to be prepared. No one can predict the future, and it is my sincere hope that history does not repeat itself. Bu you all should be well aware of history and of similar situations that seem to resemble what is now building up inside of America today.
You need to be prepared.
Know your history.
Ad hoc road block established to thwart an attack.
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Be prepared. Part of that is personal. With food, gun training, ammo, and contingency plans. But part of it goes beyond that. Clan up with a group. Know your neighbors in a good and strong way. Identify who will collect your name on a list and be very wary of them. Identify what your weaknesses are and mitigate your concerns.
Do not be like the Bosnian’s who fled their villages for the woods, and then who were hunted down over the next few months by aggressive and very motivated irregulars. It didn’t work out well for them. Don’t allow history to repeat itself.
Don’t be like the villagers in Bosnia who fled and ran into the woods when troops came to collect the women and take them to the (newly established) rape complexes in the cities.
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One of the most important things that you can do is know how to suppress a technical. Their role is to suppress you, and others while active regulars go house to house seizing people.
If you can take down a technical, you will go a long way to suppress their activity, and even gain control of the situation. Realize that the technical is the major source of power in these excursions. Take out the technical, and the leadership and the attack and assault will more than likely break.
What is a “technical”
A technical is a type of improvised fighting vehicle, typically a civilian or military non-combat vehicle, modified to provide an offensive capability similar to a military gun truck. It is usually an open-backed civilian pickup truck or four-wheel drive vehicle mounting a machine gun, light anti-aircraft gun, recoilless rifle, or other support weapon.
Usually it consists of a medium machine gun to heavy machine gun mounted on the bed of a small pickup truck. The vehicle is usually (mostly) unarmored, and the advantage of the technical is rapid mobility while producing substantial small arms firepower.
A basic “technical” vehicle.
The Toyota pickup truck seems to be a very common platform from which to mount medium and heavy machine guns. Notice that aside from the gun mount, there is very little other modifications. There might be a large ammo box in the bed of the truck for ammo, and maybe a gas can or two, but that is about it. Usually the vehicles aren’t even painted.
Here’s another technical that is very similar to the photo above. But if you look closely you can see differences. And you all should know that one is in Syria while the other was in Libya.
Another basic “Technical” vehicle.
These next two technical vehicles both have an armored shield mounted with the machine gun. They offer protection from defensive fire that originates from the target. In most cases the weapon of choice will be a medium to heavy machine gun, and supports, or is supported by a squad of regulars.
Notice that the technical would typically include a crew of three.
A driver.
A machine gunner.
And someone riding “shotgun”.
Yet another basic technical vehicle.
Cautions and limitations
Just because you see something on the internet doesn’t mean that it is wholly and completely accurate. Every person, every situation, every location, and every war is different. You just can’t simply rely on MM here to provide accurate life or death intel. And so don’t. This is just and only an introduction. If you have nothing else to go on, you can use what is printed herein as a guide to help illuminate a path to take to resolve a problem that could very well occur.
Just keep in mind that were a SHTF event to occur, it is highly likely that technicals will be involved. Being a “lone wolf” defending your homestead without a clan or a group of people for support will be lethal. A technical will be used to frighten, harass, scare, threaten, and destroy from a distance. It is not something that you can view as an after thought. It is something that you need to prepare for.
When a technical rolls into you small town or hamlet, will you be able and equipped to suppress it and immobilize it?
How they are used
In an anticipated North American SHTF situation (which is pretty much why we are discussing this) these vehicles will more than likely used by progressive Marxists to suppress the countryside. As such they will be used to…
Secure major intersections, bridges, and points of interest.
Secure “high ground” prior to a larger assault.
Capture or suppress key minor-defended targets.
Which should not be a real surprise. Of course they will be used in this role to provide quick and mobile weapons platforms. But what most civilians will need to be concerned about is as a supporting role in local assaults in small villages and hamlets.
Harass the civilian population. Cause them to break and be unable to provide a strong unified defense.
The technicals would be used to scare and chase away civilians and cause them to scatter in the directions that they choose. Eventually rounding up and herding the populace towards collection points where others would secure the people for relocation to “safe areas”. You can well guess what these “safe areas” are.
If you can, avoid boarding the trucks to take you to a “safe area”. History clearly shows that the likelihood of you and your family surviving in those conditions is small.
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You don’t want to board the cattle cars, hop into the trucks, or be in any way carted off by agents of the enemy.
When Bosnian Serb forces broke through two years later, about 15,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys fled into the woods. And twice as many terrified residents rushed to the U.N. compound in what was formerly an industrial zone at the entrance to town, in the hope that Dutch U.N. peacekeepers would protect them.
However, the outgunned peacekeepers watched helplessly as Serb troops took around 2,000 men and boys from the compound for execution...
... while bussing the women and young girls to Bosnian government-held territory.
Meanwhile, in the woods around Srebrenica, Serb soldiers hunted the fleeing Bosniaks, as Bosnian Muslims are otherwise known, killing them one by one.
The killers sought to hide evidence of the genocide, piling most of the bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they subsequently dug up with bulldozers and scattered the bodies across numerous burial sites.
In the years since, bodies have been unearthed and the victims identified through DNA testing. About 1,000 victims remain to be found.
A special U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serbs, including their top civilian war-time leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, to more than 700 years in prison for Srebrenica crimes.
-Seattle Times
British forces helping collect women and loading them into trucks “for their protection”. Of course, we all know the price that the young women had to pay for that kind of safety.
An estimated 30,000 Muslim refugees packed around the Dutch peacekeeping base in Potocari, just north of Srebrenica, after Bosnian Serb forces seized the 'safe area'. Mladic sought to calm them, telling the crowd they did not need to be afraid.
Bosnian Serb forces put the frightened refugees on to buses to leave. Many of the refugees were evacuated to Kladanj, 30 miles away on the edge of government-held territory.
The UN noticed that most of the refugees arriving from Srebrenica were women, children, and the elderly and became concerned about the fate of the men.
Over the week that followed the fall of Srebrenica, a total of about 8,000 men and boys from the enclave are estimated to have been killed by Bosnian Serb forces in detention or while trying to flee through the woods.
Men were crammed into warehouses, schools and barns in the area outside Srebrenica. They were shot and their bodies were dumped in mass graves. Serb forces subsequently dug up the bodies and scattered them in a systematic effort to conceal the crime. UN war crimes investigators later excavated the mass graves, but over 1,000 bodies are still missing.
-Srebrenica massacre anniversary: Europe's worst atrocity since the Nazis
During this up coming SHTF event, it would be prudent to trust no-one. Absolutely trust no one. Instead rely on your wits, family and closest friends. In times like these betrayal becomes normal. Expect it.
The After Picture.
Remains of the men who obeyed the troops, the police, and the advise of the political personages that were directing the entire situation “to keep order”.
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Now that you have seen the “after” pictures, let me present to you the “before” pictures. They say that a picture can say a 1000 words. Well, these two pictures taken together should speak volumes. Do not let, or allow, anyone to take you or your family to a “safe area”. No matter what it is called. FEMA camp, “holding area”, “rest area”, “UN compound”, just don’t allow it to happen.
The “before” picture. How the men were rounded up and led to a place for their protection…
The before picture. The round-up of men and women will be orderly. They will say that they will take you to a safe area; an area of peace and quiet. You know one that they have the control and you do not.
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In order for you to avoid the “after picture”, you need to avoid the “before picture“. Don’t you agree?
Other Applications
These technical vehicles can often hold much larger weapons. Typically they are anti-aircraft guns, and other such weapons. They will be able to reduce a house to rubble. We need not quibble about the size of the weapon, or predict what will be made available when. What we do know is that powerful forces are accumulating large stocks of military grade weapons for the progressive Marxists to use. My guess is that this is going to be much more than rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers.
The prepared prepper needs to be ready for anything.
Technical with a mounted anti-aircraft platform.
And let’s not get all too hung up on terminology either.
A technical is a light improvised fighting vehicle, typically an open-backed civilian pickup truck or four-wheel drive vehicle mounting a heavy weapon, such as a machine gun, anti-aircraft gun, rotary cannon, anti-tank weapon, anti-tank gun, ATGM, mortar, howitzer, multiple rocket launcher, or recoilless rifle, operating similar to a light (unarmored) military gun truck.
-wikipedia
Light improvised fighting vehicles date back to the first use of automobiles, and to the horse-drawn tachankas mounting machine guns in eastern Europe and Russia.
Machine guns are commonly mounted on fast attack vehicles such as technicals to provide heavy mobile firepower, armored vehicles such as tanks for engaging targets too small to justify use of the primary weaponry or too fast to effectively engage with it, and on aircraft as defensive armament or for strafing ground targets, though on fighter aircraft true machine guns have mostly been supplanted by large-caliber rotary guns.
Technicals are typically fitted with heavy machine guns (especially the DShK and M2 Browning).
Also mounted are anti-aircraft artillery (usually the ZPU or ZU-23-2) AA guns.
It is not uncommon to see recoilless rifles (usually the SPG-9 or M40 recoilless rifle) on such vehicles, as they now become able to take down light armored vehicles and provide HE rounds to destroy houses and fortifications.
Technical with a recoilless rifle.
Additionally, multiple rocket launchers (such as the Type 63 multiple rocket launcher or the M-63 Plamen) have been seen on these vehicles.
In the 2012 Syrian civil war, the Syrian government said rebels used the gun mounted on cars.
Technical mounting a quad rocket launcher.
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Here’s a great PDF writeup on having mounted rocket launchers on technicals.
Makeshift rocket launchers, whether converted from existing rocket pods or of an entirely improvised design, have featured in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Libya and, most recently, the ongoing conflict in Syria.
Most prominent amongst the rockets used in this manner are those of the Soviet (later Russian) S-5 series.
Over the past half a century, these rockets became one of the standard weapons for the majority of Soviet and later Russian combat aircraft and helicopters. Although Soviet forces began to supplement, and in some cases replace, S-5 rockets in many roles with the larger 80 mm S-8 series in the 1970s, the S-5 remains commonplace amongst the armed forces of many countries, particularly in the developing world.
S-5 rockets continue to be used in both the conventional manner and in improvised launchers. In many cases, improvised systems based around surface-to-air rockets are employed as makeshift multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), often in a standalone manner.
Launchers in this configuration appear to be used predominantly for indirect fire support, and make use of improvised weapons mounts allowing high elevation.
In other cases, such systems are employed in the direct fire support role. In these cases, the weapons may be used to supplement existing vehicle armaments, or in a standalone fashion.
Launchers used like this are often pintle-mounted, or mounted in a fixed or coaxial position. In at least one documented example, an improvised S-5 system was claimed to be used in an anti-helicopter role. It is also important to note the existence of other systems, including both towed and immobile launchers, remotely-operated systems mounted on radio-controlled vehicles, and man-portable single-tube launchers, including shoulder-fired examples.
Why is is important?
Well, unless you are able to respond back to an aggressive force strongly, they will destroy everything. Then, they will come back and collect the survivors. And the results will not be pretty.
Arkan’s Tigers kill Bosnian Muslim civilians during the first battle for Bosnia in Bijeljina, Bosnia, March 31, 1992. The Serbian paramilitary unit was responsible for killing thousands of people during the Bosnian war, and Arkan was later indicted for war crimes. This image and the series that accompanies it were used for evidence in the International War Crimes Tribunal for the indictment and conviction of Serbian leaders.
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When you encounter an armed aggressive force using technicals, understand that it will involve groups of armed insurgents, of which the technical will provide a supporting role. You will need to be calm, steely, and composed. Then you need to carefully identify your targets and with a fixed mind eliminate them.
There will be bedlam everywhere. Shooting, screaming, cries, explosions, fires and smoke. Do not be shaken.
Some technicals will typically fitted with heavy machine guns (especially the DShK and M2 Browning), anti-aircraft artillery (usually the ZPU or ZU-23-2), recoilless rifles (usually the SPG-9 or M40 recoilless rifle), or multiple rocket launchers (such as the Type 63 multiple rocket launcher or the M-63 Plamen).
They can completely and absolutely destroy a small town or community. Being a lone wolf will be lethal.
Burning homes in Bosina. The rural areas were terribly exposed. The aggressors would go after people on a list that they compiled, and if that person was in a small town or hamlet, they completely gutted the entire area.
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The SPG-9 can typically be found mounted on a wide variety of vehicles known as “technicals” in Somalia.
Great resources on this matter
There are military handbooks for this kind of thing. If you have the ability, I would strongly urge you to read and consult those handbooks if you can find them.
A Muslim in Bijelina, Bosnia begs for his life after capture by Arkan’s Tigers in the spring of 1992.
The suggested methods
Remember that during this period of time, long before any shooting starts, the intention of a technical in your region is to kill.
That is it’s primary purpose. It’s secondary purpose is to destroy, and the third purpose is to intimidate.
Technicals are often used to transport people when not engaged as a weapons platform.
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Your ideal situation is to disable the technical before it gets into a position of control. What ever that might be. If you can disable the technical before it can get to a staging location, or set up a firing zone, then you have completely thrown a “monkey wrench” into the assault plans. You want this.
There are numerous was to disable a technical. In no particular order they are;
Immobilize it. (Shoot off it’s tires, destroy the radiator, muck up the gas, destroy the battery.)
Kill or disable the driver. While anyone can drive a pickup truck, if you steal the keys, it will be rather hard to move the vehicle.
Render the weapon inoperable. Either deny it ammo, remove the firing mechanism or clog the barrel.
Kill or disable the gunner. Again, you might need to eliminate numerous people, as one person after the other might attempt to man the gun.
Yah, I get it. Duh!
Now, reread the list. Remember DO NOT ALLOW THE ENEMY to define the time, or the place, or the rules of engagement. When you do, you provide him the keys to success. Do not fight a defensive war. Fight an offensive war.
Destroyed Technical.
.
You have an opportunity during the beginning stages of a conflict to disable the weapons systems, and the techinicals that you enemy is planning on using. It is at this time that he is vulnerable. He is not expecting anything. You need to eliminate the treat, or mitigate the enormity of the threat long before it manifests.
Read that list again.
If you have failed, and the enemy has decided to attack your community with technicals, then you need to still play offense. But only it will be much harder. You will need to have the technical say in a fixed location for enough time for you to attack it. And then, again, disable it so that it cannot move, and then once disabled, attack the gunner.
Do not be intimidated by the presence of this vehicle. Because that is it’s intended purpose.
Advisement’s for America during SHTF
We cannot predict what will happen in the United States. Certainly one half of the nation if pitted against the other half. And both are being gloated on by wealthy interests. Bu I would advised to shake off all of your misconceptions about who the “enemy” is. They are wrong.
Do not expect that the vehicles rolling into your hamlet will be machine-shop modified technicals. They might be pristine, off the factory floor, custom designed technicals designed for the American battle arena. Be wary. Be frosty.
Do not expect that the vehicles rolling into your hamlet will be machine-shop modified technicals. They might be pristine, off the factory floor, custom designed technicals designed for the American battle arena. Be wary. Be frosty.
Conclusion
It is highly likely that if a SHTF event were to occur in the United States, that urban youth would stream out from “blue controlled” areas and invade the surrounding countryside.
They will have lists and will target those on the lists as their key focus of attacks.
Then they would take on a secondary role. This would be to round up all the people and stream them towards “safe areas” which they control.
Only they won’t really be safe. They will be traps and those going there will expect historically bad treatment, and death.
Technicals form the core “heart” of an insurgency movement. It is used for transport as well as a gun platform. By taking it out, you are best able to gain control of the situation.
.
To control the countryside they will use either existing armored vehicles as part of the DHS, and other alphabet organizations, or “home grown” technicals.
This article focuses on the technical, which is a lightly armored weapons platform that is key to controlling wide areas of contentious population. And remember…
People!
Keep in mind that most Americans are good. It is an illusion that those at the other side of the political spectrum are evil, or that Chinese are evil, or that Russians are evil. Most people are not. Those that are pushing for a war... they are the evil ones.
You all should stop contemplating fighting each other, and both gang up against the wealthy oligarchy playing you all as fools.
Alt-Right are not evil.
Alt-Left are not evil.
Those that are pushing hatred towards others that have different views from you; they are the evil ones!
And one last point…
Perhaps Mike Pompeo would be less inclined to start and fight a war, if he took a couple of tabs of acid, drank some icy cold beers, and sat down and talked deeply about the purpose of life with one of his “enemies”. We all need to chill out, and communicate. That’s a fact, Jack.
Idea: In a small scale social experiment by Heineken, as part of their ad campaign, 3 pairs of complete strangers with (secretly) wildly-differing views went to a warehouse. There, they built various constructions in pairs and asked each other questions that were prepared in advance by the event organizers. In the end, everyone finds out that their partner had completely opposite beliefs than their own. Everyone then decides if they want to talk to their partner over a bottle of beer.
Result: Among the 3 pairs of participants there was a supporter of the climate change theory and an skeptic; a feminist and a man holding conservative views; and a transgender individual, as well as a man against gender reassignment. In the end, friendship and curiosity prevailed, as every single person decided to drink a beer together, chatted, got to know each other, and deepened their knowledge about the questions they thought they had all figured out.
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One of the big (intentionally fabricated) misunderstandings within America today is that Taiwan is an “independent” nation. It is not independent. It is a province of China. And has been so for some time, around fifty years.
But the drum beat for war against China continues, and the idea that it is “independent” is one that must be drilled over and over in the heads of Americans.
It’s necessary, don’t you see? How else can America justify a war? The argument must be hammered over and over again to make Americans believe that American marines must land on Taiwan to “save it”! Just like American had to invade Kuwait, Panama, Yemen, and Syria.
US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave a radio interview to Hugh Hewitt and said, 'Taiwan is not a part of China'."
Mike Pompeo's Taiwan remarks
But, we know that this is all just part of the CIA “fire hose of disinformation”. It’s the usual build of of anti-nation propaganda that always proceeds an American invasion force.
And Taiwan…?
Taiwan is very much like Texas. It is, in that it has subverted it’s independence to become part of something bigger. Texas, which was once fully independent, became a member state of the United States, and now operates as a semi-autonomous member of the union.
This is exactly the case of Taiwan. And here, we are going to discuss the similarities and the differences between Texas and Taiwan.
This is a just a quick post that I threw together. I tire to trying to explain what the fuck is going on in China to people who have never been there, and just simply regurgitate the "fire hose of disinformation" that Mike Pompeo has established regarding China.
Bottom line, American ignorance in matters outside America is astounding. Just friggin' out-of-this-world insane. Thus this post.
Introduction
It serves the interests of the oligarchy-run American government to keep the American citizenry ill-informed, and ignorant. That is why the government controls 99% of the American media. This means all of the alternative media source, not just the mainstream media. But also the government controls both the alt-Left and the alt-Right media.
In effect, creating three separate “echo chambers” that they control.
Alt-Left echo chamber.
Mainsteam “news” echo chamber.
Alt-Right echo chamber.
And the Trump / Neocon cabal has been desirous of a hot war with China to [1] “make America great again”, and [2] unify the nation, while at the same time [3] generating the reelection of Trump in 2020 as a “war President”.
And to this end, they have unleashed a torrent of anti-China propaganda that is astounding in it’s depth, quantity, persistence, and just the lies. It’s just (chuckle) fucking amazing.
One of the big lies is that Taiwan is a tiny isolated nation that is under the shadow of near-by China. And that it is too fearful to do anything. It needs American military support to defend it! It needs protection! For liberty TM! And for democracy TM!
It’s all bullshit.
Here we are gonna compare Texas with Taiwan. Hopefully this simple comparison will help the reader understand Taiwan better than any of the voluminous bullshit out of the American media.
Ties to the “parent nation”
Texas stopped being an independent nation (independent Republic of Texas) and became a United States client state on December 29, 1845 by Annexation. It is the 28th State of the United States.
Taiwan stopped being an independent nation, and became a Chinese client state in 1972 by [1] The Shanghai Communiqué and the 1982 [2] Joint Communiqué and [3] the August 17 Communiqué. It’s the 23rd province of China.
All of this his was codified and made permanent on October 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which recognized the government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the United Nations and established the One-China Principle.
From the ice-breaking visit to the normalization of relations and to the establishment of diplomatic ties, leaders and statesmen of the elder generation in China and the U.S., Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese side, and Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger on the American side, acted in the fundamental interests of the two peoples and made the political decision of historic significance with their exceptional strategic vision and political courage to rise above the differences in ideology and social systems. The Shanghai Communiqué, the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, and the 1982 Joint Communiqué that focused on addressing the question of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, something left over from history, identified the One China principle and established the principles of mutual respect, equality and seeking common ground while putting aside differences as the guiding principles in conducting China-U.S. relations.
-Full text: Yang Jiechi's signed article on China-U.S. relations
And…
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 was passed in response to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1668 that required any change in China's representation in the UN be determined by a two-thirds vote referring to Article 18 of the UN Charter. The resolution, passed on 25 October 1971, recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) as "the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations" and...
...removed the collective representatives of Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan) from the United Nations.
-United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758
But facts don’t matter to the brutish and the idiots that follow them. That is why people die in wars. The UN doesn’t matter to the American Alt-Right political machinery. Nor does any Chinese agreements, or Taiwan agreements. Agreements are meaningless to Trump and his cabal of neocons.
Don’t scream at me. I don’t make the rules. I’m only reporting on it.
The UN and treaties are meaningless unless they benefit America. Other than that, you can ignore them.
Falsehoods, repeatedly and endlessly repeated, create a narrative and a justification for action. And smart people, and sincere people, and real true believers in ideals and truth follow these false narratives…
…and historically the results are always painful.
GottmitunsisaphrasecommonlyusedinheraldryinPrussiaandlaterbytheGermanmilitaryduringtheperiodsspanningtheGermanEmpire, theThirdReich, andtheearlyyearsofWestGermany. ItwasalsocommonlyusedbySwedeninmostofitswarsandespeciallyasawarcryduringtheThirtyYears‘ War.
.
So who’s side was God on? The Nazi Germans or the Proud Patriotic Americans? When you are led by a madman, or a crazed sociopath, you don’t know what is real or what is a lie. Even though, yourself, you might be pure and innocent of the true state of affairs.
Speaking recently about the Trump administration’s policy toward China, United States Vice President Mike Pence accused China of pressuring three Latin American nations to sever ties with Taipei and to recognize Beijing. He condemned these alleged actions, which he said “threaten the stability of the Taiwan Strait.” His claim reveals his ignorance of history.
Put simply, there is only one China, and Taiwan is an integral part of China’s territory.
This has been widely accepted since October 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which recognized the government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the United Nations and established the One-China Principle.
El Salvador became the 177th country this year (2020) to adopt Resolution 2758 when President Salvador Sánchez Cerén recognized that the government of the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate representative of China, and that Taiwan is an integral part of China’s territory.
Decades ago, when the United States established formal ties with China, they recognized the One-China Principle.
The three joint communiqués that established formal China-U.S. relations, namely the Shanghai Communiqué, the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations and the August 17 Communiqué, all affirmed the One-China Principle.
American adherence to the three joint communiqués and the One-China Principle, and its cooperation with China on restraining Taiwan independence forces, are part of the political foundations of healthy China-U.S. relations.
From time to time, some voices in the United States call on the government there to abandon the promises it made all those years ago. And some go so far as to call for the government to interfere in China’s domestic affairs in relation to Taiwan. Mike Pence, an avowed Christian, would be well aware of the Bible’s admonishment: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
-When it comes to Taiwan, America should reflect on its own history
With all that being said, let’s compare Texas with Taiwan and see how they “stack up” comparatively.
stack up against, to
To compare the worth or power of something. This term comes from poker and alludes to how one player’s chips, representing money, compare to another’s. The higher the stack in front of a player, the more money he or she has.
Military
Texas has it’s own military. It uses United States supplied weapons and training. And the forces are all United States trained. They are under the control of the United States.
Taiwan has it’s own military. It uses United States supplied weapons and training. And the forces are all Taiwan trained. They are under the control of the local Taiwan government.
Language
In Texas, the schools teach in English and in the local Spanish. All official government dealings is in English, while on the very local regional level, Spanish is often used. Most residents of Texas can speak English fluently, and most can speak some Spanish.
In Taiwan, the schools teach in Chinese and in the local Taiwan language. All official government dealings is in Chinese, while on the very local regional level, Taiwan language is often used. Most residents of Taiwan can speak Chinese fluently, and most can speak some local Taiwan language.
Passports and Travel
In Texas, the people use United States passports to travel internationally. They do not need personal papers to travel in the United States.
In Taiwan, the people have both Taiwan and Chinese passports. They can use either to travel internationally. Travel to China is simple, all they do is show their Chinese passports.
Culture / Society
The people of Texas celebrate United States holidays. They speak the local language at home. They obey the local religions. They participate in United States (typical) hobbies, watch United States sports, and listen / read United States news.
The people of Taiwan celebrate Chinese holidays. They speak the local language at home. They obey the local religions. They participate in Chinese (typical) hobbies, watch Chinese sports, and listen / read Chinese news.
Trade
Texas trades with the United States. Texans own factories that operate within the United States, and people in Texas buy products that are made in the USA and vice versa.
Taiwan trades with China. The Taiwanese own factories that operate within China, and people in Taiwan buy products that are made in China and vice versa.
Food
Texans enjoy American food, however personally they also enjoy Mexican food. Thus creating their own style of food known as Tex-Mex.
Taiwanese enjoy Chinese food, however personally they also enjoy local food. Thus creating their own style of food known as Taipei Cuisine.
What about International Intervention?
Texas cannot invite The Chinese military without repercussions. In Texas, if the local Texas Congress invited the Chinese military to come in, train, equip and set up a base on Texas soil, the United States Federal government would consider it an invasion and would respond militarily.
Taiwan cannot invite The United States military without repercussions. In Taiwan, if the local Taiwan Congress invited the American military to come in, train, equip and set up a base on Taiwan soil, the Chinese would consider it an invasion and would respond militarily.
Conclusions
There is an American narrative (actually alt-Right) that has really been heavily promoted during the four years of the Donald Trump Presidency, that America must “DO SOMETHING” about Taiwan.
The over all strategy is to establish American military bases and a presence on the island, and then, eventually use it as a staging location for a military confrontation and invasion of mainland China.
It’s a crazy, no it’s an INSANE, pipe-dream.
American cities would all be smoldering radioactive ruins were that to be attempted. China does not play.
Hopefully, this post explains why.
One last point…
You know, it is in China’s interests for America to supply Taiwan with it’s latest technology, ships and aircraft. This is because inside Taiwan, there is a small “cottage industry” that gets the parts, reverses engineers them and send the data to the engineers and designers inside of China. It’s a great system. Very mature. Well perfected.
This is precisely why China’s Navy is peer capable with America’s.
Or, perhaps you think that 60 years of technical innovation just happened in a span of ten years? Of that China was able to match and duplicate American electronics and sensing systems alone without feedback? They are either geniuses, or able to copy extremely well.
You decide.
China is using the American Alt-Right to provide them with the technical expertise and technology it needs to build up it’s military. Great work Mike Pompeo! Great work Mike Pence! Great work Donald Trump!
Here is an excerpt from “The Unconquered”…
"Deng opened the doors for the great Land of the Orient to do business with America and the rest of the world. It was however not without risks. The West led by the U.S. wrote the modern rules of the game—rules such as Bretton Woods, Plaza Accord, Washington Consensus, WTO, Petrodollar, World Bank, IMF, the Fed, LIBOR, SWIFT, et cetera, et cetera. These are cold and calculated capitalist rules.
As the rule-maker, the West can also change the rules, ignore the rules, or unilaterally abrogate the rules if they so wish. Rules are made for the weak. The West had all the game pieces while China had none. Those pieces weren’t free. China must pay to play. The West on the other hand could, when necessary, conjure up any number of game pieces out of thin air.
Furthermore, the West has a favorite move known as All Options Are on the Table, which would cause weaker players to concede right away, considering the alternative would be at least a black eye, a bloody nose, and several dislodged teeth accompanied by the loss of face. For the impertinent and recalcitrant, it could be much worse. It’s a game the West does not play to lose.
Put yourself in Deng’s shoes. What choices did he have? Deng might have been a communist but he was also a realist. China had very little resources except a billion penurious people, most of whom half-literate peasants. In order to survive in the world, China must play the only game in town.
As a big country, China could endure the usual insults, even absorb a punch now and then, but it could also learn to play the game, and over time improve the lives of its people.
That’s the ultimate goal of the Chinese government—whose motto is “Serve the People”—in fact of any government that purports to serve its constituents.
Who cares what color cats others may think the Chinese are keeping? As quantum physicists well know, Schrödinger’s cats are simultaneously black and white, especially when no one is watching."
...
“The impossible becomes reality because the Chinese Communist never gives up,” David told Victoria while the two stood among the throng that listened to Chairman Mao’s declaration of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square.
“China’s independence and its right of self-determination are not gained by rabid barking nor through a master’s largesse, but by blood and sacrifice, lest anyone forgets.”
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
I’m going to lay off this stuff about the American shit-a-storm a-brewing. It’s a real drag don’t ya know. So this will be my last post on it for a couple of weeks. Instead, I will get back to more positive and productive posts like time-travel, sex at KTV’s, delicious bacon vodka, as well as art, and literature. I’ll bet you all were afraid that I fell into a black hole on all this crap, eh?
Yeah.
I am writing this by request. I sincerely wish that none of this ever comes to pass. Sincerely. I mean, why can't we all get along together. We're all Americans we need to act like it.
There is a movement (political) that is well funded, and organized. They are an offensive movement. That is to say that they want to go on the offensive to enact their desires. It represents about 5% of the population. These are hard-core, alt-Left progressive socialists.
There is a counter movement (political) that is grass-roots and unorganized. They are a defensive movement. They consist of preppers and other survivalists. They have a few organizations, but are pretty disorganized. They are on the defensive. They represent about 5% of the population. They are known as Alt-Right, or Hard-Right or preppers.
Then there is everyone else. And everyone else is being forced to pick sides. I think most people want to be left alone, go to work, and just a return to "normality" what ever that is. This post is for the vast bulk of people who really don't want to align themselves with any movement, just defend their family, and live a quiet life outside the fray. But you know, just because you don't want to partake in politics, doesn't mean that it doesn't want to partake in you.
So, there is a buildup and a gathering storm. You can run and hide, but powerful, wealthy, interests are seemingly desirous of hunting you all down and rooting you all out. And thus this post.
These are defensive techniques for use during a SHTF event and should not be considered to be anything else.
Remember that if all you do is "play defense" you will never "win the game". You must have a strong offensive strategy.
And, if you have the means, go to a nice safe and calm place. I'm thinking Greenland. Don't you know.
You can go ahead and visit numerous prepping and survival websites for advice and recommendations on what to do during a SHTF event. They offer good, solid and reliable information for the well-prepared survivalist. Here, I want to add some of my thoughts into the mix. And rather than duplicate the excellent advice given by others, I will concentrate on other things that might not be so well known.
I have some general knowledge and advice. Some of which might be buried inside some prepper sites, and others that might not be obvious.
Again, the best preparation that you can have is to associate yourself with a community where you are respected and one where you contribute. If that means that you need to become a Mennonite, and change your entire standard and way of living, then make it so. You need to be part of something. Being a “lone wolf” during this anticipated SHTF event is likely to be lethal.
The future will belong to the builders, the creators, the fluid and the flexible, and those that can fit into society. If you cannot, you will not do well in the coming years of shit-storm-a-thon.
Here’s my thoughts on alternative tools that one can use when going into a defensive posture during an extreme societal upset.
Line Of Sight
LOS, or Line of Sight, refers to the simple belief that you need to see something to shoot and hit it. It’s pretty basic, actually. The only way around this is to use really large explosive ordinance, that do not require precision placement.
Selco tells a story about the difficulty in obtaining water. And there was a stream (a river actually) that people would try to go down to to fetch some water. The problem was that it was frequented by snipers, and those that went looking for water often died and stayed there.
If you need to make a water run, wouldn't it be nice to have a two person team do it. One to get the water, and the other to blind all snipers with something. Whether it is smoke, haze, fog, or blinding flashes of light?
This idea that you need to be able to see something to hit it is the reason why there is camouflage clothing, and the like. A good survivalist realizes this and makes sure that he / she is out of sight. “Out of sight, out of mind” as we used to say in Pennsylvania.
But you know, there are other techniques that you can use that will keep you all “out of sight”. And they are not that obvious. The following is something that was used during the Portland Rioters. They would blast these high intensity pulsed strobe lights at the police, effectively blinding them and making it impossible to target anything.
So, legit, we walked into this thing blind, in hindsight it was stupid on our part, I had no idea that they were like that. If it had been a full-blown riot we would not have gone. Bottom line, man, if you had ever given me a scenario like this and said hey, you’re sober, and you have a gun, and somebody is hitting you with a bat and throwing rocks at you that could kill you or put you in a coma, you try to get away but they cut you off with a convoy of vehicles and the assault starts again. They impede your movement and beat you with bats…
Would you shoot?
I’d be like, yeah what fucking planet are you from?
But in all the training that I’ve been through my life, I’ve never been in one where in the first five seconds of the scenario you’re blinded with a strobe light and sprayed with pepper spray…. That changes everything.
They were throwing these rocks from 15 feet back in the crowd, you couldn’t see who the fuck through it, etc. things like that…. It’s just a good talking point for guys that carry concealed, but you need to think through all these different scenarios.
It got way worse after that video ended, they chased us for 11 city blocks. They had a convoy of about 25 vehicles that cut us off at the next intersection, They had scouts on the corner with radios, they had a drone following us, they had a bull horn calling us Nazis, and the crowd was following a red strobe light that was up in the air on a stick, so they would announce Nazis and then people would follow the red strobe light, That video is just the beginning, I’ve got a fucking fractured hand from a baton, everyone of us has black and blue bruises up and down their legs and back, I had a guy spit in my face from 6 inches away, call me a pussy and a coward for not doing anything about it, and then tell me that he was going to find where I live, rape my mother, rape my children in front of me and then kill me.
I’ve never been more angry about something in my fucking life, the level of restraint that it took for us to not fight back in any capacity whether that was with a gun or fists is incredible.
-2020 is the year that the American Civil War got “real”. With shootings, military tactics, and armed insurrection.
The idea here is that the enemy knows that you are in the vicinity. They want to box you in, hit you with bullets, and make it difficult for you to fire back. Rather than use smoke, you would disable their ability to target you with a high-intensity beam of light. I would like to introduce the reader to the High-intensity, Multi-function Portable Strobe Light.
Industrial grade high intensity strobe light.
Strobe lights are used in industry, in photography, and for special purposes. What you want is a portable unit, battery powered. You want one that cycles rather rapidly, at least once a second. Though, I suppose that once every three seconds might actually work. If you can find a sharpshooter that can locate you and target you under three seconds then you are in trouble.
If you are on a budget, you can even make your own.
The basic circuit is really super simple, with a single IC chip. You would need to construct the housing and make it shoot out a matrix array of perhaps fifty LED’s, focuses behind a lens. It requires a basic skill level in soldering electronics, but it doable, that is for certain.
Here is a simple circuit for a single LED, run off a single tiny 6V battery. If you wanted to scale it up you would multiply the (resistor + LED) by fifty, and put them in parallel, and then from pin #3 (Q) it would control the gate on a transistor or FET.
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To control a large array of LED lights, you would take the output of the IC chip at pin #3 (Q) and run it to a FET, and have the power to the LED array handled separately like this…
Where LOAD is the 50 LED array with one resistor to each LED. Q, from pin #3 would come in from the left and enter R. So you would have a 6V battery to operate the strobe, and a 12V batter operate the lights from the strobe. Of course it is super easy to have the 12 V batter run everything, but most of my readership are probably not up to the challenge.
DIY Claymore
Everyone is seemingly in love with the idea of using a nice sleek expensive bullet firing gun during a SHTF event. I call it the Hollywood effect. Here’s a hint; it’s all bullshit.
A gun is useless unless you know how to use it; and use it well under very adverse conditions. People will not start dropping like flies with single shots to the head when you spray an area with suppressive fire. If you believe that, then you are deluding yourself.
You need to hide, be low key, and be part of a crew, or a clan that works together. Then, and only then, you fight as it is necessary. And you fight as a last resort. And you never, ever, go out looking for a fight unless it is absolutely necessary.
But here, we are going to discuss something that is quite different. We are going to discuss “home made claymores”.
Designed to counter human-wave assaults, the Claymore uses a shaped C-4 charge to fire several hundred steel balls into a designated 55-yard killing zone. (Illustration by Gregory Proch)
In the lead-up to World War II József Misznay, a Hungarian army officer and ballistics expert, and German physicist Hubert Schardin formulated the Misznay-Schardin effect, a phenomenon in which the blast from the face of an explosive sheet expands perpendicularly from its surface. Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler was particularly interested when fellow Austrian Franz Rudolf Thomanek applied this principle to design shaped charges to defeat tanks and fortifications.
The war ended before Thomanek could perfect his weapon, and information on the Misznay-Schardin effect fell into American hands. Explosives researcher Norman A. MacLeod used it to design a weapon to counter human-wave assaults, such as those waged by Chinese soldiers against Americans in the Korean War. He named his antipersonnel mine the claymore, after the two-handed sword wielded by his Scottish ancestors. The device weighed 5 pounds and shot 700 steel cubes 40 feet.
The U.S. Army wanted something lighter, more efficient and more powerful. Responding to its 1954 request for proposal, researchers at Aerojet Corp. collaborated on a weapon whose C-4 charge could shoot steel balls to an effective range of 55 yards. The Army accepted the claymore in 1956, and factories produced 80,000 per month during the Vietnam War. U.S. soldiers first used them to devastating effect against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese human-wave assaults.
-M18A1 Claymore Mine: Enemy Troops Fall to Pieces
Designed to counter human-wave assaults, the Claymore uses a shaped C-4 charge to fire several hundred steel balls into a designated 55-yard killing zone. (Illustration by Gregory Proch)
Essentially, this weapon is a steel box with a directional charge. The munitions are placed on one side, and the gun-power on the other, so that when ignited, the gunpowder detonates and showers the area with devastation.
I will not get into the details of such a mechanism. You can figure it out on your own, and after a few tries and experimentation you can come up with innovations ranging from electrical denotation, to movement actuated detonation, to time delay activation. It’s all in the electrical circuits, and it’s all very easy to make.
And the decision to use electronics to ignite it isn’t all that difficult either. It’s rather standard stuff. In fact, you can buy off-the-shelf hardware used for home-security systems to trigger the mine is a door is opened, light is turned on, there is motion in front of the area, etc.
A DIY claymore is rather simple to construct, but does require a handyman with some basic skills to fabricate.
Cheap DIY claymore
Here is a description on how to construct a DIY claymore out of a spring loaded rat-trap. It’s found on an Airsoft site, but it works just as well with gunpowder as it does with colored paint.
DIY claymore on the cheap.
I'm cheap, and curious, so rather then spending over $100 on a claymore, I made my own.
Materials required:
Victor Rat trap x2
Victor Mouse trap x1
Small hinge x2
Strong Rip-stop cloth 50cmx 6.5cm (20"x 3")
Wooden shelf 16cm deep by at least 50cm long (6"x 20")
Wood screws (1.5" long)
Green braided fishing line (not mono-filament)
Straight braces X2 (optional)
I used a press-board shelf as that's what I had on hand. If i were to do this again I would definitely suggest a solid wood shelf instead.
Step 1
Prepare the 2 rat traps as follows,
Remove the trigger and trigger arm circled in green
Cut the wooden base at the red marks
BE CAREFUL, these traps are powerful.
Step 2
Rip the length of the shelf to give you pieces as follows,
2x 'A' x 'B' (Pieces 3&4)
2x 'A' x shelf width -'B' (pieces 1&2)
'B' should be equal to the width of the rat trap plus 2x the thickness of the shelf
'A' should be 25cm
Step 3
Assemble the rat traps and Pieces 1&2 ontop of Piece 3 as in the above image. Use screws to fasten in place. The traps will be placed so that they snap outwards. When the trap is armed the bar should be in the center. Leave a space between the two traps. Once you have the traps fastened down cut a piece of scrap from one of the traps to fill in 1cm at the bottom of the gap between the traps.
You can also cut any scrap pieces of wood to fill in the gaps at the ends, this is optional but will give the claymore a little more strength.
Step 4 (optional but highly recommended)
To make safety bars straighten out the trigger bars that you removed in Step 1. Now drill holes in pieces 1&2 so the safety bars can go from top to bottom and hold the bars on the traps in a compressed position.
Step 5
With the traps compressed and the safety bars in place thread the strip of cloth through the traps so that it makes a single loop around both bars. Sew this firmly. I used mono-filament fishing line to do this. The claymore should now look something like this:
Step 6
Fasten Piece 4 on the front of the claymore using the 2 hinges to connect it at the bottom to Piece 2. Put one of the 1.5" screws into Piece 4, 2cm from the top and centered. The screw should be almost all the way through but not quite.
Step 7(Optional)
Fasten the 2 brackets onto the sides of the claymore and sharpen the ends so you can jab it into the ground
Step 8
Now for the part that took me the most time to figure out. How to make a trigger that's secure, but sensitive enough to be used as with a trip wire.
Remove the trigger bar from the mouse trap. Bend a loop into it so that it looks as below.
Use a second piece of wire from the mouse trap to make a small tripwire piece as below.
Use a screw and couple washers to attach the trigger bar to the top of the trap. The screw will go through the loop in the trigger bar. One washer goes below, one above, tighten enough to hold in place but not to impede movement of the trigger bar.
Put the two staples that held the rat trap trigger plates side by side at the end of the long arm of the trigger bar as you can see in this image:
Step9
Attach a small loop of fishing line to the loop on the end of the long arm of the trigger bar. (note, I used twine but found it's wearing out very quickly)
Attach another loop of fishing line to the screw on Piece 4. This loop needs to be just long enough to reach the small arm of the trigger bar.
Attach a long piece of fishing line to the screw on Piece 4. Attach the tripwire piece about 25cm (10") along this line. Tie it on firmly so it won't move at all. I tied the rest of this to the wooden part of the mouse trap and wrapped it around so I had my tripwire and it wouldn't get tangled
Step 10 ARMING THE CLAYMORE
a) Compress the rat traps and install the safety bars.
b) Spread the cloth out and press the center into the gap between the rat traps. Fill it with BBs and fold the excess on top of them to hold them in place.
c) Place the loop of fishing line on Piece 4 over the small arm of the trigger bar.
d) Put the small loop on the long arm of the trigger bar between the two staples.
e) Put the tripwire piece under the staples and through the loop.
f) Place your claymore and run the trip wire, fasten the end of it, or leave it loose so you can pull it by hand.
g) double check the trigger and remove the safety bars
Step 11
Enjoy the surprised yelp as your unseen claymore springs open on some unsuspecting victim.
-Airsoft Canada
Bullet Matchbox
Let’s keep things really simple, we have an even simpler design a “bullet matchbox”.
This mechanism is much simpler. Instead of having to mix and pack gunpowder into a box and then hand-load the projectiles in the front, you simply make a steel box that sits a carton of ammo. Behind the ammo is a striking mechanism. This mechanism can be a simple solenoid, or a spring loaded trigger. And when it is depressed, all the bullets will ignite simultaneously devastating the intruders in front of it.
It does not need any barrels, as this is not precision mechanism. It’s a last ditch emergency device.
And of course, it need not be carefully and precisely manufactured. Any household rat trap will have enough force to hit the pins on the bullets and let fly an arsenal of death.
Infrared viewscopes
We’ve all heard of night vision scopes, but what about infrared vision? These high-tech devices enable you to find camouflaged people regardless as to how well concealed they appear. But what is unknown is how (relatively) inexpensive they have become.
Night Vision
If we’re being technical, this type of night vision scope is called image intensification, or just I2. Obviously, this kind of technology only works at night. This scope gives you the gray and green images you’re used to seeing in movies and television.
It captures bits of light from the environment, such as the moon and stars, and uses a special, electronic tube to magnify that light and project it onto your lens. This is the green image you see.
The images from these scopes are varying shades of green because the human eye can see more shades of green than any other color. This means that green imaging gives you the best, most detailed vision.
The most important thing to remember about night vision is that it won’t work in total darkness. It needs a little bit of light to work its magic, no matter which generation you choose.
– Gen 1 units typically need an infrared illuminator to be useful. These are the least precise, and images are often cloudy and noisy.
– Gen 2 units are better quality and produce brighter, clearer images than Gen 1. These have a short depth of field, however, so you may have to spend time adjusting focus when targets move.
– Gen 3 is the highest quality and offers the best focus and clarity. These are used by law enforcement and some military operations.
A few of the best include: – ATN X-Sight II 5-20 Smart Riflescope – Armasight Nemesis6x-SD Gen 2+ Rifle Scope – ATN Gen 2+ Night Arrow 4-2 Weapon Sight
Infrared and Thermal Scopes
Even though you might see infrared and thermal vision talked about as two separate things, when you’re looking for a scope, they’re basically the same. Most quality scopes will be labeled with “thermal imaging” or something similar, so that’s what you should look for when you’re shopping.
“Night vision” is not the same as “thermal vision”.
A thermal scope works by capturing heat from the environment instead of light. This heat is actually infrared energy, which is why you’ll see both terms used sometimes. Everything in the world produces at least a little bit of infrared energy, so it’s easy to get a clear view of your environment with infrared technology.
Thermal imaging uses a special lens that focuses on infrared light and creates a thermogram. The thermogram is then turned into electrical impulses that become a picture on the screen. The cool thing about thermals is that they can detect the heat given off by any living object.
As opposed to night vision, they do not require ambient light to work. However, they do not require darkness to function either! This means thermals can be used during the day or night as opposed to the other type of optic.
Low End Thermal Imaging
When you view something hot, like humans, animals or running machinery, the image will show up in shades of gray and white with the lightest areas being the hottest or vice versa depending on the scope. Things like trees or buildings will show up as “cooler” images because there is not much energy release happening.
Thermal imaging is very detailed and doesn’t need light to work.
Night vision vs. Thermal imaging.
The most basic thermals have a range of 300 yards for a man-sized heat signature. Mid-level detectors typically have a 500 yard range, and an extender can lengthen that range to 900 yards. The upper-tier, military and law enforcement-grade ones can accurately detect heat over half a mile away.
A few of the best include: – ATN ThOR HD 384 Smart Thermal Riflescope – Armasight Zeus 336 Thermal Imaging Weapon Sight – IR Hunter Mark II Thermal Rifle Scope
High End Thermal Imaging
The High end version of thermal imaging systems display colors. This is very useful in discordant and contentious environments when bursts of clarity are required in a survival situation.
Drones
You can buy drones and they are very useful. They are used now, during riots, as surveillance devices, and mobile place-markers. But they have other uses as well.
Remote-controlled aerial bomb.
Mobile strobe to disorient the enemy.
Recon.
Distraction device. (Speakers, smoke, flashes.)
Additionally, the Chinese have perfected swarm drones.
Drone Swarm
These are available all over China and are used for impressive night-time displays instead of, or in association with, fireworks. America is a bit “behind the ball on this”, and it’s playing a game of “catch up”. As I know, no swarm drones are available to the American citizen as of this writing.
In a SHTF situation, the likelihood of antibiotics and medical care being available is going to be hit and miss. It might be more prudent, in the long term, to equip yourself with weapons that are cheap and easy to provides cuts and holes rather than expensive knock-down ammo. Then when a person has a .22 sized hole in their arm, they will need to deal with infection when there are no antibiotic medications around.
Rather than trying to purchase the biggest and most dangerous weapons you can find, in the belief that stopping power is most important, you should play the “long game”. If it really comes down to a SHTF situation, then there will be two things that will not be available. That is food and medical care. All it takes is for someone with a cut or a bruise to get infected, and they will die. We take antibiotics for granted. We never think about what it would be like when they are unavailable.
Antibiotics can be purchased on line inexpensively.
I would advise a small stockpile just in case.
Antibiotic online. It is possible to buy antibiotics at any time and in any place with the Internet access. Placing an order you will need to indicate your address for the delivery of the drug. Medications are delivered to any place of the planet in no time and there is no need to leave your house in order to get your package.
-Generic Antibiotic Online With No Prescription
Microwave cannons
Sounds like science fiction, eh? Well it’s not, really. The only issue is the range of application. These little monsters will cook a person alive. And are very lethal.
If you can get a hold of a microwave based radar system from an airplane junk yard, it will not be all that difficult to construct your own microwave cannon. The range will be longer, and the effects devastating.
When I was in the Navy I watched a video showing a person walking in front of a jet with it's radar accidentally turned on. That person was fried alive. Just because you cannot see it does not mean that it doesn't exist.
Microwave radar from the front of a military jet.
You can also make you own, though with a pretty short range, out of old microwaves from the kitchen. There’s a reason why the box and front door are shielded like they are.
Here’s a great technique if you want to create a very, well really big bomb. You detonate an expanding cloud of gas, and then (a second or so later) you ignite it. It’s called a Vapor Cloud Explosive (VCE).
Vapor Cloud Explosions (VCEs) The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) defines this phenomenon as : An outdoor vapor cloud explosion is the result of the release of gas, vapor, or mist into the atmosphere, forming a cloud within the fuel’s flammable limits and causing subsequent ignition.
-VaporCloudExplosions (VCEs)
Vapor Cloud Explosions (VCEs)
In military parlance these are called Fuel-Air Explosives [FAE].
Fuel-Air Explosives [FAE] disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by an embedded detonator to produce an explosion. The rapidly expanding wave front due to overpressure flattens all objects within close proximity of the epicenter of the aerosol fuel cloud, and produces debilitating damage well beyond the flattened area. The main destructive force of FAE is high overpressure, useful against soft targets such as minefields, armored vehicles, aircraft parked in the open, and bunkers.
The Marine Corps and Navy withdrew their remaining fuel-air munitions from operational service following Operation Desert Storm. By 1996, the Army’s Operations Support Command transfered the CBU-55 and CBU-72 to demilitarization, and by mid-2001 only a few hundred remained to be demilitarized.
Russia used such “thermobaric” weapons sparingly during the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya. These were employed outside the city of Grozny against villages and mountain positions. Only the RPO-A flame thrower, which has a thermobaric round, was used in fighting in Grozny itself.
When the fighting rekindled in the fall of 1999, Russian forces bombarded some villages in Dagestan with thermobaric bombs, but initially limited their use. When the Russian Army was committed, it slowly advanced across Chechnya’s plains, preceded by conventional artillery fire. The advance, however, stalled when it finally reached Grozny and the mountains.
Conventional artillery could not force out the Chechens and the Russian Army looked for other ways to move them. Two methods were apparently opposed-chemical weapons and thermobaric weapons. The Russian political leadership apparently vetoed the use of chemical weapons, but allowed the use of ground-delivered themobaric weapons. Air-delivered thermobaric systems were only used outside the city.
Fuel/air explosive represent the military application of the vapor cloud explosions and dust explosions accidents that have long bedeviled a variety of industries.
Accidental vapor cloud explosion hazards are of great concern to the refining and chemical processing industry, and a number of catastrophic explosion accidents have had significant consequences in terms of injury, property damage, business interruption, loss of goodwill, and environmental impact.
Every year, many serious explosions and fires occur in industrial plants as a result of dust. Many materials form dust clouds that can easily ignite and explode, injuring personnel and damaging plant. This is a well-known phenomenon in the coal mining, grain storage, and the woodworking and paper industries.
Many miners have been killed and injured and massive production losses have resulted from coal dust explosions in underground coal mining operations. Of the 129 grain dust explosions that occurred nationwide between 1987 and 1997, about half involved corn. Eleven were caused by wheat dust and 10 by dust from soybeans. Billions of tiny, highly combustible particles of grain are generated by grain kernels rubbing together as they move along conveyer belts and shifted between bins. Inside the enclosed chambers, those particles rise in a cloud. When the dust gets in with the right mixture of oxygen and comes in contact with a spark or even an overheated bearing on a conveyer belt, it is extremely explosive.
Almost all organic material in the form of a dust cloud will ignite at temperatures below 500 oC - approximately the same temperature as a newly extinguished match. Cotton, plastics and foodstuffs such as sugar, flour and cocoa can also, under the right conditions, act as explosives. In order for a dust explosion to take place, the dust particles must be of a certain size and the amount of finely granulated material per unit of volume must lie within certain critical values. There is generally a direct correlation between particle size and explosive hazard. The smaller the particle, the more reactive the dust. As the materials become smaller, they disperse and remain suspended more easily, increasing the potential for ignition and propagation of the reaction. Industrial explosion prevention measures include, where possible, providing nitrogen gas purging to ensure that the oxygen concentration is kept below that required for combustion.
For vapor cloud explosion there is a minimum ratio of fuel vapor to air below which ignition will not occur. Alternately, there is also a maximum ratio of fuel vapor to air, at which ignition will not occur. These limits are termed the lower and upper explosive limits. For gasoline vapor, the explosive range is from 1.3 to 6.0% vapor to air, and for methane this range is 5 to 15%. Many parameters contribute to the potential damage from a vapor cloud explosion, including the mass and type of material released, the strength of ignition source, the nature of the release event (e.g., turbulent jet release), and turbulence induced in the cloud (e.g., from ambient obstructions).
TNT generates well over 4,000 psi overpressure in close proximity to the source of the explosion, along with significant radiant heat effects from the explosion's fireball. Conventional high explosive munitions also produce fragments from the munition case, as well as fragments from material in the target area that is broken loose by the high blast overpressures.
Peak pressures created within the detonated fuel-air cloud reach 300 pounds per square inch (psi). Fuel-air munitions create large area loading on a structure as compared to localized loadings caused by an equal weight high explosive charge. High temperatures ignite flammable materials.
There are dramatic differences between explosions involving vapor clouds and high explosives at close distances. For the same amount of energy, the high explosive blast overpressure is much higher and the blast impulse is much lower than that from a vapor cloud explosion. The shock wave from a TNT explosion is of relatively short duration, while the blast wave produced by an explosion of hydrocarbon material displays a relatively long duration. The duration of the positive phase of a shock wave is an important parameter in the response of structures to a blast.
Although the detonation combustion mode produces the most severe damage, fast deflagrations of the cloud can result from flame acceleration under confined and congested conditions. Flame propagation speed has a significant influence on the blast parameters both inside and outside the source volume.
The blast effects from vapor cloud explosions are determined not only by the amount of fuel, but more importantly by the combustion mode of the cloud. Significant overpressures can be generated by both detonations and deflagrations. Most vapor cloud explosions are deflagrations, not detonations.
Flame speed of a deflagration is subsonic, with flame speed increasing in restricted areas and decreasing in open areas. Significantly, a detonation is supersonic, and will proceed through almost all of the available flammable vapor at the detonation reaction rate. This creates far more severe peak over-pressures and much higher amounts of blast energy. The speed of the flame front movement is directly proportional to the amount of blast over-pressure. A wide spectrum of flame speeds may result from flame acceleration under various conditions. High flame front speeds and resulting high blast over pressures are seen in accidental vapor cloud explosions where there is a significant amount of confinement and congestion that limits flame front expansion and increases flame turbulence. These conditions are evidently more difficult to achieve in the unconfined environment in which military fuel-air explosives are intended to operate.
Based on the known properties of flammable substances and explosives, it is possible to use conservative assumptions and calculate the maximum distance at which an overpressure or heat effect of concern can be detected. Distances for potential impacts could be derived using the following calculation method [described in Flammable Gases and Liquids and Their Hazards]:
D = C x (nE)1/3
where D is the distance in meters to a 1 psi overpressure; C is a constant for damages associated with 1 psi overpressures or 0.15, n is a yield factor of the vapor cloud explosion derived from the mechanical yield of the combustion and is assumed to be 10 percent (or 0.1) and E is the energy content of the explosive part of the cloud in Joules. E can be calculated from the mass of substance in kilograms times the heat of combustion (hc) in Joules per kilogram as follows:
E = mass x hc
Combining these two equations gives:
D = 0.15 x (0.1 x mass x hc)1/3
Vapor cloud explosion modeling historically has been subject to large uncertainties resulting from inadequate understanding of deflagrative effects. According to current single-degree of freedom models, blast damage/injury can be represented by Pressure-Impulse (P-I) diagrams, which include the effects of overpressure, dynamic pressure, impulse, and pulse duration.
The peak overpressure and duration are used to calculate the impulse from shock waves. Even some advanced explosion models ignore the effects of blast wave reflection off structures, which can produce misleading results over- or under-estimating the vulnerability of a structure. Sophisticated software used to produce three-dimensional models of the effects of vapor cloud explosions allows the evaluation of damage experienced by each structure within a facility as a result of a primary explosion and any accompanying secondary explosions produced by vapor clouds.
-GlobalSecurity
Fuel-Air Explosives [FAE]
There is evidence that the 2020 Beriut explosion was either a micro nuke or a FAE. One thing is certain, it was devastating.
I just had to add this. Hydrogen peroxide (yes, that stuff that you can buy on the bottom shelf under the mouthwash section) is violently explosive when in the presence of copper. Even a very tiny section of a copper wire will cause it to ignite violently and dangerously.
This is, by the way, the explosive warhead on numerous Russian torpedoes, and one of the reasons why the Kursk was sunk.
A huge explosion sank the giant nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, killing most of its crew and stranding nearly two dozen survivors hundreds of feet underwater. An international rescue team assembled to save the sailors, but was unable to reach them in time.
-The True Story of the Russian KurskSubmarineDisaster
The remains of the Kursk after a front-end torpedo was accidentally detonated. The entire front end has been ripped to shreds.
.
This type of munition is just a volatile as it is dangerous. You have to be precise in making the triggering mechanism and you must be very careful in handling it. The slightest contact between the two elements will be explosive.
Hydrogen peroxide is not considered an explosive. However, when it is mixed with organic substances at significant concentrations, hazardous impact-sensitive compounds may result. Small amounts of other materials that contain catalysts (silver, lead, copper, chromium, mercury, and iron oxide rust) can cause rapid decomposition and an explosive pressure rupture of the containing vessel if it is not properly vented.
In addition to accelerated decomposition through contamination, the decomposition rate of hydrogen peroxide is increased with alkalinity, contact with certain materials of construction, and increasing temperatures. The rate of decomposition increases approximately 2.2 times for each 10 degrees C rise in temperature in the range from 20 degrees C to 100 degrees C, or 1.5 times for each 10 degrees F rise from 68 degrees F to 212 degrees F.
Decreasing temperatures have little effect on hydrogen peroxide until they drop substantially below 0 degrees C. Crystals do not begin to appear in 35% and 50% solutions until -33C (-27.4F) and -52.2C (-62F), respectively.
-Hydrogen Peroxide Safe Handling | USP Technologies
.
Most of what you can purchase off the shelf in America is diluted hydrogen peroxide solution. So you would need to have a higher concentration of the material from a warehouse.
"Set up your demonstration in an area that will be easy to clean up. A 30% hydrogen peroxide will make the most impressive explosion."
All this is nasty stuff
Yes it is. Its terrible and ugly.
I feel “icky” writing about this. I left my weapons development days a long time ago. And I really don’t want to revisit that situation. I really don’t.
From my point of view, you all should scram and get out of the line of fire. Why spend $2000 on a nice semi-auto weapon when you could (just as easily) spend the money on a round trip ticket to another part of the world and live off the remaining half in cheap hotels eating cheap food while you search for a local chick to shack up with.
But that’s just me.
The smart man avoids war, and gets way, far away, from any conflict. The sly man tries to get a technical advantage over his foes. The brutish man tries to fight his foes directly on their turf and under their terms.
I have. I’m not fucking around. Dangerous times are ahead, and it’s not going to be waving a flag for this side of that side. You all are being played by a wealthy oligarchy who treats you all like dirt. Nope, no me. Tell you what, I’m gonna be quaffing some nice icy beers and cavorting with pretty girls instead. I recommend that you all do as well. Life is too short to fuck around.
Now, if you decide to stick around, here’s my advice;
You can never win a war alone.
You can never win a war if you play defense all the time.
You can never win a war if your enemies decide the terms of engagement (time, location, and weapons.)
Being an individual will be lethal if you stick around. Clan up or leave.
Anticipate back-stabbing and betrayal.
The “news” won’t report jack-shit.
Things will be going down, long before you are aware of it.
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Love him or hate him, President Trump has severely altered the geography of the American domestic political scene. He has also severely altered the international relationships that America has with other nations; friend and foe. (Well documented.) Some people laud this as beneficial, while others decry this as something horrible. For me, personally, it’s a “mixed bag”.
"a mixed bag"
COMMON IDIOM
If something is a mixed bag, it contains things that are of very different types or qualities. The newspapers carry a mixed bag of stories on their front pages. The programmes are a mixed bag as they have to cater for all tastes. Note: The bag referred to here is a hunting bag containing the different kinds of animals and birds that the hunter has shot.
-The Free Dictionary
On one hand, it was a relief to see an “outsider” enter Washington, DC and “shake things up”. I was getting tired of feeling like no one in government cared about me, or my problems and issues. Trump entered office and acted like a “big wrecking ball”. He “shook things up”, and really “upset the apple cart”. That was a relief. It gave me hope that real change in America was possible.
shake something up
to cause changes to something, esp. in order to make improvements.
upset the apple cart
wreck an advantageous project or disturb the status quo.
go under the wrecking ball
To be destroyed or demolished.
Fig. to be wrecked or torn down.
But on the other hand, he and his small army of neocon conservatives completely demolished whatever international standing that America has held. They (the neocons) were under the delusion that somehow 2020 was actually 1960, and that America was a vibrant and healthy nation, a manufacturing powerhouse, and beloved all over the world. All of which was false.
And in their glee to “reestablish America as a global leader – 1960s style” they torn down all the Agreements that America was part of. They did so in the belief that better, more pro-America agreements would be put in their places. And sadly, that has not been the case.
Now a new President will come into office; Mr. Biden.
I cannot predict what will happen. Actually. I know that the American “news” organizations are flooding the internet with stories about how [1] Biden will be tougher on China than Trump, [2] that Biden is going to issue forth Marxism in the United States, [3] Ban Guns, and [4] so on and so forth… But no one really knows what will happen.
It could become a complete police state, but jeeze guys, isn’t that what it is already?
America is a military empire and it’s citizens live within a Police State.
Anyways, I find that this fascinating.
Why?
Two reasons.
[1] The American government owns all mainstream, alt-Left and Alt-Right media. They are pushing these narratives. Why? Why are they doing it?
That’s right. I can see an anti-China propaganda campaign as a lead up to a hot war. That always happens. That is what happened with Syria and what happened with Vietnam. But if there is no hot war, or the intention of going into a hot war, then why do it?
What is the purpose of the devotion of time, money, and resources to get Americans all riled up against a common enemy if it is not war? Why is the media (Alt-Left, Alt-Right and mainstream) all geared up so that just about every second or third article is Hate-China?
It’s getting to be that Americans are becoming fearful of the most popular, and the most populous nation on the planet. Why? (You might want to see what the rest of the world thinks about America today.)
Who and what really controls the American “news”.
[2] Both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party are a uni-party. They show different faces to the electorate, but actually are in the same club.
The uni-party are the same with only very minor differences in ideology. That is true. Look at the voting records. Not the individual votes. But rather the final votes when the votes have been counted.
Oh, sure, Congressman Royalasshole decided to vote “no” on congressional resolution Fuck-Americans-in-the-ass, but his party did. Oh, by just one or two votes. Imagine that! Back-door dealings…
Hey Congressman Smartlydressedolderdickhead made the arrangements. Most could vote to please their constituents, but, as long as the party voted as the oligarchy favored, then all was well.
It’s a uni-party.
The uni-party.
So what is actually going on?
My personal belief is that President Trump was an intentional plant. He was popularly elected, but it was intended for him to be elected. Hillary Clinton was a very polarizing figure, ran a weak election campaign, and lost.
I believe that it was intended for him to be elected over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Further, that it was intended for him to has a short four year term in office, intentionally. Leading up to Biden who is the intentional follow-up President that came into office.
From my point of view, as an outsider – I no longer live inside the American media echo chamber, it appears to be crystal clear that America is being run as a big Ponzi scheme and that the entire election process is just one big hoax. No citizens have any control over anything.
And you are free to agree or disagree. But it really seems to me that the forces aligned for a Biden win, whether legitimate or not, are aligned that way intentionally.
Very powerful force, with very powerful resources, are manipulating American citizenry in very precise and elaborate ways. The outcome, no matter how you look at it, is planned.
What is going on?
I personally believe that most people are good. And that most American are good. That they live in a nation that has become hostile to them in various ways. For some, it dates way back decades or centuries, for others it is recent. But both sides of the political spectrum see America a very sick and in need of change. The difference is that both sides see different ways of accomplishing that objective.
Far Left = Marxism is the solution.
Mainstream = The status quo is perfect as it is.
Far Right = A return to a Republic is the solution
All are false.
You are here.
It is no secret (but not at all publicized in the United States) that China threw away it’s mantle of Marxist Communism back in the 1970’s. It nearly destroyed the nation, and torn it apart in ways that Americans have a hard time understanding. Over 30 million people died under Chinese Marxism. And the Chinese leadership said “never again” and changed the government.
Someone should have woken up the neocons and got them out of their comfortable echo chamber. Their narrative about what China is hasn’t been updated since the 1970’s and they are spouting nonsense that anyone outside of the USA can see clearly. China is many things, but Marxist Communist it is not.
No. American Marxism will not be an improvement. It will be a disaster.
Bafflegab.
Likewise, a return to a Republic is not the solution either. We know from history how the American Republic turned into a Democracy. How it became an Oligarchy, and then evolved into a Military Empire. Trying to hit a “reset button” in the hope of a return to what was intended is a mistake. It’s just going to allow others to establish a better, stronger and more powerful oligarchy.
No. A return to the past is not the solution either.
I want to believe.
Now, I advocate something radical.
I strongly suggest that the federal government be dissolved. It be destroyed and the individual States regain their sovereign identities.
I think that the citizens will have better control over their lives and that the benefits that the Federal Government provides won’t even be noticed when it is gone. In fact, I argue that the benefits of having a Federal Government is actually tiny on a vast majority of folk in the United States today.
How are the citizens of West Virginia benefiting from the war in Yemen?
How do the people in Tennessee benefit for the billions of federal taxes for a High Speed Train in California?
In what way does the ATF benefit the people of North Dakota?
Selected flags of the various States.
Rather than fight each other over ideology, I argue that now is the time for Americans to come together and forge a new government, and stop looking to the past for answers. Whether it is Marxism, or a 1776 Republic.
While everyone might have different personal ideologies, I argue that most people want to be left alone. they want to work, play, and raise their families. And that they really don’t care all that much about who is doing what in Washington DC.
The two parties simplified.
So What is the Big Picture?
Provided that I am correct, that it’s all a big show for the masses, then what is actually going on? What is the big plan?
Well, by looking at the results of the Trump Administration’s actions on an international scale, it seems rather obvious. He has pretty much torn up almost all the agreements, trampled on our relationships with long-term allies, and has engaged on a war footing with the largest and most important nation on the planet. Why?
Look what he is doing…
Isolate America from the rest of the world.
Contain any upset and internal turmoil domestically to American shores.
Minimize the economic “footprint” of any economic collapse that will happen inside of America.
Limit any external damage that might occur as the American monster empire goes into it’s death throes.
That is the only thing that makes sense when you look at things objectively. And not from some kind of partisan divide.
Don’t believe ANYTHING out of the American “news”. Both the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right are controlled by the American State Department. They push narratives to control the citizenry.
Why is this going on?
Well, it seems obvious. The United States is long, long over due for a reset. And no matter how you look at it; it is going to occur.
It is going to occur. The reset will happen. The oligarchy realizes this. So they have planned accordingly. From their point of view, it is best to let the trends run their course, but in such a way that they control the outcome. And that is why all this is going on.
The dichotomy between what is happening in the real world and what is happening in the world of the financiers will lead to violent upheaval on a timeline not anticipated by the ruling class. There is a good reason gun stores were overwhelmed with business at the outset of this over-hyped flu pandemic. Trust in the government, central bankers, the corporate media, and “experts” is disintegrating rapidly. The anger and disillusionment grows by the day and pockets of resistance are propagating throughout the country...
The only thing that matters is we will experience a disastrous outcome in the very near future from this reckless issuance of debt. The civic decay has entered the confrontational stage, with sides taken, weapons at the ready, awaiting the spark which will ignite the dynamite.
Reopen the nation, American Thinker – Hundreds of thousands of businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy and permanent closure. 33+ million are unemployed, and the federal government is creating massive unsustainable debt. This nation has made the biggest blunder in its history. The time has come for the politicians from the President to the Governors and Mayors to stop hiding behind the scientist/bureaucrats and fully reopen the nation. Focus on that segment of the population most at risk, without compulsory isolation or de facto imprisonment. And restore the civil liberties that have been wantonly eroded.
Spicy times ahead. Read some history.
Picture above; as the Ottoman empire started to collapse, they disarmed the citizenry. Then found scapegoats or villains. They collected them, marched them off and killed them.
Spicy times ahead.
The importance of isolating America from the rest of the world
America is being isolated in so many, many ways. Most Americans are unaware of this, as they do not live internationally. But what is actually happening is that President Trump’s policies have make it very “uncool” to have anything to do with America.
Global stability is maintained by strong routes of communication, give and take, and trade. This ensures that countries can address concerns early on before things get blown out of control, and spiral down a dangerous path towards war. It’s a very human thing, this idea of clear communications and open productive dialog.
It’s like a family. What happens when one member decides to stop talking, starts doing what they please without the consent of others in the family? What happens when they arbitrarily decide to eat what they want and spend the family budget as they feel fit, without input form the rest of the family?
But when you have a problematic family member, one with a mental illness, and alcohol addiction, or problems with the police, the family has a responsibly to isolate him/her and get them help where their problems can be resolved. For some this is a 12-step program, for others it is incarceration in a jail or a mental hospital. But no matter what the situation, the person needs to be placed in a “safe place”, isolated and attended to by experts.
When you have problematic family members you need to isolate them and get them help. They need to work out their own problems in a safe and controlled environment.
.
Other nations do not want “spill over” from American domestic turmoil to affect their economies. They collectively desire to minimize the effects of any problems.
That is what the United States is being set up for now.
And people are noticing.
From the woodpile report; July will tell the truth about the economy. I’ve chosen November as the month of general truth, whether the years following will be of manageable coping, of unexampled disaster, or something in between.
We could see a return to pre-Covid conditions, the economy revive, preps largely unneeded. Or hard times will persist but get no worse than they are now, with normalcy slowly returning, preps helpful but not critical. Or daily life could worsen long term and become the new normal, modest preps necessary but sufficient until a slow turnaround takes hold some years out.
Or systemic disruption and shortages could multiply, the recession deepen into a depression , extensive preps needed to make it from one month to the next. Or it could become a general disaster with outright starvation, government rule by decree, cities uninhabitable, regional withdrawals into fiefdoms, and only extensive preps being enough to avoid personal catastrophe. Or we'll see a rapid and unstoppable national and global collapse, criminal raids on a regional scale, rule by force, preps depleted or confiscated and the widespread rise of outright survivalism.
Preppers attempt to maintain some or most of their present circumstances in tough times. The survivalist has his own definition of preps. He practices to survive by anticipating and training for the worst of the possibilities.
Survivalism comes first, not last, because in the end preps assume the prepper survives to use them.
There are entirely reasonable variations on these themes. This is merely my personal arrangement.
He also goes on to say…
It appears we're at the start of an economic collapse similar to that of 1929 and into the 1930s. What we're seeing in Minneapolis and elsewhere appears to add the danger of organized violence.
A widespread decampment from big cities began some time ago and appears to be accelerating. Bloomberg reports RV sales are up 30% in some urban places.
The causes are fascinating but in the end what matters is how their migration to the "flyover country" they so despise may affect your personal plans.
July, when the long term direction of the economy will be plain to see, may be your last opportunity to shape your preparations more exactly, meaning food, shelter and protection. November is the month of the presidential election, when all sides reveal their intentions and one is chosen. It's also when winter weather begins.
Time is running out.
The alarm bells are ringing all over the United States…
Lockdowns, Mises Institute – Those who have claimed that lockdowns are “the only option” had virtually no evidence at all to support their position. Indeed, such extreme over-the-top measures such as the general lockdowns required an extreme level of high-quality, nearly irrefutable evidence that lockdowns would work and were necessary in the face of a disease with an extremely high fatality rate. But the only “data” the prolockdown people could offer was speculation and hyperbolic predictions of bodies piling up in the streets. The lockdown crowd destroyed the lives of millions to satisfy the hunches of a tiny handful of politicians and technocrats.
Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man mentions the unmentionable in his essay, Bailing out the states: the momentum and the prospect for violence builds. Excerpts:
If their residents find that government largesse is no longer flowing; and if they believe that they're entitled to such largesse; then they're going to get out of control and try to take what they want. The results are likely to be catastrophic for law and order, and civil society.
I think the ordinary people of America realize this. After all, that's why they bought more guns in March than any other month in previous US history. They're getting ready to defend what's theirs—and I believe they're right in anticipating the need to do so...
You want to know why my friends want me to upgrade their rifles? You want to know why I've been warning about COVID-19 as a threat to personal security, and suggesting ways to keep your shooting skills honed, even during the lockdown? ... Look no further.
American Gun News – Another Maryland Man Red-Flagged to Death by the Cops … cops shot him through a window while asleep in bed. They also shot his pregnant girlfriend
Power grab, Sovereign Man – If you think about 9/11 in particular, its remarkable how much power the government grabbed, and how many freedoms they took away. What I’m most concerned about at this point is not the virus, nor even the economic devastation.They have us all cowering in our homes, stripped of the most basic freedoms to do just about anything. People are being thrown off their own private property because they’re not an ‘official resident’ of the town. Others have been arrested for attending a funeral. Others threatened with jail for their social media posts. There’s going to be a huge impact on our freedom from this astonishing growth of unchecked government power.
…
The oligarchy, and I mean the top most, highest levels of the 1%, are aware of all these trends and they expect things to get worse. They see and view what America is entering as something that is unavoidable, but can be controlled somewhat.
The most important thing for them is to limit the damage.
Keep it on a local scale within America. Try to avoid spillover to the rest of the world. And that requires that America be isolated to various degrees from the rest of the world. Disentangled.
Isolation
As I see it, there is an effort for complete isolation.
When I mean complete isolation, I am referring to [1] a drop in international obligations and trades as well as [2] a long drawn-out rise in being fearful of other nations. Treaties would be torn up or ignored. All done to “improve” America. And news would make Americans fearful, afraid, and full of hate towards other nations, and other peoples.
You simply cannot deny this.
The year of 2020 has been a non-stop China-hate-fest. Every other article is China doing something wrong, and how dangerous they are. Coupled with that is systems of isolation and a break-up of channels of communication. Students are no longer permitted in the USA, Chinese applications and communication channels are banned (such as QQ, Wechat, and Tiktok) plus an onslaught on the American means of communication. Zoom now requires the Chinese to pay a hefty fee to use it, and Skype is putting access limitations on it’s use within China.
Americans have been so dumbed down that they don’t even realize it is happening. You would think that they would at least ask themselves “Why this flood of anti-China articles now? What happened to the most favored trading nation status?”
America is so dumbed down that this is what passes for “news” in the United States today.
.
You can argue the Mike Pompeo narrative; “China IS bad. So all this is necessary”. But I argue that it’s a big lie. It’s all part of a large orchestrated effort to isolate America from the rest of the world.
What follows is a brief compilation of the many, many treaties that President Trump and his small band of neocons have broken, collapsed, argued for re-posturing, or simply abandoned and no longer functionally obeys the Agreements that the United States has already signed. Combined, it paints a damning picture of intentional isolation from the global, and Geo-Political landscape.
Broken Treaties leading towards American isolation.
Let’s walk down the long hallway of broken treaties, collapsed agreements, and ignored responsibilities. Let’s look down that hallway and see whether or not the United States people are being screwed by it’s leadership… all in the name of “Making America Strong Again”.
As we walk down this hallway, let’s look for clues to see whether or not Americans are being screwed by the oligarchy as part of their long term plan.
.
President Donald Trump's decision to begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty will end an arms control agreement with Russia that has been a centerpiece of European security since the Cold War.
The move, meant to penalize Russia for noncompliance, is likely to alarm the international community, particularly Europe, and cause fears that the US and Russia could enter a new nuclear arms race.
Trump's time in office has seen the President remove the US from multiple international organizations and has not hidden his frustration with international trade groups and security alliances.
-CNN
China
China really doesn’t figure strongly here. Trump has made it clear that he wants to sever all ties with China, and isolate them. To this end he has constructed the ‘QUAD” to encircle China and threaten them with military support. It’s sort of like this…
Trump is trying to isolate China from the United States.
Trump’s long list of global trade deals, agreements exited or renegotiated
President Donald Trump campaigned on deals. Making deals — like an Israel-Palestine peace accord. And breaking deals — like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran Deal, both of which he labeled disasters.
Since entering the Oval Office in 2016, Trump — a self-professed negotiator —has delivered on many of his promises to abandon international pacts that previous administrations had authorized.
KORUS
The Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) went into effect on March 15, 2012. Most Korean industrial and consumer goods currently enter the United States free of duty and the merchandise processing fee (MPF) and by 2016 that figure grew to over 95 percent.
Then Trump ended it as soon as he came to office.
He renegotiated in such a way that South Korea will no longer have the United States as it’s largest export target. Instead there are limits to what South Korea can ship to America. That way, when or if, America collapses, the economy of South Korea will not be so broadly affected.
This makes sense from an Oligarchy point of view. Not so much for a MAGA (Make America Great Again) point of view.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
KORUS wasn’t the only treaty that Trump broke as soon as he came to office.
Just days after assuming office, Trump delivered on a campaign promise and announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries that took seven years to negotiate and was signed by then-President Barack Obama in his second term. Its goals were to boost exports, remove tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and open access to more markets.
It was a turn toward protectionist measures. By abandoning a deal that would give American companies an opportunity to seek cheap labor abroad, Trump signaled that his priority is to reduce the number of jobs leaving the country.
In a memorandum announcing the move, Trump favored bilateral negations and said they were to be pursued whenever possible to “promote American industry, protect American workers, and raise American wages.”
The end result was that the huge trade connections that America has had with 11 other nations collapsed. The trade back and forth between these countries started to decline and now are only a fraction of what they once were.
If Trump did nothing, and TPP stayed intact, a collapse of the American economy as a result of internal turmoil or economic malfeasance would result in economic turmoil in those 11 nations as well. Pulling out provides a “safety valve” for those nations so that if anything were to happen to the USA, the damage would be domestic and not international in scope.
The Paris Agreement
On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an international climate accord that the U.S. signed under the Obama administration that aims to combat global warming by gradually reducing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, which come from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.
Trump cited “onerous energy restriction” on the U.S. and the possible job losses it could cost as reasons for dropping out of the deal. Industrial sectors such as cement, coal, and iron and steel, Trump said, could be affected by America’s inclusion in the accord. He said there were plans to begin negotiations to reenter the deal or enter an “entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.”
Trump said the deal “punishes the United States,” which he claimed was the world leader in environmental protection, without imposing any “meaningful obligations” on the world’s leading polluters. Historically, the U.S. has ranked as one of the worst emitters of carbon dioxide, but it’s been noted as recently as this year that its contribution to CO2 levels globally has been on the decline.
What is not spoken of isn’t anything regarding climate, or the environment. There are two impacts that this has that are significant here;
American influence in an entire slew of subsequent treaties will be absent.
Other nations will not be economically dependent on this treaty as a source of income.
People all over the world rely on American funding through treaty. Trump has gone about severing as many of those ties as possible.
The Iran Deal
Throughout the 2016 presidential election campaign, then-candidate Trump promised that once he was in office he would tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran — better known as the Iran nuclear deal. The president called it the “worst deal ever.” Pushed into passage by the Obama Administration, the Iran nuclear deal reduced economic sanctions against Iran as long as the country ended its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In May, the White House announced that because the JCPOA “failed to protect America’s national security interests” it would be pulling out of the historic deal.
The White House accused the Iranian regime of archiving its past nuclear weapons work and continuing to enrich uranium and develop ballistic missiles. The administration left some room for a new deal to be struck but said that a return to the negotiating table would depend on a number of preconditions such as the Iranian regime completely abandoning their intent to develop nuclear weapons—something Trump alleges they never stopped pursuing.
In the meantime, the administration has renewed sanctions against Iran. These measures, according to the White House, would target several of the country’s economic sectors such as energy, petrochemical, and finance.
So what? What does this matter?
Iran who is one of the leading economic influences int he Middle East will continue to be economically removed from the United States. People! This is not about nuclear weapons, bombs or war. This is about preventing the entire Middle East from getting economically entangled with the United States when it is on the verge of a major shut-down.
G7
The Group of Seven (G-7) is an intergovernmental organization that meets periodically to address international economic and monetary issues. G-7 countries consist of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan.
This is an important group. It discusses international trade, money and related issues. Trump is not pulling out of it, as it really doesn’t make trade decisions, but it is very noteworthy that Trump has insisted that Russia be part of it, and China be out of it.
What is he thinking? What is on his mind?
UNESCO
In Oct. 2017, the State Department announced that the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO, which serves a number of functions around the globe such as promoting literacy and protecting historic and cultural sites through the World Heritage Center.
It was a symbolic gesture on part of the Trump administration, seeing as the Obama White House cut off funding for UNESCO in 2011, after the group voted to include Palestine as a member. The reasons the State Department gave for leaving the organization include what it views as mounting debt within the organization, a need for “fundamental reform,” and continuing bias against Israel.
Again, America’s ties to major world organizations is being severely reduced, curtailed and severed.
NAFTA
On Aug. 27, President Trump ended nearly 25 years of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the trade pact linking U.S., Canada, and Mexico. He announced a new, bilateral agreement with Mexico known as the U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement.
Canada was initially left out of the new deal, which was designed to replace the NAFTA, an agreement that Trump says carried bad connotations. Signed in 1993, NAFTA eliminated tariffs on most goods traded among the continent’s three largest countries and made it easier for companies in those countries to move goods across borders. The old trade pact is often blamed for the flight of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico and the deindustrialization of the American economy.
The new deal includes controversial stipulations such as the “rule of origin,” which requires that cars must be built with at least 75 percent parts made in North America (up from 62.5 percent under NAFTA) and that 40 to 45 percent of an automobile must be manufactured by employees earning at least $16 an hour.
This is a mixed bag. I see the economic ties to Mexico loosened, but not severed. Any collapse of America will affect Mexico. But not as terribly as before.
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
On Oct. 20, Trump announced to reporters his intention to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a 1987 pact between the United States and Russia that required both countries to destroy ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 310 and 3,400 miles, along with any supporting equipment.
Nothing quite ruins your day like global thermonuclear war.
Trump claims that Russia has violated the Cold War-era treaty, set to expire in two years, and said that the U.S. will begin weapons development unless Russia and China—who is not a party to the pact—agree to a new deal.
Days after the announcement, White House National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and said there was no chance the Trump administration would reverse its decision. Bolton suggested the INF treaty was outmoded.
“There’s a new strategic reality out there,” Bolton said. “This is a cold war bilateral ballistic-missile-related treaty — in a multipolar ballistic-missile world.”
The USA has 6000+ nuclear weapons. Russia has 7000+ nuclear weapons. But it’s a multipolar because China has 300. What the fuck?
Including China guarantees that this treaty will die. China wants no part of nuclear negotiations. (Their weapons are just enough to deter, not to MAD smash.) Knowing this, Trump has set the treaty to end. Why?
Why?
United Nations Human Rights Council
Calling it a “cesspool of political bias,” Nikki Haley, then-Ambassador to the United Nations, announced in June that the United States was pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, leaving the U.S. without a vote and sidelined from the Geneva-based group that aims to promote human rights around the world.
The Trump administration made the move amid criticism surrounding its practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. The Human Rights Council called on the White House to end the practice because it “runs counter to human rights standards.”
Again, severing the agreements with other nations. Closing of economic ties and destruction of lines of communication.
UNRWA
In August, the Trump Administration said that it would halt U.S. contributions to the United Nations’ aid program for Palestinian refugees. The decision is part of the administration’s efforts to rein in foreign aid and restrict assistance to the West Bank and Gaza. The move came one week after the White House revoked more than $200 million in economic aid to the Palestinian territories.
The U.S. is “no longer willing to shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA’s costs,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The U.N. agency provides health care to approximately 3 million Palestinians, education assistance to 500,000 children, micro-loans to another 400,000 beneficiaries, among other aid.
Again, severing the agreements with other nations. Closing of economic ties and destruction of lines of communication.
WTO
The World Trade Organization is a global organization made up of 164 member countries that deals with the rules of trade between nations. Its goal is to ensure that trade flows as smoothly and predictably as possible.
As part of his broader attempts to renegotiate the United States’ global trade deals, President Trump has threatened to withdraw from the WTO, calling it a “disaster.”23 If the U.S. were to withdraw, trillions of dollars in global trade would be disrupted.
Again, severing the agreements with other nations. Closing of economic ties and destruction of lines of communication.
WHO
The World Health Organization (WHO) was first proposed in 1945 as a public health agency to be formed as part of the United Nations. WHO’s constitution was ratified on April 7, 1948, marking its official establishment.
WHO categorizes its work into three broad areas of focus:
Advocating for universal health coverage
Preparing for public health emergencies and coordinating a global response
Serving vulnerable populations
As an agency of the United Nations, WHO’s governing body – the World Health Assembly (WHA) – includes representatives of every United Nations Member State. WHO’s structure includes an executive board comprised of 34 technically qualified representatives from the various Member States. These members generally possess an extensive background in clinical or public health.
The WHA currently consists of 194 members, one designee from each Member State. Meetings of the WHA and Executive Board may be attended by “non-State actors” (non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, philanthropic organizations, and others) who may observe and make statements to the body, but cannot vote.
During the middle of a global pandemic that is crushing the United States, Trump pulls out of the very agency set up to deal with this problem.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance of 28 countries that border the North Atlantic Ocean. The Alliance includes the United States, most European Union members, Canada, and Turkey. The United States contributes three-fourths of NATO’s budget.
Again, severing the agreements with other nations. Closing of economic ties and destruction of lines of communication.
Open Skies
**BREAKING**
The United States will officially pull out of another arms control pact with Russia on Sunday, marking the end of a six-month notification process informing Moscow, U.S. officials told Fox News. -FOX News 22NOV20
The Trump administration is set to pull out of the Open Skies Treaty, which was signed between former Cold War foes in 1992 to set up unarmed, reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory to collect data on military forces.
However, the U.S. has accused Russia of violating the agreement for years, barring flights over Russian territory, including Kaliningrad where nuclear weapons are suspected of being present and in range of major European capitals.
Conclusion
As I see it, there are no “real” political parties. Just actors playing a role. And who would be best at playing this particular role, right now, than a reality show television star and casino owner; Donald Trump. He plays a role. He is an actor. And people are treating him as “the real thing”, when all he is is just a puppet for the oligarchy.
We need to be careful and see things as they really are.
You need to be careful not to confuse who you are dealing with or what they actually are.
Instead of thinking Progressive Marxists vs. Traditional Conservatives, perhaps we should be thinking in terms of …
… serfs vs. the massive oligarchy.
A reset is in process. It is going to happen whether you want it to or not. The only thing that you can do is escape to safe havens (like the oligarchy did, or what I did), or hunker down and steel-yourself for some discomfort.
I have mapped out, here, what I believe is going on.
The oligarchy realizes that the United States is due for a most contentious clamorous collapse. It will not be uniform. Some areas will remain unscathed, while other areas will be dangerous, even lethal.
As the USA collapses like a big, dangerous out of control monster, it will thrash about and cause all sorts of discord. This is what the oligarchy fears.
And so, President Trump, their "plant" has set up systems so that the collapse of the United States will be isolated to America (as much as possible).
Now, President Biden will try to calm things down, perhaps do his best to control the hard-Left, and the minor oligarchy members (Congress and other billionaires; the PTB) from aggravating the hard-right. He will have a tough time at it.
But you will probably see him trying to settle and calm things, rather than to stir things up.
Predictions;
America will undergo a reset. 2023 to 2025 at it’s peak, with a long slow return to stability starting to manifest around 2030.
Some areas will be affected terribly, others no so badly.
Internationally, it will have an effect on the globe, but not as terrible as one might fear.
A hot war with a major nuclear-armed power is a strong possibility. I believe that it will be Russia.
China will get some dings. But it will not be anything like what will happen to America.
If a hot war occurs, the United States (as we know it) will be no longer.
What will replace America could be anything. Though my bets are on a fractured nation into five or more separate nations, all tied together by treaty. Each one with it’s own laws and ways of doing things.
Remember boys and girls, America can’t build a simple wall on it’s territory, spend 77 billion dollars for s simple train line, or keep the COVID-19 in check. What makes anyone think that it can rebuild after a devastating nuclear war? It cannot.
The loss and destruction of America will not any sense, but that is the human species for you. You need not be surprised.
The loss and destruction of America will not any sense, but that is the human species for you.
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One of the “givens” that I pretty much have come to accept as normal is the belief that if you bought something, you owned it. If you bought a pair of shoes, it was yours and you could do what ever you wanted with it. If you bought a pack of cigarettes, you could smoke them or throw them away. It was your possession and you could do what you wanted with it. Unfortunately, this is no longer true in the United States.
It all began with housing. The days of full-ownership of a house in America are long, long over. And I am not talking about a mortgage either. I am talking about taxes, and regulations, and fees and requirements. If you have to ask permission, then you don’t own it. If you have to pay more money on it, you don’t own it. If someone can change it or alter it without your permission you don’t own it.
Ownership is the bedrock of freedom.
Unfortunately it no longer exists in the United States.
And what is much sadder is that all Americans don’t realize this loss; this loss in the ability to own things, and to use them as you feel fit. They see it as normal. “Of course, you need to ask the local Home Owners Association permission to remodel your house.” “Of course, you cannot smoke cigarettes in a restaurant, or on the street or in a park…” “Of course, you need to pay the upgrade fee on your software program. You don’t really own it, don’t you know.”
This encroachment is sickening to me.
People! If you cannot own things, you are not free. Do you know who else cannot own things?
Slaves.
That’s who.
Back in the day, I had a library of books. No, I am not exaggerating. I had my walls plastered floor to ceiling with books, and my entire house was cluttered with my tomes and books. I loved those things, and I lost them. This story of how they came to disappear is noteworthy in-itself, but, let’s not get sidetracked. With the advent of computerized software, you can have entire libraries that can fit inside an object no bigger than the palm of your hand. Great huh?
Maybe not so.
I once had a iPod with perhaps 10,000 songs on it. I had collected music from all over the internet, mostly “Limewire”, but I also used other services. Then one day, the system reset for a software update. It erased my entire collection! Why? Why in God’s name did this happen?
I will tell you why.
I did not buy the songs from iTunes. (Which is the monopoly that Apple has constructed around it’s iPod platform.)
Was the iPod my property?
Apparently not.
Now the purist might say that I needed to read the fine print in my purchaser’s agreement. And to that I must counter… with this…
You do not own anything that requires that you read “fine print” that defines how you must use that object.
Ah. Let that sink in.
Remember that personal ownership is a fundamental pillar of freedom. If you cannot own things, free and clear, you are just renting them on loan.
And it’s not just me speaking. The United States government and the courts have reinforced this belief. You don’t own much of anything. In fact, it is even against the law to collect rainwater! I mean there is something seriously wrong if you cannot own the rain that falls on you from the skies above.
Let’s talk about books.
Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
This is a reprint of the great article titled “Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar”. Published on Jun 30, 2019 12:00PM EDT Maria Bustillos. All credit to the author.
Private ownership—in particular the private ownership of books, software, music and other cultural information—is the linchpin of a free society. Having many copies of works of art, music and literature distributed widely (e.g., many copies of the same book among many private owners, or many copies of the same audio files, torrents or blockchain ledger entries on many private computers) protects a culture against corruption and censorship. Decentralization strategies like these help to preserve press freedom, and individual freedom. The widespread private ownership of cultural artifacts guarantees civil liberties, and draws people into their culture immanently, persistently, giving it life and power.
Cory Doctorow’s comment on Friday at BoingBoing regarding private ownership of books is well worth reading; he wrote it because Microsoft is shutting down its e-books service, and all the DRM books people bought from them will thus vanish into thin air. Microsoft will provide refunds to those affected, but that isn’t remotely the point. The point is that all their users’ books are to be shut off with a single poof! on Microsoft’s say-so. That is a button that nobody, no corporation and no government agency, should be ever permitted to have.
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
At this very moment, governments are forbidding millions of people, Chinese people, Cubans, Belarusians and Egyptians and Hungarians and many, many others all over this world, from reading whatever they want.
So if there is to be a fear of the increasing adoption of e-books such as those offered by Microsoft, and to a far greater degree, Amazon, that’s by far the scariest thing about it. Because if you were to keep all your books in a remotely controlled place, some villain really could come along one day and pretty much flip the switch and take them all away — and not just yours but everyone’s, all at once. What if we had some species of Trump deciding to take action against the despicable, dangerous pointy-heads he is forever railing against?
Boom! Nothing left to read but The Art of the Deal.
I don’t intend on shutting up about this ever, and I’m sure Doctorow won’t either, bless him.
In 2010, techno-utopianism was in full swing, with e.g. Nick Negroponte going around saying that physical books would be mass-produced for only maybe another five years (yeah, sorry guy). His reasoning seems to have had something to do with the fact that books are hard to send to Africa.
Anyway my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday that year, and I loved it a lot. Thousands and thousands of books fit on this pretty, if potentially sinister, little machine. I’d just go over to Project Gutenberg and vacuum stuff up every which way, because I have no literary discernment whatsoever and will gladly spend the afternoon reading Agatha Christie or really, literally almost anything.
Project Gutenberg is now up to more than 59,500 free e-books, all out of copyright and so classics, mostly. And no need to feel the least bit guilty as you might even at a thrift shop, where whatever you buy, it’s going to take up room on bookshelves that you know you don’t have; these books took up no extra room at all.
I bet you will be surprised to hear when Project Gutenberg first started. 1971 (!) is the true answer, and could they ever destroy every Final Jeopardy contestant with that one, I bet.
Its founder, Michael Hart, was a most unusual and interesting man. The ultimate anti-corporatist. Like Yoda, Mr. Hart doesn’t appear to have possessed much glamour or power on the outside, but he was brimming with these and other virtues on the inside.
He didn’t care two pins about money, wouldn’t take a salary for years and years, and acquired the few bits of stuff he seemed to need at garage sales.
In the 1970s, nobody knew that computers would eventually be used for the mass storage of culture. It hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the computer would be useful for anything aside from just computation. It was so shockingly, incredibly good at that! There was such a lot of computation that needed doing, so computation was first in line.
Now it is clear as day that whoever controls computer storage will effectively control the media commons.
There are a lot of champions in this fight, but Michael Hart saw it all coming about half a century ago and started typing his fool head off, dozens and dozens of whole books, long before OCR was a gleam in a programmer’s eye.
Hart did more to secure the future of the public domain than anyone else in the world, I believe. Project Gutenberg’s widely distributed books cannot be taken away—and when they’re downloaded and stored on private devices and media, it’s like insurance for Western Civ.
My first few times on Project Gutenberg I downloaded a lot of rare early Wodehouse (highly recommended: The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England) and also a lot of Thackeray, Gibbon, pretty much all of Mrs. Gaskell and, just by accident, Émile Gaboriau’s La Vie Infernale — the fruitiest, most marvelous 19th-c. French melodrama (in two parts: The Count’s Millions and Baron Trigault’s Vengeance. I just love those.) Plus Shakespeare and the King James Bible and that sort of stuff.
I am no fan of Amazon, and even back then I resisted spending money there, but I did buy an e-book copy of Infinite Jest, which is far and away my favorite modern novel.
A few days later, I was having a little dispute with my husband over whether or not Wallace misuses the word “ilk” in that book, which with the Kindle’s search feature took about twenty seconds to settle (A: not really; the solecism appears just once, in the quoted speech of Madame Psychosis.)
It’s all thrillingly searchable, and browsable, plus once you get a book on your Kindle (or Nook, or equiv.) you can highlight things and also make your own notes. By now scholars, researchers, historians and journalists will want both a searchable ebook copy and a paper copy, I would think, of anything they’re really interested in.
I also learned that having an e-reader meant that one might quite easily wind up buying more books than before, if anything, because the getting of books was on one’s mind more.
So all that is the upside of owning e-books.
But my Fahrenheit-451-paranoia was fanned into a giant flaming ball of fear-napalm when I looked into the personal ownership of the files and books on my own Kindle. And things have only gotten a lot worse since then.
Almost exactly ten years ago, you may remember, Amazon came stealthily along and deleted e-copies of 1984 (no seriously, they did) and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies they’d already paid for and downloaded — because it turned out that there was a rights problem with the e-publisher.
Jeff Bezos wound up apologizing all over himself and taking it all back and promising never to do that ever again, but the fact remains that Amazon has some kind of access to your Kindle files and can literally remove them, if they feel like it, which is downright creepy, and if it were your computer you would not like it one little bit.
Having learned this, I went along and had a closer look at the then-current Kindle License Agreement.
There was some simply petrifying stuff on there. For starters, then as now, you don’t “own” Kindle books, you’re basically renting them. (“Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”)
Amazon’s current terms of use now specify explicitly that they can look over your shoulder while you read. Check this out!
Information Provided to Amazon. The Kindle Application will provide Amazon with information about use of your Kindle Application and its interaction with Kindle Content and the Service (such as last page read, content archiving, available memory, up-time, log files, and signal strength).
They can change the software on you whenever they like, or just shut it down completely, without so much as a by your leave:
Changes to Service; Amendments. We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice.
That is how a totalitarian state might go about confiscating books, if they wanted to. There is nothing in this agreement to stop Amazon from modifying the Kindle software to make it impossible for you to read any of your own files on the device.
Such a step is not forbidden to Amazon by this agreement; they are under no apparent obligation to protect any data you might be storing. That’s not to say that there aren’t laws, at least in some states, that might allow you to sue for damages; I don’t know. I’m just saying, this agreement doesn’t require Amazon to protect your data.
A bad government could just grab the controls from them and have at it.
Changes to Service; Amendments.We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice. We may amend any of this Agreement’s terms at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Amazon.com website.
Or they might decide to shut just your account down:
Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Service, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service without refund of any fees.
Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.
After reading all this back in 2010, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon had to my private, personal Kindle files (such as .txt and .pdf files that I’d made myself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it?
“We don’t do that.”
Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.
A portion of this piece appeared in somewhat different form in 2010 at The Awl.
Conclusion
I used to have an account on Tumblr. I enjoyed it for the strange and beautiful pictures that I would collect there, and when people started to use it to distribute some high quality porn, I collected those images as well. I really liked that webpage and social network.
Then it was bought up or sold to Yahoo!. Every assurance was made that promised that nothing would ever change and that the private collections of pictures would remain intact.
Then came the war on porn. Yahoo! suddenly, yes after saying that they wouldn’t, decided to wholesale delete images, accounts, data and histories. And all my lovely photos about America in the 1930’s, pictures of military conflicts, fantastic and unusual works of art, and yes my on-line porn collection was vaporized in a nanosecond.
Foolish me.
I believed that when a company promised to do something that they would at least try to keep their word.
Three years ago, was my twenty year anniversary of my membership on the Free Republic website. Over the twenty years that I was a member I was one of the most prolific posters with over 10,000 articles that I had posted (and which readied me for the role that this Metallicman venue provides). And then, one of my articles did not meet the desires of one of their censors, and without notice, and any kind of appreciation they deleted my entire account. Jim Robinson probably didn’t have any idea that they did it. But there it was. All my FR contacts, my notes, my articles (no backups either) and my opinions and comments, all deleted.
Poof.
Gone.
Look. I get it. I’m a “big boy”. I should have known better than to put my trust and faith in others. I should have made complete hard-paper backups, and had electronic versions in portable storage media. I was naive.
And when I was “retired” and saw what happened to my life, my possessions and my histories, I saw that I was a “big nothing”. I only existed at the pleasure of others. I only lived in whatever lifestyle that I could scrounge up at the pleasure of others, and what I owned, down to my underwear was all at the mercy of what others might decide to do.
The only way to change this course that the United States is on is to terminate it’s existence catastrophically. It needs to be sudden, and abrupt and a replacement government needs to take it’s place. This sounds so awful, but it need not be.
I advocate that the Federal government be abolished. And the individual states regain their original roles, and maintain their original existence as it was initially intended prior to 1776.
We can let the individual citizens of any given state decide what limits that they want to place on the ownership of property. Not those in California, or Washington DC. And people would no longer be citizens of the United States of America, but would be the sovereign citizen of Pennsylvania, or of Maryland, or of Colorado, or of Wyoming.
But, you know, it’s so easy to be misunderstood. And for me, it’s better not to “fight city hall”, or “beat a dead horse”. You live life to the best of your ability, and if you find that you are not able to live life to your satisfaction then you “move to greener pastures”.
Which is what I did.
I live in China, and I do own my houses. I don’t rent them. I don’t have mortgages on them. I never pay taxes on them, and I am not subject to any rules or regulations regarding them. Nor do I need to ask permission to renovate them.
That is what freedom is.
Stop.
Take a realistic appraisal of what you really own. Do not include anything that requires payments, fees, regulations that you must abide by, or that is subject to inspections, or random investigations. If you are an American you will discover that you actually own very little.
You own, functionally, just about the same as what a Roman slave would own.
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Fourth amendment? What's a "fourth amendment"?
-Joe Average American Citizen
This is a compilation of articles, thoughts, information and data that I threw together for my personal use. It dates from the time period of 2013 through to 2018, and has not really been updated to account to the enormous expansion of the surveillance capabilities of the various alphabet organizations under President Trump.
Essentially, it became too overwhelming. It was impossible to keep up with the massive effort under-weigh to convert the United States government into a totalitarian utopia for the oligarchy.
Looking at the sole enormity of this information shows an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the United States is not only no longer “free”, but that it has become a prison-state. It somehow by-passed or slid past the military totalitarian state mode and went straight to wall-less prison.
“Im just setting up a barebones linux laptop to go to Panama with. All the essentials will be kept on an encrypted thumb drive just incase I need to access client machines. Installed Skype, remote software and password safe, but the data is on the thumbdrive that gets wiped after 10 tries at the password. Its a shame that americans have to be like this for doing nothing illegal.”
-Skype message to the Author on 13JAN18.
We are witnessing the integration of spying on two levels, the government level (federal, state and local) and the corporate level (via telecom providers, web services and credit card companies). It’s “Full Metal” Orwell.
The term "full metal Orwell" is a play on words.
Full Metal
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 British-American war film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979). Its storyline follows a platoon of U.S. Marines through their training, primarily focusing on two privates, Joker and Pyle, who struggle to get through camp under their foul-mouthed drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and the experiences of two of the platoon's Marines in the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. The film's title refers to the full metal jacket bullet used by soldiers. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 1987. In slang the term “full metal” means “to go into combat or to fight”.
Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell.It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons
If you are a user of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Craigslist or another popular site, the U.S. security state is watching you. An increasing number of federal agencies are employing sophisticated means to monitor Americans’ use of social networking sites.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
.
Federal entities from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are involved in developing programs to track the American public online.
Criminals are running the United States government; call them what you will, but they all serve their own interests.
“There’s nothing more destructive to a society than the institutionalization of immunity for elite criminals, yet that’s exactly what’s happened since the financial crisis. Top tier predators, whether they operate within government or mega corporations, recognize that the system they control will never hold them accountable for anything they do.”
Read more here; https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/01/22/we-can-do-a-lot-better-than-this/
This is not, not, NOT how a function government acts. Not how ANY functioning goverment acts. Let alone one that was set up as a “Republic” for the people, by the people.
“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people.
Outwardly we have a Constitutional government.
We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state....
The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization…
It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government....
This group ... is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech
This corruption of what the United States is has many facets. But in this article we will look at a very specific, tiny portion of this corruption. It is, to put it in a nutshell, the abrogation of the powers of Congress to agencies; the “alphabet organizations”. And the powers that they have grabbed for themselves when Congress stopped policing their behaviors.
In short, Congress has created numerous “Frakenstein monsters”. (Named CIA, FBI, IRS, ATF, DHS, etc…)
A metaphorical Frankenstein monster is a situation —political, financial, ecclesiastical, or domestic—which has been created through folly, and which has become so potent and uncontrollable that it is now a menace to social stability.
Meaning of “A Frankenstein Monster” phrase of Idiom
To each one they granted it their own regulation-making and law-making powers. And to each one they allowed it to grow and get big with no limits on behaviors, no oversight in what they were doing, and no controls or rules over their ability to run “roughshod” over the Bill of Rights.
Particuliarly the 9th and the 4th amendments.
The Ninth Amendment was James Madison’s attempt to ensure that the Bill of Rights was not seen as granting to the people of the United States only the specific rights it addressed. In recent years, some have interpreted it as affirming the existence of such “unenumerated” rights outside those expressly protected by the Bill of Rights.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. In addition, it sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Here is a brief summary of some of the programs that now exist un-constitutionally within the alphabet organizations that Congress has created.
WARNING: Specific examples come from both Conservative and Progressive websites. There, apparently, is more conservative examples of progressive abuses being illustrated than the other way around. Sorry about that. I use what is available to me.
Let it be well understood that the two political parties are both THE SAME PARTY. It is the party of the rich and powerful. They conduct theater to keep you and I occupied while they rob us blind. So do not get all caught up on “he did this”, or “she was innocent”, nonsense.
The examples used are illustrative only. So please do not be offended that I am using Hillary Clinton as an example, or Donald Trump as an example. Stop thinking of them as being the “flag bearers” of your own personal ideology.
They are both actors playing a role. Nothing more.
Justice Department
“To block exposure of their misdeeds, these officials falsely claimed that national security would be damaged.”
-Michael Goodwin
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a report from the DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section, “Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites,” that describes how evidence from social networking sites can reveal personal communications that might help “establish motives and personal relationships.”
It reports that monitored data from such sites can provide location information and “prove and disprove alibis.”
Perhaps most illuminating, it advises agents that “going undercover” on social media sites can enable law enforcement to communicate with suspects and targets, gain access to nonpublic information and map social relationships.
The DOJ document notes that Twitter retains the last login IP address, but does not preserve data unless legally required to do so. However, that means nothing. Twitter censors, deletes, and fabricates lies to meet whatever objective that it deems appropriate.
It was in 2016, when angry tweeters alleged that Jack Dorsey et al., were purposefully censoring and "suppressing" certain content on Twitter,
[1] namely anything to do with the leaked DNC and John Podesta emails, as well as
[2] hashtags critical of Hillary Clinton
[3] while "shadow-banning" pro-Donald Trump content. (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-31/twitter-shadow-banning-donald-trump)
We can now confirm that at least one part of the above was true, because during the late 2017 Senate hearing, Twitter admitted it "buried", which is another word for censored, significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months heading into the 2016 presidential campaign.
Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Twitter.
Can you just imagine all the issues related to twitter with Donald trump? Oi Vey! I’ll tell youse guys. You are either convinced that there is no such thing as freedom of speech or not. It’s not my job to prove it to anyone.
“While the FISA court’s activities are secret, the court did admit in 2013 that it had, during its several decades in existence, approved over 99.9 percent of the US government’s surveillance requests.”
-Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity
There is an American idiom for this. It is known as “rubber stamping” something. It means to approve something without any consideration, as a formality. Obviously any court that approves 99.97 percent of anything isn't doing jack shit as far as doing its job is concerned.
Hence, rubber stamps became one of the symbols of excessive bureaucracy, and a rubber stamp, in your sentence, would be someone whose role was merely to signify their approval of something, to endorse uncritically. The OED says of "rubber stamp" as a verb: "To endorse or approve uncritically; to pass routinely or automatically."
Rubber stamp - phrase meaning and origin
The IRS
“The gov is so rotten that it’s going to take an incredible, massive, long effort to expose, indict, charge, try, convict, and sentence the evil doers. It won’t always be pretty. But it HAS to be done.”
-2/8/2018, 5:24:35 AM by little jeremiah
The IRS uses a variety of social media sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Second Life to investigate taxpayers.
It seems to have started this practice in 2009 (shortly after Obama became President), providing agents with special training on social networking operations, and user habits. The EFF posted the IRS’ 38-page training that offers detailed tips to agents on how to conduct searches, locate relevant taxpayer information, narrow down and refine results.
The DOD Social Media Strategic Communications Program (SMISC).
The Defense Department has solicited proposals through DARPA for a $42 million “Social Media Strategic Communications” (SMISC) program, a tool that tracks social media and weeds out information.
It has set four goals for the project: [1] to detect, classify and measure the development of ideas, concepts in hidden social media messages; [2] specify the structure of the campaign and influence in social media sites and the community they create; [3] identify the participants and intention in conducting a social media campaign of persuasion and measure its effect; and [4] develop an effective counter-message to an identified campaign carried out against the enemy.
If not, we are no longer America. We are a banana republic where it’s acceptable for the government to use its police powers against political opponents.”
-Michael Goodwin
There should be no doubt in the mind of the reader as to just how corrupt the FBI has become. Permitting serial felonious treason, while at the same time operating “secret societies” within the government, are all crystal clear indicators of dangerous behaviors. Behaviors that can turn on the American people at any time for any reason.
The FBI has become a dangerous and out of control anti-American organization.
“Several other GOP Congressmembers have weighed in. "I have read the memo," tweeted Rep. Steve King (R-IA), adding "The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen. I have long said it is worse than Watergate. It was #neverTrump & #alwaysHillary. #releasethememo."
Along with the four-page memo, Congressional investigators learned from a new batch of text messages between anti-Trump FBI investigators that several individuals within the Department of Justice and the FBI may have come together in the "immediate aftermath" of the 2016 election to undermine President Trump, according to Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) who has reviewed the texts.”
-From the article; “Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe All Named In FISA Memo, First Leak Reveals”
Unfortunately, for all the scandal, most people watching the mainstream media (run by the oligarchy) would be unaware of the turmoil inside of the FBI.
The FBI operates as a secret police. They are completely armed with military grade weapons, and they have their own secret court system. They do not follow the rule of law, and make it up as it suits them. It has gotten worse over time, and most alarming (after “upgrading” by President Obama) they have become dangerously political.
We can only imagine the terrible capabilities that they must now have after a Trump Presidency, and a Mike Pompeo Secretary of State.
This is pretty darn sad.
“So it was — and, look, this is scary stuff, right? I mean, these are secret courts. And I have long supported these because it’s mainly to go after terrorists and people abroad who are looking to do bad things. Never did I think that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would be used to go after a political campaign. And, you know, there’s gonna have to be some major reforms done to these programs. And what shocks me is that the people at these institutions aren’t worried about this.
I mean, you know, we have a hard enough time, Rush, trying to track down terrorists and bad guys around the world. And just the fact that they would have wasted our intelligence agencies’ time to go after somebody like Carter Page to try to get into the Trump campaign is really scary stuff and really a waste of taxpayer money, and I think every American should be concerned about this no matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat or don’t even pay attention to politics, you ought to care about this.”
- Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
The truth is, that today, the FBI was involved in activities more suited to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, China under Mr. Mao, and Cuba under Fidel Castro than their constitutionally stated purpose.
They not only went far and above the law, they created their own internal “secret society”.
While the "secret society" reference may have been in jest, a “whistleblower” has (allegedly) confirmed the existence of clandestine meetings. Of which high ranking U.S. intelligence officials met "offsite" to conspire against a sitting President.
This is according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“...we have an informant talking about a group holding secret meetings off-site,” Johnson said. “We have to continue to dig into it,” he added. “This is not a distraction. This is biased, potentially corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.”
-The Hill
On the night of 22JAN18, Reps. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) and Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Fox News what they had learned from a batch of communications between two FBI investigators. These FBI communications were contained within a 384-page batch of text messages that were delivered to Congress from the DOJ on 19JAN18.
Of particular note is that Ratcliffe says that Strzok and Page were included in the clandestine anti-Trump cabal. This was at the highest levels of the American intelligence community. This is disturbing stuff no doubt.
These meetings are evidence of a secret society, or club. It’s a secret society where they gathered together and determined how to achieve their own internally-determined objectives. Often, if not always, that ran counter to the needs of the American people.
I wonder if they wore robes, had secret handshakes, and performed satanic rituals…
It is critical to the “powers that be” that this information be kept secret and hidden from the American people.
Therefore, of course, the oligarchy is fighting back hard.
Sen. Feinstein, Rep. Schiff urged Facebook and Twitter to investigate involvement of Russian bots in pushing "Release the Memo" campaign:"
If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors." pic.twitter.com/SkAci5NefK” (https://t.co/SkAci5NefK)
— ABC News (@ABC) January 23, 2018 (https://twitter.com/ABC/status/955830690381254659?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
The letter's claims were immediately shot down by Facebook, which told the Daily Beast (https://www.thedailybeast.com/source-twitter-pins-releasethememo-on-republicans-not-russia/) that #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag has been pushed by actual Americans.
A knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo.
There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.
In short, according to this source, who would not speak to The Daily Beast for attribution, the retweets are coming from inside the country.
The PTB, and their oligarchy, simply just doesn’t want to lose their grip on power. They need the FBI, CIA, DHS, IRS, and the DOJ on “their side”. Or else they risk swinging from nooses on scaffolding.
It appears Billionaire (Democrat mega-donor) and Rabid-Clintonite Tom Steyer (D) is surprised that the nationwide ad campaign he bankrolled to urge members of Congress to impeach President Trump hasn’t yielded any results.
Steyer went off on both Republicans and Democrats in January 2018 after a House vote on articles of impeachment garnered a paltry 66 votes.
"This vote is not a reflection of whether or not Trump has passed the threshold for impeachment, which he did months ago, it is a failure by members of Congress to do what’s right to keep the American people safe."
- Steyer stated on Friday 12JAN18 in a press statement after the Congressional vote.
Steyer, a billionaire (former) hedge fund manager from California, launched his ‘Need to Impeach’ movement in October of 2017. While more than four million people have signed his petition, Democrats aren’t particularly happy with the initiative. Democratic leaders believe pushing for impeachment could hurt their party’s chances in the midterms later this year.
Steyer underscored his campaign by sending copies of Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” to every lawmaker.
Check out this video; https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-21/democratic-megadonor-launches-campaign-impeach-mentally-unstable-trump
To anyone reading these references, they seem so out-of-date, and boring. It’s “old news” the argument goes. Or, “Hey! it’s the democrats”, or “Hey! It’s the Republicans!” That’s not the point.
That’s not the point.
It’s both “parties”.
It’s a club and you ain’t a part of it.
Look at what is beginning to go on after the 2020 election, it’s all the same “song and dance”. It’s not to amuse Americans. It’s to control them.
Any idea of transparency in government is a FARCE.
As these dated examples indicate.
So to recap: not only were high level intelligence officials allegedly involved in clandestine meetings in which they conspired to “impair” Donald Trump, this leak in conjunction of the four-page GOP memo confirms what many have suspected all along; a highly illegal operation was conducted against a sitting President (President Trump) which goes all the way to the top of the U.S. government.
It’s a club, and you are not part of it. If you are an “outsider”, you will have zero support, and every method will be used to remove you.
“Stop and think what really happened here. We have a political candidate who lost the election. (Then) commissions an opposition research document, the Steele dossier. Which is then packaged and presented as legitimate intelligence (gathered by respected intelligence agents the world over). And it features such shocking details as the golden showers story.
We find out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC paid for this, $10 million. We find out that Steele did not even talk to these people in Russia in person on the phone.
We then find out that the FBI uses this to get a warrant, as you say, to spy on Carter Page. They did NOT tell the court that this was a political document. This is the kind of thing that movie scripts contain and are made of.
It’s hard to get my arms around comprehending the number of people that had to be in on this and their motivation. Now, you may be nervous about going into motivation. To me, that is everything. Why? What’s the purpose here?”
-Rush Limbaugh talking to Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
It’s a private club. It’s a “secret organization” that floats in the upper percentages of the United States population. The entire American government, all that juicy “freedom” and “mouth-watering “democracy” are just lies used to manipulate and control the American people from rising up from their roles as cash-cows under a feudal serfdom.
So, they must do everything in their power to keep their actions secret. For their actions are illegal and against the Constitution, and ultimately the citizens of the United States. They absolutely MUST keep things secret.
“In Comey's testimony where he said he did not determine not to recommend Hillary for indictment before her interrogation was held he asked that if any FBI person thought he was lying they should contact him privately before stating their opinion.
I thought that was a very odd thing to say.”
-LostinfortwaltonJan 25, 2018 8:00 AM PermalinkA former Federal Prosecutor sat down with The Daily Caller (http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/20/obama-administration-plot-exonerate-hillary/) to give perhaps the most comprehensive rundown of the Obama Administration's "brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton" and "frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy."
“The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us.
(This is) what this story is about - a brazen plot (by the FBI) to exonerate (Democrat Presidential Candidate) Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified (secretive) server.
(This was) Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony.
It's about finding out why (as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice) why Comey (head of the FBI) and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of (to exonerate) Hillary Clinton.
(They) ...
[1] Followed none of the regular rules,
[2] gave her every break in the book,
[3] immunized all kinds of people,
[4] allowed the destruction of evidence,
[5] no grand jury,
[6] no subpoenas,
[7]no search warrant(s).
That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce.
And everybody knew it was a farce.
The problem was, she didn't win (the 2016 Presidential election).
And because she didn't win, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic opera. And she was going to be the focus.
What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.
We're going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch (under President Obama), her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division John Carlin (under President Obama), Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys (were ALL involved in this effort).
People who were senior career civil servants violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate (Hillary Clinton)
But (it was) more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him as a president.
That's why this is important. That's why connecting the dots is important.
DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump.
Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI “created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants.
Those are ALL crimes.”
-Daily Caller
The FBI has become a very powerful police force run for and by the oligarchy.
It is used to keep the American people under control and “in line” while America undergoes a transformation to a “new” government structure –one that favors the elite oligarchy, and closes everyone else out.
This is not my opinion.
There proof of this is out there and obvious to all who is willing to face the ugly truth;
“The leadership of the FBI and DOJ behaved in a way we would expect of the former Soviet Union, not the United States of America. I applaud Representative Nunes and other Republican members of the House Intel Committee for fighting and exposing corruption.
Americans are tired of corrupt bureaucrats and their career politician enablers.
If powerful leaders are not held accountable, the American people will never regain faith in the institutions meant to protect us. Former FBI Director James Comey was entrusted with one of the most powerful positions in the world. Sadly, he intentionally abused his power in an effort to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.
He should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sent to prison for his crimes. No one is above the law. No one.”
– Georgia GOP Gubernatorial candidate Sen. Michael Williams demanding the prosecution of (former) FBI Director Comey for his efforts related to treason.
The FBI is seriously corrupted, and works to further the agendas of others.
“III. Conclusion
We should all recognize the harm done to our rule of law when crimes go unpunished because government officials look the other way for the wealthy, famous, or powerful.
Americans rightly expect a single and impartial system of justice for all, not one for the well connected and a separate one for everyone else.
The information available to the Committee at this time raises serious questions about how the FBI applied the rule of law in its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. We know that:
• The FBI did not use a grand jury to compel testimony and obtain the vast majority of evidence, choosing instead to offer immunity deals and allow fact witnesses to join key interviews.
• There were substantial edits to Director Comey’s public statement that served to downplay the severity of Secretary Clinton’s actions, and that the first draft of the memo was distributed for editing two months before key witnesses were interviewed.
• Director Comey stated that he had not consulted with the Justice Department or White House, when text messages suggest otherwise.106 We have text messages in which two key investigators discuss an “insurance policy” against the “risk” of a Trump presidency, and “OUR task.”
• Messages discuss “unfinished business,” “an investigation leading to impeachment,” and “my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”
• Senior FBI officials—likely including Deputy Director McCabe— knew about newly discovered emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner for almost a month before Director Comey notified Congress.
• Over the period of at least four months, the FBI did not recover five months’ worth of text messages requested by DOJ OIG and two Senate committees; however, when pressed, DOJ OIG was able to recover missing texts in less than one week.
Taken together, this information warrants further inquiry. While some may discount the investigation for political reasons, we all have a great interest in ensuring the public has confidence in the integrity and independence of the FBI, the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world. Unlike prosecutors or inspectors general, the primary goal of congressional oversight is full transparency in order to promote public awareness and confidence in federal agencies. For these reasons, our important work will continue.”
- THE CLINTON EMAIL SCANDAL AND THE FBI’S INVESTIGATION OF IT. An Interim Report. A Majority Staff Report of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs United States Senate. Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman
file:///C:/Users/Michael/Downloads/2018-02-07%20Interim%20Report_The%20Clinton%20Email%20Scandal%20and%20the%20FBI’s%20Investigation%20of%20It.pdf
To this end, the FBI has it’s hands in all kinds of ways to monitor (so they can control) Americans. Of course, we know that the 4th amendment to the United States Constitution prevents them for collecting “unauthorized” information. They need a court document from a judge to do that. So what they are doing in the meantime (without going through a judge) is simply collecting the information…you know, “just in case”.
Democrats do it. Republicans do it. It is a policy that is rampant.
As of 2016, the FBI has been soliciting a bid for a program that seems very similar to the DHS social-network monitoring program. Dubbed the “FBI Social Media Application,” the program would have
"[the ability] to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence ... to quickly vet, identify and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats."
In the FBI’s 12-page solicitation, it requests a program that can quickly identify, display and locate alerts on geo-spatial maps and enable users to summarize the “who, what, when, where and why” of specific threats and incidents.
Going further, it seeks to not simply detect “credible threats,” but to identify those organizing and taking part in gatherings and to predict upcoming events. According to the FBI,
"Social media will be a valued source of information to the SIOC [i.e., Strategic Information and Operations Center] intelligence analyst in a crisis because it will be both eyewitness and first response to the crisis."
An FBI spokesperson insisted,
"[We] will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to 'events' and 'crisis' and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security. Examples of these words will include lockdown, bomb, suspicious package, white powder, active shoot, school lockdown, etc.”
Rest assured, much like the assurances voiced by the DHS, the FBI insists that its monitoring won’t be used to focus on specific individuals or groups.
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is made up of fingerprints, iris scans, faceprints, and other facial recognition data. As of 2016 EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) sued regarding the FBI’s plan to include tattoos and scars in the database.
According to EPIC:
“With NGI, the FBI will expand the number of uploaded photographs and provide investigators with ‘automated facial recognition search capability.’ The FBI intends to do this by eliminating restrictions on the number of submitted photographs (including photographs that are not accompanied by tenprint fingerprints) and allowing the submission of non-facial photographs (e.g. scars or tattoos).”
“The FBI also widely disseminates this NGI data. According to the FBI’s latest NGI fact sheet, 24,510 local, state, tribal, federal and international partners submitted queries to NGI in September 2016.”
EPIC asked a judge to force the FBI to release records about its plan to share the biometric data with the U.S. Department of Defense. EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015, but the FBI has so far refused to release the 35 pages of responsive records.
EPIC and privacy advocates are concerned about the potential for cases of mistaken identity and abuse of the collected data. EPIC also argues
“the FBI stated that ‘increased collection and retention of personally identifiable information presents a correspondingly increased risk that the FBI will then be maintaining more information that might potentially be subject to loss or unauthorized use.”
Although very little is actually known about the database, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and EPIC have been able to uncover that the FBI would like to track every individual as they move from one location to another. In 2013, EPIC obtained a document that showed
“NGI shall return an incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.”
In 2011, EFF observed the growing biometrics trend:
"Once the collection of biometrics becomes standardized, it becomes much easier to locate and track someone across all aspects of their life.
EFF believes that perfect tracking is inimical to a free society.
A society in which everyone’s actions are tracked is not, in principle, free. It may be a livable society, but would not be our society.”
In 2014, EFF received documents from the FBI related to the NGI system.
Based on the records, EFF estimated the facial recognition component of NGI would include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. Indeed, the danger of abuse from facial recognition programs is on the rise.
Activist Post recently highlighted a new report from Georgetown Law University’s Center for Privacy and Technology that details how law enforcement is using facial recognition software without the knowledge or consent of the people. The report, “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” examines several cases of misuse or abuse of facial recognition technology.
Facial recognition software is not the only type of surveillance tool the FBI has an interest in. The Bureau is reportedly set to sign a contract with Dataminr that will provide the feds with an upgrade to social media monitoring software.
According to the Federal Business Opportunities’ official government page, the contract will provide the FBI with around 200 licenses for Dataminr’s Advanced Alerting Tool. This upgrade “will permit the FBI to search the complete Twitter firehose, in near real-time, using customizable filters.”
The FBI claims to want the social media tool for detecting and catching terrorists, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see how this could be applied to U.S. citizens.
The pursuit of facial recognition software and social media monitoring tools is just the latest step in the expanding war on privacy, which is itself a part of the eternal war on freedom.
This system has been in operation for a number of years now, and is toted as a success.
This Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) covers the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which serves as the FBI’s biometric identity and criminal history records system and maintains the fingerprints and associated identity information of individuals submitted to the FBI for authorized criminal justice, national security, and civil purposes.
-PIA: NGI-Interstate Photo Systen — FBI
Finally, let it be understood that the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system exempt from Privacy Act News roundup: The FBI Next Generation Identification biometrics database is exempt from the Privacy Act.
“From Rep. Adam Schiff’s increasingly desperate attempts to stonewall the truth to the FBI’s predictable appeals to secrecy from law enforcement to cover corruption, this memo is lifting the scales from the eyes of voters all over the country.
It’s telling them the cockroaches have run out of corners to hide in.
Time to put on our pointy shoes and start kickin’.
The reaction to this memo puts paid the classic libertarian critique that an organization’s highest priority is self-preservation. Doing what you formed the organization to do comes a distant second.
Government creates organizations that are not directly accountable to the people who fund them and therefore can dig moats around themselves to ensure their survival no matter what.
This is the essence of corruption. It is the essence of why the Swamp needs to be drained.
The FBI is a corrupt and venal organization of power-hungry, self-righteous arbiters of arbitrary justice. Even the good agents are tainted by the organizational rot. The same is true in every government department.
No one sees corruption like a government employee with half a conscience.
The pressure to not release this memo comes from formerly very powerful people – Obama and his staff, the Clintons, the DNC, etc. The fallout will be an overhaul from the ground up of multiple powerful agencies within the Federal Government.”
-Tom Luongo
It’s often the case that new technologies arrive on the scene faster than our society and its legal code can keep up. Sometimes this can be a good thing. For instance, 3D printing allows people to print out unregulated gun parts, thus allowing gun owners to circumvent the onerous laws of our government, which has struggled to come up with new laws to restrict the technology.
When technology advances at a breakneck pace however, it can also be quite dangerous for our liberties. This is especially true in regards to privacy. If a new technology makes it easy for the government to track us, you can bet that the government is going to take its sweet time updating the legal code in a way that will protect us from surveillance.
That certainly seems to be the case with facial recognition software. During a recent Congressional Oversight Committee hearing, members of both political parties sounded the alarm on the FBI’s use of the technology, and read the written testimony of Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Jennifer Lynch:
Lynch detailed the stunning scope of the FBI’s photo collection. In addition to collecting criminal and civil mug shots, the agency currently has “memorandums of understanding” with 16 states that mean every driver’s license photo from those states is accessible to the agency—without the drivers’ consent. The FBI also has access to photos from the U.S. State Department’s passport and visa records.
Lynch argued that “Americans should not be forced to submit to criminal face recognition searches merely because they want to drive a car. They shouldn’t have to worry their data will be misused by unethical government officials with unchecked access to face recognition databases. And they shouldn’t have to fear that their every move will be tracked if face recognition is linked to the networks of surveillance cameras that blanket many cities.”
“But without meaningful legal protections, this is where we may be headed,” Lynch stated. “Without laws in place, it could be relatively easy for the government and private companies to amass databases of images of all Americans and use those databases to identify and track people in real time as they move from place to place throughout their daily lives.”
All told, law enforcement agencies around the country have access to 400 million photos in facial recognition databases, which are connected to roughly 50% of American adults. Most of these people have never committed a crime, and obviously haven’t given any consent to this.
At first glance it may sound harmless to be in one of these databases. Movies and TV shows make it sound like this technology can help law enforcement swiftly and precisely nab suspects. So what do you have to fear if you haven’t committed a crime? It turns out that in real life, facial recognition is far from perfect.
Internal FBI documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center indicate that the FBI’s own database, called the Next Generation Identification Interstate Photo System, or NGI-IPS, had an acceptable margin of error of 20 percent — that is, a 1-in-5 chance of “recognizing” the wrong person.
And research published in the October 2015 issue of the scientific journal PLOS ONE by researchers at the universities of Sydney and New South Wales in Australia found that the humans who interpret such data build in an extra error margin approaching 30 percent.
If we ever allow our government to roll out facial recognition cameras on a wider scale, lots of innocent people are going to be hurt. Whether by mistake or by malice, it will become shockingly easy for law enforcement to identify ordinary people as criminals. The surveillance control grid will not only be inescapable, it will be unwieldy and rife with abuse.
It’s often said that you should never trade freedom for safety. In this case, we wouldn’t receive any kind of safety.
The FBI is operates as a “Secret Police”
In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth. Here is a concise summary of some interesting history regarding this issue. Intelligence provided here was collected by James Bovard and all credit due to James Bovard.
In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”
From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.
Politifact quotes a professor who asserts that “any use of unnecessary violence (by the FBI) would be met with the full force of the criminal law.” Is that why an internal FBI report claimed that every one of the 150 shootings by FBI agents between 1993 and 2011 was faultless?
FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi gunned down Vicki Weaver in 1992 as she stood in her Idaho cabin doorway holding her baby. After being accusing the FBI of a coverup in a Wall Street Journal oped, FBI chief Louis Freeh denounced Jim Bovard for twisting the truth. But after a confidential Justice Department report leaked out revealing the FBI’s deceits and unconstitutional rules of engagement, the feds paid a $3 million wrongful death settlement to the Weaver family. When an Idaho County sought to prosecute the FBI sniper, the Justice Department invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to torpedo the case. (Ah, the 9th Circuit Court, rules in favor of the Progressive government.)
“Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn to uphold.”
The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.
Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.” And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.
In the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with “Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers? But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for the American people.
The FBI can come after YOU!
This should be obvious, but it isn’t. Most Americans think that “it can never happen to me”. Ask anyone in prison. Life can change in a heartbeat. Especially when the corrupt and powerful is in control of your life.
“RUSH: And welcome back. We wrap up here with Congressman Nunes. I thought of one more thing I wanted to run by you during the break. And it was… I played the audio sound bite of this earlier. It’s a former CIA counterintelligence muckety-muck guy named Phillip Mudd, and there have been two other people like him over the weekend saying to President Trump, “You know what? If you’re gonna pick a fight with the FBI, you don’t want to make those guys mad.“They can really come after you.”
And I’ve heard that before. The same thing has been said by Chuck Schumer to President Trump about the CIA, the intelligence community. I’m sure you’re getting the same kind of insults. Now, with people saying, “You better not make the FBI mad! They could really come out and do you damage or come after you,” doesn’t that kind of validate what’s already going on, if we have people advocating that the FBI be used as a weapon against political opponents?
NUNES: Yeah. So those days are over, Rush. That is what they did in the Obama administration. These institutions became corrupt at the top, and it’s not just the FBI. It’s all of the departments who became just out of control. I mean, do we have to go back to Lois Lerner and the IRS and all of those games that were played?
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And what’s happening here is that the first time in a long time Congress — which is a separate branch of government. We created the FBI.
RUSH: Right!
NUNES: We created the Department of Justice.
RUSH: You could abolish them if you want to!
NUNES: We could abolish them. We could cut their money off. But the bottom line is this. I said, “We’re done. You cross the rubicon. You abused the FISA court.” And, you know, I had to fight for these documents for months and months and months. We issued the original subpoenas back in August of last year, and it took until just a few weeks ago for us to finally put all the pieces together. So, you know, I’m not gonna take their crap. I’m not gonna be threatened. They tried to do an end run around me, and Speaker Paul Ryan said, “No. The Congress is gonna exert our authority.”
-Rush Limbaugh talking to Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
It’s getting pretty serious. It is obvious that the FBI no longer serves the American people. It serves the oligarchy and itself only.
“I’ll tell you how serious it’s getting. Well, not how serious it’s getting. To illustrate for you just how even greater the divide is becoming, there’s a CIA analyst named Phil Mudd and we’ve got the audio sound bite coming up. This guy is on CNN, and he’s actually saying to Nunes and to Trump, “You know, you make these guys at the FBI mad at you, and they can come back and destroy you.”
What in the hell does that mean? You make these guys at the FBI mad, and they can really come get you. What is that supposed to mean? And he says that with approval and advocacy, like as though he’s in favor of the nation’s premier law enforcement agent targeting people for their politics. It’s like when Chuck Schumer warned Trump, “You better be careful of these guys in the intelligence community. They can wipe you out six ways from Sunday,” which we know to be the case, but to advocate for that.
And lest anybody have any doubt, I’m amazed at people who are just realizing this, but they are. I’ve read I don’t know how many pieces, media on our side — I’m talking about the conservative media, forget the left — who have come to a sudden shocking realization that the media is part of the establishment! I’m reading this, “Duh. You think that’s a revelation?” But, I mean, I’ll take it. I mean, the more people get it, the better.”
-Rush Limbaugh
The FBI Is Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence
“Compared to the 18-minute “gap” in the White House tape during the Watergate scandal, this is the Grand Canyon[i]. So what does the Bureau have to say about it?
They blamed it on “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades.” Someone at the FBI actually wrote that.“
-Robert Knight - Sunday, January 28, 2018[i]"The Grand Canyon". The pattern of alarming behavior at the FBI and the Justice Department deserves a recap:
On June 27, 2016, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch held a private meeting with Bill Clinton in a jet at the Phoenix airport, even though the FBI, a branch of the Justice Department, was investigating Mr. Clinton’s wife’s conduct as Secretary of State. A more glaring conflict of interest is hard to imagine.
A week later, on July 5, then-FBI Director James Comey released a report exonerating Mrs. Clinton. He criticized her misuse of emails, but described her violation of national security protocols as “extremely careless” instead of the criminally indictable “grossly negligent” in the original draft. The ever nimble Mr. Strzok has been credited with that edit.
Mr. Strzok also revealed in a text that the FBI team had removed a reference to President Obama as having received a text from Mrs. Clinton when one of them was “on the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Was it Russia? Alabama?
To downplay the severity of the breach, the FBI report editors cleverly demoted Mr. Obama from president into just “another senior government official,” according to The Journal. The very next day after Mr. Comey’s press conference and release of the report, Ms. Lynch announced that no charges would be filed against Mrs. Clinton, to no great surprise.
Mr. Comey also drafted a statement closing the Clinton email investigation before the FBI even interviewed Mrs. Clinton or her staff. And, Mr. Comey leaked his own memo to a reporter about a conversation with President Trump in order to trigger the Mueller investigation. This all adds up to a disturbingly convincing scenario in which partisan FBI officials bent the law to protect Hillary Clinton, sully Donald Trump before the election, and destabilize his presidency afterward.
If something here isn’t a federal crime, I really don’t know what is.
Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.
According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally located on Rettenmaier's computer an image of "a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck."
Westphal notified his boss, Justin Meade, also an FBI informant, who alerted colleague Randall Ratliff, another FBI informant at Best Buy, as well as the FBI. Claiming the image met the definition of child pornography and was tied to a series of illicit pictures known as the "Jenny" shots, agent Tracey Riley seized the hard drive.
Not necessarily a problem, considering companies performing computer/electronic device repair are legally required to report discovered child porn to law enforcement.
The difference here is the paycheck.
This Geek Squad member had been paid $500 for digging around in customers’ computers and reporting his findings to the FBI. That changes the motivation from legal obligation to a chance to earn extra cash by digging around in files not essential to the repair work at hand.
More of a problem is the FBI’s tactics. While it possibly could have simply pointed to the legal obligation Best Buy has to report discovered child porn, it proactively destroyed this argument by apparently trying to cover up the origin of its investigation, as well as a couple of warrantless searches.
Setting aside the issue of whether the search of Rettenmaier's computer constituted an illegal search by private individuals acting as government agents, the FBI undertook a series of dishonest measures in hopes of building a case, according to James D. Riddet, Rettenmaier's San Clemente-based defense attorney. Riddet says agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records.
The “private search” issue is mentioned briefly in OC Weekly’s report, but should be examined more closely. Private searches are acceptable, but the introduction of cash payments, as well as the FBI having an official liaison with Best Buy suggests the searches aren’t really “private.” Instead, the FBI appears to be using private searches to route around warrant requirements. That’s not permissible and even the FBI’s belief that going after the “worst of worst” isn’t going to be enough to salvage these warrantless searches.
A bill that will allow homes to be searched without a warrant was passed with overwhelming support by the United States Congress.
It was signed into law by President Trump.
It happened silently with no media coverage and very little fanfare.
On the surface, House Joint Resolution 76 looks harmless. The title of the bill claims that its purpose is “Granting the consent and approval of Congress for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the State of Maryland, and the District of Columbia to enter into a compact relating to the establishment of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission.”
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/congress-passes-bill-allowing-homes-searched-without-warrant/
No 4th Amendment Protections!
As Andrew Fleischman points out at Fault Lines, the government’s spin on the paid “private search” issue — that it’s “wild speculation” the Best Buy employee was acting as a paid informant when he discovered the child porn — doesn’t hold up if the situation is reversed. AUSA Anthony Brown’s defensive statement is nothing more than the noise of a double standard being erected.
Flipping the script for a minute, would an AUSA say it was “wild speculation” that a man was a drug dealer when phone records showed he regularly contacted a distributor, he was listed as a drug dealer in a special book of drug dealers, and he had received $500.00 for drugs? Sorry to break it to you, Mr. Brown, but once you start getting paid for something, it’s tough to argue you’re just doing it for the love of the game.
In addition to these problems, the file discovered by the Best Buy tech was in unallocated space… something that points to almost nothing, legally-speaking.
In Rettenmaier's case, the alleged "Jenny" image was found on unallocated "trash" space, meaning it could only be retrieved by "carving" with costly, highly sophisticated forensics tools.
In other words, it's arguable a computer's owner wouldn't know of its existence. (For example, malware can secretly implant files.)
Worse for the FBI, a federal appellate court unequivocally declared in February 2011 (USA v. Andrew Flyer) that pictures found on unallocated space did not constitute knowing possession because it is impossible to determine when, why or who downloaded them.
This important detail was apparently glossed over in the FBI’s warrant application to search Rettenmaier’s home and personal devices.
In hopes of overcoming this obstacle, they performed a sleight-of-hand maneuver, according to Riddet.
The agents simply didn't alert Judge Marc Goldman that the image in question had been buried in unallocated space and, thus, secured deceitful authorization for a February 2012 raid on Rettenmaier's Laguna Niguel residence.
Courts have shown an often-excessive amount of empathy for the government’s “outrageous” behavior when pursuing criminals. The fact that there’s child porn involved budges the needle in the government’s direction, but the obstacles the FBI has placed in its own way through its deceptive behavior may prevent it from salvaging this case.
The case is already on very shaky ground, with the presiding judge questioning agents’ “odd memory losses,” noting several discrepancies between the FBI’s reports and its testimony, and its “perplexing” opposition to turning over documents the defense has requested.
In any event, it appears the FBI has a vast network of informants — paid or otherwise — working for both private companies and the federal government. Considering the FBI is already the beneficiary of legal reporting requirements, this move seems ill-advised. It jeopardizes the legitimacy of the evidence, even before the FBI engages in the sort of self-sabotaging acts it appears to have done here.
Underneath it all is the perplexing and disturbing aversion[i] to adhering to the Fourth Amendment we’ve seen time and time again from law enforcement agencies, both at local and federal levels. Anything that can be done to avoid seeking a warrant, and anything that creates an obfuscatory paper trail, is deployed to make sure the accused faces an even more uphill battle once they arrive in court[ii].
The DHS Media Monitoring capability Program (MMC).
Department of Homeland Security. A more aggressive monitoring program was revealed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
This occurred when it secured from the DHS a list of approximately 380 keywords that the agency tracks. The allegedly threatening terms were found in the DHS’ Analyst Desktop Binder, part of its 2011 Media Monitoring Capability (MMC) program.
Agencies – 26 terms, including “DHS,” “FBI”, “CIA,” “Air Marshal,” “United Nations” and “Red Cross”;
Domestic security – 52 terms, including “assassination,” “dirty bomb,” “crash,” “first responder,” “screening” and “death.”
Hazardous materials – 34 terms, including “hazmat,” “nuclear,” “leak,” “burn” and “cloud.”
Public health – 47 terms, including “ebola,” “contamination,” “wave,” “pork” and “agriculture.”
Infrastructure security – 35 terms, including “AMTRAK,” “airport,” “subway,” “port,” “electric” and “cancelled.”
Southwest border violence – 65 terms, including “drug cartel,” “decapitated,” “gunfight,” “marijuana,” “heroin,” “border” and “bust.”
Terrorism – 55 terms, including “Jihad,” “biological weapons,” “suicide attack,” “plot” and “pirates.”
Emergencies and weather – 41 terms, including “disaster,” “hurricane,” “power outage,” “ice,” “storm” and “help.”
Cyber security – 25 terms, including “cyber terror,” “malware,” “virus,” “hacker,” “worm,” “China” and “Trojan.”
The DHS has been engaged in monitoring social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn as well as blogs since at least 2010. Its effort is run through the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC), and is entitled “Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness (Initiative).” Its ostensible purpose is to provide situational awareness and strengthen its common operating picture.
The scope of DHS’ practice of social monitoring was unexpectedly revealed in a special congressional hearing, the House Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Intelligence, headed by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), in February. Two DHS officials, Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan and Director of Operations Coordination and Planning Richard Chavez, raised the representatives’ ire by appearing to be deliberately stonewalling on the scope and practice of the agency’s social media surveillance.
Most disturbing, the DHS reps appeared unsure about the monitoring program’s goals, how the gathered information would be used and whether it would be shared with other agencies. In an unusual show of bipartisan unity, Reps. Billy Long (R-MO), Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) joined Rep. Meehan in chastising the DHS officials.
Under intense congressional probing, DHS reps revealed that the keywords chosen for monitoring were drawn from commercially available, off-the-shelf database programs that were customized to meet its specifications. The agency was particularly interested in determining first witnesses to breaking events like the 2011 Tucson shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and others and the January 2012 bomb threat at an Austin school.
The DHS reps insisted that data gathered was only used to confirm other news reports and that information on private citizens was not being collected. In addition, they claimed that that all personally identifying information was regularly scrubbed from the agency’s servers.
Few should feel comforted by the DHS assurances. At the House hearing, it was also revealed that the agency was involved in what appears to be an ongoing campaign to monitor the actions and beliefs of individual Americans engaged in community-based political activism. It compiled a report, “Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI,” that tracked community reactions to the proposed location of Guantánamo detainees in a local Michigan prison.
The DHS report is part of the EPIC documents acquired through a Freedom of Information request. It details that information was gathered from a variety of sources, including newspaper articles and responses, blogs by local activists, and Twitter and Facebook posts.
The House hearing also shed light on the DHS practice of outsourcing keyword tracking of social media through a sole-source contract to the giant defense contractor, General Dynamics. In 2011, General Dynamics had revenues of $5.5 billion of which 84 percent ($4.6 bil) came from government contracts. Earlier it’s Advanced Information Systems division was awarded a $14 million DHS contract to (in the words of a press release) “provide constant and continual watch operations for critical communications to the agency’s National Coordinating Center.” In addition, it will “identify the possible impacts of potentially disruptive events.
In keeping with the prevailing ethos of corporate unaccountability, it turns out if the General Dynamics employees are found to have misused the information garnered from a social network user, including a journalist or public figure, the employee must take a training course or, worst case, lose his/her job. No criminal penalties are specified.
A word to the wise, Big Brother is watching you.
The US Ministry of Propaganda
In the last your of President Obama’s term of office, “a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth had been quietly introduced in Congress.
As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information.
Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Ted Lieu (D-CA), H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”
Creation
Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles.
“These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,”
Portman explained, adding that while the U.S. spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT. Portman stated,
“Surprisingly, there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
Yah. Sure. What ever you say bub.
You ever hear of the NID, or the NED, or the “color revolutions” or the “Pro-Democracy” movements?
Long before the “fake news” meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on such discredited mainstream portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.
In short, long before “fake news” became a major media topic, the US government was already planning its legally-backed crackdown on anything it would eventually label “fake news.”
Here is the full statement issued by the generously funded Senator Rob Portman (R- Ohio) on the singing into law of a bill that further chips away at press liberties in the US, and which sets the stage for future which hunts and website shutdowns, purely as a result of an accusation that any one media outlet or site is considered as a source of “disinformation and propaganda” and is shut down by the government. Go Here to read about this historical event.
Portman-Murphy Bill Promotes Coordinated Strategy to Defend America, Allies Against Propaganda and Disinformation from Russia, China & Others
U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) today announced that their Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act – legislation designed to help American allies counter foreign government propaganda from Russia, China, and other nations– has been signed into law as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. The bipartisan bill, which was introduced by Senators Portman and Murphy in March, will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation from our enemies by establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government. To support these efforts, the bill also creates a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work. This will better leverage existing expertise and empower our allies overseas to defend themselves from foreign manipulation. It will also help foster a free and vibrant press and civil society overseas, which is critical to ensuring our allies have access to truthful information and inoculating people against foreign propaganda campaigns.
“Our enemies are using foreign propaganda and disinformation against us and our allies, and so far the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel,” Portman said. “But today, the United States has taken a critical step towards confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us by our enemies overseas. With this bill now law, we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines. We are going to confront this threat head-on. I am confident that, with the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against us, our allies, and our interests will fail.”
“The use of propaganda to undermine democracy has hit a new low.But now we are finally in a position to confront this threat head on and get out the truth. By building up independent, objective journalism in places like eastern Europe, we can start to fight back by exposing these fake narratives and empowering local communities to protect themselves,” said Murphy. “I’m proud that our bill was signed into law, and I look forward to working with Senator Portman to make sure these tools and new resources are effectively used to get out the truth.”
Priorities
The bipartisan Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is organized around two main priorities to help achieve the goal of combating the constantly evolving threat of foreign disinformation from our enemies:
The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering THE foreign propaganda and disinformation being wages against us and our allies by our enemies. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China as well as non-state actors. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations by our enemies and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.
And so, with the likes of WaPo having already primed the general public to equate “Russian Propaganda” with “fake news” (despite admitting after the fact their own report was essentially “fake”), while the US media has indoctrinated the public to assume that any information which is not in compliance with the official government narrative, or dares to criticize the establishment, is also “fake news” and thus falls under the “Russian propaganda” umbrella, the scene is now set for the US government to legally crack down on every media outlet that the government deems to be “foreign propaganda.”
Just like that, the US Ministry of Truth is officially born.
Impact
The Founding Fathers protected freedom of speech and freedom of the press as the most important liberties. They are protected in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And as discussed below, the Founders recognized that the ability to speak freely was the foundation for all other freedoms. If you remove it, the other freedoms would fall. Thousands of years of history shows how rare and valuable such freedoms really are. Please consider…
Socrates
Socrates was killed in 399 BC for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the [government] acknowledges”.
Using the Printing Press
Before the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg, the church controlled the production of books. Gutenberg’s invention allowed cheap production of books. This challenged the monopoly on books by the church, and thus allowed different viewpoints to be heard.
For example, when Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on a church door in Germany criticizing the corrupt Catholic practice of selling “indulgences” – paying the church in return for a reduction of your time in purgatory – the printing press spread his writings throughout all of Germany in 2 weeks, and throughout “all of Christendom” within a month. This launched the Protestant Reformation, and challenged the power of the Catholic church.
So Pope Alexander VI issued an edict against unlicensed printing in 1501.
And in 1535, Francis I of France prohibited – under penalty of death – the printing of any books.
William Tyndale
William Tyndale was killed in 1536 for translating the Bible into English so that everyone could read it for themselves, and no longer had to rely on the clergy to tell them what it said.
Unlicensed Printing
In 1585, the Star Chamber assumed the right to confine printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge, to limit the number of printers and presses, to prohibit all publications issued without proper license, and to enter houses to search for unlicensed presses and publications. The search for unlicensed presses or publications was entrusted to an officer called the ” messenger of the press.”
In 1557, Henry II made the collecting of prohibited books punishable by death or imprisonment. An in 1559, he made it punishable by death to print without royal authority.
Galileo
In 1616 and 1633, Galileo was tried for saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun, instead of agreeing with the church’s “mainstream” view that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Heretics and Critics
Many people have been killed over the centuries for saying anything that the church authorities of the day disliked. And the British monarchy punished anyone caught with materials criticizing the monarchy, which they labeled as “libelous” or “scandalous”, even if what was written was true.
(Indeed, the ransacking of houses by authorities searching for “heretical” and “libelous” material was so common that it was the main reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting unreasonable “search and seizure”).
Benjamin Franklin
In 1773, Ben Franklin was fired as colonial Postmaster General for informing the American Colonists about what the British were really doing.
Strongmen
Strongmen of all stripes have cracked down anyone who insults the strongman or criticizes his policies.
Book Burnings
In 1933, the Nazis carried out numerous book burnings of authors such as Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Hellen Keller, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Proust, Upon Sinclair and H.G. Wells because their writing book …
“acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people…”
There have been many other book burnings throughout history.
Mussolini
Mussolini had around 2,000 people killed because they challenged the dictator.
Stalin and the Soviet Union
Stalin murdered or through into insane asylums countless people who criticized the Soviet government or Communism.
Other Communist Regimes
China’s Mao and other Communist leaders killed people who failed to sign the Great Leaders’ praise.
CIA
In 1972, CIA director Richard Helms relabeled dissenters as “terrorists”.
Reporters
The extremely popular tv personality Phil Donahue’s show – the most popular on MSNBC – was canceled for questioning the wisdom of the Iraq war. Indeed, many reporters have been fired, harassed, spied upon and even accused of terrorism for reporting stories critical of government actions or policies.
Protect What Makes Us American
Those in power are always tempted to censor and punish critical speech and reporting. George W. Bush said “You’re either with us or your against us”, and cracked down on criticism and protest. Most powerful Democrats now want to suppress right-wing speech. But freedom of speech and of the press – no matter how much we may disagree with and even hate what someone else says – is the bedrock of America.
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
– George Washington
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
– Ben Franklin
“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”
– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo
“The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.”
-U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglass
“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
NGA
If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another agency out there – perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive – should give you goosebumps.
Foreign Policy reports that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure spy agency former President Barack Obama had learned to love and appreciate. Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4 billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99 acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers an extra $1.75 billion. Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on the work of drones.
A partially redacted March 2016 report released by the Pentagon revealed that drones had already been used domestically on about 20 or fewer occasions between 2006 and 2015. Though some of these operations mostly involved natural disasters, National Guard training, and search and rescue missions, quotes from an Air Force law review article found their way into the report. In it, Dawn M. K. Zoldi wrote that technology designed to spy on targets abroad could soon be used against American citizens.
Use Foreign Intelligence to Collect Intel
.@Judgenap: Three intel sources have disclosed that Pres. Obama turned to British spies to get surveillance on Trump pic.twitter.com/IghCFm7qhO
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 14, 2017
During the waning months of the Obama Administration, then President Obama used the British spy agency GCHQ to collect information on incoming President-elect Trump. This was because of both the constitutional limitations placed on him by law, as well as avoiding any connection to spying (and wiretaps like Richard Nixon had the unfortunate experience to endure) by using a “cat’s paw” to collect the intel.
MUSCULAR (DS-200B)
MUSCULAR (DS-200B), located in the United Kingdom, is the name of a surveillance programme jointly operated by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that was revealed by documents which were released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
GCHQ
GCHQ is the primary operator of the program.GCHQ and the National Security Agency have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google.Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013.
The programme is jointly run by:
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (United Kingdom)
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)
MUSCULAR is one of at least four other similar programs that rely on a trusted 2nd party, programs which together are known as WINDSTOP. In a 30-day period from December 2012 to January 2013, MUSCULAR was responsible for collecting 181 million records. It was however dwarfed by another WINDSTOP program known (insofar) only by its code DS-300 and codename INCENSER, which collected over 14 billion records in the same period.
According to the leaked document the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo! and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The programme operates via an access point known as DS-200B, which is outside the United States, and it relies on an unnamed telecommunications operator to provide secret access for the NSA and the GCHQ.
According to the Washington Post, the MUSCULAR program collects more than twice as many data points (“selectors” in NSA jargon) compared to the better known PRISM Unlike PRISM, the MUSCULAR program requires no (FISA or other type of) warrants.
Because of the huge amount of data involved, MUSCULAR has presented a special challenge to NSA’s Special Source Operations. For example, when Yahoo! decided to migrate a large amount of mailboxes between its data centers, the NSA’s PINWALE database (their primary analytical database for the Internet) was quickly overwhelmed with the data coming from MUSCULAR.
Closely related programmes are called INCENSER and TURMOIL. TURMOIL, belonging to the NSA, is a system for processing the data collected from MUSCULAR.
Blaming Others for Nefarious Activities
The WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release contains a batch of documents, named ‘Marble’, which detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. Per the WikiLeaks release:
"The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages."RELEASE: CIA Vault 7 part 3 "Marble"
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 31, 2017
The latest release is said to potentially allow for ‘thousands’ of cyber attacks to be attributed to the CIA which were originally blamed on foreign governments.
WikiLeaks said Marble hides fragments of texts that would allow for the author of the malware to be identified. WikiLeaks stated the technique is the digital equivalent of a specialized CIA tool which disguises English language text on US produced weapons systems before they are provided to insurgents.
It’s “designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms” often link malware to a specific developer, according to the whistleblowing site.
The source code released reveals Marble contains test examples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
“This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion,” WikiLeaks explains, “But there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.”
The code also contains a ‘deobfuscator’ which allows the CIA text obfuscation to be reversed. “Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA.”
Previous Vault7 releases have referred to the CIA’s ability to mask its hacking fingerprints.
WikiLeaks claims the latest release will allow for thousands of viruses and hacking attacks to be attributed to the CIA.
CIA's "Marble Framework" shows its hackers use potential decoy languages
Background: https://t.co/GsoN4BuyTz pic.twitter.com/ZT66doCnfY
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 31, 2017
Full release from WikiLeaks:
Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework. Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.
Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.
Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA. Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.
The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.
Intentional Fabrication of UFO lore.
And why not?
You see all the above examples, the many, many, many examples are mostly political, or used to add control “for natural security”. It’s all just excuses.
It’s not about “getting your political opponents”. Nor is it about “the children”, or “for national security”.
It’s all about control.
"I share your concern over the secrecy that continues to shroud our intelligence activities on this subject."
-Congressman Thomas L. Ashley in a letter to NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) on the subject of UFOs.
Numerous government employees have been actively engaged in the creation of UFO / extraterrestrial lore. This involves various people in the military; including the leadership, various government employees of various agencies that includes both contractors and direct payroll staff, and even elected officials who do so for political purposes. The reasons behind why they were involved in such activities ran the gambit from governmental projects with intentional goals, to mere mischievous pranks. These individuals are now well known in their complicity to deflect, redirect, and discredit all extraterrestrial related study and lore.
One must give pause as to why the government would want to employ someone to do this full time.
A former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty has admitted to having infiltrated UFO circles. As a UFO researcher says:
"Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'"
Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better.
The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realized that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years, he was [1] interpreting alien languages, [2] spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and [3] sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were watching him observe them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that “interpreted” the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to discover. The mania took over Bennewitz’s life. In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.
There’s plenty of stories like this.
Many central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they’d conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground “nuclear fracking”.
Test pilots for the military’s experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Actual photos were doctored to appear that things were being hidden, while other actual pictures were lost in the static of confusion.
It is now easy for anyone to simply say;
“There are no aliens or extraterrestrials at all. The government has been conducting a program to hid advanced research and development programs from the public. They use the smoke-screen of extraterrestrial activity to stigmatize observers of such actions into passive silence.”
As that is, indeed, partly the case.
But I am here, and I am telling you otherwise. Oh, the extraterrestrial presence is real. The technology is real. The government cover-up is real.
But most of what you read on the Internet, and in books are but lies and fabrications. What you see on the television, and observe on the Internet are but cleverly orchestrated efforts used to manipulate group conventional thought and placate the populace for the purposes of the government.
Conclusion
Long and drawn out.
Boring. Old “news”.
Old “subjects”.
Yeah! I get it.
These articles dated to before the Trump Administration. Now, you can well imagine that things are much tighter, the controls more restrictive, exacting, and lethal to your supposed “freedom”. You all are just animals in a big “free ranging” field. Nothing more.
And please don’t get all “hung up” on the “political song and dance”; the “progressives vs. the conservatives”. It’s all just “bread and circuses” for the mindless masses.
bread and circuses A phrase used by a Roman writer to deplore the declining heroism of Romans after the Roman Republic ceased to exist and the Roman Empire began: “Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.” The government kept the Roman populace happy by distributing free food and staging huge spectacles.
-Bread and circuses | Definition of Bread and circuses
When Congress gave up it’s powers to the alphabet organizations, they did much more than create “Frankenstein Monsters”. They created an endless system that keep you within a stratified social construct. One that you must toil for the well-being of others, and by which you can be imprisoned and even killed if you fail to conform.
This means a complete subversion of the systems that are intended to help you and your family in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
The subversion is now complete. It is beyond redemption.
Key Point: The “fighting” for your Rights is all just a farce. The elections are all just theater. The systems are in place, and you are the cattle that toils for your new masters. Oh, the faces change on the “news” screens, but the takeover is complete. So any articles about “regaining” your “God given” Rights is just meaningless. You have NONE. It’s over. And nothing will be done when one party or the other takes power. It’s all just nonsense.
Anyone still sticking around in America is now trapped. It’s probably too late to escape. And if history has anything to say, it is that it’s only going to get worse.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my Front Row Seat Index, though this could just as well fit under any other index as well.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Yeah, here’s yet another one of those posts that you won’t find anywhere else. Like [1] the idea that COVID-19 was a bio-weapon, and [2] the details about what the Hybrid-war by Trump on China entailed. I mean, for Pete’s Sake’s everyone! Can’t anyone else put the details together? Why the fuck do I have to do it? Eh?
Putting “the pieces” together isn’t difficult. You just need to be aware, and be able to discern. You collect information from all over. You try to avoid “echo chambers”, no matter how interesting or “delicious” they are to your own personal view points. And you just start looking for patterns.
You look for patterns.
Then while others are busy studying with the pieces that they find the most interesting, you will have a much broader outlook, and one that tends to be accurate.
.
Sigh.
Where are those highly paid “journalists” from CNN, FOX or MSNBC? Where the fuck are they now? Yes, I know, I know, they are there to manipulate, not to “report news”, but for crying out loud, it’s NOT a difficult subject to report on.
A few billion dollars are used to “send a message” to China. The propaganda campaign against China was on full-swing, and the Internet (on the neocon and War-Hawk websites) that America was “gonna kick some slant-eyed ass”. Everywhere (on the Conservative, and Neocon websites) were discussions about how “Trump was finally doing something about the evil Chinese Communists”.
Then everything went quiet.
Quiet, as in “armada? What armada?” Quiet as “you can hear a pin drop”. Quiet as the darkest dead of night. Quiet as in “Hey! Wake up! Is anyone in the Pentagon Press Room?” Quiet. Hush.
…whisper…
This quiet is what is so very disturbing. This quiet is what is worrisome to me. This quiet is what speaks volumes. This quiet is what we should all pay attention to.
OK. Let’s keep this all short and sweet.
The Basics.
As China emerges as a leading Superpower, the established nation (the United States) attempts to prevent it’s rise.
There are all sorts of reasonings, and justifications for this.
And yes it is true, it would take years to go over everything in detail. But the simple fact behind this is that the Geo-political conflicts between the USA and China fall under the Thucydides trap.
The Thucydides Trap is a theory proposed by Graham Allison who postulates that war between a rising power and an established power is inevitable.
-What is Thucydides’s Trap?
Well, yeah.
The United States “fell” into this situation. And they followed the historical model. They didn’t even pause. The United States initiated a full-spectrum “hybrid” war against China, and has done absolutely everything within it’s power short of World War III with nuclear weapons.
I wrote about it HERE in great painstaking detail.
There are many, many aspects to this assault upon China, and they are all very interesting. Because the “wide spectrum” of assaults are spell-binding in their diversity, and stunning in their depth and scope.
However, this post is going to cover one very tiny and specific event.
This event is the Enormous US Navy led, Naval armada sent to engage China in the South China Sea during the late Summer of 2020.
Enormous.
United States led.
Seven, state of the art, Attack Battle Carriers and their air wings. It is the LARGEST armada in carriers ever.
Not even during World War II were there so many carriers massed in a armada to attack anything. At most, America put three in a armada. But seven! That is a world-record, and then some!
We are going to discuss this armada, and what happened. And maybe, just maybe, the reader can get a serious insight into what actually transpired while Trump danced and placed the entire world at the brink of Nuclear Armageddon.
The Armada
Let’s start with the armada. This is a large collection of flotillas (of military naval vessels) all involved in the South China Sea.
Definition of armada.
1 : a fleet of warships
A Spanish word that originally meant simply "armed", armada is now used in Spanish-speaking nations as the name of their national navies. In English, the word usually has historical overtones. The Great Armada of 1588 was a 120-ship fleet sent by Philip II of Spain in an attempt to invade Elizabethan England; it was defeated when British forces lit eight ships afire and sent them sailing into the Armada's midst, then blocked the passage to the south so that the remaining ships were forced to sail northward around Britain in order to return home, causing dozens more ships to be wrecked in the stormy northern seas. Today we sometimes use the word humorously for fleets of fishing boats, rowboats, or canoes.
-Armada | Definition of Armada by Merriam-Webster
Let’s look at a graphical representation of what was sent against China in the late Summer of 2020. Let’s look at all the aircraft carriers in the world, by all the Navies of the world and see what President Trump amassed…
The American led armada sent against China, by Donald Trump, during the Summer of 2020. . The Trump Naval forces are encircled in red, while the Chinese forces are shown in blue. The red “X” represents the mysterious fire that destroyed the aircraft carrier in harbor in San Diego, the USS Bonhomme Richard.
.
This armada consisted of Three (x3) American assault carrier battle groups and one British aircraft carrier battle group. The major vessels that the US mobilized were three aircraft carriers – USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan – supposedly to patrol the Indo-Pacific waters.
Additionally, each aircraft carrier was paired with a “minor” carrier.
And each aircraft carrier was surrounded by it’s own flotilla of support ships and destroyers to provide protection to the carriers.
Four Carrier Battle Groups
An aircraft carrier is extremely valuable.
And without protection, an aircraft carrier is extremely vulnerable.
That’s why aircraft carriers never leave home alone. They are always escorted by an extensive flotilla of other ships. The aircraft carrier plus the flotilla is known as the carrier battle group. A modern carrier battle group is nearly invincible.
The U.S. Navy forms carrier battle groups on an as-needed basis and assigns ships to the group based on the mission. Therefore, no two carrier battle groups are the same. However, a typical carrier battle group consists of the following ships:
The aircraft carrier itself
Two guided-missile cruisers (These are offensive ships loaded with cruise missiles.)
Two destroyers (Defensive role)
One frigate (Anti-submarine defense)
Two submarines
A supply ship.
To accomplish its mission, a carrier air wing typically consists of nine squadrons, with 70 to 80 total aircraft.
The British carrier group
The British was the only nation to join this armada.
While Mike Pompeo “invited” the Navies of India, Japan, Korea, and Australia to join, it was only Britain that agreed to actively place their military off the coast of China for the purposes of threatening China.
HMS Queen Elizabeth
HMS Queen Elizabeth leads flotilla of ships as new carrier strike group assembles for first time
Britain’s HMS Queen Elizabeth leading the largest and most powerful task force assembled by a European Navy in almost 20 years.
What was the Royal Navy’s new Carrier Strike Group made up of?
HMS Queen Elizabeth – Royal Navy Aircraft carrier – Weighs: 65,000 tonnes, Length: 930 feet, Speed: 25+ knots, Use: Carries 65 aircraft at surge capacity
HMS Diamond – Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer – Weighs: 8,000 tonnes, Length: 500 feet, Speed: 30+ knots, Weapons: Fleet of helicopters, anti-air and anti-ship missiles
HMS Defender – Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer – Weighs: 8,000 tonnes, Length: 500 feet, Speed: 30+ knots, Weapons: Fleet of helicopters, anti-air and anti-ship missiles
USS The Sullivans – US Navy Destroyer – Weighs: 6,900 tonnes, Length: 505 feet, Speed: 30 knots, Weapons: Guided missiles, with guns, torpedoes and two helicopters
HMS Northumberland – Royal Navy Frigate – Weighs: 4,900 tonnes, Length: 435 feet, Speed: 28+ knots, Weapons: Torpedoes and missiles
HMS Kent – Royal Navy Frigate – Weighs: 4,900 tonnes, Length: 435 feet, Speed: 28+ knots, Weapons: Torpedoes and missiles
HNLMS Eversten – Royal Netherlands Navy Frigate – Weighs: 6,000 tonnes, Length: 470 metres, Speed: 28+ knots, Weapons: Guns, missiles and helicopters
RFA Tideforce – Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ships – Weighs: 37,000 tonnes, Length: 201 metres, Speed: 27+ knots, Weapons: Cannons, Primary Use: Replenishment tanker
RFA Fort Victoria – Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ships – Weighs: 37,000 tonnes, Length: 201 metres, Speed: 27+ knots, Weapons: Cannons, Primary Use: Replenishment tanker
The group also includes 15 fighter jets, 11 helicopters and 3,000 personnel from the UK, US and the Netherlands
Meanwhile, HMS Queen Elizabeth embarked two squadrons of F-35B stealth jets, the UK’s 617 Squadron and US Marine Corps fighter attack squadron 211.
Alongside eight Merlin helicopters of 820 and 846 Naval Air Squadrons, it is the largest air group to operate from a Royal Navy carrier in more than thirty years, and the largest air group of fifth generation fighters at sea anywhere in the world, say the Royal Navy.
The Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier led the flotilla of destroyers and frigates from the UK, US and the Netherlands, together with two Royal Fleet Auxiliaries
HMS Queen Elizabeth embarked two squadrons of F-35B stealth jets, the UK’s 617 Squadron and US Marine Corps fighter attack squadron 211
Yes, you read that right.
Not only was America sending multiple carriers off to the South China Sea to intimidate China, but the British carrier also carried American Navy and Marine aircraft and combat wings.
Most of the combat aircraft on the British Carrier were American, flown by Americans, and coordinated with American naval Forces.
The “minor carriers”
What is a “minor” carrier? This is a confusing term, because everyone has their own ideas of what it is. For our purposes herein, it is an aircraft carrier without a runway.
These are NOT small ships. They are all quite enormous.
“Minor carrier” USS Bonhomme Richard.
It is an aircraft carrier that focuses on helicopters, VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft and other aircraft that do not require a runway to land. By pairing a “major” carrier with these “minor” carriers, the Navy can increase the size of the hard and heavy attack and strike aircraft that the “major” carriers use.
Conventional take-off and landing [CTOL] and short take-off and landing [STOL] carriers share a common configuration: a hangar enclosed within a hull, a large flight deck on the hangar roof, take-off runway/s, landing runway/s and pad/s on that flight deck, lifts connecting the hangar and flight decks, and a superstructure off to one side of the flight deck. CTOL carriers such as the USS Nimitz have catapults, arresters and, usually, several runways, some angled. STOL carriers such as HMS Invincible usually have a single through runway serving as take-off runway, landing runway and pad; they usually also have a ski jump because in practice they only operate STOVL and VTOL aircraft. Some 1930s carriers also had an additional take-off runway located on the hangar deck before the hangar, the rear portion of this runway being enclosed under the forward part of the main flight deck.
Another carrier is known, this being a STOVL [short take-off / vertical landing] vessel without a landing runway: a large container ship on which containers stacked before the superstructure form a flight deck with a take-off runway, a pad and a ski jump. A STOVL vessel is an adequate carrier because even STOL vessels in practice only deploy STOVL and VTOL aircraft. VTOL [vertial take-off and landing] carriers are also known: some such as the French Jeanne d'Arc configured with a large hangar aft, a large pad atop it, and lifts connecting those decks; a carrier for V/STOL-as-VTOL aircraft with no pad but using a device developed by British Aerospace to release and recover hovering V/STOL-as-VTOL aircraft has also been proposed. Most VTOL vessels are not aircraft carriers per se, but are other-role ships, usually small, configured in one of two ways: with a hangar on the main deck abaft the superstructure and a pad abaft the hangar; with only an aft pad.
In contrast, CTOL, STOL and STOVL vessels are all large and, effectively, all aircaft carriers; this because all built or proposed have at least one of the following: a fore and aft flight deck with a superstructure beside it and therefore a wide beam; a heavy flight deck on the hangar roof and therefore a hangar of a construction sturdy enough to support it and a large hull to offset the resulting top-heaviness; a hangar enclosed in the hull and therefore a hull of wide beam; a hangar-deck with a take-off runway, that deck therefore being high above the waves; an in-line take-off runway and hangar or in-line take-off runway and superstructure and therefore a long hull; complex and/or heavy machinery like catapults, arresters and, especially, lifts.
-GlobalSecurity
The decision to add “minor” carriers to these deployed flotillas doubled the size of them. So the actual size of each of the three American Carrier Battle Groups consisted of…
The MAIN aircraft carrier
A VTOL / Helicopter “minor” carrier
Four guided-missile cruisers
Four destroyers (Defensive role)
Two frigates
Four submarines
One or two supply ships
These are truly formidable flotillas. They are historically the largest and most powerful flotillas in the history of mankind.
What is amazing is that President Trump sent FOUR of them to China.
You will be aware that this was planned and a time-table laid out back in 2016. With an invasion or an “incident” planned for late Summer 2020, within two to four months before the election.
An “incident” in the South China Sea in late Summer 2020.
To coincide with the other “color revolutions” in HK, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
Resulting in a [1] strengthening of the QUAD, [2] coordinating with the “fire hose of propaganda” making Americans “foam at the mouth” for a war in far-away China.
That it would be a success, and that the American media would promote it as Trump “spreading democracy” TM to the heathen evil “Chinese communists” TM for “freedom! and democracy!” TM.
Which not only would bolster his election chances immensely, but would accomplish his goals. Which are, of course, a complete suppression of all global trade, and a total reduction in the ability, power and might of China.
With a war or conflict to characterize much of his second term from 2020 into 2024, at which point a new conservative neocon would continue his efforts to “make America great again”.
My personal opinion is that Mike Pompeo is being groomed for this role; as President of the United States once President Trump completes his second term in office.
Just who is this “Mr. Mike Pompeo” and why is he pushing so insanely hard to start World War III with China?
Hasn’t he even thought out the consequences of a radioactive New York?
Answer; No he hasn’t.
Mike Pompeo is a neocon psychopath who is attempting to start a war with China for some reason.
In America, we have some very, very big problems.
For one thing, the economy was totally destroyed because of an idiotic flu hoax. When the government decides that it can no longer print unlimited money, we are going to have mass unemployment, mass homelessness, drug addiction, divorce, robbery, murder, and everything else.
Beyond that, we are in the middle of a total communist revolution. Virtually every major city in the country is being overwhelmed by a violent mob of black blasters and their screeching white female masters, as they proceed to tear down the entire civilization.
Many people do not think that now is the right time to start some insane world war with the Chinese in order to protect Hong Kong democracy or the Moslems or Vietnamese fishing waters or whatever the hell.
Many people, however, are not Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo believes that right now is the perfect time to fight for democracy against the Chinese.
Mike Pompeo believes America is a country controlled by vicious Jews, and we need to do what slaves of Jews do best: fight random, confusing wars in the name of Israel.
----------
Reference CNN;
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his rhetorical barrage against China as the top diplomat at the Chinese consulate in Houston suggested they may defy US orders to vacate.
Pompeo’s remarks at the Nixon Library Thursday, titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” cast aspersions on Beijing and its relations with the US, nearly 50 years after President Richard Nixon became the first US president to travel to China.
“We must admit our truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” he said. “We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”
He appeared to cast the US-China competition as a modern day Cold War, saying that “securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time and America is perfectly positioned to lead it.”
Pompeo delivered the speech on the heels of a US order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston — “because it was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft,” in his words. The order — the latest in a series of escalations between Washington and Beijing — demands that the Chinese shutter the property by Friday.
----------
Yes. They’re saying that they were using the Houston consulate to steal intellectual property.
Of course, he won’t ever explain what that means, because it makes no sense. It is just gibberish.
China is engaged in mass intellectual property theft – they do it in the factories that our companies moved to their country! It’s in the contracts that they’re allowed total access to these factories.
Why would they be stealing intellectual property in Houston? Where would they steal it from? What does this even mean?
Nothing. It means nothing.
This is simply a belligerent provocation against a major superpower.
We have a helluva lot of problems in this country, and the idea that China is even in the top 20 is absurd. And the top issue that relates to China is trade. What Pompeo is doing with this insane belligerence is making trade negotiation totally impossible.
----------
Reference CNN;
However, in an interview with Politico Thursday, Consul General Cai Wei suggested the diplomatic outpost may defy that order.
“Today we are still operating normally, so we will see what will happen tomorrow,” he told the news outlet, but did not elaborate further.
Chinese officials have urged the United States to reverse its decision and have threatened retaliation.
State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said that they “had to make the decision to close down this consulate due to this massive, massive theft of our research and our intellectual property.”
“We’ve uncovered spy rings,” she claimed in an interview with “Quest Means Business” Thursday.“But most importantly, I think what has been very troubling to us is the theft of research from our universities, from our hospitals, the theft of intellectual property, the theft from technology companies. So the FBI and the Department of Justice have started to lay out the case and show the facts again,” she said.
A seven page document prepared by US law enforcement officials and shared across US government agencies details instances of covert People’s Liberation Army activity in the US, including details related to the Houston consulate specifically, according to the document reviewed by CNN.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin denied the allegations that the consulate was the “epicenter” of illicit activities.
----------
The transcript for the speech is not up yet on the State Department website.
I do NOT trust the Moron Brothers.
The reason that I was looking for the transcript is that I wanted to ctrl+f the word “free.” I think he must have said it 1,000 times in this speech. He said it in every single sentence.
It just makes me sick. It makes me nearly as sick as Angela Merkel saying anyone who questions the lockdown is a “fact-denier.”
America is not a free country.
It was a lunatic claim to make before the virus hoax, and at this point, anyone who says “America is a free country” belongs in a padded room. We are not only not free, we are the most un-free country in all of human history.
No people, ever, have been forced under threat of state violence to remain in their houses, having committed no crime.
No people have ever been forced to cover their faces in public.
No government has ever purposefully collapsed their nation’s economy, destroying millions of jobs and tens of thousands of small businesses.
These are all entirely new forms of oppression, invented by the 2020 United States government.
No one denies this.
They will just say, “but there’s a virus tho.”
Before the virus though, we still had nothing approaching the amount of freedom the people of China have.
Just look at freedom of speech.
In America, you are not allowed to:
Criticize Jews (the richest people in the country)
Criticize homosexuals
Criticize women
Criticize black people
Criticize immigration
Make fun of CNNQuestion the veracity of theSandy Hook shootingSay that men are not women
After the banning of QAnon memes from Twitter, it is unclear if
you are even allowed to support Donald Trump at all.
In China, you are not allowed to:
Denounce the government
Produce or distribute pornography
Promote homosexuality
It isn’t comparable.
In America, entire categories of thought are banned.
What’s more, the enforcement of speech violations is different.
In China, if you criticize the government after having been given a warning, you may get a fine.
In America, you can be hunted by a mob, and the government will not defend you. You can lose your job and not be able to get another job. Your family can be harassed. Intelligence agents will go see everyone you’ve ever met and threaten them, attempting to extort information about you from them.
What’s more, in America you don’t really even know what you’re allowed to say at any given moment. You can cross lines you didn’t know existed. In China, everyone who breaks speech rules knows what they’re doing before they hit “send.”
Furthermore, the US government has made it clear that protests that they don’t agree with are completely impossible. Three years ago, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Americans gathered to defend a statue commemorating a war our ancestors fought, and they were attacked by the police, driven into a violent mob of terrorists – then many of the protesters were charged with crimes, and sued. This was intended to send a message: the United States government will not tolerate dissent on the streets.
The pattern of allowing government-supporting terrorists to attack dissidents and then charging the victims with crimes has been well-established over the last four years. One high profile case involved the Proud Boys, who were stalked on the streets of New York by Antifa, and when they defended themselves, were arrested. The attackers refused to file charges because they wanted to keep their identities secret, so the city charged them with “rioting.”
In China you can protest freely.
No one attacks you. The cops do not gas you.
The US starting a war with China because they want to enforce freedom on them would be like China invading the US because they want to enforce good driving habits on us.
It is complete bullshit.
If we were invaded by the Chinese, there is zero chance that we would not have more freedom than we have right now in this country. People don’t like hearing that, but it is simply a fact.
I am not defending China. I do not support the Chinese system, and believe that the American Constitution is the very best system of government ever.
We are not operating under the system that was created by our Founding Fathers. Whatever you want to call this current system – “neoliberalism” seems to work, but take your pick, there isn’t really a word for it – it is totally unrelated to any previous system.
I do not want to be invaded and ruled by the Chinese. I want our own people to rule our own country.
I am just telling you what the situation is.
Shills on /pol/ are shilling this nonsense, just like they shilled the hell out of the coronavirus hoax.
What exactly are we even talking about here?
If China is threatening the United States, sure, let’s defend ourselves.
But they’re not threatening us.
They’re allegedly threatening Antifa rioters and Moslems in their own country, and a sea to the south of their country.
We have real problems. We should not even be talking about this.
-Pompeo the Hutt Signals a Desire for a War with the ..
A “fair warning” meeting of military leaders
Before the invasion flotilla and the supporting armadas left for China, military leaders from both China and the United States held a “meeting of the minds” in Hawaii.
China was fully willing and ready to discuss things, but the United States, Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo kept on postponing the meetings.
Often leaving the diplomats siting in bare, empty waiting rooms and lobby’s. It was entirely rude, very insulting, and set the tone for the events that followed.
When the meeting finally did occur, neither Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo attended. Just the Military “Brass” that was in charge of the Armada.
No one knows what was said. But knowing what I know about China, and my experience in the ONI, it was blunt, direct, to the point and very matter-of-fact.
My guess is that China told the Admirals and Military Leadership that any attack on any Chinese islands, ships, people or equipment will be met in similar fashion. And probably not to expect a “regional” conflict.
If America attacks China; Chinese soil and Chinese people….
China will attack America; American soil and American people.
The “News” Reports.
What is STUNNING is that very little of this was reported.
I mean, you have an armada the size of the D-Day invasion, and it was off the Chinese coast, so close that the people on the beaches could see the ships, and the pilots could oogle the girls in their swimsuits.
And it was RADIO SILENCE.
Sure there were articles. But if you try to find anything of substance, you will be sorely disappointed.
It’s all pretty much variations of the same theme;
China is a threat to democracy and “freedom” to shipping out of China. (Why China would ever want to destroy it’s own shipping venues is NEVER discussed.)
America must lead the world in “countering” China.
China is growing and must be stopped NOW!
America must respond militarily NOW, NOW, NOW!
If America does nothing, Communism will spread all over the globe.
Yeah. You get the idea.
Now as far as really specific details, they are no where to be found.
It’s buckets and buckets of non-essential data. But nothing regarding the actual actions, events, players, or events. The news as to what went on regarding the actual vessels during this period is very detailed, but doesn’t really say anything or provide any information.
As in what these following examples illustrate.
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71)
There’s a ton of articles about this carrier, but little in the way of detail.
The US Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) and Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 11 have finished carrier qualifications.
In this period, the CVN 71 qualified pilots from the Tomcatters of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 31, Golden Warriors of VFA-87, Blue Diamonds of VFA-146 and Black Knights of VFA-154.
Pilots from Liberty Bells of Airborne Command and Control Squadron (VAW) 115, The Gray Wolves of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 142, and the Providers of Fleet Logistics Support Squadron (VRC) 30 were also qualified.
In support of carrier qualifications, the Eightballers of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 8 and the Wolf Pack of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 75 also worked with the vessel.
US Navy Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 11 commander Captain Steve Jaureguizar said: “It is very gratifying to be able to return to our primary mission in the Indo-Pacific.
“The carrier air wing joined together with the carrier is the bedrock of naval aviation and power projection.”
During carrier qualifications, naval aviators sharpen their skills acquired during Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLP).The operational relationship between CVW-11 and the Theodore Roosevelt is claimed to have been fortified by carrier qualifications.
-3JUN20 USS Theodore Roosevelt and CVW11 complete carrier qualifications
USS Nimitz
This is true for all the carriers involved. A great deal of information that pretty much says nothing. And for the USS Nimitz…
USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan join for exercises in South China Sea
Josh Farley, Kitsap Sun 7/6/2020
SOUTH CHINA SEA — Fighter jets and other aircraft have launched around the clock on the USS Nimitz's flight deck in recent days as the Bremerton-based carrier performs a central role in the Navy's rare show of force in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
The USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Groups are conducting dual-carrier operations in the Indo-Pacific as the Nimitz CSF. The Nimitz and carrier USS Ronald Reagan have been performing exercises together to "strengthen warfighting readiness and proficiency," including simulations to strike enemy territory while in waters claimed by China and neighboring nations.
Even a B-52 Stratofortress bomber flew a 28-hour mission from Louisiana to participate in the exercises, the Air Force announced separately.
"Dual carrier operations demonstrate unique U.S. capabilities, increase carrier strike force command and control experience, and show our commitment to regional allies," said Capt. Todd Cimicata, commander of the Nimitz-based Carrier Air Wing 17, in a news release. "Additionally, our operations reinforce the rights, freedoms, and lawful use of the sea and airspace guaranteed by international law."
It's been six years since the Navy has performed dual-carrier operations in the sea, a critical waterway for trillions of dollars in annual trade — and one claimed by China as its territory. But that claim was rebuked by an international tribunal in 2016. Five other countries, including the Philippines, have overlapping claims in the sea.
The Chinese government, which has continued to develop military defenses in the sea on both natural and manmade islands, was not pleased at the news of the exercises, even as its own military held exercises nearby around the Paracel Islands.
More: Nimitz at sea: Getting a new crew of sailors deployment ready
"The U.S. is disrupting peace and stability of the South China Sea and pushing for militarization by sending military forces for large-scale military exercises," China's Foreign Affairs Ministry said on Twitter Monday.
The Nimitz left Bremerton in late April to complete the rest of its strike group training and head out on deployment. Some 8,000 personnel had been in quarantine for the bulk of the month and all were tested for COVID-19 prior to departure.
In early June, with the completion of all of its pre-deployment training, the Nimitz charted a course across the Pacific with its strike group, including Everett-based ships. The carrier pulled into Guam for a port visit June 24, following dual-carrier operations with the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, which is back at sea following a coronavirus outbreak aboard the ship earlier this year.
While ashore at Guam, sailors from the Nimitz could go to designated beaches to minimize the risk of contracting COVID-19.
"The morale boost this gives to the hardworking and dedicated Sailors and Marines onboard Nimitz, many of whom have been embarked aboard ship for nearly three months, is immeasurable," Nimitz Commanding Officer Capt. Max Clark, said in a news release.
Days later, it entered the Philippine Sea, followed by the South China Sea, where it continues operations with the Yokosuka, Japan, forward-deployed Reagan and its strike group. The Nimitz isn't likely to return to Bremerton before 2021.
-USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan join for exercises in South ...
The USS Ronald Reagan
News on the USS Ronald Reagan…
USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan are now in the South China Sea for military drills, a U.S. Navy official confirms to Fox News.
"The purpose is to show an unambiguous signal to our partners and allies that we are committed to regional security and stability," Rear Adm. George Wikoff told the Wall Street Journal, which was the first media to report the exercises likely to irk Beijing.
The drills, to support a free and open Indo-Pacific and promote an international rules-based order, also included "round-the-clock flights testing the striking ability of carrier-based aircraft," he added.
The South China Sea is where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple territorial disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons. The waters are a major shipping route for global commerce and are rich in fish and possible oil and gas reserves.
China’s People’s Liberation Army had been staging exercises off the Paracel Islands in the disputed South China Sea since July 1, angering the Philippines, and Chinese maritime officials have prohibited all vessels from navigating within the area of the maneuvers.
In another message to China, a B-52 bomber from Louisiana flew a 28-hour mission to train with jets from the aircraft carriers Reagan and Nimitz in the South China Sea, according to the Air Force.
-US, China ramp up South China Sea tension with new military drills
As you can see, the “news” doesn’t say much except…
Ships sent to the South China Sea.
Purpose is to show an “unambiguous signal” to China.
Running simulations to strike enemy territory while in waters claimed by China.
Practicing joint carrier operations.
The “news” reports on the armada, it’s size and scope has not been well reported.
All historical comparisons are missing.
Any exclamation to the size and the nature of the mission parameters and the vast number of ships and fleet integration issues are all missing. Apparently, this entire effort is not to be publicized to the English Speaking Audiences in America and the UK.
No where, any where, is there any mention of the SIZE of the armada, and all the simultaneous efforts that Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State) was doing to organize a military coalition against China.
This coalition is known as “The Quad”.
The QUAD
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD), better known as "Quad," took another key step toward its key goal of becoming an anti-China military alliance with the signing by the United States and India of a military agreement to share spy satellite data.
-US, India Sign Military Agreement During Pompeo, Esper Trip
The Quad, QDS or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal strategic assembly between four nations – The United States, India, Australia and Japan.
The forum was initiated as a dialogue in 2007 by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney of the USA, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and is maintained by meetings that occur on a semi-regular basis.
The dialogue was paralleled by joint military exercises of an unprecedented scale, titled Exercise Malabar. It existed officially from 2007-2008, after which it was partially dissolved due to the Australian withdrawal from this forum under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
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However, it was re-established in 2017, during the ASEAN Summits, with all four former members rejoined in negotiations to revive the quadrilateral alliance. The intention was to re-purpose the QUAD as an Asian “NATO”. Which is intended to be a large regional military force under the direct command of the United States military. All for the express purposes of “suppressing”, “countering”, China’s rise in the area.
Not at all discussed is the regional QUAD members being urged to support the UK/American Naval armada while running their exercises in the region.
By most accounts there were some pressures being placed on the various nations, but most (with the exception of Australia) declined to engage militarily against China in any way.
Australia has signed a joint military agreement with the United States, which includes allowing the United States Navy to operate a Naval base on Australian territory..
For the United States Navy to operate near China, it needs strong logistic support.
To this end, the Trump administration has been trying to obtain this support by resurrecting the QUAD.
It appears that Australia has agreed to that role. While the rest of the nations are maintaining a neutral presence.
The Time Period
Ever since President Trump was elected, the relationship went from “Most Favored Trade Partner” in 2016 to “enemy” in 2019.
This entire event sequence was planned before Trump was President.
It predates 2017.
Apparently, the American Naval forces were to have moved into place in March 2020, but they were postponed when the battle fleets ended up getting COVID-19 coronavirus and had to dock at remote American Naval bases to recover.
As best that I can determine, the armada was schedule to coincide with [1] an uncontrollable out-break of COVID-19B on Chinese soil, [2] a “fire hose” of anti-Chinese propaganda, [3] and intentional riots in Hong Kong.
COVID-19B is the very lethal strain of Coronavirus. It hit China, Iran, and North Korea simultaneously. It causes brain seizures, and collapse. It operates in stealth, and incubates and then hits very suddenly after it sheds to others.
COVID-19A is the "herd immunity" strain. It is very mild and gives people a sore throat, but conveys immunity to the lethal strain. It hit America, and the Trump administration insisted that no one wear masks so that the entire nation could get this strain. And thus have immunity.
But none of what was expect actually happened.
The battle armada was delayed by the coronavirus COVID-19A.
The Hong Kong riots were suppressed successfully (A first for the CIA sponsored NED / NID operations. These “color revolutions” are very difficult to control, and the United States has had decades perfecting the techniques and systems.)
And China went DEFCON ONE on CNY 2020, and completely suppressed the COVID-19B bio-weapons attack.
Thus the armada fleet was delayed by four months.
The timetable was rescheduled to late-summer starting in July, and forces were in the Chinese waters and the South China Sea during July, August and September 2020.
The armada steamed home in Late September, October 2020.
The Events
So what happened?
Subs to sink all global shipping out of China
We know that the United States moved hunter-killer subs to the South China Sea to threaten China and all shipping out of China. These ships are designed and are on a mission to threaten to sink all shipping traffic out of China. That would suppress global trade like nothing else;
The US Naval submarine forces are being used like the German “Wolf Packs” of World War II; to sink shipping vessels. You remember, don’t you? Those diabolical Nazi Germans who were sinking ships left and right…
The Wolfpacks What is a Wolfpack? The wolfpacks, known to the Germans as Rudeltaktik, were created by Karl Donitz as a means to defeat the allied convoy system after his experiences as U-boat commander in World War 1. In June 1940 the first such operations were tried with the tactical control given to the senior officer of the group.The Wolfpacks - German U-boat Operations - Kriegsmarine ...
. Donald Trump threatens to end all global trade by making shipping by sea impossible. He placed hunter-killer subs on all the sea-lanes out of China. . He also sent Black-Ops submarines to the region as well…
American airborne forces practice invasion of islands and Chinese territory
We also know that the American Army has been practicing seizing islands by dropping paratroopers in practice runs.
ICBM missiles being fired towards China as a show of strength
We know that America is flexing it’s muscles and firing ICBM missiles as a warning to China…
A Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Wednesday 2SEP20 at 12:03 a.m. The test launch used an unarmed missile that traveled over 4,000 miles, at a speed of more than 15,000 mph.
China shows that it will respond with it’s own missiles
China launches four of it’s “Aircraft Carrier Killer Missiles” into the South China Sea. DoD can confirm that the Chinese military launched four medium-range missiles Wednesday from mainland China,” a defense official said.”The missiles impacted in the South China Sea between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands,” the official added. “The launch appears to have been part of a previously announced exercise.”
Reports on what occurred during the American lead naval sortie in the South China Sea in late Summer 2020, are coming in…
… in drips and drabs.
Nothing much from America or the UK.
So what actually happened?
No one is speaking. It’s all “X Ray”.
Well we know the result of the armada adventure by what the Presidential Administration did next…
There is going to be a change in strategy. This new strategy would involve the use of AI controlled underwater weapons and drones. The use of a “traditional” assault force using a large force of carriers is not considered to be practical.
These energy beam weapons operate underwater as well as through the air.
Once disabled, the ships and aircraft lose full control, and all their anti-missile technology is useless.
Nuclear reactors on both aircraft carrier, and underwater submarines go “haywire” and have to manually SCRAM. All power is lost. All electronics fail, even on backup battery power. A nuclear meltdown is a serious risk.
The location of all submarines, and naval vessels in the South China Sea have been tracked in real time using a very extensive system of redundant sensor systems. The entire South China Sea is arrayed in a very detailed, redundant and extensive multi-layered network of Chinese sensors.
(Note; If it is reported, it's NOT secret) FOUR paramilitary CIA officers drowned while on a secret mission to plant an underwater pod intended to track the Chinese military in the South China Sea, it has emerged. The men were reportedly caught in a tropical storm while attempting to place the device, which had been disguised to resemble a rock, off the Philippine island of Luzon.
Meet the HN-1, China’s New AI-Powered Underwater Drone. The battle for future undersea AI dominance is heating up and China’s ambitions are not small in this domain.
The Chinese have intercepted clandestine troops in operations upon Chinese territory. It is unknown what has happened to them…
I wonder…
Curiously, from American Media…
There was an “accident” when American marine forces attempted a landing on “one of the islands off California”. All eight / nine of the soldiers are assumed dead. None were recovered. The justification is that the ocean is “too deep”, and they all died inside of an “amphibious tank”. But by looking at any oceanographic map of the islands off the California coast, we can see that this claim is simply not true.
Just keep in mind that there were many, many events and actions that were NOT reported to the public during this entire period of time.
Here is a nice interactive map of the (inferred) Chinese power projection in the South China Sea.
Apparently, while the United States Navy was conducting “maneuvers” in the South China Sea, with the five carrier assault groups and Marine Landing / Attack forces, as well as with the entire British carrier fleet…
…something else was happening simultaneously.
Well reported in the mainstream press, but no one was putting “two plus two” together. These strange “tictac” shaped UFO’s started to appear and “move freely” all over American military bases inside of America. At THE SAME TIME as the American Navy was “probing the Chinese coastal defenses“.
Whether they are “aliens” or not is a good question.
One thing is for certain, and that is the technology involved in these craft are far up and above (perhaps centuries) more advanced than anything the United States has fielded. They can “pop” into existence out of no-where. They are immune to radar, and thermal signatures. They can accelerate to enormous speeds in a short period of time, and they are equally capable of underwater, air and space travel.
Maybe, just maybe, the narrative that this is “Chinese technology” isn’t so outlandish. It seems odd, don’t you think, that extraterrestrials would be interested in probing American military bases at the same time that the United States assembled a major armada probing China’s coastal water.
“Chinese Tictac” UFO that was buzzing and moving in and out of American military installations and airbases while the American Naval flotilla was busy probing the Chinese Coasts during the Summer of 2020.
There are all sort’s of strange things going on.
And it is difficult to see patterns unless you are active in researching and collecting the drips and drabs that land here and there from the various “media” sources.
So, consider this bit of curious “news”…
Strange Events resulting in the destruction of an American “minor carrier”.
An American VTOL carrier catches fire and burns up. Imagine that!
My personal belief is that this is a “tit for tat” response to a similar fire that broke out on the largest Chinese helicopter carrier while in dock. It was undetermined how the fire started, and the Chinese did not blame anyone.
So let’s look at this.
A mysterious fire breaks out and engulfs the newest and most advanced VTOL Chinese carrier.
April 2020
China’s first Type-075 amphibious assault carrier, designed for launching helicopters, caught fire last week while docked in Shanghai.
The fire broke out aboard the Chinese ship on April 11, Forbes reported. The blazing carrier was China’s first amphibious assault carrier and the ship was set to be sailed down a nearby waterway within days of when the fire broke out.
Photos and videos of the burning ship first circulated around Chinese social media, and eventually Twitter.
The fire appears to have spread within the hull of the ship and possibly in the ship’s aircraft hangar. Smoke could be seen billowing out of the ship’s aircraft lift elevators.
Forbes reported that the fires caused extensive smoke damage to the hull before they were eventually put out. Black smoke stains could be seen from the ship’s stern, though the full extent of the fire’s spread and ensuing damage are not known.
The Chinese assault carrier is similar in design to the U.S. Wasp- and America-class assault carriers, which are meant for launching helicopters and vertical takeoff aircraft in support of amphibious landing operations.
-China’s first helo assault carrier catches fire
But we can see this as one of many such efforts by the trump Administration to attack and probe Chinese defenses.
The Navy’s USS Bonhomme Richard burned for days at its pier in San Diego. After the fire was put out, the Navy registered the destruction as “total” and wrote off the vessel as a total loss. No one claimed responsibility for the damage, and it is officially listed as “accidental” or “undefined”.
Donald Trump did blame Iran in some of his tweets, and accused them of this or that. But he has a history of doing that. So you all cam pretty much discount that.
A brand new Chinese Navy Assault Helicopter / VTOL Carrier catches fire while at dock. It is unknown what caused the fire.
Two months later an American assault Helicopter / VTOL Carrier catches fire while at dock. It is unknown what caused the fire. Both ships are equivalent in mission capabilities, size and deployment capabilities.
The Results
If you were to sum up everything in a pithy saying, you might say this…
The neocon Trump administration has decided to wage a full-spectrum war with China, on Chinese soil. To this end, they assembled a historically massive Naval armada and threatened China in the hopes of provoking a military response.
They expected to encounter a military run by disillusioned communist conscripts using 1980’s level technology, Instead, they found themselves unmatched and confronted to a determined, talented, and well equipped force with technology that is decades more advanced that what the United States fields.
The military refused to engage the Chinese forces, and as a result, there was no war to rally the United States against a common enemy. Donald Trump was expecting to be re-elected as a “war president”, as historically, all “war presidents” are always re-elected. (Which pretty much explains the “fire hose” of anti-China propaganda throughout all of 2020.)
As a result, the lack of a “hot war” or “incident” showing American “strength” contributed to an election loss. Reeling from the defeat, and blaming it on the imission of key re-election criteria, Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper upon his defeat in the general presidential election.
And his supporters?
Well, they pretty much want to see the world burn.
A Final Note
Keep in mind that while the United States military, and it’s allies are in-love with big, costly and expensive military equipment, they require maintenance to work properly. They require skilled people to use, maintain, and operate.
People need more than just training. They need understanding of the full complexities of the systems that they are in charge of.
In the Western publications we often see successful test firings of missiles, and elaborate presentations at air shows, but anyone who actually works… hands-on… in the development of these systems (such as myself) can tell you, that for every successful firing, display or utilization of a system, are comparatively ten failures.
When you field these systems, you had best have well-educated, skilled people trained in their use. They must have above-average intelligence and able to react to changes in a very contentious, high stress environment. An environment where all normal means of operation, supply and communications are compromised. Having crew on Naval Vessels that got there by diversity scoring, waivers, and who are unable to pass the most basic physical fitness standards is a lethal decision during a hot war.
What is not shown to “Joe and Suzy Q Public”…
Do not be so sure that everything will work as perfectly as it seems on paper. It’s been my experience that things tend to go to Hell very, very quickly in dangers and contentious environments.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Trump Trade War Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
As an expat, and as a retired what-ever-you-wanna-call-it, I look at the USA today with a great deal of sadness. It pains me to watch the United States as it is today, and yearn for a simpler time where people followed the rules and got along. This is not going to be a long post. The United States is far too polarized to say anything without offending someone. Instead, I will display my feelings on this matter for all to see.
And that is that.
The 2020 election.
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I think that there are others that must feel this same way.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is something that I threw together after another mindless clone started repeating the Mike Pompeo “talking points” about China. I mistakenly tried to explain that he didn’t have all the information that he was coming to conclusions based on fraudulent and partial data sets. But, boy oh boy did that set him off! I should have known better, but whatever… it just serves me right for arguing with a fool; a manipulated fool, but a fool never-the-less.
So I threw this post together.
Personally, I believe that if you cannot make something simple to understand, then you either don't know how to communicate, or you simply don't understand the issues.
I suggested that he “discern” and “think”, and stop repeating the same tired narratives.
But that is not how the world actually works.
Most people are sheep. Humans are herd animals. Nothing more. And, in a way, you can say that this is bread into us intentionally.
So when I tell a person to “discern”, their minds switch off , and they don’t know what to say.
It’s got electrolytes.
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When I tell people to “discern”, or to use “discernment”, what I actually refer to is for them to see the full totality of any given issue. Not a little bit here, or some opinions there, but to look at a much, much larger picture.
This goes with just about everything.
Look at the bigger picture.
Always.
Look at the larger picture and then work your way down, cut through the bullshit and get to the rich nuggets at the bottom level.
Don’t just blunder about, repeating the choice bits of information that is shoveled to you in your trough and just regurgitate them at will.
Let’s consider all “news”. But let’s really focus on “news” related to [1] politics (I will use the American media in this regards for illustration purposes) and [2] Top Secret disclosures (such as MAJestic) to [3] OOPARTS, and [4] social-cultural re-engineering efforts.
In all cases there are very vocal “camps” of believers or disbelievers of all types and “stripes” and pedigrees. They take their points of view, and violently stand by their opinions in the matter no matter what information or ideas that they are confronted with. I know. I was one of them.
They do so because they have accepted others as “gatekeepers” of “news”, and only listen to those “journalists” and “media outlets”. And that person, over time, becomes the sole source of “news” for them. “News” which they regurgitate verbatim as “the gospel”.
But there is a work around.
It’s quite simple, actually…
Provide some “news”, quite interesting and factual, that their approved news sources are not providing.
Then provide another, and then another…
Add those elements of “news” to the already robust collection of information that they have at hand.
Let them come to their own conclusions, and leave it at that.
In all cases we need to collect a very broad and wide-ranging assortment of ideas, facts, details and contexts, and then we need the intelligence to intentionally structure them together by sifting though the nonsense to get to the actual “juicy” bits of value.
Thus the first key to discernment is to recognize that the PTB are not concerned with what “news” is available. They are concerned with how it is disseminated to the population.
The PTB are not concerned with the details in the “news”. They are concerned with how it is disseminated.
And that is the key, as well as the reason why everyone is so contentious in America today.
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The media don’t really care about what the actual “news” is, whether it is factually correct or not, or what the source of the information actually is. They are concerned with one thing, how to disseminate the “news” in a proper manner so as to manipulate and control it’s consumption.
So if you consider the “news” to be a hodge podge of information, you can consider it to be like an enormous puzzle box with millions of pieces. and Scattered in those pieces are fake “news” and lies. Or in other words, an entirely different puzzle, similar in appearance and puzzle-piece-part-size to the original puzzle, but intended to confuse.
But, what is “news”?
But, before we go any further let’s discuss what the “news” actually is, and what it isn’t.
The “news” is not what everyone thinks it is.
It’s a mixture of selected facts, and incident reports (traditional news), with great quantities of personal opinions, narratives, and theories interspersed, along with outright lies and deceptions. It hasn’t been pure and pristine unbiased reports for many, many decades, if not centuries. Instead, it’s just a mountain of information with zero quality control.
So the first thing you need to do in discernment, is become the QC manager for what you read and absorb.
Let’s continue with our analogy of a puzzle box.
Modern contemporaneous “news” is more like a couple of puzzles that are all mixed together. And the “journalists” concentrate on the individual pieces and they have no care if they are factual, truthful, actual, or beneficial. They just collect the “items”, package it for public consumption and then move on to the next “news item”.
Now, you all need to appreciate that almost all the puzzle pieces made in the world are cut out of the same cutting blades. A puzzle for dinosaurs uses the same cutting blade for a Walt Disney Princess puzzle. And because of this, the puzzle piece shapes are identical. If you are not careful, you can (if you were careless) mix the puzzle boxes together and create a mess.
When people try to fit separate groups of puzzle pieces together, they can fit, but the results are nonsensical. This happens often.
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You would need to be very creative in assembling the puzzle. But no matter how hard you try, it will not be what was intended. And we see that all the time with some really bizarre stories that have been popularized in American media.
Such as…
Robert Kardashian and Ted Cruz are the same person.
5G will cause brain cancer.
Fossilized reptiles are on Mars and are being covered up by the US government.
Princess Di did not die and is a sexual slave in Saudi Arabia.
And thusly, that methodology is intentionally used when it comes to “news”.
It is important to the PTB that the people are herded together and allow to roam at will within the fencing that they have created. It is important to them that the people are given an overwhelming amount of information so that the people would never be able to see the real and accurate picture of what is going on. People are herd animals, and are being shepherded effectively by others at many levels.
So rather than try to control each and every item of information, real or not, the control lies in the dissemination of the news. The objective is to maintain a fragmentation of news so that it is difficult to piece together the actual situation(s) and what is going on.
How the “news” is disseminated
So, let’s consider how the “news” is disseminated.
In short, and in America, there are three major groupings of “news”. It is pretty well established now, and came about sometime in the middle 1990’s. The groups are…
Mainstream media (also known as “traditional” media).
Alt-Right (with such notable personalities and Rush Limbaugh and FOX News)
Alt-Left (with examples being Salon.com and the Huffington Post.)
Additionally, over the last ten years these media outlets have splinted off some rather “extreme” outlets which include…
Hard-Right (Such as Alex Jones and Hall Turner).
Hard-Left (Such as Current Affairs.)
And in general, you can be well assured that the United States government has control of all the major “players” in these dissemination venues. Because by controlling them, they can control what you (the people) read, consume, and believe.
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This level of control is absolute. I was first exposed to it when I noticed that my Metallicman postings to Free Republic (an Alt-Right website) were deleted without notice, and then I was banned without care or concern that I had over 10,000 posted articles over a 20 year time span. The reason? My articles no longer fit in the “ideal desired” framework.
Anyone who has tried to run through the gauntlet of publishers to get their book or manuscript published, or had an article or two rejected by someone can well understand this horror.
The PTB, through the United States government, controls the dissemination of articles and “news” through approved and heavily monitored venues. If you are unable to fit within the “approved guidelines for content” you will not be able to publish.
In my case, the reason that I was banned was that I (tried to) post an article that said that the “pro-Democracy” riots in HK were NID / NED sponsored, and that the Chinese have the entire city bugged. They know who is doing what, why and when, and unless the United States stops and reassess their position, they will forever lose access to Hong Kong as a staging location for international bedevilment.
Well…?
What happened?
Did I call it, or what?
But that is not want the United States government wants the citizen-cattle to be exposed to. They are not to be exposed to “news” and information. They are to be manipulated and cajoled. And at that time, the sole purpose of the Alt-Right “news” venues was to enrage the American population to hate China, so that they can be justified in having a long drawn out hot war with them.
And how do they do this…
The various media groups establish a pre-defined narrative that they harp on continuously over and over…
Actually, it’s numerous narratives.
When Trump was elected in 2016, he was a walking “soapbox” of Alt-Right narratives.
Hillary Clinton is corrupt.
The “invasion” of the South Americans is stealing “our” jobs.
China is ripping us off blindly and we must do something!
And when he came into office, he tried to implement policies that reflected the alt-Right narratives.
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The thing is that the various groups (mainstream, alt-right, alt-left, etc.) only concentrate on the things that will maintain their audiences. If it lies outside of what the audience wants to hear, it is ignored or suppressed. This is necessary. Because if they didn’t do that they risk losing their audience, and thus their customer base for their advertising supporters.
So the media outlets do not want “the truth”. They want to package information (correct or lies) and sell it (via advertising revenue) to a voracious audience. Which is why I always say that…
The worst and most dangerous propaganda is that which we want to believe.
And this environment, when you have individuals that only listen to alt-left, or alt-right, or hard-right news…
…end up living inside an “echo chamber”, where they only hear what they want to hear.
The echo chamber in politics refers to a group of people who share the same political views. In this group, forum or arena, they share their identical views with each other while at the same time condemn other views regardless as to whether they have a point.
In America, for example, people who are very conservative (e.g. a lot of Republicans aged 70 or older) watch Fox News on TV while many liberals (young Democrats, for example) read things like the New York Times or Los Angeles Times or HuffingtonPost.com.
A lot of these people stay in their echo chamber and never mix with others. As a result and in consequence, over a long period of time, they no longer understand each other at all. Or, worse, some begin to hate each other.
The upshot is, people become intolerant of each other, be it due to party affiliation, religion, skin color, sexual orientation or what have you. Society as a whole becomes divided and fragmented.
Tensions ensue and, needless to say, any social progress becomes difficult of accomplishment in this type of environment.
Yes, but what does “echo chamber” mean exactly?
Oh, an echo chamber is originally a hollow room (chamber) used to produce reverberated sounds (echoes), usually for recording purposes. In this enclosed room, if you make a sound, this sound will, like a ball bouncing off the walls and the floor, reverberate, producing echoes. In other words, you hear the same sound again and again.
Hence and therefore in a political echo chamber, you hear the same arguments over and over again, ad infinitum.
Or ad nauseam because, as a matter of fact, echo-chamber arguments can become nauseating.
-Echo Chamber?
But…
But what happens when a person is exposed to ideas that lie outside of the various “bubbles” or “echo chambers” that exist? What happens when, by accident, they hear something, or read something as resonates with them? What then?
Stepping outside the echo chamber…
You step outside the echo chamber.
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They will discover something unique and special.
And they will become excited.
They will try to find other information that would confirm their beliefs and associations, and they would go through all sorts of websites and news organizations to do so. But they will be disappointed. They won’t find much of anything.
That is because the information that lies outside of those approved narratives are very difficult to find, and very difficult to accept.
And this will cause them to question themselves, and when they mention their discoveries to others, they will be shocked at how contrary others are regarding their discoveries. And while they might go along with the opinions of others, for the most part they will keep their thoughts to themselves.
And start putting the puzzle pieces together.
Putting the pieces together.
Normally, it’s difficult to see patterns in all the jumbled mess. You see an incident here, and then hear of another one there, and then you remember an article from a few years back, and then this other event reminds you of…
You start putting things together.
But it is only when you put a large number of events together, and compare it with historical incidents, do you actually start to see what is going on…
In the examples above, you can see that that study of the issues (per article) goes far, far beyond the typical three paragraph narrative so popular in the various news outlets. It involves a study of all elements of the issue, and then places them in context.
This is what discernment is.
A detailed study of an issue within context.
But how do you do that?
How do you put the pieces together?
The way to put all the pieces together is to use history, education, the known sciences and then work outward. I suppose that politics is as good as a place (as any) to start with.
It usually starts where two or twelve elements of “news” seemingly resembles something else. It could be an item, a person, a statement, or an event from history.
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The discerning individual would see that while the situation is different, there are fundamental elements that stay the same. Such as (for instance) how the United States today closely resembles the fall of Rome…
When read together, striking parallels emerge -- between our failings and the failings that destroyed the Roman Republic. As with Rome just before the Republic's fall, America has seen:
1 -- Staggering Increase in the Cost of Elections, with Dubious Campaign Funding Sources: Our 2012 election reportedly cost $3 billion. All of it was raised from private sources - often creating the appearance, or the reality, that our leaders are beholden to special interest groups. During the late Roman Republic, elections became staggeringly expensive, with equally deplorable results. Caesar reportedly borrowed so heavily for one political campaign, he feared he would be ruined, if not elected.
2 -- Politics as the Road to Personal Wealth: During the late Roman Republic period, one of the main roads to wealth was holding public office, and exploiting such positions to accumulate personal wealth. As Lessig notes: Congressman, Senators and their staffs leverage their government service to move to private sector positions - that pay three to ten times their government compensation. Given this financial arrangement, "Their focus is therefore not so much on the people who sent them to Washington. Their focus is instead on those who will make them rich." (Republic Lost)
3 -- Continuous War: A national state of security arises, distracting attention from domestic challenges with foreign wars. Similar to the late Roman Republic, the US - for the past 100 years -- has either been fighting a war, recovering from a war, or preparing for a new war: WW I (1917-18), WW II (1941-1945), Cold War (1947-1991), Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam (1953-1975), Gulf War (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing), and Iraq (2003-2011). And, this list is far from complete.
4 -- Foreign Powers Lavish Money/Attention on the Republic's Leaders: Foreign wars lead to growing influence, by foreign powers and interests, on the Republic's political leaders -- true for Rome and true for us. In the past century, foreign embassies, agents and lobbyists have proliferated in our nation's capital. As one specific example: A foreign businessman donated $100 million to Bill Clinton's various activities. Clinton "opened doors" for him, and sometimes acted in ways contrary to stated American interests and foreign policy.
5 -- Profits Made Overseas Shape the Republic's Internal Policies: As the fortunes of Rome's aristocracy increasingly derived from foreign lands, Roman policy was shaped to facilitate these fortunes. American billionaires and corporations increasingly influence our elections. In many cases, they are only nominally American - with interests not aligned with those of the American public. For example, Fox News is part of international media group News Corp., with over $30 billion in revenues worldwide. Is Fox News' jingoism a product of News Corp.'s non-U.S. interests?
6 -- Collapse of the Middle Class: In the period just before the Roman Republic's fall, the Roman middle class was crushed -- destroyed by cheap overseas slave labor. In our own day, we've witnessed rising income inequality, a stagnating middle class, and the loss of American jobs to overseas workers who are paid less and have fewer rights.
7 -- Gerrymandering: Rome's late Republic used various methods to reduce the power of common citizens. The GOP has so effectively gerrymandered Congressional districts that, even though House Republican candidates received only about 48 percent of the popular vote in the 2012 election -- they ended up with the majority (53 percent) of the seats.
8 -- Loss of the Spirit of Compromise: The Roman Republic, like ours, relied on a system of checks and balances. Compromise is needed for this type of system to function. In the end, the Roman Republic lost that spirit of compromise, with politics increasingly polarized between Optimates (the rich, entrenched elites) and Populares (the common people). Sound familiar? Compromise is in noticeably short supply in our own time also. For example, "There were more filibusters between 2009 and 2010 than there were in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s combined."
As Benjamin Franklin observed, we have a Republic -- but only if we can keep it.
-8 striking parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire
And one you come up with a theory, it becomes easier and easier to find details that fit in with your premise. And also… ones that do not.
But you know, not everyone will welcome your conclusions.
New ideas = Bad
Most people do not want their illusions shattered. They want to believe what they believe. And even if what they believe is something horrible and disgusting, they will hold on to it like tar on a baby.
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Just because you see something, doe not mean that the rest of the world can see it as well. The fact is, that you have now walked through a very special door. It is the door of the outcast, and the pariah. And as such, your happiness will be wholly dependent on how quiet you are and whether or not you “upset the apple cart”.
To spoil or disrupt a plan or arrangement.
This great idiom originated as "upset the cart" and it has been in use since Roman times which has similar meaning: "mess up the whole thing" though, the exact dates of this phrase were from the late 1700s.
So, this idiom is originally derived from a Roman phrase "upset the cart" and it is to be believed that later, it becomes "upset the applecart".
Source: theidioms.com
But that doesn’t matter.
You just need to understand things as you see fit. it is not your job, or business or concern what others might think.
So you fill in the blank spots.
And a full pattern emerges.
Yes.
As you work the various puzzle pieces, you will start to see an entire puzzle. And things will start to make a lot of sense to you.
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Of course there will always be areas that you will not be able to “fill in the blacks” with. And there will always be questions about the picture that you are able to compile and compose.
I advise keeping your discoveries to yourself. You certainly don’t need any aggravation. Right?
The trolls, whether paid (many actually are), ‘bots, bored youth, or just assholes, will do everything they can to disparage your ideas, your thoughts and your presentation.
One of the biggest things that they will try to do (and it is often successful) is to argue that you don’t have all the information…
The “you don’t have enough information” argument.
Oh those funny and silly guys; always trying to yell down and disparage that which they do not understand. Here is one of their techniques. And, it is, indeed a powerful technique. This is quite often used by disinformation organizations, as well as individuals. Here, in this method, they avoid the key and important issues. They do this by requiring opponents to solve the incident or question at hand completely. They demand that this be done immediately, at hand, on the spot. It is absolutely ridiculous. But that is what happens. It is rude; impossible to comply to, and insulting. But is is a very common techniques.
Here is an example for this. It was found in an Internet debate over a subject inquiring “how the Universe came to be”:
“…It can also be noted that evolutionists only discuss this subject in the broadest terms. If evolution is true, why don’t they give us answers to our many questions? Where did all the 90-plus elements (iron, barium, calcium, silver, nickel, neon, chlorine, etc.) come from? How do you explain the precision in the design of the elements, with increasing numbers of electrons in orbit around the nucleus? Where did the thousands of compounds we find in the world come from—carbon dioxide, sodium chloride, calcium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, oxalic acid, chlorophyll, sucrose, hydrogen sulfide, benzene, aluminum silicate, mercaptans, propane, silicon dioxide, boric acid, etc. come from?
This list continues from the macro of “where did the Universe come from”, if not from (the huge) divine intervention down to the (smallest detail) the micro of every detail of minutia of the Universe.
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In reality, as in my case, no one ever has “complete solutions”, we can only provide glimpses into specific details or a very broad overview of a given situation, abet in a blurred and unfocused manner. This is, such as what I provide here. You will find no exact and greatly detailed solutions or details, as that would thwart 99% of the core readership and simply regulate this manuscript into the heaps of obscurity.
Ah, but it’s just a tool of argument.
Do not get caught up in the techniques of disparagement
Just don’t. For you own sanity. Don’t.
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You will have more than enough information.
And with the information that you have, you will be able to see other trends and other patterns and other information.
And as you do so…
You can pretty much expect people to attack you, your thoughts, and your conclusions. And they will use all sorts of techniques.
Seriously, that is the reason behind this. It is to make you doubt your ideas, your conclusions and your process.
So, for the purposes of YOUR sanity, keep in mind…
You will never have the full picture.
You never will.
So forget about perfection. It’s an unobtainable objective.
Perfection is not possible. Perfection is an age-old myth that creates more pain than joy, more confusion than calm, more angst than creative productivity. Being perfect is a farcical fantasy that distracts us from being present. Constantly driving toward perfection creates a sort of black and white, all or nothing perspective that invariably leaves us colorblind. We are forced to forget the beauty that lies between failure and perfection if we think in such binary terms, if we uphold one way of being as the gold standard… a myopic worldview bound to disappoint.
Perfection is not possible.
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Why Perfection is Not Possible
Striving, in and of itself, can be chock-full of rewarding jubilant health. It’s when we chase perfection with tunnel vision as if it’s the only option that we drain our life force. When we strive for excellence while acknowledging our humanity we are less likely to plummet into a dark depression if things don’t turn out as we originally planned. It is maladaptive perfectionism that sets the stage for inevitable failure whereas adaptive standards for high achievement can result in productivity and a measured response when ideals are not attained.
Finding the beauty in not being perfect, or in imperfection, means we are taking an active role in changing the polarizing zeitgeist. The roots of perfectionistic characteristics begin to loosen as we explore basic aspects of identity, such as self-esteem, groundedness, and what it means to be imperfect. We dare to step into our own humanity and experiment with what it feels like to walk away from self-doubt and loathing. Striving toward understanding who we are and why we are who we are might reveal pockets of enlivening imperfection—a textured humanness that is refreshingly real and surprisingly interesting. It is a revolutionary act to embrace who we are, just as we are.
-Dr. Jessica Zucker is a clinical psychologist specializing in women’s reproductive and maternal mental health. She has a Los Angeles based practice and is a prolific writer and speaker in the areas of women’s health.
So…
What you need to do is be able to see the patterns in what ever you have stitched and pieced together. Then, by using personal examples, or historical examples, you will be able to see the big picture.
And it will be a glorious moment.
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And you shouldn’t need to worry about what others might think. They are not you. They have their own ideas, ways of doing things, and thoughts. There might be a singular issue (like a swear word, for instance), or a misunderstanding regarding their religion (“blowing up mud huts” might anger a person from a poor, rural nation), or some other trigger often hidden deep down inside.
So stop allowing others to define your reality, or control your thoughts.
They will not be able to see what you can do.
Here’s my “rule of thumb”…
If they can correctly guess the color of your underwear, they are permitted to hear your thoughts. If not, then they are not worthy.
Remember…
The world is filled with all sorts of people. Everyone is different. And that is a good, no it is a great thing.
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Know what you can control and what you cannot.
If you are unable to correctly guess the color of the underwear of the person that you are talking with, then they are not deserving of your counsel.
It’s a pretty good rule, I think.
It’s important to be open minded to thoughts and ideas, for that is how you are able to expand your picture and your ideas. And that is what you WANT. What you don’t want is to waste your time on the echo-chamber narratives that have saturated the various media outlets. For not only do they irritate, but they distract and waste your time.
Over the years, I have found that when it comes to being receptive to ideas and perspectives other than their own, most people gravitate toward one of these tendencies:
A need for the opinions of others. These individuals have not yet learned to value their own ideas and viewpoints. They are especially vulnerable to being swayed by others. When asked, they have a hard time expressing their own beliefs and convictions.
A rejection of the opinions of others. People in this category are generally high achievers who have worked very hard to get where they are in life. For some they view not having all the answers as a weakness, and their ego guards against this by rejecting the ideas of others. For others their egos are so big, they think they know it all, and just aren’t open to the ideas of others. If they do listen, they place little value on what’s being said.
An interest in the opinions of others. Striking a balance between those who rely too heavily on the ideas of others and those who reject the opinions of others, these individuals welcome collaboration and actively seek it out. They understand the benefits of the wisdom that comes from the life experiences of others. These people would participate well on any type of team.
What’s important to realize is that whatever your natural tendency may be, it is possible to learn to appreciate the ideas of others. When you do, you’ll find that your ability to envision and implement new ideas will flourish and you’ll build stronger relationships in the process. Let’s take a look at how this works.
-Be Open to the Ideas of Others
Not everyone will understand, though…
Some will use techniques to drive your off track.
I don’t know why this it, but it’s a common enough “thing”. There are others that will purposefully argue that you are missing a “key element” of the picture and that you need to to be able to reach the kinds of conclusions that you are working towards.
They might use “Gaslighting”…
“Gaslighting or gas-lighting is a form of psychological abuse in which a victim is manipulated into doubting their own memory, perception, and sanity.
Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics.
Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.”
Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by. Here is a response to an article I found on the Internet regarding witnesses recanting their testimony in a famous Brazilian UFO case:
“This is absolutely preposterous. The amount of evidence about the Varginha Case, including thousands of hours of investigations by a few dozen men, and hundreds interviews with witnesses, such as the military who did the capture, guarantee otherwise completely. You are basing most of the story on Badan Palhares account. Amazing. Would you expect that he confirms that he dealt with alien corpses? Come on?!”
This comment came from an editor of Brazilian UFO magazine. Does he have an agenda to keep the question of this case open?
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There’s often a reason behind all of this.
And in itself, the arguments against what picture that you are trying to piece together might themselves open you up to some very interesting venues of investigation. You never know.
There are many, many arguments that a person can use, and in general the best thing is to keep your thoughts to yourself and live life as the best you can. Just know that many others have agendas, and thoughts and often you are unaware of them. Just like they are unaware of the color of your underwear.
“When a wise man points out the moon, an imbecile examines the finger.”
-Confucius
In all cases remember what you are doing, and why. Accept information as best you can and be open to new ideas. Try your best to de-emotionalize the content and just look at things as objectively as possible, and don’t get too caught up in all the distortions, lies, and confusion. Life is far too short.
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So with all of that in mind, let’s get to our final conclusion…
Conclusion
The key to understanding your reality and your place in this universe is to [1] observe and [2] read everything. Be like a sponge and get as much information as you can, and when you are ready, start putting the pieces together. At first it will look like a big mess, but you will start to sift though the lies and get to the nuggets, and then you can start fitting the puzzle pieces together.
Look for coincidences.
Six brand new, never before seen, viruses that attack livestock were discovered in China during a two year time period. Very unusual. Very odd.
Drones were spreading the lethal virus(es). Very, very odd.
A bat-coin minted and released in America just when a “bat originated” COVID-19 is raging though China as a pandemic. Unusual.
A COVID-19 license plate in an abandoned BMW at an airport BEFORE the COVID-19 even existed. Very incredulously odd.
You look for strange coincidences that point to other suggested events.
And most ESPECIALLY look for things that have zero coverage. Things that have “dropped off the radar”. Things that the PTB want to keep suppressed.
The Oxia Palus facility.
Don’t worry too much what other people think or say. Just gather the information as you feel the need. And look way outside of the normal venues. remember that long before the “Alt-right” came into existence it was the Drudge Report that discovered the “blue stain” on the dress of Bill Clinton’s Intern.
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Remember, that we are all on the same side. Left, right, or center and anything in between. Most of us want justice, to be left alone to live life as we choose, and hate bad people doing bad things. It’s that we just differ in what information that we have at our fingertips.
Good and happy hunting.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my Life and Happiness Index here…
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After a solid year of [1] hate-China spewing from all my feeds, [2] comments that I have made mysteriously being erased, and [3] the most contentious articles being flooded with “likes”… you have to wonder if you are in some kind of fake-mirror world.
It really seems that way.
We, as humans, have feelings and thoughts, ideas, and relationships. We have emotions, both good and bad, and we have desires, goals and yearnings. Yet, if we try to participate in any of the American forums… our opinions are often scrubbed and erased.
I’m not talking about swearing. Nor am I talking about being racist or making threats. I am talking about saying something innocuous like “I like hamburgers”, and then finding that you offended a vegan, who immediately pressed the “alert” button.
Yes, “safe” areas have sprung up all over the internet where people of “like minds” can communicate and put forth their opinions. Such as “Gab”. But even there, you risk banishment if your comments do not fit the appropriate target audience in the associated “news” venue.
Venue Example
Association
Non-compliance result
salon.com
Alt-Left
Ban
Yahoo.com
Mainstream
Ban
freerepublic.com
Alt-Right
Ban
Table of the three major venues for American discussion.
It’s pretty much evidence that people are being put into nice tidy boxes based upon their thoughts.
And this, boys and girls, are how governments isolate, control and manipulate people. Which should give everyone reason to pause and think.
Historically, this has resulted in people's names going onto lists. And then later on, the police and military rounding up people on those lists, and doing very, very bad things to them.
Now, I know it’s hard to absorb if you are right now sitting in the middle of all this. So, instead of looking at the American media reality, maybe take a gander at another nation.
Like India…
If you read (for example) the Indian news media, you would be convinced that India is ready to invade China, and walk straight into Shanghai and no one can stop them. If you read Alex Jones or Hall Turner, you will be convinced that Donald Trump will win next weeks election in a landslide, and if you read CNN you will be convinced of the absolute opposite. Nothing is moderate or neutral. It’s all just nonsense.
Or is it really?
Are we really reading “news articles” and listening to the “comments” by others like ourselves? Or, as I believe, we are reading “fake news” which are really articles designed to manipulate, with comments and opinions and “likes” generated by ‘bots and software algorithms.
No longer “news”; a reporting of events.
Let’s look at the morning Drudge Headliners.
Drudge Report 29OCT20
Instead, of “news”, we now see the generation of “articles of manipulation”. These articles are fully intended to change how the reader thinks. They are not designed to inform. You know, like these…
Oh, every six months of so, someone writes a book, draws a cartoon, makes a statement, writes a poem, and fundamentalist islamic's are enraged and demand death! Is this news?
Oh yeah. This debit clock thingy has been in the read for decades now. Why keep track? No one really cares, at least those who have the power to do anything about it.
The police shoot and kill a black man, and the black folk in ghettos riot. Black folk riot. It's what they do.
It's sort of a cause and effect kind of thing. But is this news? You all ever been to a black ghetto in Philly? Do you know him? Is Pennsylvania on your radar screen?
Seriously?
I think that the real interest in an article like this is how any one can train monkeys to do anything. Than how to create a for-profit model around it.
Of course Drudge must have the obligatory anti-China article. It's a thing in America, don't you know.
So any-day-now Beijing is gonna invade Taiwan! Taiwan is a state of China. Just like Texas is a state within America. The Taiwanese all have Chinese passports, speak the Chinese language, learn Chinese history, and so forth.
It's sort of like "any day now, Washington DC will invade Texas." Silly, I know. But the American audience has been so enormously dumbed-down that they just are not able to discern how ignorant they are.
To me, it looks a lot like a science fiction horror flick where the people haven’t a clue as to how badly they are being manipulated.
America today.
Let’s look at this.
Let’s look at (what I like to call) Internet Forum Manipulation…
Internet Forum Manipulation
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all innocently comment on articles that we read on the Internet, and then our thoughts can be read by others. Others could read our thoughts and there would be a free exchange of ideas and thoughts. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice…
Not so. It turns out that the control of thoughts and ideas is one of the most important tools in the arsenal of power and control. (Not to mention world-line alteration and redirection.)
As such, those in power, whether rich, wealthy, powerful or in government are totally desirous of harnessing this avenue to serve their own purposes.
It’s a horrible reality.
There are several techniques for the control and manipulation of an internet forum no matter what, or who is on it. We will go over each technique and demonstrate that only a minimal number of operatives can be used to eventually and effectively gain a control of a ‘uncontrolled forum.’
Professor identifies “moderate” websites. The only thing is that the websites that he lists are all “Alt-Left” websites. Which is, of course, propaganda. Is this what is being taught in schools today? White is black. Happy is sad. Good is bad. Right is wrong?
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Let’s look at some of the techniques that those in power use to control us.
PTB - The Powers that Be.
The Oligarchy - The top 1% of the richest in a society.
The deep state - The long-employed unelected government employees.
The elected - The visible face of the government farce.
The caretakers - Actually, they are not involved at this level.
Forum Sliding
If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum – it can be quickly removed from public view by ‘forum sliding.’
A very popular technique on Freerepublic.com.
In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to ‘age.’ Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a ‘forum slide.’ The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public.
To trigger a ‘forum slide’ and ‘flush’ the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then ‘replying’ to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list (“bump to the top” or BTTT), and the critical posting ‘slides’ down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings.
By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items.
Altering Opinion & Reviews
Your opinion does not matter. If it did, then you would be able to speak freely and without fear.
There would be no such thing as “freedom of speech zones”, and “no hate” campuses.
The days of the first amendment protections are over. The first amendment only applies to those who regurgitate the narrative as defined by the government, or their owners; the oligarchy.
Here, in this section we discuss just some of the techniques that those in power use to suppress your thoughts, opinions and activities. The reader should be well advised that it is terribly out of date and obsolete. Such is the situation in the United States today.
Who is really in control? Are you?
“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation … The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.
They practically control both parties … [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country.
They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”
– John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925
It is common knowledge that businesses and even individuals can alter the behavior of those on the Internet. But what is not so well known is that the Government takes this kind of manipulation very seriously and is doing their best to replicate it.
Consider these examples that have somehow become public knowledge.
Facebook Manipulation
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
-George Orwell
Facebook Quietly Admits to Censoring information regarding the WikiLeaks DNC Links, but doesn’t say why.
Well, we know why.
Facebook and the DNC are partners in the collection of raw data of American citizens. I am sure that their efforts are quite extensive, and because of this, I shall only offer one or two examples of their efforts. If the reader chooses to disbelieve my conclusions in this matter, it will make no difference to me. So believe what you want.
Previously, Facebook was discovered to have removed a Live video of Philando Castille dying, and posts of the Bastille Day aftermath were scrubbed from the newswire.
Its news bar has also come under fire for being biased.
Facebook can call the issues disparate, but they’re not — not to users. At some point, the ignorance and blind claims of ‘damn that algorithm’ have to end. If Facebook wants us to turn to it for news and treat it seriously, then it has to be much more open.
Afterall, no one want’s to be spoon fed censored material.
The WikiLeaks link issue has reportedly been fixed, which is great — but also not really the point.
The fact links to the archive was blocked at all suggests there’s a very tight reign on what’s allowed on Facebook across the board, and that’s a problem.
Americans are both figuratively and physically tethered to a unified way of thinking. As time progresses, this system becomes stronger, more invasive and all encompassing.
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Not to mention, that this manipulation can be directed from outside the organization as well, such as from government agencies.
“More than 1,800 requests were so-called “emergency disclosures,” which are granted to law enforcement on a case-by-case basis, and are a subject of some controversy. They include, for instance, requests to suspend someone’s account, as was the case with Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old mother who was shot and killed by police in 2016, after she reportedly threatened officers with a weapon. She was broadcasting her confrontation on Facebook, and police asked the company to shut down her account, saying that other users were egging her on.”
-Hanna Kozlowska in the article titled “Facebook is giving the US government more and more data” (I guess that the First Amendment no longer has any validity.)
Google Manipulation
Google could influence who voters pick to be America’s next president. This is the conclusion that research psychologist Robert Epstein came to after studying the demographics and algorisms used by the software firm. Writing for Politico Magazine, Epstein, contends the Google search engine behemoth (as well as others) has;
"…amassed far more power to control elections … to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs … than any company in history has ever had."
He continues;
"America’s next president could be eased into office not just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one — except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers — would know how this was accomplished,"
According to Epstein, Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more and even up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.
Even if we ignore that voting is the imposition of a majority’s will on a minority, facilitated by wielding the violence of the state. Even if we disregard that voting only allows its participants the choice between two entrenched, corrupt, archaic political parties (while third party and independent voices are intentionally blocked, ridiculed and plowed under.)
We must then begin to confront the fact that electronic voting is such an openly obvious fraud to any “democracy” that would insanely choose to use it.
To have an unverifiable invisible counting mechanism, a proprietary, secret software and hardware platform, a meaningless archiving and recount system, a closed-source software system that cannot be audited and inspected is essentially and deliberately the worst possible implementation.
Not only does our country have the obvious electronic voting problems to deal with, but we have also implemented electronic voting in the most counter-intuitive, corrupt and problematically designed manner that it can possibly be implemented.
Epstein points to one telling experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups in which search rankings favored either Candidate A, Candidate B or neither candidate.
In the experiment, the participants were given brief descriptions of each candidate and then asked how much they liked and trusted each candidate and whom they would vote for.
Then they were allowed up to 15 minutes to conduct online research on the candidates using a Google-like search engine. Each group had access to the same 30 search results, but the ordering of the results differed among the three groups.
When our participants were done searching, “opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings,” he writes. “Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably.”
"Perhaps the most effective way to wield political influence in today’s high-tech world is to donate money to a candidate and then to use technology to make sure he or she wins…"
- Robert Epstein
It is interesting to note that while Google had been extremely active in attempting to manipulate the 2016 election in favor of their preferred candidate Hillary Clinton, they ultimately failed.
It was not because of their techniques however, but rather due to their expectation that the race would be close with Hillary leading by five points. Their manipulations did not take into account other scenarios.
Google is facing new scrutiny in the wake of revelations that it stores users’ location data even when “Location History” is turned off.
In the past, Google quietly edited its description of the practice on its own website—while continuing said practice—to clarify that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.”
As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press, Google was sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC urged the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree with the agency.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in San Francisco, attorneys representing a man named Napoleon Patacsil argued that Google is violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
The lawsuit seeked class-action status, and it would include both an “Android Class” and “iPhone Class” for the potential millions of people in the United States with such phones who turned off their Location History and nonetheless had it recorded by Google.
Further Reading
Google’s new scheme to connect online to offline shopping scrutinized
Also on August 17, attorneys from the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in a sternly worded three-page letter to the FTC that Google’s practices are in clear violation of the 2011 settlement with the agency.
In that settlement, Google agreed that it would not misrepresent anything related to "(1) the purposes for which it collects and uses covered information, and (2) the extent to which consumers may exercise control over the collection, use, or disclosure of covered information.
"Until the Associated Press story on August 13, Google's policy simply stated: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."
This turns out to not be true.
Amazon Manipulation
Sorry, but I am going to use an example from politics. Hopefully this one (being so dated) will not be offensive to my readership. Just remember people, politics in America is just a big game of "bread and circuses for the masses". All the participants work together.
Amazon can and will change and manipulate reviews for political reasons. With the proper amount of money, they will do so for ANY reason. (And, we all know, that the United States government has a bottomless supply of money…)
Let’s go back to later 2016, early 2017…
Hillary 2016 Book – Stronger Together
Here’s a funny story that wasn’t reported in the mainstream media. It took place during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald trump. Both had written books to promote their causes and beliefs. However, Hillary Clinton’s book tanked and was poorly received. Here’s a screen shot;
Hillary Clinton’s book was just not selling.
.
As The New York Times reported at the time, the book was a disaster. Both Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, have promoted the book on the campaign trail, but the sales figure, which tallies about 80 percent of booksellers nationwide and does not include e-books, firmly makes the book what the publishing industry would consider a flop.
“Stronger Together,” whose cover shows Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine waving, arrived closer to Election Day than most of these types of books. Named after the campaign’s slogan, “Stronger Together” offers readers, according to the book jacket,
“specific and practical solutions, while also articulating a bold and expansive vision of change and renewal.”
Its roughly 250 pages intersperse bullet-point policy ideas, like “launch a national initiative for suicide prevention” and “humanely address the Central American migrant crisis,” with photographs of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine on the campaign trail, charts in the campaign’s signature chunky font and highlights from Mrs. Clinton’s speeches.
Unfortunately the book was a flop.
No one wanted it, and the one’s whom actually bought the book gave it negative reviews. So, as with everything else in this ‘new normal rigged’ world, something had to be done and (Washington Post) WaPo-owner Jeff Bezos’ Amazon reviews appear to have been ‘tweaked’.
They apparently changed the reviews and the stats to reflect a much more favorable view of the book.
Indeed, more than doubling Hillary’s top reviews.
But, as WND.com explains, Amazon’s steps to ‘fix’ Hillary’s book reviews has resulted in 5-star ratings with scathingly negative comments. (I guess that is what happens with the literate masses object to such blatant manipulation.)
If you can’t even win when the rules are changed in your favor, things must be REALLY bad.
That’s how it looks for Hillary Clinton’s new 2016 campaign book, “Stronger Together,” co-authored with running mate Tim Kaine. WND reported this strange turn of events when the book was being savaged on Amazon.com with negative reviews, with 81 percent one-star ratings and an average of only 1.7.
Of course denials were everywhere, and the Clinton organized shrills quickly lashed out at “trolls” they said were criticizing the book only because they oppose the Democrat’s presidential candidacy.
It’s really quite funny.
Once it became news what Amazon was doing, other purchasers of the book had to chime in. WND previously reported there were more than 1,200 reviews, and the number grew to than 2,000.
Zero Public interest did not fit the Public Narrative.
.
However, that just couldn’t possibly stand, and by Thursday afternoon, the amount was yet again culled (again!) until there were only 255 reviews, with many of the most critical reviews removed by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, which created an army of 20 reporters and researchers to investigate the life of Donald Trump.
Victory for the Clinton book, however, remains out of grasp, with the negative, one-star responses, outnumbering positive, five-star responses nearly 2-1. The one-star ratings Thursday were 62 percent, to 35 percent for five-star ratings.
And, of course, knowing the DNC manipulation of all their reviews, the book reviewers simply punched the five-star button then made harshly critical condemnations of the book and Hillary Clinton.
That way their opinions were still posted…
"I didn’t buy this book or read this book, but I have read the reviews, and enjoyed hours of entertaining, fun filled reading, expressing the TRUTH, about a crooked, lying, corrupt, terminally ill Presidential candidate, who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, and who is about the steal the Presidency with the use of election fraud. 10 Stars to the authors of these reviews. Proof that not only are Amazon.com shoppers of superior intelligence, but thye call it like they see it…. Amazon shows this as a verified purchase, when I didn’t buy the book … how fun!”
- From suz702, who posted a five-star ranking
On and on, there’s pages of this stuff…
“the book confirms the hrc is a racist. every matter in her mind is about racies (sic). but reality is she does not care about the black people. just look at the ever increasing trend of black population that are relying on welfare since the obama rule. the fundermental (sic) cause of this result is the fact that lefties of the country favor the riches by allowing outsourcing jobs to other countries. black people should wake up, stop supporting dnc and hrc, who is effectively a puppet of the elite class. the book is simply a propaganda.”
- Ian alexander, another five-star reviewer said.
Just two days earlier, out of 1,244 reviews, 81 percent were one-star and 16 percent five-star. The book plunged from No. 840 earlier this week to No. 1,538 on Thursday. It was No. 5 in the subcategory “Books-Politics & Social Sciences-Politics & Government-Elections & Political Process-Leadership.”
The reviews dripped sarcasm, both before the Amazon edits to the reviews and after.
“I bought this thinking it would be a how-to book. I wanted ‘How to set up your own Foundation for fun and profit.’ Also, would like to have seen a chapter on ‘Ten easy steps to setting up your own secure server in a bathroom,'”
-Elaine.
And, here’s another…
“Not only no but hell no. I’d rather read Mein Kampf,”
- Anthony Messina.
Chjhores said:
“Pre-ordered an autographed copy but had to return it after this week’s announcement as I was worried it was contaminated with pneumonia bacteria. I didn’t want to end up exposed to the illness like her grandkids in Chelsea’s apartment she was playing with on 9/11 after she collapsed, or the little girl she was hugging in the street afterwards. Thought about ordering the Kindle version but I thought it might open my device up to being hacked by communist countries. I wasn’t too surprised to see Tim Kaine on the front cover giving the traditional National Socialist salute (“Heil Hitler!”), I felt it fitting.
Strongly recommended for those who believe the USA isn’t anything special and should be more like the peaceful utopias of North Korea, Iran, or Cuba.”
And kpm said,
“Imagine my dismay when key parts of her life were omitted, would have made for far better reading if she had included all of the below starting with flunking the D.C. Bar Exam to:
Was removed from her House Judiciary Committee staffer job because of incompetence and lying.
The Whitewater scandal.
Married a serial liar and cheater, who occasionally had sexual encounters with nonconsenting partners.
Lied about “sniper fire” in an attempt to simulate exposure to danger in a war zone.
The subject of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that led to the impeachment and disbarment of her husband
Took crockery, furniture, artwork and other items from the White House — had to return and/or pay for them.
Said “what difference, at this point, does it make” about four brave people killed in Libya as a direct result of her failure to protect them on the anniversary of 9/11.
Totally ignored the structure and rules for the handling of sensitive national security information.
Amassed a personal fortune with “speaking fees” and payments from private sector political donors and foreign governments into transparent “foundations” in obvious exchange for future political favor.”
Nearly 1,500 people found that review “helpful.”
But more than 3,400 found helpful the comments from Daniel B.:
“I was going to read this book … I really was. But just as I got started, I found myself under sniper fire, passed out, and fell and hit my head. After that I got double vision and had to wear glasses that were so damn thick I couldn’t even see to read. As if that wasn’t enough, I then had an allergic reaction to something and started coughing so hard I spit out what looked like a couple of lizard’s eyeballs, my limbs locked up, and I passed out and fell down again, waking up only to find out I had been diagnosed with pneumonia 2 days earlier. Somehow I managed to power through it all, but it’s a good thing I was able to make a small fortune on this random small trade in the commodities market (cattle futures or some such thing) and then, miracle of all miracles, a few banks offered me a few million to just talk to their employees for a few minutes – and all that really helped out because I swear I was dead broke and couldn’t figure out how I was gonna come up with the 6 bucks to pay for this book, let alone pay the $1,500 for my health insurance this month. I still want to read it, but, honestly, what difference at this point does it make? I hear it sucks anyway.”
Clinton’s 2015 book, “Hard Choices,” received an average of only three stars despite garnering 2,460 customer reviews.
Here’s some screen captures of the “Stronger Together” reviews, because by the time this manuscript is released all of these reviews will be erased to fit the new narrative.
Of course Bezo would manipulate the data his company controls. It is in his own best interests. WND also has documented Bezos’ interest in the election outcome, with the Post’s army of investigators looking into Trump’s life.
As WND reported this summer, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward told the National Association of Realtors Convention in Washington Wednesday:
“There’s a lot we don’t know. We have 20 people working on Trump. We’re going to do a book. We’re doing articles about every phase of his life.”
Woodward said he has been investigating Trump’s real-estate deals in New York. Why a book on Trump and not Hillary and her 22 biggest scandals?
“[W]e have years and years of reporting on Hillary Clinton to draw from, including her last presidential campaign, her time as secretary of state, and her position as U.S. senator, Because Trump’s involvement in political life is far more limited, the Post newsroom decided to embark on a book as a special project. In order to complete the book in a timely fashion, reporters from throughout the newsroom have been assigned to work for a brief period on particular aspects of his life and career.”
Coratti explained.
The one-star reviews for the Clinton book also continued. All were dripping with sarcasm. Just Thursday afternoon, Jimsdun wrote:
“Well I’m disappointed. This doesn’t tell me how to create a faux charitable foundation and then use it for money laundering.”
Hillary 2017 Book – What Happened
You would think that Amazon would know better than to repeat their manipulative techniques, but obviously they do not read alternative media. They are still drinking off the teat of mainstream media and are completely unaware of the public knowledge of their actions.
In what many have dubbed a flagrant intervention by Amazon itself to seemingly boost the rating of Hillary Clinton’s new book “What Happened“, the Telegraph first reported, and subsequently many others observed first hand, that Amazon has been monitoring and deleting 1-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book “which was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released.”
Reviews of What Happened have been mixed, with some accusing Clinton of using it as an opportunity to blame others, such as former FBI head James Comey, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, social media and pretty much everything else, for her failure, rather than herself.
Even The New York Times, which supported Clinton’s campaign, wrote that the book is “a score-settling jubilee”.
What is fascinating, is how few one-star reviews have remained on the website amid reports and screen-grabs showing that reviewers used the space to criticize the former First Lady. One 1-star review, which remained on the website earlier, read:
"Read all the promotional excerpts, which combined come close to book length – pretty good novel. It is fiction, isn't it? Surely, someone is playing a joke."
"Picked this book up at Wal-Mart out of sheer morbid curiosity. Returned it, claiming I bought the wrong book"
While this is not the first time Amazon has intervened to “adjust” the ratings of its products, in November negative comments under a book by anti-Trump broadcaster Megyn Kelly appeared to be removed by the retailer, it has rarely “adjusted” reviews of such a prominent product so publicly.
"In the case of a memoir, the subject of the book is the author and their views. It’s not our role to decide what a customer would view as helpful or unhelpful in making their decision. We do however have mechanisms in place to ensure that the voices of many do not drown out the voices of a few and we remove customer reviews that violate our community guidelines."
So how does this change reality….
Well just look though the lens of a clock.
And then seven hours later…
What Amazon.com shows as of today 29OCT20;
A best seller!
Yes, it’s a best seller!
Man! If only my writings could become a best seller. What’s her secret? Are her ghost writers all that great. Truthfully, I am terribly jealous.
Hillary Clinton is obviously a well-beloved and liked person, who is an excellent writer and who has made the world a better place for everyone.
Twitter Manipulation
Perhaps one of the most manipulated social media platforms is Twitter. I don’t use it. I signed up for it when it first came out, and then lost interest after two days. That is the sum total of my twitter experience. However, I am an outlier. Others, such as Donald Trump, use it quite frequently.
Let’s look at some of the ways it is manipulated to serve the needs of those in power.
Twitter Manipulation – Shadowbanned
Following the permanent banning of [1] conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from using its service; the [2] suspension of the account of Glenn Reynolds, aka @instapundit and creator of the Instapundit blog, a University of Tennessee law professor and a conservative columnist for USA TODAY; and [3] blocking veteran reporter Mahir Zeynalov after bowing to pressure from Turkish president Erdogan; October 2016 saw the [4] ‘shadowbanning’ of thoughtful – non-violent – twitter-er Scott Adams – the creator of the Dilbert cartoon character.
Scott Adams asked his followers for examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supports in public… which seems to have ‘triggered’ some people and got Adams “Shadowbanned” from Twitter…
“This weekend I got “shadowbanned” on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies, but in a way that is not obvious until you do some digging.
Why did I get shadowbanned?
Beats me.
But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling.
Late last week my Twitter feed was invaded by an army of Clinton trolls (it’s a real thing) leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized.
At around the same time, a bottom-feeder at Slate wrote a hit piece on me that had nothing to do with anything.
Except obviously it was politically motivated.
It was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year.
All things considered, I had a great week. I didn’t realize I was having enough impact to get on the Clinton enemies list. I don’t think I’m supposed to be happy about any of this, but that’s not how I’m wired.”
Twitter Manipulation – Bots
“Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege.
In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty.
Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”
-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958)
In a 2014 report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the social networking site Twitter estimated that more than 23 million of its active user accounts were being run by “bots” — software agents or bits of code that act on their own to respond to news and world events. They interact with real users, never revealing their true nature.
Bots of this kind have been used in efforts to sway public opinion in Central America already for a decade. The hacker and political operative Andrés Sepúlveda claims to have employed armies of bots to influence at least a half-dozen major election results in Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua and elsewhere.
Could the same happen in the U.S. and Europe?
Probably so, given findings on bot activity ahead of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. As part of the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford University researchers looked at some 300,000 Twitter accounts and found that a mere 1 percent of them generated about one third of all tweets relevant to the Brexit debate.
1/3 of all Brexit debate were generated by 1% of accounts.
They believe that many of those accounts were run by bots, because human users could not have sustained such a level of activity without the help of automation. It’s not clear whether the activity swayed the result, though the Leave campaign did generate more automated tweets.
This issue is far bigger than Brexit: The disturbing reality is that computational propaganda is already with us.
In the 2016 U.S. presidential race, Twitter bots support both Trump and Clinton. Bots of various kinds live on cloud servers and operate 24 hours a day, and account for about 50 percent of all activity on the web.
According to the Central American hacker, Sepúlveda, peoples’ opinions tend to be swayed more by views they see as coming spontaneously from real people than by views expressed on television or in newspapers.
Twitter Exposed by the NY Times
Most of the reports regarding the manipulation by the media are buried deep down in the lower nooks and crannies of the mainstream media. Obviously they do not want people to know how they manipulate and conspire to alter viewpoints and opinions. Yet, occasionally an excellent article comes out that just “kicks the door down” regarding just this type of activity.
The New York Times wrote just this kind of article regarding Twitter. It’s worthy of a read. Here is what political commentator Rush Limbaugh (The New York Times Exposes the Fakery of Twitter, on 29JAN18.) has to say about this article;
Folks, I have to tell you something. The New York Times put on their website late Saturday and published in their newspaper on Sunday one of the most phenomenal stories. Now, I know. I am on record as having lost respect for the New York Times, and I am on record as having said many times that my instinctive reaction to anything in the New York Times is not to believe it. However, this story I happen to know is true — and it is phenomenal.
It is a very, very long story. I would recommend that you read this story on your computer so that you can benefit and experience the amazing graphics that they use to illustrate the point. The point of the story is that you, anybody, can buy followers on Twitter and Facebook. You can buy retweets. In other words, you can buy fake human beings and have them reported as following you. The names of people who have done this are listed in the story. They run from actors, to athletes, to pundits, to journalists.
These are bots. You know, I’ve found a lot of people — when I say a Twitter bot or a Facebook bot — say, “What is that?” Well, the easiest way to explain it is it’s just an automatic script. It’s just a little piece of code that is triggered by anything the creator wants it to be triggered by. It’s called a robot or a bot because there’s no real person behind it. It’s a fake. It’s made to look like an actual human being with a Twitter account but no human being exists.
It’s totally fake, made up. Some of these bots are actually based on real people whose identities are stolen and modified ever so slightly so that you wouldn’t notice it to the naked eye. And others are just manufactured out of whole cloth. There’s an actor mentioned here in this story that has 975,000 followers with the vast majority of them unreal. They have been purchased. The number one company selling these bots is right here in West Palm Beach, above Rocco’s Tacos on Clematis Street!
Not to be confused with the Rocco’s Tacos on PGA Boulevard. The Rocco’s Tacos on Clematis Street is where this little guy’s office is. He’s 27 years old. He makes people think that his office is in Manhattan. It’s exceedingly cheap. You can buy 100,000 followers for 10 bucks. The guy has earned six to $7 million selling fake followers. My friends, what this means is that very little is real on Twitter, ditto Facebook when you can buy followers.
Ray Lewis, future Hall of Fame linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens is listed as one who has purchased followers. Now, some of these people are gonna say, “I — I didn’t know! My agent must have done that.” But the bottom line is, you can create bots to do anything. The reason I know this is true is because — as I have shared with you on countless occasions — we have run up against this procedure, this technique trying to damage our business here. And we have found out in our investigational research, it is exactly what happened.
In our case it was 10 people who were flooding our advertisers with massive amounts of emails made to look like it was coming from tens of thousands of people, and it was 10 people creating fake Twitter users, fake customers, fake everything. So it’s one thing to create bots to bombard your enemies. It’s another thing for you to knowingly go out and purchase followers. So what it means is that when you’re on Twitter and you’re looking at somebody that is somewhat known, not the well-known at all, a YouTube star that has millions of followers, the likelihood it is it is nowhere near true.
But look at the influence that it has had. This is why followers are purchased. Look at how often the Drive-By Media quotes Twitter in every story they do. How many times have you heard in reaction to a story “Twitter is melting down”? And you are being led to believe that a story happens, whatever it is, and on Twitter there is this massive reaction to it, either positive or negative — and then you are further led to believe that that story is huge and that millions of Americans have an opinion on it.
And the likelihood is that very little of that is even true. Now, you might be asking, “Why would the New York Times be doing this?” It’s very clear to me. The New York Times had to weigh a couple of things here. On the one hand, these bots can be used to really damage your enemies — business enemies, business opponents, political opponents, political enemies, personal enemies — because you can create fake bots, and you can make it look like a person is literally despised and hated when that person isn’t.
And you can turn it around. You can make it look like a person is universally loved and adored and renowned by gazillions, and that isn’t true. It’s a way to earn fake popularity. Everything is fake on this social media. Not everything. So much of what social media is is fake. So much of it is unearned. So much of it is the result of shortcuts. I’m certain the New York Times did this because they’re fed up with Twitter having more influence than they do. “The New York Times is the paper of record!
“The New York Times is the media of record. Who the hell, what the hell is this Twitter business?” they have probably been saying themselves. I mean, it is a long story. It has many different writers and reporters on it. The evidence is pretty clear. As I say, if I didn’t have firsthand knowledge of this, then I would be highly suspicious of the reporting, of the agenda, the whole narrative. But since I know that this stuff happens. Now, by the way, I have to tell you, I did not know — and I’m happy admitting this.
It makes me sound like I’m a bit naive. I did not know you could buy followers. I didn’t know that. But a lot of people have found out you can buy followers. Do you realize the power of that, folks? Let’s say you’re a B actor or a B pundit, you’re a YouTube star. In reality, you don’t have millions of people watching. Ridiculous! Streaming hasn’t grown that much yet. But yet there’s all these “YouTube stars.” Can I give you some evidence of this? There was some YouTube guy. I forget his name.
I don’t mean this to be critical of the YouTube guy. Please do not misunderstand. But some YouTube guy was creating very clever videos. I don’t even know what the genre was. His first name was Casey. So CNN thought this guy had this massive Millennial audience. And they signed this guy up to start producing videos for them. And they got zilch. The guy finally had to admit that he didn’t know how to do what CNN wanted. He didn’t know how to… So… Well, what the real problem was, the guy didn’t have anywhere near the number of followers and audience that it was made to appear that he did.
See, when did you live by the fake sword, you die by it. When you want fame but it isn’t real, it’s gonna come back and bite you. When you want wealth but that isn’t real — you’ve stolen it, you’ve cheated it, you haven’t earned it — that’s gonna come back and bite you. You want popularity. And everybody on social media does. And this is just one side of social media that’s bad. The other side is just the absolute sewer that it is with the cultural-destroying language and behavior that is used on these social networks, the discourse and all of that.
And then the third element of this is all the lying about what great lives people have and how exciting their lives are. And people read this and think their lives are miserable and they get depressed. I mean, this is… It’s bad all the way around, and now adding this buying followers to it. So how many people have now comfortably gotten a false, totally incorrect opinion of the popularity of certain issues, of the popularity of certain people, when you can go buy it all? And I’m telling you, it’s cheap.
You can buy 100,000 followers for 20 bucks, folks. All you have to do is know where to go do it. Some of these bots are actual real people who do not realize they’re being used. Their e-mail address is changed with one letter. A capital I might become a small I so that nobody would notice it. The user photo might be compressed a little bit so that it looks slight different color but not enough so you wouldn’t notice it without a side-by-side comparison. They make up people and they take actual people and steal their identities, ’cause you have to have some legitimate feel of the follower scam to work.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This Twitter debauchery is even worse. You can kill a stock. You can drive a company’s stock down or the other way with some of these fake bots, the followers and so forth. I’ll tell you what. James O’Keefe, folks, his latest book involving his expose on the political nature Twitter and how they literally ban conservative thought is called American Pravda. It’s been outs a couple of weeks. If you read books, and if you want to learn — at least get a primer on what Twitter really is and how it operates — James O’Keefe, American Pravda.”
Altering Product Reviews
Talk about a glowing review: one five-star review given to a light-up USB cable for sale on Amazon had a headline claiming that this product “has lit up my life.” That review was not only glowing, it was steaming, Amazon says.
In today’s world, anything can be bought for the right price.
This includes written opinions about products and services. One particularly worrisome example is with the book reviews on the website Amazon.com. It turns out that there is a high percentage of them (relatively) that are fake; fabricated and simply made up to deceive either one way or the other.
In the case of the glowing review of the light-up USB cable; The review was fake, purchased by a third-party Amazon seller, the online retailer claims, and probably cost the manufacturer between $19 and $22 (£13 and £15) to write it and have it listed on the Internet for (assumingly) forever. Those are the accusations Amazon has made in its first-ever lawsuit against sites that sell reviews.
The suit, filed Wednesday in Seattle’s King County Superior Court, accuses Jay Gentile, a California resident, and the websites [1] buyamazonreviews.com, [2] buyazonreviews.com, [3] bayreviews.net and [4] buyreviewsnow.com, of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act.
The sites sell packages of reviews, from as few as 3 to as many as 100. Promises include “drip-feed delivery” that won’t raise Amazon’s suspicions and a “100 percent stick guarantee” for reviews, promising to replace any that Amazon deletes or filters out.
One of the sites Gentile is accused of running, buyazonreviews.com, sounds like it’s on the up-and-up:
“We use real people that are sourced from all around the world to deliver high quality unbiased reviews on your products.”
The fine print sounds just as legit:
“We are not receiving any money for your reviews nor are we paying reviewers. Your payment goes towards review sourcing, database management, and operation costs. “
But Amazon says that the reality “is far different.”
In this, its first ever crackdown on fake reviews since it debuted the review platform 20 years ago (with its first review of Dr. Seuss’s “The Butter Battle Book”), Amazon accuses Gentile of promising to “provide as many five-star reviews as the purchaser wanted” and to “slow drip” them onto Amazon’s product pages so that the company would have a “more difficult time detecting them”.
In the complaint, Amazon also accuses Gentile of advising his customers to “do a few verified purchase reviews … so as not to raise any eyebrows with Amazon.
"The reviewers don't actually have to receive the products, Gentile allegedly told customers. Rather, his clients could just send empty boxes to try to fool Amazon into thinking that the reviewer was a "verified purchaser."
The complaint quotes the advice Gentile allegedly gave:
Note: You do not have to actually ship the item unless you want to. We suggest that for tracking purposes is that you just ship out an empty box or envelope, this will show [A]mazon that the item was actually shipped.
When one clueless reviewer working for buyazonreviews.com complained about not having actually received a product, Gentile allegedly reassured his client that she’d be brought in line:
“All our reviewers know of the process and I am not sure as to why she sent this to you but I will ensure it does not happen in the future.”
Amazon gave a number of examples of what it says are phony reviews, such as the USB cable five-star review:
This has lit up my life
By j9 on March 31, 2015
Verified Purchase“Review: I was kinda doubtful about the "electroluminescent technology" of this USB cable. That it actually would work. But it actually did. Not only did the blue light function as they should, they were clear and bright, plus they turned off when the charge was finished. It's rad. They should make them in other colors too. Let's just say we're really impressed and are going to order a few more...”
Amazon is bringing claims of [1] trademark infringement, saying the websites are using the company’s name and logo without authorization. It’s also accusing the websites of [2] cybersquatting by hosting sites with names “identical to or confusingly similar to” Amazon’s own site. Amazon has asked the court to force the various websites to stop using its name and trademarks and to stop selling Amazon reviews. It’s also seeking triple damages and attorney’s fees.
Imagine a world where if individuals can set up a cheap website and system to do this, what powerful and well-funded governments can do.
It should not be believed that they would do nothing, for the maintenance of those in power (regardless of where they reside) are all heavily dependent upon securing the mass opinions of the populace. The reader should view everything on the Internet with suspicion, from news reports, to product reviews. The Internet is a wonderful tool, and it’s use in shaping your opinion on various matters is a well-honed and well-sharpened skill.
Flooding the Forum with “Likes”
In most forums, those posts with the greatest number of “likes” are presented first (or at the top of the forum). By controlling and altering the number of “likes” by various computer bots, one can effectively control the postings on a given internet forum.
This is a very common practice, and is common at Facebook, and Google where the actual software companies takes control of the forums in this manner. However, outside entities can also manipulate the forum using this technique.
Bangladesh “Click Farm”
The idea behind a click-farm is simple, but it takes a little explanation to understand how they came to be.
In the old days, when social media likes and website views were incredibly valuable, many webmasters turned to the dark side of the Internet to find ways to inflate them. Earning 1,000 likes or 1,000 website hits was a tough process, but it could be made a lot easier by setting up a program to refresh the page over and over. For Facebook, those bots would register accounts and use them to like the page.
Robots are easy to detect.
Facebook fan page likes could easily find these fraudulent accounts and remove them. Something needed to be done to make those number-inflating accounts less visible. Something to make them look more legitimate.
The answer, as it turned out, was just to make them legitimate – or as legitimate as it was possible to make them, anyways.
Bangladesh “Click Farm”
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Webmasters pay people in developing nations like Bangladesh, where an annual income of $120 is acceptable, to create Facebook accounts. Or, more likely, webmasters pay a company that in turn pays these people.
These people register accounts, sometimes dozens, and sit idle until the money comes in. They receive a payment and a target Facebook account, and they relentlessly like the page with their accounts.
Even this was fairly easy to detect.
After all, if 10,000 accounts all mobilize in the span of a week and they all like the same selection of 10 pages, those ten pages very obviously purchased likes from a click farm.
At one point, Facebook purged so many fraudulent accounts it totaled nearly 10% of their entire user base. Unlike YouTube wiping views, however, Facebook’s deletions didn’t remove fake likes.
The modern version of a clickfarm still works the same way, only the people running the accounts take steps to obfuscate their traffic.
In addition to liking the pages they’re paid to like, they also click through ads and related pages on Facebook and like pages they aren’t paid to follow. This is how your page, running legitimate Facebook ads, can run afoul of a click-farm. The flurry of “organic” likes makes it much harder to pick out the mobilization of a click-farm for purchased likes.
The Chinese “Click Farm”
In 14MAY17, an unnamed person disclosed the operational details of a Chinese “click farm” used to manipulate the number of “likes” on a given Internet forum[i]. Photos were provided and some details were presented. From the article;
Chinese “Click Farm”
The bizarre ‘click farm’ of 10,000 phones that give FAKE ‘likes’ to our most-loved apps
Pages on social media websites are given fake ‘likes’ to make them look more popular by thousands of phones
“Footage has emerged of a giant "click farm" that uses more than 10,000 mobile phones to give product ratings and pages on social media websites phoney "likes".
Companies reportedly pay thousands to get their apps more likes by using services like this massive plant offers.
This covert clip in China shows rows and rows of like-making machines all wired to other devices in a factory. And there are said to be thousands more phones in the same building all made for the same purpose.”
The reader should note some details regarding all of the cell phones. They are all smart phones, typically generic or “off make” brands (probably due to cost considerations).
Note that the camera is covered by tape so that if any agency wanted to turn on the camera, it would not be able to record any video. Notice the screens, all of them are slightly different, but the forum that they are posing on is identical. The computer software provides a kind of software personality that automates the clicking algorithm.
A Russian man took video footage of the like-making machines and shared it online. But social media users reacted angrily to this clip. One viewer wrote: “Is everything in the modern world ‘fake’?” While, a third furious user shared: “Is anything actually real anymore?”
To which I must educate the reader.
Yes. Everything on the Internet is fake.
The Thailand “Click Farm”
Three Chinese men arrested in Thailand have acknowledged that they were operating a “click farm,” using hundreds of cellphones and several hundred thousand SIM cards to run up “likes” and views on WeChat, a Chinese social media mobile application, Thai police reported on 13JUN17.
Immigration Police Capt. Itthikorn Atthanark said the men explained they were paid according to how many likes and views they generated, each earning 100,000-150,000 baht ($2,950-$4,400) per month. Click farms are hired to inflate an online site’s viewership for prestige and profit.
Thailand click farm.
Some politicians boast of how many followers they have on social media, while clicks can generate ad revenue.
WeChat is China’s most prominent online social media platform, incorporating a text-messaging service as well as marketing for online stores.
Police seized 476 cellphones and around 347,200 SIM cards during the arrests Sunday at a house in Sa Kaeo province, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Bangkok. The men, identified as Wang Dong, Niu Bang and Ni Wenjin, were charged with working without a permit and importing the phones without paying taxes.
Itthikorn said the arrests followed a police stakeout at the Sa Kaeo house after receiving reports of suspicious activity. He said a police search Monday at another residence believed to be engaged in the same activity came up empty-handed, though police believe others connected with the business are still at large.
Russian “troll farm”
Not only can you find “click farms” in Russia, but they are also used with ‘bots to flood the social media with trolls and other denizens of internet discussion. These farms park themselves and place ‘bots fully intended to disrupt the discussion on social media sites.
And what’s more, they are open for hire, and will do so for any social media. Apparently some of their biggest clients reside in the United States where they make princely amounts disrupting discussion as tolls on social media. So in Russia, not only do you have click-farms, but they also double as ’bout farms, and bit-mining operations.
A second highly effective technique (which you can see in operation all the time at www.abovetopsecret.com) is ‘consensus cracking.’
Pig Farts are destroying the Ozone Layer
Posted by Trustworthy Joe Average
Everyone knows that XXXXXX. It has been proven that XXXXXXX. And since XXXXX is a Y-chromosome, and Brando is good for plants, that DNA is great with JAVA, and the study clearly indicates that bovine farts are safe, while pig farts are dangerous.
To develop a consensus crack, the following technique is used. Under the guise of a fake account a posting is made which looks legitimate and is towards the truth is made – but the critical point is that it has a VERY WEAK PREMISE without substantive proof to back the posting.
Once this is done then under alternative fake accounts a very strong position in your favor is slowly introduced over the life of the posting. It is IMPERATIVE that both sides are initially presented, so the uninformed reader cannot determine which side is the truth. As postings and replies are made the stronger ‘evidence’ or disinformation in your favour is slowly ‘seeded in.’ Thus the uninformed reader will most like develop the same position as you, and if their position is against you their opposition to your posting will be most likely dropped.
This works on most websites, such as Facebook.
However in some cases where the forum members are highly educated and can counter your disinformation with real facts and linked postings, you can then ‘abort’ the consensus cracking by initiating a ‘forum slide.’
In April 2020, my LinkedIN feed was filled with articles stating that the Italian government was being overwhelmed with lawsuits against China for "mishandling" of the Coronavirus.
The only thing was, all of Italy was in lock-down at that time, and mail, servers and the Judicial apparatus were not functioning. They didn't even begin to resume operation until July.
Obviously it was a big lie.
No legal actions were taken inside of Italy against China at all, but you would never realize that if you were not aware of the situation within both Italy and China, and how the legal systems works. Things that most Americans are unaware of, which is why this technique is so prevalent in America today.
Topic Dilution
Topic dilution is not only effective in forum sliding it is also very useful in keeping the forum readers on unrelated and non-productive issues.
This is a critical and useful technique to cause a ‘RESOURCE BURN.’ By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling ) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity. If the intensity of gradual dilution is intense enough, the readers will effectively stop researching and simply slip into a ‘gossip mode.’ Which is the ideal outcome.
In this state they can be more easily misdirected away from facts towards uninformed conjecture and opinion.
The less informed they are the more effective and easy it becomes to control the entire group in the direction that you would desire the group to go in.
Caution is often warranted. It must be stressed that a proper assessment of the psychological capabilities and levels of education is first determined of the group to determine at what level to ‘drive in the wedge.’ By being too far off topic too quickly it may trigger censorship by a forum moderator.
Information Collection
Information collection is also a very effective method to determine the psychological level of the forum members, and to gather intelligence that can be used against them.
In this technique in a light and positive environment a ‘show you mine so me yours’ posting is initiated.
From the number of replies and the answers that are provided much statistical information can be gathered. An example is to post your ‘favorite weapon’ and then encourage other members of the forum to showcase what they have. In this matter it can be determined by reverse proration what percentage of the forum community owns a firearm, and or a illegal weapon. This same method can be used by posing as one of the form members and posting your favorite ‘technique of operation.’ From the replies various methods that the group utilizes can be studied and effective methods developed to stop them from their activities.
This method has become famous by various anti-gun groups who intentionally collected information on gun owners in selected cities in anticipation of a anti-gun government.
Anger Trolling
This technique is known as anger trolling.
Statistically, there is always a percentage of the forum posters who are more inclined to violence. In order to determine who these individuals are, it is a requirement to present a image to the forum to deliberately incite a strong psychological reaction.
From this the most violent in the group can be effectively singled out for reverse IP location and possibly local enforcement tracking.
To accomplish this only requires posting a link to a video depicting a local police officer massively abusing his power against a very innocent individual. Statistically of the million or so police officers in America there is always one or two being caught abusing there powers and the taping of the activity can be then used for intelligence gathering purposes – without the requirement to ‘stage’ a fake abuse video.
This method is extremely effective, and the more so the more abusive the video can be made to look. Sometimes it is useful to ‘lead’ the forum by replying to your own posting with your own statement of violent intent, and that you ‘do not care what the authorities think!!’ inflammation.
By doing this and showing no fear it may be more effective in getting the more silent and self-disciplined violent intent members of the forum to slip and post their real intentions. This can be used later in a court of law during prosecution.
JTRIG
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over a period of several weeks, NBC News published a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance.
As of 2015, another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” Was published with goes into great detail how the United States government intentionally smears and destroys the reputation and credibility of anyone whom it wants to. It does this through pure application of honed Nazi and KGB techniques.
By publishing these stories one by one, NBC reports highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: [1] the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, [2] the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, [3] the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and [4] destructive viruses. But, here, specifically, lets focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two primary tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: [1] “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), [2] fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and [3] posting “negative information” on various forums.
Gaining Full Control
It is important to also be harvesting and continually maneuvering for a forum moderator position. Once this position is obtained, the forum can then be effectively and quietly controlled by deleting unfavorable postings – and one can eventually steer the forum into complete failure and lack of interest by the general public.
The goal is to only have forum postings favorable to your desired point of view present.
This is the ‘ultimate victory’ as the forum is no longer participated with by the general public and no longer useful in maintaining their freedoms. Depending on the level of control you can obtain, you can deliberately steer a forum into defeat by censoring postings, deleting memberships, flooding, and or accidentally taking the forum offline. By this method the forum can be quickly killed.
However it is not always in the interest to kill a forum as it can be converted into a ‘honey pot’ gathering center to collect and misdirect newcomers and from this point be completely used for your control for your agenda purposes. The object is to gain full control.
Prohibit Non Approved Opinion
The powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry. In fact, some of this past century’s greatest dystopian authors warned of this very danger.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
And in almost every episode of Twilight Zone, Rod Serling urged viewers to unlock their minds and free themselves of prejudice, hate, violence and fear. “We’re developing a new citizenry,” Serling declared. “One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
Conclusion
Yes, the manipulation of speech is an important tool for the control of people.
And we see a lot of this in regards to politics. Specifically in politics related to “democracies”, which pretty much rely upon “mob rule” to select the leadership. Thus we see that data in democracies are subject to popular opinion and thus must also be manipulated.
So, we see that in a “democracy”…
Leadership and politics are heavily involved in censorship and manipulation.
And in data sets and metrics of success, leadership also manipulates heavily.
But this is not the case in other forms of governance.
In totalitarian, and Republic forms of governance, there is no need to appease the population, thus there really isn’t a need to manipulate or censor. You can use China as a good example.
China
There was an outbreak of COVID-XXX in ZhangXin on March XXXX. 2,338 were infected, 388 died, and 78 were arrested for non-compliance with the mask law.
The Chinese don’t need to lie about these figures, or the presentation of them. They are facts. And whether you like them or not, agree with them or not, or anything else has no bearing on the issue. They do not CARE about your opinion.
Compare that to America, where mob opinion is very important and can result in positive or negative opinions of the leadership. Eventually resulting in their termination if things go bad.
USA
COVID-XXXX hits Boston. 456 infected, 34 deaths. But these figures are not verified by a secondary source and there are indications that they might be artificially enlarged by confusing it with the influenza. A government spokesperson admitted that there were a "few" deaths, but that everything was under control and a vaccine is under production right now to prevent further infections. Further, the vast majority of those that died had prior conditions, were old and feeble, or had other complication.
Sound familiar?
Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM.
Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM.
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Once they are aware of these techniques the operation can completely fail, and the forum can become uncontrolled. At this point other avenues must be considered such as initiating a false legal precedence to simply have the forum shut down and taken offline. This is not desirable as it then leaves the enforcement agencies unable to track the percentage of those in the population who always resist attempts for control against them.
Do you want more?
I have more posts along these lines in my Functional and practical notes section of my SHTF Index…
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I’ve been in a kind of strange funk lately. It’s difficult to put my finger on it. It could be anything. It’s really just been a strange year all in all.
Those of us expats that applied for our Federal Government Coronavirus checks never received them and we can’t seem to figure out why. Everyone else in the world got theirs. But a quick review of the news explains it all. [1] If you don’t have a social security number tied to a bank account, you just aren’t going to see the money. Or, [2] if you use a bank account not on SWIFT, or [3] if you have a family bank account with a non-citizen. If you want a stimulus check, no matter what anyone says, it must be deposited in an account that the US government can tax. It’s something that we suspected all along, but nothing hits home hard, then having money denied to you.
I’ve been terribly nostalgic for Boston, and the surrounding environs lately. I go to Visitnewengland.com and check out my old stomping grounds and some of my favorite restaurants and pubs. Sigh. There I can see that some of the places are still standing and I look at the fine blue skies of Massachusetts and the fall leaves, and just… well…
And…
.
Yah. While I do enjoy where I live, I have to admit that I really, really loved living in Boston, and the surrounding area. As you can well guess, I used to live in Milford, Walpole, Woonsockett, and Uxbridge. I wonder what it must be like now. I’ll bet that it is glorious. That’s what, and probably really nice for a nice little walk in the Wrenthan state forest.
F. Gilbert Hills state forest.
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Anyways, I feel (you know “feel”) it’s time to wind some things down, pause a while, regroup and contemplate new directions. It’s a strong feeling. And I cannot explain it, except to say that my “feelings” and “hunches” have merit and are illustrative of other things.
Whether it is only personal, or suggestive of other things, bigger things, in a more expansive Geo-political arena is unknown. It’s just a really persistent, super odd feeling. Really.
When you get into these kinds of funk, the first thing that you want to do is hide. You go into your attic and read old magazines, you get the tackle box out and go fishing, or you hop in your truck and go on long rides in the countryside. You try to settle yourself. But it’s difficult.
It’s sort of like you are a (old fashioned) peculator coffee-pot and you are sitting on the stove and the water is starting to sizzle and a few pops of coffee are hitting the glass bulb on top. It’s almost exactly like that.
A peculator coffee-pot.
.
It’s a strong feeling that I cannot shake.
The thing about these feelings, for me, is that I am unable to discern what’s going on. Is it [1] me personally? Is it [2] something having to do with my latest affirmation campaign? [3] Is it part of my MAJesic mission parameters? [4] Is it a trend or series of changes that I am sensitive to? [5] Is it something having to do with our benefactors?
I really do not know.
Jeeze!
These feelings pretty much come and go with me all the time. You get in tune with yourself and your body, and you can feel when you need to rest, or you need to exercise, or when an organ is going to give your trouble, or when you should avoid doing certain activities. It’s an internal awareness of self. These feelings, well, they are like tides or swells with the ocean. Only this time, it’s really, really, REALLY strong and persistent. Gosh darn it, I might need to go ahead and drink some VSOP and some beer to chill way the fuck down.
This reminds me of something…
You know, my first wife, well she had a mental illness known as schizophrenia. And she was the sweetest and kindest girl that I have ever met, but when the illness would hit her, she was unmanageable and needed to go into seclusion in a mental hospital staffed with trained and experienced doctors. And the thing about this illness is that while she had it, she was also really seriously super psychic. She could see things, predict things, and experience things hours or days before they occurred.
Good and bad.
Drove her crazy. Or, according to the doctors; crazier.
Anyways, this feeling that I have right now reminds me of an event years ago.
On October 17, 1989, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area, killing 67 people and causing more than $5 billion in damages. On October 17, 1989, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit ...
-San Francisco Earthquake of 1989 - HISTORY
On October 16, all day long, I watched her experience this kind of discomfort that I am kind of feeling now. Now, we were not living in California at that time, we were living in Indiana, but she had this desire to call our friends in San Francisco and talk to them. Just talk. She didn’t feel anything bad. She just wanted to talk.
…
Weeks later the friends (in San Francisco) called us and told us that when the power was eventually restored they found my wife’s messages on their answering machine asking if they were all all-right. They all asked “how did you know?”
…
Anyways, I’m just throwing this all out there. It’s probably nothing for you all to be concerned about. Just go about your daily lives. Just remember that isolation is a danger. Get out and be with friends. Be social. Don’t trap yourself in a place or within a isolation bubble.
From Robert Greene…
LAW 18
DO NOT BUILD FORTRESSES TO PROTECT YOURSELF— ISOLATION IS DANGEROUS
JUDGMENT
The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it Protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Ch‘in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China (221-210 B.C.), was the mightiest man of his day. His empire was vaster and more powerful than that of Alexander the Great. He had conquered all of the kingdoms surrounding his own kingdom of Ch’in and unified them into one massive realm called China. But in the last years of his life, few, if anyone, saw him.
The emperor lived in the most magnificent palace built to that date, in the capital of Hsien-yang. The palace had 270 pavilions; all of these were connected by secret underground passageways, allowing the emperor to move through the palace without anyone seeing him. He slept in a different room every night, and anyone who inadvertently laid eyes on him was instantly beheaded. Only a handful of men knew his whereabouts, and if they revealed it to anyone, they, too, were put to death.
The first emperor had grown so terrified of human contact that when he had to leave the palace he traveled incognito, disguising himself carefully. On one such trip through the provinces, he suddenly died. His body was borne back to the capital in the emperor’s carriage, with a cart packed with salted fish trailing behind it to cover up the smell of the rotting corpse—no one was to know of his death. He died alone, far from his wives, his family, his friends, and his courtiers, accompanied only by a minister and a handful of eunuchs.
IIII MASQU I OI IIII. RI.DDI ATH
The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatur and its seal—the redness and horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution.... And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half-depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knight, and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtier.s, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. Theyresolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. Theexternal world could take care of itself In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.” It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.... ... And the revel went whirlingly on,until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock.... And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked fzgecre which had arrested the attention of no single individual before.... The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features ofthe face, was sprinkled with the scarlet horror ... ...
A throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And oneby one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEAIH, EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809-1849
Interpretation
Shih Huang Ti started off as the king of Ch’in, a fearless warrior of unbridled ambition. Writers of the time described him as a man with “a waspish nose, eyes like slits, the voice of a jackal, and the heart of a tiger or wolf.”
He could be merciful sometimes, but more often he “swallowed men up without a scruple.” It was through trickery and violence that he conquered the provinces surrounding his own and created China, forging a single nation and culture out of many.
He broke up the feudal system, and to keep an eye on the many members of the royal families that were scattered across the realm’s various kingdoms, he moved 120,000 of them to the capital, where he housed the most important courtiers in the vast palace of Hsien-yang. He consolidated the many walls on the borders and built them into the Great Wall of China.
He standardized the country’s laws, its written language, even the size of its cartwheels.
As part of this process of unification, however, the first emperor outlawed the writings and teachings of Confucius, the philosopher whose ideas on the moral life had already become virtually a religion in Chinese culture.
On Shih Huang Ti’s order, thousands of books relating to Confucius were burned, and anyone who quoted Confucius was to be beheaded. This made many enemies for the emperor, and he grew constantly afraid, even paranoid.
The executions mounted.
A contemporary, the writer Han-fei-tzu, noted that “Ch’in has been victorious for four generations, yet has lived in constant terror and apprehension of destruction.”
As the emperor withdrew deeper and deeper into the palace to protect himself, he slowly lost control of the realm. Eunuchs and ministers enacted political policies without his approval or even his knowledge; they also plotted against him.
By the end, he was emperor in name only, and was so isolated that barely anyone knew he had died. He had probably been poisoned by the same scheming ministers who encouraged his isolation.
That is what isolation brings: Retreat into a fortress and you lose contact with the sources of your power. You lose your ear for what is happening around you, as well as a sense of proportion. Instead of being safer, you cut yourself off from the kind of knowledge on which your life depends. Never enclose yourself so far from the streets that you cannot hear what is happening around you, including the plots against you.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Louis XIV had the palace of Versailles built for him and his court in the 1660s, and it was like no other royal palace in the world. As in a beehive,
everything revolved around the royal person. He lived surrounded by the nobility, who were allotted apartments nestled around his, their closeness to him dependent on their rank. The king’s bedroom occupied the literal center of the palace and was the focus of everyone’s attention. Every morning the king was greeted in this room by a ritual known as the lever.
At eight A.M., the king’s first valet, who slept at the foot of the royal bed, would awaken His Majesty. Then pages would open the door and admit those who had a function in the lever. The order of their entry was precise: First came the king’s illegitimate sons and his grandchildren, then the princes and princesses of the blood, and then his physician and surgeon.
There followed the grand officers of the wardrobe, the king’s official reader, and those in charge of entertaining the king. Next would arrive various government officials, in ascending order of rank. Last but not least came those attending the lever by special invitation. By the end of the ceremony, the room would be packed with well over a hundred royal attendants and visitors.
The day was organized so that all the palace’s energy was directed at and passed through the king. Louis was constantly attended by courtiers and officials, all asking for his advice and judgment. To all their questions he usually replied, “I shall see.”
As Saint-Simon noted, “If he turned to someone, asked him a question, made an insignificant remark, the eyes of all present were turned on this person. It was a distinction that was talked of and increased prestige.” There was no possibility of privacy in the palace, not even for the king—every room communicated with another, and every hallway led to larger rooms where groups of nobles gathered constantly. Everyone’s actions were interdependent, and nothing and no one passed unnoticed: “The king not only saw to it that all the high nobility was present at his court,” wrote
Saint-Simon, “he demanded the same of the minor nobility. At his lever and coucher, at his meals, in his gardens of Versailles, he always looked about him, noticing everything. He was offended if the most distinguished nobles did not live permanently at court, and those who showed themselves never or hardly ever, incurred his full displeasure. If one of these desired something, the king would say proudly: ‘I do not know him,’ and the judgment was irrevocable.”
Interpretation
Louis XIV came to power at the end of a terrible civil war, the Fronde. A principal instigator of the war had been the nobility, which deeply resented the growing power of the throne and yearned for the days of feudalism, when the lords ruled their own fiefdoms and the king had little authority over them.
The nobles had lost the civil war, but they remained a fractious, resentful lot.
The construction of Versailles, then, was far more than the decadent whim of a luxury-loving king. It served a crucial function: The king could keep an eye and an ear on everyone and everything around him. The once proud nobility was reduced to squabbling over the right to help the king put on his robes in the morning. There was no possibility here of privacy—no possibility of isolation.
Louis XIV very early grasped the truth that for a king to isolate himself is gravely dangerous.
In his absence, conspiracies will spring up like mushrooms after rain, animosities will crystallize into factions, and rebellion will break out before he has the time to react. To combat this, sociability and openness must not only be encouraged, they must be formally organized and channeled.
These conditions at Versailles lasted for Louis’s entire reign, some fifty years of relative peace and tranquillity. Through it all, not a pin dropped without Louis hearing it.
Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue....Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
-Dr. Samuel John son, 1709-1784
KEYS TO POWER
Machiavelli makes the argument that in a strictly military sense a fortress is invariably a mistake. It becomes a symbol of power’s isolation, and is an easy target for its builders’ enemies. Designed to defend you, fortresses actually cut you off from help and cut into your flexibility. They may
appear impregnable, but once you retire to one, everyone knows where you are; and a siege does not have to succeed to turn your fortress into a prison. With their small and confined spaces, fortresses are also extremely vulnerable to the plague and contagious diseases. In a strategic sense, the isolation of a fortress provides no protection, and actually creates more problems than it solves.
Because humans are social creatures by nature, power depends on social interaction and circulation. To make yourself powerful you must place yourself at the center of things, as Louis XIV did at Versailles. All activity should revolve around you, and you should be aware of everything happening on the street, and of anyone who might be hatching plots against you. The danger for most people comes when they feel threatened. In such times they tend to retreat and close ranks, to find security in a kind of fortress. In doing so, however, they come to rely for information on a smaller and smaller circle, and lose perspective on events around them. They lose maneuverability and become easy targets, and their isolation makes them paranoid. As in warfare and most games of strategy, isolation often precedes defeat and death.
In moments of uncertainty and danger, you need to fight this desire to turn inward. Instead, make yourself more accessible, seek out old allies and make new ones, force yourself into more and more different circles. This has been the trick of powerful people for centuries.
The Roman statesman Cicero was born into the lower nobility, and had little chance of power unless he managed to make a place for himself among the aristocrats who controlled the city. He succeeded brilliantly, identifying everyone with influence and figuring out how they were connected to one another. He mingled everywhere, knew everyone, and had such a vast network of connections that an enemy here could easily be counterbalanced by an ally there.
The French statesman Talleyrand played the game the same way. Although he came from one of the oldest aristocratic families in France, he made a point of always staying in touch with what was happening in the streets of Paris, allowing him to foresee trends and troubles. He even got a certain pleasure out of mingling with shady criminal types, who supplied him with valuable information. Every time there was a crisis, a transition of power—the end of the Directory, the fall of Napoleon, the abdication of
Louis XVIII—he was able to survive and even thrive, because he never closed himself up in a small circle but always forged connections with the new order.
This law pertains to kings and queens, and to those of the highest power: The moment you lose contact with your people, seeking security in isolation, rebellion is brewing. Never imagine yourself so elevated that you can afford to cut yourself off from even the lowest echelons. By retreating to a fortress, you make yourself an easy target for your plotting subjects, who view your isolation as an insult and a reason for rebellion.
Since humans are such social creatures, it follows that the social arts that make us pleasant to be around can be practiced only by constant exposure and circulation. The more you are in contact with others, the more graceful and at ease you become. Isolation, on the other hand, engenders an awkwardness in your gestures, and leads to further isolation, as people start avoiding you.
In 1545 Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici decided that to ensure the immortality of his name he would commission frescoes for the main chapel of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. He had many great painters to choose from, and in the end he picked Jacopo da Pontormo. Getting on in years, Pontormo wanted to make these frescoes his chef d’oeuvre and legacy. His first decision was to close the chapel off with walls, partitions, and blinds. He wanted no one to witness the creation of his masterpiece, or to steal his ideas. He would outdo Michelangelo himself. When some young men broke into the chapel out of curiosity, Jacopo sealed it off even further.
Pontormo filled the chapel’s ceiling with biblical scenes—the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, on and on. At the top of the middle wall he painted Christ in his majesty, raising the dead on Judgment Day. The artist worked on the chapel for eleven years, rarely leaving it, since he had developed a phobia for human contact and was afraid his ideas would be stolen.
Pontormo died before completing the frescoes, and none of them has survived. But the great Renaissance writer Vasari, a friend of Pontormo’s who saw the frescoes shortly after the artist’s death, left a description of what they looked like. There was a total lack of proportion. Scenes bumped against scenes, figures in one story being juxtaposed with those in another, in maddening numbers. Pontormo had become obsessed with detail but had lost any sense of the overall composition. Vasari left off his description of the frescoes by writing that if he continued, “I think I would go mad and become entangled in this painting, just as I believe that in the eleven years of time Jacopo spent on it, he entangled himself and anyone else who saw it.”
Instead of crowning Pontormo’s career, the work became his undoing.
These frescoes were visual equivalents of the effects of isolation on the human mind: a loss of proportion, an obsession with detail combined with an inability to see the larger picture, a kind of extravagant ugliness that no longer communicates. Clearly, isolation is as deadly for the creative arts as for the social arts. Shakespeare is the most famous writer in history because, as a dramatist for the popular stage, he opened himself up to the masses, making his work accessible to people no matter what their education and taste. Artists who hole themselves up in their fortress lose a sense of proportion, their work communicating only to their small circle. Such art remains cornered and powerless.
Finally, since power is a human creation, it is inevitably increased by contact with other people. Instead of falling into the fortress mentality, view the world in the following manner: It is like a vast Versailles, with every room communicating with another. You need to be permeable, able to float in and out of different circles and mix with different types. That kind of mobility and social contact will protect you from plotters, who will be unable to keep secrets from you, and from your enemies, who will be unable to isolate you from your allies. Always on the move, you mix and mingle in the rooms of the palace, never sitting or settling in one place. No hunter can fix his aim on such a swift-moving creature.
Image: The Fortress. High up on the hill, the citadel be comes a symbol of all that is hateful in power and authority.
The citizens of the town betray you to the first enemy that comes. Cut off from communication and intelligence, the citadel falls with ease.
Authority: A good and wise prince, desirous of maintaining that character, and to avoid giving the opportunity to his sons to become oppressive, will never build fortresses, so that they may place their reliance upon the good will of their subjects, and not upon the strength of citadels. (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)
REVERSAL
It is hardly ever right and propitious to choose isolation. Without keeping an ear on what is happening in the streets, you will be unable to protect yourself. About the only thing that constant human contact cannot facilitate is thought. The weight of society’s pressure to conform, and the lack of distance from other people, can make it impossible to think clearly about what is going on around you. As a temporary recourse, then, isolation can help you to gain perspective. Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. Machiavelli could write The Prince only once he found himself in exile and isolated on a farm far from the political intrigues of Florence.
The danger is, however, that this kind of isolation will sire all kinds of strange and perverted ideas. You may gain perspective on the larger picture, but you lose a sense of your own smallness and limitations. Also, the more isolated you are, the harder it is to break out of your isolation when you choose to—it sinks you deep into its quicksand without your noticing. If you need time to think, then, choose isolation only as a last resort, and only in small doses. Be careful to keep your way back into society open.
Conclusion
Whenever you feel strange, or are angry, fearful, or upset, or confused… don’t isolate. Reach out to others, and get with your friends and support network. It might be the local watering hole, or your extended relatives. It might be some friends, or if you have no-one then just get out in nature and take your favorite dog with you.
Everyone has times where things “don’t feel right”. And it is at those times that we need to get in touch with what is going on, calm the fuck way, way down, and get with others. Others that care about us.
For me, this is one of those times. You all shouldn’t read more into this than what it probably is. Nothing. But use this as a reminder that we are all part of an environment with a complex social structures and a network that involves others. tap into that network and you will mitigate any negative concerns or worries that you might have.
For me, I’m going out to eat some delicious food, have a smoke or two with some friends, and gonna eat some fine delicious food. I’d suggest you all do the same. God Bless.
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Do not believe what the media says. It’s all lies.
Do not believe what you think they are trying to cover up either. Many people have been tricked into this “tar baby”, and just end up propagating the alternative mantras.
Look at the few “raw” facts…
Donald Trump was in the hospital for three days and then was miraculously “cured”. Ok. I know it’s all fucked up, and sounds like a political stunt in a very partisan election year. But… could it have been something else instead…?
Think about it.
What happened when he went to the hospital?
Oh, you know, the “normal” precautions. Suddenly America went DEFCON ONE. Airborne command centers were engaged and all military ICBM silos were manned and the VP and other leadership were shuffled away to secret and secure hardened facilities. Airborne command posts were fully manned and the entire nation was put on the highest alert.
Then, after three days everything went back to normal.
…
So…
…
Odd.
…
To me, as former ONI – MAJ, this appears to me as a…
… staged precaution…
…or…
… clear “dry-run” practice…
…for the “unthinkable”.
And when I say “unthinkable”, I mean exactly that. A launch of a rather nasty nuclear war.
If you all do not realize why I think like this then check out my post about what America has been up to for the last four years, here.
Strange? You betya!
What’s even stranger is the timing of this “sickness”, and the instigation of DEFCON ONE in America.
It happened at the same time when the Chinese military discovered COVID-20 hitting the population centers of China.
Imagine that!
SADS-CoV
More lethal. More contagious. Of a completely different strain than COVID-19, and both "novel" and "never before seen" viral pathogens. Only instead of your lungs filling up with fluid, and crystallizing so that they feel like cement, you die by vomiting to death. (You can also shit your self to death as well. You end up with chronic and painful gastrointestinal diarrhea.)
Both this and the COVID-19 coronavirus are both wildly contagious and you can get it from touching a surface that someone touched days or even weeks ago. Another interesting thing about it (and all the bio-weapons launched against China since 2016) is the enormous size of the virus. It's a honker, big monster.
The Facts
Americans never have any “facts”.
At best, it’s distortions and partial truths.
The American media is owned and run by the United States government. Not only do they control the mainstream media and all “fact checking” of it. But they also control the alternative media as well. They control both the alt-right and the alt-left media.
You will NEVER see real “news” any longer.
All you will see are one of perhaps three major narratives. All which are designed to move you for thinking things or thoughts that run counter to what you are supposed to think. Which is why you WILL NEVER SEE ANYTHING LIKE THIS POSTED ON THE REST OF THE INTERNET.
Only here, on MM were you able to get any of the following “firsts” first, in “real time”…
COVID-19 is an American bio-weapon. The eighth in four years.
COVID-20 secured by China on October 2020 by the PLA.
The big picture about the HK, Thailand, and the Beirut missile attack.
Just here.
Only HERE.
…
And additionally to that…
Not only are you all kept stupefied and ignorant of what is going on through drugs, distractions and economic suppression. The government completely covers up the true and real activities as they happen in real time.
You will never realize what is going on or happening until long after the events occur. If ever. And the reason for this is that in a "democracy" run by public opinion, the opinions and thoughts of the citizens get in the way of what the government is trying to achieve. For good or worse.
This reminds me of some horrific movies.
It does.
Not that the movies depicted cover ups. After all, what kind of a movie would it be if you couldn’t have all the excitement of action and adventure…?
But it did remind me of those 1980’s movies that were trying to warn people that nuclear war was a terrible, terrible thing and that you just cannot assume that it will never happen.
Thoughts that somehow have been forgotten over the years. Instead a new, fresh crop of bright-eyed American neocons have approached the stage. And they, along with their psychopath President are playing with nuclear war, and military action like five year olds with firecrackers.
People! If you keep this bio-weapon nonsense up, you are going to see the combined forces of Asia Bitch-slap the United States into the pre-stone-age.
Only this time, there are no adults to supervise…
Washington has declared war on China. The administration and its allies hope that the war will be “cold,” but have no strategy for keeping it so. I find it noteworthy that the most belligerently anti-Chinese members of the current U.S. Senate are also its youngest.
They came to adulthood after the end of the post-World War II “Cold War” and have no experience of its anxieties. They appear to take its sudden end as predestined – something that was so inevitably right ideologically that it can and should be taken for granted. Their military experience, if any, has been in the contemporary equivalent of the 19th century’s Indian Wars – combat with gun-toting farmers with no air forces, air defenses, navies, guided missiles, or nuclear weapons with which to answer U.S. hostility.
To paraphrase Hilaire Belloc’s riff on Britain’s hubris in its colonial wars:
“Whatever happens, we have got
Close air support and they have not.”
The Cold War was radically different from this. It was a global struggle between two competing ideological blocs and nuclear-armed power centers capable of destroying not just each other but all life on the planet except maybe the cockroaches. It began as a series of squabbles over the spoils of a worldwide war. Each side strove to consolidate spheres of politico-military and economic influence and deny the other access to them.
But each learned to avoid confrontations that might lead to armed combat directly with the other.
Each limited itself to proxy wars aimed at sustaining or imposing its ideology somewhere not in the grip of the other.
Each sought to minimize and contain interaction with the other. That was not difficult, given the utter lack of interdependence between the two and the blocs of nations they formally and informally commanded.
The struggle we Americans have now initiated with China has none of these characteristics. To analogize it to the Cold War of 1947 – 1991 is intellectually lazy.
More important, it is profoundly misleading and delusional. The Sino-American split is not the sequel to a bloody world war.
However politically convenient it may be for Americans to cast antagonism to China in all-encompassing Manichean terms, this is a contest born of contending national self-images and ambitions, not ideologies.
The struggle with China on which Americans have embarked is a bilateral contest in which others may or may not choose to take sides, not one between two committed blocs of nations.
China is both a much less inherently hostile and far more robust rival than the Soviet Union was.
The Movie “By Dawn’s Early Light”
Fear of a global thermonuclear war was very real in the 1980s. At the height of the cold war the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the US and NATO countries and we had just as many aimed at Russia and Warsaw Pact countries too.
What people feared was that some minor conflict between the US and the USSR would spiral out of control and we’d fire our missiles at them and they at us which would essentially send what was left of mankind back to the stone age. Movies like The Day After (1983), Threads (1984) and Testament (1983) explored life post nuke war and the picture they painted weren’t nice ones.
But after the Soviet Union began to collapse and the cold war started to wind down in the late 1980s and early 90s fear of a nuclear war between “us and them” began to diminish. Surely with the United States and the Soviet Union on good terms a nuclear war would be out of the question. Right?
The main crux of the movie By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) was that no, in fact the possibility of a nuclear war was actually GREATER now that controls over these weapons were slowly being relaxed in the Soviet Union.
In By Dawn’s Early Light, separatists steal a missile from Russia and fire it back into the country from Turkey making it seem like that NATO was at fault. And an automatic Russian defense program fired off a few nukes of their own towards the US in retaliation for this strike.
What follows are the President of the US and the Russian Premier trying to deescalate the crisis, even as Washington DC is nuked, the President presumed killed and the Secretary of the Interior, the highest surviving member of the government left alive, takes the reigns of the country. ..
And if the real President who is still alive wants to stop the war, the first question the new Secretary of the Interior President asks the military commanders is if we’re winning the war or losing it?
Are we winning the war, or losing it?
The other side of By Dawn’s Early Light is of the crew of a B-52 bomber on the way to deliver their payload of nukes to Russia, and them debating the merits of killing millions upon millions of people for a war that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
Eventually (spoiler alert) they turn their bomber around and head back home which causes the Russians to turn some of their bombers around too. And while the real President and the Premier see this as their chance to stop the war, the Secretary of the Interior President sees it as a sign of weakness and orders the B-52 shot down.
The American Air Force B-52 bomber crew is being told by the Navy Fighter Pilots that they have orders to shoot them down.
I originally saw By Dawn’s Early Light when it premiered on HBO and bought the VHS of the film when that came out a few years later. But honestly I hadn’t checked out the film in many years. While the special effects of the movie do look a bit dated, I did find that even 20+ years on the tension of By Dawn’s Early Light slowly builds and is maintained throughout the film right up until the very end.
I still found myself tensing up as the crew of the B-52 slowly comes to the realization that tonight’s flight isn’t a drill or the real President debating the Secretary of the Interior President on why it’s not a good idea to continue a war where every time one side fires a shot tens of thousands of civilians die.
While we’re probably not facing a situation like By Dawn’s Early Light in our immediate future, we still live in a world where there are thousands of nukes here in the US and thousands more overseas. And all it takes is one of those falling into the wrong hands to ruin everyone’s day.
So…
What the fuck is the matter with these neocon war-hawks in Washington DC? What is their friggin’ malfunction?
Neocons run America today.
While I genuinely believe that Trump would much rather work with both Russia, China and other nations of the multipolar alliance in lieu of blowing up the world, these aforementioned neocons think otherwise evidenced by Pompeo’s October 6 speech in Japan.
In this speech, Pompeo attempted to rally other Pacific nations to an anti-Chinese security complex known as the Quad (USA, Australia, Japan and India). With his typically self-righteous tone, Pompeo stated that “this is not a rivalry between the United States and China. This is for the soul of the world”. Earlier Pompeo stated “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.”
Pompeo’s efforts to break China’s neighbours away from the Belt and Road Initiative have accelerated relentlessly in recent months, with territorial tensions between China and Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei being used by the USA to enflame conflict whenever possible.
It is no secret that the USA has many financial and military tentacles stretching deep into all of those Pacific nations listed.
Where resistance to this anti-China tension is found, CIA-funded “democracy movements” have been used as in the current case of Thailand, or outright threats and sanctions as in the case of Cambodia where over 24 Chinese companies have been sanctioned for the crime of building infrastructure in a nation which the USA wishes to control.
Pompeo’s delusional efforts to consolidate a Pacific Military bloc among the QUAD states floundered fairly quickly as no joint military agreement was generated creating no foundation upon which a larger alliance could be built.
-Win-Win vs Lose-Lose: The Time Has Come for the World to Choose
The world is on dangerous territory, and the idiots in Washington DC (and they are idiots for even considering the use of WMD’s in all their forms) are going to plunge the world into a darkness that I am truly fearful of.
If you can, watch the 1984 movie titled “Threads”. Learn about which I speak.
The Movie “Threads (1984)”
This is perhaps one of the most masochistic films ever made. You are taken into the personal world of two British families in Sheffield (site of a major NATO installation), who have children that are about to be married. Thousands of miles away, World War 3 slowly starts, and the ultimate horror happens. Thermonuclear war breaks out.
First shown by the BBC on 23 September 1984, Threads was must-watch TV. Accompanied by documentary On The Eighth Day and followed by a lengthy discussion on Newsnight, it’s a grim and unflinching depiction of what would happen to Britain if the unthinkable happened – if a political conflict between the US and Russia were to escalate into full-blown nuclear war.
An uncompromising reportage-style drama, Threads was the first film to realistically depict the horrors of a nuclear winter. Shocking, harrowing and hard to watch, it nonetheless made an important contribution to an increasingly urgent debate about the world’s ever-growing nuclear stockpile.
Threads focuses on two families linked by an unplanned pregnancy. Manual worker Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) and middle class Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) must face the fact that they are having a baby, and that their old way of life will soon be over. Their concerns are those of any new parents: hopes and fears for their child, building a home together, saying goodbye to the Friday night pint at the pub. We also follow local government chief Clive Sutton (Harry Beety) as he struggles to put emergency plans into place amidst the growing likelihood of war. It soon becomes very clear that the city is woefully underprepared for a crisis of any kind, but in that very British way Sutton and his officials carry on regardless – unaware that, in the face of the storm to come, all preparations are ultimately futile.
I think it would be useless to repeat all that the other users have said about "Threads" since I cannot do better but agree with everything. This has to be THE most graphic representation of nuclear war.
And I used to think "The Day After" was disturbing.
I was able to cope to the whole movie, but let's say it wasn't easy at all. I can still hear in my head the yells of the panicked citizens as the mushroom cloud rises in the distance when it hits Crewe…
or see the bottles of milk…
or the corpse (which bears a striking resemblance with E.T.!) burning in the firestorm…
or see survivors keeping as gold what is taken nowadays as granted: supermarket plastic bags…
...and what they put inside is simply disgusting.
When I found out my local video store had a copy of this film, I rushed to get it, as I was impatient to see this movie I have heard so much about. The impatience to see the movie was rewarded by nothing more than a really bad aftertaste of radioactive fallout.
I liked the movie not for the quality of the actors, but for the overall realistic representation of the holocaust and for the great job done with a small budget. I give a thumbs up to that.
-airodyssey26 June 2000
Nuclear war is NOTHING to take lightly.
The world, literally, grinds to a halt, in one of the most scientifically accurate depictions of nuclear war since “War Game, The” (1965).
Framing this drama are news reports about growing political tension around the world. We learn piecemeal, through snippets of television reports and glimpsed newspaper headlines, that in recent months a coup in Iran has been followed by a Soviet occupation.
Having just purchased this on DVD I was eager to watch it after waiting years to see it after it was unofficially banned from ever being shown on the BBC again. I was four when it was first shown and my parents switched it off, too frightened to watch it themselves never mind let me see it.
I have to say it is absolutely terrifying and utterly terrifying in the extreme.
This could have actually happened!
I was impressed by the way the film conveyed what it would be like if thousands of megatons of atomic bomb was dropped on the U.K.
Normal life comes to an abrupt stop.
One minute people are shopping in their local supermarket, going to the pub and wallpapering their new flat and suddenly they are plunged into Hell.
Civilization is blown back into the stone age.
The most scary part was the way the authorities were shown unable to cope with the scale of the attack (perhaps why the BBC never aired it again). We always think that it could never be that bad because someone would come to our rescue, someone would maintain control.
But no, the bombs / missiles keep raining down and down prompting one traumatized emergency committee member to scream, "not another one!"
They just did not expect so devastation and are completely helpless. Later soldiers shoot people for food, people wish for death and the emergency committee, those meant to be running things, die in the supposed protective bunker, trapped by rubble.
Ten years later, nothing is back to normal. What young people there are behave like wild animals, raping and fighting and speaking in a bizarre caveman manner.
Since the Cold War ended people have stopped being frightened of nuclear weapons. Everybody in every country should watch this film and realize that if there ever was a nuclear war, still possible with growing tensions between a superpower and its rivals, those left alive would wish they had been caught in the blasts and killed outright.
I don't recommend this for sensitive viewers.
-charlieboy809 September 2005
Unlike the US film “Day After, The” (1983) (TV), the film gives detailed information as to what is happening on a scientific basis. You are shown how a worst-case scenario can happen, and what the effects are, as you follow the surviving members of the two families through the aftermath.
I've always said that no film can really scare you as an adult as films scared you when you were a kid. My benchmark for that being watching 'The Omen' on video when i was about 13, nothing has ever quite lived up to it in the effect it had on me.
Rewatching 'Threads' a while back makes me change my mind.
I remember first seeing it in Ireland on the BBC when I guess i was about 14. Even in Ireland, a neutral country, anxiety about nuclear war was a big thing when we were kids in the 80's.
'Threads' does really get to you, its very unsettling and disturbing. Unlike fictional horror films, 'Threads' is hugely different in one respect - it's real.
This is what would happen, you can't distance yourself by saying it's make believe. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons armed and primed to be launched within minutes, 24 hours a day, everyday. Now we even have a country, the US, that says it's ready to use them, even if no one else does first.
Rewatching it, the dated production values don't detract from the film's power. It seems to bring the film even closer to the ordinary and the everyday. It's the film's ordinariness that makes it so viscerally disturbing - Hollywood special effects would at least have allowed you to distance yourself from it somewhat.
In fact the film is more realistic for not having them. Someone else mentioned the scene of the woman in the shopping center urinating where she stood out of pure terror as she sees the bomb go off a mile or two away from her - that's the scene that stayed with me the most too.
Its depressing to think in 2004 we are living in a world where politicians are again talking about 'winnable' wars using nuclear weapons.
In many things in life you get a second chance if you make mistakes, I don't think nuclear weapons use will give us the luxury of finding out afterwards was it all worth it. Watch "Threads' and see if you think 'winnable' nuclear war is something you want to give yourself or your children.
-BenjAii7 December 2004
What follows is a complex sequence of small scale political escalations, events that are alluded to but never fully or coherently explained. By themselves, none of the steps towards conflict seem irreversible, but together they constitute a crisis.
All this occurs firmly in the background of the characters’ lives, and is largely ignored: TV reports are turned over to something more interesting, newspapers are delivered without headlines being read. It’s only as the crisis deepens that people start to pay attention.
The early 80s were the first time in a generation that full scale nuclear war seemed not only possible but probable.
It’s hard to imagine now, nearly thirty years after its demolition, but in 1984 the Berlin Wall was a very solid and enduring dividing line between two opposing world powers: the countries of NATO, including the US and Britain on one hand, and those united by the Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact on the other. Europe was very much at the center of these international tensions, and those old enough to remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis just over twenty years earlier knew that political conflict could escalate quickly and unpredictably.
Capable of being launched in minutes, and with a time-to-target of between 4 and 6 minutes, the US’s Pershing II missiles had hard target capability – meaning they could take out weapons silos and command bunkers buried deep below ground.
Both sides knew that a massive and all-encompassing preemptive strike was the only way to win a nuclear war. The stakes were incredibly high. Indecision or delay – of even a few minutes – could mean the difference between survival and total annihilation.
I was about eleven or twelve when this harrowing made-for-TV docu-drama was repeated by the BBC, back to back with 'The War Game'. 'The War Game' didn't faze me much, for various reasons, but 'Threads' - that grabbed me instantly and wouldn't let go.
It was not only horribly real, seeing a lower-middle class family rather like my own suddenly plunged back into the dark ages by a nuclear holocaust, it was also entirely believable (the cold war was still very much an ongoing concern back in the eighties) and shockingly compelling.
I wanted to look away, but couldn't.
I wanted to run from the room in fright, but couldn't.
For better or worse, this film showed in full, unflinching, uncompromising detail exactly what it would be like if your home town got nuked, and gave us graphic realism in spades.
Melting milk-bottles, spontaneous urination, houses reduced to rubble in seconds, burning cats, dead kids, gore, vomit, armed traffic wardens shooting looters, filth, decay, disease…it's certainly not a barrel of laughs, but Mick Jackson's aim was to shut up all the ignorant gung-hos who believed a nuclear war could be "won".
He succeeded, unequivocally. The scene that made the deepest impact on me was the ravaged makeshift classroom with a ragged bunch of shell-shocked adults dazedly watching an ancient videotape of a schools programme (Words and Pictures, in fact) in an attempt to regain their numeracy and literacy skills.
That was a show we used to watch at school. Work it out for yourself. In short, this is a downbeat, depressing, bleak and utterly horrible film, but I recommend it wholeheartedly to everyone. The cold war may be gone, but the threats portrayed are still very real.
-world_of_weird16 September 2004
People had become used to the jargon that surrounded the debate about a nuclear future – IBMs, kilotons, radiation sickness, fallout – but what did the words really mean? What would a nuclear war actually look like? Few in Britain at the time had any idea. Threads would change all that.
If the film was going to be a useful contribution to the nuclear debate, it needed to incorporate the latest scientific thinking and research, and an impressive number of physicists, psychologists and other scientists and theoreticians were consulted during production, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat and cosmologist Carl Sagan (who had also conducted experimental research on radiation in the 60s).
But Threads was not just about presenting research; if it was to be effective as a drama it needed a suitable story on which to hang the science. Jackson turned to a dramatist known for his naturalistic portrayals of ordinary British life, Barry Hines.
Hopelessness and helplessness pervade the script. The growing nuclear threat becomes just one more pressure on a society already dealing with high unemployment and degradation of local services. Public protest about the two inevitably become conflated: anxiety about a future of nuclear destruction is interwoven with anxiety for a future without jobs. At the root of both is a fear of society’s impending collapse.
The scenes of death, destruction and disease are so realistic, I had to shower after seeing this film for the first time.
But what is most disturbing is that the film includes the long-term effects of global thermonuclear war, going into weeks, months, years, even decades.
!3 years afterwards.
Words can't describe how this movie affected me in 1985, but I'll try. I happened upon a presentation of "Threads" when I was about 11 years old. As a Navy family, we were stationed in Washington D.C. After viewing it, I was frightened to the point of vomiting. I had nightmares for weeks. The world was a very unstable place at the time with a Soviet government that seemed to change monthly.
The cast does an admirable job here. Dialog is kept to a damaging minimum. There is no soundtrack other than screams of misery and explosions. Very effective. While you can't compare a TV production, there is effective use of stock footage. The interspersed scientific facts regarding the aftermath punctuate the film brilliantly.
While other films about the same topic, like "The Day After" and Testament", were reasonably effective in their messages, I think they failed where "Threads" succeeded. In the aforementioned films, there's a glimmer of hope.
In "Threads" there is no hope, only death, misery and dread.
I believe I saw "Threads" before the TV broadcast of "The Day After" because my reaction was one of slight indifference. After seeing Mick Jackson's and Barry Hines' work, "The Day After" is like a day at Disneyland. No film portrays the world on the brink and over the edge as effectively. Highly recommended.
-huladog557 November 2005
When the unimaginable does happen, Threads becomes something else…
Shocking images blend the mundane with the horrifying: milk bottles melting in the firestorm, bodies burning to ash in the rubble. Nothing is left untouched or undefiled by radiation. Life returns to subsistence levels as nuclear winter settles over the UK. Sickness, starvation and death become inescapable. Survivors hoard bits and pieces of broken objects – all that remains of life before the blast – in dirty plastic carrier bags. A scavenged dead rabbit becomes an unimaginable feast.
The film holds no-one responsible for all this except, perhaps, those at the very top of the chain. It calmly sets out the steps to war, with local officials no more to blame for the chaos than those left dazed and destitute once the firestorm has passed. Ultimately, all preparations to survive are futile, a child’s toy windmill in the path of a hurricane.
It’s the visual images that stay with you: a sudden splash of crimson blood against a grey wall when all before was colorless; children laboriously unpicking precious scraps of fabric one strand at a time; the pristine black silhouette of an undamaged marble tomb – as if death is the only thing in the world that has retained its sharp outline.
All this is delivered to us with a coolness, a deadpan detachment that is sickeningly unsettling. As time passes, characters simply disappear from the story – and we are left to imagine what has happened to them. It’s in the most offhand way that we discover the fates of those in the command center under Town Hall.
The film holds no-one responsible for all this except, perhaps, those at the very top of the chain. It calmly sets out the steps to war, with local officials no more to blame for the chaos than those left dazed and destitute once the firestorm has passed. Ultimately, all preparations to survive are futile, a child’s toy windmill in the path of a hurricane.
The film ends thirteen years after the nuclear attack, and the final frames of the film will burn into you like no other film ever will. There can be no question that this film MUST be re-released in the USA on DVD, so that it’s message will be heard and felt.
My boyfriend had been dogging me for months to watch this movie, which he (erroneously, I think) described as sci-fi. Now, I've never been a fan of sci-fi movies, as I think most of them are over-done, corny, etc. Add to that the fact that the movie was made 23 years ago, and I pretty much decided it wasn't going to be my cup of celluloid tea.
Was I ever wrong. Not only was it the singular most horrifying movie I've ever watched, it's timely as hell, and it's done documentary-style, so there aren't any overblown emotional scenes to detract from its realism. This movie scared me on such a profound level that I actually felt like I was having a panic attack and had to shut it off halfway through, during the "hospital" scene.
Mind you, I've never in my entire life been so disturbed by a movie that I just couldn't watch anymore. I sobbed, hard, for a good 15 minutes and couldn't sleep for most of that night. I have yet to finish the second half.
That said, I can't recommend it to the faint-of-heart. It will hit you on such a visceral level that everything in your reality will seem a little duller and less important after having watched it. I'm still amazed at how the events outlined in this movie are as much a threat to us now as they were in 1984. Twenty-three years later, we are no further from preventing a nuclear holocaust. If anything, the threat is more imminent.
If you can stomach it, you won't regret it.
-brrrnor18 February 2008
In 2020, it feels as if those safer times are ending. This is an important film that has become more, not less, relevant since it was first released.
It’s still one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever watched. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it truly is something everyone should watch.
Not yet convinced?
The United States is run by psychopaths that think that they have been given powers by God, and that they are invincible. They have followers that believe this as well, and they are all in charge of a massive nuclear arsenal and they are running around the world stirring up trouble galore.
Nothing good is ever going to come of this.
It will not be a scene from “The walking dead”. It will be something else. If you live, you might have to wait thirty years before you will see taste pizza again. If might never, ever be able to drive a car ever again, and forget about checking out your Facebook page, or attending any kind of university. It’s all over.
It’s game over.
Forever, and your life will be forever changed.
If you earnestly believe that Donald Trump and company will usher in a better world for you and your fellow Americans, you are delusional. He has been one wrecking-ball after the other, and aside from plunging the entire globe into a global recession, he unleashed a global pandemic and is RIGHT NOW toying with the idea of launching nuclear weapons.
Nothing . good . will . come . of . this.
Reality Check
Most Americans are unaware of the true realities involved. In fact, media in America is a mountain-sized discharge of manipulation and nonsense to give the illusion of understanding and objectivity. While it is none of the sort.
An attack on China is a de faco attack on Russia. Both military have officers stationed in their respective military headquarters.
Any attack on China will NOT be limited to a distant South China Sea. They will retaliate. They will make it personal. America will never be the same afterwards. If you think that America is falling apart at the seams now, can you imagine what would happen with the top 20 cites in smoldering run, zero internet, radio or television, and where every other person has a gun…
…
Think about it.
Look at what is going on now. Look at the “hybrid-war” with China. Only four short years ago, China had our “most favored trading partner status”. And what is not said, and what you just cannot find in the alternative media…
Eight American initiated biological weapons attacks on Chinese food supplies and livestock. Followed by the release of COVID-19 on the most important holiday in China, CNY 2020. It didn't work, so the USA sent a flotilla of two assault carrier groups and five nuclear carriers to the South China Sea...
...which returned with "their tail between their legs" when the directed energy weapons ringing China turned off all the electronics, sensors, engines, and systems on the Naval vessels and aircraft. Planes started to fall out of the sky. Ships became uncontrollable. Nuclear reactors started to scram.
And yet...
After all this. COVID-20 is launched inside of China. At the same time that President Trump gets "sick" and goes into "hiding" and America goes DEFCON ONE.
Russia out-numbers the USA in nuclear weapons, and China is substantially superior to the United States in key strategic military technology (like hyper-velocity weapons, directed energy beams, drone hardware, swarm drones, and captive munitions).
But if you tell these neocons any of this, they shout you down with…
“America is number one”
“God is on our side”.
“America has never lost a war!”
“You are delusional, America is the best!”
And so on and so forth.
The neocons have co-opted the American patriotic conservative movement arguing that blowing up people, places and things are signs of American greatness.
.
Ah…
Still not convinced that these neocon “patriots” don’t believe that a nuclear war is “winnable”…
In addition to a nuclear first strike, the United States and her allies have a decided advantage of quick strike, long range battlefield capabilities because of superior aircraft and carrier strike capabilities. The Chinese have developed and are close to making operation, carrier-busting weapons platforms. A major advantage enjoyed by the US is about to be totally negated by an advancement in Chinese technology.
-Can America Win World War III? A Critical Analysis | The ...
Yes, you read that correctly.
America needs to strike FIRST, using nuclear weapons because both China and Russia have well-organized defensive weapons.
Crazy, eh?
Well, they seem to temper their enthusiasm for war with some caution…
The downside of a nuclear first strike by the United States would be that the US would also take a significant beating as Russian and probable Chinese and Indian nuclear forces would have time to retaliate.
However, the US submarines could do much of the damage, because of geographical proximity, before our enemies could get many of their missiles off the launching pads. If the deep space platform missiles were successful along with the “Rods from God” in targeting Russian and Chinese nuclear submarines, the United States could win a decisive victory.
With regard to the “Rods from God”, does anyone think that the recent destruction of the four chemical plants in China was truly an accident?
-Can America Win World War III? A Critical Analysis | The ...
So…
It’s pretty much all there in black and white.
Conclusion
An odd thing happened in October 2020. The President, Donald Trump was carted off to a hospital for three days and the United States went DEFCON ONE. Then things returned back to normal.
The excuse was that he was sick. That he had the COVID-19. But that he was cured miraculously, and is now feeling better than ever. His die-hard fans and believers are pretty much spit between…
It’s a sign from God that he is the messiah.
See, COVID-19 is not as bad as the flu.
It doesn’t matter what “everyone thinks”. I am not in Middle School, nor am I a member of the American sheeple. I just do not care what everyone else thinks.
COVID-20 (SADS-CoV) was launched, and discovered inside of China by the PLA at the same time that Donald Trump went "into the hospital" and DEFCONE ONE was initiated in America.
I know that all the evidence is pointing to an out-of-control leadership that is implementing long term strategies that require the use of nuclear weapons to achieve.
Trump followers have a near-religious belief in his ability and purpose.
And while it is clear that the Overseers will not permit radical changes to the Earth environment, they will permit a wide degree of latitude in how the PTB and their oligarchy-run governments operate. You can well expect things to get dicey.
Now, I am NOT saying that it will happen. Instead, what I am saying is that all the evidence points to plans within plans that involve this exact kind of human-generated calamity. And absolutely no-one is considering or what is aware of what is actually going on.
Were I to be one of the merit-driven leaders in Russia or China, I would instigate a pre-emptive first strike to prevent a belligerent United States, run by religious fundamentalist psychopaths, from destroying the rest of the world in their zeal for a utopia where Jesus comes down from heaven to purify the universe.
Either way, it’s a sick mess.
Be aware, but be safe.
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Most of what you read in the Western press is “China = Bad”. And since this is an election year, anything related to China (the evil devil incarnate) association with the opposition party (=Biden) is fabricated and promoted. Oh don’t be too surprised to see all sorts of tweets, videos, and the like on how China has it’s “dirty little hands” in the wallets of Biden and company. It’s pretty much normal this time of year.
Lies.
Distortions.
More lies.
Insane level of howling and screeching of the lies…
Those of us who know better have either stopped reading the “news” or following our feeds, or intentionally point out the ‘bots and other nonsense spewing (and it is truly SPEWING) forth out of the government-owned and controlled Alt-Right, Alt-Left, and mainstream American and Western press.
Fuck that all!
It’s all nonsense and the last thing you want to read when you get up in the morning and check the news is to find out about what ever the calamity of the day is.
OK. Well, then…
Imagine my surprise when I read this piece of sensibility.
It’s penned by a former ambassador and (of course CIA) well experienced in Asian Geo-politics, and well aware of all the shenanigans going on right now. It is long, but gosh and golly is it spot on correct. It’s worth a read.
Reposed as found. All credit to the author. No editing at all simply because the venue it was pulled from was WordPress friendly and devoid of java-script and for-profit advertisements. Obviously this author is like me. Stop making everything for-profit.
The Struggle with China is not a Replay of the Cold War: Remarks to the Asia American Forum
Washington has declared war on China. The administration and its allies hope that the war will be “cold,” but have no strategy for keeping it so. I find it noteworthy that the most belligerently anti-Chinese members of the current U.S. Senate are also its youngest.
They came to adulthood after the end of the post-World War II “Cold War” and have no experience of its anxieties. They appear to take its sudden end as predestined – something that was so inevitably right ideologically that it can and should be taken for granted. Their military experience, if any, has been in the contemporary equivalent of the 19th century’s Indian Wars – combat with gun-toting farmers with no air forces, air defenses, navies, guided missiles, or nuclear weapons with which to answer U.S. hostility. To paraphrase Hilaire Belloc’s riff on Britain’s hubris in its colonial wars:
“Whatever happens, we have got Close air support and they have not.”
The Cold War was radically different from this. It was a global struggle between two competing ideological blocs and nuclear-armed power centers capable of destroying not just each other but all life on the planet except maybe the cockroaches. It began as a series of squabbles over the spoils of a worldwide war. Each side strove to consolidate spheres of politico-military and economic influence and deny the other access to them. But each learned to avoid confrontations that might lead to armed combat directly with the other. Each limited itself to proxy wars aimed at sustaining or imposing its ideology somewhere not in the grip of the other. Each sought to minimize and contain interaction with the other. That was not difficult, given the utter lack of interdependence between the two and the blocs of nations they formally and informally commanded.
The struggle we Americans have now initiated with China has none of these characteristics. To analogize it to the Cold War of 1947 – 1991 is intellectually lazy. More important, it is profoundly misleading and delusional. The Sino-American split is not the sequel to a bloody world war. However politically convenient it may be for Americans to cast antagonism to China in all-encompassing Manichean terms, this is a contest born of contending national self-images and ambitions, not ideologies. The struggle with China on which Americans have embarked is a bilateral contest in which others may or may not choose to take sides, not one between two committed blocs of nations. China is both a much less inherently hostile and far more robust rival than the Soviet Union was.
Emulating China’s autocracy by closing America to foreign goods, services, people, and ideas, as the United States is now doing, is self-defeating. Modeling China policy on Ronald Reagan’s treatment of the USSR before he met Mikhail Gorbachev, as Secretary of State Pompeo has done, is the path to receipt of a national “Darwin award.” The U.S. contention with a resurgent China cannot be conducted in the same manner as the Cold War. It will not end, as the Cold War did, with the voluntary resignation of an ideologically disillusioned and exhausted adversary.
Before I discuss China and how our contest with it is likely to proceed, it may be useful to spend a minute or two on what China is not.
In Chinese literature, there is a beast called a 四不像that is satirically defined by the “four things it ain’t.” The head and face of a “four ain’t[1]” is slender like a horse, but it ain’t a horse. Its horns are like a deer’s, but different. Its neck is like a camel’s, but it is no camel. Its tail is like a donkey’s, but it’s not an ass. The point is that describing a “four ain’t” by reference to previously encountered animals it does not resemble is worse than no help at all in understanding and dealing with it.
China is the “four ain’t” of today’s geopolitics. [1] It is ruled by a “Communist Party” but is an overachieving participant in global capitalism, committed to free trade, expanded foreign investment, and a market economy guided by industrial policy, not central planning. [2] China is armed with nuclear weapons, but it has sized and configured its arsenal for a retaliatory response to an attack on it by other nuclear powers, not for a first strike, which it has abjured and is not equipped to conduct. [3] China is a threat to American global primacy, but mostly in economic and technological rather than political or military terms, in which it remains decidedly inferior. [4] China is once again the immovable economic and cultural center of its native region – where the United States has for seventy-five years been the resident overlord – but China seeks no “allies” and has no political satrapies or military dependencies.
Crucially, China is not the Soviet Union:
China has no messianic ideology to export. Its appeal derives from its performance, not its ideas. It is happy to be emulated, but justly charged with callous indifference to how foreign societies govern themselves.
China is not engaged in regime change operations to create an ideological sphere of influence. It seeks to prevent the overthrow of its own authoritarian system of governance but does not oppose democracy or promote authoritarianism abroad. Where tested, as in Korea, it often has a better relationship with democracies than with their undemocratic opponents.
China’s relationships with foreign nations are transactional rather than sentimental. It has no “satellites,” “allies,” or entente partners to divert its attention from its own defense. Beijing has no ideological soul mates, committed followers, or dedicated sycophants abroad.
China’s economy dwarfs that of the USSR. It accounts for 30 percent of global manufacturing and continues to grow. China has an economy that is almost one-third larger than that of the United States in purchasing power terms and that is rapidly approaching parity at nominal exchange rates.
China is now the largest consumer market on the planet and the biggest trading partner of three-fourths of the world’s other economies. It is fully integrated into the global capitalist system and cannot be walled off from it.
China already possesses one-fourth of the world’s scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce. It is steadily increasing its ascendancy.
China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is an order-setting geoeconomic strategy with no Soviet parallel that dwarfs the nearest American equivalent – the Marshall Plan.
China spends two percent or less of GDP on its military vs. the estimated 9 – 15 percent of the USSR and the current 7.9 percent spent by the United States.[2] Unlike the USSR, if pushed to do so, China has the capacity to more than match any U.S. military spending increases.
Despite much wishful thinking on the part of its detractors, premising a policy on China’s collapse from systemic defects, as George Kennan shrewdly did in the case of the USSR in 1947, is – on the evidence – delusional.
China has not built a nuclear arsenal to match that of either the United States or Russia. It has instead adopted a “no first use” policy for nuclear weapons backed by a modest force de frappe that can conduct a limited but devastating retaliatory counterstrike to any foreign nuclear attack on it.
There are no U.S. arms control agreements, exchanges of information, understandings on mutual restraint, or escalation control mechanisms between the U.S. and Chinese armed forces as there were with the USSR
American military intervention in the Russian civil war lasted only two years (1918-1920). Overt U.S. intervention in China’s ongoing civil war, sparked by the Korean War, began in 1950. Seventy years later, U.S. support for the heirs to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Chinese regime not only continues but is escalating.
The United States backs challenges to China’s sovereignty over Taiwan and islets in its near seas. By contrast, despite rhetorical opposition to its incorporation of the three Baltic states, America never actively contested the USSR’s territorial integrity.
The armed forces of the United States aggressively patrol China’s shorelines and test its defenses, as they did those of the Soviet Union. But, so far, unlike the USSR, China has not reciprocated.
Equally important, the United States of the 2020s is not the America of the early Cold War.
As the Cold War began, the United States produced one-half or more of the world’s manufactures. It now makes about one-sixth.
For the first time in American history, foreigners do not envy American freedoms. Once almost-universal admiration for the United States has been overwritten by repeated displays of racism, gun violence, political venality, xenophobia, and – most recently – executive incompetence and legislative default in the face of national challenges. No one abroad now seeks to emulate the U.S. political system or believes that the United States illustrates the possibilities of democracy.
During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested leader of a bloc of dependent nations that it called “the free world.” That bloc is now in an advanced state of decay. America’s international followership is greatly diminished and its capacity to organize coalitions that integrate lesser powers in support of common objectives has atrophied.
Legacy U.S. alliances formed to contain the USSR have little relevance to American contention with China:
US-European alliances like NATO are withering. Though cautious about China, Europeans do not and will not support an effort to “contain” it.
No Asian security partner of the United States wants to choose between America and China.[3] S. “alliances” in Asia embody U.S. undertakings to protect partners rather than commitments by them to come to America’s aid. Such dependent relationships cannot be repurposed to form a coalition to counter China.
The United States is isolated on a widening list of issues of importance to other countries. It has withdrawn or excluded itself from a growing number of multilateral instruments of global and regional governance and is no longer able to lead the international community as it once did.
Americans have repeatedly declined to recapitalize or cooperate in reforming international financial institutions to meet new global and regional investment requirements. This has led China, India, and other rising powers to create supplementary lenders like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank. The United States has chosen to have no voice in these and continues inadvertently to stimulate the creation of still more institutions that can act without reference to American interests or views.
Since 1950, the Taiwan issue has been a casus belli between the United States and China. But U.S. allies or security partners see it as a fight among Chinese to be managed rather than joined. If the U.S. mismanages the Taiwan issue, as it now appears to be doing, it will have no overt allies in the resulting war.
No claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the U.S. in naval conflict with China.
U.S. foreign policy is now as partisan as domestic policy. It is often driven by special rather than national interests and is unrealistic, strategically incoherent, divisive, and fickle.
Partisan oligopolies have swallowed independent media in the United States and reduced the thousands of U.S. correspondents once reporting on international affairs to mere dozens. S. corporate media now treat the news as an entertainment-based cost center and consumer product rather than as a necessary public service or civic duty. These developments and the politicization of the U.S. intelligence community diminish and distort American situational awareness, helping spurious narratives to overwrite facts.
In short, this time is different.
Sino-American relations have a history and dynamic that do not conform to those of the US-Soviet contest. If you have seen one “communist,” you have not seen them all. And the United States is much less well equipped to inspire and lead opposition to China than it was to the USSR.
The US-Chinacontention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States.
The battlefields include
global governance,
geoeconomics,
trade,
investment,
finance,
currency usage,
supply chain management,
technology standards and systems,
and scientific collaboration
In addition to the geopolitical and military domains in which the Cold War played out.
Short of nuclear war, the struggle the United States has begun with China may not be existential, as the Cold War was, but it cannot avoid being hugely consequential.
Four years ago, the U.S. unilaterally decided that geopolitics are inherently driven by great power military rivalry that precludes cooperation.
In 2016 when Donald Trump became President and appointed war-hawk neocons to all the international positions in his administration.
The policies derived from this militaristic reconceptualization of international relations are generating a series of zero-sum games between adversaries seemingly as interested in hurting each other as they are in raising their own status. The newly pugnacious U.S. stance legitimizes xenophobia and justifies bilateral approaches to foreign relations that don’t just ignore issues like global terrorism, pandemic diseases, climate change, migration, nuclear proliferation, or regional tensions but actually cripple the global governance and international coordination needed to tackle them. The United States is going out of its way to demonstrate its indifference to the interests and sensibilities of its past and potential partners. It is withdrawing from international organizations it can no longer dominate. These actions amount to unilateral diplomatic disarmament and the creation of politico-economic vacuums for others – not just China – to fill.
Future historians will puzzle over why Americans have chosen to dismantle and discard the connections and capacities – other than military prowess – that long enabled the United States to direct the trend of events in most global and regional arenas. When they unravel this mystery, they will also need to explain the simultaneous collapse of the separation of powers structure on which the American republic was founded and on which its liberties were built. The checks and balances that made America uniquely resilient are now on life support. A legislative branch that refuses to take a stand on the issues entrusted to it by the plain text of the U.S. Constitution has been sidelined by an increasingly despotic and bellicose presidency. The American judiciary, once the custodian of constitutional rectitude, is now selected and appointed by reference to political rather than legal criteria. The result is governance with declining legitimacy at home and next to no appeal abroad.
Fortunately for post-constitutional America, China’s political system, despite the stability and prosperity it has fostered, has even less appeal beyond China’s borders than the degenerate and debased U.S. “model” now does. Both China and the United States are now repelling other nations rather than attracting them. If the contest were military and didn’t go nuclear, the United States, with its battle-hardened and uniquely lethal military, would enjoy insuperable advantages. But politics and armed conflict are not the central elements in the Sino-American confrontation. And the zero-sum games in other competitive arenas do not look promising for America.
After World War II, the United States made the rules. American statesmen crafted a world order that expressed American ideals and served American interests. In the post-Cold War period Washington began to contract its commitments and to disengage from the global institutions and norms it had sponsored. It also abandoned the effort to lead an expansion of the rule-bound order it had created. Over three dozen treaties are pending in the U.S. Senate. The last time it approved one was in 2008.
The United States has failed to ratify international compacts that regulate a widening range of arenas of importance to it. These include conventions on the law of the sea, nuclear testing, the arms trade, human rights, and crimes against humanity. Washington has withdrawn from or suspended compliance with conventions on the laws of war and agreements on arms control, combating climate change, and trade and investment. It has ceased to participate in or sought to sabotage a growing list of United Nations specialized agencies and related institutions. Notwithstanding the current global pandemic, these include the World Health Organization. This generation of American politicians does not seem to understand that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
America’s withdrawal from its traditional role in global rule-setting and enforcement deprives the United States of the dominant influence it long exercised through the institutions it created. Other great powers remain wedded to the old American-led order expressed in the United Nations Charter. But America’s exemption of itself from the comity of nations and its spontaneous metamorphosis from world leader to global dropout have left it unable to aggregate the power of other nations to its own. Washington’s resort to abusive language, threats and coercive measures has grown as its capacity to apply its power non-coercively has declined, further reducing the numbers of foreign allies, partners, and friends willing to bandwagon with America.
The European Union remains impotent and cannot fill the breach created by the United States’ sidelining of itself. Rising and resurgent great powers – like China, India, Brazil, and Russia – now have a free hand to reshape and supplement legacy institutions to their advantage, and they are doing so. In some ways, their initiatives are constructive. Unfortunately, in others they are not. This is especially true of their reliance on precedents set at Guantánamo that justify “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced interrogation,” the criminalization of resistance to military occupation, “targeted killings,” and the replacement of the rule of law with ruthless expediency. Russia saw the example of NATO’s war to separate Kosovo from Serbia as a precedent justifying its separation of Crimea from Ukraine. As America ceased to set a good example, the world became less civilized.
The decline in U.S. clout internationally is made even more consequential by the fact that China has resources, including money, to offer its partners, and – except for military shock and awe – the United States does not. The United States’ budget is in chronic deficit. Even routine government operations must now be funded with debt. America has spent trillions of borrowed dollars on wars in the Islamic world that it can neither win nor end. Its so-called “forever wars” siphoned off the funds needed to keep its human and physical infrastructure at levels competitive with those of China and other great economic powers. They also crippled U.S. statecraft by defunding non-military means to advance or defend American interests abroad and curtailing U.S. contributions to the international institutions charged with assuring global peace and development.
The Asian Infrastructure Development Bank and the New Development Bank and their infant sister institutions affirm American-invented global systems and practices. They do not challenge legacy lenders like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank. They supplement such institutions by recreating and recapitalizing them in forms exempt from American veto, sabotage, or stonewalling. The most recent example of such necessity-driven invention is the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement. This effectively nullifies a key element of American vandalism of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It enables the continued orderly resolution of trade and investment disputes between the EU, China, and others without the participation of the United States. Similarly, current international efforts to craft a multi-currency system for trade settlement and reserve management to replace the dollar do not reflect dissatisfaction with its service in these roles. They are driven by universal foreign objections to hegemonic American bullying through unilateral dollar sovereignty-based sanctions.
Coercive approaches to statecraft are inherently alienating. Claims to superiority that are not empirically substantiable are unpersuasive. Asking countries to choose between China and the United States, when China is clearly rising and America is simultaneously stagnating and declining, practically guarantees the progressive eclipse of American prestige and power. Advocating democracy abroad while deviating from it at home destroys rather than enhances American credibility. America’s addiction to debt risks eventual financial collapse even as it limits immediate policy options both at home and abroad.
If the United States succeeds in making its contest with China mainly military, as the military-industrial-congressional complex desires, Americans are less likely to spend the Chinese into national bankruptcy than the Chinese are to bankrupt the United States. A strategy based on the presumption that Asian and other nations are committed to eternal dependence on U.S. military protection against Washington’s enemy du jour cannot succeed.
No country wants to be caught in a Sino-American firefight. If the United States goes to war with China, the outcome is at best uncertain.
A nuclear exchange cannot be ruled out.
Protectionism and xenophobia promise to reduce American prosperity and retard innovation, not make the United States once again competitive. Trade and investment policies based on the rejection of comparative advantage promote inefficiency and stagnation rather than growth. Retreating into the “Five Eyes” technology stockade while barring the gates to Chinese scientists and students is less likely to sustain American international standard setting and scientific primacy than to cede the global commons to China and others. Withdrawal from multilateral organizations forfeits influence in them and yields it to others more open to diplomatic give and take. The United States is weakened, not strengthened, by muscular diplomacy-free foreign policy and the incapacitation of every instrument of statecraft other than the military.
For the first time in our history, we Americans must decide how to deal with a country that not only has the capacity to surpass us but is actually doing so. Unless the United States cures its fiscal feebleness, rebuilds the capacities and competence of its government, upgrades its human and physical infrastructure, and reopens itself to trade, investment, and immigration, America’s roles in global governance, trade, investment, finance, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration will continue to contract as those of China and others expand. The United States’ capacity to innovate will decline, as will American well-being and self-confidence. This diminishment of the United States is not the consequence of Chinese predation but of American hubris, political ineptitude, and diplomatic decrepitude. To compete internationally with China, the United States must get its act together at home and, in its foreign relations be everything it claims China is now not – that is: trustworthy, truthful, empathetic, considerate, courteous, and dignified. Above all, America must itself return to living by the rules – old and new – it expects others to follow.
The essence of any strategy is the efficient linkage of resources and capabilities to feasible objectives. Current U.S. China policy is strategy-free. With neither resources nor institutional capabilities to back it, it amounts to puerile fantasy. Washington is determined to crush the China of its imagination, but China exists whether the United States understands it or not.
The American turn against China began as neurosis but has now crossed into psychosis…
… evidencing a loss of contact with reality and inability to interact normally with other nations. This is a product of populism, which habitually disdains facts, embraces politically appealing xenophobic narratives, corrodes discipline and the capacity for self-sacrifice, and rejects expertise…
… in favor of ideologically inspired preconceptions implemented by true believers and untested amateurs.
U.S. China policy at present is a classic example of demonizing a foreign foe to rally support at home and divert attention from festering political, economic, and social problems. This is an approach that is highly unlikely to result in a Cold War-style victory for the United States or the Enlightenment values that gave birth to it. Quite the opposite. All the more so if spurious analogies to a cock-eyed view of the Cold War continue to shape the American approach to competitive interaction with China.
End Notes
[1] The 四不像 [sìbùxiàng] is actually the Père David’s deer or 麋鹿 [mílù], a unique species of elk long extinct in the wild but preserved in the imperial game parks of Beijing and saved from complete extinction by rendition to European zoos before its Chinese remnant herd was slaughtered in the Boxer Rebellion. In 1985, the 麋鹿 was reintroduced to China from England, where a breeding population had been established.
[2] Proposed U.S. spending on national security in FY-2021 totals $1.21 trillion, about twice the Pentagon “base budget.” In March 2020, when this budget proposal was put forward, U.S. GDP was $21.535 trillion and falling. For a breakdown, see https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/03/creating-a-national-insecurity-state/
[3] SEATO is dead, as is CENTO. The Philippines is moving toward strategic neutrality. Thailand is now closer to China than to America. Pakistan is estranged from the United States. Iran and Iraq are both anti-American. Japan sensibly prioritizes its own defense. South Korea is appropriately obsessed with North Korea and avoiding Sino-Korean hostility. Even Australia is torn between its reliance on the China market and its distaste for China’s increasingly hegemonic behavior.
Conclusion
It’s pretty much an accurate appraisal of what is going on in the world today, and regarding China.
I am personally stunned that you will find this in the English-language press. As most of those venues have been co-opted by the USA and UK governments.
This is it.
So don’t get so hot and bothered and twisted up into a pretzel. over the latest ‘news” out of America. This is pretty much everything that you need to know right now. And as you can well guess, American “greatness” is in shambles and the childish neocons running Washington DC are dangerous in their ignorance.
But that’s all gonna change. One way or the other.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Trump Trade War Index here…
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Empires are a real pain in the ass, don’t you know. They are always off concocting one war or the other. Bombing places into oblivion, and just threatening others with all sorts of trouble. They collapse trade, invention, scientific development, society, religion and the environment. But yet, it all continues.
What stops all this madness?
Internal collapse. That’s what historically ends the insanity.
You can tell a empire from a normally peaceful nation by it’s “telltales”. Which are uniformly, and historically stable;
Military bases everywhere.
The most powerful military in the areas that they occupy.
The use of their currency for financial transactions.
On-going wars or conflicts.
Justification for war using “righteous and just” excuses.
Disruption of trade.
Now, it’s pretty obvious to everyone (except the most bone-headed ignorant) that the USA today is a military empire and it is going “down” shooting as it collapses internally. The signs are all there and obvious.
But we are not going to talk about THAT, right now.
John Whitehead.
We are going to talk about something else. We are going to talk about the crimes of the empire when it is still functioning. Because, as soon as it collapses, everything is forgotten and forgiven (apparently). And that is really, really bad, and a serious problem. For how can you learn form your mistakes if you always conveniently forget the past?
“Oh, let by-gones be by-gones.”
Now, one of the big things about these military empires is that they are always invading the “little guy”. They are always invading and taking over smaller and peaceful nations. Either directly or indirectly (like the CIA and it’s many tentacles).
Hey!
Fun fact! Did you know that the United States is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars right now? Yeah. It is. Bet you cannot name them all. And you also wanna know something else? They are all smaller and unable to defend themselves from the nuclear super-power.
Harry Dunn
Well…
Perhaps it’s time for me to butt-in and say a few word about all of this. Eh?
The scarlet pimpernel.
When the British Empire was at it’s peak, it too invaded nations on the slightest whim. And the excuses were the same as they are today “because we should take precautions”. And so, let’s look at one of those little nations states that the British Empire overran and conquered…
The following is a reprint of an article titled “British Invasion of Madagascar” and Authored by John W. Osborn, Jr.. It is reprinted as found with only minor editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author and his work.
British forces were compelled to invade the island Madagascar off the coast of East Africa amid fears of a Japanese invasion.
By John W. Osborn, Jr.
“The first I saw of Madagascar and the last after adventurous months ashore was the eerie color of the soil,”
…a British novelist turned security sergeant would write a decade later.
“It gave to the sky, the vegetation, and the people a strangeness, even a deathliness which still shadows my recollections of the island. For the soil and the dust which rose from it to cake our skins and clothes, our eyelids and nostrils was not brick-colored or terra cotta but the color of dried blood.”
Lying 240 miles off the southeast coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, at 226,658 square miles Madagascar ranks just behind Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo in size among the world’s islands.
But with a population in 1942 of just 3.4 million, it had one of the world’s smallest densities, five persons per square mile.
Only 25,000 were French, the rest a mixture of African with ancient arrivals from Malaya and Polynesia dizzyingly divided into 18 sub-ethnic groups such as the Antandroy, the “people of the bush brambles,” and the Tsmimihety, the “people who do not cut their hair.”
Madagascar
Though discovered by Europeans in 1506, its French rulers did not bother to take possession until 1897. Under the rule of Vichy collaborators, the island was ignored and isolated for most of the war; however, events in the Pacific brought it briefly into the action.
As World War II raged on all over the globe, the people of Madagascar lived their lives in peace and tranquility. Knowing full well that they were safe as being uninteresting and of little importance int he grand scheme of things.
When he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor in his London headquarters, the leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, asked an aide what he thought the consequences would be for France.
“The Indian Ocean becomes a major theater of operations, and Madagascar suddenly takes on strategic importance. The Japanese will try to seize it,”
…the aide astutely answered.
In Japanese hands, the magnificent harbor of Diego Suarez at the northeast tip of the island and the naval base a mile to the south at Antisare could choke off Allied supply lines to India and Egypt.
De Gaulle appealed to the Allies to take Madagascar, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill vetoed the idea.
“Our hands are too full,”
…he cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and told his chief of staff,
“Madagascar must still have low priority.”
But then the Japanese captured Singapore and Burma. They landed on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. With Ceylon threatened, the British war cabinet decided on July 12, 1942, to seize only Diego Suarez rather than all of Madagascar.
“The rest of the enormous island was of less strategic importance,” Churchill later explained. “With the memories of Dakar in our mind, we could not complicate the operation by admitting the Free French. The decision was taken for a purely British expedition.”
Churchill called the campaign for Madagascar …
“our first large-scale amphibious operation since the Dardanelles.”
Operation Ironclad got underway just 12 nights later, winter clothing seen loaded amid rumors of a commando operation against occupied Norway. Rear Admiral Neville Syfret commanded the aircraft carriers Illustrious and Indomitable,the battleship Ramillies, a pair of cruisers, nine destroyers, six corvettes, and an equal number of minesweepers.
Maj. Gen. Robert Sturges commanded 13,000 troops.
During the effort to gain control of the port of Diego Suarez on the island of Madagascar, British soldiers come ashore with their equipment on May 5, 1942.
“It was the nearest I would come to realizing a conception of ‘adventure,’”
…Sergeant Rupert Croft-Cooke later wrote. He had already had his share of extraordinary experiences, working in a circus, traveling with a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, and wandering Europe in an old bus. The writer was now heading for the strangest of all.
The convoy rounded the Cape of Good Hope, spent five days docked in Durban, South Africa, to load supplies, then headed north into the Mozambique Channel separating Madagascar from the African mainland.
Facing the British would be 8,000 unenthusiastic local conscripts along with Foreign Legionnaires and tough Senegalese soldiers from West Africa. “We were told in a whisper that we had agents ashore keeping us informed of every defensive measure of the enemy,” Croft-Cooke wrote. The top British agent on Madagascar since November 1940 was Percy Mayer, a businessman whose work took him all over the island, while his wife, much admired in what passed for society with her looks and piano playing, tapped out his messages to Durban in their bathroom.
“But,” Croft-Cooke recalled, “when the last night came and we realized that in the small hours, the landing would start, the prospect, viewed in the tropical sunlight, suddenly seemed forlorn, uncertain of success, exceedingly dangerous.”
The campaign for Madagascar opened at 4:40 amon May 5, 1942, with the attack at Diego Suarez.
Fairey Swordfish and Albacore aircraft from the carriers bombed shipping at anchor in the harbor and destroyed most of Vichy’s 30 aircraft on the ground, while the fleet shelled the town and paratroopers descended.
Caught in town, Percy Mayer rushed from his hotel room into the street. Unluckily for him, he ran right into a Vichy patrol. When he was searched, secret messages were located on him. He quickly found himself in a cell at Antisare’s naval base, told he would be summarily executed, and was at least offered a priest.
Only the air strikes had been real. The naval bombardment had been star shells and signal rockets, light instead of heat, the “paratroopers” merely dummies. The real attack was taking place on the island’s western side, at Courier Bay and Ambarata.
“Firing at night is not to be contemplated, the entrance to the bay being considered impossible,” a French staff report confidently concluded. Royal Navy minesweepers were nonetheless able to skillfully navigate the shoals, reefs, and mines and then drop buoys for the troopships to follow.
After coming ashore on Madagascar, British soldiers of the King’s African Rifles assemble on the beach.
Commandos and East Lancashire regulars proceeded to scale the 50-foot cliff overlooking Courier Bay. “We moved up to a gun position which we could see clearly in the moonlight,” a Royal Artillery captain serving as a forward observer related.
“Strangely enough, all was quiet and deserted, no sentries were posted, and no sign of life of at all. As dawn broke, we saw some buildings and went in to investigate. There we found the gunners all in bed.”
There was little initial opposition. “In sweltering heat, loaded like pack mules with ammo and grenades, we marched against a hot wind across the 8-mile isthmus to Diego Suarez,” one Commando remembered. When the Commandos and the Lancashire troops reached Diego Suarez at 4:30 pm they finally met bitter resistance.
Sergeant Rupert Croft-Cooke and the 29th Independent Brigade, in the meantime, had come ashore at Ambarate. He dragged his motorcycle to shore, kicked it to life, then joined the advance up the single, dusty road 21 miles east toward Antisare.
“There was no sound of firing, no glimpse of the enemy,” he wrote. “Ten miles or more distance were covered before we saw anything but red earth and florid vegetation.”
“Soon after noon, the battle started,” he continued. He had been traveling 20 yards behind the Bren carrier that the 29th’s commander, Brigadier Fredrick Festing, was riding in. Known as Frontline Frankie, he was, as usual, hundreds of yards ahead of the column when firing suddenly broke out. The British rushed to cover behind the roadside trees and bushes. After five minutes, one of a half-dozen supporting Valentine tanks clanked up. As he walked toward it, Festing saw Croft-Cooke and yelled, “Been fired on much, sergeant?”
“No sir, not at all.”
“I’ve got to speak to that tank,” Festing said and started whacking the turret with his walking stick. More irritated than impressed, Croft-Cooke rode back down the road to rejoin his security section.
The prospect of a Japanese invasion of Madagascar threatened the security of British interests in the western reaches of the Indian Ocean and along the coast of East Africa. However, Vichy French resistance to the British occupation of the island resulted in some difficult fighting before Madagascar was secured.
Festing drove the Vichy defenders back with armor, then a bayonet charge. Hours later, descending a hill and coming to a bridge across a stream, the British vanguard came upon a dilapidated corrugated iron building with a sign that said “Robinson’s Hotel.”
It was actually a store.
“In every village of Madagascar, we afterward learned, there was a Chinaman’s store, usually a tin shanty,”
Croft-Cooke recalled. It was quickly taken over as field headquarters for Festing and Sturges, with Croft-Cooke in charge of the guard detail. All the while, the ancient Chinese proprietor served tea, chattering in his unique brand of French.
Three miles from Antisare, the surprised British ran into a network of pillboxes and trenches the Vichy soldiers called the Joffre Line. Percy Mayer, still sweating out his appointment with the firing squad, had reported on it, but the information had never reached Sturges.
“The firing was now intense and from all sides,” Croft-Cooke related. “Our own artillery and the French 75s were audible in the universal racket of mortars, machine-gun and rifle fire.” Festing threw in his armor, only to have it stopped by a 2,000-yard-long antitank ditch. The last four of the Valentines and two of the six light Tetrarch tanks making up the rest of the operation’s armor were knocked out by artillery fire. Their crews leaped out and fought Senegalese soldiers hand to hand to reach safety. Festing recommended Captain Peter Palmer, killed trying to save his wounded driver, for what would have produced the campaign’s only Victoria Cross, but he was instead awarded the Military Cross.
A long day came to a merciful end at 6:30 pm. “Now, it was deep night, and the crowded stars of the southern hemisphere shone brightly,” Croft-Cooke wrote. To prevent snipers from crawling up in the darkness, the British set the surrounding grass on fire. “I watched the blazing hills and the black shapes of our men against them, and tried to realize that this was a battle, and not merely a rather fantastic night in a strange country.”
Sturges prepared to launch a predawn attack, expecting “a good scrape which would end when we were at breakfast in Antisare.” Actually, he was having his breakfast at 7:30, still at Robinson’s. “It was quite clear that the attack had failed. It was an unhappy moment,” he admitted.
There were more unhappy moments to come. Despite the fires, snipers got through—a naval signalman sitting next to Croft-Cooke fell forward without a sound, a bullet between his eyes. Then, Robinson’s came under heavy artillery shelling, sending everyone but the Chinese owner dashing to cover. Sturges headed back to the coast to board Syfret’s flagship Ramilliesat 2 pm, “hot, begrimed, and unhappy,” in Syfret’s words, and requesting a diversionary seaborne raid against Antisare.
In less than 30 minutes, the destroyer Anthonywas setting out to race 100 miles around Madagascar with Captain Martin Price and 30 Royal Marines. One of them was Syfret’s valet, who begged to go, Syfret agreeing only with reluctance. He later admitted, “I did not expect a score to survive the night. The next hours were not happy ones.”
Lieutenant Commander John Hodges took the Anthonyinto Antisare Bay in pitch darkness at 8 pm, hoping to make a surprise landing, but searchlights on shore came on. Hodges steadily maneuvered through a gauntlet of fire at 30 knots toward the docks. With no time to stop, he overshot the dock, reversed in by the stern while Price and his Marines jumped off, and then headed full speed back out to sea.
Price divided his Marines to seize objectives. Those rushing the gate at the naval depot where Percy Mayer was taken for execution came under rifle fire. Grenades tossed in response soon had the commander emerging with a white flag. A bugler beside him started to sound the ceasefire. The Marines, mistaking it for an alarm, knocked him down and then apologized. Inside, 50 British prisoners taken in the morning’s failed assault on the Joffre Line were liberated, but not Percy Mayer. Luckily, he had not been shot: sensing defeat, the French had ostensibly paroled him.
Price armed the prisoners and soon had Antisare under control, and despite Syfret’s fears, he had not lost even a single Marine. “This was a brilliant diversion,” wrote Churchill. Price was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for it. Sturges ordered a final assault on the Joffre Line at 8:30. Phone calls from Antisare reported that Price’s raid had broken Vichy morale, and at 11 pm, the burst of signal rockets illuminated the black sky, announcing that the Joffre Line had fallen.
The last holdouts in Diego Suarez gave up in the morning. “It was as though we had won a hard game of rugger, and neither team appeared to have any ill feeling,” Price commented.
Rupert Croft-Cooke saw nothing sporting about the score in losses, for 105 British had been killed and 283 wounded, while Vichy French losses were 145 dead and 336 wounded. “There was little for triumph in our entry,” he wrote. “We were angry at the idiotic obstinacy of the French, who had fought and killed many a good fellow. And why? Because an octogenarian marechal at home had ordered them to do so.”
Another soldier was just as angry: Charles De Gaulle. He was in Washington, D.C., to mend relations with President Roosevelt when a reporter awakened him at midnight for a comment—the first word he had received of the invasion. For the moment, the British preferred to deal with the local Vichy authorities. They would find them as hard to handle as De Gaulle, but for a different reason.
A Grumman Martlet fighter aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm No. 888 Squadron flies past the old Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite off the coast of Madagascar.A Grumman Martlet fighter aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm No. 888 Squadron flies past the old Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite off the coast of Madagascar.
When the police, customs officers, teachers, and other assorted necessary functionaries were summoned to the town hall in Diego Suarez and asked by the British to continue working, they protested, one of them asking how it would endanger their pensions to, ironically, collaborate with the occupiers.
The British made the gesture of threatening to jail them so they could claim later they served under duress. Croft-Cooke, for one, could not hide his disdain for such people “who, thinking that their pensions might be lost or their good name obscured in the eyes of their government, refused to admit the one consideration which should have counted with a Frenchman as it did with an Englishman: the defeat of the Boche who sprawled across France and of the Jap who occupied Indo-China.”
Croft-Cooke got on with his own security work, freeing imprisoned Gaullists, rounding up Vichy sympathizers for questioning, and starting a dogged pursuit of two German agents. He even governed for a while as an acting district officer. “I came to like the Malagasy, his innocent mendacity, his primitive timidity, his talent for storytelling, his indolence, courtesy, and sweetness,” he later wrote.
In the meantime, the British left the French in control of central and southern Madagascar, to his irritation. He wrote in 1953,
“One day, I suppose, we shall be told why it was that having taken the only strongly defended port in Madagascar, we remained precariously within an area of 100 square miles before attacking and controlling the rest of the island.”
Three years before, Winston Churchill had explained why. In the fourth volume of his World War II history, The Hinge of Fate,he included a telegram to Admiral Syfret regarding Madagascar. “It must be a help and not a hindrance. It must be a security and not a burden. We cannot lock up field troops there for any length of time,” it read. Syfret had, in fact, concurred. “I think, as far as our occupation of Diego Suarez is concerned, the French will adopt a policy of live and let live.”
Before long, though, the Japanese again forced Churchill to change his mind, this time directly.
“We had settled down to life in that scruffy little seaport as though we would remain there forever,” wrote Croft-Cooke. On the night of May 29, 1942, sudden explosions in the harbor shattered that tranquility.
Ramillieshad a 20-foot hole blown it its side. An oil tanker was sunk. “Where had they come from? What did it portend?” worried Churchill.
It had been a Japanese midget submarine. Attempting to escape after doing the damage, it ran aground on a reef, the two crewmen swimming ashore to be cornered and killed two days later.
During the next two months, several more midget submarine attacks destroyed 34 ships totaling 150,000 tons. The (erroneous) assumption—the midgets actually launched from Japanese fleet submarines—was that the Japanese were operating from the ports still in Vichy hands: Majunga on the west coast, Tamatave on the east. The premier of South Africa, Jan Smuts, put particular political pressure on Churchill, cabling, “Madagascar is the key to the safety of the Indian Ocean. It all points to the necessity of eliminating Vichy control from the whole island as soon as possible.”
The British first responded with bombing missions into Vichy territory by the South African Air Force. One aircraft with a pilot named Jones went down, and Croft-Cooke was sent on a rescue mission to get him back. Jones, though, had salvaged a machine gun from his wrecked bomber and was leading his crew to safety when they were suddenly faced with a French officer and 40 men.
As operations to secure Madagascar continue in November 1942, British soldiers dismantle a roadblock that has been erected to impede their overland progress.
“I must ask you, gentlemen, to consider yourselves my prisoners,” said Jones, firing a burst from the machine gun into the air. The Malagasy accompanying the French officer scattered.
The Frenchman responded, “I surrender unconditionally.” With his prisoner in tow, Jones reached the coast to be picked up by the Royal Navy. Croft-Cooke also found the German agents he was hunting. After receiving a tip, he nabbed them before dawn while they were sleeping in a hut.
“The west coast ports were needed for control of the Mozambique Channel where our convoys were molested by the U-boats. The governor-general remained obdurate. Further operations had to take place,”
…wrote Churchill. In the end, the decision was finally made to occupy the remainder of Madagascar in a three-stage operation named Stream Line Jane.
Stream would be a landing at Majunga, followed immediately by Line, a march on Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, finishing with Jane, a landing at Tamatave. A convoy of reinforcements including the famed King’s African Rifles (KAR) sailed from Mombasa to rendezvous in the Mozambique Channel with Croft-Cooke and the 29th Brigade on the night of September 9, 1942.
Another writer, Kenneth C. Gandar-Dower, was with the reinforcing troops that night. He had flown a rickety two-seater from England to India, later exploring Kenya and the Belgian Congo and publishing accounts of his exploits. The war provided him more opportunity for exotic adventure as a correspondent covering first the invasion of Ethiopia and now Madagascar.
“The world was dark and empty for us—and Madagascar,” he wrote of that night at sea. “I did not know what lay ahead.” What did lie ahead was an episode that would go down in British lore as the Battle Before Breakfast.
The invasion force appeared off Majunga at 3 am. “Between the troopships, something was moving, a little black blob that seemed to have no shape,” Gandar-Dower wrote. “After a while, I realized it was not alone. There was another, and another, and another.”
They were assault craft carrying East Lancashire troops and Welsh Fusiliers to the beach nine miles out of town. When daylight came, his ship moved to 400 yards from shore, and he watched “little figures crawl slowly up cliffs of white chalk, following the convolutions of a winding track, halting, going on…. It was if we cut away half an ant hill, replaced by a pane of glass, and through the glass, were watching ants at war.”
In fact, he was watching a feint attack like the one at Diego Suarez.
Croft-Cooke was coming in with the real landing force, headed straight for the docks. “It took an hour and a half to reach the shore,” he related, “and before we had done, dawn had arrived. We could see Majunga in the rosy light of sunrise, a white city among palms. At first, it seemed peaceful enough, but as we were within earshot, we could hear the sound of machine guns, and we knew the French were resisting. We caught a glimpse of the Commandos hurrying up a narrow street and saw our men along the white sand of the beach.”
The Commandos landed at 5:20, quickly overwhelmed the machine guns then swarmed into the town. Croft-Cooke followed, pushing his ever-present motorcycle through the surf and sand. “The fighting was almost over, but a few shots were still audible to give me the illusion of taking part in a fight for the town,” he recalled.
The Commandos met only scattered resistance as they occupied the bank, post office, and residence of the regional administrator, and in 90 minutes, the battle—such as it was—ended with a dozen British dead. Commandos trying to flank the town had run into a far different, more determined opponent.
“As we traveled up the river,” Fred Munson remembered, “the tide began to go out, and we began to run aground on a sandbank. The river was full of crocodiles, so before we could get into the water to lighten the craft and push them off the sandbanks, hand grenades were thrown into the river to keep the crocodiles at bay.”
In Majunga, the garrison commander, Major Didier Martins, got caught in bed at the time of the attack but managed to get himself slightly wounded in the left elbow and, no doubt for the benefit of his Vichy superiors, made a show of presenting himself with a theatrically oversized sling.
“Did my men fight well?” he asked.
“Magnificently!” the British commander played along.
As at Antisare, finding a bugle to call surrender proved difficult. A young British officer was sent to the Martins home for a white flag. He found Madame Martins hysterically barricaded in her bedroom.
From outside the door, the officer explained why he was there and assured her that he was not going to rape her. The door finally creaked open, and a trembling hand passed out a broomstick and bed sheet. “A curious gaiety spread through the town at lunchtime,” Croft-Cooke observed. “We were openly welcomed, and the hope was expressed we should occupy the capital before long.”
By then, the KAR and a South African armored car column had set out 250 miles southeast to do just that. They covered 131 miles in just 18 hours, only to be slowed to a crawl by the first of some 3,000 roadblocks Vichy forces were eventually to put up all over Madagascar. The KAR worked around the clock dismantling the obstacles and met their only serious opposition 150 miles from Atananarivo, at the mountain village of Ariba.
Senegalese troops kept the KAR under heavy machine-gun fire until a sergeant named Odillo, whose British officer had been killed, led his platoon around the Senegalese and then came screaming down on them wielding three-foot-long, curved panga machetes.
“After firing to the last, one of the Senegalese would jump out and try to scuttle through our lines. We dropped a number of them like rabbits,” the KAR colonel said. Four of the KAR died in the fight, while the eight wounded were laid without rancor or bitterness alongside Senegalese casualties, though neither would accept being put next to a Malagasy conscript.
British colonial troops fire their field artillery pieces toward Vichy French entrenchments on Madagascar. Defending their government’s sovereign territory, the Vichy soldiers were defeated after several sharp fights with the British forces. This action took place near the village of Ambositra.
After 13 days, the column reached Atananarivo to be met by a Special Operations Executive operative, Royal Navy Lieutenant Peter Simpson Jones, standing by a Renault in a crisp, new tropical suit. He and a companion had delivered a radio set to another agent, but their dinghy had capsized in Madagascar’s notoriously shark-infested waters while they were rowing out for pickup. The companion drowned, but Jones was rescued by a fisherman. At his court-martial, at which he was sentenced to five years in prison, the Vichy prosecutor had suggested, “Don’t you think in the next world war,you might do better to join the artillery?”
Percy Mayer’s piano-playing, radio key-tapping wife, who spent several anxious weeks expecting arrest, was also safe. Governor General Armand Annet had fled, and with no one to take the surrender, a British officer walked into the radio station to politely request airtime for a not quite historic announcement:
“At 5 pm, our troops occupied Atananrivo. Everything is quiet. That is all.”
Five days earlier, the Jane portion of the operation had taken place. With the surf at Tamatave too rough for landings in the dark, the plan was to intimidate the town into surrender with an overwhelming show of naval force. “They might bluff up to the last minute, but not beyond it. The guns would never have to fire,” Gandar-Dower believed, but he was proven wrong—for three minutes.
That was how long the British bombardment went on after the French had rejected a 10 AM ultimatum. They hoisted a white flag at 10:03. Gandar-Dower sloshed ashore, bowler hat on head, camera in one hand, typewriter in the other, to witness a great deal of activity—soldiers in firing positions, rushing about, kicking in doors–but no action. “It was,” he wrote, “like a Hollywood assault, which was being held up by the failure of the other side to put in an appearance.”
An old woman shuffled up to him to ask if the battle was over. It was, he said, and soon he and the British were marching into town, at their head, a young lady “in the shortest of bathing costumes and pair of first-class legs.”
Even though Stream Line Jane had been successfully completed, the campaign for Madagascar would drag on for six senseless weeks. With a mix of defiance and delusion, Governor General Annet had sent off a crazed cable to Vichy: “Our available troops are preparing to resist every enemy advance with the same spirit which inspired our soldiers at Diego Suarez, at Majunga, at Atananarivo, where each time the defense became a page of heroism written by La France.”
British troops affected widespread landing don the West coast of Madagascar, including the ports of Majunga and Morondava. At Majunga, opposition, which was only slight, was soon overcome and the civil and military authorities arranged the surrender of the town. British Bren gun carrier on the road in Majunga, Madagascar, Oct. 5, 1942. (AP Photo)
He had fled 190 miles south to Finanarantsoa, and the KAR had set off in pursuit. Gandar-Dower followed in a confiscated Citroen truck, bicycle, and pirogue, admitting, “We saw little of the war, but met with a great deal of curious adventure.”
Rupert Croft-Cooke was having his own adventure with a lieutenant and a half-dozen soldiers searching for a French lieutenant with 100 conscripts. Along the way, they had encountered crocodiles, chasing them off with rifle shots. They later came upon a female English missionary, alone, forgotten, and resigned to staying after over 40 years.
“Five hours of being paddled up a crocodile-infested river in Madagascar to a collection of native huts does not prepare one for such an encounter,” Croft-Cooke wrote. Then he and the lieutenant finally had their discussion with the French officer:
“You have, of course, some soldiers?” the Frenchman asked.
“Yes,” the British one replied. “We have some soldiers.”
“Naturally, they are armed?”
“Naturally.”
“Automatic weapons, I presume?”
“Tommy guns.”
“You have, perhaps, some other forces in the area?”
“We have.”
“With some artillery, no doubt?”
“Certainly.” It was back at the coast.
“Ah. You will excuse me a moment.” He immediately wired Annet, “Occupied today by British forces armed with automatic weapons and supported by artillery.”
The campaign became one more of annoyance than action as the stubborn Vichy put up hundreds more roadblocks. “When I shut my eyes and think of Madagascar, I see one enormous roadblock,” Gandar-Dower remembered.
The French laid melon-sized rocks exactly 20 yards apart for miles and erected 18-foot stone walls. In the last significant action, the KAR turned an attempted ambush on itself, marching 30 miles around to attack from the rear, killing 40 and taking 800 prisoners. The Malagasy, always quick to run from battle, were now running away for good, deserting in droves. Even worse for the Vichy, law and order were breaking down. Croft-Cooke was an official witness at the execution by firing squad of a Malagasy for the unprecedented murder of a French settler.
After a five-week march, the KAR reached Finanarantsoa, only to find that Annet had fled another 190 miles southwest. With the KAR still in pursuit and after almost being killed when his staff car was strafed from the air, Annet finally sent his aide, Captain Louis Fauche, to negotiate surrender. In a 650-mile march, the KAR had routed 6,000 defenders for a loss of five British officers killed, six wounded and 20 Africans killed, 76 wounded.
Fauche agreed to surrender with the curious condition that it did not go into effect for another 10 hours, until 12:01 amon November 6, 1942.
The reason turned out to be, to the very end, about career concerns. Having the campaign last for exactly six months qualified the French for medals, promotions, and even cash awards, but any chance was dashed days later. To cap the fruitless futility of it all in Madagascar, the Germans occupied Vichy France.
Churchill was modestly satisfied with the campaign for Madagascar. “We had gained full military control over an island of high strategic importance to the safety of our communication with the Near and Far East,” he noted. “The Madagascar episode was in its secrecy of planning and tactical execution a model of amphibious operations. The news arrived at a time when we sorely needed success. It was in fact for long months the only sign of good and efficient war direction of which the British public were conscious.”
De Gaulle was angered at being left out. Kenneth Gandar-Dower, by contrast, later wrote, “It was for me a fascinating experience, an isolated six weeks of strange adventure.” He admitted that it was “certainly more than an exercise, but very much less than a war…. The French consciously or unconsciously conducted their defense according to formula. The first was ‘maximum results for minimum expenditure.’ The second: ‘resist as long and as fiercely as you can without loss of life—either French or British.’” Gandar-Dower’s exotic adventuring and writing ended when his transport was torpedoed en route to Ceylon on February 12, 1944.
Rupert Croft-Cooke soon left Madagascar for his next and last wartime posting, India. He spent most of his postwar life in other out-of-the-way locales, including Morocco and Tunisia, after serving six months in prison for homosexual activity in England in 1953, but he was through with Madagascar. He later wrote, “I shall never go back to Madagascar with its blood-red earth and creeping shadows.”
He continued with his prolific, if ultimately forgotten, writing and in 1953 published his account of events in Madagascar titled The Blood-Red Island. Tragically, Madagascar would become that, and not just from the soil. An uprising in 1947 against the French was crushed with perhaps 100,000 dead, and independence in 1958 was marked by more violence and tribal strife.
Empires come and go.
No empire stays around for long. They all have a half-life. This is simply because humanity cannot exist, let alone thrive under an empire. It just cannot.
Empires come and go.
Some thoughts…
It is easy, so very easy, to get caught up in the history of the past. So and so, directing troops of Mr. XYZ and using the artillery of ABC attacked the hamlet of ZZZZ. So exciting. So interesting. So fascinating.
And the geo-political issues… well it is often simplified to “it had to happen, as other decisions were in motion”. Like “we had to invade Madagascar to stop the Japs (the Japanese) from invading Africa, or the Middle East, or the Mediterranean sea.” It was a necessity. They all argue.
Now…
Pause.
Think.
Look at a bigger, a much bigger picture.
No, I’m not talking about the Japanese Empire fighting the British Empire. Or the Russian Empire fighting the German Empire. Or the American empire fighting the world.
Nor, am I talking about the bankers and their control of the finances of the world. (For they tend to be the major players in all this nasty wars and fighting nonsense.)
I am talking about something, much bigger.
Something much bigger than earth-wide politics.
There are so many people, involved in so many aspects of human society that it is one big enormous mess. Everyone is fighting and striving for the bits and crumbs left over on the ground. The “news” is off yelling and screeching one narrative after the other in rapid and rabid succession. And even though you have a kind of allegiance to one side of a complex social-economic coin, the truth of the matter is something else entirely.
We are all puppets.
The American oligarchy has created factions that they pit against one another so that the peasants (debit serfs = you) will not rise up and kill them all.
And with all this confusion going on…
…and all this turmoil, just how can anyone sort any thing out?
The owners of the Earth have a say on what goes on…
What if you were an extraterrestrial looking at this entire event. What if you were watching dispassionately. What would you think about all of this? What would you think of the British invading a tiny island (ok, maybe not so tiny) off the coast of Africa?
What would you think?
Why was the UK busy invading Madagascar?
Why?
Why was the British busy invading Madagascar?
Why, indeed.
What was all this about?
At that time, the entire globe was plunged into war. Empires fought empires. And there were a bunch of them. Don’t you know.
And afterwards…
The British Empire collapsed in stages.
Leaving only two empires remaining. The Soviet Union Empire, and the United States Empire.
In the late 1980’s the Soviet Union Empire collapsed, and that left the United States Empire that maintained sole dominance of much of the globe.
From the 1980’s to today (2020), forty years…
It’s been non stop military wars, military development, military bases. All either open or covert. And while all this has been going on, the internal structure, and balance of what America was founded upon has rotted away. And what is left?
Nothing much.
Americans (and the rest of the world) are “burned out”. They want all this fighting, bickering, and torment to end. They just want to live their lives in peace.
And now today…
You all have a Casino owner for a President, and a cabal of war-mongering neocons that are gonna show the world that America is still the toughest bully in the world. Meanwhile, the media is full of fear, fear fear to control an increasingly upset population of debit serfs, and modern slaves in the urban centers.
Conflict is all but certain…
All of the indicators are pointing to this in alarm!
From 2020 through 2025, will be a very testy and trying time for America and for Americans. However, things will start to get much better and by 2030, everything will be just fine.
We know what is going on.
We know what is happening and why.
But…
You know, if I was an extraterrestrial, and my species was in charge of the earth I would look at things quite differently. I really would.
An extraterrestrial head’s up.
In fact, I would not care at all about the details. Let the humans fight among each other. Let them sort things out. My concern would be long term and everlasting damage. But even at that, there would be some leeway provided.
I would do the following…
I would isolate the biggest troublemaker (the USA from the rest of the world).
Economically, and by trade.
By treaties with other nations.
Keep the citizens of that nation fighting among themselves.
I would allow the nation to collapse.
No support for new technology.
No intervention of any type.
Instead, I’d make new alliances with healthier nations.
In fact, all things being equal, I would permit limited global war engagement.
Sometimes it’s better to kill the rabid dog before it infects others.
Isolation of the battlefield(s) to the American nation.
Permit and encourage shunning or isolation of the rabid nation.
Change the system
I would permit and encourage the development of other forms of commerce.
And, other forms of finance.
And, other forms and systems of society.
Allowing traditional governance with a heavily monitored presence.
Now, with this under consideration, is that not what is going on now?
Sentience selection and sorting. A fight for the dominant sentience for humans. Shall it be “Service for self” (The American neocon, and Oligarchy preference), “Service for others” (Which is more Buddhist, and representative of China, and Russia.) or a continuation of the current state with a segregated humanity. One that has two sentience’s for mankind; a ruling “Service for self”, and a subservient, servant class “Service for another” sentience?
What is going on today…
Let’s look, shall we…
For Americans
it’s confusing. The rabid dog is barking up a storm, jumping around all over, and has started to rollover and over on the dirt, causing you and your fellow fleas great discomfort. To make matters worse, some fleas actually cheer the dog on. Telling everyone else that they have never had it so good, and that the dog must bark to preserve their “flea society”.
It’s all a big mess on the back of that nasty rabid dog.
You are here.
So to understand how to survive and get through the next couple of decades, understand that you all (if you are Americas) are fleas on a very sick and rabid dog. He’s running around everywhere, barking up a storm and digging holes all over the yard. The other dogs are afraid of him, and the farmer has got his shotgun out because he doesn’t want his prized poodle, and collie torn up by the rabid pit bull. Will he pull the trigger?
For the rest of the world
Well, you are a flea on the back of one of the other dogs in the yard. You know that the farmer probably will not shoot your dog. But that crazed rabid dog has been barking and snarling at your dog for some some time now. If the farmer does not shoot, the crazed rabid dog will tear your dog to pieces…
Whats going to happen?
Well…
Time is our friend. Not our enemy.
And the invasion by America of another nation will only accelerate the coming end of the United States. Not delay it.
MAKE NO MISTAKE. Things are falling into place as they should. And do not get too caught up on all the details, and the lies spewing forth from the dying nation.
A big reminder…
What you think the universe is, what you think reality is, and what science is … well, it’s all wrong. The reality that we inhabit is quite different than what you all think. And when I say that things are happening and following a plan because that’s the way it is …
… well, believe me. OK.
Strange coincidences…
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The signs of decay and collapse of the American Empire are all around us. I have written about this in other posts. It’s not a popular subject. Americans take “greatness” and “exceptionalism” for granted. They don’t care if the garbage gets collected, just as long as it disappears. They don’t care who designs and make the cars as long as they are available. They don’t care about education, as long as the proper check boxes are checked off on your social scoring balance sheet.
America is collapsing everywhere.
And the lack of skilled talent, and collapse of the educational and support systems that use them, and the rampant corruption at all levels has created a very toxic environment. It is a place where things are breaking down, and there just isn’t anyone remaining who can fix and repair them.
You know it’s really bad when…
…fucking bridges fall down!
I mean, this is ancient technology. If pre-historic Romans and Egyptians could build bridges with their bare hands, what’s stopping modern American society?
Social progressivism.
What is the real cause behind this collapse?
What is behind all this; what is the root and reason for all this collapse? Is it a particular political party? Because that is what all the articles seem to point towards…
…it’s the “democrats” fault. It’s their damn social progressivism.
It’s OUR COLLECTIVE FAULT. We have allowed and permitted lazy and corrupt millionaires to let America fall apart and denigrate. We allowed them.
It’s our fault.
Own up to it.
Our fault?
This level of collapse, and destruction is not due to one person or a group of people. It is due to the structure and the very fabric of our society.
The American nation, and everything that it stands for, created this situation. You cannot deny it. No one president, no one group of people, and no one situation created it. America has evolved in a natural progression. It is natural. It is organic.
Deal with it.
This is the truth.
A Republic that allows other forms of governance does not last long.
Mob rule is a guaranteed path to an oligarchy.
Oligarchies always turn into military empires.
Military empires require dumbed-down, illiterate slaves/servants to operate.
And when you are standing around, take a good long hard look at your life. When you are paying $10 for a fucking simple cup of coffee. When everything you do is taxed and regulated, and any projects that are make “for the good of society” just spins around and around like some 5 GB movie that you are trying to download.
There are better ways.
There are more efficient ways.
But first you need to kill off all the slime-balls that have their hands in the till. All of them. Not punish. Kill. And make examples of them. Then you need to put new systems in place. Systems that will never allow a repeat of the past mistakes.
Until that day comes, the dysfunctional America will continue to stay dysfunctional. And all these plans for a railroad from Alaska to California, HST all over the nation, moon bases, walls on the borders, high technology transports, and college of the future are all just…
…wishful thinking.
For they will never come to fruition. Not until you start training and employing people who actually fucking make things. And the way the United States is today, that will NEVER happen.
Making things.
The future belongs to the nations that make things. Not to the nations that destroy things.
Which brings me to what America is today…
The following is a complete reprint of an article titled “2 + 2 = 5 means more bridges will collapse” and written on 4OCT20. It is reprinted as found with only minor editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Reality is true even if you don’t want it to be. And it has certain characteristics, which include the fact that you need to do engineering right.
There has been a lot of talk about how Mathematics is racist, and that Math is sexist.
Well, math also describes the way the universe works, and if you want things like electric power, electric vehicles, better internet and computers, and bridges that don’t fall down, someone had better understand the math and the physics.
The FIU pedestrian bridge designed by FIGG Bridge Engineers collapsed in March of 2018 while it was still under construction. Six people died. Faulty design, due to incorrect calculations of load factors, was blamed.
Last month, the Federal Highway Administration placed FIGG on immediate suspension of any projects that involve federal funding. The FHWA also proposes that FIGG be debarred from any federally funded work for 10 years.
I am not an engineer, but clearly there was something wrong with either the design of the FIU bridge or the construction, or both.
The other thing wrong was that FIU spent something like 12 million dollars for a bridge that could have been built for less than 1 million.
There was a federal grant!
I don’t know how to gauge the quality of their designs, but when you get bridges designed incorrectly, they fall down.
They usually don’t fall down before they are in use.
Harris County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday night to change the engineer of record on the Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel Bridge after a review found one portion that had not yet been built contained a potential design flaw.
The @HCTRA plans to temporarily stop construction on the Ship Channel Bridge replacement project. An independent consultant found a design issue with the curved portions of the pylon legs. (1/2) @KHOU#KHOU11 Photos courtesy: HCTRA pic.twitter.com/ICdRu0zVR0
— Chris Costa (@ChrisCostaTV) January 7, 2020
In removing FIGG from the project, TxDOT cited a National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the 2018 Miami bridge collapse. The report released in October cited load and capacity calculation errors by FIGG for the pedestrian bridge’s design.
And no amount of bafflegab is going to change that.
Feminist bafflegab.
America is not supposed to be like this.
You have to understand that America, as founded, was the most amazing nation ever to grace this good earth. There are many reasons for this, but nothing can say it better than this…
America's founders embraced a previously unheard-of political philosophy which held that people are "...endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable rights.." This was the statement of guiding principle for the new nation, and, as such, had to be translated into a concrete charter for government. The Constitution of The United States of America became that charter.
Other forms of government, past and present, rely on the state as the grantor of human rights. America's founders, however, believed that a government made up of imperfect people exercising power over other people should possess limited powers. Through their Constitution, they wished to "secure the blessings of liberty" for themselves and for posterity by limiting the powers of government. Through it, they delegated to government only those rights they wanted it to have, holding to themselves all powers not delegated by the Constitution. They even provided the means for controlling those powers they had granted to government.
This was the unique American idea. Many problems we face today result from a departure from this basic concept. Gradually, other "ideas" have influenced legislation which has reversed the roles and given government greater and greater power over individuals. Early generations of Americans pledged their lives to the cause of individual freedom and limited government and warned, over and over again, that eternal vigilance would be required to preserve that freedom for posterity.
-Footnote: "Our Ageless Constitution,"W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
You see, America today in no way resembles what our Constitution says it is supposed to be. It has turned in to a huge enormous monstrosity.
"Allow me, just now old enough to apprehend the freak show for what it is, to put something radical to my conservative forbearers:
Little about the presentstate of American life is worth conserving. Nothing of what the Founders envisioned remains."
-Andrea Yung
We Americans, living in this mess, move along with the flow and ebb of the political and social winds. Often making the most absurd statements, and rationalizations. Thus this fellow that I was chatting with.
He then went on to say that “We need to police the world. We need to spread democracy... ...the rest of the world is one big shit-hole, seriously.” And then asked me, “Have you ever seen the Mexican side of the border?“
America is very beautiful once you leave many of the urban areas. The sky is often awesome, the roads are wide and often clear of traffic. Many of the houses are large and spacious. When compared to other nations, the United States appears to be (hands down) the most desirable place to live. So it is natural to assume every other place is a hell-hole.
Now this is coming from a guy who doesn’t even has a passport, has never tried to get a visa, and his only experience outside the borders of our country was by watching reruns of Baywatch.
Ah. that old “no one has it better than us Americans” argument. We are so fortunate. Eh. Well, it plays well in Peoria. And it’s a good conversation stopper. As we, as Americans, have all seen the “Save the Children” commercials. That money-generating venture brought images of poverty into the living-rooms of Americans for decades.
So the argument seems to have some validity.
Seems to.
Being older with some experiences…
But, you know, I am from a different generation. I grew up in the 1970’s, and at that time between all the smoking blue haze we came to appreciate the strengths of the American system. We did so cranking Jimmi Hendrix, Robin Trower, Yes, Jefro Tull, Alice Cooper, Boston, Manfred Mann, Traffic, Uriah Heep and Three Dog Night.
"I'd love to change the world... but I don't know what to do.
That 70s show was a television comedy that sort of reflected what it was like living and growing up in the 1970’s.
And…
We knew, since the Vietnam war was still fresh in our minds, that America should be for Americans. We did not need to be off throwing money, and wasting lives in some off-the-beaten track for some globalist oligarch.
We knew that America was wasting money in Vietnam. We knew that people were dying there, and many of them were friends, or relatives. We knew that what ever benefit would come of that war, none of us would ever see that benefit.
We knew that the war was just pissing away American resources.
Americans in Vietnam. We fought and died there for “democracy”. When the truth was that it was an effort with the wealthiest in America to game the situation for their very own personal advantage.
We, almost my entire generation, felt betrayed by those older than us. Those who ended up throwing away lives in far off rice paddy’s, and making laws against marijuana that everyone was obviously breaking. What was the matter with these people? We asked.
Why can’t they just let us be? Why do they have to take too much of our money, regulate too much of our lives, and go off fighting wars that are too far away? Why?
Things were so different the. We weren’t expected to apologize for being born. We weren’t ashamed of our nation. We were American gosh darn it!
Well, that was only the tip of the iceberg.
A few more years passed. Ronald Reagan did put the breaks down to some degree, but he made some other blunders that (sad to say, eventually) set the stage for what was to come…
President Bush Senior spent most of his Presidency trying to undo the good works of Ronald Reagan. In many ways he was very successful.
First, was President Gerald Ford Bush (Senior) who made it his life’s work to undo “Reaganomics”, and implement The New Global Order. Then came a succession of socialist criminals, such as Clinton, Bush Jr and finally Obama.
Each one, in their own way, contributed to the state of affairs that America is enduring today. Each one played a role. Each one created the situation leading to all the complaints that we Americans have about “our” government.
They snipped the brake-lines to the American Constitutional government, and it has been in free-fall ever since.
Free-fall.
Ahhhhhhhhhh.
Those of us, still trapped in a rapidly decaying world try to grasp for straws trying to make out some sense of reason to the hordes of pink-haired ignorance, the black-thugs of Antifa and the BLM that seem to want to put average Americans in concentration camps.
So we listen to the news. Many, well meaning of course, have no idea just how tainted it really is. They believe the news.
America is full of the manipulated, living inside an echo chamber created by the military oligarchy to control and subdue the “citizenry”. Meanwhile, as the military empire trudges on, the quality of life of the peasants (oh I mean “citizens”) falls dramatically.
Nothing works any longer.
When a nation can no longer build bridges and walls…
… homes, and houses won’t be far behind.
Conclusion
Should I bring up China? Yeah. That nation run on merit that is populated with engineers? That are building bridges and High Speed Rail at a breathtaking rate? Nah. It’s far too easy.
China is a merit based nation of hard workers.
And…
America is what?
A nation run by a corrupt Casino owner…
Is a $500 scoop of ice cream served to you by an unkempt and illiterate moron just as good as a $1 scoop served by an attractive cheerleader / honors student?
Not until you start training and employing people who actually fucking make things. Instead of accountants, stock brokers, bankers and bean-counters who can count and look at spreadsheets. The world needs people who make things. Not people who stand by and approve of what others say.
If you were trapped on a desert island, who would you want to share it with? A handyman with a set of tools, or a a stock broker who doesn't have electricity for his computer?
America is deep into decay. And you all know what?
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Well, the much promoted debates on television between Donald Trump and Biden has finally concluded, and all of us who watched them were disgusted. Very few left feeling better about ourselves, about our nation, and about where the world was heading. Instead, it actually reminded us of something quite different. It reminded us of two dirty old rats fighting for moldy turnip greens on the deck of a sinking ship.
That’s what it was like.
It was disgusting, horrifying, and just awful. But don’t worry. Trump just announced that he has COVID-19. And meanwhile…
Anyone who cannot see that the United States is in a state of decay and collapse is delusional. The USA is a mess, and the best leadership that the two parties can come up with are these two sorry washed-out clowns. It’s… well, pathetic.
Words fail me.
Perhaps, you might well appreciate what is going on through a song, eh?
Conrad Harris – Paradise (Tiny Tim on vocals.)
Yes.
It’s sort of like this.
You, yes you, are sitting in the front row seat to the collapse.
Now, maybe it will be quiet and peaceful. Maybe it will be calumnious and frightening. But, it will be a collapse. It is well beyond the point of recovery. The nation is collapsing in upon itself, and the best thing for the rest of the world to do is… stand back and let the whole thing implode.
Can you imagine Xi Peng acting like Donald Trump did?
Can you imagine Mr. Putin acting like Biden did?
I cannot. I see no leadership in either of the “preferred” candidates. I see just comical satire that has been streamlined into some kind of sick cartoon. It doesn’t matter who started the entire fiasco. Donald Trump appears to be the culprit. But the entire situation reeks of failure.
Instead, we were treated to a glimpse on the terrible, and misguided distortions of what some crazy people think is “how you rule the world”. And, people, It is dog-shit frightening.
If the world is to be handed over to these two clowns, then let me off the boat. The world is in for a shit-load of hurt on a mega-scale.
One thing is certain, and should be absolute crystal clear by now, the USA has ceased to be a leader in world governance. Further, it is under a state of collapse that is astounding in it’s magnitude and breadth and scope. And even beyond that, the general collapse of the American society on all levels; social, economic, financial, business, family, religion, morals, ethics, educational, and governance is so profound that no one can deny the truth.
The USA and the illusion of the “Strength and power” of the United States is over and long gone.
Jesus. Watching the debates was like watching two feral dogs in a remote countryside village fight over a leg of maggot infested mutton. It was that bad.
It was like watching two village dogs fighting.
It was that terrible.
Terrible.
The only thing that could recuse the participants would be either [1] a sudden war or [2] if one of them ended up with a life-threatening illness.
When Donald Trump left Walter Reed Medical Center in a car this afternoon, he simply had Secret Service agents drive him around the block so he could see his cheering idiot supporters outside the hospital, only to drive him right back into the hospital. If this stunt left a bad taste in your mouth, you’re not the only one.
Dr. James P. Phillips, who works at Walter Reed, tweeted this: “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential “drive-by” just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.
Which brings me to the latest in my SHTF series on the collapse of America.
The following is titled “Why the US is falling – and faster than you may expect: A 40-year-old prediction coming true”. Written by JO (Jan Oberg) on September 30, 2020. Reprinted with minor alterations to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Why the US is falling – and faster than you may expect: A 40-year-old prediction coming true
The unique, dominating position of the United States in the post-1945 world is well-known. It maintains this position thanks to both a very large historical goodwill capital and former glory in the eyes of generations around the world – and thanks to rampant militarism and imperialism that has destroyed the good ‘America’ that it used to be.
The world’s major division the next few years will be this: Are you on the side of [1] continued US global dominance or [2] do you want to see a new multipolar world with more balance and the US in the role of a partner among equals?
In my view, the US no longer has the capacity to lead itself effectively.
Nor can it find solutions to its own multi-dimensional crisis be it the economy, democracy, climate change, warfare addiction, social polarization, racism and on top of it all the Covid-19 crisis.
Not being able to lead itself, no one should wish that the US should lead the world. Neither does it have any right to.
Reread that sentence. Any nation that cannot handle its own domestic matters, cannot lead the world. It is like putting a pyromaniac in charge of a fire department.
While its allies, friends and admirers are increasingly turning skeptical, others turn away and look for other partners be it China, Russia or Iran.
While the friends of the US should try to help it out of its addiction to its outdated self-image…
… the designated enemies, of course, cannot help the US…
… as it simply would not listen. Strangely, these countries also need the US and have sought and still seek constructive cooperation but in vain.
The fact is that no one threatens the US (and certainly not Russia with less than 8 % of the military expenditures of NATO. The US has become its own worst enemy but blames others for its problems.
Sadly, it seems that there is not one ministry of foreign affairs among the EU /NATO countries that has even thought of developing a strategy for the post-US dominated West.
Countries such as China, other BRICS and many others are building a new world order. Will the West, therefore, loose completely, or will parts of it still be able to save what can be saved and transition into the future multipolar world order?
The chances of a “yes” to that question is diminishing by the day.
The list of twenty points below was written long before the Presidential candidate debate on September 29 (it would be an offense to children to say that they behaved like children). But that debate only confirmed these points – and the simple point that it doesn’t matter much whether the next president of the US will be Trump or Biden.
It’s the system, stupid!
And it is rapidly coming to an end.
It’s a valid intellectual-theoretical point that one cannot apply characteristics from psychology – basically the science of the individual – to much larger aggregates such as people, nations or the global system. That’s the fallacy of levels.
That said, let’s anyhow try to just a bit of such “psychologizing” to make it more familiar to the reader.
All empires go down, sooner or later – the latest was the Soviet Union, and the US/West has not been able to cope since its beloved enemy disappeared. All empires emerge, grow, reach a peak point, climax – and then begins to lose it to move to relative decline (others coming up) and then fall. Rather much like the individual life.
Over-reachor you never get enough – there is no one and nothing you don’t want to try to influence, dominate or control.
Hubris – we can get away with everything, we are big and powerful. May be right for a time, then reality catches up.
Exceptionalism– we can do things nobody else can because we are those we are – and we can tell others not to do what we ourselves do. We are above the law that others must follow, we fight wars for good while others fight for evil and are evil. Because we are good and have God on our side.
The unbearable lightness of routine – it’s all gone so well for so long thanks to our pervasive mind- and lifestyle-shaping influence through the media, film, culture, arts – Hollywood and all that. For as long as the rest of the world sees you as an ideal to imitate, – Americanization – everything goes smoothly.
The Number One problem– meaning that if you are (or believe you are) Number One in a rank order, there is no one to look up to and learn from so you end up becoming a teacher, master, dictator, more or less arrogantly “downwards”. If you are No 37, there are 36 others to learn from – how did they do it better than we did? However, sooner or later, the “pupils” stop listening and obeying the Master – His Master’s Voice, so to speak.
Mission activity or ‘mission civilisatrice’ – you try ad absurdum to shape others in the image of yourself; they shall become like us. Our national thinking is universalizable. The world should adapt to us, not we to the world. Remember who was The First World – (the Second and the Third) earlier?
Legitimacy in the eyes of others slowly disappears – you may get away with some bad acts once or twice, but when it becomes a habit, others begin to think. As time goes by, your normative power is eroded, and you rely increasingly on naked force – the military. My country, right or wrong: Send the marines!
Overmilitarization– the system needs a war more or less regularly; that means you need images of enemies (invented or real) all the time. Like a drug addict needs a fix. The US surely cannot do without enemies. The problem is that that military colossus called the Military-Industrial Media Academic Complex (MIMAC) always wants more – also in times when the economy cannot carry that burden. (Like the Sovjet Union in the 1970s and 1980s couldn’t). And the Coronavirus weakens the economy even further.
Increasing autism, denial of the real world plus Group Think– “everything worked so fine in the past, it cannot be true that we cannot just continue what we used to do. (So, let’s start a new Cold War, this time against China). Group think means that a small group of people over time build a common worldview that repels any new thoughts from the outside and become convinced that it’s right and everybody else wrong. The problem is that they don’t know they sit in that restaurant on US Titanic, the music playing so well…
Socio-political metal fatigue – something has been strong for a long time but suddenly there is a crack, and then comes another. The unthinkable, or at least unlikely and unforseen, suddenly happens repeatedly. And old tools can’t fix the problems.
Lack of vision and lack of the pioneering new dynamics– of the type that makes other want to follow you voluntarily. Little by little, everything signal you send out is negative or destructive.
The old positive life energy ebbs, and paranoia enters – like the increasingly old crumpy person who feels that the world turns its back and become unreasonable. Is there any important country in today’s world that the Trump US is not running some kind of conflict with, even friends and allies? Enters paranoia – “The whole world is against us… we see enemies all around – the world doesn’t understand us anymore. But we shall teach them a lesson…”
Stagnation and anti-intellectualism– you continue to do what worked before, such as solving every problem with the military and increasingly becoming unable to think. To the person who has only a hammer in the toolbox, every problem in the house is about hammering…So, don’t allow anything new, don’t tolerate diversity, and crack down on critical voices.
The normative and cultural power vanish– the perception by others of the Empire’s values as good and fair and as part of a vision crumbles. They embark on a future without the Empire’s diktat and/or protection and build a new world order (that the US will not hear about or let its subordinates participate in).
Over-extension through self-aggrandizement– you engage in conflicts and wars which you don’t stand a chance to win, increasingly losing a sense of reality and of your own strength vis-a-vis others.
Addiction& uni-dimensionality – since the only power scale in which you are “second to none” is the military, you use that where other means would be much more effective and cheaper as well as create respect worldwide. Diplomacy fades – lacking carrots, use the big stick.
Decadence, illusions and lies – the Secretary of State, Pompeo, is on record boasting that it is part of the American tradition to “cheat, steal and lie” – in other words, moral decay. Fake and omission, a struggle about what reality really is mounted.
Psychopaths and kakistocrats increasingly win influence = Pathocracy! Kakistocracy means government by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. The tempo with which norms and expectations of normal behaviour is broken overwhelms the world. Leader senility may play its role too – remember Breznev? And then, somebody usually turns up in the chaotic developments and declares that s/he is the saviour.
Democracy and people’s participation in it crumbles – most citizens sense what happens but in disbelief. Mobilization of counterforces to save what can be saved, become more difficult by the day.
“And faster than you may expect”?
One should hesitate to appear too sure about predicting the final end. Sometimes terminally ill people live longer than medical expertise predicted. Taking the risk anyhow, I would say within the next presidential term 2021-2026 or at the latest by 2030.
When the cracks are frequent enough and big enough, the decline and breakdown accelerate exponentially. Remember the end of the Cold War in 1989 when border guards just opened the gates and people started moving freely.
In a Danish academic book from 1981 (1) I predicted the fall of the West thus:
“The Western world is on its way down and the present crisis is not just cyclical and also not just a crisis of capitalism (it is not exclusively economic) but a sort of civilizational crisis. The global system that has existed with Europe-US as its center and developed over the last 400-500 years is going through convulsions of a deeper nature than is normally perceived.Neither liberalism nor Marxism which are both Western thought systems and neither the US nor the Soviet Union appears as attractive models to the rest of the world. They are in deep crisis themselves – socially as well as economically – while Japan, China and a series of new growth centers and regional larger powers are rising, particularly in Asia.The wealthy, overdeveloped countries are approaching certain ‘objective’ limitations in terms of nature, raw materials, exploitation of human beings, the sheer size of the systems as well as management problems, social pressures, etc.Armament and the increasing militarization of various types of social structures everywhere is an (attempt at) “rejuvenation treatment” in the old- age phase of the West, a sort of compensation for diminishing power in other areas.”
Perhaps another song is in order…
Conrad Harris – All of me (Tiny Tim on vocals.)
Conclusion
Those governments, businesses, academia and others who (in these years) hold on to the US Empire (as the leader of the “free world”)…
… will become a periphery in the future world order.
…
…
Why chain yourself to the anchor of a sinking ship? But that is what Australia is doing. That is the the United Kingdom is doing. Is that really an intelligent thing to do? Is it in the best interests of the citizens that they are supposed to represent?
America is like this big, enormous, and beautiful ship that is sinking into the deep dark oceans. It’s because the interior of the ship has not been maintained. That the hull has rusted out and the engineers and Captain do not have the skills needed to fix it and prevent it from sinking.
The future belongs to the builders, the makers and the contributors.
Not to those who hold on to the old methods, suppress any new methods, and praise themselves for tabulating and monitoring the spreadsheets in support of their activities.
"A majority of Americans are bracing for the possibility of a politically-fired civil war, and more than half are already stockpiling food and other essential items to survive and fight back, according to a new survey shared with Secrets.
In the survey, 61% said that the United States is nearing a second civil war, including a shocking 41% who “strongly agree” with that assessment.
And 52% are so convinced that it is just around the corner, or after Election Day, that they are putting away food and other essentials, an historic expansion of the prepper movement that has been brewing for years, now driven by fear and coronavirus-induced shortages."
And the other 48% who have not prepared at all will now understand the process of natural selection first hand.
-Powder keg: 61% say United States ‘on verge of civil war,’ 52% already preparing
And the final song for this theme shall be…
Conrad Harris、tiny tim – Auf Wiedersehen, My Dear (Remaster)
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The decision to land a probe on the asteroid 433 Eros, and place a spacecraft in orbit around it was not by random chance. No particular scientist looked at a tabulated list of the thousands of asteroids and picked it out randomly. There was a real good reason. And that reason, boys and girls, is because MAJestic (through NASA) wanted a close look at the extraterrestrial facility there.
What the public is told…
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) was designed to study the near Earth asteroid 433 Eros from close orbit. It was designed to operate for over a period of a year. It was designed quickly (for a NASA program) and was successfully launched in February 1996. It traveled for four years until it was able to enter orbit around the asteroid in February 2000.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft took 4 years from launch until it became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid in February 2000.
A month later, the spacecraft was re-named "NEAR Shoemaker" to honor the late Eugene Shoemaker.
To save launch costs, the mission used a special 2-year-period trajectory with an Earth gravity assist. On the way, the spacecraft imaged the asteroid 253 Mathilde.
On 20 December 1998, NEAR’s large engine misfired, failing to brake it for entry into orbit about 433 Eros. Another attempt 2 weeks later succeeded, but the spacecraft was almost a million kilometers away and took over a year to reach the asteroid.
The mission was recovered thanks to a generous fuel supply and robust contingency planning.
The implementation of the spacecraft’s daring orbital maneuvers is described, including those used to land on Eros’ surface in February 2001.
-NEAR Mission Design
In 1991, a “Discovery” Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission was proposed, and competitive proposals for it were prepared by APL and by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The APL proposal was selected and system definition studies were carried out in 1992–1993.
The studies first concentrated on direct flight paths to small near-Earth asteroids that lay on the Ecliptic plan. The initial plan was with a mission to (4660) Nereus that would launch in January 1998.
Jan 01, 2000 · The Apollo type asteroid (4660) Nereus (1982DB) is recognized as one of the most accessible asteroid, and it is a candidate for the target of MUSES-C project, i.e. the first asteroid sample return mission by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).
-Photometric observation of (4660)Nereus - ScienceDirect
Strangely, some vocal but un-named scientists were concerned that an intensive orbital survey of such a small asteroid might not be very productive. They INSISTED that the entire mission be re-scoped to a completely different asteroid.
So these un-named scientists had the program target changed.
They argued that the 433 Eros asteroid would be a much better target since it has dimensions of about 14 x 14 x 33 km, about 400 times the area and over 6000 times the volume of 4660 Nereus. It was much, much, larger.
4660 Nereus. The initial size estimate for Nereus came from an optical R-band study (Ishibashi et al., 2000a, 2000b) which concluded that it is an elongated object with diameter between 1.1–1.3 km
433 Eros. Much larger at 33 x 13 x 13 km.
Unfortunately, problem was that 433 Eros was way, way out of the way. It was not on nor lay closely upon the Ecliptic Plane as all the other asteroids that were being considered. It was “in the boondocks”, and way out of the way. Making a trip to visit is outrageously difficult.
Eros’ orbit is inclined 11° to the ecliptic (Earth’s orbit plane), requiring, for direct transfers, high declination of launch asymptotes and launch energies that are too high for a reasonably sized spacecraft with the Discovery-baselined Delta-class launch vehicle.
This problem was solved by using a 2-year delta V-Earth Gravity Assist (delta VEGA) trajectory.
The spacecraft would be launched into an orbit with an approximately 2-year period in the ecliptic plane 23 months before the latest minimum-launch energy departure date on 22 or 23 January 1998.
Near aphelion of this orbit, a delta V maneuver would be performed to target an Earth swing-by at the optimum date. At the Earth return, the spacecraft’s velocity relative to the planet would be increased considerably, allowing a swing-by low over the Northern Hemisphere that would bend the trajectory into Eros’ orbit plane with its 11° inclination to the ecliptic.
-NEAR Mission Design
In mid-1993, the delta VEGA trajectory to Eros was adopted as the baseline for the NEAR mission. At aphelion in early 1997, the space-craft would be behind the Sun as seen from the Earth, so the deep space delta V was moved to early March, several days after the NEAR spacecraft (re-christened NEAR Shoemaker in March 2000 to honor the late Eugene Shoe-maker) left the solar exclusion zone within 3° of the Sun, where communications with the spacecraft would be difficult or impossible.
Trajectory for the NEAR spacecraft to visit 433 Eros.
After a four year travel, the NEAR spacecraft approached the asteroid and started to make it’s approach. This approach involved a lot of fuel, but unusually good planning on the part of NASA made sure that the spacecraft would be able to get into a fine parking orbit around the asteroid.
The table below, lists several parameters for each of the propulsive maneuvers performed by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. In the last column, under “Mode,” the table
The table below, lists several parameters for each of the propulsive maneuvers (changing trajectory planes) performed by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. In the last column, under “Mode,” the table indicates the basic strategy for orienting the spacecraft according to the options available (and described elsewhere).
It’s all very interesting (to me at least), but let’s not get too bogged down on all the interesting details. In short, the spacecraft needed to maneuver to get into orbit. This took generous amounts of fuel and energy. And, as specified earlier, this is simply because the spacecraft was moving to a difficult to visit, and difficult to go into orbit about, asteroid.
Here’s a summary of the orbital and trajectory firings, if you don’t believe me…
Orbital firings of the engines for the NEAR spacecraft.
Objectives
The primary scientific objectives of NEAR were to return data on the bulk properties, composition, mineralogy, morphology, internal mass distribution and magnetic field of 433 Eros. Secondary objectives include studies of asteroid regolith properties (loosely consolidated surface material), interactions with the solar wind, possible current activity as indicated by dust or gas and the asteroid spin state.
NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft, met all its scientific goals in orbiting the asteroid Eros and successfully accomplished a controlled descent to the surface of the asteroid on 12 February 2001. The chief goal of the controlled descent to the surface was to gather close-up pictures of the boulder-strewn surface of 433 Eros, more than 196 million miles from Earth.
DESIGN
The NEAR spacecraft design is mechanically simple and geared toward a short development and test time. Except for the initial deployment of the solar panels and protective instrument covers, the spacecraft has only one moveable mechanism. Its distributed architecture allows parallel development and test of each subsystem, yielding an unusually short spacecraft integration and test period.
Several innovative features of the NEAR design include the first use of an x-band solid-state power amplifier for an interplanetary mission, the first use of a hemispherical resonator gyroscope in space and extremely high-accuracy, high voltage power supply control.
Equipment layout of the NEAR Spacecraft.
The spacecraft has the shape of an octagonal prism, approximately 1.7m on each side. It has four fixed gallium arsenide solar panels in a windmill arrangement, a fixed 1.5m X-band high-gain radio antenna with a magnetometer mounted on the antenna feed and an X-ray solar monitor on one end (the forward deck). The other instruments are fixed on the opposite end (the aft deck). Most electronics are mounted on the inside of the decks. The propulsion module is contained in the interior.
PROPULSION
The craft is three-axis stabilized and uses a single bipropellant (hydrazine/nitrogen tetroxide) 450 Newton (N) main thruster and four 21N and seven 3.5N hydrazine thrusters for propulsion, for a total delta-V potential of 1,450m/s. Attitude control is achieved using the hydrazine thrusters and four reaction wheels. The propulsion system carried 209kg of hydrazine and 109kg of NTO oxidizer in two oxidizer and three fuel tanks.
NEAR Spacecraft showing deployment of the solar panels.
Power was provided by four 1.8m x 1.2m gallium arsenide solar panels that can produce 400W at 2.2AU (NEAR’s maximum distance from the Sun) and 1,800W at 1AU. Power was stored in a 9A/hr, 22-cell rechargeable super nickel-cadmium battery.
INSTRUMENTATION
The spacecraft also featured Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) for imaging Eros in multiple spectral bands to determine its shape and surface features and to map mineral distributions. It had a NEAR Infrared Spectrometer (NIS) for measuring the near-infrared spectrum to determine the distribution and abundance of surface minerals and a NEAR Laser Rangefinder (NLR). This is a laser altimeter that measures the range to the surface to build up high-resolution topographic profiles (giving a global shape model of Eros).
It also has an X-ray/Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (XGRS) detecting X-ray fluorescence from elements on the asteroid surface. Some of the emissions are excited by cosmic rays and some are from natural radioactivity in the asteroid. There is also a Magnetometer (MAG) that searches for and maps any intrinsic magnetic field around Eros and a Radio Science, which is a coherent X-band transponder measuring radial velocities of the spacecraft relative to Earth, helping to map the gravitational field of Eros.
Since the robot spacecraft was not designed for such activity, the success of the landing on asteroid433 Eros was not assured. In short, after the orbital mapping was completed, the NASA team crashed the spacecraft into the asteroid. They tried to do it gingerly, but they pretty much smashed it onto the surface.
The last picture taken by the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft prior to impact.
Shown above is the last picture taken by NEAR-Shoemaker before its touchdown.
The streaking on the lower part of the image was caused by the loss of telemetry as the satellite impacted the surface.
The image was taken 130 meters above the surface and spans 6 meters across. Rocks as small as a human hand are visible.
The Official Narrative…
Feb. 12, 2001 — After an apparently gentle descent, the first spacecraft ever to land on an asteroid touched down today shortly after 3 p.m. ET.
The 1,100-pound craft settled on a saddle-shaped depression of the asteroid, Eros, and then continued transmitting signals to Earth, suggesting it was not damaged as it struck the asteroid’s rock-strewn surface.
Asteriod Landing Animation “I am happy to report that the NEAR has touched down,” said Robert Farquhar, the NEAR mission director, just after the craft transmitted its zero altitude location. “We are still getting signals!”
Not only was the dicey landing the first successful touchdown on an asteroid, it was also the most faraway landing ever attempted — at a distance of 196 million miles from Earth. The NEAR Shoemaker robot craft has no legs or landing gear and was never designed to land. To ensure a successful landing, controllers managed to slow the craft from about 20 to about 3 miles per hour.
First, controllers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., triggered the craft to thrust its engines so the compact car-sized probe was knocked from its orbit and aimed for the asteroid. Then the team used a series of four rocket firings to slow the craft as it drifted toward the asteroid.
“We’re right on the money,” said NEAR Mission Operations Manager Robert Nelson as the NEAR probe drifted toward Eros. By just before 3 p.m. ET, the probe was less than a mile from the asteroid and approaching slowly. During its final descent scientists snapped about two photos of the asteroid every minute.
At one point controllers believed the craft had landed and then bounced away from the asteroid, but soon they received data suggesting it was resting on the rocky celestial outpost. The craft landed nearly on time, touching down on a 6-mile-wide, saddle-shaped depression at Eros’ side at 3:07 p.m.
“It’s an exciting area geologically because we’re on the edge of this large depression — which is probably a very large impact crater — and we’ll be getting images of its interior as well as of the heavily cratered terrain on the outside,” says NEAR imaging team member Mark Robinson of Northwestern University.
Now that it has managed a gentle landing, the tin-can shaped probe is expected to provide unprecedented up-close images and data from the asteroid for up to three months…
(NEAR landing site on Eros) Take a look at these high-quality, close-up images of Asteroid 433 Eros that NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft transmitted as it floated to a historic landing on the rocky surface nearly 200 million miles (322 million kilometers) from Earth on Monday, February 12, 2001.
Science Fiction Landings
As far as I know, the first story about landing a craft on an asteroid was written by Edward Drax in 1931. In The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, minor navigation problems result in a landing on an asteroid:
"I had not seen it as soon as I had seen Mars, on account of its being so near to the line of the Sun... I couldn't make out anything, as most of the orb was in darkness...
I got into the darkness at last and switched on my engines, and flew till I came to the very first edge of twilight that gave light enough for me to land...
And that was how I came to make a bad landing, with my wheels deep down in a marsh..."
A more technical approach to landing on an asteroid was completed by Robert Heinlein. In his 1939 short story Misfit, young men without a trade were given another chance in the Cosmic Construction Corps. One job was to make a livable space habitat on selected asteroids.
He walked over by the lookouts at stereoscopes and radar tanks and peered up at the star-flecked blackness. Three cigarettes later the lookout nearest him called out.
"Light ho!"
"Where away?"
His mate read the exterior dials of the stereoscope. "Plus point two, abaft one point three, slight drift astern." He shifted to radar and added, "Range seven nine oh four three."
"Does that check?"
"Could be, Captain. What is her disk?" came the Navigator's muffled voice from under the hood.
The first lookout hurriedly twisted the knobs of his instrument, but the Captain nudged him aside. "I'll do this, son." He fitted his face to the double eye guards and surveyed a little silvery sphere, a tiny moon. Carefully he brought two illuminated cross-hairs up until they were exactly tangent to the upper and lower limbs of the disk. "Mark!"
The reading was noted and passed to the Navigator, who shortly ducked out from under the hood.
"That's our baby, Captain"
...McCoy forced them to lie down throughout the ensuing two hours. Short shocks of rocket blasts alternated with nauseating weightlessness. Then the blowers stopped and check valves clicked into their seats. The ship dropped free for a few moments -- a final quick blast -- five seconds of falling, and a short, light, grinding bump. A single bugle note came over the announcer, and the blowers took up their hum.
Public Discoveries
Of course, the entire data pool from the NEAR spacecraft is available for “armchair” and regular scientists to study. Of course, NASA has to “clean up” the data before releasing it. Don’t you know. There were things that might not be easy to explain or might be confusing to “Joe and Suzy Average”.
The photos of the asteroid have been very nice.
433 Eros is an S-type near-Earth asteroid approximately 34.4×11.2×11.2 kilometers (21.4×7.0×7.0 mi) in size, the second-largest near-Earth asteroid after 1036 Ganymed. It was discovered in 1898 and was the first near-Earth asteroid discovered. It was the first asteroid orbited by an Earth probe (in 2000). It belongs to the Amor group. Eros was one of the first asteroids to be visited by a spacecraft, and the first to be orbited and soft-landed on. NASA spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around Eros in 2000, and came to rest on its surface in 2001.
Well, the public will never know what was really discovered or found out.
Instead we get to see nice pictures of dust, rocks and dirt.
This view of asteroid 433 Eros is part of an image mosaic taken in the early hours of October 26, 2000, during NEAR Shoemaker’s low-altitude flyover of Eros. Taken while the spacecraft’s digital camera was looking at a spot 8 kilometers (5 miles) away, the image covers a region about 800 meters (2600 feet) across. Rocks of all sizes and shapes are set on a gently rolling, cratered surface. Locally, fine debris or regolith buries the rocks. The large boulder at the center of the scene is about 25 meters (82 feet) across.
What we are told instead is the geology of the asteroid itself. And while this is very interesting, most people wouldn’t really care about it at all. They just don’t.
433 Eros had a past full of impacts and the resulting craters.
Eros is 20 miles (33 kilometers) long and about 8 miles (13 kilometers) wide. It is the most well studied asteroid. NEAR-Shoemaker mapped Eros in detail back in 2000-2001 before officials executed a controlled and dramatic crash landing, the first-ever touchdown on an asteroid.
433 Eros.
Like any asteroid, Eros been banging around the solar system in some form for about 4.5 billion years.
In the early days of the solar system, when things were more crowded, collisions were frequent. Some large asteroids become smaller. Some small rocks stuck together and grew. Many were scooped up by the fledgling Earth and the other planets.
Two examples of evidence for a joint and fracture structure underlying the regolith layer on 433 Eros, imaged by the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft, in the form of: (A) several structurally controlled, `square’ impact craters (MET 132151598, 218.91 W, 16.64 S, 5.57 m/pixel); and (B) a network of criss-crossing ridges and grooves, with a few, small, structurally controlled craters (MET 136266921, 218.72 W, 42.00 N, 4.58 m/pixel).
The asteroids that remain, confined mostly to a belt between Mars and Jupiter, harbor a tale of the solar system’s formation. But first scientists have to figure out how to read their language, with an alphabet of craters and cracks and a grammar based largely on mineral composition and density.
Another great view of 433 Eros.
Among Eros’ most striking features is an impact crater 4.7 miles (7.6 kilometers) wide that scientists have determined was carved fairly recently. Another curious aspect to Eros is that across nearly 40 percent of its surface, all craters up to about a third of a mile (0.5 kilometers) wide have been erased.
Smooth surface.
The smooth surface has puzzled scientists since the NEAR landing.
A great view of 433 Eros.
The new study, led by Cornell University researcher Peter Thomas, nixed one theory by determining that the vanished craters could not have been covered by material ejected in the recent large impact. Further, the locations of the erased craters suggests they were jiggled out of existence by the internal vibrations caused in the impact.
Two examples of ponded deposits on 433 Eros, imaged by the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft. Note the marked difference in morphology between these ponds and the degraded craters shown Fig. 1(D) and Fig. 15, indicative of different formation processes. The ponds shown here are located on the low surface-gravity (2.5-3.0 mm sec^-2) ‘nose’ of the asteroid, which also spends a longer than average amount of time near the terminator (light/dark boundary). (A) A beautiful 100 m diameter ponded deposit containing an embedded 25 m boulder. Note the extremely flat surface containing a tiny (few-meter diameter) impact crater (MET 155888598, 179.04 W, 2.42 S, 0.55 m/pixel). (B) A smaller 75 m diameter ponded deposit. Note the difference between the smooth, fine-grained pond surface and the coarse, boulder strewn terrain surrounding the deposit (MET 155888731, 183.88 W, 3.21 S, 0.63 m/pixel).
The hypothesis, if right, can be used to glean an idea of how the asteroid is constructed. Scientists have long wondered if asteroids were solid rocks or, as is likely in at least some cases, loose piles of rubble that have undergone many collisions and managed to hang together.
"Our observations indicate that the interior of Eros is sufficiently cohesive to transmit seismic energy over many kilometers, and the outer several tens of meters [yards] of the asteroid must be composed of relatively non-cohesive material,"
-Thomas and his colleague, Mark Robinson of Northwestern University, write in the July 21 issue of the journal Nature.
That outer non-cohesive stuff would be regolith, which on Earth is called dirt and on our nearest natural satellite is known as Moon dust.
"For the first time, the authors provide convincing evidence that makes this conclusion more than just reasonable conjecture,"
- Erik Asphaug, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the study.
The non-public discoveries
Famous Taiwanese ufologist Scott Waring, studying NASA official images, regularly publishes his findings and shares his opinions. And, this time, he studied the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Eros from a photograph taken by NASA, and found something interesting on it.
According to the ufologist, on the surface of the asteroid Eros clearly visible unnatural structure, which has a rectangular shape.
NASA has reported that there is a large rectangular shaped object that rests upon 433 Eros.
The ufologist found it very funny that NASA noticed this structure, but the space agency’s explanations turned out to be very predictable and primitive.
According to NASA scientists, this is a “large rectangular object that measures 45 meters (148 feet) across“. There are no further explanations for this finding. (Ah. They know what is going on, and they know that they cannot comment on it.)
It is possible that this object is a mining station that was used by an advanced alien civilization to extract valuable metals.
No further information regarding this feature has been made available.
NASA has nothing further to say about this matter.
What is this thing?
So anyone who looks at this photograph can conclude that this object looks to be of some kind of artificial construction. Why?
The shape is rectangular.
In the exact center of this object is another rectangular object.
The light reflecting off this object is different is type and magnitude from the surrounding terrain.
The shadow of this object shows a rectangular cross section.
The shadow indicates that the front protrusion hangs out and over the terrain, like a gantry crane or some kind of access tube.
Because of the above, those that study this matter believe that this object is not of natural construction.
One thing is clear. The object in the picture is NOT the NEAR Shoemaker probe from NASA. It is something altogether different.
The probe did not “fire” or launch any objects into the asteroid. This is a photo from the NEAR spacecraft as it orbited the asteroid. In so doing it caught a picture of this rectangular object resting on the surface of the asteroid. Then it was ordered to crash into the asteroid.
Non-human probe discovered on 433 Eros. This is a photo of the NASA raw feed for the NEAR Shoemaker Probe as it orbited the 433 EROS asteroid. It shows an object that appears to be a series of interconnected rectangular boxes and containers. There are those that state that these are suggestive of mining operations, but what their true purpose is remains unknown.
Debunkers have their say…
Well, there is no way that this can be “swamp gas”, can it?
Debunkers offer alternative solutions to the observed anomaly. They postulate that [1] it is a Photoshop fraud, or that [2] it is a NASA photo from the Hubble Space Telescope that imaged a photo of the NEAR spacecraft itself on the surface of the asteroid. (If so, then it doesn’t look anything like the spacecraft.) They also postulate that [3] it is merely debris that was ejected from the NEAR spacecraft that happened to land on the asteroid in the fashion shown, and finally [4] it is just a pixilation error caused by a gamma-ray burst that caused an erroneous image pattern.
Interesting stretches of imagination.
But I can personally assure the readership that as of 2004 the MAJestic organization formally considered this object to be an extraterrestrial probe or structure of unknown purpose. That I can tell you all.
Conclusions
In the image of the asteroid Eros made by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on May 1, 2000, when it was at an orbital altitude of 53 km (33 miles), it is visible, a large rectangular object, 45 meters in diameter.
In the image of the asteroid Eros made by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on May 1, 2000, when it was at an orbital altitude of 53 km (33 miles), it is visible, a large rectangular object, 45 meters in diameter.
The size of four (40′ GP) shipping containers laid end to end.
Considering the fact that data from the spacecraft collected on Eros in December 1998 suggest that it can contain 20,000 billion kilograms of aluminum and a similar amount of other metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum.
The weight of Eros is 6.69 · 1015 kilograms, which is a bit even for an asteroid. However, if we take into account the size of the asteroid – 34.4 km in diameter in the widest place – it turns out that Eros is quite dense, about 2.67 g / cm³. The same density would have an aluminum monolith of similar dimensions. Similar characteristics have the crust. By the way, even with its small size, Eros is the second largest among near-Earth asteroids.
The shape of Eros is irregular, elongated and often compared with peanuts. Because of this, the center of gravity shifts, which creates extremely interesting effects. Moving in its orbit, Eros does not rotate, like spherical bodies – and somersaults, like a boulder rolling from the hill. This also leads to differences in gravitational force. However, it is very easy to overcome it. A man would be able to leave Eros with the help of a foot thrust.
It is possible that this object is a mining station that was used by an advanced alien civilization to extract valuable metals.
The asteroids converging with the Earth are a group of small celestial bodies whose orbit has a chance in future to cross with our planet. The asteroid Eros – is among the most studied asteroids in the solar system.
Eros belongs to the class of asteroids S – the so-called stone asteroids, the material of which consists of silicon and metals.
Orbital characteristics of Eros – its main attraction. Around the Sun, he turns for 1.7 of the Earth year, around his own axis – for 5 and a half hours. But the real feature of Eros is that it belongs to the group of Cupids – asteroids, whose orbit is similar to the terrestrial, but lies further from the Sun. So, none of the Cupids can approach the Sun closer than 1.017 “standard” distance from the Sun to Earth – an astronomical unit. By the way, the Earth itself can move away from the Sun at such a distance – when reaches aphelion, the maximum distance from the luminary. This happens in the middle of summer, between 3 and 7 July.
Due to this they are quite bright – the largest objects of the S-class can be seen in a regular binocular.
Such asteroids also contain a large amount of minerals. After analyzing the composition of Eros, the scientists once again started talking seriously about the industrial development of outer space.
The object found in place on 433 Eros.
This is an interesting object.
If I were a betting man, I would guess that this object is either a robotic mining droid or a monitoring station of some sort.
But I do not know.
As of 2004, neither did MAJestic.
Anyways…
When someone tries to tell you that sooner or later the US Government is going to release “findings” and conduct “studies” on the “UFO issue”, you can laugh in their face. MAJestic has known for years about the population of our solar system by extraterrestrials. It’s just that there are limits to how we can go about in the discovery of these entities and their technologies.
Anyways, enjoy the few precious snippets that you can find on the internet now. The suppression of NASA related images is now “tighter than a drum”. You won’t find much more in the future moving forward.
And this object…
It’s either a robot, a probe, a station, a mining vehicle, or some other mechanism that was not made by humans. It rests upon the asteroid 433 Eros, and does it’s thing. Whatever it’s “thing” is.
MAJestic knows about it. And perhaps it radiated some signals or gave away it’s presence way back in the late 1990’s. Meaning that it was active at that time.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Its going to get a lot worse regardless of who wins in November. Get ready
-kerry
As the good Metallicman readership should know, the Second American Civil War started early in 2020. It was at that point in time that a number of unique events transpired that would have been impossible, were American to be a healthy and productive nation. Since then, things have gone downhill fast. Now, prior to the 2020 elections, no one knows who will be elected. But one thing is certain, who ever is elected will not make any difference in the course of what American will go through.
This is true on both sides of the political spectrum, and perhaps that is the only thing that is unifying America right now.
The long, long postponed collapse of the oligarchy run military empire is in process, and no matter what happens, you can rest assured that…
No one will really know what is actually going on.
The “news” is never reported upon. Instead, a confluence of confusing “media reports” and disinformation will occupy much of American media.
External enemies will be identified, and effort made to direct American attention outside the US borders.
Money will continue to be made, but only at the oligarchy level. Everyone else will steadily lose everything.
The stratification of the United States is complete. Most Americans will not be able to ever leave their current status in life.
Now, what this post is all about is something that I have noticed over the last few months, and it is really becoming evident now. It is that idea that [1] the United States is in the middle of an ideological conflict right now, and [2] that it is right before the shooting starts.
Most people, on both sides, agree to this assessment to one extent or the other.
Further, most [3] agree that the election will have a very minor impact on what transpires. That a “hot” American civil war is “in the works”.
I have been told that if President Trump wins the election, that the Progressive Marxists are all set and ready to “burn the nation down”. And the Conservatives, by and large, pretty much agree with this assessment.
In a like way, if the Democratic candidate, Mr. Biden wins, then most Conservatives that I know pretty much expect a forced socialist takeover, and that they would have to fight a militarized Social Marxist America.
Businessmen conduct business. Students go to school. Families make babies. Workers go and toil. Rich people get wealthier. The stock market keeps on going higher and higher. And China is evil, bat-soup slurping monsters. Yada. Yada. Yada.
But behind this colorful exterior lies a cauldron of turmoil that you can cut with a knife.
Yes. All along the “watch-towers” (the modern day equivalents; personal blogs, and small-isolated alternative media) the signals are clear. America is embroiled in a Civil War Right Now. And everyone needs to prepare for the time, in the near future, when things will get ugly.
Most of these blogs are pretty much saying the same thing.
Civil War is going to happen, or is happening.
Other nations will not get involved.
Whatever “external distractions” that are planned will only make things worse.
Among those who discuss the prospects of overthrowing the United States government, there’s a common belief that it would be impossible for domestic rebels to militarily defeat the U.S. armed forces. This inevitably leads to speculations about alternative ways for the rebels to prevail. Maybe we could win most of the U.S. military personnel over to the side of the revolutionaries, or maybe we could get a powerful U.S. rival like China to come to the aid of the rebel forces.
But upon thoroughly examining the situation, these hopes look ever more wishful. China’s goal is not to help foment revolutions abroad. And given that a civil war in the U.S. would no doubt prompt many U.S. allies to get their own militaries involved, Russia, China, and other superpowers would be especially hesitant to intervene given how much risk this would create of world war. Maybe Cuba or the DPRK would come to our aid, but we can’t bank on any foreign army to turn the direction of the class war in our favor.
Propagating Marxist-Leninist theory among U.S. troops is a worthwhile goal. But for every armed forces defector towards the socialist movement that appears in the coming chaotic years of U.S. imperial collapse, there will be plenty of other military members who remain loyal to the forces of fascism and capitalist reaction. Thus comes the recently articulated conclusion from communist YouTuber Hakim that:
The U.S. military and police will never, and I mean will never, join a potential revolution in the U.S. They are a barrier to a revolution. These are the agents of capital sent worldwide to rob, steal, and murder, all for the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie. Reactionary attitudes and counter-revolutionary mindsets are manufactured within the American military and police. For every soldier or policeman that lays down his weapons or, even better, joins the revolution, there will be a hundred, if not a thousand, cracking black skulls and shooting children. I saw it in Iraq. It isn’t far-fetched for it to be the norm in the U.S.
As you look at these facts, you slowly come to realize the stark reality of your situation as someone who’s committed themselves to liberating the world from U.S. capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. This reality is that you can only rely on the revolutionary organizations within the U.S. to help bring you to victory against the forces of bourgeois reaction. In all likelihood, an army from across the ocean isn’t coming to save you. The throngs of heavily indoctrinated fascists in the U.S. military aren’t going to overwhelmingly join your side. Victory is only going to come from how good you are at sticking with the revolutionary tasks that the material conditions will demand from you.
These tasks are apparent from looking at how the Taliban, despite lacking tanks or warplanes and despite having always been outnumbered and technologically outmatched by the U.S., has managed to prevent the U.S. from defeating it after nineteen years of war. The Taliban has done this by winning the loyalty of much of the local populations in the parts of Afghanistan that they control, using the massive violence and corruption that U.S. imperialism has brought to the country to get many people to see aligning with their organization as the best option.
The Taliban has had advantages that rebel forces in the U.S. won’t necessarily have the equivalent of, like highly mountainous terrain and support from Pakistan. But even if we don’t manage to get military support from Cuba or the DPRK, and even if the U.S. surveillance apparatus forces us to operate with great secrecy, we’ll be able to gain a comparable advantage if we do the work to build popular support for a revolutionary guerrilla effort.
This step is where agitation and organizing come in. If we spend the coming years using the country’s crises to get many more people to join communist parties, and if we do this while educating the masses about the capitalist and imperialist contradictions behind the crises they’re experiencing, we’ll gain a large base of support. Not one that includes the enormous population of reactionaries in the U.S., but one that’s capable of providing a guerrilla struggle with popular backing. With this vision in mind, Hakim has articulated the actions which must accompany these efforts:
Arm yourselves. Establish armed wings of revolutionary organizations. Start coordinating armed actions across the country with as many organizations as you can. Remember, never terrorist activity-only military and state targets. Establish Red bases around the country, and begin building dual power. People’s war is the solution. If you truly want radical change, and if you really want to turn the U.S. from an overwhelming agent of bad in the world into an agent of good, you will need to turn upheaval-with sufficient development-into a civil war.
When this war starts, we’ll need to apply the guerrilla tactics that can make us win. These are the tactics that focus around attrition, the action of gradually weakening the forces of the enemy. Attacking military and state targets, as Hakim said, is how we can accomplish this. If we sustain these attacks, the forces of the U.S. will over time be forced to retreat.
And despite what the “a rebellion can never defeat the U.S. military” perception seems to imply about how such a conflict would play out, the U.S. won’t initially use its heaviest military tools for attacking the rebels. The U.S. will start to cripple itself if it begins bombing cities and infrastructure, and the more military resources it has to sacrifice at home, the less ability it will have to project power abroad. This certainly won’t be good for them in a future scenario where the current resource, climatic, economic, and social crises have all been massively exacerbated, and where U.S. imperial decline will have gone on for much longer than it has so far. Our enemies may have the might of empire on their side, but we’ll have the advantage of fighting against a power structure that’s destabilizing itself amid the collapse of global capitalism.
The foundations of capitalism are falling out. Through guerrilla warfare, we can tear the whole structure down. What this will require from you is the psychological commitment needed to carry forth this operation.
The guerrilla warrior has to endure great bodily sacrifices. In addition to the risks of being killed or injured in battle, the life of a guerrilla can consist of severe hunger, thirst, lack of domestic sanitation, demands for great physical exertion, and the other costs of hiding and traveling outdoors. The accounts of the great guerrilla Che Guevara make these costs apparent. But when you realize the value of revolutionary sacrifice, these things will no longer deter you. The alternative to joining the struggle is to remain complacent, to keep standing by while the U.S. empire collapses into fascism and while your material conditions keep deteriorating. Without making the necessary sacrifices, we won’t be able to defeat the ruling class.
Capitalism and U.S. imperialism may be collapsing, but revolution won’t come of its own accord. It won’t happen after a grand foreign invasion, or after thousands of armed fascists suddenly have a change of heart. It will happen after we realize that the U.S. military is not invincible, and that we have the capacity to win the class war ourselves.
Conclusions
The American media, and the Alt-left and Alt-Right branches are all controlled by the United States government. There is no such thing as a “free independent press” any longer in the United States. That pretty much disappeared in the middle 1980’s. And the narratives that they are promoting today includes a Civil War.
The American media, controlled by the American government / oligarchy, is promoting the idea of an American Civil War.
…
So here you have an American government that controls the media, promoting the narrative that a civil war is either ongoing or will happen soon. This narrative saturates modern life. It affects how Americans view their life, their friends, and their families.
Why are they doing this?
This pushing, this pressing, this march, and drum beat of civil strife is leading up to something. It has a profound influence in what Americans do, how they act, how they save, and how they survive.
…
People are reacting. But not in ways that you (the reader) and I would presuppose. People are guarded, more cautious, and gloomy… but hopeful. Many hold this secret desire that the pain of this year (2020 pandemic, trump trade wars, trump twitter storms, and the city wide riots, not to mention unemployment, etc.) will all come to an end. People want normalcy.
But the media is not giving anyone a break.
Economist Stephen Roach warns next year will be brutal for the dollar.
Not only does he see growing odds of a double-dip recession, the Yale University senior fellow believes his “seemingly crazed idea” that the dollar would crash shouldn’t be so crazy anymore.
“We’ve got data that’s confirmed both the saving and current account dynamic in a much more dramatic fashion than even I was looking for,” Roach told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Wednesday.
-Economist Stephen Roach issues new dollar crash warning, sees double-dip recession odds above 50%
It’s non-stop “the world is falling apart” headlines…
Hint: You can tell that the article originated out of the United States government when you see the "index key words" in the title.
In this case "repression".
Let's Google "China + Repression" shall we? I found 10,400,000 results.
…
So, the United States is careening towards a major domestic “hot war”. The government is aware of this, is active in setting the stage for this to occur, and plans to “manage” it in some way.
What we know, from past histories…
The conflicts will be splotchy throughout the United States. Some areas will be basket cases, while other areas will be unaffected.
The leadership plans to be able to ride out the events safely.
The United States (recently) has a terrible record of managing anything.
When the leadership is threatened, the final card will be played (a conflict with a major external power).
What does all this mean?
It means that the next two to three years are going to be testy in the United States. It means that if you planned well, that you will be in a safe area that will be relatively unaffected by the civil assaults. You will not be able to believe the American media. That includes most all alternative media.
Your life will look completely different from what is being “reported”. Just like my life looks completely different from the anti-China “news” reports out of the States.
Now…
Keep in mind, that this is not all.
When things become unmanageable, when the violence they created starts to flow outside their containment structures, then they will set up their back up plans. This will be when the leadership and oligarchy is threatened, they will invoke a war with a major global power. And they DO KNOW the risks. No matter what, they are convinced by their analysts that it will be a long and prolonged conventional war, and that it will be fought far away from the American shores.
But people… listen to me.
It will NOT be [1] a long duration, [2] conventional war, [3] fought in far away battlegrounds, where [4] Americans can be distracted by nightly updates.
It will be a short war.
It will be a nuclear war.
It will be absolutely devastating for the United States.
That war will end the United States as we know it.
Why? Because America as big, and plump and juicy a target as it is, the top leadership, and all the infrastructure has collapsed. It’s a very inflexible, behemoth run by fixed intransigents.
America is FRAGILE.
America is remarkably fragile. All the wealth and industry are concentrated in only a handful of locations.
Ten nuclear missiles is only ONE Chinese ICBM with MIRV’s. One singular submarine can reduce the United States to a third-world shithole within five minutes from launch. (As they tend to carry ten of these missiles each holding ten of these nuclear devices.) And let’s not even talk about the enormous nuclear might of Russia
America IS fragile.
As I see it…
The United States has an enormous military, with far-flung bases all around the world that are dependent upon well-established and fixed lines of supply. But once they logistics channels are interrupted, they are vulnerable.
The United States has some amazing high technology weaponry. But these are complex and need to be maintained, unit readiness is at best 60% and they require fully capable supporting logistics and talent to repair, maintain and operate. All these great weapons systems are vulnerable.
The United States (Through Donald Trump) has pissed of the world. His sole global alignments are Canada, the UK, and Australia. The rest are mercurial, and will change when situations warrant it. Politically, globally, the Untied States is vulnerable.
The oligarchy, and their minions, the American “leadership” fully expect the United States to undergo dramatic change within the next five years. 2020 through 2025.
They have planned for this.
This planning has been in place for decades, and instead of Donald Trump being an aberration in the plan, it is perhaps all a part of the grand scheme of things.
It is curious how the isolation of America "from the world stage" will absolutely limit any chaos and damage that will in America during this period to... ONLY America. There will be very little "spill over" to the rest of the world.
These members of the oligarchy are not fools, and they do not follow the “news” like you and I do. They can see the real picture (to an extent) and know exactly what is going on. And that includes all the various factions vying for power and control in the United States.
What will happen?
No one knows. Certainly I don’t, and I’m perhaps the only “spook” that has some insight into things that’s gonna tell you all the situation publicly. (I am actually much more than a “spook” but you know what I mean.) But all this should be obvious to anyone who spends sometime outside of the American media echo chamber.
But I can say this…
John Titor’s Vision
John Titor claimed to be a time traveler from the future. The world he described is exactly identical to what we are seeing today. The only significant difference are his dates. But, if you add exactly ten years to his dates you get the following….
American civil war starting in 2020 with the first shots fired.
Democratic leadership in control of government afterwards.
Democrat President trying to hold things together and using the DHS (Federal Police) to control the “rebels” in the rural areas.
Well, we will see what happens in November, eh? Who will win? Will Trump win reelection, or will there be a complete sweep of Government to the far-left Marxists? We will find out.
Anyways, John Titor further says that under the democrat President (DHS in control of forces that hunt down Conservatives, according to John Titor.) We have a…
A civil war that lasts for three years.
And then…
An event that triggers a war with Russia.
A possible “First strike” by Russia that devastates all the major cities in America.
Launch of a Chinese SLBM with MIRV (dummy) warheads launched in a practice fun right after Trump pulled the three Carrier Assault flotillas off the Chinese coastline in July 2020.
What is not stated, but implied…
America surrenders.
America is then “sacked”.
Sacked - having been robbed and destroyed by force and violence; "the raped countryside". despoiled, raped, ravaged, pillaged. destroyed - spoiled or ruined or demolished; "war left many cities destroyed"; "
Ten years of so afterwards, after a great “sorting”, many people will die. Many will starve. In fact, John Titor said that the majority of deaths were from Starvation, followed by illness. Then, Guns and radiation, in that order.
A “New America” rises from the ashes of the old.
America is broken up into five nations.
A new world order emerges.
Russia (and China) remain the top trade partners to America.
How accurate is John Titor? I don’t know. But he made these statements back in 1998. He’s been pretty much spot-on, regarding a large number of innocuous predictions and how he described his life. You all might want to plan on his predictions coming true.
It would probably be prudent to plan on his predictions coming true.
Do you want more?
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
The cult of the Biblical end of the world and the rapture does not reflect the view of the majority of Christians. But rather it is a distortion of one of the books of the Bible, twisted, and taken way, way out of context. Mentioning it here in no way is intended to disparage any Christians, or anyone who following the writings of the Bible.It is placed here as informative background only.
Yes, this year (2020) has really been something else. I mean it’s just been absurd.
Well, there is a human role in what is going on, don’t you know. It’s not all coincidence, and chance. It’s all part of a huge scheme of things that are all caught up within yet an even greater scheme of things.
And people like me and you, well we are trapped inside this car that is being driven by drunk madmen towards what appears to be… the end of the road.
Yikes!
Heads up!
I am going to say some nasty things about President Trump.
Sorry, but anyone who favors WAR in any shape, size or color, and tries to justify it is going to get "bitch slapped" by me. War is not a game. War is serious, serious business.
Stop hiding behind the soft tones of a "police action" or a "hybrid war", or a "trade war". War is war is war is war.
And anyone promoting it is a dangerous person.
This post is about the association of the United States government with hard-core neocons and evangelical Christians, I consider it a very dangerous combination. Much akin to playing with matches inside of a warehouse full of dynamite.
kapish?
This post is going to be a little bit “off the wall”.
It’s all about what happens when some ideologically motivated people, with insanely odd-ball and distorted views of their place / role in society, take the reins of power of the largest nation on the planet.
We’ve seen this in the past with Roman emperors. Like Nero.
Right?
A review of some of the madness of Nero
Nero.
Short name.
Insane.
Yeah. He was a pretty crazy guy. That is for certain, and his antics made modern politicians seem tame by comparison. But you all must keep in mind that the worst Nero could do was sack a city. He didn’t have the power to lay waste to the earth a thousand times over.
Here’s a review of what can happen when you have a psychopath in charge of a nation…
Nero Used Burning Christians To Light His Garden At Night
The most famous myth about Emperor Nero says that the crazed emperor actually played a fiddle while Rome burned during the Great Fire of 64 AD. That’s patently false. Nero did a bunch of crazy things, but this wasn’t one of them. When the fire broke out, Nero was actually 35 miles away at his villa at Antium. When he got the news, he rushed back to the city to begin administering aid immediately.
The reason that the “fiddling” myth arose was thanks to the Roman people’s belief that Nero was a pampered aristocrat who cared little for the plight of his people. He was considered to be so callous and carefree that he could play music while his people suffered.
After the Great Fire, the public came to the (incorrect) conclusion that Nero had actually started the nine-day blaze that engulfed two-thirds of Rome. In order to throw the scent off his trail, Nero put the blame squarely on Christians. Nero took to persecuting believers with glee. He had them thrown to dogs, nailed to crosses, and on occasion, he dipped Christians in oil, set them on fire, and used the light to illuminate his gardens at night.
Nero Kicked His Second Wife To Death And Then Married A Guy Who Looked Like Her
The case could be made that Poppaea Sabina was Nero’s great love. He divorced his first wife to marry her, then quickly impregnated her once they were married. Then Poppaea mysteriously perished before having their second child. Historians of the time claim that Nero actually kicked Poppaea to death. Modern historians are a bit more forgiving, and claim it's equally as likely that Poppaea perished of a miscarriage.
At any rate, what is known is that some time later, Nero fell in love with a man named Sporus whose most striking feature was his resemblance to Nero’s late wife. Nero had the boy castrated and brought back to the palace, where he took to calling him “lady” and “queen.”
Nero Liked To Dress Up As A Wild Animal And… Well, There’s More
As Nero’s reign progressed, so did his sexual peculiarities. Though he was content to simply hit up some brothels in his youth, as he got older, his tastes got a little more violent.
According to Roman historian Cassius Dion, “Nero would fasten naked boys and girls to stakes, and then putting on the hide of a wild beast would attack them and satisfy his brutal lust under the appearance of devouring parts of their bodies.”
In His Quest To Consolidate Power, Nero Ended Both His Brother And His Mother
Initially, Nero wasn’t expected to be emperor. However, after Emperor Claudius married his niece, Nero's mother Agrippina, Agrippina persuaded her husband to adopt Nero as his son. It was then - with Nero next in line for the throne - that Nero’s mother Agrippina supposedly poisoned Claudius and pinned the deed on another woman.
This plan ultimately backfired, though, as once Nero took the throne at the young age of 17, he was warned by both his advisors and his friends to watch out for Agrippina. In an attempt to secure his hold on the throne, Nero poisoned his stepbrother Britanicus and then, fearing his own mother’s wrath, he had Agrippina taken out a few years after taking the throne.
He Panicked And Ordered His Servant To Slay Him
In the final months of his short life, the emperor tried to flee Rome after some political hostility (and a healthy dose of paranoia). He made it as far as the port city of Ostia; unfortunately, a few of the officers in the city refused to listen when the emperor gave them commands, so Nero slunk back to the Roman palace.
In a move of Shakespearean-level drama, a courier arrived to tell Nero that the Senate had declared him an enemy of the state and that they intended to beat him to death at their earliest convenience. This was actually a miscommunication, as the Senate was only considering bashing in Nero’s skull. Ultimately, they decided to reinstate the emperor and sent a second envoy to let him know.
Meanwhile, Nero had spent the intervening time trying to work up the nerve to take his own life. He reportedly paced around saying what amounted to “what an artist dies in me!” He tried to convince some of his buddies to end their own lives first to show him how easy it was. When the Senate messenger arrived to tell him everything was cool, Nero heard the sound of horses approaching, panicked, and ordered his secretary Epaphroditus to do the job for him. Epaphroditus obliged and stabbed Nero.
For his loyalty, Epaphroditus was met his end in 95 AD.
Nero Had His Own Corps Of Personal Clappers
Okay, so let’s be fair here - Nero might have been an okay performer. Some of his closest advisors supposedly encouraged him to perform publicly. According to some historians, however, the emperor had “a slight and indistinct voice, so that he moved his whole audience to laughter and tears at once.”
In order to ensure that his poor ego wasn’t hurt, however, Nero pulled together a special squad of 5,000 soldiers, called Augustans, whose only job was to clap when Nero’s performances prompted it. These soldiers were also encouraged to get the audience involved in the shouting and applause, as well.
He Instituted Juvenalia, Games In Honor Of His Own Beard
In 59 AD, when Nero was 22, he finally started getting enough facial hair to merit a shave. In honor of this rite of passage, the boy emperor instituted Juvenalia, or "the games of youth," literally a festival commissioned because Nero was going to shave.
The festival distinguished itself as a showcase for the performing arts, consisting of every known kind of theatrical performance. Rome’s most prominent members were expected to join the cast and look like they enjoyed doing it. When some members put on masks to hide their identities, Nero demanded their faces be shown to the public.
Nero Emptied The Roman Treasury Rebuilding His Palace
After the Great Fire, Nero opted to spend the expansive Roman treasury not on rebuilding the city at large, but on building an opulent 100-acre palatial complex that came to be known as the Domus Aurea, or the “Golden House.”
At the center of the Domus Aurea was a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of Nero himself, which the emperor dubbed the Colossus Neronis.
Nero Seriously Breached Protocol By Giving Public Performances
Until his mother’s passing in 59 AD, Nero wasn’t doing half bad as emperor. He spoke out for Rome’s slaves, he did away with capital punishment, and he even lowered taxes in the empire. Though he always had a reputation for hitting brothels and taverns and acting a fool, Nero was able to keep it together. Once Agrippina passed, though, the boy emperor quickly lost control.
Around this time, with his popularity waning, Nero felt the need to increase his popularity. Just like any struggling star of today, the emperor began to perform in public by singing songs he’d written. Though his performances were a huge no-no because of his standing in the hierarchy, some historians suggest that Nero was actually encouraged to play in public by the Senate and his inner circle.
He May Have Been The Model For The Antichrist
When Nero passed in 68 AD, there were some who believed that his “suicide” couldn’t have been real and that the mad emperor still lived. There were even several occasions when men who claimed to be Emperor Nero - men who resembled the ruler and sang to the music of the lyre - would arise in the public eye momentarily.
Typically, these men were strung up and slain with a quickness.
The image of Nero as dastardly was so pervasive that his actions might have contributed to the personification of the Antichrist in the New Testament, and the belief that when said Antichrist arose, he would do so in the form of the emperor.
But…
But…
But, you say. “America is different.” “America is the shining light on the hill.”, and “America is special.”
We know.
We know.
We know.
America today
It’s true that there is nothing in America today that comes close to these distortions, right?
Or maybe not.
After all, there’s no such thing as gender in America, and the amount of money that flows in and out of Washington DC is staggering. I would say that (while it is both substantively, and qualitatively, different) than what Rome was like under Nero, that the belief structure of the two rulers are disturbingly similar.
For example… Both Nero and Trump believe(d)…
That God empowered them for their role.
That they have full control of the treasury and can spend it without limits.
That they can pretty much do what they want, and the Senate and Congress will not stop them.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
And so we have this modern incarnation of an ideologically religious leader who represents the largest and most powerful nation on the planet…
The Trump neocon Administration
The truth is that from 2016 though 2020, the Trump administration has been in charge of America. He has staffed his administration with hard-core neocons, and their vision of the world is a very different from the one that you and I have.
They think differently.
Their experiences are different from ours. They live differently, and their view of themselves and the world around them is quite different from the rest of us.
If you think that the last 75 years of America have been war-like, all I can say is that “you haven’t seen anything yet.” Those predecessors to the Trump Administration were “pikers” in comparison. To them, war was business. You attack a nation, you secure it. You seize it’s resources, and then you move on.
No. Not with these people.
To them. War is a religious duty.
You know, many of President Trumps followers do not follow him for his policy positions. Instead, they follow him because the evangelical Christian movement has assigned him as the savior of the American culture; the American society, and as the hope for the entire world.
War is a religious duty.
America has, over the last 75 or so years, really been involved in global war, and military activities. And while the last fifty or so years has been off fighting numerous small scale conflicts all over the world, the truth is that things are different now.
For, this time, it’s a cadre of far-Right neocons in America that earnestly believe that their role is to start World War III.
What?
Yes.
Since 2001, the US ‘war on terror’ has killed, injured and displaced millions across 24 countries, while America’s defense spending is nearly 40 per cent of the global total. In contrast, China has waged one foreign war in the past 50 years
-Forget China, America is the biggest warmonger by far
Yes, that is correct.
They believe that it is their role to initiate this thing called “the rapture“.
The Rapture.
The rapture is an eschatological concept of a minority of Christians, particularly within branches of American evangelicalism, consisting of an end-time event when all Christian believers who are alive, along with resurrected believers, will rise "in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air."
-Wikipedia
And during this rapture, Jesus will fly down from Heaven and grant blessings to the annotated, and punish the heathen. (And by “heathen”, I mean about 99% of my readership.) Unless you’ve been “birthed” in the “blood of our Lord”, you will spend life as the eternally damned.
A chilling op-ed in the NY Times by author Katherine Stewart, who has extensively studied and written about the Christian right, says that the far right have been pushing a meme for several years now that Donald Trump, conman and egomaniac, has been sent by God to be “a vessel for the purposes of the faithful” in the role of King of the United States of America.
Oh…
My…
I will repeat…
A chilling op-ed in the NY Times by author Katherine Stewart, who has extensively studied and written about the Christian right, says that the far right have been pushing a meme for several years now that Donald Trump, conman and egomaniac, has been sent by God to be “a vessel for the purposes of the faithful” in the role of King of the United States of America.
Unbeknownst to people with even a tenuous grip on reality, prior to the midterms a thousand theaters showed “The Trump Prophecy,” a film about a firefighter who, in a blinding orgiastic epiphany, picks up a Bible and turns to Isaiah 45, “which describes the anointment of King Cyrus by God.”
Do you get it, Isaiah “45”?
Trump “45”?
What more proof do you need, right?
Stewart goes on, saying that evangelical author and speaker Lance Wallnau has said:
I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus [who will] restore … us from cultural collapse.
And in this telling it is not at all paradoxical that Trump is a non-believer intent on wrecking our democracy and government. Apparently the story of Cyrus is of a nonbeliever who becomes the first emperor of Babylon (“Babble-on” — it’s all starting to come together now, isn’t it?) and…
… frees the Jews.
Stewart provides numerous quotations from across the spectrum of the religious right leadership pushing this meme that God sent Trump to be King. This includs Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Drollinger who leads weekly bible study groups at the White House attended by Mike Pence and members of the Cabinet.
In her article Stewart confirms our worst suspicions about what Trump’s core followers see in him:
This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew.
The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core.
They aren’t fighting a culture war.
They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.
And, according to Stewart, Trump has been egging them on, goading their preachers for becoming too “soft” — as he openly muses about becoming “President for life”.
But it’s more than that. It’s not just the evangelical Christian (political) base that supports this notion. It is about another group of very, very dangerous people.
I am talking about a special group of people inside America known as “neocons”. You know these people. They are the ones in charge of the United States right now. And most specifically the observation that [1] many of these neocons are also [2] American evangelical Christians…
And you all think that I am a little crazy. To repeat these beliefs.
Because the beliefs of others will be strange, and appear strange to the uninitiated.
You know what I mean. Me, going on and on, talking about intention, and world-lines and thought imposition, and slides to alternative realities. Well, my point is that everyone is different, and some people live really off the mainstream world-line paths into these realms of other possibilities. People call me “crazy”.
But at least I have a documented “back story”. At least I can provide substantive proofs, understandings and relationships.
Not so with these people. They have nothing. Instead they want you to believe blindly. “Have faith they say. Have faith they implore. Have faith and listen to me, they demand.”
Some of these people are mad. “Mad” as in crazy.
Mad as Hatters!
Mad as a hatter means absolutely crazy. The most famous illustration of the phrase mad as a hatter occurs in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with the character the Mad Hatter. In the nineteenth century, milliners or hatmakers used mercury in the processing of hats, and many succumbed to mercury poisoning.
-Mad as a hatter Idiom Definition
Many Hard-Right Christians believe that Donald Trump is a savior of traditional conservative thought that will lead the United States into the “End Times”.
And that means…
Yikes!
World War III and the rapture
Some fun links from the collective minds of the dangerously insane.
You see they equate [1] what is written in the Bible with global war. And that [2] the war will be nuclear, and [3] it will involve China and Russia, and [4] and it will be exactly what is foretold as “the rapture”, and [5] a savior will appear (maybe a prophet) who will do the bidding of God to bring the rapture to a climax. And [6] the “Jews” and the “Jewish nation” will be central to this event. As they are the “chosen ones”.
Yah.
And you think that I am crazy.
Many Hard-Right Christians believe that Donald Trump is a savior of traditional conservative thought that will lead the United States into the “End Times”.
And many of these people believe that President Trump is that “savior”.
Of course this connection between Donald Trump and the writings of the Biblical Book of Revelation has caused a kind of schism in the Hard-Right American evangelical Christians conservative movement. There was “push back” that has existed for years now, where the conservative Christians say…
“Oh no! We do not believe that Donald Trump is my savior and will lead us into the “End Times”. Donald Trump is my President, Jesus is my Savior.”
And as such, an entire line of products (all made in China, of course) have promoted this narrative…
“Push back” in the form of commercialism.
China and Russia’s role
Well that is well and good, I suppose.
The point is that a percentage (how small is unknown) actually believe that the White House is occupied by a man who (call him a savior, or something else) is going to perform some Biblical level of activity that will result in the prophesies foretold in the Bible.
The world that we know it is going to end.
There will be a great purge of the righteous from the infidels.
A prophet will come and lead this effort.
Jesus will come down from Heaven and start a killing people left and right.
The world will be remade.
Those that are “annotated” will be spared. The rest will suffer terribly.
Many Hard-Right Christians believe that Donald Trump is a savior of traditional conservative thought that will lead the United States into the “End Times”.
Uh. Huh.
Well, of course, with the 800+ military bases around the world, and the USA busily fighting eight simultaneous hot wars, and an active hybrid-war with China, it’s all someone else’s fault. I mean the USA is totally innocent, because Americans are “God’s people”, right?
So, of course, it would be the evil and nasty Russians and China that would start it…
Let me guess. “Targets the government”, and “demands for democratic reform”, and “want more freedom”. And so on and so forth…
Yada Yada Yada.
NED.
Funded and trained by the United States government, as a line item budgetary allocation under the Central Intelligence Agency. All under the control of Mike Pompeo.
Make a case against either Russia or China
Apparently US think tanks believe they can occupy Beijing and overthrow CCP without even using nukes
https://youtu.be/FxYwD_n21wI
-Bo Chen
Or course not all America feels this way.
Only the small minority of neocons do. So they must “make a case” and validate their reasoning so as to get the rest of the nation to support them in a war. And that means a relentless propaganda onslaught. Which is pretty much what has been going on all 2020.
The US military announced Friday that it is deploying armored vehicles and other military assets to Syria to protect US troops fighting ISIS amid tensions with Russia as President Donald Trump told a White House news conference that "we are out of Syria," saying the remaining US forces are there exclusively "guarding the oil."
-US sending armored vehicles into Syria as Trump says 'we are out'
But even that’s not good enough so the neocons want an excuse. And just like the invasion of Syria was searching for (nonexistent) WMD’s…
… the Trump army of neocons are trying to blame China for the COVID-19.
The thing is, everything goes right back to them directly. All of the lies, all of the distortions, all of the confusion, and all of the war-mongering can all be traced back (one way or the other) to a neocon associated with the White-house.
On the other hand, don't underestimate the crude simple mindedness of
Washington's war monger armchair Neocons. They have had a hand in
steering US foreign policy for decades now and they can't remember
whether they are Israelis or Americans.
-Len
Down this endless “rabbit hole” of insanity, propaganda and nonsense. But, I really don’t want to go there.
The Big Picture is that America is falling apart at the seams and desperately wants a scapegoat to distract the population from their misery. And right now, China is that scapegoat.
The Little Picture is that this methodology is designed, concocted, and implemented by radical evangelical Christian neocons who have the power, and the resources of America behind them.
And now for some perspective
The following are some videos are this situation. They are on the lighter side. I mean, why not? You just cannot get too caught up in other people’s madness. Please enjoy.
Let’s start with the idea that China does not lie.
It’s pretty stunning to an American. Of course, all governments lie. It’s what government so, and China must be the absolute worst that is because they drink bat soup, are stinky and are book smart, but cannot do anything but copy things. Tight?
Well…. right?
Check it out.
He’s a pretty funny guy. Check this out…
And now for some words from other Americans…
And this too…
China does not want anything that the American media is saying that they want.
And this too…
And of course after a solid year of hate-hate-hate China, the American citizenry are nearly ripe for a war. You can hear it in the speech patterns, and this is something that the neocons want to happen. They want “blood lust”.
The Chinese are helping people. That’s bad, and evil!
This is pretty much the neocon “end game”…
Quint and funny, eh?
Well, let’s be serious. There is nothing different from the American nationalist; Mr. Trump and his fellow neocons and another famous nationalist. Mr. Hitler. Both came to power because the domestic issues were a complete mess. And both had tried to galvanize their nation against an external source.
Hitler’s war on the Jews.
Trump’s war on China.
And with Hitler, all of Germany followed him. They followed him right up until the absolute collapse of the nation, and the absolute sacking of everything German.
Do NOT be under the impression that history does not repeat itself. It does.
The sacking of America
After a period of time that involved ineffectual leaders, corrupt politicians, and a collapsing society, Rome was invaded. Numerous times. And sacked. Numerous times.
As I watch the incredibly inept leadership at all levels) in America today, I am reminded of Rome and how oblivious the Roman elite were to the dangers outside the borders of the once great Roman Republic.
Perhaps it’s time to remind everyone that losing in war can happen to anyone, and history has shown that the more oblivious the leadership is to the dangers of military consequences, the greater the collapse of that society, and the horrific consequences of the resulting purges and sacks of the population.
And…
America WILL be sacked.
And you can well expect all the horrors of war; torture, rape, pillage, murder, destruction of things, and mindless retribution to be normalized.
To sack a city is a concept imported from the latin languages [esp. French, mettre à sac] in the mid-16th Century to mean, essentially, putting a town or community ‘in the sack’, in the sense of taking its goods.
-law - Why was the the sack of cities acceptable?
Let’s not forget that as soon as the Russians moved into Germany, they allowed all their soldiers to rape every single German woman that they could find. This is history. And if you think that any war that America sets up will be yet another televised war in a remote, remote place that American can watch from their social media feeds, you are sorely mistaken.
One young officer coming upon a unit that had overtaken a column of German refugees fleeing westward later recalled: ‘Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.’ A group of ‘grinning’ officers was standing near by, making sure ‘that every soldier without exception would take part’.
Women and girls were subjected to serial rape wherever they were encountered. Rape was often accompanied by torture and mutilation and frequently ended in the victim being shot or bludgeoned to death.
The raging violence was undiscriminating. Often, especially in Berlin, women were deliberately raped in the presence of their menfolk, to underline the humiliation. The men were usually killed if they tried to intervene. In East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia it is thought that around 1.400.000 women were raped, a good number of them several times. Gang-rapes were the norm rather than the exception. The two largest Berlin hospitals estimated that at least 100.000 women had been raped in the German capital. Many caught a sexually transmitted disease, and not a few fell pregnant; the vast majority of the latter obtained an abortion, or, if they did give birth, abandoned their baby in hospital. The sexual violence went on for many weeks, even after the war formally came to an end. German women learned to hide, especially after dark; or, if they were young, to take a Soviet soldier, preferably an officer, as a lover and protector. On 4 May 1945 an anonymous Berlin woman wrote in her diary: ‘Slowly but surely we’re starting to view all the raping with a sense of humor -gallows humor.’
She noted with a certain satisfaction that the Russian soldiers tended to prefer plump and well-fed women as their victims after the initial fury was over, and that these, unsurprisingly, were usually the wives of Nazi Party functionaries.
-2 million German women aged 13-70 were allegedly raped …
If the German advance into the Soviet Union previously could be characterized as horrifyingly systematic and industrialized in its genocidal slaughter of the innocent, then the Soviet advance into Central Europe was brutal, primitive, and bestial in nature. Millions of German women joined their female brethren raped in Hungary, Romania, Poland, wherever the Red Army conquered; albeit with far worse excesses committed against the women from Axis nations such as Hungary, Austria and Germany. More Slavic Axis nations, such as Bulgaria fared somewhat better, though try telling that to a Pole. Eastern and Central Europe’s women were raped repeatedly and viciously, by desensitized individuals for whom killing had become meaningless, or bent on vengeance after witnessing Germany’s crimes in Eastern Europe. Many of these women either expired from their wounds, were killed outright once used up as mere objects, killed by their own families, or died at their own hand in shame. The Swiss Embassy in Hungary reported,
The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women. Rapes-affecting all age groups from ten to seventy-are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared. They are sometimes accompanied by incredible brutalities. Many women prefer suicide to these horrors…The misery is made worse by the sad fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary.
In addition, the Red Army did not reserve the wholesale rape of Central and Eastern Europe’s women to just foreign women. The Red Army’s men repeatedly raped liberated Russian female forced laborers. When the Red Army captured the Ravensbruck concentration camp, located 50 miles north of Berlin, Soviet soldiers gang-raped the surviving emaciated female concentration camp victims. Even teenage girls hailing from the western Soviet Union were not immune. The Russian archives detail these mass assaults, as reported by the deputy chief of the political department from the 1st Ukrainian Front, by members of the Red Army upon Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian women.
“On the night of 24 February a group of thirty-five provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women’s dormitory in the village of Grutenberg, ten kilometers east of Els, and raped them...an unknown senior lieutenant of tank troops went by horse to where girls were gathering grain. He left his horse and spoke to a girl from the Dnepropetrovsk region called Gritzenko, Anna, ‘Where are you from?’ he asked. She answered this senior lieutenant. He ordered her to come closer. She refused. So he took his gun and shot her, but she did not die. Many similar incidents took place…In the town of Bunslau, there are over 100 women and girls in the headquarters….On March 5, late at night, sixty officers and soldiers entered, mainly from the 3rd Guards Tank Army. Most of them were drunk, and they attacked and offended against women and girls…This is not the only incident. It happens every night…On the night of February 14-15 in one of the villages where the cattle are herded a shtraf company under the command of a senior lieutenant surrounded the village and shot the Red Army soldiers who where on guard there. They went to the women’s dormitory and started their organized mass rape of the women, who had just been liberated by the Red Army.”
Freed Soviet prisoners of war and male forced laborers fared only marginally better. They underwent screening processes at the hands of the NKVD, to “guarantee” they were not traitors, via political re-education instead of receiving desperately needed medical care. Others were immediately sent, with no training or medical attention, to flesh out the ranks of the Red Army’s woefully under strength Rifle Divisions.The Red Army and NKVD also rounded up German civilians by the thousands and forcibly marched them to the Soviet Union for use as forced labor. The NKVD processed back to Russian farms and factories 66,680 German forced laborers by March 9, 1945. The enslaved women faced not only backbreaking work, but also constant sexual assault and disease.
There is no question the Red Army’s appalling behavior emanated from the Soviet leadership. Stalin implicitly authorized the Red Army to rape its way through Eastern Europe. Stalin’s cavalier attitude toward rape had earlier begun through the process of dehumanizing women, by referring to women employed by the Red Army as “campaign wives” (pokhodno-polevaya zhena) for the officers. Stalin’s casual attitude toward sexual exploitation and violence easily carried over to the treatment of civilian women in captured lands. The men joined in their officers predations upon these female populations. Ideology and propaganda played an important role. So did the low quality of the men serving in the Red Army’s ranks. Beginning in April 1943 former prison convicts joined teenage boys and other ill-trained conscripts in fleshing out the rifle companies. Revenge also has to be considered, with more and more White Russians and other recently liberated ethnic groups in the Red Army’s ranks men that had seen their villages destroyed and families and friends regularly killed by German soldiers during years under tyrannical Nazi rule had their chance to turn the tables.
-The Red Army's Rape of Europe | The Globe at War
With this agreed, they divided up the spoils. The imperial palace, along with 25% of the city and Byzantine lands would go the the new emperor. The other 75% would be divided between the Crusaders and the Venetians equally. There was no mention of any expedition to Egypt.
All seemed in reasonably good order that night when the Venetian Doge and the crusading nobles gathered in the imperial palace. Then the Doge made his announcement --his final act of vengeance on the Greeks for the blinding facial wound he had received as a youth. As a reward for all their suffering and hardships, the army would have three days to plunder the city! This they did with wanton abandon --killing, desecrating, raping, burning, destroying.
After the 3-day debauchery, the army was brought to a reasonable state of control, although many resisted the order that their plunder should be delivered to three collection points throughout the city. A French count hanged one of his own knights for hoarding some loot; and Greek citizens were routinely tortured for hiding treasure.
The first payment made from the plunder was the money owed to the Venetians: the Crusader's debt, which Emperor Alexius had promised to pay. These rest was divided equally with the Venetians, a sum of 400,000 marks, which one chronicler noted was seven times the annual royal revenue of the entire kingdom of England.
Next came the division of the land. With the whole empire to hand out, there was more than enough. Commander Boniface of Monferrat (the patron of the late Alexius) received broad territories, including the island of Crete, which the Venetians were more than happy to buy from him with part of their treasure.
. . . Historians who wax eloquent and indignant - with considerable reason - about the sack of Constantinople . . . rarely if ever mention the massacre of the Westerners in Constantinople in 1182 (only 22 years before) . . . a nightmarish massacre of thousands [about 2000 Greeks were killed in Constantinople in 1204, according to secular historian Will Durant], . .
. in which the slaughterers spared neither women nor children, neither old nor sick, neither priest nor monk. Cardinal John, the Pope's representative, was beheaded and his head was dragged through the streets at the tail of a dog; children were cut out of their mother's wombs; bodies of dead Westerners were exhumed and abused; some 4,000 who escaped death were sold into slavery to the Turks.
The Gauls
The story of the first sack of Rome is steeped in myth and legend, but it most likely began when the young city became embroiled in a conflict with a band of Gallic Celts led by the warlord Brennus. On July 18, 387 B.C., the two sides met in battle along the banks of the River Allia. The Romans had yet to perfect the fighting style that would make their legions famous, and many of their men scattered at the first charge of the wild-haired, bare-chested Gallic army. The rest were butchered, leaving Brennus with a clear road to Rome. His men entered the city a few days later and commenced with an orgy of rape and pillage. Buildings were burned or plundered of all their valuables, and most of the Roman senate was put to the sword at the Forum.
While the Gauls wreaked havoc on the rest of the city, the surviving Romans fortified themselves atop the Capitoline Hill. They repelled several Gallic attacks, but after several months of siege, they agreed to pay 1,000 pounds of gold in exchange for Brennus and his army leaving the city. Legend has it that Brennus used rigged scales to weigh out the ransom. When the Romans complained, he threw his sword on the scales and cried out “Vae Victis!” (“Woe to the Vanquished!”). The Romans rebuilt after the Gauls departed, but the defeat at the River Allia left deep wounds. For the rest of Roman history, July 18 was considered a cursed day.
The Visigoths
Rome recovered from the Gallic debacle and went on to flourish for nearly 800 years, but its second sacking in A.D. 410 marked the beginning of a long and excruciating fall. At the time, the Roman Empire was divided and on the decline. Marauding Germanic tribes had begun making incursions across the Rhine and Danube, and one of them, a group of Visigoths led by a king named Alaric, had already besieged Rome on two separate occasions. When the barbarians returned for a third siege, a group of rebellious slaves opened the Salarian Gate and allowed them to pour into the city. Alaric and his hordes proceeded to burn buildings, murder aristocrats and steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. Three days later, having stripped the city of all its valuables, they withdrew from Rome and disappeared along the Appian Way.
The Visigoth sacking had been relatively controlled. Many of Rome’s most famous monuments and buildings were left untouched, and since the Goths were Christians, they allowed people to take refuge inside the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul. Nevertheless, news that the Eternal City had fallen sent shockwaves across the Mediterranean. “My voice sticks in my throat, and, as I dictate, sobs choke me,” wrote the Christian St. Jerome. “The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”
The Vandals
Use of the word “vandalism” to describe the wanton destruction of public property owes it origins to the Vandals, a Germanic tribal people who carried out a famous sack of Rome. The raid was triggered by the assassination of the Roman Emperor Valentinian III, who had previously pledged his daughter Eudocia to the son of the Vandal King Genseric as part of a peace treaty. Claiming the deal was invalidated by the Emperor’s death, Genseric invaded Italy and marched on Rome in 455. The Romans were powerless to stop his advancing army, so they sent Pope Leo to negotiate. The pontiff persuaded Genseric not to burn the city or murder its inhabitants, and in exchange, the Vandals were allowed to pass through the gates of Rome without a fight.
Genseric and his band spent the next two weeks gathering up all the booty they could carry. They looted the city’s patrician homes of gold, silver and furniture, and even ransacked the imperial palace and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. True to their word—if not their name—they refrained from destroying buildings or killing anyone, but they did claim a few prisoners. Chief among them was Valentinian’s daughter, Princess Eudocia, who was later married to Genseric’s son in accordance with their earlier agreement.
The Ostrogoths
After the ousting of the last Western Emperor in A.D. 476, Rome was ruled by a series of Germanic and Ostrogoth kings. The Eastern Emperor Justinian succeeded in recapturing the region during the sixth century, but the Ostrogoth resistance later returned courtesy of Totila, a magnetic leader who rallied the Goths under his banner and laid siege to Rome. According to the historian Procopius, Totila and his men gained access to the city in 546 by scaling its walls under cover of darkness and opening the Asinarian Gate. Rome’s small garrison immediately fled in terror, leaving it defenseless and open to plunder.
The Ostrogoths spent several highly profitable weeks sacking the city, but despite having previously vowed to turn Rome into a sheep pasture, Totila avoided demolishing it when he departed in early 547. Even with most it buildings still standing, the once-great metropolis was rendered a barren ruin. It had boasted more than a million inhabitants during the glory days of the Empire, but by the time the Goths finally left, its population had dwindled to only a few hundred.
The Normans
Only a few years after his countryman William the Conqueror launched his 1066 invasion of England, the Norman warlord Robert Guiscard carried out a grisly sack of Rome. Guiscard—a name meaning “cunning” or “wily”—marched on the city in 1084 after receiving a plea for aid from his ally Pope Gregory VII, who was under siege by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Guiscard easily captured the city and rescued the Pope, but his soldiers were greeted as enemies by the Roman citizenry, many of whom had thrown their support behind Henry. When the people rose up against him, Guiscard crushed their revolt and allowed his men to indulge their lust for rape and plunder. Fires broke out across the city, and many of its inhabitants were butchered or sold into slavery. Sources differ on just how destructive the three-day rampage really was, but some historians would later blame Guiscard and his Normans for demolishing many of Rome’s most priceless ancient monuments.
The Holy Roman Empire
“They wept a lot; all of us are rich.” That was how one of the participants summed up the events of May 1527, when a mutinous army under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V savaged the city of Rome. The imperial troops were fresh off a campaign against the League of Cognac—with whom Pope Clement VII was allied—but they hadn’t been paid in months. To keep them on the march, their commander, the Duke of Bourbon, had promised them a chance to plunder Rome. The impoverished soldiers arrived on May 6 and launched an assault. The Duke was killed during the fighting, but his men breached the defensive walls and poured into the city. The Vatican’s Swiss Guard was all but annihilated during a famous last stand near St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Clement, meanwhile, was forced to escape via a secret tunnel and barricade himself in the impregnable Castel Sant’Angelo.
Once inside Rome, the leaderless army devolved in a bloodthirsty mob. Buildings were looted and burned; men and children were tortured and killed; and women—even Catholic nuns—were raped or auctioned off at public markets. By the time the imperial army finally left the city, Rome was stripped bare and half of its 55,000 inhabitants were either dead or homeless. The cultural blow was equally severe. Scores of artists had been killed, and many priceless artworks were destroyed or missing. Some scholars have since used the 1527 sacking as the official end date of the Italian Renaissance.
The Roman legend of the sack is that Brennus devastated the city in an orgy of chaotic looting and besieged those who remained in the Capitol before they were forced to offer an enormous ransom for their city. At this point, but before the ransom could be paid, Cammilus returned from exile, defeated the Gauls and drove them out.
...
While the Roman account of the sack and the city’s salvation does appear to be somewhat heavily embellished. – which, given the notorious unreliability of Roman reports on casualty numbers is not very surprising- the sack did have a profound effect on Rome, which can be seen projected into their legend. The vulnerability and paranoia derived from that disaster certainly informed later Roman behavior, particularly towards the idea of a continued Gallic threat and a near bloody minded determination not to submit to other powers in future.
You're looking at this with 21st century eyes. Back then, pillaging and looting were part of war. It was customary to let your troops plunder for a few days (typically three) after winning a siege - doing so basically was how you'd pay your troops.
A few examples of atrocities that shocked by the standards of the time:
After the Romans defeated Carthage, they sold its population into slavery, and burnt and razed it to the ground. The event was unusual in that the Romans additionally salted the grounds for good measure.
After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem for the first time, they massacred the Muslim and Jewish population wholesale, leaving few survivors behind.
The Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade went down in history as one that a 20th century author described as having been "on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable".
The Mongols practiced the "promise" of wholesale execution, which is best described as a form of psychological warfare: they'd massacre every last person in cities that would resist them, bar a few survivors who were then let loose so they could spread the word that resistance should not be an option.
During the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-1678, Turenne chocked Europe in 1674 by plundering the Palatinate far and wide, essentially burning the whole region to the ground, in an scorched earth effort to cause logistics-related problems to Imperial troops arriving as reinforcements.
At the other extreme, history also tells us of milder sacks and unusually generous surrender terms:
When the Visigoths sacked Rome, it shocked contemporaries but it was actually restrained by the standards of the time: there was no general slaughter of the inhabitants, the two main basilicas of Peter and Paul were nominated places of sanctuary, and most of the city survived intact - though stripped of its valuables.
When the Vandals sacked Rome a few years later, they were a bit more thorough - staying 14 days vs three, with a bit more damage done. But Pope Leo I had convinced Genseric to not raze the city or kill the population wholesale - certainly a welcome concession.
Saladin, in stark contrast with the First Crusaders, offered the Christians surprisingly generous terms by the time's standards when he reconquered Jerusalem. He went as far as allowing many families who could not afford their ransom to leave, against the wishes of his treasurers.
Mindsets and the standards of troop behavior eventually evolved. Restraint was expected by the early 20th century. To illustrate this, consider how Kaiser Wilhelm II sent his German troops to China as part of the punitive expedition against the Boxer Rebellion: he instructed them to show no restraints and basically behave like Huns. The anecdote is particularly telling, but not because it shocked some at the time or because it was used a few years later for WW1 propaganda purposes. Rather, it's because behaving like Huns would have been such a matter of course a few centuries earlier that it would not have been worth mentioning. Times had changed.
And now, let’s go back to reality
The things that happened back in the past is what we call “history”. There are many people who mistakenly believe that “once in the past; always in the past”. They believe that “what you don’t know, won’t hurt you“. Ah, so dangerous.
The past, and “history” tells us, and illustrates to us in a most graphic way, what the human race actually is.
And we are oh… so very close to reverting back to a more feral existence. Once of great barbarism, and great pain and suffering. All it takes is one lunatic that is in charge of weapons and systems of great power and even greater control.
There will always be lunatics.
But it is our job, and our responsibility, as humans to police society so that these dangerous people never get near any levers of power. We need stable people who sees the big picture and who sees their role as something minor in the big scheme of things. Not as someone who believe that they are the hand of God and everything that they do will have the blessings of the angels.
I have illustrated the that United States is run by a cabal of neocons.
Whether President Trump is one such neocon is not clear. What is clear is that this cabal is driving America into dangerous territory and walking straight forward to dangerous situations. And while all this is going on, the rest of the world watches in horror and rising apprehension.
And you know…
The rest of the world aren’t some barefoot peasants riding bicycles, and using the water buffalo to plow the fields. they are pretty darn contemporaneous and equals with Americans. You all just don’t realize it. Because the PTB want to think otherwise.
It makes it easier for them to launch their “dream war”. The one that the angels told them personally to launch. You know… “for democracy” and for the “American way of life”.
Here’s a reminder of just WHO, and WHAT Donald Trump…
… and Mike Pompeo…
… and Steve Bannon…
… and John Bolton want to destroy…
…for “freedom”, and “the American way of life”, don’t you know.
Take a good hard look at what they want to destroy. For the truth is, and YOU MUST FACE IT. They want to destroy average people, doing average things in average places…
Again…
I will repeat myself.
Call it a “trade war”. Call it a “hybrid war”. Call it a “police action”. Call it “enforcing peace”. Call it “making the world safe”…
A war.
Is a war.
Is a war.
is a WAR.
And this, ladies and gentleman is what they HATE, and what they WANT TO DESTROY…
…this…
Here’s a video of a pretty much average (but pretty) girl in China. She’s walking down a typical Chinese street with typical Chinese buses and Chinese kids and Chinese old ladies. This all must be DESTROYED for the “American way of life and freedom!”.
And speaking about pretty Chinese girls…
Here’s another video of some more pretty girls. A smart person appreciates the world around them as it is. They don’t try to “improve” it by killing people, forcing them to adopt their culture, or kill them outright because they enjoy watching cat videos that you hate. The neocons think that the world would be a better place if all these people were KILLED.
They are so filled with hate, and the belief that they are better and smarter than every one else…
…and that since they are all so much smarter than the rest of us, that they are doing the right thing by starting a global thermonuclear conflation. It’s what Jesus has personally empowered them to do…
…to kill and slaughter people like this…
This video clearly shows how dirty and filthy the rest of the world is. How they need to be killed and destroyed and their history erased, and so that they can be fed drugs again so that they would be easy to control and that “the American way” can manifest the real and true reality; One where they are the masters, and everyone else in the world serves them. Why? Because they are anointed by God.
They are so terrible!
They are drinking alcohol, and we all know that Donald Trump doesn’t drink alcohol. Why? Well, if you don’t know, you need to read the Bible. But let’s be real about this. Go to any evangelical church and ask them if it is ok and fine to drink alcohol. And they will tell you flatly NO! God’s chosen people do not drink alcohol.
So yes…
Even “normal” people like me and you are automatically damned. For we are sinners and in the “eyes of the Lord”, we are beyond redemption.
This video shows how toxic the association of the Chinese people are with “normal” Westerners. Where now they drink hard alcohol in their coffee. And not avoid and abstain from the evils of the flesh like a good Christian would.
In the mind of these evangelical neocons, “we gave Hong Kong a chance“. We failed, so now they must be destroyed and eradicated off the face of the world.
Sounds so strange you know.
That anyone at the other side of the world would have such a large ego that they could possibly believe that they have ANY association with such a far away and distant land. But, they do. They really and earnestly believe that they have a role in telling others how to live their life.
Name another nation that tells others how to live their lives, run their businesses, or do things their way. Does China tell Americans “You MUST use this app.”, or say “You Americans cannot…”
But the current American government does.
Why?
Because they believe that they have the power to do so, and that it comes straight to them by God himself.
Here’s Hong Kong, China today. Well, do they look all that repressed after the CIA and the NED were kicked out of the country? Does it look like they need the “proud American soldier to rescue them”? Does it look like it needs a few bombs dropped on these party-goes to “straighten them out”?
A video of a group of repressed Hong Kong Chinese that are terribly abused, and you can see it in how downtrodden they are. They must need to be given the harsh slap of “freedom” and awaken to a new life in the “blood of the annotated one”.
And some more…
… here’s some more Hong Kong folk that really need to stop their evil fornication and ways….
Another video of more Hong Kong youth showing off their devil ways and evil mannerisms. Can you not see why they all must be killed? How else can the savior clean off the earth and make way for the chosen people? All these heathens must be killed off, don’t you know. (Maybe they would be better off having a nice “gig job” in the United States, eh? And living in a nice quiet suburb, with a nice home, nice car payments, and nice taxes… for democracy, don’t you know.)
You must understand…
These neocons do not see the world like we do. They do not see people, families, relationships, actions and activities. They see serfs, peasants, and the uncouth. And in their world, the earth must be cleaned and sterilized from these vermin to make the world a better place. A place for them and their families.
And while these kinds of blurbs on the “news” goes in one ear and out the other, combined… when everything is all added up, it makes for a very dangerous and threatening picture.
It is a picture of some dangerous people, with some strange and warped ideas are trying to remake the world in their vision of what it should be.
Heaven Help Us!
…
Personally…
I don’t want any of their “improvements”. I pretty much like things as they are already. I don’t need to have someone like Mike Pompeo or Donald Trump tell me how to live my life, or threaten me and my family because I cannot conform to their idea of perfection.
This is what I have now…
I don’t think it needs any improvement…
This video is what China is right now. I just cannot imagine that Donald Trump, John Bolton, or Mike Pompeo could improve upon this. I really don’t think so.
I think that China is just doing fine.
It doesn’t need any “improvements” that are being discussed so earnestly on all the major and alternative American media outlets. China is doing well. It is clean, and prosperous. The people are smart and industrious. And they are doing things unfettered with the crime and corruptions out of the American landscape.
China today is actually quite nice.
Much nicer than many places in America.
This video says it most clearly. China is doing just fine and does not need any more of that American bullshit. It doesn’t need to be saved. Or attacked… “for democracy”.
Quick Update
This October, Donald Trump is going to have a “special meeting” with the Presidents of Japan, India, Australia, and the US. I wonder what they are going to talk about.
Andy Browne makes a persuasive case that Trump's trade war with China is a failure: "On just about every metric that matters, China is ahead. At every turn, Trump seems to have been outplayed and outsmarted throughout the global trade war that began shortly after he took office."
-Bloomberg New Economy: China is Winning the Trade War With Trump
The human condition is still as primitive as it has ever been. We still exist and small bands of very wealthy leaders determine our fates.
Do not think that anything has changed. It hasn’t.
Right now, the President of the United States is no different from any other megalomaniac ruler from the past.
You don’t need to use (the offensive example) of Hitler. Pick any other ruler of any other city or nation. Consider the cities in Hungry prior to the attacks by Genghis Khan. Consider the wars in Syria when the ISIS took over. Consider the former Yugoslavia. Consider what happened in many of those nations that the CIA has had it’s hand in…
Sigh.
And to be truthful, most Americans just want to live their lives, and be left alone. And that is the same with the people anywhere. And I can tell you all specifically, that is what China wants. they just want to be left alone and stop the crazies from hassling them because “they are empowered” to do so.
Chinese people are like anyone else. Just like in this video. They just want to live their lives freely. Eat what they want to eat, go to school. Go to work, and have productive and meaningful lives. They don’t need some busybody who believe that GOD empowered them to kill all heathens to get int their face and fuck things up.
Sigh.
Big Sigh.
I have to tell youse guys that I am horrified that any one in the present administration, regardless of political affiliation, is even considering doing ANY KIND OF ACTION against another major nation. It doesn’t matter if it is China, or Russia, or Germany, or Iran.
The next war is going to be a “game changer”.
it’s not going to be another “police action”, or isolated to the South China Sea. It’s going to be “in your face”, up front, and very, very personal.
How personal?
Keep in mind that when the victorious American servicemen came to occupy Japan, that they were NOT “enlightened” in the least. And they sacked that nation just like any other conflict in all of history. And it was the local non-military civilians that paid that price.
Donald Trump in Bible prophecy? January 20, 2017 by Gene Veith Many End Times preachers are saying that the rise of Donald Trump was prophesied in the Bible …
-Donald Trump in Bible prophecy? | Gene Veith
And going up against hard working and determined people…
China is a serious, serious nation that does not play.
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If you read the American media, one thing that runs through all the propaganda, and it’s an on-going theme. It’s pretty much this; [1] China is hard-core communist, and thus [2] everything they do is a lie. [3] America must disengage from that lie. And, [4] when the time is right, America destroy China completely.
This is a pretty big departure from the “most favored trading status nation” to “America’s number one enemy”.
I call it the “Trump effect”. Which is pretty much a nation being run upon delusions and fantasy. You all can thank Trump and his “God fearing” neocon advisers who (foolishly) believe that America is Heaven on earth, and it is their God-Given right to rule the world, and remake it into an American vassal state.
For decades, China labored and provided goods to America. Once America could no longer afford those goods, the American leadership wanted to crush China completely and seize everything inside China for their own personal use.
This is really, seriously, all messed up.
This isn’t 1840, don’t you know.
But China is not what the American leadership thinks it is. China is a serious, serious nation. It is run by leadership who where tops in their classes, experienced hardship by working their way from the very bottom of society to where they are now, and who have displayed merit over and over again. It’s a big change from the “clowns” and “misfits” that currently run America.
In this post we will look at what China has been doing over the last few decades while America has gotten, fat, lazy, slothful and rich. We will look at the efforts that they made to become a world-leader in manufacturing. And then, we will look at where this effort has got them, and what China has become as a result of it; indeed, what China is today.
To start off, however, we need to look at how China started out, and what they did to become where they are today.
Hint:
It took [1] real leadership, and [2] structural changes within the government.
We start with a post titled “Just Cheap Labor? How China Became a Manufacturing Powerhouse” by The World Affairs Blog. Posted on 13SEP20. Reprinted as found with only minor alternations to fit this venue. All credit to the writers and editors.
Just Cheap Labor? How China Became a Manufacturing Powerhouse
Many people have simple narratives about China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. And this misunderstanding (ignorance?) is also the reason why the same people believe that multinational corporations are going to quickly move or re-shore factories out of China. The logic behind this narrative mostly boils down to, “China has cheap labor and thus became a manufacturing giant.”
It’s just not true.
For starters, if poverty is the sole requirement to become a manufacturing center, obviously every other developing country would have performed well. Consider this: while China and India have almost the same population, China’s manufacturing is almost 10x India’s. Thus, let’s analyze this phenomenon more closely.
China’s growth in manufacturing over the last forty years has been nothing but astonishing. Consider that, in 1980, US manufacturing output was almost five times as large as China’s. However, just thirty years later — in 2010 — China surpassed the US as the world’s #1 manufacturing country. This was also quite momentous, since the US had been the manufacturing leader for the previous 110 years!
Of course, cheap labor made a big difference in the 1980s, 1990s and even until 2006 or so. However, after that, China’s wages caught up with other middle-income developing countries. Now, Chinese wages are 2.5x higher than in Mexico or 5x higher than in Vietnam.
Thus, while the Chinese wages tripled over a decade (2008-2018), China’s share of global manufacturing value added almost doubled from 15% to 28%!
So, obviously, there’s lot more than cheap labor.
In fact there are dozens of holistic factors that make a country a successful manufacturer. (Not all of them are positive — for example, lax environmental laws — but that’s the dark side of manufacturing). Understanding these will help see what a daunting challenge foreign companies will face in finding new countries to replace China.
There’s no one magic bullet, and all the ten factors listed below are critical:
**1. Skilled, Productive and Disciplined Labor: Yes, more than being cheap, even the lowest paid workers must have all these three qualities. The people making shoes or assembling gadgets still need skills and consistency. Products and requirements change all the time, and the workers should be able to adapt. Moreover, these people must show up for work every day and consistently perform. In many countries, you can’t find such high-quality workers.
**2. Medium and Hi-tech Manufacturing Factories: A plastic toy or a bulb may seem very simple, but there’s a lot of chemistry, metallurgy, materials science and much more behind how to make them from raw materials. Now imagine TVs, car engines etc. Factories need very sophisticated engineers to make the products to specifications at the right cost. There’s a lot of innovation here behind the scene. Here’s a quick note from Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) on this topic:
**3. Producing at Scale: Assembling 100,000 iPhones a day requires a totally different factory from the one that churns out 1,000 smartphones a day — every process will be different from end to end. Automation, smart factories, robots, and 5G will be increasingly crucial in the factories of the future.
**4. Elasticity and Flexibility: Can you handle a sudden extra request for 1 million new gadgets to meet demands for Christmas? Can you quickly switch from one version to another version of a product? For example, China was able to quickly build huge mask factories and COVID19 testing labs within 2-3 weeks.
Is that possible in Vietnam? In Britain? In Canada? In the United States?
**5. Design to Prototypes to Products: Customers just come up with vague or highly complex product designs and then expect the manufacturer to do all the work. Chinese firms have so much talent and experience that they can often create a prototype within a couple of days. And these firms must be creative enough to suggest alternative designs and features. These are invaluable skills that just can’t be developed in a few months.
**6. Logistics: How do you make sure that the parts and raw materials are always available for the factories? How do you manage all the workers? How about testing and shipping out all the products on time? How do you work with customers from all over the world and deal with different languages, legal issues etc.?
**7. Infrastructure: The Chinese government has to make sure that the factories have land, electricity, water, buildings, warehouses, roads, Internet etc. And they must be affordable. These may sound easy to someone in the US, but developing nations like India or Indonesia may struggle to provide high-quality infrastructure. For example, until recently, massive power outages used to be very common in India.
**8. Transportation: Although this falls under infrastructure, it must be spelled out. A bullet train that reduces travel time by 60% … deep sea ports that can handle massive ships and millions of containers … new strategically located airports all over the country … freight trains that can travel thousands of miles (like from Xian, China to Barcelona, Spain) … these are monumental projects in which no country can match China. This is why Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is truly visionary.
**9. Ecosystem: This is a unique success factor for China. There is an ecosystem for every kind of factory. For example, a clothing factory would greatly benefit if there are dozens of nearby factories that specialize in different kinds of materials — cotton, wool, silk, denim, nylon, polyester etc. Similarly, a smartphone company would like to work closely with other firms that specialize in microphones, speakers, cameras, screens, printed circuit boards etc. Other services experts such as international lawyers, marketing consultants, and designers are also indispensable. Without such 360-degree ecosystems, no country can expect to be a manufacturing superpower. Shenzhen, the electronics capital of the world, is a stellar example of such ecosystems.
**10. Tax Breaks, Subsidies, Incentives, Trade Agreements: Finally, you need a very smart and visionary government that plans 5, 10, 20 years in advance, makes huge investments, knows how to attract and keep foreign and domestic investors, provide tax cuts and subsidies, negotiate smart trade agreements etc. to create a win-win environment.
Elon Musk at Shanghai Tesla factory that was built in just one year!
So, these are the secrets behind China’s success. Other countries can try to replicate this model, but they need to be prepared to invest a lot and plan for the long term.
While low-end manufacturing will move out of China because of high Chinese wages and China’s desire to improve its environment, Americans shouldn’t dream of quick decoupling or re-shoring factories. This is why 75% of US manufacturers in China say they won’t move any production out of China! Moving out of China in any meaningful way will take a decade … if other developing nations execute their manufacturing strategy flawlessly.
And now that you know about how China got to where it is, you can see how this all affects it’s global standing…
China’s GDP is now $14.4 trillion. Within ten years …
China slowed down a bit, thanks to trade war and tariffs, but didn’t suffer a lot.
The mainstream media gave it a spin as “China’s economy grows at the slowest pace in 29 years!” However, the slowdown in China’s growth is natural at this stage of its development. Nothing can grow at 15% forever.
What is not mentioned by the China-haters is that China grew much faster than the US economy and left other major economies like EU and Japan in the dust.
Here are the numbers for GDP growth in 2019 — China: 6.1%, USA: 2.2%, EU: 1.4% and Japan: 0.7%.
Note that, the official GDP growth are always inflation-adjusted. This is a strange norm that distorts reality. We don’t do this to other stats like stock market or wages. Thus, in real life, China’s GDP actually grew 10% … from Ұ90 trillion to Ұ99 trillion.
Thus, last year, China’s GDP grew by Ұ9 trillion… which translates to $1.4 trillion. For comparison, the US economy grew by $1 trillion. See the difference? This is how China catches up to the US.
Every year from now on, China will reduce the gap with the US by $400 billion or more.
World Beyond the US
How did China achieve this growth? How come the trade war and tariffs didn’t wreck the Chinese economy?
There are two answers:
One, the significance of American economy is shrinking.
In 2019, the US became the third trading partner for China! Not number one. Not number two. Third.
The top two were EU and ASEAN (a group of 10 countries in Asia). The Belt and Road countries also increased their trade with China.
Two, China’s economy is no longer dominated by manufacturing.
Services sector — “tertiary industry” — is now 54% of the economy; and manufacturing is only 40%. Since services depend mostly on domestic consumption, trade war doesn’t have much impact.
Thus the “Trade War” does not affect domestic consumption. Only international trade with China’s third largest trading partner; America.
Future
If you look at the relative size of China to the US over the last 30 years, you can see how China is catching up:
With 4x as many people — who also work very hard — and a government
that surprisingly plans and coordinates the economy very well, it should
be no surprise that China will surpass the US by 2030 in nominal GDP.
(Don’t forget that China has been #1 in terms of PPP GDP since 2014).
Of course, the trajectory is based on the assumption there won’t be any major financial crisis or hot wars in the coming decade, which are all quite possible…
Conclusion
It should not be any mystery to anyone not drinking the “electric kool-aide” from the American (and Western) media. China is successful precisely because of it’s leadership, planning and hard work.
It is not a “democracy” where public opinion can change the leadership on a whim. It is a Socialist Republic run by merit. It doesn’t need to lie. They just tell you what things are, and you can accept it or not.
All Chinese leadership worked to get where they are today. They lead China into what it has become.
The Chinese people, culture and the Chinese society, along with proper investment and long term planning has created a situation where China is the global leader that America considers so much a threat.
China will continue this path that it is on, and the only thing that can slow it down (but not stop it) would be a “hot war” with America.
To this end, China is working with other nations. Creating and building long-lasting friendships and relationships. While America is tearing down relationships, ignoring treaties, and generally being a global nuisance.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my China Index here…
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“At some point, a crisis of confidence in this so-called money is inevitable. People aren’t going to trust it forever if you continue to create trillions and trillions backed by nothing but a promise from a central bank and a promise from governments. That’s the flaw in all of this. You can’t sustain the perceptions of moneyness forever. History has many examples of how money is destroyed by over-issuance, and now we’re watching it in real time.”Doug NolandDoug Noland: It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now… I Believe You Should Take Cover!
August 5, 2020
It has begun.
Nations are running away from using the United States dollar. Instead they are choosing to use other methods to pay back their debts and engage in trade. They are using such things a as gold, eyuan, or commodity trading (like oil, wheat or rice).
A new world monetary system is being set up right now which will completely kill the US dollar, which is the world’s reserve currency. At least 23 countries (60% of the world’s GDP) are setting up swap lines which bypass the dollar and SWIFT, which is the dollar-based worldwide financial transaction system. These countries include Russia, China, India, and even Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
Kevin: You know, I think about where the two of them agree. They would both say that we’re past the point of no return, that money turned into credit, and we’re now in a credit expansion. Noland would say kicking the can down the road is ultimately going to end in dystopia. What Duncan would say is, it’s our only chance at utopia. And they both know that credit probably ends badly, but I think Duncan would just like to have it end badly after he passes away.
David: That may be, so if we have a shot at utopia, let’s spend a little bit more. And that’s a little bit like looking at the hair of the dog as the real solution to a problem with alcoholism.
You’re right. It will take away some of the consequence in the short run.
Kevin: Do you remember Ian McAvity said that a doctor told him to not stop smoking because he had smoked so much that it would probably kill him.
David: That’s right. “You quit now and you’re dead.” That’s really what we’re talking about.
Doug NolandDoug Noland: It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now… I Believe You Should Take Cover!
August 5, 2020
For several years, financial analysts, primarily those outside the mainstream of academia, have been warning that any day could be the black swan event that collapses the dollar. This collapse will end U.S. hegemony as caretaker of the world’s reserve currency.
That day had arrived last year on 18NOV19 when a former head trader for a major financial institution issued a harbinger. He stated that 23 countries, and 60% of the world’s GDP, are or have setting up new swap lines which bypass the dollar. These systems not only bypass the USD, but they bypass SWIFT, and the BIS.
All of this is ushering in a new global currency system. It is a system that will kill the US dollar.
Who’s abandoning the USD?
Countries are growing weary of losing money on the falling dollar. Many of them want to protect their financial interests, and a number of them want to end the US oversight that comes with using the dollar. Although it’s not clear how many of these countries will actually follow through on an abandonment of the dollar, it is clear that its status as a world currency is in trouble.
Obviously, an abandonment of the dollar is bad news for the currency. Simply put, as demand lessens, its value drops. Additionally, the revenue generated from the use of the dollar will be sorely missed if it’s lost. The dollar’s status as a cheaply-produced US export is a vital part of our economy. Losing this status could rock the financial lives of both Americans and the worldwide economy.
Here’s just a few of the numerous nations that are running away from using the United States Dollar…
Saudi Arabia
The Telegraph reports that for the first time, Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates along with the US Federal Reserve.
This is seen as a signal that a break from the dollar currency peg is imminent. The kingdom is taking “appropriate measures” to protect itself from letting the dollar cause problems for their own economy.
They’re concerned about the threat of inflation and don’t want to deal with “recessionary conditions” in the US.
Hans Redeker of BNP Paribas believes this creates a “very dangerous situation for the dollar,” as Saudi Arabia alone has management of $800 billion. Experts fear that a break from the dollar in Saudi Arabia could set off a “stampede” from the dollar in the Middle East, a region that manages $3,500 billion.
Sudan
Sudan is, once again, planning to convert its dollar holdings to the euro and other currencies. Additionally, they’ve recommended to commercial banks, government departments, and private businesses to do the same.
In 1997, the Central Bank of Sudan made a similar recommendation in reaction to US sactions from former President Clinton, but the implementation failed. This time around, 31 Sudanese companies have become subject to sanctions, preventing them from doing trade or financial transactions with the US. Officially, the sanctions are reported to have little effect, but there are indications that the economy is suffering due to these restrictions.
A decision to move Sudan away from the dollar is intended to allow the country to work around these sanctions as well as any implemented in the future. However, a Khartoum committee recently concluded that proposals for a reduced dependence on the dollar are “not feasible.” Regardless, it is clear that Sudan’s intent is to attempt a break from the dollar in the future.
Russia
In 2006, Russian President Vladmir Putin expressed interest in establishing a Russian stock exchange which would allow “oil, gas, and other goods to be paid for in Roubles.”
Russia’s intentions are no secret–in the past, they’ve made it clear that they’re wary of holding too many dollar reserves.
In 2004, Russian central bank First Deputy Chairmain Alexei Ulyukayev remarked, “Most of our reserves are in dollars, and that’s a cause for concern.”
He went on to explain that, after considering the dollar’s rate against the euro, Russia is “discussing the possibility of changing the reserve structure.” Then in 2005, Russia put an end to its dollar peg, opting instead to move towards a euro alignment. They’ve discussed pricing oil in euros, a move that could provide a large shift away from the dollar and towards the euro, as Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter.
In 2005, Korea announced its intention to shift its investments to currencies of countries other than the US.
Although they’re simply making plans to diversify for the future, that doesn’t mean a large dollar drop isn’t in the works. There are whispers that the Bank of Korea is planning on selling $1 billion US bonds in the near future, after a $100 million sale this past August.
China just announced that it will stop purchasing our debt (holding dollars in reserve). This will force The Federal Reserve to print even more dollars than the $85 billion it’s currently printing.
A few months ago, the second largest economy on earth (China) and the third largest economy on earth (Japan) struck a deal which will promote the use of their own currencies (rather than the U.S. dollar) when trading with each other. This was an incredibly important agreement that was virtually totally ignored by the U.S. media. The following is from a BBC report about that agreement:
“China and Japan have unveiled plans to promote direct exchange of their currencies in a bid to cut costs for companies and boost bilateral trade. The deal will allow firms to convert the Chinese and Japanese currencies directly into each other. Currently businesses in both countries need to buy US dollars before converting them into the desired currency, adding extra costs.”
Way back in 2016, the second largest economy on earth (China) and the third largest economy on earth (Japan) struck a deal which will promote the use of their own currencies (rather than the U.S. dollar) when trading with each other. This was an incredibly important agreement that was virtually totally ignored by the U.S. media. The following is from a BBC report about that agreement:
“China and Japan have unveiled plans to promote direct exchange of their currencies in a bid to cut costs for companies and boost bilateral trade. The deal will allow firms to convert the Chinese and Japanese currencies directly into each other. Currently businesses in both countries need to buy US dollars before converting them into the desired currency, adding extra costs.”
India
In December 2018, India and the United Arab Emirates sealed a bilateral exchange swap agreement to boost trade and investment in their own currencies.
A swap is an international contract that is sealed off from a stock exchange and states that the two parties agree to exchange one financial instrument for another within a predetermined term and conditions.
Iran
China (in particular) appears determined to risk US sanctions in order to make a huge investment in the Iranian economy.
The US Treasury Department can only sanction firms that trade in dollars with Iran or that also trade with the US.
China intends its projects in Iran to be funded with soft-money currencies it has accumulated through its vast global trade. In accepting those African and other currencies, Iran will suffer a 30% loss, but it will escape the American net. Rendering American sanctions worthless.
Turkey
In 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced his plans to end the US dollar monopoly by pursuing a policy aimed at excluding the dollar from trading with its partners. According to the president, Ankara is preparing to carry out commercial transactions with China, Russia and Ukraine using national currencies. In addition, it is possible that Turkey will replace the dollar in trade with Iran.
This decision was prompted by both political and economic reasons. Relations between Ankara and Washington deteriorated after the failed coup attempt of July 2016. That year, several media outlets reported that Erdogan suspected that the US was involved in the coup attempt. The Turkish leader also accused Washington of harboring the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, who, according to the Turkish authorities, orchestrated the attempted coup.
Venezuela
Venezuela holds little loyalty to the dollar. In fact, they’ve shown overt disapproval, choosing to establish barter deals for oil.
These barter deals, established under Hugo Chavez, allow Venezuela to trade oil with 12 Latin American countries and Cuba without using the dollar, shorting the US its usual subsidy.
Chavez is not shy about this decision, and has publicly encouraged others to adopt similar arrangements. In 2000, Chavez recommended to OPEC that they “take advantage of high-tech electronic barter and bi-lateral exchanges of its oil with its developing country customers,” or in other words, stop using the dollar, or even the euro, for oil transactions.
In September, Chavez instructed Venezuela’s state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA to change its dollar investments to euros and other currencies in order to mitigate risk.
Why are they abandoning the USD?
Historically, new world reserve currencies are backed by gold.
China surpassed the US in terms of GDP based onpurchasing power parity (PPP), becoming the largest in the world by this measure, International Monetary Fund data show. In 2014 China reached $17.6 trillion or 16.48 percent of the world’s purchasing-power-adjusted GDP, while the US made slightly less, 16.28 percent or $17.4 trillion, the FT reported citing IMF data.
China is sitting there and wondering why the U.S. dollar should continue to be so preeminent if the Chinese economy is about to become the number one economy on the planet.
It’s an advantage for China. It’s an advantage for the rest of the world, and yes even for the USA it’s an advantage…
And so, China, and other emerging powers such as Russia, have been quietly making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade over the past few years [and, as such,] the supremacy of the U.S. dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe it to be.
As most Americans have this fantasy where America is empowered by GOD to exist and lord over the rest of the world. It is what all that “exceptionalism” means and refers to…
But, like the elephant in the room, sooner or later, you have to face up to the facts.
As the U.S. economy continues to fade, it is going to be really hard to argue that the U.S. dollar should continue to function as the primary reserve currency of the world. Things are rapidly changing, and most Americans have no idea where these trends are taking the nation.
Most Americans are in a state of denial.
They cannot believe that any other nation would have a currency as important or as valuable as the vaulted US Dollar.
But you know, all you need to do is sit down and reason it all out. It makes quite a bit of sense when you get down to it…
The Ten Reasons
The following are 10 reasons why the reign of the dollar as the world reserve currency is about to come to an end:
#1: China And Japan To Use Own Currencies In Bilateral Trade
Way back in 2016, the second largest economy on earth (China) and the third largest economy on earth (Japan) struck a deal which will promote the use of their own currencies (rather than the U.S. dollar) when trading with each other. This was an incredibly important agreement that was virtually totally ignored by the U.S. media.
#2: The BRICS Plan To Use Own Currencies When Trading With Each Other
The BRICS continue to flex their muscles. A new agreement will promote the use of their own national currencies when trading with each other rather than the U.S. dollar. The following is from a news source in India:
“The five major emerging economies of BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are set to inject greater economic momentum into their grouping by signing two pacts for promoting intra-BRICS trade…
The two agreements will enable credit facility in local currency for businesses of BRICS countries…[which is] expected to scale up intra-BRICS trade that has been growing at the rate of 28% over the last few years but, at $230 billion, remains much below the potential of the five economic powerhouses.”
#3: China and Russia Use Own Currencies In Bilateral Trade
Leaders from both Russia and China have been strongly advocating for a new global reserve currency for several years, and both nations seem determined to break the power that the U.S. dollar has over international trade.
In fact, both Russia and China have been using their own national currencies when trading with each other for a couple of years now.
Who do you think is Africa’s biggest trading partner? It isn’t the United States. In 2009, China became Africa’s biggest trading partner, and China is now aggressively seeking to expand the use of Chinese currency on that continent.
China seems absolutely determined to change the way that international trade is done. At this point, almost all Chinese companies in Africa are using Chinese currency in cross-border transactions.
#5: China and United Arab Emirates To Use Own Currencies In Bilateral Trade
China and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to ditch the U.S. dollar and use their own currencies in oil transactions with each other.
The UAE is a fairly small player, but this is definitely a threat to the petrodollar system. What will happen to the petrodollar if other oil producing countries in the Middle East follow suit?
Iran has been one of the most aggressive nations when it comes to moving away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. For example, it has been reported that India will begin to use gold to buy oil from Iran.
#7: Saudi Arabia Likely to Abandon Use of Petrodollar in Dealings With China
Who imports the most oil from Saudi Arabia? It is not the United States, it is China…Saudi Arabia and China have teamed up to construct a massive new oil refinery in Saudi Arabia…so how long is Saudi Arabia going to stick with the petrodollar if China is their most important customer?
#8: The United Nations Continues to Push For A New World Reserve Currency
The United Nations has been issuing reports that openly call for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world. In particular, one UN report envisions “a new global reserve system…that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major reserve currency.”
#9: The IMF Has Been Pushing For A New World Reserve Currency
The International Monetary Fund has also published a series of reports calling for the U.S. dollar to be replaced as the reserve currency of the world. In particular, one IMF paper entitled “Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability” actually proposed that a future global currency be named the “Bancor” and that a future global central bank could be put in charge of issuing it….
“A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank (see Supplement 1, section V) would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy. As trade and finance continue to grow rapidly and global integration increases, the importance of this broader perspective is expected to continue growing.”
#10: Most Of The Rest Of The World Hates The United States
Global sentiment toward the United States has dramatically shifted, and this should not be underestimated. Decades ago, we were one of the most loved nations on earth [but] bow we are one of the most hated.
I've said for decades now that the US needs shut down the CIA and close ALL its foreign military bases and bring the troops, planes, ships, and drones home. The CIA has toppled democratically elected governments all over the globe and as a result created hatred for the US. The CIA is the exact opposite of what we believe the US should stand for and support. We need to stop being an empire and start taking care of business right here at home. If we actually do that, maybe in a few decades the rest of the world might forgive us… might… maybe…
-pimaC Aug 17
If you doubt this, just do some international traveling. Even in Europe (where we are supposed to have friends), Americans are treated like dirt. Many American travelers have resorted to wearing Canadian pins so that they will not be treated like garbage while traveling over there.
If the rest of the world still loved us, they would probably be glad to continue using the U.S. dollar but because we are now so unpopular, that gives other nations even more incentive to dump the dollar in international trade.
An Acceleration of the abandonment of the USD
Well, since Donald Trump became President, his foreign policy has been reckless, ruthless and a complete disaster. Other nations now view the United States as a very unstable nation with many problems, that breaks long-standing treaties and contracts, and tries to imposes it’s own rules and laws in areas where it has no authority. In their mind, it’s best to just be isolated from this “train wreck” of a nation.
Trump’s Six-Point Legacy
Bully Allies
Belittle Friends
Break Good Deals
Invoke Disastrous Trade and Sanction Policies
Amplify Racial Hatred
Drive Countries Into Deals With China
In regard to points 4 and 6, Trump’s trade and sanction policies have been a disaster on every front.
Most Americans are unaware of this, and they are myopic and are only concerned with the Donald Trump domestic agenda. The Left hate’s it, and the Right love’s it. Only a very small fraction of Americans care about what goes on outside the confines of the United States.
What to expect…
What will happen if the U.S. dollar’s reign as the world reserve currency comes to an end? The answer is simple, as it is clear. The demise of the dollar will also bring radical changes to the American lifestyle.
When this economic tsunami hits America, it will make the 2008 recession and its aftermath look like no more than a slight bump in the road. It will bring very undesirable changes to the American lifestyle through:
massive inflation,
high interest rates on mortgages and cars,
substantial increases in the cost of food, clothing and gasoline and
a much harder time financing its debt.
Right now, there is a huge demand for U.S. dollars and for U.S. government debt since countries around the world have to keep huge reserves of U.S. currency lying around for the sake of international trade but what if… the appetite for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt dried up dramatically? That is something to think about.
What happens when fewer and fewer nations use the USD?
As more of these countries realize how irrelevant we have become, I would imagine Americans are about to find out the hard way about the huge trading advantage we have had all along--the world's reserve currency. When they dump the dollar as the main trading tool…
-Rocky Raccoon
17AUG20
A dollar collapse is when the value of the U.S. dollar plummets.
In that scenario, anyone who holds dollar-denominated assets will sell them at any cost. That includes foreign governments that own U.S. Treasurys. It also affects foreign exchange futures traders. Last but not least, it will hit individual investors.
When the crash occurs, these parties will demand assets denominated in anything other than dollars. The collapse of the dollar means that everyone is trying to sell their dollar-denominated assets, and no one wants to buy them.
This will drive the value of the dollar down to near zero. It would make hyperinflation look like a day in the park.
The following is compiled from “Explaining How Hyperinflation Could Come To The US” By Andrew Bieszad on August 14, 2020. Reprinted in it’s entirety with very little in the way of editing except to fit this venue.
There are no Americans alive today who remember as older adults the Great Depression. I speak of working men in their thirties or forties already on jobs here. By comparison, the Great Depression was very short, since from the decadence of the 1920s to the crash of 1929, and then twelve years to the entrance of the US in a serious way into World War II, the time from misery to true recovery was twelve years. In fact, the US recovered so well that massive industries grew, people found work, debt was paid down, families were able to settle down, and the country truly grew. The US victory in World War II that followed took the World War II induced economic boom and amplified it many times over, providing a wave of true prosperity that ushered in a small “golden age” in America which lasted until about 1965 if one considers the true effects, and until 2007 if one considers the expansion of credit as a way to prolong the economic effects of World War II through financialization at the expense of the integrity of the dollar.
It is known that around 1965, the post-World War II prosperity boom came to an end. This is also the same time where over the next decade, from 1965 to 1975, there were several major social changes, which for our purposes we will focus on the massive welfare expansions through Johnson’s “great society” reforms and then the subsequent decoupling of the US dollar from the gold standard with the opening up of “free trade” with China in 1973 under the Nixon administration that lead to the decline and death of most US manufacturing alongside the expansion of credit. Since this was all intentional, one can argue that the very towns which the US built up during and after World War II- the famous “mill towns” throughout semi-rural areas that today now are too often defined by drugs, crime, degeneracy, broken families, poverty, and misery compiled upon hopelessness -were manufactured from prosperity to decline per economic policy, knowing this would happen but not caring for the consequences because the economic ability to manipulate trade balances was valued more than the people who would be consuming the traded goods.
As one who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s before the economic crisis, I saw a lot of this decadence and credit spending as a child, but would not have called it such. Rather, I and many others would have called it “life as normal”, for this is what Millennials and some late Gen-Xers, as well as Zoomers, the arguable children of mostly Boomers and early Gen-Xers, knew to be normal. Life had a certain “pattern” to it, and it was one to follow this pattern if one wanted success. Indeed, there is an argument that can be made that such a pattern was not a bad thing for a time because it was based on a Boomer model of prosperity created by the Silent Generation as a result of World War II prosperity- essentially, one could call it exploiting the benefits of the spoils of war for public use.
But this was not normal, and given the generational gap, few could not have been expected to know otherwise. This is a reason why there is so much anger directed towards Boomers, for giving their children material goods and a pattern of life but not explaining how or why things work, and not giving them a way to fend for themselves if the pattern should fail (because they believed that it would not fail) and that life would continue to go on as normal. In a sense, life always does- even in a war torn zone such as Iraq. The problem is that life is very difficult when one does not know what to do if all one knows is one paradigm to be true.
This was violently exposed in 2007 and into 2008 when after six decades and two years since World War II, and four decades and two years since the Great Society Reforms, and thirty-four years after the dropping of the gold standards and the liberalization of free trade with China that the US dollar was exposed as being insolvent. The reasons for this are simple to understand- a combination of lots of bad debt, questionable financial practices that involved taking debt in the form of mortgages regardless of the viability of the owner to pay back his mortgage, “cutting up pieces” of the mortgage, mixing those pieces in with other mortgages “cut up” in the same way, and selling “bundles” as debt made up of untraceable ownership and questionable stability presented just as good as a Treasury bond but with no way to “re-piece” the trail of ownership if one “link” in the “chain” should default, created a crisis of liquidity and ownership. Nobody could get loans because nobody knew what monies went to who for what, and when this is combined with public debt loads on account of simple overspending and bad financial practices, the result is always the same- default and chaos.
At this point, the US had two theoretical options- she could either allow the economy to slow down naturally and in a Japanese-like scenario, see fluctuating prices along with falling wages and decreased purchasing power that could last decades, or she could service the debts as the way that governments throughout history have traditionally done in such a case, which is to create the money that was needed in circulation to keep people spending, but at a cost of lowering, even if only slightly, the value of the currency itself.
This is the reason why ever since the economy was declared “recovered” in 2009, the US has been theoretically in the middle of deflation. Since it is really a global depression, for the last decade one has seen the manipulation of aggregate demand levels and aggregate asset prices as never before arguably in history. In other words, since 2008, the U.S. and world economies have been slowly circling around the proverbial drain waiting to be flushed into the sewer, a process that if played out, would result in a Japan-like scenario that could last for decades.
However, the U.S. government has been continuing to run massive deficits as it seeks to prop up demand levels by way of “stimulus” spending, but this has simply not been enough to offset the fall in consumer spending. Since 2007, the government has become the “supporter” of all things business, and until recently, propping up all assets, including U.S. Treasuries, by way of “quantitative easing”, which is another way of saying “money printing”.
The Federal Reserve Bank- a private corporation not owned by the government but who controls the money the government issues -knows that a deflationary “death-spiral” as defined by a lack of liquidity (no available cash) will cause less spending, which leads to diminished demand, which leads to more unemployment, which leads to lower consumption, to still lower spending, until the economic machine goes to a halt.
In response, the Federal Reserve Bank bought up assets of all kinds in order to inject liquidity into the system and support prices so as to prevent this deflationary deep-freeze. This has been policy since 2010, and is a “one-size-fits-all” approach”. The danger of this is it sort of like a plumber whose only tool is a wrench- and every problem looks like a bolt or a nut to be turned.
Call it what you want- money printing, quantitative easing, price stabilization -it is all the same result, which is turning on the printing presses and printing money as fast as the machines can put it out (theoretically speaking- most of this is done electronically, so it’s more accurate to say “button pressing”).
But is this true deflation, where bond yields (interest return) is low, and unemployment continues to grow?
I wish it was. Rather, we need to talk about something I have been warning about for a long time, which is the Weimarian ghost of that horrible word, hyperinflation.
Why? Because the next step down in this world-historical Global Depression which we are experiencing will likely be hyperinflation.
Most people dismiss the idea of hyperinflation occurring in the United States as something only for the mentally ill, conspiracy fantasists, gold bugs, and survivalists. There is a point to this, for there are a lot of foolish ideas who have their own acolytes..
But what I speak of here is not fantasy. This is not about reading “conspiracies”, or projecting a desire onto a situation.
Apart from what happened with the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s, Western economies have no experience modern with hyperinflation. There were plenty of hyperinflationary events in the 19th century and before, but through careful economic management, the “advanced” economies have learned their lessons and so well that it’s been forgotten.
But there are some countries where one can draw experience from. Most talk about Zimbabwe- as so also have I done -but I would like to use a different example, since the case of Zimbabwe is a classic African example of war leading to mismanagement and corruption. I want to turn to Chile, as while in the Hispanic world, it is highly “europeanized” and yet went through a period of hyperinflation during the Allende government in the early 1970s (1970-1973).
In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president by roughly one-third of the nation. A hard-core Socialist who headed a coalition called Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), under his government socialists, Communists, and assorted left-leaning parties took over the administration of the country and began to radically transform Chile on a road to left-wing socialism.
What happened was similar to the Russian and Ukrainian experience under life in the post-revolution days. There were land exproprations, nationalization of companies and mines, and the subsequent failure of them as a combination of corruption and inexperience rendered them unable to be used and just brought to run in the same path that the ZANU followed in Zimbabwe with the confiscation of farms that lead to mass starvation in once the arguably most bountiful food producing nation in Africa.
One of the key policies Allende carried out was wage and price controls. He froze prices of basic goods and services and augmented wages- basically, forcing businesses to pay workers more while refusing to allow them the freedom (in a non-greed oriented sense) to increase prices based on market demand. The most common parallel one can draw in our times to this is the “fifteen dollar” minimum wage laws in certain cities for McDonald’s restaurant workers. Yes, the wages increase, but as one can remember in the American cases (as there are multiple areas in which this has happened), employee hours were significantly cut, a lot of workers were fired or laid off, robotics was brought in to replace workers, and prices for food had to increase to the anger of the customer in order to accommodate the wage increases.
At first, this measure worked, as workers had more money, and goods and services still had the same old low prices. The people loved this, and so did what Americans did with toilet paper leading up to the COVID-19 crisis- they went on a shopping spree and rapidly emptied stores and warehouses of consumer goods and basic products. Meanwhile, Chile’s version of the “McDonalds” experiment detailed above, by forcing private companies to raise worker wages while maintaining their same price structures, caused bankruptcy. Allende then nationalized said companies for “the people” and put them back to work, but with the government spending money to keep them running for the same economic reasons, thus operating at a net loss.
This is where hyperinflation fits in, because Allende printed the money needed to pay for expenses for these state-run companies to cover for his irresponsible policies.
This is how hyperinflation came to Chile. Workers had plenty of cash in hand but it was no better than having Monopoly money, since one could not buy goods with it.
So what followed? Rationing and “ration cards”, with preference given to the friends of Allende. However, with no real economic fix in sight, people did what happens in all countries, which is they started black markets in staple goods, and only accepting American dollars because due to Allende’s policies, the Chilean escudo was worthless.
By 1973, the crisis was so miserable that the stock market and housing market collapsed as people lost everything they had. Nothing was safe from sale on the black market for all practical purposes as people traded very precious things simply for a little food and drink to stay alive. The crisis resulted in the success of the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Allende in September 1973 and installed the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
So having this context, and knowing how serious hyperinflation can be, let’s take a look at deflation and inflation again, and see how the various movements of the economic world differ.
In a deflationary environment, where commodity prices are more or less stable, wages drop, asset prices fall, and credit markets shrink, for in such an environment, there is really no inflation, for one cannot have overvaluing (inflation) if values are dropping. To say such is a contradiction.
Inflation and hyperinflation are thus not merely the same thing. It is not that the latter is on “steroids” but, like the goat and the sheep, two animals that share a similar look but are very distinct.
Inflation is when assets become overvalued because people want them so much. To use car language, it’s when the economy “overheats”. Think people paying one-hundred dollars for a “Beanie Baby” during the Beanie Baby craze of the late 1990s. A Beanie Baby is worth three to five dollars, not one hundred. But, if people will pay one hundred dollars for it, who is to say a business will not charge that? Greed yes, but such is the nature of man. This is inflation as a textbook definition- when an economy’s consumables (labor and commodities) are so “in-demand” because of (theoretical) economic growth and easy access to money (meaning either you are earning a lot, have a lot saved to draw on, or are borrowing the money on credit) that lets people spend money like a sailor in a bar. It is classic “supply and demand”, the “if they build it they will come” mentality.
This mentality should not be considered a modern thing either. It has been seen in Europe with the “Tulip speculation” of the 17th century, and was a main reason for the “boom-bust” economics of the 19th century that would destroy wealth as fast as it would create it, since the cycle, while it can be a brutal thing, is actually a natural process on the sine-wave of economic growth, for there is a start, a demand that grows, followed by a peak, a small decline, then a major decline, then a recovery to normalcy, back to interest again that the cycle continues on. This is found in all countries and peoples, and what the desire of government through “central planning’ has always been is to keep the “highs high and the lows gone”, meaning to always push for stability or growth so that money is made and either to minimize or completely eliminate any downturn in the economy so that money is not lost or that what money is lost is lost on people who are poor and not in the “economic club” of the wealthy.
But hyperinflation? Not so at all, for this is the loss of faith in the currency. Prices rise in a hyperinflationary environment like in an inflationary environment not because people want more money for their labor or for commodities, but because people are trying to get out of the currency -so they will pay anything for a good which is not the currency because the currency is becoming merely worth the paper it is printed on.
Right now, the U.S. government is indebted tremendously, varying from 108% to 159% depending on how it is measured.
Pick the percentage you wish, it does not really matter because it is all bad. The reason for this is because the Federal Reserve is printing money to do all things, from purchasing Treasuries in order to finance the fiscal shortfall existing, to bail out the public, and to keep major corporations from having to cease production due to deficits. The overall purpose of this is to try to maintain aggregate demand levels and support asset prices for the benefit of those invested into them. It is a process of the continued financialization of the economy that has been happening since the 1970s.
A deflationary cycle would last decades, and it would be very economically difficult, but with decreasing prices and the resulting job losses and business closures that would follow, it would overall result in the same thing, which is a recovery in the economy by way of a return to “normalcy”.
But this is not going to happen. Forget talk of “double-dip” recessions and that nonsense because the US is still in the first economic “dip” since 2007. No matter all the stimulus, no matter all the “liquidity” injections for over 10 years not, the economy is going down and both the Federal government and the Federal Reserve are going to use the same- and only tool -they have used to fix it, which is money printing.
This is the paradox. It’s these very fixes that are pulling us closer to the edge of a fiscal cliff because they have undermined faith in the currency itself and the ability of the US to service her debts. Treasury bonds? They are useless, and yet they are literally the only thing(s) holding the whole economy together because it is debt being used to service debt that is merely more debt.
We are talking about a financial “minefield” here- one mistake, and the thing explodes.
So then, how could hyperinflation happen?
First, there needs to be a reality check. It won’t be forever, so forget about Mad Max type scenarios, for those are fantasies of films and not reality.
Second, realize that life will go on, and America will be pretty much like it is today, with more poor people. In reality, at this point, as I have noted, hyperinflation is probably the only way that the economy will (in a practical sense) reset to better times, as a collapse in the currency, just like with a true bankruptcy, abolishes debt.
Third, the same rules of history apply. The famous saying “Buy when there’s blood on the streets” is the literal truth in this point. The best way to prepare for this is, in my personal opinion (and not giving any sort of financial advice, but just observations on the counsel of history) to lower personal debts, purchase useful commodities, and consider tangible assets that preserve value such as metals and even one may also regard land as doing the same.
Fourth, in hyperinflation, asset prices don’t skyrocket save on paper. They collapse, both nominally and in relation to real commodities. To use an example with housing, a $500,000 house falls to $70,000 or less, or better yet, 50 ounces of silver becomes something that can actually buy you expensive stuff you normally could not purchase in “normal” times such as land or heavy machinery.
Likewise, I’m not saying “when” this will happen, and hopefully there may be intervening circumstances that delay or even partially hinder the potential of paying $500 instead of $5 for a Starbucks latte. What happens after is also anyone’s guess, since while there are patterns, it would function in harmony with political changes, which can mean anything from a decline in currency value repegged against the old currency for a buyback (such as “buying back” into the new currency at a 30% discount such as what happened during the Great Depression), or an outright dictatorship with wage-price controls.
My observation is that no matter what happens, the current situation cannot continue. The Global Depression we are in is being exacerbated by the very measures being used to fix it, and in a story like this one cannot have a good ending.
The way that any of such crises will happen will be with an event. Right now, COVID-19 is being blamed for “destroying” the economy, but in reality just exposed the rot that was already there. The printing of money under COVID-19 with an upcoming second stimulus check is also only going to worsen the current scenario.
So let’s take this into consideration- how could this happen, an using COVID-19 as an example?
One word: homes.
Before the emergence of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), most mortgages were issued by a local savings or loan company. The note of debt usually didn’t go anywhere save down the street. But once mortgage loan securitization happened, things fell apart.
Basically, what happened was personal mortgages were sold off in “slices” in bundles with other mortgages. These were “bundled” into special arrangements designed to hold the loans for tax purposes and sold off as bonds with safety equivalent to those issued by the US treasury, backed by the ability of people to pay their mortgages.
But the big question- what happens if people borrow more than they can, or lie on their statements of assets, or lose a job?
Here is the sinister part. When an MBS was first created, all the mortgages were in good standing because they were all brand new loans. Statistically, some would default and some others would be paid back in full, but no one knew which one or how. Yet by the process of “cutting up” these loans into multiple “bundles”, nobody knew anymore who had ownership of what part as there were so many scattered pieces.
To use the example of the Three Stooges (since this is the level of financial mismanagement we are talking about) consider that a man gets a mortgage. His bank sells his mortgage note to Moe, who sells a piece of it to Larry, who chops another part off and sells it to Curly, and all our notarized signatures are actually, physically on the note, one after the other as holding a share of the profits from the same mortgage note. If for whatever reason, the original holder skips any payment, then the chain of title is said to be broken. Therefore, legally, the mortgage note is no longer valid. That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer knows whom to pay. The result? The bank just forecloses on the man who failed to pay in an effort to get money back for the Three Stooges without giving him ever a change to remedy his situation. The Stooges walk away with at least some money back in their pockets, and the common man suffers a debilitating financial loss.
But this is just the start. Expand this to real estate, and rental properties for landlords. If COVID-19 puts people out of work, how can anyone pay? Likewise, what happens if businesses cannot pay their mortgages or rentals on commercial real estate, who are also indebted to banks? Likewise, what happens when multiple mortgages owned by separate people are bundled together?
Do you see the can of worms that’s opening up? We are talking about a chain reaction like a nuclear bomb.
—> disrupts ability of landlord/company to pay for his mortgage —>
—> forces foreclosure —> big real estate goes back to bank —>
—> bank tries to sell it —-> nobody wants to buy because no money and too big —>
—> real estate falls to disrepair —> now nobody wants it —>
—> prices have to go down —> people lose money, including banks —>
—> people need money for a bailout like the rest of the country —>
—> more bailouts devalues the currency —>
—> the devolution of the currency means more poverty and job losses and back to he beginning.
This is not a recovery. This is a death spiral that we are circling.
It is estimated that 33% of renters or 12 million people, to make their full payment in July, meaning that 12 million could be on the cusp of eviction in a matter of months. In total, about 40 million- or about the size of Poland as a nation -are at risk of losing their homes. In addition, landlords are set to lose billions of dollars this year over the inability of tenants to pay rent.
This year alone, tens of millions of Americans were pushed into instant poverty, many face housing insecurity and homelessness as the labor market recovery reserves. This has led to millions of permanent job losses. Many Americans already had insurmountable debts and no savings, because they simply could not due to rising prices and a dead economy.
But this is nothing. Watch as more big corporations are go bankrupt, more businesses fail, more workers are laid off, and the financial dominoes start to fall at lightning speed.
Over the last 4 months, more than 50 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits, mostly with the specter of a permanent job loss looming. As we reported, one survey from USA Today discovered that 47 percent of all unemployed workers now believe that their “job loss is likely to be permanent”.
People are really suffering and are going to suffer more in the future, and this is why I have been warning this Christmas there will not be a Christmas “sleigh ride”- such as going through the snow on a horse-drawn sleigh that is popular in American lore -but rather a “slay ride”.
A “slay ride”, implying violence and a sort of butchery found in a horror film, except this time the film is real life.
And the slaughter will be to people’s personal finances and the retail market since being forced to spend money on essentials such as food, water, and utilities, and maybe not even having enough for that.
The retail sector is going to be absolutely decimated since 25% to 40%, as I have noted before is made in the time from Thanksgiving to Christmas. With most likely poor sales for the future, there will inevitably be more layoffs, more job destruction, and more poverty.
If one wants to see what the retail sector is going to look like, one only needs to go to a local mall.
Many of them are dead or dying as evidenced by the ongoing store closures, the proliferation of people “hanging out” but not shopping (as in looking for a warm place to stay, not actually going there for leisure purposes) has continued to grow, and the fact that many of the stores are disorganized, dirty, or just falling apart. The mall, being a creation of the consumerist post-World War II economy is, like the post-World War II world, falling apart at the seams.
So what is the answer from Congress?
Two words, as noted before: money printing.
Consider that in the last few months, the US printed more money than all that was printed in the first two centuries of the US’s existence.
“The United States printed more money in June than in the first two centuries after its founding,” Morehead wrote. “Last month the U.S. budget deficit — $864 billion — was larger than the total debt incurred from 1776 through the end of 1979.” (source)
Buy why continue to print, if it will destroy the economy? As noted above, to question money-printing as the one-size-fits-all solution to every economic problem is to question the power structure of the status quo and the only tool used to manage said problem. Basically, it is telling the plumber with the wrench he needs a different tool, but since he has no other tools, he doubles-down and insists on using the wrench.
But what happens when people cannot pay their bills and still do not have a job? They already are going to get two checks- essentially 2007-type bailouts.
Who is to stop a third?
A fourth?
A fifth?
Money being thrown out of helicopters?
There is nothing. Nothing at all. The people figured out they can print themselves the treasury.
Historically speaking, there is a point in any human society that people can get the idea into their heads that they can “print their way to prosperity”, sometimes also called “voting themselves the treasury” while providing less than what is required to sustain those benefits.
This means in every case death for a society because it destroys the value of the means of exchange in one case, and in a more insidious example, in the name of “fairness” it can create polarizing factions that demand special fiscal handouts, to which other groups form and demand “justice” in the form of equal handouts, until eventually the money runs out, people become angry, and start fighting.
In both cases, the trust needed to sustain a society is destroyed, and chaos results that has to be restored by a new currency and many times, since economics is the predecessor to political change, a new government has to be instituted to restore the loss of order.
For people wondering, the US has already been on this road for decades, beginning with the ponzi scheme of Social Security, for while it was well-intentioned and may have worked in select cases, the philosophy, composition, and size of the US make it very difficult for such a system to successfully function in the US without causing a complete breakdown at some point.
The “Great Society” programs had a similar effect, for while it is true that all societies give welfare, the welfare given was not managed through churches or based upon available resources, but was funded through financialization at which the root was money printing.
It is one thing to help people with money that one has, but an entirely different matter to do the same thing but on credit that one cannot pay back without destroying one’s own finances. This is not even a matter of taxation either, since the taxes collected do not even pay into the actual programs, but rather are interest payments to the Federal Reserve Bank (a private company) on the money that they loan to the US government at her request to run said programs.
Thus the argument of “my money is going to welfare junkies” (as so many will say) is absolutely not true- the problem is not “those people on welfare”, but rather the criminally irresponsible financial policies and practices that “we the people” voted for and have continued to accept because it provides to the public the surface benefit of “extra wealth” by letting the same individuals buy fancy cars, nice homes, take big vacations, and dine luxuriously through borrowed money to be paid at a later time but which mathematically can never be paid off lest the value of the money itself collapse. Welfare is not ultimately paid for by taxes and arguably has not been since 1973, as it has all been paid for by money printing.
But to stay on the topic of “welfare junkies”, the biggest of such are not poor people in apartments in the inner cities or trailers in the woods, but are the very same corporations and their CEOs that are called “captains of industry” and “business leaders” that Americans are told to hail as intelligent and model citizens. These people are largely not leaders or admirable, but criminals in suits and with lots of servants to help them perform their actions (whether those working for them realize the totality of what is happening or not).
The reason for this is because it is they who lobby for either lower taxes for themselves or for increased tax schemes so that they can force average to small business owners out of business through excessive taxes while at the same time through as series of deceptive accounting tricks (like the “Double Irish” or the “Dutch Sandwich”) pay little to no taxes at all.
Thus having the effect of paying less while it appears to the public that these are “responsible corporate citizens” who are encouraging “their fellow businessmen” to “pay their fair share” since they are “good patriotic American citizens”, when the reality is they are just con men peddling dishonesty and criminality for their own gain at the loss of everyone.
Back in 2007, when millions of people had their finances destroyed by the crash, did the public receive a financial bailout? Absolutely not. Instead, it was major corporations who received it in the form of the TARP plan.
Now it should be made very clear that the bailouts were not good, and they should never have happened. However, noting this, if major companies were bailed out at the ostensible taxpayer expense and thus putting the country on a long-term road to either a very painful deflationary depression that would likely persist for decades or the more likely chance of hyperinflation, why should the general public, who was deceived by these same companies and politicians for years, not receive a bailout too?
The only way to fix the financial problems, regardless of now or 2007, was to fix the debt issue, and the only way to do this would be either to pay it back- which is mathematically impossible because of how the Fed system works -or to declare a jubilee, disown the debt, shut down the Federal Reserve Bank, arrest the officers of the bank, and seize control over money creation, which would plunge the US into about a decade of financial disorder but would be long-term healthy for the country as it would reset the currency and allow asset prices to stabilize and permit for real value to be created so that all men and companies, small or big, could benefit for true long term prosperity.
But that is not what has been allowed to happen and is likely not going to be allowed to happen, and especially at the current time. The only way to fix the current problems of the system is either a debt jubilee or to allow it to be run as it is until it naturally and inevitably will collapse. In both cases, such will be at a point when the debt can be disposed of and the economic system rebuilt.
This has been the greatest benefit of COVID-19 and the ensuing first and soon to be second stimulus check that will follow from Congress. Some people complain as to why the government is “giving away taxpayer money”, when not only is the reality that the government is just printing money and handing it out regardless of what the taxpayers give, but if the government will give nearly limitless amounts of welfare to major corporations for decades yet continue to force the common taxpayer to pay ever more money to the government, what reason is there that the taxpayer, who is most likely (based on statistical analyses about debt per person) overloaded with debt, should not be given a financial bailout too? Legally speaking companies are people in the US (“non-human persons”), so if a non-human person can get a bailout, is it not more important that “human persons” receive them, since societies are made of people? There is no real argument, if one supports the bailout of corporations, not to bail out the general public, because the philosophy is the same, and if the government will insist upon bailouts for companies, it is hypocrisy to deny the common man what a company would receive.
The end of the world is coming for the US economy as we understand it through a post-World War II paradigm, and that is something which all must accept but is not necessarily a bad thing, as all things come to an end.
The real trick, however, is to prepare for after the end of the “apocalypse” because life must continue on- it will go on in the middle of chaos (as it does in any war zone) as well -and how one prepares will determine one’s future after the crisis is over, and likely as in the case with World War II for many decades to come, so the impact will last beyond one’s life and extend to family and future generations.
The discussion of how to handle this for specifics is another topic for a different time. But returning to the issue of inflation versus hyperinflation, the concern now is not to fight policies being instituted or to make bold public statements- since these rarely do any good unless there is already an organic or manufactured groundswell of support guiding the end goal that such a public declaration would support to the exact same end -but to focus on the current fiscal path that has been chosen and is going to be chosen.
Hyperinflation is not the choice of most people, but rather it is the choice being forced on the average citizen that he cannot control happening but rather how he deals with in based on the current circumstances.
For example, say that you are placed in front of a massive floodgate. The gate is going to be opened upon you, and you cannot hide from it.
You are going to get hit by the water and it is going to knock you around, and there is no way to avoid this.
However, you have twenty-four hours to prepare.What would you do?
Would you just “show up” to the gates and do nothing? Or instead, would you take some precautions? For example, you could buy a lifejacket. But would you stop there? Would you possibly consider with that lifejacket a helmet to prevent head trauma, and maybe a wetsuit too? If you had the money, would you consider investing in a pair of goggles and even maybe some flippers so you could swim?
If you had a lot of money and wanted to try to make the best, would you consider purchasing a set of scuba gear so that you could swim with the currents and even explore them?
The choice is for you to make, but at the very least, a good lifejacket is in order because if you have that, you may lose consciousness, you may be cold, you may have a lot of pain to endure, but it is very, very unlikely you will drown. This is something that all people can do for themselves that is very effective.
Take this same example and apply it to the situation of the financial markets with inflation and hyperinflation. Most people are not rich and cannot afford a lot of the expensive measures that those with greater financial means could employ. However, they can take basic measures to protect themselves.
Hyperinflation is not a fun thing to think about.
However, it is real, it is historical, it can happen to anyone, and knowing the principles by which it can come to pass helps one to avoid its effects. Knowing the signs of the times, it would be wise to pay attention, as the signs are becoming too clear.
So what is the USA actually doing to mitigate this situation?
At the moment, the global financial system is centered on the United States but that will not always be the case.
As far as international monetary policy goes the United States under Trump has been radical.
The Trump administration has pursued a unilateralist and bilateralist vision for foreign exchange policy. This policy is vastly different from the multilateralist approach of its predecessors over the prior 25 years.
Treasury secretaries in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations avoided commenting on currency markets, and when forced to do so simply backed a “strong dollar.” This gave administrations the moral high ground to criticize others, especially Japan, when they sought to weaken their currencies. That high ground is gone.
The United States led the G7 and G20 in 2013 in developing new currency commitments—orienting macroeconomic policies toward achieving domestic objectives using domestic instruments; not targeting exchange rates for competitive purposes; and refraining from competitive devaluation.
Now, the president and some advisers tweet to promote dollar weakness, alleging that foreign monetary policy accommodation, for example by the European Central Bank (ECB), is tantamount to currency manipulation.
Monetary policy transmission works through a number of channels—lending, asset prices, yield compression, and confidence, for example.
Exchange rates are also a key monetary policy transmission channel.
But the administration disregards that euro-area growth is anemic and inflation persistently well below target, giving the ECB strong internal reasons to pursue accommodation.
U.S. growth performance has been superior to that in Europe and Japan, and thus U.S. rates are higher. The administration’s trade wars and tariff threats reinforce a risk-off market environment, further supporting dollar appreciation. Massive U.S. fiscal deficits also push the U.S. current account deficit higher, while boosting the need for capital inflow. If the president wishes to see a weakening in the dollar, the best way to achieve that is not to tamper with U.S. out-performance but to work with others to boost their performance, while ending trade wars.
In August, as the renminbi (RMB) fell below 7.0 per dollar after an intensification of U.S.-China trade tensions, the president ordered Treasury to designate China for “currency manipulation.” The designation was unwarranted. The RMB is managed, not “manipulated.” China could prevent the RMB from falling by drawing down reserves. But the currency fell in large part because market participants viewed depreciation as offsetting the competitiveness hit from higher tariffs.
The designation contradicted the Treasury’s own criteria for assessing whether “manipulation” and harmful currency practices were being pursued. China’s current account surplus in 2018 was around 0.5 percent of GDP, a relatively small surplus; on a net basis, China sold a small amount of dollars in market intervention. To be sure, China has a large bilateral surplus with the United States, but economists dismiss the relevance of bilateral balances.
A country “manipulating” its currency to gain an unfair competitive advantage in international trade would be expected to purchase dollars to hold its currency down and run large current account surpluses as a share of GDP. China does not fit that bill.
More generally, Treasury is undermining the integrity of its Foreign Exchange Report. It recently cut its current account “monitoring” threshold from 3 to 2 percent of GDP in order to pick up more countries, but this level is too low given economic structures. At one point, it placed India on its monitoring list, even though India ran a current account deficit. Italy and Ireland, too, were placed on the list. Prior to the manipulation designation, China was on the monitoring list, even though it only tripped one (the bilateral balance) trigger, whereas placement on the list requires triggering two criteria. On the plus side, Treasury has acted to expand the report’s country coverage, encompassing a number of smaller Southeast Asian surplus nations.
According to media reports, the administration has debated intervening in currency markets to push the dollar down. For example, the United States could buy euros or RMB, pushing up their values and thus the dollar down.
In the rare instances when the United States intervened in the past two decades, it did so on a concerted basis with G7 partners. There is little reason to believe any current U.S. operation would be concerted. A solo U.S. euro operation would not likely succeed—unless the Fed stood ready to print unlimited dollars to intervene, U.S. resources are highly constrained; the euro/dollar market is vast; the ECB could buy as many dollars as the United States could sell.
Such considerations would pertain to intervention in the Chinese currency. The Chinese authorities can exert a strong influence over banks operating in the on and offshore markets. Even if such an operation occurred, the United States would confront difficult operational issues about investing the currency proceeds.
The administration put forward a Commerce Department rule proposal to treat currency undervaluation as a countervailable subsidy, an idea the Bush administration rejected.
The proposal is problematic. Currency values are determined by balance of payments flows, not just trade accounts, and in turn by monetary and fiscal policies. There is no precise way to assess currency undervaluation. Even if one could, that would not address whether undervaluation was attributable to that country’s policies, or perhaps the flip side of policies in the overvalued currency country. The undervaluation of a country’s multilateral exchange rate also does not tell one the amount of bilateral undervaluation versus the dollar. For example, the subsidy would differ if the optimal bilateral balance deficit between the United States and China were $400 billion or zero.
The administration is aggressively pursuing trade provisions in currency deals, and this trend started under the Obama administration. The Trump administration amped up, pushing welcome side understandings on intervention alongside the revised United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) deal. The United states-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) provisions, though, allow certain exchange rate transparency and reporting issues, unrelated to monetary policy, to be included in dispute resolution. While the practical import of the USMCA currency provisions is minor, their inclusion in dispute resolution sets a precedent that could errantly allow trade authorities to stray into macroeconomic policy settings.
Some in the administration have also discussed taxing foreign inflows, consistent with a draft Senate bill of Senators Hawley and Baldwin. Such policies would stand in strong opposition to the longstanding openness of U.S. capital markets.
The administration’s robust unilateral use of financial sanctions could also corrode the dollar’s future global use. Past administrations sought to build multilateral coalitions for deploying financial sanctions. In doing so, officials balanced considerations on using sanctions with the implications for the dollar’s financial and reserve currency roles.
The Trump administration has used financial sanctions far more aggressively and unilaterally. While there is no realistic alternative to the dollar for the foreseeable future, our traditional allies have been put off by the administration’s unilateralism, as best reflected in Europe’s effort to create the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges or INSTEX, a plan to circumvent the dollar’s use to allow Europe to trade with Iran.
The Trump administration’s views on the dollar, foreign exchange policy, and external developments are a major departure from the practices followed by the United States over the past 25 years.
These policies and practices are alienating allies and eroding the multilateral fabric underpinning the international monetary system.
And the largest, and most powerful nation that is able to influence the USD and the international monetary system is China. And President Trump has declared “war” on China. labeling it an “enemy”, conducting a “hybrid war” with it, and engaging it in every way (s0 far) short of a nuclear exchange (aside from the BRI explosion)…
How China Could Crash the US Dollar on a Whim
Over the last 30 years, China’s economy has grown at an average annualized rate of nearly 10%. While this statistic alone is jaw-dropping, what is more impressive is the extent to which the nominally Communist country’s economy has become intertwined in the global economy.
China now exerts enormous influence over the economies of virtually every country in the world, and a slight change in its domestic economic policy has the potential to send shock-waves rippling throughout the world.
Nowhere is this more apparent-and frightening-then in China’s economic relationship with the United States, which is very much at the mercy of China when it comes to prices, wages, interest rates, most importantly, the value of the Dollar.
The precariousness of this relationship is already the subject of significant publicity, redolent of the Japanaphobia of the 1980’s that saw American economists scare-mongering about Japanese control of the US economy. [Of course this later turned out to be unfounded, but that is beyond the scope of our discussion.]
With regard to China, most of the analysis is focused on its growing foreign exchange reserves, the majority of which are held in Dollar-denominated assets. Here, from US house prices to global commodity prices, from interest rates to inflation rates, we will observe how China could cripple the US economy, both willfully and unintentionally, if so desired.
Forex Reserve Diversification
Let’s begin with an examination of China’s forex reserves, which is probably China’s biggest bargaining chip in its economic relationship with the US. Up until a decade ago, China’s currency, the RMB or Yuan, was pegged to the Dollar.
As with any peg, there often develops a discrepancy between the fixed value of the currency and the value that the market would assign if the currency were permitted to float. As China’s economy surged ahead, especially over the last five to ten years, tremendous pressure began to build under the RMB. In order to maintain the peg and hold down the value of the RMB, China began accumulating foreign exchange reserves by withdrawing foreign currency from circulation. Today, China’s foreign exchange reserves are massive, at $1.4 trillion as of September 2007.
In the eyes of American policy-makers, this presents a problem because the majority of these reserves are held in Dollar-denominated assets, namely in the form of US Treasury securities. The US government theoretically could not be happier that foreign Central Banks are willing to finance its perennial budget deficits. However, this borrowing has reached a point where foreigners now control over 40% of the US national debt. Moreover, long-term US interest rates are market-driven, based on the buying and selling of US government bonds. In other words, the US has gradually ceded control of its long-term interest rates to foreign Central Banks, namely China and Japan.
As the Dollar has depreciated, many Central Banks have begun “diversifying” their forex reserves, by switching from Dollar assets to assets denominated in other currencies.
This is problematic for the Dollar for two reasons.
First, switching from US assets to European assets, for example, directly causes the Dollar to depreciate.
Second, the bulk sale of US treasury securities (whether or not they are replaced with other US-assets) causes US bond prices to decline and hence, yields to increase.
Thus, if China suddenly decided to diversify its reserves, for economic and/or political reasons, it could potentially crash the Dollar and send US long-term interest rates skyward.
Since mortgage rates are tied directly to government bond yields, a rise in interest rates would probably also affect US real estate prices. Higher interest rates would make borrowing for a home more difficult, which would lower the demand for houses and thus, the value of American real estate.
In fact, China created the China Investment Co. Ltd., capitalized with almost $300 Billion, charged with investing its vast forex reserves in higher-yielding assets. However, the company’s inaugural investment was a stock purchase in the Blackstone group, an American private equity firm.
Thus, while it seems likely that China will gradually discard some of its stock of US Treasury Securities, the affect on the value of the Dollar will be minimal. Besides, while China would certainly punish US businesses and consumers by unloading US Treasuries on the market, it would punish itself even more, since the value of the government bonds that it didn’t sell would decline.
The second aspect of the China-US economic relationship which China could wield to its advantage is the RMB, itself. American public officials enjoy criticizing China for failing to allow its currency to appreciate more quickly. But it’s really all lies and distortions.
What policymakers don’t realize is that a rapid appreciation in the RMB would actually harm the US economy.
Coupled with its growing role as the world’s factory, China’s cheap currency has made Americans wealthier, by increasing their purchasing power. As production of labor-intensive goods was outsourced to China over the last decade, prices for finished products began to fall both in real terms and in nominal terms. While the effect on US employment trends is debatable, its effect on prices has been unambiguous. Thus, even while the American economy boomed, inflation remained relatively modest by historical standards. This allowed the Federal Reserve Board to hold interest rates down and foment economic growth.
As the RMB appreciates, Chinese producers will become ever-more forced to pass along some of the price increase to consumers. Now, if China was to suddenly revalue its currency by the 25%-30% that western policy-makers are demanding, prices on a whole host of Chinese products would jump up overnight.
This would adversely affect American purchasing power and limit consumption to such an extent that the US would be in danger of slipping into recession.
While the trade deficit that is the bane of American politicians’ existence might decrease in the long-term, it would skyrocket in the short-term. Besides, as many analysts have been quick to point out, there is not much overlap between Chinese and American production.
Thus, a more expensive Yuan would send production to other parts of Asia, rather than back to America. As is what is currently going on with some of the cheaper and simpler products.
Direct Competition with US Exporters
A more potent (and plausible) weapon would be to compete more directly with US exporters, by expanding into high-technology products. America currently leads in a handful of high-technology industries.
Business
Financial
IT services
Aircraft and spacecraft,
Semiconductors,
Specialized computers,
Pharmaceuticals,
Measuring and control instruments.
China has specialized in manufacturing labor-intensive products, which have long since been manufactured outside of the United States. As previously stated, a revaluation of the Chinese Yuan would surely not return production to the US. However, if China were to expand into capital-intensive and/or high-technology products, it could easily steal market-share and jobs from the US.
Key points
Many observers doubt that China can assume global technological leadership, but there are very good reasons to believe it will.
Four factors comprise ‘technology leadership’:
[1] Research and development (R&D) intensity,
[2] R&D personnel,
[3] number of scientific publications,
[4] The number of patent applications.
Three factors contribute to China’s growing technology capacity and eventual global technology leadership:
[1] China offers technology innovators a massive domestic market.
[2] China’s government has the authority to shape industrial policy and provide infrastructure.
[3] Globalization has benefited and will continue to benefit China through technology transfer and spillovers.
Limiting the Importation of US Products
Of course, there is also the imports side of the trade equation.
China is one of the United States’ largest export markets. Which isn’t saying much, America just doesn’t manufacture or create much inside of America any more. Never the less, limiting the importation of US goods and services would certainly be felt in the US. Though, truthfully, aside from aircraft and food products like wheat, it doesn’t amount to much.
Some anti-competitive options include tariffs, import taxes, quotas, or a simple ban on the importation of certain types of products.
Raw Material Pricing
In addition, there is the impact that China’s economic growth has exerted on global raw material prices. It has been said that 25% of the world’s construction cranes are currently located in China, to support the country’s building boom. These massive development and infrastructure projects require proportionally massive quantities of raw materials, namely cement and steel.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch strategists, in a note, point out that the U.S. Department of Defense has termed China’s domination of the rare earth market as potentially dangerous, given the offshoring of manufacturing and vulnerabilities in America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base.
China produced about 78% of rare earths in 2018, and owns about 40% of global resources. Bank of America strategists noted the dominance of China is due to the fact that its government classified them as a strategic resource and has emphasized exploration and extraction of the raw materials for about 100 years.
The analysts said China made the materials available at a low cost in the 1990s, hurting competitors and limiting expansion of rival producers. There are 17 rare earth elements, which are not actually rare but refining them from ore is costly and results in pollution.
— With reporting by CNBC’s Eunice Yoon and Fred Imbert.
Competition for Energy
China was responsible for three quarters of the world’s energy consumption growth, followed by India and Indonesia. The U.S. and Germany posted the largest declines.
-Fossil Fuels Still Supply 84 Percent Of World Energy
China is now the world’s largest consumer of energy, the largest producer and consumer of coal, and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Over the last half century, China’s large manufacturing-based economy has primarily been fueled by coal. From 1990 to 2018, China increased its coal consumption from 0.99 billion tons to 4.64 billion tons.
The nation that consumes the most fuel and raw materials can also control the pricing.
This will eventually lead towards hyperinflation of some magnitude.
How bad or severe the influence will be on America, the American economy, and on Americans will depend upon the international relationships that America maintains. Most significantly the relationships that it has with the largest and most influential nations. namely; China.
But there is a problem.
President trump despises China. He has set China up as the big old “boogie man”, the evil villain from which all the woes of American can be blamed upon. You have to be living under a rock not to realize this.
Now, of course, China could respond in kind. And in doing so, the entire American “house of cards” would come tumbling down.
But it hasn’t.
Not yet, at least.
In short, China has several economic “weapons” at its disposal for countering the US, ranging from the manipulation of its currency to the diversification of its burgeoning stock of forex reserves. It also has several less blunt options to choose from, such as enabling Chinese companies to compete more directly and effectively with US companies, and opposing the US in securing a domestic energy supply.
On all of these fronts, the US is essentially “playing with fire”, since it has become so dependent on China as the world’s factory.
Ultimately, it seems unlikely that China will deliberately butt heads with the US unless it is first provoked, but America should nonetheless be respectful to China, since its economy hangs in the balance.
And it is because of this that someone should slap Trump and his neocon advisors at the side of their heads and ask them WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING? Because, like it or not, China is the nation that is holding “all the cards”. Not the United States. And the only reason why Americans are not paying $67 for a gallon of gasoline is because China has decided that the likelihood of Trump remaining in office for eight years is unlikely. And that any replacement would be in the best interests of China at this time.
But that is not how the USA sees things.
The ONLY way that the USA can get out of this future cluster-fuck is to engage in a war with China, and then blame all the subsequent collapsing on China. But, as the events of 2020 has shown, the planned results will not unfold as is desired and expected. Thus we have three very likely scenarios;
[1] Full-on World War III. Whether with China or with Asia. As there is no fucking way that the oligarchy is going to accept an internal revolt of the American peasantry and their eventual torture and beheadings. This is ultimately the most undesirable outcome. The USA will strike first, without Congressional approval. Then after the fact, the Senate will “rubber stamp” the approvals.
[2] A gradual collapse of the United States unfolding with greater and greater alarm. Attempts to distract attention of the American peasantry away from the turmoil has been met successfully. Thus, the oligarchy has decided that an uprising of the surfs is the lesser of two evils. This is the outcome of the more retrospective of the oligarchy who have support networks outside of the area of hostilities. This is, after all, something that they can continue to manage, as complex and ugly as it appears.
[3] An increasing civil war scenario as in scenario #2 (above), only with an attempt to distract the peasantry with an external villain (scenario #1 above). That would mean a few years of gradually increasing Civil War style events. Maybe two to three years worth, followed by a move of desperation to “rally America together to fight some evil”. With the rally a complete failure, and a full on World War III being the result. This is the most probable outcome.
What’s your opinion? One, two or scenario three?
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This is such an important law. This is a law, that if people observed, would mitigate and reduce all the conflicts in the world. This is law 20 from the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It simply states that you should not commit to anyone. And since I am posting this in September 2020, I wish that that Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison would heed it. It is best if Australia remains neutral in the global affairs rather than cozening up to the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. Because when you chain yourself to another, you either rise with them or collapse with them through entanglement.
LAW 20
DO NOT COMMIT TO ANYONE
JUDGMENT
It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others—playing people against one another, making them pursue you.
PART I: DO NOT COMMIT TO ANYONE, BUT BE COURTED BY ALL
If you allow people to feel they possess you to any degree, you lose all power over them. By not committing your affections, they will only try harder to win you over. Stay aloof and you gain the power that comes from their attention and frustrated desire. Play the Virgin Queen: Give them hope but never satisfaction.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
When Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, in 1558, there was much to-do about her finding a husband. The issue was debated in Parliament, and was a main topic of conversation among Englishmen of all classes; they often disagreed as to whom she should marry, but everyone thought she should marry as soon as possible, for a queen must have a king, and must bear heirs for the kingdom. The debates raged on for years. Meanwhile the most handsome and eligible bachelors in the realm—Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh—vied for Elizabeth’s hand. She did not discourage them, but she seemed to be in no hurry, and her hints as to which man might be her favorite often contradicted each other. In 1566, Parliament sent a delegation to Elizabeth urging her to marry before she was too old to bear children. She did not argue, nor did she discourage the delegation, but she remained a virgin nonetheless.
The delicate game that Elizabeth played with her suitors slowly made her the subject of innumerable sexual fantasies and the object of cultish worship. The court physician, Simon Forman, used his diary to describe his dreams of deflowering her. Painters represented her as Diana and other goddesses. The poet Edmund Spenser and others wrote eulogies to the Virgin Queen. She was referred to as “the world’s Empresse,” “that virtuous Virgo” who rules the world and sets the stars in motion. In conversation with her, her many male suitors would employ bold sexual innuendo, a dare that Elizabeth did not discourage. She did all she could to stir their interest and simultaneously keep them at bay.
Throughout Europe, kings and princes knew that a marriage with Elizabeth would seal an alliance between England and any nation. The king of Spain wooed her, as did the prince of Sweden and the archduke of Austria. She politely refused them all.
The great diplomatic issue of Elizabeth’s day was posed by the revolt of the Flemish and Dutch Lowlands, which were then possessions of Spain. Should England break its alliance with Spain and choose France as its main ally on the Continent, thereby encouraging Flemish and Dutch independence ? By 1570 it had come to seem that an alliance with France would be England’s wisest course. France had two eligible men of noble blood, the dukes of Anjou and Alençon, brothers of the French king. Would either of them marry Elizabeth? Both had advantages, and Elizabeth kept the hopes of both alive. The issue simmered for years. The duke of Anjou made several visits to England, kissed Elizabeth in public, even called her by pet names; she appeared to requite his affections. Meanwhile, as she flirted with the two brothers, a treaty was signed that sealed peace between France and England. By 1582 Elizabeth felt she could break off the courtship. In the case of the duke of Anjou in particular, she did so with great relief: For the sake of diplomacy she had allowed herself to be courted by a man whose presence she could not stand and whom she found physically repulsive. Once peace between France and England was secure, she dropped the unctuous duke as politely as she could.
By this time Elizabeth was too old to bear children. She was accordingly able to live the rest of her life as she desired, and she died the Virgin Queen.
She left no direct heir, but ruled through a period of incomparable peace and cultural fertility.
Interpretation
Elizabeth had good reason not to marry: She had witnessed the mistakes of Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin. Resisting the idea of being ruled by a woman, the Scots expected Mary to marry and marry wisely. To wed a foreigner would be unpopular; to favor any particular noble house would open up terrible rivalries. In the end Mary chose Lord Darnley, a Catholic. In doing so she incurred the wrath of Scotland’s Protestants, and endless turmoil ensued.
Elizabeth knew that marriage can often lead to a female ruler’s undoing: By marrying and committing to an alliance with one party or nation, the queen becomes embroiled in conflicts that are not of her choosing, conflicts which may eventually overwhelm her or lead her into a futile war. Also, the husband becomes the de facto ruler, and often tries to do away with his wife the queen, as Darnley tried to get rid of Mary. Elizabeth learned the lesson well. She had two goals as a ruler: to avoid marriage and to avoid war. She managed to combine these goals by dangling the possibility of marriage in order to forge alliances. The moment she committed to any single suitor would have been the moment she lost her power. She had to emanate mystery and desirability, never discouraging anyone’s hopes but never yielding.
Through this lifelong game of flirting and withdrawing, Elizabeth dominated the country and every man who sought to conquer her. As the center of attention, she was in control. Keeping her independence above all, Elizabeth protected her power and made herself an object of worship.
I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.
-Queen Elizabeth I, 1533-1603
KEYS TO POWER
Since power depends greatly on appearances, you must learn the tricks that will enhance your image. Refusing to commit to a person or group is one of these. When you hold yourself back, you incur not anger but a kind of respect. You instantly seem powerful because you make yourself ungraspable, rather than succumbing to the group, or to the relationship, as most people do. This aura of power only grows with time: As your reputation for independence grows, more and more people will come to desire you, wanting to be the one who gets you to commit. Desire is like a virus: If we see that someone is desired by other people, we tend to find this person desirable too.
The moment you commit, the magic is gone. You become like everyone else. People will try all kinds of underhanded methods to get you to commit. They will give you gifts, shower you with favors, all to put you under obligation. Encourage the attention, stimulate their interest, but do not commit at any cost. Accept the gifts and favors if you so desire, but be careful to maintain your inner aloofness. You cannot inadvertently allow yourself to feel obligated to anyone.
Remember, though: The goal is not to put people off, or to make it seem that you are incapable of commitment. Like the Virgin Queen, you need to stir the pot, excite interest, lure people with the possibility of having you. You have to bend to their attention occasionally, then—but never too far.
The Greek soldier and statesman Alcibiades played this game to perfection. It was Alcibiades who inspired and led the massive Athenian armada that invaded Sicily in 414 B.C. When envious Athenians back home tried to bring him down by accusing him of trumped-up charges, he defected to the enemy, the Spartans, instead of facing a trial back home. Then, after the Athenians were defeated at Syracuse, he left Sparta for Persia, even though the power of Sparta was now on the rise. Now, however, both the Athenians and the Spartans courted Alcibiades because of his influence with the Persians; and the Persians showered him with honors because of his power over the Athenians and the Spartans. He made promises to every side but committed to none, and in the end he held all the cards.
If you aspire to power and influence, try the Alcibiades tactic: Put yourself in the middle between competing powers. Lure one side with the promise of your help; the other side, always wanting to outdo its enemy, will pursue you as well. As each side vies for your attention, you will immediately seem a person of great influence and desirability. More power will accrue to you than if you had rashly committed to one side. To perfect this tactic you need to keep yourself inwardly free from emotional entanglements, and to view all those around you as pawns in your rise to the top. You cannot let yourself become the lackey for any cause.
In the midst of the 1968 U.S. presidential election, Henry Kissinger made a phone call to Richard Nixon’s team. Kissinger had been allied with Nelson Rockefeller, who had unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomina tion. Now Kissinger offered to supply the Nixon camp with valuable inside information on the negotiations for peace in Vietnam that were then going on in Paris. He had a man on the negotiating team keeping him informed of the latest developments. The Nixon team gladly accepted his offer.
At the same time, however, Kissinger also approached the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, and offered his aid. The Humphrey people asked him for inside information on Nixon and he supplied it. “Look,” Kissinger told Humphrey’s people, “I’ve hated Nixon for years.” In fact he had no interest in either side. What he really wanted was what he got: the promise of a high-level cabinet post from both Nixon and Humphrey. Whichever man won the election, Kissinger’s career was secure.
The winner, of course, was Nixon, and Kissinger duly went on to his cabinet post. Even so, he was careful never to appear too much of a Nixon man. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, men much more loyal to him than Kissinger were fired. Kissinger was also the only Nixon high official to survive Watergate and serve under the next president, Gerald Ford. By maintaining a little distance he thrived in turbulent times.
Those who use this strategy often notice a strange phenomenon: People who rush to the support of others tend to gain little respect in the process, for their help is so easily obtained, while those who stand back find themselves besieged with supplicants. Their aloofness is powerful, and everyone wants them on their side.
When Picasso, after early years of poverty, had become the most successful artist in the world, he did not commit himself to this dealer or that dealer, although they now besieged him from all sides with attractive offers and grand promises. Instead, he appeared to have no interest in their services; this technique drove them wild, and as they fought over him his prices only rose. When Henry Kissinger, as U.S. secretary of state, wanted to reach detente with the Soviet Union, he made no concessions or conciliatory gestures, but courted China instead. This infuriated and also scared the Soviets—they were already politically isolated and feared further isolation if the United States and China came together. Kissinger’s move pushed them to the negotiating table. The tactic has a parallel in seduction: When you want to seduce a woman, Stendhal advises, court her sister first.
Stay aloof and people will come to you. It will become a challenge for them to win your affections. As long as you imitate the wise Virgin Queen and stimulate their hopes, you will remain a magnet of attention and desire.
Image:
The Virgin Queen.
The center of attention,desire, and worship.
Never succumbing to one suitor or the other,
the Virgin Queen keeps them all revolving around
her like planets, unable to leave her orbit but never getting any closer
to her.
Authority:
Do not commit yourself to anybody or anything, for that is to be a slave, a slave to every man.... Above all, keep yourself free of commitments and obligations—they are the device of another to get you into his power....
-(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
PART II: DO NOT COMMIT TO ANYONE-STAY ABOVE THE FRAY
Do not let people drag you into their petty fights and squabbles. Seem interested and supportive, but find a way to remain neutral; let others dothe fighting while you stand back, watch and wait. When the fighting parties are good and tired they will be ripe for the picking. You can make it a practice, in fact, to stir up quarrels between other people, and then offer to mediate, gaining power as the go-between.
THE KITES, THE CROWS, AND THE FOX
The kites and the crows made an agreement among themselves that they should go halves in everything obtained in the forest. One day they saw a fox that had been wounded by hunters lying helpless under a tree, and gathered round it. The crows said, “We will take the upper half of the fox.” “Then we will take the lower half,” said the kites. The fox laughed at this, and said, “I always thought the kites were superior in creation to the crows; as such they must get the upper half of my body, of which my head, with the brain and other delicate things in it, forms a portion. ” “Oh, yes, that is right,” said the kites, “we will have that part of the fox.” “Not at all,” said the crows, “we must have it, as already agreed.” Then a war arose between the rival parties, and a great many fell on both sides, and the remaining few escaped with difficulty. The fox continued there for some days, leisurely feeding on the dead kites and crows, and then left the place hale and hearty, observing, The weak benefit by the quarrels of the mighty. ”
-INDIAN FABLES
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In the late fifteenth century, the strongest city-states in Italy—Venice, Florence, Rome, and Milan—found themselves constantly squabbling. Hovering above their struggles were the nations of France and Spain, ready to grab whatever they could from the weakened Italian powers. And trapped in the middle was the small state of Mantua, ruled by the young Duke Gianfrancesco Gonzaga. Mantua was strategically located in northern Italy, and it seemed only a matter of time before one of the powers swallowed it up and it ceased to exist as an independent kingdom.
Gonzaga was a fierce warrior and a skilled commander of troops, and he became a kind of mercenary general for whatever side paid him best. In the year 1490, he married Isabella d’Este, daughter of the ruler of another small Italian duchy, Ferrara. Since he now spent most of his time away from Mantua, it fell to Isabella to rule in his stead.
Isabella’s first true test as ruler came in 1498, when King Louis XII of France was preparing armies to attack Milan. In their usual perfidious fashion, the Italian states immediately looked for ways to profit from Milan’s difficulties. Pope Alexander VI promised not to intervene, thereby giving the French carte blanche. The Venetians signaled that they would not help Milan, either—and in exchange for this, they hoped the French would give them Mantua. The ruler of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, suddenly found himself alone and abandoned. He turned to Isabella d’Este, one of his closest friends (also rumored to be his lover), and begged her to persuade Duke Gonzaga to come to his aid. Isabella tried, but her husband balked, for he saw Sforza’s cause as hopeless. And so, in 1499, Louis swooped down on Milan and took it with ease.
Isabella now faced a dilemma: If she stayed loyal to Lodovico, the French would now move against her. But if, instead, she allied herself with France, she would make enemies elsewhere in Italy, compromising Mantua once Louis eventually withdrew. And if she looked to Venice or Rome for help, they would simply swallow up Mantua under the cloak of coming to her aid. Yet she had to do something. The mighty king of France was breathing down her neck: She decided to befriend him, as she had befriended Lodovico Sforza before him—with alluring gifts, witty, intelligent letters, and the possibility of her company, for Isabella was famous as a woman of incomparable beauty and charm.
In 1500 Louis invited Isabella to a great party in Milan to celebrate his victory. Leonardo da Vinci built an enormous mechanical lion for the affair: When the lion opened its mouth, it spewed fresh lilies, the symbols of French royalty. At the party Isabella wore one of her celebrated dresses (she had by far the largest wardrobe of any of the Italian princesses), and just as she had hoped, she charmed and captivated Louis, who ignored all the other ladies vying for his attention. She soon became his constant companion, and in exchange for her friendship he pledged to protect Mantua’s independence from Venice.
Men of great abilities are slow to act. for it is easier to avoid occasions for committing yourself than to come well out of a commitment. Such occasions test your judgment; it is safer to avoid them than to emerge victorious from them. One obligation leads to a greater one, and you come very near to the brink of disaster.
-BALTASAR GRACIAN, 1601-1658
As one danger receded, however, another, more worrying one arose, this time from the south, in the form of Cesare Borgia. Starting in 1500, Borgia had marched steadily northward, gobbling up all the small kingdoms in his path in the name of his father, Pope Alexander. Isabella understood Cesare perfectly: He could be neither trusted nor in any way offended. He had to be cajoled and kept at arm’s length. Isabella began by sending him gifts— falcons, prize dogs, perfumes, and dozens of masks, which she knew he always wore when he walked the streets of Rome. She sent messengers with flattering greetings (although these messengers also acted as her spies). At one point Cesare asked if he could house some troops in Mantua; Isabella managed to dissuade him politely, knowing full well that once the troops were quartered in the city, they would never leave.
Even while Isabella was charming Cesare, she convinced everyone around her to take care never to utter a harsh word about him, since he had spies everywhere and would use the slightest pretext for invasion. When Isabella had a child, she asked Cesare to be the godfather. She even dangled in front of him the possibility of a marriage between her family and his. Somehow it all worked, for although elsewhere he seized everything in his path, he spared Mantua.
In 1503 Cesare’s father, Alexander, died, and a few years later the new pope, Julius II, went to war to drive the French troops from Italy. When the ruler of Ferrara—Alfonso, Isabella’s brother—sided with the French, Julius decided to attack and humble him. Once again Isabella found herself in the middle: the pope on one side, the French and her brother on the other. She dared not ally herself with either, but to offend either would be equally disastrous. Again she played the double game at which she had become so expert. On the one hand she got her husband Gonzaga to fight for the pope, knowing he would not fight very hard. On the other she let French troops pass through Mantua to come to Ferrara’s aid. While she publicly complained that the French had “invaded” her territory, she privately supplied them with valuable information. To make the invasion plausible to Julius, she even had the French pretend to plunder Mantua. It worked once again: The pope left Mantua alone.
In 1513, after a lengthy siege, Julius defeated Ferrara, and the French troops withdrew. Worn out by the effort, the pope died a few months later. With his death, the nightmarish cycle of battles and petty squabbles began to repeat itself.
A great deal changed in Italy during Isabella’s reign: Popes came and went, Cesare Borgia rose and then fell, Venice lost its empire, Milan was invaded, Florence fell into decline, and Rome was sacked by the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V Through all this, tiny Mantua not only survived but thrived, its court the envy of Italy. Its wealth and sovereignty would remain intact for a century after Isabella’s death, in 1539.
THE EAGLE AND THE SOW
An eagle built a nest on a tree, and hatched out some eaglets. And a wild sow brought her litter under the tree. The eagle used to fly off after her prey, and bring it back to her young. And the sow rooted around the tree and hunted in the woods, and when night came she would bring her young something to eat.
And the eagle and the sow lived in neighborly fashion. And a grimalkin laid her plans to destroy the eaglets and the little sucking pigs. She went to the eagle, and said: “Eagle, you had better not fly very far away. Beware of thesow; she is planning an evil design. She is going to undermine the roots of the tree. You see she is rooting all the time.”
Then the grimalkin went to the sow and said: “Sow, you have not a good neighbor. Last evening I heard the eagle saying to her eaglets: ‘My dear little eaglets, I am going to treat you to a nice little pig. Just as soon as the sow is gone, I will bring you a little young sucking pig.”’
From that time the eagle ceased to fly out after prey, and the sow did not go any more into the forest. The eaglets and the young pigs perished of starvation, and grimalkin feasted on them.
FABLES, LEO TOLSTOY, 1828-1910
Interpretation
Isabella d’Este understood Italy’s political situation with amazing clarity: Once you took the side of any of the forces in the field, you were doomed. The powerful would take you over, the weak would wear you down. Any new alliance would lead to a new enemy, and as this cycle stirred up more conflict, other forces would be dragged in, until you could no longer extricate yourself. Eventually you would collapse from exhaustion.
Isabella steered her kingdom on the only course that would bring her safely through. She would not allow herself to lose her head through loyalty to a duke or a king. Nor would she try to stop the conflict that raged around her—that would only drag her into it. And in any case the conflict was to her advantage. If the various parties were fighting to the death, and exhausting themselves in the process, they were in no position to gobble up Mantua. The source of Isabella’s power was her clever ability to seem interested in the affairs and interests of each side, while actually committing to no one but herself and her kingdom.
Once you step into a fight that is not of your own choosing, you lose all initiative. The combatants’ interests become your interests; you become their tool. Learn to control yourself, to restrain your natural tendency to take sides and join the fight. Be friendly and charming to each of the combatants, then step back as they collide. With every battle they grow weaker, while you grow stronger with every battle you avoid.
When the snipe and the mussel struggle, the fisherman gets the benefit.
-Ancient Chinese saying
KEYS TO POWER
To succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger. Most people operate in a whirlpool of emotions, constantly reacting, churning up squabbles and conflicts. Your self-control and autonomy will only bother and infuriate them. They will try to draw you into the whirlpool, begging you to take sides in their endless battles, or to make peace for them. If you succumb to their emotional entreaties, little by little you will find your mind and time occupied by their problems. Do not allow whatever compassion and pity you possess to suck you in. You can never win in this game; the conflicts can only multiply.
On the other hand, you cannot completely stand aside, for that would cause needless offense. To play the game properly, you must seem interested in other people’s problems, even sometimes appear to take their side. But while you make outward gestures of support, you must maintain your inner energy and sanity by keeping your emotions disengaged. No matter how hard people try to pull you in, never let your interest in their affairs and petty squabbles go beyond the surface. Give them gifts, listen with a sympathetic look, even occasionally play the charmer—but inwardly keep both the friendly kings and the perfidious Borgias at arm’s length. By refusing to commit and thus maintaining your autonomy you retain the initiative: Your moves stay matters of your own choosing, not defensive reactions to the push-and-pull of those around you.
THE PRICE OF
While a poor woman stood in the market place selling cheeses, a cat came along and carried off a cheese. A dog saw the pilferer and tried to take the cheese away from him. The cat stood up to the dog. So they pitched intoeach other. The dog barked and snapped; the cat spat and scratched, but they could bring the battle to no decision.
“Let’s go to the fox and have him referee the matter, ” the cat finally suggested. “Agreed, ” said the dog. So they went to the fox. The fox listened to their arguments with a judicious air.
“Foolish animals,” he chided them, “why carry on like that? If both of you are willing, I’ll divide the cheese in two and you’ll both be satisfied. ” “Agreed, ” said the cat and the dog.
So the fox took out his knife and cut the cheese in two, but, instead of cutting it lengthwise, he cut it in the width. “My half is smaller!” protested the dog.
The fox looked judiciously through his spectacles at the dog’s share. “You’re right, quite right!” he decided.
So he went and bit off a piece of the cat’s share. “That will make it even!” he said.
When the cat saw what the fox did she began to yowl: “Just look! My part’s smaller now!”
The fox again put on his spectacles and looked judiciously at the cat’s share.
“Right you are!” said the fox. “Just a moment, and I’ll make it right.”
And he went and bit off a piece from the dog’s cheese This went on so long, with the fox nibbling first at the dog’s and then at the cat’s share. that he finally ate up the whole cheese before their eyes.
-A TREASURY OF JEWISH FOLKLORE, NATHAN AUSUBEL, ED., 1948
Slowness to pick up your weapons can be a weapon itself, especially if you let other people exhaust themselves fighting, then take advantage of their exhaustion. In ancient China, the kingdom of Chin once invaded the kingdom of Hsing. Huan, the ruler of a nearby province, thought he should rush to Hsing’s defense, but his adviser counseled him to wait: “Hsing is not yet going to ruin,” he said, “and Chin is not yet exhausted. If Chin is not exhausted, [we] cannot become very influential. Moreover, the merit of supporting a state in danger is not as great as the virtue of reviving a ruined one.” The adviser’s argument won the day, and as he had predicted, Huan later had the glory both of rescuing Hsing from the brink of destruction and then of conquering an exhausted Chin. He stayed out of the fighting until the forces engaged in it had worn each other down, at which point it was safe for him to intervene.
That is what holding back from the fray allows you: time to position yourself to take advantage of the situation once one side starts to lose. You can also take the game a step further, by promising your support to both sides in a conflict while maneuvering so that the one to come out ahead in the struggle is you. This was what Castruccio Castracani, ruler of the Italian town of Lucca in the fourteenth century, did when he had designs on the town of Pistoia. A siege would have been expensive, costing both lives and money, but Castruccio knew that Pistoia contained two rival factions, the Blacks and the Whites, which hated one another. He negotiated with the Blacks, promising to help them against the Whites; then, without their knowledge, he promised the Whites he would help them against the Blacks. And Castruccio kept his promises—he sent an army to a Black-controlled gate to the city, which the sentries of course welcomed in. Meanwhile another of his armies entered through a White-controlled gate. The two armies united in the middle, occupied the town, killed the leaders of both factions, ended the internal war, and took Pistoia for Castruccio.
Preserving your autonomy gives you options when people come to blows —you can play the mediator, broker the peace, while really securing your own interests. You can pledge support to one side and the other may have to court you with a higher bid. Or, like Castruccio, you can appear to take both sides, then play the antagonists against each other.
Oftentimes when a conflict breaks out, you are tempted to side with the stronger party, or the one that offers you apparent advantages in an alliance. This is risky business. First, it is often difficult to foresee which side will prevail in the long run. But even if you guess right and ally yourself with the stronger party, you may find yourself swallowed up and lost, or conveniently forgotten, when they become victors. Side with the weaker, on the other hand, and you are doomed. But play a waiting game and you cannot lose.
In France’s July Revolution of 1830, after three days of riots, the statesman Talleyrand, now elderly, sat by his Paris window, listening to the pealing bells that signaled the riots were over. Turning to an assistant, he said, “Ah, the bells! We’re winning.” “Who’s ‘we,’ mon prince?” the assistant asked. Gesturing for the man to keep quiet, Talleyrand replied, “Not a word! I’ll tell you who we are tomorrow.” He well knew that only fools rush into a situation—that by committing too quickly you lose your maneuverability. People also respect you less: Perhaps tomorrow, they think, you will commit to another, different cause, since you gave yourself so easily to this one. Good fortune is a fickle god and will often pass from one side to the other. Commitment to one side deprives you of the advantage of time and the luxury of waiting. Let others fall in love with this group or that; for your part don’t rush in, don’t lose your head.
Finally, there are occasions when it is wisest to drop all pretence of appearing supportive and instead to trumpet your independence and self- reliance. The aristocratic pose of independence is particularly important for those who need to gain respect. George Washington recognized this in his work to establish the young American republic on firm ground. As president, Washington avoided the temptation of making an alliance with France or England, despite the pressure on him to do so. He wanted the country to earn the world’s respect through its independence. Although a treaty with France might have helped in the short term, in the long run he knew it would be more effective to establish the nation’s autonomy. Europe would have to see the United States as an equal power.
Remember: You have only so much energy and so much time. Every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength. You may be afraid that people will condemn you as heartless, but in the end, maintaining your independence and self-reliance will gain you more respect and place you in a position of power from which you can choose to help others on your own initiative.
Image: A Thicket of Shrubs. In the forest, one shrub latches on to another, entangling its neighbor with its thorns, the thicket slowly extending its impenetrable domain. Only what keeps its distance and stands apart can grow and rise above the thicket.
Authority: Regard it as more courageous not to become involved in an engagement than to win in battle, and where there is already one interfering fool, take care that there shall not be two. – (Baltasar Gracian, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
Both parts of this law will turn against you if you take it too far. The game proposed here is delicate and difficult. If you play too many parties against one another, they will see through the maneuver and will gang up on you. If you keep your growing number of suitors waiting too long, you will inspire not desire but distrust. People will start to lose interest. Eventually you may find it worthwhile to commit to one side—if only for appearances’ sake, to prove you are capable of attachment.
Even then, however, the key will be to maintain your inner independence —to keep yourself from getting emotionally involved. Preserve the unspoken option of being able to leave at any moment and reclaim your freedom if the side you are allied with starts to collapse. The friends you made while you were being courted will give you plenty of places to go once you jump ship.
Conclusion
As the world ends this crazy year of 2020, we see alliances forming. But many of the participants will to remain as neutral as possible. Yet the United States demands obedience. “You are either with us, or you are against us.” Trump and Pompeo demand.
The smart leadership, and the capable leaders realize the folly in following other alliances that would adversely affect their economies.
Those that do not can expect consequences for their alliances. For once you chain yourself to another, what ever happens to that person will happen to you. If that person is healthy and is a hard worker, you will be carried along with them. But if they are weak, or even worse killed, you will be buried with them.
Always establish your own alliances and maintain the flexibility of options.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This isn’t a topical post. It’s just historical for those with short memories.
A secret high-level committee of Hong Kong senior activists worked with Western agents from the CIA to coordinate and amplify the leaderless protests against the fugitive law amendment last year, Nury Vittachi claims in his book The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong.
Vittachi, a veteran journalist and a columnist for The Standard, accused the CIA of funding anti-government activities in the SAR. He said Hong Kong protesters have received practical training in street-protest strategy and media control from members of the professional revolution industry since January 2013.
The book named three US-based groups - the Oslo Freedom Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institute and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies - which were directly involved in last year's social unrest.
He added that public records had shown that the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA's regime-change arm, had sent HK$170 million to the mainland or Hong Kong since 2014 to "advance the cause of democracy."
https://lnkd.in/dwnSU-S
This is an article that I wrote at the tail end of 2019, as I was getting ready to leave to my in-laws for the 2020 Chinese New Year. At that time, the news was awash with articles that Donald Trump admitted to being involved in the protests, and that he intended a “color revolution” there. He also admitted to supporting the NED and other adversarial elements.
This was all as a result of getting China to agree to a very watered-down trade agreement at that time. Then after two days, all news went quiet about the United States involvement in trying to destabilize Hong Kong.
Hush…
(Be quiet)
Nothing to see here…
Then COVID-19 hit China hard, and Donald Trump unleashed a most aggressive and nasty anti-China propaganda campaign. Simultaneously. One that continued for at least six months, up until that too… ended. When he himself admitted to sponsoring the anti-Chinese propaganda onslaught as well.
Well, here it is. Around one year later.
All the dust has cleared and settled. We’ve had a near non-stop “hybrid-war” of America against China raging for a year now. We can see the hand of America in just about every “accident”, and “coincidence” that befell China during 2020.
And as America decided to engage in a Lose-lose strategy against China, their calculus was that China would suffer far worse than America would. Because China was fragile, did not have people’s support, made shoddy products, ate disgusting animals, and wore ill fitting clothing, etc…
Well, all 2020 was a “hybrid-war”. It was a lose-lose engagement. And who actually lost more China or the USA? Look at the 2020 Q2 growth rate;
USA is -9.1%
China is 3.2%
Now, if you are reading this, you all pretty much understand this. The United States is on fire. There are protests in all the cities. There’s an election going on, and it’s a bloody slug-fest between the two candidates and their followers. America is a real mess with defaults, bankruptcy and unemployment rampant on all levels.
And yet…
And yet still…
Americans believe that the Chinese hate their government, and that China is covering up and suppressing the “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong. that it’s all a big lie that the Chinese are happy with their government. All news out of China is considered a lie, and all data and figures out of China must be a lie, because there is “no way” that China could be doing better than American. It’s inconceivable!
Well, no it’s not.
The Chinese don’t need to lie. It’s not a “democracy” that depends on public opinion to stay in power. They don’t fuck around. They tell the truth and if you can’t handle it, well tough noodles! Which is pretty much one of the many reasons why the Chinese love their nation, and why they are all hyper-patriotic.
Yet, somehow the Americans that I have been talking to say that everything about China is a lie, and the polls in America are all a lie, and that President Donald Trump is doing the best job of any President in history. And as such they cannot believe that all that nonsense about Pepe the frog in HK, and the singing the American anthem in HK, and waving American flags were all just props of an American “color revolution effort”.
Chinese leaders unnerved by protests elsewhere this year have been steadily tightening controls over civic organizations on the mainland suspected of carrying out the work of foreign powers.
The campaign aims to insulate China from subversive Western ideas such as democracy and freedom of expression, and from the influence, specifically, of U.S. groups that may be trying to promote those values here, experts say.
“Experts” say…
Subversive ideas like “democracy“, and the “freedom of expression“.
How dare China!
That campaign is long-standing, but it has been prosecuted with renewed vigor under President Xi Jinping, especially after the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych following months of street demonstrations in Kiev that were viewed here as explicitly backed by the West.
The Washington Post would also report:
One foreign policy expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, said Putin had called Xi to share his concern about the West’s role in Ukraine.
Those concerns appear to have filtered down into conversations held over cups of tea in China, according to civil society group members.
So both the Presidents of Russia and China are alarmed, or “concerned” about the Untied States government trying to destabilize their nations.
“They are very concerned about Color Revolutions, they are very concerned about what is going on in Ukraine,” said the international NGO manager.
(Whose organization is partly financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)).
... blamed here for supporting the protests in Kiev’s central Maidan square.
“They say, ‘Your money is coming from the same people. Clearly you want to overthrow China.’ ”
Oh, but you do know that the NED is the CIA.
Same funding.
Same leadership.
Same direction.
Same training manuals.
Same operational objectives.
Congressionally funded with the explicit goal of promoting democracy abroad...
... NED has long been viewed with suspicion or hostility by the authorities here.
But the net of suspicion has widened to encompass such U.S. groups as
... the Ford Foundation,
... the International Republican Institute,
... the Carter Center and,
... the Asia Foundation.
Of course, NED and its many subsidiaries including the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute do no such thing as “promoting democracy.”
Instead they are in the business of constructing a global network of neo-imperial administration termed “civil society” that interlocks with the West’s many so-called “international institutions”…
… which in turn are completely controlled by interests in Washington, upon Wall Street, and in the cities of London and Brussels.
While the Washington Post would have readers believe NED is in the business of promoting “freedom of expression” and “democracy” the corporate-financier interests represented on NED’s board of directors are anything but champions of such principles, and are instead notorious for principles precisely the opposite.
The very concept of the United States “promoting democracy” is scandalous when considering it is embroiled in an invasive global surveillance scandal…
… guilty of persecuting one unpopular war after another around the planet against the will of its own people…
… and based on verified lies…
… and brutalizing and abusing its own citizens at home with militarized police cracking down on civilians in towns like Ferguson, Missouri.
All of which makes China’s police actions against “Occupy Central” protesters pale in comparison.
“Promoting democracy” is clearly cover for simply expanding its hegemonic agenda far beyond its borders and at the expense of national sovereignty for all subjected to it, including Americans themselves.
In 2011, similar revelations were made public of the US’ meddling in
the so-called “Arab Spring” when the New York Times would report in an
article titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” that:
The article would also add, regarding NED specifically, that:
The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties.
They were created by the United States Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy NED.
The NED was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations.
The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress.
Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.
Pro-war and interventionist US Senator John McCain had famously taunted both Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping’s predecessor in 2011 that the US subversion sweeping the Middle East was soon headed toward Moscow and Beijing.
He [McCain] said,
“A year ago, Ben-Ali and Gaddafi were not in power. Assad won’t be in power this time next year. This Arab Spring is a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing.”
McCain then walked off the stage.
Considering the overt foreign-funded nature of not only the “Arab Spring,” but now “Occupy Central,”…
… and considering the chaos, death, destabilization, and collapse suffered by victims of previous US subversion…
… “Occupy Central” can be painted in a new light…
…it’s a mob of dupes being used to destroy their own homes…
…all the while abusing the principles of “democracy”…
…. behind which is couched an insidious, diametrically opposed foreign imposed tyranny.
In particular, this global hegemon seeks to suppress the reemergence of Russia as a global power, and prevent the rise of China itself upon the world’s stage.
The regressive agenda of “Occupy Central’s” US-backed leadership, and their shameless exploitation of the good intentions of the many young people ensnared by their gimmicks…
…forever pose a threat in reality that is every bit as dangerous as the “threat” they claim Beijing poses to the island of Hong Kong and its people.
Conclusion
It’s the tail end of 2020. We can look back over the last four years of the Donald Trump administration and the unusual series of events surrounding China with the eyes of experience. No longer can all the events be attributed to “unlucky coincidences”. From day one, and point zero, President Trump and his cabal of neocons went on the “war path” against China and did everything in their power short of an all-out hot shooting war to suppress China’s rise.
They have been largely unsuccessful.
Though, and make no mistake, things are still in process and there are apt to be more terrible surprises in the future.
This post concerns the efforts to destabilize Hong Kong.
In short, and in conclusion, the United States went all-out to destabilize Hong Kong, create unrest and scare away European interests from that region. They supported, trained, and funded “fifth column” agents who trained, and authored, the many violent protests within Hong Kong.
A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or nation.
The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine.
Forces gathered in secret can mobilize openly to assist an external attack.
This term is also extended to organized actions by military personnel.
Clandestine fifth column activities can involve acts of sabotage, disinformation, or espionage executed within defense lines by secret sympathizers with an external force.
-Wikipedia
Make no mistake, all the American “color revolutions” around the globe are “Fifth column” events. It is the preferred option for America to conduct war when the opposing military is too strong, or better organized than American military forces are.
The rest of the world is finally catching up with Metallicman
Some related posts, written about a year after this post…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This article was compiled back in 2018.
It is a "Franken-article" comprising a selection of elements from other articles that I have read, by other authors. I collected the key points, and had annotations linking to the articles, and then suffered a rather catastrophic computer failure, leaving my note in RTF format without links. Anyways, to make a long story short, the following is a Fraken-article compiled together to make a point.
Originally it discussed 2018 through 2028. I've updated it to 2020 through 2030.
This article was written before the Trump Trade war onslaught, and before the COVID-19 Bioweapon that Trump unleashed on the Chinese New Year celebrations. It was written before any of the riots and protests in Portland, Chicago or Los Angeles.
This was written in 2018. And I could see that…
There are dangerous times ahead.
Every 80 years, nations often experience colossal events. There are different theories about this cycle – for example, the Fourth Turning
theory focuses on the cyclical strengths of institutions versus
individuals. Others surmise that four generations after a major crisis,
there are no more older people to warn the society, and the younger
people take peace and prosperity for granted.
Well, exactly 80 years ago, America was mired in Great Depression,
and World War II was about to begin. Yet, predictably, most Americans
and Europeans now cannot even fathom such scenarios repeating in their
lifetime.
There are two major catalysts that can ignite catastrophic wars in the next decade. They are;
The debt/economic crisis in the West.
Growinge great-power rivalries (US + EU versus Russia + China).
Geopolitical tensions that are simmering now will reach a crescendo very soon. (I predicted in 2018.) Without extraordinary caution and prudence, we’re destined to become another victim of history’s inexorable cycle of conflict and collapse.
America is #2
Pretty much.
How many American politicians and elites will say, “America is the second largest economy in the world”? How will Americans react when they hear it for the first time?
For certain, there will be shock, anger, denial and a lot of blame and finger-pointing. However, most Americans fail to realize that not only is this scenario almost inevitable, but it will happen within the next 6-10 years.
Consider that China’s nominal GDP grew 200% since 2008, while the US
grew only 35%. Even if China slows down a lot and grows only 100% and
the US continues at the same pace, China will be #1 before 2028.
Chart of real GDP growth USA (blue) vs. China (red).
What does China’s rise mean to western corporations and the
globalists who control them? Loss of power and wealth. And that’s
something the globalists aren’t going to just let happen.
There’s more to China’s rise than just GDP.
In late 2017, US News and World Report ranked China’s Tsinghua University as #1 for computer science and engineering, dethroning MIT.
In hi-tech areas such as 5G, driverless vehicles, electric vehicles, passenger drones (“flying cars”), 3D printing, Artificial Intelligence, super computers, quantum computing and numerous other fields, China is #1. America is #2.
Throughout history, an established power has never passively watched a rising power take its spot. As Harvard Professor Graham T. Allison points out, 75% of the time, the established power goes to outright war with the rising power.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, American intellectuals’ favorite phrase was “the end of history.”
And John Bolton famously claimed that there should be only one country in the UN’s Permanent Security Council:
USA! America has the won the Cold War and will stay as the hyper-power forever! Everyone will embrace America’s exceptionalism and remain submissive.
Alas, Putin came along and resuscitated the Russia.
He[1] thwarted the globalists in Ukraine and [2] Syria, [3] survived a Wall Street-engineered drop in oil price (from $115 to $45 in mere six months), [4] prevented the collapse of the Russian economy in spite of severe sanctions, [5] shored up enormous gold and foreign exchange reserves, and [6] even managed to develop hyper-sonic ICBMs that can evade America’s vaunted missile defense systems.
Worse, Putin is also working with the Chinese on US-independent versions of the Internet, banking system, credit card system etc.
All these have turned Putin into the globalists’ public enemy #1.
… expect much more in the coming months and years.
The Middle East is in play.
In the 1990s, Neocons in Israel and the US (remember PNAC?) dreamed of hegemony over the Middle East.
All you need to do is take out Iraq and Iran, and the domination is complete.
Imagine controlling all that oil and the strategic waterways through which much of global trade passes.
And if western firms can construct oil/gas pipelines from the Middle East to Europe, the latter can say, “Nyet” to Russian oil/gas. Without Europe as the customer, Russia will suffer immensely and surrender.
Controlling the Middle East also means controlling the land and the sea routes of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A few “moderate rebels” in strategic locations can greatly disrupt China’s Europe-bound trains.
In response to the belligerent comments by Esper and the Australian report, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said “China is firmly on a path of peaceful development and our national defense policy is defensive in nature”.
China has gone further by providing a cooperative framework under the Belt and Road Initiative which is built around the brilliant political agenda of providing diplomatic solutions to geopolitical points of tension through economic development strategies that enrich all participants.
This approach has provided China great payback through the defusing of tensions with other nations claiming territory within the South China Sea- especially under the pro-BRI orientation of Malaysia’s Dr. Mahathir Mohammed and the Philippines’ President Duterte.
-America Loses Asia-Pacific as Full Spectrum Dominance Continues to Fail
Road and Belt. This requires Pakistan agreements and ports in the Mediterranean. Everything has been going well. That is up until a massive explosion that some have referred to as a “mini-nuke” totally and completely gutted the Lebanon port in Beirut. An interesting assessment;
The Port of Beirut poses the biggest geostrategic threat to American power projection because China’s Silk Road is fast creeping towards the docks at Beirut Port. The US, having recently forced Israel to cancel its Haifa rail contract with China, has dampened the Chinese advance in the eastern Mediterranean, and what remains now in the path of the US is the Beirut Port. The US must either invade it to block the Chinese geostrategic mission creep, or else destroy it.
https://thesaker.is/china-newsbrief-sitrep-3/
And then it appears that a great accident destroyed it.
Moreover, the Port of Beirut also poses the biggest geostrategic threat for the US’s eastward-bound power projection where China and its new Silk Road operation is fast creeping westwards and is attempting to land at the eastern coastal strip of the Mediterranean, right where the Beirut Port docks. The US having recently forced Israel to cancel its Haifa contact with China has somewhat dampened the Chinese advance in the eastern Mediterranean, and what remains now in the path of the US is the Beirut Port. The US must either invade it to block the Chinese geostrategic mission creep, or else destroy it.
Evidently, the US has chosen the latter option – with Israel assigned the task of accomplishing the destruction of Beirut Port. After all, for different reasons, both benefit greatly from Beirutshima.
And so very timely is this destruction of the Beirut Port as the Lebanese government has very recently been in official talks with the Chinese over their offer to vastly invest in and develop the Beirut Port: a much needed gateway port and bridge into Europe for China, which represents an absolutely intolerable equation for the US’s hegemony in Europe. The Beirut Port’s rebuilding to its previous standard of activity will be contingent on strict conditions imposed by the US and Israel on the Lebanese government, if the port is allowed to be rebuilt at all, that is. Most certainly, the US is determined not to allow the Chinese any executive, investment or managerial access to it.
...
And this larger US project has everything to do with the current US war on China, albeit presently a non-military war, but a war nevertheless, a war that the Pentagon is militarily preparing for – hence the ever increasing and breathtakingly high defense budget that Congress has been allocating to the US military throughout the terms of the last three Presidents.
The US having lost Pakistan to the China sphere of influence, thus losing an attack dog bordering China, and having recently assigned Turkey as its new enforcer in the middle east, it now behooves the US to use its Mideast allies of both Turkey and Israel, two infamous terrorist states who regularly break international law with impunity: use them as spoilers and saboteurs against an advancing China and against any of Beijing’s Mideast regional allies.
Beirutshima is clearly an apparent US endeavor to push-back the Chinese advance in the highly strategic eastern Mediterranean, as the US attempts to simultaneously pivot eastwards itself through secured territories wherever China is successfully backtracked by the US and its regional henchmen.
But, can this grand geostrategic plan really work for the benefit of the US? Can the US really succeed at remaining the only superpower in the world by the incessant knee-capping of China’s new Silk Road project?
This is yet to be determined. But judging by the deep budgetary and societal crisis engulfing the US homeland, with no sign whatsoever of its deepening troubles abating, analysts doubt that the US has lungs large enough to last the whole race through with China. Here I will add that the US-China fight over the Beirut Port is not yet over. One wonders what went through the mind of the wily Chinese ambassador in Lebanon to witness the Beirut Port exploding as it shockingly did: to witness his pet project and assignment be destroyed right before his eyes and right before a signed agreement was made between him and the Lebanese government of Diab.
-UR
A War to Contain China
China’s Achilles heel is that it’s surrounded by America’s vassal states – Taiwan, Japan and South Korea for now.
The Philippines used to be America’s puppet, but it’s now leaning towards China and Russia, thanks to Duterte. How North Korea will turn out is yet to be seen.
India, which was colonized by the British for 200 years, is experiencing amnesia and is quickly ceding its sovereignty to the US.
Japanese elites – under pressure from globalists – are trying to
change their constitution so that Japan can build up its military again.
This is obviously an ominous sign.
Thus globalists have a lot of options to wage a proxy war on China. Asia has been growing rapidly and enjoying unprecedented prosperity, but there’s a good chance they will screw it up by becoming sacrificial pawns in the geopolitical chessboard.
Drawing China and Russia together
China knows what the neocons are doing. China and Russia share intel data, and combined saw that America was an active and real threat. If China collapses, Russia would be next. If Russia collapses, China would be next. So what did they do?
Then at the same time, they started to warn the United States to stop; just stop… please just stop…
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.
Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaliing that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military...
-https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/
They also watch with some degree of hope that the intel information was incorrect, and that the United States would stop. That the United States would end it’s anti-Chinese propaganda campaign, it’s anti-China technology assault, and it’s anti-China biological warfare programs…
…but that is not in the cards. Not yet, anyways.
Financial Wars
If the globalists have mighty military and vassal states to impose their hegemony, they have one tremendous weakness: a fake economy based on debt and money-printing.
America’s enormous strength is based on petrodollar – an unfair system that forces other countries to buy oil and other commodities in US dollar.
Take that away, the American Empire starts to wobble. Without enormous demand for the US dollar and treasuries, interest rates will go up, debt will become expensive, and interest payments on existing debt will skyrocket.
This is why China, the largest importer of oil, just started oil futures that trade in Yuan. China has implemented systems where one can directly buy and sell oil in Yuan. If China were to get out of the globalist hegemony, there’s no better way than to establish petroyuan, especially if it’s backed by gold.
US will go to war to stop emergence of petro-yuan !
The introduction of oil trading in yuan is a very bold move by the Chinese, because the US will not give up the basis of its hegemony – the dollar as the world’s reserve currency – without a fight. The Chinese plan to roll out a yuan-denominated oil contract is a very “brave” move, since countries who “tried to exit the oil-dollar matrix have met terrible ends,”.
...
The US financial sector and its military-industrial complex are unlikely to give up the dollar hegemony without a fight, though, as the dollar is both the basis and the main product of America. And the US will use its other favorite tool for it – war…
“Maybe they will start a war between Japan and China, and maybe they will start a war with North Korea. America will do anything to keep the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency,” “They will invade the countries, like Afghanistan, they will stop at nothing. Because this is the basis of the US empire. It’s not land-based, it’s not based on material goods, it’s based on rent-seeking. It’s based on landing dollars, getting out income and when countries can’t pay they dismantle the assets and take them over. We saw it in Latin America, South America, this is how America built its empire.”
What’s Next?
America’s military impotence when faced with the new cutting edge technologies unveiled by Russia and China was outlined in a recent report released by the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney which stated that “America no longer enjoys military primacy in the indo Pacific and its capacity to uphold a favorable balance of power is increasingly uncertain.”
Referring to China’s advanced anti-aircraft weapons, the report says“Chinese counter-intervention systems have undermined America’s ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific region” which the authors say, could be rendered impotent within the first 8 hours of conflict.
-America Loses Asia-Pacific as Full Spectrum Dominance Continues to Fail
Thanks to Deep State and the Democrats, US-Russia relations will
continue to deteriorate as sanctions pile on. Globalists will also use
the anti-Russia hysteria to create an EU army, bolster NATO, and provoke
Russia with missile defense systems and military build up on its
borders. Russia’s neighbors — Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, Sweden,
Poland etc. — will all be used as pawns to needle and threaten Russia.
The US will continue to build its troops to encircle China, saber rattle in the South China Sea, incite Muslim separatists in Western China (Xinjiang), and try to turn Asian countries against China.
I’ve covered all the elements in other posts in far greater detail. There you can see the details. Links are as provided herein.
This is just an overview.
Create strife in HK. The “pro-democracy” protests were implemented by NED / NID insurgents under the guise of being “journalists”. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Create strife in Xinjiang. Radicalized and CIA trained Muslim insurgents creating “fifth column“ activities. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Forced Starvation. Destruction of the pork industry via drones and aerosol viruses, destruction of the chicken industry, the wheat and rice industries, and multiple waves of germ attacks. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
African Incentives. This is ongoing. Though lately a number of nations are demanding that China pay billions of dollars to them for COVID-19 damage. I cannot help but see a CIA hand in all this. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Incentivize American Businesses. Enormous amounts of money has been handed to American companies throughout trumps first term of office, the greatest amounts came during the 2020 “COVID bailout”. However, no companies have shown any interest in returning operations to America. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Anti-China propaganda campaign. This is hot and heavy. Apparently it’s working a full 30% of Americans hate China and blame it for all the American ills. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Anti-China technology campaign. Well the arrest of the Huawei President and the suppression of 5G technology is only the tip of the iceberg. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
A Pandemic that would suppress China but ignore America. This is the highlight of the plan and really interesting. Three strains. A, B, and C. All unleashed on the world. Lethal strain B is for China. It is dangerous and lethal. However, Americans get the A virus. This virus is mild and safe. It self inoculates (or was intended to). It is designed for Americans to have “Herd Immunity”. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
An Alliance of other nations. By building a coalition of nations, the entire group could gang up against China in bulk. This includes strong showings by Australia, Canada, and the UK. <HERE>
Establish American Bases on Taiwan. Ongoing and NOT public.
There will also be endless economic, propaganda and hybrid wars against both Russia and China in the coming years.
US, EU, Russia and China will be developing many dangerous and effective weapons in the near future. This will include miniaturized nuclear bombs, weaponized satellites, and possibly a combination of both — satellites armed with nukes. Then there are hypersonic missiles that travel at 20 times the speed of sound, killer robots and fleets of armed drones.
Biological and germ warfare are also being developed by the US in many vassal countries. It’s a multi-dimensional and hybrid arms race that’s more lethal and destructive than ever before.
America is only 5% of the world’s population. It cannot expect to rule the other 95% forever. America’s unipolar dominance is a blip in the history. Americans have to learn to coexist with other great powers and focus on creating a peaceful, prosperous world.
Instead, America’s elites are filled with hubris and hegemonic fantasies of full spectrum dominance.
Full-spectrum dominance also known as full-spectrum superiority, is a military entity's achievement of control over all dimensions of the battlespace, effectively possessing an overwhelming diversity of resources in such areas as terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, extraterrestrial, psychological, and bio- or cyber-technological warfare.
-Wikipedia
The US is formally committed to dominating the world by the year 2020. With President Trump’s new Space Directive-4, the production of laser-armed fighter jets as possible precursors to space weapons, and the possibility of nuclear warheads being put into orbit, the clock is ticking…
Back in 1997, the now-re-established US Space Command announced its commitment to “full spectrum dominance.” The Vision for 2020 explains that “full spectrum dominance” means military control over land, sea, air, and space (the so-called fourth dimension of warfare) “to protect US interests and investment.” “Protect” means guarantee operational freedom. “US interest and investment” means corporate profits.
-Countdown to “Full Spectrum Dominance”
Americans – and sadly most Europeans now as well – are ignorant about geopolitics, easily swayed by propaganda, and programmed to accept wild stories without demanding proof or evidence. The combination of ruthless elites and gullible masses is extremely dangerous.
Without great restraint, diplomacy, wisdom and compromises, we will be sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster in the next decade.
2020 to 2030.
All the warning signs and signals are lit up and flashing.
Warning.
Those American military officials promoting the obsolete doctrine of Full Spectrum dominance are dancing to the tune of a song that stopped playing some time ago. Both Russia and China have changed the rules of the game on a multitude of levels, and can respond with fatal force to any attack upon their soil with next generation weaponry beyond the scope of anything imagined by ivory tower game theorists in the west.
-America Loses Asia-Pacific as Full Spectrum Dominance Continues to Fail
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Well, it is 2020, and America is in flames. This is both figuratively and literally. Yet, the mechanisms of power are still operating. They still crank out new laws and regulations, as well as bans. Taxes are still rising, and more and more people are unemployed to the point where the beginnings of starvation are starting to manifest. The government solution to all this is more international interventionism, higher taxes, more regulation, and more laws.
One of the things that I am seeing is die-hard American supporters of the President are saying that it is God’s will that America rule over the rest of the world. That it is our “manifest destiny” and that is why America is so very exceptional. This kind of narrative and response to all things going on right now is worrisome. And perhaps an audit of what America is today is in order.
Because if America is actually “exceptional”, then by what measure of this quality would make the world a better, a safer, and a happier place?
Well…?
The following is an article titled “American Exceptionalism” written by Larry Romanoff on August 22, 2020 and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the original author.
American Exceptionalism
“Welcome to America, the Land of Freedom”, read the signs at Washington, DC’s international airport as you line up to have your fingerprints taken and your body cavities searched for mini nuclear devices.
I could have titled this article “Setting the Cat among the Pigeons”. In an attempt to forestall the expected avalanche of disagreement, I confirm my awareness of statistics produced by a wide range of individuals and institutions of widely-varying intent and ideology, and which can “prove” almost anything one cares to prove, GINI coefficients being one easy example. The statistics on which this article is based were not selected carelessly and are not invalidated by a reader’s disaffection.
The United States Is the Best Only at Being the Worst
Let’s look at the figures, shall we…
American Freedom
Money and Savings
The US today has the greatest income inequality of all Western nations[1][2], surpassing China and more than a few undeveloped nations as well.
From this, it has the lowest social mobility of most nations[3], meaning that improving one’s station in life is becoming increasingly impossible.
If your parents are not educated and wealthy, you will never be either, and the American Dream is dead.
The US today has the smallest middle class and the largest lower class of all major nations, the middle class having been mostly eviscerated in 2008, that process completing itself today, and will probably never now recover.
Americans carry the largest amount of personal debt among all nations[4], including credit card debt and increasingly unrepayable student loans, and the US now leads the world in personal bankruptcies[5].
Since 2008, according to the US government’s own statistics, the US has the lowest percentage of home ownership at 57%[6], ranked 43rd in the world, far below China at 90%[7].
Further, America now has a virtual epidemic of homelessness compared to most other nations, with untabulated millions of homeless families with children.
The poverty rate in the US is extraordinary, with official statistics placing this number at 13% but in reality with more than 25% of the population living below the poverty line, in most cases far below[8].
It also has the highest percentage of children living in poverty, and with almost a third of all US citizens dependent on food stamps and other government aid to survive[9].
Unemployment is also extraordinary. According to the government’s own statistics, fully 40% of working-age Americans have no job[10][11], with many of the rest under-employed, working only part-time.
It is only American cities or those in the most impoverished of nations that contain such vast areas of urban decay and desperate slums like those of Detroit and Chicago, where half of the areas are violent crime-ridden wastelands where no one goes.
Education
The US has the highest educational costs, and yet the poorest overall quality of education in the developed world and parts of the rest. Read this article[12]. It will open your eyes.
A few good schools or universities in an entire nation do not make it a world leader, the proof residing in the highest level of functional illiteracy of all major nations (25%) and a truly legendary level of ignorance[13].
The US is the only country in the world where, in repeated polls for the past 60 years, a full 75% of the adult and student populations cannot find their own country on a map of the world[14].
Healthcare
Compared to other nations, the US has the highest health care costs by a factor of two to ten, and yet has a surprisingly poor overall quality as well as the highest percentage of a population without health care[15].
The US has the highest infant mortality rate and the shortest life expectancy at birth of all major nations and far below many others[16][17], ranking around 50 in a list of countries.
The US has the highest obesity rate of all nations, with nearly half of the population being overweight[18].
America has one of the highest rates of sexually-transmitted diseases[19].
America has the highest rate of of anti-depressant drug use that increased by 65% in only 15 years[20].
America is in a national crisis in opioid drug use[21] and of depression.
America has the highest teen-age pregnancy and abortion rates of all developed nations[22].
America has one of the highest divorce rates[23][24].
Note that in many international studies US statistics aren’t collected because, as observers noted “The authors left out the US because the country is “an extreme outlier.”
The US also has the largest number of one-person households (about 30%)[25][26], and the largest percentage of fatherless children (about 25%)[27].
Society
America is one of the two most racist countries in the world, where even the random and unprovoked killing of non-whites is not only permissible but usually meets with approval.
Americans are gun-crazy, owning more guns than the entire rest of the world combined, and more guns than all the world’s police and military. They carry their guns everywhere, and use them everywhere.
As a result, the US has the highest rates of gun shootings and murders of any nation, with more than 20 small children and more than 200 adults being sent each day to either the hospital or the cemetery.
Many small American cities, like the nation’s capital of Washington DC with only half a million people, or places like Detroit or Chicago, have more murders each year (by an order of magnitude) than does Shanghai with 25 million people.
The overall homicide rate for China is 0.6 and for Shanghai 0.2; that for the US is 4.0. The gun death rate for children in the US is 40 times higher than for any other nation in the world[28][29].
The US also has the highest number of crimes committed with firearms each year, a staggering total of a minimum confirmed of 500,000 and an estimated 3 million[30][31].
America also has the highest number of violent raids on private homes, with more than 80,000 instances per year of SWAT teams kicking in someone’s front door in the middle of the night, always terrorizing and sometimes killing the occupants, usually without identifying themselves and often attacking the wrong house.[32][33]
The US has the highest rate of cocaine and meth usage of any nation[34], thanks in large part to the CIA’s very successful war on drugs which permits that agency to import cocaine duty-free.
The US has the highest rate of gender inequality[35] among industrialized nations, far exceeding egalitarian nations like China (and formerly Iraq and Libya).
The US has the highest number of lawyers and lawsuits in the world, by orders of magnitude, a reflection of both natural belligerence and inborn greed, Americans spending twice as much on lawsuits each year as on new cars[36]. Japan has 14,000 lawyers, China 160,000, the US 1.35 million (11 per 100,000 for Japan and China compared to 300 per 100,000 for the US).
Americans surpass the entire world in their amount of useless consumption, having long passed the point where it can be deemed pathological. As one measure, that of shopping mall space per capita, Germany has 2.7 sq ft per person, Japan has 3.9 and the UK has 5. For every American shopper there are 24 sq ft of mall.
The US has by far the highest level of carbon emissions on a per-capita basis, thanks in no small part to General Motors who has repeatedly committed genocide on electric automobiles.
Military
Wars and violence are defining adjectives of America. The US as a nation is now, and has always been, intensely militaristic, inherently provocative, combative and violent. The US is by far the largest merchant of death in the world, being responsible for about 70% of total world arms sales. For comparison, Russia is second at 17%, while China is at 3%.
If we include everything, the US spends about twice as much on its military each year as the entire rest of the world combined, already well-documented by many authors at well in excess of $1 trillion.
America also has the world’s largest network of foreign military bases, with more than 1,000 such installations, including many that appear on no map.
America also has the world’s largest number of bio-weapons labs, with more than 400 outside the US.
America has launched the most wars of aggression in the history of the world and has been at war for 235 of its 243 years as a nation, all those wars unprovoked and unjustified, and none of which were either wars of ‘liberation’ or ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, but for colonisation and plunder.
The US is also outstanding in that it has assassinated more foreign world leaders and other officials (about 150)[37] than even Israel has done, and also operates the largest network of torture prisons that has ever existed in the history of the world.
The US also wins first prize for having some of the most bloodthirsty homicidal mass murderers and pathological killers in the history of the world, far exceeding our former heroes Stalin and Hitler. Kissinger, Albright and Curtis LeMay come immediately to mind, but there are more.
Crime
The US has by far the highest incarceration rate of all nations, with more than 25% of the world’s prisoners in its jails and with almost 35% of all adult Americans having a criminal record.
Alarmingly, the US has by far the highest number of internment camps – prison camps – in the world, all 800 fully-staffed but empty, waiting for Americans to dare launch another Occupy Wall Street or similar protest.
The US has the most militarised police forces of any nation, with frighteningly heavy-duty military hardware like MRAPs, APCs, drone aircraft and automatic weapons.
The police motto “To protect and serve” that was once plastered on every police car, has been amended. It now reads “To occupy and kill”. The US has by far the highest number of civilians killed each year by police (well over 1,000) of any nation in the world, even including rogue states and axis of evil members.
Americans have far more to fear from their local police than from terrorists. Police brutality in America is now legendary, so common as to be one of the nation’s defining adjectives, with beatings, shootings, harassment, false criminal charges reaching epidemic proportions and increasing.
America is the world’s only nation with a website named “Killed by Police.org” to document the epidemic of civilians killed by police, and the only nation where local newspapers have sections devoted to listing the number of daily killings in each neighborhood of the major cities to assist citizens in house purchases.
Violent crime rates in the US are at least an order of magnitude above those of China or Japan (and many other nations).
Corruption
The US also has one of the most corrupt police and judicial systems in the world.
No Western country is particularly free of this charge, but America excels. As one example, the US has by far the largest number in the world of citizens falsely convicted by fraudulent testimony, some 40,000 convictions caused by one fraudulent forensics lab alone.
And of course, the US has the world’s largest espionage network by orders of magnitude, with an ambition to steal every secret and to record and save every communication by every human on the planet.
Leadership Corruption
The author is getting a little bit "off the deep end" in his accusations here...
It is no longer a secret that American-style democracy has a few flaws, with extreme dysfunction and rampant corruption among the more visible, though looting the public trough would run a close second. The US also has the government most totally over-run with puppet-masters and controlled by parasitic aliens, having entirely lost control to its various lobbies and with all its elected officials having sworn allegiance to the Jews and Israel rather than to America.
The US has the highest number and percentage of Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense Secretaries who were certifiable as criminally insane and who should have been given lobotomies and committed to institutions for life.
Too many names to list here. America is the one nation that has more or less institutionalised government corruption at virtually every level, extending deeply into the judiciary, the regulatory bodies and Congress, as well as local and state governments.
The US is well-known for compiling the most fraudulent economic statistics of all developed and undeveloped nations, including the hugely fictitious ‘average income’ of $45,000, and is one of the most indebted of all countries in the world today. I strongly suggest everyone read this short article on US economic statistics[38] and cease the rubbish about how China’s numbers can’t be trusted.
White Collar Crime
Not to be outdone, the US media are in a class by themselves in terms of dishonesty, bias, censorship, and petty opinion-based journalism. American journalists are mostly cut from the same cloth, displaying more or less the same malignancies.
The US has the most complete immunity for elite white-collar crime, prosecuting only its person-companies but never the persons. Americans boast of their transparent and corruption-free financial system, and the US media enjoys trashing China for what appears to be an occasional corporate fraud. But in the long list of the world’s largest corporate bankruptcies due to fraud and corruption, all but one occurred in the US. Ron Unz prepared a list that included Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia, MF Global, Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia.
The US has also been home to the world’s largest Ponzi schemes like those of Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, that resulted in almost $100 billion in public losses. It is the US, not China, that is the home to corporate fraud and deceit, while all but two of the largest corporate frauds in China in recent decades were committed by American firms, not Chinese.
A Hated Nation
To end our list of areas in which American Exceptionalism truly shines, the US has for years been deservedly voted the world’s most hated nation, is widely reviled as the world’s greatest bully, and judged by all peoples – including Americans – as the greatest threat to world peace.
Lest anyone think the above list is unfair or exaggerated, you can do a simple test by applying the items to other countries. Germany, for example, or China or Canada.
Certainly every nation has some deaths, crime, divorces, military spending and so on, but none of the items in this list can be applied to Germany, China or Canada, nor to any other nation. The US does have the greatest debt, highest military spending, racism, killings, guns, incarceration, torture prisons, initiated wars, and all the rest.
The records for inequality, obesity, consumption, personal debt, poverty, cocaine use, murders, all belong to America, with no other nation even in the running. The claim is as demonstrably true for ignorance and hypocrisy as it is for police brutality. As an accusation or an indictment, the list is 100% accurate, a factual description of America as it is today, seen without the propaganda and rose-colored glasses.
Treason
A complete list of areas of American Exceptionalism must include one other item:The most traitors. This unfortunate category exists on several levels, the first being the President and White House staff and the US Congress who, as we already know, have pledged allegiance to Israel rather than America.
The second is the foreign-owned US FED, criminally pursuing its own agenda while systematically destroying the economic fabric of America. The cadre of elite owners of most large US banks and multinationals fall into this category as well, pursuing their own private advantage while consciously gutting the economy of their own nation.
But there is a third, more pervasive level, a large cadre of educated Americans who are essentially compradors, traitors to most of their values and to their people, embedded in the system and dependent on it, participating fully in the destruction of their own country by acting as lieutenants for the officials of the secret government. These individuals are vital for the success of the transformation of the US to a fascist state, with the elites dependent upon them to execute their policies, yet they also profit from their positions in terms of attractive salaries and protection from much of the law.
These are the people who best know of all the crimes and social injustices, being in fact a willing part of their execution process, but least likely to blow the whistle for fear of damaging their careers. It is the middle level of educated executives, lawyers, accountants and managers in government, criminal corporations, Foundations, think tanks, the media, and so many others, who are directly responsible for knowingly inflicting the vast damage on their own people and nation. Like the CEOs of the banks and multinationals, these compradors seek only their own advantage, discarding their human values and blinding themselves to the harm they do.
The following bulleted list is for your ease in reading.
American Exceptionalism in listed format…
Greatest Income Inequality of major nations
Lowest social mobility
Smallest middle class and largest lower class of all major nations
Largest amount of personal debt
Highest percentage of university graduates with massive student-loan debts
Lowest percentage of home-owners of major nations
Highest number of homeless of major nations
Highest percentage of repossessed homes and autos in the world
Highest Poverty rate of major nations
Largest number of children in poverty and homeless children in major nations
Greatest slums and urban decay of any Western nation
Highest percentage of population receiving government food aid
Highest level of unemployed, under-employed, and part-time employed
The highest number of people aged 65 to 75 returning to the workforce to survive
Only nation with no mandated paid holidays or maternity leave
Highest educational costs
Highest functional illiteracy rate of all developed and semi-developed nations
Highest level of ignorance
Highest health care costs
Most people without health care
The only Western nation with high GM food content
Highest infant mortality rate
Highest obesity rate
Shortest life expectancy at birth
Highest rate of sexually-transmitted diseases
Greatest production and access of pornography
Highest anti-depressant drug use
Highest teen-age pregnancy and abortion rates among developed countries
Largest number of one-person households
Largest percentage of fatherless children
The most strident nationalism of all nations
Highest level of racism and race-related violence
Highest number and percentage of guns
Highest murder rate
Highest number of gun shootings
Largest number of firearms crimes per year
Highest cocaine and meth usage
Largest number of lawyers and lawsuits
Highest carbon emissions
Highest military spending
Highest arms sales
Largest network of foreign military bases (1,000) and foreign bio-weapons labs[400]
Most wars of aggression of any nation in the history of the world
Most governments destabilised and overthrown
Largest number of foreign leaders and officials assassinated
Longest-lasting genocide in the history of the world
Largest network of torture prisons – and prison ships – in the history of the world
Worst human rights record of all nations, possibly excepting Israel
Highest incarceration rate
Highest percentage of population with criminal records
Largest number of civilian internment camps
Most militarised civilian police force
Largest number of civilians killed by police
Highest number in the world of violent SWAT raids on civilian homes
The only nation with widespread civil forfeiture
Largest commercial and military espionage network
The government most over-run by parasitic aliens
Highest percentage of criminally-insane Presidents and officials in history
Most institutionalised government corruption
Most complete immunity for elite white-collar crime
Most and largest corporate bankruptcies due to fraud
Most fraudulent economic statistics of any major nation
Most biased and dishonest media and columnists
Most hypocritical of all nations
Most hated nation
World’s greatest bully
Greatest threat to world peace
The American Government
So what is in control of this entire mess? What person or persons oversee this “great land of exceptionalism”?
This is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.
This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.
This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.
This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power. The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.
This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely.
This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.
This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.
This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.
This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, failing to teach them their rights under the Constitution, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.
This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.
This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.
This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.
This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.
This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.
This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.
This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.
In sum, this is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.
This is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.
The United States is a mess. While it was once an exceptional nation, now it is something else entirely.
You can either accept things as they are…
You can try to change it through available channels.
You can try to change it outside of regular channels…
You can leave it and sail far away and let it collapse in upon itself.
Your life is in your hands. What are you gonna do about it?
I bailed.
Here is downtown Shenzhen, China. This is the Nanshan district. The rest of world not only isn’t anything that resembles what the United States media says it is, but it’s actually far nicer than anything remaining inside of America today.
Downtown Shenzhen China. Movie of a typical Nanshan street.
Your life is in your hands.
What you do with the time you have will define the kind of life that you will live.
Do you want more?
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You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
When a beloved pet dies, the first thing that you notice is that the fleas start to move off the body. And when a ship is sinking, one of the noticeable aspects is to watch the rats and mice as they try to jump over board. Could the rapid, and (some say) crazed departures from the American urban cities portend something of significance?
I tend to say “yes”.
The following article is titled ” America’s Summer Exodus: Thousands Flee The Cities Every Day Because They Don’t Feel Safe”. It was written on by Michael Snyder . All credit to the author. Please note that it was edited to fit this venue.
America’s Summer Exodus: Thousands Flee The Cities Every Day Because They Don’t Feel Safe
In modern American history, we have never seen such a sudden mass exodus away from our major cities. Overall, the U.S. economy is a complete and total disaster in 2020, but moving companies and real estate agents that work in desirable rural and suburban areas are absolutely thriving right now. Each weekend we are seeing long lines at U-Haul rental facilities, moving companies can’t handle all of the requests that they are getting, and property values are shifting at a pace that is difficult to believe. Homes in our core urban areas are losing value very rapidly, and at the same time we are seeing bidding wars for some rural and suburban properties that are absolutely insane.
I certainly can’t blame anyone that wants to escape the violence. If I was living in a major city that was being torn apart by violence, I would want to move too.
New York
At one time we had some of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but now the word “apocalyptic” is being used to describe them. The following comes from an article by Victor Davis Hanson…
Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.
The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb. Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America. Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.
Chicago
Chicago is one of the cities that has been the most affected by the violence, and the Chicago Tribune recently posted an article about the mass exodus that the city is now experiencing…
Incidents of widespread looting and soaring homicide figures in Chicago have made national news during an already tumultuous year. As a result, some say residents in affluent neighborhoods downtown, and on the North Side, no longer feel safe in the city’s epicenter and are looking to move away. Aldermen say they see their constituents leaving the city, and it’s a concern echoed by some real estate agents and the head of a sizable property management firm.
Following the horrific looting in Chicago a couple weeks ago, a Tribune reporter visited some of the wealthier parts of the city, and that reporter encountered residents that indicated that they would be leaving “as soon as we can get out”…
The day after looting broke out two weeks ago, a Tribune columnist strolled through Gold Coast and Streeterville. Residents of the swanky Near North Side told him they’d be moving “as soon as we can get out.” Others expressed fear of returning downtown in the future.
Of course Chicago is far from alone.
In a previous article, I discussed the fact that the New York Times has reported that hundreds of thousands of people have already left New York City. After losing so many residents, you would think that the mass exodus would be slowing down, but that does not appear to be happening.
Moving trucks were out in force on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Saturday — leaving Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa practically tripping over them.
“The mass evacuation of Upper West Siders from NYC is in full effect,” Sliwa, who lives on W. 87th Street, lamented, blaming the city’s decision this summer to house hundreds of emotionally disturbed homeless and recovering addicts in neighborhood hotels.
And someone filmed a stunningly long line at a U-Haul rental location in New York on Saturday. In all my years, I don’t think that I have ever seen anything like that at a U-Haul facility.
Rural New Jersey
Of course all of those people need to have somewhere to go, and this is creating massive bidding wars for properties in the suburbs…
Over three days in late July, a three-bedroom house in East Orange, N.J., was listed for sale for $285,000, had 97 showings, received 24 offers and went under contract for 21 percent over that price.
On Long Island, six people made offers on a $499,000 house in Valley Stream without seeing it in person after it was shown on a Facebook Live video. In the Hudson Valley, a nearly three-acre property with a pool listed for $985,000 received four all-cash bids within a day of having 14 showings.
Isn’t that crazy?
But this is what happens when vast hordes of wealthy people are trying to relocate all at once.
San Francisco
On the west coast we are seeing similar things happen. Property values in rural and suburban communities are being driven up, and meanwhile prices in core urban areas are falling very quickly. For example, just check out what is taking place in San Francisco…
San Francisco has seen a greater increase in price drops than any other U.S. metro, with the share of sellers slashing prices more than doubling from a year ago as the COVID-19 related panic drives homebuyers out of the Bay Area, reports Redfin.
A quarter (24.5%) of San Francisco-area home sellers cut their list prices during the four weeks ending Aug. 16, the highest share since at least 2015, when Redfin began recording this data. That’s more than double the rate from a year earlier, marking the largest annual increase in the share of active listings with price drops among the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas.
Some Californians are choosing to relocate within the state, but of course many others are fleeing the state entirely.
Arizona
One of the places many of them are heading to is Arizona, and one recent Yahoo News article commented on the “surge in California license plates” in the state…
Driving across Arizona, it’s hard not to notice a surge in California license plates. The reason for this is becoming more apparent every day. California is a failed state.
If you currently live in an urban area and you are still thinking about relocating, I would make a decision rapidly. Summer is almost over, economic conditions are going to continue to deteriorate, and much more civil unrest is coming.
And countless other Americans also seem to be deeply alarmed about the near future, because we have never seen a mass exodus of this magnitude in modern American history.
The times, they are a-changin’, and life in our country will never be quite the same again.
Conclusion
This migration out of the cities is more than just interesting. It is more than just “a sign of the times”, or a reaction of riots and trouble. It is a sign that the cities have fallen into disarray, where the Rule of Law no longer exists, and that mob rule is the norm. Those that have the means to leave, do so.
And they are.
All the elements of a civil war are happening. Burning buildings, government in disarray, wealthy fleeing, empty store shelves, and a serious drop in industry. The only thing that we are not seeing is armed conflict involving tanks, planes and big-bore weapons.
Is that next?
Or, is this all there is? A peaceful migration of the capable out of the population and cultural centers.
To me, looking from the outside, it appears that a “stage is being set”, or in other words, conditions are being laid down methodologically. What we will see in the next few months should give people pause to consider…
The cities will be populated with mostly urban poor, and trapped middle class.
The coronavirus has disrupted food supplies, and industry, creating a situation of large numbers of people staying at their homes IN PLACE.
Government laws, and services at all levels are non-functional.
The citizenry are fearful, worried and unsure of their future and looking for change.
What scenarios can take advantage of this situation?
Or more precisely, which scenarios would utilize this situation to exert a level of massive change to the United States?
My guess is that is what we all can expect to occur; those scenarios that fit the build up and situation that we see unfolding before our eyes. Which makes sense that all of this is INTENTIONAL and not accidental. Which means that no matter what occurs in the future, it is planned to occur. And as such, it is planned to occur in a precise and exacting way.
That is the only thing that makes sense right now.
The USA must downsize in order to be governed properly. That can occur via two methods;
Restructure the United States into smaller local regions (states) and abolish the federal centralized government. Smaller governments rule over smaller populations.
Keep the government as it is, and depopulate all of the urban areas.
There are no other options.
Which scenario lies ahead? We will see.
Which scenario would the PTB; the oligarchy opt for?
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You’ll not
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because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Ambassador Fox:Your refusal to comply with my orders has endangered the entire success of this mission. I can have you sent to a penal colony for this.Mr Scott:That you can, sir, but I won’t lower the screens.Ambassador Fox:Your name will figure prominently in my report to the Federation Central.Doctor McCoy:Well, Scotty, now you’ve done it.Mr. Scott:Aye. The haggis is in the fire for sure, but I’ll not lower my defenses on the word of that mealy-mouthed gentleman down below. Not until I know what happened to the Captain.
-Star Trek, A Taste of Armageddon 1967
This is not your red vs. blue kind of conflict. This is not the SA fighting the SS. This is not the Northern “Boys in Blue” marching against “Johnny Reb” in grey. This is not the glorious Allied forces fighting the evil Nazi’s. This is something different and on a completely different level.
I anticipate the normal horrors of war, and mayhem. But only this time it will be up front, up close, and right in your face. It will be like the hand to hand, street to street conflicts going on in the Bosnia / Hertivogania conflict. Only this time, it will include all sorts of unexpected and dangerous “innovations”.
And for all of you who think that you and your trusty .303 will be able to fight back against under-educated hordes, you are woefully wrong. Both sides have no idea just how nasty things can be. And both sides are going to spill a lot of blood, and there will be great sadness and agony in the process. All the time, the oligarchy will sit away smug inside their bunkers isolated from the carnage that they set upon the world.
The following is an interesting article. Some military-trained conservatives decided to visit an Antifa riot, and they were wholly unprepared for what they encountered. It’s a good read whether or not you agree with their intent, or their politics. Just take note that war is never what you expect.
The smart man avoids war, and runs away from conflict.
The following article is titled “Antifa Reality Check”. It was posted by NC Scout on September 5, 2020. It is reproduced with minor editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
“Very basic background. My friend is a prior service 1st LAR 0311, 0351. (from Wiki: 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion is a fast and mobilized armoredterrestrial reconnaissance battalion of the United States Marine Corps.) Multiple tours in the early to late 2000s, then DoE, then was put through selection and went to work for Colonel G____ as a team member. Since leaving, he has been doing contract work.
He is an experienced and capable meat eater and the furthest thing from a pussy or coward. Try to learn from his experiences.
“Me and three of my buddies were in Portland this weekend, got attacked by Antifa. There’s a Twitter video with millions of views on it. They ended up on Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro etc., of us getting beaten with bats and rocks the size of cantaloupes thrown at us, getting spit on etc. We were all carrying pistols as well. Opportunity, ability and jeopardy, we were in a deadly force situation and we could easily articulate the use of deadly force, but they had pepper sprayed us. They were using industrial strobe lights on us, etc. We couldn’t PID our target and what lied beyond it, They did a great job of taking our situational awareness away, it was fucking incredible.
Bro my perspective on this changed so much.
The reason we were there wasn’t to counter protest or some shit, **** and *****, two of the guys with me, one of which is a bronze star and Purple Heart recipient. They’re both in the hiring process for the Portland Police Department. One is from Ohio and one is from Virginia. They both flew in that day just so they could come check out the city before they move their families across the nation.
Something else that I should make perfectly clear. We went to the Federal Courthouse first. There wasn’t a whole lot going on down there. We walked around and took some pictures. Bumped into a Sheriff at one point. Talked to him for a while. We asked him if the riots were over? He said fuck no, they’re trying to fuck a police station up right now on 47th and Burnside, We asked him if we could go, and he said yeah, it’s still a peaceful assembly, it hasn’t been declared a riot yet….
So, legit, we walked into this thing blind, in hindsight it was stupid on our part, I had no idea that they were like that. If it had been a full-blown riot we would not have gone. Bottom line, man, if you had ever given me a scenario like this and said hey, you’re sober, and you have a gun, and somebody is hitting you with a bat and throwing rocks at you that could kill you or put you in a coma, you try to get away but they cut you off with a convoy of vehicles and the assault starts again. They impede your movement and beat you with bats… Would you shoot?
I’d be like, yeah what fucking planet are you from?
But in all the training that I’ve been through my life, I’ve never been in one where in the first five seconds of the scenario you’re blinded with a strobe light and sprayed with pepper spray…. That changes everything. They were throwing these rocks from 15 feet back in the crowd, you couldn’t see who the fuck through it, etc. things like that…. It’s just a good talking point for guys that carry concealed, but you need to think through all these different scenarios.
It got way worse after that video ended, they chased us for 11 city blocks. They had a convoy of about 25 vehicles that cut us off at the next intersection, They had scouts on the corner with radios, they had a drone following us, they had a bull horn calling us Nazis, and the crowd was following a red strobe light that was up in the air on a stick, so they would announce Nazis and then people would follow the red strobe light, That video is just the beginning, I’ve got a fucking fractured hand from a baton, everyone of us has black and blue bruises up and down their legs and back, I had a guy spit in my face from 6 inches away, call me a pussy and a coward for not doing anything about it, and then tell me that he was going to find where I live, rape my mother, rape my children in front of me and then kill me.
I’ve never been more angry about something in my fucking life, the level of restraint that it took for us to not fight back in any capacity whether that was with a gun or fists is incredible. All of us have kids at home. The only thing going through all of our minds was we have to be able to justify deadly force if we’re going to go that route, there’s also hundreds of these people, we can’t see straight because of all the pepper spray, and it’s hard to PID exactly who is throwing these rocks and hitting us with batons, because they would hit you and fucking run and their buddy would run up and hit you. It was an incredibly stressful situation, they did a very good job tactically of taking away your situational awareness, and in my opinion complicating your legal defense when you split one of their faces open with a hollow point.
As we were running from the crowd after about the third block or so, we’re sprinting because the mob head caught back up to us and vehicles were trying to cut us off, I put my hand on the back strap on my appendix, And I heard somebody yell “Hey bro, whatever you’re reaching for, don’t reach, just keep running, they’re still 30 feet behind you. Keep running straight.”
We get 11 blocks down the road and this black Chevy Impala is ghosting us down the street, he’s kind of been in our shadow since block two or three He rolls his window down and starts asking us a bunch of questions. Why are we here, what are we doing, telling us we need to get the fuck out of here, asking us where our car is etc., we pretty much told him to get the fuck away from us because we didn’t know who he was. I finally asked him at one point, Who the fuck are you, man, you need to leave us alone, and he was like I’m the fucking police, bro, who are you?
So he pulled his car over and he and his partner talked to us. He was one of the special programs guys, either with SWAT or SRT or whatever. He was the one that yelled at me not to reach, and tried to help us out. He said he knew that we’ve been pepper sprayed and we’re having trouble seeing, I kind of snapped at him, Like hey motherfucker, You’ve been watching this whole thing fucking unfold and you didn’t intervene at all or light the crowd up or something? He started laughing and he was like, Man, if I got out and tried to help you guys, my fucking car would be on fire right now, and I’d be running next to you.
Bottom line: don’t go to an Antifa protest where you can put yourself in that situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, expect them to employ tactics that take away your situational awareness, and complicate the use of force continuum.”
Conclusion
War is something that should be considered as an option of last resort. It doesn’t matter if you are two people having a disagreement, or two nations involved in some kind of trade dispute. All war is ugly, crazy and unexpected.
Here, we have well trained soldiers going against militant civilians on their turf. They entered equipped, and read to go “hot” if need be. They had to be arrogant, for they were moving into an environment that was hostile and they were not concerned. In my “book”, it makes them cocky.
When I see Donald Trump sending Two complete assault carrier battle groups to the Chinese coastline, so close that you could see everyone with your own eyes. And then, expecting to threaten China in that action, I see the same kind of cocky invincibility as is written here.
Real war is not a Tom Clancy novel, it is not Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger killing hundreds of people with single shots to the forehead. It’s actually very uncomfortable, very horrible, and something that you don’t want to have any part of.
Expect to be surprised, tricked, betrayed, and killed.
Right now the United States is in the opening stages of Civil War, and the fact that the President is doing nothing (and don’t give me those excuses that he is powerless) tells me everything that I need to know about who is behind this, and what the objectives are.
Any president that can ban cat videos on cell phones, arrest foreign CEO’s by proxy, unleash a global bio-weapon the COVID-19, and blow up BRI shipping ports with a micro-nuke most certainly…
…most certainly…
…stop all the riots and unrest going on in the country today.
So. Everyone. Avoid all the conflict. Do not be under the impression that you will be able to fight off invading urban youth marching and screaming into bullhorns. It won’t be that way. You all won’t be playing cowboys and Indians inside a wooden stockade fort.
It will be black urban youth hyped up on drugs with kill-lust in their eyes. They will ride into your neighborhoods in brand new vehicles and pickup trucks mounting full automatic weapons. They will use drones, and fly bombs, and firebomb your community. They will attack, while flanking units go behind you and kidnap your family. They will leave raw earth, fire and blacked destruction in their wake.
Learn the lessons listed here in.
If you haven’t already, relocate to a quiet and boring place where you can ride out the up coming shit storm.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
When American people talk about China it’s all so very silly. They repeat whatever narrative that the American media has fed to them. Anything outside of that narrative is just discarded and ignored. Conservatives will repeat how evil China is, and Progressives will repeat how repressive it is. And both narratives are lies. For China is many things, but the American two-dimensional narrative, nope! It’s not even close.
One of the more amusing narratives is the changing views on China. If you actually pay attention you can follow the evolution of the narratives and observe just how the American population has been manipulated.
1970s – Eat your vegetables, think of all the starving people in China!
1980s – China is yearning for democracy! But the government imprisons everyone.
1990s – China is just a manufacturer of cheap junk and low priced gadgets.
2000s – China only copies things, they just are unable to innovate.
2010s – China uses slave labor, child labor, and pollutes terribly.
2020s – China is dangerous! We must destroy China; our ENEMY!
Prior to Donald Trump becoming President, China held the status of “Most Favored Trading Partner”. Now four years into the Donald Trump Presidency, they are considered the Number one Enemy of “Freedom, Liberty, Justice and the American Way!”
Depending on what narrative (see above) the ignorant use to describe China, we can determine just how uneducated they are in global technology, trade, and world politics.
It’s actually funny, if it wasn’t so Gosh Darn Sad.
For
many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the
world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive
list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the
moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The
US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one, in many fields.
But:
China has risen explosively, from being clearly a “Third World” country forty years ago to become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America.
Anyone who has seen today’s China (I recently spent two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been astonished by the ubiquitous construction, the quality of planning, the roads and airports and high-speed rail, the sense of confidence and modernity.
Guangzhou, China. September 2020.
Compare this with America’s rotting and dangerous cities, swarms of homeless people, deteriorating education, antique rail, deindustrialized midlands, loony government, and the military sucking blood from the economy like some vast leech, and America will seem yesterday’s country.
The phrase “national suicide” comes to mind.
Los Angeles, USA. September 2020.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion that the Chinese can’t invent anything, just copy and steal.
What one actually sees is a combination of rapid and successful adoption of foreign technology (see Shanghai maglev below) and, increasingly, cutting edge science and technology. More attention might be in order. A few examples: A few examples from many that might be adduced:
Supposedly the intent was to make the twins resistant to AIDS. It was done using CRISPR-Cas 9, a gene-editing technique invented in the West by Jennifer Dooudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier but quickly mastered by China.
It seemed odd that AIDS resistance would be the goal since the disease is easily avoided. Maybe, I thought, for some technical reason the insertion was particularly easy. But then:
“By accident” indeed. Since the researchers admitted being aware of the neurologic effects of CCR5, the gene in question, the experiment sure looked like a shot at increasing intelligence.
Whether
the insertion in fact had the effect described, I do not know, and the
story maybe or may not be sensationalized. Of interest are, first, that
it was an attempt to engineer intelligence, second, that it involved
inserting a human gene in a (presumably) lower primate, and third, that
the Chinese did it.
“China, Huawei to Launch 5G network in Shanghai Station”
Though
5G is usually presented as an improvement to smartphones, it is far
more, and the Chinese seem poised to jump on it hard. See below.
September 2020. 5G is "old technology" now. Work is in progress for 6G.
“World’s First 5G powered Remote Brain Surgery Performed in China”
It
is interesting that China and South Korea are clear leaders in 5G. The
US, unable to compete seeks to prohibit its European vassals from
dealing with Huawei by threatening sanctions. Germany has refused to
obey. .
Whether Forbes’ overstates the facts can perhaps be argued. That China has come from nowhere to be ahead in a crucial technology ought to be a wake-up call.
That America has to rely on sanctions instead of better technology accentuates the point.
A couple of decades ago, Chinese students in the US often refused to return to a backward and repressive country. It now appears that Asia is where the action is and they want to be part of it.
These things are everywhere. Click the link.Inmost countries roads and rails follow the contour of the land. China likes pillars.
Chinese Mega-Bridges are everywhere.
Digging
subways is expensive and disruptive, cutting highways through cities is
destructive of homes and business, so China goes with sky-trains.
Building these takes about half the land as roadways. The bridges are
built offsite and then erected with a special crane.
“China Develops Infrared Light to Alter Genes of Cancer Cells””
A
team led by Professor Song Yujun from the Nanjing University’s College
of Engineering and Applied Sciences designed an infrared
light-responsive nano-carrier to be used for the CRISPR-Cas9
gene-editing tool, which will have great potential in cancer
therapeutics. The strong penetrability of infrared light enables
scientists to precisely control the gene editing tool in deep human
tissue”
I am
clueless as to the function of IR in this but, as with so very many
stories coming out of China, it does not suggest copycatting.
increasingly, the Chinese seem to following from in front.
“China Breaks Quantum Entanglement Record at Eighteen Qbits”
In a
new record, Pan Jianwei and colleagues at the University of Science and
Technology of China, eastern China’s Anhui Province, demonstrated a
stable 18-qubit state. The previous record of 10 qubits was set by the
same team. The breakthrough was made possible by simultaneously
manipulating the freedom-paths, polarization, and orbital angular
momentum of six photons.
“The speed of quantum computing grows exponentially as the number of qubits in an entangled state increases … the achievement of an 18-qubit entanglement this time has set the world record for largest entanglement state in all physical systems,”
-Wan
(Noah’s ark measured 300 Qbits, but the (barely) antediluvian technology has bee lost.)
Open Date: Dec. 31st, 2002 Total Length: 30 kilometers (19 miles) Highest Speed: 430km/h (267 mi/h) Duration per Single Journey: 8 minutes Frequency: 15-20 minutes Route: Longyang Rd. – Pudong International Airport (PVG
Trains relying on magnetic levitation float on a field of magnetic repulsion, having no contact with rails. This reduces friction and ends wear on wheels and rails. China did not invent the technology but uses it well. Before this train, the trip from downtown to the airport took forty minutes to an hours.
Now, eight minutes.
The technology is German, the idea a century old, but the Chinese decided that they wanted it, and got it. The ability to make a decision and act on it without years of political wrangling and lawsuits gives China a major advantage over other countries.
The
video is long, at 43 minutes, a bit ray-rah, and wanders briefly off
into the history of elevated rail in Chicago but gives a good picture of
the train, the technology at a non-specialist level, and the China in
which it runs.
Rand: Chilling World War III Wargames show US Forces Crushed by Russia and China
“RAND Senior Defense Analyst David Ochmanek discussed the simulations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. last week. “In our games, where we fight China or Russia … blue gets its a** handed to it, not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, during a panel discussion. Blue denotes U.S. forces in the simulations.”
The reasons for this are several and belong in another column. The military’s utterly predictable response is “Send more money” instead of “Maybe we should mind our own business and spend on our economy.”
The point here is that the world is changing in may ways and Washington seems not to have noticed.
Conclusion
The list could be extended at length, to cover numbers of patents awarded, scientific papers published, quantum communications, investment in education and technological research and development, supercomputers and chip design and many other things.
Beijing is clearly bent on Making China Great Again–as why should it not?
Meanwhile America focuses more on transgender bathrooms and whether Bruce Jenner is a girl than on its endless and draining wars.
China sends its brightest to the world’s best technical school while America makes its universities into playpens for the mildly retarded. The country crumbles but spends drunkenly of defective fighter planes it doesn’t need in the first place.
This won’t work a whole lot longer.
Do you want more?
I have more articles on China inside of my China Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
It’s one thing to have Alex Jones predicting that the United States is going to collapse any day now, and it is another thing entirely when an intelligence analyst says so. And thus we have this bit of shocking news. A global military intelligence website has revised it’s five year forecast to predict a massive drop in American population by 2025.
Deagel.com is apparently some sort of global military intelligence site. They have had an online presence since 2003. They report on high-level military equipment assets and keep track of military expenditures by country “with nearly impeccable numbers”. It’s very similar to Janes.
However, unlike Janes, this is not an “Industry” outlet. But rather an “intelligence” outlet staffed with retired or former intelligence and military folk. As such, it is interesting to those of us that follow the military trends in industry.
Now, since the Military-Industrial cabal has pretty much the “lion’s share” of the oligarchy control over the United States government, any military intelligence related to this should be considered important. For this level of intelligence is what industry uses to make forecasts and projects for markets and survivability of the sales generation options.
In Late August, the Internet was all buzzing about a forecast on this website…
Deagel Forecast For USA – Population Drops 70% by 2025
One aspect of their site is to “forecast” financial outlooks for countries around the world. They track GDP (gross domestic product), defense budgets, and even population (forecasts) for each country.
No one knows for sure, but I’ve read that their sources are “the ‘deep state’ with the CIA, US Department of Defense, US Department of State and World Bank contributing data for their forecasts.
According to their own website, Deagel provides news and intelligence on international military aviation and advanced technologies.
Little is known about the real owner(s). The site name is registered in France. All online information about them is “redacted for privacy”. The site hosting company is located in Old Tappan, New Jersey. Which is pretty much in a semi-rural location with some nice wooded hills and nothing much else. The only thing that I can recall (personally) about that area is the rather large contingent of Jewish establishments there.
Deagel Forecasts Massive Depopulation in the USA by 2025
They have been forecasting a huge population drop in the United States for several years. They haven’t changed their forecast. It’s been projected to decrease for a long time now. And the election of Donald trump made no difference in the projection.
Current population of the USA is about 327 million.
What this means is that the defense intelligence organizations represented by Deagel believe that there will be some kind of event or series of events that will result in a major population drop by 2025.
Deagel site projections.
From the chart above we can clearly see a number of conclusions or extrapolations that they have made.
[1] USA Population (Red notations)
According to their projections, by the years 2025, the population of the United States would decrease. It would go from 327 million people to 100 million people. This would be approximately a 70% decrease in population over a short period of time (from now 2020 to 2025 = five years).
[2] World Population (Purple notations)
According to their projections, the entire world would suffer through a depopulation event. With the population decreasing from 7,385 million people to 6.870 million people. This is a drop of 515 million people. This is about a 7% decrease in the world population.
Thus taking [1] and [2] together, we can see that they expect the United States to take the brunt of most of the population decrease.
[3] American Defense Budget (Blue Notations)
We can see that they anticipate a very drastic decrease in American military spending by 2025. From $637 billion to $32 billion. It would be a reduction to 5% of what the current budget is.
Certainly they anticipate that the American military would be repurposed to a significant extent and this budget would not be able to support any kinds of expeditionary foreign operations.
[4] Global Defense Budgets (Green Notations)
This is very interesting, while there is a slight decrease in global defense spending, the change in spending values is small (comparatively). The global spending would go from $1.7 trillion to $1.2 trillion dollars.
Obviously they believe that the rest of the world’s military would still be funded at nearly the same levels as presently shown.
What are they saying?
To look at the chart and observe the numbers, they anticipate some kind of event or series of events that will take place IN AMERICA between 2020 and 2025.
These event(s) will dramatically decrease the size of the United States population.
The global population will also be reduced as well, but not at all at the same level of catastrophic drop that America will experience. It will not be as catastrophic to the rest of the world as it will be for Americans.
By 2025, the American military would be severely scaled down to a mere 5% of what it is now (by budget). But the rest of the world would pretty much keep their military budgets as the same level.
And this all means that…
America’s GDP will collapse from $19T to $1.6T.
PPP (Power purchasing parity) would collapse from $60,000 to $16,000
The resulting America would not look like anything that would be recognizable to anyone today. Those survivors would be struggling financially, and economically. America would not longer be a global superpower or “the policeman” for the world. Most of the rest of the world would move on, and continue with their lives and societies. While Americans would be undergoing some very severe changes to it’s society and cultures.
How did they arrive at these conclusions?
No one really knows how they came to these numbers and figures. But we do know that these are the same kinds of figures that the intelligence and military agencies use to make forecasts for spending, planning and purchases.
What I can pretty much say is that these figures pretty much match up with the John Titor narrative. He claimed to be a time traveler from the future, and pretty much said all of what is being presented here. It’s just that his dates were off by exactly ten years.
You all can read what he had to say in my John Titor Index here…
But these figures pretty much agree with the Fourth Turning predictions and other predictive sources that I have mentioned in my SHTF Index. Many people are pretty much convinced that the USA is under a state of collapse. The question is not “if”, but “When” and “how bad” it will be.
And let me offer some thoughts…
Metallicman commentary
There’s much I can say, and much that I cannot. But I will throw out some things to give the reader pause to contemplate…
A 70% decrease in the population signifies either [1] massive starvation, [2] a bio-weapon (i.e. smallpox. Something with a high R0 and high lethality.) WMD, or [3] A MAD level nuclear exchange with Russia.
China is “small potatoes” in regards to nuclear weapons. Their entire military is defensive in nature. They are no slouches, and could render the top ten American cities into radioactive glass. But they are not equipped to wage this kind of war with the USA. This level of destruction involves Russia.
Many people could die in an American Civil War, but not at a 70% level.
The low estimate of 600,000 is 1.91 percent of the census population. And 750,000 deaths would represent 2.38 percent of the total population. All told, the Civil War likely claimed somewhere between 2 percent and 2.5 percent of the total population.
-What Percentage of Americans Died During the Civil War ...
Starvation
Intentional starvation is the ONLY method, short of a full-on MAD-level nuclear exchange would result in these kinds of deaths. History tells us that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot all were very successful in this effort.
In fact, the starvation of the Eastern European peoples by Stalin is exactly the kinds of events that can result in these high and terrifying numbers…
So I would have to suggest that it might be due to starvation. This is a true and real possibility. Either through the loss and destruction of crops, or transportation and distribution channels, or by pricing the foods to un-affordable levels.
Bio-Weapons
The only nation that still maintains bio-weapon inventories and development is America. Last I heard it was under the control of neocon John Bolton.
The rest of the world just simply isn’t a threat.
Russia scaled down their operations back in the 1990’s. If the Russians still have this capability I would be surprised.
China has no bio-warfare labs, nor do they train and practice in this environment. Their only concern is defense.
North Korea might have bio-weapons, but there is no actual verification of this. Iran might also have bio-weapons, but again there is no actual verification of this.
The rest of the world just simply doesn’t have the resources to develop such weapons.
Since there is a real lack of “enemies” with this capability, it is unlikely that a bio-weapon event would ever occur. The only way that it would occur is if America used the weapons against some enemy and it boomeranged back to the United States.
Nuclear
True to form, Donald Trump has been re-configuring the military to use nuclear weapons in a strategic and tactical “humane” way. If so, this could trigger the Russian “Dead Hand” system, and unleash holy Hell upon an unprepared America.
Conclusion
How many times have you wished that you invested in Google back in the day when you had a chance? How many times do you lament not buying stock in Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Microsoft? Well the future seems to be written on the wall…
Well, it pretty much looks like anyone who is going to remain in the United States for the next ten years is in for a very exciting and dangerous time. I do hope that it does not materialize, but it looks to me that a nice small bungalow cabin in Chile might be preferable to a penthouse apartment in Los Angles, a suburban house near Portland, or a mobile home in Kentucky.
As I have stated before, if you can…
…then leave the States. At this point, it doesn’t matter where, or how ill-prepared you are. I think you all need to start making the preparations to either shelter-in-place, or bug-out to less dangerous neighborhoods.
Those top-tier oligarchy members left for their underground bunkers in early March 2020.
Their highly-paid enablers and support “armies” are all publishing articles like this one. You can well recognize that “the writing is on the wall”, and that action should be well in process by now.
What ever happens, please keep in mind that food storage is important, as is being armed with something simple and reliable and dangerous. Like a shotgun. (Forget about those AK-47 look-alike clones. They cannot hit the side of a barn.) Learn skills like first aid, and other things that can enable you to be a well liked and well-needed person in your community. And finally, stop being a lone wolf. You work as part of a community, or you will DIE.
Good wishes.
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This is a complete reprint of law 35 titled “Master the art of Timing” by Robert Greene from his book “The 48 Laws of Power”. You must anticipate the ebb and flow of power. Recognize when the time is right, and align yourself with the right side. Be patient and wait for your moment when you know you’ll benefit in the long run. Master the art of timing. When it’s time to make your end move against an opponent, strike without hesitation.
LAW 35
MASTER THE ART OF TIMING
JUDGMENT
Never seem to be in a hurry-hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time.
Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually.
Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power.
Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.
SERTORIUS’S LESSON
Sertorius’s strength was now rapidly increasing, for all the tribes between the Ebro and the Pyrenees came over to his side, and troops came flocking daily to join him from every quarter.
At the same time he was troubled by the lack of discipline and the overconfidence of these newly arrived barbarians, who would shout at him to attack the enemy and had no patience with his delaying tactics, and he therefore tried to win them over by argument. them over by argument.
But when he saw that they were discontented and persisted in pressing their demands regardless of the circumstances, he let them have their way and allowed them to engage the enemy; he hoped that they would suffer a severe defeat without being completely crushed, and that this would make them better disposed to obey his orders in future.
The event turned out as he expected and Sertorius came to their rescue, provided a rallying point for the fugitives, and led them safely back to his camp.
His next step was to revive their dejected spirits, and so a few days later he summoned a general assembly. Before it he produced two horses, one of them old and enfeebled, the other large and lusty and possessing a flowing tail, which was remarkable for the thickness and beauty of its hair.
By the side of the weak horse stood a tall strong man, and by the side of the powerful horse a short man of mean physique.
At a signal the strong man seized the tail of his horse and tried with all his strength to pull it towards him, as if to tear it off, while the weak man began to pull the hairs one by one from the tail of the strong horse.
The strong man, after tugging with all his might to no purpose and causing the spectators a great deal of amusement in the process, finally gave up the attempt, while the weak man quickly and with very little trouble stripped his horse’s tail completely bare.
Then Sertorius rose to his feet and said, “Now you can see, my friends and allies, that perseverance is more effective than brute strength and that there are many difficulties that cannot be overcome if you try to do everything at once, but which will yield if you master them little by little. The truth is that a steady continuous effort is irresistible, for this is the way in which Time captures and subdues the greatest powers on earth.
Now Time, you should remember, is a good friend and ally to those who use their intelligence to choose the right moment, but a most dangerous enemy to those who rush into action at the wrong one.
-”LIFE OF SERTORIUS, PLUTARCH, C.A.D. 46-120
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Starting out in life as a nondescript French seminary-school teacher, Joseph Fouché wandered from town to town for most of the decade of the 1780s, teaching mathematics to young boys. Yet he never completely committed himself to the church, never took his vows as a priest—he had bigger plans.
Patiently waiting for his chance, he kept his options open.
And when the French Revolution broke out, in 1789, Fouché waited no longer: He got rid of his cassock, grew his hair long, and became a revolutionary. For this was the spirit of the times.
To miss the boat at this critical moment could have spelt disaster.
Fouché did not miss the boat: Befriending the revolutionary leader Robespierre, he quickly rose in the rebel ranks.
In 1792 the town of Nantes elected Fouche to be its representative to the National Convention (created that year to frame a new constitution for a French republic).
When Fouché arrived in Paris to take his seat at the convention, a violent rift had broken out between the moderates and the radical Jacobins. Fouché sensed that in the long run neither side would emerge victorious.
Power rarely ends up in the hands of those who start a revolution, or even of those who further it; power sticks to those who bring it to a conclusion.
That was the side Fouche wanted to be on.
His sense of timing was uncanny.
He started as a moderate, for moderates were in the majority. When the time came to decide on whether or not to execute Louis XVI, however, he saw that the people were clamoring for the king’s head, so he cast the deciding vote—for the guillotine.
Now he had become a radical.
Yet as tensions came to the boil in Paris, he foresaw the danger of being too closely associated with any one faction, so he accepted a position in the provinces, where he could lie low for a while.
A few months later he was assigned to the post of proconsul in Lyons, where he oversaw the execution of dozens of aristocrats.
At a certain moment, however, he called a halt to the killings, sensing that the mood of the country was turning-and despite the blood already on his hands, the citizens of Lyons hailed him as a savior from what had become known as the Terror.
So far Fouché had played his cards brilliantly, but in 1794 his old friend Robespierre recalled him to Paris to account for his actions in Lyons.
Robespierre had been the driving force behind the Terror. He had sent heads on both the right and the left rolling, and Fouché, whom he no longer trusted, seemed destined to provide the next head.
Over the next few weeks, a tense struggle ensued: While Robespierre railed openly against Fouché, accusing of him dangerous ambitions and calling for his arrest, the crafty Fouché worked more indirectly, quietly gaining support among those who were beginning to tire of Robespierre’s dictatorial control.
Fouche was playing for time. He knew that the longer he survived, the more disaffected citizens he could rally against Robespierre. He had to have broad support before he moved against the powerful leader. He rallied support among both the moderates and the Jacobins, playing on the widespread fear of Robespierre-everyone was afraid of being the next to go to the guillotine.
It all came to fruition on July 27: The convention turned against Robespierre, shouting down his usual lengthy speech.
He was quickly arrested, and a few days later it was Robespierre’s head, not Fouché’s, that fell into the basket.
When Fouché returned to the convention after Robespierre’s death, he played his most unexpected move: Having led the conspiracy against Robespierre, he was expected to sit with the moderates, but lo and behold, he once again changed sides, joining the radical Jacobins.
For perhaps the first time in his life he aligned himself with the minority.
Clearly he sensed a reaction stirring: He knew that the moderate faction that had executed Robespierre, and was now about to take power, would initiate a new round of the Terror, this time against the radicals.
In siding with the Jacobins, then, Fouché was sitting with the martyrs of the days to come—the people who would be considered blameless in the troubles that were on their way.
Taking sides with what was about to become the losing team was a risky gambit, of course, but Fouché must have calculated he could keep his head long enough to quietly stir up the populace against the moderates and watch them fall from power.
And indeed, although the moderates did call for his arrest in December of 1795, and would have sent him to the guillotine, too much time had passed. The executions had become unpopular with the people, and Fouché survived the swing of the pendulum one more time.
A new government took over, the Directoire. It was not, however, a Jacobin government, but a moderate one—more moderate than the government that had reimposed the Terror.
Fouché, the radical, had kept his head, but now he had to keep a low profile.
He waited patiently on the sidelines for several years, allowing time to soften any bitter feelings against him, then he approached the Directoire and convinced them he had a new passion: intelligence-gathering.
He became a paid spy for the government, excelled at the job, and in 1799 was rewarded by being made minister of police.
Now he was not just empowered but required to extend his spying to every corner of France—a responsibility that would greatly reinforce his natural ability to sniff out where the wind was blowing.
One of the first social trends he detected, in fact, came in the person of Napoleon, a brash young general whose destiny he right away saw was entwined with the future of France. When Napoleon unleashed a coup d‘etat, on November 9, 1799, Fouche pretended to be asleep.
Indeed he slept the whole day.
For this indirect assistance—it might have been thought his job, after all, to prevent a military coup—Napoleon kept him on as minister of police in the new regime.
Over the next few years, Napoleon came to rely on Fouché more and more. He even gave this former revolutionary a title, duke of Otranto, and rewarded him with great wealth.
By 1808, however, Fouché, always attuned to the times, sensed that Napoleon was on the downswing. His futile war with Spain, a country that posed no threat to France, was a sign that he was losing a sense of proportion.
Never one to be caught on a sinking ship, Fouché conspired with Talleyrand to bring about Napoleon’s downfall. Although the conspiracy failed—Talleyrand was fired; Fouché stayed, but was kept on a tight leash—it publicized a growing discontent with the emperor, who seemed to be losing control.
By 1814 Napoleon’s power had crumbled and allied forces finally conquered him.
The next government was a restoration of the monarchy, in the form of King Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI. Fouché, his nose always sniffing the air for the next social shift, knew Louis would not last long—he had none of Napoleon’s flair.
Fouché once again played his waiting game, lying low, staying away from the spotlight.
Sure enough, in February of 1815, Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba, where he had been imprisoned.
Louis XVIII panicked: His policies had alienated the citizenry, who were clamoring for Napoleon’s return. So Louis turned to the one man who could maybe have saved his hide, Fouché, the former radical who had sent his brother, Louis XVI, to the guillotine, but was now one of the most popular and widely admired politicians in France.
Fouché, however, would not side with a loser: He refused Louis’s request for help by pretending that his help was unnecessary—by swearing that Napoleon would never return to power (although he knew otherwise).
A short time later, of course, Napoleon and his new citizen army were closing in on Paris.
Seeing his reign about to collapse, feeling that Fouché had betrayed him, and certain that he did not want this powerful and able man on Napoleon’s team, King Louis ordered the minister’s arrest and execution.
On March 16, 1815, policemen surrounded Fouché’s coach on a Paris boulevard. Was this finally his end? Perhaps, but not immediately: Fouché told the police that an ex-member of government could not be arrested on the street.
They fell for the story and allowed him to return home. Later that day, though, they came to his house and once again declared him under arrest.
Fouché nodded—but would the officers be so kind as allow a gentleman to wash and to change his clothes before leaving his house for the last time? They gave their permission, Fouché left the room, and the minutes went by.
Fouché did not return.
Finally the policemen went into the next room—where they saw a ladder against an open window, leading down to the garden below.
That day and the next the police combed Paris for Fouche, but by then Napoleon’s cannons were audible in the distance and the king and all the king’s men had to flee the city.
As soon as Napoleon entered Paris, Fouché came out of hiding.
He had cheated the executioner once again.
Napoleon greeted his former minister of police and gladly restored him to his old post. During the 100 days that Napoleon remained in power, until Waterloo, it was essentially Fouché who governed France.
After Napoleon fell, Louis XVIII returned to the throne, and like a cat with nine lives, Fouche stayed on to serve in yet another government—by then his power and influence had grown so great that not even the king dared challenge him.
Mr. Shih had two sons: one loved learning; the other war.
The first expounded his moral teachings at the admiring court of Ch‘i and was made a tutor, while the second talked strategy at the bellicose court of Ch’u and was made a general.
The impecunious Mr. Meng, hearing of these successes, sent his own two sons out to follow the example of the Shih boys.
The first expounded his moral teachings at the court ofCh‘in, but the King of Ch’in said: “At present the states are quarreling violently and every prince is busy arming his troops to the teeth. If I followed this prig’s pratings we should soon be annihilated.”
So he had the fellow castrated.
Meanwhile, the second brother displayed his military genius at the court of Wei. But the King of Wei said: “Mine is a weak state. If I relied on force instead of diplomacy, we should soon be wiped out. If, on the other hand, I let this fire-eater go, he will offer his services to another state and then we shall be in trouble.”
So he had the fellow’s feet cut off.
Both families did exactly the same thing, but one timed it right, the other wrong. This success depends not on ratiocination but on rhythm.
LlEH TZU. QUOTED IN THE CHINESE LOOKING GLASS. DENNIS BLOODWORTH, 1967
Interpretation
In a period of unprecedented turmoil, Joseph Fouché thrived through his mastery of the art of timing. He teaches us a number of key lessons.
First, it is critical to recognize the spirit of the times. Fouché always looked two steps ahead, found the wave that would carry him to power, and rode it. You must always work with the times, anticipate twists and turns, and never miss the boat. Sometimes the spirit of the times is obscure: Recognize it not by what is loudest and most obvious in it, but by what lies hidden and dormant. Look forward to the Napoleons of the future rather than holding on to the ruins of the past.
Second, recognizing the prevailing winds does not necessarily mean running with them. Any potent social movement creates a powerful reaction, and it is wise to anticipate what that reaction will be, as Fouché did after the execution of Robespierre. Rather than ride the cresting wave of the moment, wait for the tide’s ebb to carry you back to power. Upon occasion bet on the reaction that is brewing, and place yourself in the vanguard of it.
Finally, Fouché had remarkable patience. Without patience as your sword and shield, your timing will fail and you will inevitably find yourself a loser. When the times were against Fouché, he did not struggle, get emotional, or strike out rashly. He kept his cool and maintained a low profile, patiently building support among the citizenry, the bulwark in his next rise to power. Whenever he found himself in the weaker position, he played for time, which he knew would always be his ally if he was patient. Recognize the moment, then, to hide in the grass or slither under a rock, as well as the moment to bare your fangs and attack.
Space we can recover, time never.
-Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821
KEYS TO POWER
Time is an artificial concept that we ourselves have created to make the limitlessness of eternity and the universe more bearable, more human. Since we have constructed the concept of time, we are also able to mold it to some degree, to play tricks with it.
The time of a child is long and slow, with vast expanses; the time of an adult whizzes by frighteningly fast. Time, then, depends on perception, which, we know, can be willfully altered.
This is the first thing to understand in mastering the art of timing.
If the inner turmoil caused by our emotions tends to make time move faster, it follows that once we control our emotional responses to events, time will move much more slowly. This altered way of dealing with things tends to lengthen our perception of future time, opens up possibilities that fear and anger close off, and allows us the patience that is the principal requirement in the art of timing.
The sultan [of Persia] had sentenced two men to death.
One of them, knowing how much the sultan loved his stallion, offered to teach the horse to fly within a year in return for his life. The sultan, fancying himself as the rider of the only flying horse in the world, agreed.
The other prisoner looked at his friend in disbelief “You know horses don’t fly. What made you come up with a crazv idea like that? You’re only postponing the inevitable.”
“Not so, ” said the (first prisoner].
“I have actuallv given myself four chances for freedom.
First, the sultan might die during the year.
Second, I might die.
Third, the horse might die.
And fourth ... I might teach the horse to fly!
-”THE CRAFT OF POWER, R.G.H. SIU, 1979
There are three kinds of time for us to deal with; each presents problems that can be solved with skill and practice.
First there is long time: the drawn-out, years-long kind of time that must be managed with patience and gentle guidance. Our handling of long time should be mostly defensive—this is the art of not reacting impulsively, of waiting for opportunity.
Next there is forced time: the short-term time that we can manipulate as an offensive weapon, upsetting the timing of our opponents.
Finally there is end time, when a plan must be executed with speed and force. We have waited, found the moment, and must not hesitate.
Long Time.
The famous seventeenth-century Ming painter Chou Yung relates a story that altered his behavior forever. Late one winter afternoon he set out to visit a town that lay across the river from his own town. He was bringing some important books and papers with him and had commissioned a young boy to help him carry them. As the ferry neared the other side of the river, Chou Yung asked the boatman if they would have time to get to the town before its gates closed, since it was a mile away and night was approaching. The boatman glanced at the boy, and at the bundle of loosely tied papers and books—“Yes,” he replied, “if you do not walk too fast.”
As they started out, however, the sun was setting. Afraid of being locked out of the town at night, prey to local bandits, Chou and the boy walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. Suddenly the string around the papers broke and the documents scattered on the ground. It took them many minutes to put the packet together again, and by the time they had reached the city gates, it was too late.
When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing, and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time.
Hurriers may occasionally get there quicker, but papers fly everywhere, new dangers arise, and they find themselves in constant crisis mode, fixing the problems that they themselves have created. Sometimes not acting in the face of danger is your best move—you wait, you deliberately slow down. As time passes it will eventually present opportunities you had not imagined.
Waiting involves controlling not only your own emotions but those of your colleagues, who, mistaking action for power, may try to push you into making rash moves.
In your rivals, on the other hand, you can encourage this same mistake: If you let them rush headlong into trouble while you stand back and wait, you will soon find ripe moments to intervene and pick up the pieces.
This wise policy was the principal strategy of the great early-seventeenth-century emperor Tokugawa Ieyasu of Japan. When his predecessor, the headstrong Hideyoshi, whom he served as a general, staged a rash invasion of Korea, Ieyasu did not involve himself.
He knew the invasion would be a disaster and would lead to Hideyoshi’s downfall.
Better to stand patiently on the sidelines, even for many years, and then be in position to seize power when the time is right—exactly what Ieyasu did, with great artistry.
THE TROUT AND THE GUDGEON
A Fisherman in the month of May stood angling on the bank of the Thames with an artificial fly. He threw his bait with so much art, that a young trout was rushing toward it, when she was prevented by her mother.
“Never,” said she, “my child, be too precipitate, where there is a possibility of danger. Take due time to consider, before you risk an action that may be fatal.
How know you whether yon appearance be indeed a fly, or the snare of an enemy?
Let someone else make the experiment before you. If it be a fly, he will very probably elude the first attack: and the second may be made, if not with success, at least with safety.” She had no sooner spoken, than a gudgeon seized the pretended fly, and became an example to the giddy daughter of the importance of her mother’s counsel.
-FABLES, ROBERT DODSLEY, 1703-1764
You do not deliberately slow time down to live longer, or to take more pleasure in the moment, but the better to play the game of power. First, when your mind is uncluttered by constant emergencies you will see further into the future. Second, you will be able to resist the baits that people dangle in front of you, and will keep yourself from becoming another impatient sucker. Third, you will have more room to be flexible. Opportunities will inevitably arise that you had not expected and would have missed had you forced the pace. Fourth, you will not move from one deal to the next without completing the first one. To build your power’s foundation can take years; make sure that foundation is secure. Do not be a flash in the pan—success that is built up slowly and surely is the only kind that lasts.
Finally, slowing time down will give you a perspective on the times you live in, letting you take a certain distance and putting you in a less emotionally charged position to see the shapes of things to come. Hurriers will often mistake surface phenomena for a real trend, seeing only what they want to see. How much better to see what is really happening, even if it is unpleasant or makes your task harder.
Forced Time.
The trick in forcing time is to upset the timing of others—to make them hurry, to make them wait, to make them abandon their own pace, to distort their perception of time. By upsetting the timing of your opponent while you stay patient, you open up time for yourself, which is half the game.
In 1473 the great Turkish sultan Mehmed the Conqueror invited negotiations with Hungary to end the off-and-on war the two countries had waged for years. When the Hungarian emissary arrived in Turkey to start the talks, Turkish officials humbly apologized—Mehmed had just left Istanbul, the capital, to battle his longtime foe, Uzun Hasan.
But he urgently wanted peace with Hungary, and had asked that the emissary join him at the front.
When the emissary arrived at the site of the fighting, Mehmed had already left it, moving eastward in pursuit of his swift foe.
This happened several times.
Wherever the emissary stopped, the Turks lavished gifts and banquets on him, in pleasurable but time-consuming ceremonies. Finally Mehmed defeated Uzun and met with the emissary.
Yet his terms for peace with Hungary were excessively harsh.
After a few days, the negotiations ended, and the usual stalemate remained in place.
But this was fine with Mehmed. In fact he had planned it that way all along: Plotting his campaign against Uzun, he had seen that diverting his armies to the east would leave his western flank vulnerable. To prevent Hungary from taking advantage of his weakness and his preoccupation elsewhere, he first dangled the lure of peace before his enemy, then made them wait—all on his own terms.
Making people wait is a powerful way of forcing time, as long as they do not figure out what you are up to.
You control the clock, they linger in limbo—and rapidly come unglued, opening up opportunities for you to strike.
The opposite effect is equally powerful: You make your opponents hurry.
Start off your dealings with them slowly, then suddenly apply pressure, making them feel that everything is happening at once. People who lack the time to think will make mistakes—so set their deadlines for them.
This was the technique Machiavelli admired in Cesare Borgia, who, during negotiations, would suddenly press vehemently for a decision, upsetting his opponent’s timing and patience. For who would dare make Cesare wait?
Joseph Duveen, the famous art dealer, knew that if he gave an indecisive buyer like John D. Rockefeller a deadline—the painting had to leave the country, another tycoon was interested in it—the client would buy just in time.
Freud noticed that patients who had spent years in psychoanalysis without improvement would miraculously recover just in time if he fixed a definite date for the end of the therapy.
Jacques Lacan, the famous French psychoanalyst, used a variation on this tactic—he would sometimes end the customary hour session of therapy after only ten minutes, without warning.
After this happened several times, the patient would realize that he had better make maximum use of the time, rather than wasting much of the hour with a lot of talk that meant nothing.
The deadline, then, is a powerful tool.
Close off the vistas of indecision and force people to make up their damn minds or get to the point never let them make you play on their excruciating terms.
Never give them time.
Magicians and showmen are experts in forcing time. Houdini could often wriggle free of handcuffs in minutes, but he would draw the escape out to an hour, making the audience sweat, as time came to an apparent standstill.
Magicians have always known that the best way to alter our perception of time is often to slow down the pace. Creating suspense brings time to a terrifying pause: The slower the magician’s hands move, the easier it is to create the illusion of speed, making people think the rabbit has appeared instantaneously.
The great nineteenth-century magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin took explicit notice of this effect: “The more slowly a story is told,” he said, “the shorter it seems.”
Going slower also makes what you are doing more interesting—the audience yields to your pace, becomes entranced. It is a state in which time whizzes delightfully by. You must practice such illusions, which share in the hypnotist’s power to alter perceptions of time.
End Time.
You can play the game with the utmost artistry—waiting patiently for the right moment to act, putting your competitors off their form by messing with their timing—but it won’t mean a thing unless you know how to finish.
Do not be one of those people who look like paragons of patience but are actually just afraid to bring things to a close: Patience is worthless unless combined with a willingness to fall ruthlessly on your opponent at the right moment.
You can wait as long as necessary for the conclusion to come, but when it comes it must come quickly. Use speed to paralyze your opponent, cover up any mistakes you might make, and impress people with your aura of authority and finality.
With the patience of a snake charmer, you draw the snake out with calm and steady rhythms. Once the snake is out, though, would you dangle your foot above its deadly head? There is never a good reason to allow the slightest hitch in your endgame. Your mastery of timing can really only be judged by how you work with end time—how you quickly change the pace and bring things to a swift and definitive conclusion.
Image: The Hawk. Patiently and silently it circles the sky, high above, all-seeing with its powerful eyes. Those below have no awareness that they are being tracked. Suddenly, when the moment arrives, the hawk swoops down with a speed that cannot be de fended against; before its prey knows what has happened, the bird’s viselike talons have carried it up into the sky.
Authority:
There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
-(Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, 1564-1616)
REVERSAL
There is no power to be gained in letting go of the reins and adapting to whatever time brings. To some degree you must guide time or you will be its merciless victim. There is accordingly no reversal to this law.
Overview of Law #35: Master the Art of Timing
Anticipate the ebb and flow of power. Recognize when the time is right, and align yourself with the right side. Be patient and wait for your moment when you know you’ll benefit in the long run. Master the art of timing. When it’s time to make your end move against an opponent, strike without hesitation.
Principles of Law 35
In the quest for power, timing is everything. To take advantage of changing fortunes, you need to recognize the moment to act. Constantly read the signs and ally yourself with the right side. But be ready to switch again right before the pendulum swings.
According to Law 35 of the 48 Laws of Power, to survive and thrive while others are swept away, apply these principles:
Recognize change in the air: Be alert to the undercurrent as well as what’s happening around the edges of society. Rather than aligning with a crumbling past, look for the new leaders and movements to join.
Anticipate the reaction: When a new movement gathers momentum or a new power takes the throne, anticipate a reactionary wave and be ready to ride it.
Be patient and keep your cool: When things get chaotic, keep a low profile and play for time so you can see the right moment when it comes again.
You can master the art of timing in three ways:
Take the Long View
One way to apply Law 35 of the 48 Laws of Power is to take the long view. There’s a time frame that stretches years ahead and should be viewed with an eye to opportunity. Have a defensive strategy and play a patient, waiting game.
Waiting requires controlling your emotions and those of your colleagues who might get impatient and push you to act at the wrong time. It’s better to let your rivals rush to act, if you know they’ll fail. You can wait and pick up the pieces. In the 17th century, General Ieyasu of Japan knew that invading Korea would be a disaster. He simply waited while the emperor launched an invasion against his advice, which indeed failed. It took years, but when the emperor fell Ieyasu seized power. Ieyasu mastered the art of timing.
Taking the long view has several advantages:
When you’re not in immediate or crisis mode, you’re more clear-eyed and can see farther into the future.
You’ll be able to resist others’ intentional provocations.
You can be more flexible and able to take advantage of opportunities along the way that you would miss by rushing.
You can be methodical, completing each step properly before moving to the next.
When making long-range decisions, you’ll be less driven by emotion.
Force Your Opponent’s Hand
Another principle of Law 35 of the 48 Laws of Power is to force your opponent’s hand. There is a short, immediate time frame in which you can act offensively to upset the timing of your opponents.
The Turkish sultan Mehmed distracted Hungary from noticing he was vulnerable to attack while he battled another foe. Mehmed did this by inviting Hungarian officials to negotiations, then repeatedly postponing the meetings after they arrived. They waited, on his terms, until he finally returned from battle and canceled the whole thing.
In contrast to making your opponents wait, you can make them hurry. You can start dealing with someone slowly, then suddenly speed things up: Demand a decision or set an unrealistic deadline. Under pressure, they’re likely to make mistakes.
Salespeople use this technique by telling you that someone else is interested in the item you’re thinking of buying, so you’d better put money down right away. This is another way to master the art of timing.
Finish the Job
The third step to Law 35 of the 48 Laws of Power is to finish the job. There’s a specific moment when you need to execute your plan, forcefully and without hesitation. Patience has its place, but when it’s time to act, you must act, suddenly pouncing on your opponent and ending the game conclusively.
Conclusion
During the Trade War with China (2016 to 2020), did you notice which side had control of the time? Was it Donald Trump and his neocon advisors, or was it China? And when the United States tried to force a “color revolution” in Hong Kong through use of the NED, it was China that controlled the pace and the timing of the events.
Currently the United States is trying to force China to make a move against Taiwan. I would be willing to bet that any action or activity against Taiwan would be on Chinese terms and following a Chinese timetable.
Be smart and learn from this law.
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Yesterday, I published a post by a Hard-Right conservative Russian who had some dire warnings for America and Americans. I published it with some caveats, as some of his terminology was repugnant to my readership (and me). Never the less, if you distill everything, he had something good to say.
He said “Organize”.
Now, I took his article and massaged it with Metallic finesse. And I laid it all out that it is the PTB (sitting comfortably in their mansions) that are the enemy. They want us to fight among ourselves.
Don’t.
To which I (sort of) twisted his message. I said yes, we must organize. But, organize, on both sides. Come together on both sides. Fight against the common enemy the PTB that are causing all this turmoil in the first place.
And that was my message.
The way for humanity to get through this trying and difficult time is to work together and subdue the evil psychopaths that have hoarded all the gold and are using it to destroy humanity and remake it in THEIR image.
Well…
Now let’s give equal time to some words of wisdom from the Left. And yes, I’m going to twist this message in a metallic way as well…
The title for this comes from Umair Haque, who has seen what is happening here now in America, and warns that those who have seen the end result elsewhere first hand are being ignored. He is crying out to be heard.
We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.
We Survivors of Authoritarianism Have a Message America Needs to Hear: This is Exactly How it Happens, and It’s Happening Here.
…We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu. Our parents fled from collapsing societies to America. And here, now, in a grim and eerie repeat of history, we see the scenes of our childhoods played out all over again. Only now, in the land that we came to. We see the stories our parents recounted to us happening before our eyes, only this time, in the place they brought us to, to escape from all those horrors, abuses, and depredations.
We survivors are experiencing this terrible feeling of deja vu right now as a group, as a class. We talk about it, how eerie and grim this sense of deja vu is. It’s happening all over again! Do you remember this part of your childhood? When the armed men roamed the streets? When the secret police disappeared opponents? When the fascist masses united — and that was enough to destroy democracy for good? We talk about it, believe me — but you don’t hear it because we have no real voice. America’s pundits are named Chris and Jake and Tucker. They are not named Eduardo and Ravi and Xiao and Umair. But Chris and Jake and Tucker can’t help you now. They don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with. They literally have no idea because they have no experience whatsoever.
The only people who do right now in America are us survivors. Let me remind you, by the way, what happens we speak out: we lose whatever credibility and status we have. The moment I began to warn of this, I lost my column in HBR, my cable news appearances, and so forth. Don’t cry for me. Understand me, my friend, know me. If we had a voice, we survivors, we would be warning you as loudly and strongly as we possibly could.
All of us. We would say:
This is not a joke. This is not a drill. When we survivors of authoritarianism experience, as a group, a class, a cohort, something that we never, ever should — the horrific deja vu that the horrors of our childhoods, that our parents knew, are happening, all over again, here, something is much, much more wrong than you know.
This is what four more years looks like.
READ THE WHOLE THING. It may be the most important thing you read all day or all week or all month.
Consider just this one warning:
Why? They point to the complete breakdown of the rule of law. The rule of law only means something when an authoritarian can’t simply disappear people from the streets, ordering his paramilitary to do it, ignoring the constitution, discarding due process — with total impunity. But all that is exactly what Trump can do.
He now has the nascent powers of a Gaddafi or a Saddam. No, I’m not kidding. He doesn’t have the full powers, to be sure — but he certainly has the beginnings of them. Maybe he can’t have people tortured in jail yet — but he can have almost anyone he likes in America picked up and disappeared.
So how far away do you think even worse abuses of power are? When a tyrant can have almost anyone in a country they like disappeared, how far away do you really think torture is? Rape? Murder? I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m trying to speak to you like an adult. Will you listen?
Those words take on real urgency when you see something like this coming from the Trump administration.
Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf stated that the Justice Department is looking into arresting leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) amid protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officer Rusten Sheskey.
“Do you think the Department of Homeland Security is getting the help it needs from the Justice Department?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked. “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged for conspiracy under, say, [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law], like the heads of the mafia families were?”
“This is something I talked to the AG personally about and I know that they are working on it,” Wolf replied, referring to Attorney General Bill Barr.
The DHS chief also stated that the Justice Department is “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.”
Carlson pressed Wolf on why the “funders” of the anti-police brutality protests “haven’t been punished.”
“Again, I would say that again the Department of Justice, who has the lead in all of those investigations, are certainly moving as quickly as possible,” Wolf said.
Both the Hard-Right and the Hard-Left narratives are dripping with emotion and angst. Both are yelling at Americans. Both are saying “Wake Up!” Things can go really, really bad.
The Hard-Right offered a solution; Organize.
The Hard-Left also offered a solution; Embrace democracy more.
Scene from Aliens. You need to know what you are dealing with before your rush in and try to improve upon it.
Hum. Do you see where I am going with this? Both sides are correct. Both sides see that there is a problem. Both sides are terrified with what might happen. Both sides are concerned and offer solutions. But what are they?
More democracy.
WTF?
What is going on.
In both cases the people on both sides of the political spectrum look at the same failed model for answers and solutions. They look towards “democracy” to be the savior in this issue and the means to stop this mess.
It's like sheep that are unhappy with their lot in life. They look at the field next door. They see the taller, and greener grass, and the the other sheep, and they want to revolt and be like that other farm. They want to exchange their shepherd for another shepherd.
Here’s a big secret for you all…
“Democracy” is NOT the answer.
All democracies turn into oligarchies. And oligarchies turn into military empires. With various political solutions cropping up from time to time.
It's pretty well discussed. You all should read the Federalist Papers. The founders of the United States pretty much laid all this out for everyone to see. No one listened, of course. But it is the historical record.
So what is the answer?
Well, if I were to wave a magic wand, and place an ideal governance upon the United States, the LAST thing that I would do is have a democracy.
Democracy is a failed model. It has an expiration date; a “half-life” before it devolves into something else.
No.
Democracy is the LAST thing that you want.
You want something else.
You want small government. That way it can be participative.
You want quick and responsive “feed back mechanisms” on the local level.
You want management by merit and ability.
You want rotating management with short terms of office.
Now, I can tell you what you do not want…
You don’t want the same system with different ideologies.
You don’t want a larger system.
You don’t want a bigger, more powerful system.
You don’t want a militarized system.
Now, China is doing it right. For how long is unknown. I do not know how long this current bout of Chinese governance will last for. But I do know that it shows the rest of the world that [1] things CAN be governed by merit over popularity. That [2] small levels of governance at the local level does work, and [3] that a policing mechanism for the leadership ranks (the Corruption Police) is necessary to control fraud.
So right now, in these early stages of the popular American revolt, everyone is thinking about changing the individuals and their party platforms that comprise the government. They are not talking about changing the way the government operates.
And they should.
Nothing will change otherwise.
If you want real change, real substantive change, then you need to nuke it all from orbit and start from scratch all over again.
Ripley meme.
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
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off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
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Russia has been making friendly warnings to America and Americans. But, ah, no one in the United States is paying attention. Everyone is just all “sleepwalking”. You know, the rest of the world is watching what is going on inside of America right now. They see what is going on, and they know their own history. And what they see is as clear as day. The United States is collapsing and falling apart at the seams. And the people in control, are weak and ineffectual and are unable to stop the collapse. But still they try to warn. They try to implore Americans to take notice.
And no one is listening.
And most certainly NOT the neocons in office in the Trump White-house.
The following is one of the hundreds of warnings that I have collected where the Chinese, and the Russians have tried to warn America about what is coming. It’s a decent enough article and it is worthy of note. Most Metallicman readers will already know all this information, but you all should be pleased to read an opinion from the land of ice and snow; mother Russia.
The following is a reprint of an article titled “The American Right Will Be Crushed in a Civil War, Unless It Organizes NOW” by Gregory Conte Tue, Jan 21, 2020. It has been edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author. This post first appeared on Russia Insider
Please keep in mind that this is from a White Supremacist inside Russia. He does not see what is going on in the United States in any kind of balance.
He only sees…
Conservative = good.
Marxist = bad.
Never the less, what he says for the “Right”, equally applies to the “Left”.
The only… ONLY way this sinking American ship can be righted and put back on track is for both sides, at both extremes, to organize together and resolve this big mess. Both sides (right and left) have legitimate reasons to be angry. This is NOT the time to fight each other.
This is time to unify and fight the PEOPLE tugging at our strings and treating us like puppets.
And that takes organization. It takes leadership. It takes compromise. And it takes understanding.
So while the following article is written from a conservative hard-Right point of view, if you look beyond it, you can see that he is right. People need to organize and WORK TOGETHER to change things. Stop being manipulated. Work together to make the world a better place, and stay away from the radical elements that are unable to contribute to this end goal.
The Hard-Right Russian Article… please kindly look beyond his racial bigotry.
The American Right Will Be Crushed in a Civil War, Unless It Organizes NOW
Civil war is in the air. Many Americans have given up on
politics. The left keeps pushing to take away more of our freedoms. They
are chipping away at our culture, our traditions, our morals. They have
been doing it for a hundred years, and no one seems to be able to stop
them. It seems like the only way to change things is to have an all-out
fight.
So, many conservative whites have been talking seriously about civil war. That might not be very likely, but things have certainly been heating up.
Some state governments have passed laws clamping down on gun rights. The most egregious of these are “red flag” laws, which allow police to seize a citizen’s guns if a neighbor or family member “is worried about his mental health” or some other flimsy reason.
In response, several VA counties have
declared that they are “second-amendment sanctuaries,” meaning the
local government will not enforce unconstitutional gun laws, even if
state or federal authorities order them to.
But what if civil war does break out? Could conservative whites win an all-out fight against the system?
Many people think so.
They point out that right-wing whites have huge advantages. They own more weapons, they have better weapons, and they know how to use them. Liberals, on the other hand, live in cities with lots of hostile blacks and Hispanics. They will run out of food and water quickly. The state will not be able to maintain order.
On the other hand, some people argue that liberals and Jews (Well, this is from a Hard-Right Russian writer) will have the upper hand. As long as there is a rump-government that controls most of the US military, it will be able to use superior weapons and fire-power to crush any resistance. What chance does a rifle-militia have against an armored division?
But both sides are missing the point. Conservative whites will not
lose a civil war because of tanks and fighters and missiles. Nor will
the government lose because it cannot keep crowded cities fed and
orderly.
The winner will be the side that is better organized, better led, and knows what it is fighting for.
And, by these criteria, CONSERVATIVE WHITES WILL LOSE.
First of all, “civil war” does not mean “instant and immediate anarchy.” It is not like a zombie movie. The state and its foot-soldiers will not just disappear. In any foreseeable scenario, a crippled, weakened government will stay in place, or it might crack up into different factions. But the system will still control strong forces.
(Listen to what he is saying. He remembers the break up of Russia.)
While the state has less control, that does not mean that
there is a unified opposition. As it stands now, conservative Americans
do not have a common objective. For the most part, they just want to be
left alone. Sure, they’ll fight, but only when they or their friends and
families are threatened.
In contrast, the system has a very clear objective: it must
annihilate its competition. It will do whatever it takes. You can bet
the liberals and minorities will cling to the system, and submit to
whatever it demands of them.
Most importantly, the system will be able to count on its soldiers
and police, as long as it can feed and pay them. Most of them will do
their job and think up the necessary moral justifications later—after
they mow down scores of their fellow countrymen.
And as long as millions of rich Jews (Again, remember the source of this article.) need the US government to protect them and their property, the government can count on money, food, and weapons from foreign sources. The international Jewish system is not about to let its main hub—America—slip away.
This means that unless they organize and unite beforehand, right-wing whites will be crushed piecemeal. The system will use whatever police and military forces it can muster to defeat them in detail. It will find ways to take the rapacious energy of urban blacks and push it outward, toward suburban and rural whites. It will slowly drive the “resistance” deeper and deeper into the back-country until they can be cut off from their sources of supply and slaughtered one by one. It will use the very methods it developed to fight Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, but this time against its own citizens.
As it is, conservative whites have not been able to find a
common political goal and FIGHT FOR IT in times of peace, when it’s
easy. Since WWII, they have sat back and let their country be taken from
them. What makes them think they’ll do any better in times of war? As
long as they do not have the guts to march in the streets for their
rights and interests, they will not overcome the system, whether it’s a
shooting fight or not.
The problem is that conservative whites do not understand politics.
Liberals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and, above all, JEWS do. They get
that winning (in war or in peace) depends on teamwork, leadership, and
clear, common objectives. It also depends on the spirit and willingness
to seize the initiative and ATTACK. That means taking smart, calculated
risks; not sitting back and waiting for the perfect opportunity, which
never comes.
So, what to do? There are a lot of dumb ideas floating around. Maybe
whites should give up, hit the bottle, and pray for a miracle. Or maybe
they should write more clever articles to spread “awareness” of race
issues or the Jewish question.
Or maybe we should just work out, knock up a girl and grind away at a system-job for fifty years—that’ll show those Jews!
Or, better yet, we can all get into Republican politics, never
say anything controversial, then, one day, we can turn the tables on
the elites and steal their donors right from under their noses!
A super-sneaky revolution!!!
Look, white man, there is only one way to solve your country’s
political problems. You have to STAND UP AND FIGHT! Americans need to
realize that the system is the enemy, and that the only way to be free
again will be to beat it. To beat the system, they need to ORGANIZE,
like the left has been doing for a hundred years. If you are not willing
to speak your mind in public now, what makes you think you’ll have the
guts to bang it out with swarms of riot police and federal agents when
they come to take your guns?
You have to sacrifice. You will lose friends, relationships, money,
status. One day, you might end up in jail or be killed. But you have to
do it. You have to do it now. Civil war will not improve your
chances.
As it is, speaking up is still technically legal. The worst that is
likely to happen is that you lose your job or get beat up or be slammed
with a flimsy lawsuit.
It is true that a few men have been railroaded in the courts
and sent to prison even though they acted legally. But that is only
because almost NO ONE STOOD UP FOR THEM. Where were the donors, where
were the lawyers for James Fields, the RAM guys, etc etc…?
It’s not like there aren’t lawyers and rich men who sympathized with
their plight. It’s just that people did not work together to do the
right thing.
The longer this goes on, the harsher the punishments will get.
For decades, whites have let things slide, and look where we are! If
we’d put up a fight years ago, we would not be facing such stark
punishments now merely saying the truth.
It’s now or never. “Join or Die.” Stop rationalizing cowardice. You
need to organize. You need to say the truth, come what may. The more men
who speak up, the more will find the courage to do so. You need to
prepare yourself mentally, spiritually, for whatever is coming.
Do it for your people.
For the memory of your ancestors,
And for the future of your children.
Only the brave deserve to be free.
Comments
Firstly sorry about any repulsion you might feel from reading this article. I normally do not publish either hard-Right nor Hard-Left articles on Metallicman. But he is correct in the primary thesis of this article; that organization is needed to solve the source of everyone’s anger.
And that is why this piece is here on Metallicman.
Well, what can I say. The United States is undergoing a complete full-blown melt-down, and if history is any indication, it’s only going to get worse.
We MUST work together.
Not as hard-Right, or hard-Left, but as worried and concerned citizens that want the world to be better. That you are just like those on “the other side”, you are fed up with the bullshit from Washington DC, and everything associated with it.
DO NOT FIGHT EACH OTHER.
Fight the people pulling the strings behind the curtain. Do not fight each other.
It's like the television show "The Walking Dead".
Zombies everywhere. Buildings destroyed. Communication, life, and technology all collapsed.
Who do they fight?
Other groups of survivors.
I think that this post from Eatgrueldog says it best…
Please take care. Be safe.
Know your neighbors. There is strength in groups of people that you know.
Fear is the great destroyer. Do not fall for it’s lies.
Stay away from crowds.
Remember, Hard-Right, or Hard-Left is not your enemy. It is the PTB that is pulling the strings behind the scenes. Work together. Compromise. Work as part of a group. Both extremes want change. You want change. Work together towards it.
Do not fall into the big trap – fighting among each other.
Do you want more?
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I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Right now, as I write this, America has two complete battle-ready carrier assault groups in the South China Sea. Each one has one Major carrier, and at least one minor carrier. In addition each are supported by numerous underwater hunter-killer submarines, and both B-1 and B-2 bombers are flying mission sorties over the South China Sea. They are being supported by the British navy with their massive aircraft carrier, and have assurances from Australia that they can be supplied if necessary.
What.
The.
Fuck.
This is extraordinarily dangerous and a difficult time. Why is Donald Trump playing this dangerous “game” with China? Why are these ships off the Chinese coast? And what is all this nonsense about the need to suppress China for “democracy”? Are they out of their collective minds?
Well…
Maybe they are…
The following is a reprint of a great article titled “The Heart of the Matter in the South China Sea” by Pepe Escobar . It was written on July 30, 2020 . It was found on UNZ and copied with very little editing short of fitting within this venue. All credit to the author. You can read the comments on the original article here; Comments .
When the Ronald Reagan and Nimitz carrier strike groups recently engaged in “operations” in the South China Sea, it did not escape to many a cynic that the US Pacific Fleet was doing its best to turn the infantile Thucydides Trap theory into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The pro forma official spin, via Rear Adm. Jim Kirk, commander of the Nimitz, is that the ops were conducted to…
“...reinforce our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, a rules-based international order, and to our allies and partners”.
Nobody pays attention to these clichés, because the real message was delivered by a CIA operative posing as diplomat. Mr. Secretary of State Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo:
“The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region”
,…in a reference to the Nine-Dash Line. For the State Dept., Beijing deploys nothing but “gangster tactics” in the South China Sea.
Once again, nobody paid attention, because the actual facts on the sea are stark.
Anything that moves in the South China Sea – China’s crucial maritime trade artery – is at the mercy of the PLA, which decides if and when to deploy their deadly DF-21D and DF-26 “carrier killer” missiles.
There’s absolutely no way the US Pacific Fleet can win a shooting war in the South China Sea.
The United States has ZERO defense against these deadly missiles.
A crucial Chinese report, unavailable and not referred to by Western media, and translated by Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Wing Polin, is essential to understand the context.
Not reported in the Western Media.
Unavailable in America.
This report is pretty much well known all over Asia, China, and Russia.
The report refers to US Growler electronic warplanes rendered totally out of control by electronic jamming devices positioned on islands and reefs in the South China Sea.
According to the report,
“after the accident, the United States negotiated with China, demanding that China dismantle the electronic equipment immediately, but it was rejected.
These electronic devices are an important part of China’s maritime defense and are not offensive weapons. Therefore, the US military’s request for dismantling is unreasonable.”
It gets better:
“On the same day, former commander Scott Swift of the US Pacific Fleet finally acknowledged that the US military had lost the best time to control the South China Sea.
He believes that China has deployed a large number of Hongqi 9 air defense missiles, H-6K bombers, and electronic jamming systems on islands and reefs.
The defense can be said to be solid.
If US fighter jets rush into the South China Sea, they are likely to encounter their ‘Waterloo.’”
The bottom line is that the systems – including electronic jamming – deployed by the PLA on islands and reefs in the South China Sea, covering more than half of the total surface, are considered by Beijing to be part of the national defense system.
I have previously detailed what Admiral Philip Davidson, when he was still a nominee to lead the US Pacific Command (PACOM), told the US Senate.
Here are his Top Three conclusions:
1) “China is pursuing advanced capabilities (e.g., hypersonic missiles) which the United States has no current defense against. As China pursues these advanced weapons systems, US forces across the Indo-Pacific will be placed increasingly at risk.”
2) “China is undermining the rules-based international order.”
3) “China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”
Implied in all of the above is the “secret” of the Indo-Pacific strategy: at best a containment exercise, as China continues to solidify the Maritime Silk Road linking the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Remember the nusantao
The South China Sea is and will continue to be one of the prime geopolitical flashpoints of the young 21st century, where a great deal of the East-West balance of power will be played.
I have addressed this elsewhere in the past in some detail, but a short historical background is once again absolutely essential to understand the current juncture as the South China Sea increasingly looks and feels like a Chinese lake.
Let’s start in 1890, when Alfred Mahan, then president of the US Naval College, wrote the seminal The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Mahan’s central thesis is that the US should go global in search of new markets, and protect these new trade routes through a network of naval bases.
That is the embryo of the US Empire of Bases – which remains in effect.
It was Western – American and European – colonialism that came up with most land borders and maritime borders of states bordering the South China Sea: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam.
We are talking about borders between different colonial possessions – and that implied intractable problems from the start, subsequently inherited by post-colonial nations.
Historically, it had always been a completely different story.
The best anthropological studies (Bill Solheim’s, for instance) define the semi-nomadic communities who really traveled and traded across the South China Sea from time immemorial as the Nusantao – an Austronesian compound word for “south island” and “people”.
The Nusantao were not a defined ethnic group. They were a maritime internet. Over centuries, they had many key hubs, from the coastline between central Vietnam and Hong Kong all the way to the Mekong Delta. They were not attached to any “state”. The Western notion of “borders” did not even exist. In the mid-1990s, I had the privilege to encounter some of their descendants in Indonesia and Vietnam.
So it was only by the late 19th century that the Westphalian system managed to freeze the South China Sea inside an immovable framework.
Which brings us to the crucial point of why China is so sensitive about its borders; because they are directly linked to the “century of humiliation” – when internal Chinese corruption and weakness allowed Western “barbarians” to take possession of Chinese land.
A Japanese lake
The Nine Dash Line is an immensely complex problem.
It was invented by the eminent Chinese geographer Bai Meichu, a fierce nationalist, in 1936, initially as part of a “Chinese National Humiliation Map” in the form of a “U-shaped line” gobbling up the South China Sea all the way down to James Shoal, which is 1,500 km south of China but only over 100 km off Borneo.
The Nine Dash Line, from the beginning, was promoted by the Chinese government – remember, at the time not yet Communist – as the letter of the law in terms of “historic” Chinese claims over islands in the South China Sea.
One year later, Japan invaded China.
Japan had occupied Taiwan way back in 1895. Japan occupied the Philippines in 1942. That meant virtually the entire coastline of the South China Sea being controlled by a single empire for the fist time in history.
The South China Sea had become a Japanese lake.
Well, that lasted only until 1945. The Japanese did occupy Woody Island in the Paracels and Itu Aba (today Taiping) in the Spratlys. After the end of WWII and the US nuclear-bombing Japan, the Philippines became independent in 1946 and the Spratlys immediately were declared Filipino territory.
In 1947, all the islands in the South China Sea got Chinese names.
And in December 1947 all the islands were placed under the control of Hainan (itself an island in southern China.) New maps duly followed, but now with Chinese names for the islands (or reefs, or shoals). But there was a huge problem: no one explained the meaning of those dashes (which were originally eleven.)
In June 1947 the Republic of China claimed everything within the line – while proclaiming itself open to negotiate definitive maritime borders with other nations later on. But, for the moment, there were no borders.
And that set the scene for the immensely complicated “strategic ambiguity” of the South China Sea that still lingers on – and allows the State Dept. to accuse Beijing of “gangster tactics”. The culmination of a millennia-old transition from the “maritime internet” of semi-nomadic peoples to the Westphalian system spelled nothing but trouble.
Time for COC
So what about the US notion of “freedom of navigation”?
In imperial terms, “freedom of navigation”, from the West Coast of the US to Asia – through the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean – is strictly an issue of military strategy.
The US Navy simply cannot imagine dealing with maritime exclusion zones – or having to demand an “authorization” every time they need to cross them. In this case the Empire of Bases would lose “access” to its own bases.
This is compounded with trademark Pentagon paranoia, gaming a situation where a “hostile power” – namely China – decides to block global trade. The premise in itself is ludicrous, because the South China Sea is the premier, vital maritime artery for China’s globalized economy.
The FON program
So there’s no rational justification for a Freedom of Navigation (FON) program. For all practical purposes, these aircraft carriers like the Ronald Reagan and the Nimitz showboating on and off in the South China Sea amount to 21st century gunboat diplomacy.
And Beijing is not impressed.
The ASEAN nations have things to say about all this…
As far as the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is concerned, what matters now is to come up with a Code of Conduct (COC) to solve all maritime conflicts between Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and China.
Next year, ASEAN and China celebrate 30 years of strong bilateral relations.
There’s a strong possibility they will be upgraded to “comprehensive strategic partner” status.
Because of Covid-19, all players had to postpone negotiations on the second reading of the single draft of COC. Beijing wanted these to be face to face – because the document is ultra-sensitive and for the moment, secret. Yet they finally agreed to negotiate online – via detailed texts.
It will be a hard slog, because as ASEAN made it clear in a virtual summit in late June, everything has to be in accordance with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS).
Mid 2021
If they can all agree on a COC by the end of 2020, a final agreement could be approved by ASEAN in mid-2021. Historic does not even begin to describe it – because this negotiation has been going on for no less than two decades.
Not to mention that a COC invalidates any US pretension to secure “freedom of navigation” in an area where navigation is already free.
Yet “freedom” was never the issue.
In imperial terminology, “freedom” means that China must obey and keep the South China Sea open to the US Navy.
Well, that’s possible, but you gotta behave.
That’ll be the day when the US Navy is “denied” the South China Sea.
You don’t need to be Mahan to know that’ll mean the imperial end of America ruling the seven seas.
Conclusion
So when you look into the issues deeper, you discover that the American military presence near China is more than just trying to put pressure on China, and influence trade. If America does not seize any islands NOW, or disrupt commerce NOW, then by 2021, the United States Navy might be forever limited in action in this region.
This limitation on military movements would be unacceptable to the Neocons currently occupying the White House.
And that is exactly why the United States has an ENORMOUS assault / invasion flotilla off the China coast in the South China Sea.
Do you want more?
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You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I have been thinking and musing (a lot) about the absolute arrogance of the United States (out of Washington DC) and the myth of “American exceptionalism”, and that “America has never lost a war”. This has really come into mind with the things that President Trump is doing with multiple assault combat carrier fleets sitting right off the Chinese coast right now.
What he is doing is extraordinarily dangerous.
It reminds me of the bully in school. The one that always gets his way. That always behaves erratically, well because he’s a thug, but also because he never came across another “tough guy” that was bigger than him.
(Time for old guy memories…)
When I was growing up back in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, there was this boy who was two or three years older than me. I cannot say that he was a bully, exactly. It’s just that something wasn’t quite right about him. He was a spoiled brat, that’s for certain, that just was oblivious to the world around him. We was, well, a little “off” in the head, don’t you know.
He was an only child, and he attended the “special education” classes at our High School. They were all pretty much frowned upon as being “weak in the mind”. Which is terrible, I know, as I’m sure that wasn’t the actual case, but we were kids, and that was what we thought.
His father owned a local grocery store as well as a tri-county trash pick up service. They had a house in the nicest part of the town where we lived in, and had an indoor pool that was cool and really unique.
Think of a world where Bruce Wayne wasn't really "Batman". But instead was "The Joker". I guess it was sort of like that.
He would be off doing stuff and getting into all kinds of trouble. Just odd-ball stuff. You know how kids would build a tree-house. Well, he built one too…
…In the back yard of a house that was occupied by two little old ladies that were in their 90’s. The local constable had to have him come and tear it down.
While in High School he lobbed this flat steel disk (Lord only knows where he found it) into a crowd of my classmates. He just somehow got on the roof, yelled at us kids, and threw it. Luckily no one was killed by the flying fifty pound UFO.
He was the one that shocked us fifth graders by telling us how babies were made and how a boy puts his penis into a young lady. He even had magazines to help describe this activity. Not only that, but he was willing to demonstrate to the girls how it worked. (Don’t worry, we all left. Nothing became of it.) Never the less, we were scarred for weeks afterwards. We were just not ready.
Anyways, in hindsight, as an adult you can see that this kid had problems, and it would only be a matter of time before something bad would happen.
When I was 16 I started working in the mines, and perform stock duties in the local grocery store. There we would hear all the local gossip of the community. Of course, we called it “scuttlebutt”. Which was just a guys’ way of gossiping. We found out that he had died.
It turned out, that one Friday evening, around 7PM he was riding his bicycle all over the road. Meaning “all over the road in big lazy arc’s and meandering turns”. He was blocking traffic and forcing the cars to move at abnormally slow speeds. Since the roads were all tight and wove in and out of the hills there, the cars were trapped at the mercy of this crazed Joker-like insane young man. (He was maybe 18 years old at the time.)
Riding a bicycle, not driving a car. You see, he couldn't pass the driving tests at 16.
One of the cars (in the long train of cars beeping and honking behind him) was occupied by three United States marines, who in the early 1970’s probably had done some time in Vietnam (at the American war there). And they were not too pleased with this punk.
So…
So, they got out of the car and grabbed him. And Lordy, they beat the living Dejesus out of him. I mean they really fucked him up bad. They beat the snot out of him, and do you know what?
Do you know what happened?
He died.
That’s right. He was killed.
And the Marines, well they went to Prison. It’s a sad story all the way around. I like to think that everyone learned a lesson in all this. I would see the kid’s father from time to time as he did his business, and lived his life in the town. But, he was a now a small pale sort of man. Not the tall strong man that used to be. I guess that the death of your only child, and the turmoil of life, would do that to you. It’s a sad story for certain.
That’s my story and now for my point.
It’s human nature to believe that we are bigger, smarter, stronger, and more intelligent than everyone else. And if we evolved over time when our notions of who we are and what we are, are not tested, then we continue believing these things long after it becomes obvious that they are no longer true.
The childhood kid ended up getting his “ass whooped” because he had never confronted someone who was bigger, stronger and more aggressive than him. For he was the “big fish in a small pond”. And the Marines that he encountered were some very mean and nasty sharks.
I think of this story often, and it comes to my mind every time I see an article about how “invincible” the United States Navy is.
Now while this might make reading for the American civilian population, the truth is that the leadership of the American military machine are not fools. They know it’s strengths and weaknesses, and are not very keen on testing these expensive military machines with a peer-capable rival.
But, unfortunately, they are not the ones that are making the top-level decisions in Washington DC today. It is Donald Trump, and Mike Pompeo and the rest of the Neocon cabal that are running the country, making the decisions and playing with the military as if it was their very own personal army.
Which brings me to this article…
The following is a reprint of “China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do” written by Fred Reed on October 30, 2015. It is reprinted as found on the UNZ site and you can read the Comments to it there. All credit to the author, and note that it was edited to fit this venue, but remains as intact to intent.
China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do
It appears that Washington, ever a seething cauldron of bright ideas, is looking for a shooting war with China, or perhaps trying to make the Chinese kowtow and back down, the pretext being some rocks in the Pacific in which the United States cannot possibly have a vital national interest. Or, really, any interest. And if the Chinese do not back down?
The Vincennes. The boxy thing up front is the radar. It is not hardened.
Years back I went aboard the USS Vincennes, CG-49, a Tico class Aegis boat, then the leading edge of naval technology. It was a magnificent ship, fast, powered by a pair of airliner turbines, and carrying the SPY-1 phased-array radar, very high-tech for its time. The CIC was dark and air-conditioned, glowing with huge screens—impressive for then—displaying all manner of information on targets in the air. Below were Standard missiles, then on a sort of chain drive but in later ships using the Vertical Launch System. It was, as they say in Laredo, Muy Star Wars. (The Vincennes was the ship that later shot down the Iranian airliner.)
Being something of a technophile, I took all of this in with admiration, but I thought—what if it gets hit?
As a kid in my preteens I had read about the battleships of WWII, the Carolinas but in particular the Iowa class, fast, brutal ships with sixteen-inch belt armor and turrets that an asteroid would bounce off of. The assumption was that ships were going to get hit. They were built to survive and continue fighting.
American hull armor in a Japanese World War II battleship. Showing not only the thickness, but also the type of damage that it could take.
By contrast, the Vincennes was thin-skinned, hulled with aluminum instead of steel, and the radar, crucial to combat, looked perilously fragile. A single hit with anything serious, or perhaps even a cal .50, but certainly by anything resembling a GAU-8, and she would be hors de combat until refitted.
Damage to the thin hull of the USS Cole by improvised munitions on board a terrorist skiff.
The Iowa, BB-61. I went aboard her at Norfolk at the Navy’s invitation. It altered my appreciation of guns. I came away thinking that if you can’t crawl into it, it isn’t really a gun. And solid: There is a reason why no battleship was sunk after Pearl Harbor.
One hit.
I also knew well that the Navy played Red Team-Blue Team war games in which our own submarines—then chiefly 688s—tried to “sink” the surface fleet. The idea was that if the sub could get into firing position, it would send up a green flare. The subs were then running if memory serves the Mk 48 ADCAP torpedo, a wicked wire-guided thing with a long range. Sailors told me that invariably the subs “sank” the surface force.
When I mentioned this at CHINFO, the Navy’s PR operation in the Pentagon, flacks told me that the potential bad guys only had piddling diesel-electric subs, far inferior to our nukey boats, and couldn’t get near the fleet in open seas. Yes, no, maybe, and then. It sounded like happy talk to me. In WWII, diesel-electrics certainly got in range of surface ships, perhaps the most famous example being when Archer Fish sank Shinano.
DF-21D anti-ship (read: anti-carrier) missile. This is not the place for detail, but China has anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to kill carriers, and is working on others, hypersonic glide vehicles, that are not real interceptible. I do not know how well they work. If I were a carrier, I would make a point of not finding out.
The Chinese DF-21D anti-Carrier missile. This missile is mass-produced and is designed to be fired in clusters of multiple groupings designed to saturate the defensive capabilities of an American Carrier battle group.
I do not know a great deal about the Chinese Navy, having been out of that loop for years. I do know that the Chinese are smart, and that they have optimized their forces specifically to take out carrier battle groups near their territory.
They do not try to match the US ship-for-ship in the kind of war America wants to fight. They would lose fast, and they know it.
The key is to swarm the fleet with cruise missiles arriving all at once, accompanied perhaps by large numbers of aircraft. Would this work? I don’t know, but that is certainly the way I would bet.
The United States Navy has not been in a war for seventy years.
It has sat off various shores and launched aircraft, but the fleet has not been engaged. Over decades of inaction, complacency sets in. Unfortunately, wars regularly turn out to be otherwise than expected. Further, the American military’s standard approach to a war is to underestimate the enemy (there is probably a manual on this).
Yet further, great emotional and financial capital resides in a carrier-battle group, one of the most impressive achievements of the human race. (I mean this: the technology, organization, and competence involved in, say, night flight ops are…”astonishing” is too feeble a word.)
This assures reluctance to question the fleet’s effectiveness in the face of changing conditions. Such as high-Mach, stealthed, maneuvering, sea-skimming cruise missiles. Or terminally guided anti-ship ballistic missiles.
America is accustomed to fighting enemies who can’t fight back.
This may NOT include the Chinese.
The carrier Forrestal, 1967. A single Zuni missile was fired accidentally. A huge fire ensued, bombs cooked off, 134 men were killed, and the ship was devastated, out of service for a very long time. One five-inch missile. Something to think about.
There is also the fact that the American military simply doesn’t matter, which reduces concern with whether it can fight and who it can fight.
It doesn’t defend the US, since there is nothing to defend it against. (What country has the remotest possibility of invading America?)
So the military is used for what are essentially hobbyist wars, keeping Israel happy, providing markets for the arms companies, and for social engineering: we have girl crews who would be a disaster at damage control, but we assume that there will never be any damage to control.
Uh…yeah. The evidence is that these ships are fragile:
What would happen if in a shooting war the Chinese crippled the American fleet?
Washington is rampant with large egos, especially that of John McCain, the senator from PTSD. If it were discovered that China could disable the Navy, many other countries might conclude that they could do it too. They most certainly would think of this.
But…
Washington could not accept the discovery: Fear of the carriers is a large element in Washington’s intimidation of the world. To save face, the US would be tempted to go nuclear, or seriously bomb China proper, with unforeseeable results.
USS Stark, 1987. Hit by two Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi Mirage.
The Air Force and Navy could hurt China badly by conventional means, yes, for example by cutting off oil from the Mideast, or destroying the Three Gorges dam.
For a variety of reasons this would be playing with fire.
The economic results of any of these bright ideas would be godawful.
Just about every commercial product sold in America is made in China.
Just about every new construction or building project in America is being funded and manufactured by Chinese companies.
China holds a “Lion’s share” of American debt and could collapse the American economy if they wanted to.
Washington seems not to realize that it wields far less military power than it thinks it does, and that the power it does wield is ever less useful than before.
As a land power, it is very weak, being unable to defeat Russia, China, or peasants armed with rifles and RPGs. Air power has regularly proved indecisive.
If Washington somehow won a naval war with China, so what?
It would provide the satisfactions of vanity, but China’s danger to the US imperium lies in increasing economic power and commercial expansion through Asia, where it holds the high cards: it is there, Washington isn’t.
Grrr-bowwow-woofery in the far Pacific, even if successful, is not going to stop China’s commercial expansion, and a defeat would end the credibility of the Navy forever.
As I say, Washington is full of bright ideas.
Conclusion
The purpose of war is to resolve differences when ALL OTHER AVENUES have been exhausted.
However, United States history has clearly illustrated that that doctrine has NOT been followed. Wars have been created for other purposes. Purposes devoted to the obtainment of profits, and to manipulate a compliant and ignorant population.
There is evidence that the last 75 years or so of this behavior cannot end. That those that run and rule over the United States are unable to use the military for any other purpose than what it has been used for.
And like the bully from my High School days, America could see itself on the wrong side of a conflict. One that it started. One that it thinks that it will “win”. And one that will FOREVER change it.
Maybe change it for good, and for infinity.
And, maybe, like the Bully from my High School days, it is long overdue and will be a shock to everyone. From the bully himself who (I am sure) lay there with a look of incredulity on his face, to his toadies who thought he was invincible, to the innocent bystanders (such as myself) who was shocked that such a well-known (if not particularly liked) person could be vanquished so quickly and so easily.
War is NOTHING that the United States should get involved in at this time. It is not healthy. It is a mess, and getting worse. The last thing it should get involved in is a fight with a nation THAT DOES NOT PLAY.
Chinese ships test firing two anti-carrier missiles in the South China Sea in August 2020.
Do you want more?
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Yeah. Trump is really pushing this. But we all know what is going on. If it is Chinese, it is bad. It’s a all-hands-on-deck assault on China, short of nuclear war. And the ONLY reason why America is not invading China, and blasting the living fuck out of it’s cities is because Trump knows that America will become completely destroyed and radioactive in the process. China does not play.
So he’s going all-out against everything Chinese. And part of that is the software applications that are Chinese, and being used all over the world. We have read about Huawei, and wechat, which most Americans know nothing about. So they just go with the flow and say Yah! China Bad!
China Bad!
Well, there’s a lot of articles on this. Most are propaganda justifying banning software and technology.
Little thought is whether the President of the United States actually has the power to ban anything. After all, it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol back in 1913. Since when did the President become a King?
But I digress.
The excuse is “National Security”. It’s a catch-all phrase which means “I can do what I want and not give any reasons or justification for it”.
Anyways, this article is a pretty decent overview on this subject and is well worth a look. It is titled “Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat” written by Larry Romanoff on August 8, 2020 it has 201 Comments . It was found on the UNZ website and all credit to the author. It was edited to fit this venue.
Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat
First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1]
It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.
But this is hardly news. Forty years ago it was proven that all Xerox copy machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US were “espionage-ready”.[10][11]
Also, for at least 20 years, and perhaps much more, it was common knowledge that when any foreign embassies, consulates, banks and other corporations ordered computers and similar hardware from US suppliers, those shipments were intercepted by UPS, delivered to the CIA and/or NSA for installation of “extra” hardware and software before delivery to their destinations. This was one of the confirmations by Edward Snowden.[12][13][14][15]
Any search on this will give you millions of hits unless Google chooses that moment to lose its memory.
Huawei
Trump’s problems with Huawei are twofold.
The most obvious is that China is eating America’s lunch when it comes to innovation and invention and Trump would like to slow this down by destroying Huawei and is clearly making every possible effort in this regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world against using Huawei’s products. But this is the small part of the problem; the real issue is espionage.
There is no practical value in disputing the assertion that Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with its better and less expensive equipment.
That part is okay, but how can the CIA and NSA approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into its equipment so the US can spy on China – among all other countries?
There is no solution to this problem other than to trash Huawei’s reputation by accusing it of being an espionage threat and having the company’s equipment banned. And this applies not only to the US, but to the entire Five Eyes Espionage Network, involving the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.[16]
Briefly, this was set up to break laws while pretending no laws were being broken.
It is generally against the law for a government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign government. So Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong.
Rinse and repeat.
The sad part is that the “intelligence” received is usually of little interest to the four minor participants but all of it is shared with the US who are frothing to spy on the entire world and to take possession of “every communication” of every kind in the entire world. Thus, it isn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is Huawei-free.
And that’s the entire story, like it or not.
Tik-Tok
Tik-Tok is nothing of consequence, except that it is in direct competition with similar American platforms and has proven too popular and too competitive to be permitted to survive.
This is just a cheap, below-the-belt and illegal-as-hell shot at China.
No threat, no nothing.
However, as with all similar IT products and platforms it contains much personal information especially useful for marketing, which has so far been the private property of people like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Thus, Trump kills two birds with one stone: either simply kill Tik-Tok on some trumped-up accusation (if you’ll excuse the expression) of espionage, or force a sale to an American company.
Either way, China loses massively while the political oppression and marketing value of that personal information remains safely in trusted American hands.
WeChat
Since few Americans are familiar with WeChat, let me give you a description. Many of these functions are available in the West through various platforms, but not always to the same extent nor with the same convenience.
With WeChat we can transmit text and voice messages, photos and videos, and other files of any description even of many Mb in size.
FOR FREE.
We can send and receive both text and voice messages in any language because WeChat has an excellent translation function in combination with one of its partners which translates not only text and voice, but will extract and translate all text contained in photos, handy for restaurant menus if you can’t read Chinese.
FOR FREE
We can place not only voice calls but video calls to anyone anywhere that transmit over the internet.
FOR FREE
It is so convenient that WeChat is the default communication choice for a great many people for most purposes. WeChat also has a Moments platform where we can post text, photos, videos, that are visible to those on our contact lists while selecting those who can view and who cannot, reserving some posts for close friends and others more generally public.
In China we have two primary online payment systems, one operated by Alibaba (called Alipay) and the other by WeChat. Its use is nearly universal in China and both are free to the user. Unlike PayPal…
ITS FREE
During the past several years I cannot recall a single instance where I had cash in my pocket (even small change) when I went anywhere or was shopping for anything. Even to purchase a small bunch of green onions at a street market, the vendor has a QR code which my phone scans and the payment into their bank account is automatic.
With WeChat, we can send money to each other.
FOR FREE
If we want to share the cost of lunch, you can pay the entire bill and I transfer my share to you through WeChat. If I ever need cash, I could go to any shop or even approach a complete stranger and ask for 1,000 RMB and instantly repay him into his WeChat account.
It is frequently used to transfer money internationally this way, sending dollars to a friend in one country and receiving RMB into a WeChat account in China.
Instant, secure, and free of all fees.
FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE
It all happens within a second, with a concurrent text message confirmation from the bank of both sides of the transaction. WeChat is the main reason people can travel anywhere in China with only a mobile phone and passport (and a change of clothing). Through WeChat, people can purchase plane or train tickets, pay taxi fares and hotel bills, restaurant tabs, in the same way.
FOR FREE
Another useful WeChat function is real-time GPS location sharing. If a group is traveling to a destination in several cars, WeChat displays an active GPS map showing all locations in real space and time. If I am meeting a friend at a shopping mall or park or other large location, with this GPS function we can see each other’s location in real time and I know which way to walk to encounter my friend.
We have WeChat groups which we can create with any number of participants for any convenient purpose. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai we had a temporary WeChat group for the purchase of meat and vegetables that functioned better than any supermarket and with much less trouble. If I want to have a Christmas party I form a group of those I plan to invite, and all our discussions and planning take place within that platform. Most communities (small portions of residential districts) have a WeChat group for notification of community events and sharing important information.
The point with Trump’s “sanction” of WeChat is first that it will terminally disrupt international communications between China and the US for students, scientists, diplomats, media reporters, for all those in the US who have frequent communications with China, effects felt more seriously by those in China, which is a plus for Trump.
Second, Trump’s administration is uncomfortable with the extent to which WeChat is encroaching on the American turf of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more, with already around 100 million downloads in the US, and his actions are partially to reclaim that turf by simply banning a competing medium that is threatening to take over and seriously downgrade the popularity of similar American platforms.
But most important is the espionage and censorship role of Trump’s initiative.
As the censorship noose tightens around Facebook and Twitter, Americans are naturally moving to WeChat. The real issue is not that WeChat poses any danger to the US in any sense but, as with Huawei, the CIA and NSA cannot very well approach WeChat and ask for automatic sharing of all that personal relationship data.
Therefore, under the guise of China being untrustworthy, the US government simply bans WeChat and thus no one in the US can send or receive any message without the NSA having a copy.
A huge plus is that any news not fitting the official narrative will then be strangled at birth, as Google, Facebook and Twitter are now doing.
If Microsoft or another American firm were to buy WeChat, then of course all is well since it is US firms, not Chinese, who automatically share all personal contact data with their government.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The USA is a mess. America is a mess. And everyone knows this. Everyone realizes this. In fact, it is a rare person that cannot see this. Gun sales are up. People are joining local militias, and the government is absolutely powerless to do anything.
On the 27AUG20, a 17 year old conservative shot at and killed members of the progressive BLM on a march and protest event. This is the first open shots at what will eventually be known as a Civil War.
The first shootings of a Civil War.
Meanwhile President Trump is going on and on about a “hybrid war” on China, and everyone is pretty much convinced that this will evolve into a “hot” war, and yet the elections are continuing as if nothing is out of the ordinary. “Come on vote for me! The other guy is worse!” Jesus.
The United States is Bat-Shit crazy.
The following is a great post titled “It’s Gonna Blow. It would Be a Miracle if it Don’t” by Fred Reed and found on the UNZ website. It was written on July 30, 2020 and has 806 Comments . All credit to the authors. It was edited to fit this venue, aside from that the article is intact as written.
Hoo-boy. She’s ready to explode, go high order. Smoking ruins, dead bodies, seething hatreds, and a country that can’t be put back together. It may not happen, but she looks ready.
No one is in charge in this collapsing shell game of a country.
In Louisville hundreds of armed blacks threaten to “burn the motherfucker down,” meaning Louisville, if they don’t get their way. All cringe before them, with reason. They have guns. Larger numbers marched in Georgia, armed, ready to rock and roll. BLM says it will “go into the suburbs” to get Whitey. Who will stop them? Not the government. It fears them. Weimar Kentucky. An American Freikorps.
America today in video. Scroll down to the New York footage. It’s Planet of the Apes.
Gun sales are way up. A friend in Rhode Island went to a gun shop and found a long line outside. A columnist in Virginia was told that the other stores report long wait lists for prize arms, notably the AR 15. People are afraid, or fed up. They are arming. The spring winds.
There is no leadership, no one in charge.
In Trump we have perhaps the weakest President in history, mouthy, preening, ineffectual, much talk and no action. He did nothing while the rioters looted, burned, and vandalized, then disengaged himself from the pandemic, leaving decisions to the states. Much cawing and gaudy feathers, but no bird inside.
Congress does nothing, one parry neutering the other and all bought and paid for by special interests, by Wall Street and the arms makers and the big corporations. Local governments submit to the rioters or stand aside as the burning goes on. This is not society. It is chaos.
To collapsing countries these usually comes a man on a horse. A man with a big stick. You know, 1789, 1917, 1933. That kind of thing.
The media encourage the rioters, inflame passions either deliberately or through partisanship. They have little idea what they are encouraging. It may seem strange to say that the media do not know what is going on—it is their business to know–but they don’t. They were blindsided by the Trump because they had no idea of conditions in the country, in Flint and Gary, in Wheeling. Today they do not know what is brewing out there, or of how much they contribute to it.
Angry urban BLM males arm up to “take what is theirs”.
After all, nothing out in the great mysterious middle land affects them.
Journalists in the Beltway Isolation Cage are rich compared to deplorables in in Gary, live in a city proof against recession. Their decisions are whether to go out for Turkish or Vietnamese…
… not how to pay the rent.
They censor news they don’t like, suppress the seismic rumblings out there in a country they don’t really know. In censoring others they censor themselves. They cannot read stories they cannot write. For example, sickening racial attacks on whites. That would be racism. Perish or fend.
But race is just the most explosive part of an unfunctioning polity.
Other things ratchet up the fury. Add economic decay and you get more anger, more pressure. People live paycheck to paycheck, maxed out on credit cards. They don’t have a thousand dollars, or five hundred, for an emergency. The young live in their parents’ basements because they can’t get jobs to buy houses and start families.
People don’t see doctors because medical care is both costly and wretched. Student loans crush the young. Grade schools are propaganda mills; parents know it, but can do nothing. Retirement programs vanish as employers turn employees into independent contractors, avoiding the expense of benefits. People see no hope. This makes them dangerous. Watch.
And BLM wants to go into the suburbs to get Whitey. God help us. Then it will well and truly blow. BLM doesn’t know how many white men are sick of the chaos and destruction, sick of BLM. They quietly say, “Bring it on. Let’s settle it.” Laden words.
While these undercurrents grow, the media will chirp and lecture and say virtuous things.
Then…
… boom!
No one is in charge. No one will tell the rioters “No” and make it stick. No one, yet. It can blow.
BLM is cocky, aware of its power, made overconfident by easy victory. It, and Antifa, have never met resistance. If things get really wild, though, they will. They will also find that food does not really grow in Safeway, and that a Safeway burned out does not necessarily return to be burned out again.
A country gets what it asks for, and deserves what it tolerates.
Most of the social problems engendering chaos result from the failure or collusion of government. Other countries have good national medical care.
America does not.
Student loans are a calculated scam, just as credit card companies deliberately entice people to buy what they cannot afford and then charge them usurious interest. Retirement plans exist elsewhere. European countries have them. But the Pentagon and Wall Street get America’s money.
It’s gonna blow. Short of a miracle.
The deadliest question is how to accommodate blacks. One mustn’t say what everyone knows, that blacks are the least educable, least productive, most criminal, most violent, most dependent, and least assimilable of the population. If anything can be done about any of these, it won’t be, because no one is permitted to name the problem. No one is in charge.
As whites lose economic ground they will be less willing to pay for welfare, food stamps, free housing, and other charity. When a pie shrinks, someone will get less pie and, if the pie shrinks a great deal, some will get almost no pie.
Meanwhile, gun sales are way up.
At least six cities had serious riots last night with the mob throwing bricks at the police. A thrown brick is a lethal weapon. It would be met with equally lethal force. Yet governments, mayors, city councils back away, back away, back away. If they stop, it is going to be ugly.
America does not control its streets. The mob does. Everywhere. Name another country that permits this.
If confronted by force, the white rioters, mostly young, will melt away. They are Snowflakes, Millennials, young, stupid, ignorant, having the most exalted time of a life boring before and soon to be again, Blacks, more virile, will not. If they do not, the resultant mayhem will make our starter riots like like a PTA meeting at Lake Woebegone.
Then what?
Here we come to the joys of diversity. Cultures can be too different to live together. Whites and blacks have almost no common ground, little common history. Whites trace their history back to well before the ancient Greeks, through Rome, the Renaissance, Europe. Blacks had no part in this and, it seems, have no interest in it. Aristotle? Thomas Jefferson? Einstein? Madame Butterfly? Galois? FORTRAN? These might all have come from some remote galactic civilization.
There is no agreement, anywhere, at any level, over anything. Hardcore conservatives insist that the coronavirus is no worse than the common flu as hospitals report overwhelmed ICUs and epidemiologists cry the alarm.
Blue states favor lockdown while red states open up.
Libertarians peddle cockamamie conspiracy theories. Mask laws are ignored or fought over. China, South Korea, Singapore shut down, control the virus, go back to work. Not America.
Nobody is in charge.
Nothing holds the country together. There is no social glue, no dominant culture. We have no shared history, language, dialect, ethnicity, or religion. Diversity turns the country into rubble.
Diversity? It is the end of America. The country once was overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone, and Christian. It worked, as approximate monocultures usually do.
No longer. The North hates—the word is not too strong—the South and seeks to erase its culture and uniqueness. The Bible Belt is intensely Christian while the northern elites, heavily Jewish, seek to suppress Christianity. The coastal elites hold the central deplorables in contempt. Blacks hate whites. Feminists hate men.
Angry BLM armed with an “Assault Gun” protesting for “equality”.
Hispanics float in indeterminate limbo, not having jumped either way. Amerindians maintain a demanding apartness. Jews, neither Christian nor, in the minds of many, neither quite European or quite American, control the media and finance, generating perennial hostility. Bulk lot Somalis, having nothing in common with Minnesota, are in Minnesota. On and on.
It is going to blow. If it doesn’t, a miracle will have happened.
Currently, if weirdly, blacks hold the whip hand in the country, but it will not last and won’t improve racial relations. it is lighting a fuse, fertilizing hatreds that cannot be expressed but, if ever they are, Katie bar the door.
Statues come down if blacks don’t like them. Universities abandon teaching English grammar because blacks can’t understand it. Whites are fired for saying, “All lives matter.” The country lowers standards for blacks in medical schools, lowers required scores on the bar exam for them. High schools give diplomas to blacks who can barely read.
Gonna blow, boys and girls. At least that’s the way to bet.
The “Deplorables” will not accept BLM or Antifa incursions into “fly over” country.
Do you want more?
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I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
It is late August 2020. The United States is a mess. It really is. Even my Chinese friends who normally don’t bother with the news and international issues can see this. Face it. The United States is collapsing and all the rest of the world can do is hold on, and hope that there are some smart people managing the collapse.
Many of the nouveau riche, the ultra-wealthy, can read the handwriting on the wall. They can see the wheels coming off in America, as a debt-soaked economy, along with violence and pervasive poverty continues to increase, and our national problems have all resisted solutions and resolutions for years.
Federal government has become virtually dysfunctional, as the political extremism has destroyed professionalism and cooperation, and politicians accuse, insult, even curse at each other without ever agreeing on anything.
It is not surprising that they're lining up other countries they can move to when the time comes. And the way things are going, that time is almost now.
-Marketwatch
The following is a well written article that I pulled off the UNZ website. I passed it on to other retired professionals, current analysts, and businessmen in very senior roles within global international companies and asked them for their opinions. These are not the people who make decisions based on what MSN, CNN, Drudge, or Rush Limbaugh has to say. Instead, these are people who have experience in global trade, scientific advancements and technology. They are the people who actually make the decisions (on a working level) regarding international commerce and industry. Of the around two hundred that I queried, about thirty five responded.
All of them that responded pretty much agreed with me that is is a very accurate assessment on what is going on within China, and the world currently. That it makes complete sense, and that they have expected this all to occur and be put into place.
If you want to part the curtains a little bit, and see how things are really working…
…free of all that “noise” from the political, and media machinery within the United States (and their client nations) then read this post.
This is a reprint of “Everything Going According to Plan in China. The contours of China’s long-term strategy for the new Cold War are quickly coming into view” by Pepe Escobar. Found on the UNZ website. Written August 24, 2020. Edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author. With 33 Comments on the original post. (Republished from Asia Times)
Everything Going According to Plan in China. The contours of China’s long-term strategy for the new Cold War are quickly coming into view
Let’s start with the story of an incredibly disappearing summit.
The mysterious secretive BeiDaiHe Meeting
Every August, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) converges to the town of Beidaihe, a seaside resort some two hours away from Beijing. They do so to discuss serious policies that then coalesce into key planning strategies. Strategies that are presented to be approved at the CCP Central Committee plenary session later on in October.
The Beidaihe ritual was established by none other than Great Helmsman Mao, who loved the town where. It is not by accident, Emperor Qin, the unifier of China in the 3rd century B.C., kept a palace there.
2020 being, so far, a notorious Year of Living Dangerously, it’s no surprise that in the end Beidaihe was nowhere to be seen.
The Chinese Leadership is a cautious organization.
Yet Beidaihe’s invisibility does not mean it did not happen. It did.
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 1 was the fact that Premier Li Keqiang simply disappeared from public view for nearly two weeks.
Curiously, this was after President Xi chaired a crucial Politburo gathering in late July. One where he laid out no less than China’s whole development strategy for the next 15 years.
Premier Li Keqiang resurfaced soon afterwards. Suddenly chairing a special session of the all-powerful State Council.
This was at the same time that (CCP’s top ideologue), Wang Huning (who happens to be number 5 in the Politburo) showed up as the special guest at a meeting of the All China Youth Federation.
What’s even more intriguing is that side by side with Wang, one would find Ding Xuexiang.
Ding Xuexiang is President Xi’s chief of staff.
He wasn’t alone. There were three other Politburo members with him.
In this “now you see them, now you don’t” variation, the fact that they all showed up in unison after an absence of nearly two weeks was more than just curious..
This led sharp Chinese observers to conclude that Beidaihe in fact had taken place. Even if no visible signs of political action by the seaside had been detected.
Curious. The semi-official spin is that no get-together happened at Beidaihe because of Covid-19.
Exhibit 2
Yet it’s Exhibit 2 that may clinch the deal for good.
The by now famous end of July Politburo meeting chaired by Xi in fact sealed the Central Committee plenary session in October.
Translation: the contours of the strategic road map ahead had already been approved by consensus. There was no need to retreat to Beidaihe for further discussions.
Trial balloons or official policy?
The plot thickens when one takes into consideration a series of trial balloons that started to float a few days ago in select Chinese media. Here are some of the key points.
[1] On the trade war…
On the trade war front, Beijing won’t shut down US businesses already operating in China. But companies which want to enter the market in finance, information technology, healthcare and education services will not be approved.
[2] US Treasuries
Beijing won’t dump all its overwhelming mass of US Treasuries in one go, but – as it already happens – divestment will accelerate. Last year, that amounted to $100 billion. Up to the end of 2020, that could reach $300 billion.
[3] The Yuan as a global currency
The internationalization of the yuan, also predictably, will be accelerated. That will include configuring the final parameters for clearing US dollars through the CHIPS Chinese system – foreseeing the incandescent possibility Beijing might be cut off from SWIFT by the Trump administration or whoever will be in power at the White House after January 2021.
[4] America’s “Hybrid War”
On what is largely interpreted across China as the “full spectrum war” front, mostly Hybrid War, the PLA has been put into Stage 3 alert – and all leaves are canceled for the rest of 2020. There will be a concerted drive to increase all-round defense spending to 4% of GDP and accelerate the development of nuclear weapons. Details are bound to emerge during the Central Committee meeting in October.
[5] Chinese Independence and Self-Reliance
The overall emphasis is on a very Chinese spirit of self-reliance, and building what can be defined as a national economic “dual circulation” system: the consolidation of the Eurasian integration project running in parallel to a global yuan settlement mechanism.
Inbuilt in this drive is what has been described as…
“to firmly abandon all illusions about the United States...
...and conduct war mobilization with our people. We shall vigorously promote the war to resist US aggression...
...We will use a war mindset to steer the national economy...
...Prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the US.”
It’s unclear as it stands if these are only trial balloons disseminated across Chinese public opinion or decisions reached at the “invisible” Beidaihe.
So all eyes will be on what kind of language this alarming configuration will be packaged when the Central Committee presents its strategic planning in October.
Significantly, that will happen only a few weeks before the US election.
It’s all about continuity
All of the above somewhat mirrors a recent debate in Amsterdam on what constitutes the Chinese “threat” to the West.
Here are the key points.
[1] The Chinese Hybrid Economic Model
China constantly reinforces its hybrid economic model – which is an absolute rarity, globally: neither totally publicly owned nor a market economy.
[2] Hyper-Patriotic Nation
The level of patriotism is staggering: once the Chinese face a foreign enemy, 1.4 billion people act as one.
[3] No infighting. Powerful levers of control.
National mechanisms have tremendous force: absolutely nothing blocks the full use of China’s financial, material and manpower resources once a policy is set.
[4] Largest Industrial System on the Planet
China has set up the most comprehensive, back to back industrial system on the planet, without foreign interference if need be (well, there’s always the matter of semiconductors to Huawei to be solved).
[5] Long term planning
China plans not only in years, but in decades. Five year plans are complemented by ten year plans and as the meeting chaired by Xi showed, 15 year plans. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is in fact a nearly 40-year plan, designed in 2013 to be completed in 2049.
[6] Continuity of long-term purpose
And continuity is the name of the game – when one thinks that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first developed in 1949 and then expanded by Zhou Enlai at the Bandung conference in 1955 are set in stone as China’s foreign policy guidelines.
Conclusion
China is dealing with Chinese issues inside of China using Chinese methods. It is succeeding, and the future (as scary as it appears) seems to be well mapped out by a capable leadership supported by a robust industry, and an enthusiastic populace.
America hasn't a clue. It's still a mish-mash of politics, crime, corruption and distortions. No one inside of America trusts their government, their police or their military. To try to distract attention from domestic issues by having a war with a very robust nations would be national suicide.
The Qiao collective, an independent group that advances the role of qiao (“bridge”) by the strategically important huaqiao (“overseas Chinese”) is on point when they note that Beijing never proclaimed a Chinese model as a solution to global problems.
What they extol is Chinese solutions to specific Chinese conditions.
A forceful point is also made that historical materialism is incompatible with capitalist liberal democracy forcing austerity and regime change on national systems, shaping them towards preconceived models.
That always comes back to the core of the CCP foreign policy: each nation must chart a course fit for its national conditions.
And that reveals the full contours of what can be reasonably described as a Centralized Meritocracy with Confucian, Socialist Characteristics: a different civilization paradigm that the “indispensable nation” still refuses to accept, and certainly won’t abolish by practicing Hybrid War.
Do you want more?
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
NEOCON
A neoconservative (colloquially, neocon) in American politics is someone presented as a "conservative" but who actually favors big government, globalism, interventionism, perpetual war, police state, gun control, and a hostility to religion in politics and government.
The word means "newly conservative," and thus formerly liberal.
A neocon is a RINO Backer, and like RINOs does not accept most of the important principles in the Republican Party platform.
Neocons do not participate in the March for Life, nor stand up for traditional marriage, advocate other conservative social values, or emphasize putting America first.
Neocons support attacking and even overthrowing foreign governments, despite how that often results in more persecution of Christians.
Some neocons (like Dick Cheney) have profited immensely from the military-industrial complex and their pro-war positions. Many neocons are globalists and support the War on Sovereignty.
-Conservapedia
The Trump Administration, led by American neocons believe that they can wage “limited” nuclear, chemical and biological war without consequence.
We argue here that that idea is preposterous.
There will always be a response, and depending on the target nation, a host of responses. It is foolish to expect no response, or a “measured response”. Indeed, history tells us how absolutely ridiculous this belief is.
Today, China is dealing with the COVID-19 biological weapons attack by America on their CNY 2020 holiday. They have finished dealing with a CIA / NED sponsored “color revolution” in Hong Kong, and have just experienced a collapse of their BRI center at the Beirut Lebanon Port due to a mighty explosion (that has the hallmarks of a 6kT nuclear warhead). America has declared war on all Chinese technology, all Chinese trade, all international relationships, and all Chinese people. The anti-China propaganda effort is astounding in it’s size, magnitude, and pure visceral hate…
The COVID-19 biological attack is just the latest of at least six previous biological warfare actions by the Trump Administration, starting in 2017. Each time getting more and more aggressive. The sixth was the most brazen, with the use of drones to spray / fog swine flu viruses all over widely separate and remote pig farms.
I mean, you can’t get more ballsy than that!
The United States has done everything, and I do mean everything, short of launching nuclear ICBM’s at Chinese cities….
To assume that China will “let it roll of their shoulders” is a serious miscalculation. China has been making plans on how to deal with this situation, and has been working with Russia on military preparations. China will respond to all this, on their terms. At their pace. In their way.
And this is what this post is all about. We all need to consider the harsh reality that a nation that is willing to use biological warfare to achieve their goals will not have any problem with using nuclear weapons as well.
The following is a reprint of an article titled “The Myth of Moderate Nuclear War” by Brian Cloughley on Global Research, written on March 04, 2020 for the Strategic Culture Foundation. It was edited as necessary to fit this venue. All credit to the authors.
Early on, President Trump surrounded himself with neocon advisors. They advised that it was foolish to maintain large stores of weapons if they were not going to use them. That to use them would guarantee American global superiority.
The Myth of Moderate Nuclear War
There are many influential supporters of nuclear war, and some of these contend that the use of ‘low-yield’ and/or short-range weapons is practicable without the possibility of escalation to all-out Armageddon.
"Ah. We can use "moderate" and "reasonable" nuclear weapons. It would never escalate into a full-fledged armageddon."
In a way their argument is comparable to that of the band of starry-eyed optimists who thought, apparently seriously, that there could be such a beast as a ‘moderate rebel’.
In October 2013 the Washington Post reported that…
“The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, US-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war,”
…and the US Congress gave approval to then President Barack Obama’s plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to fight against Islamic State extremists.
The belief that there could be any grouping of insurgents that could be described as “moderate rebels” is bizarre and it would be fascinating to know how Washington’s planners classify such people.
What's a "moderate rebel"?
Someone who drinks tea with their pinky up? A person who listens to Indie Rock, and spreads organic Avocado on their whole-wheat toast, or perhaps someone who advocates "humane" techniques of torture.
"Moderate". What a nice, pleasant sounding term for a murderer.
It obviously didn’t dawn on them that any person who uses weapons illegally in a rebellion could not be defined as being moderate.
And how moderate is moderate?
Perhaps a moderate rebel could be equipped with US weapons that kill only extremists? Or are they allowed to kill only five children a month? The entire notion was absurd, and predictably the scheme collapsed, after expenditure of vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money.
President trump is an pro-war hawk that is for the use of nuclear weapons at will.
And even vaster amounts of money are being spent on developing and producing what might be classed as moderate nuclear weapons.
Moderate nuclear weapons, in that they don’t have the zillion-bang punch of most of its existing 4,000 plus warheads have.
“Moderate” nuclear weapons put a friendly face on the American use of theater nuclear bombs. This, the neocons believe, will make the use of them attractive to the American population. What they do not take into account is how their target nations would react. I dare say that they would not be pleased.
It is apparently widely believed in Washington that if a nuclear weapon is (comparatively) small, then it’s less dangerous than a big nuclear weapon.
Well…
Maybe they are right. Look what happened in the Beirut Port Bombing in August 2020.
And we know that this kind of event has been EXACTLY what the Trump NEOCONS have been arguing towards. Because, in January 2019 the Guardian reported that
“the Trump administration has argued the development of a low-yield weapon would make nuclear war less likely, by giving the US a more flexible deterrent. It would counter any enemy (particularly Russian) perception that the US would balk at using its own fearsome arsenal in response to a limited nuclear attack because its missiles were all in the hundreds of kilotons range and ‘too big to use’, because they would cause untold civilian casualties.”
Small nukes as a way to limit civilian deaths…
In fact, the nuclear war envisaged in that scenario would be a global catastrophe — as would all nuclear wars, because there’s no way, no means whatever, of limiting escalation.
Once a nuclear weapon has exploded and killed people, the nuclear-armed nation to which these people belonged is going to take massive action.
There is no alternative, because no government is just going to sit there and try to start talking with an enemy that has taken the ultimate leap in warfare.
It is fashionable to consider the use of low-yield nuclear weapons without consequence.
It is widely imagined — by many nuclear planners in the sub-continent, for example — that use of a tactical, a battlefield-deployed, nuclear weapon will in some fashion persuade the opponent (India or Pakistan) that there is no need to employ higher-capability weapons. Or, in other words, longer range missiles delivering massive warheads.
All retaliation would be measured, tit for tat.
These people think that the other side will evaluate the situation calmly and dispassionately and come to the conclusion that at most it should itself reply with a similar weapon.
Calmly.
Dispassionately.
But such a scenario supposes that there is good intelligence about the effects of the weapon that has exploded, most probably within the opponent’s sovereign territory.
This is verging on the impossible.
War is ugly and complex
War is confusing in the extreme, and tactical planning can be extremely complex. But there is no precedent for nuclear war, and nobody — nobody — knows for certain what reactions will be to such a situation in or near any nation.
The US 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (authorized by Trump as his NEOCON advisors Mike Pompeo and John Bolton) stated that low-yield weapons …
...“help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely”.
But do the possible opponents of the United States agree with that? How could they do so?
The reaction by any nuclear-armed state to what is confirmed as a nuclear attack will have to be swift.
But the neocons disagree, the threat of global conflagration will still exist.
The USA can launch small nuclear weapons, and reasonably expect no retaliation.
...
That is because it would need to be a "measured" response.
And if the attacked nation does not have low-yeld weapons, then they would refrain from using larger weapons. Instead, they would rely on their conventional arsenal.
...
Right?
It cannot be guaranteed, for example, that the first attack will not represent a series.
It will, by definition, be decisive, because the world will then be a tiny step from doomsday. The US nuclear review is optimistic that “flexibility” will by some means limit a nuclear exchange, or even persuade the nuked-nation that there should be no riposte, which is an intriguing hypothesis.
“the review calls for modification to ‘a small number of existing submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads’ to provide a low-yield option."
It also calls for further exploration of low-yield options, arguing that expanding these options will …
‘help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.’
This is intended to address the argument that adversaries might think the United States, out of concern for collateral damage, would hesitate to employ a high-yield nuclear weapon in response to a ‘lower level’ conflict, in which an adversary used a low-yield nuclear device.
The review argues that expanding low-yield options is ‘important for the preservation of credible deterrence,’ especially when it comes to smaller-scale regional conflicts.”
“Credible deterrence” is a favorite catch-phrase of the believers in limited nuclear war, but its credibility is suspect.
Former US defense secretary William Perry said last year that he wasn’t so much worried about the vast number of warheads in the world as he was by open proposals that these weapons are “usable”.
It’s right back to the Cold War and he emphasizes that…
“The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons – which I haven’t heard being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years...
... is happening now in those countries...
... which I think is extremely distressing.”
But the perturbing thing is that while it is certainly being discussed in Moscow, it’s doctrine in Washington.
America is now ready to use nuclear weapons to achieve it’s goals
In late February US Defense Secretary Esper was reported as having taken part in a…
“classified military drill in which Russia and the United States traded nuclear strikes.”
The Pentagon stated that …
“The scenario included a European contingency where you’re conducting a war with Russia and Russia decides to use a low-yield, limited nuclear weapon against a site on NATO territory.”
The US response was to fire back with what was called a “limited response.”
First of all, the notion that Russia would take the first step to nuclear war is completely baseless, and there is no evidence that this could ever be contemplated.
But ever if it were to be so, it cannot be imagined for an instant that Washington would indulge in moderate nuclear warfare in riposte. These self-justifying war-games are dangerous. And they bring Armageddon ever closer.
Today 2020
So, let’s perform a quick recap…
The United States under President Trump is staffed with neocons.
The United States is currently fighting eight wars plus a hybrid war with China.
The United States has fielded “small” nuclear weapons.
The United States has been using biological germ warfare against China.
The President of the United States argues in favor of limited, surgical use of nuclear weapons to accomplish his objectives.
No matter what the United States does, China is still plugging away. It is still building things, trading things, and growing.
There will come a point in time where the neocons will feel that it is “now or never” to finally and completely suppress China.
…
LISTEN TO ME.
I have some points that I want to make perfectly clear.
The Chinese and the Russians will know before hand what is going to happen. They have intel.
If it is plausible that an event will happen on either Chinese or Russian land, they WILL strike first.
The response will NOT be with “moderate” and “friendly” tactical weapons.
It will be the unleashing of unholy terror.
America has NEVER experienced losing a war. It has NEVER been the vanquished people. Americans have no idea what it would be like to lose in a war…
So with this in mind, let’s look at what happened after Hitler killed himself in Germany, the nation surrendered to the Allies, and Victorious Russian troops flowed into Germany in 1945…
The Rape of Germany
When Berlin fell to the Soviets it is rumored that Stalin gave the Soviet Soldiers permission to do what ever they wanted for the first 3 days. At the end of that 3 days you would be hard pressed to find a single German woman who had not been raped at least once by the Soviet Soldiers.
Almost 100 percent of women between the ages of 8 and 80 were raped — repeatedly — some as many as 60 to 70 times.
Estimates are around 2,000,000 women were raped in Germany, 100,000 in Berlin. These estimates are based in part on the number of requested abortions that climbed markedly after the Russians arrived.
Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000
War historians have described it as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and have concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.
Civilians from occupied countries and even Russian women rescued from work camps were at risk and Stalin gave his silent assent to this mayhem.
Stalin said people should
“…understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle”.
On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he reportedly said:
"We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative."
The smart women didn’t resist or found an officer to bed. Officers tended to be more civilized and would protect their “women” from the rampaging enlisted men.
Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda’s, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort:
“Frau ist Frau.”
Women soon learned to disappear during the “hunting hours” of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.
According to a former Russian army officer:
“We were young, strong, and four years without women. So we tried to catch German women and … Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women; the entire population run from the Soviet Army. So we had to take young, twelve or thirteen year-old. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. Now I can not understand how I did it. A boy from a good family… But that was me."
A woman telephone operator from the Russian Army recalled that:
“When we occupied every town, we had first three days for looting and … [rapes]. That was unofficial of course. But after three days one could be court-martialed for doing this. … I remember one raped German woman laying naked, with hand grenade between her legs. Now I feel shame, but I did not feel shame back then… Do you think it was easy to forgive [the Germans]? We hated to see their clean undamaged white houses. With roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. … Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them.”
Abortions were the preferred choice of rape victims, and many died as a consequence of internal injuries after being brutally violated, untreated sexually transmitted diseases due to a lack of medicine, badly performed abortions, and suicides, particularly for traumatized victims who had been raped many times.
In addition, many children died in post-war Germany as a result of widespread starvation, scarce supplies, and diseases such as typhus and diphtheria. The infant mortality in Berlin reached up to 90 percent.
German historian Miriam Gebhardt …
“believes that members of the US military raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, with most of the assaults taking place in the months immediately following the US invasion of Nazi Germany. "
The author bases her claims in large part on reports kept by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945.
Conclusion
War is a terrible, terrible thing.
The idea that the NEOCONS in America in Washington DC are in favor of it, by any means possible should send a shiver down the spines of anyone reading Metallicaman. How can I spell this out to you? If America gets involved in a kinetic “hot” war with another major power, it will not survive.
The chances are high that it will end up becoming a vanquished nation in a ruined world, and the rest of the world will expect Holy Hell from the survivors inside America. It will not be pretty or pleasant.
To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives’ pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe.
In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these “Western values” are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists.
The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.
The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China—although misinformed by their “experts” educated abroad in the neoliberal tradition, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it—are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington’s vassal states, for the neoconservatives, who control Washington and, thereby, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war.
As Washington is not a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war will be nuclear, and the result will be the end of life on Earth.
-Paul Craig Roberts
Or, more likely, the end of life as we have known it to be, on earth.
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I tire of all this global politics and political manipulations. It’s really quite tiring and worrisome. The anti-China campaign is geared up to prep the American electorate towards a war with China, and it is really building up to that point. (It really is.) Trump collapsed global trade, unleashed a bio-weapon, and supported the proxy use of a micro-nuke to destroy the BRI facility in the Beirut Port in Lebanon. And I haven’t even started listing the thousands of other efforts. Ugh!
Forget those negotiations with China spearheaded by the man who boasted that he was the maestro of “the art of the deal.”
Recently, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck assault on that country: from deploying U.S. aircraft carriers in the South China Sea to the sudden and arbitrary closing of a Chinese consulate in Houston. Of all people, Health Secretary Alex Azar was even dispatched to Taiwan, that other China, to meet and greet the country’s president, the highest-ranking official American visitor to do so in four decades. Of course, as with so much in the age of Trump, there was a grimly comic aspect to his trip, since he made a particular point of praising the way a democratic country could handle the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (a howler, given how Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have each handled that same virus).
And that’s just to start down a list that, from TikTok bans to criminal charges against four members of the Chinese military, only continues to grow as The Donald and crew become ever more belligerent about that rising power on a falling planet.
Hong Kong
Let’s focus on Hong Kong.
Now that China has pretty much captured, imprisoned, and evicted the NED agitators (who where behind the (so called) “pro democracy” protests), we now have a very detailed picture of the techniques and systems that they used.
A secret high-level committee of Hong Kong senior activists worked with Western agents from the CIA to coordinate and amplify the leaderless protests against the fugitive law amendment last year, Nury Vittachi claims in his book The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong.
Vittachi, a veteran journalist and a columnist for The Standard, accused the CIA of funding anti-government activities in the SAR. He said Hong Kong protesters have received practical training in street-protest strategy and media control from members of the professional revolution industry since January 2013.
The book named three US-based groups - the Oslo Freedom Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institute and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies - which were directly involved in last year's social unrest.
He added that public records had shown that the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA's regime-change arm, had sent HK$170 million to the mainland or Hong Kong since 2014 to "advance the cause of democracy."
https://lnkd.in/dwnSU-S
We know for certain that the NED was a CIA front. We also know through videos, audio recordings, phone conversations, movies, and confessions how the protestors were trained and directed to cause disruption in Hong Kong. It’s amazing stuff for certain.
Not all protestors were so trained. Just the leadership were.
They leadership ran the mobs. Other individuals (also paid for by the NED) were “recruiters” and collected and organized the mobs. Most of which operated by recruitment in Hong Kong schools and Universities. There is where the millennial youth were collected and inspired to protest.
But, not all protestors were young.
The older protestors were also recruited. But they were recruited differently. We know because they were paid to be agitators. NED recruiters would go into retirement communities, and other venues to collect people and pay them to participate in the protests. Those so paid were issued with a monetary award of a few thousand HKD and were given a stamped tattoo. You can see this tattoo on many of the older protesters during the riots.
Ah…
But such short lived money had some consequences, don’t you know…
Money flowed easily, and some Chinese tried to capitalize in this by "double dipping" and other tactics to claim the money.
However, months later, many who collected the CIA cash, found that they suddenly lost all of their social security, and their social credit score went to zero and went black. The money was dirty and tracked by Beijing. If you cashed it at a Chinese bank, and the GPS showed that you were at a protest event, you suddenly lost all social standing. Which meant, no buses, no taxi's, no subways, no school, no credit cards, no flying. No parking. Nothing....
... for the REST OF YOUR LIFE.
All of this was conducted by the NED.
Which is the CIA, run by the CIA, and funded by the CIA. But, it is now renamed as a "private NGO" for "humanitarian purposes."
In short, the CIA under the control of Mike Pompeo, and by direction of Donald Trump lead a “Color Revolution” in Hong Kong, following very advanced techniques and supported technology.
Hong Kong billionaire Jimmy Lai under arrest.
A “color revolution” in HK
Using American technology and Langley information, protest venues were precisely mapped out. Cameras were identified and disabled, and targets were selected.
Each protest was like a piece in a very complex puzzle. All directed to force the Hong Kong government to take certain precalculated actions. (As it was compelled by HK democrat law to behave in certain ways and react to crime in certain specific ways.)
This was success for some time.
For a while it was like a “wack a mole”, and the police were running all over the place. Riots were popping up everywhere, stations and buildings were burning, Chinese citizens were getting hurt and killed, and the government appeared impotent. As soon as the protestors were arrested, HK Judges (UK, and Australian citizens within HK) would let them go home free with no punishments or consequences.
This is because the entire system was not set up to combat an invasion by a foreign power. Only to arrest and suppress individual disturbances to the civil order.
The “color revolution” counted on HK maintaining democracy, and they used systems and polices that would work in that environment. As such, the rioters were trained to do as much damage as possible and to provoke as much as possible, but cause no direct confrontation.
And they thrived.
Things were going exactly to plan.
That was, until China decided that it served no purpose to continue to play the game and play by the rules established by Mike Pompeo.
China recognized that America was behind everything. They had proof and confirmations. They realized that the way the situation was being handled would eventually result in the collapse of the government there. This was unacceptable. And action had to be taken.
China takes action in HK
So they changed the rules of the game. They changed the laws, and immediately went to work collecting, seizing and isolating the CIA elements.
The entire faculty at the problematic universities were fired. There were were no exceptions for tenure or other reasons.
All foreign journalists and news media were culled for their participation in the riots. many operations were shut down, and the people deported from HK.
HK billionaires who partially funded the operations, and produced pamphlets and propaganda were arrested with their entire families and senior staff. They were taken to mainland China and are now being held for treason which will result in serious consequences for them and their families.
The COVID-19 served as great cover to clear out the remaining “rats nest” and for the most art, HK is clean of the offenders.
Now, there is a lot of information behind all this. It’s all in China. I couldn’t find anything in the American or British press. Which was strange. You would think that they might at least have one singular article. At least.
Anyways…
In the articles you can see the great deal of depth and discoveries uncovered by the Chinese investigation teams. For they have found chemical weapons labs making both munitions, and chemical weapons. they have found instructive literature (that came from the United States), and secure communication systems that lead straight back to America.
From a technical point of view, I find all this information fascinating.
But that is not what I am going to post here. Instead, I am going to just post one or two videos that have been making their way inside China that well illustrate the great degree of avant-garde control that the CIA has established when trying to force the collapse of Hong Kong and establish billionaire Jimmy Lai as the new dictator.
John Bolton with Jimmy Lai.
All of it is terribly interesting.
Video 1 – Riot control by the NED
Like I said, I won’t spend too much time on this. I really don’t have much interest in the instigation of riots for manipulative gain. But I am interested in “fifth column” activities.
Check this video out…
How instructions were sent by the NED / CIA to the protestors.
This is all very interesting.
Now, China had to stop all of this. Beijing saw that the Hong Kong government was following the standard police riot control methods that usually work for “grass roots” organizations, but this was on another level completely. These protests and riots were well funded, highly organized, and methodical. There was a long term plan and strategy at play.
Video 2 – What was intended to happen to HK.
China bugged the conversation(s) between trumps’ diplomatic aides in Hong Kong and the protest leadership. So everything they said, did, promised and explored was recorded, and analyzed in both Hong Kong and Beijing.
China has videos and audio tracks of American leadership directing riots in HK.
China has videos of American Leadership making promises and giving money to anti-China (pro-Democracy) terrorists.
China has the complete “paper trail” of the money, how it changed hands, and where it originated from, as well as detailed itemized lists of how it was spent.
They knew what was promised, what the funding and supply channels were and what to expect. And they did not like it.
Because it was clearly stated DURING THE CONVERSATIONS with the radical leadership that the intention of President Trump was to turn Hong Kong upside down “and let it burn“. The Trump administration wanted to turn Hong Kong into another fiasco like all the other “color revolutions” were.
Hong Kong – Let it BURN!
This is what the objective was…
Images form a previous NED sponsored “color revolution”.
Today, Hong Kong is quiet.
Everything is back to normal.
There just isn’t any more protests. No one is waving American Flags. No one is singing the American National Anthem. No one is spraying pro-American graffiti on the walls. Pepe-the-frog is no where to be seen.
Imagine that!
Trump is furious!
You can see this. He is completely unhinged. What the heck? Why is he so upset if Hong Kong is calm and peaceful? Why is he so enraged?
Well, we all know the reasons.
But first, let’s be clear…
China was the ONLY nation that has been able to stop a CIA / NED sponsored “color revolution” dead in it’s tracks. It’s the only nation that was able to do so.
That is worth consideration.
Conclusion
This is all pretty obvious if you have been paying attention.
What I find interesting in all of this is the dearth and lack of information about this in the American and Western press. Further, and most importantly, there is ZERO information anywhere about how China stopped a NED sponsored “color revolution” in a city that is four times the size of New York City.
You can come to many conclusions regarding all this.
You can pretty much consider all “news” to be nonexistent.
The USA is out of control and failed in containing HK via the NED.
HK still remains an economic and financial center fro the Pacific basin.
Meanwhile, Overseas Chinese are flocking back to China…
“Hong Kong is and will always be an inseparable part of China. Hong Kong has its own identity, it will always be special, like Shanghai and Beijing are special too. Because of our history, we are fortunate to have choices.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with emigrating to US, Canada or UK. My generation has been there and done that. We have many friends and family happily settled in the US/Canada/UK, albeit they are frustrated because Trump makes their lives miserable too.
But those who choose to leave Hong Kong now because media and hallucinations lead them to believe that Hong Kong will decline and there will be no more freedom and rights blah blah blah, then I guarantee you, they will miss the best ride ever and regret it for the rest of their lives.
This is the best time in history to be Chinese, and to be in Hong Kong and China.”
As a HK’er myself, I totally agree with her points of view. To be totally open, I know Sandra and her husband. We went through very similar life experience and after a long time in the West, we settled back down in Hong Kong and China. Not only is Hong Kong our home, China is the place to be at. We feel proud because of our own achievement and the prospects going forward are even better.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Well, if you want to be technical it is that he used nuclear weapons via proxy against a Chinese BRI installation within Beirut, Lebanon.
Most people are unaware that the United States has been waging a full-on “hybrid war” against China since late 2016. They see bits and pieces, and conclude that it is just more media nonsense. They do not see the “big picture” of how everything fits together. Well, as frightening as the “big picture” is, you need to see the historical context to see what the fuck we are marching forward. And, people (!) if you are not squirreled away in some safe hiding-hole by now, you had best start making preparations this afternoon.
First off, I covered the “Big Picture” regarding the United States and China here in this long and detailed post;
Thirdly, I covered the details about the use of a (micro) nuclear weapon to destroy the BRI gateway in Lebanon, with a post on the destruction of the Bruit Port in Lebanon here…
Fourthly, I had a warning to the oligarchy. This “Great Reset” will hit everyone everywhere, and you cannot hide alone in your hidy-hole and avoid it. You need to show your true colors and live and work as part of a community…
Of course, you won’t be able to find any of this in the mainstream or alternative media. Their links (internally to the articles) are flagged as “dangerous” and are scrubbed from common viewing. (Man! I never thought that it would happen to me, but it has.)
In any event, let it be well understood that…
World War III is engaged.
It is not being televised.
All of this stuff—the beautiful and the ugly—is really happening and really matters, but you have to be extremely careful in using news reports to develop a sense of how much of what is happening where.
-Resist the Crazy
What now?
No one is going to believe you.
Most people feed at the trough of “news” and they believe what they are told to believe. The “free thinkers” have been successfully funneled into what ever exists in Alt-Right and Alt-Left media. They all are being led like the sheep they are.
"...this idiocy is on a par with the "q-anon" facebook extravaganza which, with
equal scientific and religious fanaticism, identifies a secret plan, only
known to several million with access to top secret conspiratorial websites,
to get rid of trump…who knew?"
You cannot change a sheep. You cannot change a cow. Just give it grass to graze upon and lead it into the proper field so that you can get the wool or milk from them.
And does it matter that you are alone with this knowledge?
"...while the U.S. and Israel represent a threat to humanity, humanity is the
even greater loser when things like this nonsense about a nuclear attack in Beirut take hold among otherwise thoughtful people..."
What benefit could you possibly derive from telling everyone what is actually going on? None. That is what. In fact, you are more aptly and likely to be ridiculed.
So do not even bother.
What to do now, is to take care of you and your loved ones.
That’s what you need to do.
When I walked away from New York City and Wall Street ten years ago it was clear what sort of trajectory the country was on, and it’s only gotten worse since. We’re now in the crucial period spanning 2020-2025 that will decide what the next several decades look like. The big battle for the future is here. Right now. If there’s ever been a time in your life to step up, this is it.
-It's time to step into the arena
The way of the world
At this point, I want to impress to everyone the yin-yang philosophy of the Chinese. For they are the ones that are going to survive all these global changes. And make no mistake, they ARE going to survive. And they ARE going to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and prosper.
And it goes something like this…
The yin-yang philosophy says that the universe is composed of competing and complementary forces of dark and light, sun and moon, male and female. The philosophy is at least 3,500 years old, discussed in the ninth-century BCE text known as I Ching or Book of Changes , and influences the philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism.
And, what I want to do is apply it to what is going on, but at a deeper level.
You see, if you really are paying attention, you will note that the Chinese are trying very desperately NOT to react to any of the United States (Donald Trump) aggravations. They are trying to move like water around them.
And there are very good reasons for this.
One of which is that whatever the Chinese do, it comes back to them. And what ever the United States does, it comes back to them…
So the USA clamps down on every things Chinese. Students no longer attend American schools, Billions of dollars lost.
So the USA clamps down on the use of Chinese APPs. iPhone and GM sales are way down inside of China. Billions of dollars lost.
So the USA launches COVID-19 to suppress China, and the USA gets crushed in the process. Death rate in the hundreds of thousands.
So the USA launches a nuclear warhead to obliterate a city port and…
…
…
What you can do
People(!) if you are in a major city, I would strongly advise you to move. I do not want to announce that MAD-level nuclear destruction is imminent, but I will say that the forces are arrayed in that direction. Only the wise man listens and takes action.
.
My guess is that you have three years before things get dicey.
This will occur regardless of who is in the office of Presidency. Trump, Biden, Harris, Peter Pan. It will not matter.
This will occur whether the villain-of-the-day is China, or Russia, or Iran, or North Korea. It will still occur.
The systems are all in place, the slow grinding of the stone gears are a turning, and there is nothing that mice, or men can do at this point in time. The juncture has been passed, and its a long slow slide into the abyss.
I’m sensing a very dark and vicious energy out there which seems to be affecting all sorts of people who normally wouldn’t be sucked into it. I need to make a conscious effort to not have it influence me or my thoughts. If you’re feeling the same, try to retain sanity.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 4, 2020
But live life
Life must go on. You must work, buy food, and have some semblance of life. Your children must attend school and you must disentangle yourself from all the worries of the world.
Don’t let my warnings get to you.
There is really nothing you can do about anything. Your hands are tied. The systems are all in motion. The things are moving. The chess pieces are on the board, and like the automatons that we are, we are all slowly walking to death’s door.
You just have awareness.
What’s happening in America right now is what happens in a failed state.
The U.S. is a failed state. Now the imperial national security state is going to flex at home like never before.
I spent the last decade of my life trying to spread the word to avoid this, but here we are.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) May 31, 2020
The mad elephant
The United States right now is like a mad elephant inside of a cargo jet aircraft.
The United States is collapsing and thrashing about like a crazed, mad elephant, trumpeting and stomping, and snarling and biting. Those near it are trying like the dickens to hold on to the ropes that are tying this beast in place. The straps are straining and they are breaking. They are beyond unraveling. A number of the ropes are disengaged and whipping about dangerously.
But it’s only a matter of time, don’t you know.
The elephant must be put down.
It is doing more than just stomping and crushing things. It is shitting all over the place, it is using it’s trunk to pick up the handlers and smash them against the inside of the plane fuselage. Windows are getting cracked. Inside of the plane the metal sides are getting dented and chairs are being smashed.
And the pilot is opening the rear door…
As a cold gust of air floods the inside of the chamber…
And you?
Well, you are that little beetle that is riding on the elephant’s tail. And it is really, really uncomfortable.
What are you going to do? What are your options?
Stay on the tail?
Jump off the tail now?
Wait until the very last minute before you jump off… maybe while the elephant is outside the plane perhaps?
Move to a better vantage point on the elephant?
Jump onto one of the handlers next to the elephant?
Jump onto one of the ropes that are flinging about wildly?
The longer you wait, the less options you will have.
The clueless leadership
The neocons that are all involved in this haven’t a real clue as to what they are doing. They do not see this as opening Pandora’s box that will remake America, and distort the world. They see it as their God-Given Right to reshape the world in “the way of the Lord”.
America today.
In truth, they are like Nero Playing the fiddle while Rome burns.
In July of 64 A.D., a great fire ravaged Rome for six days, destroying 70 percent of the city and leaving half its population homeless. According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression has a double meaning: Not only did Nero play music while his people suffered, but he was an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis. It’s been pretty easy to cast blame on Nero, who had many enemies and is remembered as one of history’s most sadistic and cruelest leaders—but there are a couple of problems with this story.
For one thing, the fiddle didn’t exist in ancient Rome. Music historians believe the viol class of instruments (to which the fiddle belongs) was not developed until the 11th century. If Nero played anything, it would probably have been the cithara, a heavy wooden instrument with four to seven strings—but there is still no solid evidence that he played one during the Great Fire. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Nero was rumored to have sung about the destruction of Troy while watching the city burn; however, he stated clearly that this was unconfirmed by eyewitness accounts.
When the Great Fire broke out, Nero was at his villa at Antium, some 35 miles from Rome. Though he immediately returned and began relief measures, people still didn’t trust him. Some even believed he had ordered the fire started, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. Nero himself blamed the Christians (then an obscure religious sect) for the fire, and had many arrested and executed. But while Nero may have been guilty of many things, the story of him fiddling while Rome burned belongs firmly in the category of popular legend rather than established truth.
-History.com
The idea behind this is that most people see their lives turned upside down by the action of the leadership. They see the fire. They see the destruction. They see the ruin. But the leadership remains the leadership. They still live in their nice palaces, eat their fine food and drink their fine wines.
Here’s Trump and his oligarchy buddies at a fund raiser event at one of his golf clubs…
President Trump talking to his peers.
Cops and protesters banging heads while bankers sit at home drinking wine with their newly printed Federal Reserve dollars. Same as it ever was.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) May 30, 2020
The God-Given Right to Reshape the World
When I make this statement, many “normals” think I am a loon. But you must understand that there are people who believe that they themselves ARE the the mouth-piece of God. As such, they can do no wrong, because everything that they do is blessed by God, and that they will be rewarded in Heaven when they die.
Nothing is more dangerous than a narcissist that believes that he is the “hand of God” and is in charge of the vast array of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the American military arsenal.
In the 21st century alone, I’ve been given good reason to distrust all sorts of things around me, including the U.S. government (all governments really), intelligence agencies, politicians, mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, to name a few. These power centers make up “society” as we know it in 2020, which is really just massive concentrations of lawless financial and political power obfuscating rampant criminality behind the cover of various ostensibly venerable institutions. What’s most remarkable is how many people still maintain trust in so many of these provably untrustworthy organizations and industries, which speaks to the power of propaganda as well as the comfort of denial.
-Trust No One
And what does all this mean?
Well, using weapons of mass destruction against other large and power nations, all in the name of God, is opening up Pandora’s box…
Pandora’s Box
A “Pandora’s box” is a metaphor. It refers to a source of endless complications or trouble arising from a single, simple miscalculation.
Pandora’s story comes to us from ancient Greek mythology.
Or, more specifically, a set of epic poems by Hesiod, called the Theogony and Works and Days.
These poems were written during the 7th century BC in Greece.
These poems relate how the gods came to create Pandora and how the gift Zeus gave her ultimately ends the Golden Age of humankind.
The Story of Pandora’s Box
According to Hesiod, Pandora was a curse on mankind as retribution after the Titan Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humans.
Pandora was to be the first of a race of women.
She was the first bride and a great misery who would live with mortal men.
The women would be wonderful companions, but only in times of plenty. And they would quickly leave them when times became difficult.
Her name means both “she who gives all gifts” and “she who was given all gifts”.
All the Ills of the World
Then Zeus sent this beautiful treachery as a gift to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, who ignored Prometheus’s advice to never accept gifts from Zeus. In the house of Epimetheus, there was a jar—in some versions, it too was a gift from Zeus—and because of her insatiable greedy woman’s curiosity, Pandora lifted the lid on it.
Out from the jar flew every trouble known to humanity.
Strife, sickness, toil and myriad other ills escaped from the jar to afflict men and women forever more.
Pandora managed to keep one spirit in the jar as she shut the lid, a timid sprite named Elpis, usually translated as “hope.”
Hurwit (1995) says that the myth explains why humans must work to survive, that Pandora represents the beautiful figure of dread, something for which men can find no device or remedy. The quintessential woman was created to beguile men with her beauty and uncontrollable sexuality, to introduce falsehood and treachery and disobedience into their lives. Her task was to let loose all the evils upon the world while trapping hope, unavailable to mortal men. Pandora is a trick gift, a punishment for the good of Promethean fire, she is, in fact, Zeus's price of fire.
- Thought Company
Putting it all together
The world is heading to a “Great Reset”.
The leadership of the greatest nation on the earth, in economy and weapons, believes that he was empowered by GOD to remake the earth.
He has used both biological weapons and nuclear weapons in this quest.
Once used, it will be much easier to use them again, and again, and again as he seems fit.
And the rest of the world is watching with a great deal of consternation. Most do not want to believe it. But the leadership of the other powerful nations are aware of what is going on, and making preparations.
What do you think they are doing? What if you were Xi Peng, or Alexander Putin, what would you be doing right now? Would you be reading CNN, MSNBC, or listening to Alex Jones? What would you be doing, and how would you be acting?
…
…
And you. What are you doing?
Some History
It’s been a long time for many in America to know what total war is. They never experienced it. Aside from an attack on Hawaii for an hour, the last real fighting was the American Civil War, and much of the nation remained unscathed. So let me tell you all something…
Real war is ruthless.
The historical “normal” is returning. Buckle up. You and yours are all in the cross hairs.
Greek authors rarely go into any detail when describing the fall of a city, so if we want to know what this really means, we are to some extent forced to use our imagination. However, it's clear from what little we hear that Xenophon's 'universal law' usually meant 3 things:
All movable property was taken
All adult men were killed
All women, children and elderly men were sold into slavery.
The first of these points is least well attested, but probably most widespread. Every warrior who was sent against an enemy settlement would hope to come away with a profit.
Homes could be stripped of furniture and metal objects; temples could be robbed of their dedications and temple treasuries emptied. If there was time, even the rooftiles and wooden fittings of houses could be torn off and carried away.
The simple fact that large amounts of ancient coinage and jewellry was preserved in its hiding place (buried, thrown into wells, etc.) shows that people were quite concerned to keep their valuables out of the hands of greedy invaders.
The second point is better known, because it was a matter of justice and pride. When a city was attacked, it could choose to surrender; if it did not, it forfeited any claim to mercy. Those who had decided to resist their enemies would get what they deserved. The most explicit example of this is the fate Agamemnon desired for Troy:
Not a single one of them must escape sheer destruction at our hands. Not even if a mother carries one in her belly and he is male, not even he should escape. All together they must be exterminated from Troy, their bodies untended and invisible.
-- Iliad 6.57-62
There are loads of examples from Greek history of sieges ending with the slaughter of all adult men. These massacres removed the defeated community's ability to fight and ensured that there would be no further resistance.
The third point arises from the fact that the Greeks seem to have considered it barbaric to kill captured women and children as well as men. The few examples of this in Greek history were condemned as savage. Once the needs of revenge had been satisfied, the remaining population was instead considered a potential source of profit:
When they were delivered to her by the Persians, Pheretime took the most guilty of the Barkaians and set them impaled around the top of the wall; the breasts of their women she cut off and planted around the wall in like manner. As for the rest of the Barkaians, she told the Persians to take them as plunder.
-- Herodotos 4.202
There was substantial money to be made from this, which is why commanders sometimes tried to restrain the bloodlust of their victorious troops. Even if it was just, as well as satisfying, to kill the defenders, it still amounted to the destruction of a source of income:
Dionysios' entire army burst into the city (...) and now every spot was a scene of mass slaughter; for the Sicilian Greeks, eager to return cruelty for cruelty, slew everyone they encountered, sparing without distinction not a child, not a woman, not an elder. Dionysios, wishing to sell the inhabitants into slavery for the money he could gather, at first attempted to restrain the soldiers from murdering the captives, but when no one paid any attention to him and he saw that the fury of the Sicilian Greeks was not to be controlled, he stationed heralds to cry aloud and tell the Motyans to take refuge in the temples which were revered by the Greeks. When this was done, the soldiers ceased their slaughter and turned to looting the property.
-- Diodoros of Sicily 14.53.1-3
The beginning of this passage is unique in actually describing a scene that must have been typical when a city fell to a Greek army. Most successful siege assaults were not the result of elaborate circumvallation, but of a surprise assault or betrayal.
As a result, rather than bottling up the helpless enemy from all sides, the attackers usually entered the city from one point and began their rampage from there.
Those left in the city therefore had two choices: either to resist or to flee. The former would result in the brutal fate sketched above - but the latter explains how Greek communities often seem to have survived a lost siege despite the genocidal intent of their attackers. It was often possible for a substantial part of the population to get away.
Their ultimate fate would then depend on what the victorious enemy intended to do with the settlement. Sometimes (especially in the Archaic period) their intent was to seize the territory for themselves; in these cases the town would be razed, and the fugitive population cast adrift. Fear of this outcome was supposed to keep the Spartans in the fight against the Messenians early in their history:
The most wretched of all things is for a man to leave his city and its fertile fields, reduced to the life of a beggar, wandering with his mother and aged father, his little children and wedded wife. Wherever he ends up, he will be as an enemy dwelling among them. He will succumb to need and detestable poverty, bring shame upon his family, disgrace his splendid looks. All forms of dishonour and misery will dog him. Since this is how it is and no one cares for or respects a wanderer or his offspring at all, let us fight hard for our land and die for our children without sparing our lives.
-- Tyrtaios fr. 10.3-14
If they had friends elsewhere, they might be able to obtain a temporary home, or even gain resident status and a home away from home, as the Plataians did at Athens when the Spartans razed their settlement in 427 BC.
In the Classical period, the intention was often rather to plant settlers on the conquered territory in order to expand the victorious city's number of land-owning citizens. This is what Athens did with the land of most of its defeated enemies from 506 BC onward. In such cases, the captured city might be reinhabited - at times by the new settlers along with the old population of women and children, whom they took as wives or slaves.
Alternatively, once due vengeance had been exacted, the remnants of the city's population could simply be allowed to return to it, often subjected to tribute and an imposed political regime. When the Athenians finally lost their fleet at Aigospotamoi in 405 BC, fear washed through the city, because the Athenians fully expected to meet the same fate that they had inflicted upon other Greeks throughout the decades of their Empire - the eradication of their community, the death of their men, and the sale of their women into slavery. However, for reasons that are still debated today, the Spartans decided to spare them. They got away with "only" a sack, the destruction of their walls, and the imposition of the tyrannical yoke of the Thirty.
- What actually happens when a city is sacked?
You should have paid attention to history class. The historical normal is one where no one is ever safe. It is always a short bubble of time, no more than one or two generations in length where people can live together in some sort of sanity.
But that bubble always pops, and the people living their nice safe lives are often overtaken by the shock and brutality of the reality that will overwhelm them.
We know what will happen. It has been well documented. People will be collected. They will be rounded up into urban areas, or centers. The men will be separated out from the group. They will be led to an isolated area, a cellar, a warehouse, a cluster of tree, an area behind a bulldozer. They will then be held down by two people and shot dead.
We are coming for you.
It’s going to be historical. It will be Biblical, and it will consist of many elements that are not at all “enlightened” and “progressive”. It will be raw and unbridled.
It will be historical
Prepare for a resurgence in the “old ways”.
Pandora has opened up the box.
Large Urban Cities…
Worse was to come in 1221 — ‘a year to live in infamy’. While Genghis’s other armies had been busy in the east, threatening Tbilisi in Georgia and terrifying the Christian world, Tolui, one of Genghis’s equally reprehensible sons, took Merv (in modern-day Turkmenistan), one of the largest cities in the world.
Promised safety, the citizens surrendered and emerged from behind their walls. Tolui ‘surveyed the masses dolefully gathered with their possessions, mounted a golden chair and ordered mass executions to commence’.
They took four days and nights to complete.
Genghis’s rotten fruit did not fall far from the tree. Terror — and the certainty of its visitation — was a major weapon in Genghis’s arsenal: decapitated women, children and even cats and dogs were reputedly displayed.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
Complete devastation…
Incursions into Southeast Asia were largely successful, most factions agreed to pay tribute, and only the Invasions into Vietnam and Java failed.
Europe was devastated by the Mongols.
They destroyed near enough every major Russian city, and invaded Volga Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary.
If rumours spread that the Mongols were coming, then it would cause a mass panic, and some would run to safety.
There was no guaranteed way to defeat the Mongol hordes, they continuously defeated much larger armies, so numerical strength couldn’t protect you.
Mongol conquests would leave once populous and flourishing areas as wastelands, with little to no people, those remaining would be slaves.
-ESKify
Everyone thinks that change will never come to them.
The Women…
Genghis Khan had so much power that he could do whatever he wanted.
For instance, when Genghis occupied some new area, he would kill or enslave all the men and share all the women amongst his tribe.
Genghis Khan would even make beauty contests of captured women to decide which woman is the most beautiful one.
Yeah, he was having his Miss Universe competition before it was cool. So, the queen of those beauty competitions would win the privilege to become one of many Genghis Khan's women.
Rest of the Mongolian army would share all the other contestants.
-The Richest
The Wealthy…
Genghis Khan was the most feared human of the 13th century, who could destroy dynasties just by moving his little finger. He created the Mongol Empire all by himself and earned his eternal spot in the history books.
However, a lot of people had to suffer for Genghis Khan to succeed. Oh yes, the Mongolians were known for their horrendous torturing techniques.
One of the most popular was pouring molten silver down the throat and ears of a victim. Genghis Khan also liked bending his enemy's back until the backbone snapped. If that sounds barbaric, skip this next part.
So, the Mongols once celebrated victory over Russians in a very bizarre way. They picked all the Russian survivors, dropped them on the ground and put a heavy wooden gate on top of them.
Then, Genghis Khan and the entire Mongol army had a huge banquet on that wooden gate. They ate, drank, and watched how Russians were dying one by one from the suffocation, pressure, and wounds.
-The Richest
A return to the old ways…
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”
-Genghis Khan.
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Normally I’m not that surprised with things that happen. I know that there is no such thing as coincidences, and that the American military empire is collapsing and thrashing all about. But you know, even I can be bitch slapped from time to time. And this is one of those times.
No shit!
yes. I had bought into the story about the ammonium nitrate warehouse being an accident. I really did. I knew about the Donald Trump / Pompeo shit about the biological weapons attacks on China, the NED, and all that nonsense in Hong Kong. But, you know, I figured that he wouldn’t REALLY start blowing shit up. Not really.
Oh, boy was I wrong!
I just couldn’t believe that Trump would do such a thing. This is true, even though I realized that it was quite a coincidence that this port was earmarked for the Chinese BRI (Belt and Road Initiative), and that suddenly it was destroyed in a completely massive “accidental” explosion. And all of a sudden, a gateway to the BRI is completely obliterated.
An accident?
A coincidence?
Photographs, both visual and thermal, say otherwise.
Not to mention that both President Trump and the Lebanese government has confirmed this to be the case.
The following is a reprint of an article on Veterans Today. It is titled “Updated: Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. confirm”, and written on August 15, 2020. Edited to fit this venue. All credit to the original author and the post.
Updated: Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. confirm
Trump confirms this was a bombing, not an accident and is immediately scourged by pro-Israel press…starting with the Daily Beast.
Overwhelming evidence that Israeli F 16s had just finished an attack run on Warehouse 12 when the large explosion occurred. We have dozens of reliable eyewitnesses and many videos, sound and even the planes pulling out of a dive, not birds, they don’t fly 350 knots, not normally. (Lots of birds were flying away, they look exactly like birds)
Lebanese govt and Hezbollah now accepting that ammonium nitrate was in no way involved. Lebanon is built on rock and everything has to be blasted. The Lebanese know explosives, know how to use AN and all in Lebanon know this is a hoax. AN is not explosive, it burns even in an explosive slurry (ANFO) unless very large TNT charges are used to initiate.
All involved in the AN story, the Russian ship tale, or claiming it exploded are now terror suspects though most are simply internet idiots. AN is debunked.
This video has Trump’s real statement, he is 100% behind VT (embarrassing)…
Investigators are now looking at a two pronged and complex Israeli attack using a probable nuclear tipped Rampage missile (new design) while covering with an F 16 attack and possible conventional explosive. At this point, this is most likely as seen by investigators.
Rampage missile.
Narrative Rewritten
And now to the original story which has been hacked, backward counted by Google and so much more. We love it… VT was right once again while world media just published cheap slop. This never would have happened before early dementia Reagan got on the ‘free enterprise’ train for consolidating America’s wonderfully diverse privately owned local and regional independent media.
#Breaking #Syria President Assad orders all borders and ports in the country open to #Lebanon, orders caravans of ambulances to head to #Beirut and ferry injured to hospitals in #Damascus, and launches an air bridge of medical and food supplies between the two cities
Absurdity squared: YouTube and Facebook “Fact Checkers,” employed by the people VT claims staged the attack are wiping the evidence from the internet…who would have guessed it.
…by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor, with…
Nahed al Husaini, VT Bureau Chief Damascus
Jeff Smith, VT Editor, IAEA Nuclear Inspector/Particle Physicist
Actual Photos of the missiles
This is the original video frame, never posted anywhere, that proves everything on Facebook and YouTube which was taken down is real.
This is the grandfather of them all, one carefully validated as untouched and genuine.
Infrared images of the missile itself prior to impact:
Infrared photos of the missiles
Set II Different camera, different angle
Frame 1 BeirutFrame 2 BeirutFrame 3 Beirut
This is the same missile seen from a slightly different angle on impact.
Israeli Delilah missile carrying 6 kiloton (6000 tons of TNT equivalent) nuclear missile (unretouched photo via VT Damascus) Tineye says this is a unique image and doesn’t appear anywhere on the web. We, however, are always suspicious when something seems ‘too good to be true.’
This is an infrared video which shows, at 6 seconds, the missile coming in and hitting…
This infrared video makes much more sense than ammonium nitrate on its own. Yes NH4NO3 is an oxidising agent and explosive under the right conditions, it is also very stable.
Judge for yourself. Doctored video? Different location? Or #Beirut attacked?
pic.twitter.com/T0LnUqDvoy— Darren of Plymouth 🇬🇧 (@DarrenPlymouth)
August 6, 2020
This is the video that was removed from Youtube for “violating content”.
Pixel analysis says this is a good photo. Thus, debunking it will become a huge issue. An army of trolls is already on Twitter and Facebook.
” First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti ship missile of Israel. The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16. Our country is in complete jeopardy with this lazy and corrupt regime.”
This is the radiation signature of the explosion received from a source in Italy, submitted to VT by the International Atomic Energy Agency (UN).
So it is actually a NUCLEAR WEAPON.
Evidence of a nuclear fission event in the Eastern MediterraneanTrump confirms attack (nuclear not mentioned) and has suddenly become an “Enemy of Israel” (In 2015, Trump was referred to VT as a source of intelligence briefings. Eventually his staff turned to InfoWars and Steve Bannon. You can see how that has worked out.)
The media in the west claiming that this massive nuclear like explosion is from "fireworks"
-NO THE HELL IT WAS NOT!-
My heart is so heavy 💔😔😭
-Prayers for Beirut, Lebanon 🇱🇧pic.twitter.com/yAom0z9ZgG
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) August 4, 2020
Official statements from Lebanon
VT: A general in the Lebanese Army reports that Israel dropped a tactical nuclear weapon on the port of Beirut today. He reports that this was done to collapse the current political regime there and revolt against Hezbollah.
Their denial, almost identical to Israel’s supports this hypothesis.
As the lies begin, nothing about this explosion, the mushroom cloud or the strength of the explosion is fireworks, which was the first lie, then ammonium nitrate fertilizer, they say under 3k tons, which was stored for years to use on Lebanon’s golf courses, when they decide to build them. No, nothing about today is funny.
Israel statement
We also add that earlier today, Netanyahu’s statement which we believe is Israel taking credit for the attack. Beirut is still bomb damaged by Israel from 2006. How you take Netanyahu’s statements as outlined in Times of Israel today, is a matter of faith, trust or conjecture.
نتنياهو قال اليوم بأن اسرائيل ستفعل”ما هو ضروري"لحماية نفسها،تهديد لحزب الله- ما يفسر التفجيرات في #بيروت
-Netanyahu said “will do what is necessary in order to defend ourselves”. An obvious warning to Hezbollah, and this explains the explosions in #Beiruthttps://t.co/8ZVLNBA31A
— Reem Al-Harmi ريم الحرمي chez moi 🏠 (@Reem_AlHarmi) August 4, 2020
“Getting reports from Beirut, a tactical miniature nuclear bomb has been used to attack the port, nuclear experts and researchers have randomly pointed out to the reacted particles in the fire ball.
Even if there is going to be a government cover up for peace and political implications in the coming hours, one thing is clear, it is a clandestine operation by some anti-Lebanon foreign agency not by some random terrorist (non-state actor).
Terrorists involved in Urban Warfare in ME do not have access to these highly advance tactical weapons. If they have it now, then someone is equipping them for political gains. Let us wait for the official statements from Lebanon. I hope our friends from Beirut are safe.
As per my latest source of information from Beirut. There is going to be a government cover up. The story about “Nitrate in the containers” is going to be declared as the original cause of the second massive explosion that caused the major damage. This will become the official narrative in the msm.
However, what influential and credible sources from Beirut are telling me is this: “The Beirut explosion is about 100 times the energy than the 2015 Tianjin explosion, or 5.4 kilotons of TNT equivalent (using linear extrapolation from Tianjin, which involved 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate).
Conventional nukes against Japan had 15 to 21 kilotons. But this explosion is different, it is because of modern tactical nuke that contains up to 10 kilotons of the hybrid material including uranium. It is this reason why we still have acid and radiation in the air. The storage facilities near the grain elevator are NOT marked for hazardous material storage, but are instead marked for general cargo. Therefore, you can guess it, what we will be fed in the coming hours.” – Ghayet Ali
” First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti ship missile of Israel. The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16. Our country is in complete jeopardy with this lazy and corrupt regime.”
Hezbollah, we are told, is expected to retaliate against Israel and they say there is no way for Syria not to be brought in.
IAEA Confirms
Jeff Smith of the IAEA confirms this is a nuclear explosion.
The lies about fireworks in ships and fertilizer are what we always get. You don’t store either one downtown in a major city like Beirut under any circumstances. Not much farming in Beirut and they don’t celebrate the 4th of July there.
The smoke could well be missile fuel which may mean a missile storage facility was hit by Israel. We have confirmation from Israel that they were planning to attack Beirut 5 days ago in retaliation for Hezbollah’s military attacks on Golan, which were not reported anywhere.
We are told Lebanon asked for nuclear investigators from Russia but there is no attempt to protect the site which, even if this were a modern clean weapon, still be radioactive.
New video shows nature of the blast a bit better. We will keep updating.
Beirut Governor Calls Explosion a ‘National Disaster Akin to Hiroshima’
“A fire brigade of 10 people arrived at the scene. What happened is very similar to what happened in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They drove to the scene and disappeared. This is a national disaster for Lebanon. We do not know how we are going to deal with this”, Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud said. (Sputnik/Moscow)
“Israel has nothing to do with the massive explosion that rocked Beirut on 4 August, the country’s parliamentary TV channel has announced. A similar statement was made by an anonymous Israeli official in an interview with Reuters, while the country’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi alleged that the blast was likely an accident caused by a fire.” (Sputnik/Moscow)
Initial Report 2
Earlier/VT: Two explosions in Beirut, one a conventional guided bomb followed by a small nuclear weapon. The target is now confirmed to be a Hezbollah missile storage facility.
One hospital in Beirut has said it is treating more than 500 injures and is unable to receive any more patients. Tens of the people injured will need surgery and the hospital is appealing for blood donations.
-Follow the latest here: https://t.co/R2Lh904JkCpic.twitter.com/xn85sUgs7q— SkyNews (@SkyNews)
August 4, 2020
This is the second explosion, that looks like the plasma ball of a nuclear explosion to me, note the white colour indicating extremely high temperatures – no conventional explosion burns so hot. Also note the great height of the plasma ball – it is taller than the grain silo. I am very strongly reminded of the nuking of Tianjin a few years ago.The warehouse to the east he speaks of is the black building shown in the video stills above.
A large explosion has been heard in the Lebanese capital Beirut. Security sources said a number of people were injured during the widespread destruction across the city, with residents reporting windows being blown out and ceilings collapsing
-Read more: https://t.co/27zh8LaW5npic.twitter.com/SZ82gxAA7Z— SkyNews (@SkyNews) August 4, 2020
Initial Report 1 – The “official explanation”
This smells like a cover story, I very much doubt there were any fireworks involved, the small explosions seen in the videos were more likely to have been munitions cooking off due to fires started by the first explosion.
RT has just covered the explosions and quotes a Lebanese govt. minister:
Health Minister Hamad Hassan told local media that a ship carrying fireworks exploded in the port. Video footage lends weight to his explanation, as it shows a small explosion followed by the crackling of fireworks, before a second and massively destructive blast.
Local residents have shared images showing extensive damage to property. The office of the Daily Star newspaper was smashed by the blast, with windows blown out and furniture flung to the ground. France24 correspondent Leila Molana-Allen said that her apartment was “blown apart,” adding that she thinks the blast was caused by a “missile from a jet.”
It looks very much like the Lebanese have invented the ship full of fireworks story to cover the truth. Molana-Allen is almost certainly correct – that it was some kind of missile or guided bomb dropped by a jet fighter-bomber.
Or are they going with the one we have heard so many times before when tactical nukes have been used – that it was a store of explosives that went up:Of course they would deny it was an attack, no-one ever admits a nuke went off, it’s terribly bad for public opinion.
Sodium nitrate, basically a big fertiliser bomb, nope, not buying that at all, this is the cover story they appear to be going with.
This local lady describes a feeling of melting, that sounds like radiation hitting her – being hit by radiation feels like heat, it burns you.
Awareness
People in Beirut,Lebanon needs to stay indoors due to the recent Firewooks/nuclear explosion that happened in Beirut. The smoke is filled with nitric acid (Red/pink/purple smoke) which is toxic and can form an acidic rain.
#BeirutBlast#Beirutpic.twitter.com/eyKYSiVJZ0
— Women_Advocate🧕🧕🧕 (@hauwa_farouk) August 4, 2020
I don’t agree with the assessment that it was a fine particulate explosion, that wouldn’t explain the white hot plasma ball, only a nuke can explain that.
The media in the west claiming that this massive nuclear like explosion is from "fireworks"
NO THE HELL IT WAS NOT!
My heart is so heavy 💔😔😭
Prayers for Beirut, Lebanon 🇱🇧pic.twitter.com/yAom0z9ZgG
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) August 4, 2020
Windows blown out 7km away indicates a huge blast, again, suggesting this was indeed a nuke.
The phones going down is probably due to the EM pulse that nukes produce.
The “nay sayers” suggest that people are watching birds. Like sparrows, pigeons, doves, or maybe parrots. Like this. I’m sure that this is a parrot…
Or, it just couldn’t be a nuke. Right? Stations would pick up the radiation.
These stations would measure the alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Since the gamma radiation travels at the speed of light, the stations would be able to register the exact moment the weapon was detonated.
Well, suddenly this station went off line. Imagine that!
It is now reported as “malfunctioning“.
Funny thing this…
Well, malfunctioning station or what, Italy says they are getting radiation readings that are worthy of note…
Conclusion
It seems that Trump authorized the use of 6kt mini-nuke to destroy the port of Beirut. This was conducted by aircraft of the Israel Air Force, and they apparently used two missiles.
Gabriel anti ship missile.
Israeli Delilah missile carrying a 6kt mini-nuke.
Radiation readings in Europe has confirmed that a nuclear warhead was used.
Trump has admitted to participation and direction of this attack. But he did not confess to using nuclear weapons.
This effort puts a immediate pause on the Chinese Belt and Road initiative with a port on the Mediterranean sea.
Trump scares the living daylights out of me. He had no qualms about unleashing a biological weapon to kill multitudes of Chinese with the COVID-19, and is now using nuclear weapons in the Mediterranean Sea. He has two complete assault carrier task forces off the Chinese coast and is working to provoke war with Russia.
What is wrong with this man?
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This post is an update to my SHTF series of posts.
My last SHTF post was back in October 2019, and before the COVID-19, the NED sponsored pro-democracy attempt at a “color revolution” and the fierce anti-China propaganda onslaught. Back then, it seemed that America was waltzing into a state of intensified confusion.
Now things are much clearer.
The USA is on an out-of-control bobsled heading straight for disaster.
There’s no getting off now.
In previous SHTF posts, I had advised (fellow) Americans that the United States was due to a great reset, and that it would be uncomfortable for many. I also advised that if they were smart, to leave America and go to stable but boring places far away from the “death throes” of a dying empire.
I was correct.
Today, most Americans are trapped within the United States are are unable to leave. For the most part, there are very few nations willing to take in American citizens. The terrible handling of the COVID-19 has make the rest of the world frightened in having anything to do with Americans.
So Americans are trapped. Not only from asking permission to leave America by the American government, but also finding another nation willing to take in Americans. It’s “slim pickings”.
So…
Here you are.
We are in a SHTF situation where you are geographically locked inside a geographic region, while that region experiences all sorts of upheavals and changes. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look at the latest news articles out of the Drudge Report today…
You are trapped inside the United States, the news is about this chaos…
… and that chaos.
It’s all a big nasty mess. From people unemployed because of the COVID-19, to the illness itself. To the BLM and Antifa riots, to food shortages, and armed marches. To Donald Trump going “hog wild” crazy in his anti-China crusade. Seriously, it is nuts.
Indeed, in your immediate neighborhood, everything is quiet and calm. Most of the upset is transmitted to you via the Internet, and you have no idea what is true or what is false. Though most of you probably believe in the trends of what you read.
Well…
This is normal.
The Timeline
Let’s take a review of the timeline for the “great reset”.
To review, according to all the measurements that I have mentioned beforehand, everything is pointing to a period of discomfort starting in 2008, and increasing in severity in 2018. Then from 2018 to 2028 will be the worst period of discomfort. With things really starting to get bad around 2020. And a peak crisis period from 2023 to 2027, with the major crisis event centering around 2025.
According to the “Fourth Turning”, we can expect a major critical event to take place around 2025. As shown in the following illustration…
Here are the next few years before the Fourth Turning is expected to reach a crisis point.
Here are my thoughts, and some advice to those of you willing to listen…
Good News
There are some good things that I can say right now.
[1] Firstly, the good news is that change is a natural part of growing. (I know, yada, yada, yada.) But it is true. The United States simply cannot continue as an oligarchy ruled military empire run on imaginary “petrol-dollars”. It has to change. And it will, and you are seeing the start of the changes…
[2] The climax of the event is not this year. That’s the good news.
[3] It will be sometime around 2025 (plus or minus two years). Or as early as 2023, or as late as 2027. That’s in three years at the earliest.
The period of discomfort will last a decade. So expect things to be dicey through 2030.
[4] Here’s more good news. It will not be uniform. There will be areas that will see terrible change, and others what will not see much change at all.
So what will it be like?
Several things will explode all at once…
Several things could implode all at once. Indeed, this is the likeliest scenario. As there are all sorts of trends and events just about to run “off the rails”, and all sort of “the opportunistic others” who have plans to take advantage of government collapse.
All the usual “good people” assure us that violent revolution is not on the table. This means, simply, that it is.
- From Brett Stevens at Amerika
It could be everything and anything. It could be social upheaval in alignment with the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930’s, coupled with the genocide of the Cambodians under Pol Pot. It could be a mixture of George Orwell, and the worst elements of THX1138. It could be every nightmare that you could possibly dream of.
‘THX 1138’ is a chilling look at a 25th-century totalitarian state where mankind is stripped of any individuality. People are numbered drones, and a government-enforced program of sedating drugs controls the populace. The story’s title character, THX, is a factory worker whose life is irrevocably changed when he stops taking his mind-numbing drugs.
When the violence comes—and it will come—the military and militarized police forces will face domestic insurgents who are better armed, trained, supplied, coordinated, and technologically proficient than the foreign insurgents the military has heretofore been unable to defeat.
- From Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic
Breitbart - Calif. Police Chief Cancels Event to Honor Fallen Officer Because Republicans Were Invited ... "this is not Trump country, we don’t want Republicans here"
Indeed, all this anti-white propaganda is geared towards genocide. It is not geared to any objective regarding healing. It is an out of control manipulation by the oligarchy to pit Americans against each other.
You cannot purify white people through the healing magic of diversity if they are not actually part of diversity.
-Z Man
Let’s just clear out all the nonsense and get to the basics…
When Progressives talk about diversity, they mean blacks.
We can put the upper bound on diversity as 20%. Any more than that and white crime victimization and awareness of it begins to soar. This sets off white flight.
Baltimore is a great example. Once its black population crossed the 25% level, it began a rapid decline into chaos.
As Rhodesia, Baltimore and now South Africa show, there is some minimum number of whites required to keep the lights on, so everyone can enjoy the wonderfulness of diversity.
In the case of Rhodesia, the number fell below the minimum and it became Zimbabwe. In Baltimore, they have hovered along the critical number for decades. South Africa staggers on, but they too are approaching the inflection point.
-Z Man
Someone, or some group, is organizing a campaign leading towards the genocide of “white people”. This will absolutely manifest during the crisis period. Look, just because the mainstream media isn’t covering the obvious does not mean that that it doesn’t exist.
Fighting Is Under Way
And leftist blood-lust is not limited to a fringe. A very intelligent and gentle acquaintance of mine, someone with whom I once enjoyed a cordial and friendly long-running debate, believes that Trump sent federal troops into Berkeley the other night to conduct mass arrests of protesters, trigging the riots. It’s completely untrue and she had no idea where she heard it, but she believes it as much as she believes in gravity. And her false belief, what psychologists would call a hallucination (h/t Scott Adams), allows her to justify anything the rioters did, up to and including murder.
Here’s the thing. You’ve probably heard the word “privilege” so much you could puke when you hear it. The idea of white privilege is central to the leftist hallucination. And the idea of a privileged race led Germany to the Final Solution.
Adolf Hitler wrote in 1919:
"But an anti-Semitism based on reason must lead to a systematic legal elimination of the privileges of the Jews. The ultimate objective of such legislation must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews from civil and cultural influence."
In fact, the Nazi propagandists worked overtime to defame Jews for their privilege. Hitler claimed Jews avoided physical labor of any kind, preferring work in finance, mercantile, and the arts. He lamented that Jews wrote and produced 90 percent of German movies despite being only one percent of the population. His propaganda depicted Jewish women as fat and lazy, yet wealthy, feeding off the labor of the German people.
Substitute “working class whites” for “Jews,” and Nazi propaganda sounds a lot like CNN commentators and UC Berkeley professors. Even so-called conservative Bill Kristol says it’s time to replace America’s white working class with immigrants.
It’s pretty clear that the left uses the same rhetoric and scapegoating against conservatives as the Nazi used against Jews. So we have to ask if these leftists use the propaganda techniques to the same end.
The Nazis wanted to vilify and dehumanize Jews so the German people would be conditioned for the Final Solution: extermination.
When you hear the speeches of campus protesters, you have to conclude that the left has a final solution in mind for people like you and me. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here are the words of a school teacher in Seattle protesting against Trump and his supporters:
"And we need to start killing people. First off, we need to start killing the White House. The White House must die. The White House, your fucking White House, your fucking Presidents, they must go! Fuck the White House.
Pay the fuck up, pay the fuck up. It ain’t just your fucking time, it’s your fucking money, and now your fucking life is devoted to social change."
Democrats, establishment Republicans, and the supposedly “responsible” media ignored this story. They ignored it because they are afraid of attracting the mob’s attention. Like Germans in the 1930s, some people value their own survival too much to stop bloodshed and brutality.
-Hennessysview
It could be an exodus of the wealthy from the urban centers…
All those pricey urban meccas could become crime-ridden ghost towns. How could such a reversal occur? Everyone who lives outside protected enclaves will reach a point where the "urban lifestyle" is no longer worth the sacrifices and costs. Once enough of the top 10% leave, the food/beverage service industry implodes.
Service employees are renters, paying sky-high rents that unemployment can't cover. Vacant apartments pile up. As the exodus gathers momentum, all the reasons people clung so rabidly to urban meccas decay. Local government jacks up fees, tickets, permits and taxes, accelerating the exodus.
That's how pricey urban meccas turn into ghost towns inhabited by those who can't leave and those living on public services.
-Of Two Minds Blog
And what would happen if a civil war, a CWII or SHTF event were to occur? America would be in chaos. Everything would be a mess, and the central governments from the Federal to the State, and Local levels would be very busy trying to maintain order.
Would other nations sit by and watch from afar? Would they decide to help and roll in the UN to restore order? Or would they just be content to watch America burn?
Thus, if a civil war broke out in the United States, would China, Russia, and Iran not jump in to finally render America helpless? To take advantage of the situation, to cripple the United States to a point where it could never ever, ever EVER fully recover?
Why NOT do a “double tap” and castrate America back into oblivion from which it would take a full 100 years to recover from?
Nuclear war, one initiated by America in order to control the American mobs, could easily reverse America’s fortunes in a nanosecond. The idea that a war out here, or over there, would be created and have no consequences is a very dangerous belief. The world is not the 1960’s, and not every nation is a third world tiny splat of land. Major nations are now getting involved in the global scene, and they do not take kindly to Americans throwing their weight around.
If America has gotten fat, plump and comfortable, being the bully on the global stage, throwing “regime changing” wrenches (via the CIA, NED, and NID) to everyone from Venezuela, Syria, the Ukraine, Hong Kong and China, won’t other nations resent it?
And, if an opportunity presents itself, would not another nation take advantage of that opportunity. An opportunity to “de-fang” the United States, and “neuter” it’s ability to project global influence (read; power) in the world?
I would say yes.
“Hours after the bombs go off in cities, these fires continue to build up and they create firestorms that feed on themselves. They get so hot that everything in the city becomes fuel for its own destruction. The energy released becomes much greater than the weapon itself,” Dr. Mills explained, drawing parallels to the way fire consumed the city of Dresden during the World War II. From each of these 100 detonations, massive firestorms would engulf whole cities and churn five million tons of black carbon into the stratosphere.
By nuking the major American cities, all industry would grind to a halt. Banking and savings would be non-existent. Everything would collapse and the survivors would flee the cities into the countryside.
Americans should never be under the impression that the rest of the world views us with favor. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
The next turning could have the worst elements of everything known to man. This could be nuclear war, chemical, biological and germ warfare high technology spying and swarm drone weapons. All of which could happen simultaneously while the USA government might to enact genocide against its citizenry.
Oh, and by the way, a fellow by the name of John Titor claimed to be from the future. Yes, he claimed to be a time traveler from the future. He described just this exact scenario, where there was a rather long period of civil unrest and then Russia nuked all the cities. Whether you believe him or not is immaterial. He has some interesting things to ponder.
The link below opens up into a new tab for your reading pleasure.
From the post…
' The blogger suggests this because he questions what actually occurred did not match all the conflicts that John Titor predicted. Perhaps the events he mentions will actually still occur, only they will actually occur 10 years later.
Maybe, instead of a civil war in 2013, there is one in 2023? Nuclear war in 2025, instead of 2015. '
Remember those dates;
2020 – Instability.
2023 – Civil War.
2025 – Nuclear War.
So, there is going to be an increase in the severity of the current mess…
Yes, there is.
And no, we don’t know the precise details.
But, do we really need to know all those details? History has told us that when America goes into a Fourth Turning reset situation, it becomes a no-rules cluster slug-fest. In fact, we can say that…
The most advanced weapons will be used.
War will be fought on American soil.
Foreign nations will be involved to some extent.
And since this is scheduled to happen pretty soon, what can you do (personally) to protect yourself and your family?
Well, I have some thoughts on this matter…
[1] Relocate to a safe, boring area.
Yes, you are trapped in the USA for now. Maybe things will open up next year, or maybe not. But in the meantime, you can relocate to a safe and quiet location that is pretty bland and boring. That’s the key don’t you know. Be bland. Be boring. Be safe. Be dull. Be uninteresting.
A great idea me-thinks.
But where?
[1a] Avoid all urban areas. You want to avoid crowds and the likelihood of meeting people who you do not know personally. Historically, cities have always been dangerous during societal upsets, resets and wars. Let me be clear about this; Get out while the getting’s good.
[1b] Avoid wilderness areas. One of the first things that began in March when the COVID-19 outbreak started to happen was all the city-dwellers took their RV’s, trucks, pickups and vehicles and headed for the state forests. The roads were blocked and the entire forests were jammed packed like a New York City rush hour with angry and frustrated city people. There were arguments, stores that were cleaned out and incidents of stabbings and shootings. Do not go where other people might go. Avoid state parks, federal parks, state and federal forests, and other “green areas” that are displayed on maps.
[1c] Move into a small town. Small towns have the basics that you need to survive. Additionally, it is much easier to make friends there. Now the thing is that if you move into a small community, you absolutely MUST know your neighbors. Do not plan on moving somewhere and not meeting people and making friends. Not only must you make friends, but you must be productive, helpful and good.
I would suggest that you also…
[2] Have a secure lifestyle
Which means…
[2a] Get involved in the community. A the bare minimum, this would include being a regular member of a church, and a member of some other activity, like the Chamber of Commerce, or the Grange, or the Rotary. make sure that you are known and recognized.
Many people think about “bugging in”, or “being mobile”. Here, I suggest that you integrate yourself with your community. For there is strength in numbers. Automatically, you will be part of something bigger. And when things go bad, you would be far, far better off than the lone guy hiding in a basement with six months stockpile of rice.
Now is NOT the time to be a “lone wolf”. You need to integrate yourself as part of a community and do it quickly.
And that is lifestyle.
To be a part of something, you must be ready and willing to participate in things and contribute. This is true in life, but it becomes very importantly true during crisis situations.
So here, I advise that you pick up some skills that you can use to provide help, services, and assistance were things to go really bad…
[2b] Emergency First Aid. You should take some classes in emergency first aid. You should be able to bend a broken arm, stitch up a cut, and perform emergency surgery. You should know how to handle gunshot wounds, infections, and food poisonings. This means that not only would you take a singular class at the YMCA, but advanced courses at the community college, and have some reference books on hand in your house. Finally, let people KNOW that you have these skills.
This is not only a useful skill for yourself, but it is something that you can trade for when you need to trade or barter.
[2c] Access to fresh water. During great societal upsets the ability to get water, electricity and internet is gone. Some areas might be spared this, but most will not. We know from recent history that in Bosnia, people died trying to get fresh water, or contracted illnesses from drinking tainted water. Either have a way to collect and purify water, or invest in a well.
[2d] Ability to repair without electricity. Which means that the ability to repair things without electricity would be a very valuable skill. If you have access to a manual lathe, or other such tools, you will be able to provide your services from anything to repairing a windmill on a water pump, to repairing a gun. Be helpful.
Try repairing things without electricity. You will be surprised how difficult it is. You need to be able to do this with files, hammers and pliers.
[2e] Local Indian lore. Long before the United States was colonized, the local Indians in your region lived well. They farmed and had their own ways of preserving food, and treating their sick. This is local lore that has been forgotten, but not at the local library or historical society. Connect with these people and learn a thing or two. You will not regret it.
This is one of those things that you see all over the Internet. How to make hide-holes, and how to secure your windows and other such things. There is much to cover here, but I will stick to the basics.
[3a] You need well bolted doors. One that can be barricaded with 2×4 lumber pieces from the inside (two beams, top and bottom, resting on a metal clamp). It might not prevent your house from burning down, but it will be able to defend against roving bands of urban youth in jacked cars.
[3b] Windows need to be secured and covered if need be. Plywood, ready to put up in place, or welded metal bars, or other systems that would make break-ins very difficult.
[3c] The home needs to be hidden with overgrown shrubbery and debris. Sure, eventually people will find you. But don’t make it easy. Be the junk yard next to the gold refinery. Be the boring electrical sub-station next to the grocery store. Be the abandoned building next to the hardware store.
[3d] You need a hidden room, or basement chamber. Any hidden room, or any size if far better than none at all. You need to be able to secure your valuables, both things and people.
[3e] You need guns and you need not to be afraid to use them. I would suggest that you forget about those cheap SKS banana-clip pseudo assault guns. Get yourself a couple of shotguns. And a few reliable 9mm handguns. Expect that when you shoot people, it will NOT be like television. They will not go down on the first shot. Chances are that you would have to empty the entire clip into their chest. Be ready to use them.
[3f] You need a garden and you need to keep it working year-around. Make sure that you always have potatoes, onions, and other related root crops planted. Most bandits couldn’t tell a potato plant from skunk weed. So while they might raid your tomato bushes, they would tend to leave your potatoes alone. Plant some apple trees, and other berry bushes. Let your property provide sustenance for you.
[3g] If you have room, consider a chicken coop. Learn how to raise chickens. These are a great thing to do to provide food on your table, and a great way to trade with your neighbors with.
[4] Supplies
From what I see, things are going to get really bad over the next three years. Finally around 2025, things are going to go to shit really fast. So you’ve got a precious few years to stock up, learn and prepare. I hope that things won’t go “tits up” in your area, but if they do, you’ll be ready for anything.
[4a] You need basic food supplies to last you for at least six months. This means canned goods, rice, wheat flour, nuts, and other things of importance. Like cooking oil, salt, pepper, baking soda, yeast, etc. Buy the cans by the case. Buy the staples by the sack. Buy the liquids by the gallon.
[4b] Additionally, you will need “kits”. These are things that will provide you will options if things go really bad. Like cages to raise pigeons in, fishing tackle, traps for rabbits and other small game, crossbow or other quiet way to hunt. And, with everything, you had best be well prepared in how to use them effectively and properly.
[4c] Prepare things for trade. You should plan on having things for trade. The most popular things are vices. So you can stock up with cheap alcohol in little bottles (bigger than those airline bottles), smaller than a regular bottle. This can be any alcohol. Same goes for tobacco, cigarettes, and other related items. Including disposable lighters. (You can buy a case of 100 really cheaply.)
[5] Mobility
You should have a bicycle or two. Both should be capable of off road use. Do not expect that vehicles will still be operable during the height of the crisis. In fact, you will probably want to keep off the roads. Anything that will enable you to travel quickly and silently through the forest would be an advantage.
[6] Electric system
You should have a system of recharging DC batteries. Whether this is by solar power or wind, and then have a set of walkee-talkee’s. You can also have a small battery powered, or hand crank powered radio and lights. Plan now. Do not wait until the last moment.
Here at MM I can supply shipping containers of this stuff. (nothing smaller than a pallet load). If you are interested contact me privately on laobangbh@163.com .
[7] Deceptions
If things get to the point where the government has broken down…
Police are unavailable. Military are deployed in certain areas. News is periodic or confused, then you know that SHTF is getting worse. You will need to create deceptions to make your property unattractive.
Some ideas.
[7a] (Fake) Downed high power lines with signs that warn of “High Voltage”. And (if possible) some low voltage DC shock wires to dissuade any adventuresome individual.
[7b] A few dead people in the yard that looks like they got trapped when they messed up with the wrong people.
[7c] Bad odors, flies, maggots, and refuse.
[7d] Rattling cans, and other things that make a real racket is anyone moves in a certain area on your property. Most people want stealth and quiet. Even after all the turmoil dies down, people will still travel in small groups and move about silently. By rigging up noise makers, you will discourage these people from coming near your property.
[7e] Traps. With spikes, barbed wire, and other mechanisms that can be lethal if triggered. Think Vietnam booby-traps.
The idea here is that you do not want anyone to come near your space and your property. You will make it as unappealing as possible, and life threatening tends to work the best.
With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different.
The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride.
Or it may be something unspeakably worse.
The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.
It will be a turning point. It will be a point of inversion, a point of change. A point where things go one way or the other, and everyone in the middle is killed.
Glory or Ruin.
It will be the us vs them. The patriots vs the Red Coats. The grey vs the blue. The yanks against the Nazi’s.
Conclusion
Aside from the move to a safe spot, every item on this list can be purchased in total under a few thousand dollars.
If nothing happens, then consider yourself fortunate. You will have squandered your money on a insurance policy. But you and I both know that things are building up. The Antifa and BLM are on the march and are openly telling everyone what they plan to do. Theya re being funded by rich oligarchs, and are receiving large sums of money and weapons…
If something does happen, while you might not be the best prepared prepper in the nation, you will be able to survive. And that is what all this is about. Survival.
I wish that you all could have done what I did, and took a “life boat” off to a far away land. But most of you did not. Instead, figuring that you would know when you would need to leave, and then leave then.
Well… that time came and went. And you should have left the same time as when the oligarchy fled. The last week of March 2020.
You are now completely trapped with the rest of the population upon a ship that is slowly sinking into the deep dark cold waters.
It’s quiet now…
But the Captain is busy shouting orders to the staff, and people are a little restless in the lounges and staterooms. He’s slurring his voice, and making all kinds of strange proclamations and orders. Sometimes the stewards just stand there and look at him with a blank expression on their face. “Is he mad?” they ask themselves.
Do not think that it is just going to go away. Plan and take the necessary actions to secure you and your family’s safety.
Do you want more?
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
In this post we will address one of the most common misconceptions found in the world. We will address what freedom is and what it is not. And the reason why we are going to do so is simply because brutish rulers use the ignorance of their people to enslave them. And part of that enslavement is to convince them that they have this intangible “thing”; this “freedom”. And, if you are one of those people who think that you are “free”, and that you proudly wave your flag and shout how “free” you are, perhaps this post is written for you.
What it is not.
The first thing that we must make perfectly clear is define what freedom is not. Because many people confuse “freedom” with other things. Like [1] trains that run on time, [2] having ATM machines, [3] having fast food restaurants, [4] being able to vote, or [5] having a “democratic system of governance”. Ah. None of those things have anything to do with freedom. Not one thing. None of them.
In fact, when the United States was initially founded, the people who founded it wrote an entire book on why they founded the nation, and how it was designed to work. This book was called “The Federalist Papers” and you can see it online (for free in full free text), if you don’t believe anything that I have written herein. And one of the most important principles within that book was a warning that democracies take away freedom. And, that the (then newly formed Republic) should be guarded from ever the encroachment of democracy.
So, keep in mind that if you reside within a “democracy” the chances of you having any kind of freedom is practically zero.
That’s not me talking. That’s Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and the rest of the crew that first established the United States back in 1776.
Well, if a democracy is not freedom, then what is?
What freedom is…
It’s actually very simple. It’s the ability for YOU to live life on YOUR terms without any kind of interference.
If you want to go walk down the street, the freedom to get up and walk down it should be cherished. This includes the freedom if you want to eat a hotdog, or listen to a song on a radio, or being able to swim in a pond. The ability to do any of these things are freedoms.
Even the strange and the odd, maybe even especially those things.
Having the freedom to live your life on your terms is what freedom is all about. And if you cannot, then you do not have freedom.
Freedom is the ability to live life on your terms no matter what other people think. Here’s a picture of a man holding his cock out for the entire world to see.
But that is not realistic…
Now, that is where things start to get tricky. You see, there are all sorts of people, “busybodies” as I like to call them, who have a vision of a “better world”. And more often than not, their vision requires you to act in some way that they feel is proper. So they make rules, laws, add fees, and taxes, and prohibitions and bans to stop you from exercising your freedoms.
Any action that you do that has any of the following attached to it is NOT a freedom;
A regulation.
A rule.
A tax.
A fee.
A membership.
A prohibition.
A ban from use.
Forced used.
Forced sharing.
Permit.
So, if you like to eat a triple greasy hamburger with a sunny-side-up egg on top, with a beer, and your dog beside you inside a restaurant in New Jersey, but…
There is a ban on triple hamburgers.
There is a ban on sunny-side-up eggs.
You are prohibited from bringing your dog in a restaurant.
You must pay tax on your meal.
You must be carded to check your age for the beer.
You must finish before 2 am in the morning.
You are NOT free. You are enslaved.
Ah. But how do you measure it?
Well, surprisingly enough, freedom can be measured by the same set of criteria that was laid out in The Federalist Papers.
It’s the ability to have [1] life, [2] liberty, and [3] the pursuit of happiness. With part one [1] life being further divided into [1a] food, [1b] clothing, and [1c] shelter.
And, following the guidelines as listed above, any encroachment of any of those five items is a subtraction of freedom from your life.
Since most people are confused what freedom is, and how you can measure it, let’s go one by one through those five characteristics as listed…
[1a] Food
The ability to put anything you want in your body, at any time, and at any amount free of taxes, regulation, rules, bans or prohibitions of any type is a freedom. Failure to do so is tyranny. If you and your nation is somewhere in between it is “an encroachment of tyranny”.
One person’s freedom is another person’s horror. Here, many Hindu’s from India would be horrified by this meal, and would ban this meal and probably lynch you for eating it.
It does not matter if it is a tuna fish sandwich or a tab of LSD. The freedom to ingest, inject, or partake in anything into your own body free of outside influence, regulation, fees or taxes, let alone bans or prohibitions is a freedom.
[1b] Clothing
The ability to wear what you want, when you want and how you want is a freedom. If you are forced to wear a hat, a scarf, or a head-covering, you are not free. The same is true if you must wear a uniform. Whether it is a type of dress style for your corporate office, or a uniform as part of a para-military unit. True freedom involves personal dress selection.
This also includes hair styles, and makeup and other adornments.
One person’s freedom is another person’s horror. In America many companies would forbid you to wear these outfits as part of the “dress code”.
[1c] Shelter
The ability to own things is the bedrock of freedom.
Throughout history, up until the last century, people would build houses and would put their belongings within those houses. All of which they would totally and completely own.
Now, however, things are quite different.
You rent out your house to the bank on a thirty year mortgage. Your home is subject to real estate taxes, and school taxes, and you must obey the regulations set by your neighborhood from everything that you do to change the house. In fact, often you must get permission to cut down the trees on your property, or suffer with fines and fees for the failure to maintain your property up to community standards.
Because certain areas are too restrictive in the United States, people move out of the heavily taxed and restrictive areas (such as California) and more to less restrictive areas, such as Alabama.
If anyone can place rules, regulations, prohibitions, taxes, fees, or anything else on your home, you do not own it. Failure to own things is (historically) a trait of the slave and sub-servant classes.
[2] Liberty
According to the dictionary, “liberty” is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.
In other words, while the first three characteristics involved property (1a,1b, and 1c) this involves thought, belief and political views.
If you are unable to express them, or are constrained in writing about them, reading about them, or discussing them with others, you do not have liberty. It has been taken from you.
Some regions restrict how you think about things and what you actually think. To these other people, your thoughts and the resulting lifestyle that you embrace is a threat to their well-ordered life and society. Thus they do everything that they can to ban your behaviors and actions.
[3] Pursuit of Happiness
Finally, whether you have freedom or not, the ability to forge towards getting freedom is important. And this act, trying to have freedom is known as the “Pursuit of Happiness”.
However, if someone places laws, regulations or obstacles in front of you that prohibits or prevents you from obtaining your freedoms, they are interfering with your pursuit of happiness.
The Ideal vs. the Actual
Now the astute reader will note that the ideal cannot be found anywhere on the planet. There simply isn’t anywhere where people can have all five elements of freedom unencumbered. That is fine. Not perfect, but fine.
It leaves plenty of room for the pursuit of happiness, don’t you know.
Instead, we can measure things comparatively.
United States and China
Of course, the United States says that it has “freedom and democracy”. But does it really? According to the criteria above, the answer is a big flat no. On every level, the amount of freedom that a person has in the United States is actually quite scant.
What about China?
Well, according to the American media, China is a horrible, terrible and repressive place. It is a place full of sad impoverished people and a terribly corrupt nation. Well, that is what the powerful American press says.
Well, those expats who has visited it can confirm that it doesn’t look anything like what the American media narrative says it is. And, I can say and confirm that while there are many things that aren’t free (like not being allowed to take recreational drugs, for instance), on the whole, most Chinese people experience a far greater, wider and more diverse set of freedoms than Americans do. And if you don’t believe me, hop on a plane an see it for yourself.
Conclusion
It is easy to repeat the mindless mantras as spewed forth by the mainstream and the alt-press media. It’s far harder to engage in rational thought with those that do. This post is my “baseline”.
It’s simple.
You are either free or you are not.
If you move from a place that doesn’t have certain freedoms to a place that does, you are enjoying the “pursuit of happiness”.
And that’s exactly what I have done.
I went from a place where every single purchase of alcohol required me to show some picture identification, to where I just raise my hand and it is brought over wordlessly.
I went from leaving my dog in the truck to taking him inside of restaurants with me.
I went from taking a few drags of an expensive cigarette in the rain in the company parking lot, to smoking cigars in my large spacious office.
I went from paying yearly taxes, and reporting it to the federal government, on my house every year, to owning homes with zero taxes, zero reporting, and zero regulations.
Freedom.
You either have it or you do not.
One person’s idea of freedom is another person’s horror. Here, many Muslims would outright ban eating bacon, and maybe even decapitate you for even considering such a sandwich.
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Metallicman has been down for two periods in short order. The first period was eight hours long, and the second period was twelve hours long. This was due to wordpress updating the blog interface.
I have to apologize for that, as I suddenly received an avalanche of emails of concern and my visitor stats dropped to zero. Hopefully everything will be back to normal, and you all need not worry about me. But… thanks for the concern anyways.
America a third world nation?
America is collapsing and crumbling. All the indicators are there. And I have covered this subject in many other posts. However, this time we are going to look at things from a different point of view. We are going to look at what the United States is turning into if there isn’t any radical changes made to governance or society.
What then?
What if all these changes, turmoil, upsets, worry, upheavals, discomfort, riots, protests, police crack-downs, increases in taxes, don’t result in any substantive changes?
What then?
Indeed, many articles about prepping, SHTF, and the Fourth Turning are about surviving the radical changes that might happen in your neighborhood. These articles use historical precedent to describe actions to take, how to prepare, and what to do. And they are good. Do not misunderstand. They are good and necessary.
But…
But…
But what happens if the radical changes happen, and people get hurt, businesses collapse, wars are fought, food supplies dwindle … yet the corrupt government stays in power?
What happens if elections are still held, and the choice is still two pre-selected candidates from the pool of “approved” oligarchy minions? What happens if the military budget keeps on getting larger and larger, and the quality of life for Americans gets worse and worse? What happens if inflation keeps rising up, and the stock market is only getting better and better?
What happens if the entire foundation of American society collapses, but the government, and the wealthy oligarchy stays intact?
What happens if the United States government, the wealthy oligarchy, the “blue bloods”, the rich and wealthy Powers That Be, and their army of minions still manage to retain power and control behind the safety of their gated communities? What then?
What if your children will still loudly proclaim to be “free” when every Right is functionally gone? What if people will still claim to live “in a democracy”, when in reality voting would make zero difference? What if the instituted changes are cosmetic only, and the serious problems never addressed?
What will America be like then?
Indeed.
What will America be like?
The following is an article titled “America Is About To Feel Like A 3rd World Nation” by Ian Welsh written on 7 August 2020. It’s a pretty good article. It is presented here with editing only to fit within this venue. All credit to the author.
America Is About To Feel Like A 3rd World Nation
I spent a good chunk of my childhood in third world countries. Most of it was in Bangladesh, then arguably the poorest country in the world, but I visited or lived in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Nepal and India, among others.
There’s a feel to the third world one becomes familiar with: beggars, infrastructure that doesn’t really work, people doing terrible menial jobs. There’s the huge disparity between the wealthy and everyone else, or even those who have managed to attach themselves in a semi-dignified way to the wealthy.
Cruelty is routine and unremarked. Indian police officers routinely beat people as punishment (similar to American ones). Servants are treated terribly, and in fact the locals routinely treated the servants far worse than foreigners. This has hardly changed, Vivekenanda, in the 19th century, noted that Americans treated their servants far better than Indians did.
America’s about to make a double digit percentage of its population homeless. Something like 20 to 30%, or more of American small businesses have or will shut down by the end of the pandemic. The jobs won’t all come back and those that do will pay worse and feature worse treatment than the ones before (which were mostly not well paid and featured routine meanness.)
We’re talking about 30 million to 60 million homeless.
These are staggering numbers.
The United States will feel third world. Oh, parts already did, when I landed in Miami airport the first time I immediately thought “third world”. Relatively prosperous third world, but third world.
Those places will be worse ((and Florida, as I predicted near the beginning of the crisis) has handled the pandemic noticeably badly.)
Of course, for many, little will change. They’ll keep their jobs, they’ll be fine. I recently witnessed a discussion of infosec jobs, talking about how for a person with a degree and a couple certification $120,000 was a lowball. There will still be good jobs, and you’ll still be able to lose everything in a few months if you become seriously ill.
But when those people who are hanging on go out in the streets, they’ll see, even more than now, the fate that awaits them if they slip.
So much of American meanness, and the culture is mean in the details of its daily life, comes from this fear. Because it is so easy to slip into the underclass, even if one “does everything right”, Americans are scared, even terrified, all the time. They suppress it with massive amounts of drugs (most of them legal), and most deny it, but the fear drives the cruelty.
In the Great Depression people became less cruel, not more. They say that the idea of meritocracy was absolute bullshit: the richest people in society had fucked up, good people wound up in poverty, and merit had nothing to do with who had how much.
I hope this is what will happen in America this time. I fear, instead, it will lead to even more cruelty. Instead of saying “we should make sure everyone is taken care of” and instituting universal health care and good wages and a non-punitive welfare system (whether a universal income or some other way), Americans will instead become even more cruel out of fear of losing their place.
America is “undeveloping.” It is moving from being a developed nation to being an undeveloped nation.
This process has been going on for a loooooong time. At least 40 years (1980), arguably since about 68 or so. The frustration as an analyst was that the trend was obvious but it took so long. There is, as Keynes said, a lot of ruin in a nation.
Change is slow, very slow, until it is fast. People who live in the slow period, of long decline, don’t really believe in collapse, they assume that things will get worse in a steady line.
But, in fact, there are long periods where everything changes slowly, then periods like earthquakes. 2008 was an earthquake (and collapse nearly inevitable by bailing out the rich.) This is an earthquake. America will FEEL different afterwards, even if Covid goes away 100%, which it may not, since America refuses to do what is necessary. American media keeps having articles about how Covid will never go away. Well, except for qurantining visitors, it will for many countries. But not for America, or Brazil, or India. Third world countries all.
Nor should we get too down on third world countries. America is third world and experiencing the complete corruption of its ruling and governing classes, with the collapse of its administrative ability. When your post office can’t even deliver mail, you’re a failing state: this is such a basic part of being a government that it’s part of the Constitution, written in the 18th century, but since the post office isn’t a kleptocratic institution, the American political class is destryong it.
Most third world nations, indeed, are handling Covid better than America.
Nonetheless the process is underway. The US is already governed like a third world nation, it just has a lot of legacy infrastructure and institutions to destroy to get the full experience.
So, expect that this is one of the times that matters. Expect that America will be different after this. Expect that it will feel different. Understand that your personal position has become much more perilous. You must reduce your vulnerability and/or attach yourself to a corrupt money stream in a way which makes you indispensable. Valuable is not enough, it needs to hurt important people if you you go down. If it doesn’t, the second the numbers say you go, you’re off, and any individual who can be replaced can be if you get on the wrong side of someone more powerful.
There’s lots of good paying jobs, yes, but almost all of them can be done by someone else. It doesn’t have to be you.
Bear all this in mind as you plan your future in 3rd world America.
Conclusion
Most of the people reading this do indeed realize that America is collapsing and crumbling. Depending on the person, we have different stories, reasoning, and ideas concerning it’s collapse.
Some strongly claim, that “next election” will turn everything around. “You’ll see” they say.
Some others differ. They say that as long as the United States destroys China (or Russia depending on the person) that the United States can remain strong and vibrant. We just need to rid the world of that Gosh-darn communism!
Still others say that the entire nation needs to burn down to the ground and we all need to collectively start over.
While others thing that “if only” the USA would adopt a more progressive government like Sweden, that everything would work out fine.
While others just say that everything is perfect, just as it is.
Now, here’s a frightening thought for you all.
What if all this happens and NOTHING changes? What then?
Well, the answer is simple.
America will become stratified as a third-world nation with a caste system along the lines of India. And once you and your family live inside this stratified environment, you will never ever be able to leave it.
And while everyone will still wave their American flags and claim that America stand for “equality” and “Freedom”, they will do so at the back of the bus while wearing the clothes and attire of the common caste and eating and shopping in their caste restricted zones. They will pay for the priviledge to drink water, rent their abodes, and perform menial labor for their “betters” who will, over time, further distance themselves from the lower castes.
Get ready. Because it looks like this is what you have to look forward to.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here is another great law from Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power. This tactic was used by myself to survive prison in the ADC. Which was a hard labor prison in the middle of Arkansas. It was an old cotton plantation, and the purpose of a “hard labor” prison is to make your life so darn uncomfortable that you would never want to re-offend ever again. Anyways, I had to deal with a lot of hard-core criminals there, and the best survival method that I could come up with was to be slow, and dumb and kind of “not quite there”. It worked.
Here is the law. It’s a great read, and alike all of his works, you need to apply it to your own personal situation.
Remember, it is best to smile and be friendly. It’s difficult to be villianized by others if you are kind and smile. And act a little helpless, as it’s human nature to assume that you are smarter than others, and by giving that belief to others, you aptly protect yourself.
LAW 22
USE THE SURRENDER TACTIC: TRANSFORM WEAKNESS INTO POWER
JUDGMENT
When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead.
Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane.
Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you—surrender first.
By turning the other cheek you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power.
Remember, boys and girls, time is your friend. Use it, and you decide when to strike and how to strike. Do not let others trick you into premature action when you are not prepared.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
The island of Melos is strategically situated in the heart of the Mediterranean. In classical times, the city of Athens dominated the sea and coastal areas around Greece, but Sparta, in the Peloponnese, had been Melos’s original colonizer.
During the Peloponnesian War, then, the Melians refused to ally themselves with Athens and remained loyal to Mother Sparta.
In 416 B.C. the Athenians sent an expedition against Melos. Before launching an all-out attack, however, they dispatched a delegation to persuade the Melians to surrender and become an ally rather than suffer devastation and defeat.
THE CHESTNUT AND THE FIG TREEA man who had climbed upon a certain fig tree, was bending the boughs toward him and plucking the ripe fruit, which he then put into his mouth to destroy and gnaw with his hard teeth. The chestnut, seeing this, tossed its long branches and with tumultuous rustle exclaimed: “Oh Fig! How much less protected by nature you are than I. See how my sweet offspring are set in close array; first clothed in soft wrappers over which is the hard but softly lined husk. And not content with this much care, nature has also given us these sharp and close-set spines, so that the hand of man cannot hurt us.” Then the fig tree began to laugh, and after the laughter it said: “You know well that man is of such ingenuity that he will bereave even you of your children. But in your case he will do it by means of rods and stones; and when they are felled he will trample them with his feet or hit them with stones, so that your offspring will emerge from their armor crushed and maimed; while I am touched carefully by his hands, and never, like you, with roughness”-LEONARDO DAVINCI, 1452-1519
“You know as well as we do,” the delegates said, “that the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel, and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”
When the Melians responded that this denied the notion of fair play, the Athenians said that those in power determined what was fair and what was not.
The Melians argued that this authority belonged to the gods, not to mortals.
“Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men,” replied a member of the Athenian delegation, “lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.”
The Melians would not budge.
Sparta, they insisted, would come to their defense.
The Athenians countered that the Spartans were a conservative, practical people, and would not help Melos because they had nothing to gain and a lot to lose by doing so.
Finally the Melians began to talk of honor and the principle of resisting brute force. “Do not be led astray by a false sense of honor,” said the Athenians.
“Honor often brings men to ruin when they are faced with an obvious danger that somehow affects their pride. There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms.”
The debate ended. The Melians discussed the issue among themselves, and decided to trust in the aid of the Spartans, the will of the gods, and the rightness of their cause.
They politely declined the Athenians’ offer.
A few days later the Athenians invaded Melos.
The Melians fought nobly, even without the Spartans, who did NOT come to their rescue.
It took several attempts before the Athenians could surround and besiege their main city, but the Melians finally surrendered. The Athenians wasted no time—they put to death all the men of military age that they could capture, they sold the women and children as slaves, and they repopulated the island with their own colonists.
Only a handful of Melians survived.
Interpretation
The Athenians were one of the most eminently practical people in history, and they made the most practical argument they could with the Melians: When you are weaker, there is nothing to be gained by fighting a useless fight.
No one comes to help the weak—by doing so they would only put themselves in jeopardy.
The weak are alone and must submit.
Fighting gives you nothing to gain but martyrdom, and in the process a lot of people who do not believe in your cause will die.
Weakness is no sin, and can even become a strength if you learn how to play it right. Had the Melians surrendered in the first place, they would have been able to sabotage the Athenians in subtle ways, or might have gotten what they could have out of the alliance and then left it when the Athenians themselves were weakened, as in fact happened several years later.
Fortunes change and the mighty are often brought down.
Surrender conceals great power: Lulling the enemy into complacency, it gives you time to recoup, time to undermine, time for revenge. Never sacrifice that time in exchange for honor in a battle that you cannot win.
Voltaire was living in exile in London at a time when anti-French sentiment was at its highest. One day walking through the streets. he found himself surrounded by an angry crowd. “Hang him. Hang the Frenchman,”they yelled. Voltaire calmly addressed the mob with the following words: “Men of England’ You wish to kill me because I am a Frenchman. Am I not punished enough in not being born an Englishman?” The crowd cheered his thoughtful words, and escorted him safely back to his lodgings.-THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES. CLIFTON FADIMAN, ED., 1985
Weak people never give way when they ought to. -Cardinal de Retz, 1613-1679
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Sometime in the 1920s the German writer Bertolt Brecht became a convert to the cause of Communism.
From then on his plays, essays, and poems reflected his revolutionary fervor, and he generally tried to make his ideological statements as clear as possible.
When Hitler came to power in Germany, Brecht and his Communist colleagues became marked men. He had many friends in the United States—Americans who sympathized with his beliefs, as well as fellow German intellectuals who had fled Hitler.
In 1941, accordingly, Brecht emigrated to the United States, and chose to settle in Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a living in the film business.
Over the next few years Brecht wrote screenplays with a pointedly an anti-capitalist slant. He had little success in Hollywood, so in 1947, the war having ended, he decided to return to Europe.
That same year, however, the U.S. Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee began its investigation into supposed Communist infiltration in Hollywood.
It began to gather information on Brecht, who had so openly espoused Marxism, and on September 19, 1947, only a month before he had planned to leave the United States, he received a subpoena to appear before the committee. In addition to Brecht, a number of other writers, producers, and directors were summoned to appear as well, and this group came to be known as the Hollywood 19.
Before going to Washington, the Hollywood 19 met to decide on a plan of action.
Their approach would be confrontational. Instead of answering questions about their membership, or lack of it, in the Communist Party, they would read prepared statements that would challenge the authority of the committee and argue that its activities were unconstitutional.
Even if this strategy meant imprisonment, it would gain publicity for their cause.
Brecht disagreed.
What good was it, he asked, to play the martyr and gain a little public sympathy if in the process they lost the ability to stage their plays and sell their scripts for years to come?
He felt certain they were all more intelligent than the members of the committee. Why lower themselves to the level of their opponents by arguing with them? Why not outfox the committee by appearing to surrender to it while subtly mocking it?
The Hollywood 19 listened to Brecht politely, but decided to stick to their plan, leaving Brecht to go his own way.
The committee finally summoned Brecht on October 30. They expected him to do what others among the Hollywood 19 who had testified before him had done: Argue, refuse to answer questions, challenge the committee’s right to hold its hearing, even yell and hurl insults.
Much to their surprise, however, Brecht was the very picture of congeniality.
He wore a suit (something he rarely did), smoked a cigar (he had heard that the committee chairman was a passionate cigar smoker), answered their questions politely, and generally deferred to their authority.
Unlike the other witnesses, Brecht answered the question of whether he belonged to the Communist Party: He was not a member, he said, which happened to be the truth.
One committee member asked him, “Is it true you have written a number of revolutionary plays?” Brecht had written many plays with overt Communist messages, but he responded, “I have written a number of poems and songs and plays in the fight against Hitler and, of course, they can be considered, therefore, as revolutionary because I, of course, was for the overthrow of that government.”
This statement went unchallenged.
Brecht’s English was more than adequate, but he used an interpreter throughout his testimony, a tactic that allowed him to play subtle games with language.
When committee members found Communist leanings in lines from English editions of his poems, he would repeat the lines in German for the interpreter, who would then retranslate them; and somehow they would come out innocuous.
At one point a committee member read one of Brecht’s revolutionary poems out loud in English, and asked him if he had written it. “No,” he responded, “I wrote a German poem, which is very different from this.” The author’s elusive answers baffled the committee members, but his politeness and the way he yielded to their authority made it impossible for them to get angry with him.
After only an hour of questioning, the committee members had had enough.
“Thank you very much,” said the chairman, “You are a good example to the [other] witnesses.”
Not only did they free him, they offered to help him if he had any trouble with immigration officials who might detain him for their own reasons.
The following day, Brecht left the United States, never to return.
Interpretation
The Hollywood 19’s confrontational approach won them a lot of sympathy, and years later they gained a kind of vindication in public opinion. But they were also blacklisted, and lost valuable years of profitable working time.
Brecht, on the other hand, expressed his disgust at the committee more indirectly.
It was not that he changed his beliefs or compromised his values; instead, during his short testimony, he kept the upper hand by appearing to yield while all the time running circles around the committee with vague responses, outright lies that went unchallenged because they were wrapped in enigmas, and word games.
In the end he kept the freedom to continue his revolutionary writing (as opposed to suffering imprisonment or detainment in the United States), even while subtly mocking the committee and its authority with his pseudo-obedience.
Keep in mind the following: People trying to make a show of their authority are easily deceived by the surrender tactic.
Your outward sign of submission makes them feel important; satisfied that you respect them, they become easier targets for a later counterattack, or for the kind of indirect ridicule used by Brecht.
Measuring your power over time, never sacrifice long-term maneuverability for the short-lived glories of martyrdom.
When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.
-Ethiophan proverb
KEYS TO POWER
What gets us into trouble in the realm of power is often our own overreaction to the moves of our enemies and rivals.
That overreaction creates problems we would have avoided had we been more reasonable. It also has an endless rebound effect, for the enemy then overreacts as well, much as the Athenians did to the Melians.
It is always our first instinct to react, to meet aggression with some other kind of aggression.
But the next time someone pushes you and you find yourself starting to react, try this: Do not resist or fight back, but yield, turn the other cheek, bend. You will find that this often neutralizes their behavior—they expected, even wanted you to react with force and so they are caught off-guard and confounded by your lack of resistance. By yielding, you in fact control the situation, because your surrender is part of a larger plan to lull them into believing they have defeated you.
This is the essence of the surrender tactic: Inwardly you stay firm, but outwardly you bend.
Deprived of a reason to get angry, your opponents will often be bewildered instead. And they are unlikely to react with more violence, which would demand a reaction from you. Instead you are allowed the time and space to plot the countermoves that will bring them down.
In the battle of the intelligent against the brutal and the aggressive, the surrender tactic is the supreme weapon. It does require self-control: Those who genuinely surrender give up their freedom, and may be crushed by the humiliation of their defeat. You have to remember that you only appear to surrender, like the animal that plays dead to save its hide.
We have seen that it can be better to surrender than to fight; faced with a more powerful opponent and a sure defeat, it is often also better to surrender than to run away. Running away may save you for the time being, but the aggressor will eventually catch up with you. If you surrender instead, you have an opportunity to coil around your enemy and strike with your fangs from close up.
In 473 B.C., in ancient China, King Goujian of Yue suffered a horrible defeat from the ruler of Wu in the battle of Fujiao.
Goujian wanted to flee, but he had an adviser who told him to surrender and to place himself in the service of the ruler of Wu, from which position he could study the man and plot his revenge.
Deciding to follow this advice, Goujian gave the ruler all of his riches, and went to work in his conqueror’s stables as the lowest servant.
For three years he humbled himself before the ruler, who then, finally satisfied of his loyalty, allowed him to return home.
Inwardly, however, Goujian had spent those three years gathering information and plotting revenge. When a terrible drought struck Wu, and the kingdom was weakened by inner turmoil, he raised an army, invaded, and won with ease.
That is the power behind surrender: It gives you the time and the flexibility to plot a devastating counter-blow. Had Goujian run away, he would have lost this chance.
When foreign trade began to threaten Japanese independence in the mid-nineteenth century, the Japanese debated how to defeat the foreigners.
One minister, Hotta Masayoshi, wrote a memorandum in 1857 that influenced Japanese policy for years to come: “I am therefore convinced that our policy should be to conclude friendly alliances, to send ships to foreign countries everywhere and conduct trade, to copy the foreigners where they are at their best and so repair our own shortcomings, to foster our national strength and complete our armaments, and so gradually subject the foreigners to our influence until in the end all the countries of the world know the blessings of perfect tranquillity and our hegemony is acknowledged throughout the globe.”
This is a brilliant application of the Law: Use surrender to gain access to your enemy. Learn his ways, insinuate yourself with him slowly, outwardly conform to his customs, but inwardly maintain your own culture.
Eventually you will emerge victorious, for while he considers you weak and inferior, and takes no precautions against you, you are using the time to catch up and surpass him. This soft, permeable form of invasion is often the best, for the enemy has nothing to react against, prepare for, or resist. And had Japan resisted Western influence by force, it might well have suffered a devastating invasion that would have permanently altered its culture.
Surrender can also offer a way of mocking your enemies, of turning their power against them, as it did for Brecht.
Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke, based on the author’s experiences in a penal camp in Czechoslovakia, tells the story of how the prison guards organized a relay race, guards against prisoners. For the guards this was a chance to show off their physical superiority. The prisoners knew they were expected to lose, so they went out of their way to oblige—miming exaggerated exertion while barely moving, running a few yards and collapsing, limping, jogging ever so slowly while the guards raced ahead at full speed.
Both by joining the race and by losing it, they had obliged the guards obediently; but their “overobedience” had mocked the event to the point of ruining it.
Overobedience—surrender—was here a way to demonstrate superiority in a reverse manner. Resistance would have engaged the prisoners in the cycle of violence, lowering them to the guards’ level. Overobeying the guards, however, made them ridiculous, yet they could not rightly punish the prisoners, who had only done what they asked.
Power is always in flux—since the game is by nature fluid, and an arena of constant struggle, those with power almost always find themselves eventually on the downward swing.
If you find yourself temporarily weakened, the surrender tactic is perfect for raising yourself up again—it disguises your ambition; it teaches you patience and self-control, key skills in the game; and it puts you in the best possible position for taking advantage of your oppressor’s sudden slide.
If you run away or fight back, in the long run you cannot win. If you surrender, you will almost always emerge victorious.
Image: An Oak Tree. The oak that resists the wind loses its branches one by one, and with nothing left to protect it, the trunk fi nally snaps. The oak that bends lives long er, its trunk grow ing wider, its roots deeper and more tenacious.
Authority: Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let them have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. (Jesus Christ, in Matthew 5:38-41)
REVERSAL
The point of surrendering is to save your hide for a later date when you can reassert yourself.
It is precisely to avoid martyrdom that one surrenders, but there are times when the enemy will not relent, and martyrdom seems the only way out. Furthermore, if you are willing to die, others may gain power and inspiration from your example.
Yet martyrdom, surrender’s reversal, is a messy, inexact tactic, and is as violent as the aggression it combats.
For every famous martyr there are thousands more who have inspired neither a religion nor a rebellion, so that if martyrdom does sometimes grant a certain power, it does so unpredictably. More important, you will not be around to enjoy that power, such as it is. And there is finally something selfish and arrogant about martyrs, as if they felt their followers were less important than their own glory.
When power deserts you, it is best to ignore this Law’s reversal. Leave martyrdom alone: The pendulum will swing back your way eventually, and you should stay alive to see it.
Conclusion
I see this level of kind restraint being practiced by China while the United States thrashes, crashes, accuses, arrests, and bans the Chinese and their products. China just sails on, politely nodding and being pleasant.
However, you can rest assured that China is not a “push-over” and have made what ever preparations they feel is necessary to suppress American aggression. And that is the surrender technique. It is one where you are in control, and where you control the timing, the battlefield, the methods of warfare all with a singular objective.
Do not be so sure that the United States is as strong, and as powerful and as capable as it appears. Nor should you believe that China is a timid and as weak and “limp wristed” as it appears either.
Do you want more?
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Yes. It’s almost like the CIA no longer exists. For after a few decades of non-stop headlines about all the abuses of the CIA, it all went dark. It all went silent. It all went away. Why?
I’ll tell you why.
The CIA outsourced it’s nefarious activities.
They outsourced them to “non-governmental” agencies and NGO’s. And it has been these other organizations that have been doing all the “dirty work” of the CIA.
These NGO’s are the “cat’s paw” of the CIA.
cat's-paw
A person who is used by another to achieve some end, especially in a duplicitous or cynical manner. Taken from a fable about a monkey who uses a cat's paw to retrieve chestnuts from a fire.
I thought that Jake really loved me, but in the end, I was just a cat's-paw so he could stir up jealousy in his ex-boyfriend.
-Cat's paw - Idioms by The Free Dictionary
There are numerous such NGO agencies. But I will focus on the one that has been in the news lately. This NGO is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which has been busy stirring up strife and conflict in Hong Kong under the guise of “pro-democracy”.
Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy
How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies.
The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA.
Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done.
What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.
Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” – part of the image, part of the myth.
In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
GO - Government Organization
“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.” 1
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” 2
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.
In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of numerous foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED typically refers to the media it supports as “independent” despite the fact that these media are on the US payroll.
NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.
From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor unions. 3 AIFLD’s work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: “build union-management cooperation”. 4 Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning “keep the labor agitation down … don’t rock the status-quo boat”. The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of the Endowment. 5
NED has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly pro-worker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a “trade union-like organization for professors and students” to counter “left-wing organizations of professors”. To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as “Subversion and the Theology of Revolution” and “Neutralism or Liberty”. 6 (“Neutralism” here refers to being unaligned in the cold war.)
NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: “To identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change … [and] to develop strategies for private sector growth.” 7 Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist, were supported by NED grants for years. 8
In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.
Interference in elections
NED’s Statement of Principles and Objectives, adopted in 1984, asserts that “No Endowment funds may be used to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office.” But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there’s “hard money” and there’s “soft money”.
As described in the “Elections” and “Interventions” chapters, NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996; helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992; and worked to defeat the candidate for prime minister of Slovakia in 2002 who was out of favor in Washington. And from 1999 to 2004, NED heavily funded members of the opposition to President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to subvert his rule and to support a referendum to unseat him.
Additionally, in the 1990s and afterward, NED supported a coalition of groups in Haiti known as the Democratic Convergence, who were united in their opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology, while he was in and out of the office of the president. 9
The Endowment has made its weight felt in the electoral-political process in numerous other countries.
NED would have the world believe that it’s only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don’t know them, but in virtually all the countries named above, in whose electoral process NED intervened, there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED’s point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED’s favorites list.
The Endowment maintains that it’s engaged in “opposition building” and “encouraging pluralism”. “We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system,” said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer. 10 But NED hasn’t provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Eastern Europe – or, for that matter, in the United States – even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.
NED’s reports carry on endlessly about “democracy”, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it’s in a place like Cuba.
The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North’s shadowy “Project Democracy” network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED “run Project Democracy”. 11 This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if – as in an earlier period – it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.
NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. 12 This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers’ money to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who had been involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels, 13 and in 2000 imprisoned in Panama when he was part of a group planning to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosives while the Cuban leader was speaking before a large crowd, although eventually, the group was tried on lesser charges.
The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does “supporting democracy.”
The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it “destabilization.” 14
Here is an example of one of their agents;
Here’s one of the leaders of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. He wrote the guidebook for the Hong Kong revolution. Oh, wait. He isn’t even Chinese. He’s an American in “yellow face” posing as a Chinese. He was an American teaching in Hong Kong and was also working for Amnesty International. That used to be a good organization and then like so many it took Soros money and got poisoned. Now is it just like Human Rights Watch, another Soros fake organization.
Here is from Max’s story,
“An American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures has been posing online as a Hong Kong native named Kong Tsung-gan. Routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media, the fictitious character Kong appears to have been concocted to disseminate anti-China propaganda behind the cover of yellowface.
Through Kong Tsung-gan’s prolific digital presence and uninterrogated reputation in mainstream Western media, he disseminates a constant stream of content hyping up the Hong Kong “freedom struggle” while clamoring for the US to turn up the heat on China.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/08/hong-kong-western-media-yellowfacing-amnesty/#more-37402
The CIA and its many front organizations have thousands of these people. The news media never figures it out.
An American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures has been posing online as a Hong Kong native named Kong Tsung-gan. Routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media.
Conclusion
The NED is the CIA. It uses the same funding mechanism, the same people, the same policies, and the same techniques. It just uses a different name to confuse people, and distract attention away from what is really going on.
And what it actually is...
Is covert military activity used to topple another nation through destruction of it's governmental institutions. It is a technique of fighting war.
Thus the United States, via the NED, fight wars against other nations. They desire to topple the governments of those other nations as they believe that co-existence with the other nation is not int he best interests of America.
It is used to attack other nations, because use of the American military to engage in wars requires Congressional approval.
"The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed. We must not continue it. We must not return to it."
-Mike Pompeo
Notes
The New York Times, June 1, 1986
Washington Post, September 22, 1991
NED Annual Reports, 1994-96
NED Annual Report, 1996, p.39
For further information on AIFLD, see: Tom Barry, et al., The Other Side of Paradise: Foreign Control in the Caribbean (Grove Press, NY, 1984), see AIFLD in index; Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), chapter 6; Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America (monograph, San Jose, California, 1974) passim; The Sunday Times (London), October 27, 1974, p.15-16
NED Annual Report, November 18, 1983 to September 30, 1984, p.21
NED Annual Report, 1998, p.35
See NED annual reports of the 1990s.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Washington, DC), press release, June 13, 2002; Washington Post, November 18, 2003; NED Annual Report, 1998, p.53; Haiti Progres (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), May 13-19, 1998
New York Times, March 31, 1997, p.11
Washington Post, February 16, 1987; also see New York Times, February 15, 1987, p.1
San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1985, p.1
New York Times, July 13, 1998
For a detailed discussion of NED, in addition to the sources named above, see: William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Westview Press, Colorado, 1992), passim
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
As I watch from afar, I see numerous “interests” cheering for radical change inside the USA. I can see their sentiment, and for certain there are agitators and people promoting this level of extreme change. But people(!), history tells us that there is unpleasant change, and then there is REALLY UNPLEASANT CHANGE. Please be careful what you are wishing for.
Let’s look at the French Revolution. For in many ways it mirrors what the USA is going through right now…
…in many ways.
The French Revolution changed everything. France’s kings were replaced almost overnight by the most radical government the world had ever seen. France was suddenly a beacon of freedom: “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” was the motto of the revolution.
Gosh. Really, it is still used to defend liberalism today.
But the revolution wasn’t all positive.
Thousands of innocent people lost their lives and the country was torn between different groups who used force to crush rebellion. It led France into dictatorship and, eventually, back to the days of kings and serfs…
Just like what might happen to modern contemporaneous America today.
The French Revolution (The Reign of Terror) 1789-1799
The story of the French Revolution is the story of a country collapsing in on itself.
It’s unfair to compare these events to the colonial uprising of the American Revolution. That is because that conflict did not take place at the center of power, and King George wasn’t exactly removed from the throne and decapitated.
… which is kinda how things went down in France in the 1790’s.
It was a time when the hostilities between the royalty and the common folk took on a real nasty tone.
Spoiler alert: things got ugly real fast.
Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, France was dissected into three distinct classes / estates: the Nobility, the Clergy, and the smelly broke peasants who really didn’t count (aka everyone else).
At this time in France, people of the poorer classes were members of what was called the “Third Estate” in French legislature.
This is how things had been for longer than anyone could remember, and no one really second guessed it…
At least until a dangerous new idea came along…
The Third Estate: Other
The Enlightenment was a grass-roots movement that caused the underrepresented 99% to question EVERYTHING.
It was kinda like if Morpheus was going door to door with red pills and pamphlets about how the machines are harvesting our bodies as living batteries while we’re living our lives in virtual reality.
“No one can be told what <The Enlightenment> is, you have to see it for yourself.”
The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was an extension of the Italian Renaissance (meaning ‘Rebirth’), which brought new emphasis on discovery, and a search for truth and meaning through critical thinking, rather than just listening to what ‘they’ wanted you to think. This began an unprecedented drive for equality and individual rights which would ultimately challenge the hierarchy of the monarchy based government system.
The Catalysts of Change Chaos
Enter: the Bourbon King, Louis XVI (yes, that’s Louis the SIXTEENTH). Prince Louis (the 16th) was a reluctant ruler, with little to no interest in politics…
…then, suddenly he became the default king of France during the worst crisis of his country’s history in 1765.
The Bourbon monarchy reigned from the palace of Versailles.
This was Louis the 14th’s palatial estate. It was built 20 miles outside the districts of Paris, the nation’s capitol. Which was pretty handy. It was close enough for royal Kingly duties, yet far enough away from the stench of its open sewer system, and the complaints of the commoners.
This truly monstrous mansion would put every single house on MTV’s Cribs to shame.
Versailles: a 2,300 room, gold-plated, Sixty-Seven-THOUSAND-Square-Meter estate of PURE unadulterated EXCESS.
Versailles: Extravagance personified.
Not only did Louis get to be King, and live in a gigantic theme park dedicated to him…
…but he also married the young and beautiful, (albeit a little ditzy), Marie Antoinette, the Archduchess of Austria, in 1770. Louis XVI had won the lottery of arranged marriages and couldn’t really care either way.
Marie Antoinette: Madame Deficit
Meanwhile, back in the real world: France was simmering in a toxic mixture of hunger, and anger.
Enormous fiscal mismanagement
On July 11, 1789, finance minister Jacques Necker, who was already not in good standing with the King, was fired for suggesting that the royal family go on a budget to help conserve funds.
To make matters exponentially worse, the French lost against Great Britain during the Seven Years War in North America, effectively draining the bank as it were.
They took all the money in the Treasury and used it on wars, and the salaries of the military forces.
Much like how the United States has been draining the Treasury on an endless expanse of wars and military policing activities.
The French people were the ones who ultimately paid the price, starving in the streets while their privileged leaders partied around the clock like it was already 1999.
Then, when America rose up against France’s long term nemesis (they were still bitter about that whole Hundred Years War affair), Louis further bankrupted the country to send money and troops to help out the revolutionary colonists, an oversight that worked out rather well in America’s interest, but not so much for the French people.
All the while, Louis’s Queen (Marie Antoinette), ran up the credit card bills with her increasingly extravagant purchases to the point where she earned the title: Madame Deficit.
France had grown significantly in a short period of time, putting increased pressure on the government. Bakery raids, and riots swept the country. So between the food shortage, increased taxes, economic crisis, and political discourse, France was one gamma-inducing-accident away from Hulking out.
Maximilian Robespierre
That’s when a man named Maximilian Robespierre, leader of the Third Estate, came forth as the voice of the poor and disenfranchised.
You might want to consider the "Third Estate" to be the party of the "common man". It's closest equivalent would be the American Democrat Party.
Max reasonably demanded that the wealthy paid their fair share in taxes.
In his address, he blamed the royal court for their pile of problems, and essentially called Louis XVI a greedy jerk, which he definitely was.
Maximilian Robespierre
The Oligarchy refuses to listen
“A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1789: During an appeal to the courts, the nobility and clergy completely ignored their pleas.
Since legal channels didn’t work, they decided to take a different route.
The representatives of the Third Estate got up during the meeting, and simply walked out.
Well, that didn’t sit well.
After being locked out of a meeting, the members of the Third Estate regrouped outside the court house in a tennis court (randomly), and announced an Oath against the King’s authority and formed The National Assembly.
The aptly named Tennis Court Oath was basically like a French version of the Declaration of Independence.
Perhaps some compromises might help…
King Louis, unsure of how to proceed, attempted to make both sides happy, which he failed to do, on both ends.
Then as a last step, he called in troops from abroad to ‘keep the peace’. Within days 30,000 troops surrounded Paris.
Sort of like how President Trump had called up the DHS and Border Patrol troops to seize people off the streets in Portland, Oregon.
In response, The People formed a guard to fight the power!
Sheer revolt had taken hold at long last. Paris erupted into violence as the people of Paris demanded retribution. Revolution had come at last, and things were about to get fugly…
The only problem? The make-shift militia had plenty of muskets…
…but not much in the way of ammo…
The solution: Raid the Armory!!!
The French Revolt!
Spurred on by these factors, on the morning of July 14, 1789, members of the Third Estate stormed the Bastille, a political prison in Paris, in search of gunpowder.
The Bastille, though only housing seven prisoners, was a symbol of government tyranny at the time. The assault on the Bastille is now considered a flashpoint of the Revolution, and is still celebrated today in France.
“Storm the Bastille!” they cried (in French, presumably).
And so the 99% marched towards the Bastille, ready to dish out some old school justice on some fools.
The Bastille was a literal fortress. It was a tall dark fortress with an enormous dungeon that symbolized the monarchy’s absolute power, and the citizens of Paris were about to tear it apart, quite literally brick by brick!
Storm the Bastille!
“Enough is enough!” – a French Revolutionary
The soldiers stationed at the Bastille crapped their collective pants as the entire population of Paris came down on them shouting ‘Vive La France!’
Those that were too stupid to abandon their posts met a gruesome death at the hands, knives, and pitchforks of the angry mob that swarmed the castle like a colony of killer bees!
Afterwards the amount of blood splashed on the walls and pooling on the floor become a symbol for the “revolution!”.
The mob reaches the palace.
Meanwhile, ¡Vive la Revolución! had reached the gates of Versailles.
The angry mob of mothers and bakers tore into the palace, pillaging the flour storage… and royal blood!
Accounts of the time claim that more than one of the palace guards was literally ripped limb from limb.
According to an urban myth of the time, when Marie Antoinette was approached by her servants about the starving, angry, people rioting outside, the Queen dismissively pointed to the leftovers from the party, and told her advisors, “Let them eat cake.”
As funny as that is, she never actually said it.
In reality Marie was shocked.
She had no idea just how bad things had gotten, from her sheltered lifestyle in the palace.
Some claim that as she was running for her life, she may have said something in panic, along the lines of “If they’re hungry, can’t we give them some Brioche?” not fully grasping the severity of the situation.
Surrender!
King Louis XVI looked out the window, saw the torches and pitchforks, and immediately set about dipping his quill in ink to sign their Declaration of the Rights of Man, relinquishing his power.
The King and Queen attempted to sneak away, but were captured, and marched unceremoniously back to Paris in a parade of revolutionaries waving red, white, blue…
… oh and the severed heads of the royal guards on pikes.
The National Assembly took control of the system, aristocracy was thrown out for democracy (by extreme means) and a Constitutional Monarchy was established by the people of France.
Now…
Now…
If you think that’s the happy end of our triumphant story you’re dead wrong.
Now, we get to the entire point of this.
It is now 2020. America is in a state of upheaval, and the ruling Oligarchy are oblivious. The actions taken are "half-measures" and doomed to fail. Soon, one way or the other, a successful change will come about, and when it does, there will be a period of readjustment.
Consider the readjustment that occurred during the French Revolution...
The REIGN OF TERROR Begins…
The Reign of Terror.
In 1791, the King and Queen attempted an escape to Austria, disguised as servants. Unfortunately they kinda sucked at acting. They were found out, arrested, and dragged back to Paris to await trial.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette kept their identities secret from the people of France, and only guests who stayed at Versailles really knew what they looked like. This came in handy during the Revolution as the pair tried to make their escape, but there was one flaw in the plan: the king’s face was stamped on all gold coinage. They made it as far as the border before being recognized.
All the while, Jon Paul Marat became the voice of the Revolution. As it turns out, Marat was a voice of insanity.
Jon Paul Marat
His solution to every problem was the rolling of heads.
In his newspaper (entitled, “The Friend of the People”), he claimed that betrayal was everywhere.
He was sort of the Alex Jones / Bill O Reilly of Eighteenth Century France.
Jon Paul Marat demanded the execution of hundreds, and when that wasn’t enough, he upped it to hundreds of thousands!!
As it turns out, people believed every angry word he put into his one-sided tabloid, and took up arms to carry out his will…
The September Massacre
1792: War breaks out between Prussia and Austria!
The Revolution back home in France takes a turn for the worse: The September Massacre – 1600 prisoners are slaughtered by crazed revolutionaries.
Many are given quick, biased show-trials before being hanged, or worse. Enemies of the revolution are made an example of. Criminals and aristocrats alike are killed without mercy.
A noble woman, Charlotte Corday, eventually got sick of all the death and destruction brought about by Jean-Paul Marat’s poisonous words.
So with a concealed knife she set about silencing him.
Charlotte shanked Marat (in the bathtub, mob-style) with hopes of bringing peace to her country.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way…
… seeing as who he was, he suddenly become praised as a martyr…
…which only made things much, much worse.
Jon Paul Marat’s famous death.
Eat This: Guillotine Cuisine!
Speaking of bloodshed… There was A LOT of it going around, which was not only work, but (as you can imagine) created quite a mess.
The French janitors were tired of mopping up crimson streets.
Turns out, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin had just the invention to streamline the whole mass execution process. His shiny new killing machine was christened, ‘The Guillotine’!
The Guillotine was created as a ‘humane’ form of decapitation. I can only imagine Doctor Guillotine giving a demonstration like a day time TV commercial, “It’s quick, efficient, (effortless), and ‘painless’!” CHOP! (Thud.)
The Guillotine was placed in the center of a town square in Paris, for all to see. This unsanitary death-dealing device soon became the bloody symbol of the French Revolution, with a name that evokes a cross between a pro-wrestler and a death-metal band: “The Nation’s Razor”!!
The Nations Razor.
Maximillian Robespierre, a former adversary of the death penalty, did a 360, flip flopping with the times, and became the Guillotine’s most outspoken supporter overnight.
Robespierre would help fulfill Marat’s blood lust as the people demanded it.
By the end of the century, 40,000 would lose their heads to the dreaded Guillotine!
Peasants looted and burned homes of tax collectors and landlords in what became known as “The Great Fear.” Many nobles fled France at this time, fearful of the rebellion. This inspired the end of feudalism, which was officially abolished on August 4, 1789.
Death of the King
1793: The King is tried as a traitor. He is declared guilty of treason.
The punishment: Death.
Both King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette were beheaded during the Revolution. The king was beheaded on January 12, 1793. Marie Antoinette followed her husband to “The National Razor” on October 16, 1793. Her last words were “I'm sorry”—not to the people, but to her executioner; she had accidentally stepped on his foot.
A few argued that the death of the former King would only excuse violence as a means to happiness. Those who spoke against it however were drowned out by the savage calls for his head.
King Louis, the 16th, was led to the maroon-stained scaffold.
He turned to his people in remorse and attempted to give a dignified final speech.
The crowd toned him out, booing and throwing rotten cabbage. They had come for blood (especially those in the splash zone).
Poor Marie Antoinette was also put on trial. When she was brought into the courtroom, she barely resembled her former self, as a list of made-up charges was rattled off. At 38 her hair had gone gray while awaiting her sentencing in a dungeon.
She too was led to the Guillotine.
“Whose next?”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing: the so-called “Reign of Terror” followed the initial revolutionary events, starting from around 1793 and ending with the fall of Robespierre in 1794. During the Reign of Terror, many political dissidents or perceived enemies of the Revolution were executed. Between June 1793 and July 1794, there were 16,594 official death sentences across France.
Britain takes advantage of the situation
Then, without warning, Britain began invading and panic filled the streets! (More so then before.)
An emergency government was put in place, the constitution suspended, and a police force of spies were institutionalized.
A revolutionary tribunal – a 12 men council – the ironically titled ‘the Committee of Public Safety’ was a collective dictatorship.
The government became extremely paranoid.
The Catholic Church was abolished, religious icons and statues were destroyed, thousands of priests drowned.
People were rounded up and sent to the guillotine on the most mundane of charges. Even a lack of enthusiasm could be seen as traitorous.
The Reign of Terror was in full swing.
France becomes a dictatorship
Maximillian Robespierre implemented dictatorial powers, declared himself the supreme ruler, and made lists upon lists of people to kill.
“Terror without Virtue is disastrous. But, Virtue without Terror is powerless!”
-Maximillian Robespierre spoke before his groupies.
In 1794, Robespierre helped sponsor a cult based on the Goddess of Reason in place of Christianity.
In his free time he established a new holiday: The Festival of the Supreme Being.
During the festivities, Maximillian Robespierre symbolically descended from atop a paper-machete mountain in the clouds, clad in robes.
This was seen as a thinly veiled attempt at making himself appear divine.
Though, in general, people were convinced that he’d lost his marbles, and began to get suspicious.
Robespierre chose this moment to deliver a speech of threats, with an all new list of enemies against the Republic.
The best way to tell what side a man was on was to check out his clothing. The French nobility wore knee-length silk breeches, whereas the lower class militiamen wore long trousers, short-skirted coats, clogs, and red caps that symbolized liberty.
This (of course) backfired in his face when the people flipped out and silenced him.
He was immediately arrested, and sentenced to death before he could finish reading off his latest hit list.
While in captivity, Robespierre attempted suicide. His advisors succeeded, but Max only managed to shoot off his jaw. The revolutionaries carted him off to the guillotine to finish the job for him.
As poetic justice would have it, Maximillian Robespierre was killed by his own revolution. FAIL
Maximillian Robespierre guillotined.
Enter… Napoleon
By 1804, a guy by the handle of Napoleon had risen through the ranks from General to Emperor.
On November 9, 1799 Bonaparte staged a coup d’état that abolished the Directory, the government in power at the time; he then pronounced himself as “first consul” of France. This event ended the French Revolution proper and began the Napoleonic era in France.
France had gone full circle, trading one monarchy for another.
After the rise and fall of Napoleon, the other European powers reestablished a constitutional monarchy in France.
King Louis XVIII (the 18th) was followed by Charles X (not to be confused with Professor Charles Xavier), and Emperor Napoleon III. During this time France would go on to have a few more Revolutionary movements.
The subsequent French Revolutions were minor in comparison to the first, and were by and large unsuccessful:
The July Revolution of 1830
The June Rebellion of 1832 (which was a complete disaster – as seen in the play / multiple movie adaptations of ‘Les Misérables’, by Victor Hugo)
The French Revolution of 1848.
The last of which established the Second Republic of France, which lasted until Napoleon the Third’s coup in 1851, effectively establishing the Second French Empire.
The Second French Empire eventually collapsed…
… and the Third Republic of France was established in 1870.
Everything was peachy until of course World War II when Hitler’s Nazi Party went around their massive defensive perimeter (the Maginot Line) to invade and temporarily conquer France (1940-1944).
The *FOURTH* Republic of France that followed ended up imploding in 1958 due to the Algerian Crisis (long story) to finally be replaced by the current administration:
The FIFTH (and Final?) Republic of France.
THE (first) French Revolution may have been a bloody mess that seemingly accomplished little, but it’s arguable that it had a greater impact on the world at large than the American Revolution, by challenging the old ways, and making way for the modern era.
In the end, the French Revolution would lead to a century full of instability, with two more Revolutions taking place. The country would be governed as a dictatorship, republic, constitutional monarchy, and two different empires before reaching equilibrium.
The Beheading Louis XVI
The beheading of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette was one of the biggest events of the French Revolution, but it didn’t have to happen.
Before he was king, Louis XVI was quiet, dedicated to his studies and painfully shy. It took him seven years to consummate his marriage to the beautiful and intimidating Hapsburg heiress.
When he became king he was cautious and indecisive, eager to be loved. In another age he would have been a great king, but he was entirely unsuited to the political crisis of the time.
People around him took advantage of his weakness to seize more power.
Louis was little more than a figurehead.
It was no surprise when the new government voted to abolish the monarchy shortly after.
Some revolutionaries argued against executing Louis, but the revolution was in full swing and the public hated him. Louis XVI was killed by guillotine in January 1793.
Louis XVIguillotined.
The move shocked many across the world since Louis had always been seen as a moderate king. His death enraged nearby European countries and led to a war that might have been avoided. He faced his death fearlessly: with his final breath, he forgave those who condemned him and hoped that no more blood would be spilled.
The Toppling Of Statues
Executing Louis wasn’t enough: later that year, the rebels decided to remove all trace of the old kings from the country.
They started with the tombs of St Denis, the traditional resting place of France’s royals.
To begin with, the masons were happy just to destroy the old Carolingian statues and other symbols of royalty.
Destruction of Statues in America in 2020.
But within a month they were hammering into the old vault that held the kings from the House of Bourbon.
When they were in, they started destroying the old coffins.
Some of the kingly remains were put on public display, while others were dumped into a large burial pit, to cries of joy from the crowd.
Many people came to watch—so many that the laborers struggled to do their work. According to eyewitnesses, members of the crowd grabbed at the bodies when they could, taking stray hairs, teeth and other things as personal mementos.
These acts were later condemned both within France and across the world, but by that time it was too late.
Destruction of Statues in America in 2020.
After the Bourbon Restoration, the kings were retrieved from the pit and moved to the crypt in the basilica, but the damage was already done: many of the kings were unrecognisable.
The Law of Suspects
The revolution started because the rebels wanted everyone to be free and equal.
After they won, though, their anger didn’t come to an end: instead, they started hunting down anyone who might be a threat.
This period is now known as the Reign of Terror, and it resulted in thousands of innocent deaths.
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror started with the Law of Suspects, which granted the government the power to accuse pretty much anyone of being a rebel.
They attacked the priests, who were driven underground—for a while, being Catholic was actually illegal. In the end, anyone who might have been connected to the old nobles could be imprisoned and executed.
Over two years around 500,000 people were accused—a huge number for the time.
So many were accused, in fact, that the prisons were too full and people had to be put under house arrest.
Though most were eventually allowed to walk free, around 16,000 people were killed—and many thousands more died in prison.
Under the law, anyone whose “conduct, relations or language [showed them to be] partisans of tyranny … and enemies of liberty” was arrested and put on trial.
The city of Lyon backed the moderate Girondins, a group who were part of the revolution but were not as bloodthirsty as the others.
The rebel leaders considered Lyon a centre of royalist support, so they laid siege to it in 1793.
Over the course of the fighting over 2,000 people were killed in Lyon and the city was conquered. The revolutionaries had won, but they had further plans for the city.
In October, the National Convention issued a decree calling for Lyon to be destroyed.
Everyone who lived in Lyon was to have their weapons taken away.
They would be given to revolutionaries.
Any building “inhabited by the wealthy” was to be torn down, leaving only the homes of the poor, factories, and some monuments.
They even planned to purge the city’s name from history.
The city’s name would be erased: Lyon would be called Liberated City (Ville Affranchie) instead. They planned to build a column with an inscription on it saying: “Lyon made war on Liberty; Lyon is no more.”
Fortunately, this project was never finished.
The Girondins Executed
France’s new government had two main groups: the Girondins and the Montagnards.
Girondins – Moderates
Montagnards – Extremists
The Girondins were moderates: they wanted to build a free, capitalist, democratic country where everyone had a say in how they were ruled—regardless of who they were.
They were supported across France but the people of Paris liked the Montagnards more.
They were extremists who “wanted everything leveled”.
Anyone seen as elite had to give up their status or be executed. The groups got along well to begin with, but fell out over Louis’s death. The Montagnards wanted to kill him, but the Girondins wanted the country to vote on it. The Montagnards said they were plotting to save the king and called them traitors.
Things boiled over on the streets of Paris.
A group of soldiers and citizens surrounded the government buildings and demanded the Girondins be kicked out of the government.
The Montagnards duly did so.
Some Girondins were able to escape, but a few months later, those who were left were rounded up and guillotined.
Many Girondins guillotined.
The Drownings at Nantes
The city of Nantes was a center of revolution, but much of the countryside surrounding it was royalist. The region rose up in rebellion, leading to the Battle of Nantes. After this, the new French government decided to purge the city of anyone who still supported the monarchy.
To do this, they sent Jean-Baptiste Carrier, one of their most committed supporters.
Jean-Baptiste Carrier.
Jean-Baptiste took his job very seriously. In around five months, between 12,000 and 15,000 people were killed by his order.
Nantes lies on the Loire, which Jean-Baptiste called “the national bathtub”.
He and his men built special boats called lighters which were specifically designed for drowning prisoners.
The captives would be shackled to each other, often naked, and herded onto the boats—which had trap doors on the bottom.
The boats were then sunk with the prisoners on board. The elderley, pregnant women and children were all drowned without distinction.
In the end Jean-Baptiste’s methods were too extreme even for the revolution: he was recalled to Paris by the Committee of Public Safety, put on trial and executed by guillotine.
Jean-Baptisteguillotined.
The Law of 22 Prairial
Over the course of the Reign of Terror, thousands of people were imprisoned, some for absurd reasons. By June 1794, the prisons of France—particularly Paris—were overcrowded, so action had to be taken.
Robespierre and his allies drafted a new law which would allow trials to be concluded much quicker: they pushed this law through the Convention and it was passed on 10 June 1794.
It meant that people could be put on trial for simple things like ‘spreading fake news’ or ‘seeking to inspire discouragement’.
Citizens were expected to confront or report their neighbors if they expressed any kind of opposition to the government.
When these people were put on trial, they weren’t treated fairly: the judges and jury only had three days to come to a conclusion, and they had to choose whether to allow the accused to go free or be put to death.
This new law marked the beginning of the Grand Terror.
Executions per day increased dramatically across France, and most of those killed were undoubtedly innocent. The Grand Terror came to an end after two months, but not because people were horrified by the killings.
No, the new law had also made it so members of the Convention could now be put on trial. Looking to preserve their own skins, the members of the Convention removed Robespierre and guillotined him, bringing an end to the killings.
Robespierre guillotined.
The Massacre in the Vendee
The revolution was supposed to be a movement that freed the French lower classes and gave them liberty and security.
But anyone who opposed the new government was harshly punished, even those who were lower class.
In the early days, the church was singled out for its wealth and excess.
The revolutionary government veered between atheism and a new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, but they were united in their desire to destroy the old Catholic system.
In the Vendee, however, the people rose up to protect their priests and churches from the new revolutionary government.
When the government ordered them to form a conscript military unit, they rebelled, joining together in local militias which were collectively known as the Catholic and Royal Army. This alarmed the new government, who sent the army to tackle the problem. After a series of pitched battles, the Catholic and Royal Army was defeated.
But the government didn’t stop there.
Determined to prevent another such uprising, the government sent General Louis Marie Turreau with twelve columns of troops to destroy to Vendee. Farms, villages, supplies and forests were destroyed, and the soldiers killed without restriction.
When it was over, General Francois Joseph Westermann wrote a letter back to the government saying:
“There is no more Vendée… According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.”
“Scorched Earth” on the Vendee.
The Law of the Maximum
Unlike many other atrocities on this list, the Law of the Maximum was implemented with good intentions—though the government was forced to do it. One of the biggest reasons people joined the rebellion in the first place was because food was too expensive, but by 1793 even the basics were going back up in price.
The enrages, a collection of anti-elite protestors who might today be called Marxists, argued that the nobility had been replaced by greedy merchants. Action was needed to take away their wealth and help the poor.
The government passed the Law of the Maximum in response.
It set a maximum price for goods, from bread and wine to iron and shoes.
Merchants had to display a list of prices outside their stores and, if any of their prices were above the maximum, they would be fined. Instead of going to the government, the fine went to whoever informed the authorities about the illegal pricing, encouraging people to rat out merchants who ignored the law.
It had a disastrous impact on France.
While merchants did reduce their prices, it left them with almost no money.
The less honest shopkeepers began watering down their goods, disguising ash as ground pepper, starch as sugar and pear juice as wine.
Farmers in rural areas began hoarding their produce because they couldn’t get a good enough price in the cities, meaning that people in the cities starved.
The result was a black market where the rich could still buy the goods they needed, while the poor had no access to food at all.
These famines were fixed temporarily when the government sent soldiers to take food from the farmers and bring it to the city by force, but this only caused more unrest.
The September Massacres
Or, in other words, the whole-scale slaughtering of all the prisoners in all the jails and prisons throughout France…
After Louis was killed, the government fell into chaos. No-one knew who was in charge. In the meantime the Paris Commune, who were supported by the armed mob, had all the power. Chaos reigned as the new government fought over who should be in power, alongside issues like the economy, the army, and the justice system.
What dominated, however, was a fear of counter-revolutionary backlash.
The new movement had been denounced in Britain, Austria and Prussia, and war loomed on the horizon.
Meanwhile, French royalists were gathering support in other parts of the country.
The revolutionaries feared that, if a royalist army was to attack Paris, the new revolutionary government would fall.
In particular, they came to believe that the inmates of the city’s prisons would join with the counter-revolutionaries if given a chance. These fears were exacerbated when it came time for the new army to leave the city, with the people believing it would leave the city vulnerable to a prison break.
Between the 2nd and 6th of September 1792, the inmates were attacked by revolutionary mobs, with over 1000 being killed in the space of a single day.
Half the city’s entire prison population was massacred, with corpses left mutilated in the streets.
The revolutionary government sent letters to regional governments saying that conspirators in the city’s prisons had been executed. The act was repeated elsewhere: murders of prisoners took place in 75 of France’s 83 departments.
Conclusion
History can be interesting.
This is especially true if you are living through a time period that would most certainly be put into the history books.
This is 2020. A revolution has been brewing for some time, and (rightly so) many people are beginning to recognize the start of this period in America as 2008 when the banks fell, and massive financial fraud was committed. Now, the chain of events are starting to accelerate and it’s starting to look like elements of numerous historical catastrophes are starting to converge within America…
The Wall Street Crash.
The Fall of the Roman Empire.
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
…and…
The French Revolution.
Most certainly the elements are all there, and I cannot tell you what will happen. But I can paint some broad “brush strokes” for you all to ponder…
Do not expect any election to change anything substantially. It will only change form, but it will still keep moving in the same direction.
Things are going to get worse before they get better. We have not yet reached the peak.
When it appears that the old order has been toppled, and a new order is forming, that is when the REAL DANGERS will start to appear.
Expect some kind of foreign war or military action to distract attention. Expect a villainization of some nation, race or people. But note that it will not really work the way it is intended to.
The implementation of all the strife and chaos will not be uniform. It will be patchy, with some areas more dangerous than others.
Who survived the French Revolution?
Not the oligarchy, nor those that lead the revolution. Not those that were “moderate”. The survivors were those that lived outside the cities that also had strong connections with friends and families within their communities.
The American culture of “lone wolf” and “every man for himself” will be problematic at this time. I do not advise it. instead I strongly advise the formation of small tightly knit communities that share and work together.
I recommend the following…
Stay away from crowds.
Do not get involved in politics at any level.
Practice strong provisioning, and practice familial disciplines.
Be a member of your local community.
Offer your time, resources, and supplies to your community. Think of it as an extended family.
Do you want some more?
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All the people writing about the intrusive nature of the NSA, and the collection of data through the cell-phones by back-door access has got it all wrong. It’s not about the collection of data. It’s about using your phone to control your mind.
All these “back doors” and secret embedded code within your electronics, your chips, and your cell-phones is not simply about collecting your personal information. That is the obvious purpose, but that is not the ultimate purpose.
The ultimate purpose is to enable the embedding of special algorithms and embedded code that allow the government to manipulate what you see, read and hear. These enormous (and hidden) embedded programs overlay instructions to your mind. They alter the selection of programs that you might want to use, they change the access and ease of access to websites. They alter the type, range and frequency of information on your feeds, and change what you would watch, see and listen to.
Have you ever been on your cell phone, and musing about something... thinking about a memory or an event... and then suddenly you see a link or an article related to a similar type of event?
No. It's not coincidence.
It's intentional.
You are being subconsciously manipulated to act, think, and behave as part of a herd of humans, that the oligarchy wants to shepherd into certain defined behaviors.
And the revelations by Wiki-leaks in Vault 7 proves this.
Vault 7
Whenever you mention the “power” that the United States has over the serfs citizens living there, you really need to mention “Vault 7”. “Vault 7” proves, beyond all and any shadow of a doubt, that the United States government has complete distain for the Bill of Rights, and everything that it stands for. Americans have no protections. ZERO. Americans exist at the mercy of their government.
Democrat Senator Feinstein trying to put limits on the the first amendment to the Bill of Rights.
Americans are just monitored cattle. They are monitored by their owners; those handful of Billionaires that fully control the government.
WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest-ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of “Vault 7”, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released:
A total of 8,761 documents have been published[v] as part of “Year Zero”. This “Year Zero” is the first in a series of leaks the whistle-blower organization has been dubbed “Vault 7.” WikiLeaks said that “Year Zero” revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
Wikileaks released ORG Chart.
Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, “would rock the technology world“, the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in “false flag” cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks’ source notes that it “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
“With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding,
"CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE"
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017
But perhaps what is most notable is the purported emergence of another Snowden-type whistleblower: the source of the information told WikiLeaks in a statement that they wish to initiate a public debate about the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.” Policy questions that should be debated in public include “whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency,” WikiLeaks claims the source said.
The FAQ section of the release, shown later, provides further details on the extent of the leak, which was “obtained recently and covers through 2016”. The time period covered in the latest leak is between the years 2013 and 2016, according to the CIA timestamps on the documents themselves. Secondly, WikiLeaks has asserted that it has not mined the entire leak and has only verified it, asking that journalists and activists do the leg work.
Weeping Angel
Among the various techniques profiled by WikiLeaks is “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
Dotcom also added that “Obama accused Russia of cyberattacks while his CIA turned all internet enabled consumer electronics in Russia into listening devices. Wow!”
Obama accused Russia of cyberattacks while his CIA turned all internet enabled consumer electronics in Russia into listening devices. Wow!
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that
“There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of “Year Zero” goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective.”
Key Highlights
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.
The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
CIA targets iPhones, Androids, smart TVs:
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.
Despite iPhone’s minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA’s Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA’s arsenal includes numerous local and remote “zero days” developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.
A similar unit targets Google’s Android which is used to run the majority of the world’s smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. “Year Zero” shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 “weaponized” Android “zero days” which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.
Take aways…
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA’s Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as “Assassin” and “Medusa”.
The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more, such as EDB’s “HIVE” and the related “Cutthroat” and “Swindle” tools.
Also cars,
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks.
The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
This is quite suggestive of the CIA having a role in the death of Michael Hastings.
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware.
This includes multiple local and remote weaponized “zero days”, air gap jumping viruses such as “Hammer Drill” which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( “Brutal Kangaroo”) and to keep its malware infestations going.
Hoarding of Zero Day exploits:
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or “zero days” to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.
The U.S. government’s commitment to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process came after significant lobbying by US technology companies, who risk losing their share of the global market over real and perceived hidden vulnerabilities. The government stated that it would disclose all pervasive vulnerabilities discovered after 2010 on an ongoing basis.
“Year Zero” documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration’s commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA’s cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.
As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in “Year Zero” is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities (“zero days”) possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.
The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.
Take aways…
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or “zero days” to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.
Please see the table of contents for the full list of projects described by WikiLeaks’ “Year Zero”. (Over 500 and counting…)
Proliferation of leaked/hacked Cyberwar programs:
While nuclear proliferation has been restrained by the enormous costs and visible infrastructure involved in assembling enough fissile material to produce a critical nuclear mass, cyber ‘weapons’, once developed, are very hard to retain.
Cyber ‘weapons’ are in fact just computer programs which can be pirated like any other. Since they are entirely comprised of information they can be copied quickly with no marginal cost.
Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booze Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
The U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base
In addition to its operations in Langley, Virginia the CIA also uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a covert base for its hackers covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate ( “Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe” or CCIE) are given diplomatic (“black”) passports and State Department cover.
The instructions for incoming CIA hackers make Germany’s counter-intelligence efforts appear inconsequential: “Breeze through German Customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat, and all they did was stamp your passport”
Examples of CIA projects
The CIA’s Engineering Development Group (EDG) management system contains around 500 different projects (only some of which are documented by “Year Zero”) each with their own sub-projects, malware and hacker tools. The majority of these projects relate to tools that are used for penetration, infestation (“implanting”), control, and exfiltration.
Umbrage: The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
Fine Dining: Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency’s OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically “exfiltrating” information from computer systems) for specific operations. Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals.
‘Improvise’; a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor).
HIVE: HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants. The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.
Evading forensics and anti-virus
A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks.
“Tradecraft DO’s and DON’Ts” contains CIA rules on how its malware should be written to avoid fingerprints implicating the “CIA, US government, or its witting partner companies” in “forensic review”. Similar secret standards cover the use of encryption to hide CIA hacker and malware communication (pdf), describing targets & exfiltrated data (pdf) as well as executing payloads (pdf) and persisting (pdf) in the target’s machines over time.
CIA hackers developed successful attacks against most well known anti-virus programs.
CIA hackers discussed what the NSA’s “Equation Group” hackers did wrong and how the CIA’s malware makers could avoid similar exposure.
UMBRAGE
The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a “fingerprint” that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.
This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
It’s easy to have the NSA place “digital fingerprints” on their hacking efforts using these tools, and then blame another nation.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
Unless maintained, the Bill of Rights becomes useless and superannuated.
Fine Dining
Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency’s OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically “exfiltrating” information from computer systems) for specific operations.
The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate this to CIA malware configuration staff. The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff.
Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals. The ‘Case Officer’ is also asked to specify the environment of the target like the type of computer, operating system used, Internet connectivity and installed anti-virus utilities (PSPs) as well as a list of file types to be exfiltrated like Office documents, audio, video, images or custom file types. The ‘menu’ also asks for information if recurring access to the target is possible and how long unobserved access to the computer can be maintained. This information is used by the CIA’s ‘JQJIMPROVISE’ software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation.
Improvise (JQJIMPROVISE)
‘Improvise’ is a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor). Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from ‘Fine Dining’ questionairies.
HIVE
What is an "implant"?
It is the embedded code that instructs your brain what to do and how to behave when you are using electronics technology.
It is the software that has the back of your mind musing about certain things, issues of the day, or getting all emotionally upset about something.
HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants.
The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.
Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a ‘Blot’ server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the ‘Honeycomb’ toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website.
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer, so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant.
Similar functionality (though limited to Windows) is provided by the RickBobby project.
“You could have all the crazy thoughts you wanted, as long as you smiled and kept them to yourself.”
― Mara Purnhagen, Past Midnight
99.9% of the articles (on the internet and in books) discuss how “unconstitutional” the collection of information, by the NSA, is. They argue (and rightfully so) that the United States government should not be doing this, that it is against the Constitution, the law, the purpose of government, and is a dangerous precedent. Ah. We all get this and understand it.
I argue something a little different.
The reason why the United States wants your reading, watching, listening, and Geo-location information (as well as your passwords, your friends, and your associations) is not so much to track your actions and behaviors. But instead, to be able to feed embedded algorithms into your phone.
These hidden and secretive signals direct your subconscious actions.
They control what you look at, what you listen to, and what you are exposed to.
Thus, they “box you in” to a particular “mind set”. And in so doing, they control you.
And the American PTB (Deep State) Oligarchy leadership are believing that this 2D manipulation of minds will guarantee their successful implementation of change; guarantee that they will remain in power forever, and guarantee that their goals and societal adjustments will occur without any opposition.
But the universe is far more complex than any 2D operation. It’s at a bare minimum, an 11D exercise. And pushing this controlling narratives into the minds of millions of Americans will have , or is having…
… unexpected, or unintended consequences.
It should be no surprise that the United States is now balkanized into violently radical warring factions. All of which are attuned to certain pre-defined narratives. Individual, independent thought no longer exists. You are either “A”, or “B” or “C”. And they have further classified you in to a direct subcategory all for the purposes of your control. “A-4”, or “B-7”.
Vault 7 exposes this.
Now a cursory look at the files might (indeed) give you the impression that it’s just advanced techniques for the collection and gathering of information. I urge the reader to think past that. Any nation that has an intimate knowledge of your “private papers” and “personal privacy” in real time has the ability to control you.
It’s all about control.
The control of what and how you think, by a very powerful government.
And this is why Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo are all up in arms about 5G, and Huawei. It's not that the technology is better, dangerous, or would have "back doors". It is that the stranglehold of the American government control over people would come to an end as less and less people use programs with these embedded algorithms.
If you want to protect yourself from being manipulated by hidden, invisible and secret manipulations, you need to start using phones, and software developed outside of the United States. Those products that are being “banned from American use” such as Huawei and Xiaomi are almost certainly devoid of NSA malware.
Though, perhaps the best thing might be to just move away from all electronic media and live a far simpler life.
A simpler life.
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Well, you cannot help but notice. The United States is a fucking mess. It really is, and the only ones that cannot see this are partisan loyalists and oligarchs inside their comfortable mansions. Here is a great article that pretty much comes to this conclusion. And after decades of warnings, and nuanced complaining, the often discounted SHTF and civil strife seem to be building up to its ultimate conclusion.
You can see this just by reading the headlines on the Drudge Report…
Whatever the leadership is doing, it’s ineffectual.
I get the impression of a ship sinking, and everyone on the deck fighting each other. The Captain of the ship is just locked in his cabin. The rest of the crew just aren’t doing anything substantive. Any lifeboats are partially unfurled, and only partial measures are in place for all the many problems that are igniting all over the ship.
Its a mess, a flame that out of control, and the blaze is burning brightly.
Is America Heading For Civil War? Of Course It Is…
The following is an article by Brandon Smith, written on July 7th, 2020. Tt can be found at Alt-Market, and all credit to the author. This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.
In last week’s article, I discussed the issue of American “balkanization” and the rapid migration of conservatives and moderates from large population centers and states that are becoming militant in their progressive ideology. In my home state of Montana, there has been a surge of people trying to escape the chaos and oppression of leftist states.
Some are here because of the pandemic and the harsh restrictions they had to endure during the first lockdowns. Others are here because they can’t stand the hostility of identity politics, cancel culture, and race riots. Either way, they are fleeing places with decidedly leftist influences.
Uprooting and moving to an entirely new place is not an easy thing to do, especially in the middle of a pandemic. For many people, such an idea would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Believe me, moving to a place like the Rocky Mountain Redoubt is not an easy transition for most. Hopefully, these people understand that they will have to make extensive preparations for the rough winter and be ready to work hard in the spring and summer months to survive. Maybe they don’t realize yet how tough it is here; maybe they know and don’t care.
That’s how bad the situation has become – Rational and reasonable people are willing to leave behind their old life and risk it all to keep a margin of freedom.
Armed “Black Panthers” march in Texas with a list of demands for substantive changes to society.
In my view, it is clear that the political left has gone so far off the rails into its own cultism that there is no coming back. There can be no reconciliation between the two sides, so we must separate, or we must fight. I advocate for separation first for a number of reasons:
First and foremost, conservatives are the primary producers within American culture. If we leave the leftists to their own devices there is a chance they will simply implode in on themselves and eat each other because they have no idea how to fill the production void. The recent developments in the defunct CHAZ/CHOP autonomous zone are a perfect example. Those people don’t have the slightest clue what they are doing and it shows.
Second, if conservatives separate it provides a buffer that helps defuse future random conflicts. When you force the two sides into a box together eventually they will find a reason to try to kill each other. Putting some distance between them and us reduces the angst.
Third, if the leftists decide they don’t like that we have separated and are thriving on our own, and they attempt to antagonize or attack us where we live, then we hold the clear moral high ground when we smash them to pieces in response.
Antifa elements along with some non-aligned protestors have taken over vast areas of the city of Seattle.
I fully realize that the third outcome is the most likely. War is probably inevitable. Why? Because collectivists and narcissists are never satisfied. They desire unlimited control over the lives of others and they will use any means to get that control no matter how destructive. Separating from them is only a stop-gap that allows us to take a superior position. Through peaceful migration, we set the pace of the conflict. Eventually, they will come after us, and there will be no doubt about our response then. There will be no way to spin the result in their favor, no way for them to play the victims.
Some people might question if we are actually to the point of open conflict; they might accuse me of “doom-mongering”. Others may argue that conservatives are acting “passive” and that we will never take any action. These assumptions are common right now because such people do not understand how history progresses and how group psychology evolves.
Domestic war is not something pursued lightly, or haphazardly. The average person knows at least subconsciously that it’s better to seek resolution or to remain patient as events unfold. Conservatives aren’t stupid; we know that before any civil war there is first a culture war. And, we know that the cards are stacked against us and that if we act rashly in any way we will lose position in that culture war.
So, we let the leftists spit and rage like madmen for a little while. Each day people who were on the fence when it comes to the culture war are witnessing this and come over to our side because we’re the only side that is sane. The drawback is, there comes a point in which calm professionalism might be wrongly perceived as weakness. And when people sense weakness among conservatives, they might run into the arms of the extreme left thinking that it’s safer to join the “winning team”.
Lawless areas are springing up all over America’s cities. Where the government steps back and allows others, often a local crime boss, to take over portions of the city.
I believe conservatives have not been sucked into a reactionary stance yet because they are thinking logically and refusing to play the game for now. In some ways, it is how we enter the fight that is more important than the fight itself. To understand why, we have to look at the bigger picture beyond the left/right conflict.
As I noted last week, the political left is a tool for a greater agenda. They are being used as a weapon of chaos by globalist interests. This is not “conspiracy theory”, this is a conspiracy fact. Millions of dollars have poured into Antifa and BLM related groups through elitist donors like George Soros and his Open Society Foundation as well as the Ford Foundation. Globalist institutions like these have been influencing the extreme left and promoting identity politics for DECADES. This is openly admitted. What we are witnessing in 2020 is simply the culmination of a half-century-long propaganda campaign that created the modern feminist movement, victim group status, entitlement culture, etc.
The reason for the agenda should be obvious: Chaos creates fear. Fear creates division and crisis. And, crisis creates opportunity (as globalist Rahm Emanuel once bragged). Meaning, the extreme left is going to start a war because that’s exactly what the global elites created them for.
Now, some might suggest that this places conservatives in a Catch-22 position; if we don’t fight back then we will look weak. We will be culturally isolated and eventually overrun and wiped from the history books. If we do fight back we will be giving the globalists what they want – A civil war that will tear America apart.
The suggestion by certain special interests will be that there is only one way out; use government power to turn the tide to our advantage. In other words, institute martial law. I don’t really see it that way.
Once we understand that a fight is coming regardless, our task is to position ourselves with the most advantage possible while keeping our culture and our principles intact. This includes our belief in constitutionalism, civil liberties, and opposition to tyranny in ANY form. Winning the fight is important, but maintaining our principles in the process is more important. Becoming a monster to fight the monster is the same as losing.
When the left comes for us (and they will), the fight has to be won by us, not government. We cannot hand even more power to government in the name of security. We cannot become the fascists the leftists accuse us of being.
I am often asked these days about my view of the 2020 election and how it will turn out. I did predict Trump’s election win in the summer of 2016 based on the idea that Trump’s presence in the White House would drive the left insane, as well as give the globalists a perfect “conservative” scapegoat for the economic collapse they had been engineering since at least 2008.
Trump’s cabinet of global elitists suggests his complacency in this plan. We still live under a one-party system pretending as if it is a two-party paradigm.
Furthermore, I am not convinced there will even be an election in November. With pandemic lockdowns surely returning as infections spike once again, the US economy will be in ruins by winter. Voting in a traditional fashion will be difficult or restricted in some states. And, mail-in or digital ballots will not be accepted by most conservatives because of their history of being used to rig election outcomes.
Look at it this way: If Trump “wins”, or delays the election, the left will riot and a civil war will be triggered. Conservatives will have to deal with the violence of the left while also dealing with the potential for martial law (which we cannot tolerate or support either). If Biden “wins”, it will be perceived by many conservatives who still think elections matter as a stolen presidency engineered through fraudulent ballot practices.
To summarize, if Trump is still in the White House in 2021, get ready to fight back against leftist mobs as well as martial law measures. If you believe in freedom, realize that fake conservatives that support government tyranny will be as much a problem as Marxist lefties. If Biden enters the White House, expect him to immediately implement unconstitutional policies including medical tyranny, gun confiscation, and martial law. Either way, it ends in war.
BLM supporters demanding an “improved” society of segregation where they make the rules.
It’s also the classic false choice narrative: You can choose Marxism and communism, or you can choose fascism. Communism being the elevation of the weak and the oppression of the strong in the name of arbitrary “equality”, and fascism being the elimination of the weak or less fortunate in the name of making more room for the strong. Both sides rely on totalitarian government to assert dominance, and both sides benefit the elitist establishment. The great con is that there is no third option when there is; the non-aggression principle, citizen defense, voluntarism, and freedom.
Frankly, I almost prefer a scenario in which Biden and the left are perceived as stealing the election. At least then conservatives will be fully united once again and ready to fight, instead of passively relying on a Pied Piper like Trump to save them.
The truth is, in 2020-2021 we stand at a massive nexus point in human history. We are spiraling into a decade and a fight that will decide the fate liberty for the next century or more. On one side stands the global elites and the useful idiots on the hard left. They will push for a collectivist system that erases all memory of the Constitutional Republic we once knew, and they will get help from fake conservatives that value power over principle. On the other side stands the people that just want to be left alone; the free minds, the people that don’t need or desire to have power over anybody.
If humanity is to have a future at all, the second group must continue to exist and prosper. They are the wellspring that feeds us, that gives us something to hope for. If the elites and the social justice mob take control, there can be no future for our species. They desire what they cannot and should not have. They value only what they can take from others. They have a hunger that can never be satiated. They will devour the world until there is nothing left while claiming they stand for the “greater good”. War cannot be avoided with such people; the only question is, will liberty-minded people stay the course and stick by their principles or will they fall to their darker impulses to ensure victory?
Conclusion
It certainly seems to me that the United States is a mess. The government is corrupt, inefficient and squabbling to a point that few things can get done. The entire premise of what the United States is today is being questioned, with the entire political left leaning towards a mix of fascism and communism to sort things out.
Whether this will result in a shooting civil war is unknown. Certainly, historical precedents seem to point in that direction, but we really do not know. What we do know is that every time that the United States seems to be on the edge of chaos, it suddenly gets pulled back from the brink and things calm right back down.
So we just don’t know what will happen.
Certainly, the comments to this article (on the original site) express a mix of emotions and thoughts that pretty much display emotional rants, with little constructive dialog. That in itself is worrisome.
If you all in the United States now, please take care of yourself, your family, and your friends. Your strength lies in your community; your local community and your role in it. If things get better, then your life will be richer for it. If things get worse, you will be able to survive it with others in a similar situation.
Make sure that you are protecting yourself from the many threats that circle around you and your family.
These threats include COVID-19 and more. Have food stockpiles, have them hidden, and keep quiet about them. You know, canned food will keep for a long time. And, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few bags of flour or rice lying around. Some small bottles of alcohol are great trade items and can be used for other things if needed. If you don’t drink, you might want to buy a case of cheap whiskey in small bottles. The same goes for cigarette lighters – the disposable kind. A box of 100 can be bought on the internet cheaply.
Make absolutely sure that you have antibiotics. These are like gold during a SHTF event. Aspirin, Tylenol, and any prescription pain relievers are good things to have. Rubbing alcohol, and a couple of books on emergency first aid procedures will not cost much, but would really come in handy if things go “South”.
It never hurts to begin preparations now, if you haven’t already.
Reinforce your fences, gates, and protective measures, a long row of tangled foliage will work wonders. Supplement your front and rear doors with a two-by-four that you can effectively double bar the door with.
Extra protective measures might not be needed, but are always prudent when times become unstable.
Train, and drill with family. Nothing radical or worrisome. Just concentrate on the basics. What happens at home is confidential. Avoid crowds. How to handle fires, or strangers who come to your neighborhood. Be alert. Do simple things like that.
You would be amazed at the number of "preppers" who discover that their children participate in BLM marches, and rallies. And who communicate on pro-BLM and Antifa social media. For a family to survive, it needs to be unified.
Use the rule of three on weapons and hiding them; One group for ease of use. One group hidden to your family, and one group that only you know about.
Make sure that you are gardening. Even if you don’t eat the food, it’s a wonderful pastime and helps relieve stress.
Gardening need not be a big thing. Just start out small, and plant something. So you missed spring, you can plant things throughout the year.
Canning is also fun. Give it a spin if you have the opportunity. Riding a bicycle is a lot of fun. Get out of your car or truck and go riding on some local back roads. Get to know the feel of the land. Have fun.
If you can, go out fishing with your family.
Again, I do not know what will happen. But I do expect that certain areas of the country might experience some degree of civil lawlessness. Not just in Seattle. YOu will be able to see urban migrants trying to enter your area. They might come in campers, or with tents and backpacks. Be wary of tent cities and encampments. Often they are not reported, but “everyone” will know where they are. More areas than what is currently being reported. If your area becomes one such area, you need to be prepared and ready.
Start now.
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I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I have some things to say. So brace yourself. I’ve got some strong ideas about life, happiness, peace, freedom, and liberty. I also have ideas about property, hamburgers, beer, wine, and pizza. So fortify yourself with some strong drink and something to crunch upon. Here we go…
You know, the sole purpose of government is to protect it’s citizenry.
That is it.
Nothing else matters. It should make sure that the people are fine and living life, or as they used to say in the United States, being in the “pursuit of happiness“.
Now, this can mean many things, but most fundamentally it means that the people are protected from thieves, robbers, and hoodlums. It also means that they are protected from other nations who might which to perform large-scale robbery, rape, and crimes against people, property, and things.
Different nations handle this differently.
Some (like early America) were small, and provided only the necessities.
Others believed in a central government that controlled everything.
While others set up military empires that pretty much ran the nation through strength.
And still others have varying degrees of “democratic” rule.
All nations change over time. Sometimes those changes are gradual, and sometimes those changes are rapid and violent. But change is the norm in human society and it’s high time that America starts to experience some of the long-delayed changes that have been building up for decades, if not centuries.
America today is an oligarchy (PTB) run military empire undergoing the pains of social, financial, economic, and leadership contraction.
It’s painful to watch.
Because…
Fundamentally, at the most basic level, a nation that cannot protect its people and that cannot provide for its people is no longer a nation. It is a dysfunctional “something”. It might have a flag, and passports and colored lines on a geographic map, but functionally it has ceased being a nation.
It’s people can see this.
And when they can no longer rely on the police and the government to protect them, they make changes. They seek means of protecting themselves. One of the greatest indicators in a loss of respect and confidence in a nation is when the citizens start buying up firearms and weapons.
When the government can no longer protect it’s people, the people try to protect themselves. they purchase guns and ammunition.
Most of the citizens in a dysfunctional nation can see this.
Only those living within protective enclaves of the elite are unable to see this. Yet, over time, even they too can see what is going on, and those with the necessary means, flee. They construct safe places far away and abandon the nation under collapse.
Those that remain behind have only two options available to them…
Accept the status quo and adapt.
Or change the nation into something that is functional.
If you, for whatever reason, are unable to participate or accept these options then you must leave. Because no matter how you look at it, there is going to be trying times ahead.
And things could get… uncomfortable.
Things can get uncomfortable when there is no order, no skills, and when laws are not followed. Accidents can happen. Both accidental and intentional.
There were numerous people writing articles arguing that you should construct a “life boat” and leave before things get worse. I was one of them. Here’s another fellow named Llpoh. He wrote an article about escape a few years back, and now he revisits it with some interesting insight…
The following article is from the Burning Platform Blog. In it he revisits an earlier article that he wrote titled “Llpoh: Get Out While You Can”. This article updates it with the day to day craziness that is the norm in America today. It’s a pretty sobering look at what the USA is, or what it has become. All credit to the original author.
Llpoh: Get Out While You Can, Revisited
Just under two years ago I wrote the article that follows. It garnered a lot of comments, and I encourage you to revisit them to see how well they have stood the test of time. The original article can be found here:
If anything, I was far too optimistic in my assessment. It is now too late to get out, as you can easily see. I did what I could to sound the alarm. I told you so, and it brings me no pleasure (well, maybe a little) to say that.
Interestingly, there are a number of posters on the original thread that said they would fight when the time came. I called bullshit then and still do. Things are far worse today than then, but no fighting is happening.
None.
The other side is better organized, and they are marching armed and un-impeded wherever they choose. It looks more and more like the normal folks are surrendering without even a dying whimper. Much as I suspected and predicted. It is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. The left and the minorities have won. If the Hispanics ever join the leftist march, it is well and truly over.
Does anyone see a way out?
The $5 trillion or more yearly deficit, the loss of Liberty to the pandemic, the acquiescence of all organizations and businesses to the demands of the left, the inability to even argue with a black person without losing your job, the loss of freedom of movement, the ability of the radicals to commandeer interstate highways and cities without so much as a “that is illegal” from elected officials, the erasure of history, the inability to defend your person or property, etc., are just some of the thousands of examples that show the normals have lost.
If they are not standing up now, then it is not going to happen.
Because this is as bad as it gets.
Oh, it can get worse, but when you have reached Hell, and you have, it is just the particular level in Hell that is the question.
So the question is – does anyone see a way out? And if so what is it. Because there is nothing happening now that I can see. Please give me some hope. I sure could use it about now. I just do not see it.
This is the text of the original article, for reference:
LLPOH: Get Out While You Can
I am currently stateside. It has been a few years, and I had to take care of some business. My wife and I have revisited some of our favorite spots, and caught up with some family. We have driven through some of God’s finest works. There is no more beautiful landscape anywhere on earth than the west coast, Route 66, southern Colorado, the Badlands, etc.
That said, I say this most sincerely, and with great sorrow. Those of you who can, get out now.
Discussing what to do over drinks.
What I have seen leads me to depression, and there is no road back for the US, in my opinion.
The blinkered people, the tax collectors roadside (police everywhere collecting taxes), the tax collecting at every opportunity, the welfare state, the severe drop in service at restaurants, the tattoos, the green hair, the lard-asses everywhere, the severe over-population of great swathes of the country, the hideous media out only to inflame, and not to report, the aged and infirm working at whatever jobs they can find, the homeless everywhere, the beggars, the filth roadside, the severe health issues seen at every turn (people everywhere too fat to walk, carrying oxygen, diabetes inflicted, toothless), casinos one after another, hideous roads, etc. ad naseum, lead me to but one conclusion: the US is fucked. It grieves me to say it. It disgusts me to see it.
Of all of these things, the most serious is the blinkered people. They have no insight, no curiosity, no sense of understanding of the world, no vision of anything outside their tiny bubble.
Put together a “bug out bag”.
There are far too many people. California has 40 million, almost double that of Australia, which is more or less the size of the lower 48. I struggle to breathe around such masses.
I can feel the desperation wherever I go, but the people cannot see that they cause their own issues by living far beyond their means, with leased cars and pickups, and mortgaged to the hilt.
I spoke with many relying on pensions, who do not realize the precariousness of their positions. I ask how well funded are their plans, and they stare at me mouths agape, unable to even grasp the question.
If you have the means then use them and go to a safe place.
I spoke to many business owners, who are so angry it defies belief. To a man, they are wanting to throw in the towel. The government has choked them to death, and dealing with employees is killing them day by day. One has seven lawsuits going and has been sued 25 times. He services equipment for other companies. Whenever an idiot maims someone with the equipment he services, he gets roped into the lawsuit. The equipment never fails, but some idiot, not employed by him, runs over someone, and he gets sued, guilty by association.
The immigration policy of the US is helping destroy the country. As a reference point, Australia takes a couple hundred thousand immigrants a year, talent-based. Talent based. Compare that to the US insanity.
On and on it goes.
Pick a destination and leave.
So I say this. Get out if you can. I recommend New Zealand or Australia. Others might recommend somewhere else. These countries have issues, but they are a few decades behind those that the US has. If not that, then if possible move away from the big cities.
My Concluding Thoughts
Ai! The USA is certainly a big mess.
I know, I left it and ended up in my “life boat” in China. You might hate China, but most people who do, do so out of ignorance. They just don’t know what I know, or what China is like.
I can tell you one thing, though…
China is a functional nation, run by serious people, who do not play. They invest in their people and in their society. They honor their traditions and make sure that they are preserved. All of them, including the 80+ minority groups. It’s beautiful here. The sky is blue, the trees are lush green, the ocean is a rainbow of light blues to dark greens, and all the flowers are vibrant and sweet.
The people are relaxed, and nice. The roads are new and well maintained. The police are alert and there are many freedoms that most Americans have long given up ages ago.
But that is my story.
What is obvious is that the United States is a mess and the elite in positions of power are so “off the grid” in reality that they don’t know if they are coming or going. It can only get worse before it gets better.
If you are stuck in the United States right now, I would suggest that you fortify your home, stockpile supplies, and practice, practice and practice. While it might not end up as a shooting hot conflict, that is (after all) the historical norm. Be prepared.
I would suggest that you fortify your home, set up strong fencing, add strong metal doors, and 2×4 barricades that you can put in place. Hide your supplies and plant shrubbery to hide your home from view.
Do not expect things to get better.
In fact, I argue, that if suddenly things did get better, then I would dig a hole in the ground and hide. For it is possible that even worse things are down the road.
It’s long past the time for “temporary fixes” and “band-aides” and other “kick the can down the road” solutions.
Things have run out.
We all can see the wreck that the United States is today. We can see that the entire government is dysfunctional, that the police are either dangerous or useless, and that the leadership are nothing but greedy evil people who will sell you out in a heartbeat.
It’s game over!
It’s game over.
Things have run out. The end of the road is getting clearer with each passing day.
As the car barrels down the highway and pumping the breaks no longer work… you can see the signs on the highway that read “Dead End”, “Road Closed”, “Bridge Out”, and…
..and when your car crashes through the wooden roadblock and sprinters of the sign are all over the windshield…
… Like RIGHT NOW…
You realize that perhaps it’s too late.
Maybe you should jump out of the speeding car. Even though it is going 60 mph on a twisty and winding road…
Even though you might get scratched in the process, it will probably be far safer than getting trapped inside the car as it goes engine first diving onto the rocky shores below.
…
If you are stuck and trapped in the United States right now, I would advise living a quiet low-key life. You would need to tone down your internet presence. Keep your private home and personal life quiet. Keep your political opinions quiet. Blend in, and then only come out when the “all clear” siren sounds.
Only come out when it is safe to come out.
Do you want more?
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I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Americans are constantly reinforced how dark and gloomy the rest of the world is. They are told that America must fight wars all over the globe to “free people” from the evils of Communism, and “to spread democracy” and the “American way of life”. It’s all a big nasty lie. The rest of the world is doing just fine thank you. And Americans need to straighten up, get their collective shit together and stop putting their nose in everyone else’s’ business.
This post consists of some videos from the rest of the world. And no, it doesn’t look like a “save the children” commercial either. People are living life, having fun and just enjoying themselves. They are not probed, monitored, reported on, and over taxed. They are doing just fine. And we are going to have some glimpses into their lives right about now.
Meanwhile in America
Ah. The Drudge Report offers us a snapshot of how America is doing. It’s a fucking mess, I’ll tell you what.
I know that change is a normal art of life, but man….
And yet, if you go on American social media it’s still the same old narrative. America is so fantastic and so wonderful and so great that it must be the “will of God”, and all the rest of the world is evil. America needs to get involved and “teach them lessons”.
Today, Sen. Ernst says, we face a different supply chain threat: China.
"We rely on communist China for far too much," she explains.
She hasn't only been talking about the Chinese threat. Sen. Ernst recently wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in which she stressed that the U.S. must be more aggressive toward China, particularly after the communist regime's mishandling and cover-up of the coronavirus. China's role in the pandemic resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives, as well as devastating economic consequences.
-Joni Ernst Focuses on China in First TV Ad of the Year
Oh Fucking Brother!
"...the communist regime's mishandling and cover-up of the coronavirus..."
Please give me a fucking break.
The videos of people dying all over China during CNY were everywhere. I myself have collected thousands. And while this was going on, you had President Trump telling everyone that "nothing is going on", and that you don't need to wear a mask. The idea that there was some sort of coverup is just political theater.
What “mishandling”?
Six days after discovery, everything went public and under lock-down. If anyone is mishandling anything it is the idiots running the United States right now.
Anyways…
America is in bad shape. And the general “rule of thumb” (historically) is to claim some foreign threat. Then launch a war, claiming that it’s all in “self-defense”. Right now, the build up is all against China.
But if Trump loses the election, the build up will be redirected against Russia.
And if so, then it looks like the John Tutor narrative will really start to have some legs...
… Nuclear War.
But of course, the PTB, the Oligarchy aren’t thinking this. They just simply cannot envision a life where they are not inside their nice comfortable homes living life and sipping tea while fondling with their pearl necklaces. They cannot envision major change on the order of Genghis Khan level disruptions.
Instead, they are pushing the same, tired old, narrative…
Export “democracy” to the rest of the world so that they can be as fantastically wonderful as Americans are, with all those American “freedoms”!
American freedoms in action. Let’s export this to the rest of the world! Woo woo!
Well…
Let me tell you’se guys. The rest of the world doesn’t want any “American exceptionalism”. They just wish to be left alone, and the dearly wish that America would just “go away”.
Why?
Because the are NOT suffering. They are NOT some starving village out of a “Save the Children” commercial. And most people are very, very far removed to that 0.0003% of people who live in the elitist bubble in Washington DC where stocks, bonds and public manipulation are the norm.
They are having fun.
They are living life.
Having fun like everyone used to back in the day, in America before all those progressive “improvements”.
Here's some glimpses into the rest of the world. The images are from South East Asia. This includes Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma. Now, there is a lot of cultural back-and-forth going on in these areas, so there is a chance that I am mixing up a few regions with nearby societies. lease excuse the mistakes if appropriate.
Burma Music Video
Most Americans don’t know where Myanmar is.
It’s a small nation West of Thailand. It’s relatively poor, but peaceful. The only time most Americans hear about it has to do with some military excursion one way or the other. Then suddenly the news is plastered with buzz-words and trigger phrases. You know the drill “democracy”, “military junta”, “regime” and “communist”.
But aside from that, Americans are kept ignorant.
Myanmar map.
Americans just do not care.
“Out of sight is out of mind” as we all used to say.
At most, Americans might look at the news and see what constitutes as a video portrayal of events and daydream of starting a KFC franchise, introducing those “poor starving people” to ATM machines, and American social media. Not realizing of course, that they already have all of this. Each and every bit, only under their terms. Not under the oppressive terms of the iron-fisted American empire.
Anyways…
Here’s what it’s really like.
This is what the rest of the world is like.
And while you Americans were out having a BBQ with some chicken, some hamburgers, bags of potato chips, and watermelon, this is what other people were doing. While you were flying the red, white and blue flag on your porch, and drinking some fine Budweiser beer or PBR. Only…
Only…
Only…
…they didn’t need an official government holiday to do it. They just went out and lived life. Because for the rest of the world, just about every day is a holiday.
Check out this (partial) MV video from Burma…
Burma music video.
Ah it’s one of my favorites.
Now for some bad news…
THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING A NEW WAR IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA
Political Islam against China
by Thierry Meyssan
You are probably aware that you are incompletely informed about what is brewing in Myanmar, and you probably haven’t heard about the military coalition that is preparing to attack that country. And yet, as Thierry Meyssan reveals here, these current events have been in preparation by Riyadh and Washington since 2013. Don’t take sides before you read this article and digest the information.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article198141.html
All in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”…
But, take a gander. Do these people seem to need “democracy”, or “The American way of life”, or “American exceptionalism” that Donald Trump so loudly proclaim?
DO you really think that they want ANYTHING that America exports right now?
Do they look like they eat a lot of McDonald’s hamburgers, are all worked up and stressed about the IRS reporting dates, the up coming November elections, the new laws on social distancing on beaches or fishing? Nope. They are not. Because that nightmare world that all Americans live within is far, far removed for the lifestyle, and the societies of the rest of the world.
Thirteen years ago my life changed forever.
Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State and the most credible person in George W. Bush’s cabinet, made the case for war in Iraq on February 5, 2003.
As a young military intelligence officer at the time, watching from a makeshift army base in Kuwait not far from the Iraq border.
Back then I was a true believer, trusting that the government was a force for good “making the world safe for democracy. . .”
But that night it all changed.
Powell told the world unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, an assertion that history has proven categorically wrong.
But within the intelligence community, many people knew the appalling truth immediately.
That night it became clear to me that the government was lying and that the whole case for war was being fabricated.
It was crushing, like finding out everything I’d been told throughout my life was total bullshit.
So for the first time, I broke out of the spell and began questioning. Everything.
I started learning about the extraordinary political power of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about.
That led me to the fraud of many previous wars going as far as the Mexican War in 1845, one deeply criticized by Abraham Lincoln himself.
That led me to the Constitution, to which all military officers swear an oath to support and defend…
… and it surely didn’t seem like supporting or defending the Constitution in waging an ill-conceived, illegal war.
Needless to say I couldn’t talk to my professional colleagues. Everyone was so gung-ho, I felt like an outcast.
When I returned home, things didn’t improve.
While I was away the country had noticeably turned into a police state.
Yet people seemed oblivious to the change, drinking in the propaganda like a spiked punch bowl.
All the loud, bombastic nonsense and pledges of allegiance were merely illusions masking modern day serfdom.
-Simon Black
And now, well America is really knee-deep in shit. And it desperately needs a major military conflict for the PTB to stay in control and they are all “chomping at the bit” to make it happen.
It’s terrifying.
Yes. I know. I am in a “safe place”. And I know that change is going to happen. But, you all do know that I want peaceful change. Not violent change. And these elitists sitting in Washington DC are just delusional. On both sides of the isle. They do not know what they are asking, and the result will NOT be what they expect.
Hey!
Did the starvation of China work? How about the mass riots in Hong Kong? What about the UN going against the Uighur “concentration camps” (nonsensical, but still) or of course the COVID-19 bioweapons attack against China on the CNY eve 2020? How did it all pan out.?
Do you all somehow think that a war with a major power is going to be a “walk in the park”?
The United States needs to leave the rest of the world alone.
It needs to concentrate on it’s own problems and start fixing things.
No one believes the United States any longer. All the masks of self-righteous truth and Godliness has been stripped away to expose the evil dark underneath.
Instead of filling their own pockets and letting the rest of the nation suffer. And that is what is going on right now. Those trillions of dollar bailouts are not going tot he citizens. They are, instead, going to the politically connected and the cronies that support the PTB. This is not good…
The rest of the world is living life. Having fun. Chilling.
Let’s go to Thailand.
Local Thailand Music
Of course, in Thailand you can hear classic American Rock blaring from the bars and nightclubs, but if you listen carefully and go outside the tourist areas you can find real genuine local music. And it’s all pretty darn cool.
One of the most curious things that fascinated me is that the local music, and the styles all tended to resemble the hotter sections of Southern Mexico. And I am not the first to notice it.
A curious new trend has emerged in Bangkok, where young Thai men are identifying as “Mexican gangsters.”
On the outside, many of these Thais resemble the Cholos who inspire them. Their clothes, tattoos, and hairstyles emulate those sported by real homies.
What became clear is that the Thai obsession with these groups is simply an appreciation of their aesthetic. All of the men we spoke with were captivated by “the clean and simple style” that “worked well in this (Thai) weather,” as one gang member said.
So while they might appear and look like Mexican gangsters, they really emulate their style and appearance. As they both have a similar build / stature, a similar family lifestyle, a similar society, and similar weather. One should not, however, think that they aren’t able to handle themselves were “push comes to shove”. Thailand is the land of “kick boxing” and they do not play.
I dont know about the clothes but on a hand to hand combat fight my moneys on the thai boys!
They would kick their ass in about 2 seconds with that martial arts shit!
As for the idiot who wondered wtf this story got to do with anything? Get the f**k outta here! U need a change of pace sometimes!
I saw a little woman from thailand once bring a grownass man to the floor with a damn broom handle once honest! If i hadnt seen it myself i wouldnt have believed it!
I was like dayuum!
Anonymous
March 20, 2014 at 11:19 PM
Perhaps what most separates the Thais from the Mexicans they imitate is that almost all of them hold innocuous 9-5s as teachers, policemen and bureaucrats. Many are family men, and some admitted to consulting their wives before getting certain tattoos.
Thailand Music Video
In a nutshell, this is a brotherhood of style-conscious men who bond over baggy white shirts and gothic-baroque tattoos.
That’s not to say that the Thais don’t have an understanding of the fierce take-no-shit Cholo attitude. Thanks to Youtube and movies they’re very much aware of that culture’s hyper-aggressiveness and machismo. One Balcony Pain gang member – Mr. Shiro Local – bared his inner gangster to us when he rapped a few lines from an original song he had written called “Fuck the Popo” in which he compared corrupt Thai police to parasites in his scrotum.
Such outright vitriol is rarely directed towards people in authority in Thailand, where the dominant culture is one of extreme deference towards the powerful. Yet, you’d be hard pressed to find Thais who disagree with Mr. Local’s assessment of Bangkok’s cops. Perhaps a little more Mexican gangstah chutzpah is exactly what Thailand needs.
Just some local Thai men being themselves and living life.
Nice. Eh?
Local societies doing local things. People living life.
Good. Right?
Well…
Not everyone thinks so…
Trump, Pompeo and Bolton.
Now all this is going on while the PTB and the Oligarchy are moving military forces around the world. Both the American and English forces are moving in preparation for the World War that America so desperately needs…
What this article in fact announces is the state of war between the Anglo-American Empire and the PRC which with characteristic euphemism is called "hybrid".
https://www.ft.com/content/20910e6d-5ae7-4026-aaee-947e22c3dd60"Britain’s armed forces pivot east to face growing China threat
Security and defence review dominated by ways to counter Beijing’s hybrid warfare"
The FT as a mouthpiece of the Establishment is announcing that the conventional warfare elements are being mobilised as cover for covert operations already in progress for at least 18 months.
By placing visible assets near the "front" any PRC responses to covert action can be dressed as provocations justifying selective escalation.
Since the AAE is aware that it is unable to challenge PLAN elements in Chinese territorial waters or EEZ, these naval elements serve to inhibit or disrupt maritime traffic toward or from China.
The preoccupation with repeated instances of viral infection not only consume resources but reinforce the negative public image of the PRC and force its "self-isolation".
Since at the same time the promoters of the "pandemic" are determined to drive Trump out of office at all costs, both to restore control over the W**** House and hence the state bureaucracy and to continue the rollout against China and Russia unobstructed, there is little reason to expect any change in the WHO status before December.
By that time the scale of basic economic disaster will require the draconian "public health (in fact policing) measures" on a far more coordinated scale than at present is apparent.
We are going through what might best be called an indoctrination phase. This is a shift from overt criminal policing or political repression to a general "health and safety" doctrine- already well anchored in Britain and the US (the white dominions).
My gut feeling is that the protests in the US are in fact a managed "watertight integrity" test. The natural anger and opposition to all sorts of real and imagined injustice is being selectively detonated. This will starve the real opposition of the "oxygen" it needs to resist the next phase of suppression.
It would be nice to think that it is all more chaotic and less subject to management than I describe above. However, I see little cause for optimism of this sort.
Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
魏巴克
Yeah.
I know that it is depressing. It’s like you have this really nice calm life. It’s fine and tranquil and then suddenly American planes zoom overhead and release a fireball that completely wipes out your small village.
Americans spreading “democracy”.
Like what happened in Panama…
In Libya…
In Afghanistan, Syria…
And many, many other places…
Syria before and after America spread “democracy” and let them have a fine taste of American “freedom”.
Hey! I know it’s depressing.
You want to know what’s even more depressing?
It’s that any attack on China or Russia will end up with nuclear attacks on American soil. And yet somehow, somehow and in some crazy way, the American and British PTB Oligarchy leadership doesn’t think that this will happen. Thinking that a war with China will be limited to conventional weapons in the South China Sea is absolutely foolish.
What is the matter with these people?
It will not be limited to conventional weapons.
It will not be limited to the South China Sea.
Don’t they realize that on the grand scale of things that you just cannot move about… being a destroyer of things and NOT have some “flash back”?
Look at these videos.
America is a bubble of insanity.
Has anyone seen this from Rod Campbell of Australia Institute? He claims thousands of bot accounts controlled by US government spread the Wuhan bioweapons narrative nearly 5 million times in the first half of 2020:
https://www.facebook.com/HongKongGoodNews/videos/200057774713941/
The life of the people in the rest of the world is…
People… the rest of the world is not like this. The rest of the world is normal and doing well. The rest of the world is living life and having fun. They are not in the same kind of extremes that Americans are enduring.
It is like night…
… and day.
Having fun at the clubs in Thailand.
They are not living in this bubble of extreme freak-out that exists within the USA today. They are innocents. They are just minding their own business. And when the brave American bombs start dropping, there will be a response…
… you want to avoid the areas where the response(s) will end up.
…
Come on…
Look at the rest of the world.
What about life in Cambodia?
How about checking things out there…eh?
America Needs a War
As I am trying to make the point, I want you the reader to pay attention and listen. It’s simple really.
Americans are living within a “bubble”.
The rest of the world lies outside this “bubble”.
They are happy, doing well, and want to be left alone. They are now protected with strong military alliances with peer-capable weapons, serious and powerful leadership, and an understanding of the stakes and the evils of the American Military Empire as it exists today.
America needs a war. It is the only technique remaining in the arsenal of control that will allow the United States to stay coherent and not break apart through internal division.
The severity of the internal American discord is an indicator of how serious the projected war that America wants…
…and the rest of the world is aware of this.
If you all think that the Chinese, and the Russians are going to sit back and allow the America to go initiate a global war to preserve their control over the rapidly crumbling American structure…
…you are sadly mistaken.
Right now, and keep this in mind… China is STILL at DEFCON ONE. Last week they just called up all of the national reservists. All of them. (What? You didn’t see this in the American or Western press did you?) If you think that China is going to permit the five aircraft (2 + 3 = 5) carriers heading to China right now, and the two invasion flotillas to be a threat, you are crazy.
Do not think that the rest of the world is going to sit back and pretend that nothing is going on? Don’t be silly. The leadership of both China and Russia are experts that obtained their positions through merit. Not though some diversity checklist and under-the-table bribes.
Meanwhile…
…In Cambodia.
Party Time in Cambodia
It’s “party time”. There, just like it used to be in America, people would customize their vehicles and make them into mobile party-centers. Then all they would need to do is go to an empty parking lot and have a good time. Sort of like this…
Cambodian Music Video
Yeah.
The rest of the world is just having fun. They are just enjoying themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But, you would never know that this was going on from reading the American news…
To Americans within their own bubble, they are convinced that they are “special”, and “wonderful”, and all is “great”.
How could they get this kind of idea?
Well…
It’s because it has been drummed into them ever since they first started attending school, and getting participation trophies for showing up.
But…
I’ve got news for everyone.
Americans are NOT special. In fact, most aren’t really functional at the most basic level. The PTB realize this, and many people are starting to wake up to this frightening situation.
Here’s one…
The following is the full text of an article titled “RAW TRUTH: Why 97% of lives really DON’T matter at all to the future of humanity” by Mike Adams. It was found on Natural News and all credit to the Author.
The opinions are of the author and not necessairly that of Metallicman. So please take advisements. Realize that there are changes and you need to be a participant or else you will be flushed down the drain with the rest. Be advised.
Aside from that. Realize that other people are starting to "wake up" and look around...
RAW TRUTH: Why 97% of lives really DON’T matter at all to the future of humanity
(Natural News) The mantra of “Black Lives Matter” has been pounded into our heads 24 hours a day, and we’re told it’s an enlightened, progressive statement while anyone who claims “White lives matter” is somehow a racist bigot. Even worse, those who utter “ALL lives matter” are now threatened with being killed by this Harvard graduate, and people are being fired from their jobs for claiming “all lives matter.”
In truth, almost no lives really matter to the future of humanity, and that’s because roughly 97% of the people are oblivious, clueless consumers who are doing absolutely nothing to help secure a legacy of truth and freedom for future generations.
If you are sitting on your ass, watching The View and devouring Weight Watchers donuts as you allow the TV to fill your brain with mush, your life actually doesn’t matter. If you were to cease to exist, nothing about the future of human history would change one iota.
If you are still watching CNN and predominantly using Facebook, Twitter and Google because you don’t realize all the voices of truth have been banned by the authoritarian Left, your life probably doesn’t matter. You are nothing but a mind puppet of the globalist-run corporate propagandists (Big Tech and Big Media).
If you conform to the insane demands of the progressive left-wing fascists because you cower in fear over being “cancelled,” your life doesn’t matter, either.
If you’re not standing up against the lunatic left-wing mob to defend logic, reason and rationality, your existence really doesn’t matter. You aren’t changing history; you’re being used as a “useful idiot” to help achieve the aims of the anti-human globalists who despise human populations.
If you’re not fighting for the right to speak, the right to disagree and the right to question the lunacy of the mob, your life doesn’t matter.
If you’re doped up on a dozen prescription drugs to the point that you’re mentally incapacitated and can barely process events happening right in front of you, your life doesn’t matter. (But you might get nominated as the Democratic Presidential candidate, notably.)
If you vote for candidates based on political tribalism without having any real clue what those candidates stand for, your life doesn’t matter.
If you think you are owed everything without having to work for anything, your life doesn’t matter.
If you think the answer to today’s existential threats to our nation, our freedom and our Bill of Rights are no big deal and everybody should just “think positive,” then your life doesn’t really matter. You will accomplish nothing that matters.
Approximately 97% of the lives of Americans today don’t matter one bit. They are NPCs — Non-Player Characters — also known as PLFs (Programmable Life Forms), and they will do whatever they are told by the media, the corporations and the fake establishment “authorities.” They add exactly zero value to society and if they vanished tomorrow, the course of human history wouldn’t be altered one bit.
Here’s a video showcasing some members of the 97% — the clueless masses whose lives are pointless and inconsequential. Watch as they explain how the United States of America achieved its independence “in 1964” by fighting “the Civil War” against “America.” Seriously… and two of them are teachers!
Whose lives matter? Those who are informed and who make a difference. The 3%.
Only about 3% of the population have any clue about our history and are actively engaged in shaping our future. That’s fewer than 10 million people nationwide.
It is these 10 million people who will determine our shared future and whether or not we end up enslaved under left-wing tyranny or are able to reclaim our constitutional republic and defeat the anti-American forces that are rising.
So out of a nation of 330 million people, about 320 million lives make no difference at all. They are what globalists call “useless eaters,” and they are on the list to be exterminated via global depopulation efforts that are now underway via the plandemic and the coming coronavirus “vaccine.”
Another way to look at this is by simply being active in the effort to spread the truth and defend humanity against tyranny, you matter more than any 33 other people who are oblivious. Your life “counts” more, in other words, because you’re fighting to make a difference. And the 97% figure for the clueless masses is actually quite generous. The real number is probably more like 99%, which means one active, aware person “matters” more than 99 other people who are clueless.
What makes your life matter isn’t the color of your skin or your political affiliation. What determines whether you matter is how committed you are to fighting for human freedom and opposing authoritarianism and tyranny. Notably, people who really matter are self-selected: They alone determine that they wish to take a stand and make a difference. No one can appoint you to this position of relevance; you must seize it for yourself and become a person whose life really does make a positive difference in the world.
How to make your life matter
If you are an oblivious conformist who surrenders to the lunatic mob, your life is pointless and redundant. But if you want your life to really matter, you must break away from the mob and start thinking (and acting) for yourself.
There are many, many people who have set the example of independent thinking that you might allow to inspire yourself to do the same:
… and many others. There are lots of examples out there. Are you among these types of independent thinkers who challenge the status quo and work to truly empower and uplift humanity with wisdom and knowledge?
Don’t go through life on a pointless, narcissistic rampage of a cult-like obedience to the puppet masters of our time: Think for yourself. Learn history. Share knowledge. Branch out and away from the content controllers at Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter. Change the channel and stop allowing yourself to be brainwashed by CNN, MCNBC and NPR.
Use alternative platforms for sharing real knowledge, like…
Brighteon.com
Spreely.com
Parler.com.
Seek out uncommon knowledge and use it to empower yourself. Create your own channels and post your own videos, texts or articles.
Freedom is so easily accessible that you can find it by typing a URL into your browser. Instead of typing “Facebook.com,” type “Brighteon.com” and discover a whole new world.
Be someone who matters.
Change the future for the better. Join those of us who are doing this work every single day, dedicating our lives to protecting human freedom and a sustainable future of abundance and liberty for all.
97% of lives don’t matter, but yours can. What will you choose to do with it?
Be the Rufus
Make no mistake. Those that will survive and be permitted to procreate and live life through this tumultuous time period with be those that are aware, kind and knowledgeable. But most certainly have the kind of sentience deserving of mankind.
Sitting on a couch, smunching on pork rinds, and demanding that taxes get raised so that you can still keep using your food stamps is not representative of the future of mankind.
This is…
The rest of the world is starting to fight back.
The rest of the world is changing.
The way things have been is coming to an end, and people are starting to fight back. They demand stability, families, and stable relationships. They tire of the vermin… rich and the poor that prey on the rest of society. Now, with the proper tools, and the proper motivation they have declared a new order of society.
Have you noticed?
The CIA/NED instigation of the Hong Kong “pro-democracy” movement and the pay-offs of the Judges to let the criminals have a pass. Even when it came to killing people, damaging critical infrastructure, and maiming people.
And…
China changing the law. Throwing out the judges. Shutting down the CIA/NED “safe spaces”. Arresting and severely punishing the wrong-doers. Organ harvesting with life-time of hard-labor in the salt mines for many many years. No wonder that even Joshua Wong has disbanded his organization.
It’s all starting to come down. It’s all starting to fall apart.
USA compared to China. 2020.
And the petty criminals and the evil folk in positions of power must change or else they will face the consequences.
Remember this;
A functional nation devotes 100% of it's time, energy and resources on bettering the lives of it's people.
If it is unable to do that, or devotes a smaller percentage of time, money and effort to the domestic needs of it's people, it is disfunctional.
The world, and the human race, needs functional, healthy and substantive people, organizations and governments. Anything less MUST be purged and culled from existence.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this in my Happiness Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Not knocking “freedom”, mind you. I think it’s very important. It’s just that what passes for “freedom” in the “Land of the Free” isn’t freedom at all. Freedom is the ability to own property. And… the property is inviolate. Meaning no one can tax it, regulate it, or put retainers on it in any way. And if you look at things that way, then you see that Americans have just about ZERO freedoms.
But you heard me freak out about this before, right?
A true and real measure of "freedom" is the cumulative amount of worth of everything that you own THAT IS NOT taxed, regulated, associated with fees, or subject to seizure.
Under this definition the actual amount of “freedom” that most Americans have is ZERO. Everything in the United States is both regulated, and taxed (not to mention subject to seizure). That goes from your home (even after you pay off your mortgage, you still need to pay taxes on it), to your car (duh!), to every item you purchase with state and federal taxes associated with it.
Face it, Americans have zero freedom.
And no screeching at the screen is going to change that fact. Don’t yell at me. Don’t blame me. Don’t get all “hot and bothered” and shoot up an innocent school full of kids.
I am just pointing out the obvious.
Now, here we are going to watch videos of the rest of the world. A place where if you buy a house it is yours. You own it. You don’t pay taxes on it, or deal with regulations on it in any way. When you buy some cigarettes there are no taxes on it, or when you drive a car you don’t need to have it inspected or “approved” for road use.
Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.
Freedom can be measured; it is the cumulative monetary value of everything you own that is NOT subject to tax, regulation, fees, or seizure by any government.
Go ahead. Add it all up. See how free you are.
So watch these videos and see what the rest of the world looks like without that “great American freedom”. We are going to look at the “communist” China. You know, where if you own a house you NEVER need to pay any taxes, property, or school on it. Where you NEVER have to have it inspected or regulated by the central headquarters, and where you NEVER need to “show your papers” to the police when you are walking down the street.
Freedom is the ability to own things… real ownership… free of regulation… free of taxation… free of fees and reporting of any kind at any level.
Feel special yet?
And we are going to Segway from a discussion on freedom, and why it is important, to Rufus behaviors...
And then to sentience...
And then back to why "freedom" matters.
Video 1 – Having a home recording studio
So what’s so great about having a home recording studio? These have been common in the United States since the dawn of radio. What’s the big deal?
Well…
You are right.
These things have been in the United States for years. What began in the basements and garages of the 1950’s and 1960’s, migrated to churches in the 1970’s to keep out of the laws of intense regulation and scrutiny. Then after a brief period of relaxation under the Reagan administration, they all came back and most recording studios in the United States today are highly regulated, “for-profit” affairs.
The days of home recording studios in the United States are pretty much over.
Not so in the rest of the world.
Here we have a video of a home recording studio in China.
It’s not taxed. It’s not regulated. It’s not subject to workplace rules and IRS reporting procedures. It’s not subject to inspection by the various local and state and federal boards. It’s a private, personal space that is used for whatever a person wants it to be used as and the government (in this case Chinese) has absolutely ZERO say on how it is managed.
There are no lit up “exit signs”. You are permitted to smoke inside if you want and there are no fire extinguishers or “people capacity” stickers on the walls. The height of the recording desk is not specified. Nor is the temperature of the room, the decorations or sound isolation foam. It’s all up to the owner to determine. Not the government.
A life where you can own a home recording studio, free of taxation, regulation, fees or rules is far freer than one where everything you do is under the scrutiny of some kind of government organization.
Freedom. You either have it, or you don’t.
There are no grey areas in this issue.
But, but, but you NEED regulation to have a modern functioning society…
That’s the narrative isn’t it?
"Well, China is a developing country. It is a third-world shit-hole. It is where people eat dogs, and cats. Get coronavirus at filthy "wet-markets" and evil mean people riding bicycles try to pick your pocket every chance they get. It's no secret that they all yearn to move to America and be free!"
This narrative, that you NEED regulation to have freedom is an oxymoron. It is one of those never ending lies that are repeated over, and over, and over again, and the stupid ignorant people believe it. They don’t pause and think about what they are saying…
That you NEED to have all this regulation because that is how a modern society works.
"Regulation is a necessary evil. It is how America became great. It is because of regulation that we have trains, bridges, skyscrapers, and the post Office. Take away regulation and America would be back to the stone age."
Wrong!
Regulation serves one thing, and one thing only. Standardization of utility. That’s it.
The idea is that if you make everything one way, and that way is standard then the number of accidents and mishaps will decrease because you have centralized the rules and made a unified standard that everyone by abide to.
Like the sizes of steps on a stairway.
Like the minimum width in a doorway.
Like the minimum number of pages of paper in a pad of paper.
This next video is Nanshan. It’s a suburb of Shenzhen, China. This is the escalator up from the subway below. Now, Shenzhen is a “new” city. Just thirty years ago it was just a sleepy fishing village with some dirt roads and some fishing boats.
But China decided to take a “spin” with this new concept that Ronald Reagan was promoting (at the time) called “Reaganomics”. And Mr. Deng implemented capitalism to communist China.
China constructed a “economic bubble” and implemented every single element of Reaganomics into that bubble. From low taxes, to low to absent regulation, to every other aspect of it. China went full-speed ahead on this “experiment”.
And while President Bush put an end to the American experiment with Reaganomics, China plowed forward…
Shenzhen is the result…
Shenzhen is a pretty awesome place. Not because of Reaganomics so much as the freedom from government regulation.
Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.
Freedom has nothing to do about the economy
There is this unspoken myth in the United States that America is “exceptional” because of it’s “freedoms” and it’s “democracy”. And that the tremendous advantage that the American economy has globally, is proof of this.
That is false.
Let it be absolutely clear that the economy of a nation has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are free or not.
There are people in the poorest sections of Africa and South America that are far freer than Americans are.
Remember, boys and girls, a measure of how free you are is the cash value of the possessions that you have that is not taxed, regulated or has associated fees or can be seized from you.
So…
Here we have some poor kids in the heart of Africa. Their poor clothes had no fees, taxes or regulations when they bought them. Their homes are untaxed and unregulated. And yet, and yet, they are happy and living life.
Of course, I do get this. I do understand.
For many, many years Americans have been taught that being great is the accumulation of wealth, and America is thus great because it is a leading economic power.
But, people, the accumulation of things and paper scripts is not success. It is not happiness. It is not joyous abandon. It is not freedom.
If there is one thing that I have learned over my many, many years is that real freedom has a calming effect on your soul. You stop caring about others, worries about things, or getting all entangled and wrapped up in all sorts of drama.
There are so many things that Americans think are true that are not…
While I am discussing truths and reality here, let it be absolutely understood that we all (all over the world) have been fed a steady diet of lies and untruths and distortions all our lives.
It goes back thousands of years.
But we can point our fingers to just about every aspect of science and society.
When the emergence of science came about in Europe, suddenly all stories and tales of non-physical creatures became myths.
When money lenders (banks) can manufacture money though the invention of interest… the net trade off was a decrease in value of everything.
When the lie of “democracy” equals “freedom”…
Or that a strong national economy is a sign that God favors that nation.
Or that being smart, intelligent or getting good grade somehow equates to wealth.
Or that being popular is a desirable trait that with make a person happier.
Lies, lies, and more lies.
People(!) for the human society to survive this great period of change, we will need to readjust our perceptions on what is real and what isn’t,
In truth, much of what has been force fed (over the last 50 years) through the American media are half-truths and lies. They are designed to convert individual non-established sentience’s to follow a service-for-self or a service-for-another sentience. When in reality, pure and real freedom comes with the third sentience; service-to-others.
Be the Rufus.
Be the Rufus
Ah. But what does being a “Rufus” has to do with anything?
How is it connected to wealth? To fame” To “freedom”? To “democracy”? To science, to society…?
We have gotten so wrapped up on the trivial…
Society is the bedrock of our personal experiences. It is from personal experiences that our sentience manifests and fills in. And thus it is who we are and why we do things. It is our roles in society. It fills out and establishes our place… our experiences and whether or not our lives are fulfilling.
So, I urge everyone to stop listening to the bullshit narratives.
Be the Rufus.
Not only will you obtain better and more enjoyable experiences, but your soul growth and quanta entanglements will end up being of a far higher quality.
It all goes to this.
Taxes and regulations are said to be necessary for a “modern” well-functioning society. That is a lie. They are not. That is what the service-to-self people want you to believe.
Migrate towards a service-to-others sentience. Be helpful and make your life a worthwhile one.
Be the Rufus.
Be the Rufus
Conclusion
The ONLY way that the oligarchy PTB that continue to maintain their level of absolute control is to keep individuals separate. The most tyrannical governments in the world are those that praise the individual and not the group. It is when you praise the efforts of a singular lone person, that everyone else starts to believe that the entire universe is based upon the idea of “every man for himself”.
That is a service-for-self mentality.
But that is not how it works.
Service-for-others sentience is always unhappy in places where freedom is suppressed. And even though they are told over and over again 24-7 that they actually are "free" they know, in their bones, that this is not the case.
We are consciousness. And we inhabit a physical body that migrates though a long stream of world-lines to obtain experiences. These experiences are what causes our quanta to clump together and form associations.
We can be selfish. We can “master” our physical environment though greed, power and selfish exploits. And all of these experiences will also contribute to the creation of the soul consciousness.
But it is a dead-end. It is a trap.
Why?
Because humans ARE NOT singular “lone wolf” creatures. We are social animals. And thus the best sentience for us is one that the physical elements of our being match up with the spiritual elements of our being.
That is service-for-others sentience.
As social animals, we occupy a social role. We contribute to society. We help others. We make the world a better place. We do so in small ways, but we do so…
Street worker buying clothing for his young daughter. He only has so much money. So he has to count out the money carefully to buy some clothes so that she will not be laughed at during school.
The great sorting is upon us. How long this will last is unknown. It might last for a century in total. Though it might be over in as short as ten years. Most certainty there will be all sorts of elements of change here and there in different geographical areas over time.
You cannot control the world, but you can control your little part of it.
Be the Rufus.
Why does it matter?
A service-for-self person will do their intention affirmations over and over again, and still have trouble manifesting their desires. No matter what they get, they will still want more. Bigger, better, more and more. They will never be satisfied. So that when one reality manifestation occurs it is what makes them happy.
That is because their WANTS will always be a “want”.
A service-for-others person will find that their prayer affirmation intention campaigns will have a strong degree of permanency with it. When it happens, and their dreams manifest, they will be free to concentrate on other elements of their intention prayers / desires.
Like this…
How things manifest is subject to the sentience of the person making the intention campaign.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
If you buy into the government “proof” that the coronavirus is natural and that it was just extraordinary bad-luck for it to strike China on the eve of their busiest holiday, then this post is not for you. This post is a link to a comprehensive report that confirms that the United States unleashed a bioweapons attack on China.
Ah. You can believe whatever you want. It’s “no skin off my back”. You can just go ahead and believe whatever makes you live through the day.
Background
I often receive contributions from others in the form of information, links, and other data that are not usually available on the internet. When someone proposes an idea, a concept, or some information, I tend to listen to them. I might not agree with them, but if they have done their research properly and have something of value to contribute, I will provide access to their information on this site.
Thus this post.
Cautions
I do not agree with everything in the article, but the amount of research and the information conveyed is significant. It is worthwhile reading and I suggest you, the reader, give it every consideration.
Content
The following is a link to a PDF file. The author devoted a significant amount of time and effort to the study of the COVID-19 bioweapons attack, and compiled the information within a PDF for ease of reading. I suggest that if the reader has any doubts that this is a natural virus, that they read this detailed summary.
You can access it here, just click on the picture below…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I just had to sit down and write this peace. After one article after the other, all justifying American “intervention” into the affairs of China, it’s just boggles my mind that everyone believes that they have the RIGHT to mess around with another nations’ internal affairs. You don’t. And certainly not with a big enormous, technologically advanced nation.
For Pete’s sake!
America only makes laws for Americans on American soil.
ONLY.
That’s it.
The laws that America makes, the ideas that it professes, is limited geographically to the confines of the nation of the United States. America does NOT have the ability to tell Canada what to do, Chile what to do, France what to do, or South Africa what to do.
And China, like it or not, is not going to sit by and allow the USA to invade it. It’s not going to be another Syria, or another Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Libya, or Panama, or any other nameless nations that America has invaded and occupied over the last fifty years.
So all this nonsense about “suppressing” China, or “containing” it, or “stopping it’s rise” is dangerous.
Did the efforts to starve China work? The numerous bio-weapons against the chicken, the pork, the wheat, the rice and other industries work out? What about the plagues, the ban on imported Australian and NZ food, and the drones spraying swine flu... did they actually work? Are the Chinese people starving now?
Actually, no.
Did the NED / NID efforts to destabilize Hong Kong work? Are the people of Hong Kong China ready to rise up and revolt? Are they still waving American flags and singing the American national anthem? Is the image of "Pepe the frog" plastered all over the new independent Hong Kong?
No.
How about that trade war? Did all the tariffs bring global trade to an abrupt end? Is China unable to trade right now? What about those huge 25% tariff increases, who's paying for them? Did this entire effort cause the rest of the world to stop trading with China?
No.
What about the suppression of Chinese technology? The capture of the president of Huawei, the anti-5G movement, and the ban on microprocessor technology? Is China on it's knees and sobbing, and begging the United States to let up?
No.
How about India being a military proxy for the United States and having a "hot" war in the Himalayas mountains? Now that soldiers have died on both sides, is China all "bogged down" in a mountainous "quagmire"? Is the BRI impacted? What about international Geo-political relations involving China on the global stage? Is China in trouble?
No.
What about biological warfare by releasing COVID-19 on the Chinese New Year holiday? How is China doing today? How is America today? Did it bring China "to it's knees" and suppress it in the global stage? Or did it back-fire? And end up unleashing all sorts of madness in the United States instead?
...well?
The American conservative movement, and by extension the neocon right-wing movement is living within a very dangerous bubble. Their ideas of what China is, what it represents, how it works, and what it is doing is severely out-of-wack with reality. Which is fundamentally why all the attacks in this “hybrid war” is flailing.
China is not what the American “neocon” publications thinks it is.
And all those publications, “talking heads”, and commentators that endlessly repeat the 1970’s era narrative of what china is, and will be come is advocating some very dangerous ideas. Ideas that all of the advisors (Pomeo, Bolton, etc.) to President Trump actually and earnestly believe.
And they advocate a harsh “hard line” treatment of China. For they earnestly believe that the United States can “grapple” with China; “engage” China in a long multi-faceted “hybrid war” and the America would “win”. For America, they earnestly believe, is empowered by GOD to rule the world…
All of the articles listed are from "The National interest" which is an American neocon publication that supports the Military-Industrial complex, and who is just "foaming at the mouth" for a war with China. They aim to make billions of dollars, if not trillions in the process.
In truth, it’s a bunch of propaganda to gin-up support for the eventual “take down” of China.
But, you see, it’s NOT going to happen like everyone thinks.
For the last fifty years, America has defined the geography of war; where it is fought, and by whom. It has defined the technology used, and what was not used. It has defined the narrative and the history books; with thousands of American soldiers dead, the military “intervention” is still considered to be victorious.
And Hollywood enhances this vision.
The movies out of Hollywood are all about the single lone military warrior who takes down hundreds of enemy single handedly. From Rambo, to Schwarzenegger in “Raw Deal” and “Commando”, to the sniper that takes down a complete military base (while people just collapse like rag dolls with single shots to the head.) It’s all a myth. It’s all a lie. It’s all very dangerous thinking of American “invincibility”.
So let me tell you this straight up and brutal…
Any military conflict with China will NOT be limited to the South China Sea. It will be very “up front and personal”. It will occur on American soil. It will be fought on American soil, and many American cities will be devastated to the point where they will be unable to recover. They will not be able to be rebuilt.
Why, do I say this?
Any War With China Will Be a Nuclear War
Accept that fact.
It’s not going to be a conventional war.
It’s going to go nuclear from hour one.
Whether it is Donald Trump launching some “reasonable” “low yield” tactical nuclear armed warheads, or the Chinese keeping their promise that “serious, unimaginable, consequences” will occur…
… it’s is going to be a deadly – radioactive – gut-wrenching – nuclear war.
The only reason why the United States is NOT in a military conflict with China right now, is because it knows it will lose.
America will lose.
Because…
China. Does. Not. Play.
How does it know this? Seriously, why do I make this statement? The answer is clear. Every military simulation from the year 2000 on has had China winning the battles, the global-conflicts in just about every arena.
Imagine what would happen if the “nuclear guns” came into play…
And they will…
Oh. They really will.
Trump is taking a hard line stance on these matters…
It is a pretty amazing thing to watch. How every day there is a new accusation against China, and more complaints about China, and more blame being heaped upon China.
It is this increased ratcheting up of HATE and ACCUSATIONS against China that I am worried about.
Rather than being a global leader that works with other nations, respects their national sovereignty, and builds relationships. This Trump administration does the exact opposite.
Today, inside the White House, the Trump administration is concerned with suppressing not only China, but the rest of the world as well.
The over-riding objective (initially, and presently) is to suppress the entire world while America gets “it’s house in order”; builds up factories, puts more students into training as STEM engineers and scientists, and invests into Research and Development.
Ah, but none of that is actually going on.
Aside from a few (well publicized) factory start-ups, and some documentaries, nothing is really going on. While China has invested in a number of construction projects, the idea that factories are sprouting up all over America to employ Americans has fallen far-short of the ideal.
Nothing.
The only thing that is going on the the collapse of the global economy.
Clunk!
…
So it is looking like the next step will be military…
But first, America will try a "proxy war". They will use another nation to do the "heavy lifting" and create military tensions.
Like India on 16JUN20.
After that…
…all the generals and the advisers, and the “experts” in Washington DC are talking about a “scaled up” conflict with China. One that would be conventional. It is one that would be fought on the Chinese coast and in the South China sea and it would be conventional and not nuclear. As such, it is considered to be a “prolonged” war that would stifle all trade on the shipping lanes.
Thus rendering China “isolated” from the world completely.
Which is why there are two complete aircraft carrier battle groups, and a complete amphibious landing group right now in the South China Sea. Which is why attack subs are under the water in the South China Sea, and that B-1 Bombers with fighter escorts are flying all over the Pacific.
But people, the idea there could be a prolonged conventional war between the US and China is an misguided view of what such a war would look like.
In this article I will explain why any conventional war with China will trigger, a very short and very savage, nuclear war.
The idea of a “long protracted war” from David Gompert.
The US intelligence guru David Gompert came to Australia in 2017 warning “a war between the US and China would be long, destructive and could erupt if regional disputes already underway overheat.”
He said both sides “have ample forces, technology, industrial might, and personnel to fight across vast expanses of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. »
“Mr Gompert said the US should make sensible preparations to wage a ‘long and fierce’ war with China but argued it must also develop plans to limit the scope, intensity and duration of such a conflict. He said if such a war broke out today, China’s losses would greatly exceed that of the US.”(2)
Therefore, it would be advisable for Australia to make prudent moves toward allowing the United States military to use their bases and airstrips. Take special precautions regarding China, and be prepared to stop all trade with China.
This was in 2017, shortly after Trump took the helm in Washington DC.
But…
You do realize, don’t you, that…
It’s a war against Asia (Russia and China) not just China alone.
Both Russia and China realize that if America destroys one nation, the other would also eventually fall as well.
Mr Gompert insists the US should “develop plans to limit the scope, intensity and duration of such a conflict.” But can the US limit the intensity and duration of such a war? I mean, once the USA gets involved in a war, it never pulls out.
The Chinese are helping the Russians in Syria and it is quite implausible that, during a US war with China, Russia would just sit on its hands.
Yeah…
(As if) Russia would watch with glee as the Untied States would fight with China, and Chinese exports to Russia drop to zero…
Consider this discussion of what could be going on between Russia and China away from the eyes of Western journalists:
“There are certain to be scores of secret agreements between the Chinese and the Russians we know nothing about: to share intelligence (including for example signals intelligence and data from satellites) and to coordinate foreign policy and for defence cooperation including technology sharing. We know for example that the Russians and the Chinese have representatives at each others’ command headquarters and that recently they carried out in Moscow a joint command exercise involving joint operation of their respective anti-ballistic missile defences, something the US would never do at such a level with any of its allies.”(3)
Furthermore who can imagine all sides will sit on their nuclear weapons for weeks or months of a prolonged and intense conventional conflict?
Even if it did not go nuclear from day one…
If the war between the US and China started going badly for one side or the other, how long would they wait to move on from the conventional weapons and bring out the heavy artillery? It is more likely that such a war would be over in a few days as it quickly turned into a full-on nuclear exchange between Russia and China and the US.
Any War With China Will Be a Nuclear War
A nuclear war is absolutely impossible. It is inconceivable. As it would destroy both sides.
Since nuclear weapons have not been used for the last 70 years people have come to believe that they could never be used again.
Why?
There are now so many nuclear weapons, if the US and Russia began attacking each other both countries would be destroyed. Starting such a war would destroy your own country. What leader would initiate national suicide?
This is a comforting line of thought. However, a careful look at the development of military thinking about nuclear weapons since they were introduced shows it is just a pleasant fairy story.
In the 1960’s a policy was developed in the US by Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn which advocated an “active” nuclear strategy for the US.
After WW II the US saw nuclear weapons as a way to stop the USSR from conquering Europe using its much larger conventional forces. The new approach advocated by Kissinger and Kahn was to use nuclear weapons in a surprise attack to destroy the nuclear weapons of the USSR or China before they were used against the US.
The plan was to use a “first strike” to limit or remove the enemy’s ability to retaliate.
This would mean the US could actually win a nuclear war.
Kahn argued that 40 million dead in the US and a 20 years recuperation period could be « acceptable losses » necessary for such a victory.
It is no surprise that such thinking inspired Stanley Kubrick to produce Dr Strangelove.
Doctor Strangeglove.
Eventually cooler heads seemed to prevail.
At least for the last fifty years or so…
The policy known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) became the dominant policy. Some efforts were made to reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by the US and the USSR.
An article written in 2014 explains that “nuclear war with Russia is still mutually assured destruction. Hopefully, that’s still deterrent enough.”(4)
Mutially assurred destruction has been replaced by an assured first strike policy by Donald Trump.
Russia revoked the pledge of the USSR not to be the first to use nuclear weapons in any conflict in 1993.(5)
In 2002 the Bush administration modified US strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit a preemptive nuclear attack. In effect the US has returned to the first-strike policy developed by Kissinger and Kahn in the 1960’s.
Then in 2006 the influential US journal Foreign Affairs featured an article by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press entitled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”. The article begins as follows:
“Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States’ nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia’s arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China’s nuclear forces.”(6)
The US military can plan for a nuclear first strike against Russia or China, and there is a growing belief in official circles that the US is in a position to destroy the ability of its enemies to retaliate with their own nuclear weapons.
To implement this policy the US has established anti-ballistic missile bases around Russia.
As Paul Craig Roberts explains:
“US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) bases have been established in Poland on Russia’s frontier, and other bases are planned. When completed Russia will be ringed with US missile bases.
“Anti-ballistic missiles, known as ‘star wars’, are weapons designed to intercept and destroy ICBMs. In Washington’s war doctrine, the US hits Russia with a first strike, and whatever retaliatory force Russia might have remaining is prevented from reaching the US by the shield of ABMs.”(7)
The US has also located a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic system in South Korea which can be used to destroy missiles fired by China in retaliation for a US first strike.(8)
Remember there is no point in having an anti-ballistic missile system in place if you really believe any nuclear war is simply mutually assured destruction.
As U.S. Pacific Fleet chief says he’d obey President Donald Trump’s order to launch a nuclear strike on China. With CIA’s recent assessment that China poses the biggest threat to Washington in the long term, the commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet Admiral Scott Swift says he would launch a “first strike” nuclear attack against China if ordered to do so.
Further, President Trumps public announcements that he approves of first-strike nuclear use has pretty much terrified the rest of the world, and caused both China and Russia to move military forces to an offensive position.
It is the complete ratcheting up of HATE and ACCUSATIONS against China that is dangerous. As the Chinese rightly believe that this is a lead up towards an actual “hot” war, and the best defense is an aggressive offense.
Thus…
While the ANTI-CHINA attacks increase in intensity…
… so does the likelihood of a joint China – Russia preemptive nuclear strike followed by a complete debilitating “double tap”.
But why would China and Russia want to do this?
Preemptive “first strike” thinking and policy makes nuclear war inevitable.
The US military believes it can launch a nuclear war and survive any attempt by its enemies to destroy it.
This makes nuclear war much more likely because the Russians and Chinese both know that the US thinks they can actually make a successful first strike against them.
So…
What better reason do they need for making a first strike themselves?
Again Paul Craig Roberts explains:
“Washington has created a dangerous situation. As Russia and China are clearly threatened with a first strike, they might decide to strike first themselves. Why should Russia and China sit and await the inevitable while their adversary creates the ability to protect itself by developing its ABM shield? Once Washington completes the shield, Russia and China are certain to be attacked, unless they surrender in advance.”(9)
The military planners on both sides use what is called the counterforce strategy which involves attacking their opponent’s weapons nuclear and the their leadership.
“The requirements for the counterforce mission perpetuate the most dangerous characteristics of nuclear forces, with weapons kept at high levels of alert, ready to launch upon warning of an enemy attack, and able to preemptively attack enemy forces.”(10)
As Steven Starr explains, counterforce doctrines emphasize the need for preemptive strikes once a war begins.
“Both sides would be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield.”(11)
We need to realize that the duty of a nations leaders is to protect their country from its opponents.
The US has publicly adopted a first-strike policy, based on the assumption that a preemptive strike on Russian and China will neutralize their nuclear weapons by either destroying them before they are used, or shooting them down after they are launched with ABMs.
The Russians and Chinese know the US might launch a preemptive strike at any time, and realize that the best way to protect themselves is to launch their own preemptive strike before the US does.
This means that we are now as close to a nuclear war as we were in the worst period of the Cold War in the 1960’s.
This is why I disagree with the “long war” theory of David Gompert.
Once conventional hostilities begin, each side will be sitting with their fingers on the preemptive strike button hoping they can beat the other to a nuclear first-strike. He says the US would “develop plans to limit the scope, intensity and duration of such a conflict”. And the US will assume the Russians or Chinese have no plans for a first strike themselves? Let’s just have a conventional war and see what happens?
If the US says it can win a nuclear war with China or Russia, once conventional hostilities begin the Russians and Chinese would be mad not to expect a US first-strike. And the only way to protect themselves is to be ready themselves to make a first-strike before the US.
As the anti-China hybrid war increases in intensity...
... the likelihood of the United States attacking under some "excuse" or "international incident" grows to an unmanageable level.
It becomes necessary for both China and Russia to perform a lethal "first strike" nuclear event to completely neuter the United States from reaching that point.
What would actually happen if things went nuclear?
Nobody know for sure, of course, but it seems the best possible outcome would be just short of the extermination of the human race.
The Northern Hemisphere would probably be unfit for human habitation.
In the effort to suppress China President Trump unleashed a global biological weapon COVID-19 that put the world in chaos. He also unleashed a trade war that caused the generally collapse of the global world economy, what makes you think that he wouldn’t consider a nuclear strike because it’s “God’s will” that the USA make the first move?
Both the US and Russia each have 400 to 500 launch-ready ballistic missiles armed with a total of at least 1800 strategic nuclear warheads, which can be launched with only a few minutes warning.(12)
President Trump is has no doubts about which country is the most important and how its dominance should be maintained.
What Would Russia Do if Attacked?
We can have some answer to this question from an article by three Russians living in the US. They have warned the citizens of the US that nuclear war with Russia will “wipe the USA off the political map”:
“But we are just as certain that if Russia is attacked, or even threatened with attack, she will not back down, and that the Russian leadership will not ‘blink.’ With great sadness and a heavy heart they will do their sworn duty and unleash a nuclear barrage from which the United States will never recover. Even if the entire Russian leadership is killed in a first strike, the so-called ‘Dead Hand (the ‘Perimetr’ system) will automatically launch enough nukes to wipe the USA off the political map. We feel that it is our duty to do all we can to prevent such a catastrophe. »(14)
The Russian Dead Hand or Perimetr System
The Dead Hand or perimetr system guarantees retaliation against the US. Because the Russians don’t trust computers alone to make such decisions.
It has a critical human safeguard, bunkered in an incredibly strange underground chamber. The operators and their equipment are located in a hardened underground bunker in the shape of a sphere, very deep and very hardened, probably the most secure place in the Cold War.
The Russian Dead Hand System.
In this isolated spheroid room, duty officers sit and wait for three conditions to be met: “predelegation,” decapitation, and active nuclear war.
When these three conditions are met, the officers can issue launch commands to small missiles that would fly the entire width of the Soviet Union and give commands electronically to all the missile silos below to launch.(15)
The Russian SS-18 Satan
No this is not “just another” big nuclear bomb.
This weapon is designed to completely destroy huge state-sized sections of America.
Silo for the biggest and nastiest nuclear weapons on the planet.
The RS-28 Sarmat can reportedly hold up to 10 nuclear warheads, enough to effectively decimate an area the size of the entire state of Texas, or even the whole of France. The missile is intended to replace the R-36 Voevoda, dubbed “Satan” by NATO in the 1970s.
The new weapon can deploy warheads of 40 megatons, or about 2,000 times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945.
Former assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Dr. Paul Craig Roberts called the atomic bombs that Washington dropped on Japan “popguns” compared to today’s thermo-nuclear weapons.
“One Russian SS-18 wipes out three-fourths of New York state for thousands of years,” he said in a blog post. “Five or six of these ‘Satans’ as they are known by the US military, and the East Coast of the United States disappears.”
To make it even more frightening, the Satan 2 is also capable of evading radar defences and could travel far enough to strike the US East and West Coast.
-https://www.2oceansvibe.com/2016/10/26/russias-new-missile-is-called-satan-2-and-could-destroy-texas-lets-take-a-look-at-it/#ixzz6PUcHSray
Some of the consequences of such a nuclear war are:
Do I really need to enumerate them?
Maybe so, since what passes for education today in the United States is so dolefully inadequate.
Missile Launch.
[0] The destruction of all cities
Not just cities, but all water, electricity, transportation, trade, and economic activity. Everything would grind to a halt, and American would be forced to live off the food that they produced themselves, heat their homes with wood that they collected, and coal that they acquired, and travel by foot or bicycle over roads and destroyed bridges.
[1] Nuclear Winter
In a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war” begins as follows:
“A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.”(16)
[2] Fire-storms, Falling Temperatures and Destruction of the Ozone Layer After a nuclear exchange
“nuclear firestorms would produce millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B reaching Earth) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last 10 years or longer.“Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years; the intense cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations.”(17)
[3] All Spent Fuel from Nuclear Reactors Released into the Atmosphere
“Electromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated circuits in all modern electronic devices, including those in commercial nuclear power plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown; every nuclear spent fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity. The fallout would make most of the US and Europe uninhabitable.”(18)
Is anyone surprised that we would never see this explained in our mass media? If such a nuclear war ever does occur, will any of the survivors mourn the loss of the Death Cult called Western Civilization?August 30th
[4] EMP
As a result of just one EMP attack on the U.S., in an instant the nation’s power grid will fail as anything with circuits (including most automobiles built since the early 1960s when computerized components became more standard in automobiles) will cease to work.Trains, buses, subway systems and commercial airlines and other modern planes will cease to work also — even the 4,000 or so commercial flights (think Delta, U.S. Airways, Southwest Airlines, and many others) that are in the sky over America at any given time.
Imagine the world suddenly without TV, radio, phone, internet, refrigeration, microwaves, stoves and ovens, washers and dryers, waste removal, sewage treatment facilities, clean water from the tap (provided by water companies that use industrial equipment to treat water; even water that at a previous time may have been sewage) making it safe to drink; gas companies who provide heat and power gone; or of course the electric company.
Imagine each going offline — permanently.
Imagine the U.S. unable to transport food from farmland in distant states and counties — meat, dairy, eggs, produce, grain products, packaged food.
300,000 million people (the population of the United States) will quickly descend on the packaged food left on store shelves in the initial hours of the realization that an EMP had taken place.
Many will hoard — meaning, get there hands on as much packaged food as possible and then fight tooth and nail to keep it out of the hands of others who may experience panic when they see store shelves emptying and realize they don’t have more than a few days of food at home. They realize now they’re in trouble. Food is disappearing fast. Everyone is taking it.
Too bad those unprepared for disaster didn’t see the signs that America (and other Western nations) are increasingly hated by nations in the world — nations with the desire and growing means to bring our nation (and possibly other Western nations) to collapse.
Now imagine what would happen afterwards…
Most neocons imagine a world pretty much like it is now. Only instead of Yemen, it would be over some nameless islands in the South China Sea.
They never, ever, contemplate America or Americans ever being put into danger. It is beyond their comprehension. After all, they argue, that were the evil Chinese and Russians to come to America, that there would be a “rifle behind every tree”, and a “pistol in every blade of grass”.
Instead…
They envision war being fought remotely in far away distant place, and selected news media reports that always portray America as “winning”. They envision looting the riches of the conquered lands. With huge enormous cargo planes of gold flying back to the leadership in the States, and impressive videos of new, state of the art technology, shooting and blowing up cities, and villages.
But…
Were a war to occur, there will not be any television, nor internet. All American infrastructure will be fried into useless slag.
No body will know what is going on.
There will be strange “rain falls” of radioactive grey soot and dust from the sky. Vehicles will not work, and even the Emergency Broadcast System will not work. GPS will be out, as will be all electricity and water.
Then your immediate worry will be your neighbors and marauding strangers who will form groups of bandits…
… followed by sanitation and medicine for illness and sickness.
It will be a nightmare where an infected cut or scratch can kill you, where COVID-9 will mean a death sentence, and where trading your daughter out (to a platoon of men) for some moldy turnips will be considered a good deal on a good day.
Life as a subjugated people
The Trump neocon leadership isn’t even thinking the “unthinkable”.
What will happen with the dust settles and the war is over?
Even if both sides are completely obliterated, and decimated, it will be China that will survive. These people are “hard scrabble” survivors and are everywhere. With a population four times that of the United States, and the vast bulk of educated people speaking English with solid STEM backgrounds. It will be the Chinese who will define what will happen afterwards.
The Chinese are a disciplined and tough race of people that do not play.
Americans. Um, not so.
Modern Americans today.
And the new rulers; the Chinese and the Russians, oh they will NOT be kind.
If you thought that the Civil War was bad, then imagine an angry and pissed off nation that has AI, robotics, and a 5G infrastructure. It will be just like what occurred back in historical times, and it was nasty. You will pray that you will get to live a life as a slave with at least one meal a day between your daily torture sessions.
So…
You think that maybe I am exaggerating, eh?
Well, learns what ALWAYS happens to a subjugated people. Learn some history…
Some History
Perhaps a little taste of what happened in the past might awake the inner zen within you. You need to fully come to grips with the kind of “fire” that Trump and his neocon cohorts are actually playing with. Listen to me closely.
China is a serious, serious nation.
It is run by a leadership that have obtained their positions through merit. They relish in strife, and view soft people as weak. Most of the leadership are STEM graduates and they view the “softer” humanities as recreational endeavors, not something that should be seriously studied.
The Chinese do not play.
They are like the modern embodiment of Genghis Khan…
Genghis Khan had so much power that he could do whatever he wanted.
For instance, when Genghis occupied some new area, he would kill or enslave all the men and share all the women amongst his tribe. Genghis Khan would even make beauty contests of captured women to decide which woman is the most beautiful one. Yeah, he was having his Miss Universe competition before it was cool. So, the queen of those beauty competitions would win the privilege to become one of many Genghis Khan's women.
Rest of the Mongolian army would share all the other contestants.
-The Richest
Incursions into Southeast Asia were largely successful, most factions agreed to pay tribute, and only the Invasions into Vietnam and Java failed.
Europe was devastated by the Mongols. They destroyed near enough every major Russian city, and invaded Volga Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary.
If rumours spread that the Mongols were coming, then it would cause a mass panic, and some would run to safety.
There was no guaranteed way to defeat the Mongol hordes, they continuously defeated much larger armies, so numerical strength couldn’t protect you.
Mongol conquests would leave once populous and flourishing areas as wastelands, with little to no people, those remaining would be slaves.
-ESKify
This was one of the most devastating battles in European history. 25% of Hungary’s population was wiped out by after the Mongol incursions. Half of all liveable places had crumbled, smashed to bits by hordes of Mongols. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the Europeans suffered most. This was the most major battle of the war between Hungary and the Mongolians.
-ESKify
Subutai led an army of 20,000 Mongols against a Russian army 4 times its size. The Mongol rear guard was defeated early in the battle, and so the rest of the horde was forced to retreat.
Mstislav the Bold chased down the retreating Mongols with victory in his eyes. His army spread out as they attempted to catch them, a chase which lasted many days.
Mstislav spotted Mongols in formation along the Kalka River, and attacked without waiting for reinforcements.
With his army in disarray, Mstislav was forced to retreat back to a fortified camp. He had fallen for a feigned retreat.
Mstislave surrendered to Subutai with the agreement that neither he, nor any of his men would be harmed.
They were all slaughtered upon leaving the camp.
Luckily, Mstislav managed to escape. Mstislav the Bold, boldly ran away.
-ESKify
Worse was to come in 1221 — ‘a year to live in infamy’. While Genghis’s other armies had been busy in the east, threatening Tbilisi in Georgia and terrifying the Christian world, Tolui, one of Genghis’s equally reprehensible sons, took Merv (in modern-day Turkmenistan), one of the largest cities in the world.
Promised safety, the citizens surrendered and emerged from behind their walls.
Tolui ‘surveyed the masses dolefully gathered with their possessions, mounted a golden chair and ordered mass executions to commence’.
They took four days and nights to complete. Genghis’s rotten fruit did not fall far from the tree. Terror — and the certainty of its visitation — was a major weapon in Genghis’s arsenal: decapitated women, children and even cats and dogs were reputedly displayed.
But while the butchery was indeed immense, it is worth questioning its extent on occasion: a depopulated city had little economic value, and imported colonizers could make up only so much of the shortfall.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
Most military historians judge that no European force could have stopped the disciplined and innovative Mongolian armies. “Employed against the Mongol invaders of Europe, knightly warfare failed even more disastrously for the Poles at Legnica and the Hungarians at Mohi in 1241”
-Stephen Hicks
Genghis Khan was the most feared human of the 13th century, who could destroy dynasties just by moving his little finger. He created the Mongol Empire all by himself and earned his eternal spot in the history books.
However, a lot of people had to suffer for Genghis Khan to succeed.
Oh yes, the Mongolians were known for their horrendous torturing techniques. One of the most popular was pouring molten silver down the throat and ears of a victim.
Genghis Khan also liked bending his enemy's back until the backbone snapped. If that sounds barbaric, skip this next part.
So, the Mongols once celebrated victory over Russians in a very bizarre way. They picked all the Russian survivors, dropped them on the ground and put a heavy wooden gate on top of them.
Then, Genghis Khan and the entire Mongol army had a huge banquet on that wooden gate. They ate, drank, and watched how Russians were dying one by one from the suffocation, pressure, and wounds.
-The Richest
The Mongol were masterful at spreading fear and hate throughout Asia, people feared them, and therefore hated them.
They would rape and pillage entire villages, and torture their victims for fun. Nobles would get it the worst.
Spilling noble blood was considered a crime, so they simply crushed them to death, which took many hours.
Mongols would literally dine on top of them, making merry to the sounds of their screams from underneath.
The sounds of bodies squelching, and bones snapping didn’t faze them.
But rumours of this execution method struck terror. Fear made them powerful, as people often chose to surrender and pay tribute rather than risk fighting them.
-ESKify
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”
-Genghis Khan.
Conclusion
Currently the United States leadership is run by neocons. They believe that God ordained Americans to rule over the earth and subdue all other peoples, races, and nations. As it is “God’s will”. They do so in the belief that they will be blessed by divine inspiration and profound leadership.
Trump and his followers think that he was given ability and strength by God personally, and that it is his duty to take over the world and rule it with America always being first.
From day one, the Trump campaign and his administration has been run and conducted on a MAGA (Make America Great Again) narrative and slogan. This means that America must remain the sole top major nation in the world. If it cannot do so by ability, then it must destroy all the other nations to make this situation come to fruition.
The neocons are still in control, and they have been waging a non-stop “hybrid war” against China that includes all sort of biological weapons attacks. All attacks, on all fronts, have either failed or boomeranged back to America.
The neocons, however, still believe that they have the “will of God” on their side.
Thus, they are amplifying the narrative that “American must do something” about “The South China Sea”, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is no mistake that two aircraft carrier groups and one assault group are in the South China Sea now, nor is it a mistake that American hunter-killer subs are stalking the sea trading lanes where all the shipping is conducted.
The Neocons want war and are going to get it one way or the other.
I argue that this kind of thinking is insane, crazy, deluded and is dangerous. I also argue further that anything contemplated with China will end up horribly. Very, very horribly, and could actually result in the complete annihilation of America into balkanized ruined city-states…
…and the people will end up cursing the American leadership for all of eternity.
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Well, I am sure that most other sensible historians have seen the writing on the wall for some time. Yeah, verily the USA is in a state of reset. You might call it a collapse, a SHTF event (as I have) or a readjustment for much needed societal change. What is well understood that it is truly painful to watch. But, look at the good side, not that many people are dying from it. At least not yet, anyways…
Here, in this post, I want to remind everyone that the images presented to you via social media, television and radio are all lies, distortions and manipulations. Yes, I know that you all realize this, but I want to underline the fact that UNLESS you see it happening in your neighborhood, with your friends, and at your work-place, it is all not actually part of your life. It is something you hear about, and file away for future use. But, it is not something that you need to get too hot and bothered about. It’s remote. It’s distant. It’s not your problem.
Yeah. That stuff and protests in Seattle… Why worry about it unless you are living there in that city? And those protests in New York city with the rioting and looting? Does it look like it is happening in your town? In your neighborhood? With others that you know and your friends? No. Of course not.
Yes.
The USA is going through changes.
Yes.
These changes will take some time to implement and the resultant American society will change.
Yes.
There probably will be some kind of “spill over” to your local region and neighborhood.
But…
Thoughts control our reality. Do not let the artificial panic, disgust, anger and turmoil tear into your calm and peaceful life. Do not allow it to intrude on you, your life, your family, your friends, or your business.
Look around you.
The world is a beautiful place. You can make it a wonder place. Be a good friend to others. Be the best friend that you can be. Be helpful, and know your local neighbors. Be assisting. Be kind, and above all be calm. Be the island of stability in a world that every day seems to be “tearing at the seams”.
The News “reality”
The news pumped into my daily feed is upsetting. From December 2019 up until mid-May 2020 it was a non-stop stream of “hate China” propaganda. Then from mid-May 2020 it switched to “USA protests and riots”.
So does any of this “news” affect your life? Really? How does it?
At best, it’s a potential influence that might someday affect your family in some minor way.
So why worry about it?
An American Societal Readjustment
Societal change is coming.
Accept it. Roll with the punches.
That means know your neighbors. Be helpful and supportive in your community. Be stable. Be stable and calm. Be the leader that others look up to when the rest of the world seems to be completely “unhinged”.
I’ve said this before, and I’m going to say it again, over and over.
The human society will readjust.
A lead contributor is the United States, and at this stage it could go in any direction…
… from some minor, short lived, societal upset…
In New York City, supporters of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) march in protest alongside the Antifa anarchy movement.In Germany in the 1930’s, the SA competed against the SS for control of Germany. Here we have the SA performing a “peaceful” protest by preventing access to “culturally inappropriate” art.In Germany, the SS line up in support of the Nationalistic policies of Adolph Hitler after the destruction of their key rival, the “SD”.
… to full-on, full-scale World-War III.
The first of 200 nuclear warheads hits one of the major American cities.Even smaller American cities could very well be uninhabitable after a joint Soviet and Chinese “double tap” in response to the Trump neocon activities.
It’s far too early to determine what will happen. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything, and knowing who is running the White House in Washington DC right now, you must hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Remember…
I really do not. And to be honest, the PTB (in their many forms) don’t know either. In fact, it’s all kind of running way from their control. (There are rogue elements within the PTB circle, don’t you know.) And everything is gearing up for some massive (and exciting) events.
My Advice
So…
Avoid the cities.
Avoid the crowds.
Know your neighbors.
Be helpful and kind.
Watch over your family and control the little ones.
You and yours will all be just fine.
And I do mean that. The American news, and all those “International” news organs are all owned by the PTB. They want you to be in fear, easily manipulated, and corralled into accepting the behavioral lock-downs that they desire to impose upon you.
Do not permit them to drag you into a life of fear…
Unfortunately America will define the sentience selection
Ugh! I do hate to say this. But because America is so influential in the “West” it will have a sizable influence in what will happen in the future in regards to sentience selection.
At this stage in the game, June 2020, China while enormous, and a technological and economic competitor to the United States will also have an influence, but it will be what happens in America that will have the greatest impact.
Have you noticed that whatever happens in America is copied in the rest of the “Western World”? Right now as there are riots in the USA, we see the same kinds of behaviors in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Australia, and in New Zealand. Why?
It’s that this particular group of PTB leadership are making this happen.
Meanwhile, the PTB in control of Asia are of a different mindset.
We are in the midst of a sentience restructuring at a global level.
And here is the breakdown…
Breakdown of sentience by geographical region and culture / societies as of June 2020.
As you can see from the chart above, the Asian geographical regions have a higher percentage of “service for others” sentience in their population mix than what you see in the West. I attribute this to a long history of Buddhism, and a wide ranging selection of Asian belief.
Of course this does not match the “hate China”, “China is the evil devil” narrative out of Pompeo’s CIA and the Trump White House. But as anyone who has spent any time inside of Asia will attest, the society, at the local level, boils down to this mix.
In the West, of course, there is a majority that are “service for self” or the related “service for another” sentience. We can see this in the lootings, the followings for various political leaders from Trump to “The Reverend” Jessie Jackson, and such actions by Wall Street and those motivated by the Social Justice, and Climate Change special interests.
Of course, many who are “service to self” don’t look at themselves in that way. They consider themselves “open minded” and being helpful to others. But all you need to do is look at the physical actions of these individuals on television to see their “true colors”.
Non-human entities have their preferences.
I have listed them on the table as well.
I rarely discuss the Type-2 extraterrestrial class, but let it be known that they do NOT feel that the human species is really ready to leave our nursery and would prefer us to better evolve on our own and find our own path irregardless to what conflicts or upheavals might occur.
In all cases, the over riding goal is for a sentience selection of some overwhelming majority, with a near zero percentage of complex or confused sentience genders.
Once this happens we, as a species, will experience a major culling of the human species, and those survivors will have their RNA /DNA altered to meet and fit the needs of our benefactors / guardians. (I’ve discussed this elsewhere.)
So the bottom line…
The news is all an illusion. Do not get too caught up in it.
Remember, the news does not reflect the life you live and the world that surrounds you at this moment in time. Keep that in mind.
This is my life right now. Does the American news media reflect, in any way, what I am experiencing right now?
Notes on the following videos
The following are some videos that I took outside where I live in China. The area is the business section of Jida, and the videos are taken during “rush hour”. If you are having trouble watching the videos, just wait, or reload the page. Then you shouldn’t have any problem.
The point in these short micro-movies below is that my life… in no way at all… resembles ANYTHING in the United States media. It’s like comparing apples with pine cones. For me, and for the most part, for you the media is an artificial construction; a method used to control the viewing audience to think and act in certain ways.
Remember…
What you think about becomes your reality.
So here is my actual reality…
A bus stop alongside the main street.Next to the “under way”. This is an underground road that allows pedestrians to walk from one side to the other without getting run over by traffic.This is pretty typical for China. This is what my neighborhood looks like. Of course, bigger cities are different, as are smaller rural areas.
Not at all what you might think China is. Not from the United States media, that is. man, if you would believe the comments after nearly six months of hate-China fest, it’s like there is a certain percentage of Americans foaming at the mouth to “teach those bat-eating vermin a lesson”.
Here’s a Bing.com image search for “China Cities” …
Bing.com image search for “China cities” taken 6:18 PM on 13JUN20.
Does it resemble anything that I experience?
Nope not at all.
Why?
Is it because I live in an “exclusive” area for members of the dastardly Chinese Communist Party?
LOL.
Nope. Hardly. I live in a pretty average, low-middle sized Chinese city. I live in the normal local neighborhood, and not an “expat enclave”. And this is what it is like.
Notice on how all the pictures are shades of grey, black and dark brown?
What about other subjects. like “dogs in China”…
Dogs in China, American search engine Bing.com taken on 13JUN20. You would think that China is filthy, dirty and treats the dogs like some kind of rodent.
Again…
Notice the colors of greys, blacks and browns. All the pictures are gloomy and negative. When in reality, it looks nothing like this.
Now, let me remind you what it is like here in China, “for real”…
Middle School students going to eat lunch at home.
I will pretty much bet that this is the same where you all live.
Oh, maybe the uniforms are different, the road and buildings are different. Perhaps the signs and the language are all different. But the fact is that people, most people that is, live calm and pretty pleasant lives.
Most people. All over the globe.
While the “news” is filled with pictures that pretty much resemble this…
Image search from bing.com on America taken 13Jun20.
I will pretty much guess that your life actually resembles something along the lines of this…
Milford, Massachusetts.
Or maybe this…
American country home.
Or maybe something on the order of this…
Typical American suburb.
Notice the COLORS.
Are they shades of depressing greys, blacks and dirty browns, or are they in colorful and happy greens and blues?
Sanity Check
Forget about what the news people say. Forget about what the headlines report. forget the supporting elements.
Look at the pictures.
Compare the images, the colors, the impressions, the people, and the environment with what you see around you with your very own two eyes.
You should just simple compare the images that you see on the “news” with what you see with your own eyes of the world around you.
If they match, then maybe the news has something of value to you. If they do not, then perhaps you are getting inundated with a bunch of fear-mongering propaganda that has no bearing on your immediate life.
Conduct sanity checks often and daily.
The PTB are creating and cultivating an artificial reality
They are doing their best to herd mass groups of people into pre-determined thoughts and actions. None of which will generate a positive outcome. Indeed, the predicted outcomes will be social upheaval, economic collapse, mass starvation, illness and conflict.
It is intentional.
They have their reasons.
Some PTB members have honorable intentions, but deplorable methodology. Some have a limited and fixed mind-set, and their actions reflect their ignorance. Some are very intelligent, but lack the means and knowledge to implement their desires. Some are just simply powerful people with very evil behaviors. Some are just pawns for even larger and more powerful entities.
Does all this background information and details really help you personally?
Nope.
All you need to know is that things are happening and that it’s causing changes int he world. Some of which might touch and broach upon yours. Just discard the trash and do not allow it to “suck you in”.
You will be just fine.
Remember, during every societal upset, there are those that survive in relative safety and security. Some are preppers. Some live on the edge, and are mobile. Some are wealthy, and some are adaptable with a great network of friends in their local society.
I argue in favor of adaptability within your local neighborhood.
Conclusion
The world is NOT falling apart at the seams. It only seems that way.
The rest of the world is doing just fine, and it is ONLY the cities in America (and it’s Western allies) that are experiencing turmoil, and the American news media is amplifying all this to create an environment of fear, distrust and chaos. Do not allow yourself to fall into that trap. It is a lie.
While the American news media looks like this…
Yahoo! News 14JUN20.CNN Business headline and “top story” on 14JUN20.CNN news 14JUN20.
My life actually looks like this…
Good night from Metallicman.
Only you can control and determine your life. Be good, be helpful and be the best friend that a friend can be. Be stable. Stay local, and be very, very wary of outsiders.
Best wishes.
Do you want more?
I have more in some of my other post indexes. Here, I suggest both the Happiness, and the SHTF Indexes…
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Let it be well understood that today 1JUN20 that SHTF in the United States is now official. Elements have been building up for some time, most certainly. And there have been some events that definitely contributed to this situation, but make absolutely no mistake. SHTF is now active and the entire United States is in turmoil.
As with anything, it’s difficult to pick a time when an event starts. Does Christmas start at 12:01 25 December, or when children wake up? Does it start when the presents are opened? Or, is is a month-long holiday with different phases.
Ah…
Let’s not parse the details too severely. All that wonderful “freedom”, “liberty” and “democracy” that Americans are so very happy that they have has…
… reared it’s ugly face.
In fact, it is nothing of the sort. It’s all just fancy slogans, endlessly repeated, by a dumbed down mindless mass of serfs. The United States is a military oligarchy-run empire, and the peasants are tired of it.
People are pissed off.
Some of them are just bored, and want a “regular” life.
Some are opportunists.
Some want to burn it all down, and literally kill anyone who is doing better than themselves.
If you all think that it’s going to die down in a day or two you are deluded. This is the start of a long slow collapse. Oh, certain regions will fare better than others. Certain people will do better than others, and certain situations will bring more advantages than others.
But that’s not what I am afraid of.
I’m afraid of the morons running the United States. For typically when there is economic turmoil such as this, the answer is always “distraction by war”. It focuses the people to something outside the poorly run domestic economy. And since this “domestic turmoil” is so expansive (this time), the up-scaled version of war could also be “up-scaled”.
And, I tend to be wrong about 50% of the time, don’t you know.
You are Here…
You are here.
Leadership in hiding
The idea that President Trump is in a bunker, safe and sound under the White House while America is in flames reminds me of another event…
… when Hitler hunkered down in a bunker in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin while all of Germany burns.
While I actually am equating Trump with Hitler, it should not be misconstrued. I am actually equating the events of the collapse of the United States with the collapse of Germany. The mere fact that it is President Trump in Washington at this time instead of Obama, Bush, or Clinton makes no difference.
President Trump is a man of great strengths and great faults. He just happens to be at the helm at this historic event.
Other thoughts…
People of greater capability than I, and those with better writing skills have weighed in on this sequence of events. I find them illuminating. And now some “doom porn” for those of you who can stomach it…
A whopping 71% of jobless Americans haven’t gotten their unemployment payments from March. Lines at food banks are literally miles long in some areas. Rents and mortgages are not being paid. Anger is increasing. Soon it’s going to bubble over into rage and when it does, we could see unrest and crime like we haven’t seen in this country in centuries.
Charles Smith at Of Two Minds says What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy. Excerpts:
We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.
We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight...
Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.
National Post – Billionaire’s Instagram-perfect isolation on a luxury superyacht draws public outrage … as the world’s wealthy stay in vacation homes, custom bunkers or floating palaces, workers from nurses to supermarket cashiers juggle childcare and risk infection working essential jobs.
The Z Man (April 2020) – There’s lots of red lights flashing in the debt markets and the supply chain. The next months will be interesting. Maybe that will be how everyone forgets about this month of living like lepers and treating everyone like they stink. Before people can start to think about why they were locked in their homes, they will be directed to the next drama, the financial and economic panic of 2020. Perhaps the lesson here is the circus part of our bread and circuses is the government creating increasingly reckless panics seeing if they can blow it all up. Maybe this is all for their entertainment.
Riots, Z Man – The current black riots are being described as unprecedented, when in fact they are a regular feature of American life. Birds fly, fish swim and blacks riot. Amusingly, the man allegedly responsible for these riots, President Trump, you know, because of the low black unemployment, is in office because of the last round of black riots. In fact, black rioting is one of the regular features of the ongoing morality play that is modern liberal democracy. The usual suspects, looking for a reason to get white people to the theater, start scanning about for some case where a black was harmed by an unsympathetic white. They create a narrative around the incident, have the stories placed in the media and then encourage the black “activist groups” to start making an issue of it. From there, the story writes itself.
George Ure at Urban Survival: The food situation is getting dicey with meat, including pork and some poultry production coming off-line. And that will evolve over coming months into supply chain collapses and a general reset of lifestyles at a much lower-than-recent levels.
Putting everyone under house arrest and collapsing the economy is just the beginning. The can is being kicked and it moveth not. A historic catastrophe is plainly visible. Someone else's fine tuned and compelling opinion won't save you. Those who can save themselves will save themselves, not you. Those who can't save themselves certainly won't save you. Who does that leave?
Collapse, Of Two Minds – “Success” in America is now a game of creating believable facsimiles of what was once authentic. This requirement to hide the truth lest it collapse all the skims, scams, frauds, rackets and insider plundering and pillaging is the Monster Id of America. The more the insiders and institutional technocrat machinery attempt to censor and suppress critical inquiry, the greater the erosion of public trust in the credibility and legitimacy of the dominant institutions. When reality and truth become the sworn enemies of society’s political and economic elites, the society is well and truly doomed.
The current situation eventually will pass, but any time there’s any crisis — real, perceived, or exaggerated — government will instantly hit the police-state panic button. Thanks to so much of the reporting on the pandemic, which mostly has targeted those politicians who didn’t “do something” quickly enough, we’ll see an arms race over who can take the boldest moves without delaying over quaint concerns about our liberties.
Just as Americans have become accustomed to the TSA’s security theater and to endless police cameras and checkpoints, we soon may also become accustomed to routine lockdowns and arbitrary edicts any time officials get wind of a coming health or other problem. We won’t know for sure, of course, but just wait until next year’s flu season.
James Kunstler sees “a harsher, hungrier, angrier society of broken promises and dashed expectations” when “the hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary Theory” crashes in a heap. Excerpt:
The world never reached such a pitch of activity up to the blow-ups of 2008, and it went through the motions for a decade after that. Now that it’s stopped, all that’s left is the law of gravity, and it doesn’t get more basic. The “wealth” acquired in the decade since by the so-called “one-percent” was loaded onto a defective aircraft, like a Boeing 737-MAX, and an awful lot of it will fall to earth now on broken wings.
Their agents and praetorians on Wall Street are working feverishly to stave off that crash-landing, like a band of magicians casting spells on the ground while that big hunk of juddering metal augers earthward. Wait for it as spring brings new life across the land and things unseen before steal onto the scene.
Can you imagine if our grid went down and we lost electricity for an extended period of time? As bad as our current situation is, it could always be a lot worse. We relied on our government leaders to prepare our country for a pandemic, and we see what that got us. We rely on that same leadership now to protect our electric grid...
The EMP Commission estimates a nationwide blackout of the United States lasting one year could kill 90% of Americans from starvation and societal collapse...
The strategy of pretending to do something but really doing nothing and then throwing money at the threat when it happens will get millions of Americans killed when there is an EMP.
It’s suspicious how many articles about an EMP attack are showing up for no obvious reason.
Experts, Burning Platform – Not one penny of the trillions generated by the Fed out of thin air is helping the 38.6 million people who were thrown out into the streets by government decree. It wasn’t meant to trickle down. It’s just another example of socialism for the corporate fascists and another screw job for the average working stiff. The Fed’s sole purpose is to enrich their banker benefactors, corporate titans, hedge fund managers and corrupt politicians. The unemployment rate is headed toward 30%. GDP in the 2nd quarter will approach -40%. We’ve entered a 2nd Great Depression. The damage is permanent and ultimately fatal.
"It's not a lack of food, it's that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven't been able to connect the dots. You've got to galvanize people."
The immediate outcome of this food supply chain collapse will be even more rapid food inflation, hitting Americans at a time of unprecedented economic hardships with at least 26.5 million now unemployed since the pandemic struck the US.
And with a sharp economic recession, if not outright depression unfolding, more Americans are ditching grocery stores for food banks, putting incredible stress on these charities, which has forced the government to deploy National Guard troops at many locations to ensure food security to the neediest.
We’re just circling the drain. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Those ingénues who believe troops are being positioned to “ensure food security” will be among the first to discover otherwise. Get away, and stay away from crowds. It’s the indispensable first step.
We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.
We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight...
Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.
Lockdowns, Mises Institute – Those who have claimed that lockdowns are “the only option” had virtually no evidence at all to support their position. Indeed, such extreme over-the-top measures such as the general lockdowns required an extreme level of high-quality, nearly irrefutable evidence that lockdowns would work and were necessary in the face of a disease with an extremely high fatality rate. But the only “data” the prolockdown people could offer was speculation and hyperbolic predictions of bodies piling up in the streets. The lockdown crowd destroyed the lives of millions to satisfy the hunches of a tiny handful of politicians and technocrats.
Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man mentions the unmentionable in his essay, Bailing out the states: the momentum and the prospect for violence builds. Excerpts:
If their residents find that government largesse is no longer flowing; and if they believe that they're entitled to such largesse; then they're going to get out of control and try to take what they want. The results are likely to be catastrophic for law and order, and civil society.
I think the ordinary people of America realize this. After all, that's why they bought more guns in March than any other month in previous US history. They're getting ready to defend what's theirs—and I believe they're right in anticipating the need to do so...
You want to know why my friends want me to upgrade their rifles? You want to know why I've been warning about COVID-19 as a threat to personal security, and suggesting ways to keep your shooting skills honed, even during the lockdown? ... Look no further.
American Gun News – Another Maryland Man Red-Flagged to Death by the Cops … cops shot him through a window while asleep in bed. They also shot his pregnant girlfriend
Power grab, Sovereign Man – If you think about 9/11 in particular, its remarkable how much power the government grabbed, and how many freedoms they took away. What I’m most concerned about at this point is not the virus, nor even the economic devastation.They have us all cowering in our homes, stripped of the most basic freedoms to do just about anything. People are being thrown off their own private property because they’re not an ‘official resident’ of the town. Others have been arrested for attending a funeral. Others threatened with jail for their social media posts. There’s going to be a huge impact on our freedom from this astonishing growth of unchecked government power.
Lockdown, The Z Man – You can’t help but wonder if what we are seeing is just a dry run for something more permanent in the future. I don’t think this was premeditated. Like the radicals of the French Revolution, our rulers are now captive to events they set in motion. As the evidence stacks up it is clear the lock downs were a terrible idea, but the people in charge have the whiff of authoritarianism in their nostrils and like a rutting beast they can think of nothing else. They are now busy dreaming up more insane restrictions just to humiliate people. It is increasingly difficult to remain a reasonable person. I’m getting a little salty.
Debt, Paul Craig Roberts – An economic system that enriches the rentier class by converting as much of personal income as possible to the service of debt is an economic system that is dead in the water. One possible way out is a debt writedown in order to create some discretionary income. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan substituted growth in consumer debt for the missing income growth, and by this substitution created discretionary income by loading up the consumer with debt. That load is now full. We are in the unenviable position of having very high stock prices in an economy that has no growth potential. The high stock prices are the product of trillions of dollars injected into financial asset prices.
Charles Smith at Of Two Minds has posted strategies for surviving tough times. He does not claim to deal with a collapse of civilization, but rather the slower and uneven “devolution” he sees as more likely. He advises developing multiple skillsets and social networks, cutting expenses and relying on health and social wealth.
Mr. Smith is not just one of my regular reads, he's one of those few I often reread. His particular "take" on events is worth close attention, always well thought out and grounded in fact. However, he's not talking about survival, he's talking about enduring tough times. To this end he suggests avoiding extreme preps as "predicated on a decisive 'end of the world as we know it'".
I believe he's an optimist.
Being a generous nice guy with community connections is not a viable strategy for surviving the emerging catastrophe. And emerging it is. Understand what we're looking at. Shopping became raiding as the collapse visibly accelerated. Civic compliance is being quietly withdrawn as government leaders and their credentialed experts reveal themselves as corrupt opportunists and inept posers.
No one "survived" the Great Depression any more than they "survived" the good times. They bore up, endured and got through. People "survived" real catastrophes; Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde or the homicidal slave labor camps of the last century.
Survivalism is unpleasant and difficult, but it's the only alternative in unpleasant and difficult times. It won't be about becoming a handy, well liked member of a cozy little community. Open handed nice people with their Norman Rockwell settlements will be ruthlessly exploited and left for dead. Viable communities will emerge, but more like the Bielski or Forest Brothers woodland partisans, minus the antique politics.
Preparationalism—known as "prepping"—is part of survival, not survivalism itself. Preppers posit hard times and scarcity. Survivalists posit destitution, murderous chaos, pestilence and famine. Survival is prepping's precondition, not visa versa.
Mr. Smith talks like a nineteenth century idealist with a stock portfolio. It would please me if he were right, but betting the other way is wiser. We ain't seen nothin' yet.
This is what the end of the end of history looks like. We had asked ourselves how it would appear and when. These questions mattered, and not only incidentally. They matter less now as we prepare for what I suspect will be at least a decade of immiseration on a scale unimaginable to at least three generations...
Here I think foreboding is justified. Trends that were worrisome long before we had heard of the new virus are accelerating to a point at which they are probably irreversible.
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes the quiet self-authorized reopenings and says,
The shutdowns were sold as “two weeks to slow the spread,” and “flattening the curve,” and so on, and lots of people thought that was sensible, and it was. A two-month (or longer) shutdown is a different animal, and nobody consented to that. So now people are, mostly silently, withdrawing their consent from the state.
Ruling system, The Z Man – If you take time to read up on the Flynn case or the much larger plot around it, you see a large cast of people with one thing in common. They all live together as a social class and social relationships transcend the formal positions and titles of the people. Once a ruling class becomes a ruling community, reform is no longer possible. The only way to change the system is to decapitate it. The lesson of the Soviet system is that technology can perpetuate the community until it exhausts itself. The low quality of the people involved in the FBI shenanigans suggests they are reaching the same point as the Soviets in the 1980’s.
Serfdom, American Mind – The barbarians who seized Roman lands took advantage of chaos to fuel their ascendancy in what became the Middle Ages. Pestilence-driven depopulation and weakened political institutions enabled them to establish their hegemony over shrinking economies. Yet to assure their power, the Medieval aristocracies needed a belief system that would allow them to control the lower classes effectively. Today this role is played by a far-reaching “expert class” teeming with highly-credentialed functionaries.
The dichotomy between what is happening in the real world and what is happening in the world of the financiers will lead to violent upheaval on a timeline not anticipated by the ruling class. There is a good reason gun stores were overwhelmed with business at the outset of this over-hyped flu pandemic. Trust in the government, central bankers, the corporate media, and “experts” is disintegrating rapidly. The anger and disillusionment grows by the day and pockets of resistance are propagating throughout the country...
The only thing that matters is we will experience a disastrous outcome in the very near future from this reckless issuance of debt. The civic decay has entered the confrontational stage, with sides taken, weapons at the ready, awaiting the spark which will ignite the dynamite.
Reopen the nation, American Thinker – Hundreds of thousands of businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy and permanent closure. 33+ million are unemployed, and the federal government is creating massive unsustainable debt. This nation has made the biggest blunder in its history. The time has come for the politicians from the President to the Governors and Mayors to stop hiding behind the scientist/bureaucrats and fully reopen the nation. Focus on that segment of the population most at risk, without compulsory isolation or de facto imprisonment. And restore the civil liberties that have been wantonly eroded.
Fred Reed, Unz Review – We are told that In China, everything you say or do is monitored. Obviously China is a most terrible place. Who could doubt it? By contrast, in America, cameras are everywhere, all email is recorded, every bank transaction, credit-card purchase, who you called by telephone and when, and of course criminal records. Since little of this is directly done by the federal government, we do not live in a surveillance state. After all, none of the entities involved would share their information with the feds–would they?
From the woodpile report; July will tell the truth about the economy. I’ve chosen November as the month of general truth, whether the years following will be of manageable coping, of unexampled disaster, or something in between.
We could see a return to pre-Covid conditions, the economy revive, preps largely unneeded. Or hard times will persist but get no worse than they are now, with normalcy slowly returning, preps helpful but not critical. Or daily life could worsen long term and become the new normal, modest preps necessary but sufficient until a slow turnaround takes hold some years out.
Or systemic disruption and shortages could multiply, the recession deepen into a depression , extensive preps needed to make it from one month to the next. Or it could become a general disaster with outright starvation, government rule by decree, cities uninhabitable, regional withdrawals into fiefdoms, and only extensive preps being enough to avoid personal catastrophe. Or we'll see a rapid and unstoppable national and global collapse, criminal raids on a regional scale, rule by force, preps depleted or confiscated and the widespread rise of outright survivalism.
Preppers attempt to maintain some or most of their present circumstances in tough times. The survivalist has his own definition of preps. He practices to survive by anticipating and training for the worst of the possibilities.
Survivalism comes first, not last, because in the end preps assume the prepper survives to use them.
There are entirely reasonable variations on these themes. This is merely my personal arrangement.
He also goes on to say…
It appears we're at the start of an economic collapse similar to that of 1929 and into the 1930s. What we're seeing in Minneapolis and elsewhere appears to add the danger of organized violence.
A widespread decampment from big cities began some time ago and appears to be accelerating. Bloomberg reports RV sales are up 30% in some urban places.
The causes are fascinating but in the end what matters is how their migration to the "flyover country" they so despise may affect your personal plans.
July, when the long term direction of the economy will be plain to see, may be your last opportunity to shape your preparations more exactly, meaning food, shelter and protection. November is the month of the presidential election, when all sides reveal their intentions and one is chosen. It's also when winter weather begins.
Time is running out.
The United States is in a state of “free fall” and it’s only going to get worse. The American leadership are just actors reading scripted lines to appeal to the masses of under-educated, and easily manipulated serfs. This is a time when the actors and figureheads need to step aside and real leaders take the helm.
It’s not going to happen.
The only one that can prepare for this is you.
Friendships are your most valuable asset. Know everyone in your local neighborhood. Create strong friendships and alliances. Start today.
Keep your family close, protected and guarded. Youth must be corralled and controlled. They can easily create problems.
Organize and support each other. If no one stands up to lead, then you must do so. This could mean sharing resources, group patrols or sharing assets. Now is the time to organize.
Not every area is the same. Some areas will suffer more than others. Do not compare yourself to others. Just do the best in your little “neck of the woods”.
Things MIGHT calm down. I however, believe that this is the start of a three year long event cycle. Plan for the worst, but be cautiously hopeful.
About the urban rioters announcing that they are coming to the suburbs next…
“I would tell them, if you value your life, you probably shouldn’t do that in Polk County. Because the people of Polk County like guns, they have guns, I encourage them to own guns, and they’re going to be inside their homes tonight with their guns loaded. And if you try to break into their homes tonight and try to steal, to set fires, I’m highly recommending they blow you back out of the house with their guns.”
-Sheriff Grady Judd
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Well, just because your life seems to be frozen in time, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has stopped as well. It hasn’t. It keeps on moving on.
On and on.
There seems to be a real push for robotic automation; actual robots to do things that humans cannot. This includes things such as fighting fires, exploring the deep oceans, or the surfaces of Mars or Venus, and perhaps providing police services.
The Massachusetts State Police is the first law enforcement agency in the country to utilize a robotic dog in its operations, named Spot.
Robotic technology is not entirely a new concept in the ranks of law enforcement. Particularly, Spot is touted to be an addition to the line of robotics that can potentially help prevent casualties, and provide reliable and safe services to reduce risk in day-to-day police operations.
And in other ways as well, like “pack mules” or agile transport mediums. Mediums that can fight when needed.
Well, a robot can be programmed. And you cannot blame it for racism, or favoritism. Or any other excuses that are being politicized right now in America. You can program it to follow distinct rules and not worry about paying it, over-working it, pensions, or personal opinions.
You tell it what to do and it carries out your orders ruthlessly and without remorse.
It is perfect for the PTB and the Oligarchy to control people, nationalistic movements and other things that rulers find distasteful.
Technology
So…
You all realize that technology is moving forward at an incredible pace. You also know that China is leading the world in 5G technology. As well as robotics, IoT and AI (artificial Intelligence). Lately, the Trump administration has been doing everything in it’s power to stop the ability of China to procure, and develop AI chips. Have you ever stopped and wonder why?
Is it because America doesn’t want the Chinese to market better cell-phones, or is it something else?
The expression you get when you watch Boston Dynamics videos.
Is it something else?
You know full darn well that machines and computers malfunction. No matter how well-made. There is not one reader out there out in internet-land that hasn’t see the “blue screen of death“, or have had a car that won’t start. Machines malfunction.
And even worse than that, what about “hackers”? Right now there is “ransom ware”, and software that hijacks your computer. Imagine if that occurs with police or military robots… yikes!
Important Note
The following movie is great, and it must be seen to be believed. Please kindly allow the video to fully load and watch it. It is not some kind of special effects as part of a movie. It is the state of robotic police technology today.
The nation that controls the AI chipsets control the future battlefield.
It’s a strange and dangerous new world out there. It is becoming stranger and stranger, and more and more threatening. And the sad thing about all of this, is that technology is advancing, but human nature is staying the same.
Conclusion
Sara Conner from the science fiction movie “The Terminator”.
There is coming a time when the rise of technology crosses the threshold of human ignorance. And at that time, the dangers of technology can be such that the entire species can be eradicated and the earth rendered uninhabitable.
Therefore, it is of critical importance that human sentience be stabilized.
A world filled with technologically adept humans of wildly divergence sentience’s will absolutely result in danger and catastrophe. The human species MUST, absolutely must have a single unified majority sentience.
It needs to happen before the technology / sentience interface is breached.
Would you like to see more?
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I haven’t done a happiness post in a while. Perhaps it’s high time that I dust off the old keyboard, slide all that nonsense and clutter off my desk, open up a window and let some fresh sunny air inside. With that being said, let’s spend a few minutes to talk about some good things; things that matter to me. And, by extension, maybe that matter to you as well. Eh?
These are just some thoughts that I have had. They are my thoughts, and I am sure that not everyone will agree with me. But you can skip the parts you don’t like or agree with. And nod to yourself silently in parts that you do like.
Deep Dark Cool Forests
One of the little pleasures that I have enjoyed are those special moments when I enter the deep dark woods.
As most of you might be aware, there are all kinds of forests. From light sparsely fielded birch groves, to dense pine growths, to scrub and spackle arrangements. Here we are talking about deep, thick and rich old-growth forests. Forests that are populated with century old hard-woods like cherry, maple, oak and mahogany. Forests with bark as thick as your hand and lush deep thick curtains of moss that cover everything.
You can breathe in the cool moistness with your nostrils and feel the fresh air in your lungs.
The cool deep dark forest.
When you walk into this environment it is like you are entering another world. It’s cooler. It’s dimmer, and the shade is complete. There might be a very few instances of light that might manage to pierce through the upper canopy, but not often. You might be able to hear a brook bubbling away, or a swish of some deer as they disappear in the distance.
On of my great pleasures is to walk and explore the dark recesses of a midnight dark forest.
It’s a treasured place, and a treasured time. As such, I would like to express my belief that if we do not take the time to go forth and visit these treasured places that we are missing out in one of the great joys of life.
Perhaps there is a national park nearby. If so, go there and take a trail that you have never walked before. You will not regret it.
Sunny mid-morning Spring days
As I write this, it is the start of May. Springtime. Just about the entire world is waking up, stretching their arms, and venturing outside.
One of the little pleasures (that I have) is the freshness and coolness of Spring air, most especially when it is associated with a very Sunny day. These are days where the windows are open in the house to let the fresh air in. Where the kids are out in the driveway hosing down and washing the car, and where people are talking about when the local pool will open up.
After I left the ADC once I was retired, everything was “good”. It was all good. And I vowed that I would appreciate life more, enjoy it more and treasure it more. Perhaps that is what many people need today. A lesson to appreciate what you have WHILE YOU HAVE IT.
This is also the time when Winter clothes are packed and stored away. The Winterizing for the house, the car, and just about everything else is set aside. It’s also when the first mowing of the lawn occurs, and if you have a pool, when the pool cover is removed, the leaves are gathered from the water, and you “shock the pool” into health.
Maybe you might even set some chairs out in the yard.
Nighttime on the beach
It’s quiet. All that you can hear is the surf beating up against the shore. The sky is black, and the sea is black, and the sand is dark grey. Yet, strangely once your eyes adjust, the whitecaps on the waves are this light blue color. It’s actually magical.
Nighttime on the beach.
It’s a time when you walk, and think. And if you are with a friend, you talk. The waves roll. The air is still with occasional light breezes, the palms sway. There is a pace of life. It is free of the electronic media that are are all tethered to. And that is a good thing.
Then once you return home you can turn on your social media. You can read or hear people literally screaming at you with the latest “issues” of the day. Trump is a Russian spy! China is evil, nasty and eats bats! Your rights are being stolen from you! We need to raise taxes! And on and on and on.
Go outside. Shut that nonsense off.
Warm laundry on an icy cold day
It doesn’t seem like much, but to me it’s special. It’s a time when you pull the clothes out of a dryer on a frigid Winter day. The clothes are warm, toasty and delicious. Meanwhile the house is cold, brisk and icy.
A delicious home-cooked hamburger and an icy beer
You didn’t think that I would ignore this special moment, did you? Nope. All praises to the home-made hamburger and the icy cold beer. Now, when I mean icy-cold, I actually do mean icy cold. In fact, I (myself) prefer a tall glass of ice, and then pour the beer in. That means, boys and girls, that I drink the beer at 32F or 0C. Frosty.
One of the delicious pleasures that I have is the home-made hamburger with a nice frosty beer. It’s what I enjoy, and I believe that everyone should try this combination at least once in their life.
Now a frosty mug is nice. But it is the temperature of the beer that makes this special. Not to mention a nice home made hamburger with tomatoes, cheese (glorious cheese!), lettuce, and bun. Oh, and if you were inspired, some nice slabs of bacon would really enhance the overall burger flavor, don’t you know.
Well?
What’s stopping you from doing this right now?
Fixing a busted car and having it roar back to life
Have you ever dealt with a broken piece of machinery? You sit in the car, you fire it up and …clunk! Nothing.
Gagh!
That car is very tired.
So then, after some screaming and moaning, you finally figure out what is wrong. You pull out your tools, and start to get to the heart of the matter. But, of course, nothing is easy to get to. You need to tear half the car apart to get to anything. Then, after hours of work, frozen and stuck nuts, icy wind blowing on your knees and your shit wet with water, oil, gasoline and grease, you finally are able to put the replacement part back in.
It’s a real joy to see an engine roar back to life once you fix a few problems. (Oh, and don’t you just love the 454, eh?) The 1970 LS6 454 cubic-inch V8 that was one of the best street muscle car motors ever produced. Broooom!
Making a pot of Chili
There is a certain joy in making a pot of chili. I really cannot enunciate why it is so special. Maybe it is because I would tend to cook chili on the weekends. Or maybe it’s the smell of the chili as it is cooking all afternoon.
A fine bowl of home-made chili.
Or maybe it’s sitting down afterwards watching a movie with the chili in one hand and an icy cold beer in the other. I really don’t know. What ever it is, it’s most certainly a wonderful and special noteworthy time.
I started to make chili when I lived outside “Poison Canyon” in Ridgecrest, California. One day the staff on the base had a “chili cook-off” on a non-base facility. All of us were asked to submit our creations. It was my first attempt at making chili and (yes) I made some mistakes. But then ever since, I kept at it and kept at it.
Now, when I make up a pot, it is my “comfort food”.
I like to eat it over rice. (Though some friends in Louisiana like to eat it over chips.) I know that sour cream is a nice addition, but I never seem to have any around. Instead I opt for lots and lots of yellow cheese (sharp cheddar) is my favorite and some hot peppers.
Oh, and don’t forget the icy cold beer.
Playing with your dog
There’s something about a little playful ritual that I have with my dog “Shao Pi”. You see, a couple of times a day I give him a “dog sausage”. It’s a kind of meat flavored rice filler in the shape of a sausage. It’s pretty darn cheap.
Chinese doggie sausages. You cut holes in the plastic skin and he sucks the liverwurst like meat out of the sausage.
What I do is cut the ends off and punch holes in it. Then I call him.
Now, my game is to pretend that I cannot see him or know where he is. I start looking for him all over the house and outside on the porch. He goes crazy trying to say “I’m here! I’m here!”.
I carry on like this for a few minutes. Eventually he “convinces” me that he’s there, and I hand the treat out to him.
Now, my wife tried this game.
The only thing is that she didn’t play the game. She just handed the sausage to him.
What he did was so funny. He sat on the floor. Looked at the sausage, and then up to her. As if to say “what? You don’t want to play with me? Did I do something wrong?” And then he slunk back to his sleeping bed and ignored the sausage.
LOL.
This time is a little pleasure I have. I guess that it sounds so silly to dog haters or cat lovers, but I swear it is a special time and something that adds meaning to my life.
An after-dinner cigar and a glass of whiskey
Ah. You can tell that I am a man growing old. But you know what? Yup this is a real pleasure of mine. There is something relaxing and soothing to have a fine meal, and then calm down afterwards with a fine cigar and a nice glass of whiskey.
An after dinner cigar and a glass of whiskey.
I must admit that I am not a connoisseur of cigars. Rather, I take what I can get. Though the Cuban cigars obtained locally are really nice. As far as whiskey goes, I know what bad and fake whiskey is, but my budget will not permit me to have any of those expensive brands that you see in magazines. So I make the best with what is within my budget.
It’s a pleasure of mine and something that you cannot do in any public restaurant in America today. But, it is something that I can do just about anywhere else in the world. It’s what’s called “freedom“.
Picking a ripe heirloom tomato off the vine
When I was growing up we had a little garden. I was the only one who really cared about it. I would tend to it, and weed it all Summer. I would also go ahead and plant tomatoes along with the other vegetables. My favorite plants were, of course, tomatoes. Though secondary favorites included green peppers and zucchini.
A fine tomato sandwich.
I tried to grow them up here in China. No such luck. Zhuhai is way, way too hot for the kinds of tomatoes that I know and love. I wrote a post about this HERE…
Anyways, back to my story.
Growing tomatoes is a real pleasure of mine. I especially like the tomato sandwich that I make from a freshly picked juicy “Big Boy” fresh off the vine. I just cut that sucker into many thin cuts. Layer the cuts one on top of the other. Add some salt and pepper, and slather some sweet mayonnaise (Miracle Whip) on top. Of course, I use plain white bread. It’s the perfect bread for this sandwich.
I just cannot imagine a Summer without a tomato sandwich.
And, of course, I always eat it over the sink while the sauce and the tomato dripping fall down. My hands get all messy, but I just rinse them off under the running water.
It’s a great Summer pleasure, I’ll tell you what.
You do not know what your true pleasures are until you cannot have them. The pleasure of a simple tomato sandwich was denied to me in the ADC.
Canoeing on a quiet lake alone
This is a pleasure that most people do not enjoy.
You buy or rent a canoe. You go to a remote area, and there, in the early morning, you paddle out into the lake while the morning mist is rising off the lake. If you get up really early, it’s still very dark out. Like maybe four int he morning.
Ron Swanson understands. This is from season 7, episode 13.
It’s quiet. The mist is like a fog and all you can hear are the frogs, the critters, and the sound of the swishing of the water.
Then you just paddle up and down the lake. Maybe find a quiet spot and fish. You pop a top (open up a can of beer), and drink it down. You don’t have a cellphone, or at least no signals. No one can contact you with an “emergency”. Your time. Your place. Your life.
It’s magical.
Soup in a thermos and a home made sandwich
Most people don’t give this any thought. But you all should. There’s something comforting in having a lunch prepared by loved ones for you instead of a McDonald’s #3 meal supersized with a coke.
A home-made meal is healthier, better, cheaper, and often more delicious than one made in a fast-food restaurant. It won’t make you fat, it will be balanced, and it will remind you of your connections to your loved ones. It’s a win-win.
A homemade packed sandwich goes a long way to keep the stomach rumblings down and subdue the ravenous beast inside.
The thermos might contain coffee, but more often than not it would be home made soup. My personal favorites are chicken-noodle, cream of broccoli, and vegetable beef. The sandwich would generally be some kind of “Dagwood” consisting of a few slabs of meat, some tomatoes, lettuce, onions and maybe s “thickener” like peanut butter or a fried egg. Topping it off would be a fruit. Maybe an apple or a banana. Sometimes an orange.
That’s what you get when you have a traditional family. One person works outside, the other person takes care of the domestic issues. They make sure that you eat well and healthy. They put care into that meal. They put love into that meal.
A thermos filled with home-made soup is a very special thing, and it reminds you that you are nothing without your family and their support.
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and it is very, very true.
Enjoy an ice cream Sundae
Ice cream is everywhere. Or at least, what we call ice cream, is everywhere. In the West, America I’m talking to you, most “ice cream” is actually a percentage of cream with milk and other fillers. It’s not really “real” and “pure” ice cream at all.
Which is really rather sad.
This little pleasure describes eating real, honest to goodness, ice cream at a dairy that gives you the real thing. And what’s more, you eat a Sundae using it.
A well done ice cream sundae would have multiple scoops of real ice cream, with all sorts of toppings added.
Now, some history first.
Back in the day, when families still attended churches, and would spend the Sundays together, a “Sundae” was a special treat. It was a time to go traipse off to the local dairy farm and eat or have some fresh ice cream. That was a big event back in the day. It’s so difficult to imagine what the big deal was, because seemingly ice cream is everywhere.
Heck you can get a “ice cream””Sundae” at McDonald’s, for goodness sakes. Which isn’t really a true “ice cream” nor a true “sundae”. It’s a tasty food-like product. Fine for kids, but really below standard for most adults.
Adults deserve real… REAL… ice cream.
In California, back in the 1980’s, ice cream parlors were making a comeback. Though, I have no idea what is going on today. When I was there, they were being displaced by the TCBY frozen yogurt franchises.
Oh, and by the way, any decent Sundae in the United States would be topped with an American flag, don’t ya know.
Here we are talking about paying the money and eating an enormous ice cream Sundae with your loved ones. We are not talking about some fake ‘soft serve” for a dollar at the local fast food joint. So, what more can I say? Go ahead, and go get a quality ice cream sundae. You won’t regret it.
Finally, here’s a shout out for Hersey’s Fudge. Get some on-line or in a grocery store and use this (instead of Hersey’s chocolate syrup) on your home concoctions.
Now I talked about playing with my dog, but I also get an equal amount of satisfaction while playing with my cats. They are hunters and nothing gets them more excited that playing “hunt that critter”.
The best toys are the feathers or snake on a string.
Cats love to play with those feathers.
I would dangle those feathers in the air and they would spend hours running, chasing, leaping and clawing at them. They would be so caught up in it and it’s a true joy to behold. Ah… good times.
A cup of fresh brewed coffee on a cold winter’s day
Now most Americans appreciate a nice cup of brewed coffee. We go to Tim Horton’s, Starbucks, McDonald’s or Duncan Donuts to get our fix. Of course, we also tend to brew it at home, whether it is in an old-fashioned percolator, a Chemex, or even (gasp) instant coffee.
But here, I want to talk about a different kind of coffee experience.
An “old fashioned” American diner.
Imagine it’s snowing out, and as cold as a witches tit out. You had spent maybe ten minutes trying to chop the ice off your windshield with the wind howled around you, and icy cold dust flakes of snow burned your skin. Your breath would exhale in white clouds that would frost up your eye glasses and turn your beard white. And finally, after shoveling away the snow you hop into the car, and turn the motor over (you had a oil-dipstick heater, after your reinstalled the battery)…
Gah! You can tell that I used to live in Northern Indiana, eh?
You start driving down the road. It’s around 5:30 in the morning and the sky is just beginning to become a dreary light grey.
Up ahead is a brightly lit diner. It’s one of those old-fashioned stainless steel sausage affairs. It looks something like a mobile home, but is all silver color with warm inviting windows all along the sides.
You pull in, while a truck with a snowplow on it’s front is busy cleaning out the parking lot.
You park, turn off the engine and get out of the car. A few steps later, you pull open the heavy stainless steel and glass door and you are inside this warm, inviting diner filled with the aroma of bacon, eggs and freshly brewing coffee.
Inside of a fine American style diner.
You go up to the counter.
There’s a guy (or a gal) there who immediately places some silverware on a napkin next to you once they wipe down the table. You, or course, reach over to the free newspapers down the counter to see what the daily news is, and when the waitress comes on over you place your order.
If you are like me, you would order “Country fried steak and eggs” with grits (or hash browns), wheat toast (why I never ordered rye?) and a coffee.
She would say “Just a moment, hon.” Then in short order, she would fill up a fine slam-on-the table white mug filled with fresh coffee…
A vintage heavy ivory white ironstone china coffee mug. This is what coffee was intended to be drunk out of.
You see, it’s not so much about the coffee as it is about the context… the environment… the feelings and the emotions that you have at that exact moment in time.
I know, I know…
Starbucks fans will argue that that they are just fine with the paper cup that they get from Starbucks. They believe that it is just as good, or maybe better….
I do not.
Please enjoy a nice cup of coffee, and share it at a moment that remains special to you.
A cup of coffee at a diner.
Thunderstorm at night
Who doesn’t enjoy a nice cozy stay inside during a thunderstorm? The light display, and the booming of the thunder is inspiring. Not to mention the crash of the rain as it beats upon the house, and the gusts of wind that howl and moan in the ptch black night.
It’s a great time to stay inside and cozy up with loved ones under a throw. Don’t you think?
Homemade Iced Tea
I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. There, we pretty much drank Hi-C, or Cool-Aide. My mother would go ahead and pour the granulated mix into pitcher and refrigerate it. Then, when I was in High School, the idea of making “fresh” lemonade or Iced Tea caught on. We would put this big tureen on the stove and cook up a batch of tasty refreshing beverage. Then allow it to cool down.
later, at the end of the day, we might sit on the large shady porch and drink it as the sun would set. Though in those days we called it “watching the street lights turn on”. It was nice, you know.
Of course, then in those days, we might also smoke a joint, a cigarette, or a bowl of something that was illegal at that time. We were pretty much told that it would give us brain damage, and one day we might get confused, and put a baby in the microwave, or try to jump out of the window in an attempt to fly.
It was in all the newspapers and magazines, don’t you know.
Back then, we would sit on a “glider” (which is a metal couch that sways back and forth) or in a “porch swing” which is a wooden bench seat that hung from the ceiling by chains.
Metal glider. This is a long forgotten masterpiece that is fun to sit in and wonderful for wide shady porches.
Of course, there would be a blanket or throw or some pillows on the glider. We never sat on the bare metal or wood slats. You know, looking back, many of my first dates were spent on the safety of the porch while the girls’ parents were in the kitchen or living room.
It is that moment that you treasure. The sun has set, the sky is turning into a dark blue color. The air is cooling down and a little breeze is kicking up. House lights are turning on, and the homes looked warm through their windows with yellow and orange colors on the bluish-white exteriors. The crickets come out, and the cicadas. You can even watch the bats fly about in the sky.
Later on in my life, I completely forgot about that.
Delicious Southern style Iced Tea.
I would go ahead and get this kind of iced tea in fast food restaurants. it would be filled with chemical preservatives, and unsweetened. No lemon. No orange. No mint. And I would be forced to drink this kind of camel piss on my way to and from work.
Then, when I moved to the South, I experienced what “real” iced tea is. It’s called “Southern Ice Tea”, and it’s awesome!
How to Make Perfect Southern Sweet Iced Tea
Iced tea is pretty much a year-round staple here in the south - probably mostly because it's so darned hot down here most all of the year. Besides, tea - unlike soft drinks - is loaded with benefits.
Just like seasoning recipes to taste, you definitely should adjust to your own sweetness level with sweetened iced tea. Some folks like it real sweet, some not quite so sweet and you can certainly exchange sugar for an appropriate sugar substitute, even making the tea completely unsweetened, and adding it per glass.
This recipe makes 2 quarts of sweet tea and I used to use a cup of sugar, but then I switched to making my tea completely unsweetened and using a sugar substitute by the glass, but then I stopped using artificial sweeteners completely, then I went back to them, or I flip flop between a stevia/sugar blend, monk fruit or agave - I've pretty much tried most all of them. When I went back to using regular granulated sugar, I found a cup to be too sweet for me. Eventually I reduced that cup of sugar to 3/4 cup, then 2/3 cup and now I find about 1/2 cup of sugar for the whole pitcher works pretty good for me. In restaurants I always find sweet tea generally far too sweet for me, so I order it "half and half" - half sweet, mixed with half unsweetened, and during the summer I go through so much tea that I now make a full gallon of a diet sweet tea.
Sweetening aside, one thing is for certain. I believe that the perfect iced tea starts with Luzianne brand. {affil link} Period.
Now... I don't say that because I'm trying to impress the folks at Luzianne (who have no idea who I am), or because I'm trying to make myself look more "Southern" by using Luzianne. I use it because, in my opinion, it is the tea for Southern iced tea - whether it's sugared up or made with sugar substitute. Not that other brands don't make a good pitcher of tea. Mama used Lipton and it's a perfectly fine tea. It's just that for what I consider to be the perfect Southern iced tea, I truly believe you need to use Luzianne.
Finding a restaurant, even in the Deep South, that served sweet tea was a challenge there for awhile. Restaurants jumped on the bandwagon of removing sugar from their tea and tried to pass off unsweetened tea to all of their patrons, offering sugar packets at the table. Well, everybody knows that just doesn't work. Warm tea is what you need to dissolve sugar and iced tea just needs to be cold. Not warm. Not at room temperature. But chilled cold and served over ice and for me, with lemon. So, thankfully, they have finally gotten back to offering sweet tea again, and unsweetened for those folks who prefer not to have the sugar. It's true, a lot of folks, myself included, sweeten with sugar substitutes these days, but still… every once in awhile, we all sure enjoy a glass of ice cold, sugared-up tea.
Tea Tips:
1. For perfect tea always start with fresh filtered cool water - never tap water!
2. Cloudiness is often caused by putting hot or still warm tea directly into a cold refrigerator. My method prevents this since you are pouring your steeped tea directly over ice cubes.
2. Bitterness in tea is caused by overcooking and burning the tea leaves - that is why it is important not to boil the teabags and not to steep them too long in boiling water. To counter, a pinch of baking soda - only about 1/8 of a teaspoon - can be added to the hot, steeped tea after you remove the bags. It will not affect the taste of your tea, and provides insurance against bitterness.
3. Use wooden spoons to squeeze your tea bags, a glass container - like a large Pyrex measuring cup - to steep your tea, and store it in a glass pitcher if at all possible. I break this rule myself at times though, especially with my Milo's copycat diet iced tea. And I do love my Tervis cups.
4. If you prefer your sweetened tea more on the sweet side, increase the sugar. Some folks like as much as 1-1/2 cups of sugar, but start lower and increase for the next pitcher.
5. Of course, substitute artificial sweetener by the pitcher or per glass if you don't want to use sugar. I use the granulated Splenda in the large bag, about 3/4ths cup is enough for me.
6. If you like lemon in your tea, try making ice cubes out of lemonade to use in the individual glasses. As they melt, they will infuse the tea with lemon flavor! {a tip from Susan of our Facebook Family!}
Ingredients:
5 to 7 individual tea bags, (Luzianne brand preferred){affil link}
1 quart of cool filtered or bottled water
Pinch of baking soda, optional
1 (4-cup) glass Pyrex measuring cup for steeping
2 quart glass pitcher filled with ice
1/2 to to 1 cup granulated sugar, or to taste
Fresh lemon, sliced or wedges, and some mint sprigs, optionalInstructions:
Boil one quart of cool filtered or bottled water, bringing to a full, rolling boil then turn off heat. Steep tea bags in the hot water for 9 minutes. Gently squeeze bags of excess water and remove. Whisk in sugar (and baking soda if using) until dissolved and set aside. Fill pitcher with ice, and carefully pour the hot tea concentrate over the ice. Stir well and pour over ice filled glasses, garnishing with a sprig of mint leaves and a nice juicy slice of lemon. Savor. Makes 2 quarts.
Cook's Notes:
For a milder tea, use 5 bags; for a more robust tea, go with 7. Increase sugar as needed to your sweetness level. Never pour hot tea directly into a glass pitcher without ice in it! To conserve your ice and use the tea per glass, fill the 1/2 gallon pitcher with 1-1/2 quarts of water instead of ice, and top with the steeped tea.
-Deep South Dish
Personally, I always use (a generous amount of) cut up orange slices, along with the lemon. And sometimes even a slice or two of lime or grapefruit to tarten up things a bit.
Sweet + tart = flavorful neutral.
I always use mint, but too much mint is not good and will act medicinally. Your heart will start to race. Yikes! So just use a sprig and no more.
Sweeteners can be sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, and honey. Experiment. You can end up with some very delicious cool Summer drinks for your end of the day porch rest periods.
Iced tea is just perfect for the end of the day rest periods while the wold quiets down. Some of the best Southern Iced Tea that I ever had came from Louisiana and Mississippi.
Nighttime walk in a snowstorm
You have not lived life until you have walked at night in a snowstorm. This is most especially true if it is in the countryside, on a wooded road, and you are alone with only the wind whistling through the trees and the cracking and gnawing of the branches as they sway in the wind.
Night time walk in the Winter snow storm.
When ever you have an opportunity, whether it is an old-fashioned sled ride, or sleigh ride, a walk, or a ski-mobile trip to the neighboring woods… please do it. Get gout and enjoy “Mother Nature”.
Conclusion
Make what you do matter. Take time to savor every moment. Do not try to be like the actors in the movies. Just try to be you; the best YOU that you can be. Do things your way. Live life your way.
Start doing it now.
Make your life matter. Do the little things that enhance your life. Appreciate them, savor them and enjoy them.
I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have similar posts in my Happiness Index…
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Here’s some more escapist, mostly upbeat or odd, movies to help release you from the insanity that has become our daily ritual. These movies and shows were not chosen because they were praised by critics, or because I was paid to recommend them (Under some kind of money-making scheme.). Instead they are generally, known (and forgotten) movies that have the ability to carry you away to another time and another place.
And that is what is important…
Don’t you know.
To be able to carry you away to a different time, and a different place, and a different lifestyle.
And, in this case, for me… way way back to my 20’s. That in-between stage from during the transition from High School to adulthood. As a young man, being strong and healthy, and with options all over the place…
So when you watch these movies you can forget the life that you live now. You can forget your boss, the need to buy groceries, the dog wanting to go outside, and the bills piling up on the kitchen table. Instead you can escape to a quieter time; a time when things were simpler, and the entire world was yours for the taking.
It can transport you to a time when the “news” only lasted for thirty minutes, and just gave summarys of events, not panels of “experts” endlessly debating if Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are racist.
It will transport you to a time when people seemed a little bit happier, a time when that grey storm cloud wasn’t hovering over their head, and a time when … well, it was possible for you to be anything you wanted to be.
We will start with a relatively unknown movie.
Hot Dog The Movie (1984)
This movie will absolutely cart you off to the 1980’s, to the land of ski lodges, big hair, and vibrant colors in the snowy mountains. It’s funny, silly, up-beat and has a positive up-lifting music track. All in all, perfect for these uncertain times.
Who knows what surprises you might discover when trapped inside a gondola with a “snow bunny”?
Did you ever own white Vuarnet Cat Eyes? Are you stoked that padded ski sweaters are coming back in? Did you ever want to be the toast of Tahoe, ski all season long, party every night and hang out with a wacky bunch of ski bums with names like Thrasher and Squirrel?
Then check out this early 80's classic (I know, it came out in '84, but it's SO '82).
Harkin Banks is the wunderkind from the sticks who hooks up with Dan O'Callahan. Dan is the good time Squaw Valley veteran who's a permanent fixture on the competitive ski scene, sharing slopes and hot tubs with his party hardy co-horts: the nutty Squirrel Murphy, who digs zinc oxide, sexy ski bunnies and long gondola rides; Kendo Yamamoto, who doesn't speak much English, but can tear down the mountain like a Kamakaze; punk rocker, Thrasher, who dances to his own tune, even at parties; and a host of semi-nameless others.
The “rat pack”, just some friends that want to ski, drink and have fun together. What’s so wrong about that?
But what would a crazy party flick be without some bad guys?
Enter Rudy Garmisch, zee Austrian ski champ and nemesis of the Squaw Valley locals. He and his loyal "Rudettes", mostly nameless guys and fraulines also from zee Austrian slopes, push some of the locals out of the upcoming competition with promises of good television ratings and new sponsorships from internationally minded companies.
Uh-oh, ol' Dan's not happy with that at all!
Toss in a battle over a cute blonde runaway, Sunny, and you have a recipe for trouble on the slopes.
Oh. I had Sunny-side-up. Und, I had Sunny-side-down. Und, I had Sunny-side all zee way around!
Not to worry, all's well that ends well. After all, what tiff can't be settled over a friendly game of Chinese Downhill? Not sure you wanna play? No worries…there's nothing one of Dan's famous "Leg Spreader" cocktails can't fix.
And to top it all off, there's some fantastic ski footage set to even more fantastic early 80's music. Why they even bothered to make Ski School in the early 90's was a mystery to me - how could they do the ski party flick any better than Hot Dog?
Surprisingly enough it was also pretty damn good. But Hot Dog: The Movie is still the original and the best.
THE classic early 80's ski flickcolparker4 February 2003
It’s a movie about sun, fun and friends. It’s about having fun and just enjoying life. Oh, and by the way, there isn’t any sort of political correctness either. It’s PC free – you all!
You don’t need to know how to sky to appreciate this movie. It’s just a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, and just some good old vibes.
"What the fuck is a Chinese downhill?"
You are not going to be sad after watching this movie. Instead you will be in a good joyous mood and wondering just why… why you never took up skiing.
Risky Business (1983)
Just about everyone of my generation knows this movie. It’s the movie that made Tom Cruse the screen actor that he is today. But let’s be real. When was the last time you watched it?
For me, It’s been at least a decade, perhaps two. And I have talked to some of the younger folk who have never heard of this masterpiece. Can you believe it?
Well, for some fun, I downloaded the torrent and checked it out. (My betaMAX tape is lost somewhere under a pile of dusty boxes.)
It took me away.
It blew me away.
On a number of really curious levels…
As a young businessman he learns how to manage time and resources. He tries to keep his overhead down, while maximizing the profits. Look at how young Tom Cruse is.
Well, after decades, I finally sat down and re-watched this. And ohhhh there were so many things that I had forgotten, and so many things that I can see with my older eyes of experience. It will carry you back to a time long ago when business opportunities can just fall right into your lap, unplanned and ultimately successful.
It’s partially remembering what it was like having the entire house to yourself when your parents are away…
…and it’s partially about exploring what it’s like to have a relationship with a strong and positive female…
… and it’s partially about what it was like before the decades of greed and spite took over America.
fun, funny, and smart
8 February 2003 | by pompaj
Most funny comedies aren't very smart. They're funny because of individual jokes that play by themselves, without relying on the overall plot. Risky Business is an exception and the reason why it works so well, is because it tells a simple story that could really happen and would also be a lot of fun.
You're a high school kid, your parents go on vacation for a week, leaving you the whole house to yourself. That's the setup.
A friend calls up a call girl, she shows up, and the entertainment begins.
This movie is smart enough to know what kids think about at that age, sex, and it holds nothing back. It is very clever at times and has a strong character in Joel, played by a young, energetic Tom Cruise. Another thing that this movie understands is mood and tempo. Everything hits the right beat. Smart and funny is an ideal combination and this movie achieves it.
Risky Business is all about a young man who learns about how to make and manage money with a female partner. He handles finances, and she handles operations and labor.
The thing is, this movie not only takes you back to another place…
… but it gives you context. You can see what transpired in the last four decades and your experiences, right or wrong. It will give you an appreciation of things at so many levels. It’s worth a re-viewing.
"Money may not buy happiness, but it will buy the things that will Make you happy"mercuryix-121 December 2006
There are too many reviews of Risky Business for mine to have any relevance as a movie review. However, this movie is for me a time capsule of the era I saw it in, and a photograph of the future to come in American culture.
I saw this movie when I was 22 in a tiny college theater with a date. I remember several disconnected things about it: The movie was much more interesting than my date was, the music by Tangerine Dream was hypnotic and fit the tone of the film, which struck me as being more depressing in places than funny (although there are some funny moments in it), and it gave me a glimpse into a world that I thought was fictional.
It turned out I hadn't experienced the world it was presenting yet.
When Cruise asks his friends what they plan to do with their lives, one's answer is very simple and focused: "Make money". Another friend adds: "Make a LOT of money".
I well remember that when the movie first came out, I was amazed at the idea of a cordless phone. Here we have a scene where his friend is pushing the idea of calling in a prostitute for the night.
It turns out the movie was precognizant of the next ten to twenty years of American culture; the absolute obsession with making money through any means necessary, legally or illegally, regardless of consequences to yourself or others.
Then taking that money and buying the things that will make you happy: a porsche, a big house, and most importantly, a hot babe in your bed, that will only be there as long as the money is.
Internally discovered happiness? A quaint notion created by the poor who can't afford the toys that validate your existence.
I am sure that the filmmaker would be the first to say that the movie parodies the hollowness of the "American Dream" of acquiring wealth to buy creature comforts, but too much of the time it feels like it celebrates them.
At the end, the hooker stays Cruise's girlfriend only as long as he continues to make her money; she even says "I'll be your girlfriend...for a while".
Real loyalty there. But then, she is a hooker, and is being honest.
She in fact is presented as the only person in the film that is not a hypocrite.
She has no illusions that money & sex make the American world go 'round, and doesn't pretend herself to be otherwise; unlike Cruise and the rest of his friends.
In the end however, she is still hollow, the values the kids pursue are hollow (they are only after sex, not love), and the movie feels as deep and solid as a glossy magazine ad for a Lexus.
Ah. His “partner” has a love for night time rides on subway trains. The scene, the music and the situation are all hypnotic.
Even over the obsession of greed, however, the film illustrates the complete alienation of the modern American teenage male: alone, isolated, judged by his peers with the kind of car his dad lets him drive, his clothes, and whether he can get laid or not.
The emphasis is on sex, not relationship.
There is no rite of passage into adulthood, no guidance from parents who more often than not are as distant from their children as the cardboard cutout parents in this film.
In short, as depressing as this film is when you step back from it, it paints a frighteningly accurate portrait of how superficial and narrow a world, yet directionless (except for accumulating superficial wealth) a young boy's world can be.
There are no values taught in this film, because there are none available as examples. And that is the environment too many kids are subject to. That is what was so disturbing to me about the film at the time I saw it, yet it took 20 years to understand why (as I was, like most kids my age, in the same vacuous and bankrupt culture this kid was in at the time).
There are 300% more suicides committed by 14 year old boys in America than any other age group or category. This movie explains why.
Seven stars, not for humor, but for photographing the beginning of an era that lasts until this day. The message from Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart and others for American kids will be: Don't get caught. A message which is slowly becoming the only "moral direction" left in American culture.
This move will not only take you back forty years to a time where your reality was something quite different, but it will give you perspective in the reality that you now inhabit. And at that, this movie is worth viewing again.
One Crazy Summer
Here’s a fine 1980’s escape. It’s got what we all need today…
No, I’m not talking about super heroes that got bitten by a radioactive spider, guys dressed in black trooping around in flack vests and holding assault guns, or super-dooper CGI special effect animation. I’m not talking about bullets that hang in the air, or magical powers that you can use to push people away with the wave of your hand. You won’t find ugly monsters or effeminate millennial men trying to get a woman to seduce them…
This movie is about silliness on the beach.
It is politically incorrect, very dated, and outrageously stupid. It is precisely what America needs right now.
The cast of “One Crazy Summer” hams it up for a group portrait. The 1980’s were a time of many things, but one of the things of value was that Hollywood has reached it’s stride. From the 1980’s into the 1990’s Hollywood produced a broad range of movies Movies that catered to average people. Not movies that targeted a set demographic or political interest.
It’s a simple fact that there are many of us from generations from long ago who grew up loving those loopy John Cusack comedies made by Savage Steve Holland. And while I prefer there other more bizarre, out-there flick, Better Off Dead, it’s hard for me to dislike One Crazy Summer.
This is a movie I grew up loving wholeheartedly.
One Crazy Summer was a follow-up to Better Off Dead, returning Cusack and Curtis Armstrong from that film.
I cannot say enough good things about this movie. From the warped mind of Savage Steve Holland comes this superior laughfest. First, I have to say that I haven’t seen many movies that start out with a David Lee Roth tune. This could be a good or bad thing.
Cusack is Hoops, following graduation pal Joel Murray(George)to Nantucket for the summer to each some fun on the beach. He picks up his kid sister from “Generic Elementary” school with her sick dog and the adventure begins…
Hoops finds himself embroiled in a feud with a blonde, buff punk named Teddy Beckersted whose lecherous father has designs on bulldozing over homes of a neighborhood to build a giant condominium. Sigh. So 1980’s.
One of the homes, needing it’s mortgage repaid belongs to Demi Moore (Cassandra). Yikes!
However, there’s a sailboat race. And it might be their only hope of saving Cassandra’s grandfather’s home. You see it has been won by Teddy over the past many years and they need to fight for it. Yet, Hoops is deathly afraid of boats over water.
But, with the help and motivation of newfound Nantucket friends (..such as the goofy auto-mechanic twin brothers!), George, and budding love-interest Cassandra, perhaps Hoops can come to terms with his fears and win the race to save the neighborhood.
Armstrong has a supporting part as the son of a kooky, manic weapons salesman, General Raymond(..SCTV’s Joe Flaherty in an inspired bit of casting), Ack, who uses the training from his father to assist Hoops and company in their goals to win the race.
This movie is all about leaving your troubles behind and getting away for the summer to Nantucket. Hoops is afraid of boats, but has no choice when his friend George launches his clunker onto the ferry at the last minute. He shacks up with future love interest Demi Moore, the worst actress in history. But she is pretty young and 80’s looking in this one. They finally hit mainland and meet a whole host of odd characters.
Memorable scenes include Bobcat getting stuck in a Godzilla suit (!) running rampant across an entire model of Aguilla. I love how the smoke and fire is coming out of his mouth as he does so (a cigar was thrown into his costume), and the Japanese investor loving the presentation.
Beckersted (Mark Metcalf, barely recognizable as Teddy’s rather unhinged pops)’s condominium…
… Hoops being chased by deranged cub scouts wishing to perform first aid…
… George a victim of toxic flatulence…
… Bruce Wagner’s nutty Uncle Frank’s increasing insanity every time he tries to better his chances to win 1 million dollars from a radio show…
… and the wonderful Billie Bird as George’s grandma who actually bills the group after a meal!
Jeremy Piven as(you guessed it)a brutish jerk who associates with Teddy and causes trouble for Hoops and his posse, the yummy Kimberly Foster as Cookie (..Teddy’s girl who attempts to make-out with Hoops while he attends a luncheon with his father), and the one-and-only William Hickey as Old Man Beckersted, who will not reward his son and grandson an inheritance if they lose the sail boat race.
Demi Moore is cute, but this is Cusack’s vehicle, though Bobcat and Villard steal most of the scenes their in.
Again, some delightful animation from Holland are sprinkled throughout the movie (Hoops is an artist, appropriately).
The movie comes to a happy ending via boat race on the lovely waters of Nantucket. Cusack and co. build a riff raff boat and blow everyone out of the water, despite some unfair play along the way. So they get the trophy, house, and Cusack ends up in a lip-lock with Demi. Despite the cheesy story, there are some really funny moments in this one. Some of my personal favorites are: the guy getting stabbed during the hat toss at graduation, Uncle Frank getting launched out of the bathroom window, and Bobcat getting stuck in a Godzilla costume.
Sometimes a movie can take you back… way… way back to a time that you have almost no recollection of. Can you remember what it was like when you were 14, 15 or even 16 years old?
An accident puts the consciousness of an elderly dream researcher into the body of a bratty teenager. The problem? The kid prefers dreamworld limbo to real life.
-IMDB
There, in the tumultuous middle school years we have forgotten what it was like. For, and that is true for most young people, don’t really come into their own until their final years in High School.
This movie will transport you to that time.
And at that, it is valuable. On that reason alone.
The lives of a crusty old scientist and a bratty, teen Michael-Jackson-wannabe are about to intersect in a paranormal way. Coleman Ettinger seeks to break down the door of reality through studied dreaming; Bobby Keller wants Lainie Diamond, the girlfriend of his high school friend Joel, a handsome school jock. As Coleman persuades his wife Gena to join his experiments, an accident knocks their bodies out of existence, along with Bobby's consciousness. Coleman's consciousness winds up in Bobby's body while Gena's ends up buried and asleep inside Lainie's. Only when sleeping can Coleman contact Bobby and elicit his help in putting things back, except that Bobby smugly prefers limbo over his aggravated life as a modern teenager.
-IMDB
This movie will teleport you back to your middle school years.
Bizarre dream sequences are only a small part of this fabulous fantasy comedy starring Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, Jason Robards, Piper Laurie, and Meredith Salenger.
Bobby Keller (Corey Feldman) lives his life day to day, as he puts it. He is failing all his classes, his parents don’t talk to him, and he is head over heels in love with Lainie (Meredith Salenger), although he dates Shelly.
But, an accident involving Bobby and Lainie and Coleman and Geena (Jason Robards and Piper Laurie) causes Coleman to take over Bobby’s mind and body, and part of Geena’s mind takes over Lainie.
Now, Coleman has to find a way to switch back and get his wife back. But, Bobby isn’t so willing to, unless Coleman can correct his screwed-up existance, while helping him to get Lainie.
Lainie was a “hottie” in the movie.
A Touching Filmcrice-149 July 2009
It's difficult to me to review this film, for the simple reason that I was 15 when I saw this movie. It was made for me. It was made for teenagers trying to figure out life, love, getting into college, and dealing with adults. I loved it.
It was the best by far of the "body-switching" genre that seemed to dominate the 1987-1990 period, but rarely was a teen drama tackled with more earnestness and via such a bizarre but interesting plot. Whatever the reason, it works and instead of being just another body switch comedy or teen fluff, it truly becomes a beautiful film that deserves its cult status.
Favorite scenes: The opening scene intercut with the opening credits involving Bobby and Dinger (Corey Haim) talking about Bobby’s infatuation with Lainie…
… as well as singing the blues and why Dinger’s leg was broken (reason: his mom ran him over with her Volvo)…
… the accident scene, the dream sequences, the scene where Bobby discovers that he’s Coleman…
… and when they were having a hard time going to sleep…
… the scene in the gym when they were dancing to the rock version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, and the closing credits with Bobby and Coleman dancing to the same song.
Just handing out with your high school friends. It was a different time and your worries and concerns were all quite different then.
This was a wonderfully romantic movie with an original plot. It was adorable, and Corey Feldman was kinda cute, despite the Michael Jackson look, something he was into for a few years.
The Dream sequences were really interesting, filmed in a strange blue tint.
The movie also had an interesting plot, and great music (especially Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart” and both versions on “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”).
I highly recommend it to anyone who likes the two Coreys, good acting, creativity, or body switching movies.
I well remember when I first viewed it. I was in Ridgecrest, California, and I had gotten off the base at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, and pulled into the video rental store in a strip mall right outside the main gate. When I walked in, they had this movie playing and everyone was standing in the shop watching it. So I asked what the movie was, and then I went and rented it right there and then.
I should go as far as to say that all the John Cusack movies from the 1980’s are fine escapist flicks today. All of them are silly, charming and sweet. Nothing is too serious. Nothing is too dangerous…
… and there are no superheroes!
There are also no gun fights, no SWAT teams dressed in black, no making fun of traditional roles… no gays… no lesbians… not transgenders… no CGI monsters, or special effects where people can jump to the top of a building. None of that nonsense.
You won’t be assaulted by “role reversals” and insulted by snide anti-male jokes.
It’s all just good fun.
This one’s hilarious! My family have borrowed several lines from this film and use them as inside jokes. John Cusak stars in this film about a teenager whose girlfriend dumps him for the Captain of the ski team. The film has enough skiing in it to satisfy most ski buffs, but it’s not really about skiing. It’s about relationships more than anything and the results are absolutely hilarious.
What makes this a cut above is the composition of sight gags — ‘How to build a space shuttle out of household items’ is in the foreground, and then the eye pulls back to reveal the mother battling a sea monster in a pot, which frustrates her attempt to cook it…
Cusack frets over an impossibly broken binding, and in the same frame the ‘paperboy from hell’ appears on a weatherized delivery bicycle…it’s priceless stuff.
This is one of those movies where you are with your friends twenty years later and go, “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS” and the room jocularly erupts and instigates discussion. If you find yourself easily amused, can see the humor in the way life hands you a sour glass of milk to wash down life’s trials in love, then you MUST see this Classic Movie.
Better Off Dead is the zaniest movie that I think I have ever seen. Let’s just recap what this movie has in it.
We have a guy that attempts suicide but he can’t even succeed at that.
There is his best friend that declares that a mountain they are on in the dead of winter is pure snow, saying ” Do you know what the street value of this is?”
We have a father that is trying to speak the lingo of his kids and fails miserably.
A mom that cooks food that literally slides off it’s plate.
We have a math class full of genius’ that get upset when they don’t have homework to do.
Lane has a younger brother who orders books on how to pick up trashy women and learns how to build rockets.
We have the entire male population ( and Barney Rubble ) that wants to go out with Lane’s ex-girlfriend now that they are broken up.
There is two Oriental guys that want to constantly race Lane and then broadcast it over the loud speaker on their car.
There is Porky from the Porky’s movies basically playing the same role here.
Dancing hamburgers.
A basketball team that grunts.
And of course the most relentless paper boy in the history of paper delivery…
If there was ever a role that John Cusack milked until it mooed, this one would have to have been it. His portrayal of Lane Meyer will forever be remembered in high school lore as the Ultimate Champion of the Underdog. I laughed so hard my sides ached and tears were running down my cheeks. What has long been a cult classic, this film did an excellent job of portraying the awkwardness of those teenage years that all adults thank God every day that we now have behind us.
Whoooooooo! I’m out of breath.
So why do I mention all of these things about the movie? Because all of these little issues combine to somehow make one of the funniest and zaniest movies you will ever see.
Better Off Dead is so full of energy that there is enough material in here for ten movies. But Savage Steve Holland makes it work. Don’t ask me how, but he does. I think I’m going to stop here because if you haven’t seen this movie you have to see it now. This is a completely original film and it also one that no one will ever have the guts to make again.
Are you tired of the daily grind? Do you want to have some adventure and excitement in your life? Most men in their 30’s would ascribe to this sentiment. And it is exactly this that makes this next movie so special.
What happens when you are living the married life, the life with a job and a boss? When you are playing the role as a father at home, and a worker at your work? Is that all there is to life, you ask?
Maybe you dream about chucking it all way…
Hopping on a steam tramp and going somewhere… anywhere… other than here.
You need a break, a vacation a… reset.
Ya! This is pretty common in America. The society and laws are all pretty repressive. No vacation for you, and pay your taxes, and everything else. You can relax by watching movies that make fun of you. That’s your reality. Deal with it.
OK. I’m not going to elaborate more than what all this means. You all need to take a break and a vacation from life right now. You need to get out and have some fun. You need more than just a change. You need a slap in the face change…
Adulthood has lots of perks: No more homework, you really can eat whatever you want, and you eventually become a good 90 percent less angsty. However, one major drawback is you no longer get a spring break (or a summer break, for that matter). Being an adult means work never stops and vacations are rare. But! That doesn't mean you can't still vicariously enjoy spring break through your favorite movies. Is it the same as escaping to a pristine beach? No... but it is cheaper, so there's that.
There are awesome spring break movies from every era, but the '90s in particular were big on vacation movies. While not all of them focused on spring break, they did showcase the joys of travel, downtime, and relaxation. Basically, all the things you can't just drop everything and do on a whim because you have responsibilities now. Bask in the joy of those simpler times when you naively thought summer would never end and life really could just be one long vacation in the sun by planning a spring break movie night with your closest friends.
Make mixed drinks with tiny umbrellas and throw pillows all over the floor slumber party style as you watch one of these '90s gems — after all, you are an adult and while you may not get a designated spring break, you make your own rules now.
Movies about vacations gone awry are my favorite kind of movies. In real life, you want your vacation to go smoothly, but watching a movie family's vacation go from crazy to crazier is always hilarious. Captain Ron is no exception. Watching Martin Short get shown up by the cooler than cool Captain Ron during his own family vacation is a madcap story that might just make you glad you have to work all spring.
-Bustle
Let’s look at a forgotten gem of a movie… Captain Ron.
A family in Chicago inherits the yacht formerly owned by Clark Gable. They decide to sail it from the island of Ste. Pomme de Terre to Miami, and they sail with the assistance of Captain Ron and their lives will never be the same again
‘Captain Ron’ is a great movie! The plot is simple, & so is the movie. That is what make sit so much fun. Yes, most of the movie is translucent, but it works so well. Kurt Russell shines as Capt. Ron Rico, who has been hired by the Harvey family to be the drive their boat from a Carribean Island to Miami, FL. While he bumbles from one scene to the other, Capt. Ron manages to be successful in the end. All of this makes Martin Harvey(Martin Short) furious, while his family loves Capt. Ron.
This is wonderful movie, one of my favorite movies of all time! A family inherits a sailboat and decides to flee the urban rat race. They don’t realize that they will have to over come many hurdles, including aspects of them selves, Capt. Ron, the boat and the environment.
The daughter plays a teenager that is simultaneously apathetic and nearly out of control. The son is a kid who hasn’t taken an interest in life until now. The father assumes that Capt. Ron can’t know anything while the family begins to believe that it’s the father who doesn’t know anything.
This movie was one of the triggers to me moving to a tropical island to live, oh and to buy a boat.
This film has a little bit of everything in it. Adventure, pirates, lots of excitement, and plenty of laughs. It is one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve watched. If you just want to relax and sit back and laugh, CAPTAIN RON is a movie you won’t want to miss.
I don’t understand the many poor reviews I have seen from the “professional reviewers”. I think this movie is incredibly funny in a quiet sort of way. I have seen it many times. It reminds me of the many Jackie Gleason Honeymooners I have seen over and over. I know what punch line is coming and I begin laughing before the punch line is even delivered.
Martin Short is not his usual manic self and this is refreshing. Kurt Russell is a master as he plays against the heroic roles he has played so often.
The play of the use of “gorillas” versus “guerillas” is laid back genius.
By the end of the movie, I actually found myself nostalgic for the sense of freedom and fun that only Captain Ron can steer you towards
Ignore all the stuffed shirt, up-tight pinheads who couldn’t loosen up if a gun was held to their collective heads. Treat this movie as it should be…FUN! This is the film that keeps us going through the winter until sailing season…then we take the video along on board.
Martin Short and Kurt Russell are TERRIFIC together, and Mary Kay Place? Who’d have known what a versatile actress she is, after all, most of us only had Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to judge her by. The kids certainly do add a fine finishing touch to this hilarious crew.
This movie was not created to win an academy award, it was created to be lighthearted and fun and it far exceeded that goal.
Every time i want to laugh, when I see this movie on, I catch a glimpse. This movie is guaranteed to make you laugh. And Mary Kay Place is such EYE candy for us men. She represents the type of woman we men would ask to marry. Beautiful yet supportive of her family and children.
Kurt Russell is THE man! One of the most under appreciated actors in Hollywood, Russell takes what would have been a run of the mill comedy and makes it HILARIOUS!!!
Captain Ron Rico is about as laid back as laid back can be. He’s an ex Navy boat driver whose been through one too many squalls, not to mention a stint in rehab. A treasure chest of worldly knowledge, he’s never at a loss to relate his exploits even when it comes to his glass eye, “Won it in a crap game a few years back.”
At first glance he’s a man you wouldn’t trust to float an inner tube, but as he proves to Martin Short throughout the course of the movie, he’s “far more cunning than first suspected.”
After all, you gotta love a guy who as he’s sipping beer with Short’s young son, he tells the young lad that he just caught his parents “Playing hide-the-salami in the shower.” I crack up just writing about it.
This is a very funny movie that never really hit the headlines. No idea why, but maybe because I am a sailor myself, I can appreciate the humor. Well worth watching if you want to lose yourself in the Caribbean lifestyle from your cold and damp apartment in winter.
But besides Russell’s stellar performance, there’s BEAUTIFUL locations and photography, a catchy reggae soundtrack, and enough laughs from the rest of the cast to make this a most enjoyable film to pop a bowl of popcorn to and enjoy with the family.
As for me….I wanna go out drinkin’ with Captain Ron!
‘There’s Something About Mary’ (1998)
This movie was filed in Woonsockett, RI when I was actually living there. Which is a pretty old blue collar town, quiet and kind of boarded up. “Going to seed”, some might say.
This movie is great escapist fare.
Thirteen years ago, Ted (Ben Stiller) landed a prom date with the most popular and beautiful girl in school, Mary (Cameron Diaz). Unfortunately, the date wasn’t meant to be, for Ted has his manhood damaged right in front of Mary, and ends up in the hospital instead of the prom.
Owwww!
What makes this work…is its a dead-on hard hitting comedy. The Farrley Brothers spared no one: male or female, handicapped or able bodied, black or white, rich or poor, job or not, straight or gay, animal or vegetable, blonde or brunette, educated or not. It is NOT a cinematic masterpiece so don’t look for one, it is not a punch line comedy or slapstick comedy, it is sophomore humor done very well because you’re going to be laughing at what you think you shouldn’t no matter how much you want to say you would never laugh at something like that.
Thirteen years later, Ted decides to track Mary down, and have a second chance with his dream girl. He hires sleazy private eye, Pat (Matt Dillon) to find her for him.
Pat finds her, and she’s grown up beautiful.
Pat decides he wants to date her. He stalks her, finds out everything she wants in a man, and poses as just that. Meanwhile, Ted has been led to believe that Mary has become fat white trash in a wheelchair. Pat and Mary start dating.
The Farrley Brothers added in “some things” that…well… may have just happened to you at some point in your adolescence, and put a comedic/gross quality to it that shocks you into laughing at it. All through the film you might laugh because you’re thinking, “Better them than me”…..even if it was you!
Well, by the end of the movie, every man who is involved in the story has tried to make a move on Mary.
We all know how it ends, but it’s one funny ride.
The funniest gag in the movie involves a NEW brand of HAIR GEL (compliments of Ted, and tested by Mary). I won’t tell you what’s really being mistaken for hair gel, but when you find out, you’ll laugh so hard, you gag.
Not for everyone’s taste, even those who think they know comedy, but this is that kinda comedy that is hard to do once you’ve reached maturity and forgotten what it was like to laugh at simple things. This is as simple as it gets. Don’t put too much into it, it is what it is, and to me, it was really funny!
This movie knows what a comedy of this type should be like. Each gag goes somewhere, and is really big. They’re usually extended scenes with punchlines.
Me, Myself, and Irene goes for the cheapest laughs you can find, but There’s Something About Mary takes it’s time, carefully planning each gag, in order to make it gut-bustingly hilarious. That’s just what this movie is. 10/10.
‘Wayne’s World’ (1992)
Maybe you might have forgotten this flick. But, I’ll bet you that you can remember some scenes as clear as a bright day on a fresh Spring morning.
This is a positive and happy, and yet terribly silly movie that is just perfect for these dark times of fear and uncertainty.
Wayne is still living at home. He has a world class collection of name tags from jobs he's tried, but he does have his own public access TV show. A local station decides to hire him and his sidekick, Garth, to do their show professionally and Wayne & Garth find that life is no longer the same...
This is the film that catapulted both comedians’ careers into the stratosphere. 1992 is an interesting time in alternative rock history between the peak of grunge in 1991, and the coming crest of the “punk revival” in 1994 with Green Day, Offspring and Rancid. Wayne’s World reveled in this new “alternative rock,” music a concept which was at the time much more flexible than it is now. Rife with irony, alternative rock was eventually the name given to the music that blended aspects of rock, metal, punk, pop, and eclectic “weirdness.” While Wayne is the more metal half of the excellent duo, Garth is the grunge/nerd/”punk” side of the equation.
Ask most men within a decade of my age in either direction to list the 100 best movie scenes of all time, and the scene from “Wayne’s World” where they sing/lip sync Bohemian Rhapsody in the car will be on more lists than not.
Heck! It might even make every list.
Not designed for the “critically acclaimed” snob set, Wayne’s World, the film adaptation of the extremely popular Saturday Night Live skit by the same name, targets its audience perfectly and never even enters the water, let alone jumps any sharks.
The movie is true to itself from start to finish.
Heavy metal rock and roll fandom provides the backdrop for a non-stop train wreck of social satire. Only in 1992; and only in Meyer’s and Carvey’s comedic genius could Aurora, Illinois ever seem so cool.
The plot centers around an opportunistic television producer named Benjamin Kane (Rob Lowe), who, with funding from an arcade owner, turns Wayne’s World into a slickly produced national show.
You would think that this would be a good thing. But alas, it’s not.
The transition caused it to lose touch with its audience, and causing friction between Wayne and Garth, who feel they have sold out their fans and their roots.
A love interest is tossed to Wayne in the form of Cassandra (Tia Carerre), in triangular form due to the attention paid to her by Kane as well as Wayne.
Rob Lowe was excellent as the sleazeball junior television executive, while cameos abound from the rock world, including Alice Cooper and Meat Loaf. Though not publicized as much as the other quotables from the movie, my personal favorite scene was when Wayne and Garth were each laying on parked cars, and Garth starts whistling the closing theme from Star Trek.
The pop-culture cuisinart responsible for most of the SNL skits was working in overdrive in this film, and that’s a good thing. Everything from product placements, to gratuitous sex, to lame plot devices were lampooned.
Wayne’s World, in the film’s plot, is the name of a Cable Access television show (dare I say “DIY”) hosted by Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Rob Lowe plays Benjamin, an advertising scout/producer who is looking for talent to promote a chain of video game arcade stores. He finds his muse in the low-brow witticism, promptly signs the boys, and sets them up in a proper television studio.
You might have seen this move before, but a re-watch is always in order for some much needed “positive vibes”.
‘Dazed and Confused’ (1993)
There is not a single movie that portrayed my Junior / Senior year in 1976 / 1977 than this movie. To say that it is accurate is an understatement.
Wooderson: Let me tell you what Melba Toast is packin' right here, all right. We got 4:11 Positrac outback, 750 double pumper, Edelbrock intake, bored over 30, 11 to 1 pop-up pistons, turbo-jet 390 horsepower. We're talkin' some fuckin' muscle.
This movie is EXACTLY what it was like for me in 1976. My Junior year. It was exactly what was going on including my Orange (goat) GTO!
What a great, great movie. If you want to know what being in High School in the mid 70's was like, rent this film.
I grew up in the metro Manhattan area. We didn't have the freshman hazing, and few of us could afford the cars (although we sure knew about them and lusted after them), but the rest of this movie is so dead on about my experience of High School in the 70's that it's scary.
Every character in the film corresponds with someone that I knew during that time.
Yes, there was a lot of pot smoking, yes, obtaining beer was quite easy for underage kids…
I used to buy it in bars when I was 16.
We made pipes in shop class.
We hung out and had parties at night, drove the streets drinking beers and smoking joints listening to the same music.
There were no youth centers though.
The girls that I knew were as beautiful, and also struggled to get into their jeans. They used pliers too, but they also put them on while they were wet to further get that skintight look.
There was no HIV virus to worry about, Herpes was not a big thing then, the biggest worry was getting pregnant.
Everyone was having sex…
All of these facts also were no big deal.
Most of my peers grew up just fine, and now are upstanding pillars of the community. Many today would like you to believe that this is an example of the road to ruin.
It was an incredible great time.
The film has interesting character development, with the same types I remember. Philosophers, heads (now called stoners), bullies and waifs.
This is my American Graffiti and it is perfect. Waxing nostalgic? Perhaps, but anyone that didn't live through that time will sill love the dialog in this film, as it deals with the universal experience of that point in one's life.
This is high school in the 70's. Check it out.
Almost a Documentary...goodwynn191914 July 2005
The first day of summer vacation leaves a group of ’70s teens exhilarated and ready to party. Their raucous activities might remind you of the debauchery you got up to in the good old days. There are so many scenes that we all have lived, and personal flashbacks will flood your mind.
Either way, the feeling of complete freedom makes this movie a must for anyone starving for a vacation.
This movie takes you back to a time when you had absolutely no worries. It was a time when everything was in a kind of dull haze and everyone was walking in some kind of a fog.
What makes “Dazed” work so well is that it gets the LOOK of the mid-to-late 70s just right, particularly the hair & clothing styles. Secondly, the actors pull off the material expertly. In fact, a large part of the film’s success is the excellent casting choices. Both are no easy feat. Speaking of the actors, you get a few up-and-comers here: Matthew McConaughey, Milla Jovovich, Ben Affleck and one or two of lesser note (as far as future popularity goes).
Slater: Are you cool, man?
Mitch Kramer: Like how?
Slater: Okay.
All the standard school archetypes are here: the jock who parties on the side, the bullies, the hot sister and her little long-haired brother, the black dude, the hot (feminist) teacher, the streetfighter, the cool guys, the geekier crowd, the babes, the guy who graduated years ago but still hangs around, the mentors & mentees, etc.
A Time Machine Trip Back To The Texas Summer Of 1976Oracle29594 February 2005
I graduated in 1976 from a high school in North Dallas and this entire movie is so spot on it's scary.
It is my favorite film. I've seen it hundred's of times and every time it's like watching it for the first time. Only someone that was there and lived through those days could have directed such a movie.
I drove a 70 dark blue Chevelle SS 454 with a 4-speed, over 400 HP and all of the goodies Wooderson described. Starting that car up, listening to the roar of that engine and burning out in 1st gear while in a thick cloud of blue smoke in front of the high school at 3PM while wasted......doing over 80MPH in 2nd gear....oh yea!
I feel sorry for the teenagers today that drive the limp wrist fluffs of metal that pass themselves off as cars these days.
I was a stoner like Pickford smoking weed non-stop.
Some mentioned that the heavy drug use was not too common. Well, at our school it was beyond common. Before school, during school (in the bathroom and football field) and after school. Our school had a smoking area outside the cafeteria where everyone went to light up.
The opening scene with Aerosmith "Sweet Emotion" slowly building up and Pickford driving his Goat and girlfriend in the school parking lot kills me every time.
I cannot imagine a better opening scene for the movie. That was pure genius.
The funny thing is Linklater did not show getting licks from the coach or the principal. For all the "uninitiated" back then all a coach or an asst. principal had to say was "Smith, I want to see you back at my office now".
Our coach had a paddle he personally made that he kept on his wall over his desk. It had about 30 holes drilled in it and it was covered in black electrical tape! When that one came down you knew it! Now with all the PC people coach would go to jail for "assaulting the poor boy" Hell, back then it was called character building. As I remember from the 7th grade on licks were given out.
The soundtrack. Best ever.
Might as well be back at White Rock Lake or Lake Ray Hubbard on a Friday night getting wasted. Head East was a nice touch. Every time I listen to that soundtrack I remember things I have not thought about in 25 years.
The man that portrayed Pickford's dad was dead on. Accent, demeanor along with the big caddy and the tennis playing wife in the mini-skirt and puffed up hair.
Some of the reviewers mentioned they did not think it was too realistic showing/mixing a lot of sexual activity among the freshman girls. That is another point I must dispute.
Maybe at their school in their town of 500 or their strict upbringing but at our junior high and high school the freshman and younger girls were pretty wild.
I mean really "wild"!
This is coming from someone who "lost it" at 12. So insinuating things about a 15 or 16 year old freshman is pretty tame. 15 and 16 year old's were the "world travelers" to us 13 or 14 year old guys.
There is something about this movie that pulls me back over and over again. It's hard to describe.
I'm not sure what it is. Am I a Wooderson that enjoys reminiscing? Am I someone that prefers simpler times? Am I someone that is so sick of PC people that a movie like D&C is like a breath of fresh air?
Was there something magical in the air back in 1976?
The country was celebrating 200 years of freedom. Now within the last 30 years it seems that most of those freedoms have been slowly whittled away with and all that is left is a former shell of the old.
Especially after 2001.
The best scene? To me it's a toss-up between the opening "Sweet Emotion" GTO in the school parking lot and the Emporium scene with "Hurricane" playing in the background while (The Past) Wooderson, (The Present) Pink and (The Future) Mitch walk into the Emporium while the camera films every little nuance in slow motion.
The cockiness of Woods, the mellow Pink and the innocence of Mitch. Put that scene on slow motion and study their faces and the reaction shots of their peer's faces as they acknowledge their presence.
Your own personal time machine if only for an hour and a half. Slip the DVD in, turn the lights down low, take a couple good strong hits and wash them down with a few Tallboys. Use your imagination and for the briefest of time you are back in 1976. I wish they made more movies like this instead of the sugar coated pablum coming out of Hollywood nowadays.
Remember this?
Howard Hughes died,
Robin Trower-Bridge of Sighs,
Jeff Beck,
Kawasaki Z1,
Kawasaki 750 triple 2-stroke,
45 cents a gallon gas,
104 octane gas,
Frampton Comes Alive,
Bad Company - Shooting Star,
Elvin Bishop - Fooled Around and Fell In Love,
Jimmy Carter,
Dirty Mary,
Crazy Larry,
1969 Dodge Charger 440,
2 Lane Blacktop,
3 finger lids,
windowpane,
Diamond Dogs,
J. Geils,
Midnight Special, Wings Over America tour,
Bad Company - Movin' On,
Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes,
SD 455 with the Big Bird on the hood,
Marshall Tucker Band - Heard It In A Love Song,
Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery,
Edelbrock Tunnel Ram with Holley Double Pumpers, ...
...getting high at dusk while listening to Pink Floyd's "Time" and looking at the Dallas skyscraper skyline against the setting sun.
If you do then Dazed and Confused is right up your alley. If you don't then still watch it, the characters in D&C cover all generations, just the cars and clothing have changed.
Dazed and Confused is a lot like the time in which it takes place. The film doesn’t have much of note to say, but you get the sense that it has a good time just being there. By 1976, Vietnam was in the rear-view mirror, as were much of the struggles of the previous decades. It was almost like people were sick and tired of caring about things and just wanted to get wasted. Notice how nobody seemed to care when their teacher was trying to tell them about the 1968 Democratic Convention or our “aristocratic” forefathers. There is a certain innocence about the period that our up-tight and violent world of today could use right now.
And then you have the standard school experiences like parties at friend’s houses, keg parties, fleeing bullies, dealing with coaches & teachers, flirting, the possibility of sex, hanging out, meaningless conversations, fights, smoking pot at school or in your friend’s bedroom, etc.
Like “Fast Times,” “Dazed and Confused” is a joy to watch — whatever your age — because it successfully takes you back to the high school years with all its joys & agonies.
Cynthia: Maybe the 80s will be like radical or something. I figure we'll be in our 20s and it cant' get worse.
Some don’t like it because it’s more of a slice-of-life film than a plot-driven, contrived story. The plot here is simple: It’s the last day of school and the youths want to celebrate. If they can’t party at their friend’s house (because the dad catches wind of their plans) they’ll have a party at the park or wherever, but they WILL party. The rest of the film involves their interactions within this context.
Our film shows us the trials and tribulations of kids just looking to get high, drunk, or just save their butts from being paddled on the last day of school. Not much of note happens in this film. We just see kids doing what kids are still doing. They are all just out to have a good time.
Slater: Oh, a little weed, you know. There may be a beer bust later on.
I’ve heard some complain that the film conveys a terrible message.
What message?
There is no message.
The message is that school’s out and it’s time to celebrate! Besides, there are a few positive points that can be mined from the proceedings: the arrogant bully gets what’s coming, make a stand and fight when you have to (even if you get beat up), ultra-tight pants must be put on with pliers & the help of a friend, be true to yourself, etc.
But — really — this isn’t a movie to look for deep messages, its simple purpose is to take you back to the school years — in this case, 1976 — and all the fun & painful experiences thereof.
There is nothing at all pretentious or preachy about any of the subject matter. We see some cool cars, tight jeans, long hair, and just about anything you would associate with this time frame.
Don Dawson: You know that Julie chick? Loves you. You want her? Gotta play it cool, you know. You can't let her know how much you like ?cause if she knows, she'll dump you like that. Believe me. Like, if she asks you if you want a ride, you say, "No, I've got my own ride, but maybe I'll see you later." Sounds stupid, doesn't it? It works.
No review of “Dazed and Confused” would be complete without noting the excellent soundtrack. You get some great rock/metal of the 70s like “Sweet Emotion,” “School’s Out,” “Stranglehold,” “Do You Feel Like We Do,” “Love Hurts,” “Paranoid,” “Rock & Roll Hootchie Coo,” “Rock & Roll All Nite,” “Slow Ride,” “Cherry Bomb,” “Tuesday’s Gone” and many more.
Here’s some quotes, and slang, that my generation can most certainly relate to…
“Alright, alright, alright!” — Wooderson
“Shotgun!” — Slater
“It’d be a lot cooler if you did.” — Wooderson
“You cool, man?” — Slater
“‘I’ve got my own ride, but maybe I’ll see you later.’” — Dawson
“You gotta keep on livin’… L-I-V-I-N.” — Wooderson
‘Wild at Heart’ (1990)
I’m going to close out this post with a slightly more serious flick. This one is surreal, but anyone that was in love with someone who’s parents hated you would relate to this movie.
Indeed.
It was hard enough finding a girlfriend in high school. But finding one that had parents that approved of you was just about impossible. Here is a movie … perhaps taken to extremes… that illustrates the lengths at which a mother would go to in order to “protect” her daughter.
Lula's psychopathic mother goes crazy at the thought of Lula being with Sailor, who just got free from jail.
Ignoring Sailor's probation, they set out for California.
However their mother hires a killer to hunt down Sailor and hurt him.
Unaware of this, the two enjoy their journey and themselves being together... until they witness a young woman dying after a car accident - a bad omen.
Yah.
It’s something that I know all too well.
The opening scene to Wild At Heart features Nick Cage ferociously beating an assassin to death. Heads are rammed against walls, fists are lunged into guts and what results is a brutally bashed corpse with brains pouring out of it’s head. This kind of high-octane violence which is fueled by maniacal characters and deranged intervals creates a fantastic effect. One which has so much impact and so much individuality to it’s merit that it turns out to be one hell of a movie.
Recipient of the prestigious Palme d’Or award at Cannes, David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” is an amazingly brilliant spectacle for the senses. Bold splashes of deep red, curiously staged musical numbers (Nicolas Cage does his own singing and he’s great!), and the continuous references to “The Wizard of Oz” help create a surreal and dreamlike texture to the narrative.
This is simultaneously a thrilling road movie and a revelation of small town, American country folk. The two protagonists, Sailor and Lula (Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern) are so in love with each other that they’d go to extreme lengths not to be separated.
Their separation is exactly what Lula’s crazed mother wants, as she believes that Sailor is a cold-blooded murderer who is putting her daughter in danger.
Her anger is so fierce that the viewer becomes slightly scared by her: her manic fits of rage where she plasters herself in red lipstick; her bizarre paroxysms fueled by numerous cocktails.
All of her slight idiosyncrasies and mannerisms well up to create a very intimidating mother.
She sends out a hitman to dispose of Sailor and bring back her daughter, but the lovely couple are on the run from her and the law.
Sailor and Lula (excellent performances from both Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern); two broken souls passionately in love, flee the vengeful wrath of Lula’s mother Marietta, who for reasons of her own will stop at nothing to ensure the lovers are kept apart. Diane Ladd practically steals the show in her brave portrayal of Lula’s psychopathic mother Marietta.
Sailor and Lula meet up with some very strange characters whilst travelling far away from Lula’s mother.
The eccentricities of ‘Tuna Town’ in Texas, the insane car accident victim and Lula’s nutcase cousin who believes that “the man with the black glove is coming to get him”.
It’s all rudimentary David Lynch fare. He has mastered the art of contemporary film making: a clever blend of black-comedy, violence and fantasy.
Gut wrenchingly violent in places, hopelessly romantic in others; Lynch has crafted an adult fairy tale worthy of multiple viewings. Recommended to those who enjoy and appreciate abstract methods of film-making a definite 10/10!
The viewer builds an empathy for the two main characters, as it would be a terrible thing to see their undying love for each other shattered.
The other characters in the movie all seem to want to destroy that love.
Sailor’s character, although violent and hard-bitten, seems the most normal of the lot. It takes a sane man to make sense of all the insane folk in America’s underbelly.
He puts up with a lot from everyone, but all he really wants to do is escape from it all with Lula.
They meet an assortment of weird people, especially Bobby Peru, and also Perdita Durango, who has appeared recently in a film with her name as the title, also written by Barry Gifford. It is classic David Lynch, with a homage type theme to the Wizard of Oz. It has the sensuality and eroticism later seen in Lost Highway, the violence and gore, the head sequence after the bank robbery being graphic, and a general uneasiness throughout. But it is a darkly humorous and transfixing piece.
Summary…
Well, while you are trapped in this slow-motion nightmare you might as well make the best of the situation. Now, rather than watching horror and adventure movies out of Hollywood, how about checking out some more light hearted fare for purposes of escape…
If you want to relive your school years…
Hot Dog the Movie
One Crazy Summer
Risky Business
Dream a little dream
Better off dead
Dazed and Confused
If you want to relive your 20’s…
Wayne’s world
Something about Mary
Wild at Heart
If you want to just escape from your life as an Adult…
Captain Ron
In any event, it’s great escapist entertainment. Certainly at least one of these movies will strike a cord within your soul. Have fun.
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Trump’s anti-China rhetoric and actions, including crossing out the prefix “Corona” and replacing it with “China,” are part of a continuation of US empire building that began long before Trump seized power in the Electoral College coup of 2016.
-Counterpunch
My feeds are all clogged up with the hate-China narrative out of Washington DC. Ugh! It’s pretty sick and disgusting. Hate, hate, hate! What a messed up way to start the day!
Additionally, the narrative that the Chinese accidentally released it from a weapons lab in Wuhan is an insult to my intelligence. I guess people don’t know the difference between a automobile factory and a local garage that does tune-ups.
Hint;
Factories and R&D centers have loading bays, electrical substations, and internal water treatment centers. You can see these structures outside the buildings. They have fences, and security guards. They are huge!
Vaccine centers, diagnostic centers, and testing centers are much smaller. They typically consist of a number of offices, and perhaps a small wing devoted to the lab work.They also usually have a parking lot. They tend not to have a fence or security guards.Now, boys and girls, repeat after me:Bio-Weapons Research Labs have fences and security guards.Bio-Weapons Research Labs have fences and security guards.Bio-Weapons Research Labs have fences and security guards.They are not open to the public.They are not on a main public thoroughfare. They are military installations, protected by soldiers, fences, and set far back away from public scrutiny.
So please, stop parroting the Mike Pompeo / Alex Jones "talking points" that the COVID-19 was an "escaped" bio-weapons from a Chinese weapons lab. Jeeze!
The Chinese narrative that the COVID-19 virus came from American military soldiers. The American narrative is that it was released from a vaccine clinic. Which is more likely to have infected the Wuhan “wet” market? Especially since there are videos of American servicemen in that exact market at that exact time. Not to mention the strange things they were doing there. I mean, they ate in restaurants. They did not need to buy groceries to cook in their hotel room, and what’s this putting their hands and touching things so profusely?
.
But that’s how propaganda works, don’t you know. You keep hammering down the same lies over and over again until you start reacting to it instinctively.
You hear it over and over. People talk about it, and make opinions about it. you start believing what you hear without thinking.
Ugh!
Just like billions of dollars had to flow to the software companies to “prevent” Y2K. Remember that? There was a nine month intense narrative that the world was going to collapse unless we immediately “fixed” the Y2K issue!
The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, Y2K bug, the Y2K glitch, or Y2K, refers to events related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates beginning in the year 2000. Problems were anticipated, and arose, because many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits – making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The assumption of a twentieth-century date in such programs could cause various errors, such as the incorrect display of dates and the inaccurate ordering of automated dated records or real-time events.
-Wikipedia
Same thing.
Say the lies over and over and over, until people instinctively react to them as truths. When in reality, it’s all just lies, manipulations and “smoke screens”. But all that doesn’t matter. Because right here we are going to tell you all what is going on. That is, what’s REALLY going on, and how all these things all fit together.
And it isn’t pretty.
“I love war,” Trump declared during a campaign speech in Iowa in 2015. He added: "I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.”
The Thucydides Trap
"There is no such thing as a Thucydides Trap. It is just an excuse by the democrat-controlled media to attack Trump and make him look bad."
-Anonymous
To understand what is going on today between the United States and China, we should take a look at history. For history clearly describes the dynamics between an established nation, and a growing emerging nation. This dynamic is well documented, well understood, and quite predictable.
America is the “established” nation.
China is the growing nation.
More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight into the causes of the awful Peloponnesian War; a war that pitted military Sparta against democratic Athens…
“It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”
The Peloponnesian War; a war that pitted military Sparta against democratic Athens.
Other writers identified an array of contributing causes of the Peloponnesian War. But it was Thucydides that nailed down the true causes and the heart of the matter.
Thucydides, instead of looking at the minute details, focused instead on the inexorable, structural stress caused by a rapid shift in the balance of power between the two rivals.
Sparta was, for over a hundred years, the dominant city-nation.
Athens was growing, expanding, and eclipsing Sparta on every front.
Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic:
The rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway.
And the entrenched, well established nation that possessed the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power base.
In the case about which he wrote in the fifth century B.C., Athens had emerged over a half century as a steeple of civilization. There, there were advances in philosophy, understanding of history, pleasures of drama, new types of architecture, political governance based upon democracy, and naval prowess.
This shocked Sparta. For more than a century had been the leading land power on the Peloponnese peninsula.
As Thucydides saw it, Athens’s position was understandable.
As its clout grew, so too did its self-confidence, its consciousness of past injustices, its sensitivity to instances of disrespect, and its insistence that previous arrangements be revised to reflect new realities of power.
It was also natural, Thucydides explained, that Sparta interpreted the Athenian posture as unreasonable, ungrateful, and threatening to the system it had established—and within which Athens had flourished.
Thucydides chronicled the objective changes in relative power between the two. However, he also focused on the perceptions of change among the leaders of both nations. These perceptions, in both Athens and Sparta, led each to strengthen alliances with other nation-states in the hopes of counterbalancing the other.
But entanglement runs both ways. When conflict broke out between the second-tier city-states of Corinth and Corcyra (now Corfu), Sparta felt it necessary to come to Corinth’s defense, which left Athens little choice but to back its ally. The Peloponnesian War followed. When it ended 30 years later, Sparta was the nominal victor. But both states lay in ruin, leaving Greece vulnerable to the Persians.
And the eventual destruction of the Greeks at the hands of the Persians.
Germany and Britain
Let’s consider more modern times. Where people drive cars, have electricity, fly in the air in planes and have “manners”. Let’s look at the world right before World War I. Let’s consider a rising Germany to a content and powerful England.
As Germany’s economy surpassed Britain’s, Germany would not only develop the strongest army on the continent. It would soon also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” In other words, Kissinger writes…
“once Germany achieved naval supremacy … this in itself—regardless of German intentions—would be an objective threat to Britain, and incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”
Three years after reading that memo, Edward VII died.
Attendees at his funeral included two “chief mourners”—Edward’s successor, George V, and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm—along with Theodore Roosevelt representing the United States.
At one point, Roosevelt (an avid student of naval power and leading champion of the buildup of the U.S. Navy) asked Wilhelm whether he would consider a moratorium in the German-British naval arms race. The kaiser replied that Germany was unalterably committed to having a powerful navy.
But as he went on to explain, war between Germany and Britain was simply unthinkable, because…
“I was brought up in England, very largely; I feel myself partly an Englishman. Next to Germany I care more for England than for any other country.”
And then with emphasis: “I ADORE ENGLAND!”
However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.
It doesn’t matter.
China and America
The warning lights and the alarm bells have been going off for some time now. It is well established that there would be some conflict or a deterioration of relationships between the two powers. Around 2009 it was unmistakable and this prompted some firm policy adjustments in America; in Washington DC.
President Obama believed that this kind of global realignment was a natural historical progression. He argued that while America might “sunset” in various areas, China could be “managed” in such a way as to derive a kind of “partnership” where both the United States and China would win and profit in a kind of “give and take” international relationship.
For a while, it appeared that the Thucydides Trap was avoided.
But then…
Donald Trump ran for President. His policy platform was MAGA, which means “Make America Great Again”.
Donald Trump campaigned on a long list of extravagant promises:
End all foreign wars and reveal “who really did 9/11,” bring the troops home, pull out of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), ban all Muslims from entering the US, wall off the entire southern border at Mexico’s expense, end NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP and all trade treaties, bring manufacturing back to America, end NATO and all alliances (unless the vassals vastly increase their tribute payments, which they won’t), rebuild America’s infrastructure, demand and get vastly better trade terms from China, resurrect 1950s-style family values, and restore Americans’ pride in their history.
These are, in essence, the specifics behind Trump’s promise to “make America great again.”
-Does the Presidential Election Matter?
Trump’s chief rival target was China and he pledged to [1] bring back American jobs (from China), [2] stop the dependence on imported products (from China), to [3] rebuild and increase the size of the military, and [4] re-work and realign relationships with other nations for American self-interest.
Sound familiar?
Once Hitler came to power he wanted to make Germany great again. His chief villains were the Jews. And his actions were all about eradicating the Jewish treat to Germany.
It's not that I am equating Trump with Hitler. That meme is so 2015. It's just that all nationalistic movements require an enemy to galvanize the people against. In the 1930's it was the "Jews against Germany".
Today it is China against America.
So Trump is in office, and he’s realigning all sorts of issues into his vision for the “perfect” world order.
Neocon Administration
Americans, tired of the social and economic onslaught and minimizing behavior of their leadership for the last three decades flocked to Donald Trump. They attended rallies where he would proclaim that he would [1] make America great again, [2] put Hillary Clinton behind bars, [3] build a wall around the United States, and [4] bring jobs back to America.
He won the election.
Once taking over the reins of power, he staffed his administration with “neocons”, individuals with a particularly warlike views and ideas.
Neocon
A small, but constant clique in the US administration that is responsible for most of the recent US military invasions around the globe. To quote neocon Pompeo: 'I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole'
-Urban Dictionary
Not only are Neocons very “hawkish” regarding war….
… But they also believe in History, and the role that empires have in shaping history. In fact, they believe in Thucydides and his writings.
If you were to ask any neocon about what is written herein, they would 100% agree with everything this article is saying …
Among their intellectual ancestors neoconservatives count the ancient Greek historian Thucydides for his unblinking realism in military matters and his skepticism toward democracy, as well as Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author of Democracy in America (1835–40), who described and analyzed both the bright and the bad sides of democracy in the United States.
More recent influences include the German-born American political philosopher Leo Strauss and several of his students, such as Allan Bloom; Bloom’s student Francis Fukuyama; and a small band of intellectuals who in their youth were anti-Stalinist communists (specifically Trotskyites) before becoming liberals disillusioned with liberalism. The latter include Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz, among others.
-Britannica
And surrounded by his small army of War-Hawk Neocons, he set forth establishing policy.
Trump is the embodiment of this looking-for-a-fight attitude. Not good. He has surrounded himself with over-age Cold Warriors, with generals, with the pathologically aggressive hangers-on from think-tank Washington: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Steve Bannon, and minor squibs of like outlook. He has pulled the US out of the arms-control treaties, START, INF, Open Skies. He has pushed NATO against Russian borders. In the Legion halls of Idaho, this may seem virile, the sort of thing that John Wayne would do. Back the commies down. Show them who is boss. No. It is just pointless and dangerous.
-UNZ
In sort order, once Donald Trump won the 2016 election, he immediately, from day one, started his program of MAGA. He did not waste time. He did not pause. He did not relax.
America was (from the top down) full-on MAGA.
Despite campaigning against endless foreign wars and a humanitarian-based foreign policy that promotes democracy, President Donald Trump appointed several internationalists and neoconservatives to his administration, including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
Alex Jones has claimed that neo-conservatives, as part of a deep state, have been fighting a civil war inside the United States Government in order to gain control of the government and influence President Donald Trump – himself, Paul Joseph Watson, and David Knight also claimed this throughout Infowars segments, and that the recent missiles launched against Assad were a result of the neo-conservatives attempting to control Donald Trump.
Stefan Halper, a neoconservative of the Bush Sr. era, colluded with Obama CIA Director John Brennan and FBI agent Peter Strzok to set-up Trump advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos as supposed agents of the Russia government, to initiate an FBI counterintelligence investigation and procure a FISA warrant to surveil the 2016 Trump campaign, Trump transition team, and well into the first year of the Trump Administration.
-Neoconservatism and Donald Trump
Key to that program was the suppression of China. Much of which involved actions and activities that were NOT reported in the American press.
What does a neoconservative dream world look like?
Neocons envision a world in which the United States is the unchallenged superpower, immune to threats. They believe that the US has a responsibility to act as a “benevolent global hegemon.”
In this capacity, the US would maintain an empire of sorts by helping to create democratic, economically liberal governments in place of “failed states” or oppressive regimes they deem threatening to the US or its interests.
In the neocon dream world the entire Middle East would be democratized in the belief that this would eliminate a prime breeding ground for terrorists. This approach, they claim, is not only best for the US; it is best for the world.
In their view, the world can only achieve peace through strong US leadership backed with credible force, not weak treaties to be disrespected by tyrants.
Any regime that is outwardly hostile to the US and could pose a threat would be confronted aggressively, not “appeased” or merely contained.
The US military would be reconfigured around the world to allow for greater flexibility and quicker deployment to hot spots in the Middle East, as well as Central and Southeast Asia.
The US would spend more on defense, particularly for high-tech, precision weaponry that would be used in preemptive strikes.
It would work through multilateral institutions such as the United Nations when possible, but otherwise must never be constrained from acting in its best interests whenever necessary.
-Neocon 101
January 2017
Donald Trump “hit the ground running”. He wasted no time in building up his team, staffing it with aggressive neocons and working on a strategy to suppress China. It’s an implementation of his campaign promises; Make America Great Again.
Unlike President Obama, Donald Trump embraced (or fell into) the Thucydides Trap.
The goals were simple;
Reclaim American “greatness” in all fields, in all areas.
Establish dominance in the Geo-political arena.
Suppress China in such a way that they would always be “under the control or authority” of the United States.
Do whatever is necessary to accomplish the above.
Look familiar?
1. Reclaim Spartian "greatness" in all fields, in all areas.
2. Establish dominance in the Peloponnesian arena.
3. Suppress Athens in such a way that they would always be under the control or authority of Sparta.
4. Do whatever is necessary to accomplish the above.
In so doing there were some issues that needed to be addressed and some resources that he had access to.
Outstanding Issues
There were things that China was involved in that were threatening the level of control that America had over China. Trump needed to collapse or mitigate those issues quickly. If he did not, China’s rise would pass the point of no-return. In the collective minds of the neocons, it was now or never.
The primary issues at stake were…
Relationships in Africa. China was building relationships based on jobs, trade, and social improvements. The time-honored American technique of providing wads of cash to third-world dictators was no longer effective. This was giving China unique mineral and resource access, that America was denied.
Belt and Road Initiative. As long as the only way that China could maintain trade was via the sea-lanes, the United States could threaten the sea-lanes and completely collapse the ability of China to conduct trade. This threat has been real and substantive. The Belt and Road Initiative would be a land trade route. Completely bypassing the sea-lane trade routes, and rendering the American Naval threat moot.
Taiwan. Taiwan is a client state of China. Yet the American media presents it as an independent nation in the hopes that once China is weak, an American invasion of Taiwan can occur. The reason why this is so critical is that the United States needs a “safe haven” from whence to launch ground forces. Taiwan is the perfect staging location. Make no mistake, an invasion of China is a long-term dream of the neocon cabal. The first key step is to PUSH China into engaging Taiwan militarily.
Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a financial and technical hub, not to mention a gateway to the rest of Asia. As long as Hong Kong is stable, Europe will continue to conduct business with China. Therefore creating a unstable Hong Kong would effective disentangle Europe from China.
Trade. You would think that (with all the news discussing the trade imbalance) that this would be a significant issue. In the grand scheme of things, however, it really isn’t much of an issue at all. The majority of trade between China and the USA is between American companies, manufacturing products in their factories inside of China and shipping them to America. Not Chinese companies. Of that, less than 11% of exports from China goes to America. Looking at the entire issue, it’s really well blown out of proportion.
The Plan
Work on a plan to suppress China, for certain, was formulated prior to President Trump’s inauguration.
No one knows the true extent of the planning, or any details of the discussions involved. However, we can pretty much recognize that the people who helped formulate this war-suppression-strategy were…
Donald Trump
Mike Pompeo
John Bolton
Robert Lighthizer
Rudy Giuliani
Nikki Haley
James Woolsey
Frank Gaffney
Eliot Cohen
All of these people advocate for military intervention to accomplish United States objectives.
You see, the thing is that every single simulation where the American military tries to take on China, the United States LOSES. Often, depending on the scenario, quite badly. Thus, if America takes on China militarily, in the South China Sea, the results would probably be disastrous.
They cannot ignore this fact.
So a direct military campaign was not the first choice of the “task team”.
Instead they had to come up with a scenario or a plan that would be suppress China and meet all the criteria as discussed. While at the same time avoiding armed military conflict with a HEALTHY VIBRANT China. The Trump administration was faced with a “first”. Just how to suppress China, without using any overt military resources that might result in a nuclear response?
They sat down and came up with an idea.
“I love war,” Trump declared during a campaign speech in Iowa in 2015. He added: "I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.”
Neocon Echo Chamber
Their plan is based on what they believe China is.
Hard-line Communist.
Multitudes / hordes of impoverished people.
A deceptive media that hides the “true and real China”.
A population yearning for “freedom” and “democracy”.
A hated leadership that rules by sheer power.
Well, since this belief system has been so ingrained in the consciousness of the neocon administration, the came up with a plan that would be able to attack this pre-concieved image of what China is…
Since the people are large in number, and miserable, if you add additional strife and problems, they will revolt uncontrollably. They will topple the government. Then, in the confusion, the USA can establish and control the new leadership. As the USA has become experts in this kind of activity over the last number of decades. It’s an American strength that no one has figured out how to deal with effectively.
The entire plan is based on illusions and falsehoods.
I have been to China several times. I am also in contact with people in China. I can say this. Pompeo's belief that:
... the Chinese people hate the Communist Party of China that runs the country...
- is simply not true.
Among Chinese citizens there has recently been a huge upsurge in positive opinions about the Chinese system. This is due, in part, to its success in containing the Coronavirus.
At the same time there has been a tremendous disillusionment with the United States due to its failure to manage the Coronavirus. There is almost a sense of disbelief that America has failed so badly in dealing with the virus.
There used to be a saying in China that "Even the moon shines more brightly on America." That saying was demonstrated a genuine admiration for the United States and its accomplishments. But due to many things - including the institutional failure to deal with the Coronavirus - very few Chinese people say that anymore.
A second thing that is spurring a positive belief in the Chinese system by its' citizens is China's ever increasing standard of living. People who have never been there might very well find themselves astonished by what is happening there. I have been there four times in the past ten years. Each time, the improvement in the material standard of living is not just noticeable but dramatic. The Chinese people can see this with their own eyes. Before the virus hit, many Chinese citizens had become wealthy enough to the West and they discovered that, increasingly, China was comparing favorably with the West in terms of their standard of living. This has increased the belief among Chinese citizens that their country is on the right path.
There is a third thing that is important to note. There has been a recent rise in Chinese nationalism which is due - not only to the factors mentioned above - but due to Trump and Pompeo themselves. Contrary to common belief, the Chinese have a lot of access to Western media. Many Chinese study English and can read the Western media in English. They know the things being said by Trump and Pompeo which intended to malign China. Many Chinese are, not so much angry but, rather understand this is a sign of increasing weakness on the part of the United States.
In short, the actions of Pompeo are not "inciting the Chinese to act against their government" but rather convincing the Chinese that American greatness is passing into history and China's time is arriving.
Posted by: Mike from Jersey | Nov 18 2020 21:22 utc | 25
The basic plan
If China could be “broken” with all sorts of internal strife, starvation, misery, distress, and trouble, China would weaken.
It’s people would revolt.
And people would turn to “The shining city on the hill.” for help, “freedom” and “democracy”. These people would wave American flags, they would sing the American National Anthem, and they would display “Pepe the frog” in graffiti as they burned the cities down.
As a result, the United States could capitalize on that situation.
This would, if properly handled, result in forward staging bases on Taiwan, with a naval harbor there.
Create uprisings and strife at the two gateways for the Belt and Road Initiative. (HK and XinJiang)
Create Chinese starvation by decimation of all pork, chicken, wheat, and grain industries.
Offer CIA “incentives” in African nations.
An anti-China propaganda campaign would galvanize Americans against China and it’s products.
“Incentivize” American companies to bring factories back to America.
An anti-China technology campaign would destroy existing business relationships in Europe and across the globe.
A pandemic that would suppress China, but would ignore America.
Then prep for a hot war with the establishment of staging bases on Taiwan.
This is an eight-year plan, and assumes two complete terms as President for Donald Trump. The time table would look something like this…
First term in office 2016 through 2020.
Move the puzzle pieces and assets in place.
Start famines, trade disputes, regional classes, and strife.
Keep up an enormous program of anti-China propaganda.
Create “minor” military skirmishes in the South China Sea.
Then… if China is NOT suppressed and under the control of pro-American forces by the end of the Trump first term (Fall of 2020). A different direction must be taken.
In a strongly worded speech delivered as the relationship between Beijing and Washington plummeted to new lows this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “the old paradigm of blind engagement” with China had failed. Mike Pompeo: "If the free world doesn’t change communist China, communist China will change us."
-We must change China or China will change us, Pompeo …
Announce this publicly, and create a military army to attack China. Enlist local nations to do “the heavy lifting” and provide staging locations.
Mr Pompeo accused China's governing Communist Party of "exploitation, corruption and coercion". He was meeting counterparts from Australia, India and Japan - a group known as "The Quad" - to discuss an increasingly assertive China. Under the Trump administration, relations between the US and China have plummeted to their worst in decades.
-Mike Pompeo lashes out at China at 'Quad' meeting in Japan
Build up a military coalition to engage Chinese military locally. (The QUAD).
Create a “need” for the American military to enter China to “save the people”.
Then create an “emergency”, blame it on China.
Go to war. But make sure that the QUAD does most of the fighting.
Since America has “never lost a war”, the victory of America is a foregone conclusion. China hasn’t a chance (in the minds of the neocons).
Additionally there is the possibility of a successful presidential successor that could implement successive states in a complete global realignment to fit the long-term neocon plan. Eventually turning China into a client state of America, like Japan, Australia, or Canada.
Implementation
This plan of course is secret / confidential. It’s not advertised. Though, it was moving forward with great rapidity throughout the first term of Donald Trump in office.
I’ve covered all the elements in other posts in far greater detail. There you can see the details. Links are as provided herein.
This is just an overview.
Create strife in HK. The “pro-democracy” protests were implemented by NED / NID insurgents under the guise of being “journalists”. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Create strife in Xinjiang. Radicalized and CIA trained Muslim insurgents creating “fifth column“ activities. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Forced Starvation. Destruction of the pork industry via drones and aerosol viruses, destruction of the chicken industry, the wheat and rice industries, and multiple waves of germ attacks. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
African Incentives. This is ongoing. Though lately a number of nations are demanding that China pay billions of dollars to them for COVID-19 damage. I cannot help but see a CIA hand in all this. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Incentivize American Businesses. Enormous amounts of money has been handed to American companies throughout trumps first term of office, the greatest amounts came during the 2020 “COVID bailout”. However, no companies have shown any interest in returning operations to America. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Anti-China propaganda campaign. This is hot and heavy. Apparently it’s working a full 30% of Americans hate China and blame it for all the American ills. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Anti-China technology campaign. Well the arrest of the Huawei President and the suppression of 5G technology is only the tip of the iceberg. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
A Pandemic that would suppress China but ignore America. This is the highlight of the plan and really interesting. Three strains. A, B, and C. All unleashed on the world. Lethal strain B is for China. It is dangerous and lethal. However, Americans get the A virus. This virus is mild and safe. It self inoculates (or was intended to). It is designed for Americans to have “Herd Immunity”. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
An Alliance of other nations. By building a coalition of nations, the entire group could gang up against China in bulk. This includes strong showings by Australia, Canada, and the UK. <HERE>
Establish American Bases on Taiwan. Ongoing and NOT public.
In fact, the US is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement. On the ground this involves:
Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary and secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Finance’s IPO.
Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 Trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive.
Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change .
Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of airbases in Taiwan for military actions, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery[2].
Civil Subversion: color revolution , urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization and training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.
Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the US (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors, spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.
Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare.
The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information warfare.
This is mass propaganda to incite people to hate China irrationally and unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The US military calls this information warfare, “the firehose of falsehoods ” and we are all being drenched with these lies.
This is necessary (in a “democracy”) to justify war against an enemy and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.
If things went as planned…
If things went as planned, China would be a poisonous stew of conflict with all sorts of internal troubles, starvation, insurrections and conflicts. The workers would be sick and dying and the anti-China propaganda campaign would scare companies from trading (or continuing to trade) with China. No hot war would ever be necessary.
The COVID-19 germ bio-warfare released at the most vulnerable time for social communicability on CNY eve, would completely turn China into a basket case.
Meaning of Idiom ‘Basket Case’.
A basket case is a situation that is so nervous or anxious that they are completely incapacitated and thus are considered non-functioning.
Something unable to cope with a situation; someone or something unable to function.
The American military were housed at the Wuhan Oriental Hotel along with the Koreans, and the Iranian military participants in the Wuhan military games. This hotel was located one lock away from the Huanan Seafood Market, the “wet market” where the COVID-19 outbreak originated from.
Hospitals, civil services, and all government would be overwhelmed. People would be clamoring for peace and stability, and that would open up an opportunity for the United States to begin harassment in the area around Taiwan. HK would be in turmoil. Military actions would fracture Xinjiang, and alliances would crumble.
If you recall, in February and March 2020, two carrier battle groups were being sent to that area…
… up until they had to make emergency stops at Guam for COVID-19A lethal outbreaks.
By the time the end of the Summer rolled around, American intervention in Taiwan would be in action. Success would flood the airwaves, whether true or not, and trump being a “War President” would take complete control of the government with landslide victories in both Congress and the Senate.
Then with a solid control of the Washington apparatus, the subsequent phases of action could proceed. Which would of course mean military troops, on the ground, to “liberate” the Chinese yearning for “American freedom” and “American democracy”.
Ah. But it’s gonna be a tough sell, don’t you know…
But, the real China is nothing like what the neocons think it is.
China is quite different than what the Neocon echo chamber says it is…
95% of the Chinese population are proud of China and it’s leadership.
Almost 100% of the population has seen dramatic increases in their standard of living compared to their parents.
The population is hysterically patriotic.
China is a nation of nerds with over four times the number of STEM graduates than Americans.
China is ruled by merit.
China is self-sufficient in food, and most raw materials.
China is proud of it’s culture, it’s society and it’s history.
Things didn’t go as planned
No, things did not go as planned.
They never go as planned.
Someone should tell these neocons that you have to have a few “projects” “under your belt” first before you try implementing them. Things never go according to plan and if you go ahead and kick a dog, expect him to snap at you and bite your arm. China will not watch while all this happens and not train, prepare, plan and take action.
While all this was going on, China knew what the neocons were planning. China and Russia shared intel data, and combined saw that America was an active and real threat. If China collapses, Russia would be next. If Russia collapses, China would be next. So what did they do?
Then at the same time, they started to warn the United States to stop; just stop… please just stop…
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.
Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaliing that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military...
-https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/
They also watched with some degree of hope that the intel information was incorrect, and that the United States would stop. That the United States would end it’s anti-Chinese propaganda campaign, it’s anti-China technology assault, and it’s anti-China biological warfare programs…
But America wasn’t listening…
Trade. The “Trump Trade Negotiations” were all a “smokescreen”. No one in the Trump administration wanted any kind of agreement. None. Not at all. <HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE><HERE>
Factories Returning. Well, no factories are returning to America. America is over regulated, the wages are too high, the quality of worker is too low, and the corruption at the state and local levels are absurd. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Famine. The attempt to destroy the Chinese food supply proceeded as planned. It’s just that the image of what China actually is was completely out of alignment with what the Trump advisors expected. So even though the assaults went as planned, the were unable to induce a famine. <HERE><HERE><HERE>
Propaganda. The Anti-China propaganda campaign seems to be working, though it’s giving everyone fatigue. On more than one occasion I have seen people complaining. They say “Get this shit off my feed. Heck you need waders to plow through all the muck.”
In June Donald Trump announced that he would stop the campaign.
Has anyone seen this from Rod Campbell of Australia Institute? He claims thousands of bot accounts controlled by US government spread the Wuhan bioweapons narrative nearly 5 million times in the first half of 2020:
https://www.facebook.com/HongKongGoodNews/videos/200057774713941/
Technology. The Anti-China technology campaign is hit and miss. Certainly the drums are beating and there are skirmishes. Huawei, however is still in business, and many non-American companies, and nations are moving with the Chinese 5G model. But in July, he went all out, and went against all things china…
Road and Belt. This requires Pakistan agreements and ports in the Mediterranean. Everything has been going well. That is up until a massive explosion that some have referred to as a “mini-nuke” totally and completely gutted the Lebanon port in Beirut. An interesting assessment;
The Port of Beirut poses the biggest geostrategic threat to American power projection because China’s Silk Road is fast creeping towards the docks at Beirut Port. The US, having recently forced Israel to cancel its Haifa rail contract with China, has dampened the Chinese advance in the eastern Mediterranean, and what remains now in the path of the US is the Beirut Port. The US must either invade it to block the Chinese geostrategic mission creep, or else destroy it.
https://thesaker.is/china-newsbrief-sitrep-3/
And then it appears that a great accident destroyed it. Imagine that! What the coincidence!
Moreover, the Port of Beirut also poses the biggest geostrategic threat for the US’s eastward-bound power projection where China and its new Silk Road operation is fast creeping westwards and is attempting to land at the eastern coastal strip of the Mediterranean, right where the Beirut Port docks. The US having recently forced Israel to cancel its Haifa contact with China has somewhat dampened the Chinese advance in the eastern Mediterranean, and what remains now in the path of the US is the Beirut Port. The US must either invade it to block the Chinese geostrategic mission creep, or else destroy it.
Evidently, the US has chosen the latter option – with Israel assigned the task of accomplishing the destruction of Beirut Port. After all, for different reasons, both benefit greatly from Beirutshima.
And so very timely is this destruction of the Beirut Port as the Lebanese government has very recently been in official talks with the Chinese over their offer to vastly invest in and develop the Beirut Port: a much needed gateway port and bridge into Europe for China, which represents an absolutely intolerable equation for the US’s hegemony in Europe. The Beirut Port’s rebuilding to its previous standard of activity will be contingent on strict conditions imposed by the US and Israel on the Lebanese government, if the port is allowed to be rebuilt at all, that is. Most certainly, the US is determined not to allow the Chinese any executive, investment or managerial access to it.
...
And this larger US project has everything to do with the current US war on China, albeit presently a non-military war, but a war nevertheless, a war that the Pentagon is militarily preparing for – hence the ever increasing and breathtakingly high defense budget that Congress has been allocating to the US military throughout the terms of the last three Presidents.
The US having lost Pakistan to the China sphere of influence, thus losing an attack dog bordering China, and having recently assigned Turkey as its new enforcer in the middle east, it now behooves the US to use its Mideast allies of both Turkey and Israel, two infamous terrorist states who regularly break international law with impunity: use them as spoilers and saboteurs against an advancing China and against any of Beijing’s Mideast regional allies.
Beirutshima is clearly an apparent US endeavor to push-back the Chinese advance in the highly strategic eastern Mediterranean, as the US attempts to simultaneously pivot eastwards itself through secured territories wherever China is successfully backtracked by the US and its regional henchmen.
But, can this grand geostrategic plan really work for the benefit of the US? Can the US really succeed at remaining the only superpower in the world by the incessant knee-capping of China’s new Silk Road project?
This is yet to be determined. But judging by the deep budgetary and societal crisis engulfing the US homeland, with no sign whatsoever of its deepening troubles abating, analysts doubt that the US has lungs large enough to last the whole race through with China. Here I will add that the US-China fight over the Beirut Port is not yet over. One wonders what went through the mind of the wily Chinese ambassador in Lebanon to witness the Beirut Port exploding as it shockingly did: to witness his pet project and assignment be destroyed right before his eyes and right before a signed agreement was made between him and the Lebanese government of Diab.
-UR
COVID-19. It is the pandemic where China decided to stop playing “defense” and go on the “offense”. This is the way that Donald Trump had decided to wage war upon China. This is how he planned to destroy it, create turmoil, and suppress it.
But…
But the Trump administration did not expect China to be so aggressive, and proactive. They expected them to be passive, and at best muster up some sort of United Nations complaint.
Let’s talk about this…
The COVID-19 bio-weapon attack
"But... but war with China, or even Iran, is crazy! No rational country could even consider it!"
Sure, no "rational" country would even contemplate it.
I've got bad news for you.
Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 18 2020 21:32 utc | 28
America continues in it’s bio-weapon assault.
The six prior viruses against food stuck and livestock were quite successful, but they did not create starvation. Which, I am sure, was a complete surprise to the neocons in the administration. I’m sure that they pretty much “chalked it up” to heavy totalitarian control by the Chinese government instead of the actual reason…
… that China is pretty much self-sufficient in food, and has systems in place to mitigate shortages no matter how extreme.
So Trump decided to release one against the Chinese people directly. I am also sure that the Trump administration felt that “this time” their suppression techniques would work.
They took their time, selected the proper viral agent, and planned the timing directly. Nothing was left for chance. They released it at the exact geographical center of the population, and at the absolutely worst time of the year. They “felt” and believed that China would be unable to handle it, and that the worst elements would be contained within China, and that the rest of the world (those aligned with the USA) would get herd immunity with the very “soft” minor strain.
[1] Location
Indeed, they released it in the exact center of the population of China…
The American COVID-19B bio-weapon was released in the geographic center of the population density of China.
.
[2] Timing
The timing was also significant. As it was during the peak social time, where the mass migration occurred within China. It is a time when everyone travels, where huge crowds are common and normal, and everyone is in very close proximity to each other.
The very, extremely suspicious timing of the release of the bio-weapon.
.
[3] Anti-China propaganda campaign
it's so interesting when people pretend to be ignorant when it is useful to them. I thought that was a specific American trait. So let's give the answer to the author asking the question:
Once the Americans are indoctrinated into hating China, they will be willing to go to war with China and will be willing to accept wha the government will do in the name of "fighting China". Same how the Americans were indoctrinated into hating Soviet Union and Communism during the 50s and 60s and 70s. The government then can throw as much money into the military in the name of "fighting China" and the Americans will be fine with it.
Posted by: Hoyeru | Nov 18 2020 19:52 utc | 2
Further, the timing was such that it was coordinated with an anti-China propaganda campaign that was stunning in it’s size, magnitude and breadth of extent. When the incubated viruses started to manifest in Wuhan, the anti-China narrative exploded all across the world.
So…
So…
So America launches a very dangerous bio-weapon attack on Chinese New Year eve.
The timing was such that it would have spread like a fire inside a bone dry barn filled with hay. This was the time when everyone was traveling together in tight quarters. When everyone was drunk and hugging each other. This was the time when the virus could explode upon an unsuspecting China and devastate it completely.
If China did not take immediate action, the entire nation would have turned into a complete “basket case”.
But that is not what happened.
China’s early conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.
Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either China’s leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.
Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated, the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous as to defy rationality.
In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.
Unlike other nations, China had received no advance warning of the nature or existence of the deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles. But their government implemented public health control measures unprecedented in the history of the world and managed to almost completely eradicate the disease with merely the loss of a few thousand lives.
-American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?
(For some reason…) China went on full military alert.
It went DEFCON ONE on CNY eve. This is something that no one in any of the mainstream American media, the Alt-Left or the Alt-Right media is talking about. China went DEFCON ONE. China’s military were all called up, and everyone was manning their posts, and that included ALL OF THE millions of reservists and militia.
The last time that this happened in America was in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The DEFCON system was developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and unified and specified combatant commands. It prescribes five graduated levels of readiness (or statuses of alert) for the U.S. military, and increase in severity from DEFCON 5 (least severe) to DEFCON 1 (most severe) to match varying military situations.
-Defcon 1
Everything went under lock-down, and then China took aggressive action on an entire slew of areas. Obviously the Chinese intel knew something was up, and had more information about what was going on than what we have been led to believe. China killed the pandemic and stopped it right in it’s tracks.
Imagine that!
But that is only part of the story.
Strange American behavior…
While all this was going on, the American leadership started to act really strange.
The claim that the US Covid-19 response demonstrates that the US can "tolerate casualties" is one of the most asinine statements I have ever read. All that it proves is that the US is shockingly incompetent. Incompetence is not generally viewed as a strength.
Posted by: David | Nov 18 2020 21:55 utc | 33
[1] Don’t you all think that it was weird that Donald Trump and the CDC would insist on no one wearing masks?
[2] Don’t you think that it was really strange that he wanted groups of people to conjugate together? It’s almost like he wanted everyone to get sick.
Wasn’t that strange?
[3] Don’t you think this was strange when there were just terrible videos out of China? With people having seizures, dropping dead on the elevator, and collapsing when they took their children to school? With guys going into convulsions, and women passing out on buses, and little children being rushed to hospitals.
[4] Yet, Donald Trump and the CDC told everyone to stop watching videos out of China (Tictok), and meet together and do not wear a mask.
Don’t you think it was strange?
Yes. Trump unleashed the COVID-19A all over America. And yes he also gave it to his allies in Europe precisely so that everyone would get the “safe” virus. He wanted everyone to be exposed to the “safe” virus. Notice how the Military Allies of the United States, all of them followed the Trump “ok to wear a mask” narrative.
How nice of him…
He wanted American-friendly nations to be immune. He wanted everyone to get the “safe” light virus COVID-19A. He wanted his allies to get immune by getting the “safe” virus, while his enemies got the bad and dangerous virus.
He wanted Chinese-friendly nations to get the bad version of the virus COVID-19B.
America & Allies = Herd Immunity with “safe” COVID-19A
China & Enemies = Saturated with the dangerous COVID-19B
Map of the strains of the COVID-19 and the likely transmission paths. This map describes eight viral variations. But you can easily see that COVID-19B, the very lethal and deadly version hit China hard. The “light” version, the COVID-19A hit America, and Donald Trump wanted everyone to get it to obtain herd immunity.
SO what is going on today?
Of course, you all can disagree.
[1] You can believe that China was "lucky", and America was "unlucky".
[2] And that all the coincidences surrounding this speculation is just coincidences and nothing more.
[3] Bad location for the outbreak.
[4] Bad timing of the outbreak.
[5] Bad coincidence that the key attributes of COVID are all patented in the Untied States.
Just coincidences...
The entire time while China was under lock-down, people were dying, and the anti-China propaganda campaign was reaching a fever pitch, what was going on?
Coronavirus Strain
Nations affected
R0
Covid-19A (safe)
USA and Allies
0.1%
Covid-19B (lethal)
China, Iran, North Korea
10-15 %
But America is NOT that “Shining house of the hill”. It is not run by strong leadership, and skilled and talented workers. It is something else, and the idea that America can allow everyone to obtain “herd immunity” is a foolish play.
0.1% of the population of the USA = 32.8 million people dead.
And sure, this is nothing compared to what Trump expected to hit China…
15% of the Chinese population = 195 million people dead.
But China is not what the neocons thought, and neither is the United States. And what is raging around the world is nothing like what was initially intended. It has become something else…
And now, in America it is chaos. Everyone is scrambling and confused. Some believe that Trump is right. Get the COVID-19A “Safe” it will be just a minor cold. The flu is far worse. While others are watching people die, and collapse. They think that Trump is an idiot Protests are going on. Shootings, and disruptions in food supply. People are unemployed and people are disobeying the need to self-isolate.
But it’s not just that…
The Chinese are avoiding fighting.
That is America's strength. The United States is used to creating the "playing field" where they define the players, the place, the rules of engagement, and the terms of success. America is used to selecting the place. America is used to selecting the time. America is used to selecting the weapons. America is used to selecting the battles.
China does not play that game.
So China is redefining the narrative, and performing a “run around” all of the neocon’s efforts.
Like this for the “pro-democracy” riots by the CIA/NED…
(this) just came in on Whatsapp from a chauvinistic Chinese friend.
Does this also mark the end of Deng's 8 Coastal SEZs? https://youtu.be/zcY3er58aRA
This video conveys the news: *SEPARATE FOREVER* : HONG KONG
China has just announced that Hainan Island which is 35x larger than Hong Kong will be established as the new largest Free Trade/Free Tax centre to replace Hong Kong.
The Chinese leadership used the Hong Kong riots which lasted for months, made Hong Kong no longer prosperous. They intend to let it be collapse, and replaced with: Shenzhen from the North and Hainan in the South.
The special area of Hong Kong was removed. It is now only a city from the Guangdong Province.
Eventually, all foreign intelligence services will disband automatically, America and Britain will be confused, all their efforts have been in vain and wasted.
...
Strategic! Hong Kong status will be diminished from special to just a city of China and replaced by Hainan 🇨🇳🇭🇰
China is still keen to emulate Singapore which is cited in this video
Today, the NED / NID agents have been rounded up and interrogated. Here’s a particularity interesting take-down of a CIA agent…
All the protests, the violence, the riots and everything all stopped. How?
Anyone who cashes out the money dished out by the NED/NID for any reason has their Social Security balance zeroed out….forever!
Anyone arrested, caught on video or associated with the protest in any way have their social standing reduced to “black level”. They cannot buy plane tickets, use public transportation, or use banks. Schooling might be forbidden for their children, and all legal activity relating to normal day-to-day transactions will have to be done in-person in the office, not using APPs.
All HK protestors in HK are now being moved to Chinese mainland prisons for “punishment labors” and “organ harvesting”.
Yes. We are in World War III
Today the world is wracked with three strains of a bio-weapon designed, concocted in America and unleashed by the neocons in the Trump administration.
COVID-19A – Safe. Designed to grant immunity to Americans.
COVID-19B – Lethal designed to kill Chinese.
COVID-19C – A variation of B, designed to target Iran and North Korea.
And now…
COVID-19A Lethal
Oh, and by the way. none of the viruses in the COVID-19 family grants immunity. Once you get a mild strain, you are more prone to get a more dangerous strain.
The world is FUCKED.
It is FUBAR
And so, it’s all a complete FUBAR. Yup. That’s just exactly how and why you know that it is an American military operation. Name one American military operation that was not FUBAR. Name one!
Military slang from WWII, fubar is an acronym for "fucked up beyond all recognition ". " the house was completely fubar."
-Urban Dictionary: fubar
It’s a military operation. That is for certain.
No it is not yet “hot”, but it sure is “warm”. People are dying and more people have died so far in America that during the Vietnam war. Just because nuclear weapons are not yet in play does not mean that it is not going to happen.
China realizes this.
Here's China's unofficial response via this Global Times editorial. I wish I could reproduce the art at the editorial's header as it's very spot-on:
"There is no new wording in the report, which can be seen as a collection of malicious remarks from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other anti-China US politicians and senators. Right now, only a little more than 60 days are left for the current US administration. An official from the State Department explained that the report is not meant to constrain the next US administration.
But the fact is the Department of State fears that the Biden administration will adjust US-China relations, and the release of the report is part of their efforts to consolidate the current extreme anti-China path.
"But most Chinese scholars who have read the report believe it is an insult to Kennan by labeling the report as Kennan-style. Kennan, then US charge d'affaires in Moscow, sent an 8,000-word telegram to the Department of State detailing his views on the Soviet Union. At least, there was no special political motive in Kennan's report. But the latest report is trying to leave a legacy for the extreme anti-China policy adopted by the Trump administration and fawning on Pompeo, which is evil in essence.
"The impulsive and capricious governing style of Donald Trump leaves sufficient room for politicians like Pompeo to give free play to their ambitions. The Department of State has become the governmental organ that has the most serious clashes with China, outperforming the CIA and the Department of Defense.
"Diplomats are supposed to be communicators, but Pompeo and his team have chilled the communication atmosphere with China. In the China direction, today's US Department of State can close its door.
"Surrounded by such deep hostility and prejudice toward China and the wild ambition of the secretary of state, how could the Department of State's Office of Policy Planning make out anything objective about China? Their observation ability, cautious attitude toward research, and sense of responsibility for history have been severely squeezed. They are just currying favor from their seniors and manipulating extreme paths, pretending to be 'thoughtful....'
"Chinese diplomatic and academic circles look down upon the Pompeo team, which lacks professionalism, and acts like a group of gangsters suddenly taking official positions. They not only have messed things up, but also hope to build their nonsense as legacy. Pompeo's choice of opportunists like Miles Yu as advisor in particular has increased Chinese people's doubts over the 'amateurism' and 'immorality' of the Pompeo team's China policy....
"The US' China policy is very much like 'drunk driving' internally while on the international stage it's like sailing against the current." [My Emphasis]
There's not much more to add aside for asking barflies to read the entire editorial.
Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 18 2020 20:12 utc | 13
Neocons view war as necessary
These neocons do not give up. They have a near religious vision of the world where America controls everything and everyone. Where American law is obeyed everywhere and where “American greatness” defines the human race.
Many of Trump’s followers view his role as near religious. They believe that God and Jesus are blessing all of his actions and that he can do no wrong.
Heck!
They even made a coin to commemorate this event, or at least to keep the Wuhan bat-eating Chinese narrative alive.
What? You don’t think that this is all part of a long-term, well-thought-out plan? Something that has been on-going for years. (At least one year to design and produce a new coin, with 2.5 years being the norm.)
What? You don’t think that a narcissist like Trump wouldn’t create some type of monument or edifice to record his glories? Like a “special coin”?
What can I say?
.
Do you think that this entire bio-weapons attack was not planned and unleashed upon China as part of a long-term plan?
Donald Trump has a coin collection of all of his battles. Check it out, and guess which coin has been recently added to this collection?
Can you possibly be serious?
The signs are everywhere. Just little drips and drabs by the spooks involved in this activity. Check out this vehicle that was abandoned in the parking lot of an Airport in Australia BEFORE the CNY eve outbreak.
This vehicle was abandoned (who abandons a BMW?) in an Australian parking lot BEFORE the Coronavirus is officially named as “COVID-19”.
Just another coincidence…
Vehicle abandoned in an Australian parking lot BEFORE the COVID-19 outbreak in China on Chinese CNY. Remember, that it takes a minimum of six months to make a custom license plate in Australia. COVID-19 wasn’t even officially named that until after March 2020.
.
The time-table is still in play.
The Time Table is still active.
Even though things are not going well in America now, the time-table for the grand plan is still alive and active. Some of the things, taken alone are meaningless. But taken as a whole in it’s entirety, show a very dangerous picture of events.
Trump, right on schedule, declared himself a “war President”.
Right on schedule sent two complete invasion carrier groups to the South China Sea.
Right on schedule, military leadership teams went into underground secure facilities.
Right on schedule, “low yield field nuclear weapons” were placed on military forces in the South Pacific.
Right on schedule, Australia military is working with American military “advisers”.
Right on schedule, Trump put Americans on notice to leave China and return to the USA.
Right on Schedule, all air travel between China and the USA came to an end.
Right on Schedule, demands for seizing Chinese assets and defaulting on Chinese loans.
Trump made “arrangements” for a transition of power if he were to lose the election. I have no idea what that means, but if the players like Pompeo are still in office, then that means that the situation will only get worse. They will continue their plans.
Right on schedule, FIVE complete carrier battle groups were repositioned in the North Pacific for “exercises”.
Right on schedule, TWO additional complete carrier battle groups are in transit to the South China Sea.
Right on schedule, the UK is going to add their carrier battle group to the American carrier groups in the South China Sea.
All of this is worrisome.
Eight (8x) carrier battle groups are hanging out all around China.
Each carrier group with two carrier. A large and a "small" carrier. Three in the south China Sea (one British) and five near Guam. Each group has it's own attachment of Marine assault forces and landing craft.
Nothing good can come of this.
Expect some “heat”
I expect things to go “hot” sometime between 2020 and 2023. And when I mean “hot”, I mean a shooting war with America making the first action. It would be some structured military action against either China or Russia, and it involving “safe” low-yield nuclear weapons.
And…
And, China responding… to an exceptionally vulnerable America, upon America soil.
Don't ever mistakenly believe that this event will be limited to the South China Sea. It won't. Any military action against China will result in military action against Americans inside of America.
To think otherwise is wishful thinking and a rookie mistake.
America is really fragile. If you think it’s a mess now, imagine what global thermonuclear war would be like…
A nuclear strike on Mono Lake will render all of California into a radioactive dry desert wasteland for centuries.
A nuclear strike on New York City would destroy all of American industry as all of the “big” American companies are “public” and listed on the stock exchange. Wipe out the stock exchange, and you create a situation where no one can get paid. Companies all over America will collapse.
A nation where it’s every man for himself, and where over half the population has guns cannot be considered to unify under a national emergency. COVID-19 taught us that.
This is for certain if Trump gets a second term of office.
A slightly better situation is that he is out of office and a new President takes over. Still, the situation is still in play and many things are set in motions that cannot be stopped…
In any event…
I also predict that it will not go as any one expects, and that America will be devastated, the globe would we completely turned on it’s head, and both America and China would suffer.
America, a nation that never experienced a “real” war on it’s soil, would be reduced to a balkanized nightmare similar to modern day Yemen, only without potable water, and reliable sources of electricity.
China, long used to war, strife, and conflict for the last 5000 years, would simply dust themselves off and rebuild all over again.
Those nations that picked the wrong nation to align itself with would face similar hardships. Which is why I strongly advocate 100% neutrality in Geo-political efforts. If a nation is adjacent to one of the two powers, their smartest move would be to align with their closest neighbor.
Let’s hope that this prediction does not transpire.
Other opinions
Or, I could just have an over active imagination. Right?
To paraphrase some of the responses I have read…
Everyone knows that America would never even contemplate such a thing. NEVER. After all, it’s currently fighting eight wars, has 800 military bases and 14 carrier battle groups. America is way too busy to devote time and effort to fighting China. Why fight China when it’s much easier to fight in Somalia, Yemen and Syria?
And Trump and his advisors are fine God-fearing folk. Trump holds “prayer meetings” in the Oval Office. With a God-fearing leader, Pompeo and Bolton would never advocate a war against China. The idea that a neocon wants war is well…silly.
There is no such thing as The Thucydides Trap.It’s historical gibberish.
Trump wants a fair trade arrangement where everyone wins, and the Chinese are just evil, bad and eat bat soup. They are filthy foul liars. They steal and are the scourge of the planet.
With my personal duty out of the way of attacking the trolls and hopefully driving them back under the bridges from whence they came, I would like to ask if there is any way to "strip a country of its sovereign immunity" without a war?
I mean, isn't that the whole point of wars? To eliminate or protect a nation's sovereignty? Isn't trying to eliminate another country's sovereignty by just passing a law kinda like trying to simplify math by passing a law to make π=3 ? If you want your sovereignty-stripping law to have any meaning, then you have to enforce it, and that enforcement will look a whole lot like a war, regardless of what you want to call it.
Unlike Americans the Chinese are not stupid. They have long known of the approach of the obligatory scene of the Thucydides Trap and have been preparing for it as best they can (which happens to be some quite good preparations).
...
I'll let the empire's trolls in on a little secret: The Chinese can lose every single ship they send to the "Battle of the Xisha Islands" and still win the war. That's because industrial capacity is important in a major war.
-Posted by: William Gruff | May 1 2020 15:48 utc | 33
It’s like a baseball game…
Yes, the USA can take their itemized list, and pencil off the playing field. And China will sway in the wind for a while. But you know what?
China owns the ball the bat, the gloves, the players, the field, the dugouts, and the fencing. While the USA is so proud to have control over the score, it will be China that will control the game. And no wishful thinking is going to change the reality that you need people, factories and skills to make things.
Wall street does not make anything.
Diversity Officers do not create, build, repair, or structure things.
Lawyers and bankers do not put food on tables.
Bureaucrats do not provide public transportation, or hospital care.
Thinking that you are accomplishing something by writing about it, comparing it in a spreadsheet, or endlessly debating it on social media is meaningless in the overall scheme of things. Real productive nations make physical things.
And China…
Hate it or love it, is a nation that makes and creates, and builds things. The United States, is a nation that destroys things, then indexes and categorizes the destruction.
The future of the entire world belongs to the builders. Not the destroyers.
Update – 12MAY20
Apparently, since America launched the bio-weapon attack on the Chinese New Year Holiday, and China was forced to go into DEFCON ONE, it has stayed at that state or military readiness.
There is no evidence that the Chinese military has “stood down” or relaxed their defensive posture.
As such, Chinese high-yield nuclear weapons (SLBM with MIRV warheads) have been positioned all around the United States and ready to strike back were any additional neocon military “events” were to take place. This is reasonable. What is unreasonable is to think that China would not take any subsequent action.
Which brings me to this report…
"Reports coming in from some of my former colleagues during my years with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force indicate the US Military is concerned there may be a submerged Chinese missile submarine directly off the coast of San Diego, CA as of abut 4:00 PM eastern US time, Monday, May 11."
-Hall Turner
Ya don’t think?
Gosh, how stupid can these people be?
If you launch a WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) against a major power (COVID-19B Lethal), you can most certainly expect them to react. Or do you believe that they are political idiots with the brain of a snail? Do you think that they will continue to just “take the hits”? Do you think that they will go “protest” at the UN?
Update – 13MAY20
Messages are being sent to Trump.
China fires its latest underwater nuclear missile into spotlight with science prize. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force is developing its third-generation SLBM JL-3, with a range of over 12,000km (7,450 miles), which would allow it to hit the United States if the missile were launched from the Chinese coast. https://lnkd.in/gE4MG7F
Update – 23MAY20
Trump is not listening to the messages though.
The Trump administration has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992 in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions, said a senior administration official and two former officials familiar with the deliberations.
Ai! It's like a bratty snot-nosed kid playing around with a loaded gun.
The US Navy has mobilized it’s attack subs against China. I guess the four lone “boomer” subs are too much of a threat.
The Pacific Fleet Submarine Force took the unusual step this month of announcing that all of its forward-deployed subs were simultaneously conducting "contingency response operations " at sea in the Western Pacific--downplaying the notion that Navy forces have been hampered by COVID-19.
The sub force said the missions were mounted in support of the Pentagon's "free and open Indo-Pacific " policy aimed at countering China's expansionism in the South China Sea.
At least seven submarines, and likely more--including all four Guam-based attack submarines, the San Diego-based USS Alexandria and multiple Hawaii-based vessels--are part of the effort.
The action also highlights the Pentagon's desire to be flexible and unpredictable in "great power " competition with China and Russia.
"Our operations are a demonstration of our willingness to defend our interests and freedoms under international law, " Rear Adm. Blake Converse, Pacific sub force commander, who is based at Pearl Harbor, said in a May 8 release.
Attack submarines maintain an outsize stealth capability to sink ships with torpedoes, fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and conduct covert surveillance while keeping adversaries guessing their location.
The Navy recently has maintained a flotilla of warships in the Western Pacific as a show of force and proof that COVID-19 hasn't significantly degraded its capabilities, with the United States and China long trading barbs over military activities in the South China Sea and increasingly so over each other's pandemic response.
China has been accused of intensifying its occupation of man-made islands and bullying other nations in the region while much of the world has been focused on the pandemic.
Geopolitical intelligence platform Stratfor said that the U.S. and China have maintained a "robust operational pace in the South China Sea " amid heightening tensions and COVID-19--signs that point to continued escalation after the virus wanes.
When the Navy advertises the presence of its usually unseen submarines, it's often to make a point with an adversary. The Navy released a photo of the Los Angeles-class sub Alexandria transiting Apra Harbor in Guam on May 5.
As the U.S. military addresses COVID-19 at home, "we remain focused on our national security missions around the world, " Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the same day.
"Many countries have turned inward to recover from the pandemic, and in the meantime our strategic competitors are attempting to exploit this crisis to their benefit at the expense of others, " Esper said.
He accused the Chinese Communist Party of ramping up a "disinformation campaign " to shift blame for the virus and burnish its image. All the while, "we continue to see aggressive behavior by the PLA (People's Liberation Army ) in the South China Sea, from threatening a Philippine navy ship to sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat and intimidating other nations from engaging in offshore oil and gas development."
Esper said two Navy ships conducted freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea the week before "to send a clear message to Beijing that we continue to protect freedom of navigation and commerce for all nations large and small."
The guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill conducted a "FONOP " in the Spratly Islands, and the destroyer USS Barry sailed twice through the Taiwan Strait and through the Paracel Islands in disputed territory that China claims as its own.
"These provocative acts by the U.S. side ... have seriously violated China's sovereignty and security interests, deliberately increased regional security risks and could easily trigger an unexpected incident, " the South China Morning Post quoted a Chinese military command saying after the Barry's Paracel passage.
The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt has been sidelined in Guam since late March after experiencing an outbreak of the new coronavirus among its 4, 800-member crew.
U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor has been quick to note the ongoing deployment of other assets in the region, including transits of the South China Sea by the littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords, the destroyer USS Rafael Peralta sailing in the East China Sea and the destroyer USS McCampbell passing through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday.
These are not to be viewed as a threat to the Chinese navy. Instead they are a threat to any one that ships products from China. This threat is that the United States will start sinking all cargo and container traffic out of China. As (until the BRI is completed) the entire world relies on Chinese sea container shipments.
Update June 2020
China has sped up it’s production of nuclear launcher subs, and has greatly increased it’s production of hyper-velocity missiles.
2020-6-8 · They are also armed with Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles, wire-guided and wake-homing torpedoes and mines. Perhaps of greater concern, the Chinese have already test-fired an emerging JL-3 nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile with a reported range of more that 5,600 miles, according to a 2018 CSIS report. The missile is solid fueled.
Update 18JUL20
Now the Trump White-house is pushing the “America is invincible narrative”.
American media are telling the world that Aircraft carriers are unsinkable, and that America with British support is going to “kick some ass” and “teach China a lesson”…
The sad thing is that Trump and Pompeo has purposely ignored internal voices warning that China has achieved peer-level capabilities and that the American military (while enormous) has greatly eroded in capability since the cold war. They warn that China is not someone that you casually attack and not expect some painful retribution.
China is a serious, serious nation that does not play.
Update 25JUL20
Trump STEPS UP the “game”.
Pompeo makes a speech that pretty much says that everything that America did to suppress China did not work. That the old techniques must end, and a series of “new” techniques must begin.
Overall, most of the world, doesn’t feel very comforted by the Pompeo speech.
RTop/ed analysis of Pompeo's China containment policy plan, "The Elements of the China Challenge”:
"Although it is hardly atypical of the President Trump administration, the document is significant because it represents yet another attempt by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to immortalize his Cold War confrontation between the US and China, bind the succeeding administration to it and most strikingly, institutionalize anti-Beijing ideas into American bureaucracy.
"The push against China by the Trump White House is not designed to be a passing phase, but a permanent and defining change of direction, for which this entire term in office has sought to prepare.
This document aims to be a blueprint for long-term ideological struggle and a series of aspirations for maintaining hegemony, an affirmation of priority and a statement that things cannot “go back to normal”. But it makes no guarantee that the US can ever adequately understand China, or that it will succeed in its aims.
"The reference to George F. Kennan in pitching this document is appealing given the historical parallels, but it is not an exact fit and this, in turn, helps shine a light on Pompeo’s own ignorance of China. It might be described in one simple sentence: China is not the Soviet Union and the ideological stakes are not quite the same." [Emphasis Original]
While I'd agree that differences in ideology exist between China and the Outlaw US Empire, it is the Empire that's constructed upon and is living the Big Lie inherent within Neoliberalism, while China continues to perfect its already very efficient system of Collective Libertarianism through its revamped Democratic Centralism. The really big fundamental difference is that China has absolutely no need to lie to its people, whereas the exact opposite's true within the Neoliberal West.
After a lengthy period of public input, the government meets and eventually publishes its 5-year plan of development, which is contained within an even larger plan that's also been devised with public input and once put together is also published for public consumption. And since 2010, all plans have existed within China's UN 2030 Development plan, which is also available to the public.
In a great many respects. China is a more open society than the Outlaw US Empire. Why? Because it doesn't need to lie to its citizens because it fights against the corruption that provides the reason for such lies--China has no Financial Parasitism it must mask from its citizens whereas the Outlaw US Empire is drowning in a massive sea of corruption that is killing it. Clearly, Pompeo wants that to continue.
Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 18 2020 19:59 utc | 7
Further, delusional State Department policy planning paper sees the light.
Axioscalls it a “Kennan-style paper”. In 1946 George Kennan, then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, wrote his ‘Long Telegram’ that defined U.S. Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union for the next decades. And we all know how that worked out.
But the China paper which the State Department published is not comparable to the ‘Long Telegram’. It is a propaganda piece that reflects the naive views of the outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompous.
Pompous’ premise is that the Chinese people hate the Communist Party of China that runs the country and that China is not a democracy. But that is not what the people of China believe:
Charted below are the survey results from 20 countries, and they illustrate some startling beliefs — not least that 73% of Chinese consider China to be democratic, whereas only 49% of Americans believe the same about the U.S.
Read this thread to find out why that is the case:
On twitter, as a Chinese, the most frequently asked question for me is, why don't you oppose the CPC? Why don't Chinese support western style democracy? Why do Chinese people support President Xi, who has no votes? Now, I'm going to tell them why.(1/N)
The recommendations of the State Department paper listed by Axios are not practical steps but pure ideology:
The blueprint: The paper lays out “ten tasks” for the U.S. to accomplish.
Promoting constitutional government and civil society at home.
Maintaining the world’s strongest military.
Fortifying the rules-based international order.
Reevaluating its alliance system.
Strengthening its alliance system and creating new international organizations to promote democracy and human rights.
Cooperating with China when possible and constraining Beijing when appropriate.
Educating Americans about the China challenge.
Train a new generation of public servants who understand great-power competition with China.
Reforming the U.S. education system to help students understand the responsibility of citizenship in a complex information age.
Championing the principles of freedom in word and in deed.
Note especially the points 7 to 10.
They have nothing to do with China. They call for domestic propaganda, more domestic propaganda and even more domestic propaganda. How brainwashing and stupidifying one’s own people is supposed to challenge China is beyond me.
Update 17AUG20
Military action on the South-West Tier of the BRI.
The Port of Beirut poses the biggest geostrategic threat to American power projection because China’s Silk Road is fast creeping towards the docks at Beirut Port. The US, having recently forced Israel to cancel its Haifa rail contract with China, has dampened the Chinese advance in the eastern Mediterranean, and what remains now in the path of the US is the Beirut Port. The US must either invade it to block the Chinese geostrategic mission creep, or else destroy it.[MORE]
Seems that Trump authorized the use of 6kt mini-nuke to destroy the port of Beirut. This was conducted by aircraft of the Israel Air Force, and they apparently used two missiles.
Gabriel anti ship missile.
Israeli Delilah missile carrying a 6kt mini-nuke.
Radiation readings in Europe has confirmed that a nuclear warhead was used.
Radiation detected from a nuclear explosion.
Trump has admitted to participation and direction of this attack. But he did not confess to using nuclear weapons.
This effort puts a immediate pause on the Chinese Belt and Road initiative with a port on the Mediterranean sea.
Update 25AUG20
Trump and Pompeo are pushing, pushing, pushing…
China has gone from “Most Favored Trading Partner” status in 2016 under President Obama…
… to an “Enemy of America” under trump in 2020. It’s a 180 degree turn in a global relationship.
US lawmakers have introduced a bill to change the way the federal government refers to the leader of China. The ‘Name the Enemy Act’ would require that official US government documents instead refer to the head of state according to his or her role as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This implies the new bill stands to prohibit the use of the term “president”.
-President No More? US Moves to Ban Chinese Leader Xi Jinping’s Title
And China, being what it is, is not blind to what is going on…
Here are some of the key points.
1. On the trade war front, Beijing won’t shut down US businesses already operating in China. But companies which want to enter the market in finance, information technology, healthcare and education services will not be approved.
2. Beijing won’t dump all its overwhelming mass of US Treasuries in one go, but – as it already happens – divestment will accelerate. Last year, that amounted to $100 billion. Up to the end of 2020, that could reach $300 billion.
3. The internationalization of the yuan, also predictably, will be accelerated. That will include configuring the final parameters for clearing US dollars through the CHIPS Chinese system – foreseeing the incandescent possibility Beijing might be cut off from SWIFT by the Trump administration or whoever will be in power at the White House after January 2021.
4. On what is largely interpreted across China as the “full spectrum war” front, mostly Hybrid War, the PLA has been put into Stage 3 alert – and all leaves are canceled for the rest of 2020. There will be a concerted drive to increase all-round defense spending to 4% of GDP and accelerate the development of nuclear weapons. Details are bound to emerge during the Central Committee meeting in October.
5. The overall emphasis is on a very Chinese spirit of self-reliance, and building what can be defined as a national economic “dual circulation” system: the consolidation of the Eurasian integration project running in parallel to a global yuan settlement mechanism.
Inbuilt in this drive is what has been described as “to firmly abandon all illusions about the United States and conduct war mobilization with our people. We shall vigorously promote the war to resist US aggression (…) We will use a war mindset to steer the national economy (…) Prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the US.”
It’s unclear as it stands if these are only trial balloons disseminated across Chinese public opinion or decisions reached at the “invisible” Beidaihe. So all eyes will be on what kind of language this alarming configuration will be packaged when the Central Committee presents its strategic planning in October. Significantly, that will happen only a few weeks before the US election.
It’s all about continuity
All of the above somewhat mirrors a recent debate in Amsterdam on what constitutes the Chinese “threat” to the West. Here are the key points.
1. China constantly reinforces its hybrid economic model – which is an absolute rarity, globally: neither totally publicly owned nor a market economy.
2. The level of patriotism is staggering: once the Chinese face a foreign enemy, 1.4 billion people act as one.
3. National mechanisms have tremendous force: absolutely nothing blocks the full use of China’s financial, material and manpower resources once a policy is set.
4. China has set up the most comprehensive, back to back industrial system on the planet, without foreign interference if need be (well, there’s always the matter of semiconductors to Huawei to be solved).
China plans not only in years, but in decades. Five year plans are complemented by ten year plans and as the meeting chaired by Xi showed, 15 year plans. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is in fact a nearly 40-year plan, designed in 2013 to be completed in 2049.
And continuity is the name of the game – when one thinks that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first developed in 1949 and then expanded by Zhou Enlai at the Bandung conference in 1955 are set in stone as China’s foreign policy guidelines.
-China: everything proceeding according to plan
You all can buy all the guns and ammo you want. You can read all the social media that you are able to. You can stock up on food and toilet paper…
… but you are wasting your time unless you invest in iodine pills, and Geiger counters. Any attack on either Russia or China will result in almost all American cities destroyed in large, enormous nuclear explosions.
Update 26AUG20
China launches four of it’s “Aircraft Carrier Killer Missiles” into the South China Sea. DoD can confirm that the Chinese military launched four medium-range missiles Wednesday from mainland China,” a defense official said.”The missiles impacted in the South China Sea between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands,” the official added. “The launch appears to have been part of a previously announced exercise.”
A Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Wednesday 2SEP20 at 12:03 a.m. The test launch used an unarmed missile that traveled over 4,000 miles, at a speed of more than 15,000 mph.
Apparently, the China Government agrees with my appraisal. From a message group that I belong to…
Chinese propaganda getting good. Unlike West propaganda, Chinese includes evidence. exactly consistent with Uriah Heep's version.
Thanks Jeff, but Kevin it may be a conspiracy that Heep told it in real time and official docu youtubed 8 months later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEo3qk-4yx8
On September 19, 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) published the Provisions on the Unreliable Entity List. That was one day after the U.S. Commerce Department announced its ban on American users downloading the Chinese app WeChat and video-sharing app TikTok.
This article takes corresponding measures against the following actions of FOREIGN ENTITIES:
1) Endanger China’s national sovereignty security, or development interests 2) Violating the principles of normal market transactions, interrupting normal transactions with Chinese entities, or adopting discriminatory measures against Chinese entities, seriously damaging the legal rights of the entity.
3OCT20 Update.
After an entire year in blaming China for the coronavirus. Donald Trump (after a very bad public debate with his election opponent) announced that he has the COVID-19. And was flown to a hospital within a thirty minute drive of Fort Detrick (the presumptive point of origin of the COVID-19 and all American bio-weapons programs).
Minutes before the announcement, American “doomsday planes” were launched. As they control communication with the SLBM MIRV’ s that are housed in the “boomer” submarines around the world.
A look at the bigger picture is in order. Forget about all the “details”. Just name another President (any President) that [1] not only sent three assault carrier groups to the Chinese coast (with a total of five aircraft carriers), [2] launched a series of viral attacks simultaneously with [3] a hysterically-active anti-China propaganda campaign, and [4] went after Chinese industry to the extent that he did, [5] only to have nuclear ships, subs, planes, and ICBMs on active on-call status.
Name one.
If this is not a preparation for a full-scale nuclear war, I do not know what is.
12 OCT 20 Update.
It appears that President Trump might not win reelection. And as a result (I assume) there has been a flood of articles that basically state that no matter who wins the 2020 election, the American foreign policy will not change. It’s a dominant narrative leading up to the election date.
“Biden will continue the Anti-China policies of Trump.”
Imagine that!
NIKKEI is a 100% American State Department media outlet designed to manipulation discourse in the Asian-Pacific Rim. It is down line from Mike Pompeo.
.
Seriously! This is absurd!
Yet, why all the articles? Really?
The latest article from the Moon Over Alabama is a piece titled “U.S. Elections Do Not Change Its Foreign Policies”. It’s part of a nine week long period of articles that pretty much posits that the hybrid-war with China will continue whether Trump is in Office or Biden. The articles argue the same points made by others. Over and over. It’s all a rehash.
Screen Shot.
The MoA is perhaps the most logical. But all in all they are just nonsense. And they actually are NONSENSE. These articles assume a third grade reading comprehension, with a knowledge of recent history that evaporates within months.
Listen up boys and girls…
Elections DO change American Foreign Policy.
Under Bush, and Obama China has “Most Favored Nation Status”. Today, the status with China is “Enemy” (especially considering the names of the bills being pushed through congress. Namely the “Name the Enemy act”.)
That’s a pretty big change. I would say. Wouldn’t you?
But according to all the articles… “American foreign policy does not change when the presidency changes”. Yet, when Trump was elected the Foreign Polices all changed drastically. In fact, NOT ONE SINGLE POLICY stayed the same.
So…
… what is the true and real purpose of this nonsense?
To convince people that nothing is going to change if Biden is elected? When the fact and truth is the exact opposite. As we used to say in the States “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
My points.
[1] This entire premise is a big bunch of nonsense.
[2] This premise is being promoted in all of the media; mainstream, alt-right, alt-left.
[3] Our most treasured sources for alternative journalism have been tainted and corrupted to a point where they too, now regurgitate the ‘approved” government narratives.
Think!
Think people!
So for a fun exercise, can anyone tell me which foreign polices that Trump DID NOT CHANGE. As to provide some validity to this onslaught narrative? Because if all of these articles are correct, then there must be evidence to base it all on. So, what policies did President Trump leave intact?
The answer is; NONE. He tore up of every single policy that Biden and Obama worked together on. Those that the did not tear up, he openly flaunted and violated. But now, amazingly, Biden is going to embrace the Trump neocon methodology?
Remember boys and girls, what’s the purpose of having a “democracy” if you cannot change the leadership when you are unhappy with their policies?
What’s the point if both political parties have the same point of view and the same policies?
What kind of government do you have then?
Here’s a infographic showing the differences in the two political parties.
The differences in the two political parties.
Tracking this narrative on my LinkedIN account pretty much indicates that the (American government) ‘Bot’s are promoting this narrative. The exact same venues that had the ‘bot attacks on China all throughout 2020.
That Biden would embraced Donald Trump anti-China stance and policies.
That Biden did not care that Trump tore up every one of the polices and treaties that he developed in the previous 8 years of the Obama administration.
That there are no changes in policy during an election. That democracies do not change polices and elections have no no effect in policy changes.
I cannot fully understand why the Trump Administration is promoting this narrative right now before the election, unless [1] it expects to lose, and [2] is trying to create a “fall-back position” where the neocons can argue that…
"Biden MUST continue the Trump anti-China policies as it was what the American people expect."
Never the less, the 2020 election will see drastic changes away from the Trump Administration neocon “war Hawk” ultimatums, to a much more balanced and cooperative foreign policy. The Republican party are “war hawks”, with a very small and dangerous group known as neocons that LIVE FOR WAR, and that is who is running the Trump White House. The Democrat party are “doves” that seek consensus and agreements. To believe that somehow Trump’s neocon administration has fundamentally changed the nature of American political discourse is delusional.
After Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization — in protest of what he claim was a bias toward China — Biden this summer pledged to rejoin the U.N.'s health agency on his first day in office. Biden is a “globalist at heart,” wrote Natasha Kassam, a research fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute political think tank, in the Guardian.
-MSN
In truth, we can see that many (if not all) of the Trump Administration policies will end, be reversed or modified beyond recognition. All these stories out of the American media are partial and half-truths. Biden will need to deal with the Chinese situation. Primarily because Trump has made such a mess of things, and China is on the rise as a ascending power. Biden will need to sort out Americas role in this rise, for good or bad. But hopefully one that isn’t as contentious as Trumps has been.
Although transitions of power can always include abrupt changes, the shift from Trump to Biden - from one president who sought to undermine established norms and institutions to another who has vowed to restore the established order - will be among the most startling in American history.
Biden's top advisers have spent months quietly working on how best to implement his agenda, with hundreds of transition officials preparing to get to work inside various federal agencies. They have assembled a book filled with his campaign commitments to help guide their early decisions.
Biden is planning to set up a coronavirus task force on Monday, in recognition that the global pandemic will be the primary issue that he must confront. The task force, which could begin meeting within days, will be co-chaired by former surgeon general Vivek Murthy and David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
But there has also been a recognition of those around him that he may have to lean more on executive actions that he had once hoped. He can reorient various federal agencies and regulations, and he can adopt a different posture on the world stage.
-CHRON
Fake anti-China ‘bots and accounts are being discovered, rooted out, and removed from industrial and career websites. This is from LinkedIN…
Series of fake identities posting anti-China narratives throughout all of 2020.
15OCT20 Update
American “big data” are busy manipulating and massaging all data to make America look strong, powerful and healthy. This is being caught in bits and pieces, here and there. USA media will not cover it. I assume compliance.
Well…
This is obviously a fabrication. If this were true all the global stock markets would show signs of serious collapse. But they didn’t. So why is the data being revised backwards? The only thing that I can think of is to make America appear healthier than it actually is, economically.
As far as I am concerned, all data from the United States and England are subject to the need for careful review. I cannot help but question it’s validity. And you shouldn’t either.
Here’s another example, from the same source,…
According to this, the United States is the best prepared. And China is just so-so prepared. This was written in 2020, but used 2019 data, while the United States was absolutely floundering from the COVID-19, and China was successfully returning to normal after it dealt with the pandemic.
16OCT20 Update
A second new virus (perhaps another) COVID has hit China, middle of October.
It will probably be named COVID-20 in a few months. It is NOT a variation of COVID-19, as a “second wave”. It is a completely new, and completely different virus. By all reports it is much worse than COVID-19. More lethal. More contagious. More dangerous.
It is being handled differently in different regions and provinces.
Latest news in China is sudden lock downs of all restaurants and public venues starting last night at 10PM. This is for the tier one cities. This will be for a minimum of two weeks. Military is still on DEFCON ONE, of course, but the militia are notified to stand ready.
A different type of COVID is apparently breaking out in China. It is unlike the COVID-19, as it was a alpha genome, and this is a beta genome. What ever the fuck that means. I think it means pineapples and toasters.
It's not a modified staring of COVID-19 but instead a BRAND NEW virus.
This NEW and UNUSUAL virus is apparently attacking both humans and pigs. It causes violent diarrhea and vomiting, and then your lungs fill up with fluid, it turns to cement and you die.
Middle of October 2020.
A totally new virus attacks China.
Stand by. It’s too early to do anything about all this. All residences are in scanning mode. Masks are back on. Public establishments (in certain tier one cities) are shut down for two weeks. Military is still on alert. Militia are called on reserve status.
American media is clueless.
17OCT20 Update
From MoA. It discusses the fall-back positions (since the suppression of China) failed. Here, the concentration is on the QUAD alliance building. Which is nothing more than an Asian NATO like structure under the control of the US Military.
U.S. Fails To Find Allies For Waging War On China
The U.S. wants to counter China's growing economic and political standing in the world.
The Obama administration had attempted a 'pivot to Asia' by building a low tariff economic zone via the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It would have excluded China. The Trump administration rejected the TPP and withdrew from it. It launched an economic war against China by increasing tariffs on Chinese products, prohibiting high tech supplies to Chinese manufacturers, and by denying Chinese companies access to its market.
It has also tried to build a military coalition that would help it to threaten China. It revived the 2007-2008 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and rebranded it as the U.S.-Australia-India-Japan Consultations Quad. The aim was to turn it into an Asian NATO under U.S. command:
The U.S. State Department’s No. 2 diplomat said Monday that Washington was aiming to “formalize” growing strategic ties with India, Japan and Australia in a forum known as “the Quad” — a move experts say is implicitly designed to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.
“It is a reality that the Indo-Pacific region is actually lacking in strong multilateral structures. They don’t have anything of the fortitude of NATO, or the European Union,”
-U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun said in an online seminar on the sidelines of the annual U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum.
“There is certainly an invitation there at some point to formalize a structure like this,” he added.
But it turns out that neither Australia nor Japan nor India have any interest in a hard stand towards China. All look to China as an important trade partner. They know that any conflict with it would cost them dearly.
On October 6 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Tokyo for a meeting with the other foreign ministers of the Quad. He soon found that no one would join him in his militant talk:
In a meeting with foreign ministers from Japan, India and Australia in Tokyo, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged on Tuesday that they strengthen their quartet of democracies to resist an increasingly assertive China.
...
If, as it appeared, Pompeo was pushing other members of the Quad to take the U.S. side in a confrontation with China, he did not score any ringing public endorsements, and his remarks clashed with those of his host. Pompeo aimed straight at the Chinese Communist Party in remarks before the four nations' top diplomats sat down to talk.
"As partners in this Quad, it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the CCP's exploitation, corruption and coercion," he said.
But Japan's chief government spokesman, Katsunobu Kato, insisted at a press briefing Tuesday:
"This Quad meeting is not being held with any particular country in mind."
Australia and India were similarly reluctant to say anything that would potentially offend China.
Pompeo's initiative has failed.
The former Indian ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar explains why the Quad won't fly:
China cannot be beaten since, unlike the USSR, it is part of the same global society as the US. Look at the sheer spread of the US-China battlefields — global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, scientific collaboration and so on. It speaks of China’s vast global reach.
This wasn’t the case with USSR.
Above all, China has no messianic ideology to export and prefers to set a model by virtue of its performance. It is not in the business of instigating regime change in other countries, and actually gets along rather well with democracies.
...
The US created the ASEAN but today no Asian security partner wants to choose between America and China. The ASEAN cannot be repurposed to form a coalition to counter China. Thus, no claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the US in its naval fracas with China.
China has resources, including money, to offer its partners, whereas, the US budget is in chronic deficit and even routine government operations must now be funded with debt. It needs to find resources needed to keep its human and physical infrastructure at levels competitive with those of China and other great economic powers.
Why on earth should India get entangled in this messy affair whose climax is a foregone conclusion?
...
China has no need to fight wars when it is already winning.
The U.S. also tried to incite its European NATO allies to take a stand against China:
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Saturday that China's increasing influence had created a "fundamental shift in the global balance of power" that should not be overlooked. In an interview with Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper, that was released in advance, the Norwegian official said that Beijing had the second-largest defense budget in the world after the United States, and was investing heavily in nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could reach Europe.
"One thing is clear: China is coming ever closer to Europe's doorstep," he said. "NATO allies must face this challenge together."
That initiative will sink in Europe just as fast as the Quad initiative has sunk in Asia and for the very same reasons. China is not an ideological or military danger to Europe. It is an economic behemoth and relation with it need to be carefully handled. They require respect and talks and not saber rattling.
China has overtaken the U.S. as the EU's biggest trading partner:
In the first seven months of 2020, China surpassed the United States to become the biggest trading partner of the European Union (EU), said Eurostat, the EU's statistics organization.
...
The EU's imports from China increased by 4.9 per cent year-on-year in the January-July period, noted Eurostat. According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, the largest economy in the EU, China, Germany's biggest trading partner since 2016, surpassed the United States for the first time in the second quarter of this year to become Germany's largest export market, and Germany's exports to China in July have rebounded almost to last year's level.
It is time for the U.S. to look into a mirror and to awake to reality. It is highly indebted country with a way too expensive but ineffective military. Over the last decades its economic role in the world has continuously declined. The constant militant positions and 'do as we say' attitude has alienated its allies. Without allies the U.S. has no chance to defeat China in any potential conflict.
What the U.S. still could do is to honestly compete with China. But that would require humility, a strong industrial policy and a well paid and competitive work force.
Neither of that is in sight.
So…
The fall-back position, for the fall-back position is to incite riots in Thailand via CIA sponsored NGO’s. Then seize control of the government, and allow American military to use their bases for staging locations in South East Asia.
CIA is really pushing this NGO effort to destabilize Southern Asia as part of Pompeo “new way to deal with China” strategy. Nikkei is a “neocon publication” out of America. It is fully funded by the US State department and run by Mike Pompeo.
China is Thailand’s largest and most important trading partner, its largest foreign direct investor, and its largest source of tourism with more Chinese tourists coming to Thailand each year than all Western nations combined.
Thailand is also hosting one of the key routes of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative with construction already ongoing for high-speed rail that will connect China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and eventually Singapore.
Finally and perhaps most upsetting for the US is that Thailand has begun replacing its aging US military hardware through a series of major Thai-Chinese arms deals including the purchasing of main battle tanks, other armored vehicles, naval vessels including up to 3 submarines, and jointly-developed arms programs like the DTI-1 multiple rocket launcher system.
Thailand has also recently replaced some of its US-built Blackhawk helicopters with Russian Mi-17V-5’s.
To counter this, the US has mobilized opposition groups and NGOs it has funded in Thailand for years to now demand the current government step down and the nation’s constitution be rewritten, paving the way for US-backed billionaire-led opposition parties of Thaksin Shinawatra and Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit into power. These are opposition parties that have long served US interests in the past and have explicitly promised to roll back Thai-Chinese relations should they take power again.
US NED Was Behind Hong Kong’s Unrest, and Are Now Behind Thailand’s Unrest
The US was indisputably behind the protests in Hong Kong with the political opposition and protest leaders confirmed to be recipients of US government cash via notorious regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Many of the protest leaders literally flew to Washington DC or visited the US consulate in Hong Kong to receive aid, directives, and other forms of support.
In Thailand too, virtually every aspect of the protests are funded by the US government.
Worse still is that the US is attempting to stitch these various movements together to form a regional front against Beijing with Thai protest leaders regularly traveling to meet their US-funded counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan and vice versa while creating an online army with the help of US-based social media giants to stack public narratives in their favor.
Neocons believe that war is justified as long as it guarantees that America can control the world. Thus, a neocon can see an “enemy” behind every bush, every action, and inside every cell phone APP.
Historically, the original neocons were a small group of mostly Jewish liberal intellectuals who, in the 1960s and 70s, grew disenchanted with what they saw as the American reluctance to spend aggressively on the military. Many of these neocons worked in the 1970s for Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a staunch anti-communist.
Neocon is short for neoconservative, which adds the neo-, or “new,” prefix to conservative. Today, they stand within both American political parties. Arguing in favor of war, conflict and CIA intervention everywhere.
One of the primary characteristics of neocons is the belief that America must rule the world, and maintain that rule by aggressive and free unencumbered use of military might.
Mid-October Update
Apparently, while the United States Navy was conducting “maneuvers” in the South China Sea, with the five carrier assault groups and Marine Landing / Attack forces, as well as with the entire British carrier fleet…
…something else was happening simultaneously.
Well reported in the mainstream press, but no one was putting “two plus two” together. These strange “tictac” shaped UFO’s started to appear and “move freely” all over American military bases inside of America. At THE SAME TIME as the American Navy was “probing the Chinese coastal defenses“.
Whether they are “aliens” or not is a good question.
One thing is for certain, and that is the technology involved in these craft are far up and above (perhaps centuries) more advanced than anything the United States has fielded. They can “pop” into existence out of no-where. They are immune to radar, and thermal signatures. They can accelerate to enormous speeds in a short period of time, and they are equally capable of underwater, air and space travel.
“Chinese Tictac” UFO that was buzzing and moving in and out of American military installations and airbases while the American Naval flotilla was busy probing the Chinese Coasts during the Summer of 2020.
21OCT20 Update
A second; MORE Lethal biological attack hits China in October 2020.
Here in China is a semi-alert status since mid month. Everyone is on alert. Military are on full alert, but work and homes are as normal. The primary difference is that there are hyper-diligent monitoring of temperatures and GPS travel histories.
Not well publicized (inside of America or in any of the main-steam or Alternative media of any type) except for a few paragraphs. There is a brand new, never before seen, absolutely novel in biology, virus.
It’s supposed to be much worse than COVID-19. It attacks both humans and swine.
It’s new, and not a second or third wave of the coronavirus.
Though it is in the same family of viruses as the betacoronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the respiratory illness COVID-19 in humans, the scientists said SADS-CoV is an alphacoronavirus that causes gastrointestinal illness in swine.
China notified the WHO, who put the world on notice.
It’s called SADS-CoV, which is short for “Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome Coronavirus” and, yeah, it’s as bad as it sounds. The virus causes severe diarrhea and vomiting and has been especially deadly to young piglets.
Reading between the lines…
China has been on complete all-hands-on-deck military alert for all forms of warfare since January 2020. (You’d never know this if all you read is the American “news”.) They discovered a brand new and “novel coronavirus” this month. This discovery set a number of things in motion. First was the WHO which sent out an alert, and second was a rearming and re-posturing of all military and militia in China. If it wasn’t for their aggressive alert status, this virus would not have been detected, or preventative steps taken.
Again…
[1] Brand new, never seen before, virus. (Imagine that!) [2] More contagious than COVID-19. [3] More lethal than COVID-19. [4] More disgustingly painful than COVID-19. [5] Detected in China by the Chinese military self-defense monitoring teams. [6] The discovery triggered a global announcement by the WHO. [7] American scientists familiar with similar viruses provided supporting information.
22OCT20 Update
The Donald Trump three day excursion to a military Base for hospitalization for COVID-19, happened exactly at the same time that China discovered the second bio-weapon attack. The COVID-20.
CNN told the truth about the so-called respected “Chinese virologist” from Hong Kong. You know the one, that claimed that she was employed by the Chinese government to develop the COVID-19 as a Bio-Weapon. And did so at the Wuhan Virus Lab.
Well, she lied. Not only that, but she is direct-linked to both Mike Pompeo, and Steve Bannon (both hard-core neocons):
Sick. So many Chinese seditious traitors. Surprise. CNN told the truth about the so-called respected "Chinese virologist" from Hong Kong lie about Covid-19 virus and China: She is linked to Mike Pompeo: https://t.co/0avZQSuF9N
https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/pompeos-record-a-litany-of-failure/
Excerpt:
To make his case for demonizing China, Pompeo will use any source of questionable legitimacy. One example was a paper written by Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and at the time of publication a postdoctoral student at Hong Kong University. Her paper claimed that the Covid-19 virus was created in a Wuhan lab.
Her finding was sensational as it seemed to authenticate Trump’s and Pompeo’s accusation that China should be held accountable for the pandemic. The popular media went wild with the story, even though those in scientific circles criticized the non-peer-reviewed paper as weak on science.
Rapid Reviews: COVID-19, a collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, quickly solicited reviews of the Yan paper by four renowned scientists in the field and their conclusion was:
“This manuscript does not demonstrate sufficient scientific evidence to support its claims. Claims are at times baseless and are not supported by the data and methods used. Decision-makers should consider the author’s claims in this study misleading.”
Those reviews followed the publication of the Yan paper by about two weeks. It’s a safe bet that the refutation is unlikely to attract the attention of the mainstream media.
An added side note in the comment section was the observation that the co-authors listed in Yan’s paper did not exist but were fictitious – in other words, a blatant lie.
So what could have motivated Yan? By now, it has become quite clear that providing material for China-bashing can be very lucrative business. Gordon Chang showed that he could publish a book on China that totally missed the mark – instead of economic collapse, China is about to become the largest economy in the world – and instead of striking out, he became an anti-China media star for the last 20 years.
Peter Navarro did even better. He wrote a book and a documentary titled Death by China, a complete work of fiction, with imaginary “expert” “Ron Varra,” who turned out to be the anagrammatic alter ego of Navarro himself. This China-bashing turned him from being a failed politician and outcast academic into the holder of a seat in the inner circle at the Trump White House.
25OCT20
American military forces have been training to take and seize Chinese occupied islands in the South China Sea.
Army paratroopers have practiced flying long distance then jumping onto China’s island outposts in the disputed waters of the China Seas. Seizing outposts—and the strategic airstrips they host—could give U.S. forces new bases from which to strike back against the Chinese.
But the Chinese military scoffed at the idea. “The assumption that U.S. troops could capture China's islands and reefs in the South China Sea is no more than media speculation,” Xu Hailin wrote in Global Times, an official mouthpiece of the People’s Liberation Army.
That’s untrue. The Pentagon actively is preparing for just such a contingency. Back in July, 350 paratroopers from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division flew in Air Force C-17 transports from Alaska to Guam and practiced dropping onto, and capturing, a simulated enemy airfield.
American troops landing on a Chinese island would represent a serious act of aggression and a major escalation of any conflict, Xu posited. “If the U.S. military really reaches out to capture China's islands and reefs, it will declare the start of a total war with China.”
How serious?
Does the declaration of “a total war with China” means that China will “file a complaint” with the UN, or something else? Maybe they might shoot back! (Gasp.) Maybe they might do something that the neocons running the administration is not prepared for…
...In any event, Xu vowed that an American assault on a Chinese outpost would invite a devastating response.
“The U.S. troops will have to face an all-out counterattack from the People's Liberation Army and will certainly pay a heavy price for their reckless decisions,” Xu wrote.
28OCT20
Those state-of-the-art Taiwanese chip factories, are actually mainland Chinese operations. One of those things that no one in the mainstream, and alternative media mentions…
I got this thread from a WeChat group, between two Westerners. Interesting history about TSMC,
[Regaining The Edge In U.S. Chip Manufacturing: https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-chip-manufacturing/?fbclid=IwAR3nVp4oNWMJNi-OCZQwAcSBN7goF0QnZy3mU5n6tAVhks6DzU1oVfIdEeA]
Yeah can confirm x86 are stagnating due to the cisc designs of the architecture while the likes of arm and mips etc which uses risc design it can be made smaller and more efficient
Morris Chang, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's first and largest silicon foundry, was not "Taiwanese". Chang was Zhejiangese, born in Ningbo.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is not a "Taiwanese" company. It is a Chinese company located in the Chinese province of Taiwan.
Sun Yun-suan, minister of economic affairs and Premier of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, was one of the chief architects of the ROC's "economic miracle" that enabled it to become one of the East Asian Tigers.
Sun was not Taiwanese. He was Shangdongese, born in Penglai. Neither, of course, were Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, who were also Zhejiangese.
Sun recruited Chang to become chairman and president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute that spawned major semiconductor companies such as TSMC and the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park which would serve as a major electronics and semiconductor manufacturing hub.
The plain truth is that TSMC is a Chinese achievement.
All the figures involved were so-called "mainlanders" -- a pejorative term used by Taiwan independence Quislings to sow hatred between Chinese from the mainland region of China and Chinese from the Taiwan region of China.
All the figures involved were patriotic Chinese nationalists and unwavering advocates of Chinese reunification.
Indeed. Technology presents us with new opportunities.. Sad though our lot seem to be technophobes more keen in lining their pockets and keeping the starts quo of cleptocracy and "service industry Jobs" rather than innovating
What happens when you more your capital abroad and focus on financial sector
However with China developing the productive forces it opens up new opportunities for the proletariat to build themselves up
-Jeff J. Brown
29OCT20
Reports on what occurred during the American lead naval sortie in the South China Sea in late Summer 2020, are coming in, in drips and drabs.
Recall, that the US mobilized three aircraft carriers – USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan – to patrol the Indo-Pacific waters, an act seen as a “warning” to China. Each carrier was teamed up with a “minor” carrier, making a total of 6 American aircraft carriers, plus the British HMS Queen Elizabeth (a “super” aircraft carrier). That is seven aircraft carriers along with their support ships. This is the largest naval flotilla of aircraft carriers in history.
The ships eventually left the area, and we have been trying to figure out what happened.
American & British Media – Very quiet.
Very little information. Suspiciously little.
Except that there is going to be a change in strategy. This new strategy would involve the use of AI controlled underwater weapons and drones. The use of a “traditional” assault force using a large force of carriers is not considered to be practical.
Additionally large boost to the black budget has been approved and moving forward. It is supposedly considered to be “urgent“.
(Note; If it is reported, it's NOT secret) FOUR paramilitary CIA officers drowned while on a secret mission to plant an underwater pod intended to track the Chinese military in the South China Sea, it has emerged. The men were reportedly caught in a tropical storm while attempting to place the device, which had been disguised to resemble a rock, off the Philippine island of Luzon.
The Chinese have intercepted clandestine troops in operations upon Chinese territory. It is unknown what has happened to them…
Meet the HN-1, China’s New AI-Powered Underwater Drone. The battle for future undersea AI dominance is heating up and China’s ambitions are not small in this domain.
Curiously, from American Media…
There was an “accident” when American marine forces attempted a landing on “one of the islands off California”. All eight / nine of the soldiers are assumed dead. None were recovered. The justification is that the ocean is “too deep”, and they all died inside of an “amphibious tank”. But by looking at any oceanographic map of the islands off the California coast, we can see that this claim is simply not true.
Just keep in mind that there were many, many events and actions that were NOT reported to the public during this entire period of time.
Here is a nice interactive map of the (inferred) Chinese power projection in the South China Sea.
You all might want to consider what the rest of the world thinks about the Trump Polices with China, and the Asian Pacific Rim. Here’s a great article out of Australia…
The polls indicate, and most commentators believe, that Biden will win, but Trump is campaigning furiously, and the prospect of a legal imbroglio also looms.
Neither Biden nor Trump has made much of foreign policy in their campaigns.
Biden has said he would not be bluffed by China, and would not hesitate to “call it out” or retaliate against egregious acts, but the end of the Trump Presidency would certainly break the flow of “China is the enemy” that has characterized it.
Trump has surrounded himself with “China hawks”, and has personified the US anti-China campaign, but given his record it’s not impossible that a re-elected Trump would reverse policy towards China, if he came to believe that that was in the United States’, or his own, interests.
Whoever wins, in the election aftermath it will be important for Australian policymakers to keep in mind that our position (Australian) and the US’s position are not the same.
We want a peaceful, prosperous and stable Asia-Pacific, or Indo-Pacific.
The US wants that, too, but also wants to be top dog in it. As a US academic visiting Australia said last year, “the US can not tolerate a peer competitor”. But China is one, and many in the US “feel the hot breath”.
There are one or two things that can be said in response to the “peer competitor” line.`
One is “grow up”.
Another is “compete, don’t complain”, and there are certainly voices in the US saying just that.
The important thing for us to remember is that while we value our alliance relationship with the US, that is not the policy end-point for us. That end-point is a state of affairs in the Asia or Indo-Pacific under which we and other countries can live peacefully and prosper, in a stable environment.
How can that be achieved?
Certainly not by following the tack taken by Pompeo, who can’t even bring himself to speak of the “Chinese Government”; rather he refers to the “Chinese Communist Party”.
It’s a great pity that at this possibly pivotal time we don’t have anyone at the highest levels of our Government with a strong personal relationship with a Chinese counterpart, as Prime Minister Hawke had with Premier Zhao Ziyang — someone who could effectively make the point that China’s actions in the South China Sea or in regard to the Uighurs aren’t really in China’s best interests, without making a public campaign of it.
Perhaps our very able Ambassador in Beijing is saying these things anyway. And perhaps our goal of a peaceful, prosperous and stable Asia-Pacific can only come about if both the US and China can more fully accept that they have to live with each other, make room for each other, and not regard any step forward by one as a step back for the other, as Trump is said to be prone to do.
We also have to look at our own bilateral relationship with China. Why is it now described as in its “most frozen” state ever, despite China still being our largest trading partner, and still buying huge amounts of iron ore at record prices, thus preventing our budget deficit from being even larger? Both sides have contributed to the present situation, and we need to recognize that if we are going to improve it....
(more)
...But I firmly believe that what we must try to do is to include China in joint efforts and mechanisms and gradually re-build trust, rather than build alliances to defend against or contain it.
One reason is that efforts to contain or limit China simply won’t work; see what it’s already doing economically in Europe, Latin America and southern Africa, as well as in East and Central Asia, and with Russia.
Another reason is that it’s such a negative thing in which to invest our efforts and future. Of course it will be up to the Chinese how they respond. But we should have a go.
2NOV20
Just a few days before the election between Trump and Biden, the climate in the Asian Pacific Rim is…
America's choice and Asia's future
Whoever claims victory in the US presidential contest this week, Washington’s grasp over Asia’s future is on the wane.
It’s not that the United States is no longer a great power unmatched as yet in its technological and military superiority. Despite all its self-inflicted wounds, through mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis and President Trump’s economically debilitating ‘America First’ strategy, it remains so.
The short-term costs of the Trump administration’s mismanagement have been huge, in terms of US deaths, the fragmentation of national cohesion and lost trade and income. But it’s the costs over the next ten years or more that cast a long dark shadow over US societal and economic strength and the role of the United States as a reliable anchor in an open multilateral global order.
The costs of COVID-19 continue to mount and the strategy that will see an end to it is still to be articulated. Nor is there a strategy in place to deal with the collapse in the US and the global economies that the pandemic has brought with it. In international cooperation on both strategic fronts, the United States is out of play.
The world’s confidence in US power, the moral authority it once commanded and the capacity to deploy it are much diminished. Even the most energetic and driven administration won’t restore it easily, soon or perhaps ever.
If Joe Biden had a 20-point lead across the board in the polls as the United States heads towards election eve — and the polls are narrowing not widening at the finishing line — most pundits would still be shy about calling the outcome until it’s all done and dusted. So burnt are they by Trump’s unexpected win in 2016 and scared by Trump’s refusal to be straightforward about conceding power.
Yet US political trends and geopolitical realities are clear and key strategic calculations in Asia will be framed by them whatever the electoral outcome.
There are few illusions in Asian capitals about what they would inherit if Trump should once more claim the US presidency. East Asian leaders have no inclination to sign up to an ill-disciplined brawl between the United States and China as they are being pushed to do by Trump and his deputies.
The priority in Asia is to deal with COVID-19 and navigate recovery around the probability that China, having dealt with the pandemic first, will also lead global economic recovery. As former Indonesian deputy foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Dino Patti Djalal observes, they have no appetite for a New Cold War and ‘framing China as an ideological threat (constantly referring to “Communist China”, not just China)… [adopting] a blanket (rather than a la carte) attack against China: on the coronavirus, trade, investment, technology, TikTok, the World Health Organization, the South China Sea, Chinese companies and students, democracy, human rights, climate change — the list goes on.
If there is anything that is clear’, says Dino, ‘it is that China has de-ideologised its foreign policy since the 1980s. No one seriously believes that China’s political intention is to turn Southeast Asian nations to communism.
Indeed, China’s strategic intention is no longer about spreading communism (as was the case up to the late 1970s), but rather about strategic acceptance, economic engagement and political influence’.
Nor is the happy assumption that a Biden win will lead to a simple American course-correction accepted anywhere that matters in East Asia. Biden has no power to reclaim the past dignity and authority of the US presidency. As former Australian prime minister Paul Keating said of the United States under Trump, ‘if you pawn the crown it is incapable of being redeemed at the same value’.
Trump was no political aberration, chaotic though his administration may have been. He captured America’s contemporary populist spirit and unleashed its powerful political angst. Biden’s ambitious climate change agenda or the hope that he might return to negotiating entry to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement may stir still optimistic, liberal hearts.
But, apart from convincing allies and partners, including China, that he’s got the ticker for it, it’ll take time, require superhuman effort and it’s another matter altogether to pass the Pennsylvania test and sell a new global foreign policy strategy to the average American voter, let alone his own political operatives. American morale is already at a low level and has further to sink yet.
As TJ Pempel says in our first lead article this week, ‘Trump’s policies were less a one-man aberration than an outgrowth of, and strongly supported by, the Republican Party. The past four years have exposed and exacerbated gaping US socio-economic divisions, the limitations of its political institutions, the contentiousness of its information channels, and the fragility of its democratic norms. Americans now inhabit separate tribes, value alternative priorities, are convinced of competing “facts” and are firmly convinced that eviscerating the other tribe is the path to a better America’.
There’s gathering understanding in East Asian capitals that whatever happens in Washington this week, the solutions to the region’s problems will not be readily found there. The foundations on which confidence in regional stability and prosperity might be restored must be found in international cooperation effort in Asia itself that reaches out to, but cannot rely upon, the United States. This is a challenge for which there is little preparation or precedent.
In a geopolitically fractured world, strategic competition between the United States and China ultimately limits both countries’ capacity to contribute constructively both to global recovery and renovation of the global order.
The United States, the world’s biggest power, has lost its appetite for multilateral cooperation and is at odds strategically with China, the world’s second largest power. Strategic competition between the United States and China ultimately limits both countries’ prosperity and capacity to contribute constructively to global recovery.
As Elizabeth Ingleson points out in our second lead article this week, the ‘next US administration has a chance to abandon the framework of strategic competition and adopt a more nuanced policy of engagement … This would allow the two nations to work towards a multilateral approach to the climate crisis. By linking geopolitics and climate, the United States and China have an opportunity to improve the prospects of both’.
But as Sheila Smith concludes in upcoming pre-US election preview the ‘intensity of rancour that has permeated US politics will not be solved in one election, and lingering resentments may impede the president’s ability to be attentive to the accelerating shifts in the regional balance of power. A distracted America may be Asia’s lot’.
The reality is that small and middle powers in Asia now have to play an unfamiliar leadership role. This ominous responsibility will remain long after the 46th President of the United States settles into the White House.
Other recent articles in which you may be interested from the East Asia Forum are listed below. You can click the title of each one or visit www.eastasiaforum.org for daily content.
Editors
East Asia Forum
2 November 2020
The latest at the Forum:Reclaiming US credibility after the Trump tsunami
TJ Pempel, UC Berkeley
8NOV20
Joe Biden is elected, and Donald Trump and his neocon army will need to decamp from the White House. They will be forced to play their “war games” elsewhere, and the keys and codes to the enormous nuclear and bio/chemical arsenal will be handed over to others. Hopefully, people of a more sensible bent.
We will see what will happen. I, for one, look forward to a return of sanity to the world.
10NOV20
China has been, along with Russia, suspiciously quiet about the election and the Biden Presidency. With various unofficial responses coming out of China that pretty much all say the same thing…
China should not harbor any illusions that Biden's election will ease or bring a reversal to China-US relations, nor should it weaken its belief in improving bilateral ties.
US competition with China and its guard against China will only intensify.
But it's in the common interests of people from both countries and of international community that China-US relations become eased and controllable.
The two countries must work together and take joint actions to explore and work on realizing some kind of stability and predictability for their bad relations and managing bilateral ties from worsening to a destructive extent.
-https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1206128.shtml
11NOV11
A pretty good write-up about what probably would happen to the China-USA relationship with Trump and his neocons out of the White House, and a Biden presidency in place…
U.S.-China Business Under Biden
Published on November 10, 2020
Status is reachable
Brandon Hughes, LLM, PMP
Veterans Integration Program Apprenticeship at Goldman Sachs
24 articles
Following
What an amazing week it has been. Both United States (U.S.) and international citizens watched the 2020 President election with anxiousness and excitement. In the end, Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden became the projected winner of both the popular & electoral vote. While current U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to concede, preparations are already underway for a transition to a Biden administration. Below are a few thoughts from a career in U.S.-China geopolitical & business relations.An Easing of Overall Tensions
This does not mean a Biden administration will be soft but likely use a more traditional foreign policy approach to China. This means focusing on human rights, promoting mutually beneficial policies, and taking a more piecemeal approach. What this means for business is that a return to more stable policies will support 3-5 year strategic planning. However, don't expect a return to the status quo overnight. In fact, some policies may never go back. Biden has signaled he will be tough on China in certain respects but business leaders can expect these policies to be much more transparent and telegraphed before implementation.
Use of multilateral organizations
U.S. foreign policy has long supported the use of multilateral organizations to put political pressure on areas of interest. Regarding China, this means a more coordinated approach to addressing Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other political issues. This may or may not be effective depending on the level of commitment to policies but it will ensure that changes to policy are communicated well in advance.
A Gradual Reduction in Trade Tariffs
Similar to the easing of tensions, we may see a gradual reduction or repeal of trade tensions. A large portions of U.S. imports (by U.S. companies) were impacted in addition to export of raw material, agriculture, and high value added goods. These industries have been hit hard (if not decimated) due to the tariffs (and the overall approach to trade with China) and it's likely the Biden administration will take a "mending fences" approach. This applies to not only China but others as well.
A Reprioritization of Human Rights
This has been on the back-burner of current U.S. policy but it's likely that a Biden administration will put Human Rights on the docket in upcoming negotiations. This is long-standing U.S. policy and moderately effective in some cases. However, this may come in year 2 or 3 of Biden's term as addressing domestic issues and reestablishing relations will likely take priority in terms of policy issues.
Reciprocal Easing from China
China is unlikely to alter their next 5-year plan but you may see more "easing" of enforcement or legal barriers that have been impacting U.S. business. This may come as an easing of enforcement measures against U.S. shipments to China at the ports. It may result in a more open environment to business or an easing of doing business. However, like the U.S., don't expect an overnight change in priorities or stance. There is a lot to discuss before either side agrees to step back.
Takeaways for Business
U.S.-China relations will not change overnight nor will the policies. There are significant hurdles facing the U.S.-China relationships that are echoed on both sides of the political aisle. However, businesses can expect a more tempered approach to foreign & trade policy with China and a re-engagement in more multilateral institutions. This is positive news for multinational ventures as stability creates an environment for growth. Businesses who have held off the last 3 years should develop a China & APAC strategy to capture unique policy or growth opportunities that are presented. At the same time, businesses & investors should understand there are still considerable structural issues between the U.S. and China that may not be fixed and still impact bilateral policy. Overall, a Biden administration is positive news for those doing business with the world's 2nd largest economy. This means growth for revenues & growth for company value which ultimately reflected in growth for retirement accounts and investment funds.
-https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-china-business-under-biden-brandon-hughes-llm-pmp/?trackingId=8uOp0h9f%2BrOjXuDsjMXc3w%3D%3D
Biden and Xi Peng after the conclusion of the US and China trade agreement. This agreement was unilaterally torn up by President Trump in early 2017. The conservative media in 2020 are promoting the narrative that Biden will accept and embrace the revised American stance with China that Trump and Pompeo have created. I strongly disagree. The Democrat Party is one of negotiation and give-and-take. It is not a hard-line unilateralist evangelical entity such has been the case by the neocon-led White House..
24NOV20 Update
Yes, Trump make it impossible for anyone (in America) to pay for Chinese goods.
Remittances for Amazon.com, ebay.com, and paypal.com refuse to allow for payments to Chinese individuals, or banks. I have heard stores about how some of my Chinese friends have had their stores and markets closed on them without notice.
It really didn’t become crystal clear until I started to ask my fellow American expats if they ever received the COVID-19 coronavirus stimulus check that they applied for. And the answer was no. No one received it, including yours truly. So I inquired. Yup. Any one inside of China or using Chinese institutions have their checks zeroed.
And people wonder WHY so many mail-in ballots were for Biden. Heck, he just about threw away one million expats in that brilliant decision of his. Fucker!
Why not plaster a sign that says things in clear English;
No Money to anyone inside of China. Period, by order of Donald Trump.
After all, it was by EO.
29NOV20
Seems that the “firehose of disinformation” that the Biden Administration is going to be harsher then the Pompeo/Trump administration is all just CIA bullshit.
In the speech, Paulson lays out his recommendations for President-elect Biden’s China policy, arguing that competition without unnecessary confrontation should be our goal—because confrontation without effective competition has produced some poor results for the American people. He further recommends that the U.S. pursue a self-interested policy that he terms “targeted reciprocity.” By that, the U.S. should move from being reflexive, responding to anything and everything China does, to focusing on sectors where the U.S. is the strongest and most competitive. In turn, targeted reciprocity can be a negotiating tool and lever to help achieve real results in critical areas of the U.S.-China relationship, including trade and climate change. Below are Secretary Paulson’s prepared remarks.
Download “Targeted Reciprocity” Full Text
1DEC20
Yeah. The world is slowwwwwlyyyyy catching on what a mess Donald Trump and his cabal of evil neocons hath wrought…
COVID-19 is a bioweapon deployed against China by the United States to take advantage of the mass migration during the Chinese New Year.
To prevent/minimize the blowback from the virus possibly getting out of containment in China, a mild strain (CoV-A; antibody producing strain) was released among the population of the Western countries months before the deployment of the bioweapon strain (CoV-B) in Wuhan (and possibly Qom afterwards). It's akin to innoculating your population with cowpox before hitting the opposition population with smallpox. CoV-A has a much lower lethality rate (around 0.1%) than CoV-B (10-15%) which is why the data on how lethal COVID-19 is all over the place.
Let's look at the evidence:
1. Herd immunity: Only a few weeks after reporting how Chinese are welding their patients in their homes (February 6, 2020), at the same time as reporting mass graves near Qom (March 12, 2020). The Western (as well as Brazil and India) governments and media are all talking about herd immunity. With Boris Johnson saying that the UK would "take it on the chin" (March 5, 2020), Merkel stating that 60-70% of Germans would get the virus (March 11, 2020) to Bolsonaro saying that Brazilians are immune (March 27, 2020), with the media touting that the plan is not to stop the disease but to "flatten the curve" so that the medical system doesn't get overwhelmed. Despite COVID-19 being a 'never before seen' virus with unknown properties and lethality, it's almost as if they knew that the disease isn't that dangerous.
2. Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Brett Crozier and the Vietnam outbreak: The USS Theodore Roosevelt is a carrier in the Pacific fleet stationed in the South China Sea. The captain of the ship Brett Crozier, after discovering some of his sailors displaying symptoms tried to get the carrier docked in Guam so that his sailors can be evacuated and quarantined. His email to multiple captains and admiral Baker was leaked to the press, and he was relieved of duty shortly afterwards by Naval Secretary Modly.
The blame was on the shore-leave in Vietnam on March 5, but during that time, Vietnam cases plateaued at 16 for weeks, and cases did not increase until after the carrier left. The first wave of the Vietnam outbreak only had less than 300 infected vs. 1156 on the carrier. Furthermore there were no COVID related deaths in Vietnam during the first wave vs only 1 on the Theodore Roosevelt.
The scales of these outbreaks highly implies that the first COVID-19 wave in Vietname is actually transmission from the carrier to the Vietnamese population rather than the other way around. Furthermore, the low lethality rate in both cases means that it is the CoV-A variant.
The reason is obvious in hindsight:If China were unable to contain the outbreak the U.S. military would take advantage of the chaos and start a hot war while the Chinese are incapable of retaliating, it would thus be necessary to inoculate their own troops so they don't succumb to the bioweapon. Crozier was castigated because in raising the alarm with the media instead of the usual channels so the the story can be buried, China, by looking at the Theodore Roosevelt outbreak and Vietnam, not only confirmed their suspicions that Wuhan was a bioweapon deployment, but also how the U.S. and its co-conspirators plan to limit the possible blowback. So when Germany was raising noise about seizing Chinese assets in the EU for 'compensation' for the outbreak, the Chinese response is basically: "If the virus is from China, where is your patient zero?" Which brings us to the next point:
3. Difficulty in locating "patient zero" in Europe: From months, the EU has been trying to find a patient zero to link back to the Wuhan outbreak without much success. The current theory is a 43 year old Frenchman who got it from Algeria in December, the link to Wuhan is tenuous at best. However, if we work from the two-strain theory, this difficulty is pretty easy to explain: not all patients who contract CoV-A are asymptomatic, those who have it and get tested would be a positive case for COVID-19. Finding patient zero involves working backwards from all known positive cases. Since CoV-A has been in circulation for months before CoV-B was deployed in China, finding a CoV-B patient zero linking back to China is practically impossible with CoV-A positives being around for much longer.
4. False positives: Something mentioned over and over again is the high rate of "false positives" of the PCR test: how the outbreak is not as bad as reported because of the rate of false positives. This would fit perfectly with the two-strain theory: CoV-A and CoV-B should be almost genetically identical since CoV-A is suppose to prime the immune system to fight against CoV-B, if the intricate human immune system cannot tell the difference between CoV-A and CoV-B, there is no way the cheap dime-a-dozen mass produced tests used for mass testing would be able to do so. This would explain the high rate of "false positives" outside of China. Since the Western governments were (and probably still are) going for the "herd immunity" route, they would of course want CoV-A to be spread as much as possible while limiting the CoV-B. The more lethal CoV-B would of course have much more severe symptoms than CoV-A, hence people who test positive for COVID-19 with mild to no symptoms were informed that they are "false positive" so they can continue spreading CoV-A among the general population. The fault is not in the test kits but the people in charge of interpreting the results.
5. Mask policy: Continuing on the previous point. While China started masking up pretty much from the start. The CDC and WHO were both against masks before they were for them. For example the U.S. Surgeon General tweeted on February 29: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!" Dr. Mike Ryan in the Geneva media briefing on March 30: "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly." Remember Merkel's (March 11) and Bolsonaro's (March 27) mentioned above, at the end of March the prevailing strain detected outside of China, Iran and Italy would be the CoV-A strain, hence the deliberate and systematic campaign to mislead the public against mask use, they WANT the CoV-A strain to reach saturation in the population before CoV-B hits.
However, if we look at the Swedish 'miracle' and the Vietnam outbreak, it seems the CoV-A strain spreads much slower than CoV-B. Sweden got lucky and closed their border before CoV-B got into the country, their positive COVID-19 are CoV-A cases (that they got from the U.S.) which spread very slowly even without a lockdown. Vietnam closed their border with China very early and the outbreak most likely came from the Theodore Roosevelt, which makes it CoV-A; with a lockdown the cases were brought down to zero pretty quickly. Given that there is no way tests that don't sequence the entire genome can differentiate between CoV-A and CoV-B, and the reluctance of the U.S. and its co-conspirators to implement a financially crippling lockdown for the mostly harmless CoV-A, once CoV-B gets a foothold in a country, due to exponential increase CoV-B would quickly overtake CoV-A. A lockdown would be counterproductive to the 'herd immunity' approach since slower spreading CoV-A would be much more vulnerable to quarantine. That is even assuming that CoV-A provides immunity:
6. Chinese claims on reinfection: multiple studies from China has claimed that followup checkups on former COVID-19 patients showed that only a minority of them still carried antibodies against the disease thus longterm immunity does not exist in most people, while the UK studies claim that T-cells still remember the disease and thus longterm immunity exists. On the surface, it seems that these are merely academic, however if Wuhan outbreak was a bioweapon attack, it would explain the motives behind publishing these studies.
Considering the number of countries going for 'herd immunity' back in March, the number of conspirators is immense; China calling the outbreak a bioweapon attack would be like Julius Caesar confronting the Roman senate on March 14th. However, by raising the specter of reinfection, it definitely shakes the faith of the conspirators in the plan: If CoV-B does not provide longterm immunity against CoV-B, what are the chances CoV-A would provide this immunity?. Absence a working vaccine, if CoV-A does not provide longterm immunity, a hard lockdown getting rid of both strains and abandoning the 'herd immunity' plan is the only way to get the pandemic under control.
The big question is whether China is telling the truth about reinfection. China may be bluffing to create a schism between the garden variety blanket-distributor type conspirators and the 'from hell's heart I stab at thee' hardliners; the former would favor implementing a lockdown and taking the loss, the latter would call it a bluff and try to restart the economy assuming that 'herd immunity' will be achieved.
That's not to say that the UK studies can be trusted, after all, with their future tightly bound to the U.S., they are pretty much America's mouthpiece in trying to keep all the conspirators on the original plan: as long as the lethality rate doesn't get too high, most of the cases should still be the CoV-A strain. (The closer the death rate gets to the 10%, the higher the CoV-B/CoV-A ratio is.)
Posted by: Sid Victor Cattoni | Dec 1 2020 21:41 utc | 26
2DEC20
What? You mean that Biden isn’t going to continue Trump’s Anti-China crusade? How can this be???? After all, since August 2020 through December 2020 the “news” has been all awash at how “tougher” Biden will be on China than Trump.
(CNN)
President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team are preparing for an early, all-out push to pass an ambitious new stimulus bill, while also drawing up plans for a flurry of executive actions aimed at delivering on campaign promises and undoing the Trump administration's efforts...
7DEC20
Two decades of endless war and a bloated Pentagon budget that has proven useless in preventing Covid–19 deaths, now 270,000 and counting, are a jarring reminder that America’s foreign policy is thoroughly broken: It actually makes America and Americans less safe.
Successive administrations have deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself. In consequence, the foreign policies of the United States are detached from any defensible conception of U.S. interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of humankind.
Marginal adjustments to the current approach will prove insufficient. A deeper rethinking of American foreign policy is warranted. This must be an undertaking that puts the well-being of the American people ahead of ambitions to dominate the globe.
President-elect Joe Biden appears to recognize the need for a serious reorientation. His just-named national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, recently said that Biden has tasked his foreign policy team with “reimagining our national security for the unprecedented combination of crises we face at home and abroad,” including pandemics and the climate crisis. Moreover, Sullivan said that American foreign policy has to be judged by a basic question: Does it “make life better, easier, and safer” for Americans at home? Our foreign policy, in Sullivan’s words, has to deliver for American families.
-A New Direction: A Foreign Policy Playbook on Military Restraint for the Biden Team
23DEC20
Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese military continue to work together.
It follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement in October that the idea of a future Russia-China military alliance can’t be ruled out — a signal of deepening military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing amid growing tensions in their relations with the United States.
Until that moment, Russia and China had hailed their “strategic partnership,” but rejected any talk about the possibility of their forming a military alliance.
Putin also noted in October that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that helped significantly bolster its defense capability.
Russia has sought to develop stronger ties with China as its relations with the West sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other issues.
And Trump awards the highest military honors to the President of Australia for his anti-Chinese actions.
And Russia and China test fire their nuclear ICBM missiles.
Russian Submarine Fires Four Nuclear Missiles | The Daily ...
2020-12-14 · The Borei-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine Vladimir Monomakh launched four Bulava missiles at targets on a firing range in the Arkhangelsk region in northwest Russia, the Associated Press reported.. Borei-class submarines are capable of carrying 16 Bulava missiles. They displace 24,000 tons of water when submerged, can go up to 29 nautical miles per hour (just over 33 …
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/14/russia-submarine-nuclear-bulava-missiles-borei...
2021 New year
I have received some interesting information concerning the directed energy beam weapons employed by China.
They operate underwater, just like they do in the air.
They can completely destroy the electronic systems of all types.
All three aircraft carriers sent to the South China Sea during the Summer of 2020 were nuclear powered.
The American stealth submarines are also nuclear powered.
The Chinese directed energy weapons systems can cause the American Navy nuclear power systems to go haywire, go into a SCRAM mode, and melt down.
Obviously, no one wants mini Chernobyl meltdowns off their beaches, but were the USA to initiate a hot war in the South China Sea, you can well expect that to be the reality for the United States Navy.
With Donald Trump set to leave office, newly released documents show his strategy towards Beijing has largely failed, and that the US isn’t confident over its ability to contain China in certain areas should a conflict arise.
Following the departure of White House Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger and with the Trump administration coming to an end, a number of documents have been declassified setting out its ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy or, more specifically, its gameplan to attempt to contain China over its four years in office.
The documents are hardly comprehensive, yet reveal ambitions to contain Beijing in the political, diplomatic, economic and military spheres, including a blueprint of what the US would do in a potential war scenario.
According to the papers, the US has aimed to sustain its “primacy” in the region, “support activists and reformers” opposed to Beijing (such as the Hong Kong protesters), create a counter to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and economically integrate the region towards the US, enlist allies against China in the form of the Quad and assist “the rise of India”.
But what about in the event of a conflict?
The documents spoke of aiming to prevent China “dominating the first island chain” – the scope of islands extending from Japan to Taiwan and around the South China Sea – via air and sea, and to maintain uncontested supremacy over the “area beyond”. Military analysts have described the former objective as being “modest” in expectation.
If anything, the file reveals the comprehensive failure of the Trump administration’s strategy towards the region during his tenure in office. Not only have attempts to bolster America’s economic presence failed completely, largely owing to the contradictory priorities of the White House, but in addition the document illustrates subtle doubt rather than confidence that the US is capable of defeating China in this “first island chain” region.
The US, above all, is seeking naval containment of China, and in line Beijing has utilized the Belt and Road Initiative to counter it by diversifying its energy supply routes.
Throughout its tenure in office, the Trump administration has been unable to accept China’s status as a rising power, and these documents reveal how this resulted in a set of policies aimed at attempting to quell the country’s rise through various means.
These methods, however, have not yielded much success, largely because of the US’s understating of the dynamics which underscore Beijing’s centrality and importance to the region as an economic power, and the erroneous belief that it can easily divide the world into cold war blocs and force countries to undercut their relations with China on the premise of values alone.
The idea that the US can somehow displace Beijing again as the region’s economic centre of gravity is not realistic, and events such as the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership underscore that.
While it is obvious that the economic balance of power is shifting against America, what about in the military sphere? The documents show the US is looking at the region in two distinct areas; that “first island chain” and “the second one”, which constitutes the wider Pacific.
It believes that it should be able to dominate the latter in the event of a war, but can only at best try to prevent China from dominating the former completely, acknowledging that Beijing likely already has the upper hand in the South and East China Seas, and around Taiwan.
Based on this, it seems apparent the US would logically aim to defeat China
in such a conflict via an attempt at a naval embargo, given a physical invasion could never be possible.
This would involve choking off China’s access to the wider ocean and key maritime points such as the Strait of Malacca.
This strategic planning by the US subsequently sheds light on the BRI.
By strengthening infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass, China is diversifying its supply chain routes and reducing reliance on areas that can be dominated by the US Navy.
For example, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Gwadar Port gives Beijing a passage to the western Indian ocean which would bypass US attempts at containment.
This has coincided with China’s first overseas military base in the East African country of Djibouti and a port it is working on there, which would be used to protect its interests in this area and thus thwart any US military planning. As the Indo-Pacific strategy has sought to militarize China’s periphery and enlist partners, Beijing has responded.
In this case, the declassified documents reveal the wish-list of a dying administration that has thrown many things at China, with few sticking. It shows the scale of the challenge America faces. Despite the erratic nature of Trump, one should logically expect many of these ideas to be retained and form a template for incoming president, Joe Biden.
Objectives such as sustaining US military primacy in Asia and sharpening initiatives such as the Quad will not go away anytime soon, even if there is a substantial lack of realism in them.
Yet the element of doubt in how a conflict with China could be managed only alludes to the shift that is taking place. If America is not confident it could defeat Beijing in the first island chain, then what does that mean for the future? And for Taiwan?
China’s bet in fortifying its presence in the South China Sea, while diversifying its strategic options with the BRI, seems well placed. And that’s why it isn’t Beijing that is fighting an uphill battle to establish a localized dominance on this side of the world.
24JAN21
As Trump leaves the Oval Office, people are comparing his office to President Biden’s office. One of the big stand outs is the huge amount of military articles in the office.
Do you want more?
Yah, I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I’m gonna place it in my China Index, My Trump Trade Wars Index, and my SHTF Index. You can access these indexes directly here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
As I have mentioned before, we only see the tip of the iceberg in our day to day lives. This leads to some odd and strange phenomena. Nothing is more poignant than when it is associated with a global situation or catastrophe. As is the case with the COVID-19, coronavirus. And thus we have this curiosity…
Here we have a new American coin.
It was designed and developed years back and just hit the “streets” in February 2020. Just about the same time when the COVID-19 is starting to assault the American population. Check out the design.
Notice anything interesting?
The new American quarter features a rare bat found in American Samoa.
On February 13, 2020, the U.S. Mint released a quarter honoring the National Park of American Samoa in Utulei, American Samoa. The quarter is the first release of 2020 and the 51st release of the America the Beautiful Quarters® Program.
Keep in mind that the mainstream American media narrative is that the COVID-19 virus came into being by Chinese slurping bat soup. Bat soup made from “rare” (in China) South Pacific bats…
Imagine that!
Conspiracy Considerations
What better way to keep Americans thinking about “bat slurping” Chinese than to have them confront that idea every time they pay in cash?
It’s like the Will Smith movie “Focus”…
Nicky and Jess go to the football game. They make small bets with each other such as if one fan will catch a hot dog, and if another is too drunk to get up for the wave. They see a woman in short shorts and bet how many men will look at her ass as she walks by. Jess bets 8 while Nicky bets 3.
A curious man named Mr. Liuyan (B.D. Wong) joins the game and bets 5. Seven men check out the woman as she walks by, making Jess the closest. Liuyan makes more bets with Nicky over the game, practically begging him to play when Nicky tries to back out.
Nicky plays and loses $1,000. The bets escalate as the two men double the bets, even as Jess tells Nicky they should just leave. After losing $100,000, it looks like Nicky has finally had enough and is about to walk away.
Mr. Liuyan goads him back in, and Nicky bets all the remaining cash ($1.1 million) on a simple high card draw.
Liuyan pulls the card with a higher number, winning all their money.
Nicky and Jess are heartbroken. Nicky chooses not to walk away and decides to double the bet again.
He tells Liuyan to pick any player on the field, and he will guess which one, seemingly impossible odds. Mr. Liuyan thinks he is crazy and doesn't bet on crazy, so he refuses.
Nicky sweetens it when he says Jess will pick the player that Liuyan spotted, much to Jess's terror. Liuyan can't turn down free money, so he picks a player. As Jess nervously looks through the binoculars, Liuyan gives them a chance to back out.
Jess looks to Nicky, seemingly begging him to take this chance to back out, but Nicky tells her to pick. Jess again nervously scans the players. All of a sudden, she spots Farhad wearing a jersey with 55 on it. She grins and picks him, and to everyone's surprise, that's the correct answer.
On the taxi ride home, Nicky, now with a LOT of money on him, explains to Jess that this was set up from the beginning of the day.
He knew that Liyuan is a notorious gambler, so he had it set up so that Liuyan would see the number 55 throughout the day, thereby subconsciously getting him to pick that number when the moment was right.
-Focus
Will Smith in the movie “Focus”.
Another Coincidence
Australian mystery.
Airport worker said the vehicle has been left in the staff car park since before Australia’s coronavirus lockdowns began.
The disease caused by coronavirus was first officially labelled “COVID–19” on February 11, and was declared a pandemic one month later.
Mr Spry said as far as colleagues could recall, the car had been there since “February or even earlier”, and was definitely there from mid-March when most airport staff went on four weeks of forced leave.
Remember the time to have a custom license plate made in Australia is typically six months.
Did you know that Donald Trump collects a coin of every “battle campaign” that he has ever fought?
It’s true. And if you look carefully, you will certainly see that new US Nickel in his display. Check out the picture…
What a coincidence!
Commentary
What can I say?
Just a coincidence, eh?
People! Listen up. NOTHING in this universe is a coincidence.
As an aside, I have visited this park. It is beautiful. I used to live in Tafuna. And my work project was in Pago Pago, which was not too far from the park.
Map of Tutuila Island in American Samoa.
The only thing about it is the holes in the road going up and down the mountain. The locals have placed large stones near each pot-hole so that people can avoid hitting the bumps. Though, aside from that, it’s a truly beautiful place. It’s towards the North side of the island, and very picturesque. It’s worth a visit next time you are in the South pacific.
The amazingly beautiful American Samoa island. It is well worth a visit, provided you have the time and the resources.
Oh, and those fruit bats are noisy. When they fight it sounds like a cross between a cat fight and a car wreck.
Anyways, not bad mouthing American Samoa, but all things considered it’s pretty strange. Yes, all in all, it’s pretty strange. With a bat coin developed that would enter America just when the COVID-19 was hitting the United States.
It’s a curiosity. Don’t you think?
Especially when the “go ahead” to make this coin corresponds with the restructuring of the American bio-weapons office under John Bolton in 2017. Curious.
Have a nice day.
I hope that you enjoyed this little post. I really don’t know where to put it, so I am just putting it everywhere. LOL. Check out my main index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is a very stressful time that we are all enduring. many stores and factories are closed, and many people are locked inside their homes. No one is sure when the prohibitions will be lifted, or what they will do to catch up with their bills.
It’s the COVID-19 SHTF event.
The thing is, that when we try to turn on the internet for escape we are blitzed with a combined narrative; it’s either [1] hate-China or [2] fear-the-corona-virus. I mean can’t we get a break? Why does the US government feel the need to constantly and incessantly manipulate the media and try to control us all. Can’t they just take a holiday, or something?
Jeeze!
Well, I am not the government, and I do have some suggestion of what you all can do. So, here I provide some thoughts on what you can do to escape from this nightmarish assault.
Let’s start with a list of some movies and television shows. Shows that you can use to pull up interesting escapist entertainment to look at.
Now, rather than list well known movies, or the latest in special effects, instead I have decided to put together a list of 1980’s feel-good movies, and 1960’s – 1970’s forgotten comedies. The key driver here is “overlooked” and / or “forgotten”. (With the first one being “unknown” to anyone under 50 years old.)
I do hope that at least one movie or show listed here will remind you of some pleasant memories . And that maybe… maybe, you would use my suggestion as a seed to take you on a trip. A trip far away from the current frustrations of modern locked-up life.
We start with a pretty well-known movie. At least well-known to my generation.
The newer generations not so much.
Though, you would be surprised at how many people under the age of 30 never heard of it. Which is a shame. The movie is a classic and it’s all about growing up with your first heart-pounding crush…
Sixteen Candles (1983)
Climax of the movie when Samantha gets her birthday wish.
The tale is classic. American teenager Samantha (Molly Ringwald) is despondent that her entire family has forgotten her sixteenth birthday. You know, being so caught up are they in the wedding of her sister. Now, Samantha has a crush on a classmate of hers. He’s Mr. Bo-Hunk; Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and she wrongly thinks he has no interest in her.
Oh, but we do find out what happens…
This John Hughes film is one of the best romantic teen comedies in history.
Starring 2 of the Brat Packers, Molly Ringwald, playing the lovesick Samantha, and Anthony Michael Hall who plays "The Geek", he practically stole the entire movie with his one-liners.
His friends were the best, it's funny to see John Cusack as one of his geeky friends, and I just noticed Joan Cusack makes a small appearance in this as the girl with the neck brace on. That's funny.
I recommend this classic to anyone who likes romantic teen comedies.
Oh and whoever said that "Sixteen Candles" was perverted, all i have to say is WHAT? What is perverted about this movie, American Pie was perverted, this movie is a classic. There was ONE scene of nudity and it lasted about 3 seconds. I give "Sixteen Candles" 10 out of 10!!!!
- LittleRascal-15
Matters are not helped by a party that evening at school, at which much mayhem breaks out, nor by the chaotic wedding day itself.
"They Fucking forgot my birthday!!!"...
These are the immortal words spoken by SIXTEEN CANDLES heroine Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) in the ultimate 80's teen comedy.
This movie has become a classic to those born in the 70's, like myself, and I now consider it a "guilty pleasure". Its a movie we all grew up with.
Didn't we all know a person like 'Farmer Ted', or a hot queenie like the blonde he hilariously gets. It was every young freshman's fantasy. This funny flick is also a relic of the 80's that is not all that dated.
The jokes still work (as long as you see it uncut) and it is neat seeing things of the not so distant past be on display. Floppy disks, headgears, leotards, etc...
Time has not been so good to the featured stars. Ringwald and Anthony-Michael Hall, who was born to play this role, and this one only, have all but disappeared. The biggest stars now are blips on the screen here: Joan (in a headgear) and John (a geek) Cusack. The film is like a toy you can't put away.
Some situations are beat, but at least Paul Dooley adds an extra dimension to the father. Too many of John Hughes' teen-angst comedies of the era feature tissue-thin parental figures.
This was the first and best of the so-called "brat pack" movies, and will always hold a place in 1980's filmmaking history. Girls learned never to lend their underwear to a geek and we all learned that high school is just a phase, easily forgotten as time goes on.
-Don-10229 March 1999
Now, maybe you have already seen that movie ten or twenty times and do not care to re-watch it. No problem.
Seriously.
No problem.
Maybe get yourself a nice bag of chips. Pour it into a nice big bowl and grab yourself some beer, or like me… a nice glass of wine. (Just a reasonably cheap red will do.)
Relax.
Stop allowing the “news” and those that control it and the internet to control you.
Some Lays potato chips that I bought. The Chinese really like all these odd kinds of flavors. This particular flavor is a white grape soda drink flavor. Who figures? Eh? For me it was a cross between Korean style barbecued squid with Hunan spices or plain “American style” potato chips.
So, now that you have some fine tasty chips… a nice beverage of your choice, and (hopefully) a companion or two (can be a loved one, a trusted pet, or some children), settle down to some friendly escapist enjoyment.
I'm drinking red wine, so I think that it could be paired quite nicely with a white grape soda flavored potato chip.
With that being said, how about a feel-good television show.
I really like the world of Mayberry RFD. Nothing ever seems to go wrong in it. Seriously, nothing bad or really serious ever happens in it short of a cat getting stuck in a tree, or an arrest for a broken tail light.
It’s all just good, safe escapist enjoyment.
The Andy Griffith Show
The Andy Griffith show.
This sitcom was spun-off from an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. In that show, Danny Thomas was arrested in a small North Carolina town. The character of the small town sheriff turned out to be so popular that they made a complete show around him.
Of course, named “The Andy Griffith Show”, and focused on Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor in the small town of Mayberry.
Andy Taylor was a widower with a young son (Opie) and the pair of them lived with Andy’s Aunt Bee – famous for her most excellent pies.
Andy’s Aunt Bee was famous for her most excellent pies.
Crime in Mayberry was of the distinctly petty variety and much of the comedy centered around Andy, his family life and working life especially with his somewhat stupid deputy (and cousin) Barney Fife.
Andy wouldn’t allow Barney to load his weapon for fear he would shoot his own feet off! He allows him to carry a solitary bullet (usually in his left shirt pocket).
Throughout the show’s run, Andy had two love interests – the first was druggist Ellie Walker, and then later schoolteacher Helen Crump whom Andy ended up marrying in 1968.
Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor
When Andy Griffith decided to call it quits with the show it was still popular and the network decided to carry it on under the new name of Mayberry RFDwith Ken Berry in the lead as councilman Sam Jones.
Also a most excellent show.
Griffith helped with the change over by appearing in the first episode (it was in this episode that he married Helen and the pair then moved away from the town).
A typical day in Mayberry with Andy and councilman Sam Jones.
I know. I know.
Mayberry RFD is more about hotdogs and hamburgers instead of potato chips. It’s a show about mowing lawns on hot July afternoons, pitchers of icy lemonade on shady porches, and tree-houses that hide in the back yard. It’s about comic-books, airplane models that hang from the bedroom ceiling, and classmates that you play baseball with. It’s about watermelons and fresh buttered corn on the cob.
And I really do emphasize. I really do.
Maybe something along these lines, eh?
What’s life without a nice tasty home-cooked hamburger? Not much, I’ll tell you what. Notice the cheese! (No tomatoes, though. Bummer.) But hey! How about taking notice of that nice beer in the background…
Oh, and speaking of hamburgers and beer…
F Troop
This is just a fun silly television series that I used to watch when I was in elementary school. LOL.
But now, after decades of the rigors of Life, I have come to appreciate it’s silliness. And yes, silliness has an important role in our lives. If you disagree with me, then leave. You can go ahead and split up your time between CNN and the weather channel.
As an aside, American Airports have non-stop CNN coverage, or the Weather Channel. Chinese airports have silly light slapstick entertainment, Mr. Bean style. Why do you think that the two philosophies are so different?
F Troop
This show is a military farce about the gallant incompetents of F Troop. It all takes place at “Fort Courage” way back in 1866 Kansas. This was an interesting time period, being the final days of the Civil War.
The CO was the wide-eyed, bumbling Captain Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry). You see, he had been promoted from Private during the last days of the war. Imagine that! Private to Captain. What did he do, you ask? Well, he accidentally led a charge towards the enemy with a sneeze that sounded like “Charge!”
The episodes were fun and creative.
V Is for Vampire
Count Sforza, an emigrant from Transylvania, arrives in town. He comes in a hearse, has pale skin and has a crow he calls "Brother." The men of F-Troop suspect he may be a vampire, given the count's tendency to say, "Good evening," regardless of the time of day. When Jane can't be found, O'Rourke, Agarn and the Captain decide to check out Sforza's spooky mansion.
—Bill Koenig
Reveille is played at 10 am “because of the three hour time difference” and that even though rations and pay allotments are drawn for 30 men, only 17 are stationed at the fort (the other 13 are allegedly “Indian scouts out on patrol”). LOL.
Perhaps the United States government were taking notes, eh?
Unbeknownst to the captain, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke (Forrest Tucker) had already negotiated a secret – and highly profitable – treaty with the Hekawi Indians. These Indians were led by Chief Wild Eagle (Frank De Kova) from whom he also had an exclusive franchise to sell their souvenirs to tourists via O’Rourke Enterprises.
The treaty benefited both sides. This is because it permitted the Indians to trade and upgrade their living conditions, and the troops to maintain the illusion that they were involved in a deadly land war. While all the time no one was actually in danger.
The only flaw in this otherwise happy arrangement was the troublesome Shugs, a genuine war-mongering tribe (with whom there was no peace treaty) who occasionally went into action.
F Troop is a happy, go-lucky television comedy that would NEVER be permitted to air in today’s modern progressive America.
Corporal Randolph Agarn was O’Rourke’s chief aide and assistant schemer and Wrangler Jane the hard-ridin’, fast-shootin’ (and very scrumptious) cowgirl who ran the post office and was out to marry Parmenter.
Other soldiers in the troop included Hannibal Dobbs, the troop’s bugler – who couldn’t play the bugle – and Troopers Duffy and Vanderbilt.
A lot of colourful Indians passed through the Fort in one-time special appearances. Some of those included Wise Owl (Milton Berle); Roaring Chicken (Edward Everett Horton); 147-year-old Flaming Arrow (Phil Harris) and Bald Eagle (Don Rickles).
LOL.
Other special appearances included Sgt. Ramsden (Paul Lynde) and Wrongo Starr (Henry Gibson).
F Troop was an entertaining enough production which, in similar dubious taste to Hogan’s Heroes made light of a deadly serious period of history.
Let’s look at a movie.
Maybe television shows aren’t your thang, eh?
Well, let’s go and check out a teenaged boy science fiction movie from the 1960’s. It’s got all the elements of boyhood dreams. the title says it all… adventure, shipwrecked, on a lone desolate place… Mars!
And it’s got a monkey!
But first, movies like this remind me of food. They really do. Often, as a boy I would go raid the refrigerator and heat up some leftovers that were sitting inside. I would use the microwave rather than the stove, and there were always some good delicious leftovers. Back then, in the 1960’s the US dollar was still worth around twenty five cents, and middle class families could afford to eat. Not like today where it’s actual value is a fraction of a penny.
I would often make up a sandwich from scraps that I would pull out of the refrigerator.
Anyways, I would pull out some pork-chops and applesauce, or maybe some meatloaf (and make a sandwich from it), or perhaps some left over lasagna. I would hurriedly scramble and whip up a quick meal with the commercials were rolling…
Of course, more often than not, I would just end up making a “Dagwood” or a hoagie out of all the fixings in the fridge.
Anyways, back to the movie…
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
"Special-effects wunderkind and genre master Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds, The Outer Limits) won a place in the hearts of fantasy film lovers everywhere with this gorgeously designed journey into the unknown."
Robinson Crusoe on Mars tells the story of US astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper who must fight for survival when his spaceship, Elinor M, crash-lands on the barren wastes of Mars.
Oooh…
The story begins with the Elinor M orbiting Mars on the first official probe to test the planet’s gravity. Aboard are Draper, Colonel Dan McReady (Batman‘s Adam West) and Mona (The Woolly Monkey), a monkey, space suited for medical research.
The perfect mix of period science fiction for pre-teen boyhood dreams.
McReady and Draper suddenly realize that their craft is on a collision course with a giant meteor. Yikes!
In a split-second evasive action, the spacecraft swings too far off course and is dragged inexorably down by the gravitational pull of Mars.
McReady and Draper separately abandon ship with McReady taking charge of Mona.
Despite its retro rockets, Draper’s ejection capsule crashes on landing, wrecking the craft and leaving food and water for only a few days. Exhausted, Draper falls asleep only to wake up suffocating for lack of air. Without oxygen, he can sleep only an hour.
The true hero of the movie; the space-suited monkey Mona.
Draper sets out to find McReady but in his search only locates Mona. With no more than a few hours oxygen, Draper seems doomed.
Lightheaded, he passes out but is miraculously saved when little yellow rocks, burning and giving off bursts of gas, revive him. This gas is pure oxygen and Draper devises a method to feed the oxygen into his regular tank.
Imagine that! Little yellow rocks…
Several weeks later, a spacecraft appears over Mars and then lands.
Draper, sure he is being rescued, runs to the ship only to discover that it is not from the USA or even the Earth. Watching the ship, Draper suddenly sees a figure detach himself and run in his direction. The two face each other warily.
A stranded astronaut recording his audio diary within a martian cave. Wait until you see the alien. He looks like something out of pre-Aztec Mexico. LOL.
Gradually, Draper allays the fears of the newcomer and they settle down for the night.
With the arrival of the newcomer – who Draper jokingly dubs Friday – his worst problem, loneliness, has gone. Slowly, over the months, Draper teaches Friday English, and together, wondering if they will ever be rescued, set out to explore the Martian terrain.
Not a movie that will leave you wondering about life. Not so much.
It’s just a silly enough pre-adolescent movie for young boys that was written int he 1960’s. But, you know what? Maybe that’s what we need right now. Maybe we need to “escape” and forget our life for a spell. To give us a break and to relax our minds somewhat.
Now, as a man, I prefer other (ahem) more adult pleasures.
Manly adult pleasures.
Beer, wine and VSOP can help. But you know, if you don’t watch out it could consume you instead. So I would recommend just some lighthearted escapist shows and movies. Nothing too serious or upsetting.
Oh, and enjoy with something delicious to eat.
Newhart
If you have lived through the 1980’s then you knew all about Newhart. This show as a hoot!
The cast of the television show “Newhart”.
In this series, Newhart played Dick Loudon, a writer of “how-to” books who moved from New York to Norwich, Vermont to realise his dream of running a country inn. His smart, funny, and sexy wife was named Joanna (played by Mary Frann).
As with Newhart’s previous comedies, there were numerous quirky supporting characters. Tom Poston (who had been a frequent guest on the earlier show) was the inn’s unhandy handyman, George Utley, and Julia Duffy played the vain and spoiled Stephanie Vanderkellen (an heiress working as a maid at the 200-year-old Stratford Inn – Stephanie replaced her less interesting cousin, Leslie, after the first season).
Stephanie’s boyfriend, Michael Harris (Peter Scolari), was an insufferable 1980s yuppie and producer of a local TV show, Vermont Today, which Dick began hosting a few years into Newhart’s run.
Perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the most unusual, characters were three bizarre backwoodsmen, of whom only one ever spoke (until the final episode).
Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.
“I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl,” was their stock introduction. They could always be counted upon to enjoy any activity that would disgust most people.
The trio of backwoodsmen known as Larry, Darryl, and Darryl actually made their first appearance in the series’ second episode. Dick hired their “company,” Anything for a Buck, to unearth the 300-year-old body of a woman buried in the Stratford Inn’s basement. The audience’s reaction to the brothers did not go unnoticed by Newhart and co-creator Kemp, and they were one of the first additions to the regular cast when Newhart underwent a makeover after season two.
-13 fun facts about the Newhart show.
William Sanderson, who played Larry, graduated from Memphis State University with a BBA and JD, but the acting bug bit him before he sat for the bar exam. Despite this educational pedigree, Sanderson remained very much a good ol’ Memphis boy at heart. While working on Newhart he sipped Jack Daniels and read the Bible in his dressing room between takes, and he constantly chewed tobacco. He had a habit of leaving his spittle cups all over the set, to the disgust of his co-workers.
Tony Papenfuss (First Darryl) and John Voldstad (Second Darryl) are both classically trained actors who had years of stage experience on their resumes when they landed their Newhart parts. Both actors’ agents actually advised them against accepting the roles, since they were non-speaking parts.
Newhart is a classic piece of 1980’s television. It described America leading up to the Bill Clinton Presidency and thus was free of all the political correctness mumbo-jumbo that followed it.
Everyone in town sold their property to a Japanese corporation, and the finale included a parody of Fiddler on the Roof, and ended with Newhart waking up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette and explaining that he’d had a very strange dream (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous 1986-87 season of Dallas.)
Best Episode - Season 6
Episode 121: “Take Me To Your Loudon” (Aired: 10/26/87)
It's Halloween, and the townspeople believe the town is about to be invaded by aliens.
A beloved excursion, many fans cite this installment as their very favorite of the entire series. They’re also likely to use it in evidence of the show’s supposed bent towards the surreal.
You see, this story doesn’t totally forsake logic — it just asks that we find it in the broad, heightened, and not all together relatable depictions of some of the characters. That‘s the reason that it’s hard to believe and thus seems “surreal.”
It's Halloween and the Stratford is having a costume party, Michael has the station run the film "War Of The Worlds (1953)" on TV and the townsfolk believe they are being invaded by aliens from outer space.
A hilariously funny episode, in the top five best in the series. The laughs are non stop, George is the Cowardly Lion from "Wizard Of Oz', Dick the Tin Man, Joanna is Vampira, Michael dresses as a Canadian Mountie and Stephanie (naturally) is a princess. Harley shows up and tells about the invasion when he sees the movie on TV. Michael sees a chance for the same kind of panic Orson Welles caused with his radio version of "War Of The Worlds". Dick tries to be the voice of reason to the wacky towns people but they just accuse HIM of being from outer space! And Larry, Darryl and Darryl show up with their funniest introduction ever.
I think it represents the era most accurately, and, as such, is the most valuable.
And now, while we are at it, for another classic 1980’s movie…
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Ferris Bueller takes a day off from school.
Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is a born con artist. When he’s not talking a mile a minute to his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), he’s stepping aside, facing the camera and addressing the audience.
In his dedication to the joy of loafing, Ferris convinces his parents he’s ill, the student body starts raising money to save his life with a kidney transplant, and the dean of students thinks all sorts of people are dying.
But Ferris isn’t dying. He’s just lying, and it’s the ninth time in the same semester.
He convinces Cameron to ‘borrow’ his father’s irreplaceable 1961 red Ferrari, and then swing by school to kidnap Sloane.
A large part of the film (directed by John Hughes) is then devoted to elaborate schemes designed to keep Ferris and his pals out of school: Answering machines are fixed, a fake body run by strings attached to a doorknob rolls around in Ferris’s bed to fool concerned and nosy parents, a sickbed message is recorded through a loudspeaker to answer the doorbell and deter inquisitive truant officers.
While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant, catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade the principal – determined to catch Ferris red-handed – slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.
Hold the phone . . . if it’s a holiday, with floats and marching bands and 10,000 extras, why does anyone need to play hooky from school in the first place?
Brat-packer Charlie Sheen appears in a side-splitting cameo role as a drugged-to-the-eyeballs boy that spiteful sister Jeannie encounters at a police station. To get the necessary spaced-out effect, full method acting would have been a step too far, but Sheen did keep himself awake for 48 hours before the scene was shot. LOL.
If life is far too serious for you now with the COVID-19 pandemic a raging, perhaps some good old-fashioned Ferris Bueller wisdom might be in order.
I do believe that we all need to take a lesson from Ferris Bueller in today’s day and age.
Oh, and while I am on a 1980’s bender…
Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science (1985)
Triumphant geeks have always been a common theme of writer/director John Hughes, but that triumph was never achieved as raucously as it was in 1985’s Weird Science – a screenplay which took the high school movie guru just two days to write.
Among the feats of sex-starved no-hope geek boys Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith): vanquishing a psycho older brother, gaining popularity and acceptance at school, and best of all, getting the girls – both the computer-generated kind and the real kind.
With a little Frankenstein-type mission on the brain, Gary convinces Wyatt to sit down at his souped-up computer and go to work on an interactive onscreen lady friend.
But with the lightning brewing outside, the bras atop their heads and the Barbie doll hooked up to the hardware, it’s inevitable the boys take things a little too far . . .
Lisa, the Frankenstein creation of two 1980’s nerds.
Behold Lisa (Kelly LeBrock). Named after the computer (the Apple Lisa) on which she was designed, she is beautiful, brilliant and capable of some treacherous hocus-pocus. She also does their washing, cleaning and cooking – feminists will loathe this film.
Lisa fast becomes the boys’ well-needed mentor of cool. She brings them to a steamy nightclub, where they’re instant hits with the regulars; she hosts a whopper of a party at Wyatt’s house, where her duties include freezing Wyatt’s absurd grandparents and dealing with the gang of killer mutants who crash the festivities.
Weird Science (1985)
But most importantly, she teaches Wyatt and Gary how to stand up for themselves – which in this case, means facing off against the gun-toting, wedgie-bestowing older brother Chet (Bill Paxton), and, as if that’s not bad enough, a beastly biker type (played by Vernon Wells, reprising his Mad Max 2 role).
It’s enough to say that in the end, everyone gets what they deserve.
With that geek-dream-come-true premise and a quirky, catchy theme song from Oingo Boingo, Weird Science quickly became a favorite of the timid and nerdy. It is all 1980’s and it WILL carry your back to another time and place.
I know, I know…
Too many 1980’s flicks.
You all probably thought that I was going to give you REAL GENIUS (1985), and indeed I was. Nothing quite says the 1980’s more than this movie. For some reason it just carries me back… way back to that time. The music. The fashion. The “feeling”. Man, if you want to escape, nothing is better…
Ahhh Heck.
Real Genius (1985)
Female geniuses have bowl-cuts, no social boundaries and never sleep…
You can tell how dated this movie is. Instead of having a creme frappichino latte at a coffeehouse, the gang goes ahead and drinks some beer and hamburgers together. man! Don’t you just love it?
As a child of the 80s, I have a soft spot in my heart for creatively-executed movies from this period. At their worst, 80s movies become dated more quickly than films from nearly any other period in film history. At their best, 80s movies reflect the cultural undertones of an exciting time where humor and optimism were rampant in films despite the specter of cold war, the advent of AIDS and a rocky economy.
Oh, and did you know, dorm room closets are a fine place to put an entrance to a secret lair…
Terrific nostalgia trip down 80s memory lane - loved it!
by heisenberg8313 November 2005
Had very fond memories of this film as a kid in the 80s. Still holds up even today. DVD widescreen format shows off how well directed this movie is. Val Kilmer is terrific as the genius slacker hero. The whole cast gel well together, and the dialogue is very sharp and well-written (reminded me of TV show Scrubs in places). Had me laughing out loud in many places - rare for a modern version like American Pie. Lots of tasty 80s musical montages scattered throughout. Something really likable and positive about this movie, leaves you feeling really good at the end. Highly recommended - really hasn't dated at all. An enjoyable trip down 80s memory lane!
Real Genius takes the happy, go-lucky optimism of the 80s and superimposes it on the grim topics of military research, cold war espionage and assassination. The movie is set in a west-coast college (see Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford) and makes full use of the hyper-intelligent, eccentric dialog you might expect in elite California academia.
Yup.
And eating hamburgers gives you very large breasts!
The sound track from Thomas Newman (Less than Zero, American Beauty and many others) is technically complex and involving and fits the movie perfectly.
In this classic 1980’s movie, our heroes get to play with lasers and other cool things like popcorn.
At times, the movie suffers from the usual poor depiction of science (see lame computer applications and some bad blue screen work on aircraft) and unbelievable scenarios (see water slide in lecture hall and ice sledding in dormitory). But we all know that top secret military computers use 6-character passwords…
Despite these forgivable breaches, the Neal Israel’s unique dialog is truly brilliant, the situational comedy is eccentric, and the humor is uplifting.
Getting even is a moral imperative!
Val Kilmer is outstanding in his portrayal of Chris Knight and I lament his departure from this odd and extremely intelligent form of comedy (See Top Secret) – Though Kilmer has been involved with “better” movies since, I don’t think he has ever been more genuinely entertaining.
One of the all time best 80's college movies
by thirdi 3 November 2001
Val Kilmer is hilarious as a college genius on par with Einstein, but is more interested in partying and chasing girls. A new arrival to the campus, Mitch, is a brilliant 15 year-old whom Val takes under his wing and tries to get to loosen up and have a good time.
There are probably some important themes and ideas to analyze within this movie, but for me it's just an old-school personal favorite that I've seen about 100 times. Great 80's music soundtrack and funny performances. William Atherton is perfect as the self-important, snobby professor, and another highlight is Robert Prescott, who plays his butt-kissing, nerdy assistant "Kent".
A movie that asks the question, isn't life experience just as important for education, as classrooms and books? A very funny, fine film that is up there with "Animal House" in my opinion.
The bad guys get “their’s”. I love it. It’s a good feel-good escapist movie that take you back to pre-Clinton America.
I think this movie is a must-watch for anyone who enjoys science, comedy and the 80s genre, or for anyone who is planning on attending a technology school on the West coast. This movie may not depict reality, but it communicates a hopeful spirit we could all use more of in today’s world of harsh reality. Besides, Any problem can be solved with a catchy 80’s pop song and a montage.
Oh, and don’t forget, Jesus wants you to stop playing with yourself.
Ah, what can I say. The 1980’s was “the shit”. It’s great escapist clap-trap as it occurred at a time that predated all the political correctness nonsense of the Bill Clinton years, and the Military Empire building of the Bush years. It’s just a nice time capsule that will take you back to a time when people were not so easily offended and when people were ok with just being ok.
With that being said, I am going to offer up just one more 1980’s movie. This movie is a tad bit more obscure. Indeed finding it is near impossible, but OMG is it awesome.
Water (1985)
Water is a funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism. It is also a kind of raw smack in the face of commercialism and the media.
British comedy-writing legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote this funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism in the Thatcher Era. Elements of the story were also inspired by the 1982 Falklands conflict (when Argentina invaded the British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean).
An extremely funny filmsxct16 June 2004
I am quite disappointed with the average for this film. I found it to be one of the funniest films I have ever seen.
The cast is superb and the script, although not one of the best written, is filled with humor that was was made even better by the acting. It was filmed on the island of St. Lucia.
It's a story of a company drilling for oil and accidentally discovers mineral water, a substance that is even more valuable than oil. But it is important to keep it a secret. Jimmie Walker, who I don't particularly like, plays the part of a radio dj and does it wonderfully. Michael Caine and Brenda Vaccaro are fabulous as is everyone else.
Please give this film a chance. I think it might be one of those little surprises that come along every once in a while.
Set on a fictional Caribbean island (Cascara) owned by Britain but largely left to its own devices, the story centers around the discovery of a lucrative resource – the natural mineral water of the title – and the reaction of people on the island and other nations.
Location shooting for the fictional British Caribbean colony of Cascara took place in the real former British Caribbean colony of St. Lucia in the West Indies.
Water has a plot that is all over the place, but I have to admit the fact that the personal fights between the governor and his wife being broadcast all over the island really cracked me up.
...of Houston Texaslavean on 13 December 2001
I thought this movie actually had some very funny and memorable lines...The characters are so stereotyped that they have all become caricatures...from the French Commandos on the beach who when they are breaking out their emergency rations are having the menu read to them by a Sergent who informs them that it will be "accompanied by an unpretentious St Emillion which will amuse even the most cynical palate"...the American Colonel who can't see the target for the Limbo dancers...when the guerilla mets the oil man he calls him a "Yankee capitalist imperialist...of Houston Texas", says the oil man extending his hand.
It was produced by George Harrison and has Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and a lot of other name musicians involved in the soundtrack.
It has a nice way to spend an hour and a half.
No it has no deep hidden meaning nor will it change your life or make a social statement...but then I watch movies as a bit of escapism...this is one I sought out to own and when it comes out on DVD will buy it in that format as well.
The stand-out cast features Brits Leonard Rossiter, Billy Connolly, Maureen Lipman and Fulton Mackay and Americans Valerie Perrine, Fred Gwynne, Ruby Wax and Jimmie Walker.
Jimmie Walker, everyone…
Jimmie Walker plays the sole radio DJ in the sole radio station on the tiny island. He’s hilarious.
The charity rock band featured at the end of the movie – The Singing Rebels – features George Harrison (whose Handmade Films produced the movie), Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Jon Lord (of Deep Purple).
OK.
Maybe you don’t have the attention span for a movie. So let’s look at a nice 1980’s television show. Something that will take you to a land far, far away.
Maybe a little too far…
Let’s look at the classic…
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
A small-town housewife struggles to cope with the increasingly bizarre and violent events unfolding around her. It’s a way that the media was preparing America for the Bill Clinton years.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Set in fictional Fernwood, Ohio, this deliriously demented serial focused on the beleaguered heroine Mary Hartman, an average American housewife. In the first season, Mary suffered the travails of mass murder, adultery, venereal disease, homosexuality, religious cults, and UFO sightings, before she finally succumbed to a nervous breakdown on a syndicated talk show.
Then, things start to get crazy…
Wow, what a bizarre show
7 July 2000 | by A-Ron-2
This was one of those seminal moments in television history, because the 70s seemed to be more open to experimentation and strangeness than certainly the 80s and definitely the 90s.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a show that was unclassifiable by any standard of TV today. Now, I haven't seen the show in about 15 years (I watched the whole series on tape at a friend of mine's back in the mid or late 80s), but I am sure that it would be just as bizarre and wonderful today as ever.
Martin Mull was brilliant as the psychopathic wife beater, Barth Gimble. I hope that TV Land or some other such channel will pick this show up, because I would really love to see it again.
A more insightfully absurd and comically astute series has not been made. Mix the daily grind of ALL MY CHILDREN, the experimentation of MONTY PYTHON, the self-absorbed and urbane existentialism of WOODY ALLEN and the offbeat quality of BLUE VELVET and you have MARY HARTMAN MARY HARTMAN.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
I grew to love Mary Hartman’s kitchen (and other Fernwood locales) as if they were an extension of my own town and home. Too bad the show couldn’t have lasted longer than it did.
Candide in a consumer societymelvelvit-1 written on 31 May 2008
A sharply satirical soap opera about a modern-day "Candide" (Louise Lasser) and the dysfunctional pre-fab Americana she inhabits.
In the opening episodes (beginning 1/76), Mary has to contend with her impotent husband, indifferent daughter, pervert grandpa, hot-to-trot sister, and the massacre of a local family (along with their 2 goats and 8 chickens) but it seems the waxy yellow build-up on her kitchen floor subliminally affected the mass media-influenced Mary more than all the domestic drama combined.
The absence of a canned laugh track can make viewers feel they're either losing their mind or experiencing a darkly comedic, penetrating pop-culture parody. Possibly both. I loved it then and I love it now!
For a brief period of time, somewhere around 9-11, I was fortunate enough to have viewed, for the first time in 20 years, the first episodes in which Mary is held captive by the guy who “killed the whole Lombardy family, two goats and six chickens”. And thus, from the vantage point of my 40s, I was finally able to really “get it.
Mary Hartman is one of the great emblems of the distress of the mid-20th century American woman. Her hair in childish pigtails while wearing those little girl dresses, Mary was an example of the overly-consumered, growth-stunted American housewife trying to function while in a semi-daze.
...The other thing that makes this tough on reruns is that Mary Hartman was so much a part of the 70's. What's hard to explain to people who weren't there, is how weird the 70's were.
The whole country was in this very odd mood, partly giddy, partly freaked out, partly numb.
I don't know if I can explain how Mary Hartman fit in to that, but it did and maybe not enough time has passed where it won't seem dated.
The other thing is that the show had a whole parallel life running at the same time in the live soap opera of Louise Lasser's sudden fame. Her personal trajectory towards a nervous breakdown tracked Mary Hartman's.
Do I need to remind everyone of her bizarre interviews in Rolling Stone, her bust for cocaine, and her appearance as the host on SNL, in which she also had a nervous breakdown.
Years later it came out that this was not faked, that she was ready to refuse to appear on the show minutes before curtain time, and only agreed to appear once Chevy Chase convinced her that if she didn't go on, he'd go on in her place wearing a wig.
-outnaway 9 March 2009
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Her confrontations with adultery, contemporary feminism, and countless other social issues (often found within her own family) while trying to be the perfect little housewife and mother makes her eventual nervous breakdown more than just another crazy plot twist.
In actuality, it was an inevitable progression.
Compare her and her friends and neighbors to Carol Burnett’s Eunice and other 70s television characters like Edith Bunker and you’d have a rather fascinating college course, I think. Perhaps I need to put one together!
Remember when Loretta came over to bring Mary Jell-O with Cracker Jacks suspended in it?
So, for those of you who have a similar fondness for this groundbreaking, offbeat series and to those who have never seen it, here’s to bringing Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in reruns.
A demented,glorious, masterpiececoop-1616 February 2002
Truly one of the greatest-and least remembered -TV shows of all time.I loved this show back in the seventies. It was a rich tapestry of comic-and touching- characters, exemplified by the naive heroine, Mary Hartman,and her friends, perhaps most unforgettable of whom was would be Country Music queen,Loretta Haggers, played by the sadly underused -and brilliant-Mary Kay Place.
But then this show was rich in fine acting-Dabney Coleman, martin Mull, and Marian Mercer, among others.If the Comedy channel can rerun "soap" why cant they rerun this masterpiece?
I know that it is tough to decide.
Just go hop in the car, and go through a drive through and get a burger. Then on the way ponder which movie or television show to watch. I always find it easier to think on a full stomach. So have the burger and then settle down and choose one…
Burger King’s Whopper.
Conclusion
When you are living in a stressful and uncomfortable situation, it is time to sit back, enjoy a frosty beer and disconnect. It will relax your mind and permit you to recover. Nothing is better than reliving times that pre-dated the chaotic life that Americans now live.
Pick your “poison”;
Sixteen Candles
The Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry RFD)
F-Troop
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Newhart
Ferris Bueller’s day off
Weird Science
Real Genius
Water
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
Pick one. Rent it, torrent it, or Netflix it.
Get some food and drink.
Take care, and enjoy life. The coronavirus will pass. America will be changed and a new “normal” will manifest. In the meantime, relax.
I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have more in my Movie Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is a pretty good article written by George Packer that was printed in the Atlantic and has pretty much been circulating everywhere. My friends from both sides of the political spectrum are discussing it, and urging me to read it. So I have, and I found his points… oh so delicious. Here is his article and I think that you all would see that he makes some good points no matter what side of the political spectrum you are on.
The COVID-19 event, regardless of what caused it, has exposed America for what it is. And the picture is decidedly not pretty.
You might not agree with everything that he has to say. You might not like the dish of food that he serves to you, but you must admit that the COVID-19 has exposed America to be fully and completely incapable of governing during a serious emergency. And while the idea for “Make America Great Again” is laudable, it is unfortunately beyond the reach of everyone inside the monstrous American government.
When the (COVID-19) virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.
It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
America responds to the COVID-19
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective.
The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare.
When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver.
States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering.
Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Presidential Leadership
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms.
Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president.
But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster.
And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.
Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat?
Are we still capable of self-government?
A major crisis
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century.
The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded.
The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it.
At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression.
Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”
Ah, but the American middle class…
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings.
Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents.
Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.
This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders.
Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear.
The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects.
The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.
No one noticed.
Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost.
The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment.
But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.
Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life.
He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party.
His main tool of governance was to lie.
A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
The American government
Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding.
He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service.
He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests.
His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
COVID-19 exposed America for what it is.
If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half.
Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat.
With different leadership, it might have.
Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human.
But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.
When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms.
The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health.
Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.
Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.
Right now…
We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be?
Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers.
Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact.
In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick.
For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.
Dangerous parasites
The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite.
A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.
Political Nihilism
The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age.
Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university.
Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million.
Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew.
In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.
So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles.
As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.
In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust.
He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through.
With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.
To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing.
It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health.
It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives.
All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.
Our fight against the COVID-19
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed.
Under our current leadership, nothing will change.
If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
Facing a stark choice.
We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing.
Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices.
We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
The evidence is in, and with [1] Pompeo admitting that the COVID-19 strike against China was intentional, and [2] the Chinese treating it as a bioweapon, you just cannot deny what is going on. Not to mention that the bio-weapons scientists from Russia and America also agree that this is an American biological weapon.
I mean, you can only keep your head in the sand for so long. If it acts like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and has a painted sign saying “I am a duck!”….
…it’s a duck.
I can hear the scoffing already, I continue to think lots of people have a big blind spot in understanding power and how it's being executed because they don't want to consider silly sounding things like the occult.
it's taken me many long years and lots of reading to start wrapping my head around the twisted belief system of these sociopaths. I don't think it benefits anyone to underestimate what they are capable of, yet many of you here seem to be doing precisely that.
-Posted by: lizard | Apr 15 2020 17:10 utc | 2
COVID-19 was an American biological weapons attack to suppress China. It was a part of many other efforts, and all which are combined into the so-called “hybrid war” that Trump has been promising his followers for the last four years. (More about that here.) You know, that pesky “hybrid-war” that everyone is talking about on the internet.
He kept his promise, don’t you know.
Now before you all get your tail feathers all ruffled up, ask yourself these questions...
[1] Does Donald Trump try to keep his promises?
[2] Will Trump try to Make America Great Again?
[3] How does China fit in that equation of America being great?
[4] Would John Bolton support a war against China?
[5] Would Mike Pompeo support a war against China?
It's all there. No matter how uncomfortable it might be to accept.
The COVID-19 was indeed part of an aggressive “hybrid war” that Trump and his advisors; Pompeo and Bolton, were using to suppress China. This is obvious to anyone paying attention, and any student of history, that America is tumbling into the historical dangers of the Thucydides Trap.
“Make America First.” Right?
This is the best write up so far on the big plan out of Washington DC, and how it actually materialized. It fully explains the mysteries that surrounds this event. And as you read it, many puzzle pieces will come into focus. Indeed, the abject clarity of the entire effort will materialize right before your very eyes.
It’s a great article.
Let’s look at this COVID-19 situation in terms of the geo-political ramifications. Let’s look at the big picture.
But first, before we look at American’s big plan to suppress China, let’s consider the global ramifications, and what China must think of all this. You do know, that they don’t get their news from CNN. They have real experts, not actors or diversity hires, from which to make their decisions upon.
What do you think that the Chinese think of all this…
A Chinese response to US regime strategy would have to be genuinely asymmetrical.
In the sense it would use resources against which the US has little or no defense.
Since the US is probably one of the most poorly organized industrial countries in the world, any degree of well-organized and disciplined action is likely to do damage to the US. (But that is another issue.)
It is entirely possible that China was active "below the surface" after so many other attacks (the last four years of non-stop viral attacks against livestock and food grains) and because it has been unwilling to waste efforts or goodwill in overt military action. It seems to me at least clear that China deliberately refrained from accusing the US of what was so obviously an attack.
The question that must have arisen for China was-- if this attack is not suppressed systematically then other similar attacks can continue.
The issue was to map the pipeline so to speak and find ways to cut the flow (of the COVID-19) into the country. This was certainly a military and not just a public health priority.
For me at least, it makes perfect sense to conceal as much as possible about the nature of a covert attack until one has developed a defense or other response. China had every reason to deny the US any excess intelligence about the results of its attack. That is also why no one wanted (or wants to call it a war).
If there is no "war" then any information China withholds is negligent. If it is a war-- then we are talking about self-defense against an aggressor and all his NATO allies.
...
Even if we did not have the war with China however we would be faced with the fact that the NATO, and the US regime that owns it, is ruled by psychopaths. Psychopaths for whom human life is merely a conduit for potential cash-flow. They constitute pathogens for which there are no BSL standards high enough to contain.
-Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
No one wants to see what is really going on; that their beloved President would willingly launch bio-weapons against the world in order to Make America Great Again.
The Big American Plan to suppress China, and keep America Number One in the world.
This article was passed on to me in it’s really raw state by Chua. Who wrote this as the preface…
Wow, entire logical analysis that convincingly joins all the dots.
Anybody who studies the bombings, invasions, slavery, killings and looting history of the United States will have no doubt about the possibility of such bio attacks against China.
-Cheers Chua
And as such, I just had to post it in my blog.
But you know what? The article was not blog-ready. Grammar, punctuation, idiomatic expressions and other factors rendered it generally unreadable for the general audience. I needed to flush it out, enhance it, and clarify things.
So what we have here is not the raw content that I first saw, but my cleaned up and edited version. I hope that you will like it. Godfree Roberts is a most excellent word smith. I just hope that I did not botch up his magnificent piece with my “improvements“.
Yah! E-gads! Like the United States has been improved by the 16th amendment, eh?
This is a reprint of an article written on Mon, 13 Apr 2020, 9:28 am by Godfree Roberts. It has been edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author. This is taken raw from an email chain and required substantial editing. So I added grammar, punctuation, spelled out the idioms, and abbreviations, and flushed out complex meanings into far simpler (easy to digest) sentences. Never the less, it is a great and outstanding read.
But first recognize some terminology that might confuse…
Z-US = Zionists in US government.
But you know, you could easily change the nomenclature to PTB (The Powers that Be), the 1%, the Oligarchy, or the global elite. It's just a name. And, after all, they are are one and the same.
OK. Here we go…
The Big American Plan to suppress China, and keep America Number One in the world.
By Godfree Roberts, and edited by Metallicman.
Just my speculation.
After a series of asymmetrical warfare efforts and aggressive trade war failed to derail China, the Z-US deep state decided to deploy bioterrorism as a last-ditch attempt, a final-effort, short of a hot war.
Quote from General Patton. Both Bolton and Pompeo believe that if you are going to fight a war to obtain objectives to utilize every piece of equipment in your arsenal and nothing is off-limits.
Since US has always gotten away unscathed in all its successful bioterrorism efforts on China…
Many intelligent commentators have argued that coronavirus plays to Trump’s strengths – above all his hostility to globalisation and hatred of China. Trump is already playing the Chinese card and will go on doing so. No wonder, blaming China is Trump’s last hope.
-Global Research
They used a virus that is hard to contain. A virus with a long incubation time. A virus that will infect a billion, and overwhelm hospitals. They selected a virus that would kill hundreds of millions. And they targeted China. China, with all its aged Communist Party leadership, to wipe absolutely and completely out.
They would let the COVID-19 run it’s course, and ruin China completely.
And, it certainly has caused damage. That is for certain.
China GDP over time.
So, yes. The plan worked. The launch of this bio-weapon tanked the Chinese GDP. It completely stopped the Chinese “machine” in it’s tracks.
The neocons in the Trump administration must have been giddy with glee.
James Mattis, former head of the military under President Trump. He sat along side with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo in discussions on how to stop China’s rise and suppress it.
Stage 2 – Control all of Asia
Then, in short order, they could enact the second stage of their plans.
After that, a global Marshall Plan 2.0 will launch.
It would include many elements. From Congress approving measures for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang “independence”, to American military carrier groups sitting right off the China coast, to legal actions to neuter Chinese industry and government on the world stage, to complete disruption of the Belt and Road initiative.
And China, preoccupied with the COVID-19 bioweapons emergency, and it’s leadership neutered inside of hospital ICU’s on ventilators, the American forces would have the upper hand.
The Marshall Plan 1.0
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative passed in 1948 for foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred over $12 billion in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II.
The stated goals of the United States were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity, and prevent the spread of Communism.
The Marshall Plan required a reduction of interstate barriers, a dropping of many regulations, and encouraged an increase in productivity, as well as the adoption of modern business procedures, and the adoption of American social norms (fashion, trends, education, policing policy, and pornography), implementation of American society conventions, control of media by American entities, control of industries by American industry, and government that were controlled by the American government..
This Marshall Plan 2.0 is intended to enslave the devastated world just like it did after WWII. The EU, Africa, all of the Pacific and maybe even Russia would bend to the all-knowing, all-powerful, American rule. Thus, establishing a NWO with Z-US as the ultimate unchallenged master.
The entire world would thus use GMO seeds and hormone injected livestock. It would obey and follow centralized American laws, rules and regulations. No matter how nonsensical they would be locally.
Any industry would be majority owned by Americans, and the rest of the world would be neutered militarily and subjected to American style surveillance and manipulation techniques.
And that was / is the big plan.
It’s pretty simple, though the implementation was tricky. And, as we know now, it did not go anywhere near what was planned.
Implementation
So the US started the whole shebang by planting a false flag in a Fort Detrick Lab.
A false flag is a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility.
-Wikipedia
The false flag was / is “having a leaking (potential) bioweapon“.
It is used as a cover; as an excuse. As a fall-back explanation, were anyone start to trace the biological makeup of the virus back to it’s point of origination.
You know, just in case they’ve been caught red handed. Which they actually were.
Plausible deniability is the ability of people (typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command) to deny knowledge of or responsibility for any damnable actions committed by others.
-Plausible deniability
Fort Detrick, a map showing the wide expanse of this military development facility, with the various QUADS, the parking lots, and all the various outer buildings used in the development of biological weapons of mass destruction.
This is (of course) quite necessary. Otherwise being caught “red handed” would certainly [1] spark a public outcry or even worse [2] an immediate Chinese WMD retaliatory first strike on American cities.
Pretty risky shit. I’ll tell you what.
So ask yourself. Can a civilian agency shut down a military base under the direct control of the President?
No, of course it cannot.
And in this case. Can a weak US CDC shutdown a Pentagon’s powerful Fort Detrick military biowarfare lab? No it absolutely cannot. Or else, for instance, GITMO would be long closed.
We still do not know for certain where the virus that causes the current pandemic has come from. China's first known Covid-19 case has now been traced back to mid November. While the virus is most likely a natural creation the U.S. State Department officials now point to alleged insecurities at the safety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan which did research on similar viruses. It spreads unfounded rumors that the virus escaped from there. But the U.S. itself has many such laboratories with long documented security issues and there is reasonable suspicion that the real patient zero case has happened in the U.S.
Science will eventually solve that conundrum. Until it does there is little to gain from further speculation about it.
-MoA
If 3000 lives can be sacrificed for 911, what’s 30,000 to win another century of American hegemony and rule?
Now, here’s the beauty of the plan. And why Donald Trump was so adamant in insisting that the Flu was far worse, and that the COVID-19 was nothing that Americans needed to worry about…
The plan was to release a mild strand “A” for “herd immunity” in US.
Not only to release it, but to have it propagate and spread so that the largest number of Americans would get this low-level illness. Sure they might have a sore throat for three days, but that would be it. And afterwards they would be immune to the COVID-19 biological weapon. They would be immunized by “herd immunization”.
And this is exactly why, in the face of all the videos and the news out of China, that Trump was telling people to mingle and not wear masks. To go to outings, and to enjoy themselves. He told people to ignore the news out of China. To go forth.
He did this intentionally. He wanted the American citizenry to get the least lethal stain of COVID-19 to immunize themselves against the most lethal strain.
The basic plan was to release two strands of COVID-19. The weaker strand would allow immunity to build up in the populations that it infected, while the more dangerous strain would decimate the nations that it would encounter. Thus a “perfect” biological war would take place. Where the Chinese would be devastated by the dangerous virus, and the American population would be inoculated from it.
This was intended, and actually took place, before launching a more lethal “B” strain on China. Thousands did die during the immunity (herd immunity) program just like they die during normal vaccinations. However, it was easily covered up under the excuses of a bad flu season, e-vaping deaths, and other reasons.
And it actually was…
According to the latest US media reports, the 2019-20 flu season is "on track for one of the worst flu seasons in decades."
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the flu has affected 19 million people so far this season and at least 10,000 have died, including at least 68 children. In addition, at least 180,000 people have been hospitalized.
Some US media outlets said flu remains greater threat than coronavirus in the US.
-Global Times
US allies Nato, Australia, New Zealand, Japan & South Korea are also given the “A” strand for herd immunity via US military bases. In short, the United States, all all of it’s Western allies were inoculated in such a way that their populations obtained immunity to the COVID-19.
This is a biowar hypothesis to explain several anomalies in this pandemic. There are two CoronaVirus (CV) strains: “S”, which is low fatality and “L”, which is high fatality.
Propaganda Onslaught
Now, it wasn’t enough to immunize the American nation, and it’s allies, and then unleash the more virulent and dangerous strain inside China during their most vulnerable time of the year (CNY). Other actions also needed to take place.
SST has fully jumped the shark, it seems, going full in with the "Chinese poisoned us/this is war" concept, which will be the new "Putin stole the election".
Racist troglodytes are already flooding the comment board calling for the summary execution of anyone involved with Chinese students or academic institutions. The empty wheel blog went full in with the Russiagate nonsense and became virtually unreadable. SST is next.
Americans are wigged out, in general. They will believe what they want to believe, and shout anyone else down while insisting they must be Russian or Chinese agents.
-Posted by: jayc | Apr 15 2020 17:26 utc | 3
An entire anti-China propaganda war needed to take place.
Convince industry to decouple from China.
Raise American opinion against buying Chinese made or developed products.
Prepare America for a “hot” war, and military intervention into China.
American propaganda comes in many forms. From news and media, to Hollywood and the idea that Americans fight for “Liberty and Freedom”. .
Thus, a series of media warfare efforts began in early 2019. They instigated numerous narratives. With the first narrative being the notion that the vaccine facility in Wuhan (the Wuhan Lab) was actually a military reverse engineering base. And it was stealing American pathogenic Coronavirus to develop Chinese bioweapons. Further, that the Chinese were dirty people, incompetent, and the facility was leaking the dangerous COVID-19, and covering it up….
I find it really interesting how the many millions of articles that promote the idea that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan, fail to provide a simple map showing the relative locations of the buildings in question. . Or, pictures showing an unguarded entrance way. No fences. No security guards. And the clinic sitting right next to a major shopping mall. . Anyone can walk right off the sidewalk and walk right directly into the main lobby unopposed. This is not at all what is described in the American media.
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Meanwhile the propaganda onslaught ended up doxxing Chinese scientists. Imagine that! Eh?
And in every other way … to prepare ground for smearing campaign against China.
The anti-China campaign, which the Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger is running, leaked to Bloomberg that a secret U.S. Intelligence Report claims that China concealed the real numbers of its Covid-19 cases:
"...China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials."
Nonsense. China did not conceal its number of Covid-19 cases. Nor did it hold back any information.
Reporting numbers during an outbreak of a new disease is actually very difficult.
Cont. reading: China Did Not Deceive Us - Counting Death During An Epidemic Is Really Difficult
It is also extremely critical that the American public believe that there is but one singular virus and that everyone is fighting it together and equally.
Each nation is “fighting the Coronavirus pandemic“.
Not that America has the very, very mild COVID-19A with a R0=0.01%.
And that China, Iran, North Korea and Russia has the very lethal COVID-19B with a R0=20.0%.
And to do this, all videos, news and pictures from inside of China must be banned. No one must notice that the action of the two strains are very different.
You can see these videos in my SHTF COVID-19B Video collection HERE. These are the specific Videos that Trump absolutely forbid Americans to watch.
In these videos you notice something very interesting. You notice how sudden the onslaught of the virus is, and how absolutely lethal and debilitating it is. It isn’t some sick patients walking to the hospital because they are having trouble breathing. It’s people raising a spoon to their lips while drinking soup and then collapsing on the spot.
Attack on China
So, after the following prerequisite steps were put in place…
Immunized America and it’s allies with the non-lethal strain of COVID-19.
Conducted push and push, and push trade-war “negotiations”.
Instituted a anti-China propaganda onslaught.
Created a fall-back “plausible deniability” excuse for the COVID-19 virus.
The attack on China began.
In December 2019, 300 herd-immunized US Military soldiers with some injected with higher fatality “B” strand were sent to Wuhan military games to spread. They were also asked to target North Korea & Iran soldiers particularly.
In the process, 5 US soldiers became very sick.
These soldiers were hospitalized at the local hospital in Wuhan, bioposies were taken, and everything was recorded on video, and meticulous records were taken. They were all evacuated in emergency and airlifted by American military transport with the excuse of malaria.
American military troops who were infected with the COVID-19 were evacuated out of Wuhan by military transport in December 2019.
A series of events then unfolded exactly like what was predicted during the Event 201 simulation. From global outbreak to economy impact.
President Trump with his two trusted advisors on International geo-political issues; John Bolton and Pompeo. All of whom wanted to suppress China to Make America Great Again, by any and all means possible.
"while I abhor violence, I sometimes wonder if the true way to fix our broken world is to find a screening process for sociopaths/psychopaths and, once identified, either execute or sterilize them. we've been taking their top-down eugenics programs for decades now (centuries?). maybe what we need is a bottom-up program to rid our institutions of their influence."
I have had that exact same thought before, and I do believe that would be the only way to 'fix' our problems. Our system rewards those socio/psyco traits, hence they always rise to the top. Kind, caring people rarely rise to the top.
-Posted by: David F | Apr 15 2020 19:48 utc | 27
Trump tells everyone that the flu is worse.
Of course, now that the United States is effectively immunized against the COVID-19, there is no need to worry.
Thusly, President Trump could continue to push on the “everything is fine” narrative, and the the “flu is much worse“, and “you do not need to wear masks” narratives.
One of the very few remaining posters / pictures that told Americans not to wear a mask. . Once, Trump discovered that the “weak” non-lethal stain did not grant viral immunity, he made a “U turn” and told everyone to start wearing masks.
It, from the point of view of President Trump, was to get as many people exposed to the less-lethal COVID-19 virus strain as possible. The more people exposed to it, the more people who would be immune from it’s effects. It’s no wonder that he INSISTED that masks not be worn, that people must continue to attend groups and church meetings, and that everyone should ignore what is going on in China. That America is somehow different.
And what do you know…
That’s the American mainstream narrative; that the Wuhan coronavirus isn’t serious. It isn’t as bad as the flu, and the flu kills thousands of people each and every year. So that there is nothing to be worried about.
Try to find those posts on the internet now. The past has all been white-washed out. They have all disappeared. Go ahead Google it.
Until the big “U-turn” by Trump, he insisted that everyone not wear masks. . That everyone get exposed to this minor sickness, and that it is not as bad as the flu. Which is true. The mild “herd immunity” strain isn’t all that bad. So, how did Trump know that America had the least dangerous strain, and the Chinese had the nasty strain? .
And of course, the entire American media propagates this narrative. Here’s from USA Today…
So far, there have been an estimated 19 million cases of flu, 180,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths in the U.S. this influenza season – including 68 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Worldwide, seasonal influenza epidemics cause 3 million to 5 million severe cases every year and kill up to 650,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization.
"That just far surpasses the amount of cases compared to the novel coronavirus," Colburn said. "If you didn’t travel specifically to Wuhan, China, or have contact with a person with suspected or known coronavirus, your chance of contracting this is extremely low."
-USA Today
That is simply because America and it’s allies are now (at this point in time) convinced that the Herd Immunized theory has been effectively put in place. Thus, the West was not overly concerned about the outbreak despite the numerous WHO warnings.
Yeah. He, President Trump, know something that everyone else didn’t. For not only did he unleash the deadly strain against China, but he intentionally unleashed the far less virulent strain against the American people.
One strain to attack China with.
One strain to defend the United States with viral immunity.
As part of the propaganda onslaught, President Trump and his entire administration and all the Alt-Right media renamed and referred to the virus as the “Chinese virus”, instead of it’s actual name. .
The US sat still and waited for the big China collapse.
It was going to infect everyone, and in a few months the entire Chinese nation would collapse.
Mike Pompeo was in great spirits and in a fine positive mood in late January when the COVID-19 started to hit China. Here he is right before he took a flight to Minsk, Russia to discuss geo-political issues with Putin.
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With the knowledge that China was in the throes of a complete collapse, Trump authorized and set up a propaganda onslaught designed to pull out its entire supply chain and decouple it globally with border closings. A declaration of global crisis would give US a great excuse for unlimited Quantitative easing (QE) to execute Marshall Plan 2.0. Everything was put into place, and started to be engaged.
And if you recall, at that time, when the news was just starting to say that something was going on off in (far away) China, the American media propaganda machine absolutely and ruthlessly plummeted China for every direction for every possible reason. Within weeks, the American populace were “foaming at the mouth” and demanding Chinese “pay”. Don’t know what for… but “pay!” they demanded.
Leaving the rest of the world “scratching their heads”, why all this anti-China news saturating my feed? Why now? What’s going on?
The recovery will NOT be, but Trump will distract all Americans by screaming against China and how China is responsible for everything. Expect Americans to fall in line and the anti Russia hysteria to now turn into super anti China hysteria. Expect attacks against Asians in USA
And all because the Chinese were greedy bastards eager to make money and they quickly forgot history and how the Ango Saxon treated them just merely 150 years ago.
As somebody who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe it the 70s, I vividly remember how we were warned how the Americans will try to hurt us by spreading bio weapons. This was grilled into us over and over. The Communists knew. China better gt prepared, the West will try to rip them a brand new assholes. And they got nobody to blame but themselves!
-Posted by: Hoyeru | Apr 16 2020 20:13 utc | 21
The attack on Iran & Italy
The Iran attack reason is obvious.
Italy was singled out for “B” strand infection in Oct19, for committing unforgivable sins in: joining China BRI, adopt Huawei 5G, and refused to join US-Nato hostility towards Russia.
Italy has been hit hard by this virus. Their military who visited the Wuhan Olympic games shouldn’t have shared the same hotel with the American servicemen. .
Saudi MBS was tasked to collapse oil price to devastate Russia, Iran & Venezuela oil economy in crisis.
But Chinese CDC system was so damn good that it detected the COVID just with only 4~8 reported cases by 31Dec2020.
Only 4 people, perhaps as high as 8, had the virus. Yet the Chinese immediately recognized what was going on and took action.
This was not expected.
As the simulation predicted a few months later with 100 million infections. The simulation expected the Chinese to react months after the CNY holiday, and by that time, the devastation would be uncontrollable and disastrous. They expected and anticipated a scene from a Hollywood movie, or a zombie movie.
The Trump leadership expected a scene right out of a Hollywood movie to take place in China. They planned for it to happen exactly that way.
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It was expected that all of China would be shut down, and it’s GDP would plummet while deaths overwhelmed the cities, the leadership and the society. The world would then pull away from China, as they would be immune to the virus. It would be an absolute collapse of the Chinese nation, and agitator cells in Hong Kong and Taiwan would begin efforts (already in place) to topple the government for “democracy”.
But, yah, that DID NOT HAPPEN.
The Chinese immediately determined it was a biological attack; a biological WMD. A military weapon. A dangerous and lethal virus directed at the Chinese nation, the Chinese people, and the Chinese culture all during the most significant time of the year inside of China.
The Chinese communist party decisively locked down the entire country at DEFCON ONE. They did so realizing the enormous and astronomical economic trillion dollar cost.
The United States' DEFCON (short for "defense readiness condition") scale is a measure of the level of alertness of the nation's defense forces. The DEFCON scale uses a minimum of 5 (for normal peacetime status) and a maximum of 1 (for situations of global severity, like nuclear war).
-How to Understand the DEFCON Scale
The Chinese military went DEFCON ONE and the entire military was alerted on CNY eve. All the military were put on high alert. Not just the bio-weapons division, but also the nuclear, the naval and the special forces as well.
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Within 2 months the Chinese contained the epidemic with only 84,000 infections, and 3,400 deaths. The dragon is injured, but not fatally.
So, China got their house in order.
They knew who all the agitators were in Hong Kong, most of whom were “journalists”. They rounded them up, and deported them. The protests in Hong Kong came to a complete and absolute end.
No more “Mr. Nice Guy”.
Enough is enough.
It was American journalists working for the NED / NID that trained and funded the insurgency in Hong Kong.
Jimmy Lai, the billionaire “yellow journalist” who had dreams of being the new King of Hong Kong when China collapsed was seized, and sent to the mainland for “extraction of information”, and punishment (that may or may not include organ harvesting).
Meanwhile all the “rats nests” were cleaned out. Including lawmakers. Which resulted in the complete firing of all the “pro-democracy” teacher elements in the schools and universities.
And while the United States was busy sending two carrier fleets to sit right off the coast of Taiwan (You might have forgot about that eh?) – they expected to instigate some military action while China was busy fighting the bioweapon – China started to “lay down the law” and warn Trump of the consequences.
But… It’s now ready to revenge, with its own biowarfare defense chief Gen Chen Wei. And now he took over the game.
The Chinese military, while not as large as America’s is peer capable and nuclear armed. They are a force to be reckoned with, and know what actually happened.
The US was caught off guard by China’s unexpected quick success. It was not what was expected. Not at all.
With no excuse for its unlimited Quantitative Easing (QE) plan to save a completely collapsing Wall Street, Plan B was launched.
Plan B is launched by the United States
Plan B: US-Nato play fear porn by competing to be the most infected nations. This justified their Quantitative Easing (QE) & trillion dollar bailout plans…
…. as well as preparing an American police state for a full-on WMD war.
But there is a snag…
But US found its Herd Immune program wasn’t working very well. The COVID-19 “safe” strain did not provide immunity. Once people had the COVID-19 “safe” strain, they still could obtain the COVID-19 “lethal” strain afterwards.
The “herd immunity” system DID NOT WORK.
Further, to make matters even worse, the new virus is a mutated “C” strand, and it was something that it don’t anticipate. And recent data suggests that US cases are more severe than in China.
In case you are wondering why Trump insisted in this absurd demand, now you know. The only way that the BIG PLAN would ever be able to come to fruition was if the West had a vaccine and the Chinese did not. Thus it was critical to maintain this level of control over the virus.
America went into lock-down when the weak COVID-19 virus strain was displaced by the very virulent and lethal mutated strain.
They did so on the advice that the “C” strand if left to run it course it would be horrific…
Typical 60% (210 million) infections.
With 15% (30 million) hospitalizations.
Expected 3% (6 million) in the ICU.
And 0.1~4%(200,000 to 8 million) deaths.
All of this is devastating.
Meanwhile the Russians and the Chinese are not stupid.
China & Russia played along the game by sending medical aids team to study the pandemic situation in the EU.
If they lift the lock-down too fast to declare success, global economy has not yet devastated with 60M deaths as Event 201 simulated. Unlimited Quantitative Easing (QE) global Marshall Plan 2.0 will not be able roll out successfully if the world economy is not damaged.
N95 masks are in hot demand in the United States, as the government did not believe that the people and citizenry would ever actually need to wear them. They did not plan on that contingency.
Additionally, the mutated “C” strand is also not responding well to its ready Remdesivir & other prepared vaccines. Nor to the chloroquine treatment. So some lock-down is still required to buy time for new vaccine development.
But holding lockdown for too long, global supplies and food will run out in 60days.
Trump tweet on the use of chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
This will end up giving China an unprecedented upper hand using its supply chain power. In fact some clusters have already moved production orders to China from West recently due to global supply disruption.
China is now watching the game in a high position.
It has yet to decide if to retaliate or benefit from the crisis. A Chinese Marshall Plan is also been envisaged.
US-Nato is struggling with its own created “epidemic” with no effective vaccines yet.
A Plan C of WMD war with China can’t be launched until Gate’s digital vaccines can be completed, with a well prepared West police state.( The Anglosaxons Mission). America is really not ready. The situation changed, and the plan did not go as it was supposed to.
The US punts.
Seeing no near timeline to end the pandemic, Trump suspended the $10 oil price game by calling Putin & MBS.
He had to do this.
Even Americans like Scott Ritter are admitting that the United States got played by the chess masters:
"Trump cannot turn on or off the U.S. oil-producing spigot, a fact Russia knows only too well. When Trump attempted to gain credit for a 2.5-million-barrel reduction in production brought on by bankruptcy, Russia refused to allow it. Likewise, when Trump promised cuts in oil production to help Mexico meet G20 targets, it was a promise the American president is unable to deliver on. In getting the U.S. to agree to attend a G20 summit on oil production, the Russians lured the U.S. into a policy trap from which there is no escape."
Is Putin Laying a Petroleum Trap for Trump?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/putin-laying-petroleum-trap-trump/5709710
-Posted by: ak74 | Apr 15 2020 20:00 utc | 30
China and Russia have been busy making joint military treaties and both consider America and it’s allies as a dangerous, out of control, nation(s).
Otherwise devastated oil nations may cave in to start selling oil in RMB to China, the single largest oil buyer. This will collapse Petrol-dollars, hence destroying US global power.
Cold War 2.0
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even called the Communist Party of China (CPC), which is going all out to lead the Chinese people in the fight against the coronavirus, the "central threat of our times" on Thursday. US Senator Tom Cotton also made a series of exaggerated accusations against China regarding this crisis.
-Global Times
A Plan D Cold War 2.0 is also on brewing.
Everything is unfolding per the “hybrid war” that Pompeo, Bolton and Trump launched. It is not going as planned, nor as expected, but all indications are that they will continue fighting until they win… or the world is destroyed in the process. They do not care.
That is to play victim suing China as culprit of pandemic for compensation. US & gangs will then confiscate all China overseas assets & treasury, and decouple China permanently.
China has started its vaccines testing on humans. Once they work, they will able to contain US global bioterrorism damage, hence derailing NWO Marshall Plan 2.0
Chinese attack subs have been on alert since CNY and moved into place when China went DEFCON ONE.
Its also now aggressively ramping up its food production, anticipating a global food shortage soon.
With medical aids and later food aids, the world geopolitical situation will incline in favor of a benevolent helpful China. While Trump continues his tyranny of tightening sanctions and snapping at the allies medical supplies.
Its unlikely China can replace US Petrol dollars with RMB soon, so it will has to contest a new Cold War 2.0 with its aids program and a Marshall Plan after the pandemic is over.
This may divide the world into two, like during the Soviet era.
But India is a “wild card”.
But India is the most unstable nuclear time bomb to watch out. Its already fragile fake economy $2.8T will be devastated by its unprepared sudden lock-down on 4hrs notice.
50M homeless and beggars are now packed in gov and charity houses to get food.
100M migrant workers have lost jobs walking back to village spreading infections.
200M slum dwellers living in open cesspits have mostly become jobless running out of food. Living 10 to one tiny zinc roof hut with no toilet and water to wash hand, its super hot bed for virus spreading.
700M Indians are still defecating outdoor with no clean water access. Feaces & urine are proven to carry virus for long time. 90% of India cities has no sewage system, polluting all water sources with direct discharge.
800M depending on agriculture can’t plough/ harvest their land for spring season will see food shortage & lost income. Many farmers relying on loan to buy Monsanto GMO seeds & weed killers will go bankrupt.
1300M poor will deplete most of their tiny savings if any without jobs in couple of months. Consumption will fall to rock bottom. Millions of business will shut in vicious cycle.
India’s economy relies on over 50% in service sector and tiny export will collapse. Its already existent bad debt ridden banking sector will be put to acid test.
But India has no ability to print rupees out of trouble for unlimited Quantitative Easing (QE) like the US & EU. Its already nose deep in debts(70% to GDP) to get more loans.
So Modi may resort to border confrontation with Pakistan again to divert attention.
And we can well expect that the US will try goad it for a false flag nuclear war hoping to drag China in using India as canon fodder.
Conclusions about the Big Plan
The US & China will decide the entire worlds future within the next 5 years.
Expect Trump to escalate the trade war, further restrict exports to China, block Chinese corporate requirements, and threathen China's debt holdings as some form of "reparations." Expect military saber rattling to increase around Taiwan in addition to shows of strength from Guam (B52 flights).
In other words, recall Bukharin's warning that trade wars are only "partial sorties." In the end, they will be solved by "real force...the force of arms."
What we are witnessing is an unprecedented concentration of all contradictions of global capitalism and imperialism.
-Posted by: Prof K | Apr 16 2020 18:57 utc | 8
The US & China will decide the entire worlds future within the next 5 years.
The US is geared toward a hegemony world lead by its MAGA policy.
China is for a common destiny of mankind with a multi-polar world.
What will occur during this tumultuous time is undefined, but quite frightening.
What will be next?
As the entire world is right now suffering from the United States bio-weapon attack, keep in mind that any nation that is willing to use bio-weapons will not have any qualms to using nuclear weapons either.
Any nation that is willing to use bio-weapons will not have any problem in using nuclear weapons either.
Donald Trump is already deploying low yield nuclear weapons on active military platforms.
Inuit's view of Socipaths: "Kunlangeta is allegedly an Inuit Yupik word for psychopath – in a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”
-Posted by: john | Apr 15 2020 20:00 utc | 31
.
Finally, one year later, a book comes out reporting that Trump was very angry about some (unspoken, but very BAD thing that John Bolton did) and as a result he wished or vocalized that John Bolton would end up getting Coronavirus.
Not too much. You need to accept things as they are right now. You need to look at the real situation and not endlessly debate the news and propaganda. You need to start taking action, on a personal level, right now.
Right now.
There will be change.
It might be sudden, and swift. Or, it might be slow and gradual. But change will occur. It will occur on many levels.
The changes that everyone are expecting will probably NOT be the ones that will actually manifest. Be safe. Spend time with loved ones. Be part of your community. Be able to contribute, in some way, and at some physical level to the world around you.
You will be fine.
It's very unlikely the USA will collapse in a single historical event.
As a capitalist nation, the USA is much more decentralized, fragmented and anarchic (in production and distribution of the wealth it produces and consumes) than the USSR. The USSR was a centrally planned economy: when Gorbachev committed the mistake of demoralizing and destroying the CPSU, he automatically destroyed the USSR.
That will not be the case of the USA: the fall of Washington D.C. - or even Wall Street - would not be the immediate end of the USA.
The most likely scenario for an end of the USA would be for a gradual and constant degeneration of its social structure, with or without balkanization (probably with). This balkanization would be very violent, because local capitalists would assemble private armies and fight against each other for supremacy and the reunification of the USA (a la Roman Empire).
It would be a Mad Max cum Yugoslavia scenario.
The problem with this is: who would be in control of the American nuclear arsenal?
Will the USAAF be capable of stopping with the balkanization process and thus keep the country united?
Will the USA anihilate the rest of the world before it would disappear, in an act of nihilism?
A lot of known unknowns - let alone unknown unknowns.
-Posted by: vk | Apr 16 2020 20:06 utc | 16
Finally, a final statement.
Well the “big plan” did not go as it was supposed to.
Most of the people who are now going to pay for the mistakes made by the Trump – Pompeo – Bolton cabal are just normal people trying to live their lives in peace. You cannot undo their folly. Instead, you must ride out the situation…
You must play the cards that you are dealt with.
Just keep in mind this truth;
People who make or work with real physical things will do better than those that work with paper, budgets, theories, and intangibles. When the going gets tough, it’s the farmer that stays employed, not the social justice activist.
What this means is…
Dollar as global reserve currency will persist only so long as China goes along with it, which won't be all that long as they are already hashing out deals to denominate trade with other countries in currencies other than the dollar. The dollar stuck around so long as GRC because for quite a while after WWII much of the international trade involved purchasing goods manufactured in the US. Obviously that is not the case anymore.
As vk @16 mentioned above, manufacturing is the real economy. Capitalist finance is just a parasite on the real economy. On its own finance can do nothing but shuffle paper around.
What the dollar worshipers don't realize is that it isn't the share of the GRC that is important, it is what currency the people who make stuff that other people want to buy are selling their goods in that is important. The US has very little leverage to force the Chinese to sell their products in dollars.
-Posted by: William Gruff | Apr 16 2020 20:35 utc | 36
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Man, no sooner do I want to sit down and type up some thoughts about 55 (Rho1) Cancri 2e, something else comes up. Geeze! Can’t I get a break! As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say (on Saturday Night Live), if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
COVID-19 is still dominating the news.
You cannot run away from it if you wanted to.
The same tired old manipulators are still doing their same tired old games. It’s all propaganda, blame, pointing fingers, fear mongering, war, conflict, and lots and lots of manipulation. President Trump is blaming everyone but himself. The American neocons are waging a massive non-stop anti-China propaganda war, and the American sheeple are taking on mob psychology.
Jeeze!
I mean, the United States is beyond incompetent. It’s like a parody of a horrible dark comedy, and we are all stuck watching it unfold.
As the coronavirus bore down on New York City, Barbot and the Health Department were busy operationalizing social justice while remaining oblivious to the scientific realities of the pandemic.
... "As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic," Commissioner Barbot signed off: warning that the real enemy was prejudice.
What was Commissioner Barbot doing when the epidemic was erupting all around her? She was:
"spearheading the creation of the Center for Health Equity which operationalizes the Department’s commitment to racial justice, meaningful community engagement, and internal reform".
-Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish and here.
I’ve got some posts covering these subject, but frankly I’m getting pretty tired of it. The cancer that saturated America has fully metastasized. We are now just watching the death throes. It’s really not pretty, any you know what?
I’ve reached a saturation level. Don’t you know.
Yet, here…
…plopped down right on my desk is an interesting article by an American bio-weapons scientist / developer / engineer. He pretty much confirms that it appear (to him) to be a bio-weapon. He gets into some “meat” and it’s all pretty engaging and interesting. It’s stuff that you won’t find anywhere else.
And thus, it’s a good read and worthy of posting herein.
Here’s an article titled “Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?” Posted by OldMicrobiologist on March 13, 2020 . Edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author. The following is the republication of several long and very detailed comments by an unidentified purported expert on biowarfare that originally appeared on a recent thread of the Saker blogsite.
Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?
I’ll throw my 2 cents in here. I have zero proof other than my gut feeling that this is a bioweapon.
I do have 40 year of biodefense research experience behind me and worked at Fort Detrich on bacterial vaccines where I developed my own aerosol infection routes and developed multi-species models of pathogenesis to establish correlates of immunity.
Because I was a one-stop shop doing everything including animal care, aerosol exposures, sample analysis, necropsy, and histopathology, etc. …
He was fully engaged, and pretty much was involved in all aspects of bioweapon design, research and testing.
…plus I had research programs in endemic areas studying the immunopathological response in human populations…
Nicely stated. He means "biological weapon" designed to be used against humans. Oh, I just love that babble-speak.
…used to establish immune correlates of protection for candidate vaccines all for the Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP).
He means to increase the lethality of the pathogens.
Memories…
I recall the early years when the Department of Homeland Security was stood up and they got the lion’s share of poorly performing civil servants un-fireable under the then OPMA policies.
I was brought in as a technical expert as we were in dire straits for funding so I (and others) was lent out as a research prostitute.
This is a little known problem with civil service employees.
They are impossible to eliminate and generally rise to levels where they can cause the most damage.
However, an opportunity arose whereby agencies in the Federal government had to contribute bodies to the new Department of Homeland Security (as no new vacancies were created when the agency was stood up meaning everyone had to sacrifice personnel) so most, if not all, employees sent to DHS were the worst of the worst.
However, the DHS labs (specifically NBACC) also tied into some nefarious microbiologists working at the CIA (ostensibly part of DHS) and it is an understatement to say that what I saw being proposed horrified me.
That work, I am certain was performed at Battle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio under a DHS contract doing the work for the CIA under the auspices of NBACC.
NBACC was working for the CIA.
As I was very vocally opposed to this stuff I was removed from the secure access at DHS but not DoD to the offensive work which I had pointed out was not only illegal but unethical.
I have since retired now more than 10 years and am far away from all of that.
I won’t say more as they will reach out and seek retribution.
But, if you look hard enough you can find still on the internet some references. There are some pissed off people out there should anyone care to actually do some leg work and try and figure this out.
But, our news people no longer does this work so there is very little possibility of ever learning the truth.
The COVID-19
However, that said, I notice some interesting things with COVID-19, that perked my ears up a bit.
Yes, it could be a natural infection jumping species from bats to humans with a probable intermediate host, under conditions of human encroachment into world habitats.
It is actually most likely to have been that, except for the strain differences being observed.
That leads one to believe that it is, in fact, true.
That the COVID-19, by nature of it's strain differences, is a biological weapon.
And I have no reason to doubt the Chinese on this, that it originated outside of China and it seems likely to have originated in the US.
If, in fact, the US has 5 strains currently and China only one then it must have been percolating in the US for some time before it arose in China.
Likely, the deaths in the US were attributed to other diseases such as influenza and only retrospective sampling will determine this.
It would be interesting to do a combination GPS-Molecular biology tracking of strains over time and distance.
Also, a definite genetic analysis of strains over time would also be beneficial and can be done easily on every isolated strain.
This would have value in attributing the course of the disease over time as part of a natural history study of the virus.
We would need access to all samples of every lung disease related death for the past 12 months to be certain to track all potential deaths.
NBACC is the key to figuring out what nefarious stuff was being funded.
Mutations
It is possible that this virus has mutated over time to become more virulent.
In particular engineered strains are generally unstable over multiple passages through multiple hosts.
In my experience when testing strains for pathogenesis and lethality it is wise to first passage a frozen isolate several times through a susceptible animal host to regain full strength.
If you test a lab isolate (usually frozen or lyophilized) generally it is wimpy unless you passage it at least 3 passages through an animal model.
The worst strains are always those recovered from humans who died from the disease and not field collected strains.
If this was perceived to be a useful agent from the likes of Bolton or Pompeo, who are terrible and evil people, then it is conceivable this was thought to teach the Chinese a lesson in economics.
President Trump with his closest and most trusted advisors, the neocons Pompeo and Bolton.
You have to be a complete idiot to release a virus for which you have no effective countermeasures but this administration seems to be filled with complete idiots.
So, expecting normal behavior from these people is futile.
Released in Wuhan, China
It could have been released during the 7th CISM military games held in Wuhan October 18-27, 2019 and that fits perfectly into the time scale for the actual infections.
The timetable fits the use of a bioweapon in this instance.
Now interestingly enough, I was a participant in several CISM competitions in Europe for skiing (I was on active duty for 26 years) so I am very well versed in who these athletes are.
In general the best are Olympic competitors who are ostensibly part of the National Guard of their states who pay for their training by extended military active duty periods where their sole job is sports training.
I used to lose every year to one of these guys and generally I placed a distant second place in cross country skiing.
I also participated in the biathlon competitions and our soldiers were the very top level because they were in fact Olympic athletes.
Rumor is that the US participants at CISM were atrocious which is very atypical.
So, naturally, one wonders who these “athletes” were.
He is skeptical that these Olympic "athletes" were actually what they were supposed to be.
I am reminded of the US military mission in Brazil to help flood victims which coincidentally was the exact same time that all the power transmission stations in Venezuela were destroyed. (Imagine that!)
So, again a hackle or 2 rise when I heard about that.
He, like myself, are reminded of other instances when the USA, and it's various secretive military organizations were involved in subversive activity.
However, the Wuhan Olympics was the perfect opportunity to release a virus on a target population.
He concludes that the Wuhan games was the perfect opportunity to release a bioweapon upon China.
Lethal agents
I will also like to add that not all biological warfare agents are lethal.
In fact, the worst are non-lethal as it consumes vast amounts of resources in treatment and lost productivity.
Deaths are actually cheaper.
So, a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy.
As Trump’s administration claims they are waging war against economic enemies (currently China heads the list) using all possible actions.
This fits perfectly into that; however, it may end up destroying the American economy which would be ironic.
It is difficult to believe that the Trump Administration, that goes b the phrase "Make America Great Again", would not use everything in it's power to subdue China. Especially when one realizes that it is neocons Pompeo and Bolton that are making the tactical decisions in this matter.
The Chinese Response
I believe the Chinese response was exactly what a country would do if they were attacked with a bioweapon.
This actually explains a lot of their actions.
Read that two times.
I do NOT believe it was an accidental release from the BSL-4 labs in Wuhan.
Read that three times.
In fact, this may have been an irresistible opportunity.
An opportunity that is similar to the alleged Novichuk release just 8 k away from Porton Down laboratories (the UK Fort Detrich). Interestingly, the potential release from PDL was never put forward as a logical explanation.
Anyway, it sticks me that the CIA seems to have developed a pattern over time.
American use of biological weapons is mature and covert and has been in place for years. Just because CNN, WaPo, FOX, and Rush Limbaugh aren't talking about it, is not reason to ignore the truth.
Bioengineered Adenovirus
As long as I am pushing my gut feelings I will throw out there the potential for a bioengineered adenovirus with c-fos and c-jun over expression which would cause sarcomas.
That work was all published at the National Cancer Institute located where?
Fort Detrich.
I am certain it is just a coincidence.
I can imagine the cackling going on at the CIA when planning this operation and again the coronavirus operation(s).
Other nations
I believe there were at least two attacks with Iran being the second and perhaps North Korea as well.
However, evidence against it being a bioweapon is Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are minimally affected. This could mean effective countermeasures or botched attacks.
It is inconsistent though with the way the CIA operates.
Not a coiencidence
Adenovirus is another virus similar to coronavirus in usage and easily aerosolized.
I have made my own for over expression of medical treatments for wound infections.
Has anyone other than myself noted that so many enemies of the US have died from sarcomas particularly in South America?
My point is perhaps this stuff has been ongoing for quite some time and with some fairly good results.
So, familiarity breeds contempt so as they gin more experience and begin to think this is good stuff…
… it is not out of the realm of possibility that this is in fact a bioweapon.
That Iran was hit so hard is another hackle rising. It is just simply too good (for the idiots in the US government) to be a coincidence.
Interesting problems
So, we are left with some interesting problems about this virus.
Where was patient zero in China?
What will be the results if a natural history study is conducted correlating geolocation, strain identity, severity of disease over time?
Will that work be prevented? If so, that is yet another reason to be suspicious.
Will it continue to mutate and what will be the outcome of this?
Lots and lots of good stuff to examine here and it will keep a lot of people busy for years.
Another point…
Maybe you can explain this:
“Coronavirus have not previously been known to cause severe disease in humans”.
So the question for me is why should a harmless virus be patented by the US government. And then used for research in labs like US army research at Ft. Derick?
That makes it military.
That makes it a military “system”.
Why is there then the SARS-CoV, and the latest COVID-19 which is SARS-CoV-2 ?
The swine-flu was likewise proven to be lab made at least in sources other than mainstream and WHO, the same was the case with Ebola, and even HIV.
International bans ignored by the USA
It immediately raises the question of ban of biological weapons labs in my mind, by international treaties just like a ban on the use of napalm, landmines and so on, since a harmless virus are researched in army labs and suddenly appears as aggressive viruses .
It is an interesting question.
Under the bioweapons conference treaty no offensive work can legally be done and any signatory can demand an onsite inspection of facilities for verification at any time.
To my knowledge that has never been demanded of the US.
It has been done to Russia and China is not a signatory, nor is Israel or North Korea.
We have been caught doing inappropriate bio-defense research several times now but only because it became known and there were no consequences.
The USA is too comfortable using bio-weapons
The slippery slope within DoD is to make a counter measure you have to try and look forwards and using intelligence based informatics to design offensive agents.
In my opinion this is fallacious as we can’t make countermeasures against the normal 10 agents on the high threat list (since the program’s inception in 1942) other than anthrax and smallpox for which we have had effective vaccines for decades.
Since 9/11 no new effective and/or safe vaccines have been been made for any of the rest of the agents on the list.
This includes several far more likely bio-threats like the plague, tularemia, glanders, brucella, Ebola, Marburg, etc.
This was despite pouring billions into biodefense research most of which went to universities.
When things cooled down the funding dried up as always.
USAMRIID is currently shut down and may never re-open.
But contracted services still go on and are funded using black money so not under the purview of Congress.
So trying to make vaccines against biothreat agents that don’t exist seems ridiculous when the real threats, some of which the US has used in warfare, are still out there without effective preventatives.
What happens is when you pour money into an area as happened after 9/11 all kinds of ridiculous stuff gets funded with very little oversight.
The goal is to spend the money and no one really cares if any actual product is created.
In fact, success means the demise of your program so the incentive is to drag it out for as long as funding is available.
I had programs managed under DTRA funding that because I got new program managers as often as every 3 months had no clue or even any expertise in the matter and had zero idea of what we were doing.
I got tired of doing a new dog and pony show each time I was assigned a new manager who usually was some very young recent PhD graduate with no experience at all.
Often they were nebutistic appointments and daddy was a Congressman or Under Secretary.
Intelligence based decisions
The intelligence based decisions are as usual idiotic as is most intelligence coming out of the CIA and its affiliates.
You get better intelligence reading PUBMED than you get out of any intelligence agencies.
The microbiologists who work at the CIA and its contract companies were all military microbiologists who because they were essentially incompetent drifted over to the CIA.
Then you have some IMHO ridiculous events.
I recall when Ken Alibekov “defected” he spoonfed a bunch of made up BS which the CIA bought lock stock and barrel.
I had working for me at the same time several former Soviet microbiologists (one of who was a senior researcher at Biopreparat) who were in fact the real deal and all told me he was a bullshit artist.
One thing he peddled was a chimeric smallpox-Ebola and another a Ebola-anthrax.
So the CIA immediately funded an effort to create chimeric viruses.
To my knowledge these were unsuccessful however, the COVID-19 may be being caused by a chimeric virus.
The only good reason to make a chimeric virus is to develop a attenuated strain for use as a vaccine.
But, as often happens some attenuated mutants become more lethal as an unintended consequence.
Another event was trying to force photo data from Iraq to prove they had an offensive bioweapons program. These guys had no clue what laboratory equipment was in actuality and had offered up a cooking truck with pots and pans etc. as proof.
They were and I assume still are, idiots.
DoD Programs
DoD programs are actually transparent and managed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Less transparent are the foreign stuff being funded under the Nunn-Lugar Act which includes the debacle of the “white elephant” lab and its satellite labs in the Republic of Georgia.
No one will ever look into any of this but likely will end up blaming Russia or China.
They tend to underestimate their adversaries.
China has an offensive program and if they get convinced they were attacked then I believe something nasty will be coming soon to the US.
But, China is not stupid and won’t release a biothreat agent they have no preventative or treatment for.
I also had several Chinese scientists working for me and I respect them immensely.
USA Censorship
That should be PROMED for current infectious disease reporting around the world.
It is exceptionally good and not funded or controlled by governments.
PUBMED is for online publications which is also good but controlled by the government.
I am fully aware of censorship of research papers by the US.
I recall I wrote a letter to the editor of Science back in 1999 when the government decided to stockpile billions of doses of ciprofloxacin.
I did a quick BLAST search and found that only a single base pair mutation in anthrax made it completely resistant to cipro.
That letter was published and after 9/11 never seen again.
There are other example such as the Canadian paper maybe also in 1999 showing that anthrax delivered in envelopes was not very effective.
That one disappeared as well and the same as the Canadian paper where they were aerosolizing B. cereus spores out the back of a moving truck.
They were using aerial infrared cameras demonstrated that these streams of aerosolized spores agglomerated into cloudlets which moved along in the wind.
As such they would usually avoid detector arrays which sampled airflow for aerosol particles.
That is still the current state of the art for battlefield detection and that paper showed it to be ineffective at best.
I can think of dozens of papers that were removed.
After 9/11 any research paper that could be used by a foreign actor to develop better biothreat agents was rejected for publication outright.
Almost none of my work was published after that except in classified reports which I believe were never read by anyone.
I recall part of the madness in setting up NBACC was to generate very lengthy “white papers” that scrubbed through all published articles to assemble the complete picture for the then 10 threat agents.
I wrote or edited two of those and they were immediately buried in some deep classified archive to the researchers who might benefit from this work could never actually use it.
A complete waste of months and a ton of money.
If you are perceiving that the US government biothreat programs are a complete shambles then you are not wrong.
I’ll go into that a bit more as well.
“Command Directed”
It used to be in the military programs we were “command directed”. This means the military made a decision to make a vaccine against a perceived threat agent.
They would assemble a research group assign them the mission and give 5 years funding to be continued if milestones (reasonable given the pittance of funding given).
If you made progress then you got another 5 years of funding.
That funding agency located at MRMC Fort Detrick was a Research area managed usually by a Major and a Captain, both microbiologists and experienced. Two people.
There were 5 research area Directorates so a total of 10 program managers and a couple administrative colonels.
This managed the entire DoD biothreat research programs and did it well.
However, someone decided we needed an Agency to manage this stuff and DTRA which was funded by the Nunn-Lugar Act. It was already involved in the disassembly of Soviet nuclear capabilities so they wanted a bigger piece of the pie. As a result it absorbed the Research Directorates.
The BDRP program at DTRA (basically identical as before) was now managed by over 400 contractors. The money came out of the research money we were supposed to be allocated.
After DTRA took over the funding, it was no longer Command Directed and we were all required to go out and find whatever funding we could. Hence, this is why we made “deals” with DHS and the CIA.
We went to an annual funding cycle instead of 5 years and never ending Gantt charts and reports.
This was the age of 6 Sigma and the end of Management by Objective.
We were also charged rent and had to pay for every service at our Institute including the security and even the library. Even our higher command MRMC stole 6% off the top to pay for pet projects unfunded by anyone with a brain.
So, this became the age of entrepreneurial research and the end of productive research.
Our commander, as an example, had no idea what we were doing at all and was shocked at all the “cool” stuff we were doing.
This is the new breed of commander who manages by committee and never goes out walking the floors to visit labs.
What the old school commanders call management by walking around and poking your nose into everything.
But now these guys sit in their office and are fed whatever the REMFs decide they should hear. This is management in the US government as a whole and there are so many hidden agendas and internal conflicts between programs it is difficult to describe just how awful it is to try and do research in that environment.
A lot of the worst of those commanders or research Division Directors went on to be current heads of HHS, CDC, and their undersecretaries, etc. which explains why those agencies are so screwed up and why there is such a horrible response to this virus.
Conclusion
A bioweapon scientist, who is willing to admit that he worked on these kinds of programs for the DoD, and CIA, concludes that it is highly possible that this COVID-19 event is an American bioweapon attack on China for “economic supremacy”.
He does not believe that it originated in China.
He does not believe that it naturally evolved.
He does believe that it’s structure, composition, and the way that it was deployed fit all of the criteria that have been discussed in high-level DoD and CIA meetings for the use of these pathogens.
He does believe, like most normal people, that Presidential advisors Bolton and Pompeo are fully capable of ordering it’s use and application against China.
The economy has come to a screeching halt, people are scared and confused, theories are flinging left and right, and everyone wants to know – why are we being forced to shut down our businesses and stay in our homes, and why is President Trump going along with this while shady characters stand at his side?
There is a lot of confusion because nefarious characters are propagating fear tactics, embellished stories, and doom and gloom scenarios, while those with hope want to believe this is all a cover story to take down these nefarious characters.
-Corey Lynn
But, after all, it’s only his opinion. Others, like Rush Limbaugh, FOX news, CNN, and WaPo have their own opinions. If you don’t like what he has to say, you can listen to someone else. It’s your life and your reality.
Perhaps Ellen DeGeneres might have another interview with Barrack Obama and would offer some words of enlightenment. We can only hope…
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The United States was set up as a Republic way back in 1776, and over the years “improved” into other things. First it was a “democracy”, then into an “oligarchy”, followed by “empire” in the 1960’s and now exists as a military Empire controlled via oligarchy. It’s a real mess. It’s ungainly, corrupt and dysfunctional.
And, it is handling this COVID-19 emergency outrageously bad.
In fact, the handling of it is so incompetent, and unfathomably bizarre, that it would probably be best not to have a government at all. Just let the sheeple graze on the “fruited plains” freely without any “assistance” from Big Brother Government.
Seriously, it’s time to demolish the old, and look towards new horizons.
Is It Time for a New Direction?
This article was written by Jacob G. Hornberger on April 10, 2020. Edited to fit this venue and all credit to the author.
If Americans are not doing some serious soul-searching in the midst of this crisis, they need to start. Where America goes from here is not some sort of esoteric debate. What we do at this point has life or death consequences. Get it wrong, and suffer more death, suffering, and impoverishment. Get it right, and America moves toward life, health, liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.
What everyone needs to recognize is that they are facing a choice of systems, not a choice of people. Either stick with the same systems or switch over to new systems. That’s the choice now facing the American people.
Let’s examine four systems under which we currently live and have lived for decades.
America’s economic system
This is a centrally planned and centrally managed system run by the federal government. Its central aim is to “wage war on poverty” by forcibly taking money from everyone and redistributing it to people in need, such as the elderly and the poor. It is based on massive confiscation of income and wealth by the Internal Revenue Service, in the form of income taxes and payroll taxes.
America’s healthcare system
This too is a centrally planned and centrally managed system run by the federal government. It is based on big, powerful central planning agencies like as the Centers for Disease Control and the FDA, as well as massive socialist programs like Medicare and Medicaid, both of which are responsible for foisting a never-ending healthcare crisis onto the American people consisting of ever-increasing healthcare costs that have bankrupted people or sent them into deep debt.
America’s monetary system
This too is a centrally planned and centrally managed system run by the federal government, specifically the Federal Reserve. From its beginning in 1913, its job has been to print up ever-increasing quantities of paper money to enable the federal government to fund the ever-increasing expenditures of the welfare-warfare state way of life.
America’s system of empire and foreign intervention
This too is a centrally planned and centrally managed system by the national-security branch of the federal government. Its job is to wreak death and destruction among foreigners and, in the process, bring ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded largess to its army of well-heeled “defense” contractors, which are composed of former members of the national-security establishment.
Consequences of central planning
How are all these systems working out? Most, if not all, people would agree that they are not working out well at all. Together, they have either bankrupted people through taxes or debts or left millions of people without even enough savings to get them through a couple of months of unemployment.
And guess who is now paying the biggest price for the coronavirus crisis — seniors and the poor. That’s because the FDA, in all its central planning wisdom, prohibited the private sector from producing test kits that would have, without any doubt, significantly reduced the coronavirus infection rate.
How can they lower the infection rate if they don’t know who has the virus, especially since people who have the virus are infecting people for about a week before they show any symptoms? A massive number of cheap testing kits would have enabled people to ferret out quickly and early who was infected, enabling everyone else to continue working.
Given that their dysfunctional healthcare system has totally failed to stem the crisis, they have resorted to tyranny and oppression through a mandatory shutdown of the economy, sending millions of people into unemployment and even bankruptcy.
To relieve the financial distress from their destruction of people’s livelihoods, they are resorting to their dysfunctional monetary system. The Federal Reserve is now printing money like it was going out of style. Does anyone really believe that printing trillions of dollars is a way to relieve economic distress? It’s just another form of taxation, one that plunders and loots people, specially the elderly and the poor, through the massive devaluation of their money.
Meanwhile, their fourth dysfunctional system is ensuring that the national-security establishment will suffer no budget cuts whatsoever in order to enable to maintain its oversees machinery of empire and intervention.
Isn’t that ironic? Their four systems of central planning and management are responsible for massive death, suffering, and impoverishment not only here at home but also abroad.
A different direction
If you like how all these dysfunctional systems have worked out, are working out, and will continue to work out into the future, just continue supporting their existence.
But make no mistake: There is a choice to be made here because there are four systems that are opposite to the four systems under which we are are suffering. These four systems are as follows:
A free-market economic system
Under this system, everyone keeps everything he earns — 100 percent, which enables everyone to save lots of money. No income taxation and no IRS. It’s a system based on 100 percent voluntary charity. This was America’s founding economic system for more than 100 years. It produced the wealthiest and most charitable society in history.
A free-market healthcare system
Under this system, the private sector and the free market are entirely responsive for healthcare. No more having to get permission from federal bureaucrats to produce test kits or anything else because the federal government will play no role whatsoever in healthcare. A total separation of healthcare and the state, just as our ancestors had the wisdom to separate church and state. This was America’s founding healthcare system and last for more than 100 years. It produced the finest healthcare system in history, one in which healthcare costs were cheap and affordable and in which doctors and hospitals treated the poor for free on a purely voluntary basis.
A free-market monetary system
Under this system, the free market determines the currency that is going to be used. No more Federal Reserve and no more legal-tender laws. For more than 100 years, America had the finest monetary system in history, one based on gold coins and silver coins. A free-market monetary system would improve upon that concept.
A limited-government republic with a small, basic military force.
No more national-security state and no more foreign military bases and foreign interventionism. No more sanctions, embargoes, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, torture, state-sponsored assassinations, secret mass surveillance, and other destruction of civil liberties. America was founded as a limited-government republic, which lasted for more than 100 years.
The same old direction versus a new direction
So there you have it: Four completely different systems from which to choose. Americans should choose wisely. Your lives, health, and financial well-being and those of your loved ones, friends, and neighbors depend on it.
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It all began when I was researching "hybrid war". In almost every occasion, a "hot" (shooting) war would erupt. The only exception was the "cold war" with Russia in the 1960's and 1970's, but actually "hot wars" did actually erupt - via proxy in other lands. It got me to thinking. I started to wonder just what is a "hybrid war".
Still the COVID-19 bio-weapon fiasco is rampaging and tearing apart the fabric of human civilization. Still the “news” is reporting on deaths, pain, sorrow, economic collapse and suffering. Still, the “news” is relating on all sorts of “bail-outs” and “stimulus plans”, and “blue ribbon panels” to “solve” some of the imperfections inherent in modern American governance…
Yada. Yada. Yada.
Introduction
What’s the big friggin’ deal?
It’s all pretty simple.
America started out as one thing, it grew and grew and grew. It changed and changed and changed. Evil and greedy people took over and now the United States is a military empire that serves the top 1% of the global elite. They farm the American people as serfs and “cash cows” and bludgeon the rest of the world into submission through raw military power.
And China has changed.
Today it is an adaptable, young, and modern country ruled by merit. They realize what the USA is, and they also realize that the future is one of global cooperation, not 19th century military might.
Global politics today is a power-struggle between the USA and China. It need not be that way, but the Trump administration, led by his neocon army of advisors want it that way, and thus they are fighting a “Hybrid war” with China.
And we, yes all of us, have a “front row seat” to this entire mess.
We sit here and watch the events unfold in absolute and abject horror.
Sure, it was ok, trying to destroy the Chinese pork industry, the Chinese chicken and poultry industry, the Chinese wheat industry, and the Chinese rice industry. These were events that were far away from America. They could be contained and controlled.
But trying to kill the Chinese people with the COVID-19, now that was when the “bullet hit the bone” and things got ugly really quick. Because, human viruses and pathogens cannot be easily contained within a far-away nation. They can come right back and “bite you in the ass”, “sure as shit”.
And that is exactly what happened.
What America is going through right now, is what the Washington DC neocons and the Trump Administration had planned for China. Except…
Except…
It didn’t happen that way.
China saw what was going on and took immediate action. Maybe the readers of the “National Star” and CNN, FOX and Rush Limbaugh hadn’t a clue as to what was going on, but not the Chinese leadership. They knew exactly what was going on.
And so when the Americans unleashed this bio-warfare attack on China during the CNY holiday, China went military DEFCON ONE. They mobilized the entire nation, and tackled the virus, and controlled the outbreak and took control of it.
In three months it was all over.
All the time, the Trump Administration treated it as yet another long-remote war that would never come back to “bite the hand of it’s master”.
It did boomerang back
But it did boomerang back to America.
And America, soft, lazy, slothful and used to centuries of peace and feared respect was unable to adapt to it. Americans demanded their “freedoms”, and openly defied their government. A government that they did not trust and did not believe.
Right from day one, while Trump turned a propaganda war against China, he was telling Americans not to worry, that it was a hoax, and that no one should wear masks. American stockpiles of medical supplies, now depleted, were funded (on paper) with billions of dollars from the Treasury. But that money went no where. Instead the money was spent on other things.
It went into the pockets of the Washington elite. Where it was squandered on expensive cars, homes and luxuries.
And America, and Americans are caught in between the reality of the ultra-rich (PTB) rich elite, and the harsh reality of the bio-warfare out of the Trump administration.
It’s not pretty.
It’s not comfortable.
It’s not nice.
Hybrid War
Now, if you read the “news” you might think that all this is just part of a “hybrid war” that America is conducting against China. A “Hybrid war”, how nice and sterile and pat. It’s not a “hybrid war”.
America is not conducting a “hybrid war”.
This is not a “hybrid war”.
It is a instead a “prelude to a hot war”.
And that is exactly what it is.
A prelude to a “hot war”.
The machinations, and elements of this “hybrid war” are all identical to the preparations necessary in a “hot war”. It’s just that no one wants to believe that President Trump would actually try to launch a “hot” war against China and Russia.
(And it would be against Russia as well, let’s not pretend that China and Russia are isolated and do not have military coordination.)
So people refuse to believe that this is what is going on.
They call it something else.
It’s a “hybrid war”, not “the prelude to World War III.
Events leading up to a “hot war”
The events leading up to a “hot” war are all well documented. You can go ahead and read some history books if you do not believe me. All these things that we are watching as part of the Trump “hybrid war” are the exact same elements that occur right before a full-on “hot” war. It shouldn’t be any surprise to the history buffs out there.
No one seemingly pays attention to the characteristic lead-ups to a “hot” war. But they are actually well documented. They include such things as…
Propaganda campaign of demonizing a nation.
Destruction of food, livestock, and farming to create famine and distress.
Restrictions on use of a nation’s exports and technology.
Arrest or seizure of nationals from the other nation.
A trigger “event” from which can be used to BLAME the other other nation.
All of these characteristics are part and parcel of all the major World Wars, and all are going on right now as part of the “hybrid war” campaign.
The Propaganda Campaign
For illustrative purposes, let’s take a moment and study the anti-China propaganda campaign unleashed by the Trump administration.
As you get into the details, please ask yourself “just what other purpose would this campaign serve, were it NOT to be a lead up to a hot war”.
Because, people…
…it’s exactly that, and these kinds of campaigns take time. The larger the target, the longer the campaign.
I give a “hot” war with China two to three years. 2023 – 2024.
It’s pretty horrendous.
Here we look at one of the aspects of this war; the aggressive and relentless non-stop anti-China propaganda campaign to turn the world against China, and to jimmy-up support for a “hot war”.
There are various people writing about this subject.
One of the better articles is here and I do think that it is worth a read. The author tackles some of the well-known “givens” that pretty much saturate the internet these days. And I do mean saturate. Heck, you cannot click and go anywhere without encountering one of the millions of anti-China articles that are saturating the internet.
It’s sickening.
Literally.
This article was initially posted on Passages here. It is titled” Don’t Blame China For Your Government’s COVID-19 Failures” and was written by Davide Mastracci. It was formatted to fit this venue, but aside from that left intact. All credit to the author.
Trump and his advisors.
The anti-China narrative is based on falsities, and serves to distract people from the failure of neoliberalism.
April 7, 2020
In early January, COVID-19 was largely limited to China. Now, just three months later, it has spread far beyond China’s border, and has effectively been halted domestically within the country.
There are currently around 1.36 million reported COVID-19 cases globally, with more than 76,000 deaths. China accounts for just 6 per cent of all cases, and 4.4 per cent of deaths. Yesterday, China reported no new deaths for the first time since January.
Countries in the West, meanwhile, have gone into lockdown, hospitals have been overwhelmed and markets are crashing. There appears to be no clear end in sight for us here.
Despite that, a group of ideologues already have their eyes on the post-pandemic world, and are concerned China may emerge as the new global superpower. As part of an effort to prevent this, these figures think other countries should hold China “accountable” for the pandemic, and are working to create popular demand among the public for this to happen.
In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, political scientist Michael Parenti wrote, “In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.”
We’re currently seeing that happen with China, from columnists, reporters and politicians alike.
Attack…
When the Chinese government had yet to put millions of people into lockdown, it was because they cared about their image more than fighting a pandemic.
When they did enforce a lockdown, it wasn’t about fighting a pandemic, but a totalitarian move for more power.
Attack again…
When China was reporting hundreds of deaths a day, it was proof their government was incompetent because of just how bad the numbers were.
When death counts dwindled, it was proof they were lying about numbers.
And again…
When global health organizations say anything remotely critical about China’s handling of the pandemic, it’s proof the country should be punished.
When they say anything positive, it’s proof they were bought off by China.
Attack some more…
When China had yet to send aid to other countries, they were portrayed as cruel.
When they did send aid, it was portrayed as a propaganda effort.
Time for another attack…
When Chinese citizens complain about the government, it’s a sign the entire state is on the verge of collapse.
When Chinese citizens praise the government, it’s evidence they’re being forced or brainwashed.
What about these streaming attacks?
COVID-19 does appear to have originated in China, and so it makes sense, to an extent, that the country will be part of most conversations about the pandemic. However, this isn’t the reason these ideologues have focused so intently on China. Instead, it’s because of the ideological function their attacks serve.
Those in power, or adjacent to power, in the West see their government failing to deal with COVID-19, but don’t want to shoulder any blame. So, instead of criticizing policies they adopted, or failed to adopt, they direct anger outward.
For example, on March 21 the Daily Beast reported they were given a leaked government cable that contained “guidelines for how [United States] officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.” Unsurprisingly, officials were told to blame China for the pandemic when giving statements or answering questions from the press.
On March 21 the Daily Beast reported of an upcoming propaganda campaign the White House was launching against China:
As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow at a rapid pace in the U.S., the White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” and creating a global pandemic, according to two U.S. officials and a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast. The cable, sent to State Department officials Friday, lays out in detail the circumstances on the ground in China, including data on coronavirus cases and deaths, the local business environment and transportation restrictions. But it also issues guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.
The talking points appear to have originated in the National Security Council. One section of the cable reads “NSC Top Lines: [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”
Soon the mainstream media started to spread the new talking points. A Google News search for the search term "China Cover-up" now finds 449.000 results.
-MoA
Those who aren’t in power, such as rightwing journalists, realize their neoliberal ideology is unequipped to deal with the pandemic, and therefore is under attack. They won’t abandon their views, so they have to shift blame to an outside country with an ideology that is different in the right way. Attacking China clearly serves this purpose, and offers a chance for anti-communism, which, as Parenti notes, people have been primed to hate for more than a century.
For example, Postmedia’s executive editor Kevin Libin wrote in a March 23 National Post article, “We will likely persevere, but what the world can no longer afford is the threat to our collective health and well-being that is the Chinese communist regime.”
These attacks aren’t justified, and I will break down three of the more popular pieces of the anti-China narrative in the media to show the lies or half truths they’re built on. In order to ascertain what these pieces of the narrative are, I went through the pages of the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Sun and the Ottawa Citizen, and read through every opinion piece they published that focused on China and COVID-19, from January until early April 2020.
China Imprisoned A Whistleblower
A main piece of the anti-China narrative is that the government arrested or imprisoned a COVID-19 whistleblower.
The story goes that a doctor found out about a new virus, tried to tell the world, was arrested and imprisoned, and then died from the virus. Commentators claim China did this because they wanted to cover up the existence of a deadly virus in the country, and that the result was COVID-19 spreading quicker and further than it otherwise would have.
Most of this narrative is false, or at least based on half-truths.
Doctor Li Wenliang was an ophthalmologist, not an epidemiologist. He initially misidentified the novel coronavirus as evidence of a SARS outbreak. He shared that claim, along with patients’ medical records, in a WeChat group on December 30 with a few colleagues, not to any hospitals or public health organizations. Li was not arrested or imprisoned. He was called in to a police station on January 3, after a screenshot from his WeChat group leaked and caused panic. At the station, he was reprimanded for falsely claiming there was a SARS outbreak, asked to sign a document pledging not to continue spreading the misinformation and then was free to leave. Unfortunately, it’s true that Li did die on February 7 from COVID-19, which he reportedly got from treating one of his patients who had been infected.
This narrative also serves to distract from another sequence of events.
Zhang Jixian
On December 26, Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Hubei Provincial Hospital, noticed that four patients in her unit who sought treatment for suspected pneumonia — an elderly couple, their son and someone who had come in from a seafood market — all had similar and unusual CT images, which led her to believe they were suffering from something else. The next day, Zhang — who played a crucial role in combating the 2003 SARS outbreak — reported it to the head of her hospital. Within the next two days, the information was passed on to the provincial Centers for Disease Control, which then initiated full scale research into the hospital.
All of this took place before Li shared those screenshots in his WeChat group. Zhang wasn’t punished for her efforts — she was given an award by the regional government.
I used the ProQuest database to search through the entire print editions of the five publications I mentioned earlier in the article. Li was mentioned 44 times between them. Zhang wasn’t mentioned at all.
China Didn’t Act Fast Enough
Another core part of the narrative, mentioned in nearly every one of the opinion articles I looked at, was that China didn’t react to the outbreak quickly enough due to malicious intent.
Here are quotes from just a few of the manyexamples I examined: “Beijing’s authoritarian government hid information about its origins, spread and severity for weeks”; “It wasn’t until Jan. 20, 40 days after the virus was first detected, that Chinese President Xi Jinping first issued instructions to control the virus, but by then it was too late”; “We know they hid this for at least a month before they told the [World Health Organization]”; “It wrapped the communist cloak of silence around the then-unknown virus running wild in Wuhan and kept it a secret until word got out.”
What these articles fail to mention is the unique difficulties of dealing with a novel coronavirus, as going through the process of noticing something is happening, identifying what it is and confirming the extent of the danger it poses takes time. This effort should not be viewed as something China was doing for itself, but rather on behalf of the world. Any country the pandemic started in would have had to do the same thing, and there are several steps involved before widespread action can be taken.
Here is a timeline of China’s efforts, continuing from the one mentioned in the previous section.
On December 31, just a few days after Zhang noticed strange CT results, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a public notice about the disease. That same day, officials informed the WHO. On January 1, officials shut down the market where they believed the virus crossed over to humans, and a day later the WHO activated their incident management system. By January 7, China had isolated what was at this point believed to be a new coronavirus. All of this happened before the first confirmed COVID-19 death, which occurred on January 9.
On January 12, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for countries around the world to use in creating diagnostic kits. The next day, the first case of the novel coronavirus outside of China was reported, in Thailand.
As of January 14, the WHO was still noting that “there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” a crucial component of determining how dangerous a virus may be. The first confirmed case of human-to-human transmission came more than a week later. It wasn’t until January 30 that the WHO declared a global health emergency.
So, the idea that the disease was wreaking havoc within China and in neighbouring countries before the government did anything about it is false. This isn’t to say China’s response has been perfect, although it’s unclear what perfection would even look like.
Whether China reacted quickly enough to the outbreak is a matter of opinion, which I’m sure will be debated and investigated — including by the Chinese government — long after the pandemic is over and people are able to see everything in scale. For now, however, we can look at what the experts have said about China’s performance.
In a January 30 statement, the Emergency Committee convened by the WHO Director-General wrote, “The Committee welcomed the leadership and political commitment of the very highest levels of Chinese government, their commitment to transparency, and the efforts made to investigate and contain the current outbreak. China quickly identified the virus and shared its sequence, so that other countries could diagnose it quickly and protect themselves, which has resulted in the rapid development of diagnostic tools.”
In a series of tweets the same day, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, wrote, “In many ways, #China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”
A February report from the WHO noted, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” The report added, “The remarkable speed with which Chinese scientists and public health experts isolated the causative virus, established diagnostic tools, and determined key transmission parameters, such as the route of spread and incubation period, provided the vital evidence base for China’s strategy, gaining invaluable time for the response.”
The examples go on, and beg the question: Why do columnists feel more qualified to assess China’s response than the WHO? Some would say the WHO is lying, but what’s more likely: a successful conspiracy to silence the global health organization or a columnist who wrote about cancel culture a week ago being wrong?
China Is Responsible For The Crisis Globally
Commentators accusing China of failing to act quick enough likely aren’t doing so out of a concern for Chinese citizens. Perhaps that was the case initially, but now that we see China, with a population of 1.3 billion, has thus far managed to keep their death count to around 3,300, these concerns seem motivated by something else.
The reason, sometimes stated explicitly and other times just implied, is that these commentators believe the carnage in other countries is because of China. Here are just a fewexamples of these sort of headlines or statements: “China’s lies allowed the coronavirus outbreak to spread”; “now the whole world is paying dearly for Beijing’s behaviour”; “The virus is no conspiracy, just a cataclysmic natural phenomenon tragically mismanaged by the puppeteers in Beijing.”
This is absolutely not the case, and, difficult as it may be to accept, the carnage COVID-19 has caused within our countries is almost entirely the fault of our governments. The clearest example of this is the stark difference in how South Korea and the U.S. have dealt with COVID-19.
Both countries reported their first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20. Since then, as of writing this article, South Korea has reported around 10,200 cases, and 192 deaths. The U.S., meanwhile, has reported more than 367,000 cases, and 10,900 deaths. Accounting for the population difference between the two countries, the U.S. has reported 5.6 times the cases, and 9.5 times the deaths.
President Donald Trump recently predicted a best-case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths within the country from COVID-19, although experts who put together the data the projection was based off of have said they’re unclear how the number was reached. South Korea, meanwhile, seems to have beat back the virus for now, with just six new deaths on April 7.
These stark differences are due entirely to the varying approaches the two countries have taken in combating COVID-19.
For example, as of mid-March, South Korea had tested more than 290,000 people for COVID-19, while the U.S. had done just 60,000 tests. Accounting for population differences, South Korea conducted 31 times more tests than the U.S. According to the Nation, “Many of the Korean tests were administered in drive-in centers around the country, where the procedure was available for free to any citizen who asked for one and results were available by text or e-mail within six to 12 hours.”
Moreover, South Koreans were encouraged to wear masks, and they were readily available. People were able to pick up two a week from their pharmacy, with the distribution of them based on the last number of one’s birth year. The U.S., meanwhile, has had a massive shortage of masks, even for frontline healthcare workers. In recent days, they’ve resorted to essentially hijacking shipments of masks intended for other countries, and asking manufacturers to stop sending them elsewhere, including Canada.
South Korea is not the only example of a nation that has performed far better than the U.S., or Italy, France, Spain and various other countries. Vietnam, for example, with a population of more than 95 million, has had zero reported COVID-19 deaths, and around 240 cases. Their success has had less to do with testing, due to a lack of resources, and instead has come from aggressive tracing measures, enforced quarantines and the conscription of medical students and retired doctors and nurses’ to fight the virus.
All of this is to say that China’s initial handling of COVID-19 didn’t doom other nations to the fates we’ve seen in the West. Instead, as journalist Ajit Singh argues in Monthly Review, China actually bought time for the rest of the world. As such, the countries in crisis are in that position due to their policies alone. Their governments should get the blame, not China.
Conclusion
The anti-China propaganda campaign is well-funded, active, aggressive and saturating the American media at an unprecedented level. It makes both the anti-Trump propaganda campaign, and the anti-Russia propaganda campaigns look like “pikers” in comparison.
This level of ferocity is dangerous and it well illustrates how the United States is falling right into the The Thucydides Trap.
When ever you see or hear the term “Hybrid war’ please replace it with the term “lead-up to nuclear World War III on American soil”.
Hybrid War = Nuclear War on American Soil.
Please take care, as I have stated earlier, this current sequence of events are all part of a great sentience sorting exercise. This is but the first volley of about fifteen to twenty other events that will occur over the next century or so. The good news is that this upcoming nightmare will pretty much end around 2030 to 2045, and at that time there will be a nice long period of prosperity and calmness.
Just turn off the American Alt-Right propaganda outlets. They just cannot wait for World War III. It’s all China’s fault, don’t you know!
UPDATE 11:48 PM EDT --
At 11:15 PM Eastern US Time Tonight, I got a communication via SECURE methods informing me of the following (VERBATIM):
"Valhalla, (my former FBI Code Name) things are very bad and getting worse. Listen closely . . .COG (Continuity of Government) has already gone to Cheyenne mountain.DHS (Department of Homeland Security) goes to PN mountain.Reservists are called up (1 million).Expats are called home.People are told to "stay put at home and get masks."Long standing military patterns are suddenly changed.War rhetoric against China is at a TOP PEAKWhat comes next?"
I respond with my personal assessment by saying "We are going to war with China."
In the meantime, take what ever actions that you feel appropriate to survive the sequence of turmoil that is starting to manifest. Try to maximize your luck.
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As the COVID-19 ravishes the United States, a number of interesting articles are appearing. These articles consider the COVID-19 as the “pivot moment” of change that the United States sorely needs. Maybe so, or maybe not. We will see. In any event these articles are interesting, introspective, and poignant. Here is one such article.
This article is titled “The Strength of Broken Dreams” by Matthew J. Peterson and was written on 1APR20, when the COVID-19 just started to turn the United States upside down. It was edited to fit this venue and all credit to the authors.
The Strength of Broken Dreams
“The American Dream” is dead, but America remains.
In the 1960s the American Dream spread quickly through the American mind.
At its best it meant that Americans could fulfill the moderate, but deeply rooted, desire most people have to work, own a home, and raise a family on the income earned by one parent.
At its worst, it was not attached to much more than this—a generic promise of economic and social mobility. The phrase was always ridiculed by intellectuals and activists as much as it was used positively. This is America, after all.
It was always amorphous. But for some time now, the American Dream has been dead, both as concept and as reality. In the coming months, regardless of exactly how long it lasts, millions will be forced to further reevaluate their dreams as the virus takes its toll on our bodies, our economy, and our way of life.
American Dreams
Dreams slip into air outside the grasp of mind the more fully we try to hold onto them. Is their unraveling noble or unsavory? Is their letting go freedom—or slavery?
Today we hold that two parents must work for ideological as well as practical reasons. We’re told the family itself is oppressive. Certainly it is harder for many people to start and raise one, as both lived experience and data show. The suburbs are castigated as evil. Certainly it is now harder in many regions to afford a home in one. The idea of working for the same employer for years and “settling down” was long unthinkable to Millennials, and the “gig economy” celebrated, up until recently.
It made sense to tell people looking for a decent way of life to move to southern California in the 1950s and ’60s. They could buy a home, and their children could go to college and work to become doctors or lawyers. Would you advise an young, aspirational family to move to southern California now, in 2020?
But from the end of World War II to the present day, we have not stopped dreaming. We dreamed many dreams. The American Dream became an increasingly feverish kaleidoscope of dreams, manipulated by many mad masters, both within and without ourselves. Our own desires, as well as our ruling classes, increasingly untethered our dreams from reality. First whimsical and sentimental, Disney’s childhood; then Dionysian, like 70s teenage rock; then hardening into habitual vices pretending to be respectable, responsible adulthood; culminating in denial, dysfunction, and vicious delusions.
These dreams did not ultimately better us or draw us out of ourselves. They did not call us to higher purpose or action. Nor did they finally cause us to go wild, become revolutionary or reactionary, violent, or unrestful.
Instead they acted like cultural ketamine, lulling us into dissociative sleep. In our near past, many have lived in a steady twilight of manicured dreams and illusions, a coma stabilized and maintained by the anaesthetic drip of electronic media, nourished only by the feeding tube of petty consumption. These dreams are coming to an end.
As my friend and colleague James Poulos has frequentlysuggested over the last few years, the rise of digital technology—combined with impoverished, if not dystopian, elite “ethics” and “politics”—have interrupted our dreams and left us disenchanted with the televisual era. We are now collectively waking up to the reality around us: our doddering leaders long past retirement age, our corrupted institutions, our paltry or absurdist political ideologies, our weakened bodies and souls, and, for many, a deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction with present circumstances.
This is the real reason for the rise in deaths of despair despite a historically high level of material prosperity—which is rendered meaningless in context. The first to wake up were those affected most by economic realities, haunted as they were by the dawning perception that no way out, no path forward, no respectable, honored, or fulfilling way of life was available to them. What, in our contested landscape, is the American way of life now?
Our dreams were already dissipating. The coming of the virus has perhaps hastened their demise, widening the demographic range of those waking up in the valley of the real. Trust in our political, cultural, and economic system and its leaders was already waning. Regardless of how long the virus lasts, how many people are now being forced to rethink their education, their status, their work, and the very course of their lives?
The experience of the changes that have only just begun will have deep and personal effects on each of us. Our dreams are unraveling, and we cannot hold onto them.
The Death of Celebrity
Dreams unmasked and untethered, threads unbound.
Celebrity killed people—but the crowd was entertained.
Celebrity routinely, ritualistically killed people, but the crowds that created and sustained them throughout their lives were also entertained by their deaths. For the crowd which they became obliged to serve, a “tragic” death was all part of the final act, drenched in maudlin sentimentality—catharsis on the cheap.
One could never interrupt the show to speak at length of the likely actual causes of their deaths, of their inner wretchedness and pain—whatever propelled them to seek refuge in addictive pleasures. Whatever really haunted them. Whoever managed and directed their lives. Whatever kept them from healing and strengthening themselves and living accountable lives.
“No. Money and fame are good and make you and us, your fans, happy. Let us keep our fantasies,” said the plaintive crowd. “You can’t take them from us. They are ours. They do not condemn us like the heroes of old. They are our living puppets. Our living symbols. And they must die so we can live these fantasies. They must die so we can live in dreams.”
More proximately, the celebrities were the puppets of those who controlled our dreams. When the mechanism of dream creation fails, in part because it has become readily observable, all involved are revealed for what they are. And we no longer care about them. Celebrities singing “Imagine” are no longer likeable, with or without their makeup. They no longer dazzle, and we’d rather see those to whom we have some real connection on our screens. We’d rather see our family and friends than watch these dull strangers off stage without their masks on.
The #metooed men behind the curtains that have lately lifted are uninteresting to us. They are going into retirement as quickly as they can. The galaxy of interwoven mythologies they created has lost its luster, no longer appealing to our inner feelings. Nostalgia, already made uncomfortable by the totalizing “woke” politicization of our media companies, now dwindles as the future becomes more pressing on the present than the memories of childish comforts past.
For the educated classes, the same logic applies to the “news” and what passes for analysis, punditry, and intellectual notoriety. The desire for fame in the 20th century, when the screen was “silver” and the carpets ran red, boiled over briefly onto social media before the reality of digital life devalued all punditry, talking heads, and even the glamour of entertainment itself.
It was always a strange and slavish notion: why would multiple generations of millions of children desire such a thing—to be an actor or musician strutting about the stage, often paid as a part-time employee, “project” by ”project”, show by show, by producers and owners who are actually in charge? One need not be a Socrates nor a Plato to see this as nothing other than a sign of great sickness, of a society in the throes of worsening political disease.
Yet we thought it could go on forever, until it didn’t.
Dissociative Slumber
Dreams deferred? Dreams opaque and vanishing in the nude, once covered in robes that now fall silently like snow to ground.
To live the unexamined life is to be lost to yourself: to be cut off from outside light and air, cultivating an empty darkness within that eventually suffocates even the inner light by which you see yourself, snuffing out your very person. It is a long and difficult journey both to get to such a place, and to journey back—although jolting experiences can hasten the process in both directions. The streaming flood of borrowed dreams, which could not be countered by our broken families and decrepiteducationalsystem, made it possible for masses of people in our lifetimes to approach it.
We spent hours daily looking into screens pretending to substitute for reality. They gave us shared mass dreams and epistemologies by which we saw ourselves and the world at large. As time went on, the televisual medium became less reflective of us as a people and more directive, seeking to influence our way of life in an ever deeper, ever “woker” manner. At the same time, digital technology fractured the shared nature of those dreams and their corresponding epistemologies, allowing for multiple “channels,” voices, and ways of seeing the world that undercut mass control.
The temptation of all human beings in slipstreams of relative peace at home is to go to sleep—to pretend that the vivid drama of good and evil is not playing out within our hearts and minds and across the globe every day. To pretend that one can simply absolve oneself from the pursuit of justice. To pretend that one’s own society or social clan is incorrupt. To laugh off the deepest questions and airily dismiss earnest answers, as if “science” or some “expert” out there has dissected and explained it all. To lazily believe and indulge in distractive fictions and comforting technocratic myths about your world.
Such matters are extraordinarily difficult, after all. That’s what makes individual virtues and political life noble.
But this is also what makes giving up altogether so tempting. If all institutions are perfectly fine—or perfectly corrupted—why bother? This giving up, or refusal to take responsibility, leads to lives cut off from actual politics and real virtues, in which either soft hedonism or asinine idealism of all sorts flourishes. Live Action Role Playing, or idealism, leads in turn to more dashed hopes and dreams, fostering more shallow cynicism. And here we are.
What incidents like the 1619 Project reveal is how deep the suicidal urges of the western world have seeped into the American psyche. People on the Left (and Right) want to denigrate, revile, and blame the founding—our origins and intrinsic system. It makes them feel good. It doesn’t matter what some of the best historians (leaning Left with no bone to pick) say about the truth of the matter. We wanted to believe negative mythology about ourselves.
This is so because we knew something was amiss, but whatever that is we cannot easily discern. 1619 is but one example. It’s not just that it pronounces we are flawed, like every human society (although not every human society is equally good about admitting it). It’s that we want to believe we are intrinsically broken and cannot be fixed—at a time in which we are indisputably the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. This is a spectacle worth meditating on.
We want to believe we cannot change ourselves or our system and that it must break down, or be broken down. It would be one thing if we did so because we wanted something better, but this is by no means clear. Insofar as anyone does seemingly want things to improve there is a deep divide over what would constitute “improvement.” Regardless, this sort of fatalism is often a self-fulfilling prophecy in individual human lives.
We are indeed waking up now, but not in the manner the Social Justice Warriors or Right-wing culture warriors might wish. The virus is yet another quickening event that threatens our posturing. It makes a mockery of our preferred stance and subgroups. It reveals things as they are—and challenges us to confront reality.
The new reality is uncomfortable because it snaps us out of our stupor. The populace, waking up from a long distracted, T.V.-induced sleep, discovers that in real life it’s now often functionally illiterate, increasingly unemployed or engaged in meaningless employment, obese, addicted, and grumpy, if not suicidal. People increasingly feel real fears and have no idea what to do with them.
Meanwhile, our various officially approved groups of rulers are exposed as vapid, apolitical, smoothly medicated drones who wish to live as comfortably as transhumanly possible and are uncomfortable dealing with anything that bursts their finely tuned bubbles. And in differing ways, in digital life everyone seems far more vulgar and vicious than what used to be shown to us “on” the major vehicles of social engineering.
Who will rescue us from them—and ourselves?
The Courage of the Real
You find yourself looking up from the bottom of a large and ancient lake. Disorientated and troubled, you eventually get your bearings. Reflexively longing to reach the sunlit surface, you begin to feel the weight of the deep bearing down on your body. Above the underwater motions of living creatures, your countrymen are engaged in fierce naval battle on the surface. The wreckage and bodies drift downwards, but you cannot rise. Held in place, you can do nothing.
The human soul is difficult to rescue and resuscitate when habitually distant from the real, entranced in a kind of living death. But the jolt of events increasingly allows us to see our caves for what they are. The inner pilot light needs to be lit again, but what will catch? This is the problem America now faces.
The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves and end up believing. When those lies are taken from us, we are disorientated and feel the pain of their removal. But as we begin to see past them, we see the distance we have created between ourselves and reality, and we despair.
We often don’t tell ourselves outright lies so much as hide from ourselves, shoring fragments against our ruins to hide our ruinous parts from ourselves and others, attempting to cordon off or even willfully self-amputate what we consider undesirable.
We cling desperately to these fragments—these distractive or reflective fictions—as if camouflage, armor, or shelter could turn us into something we think we’d rather be, never mind heal the disease or wounds they might conceal.
Courage is needed first to seek out and confront the truth about yourself and reality, and then to conform and develop yourself accordingly. It takes courage to confront and develop one’s inner life, and above all to conform that life to reality as it is.
We are most often cowards not because we make the effort to run away, but because we merely turn away. We turn our gaze from the truth about our inner and outer reality, and we act according to our willful ignorance.
Having so turned, we too easily recreate ourselves in our own preferred image by way of simplistic amputation, bifurcation, or cosmetic concealment. Over time, we each begin to live within a partial framework of habitual blindness or willful fantasy.
In this sense, certain forms of even physiological mental illnesses or debilitating conditions can often be seen as more extreme forms of what all humans suffer, often at their own hands along with those of others in the same troubled state.
What festering wounds are we hiding? The metastasizing soft hedonism of distraction. The painful brokenness of shattered families. The apolitical “politics” of “naturally” unsocial atomistic gods. Disembodied bodies, puritanically dedicated to amorphous, directionless, prophylactically un-gendered sex within themselves, social only for the sake of attaining a continuous, inner-directed masturbatory self-affirmation.
In a sense there is no “other” when we are all autonomously equal godlike beings. When we forgo seeking fulfillment out there, or simply use what is outside ourselves for our own ends, we discover a certain devilish equality. This the inverse of the natural equality yet buried deep at the heart of the American regime. It is an imposter, born ex nihilo, rather than the substance of human nature.
As in John Lennon’s song, we imagined the impossible. We saw evils mixed up with being. Therefore being itself was evil. So we imagined we were nonbeing, or that we could become so.
We imagined we were pure potential, to be molded within ourselves without any form from the outside. We thought we could share the world because we had nothing to unify us other than our rejection of any religious or political claim to its rightful use. We thought we could attain unity merely by each seeking to use the other for their own purposes. What is everyone’s is no one’s, we thought, and so we should realize we are each no one in the empty solipsism of our self, within which we could form our own being.
In sum, we imagined that our imagining alleviates the unpleasantness of the real by eliminating the central forms of human community. This practically defines everything that went wrong with the televisual era. This was the best we could wish for—the best we could imagine—preferring imagined nonbeing to engaging with the difficulties of the real, which we wanted to evade, or saw no way to resolve. It was to act as if in the here and now we could be either gods or beasts, with nothing possible in between.
This is also the path to power for those who would rule without the bother of deep consent. Get the populace to think they are all perfectly equal, self-sufficient, atomistic little gods who make their own, fully informed, rational choices and arrive at their views the same way: internally, by means of the majesty of their own will and the gloriousness of their own mind, without learning from others outside themselves, least of all leaders or any kind of order or hierarchy. Without taking cues from anyone or anything or any event. Without suspecting that entertainment and advertising no less than punditry and education affects them in anything more than a neutral way.
Flatter them. Get them to think they are independent, free thinkers without ever having to work to think.
Give them leaders they don’t see or acknowledge and a shadow government of hierarchical order which gives them cues. Create and shape events and images that lead them to desire whatever you wish, from within, as if they’d thought of it themselves. Let them project their desires into the emptiness of the images and talking heads while you control the frame and focus, molding their desires. Let the millions of independent, free thinkers each buy millions of the same product so they can show each other they are independent and free.
Enslave them to their own internal desires. Profit and rule.
It’s an old story, forever new.
Reality-#Based Hope
Looking down the trail ahead at dusk, before having to turn back. Looking down the long roads as you pass. Looking up before turning in. Looking up before heading down again.
Tocqueville, in his introduction to Democracy in America, describes how the very people who could have helped shape democracy for the better rejected it for the wrong reasons while the worst people led its rise for all the wrong reasons. As democracy rose regardless, Tocqueville was keenly aware of the screeching, jumbled train wreck that is human existence, tried to describe it, and hoped someone paid attention. Which no one often does, really, until well after the fact.
And that’s life, often enough. To glimpse the contours and predict the directions of the train wreck—which is to see the flaws on all the “sides”—and yet refrain from despair is achievement enough. This alone is so difficult that, to clean things up, people generally construct or retreat into another’s ideological fantasy world. To fight to see the real is hard enough, and then we find it hard to bear much of what we are given to see.
But some times in life the real is forced upon us. I suppose this is why Christianity treats hope as one of only three supernatural virtues, presuming that we understand enough to know why it is needed. In this life, as anyone who has ever undergone its tragedies knows, hope is a virtue.
In our technologically advanced, spiritually primitive paganism, hope is the forgotten of the three new preeminent virtues Christianity offered as gifts to the world. Charity is abused to death; talk of love now bores us and is near meaningless from over-use. Faith or belief we think we know, even if we reject it. We think it means a kind of reasonless act of our individual will. A planting of our willful flag wherever we choose.
But hope as a kind of core or supreme virtue is almost a mystery. What does that even mean?
We don’t need hope if the arc of history bends our way and progress is inevitable.
Worse, we have hidden the very truths that reveal our need for it so as not to trouble ourselves. Death. Deep institutional corruption. Civilizational collapse. The underlying currents of pain in our particular lives like loneliness, guilt, and other anxieties. Unpleasant fictions, all. Eat, drink, and be merry. Take more pills. “Love.” Have “faith” in what you will. And “hope”—well, there’s no need for wishful thinking. Work hard and study, believe in the dreams our culture gives you, and you will be set free.
And the suicide rate rises.
The difference between hope and the shallow self-help that passes for it (often aping faith in one’s own will rather than hope) is in many ways the difference between life and death—sadness and distraction versus happiness and fulfillment.
Hope is what Christianity gave the world, even if you think it bunk. The European primitives before conversion struggled with just this: a dark vision of a doomed world. The monsters would encircle them eventually, they thought. In the end, the dragon would come and slay them all.
The therapeutic and distractive uses of technology in our time are designed to keep such visions at bay. Some iterative mythos of ekpyrosis would inevitably return except for the fact that our masters today have isolated us, and told us a different lie: like Sisyphus in reverse we must keep entertaining and pleasuring ourselves, over and over, with small delights, alone. This is happiness.
And yet we are not happy.
But we think we should be. There must be something wrong with us! Why doesn’t it work? Why am I not happy? We must climb the hill again!
Our ignorance of the human condition is vast. It is astounding that it is even possible to keep a population so ignorant. But we came to think that we had no need for hope. The problem must be in our procedure or its execution. There must be some external or internal constraint holding us back from happiness. We must further free ourselves. And thus we find ourselves enslaved.
Hope is what truly frees the oppressed, which is why the deepest form of oppression obviates not only the perception of its reasonableness or its possibility but the understanding that we need either cultivate it deep within, or live as dead among the living.
Yet even a name comes from another, just as each of us do. A name is given and received.
Names remind us that identity is not and cannot be wholly self-determined. Even in a world that recklessly seeks total atomistic self-determination, and increasingly lauds even self-mutilation accordingly, the nature of naming remains difficult to thwart. This is why it is now a hate crime to “deadname” those who say they wish to change their sexual biology.
A name is blessed or cursed, loved or hated, and gathers reputation from others. This is why Aristotle says fame or status is not a secure good upon which to base one’s ultimate happiness. A name comes from another.
We do not create ourselves or anything else out of nothing, but remain mere temporary stewards of what we are given, and whatever we finally wrought from what we were given. A name comes from another who recognizes us as something determinate.
We both name and receive names. The first human, Adam, did not create but named the animals, the Old Testament tells us, even as God often changes the names of the prophets. We need space to form ourselves and build human communities, but this does not fully unmake what we are and naturally need to become. We need to discover and receive wisdom beyond ourselves and our own experiences to do so, but this does not mean slavishly repeating old mantras or stale formulas.
The Strength of Broken Dreams
Looking through the mirror, through the glass. Looking through the water, past your own reflection, at living things, darting fast.
This transitional slipstream, in which we see suddenly and much too clearly through the water instead of being lulled to sleep by the familiar, muddying currents of the rhetoric of pre-digital life, will eventually pass. At some point we will no longer behold our own reflection mirrored on the increasingly digital surface, as all the old policies and outdated ideologies dissolve.
And perhaps, if we are conquered by those who would further control us, we will all float on into false dreams and visions again, but of another, more terrifying kind. But in the present we need the courage to jettison the old and think anew. We need new humbler but more noble dreams, conformed to the real. The best hopes and dreams are more real than the reality of present experience, because they bring what already exists unseen into sight, and what could and should actually be into being.
But fitfully waiting for this to happen is not a strategy or a plan. We can’t dream our way to better dreams.
A new frontier is the only way forward—and out of—what is and what is to come. But it is not clear where and what manner of frontier it could be. A trove of wisdom and achievement, retrieved and repurposed, is necessary for any needed renaissance. But it is not clear where in the past and what manner of wisdom might revitalize us.
As Peter Thiel wrote recently, “a renaissance will require motivational goals,” which means goals that are “both ambitious and achievable.” The goals of the televisual era were either hubristic and unachievable (“world peace”) or too small and hedonistic (“netflixing”). We are increasingly searching for something else now; like it or not, for the foreseeable future we will be compelled to grasp for it—or die trying.
There are certain summer nights when you can stride the earth and feel as if you could reach up and touch the full moon. But to actually get there, one needs to keep one’s wonder at the skies while willfully submitting to the crushing realism of humility. Reach your hands in the sky as you dream and you will experience the futility of attaining the heavens.
To accomplish such a “dream,” like those who actually put the man on the moon, one needs to abandon dreams. One must observe, learn, and act. One must work hard to know—and then overcome—every physical obstacle that stands in one’s way. One must see, in real life, what prevents the dream from being accomplished, and alter it accordingly.
Dreams in the best sense arise from wonder about what truly is, and concerted effort to discover it. This means that a clinical scientism that pretends to know more than it does, and lashes out at and seeks to cover up the great mystery of existence, can be as much of an impediment as distractive dreams to human vitality. This is because scientism itself has become a dream, and separated itself from the totality of human experience accordingly.
We must experience genuine wonder about human life and nature again, not strain within ourselves to dictate like gods.
It may be necessary for those whose dreams are still borrowed from mass culture, to be disrupted and turned away from the streaming images so that they might have dreams of substance, based on who and what they truly are, and who and what truly is outside themselves and beyond the shadows on the walls of the cave. Many need to be rehabilitated and encouraged to dream natural dreams—to be given truer dreams.
But even for those who perhaps have truer dreams already, it may be necessary to periodically sacrifice them upon the altar of our hearts. What if one must routinely give up the callings of your dreams in order to discover your true calling, or even merely glimpse it, reaching for a goal that, like a shade in Homer, Virgil, and Dante, cannot be grasped by the hands of the living? Is this not the fate of all men? The way of all flesh?
We make idols of good things, as well as bad. We make idols of things worth idolizing, in their way. But to grow and develop, to avoid stuntedness and stagnation, one must sometimes break them and enter out into the unknown once more.
There is a season and a sense in which we ought not to encourage or nurture dreams, or urge others to follow them, but rather to give them up. To let them remain illusions only, patches of glimmering sunlight on the earth beneath the trees in summer.
When I am overburdened by clinging to these dreams too long, can I recognize it? Can I free myself of them? Can we each put aside the unfelt weight we carry and dive into the ocean free? Perhaps they will return. Perhaps not. But to put bread out on the waters is to expect it not to return, to expect only the unknown, and to have to search again to know.
This is why our dreams are so hard to give up: they give us something known—something to hang on to—regardless of their realism, regardless of our circumstances. We imagine we might someday carve them into the future—into the rock of reality itself. We enjoy these imaginings, and linger with them, and attempt to chisel them into stone. To put these plans and their corresponding tools down is to begin again, even if they have propelled us forward to wherever the place we actually stand.
We must sometimes let go of what we have been chiseling, and when we do so we discover where we truly are again, and eventually resume traveling, moving, seeking.
What if, then, to offer up our dreams is not weakness but strength? What if it was silly to think one could hold on absolutely, could conclusively determine and dictate one’s dreams to the world?
To weather broken dreams is to pass through a portal into a vast reality beyond the constraints of your former world, which was likely a sort of constructed idol—an idolatrous landscape or constructed reality, meant to serve virtual goals. If, that is, one can survive the passing through—if your broken dreams don’t break you.
If our dreams become leverage against us for fear of losing them, they may have become idols. You must smash your idols to be free of fear. You must mentally work through killing your Isaacs. Kill your darlings. Even the most noble ones. Neither the world nor God owes any of us our dreams made real.
The American Dream is dead, but America still lives. If it is to live on, we must let the past die, look to our present, and habitually act to confront and determine it. We must not look to the past for dreams, but for the wisdom to perceive and act in the present. We must clear and build more humble paths towards higher ground. It is only then that we can begin to dream naturally again.
When reality has already broken your dreams, holding onto them will only accelerate your own self-destruction.
We are born naked, and we die so—with nothing that is ours except what we formed inside ourselves. But it may be that if we can sacrifice our dreams, what we are inside cannot be broken.
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However, independent bloggers and outliers are providing other points of view. Much of which are way outside the “Washington DC beltway”, and more connected to what is really and actually going on. Here we look at one of these opinion pieces.
It’s a good read.
The premise is that the handling of the COVID-19 is pretty darn obvious. China found out about the virus, and took immediate and drastic steps. America dilly-dallied around, made mistake after mistake and relentlessly blamed China for all of the problems that America has encountered. That’s pretty much it.
Simple. Accurate.
These bloggers and writers are observing these events and thinking about them. They are also coming to some rather obvious conclusions about this entire mess, and the “Washington DC beltway” and their supporters are absolutely clueless as to what is going on. They are far too caught up in their isolated bubble of reality.
So read on, and check out this particular writer.
He postulates that the success that China has had tackling the COVID-19 wasn’t due to blind luck, but rather to a strong leadership and a successful governance. While the opposite is true about how America handled this event.
Ouch!
While people might not want to face these facts, we all know that this is the truth, and it WILL affect what is going to occur in America in the next few months and years.
Listen up and take notes. It’s a taste of what will drive what happens in the next six months or so in the United States.
The following piece is titled “Coronavirus has vindicated China, exposed the West” and was written by Ravi Veriah Jacques on March 18, 2020. It was edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Coronavirus has vindicated China, exposed the West
Coronavirus has been unfairly used to attack Chinese governance. Those in the West have roundly condemned China’s handling of the virus as reeking of authoritarian oppression and censorship.
Amnesty International has declared that… “[c]ensorship, harassment and punishment for speaking out are hindering the fight against the coronavirus outbreak,” …while The Washington Post proclaimed in February that…“[t]he coronavirus outbreak shows the vulnerability of the ‘Chinese Model.’”
Against these denunciations, however, China’s response to coronavirus has been resounding vindication of the country’s deeply efficient and competent model.
Not Perfect
China’s response was not perfect, of course. Its initial response in early January was poor, as Wuhan city authorities covered up the virus and made some serious errors that slowed the Chinese response. But far too few have recognized that this was a fantastically difficult situation to handle. China was going in blind: This coronavirus was new, and nothing was known about it. These mistakes, moreover, happened in a two-week period in January when infections were still in the dozens. The United States — now with over 7,000 cases — is still dallying.
China takes action
China more than made up for its slow start. As soon as the full gravity of the situation became apparent in late January, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leapt into action. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was promptly shut down, while broad swathes of the country — including Beijing’s 21 million people — were quarantined. These measures were certainly drastic, but they have proved highly successful and have saved thousands of lives. Indeed, China now has coronavirus largely under control: The country recorded just 13 new infections yesterday.
This is an extraordinary achievement
This is an extraordinary achievement, recognized as such by the experts. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), commended China for… “setting a new standard for outbreak control.”
Responding to the fierce Western criticism of China’s approach to Wuhan, he quipped, “Can’t you appreciate [the shutdown]? They should be thanked for hammering the epicenter. They are actually protecting the rest of the world.”
Rather than accepting the words of these international experts, though, many in the West have instead cast aspersions on the WHO’s objectivity, suggesting that the organization is somehow a vassal of the Chinese state. This is to succumb to a Trumpian mindset, to disregard scientific and medical expertise in favor of prejudice and ignorance.
The Chinese Model
Ultimately, coronavirus has demonstrated the strength of China’s “model.” To quote Tedros again, “China’s speed, China’s scale and China’s efficiency … is the advantage of China’s system.”
China built a hospital in 10 days and shut down a city with 3 million more people than New York. This display of deep competence, expertise, and efficiency should come as no surprise. China, after all, has put 25,000 kilometers of high-speed rail-lines into operation since 2008 and, most impressively, has dragged 700 million people out of poverty in 40 years.
Europe and America
Europe and America should have been able to combat coronavirus with ease. After all, they had a crucial head start: Not only do we now know hugely more about the virus than was known in mid-January, but Western countries were also given a two-month head start to prepare for potential outbreaks.
They also had the chance to learn from China’s success.
But the opportunity for proper preparation was wasted. The widespread attacks on China lulled Europe and America into a false sense of security — instilling the belief that the severity of China’s outbreak was down to some fundamental flaw in the country’s governance.
In fact, rather than exposing the vulnerability of the “Chinese model,” coronavirus has instead highlighted the deep ills of contemporary Western governance.
Western incompetence
Incompetence has been the order of the day in the West. America has so far fumbled the fundamentals of containing the virus — above all, testing. Washington botched its attempts to produce a test, meaning that as of the start of last week only 8,554 people had been checked for the virus.
South Korea is conducting 10,000 tests per day. Moreover, New York’s attempts to quarantine its cases have been slipshod, and counts have risen from 105 to over 2000 in just over a week. The contrast with China couldn’t be starker.
The Western response has been further hampered by a neglect of expertise at the highest levels of government.
“is a flu. It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for … We’ve done a great job keeping it down to a minimum. Tremendous success at keeping the virus away.”
Trump proceeded to place Mike Pence — who believes that “smoking doesn’t kill” and “global warming is a myth” — in charge of containing the virus. And while visiting a hospital housing coronavirus patients earlier this week, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson “shook hands with everyone.” Championing ignorance seems to be rather popular among Anglo-American leadership.
Deep Problems
But the problems go deeper than incompetent, inefficient and philistine political leadership. The crisis has served as a damning statement on the chronic Anglo-American underinvestment in healthcare in the neoliberal era.
Symptomatic of America’s deeply backward healthcare system, it is still unclear whether Americans will have to pay for their coronavirus treatment, and the signs aren’t good.
An American family flown back from Wuhan faced medical bills totaling thousands of dollars while Trump suggested that the coronavirus vaccine may be unaffordable to most Americans — let alone the 18 million Americans who have no medical insurance.
China, by contrast, made testing and treatment for the virus free. In the U.K., underinvestment in the National Health Service over the past decade has left healthcare workers in a profoundly vulnerable position in the face of coronavirus.
The Chinese System of Government
The current crisis has fully demonstrated the superiority of Chinese governance. And as things worsen in the West, many are coming round to the realization that China is the coronavirus model.
A Forbes report last week was headlined “Italy takes China’s approach to fighting rampaging coronavirus.”
Indeed, the Italian government has now quarantined the whole country, while America has already had to deploy National Guard troops in the state of New York. The real, troubling question though, is whether European and American governments will actually be capable of replicating China’s efficiency, competence and expertise.
Don’t hold your breath.
Comments
Well, this fellow is gonna anger a lot of Americans, especially conservatives, that think and believe inside their hearts that the most superior model of governance is a “democracy”.
They believe that America must be the “policeman” for the world, and that it is our “duty” to be the foremost nation, convert all other nations into democracies, and if they do not obey… destroy them ruthlessly.
Maybe you don’t agree with this narrative?
Well, that puts you in the minority. All you need to do is check out any conservative website and the narrative will all be along these lines.
But it need not be.
America was NEVER intended to be a “democracy”, let alone a “democracy in name only”. What it is today is a functional Military Empire ruled by the global elites. The PTB (Powers That Be) don’t you know.
America today is the direct result of the last two-hundred years when progressives, and their conservative ilk reformed, and changed America to make it “better”.
But you know what?
That utopia never materialized.
Now, an awful COVID-19 is tearing through the fabric of American society, and it’s going to cause some serious people to do some serious thinking. This thinking and thought process is important and is the reason why solutions can end up resolving the most difficult of problems.
It must happen this way.
Otherwise, there will be two outcomes;
Domestic war inside the United States on many levels, and…
International war against a global power or two.
Let’s pray that there is a peaceful resolution to this conundrum, and perhaps America can revert back to individual state control instead of the big ultra-powerful gigantic Federal monster.
We can only hope.
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My inbox is now getting all cluttered up with people asking me about World War III. Seriously. They are doing this. Though, I cannot blame them. The anti-China propaganda out of America has been absolutely relentless and horrific. It has gotten so bad that I even stopped following many of my favorite conservative websites because of the outright lies, nonsense and bullshit that is pouring out of them.
As China’s Ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, pointed out in a recent interview, the political atmosphere you have in the U.S. can be characterized as the “ABC policy”, meaning “Anything But China”, that is, that nothing good should be said publicly about China or the Chinese government, whose growing respect in the international community is deemed a threat to Western hegemony.
The last time then this propaganda onslaught was this severe was in the days leading up to World War I.
Though, people are beginning to see the obvious propaganda. Check out this post at MoA; "China Did Not Deceive Us - Counting Death During An Epidemic Is Really Difficult".
Americans are waking up, and just read the comments. All of them are pretty much seeing America as the "King without any clothes on". Maybe this pile on propaganda onslaught will ease up soon. But don't get too soft and comfortable. It will just change form.
"The fact that China had an outbreak of corona virus dose not mean it originated in China ! This virus came from a USA /UK bio warfare lab."
… people are naturally asking me what I think about what China would do…
…how it would react…
…were America to start moving some troops about and flying in and out of Chinese airspace. Maybe landing a contingent of Marines on Taiwan, or taking over tiny Hong Kong, or lobbing some cruse missiles at some of the Spratly islands. You know, doing the same kinds of things that led up to the USA invasion of Libya.
Or, the USA invasion of Panama.
Or, the USA invasion of Grenada.
Or, the USA invasion of Kuwait.
Or the USA invasion of Vietnam.
Or the USA invasion of Iraq.
They ask me, off line and via e-mail, about (my thoughts on) what “might” happen if the USA decides to “protect” Taiwan. They wonder about China, and what China’s reaction might me. They see the constant anti-China propaganda as all pure pristine truth. And after this onslaught, they view China as a very vary bad nation, full of evil despicable people.
Thus they are worried about China’s “saber rattling”.
Anti-China propaganda = China “saber rattling”.
Well, rather than send out about twenty e-mails, I decided to jot down a few things herein so that everyone can read them. Right or wrong, here it is.
But some things before I get started…
Firstly, I was not in the CIA, or the DOD. I was in MAJ.
That gives me a unique perspective, but one that might not be in agreement with the current set of folk in charge of the levers of power. What I know comes about via other avenues and with other (um) “baggage”. I sort of see the “bigger picture”, don’t you know. The “why” rather than the “how”.
Secondly, I am an American inside China. I read both Chinese and American “news”. I live, breathe and fully understand China, and no it does not resemble anything even remotely like the image and the caricature that is portrayed inside of America.
What passes for “news” out of America these days isn’t any kind of reporting, or even educated editorials. It’s mostly pure lies, and distortions. They (the writers) take a piece of information and twist it beyond recognition into something evil, dirty and dangerous.
No wonder Americans are so petrified and afraid of the rest of the world. Jeeze Louise!
But, you know, you asked, so I’ll tell you all what is going on.
Most Americans are all living inside their own “bubble”; their own “echo chamber” and surrounded by their own “yes men” that nod and agree with everything they say. They read the same publications and earnestly believe that what they want will be best for their idea of the future of America.
They believe that what they read is mostly true, and that America needs to take action! And take control of the situation, NOW!
The USA is losing it’s role as the leading superpower. This is intolerable as the entire fiction that the US dollar is stable would fall apart were another nation take supremacy. So the USA is working to “suppress” China.
This could go easy or it could go hard. Apparently the people occupying the buildings in Washington DC want it to go hard.
The problem is, have absolutely no fucking idea what they are asking for. And here, is my opportunity to tell you all what to expect.
First things first…
This anti-China propaganda is not organic. It is intentional and designed to prime Americans for war with China.
On March 21 the Daily Beast reported of an upcoming propaganda campaign the White House was launching against China:
As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow at a rapid pace in the U.S., the White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” and creating a global pandemic, according to two U.S. officials and a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast.
The cable, sent to State Department officials Friday, lays out in detail the circumstances on the ground in China, including data on coronavirus cases and deaths, the local business environment and transportation restrictions. But it also issues guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.
The talking points appear to have originated in the National Security Council. One section of the cable reads “NSC Top Lines: [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”
Soon the mainstream media started to spread the new talking points. A Google News search for the search term “China Cover-up” now finds 449.000 results. It’s interesting stuff for certain, but let’s not get side-tracked.
The USA has an active propaganda campaign to prime Americans up for War against China.
Discussions of War!
This all began innocently enough. I received an email asking about how China would react were American forces were to “make moves” inside of Taiwan. You know… for “democracy” and “freedom“.
Most of the world supports China. The USA is pretty much alone except for the UK, Japan and Australia.
Hum…
Rescue Taiwan from the evil clutches of nearby neighbor China, huh?
Well, first things first.
How Taiwan is described to Americans is off-the-wall incorrect. Taiwan is not a small independent nation that is “under the thumb” of a brutal tyrannical Communist Dictatorship out of Beijing.
Taiwan is part of China.
Just like Rhode Island is part of America. It shares the same race, the same culture, the same society, the same familial relations, the same meals and is tied financially to mainland China. People go back and forth between the two nations regularly. Most people in Taiwan have relatives on the mainland. They share the same holidays and the same interests and the same behaviors. The Taiwanese have both Chinese and Taiwan citizenship. People living inside of Taiwan are card-carrying mainland Chinese.
The only thing is that Taiwan’s local government is a “democracy”.
Saying that the USA should “make moves” on Taiwan is like China tying to “make moves” on New Hampshire. It’s an issue of “outsiders” getting involved in things they know nothing about and risking world war III in the process.
Nations famously tend to always try to fight the last war, and what America is preparing to do today with the newly assertive China is no exception.
The problem is our last war was against primitive religious fanatics in the Middle East. China is an emerging superpower with approaching-peer level conventional capabilities. They have an actual strategy for contesting the United States in all the potential battlespaces – land, sea, air, space and cyber.
America is simply not ready for the Pacific war to come. We’re likely to lose.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
So let me be absolutely clear on this. The United States is the sole major military aggressor left in the world. It is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars, and has been fighting them for long, long periods of time. The presence in Afghanistan is almost twenty years now!
That is not a “policing” operation. That is nothing less than a good old fashioned military excursion to acquire territory for the empire. Just like Britain, France, and the Dutch used to do. It’s just like the Nazi’s did when they overran Poland, or what Russia did when it annexed Lithuania.
America today is a military empire.
China knows this. Russia knows this, and both of them are getting pretty alarmed at what they are seeing. Their “spies” inside of Washington DC are informing them of terrible plans. Just terrible, and they are going to try to avoid the events by purposely dancing, and waltzing around them.
That is…
… up to the point where there isn’t any “dance floor” left.
And then, well… it will not be pretty.
The mass-produced Chinese DF-41. The weapon delivery system is designed to be launched as the final stage of China’s intercontinental ballistic missile, which would approach its target at a velocity of up to 10 times the speed of sound. It carries a warhead that is 1000 times more devastating than what was used on Hiroshima. Hypersonic speed range lies between Mach 5 and Mach 10. (Bullets generally travel about Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.)
The neocons are dangerous.
Honestly, anyone that is contemplating war with China needs to have their head examined. They really do.
They view the world as a small village. They see nations and groups of people as different families (in that village) that have their own customs and habits as well as different ways of doing things. They believe that they should be left to live their own life on their own terms. They do not believe that they have the rights to scold or persuade or negotiate with the heads of these other families to change their way of doing things.
Yeah. It doesn’t agree with what you have been reading in American media does it? Eh? But then again, facts don’t matter to the ideological American press. China is planning to invade America!
Yuppur! With it’s single landing craft and one and only aircraft carrier!
I guess that all the Chinese soldiers will swim to America.
…
Anyone who knows anyone from China (on a personal basis) will agree with this assessment. China is looking for global win-win situations. They don’t want to control the world. They only want to provide a safe haven for the Han race.
It’s like most other nations, don’t you know.
Like Israel wants safety for it’s Jews. Just like the Palestinians want safety for their people. Just like most normal nations want. The nations want to protect it’s people, help it’s people, and provide a good and healthy place for them to live their lives in peace. Anyone who has traveled to Asia can see this instinctively.
Most Chinese cities are new, clean,modern and high-technology. The Chinese people are proud of their country and their accomplishments. They want to share in their success with others.
The Oligarchy wants POWER!
But that is not what the Powers That Be (PTB) that own, run and control America want. This oligarchy wants full and absolute dominance of the world. They want to maintain a post-World War II level of global control and will stop at nothing to make sure that that reality is maintained.
To maintain that level of control, America must suppress any nation that approaches the leadership role.
Which is what China is doing. Google up “China’s rise”…
So America must suppress China, and has been involved in doing so ever since Donald Trump became President. From 2017 to 2019, it has been using germ warfare designed to destroy the chicken, pork, foul, wheat and (unsuccessfully) the rice industries. Yes, it is true. America attempted to suppress China via wide spread famine.
And it was pretty innovative too. With using drones to spray Swine Flu all over the widely separated pig farms in the remote hinterlands. Pretty crafty. I mean, I am personally impressed on how the virus was obtained, stored, converted into aerosols, and sprayed in specially designed and manufactured drones. It wasn’t a “garage” operation that’s for certain.
Do you, dear reader, know how to obtain a virus? How to handle it? How to store it? How to put it into an aerosol, and then modify a drone to fog it over livestock?
Pretty fucking innovative, I’ll tell you what.
And let’s not even get into the efforts to collapse the RBI (Road and Belt Initiative) via protests, and violence in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Hey! Did you all notice that the “pro-democracy” protests came to a complete (and sudden) end once the American “journalists” were expelled from Hong Kong. What a coincidence!
Imagine that!
But China is not that card-board cut-out that the neocon echo chambers think it is. America tried to starve China. But you know, China did not starve. They just moved to other things to eat. Like water, they moved like water.
America tried to make “pro democracy” protests in Hong Kong, a place that already had a democratic government. It fell flat on it’s face, but forced the movement of international companies out of Hong Kong, but into the welcoming arms of mainland China.
Imagine that!
China is not what the “echo chamber” thinks.
American neocons have no idea how intelligent and flexible China is or how resilient their people are. That is because we are all fed a constant and steady diet of “bat slurping” evil Chinese.
There is a kind of fantasy, a card-board cut-out, or cartoon image of what the Chinese are, what China is, and what the Chinese government is. It’s all wrong.
Looks like something that you would see on Rush Limbaugh, Townhall.com, Hal Turner, or Alex Jones, eh? Is any of their statement about the Wuflu, Chicoms, or “bat slurping” any different from this 1940’s era poster?
War! War! War!
The Chinese do not want war.
They are not stupid either.
Again I note that the PRC leadership can read maps. It is probably more aware and less self-deluding about the economic precariousness of its situation than American politicians would be if the positions were reversed, because Marxist doctrine insists that politics is an epiphenomenon of economics.
The PRC can start a war, but they don’t have the capability to win one. That’s why, barring a Hitler-scale episode of insanity in the PRC leadership, it’s not going to happen.
-On the implausibility of a war with China
It’s the American neocons who want war, and they have ramped up their entire propaganda machine to jazz up the American people into a pro-war frenzy. The articles are everywhere, and the decision to blame China for the COVID-19 is from the very top of the Presidency.
America selected China as the Villain de jour.
In Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein was dumb enough to choose to face a U.S. military that was ready to fight its last war.
That last war was the Cold War, where the Americans were prepared to fight a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics. And Saddam, genius that he was, decided to face America and its allies with a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics, except fractionally as effective as the Russians.
It went poorly. I know – I was there at the VII Corps main command post as his entire army was annihilated in 100 hours.
Chances are that the Chinese will not choose to fight our strengths. In fact, those chances total approximately 100%.
It’s called “asymmetrical warfare” in English. What it’s called in Chinese I have no idea, but Sun Tzu wrote about it.
Don’t fight the enemy’s strength; fight his weakness. Strike where he is not. Spread confusion about your intentions; force him to lash out.
It’s all there in The Art of War; it’s just not clear anyone forming our current American military strategy has read it. Maybe they would if we labeled it “Third World” literature and said checking it out would check a diversity box for promotion.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Motivated and angry sheeple!
Are you one of the people so jazzed up? Are you getting all hot and bothered about the “evil Chinese”? Do you want to go ahead and “teach them a lesson”?
Save Taiwan from the hideous horde?
Rescue Hong Kong so that they can have “democracy“?
Embrace the poor downtrodden Uighurs in Xinjiang?
Crush China so that Tibet can be “independent”?
Evaporate the naval Bases on the Spratly Islands for climate change?
Well, if so, then welcome to being a sheeple.
Sheeple. Blindly obeying and listening to what the American media says. People, the US Government OWNS all American media. That includes the mainstream press, the Alt-Right and the Hard-Right press. Not to mention the Alt-left and Progressive press as well. If you read Alex Jones, know that he is fed information from the CIA. If you listen to El Rushbo, know too that he is fed information. Whether it is intentional or coincidental, both are puppets for the government propaganda machine.
Sheeple.
Because that is exactly what you are. Depending on your age range you are either a sheeple or cannon fodder. You are being manipulated, and it is in coming hard and fast.
Well take a chill pill.
A build up for war!
The Chinese are not going to invade the USA. They are not going to do anything. They are going to continue to improve their economic situation, build up relationships all over Asia and Africa, and keep on keeping on. they haven’t fought a war since 1977. How many wars has the USA fought since then?
The American neocon faction, led by Pompeo, is all setting a massive military system in motion designed to suppress China’s rise on the economic stage. This is on going. And the COVID-19 offers some great excuses to ready up the military.
The Trump administration is filled with hard-core absolute neocons.
Every indication indicates that the American political machine has targeted China as an enemy.
Every indication.
Every one of them.
Which is WHY I am getting a small flood of emails on this subject.
We seem intent on fighting not the enemy we face but the enemy we want to face. This is a rookie mistake. And we’ve built our strategy around that error.
Take aircraft carriers. I have a sentimental attachment to those potent floating fortresses – the Schlichters are usually Navy officers and I’m the random green sheep who went Army. There was a picture of my dad’s carrier (the U.S.S. Lake Champlain) hanging in my house as a kid.
I love them – but in 2019 they’re a trap.
We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day.
So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy?
Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing?
Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland.
We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Manipulation 24-7.
The news media is all FUCKING BULLSHIT.
None of it is true.
None of it is true.
None of it is TRUE.
Have I made myself clear on this?
Now that the American population is sufficiently primed towards war with China, what’s next is some “spark”, or some “event” to justify a military excursion. That’s the standard template.
It happened in World War I, and in World War II, and the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and Kuwait, and Panama, and Iraq…
…now, it’s the same “song and dance” about China.
It always works because most Americans are just mindless sheeple.
Americans that believe the government controlled media are Sheeple. If you believe what you read on Alt-Right, hard-Right, Alt-left or mainstream media, you are sheeple.
Therefore, it is likely that the United States will make some kind of provocative move that will enable the enormous military system to grind into action. Expect some sort of provocation, and the American mainstream media to hammer (over and over again) that war is necessary to destroy China.
You know…
… for democracy.
The sinking of the Lusitania was the trigger (the provocation) that dragged the United States into a war against Germany. Up until that event, Americans and their government had no desire at all to go to war with Germany at all.
Reality Check
Well, we cannot control things outside of our reality. We have to run with the herd and try to be an outlier, somehow, so that we do not run off the cliff. You know, it’s not enough to know that this is going on, it’s being aware and TAKING PROACTIVE ACTIONABLE STEPS.
Another mistake is over-prioritizing quality over quantity, which is the same mistake the Nazis made with their tanks.
The Wehrmacht had the greatest tanks in the world – all top notch. Really good tanks. Tank-to-tank, they were the best – the dreaded Tiger had an 11.5-to-1 kill ratio.
The Americans and Russians had merely decent tanks, just multiples more of them.
Quantity has a quality all its own. Right now, America has something like 280 ships. We’ll have about 326 by 2023. That’s to cover the entire world. We had 6,768 ships when WWII ended in August 1945
Of course, it would also be nice if the Navy would emphasize seamanship and basic skills again so that it could keep its super-expensive ships from running into other vessels. The U.S.S. Fitzgerald collision not only killed some of our precious sailors, but took out a key weapons platform – 1/280th of our entire fleet! – because its officers failed again and again and because key systems on the ship were out of commission.
This is inexcusable, but it is being excused.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Well, the United States today is going to get it’s ass handed to it were war to erupt. China does NOT PLAY. They are a serious, serious, SERIOUS nation that wants to avoid war at all costs. But, if they decide to fight, Lord help the people on the receiving end.
That means the Fucking United States.
The DF-41 is currently the most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), developed in China. It is one of the deadliest ICBMs in the world. It is based on an 8-axle launcher vehicle.
Keep in mind…
China is geographically larger than the USA by about 30%.
China has 4 times the population.
China has about 35 times the number of STEM trained workers.
China is a nation by merit. You either win or you beg on the streets.
China has 40 times the number of manufacturing factories.
The Chinese are survivors and will do anything to survive.
China is aligned militarily with Russia
A War with China is a war with Russia also.
So these neocons who are getting you all worked up and hot and bothered about “liberating” Taiwan are unaware that once they set a war machine in motion, both China and Russia will attack America.
Let me say that again.
China has specifically told the world, and Donald Trump personally, that any action against China in any way will result in the harshest and most devastating response that they can muster.
What do you think that means?
Trade tariffs?
Blockade?
PLA military movement inside of China?
Economic sanctions.
Arrest of dissidents?
You are NOT listening to what they said. They said the harshest and most devastating response.
Harshest and most devastating…
People that is not economic. That is not trade. That is not diplomatic. That is not about internal policing, or military movements within China. That is about war. War that is fought by a truly pissed off capable nation.
So…
Are you ready for a radioactive America?
No one wins a nuclear war. Someone had best tell Trump and his staff this. You cannot survive it, and even if you did, the landscape would be altered beyond recognition.
Let’s talk about China’s reaction…
It’s not about an electricity “grey out”.
It’s not about a loss of some internet for a spell. Or, not being to access Alexa, or your book collection on your EPUB appliance. It’s not about not being able to use Facebook or check Google.
It’s not about lines at at a gas station for gas.
It’s not about people running to COSCO for toilet paper.
America is not used to dealing with a peer-capable military nation. This will not be some “rag heads” waving AK-47’s about, and screaming “God is great!”. This will be a hornet’s nest of really, really pissed off nerds who are out for blood.
Are you ready to not just no wifi, but no electricity, and no gas? Are you ready to turn on your water, and nothing comes out? Are you ready to discover that no electronics works at all. That an EMP fried everything. Imagine. No cell phones. No computer. No car starters. No lawnmowers. No cable. No movies. No radio.
Anything that uses electronics would be non functional. Even that old CB Radio that you have in a dusty box on a garage shelf.
Have you stockpiled food and supplies for two fucking years?
The focus of our military has shifted from victory to satisfying the whims of politicians.
Here’s a troubling thought – if you go to one of the service branches’ War Colleges and poll the faculty and students about America’s greatest strategic threat, as many as 50% of the respondents will tell you it is “climate change.”
That’s not an exaggeration.
Our military is supposed to be dealing with the Chinese military and its brain trust is obsessing about the weather in 100 years.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
America would be reshaped completely were just ONE American city to be obliterated by a high-yield nuclear warhead…
Now…
… Imagine what it would be like if every city larger than Fort Wayne, Indiana were reduced to glass slag and radioactive rubble.
Imagine what it would be like when the new capital of the United States was relocated to Augusta, Georgia.
How would you be able to handle this situation?
Are you ready to follow a leader that wants to “spread democracy” way off in far-away China? If so, then take a good hard look at what your life will become. Imagine how your family, your children and your relatives will fare in this environment. War situations are always very hard on the women-folk. You had best be sure that Trump and his neocon buddies are doing the best for you and your family.
Now, take this sanity check. Let’s see how prepared you are.
Don't drive your car / truck today. Try to go to work, pick up groceries or do anything without a car. Try it. I am not kidding. Try it.
America without infrastructure is Somalia.
You will not even begin to start repairing things. No dozers, lifts, electric tools, and electric generators would work. All would have their electronics completely and absolutely fried beyond usefulness. It will just be you, and your muscles.
Of course…
…all the time while wearing radiation protection and masks for the various bioweapons unleashed.
Under this situation, would you give a “rat’s ass” whether or not Taiwan is politically connected to Beijing?
Look what you all will get when you try to help those poor Taiwanese get “democracy“. I hope it’s fucking worth it.
That is what is being set up. The media is treating all or you as dupes to go ahead with a war that they believe will be similar to Yemen, Afghanistan or Syria. But you know what? It won’t be that way at all.
There will not be any “carriers off the coast plinking at the Chinese mainland“, or “Marine expedition forces moving on Taiwan or entering Hong Kong“.
Nor will there be any riots and protests demanding “regime change”. Or that China switch from a traditional conservative Chinese government to that of a diverse and progressive democracy. And you won’t find anyone (except those on the CIA payroll) demanding that China embrace American style “democracy”.
It’s going to be something else entirely.
Put yourself in the Chinese shoes…
Here’s how the Chinese win.
First, they take out our satellites. You know the GPS location service on your phone? Satellites, which are easy to hit. Say “bye-bye” to much of the ability of our precision weapons to find their targets.
Also up for destruction are the communications satellites we rely on to coordinate our operations.
And then there is the Chinese cyberattack, not only on our military systems but on systems here at home that control civilian power, water and other logistics.
A U.S military with no comms and no computers is essentially the Post Office with worse service. An America with a ruined internet is Somalia.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Imagine if you were Chinese…
You have studied and studied and trained and trained and trained. You grew up attending schools that only had one winner and everyone else were losers and you rose to the top through sheer blood and guts. You rose to the top, not by diversity quotas, or racial advantage. You rose to the leadership position through merit.
America is a nation who’s leaders are selected by politically-justified criteria. Not through merit or hard-labors.
Now today, you, as a Chinese leader / advisor / strategist are tasked with kicking America in the gut, disabling it’s strategic response ability, and disabling it with the least number of causalities as possible.
What would you do?
Well, for starters…
EMP – fry all electronics and render all vehicles, cell phones, computers, and manufacturing equipment into worthless slag.
And you know…
Detonating nuclear weapons on the top 20 cities would cut the American population in half.
As well as…
Nuclear bombs, already buried beneath the major cities would be detonated bypassing all the expensive early warning systems.
But you are the top of the top. You would be crafty and creative. You would not be a “diversity hire” and most certainly wouldn’t be there because of “political pull”. You would handle things differently…
Nuclear destruction of Mono Lake would turn California into the Sahara desert. It would dry up, and any water that would seep up from the ground would be heavily radioactive.
Oh, and why have China do all the “heavy lifting”…
Allow Russia to perform a “double tap” using it’s Satan II weapons systems.
Last view of downtown Chicago after US Marines enter Taiwan.
The Dongfeng 41, of DF-41, is currently the most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), developed in China. It is one of the deadliest ICBMs in the world. It is based on an 8-axle launcher vehicle and is similar in concept to Russian road-mobile ICBMs such as Topol-M and Yars. First test launch of this missile was made in 2013 and the second followed in 2014. Some sources report that the DF-41A missile was fielded in 2016 or 2017. It was first publicly revealed in 2019.
The DF-41 is a solid-fuel missile. It has an estimated range of 12 000 km and carries up to 10 Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). Its range is sufficient to reach all areas of United States, Europe and Russia. It will take roughly 20-25 minutes from launch for the DF-41 to reach targets in the United States. This missile is extremely devastating and can wipe out entire countries.
This missile has internal navigation system with indigenous Chinese BeiDou satellite navigation system update. It could be accurate to 150 meters, or possibly, even more accurate.
-Military Today
China’s short and medium range missiles that are in extremely well hardened shelters.
America would be reduced to pre-Medeaval England but without water, and religion to sustain any sort of community unification. Far flung bases would be on their own. All 800 of them. They would die out or start to turn to the neighboring host nations, who (in case you haven’t noticed) are now close friends with China and Russia.
Then they hit our land bases on Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere with a blizzard of missiles, knocking them out and annihilating our aircraft on the ground.
Maybe we could respond with B-2s flying from the continental United States.
We have 19 whole combat-capable aircraft, assuming a 100% operational readiness rate, which is just not a thing. We might even take out a few missile batteries on the Chinese coast.
We won’t know the difference though.
As for our carriers, if they come to play, they are likely going to get sunk, and if they stay out of the fight, they are merely useless – assuming quiet diesel subs do not find and sink them.
This is not a surprise. We play wargames against the Chinese all the time, and we lose.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Ah, Kirk, yeah this is possible if nuclear weapons were not used. But, that’s your American biases showing.
All of the American Aircraft Carrier groups would be sunk using modern, aggressive, and mass produced missiles designed to take them down. If they are unsuccessful, a very large nuclear detonation would sent them to the great deeps.
All carrier groups would be destroyed. Not by precision missiles, but by big, dirty and nasty nuclear weapons that could detonate five miles away from the carrier and sink it easily.
Boomer subs would be sunk before they could launch anything and the ICBMs would be pre-targeted by specialized anti-missile spacecraft.
Chinese fighters with anti-ship missiles.
Moreover, we need to get it through our heads that no one is going to be as dumb as Saddam was and conveniently fight us the way we want to be fought.
We need a complete strategic mindset revolution, one that moves from a few super-expensive systems to many affordable ones.
We need to say good-bye to legacies of the 20th century, like mostly manned combat aircraft and a few huge carrier battle groups.
We need to prepare to defeat the enemy we actually face, not the enemy we want to face.
-We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China
Of course, there would be a response…
American forces react
The American forces are all set in motion for an “easy peasy” invasion and would need to be re-directed to new objectives. Nuclear missiles would be launched, and much of the Chinese cities would lie in ruin. Chinese military would take hits, and once the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle, America would continue to utilize it’s already announced strategy of using “low yield” nuclear weapons on China.
China would hurt. Make no mistake.
There would be damages ships everywhere, and none of this would be reported. American losses would be hidden, and Chinese losses would also be hidden. No one would know the true scope of things.
Chinese ships would be sunk. Chinese cities would be plummeted and damaged. Smoke, oily smoke would fill the skies, and American Marines would engage in efforts to make land fall in critical strategic points all through the South Pacific.
But…
But…
America could destroy the largest Chinese cities and still maintain a population three times that of the United States. They still would have their factories. They still would have their infrastructure. They still would have Russia on their side.
The Chinese would pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get right back to work improving their lives and making the world a better place.
Oh, you don't believe me. You think that China as "lucky" that they got the COVID-19 under control in two months. While America is going to be dealing with it for two years. It's "luck" you say.
The Chinese DO NOT PLAY.
America would be in ruin.
Surviving Americans would fight among themselves and various fiefdoms would be established. America would devolve into city-states and much of the rural country side would be no-mans land.
The Balkanization of America would manifest as enclaves; all of which would kill each other off for scraps of moldy turnips.
It won’t be at least ten years before America stabilizes.
America would try to put itself back together. In some areas the local government would be able to maintain control, in other areas, local militia would take over that role, and in still others it would be a dog-eat-dog nightmare.
At that, when the dust clears, America will probably end up a five separate nations.
It would be a mere shadow of it’s former self.
Horrible, right?
Yes, it is horrible.
And that is just my point.
The end game. Be careful what you want.
Anyone wanting war or conflict is nuts. Pure and simple. They are nuts, crazy and evil.
occupatio @11: "A hot war is not imminent..."
I just read Pepe's leak from finance insiders and am not so sure about this. The US has tried sanctions, tariffs, various trade barriers and dire threats to all and sundry, and even a series of bio attacks on China in order to maintain global dominance. As Peter AU1 has suggested not long ago, the US may try to blockade China's oil supply, but that will lead to "kinetic encounters" guaranteed and for sure.
Does anyone really believe that the US will give up on hegemony without playing every possible card it has? And what cards does the US have left other than its military?
-Posted by: William Gruff | Apr 8 2020 16:26 utc | 13
Fighting China will not be a “walk in the park”. It will be the end of the United States as you know it. Your children will curse you, your behavior and your actions.
What you can do is fight back
Anyone who talks to you, suggest to you, and posts an article (anywhere) suggesting war with China needs to be shut up immediately. They need to be told in no uncertain terms that things WILL NOT GO as they assume it will.
Do not wish for war. It’s an awful, awful thing.
So…
Conclusion and Take Aways
When people ask me what I think about the USA getting involved militarily with China, they are often of the mindset that it will be some sort of regional conflict, conducted far away, off in China.
It will not.
Any war with China will go nuclear on American soil.
Let me make myself perfectly clear on this.
Any American military “intervention” in or around Taiwan, the South China Sea, or any Chinese bases and facilities will be considered an attack on Beijing. Just like if the Russians decided to land their Spetsnaz in New Orleans, it would be considered an act of war.
The result will not be a police action. It will be a declaration of war.
If any American military operations are conducted on or near China, there will be complete nuclear Armageddon unleashed on American cities. Make no mistake, and let’s be frighteningly clear about this. This is not debatable. It will not be a far-away war that you can eat popcorn to while you are cruising through your internet news feed.
It will be up close and very personal.
I mean ANY attempt to interfere with China overtly or militarily.
So please don’t try to come up with “questionable” scenarios where the Chinese might somehow be convinced to play a conventional war with America. It will not happen. The Chinese do not play. They are a serious, serious nation.
They make the rules.
You all should realize this by now. haven’t you been paying attention during the last four years of the “Trump Trade Wars”. Things will be done on their timetable, on their terms, and under their control.
America doesn’t have a chance.
One nuclear hit on Mono Lake will render the entire West coast uninhabitable for centuries.
The destruction of New York with zero out the stock market and with it will be the collapse of every public American company.
Any one who thinks otherwise is a fool.
If you are going to shoot Tony Soprano, you had best make sure you kill him. Otherwise, your life is over.
Tony Soprano does not play. If you mess with him, you can expect to pay the price as this MEME illustrates. But China is not a television show, but they are just like Tony. They are a serious, serious nation that does not play.
Keep in mind…
China knows what is coming and is prepared to confront it.
A war against China will result in a full-MAD level response.
A war with China will result in nuclear destruction of American cities.
China has peer-level military capabilities.
Alignments…
Both Russia and China will fight together against the United States.
The EU will side with China and Russia.
The Middle East will side with Russia and China.
India will try to stay neutral.
Australia will probably side with the United States.
The results…
China can handle a nuclear war and return to normal.
America cannot handle a nuclear war and it would destroy everything.
Check out these links…
Remember, China and Russia are military partners.
If you attack one, the other would chime in. Combined, any attack on either Russia or China would result in both coming for the American jugular vein. And there would be no mercy. Both would conduct “double taps”, and America would become a radioactive agrarian society… without electricity or running fresh water.
Chinese ICBMs.
It’s not just myself that understand this. This has been the continuous, steady state response to all the simulations conducted by the RAND group, the pentagon, and other NGO’s.
Yet, the anti-China narrative has ramped up. It’s fucking insanity.
A Final Word
All this neocon talk and discussions in preparation for a war with China will absolutely tank the United States completely. With this in mind, it’s probably best to have Bozo the Clown as President rather than Donald Trump and his army of neocons.
President Trump and his top most trusted advisors.
China and Russia will not permit a war to manifest.
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. sees the Communist Party of China as the “central threat of our times” and that the U.S. must “ensure that the next century is governed by … Western democratic principles.”
- Coronavirus panic stoked by anti-China media, politicians: Myth vs. fact
Well, it was bound to come out sooner or later. Though, I pretty much expected it to come out in 70 years, like the JFK assassination did.
The facts involved here are all pretty straight forward;
At the White-house, the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo admitted that the COVID-19 event was a biological weapon “exercise”. The moment that he made the statement, Trump took a double take and responds “I wish you would have told us”.
Pompeo stated;
“This is not about retribution, this matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”
For those of you who are confused what this simple sentence means, check out the English meanings…
"Exercises" mean military weapons, training, events, and systems.
"COVID-19" is a currently out-of-control biological virus that is lethal and disrupting national economies. This is the subject subject matter that Pompeo was discussing at the time of the conference.
"Live" means being active, engaged, and in-process.
"Retribution" means punishment inflicted on someone as vengeance for a wrong or criminal act. When Pompeo refers to vengeance on someone or something, he is referring to China. As, after all, that is WHY he refers to the COVID-19 as "Wuhan Virus", and "China Virus".
"Get Right" means to correct something in error. To win in a conflict. Or in the case of United States geopolitics, to keep America as the dominant global leader over the rest of the world.
"Going Forward" means something that is in process presently and on a time-line.
So to rephrase the sentence into a form that non-American English speakers can understand, without idiomatic confusion, he said this…
This action we have taken, is not about punishment of China. The COVID-19 bioweapon event is continuing and unfolding. – We are currently in an active military operation to set the United States as the supreme dominant sole powerful government in the world.
So it appears that the “deep state” neocons inside the Trump Administration unleashed a biological weapon, the COVID-19, as a “live exercise” intentionally.
For after all, military exercises are always planned, and never accidental.
If he did not mean this, he chose an outrageously poor selection of words.
For, if he was referring to the governments action regarding a pandemic, we would use phrases such as "dealing with", "handling", allocating resources", "supporting", "adjusting", "reacting", "handling" and "controlling".
The phrase "live exercise" is only used in military and para-military operations.
For those paying attention, they did this against China, who is a economic rival to the United States to suppress it.
The “live exercise” using bio-warfare backfired terribly, and is now tearing the United States apart, brick by brick.
This excerpt is from “Mike Pompeo Admits COVID-19 Is a “Live Exercise,” Trump Retorts “I Wish You Would Have Told Us”” By Shepard Ambellas Global Research, March 23, 2020 Intellihub 21 March 2020. Edited to fit this venue and all credit to the authors.
Can someone please explain exactly what is going on here?
United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a slip of the tongue while addressing the American people from the White House when he stated that COVID-19 is a live military exercise.
“This is not about retribution,” Pompeo explained. “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”
With a disgusted look on his face, President Trump replied: “You should have let us know.”
Well, Pompeo obviously has a higher security clearance than the president does.
For those of you who are confused…
Military Exercise meaning (from Wikipedia):
“A military exercise or war game is the employment of military resources in training for military operations, either exploring the effects of warfare or testing strategies without actual combat. This also serves the purpose of ensuring the combat readiness of garrisoned or deployable forces prior to deployment from a home base.”
Walk-Back. Expect a “walk back” from this statement. It will be mitigated as a minor “misunderstanding” and nothing more, and the mainstream media will bury it in a flood of other news. The Alt-Right, bombarded by months of anti-China narrative will twist this to mean something along the line of “oh, he’s just referring to China and their lies…etc, etc.” Then the statement will have zero coverage and the media narrative will continue unabated against China.
Geopolitical Implications. Meanwhile, Russia and China knew this information all along. They do recognize that the USA is quite dangerous and out of control. This will reinforce this belief and they will begin to look at the USA like a chaotic mess that it is. Instead of a sane economic rival with a different culture.
People, what do you do if there is a rabid, out of control dog, in your neighborhood?
What do you think that proactive nations, and nations run on merit, would do and plan on doing regarding the United States being the governmental equivalent of a "mad dog"?
Personal Implications. What this means to you (dear readers) is that the American government is completely out of control. The “deep state” is running amok and risking world war III while they operate as mindless zombies on the levers of power. People (!) this cannot be good by any stretch of the imagination.
Just keep in mind that Pompeo admitted that the COVID-19 Coronavirus was a “Live Exercise” at the White-house. It’s not a reaction to an event. Reactions are never “exercises”. It’s also not an event in itself.
As such, we know what it is not…
It was NOT a natural virus.
It was NOT an accidental release of the plague from a facility.
It was NOT a Chinese-developed and deployed bio-weapon.
It was NOT a stolen bio-weapon used by China on it’s people.
What it is…
It was an American “system” that was deployed as a “Live Exercise” by the American neocons inside the American “Deep State”. Furthermore, President Trump was unaware of any of this.
You will discover that this most news-worthy report will get very little traction in the mainstream and Alt-Right, Hard-Right propaganda outlets.
If you see Rush Limbaugh, or Townhall.com, or Hal Turner, or Alex Jones talking about this please tell me. My guess is that if they do, they will defend it as a “slip of the tongue” as the USA can do no wrong in their eyes.
To find out what is going on and other reports on this subject, go to my China Trade Wars Index, or my SHTF Index. Both have many articles about the subjects listed herein.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
So as I am reading my news and opinion feeds, I am starting to see a trend. This COVID-19 is rally causing the worst of America to manifest. I mean all the sores, and the oozing puss is now becoming obvious to everyone. America is collapsing and this COVID-19 might be “the final stray that broke the camels back”, don’t you know.
Here we have another article.
In this article we see that the craziness of the COVID-19 event is acting to highlight all the many, many things that are terribly wrong with America at this moment in time. It’s an ugly scene and it’s only going to get uglier…
The following is an article titled “All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus” by Caitlin Johnstone on Caitlinjohnstone.com. It was edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the editor.
All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus
“Corona is a black light and America is a cum-stained hotel room,” comedian Megan Amram colorfully tweeted a couple of weeks ago. Her observation has only grown more accurate since.
America’s joke of a healthcare system is being highlighted as uninsured COVID-19 patients are racking up $35,000 medical bills and even insured COVID-19 patients are looking at out-of-pocket expenses in excess of $1,300.
Combine this with the millions of Americans getting thrown off of
employer-provided health insurance and you’re looking at a huge number
of people who will avoid getting tested and avoid treatment as much as
possible. Both heads of America’s two-headed one-party system have spent
decades forcefully creating this dynamic.
America’s income and wealth inequality is being highlighted in a nation suffering from all of the above problems while most Americans were already unable to afford a mere $1,000 emergency expense.
A one-time $1,200 payment to a population already stretched that thin
guarantees that millions will be plunged into crushing debt and
destitution in a nation with a historically unprecedented billionaire
class raking in even more unearned wealth.
America’s fake political system has been highlighted as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee completely vanished for a week and then returned to deliver an embarrassing string of befuddled interviews upon his return, reminding the nation once again that the Democrats are running an actual, literal dementia patient for the most powerful elected office in the world. Biden will of course be running against an incoherent reality TV star who only last week decided that the virus is indeed a real problem which needs to be seriously addressed, and who now already wants to begin rolling back
the inadequate measures his administration implemented far too late.
The debates between two men who don’t understand what they’re doing and
can’t string a sentence together between them will soon be broadcast
around the world for all of civilization to behold.
America’s lying mass media are being highlighted with propagandistic lines that would make Kim Jong Un blush, like The New York Timesclaiming today
that “the American medical system is unsurpassed and its public health
system has a reputation as one of the finest in the world”. We can
safely expect US media to get even more demented as they expands their
hysteria-inducing new cold war propaganda campaign against Russia to
China as well.
America’s murderous sanctions machine has been highlighted as the US continues ramping up its economic warfare against Iranian civilians, with thousands already dead and potentially millions to follow
due to Tehran’s inability to access necessary equipment, medicine and
resources during the pandemic. The Trump administration has not eased
the sanctions during the outbreak, and has in fact added to them, because killing Iranian civilians has always been the goal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone on record to say that the objective is to make Iranian civilians so miserable and desperate that they overthrow their own government.
So basically everything crazy about America is being amplified to absurd caricatures of its own insanity and highlighted for everyone to see. There’s a lot of ugliness coming out into the light as a result of this virus, which may end up being one of its few perks for everyone. As they say of both viruses and governments, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Conclusion
It will not be long now. Four years tops. Maybe as early as one year. Figure all Hell to unravel around 2023 or so.
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
While I am just “so-so” as a word smith, there are other that are more perceptive and better suited to document the decline and collapse of the American Global Empire. Here, we have a writer who editorialized how he believes America is starting to get involved in yet another “cold war” with China. I read his writing, found them brilliant, but feel that he is missing out on the big picture. America is collapsing all around us.
There won’t be any “cold war” where the world is on “America’s side”, and the “evil empire” is isolated.
Nope. Instead, China will continue to be aligned with Russia, and will continue to design, invent and manufacture high-end, high quality products. While the cheaper products and simpler constructions will be made in third-world nations for export to Americans at ridiculously high prices.
Americans in turn will continue to be manipulated, taxed, and generally forced into government-sponsored servitude of one form or the other. Social mobility will be non-existent. And American will live eating the cheapest foods, possessing the cheapest gear, and working the longest hours while praising their “inherent freedoms”…
The following is an article titled “The new Cold War with China has cost lives against coronavirus” written by Max Blumenthal@MaxBlumenthal for the Chicago Reader. It was edited to fit this venue, but aside from that, left intact. All credit to the author.
More than any event since the financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American empire.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has called his country’s fight against coronavirus “the People’s War,” while President Trump calls the disease "the China virus."
-Narendra Modi; SHEALAH craighead
March 19, 2020, was a milestone for the People’s Republic of China.
After enduring over two months of an epidemic of novel coronavirus,
China reported that it experienced its first day without a new case of
locally transmitted infection. After placing 46 million residents in
Wuhan and 15 other cities under quarantine, mobilizing thousands of
medical professionals to the front lines, building new hospitals
practically overnight, and implementing cautionary measures
such as forcing banks to disinfect cash, the country turned a corner in
what its president, Xi Jinping, called “the People’s War.”
Throughout the crisis, leaders of the World Health Organization
(WHO) heaped praise on the Chinese government. “Its actions actually
helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros, as he is known, added that he was “very impressed and
encouraged by the president [Xi’s] detailed knowledge of the outbreak.”
Tedros’s assistant, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who also visited China, was
astounded by what he observed: “What I saw was a tremendous sense of
responsibility, and of duty, to protect their families, their
communities, and even the world, from this disease,” Aylward marveled
in a televised interview. “I left with such a deep sense of admiration
for the people of Wuhan and for Chinese society in general.”
During the early days of the crisis around Wuhan, Chinese
authorities took some ham-fisted measures to suppress public discussion
of the outbreak. Perhaps Beijing was in denial about the gravity of the
epidemic, or terrified of its societal ramifications. It was not long,
however, before the Chinese government made the genome of the virus
public, shared detailed information
about the virus with the international community, and provided
intelligence to the WHO, which relayed it to the U.S. Center for Disease
Control (CDC). In fact, Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar recently revealed
that the CDC first learned about coronavirus from Chinese colleagues on
January 3. Tragically, while Beijing was buying valuable time for the
West to prepare for the lethal pandemic, and losing the lives of medical
personnel in the process, Washington chose conflict over cooperation.
Almost as soon as news of the viral outbreak reached the West,
mainstream pundits turned up their noses and sneered at China’s
aggressive response. A now-discredited January 24 op-ed
published in Slate and authored in conjunction with the Democratic
Party-affiliated New America Foundation proclaimed, “Many of China’s
actions to date are overly aggressive and ineffective in quelling the
outbreak.” The Los Angeles Times reinforced the condescending line, mocking President Xi’s efforts to rally Chinese citizens as “shoddy propaganda.” At around the same time, the cover of the neoliberal Economist magazine depicted China as a global disease infecting the planet—an authoritarian plague that threatened the free world more than any pandemic.
For his part, Trump has referred to the sickness as the “China virus,” deploying xenophobic bile to deflect blame for weeks of inaction. (“We have it totally under control,” the president insistedon January 22,
trying in vain to calm markets. A month later, Trump claimed without
evidence, “The people that have [coronavirus] are getting better.”) By
March 14, as coronavirus exploded throughout New York City and Seattle,
Joseph Biden took to the stage of a Democratic presidential debate and
painted the sickness as a foreign weapon of mass destruction. “This is
like we are being attacked from abroad!” he bellowed. CNN debate moderator Dana Bash proceeded to push
the candidates to propose “consequences” China should face for the
coronavirus–not lessons the U.S. could learn from China’s successful
fight against it.
In reflexive and mostly bipartisan fashion, the U.S. political
class has exploited a pandemic to ratchet up hostility against China.
While the rising power is a necessary partner against a gathering storm
of disease and societal unraveling, too many in Washington are unable to
see Beijing as anything other than the greatest single threat to
American global hegemony.
Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has encircled China with hundreds of military bases,threading
bombers, naval warships, and nuclear-tipped missiles into a
geopolitical noose. President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” designated a
full two-thirds of U.S. naval forces to contain China, setting the
stage for a new Cold War. Trump’s national defense doctrine formally
enshrined the strategy by declaring “great power competition” with Beijing and Moscow as the Pentagon’s top priority. A trade war followed, with the U.S. jailing a CEO of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, banning its 5G technology, and slapping hefty tariffs on $112 billion on Chinese imports. Dubiously sourced stories
of Holocaust-level human rights violations by China supplied the new
Cold War with heartstring-tugging background music, drawing suggestible
Western liberals into the hostile narrative.
The same U.S. leadership class that launched the first Cold War and
reignited it during the Obama and Trump eras has also presided over a
systematic degradation of America’s public health system. While the task
of providing health care was handed over to corporations, the number of
beds per 1,000 Americans declined steadily from 4.5 in 1975 to 2.5 in
2014, according to the CDC.
Having left its citizens on the verge of mass suffocation by a ghastly
respiratory infection, the U.S. government has little to offer them
today beyond Cold War bluster and corporate bailouts.
More than any event since the 2008-09 financial crash, the
coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American
empire—and it has only begun to exact its toll. By March 19, the day
that China declared victory over coronavirus, the U.S. achieved a
milestone of its own: it boasted the sharpest increase
in deaths and new infections per day of any country in the world. New
York City had become ground zero for the sickness, with 10,000 new
cases. At one Brooklyn emergency hospital, a doctor melted down over the
lack of resources. “It’s a disaster,” he fretted.
“We just had a half dozen staff test positive. We have 17 ventilators
left in the institution. Some staff can’t come because they’re getting
wiped out.”
In hospitals across the country, emergency room doctors have been
forced to fashion their own masks, or to simply wear a bandana over
their faces. Doctors badly needed N95 air-filtering respirator masks to
protect themselves from infection while they treated patients hacking up
toxic sputum. The Trump administration has invoked the Defense
Production Act, a Korean War-era provision that would enable him to
compel American businesses to produce urgently needed products.
Revealingly, Trump has refused to implement the act on the grounds that doing so would mimic Venezuelan-style socialism.
While doctors wait in vain for N95 masks, a bipartisan group of 130
lawmakers made their real priorities clear when they issued a call for a
massive buildup of F-35 jets. “Full funding is needed for the delivery
of new weapons and critical capabilities necessary to keep the F-35
ahead of our adversaries,” the lawmakers wrote in a March 19 letter to the Pentagon, demanding 98 new stealth fighters at a cost of $94 million each.
If anything has been more elusive than protective masks—and less
functional than the accident-prone F-35—it is America’s coronavirus
testing system. Testing kits were magically provided to entire NBA teams
and A-list celebrities with symptoms, but ask any average American in
need where they plan to get screened, and you’re almost certain to draw a
blank. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confessed
in testimony to Congress,“The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily
the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for
that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not.”
Inside China, an already effective coronavirus screening regimen is
likely to improve thanks to an innovative test that can be administered
in airports, and that produces results in just 40 minutes. The creator
of the groundbreaking test, Weihong Tan, was a professor at the
University of Florida’s cancer research lab until last year, when the
Department of Justice targeted him
with a McCarthy-style investigation. Accused by a Cold War-crazed U.S.
government of failing to disclose Chinese funding for his department, he
returned to Hunan University, where he found ample government support
for his lifesaving research.
With its hollowed out public health-care system overwhelmed by a
pandemic in just its early phase, the U.S. has sat and watched as China
embarks on the largest international humanitarian mission in modern
times. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has effusively thanked China
for donating two million surgical masks, 200,000 N95 masks, and 50,000
testing kits to hard-hit areas of Europe. After welcoming a massive
delivery of Chinese aid to his country, Serbian President Aleksandar
Vucic angrily accused the EU of abandonment:
“European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairytale. The only
country that can help us in this hard situation is the People’s Republic
of China. For the rest of them, thanks for nothing.”
In response to China’s humanitarian crusade, the Trump administration’s National Security Council has rolled out
a coordinated propaganda offensive blaming China for “covering up”
coronavirus. Ironically, the same corporate networks that have spent the
past year clamoring for Trump’s impeachment have provided the White
House with an eager megaphone for its anti-China crusade. A report by
CNN, for instance, suggested dark motives behind China’s delivery of
ventilators and masks to Europe, claiming Beijing was “possibly trying
to curry favor.” On Twitter, trending hashtags like #ChinaLiedAndPeopleDied have suddenly materialized, amplifying the Trump administration’s influence operation.
While China and the tiny, U.S.-embargoed nation of Cuba send medical brigades to hard-hit regions of Europe, Washington is sending the world sanctions and shows of military force.
The Trump administration has zealously weaponized coronavirus to drive
its “maximum pressure” policy of regime change against Iran, where the
death toll is approaching 2,000. During a March 18 press conference,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed to ramp up crushing sanctions on Iran, even though (or perhaps because) the economic blockade was preventing the country from purchasing vital medicine and ventilators. In Venezuela, meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have increased the cost of a coronavirus test to three times more than in non-sanctioned countries.
Those who find Trump’s actions at home and abroad deadly and
dangerous must take heart that his opponents in the Democratic Party
have united behind Biden, who seems to forget where he is at times. One of the 76-year-old former vice president’s most recent public appearances
saw him in a makeshift studio in his Delaware home, staring off into
the distance in a stupor, seemingly frozen in confusion, until his wife
shuffled him off camera. Dogged by rumors of dementia following a
comically stumbling performance on the presidential trail, where his shell of a campaign has been sustained by some 60 faceless billionaires,
Biden disappeared for an entire week in mid-March, as the crisis
reached its apex in the U.S. He finally resurfaced on March 23 for a
deeply uninspiring online livestream that pitted the stammering
candidate against a barely functional teleprompter.
As the pandemic spreads across the country, college students have
descended on the beaches of South Florida for the spring break beer bash
that has become a rite of passage for the young and mindless. The
state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a Harvard graduate who was
narrowly elected after warning his African American opponent would “monkey this up,”
defended his decision to keep beaches open for the annual bacchanal.
“If you have a Floridian that goes and walks their dog, like a married
couple on the beach,” De Santis eloquently explained, “as long as you’re not within six feet of each other, they view that as a healthy thing.”
With the shores wide open for randy fun, a widely-watched video circulated on Twitter showing a sun-burned bro gawking
at a bikini-clad woman slurping a Bud Light through the rear end of a
bent-over co-ed and exclaiming, “Nobody gives a fuck about coronavirus
here!”
Shelter in place and grab a protective mask if you can find one. The deluge has just begun. v
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misidentified Xi Jinping as the premier of China; he is the president.
Conclusion
It will not be long now. Four years tops. Maybe as early as one year. Figure all Hell to unravel around 2023 or so.
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Today, I read a couple of posts that discussed the unusually low mortality numbers for the COVID-19 coronavirus in America. While the American mainstream media was all “doom and gloom”, and doing their usual propagandized “reporting”, others were looking at the more substantive portions of this event; the numbers, the preparation, the response (failures and successes) as well as the human-events stories.
Ech! It’s all over the place.
Opinions and Biased “Reporting”
In general, in regards to the “numbers”, the “reporters” (article writers – no one ever truly reports things these days) were pretty much equally divided on this issue.
On one hand, they said that the COVID-19 mortality rate would, of course, be lower in the United States. As America is an “exceptional” nation, with exceptional healthcare, and has freedom and liberties in a wonderful democratic utopia. They argue that for most Americans this coronavirus would only be a “blip on the radar screen”. They still maintain the argument that “mostly older folk will get sick”, “the influenza is far worse”, and “it’s just like a mild cold”. This is pretty much the American politically conservative narrative. (Alt-Right). (Rush Limbaugh, and Townhall, etc)
On the other hand, the other authors argued that the virus cannot discriminate between races or geographic location. So something is amiss, and they suggest that the United States is lying. They claim that the Chinese “invented” this virus, and that the Chinese has been lying about everything from day one. That they cover up and hide the “real” numbers. Strangely enough, this narrative is also from the American politically conservative “echo chamber”. Only this is the “Hard-Right” narrative. (Alex Jones, Hal Turner, etc.)
The American left-wing is pretty much silent on all this. At most, they go along with the American mainstream media and don’t really question anything. In their mind, the global human utopia of a one-world has a “cold” and this will shape up world governance for decades to come…
So what is actually going on?
What is going on?
Here’s a chart that I compiled from data obtained by MSN on 29 March 2020…
COVID-19 Mortality Calculations 29MAR20
Aside from the really large values (Iran), and the really low values (USA, Germany and Switzerland), the confirmed mortality of this virus apparently varies from 4 to 8% or best described as 6% +/- 2%. I like to attribute this variance to social behaviors, and the healthcare operations within a given nation.
Keeping in mind that the influenza (the flu) has a mortality rate of 0.1%, every nation is experiencing the COVID-19 at a rate at least ten times higher, and in many cases, many many times higher.
Strange Conclusions
The issue is not really just how high the COVID-19 mortality rate is compared to the influenza, but rather WHY the mortality rate is not similar between different races, and different geographical areas and national borders.
Truthfully, the mortality rate should be identical for each and every nation, and only deviate in the event that the medical care system in a nation collapses.
All things being the same, we can come up with some interesting conclusions regarding the COVID-19 at this snapshot in time.
It favors people of one geographic nation over another.
Strange, eh? But that is the conclusion that you MUST come to if you assume that every nation is telling the truth and every nation is reporting accurate numbers to the WHO.
This thus implies that there is some sort of geographic or regional variable that provides some people with advantage over others.
Nations with the highest percentage of ethnic Germanic Whites have the lowest deaths to COVID-19.
The top three nations (with the smallest number of deaths) listed in the table above, all have significant populations of Germanic Caucasian people. That would imply that this virus is race-specific, or in other words, favors one race over another.
These Conclusions cannot be correct!
These findings are preposterous…
Which leads me to the final conclusion;
The different nations are using different criteria to determine who has the virus and who does not.
As well as why a person dies and does not.
As well as reporting methodology on those following variables.
If this is the case then, the situation becomes very simple.
Nations are obscuring their COVID-19 reporting to some extent. The degree of which varies from government to government.
Conclusion
None of this should be a surprise. However, a good solid look at the numbers (above) indicate some rather frightening potential possibilities.
To keep the mortality number low, the nation can either provide ICU’s for all the patients inflicted, or outright lie and be deceptive about the true numbers.
To keep the number of infected people low, and thus skew the mortality numbers, the nation can either retard (or delay) the testing for the illness or lie.
My “gut feeling” is that the United States is doing exactly this. (Whether intentionally or accidentally, I do not know.) And, I would not be surprised if Germany is also taking part in this type of action.
To believe otherwise…
… is to believe that this COVID-19 virus is [1] race specific, and [2] geographic specific in it’s behavior. Which then, of course, implies all sorts of other Frankenstein concoctions, that we won’t bother with now.
That night I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, vomiting, and shortness of breath. By Monday, I could barely speak more than a few words without feeling like I was gasping for air. I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without panting as if I’d run a mile. On Monday evening, I tried to eat, but found I couldn’t get enough oxygen while doing so. Any task that was at all anxiety-producing — even resetting my MyChart password to communicate with my doctor — left me desperate for oxygen.
- 26-year-old Fiona Lowenstein
A Welshman who caught the coronavirus in China has described how the deadly disease hit him “like a train” leaving him “suffocating” and in blinding pain for weeks. Connor Reed, from Llandudno, got ill while working as an English teacher in Wuhan.The 25-year-old described how it started as “just a sniffle” on November 25 – a month before authorities officially announced the virus – but over the next three-and-a-half weeks he got increasingly ill and was unable to move.
- 25-year-old Connor Reed
Update 5APR20
The mortality rate is climbing.
Mortality rate 5APR20.
I have more posts in my Trump Trade War Index, here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Donald Trump, in late march 2020, announced that he expects that “things will be back to normal by Easter”. That’s pretty much a three week time period.
I am sorry to say that that probably will not happen.
The United States is not China. The United States cannot replicate China’s success in controlling the outbreak. China mastered the COVID-19 outbreak by the implementation of extremely drastic measures, and even at that, it took a three month-long national lock-down to do so.
America, unorganized, corrupt, rife with fraud and incompetence is not going to be able to handle this event like the Chinese did. As I write this, many Americans are not wearing masks outside, and just last week everyone was partying (without a care) during Spring Break.
For America, and for other “free” democracies, the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak will be felt for a long time. How long? No one knows for certain, all we have is what we know from history. And, at that, history tells us that the Influenza outbreak in 1918 lasted for a solid year until well into 2019.
Here we review that event. We look at what happened and perhaps learn a little bit about history in the process.
The following information comes from the most excellent internet resource; Britannia which is an on-line encyclopedia. I find that it is better than most other internet resources and not as heavily propagandized as Wikipedia and other venues. It’s a resource worth bookmarking. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the author(s).
Influenza pandemic of 1918–19
Influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called Spanish influenza pandemic or Spanish flu, the most severe influenza outbreak of the 20th century and, in terms of total numbers of deaths, among the most devastating pandemics in human history.
influenza pandemic of 1918–19: temporary hospital A temporary hospital in Camp Funston, Kansas, during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic.Courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C
Influenza is caused by a virus that is transmitted from person to person through airborne respiratory secretions. An outbreak can occur if a new strain of influenza virus emerges against which the population has no immunity.
The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 resulted from such an occurrence and affected populations throughout the world.
An influenza virus called influenza type A subtype H1N1 is now known to have been the cause of the extreme mortality of this pandemic, which resulted in an estimated 25 million deaths, though some researchers have projected that it caused as many as 40–50 million deaths.
influenza A H1N1 virusTransmission electron micrograph of recreated 1918 influenza A H1N1 virus.Cynthia Goldsmith/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Image Number: 8160)
Three Waves
The pandemic occurred in three waves.
The first apparently originated in early March 1918, during World War I. Although it remains uncertain where the virus first emerged, it quickly spread through western Europe, and by July it had spread to Poland. The first wave of influenza was comparatively mild.
However, during the summer a more lethal type of disease was recognized, and this form fully emerged in August 1918. Pneumonia often developed quickly, with death usually coming two days after the first indications of the flu.
For example, at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, U.S., six days after the first case of influenza was reported, there were 6,674 cases. The third wave of the pandemic occurred in the following winter, and by the spring the virus had run its course.
In the two later waves about half the deaths were among 20- to 40-year-olds, an unusual mortality age pattern for influenza.
Walter Reed HospitalThe influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C., during the 1918–19 epidemic.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3a39569)
Outbreaks of the flu occurred in nearly every inhabited part of the world, first in ports, then spreading from city to city along the main transportation routes.
India is believed to have suffered at least 12.5 million deaths during the pandemic, and the disease reached distant islands in the South Pacific, including New Zealand and Samoa.
In the United States about 550,000 people died.
Most deaths worldwide occurred during the brutal second and third waves. Other outbreaks of Spanish influenza occurred in the 1920s but with declining virulence.
Conclusion
What does this mean?
We can expect that authoritarian governments will have a much better success in controlling the disease than the “freedom loving” democracies would. They are far better equipped in handling crisis events, emergencies and the mobilization of the citizenry.
We can expect that authoritarian governments should be able to resume “somewhat normal” life within a half year from the first onset of the sickness. China is leading the way, and showing that it can be done.
Other nations would have a longer duration of illness and it could easily move in multiple waves. The influenza of 1918 ran in three (four) waves, and each wave became successively more dangerous. It is possible that the COVID-19 would be able to suspend “normal” life in a non-authoritarian government for up to two years (worst case).
I cannot predict the future.
However, I feel reasonably confident that America will be dealing with this illness through the Fall of 2020 and into the Winter of 2021. It is unlikely that the United States could alter the path that it is firmly set upon.
Meanwhile China, and the rest of Asia will be able to suppress the illness by late Spring 2020.
Meanwhile…
Please be prudent, take reasonable precautions, and ignore the American media advice that…
It is only lethal to older people.
It is just a kind of flu.
You do not need to wear a mask.
All of which are false.
People this is a SHTF event. You are either ready for it, or your aren’t. Please make the best of it, in your own way, with those that you care about. God Bless.
Please make the best of it, in your own way, with those that you care about. God Bless.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other similar posts in my Trump Trade Wars Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Sometimes you come across a great article that puts things into perspective that you are unable to voice. This is one such article. For China has identified who “Patient Zero” is in Wuhan.
And it’s not only that.
Pompeo wanted the Chinese not to publicize what they had discovered.
Yang’s reply:
“We await your solemn explanation, especially about Patient Zero.”
China Wins Big With Covid-19. What Were We Thinking?
China suffered through the H1N1 coronavirus epidemic in 2008 largely because the CDC took 6 months to identify it and, as a result, 300,000 died prematurely. SARS (774 deaths) was the clincher. They (China) created a hair-trigger alarm system, mandated post-mortem pneumonia DNA testing nationwide, and promoted the CDC head, Dr. George F. Gao[1], to Demigod.
Their
Covid-19 emergency has now passed and must give Dr. Gao a B+ because,
though his system contained a potential epidemic it suffered from a
weakness: local politicians could delay, (but not stop) the alarm
sounding. Doubtless for sound bureaucratic reasons, Wuhan officials
delayed notifying Beijing for a few weeks but, after Beijing pried the
information from the Wuhan Director of Public Health[2], the system swung into action, everyone pitched in, and they literally killed it.
National cohesion and coordination were amazing, thanks to the Communist Party.
They coordinated everything and filled all the gaps, no questions asked. Ninety percent of the frontline volunteer medical staff–of whom 18 died–were Party members sworn to ‘bear the people’s burden first and enjoy their pleasures last.’
Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Party member and Director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, became a local hero for his pep-talk to Party members :
The first-aid team put themselves in great danger. They are tired and need to rest. We shouldn’t take advantage of good people. From now on, I’ll replace all the frontline medics with Party members from different sectors. When we joined the Party, we vowed that we would always prioritize people’s interests and press forward in the face of difficulties. This is the moment we live up to the pledge. All CPC members must rush to the front line.
I don’t care what you were actually thinking when you joined the party. Now it’s time to live up to what you promised. I don’t care if you personally agree or not: it’s non-negotiable.
Altogether, 40,000 volunteers self-organized and showed up to help Wuhan.
The storm has passed.
Now
the storm has passed and China has become the world’s Santa Claus,
giving out goodies and turning a potential disaster into a real triumph.
Nothing would make that triumph sweeter than the public revelation that our (American) CDC knew about Covid-19 last September.
Like many national public health systems, the CDC ignores novel Coronaviruses every ‘flu season and blends their effects in with the immense, fluctuating number of annual deaths.
That’s why, back in 2008, the CDC took so long to detect H1N1: they weren’t looking.
It was the same old, same old until January 1.
January 1, 2020
That is when China identified a nasty Coronavirus and the US went ballistic and blamed them for starting a pandemic and insulted their culture and their government.
But they handled Covid-19 so competently that they won the world’s admiration[3] and made the American attacks on them look mean.
But no big deal.
People will forget about the huge fuss we made and just remember vaguely that China is filthy and its leaders are liars.
Except for two things:
Their society’s health policies are more compassionate than ours, as older readers will realize. They have always placed a higher societal value on eighty year-olds than we do. So when they were threatened with premature, painful deaths, they put their entire economy on hold for two months and cooperatively saved their parents and grandparents, to worldwide applause (at least from my age-group). Now China is competing to have the lowest per capita Covid-19 death rate of any major country.
The world suspected that Covid-19 was circulating outside China last yearwhen they recalled this: First Vaping Death Reported by USA Health Officials. August 2019, “Amid the lack of information, investigators scrambled to find shared links to the respiratory problems. Officials said earlier this week that many patients, most of whom were adolescents or young adults, had described difficulty breathing, chest pain, vomiting and fatigue.” Covid-19 symptoms. If that’s too speculative, here’s what NPR turned up: Other Countries can Learn Important Lessons from Italy, says Dr. Giuseppe Remuzzi, co-author of a recent paper in The Lancet about the country’s dire situation. The takeaways include how to swiftly convert a general hospital into a coronavirus care unit with specially trained doctors and nurses. “We had dermatologists, eye doctors, pathologists, learning how to assist a person with a ventilator,” Remuzzi says. Some question why Italy was caught off guard when the virus outbreak was revealed on Feb. 21. Remuzzi says he is now hearing information about it from general practitioners.
“They remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November. This means that the virus was circulating, at least in northern Lombardy before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.“
The WHO has not requested the data from CDC because the US has been attacking the WHO daily and Dr. Ghebreyesus knows the US can get him fired. But Dr. Ghebreyesus and Dr. Gao and every Health Minister on earth know the truth. Dr. Remuzzi’s Italian DNA is traceable. So is China’s.
The world is very good at tracing Coronaviruses back through their generations and China has done so and now it seems the shit is about to hit the fan.
WUHAN OUTBREAK: CHINA DEMANDS AN HONEST ACCOUNTING
It is now virtually certain that COVID-19 was brought to Wuhan by
American troops taking part in the city’s World Military Games last Oct.
18-27.
The 300-strong US contingent stayed 300 meters from the Huanan
Seafood Market where China’s outbreak began (see map below) at the Wuhan
Oriental Hotel.
Five of the US troops developed a fever on Oct. 25 and were taken to an infectious-diseases hospital for treatment.
42 employees of the Oriental Hotel were diagnosed with COVID-19,
becoming the first cluster in Wuhan. At the time only 7 people from the
market had been thus diagnosed (and treated before the hotel staff). All
7 had contact with the 42 from the hotel. From this source, the virus
spread to the rest of China.
The American Military Games team trained at a location near Fort
Detrick, the military’s viral lab closed down by the CDC in July for
various deficiencies.
The big question now is whether the transmission was planned, or accidental.
Chinese authorities are awaiting an explanation from US authorities.
Outbreak source location within Wuhan, China.
A few days ago, Mike Pompeo phoned Yang Jiechi, Chinese State
Councillor for Foreign Affairs. Pompeo’s counterpart is actually Foreign
Minister Wang Yi and Yang is Wang’s boss, so Pompeo wanted to talk
about something urgent and important.
Pompeo wanted the Chinese not to publicize what they had found.
Yang’s reply: “We await your solemn explanation, especially about Patient Zero.”
China’s
leaders have long suspected US military involvement in the Wuhan
outbreak but were determined to stop the disease before pursuing the
Americans for an honest accounting.
Notes
[1]
Dr. Gao has made contributions to the study of inter-species pathogen
transmission. He organized the first World Flu Day on November 1 2018,
commemorating the centenary of the Spanish flu. It was also the 15-year
commemoration of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, SARS,
which led to China prioritising investment in the public health system.
He is a virologist and immunologist. He has served as Director of the
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017 and Dean of
the Savaid Medical School of the University of Chinese Academy of
Sciences since 2015. Gao is an academician of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences, as well as a foreign
associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National
Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the TWAS Prize in Medical Science in
2012 and the Nikkei Asia Prize in 2014.
[2] They fired him the next day. Henceforth local politicians will be out of the loop and everyone will have a CDC hotline number.
[3] Dr Bruce Aylward, head of the WHO International Mission said,“In the face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China took old-fashioned measures, like the national approach to hand-washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response started to change . . . So they refined the strategy as they moved forward, and this is an important aspect as we look to how we might use this going forward. WHO has been here from the start of this crisis, an epidemic, working every single day with the government of China… WHO was here from the beginning and never left. What’s different about this mission is it’s complementing a lot of other external experts.”
Conclusion
China is holding all the cards now.
Many of the events precipitated by the Trump Administration are beginning to become obvious. Manipulations, trade disputes, germ warfare against grains and wheat, and germ warfare against poultry and pork, as well as the onslaught of anti-Chinese rhetoric are all out in the open and clear for everyone to see. The propaganda machine is running in full swing, but it cannot continue like this forever.
I do not anticipate serious troubles unless the United States decides to “double down”, however this information while not public knowledge to Americans, is widely known to the rest of the government leadership throughout the world.
It certainly knocks the standing of the United States down more than a few notches in the overall scheme of things.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. You can see others in my Trump Trade War Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Well, America is in the middle of the COVID-19 viral emergency. Due to incompetence at all levels of the various American governments, there has been a complete failure of handling this event and it has manifested into an outright fiasco. With things as they stand today, and what we know about the corrupt American government, what is next?
Already States, and local governments are placing restrictions on liberty and behaviors. Stores are being ordered to close and assembly can get you arrested.
No one stated it better than Remus in the Woodpile Report…
These are your choices. They always were and they always will be.
Prepare when no one else is preparing.
Panic when everyone else is panicking.
Got food? Ammo? Meds?
It's too late now to prepare adequately for the pandemic much less the impending derailment of civilization itself. Preppers were calmly topping off their stashes in early January, at regular prices, in any quantity with lots-o'-choices. They saw the foreshadow of this emergency and acted appropriately. Prepping always looks crazy until the rug gets pulled. Paranoia is a survival tool, panic is not.
Systems are visibly collapsing.
The stock market is out-crashing the 1929 debacle in both speed and depth. "No Admittance" signs are posted at hospitals and needed surgeries are being cancelled. Police aren't responding to anything less then a murder in progress. Cities are opening the prison doors and chasing off the inmates. Food wholesalers were cleaned out in a fortnight and many can't restock enough to matter. Others have stopped answering their phones.
Guns and ammo are selling at a record rate.
Dealers say even anti-gun leftists are buying 'em. No one will say it, but it won't take much scarcity for the perpetual EBT Diversity to go where the food and supplies are. It's just there they'll meet real resistance for the first time in their lives. The suburbs have learned their family freezers are worth more than social posing. Unlike the stock market, price discovery will be utterly reliable when it comes to fried chicken and a six pack.
Emergency Rooms
Our Open Borders Diversities already clog the ER and get it all for free because you're paying their bills. Activists will choose the most deserving victims and it won't be the Deplorables. Compulsory charity can't be any other way. Tribal loyalty or redemption will be served. Either way, traditional Americans are a problem to be solved and inaction leaves no fingerprints.
The Center for Disease Control
The CDC had one job. Virology. Other countries had reliable test kits ready to go, in sufficient quantity to be useful. The technology is decades old yet the "renowned" CDC managed to botch it. The CDC distributed excuses and promises. N95 masks? Ventilators? Um, no. Maybe eventually, their Top Men are working on it. Somehow they always have plenty of everything to "fight the epidemic of obesity and racism" but not enough to perform their mandate. The CDC is useless and incompetent, an 11 billion dollar scam, benefiting no one except otherwise unemployable social activists.
Meanwhile, Russia is shipping nine planeloads of medics and surplus equipment and supplies to Italy, including ventilators.
Natural News reports:The battle for Los Angeles is lost. LA County announces no more testing for coronavirus, containment now impossible, 100,000+ may die in LA, prepare for chaos
The tipping point of containment has long since passed. That’s not even the goal anymore, and the number of infections being reported out of LA will no longer even come close to describing the real situation on the ground there...
Expect chaos. Expect looting and violence. It's LA, after all, and the gangs are barely kept in check even during good times.
America is right now in the midst of a full-scale SHTF event.
This is the thing that preppers have been readying for all these many, many years. And as all preppers know, there is a point in time when you are in the middle of “it”…
When you are in the middle of “it”.
With all this in mind, lets take a look at what will follow next…
A need for “violent” change.
For the oligarchy (PTB) have well prepared for this. And make no mistake, they will use this event to consolidate their power and implement sweeping changes to America… to your families and… your way of life.
Let’s dust off this document of horror…
The following is an article titled “The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest”By Larry Romanoff in Global Research, November 27, 2019. Edited to fit this venue and all credit tot he author.
The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest
Preparing For Civil War?
US authorities have for decades become increasingly prepared for mass civil disturbances resulting from government and corporate attacks on American society. We can recall that in the early 1980s the Hidden State launched its open war on the middle class by the savage FED-induced recession and the unilateral revocation of the social contract that had existed since 1946.At that time, the US government had already anticipated widespread public unrest, fully expecting mass protests and riots, and had made preparations to deal with them in the form of internment camps. In a real sense, the government had prepared for another civil war.
REX-84
Like most of the “Great Transformation”, it began during Reagan’s reign with what was called “Rex 84”, an abbreviation for Readiness Exercise 1984.
It is a plan by the US government to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest.
This master plan involved the FBI, Department of Defense, the Emergency Measures group, the Secret Service, the CIA and altogether 34 government agencies.
It was presented as an exercise to test military assistance in civil defense in times of national emergency, but in fact the plan was anticipating civil disturbances, major demonstrations and labor strikes that would affect continuity of government.
The anticipated civil unrest from the FED-induced financial crisis that devastated the middle class was considered “subversive”.
And, REX-84 is an authorization for the US military to implement government-controlled movements of civilian populations at both state and regional levels. Including the arrest of many segments of the American population, and the imposition of martial law. (1) (2)
Federal Police in America have been training alongside the American military to best be able to deal with Americans within the individual states.
Initially, the Rex-84 program was created under the pretense of a possible mass exodus of illegal aliens attempting to cross into the US from Mexico.
However, when the program accidentally became public during the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings in 1987, it was revealed that it was in fact a secret federal government program…
“to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, assign military commanders to take over state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens determined by the government to be ‘national security threats’.”
Ah. That good ‘ol “National Security” reason.
An Actual Program.
This was part of a master contingency plan.
It is a plan for which the FBI today has a primary list of more than 100,000 Americans, and a secondary list ten times larger, who are targeted to be rounded up as subversives.
Scene from the 1980’s movie “Red Dawn”.
This list includes labor leaders, scholars and public figures. With the incarceration designed to isolate political dissidents and to contain civil unrest.
And these are prison camps, ringed with fences, barbed wire and armed
guards, not places from which escape would be likely, and they were
designed to hold Americans, not Mexicans. (3)
“Avenge Me” Scene from the 1980’s movie “Red Dawn”.
There is no question the US government is prepared for the possibility of widespread and uncontrollable domestic disorder.
This program in place and building for years was encouraged by fears of a massive public uprising in the wake of the 2008 banking fraud.
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said some years ago that [1] concentration camps were a likely future reality for Americans and [2] that the Supreme Court would not do anything about the tyranny should the executive branch think it necessary.
“Avenge Me” Scene from the 1980’s movie “Red Dawn”.
He mentioned the World War II internment of Japanese in the US and said of these camps,
“you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again”. (4) (5)
“Internment specialists”
In 2009, as the US financial crisis deepened and concern about public unrest was increasing, the US National Guard was posting job opportunities for “Internment/Resettlement Specialists” to work in “civilian internee camps”. These camps were within the United States. With Halliburton subsidiary KBR actively seeking subcontractors to staff “emergency environment” camps located in five regions of the US.
KBR, outsourced Americanized Gestapo forces.
Earlier, in 2006, KBR was contracted by Homeland Security to build detention centers designed to deal with “the rapid development of unspecified “new programs” that would require large numbers of people to be interned.” (6) (7)
The US has for many years been dangerously close to a situation where, if the American people take to the streets in protest, these internments can be easily carried out.
By 2004, there were more than 800 of these internment camps in the US, all empty, but all fully operational, staffed, and surrounded by full-time guards, ready to receive prisoners.
I have seen photos.
State of the art American patrol car.
As well, many military bases are slated to be closed down and used as extra civilian prisons if the need arises, all intended for the internment of dissidents and others deemed “potentially harmful to the state”.
Some camps can each hold 20,000 or more prisoners, a massive effort at civilian population control, and the program is still expanding.
America is at this point today.
The US is very near the point today where political dissidents questioning the actions of their government will risk being rounded up. And then forced into these prison camps,. This is essentially a government plan to forcibly suppress political dissent under the guise of rooting out domestic “terrorism”.
State of the art American patrol car.
The US government defines many Americans as having become “pre-revolutionary” from their outrage at the 2008 government-approved housing collapse. They have increasing concern that massive civil unrest would emerge from both the poverty-stricken lower classes and the eviscerated middle class. They believe that this would lead to what would become an internal civil war.
This is the reason that the FBI and DHS increasingly focus their “anti-terror” apparatus on white middle-class Americans like the Occupy Wall Street protestors who were categorized as “low-level terrorists”.
State of the art American patrol car.
“Domestic Security”
In 2008, the Washington Post reported government plans to station many tens of thousands of troops inside the country for purposes referred to as “domestic security”. They did this in the light of massive civil unrest that would follow an economic collapse or serious financial crisis, perhaps stemming from 2008.
According to the government document,
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security”,
stating that the military may be needed to quell “purposeful domestic resistance”.
State of the art American patrol car.
To prepare for this quelling of resistance, the US has resorted to demonizing its own citizens.
A recent study funded by DHS conveniently identifying those Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and who exhibit signs of being “reverent of individual liberty”, and re-categorizing them as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. (8) (9) (10)
The program is designed to “reduce and eliminate” all domestic resistance to the US government.
“Crowd control agents” will be used for this purpose, and government agencies will be involved in “gathering information on dissidents” to identify all those who have either “threatened or are creating disturbances”.
American police forces today.
Manuals and Policies.
The US military produced a manual on what it termed “Civil Disturbance Operations” that outlines how military assets will be used to “help local and state authorities to restore and maintain law and order” in the event of mass riots and civil unrest.
Military and other law-enforcement will be tasked with “breaking up unauthorized gatherings” and restoring order by
“presenting a show of force, establishing roadblocks, breaking up crowds, employing crowd control agents, and other operations as required”.
American police forces today.
The same government manual describes how prisoners will be processed through these internment camps, and outlines how these internees would be “re-educated” while detained in prison camps inside their own country by their own government.
FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations
A leaked military document titled ‘FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations’, outlined a program for “re-education camps” in the US which contained plans for “political activists” to be “pacified” by various psychological officers.
They would be re-programmed into “sympathizing” with the government and into “developing an appreciation of US policies” while detained in prison camps inside the US.
American police are fully equipped to suppress a well-controlled American populace.
The document was restricted to Department of Defense personnel but was been leaked and posted online.
It outlined policies for “processing detainees into internment camps” and made clear these operations would be used for domestic civilian situations. (11) (12) The full document is available here: (13)
“Once the detainees have been processed into the internment camp, the manual explains how they will be “indoctrinated”, with a particular focus on coercing political dissidents into expressing support for U.S. policies.”
The American police are trained to control, and suppress Americans who refuse to obey Federal laws.
Part of the stated role of the psychological officers would be to
identify political activists, political leaders, ‘malcontents’, and
other agitators, and to develop and execute appropriate
“indoctrination programs to reduce or remove antagonistic attitudes”.
However, their first task would be to “pacify and acclimate detainees
to accept the internment facility’s authority and regulations”.
Americans have become accustomed to the new face of Authoritarian government control.
Approved use of violence against Americans.
There are also disturbing insights into the government’s intention to use brutal force to violently quell any civil political unrest.
The manual includes a long list of weapons meant to be used against protesting American civilians, including anti-riot grenades.
All over America, from Hawaii to Alaska, from California to Maine, the police are armed with military weapons and equipment for use against American citizens.
Page 20 of the manual authorities the use of “deadly force” in confronting these peaceful political “dissidents”, the murderous intent made disturbingly clear with the directive that “Warning shots will not be fired” first.
Northcom itself, in a September 8, 2008 Army Times article, said the first wave of the deployment, which was put in place on October 1st at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, would be aimed at tackling “civil unrest and crowd control”.
All sorts of high precision, and lethal weapons are deployed with American police and Federal police today.
In November of 2013, Forbes Magazine ran an article based on the AP newswire, detailing that DHS had been assembling a massive weapons arsenal since 2011 or 2012. (14)
The AP reported that Homeland Security had been stockpiling ammunition by buying more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in addition to a prior purchase of 1.5 billion rounds, for a staggering total of more than three billion rounds.
Depending on the state and the local police force, all manner of high-technology and state-of-the-art weapons are issued to police forces. These weapons are not for the military to use against an enemy. They are for American police to use against American people.
This is more ammunition than the US military used collectively in all its wars in the last decade, and represents about ten shots for every man, woman and child in America.
There were also confirmed purchases by various government agencies, of hundreds of millions of hollow-point rounds to be delivered to dozens of locations around the US.
These bullets are so lethal they are banned for battlefield use during wars because they mushroom and fragment on impact, their only purpose being to cause the maximum possible damage to internal organs.
The reader must ask themselves why suppression firearms, like machine-guns, and grenade launchers are being issued to American police forces. The Constitution has been quite explicit and exact that standing armies are forbidden to exist upon American soil.
Also purchased were large numbers of magnum rounds with the power to penetrate walls, and a frightening hundreds of millions more rounds of specialty sniper ammunition.
Friendly Weapons
Even more, it was reported in early 2015 that DHS had placed orders for massive amounts of other kinds of anti-civilian weaponry termed “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions”, which were described as “an arsenal of specialized weaponry for training and deployment against crowds”.
Why are American regional police forces issued and trained to us the M134 GAU-17 Gatling Gun?
These included flash grenades, light bursts, gas and chemical grenades, riot rounds, rubber bullets, and much more.
These are all heavy-duty crowd control and civilian intimidation weapons.
They have no other purpose and, in the volume in which they are being purchased, it is clear the US government is expecting some very serious civil disturbances, possibly a revolution, and soon.
One such non-lethal weapon is the 500-vold shotgun.
As recently as 2018, Forbes was reporting more of the same, that these purchases have reached an astonishing ubiquity.
It isn’t only Homeland Security who is arming to the teeth. Thousands of agents at the IRS now have tactical assault rifles and heavy weaponry.
The Small Business Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs have purchased thousands of Glock handguns.
The Health Services agencies purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns – equipped with silencers.
The US Geological Survey, which is a weather bureau, purchased millions of dollars worth of Winchester Black Shadow shotguns with large bulk ammunition orders in addition to Glock handguns.
Even the Department of Education purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns, shotguns and body armor.
I am unaware of any nation in the world where the income tax department or the departments of education and health care require huge amounts of military-grade weapons, much less body armor and gun silencers.
Non-lethal microwave cannon to use to fry the living daylights out of protesters and mobs.
Armed to the teeth
In June of 2016, RT reported that non-military federal agencies had more firepower than the entire US Marine Corps.
This including agencies like education, health and income tax. (15) RT documented, a new report where 67 non-military federal US agencies spent $1.50 billion purchasing guns, ammunition and military-style equipment.
Tazer pistols are quite common all over America and are used with far less restraint than normal pistols.
The details came from the Militarization of America: non-military federal agencies purchases of guns, ammo, and military-style equipment, published by the non-profit good government group OpentheBooks.com. (16) (17)
In addition to the massive purchase of ammunition, DHS was showing off its acquisition of heavily armored and mine-resistant personnel carriers.
Sticky foam is one such non-lethal weapon that is deployed inside America.
These have been seen on streets all across America and verified with photos and video.
Forbes noted that these vehicles are equipped with gun ports and are “designed to withstand IEDs, mine blasts and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass”, and asked why they would be necessary on American streets.
The “Thunder Generator” was originally developed by Israeli farmers to scare away crop-eating birds. However, it has now grown to become a viable weapon against humans. In good conditions, the Thunder Generator can hurl a series of super-short shockwaves up to 100 meters (328 ft) away. In general, these shockwaves serve to only knock down and stun individuals. Any closer than 10 meters (33 ft), however, and the waves can result in permanent damage or death.
The DHS also purchased large amounts of riot gear and bullet-proof checkpoint booths, as well as a purchase of 7000 automatic rifles, and 2700 armored vehicles, and the deployment of drones with allowance for their use on US citizens.
The DHS is becoming a massive domestic army to handle domestic conflict. In the words of Ellen Brown,
“somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest …”
American police have taken a page out of the Communist Chinese civilian suppression manual and have adopted drones for surveillance, crowd control and suppression purposes.
False Claims of utility.
DHS chief Janet Napolitano claimed this was to prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States that would require the “shelter and processing” of large numbers of people, but this is nonsense.
By whom will the US be attacked that Homeland Security would be responsible for defense, and from where would arise a mass of peaceful immigrants so large as to require more than three billion bullets to repel them?
America has spent millions of dollars, if not billions, on prisons and internment facilities to deal with emergencies and large scale unrest.
This is the same government that recently shut down many of its operations including most of the National Parks, for lack of funds, yet had sufficient money to purchase billions of bullets for a non-existent civilian army.
A spokesperson was quoted as justifying this massive purchase to “help the government get a low price for a big purchase”, and claimed DHS used “as many as 15 million rounds every year in training exercises”.
Someone should ask DHS to divide 3 billion by 15 million, which tells us the ammunition purchase will supply DHS needs for the next 200 years.
America has spent millions of dollars, if not billions, on prisons and internment facilities to deal with emergencies and large scale unrest.
The authorities naturally attribute criticism and hard questions to mentally-unbalanced ‘conspiracy theorists’, but this is one more instance where actions appear irrational and the official story is so full of holes that it makes no sense.
‘Unconventional’ paper targets.
Another DHS purchase that produced a firestorm of anger when its news went viral, was the supply of what we might call ‘unconventional’ paper targets which were used as practice shooting targets in ‘training exercises’.
This could very well be the future for many Americans who are not “with the program”.
These targets consisted of figures of American civilians in residential settings. They included small children. They include a young pregnant mother, and old women in robes. They include grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchens and front yards. They include teenagers in parks, little girls and more.
Perhaps the most frightening part being that all these were termed “no hesitation targets”, meaning to fire without hesitation at the sight of these enemies.
American protestors are the exact type of people that these weapons are targeting.
What could possibly justify the supply of such targets to a military force, with such an instruction? The US fedbiz.op website took down the solicitation after Infowars broke the story, and eventually apologized publicly for creating these targets of small children.
A Fake City
In early 2014 it was reported that the US military had built a $100 million fake city of about 300 acres in Virginia, for use in training.
The Federal government has created these fake cities and towns from which to train warriors to fight American patriots on American soil with.
This was for the training of troops for the occupation of cities, complete with a sports stadium, bank, school, and an underground subway in order to train for future combat scenarios in American urban areas.
The subway carriages even carry the same logo as those in Washington DC. More disturbingly, it was reported that
“soldiers are being taught that Christians, Tea Party supporters and anti-abortion activists represent a radical terror threat, mirroring rhetoric backed by the Department of Homeland Security which frames “liberty lovers” as domestic extremists.”
The DHS is also building a 176-acre secure compound in the
lowest-income area of Washington, DC, which seems almost certainly a
preparation for civil war. (18) (19)
American soldiers, train alongside the DHS, in these American sized towns wearing full spectrum bio-warfare gear.
The Trigger Event
The trigger could be an economic collapse that causes angry Americans to flood the streets similar to the Occupy Wall Street and other scenes witnessed across both the US and Europe during the last FED-induced economic crisis.
Or it could be COVID-19.
It is worth noting that the Occupy Wall Street protest had the right idea but the wrong target.
A military urban training center, which is a mock 30-acre town located on Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, has been recently upgraded to look more American than the ‘international city’ it once did, adding a Baptist church, a police station and several farmhouses. Just last February we posted a story of another fake “American looking” city, equipped with our street signs, a church and an underground subway system nearly identical to one in Washington DC.
Wall Street is just an idea, and a bit player. The ultimate cause is the FED, and that should have been their focus. But the FED, the bankers and the FBI saw this coming and infiltrated and financed the protest groups as a way to take control and deflect them from any useful action or focus.
The “top secret” exercises
In the middle of 2013 several US local media reported the DHS was conducting widely public but still “top secret” exercises categorized as “full scale terrorism drills” across the entire nation.
All of this was with the stated purpose of making citizens “feel safe”, but which resulted in thousands of terrified people not knowing how to respond to what appeared as a domestic invasion by the US military.
The military has a very long history of training and using aerosols that they would spray over regions. They have done this for cloud seeding, insect control, and to practice germ and chemical warfare operations in simulated battle conditions.
People were capriciously apprehended and released after having their belongings searched, but nevertheless urged to celebrate their “independence” from tyranny.
These drills were presented as readiness training for potential terrorist incursions, though DHS failed to mention the New York Times observation that all the domestic terror plots in the United States over the last decade were “hatched by the FBI”.
One other worrying development …
One other worrying development was the appearance of US military C-130 cargo planes apparently spraying “mosquitoes” over various Florida cities at an altitude of less than 50 meters.
An American Air Force C-130 spraying pesticides over a target area.
Pest control is hardly a military duty, these events immediately reminding me of the US military spraying bacterial and other pathogens over many parts of the US in various CIA-related experiments on the domestic population.
These low-altitude overflights are almost certainly practice runs for potential crowd control in the future, for dispensing tear gas or other non-lethal (or lethal) material that would disperse or disorient protestors.
A spraying and aerosol mixing assembly system being installed and loaded into a C-130 cargo plane for undisclosed purposes.
I cannot imagine all the possibilities, but the US military most certainly is not going into the mosquito-spraying business. (19) (20)
US Major General Curry was quoted as stating,
“We have local police, backed up by each state’s National Guard, backed up by the Department of Defense. So in addition to all these forces why does Homeland Security need its own private army? Why do the SSA, NOAA and other government agencies need to create their own civilian security forces armed with hollow nose bullets?”
Some may want to dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, but we might recall the words of Senator Daniel Inouye in 1987,
“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”
The threats to civil liberties
The threats to civil liberties go much farther and are much more ominous than I’ve related so far.
Another factor is the spate of secret Executive Orders that Obama signed without Congressional approval, observers claiming those orders violated existing laws and were therefore illegal, but that the powers behind the White House considered themselves above all law.
Militarized police can go and conduct military operations, using the same sort of tactics, in America against Americans at will.
One of the most sinister was Executive Order 13603 which granted authorization to seize possession of every possible resource, including property and “all food storage facilities”.
One author wrote that…
“This extremist, maniacal edict is designed to enforce our submission, rendering us totally dependent on Big Brother government or face the obvious – starvation and extermination.”
What could possibly have instigated such an order, unless the government is preparing for an all-out war against the American people?
What possible excuse, during peace-time, would a “democratic” government have, for the initiation of a program to seize all the “food, water and food storage facilities” of a nation?
The various American government(s) at all levels have been training on how to control, herd and disarm normal American civilians.
If we add these to the internment camps and the bullets, what conclusions are possible?
Another Threat
Another ominous threat is that much of the NSA’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security.
This is the same people with the 800 internment camps and the 3 billion bullets.
The apparent reason is that the NSA can collect information on domestic political dissidents but has no police powers to act on them, whereas DHS has legislative authority to gather, arrest and incarcerate anyone on their watch lists.
American police today more resembles a military army that operates on American soil, in complete defiance of the United States Constitution.
DHS is apparently creating a “graded list” of these targeted so-called “security threats”. Those at the top of this list assessed according to how widely disseminated are their anti-establishment views, the followers they appear to have. These will be the first to disappear into the internment maze.
This new policy gives Homeland Security full authority to effectively terrorize the American people under a pretense of controlling domestic terrorism. When we consider these two items, Executive Order 13603 and the new powers granted to DHS, the only possible response can be fear.
When the militarized police come into your communities they will first sweep it of guns, making absolutely sure that the civilians are disarmed properly and completely.
Secret Procedures
If all this isn’t enough, DHS was revealed to have a secret procedure for the instant shutting down of all private communications in America. This includes mobile phone networks. It is a program that was accidentally revealed when government officials in San Francisco disabled all mobile phone calls during a peaceful protest.
The administration insisted it had the legal authority to control these communications “during times of national crisis”, and “for the purpose of ensuring public safety”. It has also given DHS the power to actually “seize” all privately-owned communications facilities in order to prevent any civilian communications occurring.
It is quite common to find militarized police in America conducting “no knock” raids on innocent American civilians. People! Not even Communist China does this.
Some individuals applied to the courts for further information on these new procedures and policies, but DHS claimed it was “unable to locate or identify any records” in relation to the matter.
Nothing more to be said, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the US government is quickly becoming fully prepared for war against its civilian population.
No Fourth Amendment.
With the NSA revelations by Edward Snowdon, there is no longer any question that many US government agencies have been monitoring and gathering information on large numbers of known American political dissidents.
These many agencies include the NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS, various military groups and another 70 or 80 so-called “public-private fusion centers” scattered around the US.
Americans are monitored -, then they will be disarmed, as they are all on “lists” where the government will use to secure them into “camps” for their own safety.
Former NSA Technical Director William Binney claimed in an interview that the NSA had a list of 500,000 to one million people in the US who were closely watched and whose every communication and bit of personal data were recorded.
These are not terrorists in any sense, but potential leaders of political dissension and therefore potential suspects in the event of civil disturbances.
Americans are on “lists”…
There also exists a database known as “Main Core”, containing names of Americans who might be considered troublesome.
Knowledgeable sources claim these lists contains the names and communication information of more than eight million Americans who would be potential suspects of political activism.
“Political Activism” would include “national opposition to US military invasion abroad”.
It includes political dissidents, environmental and other activists, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, and many more who are most likely harmless, average people.
Average, everyday Americans, are the targets for the PTB; the oligarchy that plans to totally transform America into their vision of utopia.
The database apparently contains all to and from email addresses, all email content, all in and out phone numbers plus duration of calls, the amounts and locations of ATM withdrawals, all credit card purchases and much more.
It appears that this dissident surveillance program dates back to the early 1980s, the time of our Great Transformation.
When it was revealed that Oliver North, operating from a secure White House site, had been using a database called PROMIS which was part of the REX-84 plan, to track dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States.
This database was meant to identify and immediately locate perceived “enemies of the state” if mass civil disturbances were to break out. (21) (22)
The perceived “enemies of the state” are average people like you and I, who might not agree with the % who rule America.
The Middle-Class Revolt
In late 2008 a leaked internal memo from Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist, contained ominous predictions for American civil society after the vicious financial crisis. He wrote,
“The world is not going back to normal ‘after the magnitude of what they have done'”.
Fitzpatrick claimed that [1] the massive destruction of the middle class, [2] the draining of all the wealth from the population, and [3] the QE money creation by the FED would either bring about a resurgence of inflation…
… or that the US would fall into “depression, civil disorder and possibly war”.
Occupy Wall Street protest.
He claimed that with the passing of each week and month there was a growing danger that could lead to political instability, a risk of domestic unrest because people were becoming increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished.
Lest we succumb to the temptation of accepting the 2008 financial
crisis and the resulting loss of homes as an accident of fate, it would
be wise to consider these quotes by Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank
of England prior to the crash of 1929, addressing the United States
Bankers’ Association, New York, Idaho Leader, 26 August 1924.
“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world.”
And his thoughts on democracy:
“By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.”
“It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
The US government has developed an increasing fear of its own middle class.
The PTB Oligarchy should not need to fear Average Americans unless…
Armed Citizens
A middle class that is wide awake to the protests and uprisings in other nations where governments have colluded with the international bankers.
And where large multi-nationals to gut their middle classes and effect the same transfer of wealth to the top 1% as occurred in America.
People in many Western societies have become disgruntled and bitter at the increasing evidence that their vaunted democracies have been usurped by the unrestrained capitalists, creating intolerable situations where the people are sacrificed for the increasing wealth of that same top 1%.
While the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the world some people are stockpiling toilet paper and food, while Americans are flocking to buy guns. Images and videos of people lining up outside gun stores in the United States are emerging on social media. Amelia Adams, the US correspondent for Nine News tweeted a video of people lining up outside a gun shop in Los Angeles, with the queue trailing some 10 meters from the shop’s door down the sidewalk.
At first, the US government exhibited a grim and rather reprehensible kind of satisfaction at watching the misery in other nations where the FED and IMF and the International Bankers had succeeded in their aims of wealth transference, but it also realized that the same boiling rage existed in America and perhaps much less controllable.
US citizens were protesting against a government that was no longer democratic in any sense…
… and was both unwilling and unable to repair a hopelessly corrupt and inefficient system.
They finally awoke en masse and objected to ingrained corruption, shoddy public services, high taxes, homelessness, unemployment, rising inflation, the development of a police state, and more.
Public Rage
It is public rage at the realization of having been betrayed by a “democratic” government that converts civil unrest into political activism and revolution…
… and it is this that lies at the heart of the FBI’s categorization of US political dissent as “domestic terrorism”.
The number of American militias form with each encroachment on freedom and liberty. Today, many such militias exist throughout the United States.
This terminology is important because the US, in all its hypocrisy for democracy, free speech and freedom of assembly, cannot face the world with open and apparent suppression of political dissent.
Therefore, US citizens protesting against their own government cannot be exercising free speech but rather anarchy and terrorism, thereby justifying the use of deadly force to control dissension.
The powers that control America (PTB) have no interest in fairy-tales of freedom. They are interested in wealth and control, and the people in any country are irrelevant – including those in the US.
The number of American militias form with each encroachment on freedom and liberty. Today, many such militias exist throughout the United States.
Americans have experienced first-hand the destruction of their quality of life; they see clearly the disappearance of future opportunity for their children, and they recognize better than most the loss of their freedom of expression which they have so valued.
And they know it is precisely the retraction of that expression that is necessary for their no-longer-democratic government to maintain control.
The number of American militias form with each encroachment on freedom and liberty. Today, many such militias exist throughout the United States.
This is where their economic and social dissatisfaction mutate into political activism – revolution, in fact – and it is this realization among the authorities that has spawned the internship camps, the billions of bullets purchased, and the “shoot to kill” orders.
Revolution – The Struggle for Class Power
Buried in the litany of troubles the US is facing today is the primary fact that the nation is engaged in a brutal class war, a struggle for class power that the bottom 99% are losing.
This war was declared in the late 1970s, gained great momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and is still accelerating toward its final desperate conclusion.
There are few signs on the horizon that cause hope for a change in direction, and I fear it may be too late.
The number of American militias form with each encroachment on freedom and liberty. Today, many such militias exist throughout the United States.
There is still power with the people themselves, and indeed without the both active cooperation and silent complicity of the people, none of the pathological descent into despair would have been possible.
Probably the only force in America that can change what is happening is the combined force of labor.
This isn’t so easy today, since the government killed most labor organizations and there is now little if any leadership.
A total withdrawal of labor succeeded in forcing a new social contract in 1946 and may be the only power remaining today, but times have changed and tactics must change too. If all unions withdrew their services with the full cooperation of unorganized labor, change might be possible.
Socialist Antifa shock-troops lining u to overthrow the government in favor of a social utopia.
But realistically, there is no hope that such a mass protest could be organized even though it is the only possible way to get the attention of whatever remains of a conscientious government and force through a reversal of the tide.
In any case, taking to the streets is unlikely to produce pleasant results. If the police don’t have enough bodies to beat up and arrest everyone, DHS has its internment camps, its 3 billion bullets, its years of practice with “no-hesitation” human targets, and it will use all of them.
BLM – Black Lives Matter forces demanding “social and racial change”.
The only safe way for Americans to go on strike today is to stay at home. On this topic, one internet commenter wrote,
“Just don’t go to work. There is no need to picket in the streets to be on strike, and the factories and offices will be just as quiet and empty, and the profits just as non-existent. The police cannot possibly conduct home-by-home visits to beat up strikers one by one, and no military, even the DHS, is efficient when trying to blow up houses scattered all over the county, one by one. Strikers are probably safe if they stay at home and lock their door.”
Another wrote,
“Another tactic is for Americans to simply quit shopping. They don’t have the money anyway, and don’t need all that useless junk. Don’t buy anything you don’t actually need, and delay even those purchases as long as possible, especially the big-ticket items like cars and furniture. If at all possible, delay every purchase for at least one year. As much as is practicable, stop driving your car. Cancel your cable TV and read a book.” Your grandmother gave you advice 100 years ago that is still valid today: “Use it up, wear it out. Make it do. Do without.”
A third commenter gave this advice:
“One thing you can do to get their attention is to stop paying your bills. VISA and MasterCard can’t cancel 800 million credit cards at the same time, and no bank can process 100 million mortgage defaults. No system can cope with massive non-payment of debt. You are their only source of money and you can ensure they don’t get any of it. That will wake them up. Tell them you’ll begin paying when the overseas corporate tax holiday is over, when high income taxes are reinstated for the rich, when the individual bankers are in prison and when the lost jobs begin returning. This isn’t foolproof, but it’s the best I can do.”
And finally, a more ambitious poster offered these comments:
“Today, the US State Department, the CIA and the FBI pride themselves on their ability to use Twitter and Facebook to cause civil unrest, chaos, violence, and even revolutions, in other countries. It may not have occurred to them that the same tools they use against everyone else can be just as easily used against them. The CIA used Gene Sharp and his Einstein Institute to prepare the Otpor civil disobedience manuals that our government used as the gunpowder to destroy Jugoslavia, and as the template for a dozen other “color revolutions” of which it was so proud. Copies are freely available on the internet.”
William Blum again:
“As I’ve said before: Inasmuch as I can’t see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than this: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, raising their political and ideological consciousness, providing them with the factual ammunition and arguments needed to sway others, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it raises the political price for those in power, until it reaches a critical mass, at which point … I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger … But you have to have faith. And courage.”
Isn’t this exactly what is happening today?
Isn’t all these suggestions what is occurring today? People are staying inside. They are not buying anything. They are sheltering in place, and cowering in fear.
This translates into one of two things.
Advantage for the PTB to implement drastic change.
Advantage for the grassroots American citizenry to implement drastic change.
Both of which are truly frightening in the “powder keg” that America is today.
Author
Larry Romanoff is a
retired management consultant and businessman. He has held executive
positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international
import-export business. He lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a
series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be
contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I am appalled at the anti-China rhetoric that is spewing out from the United States these days. It is horrific and truly frightening.
This level of propaganda historically precedes a hot war with a major power.
And somehow, the American leadership thinks that they can use “small” nuclear weapons, germ-warfare, and start putting “boots on the ground” inside of China without having Chicago, Los Angles, San Francisco, and New York City vaporized within a nuclear fireball. They point out that America outnumbers the number of Chinese nuclear weapons by a huge margin, and that no one would ever risk using them against the USA.
Yes, the actually do believe that.
The mass-produced Chinese DF-41. The new weapon delivery system is reportedly designed to be launched as the final stage of China’s intercontinental ballistic missile, which would approach its target at a velocity of up to 10 times the speed of sound. It carries a warhead that is 1000 times more devastating than what was used on Hiroshima. Hypersonic speed range lies between Mach 5 and Mach 10, or 3,840 to 7,680 miles per hour.
Given the fact that geographically China is much larger than the United States, has a population four times of America, and over 40-times the number of factories, were there to be a devastating nuclear Armageddon between the United States and China…
… it would be China that would survive.
The United States would end up being transformed to pre-medeaval England. America without electricity, gasoline, water, or medicine is Somalia.
Even though much of China would be in ruin, the enormous number of factories, all spread out everywhere, and the insane level of “get back on your feet” attitude that the Chinese possess, would be formidable. The Chinese would pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get right to work.
And it’s not just that.
China and Russia are military partners.
If you attack one, the other would chime in. Combined, any attack on either Russia or China would result in both coming for the American jugular vein. And there would be no mercy. Both would conduct “double taps”, and America would become a radioactive agrarian society… without electricity or running fresh water.
It’s not just myself that understand this. This has been the continuous, steady state response to all the simulations conducted by the RAND group, the pentagon, and other NGO’s.
Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China
Americans are manipulated by both sides of the political spectrum.
The hashtag #ChinaLiedPeopleDied was recently sent trending on Twitter by “new right” pundit Michael Courdrey.
With the amplification of all the usual Trump bootlickers and their sheep-like followers.
Further feeding into the anti-China cold war hysteria conservatives have been aggressively pushing with increasingly frenetic urgency lately.
Which is hilarious, since these are the same people who’ve spent the last three years making fun of liberals and calling them NPCs for doing the exact same thing with Russia.
The Same Propaganda Technique.
And when I say the exact same thing, I mean literally the exact same thing.
The frenzied, shrieking hysteria I’m witnessing right now among Trump’s base regarding China looks and moves in the exact same way…
… the mental zombification of Russia hysteria looked and moved…
… when it began tearing through rank-and-file Democrats in late 2016 and early 2017.
The seething, screaming vitriol I get from the MAGA crowd on social media when I talk about this…
… is identical to what I got during that period from Democrats: just as irrational, just as vituperative, and just as emotion-driven.
The 2020 outbreak of China hysteria is so identical to the 2016/2017 outbreak of Russia hysteria…
…. that as of this writing if you do a Twitter live search right now for the word “wumao” or “CCP paying you”…
… you’ll see an endless stream of Trump supporters running around bleating accusations of being a paid troll for the Chinese Communist Party at anyone who disputes their hysterical China narratives.
Same with the word "wumao". Trump bootlickers are bleating accusations of being a Chinese propagandist in exactly the same way liberals have been bleating "How's the weather in St Petersburg, Ivan?" at anyone who questions establishment narratives.https://t.co/UCVrVV9I63
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 19, 2020
It’s Obvious.
Anyone who’s ever shared anti-establishment ideas on social media will immediately recognize this.
It is identical to accusations which come from the pussyhatted #Resistance crowd of brainwashed MSNBC liberals.
Liberals who accuse anyone who questions establishment narratives of being a paid troll conducting propaganda for the Russian government.
These “How much is the CCP paying you for this?” accusations which have been cluttering up my social media notifications for the last 24 hours are indistinguishable…
… from the “How’s the weather in St Petersburg, Ivan?”
McCarthyite accusations I’ve been receiving from rank-and-file Democrats for the last three years.
It’s just like the froth-mouthed victims of media-induced Russia hysteria.
The victims of media-induced China hysteria are always unable to justify their sudden Beijing anxiety in a way that makes any coherent sense.
I’ve spent the last few days debating these poor wretches online.
It’s what I do whenever a new sociopathic establishment narrative surfaces.
I do it to gain an understanding of how it works.
And I have yet to encounter a single one which can coherently reconcile the sudden uptick in shrieking China hysteria with the thing that China has always been throughout its historical existence.
Excuses and Justifications
They’ll tell me it’s because China lied about the virus and made errors in the early days of the outbreak.
But can’t lucidly explain how screaming about this helps fix any problem.
They’ll tell me it’s because China is authoritarian.
Yet, they can’t explain the sudden uptick in outrage over this.
For after all, China has always had an authoritarian government and that has nothing to do with the virus.
They’ll parrot establishment narratives about Uighurs and organ harvesting, but, again, can’t explain how this has any connection to the virus.
Manipulation of American Citizenry.
When I point out that there are extremely powerful government agencies which stand much to gain from all this.
That they tend to gain from manufacturing consent for new escalations against America’s primary geostrategic rival.
I mostly get more outraged, incoherent sputtering.
But you know, once in a while a more thoughtful China Derangement Syndrome victim will say they don’t want any escalations against China.
The truth is that they just want to end an economic relationship between China and the US which they perceive as unfair.
But, again, this has nothing to do with the virus, and also it’s a mighty interesting coincidence that they’ve formed this opinion about the one nation who just so happens to be America’s primary geopolitical foe.
Emotionally driven, not rational.
This inability to draw a rational straight line from the facts in evidence to their hysterical anti-China bleating tells you everything you need to know.
They are not rending their garments over China because of facts in evidence. Instead, they’re reacting emotionally to recent propaganda narratives. Narratives that they’ve been spoon fed. Then, they begin listing off the things they’ve heard about China in an attempt to justify their irrational behavior.
In reality these people are rallying behind the campaign to blame China for the health crisis they’re now facing. This is simply because they understand that otherwise the blame will land squarely on the shoulders of their president, who’s running for re-election this year.
Deep down they know full well that this isn’t really about China, but about protecting their president.
But what they are actually doing, unwittingly, is manufacturing consent for an agenda which is far bigger and far more consequential than who wins the election in November.
And it’s no accident that they’re being shepherded in this direction with the help of right-wing establishment narrative managers.
This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it’s about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump’s supporters think it’s a “deep state coup” to try and oust their president, but in reality this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either.
When all is said and done, Russiagate is about China.
In an essay titled “Russia-China Tandem Changes the World”, US-Russia relations analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic power China depends upon Russia’s willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine the USSR during the Cold War.
Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complementary in a way that poses a direct threat to America’s self-appointed role as world leader.
And now we’re seeing one of America’s two mainstream factions cheerleading for increased hostility toward America’s primary rival.
While the other faction cheerleads for increased hostility against that rival’s right arm.
This two-pronged propaganda campaign has enabled the establishment via the Trump administration to escalate tensions not just with China but with Russia as well.
Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment.
Arguing over whether it’s better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over whether it’s better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI, arguing over how internet censorship should happen and whom should be censored rather than if censorship should happen in the first place.
The longer they can keep us arguing over the best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about whether we want to lick it at all.
37 Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation
Added some more tips to this article from last year in order to help navigate through the haze of narrative manipulation in these confusing times. https://t.co/Z05RH16IlB
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 18, 2020
I wrote more about the way the establishment manipulators get the mainstream factions arguing over which nation should be targeted with aggression, rather than if any nations should be targeted at all, in a January 2020 article titled “On The Idiotic Partisan Debate Over Regime Change In Iran Or Syria“:
It is truly, deeply and profoundly stupid because the agenda to topple Iran’s government and the agenda to topple Syria’s government are not two separate agendas.
They are the same.
Supporting one while opposing the other is like wanting to shoot someone in the head but being morally opposed to shooting them in the heart.Syria and Iran are allies.
Eliminating one government necessarily hurts the other. Iran has been helping Syria to win the war against foreign-backed extremist proxy fighters who nearly succeeded in toppling Damascus before its allies stepped in, and should Syria succeed in rebuilding itself (something the Trump administration is actively preventing it from doing) we can be sure it would return the favor when called upon.
We are now seeing this exact same two-pronged approach used with Russia and China.
We’ve actually been seeing it for years, like in this affectionate debate between former CIA Director James Woolsey and Fox News’ Laura Ingraham over which of the two nations America should be more aggressive toward, but it’s kicked into high gear now.
The End Result
The end result being that you have America’s two mainstream parties arguing over which establishment agenda should be advanced.
War with Russia.
War with China.
As well as how establishment interests should be served.
More money for the military-establishment.
More money for studies.
More money and more regulations.
Hardly anyone in mainstream circles ever questioning if the establishment should be served at all.
The Overton window of acceptable mainstream debate has been ripped away from those who simply want peace and a healthy planet altogether, and now the only permitted arguments are about which wars should occur first.
This is gravely disordered, and it cannot continue.
The war will not play out like anyone expects. Both Russia and China are serious, serious nations that do not fuck around. It’s not gonna be another Yemen. It’s not gonna be another “police action”. It’s going to be lethal and on YOUR front door.
Chinese ICBMs.
Conclusion
War clouds are brewing. Perhaps it would be be best to start reading some of my posts on SHTF events. The Washington establishment wants war and no… it will not be televised.
If things continue along this path…
If people don’t start to put their “foot down” and demand this neocon nonsense stop…
…most Americans will notice that they suddenly have no electricity and no internet.
No phones.
No gas.
No food.
And the skies over the hills will glow red all night.
Then, and then, things will start to get really strange…
…
…
Go ahead and check out my SHTF Index.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
I read that Donald Trump wants the COVID-19 vaccine that is being developed in Germany. He wants it to be patented as an American product and limit it’s utilization to Americans only.
Meanwhile, China is sending supplies and resources to any nation that needs it. Planes, boats and transports have been dispatched and are busy trying to help other nations during time of need.
America - Selfish, self-serving, and demanding.
China - Helpful, compassionate, offering help.
Perhaps it’s time to step back and look at the bigger picture.
It’s a picture of what lies outside the shores of the United States. It’s a picture that does not resemble anything that any American media reports. This is true whether it is the Alt-Left, the Mainstream Media or the Alt-Right neocon publications.
Instead, take a look at what’s really going on, in the bigger picture…
The following is a reprint of an article found on the Global Research website. All credit to the authors.
Washington elites can’t recognize that a multi-polar world is already here. Worse, the Trump administration keeps constantly stumbling in foreign policy, thus showing the entire world that the USA may not be the almighty superpower.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the US is turning into Rodney Dangerfield of geopolitics.
Here are some recent examples of embarrassing US foreign policy:
EU & Russia
USA openly tries to block Nord Stream, the gas pipeline that links Russia to Europe. And the US-led propaganda campaign was non-stop & intense.
In the end, Germany & others went ahead with the Russian pipeline anyways.
Nord Stream
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
India and Turkey
India and Turkey ignore America’s public bullying and buy Russian missile defense systems (S-400).
Then the US threatens to retaliate by blocking the sale of F-35 to Turkey.
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
India
India — America’s strategic partner to “contain” China — buys oil from Iran & Venezuela, ignoring US sanctions.
India and Iran have made many trade agreements.
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
Venezuela
Having failed in Syria & Iran, the bloodthirsty Neocons wanted at least one damn regime change. So they targeted Venezuela and used all the standard strategies — choosing a puppet leader (Guaido), trying to bribe/blackmail military leaders, obvious sabotage of electricity across the whole nation etc.
John Bolton, Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo spend enormous time tweeting sensational propaganda.
Yet, Maduro has survived.
Now, to rub it in, Putin is flying Russian military and aid to Venezuela; and China has sent medical supplies. The Monroe Doctrine is openly challenged for the first time since the Cuban Crisis.
Maduro and Xi Peng.
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
Huawei
US bans Huawei & dictates all its allies into doing the same!
Panama ignores US threats, welcomes Xi Jinping, joins Belt and Road, and signs 40 bilateral agreements with China.
Xi Peng in Panama.
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
Italy
Similarly, the US government publicly threatened Italy about joining the BRI…
How idiotic!
The rest of the world does not subscribe to American Alt-Right neocon publications. This type of rhetoric is fine within the American echo chamber, but looks absolutely ridiculous to the rest of the world.
Maybe Washington doesn’t know that many EU countries are already formal members of BRI — Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, Malta, Poland, Portugal etc.
Well, Xi Jinping visited Italy in March, got a royal welcome and signed huge deals.
Italy ignored the US and signed on to Belt and Road. Plus, Italian PM Conte visited China in April for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Summit (where representatives from 150 countries, including 37 Prime Ministers and Presidents, attended).
As Italian leaders put it, “BRI creates a circle of virtuous growth” and “BRI is a train that Italy cannot afford to miss.”
Also please note, that during the COVID-19 crisis, the United States refused to help Italy in any way.
Yet China not only sent supplies, but sent doctors and medical staff to assist the already stressed Italian medical staff.
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
France
Then Xi Jinping went to France, got a red carpet welcome again
(including at Arc de Triomphe in Paris) and signed a massive deal to buy
300 French Airbus planes!
Not the American planes that they had discussed with Obama.
Xi Jinping went to France, got a red carpet welcome again (including at Arc de Triomphe in Paris) and signed a massive deal to buy 300 French Airbus planes!
Two days earlier, Macron had warned that Europe shouldn’t be naive about China’s influence.
But now he claims “China is EU’s strategic partner!!!”
China is EU’s strategic partner!
What does this have to do with America? Why is America so fixated in preventing this progress?
Germany
Even Germany’s Merkel endorsed the Belt and Road Initiative by saying…
“It’s an important project and Europeans want to participate in it.”
Germany has become strategic partners with China.
Everyone around the world realizes the power of China’s economy. And they ignore America’s hysterical reaction.
The entire saga is like that “Distracted Boyfriend” meme.
“Distracted Boyfriend” meme.
America needs a proactive, constructive, positive foreign policy in this multi-polar world. And the US should stop being so insecure, paranoid and negative.
Trump should join the Belt and Road Initiative and work with 126 other member countries to build infrastructure, increase connectivity and boost trade. Also, stop demonizing Russia & picking fights with Venezuela, Iran, Syria etc.
We need to get out of the zero-sum attitude & focus on a win-win strategy.
Conclusion
It doesn’t take a “Rocket Scientist” to figure out where the world is moving towards.
America possesses 10% of the world’s factories. China possesses nearly 70% of the factories. China hasn’t fought a war since 1977, and they offer grants and loans with “no strings attached”. They seek harmony and a “win – win” arrangement. They view global relationships as “give and take” in a way that both parties benefit.
They keep their “noses out of” other nations internal affairs.
Hard manufacturing industry as part of a nation’s GDP world-wide. America is on par with Burma. Even tiny Sri Lanka, and Paraguay have better ratios.
Meanwhile the United States, like a big lumbering aged dinosaur is trying to clutch and claw itself back into global significance. It has to. For if it doesn’t, that enormous mountain of debt, based on the inflated petrol-dollars, will totally devastate what remains of America.
The only options left for America are to [1] get with “the program” and work together with the rest of the world, or [2] engage China (and by extension, Russia) in World War III.
No other options are “on the table”.
Let’s see what happens. Pay strict attention to the American mainstream and Alt-Right media. The nature of the articles will inform you as to which path America has embarked upon.
If the anti-China rhetoric keeps on increasing in intensity, a move to Iceland might be prudent.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have many others in my Trump Trade Wars Index, here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
We like to think that we are independent thinkers. We like to believe that we really know what is going on in the world. We know that the American government controls the press, and that the rich oligarchy controls the Big Government Deep State. And we think of everyone else that believes them as “sheeple”.
But perhaps, the government controls ALL of the media, both the left-wing and the right-wing.
And that perhaps you are being led to believe that you are thinking independently, when you are actually just following the programmed narrative that the PTB (the Powers That Be) desire.
I see this in the narratives that are almost always easy to categorize by political affiliation. It's become simplistic and frightening.
Here we discuss this mechanism.
The following is an article titled:”Social Media Is A Polarization Machine” by FMPadmin6120 written on December 31, 2019. It is edited to fit this venue, but aside from that left intact. All credit to the author; Paul Rosenberg at www.freemansperspective.com .
Sure, we’ve all seen this in practice and people have developed catchy terms for it, like echo chamber, but the polarization effect of social media has been demonstrated scientifically. In fact, some of us were warning about it more than a decade ago. And while I can no longer find my original documentation on the subject, I can tell you precisely how it works.
The One-Room Phenomenon
What researchers discovered about twenty years ago was that putting people of the same opinion into a single room had a striking effect: The opinion in the room moved, inevitably, to the extreme. And this effect was the same no matter what the original opinion may have been.
So, then:
If you put a bunch of right-wingers in a room, the shared opinion in the room will become stridently right-wing.
If you put a bunch of left-wingers in a room, the shared opinion in the room will become stridently left-wing.
If you put a bunch of save-the-planet advocates in a room, their opinion will become all the more adamantly save-the-planet.
If you put in a bunch of the-planet-is-just-fine advocates, their opinion will become all the more adamantly the-planet-is-just-fine.
This happens because of human insecurity and status-seeking: Anyone taking a contrary opinion (advocating “right-wing” economics in the left-wing room, for example) is instantly branded as a traitor and suffers heavy shaming within the group.
Gaining social status in the closed room, however, is simple and obvious: You just adopt a stronger, more polarized, version of the original opinion.
Because of this, the opinion in a closed group becomes more and more severe. That is, it becomes increasingly polarized.
Yeah, They Know
Like I said at the open, if you’ve observed people at all, you’ve seen them polarized by Facebook. They climb into their groups, block discordant voices, and end up in a (partly) self-created echo chamber.
I say “partly” self-created because Facebook knows all too well what they’re doing. They want people who are emotionally tied to their groups. It’s called addiction, and it’s what makes Facebook rich.
Being polarized also makes people cold and cruel. Anyone who’s on the other side of what their group thinks is not just wrong, but evil. And whoever fails to agree with them is their opponent… an object of disgust.
In that condition, people will advocate all sorts of stupid and even abominable positions, assured that the members of their group will support them tooth and nail. It’s now common, after all, for such groups to lump ten million people together and slap a negative verdict on them all. If you’re the wrong skin color, or too old, or too young, or a dozen other things, you’re “privileged,” or “don’t get it,” or something else. That is, you are declared evil. After that, whoever hurts you is a hero.
This serves Facebook, you understand. Once your opinions are polarized, you are dependent on your group and you’ll be unable to leave.
This addiction is also crucial for political causes. Facebook provides hard believers: addicts with claims to righteousness. And that means that politicians need Facebook, and deeply. Politicians get ahead by making their opponents into monsters, after all, and social media may be the best tool ever for creating polar opposites. (Or at least the illusion thereof.)
The Awakening Has Begun
Little by little, people are waking up to the evils of group dynamics and the devolutionary effects they generate.
Twitter, in my opinion, is the least bad of the centralized social media platforms, and will hopefully be decentralizing at some point. They have, at least, a team working on that.
There are decentralized social media experiments coming along, and I hope they succeed, but the closed group problem will remain, even if it isn’t stoked to the limit by political and financial mercenaries((I was ready to write “whores,” rather than “mercenaries,” but I can’t equate sex workers, even metaphorically, with willful and purposeful abusers of mankind.)).
Thoughtful, observant and intelligent people are noticing that social media makes humans hateful, as well as lonely, insecure and miserable. I hope that knowledge spreads. I further hope that people will realize the past ten years of their life have been polluted by social media.
No, there’s nothing wrong with talking to friends and sharing ideas, but Facebook and other social media companies have weaponized this. They are intentionally abusing human instincts.
So, don’t get angry and hateful in response; just stop rewarding them. People who addict and polarize you are precisely the wrong ones to empower.
Social media is a polarization machine. Separating from it would be a very good idea.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
We have gotten so used to the way that things are, we painstakingly believe that they have always been this way. We think that taxes, regulation and dual-working families are the norm. They are not. They are progressive inventions. The life we live today is the utopia that President Wilson forged back in 1913.
Here, we take a look at what life was like before the progressive improvements in American Society.
Detroit’s Belle Isle back in 1905. Source: Coleman Family
Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, circa 1905. “Lawn tennis courts, Pocono Mountain House.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
When
writing historical things, I try to include perspective from people who
actually lived through the events. And for money issues in the US, I’m
able to do that back to about 1905.
So, do you think life was nasty, brutish, and short in 1905? That
there were poor and starving people falling dead on every street corner?
Hardly.
1905. “Lackawanna Railway station, Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
The Wright brothers
were flying for 30 minutes at a crack; Einstein was upgrading the laws
of physics; telephones and electric lights were being installed all
across America; Henry Ford was getting the final pieces in place for his
moving assembly line and Model T; radio was being developed; art was flourishing; and the world was more or less at peace.
American homes in 1905.
Sure, we have far more tech and better medicine now, but mostly
because the people of earlier times (like the 1905 era) gifted it to us.
People in 1905 lived in heated homes, refrigerated their food, had access to professional physicians, traveled the world
(mostly on trains and ships), read daily newspapers (there were many
more of them in those days), watched movies, and ate just about the same
foods we eat.
Chicago circa 1906. “Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
So, was it really that bad a time?
No, it wasn’t. In fact, it was better in important ways.
Money Issues in the US: The Facts Don’t Lie
Consider this:
The working person of 1905 kept his or her money. They ended up saving somewhere between a quarter and a half of everything they made – after living expenses.
Portland, Maine, circa 1905. “Congress Square Hotel, Congress Street and Forest Avenue.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
It’s hard to be completely precise when reconstructing the budgets of
average people in 1905 (records are hard to find), but we do have
enough for a good, close guess.
Here’s how finance worked for a working family man of 1905:
Life in the center of a medium sized town in 1905.
If you’re thinking that I’m taking liberties with these numbers, let
me assure you that I’m not – I’m being conservative. For example:
The income figure should probably be higher. I’ve found figures of well over $800 for construction workers.
As for expenses, I rounded up from a New York Times article, dated 29 September, 1907. It specified $325 per year.
Added to that is the fact that many people grew their own food during that time, which would skew the figures further.
As noted initially, I compared these numbers with stories I heard
from relatives who lived through the time. My uncle Dave, for example,
used to tell me how he got a job paying $390 per year sweeping floors as
an unskilled immigrant (who spoke almost no English) in 1903.
New York, 1904. “A flower vender’s Easter display, Union Square.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
The next time you drive through an old part of town and see the grand old houses, remember that people were able to build and buy them because their paychecks weren’t stripped bare.
There were no income taxes in 1905, no sales taxes, no state taxes, and not much in the way of property taxes.
Circa 1905. “Saranac Lake central station, Adirondacks, N.Y.” With a locomotive of the Delaware & Hudson Railway. 8×10 inch glass negative
There was also no such thing as a military-industrial complex in those days, and – miracle of miracles – the rest of the world survived!
And Now…
Today, the situation is much, much different. The average working family pays about half their income in combined taxes:
income taxes (to the state and the Feds), payroll taxes, property
taxes, gas taxes, utility bill taxes, sales tax, local taxes, and on and
on.
Philadelphia circa 1904. “City Hall clock tower from South Broad Street.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
So, figuring an average income of just over $50,000 (the 2011
figure). And combined taxes of about $25,000, the average American
family is left to pay bills like these:
Mortgage 11,000 Car payments 6,000 Gas, repairs, etc. 2,500 Property taxes 2,500 Food 3,000 Total $25,000
That leaves people zeroed-out. And again, I’m being conservative, and I haven’t included a number of smaller expenses.
The Mississippi River circa 1905. “Union Depot and steamboat landing at foot of Jackson Street, St. Paul, Minnesota.” Starring the sidewheeler Hiawatha. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
Great Grandpa Did It, So Why Not Us?
Your great grandfathers faced very few of the taxes that we face.
(The government survived on tariffs.) There was no social security
either, and – believe it or not – the streets were never full of
starving old people. Families were able to take care of their own – it’s not that hard when you’re saving half of your income!
Circa 1905. “St. John Street, Quebec.” Rue Saint-Jean at Côte du Palais in Quebec City, home to the drugstores of P. Mathie and J.E. Livernois. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
We have forgotten that it was once possible for an average person to accumulate money. The truth is that productive people should be comfortable. Well-off, as they used to say.
So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?
New York circa 1903. “Looking up Broadway from City Hall.” With a view of the National Shoe & Leather Bank, and a roving vendor of DESKS.
So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?
…
…
So why NOT?
…
You might want to think about that question.
May 1910. “Noon hour at Obear-Nestor Glass Co., East St. Louis, Illinois. Names of the smallest boys are: Walter Kohler, 981 N. 18th Street; Walter Riley, 918 N. 17th Street; Will Convery, 1828 Natalie Avenue; Clifford Matheny, 1927 Summit Avenue. All employed at the glassworks.” Photo by Lewis Hine.
Thank you for reading this masterfully written piece. If you loved the photos, you can check out a ton-load of them on SHORPY. You can go to SHORPY HERE.
Circa 1907. “Northampton, Massachusetts — Elm Street.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Meme
And here’s a meme that you can use to spread the message…
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
You will find all sorts of information on the internet. This is especially true about the COVID-19 coronavirus. Contemporaneously, the advice in America has gone from [1] “not to worry, the flu is far worse”, to [2] “wash your hands, but you don’t need to wear a mask”, to [3] “stay indoors as much as possible”. Great Dejesus, people! Is that the best advice the enormous American government (and by extension, their media) can give? Ok, well, here’s what to do and why. It’s straight up and no bull shit.
The following is a reprint of an article titled: COVID-19: Why America May Be Hit Hard for 3-4 Months & What To Do, written by Dr. Carl Juneau, PhD . All credit to the author.
COVID-19: Why America May Be Hit Hard for 3-4 Months & What To Do
March 13 ·
updated March 16, 6:34 pm ET · now includes US cases by time, infected
people without symptoms spreading the virus, and predictions based on 5
other countries.
Coronavirus cases in the United States by time.
It’s here. COVID-19 hit China, Europe, and is grinding America to a halt. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency. Still, as a PhD in Public Health who specialized in epidemiology, I’m worried. Here’s why:
You have a compromised immune system (Health Canada)
You have a condition (heart or respiratory disease, diabetes, hypertention, or cancer)
Symptoms can take up to 14 days to appear. You can transmit the virus even if you have no symptoms (Bai et al. 2020), and possibly 1-2 weeks after symptoms (Woelfel et al. 2020, preprint data).
A comparison of the top infected nations in the world today.
“It is a failing, let’s admit it.”
This is Dr. Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a congressional hearing.
“The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that.”
Americans are not getting tested.
As of March 12, The Atlantic estimates that about 8,000 people have been tested in the US. Compare that to 29,700 in the UK and 210,000 in South Korea, and you can see why the number of confirmed cases in the US is suspiciously low.
“It has probably bought us a few hours, maybe a day or two”
When people don’t interact with each other, the virus doesn’t spread. You can see it in the following chart: Chinese regions (except Hubei) contained the outbreak with lock-downs, whereas South Korea, Italy, and Iran reacted late and saw it spread.
But with so many untested and undetected cases, it’s probably coming in too late. See the lines curving up for South Korea, Italy, and Iran? I’m afraid this is what’s coming for the US. But it may not be too late to flatten the curve.
Flatten the curve
You can slow down the outbreak by keeping your distance. In Italy, the town of Lodi had the first case, and locked down on Feb 23. Bergamo waited until March 8.
See the difference:
A comparison of two Italian cities and what happened when they waited to lock-down the community.
An initial report on Clinical Characteristics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Guan et al. 2020) found 1.4% of patients died.
As of March 14, worldwide, 3.7% of the 145,902 people infected suffered the same fate.
But rates vary by country.
Italy, where more seniors are infected, has a rate of 7.2%.
“They may be particularly at risk for the coronavirus”
People without insurance often wait until their
conditions become serious before seeking medical help, so they could
infect many others (CNN, 2020).
In an interview with Berkeley News, Stephen Shortell, PhD, Dean Emeritus of the School of Public Health, explains:
"Financial access to care is simply not a problem in most other developed countries, like Italy and South Korea."
But in the US, without health insurance, the situation could be worse.
"Those without insurance tend to be lower income, have less than high school education, work in low wage jobs, live in areas that have more pollution and fewer health resources, and generally are in poorer health. Thus, they may be particularly susceptible/vulnerable/at risk for the coronavirus."
Sick Leave
Lack of paid sick leave is another problem.
“Many people will go to work sick, causing the virus to spread more widely.”
-Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research
"Those who are employed are more likely to go to work even when they are ill, because the low wage jobs typically do not have good sick leave policies, and people need the income."
That’s why I’m afraid the US may be hit
the hardest, and become the next epicenter of the pandemic. So what
actions can you take to slow down the outbreak?
According to models shared with about 50 expert teams, 160-214 million people in the US could be infected, with as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million dying if no actions were taken to slow transmission.
Total cases in the USA and 5 other countries.
Other countries suggest outbreak will last 3-4 months
Total cases in Italy, UK, and Iran have
been going up for 1 month (see above). South Korea, with great measures
in place, has just stabilised after 1 month. The US, arguably, has bad
measures in place. So I estimate 1-2 months of total cases going up.
Next, people infected start to recover,
or die (1-7%). But new people get infected, so the curve becomes flat.
The curve was stable for 1-2 weeks in South Korea and China, with good
measures in place.
Then most people have been exposed. You
either got it, didn’t get it, got sick and recovered, or you’re dead. So
cases go down. Active cases in China have been going down for 1 month.
But people are still dying, and have another 2-3 weeks to go.
Based on the above, I predict 3-4 months
total. Still, it’s not too late to slow down the outbreak, and avoid
overburdening hospitals. What can you do?
Stay home
The best way to stop the outbreak is to stay home. It worked in China (see lockdowns above). In fact, according to the World Health Organization, even if you have mild respiratory symptoms, you should stay home. Here are more tips from the Organization:
To recap:
Wash your hands often (e.g. when you get home, before you eat, after using the restroom)
Wash your hands at least 20 seconds (with soap or a rub with at least 60% alcohol)
Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth
Cover your mouth and nose with your bent elbow when you cough
Maintain at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing
If you have a fever, cough and
difficulty breathing, seek medical attention and call in advance. Follow
the directions of your local health authority.
If you can, stay home. Tell your parents
and friends to stay home. Especially those aged 65 and up (or with
compromised immune systems or a medical condition), as the virus is more deadly to them. Be safe!
A note to athletes
I work with athletes. If you train, you should watch out for:
Overtraining. This is when you train vigorously, yet performance deteriorates (Lakier Smith, 2003). You risk supressing your immune system, putting you at risk for upper respiratory tract infections (MacKinnon, 2000).
Cutting weight.Hagmar et al. (2008) found that athletes striving for leanness reported being ill more often in the last 3 months. Tsai et al. (2011)
found that taekwondo athletes who trained hard and cut weight before a
national competition had suppressed mucosal immunity and more upper
respiratory tract infections.
Concerned? It might be a good idea to ease off. What to do instead? Sleep, if you’re like the 1 in 3 Americans who don’t get enough sleep (CDC, 2016). Lack of sleep creates low-grade inflammation and weakens your immune system (Besedovsky et al. 2012).
How long should you sleep? At least 7 hours a night (CDC, 2016).
Tell your US friends
Will 200,000 to 1.7 million Americans die, as the CDC experts projected? Not if we act in a big way.
So please share this article with your US friends. They need to understand and stay home. Act now, and we can avoid the worst.
About the Author
Dr. Carl Juneau holds a PhD in Public Health, with a specialization in epidemiology. He usually writes about exercise as the founder and CEO of Dr. Muscle. Email · Facebook · LinkedIn
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CDC director Redfield admits there were unreported Covid "events" in US, in which case predated outbreak in China.
-The Hill
Functionally, the COVID-19 viral form is American. Not Asian. America has five viral archetypes, China has one. If it is natural, it must come from that regional archetype. And the COVID-19 archetype is one of the five American types. It’s not the Asian archetype.
It cannot naturally arise in Asia.
(Which is of course the argument that the Chinese stole bio-weapon technology from America.)
Only thing is, though, why would the Chinese want to subject their own people to a lethal virus…
You need to be a tin-foil-hat-wearing-Alt-Right- conspiracy-nut to follow the sort of twisted logic that is being bantered about to fit that narrative. Most of the Chinese I know are hyper-patriotic and are tickled pink proud of their nation, their people and their struggles.
So what’s going on?
Is the COVID-19 an American bio-weapon used by Trump in his latest incarnations of Chinese rise suppression…
…or, is it something else entirely.
This post considers the idea that it might have rose naturally, or at least, semi-naturally, from the Americas.
The Argument
Could this COVID-19 virus been in the Americas for most of 2019? Could it been floating around, getting people sick and killing people? Could it be misdiagnosed as other things?
As other things…
The e-vaping “crisis” of August 2019.
Perhaps all those vaping lung problems attributed to e-cigarettes back in August 2019 were really due to COVID-19. Funny thing. Everyone has a low dry cough, a fever, and then their lungs filled up with fluid.
Do you remember what had happened to the more than a few American tourists who suddenly collapsed and mysteriously died in the Dominican Republic? Funny thing. Everyone has a low dry cough, a fever, and then their lungs filled up with fluid.
Remember they thought the tourists were being poisoned.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, flu season is really bad this year, with almost a 100,000 people reporting symptoms in the U.S. and upwards of 30 flu-related deaths.
- Here's why flu season is so bad this year
Prior to the news out of Wuhan, America was rocked with “an unusually bad flu season”. Now it seems that this “flu” was actually COVID-19. Funny thing, the “flu symptoms” this year were a little different. Everyone has a low dry cough, a fever, and then their lungs filled up with fluid.
This COVID-19 is a terrible virus. Whether it is a bio-weapon or not, whether it originated in America, China or some other place does not matter. What really matters is that we fully understand what we are dealing with.
Instead of point fingers, let’s just look at what was going on over the world leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak in China.
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is an interesting article that I personal believe has merit. It is, of course, about the United States and some historical events that resulted into the cluster-fuck that America is today. It describes the “improvements” by the radical “enlightened” progressives that changed America into an oligarchy.
Good going assholes.
Well, the United States Empire is on the decline and the people on the decks of the sinking ship are all scurrying here and there trying to make sense of things, and figuring out how to survive the tumult. It’s horrific.
This article kind of winds the clock back a spell. We look at what events caused the great ship to sink. (Um. Many.) Now I have covered this subject in numerous other posts, but here we have another person that wants to throw his “two cents” into the fray.
It’s a good read.
(I am getting tired of the COVID-19 posts, lately.)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how things are and how we got here – and I think I’ve identified the date when we went off course: September 14th, 1901.
The day William McKinley died, a few days after being shot.
Take a look at this last address, made shortly before he was shot – do read the whole thing.
But the bit that stands out for me is how he talks at length about the growing inter-dependence of the world…
… while also asserting that our fair trade relations must never be done at the expense of our home production.
Get it?
We must trade, but we must never harm ourselves in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
This is the sort of speech we got when the President and Congress were trying to serve the interests of the American people…
… and they were doing what they did out in the open, debating it in public, and working strictly within the Constitutional confines of our government.
President McKinley
People don’t think much of McKinley and even someone as versed in history as I am only have a slight bit of knowledge about him…
… from a prosperous Ohio family; Civil War service, law, politics and the rise to the top.
He is portrayed as unimaginative; plodding.
He is entirely overshadowed by the man who succeeded him, Theodore Roosevelt, who is always cast in heroic terms…
…taking over and reinvigorating the American government.
But I think we can see now, at long remove, that having a vigorous American government isn’t an unalloyed benefit.
With a slight hiccup under Coolidge in the 1920’s, since McKinley we’ve seen the atrophy of Congressional power; an increasingly Imperial Presidency and the massive expansion of government control…
… and, over the long term, the imposition of policies which are overtly destructive of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt came in and had his famous assertion that if the law doesn’t specifically prohibit a President from doing a thing, then the thing can be done.
It was a gigantic shift.
It started the process of having our system being that of a government with strictly enumerated powers to having a government doing whatever it can get away with.
Wilson and FDR just put that attitude on steroids…
… so much so that even a limited government man like Reagan still blithely exercised powers that Presidents up to McKinley would never dreamed of exercising.
But a government without limits is a government which not only can do anything…
… it will do anything…
… and as it will still be a government run by human beings, it will almost certainly end up doing whatever those with the most influence demand.
And therein lies our problem.
Today
Realize that today – right now – there are people, right and left, who are demanding that Trump essentially go to war with Turkey because they think it wrong that the Turks are going after the Kurds.
Maybe the Turks are wrong.
But if the Turks are wrong, then it isn’t for the American President to decide if we fight them…
…or, at least, it isn’t supposed to be the President who decides if we fight…
… it is supposed to be Congress.
Our Congress, which will debate a declaration of war and then vote on it…and if approved, we go to war.
But, we’re so far down this road that most don’t even see that – they are so used, that is, to the government just doing things that they are demanding it just do something in Syria.
And do something about climate change.
And do something about trans people.
And do something about illegal immigrants.
And so on and on and on.
A big mess.
And think about what we’ve got: a gigantic system of treaties, alliances, agreements, laws, regulations and such which authorize this, that or the other thing and none of it is fully known, hardly any of it was really debated…
…and it is all in the service of doing something…
… nobody really knows what…
… but if we don’t keep things just as they are, disaster will result.
Or, so we’re told.
President Trump
I asserted some while back that President Trump is the most law-abiding President we’ve had since Coolidge: and I’m sure I’m right about that.
I do not say the most morally excellent President – first off, I can’t peer into souls and so I’m unable to judge the status of President Trump’s; secondly, because it is irrelevant to whether or not the President obeys the law.
And Trump obeys the law.
The proof of that is that after years of relentlessly being investigated (often by entirely illegal means) they still haven’t found a crime they can hang around his neck.
Hardly anyone could survive that scrutiny…
…but, Trump has.
And if you look at what he says and does, he’s always acting within the law and asking Congress to codify things into law. He isn’t President Pen and Phone.
I don’t know if this lawfulness is the result of deep thought on the part of the President or mere instinct – but regardless, Trump has hit upon the first requirement of liberty: adherence to law.
That we can only do, via government, what the law says we can do – no more, no less and if you don’t like it, change the law via lawful means.
A Nation of Laws
It is my view that a Republic must strictly enforce its laws – and because of this, the laws must be [1] few and [2] easy to understand…
… and the government must not attempt to manage the lives of the people…
… because doing so requires a multiplicity of laws…
… each of which will merely increase government power along with the ability to abuse that power.
We cannot, willy nilly, go back to 1901…
… but we must go back to it as much as we can, and the first step is to start enforcing all the laws.
The laws against illegal entry. The laws against government malfeasance. So on and so forth: it doesn’t matter if they are good or bad laws: if they are on the books, they must be strictly enforced.
And it is the strict enforcement of bad laws which will ensure their repeal or modification…
… keeping in mind that a host of laws are on the books which routinely trip up regular folks…
… and they are kept intact because they aren’t allowed to trip up the Ruling Class…
…start having people like Hillary going to jail like a poor swabby who took a wrong picture…
… and all of a sudden our Rulers will be less interested in keeping laws like that on the books.
Detangling
The next part of a restoration should be, in my view, a disentangling of the United States from the world.
We can be an Empire or a Republic: We can’t be both.
NATO has to go.
The UN has to go.
Free Trade has to go – I am going to write up about what McKinley was talking up: Trade Reciprocity, which I think that Trump is on about. I want us to trade with the world – but only in ways that are mutually beneficial.
Bring our boys and girls back home.
Maintain a second-to-none military force in being. Advise the world that an attack upon the United States is a suicidal act – and then destroy the first nation which tests us on it. If we have alliances, they are to be temporary and serving a particular national goal.
No more CIA.
No more NSA.
No more FBI. Relations with tyrannical States to be kept to a minimum (tyranny and liberty cannot really coexist).
It is time – past time – that we gave up the goals of those who don’t have our interests at heart.
This is our country – it is made by us and for us.
It is not a world police, nor a dumping ground for the world’s refuse. It is a place where free people debate among themselves and decide via law what course to follow.
It is time, that is, for America to be America.
Conclusion
If laws are being selectively enforced, then America functionally has no laws. Instead it operates lawlessly outside the confines of its charter.
America became this “whatever it is” over the years. And it all pretty much began a hundred years ago.
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
The horrible yank track record when included, tips this into deliberate bio weapon deployment territory.
-Mike T
Translated from Chinese.
You don’t think that the Chinese people read CNN, MSNBC, and FOX news do you? They don’t. To them, the nonsense spouted out of the American media outlets are something from the “Outer Limits”. They have their own media, their own chat rooms, and their own theories.
Now that the COVID-19 is spreading and mutating all over the world, the idea that it was a Frankenstein-bio-weapon-virus to suppress China is taking hold within China. For the Chinese have a “front row seat” in all of this. And…
They are not stupid.
The current Covid-19 panic was caused by seven weeks of daily anti-China propaganda as the international media abused the crisis to bash Chinese officials, citizens and their culture. H1N1 originated in the U.S. which utterly failed to contain it. It was therefore not propagandized.
-MoA
America is still holding on to the China-is-incompetent narrative…
The science surrounding these apparent reinfections is further complicated by China’s handling of the outbreak, which since January has been marred by faulty testing procedures and questionable case counting methods with shifting definitions. In addition, the overburdened healthcare system has put pressure on doctors to discharge people who may not have fully recovered to free up beds for newly infected patients.
China has been praised in recent weeks by the World Health Organization for containing the virus. But the Communist Party’s early moves to suppress public knowledge on the extent of infections prompt concerns over the accuracy of information about recovered patients who retest positive but may have been misdiagnosed in the first place.
-LA Times
So, you don’t need to freak out, and you do not need to wear a mask…
You do not need to wear a face mask to protect yourself from this airborne virus.
But that’s gonna change…
Pretty soon you will see the Hard-Line Conservatives in the USA start to blame China for the virus. Already they are calling it the “Wuhan Flu“… intentionally to generate bad will against China.
Well, what isn’t reported in the American Press is that the Chinese government has identified [1] who made the virus and [2] how it took hold so rapidly within China. And…
Scientific analysis revealed by Larry Romanoff suggests that the virus was “Made in America”:
“it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US. …
In February, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus.
This is another article, a Chinese one, that discusses this turn of events. It’s a long read. I mean… Looooooong. But it will give you an idea of what CHINA and the Chinese people think of all this.
As you read it, please keep in your mind that the Chinese people are NOT the cardboard-cut-out black-and-white cartoon that the American Alt-Right media portrays them as. They are hyper-patriotic, smart, and industrious.
Hyper-patriotic. Keep that in mind.
This is a reprint of a Chinese article titled “*Theory* Coronavirus is biological warfare to decouple the US-China economies as a prelude to US attacking China in a fighting war”, written on March 10, 2020 by Liberty Cat. The original Source (PDF with Chinese translation). (This blog post archived.)
Aside from editing the post to fit this venue, and adding much sorely needed punctuation, little has been changed. My impression is this singular article is but a collection of similar articles all strung together into a singular format for Western audiences. All credit to the authors, who ever they might be.
*Theory* Coronavirus is biological warfare intended to decouple the US-China economies as a prelude to US attacking China in a fighting war
This is the biggest and most important issue of our time…
The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was designed by the United States and planted in Wuhan, China, by the American CIA.
It was done so as a biological weapon meant to…
Decouple the US-China economies;
To separate, segregate, and to isolate China from the rest of the world.
To facilitate the closing of borders;
The severing of supply chains;
The intention of rerouting trade to bypass China.
All with the purpose of weakening China from within.
While causing internal strife and sowing chaos and discord.
But also as a prelude to a US-initiated fighting war against China in the South China Sea.
The ultimate purpose is to protect and restore American hegemony.
Including protecting the US petrodollar hegemony against the rising Huawei-enabled Chinese blockchain-based digital Yuan. As well as China’s Belt and Road infrastructure and trade initiatives in Eurasia
All the while intending to fully collapse the Chinese government…
To cut off China from global trade and international commerce
To force a regime change of China’s government.
After, of course, defeating China in a devastating physical war.
I believe and have compelling circumstantial reason to believe that the American CIA injected and planted the so-called “Wuhan virus” into Wuhan, China.
I believe that they did so in or around the dates of October 31st 2019 to December 31st 2019.
That it was done maliciously and methodically with the intent to harm China, and the Chinese people. As well as with potential to destabilize and perhaps even with the motive to collapse China from within.
Some Videos
Geopolitics of the South China Sea
PETROYUAN, CHINA’s strategy to DEFEAT the DOLLAR
China’s trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade
The People’s Republic of The Future
Is war between China and the US inevitable? | Graham Allison
America to Isolate China
The US wants to re-route global supply chain around China.
They want to bypass China and isolate China on the world stage as opposed to what the Chinese want.
The Chinese want to use Huawei-enabled digital-blockchain Yuan, and cashless WeChat, etc to topple the US Petrodollar hegemony.
The Chinese want also to use the Chinese the (One Belt One Road) BRI / OBOR relationships and bi-lateral trade/infrastructure agreements.
By the world accepting thus system and trade agreements, the world would adopt the use of the digital Yuan, and in order to have the world bypass the SWIFT system…
Since US has abused its dollar status and weaponized it for unlawful sanctions.
… and to bypass the US dollar as the default global reserve currency etc.
Why Now?
It was a race against time to see whom would pull the rug from underneath the other countries feet first.
The US, unable to compete fairly due to its structural disadvantages and its many other shortcomings, decided to go the biological attack route…
… which allows it to hide under the cover of “plausible deniability”…
Since it is more difficult to conclusively prove the attribution or source of a new mysterious virus than it would be to track the trajectory of an incoming thermonuclear missile etc.
… to inflict maximum damage to China while minimizing the potential blow-back.
A plausible deniability meme.
How it began…
Right after the signing of the so-called “Trade Deal” in which the US didn’t get what it wanted…
(The US did not get the sort of Plaza Accord concessions that it was hoping to get out of President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and thought that China would kowtow to the US.)
…and immediately into the start of the new decade…
(Marking the turn of the second decade in what the PNAC would called the “New American Century” in which it proposed using genetic viral targeting to accomplish political motives)
…the US resorted to biological attacks in order to contain, isolate and attempt to cripple China/CCP internally and on the world stage at large.
After its NED/CIA sponsored Hong Kong destablization / radicialization didn’t spill over into the rest of mainland China…
… and right after its intense year long anti-China anti-Huawei campaigns have peaked in effectiveness…
… the US releases the evil demon virus into the heart of mainland China, at the absolutely worst possible location…
(Wuhan being one of the Chinese main Central hubs in terms of transportation and an important city for China’s Belt and Road initiatives and estimated to have as high as 8% growth in GDP in 2020)
… and in also the absolute worst possible timing…
(Right before the Chinese Lunar New year, otherwise known as the greatest annual human migration event, during a time in which shopping, spending and consumerism activity would have been at a peak.)
… in order to cripple China economically…
… to cut China off from the rest of the world…
…. and force China to isolate its own cities from within…
…, and to have the effect of smearing China’s reputation on the world stage…
…while invoking the escalation of fear, racism and bigotry towards the Chinese people abroad.
Earlier bio-weapons events
All this comes right on top of the heels of the event last fall, African swine fever (ASF)…
… which had never before seen in China but now mysteriously appeared with the onset of the US trade war…
… decimated half of China’s pigs, which doubled pork prices and contributed to inflation causing pricy US pork exports to double in China.
The odds for two such consequent anomalies, timing and location are exceedingly low.
Yet both did occur – in almost perfect sequence.
Particularly devastating is the very real possibility that this virus was intentionally engineered to have as long an incubation period as possible, and with the ability to hide within plain sight…
… by being asymptomatic during its initial stages…
… hence making it orders of magnitude more difficult to eradicate.
Just recently, as recent as Feb 1st 2020, there has been yet a third mysterious outbreak in China, this time of the bird flu kind that is far more deadly to humans and wiping out Chinese chicken and poultry at the most dire of times.
Designed to kill the Chinese Advance
Indeed the coronavirus victims so far, both inside and outside of China, are only people with Chinese type of blood, Haplogroup O-M175, designed to attack that type of blood and specifically Chinese people.
Dr. Steven Hatfill Biological Weapons Expert says the Wuhan virus it will have to play it out and “run its course” not only in Wuhan but the greater mainland China.
The host of “War Room: Pandemic” Mr. Steve Bannon (Trump’s chief campaign advisor and trusted sidekick) predicted this will crush China economically, and that its the end of the XI/BRI/OBOR…
… and will give US the chance to re-route trade of all countries to go-around and bypass China…
… bringing the global supply chain back to US and its allies…
… whilst isolating China economically, politically, etc.
They are selling this to the American people and pitching it to the world as this evil Chinese Belt and Road connectivity is what is allowing this virus to spread so quickly to the rest of the world…
… and that it would behoove mankind and all nations to reconsider the security and stability of their own supply chains…
… and basically urging everyone to pull their companies, people, trade, businesses etc out of China.
This is not unlike what Wilber Ross US Commerce Secretary already
stated a few days ago… that this virus is good for America and will help
bring lots of jobs back to the USA… seems like the goal is to use this
event to pull the rug underneath China’s development feets.
It’s a coincidence…
I suppose it could be a coincidence that China, the geopolitical adversary and economic enemy to the United States (according to the US itself)…
… suddenly gets this mysterious virus seemingly far more potent than SARS…
(which itself apparently only targeted Chinese ethnic DNA and left the white/Caucasian population untouched)
…at the worst possible timing and in the worst possible location.
Wuhan being Chinese’s central hub and this being the Chinese Lunar New Year, it has the highest ability to spread and go “super viral”…
… whilst impacting the max amount of damage to the stability of the China…
… both in terms of having the max potential to cause political turmoil in the homeland
(Ruining people’s new year, quarantine and lock-downs of cities of unprecedented proportion, causing many Chinese citizens to get angry etc.)
… and doing the maximum amount of possible damage to the Chinese economy, ruining the New Year in which consumerism was supposed to be at its very highest points.
Even the SARS of 2003 had a negative impact on Chinese GDP by as much as 2%…
… and this new novel virus has already turned out to be far worse than SARS and at a much more accelerated speed of spread and deaths.
Unsurprisingly, without need for a single bullet fired or sanction imposed, it already managed to force China to self-impose the closure of its borders and cities…
… most nations have already stopped flights to China including the United States itself…
… on the world stage it is another “ding” for China’s image and gives the propaganda mouthpieces of the West something else to gripe about…
… whilst at the same time an attempt to cap Chinese One Belt One Road ambitions and sabotage China’s growing economy and hegemonic rise.
It comes right on the crisp of Trump signing the fake “Trade Deal” and the UK decided to go against the US and work with Huawei….
Behind the Curtain…
I say something else is going on behind the scenes, more than what we are being told.
We could have transition from Trade War…
… to Tech War…
… to now maybe bio-war...
… if that is the case, then very likely the US already fired the first, second, and third shots, so to speak.
China should at least stay very vigilant and have a credible deterrence contingency plan in place…
In the nuclear world in which China has DF-41, the “MAD” (Mutual
Assured Destruction) doctrine is still well in place. But a mystery
virus affords far more “plausible deniability” for the US. Thus
achieving the goal with less fear of attribution and thus retribution.
Instead of directly confronting China in the South China Sea
militaristically immediately, maybe they think a better way to take
China down a notch or two would be the use of “other means” to an ends…
John Bolton Quote.
It’s a Dangerous Time.
Science and technology in the world has come a long way since the days of Westerners giving Native Americans blankets laced with smallpox to “thanksgiving” them.
It is the human condition to be risk/loss adverse.
A nation that would stop at nothing to achieve Manifest Destiny on the way up surely wouldn’t have any qualms of preserving its hegemony at all costs on the way down.
After all, the American way of life is non-negotiable and Graham T. Allison predicted the likelihood that this confrontation of a rising power with a declining power will inevitably lead to war, and history has shown that to be indeed the case.
The US is applying its doctrine of maximum pressure to destroy China on all fronts, with Trade War, Tech and supply chain War, cyberwar, information and psychological operations warfare, and now biological warfare and most likely to be followed up with conventional or even nuclear war once US believes China is sufficiently weakened.
Steve Bannon was hoping to “break the back of the CCP ( Chinese Communist Party )” by cutting off China’s supply chain…
… and was hoping the Hong Kong riots was going to catch fire in the rest of the mainland…
…so to force the CCP to lose control…
… making it easier to do an opportunistic regime change.
The Dangerous “Red Line”
I’m sure both China and US have their own red-lines.
If the US had any involvement in this new virus, if China finds any credible evidence, then there are a number of things China can do besides retaliating with its own bio-weapon…
For example, we all know the Trade War is not about trade, but wanting China to slow down in terms of hegemonic rise…
For example China could simply start building Huangyan Island in the South China Sea, making a move that would seal the US fate as the “falling empire”.
If China militarizes the island it would give China total control of the South China Sea region, so China can declare ADIZ ( Air Defense Identification Zone ) over South China Sea.
America would be pushed back to Guam, and it would be the beginning of the end of the petrodollar hegemony.
(Which never could have lasted forever anyway but it would push it up along the timeline to make it collapse that much faster)
Plausible deniability
Some have said that well the virus is RNA single stranded which makes it harder to target any race specific without mutations losing the specificity over many infections cycles.
And that if it were double stranded it would make it that much easier to create vaccines for and kill/contain.
But I believe in this case it is about maintaining “plausible deniability” whilst not crossing any hard red lines in case attribution is established in the future.
A virus outbreak that dings China’s GDP by 2 to 5 % in 2020 is not comparable to an end of civilization event that wipes out 90% of the Chinese population, for example.
Whatever blow-back or collateral risk is considered acceptable levels since it was deployed to China’s central Wuhan, naturally China has a self-interest in containment, and the vast majority of the damage will be internal to China.
It may have been initially engineered as race specific single stranded RNA and knowingly by hostile forces that predicted by the time it lost its race specificity that China would have already contained it.
Hence “mission accomplished” with little attribution and minimal blowback.
What better way to undermine China / CCP than to have its population grow resentful of or turn against its very Government!?
Already Western media is talking about how Chinese are filthy and if it wasn’t for eating rats, bats, dogs, etc this wouldn’t ever have befallen. Perfect cover for re-enforcing racists stereotypes for the ulterior motives of containing and isolating China, and that of Chinese culture, and Chinese ideology on the world stage.
Lead up to a hot war.
Is war between China and the US inevitable? | Graham Allison
Thucydide’s Trap
All of this should be seen within the larger context and backdrop of the so called Thucydide’s Trap.
Thucydide’s Trap.
For various reason, biological warfare against mainland China gives America multi-prong strategic and asymmetric advantages, hence why it has now become the method and weapon of choice for the US to use against China.
At what point does China take action or else find itself too little and too late to be suffering same fate as Native Americans?
History has shown that America is willing to wipe out entire Han civilization to maintain American hegemony and regain full spectrum dominance and supremacy.
It started with Kissinger
Kissinger is credited for giving Nixon the idea to open up China.
It appears as the 45 year rapprochement comes to a sudden close, the US has regretted the long term decision.
When viewed through the lens of optimization of entropy maximization and the 2nd law of thermodynamics…
… it is all about the counterbalance needed to an unchallenged US uni-polar scheme…
… one that impedes the progress and destiny of a universe in evolution.
Evil Steve Bannon
Steve Bannon was quoted to say that it is Ten times more important for the US to kill Huawei than it is for Trump to sign any trade deal.
Steve Bannon quote on China..
The USA realizes that China will soon surpass them if status quo isn’t changed.
The true motive of the trade war is to decouple the US from China quickly enough to asymmetrically target and destroy any tip of the spear Chinese companies/projects/tech such as the Huawei, 5G, DJI, EV, trains, Cancer research, TikTok, SenseTime, etc etc.
It’s to cripple China’s plans to move up the value chain and hi-tech-ify its economy and to do so with enough force to set back China…
… and permanently prevent it from successfully climbing the arch trajectory of replacing the US.
For the US it’s not just about losing the top spot to China.
If America were to ever lose its petrodollar hegemony it would collapse in much the same way as happened to the USSR.
The whole US empire is built on house of cards, ever since Brentwood…
… they got away with taxing/usurping the world using the dollar as economic weaponization through ‘quantitative easing’ and its military to control OPEC to sustain the petrodollar hegemony.
Japan
In the 1980’s Japan became a threat to the US so they forced Tokyo to acquiesce to the Plaza Accord.
This resulted in the “lost four decades” and Japan never recovering.
Nowadays Trump, Steve Bannon, Pompeo and other Hawks are trying to impose the same sort of colonization on China.
However, it is much harder to do since China doesn’t entertain US troops/US bases unlike the Japanese vassal state…
…so the next best thing is to subvert Hong Kong by way of CIA/NED and other propaganda techniques.
It is a situation in which the American nation killed a million civilians in Iraq after a false flag event and a WMD pretext…
… but is now is banning Chinese AI startups…
… ostensibly because they care about the human rights of Muslims in China’s internal Xinjiang region?
Give me a fucking break!
War against Chinese Companies…
The United States congress has accused TikTok — the Chinese dancing video social media app — of being a grave National Security threat…
… and this concern is based on zero evidence…
… and then the US publicly maligned China in front of the world with regards to the success and popularity of this singing app.
The Chinese need to learn the real truth about what America is and what it plans to do…
So likewise if there is any possibility this virus crisis had anything to do with US government then the Chinese people deserve to all know or at least be aware of the possibility.
Certain elements in the US have already put out the narrative that it was China’s own incompetence that lead to the leak of the lab virus, so the Chinese people deserve to know the real truth.
This is all part of the bigger picture to contain China’s continued rise, as we see that if the US ever lost its hegemony it would be game over…
America is losing it’s grip…
America views Chinese ambitions such as Made In China 2025, One Belt One Road, 5G, AI, etc as existential threats to its very lifestyle and way of life.
Hence the whole “Huawei is a national security issue” stance…
Now even TikTok, a dancing video app, has become a “national security” threat and targeted and singled out by the US Congress.
By “national security” they really mean China is offering the world a better deal…
… and they are pissed that they are being undercut…
… and they view Chinese success as a direct threat to American hegemony.
Africa
The West had its chance to help out Africa but did nothing. Now China wants to help them develop and US is getting resentful.
The supreme irony in all this is accusing China of predatory lending.
It will get much worse…
This will only get much worse, Xi predicted this will last a period of 30 years until which time China has become the undisputed Number One in the world economically, technologically, politically and militaristically.
As the declining power the US isn’t going to just go down without fighting…..
Just like the Roma Empire, as the US declines on the way down the lip service of freedom, democracy, etc stops and the true colors of the ugly side all comes out…
… they just did another coup in Bolivia…
…conveniently after China signed a lithium deal to secure development of batteries for EVs.
And now US is even sanctioning its own “allies” like Germany for daring to buy energy from Russia (NordStream 2, etc)…
The Bio-weapon scenario is very likely.
Like others have already brought to light and mentioned, with the multiple initial sources surrounding this Wuhan virus, it makes “intentionally starting a pandemic with a bioweapon” scenario much more likely.
The virus failed to spread with the first group of targets, so they tried again with the market.
For those who refuse to believe the US could ever be morally capable of doing such a coordinated strike and biological attack on mainland China…
… even if you do not at all believe US had anything to do with it, and even if US in reality had nothing to do with it…
… it still doesn’t change the fact that this virus has changed the power dynamic.
And upset the balance.
The Situation is Precarious.
And we already have evidence from US such as Wilber Ross etc willing to take full advantage of the situation.
China must be prepared to adapt and adjust to this fluid situation as well, short term and as well as long term.
This thing could very well [1] politically isolate China (it is already having such an effect) and [2] crater China’s GDP, and most importantly [3] strategically pressure China to give up its long term development aspirations as well as to [4] sign away certain concessions (give up on Made-In-China 2025 etc) right at the most critical moment in history.
It’s a Critical Moment in History.
Sure we understand that the flu killed already 10,000 US persons this
year alone, I also know the numbers in terms of how many up to 80,000
die of flu alone last year. And yes some of the hysteria and panic of
this Wuhan thing may cause more damage than good at this point,
sometimes the fear is more than just the virus damage itself.
Having said that, on the other hand, the facts are that this banning of all flights from China to the US, the enactment of the quarantine is described by the US CDC itself as the heaviest action it has taken in 50 years.
Indeed, when was the last time Russia closed its borders to China?
When was the last time Disney shutdown, and all these hundreds of other things shutting down in China and all the countries closing their door to China?
Precisely my point regardless of whether or not the real or perceived threat of this virus is overblown or not, the fact is the reaction to it has already greatly harmed China substantively at what could be argued as the worst possible timing…
…so yes, this virus has changed the power dynamic and upset the balance.
The fact of the matter is the rest of the world isn’t closing its
flights and borders to the USA, despite the flu in the US killing way
more people, but the world is closing its doors to China…
This cannot be good no matter how it is spun.
This cannot be good.
I’m concerned this will be the point of inflection in which the tide permanently turns and China regresses back to being closed, isolated country…
… and America pulled the supply chain rung under China’s feet while China is down/ill…
… and then convinces the rest of the world to a new Brentwoods to basically maintain US hegemony for the next 100 years.
Perhaps this is what Trump was secretly hinting at when he gleefully
announced at Davos that “now is the time for renewed and great
optimism”…
Maybe he was hinting at world events to come that will greatly
benefit America at the direct expense of China, events that by the time
he made the speech at Davos would have already been put in place by the
CIA.
If there is WAR!
If America has declared war on China, —
First by [1] economic decoupling via sanctions and tariffs...
... then [2] by trying to kill off Chinese technology ascension by attempting to cut off China’s tech supply chain...
... with [3] the banning of Huawei and the restriction to supply chain access of many other prominent Chinese tech companies...
... and [4] by covert bio-warfare to destroy China’s food supply...
... and [5] then finally directly poison the Chinese people with an evil sinister virus in hopes of destabilizing the entire country.
— etc and by all appearances it has.
By all appearances, it has.
With Pompeo openly stating that the Chinese CCP was the “central threat of our times”.
And Bannon calling for Trump to “takedown Xi”…
…And to “break the spirit and crack the back of the Chinese people”, then it behooves China to defend itself and its citizens and interests appropriately.
Everyone should be aware of what is going on.
This information had better be spread across Chinese media far and wide so that the average Chinese develops a healthy and warranted suspicion of certain nations….
Certain nations that have taken it upon themselves to stop at nothing to destroy the Chinese way of life and to destroy China’s development and progress.
Making more mainland Chinese aware…
… of the underlining truth…
… that all of China is constantly being targeted with warfare…
…warfare of all categories and at all levels by the United States…
… awareness cannot possibly be a bad thing.
Warfare
America has been applying every kind of means of warfare that exists under the sun against China.
It has been applying it against the Chinese government and against the Chinese people and their well-being.
Be it Trade War,
Economic War,
Proxy War (Taiwan, HK, etc),
Tech War (Huawei/5G/AI/tiktok),
Supply Chain War,
CyberWar,
Information propaganda Warfare (including the “reverse conspiracy theory” and other false flags),
Biological Warfare
…and soon to be Conventional war and perhaps even someday Nuclear war.
The Chinese people for their own good should be more aware of the
ideological war that America has inflicted upon the Chinese citizens
both at home and abroad…
Hypocrisy
The stark contrasting juxtaposition could not be more supremely ironic and hypocritical.
“Brain drain” from the rest of the nations in the world to the US is called “free market” and labeled as “freedom loving scientists going to work in open democratic Universities with higher pay and better quality of life”.
And yet this same notion of “brain drain” from the US to the rest of the world is called “intellectual property theft”, “spying”, or “sending spies to steal ‘American technology’”.
For when as China or Russia or India jailed their scientists for working with US universities and earning US research grants.
If they did that, immediately the US media will instantly accuse them of being “totalitarian communist police state with no academic freedom” etc.
During China’s moment of greatest need and vulnerability we see Westerner’s racism and xenophobia come out in full blossom from Universities.
Universities that say it is normal to be xenophobic to so-called “free speech” newspapers that take delight in China’s plight and openly incite hatred and racisms.
And doing so by publishing intentionally vile depictions of the Chinese people and the Chinese flag in order to kick China while it is down.
A Devious Design
The deviously designed CIA lab virus was specifically tailored to cause as much economic, political, and reputational damage to China, the Chinese government, and the Chinese people (both domestic and abroad) as it possibly could.
By this “Wuhan virus” being asymptomatic at the onset and specifically targeting Chinese DNA.
Not only does this make the virus that much more difficult to permanently eradicate but it also is a discriminatory virus in that it selective targets only Chinese/Asian people.
In addition to that, it also at once amplifies and concentrates on Chinese race specificity while effectively being a silent yet stigmatic racist killer.
Since the vast majority of those that could ever be affected by this virus are Chinese or people of Chinese ethnicity…
… and since this disease can be spread to other Chinese without first showing any visible nor discernable symptoms at all…
… this creates the sort of environment and dynamics that are conducive to several uniquely emergent dynamics, all of which are absolutely devastating to the Chinese race:
It sets in place the stigma, fear and disgust of Chinese people everywhere in all areas of the world.
It also sets the double whammy of making Chinese people suspicious of each other and resentful of one another.
Thus potentially fracturing the concept of Chinese unity and destroying that of the notion and tenability of the Chinese ‘civilization state’.
This has the effect of pitting Chinese people against one another in all aspects of life and relationships…
…it is actually a form of divide and conquer enacted by the West so that the White man could once again enslave and colonize China.
By the virus selectively targeting only Chinese DNA it creates a sort of structural racism against all Chinese Americans that otherwise the US government would have a much harder time bringing about without suffering political damage abroad and in the homeland.
Again this designer virus is especially devious because it allows the current rogue Trump administration and future American leadership to do…
… what otherwise would have been political unpalatable to implement…
… by creating this artificial lab-made virus that only targets Chinese people…
… and releasing into the center of mainland China…
… to encourage it to leverage the Lunar New year …
…to spread to all corners of China…
… it has at once conveniently convinced the America citizens to willingly advocate their government to shut the door to China;
… to ban all flights from China etc, and it also has created the environment whereby Chinese American citizens in America are now viewed with suspicion, contempt and disdain.
By the virus selectively targeting only Chinese DNA it creates a sort of structural racism against all Chinese Americans (and against all people of Chinese ethnicity worldwide) that otherwise the US government or other Western governments would have a much harder time bringing about without suffering political damage abroad and in the homeland.
Every Chinese person is now a potential threat.
Even if they look perfectly healthy on the outside they could still be deathly sick and gravely ill on the inside.
This puts disproportionate focus onto the entire Chinese race/ethnicity rather than on the symptoms of an illness itself. It also gives Western governments everywhere the convenient pretext and excuse to segregate people of Chinese ancestry and to round up and gas Chinese Americans…
… just like how the Nazi Hitler of Germany prosecuted the Jews during World War II.
Indeed, due to the selectivity of the virus it has the effect of causing public resentment towards its victims based on the basis of race (Chinese/Asian) rather than on the basis of the actual symptoms and other negative physical side effects.
And because this virus can transmit without showing any visible symptoms at all, it also furthermore re-enforces racists stereotypes by ushering in an atmosphere of the fearful unknown type. It’s a sort of “uncertainty” that breeds discrimination not on visible symptoms but by casting a broad categorical stroke against all people of Chinese descent anywhere in the world.
Possibility of WAR!
This opens the door to the possibility if America were to go to war with China that someday soon…
… all Chinese Americans will be rounded up and locked up into Concentration Camps in the USA…
… but under the ostensible guise and false-flag pretext of being quarantined, segmented and segregated by race alone for…
… public safety…
… as yet another variant of the so-called “Wuhan virus” conveniently re-appears just in time.
The Bigger Picture.
In terms of the bigger picture from the high-level top-down geopolitical standpoint, (all else being equal) America knows that…
… “time is on China’s side”…
… be it with regards to GDP PPP…
… or the situation in the South China Sea…
… or that of Hong Kong….
…or that of Taiwan…
… and especially as China’s sphere of influence continues to grow in Eurasia…
… or even in the larger context of the digital blockchain Yuan…
… and China’s BRI/OBOR to replace or supplant the US petrodollar hegemony and…
…in so many other aspects…
It’s Now or Never.
America knows that if status quo doesn’t abruptly change that one day it will be too late to confront China.
Trump, as their self-proclaimed “Chosen One” has openly stated from the beginning that he won’t allow China to surpass America “on his watch”…
… and that if his administration doesn’t stop China right now that no future generation of administrations will ever be able to do so again.
The US recognizes that the situation is quickly reaching an inflection point past which there is no point of return or going back.
It is now or never.
And since a direct nuclear confrontation is not going to help America achieve its goals…
… or retaining its status…
… nor reversing its decline…
… and coming back on top in terms of once again being sole unipolar hyperpower…
… with no contender or meaningful challenger…
… then only option left….
… after a failed trade war and failed tech war…
… was to attack China in the back…
… by secretly using biological warfare against China…
… not once…
… not twice…
… but now for a third and potentially ever more devastating time…
…. as each attack is increased in boldness and exponential in unprovoked escalation.
China Side – Fear of speculation
Some Chinese people online at “Sinodefence” and other similar forums may have overinflated egos and think they somehow represent the image of China…
… and I believe they take the posture of not daring to speculate…
… because admitting that China was the victim of a foreign biological warfare attack is somehow showing weakness…
… and they may even believe if there was hard evidence it would still be in China’s favor to keep quiet to “bide time”…
… and not directly confront and risk further escalating the issue.
In their minds, since this Wuhan virus is at most something that will make a big dent in China’s GDP growth over the next year or two…
… but nothing like a zombie virus or civilization ender…
… that it is better to take the safe conservative approach than to risk the possible damage to China’s standing and reputation.
For if it were to come out and publicly accuse the United States of such unthinkable acts against humanity.
To their line of thinking, it is far better to take a hit to economic growth and regress a few months/years than to expose those behind this attack and risk further alienation on the world scene etc…
American side – Waiting to engage the military.
From the American side the narrative has already been spun that “due to the busy new year China must have accidentally leaked their own virus”…
…and certainly there are motivated elements in Western media being compelled to push this particular narrative out in the open at the moment.
But it is reasonable to question the motive for spinning something fictional like this, why suddenly now the conspiracy theory…
… from Western powers that China did this tragedy to itself by carelessly releasing a lab made virus that it supposedly had been working on in Wuhan?
Who stands to gain the most from this event and the narrative being spun around the event?
Also, even playing devil’s advocate and assuming the Western assumption may have some element of possibility…
… in that a virus in the Wuhan lab was accidentally released to China own detriment…
… a reasonable person may also wonder about the timing, in that China’s supposedly first known incident of accidental release of virus causing harm of any magnitude…
…. just so happens to be right around signing of historic trade deal and right before the lunar new year mass migration.
Hence they attack the element of timing by preemptively suggesting that due to the new year rush it must have made operations that much more error prone etc.
Some elements in the United States on the other hand runs contrary to the scientific establishment official story as well, but for different reasons.
For example, the guy who wrote the above article admitted to having had ties to the NSA.
They concede and admit that by all appearances the evidence shows that this virus was indeed designer engineered to target Chinese/Asians, to be asymptomatic at first and with a conveniently long incubation period.
But then only admit the half-truth that its man-made but curiously proceed to argue the origin or rather the attribution as the main point of contention.
In the real world it is almost always the results that matter.
The “ends” rather than the “means” that count, and tracking missile trajectories of incoming thermonuclear warheads are a lot easier…
… than ascertaining attribution in terms of finding the actual nation responsible for a sophisticated designed and cleverly released bio-weapon.
It is about asymmetric warfare to gain advantage, the timing (right before Chinese lunar new year), location (Wuhan being central transportation hub of China and a city that had been projected for 8% GDP growth in 2020 before the outbreak) and characteristics of the virus (targeting Chinese/Asian) are just too coincidental for this to be anything random or by chance circumstantial.
Just way too fortuitous for there to be any other reasonable explanation.
Now if you were a hostile power wanting to screw with China wouldn’t this be consistent with being a plausible cover story to deflect suspicion?
What’s more likely, the Chinese government accidentally released their own virus that was designed to somehow only target their own peoples Chinese DNA and it (the accidental release of the virus) just so happened to coincide with the absolute worst timing for China;
(both in terms of the peak of the US China trade war and right before the Lunar new year mass migration)
…or some hostile superpower took advantage of this for plausible deniability and then deflects suspicion away from them by spinning up this nonsense story?
Who stands to win the most from this event and who stands to lose the most?
What does common sense tell you?
Which nation in the very same first month of 2020 went against international law to trick and ambush a top Iranian general and assassinated him in a drone strike in a cowardly manner whilst pretending to operate under the guise and pretext of ‘rule of law’ and with the Iranian general being ostensibly invited for “peace talks”?
The whole idea is to provoke China into responding and in the process having China make the mistake of giving the US the excuse needed to further exponentially escalate.
America knows China prefers non-confrontation as the Chinese strategy is simply to build, to trade, to bid time and to focus on its own development and economic growth instead of worrying about confronting US directly.
Every nation simply does what’s in their own best interest, maximizing optimization strategies conducive to bettering its advantages.
For the US it means taking an early and provocative challenge direct to China in the form of trade war, tariffs, tech bans, coercing allies to switch supply chains, kidnapping Huawei CFO, and surgical bioweapons tailored to Chinese DNA and deployed at the timing and location of max impact.
This biological attack differs from conventional warfare in that it would allow the initiator of aggression, in this instance the United States of America, to preserve the option at its choosing to take a more equivocal stance and fluid position by inflicting harm onto China but without a publicly overt display of open hostilities.
This virus was engineered to have maximum devastation in high density Asian environments, and it is an asymmetric weapon because these conditions are not reproducible anywhere else in the world other than in mainland China, the factory of the global world with over 1.4 billion citizens living in high density supermegacities with the required critical threshold to cause an uncontrolled chain reaction in infection spread rate.
It would seem US is counting on the fact that China won’t respond to this attack in order to essentially score a big goal and earn major points for free.
This would allow America to crash the economy of China with impunity.
Even a total nonresponse is still a reply in the form of China believing it still benefits the most by ignoring this attack (and indeed not even publicly acknowledging it at all) and strictly focusing on growth path after it has recovered.
Is this intended to merely knock China down a few steps off the development ladder in lieu of war in the South China Sea …
— since that could end up costly for US interests as well —
…or is it really a prelude to war, intended to severely weaken China…
… so that an American initiated war later on would be on US terms and US timing…
… and would be much less costly for America and the rest of the world after China had already been sufficiently decoupled and isolated from the world.
Chinese miscalculations
I think Chinese leadership miscalculated and mistakenly believed America would never go down the biological warfare route.
Just like they miscalculated and never thought the US would arrest Huawei CFO.
Or that the Trump administration would not put Huawei on the US entity list and then lower the 25% IP rule down to 10% essentially with intent to kill Huawei by choking off its supply chain rather than just playing nice by slowing it down but still giving it room to live.
Even Huawei’s recent UK “win” is capped at 35% market share restrictions.
Trump had personally begged Boris to outright ban Huawei completely, so the idea that America would adopt any stance of shared prosperity or a mutual win-win propositions with the number two power in the world are naïve and misguided at best.
Crossed into dangerous territory.
One wonders what would have happened had General MacArthur not been capped and was allowed to use nukes to win the Korean War and capture the entire peninsula?
The landscape would surely be very different today.
But it would have crossed a Rubicon and set a precedent that would have sent the world down a different path.
The world’s number one superpower using a biological warfare attack on the people of the world’s number two power for better or worse has also achieved the effect of crossing such a Rubicon of no return.
But in the long term would this turn out to be an overplay?
Would it actually serve to prolong / restore American hegemony or would it inadvertently accomplish the opposite?
Hard to tell but hindsight is always 20/20 and it would seem by America initiating the recent decoupling with China that it has already tacitly admitted that its opening up with China with the Nixon approachment was a strategic blunder of a mistake.
The Soviet Union was going to collapse on its own sooner or later, but America’s warming up to China to further isolate the USSR was indeed an overplay in retrospect.
America at the time believed opening up China would force it to be Westernized and made more democratic and ultimately serve American interests by bolstering US hegemony.
Instead, China grew up and had other plans for itself.
Taking out Mao Zedong’s son in Korea with napalms was probably on the whole detrimental to US interests’ long term, although it seemed like a great win at the time.
Likewise, the Five Eyes Intelligence Agencies, led by the American CIA/NSA, ambushing and kidnapping Meng Wanzhou (the CFO of Huawei and also the daughter of the Huawei CEO Mr. Ren Zhengfei) at the Canadian border also did not have the sort of effect that the US had hoped it would achieve.
Ren Zhengfei believes strongly in meritocracy and was never going to hand the reigns of his company Huawei to his daughter anyway.
Had Mao handed the country to his son its very likely China would have opened up to the world many decades later than what had been achieved by Deng Xiaoping.
And today America would still be the sole unipolar hyperpower instead of Pompeo running around the world telling everyone that China is the “central threat of our times”.
A need for creative thinking
Graham Allison often said that it would take some imaginative creative thinking to overcome the Thucydides Trap between China and the United States.
The rising power doesn’t want to kowtow and suffer the fate of Japan’s four lost decade after acquiescing to the Plaza Accord ‘trade deal’…
… and the declining incumbent ruling power doesn’t want to give up its status and position…
… and even the mere thought of détente is out the window as the American “way of life” is “nonnegotiable”.
So what is left is the realization in Washington that time is on China’s side, and that if a military confrontation is inevitable anyway, then it would be advantageous for the US to strike first while it still retained the edge and initiative.
But absent an immediate kinetic force what other options are there to slow China down?
Perhaps this is the creative imaginative solution alluded to by Allison, we have seen this virus cause the closing of borders…
… the pulling out of international companies and the re-routing of global supply chains to bypass China…
… and physical isolation of China without so much as a single bullet fired or sanction applied.
It at once accomplished all the political objectives with none of the traditional political costs associated, no certain attribution, and thus also no blowback nor retribution.
When the article was translated from the Chinese it resembled paragraph long sentences with very little punctuation. It was impossible for a native English reader to follow.
Thus you have the adaptations that I have made in formatting. It is not perfect, but substantially easier to read without degradation of the article content.
We can consider the “article” to be a compilation of perhaps ten Chinese articles that all share a similar theme; That the Chinese are aware of the Geo-political ramifications of everything that is going on, and they will react to it on their terms, on their timetable.
Depending on who wrote the comment it was either the mainstream American media narrative or the Hard-Right American media narrative. Very little independent thought. Very little in the way of rational thought. Most responses were emotional in nature.
By all indications, The Trump administration declared war on China, and has been fighting it at various levels throughout his administration.
This will not end as long as the neocons maintain a grip on the Washington Establishment.
The four years from 2020 through 2024 are going to be rather dicey. I do not know what will happen. I really do not. What I do know is what history tells us, and the view that history provides is anything but pretty.
Take note and prepare.
I have more posts on this subject in my Trump Trade Wars Index. Here…
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No one can know the severity and consequences of this epidemic until it's over. The present reaction may be needlessly excessive, pathetically inadequate or wise and prudent. We can't know now what will be self-evident in hindsight.
We do know we're being misled, kept in the dark and lied to by lunatics with credentials. We just don't know which ones are the lunatics.
-Woodpile Report
When I read American media, and listen to people like Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh say how this coronavirus is a big nothing; that’s it’s not as bad as the flu. That everyone can relax and just ride it out and rest, I shudder.
Nothing to see here ... carry on ... it's less to worry about then the common flu
- C D
I scene from the movie “Aliens” comes to mind. Here, the Marines are called up on deck. There is a pre-battle briefing. During it, Ripley is trying to warn everyone about the xenomorphs. Unfortunately, no one takes her seriously, and the cocky Space Marines joke and laugh about it…
“Oh, it’s just another bug hunt.”
Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley stands in front of the squad of ten cocky, poised space marines. They laugh and joke, oozing bravado and testosterone—even the women. As the shavetail lieutenant lays out the situation, Bill Paxton’s mouthy PFC Hudson interrupts: "Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"
"All we know is that there’s still no contact with the colony," replies the lieutenant, Gorman, "and that a xenomorph may be involved."
"Excuse me, sir," interjects PFC Frost from the back row, "—a what?"
"A xenomorph," repeats Gorman, emphasizing the syllables.
-ARS Technica
“Oh, it’s just another bug hunt.”
Yeah. It’s like that.
Then they get their asses handed to them on a platter.
Lots of famous people are peddling fairy tales that will collapse in the face of reality within 90 days
Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Drew and Elon Musk are all spinning delusional
fairy tales, by the way. So is President Trump. If you ask them the
simple question above — by what mechanism does the virus stop
replication? — they can’t provide any rational answer.
Rush Limbaugh says “98% of the people survive,”
which is an admission that 2% die. If half the U.S. population gets
infected, a 2% fatality rate is about 3.3 million people, or 100 times more fatalities than the flu.
But since Rush can’t do math, you can’t walk him through this simple
equation. Rush has become the propaganda broadcast hub for Mike Pence,
who knows nothing about virology or epidemiology. When Mike Pence talks
about the coronavirus, it makes about as much sense as Joe Biden talking
about firearms.
Dr. Drew is a celebrity doctor who says it’s, “no worse than the
flu.” Yet unless he’s been lobotomized, he must know that the mortality
rate of seasonal influenza is only around 0.1% (CDC.gov), while the
mortality rate among those infected with the coronavirus is, according
to the WHO, 3.4%. That means the coronavirus mortality rate is 34 times higher than the season flu. Surely Dr. Drew can follow this simple math, unless he’s gone the route of Brian Williams on MSNBC who thinks 327 million multiplied by one million is only 500 million. (Hint: The correct answer is 327 trillion.)
Elon Musk is a high-tech huckster
and hype artist whose entire financial existence depends on fluffing
falsehoods and denying financial reality. He’s been able to sucker
millions of investors into his soon-to-fail “Tesla” fiasco, but the virus can’t be bamboozled by billionaires.
The virus doesn’t care if Elon Musk is loved by millions of deluded,
ignorant youth who literally think he’s Iron Man. The virus can’t be
reasoned with or threatened on twitter. It just replicates.
Similarly, President Trump now
repeats propaganda lines from Dr. Anthony Fauci, uttering shockingly
uninformed things like, “One day it will just magically disappear” (or
some similar paraphrased statement). Yet the virus doesn’t respond to
magic. It only responds to biochemistry and physiology. The virus can’t
even hear President Trump since the virus has no ears. So it offers no
consideration to the spin of Mike Pence or Trump himself. Their words
are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is stopping the replication of the virus.
President Trump's comments on the COVID-19 coronavirus diverge slightly from other officials.
During a Tuesday press conference, Trump sought to reassure the public, saying everything from "it will go away, just stay calm," to stating the U.S. has done a "very good job" in testing for the virus, reports CNN's Daniel Dale.
-The Week
So we ask you, dear reader, by what mechanism will the replication of this virus be stopped?
Here’s seven lies that everyone with a microphone are promoting…
[1] It’s not as bad as the flu.
If flu has killed ~300,000 worldwide this year, and coronavirus has killed 3,000, then flu is …. 100 x worse.
-WMBriggs
I see this all over the American blogsphere.
Yeah. I get this.
Can we put the Wu-flu into perspective?
It is something serious. But like I stated in another thread, it's not an end-of-the-world serious.
We're nearing the end of the regular flu season.
A season where 18,000 people died WITH an available vaccine.
And no one bats an eye.
Hell, many threads on anti-vaccinations are on this site. I don't get the vaccine.
This is a novel virus. There is no vaccine.
So wash your hands, cough into your sleeve. If you're sick? Stay at home.
The last few days I've been working from home because I've caught a nasty cold and I work in a hospital so I didn't want to freak people out.
Now I'll be in work tomorrow to check on Power Charting and time change issues because of Daylight Savings Time, but I'm also feeling a little better.
This is the flu. A new flu, but the flu all the same.
I am not stockpiling on water, toilet paper, or rice and canned meat.
I did stock up on scotch, vodka, wine, and beer but that's because I'm an aging booze hound and it was a Friday.
I won't tell people not to stock up, but you're wasting a perfectly good worry on what (in my opinion) is a minor issue.
-DBCowboy
Go ahead.
Don’t wear a mask.
Try to self-heal in bed at home…
A healthy comparison between the COVID-19 and other illnesses.
Look at the graph and read this conservative bloggers opinion…
“Oh, but this is not the ‘flu, this is the KUNG KILLER WUHAN DESTROY US ALL ‘FLU™”, we hear from usually sane sources. Yes. A ‘flu with about the same infection parameters, symptoms and slightly higher mortality than the regular ‘flu which has, last we checked, so far failed to End the World As We Know It™ after Dis even knows how many regularly scheduled outbreaks ever since we came up with a name for it. It’s so regular now that we even have the name “flu season” in the vocabulary. It’s more regular than a newborn’s bowel movements. Heck, even the seriously dangerous Spanish ‘Flu of WWI fame failed to make much of a mess of civilization, and that was back when we had absolutely no flipping clue what we were dealing with.
Not to mention SARS, MERS and H1N1, every single one of which were more lethal by orders of magnitude than this one. Quickly, everybody tell us about the MERS Panic™. No? Didn’t happen? Civilization didn’t end? Well colour us surprised, because by current levels of hysteria, it certainly should have, considering that it was every bit as infectious and 36, that’s thirty-six, times as lethal.
Yet this one, THIS one is definitely, DEFINITELY at least one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse! THIS time it will get us!
Listen, we’re not saying to not use your brains here, like washing your hands, not hanging around people coughing and hacking their lungs out without covering their mouthes, but perhaps a little bit of perspective is in order?
-Nice Doggie
Further perspective:
In the US-alone flu season, we saw at LEAST 220,690 new cases per day, on average. Over TWO-HUNDRED THOUSAND.
The peak day WORLDWIDE for COVID-19 was 15,100. Just 6.8% of the US AVERAGE for flu. (That day was an extreme outlier, because it represented China changing reporting standards from confirmed-by-testing to diagnosed-by-symptoms.)
As of 3/5/2020, new COVID-19 cases WORLDWIDE: 2,800. 1.3% of the average US flu cases.
If you truly believe you’re going to die from COVID-19, you either 1) have some extremely high risk factors like being an 80 year old man with diabetes and a bum ticker, who’s been french-kissing your girlfriend from Wuhan; or 2) you already died from the frickin’ flu.
Sure things could change. The virus could mutate again. We could import a bunch more infected people and turn them loose. But as things stand…
1. Eat decent food.
2. Wash your hands often.
3. Avoid sick people.
Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same basic precautions you be be taking to avoid the flu and common cold (which I’ll remind you is often yet another coronavirus, too; and for most people COVID-19 is amounting to a common cold).
People need to stop losing their shit.
-Bear Buss
Yeah. It’s just like the flu. Right?
Just like the “common cold” right?
The disease is certainly a handful. It has caused and will cause tragic deaths, economic damage, and social disruption and uncertainty that always attend a serious pandemic. Its R –∅ rate (the rate at which the virus spreads) seems to be high, close to seasonal flu.
But I’m getting more optimistic about the actual public health impact of the virus because its virulence appears to be much lower than the 3.4 percent mortality rate claimed by the World Health Organization.
The New York Times spoke with “a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic.”
-Jim talent on FOX News
Sure… whatever those un-named “experts”, have to say…
FOX is the same as CNN. They just have a different audience, but they spout the same narrative.
What ever you say…
“People! You can read Ripley’s report.”
If you are talking about number of people who die, well no one knows that answer as this is a new virus. We know that statistically the influenza tends to kill a lot of the older and infirm people in large quantities. However, to assume that it will always be in the top spot is foolish.
Coronavirus is far deadlier than the flu. Thus far, the mortality rate for coronavirus (the number of reported cases divided by the number of deaths) is around 3% to 4%, although it’s likely to be lower because many cases have not yet been reported. The flu’s rate is 0.1%.
-LinkedIN Pulse
This virus is certainly appearing to be quite the contender. It looks like it will displace the influenza for that top ranked spot.
Incidentally, If you have a chance to to an old cemetery. One from around the time of the American Civil War. You will find entire families wiped out by the flu. In those days, they just were not able to handle viruses like we can today.
Now, if you are looking at the need to go to a hospital to get better, the COVID-19 is far worse. With the flu, you can have it and stay at home and nurse yourself back to health. Not so with the coronavirus. If you have it, you MUST go to a hospital, and be observed. If you have the more serious strain, it will attack your central nervous system and you will go into convulsions, followed by complete and absolute organ failure, while your lungs fill up with water.
By the criteria of mobility, the COVID-19 is far more contagious than the flu. I have seen values ranging from 8x to 20x more contagious.
By the criteria of mortality, the COVID-19 if far more lethal than the flu. The R0 version of 4.5 – 6.6 that is from Wuhan is only after the entire nation went DEFCON ONE and all the medical doctors for the entire nation converged on to that city. Before that happened, the R0 value was 14%.
A Los Alamos National Laboratory analysis of the outbreak in China in December 2019 and January 2020 puts the unrestrained R0 of Covid-19 at between 4.5 and 6.6. (The R-naught figure indicates the contagiousness of a disease in a given environment. If the number is above one, it’s spreading.)
The R0 for the flu is 0.1%.
Under every criteria, the COVID-19 is far worse than the influenza.
[2] Only old people die from it.
Once the hospitals were set up (two brand new hospitals in Wuhan built within ten days), and everyone who was ill went to the hospital and immediately went into ICU… the situation improved dramatically. Only the older folk and those with preexisting conditions were dying for the most part.
China built two complete 1000-bed hospitals in Wuhan within a ten day period.
So, yes. The data clearly says that the old and those with previous health conditions are dying from this COVID-19 virus.
What is not being said is that tens of thousands of people are in ICU, and getting around-the-clock care. These people have a high likelihood of surviving. And only the sickest do not survive.
“They completely wiped out my entire crew in less than twelve hours.”
Which means, that if you have access to a month in the ICU, you will pretty much be able to survive the COVID-19 virus.
That’s the good thing.
And hospitals that can handle maybe 30 in an ICU at any given time, will now be forced to deal with hundreds. There will be those that will not be permitted to stay in the ICU.
That’s the bad thing.
If you cannot make it to the ICU, cannot afford a month in the ICU, or have preexisting issues that you might not be aware of, the lethality of this illness increases exponentially.
So… Your chances of surviving from this virus is very high if you can afford a month in the ICU and get a spot in an already saturated hospital.Aside from that, survival is not guaranteed.
— Coronavirus appears to spread more slowly than the flu. This is probably the biggest difference between the two. The flu has a shorter incubation period (the time it takes for an infected person to show symptoms) and a shorter serial interval (or the time between successive cases). Coronavirus’s serial interval is around five to six days, while the flu’s gap between cases is more like three days, the WHO says. So flu still spreads more quickly.
— Shedding: Viral shedding is what happens when a virus has infected a host, has reproduced, and is now being released into the environment. It is what makes a patient infectious. Some people start shedding the coronavirus within two days of contracting it, and before they show symptoms, although this probably isn’t the main way it is spreading, the WHO says. (However, one non-peer-reviewed article this week also suggests that coronavirus patients are shedding huge amounts of the virus in these early stages when they have either no symptoms or just mild ones.) The flu virus typically sheds in the first two days after symptoms start, and this can last for up to a week. But a study in the Lancet this week, which looked at patients in China, showed that survivors were still shedding the coronavirus for around 20 days (or until death). One was still shedding at 37 days, while the shortest time detected was eight days. This suggests coronavirus patients remain contagious for much longer than those with flu.
— Secondary infections. As if contracting coronavirus wasn’t bad enough, it leads to about two more secondary infections on average. The flu can sometimes cause a secondary infection, usually pneumonia, but it’s rare for a flu patient to get two infections after the flu. The WHO warned that context is key (someone who contracts coronavirus might already have been fighting another condition, for example).
— Don’t blame snotty kids—adults are passing coronavirus around. While kids are the primary culprits for flu transmission, this coronavirus seems to be passed between adults. That also means adults are getting hit hardest—especially those who are older and have underlying medical conditions. Experts are baffled as to why kids seem protected from the worst effects of the coronavirus, according to the Washington Post. Some say they might already have some immunity from other versions of the coronavirus that appear in the common cold; another theory is that kids’ immune systems are always on high alert and might simply be faster than adults’ in battling Covid-19.
[3] It originated from a Wuhan seafood market.
But when the time came, the bastards were prepared: The Weird Animal Market! The bat soup-slurping Chinese!
And hey, if that didn’t work: ‘The Wuhan Level 4 Biolab!’, which was conveniently minutes away from the designated ground (or patient) zero, at the Market.
(Talk about convenient! As is the coincidence that the outbreak occurred in the midst of the ultimate Chinese travel week, the Lunar New Year. Yes, the better to spread not only The Bug, but the panic; and to make sure both spread world-wide, via air travel.)
But blaming the bio-lab would be a fall-back position; ever the optimists, the real perps were hoping mother nature as patsy would hold water, at least for a few months.
–Bandito
The idea that it originated from a seafood market in Wuhan has been disseminated throughout the internet with such relish that it is taken for granted that this is the truth.
It isn’t.
Aliens is among other things a Vietnam war allegory, pitting military arrogance against the implacability of an enemy unshackled by conventional definitions of combat. All the technology in the world, even these giant guns, won’t save our heroes.
When the outbreak occurred XiPeng ordered his scientists to find out the top two questions about the coronavirus;
Where it it originate from?
What was the underlying cause that created this virus?
After one month of study, the scientist came back and made their determinations…
The virus broke out all over Wuhan in widely divergent locations. At the same time, within hours, the virus broke out in the North of Wuhan, the East of Wuhan, the South of Wuhan, and the Western sections of Wuhan. One of the virus carriers, ended up infecting the seafood market.
From that point, the virus propagated the most rapidly throughout Wuhan.
The COVID-19 coronavirus brokeout on one day in widely separate regions within Wuhan. Then, one of the infected persons, apparently made their way to the seafood market, where many subsequent people were infected.
The COVID-19 coronavirus brokeout on one day in widely separate regions within Wuhan. Then, one of the infected persons, apparently made their way to the seafood market, where many subsequent people were infected.
[4] It’s a natural virus.
I’ve been reading lots of stuff about this thing – none of it clearly definitive or trust worthy. Hype aside, it seems there are about equal cases to be made for the extremal “it’s nothing” and “the world is ending” views.
I’d opt for what I hope is true: that this isn’t a big deal, except that there are some weird things going on. Two examples:
1 – china’s apparent over reaction. Their view of human life is rather different from ours and I can’t see them shutting down whole cities over a few hundred, or even a few thousand, deaths; and,
2 – the apparent death rate among senior government people affected in Iran.
- Paul Murphy
This narrative is one where it originated naturally by eating bat soup. This narrative is so absolutely preposterous, it is amazing just how gullible people are.
Then it is bolstered with pictures of Asians in Indonesia and Papal New Guinea eating bat soup. While the Chinese do actually eat bat soup, they don't do it in Wuhan. They do it in the smaller more rural sections of China.
One of the questions that XiPeng asked his scientists was…
What caused this virus?
After studying this issue, they came back and in February had their answer.
This virus was man-made.
Even before the toll in China reached the current 3,045 dead and 80,711 infected, the Chinese Communist Party had called the pandemic a biological weapon of the USA following the revelations of Asian scientists on the anomalous “modeling” of the S protein.
As reported first by Veterans Today and then by Gospa News, the American journalist Jeff Brown, founder with other international journalists and authors of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, an independent research organization on the history and innovations of biological weapons, has supported this thesis, that with the passing of the hours finds more and more supporters.
-Veterans Today
Officially, and yes… OFFICIALLY, the Chinese government considers this virus to be of human manufacture.
If there is a way to cripple a country without warfare, this is how it's done.
I don't doubt there is a pandemic occurring, but the sheeple will buy into this more than what actually occurs from a health standpoint. Don't get me wrong, people will die from this, but it will absolutely cripple our economy. God help us and continue stocking up.
- Bill Krejci
Officially the Chinese government considers this virus to be of human manufacture.
It is the American mainstream press that promotes the idea that this is natural. Not the Chinese media.
[5] It has the same symptoms as the flu.
The Chinese are so scared of it they shut down their industrial base to keep it from spreading. And Commies aren’t know for being overly worried about deaths.
The problem we still know very little of what happened in China since they are not letting in CDC virologists.
And nothing is getting shipped from China to the U.S. I live near a rail line that brings in Chinese made goods from Long Beach Harbor to the rest of the U.S. and those big freight trains used to run by me every hour or so. They haven’t for over a week.
This is no flu.
- Rwc1963
No it does not have all the same symptoms as the flu does.
Comparison between the COVID-19, the common cold, and the influenza.
The big give away is the “dry cough”. It will be like there is a little tickle in your throat. You won’t be coughing up white or green mucus. It will just be like you need a glass of water.
Also, do not look at all the symptoms, and assume that they are all of equal weight. diarrhea and a runny nose can happen, but are not typical. The typical “give aways” for this illness is the dry cough, the soreness in your body as it tries to fight the virus, and the fever.
“Bug Stomper” nose art on the first of the Sulaco’s two UD-4 Cheyenne gunships.
The COVID-19 has different symptoms than the Flu. The most common are a dry throat, a fever and general tiredness.
[6] You do not need to wear a mask.
China found that one of the best preventions for all citizens was to always wear face masks. This is a lesson for the world. Everyone deserves to have an adequate supply of masks.
-LinkedIN Pulse
In China, they made it a law that you must wear a mask at all times until this DEFCONE ONE emergency is over. You cannot ride public transportation, enter buildings, enter complexes, do anything without a mask. It is fundamental. They enforce it with police, drones, and volunteers. Everyone must wear a mask. No exceptions.
Why is China being so gosh-darn anal about this?
Because this COVID-19 can be transmitted by the air.
Federally funded tests conducted by scientists from several major institutions indicated that the novel form of coronavirus behind a worldwide outbreak can survive in the air for several hours.
A study awaiting peer review from scientists at Princeton University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted online Wednesday indicated that the COVID-19 virus could remain viable in the air "up to 3 hours post aerosolization," while remaining alive on plastic and other surfaces for up to three days.
"Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for 42 multiple hours and on surfaces up to days," reads the study's abstract.
The test results suggest that humans could be infected by the disease simply carried through the air or on a solid surface, even if direct contact with an infected person does not occur. That finding, if accepted, would come in stark contrast to previous media reports that suggested the virus was not easily transmittable outside of direct human contact.
-The Hill
The idea that you do not need to wear a mask came from the American media that insists that the flu is far worse, and that people shouldn’t buy up all the masks, but instead, leave the masks for the hospital staff to use.
Worst Case: It's some bio-engineered frankenvirus, with who-knows what lethality, r-naught, and incubation time.
-Woodpile Report
People!, you all need to start wearing masks, NOW!
I guess just because you’ve done 38 simulated drops doesn’t really mean you’re ready for command. Writer and director Cameron takes pains to set Gorman up as the embodiment of Vietnam-era military officer hubris and jargon-veiled incompetence, and the lieutenant holds himself above and entirely separate from the squad under his command. Dropping a fancy college word like “xenomorph” is just another way to lord rank and position over the jarheads—people whose names he hasn’t even really bothered to learn.
You need to wear a mask and perform extra-careful sanitary procedures outside of your home.
[7] China seriously bungled the coronavirus outbreak through sheer incompetence.
You might get this impression by reading the absolutely insane level of Anti-China rhetoric that came from Washington DC, and the American media. They couldn’t do anything right.
Well, that was a lie.
The early work found that infections were doubling roughly every six days, and that for every three to four rounds of transmission—or once every 20 to 30 days—one minor mutation was occurring, Bedford said in a Feb. 13 interview. “We are watching very carefully for more local transmission,” he said at the time.
-MSN
They locked down the entire nation under DEFCON ONE after the first person died by the COVID-19 virus. They built up two hospitals from scratch in ten days, and mobilized the entire nation to fight this illness.
They also took these other steps…
COVID-19 medical care was free.
Medicines no longer need a doctor prescription.
Orders for medicines are now of three month duration, not one.
Quarantines, at every level with road blocks are everywhere.
Military decontamination units sweep the cities.
Suspect patients are held in isolation wards and monitored.
APPs are available for news, help, assistance and police that everyone in China can access.
Self-quarantine was advised for everyone for three weeks.
Food delivery was mandated to continue, hoarding was prohibited, as well as price gouging.
Decontamination robots were designed and put into use.
Robots deliver food.
Drones scan the people for sickness.
Drone monitor and make sure that everyone is wearing a mask.
Every business is checked by the regional community centers for compliance, and get free face masks by the government.
There’s many more things going on, but that is just a thumb-nail sketch. Now, compare that to the foolish and comical farce of the American response…
When a country is run by engineers, things get built to solve problems.
When a country is run by lawyers, laws get passed to solve problems.
And when bankers are in charge of countries, more loans are issued to solve problems.
Yet, sound finances are necessary to run a country. And indebtedness is not a sound financial state.
Put lawyers appointed by bankers in charge, and nothing good happens. Oh, at first it does. A sound system can take a lot of abuse before breaking. You are drawing down the capital built up.
- James Dakin talks of the epidemic of stupidity.
Anyone that still thinks that America is handling this COVID-19 out-break better than China needs to have their head adjusted. Especially now that Trump has appointed a committee to look into this matter and report it’s findings, instead of taking direct and immediate action.
What is he thinking?
You can believe what ever you want. I know that China has taken deadly serious action against this virus. They identified it as a biological weapon, that was made in the United States and they went DEFCON ONE on CNY, of all times! But you can listen to CNN and Rush Limbaugh if you wanna. It’s your life.
Some Videos
This is a serious illness, and nothing like the Flu. Check out some videos…
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Taking the kids shopping.Riding the elevatorGoing home from work.Checking into the hospital.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 virus is a very nasty illness. It is being handled expertly with the authoritarian Chinese government, and hopelessly bungled by the inept American government. To best survive, you need to self quarantine and practice rigid and absolute cleanliness measures immediately. Make ZERO exceptions.
Thank you for reading this. I have more articles in the Trump Trade War Index, here…
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This is a subject that I have covered tangentially in other articles. I have argued that when America was “off shoring” it’s manufacturing to Asia, it was doing more than losing jobs. It was destroying industries, evaporating engineering and design knowledge, and devastating the ability to conduct engineering efforts at all levels. Today we see this. We see bridges collapsing in Florida, and spending $77,000,000,000,000 to build a high speed rail line that only has 15 miles of track and a cardboard mock-up of a train. This article is pretty good in that it also covers this subject, though with some inherent biases, that I quickly correct. All in all it’s a pretty great read.
Please give it the attention that it deserves…
This is a complete reprint of the article titled “Can We If We May?” with a sub-heading of “America has lost engineering capabilities China now demonstrates.” written by Will Offensicht on February 20, 2020 . This reprint is written as found with minor editing to fit within this venue and my own personal opinions interjected at obvious points.
…and many other examples where our government says “You may not do that even if you can, not even if sensible people think you should.”
The Danger of Over Regulation
Although Mr. Trump’s tax cut understandably receives the lion’s share of credit for the current economic boom, his taking an ax to as many regulations as he can also deserves major kudos.
The leftist media “fact checkers” like to cast his claims of red-tape-slashing as a lie; perhaps he hasn’t actually eliminated 22 regulations for every new one created, but there’s no doubt he’s killed off far more than he originated.
It’s interesting that the media chooses to castigate him for under-destroying regulations, when they generally believe more regulation is always an unmixed Good Thing.
In fact, the opposite is more generally true as regulations rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns.
Taxes are more or less predictable. Even though tax rules are made insanely complicated to offer maximum opportunity for politicians to help their friends escape paying their “fair share,” taxes on a business venture change seldom and are more or less predictable.
Regulations, however, are not predictable and can change at any time.
We’ve explained how a politician abused the regulatory agencies to keep a new restaurant from opening even after the would-be entrepreneur had followed all the rules. Regulations cause uncertainty which quashes innovation as well as entrepreneurship. That’s why we believe that Mr. Trump’s whacking back regulatory kudzu deserves equal credit for his boom if not more.
Having dealt at length with the “May not” effect of regulations and
knowing that many of our readers have noticed that Mr. Trump’s
chopping back red tape has had good economic effect, we thought we
should switch to the “Can” question of whether we’re able to make
timely investments that will boost growth or enhance public safety.
Can We?
Part of our ranting against regulations was because we had seen that it now takes decades to do anything constructive, where in time past mere months sufficed.
The planning process to rebuild Highway 30 in Colorado took 14 years. It took longer to build the 9-11 victim monument – basically a hole in the ground with a roof – than it took to build the entire towering World Trade Center in the first place.
We reported that back in the early 1970s, the head of power generation at Consolidated Edison, the PG&E of New York, estimated that he could build a power generation plant in 9 months if everyone got out of the way, whereas he couldn’t built it at all under the then-current regulatory regime.
We remember that when an earthquake destroyed a number of California highway overpasses, the governor told the bureaucrats to get out of the way and the highway was fixed in 1/10 the time expected. We have always assumed that Americans could get things done if the regulations were cut back.
Recent events, however, have led us to
re-think that.
They Can!
When the seriousness of the current coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was recognized, the Chinese threw up a 1,000 bed hospital in 6 days.
Correction. They built two (x2) new hospitals, not one. Additionally they added completely new and refurbished a number of existing hospital in Wuhan... all within ten days.
-Metallicman
This beat the previous 10-day record, set by a 1,000 bed Beijing hospital erected during the SARS epidemic of 2003. YouTube has any number of videos showing how it was done from a height, but the details are even more impressing.
The Chinese city of Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, has completed the ambitious task of building two 1,000-bed hospitals in just 10 days to treat victims of the epidemic.
Both of these hospitals were built using prefabricated units which were trucked to the site and dropped in place. Turning prefab shells into a hospital sounds easy, but is actually anything but simple, considering that this is intended as a top-flight isolation hospital for highly contagious plagues.
For example, Siemens China boasted that their team wired up the entire hospital in 38 hours, a project which, they said, would normally take three weeks.
Hospital wiring is complicated, requiring many
carefully-separated ground circuits so that stray voltage doesn’t get
into ICU probes where a small amount of extra current can kill a sick
patient. Wiring normally comes after air ducts and after
plumbing,
because wiring conduits are easiest to bend in case some other
installer put something in the wrong place.
Unless the drawings are done extremely carefully and followed with equal care, these tasks can’t be done in parallel because something will interfere with something else and gum up the schedule.
The Chinese city of Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, has completed the ambitious task of building two 1,000-bed hospitals in just 10 days to treat victims of the epidemic.
Getting all this done in such a short time indicates organizational and construction skills of an extremely high order – the sort of thing Germans were once famous for, and which Americans used to do routinely, but which we rarely if ever see nowadays.
Electricity Isn’t The Trickiest Problem
Difficult as hospital wiring is, the real problem is the air handling
system given that the purpose of the hospital is to treat up to 1,000
patients
suffering from a virus that spreads easily through the air.
To start with, patients
have to be kept in rooms where the air pressure is slightly below
outside air pressure so that the virus doesn’t escape. But that
alone isn’t enough, because you don’t want the victims catching things
from
each other. So each room must be kept separate from every other
room – not to mention the hallways, access spaces, and so on.
Naturally, any air pulled out of isolation wards must be exhausted
to the outside through
filters that trap viruses, which are very small. Doing
this for 1,000 rooms requires world-class air management on a grand
scale.
We know how critical air handling is from the saga of the
Diamond
Princess, a cruise ship that’s been in quarantine in Yokohama
harbor
in Japan since Feb. 3. One
80-year-old Chinese passenger from
Hong Kong had boarded
the ship in Yokohama at the start of the voyage. The ship called
at
Hong Kong and passengers went ashore, mixing with the general
population of that very crowded city.
Since arriving at the Japanese port of Yokohama, the Diamond Princess has been quarantined at sea while all passengers and crew on board undergo health screenings.
By the time the ship got back to Yokohama, the Hong Kong passenger was
suffering from what looked like a severe flu. Japanese
authorities knew about the virus and
wouldn’t let anyone off the ship. There were 61 cases by Feb. 7,
showing either that the Hong Kong sufferer was a “super spreader” or
that many passengers had been exposed when they went ashore in Hong
Kong or when gathering in communal spaces on the ship.
Among the 3,711 passengers and crew there have been at least 542
confirmed cases, giving the ship the highest infection rate in the
world at 14% of the available population. If that infection rate
holds in crowded places like
Wuhan or Hong Kong, the epidemic will be serious indeed.
Although quarantining people on the ship seemed like a good idea
at the time, we now know that the virus spreads well through a ship’s
air circulation system. Just about all of the crew and
many
low-budget passengers were in rooms without portholes, so they
depended on air circulated through the ship’s ducts – which, of course,
were never designed for virus-rated filters.
We’ve expressed skepticism of plague statistics coming out of China, but as the number of cases and reported deaths have climbed, fatalities have always come out at around 2%, either by accident or by design. If 14% of a general population get the disease and 2% of those infected die, .028% of the population will die.
A Dose of Opinion.
One of the things that I have learned since I moved to China, was how wrong my Alt-Right beliefs were regarding China.
I had, over the five previous decades pretty much accepted the anti-China narrative that has saturated the American media. Most of which is designed for consumption by people who have never put foot inside of China, and thus view China using the same kinds of glasses that we all view America.
One of the narratives is that China routinely fabricates false data.
Don't roll your eyes. Hear me out for a fucking minute.
Nonsense.
Maybe they did so in the past. I know that Mr. Mao was a big fan of lying. I also know that the shedding away of his Marxist utopia came at a great cost. All you need to do is look at the photos of the 1960's and 1970's to see what all his lies were covering up.
But not today.
Today it's another "ballgame".
They do not lie, because they do not need to.
So they just tell you what it is, right or wrong. you can take it or leave it. They don't give a flying fuck what you think. No one is going to protest, complain or do anything. So they just tell you the truth.
America on the other hand, must lie because popular opinion is what drives a "democracy". So America lies all the time...
The greatest employment jobs number ever! The GDP is now at 1.5% it is mind-mindbogglingly amazing! I did not have sex with that woman! If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
China doesn't have to lie.
"Hey, we closed all your bank accounts, and seized your money. We also black listed you on social media, and are welding your apartment doors shut. But you are still alive. Let's keep it that way good citizen."
The Chinese government can do whatever it wants. But lie? Nah. They have no need to.
-Metallicman
On the basis of past experience with SARS, the British health service estimates that 60% will get the disease. If they’re right and the 2% fatality rate holds, that means 1.2% of the British population will die.
What’s worse, it’s not clear that recovering from this flu gives immunity – there are reports that a patient recovered, caught the flu, or a slight mutation, again, and died.
Some Clarity.
The COVID-19 virus has mutated, and there are at least two strains. They are "S" and "L". People who have caught the least dangerous strain and recovered, then ended up getting the more aggressive strain and dying. It's a binary double-punch virus...
A man who was discharged from one of the makeshift hospitals built to contain the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, has reportedly died from respiratory failure, raising questions about the longevity of the COVID-19 virus and the unknowns about re-infection.
The 36-year-old man had been discharged with instructions to stay in a quarantine hotel, but returned to a hospital after five days, where he later died, according to the South China Morning Post, which reported that the man’s death certificate listed his cause of death as COVID-19.
The news comes on the heels of a report from the Japanese government that a woman from Osaka tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time.
“I think it’s something that we need to know more about,” said John Connor of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories. “This is something that needs to be watched and people that have become infected and are feeling better should probably be aware of if they begin to get sick again.”
–Boston Herald
-Metallicman
Since “only” 14% of the Diamond Princess population have tested positive, we can expect a lot more illness among that group if British estimates are correct. In that case, the incubation period is a lot longer than the current two week guesstimate.
Many people who were released from quarantine after two weeks will have been spreading the virus and it won’t be possible to keep it out of the general population.
In any case, we hope that the air handler engineers in Wuhan did a
truly
world-class job in their new hospital. We’ll find out! But
the fact that the hospital even appears
to be up and running in 6 days is awe-inspiring indeed.
Suppose it Really
Mattered?
We’ve
noted that trivia such as environmental
impact statements and property rights are non-issues in China.
The
Party says “Put it there,” and that’s where it goes. Complainers
go
to jail or disappear.
Commentary.
That is correct, which is why the Alt-Right narratives about the "Chicoms" is just fabricated bullshit. They don't need approval from anyone. They do not have polls, or rely on public opinion. They do their own thing, and opinions be dammed.
Plus, the Chinese are hyper-patriotic. They don't need to kill a percentage of their population to end "starvation" or "over crowding". They would just play some patriotic music and people would line up to voluntarily die for their nation.
-Metallicman
It’s impossible to do that in America. When Mr. Trump declared a national emergency so that our military could build a wall on our southern border, people who didn’t want the wall went to court and blocked part of it.
No Chinese would be so unpatriotic, or foolish, as to question a national emergency decreed from On High.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that somehow we really got
everybody out of the way –
environmental, legal, financial, safety, NIMBY, every other obstacle –
and told some organization like the Army Engineers to Get It Done
Yesterday! Could we build a
hospital to the standards needed to contain this disease in that short
a time?
A truly motivating emergency isn’t that hard to imagine – nobody
wants to die from the
plague, and the military owns vast tracts of empty land subject to
nothing but federal law and the Commander-in-Chief. If the
coronavirus were to take hold here as in Wuhan, we fully
expect The Donald to sign just such an executive order, to the massed
applause of worried voters.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be enough to actually get the hospital
built in 6 days, or even 6 months.
Unlike the Chinese, we don’t have standard hospital plans – have you
ever seen two American hospitals that looked even remotely alike?
We certainly have no factories
churning out prefabricated units that could be assembled into a
hospital.
The British can’t do it either, which is why they’re
saying people will have to self-quarantine if the virus breaks
out.
Could our engineers work
out designs to knock together hospitals like Legos? Sure… eventually, by which time it would
be far too late.
Let’s look at something simpler, like making 10-cent
disposable masks
used to stop the virus from spreading through the air.
The South China Morning
Postdescribes mask production in China:
China, which accounts for about half of the world's mask production, is scrambling to snap excess supply from overseas, both through official diplomatic channels, and buyers like Cai [who travels to pharmacies and buys up all the masks he can find].
Demand for masks has surged in recent weeks, exhausting not just China's stockpile, but emptying shelves from Bangkok to Boston. In China, it is now mandatory to wear facial masks in public areas in many cities.
Chinese mask makers are currently operating at 76 per cent capacity, which puts daily production at 15.2 million masks based on the industry's reported capacity to produce 20 million pieces a day, Cong Liang, an NDRC official, said at a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
Daily demand, however, is estimated to be between 50 and 60 million units during the outbreak, according to Chinese media reports citing mainland mask manufacturers. [emphasis added]
Daily demand in China is now 2 or 3 times their maximum production capacity. They won't be able to make it up by grabbing the rest of the world's mask production because any nation that can make masks will keep them. Could they make more?
Not to worry: they're slapping together a new mask factory in under a week.
They
clearly know how to make
machines to make masks and they can raid their garment industry to
assemble armies of seamstresses to make them by hand. How many
masks could one sweatshop employee sew in a 12-hour day when motivated
by a credible threat of very unpleasant deaths for all their friends
and relatives?
Some thoughts.
Obviously this writer has never been to China. You do not need to threaten anyone. They would willingly come to do what ever is necessary to help their nation.
-Metallicman
You can always identify volunteers in China. They are the ones wearing the red volunteer vests that you see EVERYWHERE. It is part of the Chinese culture to participate within your society.
In a way, this is even more impressive than the 6-day
hospital. China is home to around 1.5 billion people, and up
until very recently they had very few modern hospitals if any at
all. Even
without the coronavirus, they had every reason to expect tens of
thousands of new hospitals to be needed in the coming years.
One of
the advantages of an all-powerful central government is that it can
easily standardize things. Clearly, some Communist Party official
led a team designing “Standard Hospital Models A-F,” distributed the
plans, and set up “The
People’s Hospital Factory” to crank them out. They’re just
turning the crank harder these days, is all.
Some Clarity.
Nope. It doesn't work that way. What? Do all the buildings in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou all look the same? No they do not. Stop confusing North Korea with China. It makes you all look like ignorant fools.
-Metallicman
Shanghai has an amazing array of new and modern buildings.
Nobody would have anticipated the need for a factory that mass-produces masks, yet they’ve managed to wave the wand and create those too. How long will it be before they meet their needs and are willing to resume mask exports?
Our population is about 1/4 of China’s. Could we
make 15 million masks per day to supply our needs if daily masking was
required for a similar fraction of our population?
Google believes that Americans manufacture 27.4 billion disposable
diapers per year. Masks take less material, but leaks and hidden
defects
are fatal as opposed to merely inconvenient.
We’d need on the order of 7 billion masks per year. The
experts
at
Procter and Gamble could probably retool a diaper machine to make
masks, but
how long would it take? How many masks could one re-purposed
diaper machine make in a day? Could they rebuild a machine or
make a custom mask maker in 10
days? Probably not – and then we’d have a diaper shortage, which
isn’t a good idea if half the country is sick with the flu.
What if everybody in
America needed one every day? 350 million masks per day is nearly
130
billion masks per year, far more than our 27 billion diapers. Not
a chance.
There Was a Time
There was a time when we could grind things out. Every one of our
soldiers
who
fought in WW II remembered the Great Depression, during which everyone
had to make do with whatever they had. They had to learn to
tinker,
to “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do, or do without.”
Google wasn’t around during WW II, so it doesn’t remember the story
of an Air Force general demanding that Douglas aircraft install a
radar on a bomber in 90 days. The boss tried to stall, “We’ll
need
a plane,” “My guys just landed one at your field,” the
general said. “They’ll leave you the keys.” The job got
done.
We’ve lost that ethos. We no longer have a well-developed culture
of
tinkering. Instead of learning to tweak cars as the
previous
generation of teenagers did, kids play video games.
We aren’t really prepared for the mass mobilization of building
hospitals and making all the medical bunny suits that will be
needed to replace shipments from China if the virus breaks out into our
population. We don’t live
that way, we don’t think that way, and we certainly don’t work that way
– because over the decades, bureaucracy has made sure we can’t.
The Chinese are better positioned to crank out whatever they need to
fight the virus. This is one of the few situations in which an
undemocratic central government can be enormously more effective than a
sclerotic democracy answerable to whichever people are screaming
loudest.
What’s more, the Chinese can lose a lot more people without their
civilization falling apart, if for no other reason than that they have a lot more people to start
with. Within living memory, their government intentionally murdereda huge fraction of the Chinese people, far more
than the virus is on track to do – and yet their government and
civilization, such as
it was, soldiered on.
Historical Correction.
Yup. That's the American narrative. And it's not that off. But, the deaths came from the "Cultural Revolution" with saw 30 million people die for the progressive Marxist cause. This deeply affected China, and resulted in a complete overhaul of many aspects of progressive thought in China.
-Metallicman
So from the standpoint of societal resiliency, China has already been tried and passed the test of surviving a plague of death-dealing human beings. No virus could possibly match that.
Conclusion
It’s not just that the factory workers were unemployed, it was the technical folk as well. This is the designers, the draftsmen, the CAD operators, the systems integrators, the quality folk, the manufacturing engineers and the production engineers. Not to mention the equipment, the structures and the tools to make all the gizmos and things that are so readily manufactured in China today.
The clueless in Washington somehow believe that they can snap a few fingers and suddenly a factory will spring up in a wheat-field organically just by proclaiming that “it be so”. Who’s gonna operate it? Who’s going to set the production lines, work, and modify the machines?
A “Diversity Director”?
America is paying the price of sloth. American citizens should have butch-slapped President Wilson and all his cronies back to the Middle Ages where they belong. But we didn’t. We let the cut fester and rot, until now they are a cancer that is taking America to Hell.
Rah Rah Rah all you fucking want. America is nothing what it should be and it’s all our fault.
America is trying to claw itself out from a mess that it created. That’s what all of this is. The bigger the domestic mess, the greater the risk of America getting into a long bloody war to take people’s mind off their problems.
Buckle Up.
I hope that you enjoyed this article. I have others in my China posts index here…
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I have been quite clear that the United States has been conducting biological warfare with China for the last four years. But others refuse to believe the train of evidence. They cannot reconcile the idea that the USA would wage covert germ warfare on a nuclear armed nation. But things are changing. Here’s an article by a detractor to this belief that begrudgingly admits that just maybe the USA is that reckless in risking World War III.
And that maybe I am right.
That the USA has been conducting germ warfare against China, and does not care if there is some “leakage” of the virus out of China. The goal is to suppress China at whatever the cost.
This is a reprint of the article titled ” Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China?”, it was published on March 6, 2020 by Enrique Suarez for the Strategic Culture Foundation. It has been edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China?
It might be possible that Washington has created and unleashed the virus in a bid to bring Beijing’s growing economy and military might down a few notches.
I’ve had to delete YouTube off my phone to avoid all the anti China stuff since the virus kicked off.
There is a massive offensive happening to try poison people’s minds against China.
Reality is I’ve actually never had a bad experience in China and I’m going in and out 10 years.
-Derek Kenny
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal-borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.
Where did it originate?
I got the insight today that this global crisis makes one thing very clear.
To everyone's probable disbelief in the Western world, China and other Asian countries opted for drastic measures to save the people's lives, regardless of economic impact.
The West is so concerned about economic and consequent political fall out that they compromise lives .. ultimately it will shoot in their own feet...but meanwhile unnecessary lives will be lost. And who will take the responsibility?
-Peter Buytaert
Several
reports suggest that there are components of the virus that are related
to HIV that could not have occurred naturally. If it is correct that
the virus had either been developed or even produced to be weaponized it
would further suggest that its escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab and
into the animal and human population could have been accidental.
Technicians who work in such environments are aware that “leaks” from
laboratories occur frequently.
Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab .
There is, of course, and inevitably, another theory.
There has been some speculation that as the Trump Administration has been constantly raising the issue of growing Chinese global competitiveness as a direct threat to American national security and economic dominance.
It might be possible that Washington has created and unleashed the virus in a bid to bring Beijing’s growing economy and military might down a few notches.
If there is a way to cripple a country without warfare, this is how it's done. I don't doubt there is a pandemic occurring, but the sheeple will buy into this more than what actually occurs from a health standpoint. Don't get me wrong, people will die from this, but it will absolutely cripple our economy. God help us and continue stocking up.
- Bill Krejci
It is, to be sure, hard to believe that even the Trump White House would do something so reckless, but there are precedents for that type of behavior.
In 2005-9 the American and Israeli governments secretly developed a computer virus called Stuxnet, which was intended to damage the control and operating systems of Iranian computers being used in that country’s nuclear research program. Admittedly Stuxnet was intended to damage computers, not to infect or kill human beings, but concerns that it would propagate and move to infect computers outside Iran proved to be accurate as it spread to thousands of PCs outside Iran, in countries as far-flung as China, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia.
American and Israel designed Stuxnet was intended to take out the computers of Iran, but “leaked” and took down half of the global internet.
Inevitably there is an Israeli story that just might shed some light on what has been going on in China.
Israel has a vaccine!
Scientists at Israel’s Galilee Research Institute are now claiming that they will have a vaccine against coronavirus in a few weeks which will be ready for distribution and use within 90 days.
The institute is claiming that it has been engaged in four years of research on avian coronavirus funded by Israel’s Ministries of Science & Technology and Agriculture.
Israel’s Ministries of Science & Technology and Agriculture.
They are claiming that the virus is similar to the version that has infected humans, which has led to breakthroughs in development through genetic manipulation, but some scientists are skeptical that a new vaccine could be produced so quickly to prevent a virus that existed only recently.
They also have warned that even if a vaccine is developed it would normally have to be tested for side effects, a process that normally takes over a year and includes using it on infected humans.
If one even considers it possible that the United States had a hand in creating the coronavirus at what remains of its once extensive biological weapons research center in Ft Detrick Maryland, it is very likely that Israel was a partner in the project. Helping to develop the virus would also explain how Israeli scientists have been able to claim success at creating a vaccine so quickly, possibly because the virus and treatment for it was developed simultaneously.
The biological weapons research center in Ft Detrick Maryland.
In any event, there are definite political ramifications to the appearance of the coronavirus, and not only in China.
American Political Ramifications
In the United States, President Donald Trump is already being blamed for lying about the virus and there are various scenarios in mainstream publications speculating over the possible impact on the election in 2020.
If the economy sinks together with the stock market, it will reflect badly on Trump whether or not he is actually at fault. If containment and treatment of the disease itself in the United States do not go well, there could also be a considerable backlash, particularly as the Democrats have been promoting improving health care.
One pundit argues, however, that disease and a sinking economy will not matter as long as there is a turnaround before the election, but a lot can happen in the next eight months.
National Security and Iran.
And then there is the national security/foreign policy issue as seen from both Jerusalem and Washington.
It is difficult to explain why coronavirus has hit one country in particular other than China very severely. That country is Iran, the often-cited enemy of both the U.S. and Israel.
The number of Iran’s coronavirus cases continues to increase, with more positive tests confirmed among government officials last Saturday. There were 205 new coronavirus cases, bringing the government claimed total to 593 with 43 fatalities, though unofficial hospital reports suggest that the deaths are actually well over 100.
That’s the highest number of deaths from the virus outside of China.
No less
than five Iranian Members of Parliament have also tested positive amid a
growing number of officials that have contracted the disease. Iran’s
vice president Masoumeh Ebtekar and deputy health minister Iraj Harirchi
had also previously been confirmed with the virus.
The usual suspects in the United States are delighted to learn of the Iranian deaths.
Mark Dubowitz, a Washington DC neocon and his Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is active in pounding the drums of war against Iran.
Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Washington-based but Israeli government-connected Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) boasted on twitter Tuesday that…
“Coronavirus has done what American economic sanctions could not: shut down non-oil exports.”
An Iranian government spokesman responded that…
“It’s shameful and downright inhuman to cheer for a deadly Virus to spread – and enjoy seeing people suffer for it…”
Dubowitz followed up with an additional taunt, that Tehran has “spread terrorism” in the Middle East and “now it’s spreading the coronavirus.”
The US сould be the prime culprit behind Covid-2019 outbreak that hit China and then Iran, head of its elite Revolutionary Guards claimed, threatening that the virus will eventually be turned against those who unleashed it.“It is possible that this virus is a product of a biological attack by America which initially spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world,” Hossein Salami said on Thursday.
He vowed that Iran would “fight” the virus and cautioned that the illness “will return” to the United States, if Washington was indeed responsible for the outbreak.
Though such conspiracy theories have been circulating for a while, there’s still no official proof it could be true.
The Head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, General Gholam Reza Jalali, said earlier on Tuesday that media fear-mongering over the new corornavirus in the country bolsters claims that the virus is a biological attack on China and Iran. He said that some reports indicate that it could be a hostile state, but added that his suspicion requires laboratorial investigation and a study of the virus genome.
Iran has been one of the countries hit hardest by Covid-19 outside of mainland China where it originated. As of Thursday, the Islamic Republic has reported 3,513 confirmed cases and 107 deaths attributed to the virus. Some 15 of those who have succumbed to the coronavirus died in the last 24 hours, according to Iran’s Health Minister Saeed Namaki.
The country has shuttered all schools and universities until the end of the country’s calendar year on March 20 in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.
On Tuesday, state media announced that the head of Iran’s emergency medical services was being treated for coronavirus. Numerous high-level Iranian officials have fallen ill to the virus. Recently, 23 lawmakers tested positive for the illness in the Islamic Republic.
Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a member of a council that advises the supreme leader, died after falling sick from the disease. His death follows those of two other high-profile Iranians who contracted the virus – a former ambassador and a newly-elected member of parliament.
- Сoronavirus May be a Product of US ‘Biological Attack’ Aimed at Iran and China, IRGC Chief Claims - RT News
Who made the COVID-19?
Even before the toll in China reached the current 3,045 dead and 80,711 infected, the Chinese Communist Party had called the pandemic a biological weapon of the USA following the revelations of Asian scientists on the anomalous “modeling” of the S protein.
As reported first by Veterans Today and then by Gospa News, the American journalist Jeff Brown, founder with other international journalists and authors of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, an independent research organization on the history and innovations of biological weapons, has supported this thesis, that with the passing of the hours finds more and more supporters.
-Veterans Today
So, you have your choice.
[1] Coronavirus occurred naturally, or [2] it came out of a lab in China itself or [3] even from Israel or [4] the United States.
If one suspects Israel and/or the United States, the intent clearly would have been to create a biological weapon that would damage two nations that have been designated as enemies.
But the coronavirus cannot be contained easily and it is clear that many thousands of people will die from it. Unfortunately, as with Stuxnet, once the genie is out of the bottled it is devilishly hard to induce it to go back in.
Back to America…
Nothing to see here ... carry on ... it's less to worry about then the common flu
- C D
Now it appears that it has boomeranged back to America.
The Post I’m stationed at told us today they’ve been briefed today and it’s just like the flu and to wash our hands and not worry. 75K is a huge number that would get out. I’m sure some have it but I have trouble buying that number. Anyone else on active duty please chime in if you’ve heard or seen otherwise.
- Jonathan Weaver
The United States government, being what it is, is actively lying to the people, covering up events and trying to tell everyone that the flu is much, much worse.
I work maintenance for an intercity apartments had the cops called and they were talking amongst them selves saying Kroger and several others are paying off duty cops for security. I mentioned corona virus they shut up after that. The stores know.
- Shawn May
And finally this, from a conservative blogger who bought into the Trump narrative hook-line-and-sinker…
Further perspective:
In the US-alone flu season, we saw at LEAST 220,690 new cases per day, on average. Over TWO-HUNDRED THOUSAND.
The peak day WORLDWIDE for COVID-19 was 15,100. Just 6.8% of the US AVERAGE for flu. (That day was an extreme outlier, because it represented China changing reporting standards from confirmed-by-testing to diagnosed-by-symptoms.)
As of 3/5/2020, new COVID-19 cases WORLDWIDE: 2,800. 1.3% of the average US flu cases.
If you truly believe you’re going to die from COVID-19, you either 1) have some extremely high risk factors like being an 80 year old man with diabetes and a bum ticker, who’s been french-kissing your girlfriend from Wuhan; or 2) you already died from the frickin’ flu.
Sure things could change. The virus could mutate again. We could import a bunch more infected people and turn them loose. But as things stand…
1. Eat decent food.
2. Wash your hands often.
3. Avoid sick people.
Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same basic precautions you be be taking to avoid the flu and common cold (which I’ll remind you is often yet another coronavirus, too; and for most people COVID-19 is amounting to a common cold).
People need to stop losing their shit.
-Bear Buss
Yeah. It’s just like the flu. Right?
Just like the “common cold” right?
Nothing to worry about.
You don’t need to wear a mask.
Right…
Author
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
I have other posts on this subject. You can view them in my Trump Trade War Index, here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Executive Summary
When the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, and Beijing got involved, one of the first things that he ordered was that people find out the origin of the coronavirus. The scientists did just that. Their results were published in February 2020.
The COVID-19 virus did not originate in Wuhan, China. It originated in the United States.
As people start digging into the causes and history behind this COVID-19 viral agent, it becomes clear that the agent did not “spontaneously” erupt in Wuhan by people eating bats. The etymology lineage has been traced, and it leads to a place outside of China. In fact, it points straight, and clear directly at the United States. This report is interesting and supports the notion that I have made that this is just the latest escalation of the Trump Trade Wars to suppress China’s rise.
Please read it with an open mind, and take special note that you will have a very difficult time finding this information inside America. Or on any of the regular American media channels. America will not EVER allow it’s citizens to know that it has been conducting surreptitious germ warfare against China.
Quick note before we begin…
Guys, I am so sorry for the flood of COVID-19 related posts. I have all kinds of other things that are in my stack of stuff that I really want to get to, but this is all just taking up my precious time. After all, it’s not everyday that you are at ground zero during a biological warfare attack.
I have stuff that I want to cover on soul construction, and consciousness partitioning, as well as some things regarding the the happiness of dogs, and some positive things to say about people. Please bear with me. Thank you.
Even before the toll in China reached the current 3,045 dead and 80,711 infected, the Chinese Communist Party had called the pandemic a biological weapon of the USA following the revelations of Asian scientists on the anomalous “modeling” of the S protein.
As reported first by Veterans Today and then by Gospa News, the American journalist Jeff Brown, founder with other international journalists and authors of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, an independent research organization on the history and innovations of biological weapons, has supported this thesis, that with the passing of the hours finds more and more supporters.
-Veterans Today
Japan, China and Taiwan Reports on the Origin of the Virus.
The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China. They have been claiming that it has originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.
The American Mainstream Narrative
This is a natural virus - it originated in a Wuhan seafood market from people eating bats.
The American Alt-Right Narrative
It is a Chinese biological weapon, accidentally released by a germ weapons center that is located in Wuhan - a city twice the size of New York City.
The American HARD-Right Narrative
It is a stolen American biological weapon, intentionally released within Wuhan in order to kill Chinese people to ease population and starvation pressures.
In fact the origin was for a long time unknown but it appears likely now, according to Chinese and Japanese reports, that the virus originated elsewhere, from multiple locations, but began to spread widely only after being introduced to the market.
More to the point, it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US.
Chinese Researchers Conclude the Virus Originated Outside of China
After collecting samples of the genome in China, medical researchers first conclusively demonstrated that the virus did not originate at the seafood market.
Instead, it had multiple unidentified sources.
After which it was eventually exposed at the seafood market from where it spread everywhere. (1) (2) (3)
New Chinese study indicates the novel coronavirus did not originate in Huanan seafood market.
According to the Global Times:
A new study by Chinese researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.
The study published on ChinaXiv, a Chinese open repository for scientific researchers, reveals the new coronavirus was introduced to the seafood market from another location(s), and then spread rapidly from the market due to the large number of close contacts.
The findings were the result of analyses of the genome data, sources of infection, and the route of spread of variations of the novel coronavirus collected throughout China.
The study believes that patient(s) zero transmitted the virus to workers or sellers at the Huanan seafood market, the crowded market easily facilitating further transmission of the virus to buyers, which caused a wider spread in early December 2019.
(Global Times, February 22, 2020, emphasis added (2)
Chinese medical authorities – and “intelligence agencies” – then conducted a rapid and wide-ranging search for the origin of the virus. Thus, collecting nearly 100 samples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, identifying all the varieties and mutations.
During this research, they determined the virus outbreak had begun much earlier, probably in November, shortly after the Wuhan Military Games.
They then came to the same independent conclusions as the Japanese
researchers – that the virus did not begin in China but was introduced
there from the outside.
China’s top respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan said on January 27, 2020;
“Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China”
“But that is Chinese for “it originated someplace else, in another country”. (4)
This of course raises questions as to the actual location of origin.
If the authorities pursued their analysis through 100 genome samples from 12 countries, they must have had a compelling reason to be searching for the original source outside China.
This would explain why there was such difficulty in locating and identifying a ‘patient zero’.
Japan’s Media: The Coronavirus May Have Originated in the US
In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and
that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to
influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus. (5)
Japanese Television Report sparks speculations in China that COVID-19 may have originated in the United States.
A report from a Japanese TV station disclosing a suspicion that some of those Americans may have unknowningly contracted the coronavirus has gone viral on Chinese social media, stoking fears and speculations in China that the novel coronavirus may have originated in the US.
The report, by TV Asahi Corporation of Japan, suggested that the US government may have failed to grasp how rampant the virus has gone on US soil.
However, it is unknown whether Americans who have already died of the influenza had contracted the coronavirus, as reported by TV Asahi. (People’s Daily, English, February 23, 2020, emphasis added)
On February 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) said they will begin to test individuals with
influenza-like-illness for the novel coronavirus at public health labs
in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City.
The TV Asahi network presented scientific documentation for their claims, raising the issue that no one would know the cause of death because the US either neglected to test or failed to release the results.
Japan avoided the questions of natural vs. man-made and accidental vs. deliberate, simply stating that the virus outbreak may first have occurred in the US. The Western Internet appears to have been scrubbed of this information, but the Chinese media still reference it.
These claims stirred up a hornet’s nest not only in Japan but in
China, immediately going viral on Chinese social media, especially since
the Military World Games were held in Wuhan in October, and it had
already been widely discussed that the virus could have been transmitted
at that time – from a foreign source.
“Perhaps the US delegates (to the Wuhan Military World Games) brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year.”
(People’s Daily, February 23, 2020) (1)
Shen Yi, an international relations professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, stated that global virologists “including the intelligence agencies” were tracking the origin of the virus. Also of interest, the Chinese government did not shut the door on this.
The news report stated:
“Netizens are encouraged to actively partake in discussions, but preferably in a rational fashion.”
In China, that is meaningful. If the reports were rubbish, the
government would clearly state that, and tell people to not spread false
rumors.
Taiwan Virologist Suggests the Coronavirus Originated in the US
Below is a rough translation, summary and analysis of selected content of that newscast. (see map below)
The man in the video is a top virologist and pharmacologist who
performed a long and detailed search for the source of the virus.
He spends the first part of the video explaining the various haplotypes
(varieties, if you will), and explains how they are related to each
other, how one must have come before another, and how one type derived
from another.
He explains this is merely elementary science and nothing
to do with geopolitical issues, describing how, just as with numbers in
order, 3 must always follow 2.
He spends the first part of the video explaining the various haplotypes (varieties, if you will), and explains how they are related to each other, how one must have come before another, and how one type derived from another.
One of his main points is that the type infecting Taiwan exists only in Australia and the US and, since Taiwan was not infected by Australians, the infection in Taiwan could have come only from the United States.
…
The basic logic is that the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing.
He demonstrated that only the United States has all the five known strains of the virus (while Wuhan and most of China have only one, as do Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, Singapore, and England, Belgium and Germany), constituting a thesis that the haplotypes in other nations may have originated in the United States.
Korea and Taiwan have a different haplotype of the virus than China,
perhaps more infective but much less deadly, which would account for a
death rate only 1/3 that of China.
Neither Iran nor Italy were included in the above tests, but both countries have now deciphered the locally prevalent genome and have declared them of different varieties from those in China, which means they did not originate in China but were of necessity introduced from another source.
It is worth noting that the variety in Italy has approximately the same fatality rate as that of China, three times as great as other nations, while the haplotype in Iran appears to be the deadliest with a fatality rate of between 10% and 25%. (7) (8) (9)
Due to the enormous amount of Western media coverage focused on China, much of the world believes the coronavirus spread to all other nations from China, but this now appears to have been proven wrong.
With about 50 nations scattered throughout the world having identified at least one case at the time of writing, it would be very interesting to examine virus samples from each of those nations to determine their location of origin and the worldwide sources and patterns of spread.
The Virologist further stated that the United States has recently had more than 200 “pulmonary fibrosis” cases that resulted in death due to patients’ inability to breathe, but whose conditions and symptoms could not be explained by pulmonary fibrosis.
He said he wrote articles informing the US health authorities to consider seriously those deaths as resulting from the coronavirus, but they responded by blaming the deaths on e-cigarettes, then silenced further discussion. …
The Taiwanese doctor then stated the virus outbreak began earlier than assumed, saying, “We must look to September of 2019”.
He stated the case in September of 2019 where some Japanese traveled to Hawaii and returned home infected, people who had never been to China.
This was two months prior to the infections in China and just after the CDC suddenly and totally shut down the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab claiming the facilities were insufficient to prevent loss of pathogens. (10) (11)
He said he personally investigated those cases very carefully (as did the Japanese virologists who came to the same conclusion)..
This might indicate the coronavirus had already spread in the US but where the symptoms were being officially attributed to other diseases, and thus possibly masked.
The prominent Chinese news website Huanqiu related one case in the US where a woman’s relative was told by physicians he died of the flu, but where the death certificate listed the coronavirus as the cause of death.
Just for information
In the past two years (during the trade war) China has suffered several pandemics:
February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. Sickened at least 1,600 people in China and killed more than 600. Many chickens killed.
China needs to purchase US poultry products.
June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. Many chickens killed.
China needs to purchase US poultry products.
August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. Same strain as Russia, from Georgia. Millions of pigs killed.
China needs to purchase US pork products.
May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms in 14 province-level regions in China, which destroy most food crops. Quickly spread to more than 8,500 hectares of China’s grain production. They produce astonishing numbers of eggs.
China needs to purchase US agricultural products – corn, soybeans.
December, 2019: Coronavirus appearance puts China’s economy on hold.
China’s entire economy comes to a complete halt. American leadership boasts that American businesses will benefit from this “tragedy”.
January, 2020: China is hit by a “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu in Hunan province. Many chickens died, many others killed.
China needs to purchase US poultry products.
The standard adage is that bad luck happens in threes, not sixes.
Conclusion
Just because you do not believe this, does not mean that others agree with you. The Chinese leadership gets their reports from their scientists directly, not from FOX News or CNN.
The Chinese leadership (and the Russian leadership) [1] has this information, and [2] they are “taking it in” and [3] are making the necessary long-term responses on [4] their terms, at [5] the time of their choosing.
Be advised.
Author
Larry Romanoff is a
retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior
executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor
at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international
affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is
currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and
the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The following is a chart based on the latest findings (as of 5MAR20) from a Los Alamos National Laboratory analysis of the outbreak in China in December 2019 and January 2020. I have placed the information on a graph using data from the Information is Beautiful website. It is very interesting and very instructive.
On the chart are two data points. They are labeled “L” and “S”. This is because there are two strains of the virus.
Coronavirus: there are 2 types, Chinese researchers find, while authorities say faeces and urine can transmit the infection. They found that one type, which they called the L type, was more prevalent than the other, the S type, meaning it was more infectious.
They also found that the L type had evolved from the S type, and that the L type was far more widespread before January 7 and in Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak.
https://lnkd.in/g-NrpBJ
This is a chart of the COVID-19 coronavirus R0 and mortality plotted against pathogens.
While there are two strains, I labeled the points in the chart based on the probability of where a given individual may live and their situation.
For instance, I live inside of China, but outside of Wuhan. For my situation, the data point “S” would be most appropriate. Everyone is taking extreme caution, and the hospital and medical facilities inside China are top rate.
If you, however lived in or near a city inside America, say Pittsburgh or Cleveland your data point might be in the middle of the red box. While those inside the big cities like Chicago, Los Angles and New York might be closer to the “L” data point.
"The preliminary study found that a more aggressive type [L] of the coronavirus accounted for about 70% of analyzed strains, while 30% was linked to a less aggressive type [S]."
- Roger Ng 黄扬光
Notice where the flu is on the chart. It’s difficult to see. It is all the way over buried in the lower left hand corner. If you are treating this COVID-19 like the flu, you are making a grave mistake. It’s no where near as lethal or contagious.
Theraflu will not stop you from going into a seizure.
This COVID-19 coronavirus shares the same general region (on the chart) with Smallpox and the Bubonic Plague.
Additional notes of interest…
The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated[Excerpts:] Integrating uncertainties in the exponential growth rate estimated from the ‘first arrival’ approach and the uncertainties in the duration of latent and infectious periods, we estimated the values of R0 to be 6.3 and 4.7. The high R0 values we estimated have important implications for disease control.The 2019-nCoV epidemic is still rapidly growing and spread to more than 20 countries as of February 5, 2020. Here, we estimated the growth rate of the early outbreak in Wuhan to be 0.29 per day (a doubling time of 2.4 days), and the reproductive number, R0, to be between 4.7 to 6.6.How contagious the 2019-nCoV is in other countries remains to be seen. If the value of R0 is as high in other countries, our results suggest that active and strong population-wide social distancing efforts, such as closing down transportation system, schools, discouraging travel, etc., might be needed to reduce the overall contacts to contain the spread of the virus.
This shockingly high original Chinese R0 value meant a doubling of the number of cases every few days, and subsequently, regional hospitals were overrun by infected patients. The Chinese experience indicates how it may spread in the West and the 3rd world. Critically, the often-quoted case fatality rate (CFR) of “only” 2% for Covid-19 occurs when severely affected patients have access to first-class medical treatment, with teams of nurses and doctors caring for them in isolation ICUs. About 15% of people infected with the virus will develop severe symptoms (pneumonia, etc.) requiring intensive individual treatment in order to survive. Once hospitals are swamped and many of the medical staff become infected, the CFR can swiftly rise to above 15%. This is believed to be the situation inside the Wuhan City quarantine zone.
An infectious disease with an R-naught above five, and the number of cases doubling every two days, is like a biological atomic bomb chain reaction, particularly in the age of jet travel to all points of the globe.
Be safe everyone.
Please implement Chinese-level quarantine measures, and do not believe the nonsense that the flu is far worse. The Chinese were ONLY able to control the outbreak by putting the entire nation under the DEFCON ONE military emergency, and building three hospitals in the infected area. As well as moving all the national medical personnel to Wuhan.
That action controlled the mortality rate and moved it from 14% to 4% within Wuhan. And 1% in the rest of the nation.
This COVID-19 has brought everyone together…
The virus is China’s 9/11. Not literally – there is a different mechanism that created this crisis, not a terrorist attack but a viral attack. But the effect on society is very similar – people feel the same.
The single biggest effect of this virus on modern China is that it brought people together in an unprecedented and organic way.
It’s not the result of a government campaign to foster national pride. It came about naturally, people have sacrificed in ways big and small, they have lost income, family members have died, they have lost business, their personal freedom of movement was sacrificed, their children’s education and lives have been upended, and more. The whole country has pulled together during this crisis. The feeling, the emotion that this crisis created in society is one of unity. Of strength and sacrifice for a cause bigger than the individual. It has created an overwhelming wave of pride and solidarity, of what some call nationalism.
...
On a personal note: To the people on LinkedIN who called me out for not piling on to the criticism of China’s leadership or government for handling the virus in the early days – I don’t care. It was inhumane, unkind, and worse to lob criticism of any kind during onset of the crisis.
There has been a clear divide. Those that are engaged in modern China, that live(d) there, that speak Chinese, that acknowledge the complexity of modern China and can separate the people from their government. And on the other side of the divide those that want to enforce their own views about religion or political governance or whatever soap box they want to get on and don’t care who they hurt along the way.
People have seen which side you are on. Last minute posts trying to recast yourself as someone who cares – don’t undo a month or more of hateful language directed towards the Chinese.
- The COVID-19 Virus is China’s 9/11
Most everyone (except for the 1% of “bad apples”) are with the program and 100% with the government. They are also very hyper-patriotic and very spiritual people. Here is a church service via the internet. Everyone is connected using their cell-phones and they are all singling together all over the nation. Check it out.
Prayer service inside a quarantine barracks.
More information on this subject can be found in my Trump Trade War index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7.
Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity.
We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period.Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6.
We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus.
- Title: The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated
There’s a sizable percentage of people (Americans) who have absolutely no concept of what war is like. When elements of war starts raising it’s ugly head, they come up with other ideas and excuses what it could be. Anything but war. Anything but posturing for war. Anything.
To most Americans, war is a distant concept. It is something that you do in far-away third-world shit-holes. It’s where you tromp through deserts or slosh through jungles. It’s where you are issued an “assault rifle”, ride in helicopters and expensive sleek jets blow up Arabs riding white Toyota trucks.
That’s not war. That’s a “police action”, or as I like to refer to it… “conflict lite”.
Real wars occur when one nation tries to suppress another nation.
Hitler attacks Poland.
Japan attacks China.
Syria attacks Kuwait.
Suppressing China’s Rise
Lose-lose is a situation where no participant has any option that is positive. As such, strategy in a lose-lose situation is aimed at minimizing loss as opposed to winning.4 Examples of a Lose-Lose Situation - Simplicable
The United States has spent the last three years engaged in efforts to suppress China’s rise.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
It’s called a “lose – lose” strategy because (since the USA and China are both economically co-dependent) the only way to suppress China was to accept suppression of the USA in the process.
The idea was that China would “lose more” than what America would lose.
This is the Alt-Right “standard narrative” that “China needs the USA more than the USA needs China”.
So they implemented it on all sorts of levels…
Radical protests by “pro democracy” agitators in Hong Kong.
Uyghur Muslim assaults and aggression.
A on-going propaganda war.
Pressure on Taiwan.
Arrest of the President of Huawei.
Propaganda against advanced 5G, AI and robotic technologies.
A plague that wiped out the wheat crop.
A virus that wiped out the Chicken and poultry industry… in waves.
A virus that wiped out the pig industry, propagated by advanced drones.
Now, the deadly lethal COVID-19 virus on CNY eve of all times!
Some of it is so obvious that you have to be in complete denial not to acknowledge it… like the Arrest of the CEO of Huawei in Canada. Apparently her Chinese company sold products to Iran. And the United States wants everyone to boycott Iran.
Well, nationality is just an excuse… don’t you know.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
Another example is the on-going biological warfare being conducted against China. Trying to decimate it’s livestock, it’s chickens, it’s pork, it’s wheat crops…
…didn’t work. Though.
Oh… it’s just bad luck. Right?
Or as one website stated… “It’s God’s will”.
Good one that.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
And now the COVID-19 coronavirus attack on CNY eve. I mean, if it would have happened on Christmas eve, most Americans would be suspicious. But they aren’t.
Its just a “nothing burger”, don’t you know.
Conflicts look like this. Open your eyes.
You see people. Major conflicts start JUST LIKE THIS.
And everyone around you is in denial.
Just . Like . This.
Byretaliatinginthedecades-old tariff war, Trump hasnochoice. Either China eventuallybankruptstheUnitedStatesortheUnitedStates bankrupts China. Finally, thereisthethirdcommonsensedesiredoutcome: bothpartiessettlefor free trade withzero tariffs.
- Trump's Strategy in the China Trade War
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
A hidden war…
When Hitler banned guns in Germany, the American media didn’t make a peep. When Stalin started starving the Lithuanians, the American media called it just bad weather and poor planning. When unrest started to hit Bosnia, the American media called it “isolated terror events”.
Trump’s key figures in the China Trade negotiations. All are neocons who earnestly want a lose-lose strategy.
The geo-political situation today is very complex. I cannot predict what will happen. I really cannot.
But you and I have a front-row seat to it.
Unfortunately.
The “big guns” came out to suppress China…
What I can say is that the COVID-19 bioweapon attack…
…and it actually was one – ask Xi Peng …
After all, he put his military on DEFCON ONE over it. Why are all the nuclear silos fully manned right now? Why is the Navy on high alert? Why are 100% of the militia called up? Why are all ports and entry points under lock-down? Why are all incoming packages frozen in customs and the internet completely locked solid?
Because of the... flu?
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
… is that China handled the COVID-19 event exceptionally well. And the COVID-19 virus…
… still…
…it still got loose.
President Trump appoints VP Pence to handle the COVID-19 outbreak. He referred to it as Democrat Hype, and a “Hoax”. He further claimed that it is not as bad as the flu.
Not at all what the Trump Administration was expecting.
The decision to utilize biological warfare against China was hatched in the White house, and most certainly by resident neocons within the administration.
Now all people are getting infected. Not only Asians. And the mutation is observable. The current strains running through Iran, Italy and the USA are off-shoot “branches” from the “original” Chinese COVID-19 viral strain.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
People(!) brace yourself for some spicy times. You can believe whatever you want. You can believe this is natural if you wanna. You can believe that China is the scourge of the Earth and the USA is a gift from God. You can believe anything your heart desires…
But…
The USA is not China.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
The USA does not have the ability to handle a large influx of seriously ill people. It cannot handle people dropping like flies in the middle of the street or while they are driving their cars. It cannot handle disruptions of the food and petrol supplies. It cannot handle large conditions that tax the medical system.
You all know this is true.
Which is why many Americans are running to the gun stores first, then getting food.
Panic shopping in the United States. No one thinks that this is really bad, but they are stocking up just in case. How do I know? Well, no one is wearing a mask. They are also in a crowd. Further, they are not buying food, they are buying towels and soda. They believe that the COVID-19 is “just” another strain of the flu.
I take no joy in this. It greatly saddens me…
… and now to my point in all this…
Introduction
There’s a sizable percentage of people (Americans) who have absolutely no concept of what war is like.
They think that war is 9-11, that it is Pearl Harbor, that it is bombs exploding, and fires raging, and sleek jets flying.
Oh… sometimes.
But in reality war, real war, is not the made-for-television narrative. It is something that is usually done in secret, behind the scenes.
War is ANY conflict between nations.
War can be any kind of conflict between nations. Whether it is subtle, organized, planned, overt, or serendipitous. Scene from the Chinese movie with Jet Li titled “Fearless.”
Most wars are conducted in secret and hidden behind curtains of confusion and obfuscation. It’s “CIA type stuff”. It’s strange events “out of the blue”.
It’s a leading doctor gets sick here, and a report ends up missing there. It’s mass deaths in a obscure location over there.
It’s things like an explosion inside the North Korean nuclear weapons silo.
It’s things like pigs and chickens start dying all over China…
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
When elements of war starts raising it’s ugly head, they come up with other ideas and excuses of what it could be. Anything but war. Anything but posturing for war. Anything.
Anything.
But people, listen up.
There will not be any announcements. No one is going to point at a person, place or thing and tell everyone to start fighting it. Instead, it will be conducted behind the scenes for a long time…
You see, it would be an absolute failure of the governments on both sides if it broke out into the open.
Scene from the movie about an out of control pandemic that hits the United States; “Carriers”.
It will be the worst kind of enemy; one that you cannot see and hurt and attack.
Like the movie "Invasion of the body snatchers."
This is a war that China has been dealing with since 2017, and keeping quiet and just smiling. But they have been dealing with it; fighting with it; and just keep on keeping on. They keep plugging away like the energizer bunny.
It’s got a visible face and a hidden face.
No one wants the true situation; that the agents of war; the COVID-19, has mutated to infect everyone and has washed up on the shores of the good ol’ USA.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
You had all best be wearing a mask and exercising rigorous hand washing discipline, as well as avoiding all contact outside of your homes.
Starting RIGHT NOW.
A taste of war
The neocons in the Trump administration strongly believed that they could launch this COVID-19 and it would be contained within China, and only kill Asians. They were convinced because their “experts” told them that this is what would happen.
Which explains why Trump and his administration keeps on saying the narrative that it isn't as bad as the flu...
The neocons expected that it would cause mass casualties that would overwhelm the Chinese hospital system. They figured that with a mortality rate of 10% it would cripple China for years.
The “experts” said…
Orville Schell (his father was the co-founder of Helsinki Watch) has been a card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which represents the highest, deepest echelon of the National Security State, and which has architected the anti-China consensus at the highest level of government and leadership in the US.
If we go to war with China--kinetic conflict--this will be in large part the doing of the CFR.
See here for a sampling of the type of tripe they routinely throw out about China. Remember, this is considered the elite "expert consensus".
The WHO is lying for China when it praises its response. https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty (Compare this to what Dr. Bruce Aylward reported. Dr. Aylward was previously the UN lead for the Ebola outbreak, and he would know what he's talkng about).
Xi is aping Stalin
https://www.cfr.org/blog/china-likely-enter-another-long-period-severe-dictatorship
China is the perfect dictatorship https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/podcast-perfect-dictatorship
China is the bully of Asia https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/podcast-china-bully-asia
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
But…
…that didn’t happen.
China enacted DEFCON ONE. They locked the entire nation down. They took immediate and fast action and was able to control the mortality rate to 3% in the infected areas.
A 3% mortality rate is what you have when you go into DEFCON ONE, build three hospitals, offer free medical care, and lock the entire nation down. It's what you get when you take drastic action to control a weaponized viral pathogen.
But you can expect a much higher mortality rate when you are dealing with for-profit hospitals, a media that is saying everything is fine, and a government run by the "deep state".
Maybe, China would have collapsed by now, if China was like America with [1] a contentious political structure, [2] a huge and slow moving bureaucracy, and [3] a culture of being a “lone wolf” where it’s every man for himself…
Maybe…
But…
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
The Neocons made terrible assumptions…
But that cartoon image of China is seriously wrong.
China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak].
The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free.
Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill.
In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them. They tried to mitigate those barriers.
The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals].
Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment].
And (fourthly) they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.
- Bruce Aylward
China is not the United States. It is a very serious nation that does not mess around. It is run by experts who are in their positions through merit, not popularity.
And more…
The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher.
If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early.
Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work.
This is sophisticated health care.
They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.
This suggests the Chinese are really good at keeping people alive with this disease, and just because it’s 1 percent in the general population outside of Wuhan doesn’t mean it [will be the same in other countries].
- Bruce Aylward
The suppression strategy was a terrible mistake.
The people who came up with this suppression strategy were wrong.
Somehow the COVID-19 virus mutated. Whether it was a natural mutation, or had "help" from a lab is unknown. But the inherent "safety protocols" mutated away and resulted in an indiscriminate virus instead of a "safe and controllable" weaponized virus.
Like in the original "Drudge Dred" movie titled "Demolition Man" where the evil leadership resurrected Wesley Snipes with training to become a master criminal. And Judge Dred trained to knit. Only they added a special mind block - you cannot kill the leadership.
Wesley Snipes tries but can't. The evil leader laughs, and looks at him... his new puppet. So Wesley snipes orders his chief henchman to kill him instead.
It's sort of like that,
Wesley Snipes plays the evil villain that was trained to become a master criminal by the current government leadership.
Plus…
None of the neocons have any real-world experience with the horrors of war. They don’t know that things can go “tits up” very quickly and FUBAR, then “all bets are off”.
You know, it's not just war. It's projects. It's industry. It's investments. It's relationships. The jokers in Washington has spent so much time playing politics and living in the neocon echo chamber that they are oblivious to the realities outside of it...
They did not realize that war is the last resort action of fools.
China is not the United States. It is a very serious nation that does not mess around. It is run by experts who are in their positions through merit, not popularity.
They tried to implement a “lose – lose” strategy in order to contain China. China wanted a “win – win” the neocons wanted a “lose lose” because they actually believed that it was attainable. Both nations would lose, but China would be far more damaged than the United States would be…
…it’s the alt-Right narrative; “They need us more than we need them.” It’s ridiculously false.
It is mind-blowing off-the-charts false.
It is one of the biggest lies ever made, and yet the dumbed-down alt-Right American population actually believes it.
The Lose – Lose strategy was used by the Trump Negotiation team to resolve trade issues from 2016 to 2020. It’s based on the alt-Right narrative that “China needs the United States more than the United States needs China.” It’s wrong. Terribly wrong. And this move, this calculation based on this failed idea is what brought a weaponized viral agent to America.
The inescapable fact is that the neocon perceptions of what China actually is, and capable of, as well as what American capabilities are wildly divergent from reality.
I blame the belief in the propaganda bubble that surrounds America, but it doesn't really matter now.
Things did not go as planned…
China took drastic measures… going DEFCON ONE, and fully controlled and sealed the outbreak;
Ambitious, agile, and aggressive
The team began in Beijing and then split into two groups that, all told, traveled to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and the hardest hit city, Wuhan. They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. “Everywhere you went, anyone you spoke to, there was a sense of responsibility and collective action, and there’s war footing to get things done,” Aylward says.
The group also reviewed the massive data set that Chinese scientists have compiled. (The country still accounts for more than 90% of the global total of the 90,000 confirmed cases.) They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease, 13.8% had severe symptoms, and 6.1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure. The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms. Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses. Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill. For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.
A critical unknown is how many mild or asymptomatic cases occur. If large numbers of infections are below the radar, that complicates attempts to isolate infectious people and slow spread of the virus. But on the positive side, if the virus causes few, if any, symptoms in many infected people, the current estimated case fatality rate is too high. (The report says that rate varies greatly, from 5.8% in Wuhan, whose health system was overwhelmed, to 0.7% in other regions.)
To get at this question, the report notes that so-called fever clinics in Guangdong province screened approximately 320,000 people for COVID-19 and only found 0.14% of them to be positive. “That was really interesting, because we were hoping and maybe expecting to see a large burden of mild and asymptomatic cases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That piece of data suggests that’s not happening, which would imply that the case fatality risk might be more or less as we currently have.” But Guangdong province was not a heavily affected area, so it is not clear whether the same holds in Hubei province, which was the hardest hit, Rivers cautions.
Much of the report focuses on understanding how China achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible: containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. “China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” the report notes.
The most dramatic—and controversial—measure was the lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January. That has “effectively prevented further exportation of infected individuals to the rest of the country,” the report concludes. In other regions of mainland China, people voluntarily quarantined and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods.
Chinese authorities also built two dedicated hospitals in Wuhan in just over 1 week. Health care workers from all over China were sent to the outbreak’s center. The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases. In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.
Aggressive “social distancing” measures implemented in the entire country included canceling sporting events and shuttering theaters. Schools extended breaks that began in mid-January for the Lunar New Year. Many businesses closed shop. Anyone who went outdoors had to wear a mask.
Two widely used mobile phone apps, AliPay and WeChat—which in recent years have replaced cash in China—helped enforce the restrictions, because they allow the government to keep track of people’s movements and even stop people with confirmed infections from traveling. “Every person has sort of a traffic light system,” says mission member Gabriel Leung, dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Color codes on mobile phones—in which green, yellow, or red designate a person’s health status—let guards at train stations and other checkpoints know who to let through.
“As a consequence of all of these measures, public life is very reduced,” the report notes. But the measures worked. In the end, infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household, Leung says. Once all the people in an apartment or home were exposed, the virus had nowhere else to go and chains of transmission ended. “That’s how the epidemic truly came under control,” Leung says. In sum, he says, there was a combination of “good old social distancing and quarantining very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level, facilitated by AI [artificial intelligence] big data.”
Deep commitment to collective action
How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development:
“No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”
Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.
“Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,” Phelan says. “There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.”
-ScienceMag
So China handled this biological weapons event expertly. They did so in a way that surprised the world. And while many find their techniques questionable, they begrudgingly admit that most other nations could not replicate their action.
What matters is that the COVID-19 that was supposed to cause strife in China has boomeranged, mutated, and like the “green slime monster” struck into the soul of America. And America is not ready for it.
American leadership is still, as of 3MAR20, treating it as a race-specific pathogenic organism. Even though all evidence shows otherwise. They are telling everyone over and over that the flu is far worse.
They say that flu is far worse.
Nothing to worry about here. The monsters are only harmless slime. This is a scene from the 1960’s class “B” science fiction movie: “The Green Slime”.
Lord help us all.
Why this matters…
Like I said. Anything can happen.
It could fizzle out to be nothing…
It could be contained like China contained it…
Or it could be a genuine SHTF event.
Let’s look at historical examples of other SHTF events and try to imagine what it must have been like for the participants of these events.
[1] The Massacre of Usipetes and the Tencteri
The Usipetes and the Tencteri were two ancient tribes who were massacred by the legions of Julius Caesar in 55 BC. We have known about their slaughter for thousands of years from ancient texts, including Caesar’s own account from his book on the Gallic Wars. However, we were never sure exactly where it happened, until 2015 when Dutch archaeologists claimed they found the site of the bloodbath near the town of Kessel.
According to ancient sources, the conflict began in the winter of 56 BC when the two tribes (who were referred to as Germanic but may have actually been Celtic) crossed the Rhine into Gaul after being driven away from their homeland by the Suebi.
The Usipetes and the Tencteri asked Caesar for permission to settle in Gaul, which was denied.
After negotiations failed, the Roman legions launched an attack on their camp and killed everyone in sight.
“there was also a great crowd of women and children and these now began to flee in all directions.
I sent the cavalry to hunt them down…
When they reached the confluence of the Meuse and the Rhine, they saw they had no hope of escaping farther.
A large number of them were killed and the rest flung themselves into the river, where they perished overcome by panic, exhaustion, and the force of the current.”
In his personal account, Caesar said there were around 430,000 people and that he slain them all. Modern scholars put the number at around 150,000 to 200,000, and some of them definitely survived as the tribes were still mentioned the following century. They opine that the inflated number was because Caesar wanted to portray them as a great threat and himself a protector of Rome.
In war, everyone is killed. Women, children and innocents are not spared. Later, the victors will write and boast about their success in the destruction.
[2] Genghis Khan Beheaded People For Being Over 90 Centimeters (3′) Tall
When Genghis Khan was 20, he led an army against the tribe that
killed his father and got his revenge. The Tatar army was crushed, and
Genghis Khan set about exterminating the people in an incredibly unusual
way.
Every Tatar man was lined up and measured against “the linchpin of a
wagon,” which is the axle pin in the middle of the wheel. Anyone who was
taller than these pins—which were 90 centimeters (3′) high—was to be
beheaded.
The criteria used to select survivors from the conquered is often arbitrary.
[3] The Severed Hands of Avaris
Severed Hands.
A few years back, archaeologists were excavating the ruins of Avaris and found, for the first time, concrete evidence of an ancient Egyptian practice that had been, up until that point, only read about in texts – cutting off the hands of vanquished enemies.
This evidence came in the form of 16 severed hands, all of them right ones,
buried in four pits throughout the former Egyptian capital. Two of the
pits, each containing a single hand, were found in what was believed to
have been the throne room, indicating that the presentation of the
trophies was part of a much grander ceremony.
The hands were around 3,600 years old
and came from an oft-forgotten part of Egyptian history called the
Second Intermediate Period or the Hyksos Period. It was defined by the
arrival of a new group of people called the Hyksos who conquered Lower
Egypt and installed one of their own as king. Therefore, Salitis of the
Hyksos became the first pharaoh of the 15th dynasty and, in the process,
also moved the capital to the city of Avaris.
Up until this discovery, this custom had only been referenced in ancient art and writing. However, one point that is still being debated is whether this practice was introduced by the Hyksos or was already present in Egyptian society before their arrival.
Once captured, do not assume that you would be sent off to a prison camp. There are other fates that can await you.
[4] Genghis Khan Victims’ Bones Were Mistaken For Mountains
In 1211, Genghis Khan turned his focus to modern-day China and attacked the Jin Empire. It was a reckless decision. The Jin Empire controlled 53 million people, and the Mongols had one million. Still…
… Genghis Khan won.
Within three years, the Mongols had made their way to Zhongdu (now
Beijing). The city walls were 12 meters (39 ft) high and stretched 29
kilometers (18 mi) around the city. It seemed impossible to get in, so
they didn’t try.
Instead, the Mongols starved Zhongdu out.
By summer 1215, the people there were so hungry that cannibalism was running rampant inside its walls. Finally, they surrendered, and the Mongols sacked and burned the city.
The massacre was horrific.
Months later, a passing eyewitness wrote that “the bones of the slaughtered formed white mountains and that the soil was still greasy with human fat.”
No matter how hungry you are, the fate that can occur in the hands of the enemy can be far worse.
[5] Interesting Mongol War Tactics: Cats, Swallows and Human Fat
Real war is based on surprise and the use of unconventional weapons and strategies.
The first large-scale Mongol attack in Xi Xia happened at the mighty fortress at Volohai.
Unable to breach the walls of Volohai, Genghis Khan resorted to a clever trick. He sent a message from his encampment to the Tangut general announcing that he would end his siege in exchange for a gift of one thousand cats and ten thousand swallows.
Astonished by the unusual request, the fortress commander gratefully complied.
After the animals arrived in the Mongol camp, Genghis Khan ordered his men to tie a small cotton-wool tuft to the tail of each creature then set the tuft afire.
When the panicked and frightened animals were turned loose, they made directly for their nests and lairs inside Volohai, igniting hundreds of small fires.
While the panicked defenders were preoccupied with putting out fires, Genghis Khan’s warriors stormed the city in conquest.
Here’s another example…
The Mongol siege against the walled town of Kusong exemplified Koryo’s [Korea’s] heroic resistance.
General Sartai brought the full array of his medieval assault weapons to bear against the city’s defenses. While Mongol troops attempted to undermine the defensive walls by tunneling under them, formidable lines of catapults hurled large boulders and molten metal at the town.
Special assault teams used siege towers and scaling ladders against the earthen walls and pushed flaming carts against the city’s wooden gates.
Perhaps the most grisly tactical weapon used at the siege of Kusong was the catapult-launched fire-bomb. The Mongols boiled down their captives and used liquified human fat to fuel a weapon which produced fires that were practically inextinguishable.
Kusong’s defenders refused to surrender and stubbornly held on for thirty terrifying days and nights.
An old Mongol general, inspecting the ramparts during the siege, commented that,
"...I have never seen [a city] undergo an attack like this which did not, in the end, submit."
In the end Kusong remained in Koryo’s hands.
Unconventional war is a strategy that generally results in victory. Expect the unexpected.
[6] Genghis Khan Exterminated 1.7 Million People To Avenge One Person
The marriages might have been strategic alliances, but that didn’t
mean there wasn’t any love involved. One of Genghis Khan’s daughters
loved her husband, a man name Toquchar. Genghis Khan loved him, too, as
his favorite son-in-law.
Genghis Khan’s troops attacked Nishapur and slaughtered every person there. By some estimates, 1,748,000 people were killed. Other historians dispute that number, but there’s no doubt that his armies killed everyone they found.
Women, children, babies, and even dogs and cats were tracked down and murdered. Then they were beheaded, and their skulls were piled into pyramids—a request by Genghis Khan’s daughter to ensure that no one got away with a simple wounding.
In War decisions can be made for emotional, not strategic reasons.
[7] Ancient “Barbarian” Warfare in Northern Europe
Archaeologists excavated 2,095 human bones and bone fragments—comprising the remains of at least 82 people—across 185 acres of wetland at the site of Alken Enge, on the shore of Lake Mossø on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. Scientific studies indicate that most of the individuals were young male adults, and they all died in a single event in the early first century A.D. (Around the time of Christ.)
Unhealed trauma wounds on the remains, as well as finds of weapons, suggest that the individuals died in battle.
The team didn’t dig up the entire 185 acres, but the researchers extrapolated that more than 380 people may have been interred in boggy waters along the lakeshore some 2,000 years ago, based on the distribution of the remains that were excavated.
In large scale conflicts, very few people will remember your heroism and the battles that you fought. You will be forgotten.
[7] The Mongols Had A Victory Feast On Top Of The Russian Nobility
In 1223, the Mongolian army was making its way through Russia and had
just won the Battle of the Kalka River. The Russian army had
surrendered, their towns had been captured, and the Mongolians decided
to celebrate.
The generals and nobility of the Russian army were forced to lie down
on the ground. Then a heavy wooden gate was thrown on top of them,
chairs and tables were set on top of the gate, and the army sat down for
a feast.
They held their victory celebration on top of the still-living bodies of their enemies, eating and drinking while Russian princes were crushed to death beneath their feet.
Do not expect leniency because you are rich, wealthy or powerful. In fact, you might be singled out for special treatment.
[8] Genghis Khan Diverted A River Through An Enemy’s Birthplace To Erase It Off The Map
When Genghis Khan found the Muslim kingdom of Khwarezmia, he did
something unusual: He took the peaceful route. A group of diplomats were
sent to the city, hoping to establish a trade route and diplomatic
ties.
The governor of Khwarezmia, though, didn’t trust them. He thought the
diplomats were part of a Mongolian conspiracy and had them executed. He
killed the next group they sent, too.
Genghis Khan was furious. He had tried to be nice, and he’d been
repaid with dead diplomats. He set up an army of 200,000 soldiers,
attacked, and completely destroyed Khwarezmia.
Even after he’d won, Khan sent two armies to burn down every castle, town, and farm they found to make sure that no hint of Khwarezmia survived. According to one story, he even diverted a river to run through the emperor’s birthplace, just to make sure it would never appear on a map again.
When the victor wants to erase you, your people, your city, your nation, your society and your culture, they can do it.
[9] Slaughter at the bridge
About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the
Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the
written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000
years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of
warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single
day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that
was then the height of military technology.
Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.
Strong evidence suggests this wasn’t the first battle for these men. Twenty-seven percent of the skeletons show signs of healed traumas from earlier fights, including three skulls with healed fractures. “It’s hard to tell the reason for the injuries, but these don’t look like your typical young farmers,”
Standardized metal weaponry and the remains of the horses, which were found intermingled with the human bones at one spot, suggest that at least some of the combatants were well-equipped and well-trained.
“They weren’t farmer-soldiers who went out every few years to brawl. These are professional fighters.”
Body armor and shields emerged in northern Europe in the centuries just before the Tollense conflict and may have necessitated a warrior class.
“If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move,”
When the fighting was through, hundreds lay dead, littering the swampy valley. Some bodies were stripped of their valuables and left bobbing in shallow ponds; others sank to the bottom, protected from plundering by a meter or two of water. Peat slowly settled over the bones.
Within centuries, the entire battle was forgotten.
Being in possession of the best technology and training might not provide you the advantage that you think it will.
[10] Genghis Khan Nearly Erased A Kingdom From History For Not Sending Troops
When Genghis Khan attacked Khwarezmia, he asked the conquered kingdom of Xi Xia to send him troops. They refused.
Xi Xia tried to take a bold stand against their oppressor, and they quickly regretted it. The Mongolian army swarmed through Xi Xia, destroying everything that they found. They systematically exterminated every member of the population.
They hadn’t written down their own stories, so the only records of their existence came from neighboring countries. Their language wasn’t recovered for more than 700 years. It took until the mid-20th century for archaeologists to unearth stones that had their writing on them. In the meantime, every word they had spoken was forgotten.
Genghis Khan died during the battle, most likely from being thrown from his horse. Still, the Mongolian army carried out his work. They slaughtered every person they found, even after their leader was dead and their enemy had surrendered.
You and your entire culture and society can be erased from history by the mistakes of your leadership.
Conclusion
That last lesson is poinent.
You and your entire culture and society can be erased from history by the mistakes of your leadership.
Scene from the movie “Carriers”. It is a movie about a lethal virus that hits the United States.
What was the Trump administration doing launching biological weapons against China? Did they actually believe that it would eventually bring China to “heel”; a nation much larger than the United States geographically, and with a population four times larger and ruled by merit?
What were they fucking thinking?
Geographically China is larger.
Population wise, China is four times larger.
Education wise, China has far more skilled STEM scientists.
Politically, China is a monolithic conservative culture. America is balkanized into disparate groups.
Chinese leadership are there through merit, America’s through graft & popularity.
China possesses the vast bulk of factories, resources, materials, and a motivated citizenry. America is a service economy dependent upon reputation and the petro-dollar.
For the last ten years, China has won every single military simulation that the United States conducts.
China is allied with Russia militarily, and socially. The USA is allied with Britain, and Australia and hosts a wide range of “client states”.
China is the “factory for the world”, America is the big piggy-bank based on the stability of the petro-dollar.
Jet Li in the Chinese movie “Fearless”.
Meanwhile, by all appearances, China is not doing anything.
They are just taking the hits and smiling.
Scene from the movie “Real Steel”.
They are practicing the well understood technique of using your foe’s weakness against him. This is Kungfu. This is martial arts. This is fundamental to understanding China.
Mosttraditionalorclassicalmartialartsuses the opponents strength againstthem. Thelistwouldbetoolongtogivethemallbutwillinclude: traditionalKarate (anystyle) Kungfu (anystyle) AikidoJudoTKD (traditional-nosportstkd) Mostpeoplehavethewrongideaconcernkarateandothertraditionalmartialarts.
- Martial arts using opponents strength against them
China knew (I surmise) that the virus would mutate. They always do. While there are species-specific viruses in the world, none are race-specific.
It implies that that a race-specific configuration is not stable.
Since it is not stable, that means that it has a “half-life” and soon mutates to fit a wide ranging biological host.
So now the SHTF COVID-19 biological attack has boomeranged back to it’s source.
For the last one hundred years the American government has cultivated the American citizenry into herd-mentality sheep. It’s rule over mobs of people, it serves the oligarchy well. It does not however, serve a crisis SHTF event well.
Americans are not being safe and treating this virus as the biological weapon that it is. They are treating it as if it is a variation of the flu. This is a very dangerous assumption.
How many face masks do you see? America is treating this virus as some variation of the flu and are treating it as such. They expect that it MIGHT hit them, and if so, they MIGHT get sick, and if sick, they MIGHT need to go to the hospital. All of these assumptions are false.
Things will probably go worse in America than what China experienced in January / February 2020.
Be safe.
This COVID-19 outbreak will hit America with the same level of ferocity that it did Wuhan.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
When the first person in China died, China went DEFCON ONE and locked the entire nation down. They built three hospitals (in ten days) and moved medial staff from all over the nation to Wuhan.
So far, as of today 4MAR20, eight people died in America. Test kits are under-supplied and do not work. The President and the media are telling everyone that it is nothing to worry about. To stay calm and wash hands often.
The Wuhan mortality rate was almost 4% a few weeks after DEFCON ONE. Now, the entire nation mortality is 1%.
My guess is that America’s mortality rate will approach the 10% figure as planned by the neocons in the White House. This is horrible. Please everyone… please be safe.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
Start Chinese-level personal measures now, today. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Avoid people. Sanitize. Inside clothes and outside clothes. Pets inside. Work from home or order things remotely. Isolate and self quarantine yourselves.
And Robitussin will not help you. It’s NOT the flu.
The death rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
The death rate for COVID-19 appears to be higher than that of the flu.
-Livescience.
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 0.1% of those infected, he said.
The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated.
Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.
-WHO
This illness will rock America to it’s core and it will…
Impact the 2020 Presidential elections.
Impact the American economy.
Impact the global economy.
Impact the way the local government and schools and businesses operate.
Impact all the various disparate balkanized sub-groups within America.
Jet Li from the Chinese movie “Fearless”.
"Now we’re facing another kind of war, against the coronavirus. Trump got rid of our pandemic specialist two years ago and has defunded the Centers for Disease Control because he continues to ignore science."
-Variety
End Quotes
The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began.
The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.
In what is already an infamous snafu, CDC initially refused a request to test a patient in Northern California who turned out to be the first probable COVID19 case without known links to an infected person.
-ScienceMAg
A Los Alamos National Laboratory analysis of the outbreak in China in December 2019 and January 2020 puts the unrestrained R0 of Covid-19 at between 4.5 and 6.6. (The R-naught figure indicates the contagiousness of a disease in a given environment. If the number is above one, it’s spreading.)
The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated[Excerpts:] Integrating uncertainties in the exponential growth rate estimated from the ‘first arrival’ approach and the uncertainties in the duration of latent and infectious periods, we estimated the values of R0 to be 6.3 and 4.7. The high R0 values we estimated have important implications for disease control.The 2019-nCoV epidemic is still rapidly growing and spread to more than 20 countries as of February 5, 2020. Here, we estimated the growth rate of the early outbreak in Wuhan to be 0.29 per day (a doubling time of 2.4 days), and the reproductive number, R0, to be between 4.7 to 6.6.How contagious the 2019-nCoV is in other countries remains to be seen. If the value of R0 is as high in other countries, our results suggest that active and strong population-wide social distancing efforts, such as closing down transportation system, schools, discouraging travel, etc., might be needed to reduce the overall contacts to contain the spread of the virus.
This shockingly high original Chinese R0 value meant a doubling of the number of cases every few days, and subsequently, regional hospitals were overrun by infected patients. The Chinese experience indicates how it may spread in the West and the 3rd world. Critically, the often-quoted case fatality rate (CFR) of “only” 2% for Covid-19 occurs when severely affected patients have access to first-class medical treatment, with teams of nurses and doctors caring for them in isolation ICUs.
About 15% of people infected with the virus will develop severe symptoms (pneumonia, etc.) requiring intensive individual treatment in order to survive.
Once hospitals are swamped and many of the medical staff become infected, the CFR can swiftly rise to above 15%. This is believed to be the situation inside the Wuhan City quarantine zone.
An infectious disease with an R-naught above five, and the number of cases doubling every two days, is like a biological atomic bomb chain reaction, particularly in the age of jet travel to all points of the globe.
The USA and the West will quickly run out of Chinese-made PPE, medication, and hospital supplies. For example, China has nationalized the U.S.-owned factory that makes our N-95 masks and will, instead, keep them for their own use. The Chinese have seen Trump’s tariffs as outright economic warfare. Now, in my judgment, they are going to repay us by withholding shipments of PPE and medical supplies. China will leverage its present status as “factory to the world” to their best advantage while they still retain it. These critically needed supplies will be kept in China for their own use during the pandemic, and understandably so.
So, now it will be a race to see if America can set up enough factories to manufacture our own PPEs and other medical supplies rapidly enough to meet our soon-to-be exploding needs. China’s providing, or withholding, of required medical supplies will constitute a World War dimension of the pandemic. They will not send infected travelers to Western cities: they don’t need to do this. That ship has sailed; that horse is out of the barn.
Covid-19 will now travel on its own, with asymptomatic “super spreaders” carrying the virus from country to country for as long as unrestricted air travel is permitted. Then it will spread within each country, with every Western and third-world city a potential Wuhan.
China’s recent history teaches us that interpersonal social interaction has to be reduced as much as possible to get the R naught number down to controllable levels, but this radical reduction comes at a heavy price. When people don’t go to work out of fear of infection, or after being ordered by their governments to self-quarantine at home, economies shrink and eventually collapse. After weeks of forced home quarantine, China is now trying to restart critical factories, but this risks boosting their R0 number once again, leading to more hospitals being overrun and another round of chain-reaction contagion.
...
As usual, I just watched the most recent YouTube video by Dr. John Campbell (Covid-19 Thursday monring 27 Feb). Since he has gained global exposure, he’s getting emails from physicians all over the world, including Iran and China.
He typed up an email he received from the city of Chengdu, population 16 million, which relates their mandatory quarantine rules as China struggles to get Covid-19 under control. When the virus runs rampant and hospitals are overrun, as in Wuhan and Hunan Province, the death rate soars to over 15%, according to many accounts.
Under the strict quarantine rules in the image below, the death rate can be kept to below 2%, but at the cost of crippling the economy.
Now, just imagine trying to enforce this level of social control in American cities.
-Americanpartisan
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six
week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a
selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China
handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As
of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are
cautious and careful in their actions and movements.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – New technology helps locate sick people.
Xi Peng has made a call out to all of China to help fight this deadly and lethal COVID-19 virus. The results have been astounding. From people running inside and handing wads of cash to the police (I have about a zillion videos on this), to people buying masks out of their “own pocket” and giving them away, to making food for all the workers… everyone is involved. This COVID-19 has really pulled the Chinese nation together. While before it was hyper-patriotic, today it is on a completely different level.
Here’s one of the latest innovations from the Shenzhen factories and R&D development centers. It’s already in mass production and the “word on the street” is that they will be handing these out to all of the police agencies all over China. Check it out.
Video 2 – America just doesn’t get it…
Nope, America just does not get it. The illness is a biological weapon. It is designed to be stealthy and hide within people and shed when they feel fine and normal.
So what you want to do is avoid crowds.
If you are trying to stock up for an emergency or SHTF event, you do not wait until it happens. You prepare years in advance. That is why they are called “preppers”.
Look at these fools. Do you see any of them wearing a mask? What about gloves? How many do you think are going to disinfect their clothing, wash their hands, or sanitize their car keys?
If the COVID-19 hits America, it will be like shooting fish in a barrel.
America is not anywhere as prepared, organized or run by talented and experienced leadership like China is. It just isn’t.
Video 3 – The new technology.
The new technology of the thermal imaging headsets are now in production and available. You can see them on the streets along with the flying drones and robots that are making sure that everyone is “with the program”.
America doesn’t have any of this. And won’t for years. 5G is bad for you don’t you know. It’s gonna give you brain damage, don’t you know. It’s gonna fry your brain… don’t you know…
Video 4 – Community pitches in.
China is hyper-patriotic. This is something that is unknown in the Untied States because everyone is in this propaganda bubble where everyone in China wants to move to America for “freedom” and “democracy”. Where the Chinese can’t wait to “throw away their chains” and over through the vicious tyrannical Chinese government… don’t ya know.
Here’s a common scene. The local kitchens feed the police, militia and volunteers with delicious meals. This looks to me like Guiling meifan. It’s a very delicious and spicy dish of noodles and pork.
Video 5 – Military decontamination team decontaminates the taxis.
When you are in China, most of what you will see are the civilian militia in their (either) red or orange jackets, or the hospital staff in their (either) white or blue NBC suits and masks. Most of the military presence is behind the scene. Like here…
Here is what happens before the taxis go out and about. They cycle back to their staging area for continuous decontamination by the military NBC troops.
Video 6 – Seriously sick man tries to break out of quarantine.
Yup, so you are in quarantine and you are ill and not thinking right. What you should do is call the police using the APP or the hospital and wait until they come and get you. But that’s not what this fellow does. He hops in his cart and tries to smash through the roadblock and escape on his own…
Video 7 – Xinjiang decontamination.
The Uyghur Muslims are on board with the program and are participating in the decontamination of their communities, their cities and their people. Here we have them working and participating side by side with the Chinese military crews working to decontaminate the communities in Xinjiang.
You would think that if the American narrative is correct, that the Chinese wants to exterminate the Uyghur Muslims that they would just simply let the illness run it’s course, right?
Conclusion
After about this bunch of videos I’m going to give it a rest for a spell. As you can clearly see, China is organized and working together to fight this terrible biological weapon. While it has put a dent in the Chinese economy, it is recovering.
Compare that to the levels of panic and ineptitude in the United States. It’s where “it’s every man for himself” and no one is trusting the government. Lord help the people in America. They have no idea what a shit-storm this biological weapon could end up being.
If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six
week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a
selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China
handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As
of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are
cautious and careful in their actions and movements.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Airport Screening
While there are all sort of roadblocks and check points in China at this time, there are multiple stations at airports. This is what it looks like.
One thing, notice the lines… yeah.
They are not absurdly long like they are int he United States. When I left the USA, I had to wait in a line for three hours while TSA processed me. In China it is professional, quick and of short duration.
Video 2 – What it was like when China went into DEFCON ONE.
When China announced that the nation was under a biological weapons attack and that everyone should stay in their homes under “lock down” conditions, it was eerie. It was like a horror movie.
Suddenly sirens were blaring, messages were popping up ont he televisions, and on all the social media. Drones started to fly about telling people to stay inside and the various police, military, and militia were called up to secure roadblocks and quarantine regions of society.
It was like this…
Video 3 – Inside of one of the quarantine facilities
The Chinese government has set up large containment facilities for people who were collected at roadblocks or who have come to the hospital for treatment. These facilities are policed and maintained by hospital staff and nurses 24-7. Here is what it is like at night…
Video 4 – Hitting in Italy
This COVID-19 broke out of China and has mutated to attack other races aside from Asian. It is active in Iran, Korea (both North and South) and Italy. Here is a news-woman on Italian television reporting the news before it was publicly known that the coronavirus exploded in Italy.
I do hope that this poor girl is going to be ok.
Video 5 – Quarantine in a hotel
Not all quarantines are held inside retrofitted stadiums and public schools. Hospitals have also been converted to quarantine stations in the smaller towns and communities. Here’s one where everyone is outside the door waiting for the thrice daily medical checkups and supplies.
Video 6 – Locked inside your home
If you are ordered to be quarantined within your home, special precautions are taken. Here we see that a police official marks the door with a notice that people inside are possibly infected and the at the entire home is under quarantine. Then they put on a alarm, where any removal or movement will trigger an alert. Finally, everything is connected via WeChat and QR code so that the quarantined people have instant access to the police and hospital if they need anything or are having an emergency.
Video 7 – A reminder that this is not the flu.
To this day, even now in March, the American media is still proclaiming that the flu is far worse. Donald Trump is calling the COVID-19 a “hoax” and has put off the responsibilities for dealing it to his vice President Pence. Such is the American bubble of ignorance.
I think what is happening is that American media is a propaganda arm of the “deep state”, and now even the American leadership believes the lies and twisted narrative. It’s a dangerous situation.
Meanwhile, how in God’s Green Earth can you possible believe that the Flu is anywhere near as bad as this? You never see people collapsing on the street from the flu. Never.
There are more videos to explore…
If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six
week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a
selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China
handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As
of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are
cautious and careful in their actions and movements.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Western media about China:
Xi Jinping is not the president but the "paramount leader" of China. Chinese media don't bring news because they're the "mouthpiece" of the Party
China doesn't fire officials, it "purges" them
China doesn't requisition private hospitals during a health emergency by passing laws, it "seizes" them
Chinese leaders don't strengthen laws, they "concentrate power"
China doesn't give out loans, they "trap" countries in debt.
China doesn't punish corrupt officials, they "net" them
Chinese media doesn't report news, it reports "propaganda"
China doesn't revise counting methodologies, it "under-reports" cases
Chinese companies don't innovate, they "steal IP"
Chinese people are not patriotic, they're "brainwashed"
Chinese provinces don't win PISA tests, they "selectively nominate the best schools".
-Maitreya Bhakal on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal Feb 13. 2020
Video 1 – Virus strikes a motorcycle rider.
The thing is that this virus comes with a one-two punch. It is light and you seem to get over this minor cold, and then it goes into remission. It borrows deep. Then out of the blue, while you are feeling just fine and normal, it will suddenly strike you. It will be sudden and you can be doing anything. From walking, to riding a motorcycle to driving a car.
Once the virus hit, there was an increase in vehicular accidents on the highways and roads. Some of them seemed strange. Like the woman who was just pulling out of the driveway and crashed into the wall unconscious. Or the truck driver that ran over the car ahead of him, or the delivery truck that ran through a red light and crashed into the trees. Or, the truck that drove clear off the die of a tall bridge. These stories are horrifying.
Like this motorcycle rider…
Video 2 – What it is like when you are tested as positive at a road block.
My brother asked me what it was like if you went through a road-block and you were tested positive for the illness. Well, it’s like this. They just cannot test for the illness, but they can test to see if you are having any symptoms of an illness, and if you are, they will sequester you and pull you aside and take you into to quarantine. Like this…
Video 3 – When it strikes it is sudden and swift.
WHen the second phase of the illness kits, it’s a Knock-out punch and it is sudden. This video says it all. It is frightening and alarming.
I keep hearing that this isn’t as bad as all the hype makes it look.
I would like to remind the people saying this that this particular virus was CUSTOMIZED IN A LABORATORY.
Who knows what it will mutate into now that is out in the world FOREVER?
-Busted Knuckles
I just cannot grapple in my mind how anyone can possibly say that the flu is worse than this. Obviously they are back-seat drivers who are just paper-pushers living within their own sweet bubble. Well, you all had best wake up. The reality can get to be pretty harsh. I’ll tell you what.
Video 4 – Medical staff collapsing from the KO punch when the illness strikes
I’ve presented many such videos of hospital workers collapsing during this emergency. Sometimes it due to exhaustion, but more often than not, they contract the COVID-19 illness and succumb to it. It’s a very sad and tragic situation, indeed.
Sadly, many hospitals are experiencing this event and watching their staff succumb to this frightening illness; this evil horror.
Video 5 – Remote temperature and vitals check on quarantine housing.
The Chinese have been very proactive in using drones to check on the health of the people under quarantine. As can be easily seen in this video.
Video 6 – Collecting some infected people that refuse to stay in quarantine.
here we have a family of people that are infected. They know that they are infected. So they were put under house quarantine, and they broke quarantine. Thus they became a risk to the community. So the police came to seize them an put them into more secure quarantine facilities.
Video 7 – Road block
This is what a road block looks like on a highway off-ramp. It is pretty much the same all over China.
These roadblocks are covered in other posts as they are both interesting and come in all sorts of sizes and shapes.
Video 8 – Going back to work.
Now that most of the Chinese factories have reopened, new procedures are in place. The factory, as a closed eco-system must maintain the strictest health guidelines for safety and control of this serious COVID-19 virus. Here is a video that pretty much shows what it is like throughout China today…
Video 9 – Some closeups of the Chinese decontamination vehicles.
Here’s a video that shows a decontamination vehicle close up. It gives you a great idea of what it is like and it’s design. These vehicles are handed out to the local communities but they are military vehicles. The Chinese have a complete army of them, and they are now in all the top tier cities.
Unlike most military vehicles, they are not painted green or grey. They are used during public DEFCON ONE emergencies so they are treated as part of the hospital units. So they are painted white like the ambulances are.
Conclusion
This is a very unique time in this world. Yes, not just for China but for the world. This event is unheard of, or at least the modern incarnation of it is. It’s a horror movie right out of “12 monkeys” where an evil man tries to kill a huge swath of the global population by releasing a virus on Christmas eve. Funny how this hit stride during CNY eve.
I have hundreds of videos to post, and I will get to them as time permits. In the mean time please be safe.
If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Zhong Nanshan said, "This plague originated in China first, but it didn't necessarily originate in China at first. "
Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six
week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a
selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China
handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As
of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are
cautious and careful in their actions and movements.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Girl collapses when trying to leave the quarantine zone.
Here is an interesting video, though on first glance it doesn’t look like anything special. It’s jsut some chick collapsed on the ground near a road-block.
Well the story behind this is more interesting. This woman started to have the COVID-19 symptoms and wanted to leave the complex. However, her temperature reading said that she was running a temperature and that further testing was necessary. The miitia wanted to put her into quarantine, but she refused. So she ran and climbed over the gate.
Then collapsed while she was crossing the barrier.
There she is jut lying there and everyone is afraid to touch her as she is possibly infected and (or was) terribly irritated. So they are standing around waiting for the ambulance and police to come and take her to quarantine.
Video 2 – Military Units at a Road-Block.
When China went into DEFCON ONE all of the military units were called into service. This includes such things as the nuclear forces inside their bunkers, the air forces inside their planes and the naval forces on board their ships. The group forces were dispatched and chemical and NBC decontamination troops have been busy in the cities making them habitable again. However other troops are being used to control the population and man roadblocks and triage centers.
Here we have a more or less common sight in China this month.
Video 3 – Everyone is making sacrifices.
Many of the nursing and doctor staff have had to have their hair cut off in order to service this very contagious and lethal pathogen. It’s a sad thing to see women cut off their hair that they have been growing for the last twenty years. Though not as heart-rendering as being away from your children and loved ones. They don’t understand and they don’t understand why you cannot cross the street to hug them. It’s really a tear jerker.
Here we see a flight attendant who is working triple shifts transporting hospital workers to Wuhan and the staff that she is transporting…
Video 4 – America is not with the program.
The world is entering into a new reality; a new way of interacting and working together. The old corrupted and failing structures are collapsing, and the United States appears to resemble a large dying beast, thrashing about wildly…
Because I'm 1/2 Chinese,1/2 white, I like to test Pakistani's reactions If I tell them I'm American, most become reserved, some stop smiling.
If I say Chinese? Most grin immediately & say China is an all weather friend.
Yet somehow China is painted as an enemy of Islam by US media🤔
-Shaun Rein
So, it was just a matter of time before COVID-19 would exit China and hit the shores of America. The American media and the Leadership are not worried at all. Donald Trump calls it a hoax, and the media are still talking about how much worse the flu is.
Meanwhile, there is a complete absence of programs to deal with this issue, and the citizens are out buying everything that isn’t nailed down.
You can easily see the differences between China and the USA at this juncture of time. In China, systems are in place to maintain food supplies and controlled access and screening. In America none of that exists…
… though there is talk in some states about setting up “blue ribbon panels” to look into the matter.
Here’s a comparison between an American supermarket and a Chinese one during the COVID-19 emergency.
I can’t remember a time when we have seen such widespread “panic buying” all over the nation. Today I spoke with someone that just visited the closest Wal-Mart in this area, and I was told that there are empty shelves all over the store. There are very few canned goods left, some of the most essential medications have been cleaned out, and there was nothing left in the long-term storable food section at all. Of course similar things are being reported at major retail stores all across the United States. All of a sudden, fear of COVID-19 has motivated thousands upon thousands of Americans to start prepping like crazy. But most of the population is still not taking this crisis seriously enough. As the number of confirmed cases all over the world continues to rise at an exponential rate, what are the stores going to look like when most of the country finally realizes that they should be prepping for an extended pandemic?
...
In Los Angeles, a local Costco was quickly raided of the most essential supplies when the store opened on Saturday morning…
At a Costco Wholesale market in Los Angeles Saturday morning, a swarm of shoppers loaded up carts with essential items to prepare for a possible period of quarantine.
According to the chain, water, paper towels and Clorox disinfecting wipes were the most in-demand products.
And up in northern California, photos of completely empty shelves over the weekend were rapidly shared on social media…
On social media, residents further north shared shocking photos and videos from Costco centers in San Francisco.
Shelves were depleted of tinned food, while some shoppers climbed up onto shelving in order to reach remaining supplies of rice.
Of course the exact same thing is happening in other states as well.
In Washington, one local resident claimed that “thousands of people” have been descending on the local Costco centers…
I live in the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Washington State. My advice for those elsewhere – go to Costco now. Thousands of people at local stores yesterday – not where you want to be if there is a virus spreading. Glad I went a week ago.
And one video that has been very widely shared shows hundreds of people lined up at a Costco in Brooklyn before it even opened in the morning.
-The most important news
Video 5 – Chinese decontamination robot.
The Chinese do not mess around. It is a nation full of hard workers, talent and leadership by merit. No “diversity hires” here. They’d never survive.
With all the decontamination trucks running 24-7, and the decontamination teams working “around the clock”, there is still a lot of areas and regions that are not getting the proper decontamination attention that is required.
Enter the Chinese solution; decontamination robots and sky drones with AI capability using 5G wireless technology.
Video 6 – Hyper-Patriotic China went into High Gear!
This COVID-19 brought the already super-Patriotic Chinese closer and more unified than ever.
If you listen to the American Alt-Right media you would be under the mistaken impression that the Chinese are just pining away for the “freedom” and “democracy” that America has. You believe that the Chinese government is a totalitarian government that is very dystopian and like a scene from 1984. You believe many other false and judicious things.
Yet the truth is the absolute opposite. The Chinese by nature are hyper-patriotic. So the narrative about China developing the COVID-19 as a biological weapon to kill it’s own people is just absolutely and patently ridiculous. China does not have to do that. All they need to do is ask for volunteers, play some patriotic music and wave some flags and the Chinese people would step up to the plate and give their lives for their country.
If you think that American is patriotic, you are wrong. Only some areas in America are mildly patriotic. The Chinese are 100% unified hyper-patriotic.
Video 7 – Asshole steals the building sanitizer.
Yup there is one in every crowd. Here we have a woman stealing the building supplied hand sanitizer. What a dick-wad!
During this emergency, all building provide tissues and sanitation supplies for the residents to use when they egress from their apartments. That is what they are for. Most Chinese think in terms of the society. Family, and society come first, then it’s their turn.
But there are still those selfish and evil people who believe that it is every man-for-himself. These are evil and selfish people that should not live in that community at all.
Video 8 – American rush to stock up on supplies
WTF?
So here is America, and for the last two months American media has been bashing China about this COVID-19 coronavirus non-stop. Now it looks like one or two people are carriers and are infecting others, and suddenly everyone rushes to the supermarket to get int he midst of the big crowds of people…
…with out masks!
Can you believe it?
... the White House has no ” corona virus team as he felt it unneeded. His answer to this particular pandemic is Mike Pence.
... Putting Pence in charge was a move he was forced to make as he felt the CDC was unimportant.
-Gone to Hell
People, if you are reading this you MUST do four things. [1] Never go outside unless you are wearing a mask. Wear it solidly and never take it off for any reason, and [2] stay away from crowds. Finally, [3] be hyper clean. Wash, scrub and do not wear outside clothes in the house. Wash them immediately.
And most importantly, [4] do not use your hands. Don’t touch anything, and most certainly do not eat anything with your hands. Use utensils.
That said, there’s probably not all that much that can be done at this point, other than let the thing play itself out. No vaccine anywhere in sight, nor will one be widely affordable when it finally arrives. The contagion is already pretty much out of the barn, so other than telling everyone to stay home and quit circulating among each other – which ain’t gonna happen regardless – there’s not all that much to be done at this point.
-ellipsis
Video 9 – Mask discipline
In China during this emergency, you MUST wear a mask at all times. You can go to jail if you do not. So it is very important, and wearing the mask below your chin does not count. It MUST cover your nose and mouth. It’s not just for your safety, but it is for the safety for the entire community. Many foreign visitors to China are very lax about this requirement.
They will pay the price if they are not careful.
Conclusion
Donald Trump held a press conference on Thursday naming Vice President Mike Pence to be in charge of the Corona Virus response. Many commented that Trump did not look confident, was reading from a script and kept referring to the Corona Virus as ''similar to the flu''
These were just some more videos that were taken during the bio-weapons attack on China.
It’s the fifth such biological weapons attack since Donald Trump began the Trump Trade war. With Three chicken flu outbreaks in 2017, the drone propagated African Swine Flu during 2018 and 2019, and the collapse of the grain industry by an unusual strain…
Now this.
Well, China knows whats going on.
Zhong Nanshan said, "This plague originated in China first, but it didn't necessarily originate in China at first. "
Well, it’s working. The Chinese GDP is at zero for two months now. And America is sitting nice and pretty knowing full well that the COVID-19 favors Asians over other races.
When Coronavirus hits Europe, should we wear a mask or not? Are you aware of the huge cultural difference between East and West?
Within only 3 days, already 15 confirmed infections in Switzerland, which leads to increased social anxiety.
Asian community starts to store masks and food at home, took the same measures as in China. While the Swiss community, still business as usual.
Actually, the underline message of "Wearing a Mask" differs between Europe and China. In China, it means “I'm concerned, and don't want to get infected".
While in Europe, it means "I'm already infected/sick, and don't want to pass it to you"...
This cultural difference gives great social pressure to many Asian communities in Europe, who were highly worried, yet still not dare to wear a mask when going out for work or shopping.
Therefore, I "invented" a small disclaimer to resolve this cultural crash, as:“Keine Panik, nur Selbstschutz (Don't panic, just for self-protection)”. I stick it on my bag when wearing a mask, it releases the fear for both Europeans and myself.
There are times we try to be "The Same" to hide from cultural differences. But why not face it and smile it away? :)
-Sally Yan
We will see. In the meantime, I am not going to fall for the narrative that this is a “natural” sickness that came about from eating bats…
…give me a fucking break will ya!
More videos on the way…
If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here’s a bunch of videos that I collected during the (so far) six week long quarantine that everyone in China experienced. The videos are a selection of virus related subjects but generally relate to how China handled the biological weapons attack, and how society adapted to it. As of this writing, things have stabilized and people and companies are cautious and careful in their actions and movements.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Worker gets struck by the Virus
We start this post with a reminder why the COVID-19 virus is so concerning. It has a “one-two punch”. When it first hits, the effects are very mild. Then later, the KO punch hits.
You catch it, and then it incubates for around two weeks. On the third week it starts shedding the virus to everyone around you. If you touch something, it will stay on that surface for up-to twelve hours.
Then, sometime around the fourth week, you will start to not feel well. You will have a slight fever, and a mild sore throat.
You will have this for about a week and then it will go away.
But…
It hasn’t gone away. It’s digging in deep. It’s infecting your vital organs. It’s burying in deep.
Then from two to four weeks later… it erupts.
Many people just pass out, while others go into shock and spasms.
Here we have a person experiencing the “knock out punch”.
Video 2 – Asshole spreads the COVID-19 infection intentionally.
China has an enormous population. It is four times the size of the population of the USA. In fact, there are more Chinese that speak English than there are Americans.
Chew on that for a while.
Anyways, there’s assholes everywhere. Here we have an asshole with the virus trying to give it to everyone in the apartment building.
Obviously she’s got something wrong with her.
It is precisely because of people like her that China has enacted such draconian containment measures.
Video 3 – Westerner joins the local militia.
In China during this period there are numerous levels of participation in handling this crisis. Since China went DEFCON ONE the military are all involved, as were all the military reservists. Police, Fire and Hospital services at all levels worked around the clock. Local community militia were called up and recruited residents to help the.
In this video we have a non-Chinese as part of the militia and is out setting people up for some of he free screening centers that went up everywhere. Unlike the USA, you don’t need to pay money to get tested.
It’s not a for-profit model.
Video 4 – People are dying from this illness.
"That happened to us just like throwing from happy festival to a resident evil film in 24 hours!"
-Rui Meng Wang
This video puts into words something that is entirely missing in the American media at all levels. People are dying. Families are being hurt.
This is not just something you do for geo-political advantage. This is serious business, and has serious ramifications.
Video 5 – The KO punch hits.
This video below best shows how this virus works and why it is so dangerous. For when the second phase of it hits you, it is sudden and you just collapse right then and there. This is true whether you are standing, walking, riding a bicycle, or driving a truck…
Video 6 – Not everyone wants to cooperate.
Some people are fearful. They fear the government. They fear the police. They fear the hospitals. And when they are often confronted with that fear, they react like a wild animal.
They flee.
And it is up to the police to corral them and secure them so that they don’t infect the rest of the community.
Video 7 – Decontamination in process.
The clothing used by the fire frighting crew differs from the hospital crew. Aside from being colorful, they are full spectrum NBC suits. Here we have them undergoing a decontamination procedure.
Under this DEFCON ONE emergency, everyone is playing a role and doing their part in it.
Conclusion
This virus is a very serious illness. No wonder people consider it a biological weapon. It is very important that we take this virus very seriously and do not be lax in our habits.
When I see pictures of Americans, and videos of Americans stocking up on supplies to “ride out” the virus, I am shocked. So here they are… a silent virus that hides in your body before it attacks, and what do all the Americans do?
They go out in public in the midst of enormous crowds of people and do so without wearing a mask.
That is the height of insanity.
Maybe it’s because of the near relentless attacks on China and the narrative that flu is far more serious. Perhaps it is because Donald Trump called this virus a hoax. Or maybe it’s just that Americans are truly that stupid.
Who knows?
If you would like to check out the full index of the Trump Trade War activities, you can go here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Most of the negative comments to my postings come from people who don’t read the entire post / article. They scan the headline, maybe read one or two paragraphs and then lash out with some kind of vitriol. Aside from the trolls (they don’t last long here) the responses are telling. Unless you state something similar to the mainstream media narrative, you are a radical; and irresponsible fool, who needs to be “put in his place”. Maybe. Here’s another opinion. Check it out.
Mainstream media
Government approved propaganda for the masses.
Alt-Left and Alt-Right
Elements of real actual truth interspersed with the intentionally outrageous. The articles are designed to push an on-going narrative "off track" and move it away from the truth.
This opinion on the COVID-19 coronavirus is from another person looking at things from a different, and more expansive point of view. He omits some things that I include in my calculus, such as the use of drones to propagate germ warfare, but it’s still a good look at this situation. Please give him every consideration.
China is Confronting the COVID-19 Epidemic. Was It Man-Made? An Act of of Bio-warfare?
The new
coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, also called COVID-19, has as of this date
resulted in more than 3,000 deaths and infected more than 80,000 people
Worldwide, the vast majority of them in China
The epidemic is largely confined to Mainland China.
While the virus has
spread to at least 51 countries according to the WHO, the numbers of
confirmed cases are low: 4691 confirmed cases outside Mainland China.
(See table right)
Not Addressed is that this could be a man-made virus.
Source: WHO, February 28, 2020. 51 countries according to WHO
What western media fails to
address is that there is a probability that the virus could have been
man-made in one or more of the numerous US bio-warfare laboratories.
Western media also are silent about the fact that the virus appears to be largely affecting ethnic Chinese, meaning, it targets specifically Chinese DNA.
Also not addressed is that this virus initially targeted Asians exclusively.
Almost all of the deaths and confirmed cases in the 51 countries and territories to which the virus has spread, are of Chinese origin.
The virus appears to be
strengthening, as it mutates over time, making its control even more
difficult. Will it eventually break the “Chinese DNA boundaries” and
affect also other DNA types, i.e. western “Caucasian” people.
The West expects the Chinese to control the spread and limit it to China.
But the west also expects
Chinese scientists and bio-researchers to overcome the epidemic and stop
the virus from further mutating, therefore reducing the western
infection risk.
Finding a Vaccine.
Despite early hopes that a
vaccine may be found soon – until now there has been little progress in
this direction. However, Cuba’s antiviral Recombinant Interferon Alpha
2B (IFNrec) was chosen by Chinese medical and bio-researchers to combat
the coronavirus.
Interestingly, Interferon
had been discovered in Cuba 39 years ago, at the very onset of Cuba’s
biotechnology programme in 1981. But it is not widely used in the world,
even though it could save countless lives and cure countless patients
(mainly diabetics), simply because of the US boycott that does not allow
marketing of medication Made in Cuba.
This could be an act of biological warfare.
Nevertheless, the COVID19 infection rate seems to have been gradually
declining in the last three weeks. And there is no doubt that China
will overcome this epidemic. Yet, the world must wake up to the fact
that this could be an act of biological warfare.
Precedents: Bird Flu, African Swine Flu affecting China
In the last two years, since 2018 alone, China was hit by several
types of bird flu (H7N4 and H7N9) in 2018 and yet another strain just in
January 2020 which was overshadowed by the more serious COVID-2019.
There was also an outbreak of the African swine Flu (2018), killing millions of pigs.
Propagated by drones. These advanced and technically advanced drones sprayed the virus over the widely isolated pig farms. Not talked about in the Western media, but well known in China.
And there was a massive food crop destruction (2019 – mostly corn and soybeans) by the so-called “armyworms”.
Compensating for the impacts on the supply of pork, corn and soybean,
China resorted to importing theses commodities– and most of the imports
came from the US.
An attempt to create a famine?
Were these ‘outbreaks’ which had destructive impacts on China’s
economy coincidental? They have created instability, food price
inflation and a dependence on imported agricultural products from the
US.
The western media has been playing up the so-called Trump tariff war
with China, while hidden from the limelight and in parallel, more
serious warfare – bio-warfare – was going on.
These actions are being kept hidden from Americans.
In fact, little is known in the west about these previous biological attacks by the US-led west. Thus aiming at damaging massively the China’s economy…
… as well as heightening China’s dependence on imports from the US.
In addition to damaging China morally, thereby, they, the west, believe (wrongly), weakening the level of resistance.
A real war with bombs and guns, maybe nuclear, aiming at total destruction, cannot be ruled out.
The Big Picture
Let’s remember the Big Picture.
Namely that this is, in whatever way you want to turn it, a bio-war against China.
And perhaps the first step of an all-out war against China’s rising economic power…
…and foremost against China’s solid currency, the yuan which may soon take over as the world’s chief reserve currency.
This would mean the fall of the US-dollar hegemony, the only force that keeps the (American) empire alive and kicking, other than its military strength which is non-sustainable…
….as it aims only at destruction abroad…
… but leaving behind a rapidly faltering economy at home.
Precisely the same pattern brought down the Roman Empire some 2000 years ago.
Too Many “Coincidences”: The October 2019 Simulation of a High Level Pandemic
There are too many “coincidences” to conclude that this strengthened coronavirus…
… considerably stronger than SARS, the one of the 2002 / 2003 epidemic…
… ‘escaped’ a Wuhan lab by accident, or as the west would like to present it: by negligence.
First, there were the Military Olympics in October in Wuhan (18 – 27 October 2019), where about 200 American soldiers participated.
The first cases of 2019-nCoV fever were discovered about two weeks later…
… two weeks is the average gestation period from infection to outbreak.
…
Event 201
Second, there was Event 201, on October 18, 2019, at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Baltimore, Maryland, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum.
(WEF – the corporatocracy representing Big Weapons, Big Pharma and Big Money), and the John Hopkins Institute.
The theme was simulating a High-Level
Pandemic Exercise – and yes, the simulation produced 65 million deaths.
Just a couple of weeks before the first COVID-19 victims were
identified. (See below)
And third – the timing, hitting China right on their most important Holiday, the Lunar New Year. When people are traveling, uniting with family and friends, when there are usually huge festivities with lots of people. This is an event of celebrating happiness.
All now cut short by the outbreak that put Wuhan and portions of Hubei Province, and a total of about 50 million Chinese in quarantine. And more – no shopping, no exchange of presents, no celebrations – a huge economic loss.
Not “just” coincidences
Circumstantial gut-feeling tells me, this is not a series of three coincidences. This could be (yet to be confirmed) a maliciously planned disaster.
Is this is a sinister plan carried out by a western elite to attack
China’s rapidly growing economy, outpacing that of the United States?
Is it an attack on the Yuan which is also gradually replacing the US dollar as a world reserve currency?
When that (the Yuan replacing the dollar) happens the US-empire which essentially relies on dollarization is doomed.
The build-up to more harm and destruction, possibly a hot war?
Strange WHO activity…
In late January, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director General (DG) said that the new coronavirus, COVID19, also called 2019-nCoV, was not a pandemic.
On January 30, probably on instructions from Washington, he declared the outbreak of a Global Emergency, but added on his own initiative that there were no reasons for countries to ban travel of their citizens to China.
In contradiction to WHO’s recommendation, Washington immediately issued a travel warning for US citizens not to travel to China. Many other countries followed their master, especially Europeans.
Another hit on the Chinese economy.
Cruise ships with Chinese on board are not granted docking rights. Merchandise vessels are in many countries not allowed to enter international harbors to unload their goods.
Media Propaganda
The media propaganda drums proclaim that the virus is spreading fast
and will soon engulf the entire world. The culprit is China, where the
virus originated. That’s what western propaganda wants you to believe.
Nobody mentions that the COVID19 virus appears to be focusing on the Chinese genome (yet to be confirmed) and that almost no westerners.
Well, if the media would talk about it, it would become clear for the entire world that the virus could not have been created or originated in China.
As China would not infect her own people.
No matter what the ridiculous Alt-Right narrative might proclaim.
And that the virus was most likely man-made and somehow transported into Wuhan.
Could it be that it was brought to Wuhan by one or more of the American participants in the military games?
Rates are declining.
The death to infection rate is about 3% in China, but has been steadily declining in the past week. The ratio is less than 1% in the several countries outside of China, where the virus was detected. Italy and Iran seem to be exceptions.
In Italy, as of this date, the official number of infected people has jumped to 400 with 12 confirmed deaths, also a death rate of 3%.
Iran with about 140 cases and 20 deaths, a 14% death rate, the highest in the world. Why? Faulty reporting, or do those who died in Iran have Chinese DNA?
In Italy, a country in the midst of the European flu season, most diseased people are elderly, according to the Health Ministry. But how precise are the tests? This is important since most symptoms of COVID19 are very similar to those of the common flu, especially for elderly people vulnerable to respiratory diseases and pneumonia.
By comparison, US deaths from in the 2019 / 2020 flu season so far are estimated at about 34,200 (CDC). Figures in Europe are probably proportionately similar. But these figures are silenced by the media.
And now Italy is building
up the propaganda drama, discussing border closing, but not yet
deciding, and so are France, Germany and Switzerland – the discussion is
a big media hype – but so far to the question – “Shall we ban entry to
travelers from Italy?” – They decided up to now, to leave borders open,
as closing them would be bad for business. Though, that’s what they
don’t say.
To add spice to the drama, Italy has also canceled the Venice Carnival and other public events, even closed church service and tourist attractions and monuments.
Anti-China fear.
The point is tremendous fear mongering, propagating fear from China. People in fear can easily be manipulated. It’s always been the case. Planting fear into a docile and even placid and peaceful population has always been the precursor to a call for war.
Fear, in a first round also helps isolating China, to cause as much economic damage as possible (weakening China to the point of ‘least resistance’).
Public consent for the second round, namely a hot war, will then be easy.
There is not much time, as the Chinese economy is advancing rapidly and along with it – the Yuan’s supremacy over the dollar.
Which, once recognized by the majority of the world, means the dollar hegemony is broken, and through that the US empire is broken.
For sure the US would not shy away from killing millions, hundreds of millions, just to preserve their dollar hegemony.
America.
Washington also realizes that the east, China, Russia and the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is no longer dependent on the west. But could carry on with an autonomous “eastern” economy – which in itself would be an incentive for other countries in defiance of the US dictate to join the east.
The China – Russia – Iran alliance is one of the strongest “eastern axis” – which also provides full energy self-sufficiency to the eastern countries, i.e. the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO.
The association of SCO and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) comprises today about half of the world’s population and controls about a third of the world’s economic output (GDP).
Economic Damage
Nevertheless, China’s economic damage is considerable – work stoppages, limited consumption at home and in many countries a virtual ban on Chinese imports.
The stock market has dropped tremendously due to the Coronavirus outbreak and its economic consequences.
The worst may not yet be over, even if it doesn’t come to a ‘hot’ war…
… which we profoundly trust it will not.
China reacts…
To counteract this economic calamity, the People’s Bank of China (PBC – China’s Central Bank) may consider injecting quickly important amounts of money into China’s economy.
Especially targeting small and medium size enterprises, both public and private.
It would do this through China’s public banking system and other means of direct economic support…
To cut short losses caused by the western-imposed epidemics.
Reduce the risk of economic stagnation and.
Reducing un- or under-employment.
And to (once again) achieve food self-sufficiency.
Diversify China’s suppliers and supply-chains away from the US and western US-allies.
The accent is on food self-sufficiency.
International Trade
For international trade and transfer payments, Chinas Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the crypto-yuan is expected to gradually increase its acceptance around the world…
… and outrank the western transfer system SWIFT…
… and the US-dollar hegemony which are key instruments the United States uses to impose…
… totally illegal economic sanctions upon countries that dare insisting on their sovereignty. And refuse to submit to Washington’s pressure.
Cases in point are Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Syria, Sudan – and many more.
These US-led western efforts to weaken China’s economy are also meant to send a discouraging message to all those countries that are planning to divest their reserves and international payment methods away from the US-dollar.
The west will not succeed.
China is far more powerful than the West believes.
Even with the massive
damage caused by the recent coronavirus, China’s economy is steadier and
stronger than that of most western countries, especially the US.
China’s non-confrontational approach to resolve these social – health – and economic issues, will help China to overcome and isolate her aggressive adversaries.
That’s part of the 5000-year old Tao philosophy.
What this all looks like…
As the US is increasing her aggressive stance against China (and Russia) – Washington appears and acts more and more like a dying beast…
… lashing out around itself, trying to bringing down and destroying as much as possible…
… while steadily digging itself deeper into its own (economic) grave.
Sanctions left and right and bio-wars on China – threatening China by surrounding her with some 400 military bases and nuke-equipped warships and planes…
… will not create more confidence in the US, rather the contrary.
Countries and people realize that being aligned and allied with the US of A, is dangerous, can be deadly.
So, they are driven away and towards the east, rather than being attracted by the western sinking ship.
Predictions
Amazingly, western aggression will falter confronting China’s robust social and economic system…
… and more so, China’s peaceful plan to connect and build bridges between the world’s people, nations and cultures…
… through the socioeconomic development scheme of the 21st Century spanning the globe – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road.
A way Towards a Shared Future for Mankind.
The Author
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world, including in Palestine, in the fields of environment and water.
Conclusion
I am not alone in the idea that the COVID-19 coronavirus is part of a legion of efforts used by America to thwart and suppress China’s rise. It’s pretty obvious if you look at the big picture and take off you “rose colored glasses”.
What I fear is World War III.
America is run by neocon idiots who believe the lies that they propagandize to the American people.
They are going to destroy the world, and no… America will not escaped unscathed. It will be a Genghis Khan level event. The few future survivors will crawl out of their bunkers and lament this period of time. And they will consider the current American leadership to be the greatest fools in all of humanity.
They had an opportunity to share in the bounty of the world, but instead chose to be the Lord over everything and everyone, and destroyed the entire world in the process.
Perhaps moving to either Iceland or Fiji might make sense at this time. Eh?
I hope you enjoyed this post. I have many more in my Trump Trade Wars Index…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
As the weeks go by, I’ve grown accustomed to a new normal here in Beijing. In my neighborhood, the whirring of passing cars has been replaced by wind whispering through alleyways. Without the loud honking of delivery scooters, I can hear birds chirping for the first time. Many stores and restaurants remain closed, but life is slowly coming back to many of Beijing’s major areas.
Residents are used to constantly wearing masks, sanitizing, and going through multiple temperature checks. Parks have been one of the few distractions that are still open to the public, and on a rare blue-sky day last week, I saw groups of families walking through the park and elderly folks resuming their outdoor exercise and ping pong tournaments (all with masks on, of course. Watch a video here).
Some locals I’ve talked to in Beijing have cautiously started to return to work, taking comfort in strict health checks across the city and the slowdown in reported cases across China. Others are more skeptical of the official numbers and concerned that infections will spike again as more people come back to the city, so they continue to self-quarantine.
- Coronavirus Edges Closer to Pandemic
I tire of the narrative that this COVID-19 is just “another everyday flu” and that I am being “irresponsible” in saying that it is a biological weapon.
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The trail of “coincidences” in favor of it being so is so outrageously obvious and stunning in it’s implications, it is a crime to consider anything else.
I made the statement "It's like a Horror Movie".
Online comment: "No it's not."
-A response on LinkedIN when I reported that China went to DEFCON ONE on CNY eve and drones were telling everyone to say inside and quarantine roadblocks were being set up everywhere.
That's the arrogance of Americans. If you do not experience it yourself, it does not exist.
Couple that with China going into a war-footing DEFCON ONE on Chinese New Years Eve is quite telling.
It is equivalent to having the 9-11 event on Christmas eve. There while you and your family are drinking egg nog and hanging out by the Christmas tree, the TV and cellphones all light up showing the planes crash into the skyscrapers.
Then, when the government declares the military go onto high alert. It goes to DEFCON ONE and all the reservists are called to duty...
But...
...the news media repeats the mantra 'It's only one or two planes, World War I was much worse.".
You do not do this with “the flu”. Couple that with the “on the street” Tiktok videos – videos that the military has forbidden American soldiers from viewing…
…really makes a thinking-person ponder.
Time will tell if I am correct, or if I am wrong.
Time will tell.
I would suggest that everyone take the necessary preparations and follow strict safety protocols at this time. Be safe, and let’s all be optimistic.
Be like the Chinese during this emergency.
The Chinese are taking COVID-19 very seriously. I would suggest that everyone take the necessary preparations and follow strict safety protocols at this time. Be safe, and let’s all be optimistic.
Anyways…
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 is a very interesting pathogen. That’s because it has a double whammy punch, and no one is talking about this.
Well, we will do so here.
This is an interesting article pulled from HERE. It’s titled ” Chimeric virus – “Combining two pathogenic viruses increases the lethality of the new virus”. as well as the follow up article “I told you so” And while it is short, it is really interesting. I edited to fit within this venue, and all credit should go to the author.
I told you so.
So, what’s the story of this virus? It consistently bypasses conventional wisdom.
The R0 was obviously greater than 2.6 from the start, my original estimate was 8.
[1] Asymptomatic transmission, [2] unusually long length of incubation, [3] surface survival duration, [4] numerous modes of transmission including airborne…
…the virus smells like “intent”.
In other words, it’s a hack; it was designed by a hacker mentality. It was designed to do exactly what it’s doing, circumventing the normal channel of control.
Authorities claim a 3% mortality rate but that’s a lie.
That 3% is only achievable with extreme methods that won’t scale up in an epidemic.
The real rate will probably fall into the 10-15% range for the initial pneumonia phase.
But…
But… NOBODY is talking about the secondary phase after a victim heals from the flu, the heart attack (“drop dead in your tracks”) phase.
There’s no numbers on this at all.
Gee, I wonder why.
Combining two pathogenic viruses increases the lethality of the new virus
This chart shows diseases according to their mortality (deadliness) and mobility (contagiousness). The COVID-19 coronavrus (the Wu Flu) is shown in green.
This chart shows diseases according to their mortality (deadliness)
and mobility (contagiousness). This is a classic X * Y = K graph
depicting an environmental constraint. High mortality reduces mobility
and vice versa.
If you’re a bioweapon designer, though, your goal is that empty upper right quadrant, i.e. maximum mortality AND mobility.
How can you reach that goal?
From an algebraic view, assume X * Y = 100:
Maximum mobility would be (2 * 50 = 100)
OR
Maximum mortality would be (50 * 2 = 100)
Assume a typical virus at 10 * 10 = 100
Now assume we can design the behavior by separating it into two phases:
Phase 1, maximum mobility: 2 * 25 = 50
Phase 2, maximum mortality: 25 * 2 = 50
So
we’re still within the original constraint (100) but increased
mortality from 10 to 25 and mobility from 10 to 25. In other words,
traditional virologists are now dealing with something TOTALLY outside
of their models.
Let’s look at one ramification of the new model.
COVID-19 mortality over time.
To maximize mobility, the weapon should minimize mortality at first. It will look deceptively innocuous for most of its life.
But mortality will rise drastically at the end.
The average virologist could be baffled by its behavior because it violates the well-known viral model.
Right now, the COVID-19’s rate is reported as 3%, 15% or 55% mortality rate, depending on when its measured and who is measuring it.
Think about that.
Behavior is not natural.
A natural virus does TWO things poorly ALL the time, mobility and mortality.
This virus does ONE thing well for MOST of the time… mobility.
And then it switches and does a DIFFERENT thing well… mortality.
If this is a chimeric virus, I’d expect the final rate to be closer to 55% than 3%.
Which is why the Chinese government made wearing masks MANDATORY all over China. You cannot enter a building, ride in a car, or purchase anything unless you are wearing a mask. They are taking this very, very seriously.
What do they know?
The Chinese government is taking this COVID-19 coronavirus very seriously and has made it a law that everyone must wear masks if they go in public.
Now for something truly frightening…
I read this and yes, things are frightening. If you are not petrified, then you are NOT paying attention.
The World Health Organization says the coronavirus has the potential to become a pandemic and is now at a "decisive stage". But some health experts say that the markings of a pandemic are already clear, and containment is not possible anymore.
- Coronavirus Edges Closer to Pandemic
Man gets stricken by the COVID-19 virus while riding a bus.
So much for this not being as serious as “the flu”…
Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist from Harvard, predicts that within the coming year, some 40-70% of the global population will be infected with the coronavirus - though most will likely have mild disease or no symptoms. A growing number of epidemiologists say that the coronavirus could become a regular part of the cold and flu season.
- Coronavirus Edges Closer to Pandemic
All of this is very, very serious.
Especially so when I see Americans being so nonchalant about this virus. They are acting as if they are immune and that the stuff in China is just a communist nation over-reacting…
Americans are not at all worried about COVID-19. They are just going about their normal day-to-day activities. No one is wearing a mask. No one is stocking up on supplies. No one is taking this seriously. “It’s not as bad as the flu”, don’t you know.
COVID-19; What you’re NOT Being Told by Officials or Media: This will be Survival of the Fittest. The rest will die.
Since the outbreak of a “novel coronavirus” in Wuhan, China in Mid-December, the disease has spread wildly, killing many who become infected. A LOT has been learned about this illness, but YOU [if you are an American] are not being told.
Here’s what YOU need to know . . . because your LIFE depends on you knowing:
This coronavirus, now named COVID-19, is the worst public health crisis since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
Almost no one alive today has lived through anything like this.
[It is a possibility that] literally MILLIONS worldwide, will NOT LIVE through this.
DISEASE FACTS:
This disease has an eighty-three percent (83%) infection rate. This means that if 100 people are merely EXPOSED to it, 83 will get sick.
Of those who get sick, about half will get so sick, they will need hospital care. [This is debatable. It’s a substantial number, but varies from 20% to 50%.]
Of those who need a hospital, about half will end up needing INTENSIVE CARE due to fluid build-up in their lungs (Pneumonia). [Of those that go into a hospital, a substantial will need to go into intensive care. Figures on this are hard to come by.]
Of those who need INTENSIVE CARE, and who GET THAT CARE, fifteen percent (15%) will die. [Also difficult to come up with a decent percentage.]
So, using the example above of 100 people exposed, we get 83 who get
sick, about half (40) need a hospital, half of those (20), need ICU,
and of those, 3 die.
Woman thought that she could handle this sickness at home like she would the flu. Not so. This is a very dangerous and lethal sickness. That is why the Chinese set up complete quarantine centers for people to go to, and be monitored.
ULTRA CONTAGIOUS
This new disease is an absolute NIGHTMARE in its ability to spread. It’s horrifying.
It spreads the way other diseases can, through coughing, sneezing,
and the like. So if you are walking down the street, and an infected
person a block away sneezes or coughs, the wind can carry that virus
right to . . . YOU.
Similarly, if you’re in a store shopping, and an infected person
coughed or sneezed minutes earlier, and several store aisles away, the
heating and air conditioning system can blow that virus all over the
store, and as you are minding your business, it blow onto YOU.
This virus can live OUTSIDE A PERSON, in the air or on surfaces, for upwards of nine days!
That means the counter at a store cashier, or in a restaurant, or at a
bank teller, or at an ATM can be contaminated as well. Worse still,
door handles. You’re out doing business and pull open the door to a
company or store, and you have no way on knowing that an infected person
grabbed that same handle a day earlier. Now, his virus is on YOUR
hand. When you touch your face, blow your nose, grab a hamburger, hot
dog or sandwich and eat it without washing your hands, POW, you’re
infected.
INFECTING OTHERS WITHOUT SYMPTOMS
A number of people who contract this virus start shedding it to
others BEFORE THEY GET SYMPTOMS. So the infected person DOES NOT KNOW
he’s sick, but begins spreading it to other people!!!
Doctors measure how many people are typically infected by one sick person, and they record that as R0 (pronounced “R naught”). The R naught for this virus is between R4 and R6. So one infected person can be expected to infect between four and six other people! That is a catastrophic level of contagiousness.
Here’s where things get absolutely nuts:
This disease also “sheds” from infected people via urine and feces. So, when an infected person goes to the bathroom and flushes, the swirling toilet water thrusts a small torrent of tiny mist all over the place and in that mist . . . . is virus! You walk into the bathroom and smell another person’s “stink” and POW, you’re infected.
As the toilet contents go down into the sewers and head out to the
sewer treatment plant, some of the water evaporates and comes out the
holes in manhole covers across town. In that water vapor . . . is
virus. So people on ONE side of town, can get a blast of virus because
another person on the OTHER side of town, took a dump while infected,
and flushed, and the virus comes out of the sewer!
In one apartment building in Hong Kong, a sewer vent pipe in a wall
had a crack in it. Virus went up that vent pipe, got out a crack, and
infected people in apartments several floors away from an infected
family! (STORY HERE)
Here is where things get REALLY UGLY . . .
Military decontamination squad going building by building to eradicate the virus.
HOSPITAL FACTS:
In the United States, there are only 2.4 hospital beds per 1,000 people. (SOURCE)
So, using the numbers above about the 83% infection rate, if 1,000
people get exposed, 830 will get sick. About half, 400, will need
hospital, and half of those, 200, will need ICU. But there are only 2.4
hospital beds per 1,000 people.
Now, you’re a smart person. How many people can the 2.4 hospital beds hold? Yep, 2.4.
So when we have 400 people sick with this COVID-19 virus who need hospital, and the 2.4 beds are full, that leaves 398 who CANNOT GET HOSPITAL CARE.
In Wuhan, China, the epicenter of this outbreak, people who needed hospital care, but who could not get it because the hospitals were full, suffered a death rate of 61.5% (Source)
If that just sent shivers up your spine, it should have. This is a terrible reality. And it’s here; in America, now.
Because when you apply the fatality rate for those who died in Wuhan because they could not get care, the numbers then look like this per 1,000:
1000 exposed = 830 Infected.
Half need hospital = 400
Half of those need ICU = 200
Only 2.4 beds = 397 WITHOUT CARE
of the 397 who need care but cannot get it because hospitals are full, 61.5% die = 244 DEAD, per 1,000 infected.
This is why a LEAKED Government document in the United Kingdom, shows the UK government making plans for MASS GRAVES!
This is also why China recently bought — and deployed — forty (40) portable cremation furnaces for Wuhan. Each furnace can cremate 50 people per day. Times forty furnaces equals 2,000 bodies PER DAY.
Chinese military decontamination trucks in action.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS:
Since the outbreak began, scientists have studied this virus like no other, and what they’re finding is that the virus appears to be “bi-phasic.”
It happens in TWO phases, similar to the way ANTHRAX happens. (STORY)
The first phase causes fever, cough, congestion in the lungs, and myalgia (muscle twitches and pain). Then, it **** seems **** to go away….
… But it doesn’t go away.
People who have been released from hospitals, showing NO TRACE of active virus, suddenly drop dead on the streets from heart failure.
That’s the SECOND phase of the virus.
It attacks the vital organs, kidneys mostly. The person feels achy again, feels tired again, figures it will pass and keeps on about their daily life. But what’s actually taking place inside them is the disease is sending them into Sepsis, and they drop dead from Septic Shock and organ failure.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
We are in for a terrible, life altering, situation. Many, many,
people are going to get terribly sick and DIE. Almost none of us has
ever lived through a real pandemic like this before. It’s going to be
heart-breaking to see the level of suffering and death.
We will see, firsthand, with our own eyes, nature’s primary law: Survival of the fittest.
Not just the physically fittest, but the mentally fittest as well. A lot of people in America are going to die because mentally, they cannot or will not see the facts as they are. They will REFUSE to plan with emergency food and water. They will refuse to wear filter masks. They will refuse to comply with Quarantines. The mentally unfit will likely die-off at larger levels than the physically unfit. Their tombstones should read “Died because he was stupid.”
Government is not telling you this because they don’t want you to panic. Noble goal, but misplaced.
We’re adults. We not only have a right to know the facts, we MUST
know in order to make informed decisions about our own safety.
Conclusion
Some basic math skills and deductive reasoning can clearly show that this COVID-19 is a serious virus. It is also deceptive. It masquerades as something innocuous, and then hits with a sudden ferocity.
Please take note of all the videos taken in China of the sudden onset of this illness. And also take note of the car accidents that just happened suddenly when the driver collapsed at the steering wheel.
Contrary to the seemingly popular narrative in the United States, that the Chinese are stupid, dirty, and over-reacting for this virus the opposite is true. They are taking serious immediate steps to control it.
We can only see just how successful the United States is when it strikes. Let’s watch how the “talented” leadership in the USA handles it…
Take note;
This just came in on my WeChat. Translated from Chinese. It states that the ground zero carrier for the COVID-19 virus was found and identified. He got the virus from an American while in Hawaii.
Funny thing. According to the US Government, no one in Hawaii has the COVID-19.
New Italian coronavirus carrier found
According to the latest reports from the Italian media, patient number 1 has now been found in Italy. The large-scale outbreak of the new crown in Italy is directly related to the trajectory of patient No. 1. Prior to the diagnosis, the patient had participated in many sporting events, such as the 10,000-people marathon and the football match, and had breakfast with friends many times. .
Within half a month, patient No. 1 affected 50,000 people and 10 cities. It is worth noting that the Italian patient No. 1 was infected with the new coronavirus after taking a vacation in Hawaii, USA, and had no history of residency in China. So, from this perspective, the outbreak of the Italian epidemic has nothing to do with China.
Not only does the epidemic in Italy have nothing to do with China, but other infected countries do not have a direct relationship with China.
Researchers in the United States have re-investigated people who died from the flu, and most have died from the new coronavirus. An elderly person infected with the new coronavirus has never contacted strangers in rural Japan, and there are also cases in Spain and Iran. Then the origin of the new coronavirus is not China! !! .
One last thing…
Oh, and you can get COVID-19 from a mosquito bite. Think about that, will you.
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After around three decades of increasing progressive Marxism and “Woke” nonsense, the assaults seem (or appear) to have subsided somewhat. It’s no longer “in your face” as badly as it was under the Obama Administration. But, I am here to tell you that it has not subsided, that it is not going away. It is only in remission, and we can expect that the dangerous stew that is brewing inside our schools, inside our institutions, and inside our government is going to boil-over. Maybe not now, and maybe not under a Trump Presidency, but it will decidedly boil-over and it will affect YOU.
Here is an interesting article from a Russian Immigrant that is in the university setting and comments on what it is like being around all these “woke” progressive Marxist idealists… the very ones that will be running America very shortly. Please pay attention, and understand that America is destined for change…
It might be calm and methodical, or radical and abrupt with many painful days. But whatever form it takes, it will be uncomfortable. Read this and consider what it means when every company, every school, every bureaucracy, every organization and at every government level these people are in control…
Woke! ‘The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scares me’
Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. I’m using a quote from our discussion in my forthcoming (September) book, Live Not By Lies. This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:
I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed.
I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.
This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track.
What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma.
Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive.
But the younger generation actually believes it all.
Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating.
I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried…
Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.
The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.
Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma.
People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed.
That is what ultimately saved us.
As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more.
Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.
In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime.
We’ll have to wait until their grand-kids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.
I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task.
Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically.
Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel.
Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.
All of this is sad and very scary.
I never thought I’d experience anything worse, anything more intellectually stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of existence. But now I do see something worse.
The book you are writing is very important, and I hope that many people hear your message.
Folks, Americans are extremely naive about what’s coming. We just cannot imagine that people who burst into tears in the face of gentle mockery of their political beliefs can ever come to power.
They are already in power, in the sense that they have mesmerized leaders of American institutions.
I’m telling you, that 2015 showdown on Yale’s campus between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and the shrieking students was profoundly symbolic.
Christakis used the techniques of discursive reason to try to establish contact with these young people.
None of it mattered.
They yelled and cursed and sobbed.
The fact that he disagreed with them, they took as an assault on their person.
And Yale University caved to them!
This stuff is so outrageous that we can’t wrap our minds around how these people will ever come to rule us. Listen to what these people who grew up under communism are saying!
Nadine Gordimer said:
“All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.”
The
religion of social justice is rushing in to fill the vacuum. Nice
liberals, and nice conservatives, cannot allow themselves to think of
where this might go. Solzhenitsyn knew better:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia;
…that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp…
… not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
So did Dr. Silvester Krcmery, a Slovak Catholic lay leader in the underground church, who suffered isolation and torture in a communist prison for his faith and resistance.
In the memoir he wrote after communism’s fall, Krcmery warned future generations that the past could be prelude to the future if they were not vigilant:
We are so often naive in our thinking. We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible.
We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented.
This, at first, is quite inconspicuous.
However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:
Loneliness
Social Atomization
Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions
The Desire To Transgress And Destroy
Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies
A Mania for Ideology
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
The Politicization of Everything
If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.
Some people seem to think that the Arendt list is somehow faulting the Left. It’s not, at least not intentionally. She said these factors were present in both Germany, which went to the hard right, and Russia, which went to the hard left. I think these factors are present in our society, period. Some of them are stronger on the Left, it is true, but I think they’re all simply present. Is loneliness a Right or a Left thing? Is social atomization?
Conclusion
I read this article with a great degree of sadness. Americans are within a propagandized bubble. Outside of that bubble, everything is dark, evil and dangerous. Inside that bubble you are either ‘woke” or an enemy.
Americans live within an artificial bubble. The inside of the bubble is a narrative that is increasingly defined by the American mainstream press. Many can see what bullshit is is, so they try to find other sources for news. Outside the bubble is a complete fabrication that the mainstream media controls. It’s all a big lie.
I am outside the bubble and I see all of this quite clearly.
Outside the Bubble
I am in Communist China, but it doesn’t resemble anything like what Americans fear it to be.
Yet, it almost went off-the-cliff.
There was a big show-down between the hard-line Communist / Marxist elements and their armies of progressive idealists during the “cultural revolution” and it could have gone downhill really fast.
Instead they embraced other things… like traditional conservative Chinese values, the idea of working hard and achieving things through merit, and contributing instead of fighting the government.
And..
… and now today, China is a nation of traditional conservative pragmatists, and all those Marxist idealists are off in re-education camps. Like the Falin Gong, the “pro-democracy” pawns, and the Muslim religious extremists.
You don’t hear about all that.
America is about “democracy!” China doesn’t have it. So it’s bad.
People! The world is not what CNN, and FOX tell you. It is something all together different. Now, I can talk until I am blue in my face, but you will never be convinced until you experience things FIRST HAND. I implore you to do just that.
So, just recognize that the world “outside” of America is not what you are led to believe and expect.
Meanwhile… on the inside of this bubble….
Inside of the Bubble
Radical idealists are now infiltrating all the organs of power. The government and the political factions are permitting this, and soon, once they have regained full control of the levers of power, they will implement their ideology.
First will be the disarming.
Then will be the collections of people on the lists.
Then will be the FEMA camps.
What comes next will not be recorded for history.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
And now, as we start to enter periods of quarantine and self-isolation – as nations, communities, and individuals – all that should be so much clearer. It has taken a virus to show us that only together are we at our strongest, most alive and most human.
In being stripped of what we need most by the threat of contagion, we are reminded of how much we have taken the community for granted, abused it, hollowed it out. We are afraid because the services we need in times of collective difficulty and trauma have been turned into commodities that require payment, or treated as privileges to which access is now means-tested, rationed or is simply gone. That insecurity is at the root of the current urge to hoard.
-Pulse
Whether you believe that the COVID-19 coronavirus is a biological weapon or just a virus that isn’t as bad as the flu, you should treat it as something to avoid getting. Right? You all don’t want you or your family to have this bug. Here I will lay out the precautions that I, and most of the others in China are taking to keep this bug out of our home. I strongly recommend that you follow similar procedures in your home.
Face mask – Always on – no exceptions.
When the first news started to hit China in December, we were all aware that you should wear a mask and be extra careful. So when we went out we would wear a mask.
But the thing is that we were not all that serious about it. We would pull it under our noses and allow it to wrap around our necks. Or we would take it off completely.
Then when the Chinese government went DEFCON ONE and everyone started to see alerts on their cell phones, drones telling everyone to stay inside, and Army troops with police setting up roadblocks, things suddenly took on a very serious face. We like the rest of China “got with the program.”
Since then, you never go outside without a mask on.
And not only that, you must always wear it. You wear it when you are around others, and when you are doing things. If you are in your car, you wear the mask. If you are walking down the street you wear the mask. If you are anywhere where others might have walked you wear the mask.
This virus can live on top of a surface for twelve hours. Twelve hours!
Which means that if you are eating a Big Mac on a park bench, an infected person from last night, who might have sat on that very same bench, could still infect your burger and fries.
Wear the mask or do not go outside. Period.
Avoid people.
The best way to avoid this virus is to stay inside and isolated in self quarantine. This is what China mandated, and it is working. In China, there are building quarantines, within block quarantines, within community quarantines, within town quarantines. There are multiple quarantine levels.
Do not go outside of your house unless it is absolutely an emergency.
If you can, work from home on your computer. Use the cell phone to talk to other people. Have food delivered to you and dropped outside your door and you get it when the person leaves.
HEPA Air purifier
Using a HEPA air purifier will really cut down on family cross-contamination. The machines themselves are not that expensive, but the filters are. However they are really worth it. I strong recommend an investment in a good rooms sized HEPA air purifier. You can find them at most retailers.
Wear gloves or do not touch things directly.
I have worn gloves, but you do not need to.
What you do need to do is avoid toughing things, and this is really difficult. We touch everything. And it is a real problem. We touch the buttons to get on the elevator, we touch the door handles to get into the car. We open the doors to our house, and get the mail from our mail box.
The problem is that there are evil rascals that take an evil pleasure in spreading their sickness around. Only this time, it’s not fun and games. People can die, and the death is particularly terrible.
I have videos where an infected person is walking in the mall coughing intentionally within a large group of people. I have other videos where they are spitting on elevator buttons, on door handles, and on mailboxes. I have videos where these crazy people are spitting on postage boxes and handrails.
So…
Assume that there are a few bad people near you, and that they have this illness. Do not take any chances. Protect yourself. Do not touch anything, and if you are not using gloves, then use a tissue.
Sanitize everything you come in contact with.
You can use alcohol, or a disinfectant, but you must use it.
That means everything. That means your shoes, your door handles, your keys, your cell phone and you “everyday carry”. Everything must be disinfected.
You cannot control the rest of the world, but you can control your life. Everything that you or your family touches must be disinfected daily. that means trash-bins, cars, lawn implements and everything inside the house.
To keep this work load down, you need to control who goes in and out of the home. Keep the movement low. Everyone should stay inside and if there are visitors they must stay outside.
Wash – wash – wash.
After you return home , you must take off your clothes and take a very hot shower. Scrub your body and perform hospital-level arm washes. Make sure that your fingernails are clipped short.
In public do not touch your eyes or your face, and absolutely do not eat anything with your hands. Use an utensil.
When you wash, you must use soap. It doesn’t matter what type, but you must use it.
Isolate and wash outside clothes apart.
You should have inside and outside clothes. Once you go outside and wear those clothes, they are to be considered contaminated and to be cleaned. You throw them in to the hamper and wash them immediately. Make sure your wash them with hot water, and then let them dry.
Shoes must always be disinfected once you arrive inside. That means you must spray the bottoms and the sides and the interiors of the shoes. It’s not a big deal once you make it a habit.
Grocery sanitation.
When you get groceries, spray the bag with disinfectant. Also make sure that you wash all the vegetables in warm soapy water. This includes the lettuce, tomatoes and apples. Make no exceptions.
Dogs and Cats stay inside.
Finally, the critters won’t understand, but they have to stay inside. While Fido is out vacuuming up every scent he is also vacuuming up other things and bringing them into your house. You must not take that risk and allow that you happen. You must be careful.
These rules are not really prohibitive. For most people it just means that you need to change some habits and avoid people. It’s just more of a hassle.
Cleanliness is very important.
Your life might depend on it.
And by the way, that nonsense that the COVID-19 is not serious is just American propaganda. China did not go into DEFCON ONE on a trivial runny nose. It’s a really bad illness.
Unlike the flu, you cannot stay at home and try to ride it out. If you try, WILL die.
Right now, at the time of this writing, there is a solid 80% chance of you getting over this, provided you go to a hospital and they take care of you. If you don’t the mortality is very, very high.
According to Chinese CDC data on COVID19, while mortality rate in general in China is 2.3%, but mortality rate for patients with severe COVID19 infection symptoms is 49%.
Mortality rate for COVID19 infection patients died of other complications are:
Cardiovascular disease: 10.5%
Diabetes disease: 7.3%
Chronic respiratory disease: 6.3%
High blood pressure: 6.0%
Cancer: 5.6%
These are very scarily high mortality numbers. Complacency kills people. Urgency saves lives.
COVID-19 has a ten times higher mortality rate than cancer.
I hope that this post was of use and interest to you. You can find more in my Trump Trade Wars Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Those that promote the benefits of “democracy” leave one thing out; it is always replaced with an oligarchy. Where the wealthy people control the government and eventually reduce the rest of society to slave or serfs serving them. Here, we take a look at the Athenian “democracy” and as we read about it, keep in mind the terrible parallels between it and America.
What is amazing to me is that our Republic was changed to a democracy by the 12th amendment, and those changing it KNEW HISTORY. They knew that democracies always… 100% always… always without fail… become oligarchies of the wealthy.
Here we look at the “gold standard” for “democracy; Athens. This is the standard that all the pro-democracy advocates cite. And the one that became an oligarchy before it’s eventual collapse.
Introduction
In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”).
It was the first known democracy in the world.
This system was comprised of three separate institutions:
The ekklesia, a sovereign governing body that wrote laws and dictated foreign policy;
The boule, a council of representatives from the ten Athenian tribes
The dikasteria, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of lottery-selected jurors.
Although this Athenian democracy would survive for only two centuries, its invention by Cleisthenes, “The Father of Democracy,” is considered to be one of the best contributions Greek made to the world. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe.
Which is a mystery to me.
As they all failed.
Each one, in turn, becoming a nation ruled by the wealthy and one that abused it’s poor.
Who Could Vote in Ancient Greece?
One of the things that everyone omits is that in a democracy, not everyone could vote. In fact only a handful of people were ever permitted to vote, and their selection… wouldn’t you know it… was influenced (if not decided) by the wealthiest inhabitants.
“In a democracy,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law.”
However, the “equality” Herodotus described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population in Ancient Greece.
For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or “resident foreigners,” and 150,000 slaves.
Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process.
The Ekklesia (the assembly)
Athenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions.
The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens.
Any member of the demos–any one of those 40,000 adult male citizens–was welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx.
Important point; The actual voters could directly make laws. They did not need to vote for a "representative" who would vote for them.
That was great on paper, but not really all that functional. For only about 5,000 men attended each session of the Assembly. The rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.
At the meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved or condemned the conduct of public officials.
The group made decisions by simple majority vote.
The Boule (The Council)
The second important institution was the boule, or Council of Five Hundred.
This could be considered the "Deep State" or the bureaucracy.
The boule was a group of 500 men, 50 from each of ten Athenian tribes, who served on the Council for one year.
Unlike the ekklesia, the boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance.
It supervised government workers and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. It dealt with ambassadors and representatives from other city-states.
Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the ekklesia. In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work.
Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election.
This was because, in theory, a random lottery was more democratic than an election: pure chance, after all, could not be influenced by things like money or popularity.
The lottery system also prevented the establishment of a permanent class of civil servants who might be tempted to use the government to advance or enrich themselves.
However, historians argue that selection to the boule was not always just a matter of chance. They note that wealthy and influential people–and their relatives–served on the Council much more frequently than would be likely in a truly random lottery.
In actual function, the selection of membership was determined by the wealthy and influential.
The Dikasteria (The Judges / Courts)
The third important institution was the popular courts, or dikasteria.
Every day, more than 500 jurors were chosen by lot from a pool of male citizens older than 30. Of all the democratic institutions, Aristotle argued that the dikasteria “contributed most to the strength of democracy” because the jury had almost unlimited power.
There were no police in Athens, so it was the demos themselves who brought court cases, argued for the prosecution and the defense and delivered verdicts and sentences by majority rule.
There were also no rules about what kinds of cases could be prosecuted or what could and could not be said at trial, and so Athenian citizens frequently used the dikasteria to punish or embarrass their enemies. It became a tool of the wealthy.
Jurors were paid a wage for their work, so that the job could be accessible to everyone and not just the wealthy (but, since the wage was less than what the average worker earned in a day, the typical juror was an elderly retiree).
Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi.
The one exception to this rule was the leitourgia, or liturgy, which was a kind of tax that wealthy people volunteered to pay to sponsor major civic undertakings such as the maintenance of a navy ship (this liturgy was called the trierarchia) or the production of a play or choral performance at the city’s annual festival.
The End of Athenian Democracy
Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an aristocracy.
This was the rule of what Herodotus called “the one man, the best.”
This has lead to all democratic nations evolving into one of the following forms…
Oligarchy
Plutocracy
Aristocracy
Conclusion
When some mindless clone voices the idea that “democracy” is the best, you should rest assured that they are either [1] ignorant of history, or [2] a shrill for the wealthy. Historically, all democracies evolve into rule by the wealthy and well-connected. There are NO EXCEPTIONS.
America was set up as a Republic, but was quickly changed into a democracy with the 12th amendment, and evolved over time to the oligarchy it is today.
Can you do anything about it?
No, you cannot.
Unless you want to get involved in armed insurrection (always a nasty business), I would advise moving somewhere else where the “grass is greener”. I have other posts on this subject and I would suggest you all take a look at them. Here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The writings of John Whitehead are all quite good. He voices the American anguish and feelings of helplessness of us serfs working for the American military oligarchy. And people! You cannot vote your way out of this situation. You have to fight your way out. There are no other remaining options.
In this article he ties the personal finances and budget of a typical American to the actions of our “elected” officials. It’s a good read, not that he says anything that we are not aware of, but that he gives voice to the impossibility and unsustainability of the situation.
The article is titled “The Looming Financial Nightmare: So Much for Living the American Dream” and it was published on February 26, 2020 by John Whitehead the President at The Rutherford Institute. Please give him every credit for this article. I edited it to fit this venue, but aside from that, pretty much left everything else pristine.
The Looming Financial Nightmare: So Much for Living the American Dream
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
The national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) is projected to surpass $1 trillion every year for the next 10 years.
Folks, if you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re not living the American dream.
We’re living a financial nightmare.
The
U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is
spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the
taxpayers” are the ones who will pay for it.
Could it happen here? Could the government actually seize private funds for its own gain?
Look around you. It’s already happening.
In
the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers,
and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be
picked.
Consider: The government can seize your home and your car
(which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government
agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if
they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the
first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you
have no say.
America is NOT a Democracy.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or
how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through
the nose, anyhow.
We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent
the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for
endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than
protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a
police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
If
you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the
government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
It
didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American
government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes
to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”
Determined
to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the
government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock
challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of
Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s
income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule
the Pollock decision.
On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by
way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of
1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000
could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.
It’s all gone downhill from there.
Government took and repurposed the tax monies…
Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.
You cannot fight the beast alone…
Irwin
A. Schiff was one of the nation’s most vocal tax protesters. He spent a
good portion of his life arguing that the income tax was
unconstitutional, and he put his wallet where his conscience was: Schiff stopped paying federal taxes in 1974.
Schiff paid the price for his resistance, too: he served three separate prison terms (more than 10 years in all) over his refusal to pay taxes. He died at the age of 87 serving a 14-year prison term. As constitutional activist Robert L. Schulz noted in Schiff’s obituary,
“In a society where there is so much fear of government, and in particular of the I.R.S., [Schiff] was probably the most influential educator regarding the illegal and unconstitutional operation and enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code. It’s very hard to speak to power, but he did, and he paid a very heavy price.”
It’s still hard to speak to power, and those who do are still paying a very heavy price.
Out of Control…
All
the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes,
rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought
for the plight of its citizens.
To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports,
If Americans managed their personal finances the
way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in
debtors’ prison by now.
Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.
Santa Claus America.
While
we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to
spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the
federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t
include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal
penalties), the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to
further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.
That
translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy
foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the
pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign
dignitaries.
Mind you, that staggering $6 trillion is only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.
In
this way, the military industrial complex will get even richer, and the
American taxpayer will be forced to shell out even more funds for
programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and
well-being, or secure our freedoms.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?
This is still no way of life.
Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.
Wars at home too…
We’re
also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track
our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized
police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank
accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about
freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.
Are you getting the picture yet?
We are cash-cows.
The government isn’t taking our money to make our lives
better. Just take a look at the nation’s failing infrastructure, and
you’ll see how little is being spent on programs that advance the common
good.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
This is nothing less than financial tyranny.
“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.
What we can do…
There
are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and
graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt
to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over
people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics
and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who
have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in
fascism.
We’ve become so invested in identity politics that label
us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one
label that unites us: we’re all Americans.
The powers-that-be want
to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus
them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided.
Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.
We’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”
The message is this: there is power in our numbers.
That
remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that
continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest
defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power
over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might).
This holds true whether you’re talking about health care, war spending, or the American police state.
And a final comment from John…
While
we’re on the subject, do me a favor and don’t let yourself be fooled
into believing that the next crop of political saviors will be any
different from their predecessors. They all talk big when they’re running for office, and when they get elected, they spend big at our expense.
George Harrison, who would have been 77 this year, summed up this outrageous state of affairs in his song Taxman:
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.Don’t ask me what I want it forIf you don’t want to pay some moreCause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxmanNow my advice for those who dieDeclare the pennies on your eyesCause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxmanAnd you’re working for no one but me.
Source: https://bit.ly/2PpPFOk
My Conclusions
Pretty brilliant eh?
Well… he’s right that we can do what he suggests…
Demand transparency
Reject cronyism and graft
Insist on fair pricing
Insist on honest accounting methods
Call a halt to incentive-driven government programs
And stop playing politics
And how are we going to do that? Vote for an elected official to represent our needs? Are we going to start a “movement” like the BLM, the “Tea Party”, Antifa, or “Put America First”? Is that how it’s going to work?
No one is talking about the REAL changes that needs to be made. Like gutting all amendments since 1789, or giving States back their individual power, or tossing the 16th amendment into the dustbin of history. It's all just cosmetic changes...
... a wall here. More "rights" there...
The moment any individual or group of people becomes successful at taking any quantitative action, the DHS will put us on a “watch list” and we…
… will get shot dead by SWAT that raids our homes later in the dead of night (Stalin and Hitler style).
So what is it, then?
Shot dead in the dead of night by SWAT by trying to peacefully upend a corrupt system…
or…
Shot dead when you try to forcefully remove those rascals from Washington?
Not much of a choice, I am afraid.
For those puzzled by the appeal of Sanders, there’s your answer. American politics is controlled by an elite that keeps one large swath of voters in one party and another large swath in another party, then makes them fight one another. In 2016, the voters in one camp revolted against their camp guards. In 2020, the other camp is staging a revolt. In both cases, it is a revolt against legacy code that appears to be beyond reform. We are living in legacy code that must be replaced, if it cannot be patched.
-Z Man
The ONLY option remaining to make the necessary fundamental changes involve armed conflict. And soon… very soon you all will be disarmed and that option will no longer be available to you.
I hope that you enjoyed John’s commentary on life in America today. I have other posts in my SHTF index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Trump, you can love him or hate him. I personally believe that America needs him domestically; the United States is in a real mess and needs a tough “pit-bull” to sort things out. However, that being said, his international leadership has been an absolute fiasco. The world-wide global stability has fallen in every indicator, all across the board. This is not just my opinion, it is all very well documented. I fear that, and history confirms, that if not properly corralled war will be the ultimate result.
I do not want that.
War will not be anything like anyone expects. It will be a nasty, nasty business. America will suffer the most, and most Americans will not be “happy campers”.
This is a reprint of an article titled “America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change” written by ambassador Chas Freeman on 2020-02-20. He makes some very good points (even if he is in the State Department). I have edited his article to fit this forum, but aside from that, I pretty much left it unadorned. I added formatting, and pull-quotes. Please give it a read and kindly note that all credit goes to the author.
America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change
Remarks to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) Senior Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University 20 February 2020, Providence, Rhode Island
The 21st century arrived belatedly – but with a bang – on September 11, 2001. When aircraft repurposed as improvised cruise missiles blew up the World Trade Towers and part of the Pentagon.
In the two short decades since the shock and awe of that attack, most of the previous century’s American efforts to bolster peace and prosperity have been undone.
Gone are the constraints on the strong bullying the weak provided by international law, multilateral institutions, and plurilateral and bilateral commitments to mutual aid and cooperation.
The norms that long moderated international and domestic behavior have been largely erased. Incivility is now ubiquitous.
Political systems everywhere have been overtaken by socioeconomic and technological change.
There is no sign they are catching up.
In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice.
Democracies work in theory but not in practice.
In some ways, the scene in Washington now resembles that in Saint Petersburg in the last days of the Tsar, with sycophants and charlatans running amok and government capacity in rapid decline.
…And like Tsarist Russia, America is losing its aura of imperial purpose and invincibility.
America is starting to resemble Tsarist Russia before the revolution.
American media and public discourse are dominated by bogus narratives and frenzied bigotry. Nothing seems true, but everything seems plausible.
Almost everyone acknowledges that there are serious unattended problems, but no one seems able to do anything about them.
All this has spawned an age of soul-sickening worry.
Both abroad and at home, the signposts of the past provide no reassurance. We have become pathfinders in the gloom, fumbling our way toward a better future that may or may not exist.
Many analysts attribute the current global and American despondency to President Trump.
Many analysts blame Trump.
Trump, a self-centered sociopath whose incorrigible ignorance, relentless pettiness, and winner-take-all approach to international negotiations…
… have catalyzed the deconstruction of the global political economy…
… and the established legal order.
But the trends that underlay the shocks we are experiencing began long before anyone other than Deutsche Bank, Russian oligarchs, or Gary Trudeau had even heard of Mr. Trump.
Trump is not the cause. Trump is a symptom.
Trends initiated by Trump
Here are some notable trends that have culminated under the current administration…
Diplomacy
Washington has given up on diplomacy.
Instead has turned to an aggressive reliance on exclusively coercive means to exercise influence abroad.
Instead, turning instead to taunts, threats, unilateral sanctions, ultimatums, cyber-warfare, drone and missile attacks, assassinations, proxy warfare, and military invasions and pacification campaigns.
And I would add, germ warfare.
Might once again makes right.
The United States now has over thirty active financial and trade sanctions programs, which it can and does impose on friends and foes alike.
The Trump administration is averaging 1,000 new sanctions on countries, companies, and individuals per year.
The United States currently allocates almost 5 percent of GDP to military and related budgets for past, present, and future wars, a total of $1 trillion. (This is about one third more than the usually cited U.S. “defense budget,” which fails to include many categories of spending accounted for in other countries’ defense budgets.)
Money spent on warfare amounts to about two-thirds of all “discretionary” spending in the federal budget. This doesn’t leave much for investment in anything else…
America is a military empire pushing everyone around.
War on Terrorism
The ill-conceived “Global War on Terrorism” has continued to snowball.
In 2001, anti-American terrorists with global reach were found in only one or two countries.
Today, according to the Watson Institute’s Cost of War project, the United States is engaged in combat with terrorists in 80 nations.
America is fighting in 80 nations.
We respect no sovereignty other than our own and are currently bombing at least seven nations without their permission.
The military operations kicked off by the “Global War on Terrorism” have so far cost $5.4 trillion, plus another $1 trillion in veterans’ care.
No end is in sight.
The relatives and friends of the more than half-a-million Muslims killed since the U.S. anti-terrorist campaign began in 2001 continue to queue up for revenge…
There are many, many people who just hate the United States and what it has done to them, their families and their societies.
American Military Forces
Despite the immensity and prowess of the American war machine, the United States has lost, or is clearly losing, every conflict it has fought in this century.
America’s military reputation is out of touch with reality.
With no fixed objectives or termination strategies for any of these wars, they go on forever…
…And history strongly suggests that once American troops establish a presence in a country, they do not withdraw.
Seventy-five years after defeating Germany and Japan, the U.S. still garrisons them, as it does Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In the months before the bonfire of takes surrounding the recent crisis with Iran, America’s national security and military establishment wrestled publicly with a different cause for alarm: in wargame after wargame pitched against Moscow and Beijing, the U.S. players wound up, according to one RAND researcher, “getting their asses kicked”—so much so that often games were simply halted midway through.
- You Win or You Die?
Washington has sneered at recent Iraqi demands that it remove American troops from Iraq; it has instead promised to punish Iraq if it persists in pressing for U.S. withdrawal.
This is the behavior of an imperial occupying force, not the deference to local pride and sovereignty characteristic of an ally.
Such arrogance makes the humiliating expulsion of U.S. forces or terrorism by local nationalists inevitable…
Honor and Respect
Once famous for steadfastness and the value of our word, the United States has definitively repudiated the long-established principle of PACTA SUNT SERVANDA (“agreements must be kept”)…
… and replaced it with capricious abrogation of treaties, arbitrary withdrawal from accords, wanton sabotage of multilateral compacts, and money-grubbing hedging of security commitments.
Examples include arms control treaties, the UN Security Council-approved nuclear deal with Iran, the Paris climate accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Arms Trade Treaty, and previously unquestioned commitments to defend allies in Europe and Northeast Asia.
The United States has not just forsaken, but in some instances sought to hamstring the multilateral institutions engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting it once sponsored…
… setting their mechanisms for dispute resolution aside…
… in favor of bilateral confrontations and tests of strength.
Examples include the United Nations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), UNESCO, and the UN Human Rights Commission.
America has been breaking agreements and well established rules. Thus, it is viewed as unreliable.
Trade
Washington has replaced market-driven trade based on comparative advantage with the tariffs, quotas, and government-managed exchanges characteristic of mercantilism.
Trade policy is now a national security function…
… embodying economic nationalism…
… and the vested interests of the corporate and military-industrial elites.
As China has continued to cut tariffs and eliminate quotas for other trading partners, U.S. tariffs on imports from China have risen from an average of 3.1 percent to 19.3 percent…
… a level last seen in the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that helped bring on the Great Depression.
America prefers to put coercive and punitive measures on nations, rather than to work with allies.
America’s other major trading partners are on notice to expect protectionist pressures like those imposed on China.
Overseas Commitments
Rapacious rent-seeking is replacing the national interest as the justification for U.S. overseas military commitments.
The Trump administration has begun to demand that U.S. military installations and troop deployments be paid for by the nations they help defend.
This is a significant contributor to the growing dissensus in U.S. alliances.
It treats the U.S. armed forces as mercenaries rather than the defenders of U.S. national security.
The US military are used as proxy mercenaries instead of defensive forces.
As U.S. defense commitments originally formulated to assure strategic denial of defeated adversaries to the Soviet empire erode, these former adversaries – nations like Germany and Japan – have been left with no choice but to rebuild their capacities…
… to act independently of the United States.
De-dollarization
Finally, U.S. unilateralism threatens to bring about de-dollarization of the global economy.
The dollar is used everywhere as a unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange.
Roughly 90 percent of global foreign exchange transactions currently involve a dollar leg.
About 40 percent of global trade outside the United States is still invoiced and settled in dollars.
Almost 60 percent of U.S. dollar banknotes circulate internationally, generating seignorage revenues that the Federal Reserve transmits to the Treasury. (Seignorage is the difference between the face value of dollar bills and the negligible cost of printing them.)
The universal use of the dollar as a global currency has meant lower transaction costs for U.S. businesses engaged in international commerce, lower financing costs for borrowers of dollars, and lessened sensitivity to global economic fluctuations for the U.S. economy.
These “exorbitant privileges” (as a French finance minister once called them) have been a significant U.S. competitive advantage.
But, as the United States increasingly restricts the international use of the dollar through unilateral sanctions, the dollar is ceasing to be usable everywhere.
Dollar dominance has enabled the United States to wield enormous extraterritorial influence in support of its geopolitical objectives.
But there is growing international resistance to Washington’s now routine abuse of dollar sovereignty to turn foreign banks into instruments of punitive U.S. policies opposed by their own governments.
America’s friends and foes alike are considering how best to end the dollar’s central role in global trade settlement…
The supremacy of the US Dollar is coming to an end.
No one can now take the primacy of the dollar in international trade (and investment and the American geopolitical hegemony) it has underwritten for granted.
Foreign Reactions to America
These changes in U.S. policies and practices and their impact on the evolving international system are inevitably eliciting foreign reactions and counteractions…
…many of them detrimental to American interests.
Each implies a very different set of world orders than the one we have known.
And each entails a diminished role for the United States in decisions that affect global stability and prosperity.
American adjustments to these changes.
Sadly, there is now no policy process in Washington capable of considering how to shape the American and global futures.
Congress has unconstitutionally delegated most of its authorities relating to peace, war, and foreign affairs to the executive branch.
Congress is not doing it’s job.
But the great departments and agencies of that branch are no longer effective participants in national decision-making.
Given other historical precedent, there’s nothing wrong with our current government leaders that wouldn’t be solved far more rapidly, by simply chopping 342 of them open with tomahawks and hurling them into the Potomac river-since Boston Harbor is kinda far to toss the bodies.
-Starving Larry
They have become little more than stages on which political performers sing the president’s praises and strut their stuff in hopes of celebrity, future riches, higher office, or all three.
Fiscal Inabilities…
The U.S. ability to adapt to change is severely constrained by fiscal incapacity. Tax revenues are chronically short of expenditures.
The last time Washington balanced a budget was in 2001.
“…and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon… simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.”
– An anonymous US Marine.
The federal revenue shortfall (i.e. the budget deficit) is now about $1 trillion annually – about the same size as overall military spending – and it’s destined to grow.
Roughly 40 percent of any U.S. deficit is currently borrowed abroad.
There is no money for the maintenance of human and physical infrastructure, let alone new initiatives to enhance economic competitiveness or project American power abroad.
Sixty percent of the world’s reserves are held in dollars.
…But some day…
… a few astute foreigners will notice that the United States has no plan to finance its mounting debt with anything but further credit rollovers and borrowing.
Those foreigners will then switch to currencies more likely to hold value than the dollar.
Those nations that continue to use the US Dollar might experience financial ruin if the rest of the world decouples from it.
America’s Diplomatic Ability
Meanwhile, years of diplomacy-free foreign policy and rampant militarism have gutted American diplomatic capacity.
This has left the U.S. military to manage America’s international relations.
But the generals and admirals have no answers to the dilemmas their own regime-change interventions and forever wars have created…
… let alone the pressing economic, technological, global governance, and financial challenges now facing the country.
The deficit-induced inability of the United States to invest in human and physical infrastructure…
… science or medical services at home…
…or anything other than military activities abroad continues to erode American competitiveness.
China and other rising or resurgent powers are building rival competencies as American non-military capabilities erode.
So, China and other nations are likely to play a larger role than the United States in determining what is to come.
You get what you can pay for…
… not what you believe past leadership entitles you to.
American leadership on all fronts are sun-setting. Other nations are taking the lead in areas formerly occupied by America.
Democracy!
After 9/11, Americans began a program of hit-and-run attempts to democratize other countries.
As America’s founders had warned, such military and ideological adventurism is lethal to democratic constitutionalism.
U.S. regime-change policies have stimulated smaller powers to develop their own means of striking back at the United States from afar…
… including with nuclear weapons.
North Korea is the prime example of this. But, given recent events, it is hard to imagine that Iran and others will be far behind.
America’s amazing global success derived less from our military might…
… than from our embrace of equality of opportunity…
… and shaping of the world’s multilateral institutions…
… our openness…
… and our ability to constantly redefine ourselves as we assimilated and were changed by successive waves of immigrants.
These were qualities that others everywhere admired and aspired to emulate. Border walls, Muslim bans, and the mean-spirited refoulement (or turning back) of refugees tell the world that the United States has set aside the values that long made it internationally inspiring to others.
And if democracy means citizen participation in setting policies, budgets, and national priorities…
…it is hard for foreigners to find much evidence of it in the contemporary United States…
… a nation now led by plutocrats…
… and manipulated by deceptive media.
Instead, they see American politics as both cynically venal and indecisive.
The United States is now a nation in which intransigent partisanship appears to have succeeded the separation of powers as the basis of decision-making about public policy and personnel.
To many abroad, America has lost its mojo.
American “democracy” is a failure and everyone notices it.
Use of military might.
It is against this unpromising background that the United States has decided that the only way to influence foreign nations is to use economic sanctions and military power to bring them to their knees.
The Trump administration has leavened this approach to problematic opponents by coupling what it calls “maximum pressure” on them…
… and their national interests…
… as they see them with transparently insincere flattery of their leaders and appeals to their greed.
So far, however, the application of this bizarre approach to U.S. relations with nations like China, Iran, north Korea, Pakistan, and Turkey, as well as to Europe, has yielded nothing but pushback.
America is considered a global bully deserving of some comeuppance.
Maximum pressure without the flattery has done nothing to advance U.S. interests in Cuba or Venezuela, while flattery without pressure has gained America nothing with Israel, Russia, or Saudi Arabia.
Clearly, the United States needs to revamp its diplomatic doctrine.
The rest of the world is reacting…
In the meantime, Americans must expect increased hedging on the part of their traditional security partners.
Even Britain now seeks to reduce dependence on the United States and its military technology.
Germany and Japan are cautiously rebuilding the capacity to act on their own interests internationally without regard to the United States.
As they do so, they are rearranging their strategic environments.
It is unlikely that any foreign nation will attack the United States, since the consequences for an attacker would be too severe.
But in time, many of America’s erstwhile military allies and protected states will reemerge as at least limited rivals of U.S. power in third countries and regions.
Their previously confident dependence on the defense capabilities of the United States had successfully precluded this.
Nations are taking things into account that do not include American interests.
But as they look only to their own interests, they will be ever less likely to make common cause with the U.S. on matters that concern them less than Americans.
That is unfortunate.
For decades to come, both the security of Americans abroad and their safety at home are almost certain to be imperiled by delayed reactions from the relatives, friends, and coreligionists of the many dead in our so-called Global War on Terrorism.
International cooperation is essential to manage and mitigate these threats, which are largely of our own making.
Given U.S. self-centeredness and unilateralism, cooperation by other countries will be significantly less forthcoming than it might have been.
Meanwhile, the foreign adversaries of the United States will begin to subject Americans to the deadly techniques Washington has devised to kill presumed terrorists since 9/11 – assassinations, cyberwar, drone attacks, and the like.
The Good News…
The good news is that the “attack surface” – the bases and deployments accessible to enemy attack – that the United States presents to foreign foes will shrink as American forces are brought home either at U.S. initiative or at that of the countries they have garrisoned.
Circumstances have changed.
In the Cold War, a U.S. military presence was valued by other countries as both a deterrent and a tripwire against foreign attack.
Now a continuing U.S. presence is likely to be seen as both an attractive nuisance…
… and an impediment to the negotiated resolution of the issues dividing nations…
… by the peoples of those nations themselves.
Examples include Afghanistan, Iraq, China, and Korea. The tension between the U.S. focus on deterring changes in the status quo and host-country citizens’ eagerness for the restoration of national unity makes longstanding military deployments increasingly precarious.
Some U.S. overseas presences seem certain to generate unwelcome surprises.
Nations no longer want American troops to be stationed there.
Afghanistan.
The ill-considered U.S. pacification campaign in that fractious country has failed.
There has been neither clarity nor fixity about our objectives there.
The main American goal now seems to be to withdraw without having to admit defeat.
For now, however, U.S. and NATO forces remain a feature of the politico-military landscape…
… to be exploited by all sides in their ongoing ethnic and religious conflicts and struggles…
… to siphon off foreign aid and control the drug trade.
As long as foreign troops remain in their country, Afghan factions will avoid the compromises with each other that the foreign presence enables them to sidestep or delay.
The withdrawal of U.S. and other Western forces would remove a key impediment to peace.
Afghanistan wants the United States to leave.
The United States should let Afghans work out Afghanistan’s problems even as we retain the ability to return to Afghanistan if it once again becomes a haven for terrorists with global reach.
Iraq.
The Shi`ite Arab majority in the Baghdad parliament has now formally demanded the departure of U.S. and other foreign forces.
But the Kurds and many Sunni Arabs in Iraq view a continuing U.S. military presence as essential to preserve their ability to defy the authorities in Baghdad.
The United States has inadvertently become the essential bulwark of the ethno-religious divisions that its invasion and occupation of Iraq energized.
It’s withdrawal would force Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi`i to attempt to hammer out a modus vivendi of some sort within a more unified Iraq.
If successful, this would dilute Iraq’s sectarianism…
… deprive the so-called Islamic State of space to maneuver in a divided Iraq…
…revive Iraqi nationalism as the antidote to Iranian domination of Iraqi politics…
…and reopen the possibility that Iraq might once again balance Iran.
Iraq wants the United States to leave.
Taiwan.
The separation of the island from the rest of China resulted from a civil war among Chinese that was suspended but not ended by U.S. naval intervention in June 1950.
Taiwan has since emerged as a far more attractive society than that on the mainland.
Bullshit. Maybe twenty years ago. Not today.
But this is not my article, so...
But the military balance in the Taiwan Strait has shifted overwhelmingly against it. In this context, the Taiwan Relations Act’s vague unilateral U.S. undertaking to help defend the Chinese on Taiwan from those across the Strait provides Taiwanese with a persuasive rationale to avoid pursuing an agreed relationship with Chinese on the mainland.
As frustration with the direction of Taiwan’s politics and American policy mounts in Beijing, a resumption of the Chinese civil war is becoming more rather than less likely.
Again. Complete nonsense.
Less, rather than more U.S. military involvement would arguably both improve prospects for a negotiated resolution of Taiwan’s status by the Chinese parties themselves and eliminate the most likely casus belli between China and the United States.
An active conflict over Taiwan could easily escalate to the level of a nuclear exchange. U.S. policies that sustain involvement in the latest phase of China’s civil war are long overdue for some sort of strategic triage.
I do agree here. Any attempt to conduct military operations regarding Taiwan will see New York City vaporized.
Taiwan can trigger a nuclear conflict.
Korea.
It’s intervention in 1950 successfully prevented Korea’s unification under Pyongyang.
The Korean War resulted in an armistice but no peace. In the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, a large U.S. troop presence was almost certainly the principal deterrent to renewed attack on the South by the North.
But, the balance of power on the peninsula has long since shifted decisively in favor of the South, which has become one of the most successful societies on the planet.
Today, South Korea’s economy is fifty times bigger than that in the North. Its armed forces are also vastly better equipped .
In this century, an increasingly self-confident Seoul has begun to explore the possibility of peace with Koreans north of the 38th parallel.
But the United States has remained focused solely on the north Korean military threat.
Seoul and Washington are no longer in sync, still less in lockstep. “Kachi kapsida” – “we go together,” the US-ROK alliance slogan – rings increasingly hollow.
Some South Koreans favor a continuing U.S. military presence in their country but ever more seem to view it as humiliating.
Despite President Trump’s three meetings with Kim Jong-un, the United States continues to reject addressing North Korea’s security concerns as a prerequisite to facilitating arms control, including denuclearization, and intra-Korean détente.
The American warfare state is adamantly opposed to any troop drawdown in Korea.
Korea wants Americans to leave.
But the possibility that South Koreans will insist on such withdrawals is increasing.
This is in part because they do not want to be caught up in escalating Sino-American tensions and in part because they want a free hand to craft a relationship with their fellow Koreans to the North.
The consequences for the U.S. position in Northeast Asia of a falling out over troop withdrawals could be as strategically damaging…
….as north Korea’s unbroken drive to acquire a nuclear deterrent capable of striking the continental United States.
America is becoming isolated.
As Washington replaces staunch commitments to other countries with noncommittal stands…
… and U.S. alliances decay…
… the risks of American self-isolation from multilateral bodies are also becoming ever more apparent.
American repudiation of multilateral agreements like TPP and the Paris climate accords did not kill these institutions or cause others to discard their objectives.
Japan took the lead in refashioning TPP into an eleven-member grouping that others now seek to join.
It is now forging a loose Japanese-led order in East Asia to balance China.
When Syria belatedly signed on to the Paris accords, the United States became the only nonmember on the planet.
As these groups agree on programs and rules, Americans have no say in them.
Indeed, there is a real danger that compensatory tariffs will eventually be applied to imports from countries that are not in compliance with multilaterally agreed rules about carbon emissions.
The main, if not the only target of such tariffs would be the United States.
America is isolating itself from the rest of the world.
Time for new relationships…
Washington’s efforts to incapacitate the WTO are now spurring the creation of more efficient tribunals for trade and investment dispute resolution.
At the end of January, the EU, China, Brazil, South Korea, and twelve others agreed on a system to stand in for the WTO appellate process, which the United States had hamstrung.
Another example is the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the EU.
CETA eliminates tariffs on 98 percent of EU-Canada trade, harmonizes standards for regulated professions, facilitates staff transfers between companies operating in multiple jurisdictions, and stiffens the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
It contemplates the establishment of a permanent multilateral investment court with improved rules for its members.
By contrast, the so-called “phase one” trade deal with China…
…entrenches U.S. protectionism…
… and leaves future disputes to be resolved through bilateral tests of strength that amount to renewed trade wars.
The EU has adopted CETA as a model for future free trade agreements (FTAs).
China’s Belt and Road Initiative similarly eliminates barriers to trade as well as transit and creates special courts to resolve trade and investment disputes among its participants.
The new African Continental Free Trade Area does the same.
The biggest things these initiatives have in common are [1] their affirmation of multilateralism and [2] their exclusion of the United States.
The world is inventing post-WTO arrangements to expand trade and investment. It is doing so both despite America and without it.
America is divorcing itself from the rest of the world.
America’s economic warfare.
Meanwhile, the United States has stepped up its use of the dollar as an instrument of economic warfare.
America’s unilateral application and enforcement of dollar-based sanctions…
… including secondary sanctions that penalize third countries and their banks and companies for dealing with any country backlisted by Washington…
… reflects open U.S. contempt for the United Nations, international law, and other countries’ sovereignty.
It is deeply resented internationally.
This has driven the world’s major trading nations into a serious search for ways to end dollar supremacy.
Without other nations using the US Dollar, the gigantic US financial debt would really start to affect the United States.
Their efforts have included the creation of alternatives to SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) to handle money transfer instructions.
Keeping away from America’s grasp…
The Russian “System for Transfer of Financial Messages” (STFS) has already de-dollarized 70 percent of trade within the Eurasian Economic Union.
China’s UnionPay still uses dollars when converting currencies but, later this year, Beijing is expected to expand its Cross-Border International Payments System (CIPS) to connect some twenty banks in a worldwide payments superhighway for clearing and settling transactions in yuan.
It will link up with the Russian STFS and an Indian system now being designed.
Earlier, the EU established a “special vehicle” to conduct trade with Iran outside SWIFT.
The BRICS group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is joining forces to create a single payment system – BRICS Pay.
The People’s Bank of China recently announced plans to issue a digital (blockchain-based) version of the Chinese yuan, allowing the world’s largest non-dollar economy to extend its almost cash-free domestic systems for settling transactions to the world.
The link-up between a digitized yuan and emerging alternatives to SWIFT represents a major threat to the dollar’s continued near-monopoly of international trade settlement.
It also threatens traditional banking because it promises a faster, much cheaper way to handle international transactions.
Still the main driver of this and other new clearance mechanisms is the desire to evade the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. policies that most of the world considers both illegal and obnoxious.
The USA treats the rest of the world as poor-versions of America. The first step to stop this is to sever the banking and financial ties to America.
An erosion of dollar primacy would have profound effects on American hegemony. The U.S. ability to print money and exchange it for foreign goods and services would be reduced, if not ended.
Dollar notes held overseas represent interest-free loans to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank.
Lessened demand for dollars overseas would lower the dollar’s value in relation to other currencies, reduce its credibility as a vehicle for storing value, and negate the rationale for its continued dominant role in foreign exchange reserves.
The consequences…
The emergence of digital alternatives to the dollar in the global economy would lead to less liquid capital markets in the United States and increased costs to participants in them.
In these circumstances, America could no longer run persistent balance of trade and payments deficits.
The overvaluation of the dollar that its primacy has sustained would end.
The American standard of living would plunge.
Decoupling from the US Dollar would crash the American economy.
Degradation of the dollar’s status would greatly erode U.S. global influence.
In short, the confluence of foreign resistance to U.S. bullying and the emergence of new fintech has created the possibility of a devastating monetary earthquake.
The causes and catalysts of the many nasty possibilities before us are, for the most part, decisions made in Washington, not abroad.
The rise of China and India and the resurgence of Russia are not irrelevant but hardly central to what is happening.
When one creates a strategic vacuum, it’s easier to blame the powers that are sucked into it than oneself.
The rest of the world has had enough!
But it is not China that has substituted the use of force and the pursuit of regime change for diplomacy.
Other countries are not engaged in global drone warfare or “forever wars.”
They do not occupy or maintain multiple bases in lands far from their borders or bill other countries for contributions to the common defense.
They have not felt free to repudiate treaties and agreements to which they are party.
Neither China nor other countries are trying to destroy the institutions of global governance or replace free-market transactions with government-managed trade.
With the notable exception of Israel, other countries are not asserting a right to assassinate foreign officials.
And they are not imposing unilateral sanctions or waging financial warfare on others.
All these things are examples of American self-sabotage, not predatory foreign behavior. Curing these deviations from past practice and their pernicious consequences requires introspection and reform in Washington more than anywhere else.
Nations consider America to be dangerous, and harmful. It is considered to be unreliable and potential threat to local stability.
What to expect…
If no such introspection and reform are forthcoming, the United States will have to compete with others under the law of the jungle that it has reintroduced.
It will face mounting opposition from a loose coalition of resistance to its faltering hegemony.
At the moment, America is trying to best China by pushing it into economic stagnation rather than acting to enhance U.S. economic dynamism.
This is not working, and there is no reason to believe it ever will.
In the end, America can be competitive only if it does what is necessary to rectify home-grown deficiencies and strengthen domestic capabilities and competencies.
This means addressing obvious areas of weakness and the trends that cause them, including:
A continuing refusal to raise taxes to fund the government. This guarantees competitive incapacity. Budget deficits preclude maintenance of existing infrastructure, let alone new initiatives to improve competitiveness at home and abroad.
An undemanding educational system that is content with mediocrity in both world knowledge and vocational training. (Siemens reports that to make American workers competitive with German workers, it must give them six months of remedial training in math and other basic skills.)
Domestic opposition to science and rejection of its findings, coupled with declining funding for basic scientific research and bans on the publication of politically unwelcome scientific data.
Disinvestment in what have long been the world’s best universities and their increasing subjection to national security-derived restrictions on international collaboration.
Visa bans and disapprovals that discourage foreign students, visitors, and investors.
Inadequate and often irrelevant retraining of workers displaced by automation, foreign competition, or changes in industrial structure.
Complacent but mistaken assumptions of superiority to other societies, which remain uncorrected out of disinterest in examining and adopting foreign best practices. (Recall the sneer with which Hillary Clinton dismissed Bernie Sanders’ 2016 suggestion that America might have a thing or two to learn from Denmark.)
A tax structure that directs wealth to the plutocracy at the expense of both the middle class and an increasingly disaffected working class, and that hinders rather than supports socioeconomic mobility. (Among European countries, only Slovenia, Italy, and the U.K. now have less movement between classes than the contemporary United States.)
Racial prejudice and growing barriers to the admission and absorption of foreigners and their ideas.
An economy dominated by uncompetitive oligopolies, in which laws and regulations protect vested interests at the expense of new market entrants, and in which – contrary to the conventional wisdom – innovation is in secular decline.
Disdain for expertise and a marked decline in the competence of government officials.
Many Americans know what we need to do to up our game. Still, there
is next to no public discussion of our competitive weaknesses, their
causes, or their remedies. We are in an election year. But few
candidates have offered anything other than vague, cost-free
prescriptions for restoring American competitiveness.
On one issue – the costs of war – the Watson Institute has stepped up to collect the data and raise the issues the Congress should have but hasn’t.
There is a role for our great universities in stimulating the debate about the state of the nation and its future that the vested interests that dominate Washington have stifled. And there is a long list of neglected issues for the academy to choose from. Is it too much to hope that American civil society will intervene where an increasingly ineffectual government has failed to?
Conclusion
A bit wordy, and long.
…And he doesn’t understand modern contemporaneous China AT ALL, but…
…he does have some good points.
Americans are unaware of how the rest of the world views America. Nor do we understand how the rest of the world are treating the behaviors of America on the global stage. This is independent of whether the president is Bush, Obama or Trump.
“The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.”
– John W. Whitehead
We live in some kind of fantasy, and it’s going to get everyone hurt unless everyone “suddenly snaps alert” and wakes up.
Changes are coming, and they all are a back-lash against the American policies of the last five or so decades.
Now, America can do one of only two things…
Work with other nations as equals. And come up with methodologies and systems that provides American advantage.
Demand that everyone follow America and do as we say.
Which course do you think America is on today?
This is what I am most concerned about. While the rest of the world are putting their nations first. The American empire will shrink. To prevent that shrinkage, America might do something dangerous and worse that what it has already been involved in.
Worse.
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No it’s not like television. It’s horrible, and nasty, and the rivers do actually flow red with blood.
I am fascinated by stories of the Mongol invasions and the stories of Genghis Khan. These excursions of empire relive the horror and nightmares of a time long ago, and well forgotten. They happened thousands of years ago, and no one can image the carnage and the horrors inflicted upon the citizenry who suffered through those invasions. All we can do is dig up some bones and try to interpret what it must have been like.
And while World War I and II were horrific, they were NOTHING like the in-your-face and up-close personal horror that the Mongol invasions were.
I argue that we need to be constantly reminded that war, real winner-take-all war, is a very ugly and nasty business. And it should be kept fore-front in our minds. Because every four generations or so, humanity forgets and resets itself in some kind of glorious bloodbath. A bloodbath with few survivors.
Someone should remind the American neocons of this fact.
Because I am constantly reminded of the stories (from this time period) where a city would send out 20,000 well equipped knights in shiny pristine armor to confront 500,000 aggressive, fierce, and battle-trained mongols on the field of battle.
It was always a slaughter.
It never went well. For them, and for their defenseless families back behind the massive city walls; walls that soon fell…
The following article is from the Vintage News. It is titled “Mass Family Graves Found in Russia a Grim Reminder of Mongol Invasions”. It was written on Sep 21, 2019 by Ian Harvey. All credit to the author. It was reformatted for this venue, but for the most part very little editing was required.
Mass Family Graves Found in Russia a Grim Reminder of Mongol Invasions
Many people feel we are witnessing grim times these days. But at least there are no Mongol invasions on horseback coming from the mysterious steppes of Central Asia like back in the 13th century.
What with civil wars, hurricanes, and other disasters, man-made or natural, dominating headlines around the world. Sometimes it seems we are living in a particularly violent time as social media carries bad news at an instantaneous speed with humanity’s inhumanity seeming to have no bounds.
But examining any period in history reminds us that, in relative terms at least, we are living in a more or less peaceful time.
Overall, with the exception of localized wars in various countries, we are enjoying global peace. At least we are not mired in world wars, as our forefathers were in the early and mid-20th century.
A Russian archaeological excavation is finding out just how violent and inhumane invasions could be.
Like, for example, the graves of three generations of one family recently uncovered in Yaroslavl, Russia.
Yaroslavl on a map of Russia.
Several burial pits have been found, and one of them contained a tangle of 15 bodies.
Researchers, upon examining these remains, realized they were looking at the skeletons of three generations of one family – a grandmother, a mother, and her son.
(Investigations identified their demise.) They were slaughtered by Mongol invaders in the area in the 13th century.
The remains of one entire family; three generations all slaughtered after torturing during the Mongolian invasion(s).
The Mongols invaded Russia in 1238, under the leadership of Batu Khan, grandson of the notorious leader Genghis Khan.
The Mongol invasions of Russia. Once they invaded, they destroyed everything. Then they remade it in their image… culturally, economically, and (yes) biologically as well (no women were spared).
Asya Engovatova, a researcher with the Institute of Archaeology in Russia notes that the remains have indications of gruesome torture, including piercings and severe cuts and blows, giving the picture not only of the fall of a whole city, but the sad ending of one family.
The discovered remains all buried and unearthed for study. It is a horrible and tragic way to die.
Historians have known for some time that Yaroslavl fell to the Mongol invasions in the 13th century.
However, the level of violence inflicted upon civilians has not been as well known, or understood, until the last decade or so.
The city’s Assumption Cathedral was razed in 1937, but mass graves were not found beneath it until 2005; the graves contained the remains of more than 300 people.
This latest discovery is just more evidence of the brutality the town suffered.
Skulls from the mass grave in Yaroslavl show signs of extreme violence.
Engovatova stated,
“What we now know about those raids suggests that chronicle descriptions of ‘a city drowned in blood’ were not merely a figure of speech.”
Science is uncovering the grim reality about how this city fell to its invaders, and it is an ugly reminder of just how lawless and cruel those invaders were.
She continued,
“Batu Khan’s conquest of Russia was the greatest national tragedy, surpassing any other event in cruelty and destruction. It is not by chance that it is among the few events that made its way into the Russian folklore.”
Every child understands stories of the “boogeyman” and tales about dark forces that hide under the bed or in a closet.
Russia, perhaps more so than other nations in this respect, has good reason for dark tales about bad spirits; after all, historians estimate that over the course of its two-centuries long rule, the Mongol Empire invasions killed as many as one million civilians across Europe.
And while historical texts indicate that most people submitted to their rule without argument, this new evidence suggests that many atrocities were committed during their conquests.
This family, for example, recently uncovered: researchers say the bodies were first merely chucked into the snow. (After a spell during the Spring thaw…) They were buried for health reasons, finally, and likely because of the stench.
Evidence suggests that the Mongols sacked the city in the dead of winter. The people were pulled out of their warm homes and thrust into the brutal Russian winter where they were killed and left to rot in the snow.
And so, while it is easy to get carried away about the troubles facing our modern world, we must remember that, by and large, these days civility reigns supreme, at least in most countries.
What happened in Russia during that 13th century invasion puts the world’s current troubles into some kind of perspective.
Commentary
This is horrific, but there’s more. There are other digs and other discoveries of others who have also died during this sequence of events. It’s not just one of two families. It’s an entire regions of cities, towns, and culture. No one was spared. No one survived.
Researchers Uncover Horrors Of Russian ‘City Drowned In Blood’ By The Mongols In 1238″
More than 300 bodies were buried across nine death pits of 15 people each. One contained three generations of one family.
An archeologist examines the remains at the Yaroslavl massacre site.
When the Mongols invaded the Russian town of
Yaroslavl in 1238, almost nobody was spared. Hundreds were slaughtered
brutally and dumped into mass graves as the town was completely sacked.
Nearly 800 years later, researchers have given us a chilling glimpse of
the victims left behind.
After the slaughter, Mongol raiders buried the dead in pits by the dozens with no markers to distinguish who these poor victims even were, wrote LiveScience.
But one pit of the dead in particular stood out after scientists of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology began genetically analyzing three of its 15 corpses.
Researchers found that the three murdered townsfolk buried together in the dirt were a woman, her daughter, and her grandson. Moscow’s research team found that the eldest of the three corpses was at least 55 years old before she died.
Her daughter was between 30 and 40, while her grandson was younger than 20.
The young girls and women were missing. As were all the men.
One could imagine that the men were killed trying to repel the invaders.
As for the women, we can only speculate. If there is a son younger than 20, were are his 20-something sisters?
They were buried in one of nine pits found at Yaroslavl, which altogether held more than 300 bodies.
The biological relation between three of the bodies found at Yaroslavl first became apparent after researchers noticed similar features on the skulls. All three family members also showed signs of spina bifida, which is hereditary.
As for Yaroslavl as a whole, Mongols led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan destroyed the town not long after advancing into Russia. Nonetheless, enough buildings and artifacts survived to tell us a little something about the area, namely that it was a wealthy one.
Paintings can only give us a small flavor of what it must have been like to approach your conquers and to beg to be killed swiftly.
Scientists determined this by noting the tooth decay present in the three bodies in question and noting that the honey and sugar that could cause this were only available to those with substantial means at the time.
Beyond the three generations of one family left slaughtered in a pit,
the scene at Yaroslavl showed just how brutal its conquest was. Batu
Khan invaded towns like Yaroslavl with utter indifference, ultimately
taking more than a dozen places in present-day Russia.
In just five years, he wiped out seven percent of Russia’s
population. When the Russian Grand Prince refused to submit to the
Mongols, Genghis Khan’s grandson simply burned the capital city to the
ground — with the royal family and every inhabitant inside.
Nearly 300 bodies were buried across nine pits. The son, mother, and grandmother were buried in a pit of 15 people.
For Asya Engovatova, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology
at the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the Yaroslavl excavation,
the evidence uncovered there clarifies why the story of its conquest
became common knowledge among Russians.
“Batu Khan’s conquest was the greatest national tragedy, surpassing
any other event in cruelty and destruction,” she said. “It is not by
chance that it is among the few such events that made its way into the
Russian folklore.”
The brutality that has made the conquest of Yaroslavl unforgettable
for many Russians was certainly on display in the way the victims’
bodies were treated after death.
Genrikh Semiradsky, ‘Alexander Nevsky in the Horde’. 1876. The Russian Museum.
Prior analysis suggested that the three family members, for example,
were buried in February 1238. But recent evidence in the form of
preserved maggots in their remains indicated otherwise. In fact, new
evidence shows that the bodies were probably decomposing in the open air
for months before they were buried.
“These people were killed, and their bodies remained lying in the snow for a fairly long time. In April or May, flies started to multiply on the remains, and in late May or early June, they were buried in a pit on the homestead, which is where they probably had lived.”
Fittingly, Engovatova described Yaroslavl after the attack as a “city drowned in blood.” The skeletons of the three family members as well as the remains of the other victims — including punctured, broken, and burned bones in the hundreds of buried bodies — certainly suggest that to be true.
Conclusion
We, as Americans, picture war from the lens of the television screen. We picture sleek state-of-the-art jet aircraft (or drones) firing high-technology missiles into mud huts, and an occasional Toyota pickup truck. We imagine well equipped soldiers with kelvar armored vests over their desert camo clothing. We see them firing assault guns and wearing high-technology wrap around black sunglasses.
We watch the news reports on Facebook and Google up some pictures on the Internet. Then we go through the drive through and get a number #3 with a large Coke at Burger King.
That’s not war.
That’s a police action by proxy being observed by disinterested spectators.
The most anyone is going to do is type up a snide comment in the comment section.
That is not war.
American soldiers in Afghanistan.
War, real war, is a deeply personal matter.
You and your family can lose everything, and very few people escape it without having family members killed, homes and livelihoods destroyed and your culture and society thrown into the dustbin.
War is not like a Hollywood Zombie movie. It is ugly and nasty. Everything is destroyed. Entire buildings burned up into charcoal and all vehicles inoperable. Stores looted, and women forced to choose between rape or death. When you are not picking the maggots off of a dead cat, you are trying to stop throwing up blood from your lungs. Real war is a nasty, nasty business. It is up front and personal. DO NOT BRING IT TO AMERICA.
The neocons of America are living a Hollywood constructed fairy tale. I warn everyone that you should not play around thinking that everyone else shares your views. They do not, and they are only getting pissed. Take heed.
America is not viewed as a white knight in shining armor. It is viewed as a corrupt bully that is completely out of control and needs a good slap-down.
Americans are just like those poor slobs in Russia that believed that their knights in shining armor would protect them. That those high city walls, and long-standing history of literature and culture somehow made them special. It didn’t. They were killed without mercy.
I hope that you found this post to be of interest. I have other posts in my SHTF Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
When confronted with different theories, scientists use a system of analysis to determine which theory has the most merit. This is a deductive reasoning process, and one that is used daily by engineers all over the globe. You look at all the theories, you provide weighed analysis and come up with the “best fit” theory for a given situation. Here, we will apply it to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak during the 2020 CNY new year.
Currently there are four theories on the origin and causes for the COVID-19 coronavirus. They are;
Natural. The virus sprung up naturally.
Bioweapon – The Chinese stole it from America (CIA narrative).
Bioweapon developed by China to kill Chinese (CIA narrative).
Bioweapon used by the Trump Administration to suppress China.
You will note that of the four theories, two of them are from the American CIA. Both of those two theories originated from Radio Free Asia; a (former) CIA operation outsourced, but still run by, the head of the CIA.
... upon further examination of the sourcing for this serious claim,(That the Chinese biological lab in Wuhan released this bioweapon)...
... the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.”
Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S. government propaganda.
(But why not the CIA directly?)
Notably, the long-standing ban on the domestic use of U.S. government propaganda on U.S. citizens was lifted in 2013, with the official justification of allowing the government to “effectively communicate in a credible way” and to better combat “al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence.”
- Bats, Gene Editing and Bio Weapons: Recent DARPA experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
If you pay attention to the American media you will aware of the the first three theories. The fourth theory, the idea that the biological weapon was used as an on-going suppression as part of the Trump Trade War is noticeably absent.
Seeing that the American government controls all American media; [1] Mainstream, [2] Alt-Left and [3] Alt-Right, this omission should tell you (the reader) something.
The analysis
Below is a comparison matrix. Scientists, and engineers will recognize this table immediately. It is used all the time and is very helpful in determining the “price points” to set on new products, the comparative benefits and pitfalls of a given production decision, as well of the merits of an investment decision.
At the top of the table you can see the four theories presented. While on the left side you can see all the circumstances that contribute to the theories as presented.
Theory comparison on the causes of the COVID-19.
Another Opinion
You all do not have to come to the same conclusion that I have. Other people have come to similar conclusions. Here’s one…
If the current state of global affairs reminds you of an over-the-top plot by a white-cat-stroking James Bond villain, you’re not far off. When it comes to nuclear policy, we are closer than ever to a real-life movie disaster.
- By Olivia Alperstein
America has a president that is currently using biological weapons against it’s economic foes instead of trying to make peace treaties. As well as deploying “low yield” nuclear weapons across the entire spectrum of the Armed Forces.
To me it seems like anything is possible with this President. And, that is quite scary.
Conclusion
A theory comparison matrix clearly shows that the circumstances supporting a biological weapon release by America…
… in support of the Trump Trade Wars…
… is by far (by a factor of three times) the most plausible theory regarding the origination of this event.
I take no great satisfaction in support of this conclusion. Instead, I am petrified by it. For it means that the Trump administration is actively using weapons of mass destruction against the civilians of a nuclear-armed nation and is not expecting any consequences for doing it.
Either the administration are idiots or they are evil. No other answer is possible.
I hope you are all ready to pay the price for this malfeasance.
Final note.
Oh, and by the way…
Fun Fact: China and Russia have been giving everyone smallpox vaccinations for decades now. While America stopped doing so in the early 1970’s.
When was the smallpox vaccine discontinued in the United States?
Because of vaccination programs and quarantine regulations, the risk of importation of smallpox into the United States was reduced by the 1960s. As a result, routine vaccine vaccination was discontinued in 1971.
I hope that you found this post curious. If you want to read more on this subject check out my Trump Trade Wars index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
The top three nations, in deaths by COVID-19, are China, Iran and North Korea. All of these nations have the dubious distinction that they are all America’s enemies in some capacity or the other. What a coincidence.
The top three, in ranking from most deaths to least as of 25FEB20 are;
A purist would say that you shouldn’t include North Korea because you don’t have “official” numbers. OK, then, we can bump up the number four spot, South Korea. Combined North and South Korea is competing against Iran for the number two spot.
Next is Italy, followed by Hong Kong.
What do all these nations have in common? Anyone? Can anyone tell me what they all have in common?
That’s right. They are all enemies of the United States. Either economically (as in the case with China) or global threats, as are Iran and North Korea.
It does seem curious. And, of course, according to most Americans impossible. You see that America would never get involved in global germ warfare. America is the best and would never do that and anyone even considering it is a terrible communist enemy!
Don’t believe me? You can go ahead and read the comments sections on the UNZ Review and Free Republic to observe that narrative and belief manifest.
America is the best. Anything that says otherwise is evil, Satanic, and Communist. And they have bad writing style, copies the work of others, and has horrible body odor!
I am not the only one to notice that this virus seems to be tailor made to achieve United States objectives.
While charges that the Coronavirus outbreak in China was bioengineered by the United States are unsubstantiated, “it looks as if it was tailor-made to achieve Washington' objectives," according to Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.
Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on the virus outbreak that has resulted in 213 deaths in China and more than 130 cases have been reported in at least 25 other countries and regions.
...
“On the other hand, many people are suspicious of the viruses' origins and attribute it to US sabotage. Charges that it is a biowarfare attack are, however, unsubstantiated. Until there is a smoking gun that shows there was a human-engineered component to the virus it is pure speculation,” he said.
“Nonetheless, there is good reason to be suspicious of a US role in the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus. The US is a bad actor, its word cannot be trusted and it has a history of engaging in illegal and immoral clandestine actions, both at home and abroad. The US also has the motive to engineer and spread a virus of this sort in China. It has used every stratagem it can think of to try and destabilize China and disrupt its economy. It has also launched an incessant propaganda campaign to demonize and ostracize China. Whether or not it engineered the outbreak it is taking advantage of it to advance its anti-China agenda,” he noted.
...
“US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has gone so far as to say the virus could help bring jobs back home to the US, which is a disgraceful and callous statement that shows his disdain for the lives, health, and safety of the Chinese people,” Etler said.
“The virus outbreak thus looks as if it was tailor-made to achieve Washington’s objectives. The virus is mild enough not to have apocalyptic consequences but severe enough to warrant extreme and aggressive measures to contain it. China is especially vulnerable at this time, during the annual Spring Festival celebrating the Chinese New Year,” the analyst noted.
“Whether or not the virus is a mutant strain of a naturally occurring coronavirus or a genetically engineered biological weapon is a moot question. China has to focus on one thing and one thing only, containing the outbreak to protect not only its own people but the people of the world. Its valiant efforts to do so, at great cost and sacrifice, should be welcomed and appreciated the world over,” he concluded.
Some Observations
At the exact same time as the coronavirus hit, the anti-Chinese propaganda campaign by America went into overdrive. All of the on-line sources tied to the (former) CIA had non-stop anti-China articles. The Alt-Right copied and disseminated these articles. It was a scream-fest of the highest order.
To an outsider this is what it appears as…
While China is fighting this most serious virus and people are dying, instead of lending helping hands and assistance, the United States government launched an anti-China propaganda assault of unparalleled ferocity.
You know, is that what America is?
As the usual suspects fret over the “stability” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Xi Jinping administration, the fact is the Beijing leadership has had to deal with an accumulation of extremely severe issues: a swine-flu epidemic killing half the stock; the Trump-concocted trade war; Huawei accused of racketeering and about to be prevented from buying the U.S. made chips; bird flu; coronavirus virtually shutting down half of China.
Add to it the incessant United States government Hybrid War propaganda barrage, trespassed by acute Sinophobia; everyone from sociopathic “officials” to self-titled councilors are either advising corporate businesses to divert global supply chains out of China or concocting outright calls for regime change – with every possible demonization in between.
There are no holds barred in the all-out offensive to kick the Chinese government while it’s down.
- No Weapon Left Behind: The American Hybrid War on China
Is that what America stands for?
America as historically portrayed is one of a “God Fearing Nation”, one that “Lends hands to those in need”. Not one that “kicks you when you are down”, like some out-of-control tyrannical Empire. But that is not what we are seeing.
What does this mean?
It could mean nothing. It could all be a coincidence.
Or it could mean that the Untied States is utilizing Weapons of Mass Destruction on a host of it’s enemies to achieve global nationalistic objectives without declaring a state of war through Congress.
If this is the case…
And, it doesn’t matter what you or I think, all that matters is what the leaders in these respective governments think…
Neocons running American Foreign Policy
Yes, if you start to play with matches you could get burnt. I think that this is something that most Americans realize. Therefore they make the assumption that the American government would never do something as risky as to precipitate a global thermonuclear back-lash.
No one would be that stupid.
Right?
Trump has not drained the swamp, in fact he has filled his administration with war hawks, bankers, Zionists and the Neoconservatives (Neocons) who are all inter-connected to various corporations and special interests.
-Silent Crow News
Hey! Have you seen the neocons that surround President Trump?
Do you think that these guys have any idea of what they are dealing with? In their mind China is a cartoon image and is harmless and would never align with Russia. It would never happen.
Right?
What could happen
Well, contrary to what the neocons want, we are seeing China and Russia forging trade and self-defense treaties. We are also seeing them in combined military exercises.
This was one month ago, when the coronavirus started to hit…
And all these drills continued into and throughout 2018 and 2019. All during the Trump Trade War. Most Americans were oblivious to this. Especially on the Alt-Right side of things. You would think that they would be able to “connect the dots” and see the relationship. Eh?
And the thing about all this is that these are not drills using conventional weapons, or engaging in exercises to secure trade or strategic resources. These are exercises in which tactical, and global nuclear weapons, as well as full NBC environment is taking place! Yes, that’s right boys and girls.
The joint Russia and Chinese drills are about using nuclear weapons against America.
You do not need to fear though. The American (former CIA) propaganda ministry is countering all this with the idea that Russia and China can never forge any kind of relationship to counter the USA…
So you all can rest easily. America could fight both Russia and China, with Iran and North Korea “with one arm tied behind it’s back”. Not a problem. Go ‘Merica! So now you just go back to work and report for your “white privilege meeting” held by the company “Diversity Officer”. And do make sure that you have all your tax documentation when you report your personal papers next month to your “government”.
Nothing to see here.
‘Merica!
Conclusion
America appears to be waging germ warfare with all of it’s enemies in the world. It is doing so under the guidance of the neocons in control of Washington DC. They do not believe that anyone would ever counter this aggression. So you can expect them to “ratchet up” the extent of belligerent actions to counter the rise of Asia.
We’re deep into a vicious intel war.
From the point of view of Chinese intelligence, the current toxic cocktail simply cannot be attributed to just a random series of coincidences. Beijing has serial motives to piece this extraordinary chain of events as part of a coordinated Hybrid War, Full Spectrum Dominance attack on China.
Enter the Dragon Killer working hypothesis: a bio-weapon attack capable of causing immense economic damage but protected by plausible deniability. The only possible move by the “indispensable nation” on the New Great Game chessboard, considering that the U.S. cannot win a conventional war on China, and cannot win a nuclear war on China.
A biological warfare weapon?
On the surface, coronavirus is a dream bio-weapon for those fixated on wreaking havoc across China and praying for regime change.
- No Weapon Left Behind: The American Hybrid War on China
Meanwhile, both Russia and China have been conducting joint military planning exercises involving NBC. (Nuclear – Biological – Chemical warfare.)
You would think that Washington “would take a hint”. Apparently not. Unfortunately not.
Knowing what I know about China, and Russia, do not expect World War III to be isolated and take place in a small out-of-the-way third-world-shithole. Expect it to occur on American soil, and involve Americans, American cities and American people.
If you were aware, you would be taking notes at just how well organized and direct China has handled the COVID-19 biological attack. I can tell you that America would flounder helplessly. It would not take much to reduce America to a pre-industrial agrarian society. And that’s a fact, Jack.
Are you willing to take that risk?
I ask this because apparently Washington DC believes that you are fine with this. That you are absolutely are fine with using germ warfare against other global powers, and that you are not worried about the consequences.
American germ warfare targets map.American nuclear warfare targets map.
I hope that you enjoyed appreciated this post. I did spend some time on it, and I hope that it helps add clarity into what is going on today. You can see more in my Trump Trade Wars Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Here’s a bunch more videos taken during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China during the 2020 CNY holiday and going into February of that year. These videos are very interesting. Please check them out. They all tend to be short, but since there are so many… around 20… they might take some time to load.
So…
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Keep reloading as necessary to collect the videos. If you are watching on a computer put this in a separate tab and allow it to load at it’s own speed. Depending where you live it might take up to an half hour, though most people shouldn’t have to wait nearly so long.
Sorry about this.
Video 1 – Breaking Quarantine
China is an enormous nation. There are all kinds of people in it. No matter how serious the emergency, there will be that 1% of Jack-Offs that think that the rules do not apply to them and they can do as they please. When this happens, the police need to step in and isolate the malcontents. Because all it takes is but one person and he can infect three hundred others in a matter of hours, and then suddenly the entire city starts to collapse.
Here we have a Jack-ass trying to break through a quarantine check point. These road-blocks are everywhere and you must obey them. Some are set up by local communities. Some by local police. Some by military, and some by local industry. If you try to run through, you will be stopped. You will be apprehended, and you will go to prison.
Video 2 – Breaking Quarantine 2
Here’s another one. This is a checkpoint at a highway. It’s been my experience that these checkpoints are at every toll booth and at every road-side rest area. You must obey them.
They are staffed by police, traffic police and military. You do not mess around. This is a serious, and very serious illness and containment is crucial.
Video 3 – Breaking Quarantine 3
Here’s another example of a person trying to break quarantine. You can see that not only is he not obeying the check-point, but he is taking it on himself to be a one-man wrecking-crew and starts to tear apart the entire road-block setup.
Video 4 – Shutting down a roadblock
All things end. Now certain areas are easing up on their quarantine restrictions. Thus, it means that things are starting to return to normal in certain areas. Here we have a video of a policeman shutting down one of the quarantine roadblocks.
Video 5 – Collapse 1
Medical worker collapses or almost collapses in a hospital. This is beginning to become rather common in the various hospitals that work with this virus. It’s a very serious and lethal viral agent and every care must be taken to control it.
I have all sorts of videos about the dressing and undressing procedures in this highly lethal environment. But you know, if you accidentally touch an infected article of clothing during the undressing procedure, you too could become infected.
Video 6 – Collapse 2
Here is the inside of a bank. In the lower part of the screen we can see a person just collapsing on to the floor. This kind of collapse is rather common with this illness. When it strikes it hits you suddenly and strongly.
Video 7 – Policeman Collapse
Here’s a police man that collapses in one of the police stations. All people who are out and dealing with the public are starting to see their ranks decrease and more and more members contract the illness.
It’s horrible.
Video 8 – Street Collapse
The Western media narrative is that it only strikes the old and the feeble. It’s amazing that they still maintain this fantasy. Especially the American media. Most everyone can contact this illness, and there are patients as young as ten months and as old as 95 years getting sick and ill from it. here we have a young chick getting struck down at a gas station.
Video 9 – Discovering you have the virus and being told you must go into isolation.
So imagine what it must be like. You are not feeling well, so you have some suspicions and you go to the the hospital. They run a few tests and then discover that you have COVID-19; the coronavirus. At first you would be in a state of shock and denial. Then you might panic and flee. You do not want to spend the time in the hospital. Like this poor girl.
Video 10 – Going into Quarantine.
And this is what it is like when you are sick and told to go into Hospital Isolation. You are collected and driven to an isolation ward. Then you are assigned a room, and some gear. The rest of your belongings are sterilized or incinerated and you are held there in isolation until you get better, or off to the hospital if you get decidedly worse.
Video 11 – The coronavirus hits suddenly.
This coronavirus is hitting everyone suddenly. You are just doing your job when suddenly you feel woozy. You start to wobble, and you get tunnel vision. Then the world goes black. This is what it is like.
But not to worry. CNN and FOX says the Flu is much worse.
Video 12 – Infected trying to break out of quarantine.
In this video we have a community that is infected. Large numbers of people have been taken into the various hospitals in the surrounding region. Those that remain were not tested to be sick… two weeks ago. But might actually be sick.
Here we have a fellow trying to run the gauntlet and escape from the quarantine.
Video 13 – Arrest for not wearing a face mask.
During this DEFCON ONE emergency you cannot go outside unless you wear a mask and are scanned for a fever. No exceptions. Everyone in China knows this. Yet there are those miscreants that think that the law does not apply to them and when they are refused to board public transportation they fly into a rage and cause all sorts of turmoil.
Video 14 – Refusing to go into Quarantine.
Here’s a chick who was tested to have a fever. She wants to break out of the quarantine area and go her own way. She does not want to go into isolation. But the illness is so very serious that she doe not have that option. So she is taken down and hauled off to the isolation ward.
Video 15 – The virus hits with a sudden ferocity.
This is what it is like. You are having a dinner. You drank a coke and ate some pork and suddenly you are not feeling well. While some people just get tunnel vision and black out, others just go into seizures and all sorts of bad things start to happen. Like this poor fellow….
Video 16 – Virus wipes out a hospital staff member.
Many hospital personnel are ending up catching the virus. It’s a terrible thing and they are working long hours and tirelessly to fight this conflagration. But they can get sick, and when you start to see one of the nurses or doctors starting to wobble and lose control, you need to help them out quickly. This is a serious and lethal virus.
Video 17 – This is what it is like all over China.
This is how you go onto the public buses. This is how you enter your apartment building. This is how you enter your place of employment. This is how you enter public buildings such as police stations, hospitals or transportation hubs.
Everyone must wear a mask. There are no exceptions.
Everyone must take a temperature reading, and spray their clothing with disinfectant solution. Everyone must abide to the rules or you will get arrested. There is zero tolerance for non-compliance. PERIOD.
Video 18 – Pretty Girl
This is why it is absolutely critical to stay in isolation and not get this virus. You are getting ready to go out with your friends and suddenly you do not feel well. You have a seizure, black out. You regain composure and then have another seizure. Than you black out again. It repeats over and over…
But don’t worry. The flu is far worse, don’t you know. That’s what CNN and FOX all are saying. You can go on Drudge and What-Finger-News and it’s all the same MONOLITHIC narrative. Funny that! So believe them.
Or see the reality with your own two eyes…
Video 19 – Building multiple hospitals.
When I check out the comments on social media there’s a bunch of detractors complaining about China-this and China-that. Oh, Xi Peng didn’t do enough. Oh, the Chinese stole a biological weapon and is trying to kill their own people. All sorts of just bullshit nonsense. All of which is supremely irritating.
Donald Trump would not be able to build an emergency hospital in ten day, let alone three of them So shut the flying fuck up.
Check out this, the third hospital being built in Wuhan to help handle this emergency.
Conclusion
This is a serious illness. All evidence points of a biological warfare event. At least that is exactly how the Chinese government is treating it. While the American main-steam and (alt) media are all treating it as not as serious as the flu. Well, you you ever see the flu do what you see on these videos, then go ahead and make up your own post explaining to the world that this is a big ol’ “nothing burger”.
More to follow. Please be safe.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other posts that you might be interested in that can be found in my Trump Trade Wars index, here…
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
America today does not resemble anything that is found on the original 1776 United States Constitution. In fact, in many ways, it is the exact opposite of what it was founded as. This is an open fact, and only the most ignorant disagree on this.
Today, the United States is a real mess. It really is. It is an enormous, out of control beast, and no one can tame it. It’s a snarling, nasty critter that is harmful to Americans, and a threat to the rest of the world.
Here, we talk about how America came to be what it is today.
For there are five distinct separate evolutionary periods of American governance. Each one is distinct for all the others before it. They are…
Founded as a Republic.
Changed to a Democracy with the 12th amendment.
Centralized Federal Democracy during the Civil War.
Progressive Social Democracy under President Wilson.
Military Oligarchy under President Lindon Johnson.
Corrupt Military Totalitarian Empire today.
Here we will discuss each time period in turn. What it was like, the benefits, or liabilities, and why it was changed into something different.
We will begin with the start….
Founded as a Republic. (1776)
There is no question that America was founded as a Republic. It is clearly specified as such within the Constitution itself. And the “Federalist Papers” which described (in depth) the reasoning used in the creation of the Constitution.
They abhorred a Democracy and they absolutely did not want America to ever become a Democracy. For they viewed it as “mob rule”, or rule by easily-manipulated rabble.
Their vision was one where the individual States would continue to operate as independent nations. They would have their own flags, their own military, their own laws, and the citizens would be in complete control of their state government.
The Federal Government was intended to be small. It was only intended [1] to be necessary in the case of an external military threat, and to [2] assist in the regulation of trade between the different States.
Nothing Else.
The Federal Government, through the Bill of Rights would establish the framework of “protections” that the various Federal and State governments were forbidden to touch.
The Bill of Rights listed the “untouchable” Rights, and the Ninth Amendment stated that Americans had many, many other Rights. And none of them can be legislated or rules made to curtail them. Thus, the Federal and State governments were limited to what they could do. They could only to what was IMPLICITLY STATED within the Constitution.
America was set up as a Republic. There the Individual was supreme. Second came the States Governments. The Federal Government was intentionally weak and small.
America was a Republic for only a mere 28 years.
Changed to a Democracy with the 12th amendment. (1804)
Well, that did not set well with ambitious and evil men. These people felt that they were better than other people.
Well, they did. (Read their writings.)
They felt that they were smarter, and more capable, and thus should be deserving of extra privileges. And so they strove to change the United States from a Republic into a Democracy.
This is because it is easy to manipulate mobs of people.
Through the manipulation of people, they would increase their power, through the systems inherent in the Constitution.
And this is exactly what happened.
During the first one hundred years, all of the amendments to the Constitution, and the rules and laws laid down in Congress was devoted to four main objectives…
Diluting the voting power of a citizen. (The more people allowed to vole, the less power the individual had.)
Control of the mass “mobs” of citizenry. (Control of the news media meant control of the people.)
Reduction of the influence of State Government.
Increasing Federal Control over the States.
America become a Democracy. And Controls over the manipulation of the citizenry grew, as did the size and scope of the Federal Government.
America was a Democracy for 57 years. The entire time the Federal government grew and grew and grew…
Centralized Federal Democracy during the Civil War. (1861)
This continued for many decades up until the push by the Federal Government became far too large. They kept pushing and pushing, and sooner or later someone was going to get hurt.
The States argued that they had their own sovereignty through the Tenth Amendment.
The Federal Government argued that that was no longer true. That the Bill of Rights was meaningless when you have a strong central federal Government.
They were wrong, of course.
But it did not matter. They were strong and powerful.
When the Southern States banded together to fight the Federal monster, a long Civil War broke out. It lasted four years. And while there were many cries to “free the slaves’, at the root of the matter was whether or not a State can make it’s own laws. (And the ownership of slaves is a State law issue.)
The Civil War settled that.
The individual States no longer were autonomous, and must follow the dictates of the Federal Government.
Thus, the American Government became a singular Federal Government over regional “territories” known as States.
America was a Central Federal Democracy for 52 years.
Progressive Social Democracy under President Wilson. (1913)
Now, For around sixty years or so, the Federal Government grew in size, scope and ambitions. The ideas and the systems laid out in the 1776 Constitution were not sufficient to implement any of the “new” and “progressive modern” ideas. Ideas that were being considered in the elite schools and halls of the “power brokers”. They wanted and felt that some serious structural changes needed to occur.
They longed for the power held by the Kings during the middle ages. They wanted a new and modern version; a Feudal Kingship under the guise of “democracy”. New, modern and progressive; to usher in a new utopia of man over nature.
That’s how they thought.
Enter President Wilson.
President Wilson was the President that extinguished the flame of liberty.
To make a long story short, he was the architect for what America is today. And under his leadership we now have the following realities that are permanently affixed in America today…
Government owns and controls all money.
Citizens are permitted to rent the money.
Ownership of all property belongs to the government.
Making laws and rules were handed over to “agencies”.
The Bill of Rights is just a list of “privileges”.
Americans must work to feed the government.
Yeah it sounds really bad, and it is. But if you distill all the flowery rhetoric and babble-speak, and get down to the raw meat of the issues, that is what it distills into to. And, yes, it’s horribly and very ugly.
But hey! Everyone else was doing it. From Russia, to France, to China. Every ruler wanted full control of their subjects.
America became a Feudal Kingship. People were taught to serve the Federal Government without question. And efforts to spread this type of government around the world began. For “democracy“.
America was a Feudal Kingship under the guise of “democracy” for 50 years. Then it got really bad…
Military Oligarchy under President Lindon Johnson. (1963)
We now know, through the release of the Kennedy Assassination Transcripts that a military coup occurred in 1962. President Lyndon B. Johnson, along with a hodge-podge of other Washington “interests” assassinated a “democratically elected” president.
Immediately after killing the President, America went full-on “HOT” war with Vietnam.
America became the foremost military power in the world and started to exert that power everywhere.
Then they immediately went to war fighting battles all over the world, and funneling money into an Military-industrial organization. An organization that became enormous and powerful.
America became a Military Oligarchy. Much like Hitler and his Nazi’s and Genghis Khan and his hoards of warriors.
America has been a Military Oligarchy for 38 years.
Its’ so out of control, that today we are currently fighting eight simultaneous far-flung wars.
Which brings me to today…
Corrupt Military Totalitarian Empire today. (2001)
It wouldn’t be too bad if it were “out of sight and out of mind”, but events came about that brought war, and military power and control home.
It’s been 19 years since the events of 9-11. We have been a military totalitarian empire ever since.
As America fought these various wars, simultaneous efforts were being made to "bring the Military-Industrial" complex control home domestically. We all can thank President George Bush for this.
Thus America rapidly became a full-on police / surveillance state.
America today is a wild rampaging out-of-control monster that if not contained, will plunge the world into global thermonuclear armageddon.
Domestically, the Bill of Rights no longer functionally exist. Alphabet agencies operate independently and run rough-shod over Americans with impunity. A military organization known as the DHS, operates with the NSA, and CIA / FBI to control the American citizenry. Congress has become outrageous media entertainment. Public works projects have ground to a halt, and the media (from alt-left to alt-right) are controlled by the government and manipulate with impunity.
International efforts are now all centered in [1] controlling strategic materials by proxy (Bolivia, Syria), [2] subduing other nations that might be economic threats (China, and Russia), and [3] fighting other nations wars (Yemen, Liberia) following a for-profit model.
America today is a corrupt Military Totalitarian Empire.
Conclusion
To really change the direction that America in involved in… and it needs to be changed, least the world collapse under the weight of World War III…
…we need to recognize what America is today.
We need to see what it was set up as, and how it was changed, and to put systems in place so that this will NEVER happen again.
And, America must change. This path that it is on is not sustainable.
And, tweaking things to undo the policies of Obama is not enough. We need to undo two centuries of policy changes. And this needs to be supervised by people that understand what “liberty” and “freedom” really are…
…and reporting what you did all year to a government agency is NOT freedom. Nor is asking permission to withdrawal your savings from a bank, wearing a seat-belt, or being forbidden from smoking or drinking large-size sodas. If you need to ask permission to do something or are fearful of government consequences, you are NOT living in freedom.
Any person who does not understand this MOST BASIC of understandings shouldn’t be permitted anywhere near the levers of power.
Real patriots need to take control of this situation, and it will not be organic. It’s not going to “just happen”. Like how each of the five stages of American Governance were well-planned in advance and executed, the same must occur by American patriots. This situation needs to change, and it needs to change soon.
Do not place all your hopes and beliefs on a Trump Presidency. While he is doing some good things Domestically, his International policy is driven by neocons and could actually result in World War III. This would be horrific for everyone.
Nor should you put your hopes in the other end of the spectrum. The Bernie Sanders crowd and all their ilk are dangerous idealists. They want to wind the clock back to feudal serfdom under a modern “enlightened” totalitarian social utopia. This would be horrific for many Americans.
The alternatives are far too frightening to contemplate.
Which is why we need to erase all the changes made since 1789 (The Bill of Rights) and start all over with a “clean slate”.
I hope you enjoyed this little narrative. You can find more, and better, discussions on other SHTF posts, Accessed here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Think about it. What benefit does the United States Federal Government provide that the State governments cannot?
And, is that benefit worth the extra multiple layers of taxation?
I strongly believe that it is not worth it at all. The United States today is an out of control corrupt empire, and almost everything it does benefits a mere handful of people, while Joe and Suzy Average derives very little benefit. I would like to expound on this, through the lens of history.
The following article; “The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic” is a most excellent article from the Mises Institute. Written 17NOV19. All credit to the author; Gary M. Galles.
The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic
What the Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the 1776 Constitution turned out to be true…
Most school kids are left with the impression that the US
Constitution was the inevitable follow-up to the Declaration of
Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the
exciting debate that took place after the war and before the
Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal
government at all.
The Antifederalist Movement
Everyone knows about the Federalists who pushed the Constitution. But far less known are the Antifederalists who warned with good reason against the creation of a new centralized government, and just after so much blood had been spilled getting rid of one.
The first of the Antifederalist Papers appeared in 1789.
The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution as (they feared) it would create what would become an overbearing central government.
What the Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
As the losers in that debate, they are largely overlooked today. But that does not mean they were wrong or that we are not indebted to them.
Those that fight the Deep State are antifederalists.
Confusing nomenclature.
In many ways, the group has been misnamed.
Federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. This group defended states’ rights—the very essence of federalism—against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what they predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
The Antifederalists warned us that the cost Americans would bear in both liberty and resources for the government that would evolve under the Constitution would rise sharply.
That is why their objections led to the Bill of Rights, to limit that tendency.
Their Oppositions to the Constitution
Antifederalists opposed the Constitution on the grounds that its checks on federal power would be undermined by expansive interpretations…
… of promoting the “general welfare” (which would eventually be claimed for every law)…
… and the “all laws necessary and proper” clause (which would be used to override limits on delegated federal powers)…
… thus creating a federal government with unwarranted and undelegated powers that were bound to be abused.
One could quibble with the mechanisms the Antifederalists predicted would lead to constitutional tyranny.
For instance, they did not see that the Commerce Clause would come to be called “the everything clause” in law schools...
...justifying almost any conceivable federal intervention...
...because the necessary distortion of its meaning was so great even Antifederalists couldn’t imagine the government could get away with it.
It merits remembering the Antifederalists’
prescient arguments and the virtual absence of modern Americans who
share their concerns.
And they could not have foreseen how the 14th Amendment and its interpretation would extend federal domination over the states after the Civil War.
But despite that, it is very difficult to argue with their conclusions in light of the current reach of our government, which doesn’t just intrude upon, but often overwhelms Americans today.
We need to listen to the Anti-federalist argument.
Therefore, it merits remembering the Antifederalists’ prescient arguments…
… and how unfortunate is the virtual absence of modern Americans who share their concerns.
One of the most insightful of the Antifederalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention was exceeding its instructions.
Yates wrote as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution.
Given his experience as a judge, his claim that the Supreme Court would become a source of almost unlimited federal overreaching was particularly insightful.
Expanded Judicial Power
Brutus asserted that the Supreme Court envisioned under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse…
… because they were beyond the control “both of the people and the legislature,” …
…and not subject to being “corrected by any power above them.”
When the opportunity arises the corrupt officials will spring into action and restricts the rights of Americans so that they can gain personally.
As a result, he objected to the fact that its provisions justifying the removal of judges didn’t extend to rulings that went beyond their constitutional authority…
…thus, leading to judicial tyranny.
Brutus argued that when constitutional grounds for making rulings were absent…
… the Court would create grounds “by their own decisions.”
He thought that the power it would command would be so irresistible that the judiciary would use it to make law, manipulating the meanings of arguably vague clauses to justify it.
America today.
Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired.
The Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to its alleged “spirit”…
… rather than being restricted to just the “letter” of its written words (as the doctrine of enumerated rights, spelled out in the 10th Amendment, would require).
Further, rulings derived from whatever the court decided its spirit was would effectively “have the force of law,”…
… due to the absence of constitutional means to “control their adjudications” and “correct their errors.”
This constitutional failing would compound over time in a “silent and imperceptible manner,” through precedents that build on one another.
Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired…
… because the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations would control the effective power…
…power vested in government and its different branches.
That would hand the Supreme Court ever-increasing power, in direct contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 78 that the Supreme Court would be “the least dangerous branch.”
Judicial Tyranny
Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt “very liberal” principles of interpreting the Constitution.
This is America today.
He argued that there had never in history been a court with such power and with so few checks upon it…
… giving the Supreme Court “immense powers”…
…powers that were not only unprecedented, but perilous for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed.
This is America today.
Given the extent to which citizens’ power to effectively withhold their consent from federal actions has been eviscerated, it is hard to argue with Brutus’s conclusion.
Brutus accurately described both [1] the cause (the absence of sufficient enforceable restraints on the size and scope of the federal government) and [2] the consequences (expanding burdens and increasing invasions of liberty) of what would become the expansive federal powers we now see all around us.
We need to understand their arguments and apply them to a NEW Constitution, if there is to be any hope of restraining the government to the powers it was actually granted in the Constitution.
Today
It’s well past time for a change.
But today, Brutus would conclude that he had been far too optimistic.
The federal government has grown exponentially larger than he could ever have imagined…
In part because he was writing when only direct, e.g., excise taxes and the small federal government they could finance were possible before the 16th Amendment opened the way for a federal income tax in 1913.
…far exceeding its constitutionally enumerated powers, despite the Bill of Rights’ constraints against it.
The result burdens citizens beyond his worst nightmare
The rise and fall of America.
Conclusion
The judicial tyranny that was accurately and unambiguously predicted by Brutus and other Antifederalists shows that in essential ways, they were right and that modern Americans still have a lot to learn from them.
We need to understand their arguments and take them seriously now, if there is to be any hope of restraining the federal government. Constraining it precisely to the limited powers it was actually granted in the Constitution. This is absolutely necessary given its current tendency to accelerate its growth well beyond enumerated Constitutional limits.
In my mind, the first step to controlling the out-of-control beast is to reestablish State sovereignty. Then, through concentrated and systematic efforts, starve the beast. Allow it to whither and die on the vine.
If Americans are unable to control this raging nasty beast, the rest of the world will need to call Animal Control to put it down, and that will certainly not be a pleasant event to witness.
This is America today. Look around you. The rest of the world is moving forward, and the enormous American empire remains dark and immovable.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other posts that you might be interested in that can be found in my SHTF index here…
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
This is what we refer to as a "sanity check". It is where we, as engineers, perform a simplified calculation to determine if the calculations that we arrived at, are valid...
This is a reprint of the most excellent Ron Paul article. Modified and edited to fit this venue. In it, he argues that you don’t need to look at complicated “generational theories”, r/K or KaLa theories to explain what is happening to America today. You just need to look at what happens every one hundred years or so…
The great Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote:
"History is a struggle between two principles, the peaceful principle, which advances the development of trade, and the militarist-imperialist principle, which interprets human society not as a friendly division of labour but as the forcible repression of some of its members by others."
America was founded on the peaceful principle.
If you are peaceful, other people and nations will work with you on friendly terms, and your people will be happy.
The country’s first President, George Washington, said in his farewell address:
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world".
Ah, that is all nice and good. However consider the practical applications and issues…
This policy, which can be packaged into the euphemism “America First” was the guiding policy for the first 100+ years of the country’s existence.
The guiding principle for the first one hundred years was to put Americans first in all national decisions and programs.
Indeed, America truly was independent.
America
This did not mean that America was “isolationist.” Far from it, of course. Thomas Jefferson explained at his inaugural that the policy was one of:
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."
Do not laugh.
America, as founded, was a peaceful and positive and friendly life. It was a place where people formed communities and welcomed others and helped others.
Here was a land, the largest free-trade zone to ever exist, shielded by giant oceans, with a limited government that only had a few enumerated powers. The individual was master of his domain.
Consider…
The situation. The creation of “America”in a free-ranging (or apparently so) land, were Earth-shattering and life-changing — Prosperity, the likes of which have never existed before.
America was a prosperous and happy place. The government was run by people much like ourselves, and they held the same value and issues that we ourselves cherished..
But alas, after 100+ years passed, new generations with little to no connection (or care) for the ideas of Washington & Jefferson, decided to change course for the worse. The ‘Old World’ ideas of power and empire crept in through the back door…
Ideals were replaced by individual greed.
Roughly one hundred years after the founding, ideals were replaced by individual greed.
The new reality.
In this new embrace of the ‘Old World,’ the individual would no longer be the master of his domain. Government would be the master.
Sounds perfect, eh?
It is a parent-child relationship. One in which sociologists and psychiatrists consider to be very unhealthy for peer-to-peer interaction.
Big government only grows bigger. Eventually it takes and consumes everything and you, as a hapless civilian, gets trampled upon.
I know many Democrats believe that utopia is “just around the corner”. It’s just only if…
A new America…
Suddenly, in 1898, after much careful planning by those who had an insatiable lust for power, America would take on the role of conqueror.
And conquer it did.
In a single year, the United States took control of five far-flung nations, which contained 11 million people, all in one fell-swoop.
The military was no longer used for defensive and humanitarian missions to help American citizens. It became a money-making machine to serve the special interests of Washington neocon insiders.
Washington & Jefferson were tossed into the dust-bin.
Independence was cast aside. Intervention was the new game in town. In 1898, the slow death of “America First” was given its first real kick to the chops.
Of course, the original role of government would have to be transformed.
Transformed…
If America was to have an empire, it would have to take control of every American citizen’s earnings.
Once citizens no longer owned their earnings, and money. They became powerless. The people who had control of the money also had control over them. Americans became debt-serfs at the mercy of the government.
Enter President Wilson – Progressive Genius.
And so, in 1913, with the creation of the income tax, every American’s earnings would belong to the government first. The government would decide how much each person would be allowed to keep.
The government would decide.
President Wilson believed that the concepts of “Liberty” and “Freedom” were outdated and needed to be replaced with “modern” and “progressive” systems.
The government should decide what to do with people’s earnings.
Not the people.
Not the individual.
The government should decide.
American government today. It is far, far too powerful. This is the complete creation of President Wilson.
It’s all so progressive…
…
A nightmare!
What a drastic change for the worse!
The big enormous government takes and takes and takes. It threatens and puts the citizenry in a state of near constant fear, and what do they get in return? Nothing.
But an income tax would not be enough.
It wasn’t enough. Not for the people who thought that they were better then everyone else. Oh, no.
After all, government can only tax people up to a certain point before they decide to revolt. American politicians, of all people, knew that!
So an even more insidious institution would be created, also in 1913. It would be called The Federal Reserve. This central bank would be granted a monopoly on counterfeiting money.
Pure genius!
Take the blame out of the hand of the government and put it into an unaccountable entity. Such wonderful genius.
The Impact…
How much money?
As much money as the government needs in order to sprawl itself around the world. Every American would be forced to use this “money,” of course, even though its purchasing power would be constantly eroded. Legal Tender Laws would make sure that there was no way out.
It’s ok, though.
Americans voted for the people who decided to implement this system. You know…
… one hundred years ago.
And the people in charge allocated their responsibilities and veto power to other people…
…other people who turned it over to others…
…who allocated it to others…
… who decided to pass it on to others…
… who would work in the best interests to make the system work….
Sounds bad. Well, sorry, that’s the way it is.
And so, with an income tax and a printing press, the Land of The Free would morph, over the next 100+ years, into the biggest government to ever exist … the biggest military empire to ever exist … and the biggest welfare state to ever exist.
Aren’t you all happy?
American leadership knows just how to manipulate and cajole the American serf-cash-cows… erp, I mean citizens.
Freedom!
Washington & Jefferson would not recognize this at all. It’s literally the exact opposite of why the 13 colonies seceded from England.
It is.
Do not tell me that it is not the case.
This new era of empire would be dominated by “Bread and Circuses”. There would be plenty of food, and plenty of entertainment. What happens outside of America would remain out-of-sight and out-of-mind.
Yeah.
All political fighting inside of America would take place between two virtually indistinguishable factions. The gangs would passionately battle each other, but they would never battle the policy of empire.
Yeah.
Policy is the only thing that matters. But Americans would be flooded with a deluge of propaganda telling them that the ability to change politicians is a gift from the heavens. That, they would be told, is the only thing that matters.
Yeah.
And so, throughout this period, the politicians would certainly change, but the policy wouldn’t budge even a single inch. In other words, the politicians would change….but it wouldn’t matter!
And now…
So now we have two sets of 100 year periods in American history, each guided by completely opposite ideas.
The first produced liberty and prosperity in tremendous abundance. The second has produced a dependency, militancy and debauchery that has always been the lot of mankind living under the boot of power.
American today. This is what America is, it rules by force, and power.
The two one hundred year periods…
The first was underpinned by peace, trade, sound money, savings and investment.
The first one hundred years of America was one with solid and conservative values. It put the individual in full control of his domain, and kept the government small. People lived their lives as they deemed fit.
The second has been underpinned by war, sanctions, counterfeit money, taxes, and crushing debt.
The second hundred years has been nothing but war after war, after war. All funded with more and more, and more taxes. You know for “democracy”. Everything in this picture was destroyed with American bombs, and weapons, fired by American soldiers, and used by America to spread American “democracy”. This is the reality today.
And us, the American citizens…
Those who live are always presented with a choice — continue, or change?
America: CONTINUE or CHANGE?
For years…
Years…
Generations..
No one did any thing.
America. Americans live in a constant state of fear and are really too afraid to change anything. They are just content to yell about their “freedom” and the wonderful “democracy”, instead of doing things and fixing things.
Nothing.
Weaklings. Lazy. Slothful.
Our parents, grand parents, great-grand parents.
Change happens through individual choice. The ideas that we each individually embrace mean everything.
Real change can happen when we stop allowing the government to take over society. We need to throw away that connection. Because a corrupt government will corrupt society.
People!
A corrupt government will corrupt society.
Power lives and breathes on your belief in it. Why do you think you’re surrounded by propaganda at every turn?
For fun?
No! … It’s to keep you believing.
You do not need to live your life in fear. Prepping is well and good, but your government should be on your side. Not the other way around.
It’s to convince you that liberty is dead. And that government has the keys to your happiness. You just keep on following the media talking points. Nothing else matters.
Reality
However, if you change your belief, you change everything. You breathe life into the idea of liberty.
If you breathe life into the idea of liberty, you make America a much better place.
Washington left us with these wonderful words: “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.”
The choice is always yours…..continue, or change?
And that is it.
Thank you Ron Paul.
Many Americans mistakenly believe that “America is the greatest nation in the world”, simply based on the longevity of the nation. That’s just pure ignorance. The nation had changed governmental structure numerous times.
Founded as a Republic.
Changed to a Democracy with the 12th amendment.
Centralized Federal Democracy during the Civil War.
Progressive Social Democracy under President Wilson.
Military Oligarchy under President Lindon Johnson.
Corrupt Military Totalitarian Empire today.
If you believe that what is written makes sense than you have two choices of action. They are [1] take immediate action to protect you and your family, or [2] ignore it.
If you ignore it, then that if fine. Just listen to me and do not allow the American propaganda to force you to live within fear. The world is not a terrible and dark place. Good people are everywhere and the world outside the United States increasingly looks like a modern scene from the televisions show “Wally and the Beaver”.
Avoid the American “news”. In all of it’s forms…
What in the world is the American government up to? I thought that the ninth amendment states that Americans have more rights than just the enumerated ones.
If you don’t believe that this is the state of affairs, then you can can ignore this and read CNN, MSN and WaPo to tell you what to believe and how to act.
Do not live your life in fear. DO NOT LIVE YOUR LIFE IN FEAR!
It’s your choice.
American news is really just propaganda. It is designed to keep Americans into a state of control. While real events and real news is kept secret.
Commentary and Conclusion
Kinda of boring,eh?
Well, that’s the way it is. America has stratified, and it is the rich vs. the slaves and there is nothing that exists in the “dead-lands” between the two groups. This is the sum total of the “wonderful” progressive utopia implemented by President Wilson in the early part of the last century and engineered to perfection today.
You like it?
You’d better, because there ain’t no way that you can change it. You are fucked.
You are fucked.
Fucked.
Welcome to being an American.
Put a smile on your face. It’s your life.
Rah! Rah.
“freedom”. “liberty”, “democracy”! Rah. Rah!
Hope you keep all your receipts to give to the IRS in April. You don’t want to suffer the consequences for “non-compliance”, now don’t you? It’s all part of that big “freedom” package that comes with “democracy” don’t you know.
Friendly IRS making sure that you will not cheat your owners out of their money. You had best obey or else you and your family will be shot dead. It’s all so very progressive and modern, don’t you know!
I hope you enjoyed this little narrative. You can find more, and better, discussions on other SHTF posts, Accessed here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Or, don’t allow the flying chunks and pieces to wack you in the eye.
The USA is in a long and slow death spasm. It began about two hundred years ago when the Republic was turned into a Democracy. But things went really to dog-shit when the oligarchy took control of American finances with the 16th amendment. The last seventy years has been one of a dying Empire. Now, it’s in complete free fall. And everyone is scrambling to get their “little piece of the action” before it’s all gone. That being prefaced, let’s spend some time and talk about what is going on.
The election of Donald Trump was a “last gasp” in a near vain attempt to thwart the up-coming train-wreck. But opposition forces has, for all practical purposes, deprived him of his Presidential powers. His team, has back-stabbed him, thwarted his efforts, and conducted sabotage.
Yet he remains. A shining star for conservatives to lay their hopes upon.
The opposition party is vacillating between hard-core Marxism (with a friendly face) and a totalitarian dictatorship. They are idealistic uni-mind elitists. They are dangerous and they will be lethal if they ever get a chance to regain the formal reins of power again.
Americans like to dismiss this reality as “politics”, but it is more than that. It is battle between rats fighting over a scrap of pizza while the ship that they are on, sinks under the cool, cool icy calmness of the ocean.
America today. The rats are fights for the scraps of a once great nation. It’s every rat for himself.
This is a reprint of the article titled The Empire: Now or Never by Fred Reed it was written almost exactly a year ago, on February 20, 2019. Nothing has changed. Instead, things have gotten worse. All credit to the author.
Many people I talk to seem to think American foreign policy has something to do with democracy, human rights, national security, or maybe terrorism or freedom, or niceness, or something…
It is a curious belief, Washington being interested in all of them. Other people are simply puzzled, seeing no pattern in America’s international behavior.
But, really, the explanation is simple.
The reason of course is Empire.
American Empire
Empire; that desire for which is an ancient and innate part of mankind’s cerebral package. Parthian, Roman, Aztec, Hapsburg, British. It never stops.
America is an Empire. It utilizes all of the resources under it’s control to maintain that Empire. It is run as an Empire, and aside from the stereotypical images of what a ruthless Empire leader might look like, behaves exactly like a nefarious global evil Empire.
When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.
The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority…
…Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.
Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the real lunge came with the attack on Iraq.
Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet.
American foreign policy is one of an global Empire dominating the planet economically, militarily and socially.
The astonishing thing is that some people don’t notice this.
Oil and Petroleum Dominance
The world runs on oil.
Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line.
The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.
From the central control stations within America, talented people within the deep state bureaucracy are working diligently to make sure that the Empire, and it’s objectives are being met.
A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government.
The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve.
It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington.
Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has.
Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geo-strategically vital to a world empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry.
All God’s children love the Empire.
China and Russia are the Threats
For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions.
All threats to the American Empire must be neutralized. They must be vanquished by whatever means possible, and secretly. Were an outright and overt war to occur, the United States would not fare well.
At the same time Washington pushes NATO, its deployed militia, ever eastward…
Wants to station US forces in Poland…
Plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia…
Drops out of the INF Treaty for the same reasons…
And seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).
China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire.
Thus… the trade war.
America has to stop China’s economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it will not get another chance.
For the American Empire to remain firmly and fixed in control, China must be stopped by any methods possible. With biological germ warfare being the present preferred method.
The present moment is an Imperial crunch point.
America cannot compete with China commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing’s advantages are too great:
A huge and growing domestic market…
A far larger population of very bright people…
A for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad…
A stable government that can plan well into the future.
And America’s Strengths…
America?
It’s power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely had competitors.
Today it has deindustrialized…
Runs a trade deficit with almost everybody…
Carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt…
And makes few things that the world can’t get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
Increasingly America’s commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer.
Washington tells other countries;
“If you don’t do as we say, we won’t buy your stuff.”
The indispensable country is an indispensable market.
With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the Chinese economy would wither.
Tariffs, please take note, are just a way of not buying China’s stuff.
Since
the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often
do as ordered. But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.
“Strong-Arm” Tactics
As America’s competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics.
It has no choice.
A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei’s founder.
The tide runs against the Empire.
A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling speed.
It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers…
Launches moon-landers…
Leads in 5G internet…
Does leading work in genetics…
Designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and 920) and smartphones.
Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing edge.
The big “elephant in the room” is the American use of biological germ warfare against China. First the destruction of the chicken industry, then the destruction of the pork industry (by using custom made drones) and latest is the attempt to wipe out a significant portion of the Chinese population using the COVID-19 coronavirus at Wuhan.
America’s damage is self-inflicted.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted.
The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence.
American education deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists.
Washington spends on the military instead of infrastructure and the economy.
It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new administration.
The first rule of empire is, “Don’t let your enemies unite.” Instead, Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire.
It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes de-dollarization and recognition that America is not an ally but a master.
It is now or never.
If America’s great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions subdue the world…
Or Washington starts a world war.
Or America becomes just another country.
To paraphrase a great political thinker, “It’s the Empire, Stupid.”
Conclusion
You do not need to believe me. Just look at how Russia, China and India are handing things today. Turn off the American propaganda bubble, and listen to what other nations think, and how they are handling things.
This COVID-19 coronavirus event is being treated by China as a DEFCON ONE military event against a biological weapons attack.
Just because CNN is not report it, does not mean that it is not happening. It is just that you, and your fellow countrymen, are unaware of it.
The American mainstream, left-ALT, and Alt-Right media are propaganda channels that the American government utilizes to control the population. They do not, and NEVER reflect, the true and real reality.
The United States is pushing, pushing, and pushing. The anti-Russia and the anti-China propaganda war is at a fever pitch. The last time we saw such media pro-war intensity was World War II.
I personally think that the “Genie is out of the bottle”, and unless something radical will happen, American neocons will drive America straight into Nuclear Armageddon. And do not be under the misguided impression that America will win. No one wins with Global Nuclear Annihilation. Especially when it will be full-spectrum with nuclear, germ, biological and chemical war.
No one.
No one wins with Global Nuclear Annihilation.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have many more in my SHTF Index, here…
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because I just don’t care to.
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You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
America is an empire. It is an oligarchy that is ruled and controlled by the wealthiest interests in the world, and many of them are neocons. These neocons that believe that power-projection will never result in “push-back” on American soil. To this end, they heavily promote the idea of mobile military platforms; fleets of aircraft carriers that sail the world and exert military influence where ever they travel.
My argument is legion against these mobile armadas;
The role of the American military should be defensive, not offensive. (Coast Guard NOT international Navy).
They are expensive.
They can be destroyed.
When fighting a nation that has the ability to fight back, the loss of an aircraft carrier would be the last thing that anyone should worry about. The loss of New York, Chicago, Washington and LA, should be what you worry about instead.
Keep in mind that Japan lost all of their aircraft carriers during world war II, and America lost a sizable number as well. They are NOT invincible.
Here is an article that expounds on that point. I think that it is a good read. Please check it out.
Translated by Eugenia. Recently, the American journal The National Interest published an article with a telling title: “5 Reasons Russia and China Might Not Be Able to Sink a U.S. Aircraft Carrier”. The author of the article discusses these reasons in detail. All of them are, by the way, pretty self-evident. I obtained this from the Russian translation by Eugenia. All credit to both the Russian translation and the original authors.
“Unsinkable” American Aircraft Carriers: Five Nonsensical Statements
So there’s five reasons, right…
The first one turned out to be (do you believe this?) that “the American aircraft carrier is big and fast . . . “.
The second one – “it has many weapons . . . “.
The third reason – “it is well defended . . .”.
The fourth reason – “it acts prudently . . . “.
And, finally, the fifth – “the American military technologies are the best in the world . . .”.
Such is a collection of simplistic propagandist clichés that the American propaganda machine is pounding into the head of the Western common man.
OMG!
It is important to understand that the National interest is not some “yellow” paper; this in an analytical journal that is expected to offer responsible and professional publications.
It is the voice piece for solid and thoughtful military planning and decision making efforts.
A Large And Fast Coffin With A Propeller
Let us take a closer look at the way the author of the article – an
expert and political analyst – explains to his readers why the American
aircraft carriers are invulnerable and unsinkable . . .
First Reason
OK, the first thesis. The American aircraft carries is indeed large
and fast. It has 25 decks; its maximal height is 80 meters; it displaces
100,000 tons of water and can carry 70, or even up to 90, aircraft of
different types.
Aircraft carrier cross section.
Unfortunately, one small detail spoils this lovely picture: a large target is easier to hit!
But the Americans simply cannot make their aircraft carriers smaller. The reason is simple: they are insanely expensive.
The carries have to be made in such enormous size, simply because if they are made smaller, more of them will be needed. Flexibility of the American aircraft carrier fleet would in such case increase, but the price would skyrocket.
Carl Vincent aircraft carrier.
Judge by yourself: a modern aircraft carrier costs the US approximately $13 billion (that is how much the newest “Gerald Ford” cost), and the carrier air wing (the Navy version of F-35) based of the carrier costs additional $7 billions.
Plus, there are the ships of the “carrier strike group” – multiple guided missile warships, destroyers equipped with Aegis combat system, and stealthy attack submarines.
Thus, one such group costs the Americans around $50 billion dollars!
Aircraft carrier strike group.
And, by the way, these $50 billions are never able to move as quickly as the “expert” in the National Interest asserts . . .
But in America nobody is concerned with such details.
The author does not shy away from stating:
“The aircraft carriers are constantly moving when deployed at up to 35 miles per hour – fast enough to outrun submarines – finding and tracking them is difficult.
Within 30 minutes after a sighting by enemies, the area within which a carrier might be operating has grown to 700 square miles; after 90 minutes, it has expanded to 6,000 square miles”.
It sound great but in reality not one American aircraft carrier can reach this speed. The maximal speed that it can maintain – for a limited time – is 30 knots.
The key word here is LIMITED time.
If anyone thinks that an aircraft carrier can immediately upon
entering the open sea accelerate to 30 knots (almost 56 km per hour) and
keep racing on the waives, he is very much mistaken.
This is impossible.
In reality, 95% of their time American aircraft carriers move in an economy mode at the speed no faster than 14 knots (about 26 km/hour). When airplanes take off or land on the carrier, the carrier is seriously limited in its ability to change speed or course.
An aircraft carrier is not a bike. If this floating airdrome turned from side to side all the time, pilots would not be able to make landings.
Soviet missile Granit being loaded into launch tubes
Another small detail: who would give to an aircraft carrier 30 min so it could escape from the battle zone?
Even the old Soviet missile “Granit” (note that the American still do not have anything like it), which our nuclear submarine cruisers of 949-project “Antey” type are armed with, fired from its maximal distance would reach its target in just slightly more than 500 second.
Cross section showing the anti-ship launch tubes.
This means that when a missile is fired, an American aircraft carrier would have time to get away from the point of its detection at its maximal speed to no more than 7.5 km.
Such distance is definitely within the range covered by the self-targeting mechanism of “Granit”. Thus, the missile will reach its target and, if not neutralized by the air defense systems (which is not very probable), destroy the target.
Furthermore, as the American “expert” should know, no one will fire at an aircraft carrier group just one missile!
Every our “Antey” submarine is equipped with 24 such missiles. Additionally, I believe, if the Chief of Staff of our Navy plans an operations to destroy an American aircraft carrier, such operation will involve more than one “Antey”.
The first submarine of Project 949 was laid down in the mid-1970s and was commissioned in 1980. In 1982 an updated and larger version (Project 949A) replaced the earlier version. In total thirteen submarines were constructed. The Oscar class was designed to attack NATO carrier battle groups using long-range SS-N-19 \"Shipwreck\" anti-ship missiles and targeting data provided by the EORSAT satellite system.
- Oscar-class submarine | Military Wiki
If all 24 “Granit” missiles are fired simultaneously, it will be all but impossible to intercept them. Most of them fly at a very low altitude: they creep just above the surface of the ocean.
Just one missile flies above – it guides the whole pack to the target. If the adversary destroys the guiding missile, it is immediately substituted by one of the remaining missiles flying below.
Project 949A Antey Submarine.
When the Soviet engineers designed these missiles, they incorporated elements of the artificial intelligence in their design: the missiles communicate with each other selecting their targets in such a way, so that two missiles accidentally do not hit the same small target.
For example, our missiles know how to select the main target, and if that target is an aircraft carrier, the “Granits” would not self-target the accompanying warships – they will target specifically the carrier.
In addition, the missiles know other little tricks that certainly will come as a “unpleasant” surprise for the Americans, such as the ability to interact with the Naval Space System of Intelligence and Guidance (NSIG).
It seems, however, that the author of this American article has not idea that NSIG exists. However, such a system existed back in the Soviet Union – named “Legend”.
It’s Russian descendant is “Liana” that has broad capabilities to detect and follow American aircraft carrier groups in the ocean. This system is capable of guiding missiles to targets even after their have been launched.
Liana is the second-generation Russian system for space-based surveillance and targeting. Work on the project began in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- Ocean Surveillance - Liana - Lotus C and Pion-NCC
Obviously, no matter how good the weapons are or how sophisticated the detection system is – there is no 100% guarantee that an aircraft carrier will be destroyed by the first missile launch. However, the probability that by using all means at our disposal we will be able to sink it…
… is pretty high.
All the aircraft carriers in the world placed on one info-graphic.
Armed To The Teeth And Very Careful…
Let us find out who provides serious American journals with such analytical trash.
Who is this fantastic American “expert” that has no problem misleading his readers?
He is Loren Thompson, Chief Operating Officer of the Lexington Institute, a well-known organization, by the way. He is also a Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University where he taught strategy to graduate students and lectured at the Harvard University’s School of Government.
We can only guess what kind of strategy this expert in strategic
thinking taught his students. I think we can appreciate the quality of
the government officials trained on the lecture of this illustrious
“expert”.
But let us return to the reasons why we, supposedly, will never be able to sink an American aircraft carrier.
Second and Third Reasons
The second and third reasons, according to Thompson, is that an
American aircraft carrier “has lots of weapons and can defend itself . .
.” Who could have thought? Really, one immediately senses that he is
dealing with a true professional looking into the heart of the matter
An aircraft carrier is indeed loaded with weapons.
Thompson, however, does not seem to understand that these are offensive and not defensive weapons. A carrier is completely incapable of defending itself! The air defense and defense against submarines are expected to be provided by the accompanying ships.
During World War II, American Aircraft carriers were targeted and sunk.
Loren Thompson says that these ships are numerous and well armed, and that is why a carrier will never be sunk. I am almost afraid to remind that an attack on the carrier will not be conducted single handedly, either!
And I would like to interject, that a modern nuclear missile detonated 25 miles away would severely damage a carrier group, if not sink it entirely.
...and...
The purpose of a carrier group is to go up against nuclear-armed major powers.
During the Soviet regime, a whole regiment of missile-armed Ty-22 aircraft was designated for the destruction of one American aircraft carrier. This means dozens of airplanes. Plus submarines armed with cruise missiles. Plus other means of attack and destruction at our Navy’s disposal.
As history teaches us: 70 years ago during the World War II the presence of a large number of accompanying ships did not prevent the Japanese from sinking many an American aircraft carrier. In two years from 1942 to 1944 they successfully sunk as many as 11 of them!
We should think the offensive weapons advanced significantly since those times.
Fourth Reason
Tu-22 M3M bomber.
For example, the fighter-interceptor Tu-22 M3 (long distance supersonic missile-armed bomber – editor note). These Soviet-time airplanes are being thoroughly modernized, and the equipment of these newly modernized machines Tu-22 M3M will include, in particular, anti-ship new generation missiles X-32. For some reason, they are rarely mentioned in press, but these are fantastic missiles.
After launch, the come up to 40 km and fly at the speed almost 5 time faster than the sound. After coming upon the target, they descend on it almost vertically.
Russian anti-ship new generation missile X-32.
Today, the United States Navy does not possess any weapon even remotely close in its characteristics to our X-32. The Americans also do not have any air defense system capable of intercepting this missile . . .
That is why the fourth reason that, as The National Interest asserts, makes the enemy incapable of destroying American aircraft carriers is particularly important.
What is this reason?
Oh yes – they “do not take chances”.
When, perhaps, it would be better not to leave the base and go into the open ocean at all? It is so much safer . . .
But if you are out there . . .
Take chances or not, but on the way to the area of conflict with our (Russian) Navy (in the North Atlantic, for example) the American aircraft carries would have to pass through straits, narrow channels, where…
… naturally, our submarines and other forces would be waiting for them…
…and, according to the Russian customs, welcome them…
… with the “bread-and-salt” of cruise missiles seasoned with torpedoes, mines, and bombs . . .
In any case, the traditional Russian welcome for the aircraft carriers will be assured!
Captain’s quarters inside one of the American Aircraft Carriers.
Whether you are careful or not, but you cannot arrive from
Jacksonville, an American Navy base on the US East coast, to our shores
(for example, to the area of responsibility of the Northern Navy with
its mane bases on the Kolsky peninsula) bypassing several well-known
narrow channels and straits.
The Americans themselves during the Cold War constructed anti-submarine barriers in those places with the goal of preventing our subs from getting into the Atlantic. The best-known examples – the barrier along the line the North Cape – Medvezhyi (Bear) island and between Iceland and Faroe islands . . .
Fifth Reason
The last, fifth, reason of the invincibility of the American aircraft carriers, according to Loren Thompson, is the greatest achievement of his expert-analytical approach.
The reason is a fact self-evident for every American that the Americans are generally the best in the world and they possess the best technologies, including the military ones.
However, this is not exactly a fact.
For example, the Russian technologies of the anti-ship cruise missiles are definitely better than their American counterparts. Everyone who knows anything and learned anything knows that. In particular, the military experts are paying close attention to the Russian hypersonic missiles of the new generation.
The Americans do not appear to be amenable to reason but some of their allies are more or less adequate. Thus, recently the media in the Great Britain created a veritable hysteria on the subject of the new Russian missile “Zircon”.
When an aircraft carrier is lost, so are all the aircraft and air wings associated with it.
The first to raise alarm was the British newspaper TheIndependent.
It stated: “It is impossible to stop “Zircon”. Even the newest air
defense systems are yet to come to the British Navy will only be able to
destroy target at the maximum speed of 3700 km/hour, whereas “Zircon”
can reach 6000 or even 7400 km/hour”.
The Daily Star offered further development of the theme about the scary Russians:
“Russia produces deadly missiles capable of destroying the entire Royal Navy in one hit. A representative of the British Foreign Ministry believes that the Russian “Zircon”, which cant carry a nuclear warhead, completely changes the rules of war at sea. Our aircraft carriers simply could not be deployed where the Russians have these missiles . . .”
Another British newspaper, The Mirror, carried on in the same alarmist tone.
It wrote:
“The Russian missile moves with the speed twice as fast as the speed of the sniper bullet. It can send the most advanced ships to the bottom of the sea. The experts say that out Navy today has no defense against this terrible weapon.
The appearance of “Zircon” in the Russian arsenal make both our aircraft carriers costing $7 billion each useless”.
The Daily Mail added the final accord to this panicky choir:
“Russia created an invincible cruise missile that travels at 4600 miles per hour and is capable of destroying a British aircraft carries with one hit. This deadly missile “Zircon” can be launched from the land, sea, or air carriers.
It covers 155 miles in 2.5 minutes. Its appearance make the very idea of the aircraft carrier groups meaningless, and we simply do not have anything to counter it with”.
The Americans might, of course, hope that our “Zircon” is a threat exclusively to the British aircraft carriers.
Regardless of what they think, the facts say differently: any attempt by the American Navy to test in the real battle conditions whether or not the Russians can sink their aircraft carrier will most likely end quite badly for the US of A.
Conclusion
While the American military and public lie safely ensconced within the “echo chamber” of “enormous military might”. The idea that American overseas projection – the carrier Navy can we eliminated within minutes has taken hold in the rest of the world.
This might be true, or might be wrong.
I, for one, hope that we never find out.
The systems for Empire projection, that America has relied on for the last 70 years, is coming to a close. What the evolution is pointing towards is…
America to step-down and stop being the world’s policeman.
The idea of carrier battle groups is a dangerous and outdated concept.
The idea that they can be used against a well-equipped and motivated enemy and nuclear weapons WILL NOT be used is insanity.
Losing all 12 carriers is possible along with the destruction of all of the biggest cities on American soil.
This is a terrible reality, and it may come to fruition unless United States stops it’s Empire-building role, and concentrates on domestic issues and tranquility.
If you enjoyed this post, you might find other posts in the SHTF index to your liking…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
The world is well aware of the 2016 through 2019 trade negotiations between America (the United States) and China. It lasted three years, and was marked by a seemingly endless set of stops and false starts. Finally culminating with a “phase one” agreement immediately prior to the the COVID-19 (coronavirus outbreak). What many people are not aware of is the list of demands placed upon China by the (neocon) negotiation team. Here, we look at the impossible demands, and record them for prosperity.
Remember this well kids; this is NOT how you negotiate.
Negotiation is a matter of give and take, where both sides have the belief that they “won” the negotiation. You do not enter into negotiations with the idea that “you will do as I say, or I will destroy you!“.
The American Advantage.
What many people, especially Americans (locked up within their propagandized bubble) do not understand is that America doesn’t have much clout to negotiate with.
America has little to offer China.
While it might seem like “China needs America, more than America needs China”, the truth is that is actually the other way around.
The exports to America, from China, are a very small percentage of the Chinese export market.
The imports from America to China are also tiny. With aircraft and cotton being the leading exports.
Thus, the “Trump trade war” has very little impact on China.
This is not the world of the 1980’s. The rest of the globe has grown, and they have vibrant middle classes, malls and cities. China services the world. Not only America. In fact, over the years, it appears that the bulk of products exported to America from China are increasingly the cheapest and easiest to make.
Meanwhile the rest of the world opts for better to best quality, and higher priced consumer products. All provided by China.
I’ve covered this in another post here…
You see, there really isn’t much of an advantage that America has. It can only negotiate from a point of military strength.
The John Bolton strategy… “do as we say or we will erase you from the surface of the earth”.
American Negotiation Team
The Negotiation team set up by President Trump was filled and staffed by hard-line neocons. These war-mongering dinosaurs are the reason why the entire world economy was riding a “roller coaster” for the last three years.
They entered the negotiations with “strong demands“, and “hard lists“. Then when things would apparently be going well, the American team backed out and left the table.
This continued for three long years, and threw the world economy into a tail spin.
List of American Demands
The negotiation strategy was one of strength. From the American side it was “do this, or face the consequences”.
American strategy: Do as I say, or face the consequences.
This is well known throughout the American news media, though they didn’t say it as brutally or bluntly as I did.
It’s all described as “reasonable”, “fair” and “common sense”. You know, “…for the children”.
All lies.
Just like “common sense gun control”. Just like “reasonable sentencing guidelines”, and “zero tolerance rules for the school children.”
It’s all just propaganda.
That’s all it is.
For most Americans, reading the news, they are mistakenly under the impression that the “trade wars” was all about trade. It wasn’t. It was about global power, and how America can retard the growth of China long enough to recover it’s former standing.
Here’s the list of demands that the American (neocon) trade negotiation team placed upon China…
Now to be clear and certain, this is not ALL of the demands, nor the thousands of bullet lists that the trade negotiations encompass. I am not the mainstream press.
The American media would report on a Thanksgiving dinner in the following manner...
"There was a Thanksgiving dinner. People were upset about the tooth pick selection. The toothpicks were too wooden, too few, and not the proper size. Anonymous sources within the dinner party has referred to the dinner as "catastrophic" and desiring strong toothpick discipline..."
Selective reporting is NOT reporting. It is propaganda.
Thus here, I am going to concentrate on the general omissions in American coverage of the trade war events. Here we look at some of the American demands that only warranted a mere sentence or two in a multi-page report.
[1] Independence for Tibet
If you read the American media you might be inclined to say that this is not unreasonable. The Western media is saturated with news about unhappy Tibetans and the need for “freedom” and “democracy”. That’s the story. That’s the propaganda.
Here’s a selection of some readings to give you all an idea of what is going on in Tibet and what America is up to…
What you don’t read is any thing positive about China and Tibet.
That’s right. All Western media is all about the unhappiness and “unrest” in Tibet. Americans read this while never setting a foot there, knowing people there, or getting news from other areas.
The fact is that Tibet is not riddled with unrest, strife and unhappiness. It’s quite the contrary.
Modern Tibet. It just doesn’t fit the American propagandized narratives.
Just go and see for yourself. Do not take my word for it.
In the meantime, realize that by removing the Tibet region from China, it takes a sizable geographic bite out of China. It’s roughly equivalent to removing California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas from America.
NOT . GOING . TO . HAPPEN .
China without Tibet.
[2] Independence for Xinjiang Muslims
This is a “much to do about nothing” narrative. The entire Uyghur Muslim independence movement is a CIA fabrication.
Oh, how I hate to use the letters "CIA" in anything. It makes me sound like some kind of conspiracy kook.
Yet.
The CIA does exist. They do launch revolutions, and they ARE involved in trying to destabilize China.
Likewise the narrative continues for the independence for Xinjiang. Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about? I am talking about the Uyghur Muslims. Oh, I’m sure you read about the millions and millions of poor harmless Muslims in re-education camps.
What’s the latest figure? Eleven million people in concentration camps. OK. I’ll bite. Point the camps out to me using Google Maps. After all New York City is six million people, so any camps that are double that size should be easy to see…
The reason to cause unrest and strife in Xinjiang is to stop the Road and Belt initiative from taking place there. For those “poor Muslims” are going to become filthy Dubai-rich within the next ten years. Oh, no! That will not help the United States one bit, and must be stopped.
Don’t you know.
“For the children”.
As I have stated before, the idea that China would discard the Road and Belt initiative, and isolate themselves to an over reliance on sea shipment of goods is a “pipe dream”.
NOT . GOING . TO . HAPPEN .
China without Tibet and Xinjiang.
[3] Independence for Taiwan
Taiwan is populated with Han Chinese. But maintains it’s own government structure. It’s the one nation, two systems philosophy that China maintains. Well, that does not sit well with the negotiation team. They want Taiwan to sever ALL TIES with China, and instead make Taiwan a client nation with the United States.
Here’s a mixture of links to help you all flush out the situation…
Taiwan is like a nice big juicy aircraft carrier right off the Chinese mainland.
Anyone who even thinks that China would even consider this is smoking too much of that wacky weed. China is a nation of merit. Their leadership ranks are filled with the best and the brightest. They will not even contemplate such an abomination.
NOT . GOING . TO . HAPPEN .
China without Tibet and Xinjiang and Taiwan.
[4] Freedom for Hong Kong
Hong Kong is a tiny nation. It too is part of the one nation, two systems set of governance.
However, it is important. This is because it is the second portal to the Road and Belt initiative.
By freezing egress from that portal, American can retard trade routes and isolate China effectively.
By controlling Hong Kong and Taiwan, and arranging for military bases in both those areas, America can easily place military forces in close proximity to the Chinese mainland.
NOT . GOING . TO . HAPPEN .
[5] Adopt a two party democracy
There is nothing so rude, so arrogant as to tell someone that you don’t like their hair style, their clothing, and the way they sign their name. Well, that’s American industry today. All of which happened to me.
Well, these jackasses in Washington, don’t even give a seconds thought to applying this level of rudeness to other nations.
That’s like China telling Washington DC to disband all political parties and adopt Communism.
ITS. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
China today is a single party, traditional conservative nation. Much like the United States was initially setup up as. Then after the 12th amendment the formation of two parties came into being with “democracy”. This is what Trump is demanding of China. To allow a second opposition group to embrace “democracy”.
Perspective
If the roles were reversed. And China demanded these similar kinds of demands on the United States, the nation would look something like this…
What America would look like if the Chinese made the same kinds of demands that the American neocon negotiation team are making.
Conclusions
The five major structural demands that the American negotiation team placed on China did not occur. They will not occur. They never will occur.
Independence for Tibet. (US client state.)
Independence for Xinjiang. (US client state.)
Independence for Taiwan. (US client state.)
Independence for Hong Kong. (US client state.)
Change the Chinese government into a two-party “democracy”.
China has spent the last two decades trying to be come functionally independent from the rest of the world, but tied to the global economic reality. You will [1] not be able to successfully instigate famine in China via trade restrictions, even if you use biological warfare on both the chicken and pork industries. You will [2] not get them to sever their ties with their neighbors, and [3] you will not get them to embrace the failed American “democracy” model.
NOT . GOING . TO . HAPPEN .
I do hope that you enjoyed this post. You can see similar posts in my Trump Trade War index…
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because I just don’t care to.
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Here we take a look at the two governments of China and America. We look at what they are and how they work. In this article we discard the notion that “democracy is the best” and “communism is worst“, because (after all) America is not a democracy, and China is not communist. Instead, we throw away the labels and look at the substance.
You must accept the world that you find yourself in.
-Les Brown
To read this post without disgust, you need to suspend your disbelief. You need to acknowledge that China is capable of doing things that are now impossible for America to do. Like a high speed rail network. Like tackling a pandemic. Like lifting the entire nation out of poverty without using “hand outs”.
For America to compete within the global arena it will absolutely need to change the way it does things. It will need to revolutionize it’s governmental structure. It needs to do this. The path that the United States is on is not sustainable.
And that change, for America, will be uncomfortable and will result in a SHTF event because there are too many people that are fat and comfy living well with things as they are today.
Today, regarding China and America, we will have Thought Most Potent, adequate to lube a diesel, curdle milk, or seal a driveway. Whole departments of international studies will close their doors in despair. Ha.
Why, we ask, does it seem that the Middle Kingdom advances speedily on so many fronts, while the US doesn’t? The clear conclusion seems to be that China is superior, not across the board, but in enough ways to ensure its soon global primacy.
Apparently the only way a Washington incapable of reform can stop this is with war…
The Lie of “democracy”.
To begin, China has a superior political system. Most importantly, it is not a democracy. An American conceit is that democracy is good and more democracy, better.
Unfortunately, the truth is that more democracy means worse results. Placing governance in the hands of the empty-headed, dimwitted, and inattentive, these being the most numerous classes, inevitably leads to disaster.
Further, democracy is a self-deepening evil: That is, it tends to worsen with time.
Those who profit by the votes of the appallingly ignorant majority urge the enfranchisement of the yet dimmer, as for example those too feckless to have identification, the barely literate, pubescents of sixteen years, and acknowledged felons (as distinct from those felons as yet undetected in government).
This is said chirpily to be “Inclusive,” and is…
… which is what is wrong with it.
The dumber welcome the yet dumber. Down and downer we go until, in all likelihood, fire hydrants and stray cats have the vote.
Why is this good?
Those who laud patriotism without necessarily being able to spell it say…
…” well, at least we are not a horrid authoritarian country like China.”
Americans are suckled from birth on the notion that authoritarianism is bad, and quickly conflate authoritarians with dictators, who are then said to be just like Hitler.
China is not a dictatorship.
But China is not a dictatorship.
It is an authoritarian oligarchy of technocrats. This has advantages. For example, an authoritarian government can put the intelligent and qualified in positions of responsibility.
This China does.
Xi Jingping holds degrees in chemical engineering and law. Trump is a real-estate con man blankly ignorant of technology, history, geography, and government.
China’s managers are heavy on engineers, scientists, and economists, America’s on provincial lawyers and petty demagogues.
Freedom!
Americans are also told that they have more freedoms than do the Chinese.
They do, but the gap is less than we might like to think, and closing.
Freedom of speech? In America you cannot say anything against backs, feminists, transgenders, Israel, Jews, Hispanics, black crime, affirmative action, or abortion, or in favor of the police, the Second Amendment, white rights, or the South. Politically disapproved sites, mostly conservative, are rapidly being shut down.
None of this is being done by the formal government. (Yet) It is being done. Lincoln said that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The American principle is that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.
Rule by Mob Rabble.
In a democracy the rabble, sensing their numerical advantage, will always try to pull their superiors down.
They will not make an effort, probably futile, to rise.
A central strain in American culture is hostility to elitism, which means a preference for the better to the worse. The deep resentment of the superior leads to a celebration of inadequacy seen in affirmative action, the abolition of standardized tests and advanced placement courses for the bright, and the lowering of academic standards.
We call this “inclusiveness.”
I suspect the Chinese call it “lunacy.”
China finds its very brightest young and sends them to the best schools in China or the US. The notion that virtue requires that a country suffer mildly retarded brain surgeons or barely numerate physicists is peculiarly American.
Democratic elections.
Elections, inevitable in democracies, are a terrible idea.
An election is a competitive shooing of fools in directions profitable to those doing the shooing. Democracy is thus a mechanism for the promotion of rogues and rascals.
It works.
America now has a most wonderfully ineffectual and embarrassing government.
The
holding of elections–these being combinations of raffles, vaudeville,
and popularity contests–every two, four, or six years ensures that the
beneficiaries will concentrate their thoughts more on shooing than
doing.
China has an Industrial Policy.
China, with a stable government able to focus on governing, can look to the future and plan for the long term.
America cannot.
Pols don’t think beyond the next election. They cannot do what would be good for the country but only what suits the passing fads of hoi polloi.
Thus China has an industrial policy.
America has a collection of predatory corporations clawing their way to the public trough.
China can decide to do something, and actually do it.
Congress can’t buy a box of paper clips without fourteen lawsuits, a floor fight, two environmental impact studies, and a Supreme Court decision on the disparate racial impact of paper clips.
Chinese Authoritarian Government.
If I may wade into the quicksand of cultural analysis, authoritarian government seems emotionally to suit the Chinese. We think of it as repressive, the Chinese as orderly.
In Asia there are various sayings such as,”The nail that stands up is beaten down,” while the Johnny Paycheck song resonates more with Westerners “You can take this job and shove it.”
The choice I suppose is one of personal preference.
However, consensus allows the Chinese to do rapidly things they think important.
Note that following the outbreak of the Coronavirus, China had the genome sequenced and online for the world in a month. They also very quickly developed a mass-produced test kit in giving results in eight to fifteen minutes, a hospital built in ten days.
Can you imagine the US federal government doing anything at all in ten days? Remember the response to Katrina?
Group Consensus Advantage.
Consensus does not mean oppression or servility. Go to a Chinese city such as Chongqing, which I recently visited. You will find it clean, well run, with virtually no crime or police presence, lively restaurant districts and nightclubs.
People are proud of this and proud of China.
What do you suppose they think when pondering an America laboring under the crippling diversity, under racial, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, and religious hostility and, most recently, the assaults of the libidinally weird?
Under governmental chaos?
Uncontrolled crime?
The tens of thousands of homeless defecating on the streets?
The 2.2 million in prison, which would equate to 8.8 million in China?
Dozens of cities with illiterate black minorities?
Another unearned but real advantage: China is pretty much a Han mono-culture except for Uighurs and Tibetans, who are geographically isolated. This makes for a degree of domestic tranquility that, while imperfect, is far calmer than the American chaos.
Foreign Relations…
In foreign relations, China again seems to have the edge in wisdom. America’s approach to the world is military and coercive, controlled by a vast and profitable arms industry with a Cold War mentality.
China’s outlooks (and that of most of the world) is commercial.
This is an imperfect description but catches the center-line.
China spends on China, America on the Pentagon.
In Africa, America sends troops and builds drone bases. China constructs infrastructure and buys up resources.
China and Russia prepare to commercialize the Northern Sea Route; the Pentagon to send warships to counter them. (How do you counter a trade route with an aircraft carrier? Bomb the water?)
Advantages and advantages…
Some of China’s advantages result from fertility rather than judgement, but they nonetheless are advantages.
Economically, China has a huge domestic market, larger than those of the US and Europe combined. This provides a cushion against American sanctions.
For example, while Europe dithers over whether to shun Chinese 5G equipment on orders from Washington, Huawei rapidly builds for at least a billion people, keeping the factories running and providing economies of scale.
China
is also a vast market for Western firms. Population gives China clout.
For instance, it is the planet’s largest buyer of semiconductors. How
happy are American firms at being shut out of that market?
Innovations…
Americans often say that the Chinese cannot “innovate.” This may be true.
Or may not be.
They are, however, very good at engineering. Of this there is no doubt. .
They did not invent high-speed rail but have a superb system, did not invent maglev but are working on trains that will travel at 480 mph, did not invent semiconductors but design world-class chips.
Conclusion
So, brothers and sisters, America’s choices seemingly are…
[1] To start a world war (favored by Bannon, Pompeo, and Bolton).
This is the path that America is currently on with the numerous biological warfare attacks on China. It will not be limited to China, it will involve Russia.
[2] Gut the military budget to make America great again (not a chance).
[3] Have America become a reasonably important middle-sized country that can, in peace and tranquility, focus its its attention on transgender bathrooms.
If you enjoyed this post, you might want to check out others in my SHTF index…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
One of my on-going themes is the idea that war, real terrible war, hasn’t been conducted by the United States for around 70 years. The last “real” war that the United States fought; one that required full mobilization of resources, and placed the very existence of the United States on line, was World War II. Since that date, the government of the United States has become corrupt, slothful and a money-making organism. If not trying to milk the citizens as servant-serfs, it is trying to conduct “for profit” global military operations for other interests as proxies. The time is fast arriving that this model will no longer be sustainable.
The Navy has not been in a war for seventy years. It has sat off various shores and launched aircraft, but the fleet has not been engaged. Over decades of inaction, complacency sets in. Unfortunately, wars regularly turn out to be otherwise than expected. Further, the American military’s standard approach to a war is to underestimate the enemy (there is probably a manual on this).
-Russia Insider
There are numerous articles on this point. Here is another most excellent one. Posted here for your viewing pleasure.
The article is titled; “Unused Militaries” written by Fred Reed on September 10, 2019. All credit to the author, and please feel free to visit his site for the very interesting and contrary Comments. Presented here will only minor editing to fit this blog venue.
It appears that Washington, ever a seething cauldron of bright ideas, is looking for a shooting war with China, or perhaps trying to make the Chinese kowtow and back down, the pretext being some rocks in the Pacific in which the United States cannot possibly have a vital national interest. Or, really, any interest. And if the Chinese do not back down?
-Russia Insider
Unused Militaries
“America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper is doing right now … and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to lie, cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That’s the truth of it. And that’s the agony of it.”
- Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2001 to 2005
For a couple of decades I covered the military for various publications, as for example the Washington Times and Harper’s, and wrote a military column for Universal Press Syndicate. I was following the time-honored principle of sensible reporters:
“Ask not what you can do for journalism, but what journalism can do for you.”
The military beat was a great gig, letting you fly in fighter planes and sink in submarines. But if you take the study seriously, as I did, you learn interesting things.
Such as that a war with a real country, such as Russia, China, or even Iran, would be a fool’s adventure.
A few points:
Unused militaries deteriorate
The US fleet has not been in a war since 1945, the air forces since 1975. nor the Army in a hard fight since Vietnam. Bombing defenseless peasants, the chief function of the American military, is not war.
Bombing defenseless peasants is not war.
In extended periods of peace, which includes the bombing of peasants, a military tends to assume that no major war will come during the careers of those now in uniform.
Commanders consequently do what makes their lives easy, what they must do to get through the day and have reasonable fitness reports.
This does not include pointing out inadequacies of training or equipment.
Nor does it include recommending large expenditures to remedy deficiencies.
Nor does it include recommending very expensive mobilization exercises that would divert money from new weapons.
This assures reluctance to question the fleet’s effectiveness in the face of changing conditions. Such as high-Mach, stealthed, maneuvering, sea-skimming cruise missiles. Or terminally guided anti-ship ballistic missiles. America is accustomed to fighting enemies who can’t fight back. This may not include the Chínese.
There is also the fact that the American military simply doesn’t matter, which reduces concern with whether it can fight and who it can fight. It doesn’t defend the US, since there is nothing to defend it against. (What country has the remotest possibility of invading America?) So the military is used for what are essentially hobbyist wars, keeping Israel happy, providing markets for the arms companies, and for social engineering: we have girl crews who would be a disaster at damage control, but we assume that there will never be any damage to control.
-Russia Insider
Thus an armored command has enough replacement tracks for training, but not enough for tanks in hard use in extended combat.
When the crunch comes, it turns out that getting more track requires a new contract with the manufacturer, who has shut down the production line.
The same is true for air filters, there not being much sand at Fort Campbell but a lot in Iraq.
Things as mundane as MRATs and boots are not there in real-war quantities.
GAU-8
ammo is in short supply because theory says the F-35 will do tank
busting. The Navy runs out of TLAMs early on and discovers that
manufacturing cruise missiles takes time. Lots ot it.
And
of course some things simply don’t work as expected. Military history
buffs will remember the Mark XIV torpedo, the Mark VI exploder of WWII,
and the travails of the Tinosa.
Come the war, things turn into a goat rope. FUBAR, SNAFU.
Conscription
The United States cannot fight a large land war, as for example against Russia, China, or Iran.
Such a war would require conscription.
The public would not stand for it.
America no longer enjoys the sort of patriotic unity that it did at the beginning of the war against Vietnam. It will not accept heavy casualties.
People today are far more willing to disobey the federal government.
Note that many states have legalized marijuana in defiance of federal law, that many jurisdictions across the country simply refuse to assist federal immigration enforcement.
Any attempt to send Snowflakes and other delicates to fight would result in widespread civil disobedience.
The Navy
The existing fleet has never been under fire and does not think it ever will be.
Most of its ships are thin-skinned, unarmored. One hit by an antiship missile would remove them from the war.
Being something of a technophile, I took all of this in with admiration, but I thought—what if it gets hit? As a kid in my preteens I had read about the battleships of WWII, the Carolinas but in particular the Iowa class, fast, brutal ships with sixteen-inch belt armor and turrets that an asteroid would bounce off of. The assumption was that ships were going to get hit. They were built to survive and continue fighting.
By contrast, the Vincennes was thin-skinned, hulled with aluminum instead of steel, and the radar, crucial to combat, looked perilously fragile. A single hit with anything serious, or perhaps even a cal .50, but certainly by anything resembling a GAU-8, and she would be hors de combat until refitted.
One hit.
...
I do not know a great deal about the Chinese Navy, having been out of that loop for years. I do know that the Chinese are smart, and that they have optimized their forces specifically to take out carrier battle groups near their territory. They do not try to match the US ship-for-ship in the kind of war America wants to fight. They would lose fast, and they know it. The key is to swarm the fleet with cruise missiles arriving all at once, accompanied perhaps by large numbers of aircraft. Would this work? I don’t know, but that is certainly the way I would bet.
-Russia Insider
This is as true of the Tico-class Aegis ships as of the newer Arleigh Burkes.
An aircraft carrier is a bladder of jet fuel wrapped around high explosives.The implications are considerable.
A plunging hypersonic terminally-guided ballistic missile, piercing the flight deck and exploding in the hangar deck, would require a year in the repair yards.
The Russians and Chinese are developing–have developed–missiles specifically to take out carriers.
Note that the range of some of these missiles is much greater than the combat radius of the carrier’s aviation. Oops.
USS Stark, 1987, after being hit by a pair of French Exocet missiles.
The USS Stark, 1987, after being hit by a pair of French Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi Mirage.
The USS Forrestal in 1967 after a five-inch Zuni land-attack missile was accidentally launched on deck.
The USS Forrestal
in 1967 after a five-inch Zuni land-attack missile, a pipsqueak rocket,
accidentally launched on deck. It hit another fighter. The resulting
fire cooked off large bombs. One hundred thirty-four dead, long stay in
repair yards.
Through Vietnam, America’s wars were fought by tough kids, often from rural backgrounds involving familiarity with guns and with hard physical work. I know as I grew up and went to Marine boot with them.
Discipline, if not quite brutal, came close.
Physical demands were high. In AIT–Advanced Infantry Training–at Camp Lejeune, it was “S Company on the road!” at three-thirty a.m., followed by hard running and weapons training until midnight. Yes, oldsters like to remember how it was, but that was how it was.
Today America has a military corrupted by social-justice politics.
Recruits are no longer country boys who could chop cordwood.
Obesity is common.
The Pentagon has lowered physical standards, hidden racial problems, softened training. The officers are afraid of the large numbers of military women who are now in combat positions.
One complaint about sexism and there goes the career.
Officer Rot
In times of extended peace the officer corps decays.
All second-tour officers are politicians, especially above the level of lieutenant colonel. You don’t get promoted by suggesting the the senior ranks are lying for political reasons, as by insisting that the Afghan war is being won.
Peacetime encourages careerists who advance by not making waves. Such Pattons of PowerPoint invariably have to be weeded out, at a high cost in lives, in a big war.
Today’s military is not going to fare well in anything resembling equal combat against Afghans, Russians, or Iranians.
The US military has not been able to defeat Afghan villagers in eighteen years with an immense advantage in air power, gunships, armor, artillery, medical care, and PXs. What do you think would happen if they had to fight the Taliban on equal terms–sandals, rifles, RPGs, and not much else?
Unrealism
The future is the enemy of the present.
What would happen if in a shooting war the Chinese crippled the American fleet? Washington is rampant with large egos, especially that of John McCain, the senator from PTSD. If it were discovered that China could disable the Navy, many other countries might conclude that they could do it too. They most certainly would think of this. Washington could not accept the discovery: Fear of the carriers is a large element in Washington’s intimidation of the world. To save face, the US would be tempted to go nuclear, or seriously bomb China proper, with unforeseeable results.
The Air Force and Navy could hurt China badly by conventional means, yes, for example by cutting off oil from the Mideast, or destroying the Three Gorges dam. For a variety of reasons this would be playing with fire. The economic results of any of these bright ideas would be godawful.
-Russia Insider
The military is not ready for a real war now because its focus is always on things down the road.
For example, the Navy cannot now defeat hypersonic antiship missiles but will be able to, it thinks, someday, maybe, world without end, with near-magical lasers still in development.
These will funnel lots of money to Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or somebody whether they work or not. Which isn’t important since nobody really believes there will be a serious war.
This is common thinking.
America is in process of acquiring B-21 intercontinental nuclear bombers for a frightening price. These will be useless except in a nuclear war, when they would still be useless because the ICBMs would already have turned targets into glowing rubble when the B-21s got there.
B-21
What the B21 will look like. It has a seat for Robin. The appeal of such things for adult twelve-year-olds is underestimated.
Why build them?
Because Northrop-Grumman has so much money that its lobbyists use snow shovels to fill Congressional pockets.
In my days of covering the Pentagon, whenever a new weapon was bought, the AH-64 for example, the prime contractor would hand out a list of subcontractors in many states–whose congressmen would support the weapon to get the jobs. It is all about money.
Sometimes Congress forces the military to buy weapons it explicitly says it doesn’t want, such as more M1 tanks from the factory in Lima, Ohio. Jobs.
In short, many weapons are bought for economic reasons, not for use in war. In my day, II saw many not-for-use weapons. The B1, B2, DIVAD, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the M16, the V-22, the LAW.
Nothing has changed.
The Blank Ignorance Factor
The landscape outside of the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel is at least as bleak as that within.
A friend, very much in a position to know, estimates that ninety percent of the Senate does not know where Burma is. Think Hormuz-Malacca-South China Sea.
The likelihood that Trump knows what countries are littoral to the Caspian is zero.
When I covered the military very few in Congress and nobody in the major media knew anything at all about weaponry and it uses: surface duct, deep sound channel, convergence zones, pseudo-random beam steering, APFSDS, staring receivers, chirp coding.
These are the first-grade small talk of people who pay attention.
These do not include minor lawyers-become-Congressmen from East East Jesus, Nebraska. Yet hey vote on military policy.
The Arrival of the Maintenance Hog
Being in a real war is hard on equipment.
There are battle damage and heavy wear and tear. This doesn’t matter in the wars today’s military fights.
America cannot really lose, only be worn down and leave.
If the US “loses” in Afghanistan or Syria, it won’t matter to Americans and few will even notice. Because America always fights from well-protected bases and airfields, it can afford to use weapons that require a lot of maintenance, often including high-tech work.
In a real war, no.
In
WWII, a fighter plane was just a malformed truck: engine, windshield,
tires, motor, stamped metal. If one came back full of holes, repair
crews with reasonable training could repair them fast on the hangar
deck. It wasn’t quite pop rivets and Bondo, but close.
After the Big War, American aircraft almost always flew from relatively safe bases.
For example, in Vietnam the carriers were never in danger. After Vietnam the aerial forces seldom even suffered battle damage. Since the US was always attacking utterly inferior enemies, sortie rates and repair time ceased to matter.
And the military came to expect such luxury.
But
now we have the F-35, the latest do-everything fighter of grotesque
cost. It seems to be a real dog, poorly designed and suffering from
endless problems. By accounts in the technical press, it is a hangar
queen with very low sortie rates, poor readiness, and requiring complex
electronic maintenance often at remote echelons.
This isn’t how you fight a real war.
How Wars Turn Out
Typically, not as planned. I’ve said this before but it is worth repeating.
Look at history:
The American Civil War was supposed to last a day at First Manassas; wrong by four years and 650,000 dead.
Napoleon thought his attack on Russia would end with the French in Moscow, not the Russians in Paris–which is what happened.
WWI was supposed to last weeks and be a war of movement; wrong by four bloody years of trench warfare.
The Japanese Army did not expect WWII to end with GIs buying their daughters drinks in Tokyo, nor the Germans that it would end with the Russian infantry in Berlin.
The Americans did not think they would lose in Vietnam, nor the Russians that they would lose in Afghanistan. And so on.
This happens partly because militaries are overconfident as a job requirement.
You can’t tell the Marines that they are at best mediocre light infantry or the Navy that it is essentially a target set. Instead the American armed forces are always said to be the best equipped, best trained, bravest, most formidable military that the world has ever seen.
Except they aren’t.
Assume that Bolton gets his war against Iran.
Advisers tell him it will be short and sweet, surgical, a cake walk. Have we heard this before?
The Navy says it can keep Hormuz open, grrr, woof. But somehow Iran doesn’t follow the script, doesn’t surrender.
The Navy to its surprise cannot find the deeply dug-in and truck-borne antiship missiles that keep hitting tankers. These keep burning.
Soon nobody will insure them.
They stop coming.
Three weeks into the war the world is screaming for oil, there is no end in sight, Trump can’t admit that he has blundered, and Bolton wants to nuke Tehran.
Or Washington pushes too hard in the South China Sea, an accidental collision turns into a shooting incident, and the Pompeo-Boltonian-Bannonites order the fleet to teach the Chinks a lesson.
Unfortunately the Chinese antiship missiles turn out to be rather better than expected, a carrier is disabled and three destroyers rendered scrap.
Now what?
Huge and uninformed egos in Washington could not accept defeat.
For one thing, it would end American credibility as a hegemon, and everybody and his herd of goats would want to buy Chinese antiship missiles.
Vanity plays a larger in world affairs than the textbooks say.
Washington, stupidly but inevitably, would double down and start an all-out war with China. At that point things would become unpredictable.
Washington seems not to realize that it wields far less military power than it thinks it does, and that the power it does wield is ever less useful than before. As a land power, it is very weak, being unable to defeat Russia, China, or peasants armed with rifles and RPGs. Air power has regularly proved indecisive.
If Washington somehow won a naval war with China, so what? It would provide the satisfactions of vanity, but China’s danger to the US imperium lies in increasing economic power and commercial expansion through Asia, where it holds the high cards: it is there, Washington isn’t.
-Russia Insider
Nuclear War
Men of incalculable stupidity and likely sexual inadequacy talk about nuclear war as winnable.
Dream on.
Reflect: American cities cannot feed themselves. Three days without food shipments and New Yorkers would clear the supermarket shelves. A week and they would kill for cans of tuna fish. Two weeks and they would be eating each other.
A very few nuclear bombs on transportation hubs would prevent distribution of food for months.
Even fewer cobalt bombs, designed to produce a maximum of lingering radiation, would make the farm belts lethally radioactive for a decade.
“Defense Intellectuals,” usually stupid enough that they ought to live in trees, chatter about escalation dominance and the intimidation factor and airtight missile defense.
They are nuts.
What they really need is a codpiece and a subscription to Pornhub Premium.
This is why it is a really, really, bad idea to have a psychopathic cockatoo, two loon Christians, and a pathologically aggressive momma’s boy in a position to start a war.
Trump neocon negotiation team takes on China.
If you enjoyed this post, you might want to check out others in my SHTF index…
You’ll not
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because I just don’t care to.
Many people from myself to Rush Limbaugh have compared Donald Trump’s arrival in Washington D.C. to the movie “Caddyshack”. It’s said jokenly, but the fact remains that there are some real truths in this analogy. Like Rodney Dangerfield, Donald Trump was an outsider, and his strange and (seemingly) uncouth actions upset the fine cushy empire established by the local elites. Here is an article that discusses this phenomenon.
Donald Trump, love him or hate him, is exactly what America needs right now. We need to seriously shake up what the United States has become, tear it apart and rebuild it up from scratch. He’s the first step in this process.
Donald Trump as Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack
Sep 17, 2019
RUSH: Now, normally I would not make a big deal out of this, either. But this, I’m gonna call your attention to. I’m gonna go back to May 22, 2018. So it’s, what, 15 months ago (a year and a half ago, let’s call it that), and I was describing for people… You know, I love analogies. I love to persuade. There are many different techniques that one can use to persuade. I love the analogy or comparison. I was trying to explain to a caller the way the Washington establishment has reacted to Trump, and this is what I said (audio sound bite number 1) to the caller.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You know another way to look at Trump? How about the movie Caddyshack? Here you have these phony club members led by Ted Baxter, and he’s running around. They’ve got this little country club and everybody in it thinks they’re the best of the best in town. Rodney Dangerfield decides to join and gets in and blows the club up. He’s got this gigantic golf cart, drives it on the greens, blows a big horn, has a gigantic golf bag. The leaders of the country club are beside themselves. They try to kick the guy out, and they can’t. They lose every effort against him. That’s Trump: Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.
RUSH: Yeah, Ted Baxter was great in that movie. He’s christening a new yacht for his family, and it’s like a 12-foot dinghy. And Rodney Dangerfield has this giant 80-footer and capsizes it while driving by waving. This is Trump, okay? So let’s now go to Thursday on a podcast called Recode Media. There’s a guy — the host is Peter Kafka — and he’s talking to the New York Times chief television critic, James Poniewozik, about his new book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. The question: “There’s a great comparison you have in the book. For our younger audience who hasn’t seen Caddyshack, explain Rodney?”
PONIEWOZIK: Al Czervik, who Rodney Dangerfield plays, is this obnoxious, boorish rich guy who all the stuck-up people — the other stuck up rich people in the country club — hate. His character is opposed, in the movie, to Ted Knight’s character, Judge Smails, who is the, you know, stick-up-his-ass, uptight rich guy who sort of runs the country club and cannot stand him. This all came to mind during the 2016 debates to me, when I’m watching Donald Trump in action in the debates and seeing him go up against Jeb Bush. He’s like the Clampetts against Mr. Drysdale. He’s Rodney Dangerfield against Ted Knight. It’s the rich guy that you want to be against the (bleep) snotty rich guy that everybody hates.
This article is a full reprint of “The Deep State Starring in “Caddyshack on the Potomac” ” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s pretty brilliantly (as usual), and discusses the Deep State, Hubris, Nemesis, and (of course) Donald Trump. I strongly recommend that the reader visit the author of this piece and get to know his works. You can go HERE.
[T]hey never say to themselves, “I’m not elected.” The constitution says an elected president sets foreign policy.
Period.
So there’s this sense that they, as credential experts, have a value system, and the value system is they have an inordinate respect for an Ivy League degree or a particular alphabetic combination after their name: a J.D., a Ph.D., an MBA, or a particular resume.
I worked at the NSC, then I transferred over to the NSA, and then, I went into the State Department.
And we saw that in really vivid examples during the Adam Schiff impeachment inquiries, where a series of State Department people, before they could even talk, [they] said…
“I’m the third generation to serve in my family.
This is my resume.
This is where I went to school.
This is where I was posted.”
And in the case of Adam Schiff, we saw these law professors, who had gone in and out of government, and they had these academic billets.
Expert…
And to condense all that, it could be distilled by saying the deep state makes arguments by authority:
“I’m an authority, and I have credentials, and therefore, ipse dixit, what I say matters.”
And they don’t want to be cross-examined, they don’t want to have their argument in the arena of ideas and cross-examination.
They think it deserves authority, and they have contempt—and I mean that literally—contempt for elected officials.
[They think:] “These are buffoons in private enterprise. They are the CEO in some company; they’re some local Rotary Club member. They get elected to Congress, and then we have to school them on the international order or the rules-based order.”
They have a certain lingo, a proper, sober, and judicious comportment.
... Caddyshack would be an even sharper dissection of the divide between the Haves and the Have Nots in America than the script for Animal House that he and Ramis co-wrote.
In fact, the script had many autobiographical references to incidents experienced by Ramis and the Murray brothers, all of whom caddied at local country clubs as teenagers.
In 1988, Bill Murray told the New York Times Magazine, “The kids who were members of the club were despicable; you couldn’t believe the attitude they had.
I mean, you were literally walking barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying some privileged person’s sports toys on your back for five miles.”
- 10 reasons that Caddyshack may just be the best summertime comedy ever.
So you can imagine that Donald Trump—to take a metaphor, Rodney Dangerfield out of Caddyshack—comes in as this, what they would say, stereotype buffoon and starts screaming and yelling.
And he looks different.
He talks different.
And he has no respect for these people at all.
Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. Reminds me of Donald trump in Washington DC.
Maybe that’s a little extreme that he doesn’t, but he surely doesn’t. And that frightens them.
And then they coalesce.
And I’m being literal now. Remember the anonymous Sept. 5, 2018, op-ed writer who said,
“I’m here actively trying to oppose Donald Trump.”
He actually said that he wanted him to leave office. Then, Admiral [William] McRaven said…
“the sooner, the better.”
This is a four-star admiral, retired. [He] says a year before the election … Trump should leave:
“the sooner, the better.”
That’s a pretty frightening idea.
Trump is like Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Caddyshack.
And when you have Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the whistleblower and also the lawyer for some of the other people involved in this—I think it’s a conspiracy—saying that one coup leads to another. …
People are talking about a coup, then we have to take them at their own word. …
I think that people feel that for a variety of reasons—cultural, social, political—that Trump is not deserving of the respect that most presidents receive, and therefore any means necessary to get rid of him are justified.
” It would also seem that, of all the other older members of the cast, Dangerfield bonded the most with the younger actors, mainly because of their mutual appreciation for recreational drugs. In that same 2007 interview, Colomby revealed that the laundry room of the motel where the cast and crew were booked became the designated partying area, and that occasionally after hours Dangerfield would ask him, “Hey, Scott, you wanna do some laundry?”
- 10 reasons that Caddyshack may just be the best summertime comedy ever.
And for some, it’s the idea that he’s had neither political or military prior experience.
For others, it’s his outlandish appearance, his Queens accent, as I said, his Rodney Dangerfield presence.
Rodney Dangerfield as Donald Trump.
And for others—I think this is really underestimated—he is systematically undoing the progressive agenda of Barack Obama, which remember, was supposed to be not just an eight-year regnum, but 16 years with Hillary Clinton.
That would’ve reformed the court.
It would have shut down fossil fuel exploration, pipelines, more regulations—well, pretty much what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are talking about right now.
That was going to happen.
Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. Reminds me of Donald trump in Washington DC.
And so for a lot of people, they think…
“Wow, if Donald Trump is elected in 2020..."
—and he will be, according to the fears of Representatives Al Green or [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez or Nancy Pelosi; remember, they keep saying this impeachment is about the 2020 [election]—
“...we’ve got to ensure the integrity.”
That’s what Nadler said today.
But if Trump is elected, that would mean eventually in five more years, [we’d have a] 7–2 Supreme Court, 75 percent of the federal judiciary [would be] conservative and traditional and constructionist. …
We are the world’s largest oil and gas producer and exporter, but we probably would be even bigger.
And when you look at a lot of issues, such as abortion, or identity politics, or the securing of the border, or the nature of the economy or foreign policy, they think America as we know it will be—to use a phrase from Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed.”
So that’s the subtext of it.
Stop this man right now before he destroys the whole progressive project—and with it, the reputation of the media. Because the media saw this happening and they said, “You know what?”—as Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times or Christiane Amanpour have said—“… you really don’t need to be disinterested.”
Trump is beyond the pale, so it’s OK to editorialize in your news coverage.
Trump is beyond the pale, and the “blue bloods” are shitting their pants.
And so the Shorenstein Center has reported that 90 percent of all news coverage [of Trump] is negative.
So they’ve thrown their hat in the ring and said, we’re going to be part of the Democratic progressive agenda to destroy this president. But if they fail, then their reputation goes down with the progressive project.
And that’s happening now.
CNN is at all-time low ratings, at least the last four years. And the network news is losing audiences, and most of the major newspapers are, as well.
So there’s a lot of high stakes here. And if Donald Trump survives and were to be reelected, I don’t know what would happen on the left. It would make the 2016 reaction look tame in comparison.
Conclusion
A great little read. All credit to the authors. All I did was edit to fit this blog, and added some pictures. Source links: RTWT and HT: The News Junkie.
No respect.
If you enjoyed this post, please fell free to take a trip to my SHTF index here…
You’ll not find
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notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
One of the reasons why the Chinese have been so swift in combating this coronavirus is because they identified (quickly and swiftly) it as a biological weapons attack. Most Americans are unaware of this because they read Western propagandized media. They believe that it is either [1] “not as bad as the flu”, or that it is [2] a biological weapon that the Chinese unleashed upon themselves. Here, we won’t get into that argument. Instead we will just present some videos of what went on during the days of 8FEB through 10FEB.
These videos were taken during a two day time period. Past the peak of the biological attack.
You, the reader, can believe what ever you want to. The FACT is that the China put their entire armed forces to DEFCON ONE, and shut the entire nation down.
You do not do this with the flu. You do not do this if you had an accidental leak from a weapons facility. You do not do this, especially in the middle of the biggest holiday of the year, unless there is a FUCKING GOOD REASON.
You can observe and come to your own conclusions.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – People getting sick suddenly.
The pesky thing about this virus is it’s high contagious nature, stealth infection, and rapid and sudden lethal outbreaks.
I find it laughable that the media is saying that the flu is far deadlier. Or that it only attacks old people. Here’s a young man in his 20’s going into a seizure on the bus.
I don’t know about youse guys, but I never had a seizure when I had the flu.
Video 2 – Affects children.
The reason why the Chinese video APPs were banned by the American military was so that they would not watch the effects of the biological weapon on the civilian population.
Here we have a little child in the hospital dying from the American bio-weapons attack.
Video 3 – Military decontamination units at work.
If you know what to look for you can clearly see the military decontamination units fighting this virus. Here we have a squad going after a contaminated area.
Decontamination is the process of removing or neutralizing chemical or biological agents so that they no longer pose a hazard. For military purposes, decontamination is undertaken to restore the combat effectiveness of equipment and personnel as rapidly as possible.
-Decontamination - NCBI Bookshelf
Video 4 – Bringing food and checking up.
If you have the virus, you can opt to stay at home instead of going to a hospital or a tent clinic. In that case, the military / police will lock you in your house and seal the door. If the seal is broken, they will come and take you to jail so that you will not be a risk to the community.
Video 5 – Military and police decontamination.
Here’s some units in the decontamination of the streets using the military foggers. It’s a pretty impressive sight.
The Chinese military has invested enormous sums of money perfecting mass decontamination of buildings and people. Here is an impressive array of trucks.
Hit hits suddenly. Up until when it hits, you think (falsely) that you can handle it. But you cannot. Here we see police taking a woman to an emergency station.
Video 8 – At the hospital.
This is pretty much what it will be like once she makes it to the hospital. There will be doctors and nurses in full NBC gear attending to her. But even at that, it will be a rough slog to get better…
Video 9 – Quarantine area
The Chinese government has repurposed sports arenas, and other civics facilities into quarantine areas. The people may or may not be sick. But they do need to wait within safe confines to see what may happen. Here’s one of the facilities within Wuhan…
Video 10 – Morning exercise
The Chinese love to exercise in the mornings and the evenings. This was started by the “dancing grandmothers” and after some abuses, was repurposed to a health initiative, that most of China takes part in. It’s a period of two to three hours of guided line dancing to Chinese pop music and K-pop. Here, we can watch it inside one of the quarantine facilities.
Video 11 – Drones continue to keep people off the streets
Big red banners with bright yellow letters are everywhere. They tell the people to be mindful, careful and to stay at home. Never the less there are those that refuse to listen. Some are just bad apples. Some are crazy. Some don’t give a fuck – they are far too self absorbed. And…
And some are just people going out for a walk and being casual with mask discipline. Such as this chick. The local police drone admonishes her and chases her home.
Video 12 – Inside a Military field hospital
Once Beijing declared this a DEFCON ONE situation, military hospitals were set up in all of the tier one, tier two and tier three cities. This is in addition to the new hospitals being constructed, the regular hospital and the networks of clinics that abound all over China.
China has a much more extensive system of medical care than America has. It has build up this network in great detail and complexity with layers over layers of systems.
Here we see what it is like inside one of the military tent hospital complexes.
Video 13 – Robot food delivery
To keep people from being contaminated, robots are being used in the tier one cities. Some have smiley faces, but most look like white boxes on wheels. Like this…
Video 14 – Assholes
During this period all elevators have tissues that people are supposed to use to press the buttons. Clear tape overlays are on the buttons, and public mechanisms of conveyance are all disinfected multiple times a day.
That’s all well and good, if everyone was “normal”.
One of the things that I hear from people (mostly Americans) is what about people’s rights? What about their freedoms? Well, not everyone is “with the program”. There is a tiny percentage of crazy assholes that want to make life miserable for the rest of us.
Luckily, China is fully wired up. Video feed of miscreants and trouble-makers goes straight to the local police… who know these people and take direct and swift action.
Here’s an asshole…
Video 15 – Going to the hospital
People “on the front lines”; those that need to be in public and are exposed to others are getting sick. Usually, being quite patriotic, they will stay at their posts until they get a seizure or collapse. Here’s a policeman, and that is exactly what happened.
Video 16 – Pull the nation closer.
It’s difficult to imagine the Chinese nation being any more patriotic than it already is, but this bio-warfare attack has pushed Chinese patriotism to mountainous heights. It’s really amazing. Here’s just one of thousands of videos I have collected along this theme.
If you enjoyed this post, please fell free to take a trip to my China / Trump Trade Wars index here…
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because I just don’t care to.
This is a complete reprint of a most excellent article that I (personally) 100% agree with. In short, regardless as to the events and causes related to the virus, the way that China has handled it and the global reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive. This and similar trends are pointing in positive directions for China. This article discusses the “fall out” from this event.
This article was published on February 10, 2020 by Fionn Wright – 仁飞扬 and can be found HERE. The only changes that I made was add section headers, and added some illustrative photos. I strongly suggest that the reader visit the original source, and (if possible) follow the author as he has other articles of worth.
Could the Coronavirus make China Stronger than Ever? 10 Trends that Indicate it Will.
The
virus is hitting China’s economy hard, but this is likely only
temporary. China’s immune system is fighting back — building hospitals
in record time, completely locking down a city and most importantly the
entire nation uniting as one voice of support and solidarity.
Mario Cavolo called out the global response to the Coronavirus in his post “Something’s not right here folks” which originally went viral on LinkedIn and then subsequently all over Chinese social media. He compares the media response to Coronavirus with the H1N1 outbreak in the US, saying, “it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a tragedy,” and “this vicious, political, xenophobic racist attacks and smearing of all things China needs to stop.”
What doesn’t break you only makes you stronger, and the Chinese people are resilient and will find ways to rise out of this crisis, likely coming back even stronger than before. How long that will take no-one yet knows, but the Chinese spirit is not even close to being broken, and we’ve seen how Chinese ingenuity in a time of crisis has led to entirely new operating models…
Remember how Jackie Ma became a billionaire…
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, because everyone was
afraid to go out, Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD (Jing Dong, one of
China’s largest online retailers), moved the physical stores in
Zhongguancun to an online store. Ma Yun saw the demand for e-commerce
and set up Taobao (Alibaba’s B2C commence platform).
Comparison with the 2003 SARS…
To make a comparison with SARS, China’s GDP was 12 trillion yuan in 2003, but 17 years later China’s GDP has reached 100 trillion yuan, so China’s overall anti-risk capability has increased nearly 10x since then.
Interestingly, a few industries are actually booming, from medical to online education to food delivery. The altered ecosystem during the crisis is forcing people to find new ways of accessing what they need.
Short term vs. Long term.
Despite
the short term effects on many industries across China, it is unlikely
to have a long-term destabilizing impact on China’s economy, which is
already in the midst of a major adjustment, and this event will in many
ways accelerate the pace of adjustment towards adaptability and
resilience.
Many of the concepts below are inspired by the famous
Chinese blogger Shuimuran (水木然) and much of the data and research I have
found through Dr. Shirley Yu, Political Economist from Harvard and the London School of Economics.
1 – Off-line Shopping is Over
Although people in China have already formed the habit of online shopping in the last few years, there are still a few types of products that people still prefer to buy offline.
These last few remaining products are likely to virtually disappear in the coming months after this outbreak. For example, before the outbreak people used to go to the market for fresh groceries, but now buying groceries online has also become the norm.
Shopping on-line has been a staple of Chinese life for the last fifteen years. What has changed is that many “untouchable” items like lettuce and snacks are now being bought on line.
Since shopping is done online, the physical store of the future is no longer centered on “selling products”, but with a shift through New Retail to “providing experiences”.
If the physical store is still designed as a place to sell, then it will lose relevance.
No matter what kind of enterprise, it must have an ability to capture customers online, the traditional way of getting customers, such as cold calls or traditional advertising, have less and less power, and will cost more and more.
As New Generation China Expert Michael Norris has been predicting for years, more and more things will start to be free, and more and more things will start to be infinitely closer to zero direct profit, so businesses have to find alternate ways of generating income streams.
Advertising can be charged more, or partnerships can be created to package and bundle products and services, driving people towards what they are most interested in even if its not your product, but making money by doing so.
Human attention is now the most valuable resource on earth.
2 – Online education will start to replace offline education
Suddenly a whole new possibility has opened up. While before online education was used to supplement offline education, we will begin to see online education starting to replace parts of offline education.
Home schooling via computer will displace more traditional teaching methods.
New models of doing this more effectively are being realized at this very moment, and people are beginning to realize that the time it takes to commute is actually valuable time that could be used to learn.
Just as the internet has changed the circulation path of products, it has also changed the path of knowledge transmission.
Online education democratizes superior educational resources, and this is exactly the core problem of solving Chinese education. Previously, each teacher could only teach in front of dozens or at most hundreds of people, but now a single teacher can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people online, and these students come from all over the country, including undeveloped areas that have internet access.
Working remotely will become the norm rather than the exception.
The office leasing market in 2020 will likely drop, with the potential exception of co-working spaces despite the WeWork fiasco.
Online office software will accelerate in popularity, especially the office software that can realize collaborative work. What follows is the online office model. An online China is coming, and China will become the global benchmark for a new kind of office.
Entirely new collaborative tools and features will be released and updated at lighting speed.
Areas of the developed world, such as in Africa, will leapfrog the developed world in adopting these as they have done with digital currencies, and thus in some areas become more competitive.
4 – A More Health Conscious Society Based on Biotech
Chinese people will begin to move their focus away from making money, sacrificing their health for money, seeing the limitations of the 996 work schedule.
Physical and mental health will be the key indicator of a person’s value in the future, and Chinese people will make more conscious decisions about their lifestyles.
The identification, judgment and response of the virus will promote the breakthrough of the whole medicine and medical technology, especially to enhance the awareness and attention of the whole nation on the power of biotech.
This outbreak has shown us the importance of a scientific medical system.
At least initially, the news from Wuhan was all about the shortage of medical resources. The core of medical problems lie in the effective allocation of medical resources, the scheduling ability of medical resources at critical moments, and the coordination and sharing of medical resources.
The social credit network tied to surveillance for safety and security will expand to include health of individuals.
The government will know who is sick when, and sometimes before the individual may even be aware of it themselves. This could come directly in the form of infrared cameras to capture people within a crowd with a fever, or indirectly in the form of the types of products that people buy, predicting health indicators based on big data of others who regularly consume those products.
Thanks to the virus, infrared cameras are now monitoring people at all cross-roads and place of population density. This is useful in the quick and rapid determination of who is sick and who is not.
The healthier one is, through healthy eating, buying health related products and perhaps even exercise equipment or classes, the more likely one is to perform well and be less of a burden on society. This is tricky to measure but as more data rolls in and is analyzed, conclusions can be tested, measured and implemented in rapid iterations.
5 – Accelerated Integration of Smart Cities
Wuhan
is a city with a population of over 11 million, has nine provinces and
was locked down during the Spring Festival travel rush, the largest yearly migration of people on planet earth.
If the situation of every citizen in Wuhan is known, every person can
be accurately tracked and every outflow can be located, then we will
deal with it in a more orderly way.
Facial recognition and social scoring (all tied to police records) is now automatic in Chinese cities. This coupled with video monitoring of dissidents are a powerful tool to combat crime. As was illustrated during the HK riots when the Trump administration officials were tracked, monitored, and recorded cutting deals, and training the “pro-democracy” terrorists.
China’s futuristic smart cities include: traffic management, logistics supply chain, emergency preparedness, and information traceability, which will be fully data-based, and even equipped with artificial intelligence disaster preparedness prediction.
This reflects the management level of the whole society.
With smart cities, China will have more data-backed scientific means of governance.
Modern governance is more and more based on data, with the health and security of the people as the first consideration.
Chinese monitoring software.
After this outbreak, the country will learn from experience and lessons learned, analyze what worked well and develop new systems to build the learnings into the fabric of society.
After this outbreak, we will have the speed of strategic coordination, the speed of wartime research and development, and the speed of public security response.
The advantages of China’s logistics have been fully demonstrated, and supplies in Wuhan have been quickly replenished. Even scarce medical resources have been deployed efficiently across the country, which is truly a miracle of modern logistics.
Alibaba has set up a special fund of 1 billion yuan for medical supplies, which is used to purchase medical supplies at home and abroad.
In addition to the company’s global resource search, Chinese people around the world also launched a global procurement, a batch of supplies from different countries from different flights to China.
The seemingly “frozen” China is actually engaged in epic strategic material allocation. After this outbreak, we will see China’s strategic material coordination capacity not just in crisis but throughout the entire business world.
7 – China has Contingency Plans for its Contingency Plan
In the annual Central Economic Work Conference report formulating economic priorities for 2020, China has emphasized the necessity to be ready for a “contingency plan” for 2020.
This contingency plan would in no way be framed on the basis of a liberal market model, in the event that the “China Model” failed to deliver on what was intended.
In 2019, strategic relationships were developed between Alibaba, Tencent, and the largest state infrastructure and telecom organizations, to help the state upgrade its technological competitiveness as it develops the Belt and Road Initiative.
The “contingency plan” proactively drives China’s economic independence from the US.
This contingency plan is not about market liberalism, but rather increasing state control.
The trade war directly impacts China’s labor market, as manufacturers move out of China. China is recalibrating its global supply chain routes, primarily focusing on its Belt and Road Initiative as well as the EU, to compensate for the loss of trade-related jobs.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The guiding principle from President Xi for China’s booming real estate sector, that properties are for living (within) not (for) investment, will continue in 2020.
There are currently 400 million middle income class (people) in China, and by 2035 (this) is expected to double to 800 million.
In order to drive sustainable consumption in China, structural reforms will need to happen in its healthcare, social welfare and pension systems so the middle class can afford to save less and spend more.
The participation of individuals, enterprises, public welfare organizations and Chinese at home and abroad has formed a systematic collaboration on a scale the human species has never seen before.
China built this second hospital in Wuhan in another ten days.
This creates a global ecosystem of Chinese that can support one another in times of crisis and cooperate when things settle down.
There is also an increasing realization that China is speeding ahead of the rest of the world…
… and it’s verified by Chinese who live or regularly travel abroad, constantly sharing memes of how backwards and slow the “developed world” actually is in many ways.
San Francisco, USA.
This strengthens national pride and solidarity within China, even though they see the benefits of being abroad like healthy air, safe food and uncrowded scenic nature sites.
9 – Chinese Companies will Push to Expand Abroad
Chinese companies will start looking more actively to do business abroad to diversify their markets the same way a wise investor diversifies his portfolio to dampen the effect of a crisis.
Huawei is leading the pack here swimming upstream against a lot of pressure, and doing remarkably well despite the international controversy. But Huawei is just the first of many Chinese companies that will expand beyond its borders in the next decade.
Not all companies have the resilience or reach of Huawei and will direct their attention more towards developing economies who are more open to Chinese products.
We’ll see more examples of Chinese companies like this that leverage the advantages of the Chinese tech infrastructure and applying them to meet the unmet needs of markets outside China, particularly developing economies.
The familiarity and integration with these forms of infrastructure will give them an advantage that will make it difficult for Western competitors to compete with. This will be similar in the same way that it has been difficult over the last decade for Chinese companies to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook or Apple. Of course, due to market penetration and foundational platforms that gave them the edge.
Huawei influence map.
Of the 195 sovereign nations recognized by the UN, Huawei currently has contractual relationships with 172 countries, engulfing the developing world.
The top strategic priority for Huawei will be to capture the developed world in 2020.
American proxies; independent nations in name only.
Whether Huawei’s push through Europe can succeed will be a fundamental test of China’s technological power as well as a test of the increasingly fragile relationships of the West.
The UK, against the will of the US, has now partially let Huawei in to develop their 5G infrastructure, but is doing their best to keep them out of areas that may compromise national security.
One challenging event at the beginning of 2020, while it has slowed China down, is not going to stop China from reaching its goal of being a fully developed country by 2050.
Girl takes a selfie with a Chinese robot.
Seen on the scale of decades, or the Chinese long-term view of centuries, the coronavirus crisis will be but a blip on the radar.
Since ancient times, the Chinese nation has encountered a host of disasters, and yet remains an indomitable nation, rising from abject poverty in the last few decades, returning to reclaim its place as one of the most powerful countries on earth.
This outbreak is an opportunity for China to evolve. It will be a test of China’s economic and social relations, its people and government relations, and China’s relations with the world.
China has already impressed the world with its ability to rapidly mobilize at scale to build the hospitals in Wuhan, and these moves are but a small taste of what is to come.
Let’s support the Chinese people in this time of crisis. The #ChinaDream starts in China, but will end up supporting the dreams of those all over the world.
With love and gratitude,
#Fionn
_______
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My Conclusions
You will not see anything like this on the American media. Whether it is the main-steam media, the Alt-Left or the Alt-Right media. But just because the media will not provide similar articles does not mean that the events are not occurring.
This is what is REALLY going on.
American media is designed to control, corral and manipulate the American citizenry. Much like the old former Soviet propaganda was used against the Russian people. You can see this when the media is reporting on events that you, yourself, are witnessing with your own two eyes.
But, you know, Americans do need to see the world as it actually is.
Some of it might be pleasant to observe, while others are ugly.
Some like the Uighur situation are “opportunities” for great wealth-building. If you are educated, and aware of what is really going on, you can become filthy rich, instead of the force-fed anti-China narrative and hide in fear about “re-education camps and the poor abused Muslims”.
Others, are signs of danger that you must take heed of, like the risks of hiring “diversity experts” (in a company) instead of talented experienced engineers, scientists and designers. (You know, for diversity, and to fight “white privilege”.)
For Americans to survive the growth pains of a new global situation, they must be educated through sources no longer tainted by the manipulative oligarchy. I do hope that you learn something in what I have to say.
The world is not a horrible, deep dark place, but there are under-currents of events that are transpiring that only the strong, the well-equipped and the flexible can survive.
So be strong. Be flexible. Be well equipped.
Take care, and BEST REGARDS.
Metallicman ready to take on the coronavirus.
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notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
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off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
American elites remain out of touch with everyone, our institutions are broken, and some people on the Left and the Right are still in denial about how bad things have gotten. Yet, they continue to play their games, oblivious that they are treading on dangerous territory. As the rest of the world has gotten stronger, better, healthier, the United States has grown corrupt, slothful, and evil. Eventually there will be a point where these two dichotomies will cross.
It will probably be the result of some American “push” which would involve military action (of some sort) designed to exert pressure on a major Asian nation. This is already ongoing, but at some point in time, it will get “hot” and “loud”. As such, America is unprepared to the consequences that will result.
Here we talk about this.
Not the first to say that America is going to collapse…
I am not the first to point this out.
I do believe that it is the most obvious thing on the face of the planet. What I argue, in other postings, is that this collapse is inevitable. And as such, it should be “managed” so that a “new and improved” America may result.
(It’s) Sort of like Isaac Asimov’s foundation series of stories..
It is 12,020 G.E. (Galactic Era). For more than 12,000 years, the human race—thanks to hyper-space traveling technology—has colonized the Milky Way Galaxy in the form of a far-reaching Galactic Empire.
The Galactic Empire, whose failures have started to outnumber its successes, is still able to hide its faltering behind the Gordion Knot of a social, economical and political mess comprised of millions of habitable worlds and over 500 quadrillion people.
The oppressive and authoritarian rule of Emperor Cleon I is at its peak.
Young mathematician Hari Seldon, hailing from a backwater planet called Helicon, arrives at the Galactic Capital, Trantor, to present his latest research at a mathematical convention.
Having become associate professor at a considerably young age, Seldon proposes a new field of science that could be used to predict the future actions of the galactic society and humanity.
He cites the law of mass action, explaining that advance mathematical calculations can analyze the aggregate behavioral data of an enormous number of people to deduce the patterns of behavior of the masses.
- Asimov 101: Your Ultimate Guide to the 'Foundation' Series
Of course, the wealthy elite, and the “deep state” won’t have any of this.
They still want to maintain the pre-2016 uni-party oligarchy. But forces, far larger than their desires have set things in motion.
It’s like a large locomotive that is on the path to smash right into a solid granite mountain. It cannot be stopped easily.
Other opinions on this, from both the Left and the Right side of the political spectrum have written about this. You can read some of these articles here…
Not the first to say that America cannot win World War III…
Like my statement that America is in decline, others have also voiced agreement that America is not equipped to fight a major war against a major superpower.
Well, here is yet another article, and I think it is pretty well-written and I would like to include it here.
Check it out…
The following is an article titled “Why America Is Set to Lose the Next War” and it was penned by Angelo Codevilla. It’s quite good. All credit to the author, and I would recommend a visit to the American Mind website from whence it was first published.
Our elite forces are not so elite.
News that the wargames which the RAND corporation runs for the U.S. government show U.S. forces getting “its ass handed to it” by Russia and China have elicited disbelief: “how could this possibly be?”
The short answer is that the U.S. armed forces are utterly corrupt: the very definition of parade ground forces, superbly equipped, fabulously paid (to look good)—but utterly incapable of winning the wars that our even more corrupt national security establishment defines for them.
Corrupt, and un-serious.
Specifically: U.S. forces fail in the wargames, and would fare worse in real life, because they would be sent to fight the Chinese for control of the Western Pacific, and Russia for control of areas west of the Niemen river, as well as north of Crimea.
The Chinese and Russians, respectively, would enjoy advantages in these areas.
U.S. forces, configured as they are because of inter- and intra-Service corporate priorities, because of military-industrial collusion, and above all because of the national security establishment’s self-regarding prejudices and proclivities, are not based, sized, or equipped seriously to contest those advantages.
Above all, they lack realistic plans for doing so.
In sum, U.S. forces would lose these wars because of classic mismatches between ends and means. All entirely foreseeable. I repeat: Corruption.
The wargames dealt only with operational/tactical factors on the conventional level in the theaters of operation. But China and Russia are nuclear powers whose missiles can deliver nuclear warheads to the U.S.
Neither has been shy about pointing out that they might force the U.S. to choose between its objective in their back yard and the loss of one or more American cities.
Moreover, longstanding U.S. policy, most recently reaffirmed in 2019, is not to have any equipment that can defend against Russian or Chinese missiles.
If, perchance, Chinese or Russian forces should have difficulty disposing of U.S. challenges, raising the nuclear specter would surely force the U.S. side to reconsider why we engaged in war in others’ back yards without the capacity to protect ourselves at home.
Since nuclear weapons are fully integrated into Russia’s ground forces, this rude awakening would likely come in the course of ordinary operations.
On the Chinese side, we might well see the annihilation of Guam. But, one might respond, “U.S. nuclear missile forces are so superior to China’s!” Sure. Superior for what? What good would killing a couple of million Chinese do?
What forces against what, where, to do what, is the nub
of the military matter. The Chinese and Russians, respectively, have
good strategic, operational, and tactical answers. The U.S. side does
not.
The Chinese want to control the Western Pacific militarily largely from the land. They began by building hundreds, perhaps thousands, of medium-range missiles able to cover the sea out to the eastern edge of Taiwan, making them largely invulnerable by emplacing them in caves or on mobile platforms.
To this they added excellent aircraft with cruise missiles, and diesel-electric submarines that would be placed—still and quiet—to wait for the U.S. carriers.
Then, they developed the DF-21, a ballistic missile that can adjust course on re-entry and kill a carrier with a nuclear warhead.
And then, they pushed that defensive envelope outward by building a network of artificial islands in the South China Sea, the military value of each exceeding that of several carriers.
China’s control exists.
To try undoing it with current bases and equipment, the U.S. would have to send at least four irreplaceable carrier battle groups across the Pacific to battle their way through Chinese defenses.
The full health of America’s satellite network is a prerequisite for such an attempt.
But the Chinese are certain to attack that network. Since the U.S. has precisely zero means of protecting against kinetic ASATs, we must assume something less than precise functioning of numerically vastly inferior forces whose perfect functioning is essential to their operation in an enemy environment.
Guam, and Yokosuka, over a thousand miles away from the action, would be the only nearby bases.
The U.S. has studiously avoided fortifying Taiwan.
But even assuming perfect functioning, the U.S. offensive in the Western Pacific would consist of a contest of attrition, in which China has the overwhelming advantage. There is no substitute for strategic vision.
China has it, the U.S. does not.
On the Russian side, the strategic objective is equally clear: maintain superiority in an area well known to, and easily reached by, the home team against what the Americans can bring from far away.
The area east of Poland, between Lithuania and northern Ukraine, was the scene of the great Soviet summer 1944 offensive that crushed the Wehrmacht.
One or perhaps two combat brigades would be the maximum that the U.S. could deploy to that area, probably by air through Warsaw.
Russian operations would consist of encirclement by land and denial of resupply by air through its formidable S-400 air defense system. Russian operations envisage a minimum of combat and maximal exploitation of the theater’s distance from U.S. power.
The operational objective would be to turn U.S. troops into hostages.
The same would apply to the southern theater—except that U.S. operations there would be aided by a U.S. carrier battle group in the Black Sea—another reservoir of hostages.
For a half century, the U.S. military-industrial-national-security establishment has been getting America’s collective ass kicked around the world. As patriotic Americans have bled, their superiors have gone to Valhallas in their retirement villas and as experts on Fox News.
It’s past time for Americans to realize how overpraised and overpaid this bunch really are.
Angelo Codevilla is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.
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History repeats. It’s often frightening just how it repeats.
We do not really know how the French aristocracy felt and acted during the months leading up to the French revolution. Few penned records survive. We do know, however, that the wealthy elite dismissed the reports. They called them “deplorable peasants” and instead of admonishing them to “learn to code” they told them “to eat cake”.
Rather than get involved in a discussion of how the successful French kept themselves isolated from the “ignorant Neo-peasant riff-Raff”, let’s look at how a similar situation is manifesting today in America.
The following is a great write-up. It is titled “Our Elites Are Steering Us Towards Civil War” and it was written by Glenn Ellmers when he posted it on 01.07.2020. All credit to the author. I would suggest everyone to visit the original site and give them a look around. Some really good stuff there.
They are as clueless as the ancien régime.
Along with the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a few other redoubts, my suburban neighborhood near the Maryland border represents the heart of what some pundits call the “blue church.”
It is increasingly a dream world.
I drop in periodically at Politics and Prose, a prominent bookstore
in Northwest D.C., to browse and shop. Lately I find it more and more
difficult to avoid eavesdropping on the conversations of the elderly
white women (lifelong Democrats, of course) who make up 80% of the
regular clientele.
Not that I try especially hard to tune out, because it is fascinating to hear what they say in their unguarded chit-chat.
No Japanese soldier on a remote Philippine island in 1947, oblivious
to the emperor’s surrender, was more disconnected from the real world
than these educated, well-spoken women. They read the Washington Post and listen to NPR every day, and therefore have no idea that they are imprisoned on a kind of island of the mind.
The bookstore’s regular customers, mostly retired professionals, are
the kind of well-to-do urbanites that used to be called limousine
liberals. But my bibliophile neighbors, with their casual shoes and
canvas tote bags, generally prefer a Prius to a limo. Even so, they
enjoy lives of comfortable physical ease, security, and culturally
enriched leisure. One might think this would make them nice. And on many
topics (grandchildren, for instance) they are.
But their conversations turn easily and often to politics—in particular, the illegitimacy of our odious president and the racist underclass that elected him—and then their tone becomes suddenly and shockingly nasty. That nastiness arises in part, no doubt, from an aversion to an uncomfortable truth: that the cozy world of these coastal urban elites is far from natural or normal.
It is the product of an artificial, often dishonest patchwork of legal, political, and cultural practices that have been distinctly unfair to millions of disenfranchised Americans.
It was said of the ancien régime—the nobility that reigned prior to the French Revolution—that “they learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
In his monumental book on Lincoln and the principles of self-government, A New Birth of Freedom(2000), the late Claremont professor Harry Jaffa expounds on this observation:
“They could forget nothing, namely their undeserved and socially useless privileges; and they could learn nothing, namely that their fellow countrymen would no longer tolerate the continuance of their privileges.”
One might think that this world of artificial nobility is dead and
gone. But in deep-blue sanctuaries like my local bookstore—that bubble
of bubbles, the summa bubblica of America’s leftist oligarchy—a version of this same decayed aristocracy is still holding on.
These liberal ladies (and a few distinctly milky gentlemen) are
harmless enough in one sense. They aren’t abusing the working class in
any direct or obvious way—certainly not in their own minds! Unlike the
French gentry, they do not dwell in ostentatious luxury while serfs
labor in hunger. Even less are they complicit in anything like the
gruesome brutality of chattel slavery in the Old South.
Still, they do partake in their own shallow way of an intellectual and moral presumption that is not at all harmless. Like every privileged class in history, they are convinced that they deserve what they have, however slight their own efforts may have been in the smooth glide-path of their lives.
The recognition of unearned privilege can sometimes turn
psychologically sideways, with sublimated guilt erupting into
destructive revolutionary fervor. Rarely, alas, does it flower into
genuine humility and charity. But the complacent retirees with whom I
rub elbows are not directing their unconscious guilt (if they have any)
into overthrowing the system.
To the contrary, the oligarchy they represent frantically wants to preserve, or bring back, the pre-2016 uni-party establishment in which they flourished. Because they cannot comprehend that their fellow countrymen will no longer tolerate their socially useless sinecures, they retreat ever further into monasteries of self-deception.
But this cannot continue; something must give, and it seems ever likelier that the way forward will be rough.
In New Birth and other writings over the course of his long
career teaching political philosophy, Jaffa explained that the American
Founders solved the crisis of religious warfare (which had plagued
Europe for centuries) through the separation of church and state. The
power of government would no longer be used by believers who were in
authority to persecute different believers who were out of authority.
Yet the danger of religious warfare can return in secular form when
people no longer agree on the basic principles of republican government
and regard each other as political heretics rather than fellow citizens.
“Elections,” Jaffa wrote, “may properly decide only between those whose
differences of opinion are not differences of principle.”
For example, in 1861 the Confederacy endorsed the idea of slavery as a
“positive good.” This doctrine of “you work, I eat” replaced the equal
natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence as the
South’s new faith. Driven by this alternate conception of politics based
on inequality, many of the slave states rejected the results of Lincoln’s election in 1860, and the nation was plunged into war.
Today, we face a parallel problem.
The true believers (who, not coincidentally, were also the true beneficiaries) of the blue church administrative state have also become alienated from the idea of republican government and shared citizenship.
This can be seen most clearly in their unwillingness to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election, and the demonization of Trump voters.
Like most privileged elites, their faith is immune to facts or persuasion. It is simply too hard to give up the notion of natural or divine sanction for the socio-economic superiority they have enjoyed.
With each passing day, this crumbling oligarchy seems to become more
fanatical, more fixated on its own righteousness, and more impatient
with the supposed iniquity of its political opponents. But the rejection
of dialogue and compromise undermines the very possibility of a common
citizenship. Without a shared dedication to republican principles,
self-government cannot continue.
The peaceful transfer of power that accompanies a free election is
only possible on the basis of civic friendship and trust; each side must
believe that, win or lose, the rights of the minority will be protected
by those who take power. On both sides today, that trust seems to be
slipping.
While most Americans acknowledge the fact that America is deeply divided, many of our leaders remain in denial about the potential result of this growing, fundamental distrust.
We are confronting again the dire situation New Birth describes prior to the Civil War:
“both parties [see] the contest as a zero-sum enterprise in which the advantages of one side [are] losses to the other. From this viewpoint, ballots can never really substitute for bullets.”
Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of
affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when
reason fails. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
We must fervently hope that things will change before they become
violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain
unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.
Conclusion
History repeats. I can easily see parallels between what is going on in Washington DC today, and what transpired in France right before the French Revolution. Of course no one in Washington and the establishment will agree with me. But for me, a “deplorable” outsider, it is clear as the nose on my face.
People, prepare for some spicy times ahead. This situation is not sustainable and a change will happen.
Whether it will be a revolution that follows the bloody French model, or a Orwellian dystopia, no one knows. All that I do know is that the next four years; 2020 through 2024 will be exciting and pivotal.
They really do want an armed conflict.
The Sleeping Giant is even more alert... And the puppet master Bloomberg will be guarded by several heavily-armed Stasi as he visits his kingdom. The kingdom of “peasants” he wishes to disarm.
“... Mike Bloomberg’s planned visit to Virginia, intimating the bill was passed as a way of paying homage to him: “With their billionaire benefactor coming to Richmond next week to headline a Democratic Party fundraiser, however, it is clear that House leaders would rather bow to out-of-state interests than listen to their constituents and fellow lawmakers.”
-Intro to the article; VA Democrats pass bill requiring destruction of 'High Capacity" magazines.
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The virus is proving to be far more contagious than the flu, having spread from 300 people in mid-January to more than 75,700 as of Thursday morning.
-CDC
That’s the American mainstream narrative; that the Wuhan coronavirus isn’t serious. It isn’t as bad as the flu, and the flu kills thousands of people each and every year. So that there is nothing to be worried about.
I strongly disagree. However, you shouldn’t take my word for it. You just need to watch some movies of what is going on in China today, and come to your own conclusions. Right?
Look, see, watch.
Think for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Almost too late.
You are not feeling well. So you finally decide to go to the hospital. You’ve been putting it off. It’s just a sore throat you thought. But, now you are feeling dizzy and getting tunnel vision. You should have went earlier. You know that now.
You look at your cell phone but the sweating in your hands make scrolling and pushing the buttons really difficult. So you ask your friend to help. They help you and get you in the car.
Just like the flu, right? Only the flu is much worse, right? The American media has all this pegged. Do not worry. The flu is far worse.
Here’s from USA Today…
So far, there have been an estimated 19 million cases of flu, 180,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths in the U.S. this influenza season – including 68 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Worldwide, seasonal influenza epidemics cause 3 million to 5 million severe cases every year and kill up to 650,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization.
"That just far surpasses the amount of cases compared to the novel coronavirus," Colburn said. "If you didn’t travel specifically to Wuhan, China, or have contact with a person with suspected or known coronavirus, your chance of contracting this is extremely low."
-USA Today
Now, this advise and write-up seems rather silly when you look at it. If you were in China, and were to read this, you would shake your head in pure disbelief. Because what this news “report” is saying DOES NOT AGREE with what you are witnessing.
This is what the Chinese people are starting to notice…
Almost too late.
Video 2 – Registering people at a clinic.
So you are sitting there at the table talking with people, helping them with the paperwork and interviewing them… then you don’t feel so hot. Just like the Flu, right? You’ve seen policemen and doctors collapsing in front of you with the flu, right?
Well… actually no. You don’t see them collapsing. Nor do you ever see American police inside American emergency tent-clinics registering sick people, either. But somehow, yes somehow, the flu is worse.
You know the WHO data on the seasonal flu includes deaths from impoverished areas, where people live in primitive homes and huts, do not have adequate sanitation and medical care. And we are all supposed to believe that that data is representative of a modern, civilized and state-of-the-art nation.
It’s illusionary, and deceptive. As this propaganda from USA Today proves…
There’s a deadly virus spreading from state to state. It preys on the most vulnerable, striking the sick and the old without mercy. In just the past few months, it has claimed the lives of at least 39 children.
The virus is influenza, and it poses a far greater threat to Americans than the coronavirus from China that has made headlines around the world.
“When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.”
-USA Today
Have you EVER seen ANY American policeman collapse from the flu in the line of duty?
Passing out at a clinic.
Video 3 – Another casualty at the hospital.
Don’t wait until the last moment. If you are not feeling well, rush to the hospital. You see this kind of stuff all the time with the flu, right? It’s common knowledge, right? Every flu is like this, Right?
Screenshot 7FEB20.
While it is true that people with the flu try to get better at home, and serious cases are sent off to the hospital, no one ever collapses at the front door or in the car-port. But this is what is happening with this virus.
This kind of thing amazes me.
How can anyone see scenes like this, and still have the audacity to claim that the flu is worse? That it’s all just hype?
Influenza rarely gets this sort of attention, even though it kills more Americans each year than any other virus, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics, molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Influenza has already sickened at least 13 million Americans this winter, hospitalizing 120,000 and killing 6,600, according to the CDC. And flu season hasn’t even peaked. In a bad year, the flu kills up to 61,000 Americans.
Worldwide, the flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization.
And yet, Americans aren’t particularly concerned.
-USA Today
Hospital problem.
People, this is what is called propaganda.
Now, propaganda only works when the audience is kept ignorant of the true state of affairs. If you control all the news, in all the various forms, you can control the actions of the people.
This is why the American propaganda controls three branches of news;
Mainstream news
Alt-left news.
Alt-right news.
And make no mistake, the Alt-Right news is just as manipulated as the mainstream media news is. What’s the Alt-Right news saying?
“This is a biological weapon. Stolen by China. Used on their own people for eugenics purposes.”
Yes. Absolute nonsense.
OK. Let’s go back to the mainstream news propaganda;
“This is a natural virus. Harmless, but with a scary name.”
Video 4 – Policeman getting sick at his station.
The problem with this virus is that it is stealthy and fast acting. You can get it, and then it sits inside your body making you super contagious, and you will feel just fine and wonderful. Then, it will hit you suddenly. You know…like the flu! NOT!
Sick people in China are handing over their phones to the police and medical teams. They use the GPS tracking information to compare who they might be in contact with. They are quickly discovering chance encounters with infected people, and that the virus “jumps” from the infected (but feeling normal) person in a matter of seconds.
Like this…
Infected in 15 seconds while he bought vegetables at the market.
GIC Team GICexpat 6FEB20
A 56-year-old man in Ningbo was recently confirmed as a newly found case to have contracted the novel coronavirus after visiting a food market in the city’s Jiang Bei district on January 23. The confirmation was released to the public on February 4 by the district’s official social media account.
What’s especially surprising about this case is how fast the man contracted the virus.
Video surveillance revealed that it only took 15 seconds for him to be fully exposed, as neither he nor the 61-year-old woman standing next to him while picking out vegetables at the same stall were wearing protective masks.
The woman is believed to have had contracted the virus a few days prior while attending a blessing ceremony.
The man and woman, now both affected by the 2019-nCoV, did not know each other before crossing paths at the Shuang Dongfang market.
Unfortunately, 19 people who subsequently came into close contact with the newly-infected 56-year-old patient have already shown positive signs of infection. All of them have been put under isolated medical observation for further examination.
Meanwhile, the mainstream American news is still on the “don’t worry, be happy” narrative.
Fewer than half of adults got a flu shot last season, according to the CDC. Even among children, who can be especially vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, only 62% received the vaccine.
If Americans aren’t afraid of the flu, perhaps that’s because they are inured to yearly warnings. For them, the flu is old news. Yet viruses named after foreign places — such as Ebola, Zika and Wuhan — inspire terror.
-KHN
And the Alt-Right conservative news is also parroting this more or less. They argue that this is all nonsense. That it isn’t all that contagious. Here’s from the Moon of Alabama blog…
... We had documented in an earlier post that neither the infectiousness nor the mortality of the novel Cornoavirus are especially severe. This New York Times graphic also explains that.
The ONLY reason that the virus is being contained is because the entire fucking nation went DEFCON ONE.
This is not the flu…
Video 5 – Woman is not feeling well.
So you go outside to run an errand, then suddenly you don’t feel right. You feel dizzy. So you stand there puzzled, and then you pass out. Just like everyone does every flu season. Right?
That’s the American mainstream media narrative…
Some doctors joke that the flu needs to be rebranded.
“We should rename influenza; call it XZ-47 virus, or something scarier,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 5,000 people in the past year — more than twice as many as Ebola. Yet UNICEF officials have noted that the measles, which many Americans no longer fear, has gotten little attention. Nearly all the measles victims were children under 5.
-KHN
Screenshot 7FEB20.
Personally, I think that Selco said it best…
I know now that bad things can happen, and one more important thing, actually I believe it is most important:
I no longer believe government and authority, not at all.
When they really doing their best to assure you that everything going to be fine, you can be sure that something bad is happening.
Video 6 – Truck driver passes out at the wheel.
My take on things is that this Wuhan corona virus has a potential to become Apocalyptic. I don't like what I am seeing now.
Posted by: blues | Feb 5 2020 16:36 utc
Every flu season you always hear about truck drivers unable to drive because of the flu, right? They just pull over and die at the side of the highway, right? It’s an every year occurrence. Right?
Some people may worry less about the flu because there’s a vaccine, whose protection has ranged from 19% to 60% in recent years. Simply having the choice about whether or not to receive a flu shot can give people an illusion of control, Schaffner said.
But people often feel powerless to fight novel viruses. The fact that an airplane passenger spread SARS to other passengers and flight crew made people feel especially vulnerable.
-KHN
The “Virus Hunter”, world renowned Columbia University Professor, Walter Ian Lipkin came to China and met with Zhong NanShan, China’s lead epidemiologist in fight against #CoronaVirus.
A few points are of significance:
1. Lipkin said he spoke for hours with Zhong, and exchanged different views. But ultimately he trusts Zhong, because Zhong is a humanitarian.
2. The infection ratio of the CoronaVirus is probably Underestimated. The fatality ratio is probably Overestimated.
3. I repeat, America’s top scientist already came to China. Lipkin also fought alongside Zhong and China during SARS in 2003.
These perspectives are very important! Please remember!
Most sobering of all, 35-year-old Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, the CoronaVirus whistleblower who was charged with spreading rumors of virus last month, died of CoronaVirus himself hours earlier.
Video 7 – Doctors pass out.
Ignoring the reported 2019-nCoV #s for China (which are suspect) but taking into account reported #s only for countries outside China (and assumed to be reasonably accurate), the calculated death rate (1/212) as of this morning is (rounded up) .5%. Hardly Apocalyptic.
Posted by: Trisha | Feb 5 2020 17:02 utc
And another thing about the flu is how it completely shuts down hospitals, and causes the doctors and nursing staff to pass out and stop working. Right? After all, the flu is far worse. Right?
Hotez, who is working to develop vaccines against neglected diseases, said he worries about unvaccinated children. Most kids who die from the flu haven’t been immunized against it, he said. And many were previously healthy.
“If you’re worried about your health, get your flu vaccination,” Hotez said. “It’s not too late.”
-KHN
Video 8 – Police take you away.
This morning on Canadian TV: Worldwide infected 24,0000, death toll in China 450, let's say 500
Here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00154-w
I found:
4 February 11:00 GMT — Cases in China pass 20,000, so 25,000 seems reasonable.
Then from CNN, 17 min ago (they are hardly conservative with numbers):
What we're covering here
The virus: The coronavirus outbreak has killed 492 people worldwide, the majority of which are in China, and infected more than 24,500 people across 25 countries over 30 days.
Some math:
fatality percent: 500/24500*100 = 2.04 % => really high mortality rate, almost as much as common flu.
Population infected in China: 20000/16 billion = 0.002 % which proves that this is a horrible horrible unstoppable virus
In other countries a bit less, per this site https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/countries-confirmed-cases-coronavirus-200125070959786.html
Australia 14, Germany 12, India 3, Malaysia 12, Singapore 28, South Korea 19, USA 11, Vietnam 10, Canada 4, Russia 2, UK 2, in total over 25 countries.
Percent countries where at least 1 case discovered: 25/195 = 13%, => really world wide spread.
Of course, since the flu is so deadly, the police will come to your house if you have the flu. They will break down the door, and they will haul you away to the hospital for your own good. Right? That’s what always happens with the flu. Right?
Forcefully removed from their home.
Video 9 – Military biological decontamination units.
Screen shot of the graph of contaminated cases over time. 7FEB20.
I'm not so sure that the Coronavirus is so innocuous as some would have us think, simply because of the way China has reacted to it. Why quarantine tens of millions if it is no big deal? Do you trust China to provide accurate statistics if they are seeing a huge fatality rate with a highly infections organism?
Zerohedge has posted an article showing that there was a "mistaken" post showing much more serious numbers, which indicated a 16% fatality rate. With a high R0 value and an airborne pathogen, that reportedly has shown transmission via fomites (spreads through touching of contaminated surfaces), this would be approach the lethality of the organism portrayed in the movie "Contagion".
Posted by: Perimetr | Feb 5 2020 17:32 utc | 15
Of course, every flu season has the local national guard, and military forces performing vehicle sweeps and decontamination procedures using truck mounted machines and chemicals. They scrub the air and make sure that everyone is safe. It’s normal, every flu season, right?
Military mass decontamination of entire cities.
Video 10 – Containment centers.
The one thing that would scare China the most, I think, is if the virus was infectious before symptoms appear. A virus able to spread wholly undetected can be a nasty piece of work, specially one that's seemingly a new addition to our species' ills, because we don't have any innate immunity around for the time being - if things go badly, a big chunk of the total population can get infected.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Feb 5 2020 17:44 utc | 19
And, of course, the yearly flu containment centers are always active. Right? After all, since the flu is so much worse, and far more dangerous, there is nothing to worry about. Right?
The virus is contagious at least 5 days before symptoms appear, I have read some reports that say 9-14 days before symptoms appear. Which is why it is out of control. Taking temperatures to screen is like pissing in the wind
Posted by: Per | Feb 5 2020 17:48 utc | 22
On the Alt-Right is the narrative that China is lying, and that hundreds of dead are piling up. Well, I’m not seeing that. Not first hand, not second hand. It’s all nonsense.
And people (!) nonsense = propaganda.
This situation is serious. No doubt. The Chinese are treating it as a DEFCON ONE event, and that shows how serious it is. However, it is contained and things are adjusting.
Here is a comment on MoA that speaks some sanity…
Now crematorium nonsense is back, only being applied to China. The only people who buy this ridiculous story are ones who haven't ventured into the sunlight from their parents' basement in years, and have for certain never further from their trailer park than the local Walmart. How else is it that anyone can imagine that the big problem with covering up a large number of deaths is just the problem of disposing of the bodies? What about family, friends, and coworkers of the deceased? How about creditors? Who thinks they will just shrug and forget about it if the person who owes them money disappears?
The only people who can seriously consider the narrative of cremating bodies to hide deaths are ones who cannot conceptualize people on the other side of the planet who speak a weird language as actual human beings with full lives. Delusional Americans for whom the world is just another TV show, and Chinese people are just extras in that show with no backstory or future whom nobody would notice if they died unless their body blocked the sidewalk or something.
If you, dear reader, are leaning towards believing the crematorium narrative, ask yourself if simply disposing of the body would work at erasing anyone you know, like one of your parents or children? Kinda silly to think that would make you forget them, huh?
So why imagine it would work in Russia or China?
Answer: The only way you could believe that is if your understanding of those places was just a shallow caricature; a cartoon.
Posted by: William Gruff | Feb 5 2020 21:19 utc | 65
Containment barracks.
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Perhaps the first thing that triggered my thoughts that the cronovirus attack in Wuhan was a biological weapon event was the suspicious timing of it…
… and the absolutely absurd complete shutdown of the 2020 CNY holiday.
Have you the reader ever heard of an entire nation canceling Christmas and ordering everyone to stay at home and not go out? It’s amazing, unique and horrifying.
Well…
…that’s what happened.
Of course, those in America and out West haven’t a clue as to what this means. Perhaps this graph will illustrate my point.
Plot of cronovirus infections over time overlayed with the yearly Chinese New Year mass migration.
This is a graph showing the trajectory when only a precious few people were infected.
Imagine what would have happened if the Chinese government would have not taken direct and immediate action.
What if…
Here’s what it looks like if they delayed action by two days, and all of China are having parties, drinking, eating and having fun with each other…
This scenario is what would have happened if China delayed going to DEFCON ONE by two days. The infection trajectory goes ballistic.
So, people, my argument is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.
This illness was intentionally timed to exert maximum damage on China.
If that is not bad enough…
… were China to delay their response by a mere two days, the nation would have been completely devastated and neutered by this illness.
What it is like.
This is what it is like…
Your read the news reports, and suddenly you aren’t feeling good. You report it to the 119 (9-1-1 emergency line) and an ambulance comes to pick you up.
My very first interview. I had it on 2-2-2020. How about that for a date, eh? It’s about what I experienced during the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and my sleuthing on the entire box of puzzle pieces regarding the biological weapon attack.
If you enjoyed this, you can see other posts in some of my other Indexes…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Lordy! American media is in la-la land, I’ll tell you what. And most Americans are following the big lie. No one wants to believe that America is involved in persuasive germ warfare to put pressure on China for the Trump trade wars. I guess that neocons like John Bolton would NEVER even consider such a thing, right?
What's so difficult to believe?
You all know that Trump wants America to be number one in the world and is doing everything possible to control the rise of China.
You know that that is why the "Trump Trade Wars" are on-going.
You know, if you are paying attention, that America only represents 11% of Chinese exports, and a far smaller percentage of imports. China is self-sufficient and doesn't really NEED America.
So in order to leverage China to bow to America, "other" pressures must be used...
... but biological germ warfare is "off the table".
So everyone is out there grasping at straws.
For suggesting this obvious “elephant in the room”, I’m an evil spook that gives people the heebie-jeebies for suggesting this.
Instead, it’s a natural viral “bug” not anywhere near as bad as the seasonal flu… If anything, if it is a biological weapon it’s something that came out of stolen technology, or from some kind of fringe revolutionary group.
OK. Ok.
Don’t shoot the messenger. Got it?
It’s a biological weapon. It was unleashed in China on THE Chinese New Year holiday and it is designed to create mass causalities. It’s rampaging through China now.
All you need to know is this…
[1] China is treating it as a biological weapon, and they [2] WILL NOT ALLOW AMERICAN RESEARCHERS ANYWHERE NEAR IT.
Doesn’t that tell you something?
Here’s some more videos. To youse guys who think that it’s nothing to worry about, you can ignore this post. FOX and CNN has better news with well-paid “experts” for you to believe. I’m just posting videos of what is going on, taken by people that are right here at ground zero, and who (like me) are dealing with it.
You all can sit comfy in your homes and dream that it’s just a way for the Untied States government to force you all to take vaccines, or for the dark cabal to exterminate the human race, or for Reptilians to feed on humans. Remember, it’s your reality. Not mine.
You might be right.
I might be wrong.
Here’s what I am seeing. Come to your own conclusions.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Going Crazy inside the apartment.
Like me, the rest of China are all stuck, cooped inside the house. As I write this it’s been ten days of isolation and we are beyond stir-crazy. So the Chinese social media is full of people making the best of things. The best way to protect yourself and you family is to stay isolated, if you go out, you go protected and disinfect yourself, and do not touch any surfaces.
This coronvirus is so darn dangerous. So most people stay inside, and my little dog cannot understand why I won’t take him outside for a walk (and a shit), but we are not going to take any risks.
Going crazy.
Video 2 – Ambulances going to the hospital.
Once the new hospital was constructed in Wuhan, sick patients were transported to it. They were moved from the military field tent hospitals to the new wings of the sprawling mega-hospital. The convoy of ambulances is impressive.
Video 3 – Baby in trouble!
It’s heartbreaking for anyone to get this Frankenstein coronvirus HIV monster. But it’s especially heartbreaking to see young innocents get stricken with it.
That’s precisely why the Pentagon forbid all the military not to view or use Chinese social media. It’s not that they want to prevent people from watching lip-synchronization to pop songs.
They don’t want the troops “getting soft” watching the heart wrenching events of American germ warfare unfold.
Video 4 – Breaking through a quarantine roadblock.
Not everyone is with the program. Some fight it. They don’t care. Some, like this fellow, plows through the roadblock.
These selfish people are very dangerous and put an entire community at risk.
Video 5 – Containing an infected girl.
So you’ve been diagnosed with this killer, super contagious Frankenstein virus, what do you do? You flee from the hospital and try to run away. Not the brightest of decisions.
Video 6 – Hope
You have a loved one in the hospital dealing with this illness. They are your family and they are there, and the last you saw was when they collapsed going to empty the garbage. Now, you are scared silly that they would die…
That’s what is going on in China today, right now.
China is at Level One alert.
People! This is equivalent to DEFCON 1 in America. The Chinese government is treating this as a WMD bio-weapon attack and it is very serious. People are sick and dying.
Defense readiness conditions (DEFCONs) describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are graduated to match situations of varying military severity, and are numbered 5,4,3,2, and 1 as appropriate. DEFCONs are phased increases in combat readiness. In general terms, these are descriptions of DEFCONs:
DEFCON 5 Normal peacetime readiness
DEFCON 4 Normal, increased intelligence and strengthened security measures
DEFCON 3 Increase in force readiness above normal readiness
DEFCON 2 Further Increase in force readiness, but less than maximum readiness
DEFCON 1 Maximum force readiness.
- DEFCON DEFense CONdition
The closest comparable American situation was during…
Pearl Harbor
9-11
Luckily the Chinese government took quick action. But still, it means nothing when your loved ones are in the hospital dying.
Video 7 – Eating lunch.
You are having lunch with friends and your one friend suddenly slumps over and is in distress. That’s coronvirus. That’s China today. They American media is all about this not being as bad as the flu. Well, I have never seen the flu have such rapid an onslaught, and act so stealthy in application.
You don’t know when he picked up the bug. Probably 14 days ago. He was normal. He felt normal. He went out to eat with his friends. Ordered some dishes. Now this.
Video 8 – Decontamination.
This is a sight that is not at all uncommon. Everyone is wearing full cat #4 costumes and decontaminating themselves. This germ is so darn lethal. But it’s more than that, it’s got an unusually long life outside it’s host.
12 hours (!) on metal and plastic surfaces. 6 to 12 hours on clothing.
Video 9 – Delivering supplies.
All aircraft are available to transport supplies. They are arriving from all over the world, from India, to Japan, from Australia to NZ. Nothing from America though…
Yeah, the Gates foundation owns the patent on this virus, and held a meeting discussing the possible scenarios of a release of it…
…the day before American troops were in Wuhan.
Video 10 – Going shopping.
This is what it’s like going shopping right now.
You go out wearing all sorts of protection, you go straight from point “A” to point “B”. Then you select and buy your groceries. Then return back as quickly as possible. Then you disinfect yourself.
You wash all of your clothes immediately.
Then you scrub yourself raw in a hot, hot water shower, and put on house clothes.
Video 11 – Everyone is getting disinfected.
Here we have a Chinese government official being disinfected on his way to the office. Disinfecting is mandatory. You just cannot go outside without taking care of yourself. This virus can “jump” as far as two meters (two yards), and it can do some from people who appear completely healthy and normal.
Video 12 – Hotel Cleaning
One sick person was staying in a hotel. So after the new hospital was constructed he was moved to it, and the hospital room was sanitized. The bedding, mattress and pillows were hauled off to be incinerated. The rest disinfected thoroughly.
Video 13 – Military at work.
As stated earlier, this is a level one military event. It is equivalent to the American DEFCON #1. All the military are mobilized and are on high alert. This includes the nuclear forces as well as the police and medical services. The most visible, of course, are the medical services. Here was have a video showing the men and women at work.
Video 14 – Passing out in the 7-11.
This sickness happens so rapidly. You get on your coat and put on your mask. You grab your keys and cell phone. You go downstairs to make a dash to the 7-11 on the corner. When suddenly…
…you don’t feel so well.
It’s like this. Real deal.
Collapsing in the Sinotecc.
Video 15 – Seizure of an infected person.
Not everyone wants to cooperate. Some fight tooth and nail. They do not want to go to the hospital. They do not trust doctors. They do not trust medicines. They do not want to be injected. And so they run, they hide and they put up a fight.
Of course, the police are called in and they are captured, secured and medicated.
Video 16 – This is what it is like.
You are hiding and locked down inside your house. You look outside your window and you see a bunch of police cars and ambulances outside in your courtyard. You see them do into your building and you see them take away an entire family.
It’s like living a horror movie.
That’s about it for this post. Too many videos take forever to load and freezes the entire article / post. More is on the way. I hope that you enjoyed this post, and if you liked it, please watch some of my other similar posts on my China index…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
I was interviewed to speak on my thoughts of the CNY Wuhan Coronavirus emergency. I accepted, as after all, we are all locked up inside our isolated and quarantined areas, and have nothing better to do, eh? It’s my very first interview and I do not think that it is all that great, but others think that it is interesting. Oh, I don’t know.
Taking their name from the scheming, parasitic lawyer in Charles Dickens' 1850 novel David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is a progressive rock institution who, alongside bands like Deep Purple, Queen, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin, helped lay the foundation for the United Kingdom's vibrant hard rock/heavy metal scene, via combustible hits like "Easy Livin'," "The Wizard," "Sweet Lorraine," "Lady ...
- Uriah Heep on Spotify
Uriah Heep
I’m retired with a quiet life, kids, dogs and beer. I just want to chill out in my sunset years. I really don’t need social justice trolls and their ilk causing me trouble. So while you can read what I have to say, know what I know, and see what I look like… personal contact is by invitation only. I don’t want someone crashing my party and losing my buzz. Understand?
And then, the detractors started to assault everything I said. Fine. I wouldn’t bother to nod to them on the street, let alone share a pizza with them. Anyways, China-Rising responded HERE.
Funny thing about on-line personas. I suppose in real life I am more a combination of Pauly Shore, David Lee Roth and Rodney Dangerfield.
9SEP20 Update
Apparently, the China Government agrees with my appraisal. From a message group that I belong to…
Chinese propaganda getting good. Unlike West propaganda, Chinese includes evidence. exactly consistent with Uriah Heep's version. Thanks Jeff, but Kevin it may be a conspiracy that Heep told it in real time and the Chinese officials docu youtubed 8 months later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEo3qk-4yx8
Keep in mind that I am Uriah Heep in this interview.
If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to visit the rest of my blog here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here are some more videos taken during the Chinese New Year Coronavirus emergency. At this time, and when these videos were taken, the Chinese government pretty much locked down most cities, and placed travel restrictions everywhere else. Everyone must wear a mask, and everyone must stay indoors unless it is an absolute emergency and they NEED to get out.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Viral task team.
The Chinese have established task teams to go forth and tackle specific issues and problems specifically and surgically. Here we have a video describing one such team.
Itwasanurgentorder. Manymemberslefttheir Chinese NewYear'sEvefamilyreunionstogetreadytoboarda special planetothecapitalofcentral China’sHubeiProvince. ThreenursesfromShanghaiYueyangHospitalofIntegratedTraditional Chinese andWesternMedicineareinthe team.
- Medics abandon reunions to head to Wuhan - SHINE News
Video 2 – Disinfecting the public areas.
All areas are being disinfected. Here’s one in process.
Cleaning involves getting rid of dirt and gunk where germs can grow. The friction of cleaning -- often with soap and water -- removes most surface germs, which is adequate for most household surfaces. In other cases, however, it's a good idea to disinfect, which destroys or inactivates most of the germs.
In this case anti-viral agents are being sprayed.
Video 3 – Police drones telling everyone to stay indoors.
No one is to go outside. Everyone must stay indoors. Here we have a police drone telling a village woman to go back to her house.
The use of police drones is notable, because the drone allowed surveillance of gaming operators who otherwise would have been difficult to track. While old-fashioned surveillance works best in some situations, drones in this case allowed investigators to plan a raid with 3D intel on the target site. China is the world leader in the use of drones.
- www.bestonlinecasinos.com/news/police-drones-used-for-illegal-gambling-raid-in-china/4894/
Video 4 – Regional militia and police roadblocks.
Road bocks come in different sizes and shapes. Here’s an overview.
This is a deadly virus. It stays inside of you and then when it’s ready to hit, it hits you with incredible force.
On January 10, gene sequencing determined it to be the new Wuhan coronavirus, namely 2019-nCoV, a betacoronavirus, related to the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus (MERS-CoV) and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus (SARSCoV). However, the mortality and transmissibility of 2019-nCoV are still unknown, and likely to vary from those of the prior referenced coronaviruses.
Video 6 – Police drones telling everyone to go back home and stay inside.
In the cities, the drones were out in force and instructing everyone to get home as quickly as possible.
Video 7 – Handing out face masks.
I have hundreds of these videos. Everyone is donating face masks and handing them out.
Video 8 – The virus attacks the hospital staff.
As I’ve stated before, this is a deadly lethal virus. Hospital staff are not immune. Already doctors and nurses have died. The first doctor was a man who was 62, and collapsed in the elevator.
Video 9 – Roadblocks and checkpoints.
More road blocks and checkpoints.
To all my valued clients, overseas friends and family:
With regard to the infection of the New Corona Virus, the Chinese government is currently taking the most effective and powerful measures to actively respond, and at least in Shanghai people are calm, and staying at home, except for journeys to the grocery store , which by the way (despite media reports) are well stocked!
Most cities in China are normal, albeit unusually quiet, and only cities close to the source of the outbreak around Wuhan have been affected by stricter travel restrictions . Although we expect the infection numbers to rise in the short term, we believe everything will be back to normal soon as the control measures slow down the spread of infection .
The government has extended the official CNY holidays until Feb 9th to help facilitate the measures taken, but some companies and factories will reopen earlier according to the local situation. Thanks for your understanding and support through this challenging time.
- post on LinkedIN 31JAN20
Video 10 – Arresting one of the “criminal elements” who operated the drones that sprayed swine flu and wiped out the pork industry in 2019.
As strange was it seems, the complete collapse of the pig farm industry in China in 2019 was propagated by drones. This is why so many isolated pig farms became infected. “Criminal elements” were using drones to spray the pigs with flu to devastate the pork industry.
Here are some ways that the people in rural areas blocked the roads to keep their villages safe.
Sometimes its with piles of dirt. Sometimes it’s will huge boulders. Sometimes, it’s with fencing, and sometimes it’s with bricks. Curiously, sometimes it’s just with a sign saying “keep out – infected area”. And, sometimes it’s just a few sticks and tree branches on the road.
Video 12 – Canceled wedding.
When everyone was told to stay inside, many events were canceled. Here is a wedding.
You know, many weddings are planned to occur on CNY as that is the only time during the year where everyone can come together in one spot. Canceling the wedding means that everyone will need to wait until next year to get married.
If you enjoyed this post, please click on the China index button below for similar articles.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here are some more videos taken during the Chinese New Year Coronavirus emergency. At this time, and when these videos were taken, the Chinese government pretty much locked down most cities, and placed travel restrictions everywhere else. Everyone must wear a mask, and everyone must stay indoors unless it is an absolute emergency and they NEED to get out.
... These are the same type of precautions recommended during the cold and flu season. I only began wearing a mask after the lockdown started Jan 23. Right now, I am following the public health recommendations, and staying in my apartment as much as possible. Currently I am trying to figure out if I can work remotely, reading papers at home, even though face-to-face is much more effective. A health hotline has been set up so that foreigners at our lab can get medical help, if necessary. The biggest problem is eating.
...
I went to the grocery store today, and everything was orderly. There were no shortages; but then again, I was there early and a line was forming at the vegetables.
In this health emergency, it is everybody's responsibility to protect others and ourselves. I do not want to spread the disease and I do not want to catch what other people have. Currently you cannot drive. There is no public transportation. My friends are scattered across Wuhan, and right now, all over China and the world, since it was Spring Festival. The only way to get in contact is by phone and the messaging tools like WeChat and QQ. The social isolation I hope will slow the spread of the coronavirus, but some people are trying to run away from it.
The US government airlifted a group of Americans out of the city. I decided to stay. I have a job here. I have friends here. It is a commitment and a contract. This thing will pass. I really like the street I live on. I like the food. I like hot and dry noodles. I like the Wuchang fish. I like the atmosphere in Wuhan, and people are down to earth. I walk down the streets and go to shops. When you live somewhere awhile, you become part of the community; it does not matter if you are a foreigner or not. I will continue to stay in isolation until the outbreak is over, and I will go back to work.
-Stephen C. McClure spoke with Li Lei.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Video 1 – Construction of a hospital in ten days.
The Chinese do not mess around. They have decided to build two hospitals in Wuhan to handle patients, and they are making it happen. It is absolutely astounding.
As two makeshift hospitals are being constructed in Wuhan, Hubei province, in a bid to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, ministry-level government departments, organizations, businesses and people from all walks of life are lending a helping hand to the projects.
Central government subsidies will mainly be used to buy medical equipment to ensure concentrated treatment for infected patients, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
More than 2,000 workers from five design and construction units-the China Institute of Architectural Design and Research, the China Construction Third Bureau, Wuhan Hanyang Municipal Construction Group, Wuhan Construction Group, and Wuhan Airport Development Group-have participated in the Huoshenshan Hospital project, according to China Business Journal.
Meanwhile, Xinhua News Agency has reported that the Wuhan bureau of State Grid Corp, the national electricity provider, has already installed substations and laid cables at the construction site.
A Sinopec Group gas station near the site is providing free services for all vehicles carrying building materials. The company has also provided 16,500 liters of diesel fuel and 1,000 cans of lubricating oil to back up construction work.
Communication companies, including China Telecom Corp, have built 5G base stations to ensure easy contact between the project's engineers and will lay cables for normal digital communications once the temporary hospitals begin operations.
Employees of an environmental technology research company in Beijing have provided services to prevent wastewater seepage during the construction process.
Meanwhile, officials in Pingyu county, Henan province, have sent an impermeable membrane, which had been intended for a landfill project, to the construction site.
- Donations and volunteers flood sites in Wuhan
A livestream shows trucks, earthmoving equipment and building work in full swing at the construction site of two special hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Video 2 – Scanning people boarding a bus.
Under the current state of emergency everyone must wear masks and be constantly scanned for fever. Here we see people being scanned prior to boarding a bus.
Video 3 – Community unloads hospital supplies for the new hospital.
As the new hospitals are going up, supplies are being made and brought in. It’s not just masks and gowns. It’s complete operating rooms, beds, and general hospital equipment. Everything is being replicated, from the operating room to the lowest janitor gear.
On Sunday night, a logistics company in Hubei transported 240 metric tons of steel to the site.
A company in Guangdong province, which produces medical ventilators, donated 144 machines worth 175,000 yuan ($25,000) to Huoshenshan Hospital on Monday.
In addition to construction materials, food and electrical appliances have also been donated by businesses across the country.
China Mengniu Dairy Co said it had provided milk worth 8 million yuan to construction workers and frontline medical employees.
Meanwhile, Midea Group, an electrical appliances manufacturer, donated more than 550 air conditioners to the Huoshenshan project and sent 100 employees to install the machines, according to the company's social media account.
On Sunday, the new facilities also received 1,100 televisions and 400 air purifiers from Skyworth Digital Technology Co. The televisions will allow voice calls between doctors and patients, thus lowering the cross-infection risk, according to Beijing News.
Meanwhile, a group of military veterans from across the nation volunteered to help the Huoshenshan Hospital project.
Jiang Jing, a former member of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, journeyed to Wuhan from Zhanjiang, Guangdong province.
"I am responsible for managing warehouse resources, handing out medical supplies including masks and raincoats, and arranging meals for construction workers," he said.
Retired soldier Wang Guohui drove more than 300 kilometers from Shenqiu county, Henan, to bring 4 metric tons of homegrown vegetables to the workers.
"The Wuhan people are united and striving to conquer the enemy. I want to make my own tiny contribution. I only felt at peace when I had brought the vegetables in person," said Wang, when he arrived at 9 pm on Jan 24, Lunar New Year's Eve.
Liu Yingjie, a construction worker from Shanxi province, drove 800 km to the site with some colleagues. After a break of just four hours, the men started work installing the prefabricated wards.
"Given the acute situation, we must finish the project as quickly as possible so patients can be treated," Liu said, adding that his father led a team of construction workers during a renovation project after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province.
- Donations and volunteers flood sites in Wuhan
Video 4 – Roadblock medical scan.
There are roadblocks everywhere. Here’s a typical one. You must get the scan or you will be apprehended. They are making sure that sick people are contained. Now this virus is really tricky in that you can be totally healthy and still infect people. But, all things considered, they are doing an admirable job keeping the sick isolated from the general population.
It's 4 am on Monday when my colleague, Yi Bingkun, and I finished the night shift. It's the 50th hour since we arrived in Wuhan to help fight against the novel coronavirus. The situation here is far more grievous than what we imagined, with more suspected cases and an acute shortage of medical staff. We are here to bring them hope, but it seems that we assume more responsibilities.
The ward was almost overloaded during our first night shift and we continued to receive more patients. My colleague and I plunged into work without delay after wearing protective suits.
However, an emergency occurred when a patient went into sudden cardiac arrest when we had just changed shifts. Kun (my colleague Yi Bingkun's nickname) rushed to give chest compressions to the patient and I called a doctor for help.
The patient, unfortunately, died of severe illness after all rescue measures failed. The patient's family, however, sent their gratitude to us. Their every single "Thank you" makes me feel warm and that the efforts we've made are worthwhile.
- Nurse battles coronavirus on the frontline
Video 5 – Disinfecting vehicles.
Military protocols are being used in the disinfection of vehicles, gear and equipment. These trucks did not appear out of the blue. The PLA has a complete army of these vehicle to handle nation-wide biological warfare attacks.
Video 6 – Police roadblock
Here is another police roadblock. It’s pretty common and it is more or less the same set up when I left my relatives house to go to the airport.
If you do not wear a mask you will not be permitted to be in public. You must wear masks in public. As this is a super contagious disease.
High Contagiousness
Indeed, if we compare how SARS spread out in 2002-2003, it is hard not to notice how much more contagious nCoV-2019 is compared to SARS.
It took SARS three months to reach to the point of 300 cases between November 2002 and February 2003. In the climax of SARS, the daily number of newly registered cases in Mainland China never exceeded 200 cases.
In comparison, on 28th January 2020 alone, 1459 new cases of nCoV-2019 were reported nationwide, including 315 cases in Wuhan. In just a week between 20-28 January, the number of patients with nCoV-2019 exceeded the number of all SARS patients confirmed in Mainland China between 2002-2004!
Mainland China had just 5327 cases of SARS, but nCoV-2019 already had 5974 registered cases by the end of January 28th, 2020.
- Coronavirus: Summary to date & insights
Video 8 – Throwing away all the food.
When the government told everyone that they had to stay inside… not only in Wuhan, but in the entire nation, so many events were canceled. Not just the millions of parties and dinners, but also weddings and other oddball and religious celebrations. All the restaurants are suffering. Here we have all the meals in a big banquet being thrown away because the event was canceled.
Given the decorations, it appears to be a wedding party.
Video 9 – Not wearing a face mask.
Some people just don’t “get it”. You must wear a face mask and you must avoid people. You only go out if it is an emergency. But, some people, they think that they can flaunt the rule of law and do as they please. Here we have a dimwit woman demanding to do as she pleases and she doesn’t care if she lives of dies.
Video 10 – Fumigating the city.
Here we have a typical fumigation team. All the cities are being disinfected and fumigated. No exceptions. Everyone is assisting and working on this most terrible issue and event.
If you enjoyed this post, please click on the China index button below for similar articles.
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
America was established as a Republic. As a Republic, it was designed to protect the liberty and the freedom of the American citizenry. Over the last two centuries, various individuals have “improved” upon this concept by replacing a Liberty protecting Republic, into a oligarchy ruled pretend-Democracy.
Here we take a look at this transition. We do so based on the book “Liberty in Peril,” by Randall Holcombe.
Liberty is freedom from the government.
In his book, he challenges the presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary. They are not. You can either have a Republic, or you can have a Democracy. You cannot have both simultaneously.
High School Civics Class
There is no such thing as democracy. It's a sweet utopia. US was the first country to show threat only money design your status and access to privileges of 21st century. Western EU countries (like Germany) show that an average citizen has little to zero control over own countries processes.
There is no such thing as democracy. there are fairy tales about it which are used as a tool of politics from the neo imperialist West towards everybody else. They consider us all savages and act accordingly. Because they are so "special" (remember one of this degenerative Obama-speeches?)
- Michael Goryany
When I took history and government in school, many critical issues were misrepresented. They were given short shrift, and in many instances ignored entirely.
These omissions greatly hampered my understanding of America and created mysteries that my teachers could not answer.
How can you have the fourth amendment, and also have the sixteenth amendment at the same time? One permits you to keep your financial affairs private, the other requires that you disclose them under the penalty of law.
How can you have a second amendment that cannot be infringed, and an ATF who’s entire purpose and objective is to infringe on the second amendment?
How can the United States be a Republic when the general population can vote for the President?
Indeed, the confusing nature of what America was founded as, and the way America was managed undermined my ability to understand what America really was.
I believe that it is particularly great in regard to American constitutionalism, what it is, and what it was intended to be. He spends time describing how it has morphed from protecting liberty to advancing democracy instead. As well as how this love of “democracy” has run roughshod over Americans at the expense of liberty.
The founders did not intend the United States to be a democracy.
It does so with a host of novel and important insights rather than the disinterest generated by the books I suffered through in school.
The Role of Government
Holcombe gets right to the main point:
The role of government as [America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself.
This is beautiful.
I only wish that it was taught in schools this way.
The American government was designed to protect the Rights of individuals.
... So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution.
Our nation was designed to have a very small government, with the restrictions on it, large, and clearly defined.
This book describes how the fundamental principle underlying American government has been transformed over the years…
...from protecting individual liberty...
...to carrying out the will of the people, as revealed by a democratic decision-making process. (p. xxii)
Holcombe begins by laying out the case that…
“...the Founders had no intention of creating a democracy...
...in the sense of a government that would be guided by popular opinion,” (p. 5)
…in sharp contrast to current “understanding.” Where the point of government is to take polls and gauge public opinion. Then pretend to react to the opinion poll results.
Which of course is meaningless.
Studies have shown that the government does what it wants.
The media creates fake polls, and fake news, and fake opinion pieces and fake outrage to justify the governmental actions.
And what makes the transformation from a central focus on liberty to a central focus on democracy that routinely invades liberty…
... particularly significant is that the powers embodied in America’s twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century Americans revolted against to escape. (p. 7)
Liberty used to be important.
Since I do not have the space to dissect all of the issues in Liberty in Peril, I would like to highlight a few particularly noteworthy things.
Holcombe starts with John Locke, which is a common place to start for those interested in advancing liberty.
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”.
But he also calls attention to Cato’s Letters, which was one of the most influential—but now almost completely ignored—influences leading to the birth of the American Revolution.
I have long been struck by how many of the insights our founders are credited with that actually trace back there (see the first major chapter of my book Lines of Liberty), and I echo Holcombe’s invitation for more people to discover it.
Are Liberty and Democracy Complementary?
Liberty in Peril challenges the typical current presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary.
They are not.
If anything, they are direct opposites.
American “democracy” is a corruption. It is an oligarchy of the wealthy over the rest of humanity.
The principle of liberty suggests that first and foremost, the government’s role is to protect the rights of individuals.
The principle of democracy suggests that collective decisions are made according to the will of the majority…
The greater the allowable scope of democracy in government, the greater the threat to liberty…
In particular, the ascendancy of the concept of democracy threatens the survival of the free market economy, which is an extension of the Founders’ views on liberty. (pp. 14-15)
This is reflected in the changing nature of elections.
At one time, elections might have been viewed as a method of selecting competent people to undertake a job with constitutionally-specified limits.
With the extension of democracy, elections became referendums on public policy. (p. 20)
Consensus vs. Democracy
The book also challenges commonly held presumptions that our Founders wanted democracy.
But while “the Founders wanted those in charge of government’s operations to be selected by a democratic process,”...
... they “also wanted to insulate those who ran the government from direct influence by its citizens”...
... because “[b]y insulating political decision-makers from directs accountability to citizens...
... the government would be in a better position to adhere to its constitutionally-mandated limits.” (p. 15)
Click and Goggle “democracy meme” to see just how effective and what the people think about “democracy” in the world today.
And today, in 2020 we see how absolutely correct this assessment is.
“Thus, the Constitution created a limited government designed to protect liberty, not to foster democracy.” (p. 16)
But the United States…
“consistently has moved toward more democracy, and the unintended side effect has been a reduction in liberty.” (p. 25)
After all, that was the sole purpose of both the 12th and the 17th amendments.
Holcombe lays out issues of consensus versus democracy, with consensus illustrated by market systems in which all those whose property rights are involved agree to transactions, (p. 29) but in government…
“a group is able to undertake more extensive collective action if it requires less consensus to act.” (p. 30)
And the slippery slope is that…
The more citizens want to further national goals through government action, the less consensus they will demand in the collective decision-making process. (p. 33)
An In-Depth Study of the Constitution
Another notable aspect of Liberty in Peril is how far beyond the typical discussion of constitutional issues it goes, substantially expanding readers’ understanding in intriguing ways.
For instance, how many Americans know of the Iroquois Constitution, which focused on unanimity?
The Iroquois constitution was based on the principles of peace, power and righteousness. It laid out a system of government and a method of electing representatives to its Long House Council surprisingly similar to the United States governmental system today. For instance, the Council is divided into Younger Brother and Elder Brother meetings, an instance of a bicameral legislature. Because trade and treaties with the Native Americans were critical to the success of the American colonies, the Iroquois constitution and related documents were translated into English and distributed throughout the colonies and European traders.
How many are aware of the Albany Plan of Union, drawn up in 1754, or how it was influenced by the Iroquois Constitution?
The Albany Plan of Union was a plan to create a unified government for the Thirteen Colonies, suggested by Benjamin Franklin, then a senior leader (age 48) and a delegate from Pennsylvania, at the Albany Congress on July 10, 1754 in Albany, New York. More than twenty representatives of several Northern Atlantic colonies had gathered to plan their defense related to the French and Indian War, the front in North America of the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France, spurred on by George Washington’s recent defeat in the Ohio valley. The Plan represented one of multiple early attempts to form a union of the colonies “under one government as far as might be necessary for defense and other general important purposes.”
How many know that a “clear chain of constitutional evolution proceeds from the Albany Plan of Union to the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution of the United States”? (p. 43)
How many have noticed that “when compared with the Articles of
Confederation, the Constitution clearly less constraining than the
document it supplanted…the Constitution did not limit the powers of
government; it expanded them”? (p. 48) Yet,
While the authors of the Constitution did deliberately expand the powers of the federal government, they just as deliberately tried to prevent the creation of a democratic government. (p. 52)
How many are aware of what the Confederate Constitution tells us about the US Constitution.
A first draft that remains of the Confederate Constitution.
As well as the drift from its principles since its adoption.
This is especially true because…
“the problems that the authors of the Confederate Constitution actually did address were overwhelmingly associated with the use of legislative powers. Yes, legislative powers used to impose costs on the general public to provide benefits to narrow constituencies”? (p. 107)
The Constitution often is portrayed as a document that limits the power of the federal government and guarantees the liberty of its citizens…
When compared to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution places less constraint on the federal government and allows those who run the government more discretion and autonomy and less accountability.
The adoption of the Constitution enhanced the powers of government and laid the foundation for two centuries of government growth. (pp. 66-67)
American classroom teaching American history.
The Elitist Constitution
Holcombe’s section on “The Elitist Constitution” is fascinating.
It lays out the case for why…
“[t]he Constitution devised democratic processes for collective decision-making, but the Founders had no intention of designing a government that would respond to the will of the majority,” (p. 70)
…as illustrated by the fact that citizens …
“had almost no direct input into the federal government as the Constitution was originally written and ratified.” (p. 70)
The section on the Electoral College is even more striking, as it stands in sharp variance from the presumptions behind almost the entire current debate over the National Popular Vote compact:
[A]t the time the Constitution was written the Founders anticipated that in most cases no candidate would receive votes from a majority of the electors.
The Founders reasoned that most electors would vote for one candidate from their own states…
...and it would be unlikely that voting along state lines would produce any candidate with a majority of the votes. (p. 75)
Consequently,
The Founders envisioned that in most cases the president would end up being chosen by the House of Representatives from the list of the top-five electoral vote recipients…
Furthermore, there was no indication that the number of electoral votes received should carry any weight besides creating a list of the top five candidates…
The process was not intended to be democratic. (p. 76)
I found the issues discussed above to be of particular interest. But
there is far more in the book to learn from, and often be surprised by,
in comparison to what history courses usually teach.
Seventh grade history class as taught within a private school.
America’s Evolution Away From Founding Values
Such issues include the evolution of parties, the influence of Andrew Jackson, who …
“fought for democracy, but, ironically, the result of making the nation’s government more democratic has been to expand the scope and power of government in response to popular demands for govern programs,” (p. 91)
which…
... “the Founders foresaw and tried to guard against by limiting the role of democracy in their new government,” (p. 91),
...the War Between the States (“the single most important event in the transformation of American government,” (p. 93)
And, including the elimination of state succession as a real possibility, the Reconstruction Era amendments, the origins of interest group politics, the evolution of federal regulatory power, the evolution of the incentives of civil servants, the Sixteenth Amendment (income tax) as
“a response to the demand for a larger federal government,” (p. 149)
…a different take on the 1920s, in which …
“[f]ar from representing a retreat from progressivism, the 1920s extended the now-established orthodoxy, (p. 154)
…added insight into the New Deal and the courts, Social Security as the …
“one New Deal program for the responsibility for fundamentally transforming the historical, constitutional role of the federal government,” (p. 175)
…how
...“The Great Society represents the ultimate triumph of democracy, because for the first time a major expansion in the scope of government was based on the demands of the electorate, with no extenuation circumstances” (p. 205),
…and far more.
In sum, there are very many good reasons to recommend Liberty in Peril.
In it, Randall Holcombe provides not just a powerful and insightful
look into crucial aspects of America’s evolution away from the
principles of the revolution that created it but also an important
warning:
Unfortunately, many Americans do not appear to fully understand these dangers as they continue to push the foundations of their government away from liberty and toward democracy. (p. 225)
Why is this important?
Now, global capital has created a tiny minority of wealthy people who make the feudal lords seem almost a New York rush hour crowd by comparison. As few as three multi-billionaire Americans have as much combined wealth as 150 million Americans, all of those expected to dutifully troop off to the polls and vote for continuing the system that is moving much closer to a financial breakdown, with more pain and suffering for more Americans and the rest of the world than the last collapse caused. Using public funds to bail out private wealth temporarily saved that one and the public good be damned. That cannot be allowed to happen again, and uprisings all over the world are taking place because more people can’t take it anymore. They feel the pain and see the handwriting on the wall, which may still be beyond those of us who can only use our smartphones to get dumb news which tells us nothing but what consciousness control pays its media to cram into our heads.
...
It once was easier to get away with when there were enough people getting by to feel comfortable enough to think maybe it would eventually all work out for the best. That former working middle class is sinking lower, the lower class is in more misery than ever in modern times, and the tiny minority at the top is richer than ever before based on its purchase of armies and a professional class also dwindling in numbers but still numerous enough to transform minds and politics into acceptance of the economic slavery that passes for democracy.
It can’t and won’t last much longer and if we wait for nature to take action it will obviously be a disaster. But if we organize and act as a human race, facing our problems as a race threatened with annihilation if we don’t work together, the result could be the salvation offered by real democracy in which the words of past revolutionaries like Malcolm and Martin become the actions of the present generation. That means ending capitalism and beginning humanity.
- Frank Scott’s political commentary and satire are online at the blog legalienate: http//legalienate.blogspot.com
Conclusions
Here are my “take aways” for whatever it is worth.
The founders did not intend, nor want, America to be a “democracy”.
They wanted America to be a Republic.
A Republic protects individual rights and freedoms, not to mention liberty.
A “democracy” is mob rule and is easily manipulated by people with money, power and influence.
This is what happened to America.
Today, America is a “democracy” in name, and an oligarchy by function.
As an oligarchy, as history clearly states, that it will end catastrophically.
The ONLY was to avoid catastrophic turmoil is to drastically alter the current operating framework that the United States exists under. It must go from “democracy” to something else…
If you enjoyed this post, you can view similar posts by checking out this link to the SHTF index. Here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This post is very top-heavy with videos that were taken at the start of the 2020 Chinese New Year at the same time that the Coronavirus outbreak. As I post this, all the roads have roadblocks and police in hazmat suits are performing 100% checks for the illness. It’s a frightening and terrifying time.
At the time that this is posted, you are twice as likely to die from this illness than to recover from it.
At the time that this is posted, you are twice as likely to die from this illness than to recover from it.
Everyone is terrified of this. We have seen videos of people collapsing and all sorts of bad things with this virus. It is very dangerous, and extremely lethal.
Luckily, the Chinese government has stepped in and has taken proactive and rapid action. It is really quite astounding what they have put in place. I dare say that America could never begin to match this kind of response. Already, there is a change in the trajectory of the vector of this most serious illness.
Here we have some videos that I have collected off from Chinese social media. They all tell a story.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
All roads are blocked. Everyone is staying home and all holiday festivities are shut down. No one is going out, having fun or being social in any way. Everyone is hiding inside their homes.
Roadblock
These roadblocks are everywhere. Not only in Wuhan. They are nation-wide. All cities have roadblocks, and there are police at all the train and bus stations, not to mention airports, bridges, ferries and all hubs of transport.
Most are manned by police and local government security agents. Further, housing has the private security that are naturally “deputized” as an arm of the local police and they are also conducting strong security checks and monitoring.
The military are also present. They, in their various forms, are helping in the control of population, the distribution of supplies and monitoring of traffic. Everything is all quite ordered. It’s all very organized.
Wuhan virus roadblock.
China is building two new complete hospitals in Wuhan to handle the emergency.
The first hospital is to be completed in ten days. The second will be completed shortly afterwards. These two, concrete and steel, full-capability hospitals will augment the tent-city military hospitals that are positioned in and around Wuhan.
The Chinese have mobilized and hospital equipment and gear are in route and there are no excuses. Truckloads, boat-loads, and plane-loads of supplies to equip these hospitals are in route and on the way to staff these new constructions.
Mobilized construction of a new Wuhan hospital.
A patient recovers
This is a particularly lethal virus. However, people can fight it naturally and recover. The ratio right now is that two people die for ever one that recovers. However, there is hope that a cure and inoculation can be developed quickly. In the meantime, the sick are told to fight it off. The old, the feeble and the sick cannot do so well, and thus they die.
In fact, one patient – a wealthy man in Wuhan, left the hospital and told the staff that he will not stay in the hospital to wait to die. So he took off and sped away. The police are right now trying to find him. The mere presence of him in a room with you will contaminate everyone around him. It’s like a scene from one of those horror / science fiction movies.
A patient recovers.
Hospital workers are working around the clock to contain the illness.
I have seen video after video of tied and passed out hospital workers. They are over-extended and many have been working for 72 hours straight with no breaks. Some, like this gal inject solutions to keep them going through this prolonged emergency.
Hospital workers keeping on the job.
Instruction videos are all over the internet on how to use and wear a mask.
You can expect this, but it’s pretty stunning. The workers, and the staff are taking it on themselves, on their personal accounts, to teach others how to hand this emergency. They are doing so as Rufus-style heroes and heroines. This is really wonderful, and for once, a good use for social media.
Here we have an instructional video on how to properly wear a face mask.
How to wear a face mask.
Individual towns are erecting roadblocks and stopping everyone from going in or out.
You know, it’s not just only the local governments that are placing roadblocks. The citizens and individuals within the rural communities and housing communities within the cities that are doing so as well. These small groups have set up these road blocks and are keeping everyone out of their communities.
Not everyone agrees with the government in staying home. Additionally, there are stubborn old people, poor people who are isolated and outside the major communication channels and just “hard-headed” fools that want to do their own thing.
No one is being permitted in or out of these communities. How do I know? I’ve got all my relatives locked inside at least three different communities.
Local community roadblock.
People are handing out free face masks.
Heroes come in different sizes and shapes. All the stores are sold out of face masks. But some people have supplies of them. You know, like factories, like clinics, like paint supply stores. The workers and the owners are then taking their stock and handing them out to others. It’s a kind gesture and a very important thing to do during this emergency.
Handing out free face-masks.
Police and militia are going up and down the streets telling everyone to stay inside.
Instead of fireworks exploding for hours on end, the streets are eerily quiet. Instead, troops of public service officials are marching up and down the streets with bullhorns. They are announcing people to stay inside their houses and not to go out. They are telling them to keep clean and avoid crowds. They are doing this because all taxi, DD, public transportation and buses are shut down.
These are the “town criers” for people who are not tech-savvy and monitoring the radio, the television, the internet, and the social media.
Town criers announcing to stay inside the house.
Roadblock inspection on a major highway.
All of the traffic on the major highways are pulled over and go through inspection. They are monitoring everyone for fever and making sure that ill or sick people are not out and about.
This is the best that they can do, because (as we know now) the incubation period can be from 0 to 14 days, and the person will not be aware that they are sick, but they will be high contagious. So the best thing to do is to secure everyone inside their own individual homes and not be out and about.
Highway roadblock and inspection.
Hospitals are overflowing.
What do you do when a large percentage of a city of 14 million people are sick? The hospitals are overcrowded, and the staff overworked.
Luckily the Chinese military has stepped in and they have clinics in tent cities all over Wuhan. Here, we have shipping container operating rooms, and other military systems used with great effect to help.
Here’s what it’s like. Can you imagine this in say New York City or Chicago?
Hospitals are over-flowing.
Communities are taking matters into their own hands.
Some communities will not take no for an answer, and they have established local militia to guard the communities to keep them in quarantine. These militias are quite different from American militias. Where you would find people toting AR-15, and AK-47 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, wearing camouflage clothing, and wearing Alice-harnesses. In China, they would wear something very visible to identify themselves as militia, and they would be armed with very sharp and lethal cutlery. And, please, make no mistake… they know how to use them.
Local militia in China.
Special equipment and care must be taken.
This novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), is so lethal and so contagious that it strains the most commonly available hospital equipment. Workers must wear special bio-hazard suits to work with it and handle the patients.
The different levels of hazmat suits.
As a result, the Chinese government has all the manufacturers working overtime, 24-7, non-stop to make new suits, new masks, new respiratory systems, and rapidly produce more medical supplies. There are tons of videos of workers making these articles of clothing, face masks and other medical and emergency gear.
Now, rather than post those videos, here’s a video showing just the kind of special gear that the hospitals need to utilize to fight this viral agent.
Hospital staff in full protection gear.
Hospitals must equip their staff with gear that is classified as Biosafety level four. This is the kind of gear that hospital workers require to use at this time.
What are Biosafety Levels (BSLs)?
There are four biosafety levels. Each level has specific controls for containment of microbes and biological agents. The primary risks that determine levels of containment are infectivity, severity of disease, transmissibility, and the nature of the work conducted. Origin of the microbe, or the agent in question, and the route of exposure are also important.
-CDC
“BSL-4 builds upon the containment requirements of BSL-3 and is the highest level of biological safety. There are a small number of BSL-4 labs in the United States and around the world. The microbes in a BSL-4 lab are dangerous and exotic, posing a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections. Infections caused by these microbes are frequently fatal and without treatment or vaccines. Two examples of microbes worked with in a BSL-4 laboratory include Ebola and Marburg viruses. “
Biosafety level four. This is the kind of gear that hospital workers require to use at this time.
Military are mobilized.
Not well reported outside of China, is the fact that the Chinese have fully mobilized their military.
They are not only treating this emergency as a precursor to a pandemic. But, and note-worthy, they are treating it as a WMD… a biological attack and have mobilized their entire military force to contain it.
Biological warfare (BW)—also known as germ warfare—is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities (viruses, which are not universally considered "alive") that reproduce or replicate within their host victims. Entomological (insect) warfare is also considered a type of biological weapon. This type of warfare is distinct from nuclear warfare and chemical warfare, which together with biological warfare make up NBC, the military initialism for nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). None of these are considered conventional weapons, which are deployed primarily for their explosive, kinetic, or incendiary potential.
- Wikipedia
Medical Staff are divided into “task groups” all lead by a viral specialist.
The Chinese have organized trained experts in both viral agents, and biological warfare. These are health professionals that have been dispatched to all the hospitals in all of the cities. They are the experts that will guide and lead the individual hospitals through this emergency. They know what to do, how to handle things, and the proper actions to take.
Experts arrive at a hospital.
Airplane scanning of passengers.
Of course you are constantly being scanned to see if you have a fever or are showing any sign of contamination by this viral agent. Here is a video of some staff checking the patients on board a plane.
That’s about it for now. I’ll post more videos when I get a moment. Please allow these videos to download. They are certainly interesting and provides you with a better idea of what is going on in China, compared to what CNN and FOX can provide.
If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to go visit other similar posts in my China index. Here…
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This comes from The Economic Collapse Blog, and all credit to the author. The article is edited to fit the font and formatting style of this blog, and I added pictures and minor text corrections.
Just two months before the Wuhan outbreak, a “high-level pandemic exercise” entitled “Event 201” was held in New York City.
On October 18th the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together “15 leaders of business, government, and public health” to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet.
The current coronavirus outbreak that originated in China did not begin until December, and so at that time it was supposedly just a hypothetical exercise.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.
I find it quite interesting that the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation was involved, because they are also financial backers of the
institute that was granted a U.S. patent for “an attenuated coronavirus” in November 2018.
It appears that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been
quite interested in the threat posed by coronaviruses for quite some
time.
Event 201
Eric Toner, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health
Security, spearheaded putting “Event 201” together. In his scenario, a
coronavirus outbreak had begun on Brazil’s pig farms…
Toner’s simulation imagined a fictional virus called CAPS. The analysis, part of a collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, looked at what would happen if a pandemic originated in Brazil’s pig farms.
Even though the outbreak was quite limited at first, Toner’s scenario ultimately showed that a coronavirus pandemic could kill 65 million people…
The pretend outbreak started small: Farmers began coming down with symptoms that resembled the flu or pneumonia.
From there, the virus spread to crowded and impoverished urban neighborhoods in South America.
Flights were canceled, and travel bookings dipped by 45%.
People disseminated false information on social media.
After six months, the virus had spread around the globe.
A year later, it had killed 65 million people.
Let us certainly hope that this current outbreak does not evolve into that sort of a nightmare.
A horror of a nightmare.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
According to Reuters, there are now more than 800 confirmed cases, and the death toll has shot up to 25…
China confirmed 830 cases of patients infected with the new coronavirus as of Jan. 23, while the death toll from the virus has risen to 25, the National Health Commission said on Friday.
Wuhan death.
People! This is not your average “everyday” flu or bug. This virus is a killer. It strikes hard and fast, and within minutes. Here is an actual video of one of the fellows that it killed. Video is pulled from the surveillance cameras.
It’s a horror!
This guy actually died. He was one of the first confirmed deaths.
But many are skeptical that the official figures are accurate. Because the images coming out of Wuhan are extremely alarming…
Disturbing images of Wuhan residents dropping unresponsive to the floor have emerged on Instagram following the diseased Chinese city’s coronavirus lockdown.
Wuhan has been branded a “zombieland” by frantic locals after Chinese authorities told residents they are not allowed to leave yesterday morning.
Pictures from inside the city paint an apocalyptic picture as medics patrol in hazmat suits and gas masks.
Over the past 48 hours, numerous videos have been posted on social
media that supposedly show violently sick people that have literally
collapsed in the streets of Wuhan. Here is just one example.
If people are literally dropping where they stand, that would seem to
indicate that we aren’t being told the full truth about this virus.
It affects everyone. In all walks of life.
Chinese authorities are trying to keep everyone calm, but they are
definitely treating this like it is no ordinary outbreak. For example,
one airline passenger that was suspected of having the virus was
actually “wheeled out of an airport in a quarantine box”…
Footage has emerged showing an airline passenger with suspected SARS-like coronavirus being wheeled out of an airport in a quarantine box.
The man inside the box is wearing a protective suit, a mask and gloves after he reportedly showed possible symptoms, including a fever, during screening and was isolated from other travelers.
The box is surrounded by staff wearing blue masks as it is wheeled to a waiting ambulance outside a terminal at the airport in Fuzhou in south-eastern China.
Wuhan death.
The whole world was stunned when it was announced that the entire
city of Wuhan would be facing a quarantine, but now seven other Chinese
cities are also being locked down.
Wuhan location within China.
In addition, big cities all over China are canceling festivities for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday…
Major Chinese cities, including Beijing and quarantine-blocked Wuhan, banned all large gatherings over the coming Lunar New Year festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar, in an expanding effort to contain a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak.
The announcement Thursday came as authorities expanded travel restrictions imposed on Wuhan to surrounding municipalities, shutting down travel networks and attempting to quarantine about 25 million people – more than the population of Florida.
Wuhan death.
We have never seen anything like this before in the entire modern history of China.
Profound steps are being taken.
Would Chinese officials really take such dramatic measures if the threat was not real?
“We don’t want the American public to be worried about this because their risk is low,” says Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “On the other hand, we are taking this very seriously and are dealing very closely with Chinese authorities.”
-American Center for Disease Control
Hopefully they are correct, and hopefully this outbreak will blow over sooner rather than later.
Hospitals are being overwhelmed and already one of the doctors has died.
But a virologist that played a key role in identifying SARS in 2003 insists that what we have seen so far is just the beginning…
“A bigger outbreak is certain,” said Guan Yi, a virologist who helped identify severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. He estimated – “conservatively,” he said – that this outbreak could be 10 times bigger than the SARS epidemic because that virus was transmitted by only a few “super spreaders” in a more defined part of the country.
“We have passed through the ‘golden period’ for prevention and control,” he told Caixin magazine from self-imposed quarantine after visiting Wuhan. “What’s more, we’ve got the holiday traffic rush and a dereliction of duty from certain officials.”
I am petrified.
And if that wasn’t enough to send a chill down your spine, just check out what else he had to say…
“I’ve seen it all: bird flu, SARS, influenza A, swine fever and the rest. But the Wuhan pneumonia makes me feel extremely powerless,” he told Caixin. “Most of the past epidemics were controllable, but this time, I’m petrified.”
Wuhan death.
The next week or two will be an absolutely critical time.
If authorities are able to stop the number of cases from rising at an
exponential rate, and if there are able to keep it mostly confined to
just a few areas of China, we may have a chance to prevent a global
pandemic.
But if not, we may be facing a worst case scenario.
And according to “Event 201”, a worst case scenario could potentially mean tens of millions of dead people.
If you enjoyed this post, you can find other similar posts here at this index…
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off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few decades, you should be aware that most Americans are quite unhappy. The progressive liberals hate the nation, the country and what it stands for. They want it to burn, be destroyed and replaced with a social utopia. The conservatives hate what the nation has become. They want a full return to the original intended government, and a leadership that obeys it. Meanwhile, the wealthy and the powerful, in full control of the government, is playing both sides against each other.
A conflict is inevitable.
There should be no question at all that our nation is at an impasse. There is a serious question of direction. As in what direction should the nation follow?
Embrace a Marxist paradise with the genocide of deplorables.
Scrap all the progressive “improvements” and return the government back to the original intent.
The Conflict.
Basically, there are those who see America as a thing to be preserved and another who see it as a thing needing to be destroyed.
Patriots want a return to the original principles of the founding.
Progressives want everything torn down and replaced with a Marxist utopia.
The Marxist Plan.
It was said by a number of Marxist thinkers over the decades and most notably William Ayers, that for America to be destroyed, it was a thing to be destroyed first from within, then by getting help from the outside.
William Ayers.
And while Marxist and Anarchist apologists will be quick to minimize those statements through saying its simply from a man caught in the winds of his time, its incredibly important to note that this is the prevailing thought among higher-level academia. An academia which has groomed the brokers of power in all of our nation’s ruling agencies.
Ayers is but one man with a relatively small group, an incredibly high percentage of academics in this nation not only sided with him but not-so-quietly cheered such abhorrent actions on, shaping higher education for the decades to come.
Which brings us to the present day.
William Ayers was behind the Antifa riots in Berkley, California.
In every sociology program in America, undergrads are taught Max Weber’s theories on authority in a society and, perhaps more importantly, his theories on Bureaucracy. Normally juxtaposed to Gramsci’s theory of the superstructure, it is stressed in lectures that in order to control a society, control over the bureaucracy must first be established.
The American Government today.
Once that control is slowly implemented, there is no need for a sudden revolution. Control is already obtained. Crime becomes a tool of political power rather than a question of morality. Through this power the ability to define one’s enemies- and thus eliminate them- is simple.
Where we find ourselves today is the veil of objectivity in such a bureaucracy having been ripped away.
The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.
The ongoing impeachment farce has brought a vibrant highlight to that power wield upon anyone or anything they deem a worthy target. If the denizens of the ‘interagency group’, an unelected, unaccountable group of ring-knockers who apparently view themselves outside the authority of anyone but they, who decided to target the President for literally nothing at all, what will they do to you?
Indeed, all this political posturing is a war that is raging all around us.
When the dust clears, how will it affect you?
The Fourth Amendment.
I don’t believe its far-fetched to say the Fourth Amendment is finished.
There are no Fourth Amendment protections for Americans.
There is no such thing as privacy when so many freely chose to live their lives online. Where they are always volunteering an incredibly high amount of data on themselves. Which is a data set known as patterns of life in the intelligence world…
And when such a time occurs as say, a threatening of a mass disarmament and criminalization of firearms ownership and the right to organize and train under arms…
… that without protections against the machine, armed networks of potential guerrillas may very well be unknowingly compromised before such a thing can even get off the ground.
Revolt is fated to end before it’s even vocalized.
America is a full-on police state in the very definition of what a police state actually is.
The process behind this is known as the Target-Centric Intelligence Cycle.
It follows five steps.
Find
Fix
Finish
Exploit
Assess.
It begins with a target of interest. All data is collected on the potential target with the aim of creating a plan of attack. Finishing the target is the actions-on stage. The target is either apprehended or neutralized, depending on the desired result, giving way to exploitation and assessment- whatever effects were felt in the larger targeted community, while resetting the cycle based on new targets of interest.
Military Targeting Process.
With the tools at their disposal, this process can be done almost entirely remotely with the only physical surveillance necessary is to confirm the data on the targets, and usually just before conducting the actions-on raid of the cycle.
Think about that one for a second.
The interesting thing about collective action and social movements is
that once it gathers a fever pitch, its far too much of a risk for the
superstructure to wield collective force. Some would argue that the use
of force even reveals the waning influence of the superstructure. Right
or wrong, the optics of such a move are never good and in my personal
experience, only galvanizes a people against that power.
So the question remains then- what happens when a government decides on a dirty war against those it deems a threat?
They hate us.
We know without a doubt at this stage that the real power structure in this nation absolutely hates you and I.
By their own words they have nothing but contempt for us, for our points of view, for our way of life.
They hate us. They all have come from “privilege”, and have come to despise us common people.
Indoctrinated by the very same America-hating academics who serve on advisory committees…
… to the very agencies which created the powers for themselves…
… the communist revolution of gaining control of Gramsci’s superstructure has been applied to the principles of bureaucracy outlined by Weber.
Your future home – if you are lucky.
Now, with the tools they have at their disposal, how would such an organization commit itself to a dirty war- not risking overt action but rather simply eliminating voices of dissent quietly?
Simple implementation.
So-called ‘martial law’ doesn’t have to be declared nor would it be desirable. Ties between government agencies and elements of underground criminal organizations are very real- and will be used.
Rather than risk their own officers, target packets will be handed off to the local gang and a robbery gone wrong just might happen. Do not forget that they’ve imported millions of undocumented- and thus disposable- people for more than just votes.
And while all of this looks like a pattern to the folks who are awake, but being covert in nature, its an entirely deniable way to wage a war on anyone deemed a threat.
Maybe outright killing a target is too dramatic.
Maybe you’ll get caught on false charges and given a draconian sentence, while career offenders are released for ‘processing errors’.
You could be taken into custody for jay-walking, having a photo on your computer, or driving while talking on a cell-phone. Then, you could spend five or ten years in prison.
Maybe your bank accounts will get frozen or assets seized. Without hard proof (or even with it), naysayers are opening the door to lawsuits you can’t afford to fight while the rest continue their normalcy bias.
Thenormalcybias, ornormalitybias, isabeliefpeopleholdwhenthereisapossibilityofadisaster. Itcausespeopletounderestimateboththelikelihoodofadisasteranditspossibleeffects, becausepeoplebelievethatthingswillalwaysfunctionthewaythingsnormallyhavefunctioned. Thismayresultinsituationswherepeoplefailtoadequatelypreparethemselvesfordisasters, andonalargerscale, thefailureofgovernmentstoincludethepopulaceinitsdisasterpreparations. About 70% ofpeoplereportedlydisplaynormalcybiasindisasters.
- Normalcy bias - Wikipedia
They’ve been waging a dirty war, and its about to get even worse as more people wake up to the totality of the situation.
Break the Cycle.
Break the cycle. Its way more than just about firearms, the President, or your so-called rights.
Its a fight for survival.
The weight of an unaccountable class of people are bearing down on the rest of us, and its high time to shrug them off.
Recognize that we are an enemy to them. They are at war with you and I.
We are a threat to the “deep state” oligarchy and their “swamp”. This is a fact that will not go away. We can never coexist peacefully.
One thing is absolutely certain- they won’t back off any of this and they have no interest in stopping.
The bureaucracy which wholly serves the Leftist cause in the United States wants voices like ours gone and they’ve propagandized us as no longer being human.
And when they fail to yield to protests and non-violent demonstrations, you must be prepared for what comes next.
Genocide.
Conclusion & Takeways
What is the point of this aimless and wandering post?
Peaceful coexistence between Marxists and deplorables is impossible.
The oligarchy owns the “Deep State”.
The vast numbers of the “Deep State” are Marxists.
Therefore…
Deplorables are going to be silenced, firstly. (Already in process.)
Then they will be treated as second or third class citizens. (Also already in process.)
Then they will be disarmed. (Already in process.)
Finally they will be exterminated.
Gear up. You have to be an idiot not to see the “writing on the wall”.
If you enjoyed this little rant, you can read more here…
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
One of the often cited misconceptions that many Americans have is that China would collapse if the United States were to stop trading with her. The idea is that “China needs us more than we need them”. It’s not true, and it’s not even remotely true. Here, is the actual import data that China imports from the United States. Take a good long hard look at it.
China could very well have an embargo of the United States, and would do just fine.
The items that China imports from the United States.
Here’s a graphical summary.
While most Americans, and certainly most Alt-Right conservative Americans are under the impression that China imports an enormous amount of good from the United States, this is not the case.
Import data on what China imports broken down by type and classification.
Key Points
By looking at the graph above, the only manufactured items that are of significance to China (from the United States) are aircraft. Other manufactured products actually represent a very tiny percentage of imports by type. For instance, American-made machines represent only 5% of the total machines imported by China.
Conclusion
In the global sphere of things, the United States is not a dominant supplier of things that China wants or needs. Therefore, America has very little leverage to influence China to do its’ bidding.
In order to cajole or manipulate the Chinese government to take on positions that America wants, there has to be other systems in play. These manipulations and adjustments of global power projection such as [1] the threat of war, [2] famine, [3] sickness, or [4] regional revolt are the tools that the United States is, and has been, using to force China to bend to it’s will.
It is not at all outlandish to believe that the CIA, NED, the NID and other arms of the enormous United States bureaucracy has a “dark hand” at play at this time. It’s the only “cards” that America can play.
If you enjoyed this, you might want to see other posts on this subject in my China general index here…
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
I wrote this piece during the 2020 Chinese New Year when China went DEFCON ONE.
At that time, all of us inside of China were stunned when out of the blue, all the holiday celebrations were cancelled, called up all militia, set up road blocks everywhere, and manned all the ICBM and SLBM installations on full retaliatory strike mode. China was on FULL ALERT and FULL MILITARY FOOTING.
World War III was adverted, but just narrowly.
China secured the virus, and weathered out 2020. When I wrote this piece no one was aware what was going on, but my background in ONI, MAJ pretty much told me that something “fishy” was up. At that time, I was unaware of the full depth and background.
So I wrote this piece.
I’ve tried to keep it updated, but stopped around June 2020 or so. In August 2020, the Chinese government made an official statement to the UN which pretty much validated everything written here. They blamed the USA for designing, developing, and releasing the COVID-19 in China during 2020 CNY. What’s more, they had documentation to support all their accusations. They had videos, biopsies, and some hard technical data to back up what I have collected.
Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump refused to respond to the statement made by China. They made no statments. They did not respond. The American media remained silent. It was as if China was talking to an empty room.
Instead, they gathered a military flotilla consisting of five assault carriers and marine landing forces and sailed to the South China Sea. They also engaged in numerous NGO-backed “color revolutions”, and tried to set up “The QUAD”, which was intended to be a “Asian NATO” lead by America to threaten Asia with.
As of October 2020, all American efforts to suppress China have failed. I am leaving this post as is for historical purposes. It’s pretty much well established as to whom developed and released the viral pathogen on China. And irregardless to what the American media reports, the leadership of most Asian nations, and European nations fully recognize that the United States is the culprit behind this biological warfare attack. As well as the global Coronavirus pandemic that has swept the world and collapsed world-wide trade and commerce in 2020.
Read and learn…
Given that the US fired the National Pandemic Response Team, withdrew its Pandemic Liaison Officer from Beijing, held two major pandemic simulations (attended by the Deputy Director of the CIA), and experienced multiple, unexplained pneumonia cases in Maryland and Virginia, does this look suspicious to you?
Or is it just me?
It does seem farfetched, doesn’t it?
That the United States will risk World War III, using nuclear weapons, by launching a coronavirus inside China during the 2020 Chinese New Year celebrations? But that is exactly the scenario that I fear has occurred.
Here we discuss this horror.
If this is the actual case, and it is actually intentionally engineered and used against China, it means that the USA is flirting with global nuclear annihilation. This is nothing that should be treated lightly.
Maybe not so far-fetched. When you get into the details…
Introduction
Many in the know, believe America has two options when it comes to winning a world war against China and Russia. Also, what most agree on is the fact that America cannot win a conventional war against either power, or both.
- Can America Win World War III? A Critical Analysis
Officially called the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), [renamed to COVID-19 for some odd reason] the contagion is a respiratory illness, a new type of viral pneumonia, in the same family of infections as SARS and MERS.
It highly contagious. It’s of a factor many, many time contagious than any other known virus.
High Contagiousness
Indeed, if we compare how SARS spread out in 2002-2003, it is hard not to notice how much more contagious nCoV-2019 is compared to SARS.
It took SARS three months to reach to the point of 300 cases between November 2002 and February 2003. In the climax of SARS, the daily number of newly registered cases in Mainland China never exceeded 200 cases.
In comparison, on 28th January 2020 alone, 1459 new cases of nCoV-2019 were reported nationwide, including 315 cases in Wuhan. In just a week between 20-28 January, the number of patients with nCoV-2019 exceeded the number of all SARS patients confirmed in Mainland China between 2002-2004!
Mainland China had just 5327 cases of SARS, but nCoV-2019 already had 5974 registered cases by the end of January 28th, 2020.
- Coronavirus: Summary to date & insights
Taken alone, it’s just “another” viral agent. Only this time it’s much stronger. However, taken in context with other events, other systems, and other considerations it points to some very serious conclusions; conclusions that are far too hard to ignore.
Everything seemingly points to biowarfare being waged against China.
Crazy! Right?
“(…) advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool “.
- “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, published by the conservative think tank “Project for a New American Century”
No nation would be so crazy, so stupid, so insane, so evil… as to launch a very deadly WMD inside a nuclear-armed world power on their most important holiday. Right?
The calls for drastic and immediate action against China are all over the major American neocon publications. Just because you (personally) are not aware of them, does not mean that they do not exist. These neocons are foaming at the mouth for a fight. They just cannot wait to go off the coast of China and start firing some of those expensive cruise missles at the Chinese mainland. They are all rearing up for another Iraq… or Afghanistan…
Who are they?
The culprits are the dominant Western Powers. Which pretty much is America and it’s allies (namely Britain). The objective is to put “stress” on China in a combined effort to contain her growing power and influence.
It seems so far-fetched.
No one would be that crazy, that evil, that insane to want to hurt a successful nation full of hard-working and family loving people. No one, unless…
…they are ideologically motivated.
Negotiation is not a policy. It's a technique. It's something you use when it's to your advantage, and something that you don't use when it's not to your advantage.
-John Bolton
During the 2020 Chinese New Year celebrations and mass-migration, a very dangerous and lethal virus exploded all over the nation. [renamed to COVID-19 for some odd reason]
This should not be a trivial concern.
To accuse the United States of doing so is not to be done lightly.
All that is presented herein is, of course, speculative. I sincerely wish, hope and desire that it is not the case at all. Though the sum total or unexplained coincidences have created a preponderance of evidence in support of America attacking China with multiple biological weapons…
Wuhan virus in 2020. [renamed to COVID-19 for some odd reason]
As it is pretty much a yearly event to have some type of flu or viral outbreak in China. The Chinese government is well-equipped to deal with these outbreaks.
However, what is different THIS TIME is that the virus is [1] new (not a strain of an existing virus), [2] extremely aggressive, [3] launched during the yearly Chinese migration, and [4] comes at the heels of a wide spectrum of American instigated attacks on China during the “Trump Trade Wars”.
Let’s open up this discussion with something that is well known all over the globe, but hidden from the Americans inside their echo-chamber media…
Swine flu was propagated by drones
As strange was it seems, the complete collapse of the pig farm industry in China in 2019 was propagated by drones. This is why so many isolated pig farms became infected. “Criminal elements” were using drones to spray the pigs with flu to devastate the pork industry.
The idea that drones would spread a virus was intriguing.
Who designed and modified the drones?
Who manufactured and modified them so professionally?
How were the drones in the South of China, equal to those in the West, North and East?
How can the pig farmers get a hold of the same viral agent?
Meanwhile the Western media isn’t reporting on the drone use to decimate the pork industry.
It’s using technology to destroy an entire national industry. And it’s blamed on “criminal gangs”. I know that gangs are powerful, but why would they ever want to destroy a national resource?
That is like Tony Soprano conspiring to sink every container ship in every port in the United States. It does not add up.
Tony Soprano
Trump trade war went “hot”
For some reason, ever since the “Trump trade war”, China has been hit with unusually dangerous and lethal germs, viral agents, and illnesses that has attacked livestock and people.
The Chinese chicken industry was almost wiped out in 2018 by the bird flu virus.
You do not need to believe me.
Just Google for viral outbreaks in China. It’s all over the place. It’s everywhere.
Ever since President Donald Trump became President and incorporated Neocon “War Hawks” on his negotiation team, China has been wracked with all sorts of [1] new, [2] novel, and [3] unusually lethal strains of viral agents. All of which cripple the Chinese people, food and livestock.
They have been relentless, and their control of the American media is such that no one notices or cares about their activities.
Swine flu devastated Chinese pork production in 2019.
History
Let’s take a look at the history behind the COVID-19. Here’s a time line. Check it all out…
Authorized and approved, and funded by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump.
2015
2015
Let’s focus on Dr. Shi Zhengli https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/27/pravda-us-army-created-covid-19-in-2015-research-proofs-or-debunking-you-pick/ Only focus on the work that she did. She took hundreds of trips to Yunnan to study bats and she was (more or less) the person that discovered that SARS-CoV came from bats. She and many others received grants from USA and China to, for some reason, create a chimeric bioweapon. I have not bothered to do any research to find the actual grants that were issued for this project. Here is the first important part, bats are the largest incubators of coronaviruses. But it was IMPOSSIBLE for bats to transmit the coronavirus to humans because they could not interact with human cells with ACE2 receptors. So the more typical route would be for a specific bat to infect some other animal (pig, bird, etc), and that animal then infects humans (from us eating said animal). It should be made abundantly clear that bats or the consumption of bats was NOT present at the Wuhan wet market. So there is absolutely zero proof of anyone in that market eating a bat and then spreading this virus. The study writes that Dr. Shi discovered a specific type of horseshoe bats that carry a unique strain of SARS coronavirus that can THEORETICALLY be transmitted to humans. The team named this SHC014-CoV. The science here is VERY complex and most will not understand it anyway, so to make it simple they made SARS into a super virus, that was airborne, could directly transmit to humans, and most importantly uses a glycoprotein S-Spike for RBD into ACE2. Let me make this very, very clear. The research team need to HACK SARS, give it GAIN OF FUNCTION just to make this virus POSSIBLE in nature. Again, I am ONLY referring to bat to human transmission, which the paper says is virtually impossible. Even Bat-animal-human ACE2 entry is absurdly improbable, but still possible, but then on top of that to have gain of function for R0+ aerosol? We are talking about a 0.00001% of evolution for this to happen. But this is still possible to evolve. Once this paper went public the backlash from the virology, biology, epidemiology community was heavy. Scientists could not understand why the team would intentionally weaponize SARS. That part can be verified. I heard that congress, or some government body then forced the UNC lab to be shutdown, grants revoked, and suddenly Dr. Shi goes back to China. I have not verified ANY of that information. Later in that same year, 2015, The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) opens the country’s FIRST BSL4 lab. This was a BIG DEAL in China, but opening a BSL4 lab in the middle of a major city was HEAVILY criticized. Dr. Shi was named the director of the BSL4 lab. I have HEARD that the scientific paper grants/work were, in part, from the DoD, which would not surprise me. I have not looked into that. Was SHC014 leaked from WIV BSL4? Absolutely not! SARS-CoV2 shares its closest connection to RaTG13, a different coronavirus found in Yunnan bats that has nothing to do with humans and has never infected humans. The most probable scenario is that the research team created this super weapon, their grants were cut and all of their research was terminated. The DoD 100% would have had this research and no one knows what they did with that. This is where Dr. Shi should exit our timeline, for now.
By 8/17 the COPD vaping sickness becomes an epidemic, and the CDC investigates 94 cases. The illness/deaths are later to be determined to come from vitamin E acetate. Once the government identified the specific products, the vaping deaths essentially dropped to zero. So it is highly IMPROBABLE that the vaping outbreak is related BUT it could have been used as cover OR it is highly probable that SOME/FEW of those cases was misdiagnosed and were actually COVID19. It would be great if ANY doctor could go back and look at those Virginia cases and confirm that COVID19 existed well before Wuhan.
29 June 2018
29 June 2018
In 6/29/18 At the Good Samaritan Society in Illinois, between mid May to June 29th, 20 suffer from an unknown respiratory illness, leaving 9 dead. All doctors were baffled and have zero answers to provide..
"The present invention provides a live, attenuated coronavirus comprising a variant replicase gene encoding polyproteins comprising a mutation in one or more of non-structural protein(s) (nsp)-10, nsp-14, nsp-15 or nsp-16."
It is an identical description of the current coronavirus [COVID-19]
"... a mutation in one or more of non-structural protein(s) (nsp)-10, nsp-14, nsp-15 or nsp-16."
Let that sink in…
May 2018
A sudden exit of the head of the “pandemic response” team in America exits. It is not cordial, and appears that he was forced out.
American Bio-Warfare Office Reorganization in 2018
At the same time, John Bolton take over all Bio-weapons programs and pandemic offices. There was a complete and utter shakedown. It went from a civilian response organizaiton, to a military offensive organization…
In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.
Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.
-MSN
A few months after the reorganization of the office…
January 2019 America runs a “Pandemic Exercise”.
‘Crimson Contagion’
The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year (2019) by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.
The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.
“He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.
The exercise played out in four separate stages, starting in January 2019.
The events were supposedly unspooling in real time — with the worst-case scenario underway as of Aug. 13, 2019 — when, according to the script, 12,100 cases had already been reported in the United States, with the largest number in Chicago, which had 1,400.
The fictional outbreak involved a pandemic flu, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was “very different than the novel coronavirus.” The staged outbreak had started when a group of 35 tourists visiting China were infected and then flew home to Australia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Britain and Spain, as well as to the United States, with some developing respiratory symptoms and fevers en route.
A 52-year-old man from Chicago, who was on the tour, had “low energy and a dry cough” upon his return home. His 17-year-old son on that same day went out to a large public event in Chicago, and the chain of illnesses in the United States started.
Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.
In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.
-MSN
A few months after the exercise, Canada tries to secretly import virulent viruses into China…
Imagine that!
29 June 2018
By the numbers in short order, we have in a very short time span… (1) Militarized Coronavirus Patent Granted (2) Bi-warfare office reorganized. (3) The “Pandemic Exercise”. And finally, after the results of the exercise, someone tries to sneak this very same virus into China….
March 2019 – Strange Shipment of Viruses to China
In March 2019, in a mysterious event, a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML biological labs ended up in China. Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. They claimed that it was just normal procedure.
What is unclear is why it was done in secret, and why the Chinese officials lodged a complaint. For certain, if this was just a routine transfer, the Chinese government would have been notified. And they would not have lodged a complaint.
Lethal viral agents.
Secretly imported into China.
The Chinese government filed a complaint.
Keep in mind that this was during the peak of the Trump trade wars, and at a time when remotely operated drones were spraying swine flu and decimating the Chinese pig population.
May 2019
May 2019
5/23-30/19 A Baltimore couple (one hour from Fort Detrick) check into a resort in Dominican Republic, only to later be found dead in their room. Autopsy shows pulmonary edema, respiratory failure. Both had prior medical conditions. Another American also checked into the hotel on the exact same day as the couple. She dropped dead in her hotel room on 5/25. Her husband said she collapsed 30+ minutes after drinking something from the mini-bar. She suffered a heart attack BUT also died from pulmonary edema, and a mystery respiratory illness. She had several underlying medical conditions. Her husband did NOT have any underlying medical conditions. It is important to note that the Baltimore couple died first but were not found for FIVE DAYS. FBI and CIA ran toxicology and everything came back clean. Official FBI result of THREE coincidental deaths was just that.. unexplained and coincidence. Heart attacks can happen, but pulmonary edema is something that takes days to destroy your lungs and have you drown to death. So we have an unknown virus. I cannot find any information if anyone else at the resort was sick or died. Just amazing that this case from Baltimore happens and a month later there are TWO retirement home outbreaks of mystery respiratory illness. To correct something in your article, Fort Detrick received a cease and desist order from the CDC on 7/15/19, which is coincidentally exactly when the retirement home outbreaks happened.
June 2019 – Strange Tweets
June 14, 2019– CDC finds US Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, VA non-compliant with its pathogen control agreement.
The Tweets from Turkish psychic, spiritual guru and ultra-nationalist. p.s. He is a known psychic and close to authorities. My bet he had insider information.
This is his tweet from 06/11/2019:
“”Decipher:
06/11/2019
The U.S. sent an aircraft of biological weapons to China. Epidemics may begin in China soon.They should not forget that if there is a Turk on earth, there is hope.””
source: https://twitter.com/EmirYildizdan/status/1138545686100815873
June 30, 2019– Unidentified pneumonia in Springfield, Virginia nursing home near Fort Detrick, VA, 15 minutes from Fort Belvoir, VA, where the US team trained for the Wuhan Military Games.
July 2019 – American and Canadian Bio-Labs Lock-Down.
July 9th, Report of vape pneumonia 100km southeast of Fort Detrick, VA. The lungs showed the ground glass shadow typical of Covid-19. Still unexplained.
July 12th, 2019–Respiratory outbreak at Springfield, Virginia assisted care facility, near Fort Detrick, VA kills 2, sickens 54. A third patient dies four days later. Deaths remain unexplained to this day.
July 17th, 2019–A pneumonia epidemic report reported at a nursing home in Burke, VA, 56 minutes from Fort Detrick, VA. It remains unexplained to this day.
July 26, Virginia State Health Bureau takes measures to prevent the spread of the pneumonia epidemic, including stopping collective activities, screening residents, and extra cleanliness.
In July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly removed from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML).
The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
People have speculated that there might be a connection between these two events. Perhaps, they wonder, that the Chinese have been stealing the weaponized viral agents. Perhaps, they wonder, that they were caught and then expelled from NWL.
But maybe something else was going on.
Perhaps, something else that had to be done in secret and kept away from the Chinese scientists.
August 2019 – American Germ Lab Shut Down.
August 6, 2019–CDC shuts down America’s main biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick, VA. A senior scientist describes the atmosphere there as one of “fear and mistrust.” The CDC refuses to provide details.
Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns
Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center.
In the statement, the C.D.C. cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision.
date: Aug. 5, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick-biohazard.html
And in another first, that very same month.
In late August, America got her first “vaping death” which low and behold matched the symptoms of Coronavirus PERFECTLY. Imagine that!
Fever
Low dry cough
Rapid onset of lung failure (with the characteristic “frosted glass shards” effect).
That could possibly be “patient zero”, and it was all scammed under the radar as E-cigarette mayhem.
Aug 23, 2019
The death appears to be the first among a spate of mysterious lung illnesses now under investigation by state and federal health officials in connection to vaping — at least 193 cases in 22 states, many in teens and young adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Vaping death: Person who used e-cigarettes died after ...
September 2019 – Trump signs an emergency Executive Order
In September 2019, President Trump signs an “emergency” Executive Order that gives 120 days for the development of a vaccine “just in case” a global pandemic were to occur. WTF?
September 2019–A nationwide outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia causes severe respiratory problems in hundreds of people, kills 54. So-called ‘vaping-associated lung disease’ shares same symptoms as Covid-19 and images invariably show the same bilateral ground-glass opacities.
September 2019 – Bolton and WHO
John Bolton figures predominantly in all of this.
The official US-WHO position is that the coronavirus originated
in Wuhan, Hubei Province and was first discovered in Late December. This statement is questioned by Chinese and Japanese virologistswho claim that the virus originated in the US.
Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an article in Science magazine that the first human infection has been confirmed as occurring in November 2019, (not in Wuhan), suggesting the virus originated elsewhere and then spread to the seafood markets. “One group put the origin of the outbreak as early as 18 September 2019.
A renowned Taiwanese virologist pointed to evidence that the virus could have originated at an earlier stage, stating : “We must look to September of 2019” (in America).
John Bolton
John Bolton (Neocon who was in favor of World War III with China) was fired. No one knows why.
Perhaps we should take a look at his preoccupation with biological warfare, to get some insight…
“About 2 years ago when he was still in the White House as national security advisor, John Bolton abruptly disbanded the government officials responsible for dealing with pandemics, global health security and bioterrorism. Apparently the health security bureaucracy is fragmented across various agencies, which means the White House has significant control over national health security.
This would explain the strange behavior and response of the CDC and other ostensibly independent government agencies. They’re fragmented and dependent on White House direction. This also seems like it would be a ripe environment for funny business by elements of the national security state. If health security is fragmented across various agencies and subject to White House control and can be easily kept out of the loop of things, there’s a greater probability that black ops could be implemented without worry of whistleblowers and the like.
-Global Research
The circumstances regarding his firing is speculated upon, but not one person states the real reason for the firing. It’s a big mystery, and both the Alt-Right, and the mainstream media speculated endlessly on this. Even Rush Limbaugh put in his two cents.
The official US-WHO position is that the coronavirus originated in Wuhan, Hubei Province and was first discovered in Late December. This statement is questioned by Chinese and Japanese virologistswho claim that the virus originated in the US.
In October, a top secret meeting was held with President Trump to discuss how the United States would fare during a pandemic situation.
They discussed the results from the on-going exercise “Crimson Contagion” that pretty much run from January 2019 into later Summer.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.
Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.
-MSN
Additionally, and strangely, at the same time…
October 18, 2019: The B. and M. Gates Foundation and the WEF were partners in the John Hopkins National Security October 2019 nCoV-2019 Pandemic “Simulation Exercise”. This event is in ADDITION to the American Government “Crimson Contagion,” exercise.
On October 18th the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together “15 leaders of business, government, and public health” to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet. Major participants were American military leadership, and certain neocon political figures.
Simulation Exercise of a coronavirus epidemic which results in 65 million dead. Supported by the World Economic Forum (WEF) representing the interests of Financial institutions, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation representing Big Pharma:
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. … For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.“We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 [which was also used as the name of the simulation] outbreak will kill 65 million people. .Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.”
Several of the occurrences of the nCoV-2019 exercise coincided with what really happened.
In the Event 201 Simulation of a Coronavirus Pandemic, a 15% collapse of financial markets had been “simulated”.
It was not “predicted” according to the organizers and sponsors of the event.
Private sector initiative. Participation of corporate execs, foundations, financial institutions, Banks, Big Pharma, CIA, CDC, No health officials on behalf of national governments or the WHO.
The simulation exercise was held on the same day as the opening of the CISM World Military Sports Games in Wuhan.
The Chinese were not invited. This is unusual, as almost all the major viral outbreaks for the last decade occurred inside of China and Africa.
The members took notes, and then returned to their day to day operations…
The very next day…
October 2019– American Military in Wuhan, China.
300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for the Military World Games on October 19. The American contingent did so abismially, that many have wondered if the American standards of performance has lowered, or that the participants were there for another purpose.
“They claim the inattentive attitude and disproportionately below average results of American athletes in the game indicate they might have been in for other purposes and they might actually be bio-warfare operatives, and that their place of residence during their stay in Wuhan was also close to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known cluster of cases occurred.”
-Wikipedia
And the poor showing by the American military wasn’t the only thing observed…
In October 2019, the US brought 172 (really 369) military athletes to Wuhan for the World Military Games. Despite having the largest military in the world, ten fold, the US came in 35th behind nations like Iran, Finland and Slovenia. No video or photos exist of the US team, no records were kept, a huge team but a pitiful performance for the best military in the world.
The US team did so badly that they were called “Soy Sauce Soldiers” by the Chinese. In fact, many never participated in any event and stayed near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the disease is said to have originated only days after the US left the area.
The US team went home on October 28, 2019 and within 2 weeks, the first human contact cases of COVID 19 were seen in Wuhan. The Chinese have not been able to find “patient zero” and believe he was a member of the US team.
They also have sources that say the US had misrepresented influenza that Trump claims has killed thousands, an influenza carried to China by the US team, an influenza that was really COVID 19, a disease developed in a military bio-warfare facility in the state of Washington, now “ground zero” in the US for COVID 19.
The Chinese claim, something censored in the US, that the inattentive attitude and disproportionately below average results of American athletes in the game indicate they might have been in for other purposes and they might actually be bio-warfare operatives, and that their place of residence during their stay in Wuhan was also close to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known cluster of cases occurred.
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/13/china-us-brought-covid19-to-china-during-army-games-hid-disease-in-us-as-influenza/
Additionally, and pay strict attention to this…
… the housing for the American military was also in close proximity to the [1] Iranian, [2] Italian and [3] South Korean military housings.
End October 2019
It appears that the American virus Covid 19 came with the U.S. soldier, Maatje Benassi. Maatje Benassi took part in the military games in Wuhan in October 2019.
Maatje Benassi has a relative, Matthew Benassi.
Matthew Benassi works at the Fort Detrick, the U.S. military’s chemical and biological weapons laboratory where the 2019 bio-warfare agent accident occurred.
She ( Maatje ) competed in the Wuhan Military Games as a women’s road cyclist. Maatje Benassi Age: 53 Gender: female Maatje Benassi is a NATO admiral guard and driver (diplomatic security officer) of Dutch origin.
What is a 53 year old woman doing in the Olympics?
She lives in close proximity to Fort Detrick. Fort Detrick is an American biological warfare lab, and the place where the biological weapons are developed.
We do not know how many others were infected, but we know that 5 US military where emergency rescued from the Dongfang Jianguo Hotel.
Chinese medical staff went to the Dongfang Jianguo hotel to rescue five American military participants who were suffering from [1] high fevers, [2] shallow coughs, and [3] chest pains.
Once retrieved from the Dongfang Jianguo hotel they were sent to the Wuhan hospital. There, their symptoms were recorded, some treatment provided and they were immediately evacuated to the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport.
They were then picked up by a special US military airplane to evacuate them to the US.
After the American military contingent left China, the hotel staff started to come down with an illness.
In all, 42 employees of the Oriental Hotel were diagnosed with COVID-19, becoming the first cluster in Wuhan.
At the time only 7 people from the market had been thus diagnosed (and treated before the hotel staff). All 7 had contact with the 42 from the hotel. From this source, the virus spread to the rest of China.
October 2019
A video surfaced that alleges that an American service person appears to purposefully spread COVID in Wuhan.
She is also described as an “armed diplomatic driver” with a history of ties to intelligence operations involving key RussiaGate figures.
Benassi was driver for General James Jones, of ShadowNet, (George Webb) and worked for US Army intelligence. ShadowNet and Psy-Group along with Cambridge Analytica were part of the Mueller investigation, seeking information on their relationships with Paul Manafort (imprisoned) and Donald Trump Jr. (not yet imprisoned).
Black-ops organizational chart.
2 November 2019– Wuhan Outbreaks.
The first (well established) coronavirus case in Wuhan appeared two weeks later, on November 2. [renamed to COVID-19]
Relative locations of the Wuhan vaccine lab, and where the American soldiers stayed, relative to the Wuhan wet market. Note that the American soldiers shared a hotel with Iranian, and North Korean and Italian soldiers at that location.
Keep in mind that the Coronavirus incubation period is 14 days.
So, fourteen days later…
15 November 2019
29 June 2018
“”Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” a source says.”” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273 So the CIA knew before China about a virus outbreak of pandemic proportions?!.
So how did the President deal with this information?
Strangely, while President Trump was downplaying the news in China as “just a flu”,
A “strange pneumonia” was circulating in northern Italy as long ago as November, weeks before doctors were made aware of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, one of the European country’s leading medical experts said this week.
“They [general practitioners] remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November,” Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, said in an interview with the National Public Radio of the United States.
“This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.”
December 2019– Outbreaks increase in severity.
The first (outbreak) occurrences in China appeared in December.
Here is a statement from StatNews (“DNA sleuths read the coronavirus genome, tracing its origins and looking for dangerous mutations,” January 24, 2020). It’s a bit complicated, but read it over, and then I’ll comment:
“Given what’s known about the pace at which viral genomes mutate, if nCoV [the coronavirus] had been circulating in humans since significantly before the first case was reported on Dec. 8, the 24 genomes [from, presumably, 24 different samples of the virus in 24 people] would differ more. Applying ballpark rates of viral evolution, Rambaut [one of the “experts”] estimates that the Adam (or Eve) virus from which all others are descended first appeared no earlier than Oct. 30, 2019, and no later than Nov. 29.”
My, my. That’s quite a precise peg: the coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, for the very first time, between October 30 and November 29, 2019.
-No more fake news
They appeared to be of minor concern. The incubation period has not been definitively stated but, once infections began, the spread was surprisingly rapid after the first case was confirmed.
December 2019 – American Military Forbidden to View Chinese Videos.
When the outbreak began, the pentagon suddenly began telling it’s soldiers not to use popular Chinese APPs such as TicToc and WeChat…
…No excuses were given, other than for “Natural Security”.
Apparently the United States military did not want the rank and file soldiers watching locally made videos inside of China.
Everyone is getting in on the act. This was posted on 24FEB20. What the fucking hell could a Tiktok application do to TSA, for goodness sakes?
Was it because they hated lip-synchronization and dancing, or something else? Maybe they didn’t want the troops to see the “on the street” Chinese coping with American germ warfare.
The initial symptoms were mild, which permitted many people to travel before stronger symptoms were detected.
December 2019 – My Urges.
Curious coincidence, I published this post on Christmas Eve…
People, there are no such things as coincidences. Especially, not with my actions. Especially things that invade my subconscious.
December 2019– China alerted WHO
China’s early conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.
Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either China’s leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.
Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated, the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous as to defy rationality.
In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.
Unlike other nations, China had received no advance warning of the nature or existence of the deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles. But their government implemented public health control measures unprecedented in the history of the world and managed to almost completely eradicate the disease with merely the loss of a few thousand lives.
-American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?
December 31, 2019 China alerted WHO to several cases of “unusual pneumonia” in Wuhan, Hubei province.
On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of an outbreak of “pneumonia of unknown cause” detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China – the seventh-largest city in China with 11 million residents.
Late December 2019
In late December about 10 doctors reported cases of an unknown or SARS- like virus. These were immediately reported to WHO and thorough investigation was undertaken in China and by WHO.
One doctor, Li Wenliang, posted two notices, sent from his colleagues engaged in the investigation, on wechat and weibo, and the local police reprimanded him for inappropriate use of social media.
Importantly, he was not silenced or fined.
Instead he kept working and he was by no means the only one involved in the research.
Of course, the Western media made a big brouhaha about a supposed ‘whistleblower’ who was ‘silenced’, but this was a clear distortion of the actual situation.
I recommend that you (the reader) read this report of the 40-day investigation of the matter by the National Supervisory Commission (on China Daily).
The report noted that there are very strict laws concerning the verification, release and reporting of epidemic information. Li had not followed those laws and provided some incorrect information at the time. Thus, the actions by the local police at the time had followed the law. At the same, Li – as a member of the CPC – had acted in good faith and for the social good. The report also finds that two of the police officers involved had followed substandard procedures. Thus, a sincere apology was given to Li’s family and the official letter of reprimand rescinded.
Clearly, the early mistakes in China were incidental and not systemic.
Later in December 2019
Meanwhile, WHO sent a team to China. This team included Americans who reported directly to Donald Trump.
Which is a contributor as to the absolutely ludicrous narrative that China withheld information, misinterpreted things, and did not act promptly enough. American doctors and scientists were inside the WHO investigation team almost from "day one".
16 U.S. administration officials were embedded with the WHO.
The sequence of the unknown virus was identified in a record 7 days by a Chinese laboratory.
A diagnostic kit was developed by a German lab.
A full diagnosis was possible by 20 January.
The WHO notes that this was the fastest identification made in the case of a new disease.
The plan developed was a WHO-China joint plan, and the WHO urged the rest of the world to act immediately since China had given the world an opportunity to change the course of the disease.
Unfortunately, too many countries did not listen and we find ourselves in the current situation.
In China, the ability of its socialist system to control and manage a new epidemic is now history.
Through widespread testing (1.6 million a day), integration of AI, 5G and big data, it was able to keep the epidemic to a miniscule fraction of one percent of the whole population. As for the population itself, the old Chinese cultural – and socialist – reality of the greater social good kicked in and almost everyone cooperated (those who did not soon did so). Notably, public health was paramount, and not the economy. Of course, the economy too would benefit from a focus on public health, as China’s staged resumption – as I write – of production indicates.
By contrast, the totally inept response in a place like Australia seeks to prioritize the economy and make public health a secondary issue. This will have greater economic repercussions, as more get infected.
As for the China Model, we can also note that those countries that followed it to some degree (Singapore and South Korea come to mind, but also – to its credit – Denmark, which still has a strong and able public sector, despite efforts to erode it over the last few years) have been able to control the epidemic.
Start of 2020 New Year
The United States begins a massive anti-China propaganda campaign. It was relentless and unwavering.
This campaign was uncovered in March 2020:
On March 21 the Daily Beast reported of the propaganda campaign the White House was launching against China:
As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow at a rapid pace in the U.S., the White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” and creating a global pandemic, according to two U.S. officials and a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast.
The cable, sent to State Department officials Friday, lays out in detail the circumstances on the ground in China, including data on coronavirus cases and deaths, the local business environment and transportation restrictions.
But it also issues guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.
The talking points appear to have originated in the National Security Council. One section of the cable reads “NSC Top Lines: [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”
Soon the mainstream media started to spread the new talking points. A Google News search for the search term "China Cover-up" now finds 449.000 results.
EarlyJanuary 2020 – New Virus Identified.
January 7, 2020 Chinese officials announced they had identified a new virus, The novel virus was named by the WHO 2019-nCoV (exactly the same name as the virus pertaining to the John Hopkins simulation exercise, with the exception of the placement of the date).
Which triggered this timeline…
Here is a timeline on President Xi Jinping’s “personal leadership and personal commands” to combat the CoronaVirus crisis, published in the official Communist party magazine Qiushi magazine:
Jan 7:
Mr Xi met the party’s politburo standing committee, China’s most powerful decision-making body, and gave clear instructions on the virus response.
Jan 20:
Mr. Xi gave an official command to all levels of government to put lives and public health first, and effectively contain the virus spread.
Jan 22,
Mr. Xi sent clear commands to control human mobility from Hubei province.
Jan 25,
Mr. Xi chaired the Politburo Standing Committee meeting to establish the Virus Control leadership team.
Jan 7th meeting was 13 days before the Chinese public was warned about the human-to-human transmission.
-https://amp-ft-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.ft.com/content/3da73290-5067-11ea-8841-482eed0038b1
On January 10, gene sequencing further determined it to be the new Wuhan coronavirus, namely 2019-nCoV, a betacoronavirus, related to the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus (MERS-CoV) and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus (SARSCoV). However, the mortality and transmissibility of 2019-nCoV are still unknown, and likely to vary from those of the prior referenced coronaviruses.
January 2020 –CIA Propagandizes that it is a Chinese Bio-weapon.
The first mention of this being a biological weapon comes from Radio Free Asia. This is an American government propaganda outlet. Formerly CIA. Now operates “independently” under the leadership of CIA management.
They made the outrageous statement(s) that;
There is a military bio-weapons research complex in Wuhan.
That the Chinese government intentionally released it to hurt and harm the Chinese people.
The Chinese stole the technology from the United States.
Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.”
Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S. government propaganda.
This information was picked up all over the American Alt-Right media.
Who gobbled it up as fact.
For everyone “knows” (in the Conservative circles) that China hates it’s people and China is Hard-Line Communist.
Nonsense.
But, articles like this one gets buried in the onslaught of the propagandized “biological weapons narrative” re-direction.
Additionally, it begins to be noticed outside of China…
Japan, North Korea, and Iran reports COVID-19 illnesses.
The moment it started spreading in Iran, it became obvious it was Israel/US rogue elements that spread coronavirus. Similar to when the Stuxnet ‘virus’ hit Iran and everywhere else but was denied by Israel/US intelligence at first. But this wasn’t JUST for Iran, this was for China, Iran, and the Silk Road countries.
- Ultimation 007
Mid January 2020
Trump’s first attempt was to blame the World Health Organization for not providing all information. But 16 U.S. administration officials were embedded with the WHO in Geneva. They relayed real time updates of all information the WHO received.
As the Democrats and the media did not join Trump in blaming the WHO another scapegoat was needed. Everyone then agreed that it China would be the most convenient target.
The intensity of the current anti-China campaign reminds one of the run up to the war on Iraq. The people who now claim that ‘China lied, people died’ are the very same who ran the Iraq WMD campaign. But all the reports claiming Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were just fantasy. The reports of Chinese culpability are similar nonsense.
To blame China the hawks are accusing it of three issues:
Lack of public hygiene
Insufficient information
Creating or spreading the virus by accident
The “wet market” in Wuhan did not have hygiene problems. A “wet market” is comparable to a farmers market (vid). It is “wet” in that it provides fresh products like fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. A “dry market” provides the complementary products like rice, flour, tea and sugar. China has yet to be overrun by super market chains. Some 40% of the Chinese people source their daily food at the wet markets.
The wet market in Wuhan was not the source of the epidemic. It did not and does not sell bats. The epidemic started in December at a time when bats hibernate. The first known case was not related to the market at all.
The U.S. claims that China did not inform it sufficiently. The timeline as published by China and confirmed by media reports does not support that claim.
On January 3 the head of the U.S. Center of Disease Control was personally informed by his Chinese counterpart that there was an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. On January 8 the “unknown cause” was identified as a novel coronavirus. A full genome sequence of the virus was published on January 12 and preliminary testing kits were developed and made available in Wuhan. By January 13 another test and test protocol had been developed in Germany and on January 17 the WHO adopted its refined version.
In the U.S. the CDC insisted on developing its own test and failed by contaminating its test components. It then failed for more than a month to correct the issue.
The German Federal Health Ministry was recently asked if it perceived a lack of information from China or saw reason to criticize China over its changing case numbers. It responded (in German, my translation):
"The federal government is not aware that China held back any data." ... "Considering the interim development the adoption of different definitions of cases during the epidemic in China is comprehensible."
Another claim is that China somehow created the virus or let it escape from a laboratory in Wuhan where it was researching bat viruses.
Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney and a fellow of the respected Royal Society in London, said the Wuhan laboratory blamed by some for the pandemic does have specimens of the bat virus RaTG13, the closest relative of Covid-19 source SARS-CoV-2, but the two are not genetically linked.
RaTG13 strains, he says, are from the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, not the central city of Wuhan, the pandemic’s initial epicenter.
...
Genome tracing has revealed that the bat virus RaTG13 has at least 20 years of genetic divergence, or evolutionary change, from SARS-CoV-2, and possibly as much as 50 years, ruling it out as the source of the pandemic.
The claims against China made by both U.S. parties do not have a factual basis.
January 24, 25, 2020: Meeting at Davos, under the auspices of CEPI which is also a WEF-Gates partnership, the development of a 2019 nCoV vaccine was announced. (2 weeks after the January 7, 2020 announcement, and barely a week prior to the launching of the WHO’s Worldwide Public Health emergency).
The first reported infected individuals, some of whom showed symptoms as early as December 8, were discovered to be among stallholders from the Wuhan South China Seafood Market. Subsequently, the wet market was closed on Jan 1.
The virus causing the outbreak was quickly determined to be a novel coronavirus. [renamed to COVID-19]
Worst Case: It's some bio-engineered frankenvirus, with who-knows what lethality, r-naught, and incubation time.
-Woodpile Report
As of January 26, there are over 2019 cases of 2019-nCoV [renamed to COVID-19] confirmed globally, including cases in at least 20 regions in China and nine countries/territories.
Local medical authorities have said the true extent of the Wuhan coronavirus [renamed to COVID-19] is unclear, and the early official figures may have been an underestimation since the mild symptoms and delayed onset meant infections may have been undetected.
January 30th, 2020, WHO Director General announces the “Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
The WHO did not act to reassure and inform World public opinion. Quite the opposite: A “Fear Pandemic” rather than a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) was launched.
Outright panic and uncertainty were sustained through a carefully designed media disinformation campaign.
Almost immediately this led to economic dislocations, a crisis in trade and transportation with China affecting major airlines and shipping companies. A hate campaign against ethnic Chinese in Western countries was launched, followed by the collapse in late February of stock markets, not to mention the crisis in the tourist industry.
The complexity of this crisis and its impacts have to be addressed and carefully analysed.
What we are dealing with is “economic warfare” supported by media disinformation, coupled with the deliberate intent of the Trump administration to undermine China’s economy. The ongoing economic dislocations are not limited to China.
There are important public health concerns which must be addressed. But what motivated the Director-General of the WHO to act in this way? Who was behind this historic January 30th decision of the WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
-Global Research
31 January 2020– CIA pushes the narrative and Conservative shrills magnify it.
The American narrative that this is an accidental or intentional leak by the Chinese is heavily pushed by American “interests”. A good example is this one…
Written by ” harvard2thebighouse” who is actually an anonymous author. But who places this comment in the start of the article…
"An accessible and comprehensive YouTube summary of the report below by a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School is available here. "
If you weren’t paying attention you would assume that the Professor of Neurobilogy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Schools wrote this article.
But yet again…
Un-named sources. Un-named authors. Un-named school, but a rather generic and officially sounding association. Which medical school in Pittsburgh, and which professor at that medical school? All are un-named. But look at the rich and comprehensive narrative that states that it’s FROM CHINA.
Check it out!
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernating and the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people to begin with, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as COVID-19 emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
-https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
The American internet was flooded from January though to March with these kinds of articles. All pointing “fingers” at China for accidentally or intentionally releasing a bioweapon.
CNY February 2020 – China; Full Nationwide Lock-down
All the evidence suggests the Chinese authorities acted effectively as soon as they realized the danger they might be facing.
As Hubei was struggling to provide adequate care for those infected, over 10,000 medical professionals have volunteered by Feb. 3rd.
But as the number of patients became once again overwhelming even for them, Beijing enacted an emergency order.
On Feb. 9th. nearly 6,000 medical professionals were flown in on 41 flights from all over China.
Then on Feb. 10th., another order was activated and each province and major city in China was assigned one or several "sister cities" in Hubei which they will supply with medical teams and support logistically with medical supplies.
Currently (17FEB20) the number of medical professionals which arrived in Hubei from other provinces are estimated to be over 40,000. Now, that's one thing, but keep in mind, nearly all medical professionals in all of China are still on emergency standby and have not had a single days off since the beginning of the epidemic. The medical staff are all tired, and those that stayed behind are working overtime to pick up the work of those who went to Hubei.
What kind of evil person would unleash such a weapon?
Medical authorities immediately declared the outbreak, and within a week they had identified the pathogen and also determined and shared the genome sequence with the WHO and other parties, a sufficiently speedy response that earned praise from the WHO and scientists around the world.
In America – February 2020 – People told not to wear masks.
As unbelievable as it seems, the United States government instructed the American people NOT to wear masks. This is true even though the primary means of transmission of the COVID-19 virus is through the air.
Why did the American government tell Americans NOT to wear masks? What is their malfunction? This is a well-known method to controlling the spread of a dangerous viral agent. This has been well known since 1918!
Are they [1] intentionally trying to kill millions of Americans, or are they [2] trying to “gin up” a “scape-goat” from which to generate a new war with?
Various media articles detailed the growing anger over the CDC’s recommendation to not wear masks and the US politicizing of the coronavirus.
On Feb. 28, the CDC released a video on its official Twitter account entitled “COVID-19: Should I wear a mask?”, in which the CDC discouraged people from using face masks.
“The CDC’s recommendations were immediately questioned or slammed by the American public on social media, with many claiming that the irresponsible remarks [were] risking people’s life by not encouraging basic protection.”
-People
Americans are instructed to do the opposite of what China is doing. In China everyone MUST wear a mask or be arrested. In America, a mask is not needed, apparently…
Late February 2020– More Strange Tweets.
The Tweets from Turkish psychic, spiritual guru and ultra-nationalist. p.s. He is a known psychic and close to authorities. My bet is that he had some insider information.
Tweet from Feb 24 2020:
“”Deciphered:
24/02/2020
The Pentagon made a very dangerous NUCLEAR experiment.
Without trying this #Trump He doesn’t even know.
Since it is deciphered #Trump What will they lie to? How and in what way will they announce this dangerous trial to the World Public? Research, accident
… We eagerly await.””
source: https://twitter.com/EmirYildizdan/status/1231930978551107584
February 2020 – Test Results are Reported.
Beijing points a finger at the United States;
“Perhaps the US delegates (to the Wuhan Military World Games) brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year.”
(People’s Daily, February 23, 2020) (1)
March 2020– China regains control over virus. USA holds secret meetings.
Reported new cases in China fall to double digits. 99 cases recorded on March 7.All of the new cases outside Hubei province are categorized as “imported infections”(from foreign countries).
The Trump administration is treating the meetings associated with this entire COVID-19 event as a Top Secret Deliberation. Apparently, some SAP information is being disclosed in the meetings and non-military people are excluded from attending.
The White House held dozens of meetings about coronavirus response that excluded government experts because the discussions were unnecessarily classified over the objections of HHS Secretary Alex Azar, reports Reuters. Experts were not just barred from speaking openly about what we knew about the emerging pandemic. Apparently, they weren’t even allowed in the room.
“It is not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis,” an unnamed official from the Republican George W. Bush administration told the wire service.
What “Top Secret” SAP information could be withheld from the participants during this national emergency? Why is this being done? What possible MILITARY information could be discussed in a meeting about a new kind of flu? (As this is the American government narrative.)
[1] Here in the United States, the National Security Council, under direct orders from the White House has sealed the top emergency meetings on this topic and classified them.
[2] Only people with top secret clearances have been allowed to participate, which rules out most of the medical experts who should have been there.
So putting these two facts together, first, that the rumors on Chinese social media that were already very widespread a month ago or more...
... and now have gotten the official stamp of approval that the coronavirus outbreak was an act of biological warfare by the United States...
... it seems to be becoming the official position of the Chinese government.
And that is quite concerning, because if indeed, the US government or its allies or out of control rogue agencies within it did in fact whether deliberately as is the most likely possibility, or accidentally or some combination thereof, perhaps a clumsy effort by someone outside of the normal chain of command, whatever the truth is about this, this could set off an escalation that could easily lead to World War Three.
–PressTV
And this…
Exclusive: White House Told Federal Health Agency to Classify Coronavirus Deliberations-Sources:
"Critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”
The sources said the National Security Council (NSC), which Exclusive: White House Told Federal Health Agency to Classify Coronavirus Deliberations- Sources advises the president on security issues, ordered the classification.
“This came directly from the White House,” one official said.
The White House insistence on secrecy at the nation’s premier public health organization, which has not been previously disclosed, has put a lid on certain information - and potentially delayed the response to the crisis.
COVID19, the disease caused by the virus, has killed about 30 people in the United States and infected more than 1,000 people. HHS oversees a broad range of health agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which among other things is responsible for tracking cases and providing guidance nationally on the outbreaks.
The administration officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they could not describe the interactions in the meeting room because they were classified.
An NSC spokesman did not respond to questions about the meetings at HHS. But he defended the administration’s transparency across federal agencies and noted that meetings of the administration's task force on the coronavirus all are unclassified. It was not immediately clear which meetings he was referring to. “From day one of the response to the coronavirus, NSC has insisted on the principle of radical transparency,” said the spokesman, John Ullyot. He added that the administration “has cut red tape and set the global standard in protecting the American people under President Trump’s leadership.”
A spokeswoman for HHS, Katherine McKeogh, issued a statement that did not address questions about classified meetings. Using language that echoed the NSC’s, the department said it that it agreed task-force meetings should be unclassified. Critics have hammered the Trump administration for what they see as a delayed response to coronavirus outbreaks and a lack of transparency, including sidelining experts and providing misleading or incomplete information to the public. State and local officials also have complained of being kept in the dark about essential federal response information.
U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence, the administration's point person on coronavirus, vowed on March 3 to offer “real-time information in a steady pace and be fully transparent.” The vice president, appointed by President Donald Trump in late February, is holding regular news briefings and also has pledged to rely on expert guidance. Katie Miller, Pence's press secretary, said Wednesday that since being appointed the vice president has never requested that HHS hold meetings in the SCIF or treat information as classified.
The meetings at HHS were held in a secure area called a "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility," or SCIF, according to the administration officials. SCIFs are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations.
Ordinary cell phones and computers can't be brought into the chambers. HHS has SCIFs because theoretically it would play a major role in biowarfare or chemical attacks.
A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.”
Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said. HHS did not make Azar or Harrison available for comment.
One of the administration officials told Reuters that when complex issues about a quarantine came up, a high-ranking HHS lawyer with expertise on the issue was not admitted because he did not have the proper security clearance.
His input was delayed and offered at an unclassified meeting, the official said. A fifth source familiar with the meetings said HHS staffers often weren’t informed about coronavirus developments because they didn’t have adequate clearance.
He said he was told that the matters were classified "because it had to do with China."
26MARCH 2020
A few days ago, Mike Pompeo phoned Yang Jiechi, Chinese State Councillor for Foreign Affairs.
Pompeo’s counterpart is actually Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Yang is Wang’s boss, so Pompeo wanted to talk about something urgent and important.
The entire purpose of the phone call was that American Secretary of State Pompeo wanted the Chinese not to publicize what they had found out about the start of the illness in Wuhan.
Yang’s reply:
“We await your solemn explanation, especially about Patient Zero.”
This little bit of information is all over Chinese media and Social media. With absolutely zero coverage inside America.
April 2020
The United States adjusts it’s anti-China propaganda campaign.
On April 1 Bloomberg was called up by "officials" to reinforce the campaign by attributing the claim of a cover-up of China's case and death numbers to a "secret U.S. intelligence report". That report is unlikely to exist at all because the New York Timesreported a day later that the CIA hunt for "authentic numbers" of deaths in China was still ongoing and failing:
So far, to the frustration of both the White House and the intelligence community, the agencies have been unable to glean more accurate numbers through their collection efforts.
We used the Bloomberg report to explain that the case fatality numbers, which China reported correctly, are very different from the total number of fatalities, or excess deaths, an epidemic causes.
There was no cover-up by China but naturally incomplete reporting of all deaths.
A day later the BBC published a similar explainer piece.
On April 3 the Economist also discussed wrong fatality numbers though it had found those in Italy and Spain: Covid-19’s death toll appears higher than official figures suggest. It also made this snarky cover-up remark:
[W]hen Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, America recorded only 64 deaths. A study later found that the surge in total deaths was close to 3,000. Many occurred in hospitals that lost power.
And elements of it are completely “off the wall”…
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2020/04/07/report-wuhan-funeral-homes-burned-people-alive/
Warning, this story is not for the squeamish, take comfort that it is most certainly fiction.
1. It's published by Breitbart which we know has low journalistic standards but it is sourced from 'Radio Free Asia' so it has our US CIA goons despicable fingerprints on it.
2. The propaganda worked on its target audience, the posters on Breitbart bought it hook-line-and-sinker.
3. Why do I think it's false? The sensationalistic tone, even FOX and the Daily Mail won't touch it (China must have gotten to them), they make other erroneous claims such as Chinese hospitals only giving patients oxygen because they don't have medicine while western hospitals are trying new therapies such as Colloquine. Notice the 'hero narrative' assigned to the U.S. even though China was the first to use this drup.
This is seriously demented.
-MoA Comments
Chinese treated this seriously.
Remembering the SARS troubles, they did much more.
In most large centers in the country, all sports venues, theaters, museums, tourist attractions, all locations that attract crowds, have been closed, as have all schools. All group tours have been canceled. Not only the city of Wuhan but virtually the entire province of Hubei has been locked down, with all trains, aircraft, buses, subways, ferries, grounded and all major highways and toll booths closed.
Thousands of flights and train trips have been canceled until further notice. Some cities like Shanghai and Beijing are conducting temperature tests on all roadways leading into the cities. In addition, Wuhan is building (in five days) a portable hospital of 25,000 square meters to deal with the infected patients. As well, Wuhan has asked citizens to neither leave nor enter the city without a compelling reason, and all are wearing face masks.
Additionally, the following unique measures are being taken throughout China. This is common in the far North as well as the remote South;
Small towns and villages are blocking the roads and not allowing anyone in or out. This is being enforced by the local militia.
In cities, the police are walking up and down the streets with bullhorns telling everyone to stay inside and not to leave their homes.
A tent hospital has been constructed in Wuhan to handle the cases.
A full “regular” hospital is being constructed (in ten days) to handle the problem.
A secondary hospital will be built after the construction of the first one is completed.
The military, police, fire, and hospital staff all over China are on full alert. Many are working without sleep and rest.
After the initial fireworks, everything turned eerily quiet. No one is going outside, no one is traveling, and no one is visiting friends.
All major transport hubs are on lock down and temperature screening by CDC attire is the norm.
Individual villages are laying down roadblocks all over China.
The scale of the challenge of implementing such a blockade is immense, comparable to closing down all transport links for a city five times the size of Toronto or Chicago, on Christmas eve. These decisions are unprecedented but testify to the determination of the authorities to limit the spread and damage of this new pathogen.
CHINA’S HANDLING OF THE NOVELLE CORONA VIRUS INFECTION
Below are comments from Robin Daverman , a American Doctor, expressed in Quora.
👇 Dude, the Chinese government has been exceptionally good in dealing with this virus. You can NOT deliver what the Chinese government has delivered so far, unless you are the mythical Santa Claus.
During the Western African Ebola virus epidemic in 2014, the CDC rushed in to try to find the virus. It took them 2 months from getting the 1st patient sample to identifying the complete genomic sequence, and then another 6 weeks to publish it.
This is Top Urgency, with a virus that has a 90% case fatality rate.
The 2009 Swine Flu in the US, which ended up infecting 55 million Americans and killed 11,000 of them, the first cases started to appear in late March, the CDC identified it on April 17, and the identification kits were not generally available until mid-May. And that was 250 people working 100+ hour a week!
CNY 2020 devistation!
They not only address the gravity of the situation but also the seriousness of consideration for the public health, unfortunate and difficult decisions since the holiday is being destroyed for hundreds of millions of people. Most public entertainment has been canceled, as have tours, and many weddings as well.
The damage to the economy during this most festive of all periods will also be enormous.
Just received some "professional analysis and insights" from CITI Group (as most of you know a company with a very checkered past). The most interesting "insight":
"In order to shut down the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus, many countries will need to temporarily shut down economic activity."
Ominous. I'm about 90% convinced, based on a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, that this virus was genetically engineered and deliberately released into the public domain.
-Posted by: Ben C | Apr 8 2020 16:08 utc | 12
Hong Kong will suffer severely in addition to all its other troubles since visits from Mainland Chinese typically support much of its retail economy during this period.
John Bolton quote.
As an aside, I can confirm that no one is going out. Everyone is staying inside. Avoiding others, and all celebrations are either cancelled or muted. It's really sad.
The Chinese New Year is the most important festival for Chinese. Saturday, January 25, is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a festive period that typically sees the largest mass movement of people on the planet as Chinese flock back to their hometowns to be with relatives. No health authority has ever tackled the challenge currently faced by China, as the country grapples with a new coronavirus just as hundreds of millions prepare to travel.
What kind of evil person would unleash such a weapon?
And of course, the Western media had a field day of schadenfreude. CNN published a report – a bit too gleefully, I thought – on the potential damage to China’s economy:
“China’s economy is slumping and the country is still suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and deadly virus is the last thing it needs.
The Wuhan coronavirus has already roiled Chinese markets and thrown plans for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday into chaos for millions of people. The world’s second-biggest economy grew at its slowest pace in nearly three decades last year as it contended with rising debt, cooling domestic demand and US tariffs, many of which remain in place despite a recent truce.
Beijing is worried about unemployment, too, and has announced a wave of stimulus measures in recent weeks aimed at preventing mass layoffs. . .
The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak could spark widespread fear and spur people to hunker down and avoid going outside. That kind of behavior would deal a huge blow to the service sector, which now accounts for about 52% of the Chinese economy.” [And so on... .]
American media… (shrug)… What can you say?
Meanwhile, in China…
From Asia Times https://lnkd.in/gErEzCe
"the speed of the Chinese scientific response has been breathtaking – and obviously not fully appreciated in an environment of Total Info War. Compare the Chinese performance with the American CDC, arguably the top infectious disease research agency in the world, with an $11 billion annual budget and 11,000 employees.
During the swine flu in the US in 2009 – 55 million infected Americans, 11,000 killed – the CDC took over a month and a half to come up with identification kits.
The Chinese took only 1 week from the first patient sample to complete, vital identification and sequencing of coronavirus. Right away, they went for publication and deposit in the genomics library for immediate access by the whole planet. Based on this sequence, Chinese biotech companies produced validated essays within a week – also a first."
Point of origin.
The Western media have already staked out their claim to the fundamentals, all media sources claiming the virus was transferred to humans from animals or seafood. None of which has been confirmed as happening.
So you can pretty much ignore the older articles like this one…
The media have added fuel to the fire by claiming the virus emerged from “illegally traded wildlife” in a market “where offerings reportedly include wild animals that can carry viruses dangerous to humans”, and that this virus “jumped into the human population from an infected animal”.
And a better detailed explanation…
Myth:
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is a Chinese virus that comes from bats. It infected people because Chinese people eat bats.
Facts:
The source of the virus is actually not known. The patient number 1, the person who first carried the virus, has not been found. The Wuhan wet market where exotic animals are sold was not the source of the outbreak:
The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.
While the novel corona virus might be one that was originally carried by bats it is unlikely to have jumped from a bat to a human. The older SARS virus, which is somewhat similar to the novel coronavirus, originated from bats but first spread to other animals before mutating from there into a form that infects humans.
The only place where bats are regularly used as food is the Pacific island Palau which is more or less a U.S. colony. Videos showing Chinese citizens eating fruit bat soup were actually filmed on that island.
-MoA
Those reports are also nonsense.
Bio-engineers have confirmed that trans-species “jumping” and mutation of this virus is pretty much impossible.
According to the reports, there would be three kinds of species that would have to be involved. An African cobra (now a scaled anteater), a rare South Pacific bat, and some kind of sea-creature (or else, how did it get into a seafood market?).
Three (3x) species were involved.
We know that 96% of the genome resembles a rare South African bat. We know that "other" DNA from a secondary species is involved, this has tentatively been presupposed to be a cobra. We also know that it somehow mutated to be able to exist within fish or some other kind of sea creature.
Testing at the supposed point of "ground zero" showed high concentrations of this virus within the separate fish tanks throughout the area.So, not only are three species involved, but "somehow" the virus was able to "jump" out of one fish tank and enter others.
And not a snake, something rarer…
The pangolin, a scaly mammalian anteater, is the latest animal to be identified as an intermediate host of the novel coronavirus that has sickened more than 31,000 people worldwide.
According to local media reports, an analysis of genome sequences of viruses isolated from pangolins were a 99% match with those of 2019-nCoV, as the coronavirus behind the epidemic is known. Pangolins are a trafficked, critically endangered species whose scales are believed by some to have medicinal properties.
Scientists at the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province in southern China, reported findings Friday from research conducted jointly with the People's Liberation Army Academy of Military Science in Beijing and the research department of the Guangdong Zoo.
“This has major significance for the prevention and control of the novel coronavirus,” South China Agricultural said in a statement, though it did not elaborate on the research.
While there is general consensus among scientists that the new strain of coronavirus spread from bats to another host before making the jump to humans, previous research pointing to snakes as the culprit has been disputed.
- Pangolins Latest Animal Identified as Intermediate Coronavirus Host
Trans-species migration is very rare, but unheard of to involve three species. Especially ones as diverse as the ones being considered.
Bat
Pangolin
Fish
Then it was discovered that the genome contained “HIV insertions”. Thus they discovered that not only is this virus stealthy, contagious and lethal, but it also shuts down the immune systems of the infected person. WTF?
“Wefound 4 insertions inthespikeglycoprotein (S) whichareuniquetothe2019-nCoVandarenotpresentinother coronaviruses,” thereport’sAbstractsectionstates. “Importantly, aminoacidresiduesinallthe 4 insertshaveidentityorsimilaritytothoseinthe HIV-1 gp120or HIV-1 Gag.”
- Scientist Explains New Study Revealing Coronavirus May ...
These insertions are not random.
Their functions, all four of them, are to make the coronavirus [renamed to COVID-19] very lethal. (Read about it HERE.) Leading world experts in bio-warfare to conclude that this was an engineering pathogen.
And a rebuttal to this narrative…
Myth:
The virus is related to HIV, the virus that causes aids.
Facts:
Some Indian researchers found four genome sequences in the novel coronavirus that can also be found in the HIV virus. They self published their findings in a paper that was not peer reviewed. A few days later the paper was retracted by its authors after other scientists had pointed out that the lengths of each of the four sequences they had compared were way too small to be of statistical significance.
-MoA
So, according to the rebuttal, since the paper was retracted, it MUST be false.
That’s right. Nothing to see here. The paper has been retracted. It is as isf nothing happened.
It was a bio-engineered, bio-weapon that is intended for mass casualties on a grand scale.
Initially, Chinese officials stated that the virus appears to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, though the actual origin has not been determined nor stated by the authorities. This is still an open question primarily because viruses seldom jump species barriers without human assistance.
The odds of this being a natural viral agent is infinitesimally small.
After investigation, the subsequent cases of the illness had zero association with that particular market.
A virus outbreak in the city of Wuhan immediately prior to the Chinese New Year migration could potentially have dramatic social and economic repercussions. Wuhan, with a population of about 12 million, is a major transport hub in Central China, particularly for the high-speed train network, and with more than 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities.
The odds of an accidental release of a bio-weapon inside one of China’s largest cities is infinitesimally small.
When we add this to the Spring Festival travel rush during which many hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families, the potential consequences for the entire country are far-reaching.
The odds of this event occurring naturally during the CNY eve is infinitesimally small.
The odds of this happening is the same as a COVID-19 outbreak on Christmas eve, AND Labor Day, AND the Fourth of July, AND Easter, AND Thanksgiving. Most Americans have absolutely no idea just how stunningly impossible the timing of this outbreak actually is.
Comparison with SARS
This is a novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggested that it was not dangerous.
SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold, but SARS exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified – similar to this new coronavirus in 2019.
Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists.
This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment.”
Military Weaponization of the Virus by America
Dr. Cantwell also noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades.
He wrote that when he searched in PubMed for the phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell:
“I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade. No wonder WHO scientists identified the SARS/coronavirus so quickly. Never emphasised by medical news writers is the fact that for over forty years scientists have been “jumping species” with all sorts of animal and human viruses and creating chimera viruses (viruses composed from viruses of two different species). This unsupervised research produces dangerous man-made viruses, many of which have potential as bioweapons. Certainly SARS has the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .”
Almost immediately upon receiving the genome sequence, several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare.
No trust in America. But China is considered the most trustworthy nation.
Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.”
And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.”
“...there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.”
- Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services
Russian and Chinese biochemists believe that this virus is man-made.
It wasn’t widely reported, but it seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the SARS virus was man-made.
This conclusion wasn’t a secret, but neither was it promoted to the international media since they would simply have used the claim to heap scorn on China, dismissing this as a paranoid conspiracy theory.
What kind of evil person would unleash such a weapon?
The Western media totally ignored this aspect, except for ABC news who reported that the SARS “Mystery Virus” was possibly “a Chinese bio-weapon that accidentally escaped the laboratory”.
Nice of ABC to notice, but their story, if true, would be the first example of a nation creating and releasing a race-specific biological weapon designed to attack exclusively itself.
And a rebuttal…
Myth:
The virus originated from a military weapon research laboratory.
Facts:
There is zero evidence that the virus is from a Chinese or U.S. or other (weapon) laboratory and the claim actually makes no sense. The genome of the virus consists of more then 23,000 'letters'. It is significantly different than the genome of other known viruses. (Added:) It is not lab made:
We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
To artificially create such a complex entity and to test all its variants would have been a program of the size of the Manhattan project and would have cost billions.
Weapon researchers are sane people with a limited budget. They look for methods to defeat an enemy. A virus that affects all humans indiscriminately but kills mostly very old ones would have no military value.
-MoA
No arguments on the rebuttal. Except that germ-warfare is the only way to zero out a nations GDP short of wide-scale nuclear war. Is it really that outrageous that the neocons in Washington DC would want to do this instead of awaiting the entire American petro-dollar “house of card” to collapse?
Virus is tailored to attack Asians
Notable is that while SARS spread to about 40 countries, the infections in most countries were few and deaths almost zero, and it was exclusively (or almost exclusively) Chinese who were infected, those in Hong Kong most seriously, with Mainland China suffering little by comparison.
The Corona virus is a virus that, for whatever reason, East Asians are susceptible to but other races are not, just like SARS. None of our people are going to succumb to this condition. The MSM’s constant hyping is just a way of making people panic, because people are more susceptible to being indoctrinated when they panic. By not reporting the race of those who have caught this disease in Europe, unnecessary panic is being fomented among Europeans…so that they can be more easily inculcated with the message than “race differences don’t exist, because race is a social construct.”
-vDare
The SARS virus apparently much preferred Chinese to Caucasians, though it did attack Vietnamese health care workers (who may be similar to Chinese in their susceptibility).
This appears to be precisely the case with this new virus, in that all the infected persons are Chinese. News reports speak of infections appearing in Thailand or the US, but those (at least to date of writing) were all Chinese who had been to Wuhan. There have been no cases so far of infected Caucasians.
As with SARS, this new virus appears to be tightly-focused and race-specific to Chinese.
And a rebuttal…
Myth:
Asian people are genetically more receptive for the novel coronavirus.
Fact:
The virus enters human cells by binding to the ACE-2 receptor on the cells hull. There were assertions that people in Asia have more ACE-2 receptors than people elsewhere. But detailed studies of various genome sequence databases have found no statistical basis for such claims. People of Asian, Caucasian or African heritage all have the same numbers of ACE-2 building elements and receptors. The virus will effect them equally.
-MoA
This is a mute argument, as the virus has mutated and now seemingly affects just about everyone.
American bio-scientists caught by the police inside of China doing illegal acts.
We might in other circumstances pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial events that serve to alter our focus.
One of these is the history of American universities and NGOs having come into China in recent years to conduct biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities enraged.
This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China. Experiments that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier. And where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country.
The Chinese were furious to learn that Americans were collecting Chinese DNA.
The government intervened and prohibited the further export of any of the data. The conclusion at the time was that the ‘research’ had been commissioned by the US military with the DNA samples destined for race-specific bio-weapons research.
So the American military was collecting Chinese DNA to develop bio-weapons.
Trademarks and indicators
In a thesis on Biological Weapons, Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek stated that one clear sign of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent was a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation. I.e. no clear idea of the source.
They also mentioned an “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, of which race-specificity would be one.
Recent disease outbreaks that would seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA.
In fact, thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only questions.
Curious questions…
There was another curiosity in this case, in that additionally to the usual criticisms of China being inactive or secretive, several US media replicated accusations from “a senior US State Department official” claiming Washington was “still concerned” about transparency in the Chinese government on the Wuhan coronavirus.
This virus has a long incubation time, and the symptoms appear to be of no concern. Then it strikes suddenly with lethal affect.
Other articles claimed the US CDC was “concerned that Chinese health officials have still not released basic epidemiological data about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, making it more difficult to contain the outbreak.”
There is no substantial reason that officials at any level of the US State Department should concern themselves with a virus outbreak in a foreign country.
Their criticisms were surprisingly detailed, demanding specifics on the number of infections directly from contact with the Wuhan market, the number of person-to-person infections, the precise incubation period from exposure to the onset of symptoms, the point at which persons become contagious.
The questions were presented in benevolent terms of helping the Chinese medical authorities deal with the virus, though it was already self-evident China had no need to be lectured on such basics. I must say my sense from reading the articles in question was that the Americans were fishing for something unstated, very possibly the crucial details of their handiwork.
I must say my sense from reading the articles in question was that the Americans were fishing for something unstated, very possibly the crucial details of their handiwork.
As of the date of writing, details are still too scarce to form definitive conclusions but, in every such case, once the smoke clears there are many unanswered questions that challenge the official Western narrative, but it’s old news and the media have already staked out their ground so the matter dies in the Western public mind, but not in China.
Yet, why all this United States propaganda promotion?
As the coronavirus outbreak has come to dominate headlines in recent weeks, several media outlets have promoted claims that the reported epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China was also the site of laboratories allegedly linked to a Chinese government biowarfare program.
However, upon further examination of the sourcing for this serious claim, these supposed links between the outbreak and an alleged Chinese bioweapons program have come from two highly dubious sources.
For instance, the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.”
Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department. (How dubious, coincidence ??? - my view)
-LinkedIN Anonymous
The Argument for Bioweapon use to suppress China.
First of all Pompeo admitted that the COVID-19 was a “live exercise” on 30MAR20202.
Given the multiple and serious woes that China has suffered from during 2019, it comes as no surprise that the Western powers would continue to suppress China in an effort to regain global dominance.
HK “pro democracy” riots fully funded and instigated by the NED / CIA.
Swine Flu decimated the vast bulk of the Chinese pork industry.
Bird Flu decimated huge numbers of the Chinese chicken industry.
NED support and training of Uyghur Muslim extremists.
If there’s one last hit to the economy that China doesn’t need right now, it’s a global pandemic that ‘supposedly’ originated in Wuhan.
Wuhan is the capital of Central China’s Hubei province (see map below with the red marker identifying Wuhan). For those of you who are unaware, Wuhan is located right in the center of China’s highly productive southeast region—the economic powerhouse of the nation. It is the population center of China.
…But not the center of where the local Chinese eat strange critters. That is in the deep South, near Vietnam.
Map showing where Wuhan is located inside of China.
This strategic location is an ideal location to launch a biological attack because of the easily engineered vectors of disease dissemination. After all, isn’t that a staple of Hollywood Science Fiction movies like 12 Monkeys (1995)?
Scene from “12 Monkeys”. In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.
The idea of paralyzing China’s economic and financial sectors is, after all, a primary goal of this essentially Anglo-American black operation.
Long Incubation Phase
The main concern for nCoV-2019 is relatively extended incubation phase of the virus, which can last from 5 to 14 days, during which a person is contagious. Moreover, there is already evidence of clinically silent cases (no symptoms), which will make prevention even more challenging.
In any case, full-scale quarantine to cope with Wuhan crisis seems to be a legitimate measure, supported both domestically and in the international community.
In light of the [1] US-staged Hong Kong protests, [2] U.S. tariff regime against China, [3] threat of economic sanctions against nations working with Huawei, [4] CIA-inflamed Xinjiang conflict involving the Muslim Uyghurs, [5] provocative sailing of US Navy warships through the Taiwan Strait, [6] transparent political prosecution of Huawei’s CFO, and the [7] ravaging of China’s pig farms by a bioengineered virus, etc., the Chinese government has been under withering attack since 2018.
When so many debilitating assaults are suspiciously happening at once, what can China do?
SARS conspiracy theory
The original SARS pandemic that took place in China after the turn of the millennium was also well-known in bio-medical circles as a naked act of biowarfare.
Like this year’s coronavirus bio-attack in Wuhan, the bioengineered SARS outbreak also involved a highly coordinated campaign of propaganda and disinformation.
However, the administration of Xi Jinping is much too concerned about the panic that would inevitably result if the populace was informed of a full-blown bioweapon attack.
The precipitating chaos would simply overwhelm the government in Beijing which is already on serious overload because of the seemingly endless interference by the Anglo-American Axis.
The SARS outbreak that occurred from 2002 to 2003 has already shown that China is not willing to release the hard scientific evidence that proves the existence a bioengineered coronavirus. This favors the antagonists.
The following excerpt from Wikipedia explains some of the background of SARS—the Severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic that took place primarily in mainland China and Hong Kong, but also in Canada and other countries.
The rapidly spreading Wuhan coronavirus, also known as Novel coronavirus, that was first reported in 2019 has all the hallmarks of yet another bioengineered virus in a U.S. Military laboratory.
What follows is a short description form Wikipedia of this Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).
Wikipedia on this Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
Time will tell whether this deadly coronavirus was released into the Chinese population with the intent to kill and sicken, scare and intimidate. We really do not know what the actual purpose was.
However, given the lethal nature of this viral agent, the history associated with the American bio-weapons engineering, and public statements made by American neocon leaders, can can pretty much guess the intention;
Complete and utter devastation of the Chinese population and the collapse of the Chinese government.
The intimidation phase of such an ongoing black operation is certainly aimed at the government in Beijing which refuses to be coerced and threatened by the Trump administration.
Because the highly disruptive, Western-backed Hong Kong protests have yet to yield the result desired by the U.S. State Department, it was only a matter of time before the C.I.A. implemented Plan B…
…or is this Plan C?
…or D?
Why China?
The $64,000 question here is: Why is China always the epicenter for so many strains and variations of coronaviruses, influenzas, pneumonia viruses and other highly contagious infection agents that strike the major commercial centers on southeastern mainland.
What’s particularly suspicious about all of these outbreaks in China is that they are each described by the Mainstream Media as quite dangerous to human health. The mortality rate in the beginning of these eventual pandemics is especially high, as if by purposeful design of the bioengineers.
In this way, the whole world is eventually drawn into a pandemic melodrama that’s certainly designed to fear-monger.
Hence, more of these endless distractions serve the specific purpose of taking the attention away from real problems caused by governments everywhere. But it’s the numerous criminal conspiracies at work and shocking scandals that the elites seek to cover up by any means possible.
There are relatively few military bioweaponry labs in the world that have the capability to create such a fatal and infectious virus.
Thus, when the truth is confirmed about the Wuhan flu, there will be only a few culprits who are behind these assaults against the Chinese people. In reality, should this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak become a full-blown epidemic in China it could represent an attempt to commit genocide.
Likewise, if it becomes a bona fide pandemic, it could ultimately be labeled a crime against humanity.
“It’s really quite easy for any of the numerous U.S. military bioweapon labs to bioengineer a deadly super-virus and then release it in a city as large as Wuhan, China.
Acts of bioterrorism like this are carried out all the time. As a matter of historical fact, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 actually originated at Fort Riley, Kansas where soldiers reported to the Army’s largest training facility during World War I.
The soldiers who were [DELIBERATELY] infected with the H1N1 influenza virus then served as countless vectors of dissemination for the pandemic that ultimately killed as many as 100 million people worldwide. That single US-executed biowarfare operation against humanity was arguably the deadliest depopulation event in human history.”
(See: Spanish Flu of 1918 Was Really a Bioterror Attack on Humanity)
THE DARK SIDE
This is from UNZ, a great website, worthy of visiting.
At Tuskegee, hundreds of American blacks were allowed to carry syphilis from the 1930s to the 1970s, to act as human petri dishes. This was to track the progress of the disease and observe the eventual macabre deaths that this bacteria is wont to inflict on its victims, in its final stages: insanity, nervous disorders, liver and heart disease.
The United States of America holds the exclusive patent on the Ebola virus: US patent number 20120251502, is owned by the American government. Ebola has been Uncle Sam’s bioweapon plaything since 1976, when it was discovered in Zaire and shipped 3,500km by America’s bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, then to West Africa for cultivation and development (via the UK’s bio-warfare labs in Porton Down and with the help of the World “Health” Organization), specifically, to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the current epicenters of the Ebola epidemic on the Great Continent.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak came as a result of another rogue US Military operation in austral Africa from which the Soros/Gates-funded Kenema bioweapons lab in Sierra Leone was involved.
The US has a long history of biowarfare against China. The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (ISC report) validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of months in 1952. This 667 page truth commission report has the dubious distinction of being the most vilified written document of the 20th Century. The report’s release in September 1952 brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation. When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view.
In March 2019, in a mysterious event, a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML biological labs ended up in China. Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. They claimed that it was just normal procedure. What is unclear is why it was done in secret, and why the Chinese officials lodged a complaint. For certain, if this was just a routine transfer, the Chinese government would have been notified. In July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
On October 18th, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum assembled “15 leaders of business, government, and public health” to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet. Major participants were American military leadership, and certain neocon political figures. The Chinese were not invited. The members took notes, and then returned to their day to day operations.
In Simulation Run 3 Months Ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Predicted Up To 65 Million Deaths Via Coronavirus.
300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for the Military World Games on October 19. The first coronavirus case appeared two weeks later, on November 2. Coronavirus incubation period is 14 days.
Two months later a very similar coronavirus pandemic hit China at Wuhan, a major transport hub in Central China and for the high-speed train network, and with 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities right at the Spring Festival travel rush when hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families.
The Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggested that it was not dangerous. SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold, but
SARS exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified – similar to this new coronavirus in 2019.
SARS had the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .” Several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.”
Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists, “This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment.” Dr. Cantwell noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. When he searched in PubMed for the phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell: “I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade.”
The virus outbreak coincides with the trade war on China.
The virus outbreak coincides with the HK “pro democracy” riots fully funded and instigated by the NED / CIA.
The virus outbreak occurred just after Swine Flu decimated the Chinese pork industry.
The virus outbreak occurred just after Bird Flu decimated the Chinese chicken industry.
The virus outbreak occurred just before NED support and training of Uyghur Muslim extremists.
This month, CNN published a gleeful (and untrue) report, “China’s economy is slumping and the country is still suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and deadly virus is the last thing it needs.”
What will America do next?
Nuclear plant meltdown?
Mysterious deaths in the Chinese leadership ranks.
Armed fighting in Taiwan?
Collapse of a dam?
Sinking of cargo ships?
Mysterious disappearance of a passenger plane or ship?
Launch of 50 ICBM’s that annihilate China completely?
Do not be under the mistaken assumption that America will stop, or that China will continue to accept this status quo. It can only proceed so long before all fucking Hell breaks loose.
I’ve said this over and over … please listen for once.
Americans have no FUCKING idea how bad things can get. Do not believe that fighting for “Oligarch ruled global democracy” is worth the ultimate “push back”.
Contrary Opinions
I do not have all the answers. All I did was sleuth though public, but forgotten articles, and stung things together into a thesis. There are other opinions, of course.
[1] It’s natural, but the bad timing is coincidental.
Of course, this theory omits a number of "elephants in the room".
[1] These markets date back 5000 years. Why would there be an out break now? Why not during the time of King Nebuchadnezzar?
[2] If it is natural, then why would the United States patent it?
[3] Why are all these viral outbreaks against Chinese people and livestock? Why nothing else? Why no dogs and cats, donkeys and horses and birds? Why so darn selective?
[4] Why Wuhan; the geographic nexus of the Han race? Why not Guangzhou which is bigger, has more such markets, and has a year-round environment that is conducive to viral growth?
[5] Species jumping is rare. Tri-species jumping is unheard of, and the HIV inserts are not a natural occurrence.
[6] Why did China, a nation of merit, immediately treat this as a bio-weapon and go into immediate DEFCON ONE lockdown? To believe the "natural" origination of this virus is to assume that the Chinese are idiots, stupid, and moronic. Or, at best, over-reacting.
To accept this narrative, you must also accept that the world is filled with coincidences that should not be explained.
Bats? Really?
... many in the U.S. appear to believe bat-eating Chinese people caused the current COVID-19 pandemic. Since the epidemic first started in Wuhan, Western social media have been lit up by links to several videos of Chinese citizens eating bat soup, with not so subtle racial insinuations that it is the Chinese people and their culture that have caused the COVID-19 epidemic.
But Chinese people do not have a tradition of eating bats.
Journalists from France 24 TV recently tracked down the makers of five of the six most-shared videos. They found that none of these videos were filmed near Wuhan, or in China, as many had claimed. Instead, all videos were filmed in Palau or Indonesia, in locales where bats have traditionally been consumed as food,[4] and where adventurous visitors from around the world would be welcomed to sample local, traditional cuisine.
- Will COVID-19 be Known as “the Chinese Virus” or “the Trump Virus”?
This narrative accepts the idea that the virus is man-made. However, it argues that the Chinese are not smart enough to develop weapons on their own, and are too inept to handle them.
The Chinese are the most merit-driven people on the world. This is true whether they are in school or working in a company. This narrative is something that does not fit with any Chinese that I know about. It's like that narrative the Trump hired low-class strippers and asked them to pee on a hotel bed. You might not like Trump, but this does not fit his personality.
[3] It’s a biological weapon, but it’s China’s fault. They had a biological weapons lab in the middle of one of the largest centrally located Chinese cities and it somehow escaped.
This is also the narrative that is also being pushed by the American propaganda organ “Voice of America“, and disseminated throughout the American Alt-Right outlets.
But…
The facility in Wuhan is NOT a military or development facility. It is a civilian diagnostic facility.
The difference between a military development facility and a public diagnostic facility is stark. It is the difference from a factory that makes automobiles, and a local automotive service center.
"One of the goals was to build a BSL-4 laboratory that meets the national and international standards for diagnosing, researching, and developing antiviral drugs and vaccines while additionally preserving highly pathogenic BSL-4 agents for future scientific research."
It is a diagnostic facility. It is used to develop antiviral drugs. Read for yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478205/
Civilian viral research facilities are registered with the UN. Here is a List of BSL-4 Facilities.
https://www.liquisearch.com/biosafety_level/list_of_bsl-4_facilities
Military viral research facilities are secret. While in the United States there MIGHT be some shared use facilities, I remain very skeptical about that concept. Knowing what I know about severely classified programs, it's just not going to happen.
There is a fundamental difference between top-secret military warfare development, and civilian diagnostic facilities.
Military facilities do not need to be registered with any agency. Certainly, unless specified by treaty, military development complexes are not identified as they operate outside the public domain. You will notice that no North Korean labs or facilities are listed, nor are any Chinese military facilities.
If the Chinese were developing a militarized viral agent, they would not use a monitored diagnostic facility. They would use a classified military base, and they would not advertise it's location. It would be in one or more of these facilities...
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/army-fac.htm
What most people do not understand is that most of the "dirty global politics" that this Wuhan event signifies occurs outside the public domain. Like the movie "Men In Black", the public is kept ignorant intentionally. In America that is why there are Special Access Programs, and branches that are "waived" and "unacknowledged".
Now, all that being said, the argument against an accidental release from the BSL-4 Wuhan facility is that it is a new viral agent. It's new. It's militarized.
It cannot come out of a diagnostic facility.
That's silly. That's like asking your local automobile clinic down the street to build you a new car with custom details and new type of engine and custom transmission. Silly.
Comparison between the Wuhan diagnostic facility and an American R&D weapons facility. Note the difference in the number of buildings, the campus size and distance from public roads.
And…
Editors’ note, January 2020: Many stories have promoted an unverified theory that the Wuhan lab discussed in this article played a role in the coronavirus outbreak that began in December 2019. Nature knows of no evidence that this is true.
-Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens
And of course, you have my conclusion…
Conclusion
America is waging biological warfare with China.
This time, it was really, really serious. Far worse than what started World War I, and World War II.
It is being done without an Act of War, and Congressional approval.
Luckily China took immediate steps, but the net-citizens, the world, and the people of Asia are on alert.
This is very, very dangerous, as the moment it is proved, both China and Russia will be forced to retaliate. Their people will not tolerate passive acceptance of a WMD attack on their nation.
It does not matter if it is nuclear, chemical or biological. It will not be permitted to pass without consequence.
For there HAS to be some consequences. If there isn’t any, things will only get worse.
Who ever thought this up was pure evil. It follows the same story-line as the movie “12 Monkeys” where a a bio-weapon was released directly in front of the Christmas holiday in all the major cities of the world.
Not only was the Wuhan coronavirus surreptitiously disseminated to serve as a major distraction from a rapidly collapsing Global Economic & Financial System…
…this state-sponsored black operation also represents the worst of predatory capitalism conducted as a means of generating revenue.
It occurred and peaked during the one most important day in the year in China; CNY eve. The odds of this occurrence being natural is rather small.
Look at the dissemination and propagation visually.
Look at the dissemination and propagation visually.
In China, CNY eve is roughly equivalent to a combination of Christmas eve, the fourth of July and Labor day. This is THE most critical time of the year for the Chinese people. It is a time when the “great migration” begins and everyone returns home. And there are many many public and private parties. It’s a time when drunken buddies hug each other splash alcohol all over each other and spend times with everyone. It is a time where everyone is interacting with everyone else.
The odds of this happening is 1 in 365.
Think about that! A release of a bio-weapon when the vast majority of Chinese are traveling and enjoying time together at parties.
What kind of evil person would unleash such a weapon?
Meanwhile, the narrative that this is an escaped bio-weapon is being heavily promoted by the Indian mainstream media (an individual funded by grants by an American institution). As well as some Australian news and opinion pieces (also funded by American interests).
Except, for one thing…
The bio-warfare labs are located in Xinjiang. Not in Wuhan… a city more than twice the size of New York City.
If you want to believe that a bio-warfare development lab is placed in a major city, then I have a bridge to sell you. No nation, especially not one run by merit, will put such a dangerous and lethal development center in the middle of such a large and important city.
Key Points...
American military members apparently unleashed an American patented, and Canadian engineered Biological Weapon in the major city of Wuhan designed to coincide with the yearly CNY mass migration. We know their names, and where they stayed and their actions. ALL Chinese cities are wired with video recording systems pipe-lined to the local police.
Like HK was able to record the Trump Administration cutting deals with separatist radicals, the Chinese have full documented evidence of what occurred.
China is now coping with this situation.
Once the situation settles, China will continue with negotiations with the soviets in Russia. They will conspire on a solution to reduce or to protect Asia from the American "pro democracy" internationalism.
All Americans should take note. Nothing ever goes unpunished.
Lastly, the timing of the deadly virus that ravaged China’s pig farms last year quite predictably triggered a call for the development of a preventative vaccine. What the following news report neglected to state was that the mass slaughter of pigs, in a society that demands LOTS of pork, was cynically planned to manufacture the urgent need for yet another vaccine.
The Fake News kings: Western media about China:
Xi Jinping is not the president but the "paramount leader" of China...
Chinese media don't bring news because they're the "mouthpiece" of the Party...
China doesn't fire officials, it "purges" them...
China doesn't requisition private hospitals during a health
emergency by passing laws, it "seizes" them ...
Chinese leaders don't strengthen laws, they "concentrate power"...
China doesn't give out loans, they "trap" countries in debt...
China doesn't punish corrupt officials, they "net" them...
Chinese media doesn't report news, it reports "propaganda"...
China doesn't revise counting methodologies, it "under-reports" cases ...
Chinese companies don't innovate, they "steal IP" ...
Chinese people are not patriotic, they're "brainwashed" ...
Chinese provinces don't win PISA tests, they "selectively nominate the best schools". . .
-Maitreya Bhakal on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal Feb 13. 2020
On a personal note…
There are various comments sent to me by enraged readers. They do not like what I have written.
I do not post comments I do not approve up. This is my blog and I am God here.
They claim that I am America-bashing and that all that I am saying is an attack on the great American “democracy”. They argue that China is a Communist Dictatorship (it isn’t, it’s a Republic nearly identical to the setup in America in 1776), and that everything I write is a lie.
I am an American expat. I am also a former Navy “brown shoe” and as patriotic as can be. Check out my other SHTF posts. I am a proud gun-toting, Trump loving “deplorable”.
The desire for the United States to maintain it’s grip on the world should not be in question. That is understandable. What should be, however, is how it is being handled.
You should not try to raise yourself up by pushing others down.
This course that the United States is on is dangerous and fool-hardy. I worry that it will eventually result in a “push back” that America, the nation that I love, can never recover from.
I know things that most average Americans do not know. DO NOT PLAY AROUND WITH THE THREAT OF DANGER. It’s foolish.
Be careful in your actions.
When I was in High School I used to hang out with my friends and go to parties in the woods. We called these events “keg parties” and it was an every night affair. However, sometimes people would drink too much and insist on driving.
They were our friends, and buddies that we loved and cared about. But, things being as they were, eventually the sloshed friend would end up behind the wheel.
The others, with no other way to get home would be trapped in this death machine as our drunk buddy drove all over the road and in and off it. We were trapped while the good-meaning but absolutely incapable friend risked all of our lives.
That is what is going on… RIGHT NOW… in the United States.
Chinese messaging all over Wechat
The following is a message from the government of China to everyone. Read it. The Chinese government is treating this as a major event similar to that of a war. Read the translation and come to your own conclusions.
What is a first response?
The first-order response is the highest level of national response in the face of war and major disasters. None of the 2003 SARS initiated a first-order response; Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 killed more than 100,000 people did not start a response level.
This time, Zhejiang and Guangdong took the lead in initiating the first-level response, and now the whole country has launched the first-level response.
This shows that the seriousness of the situation is far beyond peoples boldest imagination.
Therefore, we must not take it lightly.
Can let Wuhan Fengcheng, Beijing all temple fairs canceled, Shanghai Disneyland closed, New Years film all off shelves, national guard hundred cities airport!!
The outbreak must be worse than we thought!
Please put down your blind confidence. Please take good care of yourself and your family and be responsible for yourself and your friends.
Stay at home and ride out this disaster safely!
Once again popular: This is war is not a game, win, every day is the Spring Festival! Lose, this is your last Spring Festival!
Put away your blind self-confidence and luck, but also put away your attitude that you have nothing to do with yourself, there is no outsider in this battle!
Stay at home and don't go out!
You're protecting yourself!
Is responsible for the whole family!
Responsible for the front-line medical staff!
Responsibility to society!
The way that China is treating it differs substantially from the way the American and British mainstream media is reporting it.
The American mainstream media is completely out of touch. A nation with a population many times that of the United States locks down everyone inside their homes for three weeks, and this is NOT news? It’s like the flu? Only not as bad?
What.
The.
Fuck?
So the flu is far deadlier than this?
Chinese Government releases are curious statement…
Just now, the Chinese government has sent a message to everyone NOT to TRAVEL during the NEXT holiday sometime in April. That’s four months in the future…
Why?
What do they know?
Take Aways
American / Canadian bio-weapon scientists have engineered similar germ-weapons; of the same type, the same class, and the same nearly identical properties.
We know this because they have filed patents on this viral type with the United States patent office.
[1] Canadian bio-weapons scientists were caught “red handed” trying to sneak a similar Cat-4 viral pathogen into China in March 2019. The Chinese government lodged a complaint.
[2] American bio-scientists have also been caught “red handed” collecting Chinese DNA for their biological experiments.
Both events are well documented, and formal complaints by China have been lodged.
The profile, characteristics of this strain are are indicative of a bio-weapon. Especially the stealth nature of contamination, the deceptive nature of transmission, and the sudden and fatal results. All are hallmarks of a militarized biological weapon.
The launch of this sickness occurred at a time and place indicative of a biological attack. The odds of this occurring randomly is small.
Neocon John Bolton attended a high-level discussion with the Gates foundation about the transmission of a biological pathogen two months before this event.
Since 2018 the Chinese at all levels, have been “closed out” of American and “allied” biological weapons research, and pandemic studies.
American military personnel were in Wuhan at the precise moment of the first release of the virus.
Then all military staff were directed NOT to watch Chinese social media applications, videos and photos.
Chinese authorities are acting swiftly and proactively. They are not pointing fingers, or laying accusations.
However, the Chinese government and their military are treating this as a biological attack.
American mainstream media is treating this as a harmless flu.
Other thoughts…
There are some 100-plus CIA / Pentagon-sponsored clandestine and semi-known laboratories spread throughout the world – laboratories to fabricate and test agents for biological warfare.
A few years ago, one such laboratory was discovered and reported on in Ukraine. They were working on a virus affecting the “Russian Race”. Since there is no homogenous Russian Race – their initial trials supposedly failed. Since the empire never gives up in its evil attempts to dominate the world, we can assume that research on race directed bio-agents continues.
This western, especially American (CIA, Pentagon, NATO) project to develop biochemical weapons to kill people by disease rather than bullets and bombs – it is much cheaper! And less obvious – does exist.
You may draw your own conclusion on whether SARS and the new 2019-nCoV fits that pattern. The timing of the appearance was especially curious. It was first reported on 31 December 2019 in Wuhan – and then expanded into a proportion, so that it interfered with China’s most important holiday, the Lunar New Year. It could, of course, be just coincidence.
One of Washington’s “low-grade” warfare models is destabilizing China (and Russia for that matter) with any means. With the objective of destabilization, China is constantly being harassed and aggressed – see Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Tibet, the tariff wars – and why not with a contagious virus, a trial for a potential pandemic?
What can be observed and even the west must notice to their chagrin and frustration – is China’s extreme resilience and capacity to adapt and resist – to resist with powerful minds and ingenuity that saves her people. And that without counter-aggression, without even an accusation and never a threat.
This is China’s way forward: a steady flow of endless creation, avoiding conflict, no dominance, but seeking harmony by building bridges between people and among countries and cultures – creating understanding and wellbeing, towards a multi-polar world. A model for mankind? – If only the west would open its eyes and wake up.
- The Coronavirus Epidemic: Chinese Resilience and Silent, Simple and Steady Resistance – A Model for Mankind
Why is America doing this?
Why America is doing this…
And the American government wants China to be reduced, they are openly announcing their glee that Chinese people are hurting…
Yeah. As if America still had factories that can employ skilled people, as well as still had people that had the ability to manage and supervise factories…
Keep in mind that Pompeo admitted that the COVID-19 Coronavirus was a “Live Exercise” at the White-house. It was NOT a natural virus. It was NOT a Chinese-developed and deployed bio-weapon. It was an American “system” that was deployed as a “Live Exercise.
China was ready and expecting the attack
The United States carpet bombed China with bio-weapons from 1950-1952, after the disasterous losses that the United States experienced from the Chiense. When Mr. Mao made this quote most people discounted it, but today, we understand the TRUE and REAL situation much clearer.
What a quote!
He got the date and time, and reasoning quite clear.
Mao quote on USA bioweapons and the fall of imperialism bilingual
Update 1
Coronavirus: The Plot Thickens
From Reports:
Indian researchers have found HIV-derived inserts in the coronavirus genome that compound the infectious potential and greatly bolster the argument this virus was developed as a bioterror weapon. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/coronavirus-contains-hiv-insertions-stoking-fears-over-artificially-created-bioweapon
This 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community lists China as a major potential “terror actor” (p.2) and genome editing (p.9) as a major terror risk. https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/SASC_Unclassified_2016_ATA_SFR_FINAL.pdf
Before jumping to conclusions, let’s assume for argument’s sake that the paper published in India on the makeup and likely evolution of this virus passes peer review. What then? The international community will likely conclude the virus was bio-engineered and will condemn China with major implications for sanctions and global trade/travel.
But consider: it is the agenda of USA to contain the rise of China. Cui bono?
Is it far-fetched that having fingered China as a major terror actor and terror risk that US agents would have created this epidemic in the epicenter of Chinese virology experimentation?
It is easier in this instance to identify the crime than the criminal. Western intel agencies are associated with false flags.
- Coronavirus: The Plot Thickens
Update 2
Apparently, people are actually dying in the streets. WTF?
Do not let the soundtrack fool you. This is serious business.
And this…
Dead in the streets being attended to.
Update 3
Americans to the rescue!
The holiday started on CNY eve, and ended just as abruptly when the government ordered everyone to stay inside. Now, on the eve of the first day of work after the holiday we get this message floating around Chinese social media…
Big Benefit!!!
Gullit is a very powerful American company that studies viral drugs. There are few in the world, and some of the drugs it studies are not available in the world today.
This time the expert that China invites to study virus is this companys boss, academician Zhong Nanshan goes to airport personally to meet him!
Because the companys antiviral drug Red Seaway cured 35-year-old patients from Wuhan, China to the United States, China and the United States have signed a contract to buy the companys antiviral Red Seaway import agreement!
This anti-virus medicine has arrived in China today! Tomorrow will be used in Wuhans patient body!!!
The important thing is that after you take the medicine, you can get better in a day! It will all turn around soon! The seriously ill are saved!
I do not know if this message is true or not. Typically, the Chinese tend to be very pragmatic, they usually don’t post hoaxes or lies. It can land them in a Chinese gulag if they do.
Imagine that, if true!
An [1] American company, suddenly has the [2] cure, and it’s a miracle cure! It works nearly [3] instantaneous! The world is saved, and it’s the Americans who did it.
Well… we will see.
In the world of politics, and global diplomacy it’s a high stakes game of push, thrust, parry, retreat, fancy foot work, and parry.
The idea that it is isolated to far away China only, and that it’s not so bad as the flu is falling apart.
With the alternative media promoting the idea that this is a bio-weapon stolen by the Chinese and released accidentally …
… and Tictoc and Chinese social media showing men, women, children and complete families, dressed like Americans, dying on the street…
And the American military being forbidden to watch this.
And the very non-confrontational (smiling and nodding) Chinese reaction…
While China and Russia are having meetings…
Perhaps, it’s time for the USA to pull back from this operation.
We will see.
All I do know is that according to the American mainstream news, “China has not accepted help from America”, from the article titled “China has not yet accepted US help with the coronvirus epidemic “. This article is what the White House adviser Robert O’Brien has to say.
And Senator Tom Cotton (R) chimes in and demands that China be “more transparent”, yet he offers no suggestions how that is possible. HERE.
Sen. Tom Cotton, who has repeatedly chastised the Chinese Communist Party for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, said, "I have very low confidence in the state of Chinese politics because their government is still lying to the world about this deadly matter," during an interview Friday on Fox News.
Update 4
Turns out the news in Update 3 about the medicine was out of Thailand, not the United States. Thailand did the research. The United States just owns the drug that the studies were based upon.
After the outbreak, the team of Dr. Cao Bin of the famous Beijing Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital conducted clinical trials on Remdesivir in the early hours of February 3rd through a series of studies, which showed good results! ——
Within 17 hours of the drug, 96% of the lung function was restored! By February 4th, all 270 patients who participated in the clinical trial were recovering their lung function!
Moreover, the big news from Thailand the day before yesterday also confirmed the effectiveness of the drug!
12 hours to get better! 48 hours from yang to yin!
On February 2nd, at 14:00, Thai Deputy Prime Minister Anutin announced Thailand's progress in the current treatment of the new coronavirus pneumonia - the use of AIDS-suppressing drugs and anti-flu virus two combination therapies, to re-develop a new medical program.
The results showed that the hospital received the treatment of the new case of coronary pneumonia, after 12 hours of improvement, 48 hours test results were negative.
Patients from Wuhan have been more than 70 years old, to Rajavithi Hospital, the lung inflammation has been very serious, pulmonary congestion, need to borrow equipment to assist breathing, and the patient himself has high blood pressure and heart disease and other carry-on disease history, in general, the patient's infection is a more serious column.
Thai medical expert group, through comprehensive consideration and clinical trials, through HIV antiretroviral drugs and anti-flu drugs combined drug protocol program: daily morning-night HIV antiretroviral drugs, while taking anti-flu virus oseltamivir early-to-late daily anti-flu virus Oseltamivir, patients should be completely descarbexed!
What's more, the U.S. has promised not to introduce China for the drug without any hindrance! U.S. President Donald Trump and the U.S. Public Health Administration have approved:
If the results of clinical trials in China are OK, China can try the drug for free until April 27!
Just in the clinical trial effect of good news came, the high-level immediately made the corresponding, can be said to be fighting day after night! Just this afternoon, the Ministry of Science and Technology has announced that a batch of Redsiewe drugs arrived in the country this afternoon.
And just like that…
A patented American drug cures a patented American virus.
American media reports two types of stories… for two types of audiences;
It’s natural, and is pretty harmless. The flu is much worse.
It’s a biological weapon released by the communist dictatorship on the Chinese people. Either intentionally or accidentally.
Update 5
This is a serious virus that contaminates so very easily and quickly.
Infected in 15 seconds while he bought vegetables at the market.
GIC Team GICexpat 6FEB20
A 56-year-old man in Ningbo was recently confirmed as a newly found case to have contracted the novel coronavirus after visiting a food market in the city’s Jiang Bei district on January 23. The confirmation was released to the public on February 4 by the district’s official social media account.
What’s especially surprising about this case is how fast the man contracted the virus.
Video surveillance revealed that it only took 15 seconds for him to be fully exposed, as neither he nor the 61-year-old woman standing next to him while picking out vegetables at the same stall were wearing protective masks.
The woman is believed to have had contracted the virus a few days prior while attending a blessing ceremony.
The man and woman, now both affected by the 2019-nCoV, did not know each other before crossing paths at the Shuang Dongfang market.
Unfortunately, 19 people who subsequently came into close contact with the newly-infected 56-year-old patient have already shown positive signs of infection. All of them have been put under isolated medical observation for further examination.
Update 6
Police are forcefully taking sick people into quarantine. Many refuse to go along, and have to be carried out of their homes.
Forcefully removed from their home.
Update 7
The Western American mainstream narrative is that this is nothing, just a “natural” virus. It’s not so lethal or worrisome. It’s not as bad as the flu. Though, I have yet to see any person with the flu act like this…
Not as bad as the flu they say.
Update 8
A good laugh. Written in the middle of a lethal American bio-weapons attack on China, The Washington Standard defends United States global actions, eight simultaneous wars and bio / economic warfare. Is America Now “The Evil Empire”? .
Their conclusion; no, not at all.
Communism is.
Well, because of history. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and many others, such as Pol Pot killed millions of their countrymen.
Except China is Communist in Name only, just like America is a Republic in name only.
America is an Oligarchy. It was started as a Republic. Changed into a Democracy with the passage of the 12th and 17th amendments, and the progressive “improvements” of President Wilson et.al. solidified the oligarchy we know of today.
China is a Social Republic. It follows the same model as pre-political party United States. Pure communist construction was discarded in the early 1970’s. It was replaced by Capitalism but with a single political party that keeps the “Communist” name.
Update 9
February 10th, a group of companies will try to resume work, if you happen to be employees of these enterprises, please be sure to take a hard look at the following 10 recommendations:
1, carry your ID card with you
2, at least 3 masks.
3, vial alcohol 1 bottle (but please note keeping, do not smoke)
4, 1 phone sealbag
5, pen 1
6, home-cooked meals
7. Don’t touch colleagues
8, wash your hands frequently
9, cycling to and from work
10. Looking for a new job (don’t ask why, this time to let you go to work company, must not be a good company ( tears) #职场达人说#职场进化论 #
First, the Chinese government has treated the epidemic as an act of war, deploying all the means at its disposal, including the military, in order to contain its spread, building several large new hospitals, putting entire huge cities under quarantine and extending the national holidays. The response as been far beyond what this virus seems to warrant, with its low mortality rate.
Second, the Western media response has been an exemplary effort to produce a panic and to smear China, making what is happening there into a horror story. Not only did the mass media outlets do their best to stoke mass hysteria about all things Chinese, but various bloggers and independent “experts” pitched in to produce a panic.
Third, the White House has recently requested that experts look into the possibility that 2019-nCoV has been genetically engineered... I suspect that the next move will be to declare that this virus is indeed an engineered biological weapon developed by Russia, of course.
- Dmitry Orlov has his suspicions about the 2019-nCoV flu, at Club Orlov
Arab media accuse US, Israel of coronavirus conspiracy against China
One report claimed that it was no coincidence that the coronavirus was largely absent from the US and Israel.
Numerous reports in the Arab press have accused the US and Israel of being behind the creation and spread of the deadly coronavirus as part of an economic and psychological war against China, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported.
One report in the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan claimed that it was no coincidence that the coronavirus was absent from the US and Israel, though this is despite America having 12 confirmed cases at the time of writing.
“A ‘wonder’ virus was discovered yesterday in China; tomorrow it will be discovered in Egypt, but it will not be discovered either today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in the US or Israel, nor in poor countries such as Burundi or the Comoro Islands,” the report said.
It also went on to accuse the US and Israel of being behind other outbreaks over the past several years in China and in the Arab world.”As soon as Egypt announced, a few years ago, that it would rely on poultry , and that it would even export [poultry] abroad – that is, that it no longer needed poultry from the US, France, and so on – [suddenly] there appeared, from underneath the ground, the avian flu virus… with the aim of nipping [Egypt’s economic] awakening in the bud,” the report said.”
Even before this, the same thing was done in China… when in 2003 [the country] announced that it had the [world’s] largest dollar reserves they [the Americans] introduced coronavirus’ cousin, SARS, into [the country].”
At the beginning of February, Syrian daily newspaper Al-Thawra also claimed the coronavirus and other outbreaks were part of a US-China war.
“From Ebola, Zika, SARS, avian flu and swine flu, through anthrax and mad cow disease to the corona[virus] – [all these] deadly viruses were manufactured by the US and threaten to annihilate the peoples of the world,” the report alleged.
“[The US] has turned biological warfare into a new type of war, by means of which it intends to change the rules of play and shift the conflict with the peoples [of the world] away from the conventional path.”A report on the Egyptian news site Vetogate.com built on this theory even more, specifying why Wuhan was supposedly chosen as the epicenter of the current outbreak.”
American factories are the first to manufacture every kind of virus and bacteria, from the virulent smallpox virus and the bubonic plague virus to all the viruses we saw in the recent years, such as mad cow disease and swine flu,” the site claimed.
“Wuhan, the city that has now been struck by the corona[virus], is an industrial town, but it is nevertheless the eighth-richest city in China after Shanghai.”Guangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin and Hong Kong, are the country’s major cities.
[Wuhan’s] place at the bottom of the list [of China’s major cities] is what makes it a suitable [place] for an American crime… for it is not a focus of attention, and the level of healthcare there is surely lower than in the larger and more important cities.”
The news site adds that there is a theorized economic motivation for the outbreak, as the supposed masterminds behind it will reap the billions of dollars spent by China on emergency treatments and medicines, “which, by the way, will be manufactured by an Israeli company.”
Over 37,000 people around the world have been infected with the coronavirus as the outbreak continues to spread. The current death toll is over 800 people.
Update 12
For some reason, of which we can only speculate, this coronavirus was renamed to COVID-19. Thus making it difficult to associate any earlier names (and associated articles) with the current virus news.
But by the looks of it, this disease is a bioengineered weapon of mass destruction that has either been accidentally or purposefully released (either way the cat is out of the bag) so a vaccine isn't happening any time soon.
-ALS
Irrefutable; The coronavirus was engineered by scientists in a lab using well documented genetic engineering vectors that leave behind a “fingerprint”.
Article is in Chinese, and the Chinese pretty much established this as a bio-weapon event. The article was picked up by German scientists that’s been distributing the data along scientific and technical social media channels.
The R-0 value for Coronavirus is still being debated. It has been estimated around 2.x – 6.x . Link Posted February 11, 2020.
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7.
Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity.
We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period.
Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6.
Update 15
The CDC has restated (Feb 13) the virus is contagious when symptoms do not show – Link
Coronavirus can be spread through people who aren’t exhibiting symptoms of the illness, the director of the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention said Thursday.
Update 16
This falls in line with Japans researchers who estimate 1 in every 2 people were infected from people not showing symptoms Link
At least one of every two instances of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus is believed to occur while the first patient is not yet showing symptoms
Update 17
The incubation period was initially thought to be 14days, this has since been revised to 24days – Link
New research from a group of Chinese scientists suggested the virus’ incubation period – the time between exposure and the onset of symptoms – could be as long as 24 days.
And this…
The more we learn about this mysterious new coronavirus, the more alarming this outbreak becomes. When the virus first began to spread, authorities insisted that it was very unlikely that human to human transmission was taking place. Of course we soon found out that this virus spreads from person to person incredibly easily. Initially we were also told that we shouldn’t be afraid to touch a surface that an infected person may have touched because the virus cannot be spread in that manner. But as you will see below, scientists have now discovered that the virus can actually live for quite a few days on a smooth surface. Based on what we now know, this outbreak is going to be exceedingly difficult to contain, and that has very serious implications for all of us.
- End of the American Dream
Update 18
The UK Government has stated the virus as a imminent threat – Link
Coronavirus poses a serious and imminent threat to public health in the UK, the government declared as it introduced new powers to forcibly quarantine people for their own safety.
Update 19
China is still refusing US health officials to be involved and the US are voicing their disappointment – Link
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow Thursday said the Trump administration was "disappointed" with China's response to the coronavirus and the fact that no United States health officials have been invited in to help with the outbreak.
Update 16
Professor Dennis Etler of San Francisco: Covid-19 is turning out to be much like the H1N1 influenza virus in its rate of infection and severity. The death rate is higher, but that is probably an artifact of its concentration in Wuhan and the fact that most people who get the virus have only mild symptoms or none at all and are therefore not counted. When that is factored in the death rate will lessen.
Currently the death rate is most similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918, but with time it may reduce to levels comparable to the H1N1/9 American Flu (aka swine flu) of 2009.
China has taken Covid-19 seriously and has taken a big hit as a result. The US did nothing for 6 months, resulting in its global spread and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Please pray tell. Which government is responsible and which government truly has the concern of it's people and the people of the world at heart?
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/coronavirus-covid19-lawrence-wong-sars-h1n1-12436330
Update 17
All February there has been a massive ant-China propaganda campaign launched by the neocon elements inside Washington DC, and the “deep state”.
Here’s an excellent article in the on-line magazine Veterans Today;
This insecure passive aggressiveness shined with blinding intensity on February 8 during an annual National Governors’ Association event which saw 44 American state governors come together from Feb. 7-10 in Washington, DC.
During his speech, Pompeo’s niceties quickly ended in order to launch into his main agenda behind speaking at this venue: To threaten all participants to stay away from China because “China is watching you. Working you.”
Pompeo warned the attending governors not to make bilateral deals with China “that could undermine national policy”, and stated: “Whether you are viewed by the CCP as friendly or hardline, know that its working you, know that its working the team around you. Competition with China is happening inside your state and it affects our capacity to perform America’s vital national security functions.”
Faced with Trump’s often re-stated desires to build positive relations with China and achieve a trade deal, the deep state has gone on overdrive pushing to sabotage this dynamic by promoting the support of Taiwan and Hong Kong independence, while working hard to shut down as many American-based Confucius institutes which had grown to 90 at their max.
In recent months, FBI and CIA pressure has resulted in the closing of 29 of the 100 Confucius institutes in the past 6 years. Most recently, under pressure of the new National Defense Authorization Acts of 2018 and 2019, 22 Institutes have been forced to shut down with sinophobe senators Mark Rubio, and Ted Cruz leading the charge on the republican side and sinophobe democrats like Seth Moulton running the pressure campaign for the democrats. On top of this, hundreds of Chinese scholars, and scientists have been fired from their positions as professors and researchers in universities, and slandered as espionage agents by the new McCarthyite Witch hunt run under the Christopher Wray’s FBI. The policy is blunt and simple: Sever as many intellectual and cultural connections between America and China as humanly possible to prevent any alliance from forming.
Pompeo’s deployment to the Governors’ conference was a major part of this fanatical campaign since the oligarchy is aware that American governors like Matt Bevin of Kentucky, Bill Lee of Tennessee, Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts, and many others see China’s desire to invest in American infrastructure and agricultural products as a life line for survival where no federal relief appears visible and an economic meltdown looms overhead.
The irony which leading deep state operatives managing the anti-China/Russia campaign refuse to acknowledge is that America’s oncoming economic collapse can only be stopped by a FDR-styled bankruptcy reorganisation of Wall Street and a new alliance with actually viable nations like Russia and China who wish to help America rebuild its decayed agro-industrial foundations.
ctm posted my longish scientific commentary written last Sunday on Monday. The situation is still rapidly evolving. Much more is now known than last Sunday. This updates my previous commentary and the general knowledge about Wuhan, adding new factual information plus additional research. For those interested, the WSJ online (paywalled, but I am a subscriber) has added a new coronavirus section tracking Wuhan daily news because of the importance to China and global supply chains. I rely on it here using today’s WSJ noon update.
A special h/t to previous commenters Robert of Texas and Nicolas McGinley, who added much to my previous post with many erudite comments.
Origins and precedents
Wuhan is the third known transmission of a respiratory tract coronavirus infection from bats via an intermediary mammal to humans:
SARS 2003: The following information is derived from a special WHO report. 916 deaths from 8422 total infections, mortality 10.9%. Not transmissible prior to onset of symptoms (cough, fever); main transmission days 4 and 5 after symptom onset. Mode of transmission mainly contact, with an R0 about 3. Bat corona via live civet intermediate to humans in a Chinese wet market.
MERS 2012: 779 deaths from 2229 total infections, mortality 35.5%. Not transmissible prior to symptom onset. Bat corona via live camel intermediate to humans in a Saudi Arabian camel market.
Wuhan 2020: to today at noon (2/13/20), about 1300 deaths in about 59000 diagnosed cases, with about 5000 full recoveries. The implications are discussed below. Bat corona via live pangolin to humans in Wuhan’s Huanan wet market (since permanently closed) in December 2019.
Wuhan transmission and clinical progression
Many more case reports are now giving a clear clinical picture.
Transmission route is either contact or inhalation (of real concern, because more flu like than cold like—even with annual flu shots influenza R0 remains about 2 because of flu vaccine issues covered in the previous post).
Based on SARS and influenza, this means the likely Wuhan R0 is 3ish, so very contagious. The significant inhalation route is now shown by both the Diamond Princess cruise ship experiment (more below) and by the fact that ordinary surgical masks proved ineffective in the Wuhan hospital setting (JAMA, previous post).
Incubation period is 7-10 days from initial infection. The good news is that the 14-day quarantine adopted pretty much universally last week should therefore be effective (with a margin of safety) at Wuhan containment. But in most of Southeast Asia outside China, Japan, and Singapore, or in Africa should Wuhan spread there, 14-day quarantine will be difficult or impossible to maintain so the possibility of a pandemic remains.
The bad news is that Wuhan IS transmissible during some later part of the symptomless incubation period. The definitive clinical proof (there was comment debate about the reliability of previous post evidence from Japan and Germany) is an age 50’s UK male who attended an about 100 person sales conference in Singapore 1/20-1/22 2020.
The bad news is that Wuhan IS transmissible during the later part of the symptomless incubation period.
A single individual from Wuhan also attended this conference and was–per Singapore Wuhan containment policies– symptomless on arrival (no fever, no cough).
That either symptomless or very early symptomatic individual transmitted Wuhan to the UK citizen in Singapore. The UK individual then flew to France for a 4-day family ski vacation 1/24-1/28 at Le Contamines-Montjoie. During the 4-day vacation the UK male remained symptomless (entire incubation time Singapore plus France at most 8 days) but transmitted Wuhan to 11 other individuals, 5 later diagnosed in UK (family and friends), 5 later diagnosed in France, and 1 later diagnosed in Spain. Clearly this case is NOT family close proximity contact transmission.
This case may be a “super spreader” outlier, BUT it means a symptomless R0 as high as 11 cannot be ruled out, with a symptomless transmission period of several days. By comparison, the R0 for measles (absent vaccination) is 12-18, so a horrific Wuhan symptomless R0 of 11 is within the realm of actual possibility
A horrific Wuhan symptomless R0 of 11 is within the realm of actual possibility.
This is VERY bad news, as the formal CDC guidance on URI’s is that transmission risk is highest with peak symptoms (equating to peak virion shedding)–as was the case with SARS. Not so with Wuhan, reinforcing the public health necessity of strict 14-day quarantine.
Disease progression is standard common cold symptoms for 7-10 days with one exception–used since yesterday for clinical diagnosis in Hubei Province, as both the Chinese and the experimental CDC US test kits are showing significant problems with a high rate of false negatives.
Common colds from over 120 distinct serotypes from all three viral families (RNA naked Rhino, RNA enveloped Corona, and DNA enveloped Adeno) all evidence the same three symptoms: runny nose, sore throat, and cough.
Influenza adds two: fever and muscle ache.
Wuhan clinically shows four: runny nose, sore throat, cough, AND fever—but NOT muscle ache.
As of today, Hubei switched to clinical diagnosis and today’s ‘new’ diagnosed Wuhan cases were 14840. Yesterday, using only test kits, it was 1638. This is not a leap in cases; it is a leap in diagnostics.
Unfortunately, this new fact means Wuhan has previously (as suspected but now proven) been severely under diagnosed and reported. And that unfortunately means the 1300 attributed deaths were also severely underreported. More on presently inferable mortality comes in a following section.
Wuhan then makes a now well-established clinical bifurcation. In 75-80% of cases, by symptom day 10 there is a normal ‘corona cold’ recovery lasting a few days. (In my own case last week, 3 recovery days in total, days 9-12 from symptom onset.)
In 20-25% of cases, by symptom day 10 Wuhan progresses to lower respiratory tract pneumonia, where death may occur with or without ICU intervention. The percentage of these deep pneumonias that are viral as opposed to a secondary bacteria infection is not known, but the NEJM clinical case report from Washington State discussed in the following paragraph strongly suggests viral (like SARS), not secondary bacterial treatable with antibiotics.
The new NEJM case report is so important it is summarized here because it leads to a hopeful culminating section below. The Seattle Wuhan case evidenced x-ray diagnosed lower respiratory tract pneumonia from days 9-11 from symptom onset. Supplemental oxygen was started day 9. IV antibiotics were started day 10 to no effect, so discontinued after one day.
Importantly (more below), experimental antiviral remdesivir started day 11 by IV under a compassionate use exception, and the deep viral pneumonia fully resolved (per x-ray diagnosis) within 24 hours!
Diamond Princess ‘lab’ experiment
On Sunday, reported cases were 69 out of about 3700 total ship passengers and crew. Japan was removing people from the ship to hospital isolation as soon as symptoms (fever) showed, so the cruise ship became a somewhat artificial (close quarters) symptomless R0 experiment.
As of today, the ship’s website reports that 218 passengers have been positively diagnosed from 713 tested, all removed to hospital isolation. About 3500 passengers and crew remain on board as the ‘experiment’ continues. This suggests symptomless Wuhan R0 is greater than 2 (37 new cases per day for four days among a symptomless about 3500- 3600) and could be, like SARS, 3ish. Except SARS transmission was after symptom onset; this is before.
Per its website, ship offered today to begin removing symptomless passengers to shore quarantine at their expense, or to remain quarantined on the ship at Princess expense. In either event, full cruise refunds have been made.
Inferable Mortality
The news here is not good. We have mostly very poor data; both Hubei incidence and mortality were now provably severely under reported.
But we do have one piece of usable comparable information. 1300 mortalities and 5000 recoveries amongst those who tested positive from the false negative test kits used until yesterday (the majority of cases have not yet resolved one way of the other).
In the end, when the disease has run its course, there are only two outcomes: recovery or death.
On the test kit basis, the mortality could be as high as 26%. That is horrible but not impossible since MERS was almost 36%.
On the test kit basis, the mortality could be as high as 26%.
Migration of lethality / contagiousness of the WuHan Coronavirus.
Statement from Beijing claims the emergency is over. Going from “black” into “orange”.
16FEB20 Beijing statement.
Update 20 – 22FEB20
Why was University of Rochester recruiting medical subjects, when the baseline requirement was they had to be 100% ethnic Chinese? Looks like DNA collection to me. China Rising Radio Sinoland 200222
Collect Chinese DNA flier.
It is more evidence of the US collecting Chinese and Slavic (Russian) DNA, likely to be used to develop race-specific microbes that only kill that group.
Mr. Jose took the photo the winter of 2018-2019, just a year ago. It is one of those announcements seen all around schools and on grocery store public bulletin boards, with the little tear-off contact tabs below. Angela Mim’s email was on the tabs, as well as the phone number of the Flaum Eye Institute, which is part of the School of Medicine at the University of Rochester in New York. Dr. Michael DePaolis was conducting this study.
...
The University of Rochester, Flaum Eye Institute and Dr. DePaolis may have been willing participants in DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Chinese DNA collection program to develop race specific bioweapons, or were just innocent dupes, sending tissue samples on to a fake-named laboratory with a P.O. Box. We’ll never know. But, it’s safe to say that no matter the excuses, this is clear evidence of Chinese citizens being used as guinea pigs to collect their DNA.
I can smell the germ warfare from here.
Update 21
The American anti-China propaganda war has been relentless.
Swooping in on a castle’s weak point, robbing the victim of a fire, throwing stones at someone drowning in a well – a range of Chinese proverbs have been coined to make the same point: not to kick a person who is already down.
These sayings have been popping up in recent weeks in the coded phrases used by Chinese diplomats. That’s because – just when the ink was drying on the first phase of a long awaited trade deal between China and the United States – there has been a new souring in relations.
Beijing focused on fighting the coronavirus outbreak at home, Washington has seemed to be turning up the heat on the Chinese on several fronts this month.
With some Chinese believing that their American foes are trying to take advantage of the Covid-19 crisis, the subsequent bad feeling doesn’t bode well for future trade talks.
-Week in China
Update 22
Well, I have always suspected that the food market wasn’t the source or cause for the virus. So many things just didn’t add up. Now things are getting clearer with each passing day.
First off, the videos of the authorities cleaning up the Animal Market are all over the Chinese Internet. QQ, Wechat and Tictoc has literally thousands of videos detailing the cleanup efforts and the discarding of the animals. Alive and / or dead, they are captured by men in haz-mat suits, put into pink plastic containers. Shoved into a hole in the ground. Set on fire, and then buried under three yards of soil.
You know what is missing?
Bat cages.
There just aren’t any bird cares. There are those plastic cages for ground fowl like ducks, chicken, geese and quail. But not the specialized cages for bats. They need special cages.
Now, I thought it was curious that there were videos of people eating bat soup. But these were out of Indonesia and Burma. You could see by the writing used in the background. Nothing in Chinese.
So, unless someone is going to show me the cages where they kept the rare and unusual bats, I am going to stick to my belief that the Animal Market is just a ruse and a cover for nefarious American activities.
How convenient. America patented the conoravirus, and now America has the vaccine. Amazing how that works.
Update 24
"A 20-year-old woman from Wuhan, China, transmitted the coronavirus to her family members without ever showing any symptoms, a new study found.
The woman tested positive for the virus, but her CT scans were clear and she never became physically ill. Five of her family members, however, came down with a fever. Two developed severe pneumonia. The case is evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted when someone is asymptomatic".
Update 25 – 24FEB20
This is a very long article with some good things. It discusses the DARPA experiments, and the propaganda war.
A pull-quote…
... upon further examination of the sourcing for this serious claim,(That the Chinese biological lab in Wuhan released this bioweapon)...
... these supposed links between the outbreak and an alleged Chinese bioweapons program have come from two highly dubious sources.
For instance, the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.”
Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S. government propaganda.
(But why not the CIA directly?)
Notably, the long-standing ban on the domestic use of U.S. government propaganda on U.S. citizens was lifted in 2013, with the official justification of allowing the government to “effectively communicate in a credible way” and to better combat “al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence.”
The article…
Bats, Gene Editing and Bio Weapons: Recent DARPA experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
Link to Article: https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/top-news/bats-gene-editing-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/
DARPA RECENTLY SPENT MILLIONS ON RESEARCH INVOLVING BATS AND CORONAVIRUSES, AS WELL AS GENE EDITING “BIOWEAPONS” PRIOR TO THE RECENT CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK. NOW, “STRATEGIC ALLIES” OF THE AGENCY HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO DEVELOP A GENETIC MATERIAL-BASED VACCINE TO HALT THE POTENTIAL EPIDEMIC.
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic.
As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have grown, so too have the number of theories speculating about the outbreak’s origin, many of which blame a variety of state actors and/or controversial billionaires. This has inevitably led to efforts to clamp down on “misinformation” related to the coronavirus outbreak from both mainstream media outlets and major social media platforms.
However, while many of these theories are clearly speculative, there is also verifiable evidence regarding the recent interest of one controversial U.S. government agency in novel coronaviruses, specifically those transmitted from bats to humans.
DARPA.
...continued...
Update 26
In order to prevent World War III, the Chinese government “bit the bullet”. It is well known that [1] this is a biological weapon [2] the profile is that obvious, and [3] China did go into DEFCON ONE in response.
The next step is what? World War III?
So China, suggests that perhaps the bio-weapon was an accidental leak from a weapons facility. So they made a statement to this effect, and everything calmed down.
There! Everyone is happy.
The neocons can breathe a little better knowing that World War III will not be on their shoulders, and China is given some “breathing room” to strategize…
But wait…
This explanation does not really fit the actual observed situation. And others are taking note of that;
This is also of interest…
I urge you to put up with Jones and listen to the whole interview, but to sum it up: A 2015 document Boyle unearthed fingers the Level 4 bio-lab (BSL 3) at the University of North Carolina as the U.S. participant in the engineering of the ‘COVID 19’ virus. Names are named, including the Chinese scientist from the Wuhan lab who bought and then transported the pathogen back to China. The deal was sponsored by the NIH (National Institute of Health) and the FDA (Federal Drug Administration), aside from the university bureaucrats. As Professor Boyle says, all involved should be prosecuted under the Bio-terrorism Act of 1989, which, again, Professor Boyle wrote.
.
Smoking guns don’t come any hotter than this.
.
An interesting observation was Boyle’s assurance that the official claim that bats were involved in the transmission to humans is ‘balderdash’, and that, given The Bug’s HIV gene envelope, animals of any sort are ruled out as spreaders. That the mainstream is outed on this provenance-related prevarication is extremely significant, for its implications. We obviously cannot trust them on any Bug-related matter.
.
My only bone to pick with Professor Boyle is his theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab accidentally. I spent half the weekend looking into the protocols used by Level 3 and 4 labs and can assure you that an accident is no more likely here than in the Baxter scandal from 2009, which I described in a recent post. (For those who want to check my facts on this, see the quotes and links in the end notes to this post. It is quite important!)
.
Although Boyle is an exceptional man, one of the few amongst top level scientists, he doesn’t understand the long range plans of those in power, nor does he realize the lengths they have and will go to. Boyle has shown courage in airing his views before: From his position as professor of international law he spoke out against the war in Afghanistan, a risk to his job and maybe his safety after 9/11, so I tend to doubt he (in effect) would false-champion the official story on the outbreak. It could be that — like most of us — he just cannot imagine ‘colleagues’ letting loose such devastation upon the world. As I say, he has some smartening up to do.
.
See, the official story is slowly becoming ‘an accidental release’ from the Wuhan lab. This was inevitable, given the robustness of the evidence that it is a bio-weapon. (Listen to the goddamn link!)
The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report.
“No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.
Highlights:
*Wuhan Seafood market may not be the source of COVID-19
*Though virus first showed-up in China but the source of the virus may not be in China
*The possibility that virus may have originated abroad can’t be ruled out
*The theory that virus originated in December 2019 has been contested.
*According to new theory, human-to-human transmission may have started in November 2019 or even earlier.
*The people in the Wuhan Seafood may not be the first one to transmit it.
*The scenario that someone bought it to the market is one of the three scenarios that is still consistent with the data
Another study published on a Chinese open repository for scientific researchers, reveals the new virus was introduced to the seafood market from another location, and then spread rapidly from market to market. The findings were the result of analyses of genome-wide data, sources of infection and the route of spread of 93 samples of the virus collected from 12 countries across four continents, reported by VOV World. Thus, their conclusion supports one of the scenarios built by Kristian Andersen.
According to the researchers, the new coronavirus experienced two sudden population expansions, including one on January 6, 2020, which was related to the lunar New Year holiday. An earlier expansion occurred on December 8, 2019, implying human-to-human transmission may have started in early December or late November, and then accelerated when it reached the Huanan seafood market.
Update 30
• Creator Of BioWeapons Act Says Coronavirus Is Biological Warfare Weapon
Here we have a lawyer who drafted up some biological weapons legislation. They asked him what he thought, and he believes that China stole the technology, and accidently released it in Wuhan because they were developing weapons in the middle of the 11 million people city of Wuhan…
Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989
But the bottom line is I drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention that was approved unanimously by both Houses in the United States Congress signed into law by President Bush Sr. that it appears the coronavirus that we’re dealing with here is an offensive biological warfare weapon that leaped out of Wuhan BSL-4. I’m not saying it was done deliberately.
Finally, we have this…
Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag
Prashant Pradhan , Ashutosh Kumar Pandey , Akhilesh Mishra , Parul Gupta , Praveen
1111 Kumar Tripathi , Manoj Balakrishnan Menon , James Gomes , Perumal Vivekanandan* and
Bishwajit Kundu*1
1Kusuma School of biological sciences, Indian institute of technology, New Delhi-110016, India. 2Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, New Delhi-110019, India
$Equal contribution
* Corresponding authors- email: bkundu@bioschool.iitd.ac.invperumal@bioschool.iitd.ac.in
Abstract:
We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV- 1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus. [my emphasis]
Update 31
COVID-19 May Have Originated from the US? Japanese TV Broadcast
This immediately went viral on Chinese social media, with speculation that the coronavirus may have originated in the US. It had already been widely discussed that the virus may have been released at the time of the Military World Games.
“Perhaps the US delegates brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year.”
In the same article, a professor at Fudan University stated that global virologists were working to track the origin of the virus, “including the intelligence agencies”.
Update 32
Harvard Genetic Research Team Collected and Transferred China Blood and DNA Samples Back to the US
The study below pertains to a US initiative by an unnamed “renowned University” involved in collecting blood and DNA samples in China’s Anhui province in the 1990s. The unnamed university is Harvard University.
Blood samples were collected. In turn, the US scientists “acquired DNA samples of the target group for research purposes.
“The principal investigator himself admitted that for the asthma research alone, 16,400 DNA samples had been transferred to the US.“. These DNA samples collected by the Harvard research team were then shipped to the US. They are part of extensive data base.
According to Romanoff (in an earlier article) the number of DNA samples transferred to the US was much larger than the figures quoted in Zhang Yong and Zhao Wenxia’s chapter:
… it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country.
Update 33
In other news…
But when the time came, the bastards were prepared: The Weird Animal Market! The bat soup-slurping Chinese! And hey, if that didn’t work: ‘The Wuhan Level 4 Biolab!’, which was conveniently minutes away from the designated ground (or patient) zero, at the Market. (Talk about convenient! As is the coincidence that the outbreak occurred in the midst of the ultimate Chinese travel week, the Lunar New Year. Yes, the better to spread not only The Bug, but the panic; and to make sure both spread world-wide, via air travel.)
But blaming the bio-lab would be a fall-back position; ever the optimists, the real perps were hoping mother nature as patsy would hold water, at least for a few months.
–Bandito
Update 34
There are seven coronaviruses known to infect people. Four of them—229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1—typically cause a cold and only rarely result in death. The other three—MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and the new SARS-CoV-2—have varying degrees of lethality. In the 2003 SARS outbreak, 10 percent of infected people died. Between 2012 and 2019, MERS killed 23 percent of infected people. Although the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is lower, the virus has already killed more people than the other two outbreaks combined, which some have attributed to the pathogen’s fast transmission.
See “How COVID-19 is Spread”
The cold-causing coronaviruses, as well as many other viruses that cause common colds, are typically restricted to the upper respiratory tract, that is, the nose and sinuses. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, however, are capable of invading deep into the lungs, something that is associated with more severe disease.
One possible reason for this is that the virus binds to the ACE-2 receptor on human cells in order to gain entry. This receptor is present in ciliated epithelial cells in the upper and lower airway, as well as in type II pneumocytes, which reside in the alveoli in the lower airway and produce lung-lubricating proteins. “The type II pneumocytes are . . . important for lung function, so this is part of why the lower respiratory disease can be so severe,” notes Gralinksi.
The new coronavirus also appears to use the ACE-2 receptor, which may help partially explain why, like SARS, it is more deadly than the other four coronaviruses. Those pathogens use different receptors, except for NL63, which also uses the ACE-2 receptor but binds to it with less affinity, says Gralinski. (MERS is thought to use an entirely different receptor, which is also present in the lower airways.)
- Why Some COVID-19 Cases Are Worse than Others
Update 35
The Audio Archives of this radio show were hacked-into and destroyed sometime within the past 24 hours. Someone clearly did not want the free audio archive of Thursday's show about Coronavirus, to reach the public.
I do not yet know what entity did this. My technical people are investigating.
-Hal Turner Radio Show
Update 36
From John Paul Roberts...
It is difficult to get reliable information about coronavirus. The information difficulty is further complicated by interest groups using the outbreak for their own agendas.
For example, many both inside and outside China are using the spread of the virus to criticize the Chinese government. Others, both inside and outside China, claim the virus is a bioweapon unleashed on China by the US. Still others say the global elite has decided to implement a program to reduce the world population and that Bill Gates, one of the global elite, said some months ago that a global pandemic would break out at this time.
Some Internet sites attract traffic by posting reports of massive numbers of Chinese deaths and crematoriums running 24/7. The official Chinese story has been that the virus originated in a market that sold wild animal meat. The fact remains that Wuhan, apparently a city larger than any in the US, has been locked down for a month.
Francis Boyle (University of Illinois) is an expert on biowarfare weapon research. He wrote the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act of 1989, which is the US implementing legislation for the 1972 Bio-Weapons Convention. In interviews (see for example, https://www.activistpost.com/2020/02/us-biowarfare-act-author-studies-confirm-coronavirus-weaponized.html )
Boyle says he has read four scientific studies that confirm beyond doubt that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. The studies show that the virus has elements added to make it easy to spread and elements that reduce the ability of the immune system to resist the virus.
Boyle reports that the bio-engineering work that makes the virus easy to spread was done at the University of North Carolina, and that the work that allows HIV to be added was done in an Australian facility.
He shows that Chinese scientists from the Wuhan BSL-4 biowarefare lab were present in both the UNC and Australian labs and participated in the research. The Chinese scientists returned to Wuhan, each with an essential part that enabled the Wuhan lab to produce what we call the coronavirus, the official name of which is CoVid-19.
Boyle says that the virus’ escape was an unintended event, and that such escapes from biowar labs have happened before.
Update 37 – 3MAR20
It’s starting to hit the USA, and it’s not even prepared. Donald Trump calls it a “hoax” and “similar to the flu”. Vice President Pence is assigned to deal with it. Cases are popping up all over the nation, and Americans are flooding into the supermarkets without masks to stock up on supplies.
It appears to have mutated to accept non-Asians, and now it looks like generation four is multiplying in the USA.
The team at the Seattle Flu Study have sequenced the genome of the COVID19 community case reported yesterday from Snohomish County, WA, and have posted the sequence publicly, link below. There are some enormous implications here.
This case, which is referred to as "WA2," is on a branch in the evolutionary tree that descends directly from the case referred to as "WA1" the first reported case in the USA sampled on Jan 19, also from Snohomish County, WA.
This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks.
Let's do some quick math, with an R0 of 15 and generation of two weeks:
This person should have spawned four generations or roughly 3500 people, the fourth generation should just be starting to show symptoms, so the person that died is likely from the second generation if dying now (death is four to five weeks after catching), meaning they didn't catch it from the original person but from someone the original person infected.
In another month, that one original spreader can be responsible for the infection of three quarters of a million cases. (R0, generations two weeks). Here is the Model being used by government entities inside the United States. It is utterly horrifying
-Hal Turner Show
Update 38
Now the Intenet has officially claimed that the idea that COVID-19 is a biological Weapon as a hoax.
The Wuhan coronavirus at the time of writing has caused the deaths of 563 people. The number of those infected stands at 28,256 with the outbreak showing no signs of slowing down. It was reported a short while ago that two newborn infants had been infected with the virus, which suggests the virus may be passed on to unborn babies.
Conspiracy theories on the coronavirus outbreak are all over the internet. Google, Twitter and Facebook are said to be taking steps to prevent fake news from spreading across their platforms.
While several scientists believe that bats may be to blame for the spread of the virus, the victims of this disease did not become infected after eating bat soup as some conspiracy theorists are trying to convince people. This misinformation seems to have spread after footage of a Chinese woman eating soup with a bat in it was circulated on social media. However, the footage is not of someone infecting themselves with the coronavirus, but instead of a travel blogger eating at a restaurant in Palau in 2016.
Once again, the biological weapon theory appears with theorists stating the virus ‘escaped’ from a secure lab. Others claim that Clorox or Lysol will kill the virus, which it definitely won’t. Neither will keeping your throat moist and drinking vitamin C supplements prevent you from contracting the virus. Some people are suggesting that those who have already been infected should drink bleach while others claim that avoiding ice cream or other milk products will help prevent infection. None of these claims are true, and the only advice and suggestions that should be followed are those provided by health professionals.
And because he has apparently not been blamed for enough disasters, anonymous anti-vaxxers are also spreading the rumor that Bill Gates created the coronavirus.
-List Verse
Notice how they omitted all the backround on the out-break.
So you can pretty much expect all the “unusual occurances” and mysteries regarding this out-break to be religated to the tin-foil-hat fringe.
Update 39 – 4MAR20
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 0.1% of those infected, he said.
The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated. Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.
-WHO
The death rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
The death rate for COVID-19 appears to be higher than that of the flu.
-Livescience.
Ambitious, agile, and aggressive
The team began in Beijing and then split into two groups that, all told, traveled to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and the hardest hit city, Wuhan. They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. “Everywhere you went, anyone you spoke to, there was a sense of responsibility and collective action, and there’s war footing to get things done,” Aylward says.
The group also reviewed the massive data set that Chinese scientists have compiled. (The country still accounts for more than 90% of the global total of the 90,000 confirmed cases.) They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease, 13.8% had severe symptoms, and 6.1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure. The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms. Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses. Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill. For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.
A critical unknown is how many mild or asymptomatic cases occur. If large numbers of infections are below the radar, that complicates attempts to isolate infectious people and slow spread of the virus. But on the positive side, if the virus causes few, if any, symptoms in many infected people, the current estimated case fatality rate is too high. (The report says that rate varies greatly, from 5.8% in Wuhan, whose health system was overwhelmed, to 0.7% in other regions.)
To get at this question, the report notes that so-called fever clinics in Guangdong province screened approximately 320,000 people for COVID-19 and only found 0.14% of them to be positive. “That was really interesting, because we were hoping and maybe expecting to see a large burden of mild and asymptomatic cases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That piece of data suggests that’s not happening, which would imply that the case fatality risk might be more or less as we currently have.” But Guangdong province was not a heavily affected area, so it is not clear whether the same holds in Hubei province, which was the hardest hit, Rivers cautions.
Much of the report focuses on understanding how China achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible: containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. “China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” the report notes.
The most dramatic—and controversial—measure was the lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January. That has “effectively prevented further exportation of infected individuals to the rest of the country,” the report concludes. In other regions of mainland China, people voluntarily quarantined and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods.
Chinese authorities also built two dedicated hospitals in Wuhan in just over 1 week. Health care workers from all over China were sent to the outbreak’s center. The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases. In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.
Aggressive “social distancing” measures implemented in the entire country included canceling sporting events and shuttering theaters. Schools extended breaks that began in mid-January for the Lunar New Year. Many businesses closed shop. Anyone who went outdoors had to wear a mask.
Two widely used mobile phone apps, AliPay and WeChat—which in recent years have replaced cash in China—helped enforce the restrictions, because they allow the government to keep track of people’s movements and even stop people with confirmed infections from traveling. “Every person has sort of a traffic light system,” says mission member Gabriel Leung, dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Color codes on mobile phones—in which green, yellow, or red designate a person’s health status—let guards at train stations and other checkpoints know who to let through.
“As a consequence of all of these measures, public life is very reduced,” the report notes. But the measures worked. In the end, infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household, Leung says. Once all the people in an apartment or home were exposed, the virus had nowhere else to go and chains of transmission ended. “That’s how the epidemic truly came under control,” Leung says. In sum, he says, there was a combination of “good old social distancing and quarantining very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level, facilitated by AI [artificial intelligence] big data.”
Deep commitment to collective action
How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development:
“No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”
Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.
“Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,” Phelan says. “There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.”
-ScienceMag
Coronavirus: there are 2 types, Chinese researchers find, while authorities say faeces and urine can transmit the infection. They found that one type, which they called the L type, was more prevalent than the other, the S type, meaning it was more infectious.
They also found that the L type had evolved from the S type, and that the L type was far more widespread before January 7 and in Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak. https://lnkd.in/g-NrpBJ
Update 40
A Los Alamos National Laboratory analysis of the outbreak in China in December 2019 and January 2020 puts the unrestrained R0 of Covid-19 at between 4.5 and 6.6. (The R-naught figure indicates the contagiousness of a disease in a given environment. If the number is above one, it’s spreading.)
The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated[Excerpts:] Integrating uncertainties in the exponential growth rate estimated from the ‘first arrival’ approach and the uncertainties in the duration of latent and infectious periods, we estimated the values of R0 to be 6.3 and 4.7. The high R0 values we estimated have important implications for disease control.The 2019-nCoV epidemic is still rapidly growing and spread to more than 20 countries as of February 5, 2020. Here, we estimated the growth rate of the early outbreak in Wuhan to be 0.29 per day (a doubling time of 2.4 days), and the reproductive number, R0, to be between 4.7 to 6.6.How contagious the 2019-nCoV is in other countries remains to be seen. If the value of R0 is as high in other countries, our results suggest that active and strong population-wide social distancing efforts, such as closing down transportation system, schools, discouraging travel, etc., might be needed to reduce the overall contacts to contain the spread of the virus.
This shockingly high original Chinese R0 value meant a doubling of the number of cases every few days, and subsequently, regional hospitals were overrun by infected patients. The Chinese experience indicates how it may spread in the West and the 3rd world. Critically, the often-quoted case fatality rate (CFR) of “only” 2% for Covid-19 occurs when severely affected patients have access to first-class medical treatment, with teams of nurses and doctors caring for them in isolation ICUs. About 15% of people infected with the virus will develop severe symptoms (pneumonia, etc.) requiring intensive individual treatment in order to survive. Once hospitals are swamped and many of the medical staff become infected, the CFR can swiftly rise to above 15%. This is believed to be the situation inside the Wuhan City quarantine zone.
An infectious disease with an R-naught above five, and the number of cases doubling every two days, is like a biological atomic bomb chain reaction, particularly in the age of jet travel to all points of the globe.
Update 41 – 19MAR20
Scientsts are saying that this virus is natural, and discuss why…
The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, last year and has since caused a large scale COVID-19 epidemic and spread to more than 70 other countries is the product of natural evolution, according to findings published today in the journal Nature Medicine.
The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.
“By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes,” said Kristian Andersen, PhD, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research and corresponding author on the paper.
In addition to Andersen, authors on the paper, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," include Robert F. Garry, of Tulane University; Edward Holmes, of the University of Sydney; Andrew Rambaut, of University of Edinburgh; W. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging widely in severity. The first known severe illness caused by a coronavirus emerged with the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China. A second outbreak of severe illness began in 2012 in Saudi Arabia with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
On December 31 of last year, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of an outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus causing severe illness, which was subsequently named SARS-CoV-2. As of February 20, 2020, nearly 167,500 COVID-19 cases have been documented, although many more mild cases have likely gone undiagnosed. The virus has killed over 6,600 people.
Shortly after the epidemic began, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and made the data available to researchers worldwide. The resulting genomic sequence data has shown that Chinese authorities rapidly detected the epidemic and that the number of COVID-19 cases have been increasing because of human to human transmission after a single introduction into the human population. Andersen and collaborators at several other research institutions used this sequencing data to explore the origins and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 by focusing in on several tell-tale features of the virus.
The scientists analyzed the genetic template for spike proteins, armatures on the outside of the virus that it uses to grab and penetrate the outer walls of human and animal cells. More specifically, they focused on two important features of the spike protein: the receptor-binding domain (RBD), a kind of grappling hook that grips onto host cells, and the cleavage site, a molecular can opener that allows the virus to crack open and enter host cells.
Evidence for natural evolution
The scientists found that the RBD portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins had evolved to effectively target a molecular feature on the outside of human cells called ACE2, a receptor involved in regulating blood pressure. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was so effective at binding the human cells, in fact, that the scientists concluded it was the result of natural selection and not the product of genetic engineering.
This evidence for natural evolution was supported by data on SARS-CoV-2’s backbone – its overall molecular structure. If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness. But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins.
“These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2” said Andersen.
-Scripps Research
Update 42
It hit America hard in the middle of March 2020. Even with the mass riots in the stores (over toilet paper), and the total fuck-up on COVID-19 test kits… Americans still refuse to wear masks and Donald Trump is still saying that it’s a hoax or not as bad as the flu.
People(!) it has boomeranged back and hit the USA, and Ameria is not anywhere near as capable of dealing with it like the Chinese are.
Karma.
Update 43
America is overwhelmed. Everyone followed the nonsense about not wearing masks and now the entire nation is in trouble. The anti-China propiganda is relentless.
Harry Moroz @hrmoroz - 15:35 UTC · Mar 20, 2020
For the average American the best way to tell if you have covid-19 is to cough in a rich person’s face and wait for their test results
And this thought is interesting…
China and Russia have adopted a policy to contain and eliminate the Evil Virus, while much of the rest of the world has a policy of "Let 'Er Rip!". These two policies are fundamentally incompatible, with the result that China (and Russia) will have to seal itself off from the rest of the world. If Chinese people can not freely move around the world, their various development projects will be very difficult to manage.
Uncle Sam is always talking about "containing" those Evil Chinese and Dastardly Russians, and now it appears they have found a way to do that, at least for the moment. A little further along the timeline, China's partners will also adopt contain-and-eliminate and move firmly into China's "sphere of influence".
Eventually that will leave disease-ridden, poverty-stricken Uncle Sam completely isolated, and the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief.
Posted by: Trailer Trash | Mar 24 2020 16:22 utc | 9
And others are getting with the program…
... I would differ from you only in that I would say that what the US is engaged in is actual biological warfare. I don't think that there is much doubt that under international law the US guilt is easily established. As is that of its accessories.
Posted by: bevin | Mar 24 2020 16:39 utc | 14
People are noticing…
https://southfront.org/in-video-putin-visits-hospital-treating-covid-19-patients-in-moscow/
Putin, xi and non western world leaders, erdogan, orban, Netanyahu are actually showing what it takes during a crisis, if you live in us look to foreign more responsible governments during this crisis for news and updates. America just spits politicized garbage over its propoganda channels while Americans infect each other.
Anyone who is against lockdowns does not understand this disease.
GDP is everything in China, for it to sacrifice an entire city during lunar new year and to shutdown all schools and immobilize people shows the severity. Wuhan virus circulated nearly 2 months before lockdown was called, Chinese attempted everything before lockdown but was forced to lockdown and show the world once the situation got untenable, the level where wuhan locked down fully was 1000 deaths in a county of 1.5 billion.
If they weren’t afraid they wouldn’t shut down, if people could still interact commonly without mass infection they would be allowed to.
The problem is that this disease is undetectable without mass testing for the damage is done by the time you realize you have it, you’ve already ruined your lungs/organs permanently and may have infected your entire family and close contacts.
It appears to be spread easily due to surface contact, even the ground or walls, and does not die easily, countries around the world spray aerosols and disinfectants to combat it, even poor countries like Iran attempt a wide general disinfectant or public walk areas.
This is what scares me the most, if the virus died on surfaces after days there would be no need for China to be spraying buildings and streets that have ALREADY BEEN CLOSED WEEKS unless this disease spreads WAY EASIER AND LASTS LONGER on surfaces then we know of, the only information out is on SARS which although similar, appears to have a longer life and easier spread.
I don’t feel safe Until America begins similar disinfectant missions in train stations, bus stations and airports and with the massive homeless population in the americas Covid epicenters, San Fran, Seattle, la, and New York street disinfectants may have no effect as these people go around shitting on the streets
Posted by: Garrett | Mar 24 2020 16:41 utc | 15
Update 44
The situation in America is very sad, and people are noticing.
Our government lacks basic competence, even in comparison to other governments: Everyone with half a brain knows that comparing the private sector to the government is like comparing flying cross country to driving cross country. That being said, if you are driving cross country, you’re much better off driving a new BMW than a 1987 Yugo.
When you see a worldwide crisis like the Coronavirus, you might think that the United States would be leading the way, but actually it’s Denmark and South Korea. Denmark is leading the way with their economic ideas for the crisis (offering to cover 75-90% of employee salaries in hard-hit industries to try to prevent mass firings) and South Korea has been the best at fighting the virus (mass testing including widely available drive-thru testing, thoroughly tracing & quarantining individual cases and letting the public know where they’ve been, hand sanitizer everywhere).
Depending on your political leanings, you might blame our problems on Trump’s verbal gaffes or Democrats trying to use the virus as an excuse to push their pet projects for our less than stellar performance, but those are symptoms, not the disease.
We have a hidebound, legalistic bureaucracy that’s almost uniformly incompetent and our political culture is centered around politicians saying things we want to hear, not getting results or achievements. Until we demand more, we’re going to be stuck with a Burger King quality government even though we’re paying enough to have Gordon Ramsay make us a 5-course meal.
- 5 Long Term Lessons We Have Already Learned From the Coronavirus Crisis
Update 45
People are starting to see the reality for what it is.
Though, people are beginning to see the obvious propaganda. Check out this post at MoA; "China Did Not Deceive Us - Counting Death During An Epidemic Is Really Difficult".
Americans are waking up, and just read the comments. All of them are pretty much seeing America as the "King without any clothes on". Maybe this pile on propaganda onslaught will ease up soon. But don't get too soft and comfortable. It will just change form.
"The fact that China had an outbreak of corona virus dose not mean it originated in China ! This virus came from a USA /UK bio warfare lab."
Update 46
Ten Questions About Covid-19
Why did the President fire the entire US Pandemic Response Team in May, 2018? “The White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense’s job was to be the smoke alarm — keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies, sounding a warning at the earliest sign of fire — all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” [Washington Post, March 13, 2020]
Why did this 2019 simulation not cause America to prepare for such an outbreak? “From last January to August, America’s Health and Human Services ran a simulation, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” that imagined an influenza pandemic: the outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the US, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic but, by then, 110 million Americans were ill, 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.” [New York Times].
Why did CDC Director Robert Redfield not reveal the dates or locations of Americans whom he said were diagnosed as dying from influenza but later tested posthumously as positive for Covid-19?
Why will our CDC not reveal when patient zero was detected in the US? This helps determine the time of initial infection, estimate the scope of transmission, the scale of the epidemic, and location of the intermediate host.
Why will our CDC not reveal the earliest positive test result confirmed by a tissue samples? Epidemiologists, pathologists and public health authorities need this.
Why will our CDC not reveal the names of the US hospitals where they were first detected?
Why are tests so few? Tiny South Korea tests more people in one day than we test in a month. Why?
How many people are currently infected in the US? It has been almost three months since we learned of Covid-19 yet we have no idea how many of us are infected??
Covid-19 TIMELINE
As of April 2, 2020
By: Godfree Roberts
September 2008: Though the first cases of H1N1 swine flu were reported in California and Texas in late March, 2009, genetic analysis suggests that it began six months earlier This is significant because the CDC now admits that early Covid-19 cases went undetected.
May 28, 2015 More than 200 US biosafety level 3 and 4 labs working with dangerous pathogens and keep their safety records secret. Fort Detrick, Virginia is one of twelve in that state.
May 16, 2018: The White House Fires the entire US Pandemic Response Team.
May 2nd, 2019– The chemical and biological defense unit of USA Defense Fort Detrick, VA announced its bid to develop SARS and MERS virus inhibitors.
June 14, 2019– CDC finds US Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, VA non-compliant with its pathogen control agreement.
June 30, 2019– Unidentified pneumonia in Springfield, Virginia nursing home near Fort Detrick, VA, 15 minutes from Fort Belvoir, VA, where the US team trained for the Wuhan Military Games.
July 9, 2019–The White House withdraws its only US epidemiologist embedded with China’s CDC. Why?
July 9th, 2019 Report of vape pneumonia 100km southeast of Fort Detrick, VA. The lung images showed the Covid-19 ground glass shadow. Still unexplained.
July 12th, 2019–Respiratory outbreak at Springfield, Virginia assisted care facility, near Fort Detrick, kills 2, sickens 54. A third patient dies four days later. Deaths remain unexplained to this day.
Jul 14, 2019–Chinese researcher escorted from infectious disease lab amid RCMP investigation. Public Health Agency of Canada describes it as a possible ‘policy breach,’ no risk to Canadian public. Did she discover the Covid-19 outbreak?
July 17th, 2019–A pneumonia epidemic report reported at a nursing home in Burke, VA,56 minutes from Fort Detrick, VA. It remains unexplained to this day.
July 26, Virginia State Health Bureau takes measures to prevent the spread of the pneumonia epidemic, including stopping collective activities, screening residents, and extra cleanliness.
August 5th, Media widely reports that the CDC’s closure of Fort Detrick, VA was for national security.
August 6, 2019–CDC shuts down America’s main biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick, VA, an unheard-of civilian intervention in military affairs. A senior scientist describes the atmosphere there as one of “fear and mistrust.” The CDC refuses to provide details.
August 19th, CDC expands patient detection system with the same symptoms as existing patients.
Aug 26, 2019 – The Virginia Department of Health confirms three cases of severe lung illness associated with the use of e-cigarettes, known as vaping.
September 2019–A nationwide outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia causes severe respiratory problems in hundreds of people, kills 54. So-called ‘vaping-associated lung disease’ shares same symptoms as Covid-19 and images invariably show the same bilateral ground-glass opacities.
Sept 14-October 10–US military team trains for Military World Games at Fort Belvoir, near Fort Detrick, VA.
Oct. 18, 2019–The Deputy Director of the CIA participated in a Johns Hopkins, WEF, and the Gates Foundation hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise codenamed Event 201 modeling a fictional coronavirus pandemic.
November, 2019–Coronavirus identified in Italy after laboratory tests isolated a strain of the virus from an Italian patient with genetic differences from the original strain isolated in China. Massimo Galli, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Milan said, “Very strange pneumonias” circulated in Europe as early as November last year (2018).
December 5, 2019. A Chinese medical researcher is arrested in Boston trying to take biological samples back to China. Zheng Zaosong, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, confessed to taking material from a lab in Boston. FBI Special Agent Kara Spice found 21 wrapped vials containing a “brown liquid” that appeared to be “biological material” (samples of post-mortem lung tissue look like ‘brown liquid’). Zheng’s roommate, also a researcher, told FBI agents that two labmates of Zheng had succeeded in getting specimens to China. China, presumably, now went on high alert.
Dec. 27, 2019 – Dr. Zhang Jixian, ICU doctor at Hubei Hospital reports to Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on pneumonia patients with an unknown cause.
Dec. 28, 2019– Three more patients arrive at the hospital, all related to Huanan Seafood Market.
Dec. 30, 2019 – Wuhan Municipal Health Committee issues notice of an unknown viral illness.
Dec. 31, 2019–Beijing receives virus genome results, informs WHO of Wuhan pneumonia with unknown cause. Wuhan announces virus on CCTV and CGTN.
Jan. 1, 2020– Chinese CCDC researchers publish an article on the suspected outbreak. Seafood market shut down.
Jan. 3, 2020–CDC first learns of coronavirus from Chinese colleagues, according to Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar.
Jan. 3, 2020–China reports 44 suspected patients with the mystery pneumonia. National Health Commission classifies it as a highly pathogenic, orders all labs without high pathogen licenses to destroy or transfer samples to secure labs.
Jan. 9, 2020– Chinese labs confirm the existence of the new virus, begin genetic sequencing. China reports the death of a 61-year-old male in Wuhan with several underlying medical conditions.
Jan. 9, 2020–Chinese officials announce coronavirus outbreak with 44 confirmed cases.
Jan 11, 2020–China uploads the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus to an international database but it was unclear how serious this was or if serious actions should be taken: winter, flu and pneumonia are common, but discerning a novel, serious outbreak is no simple matter.
Jan. 15, 2020.– Oxford University’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group says Covid-19 reached the UK no later than mid-January and may have infected half the population by March 21.
Jan. 18, 2020–US HHS runs a 6-month, “Crimson Contagion” scenario of a respiratory virus pandemic that begins in China and quickly spreads around the world.
Jan. 21, 2020 – WHO confirms human-to-human transmission of the virus.
Jan. 23, 2020 – Complete cordon sanitaire (not quarantine) around Wuhan.
Jan. 24, 2020–Slate op-ed by the New America Foundation proclaims, “Many of China’s actions to date are overly aggressive and ineffective in quelling the outbreak.” The Los Angeles Times calls President Xi’s efforts to rally the country, “Shoddy propaganda.” The Economist depicts China as an authoritarian plague threatening the world more than any pandemic.
Jan. 28, 2020– First confirmed coronavirus case at Seattle clinic.
Jan. 29, 2020–WHO rejects accusations that China was responsible for the global spread of COVID-19. Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says, “[China’s] actions actually helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries.”
Jan. 30, 2020– US State and Federal officials refuse permission for Dr. Chu, UW infectious disease expert permission to use ongoing flu tests to monitor for coronavirus.
Feb. 3, 2020–US CDC refuses to adopt a WHO test and ships 200 test kits.
Feb. 15, 2020–CDC announces that its tests were flawed and recalls them.
Feb 16-24, 2020–2020 Said the WHO’s chief executive director for health emergencies, Michael Ryan of Ireland, “I have never seen the scale and commitment of an epidemic response at this level in terms of all of government. The challenge is great, but the response has been massive, and the Chinese government deserve huge credit for that response and for the transparency in which they have dealt with this.”
Feb. 25, 2020 – Without government approval, Dr. Helen Chu and University of Washington colleagues begin coronavirus testing and get an immediate positive Covid-19 result. By then, the virus has contributed to the deaths of two people and would kill twenty more in the Seattle region over the following days.
March 3, 2020–CDC announces it will distribute diagnostic kits to test 75,000 people by March 17. The CDC decided not to adopt a test approved by the World Health Organization and instead forged ahead with its own test.
March 9, 2020–HHS staffers often weren’t informed about coronavirus developments because they didn’t have adequate clearance. A source familiar with the meetings said he was told that the matters were classified “because it had to do with China.”
March 11, 2020–White House classifies all coronavirus deliberations and shifts HHS meetings to a secure area called a “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility,” or SCIF, usually reserved for intelligence and military operations during biowarfare or chemical attacks.
Mar. 11, 2020–US announces it has tested 5,000 people suspected of C-19 infection.
March 11, 2020–White House fires the National Security Council Pandemic Response Directorate. “We worked very well with that office,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress, “It would be nice if the office was still there.”
Mar. 12, 2020– CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield testifies to Congress that some early fatalities attributed to flu have been attributed to C-19 after post-mortem analysis. Dr. Redfield does not identify their dates or locations.
March 12, 2020–Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the United States that lacks transparency. “When did patient zero begin in the US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! The US owes us an explanation!”
March 13, 2020–“If I get COVID, I’m going to China,” said Dr. Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s Assistant Director-General and head of the agency’s COVID-19 mission. “They know how to keep people alive. What I saw was a tremendous sense of responsibility, and of duty, to protect their families, their communities, and even the world, from this disease,” reflected Aylward. “I left with such a deep sense of admiration for the people of Wuhan and for Chinese society in general.”
March 18, 2020–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vows to increase crushing sanctions on Iran though it is already preventing the country from purchasing vital medicine and ventilators. In Venezuela, meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have increased the cost of a coronavirus test to three times more than in non-sanctioned countries.
March 19, 2020–China declares victory over coronavirus, the U.S. achieved a milestone of its own: it boasted the sharpest increase in deaths and new infections per day of any country in the world.
March 19, 2020–The United States announces the sharpest daily increase in deaths and new infections of any country in the world.
March 19, 2020 –US doctors run out of N95 masks.
March 19, 2020 –A bipartisan group of 130 lawmakers write the Pentagon, demanding 98 new F-35 stealth fighters at a cost of $94 million each.
March 20, 2020–US State Department cables all officials: “NSC Top Lines: [PRC] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic. Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the world of the threat, since they were the first to learn of it. Instead, the… government hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering. “These talking points are all anyone is really talking about right now,” one official said. “Everything is about China. We’re being told to try and get this messaging out in any way possible, including press conferences and television appearances.”
March 24, 2020–Three-quarters of China’s workforce was back on the job.
March 27, 2020–The U.S. military stops providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks, citing concern that the information might be used by adversaries as the virus spreads.
March 27, 2020–China’s Purchasing Managers’ Index rose to 52, above the 50 threshold signifies expansion.
March 30, 2020–The US Defense Department orders commanders at all of its installations worldwide to stop announcing publicly new coronavirus cases among their personnel, as more than 1,000 U.S. military-linked people had been sickened by the virus.
April 2, 2020–US has the most Covid-19 infections of any country in the world.
9SEP20 Update
Apparently, the China Government agrees with my appraisal. From a message group that I belong to…
Chinese propaganda getting good. Unlike West propaganda, Chinese includes evidence. exactly consistent with Uriah Heep's version. Thanks Jeff, but Kevin it may be a conspiracy that Heep told it in real time and official docu youtubed 8 months later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEo3qk-4yx8
Finally…
America has a very long history of using germ warfare to suppress it’s enemies. The idea that they would continue to do this is hardly radical. It is an accurate and natural progression of behavior.
To deny this is to be ignorant in the face of facts.
“The Chinese are DISGUSTING, souless frauds. I hope Coronavirus wipes out EVERY last one.”
- @melpol posted on Unz.com
I doesn’t matter what you think; what you believe. I doesn’t matter what CNN, FOX or MSNBC says.
All that matters is what China (and by extension, Russia) thinks.
China is convinced that this is a biological weapon.
They went to DEFCON ONE and mobilized their entire military, and locked the entire nation down. You do NOT do this with a flu, even if it is a bad flu. You do this ONLY if your entire nation is under attack.
This entire article supports the narrative that the Chinese government, the Chinese military are treating this outbreak as;
A WMD attack by a bioweapon,
As part of the on-going Trump Trade-War,
Designed to inflict damage on China to slow it’s growth,
Like the Chicken flu…
And the swine flu, propagated by drones, were.
So rather than waste your time trying to tell me that I am wrong, how about contacting Xi Peng and tell him yourself, instead. Tell the President of China that he is wrong. That it’s all just coiencidences. That China is over-reacting. You tell him yourself. Don’t waste your time telling me.
Mark my words, there WILL be repercussions over this.
Now, READ this… This is part two of this article….
Here’s some HK links in English. There shouldn’t be any question that drones were used to spread swine flu during the heat of the trump trade wars. That is all well documented.
Whether they worked in behalf of the USA government is speculation. Most articles claim that they are working independently as part of a “criminal element”.
As far as the design of the drones, most commercially available drones are manufactured in Guangzhou. So, getting some drones and having them modified professionally, locally within China isn’t too much of a stretch. I do that all the time myself for other “projects”.
What is the question that people should be asking is HOW the “criminal elements” got a hold of “swine flu”, and learned how to handle it, use it, and disseminate it. Because, boys and girls, the virus dies once it is removed from a live host…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
While it is the “fashion”, perhaps to have the latest in prepper and para-military gear. Much of it relies on batteries and other electronic means to operate. This includes reticle lighting, laser sighting, range finders, and night vision goggles. They will all be inoperable, and worthless junk, were World War III to actually occur.
For during World War III, the USA will be attacked, and an EMP burst can be expected.
The fantasy that America can attack either Russia, China or one of their aligned states without nuclear retaliation on American soil is a neocon fantasy. So listen up and take heed. If you play with matches, don’t go lighting them inside a kerosene soaked barn.
The neocon party is going to get America “bitch slapped” and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Here we discuss this issue.
Introduction
The American propaganda engine is fully geared up to garner support for a major war. They (the oligarchy) wants war. And since President Donald Trump has pledged not to get involved in a new war, they want him out, and a Democrat elected to power.
This should not be news to anyone. Democrats pull Americans into wars. This follows the same pattern used with Kuwait, Syria, and Afghanistan. The American oligarchy NEEDS a war. Because they are doing an absolutely horrific job managing America domestically.
A war is expected to distract Americans away from domestic problems.
And they are telling everyone that there will NOT be any consequences…
They are serious, serious nations with centuries of warfare ON THEIR OWN SOIL. They are not going to tolerate America turning their nation into Syria, Libya, Yemen or any one of numerous American exploratory ventures “for democracy”.
This is especially true for modern China and modern Russia. Heck! Chinese cities look like they belong in a scene from the Jetsons for Pete’s sake!
Shanghai, China.
Now, maybe you have heard some of these propaganda talking points…
Hong Kong wants democracy. All they need is a little help from America.
Taiwan wants America to intervene and chase the mainland Chinese away.
Russia needs to be punished for the Ukraine.
China has 11 million poor Muslims in concentration camps. The USA must do something!
Poor Tibet needs to break away from China!
Russia is fostering war in Turkey.
China is prosecuting Christians. We must do something.
Etc, etc.
The Jetsons is a prime-time animated sitcom that was produced by Hanna-Barbera for Screen Gems (and later Worldvision Enterprises). The original incarnation of the series aired Sunday nights on ABC from 23 September 1962 to 3 March 1963. It was Hanna-Barbera’s space age counterpart to The Flintstones.
Yes, and you probably believe all this nonsense. Most Americans do. If you check the comment sections on these types of articles, it is along the lines of “bring it on“. Not realizing just what this term will actually imply…
For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that America is planning to get involved in a major war with a major superpower in the next ten years or so.
Nothing destroys your day like global-wide thermonuclear war.
The American leadership is convinced that America will prevail, and that the American heartland will be unscathed. They are not even bothering to think it through.
I beg to differ.
One attack by America on any major superpower will be a disaster. It will result in full-scale nuclear response. This will not be a few nuclear weapons.
It will see ALL of the fuckers launched.
Nuclear war will be a nightmare for Americans. It will unleash domestic turmoil, and embolden the radical elements in society to wreck havoc on the remaining infrastructure.
And…
… and detonated in such a way that America will get a “double tap”, and a second and third one for good measure. This will be nuclear, EMP and neutron bombs all at once.
Russia and China don’t play.
America will be sent back to the stone ages, and the survivors will be fighting each other with blood filled blisters on their eyes, and foaming puss out of their anuses.
Nuclear war, radiation, starvation and social unrest will be the least of worries for the American survivors. Bio-warfare will be the real nightmare.
Americans will be too busy fighting each other for moldy turnip remains.
In this nightmare scenario…
… not at all unreasonable…
… no electronics will work.
Those nice cell phones, and GPS systems will be useless. All automobiles from old cars to new Teslas will not work. Wristwatches will not function, and even battery powered flashlights will be trash. EMP will have burned out everything and drained all batteries turning them into nice handfuls of slag.
Every product that uses electricity will be useless.
If you think that the millennial youth of today will panic, you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until every single piece of electronics is fried beyond use. All social media is gone. Gone. Gone.
Panicked and crazed people will take on mob behaviors and they will not be easy to control.
Nuclear Weapons
The nuclear weapons fielded by both Russia and China are dangerous and nasty designs. Make no mistake about that. They are designed to kill in the most horrible way possible.
Chinese nuclear armed MIRV.
Were America try to conduct anything other than a remote proxy war on either of the nations, the consequences would be horrific. DO NOT THINK THAT they will not press the red button. It’s a rookie mistake.
EMP
During a hearing on October 12th, experts warned the U.S. House of Representatives that a single EMP bomb could kill as many as 90% of all Americans within a year.
It’s a bit of a stretch.
But it is a very dangerous weapon.
EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse, which is considered a short burst of electromagnetic radiation. This kind of burst can come from a variety of sources, including our own sun, but in this case we’re talking about a pulse from a nuclear detonation that occurs at an extremely high altitude.
When a nuclear explosion occurs in space above a target, three types of electromagnetic pulses follow: E1, E2, and E3.
An E1 pulse involves high-energy gamma rays colliding with air molecules nearly 20 miles above, then raining down electrons that get pulled in by Earth’s natural magnetic field.
An E2 pulse comes from high-energy neutrons that get fired in every direction.
A E3 pulse occurs due to the size of the nuclear fireball itself affecting the Earth’s magnetic field.
These pulses affect everything in line of sight of the nuclear blast. For example, a blast at 60 miles up can affect a 700-mile radius on Earth.
EMP bombs do not cause casualties directly.
EMP detonations will render all electronics on ALL systems inoperable.
The blast happens much too far away from people. Their power comes from interfering, disrupting, or damaging electronic equipment. That could mean power grids going down, cars and planes losing power, computer systems going berserk, and possibly even losing emergency backup power at facilities like hospitals. It’s sort of like the Y2K nightmare come to life.
The three different types of pulse—E1, E2, and E3—affect various types of electrical systems in different ways.
E1 affects local antennas, short cable runs, equipment inside buildings, integrated circuits, sensors, communication systems, protective systems, and computers;
E2 is similar to a lightning strike (so not as damaging since we know how to deal with it), and affects longer conductive lines, vertical antenna towers, and aircraft with trailing wire antennas;
E3 affects power lines and long communications lines like undersea and underground cables, which could wreak havoc on commercial power and landlines.
Overall, most of the damage would come from E1 and E3 pulses disrupting the technology we’ve come to rely on. Post-blast, generators may be able to still provide power, but for the most part, people would not have access to electricity. Thus, cars and communications would no longer work and every battery would be turned into a pile of slag..
SHTF
The SHTF in this scenario is truly horrific.
Large-Scale Attack Simulator (USA)
What would happen to the United States during a nuclear war?
Using unclassified documents on nuclear targeting and open data on the physics of modern weapons and fallout patterns, this simulation models what would happen if approximately 1,100 warheads (~7% of the world's arsenal) hit the United States. This is a realistic simulation based on hard science and known targeting strategies. That said, it should be treated as an approximation of a single scenario - a real attack could take a myriad of forms, some less destructive than this model and some far more. This particular simulation might be considered a medium-level strategic attack.
The attack lasts two hours and strikes hundreds of military, government and economic targets. It comes in two waves, a first wave that destroys government and military installations followed by a broader second wave against population centers.
One second in the model is equal to one real-time minute, thus the total runtime is 120 seconds. As the simulation runs, you can click any marker icon to expand the map and see more detail, including summary of damage per state and google streetview images of ground zero impact points.
Because it requires some heavy math, this simulation might not run to completion on older iOS devices. Beyond that it should function on any device, but it's easier to view on larger screens (pads or desktops).
Run Simulation
Nuclear detonations of 30MT magnitudes, grouped in a ringed array of three warheads detonated in clusters of three would take out all the cities. Satan II undersea nuclear detonations would create radioactive tidal waves that would wipe the coastal areas completely clean. High altitude EMP bursts would fry out all electronics, disable all communication (and internet) and wipe out everything beyond repair. Neutron bombs would eviscerate America’s global military bases and germ warfare would be seeded throughout the rural areas.
Nuclear detonations of 30MT magnitudes, grouped in a ringed array of three warheads detonated in clusters of three would take out all the cities.
No one will know what is going on.
Essentially, the entire United States Federal government will be reduced to glassy slag within five minutes of launch. The survivors would not know what to do and how to handle the situation.
And then would come the bio-weapons, and germ warfare…
How to deal
In this kind of nightmare scenario, how can you deal? Everything that we use is somehow connected to the cloud, the main electrical grid and batteries. Even solar power systems, wind power systems, and hydroelectric systems will be reduced to garbage.
I argue that this situation might really actually occur.
A scenario from Hell
Let’s imagine that America decides to place a unit of Marines on Taiwan soil…
According to the American mainstream media, it’s just for “advisory purposes” with the blessings of the Taiwanese government (supposedly). Just a few “advisors”. Not a big issue, says all the editorials out of Washington D.C.
The USA, in it’s arrogance, then orders China to “stand down”.
…
…
China AND Russia respond with a full-scale nuclear strike with hyper-SLBM MIRV’s followed up with their Satan II nuclear arsenal.
Nuclear attack on New York City is pretty much an established “given”.
In five minutes, from launch, every major coastal American city is a glowing fireball.
These are based on the latest hyper-glide technology after all. Something that the USA doesn't have. We have been too busy with diversity and sensitivity training, and funding Muslim outreach programs for the last two decades.
Within an hour, all second, third and fourth tier sites are rubble, and the largest remaining intact American city is Chatsworth, Georgia.
Map of the major nuclear strike targets within the United States.
American news is all white out.
No news. No electronics. No one knows what happened to all the 14 American carrier fleets. No one knows what happened to the rest of the world, or if America struck back.
You also don’t know that a nuclear detonation hit mono lake and evaporated the entire water supply for California. What water remaining is radioactive and all farmland, useless. Survivors streamed out away from the cities on foot like locusts. They devoured everything in their path and all local and state police are overwhelmed.
Within days, deaths from radiation start to occur. Starvation begins to raise its ugly face. Though, real starvation will not yet occur for another thirty days. It is obvious that there are some very hungry people about, and the urban poor, accustomed to food-stamps, are out searching for ways to fill their stomachs. They aren’t taking “no” for an answer.
After a nuclear detonation, there will be mass confusion and initially the police and military will arrive to restore order. That will start to follow the standard preparation procedure. Then, the second and third waves will hit…
But…
All of this is unknown to you.
You live in a small, isolated rural community.
You, living in a small community are an ardent prepper and have a “bug out” bag and the necessary foodstuffs to survive the trek to your “safe haven”.
Your situation
You don’t know any of this background.
All you know is that there was a series of “earthquakes”, and “sonic booms”, and now all the electricity is off. You do not know when it will return.
Initially, you worried about the food in the freezer spoiling, but as time goes on, there are some things that are truly disturbing to you.
…
Firstly there is nothing on the radio.
Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s all static. AM, FM, all up and down the bands. The police scanner is also just white noise.
Along with the earthquakes was a terrible wind storm, and the trees on the tops of some of the distant hills seem to be toppled over. The air is filled with fine dust and it is settling everywhere. No computer. No internet. No phone. No GPS. No electricity.
No water. No natural gas.
Even the compass doesn’t work.
The street lights don’t work.
Nor does the construction roadblock with the big flashing yellow light. Even it stopped flashing.
Nothing works. No electricity. Not even the flashing yellow construction lamps.
You look out your window and all seems normal, if a bit quiet.
The sky, however has a kind of yellow / greenish tinge to it.
You cannot find your cats, and your dog is acting peculiarly.
After a half day of this, you notice that some people are out and about and waiting to get some word from the government. A few people started to walk towards the center of town and started to mingle with others. Rumors were flying, but most revolved around some kind of earthquake that took out the energy grid.
There is an odd, bunt-sickly smell in the air, it feels “sticky”, and all the neighborhood dogs are terribly agitated.
No no one can explain all the dust in the air.
Your brain… your guts… your very being screams! Your partner, on the other hand is telling you that you have an active imagination and not to worry. That things will settle down and be all right in a few hours.
…
Never the less, just to be on the safe side, you pull out your gear by candle light.
You go to your “bug out” bag. You perform an inventory check. Your cell phone doesn’t work. Nor does your watch. Your small aluminum flashlight will not work either. You check your firearm, holster and kit.
You notice that you have not prepared a dust-mask or filter kit. So you take a bandana off the clothes line outside, brush the dust off and tie it around your face stagecoach-robber style.
The laser sight on the pistol will not work, nor will the lighted reticle on your rifle.
The TA31RCO is an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) designed for the USMC’s M16A4 weapon system (20” barrel). It incorporates dual illumination technology using a combination of fiber optics and self-luminous tritium.
But, that doesn’t matter. You had prepared for this. You go to your motorcycle and it will not start. EMP, you figured. After all no electronics work at all. You don’t know the news, but you have a very, very bad feeling.
In fact, this feeling is the worst thing about it all. It is like you ate a tube of lard, and you have this horrible feeling inside, and your brain and emotions are all screaming dark thoughts.
…
No internet. No radio. No news, and at night the sky is glowing red in the distance. Not only to the East, but in the South, and the North-East as well. Those “earthquakes” that seemed to go on and on yesterday were certainly ominous, and your neighbors are acting really strangely. The air is terribly dusty and gritty and a thin layer of dust covers everything.
The dust seems to come in big brown clouds that settle down on everything.
You wipe the dust off the handle to the garage and pull out the bicycle from the tarp in the back of the garage. You pump the tires full of air, and wheel it out.
You feel a little queasy. Your stomach feels “sour”.
So you hop on your bicycle and try to follow your “bug out” route.
Cars are stopped in the middle of the road. Not even pulled over to the side. This includes a big 16 wheeler truck and a Greyhound bus.
It’s been two days since the “earthquakes” began and things are really, really odd.
Your beard is starting to shed hair.
You notice that the local 7-11 is all empty. Nothing are on the shelves. Nothing.
You notice that people are going up and down the streets pushing grocery carts full of food and supplies, and a number of windows are broken in the local hardware store’s door. No body takes notice of you, but you don’t stick around.
You hoped to use Google-maps to chart your course, but without internet it is pretty much useless. Lucky for you that you had an old 1980’s highway map book in the garage that you stashed in your “go bag”.
You try to get out of the area as fast as you can…
Key Points
If things go full-on SHTF, nothing will work and no one will know anything. It might appear to be a natural disaster.
The unprepared will try to prepare. It will be too late.
Everything will be dangerous. From touching the dust on the door-knobs, to the irrational woman down the street. Nothing will be safe.
The aggressive will take advantage of the situation within short order and you will only have a few precious days before things get out of control.
Police, government and social services will not work, be functional, or be of assistance.
While, in general, most people in your community will be kind and helpful folk, the world will be “turned on it’s head”. Unless a strong positive leader takes control, they will collapse into a frightened mob. As such, the worst individuals in society would create all sorts of problems and confusion.
Avoid crowds.
Do not stream into any city for any reason. You do not know what is going on there, but it cannot be good. When in doubt, it is better to starve alone in the middle of the woods then be crowded into a pen with angry, frightened strangers.
Americans will be very, very irate. We are accustomed to electricity, electronic media, electronic social media and communication. The silence and lack of news would be terrifying, and people will react to it.
If it is any sort of nuclear war, all electronics will be fried and will not work.
All dust is dangerous and you need to assume that it is radioactive.
Conclusion
Finally, everything in America is tied electronically to electrical systems in some form. From simple optical systems, to vehicles, and water hydration systems. The only communities that are divorced from these addictions are the Amish and Mennonite communities. Take a good hard look at your preparations and isolate those which rely on electricity. Consider them useless during a nuclear bug-out exchange.
Remember that any war with Asia will be against a modern-day Genghis Khan with nuclear weapons. You don’t even toy around with that idea.
If you enjoyed this post, you can find others of a similar nature on my SHTF index. Here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is part of my SHTF – Practical skills posts. Most of what I post (in this section) are lost skills; skills that Americans have forgotten though the centuries of disuse. So, now, as the fourth turning is rapidly approaching, these skills need to be dusted off and updated to fit the modern American lifestyle. Here we discuss the practical methods of “tar and feathering” corrupt officials, progressive Marxists, aggressive social justice warriors, Wall street bankers and members of the elite oligarchy.
This is not written for historical interest, or in some kind of jest.
These are serious issues and should not be taken trivially. We can only hope that things do not ever get to the point where humans are seriously contemplating these kinds of actions. Let’s hope and pray that we all never have to deal with these matters.
We, as Americans have been (for the most part) isolated from them. America has lived a life of relative calmness and tranquility for the vast bulk of population. We erroneously believe that it will always stay that way and never change.
At worst, we somehow imagine climbing up on a hilltop near our home and shooting police as they approach our “stomping grounds”. Those thoughts are all fantasies. We are not talking about those childish dreams. We are talking about real issues that mean death and destruction. We imagine something out of a television series, or a movie. We cannot imagine what really happens during periods of societal reset.
We’ve been isolated and insulated from that harshness.
Meanwhile the rest of the world confronts these kinds of issues with far greater frequency than we are aware of…
Tar and feathering in contemporaneous Africa. This was in 2019.
I argue that the United States is going to go through a barbaric time, and it will be on par with the rest of the world. This reality is something that Americans have no concept of. We just cannot imagine it.
It’s a horror.
So buckle up and get ready. If you find yourself trapped within an area of conflict, such as Virginia, then be advised. Wars do not play by the Geneva Conventions, or Papal Decree. They are nasty, nasty affairs.
There are events where you would have a high 70% probability of one member of your family being killed or maimed in the process. War is very ugly. Loved ones, family die.
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 18, 1994 file photo, seven year old Nermin Divovic lies mortally wounded in a pool of blood as unidentified U.S and British U.N. firefighters arrive to assist after he was shot in the head in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than 20 years after Bosnia’s war, Radovan Karadzic will learn his fate on Thursday when U.N. judges deliver verdicts in his genocide and war crimes trial. (AP Photo/Enric Marti, File)
Cliff Notes
Note, if the worst does indeed come to past, keep these points in mind…
You can never win a Defensive war. Do not “fortify” your territory to try to defend it.
You fight on the turf and territory of the enemy, on your terms.
You always spend most of your resources going after the enemy leadership, their confederate instigators and enablers. You hunt them out, you target their friends and family. You flush them out of hiding, you capture them and you apply horrors to them Genghis Khan style.
To be fully effective in war, you need to create horror. Real wars are not tea and biscuits. It’s an ugly, ugly business where objectives must be realized with finality and horror.
Introduction
At a Dec. 3 2019 meeting of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, U.S. Marine Corps Reservist Maj. Ben Joseph Woods addressed the board and admonished Commonwealth of Virginia lawmakers for their plans to pass sweeping gun laws after they gained the majority in 2020.
The Democrats in the Virginia House are poised to impose controversial, and likely unconstitutional, gun laws in that state, including a program to register firearms. Gun registration has historically been the first step in confiscation by extremis regimes worldwide. It also is a prelude to wide scale genocide.
As Maj. Woods addressed the meeting, he spoke of his time in the military and federal law enforcement and what he feared politicians were doing to the state:
“I’m not going to address the bills themselves. What I would like to address is the fact that at this point, so many people believe that these are unconstitutional or draconian that as of last night, 30 counties in this state which have voted themselves…to be Second Amendment sanctuary counties.
The ugly truth of our situation is that is just scratching the surface of what is happening…I work plainclothes law enforcement…I walk around without a uniform, people don’t see my badge, people don’t see my gun, and I can tell you:
People are angry.
And I am frightened to the point that I am looking at moving my wife and child…out of this state if these bills pass. The reason is because my fellow law enforcement officers…
Tell me that they would not enforce these bills regardless of whether they believe in them ideologically because they believe that there are so many people angry in gun shops, gun shows, at bars, we have heard it now, people talking about tar and feathering politicians in a less than joking manner…
That is a terrifying prospect and I have never seen people willing to speak about something like that publicly…As a law enforcement officer, I empathize with concerns people have over gun violence.”
...
“The legal precedent we would set by allowing the legislature to selectively ignore enumerated rights at will is the same mindset that 150 years ago let this country into a civil war.”
The progressive Marxists don’t even bother trying to follow the Constitution. They no longer try, nor do they even bother to pretend. They know, after decades of getting away with crimes, that they can continue to do so without consequence. Thus, they are going to pass unconstitutional laws and expect everyone to obey them. No matter what.
They write the laws and you obey. This is classic tyranny.
This is not acceptable to the vast majority of law-abiding citizens in the state of Virginia. And as such, they are openly considering invoking the anti-tyranny measures inherent in the second amendment to the Bill of Rights.
So, with the understanding that large numbers of extremely pissed-off conservatives are openly discussing [1] capturing, [2] torturing, [3] tar and feathering, and [4] lynching the politicians in Virginia, it might be a good time to discuss the practical fundamentals of a punishment method known as “tar and feathering”.
Discussion of the “ugly side” of things.
This is a truly distasteful post.
It discusses torture as a form of punishment. This is Genghis Khan type of stuff, and not for the uninitiated. For the record… I do not like writing about this.
No Such Thing as Limited War
Shall we go one step further? We're now watching the smoke rising over what amounts to a small-scale battlefield between the Virginia National Guard and the sheriffs and deputies of one or more counties along with however many gun rights advocates stream in from adjacent states to augment the flash mob.
Unlike the slaughter of 1861, this will be broadcast live and in living color.
Of course, the National Guard has tanks and most sheriffs don't. Odds are, they'll win, but only by slaughtering large numbers of Trump voters - and yes, obviously, it will be Trump voters lying dead at the hands of, ultimately, Mr. Trump's political enemies.
What would the President do?
Well, what could and should the President do? Legally, he can nationalize the National Guard and order them to stand down, but by that time the Guard officers who might have obeyed his orders to stand down would have long since resigned.
He could order in the regular army.
Now we have a battle between two trained, equipped armies - yes, literally, that is a Civil War by definition, assuming the regular army was willing to obey such an order and fire on their colleagues.
Would other governors stand idly by?
Dare we imagine what Congress would do? Might there be a 25th Amendmentcoup, as the media and the bureaucracy have been agitating for since before Mr. Trump took office? How would the half of the country that voted for Mr. Trump respond to that? Don't forget that Trump would either be in the midst of running for re-election, or recently re-elected to office.
Or, he could just suck it up and let the Democrat National Guard destroy "his" people and the Constitution by force. This, too, has happened before. Paul Hindenburg, while President of Germany, let Nazi stormtroopers effectively take control of the country and suppress opposing voters and politicians until, in short order, Germany was a Nazi one-party state.
Does this sort of passive compliance seem characteristic of what we've seen of Donald J. Trump thus far? Let's just say it doesn't seem yuuuuugely likely that he'd let his supporters be gunned down without doing something about it.
Beyond this point, there are far too many unknowns to make any sort of solid predictions. Wars never go the way people who start them intend, and the end result is almost always something nobody predicted and few wanted at the beginning.
Novelists could write any number of vaguely plausible scenarios, and we'll leave that job to them.
- Virginia's Rampup to Civil War
I argue that it’s going to get ugly. Very, very ugly. It will be a horror of unimaginable magnitude, and most people will have a difficult time coming to terms with it.
You all shouldn’t.
Instead, you should read a history book or two. This is what always happens. It’s never pretty.
The Siege Of Sarajevo. One can well imagine a similar situation in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Framington, and Tampa.
History
Tarring and feathering is a form of punishment which was developed in 12th century England. It spread across feudal Europe, and was also practiced in many European colonies, once Europeans began exploring and colonizing the globe. In this punishment, the victim was stripped, painted with hot tar, and then covered in feathers which stuck to the tar.
They were then released running about and flailing their arms in pain. They would look like some kind of demented crazed bird, running around all over the streets in circles.
The primarily goal of this was physical intimidation and humiliation, with people being tarred and feathered in an attempt to run them out of town. The term “tarred with the same brush” in reference to guilt by association appears to be derived from this practice.
This practice appears to have been practiced primarily among mobs and vigilantes, rather than being an officially sanctioned form of punishment.
Depending on the temperature of the tar and the attitude of the crowd, it could sometimes become quite violent and rather dangerous. Hot tar could cause significant burns, and removing the tar would pull out hair and pieces of skin, potentially putting the victim at risk of infection. Theoretically, covering the skin in tar would also prevent it from breathing, potentially causing death.
However, the goal of tarring and feathering was humiliation, not death, and not many deaths as a result of this practice have been recorded.
More commonly, people were scarred for life by the hot tar and resulting injuries from removal, marking them to other members of the community as victims.
People also died as a result of lynchings, in which they were tarred and feathered, marched around town, and then hung.
Tar and feathering is often used as humiliation prior to being lynched in the town square.
Several variations on tarring and feathering have been recorded. In the British military, for example, people once practiced pitchcapping, in which a soldier’s head would be covered with hot tar.
Removing the tar involved being willing to lose much of your hair and scalp along with the tar, leaving ugly scars. Sometimes the bodies of people who had been hung or beheaded were also tarred and feathered, to add humiliation, and to hold the bodies together when they were hung on the gibbet as a warning for other citizens.
Many people associate tarring and feathering with the American West, where the practice endured until a surprisingly late date, with recorded instances dating to the 1900s.
In fact, people were tarred and feathered recently enough for there to be photographic examples of tarring and feathering, in which streaks of tar and feathers can be clearly seen, suggesting that the practice involved less of a careful painting of the body, and more of a streaking with lines of hot tar.
Fundamentals
The goal of tarring and feathering was humiliation, not death, and not many deaths as a result of this practice have been recorded. More commonly, people were scarred for life by the hot tar and resulting injuries from removal, marking them to other members of the community as victims.
To conduct a “tar and feathering” punishment, the two (primary) ingredients are [1] Tar and [2] feathers. These used to be quite common back in the day, as all bedding, pillows and insulation used feathers. Today, feathers are relatively difficult to obtain and you need to procure them in advance. Additionally, you need to produce a container, or caldron to cook the tar to boiling, and a heat source.
You need a rack or device to securely bind the victim to. Do not expect to hold him / her steady while applying the tar. They will be very difficult to manage.
You need to strip, and bind the victim on a metal or wooden frame.
Substitutes
You can substitute other materials in the event that you are unable to produce tar or feathers. For instance, maple syrup, glue, water proof sealants for mobile homes, coal-tar epoxy and Lacquer might be considered suitable materials. Just make sure that the tar substitute is well heated to a temperature that would generate painful first-degree burns.
Tar
Ordinary roofing tar can be procured at any hardware store and DIY chain. Make sure that you follow the heating instructions and make sure that you do not detonate the tar over a fire.
Expert tip; Watch for the flash point.
Typically, you can pour the tar into a large 55 gallon drum that is sitting over an open fire. Then, using ladles, you can pour the tar over the victim.
Henry brand roofing tar.
Other techniques with the tar include simply heating the metal bucket that the tar comes in over a fire, or a propane stove.
Application
When applying the tar, you can either pour it over the victim or brush it on. Make sure that the victim is nude. They must be fully nude for a proper tar and feathering. Also, they must be bound securely. You can use handcuffs or wire ties. Just make sure that they are securely bound. A well welded frame with attachment points for the wore ties works best.
The idea is to fully cover the victim from head to toe with hot scalding tar. The victim must be fully bound for this to happen, and you must be very thorough in the application. No area of skin can be ignored.
Then you can apply the “feathers”.
Tar and feathers and being rode out of town on a rail.
Feathers
Feathers are rather difficult to come by in the quantities necessary for a decent tar and feathering. Sources of feathers are down coats and jackets, and bedding. You can also go to poultry farms such as chicken and geese and collect the dander and feathers there.
If gathering feathers are problematic, you can certainly use commonly available substitutes. Here are some suggestions…
Used cat litter.
Styrofoam peanuts.
Dryer lint (you need to collect enough of it).
Broken glass bottle fragments.
Cut hair (from a barbershop).
Alternatives
Let’s see what the Marxists do when they take power…
Necklacing is a preferred method of torture and execution under the Marxists in South Africa.
In South Africa, the Marxists implement a similar kind of punishment. They only problem is that the victim tends to die, instead of being maimed for life. It’s known as “necklacing” and the survivors are scarred for life. It’s really nasty.
In South Africa, the Marxists implement a similar kind of punishment. They only problem is that the victim tends to die, instead of being maimed for life. It’s known as “necklacing” and the survivors are scarred for life. It’s really nasty.
They would take a tire and put it around the neck of a victim. Then they would chain it in place, place a highly flammable liquid in the tire well, and set it on fire. It’s a horrible way to die.
Necklacing was the primary form of torture under Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
It’s more work, but far easier to procure and implement.
It’s coming. That’s for certain.
Here’s a quote from one of my “must see” blogs called Busted Knuckles. He’s a word-smith that can say things far better than I can. Listen up!
Who the hell knows what is going on for sure?
Being the Realist I am, Rose scented Unicorn farts and Magic Rainbows don’t enter my world view.
Then we have Virginia.
Every truly patriotic American is watching that like a hawk.
The very real possibility of another Shot Heard Around The World is but one stupid mistake away from becoming a reality.
A lot of people have decisions to make.
On both sides of that whole scenario.
Everyone has their own personal convictions and I most certainly have mine.
I am hoping against hope that we have turned a corner at this point in time.
We as in the kind of people who think like I do.
There are a lot more of us than the media would lead you to believe.
A vast majority as a matter of fact.
It’s time we started acting like one.
Push back.
Come together as a united front against these Socialists.
Spicy Time is coming, get ready for it, the party is about to start.
Conclusion
The images are horrible, right?
You want to avoid all this, right?
You want to live a calm and peaceful life where your families can live in peace and harmony… right?
This horror is what happens when bad, evil and dangerous people are permitted to come to power, change the world around them, subvert the law, and rule over others. Once they gain control of your weapons of defense, it’s all over.
Climb into the boxcars.
Game over!
Game over, man. Game Over!
Human nature is predictable.
Those progressive Marxists believe in a stable life where they are always in control and that the systems that they have put in place can overwhelm the most basic of human emotions. They believe that through incremental steps, over a long time, their (long desired) changes to the American State and Federal Constitutions would be accepted without incident.
They believe that change is gradual. Conservatives believe that change in an on/off switch from acceptable to unacceptable.
Can you blame them? It’s been this way for at least 100 years if not longer.
But, they are wrong.
If the National Guard gets involved, it is not merely imaginable but inevitable that a televised bloodbath would ensue.
What will happen when National Guard units encounter the county sheriff in uniform, backed up by a throng of deputized, armed citizens, many of whom are former military who took a solemn oath to defend the Constitution with their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor? What would happen when they start breaking down doors and confiscating guns?
It is inconceivable that the defenders of the Second Amendment would peacefully back down - that's the whole point of the Second Amendment, after all - and thus far, Democratic rhetoric doesn't seem to leave much room for backing down either.
- Virginia's Rampup to Civil War
Rage, anger, disgust, fury and horror are real emotions that no amount of Prozac can suppress. It’s been pent up for decades, and it’s gonna blow.
In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia. Bosnia is one of several small countries that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a multicultural country created after World War I by the victorious Western Allies. Yugoslavia was composed of ethnic and religious groups that had been historical rivals, even bitter enemies, including the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims).
The objects of this anger should consider themselves lucky to be killed off humanely. A shot to the head, a lynching, burning down a union hall with the radicalized members all trapped inside…
Quick, easy death.
More often than not, however, it looks like extreme forms of torture are going to be the norm. It’s gonna be truly horrific. And if you are on the side “balancing the equation” back to Constitutional law as opposed to progressive Marxism, you had best know how to torture properly.
Let’s pray that the Marxists stand down and give up their assault on America. Because “Sunset” is coming and it’s going to be spectacular in it’s ferocity.
How do we know?
Read your history.
An archaeological team in France has unearthed a Gallo-Roman necropolis in Saintes, France, in which the remains of a group of adults and a child were found with iron shackles around their wrists, ankles, and/or necks. Archaeologists are trying to unravel the story of these individuals’ lives, their origin, and the circumstances of their death.
I so pray that we all can avoid this fate.
Final comment
Where are all those activist judges? You know the ones that are putting everything that President Trump does on hold. Why aren’t they issuing injunctions on these blatant anti-Constitutional actions?
Maybe its’ because the country is too far gone to matter.
I have other posts on this subject matter. You can check out my SHTF index here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is an interesting interview with Andrei Martyanov. He is a Russian military expert who emigrated to the United States. In it he argues that the stranglehold of American propaganda by the mainstream media has created a dangerous situation – one in which the “fake news” is believed by the American leadership.
ANDREI MARTYANOVisanexpertonRussianmilitaryandnavalissues. HewasborninBaku, USSRin 1963. HegraduatedfromtheKirovNavalRedBannerAcademyandservedasanofficerontheshipsandstaffpositionofSovietCoastGuardthrough 1990. HetookpartintheeventsintheCaucasuswhichledtothecollapseoftheSovietUnion.
- Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning
He explains that the American leadership, knowing full well that the media is a propaganda tool, actually believes much of the propaganda that they create. This is true on all levels.
The American leadership actually believes this “news”. Not only the “fake news” from CNN, MSNBC an WaPo but also from the conservative and alternative “Right wing” media.
He argues that this is extraordinarily dangerous.
Andrei Martyanov.
This belief in American propaganda is dangerous because it creates a situation where foolish men in leadership positions can make some very serious mistakes.
The majority of travelers I have met see foreign lands entirely through the filter glasses of their home front. Their worldview is shaped by government schools, Hollywood actors, television programming, mainstream pressing, and the resulting illusion of “us being the good guys.” When they travel, they carry a lifetime supply of brainwash shampoo with them. A backpack full of sheep’s wool over their eyes. And a dumbed-down uniform of sweatshop t-shirts, shorts and sandals that sores the eye of the beholder.
-Doug Casey, International Man
Mistakes, Leadership mistakes, that could absolutely devastate the United States. The leadership of a healthy and functioning nation needs good and accurate intelligence. It cannot rely own it’s own propaganda to base decisions upon.
History is full of stories of the destruction of cities, nations and empires that fell due to the bad Intel, and decisions by the top leadership. Read about the destruction of Hungary by Genghis Khan, if you don't believe me.
Or, consider the Marketing strategy of Gillette with their "Men are inherently foul pigs" campaign (to sell razors).
Or, consider Hollywood and their bevy of all-female re-writes of famous movies. Movies that no one will watch. Like "Oceans 8".
Or, consider what happened to NFL football, when the team owners permitted the players to protest against America.
Now, consider what might happen to America if it believes the narrative that both Russia and China are backwards, third-world shit holes and are no match for the United States military...
Ah. Andrei . You do not need to believe him. You just need to consider that he has some good ideas and makes some valid points.
Now, I find that he has some good points, especially his appraisal on the ignorance of the Washington “insider” class. His ideas are able to explain much of the strange decision processes that originate out of Washington DC today.
Andrei wrote…
Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments.
Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy.
Vietnam
Syria
Lybia
Somalia
Yemen
Lebanon
Iraq
The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict.
With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually...
... economically,
... militarily...
...or culturally
... to face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments...
... and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds.
The book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US approach to warfare, which manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective national cultures;
Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning illustrates the fact that Russian economic, military and cultural realities and power are no longer what American “elites” think they are by addressing Russia’s new and elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as cyberwarfare and space;
Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning studies in depth several ways in which the US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be done to avoid it.
Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.
-Amazon
Indeed, a point that I have “hammered” over and over again, is the idea that the most dangerous propaganda is the news reports that we WANT to believe.
Propaganda works best when we WANT to believe the lies told to us.
Such as 11 million Uighur Muslims are in reeducation concentration camps in Xinjiang China. That America must "do something" to free the poor Muslim innocents! All, yes ALL of conservative news is full of these stories and the figure of 11 million is bantered about without question.
Except...
No one can point out where these concentration camps are.
You cannot find them on Google Earth. And you should. After all, the population of New York City is 6 million people. So a concentration camp housing 11 million people would be over twice the size of New York city. It would be pretty fucking big. Bigger than the largest city in America, and then some.
You would be able to see it from the Moon.
If there were 11 concentration camps in Xinjiang, China, (each one million people in size) then you would be able to easily locate all eleven Atlanta, Georgia sized complexes on Google Earth. Where are all these concentration camps?
Simple math.
Simple thought process.
... Propaganda. Don't fall for it.
Anyways, he makes a great point.
Our American leadership has taken to actually believing what is being repeated day in and day out by the lying American mainstream press. And this is very dangerous.
Some minor Russian Naval ships.
You might not like his opinions, but please just view his point of view as something that you will not hear from the mainstream, or alt-conservative news. As such it is a valuable alternative view point.
One that should be taken seriously.
The interview.
Yvonne Lorenzo interviews Andrei Martyanov …
Yvonne Lorenzo: I’d like to discuss the central thesis of your first book, Losing Military Supremacy. Aside from a civil war in the late 1800s, the United States has never experienced the effects of a devastating war fought on its own soil by foreign nation and believes it is invulnerable and won’t be attacked. To the contrary, Russians to this day know the price of war. If you would be so kind to summarize, if possible, the key points you wished to make known about Russia.
"America believes that it is invulnerable and won’t ever be attacked."
The Severodvinsk, the first of Russia’s multirole Yasen K-560 submarines, by the pier of the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Region.
The difference is that I get more in depth into the tactical, operational and technological issues—to a degree that is possible in what amounts to a geopolitical study—to demonstrate and drive my point home…
… that the current American political elites are utterly delusional on the nature of modern warfare…
Crew of the Alexander Nevsky nuclear submarine topside at a welcome ceremony for the Navy’s new Borei-class project 955 vessel at Kamchatka’s Vilyuchinsk base.
… especially in a peer-to-peer scenario of which the United States hasn’tfaced since WW II.
My point is very simple…
…the ignorance of the American ruling class of modern warfare is such that it has become a clear and present danger for the world…
John Bolton neocon in the Trump administration.
… since, while improbable at this stage, it is totally plausible to see at some point of time someone in the US political top losing it…
…and unleashing a confrontation with Russia, or China…
…being fully convinced, mostly by Hollywood or [Tom] Clancy-esque pseudo military fiction…
…that the United States and NATO can attack Russia and survive.
That, America could attack Russia or China and it would remain unscathed and devastate the rest of the world and America would not suffer at all.
That’s the danger…
…especially in a country whose elites completely lost their mind and are delusional…
Rulership class in America are bat-shit crazy.
…or reside in what I define as a Perpetual Chalabi Moment.
American leadership, on both sides of the political spectrum, plus the oligarchy that controls them are completely delusional and out of touch with the American citizens, the rest of the world, and the comparative technological strengths of America.
The arms race.
The US did lose the arms race.
The arms race was not lost in 2018 or even 2015, however; it was lost much earlier and it was mostly due to the US media-propaganda machine…
… which kept it secret from the US public.
It still continues to do so but it is increasingly difficult to keep it under wraps when information, including imagery of what Russia does in this field becomes increasingly available.
Ships from Russia’s Caspian Flotilla launching Kalibr-NK cruise missiles against Daesh targets in Syria.
But that is just part of the issue: I write about predictors—the real economy, scientific development, education, etc.—for war’s outcomes [are] non-stop.
Other people have written about these predictors. Not once do they agree with the narrative coming out of the American mainstream media.
In the end, when I state that the US elites have no clue about the size and complexity of Russia’s economy, it is one thing…
…but when I state that they basically have no clue about their own economy, not Wall Street’s cooking of books, I can rely on some serious American professionals in the field.
President Trump, right, talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, on July 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The report was prepared by an Inter-agency Task Force in September 2018 and reads as an epitaph to the US machine-building complex…
… and the issue is not just massive de-industrialization…
America has still not recovered from the de-industrialization of the last forty years. It is not going to recover in only one or two years.
… or the lack of a labor force which can fill in for departing old-timers…
…with many in the new generation of Americans being mostly interested in pot and drugs or in avoiding any productive labor…
…nor money alone can solve the problem of America’s declining military strength, which was always overstated to start with.
It is the culture, an institutional one, which is responsible for this decline.
Russia presents new MiG-35 fighter jet to the public.
The decline of American culture
The United States is very good at building extremely expensive and dubiously effective (against a competent enemy) power projection forces, which by definition are offensive and aggressive.
Once one gets into the issues of actual defense, the picture changes dramatically for the United States.
It is enough to mention the whole non-stop hysteria about Turkey buying and activating the S-400 complex, with India already having a 5 billion dollar contract signed with Russia, and many Arab states lining up for Russian-made air and anti-missile systems, not to mention combat aircraft, such as a contact for SU-35s between Egypt and Russia signed, following next.
S-400 complex launching system.
All of it creates an extremely emotional reaction in the United States, but the fact that Russian military technology is in some key defense fields better than anything out there was never in doubt.
S-400 complex launching system with potential targets that it is designed to strike.
It is enough to recall Vietnam, but in the time of radio and printed media it was easier to control narratives.
The American media blitz on this subject is constant and unyielding.
Today it is extremely difficult.
Russia always built weapons to effectively kill the enemy—such is Russia’s experience with warfare, much of which being invasions of foreign powers.
The United States has zero historic experience with defending the US proper against powerful and brutal enemies.
While the Revolutionary war had some moments of brutality, as did the American civil war, neither wars EVER approached the level of absolute depraved scorched earth devastation that Russia, Europe, and China have experienced.
It is something that America has NEVER experienced.
Mexico never invaded. Canada never invaded. Russia never invaded. Cuba never invaded. Bermuda never invaded.
It is a cultural difference, a profound one and it manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities, not just the respective military-industrial complexes.
In other words, Russians MUST build top of the line weaponry, because the safety of Russia depends on it.
Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath, author of National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, told MintPress that the new Amazon product is a “disgrace of a series,” unfairly demonizing a nation at a time when the United States has its boot on the throat of Venezuelan society.
Russian SU-30SM.
“The new Jack Ryan series comes in the context of four movies stretching back decades that have all had Department of Defense and/or CIA support at the scriptwriting phrase,” he noted, labeling Jack Ryan as a classic “national security entertainment product”.
The character of Jack Ryan first appeared in Cold War era Clancy stories such as The Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal of the Kremlin, where the heroic Ryan battles the dark forces of the Soviet Union.
The series was put on hiatus but has recently returned, bringing with it much of the same Cold War mentality and rhetoric.
Ryan has been previously played on screen by Hollywood stars such as Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
Alford’s book, which he co-wrote with Tom Secker, describes the enormous influence that the national security state has on popular culture.
Based on Freedom of Information requested documents, the two calculated that between 2004 and 2016, the Department of Defense was directly involved in the production of 977 Hollywood movies or television shows, many of which were carefully scripted, edited and curated by government agents in order to present a certain viewpoint of the world to the public.
For example, the writers of Homeland were revealed to have private meetings with ex-CIA officials before each season.
From big budget movies like Ironman and Transformers to surprisingly banal television productions like The Biggest Loser, Mythbusters or American Idol, virtually every movie or television show featuring the military or intelligence figures has been edited, scripted or funded by the Department of Defense in order to cast the government in the best possible light.
Those that do not comply with the Department of Defense’s requests are not given privileged access to, or use of, military resources and may be attacked by the state as being unpatriotic or deceptive.
The constant flow of pro-security state messages has an effect on the public.
Researchers found that respondents who were shown torture scenes from the television series 24 were more likely to subsequently support the government’s policies of torture in sites like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
This held even for liberal college students.
Andrei Martyanov: The first person of repute who challenged Tom Clancy’s fantasies was professor Roger Thompson in his seminal 2006 book Lessons Not Learned, in which he correctly asked a question how an insurance agent who never served a day in uniform and had undergraduate degree in English can write competently on any issue related to modern combat and technology.
In Clancy’s case it was clear that he was promoted, he openly writes about it in his book, by former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, for purely propaganda reasons.
Secretary of the Navy John Lehman swearing in Grace Harper.
Most of what Clancy wrote was cringe-worthy pop-literature, which could be described as incompetent military-intelligence porn.
Ouch!
Clancy never made it a secret that his Jack Ryan character was written from…Tom Clancy himself. A good testimony about late Clancy himself.
Why Jack Ryan was written as a spy as opposed to as insurance agent remains a complete mystery to me, but, I guess, whatever sells books for the late Tom Clancy.
These digs… oh, boy!
In Soviet/Russian military environment Clancy’s “literature” overwhelmingly was treated with ironic smile at best, and with Homeric laughter at worst.
Yup. How the rest of the world feels about this kind of literature, and movies.
But that pretty much describes the “level” of American “knowledge” and awareness of Russia in general and her military in particular—a caricature.
It is, however, one thing to promote caricatures in pop-art, totally another when a caricature becomes a working model for decision making at the top political level.
That is dangerous.
And his point is very, very valid…
As General Latiff of DARPA correctly noted—most of what the US public and political class know about war is from entertainment, from Hollywood to the literature of such “professionals” like the late Clancy.
The Generals won’t save us.
Yvonne Lorenzo: I quoted (retired) Major Danny Sjursen earlier. He wrote a piece title, “The Generals Won’t Save Us From The Next War”
for the American Conservative. I want to reproduce an excerpt and then
ask you to comment. Your disdain for the political class is well known
but what about the generals in power? How capable and knowledgeable are
they? How competent?
Why should any sentient citizen believe that these commanders’ former subordinates—a new crop of ambitious generals—will step forward now and oppose a disastrous future war with the Islamic Republic?
Don’t believe it!
Senior military leaders will salute, about-face, and execute unethical and unnecessary combat with Iran or whomever else (think Venezuela) Trump’s war hawks, such as John Bolton, decide needs a little regime changing.
John Bolton. Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton said that it would be great if the United States could get their hands on that Venezuelan oil, and that statement alone tells you everything that you need to know about why the US is trying so hard to interfere in Venezuelan affairs.
Need proof that even the most highly lauded generals will sheepishly obey the next absurd march to war? Join me in a brief trip down an ever so depressing memory lane.
Let us begin with my distinguished West Point graduation speaker, Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers.
He goes down in history as as a Donald Rumsfeld lackey because it turns out he knew full well that there were “holes” in the Bush team’s inaccurate intelligence used to justify the disastrous Iraq war.
Yet we heard not a peep from Myers, who kept his mouth shut and retired with full four-star honors.
Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers .
Then, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki accurately (and somewhat courageously) predicted in 2003 that an occupation of Iraq would require up to half a million U.S. troops, he was quietly retired.
Rummy passed over a whole generation of active officers to pull a known sycophant, General Peter Schoomaker, out of retirement to do Bush the Younger’s bidding.
It worked too.
Schoomaker, despite his highly touted special forces experience, never threw his stars on the table and called BS on a losing strategy even as it killed his soldiers by the hundreds and then the thousands.
Having heard him (unimpressively) speak at West Point in 2005, I still can’t decide whether he lacked the intellect to do so or the conscience.
Maybe both.
General Peter Schoomaker.
After Bush landed a fighter plane on a carrier and triumphantly announced “mission accomplished” in Iraq, poor Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the newest three-star in the Army, took over the hard part of conquest: bringing the “natives” to heel.
He utterly failed, being too reliant on what he knew—Cold War armored combat—and too ambitious to yell “stop!”
Soon after, it came to light that Sanchez had bungled the investigation—or cover-up (take your pick)—of the massive abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.
General John Abizaid was one of the most disappointing in a long line of subservient generals.
It seems Abizaid knew better: he knew the Iraq war couldn’t be won, that it was best to hand over control to the Iraqis posthaste, that General David Petraeus’s magical “surge” snake oil wouldn’t work.
Still, Abizaid didn’t quit and retired quietly.
He’s now Trump’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, which is far from comforting.
General John Abizaid .
Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was heralded as an outside-the-box thinker.
And indeed, he was a Gulf War I hero, earned a Ph.D., taught history at West Point, and wrote a (mostly) well-received book on Vietnam.
Yet when Trump appointed him national security advisor, he brought only in-the-box military beliefs with him into the White House.
He then helped author a fanciful National Defense Strategy that argued the U.S. military must be ready at a moment’s notice to fight Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and “terror.”
Perhaps at the same time!
No nuance, no diplomatic alternatives, no cost-benefit analysis, just standard militarism.
These days, McMaster is running around decrying what he calls a “defeatist narrative” and arguing for indefinite war in the Middle East.
Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster .
Then there was the other Washington insider and “liberal” favorite, one of a trio of “adults in the room,” General Jim Mattis.
Though sold to the public as a “warrior monk,” Mattis offered no alternative to America’s failing forever wars.
In fact, when he decided his conscience no longer allowed him to stay in the Trump administration, his reason for leaving was that the president had called for a reduction of troops in Afghanistan after 18 senseless years.
U.S.-supported Saudi terror bombings that killed tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians? A U.S.-backed Saudi blockade that starved at least 85,000 Yemeni children to death? Yeah, he was fine with that.
But a modest troop withdrawal from a losing 18-year-old war in landlocked Central Asia, that he couldn’t countenance.
General Jim Mattis.
Then there’s the propensity for politics and pageantry among senior military officers.
This was embarrassingly and unconscionably on display in the tragic cases of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and Corporal Pat Tillman.
When, during the initial invasion of Iraq, the young Lynch’s maintenance convoy got lost, she was captured and briefly detained by Saddam’s army.
Knowing a good public relations opportunity when they saw it, Bush’s staff and the generals concocted a slew of comforting lies: Lynch was a hero who had fought to her last bullet (she’d never fired her rifle), she’d been tortured (she hadn’t), her combat-camera equipped commando rescue had come just in the nick of time (she was hardly guarded and in a hospital).
Who cares if it was all lies, if this young woman’s terrifying experience was co-opted and embellished? The Lynch story was media fodder.
Private First Class Jessica Lynch.
More tragic was the Pat Tillman escapade.
Tillman was an admirable outlier, the only professional athlete to give up a million dollar contract to enlist in the military soon after 9/11.
Tillman and his brother went all in, too, choosing the elite Army Rangers. It was quite the story.
Rumsfeld even wrote the new private a congratulatory letter. Then reality got in the way. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan during a friendly fire incident that can only be described as gross incompetence.
Almost immediately, President Bush’s staff and much of the Army’s top brass went to work crafting the big lie: a heroic narrative of Tillman’s demise, replete with dozens of marauding Taliban fighters and a one-man charge befitting the hard-hitting former NFL defensive back.
Promoted to corporal posthumously, he was awarded the Silver Star. Some of his fellow Rangers were instructed to lie to the Tillman family at the memorial service regarding the manner of Pat’s death.
Corporal Pat Tillman.
Only Bush’s neophytes and the Army’s complicit generals didn’t count on the tenacity of Tillman’s parents.
They waged something nearing war with the U.S. military for several years until they found out the truth, unearthing a cover-up that implicated Bush’s civilians and many of the military’s four-star generals (including Stanley McChrystal, John Abizaid, and Richard Myers).
The Tillman family got their congressional hearing, but the sycophantic representatives on the Hill refused to seriously criticize the top brass and no one was seriously punished.
Andrei Martyanov:
I don’t know the exact answer to this question. I am positive that
there are many highly educated and competent people in US Armed Forces
but there is no denial of the fact that some segments of the US top
brass are more politicians than military leaders. It is not unique to
the United States Armed Forces, but the record of failures is in the
open and everyone can make their own conclusions.
Fighting Russia is the goal of the political class
Yvonne Lorenzo: Your latest book, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs provides further detail on Russia’s technological advancements. A layman, I see America as principally using bombing as artillery and proxy fighters (see Syria) on the ground—not too competent. I’ve read enough to be dangerous—having no military background—but wars can’t be won by bombing campaigns alone, even against a mediocre target (I think you called Iraq’s army third-rate).
Fighting Russia, which appears to be the goal of the political class, is not what they will expect, even if the confrontation doesn’t rise to a nuclear exchange.
I’d appreciate your summarizing some of the key points of this book but I have to ask, having read some of The Saker’s writings…
… can Russia be overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands of slow missiles, like the TLAMs…
… or will Russia use their “800 Pound Gorilla” in your parlance, that is…
A leaked memo confirms that Russia is developing Kanyon, the world's most powerful nuclear weapon, with twice the power of any ever tested.
This is 2x, or double the destructive power of the most dangerous and largest nuclear weapon ever designed; TheSovietRDS-202hydrogenbomb (codenameIvanorVanya), knownbyWesternnationsasTsarBomba.
Russia's New 'Satan' Nuclear Weapons System Could Wipe Out Texas orFrance. Russia hasformonthsbeentestingagiant nuclear weapons deliverysystemthatcancarry 10 heavyweightwarheads—enoughpowertowipeout Texas orFrance. This is theRS-28Sarmatintercontinentalballisticmissileknownin Russia as "Satan 2"Mar 06, 2018 · Russia announced it is about to test its Satan 2 missile, a nuclear weapon so powerful it could destroy a country size the of Texas or France in seconds. While its official name is RS-28 Sarmat, NATO officials have given the weapon the nickname Satan 2, the Mirror reports.
RS-28 Sarmat ICBM.
… does Russia have enough weapons, from cruise missiles, to defensive, to hypersonic, not to be overwhelmed…
… and are American generals aware of the risk if it does should they engage in hostilities?
Rumors of Kanyon (or Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6, as it’s known in Russia) first started swirling in 2015 following a leak on Russian television. Soon after, the nation confirmed the weapon’s existence, while claiming the leak was a mistake.
However, as defense analyst and military historian H. I. Sutton told Futurism, this leak of the latest nuclear posture review is the first official recognition of Kanyon by U.S. officials.
“The unclassified posture review document doesn’t really tell defense analysts anything new, but it does establish Kanyon as a military fact,” said Sutton. “Until now, many observers had regarded the system as ‘fake news.’ I think that this was partly because the stated specifications are so incredible and partly because it is hard to understand how it will be used.”
Incredible Devastation
“Incredible” is perhaps putting it mildly.
Based on leaked Russian documents, Kanyon is a nuclear-armed autonomous torpedo capable of traveling 10,000 kilometers (6,213 miles) with a 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon as its payload. That’s at least twice as powerful as any nuclear weapon ever tested. According to nuclear bomb simulator Nukemap, it would instantly kill 8 million people and injure an additional 6.6 million if dropped on New York City.
Kanyon’s weapon wouldn’t be dropped, though. It would arrive via the ocean and bring with it a massive artificial tsunami that would blanket the coastal area in radioactive water. If the warhead is “salted” with the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60, as some have reported, a detonation could render contaminated areas uninhabitable by humans for an entire century.
“Kanyon is unique in every respect,” said Sutton. “There really is nothing like it in any navy’s inventory.”
- US Report Confirms Russia Is Developing the World’s Most Powerful Nuclear Weapon. The 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon isn't "fake news."
The latest nuclear weapons that China and Russia field are smarter, more technically advanced, faster, and superior to their American counterparts in every way.
I noted your comments on Professor Cohen’s latest on Ukraine posted to Unz.com on November 14th but his most recent video in PushBack from The Grayzone he said that in all the years he studied Russia and America he’d never thought the two nations would go to war.
Yet now he fears this possibility. I’d appreciate your thoughts.
America WILL NOT survive World War III, and it is foolish to believe that it will.
It is a kind of Anglo-Saxon policy not to have cooperation on the European continent – mainly between the Russians, the French, the Poles and the Germans. They want to have a line of confrontation in this area and therefore are against all promises. [As a result] NATO was extended to the East.
I was responsible for the organization of the German Armed Forces on the German territory following reunification.
We did not want foreign troops in former East Germany.
We did not want to have British or French troops there; we wanted to have only German ones.
We wanted to explain to the world that there was no desire to enlarge NATO up to the new borders with Russia that were created in 1992.
It was against all the ideas we had after reunification.
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI.
We are on the path of war again.
That is so much against the will of our people.
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI. We are on the path of war again.
This is also against the will of the Dutch, the French, the Spanish and the Italians.
We see it as a disaster that a US president that is willing to cooperate with the Russian President Vladimir Putin – President [Donald] Trump – has to face such a disastrous policy organized by the US deep state, which is against our national interests and the national interests of all other western Europeans…
What is happening now is some kind of Anglo-Saxon policy that was created even before WWI. We are on the path of war again.
***
But, when you now come to Rostock, Dresden or Leipzig they are learning Russian again, they go to theaters to watch Russian performances and listen to Russian music.
They have re-established their links with Russia, and if they could do what they want to do, they would be the big economic partners of Russia these days.
Things have really changed for the Russian Federation and with regard to Russia.
People in Dresden, Saxony’s capital, are absolutely proud that Russian President Vladimir Putin once served there.
That is the reality these days, despite what the American mainstream media say.
Would Russia engage in tank battles and soldier-to-soldier combat if NATO attacked, or would they use stand-off weapons that you discuss just to obliterate command and control centers, the sources of munitions, etc.?
Mr. Wimmer clearly sees that some Germans, as opposed to the “vassal” government, want better relations with Russia as opposed to war, including cold war.
Andrei Martyanov: The issue of TLAMs: in a conventional configuration, I don’t think that they can do much damage to Russia, especially considering Russia’s unique anti-air and anti-missile defense.
A few possible leakers in conventional configuration will not do much damage; a few leakers in a nuclear configuration, however, is a completely different game. Hence Russia’s worry about Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland. That’s the main worry.
"Leakers" missile weapons systems that are able to bore through national defenses.
In a
conventional scenario, Russia will not be overwhelmed and even
conventional response-head on (otvetno-vstrechnyi) strike will be
extremely damaging to NATO and the US.
Thatfirst strike (inRussianparlance, a retaliatory strike, or otvetno-vstrechnyi udar) followsRussia’smilitarydoctrine, whichmandatessuch strikes tocompensateforRussia’sconventionalinferiority vis-à-vis NATOandtheUnitedStates.
- Eastern European Missile Defense: Russia's Threat ...
Valeri Gerasimov was explicit couple of years ago in his interview about Russia having enough stand-off weapons at every strategic direction to provide a reliable deterrence.
Even in conventional exchange Russia can launch weapons at the US proper with Russian bombers not leaving Russia’s aerospace.
The X-101 cruise missile has a range in excess of 5,500 kilometers. Russia continues to increase her deterrence with 3M22 Zircon getting ready to be tested from Admiral Gorshkov frigate very soon, with Kazan SSGN of project 885 planned to launch the hyper-sonic Zircon from underwater early next year.
All this changes deterrence dynamics completely because the United States cannot defend her coasts and in depth against such systems.
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, officers and soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy hold a welcome ceremony as a Russian naval ship arrives in port in Zhanjiang in southern China’s Guangdong Province, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016
Russia can intercept the bulk of US and NATO cruise missiles; the US cannot do so against Russia.
Yvonne Lorenzo: As I write this on December 3rd, 2019, Vesti News posted this video on the Zircon: Putin Unveils Zircon Hypersonic Missiles! Stresses Importance of Beefing Up Russia’s Navy!
The brilliant Houthi military victory over the Saudis fulfilled the predictions in military doctrine made by America’s own De Gaulle, a retired US Army Colonel, Douglas Macgregor with an outstanding combat and command record who has been treated over the past 20 years by most of his own country’s four star generals and civilian theorists with contempt: Just as the French Army ignored DeGaulle’s armored warfare doctrines 90 years, when they were being read and applied passionately by the generals of Germany.
Macgregor observed after the Houthi victory in September that that there was no reason for surprise. Sure enough, two and a half years earlier, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on March 7, 2017, he stated:
“The skies over the battlefield will be crowded with loitering munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones). These agile cruise missiles are designed to engage beyond line-of-sight ground targets. With proximity-fused, high-explosive warheads, these systems will remain airborne for hours, day or night. Equipped with high resolution electro-optical and infrared cameras, enemy operators will locate, surveil, and guide the drones to targets on the ground… When these loitering missiles are integrated into the enemy’s Strike Formations armed with precision guided rocket artillery that fires high explosive, incendiary, thermobaric, warheads including sub-munitions with self-targeting anti-tank and anti-personnel munitions warfare as we know it changes.”
Macgregor was even more prescient in predicting the previous Houthi precision missile strikes that wiped out half the production capacity of Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries earlier in September.
Those attacks humiliatingly exposed the ultra-expensive, endlessly praised US missile defense systems sold to Riyadh as worthless dinosaurs.
Yet, writing in his book “Transformation Under Fire” published back in 2003, Macgregor had said: “The idea is to link maneuver and strike assets through a flatter operational architecture empowered by new terrestrial and space-based communications throughout the formation… Long-range, joint precision fires and C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] offer the possibility to reach over enemy armies to directly strike at what they hope to defend or preserve.
Precision strategic strikes closely coordinated and timed with converging Army combat forces would present a defending enemy with an insoluble dilemma.”
As you see, he’s retired and never became a general.
At least he appears to oppose war with Russia and Iran and China, from his appearances on Tucker Carlson that I’ve seen. Can you comment on the above piece and how Russia might respond if America used such techniques? It seems to me Russia would also be able to implement such techniques.
Andrei Martyanov: Douglas Macgregor is a brilliant man but his testimony is about…
… fighting an enemy which does not posses C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] capabilities comparable to that of the United States.
Russia does and we have to be very clear on that distinction.
Fighting a modern combined arms war against such opponents as North Korea or even Iran the United States will have massive leverage, at least initially, before boots get on the ground, in terms of stand-off operations.
Once boots hit the ground, well, then it will change. But fighting peers, such as China, let alone Russia—…
…I simply cannot see how the United States will stay away from escalation to a nuclear threshold, because the scale of losses will be catastrophic both in men and materiel.
It’s EXTREMELY unlikely that the US can stop modern nuclear weapons from Russia. There is ZERO evidence that any of the US anti-missile technologies would be sufficient to stop a MIRV warhead – let alone multiple MIRV warheads – traveling at the speeds a modern missile can achieve. In a war with Russia, literally hundreds if not thousands of warheads would be heading towards the US. No missile defense system known can handle that.
- Richard Steven Hack on 09/19/2017 at 3:40 PM
In 110 days of fighting the German army in France during 1918, the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force sustained 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 killed in action.
That’s the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a future war with real armies, air forces, air defenses and naval power.
Only… on American soil.
Ignoring this reality is the road to future defeats and American decline. It’s time to look beyond the stirring images of infantrymen storming machine-gun nests created by Hollywood and to see war for what it is and will be in the future:
the ruthless extermination of the enemy with accurate, devastating firepower from the sea, from the air, from space and from mobile, armored firepower on land.
The United Sates is not in a position to take this scale of losses, not to mention having its rear, from staffs to munition depots and airfields being under relentless and devastating fire impact from operational to a strategic depth—a condition the US Army simple has no experience with.
As even RAND people admitted:
In war games with either Russia, China or both, almost always, the United States loses.
I’ve been writing about this for years.
It’s good that some people are beginning to get it. I hope—although I don’t hold my breath—their opinions will be heard at the political top.
Yvonne Lorenzo:
Recent articles have posted on cooperation between Russia and China,
not just the well know business deals but cultural and Chinese students
coming to Russia. See these articles, “Top Russian nuclear university
eyes future cooperation with China” and “Film about WWII sniper ‘Lady
Death’ kicks off ‘2019 Russian Film Exhibition’ in Beijing” posted on
China’s Global Times.
I’d appreciate your thoughts about the Russian-Chinese relationship/partnership.
Andrei Martyanov: The answer is extremely simple—Russian-Chinese cooperation is not only natural, but it was inevitable, considering the state of the combined West and, especially so, of the United States.
Yvonne Lorenzo: Andrei, you posted this on your blog on November 26th, 2019, “New S-400 Contract For Turkey?” which I want to discuss not only because of your observations, but because in the past (and I’m not picking on him) Paul Craig Roberts wrote in effect that Russia must be more aggressive with America to avoid a shooting war, quoting him, “The Russian government’s failure to stand up to Washington’s bullying guarantees more bullying. Sooner or later the bullying will cross a line, and Russia will have to fight.”
However, in this post of yours I cited above you commented:
So, [the] Turks are already running, it seems, detection routines with F-16 and F-4 as targets.
Turks will, already do, want more.
The Turks know what comes next, and it is S-500—they want it.
The reason is simple: look at [a] map of Turkey and see how much [of the] Eastern Mediterranean she will be able to cover—pretty much all of it. Just in case.
And it is not just for reasons of Greece and gas fields, but for reasons of Israel. The Turkish path towards a leadership in [the] Islamic world lies through the fate of Palestine.
So, a lot of thing are riding on those systems for Turkey and, just a hunch, SU-35s will follow.
I’m surprised the Turks haven’t start testing against any F-35s, unless Turkey had to return them to America;
I’d love to see the reaction if they did, which so far has included this:
“‘Erdogan thumbs his nose at Trump’: US senator says Turkey crossed ‘another red line’ with S-400 test, calls for new sanctions.”
As
you also wrote recently: “How about State Department creating a new
Office of S-400 Weekly Complaints and Threats Towards Turkey (OSWCTTT).
Should be a pretty nice sinecure for some bureaucrat. Should pay well
too—rent and real estate prices inside the Beltway are atrocious. Foggy
Bottom especially.”
And I see in the way they’ve turned Turkey away from American dominance, or Western dominance, that Russia’s diplomatic team, of course under the leadership of President Putin, have performed a Jujitsu move against the West more effective than using force.
Andrei Martyanov: As a Russian proverb says: “Diplomacy is the art to say to your counterpart that he is an idiot in the politest manner.”
In reality, the Russian version is very profane, so I softened it a bit. Russians do not operate on the so called “values-based,” ideological that is, principle in foreign policy. Russians actually DO consider the other side’s interests and concerns and that is what makes Russian diplomacy so effective.
This, plus, of course, military power. As another Russian saying goes: “If you do not want to talk to Lavrov, you will talk to Shoigu.”
With Turkey, Russia does accommodate many Turkish interests; the Turks feel that.
This is as much as I can respond to, because I am not in the position to pass deep and knowledgeable judgment on Turkey’s policies since I do not know the region that well.
I am sure, however, that Turks have a very good idea about what Russia offers technologically and economically.
The Turkish officer crews for S-400 underwent an extensive training in Russia so they do not need any additional argumentation in favor of the system they were trained on.
The F-35 is irrelevant here, apart from the fact that Turks cannot use, I believe, from the top of my head, those two aircraft which they had and which will be returned to the US.
Question: You have worked for over five decades as a war reporter and documentary film-maker in Vietnam, elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
How do you see current international tensions between the US, China and Russia?
Do you think the danger of war is greater now than in previous times?
John Pilger: In 1962, we all may have been saved by the refusal of a Soviet naval officer, Vasili Arkhipov, to fire a nuclear torpedo at US ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Are we in greater danger today?
During the Cold War, there were lines that the other side dared not cross.
There are few if any lines now;
The US surrounds China with 400 military bases and ...
...sails its low-draught ships into Chinese waters and...
...flies its drones in Chinese airspace.
American-led NATO forces mass on the same Russian frontier the Nazis crossed...
...the Russian president is insulted as a matter of routine.
There is no restraint and none of the diplomacy that kept the old Cold War cold.
In the West, we have acquiesced as bystanders in our own countries, preferring to look away (or at our smart phones) rather than break free of the post-modernism entrapping us with its specious “identity” distractions.
Question: You traveled extensively in the US during the Cold War years. You witnessed the assassination of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968.
It seems the American Cold War obsession with “communism as an evil” has been replaced by an equally intense Russophobia towards modern-day Russia.
Do you see a continuation in the phobia from the Cold War years to today? What accounts for that mindset?
John Pilger: The Russians refuse to bow down to America...
...and that is intolerable.
They play an independent, mostly positive role in the Middle East, the antithesis of America’s violent subversions...
...and that is unbearable.
Like the Chinese, they have forged peaceful and fruitful alliances with people all over the world...
...and that is unacceptable to the US Godfather.
The constant defamation of all things Russian is a symptom of decline and panic...
...as if the United States has departed the 21st century for the 19th century...
...obsessed with a proprietorial view of the world.
In the circumstances, the phobia you describe is hardly surprising.
Andrei Martyanov: As in any event, war between Russia and the US is possible, but how probable it is, is a completely different matter. Some probability of Russia and the United States actually fighting each other certainly exists.
It is not very high, I think, but it does exist.
We all have to do our utmost to prevent this scenario becoming a reality.
Paradoxically, Russia’s very real military strength today is a guarantor or, at least, a robust deterrent against such a nightmarish scenario.
As I said, the US military does understand the implications, even when American politicians don’t.
I always repeat that I feel much better when Gerasimov and Milley talk to each other than when Lavrov is forced to explain basic things to Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo.
Yvonne Lorenzo: Hypersonic weapons, impressive as they are, rely on Newtonian physics. There was—to me—a term that you would call “Runglish”, Russian-English, discussing “New physical principles” which I finally understood to mean “new principles of physics” relating to the new Peresvet laser, which I think you’ve speculated on its purpose but is highly secret.
Peresvet laser complex.
However, all this technology is used for military purposes; what I find it sad about deteriorating relations with Russia because the best of the West and Russia could accomplish a great deal sharing and developing non-military technology.
I’m
reminded of this wonderful video of a Russia cosmonaut’s interactions
with an American astronaut and seeing the world below they have disdain
for politicians.
I Need More Space: Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin’s long road to the stars
What are your thoughts and how can Russians and American in this environment of “Russophobia” which is a polite, diplomatic word for hatred of Russians, cooperate as we two are doing now for peaceful and good purposes?
I worry both your doors and mine, for simply communicating with one another, will be kicked in one day by someone from the government, as happened with Max Blumenthal.
Andrei Martyanov: As I stated repeatedly, the combined West committed cultural suicide in Russia.
Yes, Russians are open to mutually beneficial cooperation, with space being one of those exhibit A cases where international cooperation manifests itself in the most profound and positive way.
Primary military targets that would be obliterated by first nuclear strikes.
Sadly, with the current US political “elites” who are Russophobic in the extreme, any prospects of serious Russian-American cooperation look very grim.
The world is in the process of unprecedented geopolitical realignment which increasingly degrades the position of the United States and Russia is at the center of this process.
The Obama Administration destroyed Russian-American relations totally and I don’t see any improvement, bar some symbolic gestures, such as, I hope, President Trump visiting Moscow on May 9th next year, because the American political class’s Russophobia is systemic and was nurtured for generations.
Plus, the United States is not an agreement-capable entity because it is ungovernable, as the last three years so dramatically demonstrated.
The first thirty cities to be attacked with nuclear weapons during a Russia or China first-strike event. Say, if America puts troops in the Ukraine, or conducts Naval operations near the Chinese coast.
Russia is aware of that—no agreement signed with the United States is worth the paper it is written on.
"... no agreement signed with the United States is worth the paper it is written on." I think that China would agree.
We can only hope that things will change for the better in the future but this change may come only through the United States reassessing its role in history and the world…
…a process which may take decades, serious tribulations and, hopefully, emergence of new American elites that would be able to formulate real American national interests.
Nuclear Targets Map in the United States.
***
After
I asked Andrei my last question, this Russian video posted on YouTube:
so much for future cooperation between America and Russia in space,
because of sanctions Americans cannot be carried to the space station by
Russians any longer:
US Will Be Stranded On Earth! Baikonur Cosmodrome Sends Very Last American Into Space!
I’d
like to thank Andrei for his kind answers to my questions and highly
recommend his books and his writings on his blog and on Unz.com for
those who wish to escape the Matrix and find a knowledgeable Russian
perspective on events and military matters; Martyanov is the antidote to
Tom Clancy disease.
Radioactive fallout map of America. Assuming a minor nuclear exchange using small, but accurate nuclear warheads.
I want to close by noting Andrei Martynov’s recent blog post “Ishenko Delivers” that referenced an article by Rostislav Ishenko entitled “In Bulgaria, a Russian Soldier” the title itself a reference to the song “Alyosha,” which I am familiar with from the album Wait for Me by the late exceptional baritone Dimitri Hvorsostovky. The below passage Ishenko wrote is moving, as is the song.
It was 1970. I was five years old.
I came to visit my grandmother. To the White Church. Near Kiev.
My grandmother is from the Urals.
My grandfather (on my father’s side) started the war near Stalingrad, and ended on the Dnieper (six wounds, four of them heavy, two shell shocks, medals “For Military Merit” and “For Courage,” the Order of the “Red Star” and “World War II” degrees).
The commander of a machine gun company. He fought for an incomplete year. From October 1943 he was no longer sent to the front (and his division arrived near Stalingrad in November 1942).
He died (in 1956) at 36 years old, from the consequences of a concussion (as a young major, in a colonel’s position).
In 1970, I was five years old (to be exact, then four and a half).
Grandmother was a teacher of French. At the same time and a class teacher. I came to visit her. Contrary to usual, I didn’t go straight home, but (for some reason unknown to me) I went to the school where she taught.
I think that she needed to complete the work with the class, and the school was five to seven minutes’ walk from home.
Here I am, as a future student, and they brought me to see how the children learn.
For about fifteen minutes I studied desks in an empty classroom (which at that time did not differ from the gymnasium at the beginning of the century) and read what was written on the board.
And then she went with her grandmother to the porch of the school, where her class (and other classes) performed.
Now I don’t remember what the holiday was, but I suspect it is May 9th. Because I went out onto the porch (they rather took me out, I was too small to go out myself), just as the girls from my grandmother’s class (8–10, already without pioneer ties and, as for me, adult aunts) sang “Alyosha.”
I haven’t heard the song so often since then, but I remember it well, because, in the words, “He doesn’t give flowers to girls, they give him flowers,” the entire female team of the school, which was standing next to me, wept.
It was the 70th year.
My grandmother was 48 years old.
Exactly at that age (in 2014) I left Kiev.
The city where four generations of my ancestors lived, in which my mother survived the occupation (and met the Red Army at the age of three), became not just a stranger, but a hostile one.
I can be forced to return there, but I cannot be persuaded or persuaded to do so voluntarily.
It’s like in a war.
All who survived and won are proud of the Victory, and while their fellow soldiers were alive, they met and remembered the days of old.
But they themselves did not dream of returning to the dugout under shelling, nor did they want to experience the “pleasure” of the attack (to their full height on the prepared defense) for their children.
Russians have in their collective memory the trauma of a war that killed millions, a subject Martyanov has discussed in depth especially in his first book;
…in that respect, they are different from Americans and I question the sanity of the rulers…
…especially the feckless political class…
…of the West who make the Russians foes.
Launch of American ICBM’s from the underground silos.
Perhaps only the people of the two nations—if they are enough in number in America—can prevent war from coming, because I am uncertain if the American military can reign in the powers that control them.
Or perhaps it is the fate for Russia to humble America, the way she did Nazi Germany, not necessarily by military might—at least I pray.
I suspect the process has started already.
Sadly, we know which side is most at fault for this deterioration of relations between our nations.
Reminders… China.
China and Russia will mutually work together militarily to counter American aggression.
As a history buff I must point out that ALL Major Wars started from misconceptions (they enemy is weak, cannot hit the broad side of the barn etc) AND starred new disruptive weapons (the Machine Gun in WW1 vs Calvary/Infantry charges, Aircraft carrier in WW2 vs the MIGHTY Battleship).
Will WW3 find the USA under EMP? Will Russian and Chinese high tech ECM systems shut off our High Tech Weapons? Ask the commanders of the two recent US Navy collisions if they think ECM jammed their Command and Control Systems. Both of the Ships were very high tech Aegis Warships, yet were rammed by slow moving clumsy Cargo Ships.
Will we get our heads handed to us like the Germans?
You know that in both world wars the Germans did not expect to lose you know.
Prepare for bad times my friends the petrodollar is almost done. The cost of everything is about to rise quickly.
-NH Michael
Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged Russia to strengthen bilateral comprehensive cooperation and mutual political support during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. This action has prompted political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko to assert that both countries are moving towards a political and military alliance.
"De facto a political and military alliance between Russia and China has existed for a long time and it is not a secret to anyone. Rumors have repeatedly surfaced that it could be formalized. But at the recent G20 summit the Chinese leader has for the first time mentioned the need to 'formalize relations' as openly as Chinese political and diplomatic traditions permit."
- Ishchenko, head of the Center for Systems Analysis and Forecasting, wrote for RIA Novosti.
Xi Jinping said that both countries should support each other in their efforts to protect national sovereignty and security. The Chinese president added that both nations should step up cooperation in such areas as infrastructure development, energy, aviation, aerospace and cutting-edge technology.
In addition, Russia and China should foster bilateral military exchanges and security cooperation.
Reminders… American Mainstream media
The US is likely to provoke a major war, partly in an attempt to unite a culturally divided country. But not just a sport war such as we’ve had in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Probably with China, possibly Russia or Iran. Perhaps with all three. The US won’t do well, since it will find that its aircraft carriers, F-35s, and the like are equivalent to cavalry before WW1 and battleships before WW2.
- Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the 2020s
Americans, all jazzed up with the mainstream media news, and the mainstream pro-military movies, and a neocon government, is all but “chomping at the bit” to fight and (of course) win a war with either, Russia or China or both…
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because I just don’t care to.
This post describes contemporaneous American events in the light of the loss of liberty and freedom.
Most certainly, that once you have a two-tiered justice system, you actually have no rule of law. And without a Rule of Law, you cannot have either freedom or liberty.
Today, America does not have Rule by Law. It has Rule by selectively applied Brute Force.
There is no rule of law in the United States. And there hasn’t been one for some time. When you have a two tiered justice system, then you have no justice when the country is founded on “equality”.
Introduction
America was founded on the premise of liberty and freedom. We have all heard this, well most of us, anyways. (Who knows what they are teaching in schools these days.) This article makes the simple statement; freedom and liberty REQUIRES a robust rule of law applied evenly throughout the nation.
If you do not have a robust Rule of Law, evenly applied. You will not have either freedom or liberty.
America is toast.
Freedom and liberty REQUIRES a robust rule of law applied evenly throughout the nation.
When rules are bent in favor of one person over another, justice fails. Without justice, the nation fails. It might be a slow slide into the abyss, but fail it will.
In the beginning…
When In The Course of Human Events……
The Founders of this nation put forward a very basic premise:
"...to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
That no government, no person whether royalty or not, King, Queen or Pawn, can take from one to give to another, to make one lesser than another, to being removed from one of the basics of humanity…
…all for the privilege of another.
This is America today. Where and what freedoms remain?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
That the very premise
of humanity is that one has a right to live, to be left alone to do as
one pleases, and to pursue — but not be guaranteed — happiness. The
only lawful and proper constraints arise when your exercise of same
prevents someone else from having that same peaceful enjoyment.
America was founded as a place where people could aspire to follow their dreams unencumbered by government interference. Sadly this is no longer the case, as the movie “Tucker – A man and his dream”, so clearly illustrates.
One cannot have a right to life if one cannot defend it using tools at least as powerful as those who would take it from you. You cannot have that right to life, that right of freedom and that right of liberty, if the rules of law are not evenly applied to everyone.
There is no freedom when the government can stop your pursuit of happiness.
Based on a true story. Shortly after World War II, Preston Tucker is a grandiose schemer with a new dream, to produce the best cars ever made. With the assistance of Abe Karatz and some impressive salesmanship on his own part, he obtains funding and begins to build his factory. The whole movie also has many parallels with director Coppola’s own efforts to build a new movie studio of his own.
There is no freedom when the government can stop your pursuit of happiness.
This is the story of entrepreneur Preston Tucker and the innovative car he designed in the late 1940s.
The car was attractive, economical, and safe, and had many features not found on the cars of that time -- an air-cooled rear engine, disk brakes, independent 4-wheel suspension, an additional center headlight that pivoted left and right for better vision when turning, a padded dash, seatbelts, and a popout safety windshield.
Tucker's promotional activities generated widespread public excitement and interest in the car, but the powerful auto industry blocked its production.
Only 50 cars were ever made.
The plan was to produce the car in the former Dodge B-29 engine plant on the far southwest side of Chicago. Many Chicagoans invested in the Tucker Motor Corporation, and some bought dealerships.
Even today, many people believe that then-Senator Homer Ferguson (R-Michigan) is the person most responsible for the loss of their investment in the revolutionary ahead-of-its-time "Tucker Torpedo".
- Tucker: The Man and His Dream
There is no freedom when the government can stop your pursuit of happiness.
This is a basic premise. It is a fundamental requirement for a nation to be one where people can live within an environment of freedom and liberty.
America today.
There is no freedom when the government can stop your pursuit of happiness.
The Constitution
The Founders put together a document called The Constitution. It established the Rule of Law that the nation would exist under.
The debate over it, and what needed to be added to it, is found in The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist; two books that are the chronology of the running debate of the time.
Anyone who claims to have an opinion on the foundations of our nation and why the Constitution is important ought to have read both, as should anyone who claims a right to run for elective office at any level — state, local or federal.
Duh! All elected officials NEED to be well-versed in both documents. The vast majority today are not.
Chief among the foundation of this nation is The Rule of Law and that it apply equally to everyone, all the time. It must be applied in each case evenly without exception.
Over time.
By various people, all for various reasons…
Laws grew, became confused, morphed into one thing or another, and their application distorted.
Today, functionally, the Rule of Law does not exist in America.
I can point this out, over and over, and over. And so I will, using examples that we read about every single day.
The law clearly states…
Not one illegal immigrant has a right to live and work, and have children in America. This is true under any circumstance; The Rule of Law says so.
It does not matter whether they personally intended to break said law; that merely encompasses whether they bear criminal culpability for the offense. It does not matter what you call them either. You can call them “dreamers”, “hopefuls”, “migrants”, “refugees” and “travelers”.
If they do not follow the law, they must be imprisoned, and then expelled.
Migrants ride on top of a northern bound train toward the U.S.-Mexico border in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, in March. Migrants crossing Mexico to get to the U.S. have increasingly become targets of criminal gangs who kidnap them to obtain ransom money.
Laws follow Due Process and are implemented, policed and structured fairly. Otherwise, they do not follow the Rule of Law. All laws must follow the Rule of Law, and that means that they are derived from the Bill of Rights.
Red Flag Laws
‘Red flag’ gun confiscation laws violate every principle of liberty upon which our country was founded. There is no due process associated with “red flag” laws. A judge’s order to seize the firearms from an American citizen who has not been accused of a crime, charged with a crime, convicted of a crime—or who never even threatened to commit a crime—based on the accusation of a single individual is anything but due process.
Our accuser could be a disgruntled employee, a bitter ex-spouse or relative, a vengeful neighbor, an anti-gun liberal or even an anti-gun policeman. By definition, “red flag” laws use mere suspicion of what one “might” do as justification to seize a person’s firearms. Tactics such as these have been used in virtually every despotic regime of history.
- Pastor Chuck Baldwin, quoted at Survival Blog
The key to having a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights… a strong organized structure from whence all other laws are derived, is that it becomes clear whether a law is constitutional or not.
Not all laws are constitutional.
Since the Rule of Law is derived from the Bill of Rights, any law that violates it is invalid.
How can you have an ATF who’s entire reason for existence is to infringe on the second amendment?
How can the IRS exist when it, by it’s own fundamental nature, violates the fourth amendment?
How can the FDA ban or arrest someone for using drugs when it violates the ninth amendment?
Now, the latest, in a long string of unconstiutional laws, the “red flag” law completely throws the “due process” scheme out the window. Where, an elected judge will make a determination of whether or not someone is guilty and action by the government needs to take place.
Once you remove judges from the equation…
You have no Rule of Law.
And…
And…
And it’s a big deal.
It’s a really, really, big deal.
If you do not enforce the Rule of Law, you do not have a nation.
The anti-gun movement.
Senators Richard Blumenthal and Mark Warner, both Democrats, have threatened legislation that is a rank violation of the First Amendment. They do so using the excuse of being necessary in response to the Christchurch live-stream.
The second amendment.
So…
Now we have 90% of the counties in Virginia turning into sanctuary enclaves that protects the Bill of Rights for the citizens of those counties. The Democrat reaction? Call in the military and increase funding to incarcerate everyone opposing them.
The Bill of Rights is not up for debate.
That’s right.
Pay attention.
Virginia under Democrat leadership.
The elected officials”, the new government has decided to openly violate the Rule of Law, and disarm citizens in direct defiance of the Bill of Rights.
This arrogance is what the founders of the nation fought against.
And it’s going to be fought again.
Americans fought the arrogant British government. They did not like being treated as a “cash cow” while the ruling class spent the money on frivolities.
90% of the counties in Virginia has declared themselves sanctuaries against government encroachment of their liberties and they will fight back.
Americans should pay attention.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
-Theodore Dalrymple
It is not possible to understand evil.
In contrast, the “American” empire acts like Genghis Khan on steroids without his military genius:
it appears to me Washington is intent on the wholesale obliteration of countries, their infrastructure, murdering the civilian populations by the millions, and so on.
Moreover, perhaps in the most memorable quote of Hillary Clinton in calling some Americans “deplorables,” it seems the entire class of rulers of America views its citizens as dispensable commodities and ill disguised contempt.
You cannot stop evil if you refuse to recognize it exists. You cannot accept that evil exists in this world if you close your eyes to it. You cannot see the evil. You cannot see the dangers if you fail to watch the errors others made that led them to their demise.
-UNZ
1st Amendment – Freedom of Speech. Means zero censorship of speech of any kind.
2nd Amendment – Ability to fight back against a tyrannical government.
Yet, these two elected Democrat officials want to violate a core tenet of law. Why?
Why?
The Democrats believe that they have achieved a strong degree of control over Americans and the only thing remaining to do is to disarm them. They are following a time-line and time-table laid out years ago, and if it seems like they over-played their hand it is because they did NOT expect a Donald Trump in the office of the President. They expected a Hillary Clinton.
Why the Democrats want to suppress freedom.
Governments are banning and attempting to ban guns and opinions related to keeping guns, not because they fear copycats:
They are banning that speech and literally burning books because faced with the gore, the nastiness and inhumanity of these acts the people may conclude that it was the government itself that sowed the seeds of these acts.
And that the government conspired with gave comfort to said people and groups…
…all the while rendering individual people powerless to stop it by infringing on The Right to Keep and Bear Arms…
…and did all of the above intentionally.
Were the people to reach that conclusion they’d be correct and in response they might revoke their consent to said government entirely and demand it depart.
When the citizens reach the conclusion that the government is corrupted and needs to be reformed, the second amendment is designed to facilitate that change.
America is resembling a slave camp.
A slave is not allowed weapons because he might use them to become free.
If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not.
Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.
-Ayn Rand
A collapse of cultures…
Cultures collapse when there is no cohesion remaining.
Cultures collapse when the primary means to get ahead is to stomp on someone else’s head instead of innovating.
Cultures collapse when cheating is no longer punished and is celebrated instead.
Cultures collapse when cheating is no longer punished and is celebrated instead.
If that is not curtailed then collapse is inevitable — it is simply a matter of time.
Europeans dubbed it the Great War. Americans today remember it as World War One, and recall it as little more than a precursor of an even more violent Second World War. In reality, Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s justification for entering the war as a freedom crusade, as a “war to end all wars,” was, ultimately, little more than rhetorical cover for what amounted to a war in support of one group of empires, the British and French, against another, German and Austrian.
Indeed, in a certain sense, it was a bankers’ war. While the ostensibly “neutral” United States acceded to the British Navy’s starvation blockade of Germany, Washington simultaneously traded war materials with its Anglo brothers and floated London vital loans numbering in the billions of dollars. Clearly, by 1917, after three years of macabre massacre, Washington had a pecuniary interest in British victory.
That may not be the version of First World War history that most Americans learned in elementary or high school. Even less well known is the cynicism and civil liberties suppression of the “Progressive”-in-chief, President Wilson.
His strongman tactics: imprisonment of peaceful antiwar activists under the Sedition Act, detainment of pacifists in prison camps, and prosecution of critical journalists under the (still statute law) Espionage Act, are abhorrent enough. Worse still, however, was the reflexive manner in which the progressive “left” quickly fell in line with their president.
The left eats its own; maybe it always has. Immense majorities of “progressive s,”just like their socialist brethren in Europe, supported Wilson and the war in spite of past records of more dovish positions.
They then proceeded to attack, suppress, and often professionally ruin, or imprison, their former compatriots —relabeled as “radicals”—such as Randolph Bourne and Eugene Debs.
Nonetheless, for all of World War I’s horror, futility, absurdity even, the veterans of the war collectively emerged from the sodden trenches imbued with a vocal philosophy of never again. Indeed, they celebrated the moment the guns finally fell silent, the 11th minute, or the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, 1918, as Armistice Day.
It was, romantic as it now seems, widely believed that theirs would be the last war. In fact, millions of lucky survivors left the war deeply dedicated to ensuring that be the case. Much of the finest Western literature of the 20th century, unsurprisingly, generated from the pens of disgruntled, damaged veterans—Hemingway, Graves, Fitzgerald, Sassoon, and many more—forever changed by the experience of needless war.
- The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs: An Interview with Andrei Martyanov ... a long but fascinating read
Whether something is “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder but irrespective of that The First Amendment protects it.
Why?
Because even the most-vile expression of dislike is one’s right to hold and have. To state otherwise is to state a right to control another person’s mind and thoughts — to not only enslave as to labor but to thought itself.
That is profoundly evil.
The facts are (and do facts matter in America any longer?) that on July 27th, 2014, when the East of Ukraine was already at war, a young woman and her little daughter—Kristina and Kira—were murdered from the shelling of Ukrainian forces. The mother then was named the “Gorlovka Madonna.”
What is evil?
Manipulation by others for personal gain? Why are the Democrats so focused on the Ukraine? Why do they want to start World War III with Russia?
America tomorrow.
Why is our government fighting eight simultaneous wars in far off lands? Lands like Yemen? Lands like Syria? Lands like Afghanistan? Lands like Libya?
Why does it want a pick a fight with Russia over the Ukraine?
Why does it want to pick a fight with China over Taiwan?
What the heck is the matter with these people?
Why is the American leadership so focused on fighting wars, and why do they want to challenge major nuclear armed nations? Can they not see the consequences?
Evil has occupied all American institutions for some time now.
All, not most, American institutions are not corrupted.
They are all beyond redemption. It need to be completely overhauled and that might mean burning them all down and building up out from the ashes remaining.
In contrast, the “American” empire acts like Genghis Khan on steroids without his military genius:
it appears to me Washington is intent on the wholesale obliteration of countries, their infrastructure, murdering the civilian populations by the millions, and so on.
Moreover, perhaps in the most memorable quote of Hillary Clinton in calling some Americans “deplorables,” it seems the entire class of rulers of America views its citizens as dispensable commodities and ill disguised contempt.
You cannot stop evil if you refuse to recognize it exists. You cannot accept that evil exists in this world if you close your eyes to it. You cannot see the evil. You cannot see the dangers if you fail to watch the errors others made that led them to their demise.
-UNZ
This very same act is what our government is now calling on “big companies” to do, it is what the left has repeatedly done to anyone who dares speak against their policies and desires.
This is true whether on college campuses, in corporate America or in the public square.
If this story was a movie plot,…the audience would walk out and want their money back. Way too unbelievable! hat’s right, – College Bribe Mommy has a JD from Harvard, Daddy has a JD from USC and was a prosecuting attorney for both Los Angeles and San Diego, – before going into high tech and becoming CEO of Wireless Telematics.
Celebrities with dim-witted children got them into colleges by paying bribes and cheating.
The claim that said students were “blameless” if their test scores were faked or they faked a “disability” to extend time and thus be able to cheat is a lie.
Another view…
Said “students” are fully culpable yet none of them have been charged;
Not only did every one of them know they didn’t compete on the rowing team (for example)…
Any of them who got an extra hour or two to take the SAT or ACT knew damn well they were cheating, whether they knew their answers were being modified or not.
Why did this happen and why aren’t the kids in the dock too?
Sad will be the day…
Universities do not obey the law.
We have no rules of law.
Colleges claim they need “diversity.”
That’s nonsense; in a meritocracy the best rise irrespective of skin color, race or religion.
The fact is that this “diversity need” is met by lowering standards and allowing unqualified people who cannot do the work into the school.
When you no longer follow the conventions established by merit, you end up diluting the value of your institution. Eventually, the lowest common denominator becomes the norm.
This was going on in the 1990s and it has only gotten worse — much worse — since.
There is, of course, no value in that to a person “selected” via “diversity” if they have to pay full price and will inevitably fail to be able to do the work.
America today.
This in turn means someone else gets screwed so they don’t have to pay full price and they also don’t have to do the work they are incapable of.
The alleged “degree” conferred by said school is thus rendered meaningless; it no longer denotes competence and to prevent that from being recognized and their “brand” destroyed said colleges conspire with employers and governments, both outwardly and not to “require” said “credentials” for an ever-expanding list of “professions.”
In short college is no longer about education.
Instead, it is about grift, fraud, bribery and slavery. It’s a racketeering enterprise writ large and ought to be prosecuted as a felony, starting with the “most-elite” schools.
Devolution of cultures.
Is it any surprise that a tiny bit of the bribery began six months earlier with so-called “standardized” testing that really isn’t and claims of being on a soccer team that were false?
Federal agencies do not follow the law.
We have no rule of law.
The Fed is prohibited from buying anything other than government backed securities.
Fannie and Freddie paper have on their face the statement that they have no such backing; go online and view any of their prospectuses.
That the government bailed them out does not matter.
Mount corruptmore.
The Fed’s transacting in same and their continued ownership is illegal.
Rather than change the law (which might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed “prints”) they simply ignore the law and you let them.
You let them.
The Fed's legal mandate under the law is for stable prices.
The Fed’s chair and other governors make dozens of speeches a year and testify under oath before Congress to their intent to violate the law with their “2% inflation target.”
Inflation, is by definition, not stability.
Congress could change that law but doing so might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed “prints” and so instead both Congress and The Fed ignore the law and you let them.
You let them.
The truth is that Money is a medium of exchange which you acquire by producing something of value to someone else. It facilitates trade because it is fungible — that is, you don’t need to transact in oranges, chickens or hours of programming a computer; all three can be reduced to money.
The truth is that Money is a medium of exchange which you acquire by producing something of value to someone else.
You cannot print money because it is impossible to materialize a television, a car, a piece of computer software, gasoline or electrical power out of thin air.
You can print credit, which spends like money.
But if you emit credit then what you are claiming is that someone in the future will produce a thing to legitimate what you did. If the people refuse what’s left?
Prosecuting him would have inevitably drawn those Democrats into what could have easily wound up being criminal culpability including spying for foreign nations. Which is treason.
So they let him go.
They let him go despite proof that he wired more than $280,000 to Pakistan — funds that very well might have been used to facilitate terrorism!
Outstanding…
Industry does not obey the law.
We have no rule of law.
Industry does not obey the law.
It is a felony to restrain trade, attempt to monopolize or fix prices among people who are supposed to be competing.
The medical industry does it every single day.
Neoliberal Economics Destroyed the Economy and the Middle Class ... credit-driven debt grows faster than the income that services it, and this impoverishes the 90%
- Paul Craig Roberts
Why not when the example set is that if you’re rich or powerful (and they are both) you could even spy for a foreign nation and get away with it.
We could literally dispose of the entire federal budget deficit, all of the Federal debt, all of the state and local pension problems and cut property taxes in half or more if we put a stop to this crap.
They do it because despite the law they have no fear of prosecution.
Why should they?
We certainly are living in dangerous times; I suspect it’s even dangerous to me to discuss the writings on his blog and his two recent books with Andrei Martyanov in an environment of omnipresent electronic monitoring and profiling of every individual American citizen, especially those who question the warfare state and challenge its goals, if only out of sense of morality and a perception—at least on my part—that the policies pursued will be destructive to America, which unfortunately seems hellbent on a path of no return.
-UNZ
You can, through hard work, earn a mid-six-figure income and have multiple business ideas that you can develop.
But given the above examples, along with the myriad things I’ve watched big business do in the last 20 years and get away with all of them — acts that were I to do myself I would be prosecuted criminally and go to prison…
So why would I?
If I was to undertake any of those risky ventures and put my capital and intellectual effort at risk any of those people could illegally undermine my product or service, putting me out of business or simply steal it.
Now we know how and why Google and Amazon and Facebook got so big, so fast. They were the corporate arm of the surveillance state.
- From Vox Day at Vox Popoli
Unless I was willing to personally kill the persons responsible there is nothing I could do about it and I’d go broke.
I will not undertake such a venture for as long as all of this crap exists, and that’s why.
I instead choose to hike, ski, run, drink beer and enjoy a much lower stress lifestyle.
There are those of us who choose to live a more relaxed and simpler life. One without stress and fighting to be the “top dog” in the barnyard.
I do not need any of the trappings of wealth; they’re options.
When my time comes to die those ideas, products and services intentionally left undeveloped will die with me instead of being produced.
Intelligent people decide to “tune out” and not fight the system.
We have no rule of law.
The Christchurch shooter, obviously nuts, wrote a “manifesto” which governments are actively trying to suppress your ability to read.
In it he pointed out an inconvenient truth — that there is no nation with a material white population percentage in which white women are reproducing at a replacement or better rate.
That is, unless this changes white people will eventually go extinct.
Know your history. Read up on it.
We bemoan a little fish, frog or bird disappearing but there is literally not one word in the media about this. The most-productive and innovative differentiated group of human beings ever to walk the planet is heading directly for extinction by their own voluntary decision.
Why are white women choosing not to bear children?
Maybe it’s because a goodly number of them have come to the same conclusion I have.
That there is no rule of law.
Think about this cartoon. Think about what it means. How can this be permitted to happen if the Rule of Law were being followed?
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.
-Ayn Rand
Thus unless they’re so rich they can cheat (like those who did so to get their kids into college) their offspring have no chance of success on a merit basis.
And they thus make the entirely reasonable decision not to create children at all.
After all why would you willingly and intentionally bring a child into this world if you believe they are going to be enslaved and mercilessly robbed for their entire lives?
After all why would you willingly and intentionally bring a child into this world if you believe they are going to be enslaved and mercilessly robbed for their entire lives?
Rather than correct that problem governments instead are importing people who have not yet made that determination.
Or even worse, believe (and are explicitly promised) that they can simply put their hand out and force others to provide whatever they want and need.
And…
And thus those people make the entirely reasonable decision to breed like rabbits!
The socialist ideal eventually goes viral, and the majority learns to game the system.
Everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else.
In the terminal phase, the failure of the system is disguised under a mountain of lies, hollow promises, and debts. When the stream of other people's money runs out, the system collapses.
-Kevin Brekke
WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.
Think about this tweet. Think about what it means. How can this be permitted to happen if the Rule of Law were being followed?
WE
HAVE NO RULE OF LAW AND WE ARE GOING TO LITERALLY EXTINGUISH WHITE
PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WESTERN WORLD AS A RESULT. AS FURTHER POPULATION
SEGMENTS ARE TAPPED TO BE THE VICTIMS OF SAID POLICIES THEY WILL CHOOSE
NOT TO REPRODUCE AS WELL AND INEVITABLY THEY WILL ALSO GO EXTINCT, ONE AT A TIME.
Our government is depraved.
We have no rule of law.
Our government has turned into a tyrannical monster. It is obvious to everyone.
We have in fact become so depraved that our own government is giving cats diseases on purpose. The excuse is to study them, and even though those diseases are easily curable and the animals could then be adopted out that takes a bit of effort and more than a a nickel in cost so they kill them instead.
That would be bad enough but our government is also importing cats and dogs from nations around the world for the purpose of meat to feed said study subjects, practicing animal cannibalism.
We can’t be bothered to use byproducts of human food production; you see, that might cost a bit more money.
In twenty-five years, we went from arguing that it must be legal to burn the American flag to punishing someone who burns an LGBTP flag with fifteen years in prison.
- From Brett Stevens at Periscope
I’m not the only one who recognizes this; here’s another article pointing out many of the same things.
America is extended, riddled with debt and too reliant on ever more debt, past its growth peak, incapable and unwilling to address structural issues.
Both political parties have given up on dealing with debt, illusory monetary policies such as MMT are invented to render structural issues as irrelevant.
Meanwhile wealth inequality keeps expanding from administration to administration no matter who is in charge with voters distracted by the ideological divisions of the day, not trusting their leaders or each other.
And all this with 3.8% unemployment. What will this all look like during the next downturn?
Nobody knows. Rome showed us to not take civilization for granted. It also showed us to not ignore structural problems before they become too large to tackle.
Sven may be hopeful but I am not.
The writing is on the wall.
When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you … you may know that your society is doomed.
-Ayn Rand
I’m not alone either. Charles Hugh Smith has written a number of columns on this same point, including just recently.
I challenge you to show me just one “grand idea” or modern stock market rocketship that is not a scam in some form over the last 10+ years.
America today.
Netflix, as just one example, effectively stole their entire distribution infrastructure, which is very expensive, through various forms of browbeating and when that was threatened they got the government to mandate their ability to force non-customers to pay for what they wanted during the Obama Administration.
Then, when Obama left, both he and his wife got a multi-million dollar contract from the company.
No justice in America today.
You don’t really think that was the kickback payment to the former President since the stock went from ~$5 when Obama took office to nearly $400 now….
Martyanov blogs about the political class, including Donald Trump, on his blog Reminiscence of the Future…. But I gave him, if you pardon the expression, a homework assignment, a recent piece by Whitney Webb describing the powers behind Washington’s politicians, be they “Democrats” or “Republicans.”
It’s hard to determine where the real power in Washington and the City of London lies, that is to say who the actual rulers are, but the greater power is evidently held by the central bankers and billionaires, operating in a mob like fashion as Ms. Webb described, in fact actually working with mobsters.
-UNZ
None of them would exist were there an even-handed enforcement of the law for the simple reason that all of them violate the basic law of business balance:
The more people who touch a transaction the more it costs -- always.
The reason for that is simple: Nobody works for free.
If you think you’ve found someone who is someone else is stealing from them because no rational person will perform work that benefits only someone else.
No reason to change. The justice system is beyond repair.
We have no rule of law.
This can’t — and won’t — change without Americans rising up by the millions and demanding that it stop and be willing to enforce that demand by whatever means are necessary.
Soldiers and armed civilians occupy the office of ousted Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu in the capital Bucharest on Dec. 26, 1989, the day after he was executed.
This does not mean violence is required.
However, until and unless, those who claim to be “our leaders” believe that any such demand has the force of the people behind it (and will be enforced)…
… should they stick up their middle finger toward common people (once again) as they have done for the last 30+ years…
… they have no reason to stop stealing…
…no reason to stop rigging the system…
…and no reason to stop screwing everyone else.
There’s no reason for me to be hopeful.
This is what I would look like if I was a cat.
This is because there is no reason to believe that Americans, say much less the people in any of the other developed, Western nations will in fact demand this crap stop.
While we have been indoctrinated to believe that “democracy” is the favored and best way to govern nations, the spectacular failure of what America has become is obvious to the world to see. America, that great, and grand experiment is a complete and total failure.
Coming soon to a State near you.
You, and I, and our families will now need to ride out the collapse to it’s conclusion.
Yvonne, I don’t think many in Russia view the United States as a “fascist” power per se—it is indeed difficult to do so for a country so ethnically and culturally diverse as the United States.
This diversity precludes the United States to define itself completely as a nation in an ethno-cultural sense, nor does the political system of the United States allow for the emergence of a dictator, a key element of the fascist state.
For all his bluster today and accusations in being a sort of a dictator, President Trump is an extremely weak president, as is generally the office of POTUS.
The United States is a classic oligarchy wrapped in a vast state bureaucracy a/k/a the Deep State which is increasingly dysfunctional.
If it is a fascist state in any sense, it is a very sad in a comical sort of way fascist state, as the three-years long Russia and Ukrainegate “investigations” demonstrated. Russians, however do use widely the term of “liberal fascism” to underscore the totalitarian nature of the so called “liberal” ideology of which the United States, together with subservient Europe, are the main drivers.
As I repeat ad nauseam for years now, the Western in general and American in particular so-called elites are incompetent. I observed a precipitous decline in the professional, the intellectual and the ethical levels of these elites for over twenty years.
Now it has reached truly grotesque forms from pedophilia inside the ruling class, to the media being utterly corrupt and incompetent.
I can only repeat my point about the US having no mechanisms anymore for producing real statesmen.
Russians know this, they observe this everyday and in my fifty-seven years of life on many continents I cannot recall a time period when Russians had such contempt for and rejection of the so called “democratic values.”
This is simply unprecedented in Russian history.
- Andrei Martyanov
America tomorrow.
Conclusion
There is no rule of law in the United States. A two tiered justice system is NOT rule by law. It is rule by power. As such, the nation will soon collapse. As the Rule of Law is a fundamental aspect of a thriving and successful nation.
There is no rule of law in the United States. And there hasn’t been one for some time. When you have a two tiered justice system, then you have no justice when the country is founded on “equality”.
A Rule of Law is important to suppress evil, and to keep the government under control and the nation stable.
Now, everyone, from all quarters and all points of view are starting to come together. All from different perspectives and are arriving at the same conclusion.
r/K theory
Generational turnings.
The rise and fall of nations.
Kala Rhythms
I pretty much covered this subject here, in numerous posts.
When there isn’t any rule of law, the people in power start to act tyrannical and dictatorial. Fundamental to this behavior is the disarming of the population. As that is the last remaining resistance to them.
Failure to obey the Constitution is treasonous.
You can expect to see an acceleration of disarmament efforts all over the Western sphere of influence. With major efforts in the United States taking place irregardless of the consequences. The progressive Marxists do not believe that people will rise up and fight back.
They DO NOT believe that it will happen, or if it does, that they can effectively suppress the actions and spin the events in their favor.
You all can decide on how to handle the elements that are certain to transpire. Just be quick about it, why don’t you.
We don’t have any control over the coming storms- but what we do control is our own abilities and what we bring to the table.
- NC Scout at American Partisan
Some areas will be very “hot”, while others will escape unscathed.
Some areas will be very “hot”, while others will escape unscathed.
Plan ahead, and be smart about it. If you have any questions, check out this post…
If you enjoyed this post, then please check out the SHTF master index. You can access it here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This article discusses neocons and their manipulation of American politics for Geo-political advantage.
The problem with this is that the stakes are dangerously high. We are not talking about a small country with a few cities. We are talking about technologically advanced first-world nations with state of the art weapons and nuclear, biological, and germ warfare technology.
Further, most Americans are so dumbed down that they have no idea just how advanced China and Russia are. That robots, facial recognition, 5 and 6G systems, and high speed trains are the norm. And have been so for half a decade. America has fallen terribly behind, and our military as well trained and experienced as it is, is not a match for the kinds of swarm drone germ warfare that China and Russia possess.
It'll be very difficult to shoot your rifle while your eyes are foaming with blood and puss.
I did take the liberty to make editing changes. I edited the run-on sentences to make it easier to read. I also added images, and commentary in dialog boxes, and provided supporting links. The conclusions, photo narratives, and associated editing are my own.
Donald Trump is in a painful bind.
The China-bashing traitors within his own party trying to pass themselves off as American patriots have done everything imaginable to destroy the one chance the President has to save America from the policies of economic and social decay which have mis-shaped the past 50 years of world history.
Before breaking under the pressure to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act on November 27, Trump attempted desperately to push against the hard liners stating a day earlier:
“I stand with Hong Kong, but I also stand with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine, he’s an incredible guy. We have to stand, but I’d like to see them work it out, OK? We have to see them work it out. I stand for Hong Kong, I stand for freedom, I stand for all those things we want to do. But we are also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history.”
Of course, Trump’s desire to use protective tariffs, rebuild decayed infrastructure and industries while reversing the regime change wars abroad are good things.
They are very good things.
Risk of confrontation is high.
However, the ugly fact is that the Trans-Atlantic financial system is also set to crash, and a serious military confrontation between the US military and the Russia-China alliance is both very real and very dangerous.
This is also why the passage of the anti-Beijing Bill on November 27 is so tragic, since the desperately needed economic alliance which Trump has desired may have suffered a wound from which it cannot recover.
A serious military confrontation between the US military and the Russia-China alliance is both very real and very dangerous. It will NOT be America plinking away at a third world “shit hole”. It will instead, be nuclear, bio-weapons, germ weapons, and using the most modern technologies available to man ON AMERICAN soil.
Not only this, but those anti-China hawks pervasive across Washington are now emboldened to go even further starting with Sen. Ted Cruz’s new bill.
The use of pests and biological warfare is almost a given if World War 3 is to take place. With the advancement made by biotechnology in the 21st century, strains of viruses capable of eliminating the entire population of the rival country are a reality.
-Listsurge
America to interfere with Taiwan.
For it is a bill to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty, thus undoing the 1972 ‘One China’ agreement which established Beijing as the capital of China, and OPENLY threatening to drag mainland China into a nuclear confrontation.
I’ll say it again.
China has repeatedly stated that if you mess with Taiwan, you mess with China. It is one and the same.
If you mess with Texas, you mess with the USA. It's one and the same.
So any war, or provocation involving Taiwan, will involve China.
So, any war involving Texas, will involve the United States.
But this war or conflict or skirmish…
…will NOT be limited to China. But, will instead, include the American cities of Los Angles, Chicago, New York and many other enormous civilian population centers.
The basis of nuclear warfare in future was established when America dropped the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the end of 2nd World War. The rush to develop nuclear weapons by France, USA, Soviet Union and China following the 2nd World War resulted in the extremely tension ridden period known as Cold War.
It is theorized that a nuclear war will cause ten times more casualties than a military war. Some analysts suggest that the nuclear fog after a war will result in the entire humanity starving to death.
The political standoff between USA and China over Taiwan is thought to be a situation that could easily spin out of control if these two nuclear super powers do not behave rationally.
-Listsurge
Here’s Chicago…
Neocons believe, incorrectly, that nuclear warfare will never occur on American soil. That any war that they promote will be limited to the geographical areas that they define. They are wrong. Any war with either China or Russia will result in nuclear destruction of most of urban America.
Any large scale conflict today (or in the near future) will seriously affect America’s status as a global superpower. Whether America “wins” or “loses”, it will change, and the likelihood is that it will not change for the good.
The rise of USA as a superpower during the end of the Second World War and the disintegration of Soviet Union after the Cold War is proof of the rearrangement of powers at the end of major wars. It can be theorized that the Third World War will see the emergence of a new super power. Many think that China can be the superpower which changes the dynamics of the next war to come.
-Listsurge
Perhaps this is what Washington, D.C. might look like after a cluster of MIRV SLBM hyper-glide swarm nuclear missiles are launched.
Dancing with danger…
Cruz’s Taiwan Symbols of Sovereignty Actaims in Cruz’s words to “peel back some of the extreme insults of the Taiwanese that are inflicted by the One-China policy protocol”
including the banning of Taiwan officials from visiting US government
agencies, and Taiwan students studying at West Point military academy
from wearing the Taiwan flag.
Hum. Are "extreme insults" reason enough for your entire family to be bleeding out of their anus, and your home a smoking black radioactive waste?
Already, the US-military have vastly amplified their presence on China’s border ever since Obama’s “Pivot-to-Asia” and “Air-Sea Battle” were put into practice in 2011-2012. This presence heavily relies on a militarized anti-China force in Taiwan ready to do the US’s bidding.
Any one who is delusional to think that American soil will not be affected by these decisions should have their head examined.
This is not 1913. Wars can get radioactive "hot" within seconds.
Here’s San Francisco…
Neocons think nothing of getting involved in the affairs of other nations. Today, America is fighting eight simultaneous wars. They argue that a ninth war would be easy. That China for all it’s technology, is no match for the United States military and is willing to bet YOUR life and YOUR family’s lives on that belief.
Everyone seems to want a fight…
Many leading figures in Taiwan are stuck in a Cold War traumatized mindset established 60 years earlier, and still see their life’s mission and Taiwan’s destiny through the outdated lens of their Kuomintang forebears- as the only rightful leaders of China, destined to reconquer the mainland lost to the Communist Party in 1949.
The G series of nerve gases is so named due to their origin, with all of them originally discovered in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Their discovery was actually a complete accident; Gebhardt Schraeder, a German researcher, was investigating the potential use of organophosphates as pesticides in 1936 when he synthesised the first of the G series nerve gases, tabun. He also played a part in the discovery of sarin in 1938. The other member of the G series, soman and cyclosarin, were discovered during the course of research funded by the German army into the pharmacological action of tabun and sarin.
These groups would do anything to fulfill that quasi-religious sense of purpose. Thus making them the perfect puppets for the Deep State.
What the heck is America doing? Why is it so involved in far away places, blowing the shit out of buildings and leveling cities flat? Doesn’t anyone realize that sooner or later America will pick on the wrong nation.
Here’s Houston, Texas…
Nuclear weapons launched by Russia or China will be SLBM’s with MIRV multiple warheads many, many times larger than what was used in Japan during World War II. These SLBM MIRV’s are all hype-velocity weapons and the city would be obliterated within five minutes of launch. The doctrine calls for multiple warheads for city, thus guaranteeing complete and absolute devastation.
An ugly and overlooked example of this operation includes the renewed effort by China-basher Steve Bannon who Trump rightly booted from his team in August 2017.
Bannon has been a dangerous character attempting to coral Trump supporters in America and the European right into a new anti-Chinese united front. He is doing this while reviving the neo-con “clash of civilizations” doctrine with a vengeance.
Steve Bannon.
One of the main conduits Bannon chose to unleash this assault was the Committee on Present Danger-China. This is an organization which he founded alongside a group of raging neocons in March 2019.
Labeling China’s Belt and Road as a new empire threatening to undo America and enslave the world, Bannon’s think tank stated:
“As with the Soviet Union in the past, communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom – one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat.”
He just doesn’t get it.
This could be Thanksgiving day, two years after the United States is struck with a nuclear salvo of AI robotic nuclear swarm missiles in hyper-velocity glide platforms.
China doesn’t give a rat’s ass about America. Anyone who attacks it will be glowing nuclear rainbows for the next two hundred years.
Here’s Boston…
The neocons, such as Bannon, do not believe that the nuclear on/off switch will ever be depressed. They believe that a conflict with China will be a conventional affair. With American Naval forces firing curse missiles at leisure, and launching drones at will to an unarmed, and America-leaning China.
Bannon has also found himself working ever more tightly with the anti-Beijing CIA-funded cult Falun Gong. This radical group has been banned from China since 1999. It is readily and consistently used by the CIA as a propaganda weapon against China.
In these propaganda attacks they routinely claim anecdotal evidence of Beijing-sponsored organ harvesting and killing of religious minorities. Though pushing itself as a meditation group, its leader Li Hongzhi is based in the USA. He promotes the idea that he has magical powers that keep the forces of evil from destroying the world.
Bannon most recently produced the Falun Gong-funded film “Claws of the Red Dragon”. This kind of action put him into the same boat as his left-handed mirror image George Soros who also supports the Falun Gong. He does so through Open Society Foundation’s Freedom House.
Of course, Soros wants World War III on American soil. He said so many, many times in public.
Here’s New York City…
The rest of the world “does not play”. Expect any toying around with the internal affairs of a major superpower will result in nuclear detonations up and down the American coastline.
The contradiction arising from this alliance of pro-Trump sociopaths working with anti-Trump sociopaths only makes sense when you look at the anti-human game from the top down rather than the bottom up.
It is here, that we start getting a fuller picture of the nature of the false ‘left vs right’ game being played. We look at a City of London-based think tank which Bannon leads. It is called the Dignitas Humanitae Institute. And it operates alongside 5 other highly connected figures which were recently exposed in a powerful expose . This expose by journalist Stan Ezrol described Bannon’s four other co-patrons of this Catholic group as…
“Archduke Otto Von Habsburg, successor to the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor when it was dissolved; His Royal Highness Charles of Bourbon Two Sicilies and Duke of Castro, a leading figure in the anti-Renaissance wing of European nobility; Field Marshal the Lord Guthrie GCB (Knight of the Grand Cross), LVO (Lieutenant of the Victorian Order), OBE (Order of the British Empire); and Father Matthew Festing.”
The forces managing this international battle are desperately afraid of the fact that western and eastern renaissance traditions may be awakened in the face of the existential crisis facing the human species today.
These groups are very much aware that the essential character of any society fit to survive is rooted on certain moral principles that are found in both Christian and Confucian cultures alike, making the USA and China potentially very strong and organic allies.
When one reads the writings of such founding fathers of either great nation as Dr. Benjamin Franklin or Dr. Sun Yatsen, the common moral worldview and sense of human nature as a species made in the image of the creator endowed with inalienable rights is electric.
Both Dr. Benjamin Franklin (USA) and Dr. Sun Yatsen (China) believed that governments are made by man to serve under Rights given by the divine creator.
This is a concept which Hong Kong rioters, Taiwan militarists, Open Society ideologues and right wing Bannonites know nothing about.
George Soros, through his Open Society network, is actively pushing for the United States to be involved in wars domestically and globally. He intends to destroy America completely and that is why he is funding and supporting Neocon efforts to entangle the United States into global warfare with nuclear armed nations.
Today, Xi Jinping and President Putin exemplify this common outlook wonderfully. As their alliance has transformed the international rules of the game on every level. If Trump wasn’t constrained by such bigoted agents as Cruz, Bannon or the rabid hive of leftist hacks frothing at the mouth for impeachment, then the USA would make an organic ally in this new multi-polar alliance.
If not, it will be China and Russia that will align, and the USA will be on it’s own.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is issuing a warning, one Americans need to pay attention to before US politicians take us past the point of no return, if they haven't done so already.
While the media in Russia is "state-run," meaning that one never knows how much is true or how much is propaganda, the flip side of that particular coin is that nothing goes out over it without the express permission, or instigation of Russian leadership, so it is clear that when their articles are written or news spoken, it is exactly what Putin wants the world to know.
With that said, the very first paragraph of Russia Today's editorial titled "America tuned out as Congress bangs war drum against Russia," which states that US House resolution 758 has "brought the nation one step closer to all-out-war with Russia," is a dire warning directly from Russia to the populace of the United States.
Future historians - that is, assuming there are humans still around to contemplate history - may one day point to House Resolution 758 as the single piece of legislation that sparked a global conflagration between two leading nuclear powers.
The article also goes on to take a look at House resolution 758, breaking it down, giving a birds-eye view of how Russian leadership views these actions on the part of the US Congress and it appears that things are about to get much uglier.
Read the whole article over at RT.
We need to take a fucking serious look at who we are picking fights with. Not everyone will stand by, bend over, and allow them to get fucked over.
Here’s Washington, D.C…
Nothing can quite ruin your day like global thermonuclear war can.
Conclusion
Both sides of the political spectrum (in the United States) are pushing President Trump towards war. It feeds the neocon agenda. It provides a great distraction of the public from domestic malfeasance, and allows the wealthy oligarchy to loot and profit from “American nation rebuilding efforts”.
Only this time, the stakes are higher and the nations selected will fight back.
They will fight back on American soil.
You know, it might be all Gung-Ho to say “Bring it on!”, the fact is no one wants to see America turned into a radioactive wasteland. But, that is exactly what will happen unless these neocons are corralled up and subdued.
I’m just a lone voice in the wilderness. But please listen to what I have to say. I am begging. I am pleading with you all.
400 kilometers northeast of Bombay there is a circular 2,154-metre-diameter crater, the Lonar crater. It has been dated at less than 50,000 years old, and could conceivably be related to a nuclear attack or mishap of antiquity.
No traces of any expected meteoric material has ever been found in the vicinity, and this is the world's only known "impact" crater in solid basalt. Indications of a tremendous shock exceeding 600,000 atmospheres combined with intense, sudden heat has been determined.
In Rajasthan, India ten miles west of Jodhpur -there is a heavy layer of radioactive ash ,it covers about three-square miles. Scientists investigated the site. It has been noted that has always been a very high rate of birth defects and cancer in the area. The levels of radiation there registered so high on investigators' gauges that the Indian government cordoned off the region.
- Nuclear Warfare in Ancient India
Nuclear war would send America back to the stone age. It might never recover.
If you enjoyed this article, take heart that more articles of a similar nature can be found here:
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This article discusses the current preparations for war on going in the state of Virginia. This is a war between conservative patriots, and progressive Marxists. It’s a war between then the urban cities and the rural areas. In many ways, it is shaping up to resemble the Bosnia civil war in general scope with elements of the Rwandan genocide being planned for in the urban areas.
It is my sincere hope that things can be diffused shortly. However, the build up of tensions is proceeding unabated, and it appears to be intentional.
America today. We are at a point of no return.
First, the sides
The sides have already been established early on. One one side you have the conservative, traditional patriots. They reside in the predominantly rural areas and typically vote Republican and voted Trump into office. They fiercely defend free speech, free association, and the right to bear arms. They are very, very tired of progressive Marxism being rammed down their collective throats, and it appears their angst has reached a breaking point.
They follow and believe in the Constitution, both State and Federal, as written.
“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”
—Thomas Paine
Advertisement catering to the American patriot.
On the other side you have the progressive socialist Marxists. They voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. They have been funded from enormous cash donations out of state, and even out of country. They have big business, and big government, and big landholders and the big oligarchy on their side. They pretty much reside in the urban areas and the richest and wealthiest counties.
The progressive activists come in different shapes, sizes and an amazing array of names. They go from democrat socialists, to communists, to liberals, to progressives, to social activists. They have armed groups that range from the Black Panthers, to the BLM and the Antifa. They all believe in replacing the United States Constitution with a more malleable document where they can control everything.
The break down between these two groups can easily be illustrated on the 2016 election map, by country, for Virginia in 2016.
The break down between these two groups can easily be illustrated on the 2016 election map, by country, for Virginia in 2016.
Second, the violations of Rights
Expert Tip – Never hand in your weapons to the government.
Well, after intense funding from outside the state, and a lack of interest in the Republican “wishy-washy” candidates, the progressive socialist democrat Marxists took control of all the levers of power in Virginia.
This newly elected democrat majority wants to ban the majority of firearms in the state. They want to ban everything about firearms. They want to ban ownership, transport, training and even mentioning having a gun.
The German genocidal events are well known to most Americans over the age of 40. Not so well known to the younger generations. The Nazi Germans "purged" the German society of "undesirables" which included just about EVERYONE except the "chosen" Arian race.
Hitler gun ban meme.
As such the newly elected socialist / Marxist democrats wasted no time “rubber stamping” pre-written anti-gun legislation…
Four
years after the government passed the anti-gun ownership legislation,
the Christians were all collected and rounded up by armed militia,
soldiers and local police forces. They were collected in the schools,
town centers, and formed into groups. Then they were either killed
outright, or sent on death marches into the hot barren desert.
They want people to turn in their weapons, New Zealand style, and barring that go house to house to search and confiscate the weapons. Those that do not comply will be arrested and given felony convictions.
It’s a scene right out of the 1984 movie “Red Dawn”.
FEMA camp scene from the 1984 movie “Red Dawn”. Where people were rounded up because of their association with weapons. Here, Harry Dean Stanton gave the legendary line, “AVENGE ME!”
Why this is contentious.
The political “talking points” is that all this is “common sense gun control”.
However, the real reason is to wrest control of the United States from the people. This is a long-duration effort that has been on-going for over a century, and now the only thing standing in the way of this takeover are clusters of armed citizens.
The idea is to disarm the citizens and begin the standard socialist takeover of the nation. Already, [1] the socialist Marxists have gained control of almost every government institution, and has molded it in their image. They have also [2] taken over many of the largest private institutions as well. In addition, they have also [3] been funding and arming socialist Marxist agitators.
Everything is falling into place.
Antifa receiving weapons, logistics and strategy training under the CIA alongside the ISS fighters in Syria.
For those of you that don’t know what this means, I’ll tell you. It means complete and utter genocide of the opposition.
It’s “common sense” genocide.
Like this… (Opens up in a different tab.)
In case you, the reader, think that I am exaggerating, read up on this subject. I have a six part study of this, and it is very important to read. The first post will take you into the series. Click on the link below, and it will open up in a different browser tab.
Oh, and don’t think that you will be able to sit this one out…
Ahhh, but don’t listen to me. Listen and get a second opinion, like this…
Gun Control “wet dreams”. Here is a second opinion on this subject.
Our protections…
Aside from a direct violation of the second Amendment in the Bill of RIGHTS…
Right to Bear Arms
Passed by Congress September 25, 1789. Ratified December 15, 1791. The first 10 amendments form the Bill of Rights
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It is also a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of RIGHTS. For these laws talk about going house to house, searching for firearms and seizing them, and arresting the people in the house for good measure.
Search and Seizure
Passed by Congress September 25, 1789. Ratified December 15, 1791. The first 10 amendments form the Bill of Rights
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Another opinion…
There isn’t any “due process” in any of these Democrat actions on gun control.
To these people, it’s as if the Bill of Rights does not exist, and that elected officials can make what ever rules and laws they want, selectively enforce them and the people; the citizens have absolutely zero say in the matter.
The American Bill of Rights does not exist if the government does not protect it.
This subject is also covered here (opens up in a separate tab.)…
Tazewell County has formed an official active militia.
Tazewell County has formed an official active militia as per the Second Amendment to the Constitution. This is in response to the actions of Virginia lawmakers that (immediately upon election) passed a very draconian gun control bill. A bill that is in violation of both the Federal and the Virginia Bill of Rights.
Tazewell County has formed an official active militia as per the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
The foundation and the authority for Tazewell County to take this action is the Constitution itself;
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
"To all of those who like to mock gun owners and ask if they’re going to fight tyranny in a militia, Virginia’s answer is a clear and adamant “yes.” That’s exactly what they’re planning to do."
Background
Daisy Luther has been tracking this issue aggressively on her website The Organic Prepper. I can find no source finer and better researched than hers on this issue…
After the most recent election, the state’s House and Senate are both Democrat majorities and they haven’t wasted a moment in attempting to gut the gun laws in what has historically been a permissive state.
The so-called “assault weapon ban” is SB16 and has that perilously vague wording we all know to be incredibly dangerous. In some interpretations, this law, if it passes, could make illegal the ownership or transportation of any semi-automatic gun because extendable magazines are available for it – and you don’t even have to have the extendable mags. (source)
I personally do not know if the progressive Marxist democrats in the United States realize that they are going to experience some “push back”, or if the “triggers” are intentional to start open warfare. I just don’t know.
Maybe they just think we are all stupid, dumb hicks that will obey what ever they tell us because we are not as bright and enlightened as they.
The Reaction
In a series of rapidly changing developments, Virginia is undergoing wholesale rebellion by rural and even suburban counties, rejecting the oppressive gun control agenda recently revealed by the new incoming Democrat-controlled legislature.
Gun owners all across Old Dominion have been up in arms since anti-gun forces took the House and Senate in the recent election and are now preparing to resist having their arms taken from them in any way possible.
-Gun Rights Watch
That’s pretty much it.
You can chip away at every Right in the book , but when you start taking away the 2nd amendment… the very last roadblock to mass slaughter, genocide and tyranny, patriots will put their foot down.
And they have.
Counties across the state quickly organized into Second Amendment sanctuaries.
The speed at which they reacted is a testament to how furious they are that their state government now wishes to infringe on their rights.
An even dozen counties have passed gun owner sanctuary resolutions already, with new ones coming on a near-daily basis.
-Gun Rights Watch
The idea behind this is that the counties, as Second Amendment sanctuaries, would disregard any law that violates either the Federal or State Rights protecting firearm ownership, use and training.
The county-level defensive tactic that began originally in Oregon close to a decade ago, then popularized in Illinois, has spread to over a dozen states. It comes as no surprise that with few other options and little to lose, many communities in the state are vowing not to take part in any gun confiscation schemes or enforcement of unconstitutional laws designed to make private citizens less able to defend themselves.
Now, compare this map to the 2016 election map at the first part of this post. Obviously the battle lines are forming and the progressive tyrannical democrat Marxists want to disarm all traditional conservatives.
Then they have other things that they intend to do. It’s the historical norm. Don’t you know.
Other things…
South Africa. Once the socialist Marxists gain control, they purge all opposition by using military armed police. Do you think that those dead bodies on the ground had firearms? Do you think that they were trained in how to shoot, and oppose the ruling Marxists in power? This is what a Marxist progressive socialist utopia looks like. It is South Africa today. The disarmed people are turning over their farms, vehicles, and property for an increasingly hungry Marxist government.
The Reaction from the Tyrannical Marxists…
This reaction of taking proactive steps, as opposed to the nearly uniform sheep-like behavior of the past few centuries took the Marxists by surprise. Their reaction was totalitarian.
What?!?!
The sheep (serf-slaves) won't obey us? Well, that just won't go. Jeeves, please fetch me my jewel-encrusted phone. Yes. Now, quickly, don't you know, my masseuse is due in five minutes...
George. George Soros, please. Yes.
What should we do? The plantation is in open rebellion. What would you advise?
Oh, yes. That's right.
Kill the fuckers. Show them who's boss...
State Representative Donald MacEachin (D) was the first to suggest calling up the National Guard to squelch the rebellion…
McEachin also noted that Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam could call the National Guard, if necessary.
“And ultimately, I’m not the governor, but the governor may have to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the law,” he said. “That’s his call, because I don’t know how serious these counties are and how severe the violations of law will be. But that’s obviously an option he has.” (source)
This reaction was historical.
Which is to say, it follows the model of a tyrannical takeover predictably and unequivocally. It’s historical and follows the same tried and true application of seize, suppress, repress and implement tyranny.
There is no fucking way that Americans are going to allow the government to take away their rights, and implement genocide on them and their families.
There is no fucking way that Americans are going to allow the government to take away their rights, and implement genocide on them and their families.
No. Fucking. Way.
The progressive Marxists are delusional to believe that it will ever happen without a fight.
So they began to contemplate calling in the military to disarm, arrest, and subjugate the citizens of Virginia.
Adolf Hitler addressing his military telling them that they need to round up Jews, and undesirables, disarm them all for the good of the nation.
The National Guard’s Response
Maj. Gen. Timothy P. Williams, the Adjutant General of Virginia’s National Guard responded rather vaguely via Twitter.
We have received multiple questions regarding proposed legislation for the 2020 General Assembly session and the authority of the Governor of Virginia to employ the Virginia National Guard in a law enforcement role.
We understand and respect the passion people feel for the U.S. Constitution and 2nd Amendment rights. We will not speculate about the possible use of the Virginia National Guard.
— Va. National Guard (@VaNationalGuard) December 13, 2019
The responses in the Twitter thread were very interesting and suggest a firestorm is brewing…
A militia is forming in Virginia
Tazewell County, a county on the mountainous West Virginia border, is taking this threat to the Rights of citizens very seriously. In their minds, the government has completely failed them that that the time has long past for passive acceptance of tyranny. They believe that they need to take strong, unequivocal, and proactive measures to assure that their Rights will remain intact and in place.
The militia is constantly made fun of by the mainstream American media, however there is nothing wrong with demanding that people obey the Constitution. When the government stops following it, and then starts to break every single law in the book, true patriots will not allow it to pass. They will fight back and wrest control back to them.
So, not only did they pass a Second Amendment Sanctuary resolution, but they’ve also officially begun to form an armed, and active militia.
Just this past Tuesday, on December 10th, the Board of Supervisors from Tazewell County passed two different resolutions in light of controversy circling those who are pro-gun.
The first resolution declared the county to be a second amendment sanctuary. This is not at all surprising to see, as 76 out of 95 counties, 9 out of 38 independent cities, and 13 towns have adopted second amendment sanctuary resolutions.
The second item on the agenda was the proposition of establishing a militia in the county. When both of the resolutions passed, the crowd cheered loudly in support of the decisions.
Also, the resolutions didn’t exactly pass by a small margin; the votes were unanimous, with more than 200 citizens standing by in support.
-Law Enforcement Today (source)
County Administrator Eric Young explained why the county has opted to form a militia.
“Our position is that Article I, Section 13, of the Constitution of Virginia reserves the right to ‘order’ militia to the localities.
Therefore, counties, not the state, determine what types of arms may be carried in their territory and by whom. So, we are ‘ordering’ the militia by making sure everyone can own a weapon.”
Thus, if anyone from the state (government) tries to remove the Sheriff from their elected office because they refuse to enforce unjust laws, those state officials will be faced with a lawful militia composed of citizens within the state.
- Tazewell County Administrator Eric Young (source)
Arming up and readying for battle
This article explains the extensive training being offered by Tazewell County to its citizens. This is being done in order to make sure everyone is acting safely and responsibly.
“Coincidentally,” there’s an anti-paramilitary bill on the table.
It’s probably no coincidence that at the same time militias are forming, there’s also a bill to make them illegal. The anti-paramilitary bill SB64 has thrown kerosene on an already brilliant inferno.
This bill, once it becomes law, will make learning how to shoot a weapon a felony. It will be equal to that of rape of a child, or selling hard drugs to infants.
The future of anyone who has any association with guns, gun organizations, shooting, shooting clubs, or hunting. This is a scene from the Bosnia conflict. Take note that all these rounded up men, every single one in this picture, was killed and found buried in a mass grave five years later.
Obviously, the radical progressive Marxists want a conflict. They do so, obviously in the belief, that they will persevere and win this conflict.
Here’s some of the text of that bill.
§ 18.2-433.2. Paramilitary activity prohibited; penalty.A person shall be is guilty of unlawful paramilitary activity, punishable as a Class 5 felony if he:
1. Teaches or demonstrates to any other person the use, application, or making of any firearm, explosive, or incendiary device, or technique capable of causing injury or death to persons, knowing or having reason to know or intending that such training will be employed for use in, or in furtherance of, a civil disorder; or
2. Assembles with one or more persons for the purpose of training with, practicing with, or being instructed in the use of any firearm, explosive, or incendiary device, or technique capable of causing injury or death to persons, intending to employ such training for use in, or in furtherance of, a civil disorder; or3. Assembles with one or more persons with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons by drilling, parading, or marching with any firearm, any explosive or incendiary device, or any components or combination thereof.
-(source)
Obviously, this is not a coincidence.
They predicted how rural Virginians would respond to their gun-grabbing actions. Their plan all along was to confiscate guns and turn any organized resistance into a felony.
The “fall back” position is to “register the guns” instead of an outright seizure. But that is just buying time. The truth is that history tells us that ALL registration of weapons WILL result in collection efforts, followed by the obligatory genocide of the disarmed. Gun registration is the “Albanian method” of genocide.
The Virginia Legislators are committing treason.
There could hardly be anything more unconstitutional than SB64. When you violate the Constitution you commit treason.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
They are violating their oath.
This is the pledge these legislators swore:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as ………. according to the best of my ability, (so help me God).”
-(source)
Every person in the government who has sworn this oath yet supports these unconstitutional bills should be immediately recalled as well as tried criminally. This is long overdue, and because of this lack of policing of the elected officials, we have found ourselves within this mess.
When the government stops policing the very structure of the national Constitution, the door opens wide for the usurpation by people with evil intent.
This strategy was orchestrated by someone with a lot of money and power.
Daisy Luther framed this situation quite presciently. She said…
This is something that has been thought through, perhaps even by gun control advocate and presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. The reason I’m suggesting Bloomberg specifically is that his PAC donated millions and millions of dollars to turn the legislatures of 24 states to a Democrat majority.
His millions worked in 21 of those cases, and Virginia is one of them. Packing the state legislatures with allies would help his agenda should he actually become the next president. Records filed so far show that organizations controlled and funded by Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $41 million on 24 House races, much of it on eye-catching ads rolled out on social media and broadcast on television in the crucial final days of the campaign.
And while it’s impossible to conclude that any one factor tipped the balance in a race, Mr. Bloomberg appears to have reaped the benefits of his millions in giving.
Democrats won 21 of the 24 races he sought to influence. Of those, 12 had been considered either tossups or in Republican districts. “The mission was to flip the House. Success or failure would be defined by that,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. (source)
Bloomberg is rabidly anti-gun and has said that ending “the nationwide madness of U.S. gun violence” is the impetus behind his run for the White House. If he were to be elected, may God help America, because he will destroy everything for which our nation has ever stood.
Here’s the summary on what’s happening in Virginia
It’s funny because it is so very true. Girls and guns. So very funny.
Let’s look at all these facts together.
With Michael Bloomberg’s help, the Democrats took over the Virginia state congress.
There’s an anti-paramilitary bill that would disallow armed people
to gather or teach others how to use firearms or any technique that
could cause injury or death.
There’s a bill that would make semi-automatic weapons illegal.
Nearly the entire state (aside from the highly populated areas that
elected these yahoos) has balked and formed Second Amendment
sanctuaries.
A legislator threatened the sanctuaries with the National Guard.
The sanctuaries responded by activating an organized militia.
The only real way to prevent bloodshed and save face for the congress and governor is for these bills not to pass.
What happens when only the government has guns.
That would be difficult, though, given the fact that Bloomberg dumped
millions of dollars into getting people elected who promised to pass
strict gun control bills. If they suddenly vote against the bill, they
will have to face their angry constituents and the wrath of Bloomberg.
Rural Virginians seem unlikely to back down and are willing to fight.
They have another month to get organized to defend their communities.
Remember that in situations such as these, the rumor mill works overtime. There are a lot of reports that are exaggerated.
The truth is bad enough that we don’t need to add far-fetched theories to the mix.
History is terrible enough and crazy enough that all you need to do is read the “lessons learned” from the handful of survivors of Socialist / Marxist genocides.
This article is a very good, common-sense breakdown of fact vs. fiction, although some vehemently disagree with the assessment that the government will not turn off communications and power for the sanctuary areas.
It’s certainly not impossible to imagine that drastic measures could be taken.
Very Puzzling.
What will happen next remains to be seen, but it is no exaggeration to say that the future of our country is now riding on the response of Virginians, should these unconstitutional laws pass.
Conclusion
These articles will either pass or not.
If they pass, there will be “push back” from the conservative patriots against the Marxist democrats.
If they do not pass, then there will be a short (perhaps two to three years) while the progressive Marxists regroup and rethink a strategy that will enable them to attain their goals to their benefit.
And that is the way it is.
This is when the bullet meets the bone.
Thus, the first volley into CWII and SHTF is in progress. Make sure that you have achieved all your prepper goals, mapped out strategies and have back-up plans in the event that things do not go in your favor.
There
is a direct link between gun collection and genocide. It is the
historical norm. However, most people are ignorant of history, and
others don’t care. They openly want genocide… against their neighbors.
They never think that it could be used against them.
Best of luck, and God’s grace.
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Here we look at the protests in Hong Kong and who is funding and training them. For they are using sophisticated urban combat techniques, as well as creating very sophisticated bombs, and handmade weapons. Obviously, some agent wants this group to cause damage and trouble in Hong Kong.
Who are they, and who funds them?
I pretty much sat down and wrote most of this after reading the onslaught of negative news reporting out of the USA after the Senate passed an anti-China resolution regarding HK and American businesses operating inside of China.
U.S. Senate Passes Hong Kong Democracy Bill, Drawing …
I don't like lies and characterizations in general, but this affects me personally, and it thus pisses me off.
To quote Q;
Control of narrative = control of public opinion
Control of public opinion = power
How do you control the narrative?
Information warfare.
Q
Well for starters, for the most part, the most radical instigators are not Hong Kong citizens. The instigators are NOT the “figureheads”, they are educated agitators, with knowledge in urban warfare, and close combat strategies.
Those “leaders”, “trainers” and “agitators” that have been captured by police are neither students, nor (in most cases) Hong Kong residents. While the vast bulk of the protestors are indeed, HK residents, their leadership is not.
What’s going on?
The demonstrations in Hong Kong, now an open confrontation with the People’s Republic of China, have a global impact. So, as such, what are the forces behind this movement? Who provides the funds and who stands to benefit?
Who?
Protests in Hong Kong routinely carry the US flag and photos of Donald Trump.
The increasingly violent demonstrations in Hong Kong are completely embraced and enthusiastically supported by the United States government, including Donald Trump, the US Congress and the Senate. The American news media is having a near feeding frenzy over all this news, and the U.S. corporate media is eating it all up.
This should be a danger sign to everyone fighting for change and for social progress. U.S. imperialism is never disinterested or neutral. It’s always for a objective.
The protesters now use the same violent methods that were used in the Maidan protests in the Ukraine. The U.S. seems to hope that China will intervene and create a second Tianamen scene.
That U.S. color revolution attempt failed but was an excellent instrument to demonize China.
A repeat in Hong Kong would allow the U.S. to declare a "clash of civilization" and increase 'western' hostility against China. But while China is prepared to intervene it is unlikely to do the U.S. that favor. Its government expressed confidence that the local authorities will be able to handle the issue.
-Moon Over Alabama
That objective is almost always to institute a “puppet government” taking the form of a dictatorship under the disguise of “fighting for democracy”. It’s a model that has worked for many decades, and should be so well known by now to everyone…
The Vietnam war was for democracy.
The Kuwait war was for democracy.
The Iraq war was for democracy.
The Grenada war was for democracy.
The Panama war was for democracy.
The Libyan war was for democracy.
The Yemen war was for democracy.
Now, the war drums are for what? Democracy?
A war in Hong Kong for democracy…
Only this time it isn’t against a long tiny third-world back-water nation. It will not be Libya, Yemen, Syria, or Grenada. This would be a war against China, on Chinese soil.
And China will fight back…
…in a nuclear fashion.
Why does China want Hong Kong?
Well, Hong Kong was always a part of China. The English seized the city during the Opium Wars, as part of a treaty that put an end to one of the steps of English aggression against China. Even then, the English only got a 99 year lease. That expired towards the end of the 20th century.
China was of course happy to see a part of their country that had been stolen by the English returned to them.
Can't really think of an example where the USA has had a portion of its nation stolen from them, but it isn't hard to imagine that they'd want it back. They were certainly willing to kill a lot of people just to get back a part of America that seceded and tried to tell the Yankees that they weren't all that into them anyways.
-Posted by: Who Dat | Aug 14 2019 15:51 utc | MOA
And make no mistake about it, parsing the details to confuse Americans will not work on the global audience. You would be dealing against a nuclear-armed global super-power. How do you seriously think it’s going to pan out? Are you willing to engage in nuclear war with Russia and China simultaneously? Because, that’s what’s going to happen…
And make no mistake about this either, China (even if alone) is no slouch in the ICBM, MIRV nuclear arena. They would “kick some ass” and have enough left over…
For decades, the United States has taken China’s ballistic missile capability for granted, assessing it as a low-capability force with limited regional impact and virtually no strategic value. But on October 1, during a massive military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing put the U.S., and the world, on notice that this assessment was no longer valid.
In one fell swoop, China may have nullified America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. missile defense capability. Through its impressive display of new weapons systems, China has underscored the reality that while the United States has spent the last two decades squandering trillions of dollars fighting insurgents in the Middle East, Beijing was singularly focused on overcoming American military superiority in the Pacific. If the capabilities of these new weapons are taken at face value, China will have succeeded on this front.
Nothing is what it appears. It’s all manipulations and lies to mask the true purposes.
Those that want confrontation with Beijing are delusional, and you are, in a few short years, going to pay the price of their idiocy.
The official statement of the Chinese Embassy in the Russian Federation regarding the events in Hong Kong (in Russian).
The words at the end of the statement are very revealing, given the recent intentional provocations and riots of a bunch of marginals (aka "Russian liberal opposition") in Moscow:
A comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction have been established between China and the Russian Federation in a new era. Both countries have been unjustly charged for their level of freedom, democracy, and human rights. We are confident that we will meet the same attitude among the general public of the Russian Federation on the issues of Xiangang. We are confident in the understanding by the Russians of the determination and perseverance of China in protecting state prestige and sovereignty.
- Posted by: alaff | Aug 14 2019 16:23 utc | MoA
Manipulation in Hong Kong
One of the most significant examples of US aggression against China is the instigation of a color protest or color revolution in Hong Kong. The aim is to provoke China into reacting harshly and violently, which would reinforce the Western perception that China is heavy-handed, tyrannical and totalitarian. China has already moved troops to its southern mainland border, just across the water from Hong Kong. It is possible that another US objective is to push the protestors into declaring Hong Kong independent of China. There are some who say the Hong Kong protests are a grassroots affair. There is usually a grassroots element to many of these protests, but almost always the bigger factor in the shadows is US interference (or US-UK, or US-UK-Israeli, interference). Here is a very telling comment about the Hong Kong protests found under the article Violent Protests In Hong Kong Reach Their Last Stage on the MoonOfAlabama.org website.“The Extradition Law revision that started this was only a convenient proxy for those wanting chaos in HK to create chaos. The instigators behind the initial protest march are the same ones who started Occupy Central five years ago. They are the ones who huddle with operatives from US/UK Consulates, who travelled to the Washington/London/Brussel/Taipei, etc. to see politicians and plot strategies, to arrange for funding, and to recruit dare devils for the carnage. Lucky for them that HK was ripe for such shenanigans because HKers in general are sullen over their loss of superiority complex against mainland Chinese, brainwashed subconsciously through schools and churches about CCP wickedness, and desperately stressed under HK’s economic realities. Most of the protesters don’t even know what the Extradition Law is all about …”“The instigators, however, are well versed in all the intricacies. They know who they can easily recruit and order to do violence … they know the fifth column within the government and business … If large casualties result what do they care? … [T]hey know their foreign backers are only too glad to see Chinese killing Chinese …”“By the way, the US Consulate in HK has over 1,000 on payroll (an estimated 200 CIA agents), UK’s is over 500 (among them MI6 agents). That size of consulate in a city of less than 400 sq. miles of land (over half of which mountainous) is a laughable anomaly, wouldn’t you think? What are they all there for?”
-The Freedom Articles
The disruptive actions involve helmeted and masked protesters using gasoline bombs, flaming bricks, arson and steel bars, random attacks on buses, and airport and mass transit shutdowns.
HK protestors are set on burning down the entire city.
Among the most provocative acts was an organized break-in at the Hong Kong legislature where “activists” vandalized the building and hung the British Union Jack flag. As well as burning down a university campus.
U.S., British and Hong Kong’s colonial flags are prominent in these
confrontations, along with defaced flags and other symbols of People’s
China.
A man inspects a Bestmart store which was vandalised during Sunday’s anti-government protest in Hong Kong, China, October 21, 2019. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
The New York Times described the airport shutdown:
“The protests at the airport have been deeply tactical, as the largely leaderless movement strikes at a vital economic artery. Hong Kong International Airport, which opened in 1998, the year after China reclaimed the territory from Britain, serves as a gateway to the rest of Asia. Sleek and well run, the airport accommodates nearly 75 million passengers a year and handles more than 5.1 million metric tons of cargo.” (Aug. 14)
U.S. media have consistently labeled these violent actions “pro-democracy.”
But are they?
HK protestors are set on burning down the entire city.
Even if the leaders of these reactionary actions decide to pull back from the brink and re-calibrate their tactics, there is pause for concern. For based on the Chinese government’s unequivocally strong warnings, it is important to understand a movement that has such strong U.S. support.
The protestors want “freedom”
This is a rally cry that evokes strong emotions with Americans.
Though it shouldn’t. Most Americans haven’t tasted freedom for at least one hundred years, and have no concept of what it actually is.
The cognitive dissonance has been overwhelming these past months. "Pro-democracy protesters" who use black bloc tactics of arson and vandalism. "Students yearning for freedom" who organize Molotov cocktail factories. Complaints of excessive "police brutality" when by objective international standards the police were remarkably constrained.
"Hong Kong is a repressive police state" says Joshua Wong, and yet it is consistently near the top of the list in the Cato Institute world freedom index.
The protesters are "fighting for democracy" even though Hong Kong is democratic, and demand a "universal suffrage" that in practice very few jurisdictions, least of all their beloved US/UK, enjoy.
Add a dollop of uninformed virtue-signalling from the usual clueless western cheerleaders, and it has been a festival of delusion which somehow ends with the image of a petrol-bomb-wielding black bloc protester as the new face of "freedom" (as seen on twitter).
-Posted by: jayc | Nov 22 2019 21:14 utc | 19
People, freedom is being able to drink booze, and smoke, and plop your dog Fido next to you in a public restaurant. It means that you can ride in a car without a seat-belt, drink large size coke’s and have sunny-side up eggs whenever you want. It means that you can hunt and fish without a permit, and buy most medicines without a prescription.
America had freedoms, but when FDR and Wilson removed the SCOUS defense of the ninth amendment, American became a nice, safe, gulag.
Today, most Americans can only have small brief glimpses on what freedom used to be like…
The Fitzgeralds arrived in New York in the early autumn of 1922—after a rocky start working as an ad man in his bachelor days, Scott was finally making headway as a celebrated author. They checked into the Plaza and began partying, not even sobering up to go house hunting, but then what was the point, they weren’t going to be sober while they lived there. Zelda was an incorrigible flirt when drunk and she also had a habit of taking her clothes off and dancing naked in fountains or parading down railway tracks. Scott, although less of an exhibitionist, was equally out of control. In December of the same year the couple’s ‘house rules’ for weekend guests at their home in Great Neck, Long Island included a polite directive “not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by their host and hostess,” and warned that “the invitation to stay over Monday, issued by the host and hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning, must not be taken seriously.”
They needed the occasional sober Monday, if only to write the letters of apology they constantly had to send excusing their drunken antics and bad behavior, but in many ways the Fitzgeralds could do no wrong. They were young, beautiful—Dorothy Parker described them as looking “as though they had stepped out of the sun”—and fast. In a complex case of life imitating art, and vice versa, they both typified and immortalized the Jazz Age—their extravagant lifestyle funded by the handsome payments Scott received from the magazines that published his flapper fictions and the publishers who bought his novels.
So, I find it very curious, and you the reader should as well, that a nation-state that is #1 in personal and economic freedom would want to be more like a nation that is #25 at best in the same category.
For the past 25 years, including this year, Hong Kong has been ranked No. 1 in the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries with the “greatest economic freedom”—meaning the least restraints on capitalist profit taking.
Why do the HK protestors want less democracy and freedom? The answer is that this is not really their goal. It is instead the mechanism from which they can instigate disruptions.
Hong Kong’s ranking is based on low taxes and light regulations, the strongest property rights and business freedom, and “openness to global commerce and vibrant entrepreneurial climate … no restrictions on foreign banks.”
That has not changed. No where has the mainland placed new laws, regulations or changes to that model of governance. When the HK local government wanted to open up extradition to other nations, the protests erupted, and the government backed down.
So what the heck is going on? The protestors are not asking for more. They are demanding less.
WTF?
China has a right to intervene
It must be strongly stated that China is not invading Hong Kong if it
moves against these violent disruptions. Hong Kong is part of China.
This is an internal matter, and the call for independence for Hong Kong
is an open attack on China’s national sovereignty.
Hong Kong is a part of China.
The idea that any American military force will come to “liberate” or “save” Hong Kong is an invasion of China.
Any attempted invasion of China will result in the nuclear destruction of most major United States cities.
As it stands today, and what is NOT being reported in the United States media, is that under Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the constitution for the city, the government is legally allowed to request help from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
China is not Syria.
China is not Bolivia.
China is not Venezuela.
China will fight back. They will not permit this, and frankly, I am quite surprised that they have permitted this to go on so long. They have been very polite and have kept causalities to a minimum. Were this kind and level of damage to have taken place in the United States, people would have been killed.
Here is an article that explains one key way that Washington is meddling in the affairs of Hong Kong:
https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-washington-is-meddling-in-affairs.html
While the ideals of democracy are admirable and desirable, Washington's version of democracy is tainted by big money and has developed into a system where politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.
-Posted by: Sally Snyder | Aug 14 2019 16:10 utc | MoA
China has announced that it will take action if things escalate.
The Chinese government has announced that it will intervene militarily to defend China’s sovereignty.
Top government officials have labeled the most extreme acts as “terrorism” and denounced U.S. support.
Several times officials raised the analogy to the Western “color revolutions” that violently overturned governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Libya and Haiti and were attempted in Venezuela and Syria.
China is aware of what is going on and they will take appropriate and measured action. the problem is that the United States people, haven’t seen measured and appropriate responses since the 1940’s.
Americans are not expecting military push-back. For if they were, they would be terrified of all the war-drum beating by the American press.
“The ideologues in Western governments never cease in their efforts
to engineer unrest against governments that are not to their liking, even though their actions have caused misery and chaos in country after country in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Now they are trying the same trick in China,”
-China Daily explained on July 3rd, 2019
Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to Britain, told reporters that
their country was still acting as Hong Kong’s colonial master.
(nbcnews.com, July 4)
“A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry claimed Tuesday that
recent comments from American lawmakers [Nancy] Pelosi (D-Ca.) and
[Mitch] McConnell (R-Ky.) demonstrate that Washington’s real goal is to incite chaos in the city,” according to CNBC.
“By neglecting and distorting the truth, they whitewashed violent crimes as a struggle for human rights and freedom.” (Aug. 14)
Where is U.S. support for other resistance?
Hong Kong police are denounced in the U.S. media for violence, but actually have shown great restraint. Despite months of violent confrontations, with flaming bottles constantly thrown, no one has been killed by the police.
That is NOT going to last for long.
There are rumors that some Hong Kong oligarchs were originally behind the protests to prevent their extradition for shady deals they made in China. There may be some truth to that.
China's president Xi Jingpin is waging a fierce campaign against corruption and Hong Kong is a target rich environment for fighting that crime.
The former British colony is ruled by a handful of oligarchs who have monopolies in the housing, electricity, trade and transport markets:
The book to read is Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong (2010) by Alice Poon, which explains how the lack of competition law created outrageous wealth for the tycoons. It’s a complex subject but the key point is that in Hong Kong all land is leasehold and ultimately owned by the government, which uses it as a means of raising revenue.
This goes back to the days of empire when British policy required colonies to be self-funding. The system kept taxes down and attracted business – but one side-effect was that it gave the government an interest in rationing land to keep it expensive. That didn’t matter much when the local economy comprised a few traders but, in the modern technological world of 2012, it puts the government at odds with every person and business wanting affordable space.
Indeed, it induces the government to distort and damage the economy, and indeed society. This system paved the way for a handful of Hong Kong families to become unimaginably wealthy by getting their hands on cheap land back in the days before the city started to boom.
Rents and apartment prices in Hong Kong are high. People from the mainland who buy up apartments with probably illegally gained money only increase the scarcity. This is one reason why the Cantonese speaking Hong Kong protesters spray slurs against the Mandarin speaking people from the mainland. The people in Hong Kong also grieve over their declining importance. Hong Kong lost its once important economical position. In 1993 Hong Kong's share of China's GDP was 27%. It is now less than a tenths of that and the city is now more or less irrelevant to mainland China.
-Moon over Alabama
Demonstrations in Honduras. Americans haven’t a clue or idea that any of this is going on. They only care what they are told to care about, at that time. Nothing else.
There is no such favorable media coverage or support from U.S. politicians for demonstrations of desperate workers and peasants in Honduras, Haiti or the Philippines, or for the Yellow Vest movement in France.
There is never an official condemnation when demonstrators are killed in Yemen or Kashmir or in weekly demonstrations in Gaza against Israeli occupation.
Demonstrations in Haiti. Americans haven’t a clue or idea that any of this is going on. They only care what they are told to care about, at that time. Nothing else.
These struggles receive barely a mention, although in every case scores of people have been killed by police, targeted for assassination or simply just disappeared.
Demonstrations in the Philippines. Americans haven’t a clue or idea that any of this is going on. They only care what they are told to care about, at that time. Nothing else.
Hong Kong has always been part of China. It was seized by the British in order to facilitate the illegal drug traffic of the East India Company. The Chinese government, concerned at the social and economic mayhem caused by imported opium, paid for in silver, banned its import. The British government, which relied on the revenues it got from exporting cheap Indian opium, grown on stolen land, insisted that China allow the trade to continue. And enforced its demands militarily-the Opium Wars. Within fifty years of these wars and Hong Kong's occupation by the British on a 99 year lease, a significant proportion, close to 20% of China's men were addicted to opium.
That is why China wanted to regain sovereignty over Hong Kong. As to the assertion that the local people don't want Chinese rule but long for the British-now under US rule- to return, that is simply untrue.
As b has been pointing out the troubles in Hong Kong are almost certainly organised by the US government.
Laguerre suspects that the same is true of the gilets jaunes. Does anyone else believe that Macron is being attacked by the US government?
-Posted by: bevin | Aug 14 2019 16:18 utc | MoA
Demonstrations in Malawi. Americans haven’t a clue or idea that any of this is going on. They only care what they are told to care about, at that time. Nothing else.
While Hong Kong protests receive widespread attention, there is no similar coverage of or political support for Antifa, Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the U.S. or the masses protesting racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and roundups of migrants.
It seems to be a narrow focus on China, and only on China.
U.S. pressure continues
Months of violence and chaos in Hong Kong have US dirty hands all over them.Orchestrated by the CIA in cahoots with other anti-democratic US agencies and anti-government Chinese hooligans, there’s nothing spontaneous about what’s going on endlessly.
Days earlier, the Trump regime’s State Department (up to its ears in what’s happening) expressed phony grave concern about violence and chaos in the city — ignoring US responsibility for what’s ongoing.
Pompeo threatened China, saying all options are on the table, including direct US intervention, if Beijing’s military intervenes to quell what’s unacceptable and must be stopped.
Over the weekend, masked hooligans clashed with police at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University.
On Sunday, police surrounded the campus, warning elements involved in rioting and vandalism to leave or be dealt with harshly.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that a “sedan without license plates tried to ram a group of police officers,” a live round and rubber bullet fired at the vehicle.
“(M)asked radicals” occupying the campus clashed violently with police, dozens arrested, hundreds more involved.
Highly inflammable “dangerous materials” that can be used for explosives were seized from elements arrested — “stolen” from the university’s labs, adding:
“(R)adicals shot arrows and hurled petrol bombs and bricks (at police) – sometimes from catapults mounted on the roof of campus buildings.”
“Police fired a large quantity of tear gas and deployed two water cannons and armored vehicles.”
Clashes raged for hours, a police statement saying: “Anyone who enters or stays on the campus and assists the rioters in any way will risk committing the offense of ‘taking part in a riot.’ ”
Hooligans arrested were not university students.Police called them outsiders. On Monday, classes at all Hong Kong universities were suspended — a Polytechnic Univ. statement saying in part:
“All classes have been forced to be suspended and all operations on the campus have been halted,” adding:
“The University is gravely concerned that the spiraling radical illicit activities will cause not only a tremendous safety threat on campus, but also class suspension over an indefinite period of time.”
“They are concerned about the safety on the campus, and they do not want to see the campus being destroyed further.”
A commentary published by Beijing’s official People’s Daily broadsheet on Monday said ending months of violence and chaos in Hong Kong “is a critical matter,” adding:
In multiple parts of the city, “rioters have been rampantly committing acts of vandalism and arson, paralyzing public transport, trashing rail tracks, hurling petrol bombs at running trains, indiscriminately causing bodily harm to civilians and even turning campuses into battlefields.”
If what’s going on isn’t stopped and the rule of law restored, “there would be no guarantee for the peaceful life of residents, to say nothing of Hong Kong’s future development.”
On Monday, SCMP’s deputy executive editor Zuraidah Ibrahim said the following:
“Hardcore mobs upped their violent game when they took over tertiary campuses last week, as bureaucrats came under fire for doing little and the police warned the city was on the brink of total breakdown,” adding:
“In the north, radicals occupying Chinese University took over the Tolo Highway. At Polytechnic University, they have shut down the Cross-Harbour Tunnel for five days, the longest forced closure ever.” “The mobs broke into the campuses’ chemical laboratories and set up petrol bomb mills overnight and practiced throwing fire bombs with catapults and arrows.” “Fiery battles between protesters and police spread across several universities, as mainland and international students evacuated.”
“The radicals finally withdrew, except at PolyU where a stand-off continues as I write this. Last week, the People’s Liberation Army soldiers took to the streets with brooms – not guns – to clean up, as did volunteers fed-up with the violence and their pockmarked streets. We still don’t see an end in sight.”
US dirty hands are all over months of violence, vandalism, chaos in the city, attacking China’s soft underbelly, trying to destabilize and weaken the country.
Beijing knows what it’s up against — US imperial rage challenging China’s sovereign independence.
- US Dirty Hands Escalate Hong Kong Violence
Despite China’s warnings of possible martial law, strict curfews and military intervention to restore order, protesters have shown no signs of retreat.
The U.S. and Britain are determined to propel forward those hostile political forces they have cultivated over the past two decades.
This is really, really dangerous.
What a fucking mess the Empire has made over the last century.
Trying to reconcile my belief in democracy with non-intervention makes this one tricky. I have no desire to support the fascist United States in attempting to subvert another country's government.
The cultural gap (and therefore lack of knowledge and understanding) between the west and China is so vast it makes attempting to separate genuine journalism from McCarthy-ist era style propaganda about the country very difficult, thus making a merits based comparison between the 2 spheres of power almost impossible.
Most of the stories I hear about Chinese repression are obvious pro-western propaganda, which makes it tempting to dismiss other pieces of information out of hand.
I can only wish the best for the people of Hong Kong and China, whatever they decide that may be.
Laguerre hints at an interesting point I'd not considered with regards to the yellow vests in France - are they US aided? I'm still inclined to lean towards it being a more genuine grass roots movement from the limited bits I've seen, though I'd be intrigued to see what connections could be verified there. US state department attempting to push Frexit would certainly be a new angle to think about for a lot of us.
-Posted by: Northern | Aug 14 2019 16:22 utc | MoA
Methodology
The escalating demonstrations are linked to [1] the U.S. trade war, [2] tariffs and [3] military encirclement of China.
Four hundred—half—of the 800 U.S. overseas military bases surround China. Aircraft carriers, destroyers, nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile batteries, and satellite surveillance infrastructures are positioned in the South China Sea, close to Hong Kong.
Media demonization is needed to justify and intensify this military presence. And it is ongoing and ruthless.
John Reed at Foreign Policy describes “how the U.S. is encircling China with military bases.”
The U.S. military is encircling China with a chain of air bases and military ports. The latest link: a small airstrip on the tiny Pacific island of Saipan. The U.S. Air Force is planning to lease 33 acres of land on the island for the next 50 years to build a “divert airfield” on an old World War II airbase there. But the residents don’t want it. And the Chinese are in no mood to be surrounded by Americans.
…In addition to the site on Saipan, the Air Force plans to send aircraft on regular deployments to bases ranging from Australia to India as part of its bulked up force in the Pacific. These plans include regular deployments to Royal Australian Air Force bases at Darwin and Tindal, Changi East air base in Singapore, Korat air base in Thailand, Trivandrum in India, and possibly bases at Cubi Point and Puerto Princesa in the Philippines and airfields in Indonesia and Malaysia, a top U.S. Air Force general revealed last month.
As I’ve written in the past, these Pentagon plans are part of the Air-Sea Battle strategy. The idea is to have enough US bases and Air Force capabilities peppered throughout the region so that China would be too surrounded to safely attack in the event of a conflict.
“Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country,” reports the WashingtonPost. ”The initial ‘blinding campaign’ would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.”
Not surprisingly, Beijing is none-too-pleased with the fact that Washington is planning contingencies to “battle” China, and militarily encircling China in the Pacific. Imagine the calls for war in Washington if China was backing various Latin American countries with money and weapons and building air and naval bases in the Caribbean with the explicit aim of bombing United States to smithereens.
I haven’t seen such demonization since World War II against the Nazi Germans.
Encouraging the demonstrations goes hand-in-hand with international efforts to bar Huawei 5G technology, the cancellation of a joint study of cancer and the arrest of Chinese corporate officers.
All these belligerent acts are designed to exert maximum pressure on China, divide the leadership, destabilize economic development and weaken China’s resolve to maintain any socialist planning.
The Trump Admin has come out with all guns blazing against Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, which is now the 2nd biggest smartphone producer in the world, second only to Apple and within striking distance of them.
The USG has accused Huawei of assisting Chinese Intelligence by placing backdoors in its software and hardware that allow surveillance by Chinese authorities (but not the NSA).
Trump has even pressured allies like the UK to stop using Huawei altogether, despite the fact that Britain relies heavily of Huawei for its infrastructure.
The attacks against Huawei escalated on December 1st 2018, when the US orchestrated a totally illegal kidnapping and illegal detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO (Chief Financial Officer). Wanzhou is still being held against her will in Canada on US orders.
-The Freedom Articles
Martial law in Hong Kong, a major financial center, especially for international investment funds coming into China, would impact China’s development.
And that, my friends, is the objective.
Capitalist economic “freedom”
British imperialism, in the 155 years it ruled Hong Kong, denied
rights to millions of workers. There was no elected government, no right
to a minimum wage, unions, decent housing or health care, and certainly
no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. These basic democratic
rights were not even on the books in colonial Hong Kong.
The British were ruthless when they owned Hong Kong, and treated the native Chinese there with scorn and dismay.
For the past 25 years, including this year, Hong Kong has been ranked No. 1 in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s list of countries with the “greatest economic freedom”—meaning the least restraints on capitalist profit taking. Hong Kong’s ranking is based on low taxes and light regulations, the strongest property rights and business freedom, and “openness to global commerce and vibrant entrepreneurial climate … no restrictions on foreign banks.”
For this Hong Kong is well considered the “freest society in the world.”
This “freedom” means the world’s highest rents and the greatest gap
between the super-rich and the desperately poor and homeless. This is
what Hong Kong youth face today. But the youth are consciously being
misdirected to blame the city administration for the conditions Hong
Kong is locked into under the “One Country, Two Systems agreement.”
Ah, if only HK was independent, free of China, would everything become equal, fair and just. Only if...
An unequal colonial treaty
Hong Kong is stolen land.
This spectacular deep water port in the South China Sea at the mouth of the Pearl River, a major waterway in south China, was seized by Britain in the 1842 Opium Wars.
Hong Kong was seized by Britain, and used as a staging platform to get the Chinese addicted to Opium so that the wealthy in Britain could profit.
After negotiations with Britain had dragged on through the 1980s, the British imposed another unequal treaty on the People’s Republic of China.
Hong Kong under British rule in the 1970’s.
Under the 1997 “One Country, Two Systems” agreement that officially
returned Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories to the PRC, Britain
and China agreed to leave “the previous capitalist system” in place for
50 years.
China, determined to reassert its sovereignty over land stolen by the British, also needed funds for development.
Most money in Asia moved through the Hong Kong banking system. So in 1997 China was anxious to reach a smooth transition that would not destabilize the transfer of investment funds into the 99.5 percent of China that had previously been denied development funds.
To understand this situation, you must realize that ever since the Chinese Revolution in 1949, China had been sanctioned and blockaded from accessing Western investment and technology.
China had been denied development funds for many years. The plan was to keep them backwards and primitive. So that they could continue to be a low-cost resource for the Western nations.
U.S. and British imperialism took full advantage of the 1997
concession that maintained their economic control of the former colony.
Their hope was that Hong Kong could serve, as it had in the past, as an
economic battering ram into China.
Their hopes were not realized.
In 1997 Hong Kong’s gross domestic product was 27 percent of China’s gross domestic product. Today it’s a mere 3 percent and falling. Much to U.S. and British frustration, the world’s largest banks are now in China and they are state-owned banks.
What confounds the capitalist class, far more than China’s incredible growth, is that the top 12 Chinese companies on U.S. Fortune 500 list are all state-owned and state-subsidized. They include massive oil, solar energy, telecommunications, engineering and construction companies, banks and the auto industry.
-Fortune.com, July 22, 2015
U.S. corporate power is deeply threatened by China’s level of
development through the Belt and Road Initiative and its growing
position in international trade and investment.
U.S., Britain built a network of collaborators
When Britain and China signed the One Country, Two Systems agreement,
all foreign intervention and colonial claims on Hong Kong were supposed
to end. Full sovereignty was to return to China.
However, U.S. and British efforts to undercut Hong Kong’s return began in advance of the signing.
Just before the transfer of sovereignty, Britain hastily set up, after 150 years of appointed officials, a partially elected, although still mainly appointed, government. They quickly established and funded political parties, composed of their loyal collaborators.
Millions of dollars were openly and secretly funneled into a whole
network of protected social service organizations, political parties,
media and social media, student and youth organizations, and labor
unions established to undercut support for China and the Communist Party
of China.
Think about it. Of course this would happen. Neither the USA nor the UK were stupid.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKFTU) receives U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding, along with British support. It promotes “pro-democracy, independent unions” throughout China. The HKCTU was established in 1990 to counter and undercut the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions founded in 1948, which is still the largest union organization with 410,000 members.
The HKFTU suffered years of brutal repression under British colonial rule as it fought for basic protection of workers’ rights. A strike organized by the HKFTU shook British colonial rule in 1967. The strike became a citywide rebellion sparked by mass layoffs of workers from the plastic flower factory.
"They seem to want a Tiananmen Square outcome as success."
The Tiananmen Square outcome was–media accounts to the contrary–that the kids all left the square safely by 7:20 am, just as all the HK demonstrators are unharmed.
There was a riot led by professional thugs elsewhere in Beijing, in Chang'An Avenue, but that was a different matter entirely and one with an interesting sequel. The leader of that riot was exfiltrated to the UK by MI6 and subsequently convicted of robbing and murdering an elderly Londoner. Sweet.
- Posted by: Godfree Roberts | Nov 22 2019 23:23 utc | 34
British colonial authorities harshly suppressed the uprising, resulting in 51 deaths and hundreds injured and disappeared. The HKFTU supports China and opposes the reactionary demonstrations.
NED funding = CIA support
Allen Weinstein, a founder of the NED, told the Washington Post in 1991;
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” (Sept. 21, 1991)
The NED funds, coordinates and weaponizes nongovernmental organizations and social organizations with the capacity to put tens of thousands of misdirected, idealistic and alienated youth on the streets.
Funding from the NED, the Ford, Rockefeller, Soros and numerous other corporate foundations, Christian churches of every denomination, and generous British funding, is behind this hostile, subversive network orchestrating the Hong Kong protests today.
While you would NEVER hear about this in the mainstream American media, it of course makes sense. All you need to do is follow the money trail.
In HK, for instance, when the protestors receive payments through the NED, or NID, they get a tattoo on their arm (to prevent multiple payouts),a nd you can see this clearly on the exposed skin of rioters.
The NED bankrolls the Hong Kong Human Rights Movement, the Hong Kong
Journalists Association, the Civic Party, Labor Party and Democratic
Party. They are members of the Civil Human Rights Front that coordinates
the demonstrations.
This role of the NED in China is increasingly harder to obscure.
Alexander Rubinstein reported in “American Gov’t, NGOs Fuel and Fund Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Protests” (mintpressnews.com, June 13):
“It is inconceivable that the organizers of the protests are unaware of the NED ties to some of its members.” (tinyurl.com/y6nhmapz)
The goal is to promote a hostile and suspicious attitude toward China and toward communism and to foster the false concept of a past democratic Hong Kong with a distinct identity.
China Daily warns:
“In recent years, there have been warnings that color revolutions are emerging as a new form of warfare employed by the West to destabilize certain countries.” (Aug. 12)
Which system works better?
The Aug. 13 New York Times refers to Hong Kong as a “bastion of civil
liberties” to counter “Beijing’s brand of authoritarianism.”
British colonial past is deeply mythologized. Twenty-two years of constant nostalgia for this past, supposedly glorious time has influenced increasingly impoverished youth.
The most violent rioters, amongst them those who hold the US flag, have obviously the order or to kill somebody, better a policeman ( as the clear intend on the GT journalist shows... ) or to provoke some killing of a protester, or by accident of a journalist ( who, btw, astonishingly, remain in the middle of the melee always...
I find this very suspicious, which is their insurance company? I want it for my travels...Most probably not journalists themselves but rioters in disguise ), as these intends of assassination happened very timely, almost simultaneously with or consecutive to Trump´s Twitter on that he expected nobody will result with any harm.... obviously from his terrorists side...
BTW, this behavior have time ago passed from ghastly to straight criminal, under any country´s law.
In the US, none of these terrorists would still remain alive, they would never had been able to get so close to any policeman so as to grab his batton leaving him unarmed. They would had been shot in place, the whole bunch of them...as we so usually watch happens with black people there....
Why The Donald ( and Bannon, the Pepe Frog exposes him all the way, they already do not even try to conceal anymore...) thinks any country in the world would have to allow this?
I posted some of these videos yesterday in the week review thread ( and I am glad "b" gave them some greater visibility..) and to my view, some of these rioters, especially those who talk with the travelers seem to be on drugs....
It´s an appreciation on how their tongue slide so much plus the slowness with which they talk, in such stressant situation, very contrasting with, for example, the elder summoning the rioter in the subway. See the very thin guy talking with the Australian businessman in the video i posted in the week and review thread....
I wonder whether these could be people taken from jail or correstionals, as they were part of the ISIS recruits who flew to Turkey to be tarinned and then to Syria, their behavior is clearly antisocial, no wonder any real complaint they could have ...
In the video on "strangers" supplying the rioters, there are two totally masked and covered women ( all the way the ISIS handlers style...) who, by their physical complexion and hair, seem to not be Chinese women at all, but Westerners...at 2:21 footage....Most probably NED/CIA operatives...
-Posted by: Sasha | Aug 14 2019 16:06 utc | MoA
Listen up. Much of what you read is a myth.
Despite decades of multimillion-dollar Western funding, Hong Kong has
a poverty rate of 20 percent (23.1 percent for children) compared to
less than 1 percent in mainland China. In the past 20 years, mainland
China has lifted countless millions of people out of poverty.
Poverty rate in HK = 20%
Poverty rate in mainland China <1%
Just across the river from Hong Kong sits the city of Shenzhen.
It is one of the Special Economic Zones established to lure Western technology. These zones, originally with thousands of labor-intensive factories and millions of workers earning low wages, were centers of capitalist exploitation and enormous profits for U.S. and other global capitalists.
Shenzhen grew from a city of 30,000 in 1979 to a megacity of 20 million, with the largest migrant population in China.
Shenzhen had a population three times the size of Hong Kong. With investments via Hong Kong, this new city became a massive polluted factory town with sweatshops spewing out clouds of dark toxic smoke.
In the past five years, through city and national urban planning, Shenzhen is today one of the most livable cities in China, with extensive parks, tree-lined streets and the largest fleet of electric buses in the world (16,000), along with all-electric cabs.
Shenzhen aims to have 80 percent of its new buildings green-certified by 2020. It is full of apartment blocks, office towers and modern factories with advanced equipment manufacturing, robotics, automation and giant tech startups.
For the last 10 years wages have been stagnant in Hong Kong while
rents have increased 300 percent; it is the most expensive city in the
world. In Shenzhen, wages have increased 8 percent every year, and more
than 1 million new, public, green housing units at low rates are nearing
completion.
United States Demands
The U.S. is demanding that China abandon state support of its
industries, the ownership of its banks and national planning. But
contrasting the decay, growing poverty and intense alienation in Hong
Kong with the green vibrant city of Shenzhen across the river shows that
there are two choices for China today, including the angry forces
mobilized in Hong Kong: modern socialist planning or a return to the
super-exploitation and imperialist domination of the colonial past.
For decades Britain and the U.S. used the people of Hong Kong for
cheap labor. Now they are using the same population for cheap political
propaganda. This cynical maneuver is just one more weapon in a desperate
effort to disrupt China’s further development.
U.S. corporate power is incapable of meeting any of the desperate needs for housing, health care, education and a healthy environment for people here. Instead, in a relentless drive for profits, enormous resources are squandered on militarism to threaten countries around the world.
Today…
The Hong Kong protests are escalating, just as the US-China trade war is also escalating. None of this is out of the blue.
For quite some time now, the US has been shifting the focus of its hegemonic and imperial ambitions towards China, recognizing it – even more than Russia – as its main rival superpower.
Author Graham Allen published his 2017 book entitled Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? addressing growing US-China tension and the potential for a future US-China war.
The term Thucydides trap is derived from ancient Greece to describe a situation when a rising power gains enough strength to challenge and disturb the existing ruling power. With this phenomenon in mind, let’s take a look at the background to the current US-China trade war (which is becoming more bitter and intense by the week) and the Hong Kong Protests.
Identifying the Enemy
Quotes from top US officials, military and non-military alike, show that China has gradually been replacing Russia as the #1 enemy, although this is not clear cut; there is still a lot of hatred towards and fear of Russia.
In 2018, the USA changed its official defense strategy.
Terrorism was no longer the #1 threat and was replaced by Russia and China.
The DoD report accused China of wielding predatory economics and building fake islands in the South China Sea to intimidate nearby countries.
“China remains our biggest long-term challenge. Without focused involvement and engagement by the United States, and our allies and partners, China will realize its dream of hegemony in Asia.”
- Admiral Harry Harris, former commander of the US Pacific Command, said this about China in 2018.
“China’s intent is crystal clear. We ignore it at our peril. I’m concerned China will now work to undermine the international rules-based order … China’s impressive military build-up could soon challenge the United States across almost every domain.”
Earlier this year, DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats said:
“[The] rule of law, international norms, and fairness in trade and international engagements is not the Chinese model … Chinese leaders will increasingly seek to assert China’s model of authoritarian capitalism as an alternative—and implicitly superior—development path abroad, exacerbating great-power competition that could threaten international support for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
- DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats said:
Previously in 2018 Coats had followed Trump’s lead by blaming China
for interfering in US elections (where have I heard that one before?).
He stated:
“[China is targeting] state and local governments and officials … It is trying to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy, and uses investments and other incentives to expand its influence.”
- DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats said:
All this rhetoric comes against a backdrop of intertwined economies, where many US companies have outsourced and offshored their labor to China.
Targeting Chinese Institutions, Initiatives and Projects
The US has taken a dim view of practically every Chinese effort to develop itself in the last decade.
The US has opposed China’s gigantic OBR (One Belt, One Road) Initiative which has been dubbed the New Silk Road.
The US has directed propaganda against BRICS, China’s SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), its development bank and many other trade initiatives.
The US accuses China of trying to control the world, yet such accusations must be difficult to receive with a straight face given that the US routinely threatens both its allies and enemies with economic warfare, sanctions, trade wars, governmental overthrow, invasion or even nuclear annihilation if they don’t toe the American line.
Funding and Training Muslim Uyghurs – Sometimes as Part of ISIS
You may not have heard of them, but there is a Chinese minority group known as the Uyghurs or Uighurs. Many are Muslim and of Turkic ethnicity. They live in the semi-autonomous region of north-west China in a province called Xinjiang.
Well, guess what?
The United States government has been funding them to aggressively fight against the Chinese government.
The funny thing is that a little bit of effort and the whole thing becomes apparent even through the traditional media reports. Recall that early media reports said there were 1.7 million protesters "according to the organiser's estimates". Once you remember that, then every time you hear millions is a hint to look up the Police estimate (150k) and estimates of maximum numbers in space available - also 150k or thereabouts.
More stories hint of high protester numbers but don't mention numbers -so check the accompanying pictures and videos - we a few thousand (ie well down on ever factual early numbers) and more recently just a few hundred. Police violence - yet every picture or video show large numbers of police acting very very peaceably (compare Paris). HK democracy - yet all the pictures recently have been exclusively of masked blackshirts and if you dig deep most of the violence has been blackshirt on passers by.
There must be picture editors who are stunned by the reports they run.
And obviously the story they are all looking for is the China overreaction that was never going to happen.
The whole thing runs in parallel with the obvious Ujghur 1 million in prison lie (it would be equivalent to every male aged 16-29) where the only witnesses to speak to western journalists have been fed to the press in Istanbul. We all know that Chinese muslims in Istanbul are going to or already in ISIS. James Le Mesurier doing a little extra press feeding in his spare time.
- Posted by: Michael Droy | Nov 22 2019 22:17 utc | 29
So when ever you hear, or read about the Chinese concentration camps and the imprisonment of those “poor” Uyghur Muslims, keep in mind that it is the Untied States that has the largest prison population in the world. China doesn’t even come close.
The United States is THE prison nation, and locks up more citizens than any other nation on the surface of the earth, and has put more people in prison behind bars than Hitler did in Nazi Germany, Stalin did in the Soviet Union, and Pol Pot did in Cambodia. Compared to China, it’s not even on the “radar screen”.
So America is great because of “freedom” and “liberty” and protections afforded by the “Bill of Rights”, Eh?
The White House has asked the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals to place an emergency stay on a ruling made last week by a federal judge so that the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge is reaffirmed immediately.
On Wednesday, September 12, US District Court Judge Katherine Forrest made permanent a temporary injunction she issued in May that bars the federal government from abiding by the indefinite detention provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA.
Judge Forrest ruled that a clause that gives the government the power to arrest US citizens suspected of maintaining alliances with terrorists and hold them without due process violated the Constitution and that the White House would be stripped of that ability immediately.
- White House demands military prisons for Americans under NDAA
The bullshit is amazing to me!
In America, you can get incarcerated for the tiniest of reasons, or commit enormous crimes and be totally immune from prosecution.
We all need to look at things objectively and at the “big picture”. Just why is the United States government pushing the anti-China narrative? Why are they making a big deal of “concentration camps for Muslim terrorists” when the largest number of inmates are in the USA itself? What is going on?
Follow the money trail…
Neocon Marco Rubio, and warhawk, sponsored this 2018 bill pushing the US to get involved.
Rubio, for those who don’t recall, was the very same guy itching for war with Venezuela earlier this year in 2019. War is so great with these people. They think that America will forever be isolated and protected and war can never come to roost inside the United States.
Hong Kong’s opposition unites with Washington hardliners to ‘preserve the US’s own political and economic interests’
While claiming to fight for “self-determination,” Hong Kong opposition leaders are collaborating with regime-change neoconservatives in Washington to “preserve the US’s own political and economic interests.” A new DC lobbying front has become their base of operations.
The Grayzone piece linked above misses the real man behind the lobbying. Andrew Duncan who is a main sponsor of Senator Marco Rubio who is the main promoter on the hill for "activist" and U.S. darling Joshua Wong. Duncan is also one of the producers (financiers) of a film about Wong.
Watchdog group files complaint in shadowy gift to super PAC aiding Marco Rubio
An election watchdog organization filed a complaint Friday with the Federal Election Commission over a $500,000 donation to a super political action committee aiding Marco Rubio from a mystery firm headed by a New York investor.
...
The complaint from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, seeks an investigation into IGX LLC for masking the donation and to determine whether the Conservative Solutions PAC was aware of the origins of the contribution. The actual donor, Andrew Duncan, of Brooklyn, New York, acknowledged to the Associated Press earlier this month that he had routed his contribution through IGX, a business entity registered last year in Delaware.
- Posted by: b | Nov 22 2019 20:17 utc | 12
However, much of the funding is done under-the-table by the soft power network of NGOs, illustrious among them the National Endowment for Democracy of NWO (New World Order) insider George Soros.
The UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project) admits on its website that it was “founded by the Uyghur American Association (UAA) in 2004 with a supporting grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”
Got the following email today from my "representative" U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (for whom I have never voted) on the reason for his vote: "The world is watching, and we must step up to hold the Chinese government accountable. Please know that I will continue to fight for an America that brings moral leadership to the international stage."
Merkley remains the darling of self-styled Oregon "progressives", who have no clue about the real meaning of moral leadership. He pulled a stunt a year ago trying to get into an immigration gulag and was refused entry. He conveniently forgot to mention that privatized corporate immigration gulags were established by Democrats under President Obama.
I used to call his office to express my opinion, but no longer bother, he's just another war party flack.
- Posted by: Trisha | Nov 22 2019 22:22 utc | 31
Since when does the USG deeply care about oppressed minorities in
other nations? It’s a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it this time:
if – and only if – US interests are aligned with that minority, and for
the (usually short) time period the interests are aligned.
“The alleged “struggle” by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, referred to by the terrorists and their foreign sponsors as “East Turkistan,” consists of two essential components – a foreign harbored political front including the Washington D.C. and Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and a militant front clearly backed by the US and NATO through intermediary groups like Turkey’s Grey Wolves … Encouraging separatism in China’s western Xinjiang region, if successful, would carve off a substantial amount of territory. In conjunction with US-backed separatism in China’s Tibet region, an immense buffer region stands to be created that would virtually isolate China from Central Asia.”
So, just as the US funded and trained Operation Gladio warriors to fight communism in Europe, Mujahideen fighters to battle the USSR, ISIS to battle Syria, it is also preparing for war with China by funding and training the ‘separatists’, whoever they may be, in this case the Uyghurs.
“Chinese militants from the western region of Xinjiang have fled from the country to get “terrorist training” from Islamic State group fighters for attacks at home, state media reported on Monday.”
Initiating a Trade War
There is no doubt that it was the US under Trump who initiated the US-China trade war. As such, these series of HK protests are part of the negotiating strategy.
Even before he took office, Trump took to twitter bashing China for its supposed economic exploitation of the US. Trump says the objective is a better trade deal with China to benefit all Americans, but this trade war is producing a massive fallout and host of negative effects for American consumers, farmers and manufacturers.
“How about China’s economy? Are Trump’s tariffs crushing the Chinese economy? Not really. During Jan-May 2019, China’s exports to the US fell about 5%, but China’s exports to the EU rose more than 14%. And, guess what, EU is China’s #1 trading partner (and ASEAN is the #2 trade partner), while the US is #3. So, China keeps growing at a healthy pace — even the IMF predicts a healthy 6.2% real GDP growth for China this year!
But here’s the kicker. While China’s exports to the US fell 4.8%, the reverse — US exports to China — fell by a whopping 24% (for the first five months of 2019). So, US exporters and farmers are hurting real bad. And Trump cannot win re-election without the support of those “great soybean/corn/pork farmers.””
Instigating a Color Revolution by way of the Hong Kong Protests
One of the most significant examples of US aggression against China is the instigation of a color protest or color revolution in Hong Kong. The aim is to provoke China into reacting harshly and violently, which would reinforce the Western perception that China is heavy-handed, tyrannical and totalitarian.
China has already moved troops to its southern mainland border, just across the water from Hong Kong. It is possible that another US objective is to push the protestors into declaring Hong Kong independent of China. But, you know what, they are going to hold back. They will not give the USA what it so obviously wants.
The idea behind the protests and the rioters In Hong Kong was all along to provoke another Tian An Men incident. This was quite obvious since the start of the protest. It now gets publicly acknowledged:
BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight - 11:00 UTC · Nov 19, 2019 “Some of the protesters seem to have an objective to provoke a military confrontation with China. They seem to want a Tiananmen Square outcome as success.”
Fmr Foreign Sec @Jeremy_Hunt says he is “concerned with the tactics” with some of #HongKong’s protesters.
Had China moved troops to Hong Kong, or allowed more force to be used against the protesters, the U.S. would have used that to press its allies to put strong sanctions on China. The protesters' violence was designed to achieve that outcome. The plan was part of the larger U.S. strategy of decoupling from China.
The plan failed because China was too smart to give the U.S. what it wanted. Now it is Trump who is under pressure. He needs the trade deal with China because the current trade war is doing harm to the U.S. economy and endangers his reelection.
Which is probably the real reason why the protests have died down.
- Posted by b on November 22, 2019 at 19:02 UTC | Permalink
There are some who say the Hong Kong protests are a grassroots affair. There is usually a grassroots element to many of these protests, but almost always the bigger factor in the shadows is US interference (or US-UK, or US-UK-Israeli, interference).
“The Extradition Law revision that started this was only a convenient proxy for those wanting chaos in HK to create chaos. The instigators behind the initial protest march are the same ones who started Occupy Central five years ago. They are the ones who huddle with operatives from US/UK Consulates, who travelled to the Washington/London/Brussel/Taipei, etc. to see politicians and plot strategies, to arrange for funding, and to recruit dare devils for the carnage. Lucky for them that HK was ripe for such shenanigans because HKers in general are sullen over their loss of superiority complex against mainland Chinese, brainwashed subconsciously through schools and churches about CCP wickedness, and desperately stressed under HK’s economic realities. Most of the protesters don’t even know what the Extradition Law is all about …”
“The instigators, however, are well versed in all the intricacies. They know who they can easily recruit and order to do violence … they know the fifth column within the government and business … If large casualties result what do they care? … [T]hey know their foreign backers are only too glad to see Chinese killing Chinese …”
“By the way, the US Consulate in HK has over 1,000 on payroll (an estimated 200 CIA agents), UK’s is over 500 (among them MI6 agents). That size of consulate in a city of less than 400 sq. miles of land (over half of which mountainous) is a laughable anomaly, wouldn’t you think? What are they all there for?”
And yes, there is proof. The senior US consulate member Julie Eadeh
was photographed secretly meeting with the top 2 leaders of the Hong
Kong protests, Joshua Wong and Nathan Law.
The senior US consulate member Julie Eadeh was photographed secretly meeting with the top 2 leaders of the Hong Kong protests, Joshua Wong and Nathan Law.
Remember – the NED now does overtly what the CIA did covertly decades ago. Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of NED, confessed that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
NED has been equipping the HK protestors out of CIA enclaves inside of Hong Kong.
To an American, I sound like some kind of Chinese lover / Communist sympathizer. But the difference between myself and Joe and Suzy average is that I LIVE HERE. I see the changes and the differences FIRST HAND.
I can compare things directly, and I don’t need to be told what to believe by an actor playing a newscaster on television.
I'm a Hongkonger, so allow me to inject some perspectives here as a very concerned onlooker to what is happening. I'd admit my views are in the slim minority among fellow Hongkongers, and likely be laughed off as a conspiracy-theory monger or a Commie groupie.
The Extradition Law revision that started this was only a convenient proxy for those wanting chaos in HK to create chaos. The instigators behind the initial protest march are the same ones who started Occupy Central five years ago. They are the ones who huddle with operatives from US/UK Consulates, who travelled to the Washington/London/Brussel/Taipei, etc. to see politicians and plot strategies, to arrange for funding, and to recruit dare devils for the carnage. Lucky for them that HK was ripe for such shenanigans because HKers in general are sullen over their loss of superiority complex against mainland Chinese, brainwashed subconsciously through schools and churches about CCP wickedness, and desperately stressed under HK's economic realities. Most of the protesters don't even know what the Extradition Law is all about, but what the heck, it seemed like a good party to participate in, no?
The instigators, however, are well versed in all the intricacies. They know who they can easily recruit and order to do violence; they know the Basic Law and its fuzzy edges; they know the influences of clergy/university,high-school teachers; they know the fifth column within the government and business; they know HKers' irrational sensitivity towards so-called world opinions; they know that the foreign judges (which consist of 95% of the court) and foreign press are solidly behind them. Thus, they wanted to sock it to China; the more direly the better. If large casualties result what do they care? None of their own children were among the crowd and casualties would surely enlarge that blackeye they were to deliver. And they know their foreign backers are only too glad to see Chinese killing Chinese.
Like someone said in posts before mine, this incident is more similar to Maidan than any other color revolution prior. US/UK/Taiwan/Oz/Japan are enjoying their 5-minutes of glory and celebration at this point. The blowback, however, will come years and decades later.
By the way, the US Consulate in HK has over 1,000 on payroll (an estimated 200 CIA agents), UK's is over 500 (among them MI6 agents). That size of consulate in a city of less than 400 sq. miles of land (over half of which mountainous) is a laughable anormaly, wouldn't you think? What are they all there for?
-Posted by: Oriental Voice | Aug 14 2019 19:22 utc | MoA
The USA is collapsing, and like a snarling, rabid dog is snapping and thrashing about as it plummets further and further into the black, black abyss. The idea that somehow, the USA can wrestle back some of it’s old “greatness” by stalling the rise of China is a chimera.
America the nation that was founded as a republic no longer exists. it has been replaced with something different. First a “democracy”. Then after untold number of amendments, “mob rule”. Then with the consolidation of the mainstream press, an oligarchy.
It’s just an illusion. It’s not going to happen.
Evil Outlaw US Empire planners in their hubristic zeal to decouple from China's economy erred massively in thinking China would be the one harmed and come begging for a trade deal. Instead, China's geoeconomic strategy is clearly working and is more potent than what the Empire can bring to the table--Oops! China can now play Trump.
- Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 22 2019 21:16 utc | 20
But in the meantime, these are dangerous times we live in, and Nuclear warfare is nothing to trifle with.
What the American media is showing are distortions and lies. They are dangerous.
To understand what is going on you need to see the FULL picture. Not only what the “deep state” wants you to see to the exclusion of all else.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
No. This article is not about America. So it is an outlier. In truth, America lost that role decades ago. It lost it when it decided to embrace something other than it’s charter. The moment when the government stopped serving it’s people, it became something else. Nope. This is about China. Communist China to be exact.
What is put forth is going to anger many, but that’s to be expected.
This article is not about America. It is about nations that obey their charter to serve the needs of their people. Over the last century many nations have failed at this charter, and as a result created an internal rise in nationalism. As such we are covering China, for they are a serious nation that cares for it’s people.
We are in the midst of titanic changes and shifts on the global stage. These changes will be uncomfortable for some, but will open up amazing opportunities for others. It’s all going to boil down to an awareness of the way things really are, as opposed to what we are instructed to believe.
We look at things as they actually are.
Here, we address this issue. In fact, we address it with the largest and most successful nation in the history of the world; China. Not America.
The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.
-Lee Kwan Yew.
China is the biggest player in the history of the world.
This narrative doesn’t fit the nonsense spewed out from the American media by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, it is the truth. American media serves a purpose; to control Americans. Not to inform.
American media serves a purpose; to control Americans. Not to inform.
In 2003 Godfree Roberts (Check out his site UNZ.com.) published a book charting America’s decline in thirty-six social and economic indicators. It’s a great read, but is out of date. Today, the decline is quite pronounced, and disturbing.
Back in 2003, he mailed copies to the Bush Administration, Congress and department heads. For all effort, he only received one reply. Only one singular reply. No one else even bothered to say “thanks for the book“. It was like talking to a brick wall.
The singular reply was from the Director General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He said that the Agency had been providing almost identical information to the government for decades. But no one, apparently was concerned. The administration at that time felt…
The global New World Order was a good thing.
America is strong and will always be strong.
America can bend the rest of the world to fit it’s model of perfection. The CIA, NED and the rest can instigate proxy wars on anyone that steps out of line.
Since then our decline and China’s rise have both accelerated and momentum has carried us so far so quickly that today it is too late. Global competition against China (at this stage) is unrealistic. China is far too strong and far too capable. They are not a nation to trifle with.
Most of the rest of the world realizes this.
The BRI with its multiple proposed pillars extending beyond infrastructure development (including free trade, financial integration, people-to-people connections) appears to have the potential to transform the ever-challenging region between Europe and China.
In this regard it is important to avoid confrontational ideology and focus on the areas of mutual interest (facilitating a non-discriminatory regulatory environment, the convergence of technical/SPS standards, greater cost efficiency and sustainability of investment projects), as well as avoid imposing ‘either-or’ choices on the countries along the New Silk Road.
The long-run objective of facilitating peace and prosperity in the still problematic regions of Central Asia and the Middle East is in the common interest of China, the EAEU and the EU.
- China’s Belt and Road Initiative: opportunity or threat?
We look at things as they actually are.
Reality vs. Illusion
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
If China resembled the caricature our media has drawn for the last seven decades then yes, we can compete against her and be victorious. If they are a real joke… a real third-world shit-hole… and a population of dog-eating communists…well yes. Yes we can compete against her. Easy.
Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.
The Global Attitudes Spring 2016 survey by US-based Pew Research Center said nearly 60 per cent of the Chinese think that territorial dispute between China and its neighboring countries could lead to a military conflict, while 45 per cent see the power and influence of the US as a major threat.
We could make an example of her.
We could show the world how American democracy can compete against China. China, that evil and backwards third-world shit-hole with her repressive, extractive, authoritarianism. And we could invest our bounty in advanced technologies to ensure that we remain the envy of the world.
We can show the world with our large fine and massive military, our state of the art aircraft carriers, and our space adventures where we capture a dishwasher-sized asteroid and put it in orbit about the moon.
We can show off our state of the art health care, our humane treatment of illegals, and our fair and just government. We could show the world how talented, serious and no-nonsense our freely elected officials are. We could do all this and more.
We could show the world our network of high speed rail, our wonderful and cost effective medical care systems, and our institutes of higher learning that run on merit and produce the brightest and best that the world can offer.
But…
What if our assumptions are all wrong?
Shanghai is a typical Chinese first tier city.
Think about it. What if the media is lying to us? What if FOX news lies just as bad as CNN? What then?
What if China is neither repressive, extractive nor authoritarian?
What if we have no bounty left to invest? What if it has been squandered by the generations before us and nothing much is left?
What if Chinese leaders are more popular, respected and competent than ours?
What if her economy is thirty percent bigger and growing three times faster, with one-third the debt burden?
What if she is already ahead of us scientifically and technologically?
What if she is militarily impregnable, with weapons or mass destruction that rivals (or are superior) to our own?
What if China has and possesses more–and more powerful–allies than we do?
What should we do then? What could we do?
Think about this situation. Pause. Think. Look at the facts in a true and real context. Look at the world, the globe, as an ever changing organism with constantly moving lines of power and control. Look at what happens when nations, people, and systems grow and change. Look at China today.
Here’s an inventory:
Government
“If people have no faith in their rulers then the state cannot exist.”
- Confucius
As an American, our trust in our government is at its lowest point in history. It is rock bottom, scraping and mired in the sludge at the very bottom of the barrel.
Gallup says most of us rank government as our most pressing problem. All that I can say to that is…”Duh!”.
So in America, the majority of people do not trust the government, the institutions that they represent and support, and the media that reports about their actions. Very precious few American people trust their government and their institutions.
America was founded on the principle that the government was made by the people, and it’s sole purpose is to serve the people. If Americans do not trust the government, then that means that it is NOT servicing the people and they are not happy about it. This is a serious concern, and should not be taken lightly.
America, by just about every indicator, is a nation that does not serve it’s people. The government functions within an isolated “bubble” much like France was before the French Revolution, or like Russia before the Communist Revolution. People know this, and do not trust the government.
America, by just about every indicator, is a nation that does not serve it’s people. The government functions within an isolated “bubble” much like France was before the French Revolution, or like Russia before the Communist Revolution. People know this, and do not trust the government.
Do you? Do you, dear reader, do you trust the American government? Do you believe them? Do you think that they have your best interests at heart?
If the government raised your taxes (again), would it end up improving your life? If they seized all your firearms, would you feel safer at night? If they banned something else, would you believe that your personal life was improved?
Most Americans would say no.
America, by just about every indicator, is a nation that does not serve it’s people. The government functions within an isolated “bubble” much like France was before the French Revolution, or like Russia before the Communist Revolution.
Don’t you think this is a problem?
Meanwhile, China’s system of professional, non-factional government has returned it to its traditional role as the Central Kingdom.
Compared to ours, China’s government is forward-looking, decentralized, efficient and thrifty.
For instance, the Government Entrance Examination selects the top 2% of graduates each year and success is the only avenue to power, responsibility.
The Chinese Government Entrance Examination selects the top 2% of graduates each year and success is the only avenue to power, responsibility.
While in America it is completely different. In America it is well-promoted "blue bloods" (family dynasties) that are promoted and elected by mob rule through corporate media promotion.
The 200 members of the State Council, all promoted on their ability to work cooperatively, have collectively governed billions of people for a combined 5,000 years and their publicly available statistics are jaw-dropping.
Most of the Chinese leadership in Beijing have a PhD.
Most of the Chinese leadership in Beijing has an IQ over 140.
All of the leadership began their careers in the country’s poorest villages.
All of the Beijing leadership stayed in their home villages, and were only able to leave once they raised local incomes by 50%.
They repeated that performance at every level, including the presidency, as Xi Peng is doing.
Most of the American government are members of a private club of "elites". They have an enormous bureaucracy that services them that are culled by ideology.
American university and agency entrance exams have done away with placement though merit. In the interests of inclusion and diversity, positions are filled by "other criteria". It "improves" America, don't you know.
As a result, the people of China (contrary to the anti-Chinese propaganda in the American media) trust their government.
Chinese people trust their government because they had bettered their lives for three generations. The people also have a bright future to look forward to.
China is super patriotic, and who can blame them. Just about everyone is living light-years better than their parents did at their age.
Chinese people trust their government because they had bettered their lives for three generations. The people also have a bright future to look forward to.
They know that peace and stability are essential to achieve what China has achieved and requires strong leadership to do this. They therefore like a strong leader and they see this in President Xi Jinping.
They trust their government also because not only have they delivered but more importantly create an environment whereby they can improve their lives. The equal opportunity for everyone to raise their wealth and living standards are all there for people to witness.
They are now ready to be self sufficient and not dependent on the US for export to improve their economy and the latter does not like it. The US is seen by the Chinese people as attempting to thwart their progress. This is spurring the Chinese people to unite behind their leaders and providing them with incentive to work harder and more innovatively to beat the US.
- Louis Lim.
China is super patriotic. So most Americans need to forget the media-promoted illusion that the Chinese are ready to leap into the arms of “democracy”. It’s not the case, and is a big lie.
Impromptu show of patriotism in a mall in Hong Kong. While all of Western media are focusing on the radicals storming the subways lines, destroying things, and dressed in Antifa black wearing Antifa black masks, and behaving like BLM radicals, the rest of Hong Kong is more like this. They are proud of their nation, proud of their country, and proud of their heritage.
Leadership
In America, we choose leaders by acclamation–a Greco-Roman custom favoring eloquent rascals–and that is exactly what we have.
Rascals.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – AUGUST 22: California Lt. Gov. and California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom looks on as he visits the Alice Griffith Apartments on August 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco mayor London Breed toured a low-income housing complex. Newsom leads Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox by an average of 23 percentage points in recent polls. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
It’s so bad, and so outrageous, that they are no longer trying to hide their crimes. The rich, and powerful know that they can get away with things with impunity. They are no longer giving a care as to what others think.
“China’s leaders are much smarter than ours. It’s like taking the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and having them play your high school football team.”
While this is covered above, it should not be overlooked. The Chinese is a true merit-based society. The government is run by intelligent leadership. Not hand-puppets of the oligarchy. And while America has an enormous career bureaucracy, it is nowhere as talented or driven as the Chinese.
Nor are American leaders policed. For in China, all government officials are under observation by the “Corruption Police”.
Three more officials have been given the chop as part of China’s anti-corruption drive. The disgraced politicians are the latest in a string of purges of former aides to Zhou Yongkang, China’s retired chief of domestic security, fueling speculation that Zhou will eventually face charges.
Ji Wenlin, former deputy governor of Hainan, and Yu Gang, former senior official in the Politics and Legal Affairs Commission, have both been expelled from the Communist Party for taking “huge bribes” and committing adultery, announced the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on Wednesday.
Adultery, while not illegal in China, is considered a serious violation of Party regulations.
The third official charged with corruption is Tan Hong, a former senior officer in the Ministry of Public Security.
All three have close ties to Zhou, working under the security czar at some point during their careers. Zhou was a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, until he retired in 2012. He was considered one of the most powerful men in China, serving as the head of China’s security and police institutions.
On China: Tigers and flies
On China: Tigers and flies 01:52
On China: fashion and corruption
In America, the opposite is true. In Washington, it’s a free-for-all of corruption and abuse.
However, in China, all government officials, their aides, and support personnel are all under the careful watchful eyes of the “corruption police”. The Chinese do not want rampant corruption to reach the levels of 2004 in China, or what it is in America today. So they have taken aggressive and proactive steps to ensure that this will not happen.
In 2013, some 182,000 officials were disciplined while courts nationwide tried 23,000 corruption cases, according to the CCDI.
After coming into power in late 2012, President Xi Jinping banned official extravagance — from banquets to year-end gifts — and vowed to target “tigers and flies” alike in his fight against corruption when describing his resolve to spare no one regardless of their position.
Given the high levels of corruption in the American government, one can really wonder American-based criticism of Chinese attempts at curbing corruption.
Since Donald Trump become President there has been exactly zero arrests, and zero prosecutions for the thousands of felonies committed in the last ten years. His DOJ head Jeff Sessions, did nothing. And the current Attorney General, Mr. Barr seems to be heading in the same direction.
Economies.
Today, China generates 20% of global GDP vs. our 15%, its imports and exports are in balance, its trading relationships are excellent, its currency fairly valued, its economy one third larger and growing three times faster, its manufacturing wages at parity with ours and its plans for 2025 are breathtaking.
Share of the world economic output. Including forecasts.
What is China? New highways, railways, subways and ports and, next year, the fastest, most advanced Internet and entire cities built around 5G. Meanwhile, 6G development is well in progress and there is a race on it’s development and implementation.
The infrastructure comparison is stark, and alerting.
What is America?
Not much. $77,000,000,000 for high speed rail, and all anyone has to show for it is an army of attorneys demanding more fees, fifteen miles of partially completed tracks and a cardboard mock-up.
China started it’s High Speed Rail plan at the same time as the United States did. Today it is everywhere and super convenient. In America it is no where to be found.
Chinese high speed rail is very commonplace. It goes just about everywhere, and is cheap, clean and affordable.
America can’t even build a simple fence on it’s border. I mean, don’t you know, that’s a purely dysfunctional government you all. (I turn my head and spit on the ground.) It’s all totally fucked up. It’s a train-wreck, and getting worse.
China, well, that bridge that connects Hong Kong to Zhuhai is an amazing civil construction feat that is beyond the abilities of Americans. Fact.
Zhuhai to Hong Kong Bridge.
Geopolitics.
In 2018 China’s 34% world approval rating beat America’s 31% and Gallup says, “As the global balance of soft power continues to shift, it may prove even more difficult for the US to counter this influence.”
They are focusing their attention on Eurasia and, Zbigniew Brzezinski warned…
“Control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. Seventy-five percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia and most of the world’s physical wealth is there too, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
We ceded control of Crimea and the Black Sea to Russia and, increasingly, the Middle East, too.
With the Belt and Road, China and Russia are amalgamating numerous alignments.
The Eurasian Economic Union.
(Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Russia with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Moldova in consideration)
The Shanghai Cooperative Organization, SCO.
(Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, China, and Pakistan; with Afghanistan, Iran, Mongolia and Belarus as observers and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey as dialog partners)
(Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand).
Once the Nord Stream II and South Stream pipelines are completed in December, how can the EU resist joining them?
The Belt and Road Initiative is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. The leader of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, originally announced the strategy during official visits to Indonesia and Kazakhstan in 2013.
This plan, the Road and Belt Initiative, has been in the works for decades, and it’s implementation has taken years. It’s just another example of how China plans. They do so generationally – 25 years in advance. America plans by financial quarter – three months in advance.
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not only the most ambitious and all-encompassing economic development project in the history of humanity but also the core of what is likely to be China's grand strategy for the twenty-first century. It aims to connect China and Europe in a web of roads, high-speed rail, power lines, ports, pipelines, fiber-optic lines and other infrastructure with the goal of stimulating growth in the scores of developing countries in between. New maritime trade corridors provide China with new shipping alternatives while offering its less developed western, northern and southwestern provinces easier access to new markets. While the initiative offers China great strategic and economic benefits it also offers hope to the struggling economies of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Yet, despite the magnitude and promise of the initiative and its interface with almost every region in which the United States has strategic interests – the Middle East, South China Sea, India-Pakistan, Eastern Europe and Central Asia to name a few – Washington has largely ignored it, and in some cases it even took active measures to undermine it.
- Dr. Gal Luft
After trying to derail it, the United States decided to create their own version. This United States version is loosely structured on providing funds in USD to member nations in exchange for their “loyalty” to the United States in a slew of areas. So far, as of November 2019, only Australia signed on.
The Chinese Road and Belt Initiative will transform the globe in a better and stable way. It will surround China with growing nations with thriving middle classes that are economically tied to China.
“America will need to sell $12 Trillion of bonds in the coming decade. Who on earth–or in global finance–will buy this looming mountain of Treasuries, the US borrowing requirement even before Trump’s major upgrade of America’s weapons systems?"
Who is willing to buy one billion dollars in US bonds, let alone one trillion dollars worth? Who, which nation, can afford twelve trillion in bonds? Jupiter?
For reasons outside of fiscal responsibility, the United States government has been borrowing money for everyone on the planet. These borrowing needs [will all] eventually have to be financed in the context of already high global dollar debt exposure.
What it does show is what then Senator Barack Obama eloquently described in 2006: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
The reality is that at some point, sooner or later, we will have to pay back the money we’re borrowing. The longer we wait to do this, the more painful it will be to do so. The victims of all this are America’s youth. Peter Welch and his 189 cohorts in the House, his allies in the press, and anyone else who supports this fiscal insanity seem to have no moral problem sticking our children and grandchildren with a tab that will dramatically diminish our kids’ future standard of living. This is intergenerational theft. There’s nothing noble or courageous about it.
One of America’s biggest hedge funds privately concluded that in five years’ time the Treasury will need to sell bonds equivalent to 25 percent of gross domestic product, up from 15 per cent now.
This level of debt has occurred just twice in the past 120 years, first during the second world war and then again during the 2008 financial crisis”.
China’s External Debt accounted for 14.4 % of the country’s Nominal GDP in 2018, compared with the ratio of 14.5 % in the previous year. China’s External Debt: % of Nominal GDP data is updated yearly, available from Dec 1985 to Dec 2018. The data reached an all-time high of 17.1 % in Dec 2014 and a record low of 5.1 % in Dec 1985.
Russia and China have no foreign debt (only domestic debt), and at that, China has abundant savings and carries a debt burden one-third America’s or the EU’s.
Science.
Their natural genetic encoded ten IQ point advantage over Americans means that they have 600,000 people with 160 IQ, compared to only 30,000 in America.
Here is the average IQ of more than 80 countries. These numbers came from a work carried out from 2002 to 2006 by Richard Lynn , a British Professor of Psychology, and Tatu Vanhanen , a Finnish Professor of Political Science, who conducted IQ studies in more than 80 countries. On average, children from Asian countries get about a 107 IQ relative to American norms. Tracking and following through on the comparisons in society and the importance of education, we end up with these trends as illustrated.
China dominates a global ranking of the most-cited research papers published in the 30 hottest technology fields.
Though the U.S. accounted for 3.9 million research papers overall compared with 2.9 million from China, the Asian country produced the largest share in 23 of the 30 fields that drew the most interest, while America took the crown for the remaining seven.
Presently, China spends more on R&D than Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined, and only trails the United States in terms of gross expenditure. In 2016, China’s spending accounted for roughly 20 percent of global R&D expenditure. According to some estimates, China will overtake the US as the top R&D spender by 2020.
As we can infer from the chart, the social groups controlling our surplus used it for non-productive, ego-satisfying purposes which distributed the surpluses to consumption but did not provide more effective methods of production.
In China you must compete and be the best, otherwise you will spend the rest of your life begging in the streets. There are no prizes for fifth or sixth place, and no allowances for minorities or diversity quotas.
China is the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, ranking first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering and is rapidly catching up in physics.
The U.S. led in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine. And each year, the USA lead drops far, far behind.
Pretty good for elementary school students. Try to have an American fifth-grader design and build a robot from scratch.
As impressive as all this is, let me underline a very significant point. After 12 to 16 hours of studying, the typical Chinese student will squeeze in a job, or labor to help with the family. Try to find an American student willing to put up with this kind of pace, or familial expectations.
Young lady working after school, still wearing her school uniform.
Twenty years ago Samuel Huntington said,
“Civilizations grow because they have an instrument of expansion, a military, religious, political, or economic organization that accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations and they decline when they stop the application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases.
This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for non-productive but ego-satisfying purposes which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production.”
To the rest of the world, Americans are seemingly looking more and more like a parody of idiocracy.“
Americans are seemingly looking more and more like a parody of idiocracy. Our government, based upon the ideas of “modern progressive thought” has allowed a dangerous oligarchy to take over. This has created a global oligarchy that services the top 1% of the world globally. It serves no one else. When another nation, China, improves upon the model, the American reaction is disgust and fear. But, you know, it need not be the case. Learn. Adapt, and adjust.
Technology.
Two thirds of the world’s fastest computers are Chinese but nothing reveals the emptiness of our IP closet more than Chinese dominance of enhanced mobile broadband.
We will take twice as long and spend twice as much integrating a less affordable, functional, compatible, upgradeable system.
5G is the next generation of mobile broadband, which will replace or augment its 4G/LTE predecessor and will set the stage for 6G service. The company that can get ahead in 5G will be able to have more market control over 6G service in the future.
The benefits of 5G are faster download and upload speeds, and other measures of network efficiency like latency. These faster download and upload speeds will be essential for processing and moving large amounts of data for services like autonomous vehicles.
Huawei technologies, the Chinese tech company, has been aggressively pursuing 5G dominance, adding the most technical contributions to the 5G standard at international conferences where what 5G is and how it will be implemented is outlined. The company has added more than 11,000 technical contributions to the 5G standard. Swedish telecoms company, Ericsson, has added the second most to the standard, adding over 10,000 technical contributions.
Yet our feckless media derided President Trump when he called for America to dominate 6G, despite the publicly known fact that Huawei has had 600 mathematicians, physicists and engineers working on 6G for over a year.
China leads the world in most of the top ten ‘hot’ fields like battery research and accounted for more than seventy percent of all papers on photocatalysts and nucleic-acid-targeted cancer treatment, which ranked 12th and 14th.
“Approximately 72% of the academic patent families published in QIT since 2012 have been from Chinese universities. US universities are a distant second with 12%.”
China will overtake the US in the most-cited 50% of Artificial Intelligence research papers this year, the top 10% of research papers next year, and the top 1% by 2025.
Six of the eleven AI unicorns are Chinese.
Unicorn (finance) A unicorn isaprivatelyheldstartup company valuedatover $1 billion. Thetermwascoinedin 2013 byventurecapitalistAileenLee, choosingthemythicalanimaltorepresentthestatisticalrarityofsuchsuccessfulventures.
- Unicorn (finance) - Wikipedia
We have no entrants in quantum encryption or face recognition, nor 100 mph maglev subways, nor lossless power transmission. We are so far behind in those fields that it’s not even tying to begin with.
Aerospace: China launched more space missions in 2018 than Russia or America and its first indigenous airliner will take to the air this year, despite FAA foot-dragging. It is the world’s leading provider of UAVs and the largest manufacturer and exporter of light combat aircraft. Now that its WS-15 fighter jet engine is in production, its J-20 will out-carry and out-speed our fighters.
China’s newest warplane, the J-20 stealth fighter, will make its first public flight at the Zhuhai Air Show, its manufacturer announced on Monday, as Beijing flexes its long-range military muscles.
The J-20, “which military enthusiasts at home and abroad have watched closely”, will make its first public flight demonstration, said Tan Ruisong, the president of China’s state aerospace company AVIC.
China trailed the world in aerospace technology 20 years ago, he told a press conference, but was now at the leading edge.
Swift, stealthy, and armed with long-range missiles, the new J-20s+ represent a leap forward in China’s ability to project power in Asia and compete in capabilities with the United States.
Ocean engineering. China is the go-to builder for LNG transporters and naval vessels that require technical expertise (the USN approached it about building a floating dock) It designs, builds and operates the most powerful surface combatants afloat, the Type 55 cruiser, ensuring that its claims in the South China Sea and the East China Sea will not be contested.
At a time when the United States Navy is struggling to determine the future of its Navy, China has been quietly building up its naval forces. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has risen to be the second largest navy in the world by tonnage. It’s not just quantity that China is after, but the also the quality of its ships. Case in point is China’s newest warship to be launched, the Type 55 destroyer. With this warship, China has produced a destroyer larger, more powerful, and far more capable than its predecessors.
Advanced railway equipment: China leads in all aspects of railway engineering and wins the bulk of global rail contracts. The first of five low speed maglev lines has completed testing and two more will open this year.
High-speed rail (HSR) in China consists of a network of passenger-dedicated railways designed for speeds of 250–350 km/h (155–217 mph). It is the world’s longest high speed railway network, and is also the most extensively used. Over 2,800 pairs of bullet trains numbered by G, D or C run daily connecting over 550 cities in China and covering 33 of the country’s 34 provinces.
Energy-saving and new energy vehicles: China leads the world in batteries and electric cars and has more than 20 manufacturers competing to survive.
While Tesla engineers have been gradually adding autonomous capabilities to its electric stable, Chinese firm LeEco has gone one step further and announced a car that can do it right from the off.
The LeSEE, announced last night in China, managed to drive itself out of a shipping container and on to the stage with little more than a few voice commands spoken into a smartphone by CEO Jia Yueting. It even reversed, too.
Power equipment: China leads the world in basic research and manufacturing of renewable energy and nuclear energy and installed more renewable and nuclear power last year than the rest of the world combined. It owns the market for long distance UHV transmission.
Ultrahigh-voltage (UHV) electricity transmission has been used in China since 2009 to transmit both AC and DC electricity over long distances separating China’s energy resources and consumers. Expansion of both AC and DC capacity continues in order to match generation to consumption demands while minimizing transmission losses.
MaterialsScience. China’s share of the most cited nanoscience papers grows 22% annually and overtook the US in 2014. Its contribution–in quantity and quality–is now greater than the rest of the world’s combined. Most of the world’s graphene is manufactured in China, home to most graphene startups and the country is even with us in nanomaterial development.
Biomedicine and high-performance medical devices. Judged by papers in 82 high-quality research journals, China is the second leading contributor to biomedical engineering articles after the US and will overtake us in three years.
China has become the top destination for research involving these animals, which are invaluable models for studying human disease. Other countries do not breed the primates in such large numbers or to the standard produced in China. “Some 95% of papers using transgenic monkeys come from China,” says Bezard, director of the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Bordeaux, and manager of his own lab at the Institute of Laboratory Animal Sciences, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
Among recent breakthroughs, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have genetically modified cynomolgus monkeys so they exhibit autistic-like behaviours, to better understand what causes the disorder, and how to treat it. CAS scientists have also cloned primates using a technique similar to the one that produced Dolly the sheep. Bezard has used rhesus monkeys to show how brain–computer interfaces can restore leg movement after spinal cord injury. These developments have coincided with improvements in the regulation and enforcement of international standards in the biosciences in China.
Two events were critical to the process: the 2003 SARS outbreak, which put a spotlight on the issue of wildlife and lab animal management, and the creation in China of the world’s first human–rabbit embryos in 2001, which provoked an international public relations crisis for the country.
The Chinese government recognizes that bioscience will play a major role in its global competitiveness. Biomedicine, synthetic biology and regenerative medical techniques are listed as strategic fields and industries in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. “China doesn’t want to miss the life-science biotech revolution,” says Cao Cong, an innovation studies researcher at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
Trade.
Midway in the sixteenth century China became the great repository of the early modern world’s newly discovered wealth in silver. Long a participant in international maritime trade, China experienced the consequences of the greatly enlarged patterns in world trade. In that commerce China was essentially a seller of high-quality craft manufactures. Other countries could not compete either in quality or price. The colonies of the New World and the entire Mediterranean sphere of trade, from Portugal and Spain to the Ottoman Empire, began to complain that the influx of Chinese goods undermined their economies.
-F.W. Mote
China’s most significant trade relationships are with Asia and Europe, with the US third.
Almost no other country in the world has such a strong influence on the multilateral trading system as the United States. But with his “America First” policy, U.S. President Donald Trump is increasingly undermining international trade law. And that comes with huge costs not only for its trading partners but also for the United States itself.
As Parag Khanna says…
"Beijing must wonder why #3 would launch a trade war against #1. Though we are self-sufficient in many things,we may be more dispensable than we imagine. ‘America first’ sounds great except when it actually means ‘America alone’."
China has a multi-generational plan for on-going trade with the rest of the world. As discussed previously, the first step is the “Road and Belt Initative”, but other systems are slowly being put in place.
Meanwhile, the 2016 to 2019 “Trump Trade War” between the United States and China, has proven, beyond a doubt that the United States is NOT a stable trading partner, and other trading partnerships need to be developed.
China’s GINI, which never reached our nosebleed levels, is dropping like a stone and extreme poverty will be gone next year, when every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care.
The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line. Thus a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality.
- China GINI index, 2017-2018 - knoema.com
When this happens there will then be more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.
China’s GINI, which never reached our nosebleed levels, is dropping like a stone and extreme poverty will be gone next year, when every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care.
500,000,000 urban Chinese will have more net worth and disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of–and outlive–our kids.
Chinese upper middle class house and lawn.
Ninety-eight percent of Chinese listed as ‘poor’ already own their homes (not “have mortgages”, they actually own the homes and the homes are paid off.) and Xi has scheduled 2021-2035 to bringing GINI below Finland’s.
Education.
No country has so many intelligent, well trained, devoted engineers.
One-fourth of the world’s STEM workers are Chinese, an intellectual workforce eight times larger, growing six times faster and graduating high school students three years ahead of ours.
One-fourth of the world’s STEM workers are Chinese, an intellectual workforce eight times larger, growing six times faster and graduating high school students three years ahead of ours.
By 2025, China will have more technologically skilled workers than the entire OECD–the US, EU, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Turkey–combined.
The Chinese school system is merit based. You get zero points of diversity, economic hardship, or gender advantage. You succeed or fail. There are no easy outs.
The Chinese school system is merit based. You get zero points of diversity, economic hardship, or gender advantage. You succeed or fail. There are no easy outs.
Violence.
Low crime, no religious nonsense or Islamic violence. Companies can invest safely without fear of religious unrest, violence or robbery.
In China it is against the law to promote “progressive” change.
In China it is against the law to have any kind of social upheaval. It is also (functionally) against the law to have a lifestyle outside of the traditional conservative Chinese family. If you try to do so, for what ever reason, you risk being arrested and spending the rest of your life in a re-education camp, if not killed outright.
The Chinese do not mess around. Know your history.
Faith in the future.
Faith in the future, nationalism, a belief in building a better China: the Chinese have a strong belief in the future and willingly sacrifice time and effort for the next generation.
Faith in the future, nationalism, a belief in building a better China: the Chinese have a strong belief in the future and willingly sacrifice time and effort for the next generation.
The Chinese are feeling as we did in the 60s, except that their wages and wealth have doubled every decade for seventy years.
Their Market.
There are twice as many people in China than in the US and Europe combined and domestic consumption of China is growing 7% annually thanks to 200 million rural people moving into new cities.
China will have abundant low salary workers in its western provinces for the next 15 years.
Chinese companies are flexible beyond imagination. They can change products, management, focus or whatever literally overnight.
The Chinese are incredibly flexible and their culture has already outlived the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. Western companies are hierarchically organized whereas in Chinese companies decisions are made fast, often on the phone.
Politics.
China is the world’s leading democracy. It’s called “Communist” as a hold-over from the Mr. Mao days, but that time is long, long past. China holds on to the idea that it is “communist” in the same way that Americans still call America a “Republic”. Both have evolved far, far away from their initial charter.
Here is why China is a democracy. You need to study the indicators that define governance of a nation…
In 2005, The Carter Center began transferring America’s democracy knowhow to China. Today, China’s democracy is bigger, faster, safer and cheaper than ours and runs entirely on Chinese intellectual property.
There’s a potentially huge market for an improved version. Might Chinese democracy displace America’s? Should we be surprised if the Chinese model becomes competitive?
For three thousand years no subject has preoccupied their elite more than governance. From their perspective, Deng’s 1977 comment about Western democracy, “It’s too soon to tell,” was simple common sense.
Barely forty years later, perhaps we can tell.
Only twenty percent of citizens in newly-democratic Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Latvia, Poland and Bulgaria, trust their governments. Even fewer Britons trust Parliament and less than ten percent of us trust Congress.
Western democracy is losing legitimacy because governments’ agenda have remained at odds with their citizens’ agenda for decades but, as Margaret Thatcher would have said, there was no alternative.
- Selling Democracy to China
Now there is an alternative and, if we compare American democracy to China’s on seven axes we can at least begin the conversation.
“The State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism.
The National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through democratic elections.
They are responsible to the people and subject to their supervision. All administrative, judicial and procuratorial organs of the State are created by the people’s congresses to which they are responsible and by which they are supervised”.
America’s founders carefully omitted the word ‘democracy’ from all Constitutional documents. As it was initially founded as a Republic. But the 12th and the 17th amendments changed it into a democracy. Thus paving the way for Wilson, FDR, Clinton and Obama to turn America into a medieval-style serfdom functioning as an oligarchy.
At least the Chinese constitution clearly says that it is a democracy.
Electively, China’s bigger, more transparent elections were designed and supervised by The Carter Center which continues to expand the franchise at the behest of Premier Wen Jiabao, who told them in 2012,
“The experience of many villages shows farmers can succeed in directly electing village committees. If people can manage a village well they can manage a township and a county. We must encourage people to experiment boldly and test democracy in practice”.
Today, 3,200 democratically elected Congressional representatives must vote, almost unanimously, to approve all senior appointments and all legislation.
In the U.S., wealthy, unelected people propose and fund candidates for election. An unelected Electoral College chooses the chief executive.
Popularly, the Chinese, who still bear scars of recent governance mistakes, will tell you that it was when Mao, Deng and the Qing Emperor ignored experts that they got the country into trouble.
Today, Chinese democracy resembles Proctor and Gamble more than Pericles.
There are more than a thousand polling firms in China and its government spends prolifically on surveys, as author Jeff J. Brown says,
“My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”.
Even the imperious Mao would remind colleagues,
“If we don’t investigate public opinion we have no right to voice our own opinion. Public opinion is our guideline for action,”
which is why Five Year Plans are the results of intensive polling. Citizens’ sixty-two percent voter participation suggests that they think their votes count. Princeton’s Gilens and Page, on the other hand, examining the causes of Americans’ fifty-two percent voter participation, found
‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’.
Procedurally, The Chinese engineers, economists, statisticians and sociologists who develop policies practice democracy among themselves and the top seven decision makers–appointed independently of each other and with a collective 200 years governing experience–require at least six votes to send legislation to Congress.
If President Xi claimed that global warming is a hoax he would be regarded as autocratic, not democratic.
If he wants a new climate policy and persuades five colleagues to support it, he can push it into the trials pipeline but, without solid trial data, he can’t propose legislation and the popularly elected, unpaid congress has proven willing to delay leaders’ pet projects for decades.
Data-driven democracy has steadily narrowed the gap between public expectations and government capacity, which is why Chinese support for government policies stands at 96 percent, higher than even Switzerland’s or Singapore’s and far higher than our twenty percent.
Operationally, American presidents resemble the medieval monarchs upon whom their office was modeled, as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, observed,
“We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”.
Our presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war.
No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things.
The president cannot even choose his prime minister (always his strongest rival for the presidency), can only make decisions with 6–1 or 7–0 support from colleagues and can’t hire or fire officials, elect, assign or suspend members of Congress.
President Obama’s healthcare initiative relied on his popularity and promises whereas, as Stanford VC Robin Daverman explains, China’s initiatives rely on math:
“China is a giant trial portfolio with millions of trials going on everywhere. Today, innovations in everything from healthcare to poverty reduction, education, energy, trade and transportation are being trialled in different communities. Every one of China’s 662 cities is experimenting: Shanghai with free trade zones, Guizhou with poverty reduction, twenty-three cities with education reforms, Northeastern provinces with SOE reform: pilot schools, pilot cities, pilot hospitals, pilot markets, pilot everything. Mayors and governors, the Primary Investigators, share their ‘lab results’ at the Central Party School and publish them in ‘scientific journals,’ the State-owned newspapers. Major policies undergo ‘clinical trials,’ beginning in small towns that generate and analyze test data. If the stats look good, they’ll add test sites and do long-term follow-ups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three major provinces. If a national trial is successful the State Council [China’s Brains Trust] polishes the plan and takes it back to the 3,000 Congresspeople for a final vote. It’s very transparent and, if you have good data and I don’t, your bill gets passed and mine doesn’t. People’s Congress votes are nearly unanimous because the legislation is backed by reams of data. This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time: your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country, you’ll be a front page hero and you’ll be invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to find solutions is intense”.
China is doing this right. America is just running around in circles playing games (politics) and servicing the millions of leeches that live off the system. No wonder nothing can be completed in the USA.
Substantively, China has won her battle for survival and is now militarily and economically impregnable, so authoritarian giants like Mao and Deng are no longer needed.
Today, researchers, experts, media, academics, stakeholders and obstreperous citizens set the agenda.
Since 2000, China has allowed foreigners to conduct surveys and publish apolitical results without submitting their questionnaires and Harvard’s Tony Saich, who’s been polling there for over a decade reports, in Governing China, that ninety-six per cent of Chinese are satisfied with their national government and, according to Edelman’s 2016 Report, almost ninety percent of Chinese trust it.
Financially (we exclude financial democracy from polite conversation but the Chinese don’t), ninety-five percent of poor Chinese own their homes and land and the Chinese own, in common, the commanding heights of their economy– banks, insurers and utilities.
And Inequality is being effectively addressed.
In its 2017 study, Global Inequality Dynamics, America’s National Bureau of Economic Research reports that, though the bottom half of Chinese saw their share of national income fall from twenty-seven percent to fifteen percent after 1980, Americans’ share collapsed from twenty percent to twelve percent.
Simultaneously, China’s top one percent captured thirteen percent of all personal income, but America’s elite grabbed twenty percent.
“We can reasonably expect the virtual elimination of extreme poverty in [rural] China by 2022”.
Every Chinese–not just the poor–has doubled her income every ten years for the past 40 years, an extraordinary improvement in income mobility and the inverse of our experience.
“rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class”.
Whether or not we’re willing to call China’s 20th century system democratic, it’s clear that they’ve improved on our quaint, eighteenth century model.
How long before they start selling the new, improved version of democracy? Yes, the Chiense version of democracy is light-years vastly improved over that clunky oligarchy model that exists in Washington, D.C..
Though this claim enrages many Westerners, regardless of the metric employed, electively, popularly, procedurally, operationally, substantively, financially, and technologically,
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
- Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
To understand China and how they view defense, you should understand their history. They have over 5000 years on nearly continuous warfare. They have evolved within this reality.
To understand China you must understand that they have evolved though over 5000 years of wars, and bloodshed.
Its more modern missiles out-range ours in every weight and class thanks to the tight coupling between their world leading chemists and rocket propellent manufacturers.
Russian weapons systems fill any gaps.
Morale.
A highly cohesive society, the Chinese, by a full 95% support their government’s policies and most are willing to fight for their country. They are fiercely patriotic. No matter what the Western media might say otherwise.
A highly cohesive society, the Chinese, by a full 95% support their government’s policies and most are willing to fight for their country. They are fiercely patriotic. No matter what the Western media might say otherwise.
The Future.
By 2025, nine provinces will enjoy higher average incomes than the US. By 2040, all will.
By 2025, nine provinces will enjoy higher average incomes than the US. By 2040, all will.
Conclusion
As large and great as America was, it is now in decline, and the Chinese nation is on the rise. Every indicator, on just about every level, confirms this. It is a fools errand to ignore this fact and to try to stymie this natural progression of the human species.
The smart and intelligent will recognize this and try to personally profit from this growth.
The sunset of the United States as a global empire.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
There is a sizable majority of the American (and by extension, globalist) oligarchy believe that they will be able to “ride out” the coming “shit-storm” of societal upheaval slated for America. They have bought land, and established residences, and constructed mini-fortresses in far away lands for precisely this purpose. Well, I am going to be the first to lay out the truth; you all will not be able to avoid your comeuppance.
It’s coming.
It’s heading and barrelling right down upon all of us, and this time, the oligarchy will be not be spared.
The American second civil war will not be like Bosnia, Rhodesia, Rwanda, or any other revolutionary messes. You know the ones. Where the wealthy creates a situation, and then skedaddles off to a “safe haven” to wait out the societal reconstruction.
Take note. This time is different.
We are coming after you.
The world is connected. There’s a Burger King and Pizza Hut on Tutuila island, for goodness sakes! Internet is everywhere. We know where your “hidy holes” are, and who built them, and when, and what mechanical systems you utilize. We know which planes you fly, who pilots them, and where the pilots families reside.
We know a lot more than you think we know, and (drop the bullshit) you know that us “deplorables” are not at all the under-educated white racists that you so loudly proclaim. We are watching you all with seething anger.
I met Lloyd Blankfein at a Super Bowl. It was the New England Patriots and the New Jersey Giants. And Blankfein came up to me, “I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.” And I said, “The hell I don’t! You run Goldman Sachs. I know who –” and he was stunned that I knew who he was. He said, “I know who you are,” like, “I know who you are. Ha-ha. I know what you’re up to, but you don’t know who I am.” “Oh, yes, I do.”
-Rush Limbaugh
We are chomping at the bit for an excuse to come after you all. It’s gonna be glorious.
Factory
workers, with their company name badges, in the parking lot of their
employer. Two dead and one dying with his legs shot off. He and his
co-workers had no idea that “world war III” would break out while they
were trying to clock in at work. When one group of people identify
another group, and target them with hate, and violence, it only
escalates. It gets worse. Eventually there is whole-scale blood shed. Do
not be under the illusion that it will never happen in America. There
are enormous groups of people just chomping at the bit to attack
conservatives and traditionalists. All in the name of a progressive
utopia.
See how easy it was to find this information, on just a three key-word search. Very easy.
But you know, escape anywhere will be fraught with problems. We, as humans, are all interconnected. He have histories, associations, and ties. And, it’s not all “black and white” internet data streams either. It’s personal. It’s visceral.
It's not going to be like you all think. With some kind of race genocide, on top of political machinations, with overtures of hicks riding around like some scene out of Mad Max.
There are going to be elements of WWIII, and WMD. There's going to be a great deal of political and sociological changes, and you are right to realize that "blue areas" in America will not be safe.
But you are wrong to think that you all can sneak away and go somewhere where you will be forgotten. You will NOT be forgotten.
Let that sink in.
And, it’s all going to come back and haunt you.
What? You think that you don’t have siblings, who are married with kids? You think that they are immune from the consequences of your evil machinations? You think that you are NOT on watch lists? You think that your behavior is not tracked? You think that your “connections” in whatever government entity will protect you?
Listen up.
The world is not a new “enlightened”, and “progressive” reality where wars are long behind us. Where citizens will turn in their weapons willingly to be serfs under a wise Kingly leader. Nope. Those are all imaginary fantasies that many of you all believe.
They are not true.
Most of human history has been fraught with terrible, terrible battles and conflicts. Where entire blood lines were executed. Where women, if they were lucky, were enslaved as sex slaves, while everyone else were killed. Know your history. Entire cities were decimated. Men, women, children, even the dogs and cats. All killed and the ground salted afterwards.
The time has come that you all must start to live like the Kings of old. With poison testers, thrice-tested body guards, and loyalty oaths that are rock solid. You will not be able to hole-up behind strong stone walls. You will not be able to escape to a land where you will be unknown and untraceable. You will not be able to escape the wrath of your fellow citizens who have spent decades watching you cart your weight around and lord over us.
We are coming for you.
Know your history. This is what really happens when a particular group comes to power and their enemies are disarmed. It is never pretty. Know your history.
You think that your accents, behaviors, and lifestyle won’t give you away. You think that being a flabby old white dude walking on the beach of Mahebourg on Mauritus will be overlooked? Is that what you think? Do you actually believe that an extensive underground lair in Dunedin will protect you? Hey! Am I being specific enough for you? Or, perhaps you think that you will be different…
We are coming for you.
No, you do not have to worry about one singular person. Personally, I not going to do Jack Shit. But what you will need to worry about is the consequences of your support… in all the myriad of ways… for the coming Shit Storm that is going to engulf the United States into a conflagration of an unparalleled magnitude.
Read your history books. You cannot simply take on a defensive posture and hole up like some hermit in a monastery while Rome burns, or the Huns sack your city, rape your women and torture everyone else.
The “bubble” of civility is coming to an abrupt end.
Graphic photograph of a capture and subsequent rape of a young girl by German soldiers. Know your history. This will be common. Know your history.
It had a good run. At least in America, it did. Eighty years. That’s long enough to assume that things will always be a certain way, and full danger is really only the stuff of nightmares. Well, it is ending.
In large part because of your actions.
As such, the historical “normal” is returning. Buckle up. You and yours are all in the cross hairs.
Greek authors rarely go into any detail when describing the fall of a city, so if we want to know what this really means, we are to some extent forced to use our imagination. However, it's clear from what little we hear that Xenophon's 'universal law' usually meant 3 things:
All movable property was taken
All adult men were killed
All women, children and elderly men were sold into slavery.
The first of these points is least well attested, but probably most widespread. Every warrior who was sent against an enemy settlement would hope to come away with a profit.
Homes could be stripped of furniture and metal objects; temples could be robbed of their dedications and temple treasuries emptied. If there was time, even the rooftiles and wooden fittings of houses could be torn off and carried away.
The simple fact that large amounts of ancient coinage and jewellry was preserved in its hiding place (buried, thrown into wells, etc.) shows that people were quite concerned to keep their valuables out of the hands of greedy invaders.
The second point is better known, because it was a matter of justice and pride. When a city was attacked, it could choose to surrender; if it did not, it forfeited any claim to mercy. Those who had decided to resist their enemies would get what they deserved. The most explicit example of this is the fate Agamemnon desired for Troy:
Not a single one of them must escape sheer destruction at our hands. Not even if a mother carries one in her belly and he is male, not even he should escape. All together they must be exterminated from Troy, their bodies untended and invisible.
-- Iliad 6.57-62
There are loads of examples from Greek history of sieges ending with the slaughter of all adult men. These massacres removed the defeated community's ability to fight and ensured that there would be no further resistance.
The third point arises from the fact that the Greeks seem to have considered it barbaric to kill captured women and children as well as men. The few examples of this in Greek history were condemned as savage. Once the needs of revenge had been satisfied, the remaining population was instead considered a potential source of profit:
When they were delivered to her by the Persians, Pheretime took the most guilty of the Barkaians and set them impaled around the top of the wall; the breasts of their women she cut off and planted around the wall in like manner. As for the rest of the Barkaians, she told the Persians to take them as plunder.
-- Herodotos 4.202
There was substantial money to be made from this, which is why commanders sometimes tried to restrain the bloodlust of their victorious troops. Even if it was just, as well as satisfying, to kill the defenders, it still amounted to the destruction of a source of income:
Dionysios' entire army burst into the city (...) and now every spot was a scene of mass slaughter; for the Sicilian Greeks, eager to return cruelty for cruelty, slew everyone they encountered, sparing without distinction not a child, not a woman, not an elder. Dionysios, wishing to sell the inhabitants into slavery for the money he could gather, at first attempted to restrain the soldiers from murdering the captives, but when no one paid any attention to him and he saw that the fury of the Sicilian Greeks was not to be controlled, he stationed heralds to cry aloud and tell the Motyans to take refuge in the temples which were revered by the Greeks. When this was done, the soldiers ceased their slaughter and turned to looting the property.
-- Diodoros of Sicily 14.53.1-3
The beginning of this passage is unique in actually describing a scene that must have been typical when a city fell to a Greek army. Most successful siege assaults were not the result of elaborate circumvallation, but of a surprise assault or betrayal.
As a result, rather than bottling up the helpless enemy from all sides, the attackers usually entered the city from one point and began their rampage from there.
Those left in the city therefore had two choices: either to resist or to flee. The former would result in the brutal fate sketched above - but the latter explains how Greek communities often seem to have survived a lost siege despite the genocidal intent of their attackers. It was often possible for a substantial part of the population to get away.
Their ultimate fate would then depend on what the victorious enemy intended to do with the settlement. Sometimes (especially in the Archaic period) their intent was to seize the territory for themselves; in these cases the town would be razed, and the fugitive population cast adrift. Fear of this outcome was supposed to keep the Spartans in the fight against the Messenians early in their history:
The most wretched of all things is for a man to leave his city and its fertile fields, reduced to the life of a beggar, wandering with his mother and aged father, his little children and wedded wife. Wherever he ends up, he will be as an enemy dwelling among them. He will succumb to need and detestable poverty, bring shame upon his family, disgrace his splendid looks. All forms of dishonour and misery will dog him. Since this is how it is and no one cares for or respects a wanderer or his offspring at all, let us fight hard for our land and die for our children without sparing our lives.
-- Tyrtaios fr. 10.3-14
If they had friends elsewhere, they might be able to obtain a temporary home, or even gain resident status and a home away from home, as the Plataians did at Athens when the Spartans razed their settlement in 427 BC.
In the Classical period, the intention was often rather to plant settlers on the conquered territory in order to expand the victorious city's number of land-owning citizens. This is what Athens did with the land of most of its defeated enemies from 506 BC onward. In such cases, the captured city might be reinhabited - at times by the new settlers along with the old population of women and children, whom they took as wives or slaves.
Alternatively, once due vengeance had been exacted, the remnants of the city's population could simply be allowed to return to it, often subjected to tribute and an imposed political regime. When the Athenians finally lost their fleet at Aigospotamoi in 405 BC, fear washed through the city, because the Athenians fully expected to meet the same fate that they had inflicted upon other Greeks throughout the decades of their Empire - the eradication of their community, the death of their men, and the sale of their women into slavery. However, for reasons that are still debated today, the Spartans decided to spare them. They got away with "only" a sack, the destruction of their walls, and the imposition of the tyrannical yoke of the Thirty.
- What actually happens when a city is sacked?
You should have paid attention to history class. The historical normal is one where no one is ever safe. It is always a short bubble of time, no more than one or two generations in length where people can live together in some sort of sanity.
But that bubble always pops, and the people living their nice safe lives are often overtaken by the shock and brutality of the reality that will overwhelm them.
We
know what will happen. It has been well documented. People will be
collected. They will be rounded up into urban areas, or centers. The men
will be separated out from the group. They will be led to an isolated
area, a cellar, a warehouse, a cluster of tree, an area behind a
bulldozer. They will then be held down by two people and shot dead.
We are coming for you.
It’s going to be historical. It will be Biblical, and it will consist of many elements that are not at all “enlightened” and “progressive”. It will be raw and unbridled.
Who are “we”?
We
have learned all about the great con game, and we are fed up. We know
know what is going on and we are pissed, and desire real, substantive
change. Now, for those of us who have awakened from the con, it is time
for a clean break – a refusal to accept that anything over the past 60
years was any good…a desire, that is, to move forward in an entirely
new way, unshackled to whatever we might have said or done in the past.
Like water, we are not one set person, but rather a very lose and amorphous collection of many well-educated people that will not allow instigators, and criminals to scurry away unscathed. It won’t be me, but I’m telling you that it will be others. And they won’t have any set plans, no set maps, no coordination. But they will see you all for what you actually are; big, plump, juicy, lush, targets to seize and use for purposes that you do not want to read about.
Yet…
Yet, there is still time. You can alter your future and atone for your sins. Your future does not need to be that of fertilizer spread out upon a glassed-over barren wasteland. You can change. You can start taking action to prevent the crisis that is barrelling straight down the Pike for us all. You can make a difference.
Yes, YOU!
Well… listen NOW.
But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?I see pitchforks.
- On Friday Jun 27, 2014 at 12:04 pm Michael Krieger posted an article where he offered up a warning for thouse oligarchs about the coming shit-storm and what you can do about it.
He and others have warned you.
Once
a political ideology takes power, they are ruthless in their treatment
of opposition. They will kill you, and if you are a woman, they will
rape you and then kill you. There will not be any mercy. It is better to
die fighting when they come to your house, than to accept the lies that
they will put you into “protection” for your own best interests.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.
There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
The is something about money, wealth and power that corrupts. It corrupts everyone it touches, and no one is immune. If you are wealthy then you are corrupted. There are no exceptions.
You might not think that you are corrupted.
You might, somehow, think that you are different. “Just one of the guys that got lucky.” You are deluding yourself.
The “freedom from need” corrupts the soul. Thus, the individual finds other pursuits to occupy the void in their being.
"What I do care about is the kind of power that such money can buy, and how that power is then abused to purchase politicians and run roughshod over entire societies. I have also been disgusted with the fact that the 0.01% as a class seem self-absorbed, apathetic and delusional when it comes to the catastrophe the current economic and financial system is reaping upon the planet. So busy are they patting themselves on the back and scrambling to acquire that next billion to see what is rapidly unfolding beyond their moats."
- Michael Krieger
And that is where you are all.
You might consider yourselves smart, intelligent, lucky, fortunate, or whatever.
But you are not.
You have forgotten so much.
The
progressive liberal communists rounded up anyone who could possibly be a
threat to them. They loaded them into trucks. They tied their hands
behind their backs, and they killed them.
You have forgotten, or maybe never had the experience of being a most valued employee; working 14 hour days for months in a row, earning the company millions of dollars and then you suddenly being let go on Christmas eve. Coming home to a shocked wife, with the baby screaming for food, and you being forced to go into your meager savings… savings that will be depleted in a week… to buy some day-old vegetables, and on-sale food-stuffs.
That’s America for the last fucking three decades you God damn son-of-a-bitches!
You think that we are going to turn the other cheek and not find a scapegoat to roast over some burning embers? Maybe you weren’t the the person who handing out the pink-slip, or the manager that approved it, or the VP that authorized it, or the President that demanded it. But all of you… EVERY… FUCKING… ONE… contributed.
We will never forget.
Your time is coming.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
Yes.
Inequality is one aspect of it. There are “haves” and “have nots”. But that’s not the point. Many of us watched our life fall apart before our very eyes, not because we were lazy while we toiled in the company, but rather instead to make the bottom-line look better to the investors of the companies where we were employed.
We see pictures in history books and say, “nah that could never happen here”. The roads are dirt. The people are wearing military clothing. There isn’t anything that looks like a part of America in the pictures.
This attitude… one of us being just a useful tool… like a broom or a toilet brush… has altered the emotional fabric of America. And, yes, part of the turmoil that you see all over America today is a direct result of this arrogant behavior.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is
intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society.
Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will
disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
Oh, do not be under the illusion that the situation and the contributors can all be quantified on some sort of chart. They cannot. Like the school kid relentlessly bullied by the school-hall bullies, an anger has been pent up for decades.
You do not want to be on the losing end of that stick.
During
these times and types of conflicts it is NORMAL for women, and girls to
be abducted, raped repeatedly and then killed. This is a historical
norm.
The only way that you avid this fate is to confront it.
Face on. Right now.
Do good works, and stay out of politics. Help people.
In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
You know that this is coming. Its not a surprise.
You all are not fools. Indeed, you all are investing in property, safeguards and insurance plans.
ISIS
sex slave at a slave auction in an occupied region of Syria. During
periods of change, the plight of women is always a dangerous one.
What I am saying is that clutching your bags of gold and scurrying off to your rat-hole in some remote location is not the answer. Historically it will not end up like you think. This will not be like a Hollywood movie.
Instead, it will (more) be like a barricaded city that tries to deal with an overwhelming and vicious Mongol horde.
Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
Imagine that you and your family are living in one of those cities, one thousand years ago.
It’s a very large city for the time. With large stone walls that tower up many, many stories high. You have a great life, based on trade along the “silk road”. You are wealthy. You have a large spacious home. You have a beautiful family, servants, fine clothes and a home filled with fine arts, laughter and parties.
You are aware of the coming Mongols.
You have discussed this matter with your other wealthy friends. They all have strong political connections and everyone reassures you that there is nothing to worry about. Most of the Mongols are over-rated they say. Plus they have provided reassurances that our military, with the best fighters in the world are more than a match for them. They even took you on a tour of the military barracks and you saw first hand how well organized they were.
Rather than agree to the demands of the Mongols, the most intelligent in the city advised that the rulers confront the Mongols with their superior military.
And so a strong force of 20,000 of the best warriors in the city left the city gates and marched forward with trumpets blowing to confront the horde.
You don’t know what will happen. But you have been reassured that your military will be victorious. After all, they have never lost a battle for at least four decades.
Still you worry.
All you know is that the military went out one week ago and never returned. The King gave you every assurance that things are proceeding well, and that you need not worry. But the truth is that you feel very uneasy.
This is a joint suicide by a Burgermeister and his family upon news that the Americans were entering the town.
The wife says that people are beginning to talk and rumors are starting to fly about what happened at the battle last week.
You cannot put your finger on it, but there is this feeling of dread and gloom that you cannot shake. yet, the sky is blue. The birds are fluttering in the trees, and the boys are playing in the yard. Your daughter just bought a nice silk dress that she is going to wear to a religious celebration in two days. Yet, that dread persists.
“Maybe I should flee?” you ask yourself.
Maybe.
At Politicon 2019 in Nashville on Saturday, during a "conversation" with Never Trumper MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, James Comey said, "Our leaders must reflect the glue that holds us together. They can’t be people who lie all the time. They just can’t. And I hope people see that’s true whether they are Republicans or Democrats.
Wallace then asked, "What if he wins again? Will you still believe that?"
Comey said, "I will be, from my new home in New Zeland, I will still believe in America."
-Townhall
Do you want to place a bet that what Comey says will come true? That he will be safe and forgotten in New Zealand?
Do
not think that in today’s “modern” and “enlightened” society that we
are beyond mass genocide against a particular race, or group of people.
Here are people who were seized out of their homes at the dead of night
by militarized police (the Federal Police), handcuffed with wire-ties
(behind his back) and then killed and dumped in a mass grave. Like this
poor fella. I am quite sure that the person putting the wire-ties on his
clasped wrists was very polite and nice about it. Cool and
professional, most certainly. Then he was handed over to others. Those
others then killed him like one would step on cockroach. And, with just
as much care. What? You think America can’t relive the Bosnia
experience?
Or do you think that he will be in chains before he can ever reach an airplane? Or, barring that, seized by the NZ authorities upon the direction of the American government?
All of you are delusional.
Raped and then killed. This is the fate for most targeted women from the ages of 10 to 40. Those outside will probably just be killed.
You keep on dancing near the fire, unaware that you are dowsed in kerosene and that a single spark can set you, and those around your alight.
Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
Grbavica where a huge complex was set up for the mass internment and rape of women. This is what it looked like at the tail end of the war. 1996.
People! You have jumped over the turnstiles, and gobbled up all the money that you can. Then you set up systems to keep it all for yourself. And somehow you think that the rest of us hasn’t noticed.
Well, we have, and we are royally pissed off over it.
Wal-Mart is our nation’s largest employer with some 1.4 million employees in the United States and more than $25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. Wal-Mart won’t (and shouldn’t) volunteer to pay its workers more than their competitors. In order for us to have an economy that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages—not just ask politely.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
All of you are fucking guilty.
And if you live in an upscale neighborhood, YOU WILL BE TARGETED.
There will be no avenues of escape. You are FUCKED.
While Donald Trump is undoing many terrible things, nothing is being done about the pre-genocidal conditions already put in place. Unless action is taken by the President or Congress, it is just a matter of time before they will be mobilized against YOU and your family. Take notice.
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and
the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.
-From Nick Hanauer’s excellent Politico Op-Ed: The Pitchforks are Coming…For Us Plutocrats
Back to the wealthy man living in his villa in the upscale part of the city-state that he inhabits…
Last night over some chicken and some fine vintage wine, you discussed what was going on with a fellow trader friend of yours. He had entered the city and was planning on leaving in the morning. He said some worrisome things.
He said that he used to trade to numerous cities to the East. But he no longer trade with them any more. They no longer exist.
When we went to visit them, they were abandoned. Some still had the walls intact, but most of the homes were empty. Some wild dogs and a goat or two were all that remained. He said that most of the homes no longer had roofs and it looked like the entire city was sacked and set ablaze.
Some had piles of bones blowing in the sand and trapped under broken stone, bricks and walls. Farm fields of plants weren’t harvested and allowed to go fallow. The trees were ripe with apples, but no one collected them.
He couldn’t tell what happened.
All he said was that it looked like it came upon everyone suddenly and no one was spared. Even the churches were burned to the ground. What was not looted, was intentionally destroyed.
He said that he was going to leave in the morning and wanted the family to leave and accompany him.
960403-A-2407B-008
Photo of a suburb in Sarajevo Bosnia after the fighting that took place
between the Serbians and the Muslims,taken by Specialist Nadine Byrnside
from the 55th Signal Company Combat Camera team, in a place called
Grbavica on 3 April 1996.
In Conclusion.
I tip my hats off to Mr. Hanaeur and Mr. Krieger. I think you all should listen to them. But if you choose not to, that is fine. Then listen to me. Your fucking days are numbered, and if America burns, then do not rest easily, for you will be searched out. Located and slaughtered.
It will be historical.
Heed my words. There will be no place for you to hide.
I am talking about the annuals of history and the role that you will play in it. It will not be pretty. But there are things that you can still do about it. You can still make a difference. And running away to hide is not one of them.
This
is what happens to people who do not “go along” with the “new” way of
doing things. It is never pretty. You are rounded up. You are
handcuffed, and you are killed. That is the way it has been for
thousands of years. It never stopped. It will continue.
It is time to atone for your sins. Do not put it off.
Now, you are probably wondering what happened to the family that was awaiting the news of the battle between their city and the Mongol hordes…
Large Urban Cities…
Worse was to come in 1221 — ‘a year to live in infamy’. While Genghis’s other armies had been busy in the east, threatening Tbilisi in Georgia and terrifying the Christian world, Tolui, one of Genghis’s equally reprehensible sons, took Merv (in modern-day Turkmenistan), one of the largest cities in the world.
Promised safety, the citizens surrendered and emerged from behind their walls. Tolui ‘surveyed the masses dolefully gathered with their possessions, mounted a golden chair and ordered mass executions to commence’.
They took four days and nights to complete.
Genghis’s rotten fruit did not fall far from the tree. Terror — and the certainty of its visitation — was a major weapon in Genghis’s arsenal: decapitated women, children and even cats and dogs were reputedly displayed.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
Complete devastation…
Incursions into Southeast Asia were largely successful, most factions agreed to pay tribute, and only the Invasions into Vietnam and Java failed.
Europe was devastated by the Mongols.
They destroyed near enough every major Russian city, and invaded Volga Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary.
If rumours spread that the Mongols were coming, then it would cause a mass panic, and some would run to safety.
There was no guaranteed way to defeat the Mongol hordes, they continuously defeated much larger armies, so numerical strength couldn’t protect you.
Mongol conquests would leave once populous and flourishing areas as wastelands, with little to no people, those remaining would be slaves.
-ESKify
The Women…
Genghis Khan had so much power that he could do whatever he wanted.
For instance, when Genghis occupied some new area, he would kill or enslave all the men and share all the women amongst his tribe.
Genghis Khan would even make beauty contests of captured women to decide which woman is the most beautiful one.
Yeah, he was having his Miss Universe competition before it was cool. So, the queen of those beauty competitions would win the privilege to become one of many Genghis Khan's women.
Rest of the Mongolian army would share all the other contestants.
-The Richest
The Wealthy…
Genghis Khan was the most feared human of the 13th century, who could destroy dynasties just by moving his little finger. He created the Mongol Empire all by himself and earned his eternal spot in the history books.
However, a lot of people had to suffer for Genghis Khan to succeed. Oh yes, the Mongolians were known for their horrendous torturing techniques.
One of the most popular was pouring molten silver down the throat and ears of a victim. Genghis Khan also liked bending his enemy's back until the backbone snapped. If that sounds barbaric, skip this next part.
So, the Mongols once celebrated victory over Russians in a very bizarre way. They picked all the Russian survivors, dropped them on the ground and put a heavy wooden gate on top of them.
Then, Genghis Khan and the entire Mongol army had a huge banquet on that wooden gate. They ate, drank, and watched how Russians were dying one by one from the suffocation, pressure, and wounds.
-The Richest
A return to the old ways…
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”
-Genghis Khan.
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Some prepper humor…
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
From 2016 through 2019, the United States under the guidance and direction of Donald Trump was enmeshed in trade negotiations with China. For most of that time, the negotiations were rocky and a period of discord and confusion reigned. Things become worrisome, and as a result, the world economy went into a recession and things began to take on a very gloomy outlook.
Then, in October of 2019, it was announced that the trade talks were resolved and that Phase One of the trade negotiations would be implemented. Here we discuss these issues, trends and the related affairs that colored this sequence of events.
There is a lot to learn here, as it involves diplomacy, expectations, society, culture, manufacturing, the global environment, and industry. Rather than look at it from the simplistic black-and-white “cardboard cutout” of how it is presented in the American media, let’s look at it in detail. It’s a very interesting study of the affairs of men and nations.
We will start with a recap.
A Brief Historical Recap
The US-China trade dispute erupted publicly in March 2018.
Its origins, however, go back to August 2017, when the Office of US Trade Representative (USTR) issued a preliminary report charging that China’s ‘2025 Plan’ projected passing the US in next generation technology development (5G wireless, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity).
China’s plan represented a fundamental challenge to US global economic—and military—hegemony next decade, according to the USTR.
Made in China 2025 is a strategic plan of China issued by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and his cabinet in May 2015. With it, China aims to move away from being the world’s “factory” and move to producing higher value products and services. It is in essence a blueprint to upgrade the manufacturing capabilities of Chinese industries.
That initial USTR report was followed by a second report released in March 2018. That report concluded and confirmed what the first report had raised. Both reports argued that China represented a threat in nextgen technology development that the US could not ignore.
Dr. Christopher Ashley Ford, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, gave a speech at the Multilateral Action on Sensitive Technologies (MAST) Conference, in which he explained that “countries that choose Huawei technology are opening the door to Chinese access to their domestic networks and local companies, as well as potential surveillance by Chinese officials, posing a potential threat to their national security and economic well-being.”
- State Department Highlights Chinese Technology Threats
The trade war with China only then commenced, with Trump imposing an initial $50 billion in tariffs on China imports.
An initial tentative agreement was reached between the main negotiators, the US team led at the time by US Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, in May 2018.
But you know, that tentative deal was quickly scuttled. The kibosh was put on it and it was shit-canned.
Neocons aborting the plan 1.
This is because US neocons, China hardliners, Pentagon, and the US Military Industrial Complex and friends in Congressional defense appropriations committees organized their forces and got Trump to nix the deal.
The scuttled deal included some serious concessions by China. That included [1] China agreeing to buy $1 trillion more in US farm goods over five years and [2] agreeing to allow US banks and financial institutions to have 51% ownership control of their operations in China.
These are really big deals.
But, the neocons would not have any of that. They wanted to rule the world and wouldn’t give an inch any way in any manner. Only America will be in charge. Only America can rule, tell other nations how to live and define the trade agreements. And if war is necessary to put other nations “in their place”, then so be it.
China reiterated their earlier (and substantial) concessions over the summer of 2018, but to no avail. The neocons would nave none of it.
The main issue was not the US trade deficit.
Nor IP guarantees.
Nor tech sharing of US companies in China.
Nor even majority ownership of US operations in China.
The main issue was the development of nextgen technologies—AI, 5G, and cyber. US Neocons aligned with the Pentagon-Military Industrial Complex, now led by Robert Lighthizer, the head of the USTR. These neocons did not want any nation to have any kind of technical superiority over America and they would fight it “tooth and nail” and economies, world trade, and prosperity be damned!
America MUST be number one, or nothing.
NOTHING!
Other notable neocons included Peter Navarro, special trade adviser to Trump.
Not to forget the largest neocon of them all, John Bolton, who demanded China slow, and even share its nextgen technology development with the US, or else no deal!
"We want your technology and you WILL give it to us.
If you don't well, we will put every pressure possible on you. And, oh by the way, don't think that we are not capable of planting swine flu to destroy all your pork products, launch revolutions and unrest in your cities, and maybe even sink a few ships if that's what it take to put you all in your place.America is the biggest, the best and the most powerful. Never forget that."
Seriously!
Negotiations stalled thereafter as Trump turned his focus to the NAFTA 2.0 negotiations and the 2020 midterm elections approached.
Six months burned away, and the trade negotiations, were dead in the water. The neocons convinced president Trump to “hold fast”, that China is still a third-rate nation and that the trade “wars” are sending China back twenty years.
But they were deluding themselves.
All the signs pointed to a reality that was at odds with American perceptions. Indeed, the Chinese had many “cards up their sleeves” and many of the assumptions that American advisors had on China were simply not true.
What’s worse, the American people started to notice this.
Negotiations were restarted in January 2019 after the midterm elections, and another five months of negotiations between the parties took place until another tentative deal was reached in May 2019.
Neocons aborting the plan 2.
That tentative deal once again was blown up at the last minute by the Lighthizer-Navarro neocon faction now in control of negotiations, with Mnuchin in tow as a co-chair.
That tentative deal once again was blown up at the last minute by the Lighthizer-Navarro neocon faction now in control of negotiations, with Mnuchin in tow as a co-chair.
As the China delegation prepared to come to the US to sign off in May 2019, the US raised new additional demands:
[1] China had to share its nextgen technology development with the US.
[2] China to cease subsidizing its state owned enterprises.
[3] China to provide assurances it would not devalue its currency to offset US tariffs (which now totaled $200 billion).
[4] The existing US tariffs would remain in effect even if an agreement were reached. They would not be removed.
These were the new terms, “Too bad” they said.
All these demands were publicly communicated in the week prior to the May 2019 meeting in Washington D.C. when the deal was scheduled to be signed off.
It seems like they were totally and wholly devoted to terminating the deal, rather than trying to find some common ground from which to negotiate to in good faith.
Neocons aborting the plan 3.
Understandably, the China delegation came and returned home in a day.
The Neocons had scuttled a deal once again. Nextgen technology was the crux. Either China capitulated on nextgen tech or there was no deal, according to the Neocon-Pentagon position.
The Neocons had scuttled a deal once again. Nextgen technology was the crux. Either China capitulated on nextgen tech or there was no deal, according to the Neocon-Pentagon position.
Trump thereafter met China president, Xi, in Osaka Japan at the G20 meeting. They both agreed once again to restart negotiations. Both also agreed to keep a hold on the level of existing tariffs and not raise them further in the meantime.
But Trump broke the pledge in late July 2019.
On the advice of his neocon trade negotiators, he raised tariffs on the remaining $250 billion of China imports. The understanding with Xi not to raise more tariffs was thus shattered.
China raised tariffs of its own on US goods in response.
On the advice of his neocon trade negotiators, he raised tariffs on the remaining $250 billion of China imports. The understanding with Xi not to raise more tariffs was thus shattered. China raised tariffs of its own on US goods in response.
Trump threatened to raise existing tariffs by another 5%, to 25% and 30%, and levy more on all the remaining China imports in December 2019.
The trade war was intensifying.
China took steps to stabilize the situation. China stopped intervening briefly in global money markets to prevent its currency, the Yuan, from devaluing and allowed it to fall 5%-7%–a move that essentially negated Trump’s additional 5% tariff hike.
China stopped intervening briefly in global money markets to prevent its currency, the Yuan, from devaluing and allowed it to fall 5%-7%–a move that essentially negated Trump’s additional 5% tariff hike.
Stock and bond markets plummeted on the mere prospect of a trade war now morphing into a currency war. The trade war, based mostly on tariff hikes, was about to expand the economic conflict beyond mere tariff measures.
Uh oh!
It will be the USD (inflated with mountains of debt) against a rising currency the yuan (that represents the bulk of world wide manufacturing).
Tariffs were already slowing the global economy. A currency war would quickly spread beyond US and China and inject even more instability into the already slowing global economy.
Both China and Trump peered over the cliff of a pending broader economic war between the two economies—and then backed off.
Both China and Trump peered over the cliff of a pending broader economic war between the two economies—and then backed off.
This continued all Summer until September 2019.
Fast forward, the outcome by September 2019 was yet another resumption of negotiations between the two parties, followed by the announcement of a ‘Phase 1’ deal on trade.
So why did Trump ‘stand down’ and agree to a deal now, after escalating his threats and actions over the summer?
The reasons pointed to American problems as a result of the “trade dispute”. You see, America was not as robust as the government would like everyone to believe. Thus, clearly it had to do with [1] the US economy softening in the 3rd quarter combined with [2] a growing discontent in the farm sector. This discontent is over Trump’s handling of the trade dispute that was beginning to bite hard on US farm sector sales. You see, American farmers were heavily dependent on exports to China.
The reasons clearly have to do with [1] the US economy softening in the 3rd quarter combined with [2] a growing discontent in the farm sector. This discontent is over Trump’s handling of the trade dispute that was beginning to bite hard on US farm sector sales. You see, American farmers were heavily dependent on exports to China.
As the trade dispute between the countries had intensified over 2018-19, Trump had placated farm interests by providing an extra $28 billion in direct farm subsidies.
But it wasn’t enough.
According to some sources, no fewer than 12,000 farms went bankrupt in 2018 alone. The $28 billion was going mostly to agribusiness and not getting down to independent farmers who needed it most.
According to some sources, no fewer than 12,000 farms went bankrupt in 2018 alone. The $28 billion was going mostly to agribusiness and not getting down to independent farmers who needed it most.
Farm sector trade associations were demanding Trump settle the trade dispute and their voices grew louder after the August escalation between the US and China.
"This trade war of YOURS is killing US. Please stop it, resolve it, or do whatever it takes, and do it soon. You are killing us!"
So too were other notable business groups, like the US Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, raising their complaints about the now rapid deterioration of the negotiations.
"I thought that we would come to a mutually fair and agreeable trade agreement. Not one that is contentious, where we are making all the demands, and forcing China into a corner in which they will never agree to. This is not only stupid in the short term, but unwise in the long term. STOP POKING THE PANDA BEAR!"
So too were other notable business groups, like the US Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, raising their complaints about the now rapid deterioration of the negotiations.
The trade war was beginning to clearly impact general business investment and manufacturing in the Midwest US, and not only in the US but worldwide.
The entire global economy started to slow affecting everything and everyone.
US business investment on new plant and equipment turned negative in the 2nd quarter and promised to continue to slump, while business inventory investment was also being pared. If actions wouldn’t reverse, the entire “deck of cards” could go “belly up”.
On January 8 the World Bank released its report Global Economic Prospects, which confirmed what most people had suspected all along. The World Bank estimates global economic growth to decelerate by 0.1 percentage points in 2019, and the decline could continue well into 2020 as well.
Part of this could be attributed to the Donald Trump factor — free trade is being threatened like never before. However, it is also because the world has been awash in cash after 2008. Any attempt to bring back financial sobriety will mean a bit of belt-tightening, and hence an inevitable slowdown.
The trade war was beginning to impact beyond the farm sector.
By August the US manufacturing sector began to contract, joining what had now become a global manufacturing recession.
Moreover, at the end of August it was also beginning to appear that the manufacturing contraction in the US was potentially spilling over to the larger services sector.
While manufacturing PMIs were contracting in the US, the even larger Services sector PMI had begun to decelerate sharply in terms of growth rate.
Chase bank research was estimating that, with the new Trump tariffs on China consumer good imports set for September and December, consumer spending would be reduced on average by no less than $1,000 per household.
Of equal concern, the new round of Trump tariffs on consumer goods now threatened to slow US consumer spending—the only sector of the economy still holding up in terms of growth. If it does in fact impede growth, there could be disastrous consequences for America, Americans the reelection chances of Donald Trump.
"A key measure of consumer spending unexpectedly dropped for the first time in seven months in September, raising concerns about one of the brightest spots in the US economy.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday retail sales fell 0.3% last month, the first decline since February and compared with a 0.6% rise in August. Retail sales account for more than two-thirds of economic output.
Consumer activity, along with hiring, has propelled an economy that has been otherwise roiled by a trade dispute between the Trump administration and China."
Chase bank research was estimating that, with the new Trump tariffs on China consumer good imports set for September and December, consumer spending would be reduced on average by no less than $1,000 per household.
It was this growing economic slowdown in the US—combined with the growing political discontent in the farm sector and from other major non-farm business organizations—that pushed Trump to concede to the Phase 1 deal.
President Donald Trump’s trade war provided the kind of real-world experiment that practitioners of the dismal science so desperately crave, but the results weren’t all that different from what their econometric models predict. In a new paper, “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on U.S. Prices and Welfare,” economists Mary Amiti of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen J. Redding of Princeton University and David Weinstein of Columbia University document what economists have told us for decades: that tariffs are a tax on the consumer.
Trump may say, and believe, that “billions of dollars will soon be pouring into our Treasury from taxes that China is paying for us,” but China isn’t paying the taxes. U.S. consumers are. And as for the president’s belief that tariffs will “cure” the nation’s trade deficit, which he sees as a sign of weakness, today’s data suggest otherwise.
The study found that the waves of tariffs throughout 2018 resulted in “substantial increases” in the prices of intermediate and final goods, the cost of which was borne entirely by U.S. consumers. There was little improvement in the “terms of trade,” which means exporters didn’t lower their pre-tariff prices. And the higher price of imports enabled U.S. producers to raise their prices. What’s more, the tariffs introduced inefficiencies by disrupting supply-chain networks. And the customs duties were insufficient to offset the loss to consumers.
Trump’s 2020 election interests had become more paramount than the concerns of the neocons and militarists who were demanding China capitulate on the nextgen tech issue or no deal.
A rapid about face by Trump occurred by late August-early September and China was once again invited to resume talks in Washington in early October.
The content of the Phase 1 deal reached October 11, 2019 reveals that Trump abandoned his ‘big deal or no deal’ position. He retreated from the neocon ‘non negotiable’ demand, that was holding up a deal since May 2018. This demand was that China capitulate on the nextgen tech issue or no trade deal.
The content of the Phase 1 deal reached October 11, 2019 reveals that Trump abandoned his ‘big deal or no deal’ position. He retreated from the neocon ‘non negotiable’ demand, that was holding up a deal since May 2018. This demand was that China capitulate on the nextgen tech issue or no trade deal.
Placating his farm sector political base to get China to resume purchases, and taking China’s 51% ownership concession desperately wanted by US big banks (i.e. the primary demand of the Mnuchin faction on the US negotiating team), became Trump’s new priority demand in Phase 1.
Neocon John Bolton fired.
The nextgen technology issue so critical to the neocons was clearly demoted and removed from the bargaining table by the US.
In Phase 1 China got its ‘partial’ deal—and absent any concessions on the nextgen tech issue. That was left for a Phase 2 or even Phase 3, as Trump put it in his press conference the same day.
Trump’s advisers believe he wants to impose a 25 percent tariff on foreign autos, hoping to raise the cost on foreign competition and persuade U.S. consumers to buy American-made cars. But critics — which include many of his fellow Republicans and even some of his own advisers — caution it could raise costs for consumers and be a disaster for jobs.
Those critics also (unsuccessfully) urged Trump to not put tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, but this time the stakes are far higher.
So far, the president has tariffs on foreign washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum and some Chinese-made goods. In total, the tariffs cover about $85 billion worth of products. It sounds like a big number, but it is less than 4 percent of the United States’ total imports last year ($2.4 trillion)
Trump got what the China delegation had already offered way back in 2018: i.e. 51% ownership and resumption of big purchases of US farm products.
In short, Trump caved in and in effect “took the money and ran”. His 2020 re-election interests took precedence over the neocon-military concerns over China’s nextgen tech development. He announced to the world that the USA and China came to an agreement and trade deal.
In short, Trump caved in and in effect “took the money and ran”. His 2020 re-election interests took precedence over the neocon-military concerns over China’s nextgen tech development. He announced to the world that the USA and China came to an agreement and trade deal.
What’s In the Phase 1 Deal?
Important to note, the Phase 1 deal itself is not yet a signed agreement. It’s a verbal understanding between Trump and China’s vice-premier and chief negotiator, Liu He.
In his press conference announcing the deal on October 11, Trump admitted the parties were yet to sign off even on Phase 1 but hoped that it could be done within 5 weeks; that is by the time Trump and Xi meet again at the APEC conference in Chile in November.
Increased purchases of farm products by China.
Trump boasted repeatedly the Phase 1 deal included up to $40-$50 billion in new US farm purchases by China.
Over what period was not clear, however. Trump vacillated from saying current levels of China farm purchases were $8 billion, or maybe $16 billion, or was $17 billion at prior peaks.
He really didn’t know. Or maybe it was $20 billion, as one side comment was made in the press conference. It sounded like $40 billion was the target agreed to in principle and over the course of the next two years.
But that was the ceiling apparently.
Trump declared there’s “never been a deal of this magnitude for the American farmer”. Of course that wasn’t true. But the Trump hyperbole and spin was in.
Americans can have controlling interest in their companies on Chinese soil.
Another major agreement area in Phase 1, according to Trump, was China’s confirmation it would allow US companies to own 51% of their operations in China. As Trump put it, “banks will be very very happy”.
More US multinational corporations could now shift even more production to China.
A Suspension of an additional 5% tariff hike over the already applied 25% tariff hike.
On the important tariff front, in Phase 1 Trump agreed only to
suspend his threatened 5% tariff hike (raising rates from 25% to 30%)
due the following week of October.
What’s NOT In Phase 1
What’s not in Phase 1 reveals clearly that Trump clearly capitulated
on the nextgen tech issue in exchange for resumption of farm purchases
and the 51% US bank ownership in China offer.
No Intellectual Property protections.
What was agreed to in ‘IP, or intellectual property’ protections was
left vague in Phase 1. Trump admitted only some IP issues were included
in Phase 1 but didn’t say what. IP was mostly left to Phase 2, per
Trump.
No details on how China can control the value of the yuan.
Equally vague was the understanding in Phase 1 on how China might agree not to devalue the Yuan, its currency. That was key to the US since devaluation would offset Trump tariffs.
Trade representative, Lighthizer, provided some vague commentary during the Trump press conference about how China and the US would meet to work out some rules in that regard. But the devaluation issue itself was irrelevant.
China had consistently over the preceding 15 months of trade war intervened in money markets to keep its currency from devaluing, and did so even as the rising US dollar was the primary cause of the pressure on the Yuan to devalue, as it other currencies worldwide as well.
If anything was driving the devaluation it was the rising US dollar, not a policy action by China to enact a devaluation.
No action on nexgen technology.
Tech issues were in general put off.
As Trump declared, would be “largely done in Phase 2”, or maybe even a Phase 3. And Phase 2 would not begin until and if Phase 1 verbal understandings were ‘signed off’ in writing five weeks from now by Trump and Xi in Chile.
Further revealing no agreement on the strategic nextgen tech issue, Trump indicated the US would continue its policy attacking China’s 5G tech company, Huawei, as well as selectively ‘blacklist’ other Chinese AI companies in the US.
That was, he added, “a separate process”.
So the nextgen tech issue is now a separate track, in effect decoupled from the trade negotiations. It is very unlikely it will be reintroduced in Phase 2, should that subsequent round even occur, which is not likely in any substantive way before the 2020 US elections.
No reduction on existing tariffs.
Also left out of Phase 1 was any US reduction of existing tariffs on
China imports. That continuation of tariff levels included the $160
billion of China consumer goods exports to the US scheduled for December
15, 2019.
China can continue to subsidize it’s state-owned businesses.
The US also apparently failed to attain its demand that China reduce
its subsidies to its state owned enterprises—a strange proposal given
that the US just subsidized its business sector with trillions of
dollars with Trump’s 2018 tax cuts.
How and Why Trump Folded in the Trade War with China
As usual, Trump talked tough before his G20 meeting with Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan.
“China will face 25% tariffs on the $300 billion of the remaining imports,”
It was frightening and terrifying, and the world shook. But lo and behold, he not only came up empty handed, but he also caved in numerous ways, including reversing his ban on Huawei.
What happened?
To summarize Trump’s astonishing loss at the negotiations with China:
He didn’t raise new tariffs (on the $300 billion of Chinese goods)
He reversed his ban on Huawei as well as eight other Chinese hi-tech companies, which were sentenced into the “entity list” just a month and half ago. (Now the whole “Huawei is a security threat” has been revealed as an utter hoax!)
He accepted more talks (though, without any deadline targets).
In exchange for all of this, all Trump got was China’s promise to buy more agricultural goods. Ah yes. Once again soybeans and farmers play an immense role in trade decisions.
Tech Bomb Neutralized
How did this happen?
First, China quickly neutralized Trump team’s “nuclear option”. With that option (or idea) being to shut down Huawei, at all levels, in the United States.
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational technology company that provides telecommunications equipment and sells consumer electronics, including smartphones and is headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.
It’s not a bad play. As it has worked before.
The US was trying the same playbook that worked with Japan in the 1980s. That time, the US banned Toshiba to bully Japan into the infamous Plaza Accord. But, don’t you know, China isn’t Japan!
ThePlazaAccordorPlazaAgreementwasanagreementbetweenthegovernmentsof France, West Germany, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, todepreciatetheU.S. dollarinrelationtotheJapaneseyenandGermanDeutsche Markbyinterveningincurrencymarkets.
-Wikipedia
This time, however, was different.
Indeed, China and Huawei had a surprise for the US team. Huawei announced that it had been preparing for just this kind of an emergency for many many years.
They were ready.
This time, however, China and Huawei had a surprise for the US team: Huawei announced that it has been preparing for just this kind of an emergency for many many years. They were ready.
Huawei’s CEO (Ren Zhengfei) went on the offensive.
With the media hounding him for rebuttals and sound bites, he responded in a measured and methodical manner. In all, he laid out some pretty surprising comments and announcements. In which [1] he claimed that HiSilicon (a Huawei subsidiary) can make most of the semiconductor chips that Huawei uses, and [2] that Huawei has been working on a secret operating system (“Hong Meng” or “Ark OS”) that can replace both Android and Microsoft Windows!
Huawei did not need American semiconductor chips.
Huawei did not need American or Korean operating systems.
Some media outlets reported that this OS, referred to as "Hongmeng OS", could be released in China in either August or September 2019, with a worldwide release in the second quarter of 2020. On 24 May 2019, Huawei registered "Hongmeng OS" as a trademark in China.
- Harmony OS - Wikipedia
The reaction on the social media was unmistakable. Make no mistake. Anyone who was not an American was rooting for Huawei. Yes, the “underdog” which sold 200 million smartphones last year and half of them were outside China.
Hisilicon Technologies Co., Ltd. (海思半導體) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company wholly owned subsidiary of Huawei. Founded in 1991 as ASIC Design Center of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., HiSilicon became an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Huawei in 2004.
- HiSilicon - WikiChip
The reaction on the social media was unmistakable. Make no mistake. Anyone who was not an American was rooting for Huawei. Yes, the “underdog” which sold 200 million smartphones last year and half of them were outside China.
Americans had no idea. The Trump negotiation team were blindsided by this. American industry were stunned.
Now, Google and Microsoft were scared.
What if Huawei really launched a good decent OS that can take on Android and Windows? Worse, what if all the other Chinese smartphone companies switched to Hong Meng?
About 65% of worldwide Android users are using Chinese brands!
China is a major player when it comes to the production of smartphones. In addition to having a hand in many of the most recognizable tech brands, China has a number of its own brands that have become quite popular internationally. Are any smartphones not made in China? You can find a phone that’s not manufactured in the People’s Republic–if you’re willing to hunt.
While the US was trying to kill Huawei, it seemed like Huawei was about to kill Android.
The roles were reversed, and America wasn’t ready.
And the implications are far worse.
For the US would lose all its abilities to spy on the world, if both the hardware and the software are Chinese! Truth be told, this is the real reason why Google started lobbying the Trump administration to lift the ban on Huawei.
As for the US semiconductor companies, they also started seeing signs of Chinese independence in the chip-designing area.
China announced a new home-grown CPU that could compete with Intel and AMD. This would be the first time a non-American company would make its own CPU. And another Chinese company announced it will start mass production of memory chips (DRAM).
China announced a new home-grown CPU that could compete with Intel and AMD. This would be the first time a non-American company would make its own CPU. And another Chinese company announced it will start mass production of memory chips (DRAM).
To summarize: US plans for crushing Huawei fell flat and (depending on your point of view) even backfired.
US plans for crushing Huawei fell flat and backfired.
Chinese Economy
How about China’s economy? Are Trump’s tariffs crushing the Chinese economy? Was China on the verge of collapse due to starvation, famine and a rising tide demanding “democracy”?
Not really.
Of course, you wouldn’t be able to tell, with the American propaganda machine in full force, churning out bullshit…
"China’s economy grew at mere 6 per cent in the third quarter of 2019 compared with a year earlier, its slowest pace in about 30 years, delivering another blow to global growth and underlining many of the challenges facing President Xi Jinping.
The country’s trade war with the US, slowing income growth and cooling manufacturing investment took a toll on the world’s second-largest economy between July and September, according to the figures released by the (American) National Bureau of Statistics on Friday."
- The Worst Chinese Economy in 30 Years
Meanwhile, the American economy is roaring forward ever skyward…
"The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States expanded 2.30 percent in the second quarter of 2019 over the same quarter of the previous year. GDP Annual Growth Rate in the United States averaged 3.20 percent from 1948 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 13.40 percent in the fourth quarter of 1950 and a record low of -3.90 percent in the second quarter of 2009."
- United States GDP Annual Growth Rate | 2019
Um… I might not be the smartest fellow in the world, but I am pretty sure that 6.0% is a lot better than 2.3% growth. No matter how you look at it.
What’s going on?
During Jan-May 2019, China’s exports to the US fell about 5%, but China’s exports to the EU rose more than 14%. And, guess what, EU is China’s #1 trading partner (and ASEAN is the #2 trade partner), while the US is #3.
During Jan-May 2019, China’s exports to the US fell about 5%, but China’s exports to the EU rose more than 14%. And, guess what, EU is China’s #1 trading partner (and ASEAN is the #2 trade partner), while the US is #3.
So, China keeps growing at a healthy pace. In fact, the IMF predicts a healthy 6.2% real GDP growth for China this year!
But here’s the kicker.
While China’s exports to the US fell 4.8%, the reverse — US exports to China — fell by a whopping 24% (for the first five months of 2019).
The talking is over. Now we’re fighting a real trade war — and here on my farm in Iowa, I’m on the front line.
The dispute between the United States and China poses a direct threat to my livelihood. Because of the new and emerging tariffs on both sides, the things I grow will sell for less and the things I buy will cost me more.
This week the price of hogs dropped $12 for every pig I sell. This morning, soybeans are down 40 cents a bushel — a $1.7 billion loss to the value of U.S. soybeans. And if I want to make new capital purchases of machinery or grain bins — anything made with steel or aluminum — I’ll have to pay a higher amount.
For years, we’ve engaged in a war of words with China over trade. American officials have complained about everything from China’s currency manipulation and subsidized industries to a trade deficit that hit a record level in 2017. The difference between what Americans bought from China and what Chinese bought from the United States reached $375 billion last year. President Trump recently demanded that the United States reduce this gap by at least $100 billion.
Last month, Trump fired a salvo, announcing new tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum. China retaliated a few days ago with a long list of new tariffs, affecting about $50 billion of American-made products. Many fruits and nuts, for example, will face a 15 percent tax. So will a variety of stainless steel pipes.
China also slapped a 25-percent tax on pork products — a category that affects me directly because I raise hogs. We try to sell every part of these animals, from the meat to the offal. Even before the trade war erupted, pork prices weren’t very good. Now they have dropped to the lowest prices since 2003.
Now things are going from bad to worse.
The Trump administration responded on Tuesday by proposing more than 1,300 new tariffs on Chinese products, including televisions, chemicals and machinery. They’re also worth about $50 billion, in a tit-for-tat move that aims to match China’s latest round.
Now China has shot back. On Wednesday, it added tariffs to more than 100 U.S. products, including cars and planes. This round affects me, too. If the Chinese impose the announced tariff of 25 percent on soybeans, another major product on my farm, it will lower my price $2.50 a bushel.
China isn’t the only market for my pork and soybeans. Reducing our access to this important destination, however, has global repercussions. The bottom line is that what I produce is suddenly worth less money. My competitors in Argentina and Brazil must be celebrating their good luck.
What will tomorrow bring? Nobody knows. Today, however, is bad enough: My farm business is now under siege, held hostage by a trade war that my neighbors and I never wanted. Yet, U.S. Trade Ambassador Robert Lighthizer says we can’t worry about me, it is the big picture that is important. All I can say to him is that the financial bullets are real, and they hit with real impact on us in agriculture.
To be sure, Trump isn’t doing anything he said he wouldn’t do. He has talked tough on trade from the moment he announced his candidacy. I supported his election, but also harbored deep reservations about his trade agenda. Now my fears have come to fruition.
My hope is that the president will make good on the promise that he’s a master negotiator. Perhaps he’ll bargain his way out this mess. Many of the new tariffs have yet to take effect. They’ve already shaken markets and taken an economic toll, but they are threats rather than realities. Perhaps a round of productive bargaining will sweep them away.
- Impact of Chinese trade war: What American farmers produce is suddenly worth less money
So, US exporters and farmers are hurting real bad.
And Trump cannot win re-election without the support of those “great soybean/corn/pork farmers.”
As for the tariffs on the last $300 billion of imports from China, 600 major US corporations and influential trade groups — Walmart, Nike, Apple etc. — strongly lobbied against the tariffs and held a few days of hearing/testimony with the US Dept. of Commerce.
Behind the doors, corporate lobbyists were probably threatening US politicians — “If you don’t stop these tariffs, we will fund your opponent in the coming election and destroy you!”
Then, to really really rub it in, Apple announced one day before the G20 meeting that they were going to move manufacturing of high-end desktop computers (Mac Pro) from the US to China!!!
Yes, it is true, China can cripple the US economy in many ways. Rather than actually carrying out these threats, the Chinese government warned US corporations whose subsidiaries are making hundreds of billions of dollars every year in China — note that this is not reflected in the official trade surplus/deficit calculations.
Then China made these corporations lobby the Trump administration. This is much more effective.
At the same time, China has also been opening up certain sectors in the last month. For example, Morgan Stanley was allowed to become a majority holder in its joint venture; and US corporations would be free to compete
in oil/gas sectors in China. Such actions create allies who will put
the pressure on US politicians to not escalate the trade war.
As for manufacturing, China is moving ahead with artificial intelligence, robotics, 5G, IoT etc. The Chinese really don’t want to be stuck with low-end manufacturing. If some of these jobs move to Vietnam, Thailand etc., that’s fine.
China needs only four or five more years before it fully catches up with the US in major sectors such as semiconductor, biotechnology and civil aviation. While the Chinese government has officially stopped talking about “Made in 2025,” you can bet it has been accelerated to “Made in China 2023.”
Thus, the Chinese government’s plan is to just ride out America’s temper tantrum for a few more years.
The US needs a completely new paradigm for the 21st century. Unfortunately, Washington elites are totally clueless.
Washington elites are totally clueless.
Sun Tzu said, “strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” The latter approach is more appealing to Trump, the real estate salesman and TV reality star.
Total capitulation? Art of the Deal? There are actually some very interesting global dynamics at play and lessons to learn. First, to summarize, Trump announced a ‘Phase 1’ of trade deal with China.
Moreover, to the dismay of many of his supporters who are virulently anti-China, he said the following: “There was a lot of friction between the US and China. Now it’s a love fest! That’s a good thing.”
Why Trump made the deal with Phase One
As I have written numerous times over the last 1.5 years, the trade war with China was a futile effort.
China is too strong.
The US is too dependent on China.
It is also impossible to move any meaningful amount of manufacturing out of China.
Moreover, Trump is facing re-election and now, to make things worse, possible impeachment by Democrats. He needs a win. The best solution is to get a partial deal and declare victory.
Winners and Losers
While the US didn’t get its biggest demand (structural changes to the Chinese system) Trump certainly won some decent concessions. These include
China opening up its financial sector to Wall Street
US companies operating in China without joint ventures or technology transfer
Currency deal (strengthening Yuan)
Chinese purchase of agricultural products
Winner #1: The people who run the US are the financial guys — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Blackstone, Fidelity, Vanguard, Citigroup etc. These guys don’t give a damn about manufacturing,
which is a low-profit operation. The mega and easy profits are made in
stocks, bonds, mutual funds, insurance, derivatives etc.
The ultimate dream of these Wall Street types is to tap into the Chinese market, which has the world’s largest middle class with the fastest growing wealth. Starting next year, these financial guys will be able to set up fully foreign-owned firms that specialize in futures, securities and mutual funds.
Winner #2: China comes out as a winner, even though it has suffered and compromised quite a bit in the negotiations.
First, the US attack has forced Chinese companies to accelerate their plans for technology independence.
Second, the trade war has helped strengthen the Chinese communist party and has increased the sense of nationalism among the public. China has now proven to the world and itself that it can stand up to the US — it didn’t fold in the trade war; numerous countries have refused to ban Huawei or drop out of the Belt and Road Initiative in spite of a lot of American pressure; and US corporations like the NBA and Apple have bowed to China.
Third, the opening up of China will create competition and eventually improve Chinese companies.
Finally, fourthly this truce will stabilize China’s economy and stop America’s hybrid wars (non-war wars). Indeed, just watch how quickly the protests in Hong Kong fizzle out; and watch how the Uyghur “concentration camp” story gets forgotten by the US media.
Partial Winners: US corporations are partial winners, and US farmers will go back to where they were before.
US corps will be able to export more, when the Yuan becomes stronger.
Of course, it depends on how much and how fast Yuan rises. Also, Trump
says that China has agreed to buy $40 or $50 billion worth of US
agricultural products, but farming is not like a factory where you can
double the output easily. So, farmers will just go back to the status
quo before the trade war began.
Just like Bush didn’t break China, Trump won’t break China by forcing
another 20 or 25% rise in Yuan’s value. In fact, that will work just
fine for China, which wants to (1) move its economy more towards
consumption and (2) make Yuan an international currency.
Losers: First, all the rabid anti-China, anti-communist and anti-globalist conservatives are going to be deeply disappointed.
We are not decoupling with china and, worse, we are becoming more interconnected with China. There’s a big crowd on social media who spew insane things like China is our biggest enemy every day! Followers of Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Gordon Chang, Kyle Bass etc. will be going through the five stages of grief.
Also, the losers will be those who dreamed of manufacturing jobs
streaming back from China to the US. (They may come back 10-15 years
from now when industrial robots are much smarter).
Phase 1 Conclusion, and on to Phase 2
In his White House briefing, Trump also mentioned a couple of times that this deal is good for world peace. Whether he meant it or not, the sentiment is right. The concept of “Chimerica” may have a chance to live a little longer.
However, there is a catch: US elites may still be dreaming of the “Phase 2” of the deal.
What’s in Phase 2
This is the failed dream-plan to stop the rise of China. Many conservatives hope that this will be implemented to put China in it’s “rightful” place.
This includes “structural changes” to China’s economy — basically making China open up its entire economy to foreign banks/corporations and dismantle its socialist system. It is intended to dismantle the Chinese “Communist with Chinese characteristics” system and replace it with American-style democracy…
As if that is EVER going to happen!
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019. Also, we can expect more legislation. The legislation will hamper Chinese interests. Geng Shuang, China’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson, warned the US about consequences. He said that the legislation is the “wrong decision of the U.S.”
He also said, “Chinese side will have to enact effective countermeasures,” according to a CNBC report.
Shuang warned that if the Senate passes the bill, the bilateral relationship between the US and China could deteriorate. The deal will hamper US interests in China.
Notably, China is an important market for US stocks like Apple (AAPL) and Tesla (TSLA). Apple suppliers are located in China. Notably, car sales in China contribute significantly to Tesla’s revenues. However, the above events might give President Trump an extra edge during the trade talks. The legislation needs President Trump’s approval.
-Market Realist
Such changes will mean that there won’t be any state-owned enterprises or government-directed plans like “Made in China 2025.”
From the beginning, US elites were trying to break China like they did with Japan in the 1980s.
In the Plaza Accord, the US forced Japan to double the value of Yen, move car manufacturing plants from Japan to the US, accept crippling sanctions on Toshiba, and handover valuable semiconductor technology patents to the US. All these were possible because the US still occupied Japan. And the lead American negotiator who made it all possible was … Robert Lighthizer … who’s now been leading the charge against China for more than two years.
Unlike Toshiba … Huawei and other Chinese companies now under the “entity list” can survive without US technology or market. Unlike Japan … China is a fully independent country.
Head’s up…
Phase 2 will never happen.
It is highly unlike there will be a ‘Phase 2’ in anything but a token discussion level. And if there is, it is extremely unlikely it will include any meaningful concessions by China on next gen tech—i.e. AI, 5G, cybersecurity.
China has now clearly prevailed in blunting Trump and the neocon offensive in that regard.
For their part, Trump and US military-industrial-Pentagon interests will continue to pursue blocking China on the tech issue in ways decoupled from trade negotiations.
Various other measures will now be the focus, such as attacking and blacklisting China tech companies in the US and even elsewhere among US allies. Perhaps even delisting them from US stock exchanges, as a recent Washington ‘trial balloon’ proposed.
Trump did not go there on the eve of the recent negotiations.
It would certainly have ‘blown up’ the trade deal once again if he had. But that—blacklisting and delisting—remain as likely US tactics in the months to come. For the technology war—i.e. the real war behind the tariffs and trade war—has only just begun between the two countries.
And a broader economic war involving non-tariff measures is almost certain to erupt after the 2020 elections.
A ‘Phase 2’ follow up negotiations is tentatively set for after the Phase 1 sign off in November in Chile. Not much will come of it, however, so long as Trump insists on maintaining the current level of 25% tariffs on China imports to the US.
Trump likes the current level of tariffs and the revenue it brings in, which allows him a somewhat independent source of financing for his domestic programs independent of the US Congress passing legislation and authorization bills which he now won’t get.
On the other hand, Trump may temporarily suspend the planned tariff hikes on $160 billion of consumer goods due December 15, 2019 should the US economy continue to weaken in the 4th quarter, which is more likely than not.
But it will be a temporary suspension, not a dropping of the tariffs.
The 15 month long US-China so-called trade war is over.
There will be further discussions but no significant changes before the US 2020 election. What Trump got in Phase 1 is all he’s going to get.
He’s probably promised the neocons, who have lost out on this Phase 1 deal, even more aggressive action against China companies doing business in the US. That’s their ‘concession prize’.
Worst case, Phase 1 might not even be finalized, should the neocon-Pentagon-Military Industrial Complex faction regroup and try to scuttle the deal, once again for a third time. There’s always that possibility.
-Counterpunch
Meanwhile, China is putting the Neocons on warning… do NOT mess with us.
This is China's most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and it has an operational range of more than 14, 000 kilometers. The DF-41 is capable of carrying about 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads which can hit any target on earth. DF-41 is now the world's longest range missile ahead of US LGM-30 Minuteman which has a reported range of 13,000 kilometers.
- China unveils Dongfeng-41 missiles that ‘can strike US
…the US realized that gunboat diplomacy or nuclear diplomacy are off the table.
For decades, the United States has taken China’s ballistic missile capability for granted, assessing it as a low-capability force with limited regional impact and virtually no strategic value. But on October 1, during a massive military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing put the U.S., and the world, on notice that this assessment was no longer valid.
In one fell swoop, China may have nullified America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. missile defense capability. Through its impressive display of new weapons systems, China has underscored the reality that while the United States has spent the last two decades squandering trillions of dollars fighting insurgents in the Middle East, Beijing was singularly focused on overcoming American military superiority in the Pacific. If the capabilities of these new weapons are taken at face value, China will have succeeded on this front.
The ghosts of Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation made sure that China was prepared for this moment.
A Failed Trump Trade Policy
Trump’s trade war with China is clearly a net failure. Trump could have gotten the same deal back in 2018, more than a year ago. Instead, the dispute was allowed to escalate, with the effect of causing business uncertainty and slowing investment in the US and worldwide due to the 15 month trade war.
The trade war has clearly played a part in the global manufacturing recession now underway, which threatens now to spread to services and consumption and precipitate a general recession in the US economy and possibly even worldwide.
Trump has pushed the global economy to the brink of a worldwide
currency war in the process as well. He has drained $28 billion thus
far from business and consumer spending in order to collect tariff
revenues that he’s diverted in turn to the farm sector in subsidies that
otherwise might not have been necessary. Small business, household
consumers, and failing small farmers have paid the price and will
continue to do so in higher prices from continuing tariffs.
Despite 15 months of trade war with China—and a series of ‘softball’ trade deals with South Korea, Japan, and Mexico-Canada—the US trade deficit as of August 2019 has reached record deficit levels of $55 billion that month and an annual rate of nearly $700 billion a year. The trade wars have been totally ineffective in reducing the US trade deficit—if that was ever the goal.
If we look at the ratio of #exports to #GDP (currently 19.51%) and the #distribution by country (just about 20% to the #US), we realize that only about 3.9% of #China's GDP is coming from exports to the US.
That is less than the annual growth of GDP.
In other words, China's #economy grows by much more than all the exports to the US - every year.
This puts the potential pressure the #USA can put on China via protectionist policies in quite some perspective.
Of course, the actual exports have a multiplier, as suppliers to exporting companies would also suffer from a further closing down of the US economy.
But the main message remains: 80% of Chinese exports don't go to the US (and increasing as trade with #Africa grows), and overall the Chinese economy is less and less dependent of foreign #currency coming from exports. #TradeWar
-Harold Bachmann
Now some humorous Dilbert on this matter…
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
I believe that it is time for all Americans to take a serious re-look at what America stands for; our “democracy”, and our way of life as it exists today. Is it really all that great?
Is America living up to the grand ideals set forth in the “Great Experiment of 1776”?
Or, it is just going to be yet another big mistake heading towards the “great collapse” of society?
I think that a serious reappraisal of [1] what America is, [2] what notions it is founded upon, and [3] how it is structured needs to be re-thought out. It is time to take a good long hard look at [4] what America has become, and [5] how we got here. And [6] what needs to change once [7] corrective measures have been put in place.
I ask this.
Really, is democracy; “rule by popularity” ideal for Americans?
A typical American, inappropriately dressed (obviously), shopping at Wal-Mart. Really, is democracy; “rule by popularity” ideal for Americans? Or should America be run by talented people who earned their role through merit rather than popularity? Think about it.
Can the Constitution be protected from “well meaning”, or “the greedy”, or “evil” such as President Wilson, or FDR, or Obama from rewriting and re-interpreting it to fit their various nefarious ends?
Well, can it?
Because if we cannot, using the current governmental structure, then we must change it into something different.
Indeed, simply hoping that our progeny will be “ever vigilant” is just wishful thinking, and history has proven, for certain, that it does not work. And at that, we must well understand that it will NEVER WORK in the future.
Can the Constitution be protected from “well meaning”, or “the greedy”, or “evil” such as President Wilson, or FDR, or Obama from rewriting and re-interpreting it to fit their various nefarious ends?
What’s going to stop another Wilson, another FDR, another Obama, another Bush from rewriting the Constitution, or reinterpreting it to fit their nefarious ends? What’s it going to take?
What is it going to take?
But my thoughts are this matter are perhaps a little too harsh to the general American public. No one wants to hear that a democracy is flawed, or rather so flawed that America will collapse upon itself within a decade. No one wants to hear this.
Americans have a Pavlovian response to the phrase “freedom and democracy,” and it’s no surprise that so many of them are rooting for the protesters in Hong Kong.
-World Affairs Blog
Well, others, better word-smiths than myself have some things to say about this subject. One of the best comes from Mr. Noonan in his article titled “A Clean Break“. He wrote this article on 29 September 2019, and I personally think that it is brilliant. He isn’t so prone to offending people as I am.
For I earnestly believe that America has neither "democracy" nor "freedom". We just parrot the words without talking a good look around us at what America has devolved into.
Here I present it for your viewing pleasure.
This article is copied as written without much editing aside from some paragraph formatting and the fonts used in this template.
I added some "pull away" text for highlighting and maybe interjected on or two personal comments along the way (though you will be able to easily see that they are from your's truly.)
I have added my own pictures to help illustrate some of his fine points.
After reading the article, I would suggest the reader go to his original article and read some of his other works. This fellow is brilliant and a word-smith.
All credit to the author Mr. Noonan writing in Blogs for Victory.
As the last few weeks have played out in politics, it has forced me to do a complete re-assessment of how I’ve looked at the world for my entire adult life.
To be sure, this reconsideration has been ongoing for about a decade, or maybe a little more, but it has really crystalized out recently. It is time for a complete, clean break with what went before and to chart a new path forward.
As the last few weeks have played out in politics, it has forced me to do a complete re-assessment of how I’ve looked at the world for my entire adult life. It is time for a complete, clean break with what went before and to chart a new path forward. Maybe the American Constitution is flawed in some very serious ways, and it is up to use to seek out those flaws and eliminate them completely.
What Hunter Biden did is nothing new; it isn’t in the least remarkable.
He was merely the recipient of what people in his position routinely receive: a special deal which allows him to be very rich for little or no effort.
Hunter Biden was merely the recipient of what people in his position routinely receive: a special deal which allows him to be very rich for little or no effort.
This way his life can be devoted to what really matters: hanging around with other rich people, attending conferences and galas and generally having a swell time.
And if he decided to follow in Daddy’s political footsteps, the way would be cleared for him in some safe (Congressional) seat.
If you start looking into it – as Matt and I did in our 2007 book, Caucus of Corruption – you just see that it is everywhere. In that book, for political reasons, we concentrated on the Democrat side of the aisle (given that our goal was to show the absurdity of the Democrats 2006 campaign against a so-called “GOP culture of corruption”), but we could easily have written it about politics, in general.
If you start looking into it – as Matt and I did in our 2007 book, Caucus of Corruption – you just see that it is everywhere. In that book, for political reasons, we concentrated on the Democrat side of the aisle (given that our goal was to show the absurdity of the Democrats 2006 campaign against a so-called “GOP culture of corruption”), but we could easily have written it about politics, in general.
Corruption is everywhere in the United States.
What it really shows is that people who go into politics – with a few very rare exceptions – are in it for themselves.
The advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court empowers the superrich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects, to foster pet policies, and to represent pet political enclaves. You have a billion, or even several hundred million, then purchase a candidate from the endless reserve bench of minor politicians and make him or her a star, a mouthpiece for any cause or purpose however questionable, and that candidate will mouth your script in endless political debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for. All legal now.To compound the political felony, much, if not most, campaign financing is now carried out in secret, so that everyday citizens have a decreasing ability to determine to whom their elected officials are beholden and to whom they must now give special access. As recently as the 2014 election, the facts documented this government of influence by secrecy: “More than half of the general election advertising aired by outside groups in the battle for control of Congress,” according to the New York Times, “has come from organizations that disclose little or nothing about their donors, a flood of secret money that is now at the center of a debate over the line between free speech and corruption.”Of this handful, the largest by far is WPP (originally called Wire and Plastic Products; is there a metaphor here?), which has its headquarters in London and more than 150,000 employees in 2,500 offices spread around 107 countries. It, together with one or two conglomerating competitors, represents a fourth branch of government, vacuuming up former senators and House members and their spouses and families, key committee staff, former senior administration officials of both parties and several administrations, and ambassadors, diplomats, and retired senior military officers.WPP has swallowed giant public relations, advertising, and lobbying outfits such as Hill & Knowlton and BursonMarsteller, along with dozens of smaller members of the highly lucrative special interest and influence-manipulation world. Close behind WPP is the Orwellian-named Omnicom Group and another converger vaguely called the Interpublic Group of Companies. According to Mr. Edsall, WPP had billings last year of $72.3 billion, larger than the budgets of quite a number of countries.
– From the Gary Hart article, Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption
Corruption is part of democracy.
They want power and money and attention and fame and praise and so they go into politics – and almost invariably, if they are even modestly successful at winning office, wind up richer than they did when they started.
And it has been going on for a long time, folks; throughout all the Western democracies.
When you study the motivations of those in politics, you discover what drives them. They want power and money and attention and fame and praise and so they go into politics – and almost invariably, if they are even modestly successful at winning office, wind up richer than they did when they started. And it has been going on for a long time, folks; throughout all the Western democracies.
There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.
It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people.
In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland.
In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland.
If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.
…extraordinary democratic coincidences.
Funny, huh? How people from the same family can keep winding up on top. Either they are families of geniuses, or someone is making things happen.
What are the odds that the son of an American Senator would be just the person an oil company needs to pay $50,000.00 a month to?
But, it just keeps happening and happening because, well, that’s just the way it is. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they were at least any good at being an oligarchy!
But they aren’t.
After you study this issue, you discover that it just keeps happening and happening. And the reason why, is because, well, that’s just the way it is. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they were at least any good at being an oligarchy!
Back in Chesterton’s day, there was the cold, hard reality that Winston Churchill was at least as talented as his father, Randolph. There was something there – there was, that is, a justification for Winston getting a leg up (and he did) to enter politics based on his father’s previous efforts.
These days, you get to benefit even if the previous person in line was a complete, rotten failure. And rotten failure is all we’ve gotten – and I’m getting very ecumenical in that, by the way. I’m not excusing anyone on partisan grounds any longer.
To be sure, the Republicans I voted for in the past were at least better than the Democrats I voted against (with the exception of McCain: knowing that I’m the co-author of Worst President, please understand that I believe McCain would have been even worse than Obama proved to be).
But they were only better in degree, not in kind.
Republicans are corrupt.
I mean, let’s face some cold, hard facts here: President Bush the Younger was re-elected with 51% of the vote in 2004 and came into his second term with high approval ratings and a Republican Congress.
With all this, he couldn’t even manage to de-fund Planned Parenthood or NPR!
I mean, let’s face some cold, hard facts here: President Bush the Younger was re-elected with 51% of the vote in 2004 and came into his second term with high approval ratings and a Republican Congress. With all this, he couldn’t even manage to de-fund Planned Parenthood or NPR! He did not care for the conservative cause(s), he only campaigned on them to hood-wink all of us for voting for him. He knew which levers to push, and which buttons to push.
It could have been done, easily, in a budget reconciliation between House and Senate and there would have been nothing the Democrats could have done about it.
On a more personal level, how can public service be promoted as an ideal to young people when this sewer corrupts our Republic? At this point in early twenty-first-century America, the greatest service our nation’s young people could provide is to lead an army of outraged young Americans armed with brooms on a crusade to sweep out the rascals and rid our capital of the money changers, rent seekers, revolving door dancers, and special interest deal makers and power brokers and send them back home to make an honest living, that is, if they still remember how to do so.Our ancestors did not depart Europe and elsewhere to seek freedom and self-government alone. They came to these shores to escape social and political systems that were corrosive and corrupt. Two and a quarter centuries later, we are returning to those European practices. We are in danger of becoming a different kind of nation, one our founders would not recognize and would deplore.In addition to the rise of the national security state, and the concentration of wealth and power in America, no development in modern times sets us apart more from the nation originally bequeathed to us than the rise of the special interest state.There is a Gresham’s law related to the republican ideal. Bad politics drives out good politics. Legalized corruption drives men and women of stature, honor, and dignity out of the halls of government. Self-respecting individuals cannot long tolerate a system of election and reelection so dependent on cultivating the favor of those known to expect access in return. Such a system is corrosive to the soul.
– From the Gary Hart article, Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption
This was “better” than a President Kerry who probably would have increased PP funding, but not really better in that the taxes of pro-life Americans were still going to fund something they consider abhorrent…and which Bush and the entire GOP campaigned on getting rid of.
I know some will say that this is just our GOP screwing it’s base and that the Democrats don’t do that. But, they do.
Both the republicans and the democrats are corrupt to the core. They only care about themselves and their little tribe of corrupt underlings. No one else.
Democrats are corrupt.
Obama was elected in 2008 with 53% of the vote and came into office with a Democrat Congress and a filibuster-proof Senate majority…and he couldn’t even get the single payer health system Democrats say they want.
It would have been easy.
The GOP could have done nothing to stop it. Enact a 10% payroll tax to fund it and just start passing out the cash to people who need health care.
A former senator from Colorado, Gary Hart, has written an extremely powerful and accurate critique of the unfathomably corrupt and crony state of the U.S. government in 2015. It covers several very important angles, including how appalled and disgusted our founders would be at the current state of affairs. How a once great republic has devolved into a thieving oligarchy in which the pursuit of money at power at the expense of the public good has been elevated into something that’s not just tolerated, but actually celebrated and encouraged amongst an ethics deprived status quo.
-Liberty Blitzkreig
That you and I know it would have been a disaster is neither here nor there – our side had lost the election and the Democrats won all the power they could possibly need to make all Democrat dreams come true…and they couldn’t do something like that.
Once you are in politics, it’s all on for party-on good times. You swindle and funnel money left and right and no one gives a damn about the American people. This includes both sides of the Congress, and all their cronies from the war-mongering generals to the intellectuals pushing climate change, and radical social change down our collective throats.
They instead wound up with the abomination known as Obamacare which even if it had worked as planned would still have left millions out in the cold and cost like the devil – but they couldn’t even write something that worked!
Meanwhile, not only did Obama not end the wars they campaigned against in 2008, he started new one’s…
droning the living sh** out of every poor, brown skinned person they could target (well, those they weren’t letting in as unvetted refugees, that is).
A public works bonanza that didn’t create any public works.
A slew of new spending which improved nothing.
This is what the Democrat voters get for investing their time and effort? Yep – in other words, nothing: but lots and lots for whomever is the crony. Democrat cronies made out like bandits. But your average purple-haired Democrat wanting more safe spaces? Not much.
This is what the Democrat voters get for investing their time and effort? Yep – in other words, nothing: but lots and lots for whomever is the crony. Democrat cronies made out like bandits. But your average purple-haired Democrat wanting more safe spaces? Not much.
By that standard, can anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? There have been Teapot Domes and financial scandals of one kind or another throughout our nation’s history. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.What brought us to this? A sinister system combining staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, most of all, the rise of the lobbying class.Worst of all, the army of lobbyists that started relatively small in the mid-twentieth century has now grown to big battalions of law firms and lobbying firms of the right, left, and an amalgam of both. And that gargantuan, if not reptilian, industry now takes on board former members of the House and the Senate and their personal and committee staffs. And they are all getting fabulously rich.Frustrated, irate discussions of this legalized corruption are met in the Washington media with a shrug. So what? Didn’t we just have dinner with that lobbyist for the banking industry, or the teachers’ union, or the airline industry at that well-known journalist’s house only two nights ago? Fine lady, and she used to be the chairman of one of those powerful committees. I gather she is using her Rolodex rather skillfully on behalf of her new clients. Illegal? Not at all. Just smart . . . and so charming.There is little wonder that Americans of the right and many in the middle are apoplectic at their government and absolutely, and rightly, convinced that the game of government is rigged in favor of the elite and the powerful. Occupiers see even more wealth rising to the top at the expense of the poor and the middle class. And Tea Partiers believe their tax dollars are going to well-organized welfare parasites and government bureaucrats.
– From the Gary Hart article, Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption
And as far as the social disintegration we’ve seen over the past 60 years – we’ve been blinded by the Democrats pushing the disintegration that we haven’t noticed the Republicans letting them do it.
And when they have power to roll it back, doing nothing of the sort.
And as far as the social disintegration we’ve seen over the past 60 years – we’ve been blinded by the Democrats pushing the disintegration that we haven’t noticed the Republicans letting them do it. And when they have power to roll it back, doing nothing of the sort. They just smile for the cameras, enjoy their high-priced meals in fancy restaurants, free hookers, and retire for their closed “boys clubs”.
The Administrative state and its regulators, a creation of previous congress’s, have grown into a bureaucracy so entrenched that worker’s can’t even be fired. They lurk in the darkness of their own regulations and use their powers to punish those who fail to comply. Regulators are great for making and executing rules and regulations, and taxing, but not so good at designing those regulations to advance unproven political theories, that most often come undone.
The unrealized dangers of delegating rules and regulations making, is that Congress removes itself from accountability. Legislators govern by theory, proposing ideas that are then delegated to an agency charged to “make” it work. To ensure their schemes work, Congress politicized the Federal judicial benches, including the Supreme Court, to support their legislative agenda regardless of the unconstitutionality, through judicial activism. Judges don’t make laws!
- Why Should We Accept Corrupt Government?
Their actions are disgusting.
And now we see in the Epstein case the reason why it might have all been allowed to happen: Lord only knows how many of the high and mighty are caught in that web…
…but what better way to get out from under that rock than by making the rock legal?
Hey, Paul Ryan, you’re the guy in charge of the House. You’re the Speaker of the House. [1] You had half a decade to figure out what to REPLACE Obamacare with and you came up with … bupkis? [2]. Hey, Paul Ryan, you had more than a hundred days to fashion a piece of legislation after you knew President Trump won — even with all the “budget resolution”, three tranche, inside baseball baloney and it came as a surprise that the Freedom Caucus wasn’t on board? [Pro tip: Check with your own caucus first. OK, that’s better.] Hello, America, Paul, babe — that was your job. We gave you one stinking job — to fashion a clean repeal and replacement of Obamacare — and you were surprised the Freedom Caucus wasn’t genuflecting and kissing your ring? A week out, you tell the President you “have the votes” and the day of the vote you come to the White House and say, “Uhhh, maybe not. Maybe not, Mr. President. Poorly played, Paulie. Very poorly played. [3]. Hey, Paul Ryan, this shit is on you not the President. You suck at your job.
By making you, a normal person, the bad guy if you point out some of the disgusting actions?
Illegal immigration to provide votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Republicans.
Wars which don’t end in victory or defeat.
Enforcing immorality against popular wishes.
Providing government sinecures to anyone who will toe the line – and who won’t be got rid of no matter how corrupt or stupid they prove.
Accepting money from foreign entities who want the United States destroyed.
Will you fucking Republicans stop criticizing President Trump for following through on his campaign promises?
He ran on them. He told you what they were. He won on them. He is delivering on them and you snowflakes act like you just discovered them.
Both sides, all the time – and on top of being this stupidly destructive, raking it in for themselves, their families and their friends. It is time to bring an end to all that. By peaceful means if possible but, ultimately, by any means necessary.
Our peaceful means are “President Trump”.
President Trump is the hero of the common man.
Trump isn’t part of the system, you see.
Dimwits look at his billions and go, “he must be one of them”. But, the bottom line is that he’s not.
He’ll hang out with them. Be friends with them. But he never was of them. He made his own way and got his pile of money…and then looked around and saw, from the 1980’s, what was happening to his country and started to wonder why, and if there were anything he could do about it?
He essentially first let Bill Clinton have his chance.
Then Bush the Younger.
Then even Obama.
But he found out something – it didn’t matter who was in charge, they were all in on it, together. That is, regardless of stated political philosophy, the primary goal of nearly everyone in politics was personal enrichment and making sure no outsider pushed his or her way in.
Trump found out something – it didn’t matter who was in charge, they were all in on it, together. That is, regardless of stated political philosophy, the primary goal of nearly everyone in politics was personal enrichment and making sure no outsider pushed his or her way in.
Trump decided to push his way in.
And now he’s there – and outside of a precious few (Cruz, Paul…and, oddly, McConnell), he’s nearly alone fighting for one thing: us.
The United States of America.
We, the people.
And everyone inside is furious and terrified and so are lashing back as much as they can hoping that something, anything will turn up to get rid of Trump.
And, make no mistake about it, they are already planning on punishing us for electing Trump. They don’t propose to allow this sort of thing to happen again.
And, make no mistake about it, they are already planning on punishing us for electing Trump. They don’t propose to allow this sort of thing to happen again.
And everyone inside is furious and terrified and so are lashing back as much as they can hoping that something, anything will turn up to get rid of Trump. And, make no mistake about it, they are already planning on punishing us for electing Trump. They don’t propose to allow this sort of thing to happen again.
The “big con game” is up.
I’ve mostly stopped arguing with liberals these days – first off, it is pointless but, secondly, I’m starting to pity them; nearly as much as I pity that shrinking number on the right who still stand aloof from Trump: they simply can’t shake free from the line they’ve been fed.
And none of us can get high and mighty about that: to one degree or another, all of us were suckered at one time or another.
No other government is as corrupt as the United States government.
All of us believed in some aspect of the con being used to keep us confused, frightened and divided while the Ruling Class stays fat and happy.
All of us. Including myself.
But for those of us who have awakened from the con, it is time for a clean break – a refusal to accept that anything over the past 60 years was any good…a desire, that is, to move forward in an entirely new way, unshackled to whatever we might have said or done in the past.
We have learned all about the great con game, and we are fed up. We know know what is going on and we are pissed, and desire real, substantive change. Now, for those of us who have awakened from the con, it is time for a clean break – a refusal to accept that anything over the past 60 years was any good…a desire, that is, to move forward in an entirely new way, unshackled to whatever we might have said or done in the past.
We can see what happened; we can see what needs to be done – we can’t trip ourselves up (nor allow our opponents to slow us down) by fussing over what views we might have expressed previously.
Our desire is a Constitutional Republic of free people – our means of getting there must be “whatever works”, not adherence to a dogma which might, upon review, only have been a means whereby the con artists kept us in line in the past.
I, for one, will only defend what I find defensible and will attack whatever I see as wrong.
Republicans Are Terrified Because Their Candidates Are So Fucking Lazy. As a number of Democrats win high-profile special election victories in deep red districts, fewer and fewer safe Republican strongholds seem to be off limits.
We still have a magnificent window to win this thing and fix our nation – naturally, the first requirement is protecting President Trump.
We need a complete review of EVERYTHING and ask “is it good”
But the next step is just as important: a complete review of everything and asking the question, “Is this good?”.
We’ve already learned that so-called “Free Trade” wasn’t what many of us thought it was – take that as your template and ask yourself, “is this thing I’ve adhered to really in the interests of a free people? Or is it something which only serves the well-connected?”.
As Lincoln once said, it is time to think anew and act anew: not to create something different (nothing can be more magnificent than the United States, as far as human effort allows), but to recreate what we had, but even better than before.
It is time to think anew and act anew: not to create something different, but to recreate what we had, but even better than before.
And if that mission requires us to knock a few off their pedestals, then that’s just what will have to happen.
The problems of government are systemic. The reason for government should be a primary concern of anyone wanting a better government but this cannot be accomplished with people of socialist persuasion who scream, yell and interrupt other speakers in an effort to kill free speech.
Trump has thrown a wrench into the gears of socialisms advancement. Socialists are reeling in confusion but don’t count on them staying there. A revolution is coming. The question is, who’s going to lead it, them or us?
- Why Should We Accept Corrupt Government?
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Some prepper humor…
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This article suggests that of the numerous forces tearing America apart, one such force is an out-of-control legal system. No, we are not talking about the US Prison system that incarcerates a full 25% of the inmates on the planet. Though, yes it is a problem. We are instead going to talk about laws and regulations in the United States and the damage to liberty that they have forged. This article argues that when the laws and regulations have become so numerous and complex, that the entire system devolved into lawlessness.
Now, of course, there are numerous forces that are tearing the United States apart, and eventually (sure as shit) it will crumble and die, and a New America will rise up from the ashes. What it will look like, no one knows.
Though, I have painted some pretty dark and gloomy pictures of what could happen in other posts. Don’t you know.
These forces are numerous and include such things as…
The socialists Marxist movement started 100 years ago by President Wilson.
The greedy oligarchy that is gobbling up everything that they can lay their hands on.
The upper middle class which is following the (winning) strategy of the oligarchy.
A collapsing culture and morals.
A decaying infrastructure.
A collapsed educational system churning out imbecile serfs ready to work on “the plantation”.
And, many more.
Here is an article that was written by Alec Orrell . I think that is is really very good. He mapped out how we devolved into orderly lawlessness. His article is titled Legitocracy in America, and it is worth the time to read.
This article is copied as written without much editing aside from some paragraph formatting and the fonts used in this template.
I added some "pull away" text for highlighting and maybe interjected on or two personal comments along the way (though you will be able to easily see that they are from your's truly.)
I have added my own pictures to help illustrate some of his fine points, but there are a couple of decorative "splash" pictures on his originally posted venue.
After reading the article, I would suggest the reader go to his original article and read some of his other works. This fellow is brilliant and a word-smith. (Though he tends to write on a university level, where I tend to be far more plebeian.)
All credit to the author Alec Orrell writing in Human Events.
The commentariat across the political spectrum have recently reveled
in predicting imminent authoritarianism and the “literal death of
democracy” unless sundry bugbears are stopped.
As Murray sees it, the United States’ hyper-complicated and outrageously voluminous law is much the same as no law at all for the ordinary citizen.
The catastrophizing is quaint.
Perhaps they are too terrified, distracted, or dissembling to utter the truth obvious under closer examination: the United States ceased to operate as a constitutional democratic republic at least 100 years ago. Democracy isn’t “in peril”—it’s dead and buried.
The United States ceased to operate as a constitutional democratic republic at least 100 years ago. Democracy isn’t “in peril”—it’s dead and buried.
How did we get here?
How did we get here? Social scientist Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) penned a fascinating but little-remarked book titled By The People in 2015. There, Murray argued the United States has become, in effect, a lawless society.
His assertion may strike some as odd, because lawless usually calls to mind a breakdown in order, like in Afghanistan or Somalia.
But countries maintain order without righteous law all the time.
Dictators the world over regularly keep the peace using suppression and intimidation. There’s no shooting in the streets, but there’s no sense of justice or predictability, either.
Dictators the world over regularly keep the peace using suppression and intimidation. There’s no shooting in the streets, but there’s no sense of justice or predictability, either.
LAWS, LAWS, AND MORE LAWS
As Murray sees it, the United States’ hyper-complicated and outrageously voluminous law is much the same as no law at all for the ordinary citizen. The oppressor isn’t a dictator but an incomprehensible and unpredictable justice system passed from one set of leaders’ hands to another, from one political party to another.
Murray writes:
[L]et’s talk about the legal system not as it looks from thirty thousand feet to law professors, where everything can be fit together and rationalized, but how it looks at ground level to ordinary law-abiding citizens …
I am reminded of science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
From ground level, our encounters with today’s legal system as it actually functions are often indistinguishable from lawlessness.
Consider that, between federal, state, city, county, and judge-made
law—along with truckloads of regulations and codes by state and federal
agencies which carry the full force of law—an American today lives under something like 100 times as much law as his or her great-great-grandfather. That’s a chilling comparison.
An American today lives under something like 100 times as much law as his or her great-great-grandfather.
Further, consider that the average American thoroughly understands few or none of the laws governing him.
Sure, he possesses a vague sense of the basics and some traffic law, but that’s all.
Should the internal functions of the miraculous device go awry, the average citizen is helpless. He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
Washington, D.C.; April 29, 2019: A study released today shows that the vast majority of Department of Health and Human Services regulations issued over a recent 17-year period are unconstitutional. The first-of-its-kind study reviewed 2,952 rules issued by HHS and found that 71% of final rules from 2001 through 2017 were issued by low-level officials and career employees who lack constitutional authority to do so.
Such rules are unconstitutional. The Constitution requires that significant government decisions must be made solely by “principal officers” appointed by the president after Senate confirmation. Issuing a regulation with the force of law is one of those actions that only principal officers can perform.
The majority of unconstitutional rules were issued by the Food and Drug Administration. Just 2% of FDA rules were issued by principal officers, while 1,860 rules were finalized and issued by career employees.
“In a democracy, those who make the rules need to be accountable to the people,” report co-author Thomas Berry, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, explained. “That’s why the Framers included the Appointments Clause in the Constitution. Only properly-appointed officers in the executive branch may issue regulations that are binding on the public. This preserves democratic accountability for significant executive branch actions.”
One such rule is the controversial “Deeming Rule,” which classifies tobacco-free vaping products as tobacco products. The rule prohibits Steve Green, a California vape shop owner, from telling his customers his story about using vaping to stop smoking and recover from early signs of emphysema. PLF filed three lawsuits challenging the rule last year.
“Among the hundreds of illegal FDA rules, 25 rules were classified as significant because they had an impact on the American economy of at least $100 million or had other significant economic impacts,” said Angela Erickson, PLF’s strategic research director and co-author of the report. “Congress and the White House should ensure that this practice ends and agencies comply with the law.”
The full report is available at pacificlegal.org/HHSreport.
He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
The law is like an iPhone: a miraculous device at which he glances all the time and uses for simple tasks without knowing the first thing about how the internal functions perform their magic.
Should the internal functions of the miraculous device go awry, the average citizen is helpless.
He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
In the United States, Federal drug defendants who won’t plead guilty pay dearly, according to our new report, “An Offer You Can’t Refuse.” Prosecutors use their ability to vary the charges to seek longer mandatory sentences for people who turn down plea bargains. Defendants who go to trial receive sentences that, on average, are three times as long. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of drug defendants are convicted by pleas, not trial.
The wrongfully accused regularly plea bargain to avoid being crushed by the legal process.
The vast majority of criminal cases in the United States end not in courtroom trials but in negotiated agreements between prosecutors and defense lawyers. Plea bargaining dates to the 1800s and has often been controversial. Law-and-order advocates say the practice lets criminals get lower sentences, while some defense lawyers and civil libertarians say it coerces defendants to give up their legal rights. Most prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, however, say the practice helps produce justice while reducing strains on the court system. Defense lawyers last year cheered a court ruling that would have barred prosecutors from offering leniency in exchange for a defendant’s testimony against accomplices. But prosecutors celebrated last month when the ruling was overturned.
The citizen is told that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it, but he cannot correct his ignorance himself nor pay to have others supplement it.
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.
Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Madison’s sketch of run-amok law bears an uncanny resemblance to the United States today.
He highlights a fundamental truth Americans have forgotten amidst the partisan bickering over which byzantine laws to pass:
Representative lawmaking does not produce democracy when demos (“the people”) cannot grasp the laws, either to express their disagreement with them or to follow them.
In Madison’s view, such edicts aren’t real law, just dressed-up tyranny divorced from the ethos of a constitutional republic.
Taxation of Social Security benefits. The complicated formula and the 20 step worksheet used to determine the percentage of benefits (up to 85%) subject to tax aren’t new, but they are affecting more Americans as the number receiving Social Security grows. Here is the equation as i stood in 1997.
Were Madison alive to witness the present debacle, he might opine:
The United States possesses no authentic law, only enforced order.
A tyrant who inflicts his will with rifles and a legal priesthood who inflict their will with occult laws are functionally equivalent. In both cases, citizens lose all confidence in a coherent moral order of their own design underlying their day-to-day existence.
The United States possesses no authentic law, only enforced order.
RULE BY LAWYERS
The United States today might be better called a legitocracy—a government by the legal priesthood for the legal priesthood.
Judges, lawyers, prosecutors, regulators, law schools, bar associations, and legal-activism conglomerates like the ACLU and GLAAD use their specialized knowledge to function as gatekeepers of society’s rules, politics, and culture.
Nothing is accomplished without the involvement of the legal priesthood.
Judges, lawyers, prosecutors, regulators, law schools, bar associations, and legal-activism conglomerates like the ACLU and GLAAD use their specialized knowledge to function as gatekeepers of society’s rules, politics, and culture. Nothing is accomplished without the involvement of the legal priesthood.
Armies of lawyers draft the bills for elected lawmakers, who enact their recommendations with only a vague understanding of their mandates.
Then lawmakers turn the laws backover to prosecutors, regulators, and jurists for implementation and enforcement. More often than not, lawmakers come from the ranks of the law-schooled themselves.
Representative lawmaking does not produce democracy when demos (“the people”) cannot grasp the laws, either to express their disagreement with them or to follow them.
Thus the legal priesthood operates in a closed system, disconnected from the populace and unaccountable in practice to anyone but themselves.
Thus the legal priesthood operates in a closed system, disconnected from the populace and unaccountable in practice to anyone but themselves.
To be sure, the priesthood declaims with great eloquence about “democracy,” a “nation of laws,” and “the people”; but they amount to an insular social class—the card carriers in a one-party state.
The rest of us are merely along for the ride.
One is reminded of the famous maxim:
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” In this case, one might say: “Those who enact the laws and vote for lawmakers decide nothing. Those who interpret and enforce the laws decide everything.”
Much like the aristocracies and theocracies of bygone days, the chieftains of the legitocratic class have fallen into warlording over which of them gets to make the rules that control the society and the state.
They bicker over bizarre ideologies and disrupt elected government at every turn with nuisance lawsuits and politically-motivated prosecutions. They divert political and cultural issues from legislatures and elections into courtrooms.
They divert issues away from legislatures and elections and into the courtrooms instead.
For example, Americans recently were treated to the groaning spectacle of a federal judge deciding how the President may operate his personal Twitter account, and whether biological men must be allowed in women’s locker rooms when they identify as women.
As in all warlordism, the resulting instability destroys the average citizen’s peace, predictability, and trust.
He may not be able to articulate the government’s devolution into feuding legitocracy; nevertheless, he senses that he lives in a failed state.
He sees no sacred or impartial justice emerging from the legal system anymore. Virtue and common sense have no place and no reward. All he sees are wizards in tailored suits hurling thunderbolts at one another and terrorizing his day-to-day existence with their staggering litigiousness and self-righteous culture crusades.
He senses that he lives in a failed state.
He sees no sacred or impartial justice emerging from the legal system anymore.
Virtue and common sense have no place and no reward.
All he sees are wizards in tailored suits hurling thunderbolts at one another and terrorizing his day-to-day existence with their staggering litigiousness and self-righteous culture crusades.
The average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries.
Should anyone bother to ask him, the citizen will declare that the words chiseled on the Supreme Court building (“Equal Justice Under Law”) have turned to bitter irony.
He watches with ballooning cynicism as the legal priesthood deploys word games to exonerate one another’s heinous manipulations, then turn and damn ordinary citizens like him to years of legal hell for standing up to their diktats.
He watches with ballooning cynicism as the legal priesthood deploys word games to exonerate one another’s heinous manipulations, then turn and damn ordinary citizens like him to years of legal hell for standing up to their diktats.
Justice is no longer a sacred right grounded in fear of God and His mystery. It is something you hire or receive as a reward for loyalty.
Justice is no longer a sacred right.
The legitocratic class has changed the motto of the United States from “In God, We Trust” to “There Is No God—Trust Us.”
Thus, the average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries.
He fears to resist the legal system’s incessant cultural bullying, lest he gets sucked into the vortex and land in Oz for years pursued by flying monkey lawyers.
Thus, the average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries. He fears to resist the legal system’s incessant cultural bullying, lest he gets sucked into the vortex and land in Oz for years pursued by flying monkey lawyers.
He can’t say how it happened, but the citizen knows he dwells at the bottom of a multi-tiered, politically corrupt, unchecked cabal of a legal system that cares nothing for his well-being.
Will the legal priesthood reform themselves?
Will activist judges voluntarily give up their arrogated and unconscionable power of nationwide injunction?
Will the Supreme Court allow voters and lawmakers to address questions of culture and politics through elections and legislation once again, rather than dictating both from the bench?
Will law schools cease to operate as seminaries of progressive social engineering, imperious elitism, state-enforced credentialism, relativism, nihilism, identity politics, and other ever-shifting philosophies?
Will the legal priesthood stop terrorizing the unanointed and favoring their own, demanding with one voice that the law revert to a form comprehensible and accessible to the average citizen?
Of course they will, right after unicorns fly out of Chief Justice John Roberts’ robes.
He can’t say how it happened, but the citizen knows he dwells at the bottom of a multi-tiered, politically corrupt, unchecked cabal of a legal system that cares nothing for his well-being. Happiness has been replaced by trinkets and freedom by tax rebates, and liberty… well, it just doesn’t exist.
Americans live in denial of their rationalized, systemic oppression.
Over the last five or so generations, legalistic authoritarianism has progressively choked the average citizen’s pursuit of happiness, like a slow garroting in a collar of recondite laws.
Americans live in denial of their rationalized, systemic oppression. Over the last five or so generations, legalistic authoritarianism has progressively choked the average citizen’s pursuit of happiness, like a slow garroting in a collar of recondite laws.
If one doubts this, it’s only because he hasn’t experienced the extremities of the legal system’s insanity himself yet—the Kafkaesque horror of an endless, politically motivated IRS audit, or a court telling a father he must call his 6-year-old son a girl. The law and government do not serve the will of the people; it’s the other way around now.
The law and government do not serve the will of the people; it’s the other way around now.
Where does that leave the citizen?
He is reduced to hoping the orderly lawlessness of the legal system remains confined to the courts and the government, that disorderly lawlessness does not erupt in public.
He is right to be concerned.
Americans are quarreling with one another in frustration. A growing number of individuals and groups misidentify the root of the tyranny and endanger public order, blaming vague and simplistic concepts like “white supremacy,” “fascism,” “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” etc. for the oppression they sense.
Americans are quarreling with one another in frustration. A growing number of individuals and groups misidentify the root of the tyranny and endanger public order, blaming vague and simplistic concepts like “white supremacy,” “fascism,” “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” etc. for the oppression they sense.
Meanwhile, disturbed young male shooters at the end of their tether scapegoat women and minority groups for the proliferation of politically correct rules under which they feel smothered.
Tracing their anxieties back reveals a common source: alienation from the rules that govern them.
Tracing their anxieties back reveals a common source: alienation from the rules that govern them.
Unsurprisingly, the legal priesthood plays both sides to lengthen their reach and tighten their grasp: The root problem is not that the people toil under mountains of legal minutiae and can’t even breathe without violating at least five laws.
No, according to them the problem is always too much freedom requiring (you guessed it!) more laws.
Laws restricting firearms.
Laws restricting hurtful speech.
Laws restricting plastic straws.
Laws, laws, laws.
A violent response.
Rooftop Koreans taking matters into their own hands when the government failed them.
A militia-like civil defense response from ordinary citizens akin to the Roof Koreans of the L.A. riots seems well within the realm of possibility these days.
Scene from the television series “The Walking Dead”. Americans are getting ready for the conflict that lies ahead. They are “prepping” and make no mistake, it will happen unless drastic action takes place immediately.
American citizens must be brought to understand that the struggle gripping the country does not fundamentally pit liberals against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans.
The struggle pits average citizens who want to live under clear, predictable, and widely understood laws against the legal priesthood’s empire of complication and confusion.
American citizens must be brought to understand that the struggle gripping the country does not fundamentally pit liberals against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans. The struggle pits average citizens who want to live under clear, predictable, and widely understood laws against the legal priesthood’s empire of complication and confusion.
And that is the way it is.
One of the first things that you notice when you move to another nation is just how simple it is.
If there is a tax, it's only one singular tax. There are no regulations, and the things that you can do, from driving without a seat-belt, to having your five year old buying a beer for you is astounding.
Here in communist China, I am afforded so many, many MANY freedoms that Americans haven't a clue to what they have lost. That's a fact Jack. Deal with it.
If the public can grasp that their system of government has slowly
changed without their consent, the legal priesthood’s magical powers
will evaporate and the U.S. legal system will be seen for what it is: a
recondite abomination propped up by platitudes. At that time, rescuing
the democratic republic back from the pit of legitocracy stands a
chance.
Until that time, the wizards will continue to rule, and may God help us all.
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Some prepper humor…
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This article looks at the political term “Gaslighting” and what it means. It is used in context in reference to the elected officials and their cronies in Washington D.C. with examples. This this case, we use a most excellent, and caustic biting article, by Kurt Schlichter.
It can also be applied to inner-personal relationships;
It’s important to distinguish between regular lying and gaslighting. A lie is just a falsehood and it can be told for many reasons.
Gaslighting are lies told with the specific intent to make the other person question their sanity/reality.
It is a form of manipulation to make the other person doubt themselves so much that they no longer trust their perception of events. If you no longer trust yourself, then you begin to think you are the problem and the other person is then off the hook.
-What is gaslighting
The article is presented as published, and all credit to the author. I personally like Kirts writing style, and I would recommend that reader go visit his presence on the internet on townhall.com once you all finish reading this article.
Bad Gaslighting Epidemic Sweeps The Elite
There are three questions that our terrible, terrible ruling class raises whenever it opens its collective kale-hole to lecture us: 1) Does the elite think we are really, really stupid, or 2) Is the elite really, really stupid, or 3) Is the elite all of the above?
The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards, and the one enduring takeaway is just how bad these people are at gaslighting us with inept lies that demand we disbelieve what’s happening right in front of us.
But it should come as no surprise that our alleged betters are no good at gaslighting because they have proven themselves to be no good at anything.
Here’s a fun test: can you name something – anything – major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up?
I’ll wait.
Gaslighting is their default move because gaslighting is all these losers have. It’s not like they can sit back and let you read their CV of achievements. Iraq, Obamacare, their annoying millennial kids…all disasters. The members of America’s current ruling class are King Midases of failure.
Everything they touch turns to suck.
So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are.
What Gaslighting is.
That’s called “gaslighting,” the straight-faced denial of what’s happening right in front of you that tries to leverage your politeness and deference to convince you that it’s not the elite that’s rotten. You’re just crazy for noticing, you crazed crazy person of craziness.
Gaslighting is lying “straight to your face” when there is obvious physical evidence in front of everyone that you are telling a lie.
An example of gaslighting.
Take the Northern Syrian crisis – please. I generally side with the non-commie Kurds over the Turks, but facts are facts and facts mean something.
We keep hearing how we “betrayed our allies,” but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf?
It’s a big jump from “Let’s both fight ISIS” to “Take that, NATO ally.” But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort of hand wave away the fact that you can’t “betray” someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable person could ever expect you to do it.
A second example of gaslighting.
And then there’s the Kurdish monolith issue – all Kurds are not created equal.
There are different Kurd factions and different Kurd groups, and some Kurds are communists. In fact, we’ve designated the very Kurds Turkey says it’s going after (the PKK) as terrorists based on their actual terrorism.
Certainly, at the start of the story you probably couldn’t have expected our reporters and our politicians to tell Kurd X from Kurd Y without a program (in a better world, though, we’d expect them to zip it until they could), but when we’re a week-plus into what is allegedly the greatest atrocity ever was (because they think they can pin it on Trump) and they are still pretending that all Kurds are sweet n’ cuddly, they are lying to you.
A Washington DC example of gaslighting.
How about the response on Capitol Hill? We’ve got a bunch of politicians posing and posturing and prancing about over this border incursion half-way around the world and we’re sitting here wishing they would devote some of that wailing and teeth-gnashing to the incursions over our border.
But once again, they act like we can’t see the truth sitting right there.
As for the Democrats, well, how long would their support have lasted if Trump had used force against…our NATO ally?
“You’re helping Putin!” they would shriek. Of course, they are currently shrieking, “You’re helping Putin!” when Trump doesn’t use force against Turkey.
And then there are the Republicans who holler and cry, raging over this terrible situation as if there wasn’t some way for our pols to influence events by, oh, I dunno, offering a resolution declaring war.
That’s a thing in the Constitution, I hear.
But taking votes means taking stands, and virtue signaling is no fun if that signal is, “I
want you to send your sons and daughters to maybe die to sort out this
latest 2000-year-old brawl between this latest bunch of strangers,” and the voters you signal it to are sick of stupid wars that never seem to end.
Gaslighting by Hillary Clinton.
An example of phony outrage gaslighting.
And then there’s the phony outrage over some silly meme where fake Donald Trump fights fake logos of the fake news.
They insist that this year-old YouTube clip is going to spark terrifying violence against…I guess, CNN and MSNBC logos. Of course, these trademarks have remained unassaulted since this silly, fakey vid was created, but never mind that – this is the worst thing ever!
Also, you must ignore the fact that the original movie scene the meme was based upon featured the hero massacring a church full of conservative Christians in Kentucky.
Weird how that realistic cinematic bloodletting matched the seething hatred of traditional Americans we’ve come to expect from our poisonous popular culture, but the Blue Check Mafia has an explanation about why the Christian slaughter was A-OK.
See, in the movie, Beanie and Cecil had a magic crystal and the mind control lasers made it so Zippy and Zoopy were actually good guys and shooting a bunch of Jesus people actually means we love Christians and stuff and don’t you see that when they shoot a church full of Christians it doesn’t mean they are shooting Christians, and that if you think it does you are craaaaaazzzzzyyyyyyy?
Just don’t pay attention to the real violence outside Trump’s Minneapolis rally.
Gaslighting Summary
It’s bad enough that they lie to us, directly and by omission, all the time. But what makes it worse is how their lies are such glaringly obvious fabrications and/or dissimulations that the deepest insult is that they think we might believe them.
The article is presented as published, and all credit to the author. I personally like Kirts writing style, and I would recommend that reader go visit his presence on the internet on townhall.com once you all finish reading this article.
A good example of gaslighting is when your husband comes home late from work for the 10th time in a row. You ask him why he keeps coming home late. “What?” He says, in shock. “I haven’t been coming home late! Are you sure you aren’t just losing track of time?”
And you doubt yourself.
The next day it happens again, but you checked the time. “You’re late!” And he said “what? No I’m not. I always come home at this time.”
And you try to argue that it’s only been the last ten or even times he shows up at this time, he insists that you must have been confused, maybe in the past he got off work early once but he definitely always just comes home at this time.
You wonder if you’re really that unobservant. Honestly, that is so like you to be kinda airheaded. You’re not too smart, or you’d know for sure what time he gets home. The fact that you doubt it is not a good sign, he seems pretty sure that he always got home at this time. You shrug.
You move on.
He goes on screwing the secretary. Some day you find a pair of underwear in your laundry and it’s not yours. You ask him about it. He says he got you those two years ago for your anniversary, what the fuck, why don’t you remember? You apologize because you feel bad for being inconsiderate, forgetting something that mattered to him. You wear the women’s underwear to dinner as a make-up surprise.
It’s beyond simple lying, it’s lying that makes you doubt your reality and makes you docile, easy to control because you no longer trust which way is up, you have to depend on them to tell you which way is up.
-What is gaslighting
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Some prepper humor…
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a pretty decent article that I found on the Sign Of The Times network. It pretty much enunciates what I have been observing for some time. It’s well written and as such.
I am reprinting this directly as published. All credit to the author, and I would suggest that the reader click on the link and honor all their effort in writing this article.
It’s got a terrible title, but (shrug) what can you do?
This article discusses how America (and by extension, Americans) hold on to the title and respect that they inherited from their forefathers. America inherited being the world’s leader militarily, socially, economically, culturally, and spiritually.
However, those that took over, during the last 60 years, squandered what they were given. In many cases destroyed what was built up, created, and established. And replaced it with something else. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, look up “culture wars”.)
As America crumbles, people naturally try to hold on to what is no longer healthy and viable. That is what we are witnessing today. With China being the rising competitor.
Thus this article.
Technical note: When the author refers to typical American / UK statements (well known to all us expats), the background is set as light grey. My comments are in raw format.
In the 1980s, American elites feared the rise of economic powerhouse Japan, but managed to contain its competitor because Japan was at root a vassal state occupied by the US military.
Fair enough.
However, China’s rise today is a different story altogether. With 1.4 billion people, the largest economy in the world (by GDP at purchasing power parity – PPP), and an independent foreign policy, China’s rise heralds the beginning of a multi-polar world.
Obvious to most of the world, if not Americans.
The ‘American Century’ is over, but Americans cannot accept the fact that they – 5% of the world’s population – cannot rule the other 95% forever. American entitlement and hubris are causing many to lash out and embark on a path that is perilous both to themselves and the world.
Yes. It's the "Fourth Turning" baby, and it's gonna get nasty.
Incongruent Fear and Loathing
Let’s take a look at some illogical American talking points used in the smear campaign against China:
“China is going to collapse soon!”
If Americans really believed this, they would sit back, smile and ignore China.
“China is going to take over the world!”
This paranoid warning usually follows the delusional, “China will collapse” claim. Make up your mind!
“Our free market is the best and China is communist!”
Americans conveniently forget that the US government subsidizes farmers, Big Pharma and the military-industrial-complex with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Also, when developing nations subsidize Western corporations, it’s applauded as smart business; but when developing nations help their domestic firms, it’s vilified as socialism or communism.
What’s even more interesting is that China now has more publicly traded companies than the US!
There’s more competition in “communist” China than in the “capitalist” US. For example, the US has only one smartphone company (Apple), while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, ZTE, OnePlus, Transsion, etc.
Finally, comparing the economic growth of the US and China over the last four decades, no one can reasonably say that the US is superior to the China model:
Comparing the economic growth of the US and China over the last four decades, no one can reasonably say that the US is superior to the China model.
“China isn’t open! It discriminates against US corporations!”
This is often accompanied by, “We should decouple from China!” This ‘logic’ hurts the brain.
Also, while demanding that China treat American companies just like Chinese companies, the US has placed 140 Chinese companies under the “entity list,” meaning they can’t do business with US corporations or the government.
“China censors Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.”
This is followed by, “OMG! There are Chinese bots and trolls flooding our social media. Ban them, please!”
“China steals everything”
China has been #1 in both scientific publications and patents for the last few years. Why?
Chinese companies like Huawei, Alibaba and SenseTime are leapfrogging over the US in AI software, AI chips, database software, 5G etc.
And young Chinese people have the “9-9-6” work ethic – they work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
Well, it’s like sports where partisan supporters are certain that the other team won only by cheating.
“China forced US corporations into technology transfer”
In exchange for technology, China offered generous subsidies and tax cuts that allowed US corporations to make trillions of dollars over the last 40 years.
To put it succinctly: China bought the technology from American, European, Japanese and Korean companies. Americans didn’t mind the technology transfer, because they never thought that China could compete – after all, China merely employs slave labor to make crappy products, right?
“China is a totalitarian government! We are so amazing because we have Democracy!”
Democracy in America is a joke.
As Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank said, “America is of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%.”
The Chinese government is based on meritocracy and has a 90% approval rate. While it’s not perfect, it has done a remarkable job in the last 40 years by lifting 800 million people out of poverty and creating the world’s largest middle class.
Also, note that the US never tries to spread democracy in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, etc.
‘Freedom and democracy’ propaganda is a selective tool, not anchored to any consistent values or principles worthy of being called such.
Atrocity Propaganda
Like “Saddam threw babies out of incubators” or “Assad uses chemical weapons,” the US started the “1 million Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” narrative in early 2018.
While hundreds of diplomats and journalists from all over the world have visited these re-education camps in Xinjiang, the US establishment sticks to its pathetic atrocity propaganda.
It’s not even remotely true. Not in the least.
When that desperate narrative fizzled out, whoever is responsible for conducting psy-ops in Washington DC restarted the “organ-harvesting” fake news with the help of Falun Gong and the World Uyghur Congress, both of which are funded by the US.
No matter how absurd or sensationalist, it’s never a “conspiracy theory” when it’s about China, Russia, Iran or any other geopolitical competitor.
Racism and Yellow Peril
Behind all this anti-China propaganda is deep-seated racism in Americans that cannot accept the Chinese as equals.
If confronted about racism, Americans would say, “I only hate the Chinese government, not the people.”
However, this is clearly disproved by how Americans behave on social media, where any article that’s negative about China instantly goes viral; and positive news about China gets ignored or even down-voted.
‘Yellow Peril syndrome’ is deeper among those in the US establishment.
The right-wing is more blatant and sensational:
"The Chinese aren't smarter. They CHEAT," tweeted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. A US State Department official said, "It's the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian." The FBI Director upped the ante and called China a "whole-of-society threat."
Like George Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate‘, the US media and social media influencers — Kyle Bass, Gordon Chang, Charlie Kirk, General Rob Spalding etc. — spew insane anti-Chinese hatred every day to rile up the mob.
Censorship
As Rania Khalek pointed out, corporate media is filled with spooks and US government officials acting as “analysts.”
Sadly, social media giants are also acting as state propaganda outlets. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium etc. are all actively purging pro-China voices, while tolerating what amounts to hate speech.
Nathan Rich – an American living in China – illustrated how YouTube actively worked against him.
For example, his subscriber numbers would go down substantially, people could only dislike his videos but could not like them, his videos wouldn't show up in searches, etc. Twitter also purges pro-China people, but if there's a huge outcry - like when they deleted Carl Zha's account - the thought police would quietly reinstate a handful of the victims.
Anyone who’s remotely pro-China on social media is vilified as a Chinese bot or a “Wumao” – a person who supposedly works for 50 cents/hour to spread Chinese propaganda.
This is where the "fifty-center" meme came from.
On Reddit, there’s a sub-group called “r/China” with 120,000 members. But you won’t find anything positive or neutral about China in that group — it’s a sewer of racism and hatred. And people who post positive news about China also get banned or attacked by online mobs.
As an aside, I (Metallicman) was banned on Free Republic in October 2019 because I posted a positive article reporting on Hong Kong events. That is amazing as I was a long time member (20+ years!) to Free Republic with over 8,000+ posted articles. No warning. No email. No excuse or reasons given. Just erased me and my my history. Zilch!
That is what Jim Robinson has become. Just another Software mogul in the United States.Snubbing his nose at us "little guys" that made FR popular.
From corporate media to social media, only one-sided sensational claims are allowed.
The concept of ‘freedom of speech and expression’ in the US is a farce.
Conclusion
The USA is exhibiting all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism or a dying empire — deep internal divisions, extreme wealth inequality, exploding debt, brainwashed masses, overextended military, and paranoia about geopolitical competition.
Meanwhile, China has a lot of room to grow, since its GDP-per-capita is still only $10,000 overall and $20,000 in big cities. China’s strategy is to keep calm, maintain growth, expand trade, and become technologically independent by 2025 — especially in semiconductors. By 2030, China’s nominal GDP will be larger than that of the US; and Asia will account for 40% of global GDP.
If China can successfully navigate all the proxy and hybrid wars waged by a belligerent America in the next decade, then China and Eurasia will be the shining stars of this century.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
This is sarcasm. It comes from The Babylon Bee, and when I first came across the article I almost "shit my pants" it was so funny. If you are unaware of where the humor is in this, I would suggest you watch the movie "Aliens". It will put this meme in better context than I ever can explain.
All credit to the original posters.
Yeah. The United States is really, really messed up now. The government cannot function. Corporate big-wigs are pushing radical Marxism and a progressive socialist ideal that makes Pol-Pot look like a teeny-bopper, and hard core criminals are immune from justice. It’s all a massive cluster-fuck. Experts Now Recommend Nuking Everything From Orbit.
Experts Now Recommend Nuking Everything From Orbit – July 23rd, 2019
WORLD—In
the wake of a string of increasingly bizarre antics from a rapidly
declining western civilization, experts recommended nuking everything
from orbit.
Should world leaders approve the plan, the nukes will be launched sometime in the next week, weather permitting.
“Our new strategy for eradicating the potential for more of the absolute insanity as we have seen over the past weeks and months is to just wipe the whole thing out,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper declared in a press conference at the Pentagon.
“We explored plans ranging from releasing biological weapons into public areas around the world to just sinking everyone into the sea. But based on computer simulations, a barrage of orbital nukes from our defense satellites is the most effective plan for just wiping everything out in order to let someone else have a shot.”
Esper
went on to state the first barrage of nukes would include some 325
different ICBMs targeted at the world’s most densely populated areas,
while a second salvo would target more rural areas to wipe out any
survivors.
“It’s the only way to be sure.”
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
According to the “Fourth Turning”, the year of 2025 will be the point in time where a major “turning point” or crisis will occur. Historically that means a serious war on American soil.
As 100% of the previous fourth turnings were [1] deadly serious wars that [2] occurred on American soil. They also [3] used the most lethal technology, and military forces of the time.
This article embraces this historical fact and extrapolates possible scenarios out from it.
These are ugly, ugly scenarios and I personally hope that none of them come true.
A crisis event on American soil.
Deadly serious event that costs the lives of Americans and wrecks the economy.
Uses the most lethal technology of the time.
The ruling class has gone too far in accumulating the wealth of the nation through the capture of regulatory, political, financial, and communication structures. They know what is coming. They are not pretending that all is fine. They have their very own safe houses all set up far, far away from the strife that is barrelling down towards them.
As a review, for those of you who are oblivious what this is all about, the “Fourth Turning” is a theory that predicts social turmoil upon an 80 year cycle.
Social turmoil.
The possibility of social upheaval.
The possibility of a major HOT war during the crisis period.
The work was written around 1995, and EVERYTHING that was predicted has come to pass. This prediction also predicts for a major crisis event to take place in the 2025 time period +/- 2 years.
The article is about the “peak” of the Fourth Turning – A crisis period.
This article discusses a very specific event that takes place in the midst of the Fourth Turning. It is the “peak” or most dangerous time. It is known as the “crisis”.
If you want to read about the social upheavals and changes leading up to this crisis, you can read about it in another post. It opens up into a separate tab for your reading pleasure.
A nuclear nightmare.
Here, we talk about the “crisis” that will be the “big event” of this “Fourth Turning”. As such, and I am sorry to say, that there is a very strong likelihood that it will result in large-scale nuclear weapon detonations on American soil.
Yes.
You read that correctly.
There is a strong likelihood that large-scale nuclear weapon(s) will be detonated on American soil around the Fourth Turning crisis event.
There are numerous reasons why I hold this belief. But the biggest, I suppose, is the pro-war faction in the United States government.
You see, the United States now believes that we should improve our nuclear warfare fighting capability so that we can use it.
After all, with all those proxy wars the United States is fighting now, (eight in total as of 2019) that we should be able to field and use nuclear weapons freely without worry of retaliation. (After all, what’s all this nonsense about going to battle against Turkey and “our allies” the Kurds?)
John Bolton, openly advocates a first-strike policy against nuclear-armed enemies, and the Pentagon, after decades of careful disarmament, wants to spend $1.2 trillion to upgrade its nuclear arsenal.
If you’ve felt a new shiver of nuclear fear over the past year, you’re not alone: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its “Doomsday Clock” to within two minutes of midnight — closer than it has been since the height of the Cold War.
- This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
You see, according to the military and political planned deep within the bowels of Washington, America can use “low yield” tactical nuclear weapons on a sovereign foreign nation, and aside from some “political squawk”, nothing bad will come of it.
No one ever fights back. Right?
In December 2016, the US Defense Science Board – a semi-independent group that advises the Secretary of Defense – warned that “the nuclear threshold may be decreasing owing to the stated doctrines and weapons developments of some states.”
Therefore, the DSB recommended DOD should “provide many more options in stemming proliferation or escalation; and a more flexible nuclear enterprise that could produce, if needed, a rapid, tailored nuclear option for limited use should existing non-nuclear or nuclear options prove insufficient.” This would involve “lower yield, primary only options” for strategic warheads on long-range ballistic missiles.
- The Terrifying Nuclear War Game the US Shouldn't Play
Now along with this attitude, is the strong belief that if America fields “low yield” nuclear devices that it will NOT result in devastating nuclear retaliatory strikes. That is considered inconceivable, as “everyone knows” that the United States is the strongest and most powerful nation in the world.
There wouldn’t ever be any repercussions.
It’s inconceivable.
In the United States today is the strong belief that if America fields “low yield” nuclear devices that it will NOT result in devastating nuclear retaliatory strikes. That is considered inconceivable, as “everyone knows” that the United States is the strongest and most powerful nation in the world. No one would dare strike back.
America still thinks that it is the only dog in the barn-yard. But, you know, the rest of the farm animals are getting mightily tired of the dog bullying everyone around. Especially as the dog is getting old, has arthritis, and other problems. One day, another animal might just say that enough is enough.
America spent millions of dollars on NED, which actively went into China, into Hong Kong, on Chinese soil. They taught and trained the anti-government forces there. They taught them how to perform "soft violence" to provoke the mainland Chinese. They paid protestors, and gave them the skills to build bombs, and target maps and a strategy.
All of which was caught on video. With Trumps advisors caught on film (with a clear audio track) in the HK Marriot hotel explaining how to conduct the riots and how to destroy the subway stations. The Chinese have videos of the teaching and training classes for the insurgents, and the NED even has the gall to have their members on LinkedIN boasting about their involvement in HK.
China did nothing.
Though, if the roles were reversed, it would be a different story. If China sent advisors to train the BLM and Antifa on how to bomb bus stations, trains, airports and destroy all public transportation. And they were caught on film and broadcast on all the Conservative networks, with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talking about it 24-7. It would be a catastrophic error in judgement. Don't you agree?
But China did nothing.
So America believes that it can go about launching all sorts of military, quasi and semi-para military operations all over the globe and no one will ever raise a finger to stop the empire expansionism.
(Limited Yield) Snow ball strike from the movie “A Christmas Story”.
It can be Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, the Ukraine. It can be anywhere from Venezuela to Turkey. No one will or can stop us. Right?
China will do nothing. Right?
Russia will do nothing. Right?
No one will fight back. Russia and China won’t ever work together against the USA. Right?
Right?
Ralph fights back against the schoolyard bully. The scene is from the 1980’s movie “A Christmas Story”.
The belief is that the US can launch a few “low yield” nuclear weapons and no nation would dare strike back. The USA can deploy Marines in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and China won’t do anything.
It’s inconceivable. Don’t you know.
I am not the only person that believes this. Read John Paul Roberts excellent article on the pre-nuclear holocaust preparations that America is currently engaged in.
Are You Ready To Die?
And since it would be inconceivable, the military and the United States government officials are today, far more likely and prone to using “safe”, “tactical” nuclear weapons to further their agendas.
And these are dangerous agendas.
These are agendas that are BLIND to the idea that the rest of the world might put it’s collective foot down and say “ENOUGH!”. And launch a retaliatory strike in full force, not only against the military forces on their territory, but rather at the American homeland, the American cities, and the American people who allowed these morons to get anywhere near nuclear launch codes.
This map should scare the living Dejesus out of you. It shows how Washington DC and the political establishment views the use of low-yield nuclear weapons against Asia in the assumption that no one would strike back.
I argue that if the United States, for what ever reason, launches and detonates any kind of nuclear weapon (low-yield, small backpack, tactical strike, or strategic nuclear), that there will be a FULL SCALE retaliatory response aimed at the Untied States.
Any use of nuclear weapons in Asia will result in the complete destruction of the United States.
This, I argue is the 2025 crisis what we should prepare for.
...
The second reality we have failed to understand is what a nuclear detonation and its aftermath would actually look like. In our imaginations, fueled by apocalyptic fictions like The Road and The Day After, the scale and speed of nuclear annihilation seem too vast and horrific to contemplate.
If nuclear war is considered “unthinkable,” that is in no small part because of our refusal to think about it with any clarity or specificity.
In the long run, the best deterrent to nuclear war may be to understand what a single nuclear bomb is capable of doing to, say, a city like New York — and to accept that the reality would be even worse than our fears.
- This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
Most articles on the internet today, when discussing nuclear conflict on American soil, do so under the assumption that it would be a small “terrorist nuke”. A small nuclear weapon, roughly the size of the atomic bomb used against Japan in World War II.
I disagree, and this post does not cover that scenario.
And when American military planners contemplate the use of nuclear weapons it is along the lines of tailored tactical responses for set specific objectives. It’s always with “surgical” precision and “contained” destruction. Never taking into account the strong possibility of “unleashing the dogs of war” against us.
They never take into account that the rest of the world thinks of America as a big loud-mouth bully that one day will get it's comeuppance.
Here we consider a “slap back” response up to an all-out MAD-level (Mutually Assured Destruction) response to the United States. It assumes that we initiate the actions though our military use of “low yield” nuclear weapons in Asia. As such, we look at a large super-power unleashing modern large-capacity nuclear munitions, using hyper-glide technology against an unsuspecting America.
Though, at that, many basement computer nerds think that a nuclear war is winnable and not all that bad...
"Anukeisabigbomb, butnotthatbig. Mostof DC wouldsurvive, alotofradiationpoisoningthough, andasyoucanseefromtheoccasionalfloorshot, mostofourcongressisoutofthebuildingatleastandmostofthetime... "
We consider them releasing this onslaught within minutes after the USA detonates a”low yield” device in Asia. Which means, that nuclear detonations over coastal cities by SLBM MIRVs will detonate within minutes of launch.
Minutes.
Two minutes after the SLBM launches off the USA coast, the red lights will light up at NORAD and they will scramble to contact the American leadership. Five minutes later Washington will be erased from the surface of the globe.
Thus obliterating the leadership of America in one fell swoop.
These scenarios assume that the leadership in both Russia and China are not idiots. That they have anticipated the use by America of a tactical "low yield" nuclear weapon, and have positioned submarines and other systems for an immediate kill-level response that would detonate on American soil within minutes.
Perhaps, you the reader disagree. Maybe you think that the rest of the world are idiots, and only Americans are smart. Good for you. Then.
A quick reminder.
While the United States has been very busy funding conventional military operations around the globe, strategic nuclear missile forces have taken a back seat to the realities of global proxy wars without nuclear strike-back.
Once a missile launch is detected, I am comfortable knowing that it will be detected via satellite and the knowledge relayed to SAC HQ. That is…
…unless the Chinese and the Russian hunter-killer satellites don’t take them out.
Missile Combat Crew Commander, Capt. Kenny Gibaldo, (left) and 2nd Lt. John Butler, Deputy Crew Commander of the 320th Missile Squadron, simulate the launch of a Minuteman III using the REACT console in a Launch Control Capsule at Missile Alert Facility Hotel-1.
People!
People!
Five minutes is not enough time to react to nuclear destruction. Whether or not the United States strategic forces are aware of a launch means nothing when hyper-speed technology and delivery weapons are used.
Fundamentals
According to the “Fourth Turning”, we can expect a major critical event to take place around 2025. As shown in the following illustration…
Here are the next few years before the Fourth Turning is expected to reach a crisis point. The astute reader should realize that the event is scheduled immediately after the 2024 election. Historically, this will mean that a progressive democrat will take over the Presidency. In that event, we can expect a full -on gun confiscation effort that would be the result of a mass-shooting event. Democrat presidents always have mass-shooting events in the first six months of their presidency. Then they unleash the anti-gun narrative to a fever pitch. The event that was supposed to really work this last time was the 2016 Los Vegas shooter, but of course it wasn’t Hillary Clinton at the Helm it was Donald Trump..
We should note that it immediately follows an election. An election that historically will follow the following features…
Typically a democrat is elected after an eight-year Republican presidency.
Democrats historically tend to get America into proxy wars or full scale wars as need be.
It is well known that Democrats love to drag America into wars.
On October 12, 2016 longtime Putin ally Vladimir Zhirinovsky openly threatened nuclear war if Hillary Clinton is elected, saying:
Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it’s war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere.
…and…
I’m forced to remind myself that these are the same people who think that “inclusion” means shutting down free speech, who believe that the US should not have borders, who promote transsexual reading hours in the grammar schools, and who fiercely desire to start a war with Russia.
-Kunstler
…and…
Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria is about as relevant to the life of the average American as Late Bronze Age incursions into Syria by the Hittite king Suppiuliuma I. But for days now, President Trump has been called a coward and a traitor—not only to his own country, but to the valiant Kurds, who as far as the left is concerned, might as well have fought with Washington at Yorktown.
Putin Bad: The Democrats Embrace Neoconservatism
Only the depleted discourse of an utterly bankrupt ruling class could construe support for endless war, expressed in the puddle-deep sentimentality of “muh Kurds,” as courageous, while opposition to the military-industrial complex and its misadventures is craven and worthy of the worst names that posterity can find.
The meltdown over the Syria crisis and the simultaneous Tulsi-Clinton dispute, have driven home the strange truth that the Democrats have become neocons.
While the Republican party remains split between a dissident, non-interventionist base and an increasingly illegitimate, out-of-touch neoconservative Old Guard, which after three years is still scrambling to defend its prestige in a “revolt” against Trump, the Democratic party is almost totally in the interventionist camp.
-American Greatness
Modern warfare is quite advanced, and involves all sorts of high-technology.
The world is evolving, and former isolated smaller nations are now aligning with strong super-power nations.
Every crisis, of the previous three “Fourth Turning” crisis’s has involved full-scale warfare on American soil.
With that in mind, I have taken the liberty to make some assumptions regarding the next crisis which is due to occur in 2025. These are my opinions, and please let it be well understood, that I do not wish any of this to occur.
There is no escape from the Fourth Turning.
The assumptions
The following assumptions have been made, even though there are a significant number of variables in play.
The 2024 election will result with a Democrat president. (A historical norm.)
The new president will implement all sorts of progressive initiatives. Many of which will result in higher taxes, more rules and regulations and gun confiscation. (Well. Duh!)
Unlike President Trump who wants to disengage the USA from foreign wars, proxy wars, and empire policing efforts, the democrat President will do the exact opposite and will resemble Presidents Obama and Bush Jr in that regard.
The Neocon donors to the democrats will demand further involvement in additional proxy wars. The democrats in power will oblige. (It’s the price you pay for all that cold-hard cash.)
American forays towards the next proxy war will not be an isolated event limited to a singular nations, but will involve an alliance with a major global super-power. (Surprise! and this fact alone will spell doom for many of the cherished beliefs that Americans hold so dearly.)
The super-powers involved might include either Russia, China, both and a consortium of numerous other interests.
The normal NED / CIA operations against a sovereign nation will be considered an act of war. (Or at the minimum a serious contributor.)
Nuclear weapons will be unleashed upon the United States.
Putin and Xi are essentially dictators who have no fear of elections. They are serious men in possession of nuclear missiles, capable of destroying the world. They are both serious, serious people. They are in their positions of power through merit. Not though mob rule. They will tolerate the CIA / NED interference with Hong Kong, and the Muslims only so far. There are however, absolutes that they will not tolerate. One of which is the use of “small” nuclear tactical weapons detonated on Asian soil. If the United States decides to push too hard, they WILL strike back… at American cities. IN FULL FUCKING FORCE.
There are various reasons why nuclear weapons would be used against America. But we will limit the reasons to the following;
To destroy the civilian population centers of America rendering it neutered to the effect so that internal civil strife can “eat it alive” unfettered by federal and state governments.
To provide a “double tap” to smash all and any technological, research and industry might that might oppose efforts elsewhere in the world.
To send the United States “back to the middle ages” to a point that it would not be able to recover as a viable nation for at least fifty years.
Welcome to 2025. It’s a truly scary scenario.
Nuclear War is no picnic
For those of you younger than 50 years old, here is a quick review about the dangers of a nuclear bomb. It is a nasty device, and if the blast and the light/heat doesn’t kill you, the poisonous radiation will.
In front of me is a strange amalgamation of '60s-era flip switches and modern digital display screens. It's the control console for launching an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM.
On an archaic display screen in the center of the console, three large letters blink in rapid succession. "EAM inbound," says my deputy commander and the second member of the launch crew. An emergency-action message is on its way, maybe from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, maybe from the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, maybe even from the president. We both mechanically pull down our code books, thick binders swollen with pages of alpha-numeric sequences, and swiftly decipher the message.
After nearly four years of pulling ICBM-alert duty, this process is instinctive. I deliberately recite the encrypted characters to ensure my deputy is on the same page, literally and figuratively, as six short characters can effectively communicate a wealth of information through the use of special decoding binders. "Charlie, Echo, Seven, Quebec, Golf, Bravo, six characters ending in Bravo." My partner concurs, scribbling in his code book.
-Death Wears a Snuggie
Here’s an article talking about a very tiny-tiny suitcase nuke that a terrorist might create and detonate in the center of New York City. (It is difficult to find MAD scenarios on the internet.)
Near the center of the blast, the suffering and devastation most closely conform to the fictional apocalypse of our imaginations. This is what it would look like within a half-mile of Times Square: Few buildings would remain standing. Mountains of rubble would soar as high as 30 feet. As fires raged, smoke and ash would loft into the air. The New York Public Library’s stone guardians would be reduced to pebble and dust. Rockefeller Center would be an unrecognizable snarl of steel and concrete, its titanic statue of Prometheus — eight tons of bronze and plaster clad in gold — completely incinerated.
Within a half-mile radius of the blast, there would be few survivors. Those closest to the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have described the horrors they witnessed: People with ripped sheets of skin hanging from their bodies; people whose brains were visible through their shattered skulls; people with holes for eyes. Sakue Shimohira watched her mother’s charred body crumble into ash as she tried to wake her. Shigeko Sasamori’s father cut off the blackened husk of skin all over her face, revealing pools of pus beneath.
As the fireball travels outward from the blast, people, buildings, and trees within a one-mile radius would be severely burned or charred. Metal, fabric, plastic, and clay would ignite, melt, or blister. The intense heat would set gas lines, fuel tanks, and power lines on fire, and an electromagnetic pulse created by the explosion would knock out most computers, cell phones, and communication towers within several miles.
Traveling much farther than the fireball, a colossal pressure wave would hurtle forth faster than the speed of sound, generating winds up to 500 miles per hour. The shock wave would demolish the flimsiest buildings and strip the walls and roofs off stronger structures, leaving only their naked and warped scaffolding. It would snap utility poles like toothpicks and rip through trees, fling people through the air, and turn brick, glass, wood, and metal into deadly projectiles. A blast in Times Square, combined with the fireball, would carve a crater 50 feet deep at the center of the explosion. The shock wave would reach a diameter of nearly 3.2 miles, shattering windows as far as Gramercy Park and the American Museum of Natural History.
All this would happen within a few seconds.
- This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
Modern Nuclear Weapons
But we are not talking about small ultra-tiny portable nuclear weapons. We are also not talking about the same kinds of bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945.
We are talking about something quite different.
We are talking about massive city-reduction weapons using high-technology and specifically designed ultra-lethal nuclear weapons. But not just “city reduction” weapons. These are massive weapons that will turn an entire State into a glassed-over desert.
Oct 26, 2016 · Russia unveils massive Satan 2 ICBM capable of destroying France or Texas in a single hit. Russia has moved to update its nuclear arsenal with an extreme-range, massive payload ICBM designed specifically to defeat anti-missile systems. Capable of traversing the planet's poles and blowing up Texas in one hit, meet the RS-28 Sarmat, or Satan 2.
- Cold war redux? Russia unveils massive Satan 2 ICBM
Yes, you read that right.
The Soviets have fielded full MIRV equipped ICBM’s armed with high-capability nuclear weapons capable of wiping out Texas in a single strike.
The damage of a single MIRV hype-glide RS-28 ‘Satan 2’ Russian nuclear weapon aimed at the center of Texas. The image is to scale. This is but one warhead in a missile that contains fifteen (x15) warheads.
People, this is serious business.
This is not MOAB, or “suitcase nuke”. This is a lance forged in Hell and would totally redefine the geography (not to mention the social, cultural, and physical) makeup of the United States.
Russia unveiled its new super-heavy, MIRV-equipped ICBM this week. The ‘Satan-2’ (that’s its NATO codename), has a reported throw-weight of 10,000kg, and can carry up to 15 separate warheads.
MIRV is an acronym that stands for Multiple Independently targeted Reentry Vehicles. MIRV-equipped missiles can deliver multiple nuclear weapons to a single target area, or blanket a large area with separate detonations.
Historically, MIRVs have been seen as potentially destabilizing because they give a decisive advantage to the country that can strike first and eliminate its opponent’s land-based missile silos.
The stats on the RS-28 demonstrate this is a missile that means business, and media outlets controlled by the Russian government have stated that a single missile is large enough to destroy Texas or France.
We could quibble with the definition of “destroy,” but we won’t — any time a government drops 50MT of nuclear weapons on you, you’re going to have a really bad day.
- Russia unveils its new class of RS-28 ‘Satan 2’ nuclear missiles
Russia would launch it’s ICBM that has the technology to avoid ABM technology. Then it would launch individual warheads, each aimed at a specific city. To the people on the ground it would look like this with lines of fire streaking from the sky towards the cities nearby.
Lead ups
Now, back to the Fourth Turning.
Keep in mind that the United States will be in the midst of a great “unraveling”. It will seem like it is teetering and tottering out of control. And well, it will be.
For ten years leading up to the 2025 event, the United States will be in the middle of social and political upheaval.
2015 through to 2025
As crazy as everything seems under a Donald Trump presidency in 2019, now imagine that same level of craziness, except that a radical progressive Marxist democrat is in office, with full support of the mainstream press, the judicial branch, the agencies, and the military. The domestic scene in the United States will be unbearable for most of the nation.
Again, this scenario predicts a democrat president in 2024. Thus, prior to any international activity, the United States would be quite busy involved in converting America into a progressive democrat Marxist “utopia”.
Something along the lines of maybe…
Cambodia under Pol Pot.
China under Mr. Mao.
The Soviet Union under Stalin.
Cuba under Fidel Castro.
You know, socialist utopias following the traditional model. Though, not everyone will be on board with this vision, and thus civil strife will start to manifest. America, already a police state, would become a very contentious place to live.
Hard line gun disarmament will be under-weigh as well as other progressive initiatives (which were well planned, just “waiting in the wings” since 2014.)
After every high-profile shooting in America, Leftists immediately, and predictably, begin their calls for gun control. With the measured constraint and careful consideration of Bill Clinton in the Champagne Room at Fuzzy Holes Gentlemen’s Club in Little Rock, they self-righteously and repeatedly demand that we “do something!”
You can probably list some of the meaningless blather they shout at us reflexively, such as “If not now, when?,” “The NRA has blood on its hands!,” “Nobody needs an assault rifle to shoot a deer!,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Despite all their hysterical nonsense, they usually have enough presence of mind to also say, because they have been trained to so do, that “nobody wants to confiscate your guns,” or “no one is talking about banning guns.” If you’re really lucky you’ll hear one of these would-be authoritarians say the following (and this is my personal favorite): “I support the Second Amendment, BUT…”
The disruptions would tend to get ugly, and when domestic squabbles get too clamorous, a democrat presidential solution is always to bring America into another war.
He’s making a point here. Ten years ago we were told that these 50 troops would be there for 30 days, and we’re still there. And you know what is amazing is that you have the American left, which ostensibly opposes all use of the military. They actually don’t.
Democrat leaders don’t. They’re in on this game like everybody else. Just like they are the original segregationists but have gotten away with not being seen that way.
They are huge warmongers.
They profit incredibly from it.
Their public position is anti-war. Their public position is anti-military. But look at all the political donations they get from — they supposedly hate Wall Street. They supposedly hate the big banks because the big banks screw the average little guy, American consumer.
Yet look where all their donations come from. The big banks, Wall Street, military industrial contractors and so forth. A gigantic scam.
-Rush Limbaugh
At some point in time, I predict early on in the first year of the 2024 democrat president, the following events will transpire…
A mass-shooting event (within the first six months) followed by massive gun disarming efforts. There will be zero efforts to maintain any legal constitutionality in this matter.
This is as predictable as the Epstein death in prison. Everyone knew that he was going to be killed, and that any "investigation" would go nowhere.
A rapid mainstream press war stance against a super-power or an ally of a superpower. This will be in the first year.
One or two “international incidents” which will serve as an excuse to deploy troops.
The rush into yet another proxy war is hard to predict. However it is likely that no time will be wasted in this effort.
“Hours after the bombs go off in cities, these fires continue to build up and they create firestorms that feed on themselves. They get so hot that everything in the city becomes fuel for its own destruction. The energy released becomes much greater than the weapon itself,” Dr. Mills explained, drawing parallels to the way fire consumed the city of Dresden during the World War II.
From each of these 100 detonations, massive firestorms would engulf whole cities and churn five million tons of black carbon into the stratosphere.
Oh and make no mistake, the democrats greatly want another proxy war, and they are not getting it under Trump. But once he’s out of the picture, it will be business as usual.
…They think.
"In leading Australia China Business Council for a decade, I saw first hand China's primary and dominant focus is internal - on the welfare of its people, on the betterment of their lives, not on global conquest - as cold war apologists would have us believe. And it has delivered in spades, bringing 850 million of its people out of poverty at the same time as fueling global growth.
It is the United States that has 800 overseas military posts when China has just 1. It is the United States that is threatening to "totally destroy and obliterate" Turkey. It is the United States that is funding disruption in HK. It is the United States that created the fiction of weapons of mass destruction.
Australians need to see beyond the US strategies to extend its global hegemony at any cost and focus on the reality of Chinese history and engagement."
-Duncan Calder
This post describes the scenarios when the aligned super-powers decide to snap-back at the United States.
For, the rest of the world is "de-coupling" from the United States and forging strong relationships with Asian nations instead.
The mainstream American media is not reporting on this trend, and Americans are now oblivious at how badly they are perceived, and how out of touch with the rest of the world they are becoming.
There are four scenarios.
Limited Strike. A “warning shot”. A do not mess with us, warning in bright flash technicolor. This situation is one in which America might still be able to retain a kind of national sovereignty.
A controlled, and yet limited nuclear strike. A “friendly” slap in the face warning to stop all war-like action or face obliteration. All major cities will be crippled beyond repair. Local authorities would take over and the Federal government would be hardly functional at all. Most of America will revert to a time before the Internet, and would consider themselves lucky to have clean water, and electricity that works once or twice a week.
A nuclear response. This is a “slap back” nuclear response on American soil, if America decides to unleash nuclear weapons in any proxy nation. This is the best-scenario version or the most probable outcome. If America is lucky, it might resemble a radioactive North Korea with a Democrat President declaring himself Marxist utopia ruler for life.
The Fuck-you Response. This is the “double tap” nuclear response that is intended to send America back to the dark ages. It is designed to allow for the indigenous peoples outside of the cities to balkanize America into smaller, easier to manage third-world “shit holes”. An America after this strike would look like Somalia on a bad day. If America is lucky and fortunate, America would fracture into tiny “third world” nations with would require 75 years to even begin to negotiate on the global table.
Knowing what I know, I would say that the probability of response to be around 80% the “Fuck You” response, and about a 10% chance for the “Nuclear response” and the “Limited Strike” responses respectively.
I argue this based on what i know about democrat presidents. They make decisions based on emotion, not reason. The other nations realize this.
On October 12, 2016 longtime Putin ally Vladimir Zhirinovsky openly threatened nuclear war if Hillary Clinton is elected, saying:
Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it’s war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere.
Why Russia?
While China or other nations might be the target of American proxy wars towards distraction. There are two elements here that are coming to the forefront. It’s all very simple really.
The election of 2024 will be a Democrat President. (This is a historical norm.)
Since 2016, the Democrat narrative has been “Russia! Russia! Russia!
Democrats tend to start large wars, historically speaking.
While it is obvious to everyone that it’s all a concocted narrative aimed at defeating Donald trump and the conservatives, there is no evidence that this narrative is dissipating. Thus, we can expect that the narrative will “take on legs of it’s own” and start to “walk”. This would be dangerous with the rabid ultra-progressive wing demanding that the USA “do something” about Russia.
And what is the government going to do?
Sanctions?
More likely than not a movement of military forces, and subversive NED / NID activity internally. This alone will be enough to trigger a nuclear conflagration.
I argue, and it seems more likely to me, that the Russians are already seeing this scenario in their future, and the moment a military event (troop movement, weapons detonation, or nuclear launch) on their territory, you can expect a Russian response. And, I dare say, Russia will not wait and then react. They will have a plan in place and actions to take.
Automatic full-scale nuclear detonations the very second that the USA tries anything. There will not be a gradual phase-in and tit-for-tat activities. I’m telling you, the Russian reaction will be the pincer event for the rest of the world – a world absolutely fatigued of American arrogance and bellicosity.
Russia will strike first, and will do so in a way that the entire American leadership will be taken out within minutes.
Some notes on the nuclear detonations
This study does not assume one nuclear warhead per city.
Here, the assumption is city devastation by clusters of 1 MT to 5 MT nuclear payloads. These payloads are delivered in clusters of targeted strikes. The clusters are to spread the glassed-over devastation over a wider area, and render nearby areas uninhabitable for centuries.
It assumes groups of three or more nuclear warheads (1 MT) targeted to obliterate specific urban areas completely. The idea is to eviscerate entire swaths of infrastructure and render the population poisoned and unable to recover. Which is the expected norm with both Russia and China.
Los Angles under the effects of a trio of three high-density, high-magnitude one megaton nuclear hydrogen bombs detonated in such a way as to render the entire real-estate worthless for centuries to come. Black represents completely flattened area with glassed surfaces. The grey area represents complete radioactive and reduced rubble and debris that resembles the moons surface. All other areas will be poisoned by radiation, knocked flat by the impact of the wind, burned to a crisp by the raging fires, and completely uninhabitable.
Now, you can easily see on the map above that the use of one megaton nuclear weapon, in a cluster of three such warheads, would devastate a large city like Los Angles. The thing is, that most of the weapons used by superpowers are not that small. They are, instead, much larger.
The SLBM R-29RM carries six smaller 500 kilaton nuclear warheads (1/2 a megaton).
In the following scenarios, we will assume small SLBM launched by submarines. Each target shown would be a cluster of three 500KT to 1MT nuclear detonation.
These scenarios are based on Typhoon "boomer" submarines (Project 941 Akula) launching SLBM R-29RM SLBM armed with six 500 kiloton nuclear munitions aimed at two cities per missile (three warheads per city).
For example, one Typhoon "boomer" would launch 20 R-39 (NATO: SS-N-20) ballistic missiles. Each missile could target two cities, with three nuclear warheads each. Thus one sub could totally and completely destroy 40 cities; launching 120 nuclear 500KT nuclear weapons.
Let’s look into these responses in detail.
[1] Limited Strike.
Here we have a limited strike.
Note, for purposes of simplicity, I refer to a “single warhead” as a single target of three smaller low-yield nuclear weapon detonations. The maps can be used to assume a single warhead in the 10 megaton range, if you would prefer.
Comparative weapons sizes and footprints. The images in read are the tiny nuclear weapons the the United States used to end the war with Japan. The large weapon on the right is the size that is fielded by the Russians in their RS-28 Satan 2 MIRV ICBMs.
This is the scenario that most Americans assume would be the worst possible scenario that America might need to confront.
Of course, most neocons believe that this will never happen, but if you ask them in private, they would grudgingly admit that a nuclear “strike back” option is possible. But that the damage and causalities could be contained, and at most less than a few million Americans dead.
“Just” a few hundred million dead. It’s a “win – win”.
It’s a win – win!
I personally consider this scenario to be the least likely scenario. Though it is considered to be the most realistic worst-case nuclear scenario by the military “experts” in the Washington “think tanks”.
Limited Strike. A “warning shot”. A do not mess with us, warning in bright flash technicolor. This situation is one in which America might still be able to retain a kind of national sovereignty. This is the result from one Russian “boomer” only firing half of it’s payload. You know, to control the situation and prevent escalation.
This scenario would devastate the American industry, the stock exchange, the value of the USA dollar, and rock the government to it’s core. It will also result in a full mobilization of the United State military for a global war footing. No one wants this.
Well, almost no one.
This scenario allows the United States to be able to launch a counter strike. Thus, it is very unlikely that any nation would want the Untied States to be able to retaliate from a nuclear strike.
The thing about this scenario is that it is recoverable. Within five to ten years the United States could recover and continue with “business as usual”.
Personally I found the creepiest parts to be the ones in the aftermath where the struggling survivors have to contend with a government that pathetically and menacingly still sees itself as ruling something — particularly the bit where soldiers gun down a farmer who resists their “taxing” his meager crops.
- Umbriel from The Day After traumatized a generation with the horrors of nuclear war
The problems that I have with this scenario is that…
America is able to recover from it and continue “business as usual”.
America would still be able to launch a nuclear counter-strike.
[2] A controlled, and yet limited nuclear strike.
This scenario is a larger response to the previous scenario.
It describes a nuclear exchange that has the intention of reducing the United States to a third world nation.
This is the the kind of scenario that has been portrayed in fictional Hollywood movies like "In dawns early light". It's a fictional scenario. Do not ever think that Hollywood represents reality. It doesn't.
We still live in a world where there are thousands of nukes here in the US and thousands more overseas. And all it takes is one of those falling into the wrong hands to ruin everyone’s day. We should never assume that a small tactical nuke would not initiate full-scale MAD-level destruction of the United States.
This nuclear exchange renders all government and social programs neutral.
It zeros all government outlays, and thus risks severe public out-lash from the urban folk that live off the government handouts. It also renders the stock market, financial markets, and industrial base into squashed pablum.
A controlled, and yet limited nuclear strike. A “friendly” slap in the face warning to stop all war-like action or face obliteration. Most of America will revert to a time before the Internet, and would consider themselves lucky to have clean water, and electricity that works once or twice a week.
An America that survives this attack would still have a very difficult time fighting any kind of global war. Many troops would need to be recalled as their support network of supplies would be rendered inert.
Any overseas military operations would be terribly exposed and subject to capture and destruction.
This scenario would cause America to retract it’s global empire building efforts and concentrate on repairing the American infrastructure. This scenario will result in a 25 year long retardation in the global world stage.
This scenario would cause America to retract it’s global empire building efforts and concentrate on repairing the American infrastructure. This scenario will result in a 25 year long retardation in the global world stage.
For this reason alone, this scenario is attractive to the rest of the world.
[3] A nuclear response.
This scenario is what might possibly happen when American armed military forces are employed in attacking a nation strongly in line with one of the global super-powers. This is a very ugly and nasty scenario.
This scenario is what would happen if the United States were to employ or dispatch American troops onto the soil of either Russia or China. It would be the result if American troops were to set foot on Taiwan. It would be what would happen if a “low yield” nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere in Asia.
This scenario is what would happen if the United States were to employ or dispatch American troops onto the soil of either Russia or China. It would be the result if American troops were to set foot on Taiwan. It would be what would happen if a "low yield" nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere in Asia.
It is what would happen if the United States launches a "low yield" nuclear weapon in Iran.
This response is a truly nasty response.
After the strike, or more likely, the numerous strikes the United States will no longer be functional. Any government that exists will hardly be functional. Only the state governments will exist, and they will enact strong levels of independence from the Federal government.
The entire East and West coast turns to desolate glass covered wasteland. The uneducated migrant folk from the South American nations then march up into the United States and start claiming territory as their own.
The American government is rendered inert.
A nuclear response. This is a “slap back” nuclear response on American soil, if America decides to unleash nuclear weapons in any proxy nation. If America is lucky, it might resemble North Korea with a Democrat President declaring himself Marxist utopia ruler for life.
After the strike, or more likely, the numerous strikes the United States will no longer be functional. Any government that exists will hardly be functional. Only the state governments will exist, and they will enact strong levels of independence from the Federal government.
After the strike, or more likely, the numerous strikes the United States will no longer be functional. Any government that exists will hardly be functional. Only the state governments will exist, and they will enact strong levels of independence from the Federal government.
If a federal government were still to exist, it would probably operate out of the Courthouses of West Virginia. And have little to no authority.
[4a] The Fuck-you Response.
This is a “lite” version of the “Fuck You” response. For, I personally believe that if we piss off the wrong nation, that they will come for America and flush it right down into the sewer. They don’t FUCKING CARE.
This is a “lite” version of the “Fuck You” response. For, I personally believe that if we piss off the wrong nation, that they will come for America and flush it right down into the sewer. They don’t FUCKING CARE.
Wake the Fuck up!
Now for the last fifty years America has been pushing “democracy” as the reason for the imperial expansion. But it’s all a lie, and while many Americans might believe in it, the rest of the world does not.
They do not like it.
They just bide their time, and when the opportunity comes, they will bitch slap American in a most violent method.
But let me warn the reader about this. Of all the scenarios, including this one, there is a strong possibility that the nuclear exchange could be much, much worse. It could be global and turn all of the earth into a real cesspool. It could look a lot like this.
America can only keep fighting all those proxy wars so long before there is some serious kick-back.
Yes. And when it comes to a nuclear equipped nation, they will not have the same kind of political restraints that Americans might not accept. DO NOT ASSUME THAT THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS LIKE AMERICANS.
They do not.
The Fuck-you Response. This is the “double tap” nuclear response that is intended to send America back to the dark ages. It is designed to allow for the indigenous peoples outside of the cities to balkanize America into smaller, easier to manage third-world “shit holes”. An America after this strike would look like Somalia on a bad day.
This is a very bad scenario.
And would in fact, be what I would assume would happen within minutes of the United States entry into Asia of either physical troops, or a nuclear weapon of any size.
This scenario, as awful as it is, is only the first part of a full devastating strike. This scenario consists of three parts.
Knock out of all military satellites.
SLBM launch, five minutes to target and complete devastation of American coastal cities, and much of America’s nuclear deterrent capability. Followed by…
ICBM launch. (No more than) Thirty minutes to target and complete obliteration of all America.
So, that image; that map shown above is only the first “punch” of a two-part KO punch. Now, we discuss the second part…
[4b] The second part of the Fuck-You response.
Now, if this scenario were to manifest, I dare say that the RS-28 Satan 2 ICBM’s and MIRVs would be called into service. As a result, it is quite possible that the United States might look something like this “love tap” scenario.
Russia has fielded a “super-nuke” nuclear ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) called the RS-28 Sarmat Satan 2 AND a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) called “object 4202“. Satan 2 can reportedly destroy and area the size of France or Texas in one strike. Wow. The Russian HGV is designed specifically to be able to evade European and U.S. strategic missile defense systems, and up to three HGV’s can be carries inside the same Russian RS-28 Sarmat ICBM that does double duty as Satan 2.
Here, we have the [4] Fuck You scenario broken down into two parts. The first is SLBM launches within five minutes of USA detonation of low yield nuclear weapons in Asia. Followed up with this punishing scenario.
But let me warn the reader about this. Of all the scenarios, including this one, there is a strong possibility that the nuclear exchange could be much, much worse. It could be global and turn all of the earth into a real cesspool. It could look a lot like this.
The Day After becomes a genuine horror film as its characters begin to succumb to radiation poisoning, their hair and teeth falling out as they shamble through scorched fields strewn with bloated animal corpses and dead family dogs, swarming with flies.
Befitting the deathly pallor, Meyer imbues these scenes with classically gothic imagery: a bell struck by an unseen hand wielding a brick summons survivors from the crypts of their shelters; a lighthearted conversation between Robards and Williams is interrupted by a bandaged woman sitting up into frame and shrieking; a preacher gives a sermon inside the crater of a church, a burned crucifix dangling behind him; a young woman sitting in the pews begins suddenly bleeding from between her legs into her white dress.
A bit heavy-handed, maybe—but then, there’s nothing subtle about apocalypse. And as the end title card reminds us, even this grisly depiction is still “in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur,”.
- The Day After traumatized a generation with the horrors of nuclear war
In this most horrible scenario, you would be lucky to die in the first few strikes. No one would want to live in the United States after this exchange.
And it would truly be horrible.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
-Einstein (Paraphrased.)
Just look at this map, and this map (I must add) is not nearly as bad as what a pissed-off Russian would do.
The is the Hell Scenario using a combination of Satan ICBM and MIRV’s targeting American cities, social, infrastructure, and society, after a crippling blow sequence via SLBM nuclear weapons.
Yes. This is our possible future, post 2025.
Like the scene where Cullum’s farmer is given the laughable, FEMA-sourced advice to just “scrape off” his irradiated topsoil, it’s in moments like these that The Day After’s actual—and again, sadly relevant—message makes itself known: Should we be hit with nuclear missiles, no one will really know what to do about it. Hell, if it happens sooner rather than later, we won’t even have the cold comfort of a president who can offer up some eloquently empty words.
That’s why, watching it today, the most chilling aspect of The Day After isn’t the bombs, or their grisly aftermath. It’s all the scenes leading up to it, as people go about their lives with snatches of news broadcasts overheard—and ignored—in the background reporting on some tense, but relatively minute skirmish in Berlin. Even Lithgow’s politically informed, astutely cynical intellectual laughs off the idea of escalation, saying he has symphony tickets. The soldiers stationed around Lawrence’s missile silo joke about nuclear war infringing on their weekend fishing plans. Robards’ wife sees an alarmist special bulletin, moans, and says she just wants to go to bed. Even as the world teeters on the edge, Robards pauses to ask, to no one in particular, “Do you understand any of this?” Throughout, the threat of cataclysmic war remains a distant, inscrutable, headache-inducing hum, something to be switched off as soon as it becomes too complicated to follow. If it were made today, you could easily cut in shots of people paging listlessly through Twitter.
- The Day After traumatized a generation with the horrors of nuclear war
I know that the reader cannot control the ideas, and the passions of the oligarchy that is aligned with the Marxist democrats in power, However, the reader should be aware that after 2025 +/- 2 years, the entire globe could completely change. With America reverting to a radioactive bronze-age existence.
It is with this sad, sad warning that I leave the reader.
The moment a nuclear bomb detonates, several forms of nuclear radiation instantly permeate the environment. As this pulse of radiation surges through the bodies of everyone who is outside, or in weakly insulated buildings, it wreaks biological havoc at the molecular level. By altering the structure of key cellular machinery and injuring DNA, the radiation impairs the ability of cells to replicate and repair themselves. A ground detonation of a ten-kiloton bomb in Times Square would subject everyone between Murray Hill and Hell’s Kitchen, and from 32nd Street to the bottom of Central Park, to a potentially lethal dose of radiation.
Within minutes to hours, most people exposed in these areas would begin to show signs of acute radiation syndrome: nausea, headache, dizziness, and vomiting. After several days to two weeks, new symptoms would emerge: diarrhea, hair loss, fever, seizures, and bleeding in the mouth and under the skin, which sometimes creates purple blotches on the body. In the most severe cases, people would become emaciated, delirious, and incapacitated. Most people with radiation sickness will die for one of two reasons: because they no longer have enough immune cells to fight off microbial infections, or because their digestive system is too damaged to function properly.
The radiation released instantaneously by an explosion is only a prelude to a much more insidious and long-lived threat. Immediately after the blast, a huge fireball would rise swiftly through the air and begin to condense into a mushroom cloud, tinted red at first, then white. A strong updraft and inflowing winds would suck soil and debris, already bonded with radioactive particles released by the explosion, into the cloud. Within 15 minutes, a portion of this radioactive dust — mostly grains the size of salt or sand — would begin to fall directly on the city. Within a day, some survivors exposed to the dust would begin to experience itching and burning sensations; within two to three weeks, lesions would begin to appear. Fallout that is inhaled or swallowed, or that enters the body through a wound, would be even more dangerous: It exposes internal organs to a continuous source of nuclear radiation, damaging tissue in the same way as the initial pulse of radiation from the explosion itself.
- This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
Nuclear notes & Conclusion
Nuclear war will devastate America for centuries.
If America is lucky, yes if it is lucky, America might revert to horse and buggy carriages as the primary means of conveyance. Medical treatments can revert as well. Leaving other nations first world status while America is marked on the map as “Keep Out – Dangerous”.
We do not know what the future holds, but here I try to look at what might manifest, given the historical norms with American politics. Given the historical norms, nuclear war is highly likely no matter what the politicians might pontificate.
I pray that this does not happen, but as time moves forward, it is becoming more and more likely each and every day. Most of the oligarchy that exists today has no idea of just how dark and black things can get.
They have raised the stakes of human existence sky-high, and when things tumble, they will crash with a thunderous roar.
“We need to fight for democracy around the world, and use force as necessary to spread the joys of freedom!”
They are oblivious and do not care. And at that, we can guarantee that nuclear Armageddon will most certainly destroy America.
They are oblivious and do not care. And at that, we can guarantee that nuclear Armageddon will most certainly destroy America.
Not Convinced?
For decades, the United States has taken China’s ballistic missile capability for granted, assessing it as a low-capability force with limited regional impact and virtually no strategic value. But on October 1, 2019 during a massive military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing put the U.S., and the world, on notice that this assessment was no longer valid.
One of the nations keenly observing the impact of the American RMA in the Persian Gulf was China. Chinese military theorists studied how Marshall adapted Ogarkov’s theories into an American version of RMA, and responded with a Chinese adaptation, developing weapons specifically intended to overcome American superiority in critical areas.
In one fell swoop, China may have nullified America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. missile defense capability. Through its impressive display of new weapons systems, China has underscored the reality that while the United States has spent the last two decades squandering trillions of dollars fighting insurgents in the Middle East, Beijing was singularly focused on overcoming American military superiority in the Pacific. If the capabilities of these new weapons are taken at face value, China will have succeeded on this front…
One of the nations keenly observing the impact of the American RMA in the Persian Gulf was China. Chinese military theorists studied how Marshall adapted Ogarkov’s theories into an American version of RMA, and responded with a Chinese adaptation, developing weapons specifically intended to overcome American superiority in critical areas.
These weapons became known as “shashoujian,” or “the Assassin’s Mac,” derived from the traditional Chinese way of describing a weapon of surprising power. “A shashoujian,” a contemporary Chinese military journal notes, “is a weapon that has an enormous terrifying effect on the enemy and that can produce an enormous destructive assault.” More importantly, the modern Chinese concept of shashoujian envisions not a single weapon, but rather a system of weapons that combine to produce the desired effect.
There’s more…
Enter the DF-41, China’s ultimate shashoujian weapon. A three-stage, road-mobile ICBM equipped with between six and 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads, the DF-41 provides China with a nuclear deterrent capable of surviving an American nuclear first strike and delivering a nation-killing blow to the United States in retaliation. The DF-41 is a strategic game changer, allowing China to embrace the mutual assured destruction (MAD) nuclear deterrence posture previously the sole purview of the United States and Russia.
In doing so, China has gained the strategic advantage over the U.S. when it comes to competing power projection in the Pacific. Possessing a virtually unstoppable A2/AD capability, Beijing is well positioned to push back aggressively against U.S. maritime power projection in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits.
For decades, the United States has taken China’s ballistic missile capability for granted, assessing it as a low-capability force with limited regional impact and virtually no strategic value. But on October 1, during a massive military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing put the U.S., and the world, on notice that this assessment was no longer valid.
Words from a time traveler
There’s a fellow by the name of John Titor that claimed to be from a future where scenario 4a & 4b took place. What he had to say was very interesting. Believe it or not. But it’s an interesting read.
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
World War II began September 1st, 1939, and lasted until September 2nd 1945. It lasted six long years. In total, 80 million people died in that war.
Since then, we have been living in the sweet calm of peace that dwells between the periodic madness that is the GREAT RESET. This period of calm quiet lasts for around 80 years. Then it all starts all over again.
We have been living in the sweet calm of peace that dwells between the periodic madness that is the GREAT RESET.
The quiet and calm lasts for 80 years.
1945 plus 80 years equals = 2025.
Today, I have a short warning from the great book The Fourth Turning by Howe and Strauss. For they, using the theory of generational cycles (or turnings), predict the same RESET to reoccur in our near future.
We know the climax of this Fourth Turning is slated for around 2025. This infers a high likelihood of a major war involving the U.S. in the foreseeable future.
We know the climax of this Fourth Turning is slated for around 2025. This infers a high likelihood of a major war involving the U.S. in the foreseeable future.
-The Daily Coin
What Should Have Happened after 2016
Strauss and Howe prophesied an election that changed everything sometime during the Crisis era. This era began with a start, with the colossal fall of Lehman Brothers.
And they were right. They were smack-dab absolutely correct.
The filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 remains the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, with Lehman holding over US$600 billion in assets. The bank and financial services firm had become so deeply involved in mortgage origination that it had effectively become a real estate hedge fund disguised as an investment bank. At the height of the subprime mortgage crisis, it was exceptionally vulnerable to any downturn in real estate values.
If the government were better managed, perhaps things might have turned out differently than they had. But it isn’t, and thus things turned out in such as way as what you see today.
The predictions called for a “change in governmental direction” that would have been triggered by this “event”.
The winners (in the election) will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned.
This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis.
Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.
The regeneracy will be solidly under way.
Sides were formed. People migrated towards those sides. Many people, surprisingly diverse, chose the Republican leader; Donald Trump. Though, the prediction still held true whether the winner was Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
The Fourth Turning predicted an equal likelihood of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump being President. Then they predicted that whomever won the election would define the direction the Country would take during the Fourth Turning.
We got the realigning election with Donald Trump. He did what H. Ross Perot could not. He united conservatives and blue-collar patriots to win the presidency.
But…
What did not happen.
But, Republicans in Congress did not advance Trump’s agenda.
The predictions assumed that the winner of the Presidency would be in full possession of the levers of power. That did not happen. The “Deep State Swamp” took over the leadership of the nation.
Donald Trump was considered an "outsider". One one of the elite. Not one of the blessed. Not part of the "club", or the "inner circle".
Republican Congressional leaders were either too timid to push, or they were political saboteurs (looking at you, Paul Ryan). Either way, Congress undermined the Presidential agenda, the mandate, that the people gave them. Then they tried to push him out with al kinds of claims related to Russia and sex. Finally, they just threw up their hands and tried to impeach him.
This is what the deep state does to outsiders Middle America sends to Washington to challenge or dispossess it.
- From Pat Buchanan
Oh, and about the impeachment…
When asked about the impeachment of President Trump, 100% of him answered, "If they convict it'll be like when the Germans dropped the A-bomb on Pearl Harbor and caused the fall of the Roman Empire."
-Woodpile Report #598
They did not permit President Trump to really implement much of his agenda. Congress, and the entire “deep state” (the unelected bureaucracy) opposed him in every way possible.
Congress and the deep state blocked President Trump from implementing any of his agenda. This was unheard of, and raised it’s ugly head fro the first time during the Trump Presidency. Since then, hundreds of blocking efforts were undertaken to thwart the Republican President’s agenda. They did not permit President Trump to really implement much of his agenda. Congress, and the entire “deep state” (the unelected bureaucracy) opposed him in every way possible.
While he was able to appoint some judges, and conduct some staffing realignments within the enormous Washington bureaucracy, he has been mostly ineffective.
President Donald Trump has been completely blocked by embeds inside the “deep state”. Thus he has been severely handicapped in running the nations and is incapable of many actions and activities that other presidents were able to get away with.
Like a wack-a-mole, judges stop implementation of any of his EO’s, hidden masked and nameless bureaucrats thwart every policy he makes. Meanwhile his most close advisors (such as John Bolton) undermine his foreign policy efforts.
Neocons hold a mid-1850s mindset. They think in terms of nations, wars, and geographical conquest. They do so at the expense of understanding the Earth as a living (kind of) organism that we all inhabit.
As a result, the House of Representatives, and their “troops” the supporting bureaucracy, are now firmly in the hands of the opposition. Which is essentially, the Bolsheviks. While a true Gray Champion of the Republic holds down the White House in a figurehead role.
A figurehead role, while his supporters have been targeted for assault…
The Left Has Declared War On You
There’s no need to worry about finding yourself in the center of a riot until a faction of society decides it’s okay to intimidate or kill people they don’t agree with you. So maybe it’s time to start worrying.
You probably saw the news of the riots in Berkeley, California. Social Justice Warriors shut down a conservative speaker’s presentation, set fires, looted, destroyed buildings, maced some conservatives and beat others mercilessly. The police stood by and watched. The mayor blamed the victims.
In Austin, Texas, a gay conservative was beaten unconscious for lighting his cigarette with a Donald Trump lighter. His assailant is at large. Don’t expect the Austin police to put in any overtime hunting him down.
Magazines openly call for Donald Trump’s assassination.
Feminists assault anyone who disagrees with them, even shoving bloody maxi-pads into pro-lifers’ mouths.
The Secret Service is investigating over 12,000 direct threats to assassinate the President.
And these are just a few of one day’s examples of leftist violence against anyone who disagrees with their worldview.
Meanwhile, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Time Magazine, and everything else you would consider “responsible” journalism openly condones violence against Trump supporters. Academics and Democrat leaders justify violence and encourage leftists to attack their political opponents.
Having lost at the ballot box, having lost in the court of public opinion, the left has decided to intimidate or kill its adversaries. Just like the Nazis. Just like the Leninists. Just like the Maoists.
-Hennessysview
So what will happen now?
A Fourth Turning Prophecy
Chapter 10 of The Fourth Turning is a prophecy written in 1996 and published a year later. In every way it appears to be a complete reflection of the events unfolding all around us today.
Keep in mind that this work was published a full five years before the events of 9-11. It was written a long time ago, at a time when Bill Clinton was President of the United States. And yet, as long ago as that, the things that it has predicted and the trends that are manifesting are all… spot on target.
Movies of the year 1995.
And, I am sad to say, that this prophecy is getting to be quite frightening.
Even if the nation stays together, its geography could be fundamentally changed, its party structure altered, its Constitution and Bill of Rights amended beyond recognition.
History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis.
If there is confrontation,it is likely to lead to war.
This could be any kind of war—class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war.
If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil—its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.
And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed.
That total war could also be a combination or series of several types of war. Several.
Several… all at once.
Several things could implode all at once. Indeed, this is the likeliest scenario. As there are all sorts of trends and events just about to run “off the rails”, and all sort of “the opportunistic others” who have plans to take advantage of government collapse.
It could be a meltdown of government…
Congressional leftists are exploring the nuts 'n bolts of arresting and confining those insufficiently cooperative with the coup d'etat. And how many times have I said DC is well and truly imploding when they start arresting each other?
We're reenacting Sulla's Social War. Lists of the proscribed are being circulated, the walls have networked eyes and ears, and neighbors are exhorted to turn each other in. After years of hanging out in academia and the lower courts, the ghost of Roland Freisler now hears every appeal.
The elites saw this coming, consolidated their winnings and quietly decamped to more inaccessible redoubts. Bereft of expert supervision, the next tier down is looting the public weal with clumsy abandon. The tier below, even less sophisticated, will strip the fixtures and wiring from government buildings. Officialdom will demand we applaud their righteous resourcefulness. Because equality.
-Woodpile Report
It could be a violent readjustment of society…
All the usual “good people” assure us that violent revolution is not on the table. This means, simply, that it is.
- From Brett Stevens at Amerika
It could be everything and anything. It could be social upheaval in alignment with the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930’s, coupled with the genocide of the Cambodians under Pol Pot. It could be a mixture of George Orwell, and the worst elements of THX1138. It could be every nightmare that you could possibly dream of.
‘THX 1138’ is a chilling look at a 25th-century totalitarian state where mankind is stripped of any individuality. People are numbered drones, and a government-enforced program of sedating drugs controls the populace. The story’s title character, THX, is a factory worker whose life is irrevocably changed when he stops taking his mind-numbing drugs.
It could be domestic guerrilla warfare…
When the violence comes—and it will come—the military and militarized police forces will face domestic insurgents who are better armed, trained, supplied, coordinated, and technologically proficient than the foreign insurgents the military has heretofore been unable to defeat.
- From Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic
It could be a polarization of society…
Breitbart - Calif. Police Chief Cancels Event to Honor Fallen Officer Because Republicans Were Invited ... "this is not Trump country, we don’t want Republicans here"
Indeed, all this anti-white propaganda is geared towards genocide. It is not geared to any objective regarding healing. It is an out of control manipulation by the oligarchy to pit Americans against each other.
You cannot purify white people through the healing magic of diversity if they are not actually part of diversity.
-Z Man
Let’s just clear out all the nonsense and get to the basics…
When Progressives talk about diversity, they mean blacks.
We can put the upper bound on diversity as 20%. Any more than that and white crime victimization and awareness of it begins to soar. This sets off white flight.
Baltimore is a great example. Once its black population crossed the 25% level, it began a rapid decline into chaos.
As Rhodesia, Baltimore and now South Africa show, there is some minimum number of whites required to keep the lights on, so everyone can enjoy the wonderfulness of diversity.
In the case of Rhodesia, the number fell below the minimum and it became Zimbabwe. In Baltimore, they have hovered along the critical number for decades. South Africa staggers on, but they too are approaching the inflection point.
-Z Man
Someone, or some group, is organizing a campaign leading towards the genocide of “white people”. This will absolutely manifest during the crisis period. Look, just because the mainstream media isn’t covering the obvious does not mean that that it doesn’t exist.
Fighting Is Under Way
And leftist blood-lust is not limited to a fringe. A very intelligent and gentle acquaintance of mine, someone with whom I once enjoyed a cordial and friendly long-running debate, believes that Trump sent federal troops into Berkeley the other night to conduct mass arrests of protesters, trigging the riots. It’s completely untrue and she had no idea where she heard it, but she believes it as much as she believes in gravity. And her false belief, what psychologists would call a hallucination (h/t Scott Adams), allows her to justify anything the rioters did, up to and including murder.
Here’s the thing. You’ve probably heard the word “privilege” so much you could puke when you hear it. The idea of white privilege is central to the leftist hallucination. And the idea of a privileged race led Germany to the Final Solution.
Adolf Hitler wrote in 1919:
"But an anti-Semitism based on reason must lead to a systematic legal elimination of the privileges of the Jews. The ultimate objective of such legislation must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews from civil and cultural influence."
In fact, the Nazi propagandists worked overtime to defame Jews for their privilege. Hitler claimed Jews avoided physical labor of any kind, preferring work in finance, mercantile, and the arts. He lamented that Jews wrote and produced 90 percent of German movies despite being only one percent of the population. His propaganda depicted Jewish women as fat and lazy, yet wealthy, feeding off the labor of the German people.
Substitute “working class whites” for “Jews,” and Nazi propaganda sounds a lot like CNN commentators and UC Berkeley professors. Even so-called conservative Bill Kristol says it’s time to replace America’s white working class with immigrants.
It’s pretty clear that the left uses the same rhetoric and scapegoating against conservatives as the Nazi used against Jews. So we have to ask if these leftists use the propaganda techniques to the same end.
The Nazis wanted to vilify and dehumanize Jews so the German people would be conditioned for the Final Solution: extermination.
When you hear the speeches of campus protesters, you have to conclude that the left has a final solution in mind for people like you and me. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here are the words of a school teacher in Seattle protesting against Trump and his supporters:
"And we need to start killing people. First off, we need to start killing the White House. The White House must die. The White House, your fucking White House, your fucking Presidents, they must go! Fuck the White House.
Pay the fuck up, pay the fuck up. It ain’t just your fucking time, it’s your fucking money, and now your fucking life is devoted to social change."
Democrats, establishment Republicans, and the supposedly “responsible” media ignored this story. They ignored it because they are afraid of attracting the mob’s attention. Like Germans in the 1930s, some people value their own survival too much to stop bloodshed and brutality.
-Hennessysview
It could be an exodus of the wealthy from the urban centers…
All those pricey urban meccas could become crime-ridden ghost towns. How could such a reversal occur? Everyone who lives outside protected enclaves will reach a point where the "urban lifestyle" is no longer worth the sacrifices and costs. Once enough of the top 10% leave, the food/beverage service industry implodes.
Service employees are renters, paying sky-high rents that unemployment can't cover. Vacant apartments pile up. As the exodus gathers momentum, all the reasons people clung so rabidly to urban meccas decay. Local government jacks up fees, tickets, permits and taxes, accelerating the exodus.
That's how pricey urban meccas turn into ghost towns inhabited by those who can't leave and those living on public services.
-Of Two Minds Blog
It could be another mindless war…
Those in power could start beating the war drums again. You know, to unify the nation, and distract us from the problems at home. It worked during both Iraq wars.
But right now the United States is mired in eight simultaneous wars. Can you name them all? I can’t. I have to look them up.
Now, luckily Donald Trump has pledged not to get us involved in more wars. This has cost him some political capital. Notable fatalities are General (Mad Dog) Mattis, John McCain (deceased and good riddance), and John Bolton (Neocon on steroids).
Donald Trump came into office promising to not start any new wars and to get us out of the old ones our feckless elite had dragged us into, and now that he’s doing it in Syria the usual suspects are outraged. How dare he actually deliver on his promise not to have anymore of our precious warriors shipped home in boxes after getting killed on battlefields we can’t even pronounce, while refereeing conflicts that began long before America was a thing, in campaigns without any kind of coherent objective?
- Critics Aghast As Trump Keeps Word About No More Wars
Yet, his successor might not be so careful about husbanding our military might. This could have dire consequences. As the world is getting to be technologically advanced, and nuclear weapons are getting increasingly easy to make.
It could be World War III…
And what would happen if a civil war, a CWII or SHTF event were to occur? America would be in chaos. Everything would be a mess, and the central governments from the Federal to the State, and Local levels would be very busy trying to maintain order.
Would other nations sit by and watch from afar? Would they decide to help and roll in the UN to restore order? Or would they just be content to watch America burn?
Thus, if a civil war broke out in the United States, would China, Russia, and Iran not jump in to finally render America helpless? To take advantage of the situation, to cripple the United States to a point where it could never ever, ever EVER fully recover?
Why NOT do a “double tap” and castrate America back into oblivion from which it would take a full 100 years to recover from?
Nuclear war, one initiated by America in order to control the American mobs, could easily reverse America’s fortunes in a nanosecond. The idea that a war out here, or over there, would be created and have no consequences is a very dangerous belief. The world is not the 1960’s, and not every nation is a third world tiny splat of land. Major nations are now getting involved in the global scene, and they do not take kindly to Americans throwing their weight around.
If America has gotten fat, plump and comfortable, being the bully on the global stage, throwing “regime changing” wrenches (via the CIA, NED, and NID) to everyone from Venezuela, Syria, the Ukraine, Hong Kong and China, won’t other nations resent it?
And, if an opportunity presents itself, would not another nation take advantage of that opportunity. An opportunity to “de-fang” the United States, and “neuter” it’s ability to project global influence (read; power) in the world?
I would say yes.
“Hours after the bombs go off in cities, these fires continue to build up and they create firestorms that feed on themselves. They get so hot that everything in the city becomes fuel for its own destruction. The energy released becomes much greater than the weapon itself,” Dr. Mills explained, drawing parallels to the way fire consumed the city of Dresden during the World War II.
From each of these 100 detonations, massive firestorms would engulf whole cities and churn five million tons of black carbon into the stratosphere.
By nuking the major American cities, all industry would grind to a halt. Banking and savings would be non-existent. Everything would collapse and the survivors would flee the cities into the countryside.
Americans should never be under the impression that the rest of the world views us with favor. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
America is viewed as an out of control bully by the rest of the world.
Today is not the 1960’s. It’s no longer “just” a small world after all. It’s a complex and complicated stew of various interests all colliding together for personal advantage.
In the midst of this backdrop the United States is viewed as an out of control empire, a bully, and now (seemingly) with Mr. Donald Trump at the helm, run by an apparent “mad man”.
Right or wrong, perceptions are everything.
Any civil strife in the United States will open the door for other, more powerful nations, to perform the “kill strike”, the “double tap”, on the American nation.
The next turning could have the worst elements of everything known to man. This could be nuclear war, chemical, biological and germ warfare high technology spying and swarm drone weapons. All of which could happen simultaneously while the USA government might to enact genocide against its citizenry.
Oh, and by the way, a fellow by the name of John Titor claimed to be from the future. Yes, he claimed to be a time traveler from the future. He described just this exact scenario, where there was a rather long period of civil unrest and then Russia nuked all the cities. Whether you believe him or not is immaterial. He has some interesting things to ponder.
The link below opens up into a new tab for your reading pleasure.
From the post…
' The blogger suggests this because he questions what actually occurred did not match all the conflicts that John Titor predicted. Perhaps the events he mentions will actually still occur, only they will actually occur 10 years later.
Maybe, instead of a civil war in 2013, there is one in 2023? Nuclear war in 2025, instead of 2015. '
Remember those two dates; 2023 – Civil War, and 2025 – Nuclear War.
With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different.
The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride.
Or it may be something unspeakably worse.
The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.
It will be a turning point. It will be a point of inversion, a point of change. A point where things go one way or the other, and everyone in the middle is killed.
Glory or Ruin.
It will be the us vs them. The patriots vs the Red Coats. The grey vs the blue. The yanks against the Nazi’s.
So what will happen?
Consider the Millennials, how they were raised (Power Rangers, Captain Planet, Animal Planet, school uniforms, and conformity against human nature). To them, conformity, and control via electronic media is as natural as breathing air. To them, it is normal to demand conformity, conformity in everything, even in thought and speech.
Consider the Millennial’s, how they were raised (Power Rangers, Captain Planet, Animal Planet, school uniforms, and conformity against human nature). To them, conformity, and control via electronic media is as natural as breathing air. To them, it is normal to demand conformity, conformity in everything, even in thought and speech.
This youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millennial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues.
The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20 percent of Millennials who were poor as children (50 percent in inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia.
Unraveling-era adults who are today chilled by school uniforms will be truly frightened by the Millennials’ Crisis-era collectivism.
It’s exactly these millennials, and their behaviors, that have created the NPC meme.
“Unraveling-era adults who are today chilled by school uniforms will be truly frightened by the Millennials’ Crisis-era collectivism.”
An opportunity came and passed.
So with all these issues, all of them coming to maturity at the same time, we have a situation where a real leader should take the helm of the American government. Then cultivate the civilian population, and provide rules, and outlets to blow off some steam.
But this was not permitted to occur.
Instead, we have the situation we see today. A president that is unable to do much of anything. An entrenched bureaucracy that operates in direct opposition to his policies, and an opposition that is chomping at the bit to install radical Pol Pot style Marxism.
Meanwhile the “fox is running the hen-house” and blatantly behaving like they are untouchable, because they actually are. President Nixon was impeached within months. The people who assassinated Lincoln were arrested and hung within weeks. Yet, Hillary Clinton has been running around freely for over three years and nothing is being done. Let’s never forget Lois Learner, and the rest of the cabal.
Hillary Clinton’s guilt is so obvious and spectacular that it is considered a joke.
It’s true.
An opportunity came and passed. The Presidential mandate of the American people was not implemented. Indeed, the only way for the President to communicate is via twitter. The news media is a complete train wreck.
It seems America is seriously out of alignment.
And, like a car badly out of tune, the vehicle shutters, rocks, starts and stops. It sputters, gasping for air or gas, then collapses.
Hillary Clinton meme. Nobody has 56 dead friends.
Republicans failed to fulfill their mandate with the House and Senate. And then what happened… Well, the people turned, instead, to the other side. The Bolsheviks now run the House. And people, this is not good. Not at all. Not in the least.
And this is who’s running the House:
These four women, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, are 4 of the most radical, hardcore Socialists you will ever meet. On top of that, they all advocate for open borders, they all advocate for illegal immigrants, they all advocate for the Palestinians, and 3 of them are anti-semitic and against Israel. Now you know a little bit more than you did about ‘The Squad’ of these four freshman congresswoman who are, by their own actions, dominating the news cycle at this moment. No one that I know has any problem at all with women in the Congress, or women of color in the Congress, but have a huge problem with radical activists like these who are pushing to collapse the system.
Look at them. They would arrest you, strip you, hang you by a hook and gut you before you could utter your Bill of Rights protections. They do not run on reason. They are incapable of it. They operate on emotion. And right now, it is unbridled rage.
Think of it as a small “toe hold”, a small start, for something much larger on the horizon.
And people, these individuals HATE YOU. They hate you with a passion and they do want to see you, your families, and everything that you stand for killed, eviscerated, and the ground you walk upon salted for centuries to come.
And if given the opportunity, they will transform your world into something very, very awful.
And people, these individuals HATE YOU. They hate you with a passion and they do want to see you, your families, and everything that you stand for killed, eviscerated, and the ground you walk upon salted for centuries to come.
It Gets Worse
It needs to be clear that 2025 is the date of the climax, not the end, of the 4T.
The end of the 2020s is the date at which the 4T will end.
We have much more to go through first, and it will take a few years. It cannot end during the current regime, and correcting it will take some years in addition. The current situation in which the hard right dominates our country cannot continue; it must be displaced.
That might require violent confrontation, not to achieve a leftist takeover, but to curtail a hard right rebellion that might break out against the policies of a soft-left regime that needs to replace today's hard-right regime.
-Generational Theory Forum Comment written by an obvious leftist.
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026.
What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?
History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship.
We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin.
Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war.
Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse.
It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
This is not a new observation.
Leading up to the major crisis in the Fourth Turning, the police will find themselves becoming more and more militarized. It will reach a point that it will be difficult to tell the difference between a police officer and a soldier.
Do you think that I am perhaps exaggerating a little? Well, I am not.
Having lost at the ballot box, having lost in the court of public opinion, the left has decided to intimidate or kill its adversaries. Just like the Nazis. Just like the Leninists. Just like the Maoists.
-These People Want You Dead
Of course it is. The United States doesn’t resemble anything like what it was intended to be. Instead, greedy, and selfish men rewrote it to be “progressive”. Which means “subject to change”.
And they changed it.
And changed it.
And changed it.
Now, today, it is a complete and absolute nightmare.
Well, let’s get back to the Fourth Turning. Of course, they cannot predict the future specifically. They can only predict trends.
These predictions are based on previous turnings and the historical record.
“An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown. The president declares emergency powers. Congress rescinds his authority. Dollar and bond prices plummet. The president threatens to stop Social Security checks. Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
Strauss and Howe wrote their book in 1996. They were not trying to be prophets of doom. Instead they were observers of history able to connect events through human life cycles of 80 or so years. Well how close were they? Look at the headlines today on Drudge…
Drudge Report splash 9OCT19.
We have gotten so accustomed to this new “normal” that we forget how obscene it is. Functional governments do not act like this. Dysfunctional ones do.
"The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown."
Using critical thinking skills and identifying the most likely triggers for crisis: debt, civic decay, and global disorder, they were able to anticipate scenarios. Scenarios which could drive the next crisis. And which they warned would arrive in the mid-2000 decade.
A polarization of the community.
Elements of civil strife, followed by physical strife.
The possibility of war and conflict.
The scenario described above is fairly close to the current situation, driven by the showdown between Trump and the Democrats regarding everything from the border wall to the endless stream of impeachment level attacks.
As we enter the twelfth year of this Fourth Turning, the fourth Crisis period in U.S. history, the mood of U.S. citizens and citizens around the globe continues to darken.
As we enter the twelfth year of this Fourth Turning, the fourth Crisis period in U.S. history, the mood of U.S. citizens and citizens around the globe continues to darken.
Fourth Turnings are driven by generational configuration and the emotional reaction to events by the Prophet generation leaders, Nomad generation spearheads, and Hero generation cannon fodder.
What’s going on now…
Do I need to list all the discomfort?
Discomfort is what happens as the population waltzes towards disaster. It happens each and every time. Consider the years leading up to the first American Civil War…
William J. Cooper has written a magnificently researched account of the political atmosphere that prevailed in the United States immediately after the election of Abraham Lincoln and through the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. What individual elements made up the call to arms on both sides of the Mason Dixon line? Which persons were conciliatory and which were belligerent? What contribution did the nuances of the several political parties play in the mood of the population? Was the Civil War inevitable no matter what action was taken by Lincoln?
Many eminent American Civil War historians tend to move quickly throughout the three year period preceding the onset of the War, as they move on the War itself, however Wm. Cooper's work has has been devoted entirely to a study of this critical era, and provides significant insight as to the period's ultimate result-- namely, the War itself.
Cooper has devoted much effort to a study of the era's significant and influential caste of characters, including an newspaper editor, abolitionists, radical Republicans,, members of both houses of Congress,and each of the Presidents---both sitting and newly -elected..
-Amazon reviews of "We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861" by Cooper, William J. (2012) Hardcover
Examining the three prior Fourth Turnings may give us a window into where we stand and what may happen in the coming year.
We are in the eleventh year of this Crisis. (The eleven-year anniversary was in September 2019.) Here we look at the three previous events.
The American Revolution Crisis
The Civil War Crisis
The Great Depression/World War II Crisis
A comparison of the last three “Fourth Turnings” in the United States. Full-scale war is shown in black.
The American Revolution Crisis
The American Revolution Crisis was catalyzed in 1773. This was when the Boston Tea Party forever changed the colonial mood towards revolution.
After eight years of struggle and desperate measures, the climax was reached with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
The American Revolution Crisis was catalyzed in 1773. This was when the Boston Tea Party forever changed the colonial mood towards revolution. After eight years of struggle and desperate measures, the climax was reached with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
But there was still thirteen more years of crisis as the new states forged a Constitution, elected Washington its first president, and he withstood the Jacobins, put down the Whiskey Rebellion and finalized a treaty with England.
In year ten of the crisis, two years past the climax, the Treaty of Paris was signed, British troops left the continent, and Washington resigned as commander of American troops. The Articles of Confederation had been ratified in 1781 and remained in place until succeeded by the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
In year ten of the crisis, two years past the climax, the Treaty of Paris was signed, British troops left the continent, and Washington resigned as commander of American troops. The Articles of Confederation had been ratified in 1781 and remained in place until succeeded by the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
The Civil War Crisis
There was no tenth or eleventh year of the Civil War Crisis. Lincoln’s election with only 40% of the popular vote, prompting the attack on Fort Sumpter.
Lincoln’s election with only 40% of the popular vote, prompting the attack on Fort Sumpter. As well as the subsequent secession of Southern states. It triggered the bloodiest conflict in world history. It was a fiasco, with 8% of all white men aged 13 to 43 killed in the war, including 6% in the North and 18% in the South.
Lincoln’s election with only 40% of the popular vote, prompting the attack on Fort Sumpter. As well as the subsequent secession of Southern states. It triggered the bloodiest conflict in world history. It was a fiasco, with 8% of all white men aged 13 to 43 killed in the war, including 6% in the North and 18% in the South.
More death and decay. Two per cent of the United States population was wiped out because of the war.
The acceleration of this Fourth Turning into a five-year window from 1860 to 1865 was not a positive development.
The extreme intensity of the conflict resulted in 700,000 tragic deaths. The catalyst occurred five years too soon and the resolution a generation too soon.
Perhaps, a more extended crisis may have allowed tempers to moderate and the conflict to end in a more constructive manner. Instead, with the surrender at Appomattox and assassination of Lincoln, the resolution felt more like a defeat than a victory.
Turmoil continued for at least a decade after the resolution.
The Great Depression/World War II Crisis
The Great Depression/World War II Crisis saw its tenth and eleventh years as the most ominous, dangerous and destructive for Great Britain, as they bore the brunt of the German onslaught.
World War II will always be known for the mass genocide of Jews, the use of atomic weapons to destroy complete cities, and the wholesale slaughter of innocent people. When the people who started this entire fiasco started to lose, the followers of Hitler and the Nazi’s, they killed themselves with cyanide rather than face their crimes against humanity.
1939 saw the Nazi invasion of Poland and the official start of World War II.
A year and a half after the invasion of Poland by the Germans, the Nazis evacuated the Jews from my home town, Krakow, and resettled us in very cramped quarters in the most dilapidated part of the city. On March 13, 1941, my family of six people was forced to relocate from our comfortable 3-bedroom home at Retjana # 5 to a cramped one bedroom apartment at Targowa # 1, which we shared with several other families.
Life was difficult in the ghetto. Jews were routinely abused, assaulted, and even murdered by the Nazis, who patrolled the streets with pistols, rifles, and whips. We were prisoners at the hands of an abusive force that had prompted a world war, but we were totally unprepared for the obscene horrors and large-scale genocide that our captors were about to execute on us.
The date was October 28, 1942. The Nazis were about to implement their second deportation of Jews from the Krakow ghetto to the extermination camps. We were told that the ghetto would be liquidated, that we all were to be transported to labor camps, and that everybody had to go to Plac Zgody square with their most important belongings.
Fear could be seen on the faces of every Jew in the ghetto. Everyone felt that something horrible was about to happen. On my way to our family’s apartment, I met my parents, my sister Greta, and my brother Leszek inside the corridor of their building. My parents had come out of the bunker where they were hiding, and I wanted to warn them to stay inside.
They didn’t have any working papers (Arbeits-bescheinigungen), so I thought that their lives could be in danger. But, it was too late to tell them to go back into hiding. From all sides, the SS Gestapo appeared before us and pushed us into the street.
Leszek and I had working papers indicating that he was a toolmaker and I was an auto mechanic for the German SS. We thought that these papers would save us and our family from the deportation. We presented the papers to SS Obersturmfuhrer Martin Fellenz, {1} a Gestapo
officer who was in charge of the deportation.
On Mr. Lewis’ return to Krakow 43 years after the second liquidation of the ghetto, Plac Zgody was eerily quiet. Fellenz ripped up our papers, began to beat us with his club, and ordered us to go with all of the other prisoners to Plac Zgody. At Plac Zgody, I noticed many familiar faces, including my girlfriend Regina’s mother, Ida, and her two sisters, Tosia and Gienia.
I wanted to talk to them but I was not permitted to do so. I had to sit on the ground and remain still. The Germans ordered us not to move an inch. To prove their point, they began to kill anyone who got up or moved around. At that point I decided that I had to escape, no matter what might be the consequences.
I told Leszek my plans, and he said he would try to escape, too. I told my parents and sister what I intended to do, and they told me to go ahead and run. Soon, we were ordered to line up, four in a row.
I told my family not to look for me if I tried to escape. Passing Wieliczka Street, I tried to run into a house, but I was unsuccessful. I was stopped by an SS guard and forced back onto the line. I was lucky that guard did not kill me right then and there for trying to escape.
- The Story of Victor Lewis
In May of 1940 Germany launched its blitzkrieg offensive through Holland and Belgium, defeating the French and British forces in a matter of weeks. Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister, replaced by Churchill, as France surrendered in late June.
The Battle of Britain raged from July through October as Hitler relentlessly bombed England, trying to force their surrender.
Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite pact in September, setting the stage for the U.S. eventual participation in the war. Einstein informed FDR of the potential for an atomic bomb during 1939 and the Manhattan Project was born. The climax of the crisis occurred with the successful D-Day invasion. The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan and successful demobilization of military forces marked the end of the crisis.
Smoldering ruins of Nagasaki, about 700 meters from the hypocenter. The United States detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, with the consent of the United Kingdom, as required by the Quebec Agreement. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
Learning from History
History may not repeat, but human nature never changes, so the 80-year cycles of man-made crisis will repeat. The length of time from the American Revolution climax in 1781 until the Civil War climax in 1863 was 82 years.
The next climax in 1944 was 81 years after the Civil War climax.
History may not repeat, but human nature never changes, so the 80-year cycles of man-made crisis will repeat. The length of time from the American Revolution climax in 1781 until the Civil War climax in 1863 was 82 years.
Therefore, we can expect a climax to this current Crisis sometime in the 2025 range. The question is what events will transpire between today (the tail end of 2019) and 2025 before a climax is reached.
80 years = 2025
81 years = 2026
82 years = 2027
A study of the years ahead…
There’s a few precious years ahead before these fateful target dates. However, you the reader should please take note, the event and the turning can occur earlier or later than the historical norm. It is just an average target date obtained through extrapolation.
Here are the next few years before the Fourth Turning is expected to reach a crisis point. The astute reader should realize that the event is scheduled immediately after the 2024 election. Historically, this will mean that a progressive democrat will take over the Presidency. In that event, we can expect a full-on gun confiscation effort that would be the result of a mass-shooting event. Democrat presidents always have mass-shooting events in the first six months of their presidency. Then they unleash the anti-gun narrative to a fever pitch. The event that was supposed to really work this last time was the 2016 Los Vegas shooter, but of course it wasn’t Hillary Clinton at the Helm it was Donald Trump..
My guess, for what ever reason, is that Donald Trump will win the 2020 election. The nation would continue to go bat-shit crazy and the opposition forces, with the oligarchy-controlled “deep state” will have all sorts of options on the table for the 2024 election.
I anticipate that there will be numerous things that will occur after the 2024 election. One of which would be a progressive democrat become president with the support with the brain-dead youth vote.
This president, predictably, will [1] unleash full scale gun confiscation efforts, [2] new military expansionism all over the globe, [3] higher taxes along with [4] instituted (pro-black, anti-white) institutionally supported racism leading towards [5] deplorable genocide.
It's what "Democrats" always do. Name one democrat that hasn't raised taxes, banned guns or used the military as a global police force.
Thus, it is my guess that there will be a push-back.
Some “heavy hitter” nations might slam-dunk the USA military and cities. They would “hit back” using overt state of the art WMD weapons.
Rural “deplorables” might resist federal gun collection efforts.
The already dysfunctional government would become a true and real “train wreck”. With more corruption, more inefficiency and expanded theft.
What we can expect…
We can expect…
There will be an increase in “False Flag” events, and paid protestors, and actors crying, screeching and pandering to a well positioned media. This will be broadcast over all the media outlets, seemingly providing justification for the government to take radical action.
Here’s American NED “regime change” (color revolution) efforts in Hong Kong, China…
HK chop on a paid protestor. There will be an increase in “False Flag” events, and paid protestors, and actors crying, screeching and pandering to a well positioned media. This will be broadcast over all the media outlets, seemingly providing justification for the government to take radical action.
Aside from paid protestors, there will be talented actors and actresses that will cry and sob for the cameras. Here’s a typical child actor sobbing for media promotion…
Aside from paid protestors, there will be talented actors and actresses that will cry and sob for the cameras.
Institutions that we historically rely upon to be corrupted beyond usefulness. This will mean everything from the FBI, to the IRS, to the FDA, the FCC, and the military.
This is our “improved” military…
The promotion of diversity makes the American military strong because that is something that the armies of China and Russia do not have.
There will be a retreat in technological, educational, and manufacturing leadership. The attempts by Donald Trump to thwart the global strategic trade supply chain has not been successful, and only aggravates an already dire situation.
There will be a retreat in technological, educational, and manufacturing leadership. The attempts by Donald Trump to thwart the global strategic trade supply chain has not been successful, and only aggravates an already dire situation.
It will not be peaceful. Based upon history, the resolution will not be based on compromise, civility, reason, or peaceful means. The opposition forces who follow “progressive thought” will not longer need to follow the Constitution. They will write their own rules as they go along.
It will not be peaceful. Based upon history, the resolution will not be based on compromise, civility, reason, or peaceful means.
It will be a dark and dangerous time. The combustible combination of unpayable debt, civic anarchy, and global chaos are set to detonate, creating an era of maximum darkness, death, destruction, and decisions.
People will die, and the police and the government will be complicit.
It will be a dark and dangerous time. The combustible combination of unpayable debt, civic anarchy, and global chaos are set to detonate, creating an era of maximum darkness, death, destruction, and decisions. People will die, and the police and the government will be complicit.
Read this it’s a six-part series. I suggest you read all the parts, as each one says something unique. It opens up into another tab.
We will have to be strong. Making America Great Again will require personal sacrifice, dreadful choices, survival skills, intelligent decisions, and the courage to win at all costs. We will have to accept that there are people who want to disarm us, then herd us into cattle cars and gas us wholesale.
We will have to be strong. Making America Great Again will require personal sacrifice, dreadful choices, survival skills, intelligent decisions, and the courage to win at all costs. We will have to accept that there are people who want to disarm us, then herd us into cattle cars and gas us wholesale.
Check out the link below. It opens up in a separate tab.
We are leaving the “quiet” period of simmering unrest. The first ten years of this Crisis were the early Winter solstice period when public order began to pass its nadir.
Things will go from “rumblings in the distance” to whole-scale Shit Hit The Fan!
Normally peaceful and quiet people will start to fight back. Those people who have never had to deal with “push back” will be unprepared. Initially it will be glorious…
Normally peaceful and quiet people will start to fight back. Those people who have never had to deal with “push back” will be unprepared. Initially it will be glorious…
…but it will be short lived.
Then…
All Hell will break loose.
Factory
workers, with their company name badges, in the parking lot of their
employer. Two dead and one dying with his legs shot off. He and his
co-workers had no idea that “world war III” would break out while they
were trying to clock in at work. When one group of people identify
another group, and target them with hate, and violence, it only
escalates. It gets worse. Eventually there is whole-scale blood shed. Do
not be under the illusion that it will never happen in America. There
are enormous groups of people just chomping at the bit to attack
conservatives and traditionalists. All in the name of a progressive
utopia.
America could be unrecognizable afterwards. These events always change the social, political, and personal landscape.
Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, was modern, prosperous and a net exporter of food.
In the end, Africa won.
Basic services have collapsed, tyranny and privation are their new rulers, apparently by preference.
-The Woodpile Report
The changes can be really good, and long overdue. Or, they could be just absolutely awful. It will be all or nothing, and everything will be affected.
Everything will be affected.
Everything.
The changes can be really good, and long overdue. Or, they could be just absolutely awful. It will be all or nothing, and everything will be affected. Everything will be affected. Everything.
The Storm Approaches. The coldest days of Winter beckon with the harshest years of the Crisis ahead. Many melancholy days lie ahead, as bitter winter winds and blizzard like conditions sweep the bleak landscape, testing the mettle of even the bravest souls.
The catalyst for the Crisis was the Wall Street created global financial meltdown in 2008.
The election of Trump marked the beginning of the regeneracy, with Trump as the Gray Champion.
The last four years have certainly marked a new more volatile phase of this Crisis, setting the stage for the fireworks to come.
The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that
underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain
reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies.
The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global
disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will
juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way.
The regeneracy is less like FDR’s New Deal initiated unification of the country. Instead it is more like the Lincoln regeneracy after the First Battle of Bull Run. This was when he ordered the enlistment of a half million men to fight against a like number of fellow American men.
Both American factions were unified in their cause.
The chain reaction of emergencies and unyielding responses will continue unabated until a final resolution is achieved.
“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial
crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party[1].
The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that
underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain
reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global
disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will
juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning– Strauss & Howe
[1] Written over ten years before the Conservative Tea Party came into existence.
About these predictions…
Strauss and Howe foresaw the core elements which would surely propel the next Fourth Turning.
Life was quite different before the American Civil War.
They, of course, weren’t the only ones. But they were able to formulate a hypothesis based on their observations that others could apply in their own individual cases. All of these observations were plain to see for people who chose to see the world with eyes wide open.
Debt, civic decay and global disorder are on center stage as we enter the fateful next decade of 2020.
Syria before and after the Syrian civil war. America will also look like this as well. Stay out of the urban areas. Prepare yourself and your family.
A madness seems to be gripping the nation, a melancholy realization all is not right.
Everything has a chaotic feel, as financial markets are falling, politicians threaten and attack each other. The government dysfunction is laid bare for all to see. Meanwhile the Deep State snakes slither behind the scenes trying to bring down Trump. Yes, and racial tensions grow as they are being inflamed by agitators. And the CIA / NED instigate changes where foreign governments topple. Meanwhile, both Russia and China challenge U.S. hegemony, and the global debt Ponzi scheme is entering its collapse phase.
It’s all collapsing like a house of cards.
America is polarized
There are no moderates, only pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions.
Compromise and workable solutions to our deep-seated problems are off the table. The mood of the populace ranges from frustrated and angry to depressed and stressed. The aroma of conflict wafts through the air as battle lines are being drawn.
The initial spark of a global financial meltdown created by greedy
Wall Street banks, the feckless Fed, and corrupt government officials
was driven by bad debt, outright control fraud by the financial
industry, captured rating agencies, easy money provided by the Wall
Street owned Fed, and utter contempt for properly regulating the Wall
Street cabal by the Fed and SEC.
This emergency was met by an unyielding response from the
establishment, with the easiest money policies in world history, bailing
out criminal bankers with taxpayer funds, increasing global debt by $80
trillion to $250 trillion (318% of global GDP), running fiscal deficits
exceeding $1 trillion per year, and pretending all that debt will be
repaid. Pretend and extend has been the solution.
The Deep State has taken extraordinary measures to try and retain their stranglehold on the wealth of the nation and control of the political, financial, social and media levers of society.
They have utilized a combination of propaganda disguised as news, social media distractions, technological surveillance, misinformation campaigns, welfare to keep the poor sedated, and the continued issuance of debt to keep the masses satiated with consumer goods as their wealth dissipates.
But the teetering edifice of debt, delusion and deception is poised to topple sometime in the next decade starting in 2020.
Can you feel it?
It’s like vibrations that you feel in your car as you drive past a very loud rock concert. It’s a gathering storm, an increasing in pressure, a cooling of temperature, and a raising of pressure…
As we enter 2020, year twelve of this ongoing Crisis, you can sense the panic and distress permeating from the pores of the establishment figures. As well as their rich shadowy benefactors trying to maintain their unseen presence behind the curtain as they pull the strings. As they continue operating as the invisible government running the show for their own benefit.
It seems the unanticipated election of Trump has thrown a monkey wrench into their well- oiled pillage machine. It is forcing them to reveal themselves as they attempt a not so subtle coup against a sitting president.
Fourth Turnings always sweep away the existing social order in a torrent of violent upheaval and the blood of young men.
But that doesn’t mean the existing establishment will give up their wealth, power and control without a fight. And the fight is underway. The volcano has erupted and the molten lava could flow in numerous pathways over the next six or so years.
“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake.
All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:
Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction” – The Fourth Turning– Strauss & Howe
The ingredients of distress in the next phase of this Crisis could include any or all of those pondered by Strauss and Howe twenty-two years ago.
I thus can make the case for multiple levels of distress breaking free from their channels, making 2020 as historic a year as 1939 or 1940.
My prognosis for the decade starting in 2020 follows:
Economic Distress
Economic distress is mounting, as the machinations of the Fed, Wall Street and the U.S. government prove to be nothing more than debt financed illusions.
Once the easy money spigot is turned off and the tide of zero interest debt for Wall Street and mega-corporations recedes, you realize everyone was swimming naked.
The national debt grew by $1.4 trillion in 2018 during “the best economy ever”, according to Trump.
We added $12 trillion to the national debt and have generated a historically weak recovery, especially for the working class.
We’ve gone nine years without recession and the longest period in U.S. history between recessions was ten years. Without the tax cut stimulus, interest rates higher, corporate profits flagging, global trade waning, and central bankers withdrawing liquidity, recession is likely ahead of us. When it happens it could end up driving deficits towards $2 trillion.
The number of zombie companies (GE, Sears, JC Penney, Chesapeake, all fracking companies) propped up by cheap junk bond debt is astronomical.
National debt default is still a ways off, but a tsunami of corporate debt defaults will inundate the economy once the recession knocks the legs out from beneath this faux recovery.
Corporations and consumers have never been more indebted. Stock valuations have never been higher.
An economy that begins to self destruct when interest rates approach 3% proves the “solutions” implemented by those in power did nothing for the average American, while further enriching the parasitical class pulling the strings.
At this point, a specific triggering event is unnecessary to provoke the economic conflagration.
The unbearable weight of unpayable debt is going to cause the structure to collapse at free fall speed, like the Twin Towers pancaking everyone in the floors below.
Collapse of the South Tower on 9-11.
With a recession inevitable in the future, we know the stock market declines 30% to 40% during recessions, on average. When a stock market is this overvalued, based solely on Fed easy money and corporate buybacks (Apple has lost $9 billion on their buybacks this year), the withdrawal of liquidity combined with recession and declining profits will knock 50% to 60% off current prices. I wonder how many middle-class 401k contributors expect this to happen. Well this will be the third time in 18 years, so you would think they’d learn by now.
Recession means job losses, consumer debt defaults, less tax revenue for the government, more wasteful spending by politicians pretending to care, soaring deficits, currency gyrations, and the potential for rising interest rates as no one will be willing or able to buy the newly issued debt.
Will we have massive deflation or hyperinflation? Anything is possible in a collapse scenario.
What is certain will be millions of angry Americans looking for someone to blame and politicians seeking to distract them with some foreign “threat” to their safety and security.
People! This is when trade wars morph into real wars.
Social Distress
The social distress sweeping the country gets the majority of attention on the left-wing corporate media propaganda machines as they purposely fan the flames of divisiveness.
Keeping the sheeple angry at each other keeps them distracted from the continued pillaging of the national wealth by the Deep State scum operating in plain sight. As they loot and pillage, and then leave for greener pastures. Leaving their underlings to clumsily fight for the remaining scraps.
Before and after views of Syria after the Syrian civil war.
The daily war against the normals has reached new heights of hypocrisy and idiocy.
It’s all building up towards a major catastrophe.
The unceasing mantra of diversity, trying to normalize the lifestyles of the mentally ill…
Glorifying socialism as Venezuela implodes due to socialism…
Promoting the climate change agenda to abscond with more taxes…
Trying to force left wing agendas down the throats of white traditional family-oriented people….
All of this is on the verge of starting civil violence. It’s so close that you can taste it.
This is what a civil war did to Syria. Not a pretty sight.
The ruling class has gone too far in accumulating the wealth of the nation through the capture of regulatory, political, financial, and communication structures.
They know what is coming. They are not pretending that all is fine. They have their very own safe houses all set up far, far away from the strife that is barrelling down towards them.
Wealth inequality arisen through fraud, deception and corruption will lead to class warfare – highly likely after the next financial collapse.
The ruling class has gone too far in accumulating the wealth of the nation through the capture of regulatory, political, financial, and communication structures. They know what is coming. They are not pretending that all is fine. They have their very own safe houses all set up far, far away from the strife that is barrelling down towards them.
The current government shutdown over funding for a border wall is essentially a showdown over the racial makeup of the country. It goes forward allowing unfettered access to welfare benefits to illegal invaders. And who are allowed to come so that they will loyally illegally vote for their Democrat benefactors for eternity.
Come in – get your free stuff – now move into the ghetto.
Ah yes …Racial politics is what has kept blacks enslaved on the welfare plantation in decaying urban ghettos run by Democrat politician plantation owners.
A black uprising led by Kanye West has struck fear into the hearts of Democrats, giving them further incentive to keeping the southern border open to new Democrat voters.
With gun grabbing liberal politicians attempting to disarm the deplorables in flyover country. Meanwhile supporting antifa and black lives matter terrorists, and thwarting efforts to keep criminals and terrorists from illegally entering the country,
People! a violent showdown is inevitable.
America is messed up way past the point of redemption. For many Americans, they would be just happy to watch the cities burn and let the survivors fend for themselves.
Political Distress
The political distress since the 2016 election has reached levels not seen since the Civil War Crisis period.
The Deep State controllers’ next hand-picked figurehead president – Hillary Clinton – inexplicably lost the election to a NYC reality star real estate mogul (who boasted about grabbing pussies and had a weakness for strippers and Playboy bunnies no less).
Clinton’s arrogance and hubris were her downfall as the deplorables she ridiculed and a majority of white women in the country gave Trump a slim victory. This, of course, drove millions of pussy-hat wearing feminazis into a blind furious rage.
We’ve all heard of the “end-of-days” scenarios where the government finally passes through enough “gun control” laws and mounts a full-scale attack on democracy, running through houses with gun sniffing dogs to confiscate guns, running concealed carry permits, etc. The general fear held by most anti-gun confiscation groups (which should probably include any and all gun owners) is the idea of the US government announcing martial law during an “emergency” and seizing all firearms to “maintain peace”.
They are still living that rage.
College students across the land sobbed in their safe spaces and missed their Queer Theory or Pick your Gender classes.
But not only were snowflakes across the land melting, but the surveillance state spooks who attempted to rig the election in Clinton’s favor went into a frenzy of fear. It is understandable as fear of their traitorous machinations being revealed forced them to begin a coup attempt against Trump.
The Mueller, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Obama, Clinton reactive coup attempt is ongoing and will never be permitted to come to a head. It will just fester. Like an infected scab that poisons the host to a point where an arm or two needs to be amputated.
America today is a seriously sick nation that is more akin to having a festering sore getting worse and worse until amputation becomes an absolutely necessary.
The outcome of this epic struggle between the Deep State and the non-approved upstart president could create civil war like conditions.
How will Trump supporters react if they believe their leader is removed through impeachment, based on false charges?
Will they take to the streets in armed insurrection?
Will the police and military fire on their fellow citizens?
What if Trump refuses to step down, creating a Constitutional crisis?
What if he is assassinated?
Do you know how to take down a tank, an APC, or a technical armed by roving groups of armed urban youth? You should. Do not think that you can ride out the Fourth Turning unscathed. It will affect everyone, and you need to be prepared for the worst.
On the other hand, what if Trump’s allies within the DOJ and Military present evidence of collusion against the Obama administration, Clinton and top officials in the FBI, DOJ and CIA?
How would the left wingers react to military tribunals with their beloved leaders in the docket?
Even if these earth-shattering events don’t come to fruition, a Democrat controlled House will thwart everything Trump attempts to accomplish as they position themselves for the 2020 presidential election. The anger and disillusionment of the masses will deepen.
Military Distress
The potential for catastrophe on the military front hasn’t been higher in decades.
Putin and Xi are essentially dictators who have no fear of elections every two years. They are serious men in possession of nuclear missiles, capable of destroying the world. They are both serious, serious people. They are in their positions of power through merit. Not though mob rule. They will tolerate the CIA / NED interference with Hong Kong, and the Muslims only so far. If the United States decides to push too hard, they WILL strike back… at American cities. IN FULL FUCKING FORCE.
The linear thinking lemmings dismiss the possibility of a global conflict because they are just as obtuse as “experts” before them throughout history.
Since World War II we have only experienced proxy wars where the outcomes would not change the course of world history.
There have been no “total wars”, where the loser is utterly shattered and complete victory is attained. As we continue on our path of just another righteous war, be advised that the rest of the world is getting awfully tired of this war-mongering.
They want it to STOP.
As we continue on our path of just another righteous war, be advised that the rest of the world is getting awfully tired of this war-mongering. They want it to STOP.
Those who practice revisionist history act as if the previous two Fourth Turning total wars were completely predictable before they began. They weren’t.
In 1858 no one believed a Civil War taking the lives of 700,000 Americans was just over the horizon.
Exactly 80 years later in 1938, few believed a global conflict which would kill 65 million people in six years was imminent.
Here we are exactly 80 years later and anyone predicting a global conflagration killing millions is declared a loon.
Every previous Fourth Turning has ended in total war with victory of the “good guys” always in doubt. Every total war has ratcheted up the level of death and destruction, as technological “advancements” enhance our war making abilities.
Every previous Fourth Turning has ended in total war.
This means nuclear World War III…
Human nature DOES NOT change.
We are not smarter, less war-like, more humanitarian, or less arrogant than our predecessors throughout history. Hubris, power, and miscalculation by egomaniacal leaders leads to war.
We know the climax of this Fourth Turning is slated for around 2025.
“[W]e should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons,” Rep. Eric Swalwell wrote, adding that law enforcement agencies and shooting clubs should be exempted.
This infers a high likelihood of a major war involving the U.S. in the foreseeable future.
Will it ignite in 2020? All the combustible elements are present. The onset of a global depression, trade wars, China & Russia feeling pushed into a corner and the volatile political situation in the U.S. and EU provide a potential pathway to global conflict.
It will, contrary to what everyone expects, absolutely affect America. It will be a war that will “come home”. It will somehow (in ways that we do not know) become entangled with the American citizenry. Be frosty. Be alert. Any foreign war will manifest as trouble on the “home front”.
It will, contrary to what everyone expects, absolutely affect America. It will be a war that will “come home”. It will somehow (in ways that we do not know) become entangled with the American citizenry. Be frosty. Be alert. Any foreign war will manifest as trouble on the “home front”.
Immigration chaos in Europe, Brexit, Ukrainian nazis provoking Russia, South China Sea territorial disputes, the Syria, Turkey, Iran, Israel ticking time bomb, Saudi anarchy, socialist South American regimes imploding, and U.S. political pandemonium have created a perfect storm of domestic and international disasters.
QUESTION: What do low-life politicians do when faced with terrible domestic issues?
ANSWER: They seek to distract their citizens with a foreign threat. See “Blame Russia for Everything” as an example of this tried and true propaganda technique.
Desperate politicians do desperate things to retain power.
After every high-profile shooting in America, Leftists immediately, and predictably, begin their calls for gun control. With the measured constraint and careful consideration of Bill Clinton in the Champagne Room at Fuzzy Holes Gentlemen’s Club in Little Rock, they self-righteously and repeatedly demand that we “do something!” You can probably list some of the meaningless blather they shout at us reflexively, such as “If not now, when?,” “The NRA has blood on its hands!,” “Nobody needs an assault rifle to shoot a deer!,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Despite all their hysterical nonsense, they usually have enough presence of mind to also say, because they have been trained to so do, that “nobody wants to confiscate your guns,” or “no one is talking about banning guns.” If you’re really lucky you’ll hear one of these would-be authoritarians say the following (and this is my personal favorite): “I support the Second Amendment, BUT…”
Desperate Deep State actors care not one wit for their fellow countrymen.
They are willing and able to sacrifice the youth of their nation to fight wars which will further enrich themselves and their fellow traitorous benefactors.
They do not care about us. For they follow the Marxist model; we are cattle to be used as they see fit.
We are nothing but cannon fodder to this psychopathic scum.
Putin and Xi are essentially dictators who have no fear of elections every two years. They are serious men in possession of nuclear missiles, capable of destroying the world.
They are both serious, serious people.
They are in their positions of power through merit. Not though mob rule. They will tolerate the CIA / NED interference with Hong Kong, the Ukraine, and the Muslims only so far. If the United States decides to push too hard, they WILL strike back… at American cities.
IN FULL FUCKING FORCE.
Putin and Xi are essentially dictators who have no fear of elections every two years. They are serious men in possession of nuclear missiles, capable of destroying the world. They are both serious, serious people. They are in their positions of power through merit. Not though mob rule. They will tolerate the CIA / NED interference with Hong Kong, and the Muslims only so far. If the United States decides to push too hard, they WILL strike back… at American cities. IN FULL FUCKING FORCE.
Blaming others for all the ills in your own country is a fool hardy tactic. And do not fall for the non-stop mainstream media narrative that they are evil and a war is needed to put them in their place. It’s all propaganda aimed at YOU.
Blaming others for all the ills in your own country is a fool hardy tactic. And do not fall for the non-stop mainstream media narrative that they are evil and a war is needed to put them in their place. It’s all propaganda aimed at YOU.
The ever- increasing American saber rattling, whether in the Ukraine, Syria, South China Sea, or during antagonistic trade negotiations can easily lead to unintended consequences. All leaders have enormous egos and are prone to over-confidence and miscalculation regarding how their opponent will react.
Listen to me. Someone, somewhere, somehow is going to do something stupid and then all hell is going to break loose.
American military in Taiwan = Radioactive California.
NED coaching in China = Glassed over Washington, DC
American ships launching missiles in the black sea = Texas sized crater.
The danger is REAL.
To Bolton, the support of allies is proof of US military weakness, not diplomatic strength and he is yet to meet an arms control agreement he likes. The latest casualty amidst their wreckage of the pillars of the US-crafted global order is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
There is No Escape
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high.The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war.Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of
destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.History offers no guarantees.Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship.We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin.Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe –The Fourth Turning
There is no escape from the Fourth Turning.
There is no escape from the Fourth Turning.
We are midway through this crisis and the existing social order retains tenuous control over the levers of finance, government and the legacy media.
History tells us our society will be reshaped and transformed before this crisis resolves itself sometime between now and 2029.
That’s ten LONG years.
It would be the utmost of arrogance to believe our nation will be protected from destruction by an all-powerful God.
Face it.
Face the hard slap of reality.
We’ve made bad choices, deferred hard decisions, squandered our financial resources, allowed our educational system to be corrupted and valued all the wrong things.
Face it. Face the hard slap of reality. We’ve made bad choices, deferred hard decisions, squandered our financial resources, allowed our educational system to be corrupted and valued all the wrong things. The United States is in a complete mess and the Marxist progressives are just about ready to take over and convert the entire nation to a Marxist version of Detroit. When in all actuality everything should be nuked from orbit and it should be rebuilt from the ground up.
A just God would allow us to learn through suffering.
This is your life – Buckle up!
There will be consequences.
The overt last- ditch financial debt schemes concocted by the entrenched establishment, to prolong their power and control, are unraveling. This will result in a death and rebirth of the social order through a chaotic cleansing. It is all in the offing.
I believe the real fireworks will begin during the up coming decade starting in 2020.
It’s gonna be nasty.
What ever you do, do not panic. Plan. Keep your wits about you. Be steady. Be prepared. Be flexible. Be adaptable. Be safe. Do not trust anyone, and what ever you do.
What ever you do, do not panic. Plan. Keep your wits about you. Be steady. Be prepared. Be flexible. Be adaptable. Be safe. Do not trust anyone, and what ever you do.
Avoid crowds.
Do NOT turn in your guns.
Do NOT allow yourself to be collected and relocated to “safe” areas.
Do NOT advertise your beliefs. Lie low.
I don’t eagerly await the terrible storms headed our way.
What ever you do, do not panic. Plan. Keep your wits about you. Be steady. Be prepared. Be flexible. Be adaptable. Be safe. Do not trust anyone, and what ever you do.
The Bolsheviks are younger, angrier, and more ruthless than the patriots. Something far worse than Venezuela or Cuba is probably the future for America.
Sorry.
Millennial leftists don’t want to win elections; they want to exterminate people who disagree with them. Like Stalin. Like Mao.
Like Pol Pot.
Millennials who are active in politics tend to be radicals and atheist. They have no moral restraints. Anything goes.
Anything goes.
When Marxists come to power, they often arm children and youth. For they are the easiest to control ideologically. They teach them how to shoot weapons and let them loose on the countryside. This is a picture from Cambodia under Pol Pot, who curiously enough believed in the same sort of Marxist utopia that is in favor in places like San Francisco, Detroit and Baltimore today.
I wish we didn’t have to withstand the brutal gales of this coming winter, but we have no choice.
You have to survive Winter to experience the blossoming Spring.
The coming decade will try our souls and force everyone to make choices that will make a difference. The specific events are unknowable, but how we react and who we support during the events will be the decisive factor in whether this Fourth Turning is resolved in a positive way.
Having it resolved in negative way could be an unimaginable tragedy.
When Pol Pot and his merry band of Marxists came to power in Cambodia, they disarmed the military, the police, the agencies and all the civilians. Then they collected them. Often still wearing their uniforms. Like this poor soldier. They interviewed them to list their crimes against social Marxism, took their pictures and then executed them on the spot. This is what is coming to America. It is coming. Look into his eyes. He knew that he had minutes to live. What do you think was going through his mind? Was it how he wished that he didn’t listen to his leader when he was told to hand in his weapon? Do you think it was regret for turning around and having his hands handcuffed? Was it when he was told to climb onto the truck?
Patrick Henry made his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech during the first American Fourth Turning. His words ring true today.
We are already at war.
Sides have been drawn.
You are on one, whether you like it or not.
We are going to have to fight whether we like it or not. Our only other choice is chains and slavery. The other side(s) are armed, well equipped financially secure and operating on a level far, far above us “normals”.
We are going to have to fight whether we like it or not. Our only other choice is chains and slavery. The other side(s) are armed, well equipped financially secure and operating on a level far, far above us “normals”.
Follow the money trail. There you will find the instigators and the crooks that are playing the role of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. They transfer huge amounts of money through “art” and “book deals”, like how “someone” gave former president Obama a $60 million dollar advance on a book that would at most make $25,000.
Who was the one who coughed up all that money? And why?
Follow the money trail. There you will find the instigators and the crooks that are playing the role of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. They transfer huge amounts of money through “art” and “book deals”, like how “someone” gave former president Obama a $60 million dollar advance on a book that would at most make $25,000.
The time to choose has arrived. Welcome to 2020.
“The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
– Patrick Henry – 1775
Millennial activists hate science. They have been fed scientism since
birth and lack the intellectual training to discern the difference.
Therefore, the advances humanity has made thanks to science will quickly
reverse as cures for things like global warming turn out to be distress
for man and beast.
If the Bolsheviks don’t turn America into a giant, barbaric, communist prison camp, the divisions in our country will leave us vulnerable to military attack.
Iran, Russia, China, even the European Union could feel emboldened and attack. While we might be able to repel the attack, society would further disintegrate. The will to fight a protracted war just isn’t there. We would move quickly to the most lethal weapons in our arsenal.
If these dire prophecies come to pass, my impulse will be to fight. To choose a side and fight to the death. To the death. Yes, that death. That cold darkness that you never wake up from. It’s that rock-cold serious.
We are rapidly approaching that climax.
It’s soon. One to four years away. Buckle up.
The Prophesy
In The Fourth Turning, Howe and Strauss warned us that these Crisis eras end in a climax. That means the worst is yet to come.
The Crisis climax is human history’s equivalent to nature’s raging typhoon, the kind that sucks all surrounding matter into a single swirl of ferocious energy.
Anything not lashed down goes flying; anything standing in the way gets flattened. Normally occurring late in the Fourth Turning, the climax gathers energy from an accumulation of unmet needs, unpaid bills, and unresolved problems. It then spends that energy on an upheaval whose direction and dimension were beyond comprehension during the prior Unraveling era.
The climax shakes a society to its roots, transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its people (and its generations) for life.
The climax can end in triumph, or tragedy, or some combination of both. Whatever the event and whatever the outcome, a society passes through a great gate of history, fundamentally altering the course of civilization.
Yet one generation—Generation X2, aka, “13ers”—holds the key to surviving the climax:
The 13ers’ gravest Fourth Turning duty will be their society’s most important preseasonal task: to ensure that there can indeed be a new High, a new golden age of hope and prosperity.
For the Crisis to end well, 13ers must keep Boomers from wreaking needless destruction and Millennials from marching too mindlessly under their elders’ banner.
They will not find it easy to restrain an older generation that will consider itself far wiser than they, and a younger one that will consider itself more deserving.
For this, 13ers will require a keen eye, a deft touch, and a rejection of the wild risk taking associated with their youth.
Warning us in 1997, Howe and Strauss said:
From now through the end of the Fourth Turning, 13ers will constantly rise in power.
From 1998 until around the Crisis climax, they will be America’s largest potential generational voting bloc. As the years pass, their civic contributions will become increasingly essential to their nation’s survival.
They will have to vote more and participate more, if they want to contain the Boomers’ zealotry. They will have that chance.
Their own elected officials will surge into Congress as the Crisis catalyzes, eclipse Boomers around its climax, and totally dominate them by the time it resolves.
As they go one-on-one with history, 13ers should remember that history is counting on them to do whatever hard jobs may be necessary.
If 13ers play their script weakly, old Boomers could wreak a horrible apocalypse, and 13er demagogues could impose a mind-numbing authoritarianism— or both.
If 13ers play their script cleverly but safely, however, a new golden age will be their hard-won reward.
As they age, 13ers should remember Hemingway’s words: “Old men do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
Even luckier, Generation X is already hardened. We grew up with hard
rock and hard drugs and hard breakups and hard attitudes. We were eager
fans who made Nirvana and Pearl Jam possible. And it’s an honor. History
has handed us the keys to survival.
Those haters in Berkeley are largely Millennials. They’re following
the bad examples of destructive, reckless Boomers. If America is to
survive the coming climax, history will note that the Slackers, the McFlys, the generation nobody watched overcame our recklessness to rescue civilization itself.
But Generation X cannot win the battle for America’s survival alone.
We need to attract soldiers from the Millennial generation. And we need
to follow the lead of the Gray Champion, about whom more in future
posts.
It’s Going to Be Okay
In the meantime, cut out carbs, eat more healthy fat,
practice dry fire drills, stock up on ammo, and be ready for the
inevitable climax. You, my friends, are the first and last line of
defense in our battle for self-government. We won’t go down without the
fight of the millennium.
For your planning purposes
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that their dates are close but seem to be off by a few years. In our case, the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle. That is three years later.
Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…
“Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
Climax in 2023.
Resolution in 2029.
.
Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.
Summary
I know that I tend to be a little long in the tooth. Yes, my articles are long. I try to cram a lot in them, and sometimes it can get confusing. Here’s a quick summary.
The Fourth Turning is proceeding on schedule.
The major tripping point is scheduled for 2023 +/- 2 years.
It will involve all manner of conflict.
Oligarch-instituted cultural changes, and genocides will be initiated.
A total clamp down on freedoms via electronic means will take place.
Total gun bans, one way or the other, will take place.
The USA will get involved in some sort of war. The idea is that it will be just another distraction.
One or two, or even three super-powers, will side with the attacked nation.
A strong possibility exists for nuclear weapons to be detonated on United States cities.
My suggestions.
For what ever it is worth, here are some suggestions. You have three years. Start now. Start today. (If you do nothing else, try to do the points in bold. It will give you advantage.)
Leave the cities. Move. Buy property in a small town, a rural area, or some other place about a three days walk from a major city.
Start now. Do not put it off.
Have firearms. Use the rule of three. [1] One or two in the open for ready use. [2] Some hidden, and you can tell your wife (but not your children the location). [3] Hidden and known only to you.
Have multiple lethal knives. Do not be afraid to use them.
Take a class in basic first aid and know how to stop bleeding, provide basic health care, mend a broken bone, and perform emergency surgery. If not the YMCA, then via the internet. Start NOW.
Learn on how to make improvised explosives. Especially those that can be used to take down a bridge, disable an ATV, and create a minefield.
Stock up on prepper literature in the form of books.
Stock up on basic medical supplies including antibiotics.
Stock up on all manner of food supplies, and hide large quantities of them from random seizure by roaming groups of people..
Start going “x-ray” and do not advertise your plans, or anything about your life to anyone.
Have some sort of vehicle that does not require gasoline or electricity to operate. (Bicycle or horse.)
Make friends in your new location. Friendships are worth gold. Identify these friends on a scale of trust.
Start cutting down on the use of your cell-phone. Start leaving it at home when you go out.
Buy a Geiger counter, and iodine pills.
Set up a rain water collection system at your house.
Start a garden. Learn to grow potatoes.
Leave America. If you cannot, then live in a predominantly “red” state. The redder the county the better.
Move to a deep red colored area. Absolutely avoid cities and bright blue areas. Any area that has a shade of blue is to be avoided. Consider Alaska over Hawaii. Avoid Indian reservations. Avoid the border with Mexico. Avoid urban black enclaves.
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
As I write this, the “Trump trade war with China” in on it’s third year. It has been one heck of a roller-coaster ride, and today I can definitely say that, contrary to what the mainstream American media reports, China is just happy as can be waiting the “trade war” out.
China is not starving, ready to collapse towards famine.
There aren’t layoffs of millions of people
Huawei hasn’t collapsed, and sitting by waiting for America to develop 5G technology
Here, we review the current state of affairs between the USA and China in the building “cold economic war”, and then investigate options that can move the trade war as a positive win for America. Because right now, it is just floundering. And the only ones really getting “dinged” by it are the Americans that have to pay higher prices for their manufactured products.
This article is all about making America #1.
But first, we need to see things as they actually are. Not as how we want them to be. In many cases that means that we must erase some preconceived notions that we might hold dearly.
To help a person that has collapsed in the street, you need to know WHY he collapsed. Was it heat stroke? A heart attack? A gun shot wound? Or, was he just sleepy. You need to know the TRUE situation in order to provide the proper assistance.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
The Lose-Lose scenario
At the start of the Donald Trump presidency, myself and others sincerely believed that the trade disagreements between the USA and China could be resolved. We believed in a win-win scenario. One in which both side so the table came back with something resembling success. A win-win for everyone.
But, unfortunately, that did not happen.
Instead, what developed was a policy of “lose – lose”. That is to say, that both sides would lose. However, the idea was for Chinese to lose much more than America would. Thus it would be a positive gain for America, and thus provide the USA with a greater amount of bargaining power.
The USA would lose a little bit, but recover quickly.
The Chinese would lose a lot, and maybe not recover for decades.
Personally, there is no doubt in my mind that this lose-lose strategy is a NeoCon strategy.
Because it is complete and utter nonsense, and has no bearing what so ever on reality.
As such, it is no surprise that it would be enforced, embraced and cultivated by Neocons within the trump administration. For every time it looked like the trade issues would be resolved, there would be some kind of problem. And each and every problem resolved around a Neocon-related issue.
I like to point my fingers at war-monger extraordinaire John Bolton, but I could be wrong.
To Bolton, the support of allies is proof of US military weakness, not diplomatic strength and he is yet to meet an arms control agreement he likes. The latest casualty amidst their wreckage of the pillars of the US-crafted global order is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
How and Why
Why in the heck would anyone really want a lose-lose situation? Really, it’s crazy right? I mean, why go to a restaurant that has discount week-old meals for a cheap price when you know that you are going to get sick afterwards? Why do it?
Maybe on the HOPE that there is a CHANCE that you won’t get sick.
The understanding on how anyone would possibly want a lose-lose trade agreement is clear once you see the distortions of reality that neocons live under.
China is forever a third-world nation.
America is a long-term first-world nation.
China is dependent on the United States for labor, food, and status.
America doesn’t need China, and we can reopen all our factories again easily.
Each and everyone of these assumptions parrot the American mainstream press. And, as such, each and everyone is completely and absolutely wrong. It’s what Americans WANT to believe, not what is really going on.
China is not what the American mainstream press says it is. Instead it is something else. The mainstream American press produces “news” and “reports” that appeal to American emotions. Not to provide them facts and information. Remember, the only way that America can operate efficiently is with a just and well-informed populace.
People!
A healthy America requires an educated and well-informed populace. Otherwise, America is doomed to suffer through the mistakes of the mass-mob, as well as the manipulations by those that control them.
Changing things around.
Right now, the trade situation is at a standstill.
China is waiting everything out. They will let events play out. For they play “the long game’.
America is willing to suffer though events as they transpire. They believe that China is feeling the same kinds of pressures that Americana feel. For Americans believe that the Chinese, just like Americans, play the “short game”.
The only thing is… China just isn’t experiencing any kind of serious pressures.
In reality, for the Chinese owned businesses, it’s all just a slight down-tick in trade and a very slight increase in prices on imported goods. The ones that are hurting are the American businesses that operate within China. They are feeling the vast brunt of the trade-wars, as well as their support networks. Most of which are HK based.
"The Trump administration made a very serious miscalculation in launching the ‘trade war’ with China. It believed that either, or both, the leadership of China would submit to the Trump administrations threats or the Chinese population would not be prepared for a serious struggle with the US. Both calculations have proved entirely wrong. China’s leadership did not surrender to but hit back against the US attacks. Furthermore anyone who follows China’s domestic discussion, on what is now by far the world’s largest internet community, knows that this line was strongly supported by the Chinese population."
- China prepares for economic ‘prolonged war’ with Trump
The big issue in China today, and I can tell you this personally, is that there is a global slowdown going on. This slowdown was triggered by the Trump Tariff wars, but was not caused by them. The global slowdown was forecast for years, and China has long prepared for it.
The Chinese play the "long game" and plan in terms of centuries. American play the "short game" and plan on quarterly results (once ever three months).
Thus, as far as the tariff situation is concerned, they are just content to let things play out and allow America to eat itself alive…
China is playing the “long game”. America is playing the “short game” (quarter by quarter). In this situation, the “long game” favors China. The “short game” harms America.
One of the reasons why these authoritarian regimes like China are much more popular in the eyes of millennials around the world than among older generations, is that the younger people feel at least China focuses on the future, invests a huge part of their economic product into the future, and have a plan.
Look at the United States. Look at these countries today. They’re unable to focus on anything beyond next month. They can’t even formulate a budget. They can’t get anything through Congress. And all they’re doing is embarrassing themselves.
-McAlvanay
In the long run, the United States can be harmed immensely unless this situation does not turn around.
The very first thing that needs to happen is to do a deep purge of the neocons in the White-house.
President Trump's agenda is at odds at the neocon agenda. In many ways they are direct opposites.
These people do not want any kinds of win-win trade situation. Instead, their world view is one of “us vs. them”. They believe that there can only be two types of people in the world; The “hammers” and the “anvils”.
Neocons hold a mid-1850s mindset. They think in terms of nations, wars, and geographical conquest. They do so at the expense of understanding the Earth as a living (kind of) organism that we all inhabit.
Here’s my narrative on one of these neocons. Open it up, as it will open up in a new tab. Read it. All neocons are the same. They do not love America, American conservatism or tradition. They love power and empire building.
They believe that there can only be one leader in the world, and that is the United States. They believe this because we have “democracy!” (whatever the heck that is supposed to mean). The rest of the world is to live under our subjugation.
No other relationship is possible.
Now, Donald Trump did actually purge neocon John Bolton from his staff, and then immediately contacted Xi Peng in China wanting to resume trade talks.
The American media of course does not associate the firing of Bolton with China. To them, it's all just a coincidence. Bolton was fired for other reasons, like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Syria.
According to the mainstream American press, calling China and Bolton’s firing within minutes of each other was just a coincidence. Nothing more.
What China is
The way that Donald Trump tells it, China’s manufacturing sector is close to collapse, fatally wounded by Washington’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
Last month the American president was celebrating how China’s supply chain was “breaking up like a toy because companies are moving out”. A few days later he talked again about how Beijing was desperate to call a halt to the trade row. “You know why they want to make a deal?” he crowed. “Because they’re losing their jobs, because their supply chain is going to hell and companies are moving out of China and they’re moving to lots of other places, including the United States.”
But if Trump’s tariffs really are designed to torpedo China’s manufacturing base, he may have to think again.
Washington will have announced levies on about $550 billion of Chinese goods, when the full tariff quotas come into effect at the end of this year. That could affect up to 5% of China’s manufacturing capacity, according to calculations from Qu Hongbin and Jingyang Chen, two economists at HSBC.
But the impact of the tariffs isn’t going to be the same across the manufacturing sector at large. Much depends on the type of goods being made. Lower-end, more labour intensive industries such as furniture and textile production are taking the biggest hit, with companies shifting their factory lines to countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh.
-Week in China
China is many things. One thing it is not is what the neocons think. China has leap-frogged the USA in so many areas that it’s just too tiring to elaborate upon. Maybe one or two videos might help add some perspective in this matter.
Some facts. (Opens up in a separate tab.)
But maybe we can ignore the charts, tables and figures. Not everyone can follow them. (Given the really poor state of education in the United States today.)
Rather than the charts of facts and figures that I have in other posts, some informal quick peeks into what is going on in China might be refreshing. Here are things that are EVERYDAY sights in China, but that you will not see in the United States.
For starters…
One of the first things that people are beginning to see when they cross into China and go through Chinese customs is a robotic customs officer. They will instruct you to input your biometics into the Chinese data base.
The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Ten robots have started working as customs officers at three ports in China’s Guangdong province, authorities said. They were the first batch of intelligent robots, to be used by Chinese customs at the ports of Gongbei, Hengqin and Zhongshan, Xinhua news agency reported.
The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk. Based on a specialized customs database, the robots can answer questions in 28 languages and dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Japanese.
There are some particular problems they cannot solve, and customs officials said they will link the robots to their customer service hotline in the future. With face recognition technology, the robots can detect suspicious people and raise an alarm, according to Zhao Min, director of Gongbei customs.
Then, once you leave customs, you walk out into the bright daylight and confront traffic. China has traffic galore as they are a very populous nation.
Check out this MICRO VIDEO of the amazing traffic technology being implemented in Chinese cities this year…
Chinese traffic lights. As 3D holographic laser light presentations. Meanwhile the USA is still using 1960’s technology in traffic control.
It’s not even funny how much the Chinese have pushed ahead of American technology. While American industry has been hiring “Diversity officers” to hire employees based on minority “disadvantage”, China doubled down and only hires and promotes on merit.
The Chinese are a serious people. They do not play around.
Their products are excellent. For instance, when President Trump shut off all the Huawei 5G products and development in the United States, China said fine. You see most of the Apple, Motorola, and LG products are all designed in China. (Aside from some leadership positions.) Not in the United States.
There will be a retreat in technological, educational, and manufacturing leadership. The attempts by Donald Trump to thwart the global strategic trade supply chain has not been successful, and only aggravates an already dire situation.
So all the Chinese workers, the engineers, the developers and the designers, they are all inside China. They live in China. They are Chinese, and are paid Chinese wages and salaries. So when the United States government started to crack down on this outsourcing, they politely bowed, and left. They left the American owned companies. They walked across the street. And then they joined the Chinese owned companies. No problem.
With this influx of American-trained talent, China just took off.
They sprinted ahead and are now galloping forward at a healthy clip. The American companies are now in a kind of funky planning stage on how to react to the disruptions in their supply chains.
Check out this MICRO VIDEO of the latest wrap-around visual technology in the new Huawei phones. Pretty darn impressive.
Almost all communication products are designed in China. So if American companies cannot hire the Chinese engineers to make the products, the Chinese companies would instead,
And of course, there is there growing drone and robotics industries. Both of which has dwarfed anything in the United States.
For instance, today all public fireworks displays in China come along with these lighted drone formations. These make an enormous three dimensional visual canvas. This is, I must admit, quite visually stunning. When I first saw this in 2014 I was stunned. And today, it is so very commonplace that no one seems to give it a second thought.
Check out the impressive swarm drones in this MICRO VIDEO below…
Chinese swarm drones.
It’s like those super modern high-speed trains everywhere. “Oh that thing? What you’ve never ridden in one before?”
High speed rail is fast, cheap, clean, economically and ecologically friendly. It is accessible, and a great way for getting from one point to another. There are no long TSA lines. The seats are big, roomy, and the ride is comfortable and smooth. And the cost. Well, the cost is about 1/6 the cost of an airline ticket.
Read more (opens in a separate tab) here…
People! Seriously, China got started about four decades ago, and kept on running. They are moving forward, and perhaps (from their point of view) it’s a good thing that people are oblivious just how quickly and far that they are advancing.
So you know they are advancing in robotics, and in synthetic memory and minds. How about sex toys? Are you aware of the quality and scope of the Chinese sex toy industry? It’s taking the world by storm, I’ll tell you what.
Off the shelf standard sex doll. This one is warm to the touch, can talk and converse (in multiple languages) and has some limited mobility circuits.
Here’s another sex doll.
They come in a wide range of styles, shapes, weights and performance. Personally, if you are desirous of purchasing a sex robot, I would advise getting the premium model. They come with additional features that help mitigate the price tag amount.
This sex doll has limited functionality, being more a doll rather than a robot. However, it is totally and completely customizable. You can select anything from eye color, skin tone, body softness, height, check size, and many other attributes.
The point here is that everything from custom genetic designed pets, electric vehicles, to yes, even sex dolls are made in China and they are made well in China.
No one in America is apparently aware of this.
Go ahead, ask an American “China expert” on [1] the gongbei robotic customs officers, the [2] holographic traffic gates at cross-walks, the [3] 5G integration of Shenzhen, or [4] to name all the different makes and models of electric cars debuting out of China this year. He can’t.
And thus… he’s no “expert”.
Just an actor, pretending. He found a nitch a few years back and has been milking it over the years. But, you know, China is not America it’s rate of change is about 20x that of America’s. You need to really pay attention to keep up with all the changes.
Or else you will just be regurgitating “sound box” echo chamber narratives from like-minded individuals.
One of the many, many new housing subdivisions in China.
John Bolton actually stated in late September 2019 that (I am paraphrasing) “… the tariff wars has sent China back twenty years…”.
Twenty years, eh?
Ah, the ignorance is great in this one. Either that, or he has a tumor in his head. It’s a typical characteristic of neocons, don’t you know.
Most of the companies in the US–China Business Council (an organisation of about 200 American firms that trade with China) think that investment will continue to flow. A full 97% of the council’s members say their operations in China are profitable, and 87% report that they have no plans to relocate any of their activities to other countries.
Some of the difficulties of ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs back to the US were brilliantly revealed by the recent Netflix documentary American Factory too (see WiC464).
In the meantime there is little sign that the Chinese supply chain is being eroded, because of the tariff pressure from Washington.
“Trump’s claim that an exodus of foreign firms will force China to capitulate to US demands to settle the trade war is wishful thinking at best,” Lardy concludes.
-Week in China
Knowing the trade situation as it is, what can be done to salvage it?
That’s what this article is all about.
It’s about us taking a pragmatic, realistic look at the way things are, not at how we wish them to be, and planning on implementation of changes for our own personal benefit.
Let’s look at each issue and figure out how we can reduce or ameliorate the situation successfully. In so doing, let’s tackle the American mainstream (conservative & liberal) narratives. Let’s do it one, by one, and see how we can migrate things into “our” favor.
It sure beats sitting in a dark closet and trying to shoot darts at a target that we cannot see. Eh? Or, to put it another way. We don’t want to go around to tree after tree, pissing indiscriminately.
American mainstream media reporting on the trade wars.
Here’s some Mainstream media issues, and what the “informed” American populace thinks about China. Let’s take each one, dissect it, and see what we can do about it. OK.
$500 B trade deficit.
Global Supply Chain.
Made in China is bad.
China is ripping the USA off!
Chinese are unable to buy American products.
Chinese products are poor quality, simple and break down.
Chinese workers are slaves that labor for nothing.
Fair Trade
Dumping products
Stealing IP
They are dirty Commies!
Tariffs will bring back jobs.
For starters let’s tackle the A-#1 reason why the trump Tariff Wars exist in the first place. It is because America is losing $500 billion dollars every year to China, and we (pretty much) need to reduce that amount in order for America to be vibrant, healthy and prosperous.
[Issue 1] We are losing $500 billion every year to China
This is based on the fact that we have a trade deficit in goods for about $500B. This is a fact, Jack.
But, what is the composition of that deficit? Where within that composition can we move things to our advantage, and what parts should we ignore as hopeless?
Well, when we study the deficit we note that it is only based on products. It doesn’t include services. And in this area we have a surplus with China. We export those services to China. There are things that they cannot do, but we can. It’s our strength.
I propose that we increase our strength in this area. Work on our strengths, not play to our weaknesses. No matter how good it sounds politically. Give and take.
We provide services. They give us products.
Why not put a tax on the services that we supply to China? That tax can then be used to offset the tariffs that Americans must pay in imported products.
Play on our strengths. It’s a win-win for Americans.
[Issue 2] The Global Supply chain.
Then there’s the global supply chain.
Today we have a global business environment, and no wishing for the “good old days” is going to put that “Genie back into the lamp”. That “train has left the station”.
China imports a lot of natural resources and components from other countries to manufacture and assemble the finished goods. China buys chromium from Africa, and that goes into the metal alloys in cell-phones, drone motors and automobile electronic chip-sets.
Now, China does import other raw materials.
And yes, they do import a lot of raw materials out of the United States. And, no, I’m not talking about wheat, rice, and barley. I’m talking about uranium, and other precious metals that we have. Not to mention coal. China wants our coal. China wants our natural gas. Why not give it to them?
…at a price, don’t you know.
Again, that little bit of extra cost to buy from Americans can be used to offset the imbalance in tariffs. It would be a win-win for the American consumer.
Continue our exports to China, only raise the prices on them. Not prohibitively high, but gradually over time. Another win – win for Americans. Be smart. Think long term.
[Issue 3] Made in China.
Not every product made in China is Chinese.
It’s not. Many Japanese, British, German, French, and yes… American products are made in China. Actually 40% of “Chinese” exports are actually products of foreign (multi-national) corporations based in China. Many of which are American owned.
You’d never hear that in the American mainstream media.
Like Apple and their iphone. Like all those hobby drones that you can buy in the stores. Like the automobile electronics found in all the Fords, General Motors and other American cars. They are all American, but manufactured in China.
They are all American products, manufactured, designed and built in China.
Check out this graph…
Chart of the Chinese exports of goods, broken down by resource type, over the last ten years.
Thus, all these “Chinese” goods, aren’t really Chinese at all. They may be American, Japanese, South Korean, German etc.
You see, it’s easy to consider trade as products from one nation to another. But the fact is that the way business, and manufacturing is conducted today does not resemble in any way the old “made here, stays here” formula.
We need to take that into account.
We could by law, force American companies to make their products in America. That is, forbidding them to manufacture parts and components outside of America. It would be a law specifically targeting “supply chain management” outside of the USA.
American products should be made in America. We can still buy from China, but those products that are made by American companies need to be made in America.
No tariffs that Americans need to pay. More jobs for Americans. Yet another win-win.
[Issue 4] China is ripping us off!
This is pretty much the narrative. It doesn’t matter if you are an American Conservative, a liberal, or a member of the American mainstream media, this is the mantra.
Cheap junk in Walmart – China’s fault!
High prices for iPhones – China’s fault!
Power tool breaks – China’s fault!
US oligarchs and corporations decided to move American jobs abroad not China.
China smiled and took the business. But, seriously, their attitude was "Meh, whatever!". You see, everyone was coming to China to manufacture their products. America had to stand in line.
They raked in the profits, and gave the American consumers some benefit in being able to purchase inexpensive goods.
They came to China with bucket loads of cash. They promised the Chinese the world and gave them blueprints, technical specifications and trained them how to make their products. Then they sat back, drank their chardonnay while the money poured in.
US oligarchs and corporations decided to move American jobs abroad not China. They raked in the profits, and gave the American consumers some benefit in being able to purchase inexpensive goods.
Yes.
Never forget, US consumers and businesses benefit from inexpensive Chinese goods and labor. So, let’s not blame China for the lost manufacturing jobs. If you want to do something about it instead of eternally complaining then…
…ONLY BUY AMERICAN.
What’s so darn hard about that?
So stop your moaning and groaning. Start today. Stop buying anything that even resembles something imported. Period. You cannot change the world, but you can change your little part of it. Begin now. Begin today.
[Issue 5] They don’t buy our products!
This is another outright lie that is somehow broadcast in the United States. The actual reality is quite different. The Chinese place a high value on American products. In fact, in terms of personal value, to a Chinese person, owning a Buick is about equal to owning a Lamborghini. Yes!
It’s one of those jaw-dropping things that boggles the mind of most Americans. For in America, a Buick is considered a robust typical family car. While in China, it is considered the height of luxury, good taste, while at the same time being fiercely loyal to one’s family.
In China, the Mary Kay company gives her top saleswomen pink Buicks.
Perhaps that’s all part of the reason why GM sells more cars in China than in the US.
Not to mention that Apple sells more iPhones in China than in the US.
For United States semiconductor giant, Qualcomm, 65% of their revenues come from China.
Boeing sold 1000 planes to China in the last five years.
In fact, most major US corporations consider China as their #1 or #2 market.
So, yes, China has a very open market and it buys a lot of American services and goods, but a lot of them happen to be made in China. Similarly, corporations such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, KFC etc. profit enormously from their thousands of branches in China.
Starbucks continues to open thousands of new stores each year, mainly outside of the North American market. The company has a five-year plan with several goals to continue driving growth. Starbucks wants to be the employer of choice and invest in those employees who continue to deliver superior customer service. Starbucks has always been on the forefront of valuing employees, especially its part-time staff. The company has stated it will grow to 30,000 locations globally and work on creating new reasons for customers to visit its stores throughout the day.
The Chinese love, just love American products. If you really want to offset the trade imbalance between the two nations, then sell more products to China. This means a retail presence inside of China and far greater social and industrial brands than what is presently established.
The Chinese end up buying more American products (especially if they are made in America) and the Americans take home more money. The Chinese are willing to PAY MORE money for an American product just by virtue of it’s reputation. Don’t squander this advantage.
Sell more products to China, they will be happy, and the Americans will be raking in the money. It’s a win – win for America.
[Issue 6] Chinese products are crap
If Chinese products are crap, why do Americans keep spending $500 billion a year on buying crappy things?
Are Americans stupid, or powerless to change things? Is it that the deplorable Americans are just uneducated simpletons. Not hip to the wily ways of the Chinese?
Is that the narrative?
This narrative makes no sense. Not really. Everyone seems to think that all China makes is the cheapest toys in Walmart, but it’s only Americans that makes the computers, iphones and drones that fly in the sky.
Wrong! The roles are actually the reverse.
Don’t forget that BMW manufactures most of their cars in China.
BMW debuted its Vision Future Interaction Concept, a Mirrorless i8 Concept and its Internet of Things concept. It’s a very large suite of new technologies and it’s all extremely impressive. However, BMW wants to make it disappear into the background and make it invisible to customers.
Also, iPhones, Nike shoes and Prada bags are all made in China.
And Chinese brands like Huawei and OnePlus are actually beating Apple. So it’s not as if Chinese can’t make high-end, high-quality products.
They can, and they do.
We need to recognize the true and real state of things. That way we can best be able to decide on courses of action that actually work.
Instead of the progressive liberal Marxist "feel good" legislation.
That said, if you pay someone $1 an hour, don’t expect amazing products that will last for a lifetime. You get what you pay for.
You can only pick two.
Also, Chinese corporations are working their way up the value chain. Chinese high-end smartphones (Xiaomi and OnePlus) are already #1 in large consumer markets such as India; and, within five years, Chinese electric cars will be globally popular as well.
Chinese electric vehicles dominate. More Chinese electric vehicles are made in China than in the rest of the world combined.
To understand how to take advantage of the global situation, you must first understand it as it exists. We need to see things as they are. Not as we want them to be. That way, we can leverage the situation towards our very own benefit. It will be a win-win for Americans.
A win-win for Americans.
LeEco announced its investment in a joint venture between Aston Martin and Faraday Future, a direct competitor of Tesla, further signalling its intentions in the space. The front of the car features an LED loop that can be lit in different spots such as indicators or fog lights. The rear passenger doors, known as ‘suicide doors’ open from a hinge at the rear, as opposed to the front. They’ve also waived a previous law that protected home-grown companies from being gutted by foreign competition, as long as they invest in electric technology.
That’s led to a boom in EV startups such as NextEV and CH-Auto who, along with LeEco, could turn the car industry on its head. Especially given the size of China’s domestic market has now surged past America’s to become the largest economy in the world. Chinese EV companies have also been poaching talent from the likes of BMW to help make China the electric car center of the world.
[Issue 7] Everything in China is made by slave labor
It’s not.
The Chinese have a much stronger work-ethic than Americans have. We might not want to hear it, but it is true.
There is nothing good or bad about it. It has do do with society. The higher percentage that Americans have for leisure transmits in more time to attend church, more time for personal education, and more time to spend with the family and making the best of the life that one has. Let the Chinese work themselves to the bone. Americans don’t need to as we have what is known as work-life-balance. It’s a good thing… for us.
Let others live their lives as they want. If they want to work 12 hour days and on Saturdays, let them. Live and let live.
They also have different laws, different customs, and different culture. Thus comparing labor in China to that of the USA is like comparing apples to oranges.
Here is a brief comparison between three factories. One is an American non-union factory. One is a union American factory. One is a Chinese factory. One of the first things that the astute reader will notice that, aside from the pay, there is little else of value that the union provides the employees.
The second thing that you will notice is that the Chinese employee is granted all kinds of things that an American would never, ever be provided with. Like free housing (as in a personal apartment), free internet, three free meals a day, and many other things unheard of in the United States.
This is a quick generalized comparison between factories in the United States compared to factories in China. It is a gross simplification on many levels. However there are some things that need to be taken into account. firstly, the Chinese make far less money than their American counterparts. On the other hand, they get many perks and things that Americans can only dream about.
If you want to buy a product at Walmart, and you like it’s price, then go for it.
Sears tried to compete against Walmart, and lost. They offered better quality, warranties, and (for a spell) better working conditions in the factories that supplied the products to them.
It didn’t work.
When I buy something made in Wisconsin, I do not know about the working conditions that the product was created under. What I do know is that I liked the product and so I bought it.
China’s electric vehicle start-up Nio launched its first mass-produced model over the weekend, in a home market marked by competition with companies such as Tesla. The ES8, which starts at 448,000 Chinese yuan ($67,765) is half the starting price of Tesla’s 836,000 yuan ($126,470) Model X in China.
Complaining about situations beyond your control, outside of your understanding, and trying to moan and groan about it is fruitless. If you think that the Chinese labor like slaves, then DON’T BUY CHINESE PRODUCTS, and shut the heck up.
It’s a win win.
[Issue 8] We want Fair Trade and China must lower their tariffs
It’s not as if the only thing that stands in the way of US progress is China’s tariffs. Consider that we imported 8 million cars last year.
We imported Eight Million cars.
Eight / Million / Cars.
Maybe we should buy American goods, before we demand that others buy American products. Eh?
Imported vehicles to the United States. Most of the vehicle imports to the USA come from Canada and Mexico. While China is certainly the leader in automotive manufacture by volume, type, and differentiation, it hardly exports any vehicles to the United States.
Also, even if China eliminates their tariffs on our exports, US corporations will find that it’s still cheaper to manufacture goods in China, rather than making them here and shipping them over.
It’s not about nations. It’s about the oligarchy and the companies that they control.
Let’s not forget that the US already has a lot of protectionist tariffs, quotas, barriers and subsidies for various products and business sectors. Every government in the world has to cater to its people and special interest groups.
Finally, since WWII, the US has enjoyed an extraordinary privilege of being able to easily print the global reserve currency and wantonly borrow from the rest of the world.
Be careful what you wish for.
For a true “level playing field,” all currencies must be equal, which Americans won’t easily accept. Yeah. Can you just imagine if China could sanction western countries and arrest western CEOs for violating Chinese sanctions! Like the USA does.
Be careful what you wish for.
Most Americans, American companies, and the company stockholders would be most unhappy if China began to play to the same rules that the United States have implemented over the last four decades.
I would advise that we get on the good side of China. With China as a friend we can merge with shared benefit. Treating them as an enemy does the opposite. Work together for the betterment of all. It’s a win – win for everyone.
[Issue 9] They operate at losses and dump products
It is true. There are some state-operated Chinese entities that keep operating while losing money and simply rolling over their debt. China allows that to create employment for its people and also, sometimes, to capture the global market.
However, US corporations such as Amazon, Uber, Netflix and others do the same as well.
Moneys flow toward utility. The Chinese fund factories. The USA funds institutions.
China is a nation that values work, labor and production. America is a nation that values medicine, social reconstruction and government, As such, China will make the products that Americans will use under regulation.
It’s just the way things are.
China is a nation that values work, labor and production. America is a nation that values medicine, social reconstruction and government. You can easily see where all the money is going in America. Just look at the top three items. As such, China will make the products that Americans will use under regulation.
Truthfully, the only difference being that the US corporations are subsidized by commercial banks and the Federal Reserve Bank. While the Chinese factories are subsidized by the Bank of China.
We need to recognize that within the framework of utility. When we do, and grasp the true nature of things, it becomes easier to accept the truth. China makes the things that Americans use. Embrace that reality. It will be a win – win for Americans.
[Issue 10] They steal our IP
IP = Intellectual Property.
Most of these accusations are unwarranted.
It makes for great arguments, and a pretty decent media platform from which to espouse upon, but really, it’s just nonsensical. No one is sneaking around “stealing things”.
The Chinese company just buys an American company fair and square. Then , since they own the patents and the equipment and the intellectual property, they can do with it as they wish.
Carpetbaggers
In general, the term “carpetbagger” refers to a traveler who arrives in a new region with only a satchel (or carpetbag) of possessions, and who attempts to profit from or gain control over his new surroundings, often against the will or consent of the original inhabitants. After 1865, a number of northerners moved to the South to purchase land, lease plantations or partner with down-and-out planters in the hopes of making money from cotton. At first they were welcomed, as southerners saw the need for northern capital and investment to get the devastated region back on its feet. They later became an object of much scorn, as many southerners saw them as low-class and opportunistic newcomers seeking to get rich on their misfortune.
If China is stealing our IP, how come Tesla just opened a new plant in Shanghai and Boeing just announced a new factory in China?
If China is a thief, how come Intel Corp. has funded Horizon Robotics, a Chinese startup?
If China is a threat, why does Warren Buffet own 10% of BYD, China’s biggest electric car manufacturer?
Every western hi-tech firm — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell etc. — has branches in China and they wouldn’t do it if China is just stealing their IP. They are not stupid. Are they?
Yes, China required transfer of technology in many industries, but it was a voluntary, consensual business transaction. Driven by greed to conquer the Chinese consumer market, western corporations obliged. Also, arrogance made the West assume that Chinese copycats will never be good enough.
Fast-food giant McDonald’s is selling a controlling stake in its China business to a group of investors led by state-owned Chinese conglomerate Citic in a deal worth up to $2.1 billion, the companies said Monday. The transaction is part of a global business overhaul being carried out by the American company to keep up with changing tastes that have resulted in declining sales. Under the terms of the deal, Citic Ltd. and its investment management unit Citic Capital will acquire 52 percent of the business while another partner, Washington-based private equity firm The Carlyle Group, will own 28 percent.
There are definitely problems with Chinese espionage and those must be opposed and stopped. However, most people confuse blatant theft of intellectual property with it being given away. And for the last couple of decades, the American companies did just that. They gave the technology away so that the American company owner can make enormous profits in the transaction.
America lost it’s technical edge, so that a hand-full of individuals could profit from it. These Americans sold out America so that they could become filthy, filthy, rich.
For America to become great again, we need to arrest and imprison those that gave away our strengths, our knowledge, our technologies, our resources for their own personal profit. They should be in jail instead of drinking chardonnay in one of their many mansions. It’ll be a win – win for Americans.
[Issue 11] But they’re commies!
In spite of China’s “communist” party, CCP, what they have is a unique mix of socialism, capitalism and Confucianism. Don’t treat them as a cardboard cutout, a cartoon of something evil. They are not, and you should be ashamed to fall for the 1930’s-era propaganda template.
Chinese communism is NOT the same kind of communism that we Americans have come to think of. It is something all together different.
The private sector is vibrant — [1] 90% of new jobs are created by private enterprises, [2] venture capitalists are investing more in Chinese startups than in American counterparts, [3] the upper middle class is growing rapidly (200 million), [4] there are 3.5 million millionaires and [5] two new billionaires were created every week last year.
Two new millionaires every week!
China is not your textbook “communist” country.
While the Chinese government is certainly authoritarian, relative to western democracies, it has accomplished an economic miracle over the last four decades that’s unprecedented in human history.
800 million people were lifted out of poverty and the GDP grew 40-fold in 40 years.
That’s why 84% of Chinese trust their government and 68% say that the government is the best institution to lead the country to a better future.
To understand how we can “beat the other team”, we need to understand who they really are, what their tactics are, how they call their plays, and their strengths and weaknesses. It will be a win – win for Americans.
[Issue 12] Tariffs will bring back jobs
Tariffs can only bring back jobs if there are American alternatives to the Chinese products. That way the tariffs will price the Chinese products at a disadvantage to American products. And the consumers will want to buy American products.
But…
The vast majority of products under the Trump tariff schedule has no comparative American-made alternative.
Thus it will be the American consumer that will be paying the tariffs, as they will have no other alternatives.
This is a real big problem, and perhaps the real heart of the problem with the “trade wars” today. We need to realize how legislative actions produce unintended consequences…
In the 1990's Bill Clinton and his Democrat controlled Congress, single-handedly devastated the American ship-building industry. You see, they laid a "wealth tax" on boats. As they (incorrectly as it turned out) that only wealthy people could afford yachts, and small boats.
What happened, is that everyone stopped buying boats. As a result the entire ship-building industry collapsed. It took decades to recover, and even today it is just limping along.
You see, most of the products that Americans buy comes from China, and that there are zero alternatives. This is a problem. This is a really big problem.
Factories do not grow on trees.
You cannot snap your fingers and immediately start making televisions sets, drones, robots, kitchen appliances and shoes from nothing. You need talent, knowledge, machinery and a skilled and talented work force.
But, you do know, that most of the American work force does not have this background. Their background is in the service industries.
Thus creating a factory, or even moving it from China to the USA is a very difficult thing to do. Check out this link (opens up in another tab).
You see, Trump’s 10% or 25% tariff on Chinese goods won’t create enough incentive for most manufacturers to start building products in the US. At the most, US companies will simply move the manufacturing to other developing nations such as Vietnam, Thaliand etc. Moreover, Chinese Yuan has already fallen 10%, thus largely neutralizing the first round of tariffs.
Considering that every major business/lobbying group, corporation and economist is against tariffs and trade wars, it’s highly unlikely that jobs are going return from Asia, Mexico and elsewhere.
Tariffs and retaliatory tariffs can also lead to a big loss of jobs or even a recession. There have already been endless stream of stories about layoffs and lost sales.
While it’s true that some Japanese and German automakers who want to avoid confrontations may build new assembly plants in the US, others may be forced to relocate some existing factories from the US to Europe and China to avoid the cross-border tariffs.
Make a favorable environment for other nations to put their factories in America.
Reduce regulations so that the factories will want to move to America.
Limit the taxes on employers, and on workers so that the American factory worker has a chance to compete.
It will be a win-win for Americans.
Conclusion
There won’t be any winner in the trade war. China in 2019 isn’t China in 1990. We should stop treating it as such. That is crazy.
At the same time, the West should be mindful of history — the Opium Wars and the following Century of Humiliation are etched in the Chinese national psyche. China has worked very hard and sacrificed a lot in the last forty years; and they’re not going to give up their dreams. They are a nation of achievers.
The Chinese are a serious nation and do not play around. If this trade situation is not handled carefully, things can turn really bad for America. It’s not going to be anything like Americans expect.
(Aside from the total collapse of America at every level...) I think there are two other options.
One would be a crisis and defeat. That is something we have not experienced in America. What that would look like we can only speculate by looking at other examples of defeated nations, what has happened to them, and how they have adjusted to their post-defeat role.
You might look at the defeated Axis powers after World War II as an interesting test case, and we have written a little bit about that. One thing that might even be most disturbing of all, is that no real crisis ever ultimately expresses itself, which actually, oddly enough, may be the worst outcome of all.
That is to say, everything we see about our world today, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, democracy sort of ebbing away, people feeling powerless over their political lives, people feeling less and less a sense of civic participation or belonging, and we have kind of turned that up.
There is an interesting book by Tyler Cohen. He is a very popular writer now, he wrote Average is Over and The Great Stagnation. He wrote a recent book called The Complacent Class. If you want to read a book about America’s future in the absence of a fourth turning, read that book.
The real rate of return gets lower and lower, we kind of approach the stationary state, productivity growth kind of ebbs to nothing, we become a kind of nominal market society, but one in which all the markets are dominated by a few very large companies with enormous market power and concentration.
In that kind of society, highly stratified, not feeling at all like what we think of as being America, is, I think, the scariest one, one in which global problems, problems of global order are not rectified. And it is one that disturbs me the most.
-McAlvany
So, let’s get rid of the zero-sum mentality, drop the aggressive posture, come up with tangible goals, and negotiate with respect and a smile.
The tariffs have slowed China’s economy, which grew 6.6 percent in 2018, its slowest rate in almost three decades. Meanwhile the United States grew an amazing 1.7 percent. The most astounding growth in decades.
For goodness sakes. Everyone can win. We just need to stop playing the neocon war – war -war game. It’s going to really… REALLY harm the United States. And I do mean BIGLY.
So, let’s think smart. Address things as they really are, and work for a win-win for everyone. Now is the time to do it.
12OCT19 Update
Trump said the U.S. and China have "agreed in principle" on a preliminary trade agreement. Trump acknowledged that differences remain on major issues on which the two countries are divided, but the White House still decided not to push ahead with a planned increased to tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods next week.
The move would have raised those tariffs to 30% from 25%.
"There's too many factors at play for him to just issue threats to governments, China's or anybody else's, to just follow along with what he says," said Wang, referring to the U.S. president's previous threats to slap additional penalties on Chinese goods.
-USA Today; Senior China adviser: Trump to blame for delays in securing final trade deal, says China has been 'accommodating'
Links about China
Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.
And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
There are many articles about the Trade War between the United States (Donald Trump) and China. Many are written from the perspective of an American consumer sitting in America, and desirous of a return to the “golden days” of industrial might. Others are written from the point of view of a progressive “enlightened” globalist who wants a one-singular world order. This article is different. It is written from the point of view of someone who has a vested interest in both “camps of thought”.
A fresh slap of reality.
In terms of the trade war, there are some facts that do not support any of the assumptions held and promoted by the “talking heads” in the mainstream media.
None of these facts agree with the promoted narratives. This is true whether you are politically liberal or conservative.
On the conservative side...
I’m seeing a type of artificial patriotic fervor. It's an organized attempt using memes and propaganda to convince conservatives that the trade war requires mindless fealty to the anti-China message.
Americans don’t like dictators, and many don’t like China. However, conservatives are being duped into thinking the trade war against China some type of an ideological crusade. It’s one that somehow will lead to a better America or a better world.
People! Wake up. This is not what the trade war is intended to do.
Let’s start with the assumptions surrounding the trade war and then look at the evidence that debunks them. Remember people…
The American government requires an alert and well-informed citizenry to function properly.
Fallacy #1: China needs America
The idea here is that the entire nation of China, all 1.4 billion of them, needs Americans (325 million) buying their products.
Seriously?
I’m not sure where this idea comes from specifically, but it’s not based on anything tangible. I sometimes wonder if the notion that the world depends on the American consumer (for its bread and butter) is perhaps a kind of appeal to American’s narcissism? Thus making the average American feel superior, or feel special. You know, by simply by telling them that their steady American way of life (one of debt-based consumption) keeps the engine of the global economy running.
Pretty outrageous.
In the case of China, here are the facts:
The US only comprises around 18% of Chinese exports. While this is a nice piece of the pie, it’s hardly enough leverage to bring down China’s economy. China would suffer profit losses in certain sectors as well as a possible recession, but not the kind of crisis that some in the alternative media are predicting.
There will not be riots in the streets, famine, or civil upheavals. Don’t be silly.
In 2018, China shipped 18% of its exports to the United States. That contributed to a $419 billion trade deficit. China's trade with Hong Kong, at 14%, was almost as much. Its trade with Japan, which was at 6%, and South Korea, at 4.5%, was much less.
-The Balance
You need to know that China is NOT structured like the United States and does not operate under rule by popular opinion. They are a serious, serious nation. Their leadership got where they are through merit. (Have you ever attended school with a Chinese / Asian student? They work hard, study hard, and make informed, calculated decisions.)
For the last decade or so, China has been busy changing its economic model. They have moved from an export-based system to a far more self-reliant domestic-based system.
I covered this subject in another post. You can click on the link below. It will open up in a separate tab so that your reading here will not be interrupted.
Maybe they knew something that the Bush and Obama administrations didn’t. It appears that they have been preparing for a possible economic war with the US.
For the last decade, indeed since 2010, China’s domestic market has grown dramatically. This should indicate to the more alert in the audience that China has no intention of relying on the US consumer as an economic pillar.
They are a self-sufficient nation.
Meanwhile, the US consumer is almost tapped out. It’s hard to see because retail sales in certain areas remain steady. Not to mention that the mainstream media (and the Fed) has been using this to promote the idea that the economy is still “going strong”. It’s not really the true and real situation.
The reality is that US consumption is driven by historic levels of debt. Household debt is now FAR above levels last seen after the last financial crisis, with total debt at $1.2 trillion higher today than its last peak in 2008.
The downturn in retail is more obvious in the steady closings of thousands of outlets in 2019 alone. This year has seen a 29% increase in store closings compared to 2018, even though 2018 saw a considerable spike in store shutdowns. Around 12,000 stores are slated to close this year.
OK, so the actual situation is quite different from the mainstream media narrative.
China is a self-sufficient nation.
America is completely engulfed in a debt hole.
So the question is, with the US consumer stretched thin by debt and US retail on the verge of a recessionary plunge, why would China feel threatened by the loss of the American consumer market?
They are losing it already by attrition.
The truth is they aren’t threatened. Which is whythe trade war continues unabated. This is the situation despite the fact that so many people have argued that China would “quickly fold” to Trump’s demands.
I realize this is not what many people want to hear, but it is foolish to get caught up in a farcical mob mentality and ignore the fundamentals in the trade war. If you think that the US is going to “win” based on leverage, you are sorely mistaken.
America has NO leverage. The US is in no better shape economically than China; in many ways, we are much worse off.
“Trump’s claim that an exodus of foreign firms will force China to capitulate to US demands to settle the trade war is wishful thinking at best,”
-Week In China
Fallacy #2: Manufacturing Will Return
This is perhaps the most persistent and fraudulent “carrot” that has been held out to the American people. It’s the idea that those “golden days” of American Manufacturing will return, and all will be back to “normal”.
It’s a lie.
It’s not going to happen.
I am sorry to break this new to you all, but factories, industrial might, scientific ability and skills are not “light switches” that you can turn on and off at will. You cannot just snap your fingers and start up a fully automated factory, producing high quality products with a skilled work force overnight.
It doesn’t work that way.
I covered this subject elsewhere. You can click on the link and it will open up in a separate tab.
First, as it stands now manufacturing in the US makes up only 11% of total economic output. I don’t think that many people understand the consequences of this.
We have a 70% retail and service-based economy.
This means that the majority of US citizens in the job market have no experience whatsoever in the manufacturing sector.
Thus, by extension, the average US company has no guidelines for how to establish a manufacturing base using the existing American labor pool.
Second, American labor expects a certain level of wage compensation. Not to mention an expectation of union organization. Combined, this makes manufacturing far more expensive here than in just about anywhere else in the world.
The average factory worker in China makes around $3.60 per hour. So tell me, just how exactly would the American market ever be able to compete with this?
Tariff’s alone are not enough to force corporations to spend the billions necessary to rebuild factories in the US and hire American workers at $15+ an hour (let alone the $45+ an hour at union wages). It’s just not going to happen.
There's a movie called "American Factory" that might be worth your time to watch. It's a documentary that was released in August 2019.
The documentary tells an increasingly American story. In 2015, seven years after a General Motors plant closed in Dayton, Ohio, a Chinese company that manufactures glass for trucks and automobiles reinvests in the factory.
The former GM workers are are ecstatic. Some went into foreclosure and were evicted from their homes after GM pulled out — one woman, a forklift operator named Jill Lamantia, is living in her sister’s basement. They’re happy to have another factory job. Never mind that the GM plant was fully unionized and paid more than $20 an hour, and Fuyao, a non-union shop, has a starting pay of $14 an hour, it’s a job.
Cao has a bold vision: Pair U.S. workers with Chinese workers, who are brought to Ohio to train and work alongside their American counterparts. The idea is that the Chinese and the Americans can learn from each other, taking the best working methods from each culture to increase production. Although Cao visits regularly from China, the onsite boss is an American, and management is from both cultures.
But the results don’t meet that utopian ideal. The culture divide seems insurmountable. To start with, the Chinese workers have no problem working long hours and overtime, while the Americans are used to eight-hour shifts...
Download the Movie Torrent HERE.
Read reviews about it HERE.
Third, there are many, many places besides China to build a manufacturing base. No company is going to bring its factories to the US when they can build in Vietnam, or Taiwan, etc. In many cases, it is cheaper to ship raw materials and products to these countries, have them finished by cheap and motivated workers in Asia, and then have the items shipped back, than it is to build the product from start to finish in the US.
Fourth, we can talk all day about patriotism, but in the end, the average American is not going to buy “Made in the USA” for most goods out of a sense of patriotic duty if the price is twice as much or much more. Walmart and Amazon dominate the retail market for a reason – they sell things cheaply.
$19.95 Toaster – Made in China.
$79.95 Toaster – Made in the USA.
Fifth, raising tariffs on foreign exporters would only work to encourage consumption of domestically manufactured goods. If the foreign made products cost too much, then you would buy American. Right?
Why buy an Mercedes, when you can buy fifteen (x15) Kia Rio Sedans for the same amount of money?
2019 Mercedes-Benz S-Class – $253,550
Kia Rio LX, 4-Door Sedan. – $16,195
This only holds true if the US already had a large manufacturing base and produced all the items other nations produce. But it doesn’t. Many of the things that are under the tariff schedule are wholly made overseas.
Televisions – 100% made in China.
iPhones – 100% made in China.
Sneakers – 100% made in China.
Clothes Washers – 100% made in China.
Automobile Tires – 100% made in China.
The American consumer doesn’t have a choice. He can only buy imported items. Thus, it is the American consumer that ends up paying the tariff.
Entering into a trade war without a resilient manufacturing sector is backward. You don’t fight a trade war to get manufacturing to come back, you fight a trade war to promote the goods you already manufacture.
Seriously, if Trump had really intended to bring factories back to the US, he should have done things differently. For instance, he could have given corporations tax break incentives in exchange for creating manufacturing jobs on US soil.
If you do “A”, I’ll give you “B”.
Instead, he didn’t do this. He just gave American corporations tax breaks for nothing.
Fallacy #3: China Will Starve Without American Food
Uh, no. China will not experience famines, riots, or starvation. It’s all pretty darn silly.
This is a very weird argument. It’s as if some people assume that the US is China’s only potential source for food. Where do Americans get such really “off the wall” ideas? Seriously!
China buys agricultural products from all over the world and has alternative sources for foods like soybeans and pork, including Brazil, Mexico, and Russia. Not to mention that they grow, and raise their own food. It’s part of the conservative belief in self-sufficiency. Don’t you know.
I covered this subject elsewhere. The link below will open up in a new tab. It’s pretty damming and will open up a few eyes. China is not a nation to be trifled with.
Prices will rise in China, sure, but nowhere near the point of
collapse. Again, the Chinese are not reliant on the US for anything, so,
the idea that the US has overt leverage in the trade war is simply not
true.
Fallacy #4: The World Will Side With The US Over China
This is a prime question – if they had to choose sides, would a given nation choose the USA, or choose China?
On one hand you have the debt-ridden oligarchy-ruled military state with a large consumer base or communist China’s cheap export market. What would they choose if they had to pick only one?
The US consumer is nearly tapped out.
China has the largest import/export market in the world.
The vast bulk of manufacturing is in China.
The US has little manufacturing to speak of.
I also question the validity of the idea that Europe or most other nations have loyalty to American markets. Think about it; do they really?
Do they see America as indispensable?
Or is the rest of the world being sent on a path towards globalism? Meanwhile the US is being made to look like a barbaric and archaic throwback. Like some kind of Neanderthal man that is desperately clinging to power. And one that is willing to drag everyone else down with him if he doesn’t get his way?
Why do people cling on to the power they hold, and you have to wait until they die before you can have some “new blood” and some changes done? Why won’t they just let go and accept change.
Many in the “liberty movement” understand that this is not the case.
We know that the globalists have sabotaged this country from within. We also know that they are using Trump as controlled opposition and a useful puppet in this task.
Ah yes, but the majority of the rest of the world does NOT understand this.
If there is an economic crash which sends shock-waves through multiple economies, the trade war will most likely be blamed along with Trump and his “populist” supporters.
The rest of the world will see us as the villains, because they do not understand the nature of 4th Generation Warfare, nor do they understand the globalists’ strategy of “order out of chaos”.
The narrative that has been pushed in the global mainstream media is quite different than what you would see on FOX.
China is the victim of US aggression.
The trade war and the economic crisis are purely a product of Trump’s madness.
Who do you honestly think the world will eventually side with?
We’ve been hearing this for almost three years now. Trade wars are “easy to win”, right?
Every couple of months the trade war deal hype is recycled and every couple of months the markets are hit with renewed disappointment. The latest trade talks are set for October and if they happen at all, it is unlikely they will result in anything of significance.
At most, they will be heralded as the “start of a great deal” and both sides will claim “progress was made”, and then, once again, nothing will happen and the conflict will accelerate.
You would think people would have figured it out by now, but the investment world learns very slowly and functions solely on blind hope. At the very least, economic analysts are starting to realize that no deal is coming and that the situation is only going to get tenser.
In fact, it is designed to get more tense.
Fallacy #6: The US Dollar Is Untouchable
This claim revolves mainly around the idea that because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US has the upper hand in all trade negotiations. Therefore, the rest of the world will follow the currency leader because there “is no other option”.
I disagree.
As Bank of England governor Mark Carney has openly admitted, the plan is to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency anyway. How? Well with a global cryptocurrency, of course.
They need a massive crash event, and they need the US dollar to go the way of the dodo.
It seems rather convenient to me that China has been preparing for just such an event. While many analysts point out that China has generated intense amounts of debt over the past decade, they seem to forget that this was a requirement in order for China to attach the Yuan to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket. This is, of course, the foundation for a global currency mechanism.
Chinese economic officials and the globalists both argue that the current monetary system, based on a single national currency (the dollar) as the world reserve is inherently unstable.
Their solution? A basket of currencies monitored by the IMF, followed by a single digital currency mechanism.
I would note that China and the globalists have consistently hinted that a major economic crisis event will act as a catalyst for this “reset” in the world monetary order and that the dollar must be replaced in the process.
China has also been stockpiling large amounts of gold for
the past decade. This would indicate they are expecting a monetary
devaluation event, most specifically in the dollar. It’s as if they
know something the rest of us only suspect.
The trade war is the perfect cover for the collapse of the US dollar that the globalists desire. While some people suggest that China’s dumping of US treasuries is the “nuclear option” in the trade war, this is not exactly true.
The REAL nuclear option is for China to dump the US dollar as the reserve trade mechanism and go to a basket of currencies, which the IMF will happily aid them with.
As the largest exporter/importer in the world, China can drop the dollar and most of their trading partners will follow their lead. The US economy would crumble in response, as the dollar is the only thread holding our system together.
This is a FACT, Jack.
This is the ugly truth behind the trade war. It is nothing more than a farce, a smoke and mirrors distraction leading up the dismantling of the US dollar and paving the way for the globalist one-world digital currency system.
Whether or not the plan succeeds relies on ample resistance from people who see the danger ahead. However, make no mistake, the globalists are not afraid of an economic crash or the decline of the dollar. In truth, they WANT these things to happen so they can establish even more centralized control.
Updates
Hot off the presses! We surveyed our members on how they are adapting to the US-China Trade War and have some surprising comparative data here from a previous survey in January 2019.
Long story short: European companies have resigned themselves to the long-term nature of the trade war, and many have made significant shifts in strategy to mitigate its effects. That means changing suppliers, rejigging product flows through corporate global operations, and avoiding the US-China trade 'border' like the plague.
Interestingly, roughly the same number of companies that are moving relevant production out of China (8%) are increasing investment in China (6%) as companies decide to move out affected production or further onshore supply chains respectively to avoid the tariff bite.
However, the effects of the uncertainty coming from the trade war are increasingly significant. In January, 6% of members said they were delaying investment/expansion decisions in reaction to the conflict. That number climbed to 15% in September.
-European Survey
Conclusion
The “Trump Trade War” is a natural progression of events that were bound to occur sooner or later. It will eventually precipitate numerous events. One of which will be a global currency. Another will be a strong ascendancy of China in the global stage. As well as some serious internal economic readjustments (collapse, maybe?) in America.
We will sit by and see what happens.
Personally, I hope that any changes that occur to be a painless as possible. To endure the changes, you might need to turn off the mainstream American media which will be shrieking, wailing, gnashing it’s teeth and flaying it’s arms all about in wild, crazed abandon.
12OCT19 Update
Trump said the U.S. and China have "agreed in principle" on a preliminary trade agreement. Trump acknowledged that differences remain on major issues on which the two countries are divided, but the White House still decided not to push ahead with a planned increased to tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods next week.
The move would have raised those tariffs to 30% from 25%.
"There's too many factors at play for him to just issue threats to governments, China's or anybody else's, to just follow along with what he says," said Wang, referring to the U.S. president's previous threats to slap additional penalties on Chinese goods.
-USA Today; Senior China adviser: Trump to blame for delays in securing final trade deal, says China has been 'accommodating'
Take a break
I know all this is very serious stuff, and a tad alarming. I would suggest that you might want to check out some of my lighter articles. Here’s four stories for starters. All open up in a separate tab for your viewing pleasure. Pick one and relax.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
We often talk (and complain) about the bad side of the new Orwellian police state that all nations are morphing into. Yet, with all of our moaning, groaning, and complaining we neglect to look at the more positive aspects. No, this is not an article in praise of the Orwellian Police State. Instead, we look at how intense monitoring of enormous populations, using high resolution cameras and 5G networks enable full “real time” tracking of agitators and hooligans. Especially those from another nation. Ones that are intended to destabilize, and cause strife, for global political ends.
In particular, we will look at the tracking (by China) of the United States agitation in the (so called) “Free Democracy” movement in Hong Kong during the Summer of 2019.
Quick Review
The United States under President Donald Trump has been involved in difficult negotiations with China over trade. These negotiations began in 2017, and “heated up” in early Summer of 2019. During the Summer of 2019 mass “Pro Democracy” protests broke out in Hong Kong. The idea, of course, has been to put every type and means of “pressure” on China so that the trade negotiations would fall in favor of the United States.
I covered the Chinese reaction to all this here. The link below opens up into a separate tab so as not to interrupt your viewing pleasure in this article.
These “pressures” included such things as…
Increasing Tariffs on Chinese made products.
Protests and disruptions in Hong Kong.
Asking European Nations to stop or break trade with China.
Financial incentives to other nations.
Pressure on American companies to move back to the USA.
Time will tell just how effective they will all be.
What I do know, as of the time of this writing, at the tail-end of September moving forward into the 70th anniversary of China, the following is true…
[1] International Trade
There is a GLOBAL slowing of all international trade.
International trade, across the board is reduced by 30%.
Companies located in strong pro-USA nations (Australia, NZ, and the UK) are looking for alternative off-shore supply chain operations outside of China. But there just aren’t any.
[2] American Trade With China
China has also surprised Americans with the most complete supply chains in the world. "You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That's the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours," one former high-ranking Apple executive was quoted as saying in a New York Times report.
- Smaller US companies depend on Chinese supply chain
The clear majority of American companies are staying inside of China. This is out of financial necessity. They do not have the financial means to take on the enormous financial risks to relocate back to the USA.
Those American companies are passing on the tariffs directly to the American consumer (25% direct) or (10% through a “pass through” arrangement).
But all accounts, the tariff situation is hurting American consumers much more than it is hurting China.
Read about the reasons here. Opens in a separate tab.
[3] Cut in American Food Items for Export
The cut in importation of American foodstuffs has resulted in the increase in the price of food. But not in the availability of food. China has food galore and a-plenty.
This goes absolutely against the American media narrative. Which on some websites are even suggesting famine! It’s insane. Ah, but, it’s easy enough to check.
China has spent the last thirty years building up their self-sufficiency in food, technology and vital products. They have not forgotten the mistakes made under Communism under Mr. Mao.
Now, of course, there are all kinds of different cuts of pork. It would be like comparing apples and watermelons if we use different cuts of pork. But, you know what, we work with what we have to work with.
Here is a flier showing one of the more expensive cuts of pork (it’s the Chinese national holiday, after all, ) Never the less, you can clearly see that a pork roast costs 17.8 RMB / half a Kg in October. Where in January (before the trade embargoes) a cheap cut of pork shoulder costs 12.8 RMB / half a Kg.
At which I would like to remind the reader that China is a bacon-loving nation. They love their pork and out-produces pork products that makes America look like teeny-boppers.
China, with it’s enormous population, does not need food imports to exist. China is an enormous breadbasket. Farms exist everywhere. For instance, did you know that China has more pigs than the next 43 pork producing countries combined.
Yeah. America is a light-weight in pork production.
The Chinese love pork. This is a nation that loves bacon. They love pork chops, and all sorts of pork products.
China does not need any imports of food to feed it’s people. It is self-sufficient.
China feeds 22 percent of the world population with only seven percent of the planet's arable land. Land is heavily utilized for agriculture. Vegetables are planted on road embankments, in traffic triangles and right up the walls of many buildings.
China is the world's top consumer of meat and grain. As it becomes more affluent people consume more meat and cooking oil and this has lead to increased demand for soybeans as an oil source and feed for livestock. China also uses more fertilizer that any other country.
According to United Nations statistics, China's cereal production is the largest in the world. In 2003 China produced 377 million tons, or 18.1 percent of total world production. Its plant oil crops---at 15 million tons in 2003---are a close second to those of the United States and amounted to 12.6 percent of total world production.
Lauren Keane wrote in the Washington Post, “China has a long-standing policy of food self-sufficiency, growing 95 percent of the grain required to feed its people. The country's sheer size means that a major crop failure or other food emergency here could have international ramifications, overwhelming world food markets with sudden demand. "Were China to need to import a large amount of grain, it would have a very dramatic impact on world food prices," said Anthea Webb, director of World Food Program China. [Source:Lauren Keane, Washington Post, May 31, 2010]
-Facts and Details
The idea that China cannot feed it’s people comes from the late
1960’s when the Communist central government failed in the
implementation of policy. Taking advantage of that situation was a SJW
moment known as the Cultural Revolution. It collapsed when the military had to be called into to restore order and control.
[4] Discarding of the United States Dollar
For a full half a century, the world used the USD to conduct international business and trade. This was advantageous for the United States. As the value of the dollar could be artificially propped up as the entire world was using this currency, and it was able to “float” upon the stability of the economies of multiple nations.
Not so any longer. Each time a nation stops using the USD as a currency for international trade, the stability of the USD decreases.
Numerous nations are starting to conduct trade in the Yuan instead of the US Dollar.
Numerous nations are buying up gold and increasing their gold reserves.
America has countered to this by printing more money, and taking on more debt.
Maybe these nations know something that many Americans aren’t.
In the forefront of all these various issues, we have the (so called) “Pro Democracy” movement in HK. This is an effort that is designed to destabilize the region as a way to put pressure on China.
Indeed, Donald Trump himself tweeted to Xi Peng in September that all the protests in HK would end abruptly if China agreed to the USA trade concessions.
How could Donald Trump say that if he wasn't able to make that happen?
The “Pro Democracy Movement”
I covered this subject in great deal elsewhere. If you want to find out who the players are, the stakes involved, the money that changes hands, and the interests of the American “deep state” swamp you can clink on this link below. It opens up in a separate tab so as not to interrupt your reading pleasure here.
In order to put pressure on China, Donald Trump utilized a branch of the CIA known as the National Endowment for Democracy or NED.
This is all well known as the “paper trail” for the funding is public knowledge. Indeed, groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.
You know… for “democracy” around the world.
While
US lawmakers nominate Hong Kong protest leaders for peace prizes and
pump their organizations with money to “promote democracy,” the
demonstrations have begun to spiral out of control.
And the people used to [1] instigate the riots, [2] train the protestors, arrange and [3] organize the newsmen and cameras and [4] teach and instruct the rioters for “soft conflicts” used to [5] provoke violent actions by the HK Police all have LinkedIN profiles.
Don’t you know.
So, even a dweeb like myself can [1] track the funding, [2] see the names and addresses of the agitators, and [3] view where they are and what they are doing in Hong Kong.
Just imagine what the Chinese government can do.
But Hong Kong is not America. It is part of China.
As Americans, especially those who have never stepped foot outside of America, think of other nations, other people and other cities from our point of view. That is to say, we imagine the WORST outside the USA. And never give the other nations any credit for doing certain things well. We just assume that they are all blunder-head nincompoops.
When we think of Hong Kong, we think of New York city.
Night meal in Hong Kong. Yup. It’s pretty much like this. And, yes, I do love it. It’s glorious.
Which is sad.
We should be thinking of Tokyo. We should be thinking of High-Tech (though not nearly as high-tech as Shenzhen), and state of the art. China is advancing in so, so , SO many ways and NONE of it is being reported by the mainstream American media.
We think, maybe that there are a few cameras here and there. We think that maybe the video feeds are being monitored, or that the traffic police are checking things out.
We don’t realize that the entire city is under constant advanced surveillance. And that China knows exactly what is going on in great detail.
Here, we are going to talk about this.
5G networks in all the Chinese cities
In the USA, there is an active program to justify why America is still using obsolete technology. “We don’t want to be irradiated with that dangerous 5G radio waves”, we say to ourselves. “We don’t want our brains cooked”.
Yeah. We heard it all before.
We Americans don’t want or need High Speed Rail. We are just happy with boarding our cattle-car-airlines, and paying the enormous ticket prices. We like doing it. HST has no place in America. Besides we have Amtrak!
Who cares about fluoride in the water? It’s a great way to get rid of the by-products of aluminum production. Fluoride is good for us. It’s modern, don’t you know.
America is great!
And a wall on the border of the USA and Mexico. It’s been three years and America can’t even construct a simple, singular wall. You know you have a problem when illiterate goat-herders in Afghanistan can make a half-decent wall and the great United States can’t even start…
Well, while Americans are justifying living in a nation that is increasingly becoming a “time portal” back to the last century, the rest of the world is advancing at break-neck speed.
Most of Africa has a growing and vibrant middle class, with malls, toll booths, and high speed (5G) internet. The Middle East (outside of the American-sponsored war zones) are all prospering. Check out the photos, for goodness sakes!
America is still stuck in the 1970’s I guess.
You can tell.
People still write checks instead of scan QR codes.
AM radio has the largest listening audience.
Everything comes with a price tag. Nothing is free, including water.
Software still has the same functionality as it did in the 1990’s, only now it has a nicer interface, but you must pay for updates and it auto copies your work “to the cloud” for governmental purposes.
China is different.
They have implemented 5G everywhere. There are cameras everywhere. And instead of paying people to collect welfare, have free healthcare, and protest for more goodies, China puts them to work. They are employed. They build things, clean things, work on things and monitor things.
Yes, and Hong Kong is constantly being monitored.
China is aware of everything.
One of the mysteries that I had was why didn’t the Chinese just “take out” the agitators? I mean, it was public knowledge who they were.
The HK populace are getting increasingly pissed off with the Antifa-style interruptions, and they are actively unmasking (literally) the protester participants. And, of course, everyone knows that everything you do is tracked in China. HK is NOT an exception.
So why not “take out the agitators”?
And then they actually did…
On Wednesday 4SEP19, President Trump reached out to China’s President Xi in a tweet:
“I know President Xi of China very well. He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a ‘tough business.’ I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. Personal meeting? ”
-Donald Trump
So what is Donald Trump saying?
That’s he’s ready to stop the HK protests if Xi Peng negotiates.
Or, perhaps that China can use their military to enter HK.
So.. the Chinese went forth and rounded up all the CIA related NED operatives in Hong Kong.
The video footage was pretty darn dramatic.
It’s all in 5G. You can even count the eyebrow hair on the American CIA agents. The Chinese had everything. From complete transcripts of the CIA instructing the rioters in “soft conflict” designed to provoke a military reaction, to a second by second, “walk through” where Trump advisors worked out planning with the protest leadership.
It’s all there.
Not televised in the USA, though.
Man! The Chinese knew everything!
People, it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with American presidential aides!
Check out the photo below. Notice the angle of the photo. Taken by an object on a dining room table. (Below belt level.)
People,
it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK
protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with
American presidential aides in the HK Marriot hotel!
This is very very embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters. pic.twitter.com/JfiU2O2HZq
— Chen Weihua (@chenweihua) August 8, 2019
Of course, this kind of nonsense won’t be tolerated by China.
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on the US …
“to immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”
The Chinese knew everything.
Everything. And they expected the United States to realize (and expect it).
They didn’t.
From the moment that Julie Eadeh stepped foot in Hong Kong, to how many steps she took to the elevator. They knew her heart-beat as she rode in the elevator in the Marriott. They even knew the color of the bra and panties that she wore. (Well, at least that is the current joke on Chinese social media…)
They know everything she said with the young protestors.
Everything.
Everything. From, promises, various “guarantees”, words of support and hope for assistance. As well as implications and guarantees of a cushy future and financial support in all sorts of ways. Any outsider can clearly see the implied promises under the veneer of political jargon.
Promises of free high-end university schooling .
Promises that they will be backed politically and that they will become the future leaders of HK.
Promises of houses, cars, and lifestyle,
Promises of money, lots and lots of money.
As well as who they are, and what they told her. Then they used “Minority Report” style technology to back-track and see who all the connections and phone calls that the confederates made. They had full conversation records, don’t you know.
The Chinese knew everything.
Of Course the CIA instructed the protestors.
It’s all on video. It’s all recorded in audio, and transcribed in English, Cantonese and Chinese. And then, then… then, plastered all over social media for the Chinese to see. Woo woo. What ever the American media is saying, the videos that the rest of the world watch clearly show that the United States is LYING.
It makes the United States look like some kind of Keystone Kops.
The protestors were instructed by NED to take out cameras and video systems. They were told to use black cans of spray paint.
Yes, but every can of black spray paint purchased in Hong Kong is recorded with a video of the person buying the paint. The Chinese government knows the person who bought the paint, and can make reasonable assumptions on it’s use. (The Chinese do not need to prove intent in a court of law.)
They were instructed to post flyers on the walls, use glue to hold them in place, and make banners.
But, every printer shop is under surveillance. Every one has video cameras installed. They know who ordered the flyers. They even have the PDF artwork in digital file from which the flyers were made. They know who ordered the fliers, when they ordered, who they paid and from which bank account. They also know the moneys that went into that bank account and who deposited the money.
They were instructed to leave their phones at home. And, I am sure that this helped. Maybe.
However, every person in China has a profile of “normal” behavior. If you take your phone with you every day, and then suddenly on a day of protest, you phone is at you house of residence, when the video cameras show you leaving the house, the police pretty much assumes what you are up to.
They were instructed in what to do by the CIA under the assumption that the Chinese are a growing third-world nation. Maybe like Libya or Syria.
They are not treating China like a high-technology version of Japan. They are not treating China like a serious, serious, SERIOUS nation that does not play around.
Conclusion
All of China is wired as a high-technology surveillance center. The larger cities are all wired. The Western cities (Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing) pretty much follow the “London model” of domestic surveillance.
While America has been busy throwing money away …
In “NASA educational programs for elementary schools in the Sudan”.
War after war. Now, eight simultaneous wars.
And 15 miles of rail for a High Speed Train that was never intended to be anything other than a political slush fund to pay off people.
… the Chinese have been spending their money on their nation. Improving the roads, public transport, lines and means of communication, public works, buildings, and public health. Not to mention, planting trees, making parks, and increasing the amount of farmland.
And they are dead serious about it. These Chinese are very, very serious people. Those that oppose or try to siphon away money are seized, arrested and imprisoned by the corruption police.
The Chinese do not mess around.
Thus when the United States tried to use the same “play book” to agitate protests in Hong Kong in the Summer of 2019, the Chinese observed and leveraged that information. Then when the time was ready, they pounced.
Round #1 – China win. USA media oblivious.
I anticipate another series of protests that the Chinese will observe, and then quietly (behind the scenes) squelch. Maybe in the first week of October 2019.
They will do so and the American television viewing public will be confused. They will wonder “what is going on”? Why doesn’t China relent and allow HK to be just like America?
Round #2 – TBD
It’s because the main-steam media (both conservative and progressive) provides a skewed nonsensical narrative. One that has no bearing on the true and actual state of affairs. And that ignorance… will be what ultimately hurts and harms America.
People! Listen up!
America NEEDS a well-informed electorate to function properly. To think that the vast bulk of Chinese citizens, both on the mainland, and in Hong Kong want America “to save them” is ludicrous. Absolutely bovine excrement!
Looking at the big picture, it looks silly…
The truth about the HK pro-democracy movement and the tariff wars.
Just silly. It make the United States look… well… awful.
Predictions
I cannot predict the future. It has been my experience that the future will always certainly surprise. Anything can happen.
Anything.
Anything.
Donald Trump could be impeached.
Joe Biden or some other Marxist could become President.
Anti-gun house-to-house collection efforts might begin in earnest.
The USA could start a war with Iran.
Bacon could be banned all over America so not to offend Muslims.
Taxes could be raised 50% to fight global-warming.
Gender-neutral operations could be mandated in all American elementary schools.
I do not know what is going to happen. I am always taken by surprise, and I haven’t a clue as to what is going to happen in the future. Maybe some more of the old same-old same-old, eh?
The future will surprise…
I never expected “Joe Camel” to be banned in the United States “for the children”. Heck, by law, you had to be at least 16 years old just to be able to buy the cigarettes.
It has certainly surprised me. Time and time again, what I expected to happen, never came true…
I expected the United States to have a full colony on the moon by the year 2000. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that the money would be funneled away for infrastructure investments in Russia! As well as some social re-engineering initiatives in Baltimore, Detroit and San Francisco.
Not just objectively, but socially as well, and on so many levels at that. Don’t you know.
I never expected that 007 James Bond would be replaced with a black woman. Never, in my wildest nightmares. It’s not yet released. I wouldn’t be surprised if she is some kind of transgender LGBT thingy.
The future cannot be predicted. Not by myself. Not by anyone.
I never, in my wildest dreams, expected companies to do away with free coffee and coffee services. That they would expect the employees to “chip in” and pay for the coffee that they would drink at work. Amazing, and completely unexpected!
The future will always surprise.
In the trade front, it’s all in flux. What I really hope for is a strengthening of relationships. I hope for balanced trade without influence by the greedy in Washington D.C. and a chance for American industry to recover from the devastation of the Marxist globalist agenda. I can see it being a win-win for both the USA and China.
Seriously! China is an enormous market. They would pay a premium (+50% more) for “Made in America” products. But that is never going to happen if China matches the Trump tariff scheme. It just will close American companies to the enormous Chinese consumer market.
Right now, and for the last three years, the tariff negotiations have been driven by the Neocon advisors to Trump. They have asked the impossible and set up road-blocks at every turn.
Jimmy
Lai (HK ultra-billionaire) meets with American VP Mike Pence. His goal
is to disrupt the relationship between the United States and China so
that he can have financial and economic advantage in Hong Kong. His
primary and sole goal is to INTERRUPT the relationship between China and
America.
This is actionable disruption, and while it might make some political “hay” in the short term, it will result in some real serious problems in America in the long term.
Donald
Trump fired John Bolton. He obviously felt that John Bolton was not
“on the same page” in resolving the issues with China at this time.
As I have previously stated, John Bolton is a war-hawk and a neo-con from the “deep state”. He has opposed every effort that Trump has made to negotiate with China, North Korea, and Iran. In his world view these are all dictatorial nations and America must stand firm in opposing them in every way possible.
Understand that the rest of the world does not think like Americans. They do not watch American media and do not care what Americans think. They will follow nations that seemingly benefit THEM in the future.
They will be selfish. They will work with nations that provide them with benefit.
That being stated, do not make dated assumptions on the inflated capabilities of the United States, and upon the out-of-date ideas about China. I said it once, I said it twice. I will say it again. China is a serious, serious nation. They DO NOT PLAY. We had best start treating them as such.
Finally.
Do not think that China is not afraid to kill a few people for the greater public good. They will do so in a heart-beat.
Do not judge China under the same criteria that you might judge America. It is like comparing apples to an oak tree.
Chinese Social Media
You do not need to rely on CNN, Fox or Rush Limbaugh for your news. You can [1] watch the videos of the CIA agents getting arrested yourselves. You can [2] read what the “Joe on the streets” thinks about the protests. You can [3] see what is going on in the other side of the world with your own two eyes.
America needs an informed electorate to function properly.
Here’s some links to Chinese social media. Warning, most are banned in the United States. You might need to use a VPN to use them. You do know that the Software moguls in California does not like competition.
I posted this article under “bloggers” in the Free Republic website, and was subsequently banned. I guess they do not like my opinions.
Never the less, immediately afterwards, it turned out the the United States government admitted that everything in this post is true, and that was posted on the well-known Washington Post.
Then they totally blocked me. Erased my 20+ years of articles and comments, and I became a non-person. That’s what “freedom of speech” is on Free Republic. You will conform to the Alt-Right narrative out of Washington DC, or you get destroyed.
Well, I was “killed”, but…
..everything I wrote was accurate, and real. And thus…
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Sunday had a call with President Donald Trump about gun control legislation. According to a statement from Democratic leadership, universal background checks are a non negotiable that must be included in any proposal Trump moves forward with.
People! A “universal background check” is a violation of the 4th amendment. Yeah, I know. It’s already violated left and right and every which way that you can think of. Indeed, the entire 16th amendment is a blatant violation of the 4th amendment on it’s face.
Fourth Amendment - Search and Seizure
Amendment Text | Annotations
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
And for all of you who are confused about the second amendment…
Second Amendment - Bearing Arms
Amendment Text | Annotations
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
All of this is silly.
The United States stopped being the land of the free the moment the 12th amendment was ratified. Good-by Republic. Hello to mob rule and manipulation by oligarchs. It’s just dying a long, slow death. That’s the way it is, and any protests from myself or others just fall on deaf ears. No one wants to hear all this. They want their feudal society, and us rabble had just better accept our place within that model.
From what I see, they are not giving up on this. They will push and push and push until something snaps. Though, I think that they have no fucking idea just how bad the snap will be. You have over three decades of rage built up inside of conservative patriots. They will not give any quarter.
And that, boys and girls, is the way it is.
About the picture, splash above…
Cambodian troops before they were disarmed by Pol Pot in 1970. Socialist Marxist Communist Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia in 1970. These troops were government military forces who were told by their leadership to hand in their weapons to the new government. They complied. They listened. They turned in their weapons. Every one of them were then systematically killed. Not one survived.
Not one person survived once they turned in their firearms to the new government. Not. One.
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Funny Pictures
Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Here, in this article, we look at the United States involvement with HK. We [1] study how the United States uses Hong Kong to exert pressure on China for trade and geopolitical advantage. We also [2] take a look at the various people “behind the scenes” that are pushing for American involvement, for their own personal gain. Finally, [3] we study the role that the American media plays that the stereotypes that they cultivate in order to manipulate Americans. This is perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the USA / China involvement in Hong Kong that you will find on the internet.
For starters, you the reader should recognize that global politics are often complicated, and convoluted. People will say one thing and then do the other. That there are forces, all with their own agendas, manipulating, jockeying, and vying for positions of power and advantage. All of this takes place on a canvas that is painted by the media. Often, a picture that doesn’t at all resemble what is actually going on behind the scene.
Or has everyone forgotten the "Trump is going to prison for conspiring with Russia to steal the election" narrative from the mainstream media from 20016 though to 2019?
The HK / USA / China issue is typical in geo-political posturing. It is like an onion. It really is.
You look at the onion, and you see the outside as portrayed to you. Much like how you observe the news media reporting. Then, you peel away the first layer. There you see the actions, and turmoil behind the scene. Your eyes will often burn. Because the truth what is going on was unknown to you. You then peel away the second layer, and find out just how deep all this goes.
You continue deeper and deeper.
You peel each layer away, one by one. And then finally you reach the true truth of the matter and take a good hard look at what is involved. In this particular situation, there are nine (x9) levels or layers of this “onion”. Ah, yes, and in this article we will investigate each one.
The HK – China – USA “free democracy” protests during 2019, and their complexity relative to the comparison to that of the layers of skin in an onion.
Here, we will proceed forward and address this issue in all of it’s complexity. We will move forward from the outside inward, and study each layer in relative detail.
The layers in this issue are;
News media reporting and bias.
Constructed and cultivated stereotypes.
The actual physical events.
The people who caused the events.
The people who are driving the events forward and pushing.
The people who provide financial support, training, and logistics.
The rise of the risks involved.
Reactions and the casualties of war.
The root effects; the trade relationships between the USA, HK and China.
As such, we will begin here…
News media reporting and bias.
President Donald Trump tweeted on August 13 that he “can’t imagine why” the United States has been blamed for the chaotic protests that have gripped Hong Kong.
Donald Trump doesn’t understand how anyone could link the Summer of 2019 HK riots with the Summer of 2019 Trade Wars with China.
Trump’s befuddlement might be believable considering [1] the carefully managed narrative of the US government. As well as [2] the mainstream American media apparatus. Yeah, I get it. Even VP Mike Pence repeats this ludicrous narrative. But come on! Do you really think that the world believes this? After Syria? After Libya?
What? You think that the Chinese will believe that you are sincere?
This GIF pretty much sums up how it looks like to the rest of the world…
I am shocked! Shocked! That there is a connection between the Summer of 2019 HK riots and the Summer of 2019 trade wars.
I believe that the Hong Kong protest is influenced by the US.
The rioters are well-trained, organized and commanded, knowing what to do and when to do it, they have a united uniform, they know where the cameras are and they know how to disable them, they know how to fight against tear gas.
The violent protests are not simply targeting the extradition law amendment bill, but also aiming to throw Hong Kong into disarray, to drag down the SAR government.
- Ty Yang (Hong Kong , China)
You think that they do not have informants? You think that HK is independent and immune from Chinese mainland observation? You think China doesn’t have cameras, video surveillance, wiretaps on telephones, and are not monitoring their insurgents?
Of course they are. And of course, they know full well what is going on. They know.
Keep your hands off Hong Kong!
US has no authority to lecture China on our own sovereign territory. How can US warmongers like Mike Pence even have the legitimacy to talk about HK, when the US is still illegally militarily occupying Syria with their US bases. Syria gave no permission for the US to build bases in Syria. How can the US think they have any god-given right to smack to China?
- MrBudha888 (China)
And we shouldn’t take their (apparent) lack of action on these matters as a weakness. Instead, we should consider it with the upmost caution. They do not make decisions based on what they see on CNN. They make their decisions off other criteria.
So it would be the height of follow to assume that the Chinese are simpletons, backwards, inept, and foolish. They are not. They know the game, and how it is played. They have over 5000 years of political intrigue, and they most certainly will not base their decisions off of what they see on the news.
The suspicion of US manipulation behind the scenes is gaining traction in the online world.
The US has gained notoriety for using subterfuge to interfere with other sovereignty's affairs.
It's not like the world is oblivious to that.
- Joseph Kuan (US)
This reporting has been very “black and white”.
They report that the protests are some kind of organic “pro-democracy” expression of young idealistic grassroots youth. That they only want “freedom”, American style “democracy”, and a “slice of the American pie”. They just do not want to be considered Chinese, and they certainly don’t want anything to do with mainland China.
Oh. If only it were TRUE…
The protests have been staged and arranged for an American audience, because that is the insurgents’ primary funding source.
However, a look beneath the surface of this oversimplified, made-for-television script reveals the truth.
It’s all a stack of cards. It’s all an illusion. It’s all a manipulation. It’s all a line and nonsense. And the Chinese are all well-aware of this.
US is everywhere in other countries' affairs! What a joke!
Nothing will distract China from focusing on economic development and raising the standard of living for the 1.4 billion Chinese people.
The US should do the same, concentrating its resources and energy to improve American people's lives. There is so much more to be desired for the most advanced country of the world.
- Miyya Z (China)
The truth is that there is a small but extremely vocal and well-funded, ferociously anti-Chinese network behind the demonstrations. They hate China. They really, seriously do.
But, it’s more than just hating China.
They hate America as well. They also hate Britain. They are so filled with hate that you would think that they were members of the American terrorist groups Antifa, and BLM. I mean, after all, they look like them, they act like them, and they use the exact same strategies as their American counterparts, the Antifa.
What? You think the Antifa and BLM love America? That’s what you think?
When a masked radical is shouting and screaming at you and is telling you that they want you hurt, tortured, and killed, you should believe them. The mainland Chinese are listening to them, and as a result they are amassing military forces in the event that things spiral out of control.
But they will cover up and hide their hate. Most of the time they will put on masks and pretend to be something else. They will act nice and courteous, and seem and appear reasonable. Anything to obtain their goals.
Frangfang (Hong Kong, China)
The US is linking the current situation in Hong Kong to the US-China trade negotiations, using Hong Kong as leverage to pressure compromise from China. Such 'bargaining', in essence using Hong Kong as a 'trading chip', would be a gross insult to the Hong Kong people.
And their goals are simple ones. It’s what every dictator and tyrant wants. They want their own fiefdom; they want Hong Kong as their own, and then they want to join the rest of the world as global oligarchs.
And America plays along.
Jimmy Lai (HK ultra-billionaire) meets with American VP Mike Pence. His goal is to disrupt the relationship between the United States and China so that he can have financial and economic advantage in Hong Kong. His primary and sole goal is to INTERRUPT the relationship between China and America.
This network has been cultivated, funded, and trained with the help of millions of dollars from the US government. (Read on to see the funding amounts, the agencies, the American officials involved, and other particulars.) Not to mention a particularly vocal progressive globalist Washington-linked local Hong Kong media tycoon. (Jimmy Lai with dreams of his own nation, and a near religious cult of followers.)
Constructed and cultivated stereotypes.
The way that the events are portrayed in Hong Kong is to fit the appetite for the American news-consuming audience. In particular, to appeal to the emotions of two especially and diametrically opposed groups;
The Progressive, Liberal Democrat Marxists.
The Traditional, Conservative Republicans.
The protests in HK are staged to pander to the American consumer. They are designed most especially to trigger emotional responses from Americans. This is most especially true when the protestors sang the Star Spangled Banner. I ask the reader this, how many of you can sing the Chinese national anthem?
Let’s start with the appeals to the liberal democrat progressive Marxists in America. Look at the progressive media show DemocracyNow! (DN!) as one example. It is a prominent media outlet on the “progressive” end of the spectrum. They have been quite busy “reporting” on all the protests in Hong Kong. They report on them as if they are part and parcel of the same kinds of Antifa and BLM protests in the United States. So, of course, they would report on everything. Right?
From April through August 28, there have been 25 brief accounts (“headlines” as DN! calls them, each amounting to a few paragraphs) of the events in Hong Kong and 4 features, longer supposedly analytic pieces, on the same topic. Transcripts of the four features are here, here, here and here.
Democracy Now! is an hour-long American TV, radio and internet news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman, who also acts as the show’s executive producer, and Juan González. The show, which airs live each weekday at 08:00 ET, is broadcast on the internet and by over 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide.
There is not a single mention of [1] possible US involvement or the meetings of the various leaders of the protest movement with [2] Pompeo, [3] Bolton, [4] Pence, or [5] the “Political Counselor” of the US Hong Kong consulate. It’s almost like they ignore the news that doesn’t fit their narrative. Imagine that!
And this silence on US meddling is true not only of most progressive commentators but also most conservatives.
On the Left when someone cries “Democracy,” many forget all their pro-peace sentiment. And similarly on the Right when someone cries “Communism,” anti-interventionism too often goes down the tubes.
In fact on its August 12 program, DN! managed a story taking a swipe at Russia right next to the one on Hong Kong – and DN! was in the forefront of advancing the now debunked and disgraced Russiagate Conspiracy Theory.
Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement and Chevron Corporation’s role in Nigeria. Since 1996, she has been the main host of Democracy Now!, a progressive global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the Internet.
Yes, on the other side of the political spectrum, is an appeal to American conservatives.
Protesters in Hong Kong waving the American flag and singing the American National anthem as they advocate for democracy. Wow! pic.twitter.com/CKyFstud22
— Kaya Jones (@KayaJones) August 12, 2019
Displays of pro-American “jingoism” in the streets of Hong Kong have been like catnip for the international traditional conservative right. Conservatives LOVE to hear that people are throwing down the chains of Marxist socialism and embracing liberty and freedom. Even though they are actually calling for “democracy”, instead.)
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host and conservative political commentator. He resides in Palm Beach, Florida, where he broadcasts The Rush Limbaugh Show. According to December 2015 estimates by Talkers Magazine, Limbaugh has a cume of around 13.25 million unique listeners, making his show the most listened-to American radio station.
Conservative Joey Gibson
Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson recently appeared at an anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong, live-streaming the event to his tens of thousands of followers.
A month earlier, Gibson was seen roughing up antifa activists alongside ranks of club wielding fascists.
In Hong Kong, the alt-right organizer marveled at the crowds. “They love our flag here more than they do in America!” Gibson exclaimed as marchers passed by, flashing him a thumbs up sign while he waved the Stars and Stripes.
In Hong Kong, Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson marveled at the crowds. “They love our flag here more than they do in America!” .
Personally, I like to refer to these narratives a “two dimensional”, “black and white”, “cardboard cutouts”. It’s a simplified narrative useful for emotional manipulation of large groups of simple-minded people.
Boris and Natasha are card-board cut-outs (a two dimensional portrayal) of Russian Communists during the 1960’s and into the 1970’s.
The actual physical events.
Throughout the summer of 2019 the world has watched as protests shook Hong Kong.
A man in Taiwan murdered his girlfriend and then fled to Hong Kong. The Taiwan government wanted HK to extradite him to face justice. To facilitate this (and other similar cases), an extradition bill was proposed and about to be signed, when suddenly all Hell broke loose.
It turned out that (apparently, out of the blue), a large number of Hong Kong residents didn't like the idea of being forcibly extradited to another country to face legal charges.
As early as April they began as peaceful demonstrations which peaked in early June, with hundreds of thousands, in protest of an extradition bill.
That bill would have allowed Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, to return criminals to Taiwan, mainland China or Macau for crimes committed there – after approval by multiple layers of the Hong Kong judiciary.
In other words, if you commit a crime in Taiwan and flee to Hong Kong, the Hong Kong police would no longer provide you with a safe-haven. They would return you back to the Taiwan where you committed the crime.
Ai! This was considered an assault in "freedom" and "liberty".
Protestors in Hong Kong protesting the passage of the extradition bill.
In the wake of those enormous nonviolent demonstrations, Carrie Lam, CEO of Hong Kong, “suspended” consideration of the extradition bill, a face-saving ploy. To make sure she was understood, she declared it “dead.”
The large rallies, an undeniable expression of the peaceful will of a large segment of the Hong Kong population had won an impressive victory. The unpopular extradition bill was slain.
But that was not the end of the story.
The protests continued.
Carrie Lam, CEO of HK, meets with Xi Peng the President of Mainland China.
They… continued.
They continued, even after their goals were met.
They continued, even after the head of the HK government admitted to bowing down to the demands of the protestors. Yes, it’s true. A smaller segment continued the protests. (The Hong Kong police at one point estimated 4,000 hard core protesters.)
They pressed on with other demands, beginning with a demand that the bill be “withdrawn,” not simply “suspended.” Well, it's all a matter of terminology. By “suspension” is every bit as terminal as death by “withdrawal.” The most recent news confirms that Corrie Lam has now formally withdrawn the bill.
But even at that, the protests are continuing by this group of hard-core radicals.
They still continued to protest.
The people who initiated, inflamed or caused the events.
On the surface, it seems very simple. An extradition bill was up for ratification. Protests against the ratification were initiated, and the bill was withdrawn. Victory, right?
Nope.
Radical elements are pushing for more protests. These are violent protests, and they pull at the heartstrings of American democrats who can see their faces behind the black-hoods and face masks of the protestors, as well as American conservatives who get "goosebumps" when they see their American flags being waved along side for calls for freedom and democracy.
Who are the public people who are getting everyone all riled up and agitated on both sides of this issue (oh, yes, there are two sides to this issue. Even though the mainstream America only shows one side.)?
As the summer passed, two iconic photos presented us with two human faces that captured two crucial features of the ongoing protests; they were not shown widely in the West. They are, apparently, not considered to be “newsworthy” enough for the American viewing public.
Fu Guohao
First, Fu Guohao, a reporter for the Chinese mainland newspaper, Global Times, was attacked, bound and beaten by the radical protesters. This occurred during their takeover of the Hong Kong International Airport.
FuGuohao, a reporter for the Global Times, a nationalistic Communist Party-run newspaper, has become an overnight sensation. He is being hailed as a hero on Chinese social media after he was tied up and beaten by protesters as Tuesday’s demonstrations at Hong Kong’s airport descended into violence.
- Chinese Reporter Assaulted at Hong Kong Airport
Fu Guohao, reporter of Chinese media Global Times website, is tied by protesters during a mass demonstration at the Hong Kong international airport, in Hong Kong, China, August 13, 2019. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
When police and rescuers tried to free him, the protesters blocked them and also attempted to block the ambulance that eventually bore him off to the hospital.
Protestors fought the police.
Protestors blocked the ambulance.
Protestors bound, taunted and tortured Mr. Fu Guohao.
The photos and videos of this ugly sequence were seen by netizens across the globe even though given scant attention in Western media.
Where were the stalwart defenders of the press in the US as this happened? As one example, DemocracyNow! (DN!) was completely silent as was the rest of the US mainstream media.
Fu’s beating came after many weeks when the protesters threw up barriers to stop traffic; blocked closure of subway doors, in defiance of commuters and police, to shut down mass transit; sacked and vandalized the HK legislature building; assaulted bystanders who disagreed with them; attacked the police with Molotov cocktails; and stormed and defaced police stations.
The protestors seem to be trying to provoke mainland China to take action. However, HK is standing firm and allowing the protestors a great deal of leeway in their actions and damage.
Fu’s ordeal and all these actions shown in photos on Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, a paper leaning to the side of protesters, gave the lie to the image of these “democracy activists” as young Ghandis of East Asia.
The South China Morning Post is based in Hong Kong and its readership is concentrated there so it has to have some reasonable fidelity in reporting events; otherwise it loses credibility – and circulation.
Similarly, much as the New York Times abhorred Occupy Wall Street, it could not fail to report on it.
Joshua Wong
A younger generation of political HK activists emerged during the 2014 Occupy Central protests with a new brand of localized politics. It is a brand that appealed to the American conservative (anti-Chinese) Right.
Joshua Wong was just 17 years old when the Umbrella Movement took form in 2014. After emerging in the protest ranks as one of the more charismatic voices, he was steadily groomed as the pro-West camp’s teenage poster child.
Joshua Wong meets with Sen. Marco Rubio (R) in Washington on May 8, 2017
Wong received lavish praised in Time magazine, Fortune, and Foreign Policy as a “freedom campaigner,” and became the subject of an award-winning Netflix documentary called “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.”
Unsurprisingly, these puff pieces have overlooked Wong’s ties to the United States government’s regime-change apparatus. For that is what he is. He is the face of the American conservative foreign branch.
For instance, National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) maintains a close relationship with Demosistō, the political party Wong founded in 2016 with fellow Umbrella movement alumnus Nathan Law.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a U.S. non-profit soft power organization that was founded in 1983 with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad. It is funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress in the form of a grant awarded through the United States Information Agency (USIA). It is an American agency that obtains funds directly from the American federal government.
National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI)
To find out a little bit more about this “shadowy” and “well funded” machine for causing protests, turmoil, and discord in other nations, read this…
It’s a bit long. You can skim over it, or ignore it as you wish. It’s just some really interesting background information on how front organizations, funded by the United States government, can be used to create proxy protests, and turmoil for American geo-political advantage.
“They’re meddling in our politics!” That’s the war cry of outraged Clintonites and neocons, who seem to think election interference is something that Russians do to us and we never, ever do to them.
But meddling in other countries has been a favorite Washington pastime ever since William McKinley vowed to “Christianize” the Philippines in 1899, despite the fact that most Filipinos were already Catholic. Today, an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies engage in political interference virtually around the clock, everyone from USAID to the VOA, RFE/RL to the DHS—respectively the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Department of Homeland Security. The last maintains some 2,000 U.S. employees in 70 countries to ensure that no one even thinks of doing anything bad to anyone over here.
Then there is the National Endowment for Democracy, a $180-million-a-year government-funded outfit that is a byword for American intrusiveness. The NED is an example of what might be called “speckism,” the tendency to go on about the speck in your neighbor’s eye without ever considering the plank in your own (see Matthew 7 for further details). Prohibited by law from interfering in domestic politics, the endowment devotes endless energy to the democratic shortcomings of other countries, especially when they threaten American interests.
In 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave $575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly half a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our anti-communist policy in Central America.
A year later, it gave $400,000 to the anti-Sandinista opposition in Nicaragua and then another $2 million in 1988. It used its financial muscle in the mid-1990s to persuade a right-wing party to draw up a “Contract with Slovakia” modeled on Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America; persuaded free marketeers to do the same in Mongolia; gave nearly $1 million to Venezuelan rightists who went on to mount a short-lived putsch against populist leader Hugo Chavez in 2002; and then funded anti-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine in 2005, and the later anti-Russian coup there in 2014.
What all this had to do with democracy is unclear, although the NED’s role in advancing U.S. imperial interests is beyond doubt. Rather than “my country right or wrong,” its operating assumption is “my country right, full stop.” If Washington says Leader X is out of line, then the endowment will snap to attention and fund his opponents.
If it says he’s cooperative and well-behaved, meaning he supports free markets and financial deregulation and doesn’t dally with any of America’s military rivals, it will do the opposite. It doesn’t matter if, like Putin, the alleged dictator swept the last election with 63.6 percent of the vote and was declared the “clear” winner by the European Union and the U.S. State Department. If he’s “expanding [Russia’s] influence in the Middle East,” as NED President Carl Gershman puts it, then he’s a “strongman” and an “autocrat” and must go.
America’s own shortcomings meanwhile go unnoticed. Meanwhile, the NED, as it nears the quarter-century mark, is a bundle of contradictions: a group that claims to be private even though it is almost entirely publicly funded, a group that says democracy “must be indigenous” even though it backs U.S.-imposed regime change, a group that claims to be “bipartisan” but whose board is packed with ideologically homogeneous hawks like Elliott Abrams, Anne Applebaum, and Victoria Nuland, the latter of whom served as assistant secretary of state during the coup in Ukraine.
Historically speaking, the NED feels straight out of the early 1980s, when Washington was struggling to overcome “Vietnam Syndrome” in order to rev up the Cold War. The recovery process began with Ronald Reagan declaring at his first inaugural, “The crisis that we are facing today [requires] our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. After all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.”
The U.S. was apparently not just a nation, but something like a religion as well. Additional input for the new NED in 1983 came from spymaster William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987, who, after the intelligence scandals of the 70s, had swung around to the view that certain covert operations were better spun off into what the British call a “quango,” a quasi-non-government organization. “Obviously we here should not get out in front in the development of such an organization,” he cautioned, “nor do we wish to appear to be a sponsor or advocate.” It was a case of covert backing for an overt turn.
Others who helped lay the groundwork were:
Neoconservative ideologue Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, famous for her argument that “traditional authoritarian governments” should be supported against “revolutionary autocracies” because they are “less repressive” and whose UN aide Carl Gershman would become NED president and serves to this day.
Human rights Democrats who believe that America’s job is to enforce democratic standards throughout the world, however idiosyncratic and self-serving they may be Old-fashioned pluralists who maintained that the power to succeed existed in different groups’ working separately toward a common goal, in this case, spreading democracy abroad .
The result was an ideologically lethal package that assumed whatever Americans did was democratic because God is on our side, that old-fashioned CIA skullduggery was passé, and that the time had come to switch to more open means. “We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” Gershman later explained. “We saw that in the 60s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”
In the interests of pluralism, the NED adopted a quadripartite structure with separate wings for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the GOP, and the Democrats, each working separately yet somehow together.
Pluralism helped tamp down debate and also shore up support on Capitol Hill. Liberal Democrats were initially skeptical due to the NED’s neocon tilt. Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. tried to kill it in 1985, and The Nation magazine complained a few years later that the group served as little more than “a pork barrel for a small circle of Republican and Democratic party activists, conservative trade unionists, and free marketeers who use endowment money to run their own mini State Department.”
But when the House voted unexpectedly to defund the agency in 1993, beneficiaries sprang to its defense. Major-league pundits like George Will, David Broder, and Abe Rosenthal “went into overdrive,” according to The Nation, as did the heavy hitters of the Washington Post editorial page. Vice President Walter Mondale, a member of the NED board of directors, worked the phones along with Lane Kirkland, George Meany’s successor as head of the AFL-CIO.
Ronald Reagan wrote a letter, while Senators Richard Lugar, Orrin Hatch, and John McCain pitched in as well. So did prominent liberals like Paul Wellstone, John Kerry, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, and Carol Moseley-Braun. These people normally couldn’t bear to be in the same with one another, but they were of one mind when it came to America’s divine right to intervene in other nations’ affairs.
The anti-NED forces didn’t stand a chance. Twenty-five years later, the endowment is again under attack, although this time from the right.
Gershman started the ball rolling when, in October 2016, he interrupted his busy pro-democracy schedule to dash off a column in the Washington Post accusing Russia of using “email hackers, information trolls and open funding of political parties to sow discord” and of “even intervening in the U.S. presidential election.” Since there was no question whom Russia was intervening for, there was no doubt what the article amounted to: a thinly veiled swipe at a certain orange-haired candidate.
Never one to forget a slight, Trump got his revenge last month by proposing to slash the NED budget by 60 percent. The response was the same as in 1993, only more so. Uber-hawk Senator Lindsey Graham pronounced the cut “dead on arrival,” adding: “This budget destroys soft power, it puts our diplomats at risk, and it’s going nowhere.”
Gershman said it would mean “sending a signal far and wide that the United States is turning its back on supporting brave people who share our values,” while Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin moaned that the administration was guilty of an “assault on democracy promotion.” The ever-voluble Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey accused the administration of “dismantling an agency that advances critical goals.”
“The work our government does to promote democratic values abroad is at the heart of who we are as a country,” added Senator John McCain. America is democracy, democracy is America, and, as history’s first global empire, the U.S. has an unqualified right to do unto others what others may not do unto the U.S. Only a “Siberian candidate,” “a traitor,” or “a Russian stooge” could possibly disagree.
- The National Endowment for (Meddling in) Democracy by Daniel Lazare
Julie Eadeh
In August, a candid photo surfaced of Wong and Law meeting with Julie Eadeh, the political counselor at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, raising questions about the content of the meeting and setting off a diplomatic showdown between Washington and Beijing.
Julie Eadeh
People, it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with American presidential aides!
People, it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with American presidential aides in the HK Marriot hotel!
This is very very embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters. pic.twitter.com/JfiU2O2HZq
— Chen Weihua (@chenweihua) August 8, 2019
Of course, this kind of nonsense won’t be tolerated by China.
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on the US “to immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”
The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on the US “to immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”
So the United States wants to get involved in Chinese affairs.
Well, then be prepared for some “push back”. The pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao doxxed Eadeh. They published personal details about Eadeh, including the names of her children and her address.
But, Washington, D.C. is not used to “push back”.
State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus lashed out, accusing the Chinese government of being behind the leak but offering no evidence. “I don’t think that leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children, I don’t think that is a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would do,”she said at a State Department briefing.
Totally ignoring the already issued formal protest from China.
State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus lashed out, accusing the Chinese government of being behind the leak but offering no evidence. “I don’t think that leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children, I don’t think that is a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would do,” she said at a State Department briefing.
Aside from the official American government protests bout the doxxing, the leaked Mariott photo underscored the close relationship between Hong Kong’s pro-West movement and the US government.
There is ample proof that the United States government has been coaching, and supporting the protests in Hong Kong.
Since the 2014 Occupy Central protests that vaulted Wong into prominence, he and his peers have been assiduously cultivated by the elite Washington institutions to act as the faces and voices of Hong Kong’s burgeoning anti-China movement.
This has continued a pace.
In September 2015, Wong, Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee were honored by Freedom House, a right-wing soft-power organization that is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the US government.
In September 2015, Wong, Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee were honored
by Freedom House, a right-wing soft-power organization that is heavily
funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the US
government.
Freedom House
Just days after Trump’s election as president in November 2016, Wong was back in Washington to appeal for more US support. “Being a businessman, I hope Donald Trump could know the dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to maintain the judicial independence and the rule of law,” he said.
Wong’s visit to Washington DC provided occasion for the Senate’s two most aggressively neoconservative members, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, to introduce the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,”.
Wong’s visit provided occasion for the Senate’s two most aggressively neoconservative members, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, to introduce the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,” which would “identify those responsible for abduction, surveillance, detention and forced confessions, and the perpetrators will have their US assets, if any… frozen and their entry to the country denied.”
Marco Rubio
Tom Cotton
Wong was given the “royal carpet treatment”. He was then taken on a junket of elite US institutions including the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and the newsrooms of the New York Times and Financial Times. He then held court with Rubio, Cotton, Pelosi, and Sen. Ben Sasse.
Heritage Foundation
Nancy Pelosi
Ben Sasse
Wong was given the “royal carpet treatment”. He was then taken on a junket of elite US institutions including the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and the newsrooms of the New York Times and Financial Times. He then held court with Rubio, Cotton, Pelosi, and Sen. Ben Sasse.
In September 2017, Rubio, Ben Cardin, Tom Cotton, Sherrod Brown, and Cory Gardner signed off on a letter to Wong, Law and fellow anti-China activist Alex Chow, praising them for their “efforts to build a genuinely autonomous Hong Kong.” The bipartisan cast of senators proclaimed that “the United States cannot stand idly by.”
Ben Cardin
Sherrod Brown
Cory Gardner
Rubio and his colleagues nominated the trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
A year later, Rubio and his colleagues nominated the trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
Honored to have met Joshua Wong, a student leader who led a big protest demanding universal suffrage in Hong Kong. pic.twitter.com/sSb46j7zIX
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 18, 2015
Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplemented with untold sums of money from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to civil society, media and political groups.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
National Democratic Institute (NDI)
Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplemented with untold sums of money from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to civil society, media and political groups.
As journalist Alex Rubinstein reported, the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a key member of the coalition that organized against the now-defunct extradition law, has received more than $2 million in NED funds since 1995.
Other groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.
While US lawmakers nominate Hong Kong protest leaders for peace prizes and pump their organizations with money to “promote democracy,” the demonstrations have begun to spiral out of control.
The people who are driving the events.
25th August 2019 – (Hong Kong) The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has funded the 2014 Occupy Central in the past but many have begun to wonder if the Americans did indeed have a hand in the latest anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong. Numerous meetings between pro-democracy political activists, representatives from NED and top government officials have left us wondered if NED has funded the frontline protesters .
We have mentioned earlier in our previous article that, there are in principle two factions of protesters, the genuine protesters (90%) and the frontline protesters (10%). Only the 10% frontline protesters are potentially funded by the Americans as the mass of Hong Kong protesters fit naturally into their agenda.
What is NED? NED is a U.S. non-profit soft power organization that was founded in 1983 with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad. In principle, NED is a grant-making foundation, distributing funds to private non-governmental organisations for promoting democracy abroad. NED does not directly fund any political party, as this is forbidden by law. According to NED, it funds election monitoring and also civic education about voting, such as student-led “get-out-the-vote” campaigns.
However, according to American Conservative, in 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave US$575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly half a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our anti-communist policy in Central America.
- Is United States involved in the current civil unrest in Hong Kong via its National Endowment for Democracy (NED)?
The protesters’ stated goals remain vague. No one now knows what exactly they are protesting for.
HK Riot police can only take so much violence before some serious accidents will occur.
Joshua Wong, one of the most well known figures in the movement, has since put forward a call for the Chinese government to [1] “retract the proclamation that the protests were riots,” and [2] restated the consensus demand for universal suffrage.
Wong is a bespectacled 22-year-old who has been trumpeted in Western media as a “freedom campaigner,” promoted to the English-speaking world through his own Netflix documentary, and rewarded with the backing of the US government.
Hey! This kid is doing really well for himself. He's getting millions of dollars from various political American movements. He was up for the Peace Prize, and has his own Netflix documentary. Pretty good for a a young unemployed Hong Kong millennial. It's nice to see where all our campaign donations and tax dollars goes to.
Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong released from prison, vows to continue actions of violence.
But behind telegenic spokespeople like Wong are more extreme elements such as the Hong Kong National Party, whose members have appeared at protests waving the Stars and Stripes and belting out cacophonous renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner. The leadership of this officially banned party helped popularize the call for the full independence of Hong Kong, a radical goal that is music to the ears of hardliners in Washington.
Xenophobic resentment has defined the sensibility of the protesters, who vow to “retake Hong Kong” from Chinese mainlanders they depict as a horde of locusts.
The demonstrators have even adopted one of the most widely recognized symbols of the alt-right, emblazoning images of Pepe the Frog on their protest literature. While it’s unclear that Hong Kong residents see Pepe the same way American conservatives do, members of the US far-right have embraced the protest movement as their own, and even personally joined their ranks.
Protesters in Hong Kong have adopted the popular “Pepe the Frog” meme as one of their symbols of resistance amid ongoing demonstrations against a proposed extradition bill.
The frog’s familiar face has appeared on signs in various protests calling out violent police crackdowns against demonstrators.
One meme showing Pepe with an injured eye focused on a police assault which left a first responder blind after being shot with a bean bag round at close range.
Which brings us to the second key photo of importance. It is much more important to US citizens. It clearly shows a “Political Counselor” from the US Consulate General in Hong Kong with radical anti-government protestors at the HK Marriot hotel.
The official was formerly a State Dept functionary in the Middle East – in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Beirut, Baghdad and Doha, certainly not an area lacking in imperial intrigues and regime change ops.
People, it’s pretty obvious that Washington D.C. is involved in the HK protests, when you have photos of the protest leaders meeting with American presidential aides!
That photo graphically contradicted the contention that there is no US “black hand,” as China calls it, in the Hong Kong riots.
In fact, here the “black hand” was caught red-handed, leading Chen Weihua, a very perceptive China Daily columnist, to tweet the picture with the comment:
“This is very very embarrassing. … a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if a Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters.”
And that photo with the protest leaders is just a snap shot of the ample evidence of the hand of the US government and its subsidiaries in the Hong Kong events.
There is substantial and ample evidence that the United States government has been very active in funding, advising and supporting the anti-government protestors in Hong Kong.
Perhaps the best documentation of the US “black hand” is to be found in Dan Cohen’s superb article of August 17 in The Greyzone entitled, “Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence.”
The article by Cohen deserves careful reading; it leaves little doubt that there is a very deep involvement of the US in the Hong Kong riots.
Of special interest is the detailed role and funding, amounting to over $1.3 million, in Hong Kong alone in recent years, of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), ever on the prowl for new regime change opportunities.
Perhaps most important, the leaders of the “leaderless” protests have met with major US political figures such as John Bolton, Vice President Pence, Secretary Pompeo, Senator Marco Rubio, Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel, Nancy Pelosi and others, all of whom have heartily endorsed their efforts.
This is not to deny that the protests were home grown at the outset in response to what was widely perceived as a legitimate grievance. But it would be equally absurd to deny that the US is fishing in troubled Hong Kong waters to advance its anti-China crusade and regime change ambitions.
People! China is a serious, serious nation. They do not mess around. If you think that they will not take this meddling as some kind of physical attack, then you are living in a fantasy world. They WILL take action. You all just have no idea what it will be.Nor will you know when they will take action.
The people who are activating the events.
As has been demonstrated so far, there are various individuals who are playing the "global high-power" politics role in all this. This includes American Senators, Congressmen, and various American sponsored "freedom" organizations.
But there are also others. Other people who have their own personal interests for "stirring up the pot". Here we look at others, who have a bigger personal stake in all of these protests.
Jimmy Lai
Among the most central influencers of the demonstrations is a local tycoon named Jimmy Lai. The self-described “head of opposition media,” Lai is widely described as the Rupert Murdoch of Asia.
The United States is intimately involved in the HK protests.
For the masses of protesters, Lai is a transcendent figure. They clamor for photos with him and applaud the oligarch wildly when he walks by their encampments.
Lai established his credentials by pouring millions of dollars into the 2014 Occupy Central protest, which is known popularly as the Umbrella Movement. He has since used his massive fortune to fund local anti-China political movers and shakers while injecting the protests with a virulent brand of Sinophobia through his media empire.
Sinophobia - definition of Sinophobia by The Free Dictionary
Sinophobia synonyms, Sinophobia pronunciation, Sinophobia translation, English dictionary definition of Sinophobia. n. 1. Fear of or contempt for China, its people, or its culture. 2. Behavior based on such an attitude or feeling. Si′no·phobe′ n. Si′no·pho′bic adj.
Jimmy Lai (HK billionaire) meets with American VP Mike Pence. Politically he is a progressive leftist who became one of the most powerful men in HK. He desires to leverage his relationship and power to have the USA perform proxy interceptions within China and HK relationships for his own personal benefit.
Though Western media has depicted the
Hong Kong protesters as the voice of an entire people yearning for
freedom, the island is deeply divided. This August, a group of
protesters mobilized outside Jimmy Lai’s house, denouncing him as a
“running dog” of Washington and accusing him of national betrayal by
unleashing chaos on the island.
Days earlier, Lai was in Washington, coordinating with hardline members of Trump’s national security team, including John Bolton. His ties to Washington run deep — and so do those of the front-line protest leaders.
John Bolton
John Bolton – National Security Advisor to Donald Trump.
Jimmy Lai has been working with President Trump's national security advisor John Bolton in how to work with China.
In this relationship, it is obvious that both Jimmy Lai and John Bolton want to take a very hard-line with China. As such, we can well expect John Bolton to sabotage any tariff agreement between Xi Peng and Donald Trump.
Personally, I believe that for there to be any kind of mutually-beneficial trade relationship and agreement between the USA and China, John Bolton would have to step down from being an advisor to Donald Trump.
Millions of dollars have flowed from
US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
into civil society and political organizations that form the backbone
of the anti-China mobilization. And Lai has supplemented it with his own
fortune while instructing protesters on tactics through his various
media organs.
With Donald Trump in the White House,
Lai is convinced that his moment may be on the horizon. Trump
“understands the Chinese like no president understood,” the tycoon told the Wall Street Journal. “I think he’s very good at dealing with gangsters.”
Born in the mainland in 1948 to wealthy parents, whose fortune was expropriated by the Communist Party during the revolution the following year, Jimmy Lai began working at 9 years old, carrying bags for train travelers during the hard years of the Great Chinese Famine.
Inspired by the taste of a piece of chocolate gifted to him by a wealthy man, he decided to smuggle himself to Hong Kong to discover a future of wealth and luxury. There, Lai worked his way up the ranks of the garment industry, growing enamored with the libertarian theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter of whom became his close friend.
Friedman is famous for developing the neoliberal shock therapy doctrine that the US has imposed on numerous countries, resulting in the excess deaths of millions. For his part, Hayek is the godfather of the Austrian economic school that forms the foundation of libertarian political movements across the West.
Lai built his business empire on Giordano, a garment label that became one of Asia’s most recognizable brands. In 1989, he threw his weight behind the Tiananmen Square protests, hawking t-shirts on the streets of Beijing calling for Deng Xiaoping to “step down.”
It was a year after the Communist Party of China, led by Deng Xiaoping, put forward the policy of reform and opening-up. Under the policy, individuals nationwide were encouraged to run businesses and set up private companies. That meant that family enterprises like the Nian’s sunflower seed business became legal. Deng’s visionary move fueled the growth of private enterprise and set a milestone for China’s market-oriented economy.
In other words, Mr. Deng introduced China to Reganomics. And while President Bush stopped all of the Reaganomics that he started, Mr. Deng continued, creating the China that exists today.
Lai’s actions provoked the Chinese government to ban his company from operating on the mainland.
A year later, he founded Next Weekly magazine, initiating a process that would revolutionize the mediascape in Hong Kong with a blend of smutty tabloid-style journalism, celebrity gossip and a heavy dose of anti-China spin.
The vociferously anti-communist baron soon became Hong Kong’s media kingpin, worth a whopping $660 million in 2009.
Today, Lai is the founder and majority stakeholder of Next Digital, the largest listed media company in Hong Kong, which he uses to agitate for the end of what he calls the Chinese “dictatorship.” His flagship outlet is the popular tabloid Apple Daily, employing the trademark mix of raunchy material with a heavy dose of xenophobic, nativist propaganda.
In 2012, Apple Daily carried a full page advertisement depicting mainland Chinese citizens as invading locusts draining Hong Kong’s resources. The advertisement called for a stop to the “unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women in Hong Kong.”
(This was a crude reference to the Chinese citizens who had flocked to the island while pregnant to ensure that their children could earn Hong Kong residency, and resembled the resentment among the US right-wing of immigrant “anchor babies.”)
Ad in Lai’s Apple Daily: “That’s enough! Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!”
The transformation of Hong Kong’s economy has provided fertile soil for Lai’s brand of demagoguery. As the country’s manufacturing base moved to mainland China after the golden years of the 1980s and ‘90s, the economy was rapidly financialized, enriching oligarchs like Lai.
Left with rising debt and dimming career prospects, Hong Kong’s youth became easy prey to the demagogic politics of nativism.
Many protesters have been seen waving
British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an
imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally
experienced.
Many protesters have been seen waving British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally experienced.
In July, protesters vandalized the Hong Kong Liaison Office, spray-painting the word, “Shina” on its facade. This term is a xenophobic slur some in Hong Kong and Taiwan use to refer to mainland China.
The anti-Chinese phenomenon was visible during the 2014 Umbrella movement protests as well, with signs plastered around the city reading, “Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.”
支那(Shina) is Japanese word for China that became derogatory during Sino-Japanese War. Post-War Japan gov ban its use in Kanji form (Chinese characters) in official document. Yet some people in Hong Kong and Taiwan use it to insult people from Chinese mainland. It=“Chink” in Eng https://t.co/Oe8LCXgak8
— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) July 22, 2019
This month, protesters turned their fury on the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, spray-painting “rioters” on its office. The attack represented resentment of the left-wing group’s role in a violent 1967 uprising against the British colonial authorities, who are now seen as heroes among many of the anti-Chinese demonstrators.
Edward Leung
Besides Lai, a large part of the
credit for mobilizing latent xenophobia goes to the right-wing Hong Kong
Indigenous party leader Edward Leung. Under the direction of the
28-year-old Leung, his pro-independence party has brandished British
colonial flags and publicly harassed Chinese mainland tourists. In 2016,
Leung was exposed for meeting with US diplomatic officials at a local restaurant.
Edward Leung Tin-kei (Chinese : 梁天琦 ; born 2 June 1991) is a Hong Kong student and activist. He is the former spokesman of Hong Kong Indigenous, a localist group. He took a leading role and was arrested in the 2016 Mong Kok civil unrest.
Though he is currently in jail for leading a 2016 riot where police were bombarded with bricks and pavement – and where he admitted
to attacking an officer – Leung’s rightist politics and his slogan,
“Retake Hong Kong,” have helped define the ongoing protests.
A local legislator and protest leader described Leung to the New York Times as “the Che Guevara of Hong Kong’s revolution,” referring without a hint of irony to the Latin American communist revolutionary killed in a CIA-backed operation. According to the Times, Leung is “the closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a guiding light.”
Andy Chan
The xenophobic sensibility of the protesters has provided fertile soil for Hong Kong National Party to recruit. Founded by the pro-independence activist Andy Chan, the officially banned party combines anti-Chinese resentment with calls for the US to intervene.
"I ask President Trump to bring full-scale of sanction on to Hong Kong. The sanctions brought on China must [be] brought on Hong Kong because China can escape sanctions through Hong Kong. I would like to take the chance to reiterate my advocacy again: to revoke the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act passed by the United States Congress. It allows Hong Kong to enjoy a special status apart from China. However, it turns out to be a back door of the free world that could be accessed and manipulated by China. Moreover, over 70% of foreign direct investment goes in to China through Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the main window that China obtains U.S. dollars from. Therefore, shut it down."
-Andy Chan
Images and videos have surfaced of HKNP members waving the flags of the US and UK, singing the Star Spangled Banner, and carrying flags emblazoned with images of Pepe the Frog, the most recognizable symbol of the US alt-right.
It is a very small group. With only a handful of members. While the party lacks a wide base of popular support, it is perhaps the most outspoken within the protest ranks, and has attracted disproportionate international attention as a result.
“I ask President Trump to bring full-scale of sanction on to Hong Kong. The sanctions brought on China must [be] brought on Hong Kong because China can escape sanctions through Hong Kong. I would like to take the chance to reiterate my advocacy again: to revoke the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act passed by the United States Congress.
It allows Hong Kong to enjoy a special status apart from China. However, it turns out to be a back door of the free world that could be accessed and manipulated by China. Moreover, over 70% of foreign direct investment goes in to China through Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the main window that China obtains U.S. dollars from. Therefore, shut it down.”
Chan has called for Trump to escalate the trade war and accused China of carrying out a “national cleansing” against Hong Kong. “We were once colonized by the Brits, and now we are by the Chinese,” he declared.
The risks if this manipulation cannot be constrained.
Such xenophobic propaganda is consistent with the clash of civilizations theory that Jimmy Lai has promulgated through his media empire. It is useful. It has a proven record of success, and is useful to obtain his objectives at this time.
“You have to understand the Hong Kong people – a very tiny 7 million or 0.5 percent of the Chinese population – are very different from the rest of Chinese in China, because we grow up in the Western values, which was the legacy of the British colonial past, which gave us the instinct to revolt once this extradition law was threatening our freedom,” Lai told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “Even America has to look at the world 20 years from now, whether you want the Chinese dictatorial values to dominate this world, or you want the values that you treasure [to] continue.”
During a panel discussion at the neoconservative Washington-based think tank, the Foundation For Defense of Democracies, Lai told the pro-Israel lobbyist Jonathan Schanzer,
“We need to know that America is behind us. By backing us, America is also sowing to the will of their moral authority because we are the only place in China, a tiny island in China, which is sharing your values, which is fighting the same war you have with China.”
While Lai makes no attempt to conceal
his political agenda, his bankrolling of central figures in the 2014
Occupy Central, or Umbrella movement protests, was not always public.
To find out what is going on here, all you need to do is “follow the money”.
Leaked emails revealed that Lai poured more than $1.2 million to anti-China political parties including $637,000 USD to the Democratic Party and $382,000 USD to the Civic Party. Lai also gave $115,000 USD to the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation and Hong Kong Democratic Development Network, both of which were co-founded by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Lai also spent $446,000 USD on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.
Lai’s US consigliere is a former Navy intelligence analyst who interned with the CIA and leveraged his intelligence connections to build his boss’s business empire.
Named Mark Simon, the veteran spook arranged for former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to meet with a group in the anti-China camp during a 2009 visit to Hong Kong.
Five years later, Lai paid $75,000 to neoconservative Iraq war author and US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to organize a meeting with top military figures in Myanmar.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz believes that supporting the HK protestors will not have any adverse actions and that America will continue to be the most powerful and “free nation” on the planet.
This July, as the Hong Kong protests gathered steam, Lai was junketed to Washington, DC for meetings with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Cory Gardner, and Rick Scott.
Bloomberg News correspondent Nicholas Wadhams remarked on Lai’s visit, “Very unusual for a [non-government] visitor to get that kind of access.”
Today: Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai met National Security Adviser John Bolton in DC. After meetings with @SecPompeo and @VP, this is meant to send a signal to Beijing. Very unusual for a nongovt visitor to get that kind of access. pic.twitter.com/6rvqsGJzru
— Nicholas Wadhams (@nwadhams) July 10, 2019
Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai met National Security Adviser John Bolton in DC. After meetings with @SecPompeo and @VP, this is meant to send a signal to Beijing. This continued as the proxy protests continued in HK. In this picture a protestor was arrested trying to sneak into the HK international airport.
One of Lai’s closest allies, Martin
Lee, was also granted an audience with Pompeo, and has held court with
US leaders including Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joseph Biden.
Among the most prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-US political parties, Martin Lee began collaborating with Lai during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
A recipient of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” in 1997, Lee is the founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, now considered part of the pro-US camp’s old guard.
Policemen arrest a protester during a demonstration at the Airport in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2019. Chaos has broken out at Hong Kong’s airport as riot police moved into the terminal to confront protesters who shut down operations at the busy transport hub for two straight days. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
These latest groups of protests are not about HK law. They are about armed militarized conflicts against the HK government. They choose not to work with the government, instead they want to embrace violence.
After the extradition law was scrapped, the protests moved into a more aggressive phase, launching “hit and run attacks” against government targets, erecting roadblocks, besieging police stations, and generally embracing the extreme modalities put on display during US-backed regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Nicaragua.
After the extradition law was scrapped, the protests moved into a more aggressive phase, launching “hit and run attacks” against government targets, erecting roadblocks, besieging police stations, and generally embracing the extreme modalities put on display during US-backed regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Nicaragua.
AJE in position to cover HK protesters' "hit and run strategy."
Here's William Engdahl on Otpor!, the CIA-backed Serbian group that trained thousands of youth activists in countries around the world in color revolution swarming tactics: https://t.co/jvCk2QBNhKhttps://t.co/I8oGScbpsSpic.twitter.com/a3JZzGwDb9
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 13, 2019
The techniques clearly reflected the
training many activists have received from Western soft-power outfits.
But they also bore the mark of Jimmy Lai’s media operation.
In addition to the vast sums Lai
spent on political parties directly involved in the protests, his media
group created an animated video “showing how to resist police in case
force was used to disperse people in a mass protest.”
In addition to the vast sums Lai spent on political parties directly involved in the protests, his media group created an animated video “showing how to resist police in case force was used to disperse people in a mass protest.”
While dumping money into the Hong Kong’s pro-US political camp in 2013, Lai traveled to Taiwan for a secret roundtable consultation
with Shih Ming-teh, a key figure in Taiwan’s social movement that
forced then-president Chen Shui-bian to resign in 2008. Shih reportedly
instructed Lai on non-violent tactics to bring the government to heel,
emphasizing the importance of a commitment to go to jail.
According to journalist Peter Lee,
“Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and
mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order
to attract the support of the international community and press, and to
sustain the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and
fresh.” Lai reportedly turned off his recording device during multiple
sections of Shih’s tutorial.
“Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order to attract the support of the international community and press, and to sustain the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and fresh.”
One protester explained
to the New York Times how the movement attempted to embrace a strategy
called, “Marginal Violence Theory”: By using “mild force” to provoke
security services into attacking the protesters, the protesters aimed to
shift international sympathy away from the state.
As I have repeated stated in this article, it seems like the protestors want the police and military forces to engage them. Per this quote in the use of "mild force", it seems obvious that this is their strategy.
As the protest movement intensifies, its rank-and-file are doing away with tactical restraint and lashing out at their targets with full fury. They have thrown molotov cocktails into intersections to block traffic; attacked vehicles and their drivers for attempting to break through roadblocks; beaten opponents with truncheons; attacked a wounded man with a US flag; menaced a reporter into deleting her photos; kidnapped and beat a journalist senseless; beat a mainland traveler unconscious and prevented paramedics from reaching the victim; and hurled petrol bombs at police officers.
A Hong Kong protester continued to attack Chinese reporter for @globaltimesnews with American flag even as Paramedics finally freed him from the crowd and tried to rush him to hospital pic.twitter.com/AIULKRW76t
— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) August 13, 2019
The charged atmosphere has provided a
shot in the arm to Lai’s media empire, which had been suffering heavy
losses since the last round of national protests in 2014. After the mass
marches against the extradition bill on June 9, which Lai’s Apple Daily
aggressively promoted, his Next Digital doubled in value, according to Eji Insight.
Meanwhile, the protest leaders show no sign of backing down.
Nathan Law, the youth activist celebrated in Washington and photographed meeting with US officials in Hong Kong, took to Twitter to urge his peers to soldier on: “We have to persist and keep the faith no matter how devastated the reality seems to be,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the protest leaders show no sign of backing down. Nathan Law, the youth activist celebrated in Washington and photographed meeting with US officials in Hong Kong, took to Twitter to urge his peers to soldier on: “We have to persist and keep the faith no matter how devastated the reality seems to be,” he wrote.
Nathan Law
Law was tweeting from New Haven, Connecticut, where he was enrolled with a full scholarship at Yale University. While the young activist basked in the adulation of his US patrons thousands of miles from the chaos he helped spark, a movement that defined itself as a “leaderless resistance” forged ahead back home.
While there has been growing coverage of the unrest in Hong Kong, there has been minimal coverage of what may lie behind the pro-democracy protests.
As you will see in this posting, it is entirely possible that a
Washington-based and Congressionally funded institution is responsible,
at least in part, for the lack of calmness in Hong Kong.
American involvement in the affairs of other nations is well established. It should come as no surprise to anyone that America would fund and instigate protests and violence in China’s backyard.
American involvement in the affairs of other nations is well established. It should come as no surprise to anyone that America would fund and instigate protests and violence in China’s backyard. For more information, go to this posting on the National Endowment for Democracy or NED, America’s instrument of democratic promotion around the world, that is, democracy American style. NED was founded in 1983 during the Reagan Administration with the following Statement of Principles and Objectives:
“Democracy involves the right of the people freely to determine their own destiny.The exercise of this right requires a system that guarantees freedom of expression, belief and association, free and competitive elections, respect for the inalienable rights of individuals and minorities, free communications media, and the rule of law.“
NED is a unique institution. The Endowment’s nongovernmental character gives it a flexibility that makes it possible to work in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances, and to respond quickly when there is an opportunity for political change.
While NED touts itself as a “private” foundation, in other words, it
is independent of government. That could not be further from the
truth. Here’s what NED has to say about itself that belies its true
character:
“NED is a unique institution. The Endowment’s nongovernmental character gives it a flexibility that makes it possible to work in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances, and to respond quickly when there is an opportunity for political change. NED is dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organizations, as well as the many elements of a vibrant civil society that ensure human rights, an independent media, and the rule of law.
This well-rounded approach responds to the diverse aspects of democracy and has proved both practical and effective throughout NED’s history. Funded largely by the U.S. Congress, the support NED gives to groups abroad sends an important message of solidarity to many democrats who are working for freedom and human rights, often in obscurity and isolation….
From its beginning, NED has remained steadfastly bipartisan. Created jointly by Republicans and Democrats, NED is governed by a board balanced between both parties and enjoys Congressional support across the political spectrum. NED operates with a high degree of transparency and accountability reflecting our founders’ belief that democracy promotion overseas should be conducted openly.”
NED receives its funding through an annual appropriation from Congress through the Department of State making it little more than another mouthpiece for Washington’s agenda. NED promotes Washington’s global agenda through direct grants to more than 1600 non-governmental groups that are working for “democracy” in more than 90 nations around the world.
Despite its proclamation that it has a “nongovernmental
character”, NED receives its funding through an annual appropriation from Congress through the Department of State making it little more than another mouthpiece for Washington’s agenda. NED promotes Washington’s global agenda through direct grants to more than 1600 non-governmental groups that are working for “democracy” in more than 90 nations around the world.
Let’s look at NED’s activities in Hong Kong for 2018 according to its website. Here are the projects that were funded over the period from 2015 to 2018.
Notice that the 2018 funding to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs was granted to “facilitate engagement on Hong Kong’s growing threats to guaranteed rights”.
Policemen clash with demonstrators on a street during a protest in Hong Kong, Sunday, Aug. 25, 2019. Hong Kong police have rolled out water cannon trucks for the first time in this summer’s pro-democracy protests. The two trucks moved forward with riot officers Sunday evening as they pushed protesters back along a street in the outlying Tsuen Wan district. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
That certainly sounds like promoting democracy to me. NED spent a total of $1,357,974 on grants to organizations that were promoting freedom, democracy and human rights in Hong Kong over the period from 2015 to 2018.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what NED spent on promoting democracy in Hong Kong in the time frame prior to 2015. While, in the grand scheme of what Washington spends this is not a great deal of money, it is the principle of what Washington is attempting to create in Hong Kong that is of concern.
This is a very clear example of meddling in the internal affairs of China and Hong Kong, actions that will only serve to anger China who is the also the recipient of a great deal of NED’s attention.
Protestors assault an international traveler near the subway in the HK airport.
It is also key to remember that there are likely other taxpayer-funded programs through which Washington is attempting to influence what happens in Hong Kong.
In my opinion, this tweet by the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner is a dead giveaway to the source of the unrest:
Video from Hong Kong shows pro-democracy protesters waving American flags and singing the American National Anthem. Demonstrations have shutdown the city's airport for a second consecutive day and put the entire Chinese city on edge. pic.twitter.com/ZrYE5DzZYU
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 13, 2019
While the ideals of democracy are admirable and desirable, Washington’s version of democracy is tainted by big money and has developed into a system where politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.
Meanwhile, the Chinese themselves are not falling for this (same old, same old) lie…
huaqiao (Expat in China)
The rioters are trying to force the police to act and then certain foreign media will report it as "police brutality" while ignoring the rioters' assault against the police. This is a planned, deliberate act to show the world China's system is not working.
But the fact is China's system is working and is the envy of many nations, but certain "free world" countries cannot accept that. The value of "democracy" is overstated and these rioters show the effect of being overdosed with "democracy" and act senselessly.
While the ideals of democracy are admirable and desirable, Washington’s version of democracy is tainted by big money and has developed into a system where politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.
This is not the democracy that most of the world wants.
Long-term Congressional meddling in other nations internal affairs through its funding of the National Endowment for Democracy is little better than the nation reengineering exercises undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency since the end of the Second World War.
Reactions and serious attempts to control the situation
This situation is in the process of being resolved. Much of what is going on is behind the scenes, but we can get some glimmerings of the various events.
Point One
As of 10 September 2019, the United States president Donald Trump tweets out that he no longer needs the services of John Bolton. John Bolton, the national security adviser.
So, obviously Bolton has been fired. (paraphrasing) “I told Bolton I no longer need his services. I disagreed with many of the suggestions that he has made.”
The president is saying he asked for Bolton’s resignation; it was not Bolton’s idea. So now people are trying to speculate, “What is this about?” He’s the national security adviser, and there are any number of things it could be and there’s no way of knowing. We just have to wait. It will come out at some point.
Oh, I’m sure it will. Though, I’d be really surprised if they would address the truth. Which is the fact that he has been working personally with the key super-billionaire oligarchy opposition forces in Hong Kong against China, and against any resolution to the China – USA trade disputes.
The Friggin' idiot. That's not his job. His job is to assist President Trump, not to oppose his efforts. No matter how impassioned he might feel about Neocon-ism.
Donald Trump fired John Bolton. He obviously felt that John Bolton was not “on the same page” in resolving the issues with China at this time.
As I have previously stated, John Bolton is a war-hawk and a neo-con from the “deep state”. He has opposed every effort that Trump has made to negotiate with China, North Korea, and Iran. In his world view these are all dictatorial nations and America must stand firm in opposing them in every way possible.
Trump loves meeting with these people because he’s got dreams of ending disagreements with these people, bringing peace and tranquility to the humanity of earth. Bolton doesn’t see eye-to-eye with any of that. It could also be about troop withdrawals in Afghanistan. You know, there are factions in the White House that want to get us out of there. It’s been announced that we’re getting out of there. We’ve been over there for I don’t know how many years, and some people say we don’t even know why we are still there.
Trump loves meeting with these people because he’s got dreams of ending disagreements with these people, bringing peace and tranquility to the humanity of earth. Bolton doesn’t see eye-to-eye with any of that.
Bolton would not want to pull out of Afghanistan. Bolton would not want to withdraw from any presence in places like Syria. So it could well be that this is just the culmination of systemic policy differences that have led to this.
Bolton has a reputation as a hardliner, doesn’t take any guff, is not one of these touchy-feely, politically correct guys. He’s a war hawk and fully supports all eight (x8) proxy wars that the United States is currently mired in.
“Let’s try to make ’em like us. Let’s find out why they don’t like us and change.” That’s not Bolton. He don’t care that they don’t like us. We just gotta beat ’em. We gotta pummel ’em.
That might not be appropriate at this time when dealing with China. China is a serious, serious nation that would absolutely take meddling in their own affairs very, very seriously.
Point Two
On Wednesday 4SEP19, President Trump reached out to China’s President Xi in a tweet:
“I know President Xi of China very well. He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a ‘tough business.’ I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. Personal meeting? ”
-Donald Trump
So what is Donald Trump saying?
That’s he’s ready to stop the HK protests if Xi Peng negotiates.
Or, perhaps that China can use their military to enter HK.
Point Three
China has begun arresting American advisors to the protestors and their aides to the protest movements in HK. You see, China does not mess around. They know who all these players are, they know the funding sources, and have surveillance cameras everywhere. If you want to stir up a hornets next, do not allow yourself to get stung.
China has identified all the leadership of these protest groups, and their subordinates. They have since followed them and watched them. They have all been under observation. They have filmed these advisors instructing the protestors in behavior, and strategy.
Then, independently they have targeted these individuals and collected them in public near the protests. It's all on film.
What?
You haven’t heard about this? You mean it’s not reported on the American mainstream media? Imagine that!
Here is a video of a “so called” reporter instructing the HK protestors on how to behave. It’s all on video, and how the HK riot police comes after him and carts him off for “processing”. The video praises the HK riot police for nabbing these “instigators”, and claims that 53 CIA-related advisory staff have been arrested.
They say he’s CIA, but he’s really probably a member of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or the National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) . All American front organization that receives Federal Funding for the purposes of disrupting the stability in other nations.
Here’s some of the arrests. The video shows three Americans arrested and being detained. I am sure that there are many more.
The point is that China knows full well what is going on and THEY DO NOT PLAY AROUND. China is a serious nation that does not pretend that everyone is playing on the same playing-field.
The root effects – trade renegotiation with China.
Anonymous (Italy)
This sudden chaos without major motivation is indeed a sign of interference. As a foreigner, I am Italian and married to a local, I do fully support Chinese mainland on this matter. People in Hong Kong that are doing this are ignorant and do not even know their own history.
It began as a promise to the American people. Donald Trump, if elected would renegotiate trade with the Chinese in such a way that it would be a two-way street to mutual respect and fairness.
When things were looking favorable, suddenly everything went to sh@t. There were rumors that some of the negotiators were hard-line deep-state plants that informed the Chinese to wait Donald Trump out. That he would not be reelected.
So the negotiations stalled, and Trump put full pressure on China. Simultaneously when he raised tariffs on Chinese goods 30%, protests broke out in Hong Kong. It appeared that the pressure was enormous on China, and (according to the United States media) China was really suffering.
30% tariffs
HK protests
Banning Huawei
Diplomatic pressure on Europe
But, you know what? It’s all a big lie, or at the very most, an exaggeration. China wasn’t suffering like the American mainstream media reported.
Ah, it’s partially true. But, not as bad as most Americans believed. China’s exports are not 90% to the USA and 10% to the rest of the world. Nope. Its actually 11% to the Untied States. And 89% to the rest of the world. So China has dealt with it.
Meanwhile, the tariffs has pretty much put the global economy into a malaise and it has backfired and hit the American consumer. It will need to be resolved before the 2020 elections or else it is potentially feasible that it will effect the elections.
And China’s reaction?
Nothing. Ride it out. Don’t go on the offensive. Don’t go on the defensive. Let things sizzle for a while and ride it out. They realize that the present Trump strategy is to force China to agree to a range of demands.
Implement “democracy” in China.
Stop the reeducation of radical Muslim separatists.
Allow Tibet independence.
China said no, and won’t do anything. They want favorable trade but not at the risk of their national identity and global sovereignty.
The idea that liberal or Western-style democracy and the country’s long-term stability are incompatible is deeply entrenched in the Chinese mind. Most Chinese believe that the current level of maturity in Chinese society does not allow for a “one man one vote” system. It is broadly accepted that China will disintegrate if it recklessly adopts Western-style democracy.
- The construction of the Singapore Model in Mainland China
How would you feel, if China demanded that;
America implemented Communism?
Integrate Muslim extremists in key leadership roles in government?
Allow California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arazona and Texas to be an independent nation?
It’s all pretty silly. It’s obscene and an insult.
Well, that’s how the Chinese feels. They have plenty of trade relationships with other nations. Contrary to what the mainstream American news say, and they are healthy and chugging away just fine. You see, China realizes that they can under-price any American company on the global stage.
And so, they are just waiting everything out.
Thus the worst effects of the trade war backfired and are now squarely on the shoulders of America. John Bolton, of course is all happy about this. But there are far other considerations than the John Bolton Neocon narrative, and Donald Trump has a nation to take care of.
So, Donald Trump is regrouping and removing the Neocon planks from the trade demands and will continue to work with China on resolving this.
The end results…
The Trade war will end.
The HK protests will end.
Things will continue much as they had, only there would be more favorable trade terms for the United States.
Let’s see how correct my fortune telling ability is, shall we? Maybe I’m right or maybe I’m wrong. We will see. Eh?
Anyways about the video. He's going on in English about the "rule of law" and then switches in Cantonese. Anyways, his goose is cooked.
Once HK passed the insurrection law which permitted the arrest of agitators who forment revolution, regardless of nationality, and extration ot the mainland for lengthy prison sentences and organ harvesting… everything changed.
For months, if not years, the Chinese have documented everyting on video, and then seized the computers and technical data form the foreign newspapers operating inside of HK.
So it's over for this cat. He doesn't have a hope in Hell. In China, there isn't any court negotations between attorneys. Instead, they look over the documentation and evidence and assign punishment(s).
BTW. I don't know if I told you this. But a lot of retired men in HK and China participated in the protests because if they did so, they would get a $200 USD check. Well, of course, they all started to deposit it in their own individual bank accounts. Right? Guess what happened?
Every account that has a $200 USD deposit during a specific time period is assumed to be a paid-for-riot paycheck. So every person who got that money… young and old… suddenly has their social security balance set to zero and frozen for the rest of their life.
Finally, we conclude with a decent editorial
US fooling no one with claims of innocence in HK: Opinion
By Ian Goodrum
For no particular reason I’ve been thinking of Claude Rains in Casablanca
lately. You remember him; the Moroccan police captain who is “shocked,
shocked” to find gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s establishment during a
raid, only to be handed his winnings without missing a beat.
You might wonder at the relevance of that famous movie moment. I’ll explain.
Amid ongoing violence and turmoil in Hong Kong, Chinese media outlets
have brought up a few relevant facts: That “pro-democracy” opposition
heads had met with politicians in the United States, protest leaders had
been in contact with State Department officials and major figures like
Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have issued statements supporting the
demonstrators. With all this in mind, it’s been suggested the US has
been inflaming tensions in the city and encouraging escalation in an
already heated environment.
To wit, the Claude Rains moment: Members of the diplomatic corps were
“shocked, shocked” by this news. Why, it’s unthinkable that the US,
that bastion of democracy and freedom, would ever attempt to interfere
in the affairs of another country! China was called a “thuggish regime”
for even bringing this up — naturally, the “free press” was all crickets
when it came time to do their purported jobs and speak a little truth
to power.
Safe to say none of these faux-outraged government functionaries or
their lapdogs in the media bothered to ask a Libyan what they thought of
the idea. The NATO intervention there in 2014 turned the African
country with the highest standard of living into a disaster zone,
complete with open-air slave markets.
They wouldn’t have asked an Iraqi, either. I’m sure the families of
the million-plus people killed by the US military since 2003 would have a
few things to say about their invaders’ good intentions.
Or a Haitian. Or a Syrian. Or a Venezuelan. Or a Honduran. Or an Iranian. The list goes on.
The truth is US “diplomacy” has never been that innocent, and
everyone knows it. State Department personnel — in league with military
and intelligence agencies — have spearheaded countless interventions
since the turn of the 20th century, destroying countries or political
formations they saw as counter to US interests. After the Russian
Revolution of 1917 and especially after the Cold War began, this meant
subverting communists or socialists and materially supporting
anti-communists and fascists.
Among the best-known examples of this skullduggery are the hundreds
of assassination attempts on Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro —
none successful; he died at 90, probably laughing at the US as he went —
and the overthrow of democratically elected Chilean Marxist Salvador
Allende. The US loved democracy so much in the latter case they replaced
Allende with a military dictator. These and many other interventions
were overseen by the same sort of “diplomats” who now act offended at
the notion they may be doing something untoward in Hong Kong.
But things are a little different now. These clandestine activities
used to be the sole purview of the Central Intelligence Agency, and when
word got out the US’ definition of “liberty” really meant “not being
communists”, quite a few people were furious. So in a long process which
began in the 1970s, the CIA delegated its regime change
responsibilities to a host of organizations, each given a degree of
separation with some legalese and clever accounting.
Though the Agency remains a potent force for subversion — and you
would have to be truly naïve to think their cloak-and-dagger era is over
— the interventional landscape has been somewhat diversified, with a
host of non-governmental organizations taking the place of traditional
spies. The National Endowment for Democracy, the largest among them, has
of course given a great deal of money to “pro-independence” forces in
Hong Kong. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.
Allan Weinstein, an early leader of one such think tank, admitted it
outright when he said “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25
years ago by the CIA.” While this makes US influence operations easier
to track, it also gives them a veneer of respectability among the
general public. It’s a bigger deal when a government agency is funding
rebellious elements in another country; much less so if it’s some
“non-governmental” cutout with a bit of plausible deniability.
When news of CIA activity broke in the past, it was big news. That
was bad for optics. Somewhere along the way, powerful government figures
and capitalists realized by doing all their influencing in the open —
and with a media that had long since stopped pretending to question
motives — the scandal brought by secrecy would go away. This has worked
wonders on a browbeaten population fed a steady diet of propaganda. It
turns out if you’re told every other country on earth is inferior to
yours, you’ll start thinking intervention is great for everybody else.
Some people normally skeptical of official US narratives look back on
this sordid history and conclude it’s a thing of the past, the stuff of
ancients. But what’s changed between then and now? Why would any empire
stop consolidating its influence if it had the ability to continue? In
fact, the US’ capacity for interference has only grown more
sophisticated since the end of the Soviet Union. With that country’s
dissolution in 1991, the world lost a counterweight against imperialism —
and logic dictates things would get worse rather than better in an era
of unilateral hegemony.
So the question remains: Why would the US’ well-established,
well-funded campaigns of subversion suddenly cease? Well they wouldn’t,
of course. There’s an equally bizarre notion from otherwise
right-thinking people that intervention stops at certain countries’
borders. This is patently ridiculous. If it can happen in Venezuela,
Iran, Libya, Cuba or Syria, it can happen in Hong Kong — a
geographically small Chinese territory with longstanding ties to the
West. It is, in fact, perfectly positioned as a pressure point for the
rest of China.
And it’s not just a question of economic or political systems
anymore. The US doesn’t trust anyone, even its own imperial allies;
recall that the National Security Administration had German Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s phone tapped for years. There’s no telling how they’re
keeping tabs on other NATO members. Because the US has the largest
economy and military many times over, however, leaders who might
otherwise speak out against this treatment stay silent. Yet the idea of
US benevolence still has a hold on the world’s imagination. I encourage
anyone on the fence to think about it this way: If this is how the US
treats its friends, imagine what it tries to do to its enemies.
And make no mistake, the US considers China an enemy. It says so in
official statements and policy briefings, and academics and journalists
uncritically launder these claims for a mass audience on their enormous
platforms. No matter how many times China says it wants peace and to
handle its own affairs, the myth of the “China Threat” persists — stoked
by US “diplomats” and their lackeys in the press.
These inflammatory statements serve a twofold purpose. On a personal
level, they attract attention to the authors’ work and better position
them for career advancement. More broadly, they further US interests and
provide cover for narratives that wouldn’t get consideration by the
public if they came straight from the military-intelligence apparatus.
It’s a win-win for everyone — except the US’ victims.
None of this is to say that things in Hong Kong are perfect, or that
everyone in the city was happy as a clam before the State Department and
NED came along. Severe inequality plagues the city, and must be
addressed for the government to enjoy continued support from the people.
But bad actors take advantage of existing negative sentiments and
amplify them, turning issues that could be handled peacefully into
profound existential crises.
This playbook has worked for decades now, undermining countless
sovereign governments whose existence ran counter to the interests of
the United States; it’s the height of foolishness to think it can’t
happen here.
The author is a copy editor with chinadaily.com.cn.
28NOV20 Update
It is pretty well established that the CIA has been well involved attempting a “color revolution” inside of Hong Kong as part of the Trump Trade Wars of 2017 – 2020. There are all sorts of articles on this subject. Here’s a worthwhile read…
A secret high-level committee of Hong Kong senior activists worked with Western agents from the CIA to coordinate and amplify the leaderless protests against the fugitive law amendment last year, Nury Vittachi claims in his book The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong.
Vittachi, a veteran journalist and a columnist for The Standard, accused the CIA of funding anti-government activities in the SAR. He said Hong Kong protesters have received practical training in street-protest strategy and media control from members of the professional revolution industry since January 2013.
The book named three US-based groups - the Oslo Freedom Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institute and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies - which were directly involved in last year's social unrest.
He added that public records had shown that the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA's regime-change arm, had sent HK$170 million to the mainland or Hong Kong since 2014 to "advance the cause of democracy."
https://lnkd.in/dwnSU-S
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
Well, California Governor Gavin Newsom has abandoned plans to build a high-speed railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco. After spending billions of dollars in funds, much of it from the Federal government, the Governor said that the project should be shelved.
The face of American politics today. This is the slick and well-packaged oligarchy pick for California. Mr. California Governor Gavin Newsom. Look how plastic he appears. Why, he could be right out of one of those political villains from a 1980’s John Cusack movie.
Managerial elites, Of Two Minds - The sole output of America's managerial elite is self-serving hubris. The Deep State can't be fired, nor does it ever stand for election.
As systems become more complex, the need for a professional class to manage the overwhelming complexity grows.
"Stakeholders" multiply in endless profusion, dooming every project to a glacial process that increases the sums paid to manage the glacial process and pushes the final cost to the moon.
The managerial elite always has one answer for every problem: give us more money.
The system is broken, and the managerial elite will keep it broken because it serves their interests to keep it broken.
Some History
It all began ten years ago. Back then, President Obama called for a network of high-speed railroads to criss-cross the country “within 25 years”. The nation roared with glee and cheering his forward thinking.
Perspicacious = To be far-sighted in understanding things.
At that time, of course, the rest of the world had already implemented High Speed Rail. America was going to get involved in a game of “catch up”.
Only this time, progressive values and liberal management would lead the way.
Look back. The year is 2009; “President Obama’s goal of building a high-speed rail network that at least 80 percent of Americans will have access to by 2025, is facing major resistance in Congress. Earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden announced a $53 billion, six year plan to get the U.S. high-speed rail network going with $8 billion over the next year spent towards building new lines and upgrading existing passenger lines in areas such as the northeast and midwest.:
His plan, began its’ implementation through California.
Of course, compared to the rest of the world, it’s pretty modest. The idea was to link the two largest cities in California together. This would occur by placing rail lines through the large entirely rural California valley. The top speed would be limited to 220 MPH, which is the global norm. The most ambitious plans would have 800 miles of rail line, paid in part by the Federal government and bonds issued by the (insolvent) California government.
Killing the High Speed rail program.
The decision to cancel this program was welcomed by Conservatives, and derailed by Liberals. Both for reasons related towards political considerations. However, in my mind, everyone loses.
What’s worse, rubbing salt in the wound, comes President Trump. He rightfully questioned the decision to kill the project. As a businessman, you do not casually start of kill things without study, and an analysis of the consequences. Obviously, there were concerns that the decision to kill the project were not carefully thought out.
Seriously. It is like going to a restaurant and expecting to pay $100 for the meal. You wait and you wait, and you wait. Finally, the waitress comes to the table. The bill is $2000.
You get angry!
Where is my food? Why has it taken so long? What the heck are the cooks doing? What do I have to show for all my time; for all my money? What?
And the waitress looks at you condescendingly, and points to the toothpick that is on that table.
"You have a toothpick", she says.
Thus, in summary, and rightfully so, President Trump demanded that California be fiscally responsible and return the Federal funds given to them.
California fights back and builds the High Speed rail… somewhat.
These were funds earmarked for the doomed program. However, the Governor rebuked him. He argued that no funds needed to be returned. He said the state would still build a portion of the system. It would build the section still under construction in the rural Central Valley.
You demand to see the Manager, or better yet, the owner of the restaurant. A few minutes, he comes out of his office. You interrupted him from playing the game of poker he had with the other workers.
We wipes the beer off of his beard and takes a puff of his cigar.
"Wadda ya want, bub?"
You calmly, and clearly, state that you paid for a meal. And that you want the meal, and you want it at the price that is advertised on the menu.
He snorts!
"Sure, wadda ever ya say. That will be another $4000."
You get angry, and suddenly all the workers in the restaurant come out and line up with the Manager. They start yelling at you. Calling you names like "deplorable", "uneducated hicks", and "racist". They carry on so much, that you eventually slither out of the restaurant.
You cut your losses. You reason, at least you got a toothpick.
So, California is going to build the high-speed rail after all.
By doing so, he could legally claim that he met the requirements that California build a High Speed rail line. It wouldn’t need to be very much rail. Not even a few hundred miles or so of rail. Five, ten or fifteen miles would be all that would be needed.
Everyone files back into the back room, and continues their game of poker. Another case of beer is brought in. No one notices the line of people at the front door waiting to be served and led to their tables.
His advisors suggested something a little more practical, though. So a little over a hundred miles will (some day… eventually) be built.
A plywood, and paint mock up of the American High-speed rail engine. It only cost a few million to make such a fancy plywood “doll house” for kids to play in. take note that the progressive plan for the design,and manufacture for the locomotives would be from the German multi-national company Siemens. No American design. No American factories. No American construction. This would be a fully funded international, and globalist initiative. So very progressive!
Everybody gets their cut…
Once the labor unions get their cuts, the environmentalists get their shares, the local labor bosses get to skim off some money, and the politicians in Sacramento each get another new mansion, can the tiny amount of rail line be built.
California High Speed Rail as envisioned by the Democratic Governor. The cost of many billions of dollars will be used to provide a non-vehicular transportation method for those commuters between Merced and Bakersfield.
This couple of miles of track would be enough to prove that the rail was built in “good faith”. (And not a scheme to siphon Federal funds into the pocket of various special interest groups.)
So, there! You evil non-progressive, you!
Progressive justification for the “new” High Speed rail.
Of course, the need for a High Speed rail to travel a distance that a person could drive in a little over an hour is rather silly. However, the Governor denied that it would be a “train to nowhere.”
He justified his plans stating that many people would want to abandon their cars for public transportation between Merced and Bakersfield. (Then use public transport, such as taxis and public buses, to get around in those cities.)
Of course, it is debatable whether he actually believes this statement personally. Were it to function he, and his family would never use it. They are members of the elite. They travel by private jet. They don’t travel by “cattle car” like the rest of us.
Though the administration bills the program as "high-speed rail," most U.S. projects won't reach the speeds seen in Europe and Asia.
-Obama doles out money for High Speed Rail
He defended his decision on reasons of fiscal responsibility. (Of course he would. It “sounds good”, like the words “fresh”, “green”, and “healthy” does.)
The usefulness of the California 77 billion dollar high speed rail program. Map shows the major population areas of California for reference, and to show that the rail does not impact any of these areas. The reader should note that 77 billion far, far dwarfs the amount of money that NASA spent to send men to the Moon. To me, by looking at the map, they put this rail line in the absolutely middle of frigging nowhere. How in the world is it supposed to help anyone out there?
California needed the money for it’s many social programs. It needed the money to support the influx of illegal migrants, and it needed the money to support the rising number of unemployed poor. California needed the money for yet another study on the endangered bo-bo-tiutsi fly, and the impact on plastic straws have on “global warming”.
Important things. Don’t ya know.
Memes erupted all over America when the various progressive liberal governments announced banning of plastic straws. Here’s one such meme.
He would not give any of money back.
Not that he could mind you. Too many people accepted bribes. Too many studies" on the dangers of coffee and the need for LGBT education in Kindergarten needed to be funded. Where the heck do you all think all those crazy radical progressives get their money to live off of? Do you actually believe that they work in a company like a normal person would?
After spending over 77 Billion dollars, he said the state would not send any money back to the federal government. He did not want it to be spent by President Donald Trump.
China started planning and implementing High Speed rail back in the 1990’s. Today, High Speed rail transport in China is ubiquitous. It is “old news”. Eventually, in China, all rail will be replaced with High Speed Transport.
Construction has been underway for the last couple of years on a section of 220 miles of rail. This section consists of the system from Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, with expected passenger service in 2025. (Now, delayed until 2035.) The announcement to kill the plan has resulted in a much smaller stretch of rail being realized.
The fares were expected to average $89 per person per trip.
Which is about 2x (two times more expensive) than Chinese High-Speed rail, cover a mere tiny percentage of a fraction of the distance that Chinese rail covers, and start roughly 35 years later than when China built their first High Speed rail line.
Not that it matters. Just sayin'
All of this is silly.
In reality, this is not a technical issue, or even a fiscal issue. It is a political issue. It is a mechanism from which politicians, beholding to donors will be able to pay them back for the money that they lent to the progressive liberal democrats.
Interior of an Amtrak bathroom. American rail is not maintained, or treated with the care that is required for rail transport. This is evident to anyone who rides on Amtrak.
It is so very obvious, and so blatant, I will not insult the reader by showing pages and pages of justification. If you can’t see the reality, then, maybe you need to go back to school and learn some discernment skills. You know, like elementary school.
77 Billion Dollars and NOTHING to show for it!
The corruption in the USA, and California is so very bad, that 77 Billion dollars and 20 years can not complete a single spur line of high speed rail! Well, China started at the same time as California did.
Look where China is today…
Chinese High Speed rail as of 2019. All of these lines are in the process of conversion to High-Speed access, and old-style rail will be obsolete and phased out over time. Look what you can do without legalized bribery, and absolute corruption.
Chinese High Speed Rail
Now, China just so happened to decide to implement High Speed rail at the same time that California did. The result is quite different. Why?
Chinese High Speed Trains are the absolute best.
Well, let’s do some comparisons shall we.
First off, let me be clear that NOT every line is high-speed rail. This is a work in process. Secondly, it it also be clear that China is an enormous nation and right now the High Speed rail only connects major population centers.
Today, these are the active High-speed rail lines…
Active 2019 high-speed rail map in China listing all the station names. This is the map that you can use today to plan a high-speed travel anywhere in China. Click on the image to see a full-scale, enlarged view.
Here is a typical Chinese bullet train. (I just cannot show you any United States bullet trains because they haven’t even been constructed yet. Though there are some nice colorful mock-ups. See above.)
Chinese High Speed Trains are the absolute best.
Oh, and I must add that the cardboard, wood and fiberglass (hollow) mock up of the California high speed rail COST MORE than an actual high-speed locomotive by many millions of dollars. Consider that will ya!
Inside a Chinese bullet train
Bullet trains are all over China. There is an enormous network of them. They are very comfortable to ride in, and their cost is reasonable. Notice how calm the ride is. Note the water in the bottle.
And…
America’s Plan for a Progressive Future
Under Obama, and other progressive leadership in the seaboard corridors, they had (and still have) a very progressive vision for America. In their vision, the states would be discarded in favor of a new America of “regions”.
States would become obsolete, and over time, discarded.
Administration regions would replace independent states.
High Speed Rail would connect the administrative centers.
Control would be centralized in the mega-cities on both the East and the West. Thus, High-Speed trains would cart people through the barren “waste lands” between the “two important” regions of the United States.
As shown in this map from the New York Times…
The High Speed rail is just a part of the new progressive vision the left has for America. It’s no secret, though it isn’t publicized to the masses. With the election of DJT, everything was put on hold until the Left can retake the reigns of power and continue on their march towards socialism.
Ah, but the corruption prevents the ideal.
That looks so nice, but it’s never gonna happen. It implies that enough money will be available to manage and manufacture the progressive utopia.
As soon as Obama came to office he started throwing money at this. And, like high-absorbancy disposable dish towels, the money evaporated.
Obama was very liberal with the tax monies, as well as the money not yet collected. He gave it away like party favors at a drunk frat party.
Just check out the amazing amount of corruption. Check out this map from the US government. Where did the money go? Eh?
Obama threw billions of dollars towards High Speed rail transport system, and his cronies all took the money for their own purposes. You know, like a new swimming pool for their third mansion, and redecoration of their Lear Jet. Ah, well that is life in America today. It’s not pretty, but that is just he way that it is.
Comparisons of High Speed Rail
I looked at various sites on the internet, and it’s a hoot how everyone tries to justify the superiority of Amtrak compared to China’s bullet trains. They imply that China’s bullet trains are nothing to be proud of.
It’s funny, but sad too. You know, the first step in recognizing you have a problem is to face up to it, and announce that you have a problem. (12 step program for those of you who don’t know the reference.)
Crime and corruption in the USA is institutionalized and regulated in legal means. Thus it is not officially considered a crime. Pretty slick, eh?
They do one on one comparisons and come to the conclusion that they are similar. What a laugh. The trains are similar. How can you possibly come to that conclusion?
The one article (linked above) starts off straight forward enough…
But then it starts to show a bunch of photos how they are really just pretty similar, aside from the price, and speed. As if the train stations are identical. (Have you been to an Amtrak train station lately? Talk about a run-down 1960’s era ghetto.)
Really?
Here’s a screen capture from the article listed above.
In the comparison they say that the two systems are pretty much the same. After all, it is the politically correct thing to say. Right?
What’s what the article says.
Then, it shows this following picture…
Is that the only difference? Really? Are you so dumb founded blind in political correctness not to notice the differences right in front of your face?
Is that the only difference? A hat?
Really? Are you so dumb founded blind in political correctness not to notice the differences right in front of your face?
In China, the stewardesses are all female. They are all attractive, and rated in beauty, physical appearance, and weight. They are all under 35 years of age. They are trained to be demure and act very respectfully.
Chinese hostesses. They are judged not only on their ability, and their scores on tests, but in their appearance. That is why when you go to China all of the hostesses are very attractive and giving and providing the best to you, the customer.Hostess rejected because her fingernails were not good enough. In China everything must be perfect and done to the best of one’s ability. There just isn’t any acceptance of inferior job performance due to any of the criteria that plagues Western society.
In America on Amtrak, there are no age, appearance, weight or gender requirements. The attendants can be polite or not, fat or not, ugly or not, burly or not. In the progressive reality that is America today that is the reality. But don’t deny what is right in front of your eyes just for the sake of political correctness.
American rail; Amtrak stewardess. I have nothing against older people working, whether they are male or female or confused-gender. However, it must be recognized that the Chinese put more emphasis on appearance and ability than what is present in the United States.
Chinese High Speed Train Appearances
This is what the interior of one looks like…
And here’s the view outside…
Oh, and while I am at it, here is what the over all appearance and image that the Chinese bullet trains have in China and around the world.
In contrast Amtrak is viewed as sluggish, antiquated, and brutish. Check out the video and then go ride on Amtrak to see what I am talking about.
Train Stations
Here’s a quick comparison in train stations.
First, we check out Amtrak’s stations. The photo below is a historical station known as Sandpoint. Now, don’t get the wrong idea.
I do happen to love history and American rail has had so many absolutely awesome train stations. What about the one on Allegheny avenue in Pittsburgh, or the massive complex in Detroit? Ah, but they are all gone now.
American train station – Sandpoint station. This is typical of what remains in the United States for railroad stations for passengers.
All that remains are little quonset hut kind of affairs. You know the kind used to give the impression of progressive advancement by tearing down the old. Sad.
Here’s the current interior of the Amtrak rail station in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. It looks like the rest of the world has passed it by. It’s really, really sad.
And, I don’t like it one bit.
Interior of the Amtrak station in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. It’s sad really. So much history, so much that can be done to keep and preserve it.
Now, let’s look at the train stations that you would encounter were you to board a train in China. This is from the 3nd tier city Tianjin. It’s third tier, ya all! It’s just a little Po-dunk city.
Chinese train station in Tianjin, China. It is new. Well taken cared for, and well maintained. There are no beggars and the floors are so clean that you could eat off them.Chinese high-speed rail. Look at all those bullet trains. How many billions and billions of dollars was spent for the California high-speed rail, and what? Only 15 miles were completed, and not one single train was fabricated? What a waste. America is much better than that.
Ask yourself how, and why can China do this, but much bigger, and better USA cannot? Maybe fighting eight simultaneous wars and spending 65% of welfare benefits on illegal aliens has something to do with it. Eh?
Maybe. But I also like to think that part of it is because China is a meritocracy.
Here is Amtrak rail. This is what passes for American High Speed rail today. You know, as someone who can compare different ways of doing things, it is just so obvious the crime, decadence and corruption at Amtrak is just horrible.
For all the money being thrown at Amtrak, this is the best America can do? Really?
Modern Amtrak in the North East region. This is what American high-speed looks like.
America has so much to be proud of, yet we have let our achievements grow fallow, and our leadership become corrupt. We, our parents, and our grandparents are all responsible for the sad, sad state of affairs in America today.
Pennsylvania Railroad Station Pittsburgh
Chinese Stewardess Training
In China, it is very important to maintain a very positive image. This is reflective of the company, the brand and the service that one provides. Thus, there is a very rigorous selection process to become a stewardess on a Chinese train, and a long and involved training program.
Here is a video showing how the stewardess are trained to walk.
And, here are how they are trained to act and greet people…
Of course, the criteria in the United States is quite different.
The American rail system is controlled by Amtrak and it is a government funded agency. As such, it is very progressive, and very “modern” and “diverse”. You won’t find attractive women, or training on how to behave at Amtrak. Instead you will find other criteria that is “more important” being used.
Some other criteria…
Amtrak is a very “forward thinking”, progressive liberal government agency. Everything is top-down controlled by the Washington DC central office, and all the management got into their positions of power through liberal progressive leanings and “other means” (not to be discussed here). You can easily see how wonderful this has been when you compare Amtrak with train and rail lines in the rest of the world. Yessur!
These other criteria are things that you cannot speak about, but everyone knows about.
You know, like how certain famous people got their children into Harvard and Yale, or like how some cute starlets got their start in Hollywood by visiting a couch.
It is like how you have to show some cleavage to get the Pennsylvania department of transportation to fill the pot-hole in front of your house, or how the Mexican dishwasher gets paid for washing pots and pans. That is how things are really done in America today. If you haven’t experienced this, then you haven’t really experienced the America that the “rest of us” has to endure.
Eh? Maybe you have a silver spoon in your mouth. Or a Starbucks coffee. It’s the same thing really.
Reality. You know, like the child molester teacher that lives down the street, or the potholes in the road that never get fixed, or the “extra” “fees” that you have to pay the gal behind the window to get some attention to your issue.
Ah, all so very progressive.
Just like things used to be done in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or how things were done in China under Mr. Mao. So equal. So diverse. So progressive.
“The toilets in your car are not working anymore. Please, use the ones of the car in front of you. Do not enter the sleeper cars. I repeat…”
The day has barely started when we hear the announcement. I am exhausted after a sleepless night on a half-reclined chair."
-Roaming about on Amtrak
Amtrak workers showing their uniforms and attire. Notice how progressive and diverse they are. That’s fine for a nice liberal progressive reality. However, I personally like the way rail used to be run in the United States…by merit, not by the color of one’s skin. Which is one of the reasons why Chinese high speed rail is light years more effective than anything in the United States.
Just how far did America go down the drain?
It’s hard to vocalize. I like to think that the best years of Amtrak were in the 1930’s. It was a time that I did not experience. All that I could picture were the faded images of massive locomotives, and advertisements of luxury travel inside old Life and National Geographic magazines.
City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie
I’m pretty saddened by it, actually.
1:30pm: We are stopped and the power disappears with a buzzzzz.
No AC, no lights, no nothing.
Soon, it becomes quite hot. The electricity has had hiccups before (ask Mark who has to re-set our router each time), but never this long. Apparently, one of our engines has a problem.
The power returns, the passengers sigh; the train is still motionless.
-Roaming about on Amtrak
Boarding trains in the Untied States tends to be like this, crowded and rushed. There just isn’t the kind of order that is demanded in Chinese train stations.
7:25pm: The train stops in Cleburne, TX to offload the passengers going to Oklahoma who take a bus from here, because they missed their connection in Fort Worth.
We sit at this station for half an hour and don’t know why. This is becoming infuriating! No information, just a grumbling crowd.
The way Amtrak “solves” problems is the epitome of inefficiency. On all accounts.
-Roaming about on Amtrak
America high-speed rail today. Here is a picture of contemporaneous American rail.
Like most passengers on the Texas Eagle that day (and, believe it or not, but all the trains we took were fully booked), we are tempted to say “Never Again”!
Long-distance train journeys have a certain appeal. Each one is an adventure. The ones on Amtrak even more so, it appears.
What we have learned first-hand is that all the rumors about Amtrak are true. The company is ran very inefficiently and nobody seems to care about multiple-hour delays, reroutings or change of itineraries/schedules except for the passengers.
It was an experience, but we are not jumping to do it again. Beware: anyone traveling on Amtrak’s long distance trains should have lots of time, and no connections!
-Roaming about on Amtrak
Let me tell you Liesbet that train looks absolutely first class compared to our train and trip overnight from New York to New Orleans.
What a nightmare trip!!
Let me guess why the trains are so bad going down south. Disgusting!! The train was on freight lines so was very bumpy and very uncomfortable.
We did book first class, the guy laughed when we asked where that was. Yes, we were stood out like a sore thumb on the train!!
- globalhousesitterX2
High Speed Rail elsewhere
The rest of the world uses High Speed rail. It’s a mature technology, and provides benefit to the people who live in the nations that have it.
Everyone has it. Except the United States.
Don’t believe me, well then take a look at these maps here. Here’s Europe.
European High Speed Rail.
And how about tiny South Korea…
South Korean High Speed Rail.
Japanese High Speed Rail…
Japanese high speed rail network.
And, here’s Australia’s High Speed rail network (in construction)…
Australian high speed rail.
Here is the high speed rail in Brazil. It connects the largest cities for low cost, and fast transport for it’s citizens.
Brazil high speed rail map. Showing the rail corridor that connects the largest cities together.
Here’s the high speed rail network for Italy…
Italian high speed rail map.
Even tiny Java has high speed rail. What is America’s malfunction? Eh?
High speed rail in Java, Indonesia.
Russia is in a class by itself
Russia has had rail for as long as the United States. However, they have worked out various agreements with the Chinese, and are now upgrading their trans-Siberian route to be High Speed Rail. And what an upgrade it is.
I mean, well I really admire Chinese High Speed rail, but OMG the Russians have taken it to the next step! And you can find out about their “budget” travel HERE.
Here’s a map of what it looks like.
Russia & Chinese High Speed Rail map. The Russians have collaborated with the Chinese to improve existing rail lines and upgrade them to High Speed Rail.
And here are some cross sections of the various cars. I particularly like the first class cabins. Maybe I can pretend to be James Bond and travel West with a Femme Fatale. Eh?
A femmefatale is a stock character of a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art. -Wikipedia
Golden Eagle Imperial class stateroom for first class passengers on the Russian trans-Siberian rail that is being upgraded by the Chinese to High Speed rail.This is the staterooms for the Golden Eagle “Gold” class for the trans-Siberian High Speed rail.
The Golden Eagle is your luxurious hotel-on-wheels. Unpack just the once and settle into your well- appointed and comfortable en-suite cabin as you begin this voyage of a lifetime. One of your cabin attendants, available at all times, will be on hand to look after all of your needs.
The Golden Eagle, comprising three categories of cabins, featuring state-of-the-art amenities, and all offering en-suite facilities, is the only private train of its kind operating in this part of the world.
Our newly introduced Imperial Suites are the most spacious cabins on the Golden Eagle, and on any train in Russia. The Gold and Silver Class accommodation has been cleverly designed to maximise the available space as cabins covert from a sitting area by day into a comfortable sleeping accommodation by night.
On the occasions where we travel by day, your cabins provides a calm, personal space in which to read, enjoy a DVD or simply watch the landscape unfold through the large picture window and the facility to adjust the air-conditioning for your own personal comfort.
All three classes of cabin benefit from an evening turndown service and the services of a cabin attendant who is on call 24 hours a day. Our onboard cabin attendants are highly regarded by our guests for their impeccable service. In each cabin you will also find an excellent selection of L’Occitane shower gels and shampoos, complemented by premium bath robes, slippers and a hairdryer.
-The Trans-Siberian Travel Company
There are three classes that you can can have when you travel by rail. Golden Eagle Imperial Class. Golden Eagle Gold Class. Golden Eagle Silver Class. There is also a Shangri La Diamond Class, and the Shangri La Heritage ClassTrans-Siberian high speed rail car layout.
Causes and Commentary
America is out of pace with the rest of the world in regards to high-speed, modern mass transit. America relies on personal automobiles, the airlines, and an antiquated railroad system that is corrupt and bureaucratic.
There are many reasons why America is unable to have high speed rail. The primary ones are politics, and corruption associated with politics.
In America, criminal enterprise that siphons enormous taxpayer funds into various “programs” has been institutionalized and made legal. These moneys are no longer available to American taxpayers for programs that support their life, their community, or their future.
They are siphoned away for “other” purposes.
How about spending some of this money on American bridges, American public transportation, American education, American needs, and American rail? How about it eh? Or, are there too many wealthy people siphoning the money away?
An Intolerable Situation.
Vintage American rail. Art Deco design, with traditional order and behavior. It was a glad and welcome time; a time when men could work for a living and still keep almost all of his money without being bothered by the tax man.
Personally, I find this situation intolerable, as I have a personal love and affinity for AMERICAN rail. As a boy, I used to walk the railroad tracks that wound in and out of the hills of Western Pennsylvania. I used to explore the tunnels and old rail side communities. I used to stand in awe to those enormous engines that hauled the coal from the depths of the earth.
This is what American rail used to be. It was large, powerful and proud. Not the wimpy bureaucratic corruption filled organization that it is today.
My first train ride was to university and I traveled the “red eye” from Erie, PA to Syracuse NY. I fell in love with rail from that moment on.
I loved everything about it.
I loved the stewards in the dining car with their white starched uniforms, to the big burly train conductor and his cheery announcements. I loved watching the countryside go by, and having a 5am breakfast of coffee and toast in the dining car.
In traditional conservative America, people were proud of America and it’s accomplishments. One of which was the rail lines. This is the America from my boyhood. What happened?
I lament this loss, and this post is my anger that corrupt people have taken something so wonderful, so fantastic, and turned it in to what it is today. Today it is nothing more than a failed business model staffed with the bland and the politically acceptable.
It is my hope; my prayer that other lovers of AMERICAN rail will wake up and wrest the rail industry from the corrupt politicians back to the people where it belongs.
The America that used to be, or it is it really over? What can we do to regain America to take back it’s glory days?
Article was posted on FR 26MAY19
This article was posted (well, the first three or so paragraphs, anyways) on the conservative website Free Republic on 26MAY19. The post is HERE, and some selected comments (from people who obviously didn’t read the article).
Here’s some of the best comments.
I used to work for this company that had a contract with a large corporation and I used to have to go in to the large Corporate Offices occasionally and I would go in early to grab a little breakfast in their cafeteria. That’s what I noticed that everybody who was on the “early work schedule” would get there early and then leisurely eat a breakfast and be up with their desks just before the normal 8 to 5 people showed up. Pretty sneaky, because the early workers left early… but didn’t put in a full day…that’s when I learned that having an early staff is probably inviting a little cheating into the workplace.
As a Ferroequinologist (railroad fan), I’m going to say, we can but let private companies do it. Virgin Trains is expanding Brightline from West Palm to Orlando…and onto Tampa…
Conclusion
So, to answer the question; “Why can’t America have High Speed Rail transportation?”, if you set aside all the rationalizations and justifications, there is but one conclusive answer.
In some ways, extreme populism actually is a symptom of this institutional failure, and this brings me to my last point. Due to our lack of a functioning institutional system, we are no longer able to undertake great, long-term projects, or to address seriously deep structural problems in our system in the long term.
We suffer from a kind of “tyranny of myopia.” We are incapable of operating as a country on anything resembling a serious and long-term time horizon.
-American Greatness
America does not have the ABILITY to create modern public transportation.
I have not been to Niagara Falls in close to 30 years even though I live 80 miles from there. I have driven by it many times over the years but it was one of those things that since I had been there repeatedly as a kid, I saw no need to go there again.
Well, my kids are now 10 & 12 years and it was time to take them to see it.
The city of Niagara Falls is a total dump. It might as well be Detroit, Newark NJ, The level of devastation is identical. It might as well be the third world.
Then, there is the New York State Park around the American Falls. Like every park in New York state, it is a complete embarrassment. This park should be a showplace, and yet it is a total shithole. I was stunned at the complete lack of maintenance the shoddy landscaping and the overall poor condition of the park as a whole.
Obviously, the state has the money to squander on illegal aliens but the parks are a complete mess and an embarrassment.
The Canadian side park was well kept and was an attractive and enjoyable place to be. The city of Niagara Falls, Ontario as a whole is not the welfare basketcase that Niagara Falls NY is.
Andrew Cuomo, Louise Slaughter (now dead), and every other NY democRAT ('Nadless I'm looking at you) should be ashamed of themselves for turning this place into a disgrace.
-Vanity Post
A joint venture of Milan-based contractor Salini Impregilo and its U.S. subsidiary Lane Construction Corp. have won a $14-billion design-build contract for the planned high-speed rail project to connect Dallas and Houston, with a total estimated cost of some $20 billion.
Salini-Lane will provide civil and infrastructure scope for the project, which includes design and construction of all 131 viaduct sections and 130 embankment sections along the 240-mile route, installation of the track system, and construction of all buildings and services that will house maintenance and other equipment.
Not going to be made by Americans or American companies, though. Also the scope is going to be rather modest. 240 miles for $20 billion dollars.
Links about China
China and America Comparisons
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
"The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.
“Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singaporeans. We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. We allow their papers to sell in Singapore so that we can know what foreigners are reading about us. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration. If allowed to do so, they will radically change the nature of Singapore society, and I doubt if our social glue is strong enough to withstand such treatment."
-A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Every day I take my dog out for a walk. I actually do it twice a day. It is first thing in the morning and at the end of the day after the evening meal. We live on the beach, and there is a nice long park right in front of the house (it is a boardwalk) with an absolutely magnificent view of the ocean and the skyscrapers of Macao in the distance. While we are out there enjoying the morning air and watching the joggers on the beach, our dog is nose-to-the-ground and smelling everything like a canine vacuum cleaner. He really enjoys it. He cannot wait to smell the latest news on the road, and contribute a post or two of his own.
Every morning, I too much check out the latest news. However, as of late it is so boring and predictable that I just simply scan the headlines. It’s always the same old news, just repackaged. Buy more stuff! Support a war! Be afraid! Hate Trump! Pay higher taxes! Oh, and don’t forget Global Warming! Russia! Russia! Russia!
Are we any different? Humans are just as bad as canines. This has gotten me thinking…
About Dogs
I personally like dogs. While I am, I suppose, a “cat person”, dogs are very special to me personally. There is nothing better than coming home from work, and my loyal buddy (Shao PiPi) is lying down at the door waiting for me. (I know, my wife takes photos to show me. He gets in position about a half an hour before I arrive home. Cat’s too. But my little buddy is special.) Then he gets so excited, grabs his little toy (an old sewed up sock ball), and wants to play with me with it. Then he is all over me in happiness. It’s the best!
Here is a scene from a great movie about a dog in Japan. The dog’s name is Hachiko, and it is a true story. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to.
Animal haters won’t understand.
Dogs are wonderful creatures. From when they are puppies to their old and grizzly old age, they are wonderful, loyal and quite compassionate. However, you and I both know, they are not human. No matter how much we may want to dress them up in clothing, teach them to “speak”, take them out and tell them not to eat out of the trashcan, the fact remains, dogs are dogs. For them, poop is wonderful, trash (the smellier, the better) is an adventure, and there is nothing better than smelling another dog’s ass.
(BTW, someone had best describe this to the folks in China. They don’t treat dogs as dogs. They treat them as little children. They just love to dress up their dogs in clothing including underwear, hats, socks, and shoes. Well yeah, even my dog has socks and shoes. But, really, it does tend to be a little strange, especially with all those ever-changing doggie hairstyles that seem to come and go with the local doggie fashions of the day. Indeed, China can sure be weird at times. The Chinese, for the most part treat their pets as family members. Oh, one more thing… Dog lovers far outnumber the dog eaters in China. Don’t fall for all the anti-China propaganda.)
Anyways, dogs are dogs. That is neither good nor bad. It is a statement of reality. Dogs, regardless of the breed, are members of the canine family. They have certain individual differences depending on which breed, but overall they will all act like dogs. You can dye their hair fashionable colors, and dress them up in outfits. You can put socks and shoes on them, and give them eyeglasses and a LV handbag, but you can’t change who they are. Dogs are dogs.
Dogs can do things that humans cannot. We might not want to recognize this fact, but it is (after all) a fact.
Dogs can Smell
Duh!
What I know about dogs come from personal experience. I never studied anything about our canine friends. What I have learned about dogs comes from the Internet. (In addition, perhaps an odd television program or two as well.) So the reader can take my opinions however, they want. I am decidedly not an expert. I am at best a generalist who has the ability to put various “puzzle pieces” together in very interesting ways.
I’m just an average dog lover. Maybe like you? Eh?
You (the reader) should realize this, but many people do not. Dogs can smell much better than humans can. Whoa… let’s replace “much better”, with “unbelievably, superbly, and stunningly better”. It is really true, and I am not at all exaggerating in the least. In fact, a dog’s brain is specialized for identifying scents.
While we need room in our brains to think, and work, dogs use a huge portion to analyze scents. We use our brain to help us think and reason. They use their brain to smell. We use our brain to better understand the universe. They use their brain to smell better. We use our brain to try to fix and repair things. They use their brain to best understand the ways of smelling.
Dogs can pretty much smell anything. They can be trained to find scents that represent danger and serious medical conditions. Photo is from a National Geographic article published in 2014 (Go here to read a report on the article.)
There are all kinds of reports and studies on just about how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than ours. The problem is that there are so many variables that it’s nearly impossible to quantify or perform comparisons. In a true sense, it is like comparing a black and white photo of an apple, with a freshly baked pizza hot out of the oven. There just isn’t really any good and real way to compare the two.
Real Estate
A dog’s sense of smell may be much better than over 1000 times better than ours, making it the most sensitive (and vulnerable) part of its body. (Other reports place this figure much higher.) Comparatively, if you look at the mechanism of smell between humans and dogs, you can see a striking difference. The human nose has only three-square centimeters of olfactory membrane. While, compared to dogs such as Bloodhounds, can have as much as 150 square centimeters of scent-sensing material in their noses. So that means, we have three (3x), and (some) dogs has one hundred and fifty (150x) cm squared of area to smell with. More is better, right?
A small parabolic dish might be able to pick up a satellite signal with come careful positioning, but a larger one will have a much better change in getting the signal and locking on to it. The same is true with dogs. Their snozes give them ability.
Brain Power to Process the Scents
Dogs also have forty times more scent processing cells in their brains than humans. They need this computation power to be able to handle the enormous sensory input from their huge snoozes. It’s never just an issue with size, it’s an issue about what you can do with the larger members and capacities. (No sexual references, here please.)
“Dogs can smell 100,000 times better than humans. In tests, dogs have been able to detect a chemical in a solution diluted to 1 to 2 parts per trillion. The human brain has a large area devoted to vision, while dogs have a large portion dedicated to olfaction, in fact, 40% more of a dog’s brain than a human’s is committed to smell. The average person has 5 million smell receptors, while the average dog, depending on breed, has 125 to 250 million smell receptors. The Bloodhound has an incredible 300 million smell receptors! Dogs can smell things up to 40 feet underground. Dogs can even smell human fingerprints that are a week old!”- The Incredible Sense of Smell in the Dog
We who hang around dogs, know that they can “feel” or sense our emotions. If you are around dogs (or cats) and haven’t noticed this, I would be truly surprised. It’s a very common thing. Not only is it common, but research seemingly proves this as well. Indeed, it’s quite likely that dogs can actually smell emotions. (I would say that it is a given, but you know there are always exceptions to the rule.) Dogs can smell fear, anxiety, even sadness. The flight-or-fight hormone, adrenaline, is undetectable by our noses, but dogs can apparently smell it. In addition, fear or anxiety is often accompanied by increased heart rate and blood flow, which sends telltale body chemicals more quickly to the skin surface. Oh yeah, your dog will most certainly know your feelings. Not only that, but there are indications that dogs can even smell if you have cancer.
“Dogs read about the world through their noses, and they write their messages, at least to other dogs, in their urine.” - Stanley Coren
Doggie Facebook
I know, I know, the dog is spending way too much time smelling a fence post, or a pile of shit. You are getting impatient, and want him to get a move on. But, he is just there, oblivious to the world around him, just totally absorbed in what he has just “discovered”. I know that it’s tempting to drag your dog away from that pile of shit. I have actually done so myself (when we used to walk him out on a leash).
But… even though he’s sniffing everything with an annoying slowness, maybe we should give him a break and let him spend some time at that post (get the pun?). Let him have some time to smell the local neighborhood gossip. And, if he is satisfied with it, let him give a “like” to it. Let him do a posting on his own.
Dog urine is the “ink” of the dog social-network. Think of it as an exciting blog post on Facebook or your favorite social networking platform. Instead of “Face-book”, it’s “Doggie-ass” and just as important.
Information is Hidden within Scents
When dogs start sniffing each other’s asses, the chances are that they’re really learning a lot. It’s far, far more than what we can comprehend. Indeed, it is obviously much more than just simple idle chitchat. The ability to smell given the geometry of the nose, and the ability to interpret that information in the brain can lead us to some interesting conclusions.
Exactly what the dogs are learning, and what they do with that information, is unknown. As of this writing, no one has figured it out yet. (No one is even studying this, as far as I know.) Many people claim that it is “simply” just “marking their territory”. However, it’s probably much more than that. In fact, it’s very likely far beyond “this is my territory, keep out!”
I really don’t know. But, I would guess that it’s probably more along the lines of, “Oh, you’re a nice male dog, 3.26 years old. You are a collie and beagle mix. And… I notice that you’ve been hanging around the park on Dixon Avenue again, you had some baked chicken wings recently (that you found on 8th street), and you like to sleep on your left side.”
Links
Here’s some great links on dog’s ability to smell;
Stanley Coren on Understanding a Dog’s Sense of Smell
While dogs communicate through the sense of smell, humans communicate through the written word. (Yes, I know that there are other mediums. Let’s not get off track here.) We communicate through writing our thoughts down in printed media. This can be electronics or on paper.
It wasn’t always that way. It used to be carved in stone, but that is rarely done these days.
In the “old days” people would chisel their writings into stone for everyone to know and remember. These records would spell out major events, and accomplishments. They would tell stories and help us understand our relationships with the Gods of Heaven. It was written and carved to be everlasting.
Kings and rulers used to carve their deeds, rulings, laws, and pronouncements into stone so that no one could misinterpret them, or rewrite them. The only way that the history could be forgotten was if the stone or writing was physically destroyed. (Image Source.)
Ah, but you know, Humans are a mercurial lot.
When individuals come to power, they want something that is easily erased and written over. In the old days, they would have to chisel off the names of their predecessors on all the temples and government buildings. It took a while, and left garish scars on otherwise beautiful structures.
For what ever it is worth, let it be well understood that the Egyptians were pretty bad at this.
OzymandiasPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Now, let it be known; the printing press really rocked our world. Not only could things be printed on paper and mass produced, but governments and individuals in power can host periodic burning of books and records. They could rewrite history to fit their new narrative. (Maybe sort of, like how a dog will try to over pee another dog’s urine.)
Ah. Yah don’t say…
Book burnings are very common. They go by many names. Progressive liberals and their established socialist governments always have book burnings. It’s their thing. It’s kind of like how they like to wear white sheets, hate Catholics, and use masks to cover their faces.
The progressive socialist nationalists of Germany (Nazi for you under-educated folk) held massive book burnings. They really took the time to make them impressive. They would have uniforms, orchestrated dance and march movements, flags and special effects. It must have been impressive. Huge barn fires rising up into the Heavens. People dancing around in uniforms with crazed people throwing books into the fires.
The Nazi’s really loved to use school kids to do it. They would organize these rallies and allow the school children to leave the school. The kids were, of course, happy to do so. There, the kids would gleefully destroy their own history.
Progressive Socialist Democrats in Germany (Known as NAZI.) having one of their many book burnings. These were often festive affairs with music, speeches, and youth that gleefully toss their collective histories into the fire. Book burnings are ALWAYS associated with power struggles. (That and other things such as statue desecration, and politically correct types of speech.) When one movement ascends to power they start to rewrite history. (Image Source.)
The Chinese which is also a progressive liberal government structure (officially socialist with Chinese characteristics ) held massive book burnings during the Cultural Revolution. They also used children to promote their agendas. This included the full range from gun control to destruction of history, to (of course) book burnings. Unlike the Germans, who able to recover about two decades later after a global war, the Chinese took around four decades to recover, and in many ways the cuts and destruction were too deep. Various aspects of the Chinese culture never really recovered.
Darn those progressive democrat socialists. Always trying to mess up everyone else’s lives!
In many ways, the Antifa movement is a cross between the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the German Socialists of the 1930’s. (I do cover this in another writing elsewhere.) You know, you don’t really need to be a student to history to know any of this.
You just need to be awake and listening.
Which, I am sad to say is a real rarity today. For the record, book burnings occurred in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and Argentina as well as just about any other nation in the world.
One of the best books to describe how history, rules and laws are rewritten is the book by George Orwell titled “Animal Farm“. As history is always being rewritten in order to manipulate people into doing things that go against their well being.
Now that everything is migrating to the internet, the ability to erase and rewrite history has never been easier. Indeed, the internet is like one large “white board”. You erase what you don’t like, and rewrite it to fit your new revised narrative. There are all kinds of examples. I have covered one myself on the subject of Calexit and the American Civil War by President Obama.
It is the way that it is done. There isn’t too much that we can do about it. Except change our behaviors and be skeptical of all the news. Especially to take notice to avoid any kind of pre-approved or “fact checked” news deemed worthy by others. Indeed, that is the most dangerous.
News in America in 2018 has completely gone full-on Orwell. George Orwell well predicted the American media in his book “Animal Farm”. Good is bad. Happy is sad. White is black. American media in 2018 is absolutely off the charts in insanity.
Have you noticed any trends? Man, I’ll tell you it seems like everyone is writing on and on just how bad Russia is, and that there will eventually be a world war between the great powers. How can that be? Bill Clinton was paying Russia to keep it’s military intact through most of the 1990’s. Now why would they want to nuke us now? Didn’t Hillary Clinton just give them 25% of our nuclear stockpiles? It just doesn’t make too much sense.
We’d make a far better trading partner than an enemy. But, anyways… Now what do you all think is gonna happen once, the USA and Russia nukes each other? It’s a great question. It’s one that deserves some thought. What do you think is going to happen once the USA gets involved in a nuclear war?
Nuclear war is terrible and it is nothing to take lightly. If a nuclear war were to break out, there would be many things that would be nearly impossible in a post nuclear-exchange United States. Things such as easy cell phone access, nope the War Powers act will limit that. Things such as your Starbucks coffee are also going to be changed as the headquarters would be reduced to radioactive glass. Nope, a nuclear exchange will impact YOUR life in ways that you are unaware of.
Do you believe that the world will be over? Is that what you really think will happen? Do you believe that since the USA is number one, that the rest of the world will just scurry under rocks or something? Is that what you think? Ha!
Not. Going. To. Happen.
What do you think China will do while both Russia, Europe (of course the EU, as they are driving this war narrative), with the USA are in ruins with radioactive rubble for cities?
Do you think that the rest of the world will continue to live like a scene from a “Save the Children” commercial? Do you think that it will make a big difference in the lives of other people in Sydney, Australia? How about Osaka, Japan? What about Sao Paulo Brazil?
Hong Kong is a very western Chinese city. It is very modern and very crowded. I like it, but I can only take it in small doses as they use Western pricing and it tends to be too expensive for my tastes.
Do you think that they will care…?
The rest of the world has a vibrant middle class. There are factories, farms, subways, tollbooths, ATM machines, and McDonalds all over the world. They have toothpaste, football, cars, cable television, and the internet. If American shuts itself off from the rest of the world… the rest of the world will go on as if nothing happened. America will just be a footnote in the latest Wikipedia entries as maintained from Beijing servers…
So…
Do you think that the USA will still be able to project “it’s interests” globally? Do you think that the domestic issues, internally, will be just the same-old same-old script? Nope, boys and girls, it is going to be awfully hard for most Americans. Especially those from the cities.
Most especially for those urban or suburban folk.
What are they going to do when Starbucks runs out of coffee? When Wi-Fi has zero hot spots, or when girls will need to “put out” for a half-bowl of pea soup? Know your history people. How do you think that the young lasses of Germany survived when the Russians moved in through the devastated countryside? How do you think the people of Cambodia, and Burma survived? I cannot predict the future, but I can report on what happened in the past when this situation raised it’s ugly head.
Nuclear tipped ICBM’s are nothing to take lightly. Yet, here we are with the media promoting war as if it was just “another” issue like “racist peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”. Ugh!
Oh sure, the surviving Americans will try to leave the glassed rubble of their cities. Though, I doubt that they will make it very far into “deplorable land”. You know with all those squads of “good ol’ boys” hunting down all the urban folk escaping from all that glassed wreckage.
Oh, their Prius or Tesla might make it a few hundred miles into “flyover country”. They might even get some militia assistance. Oh, some will make it to FEMA camps. There, of course they will be pre-screened and set to work.
Ain’t nothing for free in this world. We all will have to pay the tolls. The tolls will, or course, be guarded by men with guns.
While the USA is all busy straightening out it’s house, the rest of the world will continue as if nothing happened. Since the exports to the United States account for around 11% of what China makes, there will certainly be an impact.
However, it won’t be life-threatening. China will survive. The nuclear exchange between the USA and Russia will be noted. Maps will be redrawn with huge “Forbidden to Enter” areas marked in red. But that will be about it.
If the United States were to get involved in a hot nuclear war, those nations that do not participate in the war would benefit. Many of these nations, such as China, South Africa, Europe, Dubai, Tokyo and many others are just as advanced as the United States is and would thrive if competition from Los Angles, San Francisco and New York were to end.
China will take over. Not a bad thing. I’ll tell you what.
War with the President
Oh but not all the news is about trying to get people to go to war. Jeeze! This is not 1960 people! While America might be populated with half-asleep sheep, they do know when they are being manipulated. At least the older ones do. The news is really pretty obvious. The only way that you wouldn’t notice the obvious propaganda is if you were on some kind of drug like a painkiller, or an anti-depressant…
Anyways, the other news concerns president Trump.
It’s a non-stop hate fest. I have never seen such vitriol and hate from the American propaganda mills. These idiots actually believed that Hillary the Horrible could actually be elected. They thought that the game was rigged in her favor, and even if she did manage to become President that no one would bat an eye and it would be accepted. Hah! I’ll tell you, these people are absolutely delusional.
So, when I see the “Russia, Russia, Russia!” anti-Trump narrative, it just bores me. It’s not news. There just isn’t any news there.
It’s just a bunch of attractive actors reading scripted lines, and being paid large bucks to make up news.
I’m beyond bored with it. I will honestly say that I haven’t seen ABC, NBC or a CBS newscast in over a decade. It’s all just junk. CNN? Give me a break. I was turned off from them way back in the 1990’s when they were caught staging a protest.
CNN staging a fake protest. In this case they reported that a huge groundswell of Muslims were protesting Islamic terror. Those individuals weren’t even’t actual Muslims. They were paid actors. Jeeze!
It’s all propaganda with a set agenda that benefits the richest people in the world.
That is why it is important to read grass-root reporting. Read from small-time bloggers, and get your news from other sources. Of course, the powers-that-be don’t want you to do that. No sir ree! You can bet that those in the oligarchy want their control over all thought, ideas and media. You will follow their directions or not at all. The Bill of Rights, and the first Amendment can just go to hell as far as they are concerned.
Here is Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein on her attack on people who have a “five dollar blog”…
Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein making a formal statement that the Bill of Rights does not apply to American Citizens. She makes the case that it ONLY applies to elected officials. Therfore, it is important to prevent citizens from writing or blogging on the Internet using their “five dollar blog”.
Diane Feinstein talking about the need to only allow properly vetted, government “approved”, people to have “Free Speech”. Doesn’t she look like the teacher from Hell? (Image Source.)
I wonder why there are no progressive liberal attacks. I guess that it is just ok to take away freedoms… how about we start with Facebook, then Tumblr, Pinterest, Google, Snapchat, for starters.
Unless you have lived under a rock for the last ten years, what constitutes news out of the United States today is anything but news. It has become a complete political propaganda machine that is populated by highly paid actors and actresses reading scripted lines. There is a science to this, and there is a feedback loop that dictates what propaganda that should be dished out to the American population at which specific times.
American media is just propaganda. Nothing that you see is real and truthful. It is all distorted lies and partial-truths.
Real news would tell us details about the hidden cavity in the Great Pyramid, or a review of NASA funding for the next fiscal year. It would cover topical news; a protest here, a murder there, and a car crash there in brief one or two sentence bites. When a President speaks, they would play his entire speech, not show him speaking with the audio off and then translate for us what he is saying.
They would not have “panels of experts” who are just actors with nice titles (not nice titties, or… um I take that back), farmed out by rich organizations for propagandized purposes. They would provide balance of different viewpoints (if they wanted a broad viewership base). Or not have any dissent on the editorial sections if they wanted to become the foremost expert in their political narrative.
This reminds me of an incident in my own house with my own dog…
Our floor is mostly hardwood and tiled marble. It’s the Chinese way. That is unlike the States, where the floor is carpeted (wall to wall) over a plywood floor if the house was built after the 1980’s. In China, most houses have a stone floor. The stone is typically cut at a ¼ inch thick sliced tile, polished, and provided into two feet square sections. Most floors use a light colored granite or marble. In upper-scale homes, wood floors are provided in the bedrooms. Cheaper flooring methods such as linoleum or carpeting are never used.
As such, we have a few throw rugs to lie down and make the house a home.
Now our dog knows, absolutely knows, that peeing in the house if forbidden. We have a rule that he must pee and crap in the bathroom (if not outside). We have trained him to use a blue mat (Indoor/outdoor carpeting that is blue instead of green.) just for this purpose.
In fact, the reader should know, that the way we trained him was that we got a really large mat, and put it in the shower. (In China, the showers do not have a tub. Therefore, the shower goes straight down to the floor.) Once the dog knew that he could do all the peeing and crapping he needed to do, on the shower, that is where he went. Over time, we cut the mat down smaller and smaller. It was one yard by one yard, then it became two feet by two feet. Then one foot by two feet, then one foot by one foot. We kept cutting it down. Finally it was one square inch, and you should have seen him trying to aim and hit that tiny little mat.
Anyways, long story short, he knew that he could only pee in the shower.
Well, we also have a few throw rugs. We decided to not use them when he took up the (terrible) habit on peeing on them.
Now, I really don’t know why he would pee on them. Maybe it was because he was trained to pee on mats due to his bathroom training. Or, perhaps, maybe he wanted to make the house feel more lived in and “doggie friendly”.
Whatever.
One day, we decided to lay down this black and white shag rug that we have. (Yeah, I know that it is shag, but it fits with our modern Asian décor.) We wanted to make the living room area more comfortable, and that would include a rug nested in between the sofas and the various chairs. However, we were very concerned because our dog had a propensity to pee on the rugs.
So we laid the rug down. We told him, in no uncertain ways, that it was “off limits” to pee upon. We then watched him like a hawk.
I can tell the reader that he knew not to do anything. He would walk near the rug with a hunched back look, and with tail down. He was afraid to do anything with that rug. Indeed, he would walk around it rather than walk on it.
All was well. Then one day, the wife saw him do a “dryless pee” on the rug. That I mean to say is that he pretended to pee for a split second, but no pee came out. She chalked it up to him getting old, and let it fly. Of course, the reader might say, “Hey, why don’t you simply lift up the rug, you moron?”. Well, we couldn’t. The rug was under this massive marble coffee table. It is an enormously heavy sheet of brown veined marble (Also known as Adobe Granite, Golden Brown Marble, Canadian Mahogany, or Deer Brown granite.) that is at least one inch thick, with beveled sides. It weighs a ton. It is far too heavy for me to move alone, or even to have two people move it. You actually need four strong men to move this friggin’ coffee table.
Well, the design (with the cold gold metal sides, and the glass bottom) looks a lot like a KTV table. Which wasn’t our intention, but hey the wife picked it out and now we have it. Anyways, the other ends of the rug are buried under large sofas and leather chairs. So for us to move everything about, would take a lot of effort. It wouldn’t be something that we would ever do casually. So, we just let it slide.
A few days later, I thought that I smelled pee, but the rug was dry. It must have been my imagination, I reasoned.
A few weeks later, my wife too smelled something. It was driving us crazy. The rug was dry, but the smell of urine was unbearably strong. We had been watching him carefully but he wasn’t doing anything. When it looked like he would pee, nothing came out, and so we took no action. So, to us, it was very perplexing.
Finally, around six o’clock on a Saturday, we couldn’t stand it any longer. We moved the sofas out, and the (enormously heavy) coffee table away. Then we lifted up the rug.
My God! The entire underside was wet and saturated with dog urine! Somehow, the shag carpet stayed dry on top, no matter how wet it got. But the underside acted like a massive sponge. It absorbed the urine and just collected it there. It was absolutely horrid and disgusting. Weeks of moldy pee saturated the matting making it look and smell like an outdoor shithouse in the middle of August.
Apparently what had happened was that our dog knew that it was wrong to pee on the rug. However, when it wasn’t punished for tiny efforts to pee, it thought that it could pee at will as long as it wasn’t caught. We were delusional in thinking that the dog would not do this. The end result was that our intention (of a pee-less rug) never materialized. Our dog thought it could pee away… as long as it could not be caught.
I guess that is what happens when we let people get away with things that are wrong. Unless we stop them in the early stages, their behavior will get worse and worse over time.
I have seen that this is true, and I am sure that the reader knows examples of this. Perhaps with children. Maybe with criminals. With classmates, and with other things as well. It just seems that if you do not have limits, it is within our nature to treat things as without limits. As such, we tend to keep pushing and pushing until we start to hit some roadblocks.
News and Politics
Which of course, brings us back to the Democratic Senator from California, Diane Feinstein and her attempt(s) to ban the first amendment. (Now, she like any other “good” Democrat is off trying to ban everything from ice cream to baby pacifiers. It’s in their nature. However, for now, let’s just focus on this one particular instance, and not get sidetracked.)
You know, she (and others of her ilk) believes that they can get away with their actions simply because no one is stepping up and stopping them. Like our dog, who needed a good hard paddle after his first attempted pee, this woman needed to spend five years at hard labor when she first started to suggest banning a Right. It would have stopped her dead in her tracks, and served as a notice to others who might try to follow in her footsteps.
Newsflash to everyone; Senators are just like everyone else. The only thing that they have that you (the reader) do not have is a title, and a good PR firm. They must follow the rules. It doesn’t work that way of course. But it should.
Ah…
The young millennial asks “what rules, and what laws are you referring to?”
To this, I must teach the reader something that is a very well-kept secret. Yes, it is. Why it is the “Preamble to the Bill of Rights” of course. This is one of the most secretive documents in the entire United States. Everyone tries to hide it, because it clearly and plainly says what a Right is, and what the purpose of a Right is. Hey! Surprise! Here it is so you can read it for yourself.
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.
And, for those of you who only have a public education, let me translate for you.
The Bill of Rights is a special set of rules inside, yet set apart from the Constitution. It is designed to prevent the Constitution to be used to harm the citizens of the United States. It offered protections in that it clearly stated that no elected official, nor anyone appointed by them, could influence, takeaway or disparage any of the RIGHTS listed in the Bill of Rights.
That’s correct.
No one, let alone a Senator can even consider taking or limiting a right. That means ANY right, for those of you who are confused out there. Now there are ten Rights. The first group of Rights is in a collection known as the first amendment. One of these rights is, of course, the Right of freedom of speech. Which means that you can say anything, or write anything, or even think anything NO MATTER WHAT. You offend someone… tough cookies. You swear or use profanity…meh. You call a person a bad name, or say something that someone doesn’t like… no problem.
The RIGHT to speak your mind; America used to stand for this freedom. Not anymore apparently.
Ah… but I digress yet again.
Bad Behaviors
Wouldn’t you think that being a Senator, and not following the Constitution is wrong? Wouldn’t you think that it is a “bad behavior”? I would.
But, you know, defining what “bad behavior” is and what isn’t is really meaningless unless there is an enforcement arm.
When we were all children, we knew that there were things that we were not permitted to do. If we crossed the line, and did those “naughty” things, our parents would get angry and punish us. Now, we all had friends who could seemingly get away with anything. Their parents apparently didn’t care in the least. They were always on our case, acting like bullies or worse. Their parents were either oblivious, or defensive of their actions. It was truly frustrating. However, now that I am much older I see where the lack of discipline and parental guidance led the kids. It wasn’t pretty.
I would guess that perhaps one of the reasons why the United States is in such a mess today is partially because there just hasn’t been any enforcement to follow the Constitution. People could seemingly get away with anything. As such, they never would get in trouble. Look at Louis Learner, and the rest of her ilk, and how they were never punished.
This all reminds me of my dog, and when he’s acting poorly.
Being in the Dog House
Here in China, it is very crowded. As such, there is a necessity in making sure that everyone follows certain basic rules. Because, one or two odd balls behaving badly can cause all kinds of trouble in a crowded environment. Now, that is not to say that China has their act together, as there are many things about China that could use some improvement. However, there are things that they do right.
One of the things that they have in China that just isn’t so popular in the United States is security guards in every building for the purposes of keeping order. That differs from the United States, where security is used to enforce laws. In China, while laws might be enforced or not, the primary purpose of a baoan (security guard) is to keep order.
In a crowded place, especially a residential building, excessive noise is not tolerated. If you think that you can jam with your stereo up all night long and not have the rest of the building lynch you, you are sorely mistaken. You will have a baoan knock on your door, and if you are not corporative, they will pick up your stereo and toss it of the 65th floor below. If you complain, they will arrest you and in China, this is decidedly NOT a good thing.
Anyways, back to my dog.
For a while we had two dogs. Our current dog (Pipi) and a younger dog named “Super”. Super was a beautiful dog. The problem with him is that he hated my guts. He just could not stand me. When I would come home, he would bark at me all night long. It would continue hour after hour. He would be bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, and his voice would be hoarse, but he would keep it up like it was his duty. He would bark like there was no tomorrow. You could hear his voice getting hoarser and hoarser. It would crackle and dry up, yet still he barked. Then when I would leave the house, he would collapse in his bed from exhaustion. I know, as my wife would show me pictures of him collapsed from exhaustive barking. He would lay there on his back, his mouth open and his tongue out exhausted.
For my wife, she loved the loyalty of the dog. However, she saw that it was a problem. On more than just a few instances, we would have the guards knock on our doors to get the dog quiet. One time they were going to toss him off the 63rd floor, if we didn’t get him quiet. Indeed, for a long time it was a real problem. That is… until we consulted a vet about what to do.
When confronted with this problem, many Chinese simply cut the vocal cords of the dog. That way, they can live their life normally, but they will no longer be able to bark. Now, before any reader has a heart attack, please relax. We didn’t do any such thing. Instead we turned to technology for an answer.
We put on a barking shock collar on him.
Whenever there was a loud sound the dog would get a three second beep. If the barking continued, there would be a shock. The collar would then wait for five minutes. If there were additional loud sounds in those five minutes, there would be four louder beeps and a louder shock. This continued up the scale to ten. If the dog were still barking after fifty minutes (10 x 5 minutes = fifty minutes) of barking, a very loud shock would be released.
Super was a smart dog, and quickly discovered how the system worked.
Anti-barking training device used to train dogs to stop barking. This particular model is available in the United States. Chinese models are (ahem) more efficient.
Anti-barking shock training collar for dogs. (Image Source.)
Problem solved. Right?
Now Super whispered his barks. Instead of BARK! BARK! BARK!, it was bark… um, bark, … bark. (Timidly.) It was cute, and it did work. Our dog had figured out how it worked and realized that he could no longer bark in the house. There weren’t any more visits from the building guards. Great right? Of course it wouldn’t work if the dog were not bright or slow. But Super was smart, so it worked.
But then, again our other dog (Pipi) was smart as well.
And he too discovered how it worked. He discovered that he could shock Super by barking at him. Super could be sleeping, and our dog would walk up to him and bark right into his collar. What a shocking way to wake up! Oh, my goodness! What hath we wrought?
One day we came home to barking and howls of pain from Super. Our other dog Pipi was pacing around Super barking crazily, and watching him get shocked. Then he gleefully would start up again, to watch it all over again.
We had to put an end to this mess.
We initially didn’t know what to do. We were afraid that if we removed the collar that Super would start barking again. There was a real and serious risk that he would find out the hard way how to fly. We needed to do something. We discussed it back and forth, over wine (as was our preference) and decided a solution. We put shock collars on both of them.
That’s right. Now it wasn’t fair. But it was the best thing to do.
We had a small cage for both of them, and put them both in it with shock collars. We then put on a camera and watched them from our cellphones, and left the house for dinner.
Sure enough, our one dog would start barking and Super would start to cower in fear. The only difference now was that both collars started to beep. Now, both dogs got a shock. Our dog didn’t know what was going on, so he started to bark and attack Super. Then off goes the stage-two beeps…then shock. It continued, and then Super started to fight back. He started to bark back. There was a mess of fighting, howling, beeping and electric shocks. It took maybe two hours before they all collapsed from exhaustion.
Neither dog would bark after that.
After that one massive battle, everything went quiet and peaceful. Neither dog barked. Though, they didn’t look at each other either. They would take turns eating and they would stay in separate rooms in the house. The good news is that Super wasn’t thrown out the window, no dog had a operation to stop barking, and the Baoan never visited us again. Mission accomplished.
That makes me think…
I must admit that I am pretty sick and tired of Congress. Not one of them are acting the interests of their constituents. Not one of them. They are self-serving and evil.
It makes me think that maybe we should have shock-collars for everyone in Congress. The moment they start to put restrictions on people and any of their Rights, that they get graduated electric shocks. Maybe that would teach them that they couldn’t violate the Constitution no matter what their excuses are. Try to ban free speech, get a shock. Try to ban guns, get a shock. Try to ban religion… get a shock. Try to ban large sodas… get a shock. Try to ban straws… get a shock. Try to ban bikini’s… get a shock. Try to ban chewing gum… get a shock. Try to ban bacon…get a shock. Try to ban knives and forks… get a shock.
It’s a win-win situation!
When does information stop and propaganda begin
Well, isn’t that the way life works. You start talking about dog shit and end up talking about putting shock collars on American Senators. Ah, my goodness, life as an American.
People say that we live in an “information age”. I disagree. We live in an “age of manipulation”. I say this because never before have we ever been so assaulted upon by propagandized media, and surveilled so severely. Face the facts.
All, the totality of, American media is owned by only six people.
Everything that you see on the “mainstream” media is directed and spoon fed to you by the desires of six people.
Why use propaganda unless you want to manipulate, and why utilize surveillance if you have no intention about using the information you obtain. The answers to both questions point squarely towards manipulation.
This being stated…
How does the news benefit you?
Really, how does the “news” benefit you? If you were to go without watching, reading, or listening to the news for a week, would your life collapse? Would your quality of life decrease? Would your income drop?
Do you like being afraid of the latest pandemic being shoved right before your morning coffee?
I am willing to bet that your quality of life would increase. Your stress level would definitely decrease, and your levels of happiness would increase. I think that maybe we have become so addicted to the news that we have forgotten it’s relative importance in our lives. Since most of the news is used to manipulate and alter your way of thinking, it is refreshing to ignore it.
People who ignore the news, and the warnings about all the wars and troubles in other nations, go out and are happy outside of the USA. They are not afraid.
Those who ignore the news, don’t know that they cannot do certain things, so they do them anyways. They survive and succeed. News in many cases, is like a big weight around your neck that weighs you down and holds you back. It holds you back.
So, like a dog, I would suggest that you ignore that big pile of shit on the sidewalk. Let other dogs smell it. There are other trees to pee on. Other places to run and play. Don’t let anyone tell you that you must smell that pile of shit and no others. You can choose your very own pile of shit and do with it as you may.
You, yes YOU, can choose your own pile of shit to smell. Don’t let anyone tell you what shit to smell.
What you can do
To steal a quote from the movie “Forrest Gump”, life is like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you are going to get. But, my dear friends, you can most certainly choose the box. Don’t listen to the propaganda.
"Ben Rhodes from Obama’s national security apparatus made the comment that your average journalist today is 27. They don’t know anything; they believe everything we tell ’em. It was a snap.
It was right out of the page of Jonathan Gruber, who was the architect of Obamacare, who after it was signed into law, ran around the country bragging about how easy it was to lie to the American people about it because the American people are essentially ignoramuses."-Rush Limbaugh
Likewise, don’t do what all the other dogs do. Don’t go towards the biggest and most popular pile of shit. Be different, be selective in which shit that you smell. Only pee where you want to be.
Don’t go from tree to tree peeing indiscriminately. Use some thought and planning. I am sure that your life would benefit from some judicial peeing responsibility.
We cannot change the world, and maybe we shouldn’t even try. All that we can change is ourselves.
If there are something’s that I urge the reader to do, I would suggest the following;
Stop watching, reading, and viewing all the “major” media outlets. (CNN,MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc.)
Replace the time with something involving food, fresh air, friendships, or animals. (Oh, sex and pizza with wine would be a good thing also.)
Now, that should take care of most of your need to take medication (if you are an American). Now, in addition I would also suggest a phased approach of the following suggestions;
When you go on the internet, do not visit any of the “minor” news sites. (Drudge, Huffington Post, Forbes, WaPo etc.) Give yourself a break.
Avoid sites that promise to tell you “the truth”. Or “fact check”, they will just inform you of what the truth is relative to the person who paid them. They are always lying for financial gain. While Snopes is perhaps one of the most famous, all of them utilize a financial model that promotes one version of the truth over others for financial gain. There is nothing free out there. You have to pay a price for everything. Being “educated” so you are manipulated is the price that you must often pay as an American.
Avoid “Social media”, like Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, or any of the others. If you need to go on it, pledge to stop using “likes”, and responding to posts.
Go there, do your task, and leave. A kitchen timer helps too.
The goal to all of this is to simplify your life by removing the anxiety and excitement of the internet from your life. You don’t need it. It hasn’t helped you at all, and it has only made your life miserable. Forgetaboutit.
I’ve noticed that in my rush to check out Tumblr, that I ended up acting like my dog anticipating a great pile of stinky poop. I just couldn’t wait to what was on my feed. But you know what? It’s just another addiction. It doesn’t really matter. Don’t be like my dog that just cannot wait to smell the freshest pile of shit in the park. Then he just has to pee on top of it. You don’t need it. It’s addictive, and other people know that you are addicted to it, and use that to control you.
Other people control you this way.
Some Final Comments
This being my opinions, and with the world populated with others, there will be some disagreements. Maybe some readers won’t like my comparisons between American news and dog shit. But, you know, that is exactly how most of America views the media, reporters, and those who are on the news shows. We think that they all stink.
Idea: 689,003 Facebook users participated in a social experiment during which researchers wanted to see what would happen if people started reading bad news every day. For an entire week, some users had to view news posts which had negative information, some of which were incredibly stressful emotionally. The opposite was also tested out by using positive news instead of negative posts.
Result: Like a lot of us instinctively predicted, reading lots of negative news over 7 days changed Facebook users' behavior online. Not only were they more prone to posting similar information as in the negative news more often, they were also more likely to emphasize negative emotions. Meanwhile, positive news stories made people feel happier, act more compassionately and kindly towards others. In other words, the news that we consume on social media shapes how we react because, on some level, we feel that what we see and read happens to us in reality.
Maybe some readers will take offense on what I have to say about Nazi’s, Liberal Progressives, and similar organizations like the Antifa and the KKK. Well, heck, that is what the First Amendment is for; the ability to speak your mind. Or to paraphrase the good Democrat Senator, “to express non-approved ideas on my five dollar blog”. Well, there is a solution that will prevent you from getting upset. Don’t read any of my opinions. Leave. Thank you.
This entire article is based on one thing; the musing that I had while I was walking my dog along the beach in front of my house. I noticed how excited he was smelling crap and his urgency to pee everywhere. In turn, I too wanted to see what the latest feed was on the news. And then, for a brief second of clarity, it became totally clear to me. Dogs and humans are the same.
We are the same, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
In my desire to keep my dog focused, and to keep him from getting hit by a car, I would often need to direct him. He cannot crap in the middle of a road, and not run blindly across a road to smell a fire hydrant. It is dangerous in many ways. As such, I need to help him and to protect him.
Isn’t that the same with us humans?
If we blindly react to the canned news that is fed to us, and the manipulative narratives that tug at our hearts and souls, we can get ourselves into a great deal of danger and hurt. I suggested the Russian narrative that is really being pushed by CNN, MSNBC, and Drudge. But other narratives are just as dangerous. America has been at war for over two hundred years. Don’t you think we all ought to give it up and chill out some? Really!
Take Aways
Well, there are some take aways from this dialog;
Dog poop is stinky.
Dogs like to smell things, and what they smell is more than we humans can understand.
News can be compared to dog crap.
There is no reason for us to be so interested in the news, as MOST news does not affect us personally.
News or Social Media is addictive to humans. It is like stinky shit to a dog.
Addiction to news can be dangerous, and it MIGHT be a contributor to the opioid problem in America today.
Manipulation of the news is equally dangerous, and could result in a most terrible turn of events.
I think that it might be a good idea to have Senators wear shock collars
FAQ
Q: Do you think that all news is bad? A: No. I am just concerned that all news is used to manipulate. Our addition to news and Social Media might be harmful to us.
Q: Do you hate dogs? A: No. I actually love them. I also think that they should be permitted to smell all the stinky stuff they want. They just need to be careful so that they don’t get hurt in the process.
Q: Do you hate Senator Feinstein? A: No. I think that she is more than a little confused.
Old age does that, you know. You forget things and your sense of judgment tends to be distorted. She came to Congress when telephones had dials and hung on walls. There was no such thing as computers, and people wrote letters with “Bic banana” pens. Everyone was saying “Groovy”, and the movie Jaws just came out. I think she should have retired three or four decades ago. Like when Microsoft DOS first came out.
Q: Do you read the news and listen to it? A: Yes I do. However, I have been actively trying to reduce the impact of it in my life. I think that I have been far too involved in it in the past. Looking back, I can see how silly it has been.
Posted On Free Republic
This article was posted on Free Republic in the chat section on 31JUL18. It was edited as the language was deemed improper. It used the word “shit”. The comments can be read HERE.
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